Digging sounds have become familiar to Eli Orrvar. He's an archeology graduate student at Northern Illinois University.
Orrvar spends each day working on the excavation of the Glidden Homestead barn in DeKalb. The digging process began last month.
Orrvar says the excavation is more complex than just digging in the ground.
"You find an area of interest and you just start digging layer by layer -- sifting through the soil finding artifacts, a lot of documentation about how deep you're digging, what you're finding, how the soil is," Orrvar said.
But he says it's a long and delicate process. That's why he uses handheld shovels, dust pans, and brushes to dig through each layer of soil.
"You have to be very careful; you don't want to break anything or dig too deep and disturb a layer that you're not ready to document yet. You have to be very, very careful," Orrvar said.
Joseph Glidden is known for inventing a commonly-used barbed wire in the late 1800s. But Orrvar wants to find artifacts from Glidden's other "crazy inventions."
Orrvar has about 10 NIU undergraduate students helping him sift through soil and document the findings.
The work is expected to continue through the summer.