Hi, and welcome to our Facebook live tour
of the archeology lab at Michigan Technological University.
We are standing
right now in front of the academic
offices building, which houses the Social
Sciences Department and the archeology
lab, strangely enough, is not in this in
the academic offices building it's
actually in the AOB annex.
So we are going to walk over there and go on this tour.
So the industrial archaeology program is
celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.
Started by several faculty who
recognized the need to help people
understand the history of human use of
technology and to excavate a more modern
human history.
So the the faculty have done research in
places like Cold Spring, New York,
excavating a foundry that made
locomotives and cannons.
They've also excavated a range
light keeper's house up in Copper Harbor.
They have also done excavations in you
know, South America, kind of all over the
world.
We were just treated to a story
about scorpions and cobras in people's
suitcases from excavations.
So I'm going
to be passing you off now to LuAnn
Wurst, who is a professor of archeology
here at Michigan Tech.
And she's gonna
introduce you to the annex and it's
lovely wonders within.
Hi, welcome to the
academic office building annex.
This is the archeology labs ...
It's why the sign says that...
We're excited to have you here
today because we finished renovations of
the archeology labs last year so that we
had more opportunities for research and
student projects; so, would you like to
see what we're doing?
When you walk in the door, this is the
what what archaeologists call the wet lab.
This is where all the dirt, and muck, 
and chemicals go when we are working in
the field all the artifacts come through
this room first because they're sinks
where we can wash artifacts.
We have fume hoods and kilns
for
experimental archaeology all of the
infrastructure to preserve and
reconstruct artifacts to do experimental
archaeology and right now we working on
the project to finish up from our
archaeological field school this summer
up in Copper Harbor.
And this is James Shwater.
He's a PhD student in the
industrial archaeology program that was
the field supervisor for the work in
Copper Harbor.
Thanks, LuAnn,
so welcome to the annex.
As LouAnn was
mentioning in this location we're able
to bring the artifacts once they're
recovered from the field and further
analyze, clean if necessary, then
identified these artifacts and
archaeology is best taught to students
through our field school as an active
process so we're engaging in excavation
and learning in research, so it's kind of
simultaneously.
And we've laid out for you
a sample of some of the artifacts we
found this summer from Copper Harbor.
The small collection came from a site known
as the Astor House, which was originally
a storehouse owned by the Pittsburgh and
Boston mining company, later became a
small hotel, housed a printing press, and
we can see right here some smoking pipe
fragments, a little bit of ceramics, and
some nails that were used in the
construction of the site so not a lot of
material found, but we found out a lot
about the structure, including its
location and
possibly some of the activities like
smoking, which was a very common thing
for people to engage in at the time.
The rest of these artifacts we found
came from the range light keeper's house.
The range lights help guide ships into
the harbor there in Copper Harbor,
along with the lighthouse.
And had a keeper's house that maintained these lights
from the 1860s through 1937 when electricity was added.
And on this side of the table we can see
everything again, from smoking
pipe fragments, to glass bottles here
ceramics like this washbasin on the end
of the table and then we also found this
is a actually a Bosch beer bottle that
we found in the dump associated with the
site and then this is a kerosene can to
light the original range lights and while
it's great that we found a lot of stuff...
that isn't as important as what we find
out about this stuff so the research
that students at all levels and
professors as well engage in this
process, that's a really important thing.
Is the information that we learned about
this to then help tell stories about the
people who lived at these sites.
Right now what we're working on, we have two of
our field school students here Morgan
and Cooper, they're currently working on
processing a soil sample we took from
the Privy, which is one of the locations
that we excavated.
And this is part of
the future work that's going on for this
site right now.
They're working on this.
We're working on a field report and then
we're also working on a conference
presentation at the Midwest Archeology
Conference. So students are not only able
to take classes that look at archaeology,
engage in fieldwork, but they're also
able to engage in research then present
that at academic conferences.
So the next room is what we call the
research lab.
So once all the artifacts
are processed this becomes a place where
we can work to identify, to catalogue the
artifacts, to work on individual research
projects.
And this is Matthew Durochers,
one master student in industrial
archaeology that's been working in the
lab this semester.
Okay thanks, LouAnn.
So welcome to the research lab.
So as you can see we've got some artifacts laid
out and Michigan Tech actually is a
repository for many collections.
Hiwatha National Forest, National Forest, among others.
A lot of its in the
Upper Peninsula but we also have some
projects that were taken, such as the
West Point foundry in on the Hudson River.
Pretty cool project.
