Field Schools and Scheduled Excavations in the Middle USA

May 11-June 22, 2011. Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) and Glenn A. Black Laboratory Indiana University Bloomington. The Angel site (12Vg1) is a large (ca. 47 ha) palisaded Middle Mississippian agricultural town with 11 earthen mounds on the Ohio River near Evansville, Indiana. Professional research has been ongoing at the site for over 80 years, including the pioneering work of Glenn A. Black from 1939 until his untimely death in 1964. More recent excavations, geophysical survey, radiocarbon dating, and other specialized analyses have vastly increased our understanding of this site and its importance in Midwestern prehistory.

Dates TBD, 2012. University of Missouri-Kansas City. Currently, work is being planned at the Battle of Island Mound State Park site near Butler, Missouri. Additional opportunities for students will be scheduled during the summer of 2012.

July 5-July 22, 2011. Notre Dame. We have been working at the Collier Lodge Site, a historic hunting lodge on the Kankakee River with the official Indiana State Site Number of 12 Pr 36. The site has a Removal Period occupation and prehistoric occupations as well.

June 1-July 10, 2010. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Excavations at this large Oneota village site have been running since 1998. The AD 1250-1350 palisaded site has yielded at least one house, hundreds of features, and unique ceramic, lithic, and copper tools. The director (Robert Jeske) will be assisted by three Ph.D. students as TAs.

May 31-July 1, 2011. Michigan State University. The Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool teaches undergraduate and graduate students how to apply information and computing technologies to cultural heritage materials and problems. Students will work together on the MSU campus to work on several projects, learning what it takes to build applications and digital user experiences. No prerequisites.

May 24 - July 2, 2010. University of North Dakota. The 2010 summer field school will be held at the Elbee and Karishta sites, located within the Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, Mercer County, ND (map). This National Historic Site was established in 1974 to preserve over 50 archeological sites located near the mouth of the Knife River in west-central North Dakota. The most notable of these sites are the large earthlodge villages which reflect the culture and hunter-agricultural lifestyle of Northern Plains Village Indians, primarily the Hidatsa and Mandan. Circular earthlodge depressions abound at the larger villages, where the largest earthlodge depressions reach up to 40 feet in diameter.

May 16-June 8, 2011. Shumla School. Field Methods in Rock Art is a three-week field school in rock art recording offered through the Department of Extension Studies at Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas, in partnership with SHUMLA. This class, designed for both graduate and undergraduate credit, is held between the spring and summer semesters at the SHUMLA campus in southwest Texas.

June 30-August 19, 2011. You are invited to participate in the 36th annual archaeological field school directed by Dr. Michael Nassaney. The program will continue archaeological investigations of Fort St. Joseph, a mission-garrison-trading post complex established by the French in 1691 and occupied for nearly a century in Niles, Michigan.

January 19/20-April 28/29, 2007. Rutherford B. H. Yates Museum Community Archaeology Project (YCAP). Community-based investigations into Houston's Freedman's Town, regarded to be the last African American "Freedmen's Town" community extant in the United States that continues to be occupied.

July 10-August 15, 2011. Idaho State University and the Gault School for Archaeological Research at Texas State University at San Marcos. Deep testings of the Gault site have repeatedly found traces of what appears to be a pre-Clovis occupation, people who may have lived in central Texas before 13,500 years ago. The 2011 season will be focused on layers below the Clovis occupations, where excavators hope to find definitive proof of pre-Clovis.

June 6-July 8, 2011. Heidelberg College. Johnson's Island Civil War Prison, located on a small island in Sandusky Bay, Lake Erie (just north of Cedar Point). From April 1862 until the end of the war, Johnson's Island Civil War Military Prison functioned as the main Union depot for Confederate Officers. Designed to hold approximately 2500 prisoners of war, Johnson's Island eventually held up to 3200 at any one time. The overcrowding resulted in the construction of new latrines and to an expansion of the prison compound. Expansion of the prison facilities provides archaeologists with an opportunity to study changes in the physical structure of the prison as well as in the lifestyles of it's occupants.

June 10-August 4, 2012. Arizona State University and Center for American Archaeology. Whether you are a beginning or an advanced student, you can earn credit through a wide variety of field and laboratory courses at Arizona State University's Kampsville Field School. Held at the Center for American Archeology’s research and education headquarters in Kampsville, Illinois, the program allows students to earn 9 credits of undergraduate or graduate coursework from one of three 6-week options.

May 21-July 13, 2012 (two sessions) Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.The current Archaeology Field School is held at Kincaid Mounds in far southern Illinois, a Mississippian mound center located in Massac County near Metropolis. The course is offered as two consecutive 4-week long, 3-credit-hour sections; you can take either or both. Students will live in Brookport, IL during the week, living, working, and eating together. They will be returned to Carbondale Friday evenings, with free time until early Monday morning, when they will be driven back to Brookport and Kincaid Mounds.

May 23-July 15, 2011 (two sessions). Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Continuing excavations at the Kincaid Mounds on the Ohio River floodplain in far southern Illinois will be held this summer, focusing on an anomalous rise and a structure near the main mound group.

May 24-July 2, 2010. University of North Dakota. Most of the research will be conducted at Elbee, a multicomponent site located along the Knife River in Mercer County, North Dakota. Elbee has a prominent Plains Village occupation dated between AD 1520-1630

May 12-June 23, 2010. Indiana University at Purdue. Excavations at a probable regional center during the Mississippian period, located in the central Illinois River valley of west-central Illinois, approximately 9 km northeast of the city of Beardstown.

mid-June to late August, 2011. Mackinac State Historic Parks. Several ongoing excavations around the island to visit.

June 1-July 2, 2010. Michigan State. Ongoing excavations of historical structures on MSU's campus in East Lansing.

January 5-22, 2009 (2 concurrent courses). University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Both courses will offer a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exploration of U.S. ethnic and racial identities and experiences, with special attention focused on the cultural history of New Orleans and the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

May 24-July 29, 2011. University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois State Museum, University of North Carolina, University of Iowa, University of Illinois, Springfield, New Philadelphia Association, University of Maryland, Hannibal-LaGrange College. New Philadelphia is a rare example of a multi-racial early farming community on the nation's Midwestern frontier. This NSF-REU program will emphasize scientific methods and analyses in an ongoing long-term project at New Philadelphia.

May 17-June 4, 2010. University of Iowa. We are investigating 19th and 20th century farmsteads in the Iowa City area through archaeological fieldwork focusing on the footprints of out-buildings and use-areas away from the main residences.

June 8-24, 2012. Arkansas Archeological Society. The Training Program in Archeology is a research project where individuals interested in archeology can gain experience in all phases of archeological excavation, site survey, and laboratory processing under professional supervision

June 2 and July 9, 2010. University of Wisconsin at Baraboo/Sauk County. Excavations at the Mississippian site of Trempealeau, Wisconsin, near LaCrosse. Excavations will study interactions between local Effigy Mound people and Middle Mississippians who ventured hundreds of miles up the Mississippi River nearly 1,000 years ago.

TBA 2011. UW-Baraboo/Sauk County and the University of Illinois. The 2010 field school uncovered early Mississippian artifacts such as red-slipped pottery and stone tools made of exotic flints that were brought up river by ancient people from present-day Missouri. They also detected several Mississippian house basins with numerous hearths. Together with the effigy mound complex in the area, these remains represent the first town of Trempealeau.