A Letter to the Niles Community (From an FSJ Newbie)

Dear Niles Community,

We already miss you very much. Yesterday, we packed up all of our belongings and left your beautiful riverside town. On our way out, we made sure to wave goodbye to all of the restaurants on Main Street we frequented, the coin laundromat where we washed our clothes, Martin's supermarket where we consistently had to go to buy more bread (we eat a LOT of sandwiches), the Niles District Library, and of course, the site. It was a sad but cathartic goodbye, and in the words of field school student Shailee, "leaving Niles feels almost wrong."

We have each gained something special with our experience at Fort St. Joseph and in Niles. Of course, it all culminated in the final weekend with our annual Open House, wherein we had the chance to meet with nearly everyone who has supported the project, as well as several Niles inhabitants who we had not previously met, but knew all about us. It was exhausting, anxiety-inducing, and intense, but all of us would agree that the Open House was something we will never forget and would love to do ten times over. We were prepared and pleased to answer all of your hard questions. We had considered every complicated scenario, and made it work. We made our throats raw with how much we wanted to tell you about what we've done. We were a proud, energetic, and happy crew. But now, we must pass it on to next year's field crew.

Don't get us wrong, we are definitely going to milk our hard work until next summer. You will likely see news of us in classrooms and other public spaces, on posters and flyers, on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter, and hopefully at next year's Open House talking about what we found and what it means. All of our excited bragging about what we found wouldn't mean a thing if we didn't explain the "how" and "why", right? That's what makes it all so exciting. Our end goal is to make accurate connections with the past and then tell the whole world.

I would like to personally thank certain community members and organization for their efforts to support our work this summer and in previous years.

Mary Ellen, thank you for your amazing excavation techniques and ability to mobilize a plan to get the work done, whether it be at the site, for a party, or for a tour, you are always on top of things and we are eternally grateful for your love and support.

Neil and Lynn, thank you for giving your time and energy towards implementing the dewatering system, building the ghost structure for the Open House, and all other logistical work that you have accomplished this summer.

Stephanie, thank you so much for giving us a roof over our heads and a working AC system! After a long day at the field, we are grateful to have such a comfortable and safe place to rest our heads and share our meals.

Christina and Mollie, thank you for your efforts in planning, implementing, and supervising the various public events that have happened in Niles. There is only so much work that the field crew can accomplish, but it is simply astounding and inspiring how you two succeeded this summer.

To the Kiwanis Club, DAR, Chamber of Commerce, Friends of the Niles District Library, South Bend History Museum, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, WSJM, WNIL, WestSouthwest, Niles Daily Star, Michiana Life Article, South Bend Tribune, The Buchanan Paper, WWMT, the Herald Pelladium, and all others who have provided food, entertainment, knowledge, wisdom, advertisement, and funds to the project this summer and in the past. We thank you with all of our hearts.

As the days turn, we slowly begin the final week with this season's field crew, as it is the last week of this summer semester. The students and staff will round out all their hard work by digitizing all of their notes, maps, and other documents, so they are readily accessible via computer. During this time, we will be reminiscing on our time in Niles. As always, we will be doing so as a group. I will not forget this family that I've been invited into these past six weeks, nor would I allow myself to do so.

Personally, I have experienced many community-living situations and gained many lifelong friends; however, there is nothing quite like this project. For me, the choice to apply for the site photographer and social media coordinator positions was career-driven, and I liked the idea of working at such a world-renowned place. Right now, thinking back to my application and acceptance for the position, I'm happy that my experience was much different than expected. Each day was begun with a smile and an energy that I've never had before. This job made me excited to get ready for work every day and begin with a "what's next?"

Thank you all for giving me that energy, and making everything worth it.

I must bid you adieu, as there is still so much for me to do. Until next time,

Hannah Rucinski

An Unforgettable Meal Rounds Out An Unforgettable Season

Hello all,

On Wednesday, we hosted our annual FSJ community dinner. This was our opportunity to repay the Niles community members who have done so much work to make this project and field school a possibility. We could never do this without the passionate determination and effort of the people of Niles.

From those who feed and host parties for us, to those who attend our lecture series, and the handy people who build ghost structures and install dewatering systems, we thank you. You are all completely invaluable to our experience here. The work you have done not only helped us students, but helped make the Open House last weekend possible AND made an unforgettable experience for the broader community. THANK YOU!

While we all deeply value your commitment and effort, the community dinner also gave us students a chance to see our work pay off. When we played a game of FSJ trivia, it was astounding to see the knowledge this community retains regarding the fort, as well as knowledge about our work.

