thank ramsey county the star of society for offering jerry's time this summer to conduct the archaeological dig and i'd also like to thank the city of maplewood and ramsey county who offered us the use of their colleges and universities including as a professor professor of anthropology at inver hills community college as eight archaeologist over twenty years experience as a slice of the spread just heard archaeology with the archaeologist  the state of minnesota and he has given many public talks throughout minnesota over the past seventeen years almost all archaeology and anthropology i hope you enjoyed tonight's top five down you know they really appreciate that i sound really old now say that twenty years of doing archaeology my name is jeremy i have been doing archaeology for twenty years and i've absolutely loved every moment of it i'm going to move around a little bit as i talk and feel free at any point if you have a question about something it's not unclear just jump right in raise your hand ask a question this is very informal i'm not going to stand behind the podium the whole time and drone on about some obscure part of archaeology i'm going to talk about some of that happened in your backyard and archaeology projects that we did just this past summer where we learned just a little bit more about what's going on in the past so any questions you have we can absolutely answer them during the program hopefully i don't talk very long and we can have a lot of questions and time for questions afterwards ok so a couple things just to get a get through at the beginning as bob said this this project came together with a lot of different partners an initially there were four count including ramsey county and they went off to when they after a legacy grant this past year to hire an archaeological liaison that person's me and one of the things that i've got an opportunity to do as the circle logical liaison for ramsay and s dakota counties is work with smaller circle societies and offer my time and talents to them they have lots of different interests and projects some of them are archaeological ones like what we've been doing here fish creek other times it's thinking about their collections that they have been able to go into the field into the laboratory into people's collections and document lots of things and i've had a really amazing year doing that and it's been a really cool project in a lot of ways so that that was done so lots of different people came together to do this project i'm going to go through some background information and then i'm going to talk about the things we actually did this summer i'm going to give you a little bit of interpretation about what the site likely was and then future efforts that we could do things that we could do coming up next summer next spring as soon as it's dry enough to get out there we could go out and do some work elegy so if you're interested in doing that i think we i think we have the opportunity to do it so the fish  itself we're looking at a space come on in have a seat starting here at carver lake and going down crossing four ninety four it's been channelized in a lot of places goes through this part of the fish creek nature preserve have a better map of than a second our site is generally about here and then it goes and ends in the mississippi river this whole space has not been overly developed luckily that didn't occur and actually there was a project that that spurred this archaeology work that we're talking about tonight that happened in two thousand and five where they were going to be doing a bunch of development and that project didn't happen and then a couple of years went by and now it's part of this larger preserved area so that's where we're located this map and you know it's got a lot of stuff going on with it focuses in a little bit you've got carver lake up in the upper right the mississippi river flows down here in the left and you've got several different properties owned by many different  entities that all together make part of this fish creek greenway so you have the fish creek going through the whole entire area the places that were going to be developed as part of this two thousand and five project were these two locations here and the site that we're talking about tonight is at the very corner down here of the area so we're going to be talking about some excavations that happened in two thousand and five by some environmental solution there a culture resource management firm that still operates in the twin cities they were doing archaeology work they found two different sites one right about there the other one down the corner is this one down in the corner whose designation is twenty one are a fifty four that we're going to be talking about tonight all right so as i said in two thousand and five the area was part of a larger maplewood crossing's development it was going to be developed for housing project the landowner was a company called cope are and what happened is they because they were doing somewhat wind changes they had to get an army corps of engineers permit and that permit triggered a process that included archaeology a lot of archaeology today is not being done by academics a lot of archaeology gets done as a business and it is driven by environmental concerns or part of something called the national storage preservation act that thinks about cultural resources in the same way that we think about natural resources so when we have projects that either incur federal funding or have federal agencies involved with them archeology gets done and so there are lots of different companies here in minnesota that do this as as a business and that's what this project was so for a couple of days in two thousand and five this company as some environmental solutions came out and did their work and they cover both areas eighteen b that you saw in that previous map and they've did find some archaeology in the past so that's that's how it got started so they had a small amount of materials they had one site that was just a single piece of lithic debris a rock that had been broken as part of making out a projectile point or a tool of some sort that was the one piece of material they had that was the sit to the north this site to the south down on where the fish creek is coming along has slope on two sides it was right in the corner of where the development was going to be happening it used to be a farmer's field down in that corner and there were some trees and things on the other side will have a nicer area