Home > 2001 Workshops

Joel Schuldenrein and Glen Doran on Preservation

Joel Schuldenrein: We're going to do a kind of a Mutt and Jeff kind of a routine here. We're not going to do a visible slot per person because we are basically coming from such completely different perspectives that we felt that we needed to make it either clash or meld. So, the way we're going to structure it, I guess, is I'll give a little bit of background of myself and then Glen is going to talk about some major issues because he's the university guy, and then I'm going to talk about simple issues because I'm working in the linear world. [laughter]

Ruth Tringham: Bad attitude.

JS: Raised in the dirt school that's how we think so . . . a little bit of background here. What I'm interested in primarily and what I do in archaeology–because in many cases this is a linear world, is, I'm a geo-archaeologist; and so they tell me, "Please do the dirt." And, in the course of doing the dirt for very, very many years, I've done the dirt all over the world and so I have different perspectives on how the dirt is done and what its relationship is to archaeology, because believe it or not, I was trained as an anthropologist. So the perspective is very, very unique, and I hope some of that uniqueness will come out over the course of the presentation. The other issue is that while we're formally charged with the objective of talking about preservation, largely tilting into the CRM community, we're talking about some very pragmatic issues that wherever your reach is, or whatever your domain is in archaeology and in anthropology, there's going to be some overlap, and what's really critical for me, as far as I can see, is that we get some input from people who represent a relatively diverse community within the archaeological community, a sub-group within the archaeology community. I would like to see where people's responses are to the types of materials that we're going to present, and the types of perspectives we're presenting with this particular presentation that we have. Now, we're not 100% sure where we're going with this, it will diverge; and we're going to encourage a non-linear outcome, but by the same token [appreciative responses] . . . So, we will start with the issue of preservation. We will talk about some issues about compliance, and then we'll start to diverge into some issues and topics that everybody's going to be interested in. Glen?

Glen Doran: One of the questions that's been puzzling Joe and I, and I guess I'll do the same thing in terms of introduction. I'm Glen Doran from Florida State University, and if I stand over here, a lot of people will know me as a physical anthropologist, I'm primarily in skeletal biology, I do a little bit of forensics on the side–that's where a lot of my academic research and publications come from. But, if I come back over here, I am really an archaeologist, and in fact I've done ceramics place element analysis. I have a new toy that geo-probes so I'm getting real close to this guy with dirt samples. We can get you some really nifty dirt samples, but Joe and I did both sort of question of why were we the ones picked to talk about preservation issues, and perhaps by the end of this you may be asking yourself the same question. [chuckling] We'll see about that. We have looked at a variety of different things, and one of the things that I want to sort of quickly read to you is the list of people who have stakes in this and who have specifically written about preservation of sites. And this is just a tiny, tiny list–Sabloff, Mackenzie, Smith, Erin-hard . . . , Nickens, King, Lerner (who just left, she was wondering if I was really going to say something or not, and the answer is–yes), McLannish, Benz, Owl, Messenger, McNutt, Knott, Brose, Schott, Judge, Mathison, Nickens, Hoffman, McMannamon, Jamison, Keal.

And we could around the room, and everyone of you has talked about in class and written into your literature the importance of site preservation and what the issues are. So this is something that truly does transcend everyone of the possible classes that you can have. There's no, in some ways, more single, important component to archaeology and particularly when we think about teaching undergraduate students who come in a take one class and then disappear. These are the people who are going to be on the street, and these are the people who, for many of us, act as eyes and ears out there in the community. There is another component to that that is also real obvious to a lot of us, in that these are the people who, in many cases, will be framing legislation, or voting on that legislation. And if they think they know what the issue in terms of site preservation and site destruction are, then they will be on our side. If they go to our classes, whatever they are–whether it's a Meso-American class or a class on lithics, or the general anthropology classes–and they take that class, and they don't walk away with a certain sense of paranoia, then we've kind of missed the boat.

There was a time when we used to call cultural resource management archaeology, salvage archaeology, and I actually like that term. I still try to use it even though the next generation or two doesn't know exactly what you're talking about, but we still are doing salvage archaeology, whether it's under controlled manners or uncontrolled manners. Because there are still incredible threats to archaeological sites and historic heritage and so on, and there's dozens and dozens of state programs, there are dozens national programs that address this issue. You know . . . classes, 106 classes–there all focused on the same thing: what is happening to the archaeological record. This is not just a problem in Indiana, or Florida, or Ohio–it's all over the world, and we actually do a pretty good jog compared to a lot of places in the world that many of us work. I think we kind of in our classes, frequently have gotten away from some of the horror stories that spurred, in some cases, some of us into archaeology. Did you see the bulldozers out there?–Slack farm is really great, I mean, even somebody who doesn't have a deep sense of archaeological heritage, and what should be done and what can be learned. When they see those pictures from Slack farm, and it looks like a minefield, that's a pretty gripping image.

JS: Let me just interject here, the most critical issue I think for this particular forum, especially in dealing with undergraduate education, what we were talking about earlier, about the non-majors, the non-majors clearly have to be infused with some information regarding what preservation is about and what the law is about. When I first started doing this 20 years ago, we had in place preservation law, the national historic preservation act based back in 1966 basically did not do a ton until 1976 or the late 70s when a lot large scale development projects started to actually impact . . . historic resources. When that started to occur, the people who were positions of power in private enterprise were folks from the very old school, corporate folks, these were the people with the big cigars, the folks that one day we'd draw the cartoons about. And, when folks like us, basically university people went out there, very green and without much of a track record of historic preservation, we'd go to THESE guys in their huge mahogany offices and say, "Well sir, there's an issue of preservation here." And you see the guy smoking rings in your face and says, "Uh huh, Uh huh. What's it gonna cost, and why do we have to do." And when we told them that, they would get on the phone with a congressperson and then all of a sudden we would disappear. We were gone, we're history. We would get a phone call from somebody in whatever company we worked, and they said, "We got a call." And that was enough.

Well right now that's not the case because the people who have not inherited positions of corporate power, as much as you want to undermine what they ultimately do . . . , they KNOW something about compliance, and the folks who are advising them know something about compliance. And because basically the amounts of money that we deal with are that great anyway in terms of what corporate people have, they say, "You know what, we do not want those green-oriented congress people–who do exist in the world–to even annoy us! And we do know a little bit about what has to be done, we will go ahead and we will pay attention to whomever these people are that making us do this." And it does get done, sometimes with more pain, sometime with less pain, but it will get done. In very many cases right now, because there are grassroots movements that protest the presence of things like gas pipelines in their backyard, there is now a concerted effort on the part of private industry to make this and convert this into a good public relations machine, and so they will pay for a small museum. They will pay for an educational forum to get the community on their side, and you could call that manipulation, and in many cases it very well may be, but the bottom line is that these types of strategies and increasing enhancement of a preservation mentality has started to really infiltrate into all the sectors of the society. And so, if we want to get this message across, then as we had said before, the undergraduate slot is the key slot because these are the people that will be making decisions. In that sense, this becomes a very critical issue.

