One bullet, then two, then three, then a hand full had one ISU alumnus researching what he had found on Iowa State’s campus.

Last summer, Benjamin Worrell, then a senior in civil engineering and now an ISU alumnus, discovered a piece of Iowa State history that had been lost for nearly 100 years.

While metal detecting on the south side of Lake Laverne, Worrell discovered a bullet, and then another bullet, and then another.

“I [then] had a couple handfuls of bullets by the time I was done that day and I thought that was kind of strange, so I did some more research on bullet types and figured they were fairly old,” Worrell said.

He found more casings along with some coins on his second trip to the lake. While it took a lot of time to find the artifacts, the research into their origins was just as intensive and time-consuming.

The next step in Worrell’s finding was to record the information he had found. Unbeknownst to him at the time, metal detecting on campus was against the law.

“I found out that you are not supposed to metal detect on Iowa State property,” Worrell said.

However, the Office of the State Archaeologist (OSA) and the university let Worrell off scot-free by merely informing him that he shouldn’t be metal detecting on campus. However, both agencies let him continue to record the information, Worrell said.

“It was interesting, I ended up doing a lot more research through the special archives people at the library,” Worrell said.

Worrell dug through old military inspection records, photos and anything else that might have pertained to the bullets he found.

Eventually, he concluded that the site was most likely used for target practice and a place for students to get used to shooting guns before going to war.

One concept that had Worrell scratching his head, however, was why they used that area. From the location of bullets and his findings, Worrell couldn’t figure out why the main bullet field was shooting toward the hill facing Lincoln Way.

“I found bullets all the way to the top of the hill,” Worrell said, laughing. “It was almost like they were at least somewhat shooting over the hill, and Lincoln Way was there at the time, and there were buildings across the street, too. So I’m just sittin’ there scratching my head going ‘boy.’”

Then, with an OK from the OSA and Iowa State, Worrell moved on to register his findings as an official archeological site.

The process can be done through the OSA, and according to Worrell, even though it was new to him, was not as hard as it may seem.

Last spring, Worrell worked at the DOT alongside an archaeologist. Having previously found other objects, Worrell brought some of the items to his co-worker and they began to talk on recording discovery sites and how to do it.

To record a site, one must list things such as the county, local site name, the type of site, the condition, the method of collection and what was discovered at the site. A detailed description of the site must be included as well, according to the OSA.

The website also mentions some Do’s and Don’ts to recording the archaeological site. For example, “Do get landowner’s permission before collecting, do catalog and label all finds, do try to identify artifact types represented in your collection.”

Some “Don’ts” include, “don’t trespass, don’t dig in or around archaeological features and don’t collect from public land without a permit.”

“It’s always good to talk to an archeologist, you can go through the university or whatever, but they’ll always be willing to help,” Worrell said.

Worrell added that one of his biggest takeaways from the investigation of the site was “how integral into the college the military program was.”

“The land-grant act of 1862 made it so it was expected to have a military program in the college and all the male students who were able were expected to take military training of some type,” Worrell said. “There were a lot of people that were students and faculty that ended up serving in World War I.”

As for why Worrell was even searching the site in the first place, that comes from Worrell’s childhood.

“I used to go metal detecting as a kid with my grandpa, but we would mostly just go to the same schoolyard and look for change or just jewelry,” he said. “But after I started to get more into archaeology, then metal detecting took on a new flavor for me.”

It stopped being enough to just find a 10-year-old penny in the junk yard, Worrell wanted to begin finding things of actual interest.

In his collection, Worrell has ancient Indian arrowheads, pottery shards, an old honor guard hat pin from 1995 and a spearhead, all with their own story as to how Worrell found them and where they came from before they were discovered.

One of Worrell’s bigger collection items, a bison horn, was something that he stumbled across in December of 2014 while taking a walk near Squaw Creek.

The horn was about a foot long and still attached to about 8 inches of a partial skull.

In a previous article for the Daily, Matthew Hill, associate professor of anthropology said that the specimen was most likely from the species Bison antics occidentals, an extinct species that lived in North America.

In that article, Worrell said, “I’ve been sharing [the horn] with a lot of people and that’s why this stuff is interesting to me. Sharing is what makes it important, you know?”

Worrell said he wouldn’t be opposed to giving the bullets he found to the university partially in an attempt to help share his findings. He would just hope that they would be put to good use and hopefully displayed and not placed in a box and hidden away.

Worrell has been recently trying to learn more about the artifacts that he already has by talking with people from the university. Worrell said he’s trying to learn as much as he can in regards to how old his artifacts are and what they’re made of.

“You’d be amazed at how much information you can get,” Worrell said.

At the end of the day, Worrell said that he was happy to have added a little piece to ISU history.