‘Garbage’ considered a treasure trove in Fort McCoy archaeological work

Courtesy Photo | Pictured are beer cans found at Fort McCoy, Wis., during an archaeological dig in July 2015. They were found in a feature that dated to the 1960s. (Photo by Colorado State University Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands.)  

FORT MCCOY, WI, UNITED STATES

04.12.2018

Story by Aimee Malone 

Fort McCoy Public Affairs Office           

In summer 2015, archaeologists digging at Fort McCoy discovered a feature filled with chicken bones and beer cans that dated to the 1960s.

The average person might be disappointed and dismiss the find as garbage. To an archaeologist, it’s a treasure trove of information, even if the era is a little more recent than what he or she had been hoping for.

“I don’t like the term garbage. … As soon as we start saying the archaeological record is full of garbage and we’re studying other people’s garbage, it makes it sound like it’s not valuable or important,” said Alexander Woods, Ph.D., an archaeologist with Colorado State University’s Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands under contract with Fort McCoy.

“It’s something of a bias to think that just because it’s more recent, it doesn’t matter. In 200 years, that chicken and beer feature would be a gold-mine find of the late 20th century,” he said. “The chicken and beer is identical to the stuff we hope to find on the prehistoric sites, where we find smashed pottery and animal bone.”

Archaeologists spend much of their careers studying what people left behind, hoping to learn about how people behaved and lived in the past. Studying the items that people used in everyday life can paint a very different picture from what is written down in history books or even private journals.

“Much of history, as historians will tell you, is written by the people who had money and power. There’s a lot of history we don’t actually know,” said Kira Kaufmann, Ph.D., archaeologist with the Fort McCoy Directorate of Public Works Environmental Division Natural Resources Branch. “We learn about that history through archaeology, through digging up the past, which is oftentimes somebody else’s garbage.”

In the 1970s, an archaeologist named William Rathje helped train his students by conducting a “garbology” project, she said. He sent his students to interview people at their homes, asking questions about how much they drank, how much they ate, what sort of foods they ate, and more.

“Unbeknownst to the people, at the end of each week, when they would put their garbage by the curb, the students would pick up the garbage and sort through it,” Kaufmann said. They found that what people said and what people actually did were two very different things.

Digging up ancient or historical garbage pits provides the same sort of information compared to what people wrote down or recorded about their lifestyles.

“Garbage pits and other features are discrete time capsules,” she said. “That’s why types of features are important. They teach us things we don’t know from history books.”

Both Woods and Kaufmann compared garbage pits and other archaeological features to time capsules: sealed containers that help preserve and protect what’s inside them. The primary difference is that a feature usually contains what people were actually using and not what they chose to put inside as an illustration of their time.

A feature, often a filled-in pit or hole, is a part of an archaeological site and is an indication of human activity that provides a glimpse into the human past. Features can include hearths or fire pits, storage pits, middens, privies, garbage pits, and structures.

The feature that held the chicken bones and beer cans contained 161 animal bones, which were determined to have come from eight whole chickens because of a lack of cut marks on the bones and the number of a particular type of bone. The beer cans were dated to the 1960s based on the artwork and style of the cans.

While some might dismiss the find from the 1960s as too recent to be of any historical value, Woods said it’s important to remember that the 1960s are now 50 years old, and things that were normal in that time period are much more unusual today.

“Today, you’d be getting KFC. There’d be wings and legs; you don’t see a bunch of dudes with beer going out in the woods and cooking whole chickens,” he said. “That’s already starting to look like something from a different era.

“In general, while we’re not looking for the 1960s, it’s starting to become historical. … Sites from the 1960s are now qualifying for the National Register of Historic Places,” Woods said.

“The old ammo storage building is full of counter culture. It’s got Bob Dylan lyrics on the side. … The Vietnam War and the protest against it are becoming history, and the people who have memories of it are plentiful and around,” he said. “That’s no longer true of the World War II-era folks. … We’re now going, ‘Man, I wish we’d asked those folks a lot more questions.’”

Woods said that archaeologists don’t spend a great deal of time studying more recent features, but it’s important to realize that they can’t just stop digging because they found a more recent time capsule than they were expecting.

“When we go out there to dig, we do not know what we are going to find,” Woods said. “Most of our prehistoric sites, people have been returning to for thousands of years, including up into the 1960s and ‘80s.

“You know someone dug a hole, and you know someone filled it with dirt. ... You have to dig that with absolute scientific precision,” he said.

Because these sites have been used for centuries, there’s a possibility that something else is beneath the more recent finds or even mixed in with the dirt that was used to fill the hole after it was used.

“Fort McCoy has seen a lot of military training, so it’s not at all atypical for us to find mid-20th century garbage in the middle of thousand-year-old archaeological sites,” Woods said.

Kaufmann and Woods said that’s part of the reason why documenting and excavating these sites is important. It helps cut down on contaminating historical sites due to new construction or training activities. And it allows Fort McCoy staff members to save time and money when planning new construction because they already know whether a building or site can be used for a new purpose.

“There’s been an incredible amount of preservation work done at Fort McCoy compared to other land-management programs,” Kaufmann said.
“We want to be effective stewards of the land. We don’t want to keep digging holes in thousand-year-old archaeological sites and filling them with chicken and beer,” Woods said. “Fort McCoy has invested in a really innovative archaeological program to map and document archaeological sites on post.”

Woods mentioned another find that some might consider too recent to be of any historical use that was exactly what archaeologists hope to find in older sites: a fire pit containing 33 .30-caliber blank cartridges and metal ammunition belt links, along with other refuse from the 1980s.

“A whole bunch of empty rounds, all stashed in the empty box. Two packs of Kools. A Saltine wrapper. You can see it; it’s a whole story sealed in one little fire pit,” Woods said. “If we’d found that 600 years later, that would have been a gold mine, a perfect, beautiful little story in one little feature. We just found it too early.”

When an article about it was shared online through Archaeology Magazine’s Facebook page, Woods said he read a lot of comments from people who’d served in the 1980s talking about how they’d tossed empty or leftover rounds into the fire after training, backing up the story they’d reconstructed from finding the fire pit.

“Archaeologists dig and love disposable stuff,” he said. “You can use the word garbage, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable, and that doesn’t mean it’s not culturally beautiful and wonderful. It means it’s been disposed of.”

All archaeological work conducted at Fort McCoy was sponsored by the Directorate of Public Works Environmental Division Natural Resources Branch.

Visitors and employees are reminded they should not collect artifacts on Fort McCoy or other government lands and leave the digging to the professionals. Anyone who excavates, removes, damages, or otherwise alters or defaces any historic or prehistoric site, artifact, or object of antiquity on Fort McCoy is in violation of federal law.

The discovery of any archaeological artifact should be reported to the Directorate of Public Works Environmental Division Natural Resources Branch at 608-388-8214.

• Date Taken: 04.12.2018
• Date Posted: 04.13.2018 16:58
• Story ID: 272882
• Location: FORT MCCOY, WI, US