Farewell Fort St. Joseph

         

Me in my pit before we
backfilled

Hello, everyone! This is Diana, again, and I have been granted the special task of writing our final blog for the season. Yesterday (Wednesday, August 16) was our final day of the season. Throughout this experience we uncovered two features and many amazing artifacts. For many of us, this was our first experience actually excavating at a real archaeological site. For each student, the experience was a unique and valuable part of not only learning what it means to be a real archaeologist, but also learning about ourselves and where we may wish to go with our future careers. Most people’s blogs will probably speak for themselves, so as someone who has not posted since the very beginning of the season, I will provide my own personal perspective on the season as a whole.

           In my case, I am a transfer student from Kellogg Community College (Battle Creek, MI), and archaeological field school was my first class at Western Michigan University. Since I had not completed the usual listed prerequisite, I was not expecting to do it this summer, but one of the WMU faculty referred me to Dr. Nassaney, and he told me to apply anyhow. I knew it was a major opportunity before I started because I had learned field school is a requirement for various forms of employment, but only once I showed up at orientation and learned that almost half of the thirteen students selected were from other universities did I realize the magnitude of what I was doing. I was in a room full of people who were passionate about anthropology, many of them majors who were considering careers in archaeology or related fields. At that point, I instantly knew that this class, which was almost entirely different from any other course I had ever taken, was the best transition I could have had from one school to another.

         

Erika and Anne discussing Feature 28 (Alvin)

    For those who do not know, the Fort St. Joseph Archaeology Field School is actually a six credit hour class offered through Western Michigan University. Being involved in this field school is probably most similar in overall experience to an internship, and just like an internship, we have to fill out a special application for acceptance. This is an opportunity to learn virtually every task involved in excavating a historical site by doing it, rather than simply studying it in a book or being told how it works in the classroom. We start off the season with two days of orientation, in which the field school staff members instruct us field students on basic skills we will need in the field. During this time we also received a lesson on the background of the project, as well as the goals for the upcoming season. The following week, we moved into our new “home” in Niles, Michigan where we will be stayed Monday through Friday for the next six weeks. During this time we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together as a group from Monday through Friday. Our days were spent working in the field from about 8 a.m. to about 4:30 p.m., we then had lab from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. every night except Friday, when we are dismissed about an hour early to go home for the weekend…or remain in Niles if we should choose to do so. This is the general idea of our schedule, except on rainy days, when we usually have to improvise; for those instances, Dr. Nassaney usually has a menagerie of alternative educational activities we can do as rainy day activities.

         

Feature 28 (Alvin)

Now we are at the end of the season, and I am amazed at how far we have come. Some of us had no idea before we started how to properly use or even hold a trowel, and now most of us have excavated all the way down to at least 50 centimeters below datum (we usually use the southwest corner of our units as references for depth). For me, the highlights were definitely reviewing notes to propose potential unit locations for this year and having the opportunity to draw maps and theorize where the walls of our house might be. Naturally, I was quite tickled when we discovered what is probably the corner of a house in our pit, because I had, in fact, guessed that we had a corner in our unit! Of course, finding a feature has its pros and cons; I was excited to find it, but not about the extra paperwork…I ended up deciding our feature needed a more interesting name than Feature 28, and started calling it Alvin, like in Simon and the chipmunks. Meghan said that was her name, though, so the jury’s out on whether Feature 28 gets to keep it. What can I say? Unit N24W11 or “Bertha” needs a little brother.

         

Ring placard I found just in time for
the Open House

As you can tell, field school was very time-consuming. This experience was sort of like an intermission in school and just general life, but it also gave me a chance to give my brain a break from academics. I am ready to go back to regular classes in the fall, as are several of the other students, but likely nothing ever will fully compare to this experience. Working in nature with an amazing number of frogs and butterflies all around, the excitement of a crayfish (Ashley and Hailey named him Archie) appearing in one of the pits, or finding my first unique artifact (for me, it was what we believe to be the placard of a Jesuit ring) are things I will never forget. Farewell from the 2017 Fort St. Joseph archaeology field school, and we look forward to the possibility of some amazing new updates next year!

Our last days of Field School

            Hello readers, Claire again! On my drive to Western's campus this past Monday morning, I reflected back on how perfectly evenly we students had spaced ourselves around the classroom during orientation in early July before we left for Niles. It wasn’t surprising, it’s just what students do at the beginning of a new semester when you don’t know anyone. We went through the motions of awkwardly introducing ourselves with only vague ideas of what was to come, but by the end of orientation, there was a feeling of excitement and anticipation to get to the field.

As you can see we have really opened up since the first
time we all met

Now, six weeks later, I tried to imagine how we would disperse ourselves in the classroom back at Western, almost certain that it wouldn’t be exactly the same as during orientation. I thought surely we would be seated at least a little more densely considering the circumstances we had just endured together: Every meal, every lab, every lecture, day and night.

            Arriving on monday I found that I was right; many of us had shifted closer to the sunny south side of the room where the window is. It wasn’t as quiet as before either, with students filtering in and sharing details of their weekends just like we did when we had returned to Niles every monday morning before heading to the field. I believe many of us were still tired from the final two-week stay that included the Open House and preparing for it, completing our units, and moving out of our temporary home. Nevertheless, we came prepared monday morning to do what needed to be done to say with integrity that we completed this field school.

