Backyard Archaeology: Informing the Southwest Michigan Community about local archaeological sites and research through the “Evidence Found” Exhibit

This paper is a report of my involvement with and background research for an upcoming exhibit called “Evidence Found.” The project is a collaboration between the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project and the Kalamazoo Valley Museum. In this report, I provide a description of the exhibit and my involvement in preparing the exhibit. I also present the research I conducted for use in the exhibit. Joseph Hines, a designer with Project Arts & Ideas, and Dr. Michael Nassaney, a Professor of Anthropology at Western Michigan University and the principal investigator of the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project, are creating the exhibit to communicate an interactive format showing what archaeology is, what archaeologists do, and the presence as well as the importance of archaeological sites in southwest Michigan. I collaborated with Hines and Nassaney providing content for a section of the exhibit dedicated to the presentation of local archeological sites. I present my research on the four sites, which are Dieffenderfer, a Late-Woodland site in St. Joseph County; Ramptown, an Underground Railroad community in Cass County; Schilling, a pre-contact sweat lodge in Kalamazoo County; and the Warren B. Shepard homestead site in Calhoun County. I provide a brief summary of the possible interpretation for those sites as well as the images and artifacts that may be used in the exhibit. In addition to those four sites, I will provide a summary of the two other sites, Fort St. Joseph and the Bronson Park Native American Mound, included in the exhibit.