Photo By Scott Sturkol | Fort McCoy Garrison leaders and personnel listen to Katherine Stevenson, operations...... read more read more
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Fort McCoy Garrison Commander Col. Stephen Messenger, Command Sgt. Maj. Thomas Calarco, garrison command sergeant major, and other Fort McCoy Garrison personnel visited the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center on. Jan. 26 to learn more about their support in curating and housing archaeological artifacts found at the installation.
The visit, organized by Garrison Archaeologist Ryan Howell with the Fort McCoy Directorate of Public Works Environmental Division Natural Resources Branch, took a couple hours at the center on the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse campus.
Howell said Fort McCoy’s artifact collection contains more than 600,000 artifacts ranging in age from Native American artifacts more than 12,000 years old to 1942-45 World War II-era military artifacts.
“The Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center is the closest federally sanctioned curation facility to Fort McCoy and has a long history of working with the installation’s cultural resource management program,” Howell said. “Most of the Fort McCoy (archaeology) staff and others have worked or trained with the program over the years. Plus, most scientific interest in the Fort McCoy collections would most likely come from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse archaeology program or scholars visiting it to see other collections.”
Katherine Stevenson, operations manager with the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center, described the center when visiting with the garrison leaders.
“Our … area here is open to the public, and (we) try to have people do a lot on social media and really try to encourage regional understanding and preservation,” Stevenson said. “And so (we have) that combined mission, and (we’re) also serving as a regional repository. We’ve been doing that since 1952. Besides our former friend collections, we also are a repository for … wildlife collections from this area, and it has I think been a nice arrangement. I know that there’s kind of a centralization trend with repositories, but it’s awfully nice for agencies that are managing collections to have them readily available for access and to have kind of that working relationship with them as a local repository.”
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During the visit, Messenger and Calarco and the others got to see some of the artifacts from Fort McCoy and visit with additional members of the Fort McCoy archaeology team who are with the Colorado State University’s Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands (CEMML) and partner with the installation’s cultural resources personnel.
Miranda Alexander with CEMML who works as a research archaeologist who specializes in curation management of Fort McCoy artifacts, and works directly with the archaeology center, said being able to document Fort McCoy’s distant past is an honor. And she said it’s crucial work.
“Each year we do a partial inventory, and every five years there will be a complete inventory of all the artifacts,” Alexander said. “What the inventory does is it allows us to locate every artifact to make sure that they're still here, check their condition, and it creates a nice finding. So, if anybody wants to come in to do research on the collection, we can easily say, ‘Okay, it’s right here.”
Alexander discussed the importance of preserving Fort McCoy’s ancient history and more recent military history.
“I think having the collection close to us is very important,” Alexander said. “Especially if someone wanted to do research on them. And as for preserving history, it’s important because we can learn all the different time periods, cultural time periods, and more. We have artifacts spanning from the earliest Paleo-Indian time anywhere from 10,000-plus years old to the more recent military artifacts. … We’ve been working a lot on a site called Old Camp McCoy at the installation … and it really helps us with understanding the military history.”
Howell said it was important to have the leaders visit so they also get a perspective on their roles and “federal land managers” in the process overall.
“The garrison commander and garrison command team serve as federal land managers under the National Environmental Protection Act and the National Historic Preservation Act,” Howell said. “They are responsible ultimately for holding the artifacts from the installation in public trust.”
Howell added that Fort McCoy’s archaeology program accomplishes its mission, meets federal and Army regulations for its collections, and achieves significant cost savings from using the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center as a storehouse for McCoy artifacts.
And as the future relationship with the center continues, Howell said they will be doing things to improve efficiency, and more.
“Current program goals include achieving proposed new Army curation standards proactively ahead of schedule (2025) and reducing the cost of future collection storage by minimizing the current collection through efficient reboxing, reorganization, and culling past excavation materials from 30-plus years of digs,” Howell said. “The saved space can then be used for future artifact finds without the need to pay for extra space.”
Alexander said she will continue to enjoy doing the work with the center and preserving future artifacts.
“I find it rewarding,” Alexander said. “I like to be organized, … and I like preserving everything. It’s (about) preserving it for the future.”
According to it’s mission description at https://www.uwlax.edu/mvac/about-support/overview, the mission of the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center “is to provide education about the science of archaeology and the ancient cultures of the upper Mississippi River Valley to the general public, educators, undergraduate students, and precollegiate students; to conduct research and exploration of archaeological sites and artifacts; to preserve archaeological artifacts of ancient cultures which flourished within the upper Mississippi Valley; and to provide a regional center to promote an understanding of the prior inhabitants of this region.”
Fort McCoy also is part of the Driftless Area, also called the Paleozoic Plateau, which escaped glaciation in the last Ice Age, some 11,700-plus years ago. Combine the location with archaeological work done at Fort McCoy for almost four decades and a greater understanding of early human life in the region and the state has unfolded as more research has been done, said Alexander Woods, Ph.D., in 2017 in a previous news article. Woods is also an archaeologist with CEMML.
“Archaeology (on post) has helped the state of Wisconsin better understand the Driftless Area because the work has produced a broad set of data,” Woods said. “Archaeological surveys and digs at Fort McCoy have produced hundreds of thousands of artifacts, some more than 10,000 years old, that show how the earliest of peoples inhabited the Driftless Area of Wisconsin and more specifically around Fort McCoy.”
The Driftless Area is mainly in southwestern Wisconsin, but also includes areas of southeastern Minnesota, northeastern Iowa, and extreme northwestern Illinois. Because the area wasn’t under a glacier during the last Ice Age, ancient people — believed to be ancestral to members of the Ho-Chunk Nation — were able to live and sustain their lives in areas around the installation.
The archaeological teams that have worked on post categorized artifacts in certain archaeological time periods. For North America, those time periods include Paleo-Indian, pre-8000 before Common Era, or BCE; Archaic, 8000-1000 BCE; Woodland, 1000 BCE to 1000 Common Era, or CE; and Mississippian, 800-1600 CE. The Plainview points would have fallen into the Late Paleoindian period.
“We’ve also found ancient pottery and Madison points from the Woodland period,” Woods said after helping with a phase III dig in 2017. “Being able to have the huge collection of artifacts we have from this area (around Fort McCoy) has led to further understanding of the Driftless Area.”
Learn more about the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center by visiting https://www.uwlax.edu/mvac.
Learn more about Fort McCoy online at https://home.army.mil/mccoy, on Facebook by searching “ftmccoy,” and on Twitter by searching “usagmccoy.”
Also try downloading the Digital Garrison app to your smartphone and set “Fort McCoy” or another installation as your preferred base. Fort McCoy is also part of Army’s Installation Management Command where “We Are The Army’s Home.”
| Date Taken: | 02.05.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 02.05.2024 13:50 |
| Story ID: | 463208 |
| Location: | FORT MCCOY, WI, US |
| Web Views: | 468 |
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