Off-Season Updates

 

Dear Fort Followers,

The much-anticipated field season has come and gone, providing time for laboratory analysis, organizational tasks of the collection, presentation of our results to various audiences, and outreach activities. But, before I discuss what the Project has been recently up to, I would like to take a moment to thank you for your ongoing support! It has been difficult for many of people and organizations across the globe since the COVID-19 pandemic began and our Project is no exception. However, your continued encouragement and engagement with our virtual and in-person activities have helped keep us motivated and made this past field season a huge success! …Thank you!

Now that we are heading deeper into the “off-season” as some archaeologists refer to the winter lab months, I wanted to check in with you and share some updates. If you are new to following the Project, I am the field director and curatorial fellow for the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project. During the past several years, I have worked closely with Dr. Michael Nassaney the Project’s principal investigator. Since his retirement last fall from WMU, I have maintained my current roles with the Project and Nassaney recommended me to become the instructor of the university’s archaeological field school.

Many people have often asked, “What do Project members and archaeologists do when they aren’t excavating?” The answer is: “lots of things!” A few of the current tasks that I am working on include performing an inventory of the items recovered from our excavations, taking pictures of artifacts, and writing a report on our findings. As the curatorial fellow, I have also been testing a new organizational scheme for the artifacts recovered from this field season and those from 2019. In the past, artifacts in the collection were organized and stored by raw material (bone, copper, iron, etc.). However, after careful consideration, it was decided to reorganize the items based on functional type (beads, buttons, nails, pipe fragments, rings, etc.). This new organization will help us better manage the collection and make it more accessible to staff, future researchers, and the public.

In addition, I have been sharing and discussing some of our recent findings in a few outreach initiatives. In early October, I attended and presented a paper at the Midwest Historical Archaeology Conference held jointly with the Midwest Archaeology Conference at Michigan State University. The paper, coauthored by Tim Bober and Michael Nassaney, discussed the Project and its outreach programs that have occurred since the beginning of the pandemic, focusing on the challenges and prospects that had to be overcome to conduct our fieldwork and host programming events. I also attended Michigan Archaeology Day last weekend in Lansing at the Michigan History Center. A few field school students from this past summer joined me at the Project’s table to engage with the visitors. Though it was chilly, we had a lot of fun!

To assist me in some of these endeavors, the Niles History Center offered to once again support an archaeology intern during the 2021/22 academic year. The internship was an opportunity that Nassaney first arranged with the Museum over 15 years ago. Chloe Trinka, an undergraduate at WMU and 2021 field school student, was selected from the pool of applicants for the position. Thus far, she has been helping me with our outreach efforts and reorganizing artifacts in the FSJ collection. She also participated in the MAC/MHAC meeting and presented her first poster on this past field season with Michael and I as coauthors (Returning to Fort St. Joseph: The 2021 Field Season). Chloe will share more about that experience in her upcoming blog post--stay tuned!

There are a few more outreach items that I am working on, but I can’t spill all of the tea in one blog post. You will have to wait in anticipation of more Project news and updates.

Stay warm, well, and curious,

Erika Hartley