Company commits funding to school for ecology study equipment.
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ROCHELLE — A large mitigation project of Deer Creek is not only going to benefit the park district and visitors to scenic Skare Park, but it also has Rochelle Township High School staff and students excited.
“This project would provide our ecology and environmental students with a great resource for studying archeology and other related fields,” said RTHS superintendent Jamie Craven, during a field trip to the park last week. “We see this as an opportunity where students could come out here for future decades to study the changes of the area’s ecosystem.”
Randy Vogel, manager of operations of Land & Water Resources, set up the field trip for the students and arranged for several members of Midwest Archaeological Research Services to demonstrate what work has to be done before construction on Deer Creek can begin.
“Our plan is to mitigate the creek and the surrounding prairie grasses back to their original state before man settled here,” Vogel explained. “But before any of that work can start we have to bring in an archaeological team to make sure we aren’t disturbing any historical Indian camp sites or burial grounds.”
Vogel and Jay Martinez, the president of MARS, explained several of the procedures that go into a mitigation project on public land.
“We dig down a foot or so in all four directions about every 50 feet looking for artifacts that could be part of a camp settlement,” Martinez explained. “If we find something significant, then we would expand our digging to see if this could be identified as a historical site and an area that would need to be designated and protected.”
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