Nature-Friendly Methods To Probe Sacred Ground

In a lonely field a few feet from the shade of a towering Indian mound, a graying medicine man charts the progress of the crew probing his ancestral stomping grounds for ruins.

Tim Thompson, the soft-spoken spiritual leader for the ceremonial Hickory Ground, scribbles measurements on a crisp white tablet as a ground-penetrating radar system rolls across the grassy pasture, yielding a series of blips and dips on a colorless computer screen.

In a few days, the data they painstakingly record will be used to jot a map of ancient structures and relics buried deep in the sacred soil of the Etowah Indian Mounds site in northwest Georgia. Yet even if the data can pinpoint exactly where Native American artifacts are buried, Thompson would rather leave them alone.

Adam King has dedicated his career to unearthing the ruins locked beneath the site in hopes of shedding more light on how the land's first settlers lived. Word that he might not be able to excavate parts of the site is, to say the least, discouraging.

King is on the vanguard of a group of conscientious archaeologists, a class of excavators dedicated to studying ruins but also seeking to cooperate with the natives who want to keep the land unscathed. Full Story

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