Old Dirt – New Thoughts

I just finished a meeting with Candy Hart, Hamline’s archivist, and Phil Reinhardt of the Hamline-Midway History Corps, where we discussed starting a ”Hamline Village” history project. What we are envisioning is an ongoing collaboration between the University, the community, and local schools to document the history of our neighborhood. We would like to combine archival research, oral history, and archaeology to investigate the Hamline area landscape, how it began and how evolved.

Phil is very interested in the train depots. As he sees it, these structures are the “genesis” for the entire neighborhood. The original depot was built around 1874 near the Snelling and Taylor Avenue intersection. A second depot was built sometime around 1886 and located near where Pierce Butler is today.

One idea we are considering is to try and locate one of these depot sites so that we can have an archaeological dig at the site next fall as part of a course I will be offering called ”Excavating Hamline’s History”. We plan to spend the next couple of months gathering more information on the depots. Anyone interested in this project can come to our next meeting on 24 January at 9:30 AM.

The Hamline-Midway History Corp has a great website with lots of neighborhood history materials  including some fascinating historical maps. This map from their site shows a dot where the 1874 depot was located. It would be an exciting dig if we could find the piece of ground that matches the dot.

 Close up of 1874 map showing depot north of “College Place”. From Hamline-Midway History Corp website.

My Lab class has finished their projects. You can see their reports in our Aniakchak Wiki. The mammal group found some interesting results when they compared the skeletal parts recovered from fox and from sea otter. As their pie charts show, the identified sea otter elements are from all parts of the body, where as the fox elements are predominately either mandibles, metapodials, or phalanges. That is, heads and feet for the fox versus entire carcasses for the sea otter. One interpretation of these patterns is that the inhabitants were primarily hunting fox for furs (which they brought back to the site with the feet and head attached), while the sea otters were brought back whole (presumably as food). We need to pursue this analysis a little further, but I thought this preliminary result very intriguing.

Sea otter and fox identified elements (Illustration made by Amy Branden).

     My Archaeology Lab Techniques students are finishing up some great projects. I have groups working on the bifaces, chipped stone flakes, mammal bones, shellfish, bone tools, and flotation samples – so we have a lot of work happening right now. The students will be posting the results of their analyses on our new Aniakchak Wiki. Everyone should check it out. I’m expecting some interesting data.