By Lotte Govaerts   This post is part of a series on the historical archaeology of the River Basin Surveys (RBS). In this installment I discuss site 32ML1, Fort Stevenson. The site was a military post from 1867 until 1883. After its abandonment by the military, the buildings were used as an Indian school until 1894. Now submerged below the waters of Lake Sakakawea in present-day McLean County, Fort Stevenson was built on a level terrace that almost formed an island, between Garrison and Douglas Creeks, on the north side of the main channel of the Missouri, which at that point flowed eastw ..read more

By Lotte Govaerts   This post is part of a series on the historical archaeology of the River Basin Surveys (RBS). In this installment I will discuss site 32ML2, which includes Like-A-Fishhook Village as well as Forts Berthold I and II, along with several other buildings associated with smaller-scale traders and Indian Agency buildings from a later period. History of the Site Site 32ML2, now under the waters of Lake Sakakawea, was located on the north side of the Missouri, opposite the mouth of L’Ours qui Dance (Dancing Bear Creek) in what is now McLean County. The village and first trade ..read more

By Lotte Govaerts and J. Daniel Rogers Although we haven’t been very active on our blog or our Twitter, we have been pretty busy these past few months, both in and out of the lab (mostly out of the lab during the month of January, because the government shutdown closed our lab for most of that month, along with the rest of the Smithsonian). In this post we’ll discuss some of the things we’ve been working on recently. Happy faces upon our return to the lab at the end of January. Selfie by Lotte Govaerts.   The cataloging work on the 39BF2 (Medicine Crow) collection continues, though the ..read more

By Lotte Govaerts   I recently returned to the lab, after having spent most of my summer in Belgium. I have settled back in, and picked up where I left off back in June. Among other things, I have resumed work on the cataloging project I begun in late 2017. You might recall we very excitedly announced completion of the Larson cataloging project (39WW2), last summer. By finishing work on Larson, we completed a multi-year cataloging project that also included collections from three other sites. At the time we believed that these were the last uncataloged River Basin Surveys collections fro ..read more

(Part of a continuing series of travel commentaries) By J. Daniel Rogers   The Great Plains brings all landscapes down to their essence—earth and sky. No hills, no trees. It is not boring, or blank or incomplete, the prairie is the foundation, the prototype. For me, it is the place to start. The essence of the Plains. Photo by Dan Rogers.     All simple and true things are oversimplifications. The Great Plains is not only flat land and ever-changing sky. There are rivers--sometimes very large rivers--and hills and valleys. Stands of trees and forest follow along the river and s ..read more

By Lotte Govaerts   This is the fifth and last post about my recent trip to North Dakota. Previous posts in this series are here, here, here, and here. In this post, I describe our last stop in North Dakota: Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site (NPS). The park is located ca. 25 miles southwest of Williston, ND, near the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, on the North Dakota/Montana state line.   History of the fort: Fort Union was the longest-lived of the Upper Missouri trade posts. Established in 1828 by the American Fur Company’s new “Upper Missouri Outfit ..read more

by Lotte Govaerts   Today’s blog post is another installment in our series on the historical archaeology of the Missouri Basin Project. Links to all previous posts in this series are included below.  In this post I examine the history and archaeology of site 32MN1, the site of an 1820s trading post called Fort Floyd. The site, now under the water of Lake Sakakawea, was located in Mountrail County, on a high terrace on the northern bank of the Missouri near its confluence with the White Earth River. The precise identification of the site has been somewhat problematic, as I will discus ..read more

By Lotte Govaerts   We’ve been a bit absent from the blog this past year, but we do have some new content lined up for you. First up, a return to our series on the historic archaeology of the Missouri Basin Project, with an installment on the archaeology of the Garrison Dam survey area. [Note: the site descriptions in this blog post are excerpts from my 2016 paper on the impacts of Garrison Dam (Govaerts 2016)]. In the most recent installments in this series (here and here) I discussed the construction of Garrison dam and its ecological and social impacts. In earlier installments I descri ..read more

Great Plains Travel Series By J. Daniel Rogers   The mosquitoes were glad to see us. If you remember a few posts back Lotte wrote about her visit to Fort Union, North Dakota during a cold spell in late Winter, 2017. By way of contrast I thought it might be interesting to make a few further comments and share a few images of the visit Garry Rogers and I paid to the fort on June 6, 2018 as part of our travels across the Plains. My summer images of green prairie and leafy trees are a nice contrast to Lotte’s frozen pictures of winter splendor. I haven’t written sooner about this visit becaus ..read more

By J. Daniel Rogers   When our team has a new publication we post a brief announcement.  I cannot claim much credit for the publication mentioned below, but I was glad to be part of the project.  I am author 13 of 120.  Yes, 120 co-authors!  The core research team was led by Lucas Stephens and included my Smithsonian colleague Torben Rick.  The article was recently published in the journal Science.   Stephens, L., et al. 2019 Archaeological assessment reveals Earth’s early transformation through land use, Science, 30 Aug 2019: Vol. 365, Issue 6456, pp. 897-90 ..read more