The Lake Superior Basin Workshop will be held this Friday and Saturday, March 18th and 19th at the Northwest Company Fur Post near Pine City, Minnesota.   The workshop is a rather informal gathering of archaeologists, avocational archaeologists, collectors, and the general public with lots of hands on opportunities to view artifacts and hear about ongoing projects.  Something of a last hurrah before the field season begins, the focus has traditionally been the archaeology of the Lake Superior Basin with archaeologists from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Canada in attendance.  It has gradually expanded to include any regional topic and has facilitated collaboration between archaeologists from different states and countries.  Continue Reading →

This time of year archaeology in Minnesota moves indoors.  There are still a few projects where the clients need something done and are willing to pay a premium to have the archaeologists thaw the ground to do the testing, but for the most part, the field season is over.  (Look for a future post on doing archaeology in the snow.)   Most archaeologists have started the processing and analysis of artifacts recovered this past field season and writing up reports for completed projects. 

To get an idea of what happens at an archaeology lab check out Brian Hoffman’s blog.  Brian teaches at Hamline University in St. Paul and his main focus is Arctic archaeology.  But Brian and his students have also been doing some excavations on a historic site near the Hamline campus.  His blog “Old Dirt – New Thoughts” details what has been happening there at the Hamline lab.  You might also want to check out his entries about doing excavation at the  Aniakchak Bay Village (SUT-027) on the Alaskan Peninsula.

One of the most common non-artifacts shown to archaeologists are cobbles with spherical voids in them referred to by geologists as omars.  Admittedly this was also the first thing I found when I was younger that I thought might be an Indian artifact.  These are generally blue-gray to green-gray cobbles with round holes or depressions in them.  Omars are often thought to be paint pots or bases for fire starters or drills by their finders.  While they could have functioned as such, they often show no evidence of the wear or polish within the depression that such uses would have produced. 

 The holes are the result of the weathering of calcareous concretions from the stone.  The base stone being harder is more resistant to weathering and the softer concretions weather away leaving the spherical holes.  Here’s a link to a scientific article discussing omars and how geologists use them to track the movement of glaciers.