Archaeologists finally dug at Fort Astoria, and found the fur trade still there

Excavations at Fort Astoria Memorial Park. NPS.

Fort Astoria was one of the oldest colonial fort sites in the Pacific Northwest, a fur trade post that ran from 1811 — renamed Fort George in 1813 — until 1848. It has been a National Historic Landmark since the 1960s on the strength of that history. What nobody had done was dig.

Five days in 2012

Between 31 July and 4 August 2012, National Park Service archaeologists worked three locations on the site with students and staff from Portland State University and Washington State University Vancouver, helped by the City of Astoria and by staff from Fort Vancouver National Historic Site and Lewis and Clark National Historical Park.

The field school report sat unpublished for eight years. In 2020, at the City of Astoria's request, the regional National Historic Landmark programme published it.

What came out of the ground

Enough fur-trade material to confirm the fort's location and to say something about how it worked. Alongside it came nineteenth- and twentieth-century artefacts from the city dwellings built over the site after the fort was abandoned.

The two are not separable, and that turns out to matter. Fort George is not itself significant under the Landmark criteria — but the fur-trade items sit among the Fort George ones, and they are what supports the Landmark's historic integrity. You cannot excavate one without the other.

Very few preliminary tests have ever been made at these forts, which is why the archaeologists think trenches, trash pits and structural footings are probably still down there.

Why it is worth going back

More site visits would establish how much of the original fort survives. That would update the Landmark documentation, and it would add to what is known about the colonial period in the West generally — the fur trade emporium, the interactions between Indigenous people and settlers, and how Astoria itself came to be a town.

Where this belongs

• Fort Vancouver National Historic Site
• Lewis and Clark National Historical Park

Sources

Written from the National Park Service's
First Archaeological Investigations of Fort Astoria,
a work of the United States government in the public domain.