GD: I suspect some of us have probably spent more time in the last 2 or 3 days listening about education and hearing what educators are saying then we probably have in our entire careers. Most of us were not trained to do any of things, in terms of education–they just said, "Well, you know, your class starts at 8 o'clock on Monday morning in Introduction to archaeology, Good luck." They might not have even said ‘Good luck.' They said, "It's there and it's yours and go forth and do the best you can." So, I'm going to try to incorporate some of things that I have heard, which actually I think I was already doing in some respects. I'm going to give each of you a piece of paper. I'm not going to give you one [Trudy Banta]. I'm going to give all of you, some of the students too–I'm going to skip over you, actually if you look at this piece, this is a piece of paper stolen from the hotel. Florida is having some profound budget cuts, and I'm trying to be as efficient as possible.

AP: Are you going to take attendance with these?

GD: No, I'm not going to take attendance. I'm actually going to collect data . . . On that piece of paper, I want you to write . . . these are archaeological questions, and what I'd like you to do is write a very short set of letters because this is what we're going to collect in terms of data as we go along. And if I remember to do this, it will be active learning. . . . So if you take this piece of paper and draw three lines across it, and then up at the top of those, write ‘YES' and in the next column write ‘YENS' and in the third column write ‘NOS' and in the fourth column write ‘NOSDD.' . . . It relates to the columns going up and down on the page like this. This is not a complex multimedia task, but I already know what the trouble is.

Q:You're doing it with archaeologists? Is that the trouble? [laugher]

GD: In this first column, what I would like you to do–this is Your Estimator State, and that's literarily, what state are you in as in terms of a geographic area where you work. SO that's real simple.

AP: Where you work or where you teach?

GD: Either way, you can put Mesoamerica or South America or California or Arizona. So that's the first thing that you're going to do. In the 2nd column, put how many–your estimate of the number of students who take an archaeology class in a year at your school, our emphasis is really on undergraduates.

Q: And those of us who are not professors should? [JS:--ignore this exercise. Laughter]

GD: Ignore this exercise, that works, although you do–How many students do you teach a year that would have a utility for knowing more about site preservation, what the issues are, virtually everyone you teach out there.

Lady in the corner: Well that's what I do.

GD: So how many of them do you touch a year. Because these are at some level the people that we need to touch and get some of this information across to, and now we'll go on to some of it that is actually more . . . I don't know this is pretty challenging. There are any number of people that could do this equally as well, perhaps even better than we could with much more information in some cases, longer periods of active involvement. If you think about why we care about archaeological site preservation, resource preservation, however you want to term. There are obviously some real clear issues. Everyone of us has said 1,000 times in a 1,000 classes, archaeological sites are non-renewable. This is the most obvious thing that any of us can get across.

One of the other things that is obvious is the rate of destruction is increasing, now there are a couple of obvious reasons why the rate of destruction is increasing. One is that there are simply more of us on the globe today than there were last year, or last hour. So, if we don't do anything but what we have done in the past, there are more actors on that stage having a potential impact on archaeological sites. This also factors into the fact that we're looking at incredible, incredible unprecedented landform transformations because of technological issues, there's bulldozers that are wonderfully large, some of the construction techniques now believe in plane-ing everything away. I mean it's not just, you put the house on top of it, you do some pretty serious excavation. And those are just the little things.

The expansion of agricultural lands, in some cases directly related to obvious increase for food production, all of those things are factors in this whole process. Obviously, and every body knows most of these things, they know all of these things. These sites, these resources are, in fact, the repositories of information for future generations; there's no way around it. Again, we've been saying this in everyone of the classes, or we should have been. But I guess we haven't or we wouldn't be here, trying to get this message across. And these are very simple messages, if we don't have better public awareness, we're always going to be caught on this merry-go-round that just keeps going in a circle, and in places that have very, very active local, national archaeological entities and programs, you can already see sort of the wheels of this process starting to slow down.

One of the areas that I'm not as well familiar with as I'd like to be, is Pensecola in Scambia County, where Judy Dench has been working for about the last 20 years. And it has been a dramatic transformation because she's active, she's vocal, she's visible. There is an incredibly heightened public awareness; I remember in talking to Judy years ago, she said the first thing that she would ask in group, "Where is the closest archaeological site?" or "Where is an archaeological site?" And she said she got really tired of people say, "Oh, Egypt! Israel, Jordan, Turkey. . ." You know pick one of those places, rarely would people say, "Actually right across the street . . . down the corner." They're everywhere! And people would kind of say, "Really, you mean there's sites right here? In this place?" And now I think that most of the people in Pensecola and in the Scambia County are little more conscious, and in fact, because of this public awareness, she has gotten some county mandates and regulations that directly touch the archaeological resources. She's one only of her area, and because of her, it is one area that has a local archaeological ordinance. And it wasn't necessarily easy to get through; it doesn't do everything' it has some problems . . . the fact is that if is far move than what we saw there when she walked in the door.

Again, the people that we touch in these undergraduate courses, potentially will vote, not all of them. Potentially, they will vote on issues, and some of them will, in fact, go off and become managers, become business people, become legislatures, and god-forbid, they'll probably, some of them, become lobbyists. And if they know what the issue is, that can only help us, and that can only help us regardless of where you work, whether it's in the States or in some other country. One of the things that Joe and I were also talking about . . . there is an incredible economic impact with archaeological site preservation, some of it's real, real obvious, and in fact there are multiple voices in this process. In some cases archaeology in some communities was initially seen as, ‘This is going to slow stuff up. We'd just as soon for you guys to do it fast, do it cheap and get out the way.' But in a lot of communities, you're seeing the alternative as well, actually it is–‘Neat, let's emphasize our archaeological sites. Let's emphasize our heritage.' And that translates not only into the person that may own the concession or the gate at the site, or the whatever, but those folks, who are there–they go stay in a hotel, they're going to have a beer, they buy something, and they can contribute to the local economy. There was a study done about 15 years ago, and they asked the people coming into Florida to sort of rank the kinds of things you would be interested in seeing, and either 1st or 2nd came historic heritage and archaeological sites. We thought that was pretty exciting, in fact, some of those answers were actually thinking about the Disney theme park [laughter]–but that's another story. But there is this interest, of all the disciplines out there, we have in some ways the easiest job to excite the public.

JS: And have done a miserable job at it, to actually make something that's implicitly exciting extremely dull.

GD: We have not diminished the interest (despite that we have failed). There are still people out there who want to know about what it is we do, the sites we're at. You can look at this in the volunteer programs. Everyone of us has probably used volunteers at one point: sometimes in class, sometimes in the field. And everyone of those people can go out into the community and become a disciple for us, this is a Messianic movement in my opinion. You know we're no better or no worse than the Pentecostals or anybody else. We have a product and a message, and we want you on our side.

