Sunday, October 4, 2009 9:28 PM CDT
'A slice of time'
Ground-penetrating radar may tell tales long buried at Five Mile House
By BILL LAIR, Managing Editor
blair@jg-tc.com
CHARLESTON — Tom Vance is hoping to have an archaeological dig on the Five Mile House grounds next summer.
But he will have to wait a while to learn the results of the ground-penetrating radar (GPR) project conducted Saturday at the historic Five Mile House at the intersection of Illinois Route 130 and the Westfield Road south of Charleston.
Harvey Henson from the College of Science at SIU-Carbondale made dozens of trips back and forth on the grounds of the Five Mile House as the radar machine penetrated the soil about 6 ½ feet deep. The GPR machine, about the size of a push lawn mower, looked for “disturbances” or objects buried in the subsurface.
“If there’s a disturbance or there is something buried as the GPR sends the radar lines down, a disturbance indicates there’s something there,” said Vince Gutowski of the geology/geography department at Eastern Illinois University. Gutowski and fellow geology/geography department faculty member Steve DiNaso have worked with Henson on other projects and arranged for Henson to scan the Five Mile House grounds.
Vance, president of the Five Mile House Foundation, wants to set up an archaeological dig on the grounds next summer. And Henson said the GPR work can tell archaeologists the best places to dig.
“You can spend a lot of time digging,” Henson said. “If you are digging and you hit something you didn’t expect, you zig and you zag trying to find it. If there is (the foundation of) an old building or grave shafts out here, these scans will be very useful to archaeologists and historians. You can see a slice of time.”
DiNaso had a GPS map of the Five Mile House property that shows buildings, trees and water lines. Henson will go back into his lab at SIU, clean out “noise” like tree roots and then lay his findings over the GPS map to see if building foundations or other large objects are buried beneath the surface.
“Hopefully, we’ll get an idea of what outbuildings were here and what they were,” Vance said. “I hope it’s a blacksmith shop. Legend and lore said there was one here.”
The Five Mile House dates to the 1840s and is believed to be the oldest structure in the county. Abraham Lincoln may have stopped at the building when it was an inn as he traveled between Clark and Coles counties.
Henson, Gutowski and DiNaso worked from about 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. Henson even made a second, deeper pass over the grounds. On the second pass, the radar penetrated to about 13 feet deep, although the signal is not as sensitive at that depth as it is at 6 ½ feet, Vance said.
As Henson walked the GPR equipment over the grounds, a screen showed the various layers of soil below. Occasionally, the horizontal layer would be interrupted by peaks and valleys, indicating something was beneath the soil.
Henson said it will take “three solid days” of work to put the data together from all of the passes back and forth.
“We’ll all share data,” DiNaso said. “We’ll look for anomalies and (Henson) will sketch on the map what he thinks the features are.”
Gutowski said the GPS will enable the team to get within a “centimeter accuracy.”
“You could come back 100 years from now and be able to reproduce our grid,” he said.
For now, Vance is just hoping to get a team back next summer for an archaeological dig.
“We may not find anything but that would be results in itself,” he said. “We’re looking at this as a workshop for historical research.”
Contact Bill Lair at blair@jg-tc.com or 238-6865.
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