But I'm
currently working on the Hiawatha
National Forest collections here and
it's funded through a grant that they
have provided to reorganize, as well as
digitize their collections into a database.
So that's kind of what we're doing here.
It's a great opportunity for students to
actually get hands-on work with this
stuff.
I mean you can see little pieces of
ceramics that we can work with it isn't
always exciting, but it can be very
exciting yeah
more often than not actually.
It is a great project to be able to work on.
Part of what we're doing is
is archeology is one of the few sciences
that's disruptive.
You know when you
excavate a site you actually destroy it,
so we have we have this kind of moral
imperative to maintain collections for
future researchers,
you know different questions,
different research, and so we
have all of these collections,
but what we've discovered is the way they're
organized just by the year the
collection was generated.
So the Forest Service has all these people out working
and they send us the boxes from 2006, you
know,
so they could visit the same site ten times,
and then the collections were all really
separated into these different boxes.
So what Matthew is doing is literally going
through every box reorganizing the
entire collection so that if somebody
says "hey I'm gonna do some research on,
you know, lumber camps the date to the
1920s." We could say,
"okay from our database, here's the five sites that you might be interested
in looking at." And we can pull those artifacts out really
easily, so we're hoping that through
this process, we not only have a better
organization, but then it'll lead to a
larger comparative research where we can
actually see what we have and say okay,
what do we know about lumber camps
in the Hiawatha over a 50-year period of
time.
LouAnne, we've had actually some questions come in.
And one person is
wondering when did Michigan Tech get
an archaeology lab?
oh well so so I'm not
sure how long we had a lab, but I do know
that this is the 25th anniversary of the
industrial heritage and archaeology
program,
so part of what we're doing is
gearing out towards our 25 year
celebration, you know, archaeology you
teach archaeology it's got to be
hands-on and so you have to have labs.
So you know my guess is that Tech
had archeology labs was, you know, long
as they have archaeologists on faculty.
And I don't know if that's the 25
years or actually spans longer than that..
But you you have a you know many years
of material here now.
We have over 40 years of material
in our collections
can you tell us a little bit about these?
Here's just a
few things, you know, we've got some
stoneware drugs here
and then of course bottles are always.
everybody loves bottles!
We found some pretty
cool things.
I'm a musician myself and I
love cowbells, so we're gonna run with
the cowbells, but this one's pretty
interesting because it was actually
altered on the inside with a bolt and a
knot. So it's a little interesting.
We have a clock here, a compass, and then
here are some musical reeds
these ones are for harmonicas and this
one could be either from a concertina or
an accordion.
This is actually a project
that I've been working on for my thesis
work,
but it's a very broad collection, I mean
we've got a lot of different things from prehistoric as well as historic.
We often joke that this project is a lot like Christmas everyday.
Cuz every time Matthew grabs a box and opens it up,
you never know what's gonna be in it.
And it's not always exciting, you know, just looking at
it all helps think about all of these
materials in a different perspective a
different context so sometimes super
cool stuff, sometimes not, but but I think
it's gonna be really useful to do.
yeah
so this is the research lab.
One of the other spaces we renovated in this room
is a teaching lab
so this is a space where you know classes
that are too big
actually to meet in the lab can have
hands-on lab exercises
And this is Kelly... she's a visiting professor in
social sciences and she's at biological
anthropologist and primatologist
so Kelly?
Yeah welcome to the newly renovated
anthropology teaching lab.
We're really excited about this space
the room itself fits about 15 to 20 students at a time,
but what's great about having the
building is even with the larger class
were able to have some overflow,
so my course that I'm teaching this semester,
biological anthropology, has 30 students
and we're able to come here and do
comparative analysis with fossil casts
and bone casts.
So I can give you a little tour here
of some of the items
that we have.
Of course we have the skeleton here behind me
the human
skeleton the modern human skeleton and
we also have a cast of a skull of a
chimpanzee, next to the very famous
Australopithecus afarensis known as Lucy.
Many people know this specimen as Lucy
discovered by Donald Johanson in the
1970s.
What's great about this space too,
is well we have our cast collection,
it is sometimes limited,
so we're able to also
use 3-D models on the computer as well,
so looking at something like this theropithecus
an extinct form of baboon, we
can then compare it to a modern baboon
skull and using the 3-D abilities,
we can move all through
the different planes here.
One thing I've
been working on with the technology and
innovation department at the Michigan
Tech library,
with Chad Arney and
John Schneiderhan,
is to make our own casts of
fossils using their 3-D printer.
