Context Podcast Digital Collection

Doug Exton: Thank you so much for joining us for today's connected Conversation. A program conducted by the Idaho Humanities Council. If you're not familiar with our organization, I encourage you to check out our website, Idaho humanities.org. With me today is Dr. Mark Warner, and he will be talking about the Sandpoint Archeological Project. It's a pleasure to have you with us. I turn it over to you.

Dr. Mark Warner: Thanks, Doug. And thanks for joining me today. A couple of things. First of all, the pandemic stunk, in many ways. But I will say one of the the things that I'm deeply appreciative of is the creativity of Idaho Humanities Council to come up with with things like this so we can still keep in touch throughout the state rather than just, you know, in our in our silos several hundred miles apart.

So thanks to Idaho Humanities Council for sort of being creative, that we, we were forced to do that. But, the creativity is much appreciated. Second thing is just a little public service announcement on this. This project or what I'm going to talk about today. If you were going to do a movie reading, there might be a little bit of R-rated conversation in this later in the second part of this talk, when I talk about, prostitution.

And I want to just make sure I get, acknowledgments, done first. I was one of three principal investigators on the project. The lead investigators were, Jim Bard of SWC and Bob Weaver of Environmental History Company. And we did this project for Idaho Transportation Department. So this is this is very much an example of kind of an applied archeology project.

Dramatically changing traffic in traffic patterns in the city. But when you do a project like this, you're going to have some issues that you've got to deal with. And some of those issues are basically, you know, you have to do the compliance regulations to make sure you're not environmental and cultural resources. That's what you have to manage.

And there are going to be a lot of cultural resources on this project. What you see here are two shots of the same place and a couple things I would kind of point out to you. Keep track of these bridges. These bridges are good landmarks for you to, be aware of as as you orient yourself through this.

This is the byway in progress. This is the this is the, area that the byway was going in in circa 1910. And, this is this is the finished project. And you can also see the, the the bridge there was there. The key thing is the route that this highway was, was going through was the route of a whole lot of other things.

These are two shots of what was there in the 1880s and 1890s. You look at this, this site of the railroad station here, and then this is sort of a fish eye view of, the commercial district. So we knew there was a whole lot of cultural resources there that had to be addressed before this. This, project was this project was was built.

In other words, between the summer tourism season and the winter skiing season, which made for some interesting field work. These were the good days. This is where you think, oh, archeology is a great thing. It's a beautiful, beautiful time. And these were maybe the not so good days where they're actually in November, digging in the snow and about a foot and a half of snow.

And just to kind of thoroughly deflate the Indiana Jones stereotype of any archeologist. We spent a lot of time in the mud. So, briefly, what do we do? Well, there was, like I said, there was a tremendous amount of stuff there, and there were 5 or 6 areas that were that we focused on. Blacksmith shop, workers housings.

There was the remains of the cemetery there. The hotel, commercial district. Some brothels and a Chinese residence. And what I'm going to talk about is some of the information that was coming out of of the whole project. And then later in the in the talk, focus a little bit more on some information that came out, came out of the brothels.

So that's just to give you a overview of where we're going. Summary. This is a nutshell of kind of what a really is the biggest archeology project I've ever been a part of. And it's like I said, it's the biggest archeological archeology project I believe in, in the state, in the state's history. We had about six months of fieldwork.

Historical archeologists get a little bit spoiled in the fact that we find a lot of stuff. It also causes a problem, too, because how do you deal with 600,000 artifacts? But we're talking about two things, and I'm going to talk about the first thing we'll talk about is kind of focusing on, on the glass that we recovered from the whole site.

And my rejoinder would be, I mean, I usually make it pretty personal. And I say, think about think about your world today. And if you think about, the history or the image that you project through your I used to say a diary, but now say your social media presence. And what we learn about you through your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

TikTok accounts and so on. Versus what I might learn about you if I was going to go through your trash. In a nutshell, people, when you write down history, you you are very conscious of recording something. You write down a memory, you write to create a diary. You're very conscious of trying to record particular events.

When you throw something out, you aren't necessarily conscious of recording that particular event. And in fact, you may want to be hiding that particular event. And so what historical archeology does, is it uncovers the invisible histories, the histories that people don't write about, the histories that people don't, record in their diet, didn't record in their diaries. And I guess today don't post on social media.

As a side note, I will also say that, When you when you think about sort of invisible histories, this is particularly powerful when you deal with groups that are underrepresented in the written records. Much of what I've done over my career has been focusing on, groups that are you don't hear about in written records.

