By DEBORAH GERTZ HUSAR

Herald-Whig Staff Writer

BARRY, Ill. -- Katie Hardcastle held up a soil-encrusted tooth for inspection.

"Horse or cow? I think horse," said Hardcastle, an anthropology major at Grand Valley State University.

"Cow," said Terry Martin, curator of anthropology at the Illinois State Museum Research and Collections Center and co-director of the National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates field school at the New Philadelphia site.

"Dang it," Hardcastle said. "I told you it was a tooth though."

The learning experience for nine students -- from identifying artifacts discovered beneath the soil's surface to the story of the settlers of the community founded by Free Frank McWorter in 1836 -- is key to the field school, which combines five weeks on site at New Philadelphia and five weeks in the museum's lab.

"I feel like a kid in a candy store," Hardcastle said.

Working on hands and knees in a rectangular hole, Hardcastle and Alison McCartan carefully scraped dirt away from remnants of the past.

The two, along with Joshua Brown, make up one of three student teams digging into the past of New Philadelphia. Their finds include a bottle, a toy gun, bits of leather, and glimpses of the scalloped edge of what looked to be a plate or platter.

"Right now, the teams are all on top of house foundations," said field school co-director Chris Fennell, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois. "We expect to see quite a lot of artifacts of the mid- to late-1800s coming out of this."

McCartan, a history major at Willamette University in Salem, Ore., sees history come to life by comparing what she's learned from textbooks to finding actual pieces of the past. She hopes to pass that along to her own students someday.

"It's great experience to have for myself the impact of hands-on learning experience," she said.

Brown, a student at Mississippi State University wielding a shovel to widen the dig site, said the site's rich history helped draw him to the field school.

"Free Frank and his story really intrigued my senses. You don't read that in history books," he said.

"I don't think African-American history gets written about or paid attention to when it's just as important," said Annelise Morris, a student at the University of Illinois, working nearby where the dig uncovered a mold stain that indicated the presence of a post.

A $284,856 grant from the foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates program funds a second three-year field school at the site.

Researchers use both geophysics and aerial thermal surveys to determine likely dig sites. Pairing the two with "ground truthing," or actual excavation, provides vital comparative data for survey practices.

Historical data also help shape the dig. Martin's wife, Claire, works to document the site's history and recently discovered an 1846 tax record showing a site excavated in 2004 was taxed at $60, higher than surrounding property, which indicated it had some improvements.

"We're opening new units around that. We want to go through the 1930s house, the 1870s house, and look deeper to see if there's an 1840s or 1850s house because of the new documentary lead," Fennell said. "The documentary work can take years to track down these little bits that are not indexed well and are deep in an archive on microfilm. You almost find them by chance."

The wet spring also affected survey methods, mostly in a positive way, and the dig.

Geophysicist Mike Hargrave "got really intense data in a way he didn't get in 2005, when we had a drought year and it's harder to see contrast in soil," Fennell said.

"At times it's a burden, because we get rained out and can't dig. We were thinking of opening up more in the area of the blacksmith shop this summer. We're not doing that because the soil is so moist. We'd have a hard time seeing a post mold or architectural feature that was a soil difference."

The students will work on site until the end of June, then move onto the Illinois State Museum to analyze their finds.

-- dhusar@whig.com/221-3379