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THE OPEN RECORD, AND WHERE IT STOPS
The one published synthesis the sister builds cite is identified here, and its counties corrected: Kaitlyn Davis, Environmental Analysis of Native American Settlement Patterns in the Late Archaic and Early Woodland Periods in Northern Indiana — a University of Notre Dame undergraduate senior thesis directed by Dr. Mark Schurr, dated by its internal evidence to about 2014 — studies LaPorte and St. Joseph Counties. The project's shorthand for it, "St. Joseph and Marshall," is wrong: the archaeological survey of Marshall County is Charles H. Faulkner's separate work of 1961, whose Benack village site stands in Marshall County and is evidence about that county, not this one; nothing in Faulkner is imported into Penn. Davis queried the state's site database for the two counties and received 40 site numbers — 19 in LaPorte County, 21 in St. Joseph — of six types: lithic scatter and artifact scatter, cache, camp, village, isolated find and unknown. The county's 21 divide as camps, isolated finds, lithic scatters and unknowns, with no village, burial or mound type among them; the only village in the whole 40-site set is a LaPorte County site, and the study's distribution concentrates on the Kankakee Marsh side of the two counties. For Penn Township and the Baugo drainage specifically, the thesis says nothing: a full-text search of it for "Penn" and for "Baugo" returns no matches, and it publishes no township-level breakdown. At its strength, the open record for this ground is a county distribution of small Late Archaic and Early Woodland camps and isolated finds in which Penn is never named.
The period histories, searched whole, return the same negative at their strength: the word "mound" occurs zero times in Chapman's Penn chapter, and no earthwork or burial-ground passage appears in it; Howard's Penn section carries no mound, burial or earthwork mention either, and his general Mound Builder chapter places the county's notable remains elsewhere — "the most remarkable of these are three large mounds and two small ones, found in Warren township," at the county's west end. One burial the Penn record does carry — a historic-era chief's grave on a named farm — and it is told whole in this section's valley article, where it belongs, at Chapman's print strength. Two cautions ride with this article, both traps the record sets: Mark Schurr's test excavation of the Bellinger Mound (site 12 SJ 6) in St. Joseph County is real published work, but its township was not established in anything reached for this build, and it is not imported into Penn; and Cyrus Thomas's mound catalogue mentions mounds "on the St. Joseph River near the mouth of Cedar Creek at Cedarville" — that is the other St. Joseph River, in Allen County's Maumee drainage, not this valley. The record's edge is named plainly: the Indiana state site file, SHAARD, maintained by the Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology, is access-restricted, and the Division publishes recorded-site counts by county, not by township. Anything finer than this article's county strength requires that access, and this section does not pretend to it.