Provisioning Camp Floyd: An Analysis of Faunal Remains

Abstract

From 1858 to 1862, the United States Army operated Camp Floyd, a military outpost in Utah’s Cedar Valley that, at its height, housed thousands of soldiers. Even though Camp Floyd has long since been abandoned, clues about life there can be coaxed from archaeological remains. Dale L. Berge, a professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University, and his students conducted archaeological field schools at Camp Floyd from 1982 to 1993. Most of the artifacts they recovered came from several refuse pits, and the largest collections of artifacts consist of ceramics, glass, and animal bones.1 Unfortunately, very few collections from Berge’s excavations have been analyzed. The majority of the field work was done by Berge’s students and volunteers, and information about the project comes from student field notes, maps, and the physical artifact collection.2 The following article represents the first in-depth analysis conducted on the animal remains excavated from Camp Floyd (CF87–1).3