From the Copper Country to the Color Country

The field school students are all on the road!  

Two vehicles left from Michigan Technological University this week, carrying people and gear for the dig.  Our incoming graduate students have left from their home states in order to rendezvous in Parowan, Utah, this Sunday.  We also have some people arriving by plane at the Las Vegas airport.  We'll start work on Monday morning, bright and early.  The experience will be interesting for the MTU students, who are traveling from Michigan's Copper Country to Utah's Color Country.

Michigan Tech is on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, on the south shore of Lake Superior. The Keweenaw Peninsula juts out into the lake and includes the former grandeur of the copper mine and mill towns like Calumet, Houghton, and Hancock.  The copper deposits of the Keweenaw Peninsula were famous all over the world, as were the mines and immigrants came from all over the world to work in the mines, mills, and logging camps.  After decline during the twentieth century, the copper country is rural today and the economy relies upon tourism. 'Downstaters' visit during the winter for our 350 inches of annual snow and our Winter Carnival celebration.  People also visit during the summer and fall, when the big lake keeps us cool during the hot Midwestern July and August and when our leaves start to turn in the fall.

Of course, Iron County is part of Utah's Color Country.  The history of Iron County is similar in many ways to Michigan's Keweenaw.  The draw of iron mining and other related industries drew immigrants, in the context of the Latter-day Saint settlement.  The iron mines and furnaces cycled through boom and bust, leading to a decline in the mid-twentieth century.  Iron County is rural today, between larger cities and communities on the Wasatch Front to the north and St. George and Las Vegas to the south.  The economy is diversified, but tourism plays an important part.  Visitors come for the skiing in the winter and camping and hiking in the summer, enjoying the communities proximity to Cedar Breaks National Monument, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, and many other eco- and heritage tourism attractions amid southern Utah's stunning polychrome geology.  Cedar City's Utah Shakespeare Festival runs from summer into the fall, and like MTU's Winter Carnival, it attracts guests and encourages families to come year after year.

Another similarity is that both communities are small, with 10,000 to 15,000 people in the cities and good universities (Michigan Tech and Southern Utah University).  Despite the small size, the former industrial booms mean that lots and lots of people have family history tied to the area.  I am constantly meeting people when I travel who tell me, "Oh, Houghton!  My Grandfather worked there." or "I have an ancestor from Parowan who then moved to northern Arizona."  Houghton and Hancock share some of Parowan's famous claim to be a Mother Town from which individuals and groups of immigrants struck out to other places in the United States.  

As an afterthought, both regions also have great traditions of local music. Check out these musicians:
Houghton's Hanna Bethel just posted a video on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8S5dSaz6cA&feature=player_embedded
and our own Eric Koskinen, although he now lives in Minneapolis:
http://www.erikkoskinen.com/

You can find great music in Cedar City at Groovacious Records:
http://www.groovacious.com/
and live at The Grind:
http://groovinatthegrind.com/

More from the Society for Historical Archaeology meeting

While at the conference, I had several long conversations with my colleague Benjamin Pykles.  Ben is an assistant professor at SUNY Potsdam, and he leads a fascinating archaeological study of the Latter-day Saints' settlement Iosepa in Skull Valley, Utah.

Iosepa was settled by a group of Polynesian immigrants in the 1880s.  The Latter-day Saints had been very successful missionaries throughout Polynesia, particularly in Hawaii.  Many came to Utah and settled into this Skull Valley community where they undertook drylands farming and mineral prospecting.  Many families lived there for three decades.

Like most archaeological sites, Iosepa's remains serve as a touchstone for current social controversy.  The site is a sacred and powerful place to many of those who are descended from the settlers, and the landscape itself reminds people of past struggles for equality, faith, and social justice.

Ben's study is a multi-year project, starting with survey and limited testing.  Ben's collaborators are working with ground penetrating radar and he hopes to do some multi-spectral aerial photography in the future.  Both types of survey will help him map the imprint of peoples' activities at Iosepa.

I admire Ben for his earnest efforts to bring disparate stakeholder groups together and include them in his research work.  

For more information and some photos, click on these links:

Archaeology Magazine:

http://www.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/letter.html

The Bonniville Mariner Blogger worked with Ben and his team during last year's dig:

http://bonnevillemariner.wordpress.com/category/iosepa