The Ranelius 1954 and 1955 excavation notes and maps
Posted by Travis Hager on Tuesday, June 22
As mentioned in the beginning of the “The Science Museum of Minnesota’s 2010 Ranelius site project at Spring Lake” blog post, the first step of the Spring Lake project was to study the 1954 and 1955 crew’s journals, maps, and any other notes associated with their excavations. Understanding the previous excavation is important because it allows us to associate the collected artifacts with where they were found within the site. We can also learn about the location and characteristics of any feature discovered during the previous excavation at site. Features are remains of a human activity that can be observed within the soil, but features cannot be removed from the site and brought back to the lab as a whole. Some examples of features are a hearth area, a storage pit, a refuse pit, or a house floor. This information gives us an idea of the layout of the site and what types of activities took place at Ranelius. This type of information is usually readily available in a formal report written after any excavation. Because the 1950’s excavations at Ranelius were never formally written up, we need to rely on these original notes to understand the site.
The methods used in archaeology have greatly improved since 1955, which includes how information was recorded during excavations. So, there are many problems involved when using original notes from old excavations that should not occur with recent excavations. The Ranelius journals were created as a personal reminder to the excavators about how excavation units were organized and about the location of unusual anomalies in the soil, like features. The information in the journals is often sparse and vague. This is avoided in current excavations by filling out a standardized form after each level is excavated in every unit. The Ranelius notes are also limited since they mostly contain how they excavated an area and rarely contain any interpretations or explanation for why they excavated an area a specific way.
The methods used at the site were also inconsistent and their style of excavating changed several times throughout their investigation at the site. These methodological inconsistencies cause quite a bit of confusion and frustration when trying to study this excavation.
Though there were many difficulties working with these notes, an understanding of the Ranelius excavation was not impossible to achieve. We are using this information to create digital maps of the excavations and compare them to the results from the geophysical survey, using a Geographical Information System (GIS). This information combined will help us accurately interpret which areas of the site have been disturbed and which areas mostly likely have potential to help us understand the Ranelius site better.
