Theses

DOCUMENT Full-Text Amanda Brooks.

Details internship at the Michigan Office of the State Archaeologist and the application of this experience to the reorganization by raw material, function, then provenience of the collections obtained under the auspices of the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project at Western Michigan University.

DOCUMENT Full-Text Brock Giordano.

The study of labor organization through the examination of craft production in complex societies has been a topic of intense scholarly interest (Blackman et al. 1993; Costin and Hagstrum 1995; Shafer and Hester 1991). A number of scholars have hypothesized that goods produced in mass quantities by particular specialists can be recognized by their high degree of standardization or homogeneity (Blackman et al. 1993:61; Schiffer and Skibo 1997). As such, this study employs the theoretical framework...

DOCUMENT Full-Text David Martinez.

Fort St. Joseph, a seventeenth- to eighteenth-century archaeological site in southwestern Michigan, and the adjacent Lyne site provide a recent and ongoing example of historical archaeology posing questions about the notion of culture contact during French colonialism. Effective research questions, increasingly systematic procedures, and a balance between historical and archaeological material have served to solidify and situate the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project’s contributions to...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Rory Becker.

Cultural identities can be created and maintained through daily practice and food consumption is one such practice. People need food in order to survive, but the types of food they eat are largely determined by the interaction of culture and their environment. By approaching the topic of subsistence practices as being culturally constituted, the study of foodways provides an avenue to examine issues of cultural identity through selective consumption. Eating certain foods to the exclusion of...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Cezar Carvalhaes.

French colonial North America was settled in order to expand the fur trade and also secure the North American interior from British incursions. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France had come to occupy huge swathes of land in North America, establishing a trading empire from Newfoundland to the Rocky Mountains, and from Hudson Bay southward along the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. As the fur trade expanded, the Great Lakes region proved vital to France’s interests, and near...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Elizabeth Ann Sylak.

First circulated by French traders and Jesuit missionaries on their visits to New France in the 17th and 18th centuries, copper-alloy finger rings bearing Jesuit and secular iconography are found wherever French traders or colonists ventured. Fort St. Joseph was a Jesuit mission and later both a trading post and a military garrison near the modern city of Niles, Michigan. The fort allowed the French to gain better control of southern Michigan and easier access to the Mississippi River and...

DOCUMENT Full-Text LisaMarie Malischke.

Fort St. Joseph in Niles, Michigan was a French and later and English fort built along the St. Joseph River. It had a military presence, but the majority of its activity involved the fur trade. A variety of French, French-Canadian, Native and Métis people called this fort locale home, which led to a blending of cultural practices. Documents such as the baptismal register for the fort suggest this site hosted daily interactions between the French inhabitants and the neighboring Miami,...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Erin Claussen.

This thesis documents the effort to curate digital information associated with the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project, which has been generated over the past decade of investigation of the site of Fort St. Joseph, an 18th century mission, garrison, and trading post complex located in present-day Niles, MI. A review of literature on the subject of archaeological curation and collections management was undertaken to inform the approach to execution of this project, which included the creation...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Daniel Lynch.

Fort St. Joseph is a 17th-18th century French (and later English) mission-garrison-trading post complex located in southwest Michigan. A geophysical survey was performed and the results of the survey were tested through archaeological excavation. The geophysical methods included ground penetrating radar, electromagnetic induction, electrical resistivity, magnetic gradiometry, and magnetic susceptibility. The results of the archaeological excavations demonstrate that magnetic gradiometry was the...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Andrew Beaupré.

My research examines archaeologically recovered artifacts and documentary sources to gain an understanding of the role that religious material culture played on the French colonial frontier, ca. 1608-1763. This study revisits the claims made by Rinehart (1990), stating that religious items are more likely to be recovered from the archaeological record at sites near Jesuit missions. I examined a large portion of the French colonial archaeological literature and located 30 sites that have yielded...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Susan Benston.

Geography and geographic perspectives make important contributions to many other disciplines. This thesis project is designed to bring a geographic perspective to an ongoing archaeological investigation. The project is focused on Fort Saint Joseph, a French colonial mission, garrison and trading post built in 1691 and occupied for 90 years. The site has been excavated for six years and plans are in place for annual excavations until 2018. As the body of information about the site increases, a...