Part of the archeological find from 19th Century working-class neighborhoods along the Cedar River in Cedar Rapids (Bryon Houlgrave)

CEDAR RAPIDS — It’s hard to tell which discovery that archeologist David Benn is most excited about:

The treasure trove of more-than-century-old bottles, trinkets, pieces of china, coins, nails, animal bones and much more that he and his digging crew unearthed here this fall — much from backyard privies and outdoor dump sites used for household kitchen waste — in an effort to unravel the story of late-19th Century working-class Cedar Rapids.

Or the portion of a single spear point shaped from chert that Benn says his crew found 8 feet below a city parking lot along the Cedar River and that he says comes from prehistoric Cedar Rapids of some 9,500 years ago. He calls the find of the Hardaway spear point — named for a discovery site in North Carolina — “significant” and a rare event in Iowa and the Midwest.

“We found some neat stuff, both historic and prehistoric,” is how Benn, 63, research coordinator and principal investigator for Bear Creek Archeology of Cresco, Iowa, puts it.

Benn and his Bear Creek team are working under a $295,000 contract with the Army Corps of Engineers to survey, dig and test and then recover and preserve artifacts from an area that the Corps will disturb as it builds a new system of levees and flood walls to protect the city from a repeat of the city’s 2008 flood. The archeological work is taking place on just the east side of river, which is the Corps’ focus for now. However, city officials are committed to finding local and state funds to also build west-side flood protection, which will prompt an archeological study there if funds are found.

Earlier survey work of Benn’s team guided it this fall to dig in four spots along the east side of the river: in the park at First Avenue East near the Tree of Five Seasons; in the parking lot next to the Great America Building; in the city parking lot between Ninth and 12th avenues SE; and mostly in former backyards from the 12th Avenue bridge to the edge of the former Sinclair packing plant site.

The rare find of the Hardaway spear point came from undisturbed soil about eight foot below the city parking lot in one of five holes that Benn and his crew dug there. The estimated age, about 9,500 years old, comes from its similarity to spear points dated from more extensively studied sites, he explains.

“This looks like a temporary camp where a couple of guys on a hunting trail stopped and camped,” surmises Benn, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology and archeology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “It looks like one of the guys was refurbishing his weapon. The spear point broke. He took it off and put a new one on.”

The established thinking is that the first people entered North America over the Bering Sea land bridge from Asia more than 13,000 years ago. The Clovis culture of the earliest people to the continent is tied to the discovery of a certain style of weapon points first discovered at Clovis, New Mexico, in 1929, though later disputed discoveries have worked to make a case that people arrived in North America at an even earlier time.

Benn says 9,500 years ago, people had been in Iowa for a couple thousand years, and he described the Hardaway spear point found from that time as very thin and technologically advanced over projectile points from an earlier time.

“It was a shock,” he says when the prehistoric artifact turned up as a member of the crew was sifting hard dirt through a screen to see what of value might be in it.

He says he would be nice to excavate further to see if remnants, for instance, of a fire pit might be found where the spear point was found. But he says further digging may not take place if the Corps’ actual flood wall is too far from the spot.

The dig also turned up prehistoric pieces of pottery from the Late Woodland Period of 1,000 to 1,500 years ago and the Middle Woodland period of about 2,000 years ago.

Much of the Benn team’s work focused on the historic, not prehistoric, in the hunt for artifacts of the earliest settlers in Cedar Rapids in the 1840s and of the first established residents in the city’s early working-class neighborhoods of 1870 to the 1890s in around the former Sinclair plant.

Dig down into a riverbank here and there’s plenty of historic trash to find from an era before municipal garbage pickup, says Benn.

The archeological digs, he adds, necessarily focus on backyard privies and “middens” or outdoor dumps for household kitchen waste because both were burial sites for much of what a household discarded.

A home’s residents typically dug an outhouse privy 3 to 4 feet deep and between 4 and 7 feet across at the edge of a backyard. The organic material long ago decomposed into what Benn terms “night soil,” which his crew dug into to see what was there. Whiskey, beer, patent medicine and liniment bottles often ended up at the bottom of the privy, he reports.

“There was a lot of patent medicine bottles,” he says. “When do you take your medicine? When you’re in the bathroom.”

The middens yielded bones from an assortment of fish and animals, including cows pigs, sheep, chickens and turkey as well as raccoons and likely squirrels and rabbits, he says.

Literally, thousands of artifacts were recovered and sent to Bear Creek’s laboratory in Cresco for cleaning, sorting and analyzing, all to help shape a future report to the Corps on working-class Cedar Rapids and on the city’s prehistory. Benn suspects that representative samples of what has been collected will become an exhibit in Cedar Rapids in the years ahead.

In addition, he says an archeological team will monitor the Corps’ construction work as it takes place in the years to come to further work to recover and preserve pieces of the city’s history and prehistory.

So far, Benn’s team has found little evidence of the cabins of the very first settlers to Cedar Rapids because, he says, most of it was destroyed in subsequent building along the river in the last 150 years. The hope had been to find something of early settler Osgood Shepherd’s cabin in the park by today’s Tree of Five Seasons, but nothing was found.

The federal government’s requirement that such archeological work precede federal construction projects stems from the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and an executive order signed by President Richard Nixon in 1971, says Benn.

“It’s based on an ethic that the past is important,” he says.

Benn says people can come to think they know about a place’s past, but he says memories misfire and written histories can often focus on civic leaders and leave the working class out.

“We’re going to know a lot about the working class people who built Cedar Rapids,” says Benn of his team’s work. “People know what they remember. But do they really know what’s gone on? Do they really remember what grandma served on Sunday? Where the china came from? What their role in society was or in the economic system?

“You have to know these things from the bottom up. You have to look at the little stuff and work your way up to the big picture, the big, social, cultural picture.”