Some Ephemeral Early Nineteenth Century Native Signatures in Illinois

We understand that a number of native groups were present in Illinois during the nineteenth century. While the historical and archaeological evidence of large, well-established summer villages postdating 1800 is limited to several well-known sites, the population of the native communities of the era, the pattern of seasonal land use, and the numerous references to "Indian villages" in late nineteenth cen-tury country histories, all suggest that there should be more sites or signatures than we are encountering in our archaeological surveys. Expectations tend to color how we define such sites, however. The bulk of these sites (particularly those postdating 1800) are probably much more ephemeral than we might expect, defined as they were by small numbers of people briefly occupying seasonal, resource-procure-ment locales. The result may be very small, low-visibility samples that appear in apparent isolation, or perhaps more likely, on multicomponent sites with stronger prehistoric or early Euro-American visibility.