Coming Back to Fort St. Joseph

          Hi everybody, this is Cameron. I’m coming back to you again, and this time as a staff member this field season. I am grateful to be back working in Niles amongst a very welcoming and neighborly community, especially as an archaeologist excavating at a site that has a lot of meaning for so many of you.

          Just to get you guys caught up with my life since my last blog, I have just recently graduated this past spring with my undergraduate degree in anthropology from Western Michigan University, and fortunately I have been able to maintain employment as an archaeologist for the past three months. Over the past year I worked in the lab at Western Michigan University as an independent study student under the guidance of Doctor Nassaney. My job was to create a digital inventory for an artifact collection from a field school back in 1998, and to deaccession any redundant artifacts from that collection which had no research value. Anyways, after I graduated I was offered a job doing this same task. It was a temporary position that lasted for two months. And during that time back in May, I was invited to come to the site in Niles while the trenches were being dug into the old dump site. A few other students and I dry screened for artifacts that were taken from core samples from the bottom of the trenches. And as many of you already know, these samples were positive, and they yielded eighteenth century materials such as wampum, lead shot, and calcined bone.

          Fast forward to the end of June and I was offered employment working as a field assistant as Fort St. Joseph, which I did not hesitate to accept. And since that time I have been living and working right here in Niles. My role as a field assistant is to work along side the students assisting them with excavating their unit, mapping, filling out paperwork, and supervising during lab time while they wash artifacts. And I also work with Gary by prepping the site for pit tours and the upcoming open house next Saturday. The site was littered with debris from the dump, and sprawling with brush. But between the collective efforts of the staff, students, and volunteers, the site is safe and navigable for the public to visit during the open house. 

          I should also mention that since I have began working as a field assistant this season, I have also accepted another job here in Niles working at the History Center. I will be there every Saturday working at the front desk, greeting visitors, educating myself about the history of Niles and Southwest Michigan, and digitizing field notes from the past field seasons at Fort St. Joseph. This is another wonderful opportunity that I am more than grateful to have been offered. And if you happen to be in the area, come visit me so we can catch up or become acquainted.

          Working at both the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project, and in the Niles History Center, are both learning experiences that will help me traverse my through my journey of life, and which I have no doubt will help me grow as a person. I can not succeed on my own, and I owe it to the people who have guided me along the way. I am indebted to the community of Niles and the faculty from Western Michigan University for everything they have done for me in my past, my present, and my future.

Hasta Luego,

Cameron

Fort St. Joseph Revealed: The Blog

Lucy intently wet-screening. Photo by

Hannah Rucinski

Hello all! My name is Lucy and I wrote the blog on our dewatering system at the Fort St. Joseph archaeological project! Today, I am back with another blog on a lecture we had at the Berrien Springs courthouse. This lecture came from our very own principal investigator at Fort St. Joseph, Dr. Michael Nassaney. His lecture, Fort St. Joseph Revealed, was a comprehensive overview of the last 20 years of archaeology at Fort St. Joseph.

Dr. Michael Nassaney giving his lecture at

the Berrien Springs Courthouse Museum. Photo

by Alex Michnik.

          Obviously, an hour lecture can not cover all of the detailed and important work that has been done at Fort St. Joseph, but it was a great overview of the last 20 years. Dr. Nassaney began by discussing the history of the fort's inception and how its location was chosen. Originally, the French were in America on a search for a route to China, which they did not find in Michigan. Instead, they found many fur-bearing animals, such as deer, beaver, and muskrat, which were extremely valuable at the time. Namely, the fur trade was an important means of maintaining alliances with the native peoples of the area. The Fort was located on the St. Joseph river, which provided access to an important transportation route. This water route attracted large groups of native peoples, who then occupied the surrounding area. Thus, the location of the Fort made a lot of sense to the French.

          After discussing the fort's location and a bit of its history, Dr. Nassaney began discussing the archaeology at Fort St. Joseph and how it did not come easily. Before there could be any archaeological work done, they first had to find the Fort. Many universities tried and failed. With the help of historical documents and Dr. Joseph Peyser's research, WMU archaeologists were able to locate the Fort.  After locating the Fort, and partnering with Niles, Dr. Nassaney and colleagues were finally able to do some archaeology! There is an endless number of things to be said about the archaeology done at Fort St. Joseph, including all of the survey, testing, and dewatering, but one thing that I took away from Dr. Nassaney’s lecture was that our archaeology helps to recreate daily life. Our goal is to recreate that life with as much accuracy as possible, and to tell the narrative as it was and not as we assume it to be. Upon excavating at the site, we have been able to paint a partial picture and begin to understand what some daily activities looked like. From the copper alloy kettles that they used for cooking, to the thousands of glass beads they used for embroidery, we can get a glimpse into what daily life was like at Fort St. Joseph. Dr. Nassaney stressed the importance of fully understanding what we were finding and not to assume that everything was being used for what it was intended for. 

