Between 800 and 1,000 years ago, a young Native American man died in what is now Antioch Township near Fox Lake, Ill., and after all those years, a homeowner inadvertently dug up the bones while working on a landscaping project last September, opening a window into the past.
"It was something else. It was scary, funny, and exciting all at once," said the 58-year-old homeowner, who said she didn't want her name used.
She had been digging to build a terrace on an eroding hill on her property, and while shoveling about a foot down, she came across what she thought were probably animal bones. Then she found a jaw bone.
"There were no fangs. This looked human," she said, so she called the Lake County Sheriff's Office, which in turn called Lake County Coroner Dr. Howard Cooper, who still remembers the text message. "It was Sept. 17 around 7 p.m., and I got a text from a sheriff's deputy asking if this jaw bone was human," said Cooper, who is also a forensic dentist.
"My answer was, 'Yes, it is,'" Cooper said.
The first thing investigators did was send Chief Deputy Coroner Jason Patt and Bones, a one-year-old Belgian Malinois trained as a cadaver dog, out to the scene, which is near where Fox Lake and Petite Lake are connected.
"Bones searched the entire area, but in one area, he indicated multiple times and started digging and found two bones," Cooper said. "At that point, everything stopped, and the sheriff's deputies secured the scene."
Cooper began to make calls for a grave-recovery operation, and he linked up with the U.S. Navy's Jason Keller with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) because Cooper knew he had a trailer with all the right equipment. Cooper also called anthropologist Erin Waxenbaum from Northwestern University.
"Then we did an archeological dig-all the soil was sifted and looked at to determine what bones were present. It was really impressive," Cooper said. They recovered about 75 percent of the body, which did not include the upper portion of the skull.
The anthropologist cleaned the bones and determined that they were from a Native American male between the ages of 17 and 27, and there were no signs of foul play.
Many of the bones were broken, and some had marks on them. According to Cooper, the experts explained the ground pressure will often break bones over long periods of time.
Cooper said investigators then sent the remains to Dawn Cobb at the Illinois State Museum Research and Collection Center in Springfield. She also dated the bones as being from 800 to 1,000 years ago, and her age range for the unknown man was 20 to 30 years old.
The markings on the bones were "root marking" produced by plants growing in the soil and were used to help determine the age. She also noted some animal marks on the bones.
Cooper said Cobb, an archeologist, searched their records and found they had documented a burial ground in the same area back in 1919.
"It was pretty exciting," Cooper said. "It's fascinating how old the skeleton is, and the condition we found it in was amazing. Here you are touching something that is between 800 and 1,000 years old. 'A prehistoric Native American' is what she called him.
"Then of course one starts thinking about the back story," Cooper added, "What was his life like? How did he live?"
Bill Brown, a Native American who runs the Potawatomi Trails Pow Wow in Zion every year, said that in the time frame provided by the investigators, he would expect the body to be from either the Ho-chunk or Miami tribes.
Since there were no funerary objects with the bones, Brown added, it's possible the man died during a hunting accident or some other way where he died alone. "But anything he had with him, leather or wood, would have broken down and is gone. So you don't really know," said Brown, adding that Native Americans at that time in the Chain O' Lakes area would have hunted small game birds and animals and fished.
The region's early residents lived in wigwams, which are shaped like an upside-down cup. There is an example of one at the Bess Bower Dunn Museum of Lake County in Libertyville. The museum, run by the Lake County Forest Preserves, recently repatriated Native American bones it had in its collection.
A skull and a stone arrow or spear head were returned this year, bringing the total number to 46 individuals and funerary objects from the Lake County museum collection repatriated to Native American tribes.
Brown said the repatriation is important, because when Native Americans buried their dead, "it was like putting a child down to go to sleep. You leave to rest and don't disturb them."
Dennis Downes, an Antioch resident and artist, has been studying Native American trail-marker trees in Lake County and across the country. The trees are bent to show the way for the trail, fresh water or tool making sites. He dedicated a bronze trail-marker tree in a small park in downtown Antioch last year.
He said there used to be two trail-marker trees in the Chain O' Lakes on either side of sandbar between Channel Lake and Lake Marie, pointing out a shortcut. The sandbar is known to 21st-century boaters as a place to party and hang out, and it is just a few miles north of the recent bone discovery.
During a 2017 talk in Waukegan, Downes said the Chain O' Lakes area would have been a rich environment for people living off the land in prehistroic times, describing it as "a paradise" with trees for fire and plenty of food and water sources.
The Illinois State Museum could not be reached for comment on what will happen to the bones found in Antioch Township, but Brown believes they would have to be repatriated to a tribe.
Cooper said the whole experience has been fascinating, and he praised the teamwork between his office, the sheriff's investigators and the NCIS team from Naval Station Great Lakes.
"It was awesome to pull all these resources together. Everyone worked well together. During the dig, it was raining, but it didn't matter," he said. "It was a neat, neat case."