For the past three years, the University of Notre Dame archeology field school has conducted geophysical surveys and excavations at the Goodall site in northwestern Indiana. The Goodall tradition, a northwestern extension of Havana Hopewell, was one of the first archeological cultures defined in Indiana.

The Goodall site has been central to archeological ideas about Hopewell in northwestern Indiana and southwestern Michigan. However, most of what we know about the site comes from amateur excavations conducted in the nineteenth century, so the site remains poorly known by modern standards.

 

Even the number of mounds once present at the site (22) was uncertain until Bill Mangold, Indiana Division of Natural Resources, found a "lost map" of the site in the Ernest W. Young Collection at the Illinois State Museum (Figure 5). Young was an amateur archeologist who regularly collected at the Goodall site during the mid-20th century. The Young collections are now on loan to Notre Dame, where they are being studied in depth by Mark Schurr and Bill Mangold. The field investigations have shown that even a site that appears to have been destroyed by years of looting, grading, and cultivation can still provide new archeological data when approached with modern techniques.		click on image to enlarge
		Figure 5. A reconstruction of the original distribution of mounds at the Goodall site based on Bill Mangold's interpretation of Ernest Young's maps. (Click on the image for a larger (11 KB) version.)
		click on image to enlarge
So far, the Notre Dame field investigations at the Goodall site and Bill Mangold's surface surveys have defined several habitation areas surrounding the mound group. They have also revealed that one of the mounds was probably constructed between AD 1 and AD 150, when Havana Hopewell was in its most complex and elaborate expression. The Hopewell ware sherds in (Figure 6) from disturbed contexts in the mound were probably produced at that time.		Figure 6. Classic Havana Hopewell ware sherds from the Goodall site. (Click on the image for a larger (58 KB) version.)
Leslie Bush, Indiana University, has identified a single, well-preserved bottle gourd seed from the Goodall site, which is the first documentation of a domesticated plant from a Middle Woodland context in northwestern Indiana. Further investigations at the Goodall site in the coming year will attempt to refine the use of geophysical surveys through a large-scale magnetic and soil resistivity survey of several of the former mound locations.