This is something, number one, you know, historical archeologists deal with that a tremendous amount. And there's a bunch of really compelling reasons that it's taken for granted in the trash is taken for granted today. We recycle it, but it's extraordinarily useful from a from an archeological perspective. First of all, there's a lot of it. I mean, glass was accepted by about the 1850s.

Glass became extraordinarily cheap to produce. And so you started just putting everything you could in bottles and jars and so on. And as a result, when there's a lot of it, there's a lot of it that gets thrown out, and that means there's a lot of it for archeologists to find. Which brings me to the second point.

It goes into the archeological record really quickly. This is this sounds kind of weird, but, you know, you think about a family heirloom, you might want to you hold on to it for 50, 75, 100 years before, you know, the cat knocks it off the shelf and you have to throw it out, and it's getting deposited. Archeologically 100 years after it's manufactured.

People buy bottles for their contents, not necessarily the bottles themselves. So you buy it. You use the. You use up what's in the bottle and you throw it out. Meaning, you know, the the life from production to deposition. Archeologically can be a matter of months in some cases. I mean, I acknowledge people, we use bottles and people. People, things go go can be used for a number of years, but, in many cases, they're they're consumables.

You you buy it and you throw it out. And it's what what's great is it's really datable. You the how it's manufactured can give you some fairly detailed information about dates. In the case of this Chamberlain's cough remedy that I have up here. It can give you you can, you can. You know that that bottle was manufactured between in about a seven year period?

So you have extraordinarily, precise dating, and it tells you a lot about behavior when you think about what goes into glass. You think about, obviously, medicines, but then there's food, there's grooming products, there's there's cleaning product, there's, bottles. Glass can be used for storage. There's a whole lot about of behaviors that can be inferred through what was in the glass.

You've got stuff coming in from all over the world. And, you know, that's that's sort of that's one of the big picture narratives that I thought was really intriguing that came out of this was how thoroughly the archeological evidence sort of showed that we were absolutely part of a global, global market. Stuff was coming in from all over the place.

Probably many of your communities have something like this. And you know, from my perspective, this is really registered in the last. I don't know, maybe, maybe, 20, 20 years or so. Where there's, there's a fairly explicit, sense of of buying local. You know, make sure you support your own, your own folks. Well, what was kind of interesting about this project was in some regards, we see this, this happening a century ago.

And if you look at this, you're going to see, there's gunk in it. We we had a number of bottles, a number of materials we recovered that had stuff in it, and we thought, this this provided another, this was actually the impetus for what's now become a ten year, collaboration with the chemistry department at the University of Idaho, doing our chemistry.

But we took this bottle over to my friend Ray von Wandruszka, and it's a mouthful that, to get out sometimes, in the in the chemistry department. And we said, Ray, we've got this. We've got a bunch of other bottles. We'd like to know what's what's in them. And so he did. He did he and work. He had undergraduate students work on this.

And he did, did an analysis of it. And it's clearly a medicine bottle. And the material that was there was left in it was, was pine pitch, which the initial response was. Why why why pine pitch? What's what what makes why would you put something like that in there? Well, it caused us to do a little bit more digging.

Those are they're sold throughout the United States. And, and this, this there was nothing different than that with, with the patent medicines in the early 20th century. Both of these bottles was going to back up a bit. Both of these bottles of beer that there it was, Doctor Bell's pine tar and honey to cure, and it was Foley's Honey and Tar Cure.

So you know something? You you thought about what makes. Why do you have pine pitch? Why do you pine tar in a in a pharmaceutical bottle? Turns out that's a fairly. There was a fairly commonly used ingredient so commonly used that people were advertising it in their, in their products, their they were buy it. They were selling this stuff.

Foss went on to create to, establish Price's drugstore. And what I, what I think we're seeing here is exactly a version of the by local phenomenon forces creating a locally manufactured, a locally produced product. Emulating analogous. Similar your adjective to the nationally marketed brands for for consuming you know for for cold and cold and flu cure. He's marketing this stuff locally as his own personal thing.

It's a local. It's a local man. It's a locally produced drug that is emulating nationally marketed brands. This is exactly the same stuff we see going on, in the sort of the buy local today. Don't go by. Don't go buy your your big conglomerate. Buy locally. So just wanted to, you know, we have these big picture stories about globalization, but then we have these smaller picture stories about about, about particular behaviors, that that sort of tell you kind of more nuanced accounts of, of daily life.

