By DEBORAH GERTZ HUSAR

Herald-Whig Staff Writer

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. -- Beth Sylak holds a ceramic shard, debating whether to label it whiteware or hard paste ceramic.

Then she puts it to the test. She licks it.

If her tongue sticks, it's whiteware, a more porous type of ceramic. If it doesn't, odds are it's hard paste, closer to porcelain with a slick finish.

"It's not foolproof," Sylak said.

But it's one identification trick learned by the New Philadelphia field school students as they catalog finds from this year's excavations at the site of the first community established and platted by an African American, Free Frank McWorter, in 1836.

Nine students in the field school, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, spent five weeks on site and wrapped up Friday in the lab at the Illinois State Museum, cataloging the most items found in any of the three previous field schools.

"All the sites we worked on were very productive," said Chris Fennell, field school co-director and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois.

Compared to previous years, "the findings were very much the same with interspersed houses and the housewares looking the same across African-American and European-American households," he said.

Finds ranged from bottles and tinware to nails, a scythe and a William Jennings Bryan campaign button from 1908.

Two sites explored for the first time this year yielded an "incredibly productive trash pit" serving two generations and "nearby structural remains with a large post hole, a field stone foundation we believe was the base of a brick chimney stack," Fennell said.

No whole bricks were found, but "our interpretation is probably at some point as the house was demolished, they took away, cleaned up and recycled all usable bricks and left behind just the fragmented ones. Those got thrown in the rubble pile on top of what was earlier trash deposits."

Chris Valvano, a graduate student at the University of Michigan who oversaw undergraduates in the field school, worked in the lab to develop digital maps plotting this year's excavation sites.

"Often times in the field you can't always figure out exactly what you're doing. Lab work is where it all comes together," he said. "Field work is data collection. Lab work is data processing."

The students worked to identify items and their provenance -- where and when they were made. "Everything is a learning experience," said Shalonda Collins, a student at Mississippi State University, who had some previous lab experience with artifacts. "It is time-consuming. You have to be careful with what you're doing."

In another lab just down the hall, Katie Hardcastle and Alison McCartan worked to identify feline bones, including some from a cat that used some of its nine lives with a badly broken, but healed, leg and an abscessed tooth.

Identifying excavated bones would be a lab course in a university setting, with at least a couple weeks spent working with modern reference specimens to learn basic anatomy.

With the field school's tight timeline, "we learn by doing. We just start in," said Terry Martin, curator of anthropology at the Illinois State Museum Research and Collections Center and a field school co-director.

"Each group that comes in here, each person because of what they're dealing with in their individual bags, has a totally different experience than somebody sitting across the table. Maybe somebody got a bag with a lot of cat bones or pig feet. Somebody on the other side of the table will have rabbit bones or rat bones."

-- dhusar@whig.com/221-3379