Hello all! My name is Amelia Harp, and I am a first year
graduate student majoring in Anthropology down at Georgia State University. This
field school marks my fourth archaeological field experience, and my second dig
at Fort St. Joseph. I participated in a week-long summer camp at the site back
in 2011, and ever since, I haven’t been able to get the fort out of my mind!
What most interests me about the site is its history of interconnectedness.
Hundreds of years ago, the French and Native American peoples in the area
intermingled in this unique community, exchanging things both tangible and
intangible: furs as well as different ideas, traditions, worldviews, and so
much more. Such collaboration at Fort St. Joseph continues to this day, in more
ways than you would expect!
Today was a chilly one compared to yesterday, but despite this,
we accomplished quite a bit at the Lyne site! This morning, we finished laying
out our 1-by-1-meter units. All of the stakes were in, and once we finished
tying up string to outline each unit, we measured the starting elevations in
the center and each of the four corners. This was done to establish a “starting
point” for our excavation. By measuring how far above or below the ground level
was in relation to our datum point (the southwest corner of a unit), we were
able to determine how deep we needed to dig in order to form flat, uniform,
5-centimeter levels.
Before any of our trowels or shovels broke ground, however, we
stopped to observe a short, but very important ceremony. Seth Allard, of Ojibwe
descent, smudged each and every one of us with the smoke of smoldering sage.
Then, he came around and had us each take a pinch of tobacco, and instructed us
to go to any point in the site for a private moment in which we dropped our
tobacco. These rituals were done to purify us for our task at hand, and to
acknowledge and give thanks for what we will be taking from the earth during
our excavations. I am familiar with this ceremony, as I learned about and previously
experienced them among my tribe, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi. It would be an
understatement to say I was pleasantly surprised to see those same rituals included in the beginnings of our field work! It makes me all the more proud to
be involved with this project, knowing that we (Native Americans) are as very much
a part of this site today as we were centuries ago.
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| Seth Allard prepares sage for a pre-excavation smudging. |
The second time I came face-to-face with the Native reality
of this area came much later in the day. After some excavation (with some
interesting finds!) and dinner, Dr. Nassaney took us all out to visit a site of
interest just down the road. Among houses and churches, there was a grassy lot
on a street corner with a couple big trees, a historic marker, and a few
unusual little hills. These were the Sumnerville Mounds, dating back to the
Hopewellian culture of the first few centuries A.D. To be sure, they are
nowhere near as marked as the Etowah Indian Mounds back in Georgia – in fact,
as this corner of the city was being built up by early Niles founders and
residents, other mounds in the area were destroyed! Fortunately, those mounds we
saw at that grassy little corner have been preserved, with minimal
archaeological disturbance, for future generations to visit and learn about.
As an anthropologist and a Potawatomi woman, I cannot
describe how happy it makes me to see Native perspectives and traditions being
taken into such careful consideration when working with sites like Fort St.
Joseph. It makes me proud to be involved with this project, and I cannot wait
to see what more we can learn about the Native Americans that called Fort St.
Joseph and the surrounding area their home.
-Amelia
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