Michigan Tech Alumni Event!

A Day in the Field with MTU’s Industrial Archaeologists!

The Department of Social Sciences is pleased to invite Michigan Tech alumni and friends to visit our archaeology dig in Parowan, Utah. On June 20th, please come to see the important discoveries, including the well-preserved remains of one of the first non-Native pottery shops in the southern expanse of the Utah Territory.  Alumni and friends could put these events at the center of a weekend trip through Utah's beautiful and historic Color and Canyon Country!

MTU faculty, students, and volunteers are excavating the site of the pottery shop established by Thomas and Sarah Davenport in 1852. These English factory workers spent nearly a decade struggling to solve technical problems, then operated their shop successfully over forty years. MTU excavation teams have unearthed several extraordinary features, including well-preserved building foundations, heaps of kiln failures, and the first English-style updraft kiln ever excavated west of the Mississippi river.

After touring the site and talking with project team members in Parowan, the group will meet at the Iron Mission State Park Museum in nearby Cedar City, Utah. At the museum, Dr. Scarlett will take the group through the exhibit, Potters of the Gathering: Clay Work in Early Utah. The exhibit includes more than 200 objects, both antique and archaeological, along with DVD video and audio programs that illustrate the successes and failures of the immigrant clay workers.

Following the pottery exhibit, the tour will consider the history of iron mining and smelting in Southern Utah. MTU industrial archaeologists and Utah State Parks staff will preview the museum’s new exhibits about residents’ efforts to make iron in the 1850s, including a full-scale replica of the blast furnace. Then the group will head west of Cedar City to Old Iron Town State Park, an industrial ruin where workers smelted iron in the 1860s. The furnace, casting house, charcoal ovens, and other industrial ruins are potential sites for archaeological fieldwork during the summer of 2010 (pictures here).

Schedule and Rendezvous:
9:00 AM – 12:00 PM: Open visits to excavations at the pottery site and local museum in Parowan, Utah.
Site location: 75 West 100 South, Parowan, Utah, 84761

1:00 PM – 2:00 PM: Guided tour of Potters of the Gathering at the Iron Mission State Park Museum in Cedar City, Utah.
Museum location: 585 North Main St., Cedar City, Utah 84720

2:30 PM: Overview of iron industry history, view of exhibits, caravan departs.

3:30 PM – 5:00 PM: Visit to Old Iron Town State Park.
From Cedar City head west on Hwy U-56 for approximately 20 miles. Turn south onto Old Iron Town Rd. Travel this gravel road for approximately five miles to the ruins located on the left hand side

Michigan Technological University Alumni and Friends can register here.

Press Coverage

At the end of the week, we spent time with reporters from the regional newspaper and TV stations.  The first article has appeared in The Spectrum, the regional paper that covers St. George, Cedar City, and southwest Utah.  The Spectrum also published a story about opening of Potters of the Gathering: Clay Work in Early Utah at the Iron Mission State Park Museum.  Nur Kausar wrote both stories and I have received emails that remark on how much people enjoyed her writing.

A reporter/camerawoman also came from KCSG, the regional NBC affiliate.  We don't have a TV in our field camp, so we don't know if they broadcast the story yet.  Stephanie told us to watch the website, so I'm keeping an eye on things and will post the link if they story appears.  The NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City might run that story, so I'm also keeping an eye on KSL.com.

If you are just visiting this blog for the first time, you can read about the excavations at the Davenport Pottery by clicking here.  This research is a public archaeology project and is entirely funded by tax-deductible donations.  Even small donations will help our work-- $20 buys one sample of clay or ceramic isotope fingerprinting, for example.  Please give by clicking here.  If you would like to see a list of needs and a summary of how the fieldwork was sponsored, please click here.

The press exposure and spreading with word of mouth in town has meant that we've had many more people coming out to visit the dig and see our discoveries for themselves.  I think everyone who visits the dig leaves impressed-- the tremendous detail in what we have discovered impresses them.  We welcome people to come to the site whenever we are present.  If you are planning a trip to the area and would like to see our dig, I published the work schedule here.

Several people in town have adopted my students, bringing them occasional treats during visits.  In the picture below, the students are all enjoying cold sodas brought over by our neighbor Mr. Denhalter.  We appreciate all the cookies, muffins, and other treats.  This may be the first dig on which I've gained weight while working!

Everyone on the project wants our readers to know what a warm and wonderful town Parowan is and how much we are enjoying our time here.  Yesterday was the town's classic car show.  The entire community is getting ready for a huge glider festival during June and July.  We are starting to see gliders arrive on trailers and are excited to entice the people who love the sky with the allure of what we find underground!

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/

Potters of the Gathering, Part 2

Why choose Potters of the Gathering for our exhibit title?  This is a great question and one which, as several of my colleagues pointed out to me recently, I completely neglected to explain in my post!

Leonard Arrington identified "The Gathering" as one of seven ideals that leaders of the Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter-day Saints developed to guide their community during the organization's first 15-20 years.  According to Arrington, the ideals were:

1. Gathering souls from Babylon to Zion, through active mission programs.

2. Establishing nucleated villages.

3. Consecrating private property to the Church and having it returned in stewardship for the community.

4. The redemption and beautification of the earth.

5. Frugality and economic independence from Babylon.

6. Group unity and cooperation

7. Equality among members

As Arrington explained, these were ideals that infused government policy, economic development, public discourse, and individual social action.  Like all ideals, people engaged with them in many different ways, but all of the ideals touched the potters and clay workers during their lives.

In terms of our exhibit, The Gathering was among the most important ideal.  Many of the potters came to Utah in response to calls to serve missions settling news town and "building up home industry."  Their experiences were very different within that context, but the principle of the gathering tied many of them together.

My academic interest is in the material practice of the gathering and how individuals experienced and contributed to it in their communities.  The idea of The Gathering also has powerful theological meanings in Latter-day Saint communities, both historically and today. While the principle of the gathering lost its literal and material meanings by the end of the nineteenth century, the Saints kept their personal, theological, and doctrinal connections to Israel.  I am not a scholar of theology, so I'll refer interested readers to Elder Russell M. Nelson's speech The Gathering of Scattered Israel from the 2006 General Conference in Salt Lake City.

My co-workers and collaborators here also chuckle that this exhibit will be the largest gathering of Utah-made pots ever assembled.  I appreciate the double entendre!