After turning 472 shovelfuls of soil in the Baker Wetlands, a state archeologist couldn’t uncover any evidence of humans buried beneath the soggy earth in the path of the proposed final leg of the South Lawrence Trafficway.

“I’ve been told there are hundreds of graves there,” said Tim Weston, an archeologist for the Kansas State Historical Society. “But with … the physical evidence work we have done, we have not encountered it.”

Weston said he knows that his search  conducted last week along the trafficway’s proposed 32nd Street alignment, between Louisiana Street and Haskell Avenue  is only the beginning.

Later this week, a team of high-tech archeologists from Colorado will bring their ground-penetrating radar equipment to the wetlands.

Their target: “subsurface discontinuities” that could indicate locations for dozens of American Indian graves, whose purported sites are on the minds of trafficway opponents but remain elusive to highway officials.

“We’re in a position of proving a negative,” said Mike Rees, chief counsel for the Kansas Department of Transportation, which wants to spend up to $100 million to finish the trafficway between U.S. Highway 59 and Kansas Highway 10 east of Lawrence. “There are some people who know there are sites out there and where they are, but they won’t tell us.

“Absent any information about where to look, we’re trying to find out if there are or there are not. We’re doing the best we can in order to answer the question, yes or no.”

The radar work will cost the state a little more than $12,000. That will be in addition to the time and money invested by Weston and his crew from the state’s historical society, which followed stakes through the wetlands and dug up to 2 feet deep in search of evidence of human remains.

The work didn’t sit well with Anna Wilson, a graduate of Haskell Indian Nations University and spokesperson for the Wetlands Preservation Organization. The wetlands group has been a leading opponent of the trafficway project, saying the highway not only would harm the environmental integrity of the wetlands but also destroy the cultural, historical and educational foundations of the school in southeast Lawrence.

Digging for American Indian graves without consulting Haskell students, American Indian tribes or other American Indian experts is a cultural affront to many in the community, Wilson said.

“They’re looking for something they shouldn’t be looking for,” she said. “If they’re there, leave them alone. KDOT isn’t showing the respect they need to do. They’ve kept a whole racist mentality, and that needs to cease.”

The archeological reports  from Weston’s physical search and the upcoming radar work  will be included in a draft environmental impact statement for the trafficway project. Such a statement, required by federal law, is designed to assess the project’s effects on the land, environment, history, culture and other aspects in the road’s path.

Among those issues is the prospect of human remains in the wetlands, something officials say they want to settle, one way or another.

“We are trying to do what we can do,” Rees said. “Some of the Native-American tribes will not be satisfied, no matter what we do. But the tribes have expressed an interest in it, and we’re trying to address those concerns.”