IL - Antioch Township homeowner unearths 800-year-old bones on her property

[Indy Anna]

At least 800 years ago, a Native American man died. A Lake County woman found his bones while landscaping her yard.

Between 800 and 1,000 years ago, a young Native American man died in what is now Antioch Township near Fox Lake, 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.

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.”

“Then we did an archeological [sic] 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.

I think we can all agree, anyway, there was no foul play on the part of the homeowner.