photographing this a little bit they put in shovel test which you'll see some examples of shell tests when we do this if we have a short video that we're going to see that is a shovel testing down there basically think about taking a hole about the size of a toilet seat and digging down about three feet into the ground and screening that material and they found a couple of pieces of lithic a broken rock that's from project up points they found some broken ceramics as well basically pieces of pots all the materials that they that they found that we were as we see from the report those materials they were reported as being weathered heavily whether as if they had been in a clue vehicle or in the louvel environment if they had been slope wash or they had been moved in some way and the site basically was thought of to be interesting it was potentially eligible talk about eligibility a little bit later tonight it was potentially eligible the land owner the developer decided to just not build the house in that spot so because they decided not to build a house on that one location there was no further need for archaeology and that was the end of the work as i said the company eventually went out of business and the development wasn't done and the materials were lost so these pieces of the past twelve ceramic some five live fix and all that's left essentially of these materials is a report there's no if it's private land just like it's your private your own backyard there's no requirements for your materials that anything you find in your in your back unless of course it's a human body which by the way call the sheriff when that happens ok call the sheriff they'll call the archaeologist don't worry don't worry about that you call the sh first so but when you find something on private property it's yours all right and even if it belongs to a previous cultural group or thing like that is on site human remains it's your private property so this was a private development and those materials were not housed at the historical society they likely ended up with the landowner and they probably ended up in a box and they probably went away and that was the end of it so we don't don't have those artifacts but we have lots moved and you artifacts to show you tonight i said the site was potentially eligible for the national register if any future work was going to impact the site it was highly recommended that additional work be done all right so that sets us the stage back in two thousand and five as we move forward and this these two parcels become part of this larger fish creek greenway they actually a few years ago did a produced a fish creek master plan in which they cited this earlier work in two thousand and five and they wanted whoever was going to be doing work in the future to really think about that work that had been done and they have a little language and here they really wanted some new additional work probably funded through grants to learn more about the site have some sort of public engagement program they knew the site existed they didn't know what to do next so that was a couple of years ago now of this spring ramsey county a circle society has this great archaeological liaison project they work with the city of maplewood they were the main port area storable society and they decide to do a public focus today archaeology event looking at more information about this site because we don't have any more artifacts we know the site exists we know it's interesting but we don't know much about it and those objects are lost so let's try to find more information out about those objects so from that master plan in those early conversations we developed a series of research questions so there's research questions deal with topics like does the site extend outside of the boundary when the work was done in two thousand and five they could only go up to the edge of the plowed field because that was what was owned by the landowner at the time they could still go another twenty five feet to the edge of the slope to say probably really went farther but you couldn't it because it's on a different land owners property archaeologists can't violate those boundaries we don't and it's not only doing really working this parcel so they couldn't go any further so that was one of the first questions is the site larger than what we know  today that was the first question after that it was questions how deep does the site go as i said the part of the site it was been previously plowed that plow zone which is about a foot deep has churned up a lot of the soil and mixed it all to gather all right when you mix all the soil together and all the artifacts get jumbled together you lose a lot of information about the past so does the site extend below that mixing cells in our fundamental question and then how dense is the site how many things per cubic meter do we expect to find is there any idea about how many things could be here at this location so those are three answerable research question out to answer for two days to two days of work all right and we're going to watch a video in just a little bit how many people in the audience were actually here for the two days that did the archaeology work raise your hand it's a good welcome time which was pretty crazy but it was hot and sunny and we had a great time and people sweated and we took lots of breaks and we set up a canopy so you didn't have to be the not in the shade too long we had thirty members of the community there the first day we tried to answer that first question about does the site extend farther out so to do that we put in more of these shovel tests into these areas that we weren't able to test before and then the second day we wanted to answer the question about density how many objects we're talking about do they extend deep or below that plow zone so we put in a test you know we're going to watch a video here for a little bit i'm going to talk over the video min to turn the volume down and and most because it's me talking on the video and just me double talking so i'm going to throw that in real quick so again you're digging a hole about the size of a toilet seat about thirty five to forty centimeters across with the spade you take it down about six to eight inches at a time put into an archeological screen we had certainly s the screen as quarter inch mash window screen in the bottom so we're collecting everything larger than a quarter of the size looking through a very meticulously that first day i mean it was hot they were doing the sweat was