Emily Royston, Audiovisual Collections Intern

The North Dakota State Archives houses a large collection of film and magnetic tape in a variety of formats that it continues to archive, preserve, and digitize for public use. From home videos to television news footage to oral histories to professional and educational films, the Archives stores hours upon hours of material.

Since I was new to the audiovisual field, spending 12 weeks this past summer working with different formats, equipment, and software was enlightening and opened new avenues of interest for a career in this area. My training included processing and describing AV collections, using video editing and digitization software, handling and inspecting film and analog tapes, and engaging in preservation practices. Much of my work centered on two large collections: the WDAZ-TV Collection, consisting of approximately 2,200 analog tapes, and the Matthew Werven and Diana (Yeado) Oral History Collection, which includes over 700 interviews of North Dakota residents.

For WDAZ, one of ten North Dakota TV stations in our collection, it was my job to input the data from the tapes’ respective shot sheets—such as news stories, date of broadcasts, names of reporters—into our collections management software to make the clips discoverable. I also processed and digitized part of the Werven collection, using audio cassette decks and the software Audacity to create audio files.

Outside of these collections, I also had the opportunity to digitize other formats such as open-reel audio tapes, video cassettes, and film. Working with film was one of my favorite parts of the internship. I learned how to inspect films for patron requests and carry out preservation practices such as adding a protective leader to the heads and tails of film, rehousing films in ventilated archival cans to prevent off-gas build up, and removing adhesive and other residue using film cleaner. I can’t emphasize enough just how much fun I had working with these materials during the summer. I was so fortunate, particularly as someone from outside of the state (and the country!) to have been able to work with such a supportive and hospitable group of people.

Shelby Kriewald, Reference Intern

During my three-month internship at the State Archives last summer, I was assigned a variety of duties. When patrons visited our reading room, I commonly assisted them in using our microfilm scanners, atlases, or county history books. I also helped patrons navigate our website’s indexes and genealogical resources.

When I wasn’t helping patrons in person, I worked on a number of requests from those who reached out via phone or email. This included locating and sending out marriage records, biographies, naturalization records, obituaries, or other records. Additional projects I worked on at the reference desk included digitizing photos to put on our website, using archival software to find return locations for collections, transcribing oral history interviews, putting statistics into our database, and writing articles for "Dakota Datebook."

"Dakota Datebook" is a radio series broadcast by Prairie Public in partnership with the State Historical Society of North Dakota and other local organizations. This was one of my favorite projects to be involved in because it gave me the opportunity to do my own research and writing on history topics related to North Dakota. In doing my research for these articles, I typically looked through old newspaper articles using online resources like Advantage Archives or Chronicling America to find inspiration for stories. I also found sites like Ancestry.com very useful in providing census and biographical information related to the topics I was working on. In some cases, I even reached out to archives and institutions out of the state to locate obituaries and information needed for my writing. Several of my stories have aired on the radio and exist on Prairie Public’s website.

My internship with the State Archives was a very valuable learning experience. Not only did it enrich my knowledge of the region and its people, but it gave me the opportunity to learn about the daily operations of an archives firsthand. As someone who is interested in pursuing a career in archival science and special collections, this internship reinforced my career goals in ways that my undergrad education hadn’t ever before.

Clovis artifacts represent the earliest material evidence of human occupation in North Dakota. The Clovis tradition appeared on the Great Plains of North America about 12,000 to 13,500 years ago (Huckell 2014). The presence of unifacially or bifacially fluted stone spear points at an archaeological site is the primary distinctive marker of Clovis technology. However, not all Clovis sites contain fluted stone projectile points.

Casts of Clovis points from the Archaeology and Historic Preservation Education Collections. Clovis points are thin, fluted projectile points characterized by concave longitudinal shallow grooves that may have helped the points be inserted into spear shafts.

Various site types are associated with the Clovis tradition, including cache sites, encampments, quarry sites, and kill or butchering sites. Clovis artifacts found in caches more likely contain artifacts manufactured at quarry sites, then transported and placed into temporary storage. Caching behavior may indicate that individuals planned to set aside or hide artifacts for later use. Clovis sites are found all over North America and Central America, with caches often consisting of bifaces, projectile points, blades, flakes, and cores. One of the first caches discovered was named after the town of Clovis, New Mexico, where the ancient culture’s distinctive spear points were found together with mammoth bones.

In North Dakota, the Clovis artifacts were recovered from the Beach Cache site near the town of Beach in the western part of the state. About 103 artifacts (from a total of 135) were recovered from a dozen cache pits between 1970 and 1975, and most pits contained 8 to 10 stone tools. Some of the artifacts came from a disturbed plow zone. These blanks (partially worked/unfinished tools) were formed for easier transportation and could be made into a variety of stone tools. The Beach Cache site did not have Clovis points. It was dominated by bifaces. More than half of the Beach cached bifaces (58) were made of White River Group (WRG) silicates found at Sentinel Butte. Other bifaces were made from black chalcedony (12), quartzite (12), Rainy Buttes silicified wood (8), porcellanite (3), chert (4), and petrified wood (3) (Kilby and Huckell 2013; Huckell 2014). The sources of stone materials used in making the Beach Cache artifacts may indicate the movements of the Clovis hunter-gatherers. Although the Beach Cache lacks diagnostic Clovis projectile points, it is identified as Clovis based upon the presence of distinctive lithic technological attributes and radiocarbon dates (Kilby and Huckell 2013).

Clovis Beach Cache artifacts on exhibit in the State Museum’s Innovation Gallery: Early Peoples. SHSND 2007.75.1, .2, .3, .5, .17, .18, .20, .22, .27, .28, .30, .32, .38, and .41.

The Clovis hunter-gatherers were constantly on the move, following migrating game. They hunted mammoths (extinct elephantids), mastodons, Bison antiquus, and other smaller animals. “Consideration of the kinds of caches, their geographic distribution, and the source locations for some of the stone tools present in the caches can provide insights into the patterns of migration of Clovis groups more than 12,000 years ago and may, in turn, shed light on the geographic origins of Clovis technology” (Schroedl 2021: 121). More information on the Clovis Beach Cache artifacts and early peoples of North Dakota is available in “Traces: Early Peoples of North Dakota,” by Barbara Handy-Marchello and the late Archaeology and Historic Preservation Department Director Fern E. Swenson. The book, published in 2018, is available for purchase at the North Dakota Heritage Center & State Museum store in Bismarck.

The small group of Clovis people that camped at the Beach Cache site may have come from the south and west, traveling from what is today eastern Wyoming via western South Dakota. Traces: Early Peoples of North Dakota, 2018

References

Kilby, J. David, and Bruce B. Huckell. 2013. “Clovis Caches: Current Perspectives and Future Directions.”
In Paleoamerican Odyssey, edited by Kelly E. Graf, Caroline V. Ketron, and Michael R. Waters, 257–72. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.

Handy-Marchello, Barbara, and Fern E. Swenson. 2018. Traces: Early Peoples of North Dakota. Bismarck:
State Historical Society of North Dakota.

Huckell, Bruce B. 2014. “But How Do We Know If It’s Clovis? An Examination of Clovis Overshot Flaking
of Bifaces and a North Dakota Cache.” In Clovis Caches, Recent Discoveries and New Research, edited by Bruce B. Huckell and J. David Kilby, 133–52. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Schroedl, Alan R. 2021. “The Geographic Origin of Clovis Technology: Insights from Clovis Biface Caches.” Plains Anthropologist 66, no. 258: 120-48.