Site Update: Final Thoughts

by Eric Deetz

In the past I have worked at James Fort in Virginia, Jamestown in Virginia and Jamestown in Nevis, West Indies. So I had a good chuckle when I heard we were going to be working on Fort James in South Dakota. Of course the other sites were all from the 17th century, so the material we expected to find would be entirely different. The other interesting thing about this site is that it is on land owned by Hutterites, a communal farming community that has been on the land since just after the abandonment of the fort in the 19th century.

This was also the first site since Fort Raleigh that we had Ian, our backhoe machine operator, available to help us out with the removal of the overburden. Like Fort Raleigh there is a significant amount of wind-blown soil deposited on the site since it was abandoned.

The first day on site we opened a couple of areas along the exposed wall of the fort, one at the corner and one along the mid section. We had a good crew made up of students and local avocational archaeologists but very quickly it also included a good number of the Hutterite children. They were very interested in what we were doing and were anxious to lend a hand.

It wasn't until the second day that we started to find intact deposits dating from the fort period. We were worried that the site may have been picked clean by the looters but we started to find artifacts, mostly in Chelsea's units along the exposed wall.

By the third day, all of the geophysics results had been interpreted to a point where we had some leads to follow, so we started looking for the stables. We found very little in the way of artifacts and the archaeological remains were ambiguous, however I think that what we found is in line with what may have been part of the stables. Our trench wasn't wide enough to encompass more than one stall area but the contours of the soil layers showed depressions that matched up with the geophysics. These depressions may have been where horses stood over time and the soil either became depressed or was scooped out when the stalls were cleaned.

Overall, I think the Fort James dig was a great success. We defined the limits of the fort, recovered some artifacts related to the cavalry and, in the process, gave the landowners an appreciation for the need to preserve the site from further damage by looters.