Individual Agency and Military Structure: Personal Artifacts From 1890s Fort Missoula
With a history spanning over 135 years, Fort Missoula, Montana, was involved in several aspects of local and national history, including the Battle of the Big Hole, the 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and World War II internment camp. In the 1980s, former University of Montana anthropology professor Carling Malouf led a series of excavations, recovering hundreds of artifacts which, until this project, had been left unanalyzed. Over the course of two years and over 1500 hours of invested labor, the collections were re-processed, analyzed and curated, producing a detailed artifact catalogue and establishing provenience for most of the assemblage. One of Malouf’s excavation units, Trench 2, recovered artifacts from the 1890s period of fort use. The high ratio of personal artifacts allowed for a qualitative comparison of the assemblage with material culture from a contemporary military outpost: Fort Mackinac, Michigan, in which material signatures of both military structure and individual agency were established. Following recent attempts by other historical archaeologists to study the individual within archaeological assemblages, this thesis draws correlations between the role of an individual soldier stationed at Fort Missoula and individual artifacts.
agency, archaeology, Fort Missoula, microhistory
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