For four weeks, Mark Rees, Ph.D., director of Sociology, Anthropology and Child and Family Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and two students have been conducting searches along Bayou Teche to locate clues to where the original Acadian settlers built there homes.

Their efforts are known as the Projet Nouvelle Acadie, or the New Acadia Project.

“We’re starting with what we know,” said Rees, taking shelter at the Loreauville Town Hall during a brief summer afternoon storm Wednesday. “Right now, we’re working in the Loreauville area, shovel testing and using remote sensing with a magnetometer.”

This instrument senses disruptions in Earth’s magnetism, explained graduate student Maegen Smith, such as changes in soil density. It helps them detect where an area may have been dug up and refilled, which is handy in their search for unmarked graves.

Smith said they have investigated five properties over the past few weeks, searching for pieces of ceramic plates, metal nails, glass shards and brick fragments that could indicate the site of a former settlement.

The Holy Grail of this search would be the gravesite of Joseph “Beausoleil” Broussard, who led that first group of Acadian settlers to Louisiana. The group is looking for graves because in the 1700s the dead would have been buried close to the village, explained Smith’s fellow student worker, senior Christian Sheumaker. Broussard’s grave would be a good indicator of where the original colony would be.

After the rain passed, Rees met up Smith and Sheumaker at a property right off the bayou.

“My wife teaches history and I was a history major,” said the land owner, who asked not to be identified to protect his property from unwanted visitors. “I think (the project) could offer a good sense of history, knowing where your ancestors came from. I think it’s all fascinating.”

The research crew was investigating a concrete-covered burial site on the property that was covered sometime before the 1990s. The burial is said to hold several children with the last name Broussard.

Asked what he would think if the original settlement turned out to be on his property, the owner replied laughing, “That’s a quandary all right. Being that it’s a Broussard cemetery is pretty interesting. There’s a lot of maintenance into keeping up this road. That’s my main concern.”

Rees brought out a steel-bladed weed whacker to help cut through the thick layer of matted roots and ivy that accumulated on the area to make sure there were no inscriptions in the concrete.

They haven’t discovered any unmarked burials yet, Rees said, but he didn’t expect to locate any during the first few weeks. With four weeks down this summer, there’s another four weeks remaining for this summer’s search, but it will continue for four weeks in the winter, next summer and the following winter as well, for a total of 12 weeks per year.

“It’s like searching for a button in a cane field,” he said. “Whether we’ll ever find it is unknown.

“We never thought we’d find it the first day or even the first year. It’s proving to be a slow methodical process.”

Looking through land holdings of the generation following the first arrivals and other current research on the first settlers, Rees landed on Loreauville as the place most likely to hold clues to the first settlement.

However, many of the areas Rees wants to search are inaccessible because they’re in overgrown wilderness or could even have been built over, he said.

“We’re lucky,” he said. “There’s not as much development in Loreauville as there is in New Iberia or Lafayette. It’s a race against time. We’re trying to locate these sites before they are built over or destroyed.”

Rees isn’t the first person to ponder the origins of Cajun culture. The idea has been kicked around since the 1980s, he explained, but the state was doing nothing to locate these historical sites. However, the New Acadia Project began gaining traction when Rees was invited to speak at Vermilionville.

“I made the mistake of saying, ‘Not only do we not know where these sites are, but we’re not even looking for them,’ in a room full of original Cajun descendants,” Rees said.

Rees described the 1970s as a period of Acadian Renaissance, when people began to take pride in their Acadian heritage.

“People asked, ‘What are we doing to preserve our heritage, our culture, our language?’ ” he said. “The Evangeline story filled a void, but it was written in the 19th century, about people who never existed, by a man who never came to Louisiana. Evangeline embodies the tragedy and sorrow (of the Acadian story) but not the history. We’re looking for something concrete and real.”

The research is good for economic and cultural reasons explained Rees. He said that the true Acadian history is being under utilized, even ignored.

“There’s potential for development not just for tourism, but a lot more than that,” he said. “We could call it the cultural economy. We use local names to buy and sell things, such as Evangeline Maid. This (New Acadia Project) could open up possibilities, I think not just tourists but local people would come to visit their own heritage.”

Loreauville Mayor Al Broussard is a member of the New Acadia Project’s Steering committee. He has been helping the group by working with land owners along the bayou, and he agreed that the economic prospects of the search were innumerable.

“This is a really big deal culturally and historically and for economic development for the state,” he said. “Once we establish that this is the birth place of Cajun culture, that could affect the thousands of descendants from first families that arrived here.”

Broussard routinely visits the group to check up on their work and, Rees said, has helped by getting equipment such as an SUV for the group to use to help transport research tools.

The work is slow going because the search is only part time and minimally staffed. Rees doesn’t get to spend a lot of time in the field as head of the department, but he helps supply Sheumaker and Smith with tools, equipment and hydration to keep their search going.

The project has an approximately $77,000 budget at the moment, made possible by a $25,000 donation from the McIlhenny Foundation, a $50,000 donation from the Iberia Parish Government and smaller donations from individual donors. Rees said a crowd sourced funding site is a possibility to raise more money, but it would have to go through the steering committee.

“The only reason we do it is because of public support,” Rees said. “The people of Iberia Parish wanted this to happen. I call it public archeology. We’re publicly funded, so we’ll stop when the public stops supporting us.”

To volunteer, visit the groups Facebook page or email newacadiaproject@gmail.com. To donate to the group, visit acadianmuseum.com/New_Acadia_Project.html?AID=2013304150004 or http://www.ullafayettefoundation.org.