Collaborative Research: Reconstructing an Early Urban Landscape

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This research focuses on one of the United State’s earliest cities which even after decades of professional fieldwork and analysis some of the most fundamental facts of its growth and organization remain unclear. Current models suggest that in little more than a century it attracted large numbers of immigrants from elsewhere in the Midcontinent and became the preeminent center in all North America. Drawing on theoretical approaches the project seeks to explore its trajectory of growth as the making of an urban landscape. Yet understanding urbanism requires large-scale spatial data on the growth of such centers in the early years of their development. To address this problem, the research team will perform high-resolution magnetometry over the site. This massive subsurface survey will cover more than 5.5 km2 of urban landscape, making it the largest such survey ever conducted in the Americas of an archaeological site. This project will provide the first near-total geophysical survey of the subsurface. Data from the magnetometer survey, combined with rigorous GIS and geospatial analyses, will allow us to finally “see” beneath the surface from a birds-eye view, thus affording an unparalleled opportunity to compare growth with other early cases of urban formation around the world. This project will include not only the first site-wide map of the buried landscape but will also provide insights into the ways that Indigenous peoples coalesced to form the largest precolonial community in the US. The investigation will also provide a dataset of incalculable value for future planning at the site which is visited by a quarter-million visitors each year. After the project, these data will be made available to other scholars and students via the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) and a web portal hosted by the University of Michigan. The digital atlas will become the basis for future investigations within the site’s central core, forming a foundation for multi-year research projects, Ph.D. dissertations and M.A. theses, and even projects through which middle and high school students learn GIS techniques while exploring America’s first city. Through consultation with the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency (SHPO), and across Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (THPOs), the project also promises sustained collaboration with Indigenous tribes who claim the site as an ancestral homeland. This will ensure that the opportunity and responsibility to serve as stakeholders in stewardship of these sensitive data are widely shared.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.