The schedule for the Lithic Material Workshop in Iowa City February 24th  and 25^th has been posted.  Click here to see it.

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.

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.

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.

The 2010 Archaeological Reconnaissance Survey of Olmsted County, Minnesotawas completed by the Mississippi Valley archaeology Center and Strata Morph Geoexploration.  The project entailed an examination of the recorded archaeological sites in Olmsted County as well as archaeological and geomorphological survey to locate additional previously undocumented sites.  The study concludes that the low number of recorded sites in the county is the result of the limited use of the area by the early occupants and not the result of site destruction during modern times or lack of archaeological survey.

Investigating the Earliest Human Occupation of Minnesota:  A Multidisciplinary Approach to Modeling Landform Suitability & Site Distribution Probability for the State’s Early Paleoindian Resources completed by the Archaeology Laboratory, Augustana College.  The purpose was to determine if intact sites dating prior to 10,000 BC can be found in Minnesota.  This was done through an extensive analysis of environmental and archaeological records.  A small field component was also included.    A lake sediment core from Fish Lake in Cottonwood County was analyzed to reconstruct the post-glacial environment of southwestern Minnesota.  The report includes photographs of most of the projectile points they inventoried as part of the study.

An Investigation of Unrecorded Historical Cemeteries in Minnesota compiled by the Two Pines Resource Group, LLC.  This study summarized what is known about unrecorded historic cemeteries in the state of Minnesota.  Two Pines built the first comprehensive electronic database of historic period cemeteries in Minnesota.  The list was garnered from an extensive literature search.  Field investigations in three counties helped to determine the accuracy of the available data.  The search identified 5,876 historic period cemeteries, of these 3,333 were classified as recorded and 2,543 as unrecorded.  The study provides a foundation to help determine the scope of the unrecorded cemeteries issue in the state.

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.

The Beltrami County site, located on a low terrace at a lake outlet, was a seasonal fishery location.  During the Woodland Period populations tended to move around the landscape throughout the year to gather seasonally available resources.  In the late winter and early spring spawning runs of fish, like northerns and suckers, out of lakes and into streams, were an easily exploited resource.  After a long winter the people were relieved to again have access to an abundant food source high in protein.  It is assumed that many of the fish were netted, based on the fact that most of these fishery sites are located at locations where the stream channel is constricted in size and shallow.  Many of these locations also have boulders in the stream bed which would facilitate the construction of fish weirs to easily trap the fish. 

Archaeologically these fishery sites are generally characterized by a small number of lithic artifacts, likely because the fishing activities did not rely heavily on stone tools.  Bone or antler harpoons are occasionally found.  There are a large number of ceramic vessels showing heavy use as cooking vessels, many with carbonized residue or discoloration from the cooking process.   And if conditions are right, deposits containing layers of fish bones and scales.  

A number of archaeologists have also noted the soils at these sites are very dark and “greasy”.  The greasy soil is the result of the intense activity that went on at these sites, where large amounts of fish were process and likely smoked for later consumption.   The fires needed to smoke the fish and to keep warm in early spring generated a lot of charcoal.  Grease dripping from the smoking fish would have flared up the fires but also ended up in the soil.   In an article about another fishing camp site David Mather (The Minnesota Archaeologist, Volume 64, 2005) suggests that the fish guts and heads that remained from processing fish for smoking might have been used to make fish oil.  The combination of large amounts of charcoal, fish remains and grease gave rise to this black, greasy soil.

The Minnesota Office of the State Archaeologist has posted the report completed by the Duluth Archaeology Center (DAC) for the Legacy Amendment funded archaeological survey of Minnesota Archaeological Region 9, the Lake Superior Shore.   Points and Pits: Archaeological Investigations in Minnesota’s Region 9, the Lake Superior Shore, Carlton, Cook, Lake and St. Louis Counties, Minnesota will be a firm foundation for future research in the region.  As with other areas chosen for survey by the Advisory Board, Region 9 was represented by a relatively small number of recorded archaeological sites (a total of 34 prior to this survey).  The hope was to gain a better understanding of the region’s archaeology by increasing the number of recorded sites to provide a better sample for researchers. 

