Can You Dig It?

Hi buddies! I’m Raegan Delmonico and I’m a student in WMU’s 2018 archaeological field school, I also really dig kids. We both generally have the same high energy and can just bounce off the walls for hours at a time sans caffeine. When I first came to the field school I was so excited to find out that there was a camp for middle schoolers that the university students get to help with. They had a great energy and I was really excited to see how that translated to working in the field for them. Would they like it as much as I do? Would they lose interest after 10 minutes? Would they try to poke each other’s’ eyes out with a trowel? Fortunately, the latter two were both a no and they ended up having blast!

A camper was so excited to find a bone fragment
 while hand excavating in a unit.

Each day the kids would spend the morning learning about the history of the fort and doing other classroom activities with Tim Bober, our education coordinator, at the Niles Public Library. Around noon, they would head out to the site and begin digging side by side with us students. They were able to get hands on experience and learn the techniques we use every day. One of an archaeologist’s most used tools is a trowel. The kids learned how to hold them and how to gently scrape up a thin layer of soil from the unit, while also keeping everything flat and level. Shovel skimming is another method used to clear away dirt while also keeping a unit level which the campers got to practice on a unit of their own. They kept high spirits and a great attitude even when doing the most tedious tasks.

 Wet screening is a technique used by archaeologist in order to more thoroughly search the soil for artifacts and ecofacts. You take a bucket of soil from a unit and put it into a 1/8^th inch screen then spray it down with a hose to wash away the sediment. The kids helped assist us with processing buckets of sediment and sorting through what was left in the screen. This task can be monotonous, but the campers found a way to make it stimulating. “Bone or stone” became a sort of game when picking through the screens and guessing whether an item was a piece of calcined bone or a pebble.

Tim Bober, our education coordinator,
wet screening with some of the campers.

Working with the campers this week was such a fun experience for everyone. The energy the kids brought to the site was so refreshing! It was a great way for me to share my passion of archaeology with a younger generation. I have learned so much while working on the Fort St Joseph Archaeological project and being able to pass on that knowledge to the kids and maybe future archaeologists was delightful.

           

Get Your Tickets to the Gun Show

Larry Horrigan showing off his homemade birchbark vessel.

          Hello everyone! My name is Gretchen, I’m a senior at Western Michigan University studying anthropology and comparative religion. I hail from Saint Clair Shores, Michigan. Wednesday, July 18^th, was the second lecture in our series for this year’s Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project field season. Larry Horrigan, our speaker, came well-prepared in his full 18^th-century get-up and demonstrated much of his life’s work and homemade replicas to a full audience. Larry is well-versed in technologies used by the Native peoples and Europeans that would have inhabited Fort St. Joseph. He explained much of how technologies between the two cultures before contact were very similar and how after contact were incorporated in new ways.

          The audience was enlightened about many of the similiar technologies that Native peoples and the Europeans were using during the fur trade; tools were created differently but held the same functions. Europeans were known for their flint-lock guns and their many variations as Natives are recognized for their use of bows and arrows. The Europeans moved in on Native Americans when building their colonial forts in which they had to find a way to live together. The Natives and Europeans crossed cultures in many ways, while retaining some distinctive cultural traits.

Larry explained to us the different types of technology used by Native peoples and Europeans in every aspect of their lives. He explained different variations of firing mechanisms such as wheel locks used with pyrite, flint locks, round-face locks, and match locks. Some were more popular than others as suggested by  documents explaining that Europeans  sent over a hundred match locks to New France (the forts) in which they were returned and flint locks were requested instead. As for subsistence tools, Europeans used different recipes of copper to create copper/brass kettles. To create shelter, several different types of tools were employed for specific uses. For instance, they had axes made for scoring logs, shaving logs into square posts, and splitting them. 

A portion of Larry Horrigan's flintlock muskets.

Bows and arrows, Larry described, were used by Native peoples in a variety of manners for survival. They used different materials for projectile points such as bone or stone, and even dull, bulbous points for blunt blows. Often, Native peoples employed technologies created from natural elements (like animal bones) to complete tasks that the Europeans would have manufactured out of metal. Natives had many simple tools (requiring less parts needed to create and use the tools) to build their canoes and to collect rice with. As Europeans utilized copper/brass kettles, Natives utilized clay vessels for cooking.