JS: Speaking of voices, the other brewing issue is economic-stimulus in 3rd World countries. Many, many 3rd world countries, quite frankly, and this is probably something that one shouldn't say, but they have better stuff than we do. You can argue this back and forth, but when you look at Tel? sites, when you look at Mesoamerican pyramids and you look at the kind of stuff we have in New York. Ah, sorry. But by in large, on a relative scale, if you're going to speak to a relatively uninformed public, they're going to say, "Egypt!" So the issue that emerges here is that there's also a strong correspondence with outstanding archaeological sites and being in the 3rd world, and because we're in economic crisis and going into a more severe economic crisis, one of the things that we have to wrestle with in the public archaeology community is how to move these concepts, techniques, and perspectives into the 3rd world.

Probably most significant issue here is that Americans are very provincial, insular people; and we do not and we are afraid to go places in which we have to interact very heavily. Some of that is simply due to the fact that we have always have felt we were the biggest and greatest there is and the smartest (which of course is not true). The other thing is that we have basically been very stable and when we go into places into the 3rd world, the stability issue really dissipates rather quickly. So a lot of the people who are in the best position to fund these questions, to utilize the resources that are in fact available are very, very scared of going into a place where you may not come back. And of course one of the most stark examples is the Buddhist temples and the Taliban that we've heard about in Afghanistan. These are very, very sensitive issues obviously, and this of course, again, is where the anthropological perspective could not be more important . . . .

One of the main problems that we have is, of course, when you start talking about heritage management in unstable countries, there's inherent problem. I mean, what are you getting into? And these are questions that we will have to wrestle with because of globalization and anthropologists are now placed optimal positions in providing the input here, and if we don't grab this, it will grab us, and it will be a very dangerous situation. So what I'm saying is that we're starting to do it, there are now CRM firms, US-based that are going into places like Egypt, they are going to places like Pakistan, receding for the time being. But, this is the wave of the future, heritage conservation on a global scale, like everything else is going to be huge, and we do, in fact, have the best, probably the best technology and the best resources to be able to do this. We do not have the best people skills, and we certainly don't have the strongest international skills. So that's another issue that we're going to get heavily involved in.

Q: Are you talking about people being invited from the U.S. to go to these other places?

JS: I'm talking about development agencies, people like the World Bank, who don't have a good name, USAID–that has a questionable name, but people who do ultimately have deep pockets.

RT: I was going to say that this can backfire. It can backfire, two cases recently where it did backfire. One's in Egypt and the other is in Honduras I think in terms of the preservation being taking as, being linked to tourism and that . . . priority there, takes precedent over the actual local community, who are driven out of the place where the archaeological site is. And so, you've got this whole idea of cultural heritage of the people who live there not being as important as the archaeological heritage, and so it is a very, it's a really complicated issue.

GD: Yes [in agreement] if it wasn't complicated, we wouldn't be here.

RT: But because it's complicated I think that it's the full issue rather just preservation needs to be addressed.

GD: Right

JS: Absolutely, and that's why anthropology is so important because this clearly has a direct impact, an obviously Native American issues–it's probably way ahead, and in Native American issues, I would say that, I hate to say this in a way, but we're getting a sample of how this process works, and how it's bringing in elements of all the communities that are impacted from archaeologists, to regulators, to native peoples, and that's going to play itself out, but I want to tell you that while this is a wonderful map for how we're eventually going to have to do this. We're, as you had said Ruth, we're in uncharted waters here because we don't know, and it's something that is clearly going to be happening.

AP: Going back to the curriculum development themes: you can't teach preservation without teaching ethics.

GD: Right, it's so obvious, and that's why we didn't put it up there. [laughter]

AP: So many of the other concepts are involved, that really you're talking about the entire set when you're talking about preservation.

GD: And we're in the best position as anthropologists for doing that, as geologists might want to preserve land forms and blah, blah, blah. They might spend so much time in thinking about living people, living cultures that hopefully we have. We're in the best seat; if we can't do it, it's not going to get done with all of these multifaceted ideas.

AP: There is a move in archaeology to move archaeology away from anthropology, and I think we can't afford to have conversations about that at this point. But, I will say that the link between ethnographic knowledge, and ethics, and stewardship and preservation are the reasons that I can't separate.

GD: And again, as we've said, this has an obvious issue in terms of national pride: it's not just a positive point. You have to balance very carefully. We can see where this has in fact in the past historical record become pretty rampantly racist and exclusionary and everything else so it is a very tough issue, but just because it's tough doesn't mean that we are not going to have face it, and that we shouldn't face it. I think we should face it head on and do the best we can. And the reason we're here is because as a profession we know we need to be attentive. If this was not a significant issue, this would not have ended up as one of the strong elements that should be in the curriculum. Because there is a sense that somehow we weren't quite getting everything in that we should, so that is part of our professional obligation, but I think it's also absolutely critical for the lay public. There's always going to be more folks out there than there are archaeologists who go around with a hoe, otherwise we've got some serious issues in the job market. [laughter]

But I would like to believe that we can enlist their support, assistance, and make them knowledgeable when they have to make decisions, some of which, we will not even have thought of. We all get phone calls from people, who are interested in what they found in their backyard, in their sewer line, whatever; and those folks are already predisposed to doing the things that we're interested in doing, we just need to keep doing more of what we've been doing. One of the things that we haven't done a very good job on either, and Joe has a slide on this, is the 106 process. And in fact, that's what Linda is professionally, she goes out there [teaching this process]. But, how many archaeologists have taken your class?

Lynn Sebastian: In the last 2 years? [GD: Yeah.] Probably about 400.

GD: How many academicians in departments have taken your class?

LS: Vin going to come in DC! [laughter]

GD: Vins going to be one of the few coming from an academic context. I mean, I think I heard you at lunch yesterday say something like, "You know there are a lot people who don't understand the 106 process even yet?!"–paraphrasing somewhat.

JS: So let's take a look at it really quickly.

GD: So this is something that could go in every class. This is part of the national law: it ought to be there.

LS: And the other thing is that it is a process that people, average people can use to preserve stuff and when you're talking about the non-major undergraduates, if they're aware that there is a legal process out there and have some idea of how to tap into it, they become the people in the communities who are on the lookout for problems. So it is important so that they at least become aware that there are legal processes that are available to them.

AP: . . . there are some courses where students can substitute for a term paper a nomination for a site.

JS: We're just going to through a very generic flow chart for national register evaluation process. This is the section 106 process, which is basically the broad over-arching law for the US and we're going to talk about that just in a general sense–Glen feel free to chime in as we're going . . . . Basically, I'm sure a lot of folks here are interested in this; we are based on a research issue–research questions are critical in terms of the 106 process. In this flow chart we're looking at a variety of different parameters; there are region concerns, local concerns, and theoretical concerns, and methodological concerns in the evaluation of sites and significance. One of the key elements is how the field procedure is undertaken, and obviously the most important pieces of information are archaeological data sets in many cases also non-archaeological, architectural data sets, historic architectural data sets. And then we proceed into a loop.

