Good Times at S7E20

Courtney and Maddie next to their unit, S7E20

Hello everyone! 

It’s Courtney and Mady back to tell you about our unit. On the first day of orientation, we were thinking we may have been in over our heads, especially when we started the field exercises. Thankfully, we quickly realized once we started stringing up and excavating our unit that we love getting down in the dirt. There have been challenges, such as torrential downpour, scorching days, and bugs upon bugs, but we wouldn’t have it any other way!

We started our excavations in Trench 1 as the furthest unit to the east, behind a bone midden, known as Feature 29, where the people living at the Fort would have dumped their leftover animal bones in a sort of trash heap. We were hoping that our unit may have been part of the bone midden, but upon further investigation (deep in the notes of the field school's past), we realized that the bone midden extended to the west, in the opposite direction of our unit, and so we pondered about what else we could find. We had to get through a lot of 20th-century landfill, so broken glass, glass bottles, plastic, and rocks were abundant at first. Shortly after we really got digging in the first week, we noticed an orangey soil coming up in little patches here-and-there. We thought that it could be transition soil from the 20th-century landfill to the plowzone, so we kept going, hoping to find 18th-century artifacts. We started to find seed beads, a few pieces of lead shot, a lot of bone fragments, and we even found a straight pin which was used for pinning garments! The excitement was invigorating!

We recovered this straight pin in our unit!

After about two weeks, we noticed that the orangey soil change had overtaken most of our unit. We were then told that we had probably hit the B horizon, the level beneath the occupation zone, without actually hitting the occupation zone. At that point, we were stumped before Dr. Nassaney gave us some insight. He hypothesized that when the trenches were being dug with the backhoe, the elevation couldn’t be seen properly, so they may have dug a little too deep, taking off some of the plowzone. There were 18th-century artifacts found in the soil, so it all started to make sense. We were kind of disappointed, but, as students of archaeology, understood that this was still a great opportunity for learning.

At the moment, we are in the middle of mapping out our first level. We are still finding bone fragments and we even found more lead shot in our wet screening, so we are planning on digging a little deeper to make sure we are in the true B horizon. If we do find that we have no artifacts in the soil, we will close out our current unit and start a new one. The new one will be further down the trench, to the east. We think we might run into the same problem, but with how unpredictable archaeology can be, who knows what else we might find!

Glass at Fort St. Joseph

Hello, friends! I’m Hana, a senior Anthropology student here at Western Michigan University, and this field season I am excavating a unit at the very Southern end of Trench 2 to learn more about the boundaries of the site. I also have an interest in craft production with a focus in glass making, which makes the site a great place to find interesting glass artifacts!

Here at Fort Saint Joseph, we have a fairly extensive collection of excavated glass beads and shards of both curved and flat glass. In fact, we’ve uncovered a few in our units already this season!

Where did this glass come from? Glass working was not continually practiced in the United States until the mid-18th century. During the French colonization, when Fort Saint Joseph was established and occupied, almost all glass was imported from England and was made in either Italy (specifically the island of Murano off the coast of Italy which was the main producer of glass for several centuries) or in Amsterdam or France. These beads, small windows, and even vessels or tableware were transported with the French when they came to the Americas and were then used and traded with the Native populations.

Seed beads, and some of the larger beads that have been found at the site, were most often used by the Native Americans (in this case namely the Potawatomi) for embroidery onto clothing and for making into jewelry and other adornment. These beads would be traded for furs, bark, and fruits.

Some of this glass has also aged in interesting ways. One of the pieces found in our unit is patinated, which happens when a piece of glass has been buried for a long time and the soda or lime (which is added to silica to create stable glass) has started to leach out due to exposure to water. Our site here in the trench is fairly damp, so it’s no wonder this piece of glass is so highly deteriorated. Here’s a good comparison picture to see the difference between patinated (right) and unstained glass (left).

Thanks for reading!