So this here is the skull case of a species
known as Homo Naledi just discovered two
years ago, or just published on, I should
say, two years ago, from South Africa and
some other examples of extinct ape
species. Afropithecus and Proconsul.
We're really excited to be able to have
the space now,
where students can come,
they can work with these, they have a
hands-on experience, and do this kind of
comparative analysis.
Oh if you'd like ... you know part of
the reason that we made this the
teaching lab
is that we have this
other room here where we can store our
teaching collections.
So we have these
amazing wooden cabinets that we rescued
from from geology when they were getting
rid of them and it becomes a way that we
can organize teaching collections so
that we can, you know,
identify the artifacts
that we found.
What is this metal thing?
We have something to compare it to.
We can look at ceramics to look at
different ceramic forms and we can
create exercises for classes so it
becomes a really convenient way to store
our our artifacts and teaching
collections
that students can
actually help identify and and look at
look at the artifacts themselves so that
So that's the teaching collections and the
and the teaching lab
This next room is what we call the
graduate student research lab.
So we have a we have a graduate master's program
in industrial heritage and archeology
as well as a PhD program,
so students
need to have someplace to work on their
own research and projects and they never
had that before so
we've created this as
a place where students can you know work
on their projects themselves.
This is Brandon, he's a new master's student
in IHA
This is basically a final collection that I'm working on.
What I'm doing specifically right now is
taking bones that we've excavated from various
lumber sites
in Hiawatha National Forest
and pulling out good specimens from them
and I'm laying them out here,
which is making what we call a comparative
collection and that's really useful for
examining animal bones because it's
really hard to ID them without having
some kind of collection to compare them
to.
So that's what I'm working on here
and you guys also came in at a pretty
good time because we've got these trays
here laid out.
It's pretty good idea of
like what a you know basic final ID
project goes like so they'll clean all
the bones and then basically just pour
them out on a tray like this.
So the next step would be
this tray right here which is sorting everything based on
like you know what part of the body they
come from or like animals if you can
just figure that out by looking at them
at a quick glance
and then from here
we'd go into like identifying the specific
bones like what animal they belong
to
[voice off camera] and this is what the people at the logging camps ate, right?
Correct. So you can see
lot of them they're sawed here so that
would be you know just getting different
cuts of meat and a lot of butchery marks
on these bones
heres's another really good 
example right there that's pretty common
with the the larger long bones like this
this is one of my favorite because it
has all of these cut marks so one of the
things that we've been looking at is how
will these animals process how do they
get their meat and some of the the it's
so obvious that they're not
professionally butchered.
Somebody didn't really know how to deal
with that and James' dissertation is going to be
looking at provisioning in this
lumber camp and I think Brandon is
interested in wild game and so a lot of
what we've been finding from some of
these deposits is a lot of fish that
meant that some of these some of these
lumber camp workers probably in their
spare time or some of their children
were out hunting or fishing to
augment their diet.
so a lot of a lot of
research potential with this bone
collections are crazy
we had there's just so much bone from
this site you know one feature we had 15
boxes of artifacts.
14 of them were
animal bone.
Did you know that before you agreed to do this? [laughs]
[voice off camera] I think James said that these men in the logging
camps were burning like 10,000 calories
a day so they were eating giant meals as
often as they could [laughs]
yeah so they the the USDA caloric intake
for a lumberjack as a lot different
than the 
typical modern American. [laughs]
so you have a lot of bone.
Thanks Brandon.
And the other main room we have is our
computer lab,
and GIS lab, and this is a Tim
Scarlett another faculty in IA, to talk about his work.
Thanks  Louanne and welcome to the GIS lab
in the archaeology annex and for the
Department of Social Sciences at
Michigan Tech.
I think you've been
getting a feel for the flow of research
as things come in
on projects students
are doing from the field through
cleaning and processing, analysis, and
identification. Up to larger analytical
questions and that's one of the things
that happens here.
Because this is one of
our GIS labs around campus.
We've got some more facilities down in the
Great Lakes Research Center
there's more
facilities upstairs and office spaces
and things like that,
but in in this
particular area is a classroom for us
for working through different kinds of
geospatial research questions.
Because
all archaeological studies are geospatial.
And so students work on a lot
of different kinds of applications here
from the analysis of their material, of
artifacts
from excavations, to bigger
picture questions about landscapes and
the evolution of the industrial world.
There's a couple of things I've put up
on the monitors for people to see
student projects that they're working on.
Over here on the big screen is an aerial
photo and on one of our web-based GISs
is of the area around Pullman National Monument.
And really quickly as you're as
you're looking at that I'm going to
click on a couple of things.
