From the July 23rd issue of the Lake Superior Journal (Sault Ste. Marie)

July 18th, 1853 dated editorial from a “C”:

“Amongst my more immediate “compagnons du voyage” are some of those whose names are identified so closely with the early history of the mining operations of Lake Superior and the rise and progress up to the present moment of its most successful development that the time may come, when their names will be consecrated, as the Poet has it, either in “Sculptured Marble or Monumental Brass” as they have already been crowned with many masses of copper. But should the districts for which these gentlemen have done so much prove ungrateful, they will have the pleasing satisfaction of knowing, that they belong to “the forlorn hope” whose good fortune it was, to rescue from comparative oblivion this great district! That it was to their indomitable will and perseverance amidst difficulties and disasters, which banished from the country all their competitors, that the solid “Cliff” was made to “Ope its ponderous jaws” and yield up its treasures to their invincible determination.”

Roger and I mapping, measuring, and drawing a supposed continuation of the wash house floor.

During the backfill of the excavations (actually when we were finished and packing up), one of our volunteers (and a fellow grad student in Michigan Tech’s Industrial Archaeology program) Mark noticed a series of wood planks that looked suspiciously like a floor sticking out of the ground about 100 feet south of our workings. We didn’t have time to really look it over that day since it was time to go but I decided to come back out with Mark and fellow student, Roger to have a closer look.

One of the problems with archaeology is that at some point, you have to stop. We worked for 7 weeks at the site and opened up a lot of ground. The post-excavation lab work will be time-consuming, and adding more to an already overflowing plate is just foolish. However, we had to at least take some pictures and measurements to see if this was in fact a floor. We can always come back next year to investigate further.

It my be hard to see but there is a floor mixed in with all that dirt. In the background can be seen a stone foundation wall of the wash house.

The reason this supposed floor is intriguing is that it is pretty far removed from any visible remains associated with the mill and wash house. But (there’s always a but), the distance from the end of this supposed floor to the stone wall we believe was the eastern foundation of the wash house looked to be about 50 feet. According to the mine’s 1863 Annual Report to stockholders, the wash house was originally 100 feet long but had another 50 feet added in 1862. So, it is worth investigating this floor since it could be the remains of that 50 foot addition.

We measured the distance more accurately and found that it is roughly 49 feet. This is right in our wheelhouse. The ends of the planks were uncovered, drawn, mapped with the Total Station to see how they line up with known points in the wash house, and then covered back up again until next year. Its pretty exciting to make discoveries on the last day, though it is equally frustrating knowing you may have to wait a year or more to look closer at your find.

Today's photographer, Brandon, and Meghan working very hard (not goofing off at all).

That's me supervising the hard working efforts of Meghan, Kim, and Eric. Natiffany and Louise work on a drawing of 101.T4 at upper right while Gary and Dr. Scarlett talk with a visitor.

Eric and Kim showing how archaeology=fun.

Kim was always brought a smile to the work-day. It was greatly appreciated.

I think it was like 90 degrees this day. We'd just finished giving a tour to visitors from the Keweenaw National Historic Park. This was basically our last day of work (other than the backfilling).

]]> http://cliffmine.wordpress.com/2011/08/02/more-pics-from-volunteer-brandon/feed/ 0 cliffmine 263596_557830426971_78000810_31555699_508395_n 259947_557830935951_78000810_31555727_6427370_n 264606_557830751321_78000810_31555717_1178842_n 271015_557830147531_78000810_31555682_6176033_n 263515_557831739341_78000810_31555771_4632531_n http://cliffmine.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/a-visit-from-the-national-park-service/ http://cliffmine.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/a-visit-from-the-national-park-service/#comments Mon, 01 Aug 2011 12:07:18 +0000 Sean Gohman http://cliffmine.wordpress.com/?p=1128 ]]> The week after close of excavations consisted of three more visits to the site. The first visit was to finish some drawings of the excavations (especially the large wood beam from the post, “Defining the Beam”). The second was to give a tour to the Keweenaw National Historic Park and their Advisory Commission. The third was to document a possible wood floor found to the south of the wash house (covered in tomorrow’s post).

The Cliff Mine Archaeology Project is partially funded through grant money given to us from the KNHP Advisory Commission. The grant money is for assisting groups and site owners dedicated to telling the story of copper mining in the area. We fit the bill so they’ve kindly awarded us funds for two years running now to work at the Cliff. As part of the grant’s stipulations, the work must be available to the public. We meet this goal by offering the public open house tours of the site and also by giving talks about our work to anyone who will have me. So far talks have been given to KNHP, the Ontonagon County Historical Society, Hancock High School, and others.