pouring off of people you can see from the soil so a lot of these so you can see they're kind of reddish there are lots of of rock and things in this this part of minnesota is covered by glacial till with part of something called the grand spring sub lobe and we have materials here that have been pushed and things there's no dirt in a hole that's the big it's an archaeology joke right when you're done you fill it in and then you take a lot of detailed notes which we had video going we had photography going we of course had normal schauble test information we did these tests about five meters apart from each other about fifteen feet in the pool and the plough zone area which had been mowed for us very nicely so we could get an idea of just how to do archaeology the first day so get oriented this site that was the first  the second day we came back and we set up a shaded area which was badly needed and so we basically dug a three foot by three foot square and we went down four inches at a time about ten centimeters at a time meticulously recording all the information everything we found we found lots of different things are going to see some pictures of those in just a little bit what's nice about having to dig a three foot by three foot square is a lot to look at the opportunity we do have different kinds of shovels for that work at four screens going at the same time lots of people got involved we had a video cameras out documenting that day so work so what i'm doing here in this picture is one of the things we're doing is recording the soil different colors that's called  cell book and that keeps a has a systematic way of doing universal coloring for soil so when we called something a certain color type in that book anybody can go back to that book look at that color and say aha i know exactly what color they're dealing with texture of the soil and how much sand is and so a lot of the soil has a lots of sand which then goes to sand and clay towards the bottom and lots of glacial till little cobbles throughout it when we were done we then profiled two  walls some just basically denoting the different soils at the top here this is the basically the top of the modern soil horizon where grasses and things are growing all right your and then below that there's a plow zone that goes across and then below that is some original soils that have been going around for thousands of years and then below that is sterile soils that have been here for twenty thousand years since the glaciers pushed those things around so in a very short period of time you've got a lot of time death you're looking at twenty  right so from just those two days of work and again we only put intentional tests on the map in a second ten shovel test and one test you know we found almost seventy objects the vast majority of those objects were prehistoric it's age unless you want to do carbon dating on it but then fifty two of the objects are definitely pre contact or prehistoric in nature so let's look at the site map a little bit so this is a nice little aerial view you can see fish creek coming through these little green dots that are kind of hard to see are shovel tests there's basically slope right here so the site this is the original site boundaries and they did the show testing here and that's where they found the site the first time we did more shuttle testing and just to get used to what  major flood events that have impacted fish creek two thousand and five two thousand and twelve or thirteen and those those events have have radically eroded many of these locations and have changed  landscape looks like so they've probably lost portions of the site keep in mind this area right over here and then coming up this direction for later on in the discussion  over here there it is in some way over there yet so we're looking at a very small portion now back of me back up a few go back to that to the previous map it's well off the map  right so we're basically our little side that little spot you're looking at is right here this little portion of the creek right there so carville it's way up over there so some of the fun things we found one of the scariest moments we had on the entire is that people are laughing because they've they were there we were doing shovel testing and someone said i found a baby arm and i merely thought oh no i have to call the sheriff now because we found a baby's arm well it's here's our baby's arm right here it may be one of those he mans or something from the one nine hundred eighty s it's a plastic it's a plastic toy these are storage materials again we have we had fifteen of these objects majority of them are metal object small pieces of tin and the backings from a button and i hook from piece of wire one piece of ceramic so piece away where the very same stuff you might have in your kitchen your kitchen cabinet right now a piece of a porcelain dall and rainbow a glass for a minute clear bottom glass fragments all these are these are small fragments we have found some tin foil a few other some plastic and other for oil is from people's candy wrappers and things like that what these materials represent the base of the last hundred  fifty years of people living near this area some of these things were brought out into the farmer's field through plowing and turning of the soil others were brought through by people playing in the area after we didn't get developed still others from people doing recreation and walking through the space but you basically looking at you know basic every day refuse from the site not very exciting they also found some of these things and they do the work in two thousand and five they didn't even collect them they just said they look like stuff historic stuff we don't really need to keep that so they didn't know how much there was but there was some that so the reports said so but this is the kind of typical things that you would find in a area that has been lived in by people in your americans for the last two hundred fifty years pieces of kids dogs pieces of containers bottle glass things like that where we leave stuff everywhere you think you think your lawn is nice and you go you go and put i ago so we've got courts and we have still stones so stone again you know and materially gets pushed in this glacial till but then we also have some other materials that come from places to the southeast of where we are not too far away but we're just as southeastern minnesota wisconsin iowa we have some prairie sheen shirts so that course comes from that's sort of by