One Sunday in October four years ago, Beau Burgess came to work at the Fort Douglas Military Museum and peered into a utility trench cut the day before at the historic U.S. Army outpost established in 1862 just outside the nascent Salt Lake City.
“You could see the bottles in the side of the trench,” said Burgess, now the museum’s director. He contacted the Utah Division of State History for guidance and thus began an archaeological project that continues to disgorge bits and pieces of everyday life from a 19th-century military base that is now part of the University of Utah.