We know we can never repay all the support you all have provided over the last 21 years. We hope our little dinner at least serves as a symbol of all of the respect and admiration we students hold for the people in this community.

We will be heading back to Kalamazoo today to finish out the field school, but we are eternally grateful to all of the people who made Niles feel like home over the last six weeks. It was great to visit with all those who came out to the community meal on Wednesday, and to all those who couldn't make it: we missed you!

Once again, and we mean this most sincerely and from our collective hearts: THANK YOU ALL SOOOOO MUCH!!

Danny and the Whole FSJ Team

Closing a Unit: A How-To Guide

Good morning, afternoon and evening!

It’s Shailee once again, and for my last blog of the season, I want to give a big FSJ thank you to the supporters of the site, our social media, and blog, for being as involved as you are through each field season. In my first blog, I recounted what it was like to set up the field and our units for the first time. From there, we saw it only fitting for me to come full circle and tell you what it was like to close it.

Most field students like myself form a lot of attachment when it comes to their units, even going so far as to name them. My pit was named Claudia, and nicknamed “The Dragon Lady”. After building a stark routine day in and day out, as you take your tools to the pit, untarp, set up, and get digging, it seems weird to hear that at least for this season, your unit won’t be going any deeper. In many ways, it feels unfulfilling because you haven’t answered all of the questions that you may have.

Especially in my unit, we decided to stop due to remaining time, not because we had run out of artifacts to find, or occupation zone to excavate; quite the opposite, in fact. We had just uncovered the beginnings of more large bones, and possibly structural stones. So when we said at the Open House that there was still so much more to be done… we certainly meant it! But what does it mean to close out a unit? What happens? Well, in the case of this field school, it means to curate, or preserve the site for future visitation and excavation (should we decide to do so). Each unit we set up teaches us something about Fort St. Joseph, even if we only learn that something is not located where we’re digging, so it’s located somewhere else. We want to preserve that, so at any time, the unit can be revisited and reexamined.

The first thing that happens when the decision is made to close down a unit is that the level sheet is finished. Notes, maps, and plan view photographs are all taken and checked by an appropriate staff member. With that done and checked, we then begin to clean scrape the walls and floors to set up for a new type of photograph called a “profile view,” and just as the name entails, these photos focus on the profile walls and stratigraphy of the overall unit (more specifically, which soil zones can be seen and where). These give us a photo view of what we are seeing in preparation for the next big step: profile mapping. We set out to map the soil zones (such as landfill, plow zone, and occupation) as well as any artifacts in the walls and other things worth noting. I just so happened to be lucky enough to not only map one wall, but all four walls.

A datum string gets set up and leveled out at a certain depth (a constant depth) in relation to your original datum line in the southwest corner. Mine happened to be at 20 cm bd (below datum). From there, you draw a two dimensional map with the points being measured above, below, or at that new datum line. Like all maps, a profile map has a key that lists what certain things are, as well as the interpretations of the soil zones.

Upon completion of the profile map, you get to begin the strangest goodbye of your life. It is a goodbye that includes at least 16 pieces of paperwork, some of which are your last hurrah, a unit summary. This summary is the pivotal moment of being a field student, because one of two things happens: one, you look back at your past notes and maps, reveling at your own brilliance and clarity; and two, the one that I personally experienced, was multiple hours of me yelling at myself for not taking more specific notes, and reinterpreting the date I left myself with a seething hatred. A unit summary is meant to be a semi-succinct overview of the unit excavated, providing highlights about each level and what it revealed, suggestions about what should be done with the unit and the area surrounding it, and finally, a conclusion detailing what was learned from the excavation of this unit.

My summary took three drafts and multiple days to write, and I’m sure that if I looked at it again right now, there would be more that I wanted to change. But, the goal here is to provide accurate interpretations of data collected over the course of the field season, not to argue about why your unit may or may not be the best. These things all need to be summarized in a way that any archaeologist should be able to read and understand them.

Then, the hardest and seemingly most final part of closing down a unit… is backfilling it. We protect the unit by laying down a tarp on the unit’s floor, which makes it easier to distinguish fill versus undisturbed soil, and then we fill it with dirt. Adding the fill back in creates a secondary layer of protection by providing stable temperature conditions (something we learned from Dr. Lynn Evans during her lecture about curation records at Fort Michilimackinac, one of my other blogs), which continues to preserve artifacts. A piece of flagging tape with some information about the unit is dropped in for later excavators to have the correct provenience, and then we leave the site (more or less) so that we can come back and continue our work the following seasons.

