Finding flooded Fort St. Joseph raises more questions than the discovery settles.

Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project, a partnership between Western Michigan University, the City of Niles and the Michigan Humanities Council, is winding up field school for this summer with a weekend open house.

Questions yet to answer include precise dimensions of the fort. Is the field school digging inside or outside the fort? Why do archaeologists find so few ceramics? And the site sat on a river. Eating fish seems obvious, but they’re not locating bones that would confirm that, two project participants told Dowagiac Rotary Club Thursday noon at Elks Lodge 889 as the guest of Doug Stickney.

“We have a lot of fun together, and everybody gets along,” Erica Stone said, “even though we’re supposed to be in a very academic environment. Field school has been a great experience for all of us. We find a lot of interesting things in the wet screens,” like a lead bale seal from an 18th century French textile city, tinkling cones that replaced bones, cufflinks and glass insets indicating some finery was worn even on the frontier, a mouth harp and “countless” white-tail deer teeth.

In addition to small artifacts, larger “features,” or things in the ground such as hearths and foundations, are indicative of “human occupation.”

They pack up next week after the open house, remove the pump and the river will submerge the site again — a great natural defense.

“We can learn a lot from beads (found in white, black, red and blue in a variety of sizes) and straight pins for making clothes. I’ve learned a lot being part of this dig. I didn’t realize how much local history was there, under my feet, until I was out there digging it up,” Stone said.

“We find a lot of tinkling cones. Native Americans adorned clothing with bones to clink together. After Europeans got here, metal made a more pleasing sound. Whenever there were scrap pieces of metal from trading copper kettles, they’d cut them into trapezoidal shapes and shape them into cones that are indicative of interaction between Native Americans and the French. It took something European and used it as a Native American adornment. We find them in various sizes made on site.”

Stone, of Edwardsburg, belongs to the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians.

Her mother and grandfather are from Dowagiac.

Gun spalls and flints, “Lighter flints are indicative of French,” Kelley Walter explained. “British flints are darker, almost grayish-black. There’s always debate of how many soldiers were garrisoned at this fort. SIx? Ten? What was being traded with the Potawatomi and Miami communities? Were firearms really traded or was it powder and flints and things of that nature?”

Deer teeth quantities “tell us that rather than relying on domesticated animals or bringing them from France or other established communities, like Quebec, they relied on wild animals,” Stone said. “Again, showing interaction between the Native community and the French community and how important they were to each other.”

Iron items disintegrate, where copper alloy items are more likely to be preserved.

“I’ve always been interested in archaeology,” Erica said, “and this area is very important to me, I love living here and I’m hoping to stay here and carry on telling everybody about history. It’s pretty rural, so it’s hard to get the word out about everything that’s going on.”

After two years at Southwestern Michigan College, Stone transferred to WMU expecting to major in history for teaching.

“When I found out about the public history major, I was excited because I want to work in museums and in public outreach, get the word out about history and get people interested in how important everything was,” Erica said. “This summer before I started the dig, I worked for about seven weeks in the Fort St. Joseph Museum in Niles, getting a wide variety of experiences — exhibit work, children’s programs, educational booklets, a little bit with conservation. What they’re doing is nice and needs more publicity because they’ve got programs for children and their exhibits change all the time. It’s a really great museum full of history of Niles and this area in general.”

Walter shares Stone’s infectious bubbly passion, but Kelley came to Michigan by following a more circuitous path which began growing up in West Friendship, Md.

“From an early age, I knew history was the thing for me,” Walter said. “My dad was the kind of guy who any time we saw a Civil War trail sign, he’s turning that steering wheel, we’re pulling over and we’re out looking at battlefields. My favorite field trips were the ones to Williamsburg or Jamestown. I couldn’t get enough of it. My parents thought it was a little bit strange, but they encouraged it, by all means.

“I took every history class I could coming up through high school and decided I wanted to go far and wide from my small town. I went to seek my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto. I majored in history and anthropology, but for a while I wasn’t sure where I wanted to take what I loved because I needed a job, too.”

