Home

Rising seas and intense storms dominate the headlines about climate change, but there is a quieter catastrophe already unfolding: the irreversible loss of cultural heritage. Across the state of Illinois, thousands of ancient Indigenous sites, historic buildings, and landmarks are being slowly erased by extreme weather.

One might presume that we know everything about the “Historic period”—the past four or five centuries on this continent when events and characters were recorded for posterity. But we don’t. On the one hand, documents from the recent past can be sparse and biased, often underrepresenting farmers and other non-elite or non-masculine characters. Indeed, many kinds of people are underrepresented in historical accounts and explanations of historical processes. Thus, archaeologists study the Historic period for the same reasons that we investigate the deep past—knowledge about how and why history unfolded the way it did will help us to navigate our own future.

Even in Illinois, where there is on average one precolonial-era archaeological site for every 35 acres, thousands of acres are bulldozed every year for housing developments and chain stores. If we don’t course correct, there will be very little physical heritage left on large chunks of the Illinois landscape to claim or protect in the not-too-distant future. We at ISAS want to hold the line.