And I also want to emphasize I'm, I'm cherry picking here when we have a whole bunch of different, a whole bunch of different sites. We have a whole bunch of different materials. I mean, there's a whole there's an array of these narratives, that are out there. So that's selling, selling things globally. This is the picture. Remember, this is the route where the thing was going through, where the the byway was going through.

And now I want to go to the, the, the the, the, the senior side of things. To again talk about selling and talking about, what archeology can tell us about behavior in the past in some unexpected ways. I want to I'm going to use the term the restricted district. The restricted district was actually a term the locals used to, basically talk about this this, this area down here in the project, it was a where there was a complex brothels, and at least, one Chinese residents, slash business.

So what's going on with the restricted district? Or let's more specifically, let's go on to talk about life in the brothels. And again, I'll repeat my, public service announcement. This is where we might get a little bit of a. Well, let's let's put it this way. I'm going to be talking about things as an archeologist that I never thought I was good at, I ever thought would have talked about, when I was taking classes.

And I don't think you're ever going to see some of this stuff in, in archeology textbooks. It's just the the quirkiness of historical archeology and working in, in brothel settings leads to some truly unexpected, finds. Anyway, so here's the story. The restricted district, was in particularly the brothels. It was a complex of of, multiple, couple brothels.

We had, Willa Herman and I believe Marie Henderson's. Sorry, I forget, I forget her first name. Herman's brothel and Henderson's cribs. The the right next to each other. The key thing is. And by the way, for orientation on this picture, this is one of those bridges that goes across, sand Creek. If you just, you know, you're really fixating and orienting yourself.

Now, here's the interesting here's here's the interesting contrast. And I'll, I'll start with this. Henderson's cribs had 11 women working in it. Herman's brothel had three women working in it, there. And you can see, I mean, in the 1909 sandbar. And this is part of a complex, you two saloon and restaurant. You had a couple couple saloons.

And on either side of it, these brothels catered to it's important to, to to gather this is these brothels cater to somewhat different clientele. The and there there is a hierarchy of cost associated with prostitution. Some of you may have some, you know, awareness of this from movies or pop culture today, but the point of it is you you had Henderson having 11 women working for, these women most likely would have been working, their clientele would have been the, the the guys who were working in the the lumber mill.

The guys who were the workers. Herman's brothel was the smaller establishment, had three people in it, and their clientele would most likely have been the managers, of the, the lumber yard or the middle management, you know, the business owners in town. And so on. Puts simply there's a class difference. And the the experience was going to be different as well.

You were for you're visiting Henderson. You were there for a very short period of time. You were there to pretty much have sex and get out in the the. There's truly, if you read some of the historical counselor's truly horrific accounts of sort of what what you're what the reality of prostitution was like. In, in, in some circles in the, in, in the 19th century.

This was fascinating. An extraordinary amount of, of jewelry, an extraordinary amount of, of, decorative pieces that were found, more of them tending towards Willa Herman's place. But, not, you know, we we found them in the context of Henderson's assemblage as well, for wedding bands. Who knows how those got lost. Go figure. For wedding bands.

Was that. It was. It was actually kind of cool. But we also found evidence of the distinctive economic contrast between these two, between these two establishments. There was way more bottle glass in the higher in the, in the higher class brothel. But they were in the, in the cheaper the cheaper establishment. There's a lot of champagne and by percentages, you know, it was like, get a drink and go have sex.

Get it, you know, as quickly as possible. But the other pieces, decorative bric a brac, just the little things that were decorative, kind of a fake, you know, a faux Victorian, household, living room. That would be. That would be what you would see in, in the in the the Willa Herman's account. The stuff that would look more superficially like a, like a dining room, or like a parlor, shall we say.

Sorry about that. And when we get down to, specifics, not surprisingly, we did find products that were specifically there to treat, venereal disease. We found some very fancy stuff associated with with Herman's place. We found way more meat, at at the, at Herman's brothel. Than than than, in other words. This is actually a good at good illustrative illustration of the contrasts.

You were going to Herman's brothel, and you were going to have a meal, and you were going to socialize, and you're going to drink out of fine glasses, and you were going to spend an hour or two there. If you were going to go visit Marie Henderson's place, you were going to be there for a very short period of time.

And, you know, the archeology materials, illustrate this. Now, this is where we get into an area that I would never have thought I would have gotten into. As an archeologist. And this is where, again, I beg forgiveness for what may be somewhat crude. But one of the things we found overwhelmingly in associated with an association with the, the brothels, and particularly the more expense, the more cost.

