DeKALB – Archaeologists are digging into DeKalb home of barbed wire baron Joseph F. Glidden – just off Lincoln Highway – and the community is welcome to take a look as the excavation continues.

Eli Orrvar, an archaeology graduate student at Northern Illinois University, is working with Glidden Homestead director Rob Glover to explore the history of the barn that sits on the homestead, which was built around 1870, Glover said.

Joseph F. Glidden patented his idea for the unique fencing in 1874 and began manufacturing wire on the farm before relocating to larger facilities. When fully excavated and restored, the exhibit will show a unique time in DeKalb history, as it was on the cusp of industry transition from agriculture to manufacturing, Glover said.

“We have this plan for the usage and historical restoration,” Glover said. “The idea is to clear this off so we can clear [the flooring] and then dig those test pits and see if there are artifacts in there.”

The team already has found a few interesting items such as a glass medicine bottle, a kitchen knife handle and fragments of glass, coal and animal bones at a surface level dig, so it is likely more artifacts will emerge, Orrvar said.

“But you never want to get your hopes too high,” he said. “It’s always better to be halfway surprised than disappointed.”

There are a few different ways to estimate how old an item is, from research to carbon dating, depending on the artifact, Orrvar said.

“That usually comes after the digging is done,” he said. “You do your field stage and then the lab stage. It’s hard to do both at once because just looking at one artifact, you can research it for weeks.”

The goal is to complete the excavation by July or August, but a lot of different factors can affect how long the process takes, Orrvar said.

“If we open a test pit and it’s extremely dense with artifacts or there is a feature that is going off in a different direction, we have to open another test pit,” he said.

What happens with the items foundjust depends on what’s there.

Finding a piece of barbed wire or something else related to that part of the barn history would be ideal, but since it was the wire manufacturing site for only a little while, that might not happen, Glover said.

“It’s such a small period of time,” he said. “Historically, we really know what happened here, but what else were they using it for?”

Glidden had more than 20 patents, and there is no telling what went on in the barn, which has made the project even more interesting than it was at the start, Glover said.

“We have to shore everything up and make it safe,” Glover said. “We initially just needed to know where everything was. Now it’s sort of shifted. … We really want to know, what is it, what went on here, what does it hold.”

For information, visit gliddenhomestead.org/.