pretty sheen and i have a piece of cochran church that's a western wisconsin sure that's a piece of really high quality it's been he treated which means that people that used it before they made it in to a tool they heated it to change its chemical structure and make it easier to fling them and such a really high quality piece of material the rest of the stuff cts is not a high quality material right courts is difficult to work with pretty sheen is ok silverstone is not that good either so we've got we've got some not very good materials and we have one really high quality material it's in this collection which is kind of cool but this is the tip from a broken projectile point of some kind we don't know what it is because it's just the tip it could be a triangular point it could be a larger point  we don't know right maybe we could find some more if you want to see some examples of some other lithic that are from just about a mile away we also have some in the splay case were brought in by a local landowner it's great his he's got all the list thinks we have all the ceramics we should put these two sides together and we could actually tell a lot about our history so the listings are interesting and they tell a story of local resource procurement you're basically working with glacial till you're finding cobbles you're testing those cobbles and making tools and then your retouching and reusing those tools when they break or you're bringing with you raw materials from slightly to the east ok the ceramics which we have many more of them they're not very large most of the pieces are a quarter size or less so they're pretty small and they're they're very thin and they're hard that's when the reasons they they've persist in the environment as long as they have but you notice that all of them have this kind of patterning on them right that's called cord ruffing or cord marking basically ceramics are being made in a fabric bag and as they make it you're see impressions of this fabric bag on the outside of them and some of the pieces have really deeply the chord impressed lines on them this could be a for decoration or it could just be a repairs to the fabric bay that was being used or it could it could have just been for a tightening of the ceramic vessel when it was done it doesn't necessarily mean decoration but it could be our one  so vessels will have some pictures of vessels in just a little bit what they look like at the very top of them at the lip of the rim is usually where you see lots of decoration you'll see holes poked in them you'll see geometric designs and patterns lines going at different angles there's nothing on this it's plain it's undecorated darn it you really wish there was some cool form of decoration in there because that's one of the ways that we tell what culture is using these ceramics are made these ceramics by the kinds of decorations they leave on their pots that's how we've categorize them as archaeologists but this one doesn't have any decoration on it and that's ok i'll tell you why that's ok it is a second so i've got those things all right so generally the timeframe that we're talking about where these count things come from is called the woodland so i don't know how i don't know how much i should go and sort of describing these different traditions but essentially people have been living in north america in the part of the world where we are for at least thirteen to fourteen thousand years right those earliest peoples are called paleo indian individuals they are going across a tundra like environment they're hunting large megafauna and this landscape and there's few of them and they're very far between right several thousand years ago by they start the environment starts to change you start to start to see lots of diversity in your landscape which is why people live in minnesota by the way we have great diverse resource landscape here in minnesota and they we be called these people the archaic peoples they're huge they're doing some hunting and gathering like they used to in the paleo but now they're also doing other kinds of ground stone tools they're  after smaller game they're doing some fishing they're doing other kinds of gathering and collecting so they're diversifying their economy they do that for a few thousand years more and then beginning about one thousand b c to about eight hundred years ago this period called the woodland and during the woodland we see some pretty big changes the things that are driving this change clear and simple are people populations increase when people get used to living in this environment this very diverse the changing environment that they're living in they start to see more people on the landscape and we see changes in the size of the project points we see the size of the of the areas the camps that they're living in and what we see during this period is that people start to make for the first time in  at the top look at the here's the top that look there's all the decorations so that's what we're hoping to find a little room sure but we didn't find any over time the vessels change and they become thinner walled they get made from harder pace and they circle look more like globes their core globular shaped very low lying mounds are as much as fifty to one hundred feet long but they make different tribal entities will talk about that a little bit but they early on certain a king burial mounds conical shape by the way it's these mounds these kinds of mounds which are all over eastern in the midwest united states these are the things that first got people interested in archaeology one hundred fifty years ago people saw the landscape they saw these things in the landscape they knew they were natural and they wondered who built these mounds and those kinds of questions started driving archaeology that started the entire field that i'm in today right so these woodland peoples generated my entire industry thank you appreciate that so they make pottery they there is  and they change their technology prior to this they're using at allows which is basically they were throwing long darts with a short and some are called that a little it makes your arm longer and prior to that they had spear technology you guys are all familiar with you when you think about cave men and things like that spirit technology basically they had very large projectile points for hunting large animals over time all those large animals go extinct hunting smaller animals you don't need a big project point more use smaller and smaller projectile points and