Disentangling the Late Pre-Contact Native History of Northern Illinois: Ongoing Research in the Legacy Collections of the Fisher Mound and Village Site, Will County, Illinois

During the 1920s George Langford, an early avocational archaeologist, conducted extensive excavations in one of the best preserved and most important Upper Mississippian sites in the midcontinent. The Fisher site contained the unplowed remains of at least fifty house depressions and twelve mounds associated with what we now identify as the Langford and Fisher phases on the bluffs of the Des Plaines River. He donated his extensive notes and well-documented collections to the University of Chicago in 1930. Unfortunately, they dispersed the collection in the early 1960s. Since 1995 the authors have been seeking to reassemble this important data set and to prepare a comprehensive analysis and report on his research. Our preliminary analyses have provided extensive bioarchaeological information on Upper Mississippian diet and movement, detailed data on Langford and Fisher material cultures, and insights into ethnic interactions that suggests a social and political environment dominated by violence.