GD: These are one of those columns? that should be in every one of our classes. I think they could all identified? .

Vin Steponaitis: We could talk about this later, but I believe that this kind of stuff should in the curriculum, but I wouldn't agree that this stuff should be, that everything should be in every class.

GD: I might be able to satisfy you by disguising the 106 process to say here's a region, when you're doing archaeology you think about regional issues, you think about local, you think about field methodology–so those are all components that are there.

JS: Well let's just quickly go through this and then we'll discuss it. Major question–does the site posses integrity? If it doesn't, you drop down into whether or not it possesses theoretical and methodological data. Does it have a know time period? And again, these are standard criteria, we can argue the pros and cons–historic preservation officers do that very often. . . . Does it have a single component, if it doesn't have a single component, are the components separable? In other words, you're getting back to the integrity, again what the level of information is that you can get. Is it dispersed in a plow zone? In which case, the level of data–the level of analysis you can possess often shifts as well, and when it meets all these criteria on the left-hand side, then you nominate it towards the national registrar of historic places. If it does not, then you do not nominate it.

When these nominations and assessments are done, then you go through the process of various types investigations, some of which we talked about with Lynn's square before. The square that was placed in the middle of the room here 2 days ago was generally part of an eligibility determination because that's the testing process, where you want to look at the questions of integrity. And so, as this process starts to whittle its ways out, we eventually develop criteria that most people in positions of authority and people who make these determinations could have–"Oh these make the criteria which we can actually answer some significant questions about both research and our heritage." And then we have the nominations of the national registrar or eligibility for nomination, again I'm not going to get into all these details. Lynn is there anything you want to add on this?

IUPUI: Is there a form that you can pick up somewhere?

GD: There are several forms actually.

Another: Is this flow chart available anywhere?

GD: The fact that you don't have it means that we have failed, for 25 years we have failed.

LS: Ann, maybe something that would be useful is that I could get some of the materials from my section 106 class, not all the material or you wouldn't pay me to come and teach you, but a good summary of the 106 process and some additional information about how it works and make it available.

GD: You could make this a tiny, clear 5 minute module presentation. I think this will work. I mean because what we're talking about is archaeological significance–it just happens to be the 106 process, but when you talk about research this is an issue.

Nancy White: Just mention asking the students the first day, where's an archaeological site?–there's one across the street. You're going to go back to that, you're always going to have some local, or some regional, national relevance. This is the time, even if you're teaching straight culture history, you know, the so and so site we're reading about today. How would it make it through this process?

AP: Vin has a question, and I want him to ask it because I think I want to answer it.

VS: Well, let me just . . . I guess an observation, and this is coming from someone who is a believer that this sort of stuff should be taught and should sort of appear–I mean, it needs to be there more than it is. But, I think we need not to loose sight of the fact that particularly when we're talking about the undergraduate level, teaching the message of stewardship, I think is fundamentally more important than teaching the details of the section 106 process, now we could debate that, but I think we need to not loose sight of that. [a lot of reaction and laughter at this] And observation number two, and this is, I guess, from personal experience. When I got the message, the first time I got the message, that we needed to do more of this, and I started making the effort. I actually invited someone to come to class, this is to a graduate class now, and talk about Section 106. And this was somebody talking about Section 106 to interested graduate students, not to an introductory class, but it was–they took a flow chart like that and put it up on the board and spent two hours going through it, and it had to be one of the most boring classes that anyone had sat through. So, I guess the punch-line of this observation is that if we teach this, particularly if we tried to teach this at the undergraduate level, it has to be done in ways that are creative and that don't get bogged down in the details . . .

GD: We could do it just like Joel did, 7 minutes then they have a comprehension.

JS: I agree with that, one the other hand, I would question a graduate student, who can't follow something like this for a few hours.

AP: But Jean pointed out that this could be a wonderful, interactive gave on the Web.

JS: That's right.

[Discussion on the potentials of this . . . ]

Joe Watkins: The thing about the Section 106 process: it makes a great teaching tool if you say, "Okay well, here's a group of regional, local, theoretical, methodological . . ." But, if you notice that stewardship plays roles in all of this because you have different people–descendant communities, you have different legislatures, okay so this is how this interacts, you want to work on diverse pasts? Okay, you've got it in here. Research questions, who decides those? Ethics and values–oh well, archaeological data, is it ours, is it there's, whose is it? So you can use this as a tool to get all 7 of these, and still get the point across that it is a process that students need to know about, and you can actually teach these in 5 different levels without them knowing you're teaching it.

VS: Well, I agree with what you said about some of the mechanics of teaching and how it can be used in teaching all those–100% in agreement on that. I guess the thing I was questioning was just a more fundamental point, and that is, which is the tail and which is the dog. At the undergraduate level, remember we're reaching students who are not going to even by archaeology majors, most of whom, they're going to be lawyers and bankers and insurance salesman and car salesman and all that, and Section 106 is of critical importance, NAGPRA is of critical importance in this country, we can think lots of other pieces of legislation that are of critical importance in this country. But is not of critical importance that students, particularly at the lower levels know the details, so if you choose to use this to teach that–that's great, but I could see teaching those principles using other tools as well, and that's not necessarily bad.

JS: I don't think we're arguing about that at all--

GD: Yeah, we're not.

JS: And one of the reasons I said, I do not want to go into the details, because even with this very enlightened group, there will be some ZZZ's copped. So that's true, but the other issue that I'd pose to you is that undergraduates, especially in our snapshot society, they pick up little things. If you say Section 106, somewhere in that television commercial brain, that will be lodged. The worst thing you can do, by the way, is to have a lawyer teach you Section 106. There is nothing worse than that, I've seen it, and I no idea what that man's talking about.

Bill Lipe: I think at the undergraduate level the important things to establish, or one important thing to establish is that Section 106 is a section of the National Historic Preservation Act. This is a national statement that historic values are important, and it establishes through this section a planning and evaluation process, by which the significance of historic sites can be judged before development for federally-supported development projects . . . . So I think you've got to put it into context, and this could best as an example of how that rational process works, but you've got to put it into context of the national–

EK: I would like to go back to what Joe was saying, and on top of this being a tool for teaching all the things that we're trying to get across in this whole project, legislation, which includes Section 106 and this process, this is an excellent way to teach critical thinking skills. And, not only that, going through this process teaches students how to evaluate information on any level, and as undergraduate–so this will make you happier. As an undergraduate, I took a government class in American Indian politics and policy, as an anthropology student. Learning how to read and evaluate and understand and figure out the holes in legislation is one of the most important things that I learned as a college student, and I don't that it's just because of how it applies to archaeology. I mean was just an amazing experience, and I think learning how to read documents and figure out the holes and figure out where people are being sort of tricky, and you know, I mean those are all skills that apply way beyond archaeology, but have been really integral to my further education as an archaeologist.

Sarah Quick: I was just going to add to the support and say that if students learn something about a legal issue that is relevant to them as citizens, they are going to pay more attention to it. Learning these values are going to become concrete, and they're going to also learn about legislation, you know, it's a dual teaching approach.

