Most archeologists leave little impact on the lives of the people whose ruins they study. After all, their subjects tend to be past all mortal care. So Carolina diggers are excited that their work is helping some North Carolina Native Americans reconstruct the village of their ancestors.

Fifteen years ago, scientists at the Research Laboratories of Archaeology began to explore the bottomland around Hillsborough, North Carolina, searching for a town described in travel accounts nearly three centuries old.

Plowed-up clay pipe stems and potsherds led them to a site that, once dug, revealed the remnants of a village. From the written accounts and artifacts uncovered at the site, the researchers were able to date the village’s occupancy to the early 1700s and identify its former residents as the Occaneechi Indians.

Historical evidence suggests that the native population of the Piedmont left North Carolina around the time the village was last occupied. So when Carolina undergraduate Forest Hazel contacted research archeologists Stephen Davis and Trawick Ward and claimed that local families were descendants of the village’s long-ago inhabitants, they were surprised, even skeptical.

But Hazel had done his homework. His evidence-court and genealogical records-persuaded the scientists that these families were, indeed, Occaneechi.

Convention was right on one score: the native population did leave the region, probably by the 1710s. At the time, Iroquois warriors were targeting the area’s Native American settlements as ripe resources for deerskin and slaves. Depopulated by warrior raids and European diseases, many of the local tribes left their homes and fled to Fort Christanna, a colonial fort in Virginia that had pledged the groups protection.

Five tribal groups assembled at Christanna and settled there for two generations. But by the 1770s, the fort’s inhabitants were scattered. Some moved north while others journeyed back to their homelands.

By the early 1800s, descendants of the Occaneechi villagers were living in the area around Hillsborough. For two hundred years, school officials and census takers recognized these families as Indian, but no one was really sure what tribe they’d come from. Says John “Blackfeather” Jeffries, “The big joke was, we were all Cherokee.”

Jeffries, an Occaneechi leader instrumental in the village reconstruction, played as a child on the fields around the Eno River in Hillsborough. All the fields, that is, but one.

“All of us little kids stayed away from what we called the `Ghost Field’-we went out of our way to avoid going through it at night,” Jeffries says. He never did find out why the land was considered spooked. And as the children grew up, they forgot about the ghosts.

In 1983, Davis and Ward uncovered Occaneechi Village in a corner of the “Ghost Field.”

Pairing this historic lore with dug-up data was rewarding for the researchers. “We were no longer doing archeology within a strictly academic context,” Davis says. “We were doing research that affected people living today.”

The benefits are mutual. Backed by this research and their own documentation, the tribe is petitioning the state for recognition as the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. And with the help of the excavation records, they’re reconstructing the village the researchers discovered years ago.

Davis says, “We took the archaeological map and measured the site where the Occaneechi want to rebuild the village. It’s about a half-mile upstream from the original site. When they reconstruct the houses, they’ll be the same size and in the relative locations of the houses we identified.”

Davis believes his lab’s biggest contribution to the Occaneechi community is to their personal histories. “We’re able to give them hard data about how their ancestors lived, what their material culture was like,” he says. “They can walk around the site and know that they are walking exactly where their ancestors walked, where their ancestors lived and were buried.”