This volume reports on work conducted by the National Park Service (NPS) and the Institute for Minnesota Archaeology (IMA) in 2001-2002 to extend knowledge of historic fur trade resources and activities within the area of Voyageurs National Park (VOYA). The project involved terrestrial and underwater archaeological investigations, archival research, artifact analysis, and informant interviews. Douglas Birk, Senior Archaeologist/Historian of the IMA in Minneapolis Minnesota, and Jeffrey J. Richner, NPS Archeologist with the Midwest Archeological Center in Lincoln Nebraska, served as principal investigators.

This work is part of a broader study. An earlier phase of the study, a literature review completed in 2000, documented the park’s environmental history and assembled some historical information relevant to fur trade experiences in the VOYA between 1730 and 1870 (Catton and Montgomery 2000:4).

VOYA is a NPS unit located in the Rainy Lake-area of northern Minnesota. The park incorporates over 217,000 acres and a part of the “Voyageur’s Highway,” an old mainline fur-trade canoe route extending between Lake Superior and the northwest interior of Canada. Much of the park area is comprised of surface water, now regulated by reservoir dams. While the surface water has influenced local settlement, land use, and transportation since ancient times, it is the historic era of the fur trades that gives VOYA its historical identity and name. The NPS is currently sponsoring programs to locate, identify, evaluate, and protect fur trade resources in the park, and the IMA, through a cooperative agreement with the NPS, is assisting these efforts.