Several years ago, in fact, shortly after I got my master's degree, I had the opportunity to work on a French fort site in southern Illinois, in the Midwestern US. The site, Fort de Chartres, or Fort Charters as the locals would have it, was the last of three forts by that name, and is a stone fort built on the Mississippi River in the early 1750s. The French left the fort at the end of the French and Indian War, and the British took possession in 1763. Fort de Chartres never saw a battle of any sort, except for the one with the Mississippi River, which proved a very worthy adversary, forcing the British to abandon the fort in 1771. Fort de Chartres had a modern taste of the Mississippi River during the floods of 1993, when the levee was purposefully breached to provide an outflow above St. Louis.
The State of Illinois bought the ruins of the Fort in the early part of the 20th century. A concerted effort to reconstruct the fort was made during the Depression, as part of the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s, but the improvements were limited to a low wall made of cement and glacial cobbles. Later efforts were more realistic, shall we say, so, in 1984 or so, a pal of mine was hired to find evidence of the original construction, so that a reasonable simulacrum could be built.
Archaeology and Heavy Machinery
When I arrived, I discovered to my initial horror that we were to use "heavy machinery"--something my delicate academic sensibilities had never considered before. The "heavy machinery," it turns out, was a riding trench digger machine called a Tiger, and we were to use it to excavate exploratory trenches. We were looking for evidence of a defensive structure, sort of an empty moat with a row of wooden palisades at the bottom. Between the Fort's abandonment in 1771 and the construction of the Mississippi River lock and dam system, the river had flooded the site area several times, depositing several feet of silt, and a rather nasty layer of "Mississippi River gumbo," which is a thick, black, rocky mess of clay and goo that you could easily mistake for asphalt.
