Mole Team

 Hi there! 

     It is Katy writing to you from unit S5W7! Cole and I have been busy at our unit this week as we continue to find a wide range of artifacts. With help from the middle school campers last week and the high school campers this week, we have made it to 30cmbd level all around. Getting to excavate in the floodplain has been an exciting experience for sure. Excavating in uncharted territory has led us to some potential answers about the size of Fort St. Joseph, which is our main goal for the 2022 field school season. In our unit, Cole and I have hypothesized that it could have been a potential structure, or place where the cooking was done based upon the variety of artifacts that have been found thus far. For example, we have been finding teeth both from deer and beaver, bone, calcined bone, pottery, redware, lead shot, hand wrought nails, lead, a possible kettle lug, seed beads both regular and tubular, along with a clear mulberry bead, a possible piece of a clay pipe stem, gunflint, a couple larger structural stones which have since been removed from the plow zone, and 18th century window and container glass. Getting to work with the campers these past two weeks has been great! They are all super eager to learn and excavate the units down in the floodplain. Some challenges that the campers and I ran into were having to dig around the structural stones and bioturbations within the entirety of our unit. We have a larger bioturbation in the N1/2 of the unit that goes down roughly 20cm. We also had some unusual soil changes that we were instructed to excavate around just in case it was a potential feature underneath. The soil went from a dark brown to a lighter yellowish color which was sandy in texture. Around 25cmbd was when we learned that the soil changes were not crucial to our unit, and they were dug through until our unit was level at 30cmbd. Our next goal is to excavate further and attempt to make it to the occupation zone by next week. Overall, Cole and I are having so much fun this field school season and are excited to see what else we can discover and reveal about Fort St. Joseph. Thank you for reading!

Katy Dreger

Updates from S5 W11!

Hi everyone!

    Here’s a small update on Matt and I’s unit! So far, we’re at 25 cm bd on the North half and around 23 cm bd on the South half! We’re currently getting about 5 cm done each day in the field. Once we complete 25 cm bd on the South half, we’re going back to the North half and going to either 30 cm bd, or where we can see a distinct change from the plow zone (or Level 2) to the occupation zone (or Level 3).

So far, we’re finding some really cool artifacts! We’ve found many seed beads, most of them are white but I managed to find a blue seed bead in the wet screen! We’ve found many bones, and even some teeth. There’s glass, and some slag, which is the core or remnants of burned charcoal. We’ve also found an awl and a few nails! The awl and one of the nails are in pretty good condition, the awl is 11 cm long and has very little corrosion. Both in the wet screen and during excavation, we’ve found multiple lead shots and even a musket ball. Those are my favorite to find because they’re so small but because they’re made of lead, they’re so much heavier than they look! Remember your lead wipes!

    Matt and I are getting a lot done and have developed a pretty good system to be as efficient as we can! We dig together in the mornings, and I take our dirt up to the wet screens in the afternoons. This way, we get as much dirt excavated in the morning while it’s cooler as we can while not getting backed up on buckets of dirt! Overall, S5 W11 is cooking with gas and finding some really cool things! Check back soon for more unit updates!

        From,

                Mary

Middle Schooled

Hi everybody!

    My name is Isaac Strodtbeck. I am a senior at Western Michigan University, and I currently plan to graduate next spring with a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology. My minor is Music, and that is primarily what I studied at Jackson College for two years before transferring to Western. I am from Spring Arbor, Michigan, which is about ten minutes from the city of Jackson. Later in life, I hope to study ethnomusicology, which would involve researching how different cultures develop, notate, and perform music. It may be a bit obvious, but cultural anthropology is my favorite type of anthropology, though archaeology is a close second. This is my first experience being enrolled in any kind of field school, and when I heard about the program, I was eager to sign up. So far, it has been a valuable learning experience for me, and I think other students in the program would agree. What made week 3 interesting was that we were no longer the only students digging on the site.

     We were joined for the week by an archaeology day camp comprised of middle schoolers. They visited us in the afternoon during lunch from Tuesday to Thursday, then stayed with us all day on Friday. The general expectation I held was that we would be supervising the students while teaching them how to perform certain archaeological techniques around the site. Skimming dirt with a trowel and washing artifacts at the wet-screens were the primary focus for the middle schoolers. My expectations were blown away, however. As it turns out, there were some students among them who have been into archaeology longer than I have, and it showed.

    There were a couple of middle-schoolers who had discovered lead seals in the wet-screens, which still remain some of the most exciting and significant artifacts discovered this year. Other middle-schoolers I had worked with were way more proficient with using trowels than me. Every day, I had always felt like I was learning more from them, which was a pleasant surprise.    

    Week 4 is when we will be visited by a camp of high-schoolers. If I have already learned this much from middle-schoolers, then I cannot wait to see what the following week brings!

With regards,

Isaac Strodtbeck