David Winkler, a graduate student in archaeology, excavates a pit at Willamette Heritage Center on April 8, 2022 (Rachel Alexander/Salem Reporter)
Archaeology typically doesn’t involve whips, rolling boulders, pits full of snakes or priceless historical relics.
In contrast to the Indiana Jones image many Americans were raised with, the real work taking place on the north side of the Willamette Heritage Center’s campus this month is quieter – a group of volunteers painstakingly excavating dirt from small square pits dug into the grass like a checkerboard.
“It’s very rewarding in its own way to put your hands on history like this,” said David Winkler, a volunteer helping with the dig as part of his graduate studies at Portland State University.
The dig began this month as part of a collaborative project involving the city of Salem, the heritage center, the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde and Willamette University.
A pit at the archeological dig at Willamette Heritage Center on April 8, 2022 (Rachel Alexander/Salem Reporter)
The project aims to identify the site of a Methodist mission school that operated in the 1840s, bringing in Indigenous children from around the region in the decade before the U.S. government forced local tribes from their ancestral homelands and onto reservations.
The school operated for only two years before the missionaries were recalled, and its exact location has been a mystery since the original building burned to the ground in 1872.
On Sunday, the public will get a chance to look at the work so far.
Willamette Heritage Center at 1313 Mill St. S.E. is holding an open house April 10 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. that’s free and open to anyone. The event will feature hands-on activities as well as a chance to look at the dig site and see what’s been discovered.
“I’m hoping people will get the chance to see what archaeology is like. I feel like it gets romanticized,” said Kylie Pine, curator at Willamette Heritage Center.
Kimberli Fitzgerald, city archaeologist, said archeology rarely yields single revelatory discoveries.
She said people often ask, “What have you found?” But archaeologists are usually more interested in the site as a whole and the context, trying to better tell the story of the past by looking at what soil layers show about previous disturbance and what an artifact was found near.
“We’re learning more about the site, but we have so many questions still,” she said.
So far, efforts haven’t turned up evidence of the original labor school’s foundation.
Early work using ground-penetrating radar spotted some “anomalies” at the dig site, Pine said.
Digging revealed another mystery.
“It turned out to be a bunch of rocks,” she said.
Archaeologist Ross Smith, primary investigator at the mission school Willamette Heritage Center dig, stakes out an area for excavation with help from his daughter on April 8, 2022 (Rachel Alexander/Salem Reporter)
“The evidence we’re seeing now is fairly ambiguous,” said Ross Smith, an archaeologist who’s volunteering as the primary investigator at the site. The soil dug up so far looks about the same across the site, he said, and so far they’ve uncovered no evidence of a burned layer from the 1872 fire.
Still, Pine said they are finding ceramic pieces, brick and metal. Soil removed from the dig is screened and anything found is bagged for future analysis.
The dig will continue until the end of the month. Fitzgerald said at that point, the partners involved will assess progress and figure out how best to continue efforts to understand the mission school’s history.
Screens used to sift dirt at the archeological dig at Willamette Heritage Center on April 8, 2022 (Rachel Alexander/Salem Reporter)
Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
JUST THE FACTS, FOR SALEM – We report on your community with care and depth, fairness and accuracy. Get local news that matters to you. Subscribe to Salem Reporter starting at $5 a month. Click I want to subscribe!
Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers city news, education, nonprofits and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for a decade. Outside of work, she’s a skater and board member with Salem’s Cherry City Roller Derby and can often be found with her nose buried in a book.
