B-B-B Beads!

 Hello again! 

It’s been a few months since the 2023 Fort St. Joseph Field School ended. During this time off my classmates and I have started the Fall 2023 semester at Western Michigan University. I am also in the new archaeological analysis class that involves working with artifacts that we recovered this past season  as well as those from past field schools. During our class, we typically examine the artifacts we found this year and check to make sure they were labeled correctly, as well as help inventory them. We are also working on projects regarding specific artifacts that we selected to research. This leads me to talk about my classmates and I signing up to go to the Society of American Archaeology’s 89th Annual Meeting. The meeting will occur in April of 2024 and will be held in New Orleans. 

My classmates and I each submitted an abstract describing a project that we wish to present at the meeting. These projects are the same as the ones we are working on in the analysis class. While we won’t know if our abstract will be accepted or not for a little bit, we will work on our projects to gain experience in the process. I will also still attend the conference, as I have signed up to volunteer. This opportunity is very exciting to me, as I will gain experience from the volunteer work, and I will be able to see other presentations when not volunteering. 

For my research project, I partnered with my classmate Abbey. We decided to create a presentation about the different beads of Fort St. Joseph. We will not be going over seed beads, as there has been some research done recently on them. Our project will expand and draw from WMU graduate LisaMarie Malischke’s master's thesis, “ The Excavated Bead Collection at Fort St. Joseph (20BE23) and Its Implications for Understanding Adornment, Ideology, Cultural Exchange, and Identity”. 

Abbey and I will go through the beads in the Fort St. Joseph inventory, and identify what beads Malischke studied, and the beads she didn’t study. I have included some photos of beads that we have stored in the Fort St. Joseph collection. One of the beads I photographed (top right) was labeled as a “Mulberry glass bead”, which is a bead shaped like mulberries. I like this type of bead, as it looks like they were intricately made, especially the bumps on the sides that represent the seeds. 

I’m ready to see what comes next in our class, regarding the project, inventorying artifacts, etc. I am excited to learn about the fort’s beads and any other interesting things that I come across. For now, I will continue to research for the project, and enjoy my time in class! 

Until my next blog, Korrin