Rosemary Joyce: Just to endorse this–I've used this to talk to students about my central American sites, because when I say that all the sites in the Honduras are government property, or property of the people of Honduras, one of the first things that happens is that that's a very weird and exotic concept. And it shouldn't be a weird and exotic concept because our students should know that we legislation, but they don't know that. And if you walk people through this in the abstract, I agree, I'd fall asleep in 5 minutes, but if you take a real site and say, "Let's just go through this." You can use it as a way to talk about the research process, which is certainly what we try and teach our students, and for me, in a way, to get them understand that what's happening in the weird and exotic place that I go, is something that's actually happening around them. And I really think that there's 2 different aspects to this. One is that if you came in and just said, "Here's the legislation that applies to archaeology in the United States" and did that, then they'd fall asleep and there's no point. If you make it, this is one of those few things where legislative process actually in some sense mimic an intellectual process that they really have to use in thinking about archaeological sites. That way you're giving them collateral learning.

AP: And that was the answer to your question I wanted . . . I should also say that one of the goals here is to completely subvert it, that we have brain candy from archaeology and we're going to use that interest that people come with, going in and teach them something they want them to know, whether or not it's obviously . . . I mean they really ought to know something about.

VS: Is this the question you thought I was going to ask?

??: Even more important is that the students are pre-adapted for this. This is a map of tomb-raider or any other video game you can think of. All you need to do is stick a picture of Laura Cross up there, and they've got the idea, and you pick a site and you take it through this process, and she kills Nazis along the way, but seriously they think in these terms.

??: You'd kill to birds with one stone if you went to the trouble of creating sets of data for a ?? questionnaire and had students learning from this outside of class. It would make these decisions the bait for them to write it up . . .

GD: It begs for that sort activity.

RT: It also begs for a . . . internet as Jean was saying–you could make a beautiful thing out of this. You could make something where you would have the links, you could go from to the other. . . . Keep asking the question, actually I don't know, some character saying, "But! This is my site laddies!" [Laughter] In addition to a public presentation format, and you could go back later and advise them to try this out for themselves as a game . . .

NW: We have another subversive goal here and that is changing the academic tradition. If you look at the textbooks, you know, intro. Archaeology have all the methods and stuff, and at the end one chapter social or the prehistory of wherever it is on earth textbook might now be a little bit enlightened and have at the end a chapter archaeology and the people today, but that shouldn't be a little chapter at the end, and if you stick this stuff in, you know the museum-designed class–how did we get this stuff in this museum? Well, let's look at the 106 process, we had to be the agency that took it, what are the records, you know is the place significant, why and stuff. Whatever the concept is, if it could be fed in there in a less painful way, I'd love to see us do something that would go so far as to impact textbooks because that's possibly too optimistic, but for people–there are so many colleagues out there that don't know this. If we could give them a painless–

AP: It has been suggested that one of a projects would be a textbook.

GD: And also, if we found out who was writing the textbook and said, "Hey we've got a whole bunch of resources here for you. We've got some web-links, we've got some pictures, they're free . . . Insert them." I think some of them will.

Maybe this is a dream or a vision of something, but I think I heard Brian Fagan say that he wants to write, that he wants to incorporate all this stuff. He's just waiting to get his hands on it.

GD: Yeah. We're doing the work for him. You know, I mean that's what we're doing. We're trying to provide tools and modules for everybody out there so I think they'll take advantage of it. . . . There is a need for a public understanding . . . that impact sites, and this is certainly also recognized on a national basis. ICOMOs has issues with site preservation, national heritage sites, international heritage sites, and there's a lot of stuff that they'll present to the papers on those kinds of issues. And Joe has a couple of photographs here.

JS: I'm going to show those later on with site preservation–

GD: I mean this is not just a local, national; it is an international issue wherever you want to work. Actually part of the active learning process is there are 12 errors in the overhead and there are 12 letters in the word p-r-e-s-e-r-v-a-t-i-o-n, which is what we're all about so if you can find the either grammatical or spelling errors in here, you will be our active learner of the week. One of the things that we think we need to do as part of this. It's one thing to stand up in front of an Intro class and say, "There are lots of things that destroy sites." But, I think if we were to say, "here are the things that destroy sites." And provide some information, and these are quite graphic, some of these are horrific and each of us has examples that we can provide of sites that we've either worked on or places that we've seen, Slack Farm and so on that really makes these vivid. Even the less than wildly enthusiastic, when they see Slack Farm, they understand what looting is. But, I always tell students and I think this a part of the issue, that we will never win because there are obviously natural forces out there at work that also erode sites, just the natural process, we can't get a way from that. But we can in some cases devise plans to [offset the destruction].

JS: If you North American archaeology and you're interested in the early periods, you know that the banks not withstanding, the peopling of the New World by and large occurred sometime around 20,000/15,000 b.p.–I'm not going to get into all the arguments. But what I do want to get into is the fact that this was contemporaneous, this generic time integral, if you want to call it that, was contemporaneous with the last phases of glaciation across the North American continent. Hopefully we can agree on that, if that's the case, then there were massive landscape overhauls across the continent, and basically across the world associated with the waning phases of glaciation and the introduction of new land-forming processes that fashioned that we could probably eventually track our way into. One of the issues here, and where I'm coming at with this, is that there are, in fact, well-documented sequences of environmental events that can be dated, gauged in terms of their magnitude and effects, in the Piturniary record of the geological record that are massive, their huge, they're enormous. They do not approach the levels of landscape modification that have occurred since the Euro-American [colonization] across most segments of the continent. They don't even approach it, and they occur in ways that are very difficult to discern because in some cases, if you're out in the areas West of the Mississippi river in semi-arid and ??? environments, mild changes in climate will result in massive erosion, witness things like the Dust Bowl that these types of overhauls have no parallels, and they probably don't have many parallels in the natural world. And so where I'm getting at is that, for preservation issues, the amount of site destruction since most of us and our ancestors came to this part of the world, were just massive and accelerated in scales that are very difficult to assess.

GD: Wait a minute Joe, so you're telling us that we could even talk about site preservation in the chapter where we talk about environment?

JS: That's correct. [laughter] So, what I'm saying is that we have to get a handle on this and we have to get a handle on this very fast. Fortunately, right now we're starting to understand that we can impede erosion, we can impede site destruction by doing, again, number of human-engineering operations that will help us and here's a couple examples of what we could do in that regard. Here's just an example–the covering of slopes, when the soil cover and the vegetation cover is stripped that is disaster because once you start getting into stripping slopes, then you have engineered a series of self-fulfilling erosional prophecies that can't be replaced in part because the cover soil itself is such a strong factor in binding the vegetation that it is the greatest impediment to erosion itself. Once slopes start to get stripped, this is a huge issue in your part of the world, obviously people who work in Mesoamerica, slope erosion is just almost uncontrollable and you get into a variety of different types of process that will completely your landscape. And they will both retard, obviously they're critical in terms of preservation because they destroy sites. On the other hand, they also give us some insights into how sites got there in the first place and we'll be talking about that a little later. But in this particular segment, I just wanted to mention how significant erosion is as a process. One of the most important issues that we have is where are sites located? Obviously, I would think, those of you who teach undergraduates will know this much better than I do, if we said, "Where do people, where are archaeological sites most likely to be found?" Will they say near water? [others affirm] They will say that.