The Europeans and Natives had much to learn from each other. The Europeans in a new environment of the New World were educated about snow shoes from the Natives. The snow shoes were intricately designed wood frames with thin-cut animal hide woven together as support. Native peoples had much to learn from the Europeans as well. They adopted the brass/copper kettles for their intended purpose, and then repurposed them many times to create new items. As Larry put it, Native peoples “used them to death, literally.” Natives repurposed metal objects for things like gun repair, making knives, and creating personal adornment such as tinkling cones. Guns were adopted from Europeans as well. Guns became so popular among the Natives that gun technicians and specialists were sent all around New France to facilitate the gun industries among them.

Overall, it is interesting to see the history of technology as well as how we can learn from one-another and see the same things in different perspectives. Once again, we would like to thank Larry Horrigan for sharing his passion with us. I hope to see you all at the next lecture!

Dr. Nassaney, Larry Horrigan, and Dr. Brandao at the site. 

Letting Loose with the Community

Mary Ellen and I. 

Hi everybody,

My name is Seneca Bradley and I am a Western Michigan University student. I am a senior and I am participating in the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project this year.

Being out in the field all day is an exciting experience with all the artifacts that we find, but the most exciting part of it all is being able to be involved with the community and the city of Niles. The community is very supportive and really involved with the archaeological project. Honestly one of the best things about the community is how they host us throughout the community and in their homes. I mean, getting food is not the best part about the community but who doesn't love free food right? Anyway, today, Tuesday July 17, 2018, after being in the field all day, the FSJAP staff and students were hosted for a pool party at the home of Mary Ellen Drolet. Mary Ellen has been involved in the Project since 1998 and has a lot of passion for the project, and she gets down and dirty with us in the field. She was out there all day with us working out of the excavation unit, which is awesome.

The first time I met Mary Ellen was at the Mansion Dinner before our first lecture and I thought she was an amazing person. She told us about how her mother went on a field trip in the third grade to the area where the fort and said that on day we were going to find this fort and now that there is project being done involving the fort, I know that it is exciting for her and I know as a team, it makes us really thrilled to be involved in it. The pool party was fun and the water in the pool was great, from what I heard, and everyone had a great time in the pool as well, especially Raegan with her perfect form cannon ball. I know from watching, that everyone was having fun talking with the community and eating great food.

Being able to bond in the community and the people of Niles is honestly a blessing and the support that we have from the community is amazing and it really motivates me to keep going out there and digging and find more to show to the Community of Niles to give back.

A Smoking Good Find at Fort St. Joseph

I am troweling the north half of my unit. 

Hey everyone, my name is Kaleb. I am a senior majoring in biomedical sciences and anthropology, and minoring in chemistry at WMU.  During the first full week of excavating at the Fort St. Joseph site here in Niles, my pit partner Melanie and I found an interesting artifact, that at first appeared to be calcined bone in the bottom of our pit. On closer inspection however, we noticed that there were letters engraved into one side of the artifact, and that the underside had a bit of a curve to it between the two lines where it broke at. After conferring with Dr. Nassaney and several staff members at the site, we found out that the artifact we had uncovered was not bone, but in fact a segment from the bowl of a clay pipe. The reason that the pipe looked like bone was that it likely broke when the area was plowed, well after those who lived at Fort St. Joseph had moved on. We were able to tell this because the area of soil we were excavating at the time was approximately seven to eight centimeters beneath the grass covered silty soil, deposited over the years from the flooding of the river. The silty soil is a number of centimeters above what we call the occupation zone of the soil; the area in which artifacts such as large sections of oxidized soil (soil where there was at one point in time high heat over a period of time), or features (larger man-made remnants such as building foundations, walls, or fireplaces) lay undisturbed.

 The pipe piece that we found had the letters T. D., with filigree (ornamental patterns resembling swirls or leaves) below the letters, all within what appears to be a circle surrounding it. We believe that the T. D. engraved on the pipe bowl is related to 1700’s clay pipe maker Thomas Dormer and is either a part of his pipe company’s makers mark or is a post 1750’s nod to Thomas Dormer’s style of pipe that became incredible popular among pipe smokers and was imitated by later pipe companies such as the D. McDougall Co. out of Glasgow Scotland in the early 1900’s (Sudbury, 2006).

The T.D. pipe bowl fragment.

