♪ >> Archaeologists Christopher Moore and Elizabeth Straub are digging into a mystery.

About a century and a half ago, this cornfield was part of the Wabash and Erie Canal.

This water superhighway traveled all the way from Lake Erie in Ohio, through Indiana, down to Evansville.

There are places where the canal is still navigable, such as the Wabash and Erie Canal Park in Delphi, but there's still a lot that's unknown about this unique period.

>> It's a blind spot, in large part because it's kind of a maligned time in our history.

There's a huge levy of tax money that was placed toward building things like the canal.

Unfortunately, most of the canal ended up not being profitable.

>> But that doesn't mean that this wasn't an important time in Indiana history.

>> The smaller towns like Delphi and Logansport and Wabash, Huntington, Peru, they were really, really tiny before the canal came through.

They were trading posts, basically, along the river.

They ballooned up after the canal came through.

The thing that brought most of our pioneering ancestors into this region, literally, was the canal.

>> The project is funded by a $100,000 grant from the Wabash River Heritage Corridor Fund.

Sites in Carroll and Cass Counties are being assessed.

The goal is to see which locations might be eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

>> And so ultimately what I'd like to see is a linear national register multisite that contains all of these Wabash and Erie Canal resources that we're finding, and that could be expanded in the future to cover the entire length of the resource.

So our work out there is primarily focused on trying to locate a section of the canal, excavate down to the bottom of the channel to see if there is anything that is left that would help us understand how the canal was constructed, so we can get a better feel for the way that the Irish dug the canal, what they did to the canal to keep the banks intact, you know, all of these sorts of things.

>> What Moore and Straub are looking for isn't profound.

In fact, it's often the stuff folks might have tossed out.

>> The main way that archaeologists can tell us more about the canal period and any period in history is that -- you know, unlike our histories, which tend to be written from a particular point of view, material culture, the objects that are left behind, they have a different kind of bias, right?

When you talk to somebody surveying you about your household consumables, for instance, you may not tell them about all the beer you drink, but the beer cans are still there in the trash.

And so archaeology can tell us about those kind of hidden things that maybe we didn't want to write down.

>> Today's big find is a lump of clay, likely left over construction material.

>> In areas like this, where the bottom of the canal is very sandy, they had to line it with clay.

And so this is probably some of the raw material that is left behind from that -- from that liner.

>> But a few miles away, at a small park next to the Wabash River, Moore hopes to learn about what day-to-day life was like along the canal.

>> That site is really interesting because it was a private residence that was converted to a tavern, and it was directly related to the function of the canal.

These taverns were located along the stretch to give people the opportunity to get off the boat, to have a good meal, to sleep in an actual bed that wasn't a canal boat bed, these sorts of things.

>> Preliminary digs here have been fruitful.

They've found items that speak to everyday life, such as ceramics, buttons and even jewelry.

>> In my opinion, the coolest thing we found so far is we found this crushed finger ring.

It has a red glass stone in it.

It probably wasn't a super expensive finger ring, but still it was somebody's ring.

You can imagine this on a person's finger, maybe put yourself into the -- the past.

>> And so with each new discovery, Indiana's canal period becomes a little less mysterious.

>> These little tiny fragments of the past that really open up -- they are vignettes into these bigger narratives about who people -- who our ancestors were and what their stories were.

And those stories are incredibly fascinating.

So, you know, archaeology helps us have a window into those stories.

It's never perfect, but, you know, it does help fill in some of the gaps in those broader histories that we have.