GD: So you say the purpose of this information is to allow us to talk about predicting models?

JS: You can indeed! [laughter]

GD: Are you going to be able to talk about it in 41/2 minutes?

JS: That's right. This guy's a great . . . ? [laughter] So one of the things that I often do when I teach folks–and it's a variety of different kind of classes–is that valley systems and landscapes are critical in understanding why sites are where they are, and ultimately why they are preserved where they are, and why they get destroyed. This is a very brief model on how valleys evolve. Valleys will generically fall into 2 categories: there are U-shaped valleys and there are V-shaped valleys. V-shaped valleys, like that, will typically be formed by extensive erosional and incisional processes, by in large those are destructive. What you are seeing over here are the initial phases of valley formation in which you have the tops of valleys formed in terms of mountains, hills, and slopes that create the landscapes that we eventually have. This is just a generic model to show how landscapes evolve and where site preservation is actually supposed to pick up after you learn how the landscape formed.

Now we get into site preservation. This is a wonderful exercise that I always like to show. This is a site in Georgia called the Rucker's Bottom site. David Anderson and I worked on this site about, a long time ago, before I was thinking of things like Social Security. It's a wonderful site and the core of engineers, bless their hearts, understood that this is a very major issue, because they were going to turn this into a dam, which it now is. . . . Anyway, the core has eventually flooded this site; they're making, they're considering this particular area, which is a stratified, early archaic through woodlands site on the river. One of things that they didn't pick on, and the core's a great operation. Is anybody here from the core? [laughter] They are a wonderful group of people by in large, and they have some management tools that leave something to be desired. They think if you build more levees it won't flood, which we found out in the mid-90s doesn't work in the Mississippi valley. But one of the things they did here is they said, "Okay, we are going to make a lake here. And we have to make sure that we test it for archaeological resources because archaeological resources are obviously part of the 106 process." Here's a wonderfully stratified site; one day we went up on the plane and took some shots and said, "You know something core people, one of things you never really got right despite your best efforts is that this is an eroding river. And if you look at this point bar on the side of the river, you will see that eventually our site will be taken out, whether or not you want to put a lake in there or not."

So the core actually made a wonderful effort to recover the site because of its plans, but they didn't realize that this site would eventually be eroded by a natural process. So the core did a good thing despite itself. And we looked at this and we were kind of aghast, and we told the core guy. And he said, "Well we're doing the right thing." But eventually this site will fall off, and to understand that you really have to understand what natural processes are all about, what stream systems are all about, what flooding patterns are all about, and we're eventually going to get into some great discussions about that, but this in terms of the preservation sense is a really important lesson for people to understand. Most of the sites in North America, as unexciting as they are, have critical components that you will lose if you don't understand the natural landscape. As a matter of fact, corollary to that is the farther back you go in time, the more critical is the natural interface that you have to examine. So what a lot of agencies are now doing in terms of dealing with archaeological resources and landscape resources is restoring them, and this is a common preservation pattern that's called rip-wrap?–it's lining the edges of delicate streams to maintain the stream integrity.

Since archaeological sites are often on terraces of streams, we're able to negotiate an agreement with a pipeline company because there was a site over to keep this site intact by extending the preservation pocket, the preservation window that they had identified. So they reinforced the rip-wrap up on the tops of the terrace, to make sure that didn't get eroded and that the site would remain in place. Another example of that is one of these better developed U-shaped valleys with an extensive flood plane, where reinforcement also occurred along the side . . . of the depositional segment . . . to maintain the site and to maintain the integrity of the landscape. And we are now working with planners from all segments of the private and public sector to insure that sites get maintained by this type of procedure, so we're making major strides because we understand effectively how these landscapes change. So that's one of the issues we wanted to talk about. Glen did you want to talk about the biological–

GD: Yeah, flip it up and we'll go through them. You know when you're talking geology, geo-archaeological information, river valley formation, river destruction and so on; we've got some great examples of biological impacts on archaeological sites, and those go from tiny issues in terms of individual artifact preservation to the disappearance of whole sites. And some of that is natural in terms of just wild animals running amok, so to speak. And some cases, it's obviously creatures that we have brought in to geographic areas that are running amok and destroying sites. So there's this whole biological component, and the same thing is true of the botanical element. There's plenty of examples in Florida, we have a lot of shallow, tree roots so every time there's a big storm, you have these dimples from every site that's out there. These things tip over and they rip up everything that's with it. So it's real graphic, and again it's easy to show some of those in any of these classes.

When we talk more, and we can go on, this is hardly an exhausting list, but it ought to give you some sense that while these natural processes are taking place, an awful lot of them can be laid directly or indirectly at our doorstep. Things that we as individuals; we as society are doing. Some of it's intentional, obviously looting, some of it's not intentional. People never realized what was going on, they didn't even know there was a site there. They didn't know that what they were doing would have an impact on the site. And, I would have to remind you that, and most of us know this, excavation is destructive, and that's part of the balance that we have to achieve. Every time I dig a hole in the site, and you do too, you're destroying that part. So again, there's a very active role we each take in site destruction, whether or not we want to admit it or not.

JS: Another issue, this is not just true for preservation, and I'm going to talk about site formation at length a little bit later, I just wanted to interrupt for one second. People who deal with all types of archaeological sites have to deal with issues of disturbance and compromises of integrity. You work on early hominids stuff right? [talking to Jean Sept] One of the critical issues for early hominid sites is this phenomena called stone line; these are stones that occur in distinct lines in Eastern South Africa that are associated with very often actually in artifacts, and it's very difficult to identify the processes that will enable you to separate which came first. It turns out that termites tend to burrow their way in the sub-surface and will eventually create these collapsing surfaces on which you will find hand axes. It's an incredible task to figure out which is which because very often the hand axes themselves have been modified because of the ravages of time. So these types of processes affect us absolutely everywhere we look in the archaeological record. Biological and what are called sub-areal processes and eroding processes will have very major effect on site preservation.

Bill Lipe: One of the critical thinking issues that comes here is the notion of integrity, which of course is relative to what you're trying to do with the data. For some landscape archaeology project . . . , all you want to know is whether the artifact is still somewhere within a few hundred meters of where it was deposited so that whether it's been pushed around by bulldozer or a plow zone doesn't make much difference. [JS: that's right.] For other fine-grained problems, integrity may depend on the geo-microstructure of the . . . of the deposit. But that's an issue that I think that sometimes doesn't get enough attention, the relativity of the notion of integrity.

