It’s 94 degrees under a bright blue sky, and the air is thick with humidity. More than a dozen aspiring archaeologists squat or hunch on their hands and knees to sift through the dirt. They raise their sweaty faces gratefully when a large silver milk truck hurtles down the nearby highway and stirs up a slight breeze.

This is hard, hot, and sometimes filthy work. But 13 college students from 7 states (Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Massachusetts, Illinois, Ohio, and Kansas) have traveled to Fort Atkinson and enrolled in The University of Iowa’s field school. For six weeks, they will hunt for the remnants of the pre-Civil-War-era Hewitt-Olmstead Trading Post and nearby Chief Whirling Thunder Village. Today, they have almost forgotten about the heat, the midday sun, and their constant thirst, because the morning’s dig has paid off with a rare discovery.

It is a miniature white china figurine: less than one inch tall, headless, missing an arm and the portion of one leg below the knee. But it is clearly the figure of a woman. And it was found buried in the soil within the Hewitt-Olmstead site, number 13WH160 in the archaeological files of the state.

"We don’t know yet if this artifact is from the Hewitt-Olmstead period," cautions John Doershuk, director of the General Contracts Program, adjunct assistant professor of anthropology, and director of the field school. "The people who owned this land made a picnic park out of it for a few years in the 1920s. So now we have two different settlements, one sort of on top of the other. And we have to be very careful with our artifacts to determine which ones come from the earlier period."

That said, Doershuk looks as elated as his students when it is his turn to examine the tiny doll. He turns it over in his palm for a full minute, then tips it carefully into a brown paper lunch bag neatly labeled with the unit number and level of the find. In other bags, there are musket balls, pieces of bottle glass, square-cut nails, and shards of decorated pipe stem from the early 1800s. The archaeologists know these are authentic because they all bear evidence of the period: distinctive artwork on the wooden pipe stem, and a quality and thickness of the glass that had disappeared by the 20th century.

Doershuk and his colleagues at the Office of the State Archaeologist (which is housed within the University) are intent upon salvaging Iowa’s archaeological record. Only 10 percent of the state has been professionally surveyed. And twice that much landscape has been so thoroughly destroyed, mostly by the urban, industrial, and road building of the last century, there is no chance of recovering artifacts in their original contexts. To date, the Office of the State Archaeologist has identified more than 19,000 archaeological sites in the state of Iowa, but many of these are no longer intact.

The Fort Atkinson dig is unusual because archaeologists are not just digging to uncover the past. They also are working, in collaboration with the State Historical Society of Iowa and the city of Fort Atkinson, to preserve the history of the Indian tribes that were settled there against their will nearly 200 years ago. This field school is assembling a story.

The Winnebago Indians (now called the Ho-Chunk) were forced out of Wisconsin by the U.S. government around 1840 and moved to this area, high in the northeastern corner of the state. They were installed as residents of a "neutral zone" between feuding Sioux and Meskwaki tribes who were struggling for control of the area. The trading post was erected to sustain the Winnebago settlements. White traders visited the trading post to obtain skins, corn, and furs from the Indians in exchange for weapons, pipes, and man-made cloth.

Together with Larry Zimmerman, executive officer of the University’s American Indian and Native Studies Program, Doershuk created the summer 2000 field school with a dual mission: to retrieve artifacts from the past while collaborating with Indians interested in reclaiming the history of the Winnebago and other native cultures. (The field school is offered by the Department of Anthropology and the American Indian and Native Studies Program through the Center for Credit Programs. Personnel of the Office of the State Archaeologist direct the field work as adjunct faculty members of the Department of Anthropology.) Over the six-week course of the dig, members of all three tribes–the Ho-Chunk, Meskwaki, and Sioux–will visit the site and speak with students at the field school about their goals for archaeological reconstruction.

"We’re providing the same traditional, high-quality archaeological training University of Iowa field schools have always been associated with," Doershuk says. "But we’re also bringing students up to speed on the fact that if you’re doing archaeology in this country, you’re probably doing it on ancestral land. So it only seems logical to take into account their interests in terms of how the work is carried out."

"Our lab is dedicated to better understanding birth defects," Murray says. "But in a larger sense, it is part of a research lab’s function to allow talented students to experience research and see how it will affect the future world they will both inhabit and create. Then they, in turn, take this knowledge back to their home towns."