Abstract
This article presents the results of excavations on the dugout house site of Anna Byberg Christopherson Goulson in west-central Minnesota. Anna and Lars Christopherson reportedly moved into their dugout house ca. 1868. With the death of Lars and two of their five children in 1878, Anna married Hans Goulson (who had immigrated to the area from Wisconsin) in 1879. Sometime after the birth of their first child in the dugout in late 1879, Anna and Hans built a small wood-frame house on land located about one-half mile south of the dugout. The dugout house, like the sod house, was a typical solution for providing quick and inexpensive shelter for families settling new farms on the prairie frontier regions of the Upper Midwest. Archaeological investigations identified the Christopherson/Goulson dugout house and documented the belowground architecture of this intriguing structure. While neither the dugout structure nor the artifact assemblage is particularly reflective of the family’s Norwegian heritage, their subsequent ca. 1880 wood-frame house was decorated to reflect their Norwegian roots.
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Linebaugh, D.W. Excavating the Dugout House of Norwegian Immigrant Anna Byberg Christopherson Goulson, Swift County, Minnesota. Hist Arch 39, 63–88 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376686
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376686