In order to help the Park and the Advisory Commission understand our progress, we’ve invited them each of the past two years to visit the site and discuss our work. This year they came after work was completed but due to the fact that we postponed the backfilling, they were still able to see the work we accomplished. KNHP’s new Superintendent, Mike Pflaum, had never been to Cliff, so this was a great opportunity to expose him to one of the many ways the Park assists others in bringing the story of copper to the public.

Those from the Park and Advisory Commission were impressed with our work, and lots of future brainstorming and collaboration is hoped to come out of their visit. I want to take this opportunity to thank them for the visit and for the funding. Next year (grant money availability willing) we hope to grow CliffMAP even further.

Brandon (in yellow) and myself discussing our work with visitors to the site.

The last weekend means the end to field work and tours. It was our last open house to the public and over 400 people visited us. Pretty amazing when you think of it. Keweenaw county has just over 2,000 people in it (though in the summer than number increases), and yet nearly a fifth of that number visited the site in two days!

Having 200 people a day make their over to where you are working can be a bit hectic to say the least. There are always loose ends that need tying at the end of an excavation, and having to manage visitors and get everything done can (for me) be a frustrating experience. The idea of the Cliff Mine Archaeology Project is to include the public in our work. We want others to share in our findings, but at the same time work has to get done in order for us to be able to share it with you.

So in between visits from tourists (we had between 20-30 every hour), the students and I continued working on drawings of the excavations. I’ll be posting the large overview pencil drawings shortly, followed by the digital versions created with Adobe Illustrator.

At the end of Sunday we were expecting to backfill the excavations. It turned out that the level of interest that day prevented us from being able to do this. We decided to hold off for another week so I could both continue with drawings (if necessary) during the week as well as show a few more people (such as the Keweenaw National Historic Park and their Advisory Commission-an upcoming post) the site and works. Backfilling was postponed until the following Saturday.

On a side note I wanted to say one thing about the blog. One of the reasons the blog posts were always weeks behind the actual field work was due to there just being too much work going on. At the end of the day I rarely had the time, patience or interest to spend another 30 minutes blogging about what I just spent the last 10 hours doing. I wrote as time allowed, which in the end made for a 3-plus week discrepancy between work and writing, but overall I think it was beneficial since I was able to write a lot more details than if I had just summed up each day as it happened. This approach also allowed me to better organize the days/weeks events chronologically and thematically. I hope you all enjoyed the longer write-ups. Next year I may try the same-time approach and then add more details after the field work is over. We shall see.

From this photo the beam looks very sturdy and stable, but its actually quite fragile. If you stepped on it you might fall through it.

One of the last tasks tackled during excavations at the mill was trying to better understand the purpose and size of the large beam that seems to divide the stamp room and wash house. We’d uncovered this piece of architecture weeks ago but we never fully cleaned it off of all the sediment in order to help preserve it (its much more fragile than it looks-in some places it’s almost rotted through) until the very end of the field season.

Lots of rain the previous Sunday helped us out a lot by saturating the wood and surrounding sediment, thereby defining notches and where sediment could be removed from the fragile wood. We spent the morning cleaning up the beam and found quite a few mortises and post holes in it. this beam definitely supported vertical beams, probably support posts for the southern wall of the stamp room. When we were done the beam looked great, and really stands as an excellent example of the construction techniques of those working at Cliff.

Now looking west. The white is a layer of latex for a soil peel of the excavation's soil stratigraphy. Also note how not all the mortise joint holes line up. Could this mean modification over time?

View looking east. Note all the mortise joints in the beam. The smaller ones on each side of the larger post joints were likely housing smaller diagonal support beams

Roger, mapping a shovel test pit (off camera) while other student's excavate a worker's log cabin home.

Aside from excavating in and around the Cliff mine’s various stamp mills, we also wanted to tackle a couple other projects during the field season. Last year we spent weeks mapping the industrial core of the site with digital surveying equipment (Total Station surveying). This year we hoped to continue with some mapping of Clifton, the mine’s townsite.

Due to the complexity of the mill excavations and the attention they demanded, we weren’t able to get nearly as much accomplished as last year on the mapping end. There simply wasn’t the time. We did manage to site in many new control points inside the townsite though, and these will be helpful next year if we continue with the project. So if you are wandering around the townsite sometime over the next year and spot a (modern) nail in the ground with flagging tape, please leave it in place. These control points allow us to tie into the previous years work, saving hours and days of re-work if they are missing.

In the background is the prism Roger is using to map test pit locations. Nick and Gary excavate and record another worker's log cabin home. Note the screen, all the material removed from the test pit must be screened in order to catch seeds, bones, and small pieces of glass and ceramic.

One thing that had to be mapped accurately in Clifton were the many shovel test pits dug around specific foundations we selected for artifact survey. I wrote a little about what shovel test pits were in the July 16th post, “Testing for the Early Mill,” though in this case it wasn’t stratigraphy we were concerned with, but rather the artifacts contained within.