 While the marker of an artifact is incredibly important in understanding the way that it came to be lost, discarded, or left behind by an individual; the use of an artifact is also incredibly important. In todays “modern society” we use items such as gas gauges or mile markers to determine how much distance we can traverse before either having to stop to refuel or to reach a destination. In the early 1700’s the French fur traders at Fort St. Joseph did not have pre-calculated and posted delineations of distance like we do with mile markers, so they used what tools they had at the time. The voyageurs would measure distance by the length of time between packing their pipes and having to repack their pipes. These distances became known as 'pipes' which were then used similar to having a half of a tank of gas and knowing that you could go 200 miles off of that tank. 

Technology of today’s world has changed the items in which we measure how far and how long a journey is. However, the concept behind the modern gas gauge and tobacco pipes is the same, linking us to the past in ways we never really considered before.

References

Sudbury, J. B. (2006). Historic Clay Tobacco Pipe Studies. Phytolith Press.

Public Archaeology at Fort St. Joseph

Hello Fort Friends,

For those of you who don’t know me, I am Erika Loveland and serve as the field director for the Project. This is my fourth year working with the Project and at the site. I truly love every bit of it! I completed the master’s program through the Department of Anthropology at Western Michigan University in Spring 2017. My thesis, “Archaeological Evidence of Architectural Remains at Fort St. Joseph (20BE23), Niles, MI,” examines the architectural remains of Fort St. Joseph.

We have our hands full with many different fun and exciting opportunities throughout the year, especially during the field season. The Lecture Series, for instance, began last Wednesday (check out Melanie’s blog) and will continue for the next three upcoming Wednesdays in the Niles District Library at 7 pm. These talks are awesome! Not only do they provide information on how technology is used in archaeology, but they also allow everyone who attends to interact with one another. Field school participants are able to share exciting news about what they are uncovering at the site and community members share any knowledge they have related to the fort. This informal opportunity to interact and communicate is an important avenue for the Project as it truly highlights the collaborative nature of our work.

One of the best ways to find out more about what is going on is to continue the in-person interaction. Site tours are offered every Friday at 12:30 pm (weather permitting). It is really exciting to see the public, their interest in the site, and their strong desire to learn more about what we are finding out. Please come out and visit us, you will not be disappointed!

Our site visitors also teach us a thing or two! Last week and today, the local Pokagon Band of Potawatomi have brought out around 100 summer campers to see the site and how the artifacts unearthed relate to their history and life today. For example, the campers shared information about the use and production of beads and tinkling cones with us. It was amazing to see their excitement! I know that each one of the field school members enjoyed having them on site.

Eating lunch together at the site. The university students were excited to meet the 2018 middle-school campers.

There are more ways to share information about Fort St. Joseph, its inhabitants, and archaeology beyond the lecture series and site visits. We often are invited to attend a variety of events and programs happening in southwest Michigan. Pears Mill in Buchanan, the Air Zoo in Kalamazoo, the Mini Makers Faire in St. Joseph, the Brothers of the Holy Cross in South Bend, and Nile’s own Third Thursday have all invited us to come out, spread our enthusiasm, and convey knowledge about archaeology. Additionally, the blog, Facebook, and Instagram are a few great ways for us to post about happenings at the site. We enjoy looking to see how many people read, “like,” and comment on our posts! Feedback from fort followers is so nice to receive.

In sum, there are many activities and opportunities that the Project participates in and we love every minute of it! I hope to see you at an upcoming public event. Please introduce yourself and tell me what interests you about Fort St. Joseph.

LEADing Off a Remarkable Field Season at Fort St. Joseph

Trying to identify the lead seal. 

How do you do, my name is Samantha Brown and I am currently a ‘super’ senior at Western Michigan University.  I am currently partaking in the archaeology field school at Fort St. Joseph in Niles, Michigan as a student. I am working towards a double major in biomedical sciences and archaeology with a minor in chemistry.  I wanted to take a bit of time to explain the importance of one of the artifacts that we have found repetitively over the years at Fort St. Joseph called a lead seal, also known as a bale seal.

These lead pieces are stamped with a unique seal that can be identified to a specific manufacturer, designer, merchant, and even to a place or date of origin.  By examining and identifying the seal stamped into the lead, archaeologists can then make claims as to what country, merchant, or types of goods these seals would have been placed onto, as each design is associated to one specific location.

