Researching Back in the Lab

Hey everyone,

Long time no blog! I wanted to reach out and give you an update about what I am doing now that we are back from the field school and are in the Archaeological Analysis course. My classmates and I have been doing some inventory, cleaning, and sorting to get caught up on what we had left over from field school, and although we are still doing those things, we are also getting started on our own research projects! So let me tell you about what I am doing.

For my research project, I am going to be focusing on lead seals found at Fort St. Joseph, specifically where they are from and where they are found on the site, along with the type of lead seal that they are. By doing this research, I am hoping that I will be able to better understand how the type and manufacturing location relate to the location in which they are found on the site. 

Some things that I am going to look at for this project include our inventory of lead seals that we have found while excavating at Fort St. Joseph. I will use this information to tell me what types of lead seals have been found here (relying heavily on previous research by Cathrine Davis), how many of each type of lead seal we have found, and where on the site they were excavated from. Similarly to this blog post and my last post on lead seals, I am going to utilize Cathrine Davis’s honors and masters theses. Her honors thesis has a lot of information on the lead seals found at Fort St. Joseph and Fort Michilimackinac since that was her research focus. I plan on using this document as a starting point for some of my own. I would also like to learn more about the lead seals that have been found since her work with the Fort St. Joseph collection. I plan to also lean on documents and reports from Fort Michilimackinac. There may be some lead seals that weren’t covered in Davis’s thesis but were covered in Fort Michilimackinac’s record.

Lead seals are important because they can tell us some of the goods that were brought to the fort, and this information can tell us a lot about the people at the fort and what they thought was important to have when they came to the Great Lakes Region. I am hoping that after my project is conducted, we will know more about the lead seals recovered and their association with other lead seals at the site. Knowing the recovery location of each lead seal at the site may help us better interpret trade at the site since lead seals provides a variety of information by themselves about clothing and trade networks.

A popular saying at the fort is ‘it’s not what we find, but what we find out’ meaning that understanding what we find and using it to get a better grasp on the story of the people who inhabited the fort is what this Project is all about. I am attempting to do just that with this research project. I want to use the data I find to better understand the story, because in the end that is every archaeologist's goal. 

- Brandy

Source: Davis, C. (2014). Lead Seals from Colonial Fort St. Joseph (20BE23) (2408) [Honors Theses, Western Michigan University]. Scholar Works at WMU. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3417&context=honors_theses