The dates and location for the 2012 Lake Superior Basin Workshop have been announced.  It will be held Friday March 16th and Saturday March 17th at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.  The workshop is free and open to the public.

I hope at this point we have the email notification glitch corrected.  No one who subscribed to the blog was being notified of new entries.  You might want to scroll down the page to check out the entries you’ve missed.

I was told by my web guru that I was remiss in downloading some upgrades to programs and no one who subscribes to my blog was notified of the last couple of entries.  That should be corrected now.  So check out the previous couple of entries.   One is on the Legacy Project reports available on the Office of the State Archaeologist  website and the other on a program sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America-Minnesota Chapter this coming Thursday, Feb. 2, taking place at Macalster College. 

For those of you who do long range planning, this week the Office of the State sent out a notice saying that they are shifting Minnesota Archaeology Week to the fall season this year in order to encourage more participation and avoid the inclement weather that has been plaguing the springtime events the last couple of years.  Minnesota Archaeology Week will be held September 8^th through the 16^th, 2012.

After languishing for centuries in obscurity, the archaeological ruins ofPetra have become much better known in recent years, thanks to popularization by the movies, UNESCO World Heritage Site designation, and (relatively) favorable political conditions in Jordan. Nevertheless, the Nabataean people, who were responsible for building the spectacular monuments we see today at Petra, remain under-examined and little understood, although their remarkable civilization flourished in the Near East for over four hundred years.  This lecture will provide an introduction to this enduring legacy at Petra, while also setting the enigmatic Nabataeans and their cultural achievements within a broader historical context.  Speaker Dr. Jeff Pearson is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Classics for the 2011-2012 academic year at Macalester.  The lecture will be held Thursday, February 2, 20012 at 6pm in the John B. Davis Lecture Hall in the basement of the Ruth Stricker Dayton Campus Center at Macalester College.  It is sponsored by the Minnesota Chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America.

The Minnesota Office of the State Archaeologist has  posted three additional archaeological research reports to their website.  These projects were funded with monies from the Clean Water, Land, and Legacy Amendment.   These are edited versions of the original reports but are still fairly large files.  Clicking on the titles will take you to the documents. Continue Reading →

Occasionally while excavating an archaeological site in Minnesota the archaeologists come across an especially unique and interesting feature.  In 2009 while excavating a site in Beltrami County the archaeologists from Two Pines Resource Group uncovered a fragmentary late woodland ceramic vessel that contained a large amount of fish bone.   This was unusual for a couple of reasons.  First, fish bone is so fragile it is often not preserved and second to actually have the recognizable contents of a vessel still present is a rare occurrence.   The only other similar occurrence I’m aware of here in Minnesota happened about twenty-five years earlier at another site on Forest Service land in an adjacent county where Hohman-Caine & Goltz recovered another Blackduck vessel with fish remains sandwiched between broken rim and body sherds of the vessel.
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This week I received a flier announcing the dates for the Lithic Material Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa.  It will be held Friday, February 24 and Saturday, February 25, 2012 in the Old Capitol Museum/Natural History Museum on the campus of the University of Iowa.  Check out this flier for additional information.  The workshop focuses on the subject of lithic materials and identification in the upper Midwest.  The event is sponsored by the Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist, the Iowa Archeological Society, and the University of Iowa Natural History Museum.