Issue Twelve : Fall 2018

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River in Aosta, Italy. Photo by Mario Álvarez on Unsplash.

Thank You

As of this issue, Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community has officially been in production for three years. Over the past year, we have continued to reach new readers, include work from new writers, and expand community and campus conversations about the myriad ways water is implicated in shaping social and material landscapes.

"Returning the River" by Molly Van Avery, Dameun Strange, and Michael Hoyt. Image courtesy of Michael Hoyt.

Review of Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

As the water quality coordinator for the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area (MNRRA) for nine years, I organized and hosted the Mississippi River Forum. A monthly informational and networking series, the River Forum was one of my more visible tasks. A fundamental organizing principle of this ongoing series was to bring together a disciplinarily diverse group of water resource practitioners and decision-makers for conversations with people beyond their typical working relationships.

Baudelino Rivero shows one of the streams under protection of the Asobolo watershed organization. He visits this point in a weekly basis as part of his duties helping to monitor water quality. Image courtesy of Kelly Meza Prado.

Putting Suppliers on the Map

While there are many ways of approaching community-engaged research, the way that research projects are set up rarely provides the time and resources to create a research deliverable for community partners. This needs to change. Creating research products for academia and partners advances both science and the conservation work of communities.

A picture of weathered bone from the University of Minnesota Anthropology laboratory’s faunal comparative collection. Photo courtesy of Katrina Yezzi-Woodley.

Rivers and Bones

The bones that lie below the ruins of a medieval fortress in Dmanisi, Georgia, tell a story about the exodus of early humans from Africa almost two million years ago. The remains of five early humans, known as Homo erectus, have been found at Dmanisi. This 1.78 million-year-old World Heritage site is located in the country of Georgia on a promontory above where the Masavera and Pinasauri Rivers converge.

Figure 3. Archaeologist Doug Birk speaking to St. Cloud State University anthropology students enrolled in the author’s 2014 archaeological field school at the Little Elk River Mission site. Image courtesy of the author.

Life, Land, Water, and Time: Archaeologist Doug Birk and the Little Elk Heritage Preserve

The title of the 1976 novella by Norman Maclean, A River Runs through It, is also an apt description of the career of Minnesota archaeologist Douglas A. Birk, who passed away unexpectedly in March 2017. Actually, several rivers run through his remarkable and pioneering career, which spanned nearly 50 years. Birk was among the first historical archaeologists to conduct underwater investigations of sites relating to the North American fur trade along the “voyageur’s highway,” the chain of rivers, lakes, and overland portages that run along the Minnesota-Canadian border.

Figure 7. Fall of the Grand Recollet, French River, Ontario, by John Elliot Woolford, 1821.

The View From Watery Places: Rivers and Portages in the Fur Trade Era

On the drive northward from the Twin Cities on the straight and flat road of I-94, and then Minnesota’s Highway 10, the landscape of urban and suburban development slowly cedes to wide open fields and scattered towns, sometimes lined with rows and patches of trees. This is not the most exciting or scenic of drives, but it’s exciting to us nevertheless, because this is the way toward another season of archaeological fieldwork on a late eighteenth-century fur trade post located on the Leaf River in Wadena County.

An excavation unit has been carefully laid out and is awaiting excavation at Réaume's Leaf River Post, Minnesota.

Guest Editor’s Introduction to Issue Twelve: Watery Places and Archaeology

Archaeology, the study of past human societies, has a certain aura of mystery to it that captures the public’s imagination. The authors in this issue, myself included, are broadly defined as archaeologists. Not the Indiana Jones kind—more the geeky and scholarly kind, whose job and passion is not only to uncover how past people lived based on the things and structures they left behind, but also to take prodigious amounts of notes, photographs, measurements, and soil samples.