eventually during this time period you start using bow and arrow technology but one arrow is great for hunting it's also really good for getting rid of your neighbors right so bone marrow is good for warfare again another marker of increases in population so all the basically all we're seeing through time as we start with paleo the paleo introductions and then the archaic and then finally the woodland all are really looking at is increases in population for thirteen thousand years and how people interact with their neighbors and how they manifest their daily lives that's really always archaeologists look at so i just talked about these changes but ceramics in the woodland started very thick and crude they have grit temper and they make cone shaped vessels over time they have fin walled finer harder pace and sometimes they start using shell tempering at the very end mounds go from conical shapes to effigy mounds they still make conical mounds by the way during the period and they bury people in them what they don't they also make these effigy moun over time by the end of the woodland people are actually living in fortified year around types of settlements during most of the woodland in all the previous periods before that you never stayed in one place too long you ran out of stuff to eat or the next place  to the next place you have a nice seasonal migration route where you're moving through the landscape and going after different resources at different time periods all right so there was a picture of the wood one all right so i want to specifically talk about a period at the end of the will and so again we just talked about i gave you a lot of information it's like it's a class is no test or nothing like that so we had paleo indian archaic in woodland the woodland itself is broken down into a couple of time periods of ganda noted upon the kinds of ceramics that you find in the late woodland we see and by the way the woodland has a lot of what we know that the woodland has a lot of influences from places farther east so for here in minnesota we see ceramics in the early and middle woodland impacted by peoples living in illinois that's called that's called where the whole of van away right so those kind of middle with and things which we've seen and know cook county all way down through dakota county pretty cool big archaeological sites they have the same kind of vessels only nicer with more burial goods in their stuff down in illinois so basically we've got neighbors we're trading with those neighbors after a period of time we see the influence of people in illinois start to wane and a different culture springs up woodland before we see other manifestations of populations coming in i have lots of information on this all basically all that says is that they're making different kinds of ceramics they make different kinds of burial mounds they use lots of different tools than other people and the most important thing of course for us is that their vessels are thinner and a lot of their wares that they're using aren't decorated that's right that's a big giveaway and one of the where specifically they talk about is something called madison where again it's called mass somewhere because it was found near madison wisconsin this evidence is very well known if i was giving a talk in central wisconsin you know they going oh yeah if it's human culture i know all about that you know about we don't we're not as familiar here in minnesota it's ok we're kind of on the the fringe of the mound populations matter fact in minnesota there are only fifteen different site locations where there are efforts amounts just fifteen they're mostly in dakota county and south scott county dakota county places to the south and east those are effort human populations are at ok so we're here in ramsey county we're right on the fringe of that of that area so madison where it's have a broad distribution to the upper midwest including wisconsin northern illinois northeastern iowa and southeastern minnesota these are they what their vessels look like so i can neuer to globe shape their changing shape this time they're heavily coord roughened or chord marked on the outside and not a lot of decoration is an entire we're called madison plain doesn't have any decoration they also have different ones that have punk tate's in these little dots they'll do in size lines they'll take the cord they'll take a cord that basically twist the fibers together and use that for decoration a number of those sort of look like does that look familiar similar to our ceramic and it's are certainly the same thing they're all cord roughen just like those other ones they have some in size lines and they have plain rims so jump back so we're dealing with this time period of people here's just a bunch more information about medicine or just in case you needed this is basically going on the website later we're going to be putting th our ceramics fit nicely with this time period so what does that mean for twenty one are a fifty four by the way in case you were just curious twenty one is the designation for minnesota in this system this system for sites are a means  anybody have i guess i'm going to quiz you now so talk to your neighbor for just a moment why do you think ramsey county has so few archaeological sites talk to him for thirty seconds i'm just curious county that's not a bad idea that's that's pretty good news just when it's a you know average sized county and it should have more sites in it but that's not a bad idea and somebody on this side of the room somebody right down the front said it's already been dug up and that's what's gone on people been living in ramsey county since we started you're american started hanging out in minnesota i guess right after we were in stillwater we came here to the locations of course you have fourteen anthony fort snelling living in this area because i've been living  area for a long time we've developed over lots of these sites already they've lost them to development so interestingly enough ramsey county even though it has so few archaeological sites and it has just less than one hundred now most of the sites are historic because we are starting to actually value our own history now as a people so we have lots of historic sites in ramsey county but very few prehistoric sites less than a dozen woodland sites alone just twelve and most of those are mt sites and very few of them are sites like this one so our site is a small campsite you can envision a small family of individuals moving across the