DIGGING UP BONES

DANI MESSICK

THE GOSHEN NEWS

GOSHEN — Students and staff of IUSB’s Sociology and Anthropology Department spent time Tuesday digging up bones at Cora Dale House.

The property, at 114 S. Fifth St., is the home of the Elkhart County Clubhouse, a place for personal growth, professional development and relationship building for adults with mental illnesses.

Thanks to a grant from the National Parks’ Service’s Historic Preservation Fund through the Indiana Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology, a dilapidated porch on the back of the home is finally getting a muchneeded replacement and addition of a wheelchair ramp through contractor Dana Miller Building Solutions. The collaborative effort also requires an archaeological dig in order to place the footings in order to qualify for the grant funding.

“Because this is a historic (site) here they have to sift through and make sure there’s nothing significant,” explained Jim Pinkerton, director of Communications and Marketing at Indiana University South Bend.

Professor Josh Wells said the department was asked by Cora Dale House to help in the archaeological study, and it’s a task they take on occasionally pro bono to help keep costs low for certain projects.

“Because it’s a historic house and we’re using federal money to move earth, the National Historic Preservation Act comes into play and you need to have archaeologists monitor the earth moving to make sure that nothing of historic value is destroyed or lost,” Wells said. “It could be that there would

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IUSB Archaeology Professor Josh Wells finds something in the dirt during an archaeological study behind Cora Dale House in Goshen.

Photos by Dani Messick | The Goshen News

Andrea Torres, of Goshen, a junior in the archaeological program at IUSB, digs through the dirt during an archaeological study at Cora Dale House on Tuesday.

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be remnants of one of the houses or churches or hotels, all historic properties around the house here, could have left trash piles or could have built a small outbuilding illegally. … There could have been all sorts of things going on in the yard and sometimes you even have unmarked burials and you need to have archaeologists monitor what’s going on.”

For the diggers on site, though at Cora Dale, much of the finds included nails, plastic, pieces of broken pottery and even juvenile mammal bones — presumably from pigs.

IUSB Archaeology Professor Jay VanderVeen believed the bone to be an immature pig bone.

“It makes sense being exactly outside the house,” he said. “We eat the immature pigs. We don’t let them get that old because then they’re big and heavy; so you kill them when they’re a little younger. So it was a pig that was butchered and tossed. It was part of a barbecue.”

Wells noted that the porch undergoing replacement wasn’t a part of the original house and tossing the kitchen trash outside was not uncommon “in an era before public sanitation.”

Wells said what the IUSB students and staff are doing saves thousands of dollars in scientific monitoring and also gives students the opportunity to practice their own skills.

“The Historic Preservation Fund that’s paying for this important work to be done on the side of the house is something that could be endangered in the current era of supposed efficiency at the federal level,” Wells added. “If they had waited another year, they might not be getting this ramp put in. There wouldn’t be the money.”

Wells said the director of Cora Dale House, Erich Miller, asked the department if they’d be willing to help with the study and so they sent out an email to students requesting their assistance in exchange for some hands-on experience.

“I’m learning a lot of handson and what to find out of organic material to make sure you see something that looks like it was manmade or seems out of place that you don’t find in the dirt,” said Andrea Torres, of Goshen, a junior in the archaeological program at IUSB.

When asked how they know if something is manmade or not, VanderVeen declared, “We lick our science.”

“I haven’t gotten to that part yet, but I’m sure I will,” Torres said. “We use all five senses.”

Dani Messick is the education and entertainment reporter for The Goshen News. She can be reached at dani.messick@goshennews.com or at 574538-2065.

The crew from Dana Miller Building Solutions augers the ground outside Cora Dale House for an archaeological study on Tuesday.

Dani Messick | The Goshen News