The idea was to select a few different home foundations in order to create a wide sample of different classes/positions within the community’s/mine’s hierarchy. Worker housing, boarding houses, and managerial housing were all selected to see what if any differences there were regarding what the people ate and ate off of.

Kim is inspecting a decorated piece of ceramic found during excavation. Note the paperwork. Everything from depth, soil changes, artifacts found and their location is carefully recorded in order to recreate the student's work either in the lab or in report form.

From a methodological standpoint, the test pits were dug inside and outside any given foundation. Artifacts were collected at specific level intervals in the pits depth. In total, a few dozen pits were excavated and bags and bags of artifacts collected. What is of great interest are the types of ceramic found (well, fragments of ceramics) as well as the bones. Identifying cut bones can tell you what people ate, while the ceramics can help to place people in specific class categories. Perhaps certain food stuffs one wouldn’t expect to find in a mine location will be found. Or, maybe there won’t be wide differences in the types of ceramics used by both the working and managerial classes. These answers won’t be available until after the artifacts are cleaned, catalogued, and analyzed. Such is the pace of archaeological investigation.

The not-so-exciting shovel test pit.

How many artifacts can you identify in this picture? I see a horseshoe, an iron shim, part of a bucket, a nut from a bolt, and many nails and spikes.

So it rained on Sunday, June 19th. It was supposed to be a public open-house day but we had to cancel on account of the weather. What does an archaeology crew do on a rain day? They sit in the lab and work on cleaning and identifying artifacts.

Natiffany (not someone named Craig) cleaning a piece of iron strapping with a wire brush. The apron keeps her clothes from getting stained with rust.

Cleaning artifacts is a dirty business. First, everything is covered in dirt and soil. Second, iron artifacts have corroded over time and stain everything reddish-orange. Ceramic artifacts need to be washed delicately with water. It all adds up to a big mess, but when you’re done, everything is easily identifiable and put away in new artifact bags for cataloging and storage.

A new artifact bag is prepared.

Items are sorted, brushed, and then bagged again according to where they were found during excavation. Also, items first thought to be significant can be removed from the collection and returned to the site. I mean how many nails does one need to keep to figure out what type of nail they were using, right?

Cleaned artifacts ready to be sorted and bagged. You can see some tar paper with roofing nails still attached, glass, and way to many nails.

It’s not just cleaning that takes place on lab days, though. It’s also a chance to get caught up on paperwork and show students what happens to that paperwork after it gets back from the field. Mostly, its digitized with a scanner so that its is stored both in a physical form and digitally in case one or the other is lost to time, fire, or vandalism.

A drawing of 101.T8 before we excavated the southern portion of the unit. Everything else was a wood surface or beam. The numbers in circles are locations where we measured the depth of that point from the datum (the starting elevation point).

In there somewhere is a wood box. You can see the wall clearly on the left. The right side is covered by wood rubble, sediment, and a small iron pipe that's threaded. We first thought this was in situ but discovered it was just lying loose on the surface.

Chris and Meghan excavated with trowels knowing that wood features were just below the surface. Artifacts discovered were large iron bolts, a threaded iron pipe with another pipe fit inside it, and lots of nails (there’s always lots of nails). Lying on top of all of this was quite a lot of wood rubble as well, though not in positions or conditions that spoke to their purpose or original context. The box that began in the north end of 101.T8 was found to extend another 80 cm north, where it then abutted the large wood beam discussed in the previous paragraph. The eastern end of this box continued out the east side wall so we’re not sure its entire length but suffice to say, its a big wood box. At this point, our best guess is that it is part of a jig or settling tank.

We know that in the mid-1860′s the Cliff installed 4 Asmus’ Patented Automated Jigging machines. These machines were 11 ft. square, 4’6″ long and  2’4″ wide (this fits pretty nicely the dimensions we have so far for this box if you think of the outside dimension as the length and the inside width as the wide measurement given). Now this could very well be wrong but these are the kind of leads you must follow in order to make sense of what you’ve uncovered once you get back to the lab/office to do the write-up.

The beam extends nearly all the way across the unit (we're looking west here). Its abrupt end is met by a stone on its end, though on its north side by another large wood beam. Note the mortise joint notched in at the to of the picture.

Aside from the box, the large beam was found to end about 30 cm from the east side wall. Now we should be able to measure a total length on that beam. also found in the beam was a very nice mortise joint notched in near the west side of the unit. This is likely a post hole mortise joint for the i-beams supporting either the was house’s north end or the stamp mill’s south end (or both). Set in behind the beam and making a corner was another beam, though for now it’s not well enough defined to understand what is all going on here. We’ll have to come back to this discussion in a later post.