Susan is an architectural historian who loves old houses, barns and schools. She reviews projects that might impact cultural resources and researches earthen construction.

Welcome to A&HP’s initial processing lab, sieve sorter in foreground. For more information please see blog.statemuseum.nd.gov/blog/easy-question

Archaeologists and architectural historians use initial processing labs or wet labs, containing sieves, to discover tiny bits of evidence that measure big changes in technology. We included one of these rooms in the recent expansion at the Heritage Center. It is used to sort and process artifacts in the Archaeology and Historic Preservation Division (A&HP). The sieve stack (also known as a size-grader) and sorting trays help scientists sort soil, artifacts, and organic material. Researchers are usually searching for objects or fragments of objects that someone made or modified at some time in the past.

In northern plains archaeology, detailed procedures set out in 1989 by Dr. Stanley Ahler outline how to quickly make sense out of hundreds of bags of cultural material by sorting and weighing according to size grades. Viewed as an especially useful way to analyze lithic debitage (the flakes of stone that are removed from a cobble or preform when someone makes a stone tool), archaeologists statistically analyze hundreds or thousands of flakes that have been sorted by size. By doing so, researchers can gain new insights into methods of stone tool production over thousands of years.

Clean ordinary sand under magnification.

Architectural historians and masons also use such labs, equipped with sieves, microscopes, and Munsell color charts. They need the same tools to determine the best match for repairs or repointing between stones and bricks. These researchers try to match the mortar being used for restoration to the historic mortar. To match the sand in a mortar sample taken from an old brick or stone wall, you must first remove the binding element by digesting it in acid. If the original masons used a lime-based mortar, the lime will bubble away, leaving clean and rather attractive sands behind, as seen under the microscope. If the original mortar used a Portland cement, the acid digestion process will probably leave some hard chunks of cement with the sand.

Although Portland cements were known earlier, this technological change from lime mortars to Portland cement became widespread in the 1930s. Use of Portland cement was a fundamental change in building technology. Much of the art and science of lime-based mortars was nearly lost when mixes became far more standardized using Portland. Careful analysis of historic lime-based mortars and maintaining libraries of those recipes allows for nearly exact replicas in mortar when applied next to historic mortar.

Here both new bricks and new mortar needed to match the originals on the left and right of the photo. The architectural historians decided to match both as they were originally made rather than try to match the currently worn brick through artificial antiquing. The mortar will weather out in a rainy season to wash away the fines and leave the sand more exposed. Photos by S. Quinnell

So the same laboratory equipment is used in different applications to discover more about our pasts. In northern plains archaeology the wet lab allows analysis of many minute pieces from our ancient past, from Paleoindian big game hunters through the days of military forts. Similarly, mortar analysis performed with this same equipment can be used to understand changes in building mortar technologies from the earliest stone and brick buildings to the structures of the recent past.

A mission is an important thing for a museum. It provides a focus and a compass for how we interact with the public, what we put in our exhibits, and what we collect. It defines what we do and gives us a purpose for why we do it. Largely an invention of the 1960s and 1970s, missions emerged in museums at a time when the US bicentennial stoked a great deal of interest in history and the field became more evenly professionalized. Our mission is as follows:

To identify, preserve, interpret, and promote the heritage of North Dakota and its people.

Without that focus, many museums of the early 20th century functioned as a “cabinet of curiosities” of sorts. They often displayed items that visitors wouldn’t normally see in everyday life, sometimes peppered in amongst artifacts more familiar to the viewer. They showcased items from foreign lands, often picked up as souvenirs during travel, or at times, highlighted the unusual and bizarre.

The Liberty Memorial Building on the capitol grounds housed the State Museum from 1924 until the current Heritage Center was completed in 1981. Here you can see one of the displays, which contains covered wagons and steamships, forms of transportation not unusual for North Dakota, juxtaposed with a model of a Spanish galleon and other foreign ships.

This isn’t intended as criticism of the past. What we collected says a great deal about what we valued as a society and speaks to the curiosity that is inherent in human nature. In a time before the internet and trans-Atlantic flight, a visit to the museum was a way that you could physically see pieces of a faraway land or event that may otherwise have been inaccessible. And really, that is one of the ways we still serve the public today.

While the State Historical Society has generally focused its collecting on North Dakota, we still have some artifacts that were collected long ago that are very random. I’d like to highlight some of those items for you. Once the process is complete, an artifact has enough information recorded so that it and its story are easily accessible to staff, visitors, and researchers.

The Historical Society holds a set of Babylonian cuneiform tablets dated to 2350 BC. This tablet was acquired in June 1924 and is reportedly, “A list of cattle and sheep delivered to a shepherd for herding. Found at Drehem [Iraq], a suburb of Nippur where there was a receiving station for the temple of Bel.” While having no connection to North Dakota history, it was collected to allow people to see a piece of ancient civilization that they might otherwise only read about.

This is a chunk of granite taken from the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., when one of the bricks was replaced with stone from North Dakota. On the surface, it is just a rock. If you saw it in your driveway, would you attribute any significance to it? Instead, it is imbued with significance due to the location it came from.

Known as the deer locked in death, these unfortunate deer were found impaled by their antlers near Belfield, North Dakota. They were mounted and displayed at the North Dakota exhibit at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in 1901. Definitely an example of the bizarre, they could also be seen at the Liberty Memorial Building for many years.

Seeing these items makes me think about what we value today and how our views have shifted in the century since the Historical Society first began collecting. What are your valued possessions? What do they say about you?