With the death on March 4, 2021, of James O. Marshall III, Kansas and Central Plains archaeology lost a dedicated student. He was 86 years old. Jim’s death followed that of his wife of 64 years, Sa...

Fragments of a charred wooden bowl were recovered from Aztalan during excavations by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (SHSW) in 1964. Recent advances in analytical methods facilitated a mu...

This article chronicles the development of a streamlined workflow for state agencies to follow when transferring electronic public records to the State Archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society. The workflow, which utilizes an open source application and SFTP (Secure Shell File Transfer Protocol) for remote transfers, was developed to establish a secure and standardized process for transfers to replace the ad hoc manner of earlier transfers. The authors describe the genesis of the workflow and the significant challenges faced during implementation, including differences in technology usage and organizational culture, and they discuss the lessons learned from the project and plans for future work.

Despite the rich histories of rural communities in northern Wisconsin, accessibility to professional archivists is limited at best. The North Woods Tour project in Wisconsin focused on empowering local residents to preserve historical materials themselves, by teaching them basic archival methods relating to a variety of formats through personal archiving workshops. Led by Amy Sloper, head archivist at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, three Wisconsin archivists created and implemented the project, visiting three rural northern Wisconsin communities and working with 30 local community members. This report examines their planning process and attendee response. Additionally, it argues that, in some cases, materials might be best preserved within the context of their creation.

This study looks at citations of archival material in a sample of 136 recently published scholarly historical monographs produced by a selection of highly cited university presses in the United States, with the goal of discovering patterns in scholarly user reportage of archival use. The study found that 68 percent of the titles referenced at least one archival collection, that archival collections housed at universities were used more often than other types of repositories, and that the amount and type of repositories did not in most cases vary based on the subject matter of the book. The study also revealed that less than 3 percent of all archival citations in the books examined were to digital collections. The findings could potentially provide a baseline by which further and more diverse archival use and users can be measured.

ABSTRACTThe Wisconsin Historical Society has collected the history of Wisconsin for more than 150 years. The Society serves as the North American History Library for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as a manuscript repository, and as the official archive for the State of Wisconsin. Through regular assessment of the archival collection development policy, the subject area of recreation and leisure was identified as a significant topic that helped document the history of Wisconsin’s social/cultural organisations, hobbies and sports, and tourism. This topic was also relevant to documenting the history of the state’s economy, transportation, and folklore. The assessment also identified these subjects as a collection gap that could be amended with more targeted collecting. Beginning in the early 1990s, Society archivists have made an effort to identify and collect archival material related to the tourism economy of Wisconsin. The collections contain a wide variety of documentary source materials for scholars interested in twentieth-century tourism, hunting, conservation, tourism photography, and the role of tourism on state and local economies. The documentation for these subjects is wide-ranging and includes personal accounts of tourists, business records, affinity groups, and grassroots organisations, as well as, government records and publications.

The impact of the New Deal has been a topic of ongoing historical investigation, with, in the past few decades, substantive research in New Deal relief programs on Americanist archaeology by disciplinary historians. The application of resources newly available through relief programs varied considerably geographically however, and this article uses Kansas as a case study of a state in which there was no federal New Deal archaeology. The article explores archaeological research conducted in the state during this era by the Smithsonian Institution as well as an attempt to secure funding for systematic investigations by the University of Kansas. The article highlights several factors that forestalled use of relief funding for archaeology.

Monitoring, managing and preserving submerged cultural resources (SCR) such as shipwrecks can involve time consuming detailed physical surveys, expensive side-scan sonar surveys, the study of photomosaics and even photogrammetric analysis. In some cases, surveys of SCR have produced 3D models, though these models have not typically been used to document patterns of site degradation over time. In this study, we report a novel approach for quantifying degradation and changes to SCR that relies on diver-acquired video surveys, generation of 3D models from data acquired at different points in time using structure from motion, and differencing of these models. We focus our study on the shipwreck S.S. Wisconsin, which is located roughly 10.2 km southeast of Kenosha, Wisconsin, in Lake Michigan. We created two digital elevation models of the shipwreck using surveys performed during the summers of 2006 and 2015 and differenced these models to map spatial changes within the wreck. Using orthomosaics and difference map data, we identified a change in degradation patterns. Degradation was anecdotally believed to be caused by inward collapse, but maps indicated a pattern of outward collapse of the hull structure, which has resulted in large scale shifting of material in the central upper deck. In addition, comparison of the orthomosaics with the difference map clearly shows movement of objects, degradation of smaller pieces and in some locations, an increase in colonization of mussels.