Identifying Unusual Objects

Hi Friends,

One thing that our class is doing during off season is categorizing the artifacts we found during field school (as others have posted about). Although the excavation tends to get the spotlight, what happens after is equally essential. Every object we collect can tell a story, but we first have to categorize, clean, and research the object.  

Some artifacts are able to be recognized immediately, like nails, ceramics, or glass. However, some objects fall under a “mystery” category. These are items that have a use that none of our crew are able to determine at the moment. Currently, I am trying to identify one of these objects. It’s a small metal object that we think is lead due to its weight. At first, we thought it was a gun part due to its unusual shape, so I looked up some books about the types of gun parts used in the eighteenth century. It did not look similar to anything in the book and lead was an uncommon material, which left me even more stumped. To broaden my search, since I now knew it was unlikely to be a gun part, I looked at a catalogue of artifacts from Fort Michilimackinac completed by Lyle Stone. This site is contemporaneous with Fort St. Joseph and very similar in terms of the people occupying and visiting. From here, the most convincing possible find was a kettle side lug. The side lugs are used to hang something to the kettle. My mystery object fit the dimensions of the object pretty closely, so I thought that I had solved the mystery. There was one problem though: none of the kettles were ever made out of lead, as far as I could tell. And with that, we are way back to square one.  

For now, we still don’t have a definitive answer for what this artifact is, and that’s okay. It may take us a while to figure out the use of this object, but our team is full of strong researchers and knowledgeable people so it will only be a matter of time.

Let us know if you have any ideas,

Kierra