Preserving the Past at Fort Michilimackinac: An Inside Look at the Third Lecture in Our Series

Dr. Michael Nassaney (left) introducing
speaker Dr. Lynn Evans (right).
Photo by Shailee Kurowski

Good Morning, Afternoon, and Evening! It is Shailee once
again with today's blog. On July 24th, 2019, Fort St. Joseph's Archaeological Team was honored to welcome Dr. Lynn Evans Ph.D. to Niles as a speaker in this seasons archaeological lecture series. For those who are not familiar with this years lecture series, our focus is on curation, and more broadly, preservation. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines curation as the act of "selecting, organizing, and looking after the items in a collection or exhibition." whereas preservation is defined as "the maintenance of something in its original or existing state." This aides to archaeology by being two of the defining points of what happens after an artifact (or sometimes feature) is found and documented within the field. With more than ten publications since 1994, and over 23 years of service dedicated to curation at Fort Michilimackinac, Dr. Evans got her start in a similar manner to the students (myself included) working at Fort St. Joseph, by being a field school summer student. Now charged with tasks including the research, recovery, and curation of artifacts, her lecture overall included methodology over the separation, cleaning, tagging, and storage of artifacts, as well as the importance of organization within documentation.

On the topic of separation, she started by explaining the four main categories an artifact could be sorted into at Michilimackinac. This included faunal (for example: bones.), seeds, metal, and washables (such as ceramics, glass, and glass beads.) The idea as she explained it was to create microcosms within the 1 million plus artifacts found and held at the sites facility. By creating these four major categories she elucidated as to how further separation happened within each category. Simply put, though separated by excession numbers, like was grouped with like. In the category of metal, lets say, there is a shelf only for buttons. Micro-categories within that shelf would include brass buttons, copper alloy buttons, and maybe even iron buttons. But all the buttons would be in one place. But to put like with like also aided in other areas, such as cleaning and preservation. For those who were able to attend our second lecture in this series, you may remember the mention of how different substances are treated and cleaned according to what they are made of. By having a series of separation like this, artifacts of similar composition can be treated as a group in a more timely and organized manner. To refer back to our example above with the buttons, we can compare it to how she said they may handle them in comparison to something like fish bones, which is said to have been found a lot at the site. Fish bones, due to their size and delicacy, are treated using a sonic cleaner, where the bones are first submerged in water, then subjected to high frequencies which causes a vibration which effectively removes dirt and debris from the bones, without shattering them. Compare that to a metal button which might be experiencing some form of decay, an archaeologist wouldn't want to use a water bath in fear of further damaging the artifact, so instead if they employ any treatment to the button, they might use a dry pick to take away some of the rust instead. Moving forward, Dr. Evans talked about the importance of tagging, and how it's done at Michilimackinac. Given an excession number while still in the field, the artifacts are measured by their site number, unit number, depth/level found at, and a unique identifying number that correlates to a page with all other excessions. Once this is done, though there is quite a process before this happens, the artifact moves on into storage, or display. Michilimackinac, like Fort St. Joseph, contains a facility that is entirely climate controlled. Both temperature and humidity are monitored and set to a certain degree, and then left there so that there are no fluctuations. Dr. Evans explained that it wasn't necessarily a certain temperature that artifacts craved, but a stability that these monitored and controlled systems provided.

A full crowd! Photo by Miro Dunham

Linking storage into both tagging and categorization, Dr. Evans moved into the Michilimackinacs employment of a digital database system called ARGOS Museum Collections Management Software. With the aforementioned million plus artifacts in their collection, having an online database made it easier to find and recall artifacts once they had been put into storage. The database offers users many different options to sort and look up artifacts, also providing a picture (should one be taken) of the artifact, to make it easier to recall. The downsides mentioned with using a system like this, and having used it for as long as they had, includes that as technology is evolving and updating, so must the recording system. ARGOS is now a cloud based system, but it had been mentioned that in the years that they had used it, three major reconfigurations had happened to get it there. Now being a cloud based system also meant that it was a continual pay-as-you-go system, which means that as long as you're using the system to store data, you have to pay for it. It also, as an evolving system, means that during updates, some information can migrate and get re-categorized into places it may not necessarily go. This places stress on those set to manage the database, which brings me to her final point of the importance of written documentation. Keeping a hard copy, though some may call it tedious, offers for the re-entry of data in the event that something happens to said technology, and a file or artifact information gets lost. This technique is used by both Fort St. Joseph and Fort Michilimackinac, and is employed by using acid-free papers and binders, which is a preventative step towards having non-decayed or yellowed paper. Doing this, as well as using pencil for all notes and field documentation makes it easier to edit later on, or reclassify in the case of unknown artifacts.
The lecture came to a close with some final notes about their own field season, how the summer was the best time to see the dig (as that was when their season took place), and around September was the best time to see the views and simply enjoy the site. It was an honor to have  Dr. Evans both at our site, and in our series, and we look forward to implementing some of the techniques she discussed, as well as continuing the relationship built between Fort St. Joseph, and Fort Michilimackinac.
From the trenches to the trees, this is Shailee Kurowski, signing off!