Please help support our research

After some conversations with visitors to the site over this holiday weekend, I realized that I needed to explain our project's funding and the urgent need for support.  This is a public archaeology project. The research is dependent upon tax-deducible gifts from private individuals who discover our work and decide that what we are doing is important and should continue.

Many people seem to be under the impression that a patron or foundation is sponsoring our work at the Davenport Pottery Site in Parowan, Utah.  To be blunt, people think we have a sugar daddy.  This is not true and it is important that people understand how this project came into being- archaeology research doesn't "just happen."

I have cobbled together enough support to run the field school.  Several partners or patrons are helping, mostly through in-kind donations of logistical support.  I thought I would give readers an idea of what it takes to make a field school happen:

The Iron Mission State Park Museum is making most of our photocopies and letting us bring the students there for lectures.  In addition Todd Prince, the park director, and Ryan Paul, the curator, have both given guest lectures or led field trips, teaching the students about Iron County prehistory and history.  Todd has extensive experience in Utah prehistory and stands ready to help us with the consultation process if we discover any prehistoric remains.

The City of Parowan and The Dixie National Forest worked together to get us a waiver so we could camp in the Five Mile Picnic Area at no cost.  The camp or hotel fees are a big part of field work expenses, so this support was critical.  Parowan City staff have also been very helpful because they found us a secure storage location, give us access to potable water, help with equipment for specific field needs, and are keeping up the campground.

The archaeology faculty and staff at Southern Utah University's Archaeological Repository lent us a bunch of equipment for our field camp, including some extra tents, cooking gear, and potable water tanks.  I am in debt to both Barbara Frank and Emily Dean for their help.

Utah State Parks will lend us some equipment and help with back filling and earth moving.

The Matheson family have given us permission to work on their land and promised to donate the artifact collection to the state.

Michigan Technological University awarded me a small grant that will cover about 1/2 of the vehicle costs from the motor pool.  The Department of Social Sciences is also supporting some of the students during their time here, through small scholarships or hourly pay, and helped cover some of Chuck Young's travel costs to come out and bring the geophysics equipment. Chuck paid the balance out of his pocket.  The department also let me teach the field school class, despite the fact that enrollment was well below the cut-off point that makes a class viable.

The Register of Professional Archaeologists also provided a scholarship award to the project. This helped students to enroll who might not have otherwise been able to afford to attend.

The Utah Humanities Council awarded State Parks a small grant to help us tie the exhibit and the excavation together in some public programs.

That is how we made the field school happen.

The analysis and write up of this excavation and the ongoing research are separate issues.  We will return to our lab at MTU with tens of thousands of artifacts to analyze and research to complete.  Without any donations or support, I will spend the next ten years studying the collection and writing a manuscript, working on occasional Sundays and during future months of August.  I will not return to the field in Utah again until that is finished.  It would be unethical for me to collect more excavation data without reporting on what we'd already gathered.

With your gifts of support, however, we could finish the analysis in a year, help the Iron Mission Museum design their replica exhibit of the Davenport Pottery for the Ironworks Homestead, and set up another study in Parowan or another pottery site.  The key to making this happen is gifts in support of student scholarships and analysis.  As you read in the list above, lots of organizations can give in-kind and logistical support. None of the organizations with which I've partnered can support students working in the lab.  We are looking for partners to join us in our research effort by supporting students and other direct costs.  The partners could be communities, businesses, or private patrons who wish to ensure that the archaeological study of Utah's historic-era pottery heritage continues before more of the sites are destroyed.

The way that the Industrial Heritage and Archaeology program at Michigan Tech operates, we find sponsors that support our students while the faculty donate our time to various research projects.  We collaborate in this way.  I don't get paid out of donations from the public-- the university already pays me to teach students and do research, so I don't need money for my salary.  We use your donations to support graduate and undergraduate students and direct research costs (gas for the truck and van, Neutron Activation Analysis and other archaeometry, etc.)