The question has always been, are there few recorded sites in the region due simply to a lack of survey or is the lack of sites due to small numbers of prehistoric inhabitants?  This investigation suggests the latter.  DAC’s survey visited previously recorded sites and looked for new ones using a GIS based survey methodology.    Hampered somewhat by the time frame inherent in the Legacy Amendment projects, which limited survey to late fall and spring, DAC located 6 new sites during field survey and verified an additional 20 based on informant reports and museum collections.  The report documents the activities conducted for the investigation and provides a summary of prehistoric archaeological sites known in Region 9.  Check it out.

I had the pleasure last evening to sit in on a discussion among researchers who have been exploring the Knife Lake Siltstone quarries in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) of Northern Minnesota.  While siltstone has been recognized by archaeologists as a distinct lithic material for a number of years, with a bedrock source of the material on Knife Lake, the extent of the quarrying activities at that location by early peoples has only recently been discovered.  The outcrops of siltstone straddle the international border and it was Canadian archaeologists who first identified siltstone quarry sites.  A forest fire several years ago in the BWCA cleared the dense vegetation on the Minnesota side and exposed extensive quarry and workshop areas.  The remoteness of the area has served to protect the sites, but also hinders the research of this unique cultural resource.  The local is being studied by archaeologists from a couple of State Universities and the U.S. Forest Service.  

The basic geology of siltstone formation is understood, but due to the complex nature of the geology in the area archaeologists are still trying to track the extent of the deposits of tool grade siltstone.  Because this is a wilderness area only small groups of researchers are allowed in for short periods of time and they need to carry everything needed in and out with them.   Limited excavations are trying to answer basic questions.   Such as, when were people here?  What was the population size and how long did they stay?  What sort of tools were they making from this material and how far afield were those artifacts traded? 

Researchers have been hampered by the thin soils of the region which have been mixed and disturbed by natural process such as tree tips turning the soil and mixing artifacts.  The lack of deep soils hinders the development of an uncomplicated site stratigraphy which would allow researchers to tease out a sequence of events or occupations at these sites based on the relative positions of the artifacts they recover.

Site interpretation is also hindered by a lack of diagnostic artifacts.  Someinitial thoughts are that it appears people were here very early.   An examination of the kind of debitage produced on the sites suggests late Paleo-Indian or early Archaic flintknapping strategies.   The formation of a patina over some of the knapped/worked surfaces also suggests some antiquity to the artifacts.  It was the very white patina on the outcrops that made them highly visible after the forest fire which in turn attracted the attention of researchers.  However at this point researchers do not know how long it takes a patina to develop on siltstone or what causes its formation. 

Siltstone is also found as cobbles in the glacial till in Minnesota.   Is the glacial material derived from the Knife Lake outcrops or are there other, as of yet unknown, siltstone sources?  There is a variation in the color and texture of siltstone found in the Knife Lake outcrops.   Researchers are still scouring the wilderness terrain collecting samples of material from various outcrops in the Knife Lake area to determine the range of siltstone variability in that vicinity.  They will eventually be able to compare the bedrock derived samples to siltstone found in the glacial till to determine possible sources for the till materials.   It will also allow them to determine if siltstone artifacts from outside region are made from stone acquired at Knife Lake quarries or from till sources.  A couple of decades ago archaeologists discovered a workshop site, 200 hundred miles south of Knife Lake, where people had been making stone tools from glacially derived siltstone cobbles and boulders pulled from the nearby stream bed.  The Bradbury Brook site (21ML0042) was dated to 9200 years BP.

Researchers are enthusiastic about trying to understand the nature of these large quarry sites and regional siltstone distribution.   It can be both fun and challenging to get in on the ground floor of a new discovery which raises some very basic questions about our Minnesota Prehistory.  Look for updates on the work being done on Knife Lake in the years ahead.