            So here we are on the very last day, but keeping busy to the last minute. We’re in the lab, we’re cleaning, sorting, taking final notes, and discussing opportunities for what comes next. Even this afternoon I had the chance to see another process of archaeology, working with Dr. Nassaney on taking a full inventory of artifacts found this season. He took notes on his laptop regarding accession numbers and artifact descriptions, and we meticulously counted and weighed every artifact, including every seed bead and individual piece of calcine bone (of which there are hundreds). We worked for three and a half hours, and are not even a quarter of the way through everything we found this year!

Through thick and thin we all made it through the 7 weeks
 in the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project

             Being back on campus for the last three days has felt almost surreal knowing that we’re having the last meals and laughs together as a whole group that we will for the foreseeable future (but probably not forever). Still the finality of this time cannot negate the value of what we’ve experienced in the last six weeks; There has been curiosity and sharing of knowledge, as well as new levels of exhaustion. There has been a great deal of strain and stress  but there has also been beauty, joy, supporting, and bonding. For myself, although I suspect I speak for others as well, I learned lessons not only in archaeology but for life that I may never have otherwise, and that makes field school worth more than the money it cost and the credits we earned.

Back to WMU

          Hello everyone, it's Morgan again! With our work officially done for the season in Niles, Michigan and all of our units back filled, we are back at Western Michigan University. As a result, I am here to tell you all about our first day back on campus after spending almost two months in Niles. Yesterday our activities consisted mostly of lab work and some organizing, trying to square away all of the work we have accomplished.

The archaeology lab at Western.

We started in the morning at 9am trying to organize our lab located on WMU's campus. The organizational process involved taking inventory, sorting binders and pamphlets, and putting supplies in their proper places. Once our work space was cleared we were able to spend the remainder of the morning cleaning and sorting the artifacts that did not get completed in Niles as well as catching up on paperwork.

Having some fun on our
final day in the field.

A quick lunch break in the afternoon was spent working on a puzzle with Erika and we spent the rest of the day catching up on the pile of paperwork completed while excavating our unit. Our paperwork includes maps, soil descriptions, artifact contents, recorded depths, recovery information, techniques used, and any observations we may have noticed. We also included a unit summary at the end of our notes that talked about the unit excavation, basic soil composition, and cultural materials. Unit excavation talked about the techniques we used to excavate- like shovel skimming, wet screening, and troweling. Then basic soil excavation was a summary of the soil found in the alluvium, plow zone, and occupation zone. Lastly, cultural materials talked about any artifacts that we found such as hinges, rosary beads, chains, gun parts, and so many more. Now that we finally have some time on our hands we have the chance to go back through all of our notes and make any changes needed. Those that were already done editing their notes began the process of digitizing the notes so we have copies for the future.

Digitizing field notes!

Throughout the whole process of organizing our notes, we noticed our growth not only as students but also as archaeologists. Our mistakes became fewer over the course of the past two months as we learned from our mistakes and improved. Overall, the experience my fellow archaeology students and I have gained at Fort St. Joseph has by far been the best experience in advancing our college education in archaeology. With only two more days left before we return to our normal routine, we intend to make the best of it and learn as much as we can.  

A Peek into a French House

           Hello everyone, it's Joey again. Even as the end of a field school draws near, great and exciting finds are often revealed. In fact, one of the greatest finds this year was recovered on the Tuesday before we were supposed to pack up, our second to last day to work in our units. On that day, in the unit North 23 East 9, Diana and I began to uncover strange soil patterns in the south half of our unit as we were trying to level it out at 50 cmbd. We were soon told to excavate around it, and for good reason, as we found that it was lining up nearly perpendicular with another soil formation in the north half and both went nearly as straight as an arrow. Surrounding this strange and unnatural soil formation, we also found large pieces of charcoal and pockets of ash, yet strangely no signs of oxidized (burnt) soil, and the opposite had been encountered in a previous unit to the west. 

            This indeed piqued the interest of our supervisors, who soon declared that we had found feature 28, the corner of a three-hundred-year old French house! Finally, after a month and a half of excavations we had found the architectural remains we were hoping to. We could scarcely contain our excitement. Wasting little time, we soon began taking samples from various areas of the unit, including carbon 14 samples of the two great charcoal chunks in hopes of dating them with fairly accurate precision and to determine what species of trees they came from. After accomplishing that, we attempted to take a float sample from the area that had the greatest concentration of charcoal to try to find other organic remains but were unable to accomplish this as we were pressed for time. To our joy, we found two possible post holes only a half centimeter from this concentration and thus further excavation there was stopped in an attempt to preserve them for further study in future years.

This photograph depicts the feature very well.

            Another interesting part of our feature was that it lined up in a nearly perfect line with a line of B horizon fill (the B horizon soil is usually found below the soil present during the fort’s occupation) in North 20 East 3 that was also being excavated this year. We believed that this showed that there was once a ditch that had been dug here in the 1700’s. The line between feature 28 and this possible ditch only serves to further reinforce this theory.

            Finally, on our very last day of excavations we uncovered a chain of either a necklace or bracelet inside our feature that was still clasped. This was indeed a rare find as no other intact jewelry chain has been recovered at the Fort so far. Now as we wrap up lab work back at WMU, I deeply hope that further work and study is put into this feature in later years.