May 15th Update

Hi everyone,

This has been a busy week; Monday Mandy Kramar of MSU, Beau Kromberg of WSU, Jeff Sommer from the Castle Museum, CMU alumni, Nick Bacon and Kate Russell, and myself conduct some Magnetic Susceptibility surveys at an early settler cabin site in Saginaw. We found some interesting anomalies and found a square nail and a metal garden tool in one of the isolated anomalies.

Tuesday I ran 4/8 of the remaining flotation samples from Ehinger.

Wednesday MSU alumni Ken Kosidlo, Nick Bacon, Jeff Sommer, and myself did some more magnetic susceptibility, this time at the rumored location of some protohistoric/early historic structures. We're hoping to evaluate how well the high readings and the surface finds from this location match spatially. 

 

Friday Dr. Surface-Evans, Cmu Alumni Nick Bacon and Travis Corey, and I went out to the Logging Camp in Clare Co. our class visited last year. After conducting some ms2 testing here, I got a chance to go to the Rogers site in the St. Charles area and do some sensing there as well. The readings were some of the highest ive ever seen on the device, probably due to some metal near the surface. 

 

Saturday Travis Corey joined me to sense my own backyard. We got a nice 3m grid in before it started to rain. We had to cancel work in Fenton planned for later that day since the grass would be too wet to sense on a lawn surface. Instead Travis and I dug a 50x50cm mini-unit at the high reading and discovered some saw-cut bone (deer?) and a large amount of nails. Interestingly a much larger amount of artifacts came out of the 20-30cm below surface layer than the 0-20 cm one.

It seems we also found the edge of a gravel layer that was added sometime before 1956 (aerial photo depicts gravel in this location). A tree root prevented us from going deeper without expanding the unit horizontally or considerably disturbing the stratigraphy. One large peice of possible FCR or cobble foundation fragment. Looks like Argilite?

 

Future: I'm trying to keep my schedule flexible as the field season begins (hoping to get some paid work) however I will be using ms2 and excavating as long as I have the device and as long as I am unemployed. I'd really like to build a good set of data, especially if people plan to ground truth the locations. In this way we can evaluate the value of the device to detect certain features in particular conditions. 

If you are interested in taking part in archaeological surveys or recoveries around the area, please send an email to patrick.mo.lawton@gmail.com

Best,

Patrick Monte