Lead seals can be categorized into three different and very distinguishable types.  Type A lead seals have a lead disk at one end, a lead doughnut shaped loop at the other end, and these are connected by a narrow lead piece.  On the reverse, or back side, of the disk is a protruding knob or post.  This knob would have been passed through a packaged good, like wool or silk, and then sealed by passing it through the loop in the doughnut.  The two pieces, the disk and loop, would then be pressed very tightly together, sealing the lead.  Type B lead seals are the rarest of the three types, especially to locations like Fort St. Joseph.  Type B seals are composed of a single lead disk with a narrow lead band.  The narrow band would have been bent over a packaged good and then clamped tightly.  This would result in the seal appearing on both sides, obverse and reverse, of the lead disk.  The last type of lead seal is called type C.  Type C lead seals are composed of a single lead disk that has two holes in it.  A wire would have been wrapped around the trade good, and then sent through the lead seal, ultimately sealing it shut.  It is very common to find a hand etching of a date or merchants initials on the reverse side of a pressed seal.

Obverse of the lead seal. 

I am sure your wondering why any of this is important, or why I choose to explain all of this to you.  Well, that is because I recently found a lead seal while troweling between two rocks in my unit, north 9 east 2.  When we can associate a lead seal to a specific merchant or manufacturer, we can further deduce exactly what materials were being sent from France to be traded with local peoples or fur traders during the 18^th century.  Upon referencing both Cathrine Davis’ thesis on lead seals and Lyle M. Stones book titled, Fort Michimackinac 1715-1781 along with some internet searching, and viewing roughly 85 different seals, we could not deduce a definite merchant.  We encourage you to both assist us in sealing the mystery of what merchant or trade good this seal came from as well as giving us your own personal thoughts on our most recent, exciting, and promising discovery here at Fort St. Joseph.

Making Memories at Fort St. Joseph

Wetscreening!

Hello everyone, I’m Kaylee Hagemann. I am a senior at Western Michigan University, I’m majoring in Anthropology and double minoring in Comparative Religions and Public History. This is my third year participating in the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project. I was in the life-long learners summer camp in 2015, I was a field school student in 2017, and this year I am the Lab Coordinator for the 2018 Field Season.

After a year of being away from the field, I was surprised to see how easy it was for me to fall back into the same field school routine since we have a new group of students. I was used to the group of students I was part of last year, so I thought it would take a while to get used to all the new faces. But it has been surprisingly easy. The students of this field school are engaged and so full of energy. They are a joy to work with!

As Lab Coordinator, my job mainly entails keeping track of the artifacts and helping the students in the field and in lab. During the day while we are in the field, I assist the students with their units and at the wet screening station. I go from unit to unit, helping the students excavate and answer any questions they may have. While the students are digging in their units, they dump all their soil that they remove into buckets and is saved to go through the wet screen. They take their buckets to the wet screens and dump their soil through screens with 1/8” mesh. They then use water from hoses to help push the soil through the screen to reveal any artifacts they may have missed while hand excavating. So far, students have found unburned animal bones, calcined animal bones, seed beads, wampum beads, lead shot, and more in their wet screens.

After working in the field, the students do lab work. All the artifacts recovered in the field are taken to the Stables to be washed and sorted. The students must remove dirt from the artifacts before they are sorted. They use water, tooth brushes, and dental picks to clean the artifacts. Once the artifacts are completely dry, they can be sorted by material and how the artifact was used. For example, we would separate iron nails from unidentifiable iron. This activity helps the students to learn how to identify 18^th-century French colonial material and Native American material. They can use what they learn from the artifacts to get an idea of what life was like at Fort St. Joseph. These artifacts are then put in bags, are given identification tags, and is put in boxes to be ready to be studied, to be cataloged into the artifact inventory, and integrated into the artifact archives at the Fort St. Joseph Museum during the year.

I am very excited for this field school and all the things the students will discover at Fort St. Joseph. All the field work and lab activities can be hard work, but the students will be able to learn so much from it. When they handle the artifacts, they are not just touching an object, they are connecting themselves to the artifact’s memories and to the people who owned these materials. Once the students dig past the alluvium and the plow zone soils, and reach the occupation zone, they will be able to touch a ground that has not been touched in about 250 years. The artifacts they find in the occupation zone were not disturbed, where they lay is exactly where they had been set down all those years ago. I believe it is such a special gift to be able to learn from the memories of the people who lived at Fort St. Joseph and to continue these memories.