It’s bittersweet to think that I may not come back next field season and open my unit once again, but overall, this has been one of the most clarifying experiences of my life. I hadn’t considered a job in field work before, but now I know that it isn’t something I would entirely dread (though I recognize that I much prefer lab analysis), and I live for what we learn from the artifacts we collected. More so than that, I wouldn’t trade the friends I have made along the way. In any place that you go or work, you’ll hear that it really is the people who make it, and I’ve never found that truer than being here. The people of Niles embraced us, my friend group expanded exponentially, and a working family formed, all over two months in the bottom of a dump.

From the trenches to the trees, this is Shailee Kuroswki signing off for the season.

Greetings from a 2009 High School Summer Camper: Ten years later

Greetings Fort followers!

Visiting the site recently I was reminded that ten years ago, I was an excited high school junior that jumped up and down in the kitchen after receiving a letter of acceptance to participate in the FSJ summer camper program. I remember the months I spent researching field schools that would accept a 16 year old. I was thrilled to discover that just an hour’s drive away from my home in Three Rivers was a site and a program that would allow me to finally get my hands dirty. A lot has changed since then but I am happy to have remained involved with the project, attending a second year of summer camp, taking my first field school and working as site photographer, writing a thesis on lead seals from the site, connecting with students in the 2018 field school, and most recently, having my research on the fort’s lead seal assemblage published as a chapter in an edited volume, – Fort St. Joseph Revealed.

            These memories of past fieldwork at Fort St. Joseph were made even more poignant this summer as I directed eleven students through their first five weeks of field experience as part of the College of William and Mary Archaeological Field School. As teaching assistant for this diverse cohort of students (composed of not only archaeology students but also computer scientists, international studies majors, and student athletes), I was privileged to assist director and Colonial Williamsburg Archaeologist Mark Kostro in excavating a series of progressively more intriguing nineteenth and eighteenth-century deposits within a refuse filled ravine that once separated the Governor’s Palace complex from the property of Robert “King” Carter (the richest man in Virginia in his time) and his notable successors, Robert Nicholas Carter and Robert Carter III. The excavations on the grounds of the Robert King Carter house have attempted to understand the evolution of the landscape and architecture on the property, but also have sought to gain a fuller understanding of the lives of enslaved individuals that lived and worked on there in the 18^th century.

            Though this excavation uncovered new and unfamiliar artifacts such as buckets of British ceramics, one 1773 Virginia halfpenny, and oyster shells, we also uncovered one lead whizzer like many of those found at FSJ and at other nearby French sites. This whizzer was a little reminder that even sites that seem drastically different still existed in the same interconnected eighteenth-century world. As I have continued in academia, through an MA in History at Université Laval (Québec, QC) and into this impending second year of my PhD in Anthropology at William and Mary, thinking about connections has taken me to many far away places in search of stories first uncovered in the wet screens and dustpans at Fort St. Joseph. Earlier this summer I visited France for the first time in order to learn more about the lives of French Canada merchants- “négociants du Canada”- and the social bonds that enabled the production and importation of textiles to New France. I visited the area of France most represented in lead seal collections across New France, traveling to Toulouse, Carcassonne, Montauban, Bordeaux, Rochefort, and La Rochelle. Though my two weeks abroad went by very, very quickly, some of the highlights included visiting the townhouse of the Mariette family in Villebourbon (Montauban) and research at the Archives départementales de Tarn-et-Garonne, locating old cloth merchant homes in the bastide of Carcassonne, exploring the courtyards of l’Hôpital Saint-Joseph de la Grave in Toulouse, and visiting the Musée national des douanes in the heart of the old port of Bordeaux for an in depth look at how eighteenth-century French customs houses functioned (seals included!). I’m now planning my next research trip to France and beginning analysis of death, marriage, and baptism records within and between merchant families in Montauban, the central focus of my dissertation study.

            I’m glad the project is about to round out yet another very successful field season, and of course I look forward to yet more discoveries in the lab! I hope to keep you posted as my research on Fort St. Joseph and the story of textiles in the eighteenth-century French world continues to evolve!

Best wishes,

-Cathrine Davis

A Lifelong Learner's Experience with the FSJ Camp!

In this video, Evan talks to you about how he became involved with the project and how he has been influenced from his week of experience. Check it out on Youtube or with this video below.