GD: If we go through and look at the other things that we do. Obviously, as agricultural change, those have impacts, timbering has impacts, animal husbandry practices have impacts, fire lines have impacts, all of those things . . . .

LS: This is a nice opportunity to bring in something. One of the things I like about using the 106 process and cultural resource management issues in classes is that it helps to tap in to sort of a natural social activism in young students. One of the things that the SAA government affairs committee is working on right now is the farm bill, in congress it's being re-upped. And, we have the opportunity to get archaeological sites included among the conservation measures, you know that pay farmers not to grow soy beans for all kinds of reasons. And land-leveling in the Southeast especially has been enormously destructive to archaeological sites, and so, we're working now to get provision in the farm bill that we can farmers not to do land-leveling over archeaological sites. . . . I think we may actually make it: it's passed the house already and things are looking pretty good in the Senate. . . .

GD: Some of these things are real obviously episodic impacts. I mean hurricane Andrew was a wonderful archaeological event. It made a lot of things much more visible, and a lot of collectors know that; they go out after big storms. They walk the beach; they walk the river, and they find sites. And those things are pretty interesting for tempting students . . . Some of these things are episodic, some of them are more consistent. I've seen a number of archaeological that have emerged in the gulf coast area, that have actually a 50 and 60 year old record of net changes because every time a shrimper would drag a net across there, it would snag it on the bough, or piece of equipment. And so there's build up of nets on the bough, which is a very consistent phenomenon that is not weather related.

Obviously these are local issues, state issues, federal and you also involve the private sector lobbyists–they get hit right in the face with some of them. The military, you've got military situations, whether or not they're just landing and building things and training, those are huge issues. People haven't done a whole lot with chemical alterations of the landscape in terms of fertilizer or things like that, but we know goes on. Much of what we do on a large scale basis has to do with the control of water, or the effort to control water, hydrological effects. You saw some slides from Joe, so those are real obvious things. One of the other natural phenomena, again I know all of you know these things and we could add to this all day long, is weathering. There are plenty of sites around the world, simply because, frequently we have exposed them, or we have made them more susceptible to these aerosol phenomenon, contaminants in the soil, pollutants, sound pollutants, vibration, you name it. And, in all lot of cases what people have done is they've excavated . . . and after they did their job, they've just left it exposed. There are a lot of publications out there that go into a great deal of detail on the physical-chemical-hydrological-biological interplay between these kinds of phenomenon, and we can, I mean you could do whole classes on this, but I don't think that's what any of us thinks would work in many of these situations. But to briefly expose and to make people aware of these things I think is what we're looking for, and one of the reasons we want to do this is that somewhere we hope 100 years from now there are going to be other archaeologists who will look back at what we've done and say, "Huh. I wonder what in the hell Doran was talking about at that site." And they can go back, you know the old line about the French witness, which was a great motto, that you leave a portion of the site unexcavated, preserved for future generations.

One of the things that I think Joe and I would emphasize is, this is a dynamic process, and part of what we have to understand is that you have to also have to look at the site formation process to understand many of things that we want to do in terms of site preservation, really are changing that dynamic cycle in terms of site preservation. There are actually some wonderful core of engineer publications back in '89, '90, '91, and '92 that I know a lot of core people have not read. So there are many things that we now understand, that's not to say that there isn't more, we sort of said, "Okay, what were our main goals in terms of site preservation." One is once you identify the impact, you want to try to minimize the impact on those resources. We also would emphasize comprehensive documentation of ??cular, it's one thing to say we're going to cover this site. But if you don't have any information on it, you can't even make the decision of is this one we're willing to stake some effort to preserve, and actually that goes back to the 106 process. You've got to have a little information to figure out how to do it. It has to be cost effective and it has to be practical. I could argue that if we went out on a really important site, we could enclose it in a stainless steel vault, and that would preserve it forever. I'm reasonably certain that that's not cost-effective. You have to strike that balance, it has to be something that it can actually be implemented, and this can get pretty tricky, depending on the resources available, both in terms of simple dollars, as well as what materials are available to allow you to try to make some effort.

We've put together a sort of running of things that people have used in terms of site preservation strategies, and we'll go quickly through those things. One is that we do nothing. Most of the sites that most of us have worked on, I suspect, that's been the policy, we backfill, which is better than what folks used to do 30, 40, 50 or 100 years ago. We at least put the stuff back in and then say, "Well I did what I could in terms of preservation of that, with the components that were unexcavated." There are a few sites where we actually moved the sites out threatened zone, obviously the S-1 dam is the most classic example, where we basically just picked the sucker up. Big monumental components were carted away. We've also in the past 10 years moved a couple of lighthouses to preserve because of natural, coastal erosion. There are a variety of strategies that people have used to create, construct barrier of various sorts that control access to sites. Sometimes you want to have some portions of the site exposed to public access, sometimes there are more sensitive, you have to look at that. Some of them are actually quite innovative, and there are plenty of examples out there that I think we would love to get information on. Judy Bens had one that I thought was just great, where she has mentioned in a couple places. The site that she was interested in going back to excavate, and she knew if she put up a sign it would attract people; she knew if she mentioned it in anything it would create problems. So she talked to a beekeeper and put a bunch a hives out on the site; she didn't have to say a word. She said there was not a single pothole ever at that site when those bees were out there. So there's some pretty innovative ideas out there.

. . . You also have to factor in what accommodations or adjustments do you make for your public that's in the area that wants to go to the site. One of the strategies and one that we have a fair amount of experience with is burial of sites, presuming we've figured out its important, it should be preserved. We've also figured out some strategies in terms of reburial, and certainly we do that with a lot of exposed materials . . . We also have seen in some places inundation as an effective strategy. It's a little harder to evaluate sometimes what happens to those sites but there are some situations where we can do it. Core of engineers and a lot of others have done a lot of things out there with covers, various kinds of fabric materials on sites to protect them. You can erect sand fences to catch sand to various sites so that you're talking the fairly passive human action in letting nature do the job in some cases. Joe had a couple of photos there of cement strategies where we actually go out and build something with a consequence to either change the drainage, improve the drainage, in some cases these things are done actually off site. So you're changing the terrain to protect the specific location; it doesn't have to be construction on top of a site, it can be at some distance, once you identify what the threat is, you can move that threat around the site. There's obviously a lot of issues in terms of extensive stabilization, small-scale stabilization in doing different soils, etc. etc.

Did anybody know there's actually an archaeological engineers society? I kid you not. I didn't know it was there either, somewhere I've got the web-page, I mean I'd never heard of them?! Plant cover, everyone of us have seen situations where plant covers of various sorts, different species, etc is used to protect archaeological sites. In some places this amounts to camouflage, some of it can be done with natural materials, some of it can be done with artificial things. There are also issues in terms of biological probes, things that we can do on sites in terms of materials and so on. In some cases we want to provide some sort of site surveillance to help us know what's going on out there on a long term basis. I could see some of this going on for geological reason, just to monitor the progression of site destruction. Signage, John Jamison has a whole section on the advantages and disadvantages of using signs at archaeological sites. A lot of people traditionally have said, "It's really better if we don't put up a sign because that attracts attention." I'm not sure I believe that; it's sort of like the old argument in Florida about we should not make site locations generically available to the public because of looting. I've got news for them, looters don't know need signs; they already know where the sites are. We can learn from them, and in fact we frequently do.

