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Passport in Time Project Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest March 2017

Volunteers from around the country recently came to Ogden, Utah for another round of artifact curation as part of the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest’s, “Boxes from the Bowels” Passport in Time Project. This is the fifth year the Forest’s Heritage Program has conducted this PIT project at Weber State University’s Archaeological Lab.

This year, professional archaeologists and staff with the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest and Utah Division of State History worked with volunteers on collections from two historic sites on the forest, Strawberry Valley and Forest City, excavated between the 1980s to the present by the Forest’s Heritage Program. These collections are important for both public interpretation and scientific research. To prepare these collections, PIT projects have focused on cleaning, sorting, and placing artifacts in archival quality storage, along with gathering and recording information.

Strawberry Valley was the location of a massive military training maneuver conducted in August of 1888 by troops from Fort Douglas and Fort Duchesne, UT, and Fort Bridger, WY. The collection of artifacts from this site contains some of the most significant historic archaeological finds in the state of Utah, and includes a wide range of material classes from militaria to liquor bottles. With the help of PIT volunteers over the past five years, this collection of artifacts is now completely cataloged and totals approximately 20,700 artifacts. This year volunteers focused on correcting data errors and replacing handwritten tags with printed tags from the collection’s database.

The Forest City site, located in American Fork Canyon, was a large mining camp with a diverse population in the 1870s. The artifact collection contains a significant assemblage of late 19th century artifacts that give specific and detailed insight into how people lived and worked during this time and in this locale. Volunteers continued to dedicate time to formally cataloging Forest City artifacts which included measuring, weighing, and describing artifacts, and entering data into a digital database.

This PIT project offered volunteers a fun and educational experience through a hands-on glimpse of materials from these two important historic sites, providing a feel for the times and peoples the artifacts represent. Each participant gained experience in proper archaeological laboratory techniques from Forest Service staff, and was exposed to the process of curation practices. PIT volunteers have been invaluable to Forest’s Heritage Program as they provide the much-needed help to get artifact collections properly documented and archived in order to preserve these sites legacy and scientific value.