It’s time for another Charles E. Brown presentation! Register at https://wihist.org/CEB-Mar26 to join us for our first presentation of 2026!

 Tracing the Midwest Fur Trade with Archaeological Chemistry

Please join Dr. Heather Walder of UWL Department of Archaeology and Anthropology as she gives us a new look at the Fur Trade.

During the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, European and Euro-American fur traders brought exchange items, including vermilion pigment (mercury sulfide, HgS), as gifts and payments to their Indigenous trade partners around the Great Lakes region. The speaker will share results from an interdisciplinary project testing soil samples from the AD 1793-1835 Northwest Company and American Trade Post archaeological site on Madeline Island, Wisconsin. The mapped results of this collaborative study help better understand fur trade activities in the Midwest and identify potential areas of future archaeological investigation on Mooningwanekaaning, an island still sacred to Ojibwe descendants today.