Lee. Will a Herman brothel were, I think, 21 irrigators. This is a picture of most of them in new see, most of them were a variety of sizes. And most of you probably we do what archeology is always do is we create typologies. And this is, like I said, not what one would, would expect. Typically in your archeology how to manual.

But that's the summary of our, of our, of our irrigators. And remember there were and let me add to this, rubber fragments of what would be a douche bag, clip, which would have been, the, the not the, the joint for a, a dosing nozzle and so on. So remember, there were three women working in that, that brothel.

And we have 20 some odd irrigator nozzles. Why? Well, you start looking at the history of the times and there's some interesting things that went on. In the late 18th, late 19th century, you know, the it basically became illegal for any form of conscious option to be sold. You you could not condoms, you could not, any, any anything was, was was illegal act the Comstock Act, made any sort of contraception sales illegal.

However doing which was a fairly commonly used form of contraception in the 19th century, though not extraordinarily effective. It was fairly commonly used, I think. The limited stories that are out there said there were, probably 20% of women. Women practiced as a form of birth control. You can't buy it as birth control, but you can buy it as a hygiene product.

And so what you saw in the late 19th and early 20th century was a myriad of, of, advertisements that included, you know, sort of an array of nozzles to basically irrigate any, any part of your, any part of your body for, for health reasons. And so what do we think happened? Well, you're a prostitute. You're in a, you're in a relatively well off setting, so you're not moving tricks, moving customers through as quickly as possible.

You have some wherewithal to take some time. Between clients, you have some resources. It's a it's a like I said, it's a catered to a more affluent clientele. So what I think is going on here is if you're going to explain this, this, plethora of irrigator nozzles, you're looking at somewhat, you're basically looking at kind of class differences within, within, prostitutes.

The those that, those that were working in a, in a better place had resources, had wherewithal, and had the time to do between clients, had the time to, to, to do this. And what we see Archeologically is the nozzles that were needed were kept, hence a relatively small number of Agilent nozzles and the ones that were not necessarily needed that were used for irrigating babies or your nostrils or, your rectum were, were thrown out.

This is absolutely, one of the most unexpected things that I've ever run across in my career. And like I said, it's one of those issues that I would never had thought about as as an archeologist or to have talked about. But in historical circumstances, you get some very unexpected things. And this is this is one of them.

I also want to emphasize that, you know, these are what I've talked about is just a couple of things regarding sort of, sort of historical archeology and the marketplace, you know, selling, selling sex and how the differentiation was there, you know, standpoint in the global community. There's a whole lot of other things that came out of this.

And I want to make sure that if this is if any of this is, piqued your curiosity that you have opportunity to sort of pursue this. And so, just to make sure, you know, you know, I think we have 20 minutes for questions. You're more than welcome to email me after the after this talk as well.

And I also want to sort of highlight some other resources that that came out of this project. This is by no means an exclusive list. But it gives you some it gives you some other places to go. Look, there's an exhibit based on the archeology. It doesn't talk about the prostitution. And the Bonner County Historical Museum.

It's not made to, to we've we tried not to sort of talk archeology too much. Archeology ease and all those technical details. So if you want to go pursue some of this further, here's some more resources and that's it for me. Looks like I went two minutes over my allotted 40 minutes. Doug. So, you know, forgive me for that.

And I guess the floor is open for questions now, is that right?

Doug Exton: It is. Yes. Thank you so much for all that info. So the first question, you know, circling back to the glass, you know, the first part of the presentation. How is recycling playing into that? You know, for the future. You know, for, you know, let's just say 100 years from now, looking back, you know, full recycling impact the records of, you know, objects that people find.

Dr. Mark Warner: Undoubtedly, yes. But I will say there is one people there's always some sort of idiosyncratic behavior or some sort of behavior that modifies what gets thrown out and what doesn't get thrown out. So, I mean, then that just kind of goes with the territory in any and in any archeological, in any archeological project. So, yeah, there will be some skewing, but.

That'll probably be made up for by the volume of plastic that's been through that statement thrown out in the last 50 years.

Doug Exton: Yeah. I'm kind of balancing itself out in a way.

All they're doing is grinding it up and and reusing it in roads or something like that. There's no value in, in re melting it or anything like that. Or it's, it's at this point there's no value as opposed to your aluminum cans or whatever.