What the
students have done here is to
superimpose geo-referenced historical
fire insurance maps on top of the ...
There we go!
There it is!
On top of the resource
and so these you can look at to various
degrees of scale and by having them
geo-referenced and
one on top of the other we can see all
kinds of interesting things as they
evolve over time on the landscape.
This group of students has been looking
at the change in the process of how this
factory operates.
So for example,
if you're watching for a moment I'll flip
this,
but this is a factory for the
Pullman Palace car company in Chicago, 
Illinois,
a world-famous place for making
passenger cars for trains.
And you can
see this map, which shows the process of
building these cars from 1911.
And what
the students have done in setting things
up initially, is to make it so that we
can go forward in time.
This is 1938.
And look at how those those
processes have evolved and changed,
different work areas and different
workspaces.
And this one is earlier in
time going going back to older sites
from 1892 before they were making steel
carts when all the trains were made of
wood.
And I've also, as you look around
this area where you see various student
workstations and things like that,
I put up on the other monitor over here,
another example of a big collaborative
project from the Keweenaw time traveler,
which
anybody out there can go look at at
keweenawhistory.com
and the time traveller is
where all of these kinds of GIS projects
head. That as that data becomes geospatial,
as it gets integrated, each little piece
that a particular student might work on,
or a particular faculty member might
work on, gets drawn into this larger,
connected database that makes it easily
accessible to people.
And all data from
scientific data like remote sensing
imagery to studies of wildlife and fish
populations,
and the sediment load of
streams, to historical data, census
records, telephone directories, economic
records, tax records, photographs, diaries--
can all be drawn into this
geospatial process.
So here in the
time traveller,
if I switch over switch
over on the other computer here you can
see some examples where again we've got
fire insurance maps overlaid on top of
of aerial photographs and I'm just going
to zoom in a little bit on different
buildings and they're set up now at a point
where you can select a building and then
you can start to sort and search through
this information finding out who lived
where or backing up and starting with a
person and finding out where they live
you could look at the clustering in
space and time of communities that
belong to particular churches or belong
to particular ethnic groups people with
different kinds of jobs.
Ultimately this
all becomes a public face for an
interface for people to do,
communities to participate in their heritage
because
people will be able to log on and use
this there are games involved in this
with people helping to identify the maps
what kinds of building materials and
uses buildings were put to, but then
eventually, as it gets through the
version 2, version 3 version 4,
people start adding their own photos, their
grandmother's letters, all these
different kinds of records that then
researchers and other users will be able
to interact with this kind of community
facing work and community based work
where our students are out in the
community scanning and and teaching and
working with young students and working
on creating these geospatial networks
that connect all different kinds of
information making information available
to people and allowing people to share
that information with each other.
These are all the kinds of things that go on
in this room.
Do you have any other kinds of questions or thoughts
about the way we're using
geospatial technologies here on campus?
I think we're just, you know, telling the people what we're doing..
Sure...I mean there's so
many things that we're doing here that
are connected so we
from scanning 3-D models
of artifacts like,
Dr. Hunt I was working
with in the other room where students
can 3-D print them for for sharing an
analysis we're connecting with remote
sensing we were doing some some projects
I have a meeting very shortly to talk
about spectral imaging, thermal imaging,
and lidar and ground-penetrating radar
data fusion at the site of the
Quincy Smelter.
We're connecting
with all these different departments on
campus, as archaeologists always do,
because we're infinitely curious about
people in the past and and in the past
worlds and we need therefore kind of an
infinite toolbox to get at that
fragmentary information,
to build bigger
and bigger pictures of things that are
going on.
I'm really pleased to be
able to show you a couple of things and
unfortunately the GIS students are all
in class right now, which means there's
no one's actually in this room they're all
down Great Lakes Research Center,
but do go to
Keweenaw history dot com and check out the
time traveler and see it as it involves.
And it's all going to be you know there
it is already web enabled so that if you
have a tablet with a cellular data
package, you can walk around the Copper
Country and you can flip through these
historic maps.
It follows you where
you're going
and you can start to sort
that data on the spot on demand as
people begin to tell their own stories
with the place where they live.
And don't
forget that next week is the 25th
anniversary celebration of the
department.
There's going to be tours of
the Copper Country, there's going to be
alumni engaging in
roundtable discussions about where
the program has been and where it's
going, and we anticipate it's going to be
a really excellent exploration of the
past as a way to know where we're going
in the future.
So thanks for joining us today
on this live tour.
We hope you've
enjoyed it and again this is the
archeology lab at Michigan Technological
University
