Summer Camper ➡️ Field School Student ➡️ Grad Student

Hello everyone! 

My name is Emily Fletcher. I have contributed to the Fort St. Joseph blog a few times now to describe my experiences with the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project. Today, I am excited to talk about what I have been up to in recent years, and how my experiences with the Project have helped me along the way.

Excavating at Fort St. Joseph as a summer

camper (left) and as a field school student (right).

First, some background. I was very lucky to have an early encounter with the Project through the summer camps, which I attended first in 2009 (for more information, check out my blog post). As a child, contributing to a real archaeological excavation was thrilling. Every time I unearthed a new artifact, my heart raced as I remembered that I was the first person to see these objects in over two hundred years. This experience proved that archaeology was the career for me. After that summer, I sought out as much exposure to archaeology as I could and ended up coming back to the FSJ summer camps multiple times, and even traveling to Kampsville, Illinois to attend another camp organized by the Center for American Archaeology. I returned to the site as a field school student in the summer of 2017 (check out my blog posts here and here about my experience as a field school student!).

Presenting my work at the Congress on Visual Heritage in

Vienna, Austria (2018).

The next summer, I graduated from Kalamazoo College (a small liberal arts school practically across the street from WMU) with a double major in computer science and history. I had been exposed to computer science in high school, and because of my previous experience with archaeology, I immediately began to think of ways that software could contribute to understanding our past. As my undergraduate thesis, I created an Android application called Mapp as a tool to map archaeological excavations. Friends from FSJ gave me wonderful feedback on this thesis and suggested that I try to present it at a conference. In 2018, I traveled to Vienna, Austria and talked about my app to an international audience of about one hundred professionals. This was a nerve-wracking, awe-inspiring experience to have at the age of just 21! 

Now, I am working towards a PhD in Anthropology at Purdue University. I continue to study the ways that software can be applied to archaeology. However, my archaeological focus has shifted from the French Fur Trade to Native Alaskan archaeology, specifically a location in southeast Alaska called the Gulkana Site. This site was a seasonal residence inhabited by Northern Athabascan people some time between 1000 and 1500 AD. The Gulkana Site is important not only to the Ahtna descendant community, but also to the study of a material called native copper. This term refers to a type of raw copper which is naturally occurring and very pure. The Gulkana Site was excavated in the 1970s and again in the 1990s, and 170 copper artifacts were recovered from the vicinity. This is the most of any site in the Alaska/Yukon region (in fact, almost a third of all native copper artifacts in this region come from Gulkana!). Although the Gulkana Site holds immense importance to the descendant community and to this field of research, little has been published about it. One reason for this is that the excavation had to quickly document as much of the large site as possible before it was destroyed by development. Researchers were able to record lots of information about the site, but there was little time to create detailed maps. As my dissertation, I am using software to convert the handwritten excavation records into a map, so that the excavation of the Gulkana Site can be more effectively shared with public and academic stakeholders.   

The main screen of Mapp,

where users document information

about their excavation.

In addition to this work, I am still adding to my Android application, Mapp. I was scheduled to present this project at another conference in March of 2020, but this was unfortunately canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Around this time, I was also awarded a scholarship to help test the application by using it to document an excavation. Excitingly, this project will bring me back into the world of the French Fur Trade! This summer, I will contribute to an excavation at Fort Ouiatenon—a trading post in the same network as Fort St. Joseph, located in present-day Lafayette, Indiana. I am eager to apply the knowledge I have gained from working at Fort St. Joseph to help understand its sister site.

My experiences with public archaeology through the Project have driven me to where I am today. The summer camps pushed me to pursue a career as an archaeologist through an impactful hands-on excavation experience. Years later, the field school made me passionate about public archaeology. This passion drives my ongoing work to use software to make archaeological data more accessible!

- Emily Fletcher