When is a thimble not a thimble? When it's used as a tinkling cone! Photo from Katelyn Hillmeyer

          A great example and riddle that Dr. Nassaney used was, "when is a thimble not a thimble?" At the Fort, a thimble is not a thimble when it has a hole intentionally punched through the top to become a tinkling cone, which is used for adornment. In any case, it would have been easy to say that this particular thimble was a regular thimble; to recreate actual life, you have to make sure you aren’t presuming what the picture looked like. After the lecture, our field school students and staff got together and discussed how every single one of us had learned something new about the Fort, even staff who have worked here for years! This just goes to show that there is always something new to be learned, and the history of Fort St. Joseph is still being revealed. If you want to see some of the amazing archaeological work we do at Fort St. Joseph, you can see it in person at our Annual Open House on August 3^rd and 4^th from 10am to 4pm! This season,we are exploring new areas of the Fort where we are making some exciting discoveries!

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!

Wet Screening with Lab Coordinator Raegan!

Check out today's blog on what goes on at the Fort St. Joseph wet screening station with the 2019 lab coordinator, Raegan.

Something Old Teaches Something New

Hello, all!

We have made an exciting discovery at Fort St. Joseph this past week. I (Danny) and my pit partner (Heidi) were lucky enough to turn up some pipe stem fragments in the blistering heat on Friday afternoon. Luckily, the heat wave has passed, and we can get to researching. 

The number of pipe stems retrieved from the Fort St. Joseph site varies from 10-15 each year. My pit partner and I were able to turn up two fragments, making this discovery all the more exciting.

Europeans had started producing white clay pipes by 1610. They adopted the practice from Native peoples, who they encountered along the St. Lawrence Seaway and into the Great Lakes; however, these European-produced clay pipes were fragile. Stone pipes were another variation of pipe, and were often produced from limestone, catlinite, and sandstone. Through years of research, archaeologists have come up with a system of dating pipe stem fragments based on the width of the bore hole. Judging by the size of the bore holes in pipe stems at Fort St. Joseph, we can judge them to be from approximately the 1760's.

Pipes were most commonly used for smoking tobacco, but use of tobacco had a significant meaning between the Europeans and Indigenous peoples who partook in the substance. Tobacco had become an increasingly popular recreational pastime among Europeans post-contact, i.e. snuff or smoked tobacco. Among the Indigenous people, particularly the Potawatomi in the area of Fort St. Joseph, tobacco (oftentimes dried, unsmoked tobacco) played a vital role in spiritual activities. It was often placed around as an offering to spirits.

Whether European or Indigenous, recreational or spiritual, tobacco smoking was an important aspect of life at Fort St. Joseph, and finding this particular piece of paraphernalia expands our knowledge of daily life practices at the fort. It is very exciting to us practicing archaeologists!

P.S. On Tuesday, we turned up a third pipe stem fragment!!

Familiarity with Myself and the Community

Having a place to be and a community to connect with has made me feel better than I have in a long time.

            During the school year, I rarely enjoy socializing. I spend my day on campus and the majority of my free time in my bedroom. I’ve always thought that my career and academic goals took precedent, since they’re what I struggle with most. However, my social skills have atrophied over time and I find it difficult to talk to people I can’t readily relate to. When I do, I’m distracted, physically present but mentally elsewhere worrying about tasks I’ve not yet completed. Because I let my lack of executive functioning skills related to ADHD go unchecked for so long, I had fooled myself into believing that if I finish my task list now, I can build a healthy social life later. No one ever tells you that to-do lists never stop growing.

            Which is why the field school feels almost like a vacation to me. When I climb down into the trench every day, I feel like I’m a kid again, digging up treasures in the backyard. I always have dirt under my fingernails, on my pants, and just about everywhere else—and I couldn’t be happier. I get to mentally put down everything else going on in my life and zone in on my unit. I get to prove to myself that I am intelligent because of how fast I catch on to everything in the field. When I’m asked a question, I’m more ready to trust myself when an answer comes to mind. While I don’t always remember specific dates and times, I somehow remember all the little facts mentioned while we’re working. I don’t always understand how my brain works, but it’s incredible to feel like it’s working with me instead of against me.

            Though I have an extensive history of living and working in learning communities, I originally thought that the field school would be overwhelming. It’s been a while since I’ve been dropped in the middle of a team and community of people that I’m unfamiliar with.

I’ve actually found that being around this group of people all the time is uplifting. Though I still need some quiet time in my day, we all have so much in common that it’s easy to get along. I’m genuinely interested in learning about other people and building genuine connections—normally it would tire me out to talk to someone for so long. I don’t have to constantly be thinking of what to say or how to react. We all have somewhat similar worldviews. When they differ, I don’t feel like I have to take a defensive stance, nor am I over-worried about how I’ll come off. I just listen and make sure that if something comes to mind, I can note whether or not it’s worth contributing, and be kind and caring in the moment.

            The best part is, the community is so genuinely interested in what we have to say. Everyone so far has been generous and willing to help in whatever way they can. Usually I am entirely unable to talk to strangers, but since we all have common ground regarding the project to build off of, I can relax and go with the flow of the conversation. I can honestly say that I haven’t felt any social anxiety since the first day of orientation for the field school. Since then, the closest thing I’ve felt to anxiety was when my pit partner went home sick and I was left on my own to present during pit tours. Even then, I was confident enough in my ability to present our findings, and I’m told I did fine.

            All in all, becoming more familiar with this project and community has already helped me grow exponentially. I feel like I’m finally becoming the person that I’ve always wanted to be, and that I get to relax and be myself without passing or receiving judgement, even if I can be a little too honest sometimes.

From,
Maddie