landscape moving their move maybe they're moving from the mississippi they're going to the carver where there's a where there's a clearly a another larger site over by carver lake same time period because of the projectile points that were brought in to night and they are resharpening some tools they are cooking in a pot that's all we know we just have a couple of remnants of the of them in the past it's not a large it's probably a short occupational campsite but we know that they're part of a larger broader group of people who collectively identified and lived in an area that mostly included south central wisconsin northern parts of iowa and illinois they built and made similar potteries they had benefit and made similar kinds of mounds and they made similar kinds of project up points they hunted in the same way as the price spoke in the same ways and they understood things in the same ways and they're different from other cultures that they bumped into another part of the landscape and so they have their own cultural identity so the site that we have here even though it started out small in two thousand and five with a handful of objects have now been unfortunately law lost we now have a much larger assemblage and it tells a story that is not very well taught about it all in ramsey county very small number of sites here so that means the site has value or it should should be protected and it should continue to be investigated today's business so often times there is a business process that gets done the first question is is there an archaeological site there yes or no it's called jennifer cation that first step they find a site the second question is if there's a site there should be is it is it cool enough to go on the national research evaluate that a lot of sites don't get to that evaluation stage they get written off yeah so things have definitely changed in the last one hundred years of doing archaeology in minnesota since we first founded an anthropology department in the one thousand nine hundred at the university of minnesota and we saw a lots of archaeologists doing work purely academic work right now adays most archaeology is not done in an academic setting now does an excellent question so how do we site there from two thousand and five yeah they did that they did the hard work force they tested all the rest of that they looked at if you were that mad they had a and b the parts of the greenway they had tested all of a and b i only found two sites and so we tested that second site location the question now they're just going to rein in yes push the clay into the fabric bag and then you scrape away until you have very thin walls and then you let it dry and then you pull it away from the untold when it's just tacky put away and then dry it in a fire and cook it know yeah exactly like a gunny sack that's a really good way to live and work it would make a really cylinder look in the bowl at the end there for the going to set but yeah you can do the exact same thing and you can do you can do all the different decorations just with little twists of fabric or the edges of shell or a piece of straw can make all the different decorations that you see on different vessels and over time they do become more complicated and more complex and you see different kinds of tempering in them specifically shell tempering for larger village sites near lacrosse and red wing but for most people using crushed up bits of of other rock yeah all right so how can we learn more about our site that we have one we could do some carbon dating so we could attempt to carbon date the carbon that is still on the inside some of the ceramics there is very very very small portions of also file of material phylis are basically the silicate structures of plants things like grasses wild races and things like that when they take up water they sequester the silica that's in the water and they cannot get rid of it so they build it into their cell walls and they so they're so also to commit a glass on the plant dies the glass the laws are still there and they very particular shapes different plants so we have people call file with experts to look at that we could do some of that or of course we could convict conduct additional research at this site or we could do a much larger which i think we should do broader look at more of the region especially moving towards carver lake getting permission from multiple different landowners both public and private and try to find we know there are political sites or we've just not had the opportunity to look for them yes so arced this site is still potentially eligible the national register a formal phase two basically the second step of doing this archaeology has not been completed well what that looks like for this basically more of those test units that we put him in to put in a few more of those test units and then we could try to make a determination unfortunately this site isn't very large and it's not very sexy in terms of coolness of all i mean it's great for us we're very excited about it bob is one of the most excited people were at the site i've ever met he's really super keen on it easy jumps up and down when we look at the history of our of archaeological sites and all the other kuharich logical sites in minnesota it's just not that cool it doesn't it just doesn't rate getting on the national register which is very few so it's the national research so i think we should let it maintain its potential eligibility it just more about the peoples from the specific time period and there in their living in minnesota but it also has soils they have not been impacted by us on the landscape right those two things alone research potential and intact soils make it a cool site right make it potentially eligible to the register so that's something to remember so we could do a phase two we could do a fun one or we could just continue to do other types of research we could put in every year we could come back out and spend two days doing we do this for next ten years you know we can do that too that's another as another option there they are going to be putting in a nice system of trails to connect through much of this area and i recommend they do some interpretive signage some pictures of the objects and things like that  respect the site hopefully they don't dig up the site that's of course a problem that could happen but you can give people a much better understanding of the place so they're walking people been living there for two thousand years and this one spots me walked through