Over the past 60 years, archaeologists have found more than half a million artifacts during their investigations around Fort McCoy.
Not all artifacts are collected during survey efforts performed to identify historic sites around the installation. Many small artifacts that do not tell much of a story by themselves are documented on maps and with handheld Global Positioning System data recorders and left in place, such as small fragments of bottles and plates, nails and other miscellaneous metal fragments, and small pieces of chipped stone left behind after creating or sharpening stone tools.
More than 400,000 artifacts have been collected and are stored at the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center curation facility at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Distinguishing artifacts which pre-date European contact from natural materials (stone, clay pottery, bone) requires training and a keen eye and is sometimes challenging even for experienced archaeologists.
Very few people will mistake a shard of bottle glass for a piece of natural quartz but being able to tell whether a piece of quartz has been intentionally modified or shaped by a human within the last 10,000 years is much more challenging.
Archaeologists have long had resources such as reference books and reports about archaeological investigations to help identify artifacts, and the proliferation of the internet has added many opportunities for research on items recovered from excavations. Archaeologists use these tools to compare the artifacts they have found at a particular site to artifacts found by others elsewhere to help them interpret the site from which their artifacts were recovered.
There are websites devoted to the headstamps on ammunition, and these are extremely useful for a place like Fort McCoy where researchers not only study the history of military training but also encounter the indications and impacts of modern and historic military training and lots of recreational hunting.
Being able to tell that a cartridge was produced 100 years ago at the Rock Island Arsenal, 80 years ago at the Winchester ammunition factory in Connecticut, or two years ago at the Remington ammunition factory in Arkansas will go a long way to determine whether spent cartridges represent historic military training or recent hunting activities.
There are research volumes devoted to sourcing the maker’s marks on dinner plates, the hundreds of variations of barbed wire, and the history of glass bottle making, and all of these can contribute to a better understanding of the history of an archaeological site.
Despite the availability of these resources archaeologists and history enthusiasts will inevitably come across objects that are not easily identified via online references or books.
One of the objects in the photo accompanying this article is a piece of wood (A) that was found in the Fort McCoy Family Housing area near the concrete tent pads which were used by people training at Fort McCoy roughly 100 years ago. This piece of wood would not have been a standard issue tent stake but may have been used for that purpose in a pinch. It may be possible to radiocarbon date the wood to help understand when it was used, or if it was even used at all. Other objects shown in the picture include stone tools in the bottom left (B), pre-contact ceramics in the bottom right (C), and a natural object in the bottom center (D) commonly recovered from archaeological excavations around Wisconsin called an iron concretion.
The stone tools (B) shown in the picture were all recovered from a single archaeological site, and they illustrate the variety of stone tools that archaeologists can encounter in the field. Natural rocks can sometimes resemble stone tools and tool fragments as a result of weathering processes from water and wind, and sometimes pieces of gravel produced in house with the same or very similar local raw material can very strongly resemble pre-contact waste flakes produced while fashioning stone tools.
More than one archaeologist has mistaken a piece of sandstone for a part of a pre-contact pot while in the field and before it has had a chance to be cleaned off in the lab.
Archaeologists will not always be able to distinguish artifacts from natural objects easily, but most archaeologists will always be willing to look at objects that they or others suspect may be artifacts with an open mind and healthy curiosity. All archaeological work conducted at Fort McCoy was sponsored by the Directorate of Public Works, Environmental Division Natural Resources Branch.
Visitors and employees are reminded they should not intentionally collect artifacts on Fort McCoy or other government lands and leave the digging to the professionals.
Any individual who intentionally excavates, removes, damages, or otherwise alters or defaces any post-contact or pre-contact site, artifact, or object of antiquity on Fort McCoy is in violation of federal law. The discovery of any archaeological artifact should be reported to the Directorate of Public Works Environmental Division Natural Resources Branch.
(Article prepared by the Fort McCoy Archaeology Team that includes the Colorado State University’s Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands and the Fort McCoy Directorate of Public Works Environmental Division Natural Resources Branch.)
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