Here are some things for which I need immediate support:

If I can find support for Jessica Montcalm, she can work on this project full time as her MS thesis, instead of waiting on tables or holding another part time job while finishing her studies- M.S. student tuition waiver, 2009-10-  $12,000

To get the lab work going, we need funds to support undergraduates working in the lab.  They help Jessica and me with the cleaning, cataloging, refitting studies (pottery jigsaw puzzles), and other analyses-  Undergraduate student lab staff- $5,000

Vehicles cost us money when we take them from the Motor Pool.  Right now, I am on the hook for gas and rental costs- $1,500 

The science costs money.  Neutron Activation Analysis, analysis of animal bones, charcoal identification, LA-ICP-MS all cost about $20, $50, or $100 per sample- Scientific testing:- $2,000

Every little gift helps!  Your gift of $20 lets me buy one scientific test.  For example, I might be able to compare the chemistry of Thomas Davenport's raw clay and his finished products, or study the charcoal to determine what type of fuel burned to heat the kiln.  

Gifts at any level are tax deductible.

Donations can be made to a special account at the Michigan Tech Fund by clicking here. Individuals who wish to give money to organizations in Utah can make donations by sending checks to the Iron Mission Museum Foundation (Davenport Pottery Project), 585 North Main, Cedar City, Utah 84720-1079.

I offer my deepest thanks our past supporters, including the students who invested their time and finances in the research.

Exhibit Opening

We opened Potters of the Gathering: Clay Work in Early Utah on Saturday, May 2.  I am very grateful for all the help and support of everyone on the team at the Iron Mission State Park. We finished the last bits of exhibit preparation that morning, and my wife Sarah even joined the work team, despite the fact that she was on vacation from her job at the Chipstone Foundation and Milwaukee Art Museum. Sarah helped polish the acrylic boxes that cover the vitrines and then helped Ryan aim lights in the gallery.  

I will post more quality photos of the exhibit as I get them.  I was pretty busy Saturday night talking with visitors, so I didn't take any pictures myself.  

We designed three main areas for the exhibit. The first area has the feel of a natural history museum.  This area includes wall panels with text, photos and a touch-screen DVD, as well as cases of archaeological artifacts and an ambient audio program.  This section of the exhibit explains the process of pottery manufacture, with emphasis on the English factory experience.  It also presents the archaeological research into Utah's clay industries.

This case, as one example, is full of mold fragments from the Deseret Pottery site in Salt Lake City.  Utah State Parks staff and groups of student volunteers did archaeological salvage at the site in 1977.
We built the second area of the exhibit in the style of an art museum.  This section includes several cases that gather together examples of pottery that the maker stamped or signed.  This is the largest collection of signed and identified pieces ever exhibited.  In addition, this area also includes a large table display, pictured below, where a number of unsigned objects sit together.  We hope that this display will encourage people to consider the aesthetic and technical variety in these objects and the similar diversity in the artisanal community that manufactured them.

The picture below shows the Eardley vitrine, which contains many of the Bedson Eardley and Deseret Pottery pieces in the show. In the background are panels that explore the push forces that encouraged potters to leave England for Utah.

Our third area is in the style of a history museum.  We explain the potters' quality of life in this area, including health issues, business practices, and the social construction of identity.  The displays, which include two pioneer period rooms, a peddling wagon, and a black-box theater, interpret objects using text panels and photographs and two separate audio programs.

Some local media covered our opening:

TheSpectrum.com from St. George, Utah.

I do hope lots of visitors will come to see the show while it is open at the Iron Mission State Park Museum.  We have had some inquiries about hosting the show in other cities around Utah, but there is no guarantee the show will travel.  The exhibit includes about 300 objects, most of which have never been exhibited before.  It is certainly the largest collection of nineteenth century pottery ever gathered together.  Besides all the objects, there are two audio programs, an ambient audio atmosphere, a touch-screen DVD with video segments, and dozens of historic and modern photographs.