there two thousand years ago and did what you're the very same place and that gives you a real connection to places which is why we do archaeology in the first place these objects these small broken less than a quarter size objects give us connections to the past it's easy for us to see that  we see the little pieces of toys and things from our own time period but when we see things that are two thousand years old that gives us that much of a better richer understanding of who we are and the whole reason why we did the work here form is here right there that's what we should look next right there because it's the same landform and very and has just as much potential as that location so similar land form  right in the same location probably going to get in and i think it's because because this year you grow up here and you're camping in that spot and you come back again the next year and going through and for whatever reason it doesn't work because there's a nest of ground bees there's a tree in a spot you don't like  when they were doing their archaeological work so we go back for other so in these locations where we can go way up to the very top arise we can see the most they've already tessa's locations and unfortunately one of the other things that happened is that th locations that we think are cool for people in the past were very cool for the farmers that live there so we have we have farmsteads that are built right on top of locations and those have all been pulled out his farm stores there are some fragments there are still down by the road and things there's a very good question so either with other places of course or over here anywhere along this stretch we basically have either plowed field still in the area we can go out in the spring once they're plowed and just walk them on a weekend we could probably find some objects minutes an easier way to certainly less labor intensive than doing testing or put in unix creation we know that it's probably not a logical site somewhere in this vicinity right here so we could do some more of that systematic shovel testing like we did there that so that would be our third option so we've the you know in looking at all the vessels that i've seen we don't see that we would see very telltale smoothing and things having them we don't see them operating in the same way yeah that's a good question there at least not in this area at least not in this or they may be making in different parts united states push it they push it into this fabric big yeah i really i don't know how many of these talks i've done i have a video of chuck decent making one of these parts for a class of mine and rails a couple of years ago i don't know why i don't bring that in and then i did lots of smaller different projects in between so i've just been spread out over my four counties and chad roberts executive director for the ramsey county circle so i gave a finite number of hours to the project very graciously and we use them all it be great we don't have anything formal yet but i think it would be a really good yes i don't know i can't speak for the county but oftentimes when i tell counties that i have archaeological sites they go no this is mean we can build on this doesn't mean that but a lot of times if that's where the things to a people often times  when i i did this larger project for a little lake a loss on the northern part of ramsey county and i had to go house door to door basically to ask permission from all the different landowners that are on the property and the first thing i say is when you find something is i mean i can so my property the first thing they want to know property just there's a cemetery in the property now which changes it so but i had to sure people there were in india and we didn't find any bodies it was it was it worked out fine but i don't know what the county the all the people that i've been happy to work with at the county like jimmy jimmy is more than excited yet they were there well versed versus what we knew before we learned an awful lot of this before all the objects were just generally dated to the woodland so we didn't know where in the world and they fell and plus we didn't have the objects anymore the objects are gone so this this time around finding all these objects was able to put us into a much narrower band of the woodland and we also expanded our knowledge of where these were in people's lives i mean we don't have any other sites like they're several hundred years earlier so they're part of that big hub vana illinois influenced groups that start that basically is a big swath from no county all the way down to dakota county with any mounds park  known site there we don't exactly know where it was we know it was a mound site of some sort but it was destroyed by the railroad and i wanted to mention before before we run out of time that there are these low fliers as well so the city may point in ramsey county parks and recreation are doing a future development discussion for fish creek that's coming up on wednesday december second at the battle creek recreation center from six to eight o'clock so you have your chance to weigh in on what's going to be happening and maybe you can talk about the value of archaeology and make sure that it gets as know a lot of times in those in that setting there it's all sloped in so those are areas are eroded environments where there isn't likely to be intact archaeological sites and all the of vents they had occurred had basically disturbed a lot of the soil so many of them that they didn't need to do archaeology in them we do know there are some interesting historic sites i mean there's a couple of dams at the very bottom down there as an historical archaeologist i'm really interested in those and no one's looked at those yet either archaeology is sort of this business side of archaeology didn't get started until the one nine hundred seventy s late one nine hundred seventy s so we have been doing a lot of this compliance side work for a long one last question yes a couple final words we all tend to think of me what history starting to feel i think we now realize it started a few thousand years before that and we're finding evidence of it not just the story but after that if you'd like to learn more about the history of ma encourage you to stop at our fire stand back here at the plant whatever historical society you can remember to come on our e mail list where you can be kept aware of our events and more importantly listen for future historical talks we usually have about to