Fort Owen was part of recent historical western expansion into Montana, influencing both the cultural and environmental landscape of the state and the forts own existence. The Fort Owen collection provided the opportunity to research the history and archaeology of Fort Owen as a contact period site and as the first historic-period agricultural center in Montana. Fort Owen provided goods and services to a variety of individuals and was the nexus of settlement for the region for several years during the latter portion of the 19th century. Six goals of this thesis were to: 1) inventory the Fort Owen artifacts and locate all associated excavation and research records; 2) sort, clean, and catalog Fort Owen artifacts that have been collected over the past several decades; 3) examine whether and how a poorly provenienced collection still had significant research value relevant to the study of Fort Owen; 4) use new archaeological excavations to help establish provenience data for unprovenienced artifacts by cross-referencing the new finds with artifacts recovered from the site during past excavations; 5) provide a comprehensive record of all known information relating to Fort Owen in one place and provide copies of that information to relevant repositories; and 6) use the Fort Owen collection to argue that the site is critically important to Montana heritage, inspiring future research related to Fort Owens historical landscape. One of the major steps related to the above goals required synthesizing data from past field notes and related historical resources, including census records, historical accounts, books, and newspaper articles. Here I propose that Fort Owen itselfas well as its unprovenienced collectionhave information potential if examined using a theoretical approach based on Fort Owens historical position within a zone of 19th and early 20th-century cultural interaction in Montanas Bitterroot Valley. In addition, I also argue that applying an interpretive framework of agricultural development to archaeological analysis of Fort Owen reveals a complex set of socioeconomic interactions at local, regional, and even national scales.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MONTANA/oai:etd.lib.umt.edu:etd-06092010-105551 |
| Date | 29 June 2010 |
| Creators | Merritt, Donald |
| Contributors | Duane Hampton, Richard Satler, Kelly Dixon |
| Publisher | The University of Montana |
| Source Sets | University of Montana Missoula |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.umt.edu/theses/available/etd-06092010-105551/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Montana or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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