Elsie Touchstone, ““Unknown, Unknowns”: Reconciling Archival Documentation with Material Artifacts”
Mentor: Shannon Freire, Anthropology
Poster #210

There are “known unknowns” when conducting field excavations; these are often the main purpose of excavation in the first place. However, researchers cannot plan for the “unknown unknowns”, they can only anticipate their existence. Often, it is only through laboratory analysis that these “unknowns” are transformed into actionable data to support broader research questions. The subject of this research is the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery (MCPFC) Number 2. Material culture recovered during the 1991-1992 excavations of Cemetery 2 was recorded in three different forms: the Great Lakes Archaeological Resource Center (GLARC) Grave Goods Inventory form, the GLARC Data Entry form, and the 1993 Reports of Investigation (ROI) burial appendices. All these forms vary slightly in their interpretation of unknown material, from question marks and “unknown” to omitting it entirely. Currently, there is a fourth form of data management underway for the MCPFC Project, a Microsoft Access database to facilitate future research queries. Thirty-one samples, previously described as “unknown material culture”, were reanalyzed through comparison to a material attribute list developed by the author. Material culture entries were revised in the new Access database, reflecting the newly assigned raw material categories and in some cases, artifact type. Our goal is to decrease the amount of ‘unknown’ material culture, giving a more holistic view of Cemetery 2. Combining biological and archaeological analyses consolidates multiple lines of evidence, providing a more robust bioarchaeological framework for our research and facilitating our ability to make provisional identifications of archaeological individuals.