Doug Exton: And then I was wondering if you can share any reflections about, you know, teaching or mentoring students in archeology. Specifically, you know, some perspectives or realizations that they may come to learn or discover during that process of mentorship.

Dr. Mark Warner: Oh, man, that's a great question. My my story is I didn't start out. I didn't grow up thinking it was going to be an archeological site to sort of stumble into it. And, you know, one of the things that I've taken great joy in doing this over my career and I love doing that. And one of the things that I say is also what's nice about historical archeology is it's extraordinarily tangible.

The folks I mean, the materials are generally identifiable. They're fairly easy to teach. You get a lot of hands on stuff, and it's not, oh, we're going to contaminate this. We're going to destroy this. I mean, you know, the story comes out of the volume of materials, not necessarily the one item, that happens to be 80,000 years old.

You know, one of the regrets of this project was we couldn't have it opened up for visitors to walk through. We couldn't do this. And I'm a big proponent of kind of public archeology and doing things in public. And we couldn't do that. So we had to do it kind of after the fact, through museums and through, open houses and so on.

Doug Exton: And then what happens to items that don't end up, you know, in a museum, you know, on exhibit? You know, from, like, this project or in general?

Dr. Mark Warner: It's a that's actually an interesting question because, you know, one of the things archeologists always say is it's a destructive process. You know what? What we got, what was there, what's left is now under, you know, hundreds of tons of dirt and asphalt. And so on. The materials are actually in the repository and University of Idaho.

But they're they're at the University of Idaho in the, Northern repository here at the Bowers lab.

Doug Exton: Awesome. Thank you. Can you talk a little bit about the items found in the blacksmith area? There's that. A whole separate presentation.

Dr. Mark Warner: It's been a few years since I did that. I can talk a little bit about that. I do have to go back and, like, noodle things through. I mean, you know, not surprisingly, the blacksmith area was a very different look than than, much of the other much of the other assemblage. It was heavy, heavy on metal scraps, heavy on, the slag and the byproducts of, of, metal working and so on.

The one kind of really entertaining thing that came out of that, which was I got a kudos to Mary Patrick guy who identified who was she actually in the cataloging process, found a little piece of window glass that had a caricature etched on on it of, some some sort of sketch of some some, you know, probably the, the manager or whatever.

This is one of those areas where, honestly, I didn't know much about going into, and then kind of came out of that going, Who knew about the variability of horseshoes? But that that was, you know, one of the, one of the findings that came out of there was like, well, I'm not going to speculate.

I'm kind of off. I'd be off base on that. But you can read all about the archeology of the blacksmith shop in the mere 1200 page report. That's in their technical report. If you really are motivated.

Doug Exton: Well, that's something I would have never thought to even look at is horseshoes, you know, and that's obviously not my forte, but I would never, you know, thought of horseshoes, completely different things.

Dr. Mark Warner: Well, I mean, and that's, you know, that's one of the things that the downside of historical archeology is you get overwhelmed with material culture. The upside is there's all these unexpected stories that you never think you're going to get into until you run into them. But yeah, there are there are horseshoes for working in, you know, if you're if your your horse is hauling logs have got different shoes than if you're horses taking you up and down the streets of a, of a city.

If you have a workhorse, if you have a kind of a horse, it's just for writing very different things. A couple of them were had evidence of people tweaking the horseshoes to adjust, for some sort of, ill not illness, affliction. You know, they had some little problem with their hoof, and it was, you know, like the horse equivalent of orthotics or something like that.

Doug Exton: And then is there any, you know, signage around that area and now, you know, kind of explaining what was here or is that housed more in the local museums? And there's a.

Dr. Mark Warner: There's certainly an exhibit still a museum. There was some signage that was going up. I have not been up there in a few years. I know the intent from Idaho Transportation Department was to put up some signage. I don't know how much is actually gone. The to sort of reflect what was there like, you know, that the diorama shot of, of the commercial district is a is a great picture and you can look from one side to the other.

I don't know if they've got things up, but I know at one point that was the discussion that they were going to they were going to launch about that.

Doug Exton: And then I was wondering, is, was there any kind of evidence as to, the ethnicities of the women that worked in the brothels? You know, did you find anything about that, or did you just find more of those material goods?

Dr. Mark Warner: Certainly not archeological evidence. We had some, historical evidence, trying to remember what what the what? One of them was identified as coming from France, though, the the standpoint the census records are somewhat notorious for, for, or, let's put this way, women who are working in prostitution were pretty well known for not exactly sharing every piece of information coming from France.

