Mark Springer at the podium
The two-day Council for Minnesota Archaeology conference at St. Cloud State University was hosted by the Department of Anthropology and brought more than 100 professional archaeologists and students from Minnesota and neighboring states to campus. The conference featured a themed session celebrating Birk’s life and work.
Birk, who died in 2017, worked as an archaeologist in Minnesota for several decades focusing on the European colonial period in Minnesota and Western Wisconsin. He was an expert on fur trade history and early European exploration. He also co-founded the Institute for Minnesota Archaeology.
The collection comes to St. Cloud State University thanks to a donation from Birk’s life partner, Lynda Weiss, and from a collaboration with Morrison County Historical Society for stewardship of artifacts from a major site excavated by Birk. This collection is an opportunity for researchers and students at St. Cloud State and beyond, and the university will work to make sure it is accessible and usable, said Rob Mann, Associate Professor of Anthropology.
The Birk Collection includes research texts — archival and primary documents, artifacts from sites Birk worked on throughout his archaeological career, photographs and slides from excavations and much more. The collection includes documents covering the fur trade era, dams, railroads and forts.
“His work has been a gift to Minnesota history as well as other places,” said Weiss. “Now his gift is to share what he has done so other can use it going forward. He believed there was always more to find and learn.
The dedication included the presentation of a plaque to Weiss in recognition of her donation, and a second plaque to the Morrison County Historical Society honoring a collaboration between the organization and St. Cloud State for stewardship of materials excavated by Douglas Birk at a Fur Trade-era archaeological site in Morrison County.
”“We are proud to be the recipients of Birks’ collected work [and to be] working with Lynda Weiss and the Morrison County Historical Society to allow his work to remain intact as a collection and be further developed though research and analysis” said Mark Springer, Dean of the St. Cloud State University College of Liberal Arts, in his presentation of the plaques.
“Doug left many threads that we can pull on and those threads will lead us to new expectations, new projects, and new discoveries,” Mann said. “That is what Doug would have wanted and that’s what we hope to gain by housing this collection. This is a library to be used — not to sit on a shelf and gather dust.”