PEORIA MAGAZINE August 2022

Greg Wilson, Ph.D., professor of anthropology and team

S P O T L I G H T

SECRETS JUST BENEATH THE SOIL In Woodford County, archeologists dig in search of answers to ancient questions

BY MIKE BAILEY

J ust off Illinois Route 26 a few miles north of Spring Bay sits a soybean field, under which has lurked a secret for, well ... for a millennia or so. It’s commonly known as the Fandel property, and since the early 11th century, it has concealed clues just below its surface regarding the origins, rise and fall of the Mississippian Indian culture that once flourished in the incomparably fertile Illinois River valley. Not only that, but it may hold hints be hind the enduringmystery of what really

happened at Cahokia Mounds, for three centuries starting in 1050 A.D. the cul tural and population center of a political and religious transformation in theNorth American mid-continent – with more people than London at the time, not to be surpassed inwhat would become the United States for another four centuries. “This whole region (of central Illinois), archeologically speaking, is just incredible,” Greg Wilson, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at the University of California Santa Barbara, said recently from the dig site.

An Illinois native – he hails from Marissa in St. Clair County, “in the shadow of Cahokia Mounds” – Wilson has long been fascinated by what transpired and why at the center of the Mississippian universe, at the largest and most complex manmade earthen mound and archeological site in the world outside of Mexico. In trying to answer those questions, Wilson’s program at UC Santa Barbara is partnering with Northern Illinois University, specifically with Dana Bardolph, Ph.D. — a former student of

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