Certainly would sound good for from a, from a, you know, a marketing perspective. But whether they actually did I don't know. We do know some of the, some of the women that by name, because of the were listed in the same in the census record and there were occasional newspaper accounts of certain incidents went on at Herman and Anderson's, establishments, when, you know, we found one of the things I didn't talk about.

We have a little signet ring on there. And there was actually a Trixie Walker, working at one of the brothels, and, you know, we like to. It was speculation. Was that actually Trixie's ring or not? It's a reach, but it's it's kind of fun to speculate.

Doug Exton: And then also, can you talk about the, Chinese residents, you know, was that just kind of like conveniently there or well like more at play.

It's very different, understanding than, say, much of the archeology work that's been done in, say, Chinatowns where you had, you know, insular Chinese communities within the broader, you know, you had, you know, you had a critical mass of, you know, 102 hundred and 300 people living in a place. And here you had, you know, nine people.

Doug Exton: I was wondering if you can talk about the the reaction that people in Sandpoint had to this project. Not from the actual interstate or highway byway component, but, you know, the excavation and you're kind of re uncovering that history.

Dr. Mark Warner: A little bit. I mean, and this is where I think it was it was hard because and this is let's to be clear, this is pretty typical of most, constructions driven archeology projects in the sense of you, you put fences up to keep people out. You don't make a whole lot of noise about what's what's going on.

And that was the case that there was a case of, that we had, and it was hard. It was really dragged. I mean, it wasn't dragged out, but we they would we had to work in shorter shifts. So the fieldwork took two years, and that was 2 or 3 years to to analyze and write up the report.

So it was like 5 or 6 years before or, you know, the local folks knew something was going on, but they couldn't. There wasn't a whole lot of communication about it. There were a couple open house days that my colleagues, Jim Bart and Bob Weaver, ran. That was, you know, it attracted a certain audience, but, you know, several years after the fact, I mean, when we had an opening at the Bonner County Museum, it was extraordinarily well attended.

My since I came and talked to folks up there in the last year or two. But, you know, it's a it's a regular draw. People are appreciative of Nancy Rank's stuff. We also build some teaching trunks for a couple schools there. So in other words, there was some stuff there. And we do have a systematic sense of how it's been perceived.

Not exactly. Do I think in a different world, we could have done more. We could have done something more proactive. Yeah. But that was just the the rules of engagement at the time.

Doug Exton: And then besides the fact that this was, you know, the largest project in Idaho history, can you compare this project to other historic community excavations in Idaho? Were there are there any that have happened that are similar in a way?

This was I mean, you know, the building, a building, a highway through a four lane highway, through an area that was a historic district just doesn't happen very often. And, you know, that's that was a unique combination of circumstances, the scale, I guess I'm saying the the topics of being asked have been asked in other ways throughout the state, but the scale of it, it certainly has not not happened.

Doug Exton: And then do you think something like this could have happened if the byway was never built? Or do you think that byway was really the catalyst for this entire thing to happen in general?

Dr. Mark Warner: That's a that's a really interesting question. There is no way there has been that amount of archeology done at that location, without the byway being built. And the fact that that three quarter mile long district was going to, was going to be effectively destroyed, that wouldn't that wouldn't have happened. That being said, it also was not going to be disturbed all that much until the byway came through.

So there may not have been that need to have done that. So it's a, you know, it's a that's a really it's an interesting kind of issue in the sense of we learned a lot. We got a lot out of it. We saw an extraordinary amount of data, but it was the product of a an extraordinary set of circumstances as well.

That the left here on the left, to my own devices, what I willingly say I'm going to go dig up 600,000 artifacts. Absolutely not. That's that, that's that's way too much.

Doug Exton: Yeah, well, and thank you for all the insight, all the information in that wonderful presentation. Unfortunately, we are out of time today, but. Well, thank you everyone for attending. And like I said, thank you for having me.

Dr. Mark Warner: Yeah. And and I would absolutely say, if people want to, to get in touch with me, to feel free to, to just shoot me emails. After this, you got my email. It's in Warner at you, Idaho edu. And I'll be happy to to to answer anything that I didn't get to. I see that there were like 2 or 3 Q&A days.

I don't know if you're trying to knock them off. Feel free to feel free to shoot me emails.

Doug Exton: Awesome. Have a great day, everyone.

Dr. Mark Warner: Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. And kudos to Idaho Humanities Council. This was great. Much appreciate it. Take care. The.