The Sangamo Frontier

“Until I was introduced to Robert Mazrim’s splendid book I had never heard of Sangamo Town—which was not surprising since it had lived out its life and vanished by 1850. While towns of the ancient world tended to last for centuries, in America progress means that very little is built for permanence. We shovel away the past with scarcely a word of regret. The author’s study of Sangamo County not only makes fascinating reading but also serves as classic demonstration of the elements that, when woven together, bring the lost past to life. There are many other lost towns from Virginia to California, every one of which can provide scholars and students with an exercise in archaeohistorical deduction—but first they must read Robert Mazrim’s The Sangamo Frontier.”

“In The Sangamo Frontier, the culmination of years of determined and loving detection, the archaeologist Robert Mazrim brings a searchlight to bear on the region’s early material culture and documentary sources. We accompany him on painstaking excavations that inform a study graced by shrewd scholarship and assured revisionism.  Mazrim exposes the complex layers of Native American, French, and early American habitation. He rescues extinct settlements. He corrects misinterpretations and mislabeled sites, not least in Lincoln’s New Salem. He shows the remarkable—because routine—presence of fine imported pottery in frontier log houses. His readers will not see the Land of Lincoln in quite the same way again.”

“Robert Mazrim makes archaeology interesting for a broad audience in the way that Carl Sagan did for astronomy and Stephen Jay Gould did for paleontology and natural history. He breaks new ground in studying frontier history using the findings from various digs in central Illinois. And his study comes at a fortuitous time as Illinois and the nation prepare to celebrate the Lincoln Bicentennial.”