UW-L archaeology students unearth 1,500-year-old artifacts

Kassie Praska got the attention of her classmates Thursday with a loud shriek.

She’d struck an animal bone while lightly scraping the soil with a shovel in a trench about 25 yards from Sand Lake Road in Onalaska and wanted classmates in the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Archaeo-logy Field School to see it.

“Everyone usually goes to take a look when someone screams,” said Wendy Holtz-Leith, site director and an archaeologist with the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center.