After our opening, my wife and I took the remaining two days of her vacation time to do some camping and hiking in the desert's spring beauty.  The wild plants are in bloom here, the days are warm, and the Coal Creek has swollen with snow melt runoff.  My thoughts are increasingly turning to the fieldwork at the Davenport Pottery site.  I'll post more exhibit pictures as soon as I get them, but will be write more soon about the field school and excavations!  The students are on the road from MTU and should arrive in a day or two.

Weekend Exhibit Work

I'm having a busy weekend! Gibb finished the vitrine bases in the shop. Larry and Murph are painting them. Ryan and I went up to Sandy, near Salt Lake City, to meet Gary and Jill Thompson. We completed condition reports on his collection and moved them down to the Iron Mission Museum.



I offered to help the museum staff with some public programming activities. We hosted a big group of Boy Scouts. I taught them about Paiute pump drills. It was a nice break from exhibit preparation and field school planning.

The Iron Mission Museum keeps making progress on several other projects. Below is a photo of the replica the museum is building of the blast furnace that residents operated in Cedar City in the 1850s.  The wood frame will be covered with a facade of stone, which will give it the look of the old furnace at  much lest cost.  The interior of the furnace will be filled with interpretive exhibits.  It should be done by early June.




My next post will be about the field school schedule.

Mobile blog post

Potters of the Gathering

I have mentioned the exhibit we have been working on for the Iron Mission State Park Museum.  Well, the final logo is done!  Our exhibit, Potters of the Gathering: Clay Work in Early Utah, now has a title, logo, and color scheme.  Check it out: 

The design is by Darrin Fraser, the creative director at Mishap Studios.  Their website is here:

http://www.mishapstudios.com

Darrin is working hard on the rest of the design.  Ryan and I passed him the exhibit checklist and our layout of the exhibit.  I gave him this scaled floor plan:

The plan map is hard to read at this scale, I know.  But the exhibit will be about 2,200 or 2,600 square feet in total.  Darrin has been visualizing the entire thing for us: color schemes, layout, and design.  He came to our meeting with a 3D visualization of the 2D plan I'd drawn, which really helped me see what he was imagined (below).  He's been great and I'm excited to see more of his design work.

The exhibit will tell the story of the Utah's nineteenth century immigrant potters, using archaeological artifacts, antique objects, historic photographs, drawings, DVD video, and audio recordings.  We have pieces from the three largest collections of antique Utah-made pottery, along with digital video and historic images on loan from The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery and the Staffordshire Film Archive.  

I am very excited as the exhibit is coming together.  Gib the carpenter has most of the vitrine cases built and the rest of the staff are painting them now.  The wall panels will go to the printer this week so they can be printed and mounted on boards. 

The exhibit will be open from May 2nd through July 31st, so that means that it will be open the entire time we are excavating at the Davenport Pottery site.  Since Parowan and Cedar City are only about 20 miles apart, visitors will be able to travel back and forth between the gallery and the excavations.  This should give us the ability to layer our interpretive strategy from the site with nuances from the exhibit, and the reverse will surely be true since we have reserved one vitrine case for "The Discovery of the Week."

Things are coming together nicely and excitement continues to build!

New Digs!

I am pleased to report that my colleagues at the Iron Mission State Park Museum did a bit of scrounging around in the Department of Natural Resources.  They borrowed a camper trailer for me, so I have moved up in the world from camping in my Nissan Xterra to camping in a trailer larger than some of the apartments I lived in when I was in college.  I have filled a propane tank, so I can cook on the range, and when the threat of freezing passes, we'll hook up the hose and my trailer will have hot showers.  Living in the lap of luxury!

The fire crews will need their trailer back in May, so we won't be hauling it up the canyon for our field camp and lab, but I am very grateful for the loan during the next two months while we put the exhibit together.  It is thrilling to have a table where I can plug in my laptop and keep working into the evening hours.  Of course, I am equally happy that I no longer have to scrape the snow and/or frost off my tailgate before I climb out of my sleeping bag!