During Kelley’s last year of college, she became interested in archaeology through a professor with a global resume that encompassed Israel and South Africa.

“Talking about Egypt is glamorous,” she sensed, “but there’s a lot of history” closer to home. “Surely local communities are interested. I left knowing a lot, but still not really knowing what I wanted to do and came back to Maryland and, through some odd connections, like my mom’s high school anthropology teacher.”

He steered her toward the Maryland Archaeological Society, which had a couple of summer digs where Kelley could get her hands dirty and gauge if she liked it.

“I was hooked,” Walter recalled of her “powerful” volunteer experience with the early colonial site Port Tobacco near Chesapeake Bay, south of Washington, D.C.

“We camped on-site, a whole slew of volunteers,” Walter related. “We’d come out of tents in the morning with our coffee mugs in hand, gather around and try to warm up, but before long you’d hear the clinking of shovels, trowels and tools and people laughing and joking about their finds. I knew this was where I wanted to be. I wanted to do research, but with a public volunteer component.

“That led me to employment, actually, which was great. The fellow running the project, for some reason, thought I knew what I was doing and offered me a job. He hired me to work for a cultural resource management firm, which involved archaeology projects done in compliance with county, state and federal law. I became familiar with excavating, dealing with deadlines, writing reports, photography, a little bit of everything. Jim was excellent bringing me through this, like a second father. I also learned how bad the tick and mosquito population was in Maryland working outside.”

She wasn’t enthralled by the prospect of returning to school, but Kelley enrolled at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

Colonial Williamsburg. “I’ll put a plug in for that amazing place,” she said.

They even relied on archaeology as the theme for their Homecoming parade float.

Convinced it was time to “pick up this collaborative archaeology and run with it,” Walter researched Port Tobacco, which had been a 1700s commercial center, but fell into decline. The courthouse burned in 1892. People moved away. The railroad redirected to a more vibrant destination.

“It was a ghost town” where “you can’t put a shovel in the ground without getting ceramics and Native American projectile points. This interested me because we had a great public volunteer community, but we sometimes got the feeling that the resident community didn’t really want us there. Interviewing these folks, there was a lot of conflict, so we started an instructional online blog about what we were finding. We also did some traveling exhibits to make it accessible.”

Conflict came to a head over a map. “They said they knew their history. Archaeologists said, ‘No, you don’t. We have different evidence.’ That’s where my thesis really got into how do we negotiate these differences and how we try to educate one another. After I completed my research, that’s what brought me to Fort St. Joseph — the idea that archaeologists need to spend more time working with communities and understanding where they’re coming from. Communities need to know more about archaeology and what we’re doing out there. Sometimes we just storm on in with our tools and boots and say, ‘We’re going to find history here!’ when people often know their local history. This is a big adventure for myself. I graduated in May” and will be moving to Montreal this fall.

“I needed a temporary job,” Kelley said. “I met Dr. (Michael) Nassaney (of WMU) at a conference in January, so I knew about this project. I used some of my thesis research and suddenly there was a job opening for a public outreach coordinator. Somebody’s smiling on me because I’ve been very lucky that this has worked out so well. I got this position because nobody from Western applied.”

A picture shows her in a booth at the French Market exhibiting artifacts to the public “to have a presence in the town, so they can keep track of us without necessarily coming out to the site,” though there is a free open house this Saturday and Sunday, Aug. 13-14, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Fort and Bond streets in Niles.

Observe an archaeological dig in progress, meet archaeologists, watch re-enactors demonstrate activities that took place at the fort, listen to historians and archaeologists present information about the dig and the fur trade.

There will be crafts and activities for children.

“The community has been the most rewarding part for me,” Walter said. “I knew I wanted to do public archaeology, but now I feel that commitment stronger than ever. I’m staying with one of the original members of Support the Fort, which got this project rolling over 10 years ago. Everyone’s been so wonderful. I really like Michigan. I’d never been here before.”

Visit www.kwmich.edu/fortstjoseph or www.fortstjosepharchaeology.blogspot.com.