Now, what this boils down to is that this is an obviously dynamic process, and you have to incorporate non-archaeological folks–geoscientists, the local constabulary, land planners in the area–and come up with what amounts to ‘the best' or optimal preservation strategy.

AP: So it seems to me that you could start with the question, What is an archaeological site? And, introduce a number of the formation processes that include various types of erosion . . . but you could actually, not only make that really cool interactive kind video game where you looked at what impact different kinds of erosion or different kinds of ??? would have on the future of the archaeological site. You could also take Lion's and Ed's set of cognitive abilities and you begin with the either or approach to learning, is this a site or not a site, and then gradually through the exercise show that whether or not it's a site, they're learning it's actually a process. And in the process of showing that an archaeological site is an archaeological process, you could get them into thinking processes.

JS and GD: We have one of those. That's part of the class activity.

NW: In the bigger picture, especially site formation processes and preservation are kind of cool to use for you're real world problem-solving and social-relevance. And, I don't teach any archaeology class these days without asking an essay question–Who cares? How is this relevant for learning something about solving modern world problems, whether it's past disasters, ecological degradation, world trade center, and that goes to those educational criteria of making it personal to the students. Why is your learning about early hominids or food production or gender in ancient Mesoamerica in this class relevant to you as a person? And those objectives are not that hard to do when you can show, "Here's the evidence that a hurricane did and it changed this whole civilization, or whatever."

JD: One other issue that is really pretty critical and is becoming more critical now is what Glen had talked about before–cost-effectiveness. Cost-effectiveness is bottom-line stuff; everybody's ears sort of perk up when that becomes an issue. One of the problems that was encountered in the excavation of the African-American burial ground in New York was that the nature and the potential for this site being there was never recognized. It simply wasn't recognized and it should have been by a variety of people, including historians, designers, archaeologists, everybody should have recognized that. When they finally came across the site, it was finally decided what, finally determined what the . .? . of this was, one of the issues that became really critical was cost-effectiveness. And archaeologists took it in the face because they simply did not get involved in the planning process early enough, and to some degree we're guilty of that, and to some degree the powers that be are guilty of that. This is just one of the major examples that we have of public relations and interactions with the general community which again goes back to the significance of this for undergraduate training. The people that we will be dealing with are the people who need to know this. The people who are going to make the decisions are the people who need to know how important the process is.

In the scale of pure dollars, what we spend is nothing, it's . . . peanut shells! Where we do get screwed all the time, because we're the last folks to impede the so-called process, that process being construction of whatever the process is. People have always tended to push it under the carpet–it will go away; it will not go away. If it's not involved high enough in the planning process, you will hear about it, we will get incredibly bad name. It's not always our fault, but what is our fault is our sometimes cataclysmically bad skills in dealing with people. We simply don't deal with people properly very often, and we can't get that message through when you tell them that time is the issue and the costs are simply just not that great. Then you'll start to see that people will eventually back off and say, "Okay, when can you do, how can you do it." The ironic part of it is the process is there.

The process is always there, the channels are there. Those linear processes are there, you we're talking about linear process, Ruth and I argued about this before. One thing I can guarantee is that engineers do not understand a non-linear process. [laughter] These are the people you have to talk to; it's engineers, it's geo-technical people, and they understand, "Okay, what do I have to do first, what do I have to do second. How much is this going to cost me when you're done." That's it, end of story; they don't want to know about interpretive potential, what the impacts of this are on the greater society, uh-ah [no], "When's it going to be done, I have a building that has to go up." And so this cost-effectiveness issue is critical, communication skills critical, informing on time–critical.

NW: I was just going to say that the quickest way to bring it out to the undergraduate or the engineer is to compare cost of archaeology with the cost of everything else they've got to do. You know, the Tennessee . . . waterway's is one of the figures I remember the most. It's 11-12 million for the archaeology, 42 something million for just the biology–

JS: Oh those numbers are dwarfed. It's not even close, and at the end of this entire process, the folks who are basically doing the construction are saying, "You're kidding me, 2 million dollars! We couldn't do it [with this amount]!" For archaeologists that's a fair chunk of change, right?

AP: You know it is possible, you could consider targeting recalcitrant audiences in elective courses. I have taught a course called ‘Archaeology for Engineers.' It was a lot of fun to teach, and they responded to it very well after the first month of "What do you mean there's no right answer?" [laughter] After that first month, the level of engagement was as high as any class I've ever taught. They were very exciting and excited about it.

GD: They may be a lot of things, but they're not dumb.

AP: . . . there are certain kinds of professions that are particularly problematic for our discipline, perhaps we should consider targeting some of the curriculum that we are developing to students in those fields. ‘Archaeology for Engineers and Scientists' is what it was called; it was packed full and it was a blast!

Lynn: Don't worry about the scientists, go for the petroleum engineers, the mining engineers, [AP: the chemical engineers], the highway engineers–people in development industries.

EK: Also, we've been talking a lot about targeting non-archaeologists, but I think the project certainly has the option of creating courses for advanced students, advanced undergraduates in archaeology that know that they're going to go on to archaeology, which gives us a sort different audience to talk to, and I don't know where this idea came from, it's not purely mine, someone else mentioned it to me and I can't remember who it was. But something like, ‘Business for Archaeologists' would be incredible class to try and put together, and it would have to draw on lots of different people probably, but something like that too. . . . We would attack both sides of the problem if we had those. . . . And you could work public relations into that too.

LS: Also, career paths . . . what I did in my one adventure in University teaching, I taught a CRM class, and I had both undergraduates and a couple of graduates students. And, one of the things that they liked the best when I went through my evaluation process was I gave an assignment to shadow somebody in one of the CRM career paths. It helped that I knew every CRM archaeologist in New Mexico, and I could hook them up with the exact kind of people they wanted, including an underwater archaeologist, you wouldn't think we'd have a lot of them in New Mexico, but the Parks Service underwater archaeology is in Santa Fe. Anyway, I hooked them up with somebody in a career path that interested them, either a consultant or somebody in one of the Federal agencies, somebody in the Museum world that was not a traditional career path. And, they loved it, and they had to spend 8 hours with them, and they had to report back to the class what they found out. Some of them ended getting jobs with the person that they'd been working with, you know for the summer and things, and so helping students who are majors to understand what those other career paths are is really essential.

[Multiple discussions going on]

VS: This sort of gets back to what we were discussing earlier. If someone is faced with having to teach this kind of stuff, but is not embroiled in it on a daily basis. As we were talking I was thinking, what would help me the most to bring this into my classes? And the immediate problem is that a lot of these, well Section 106, go read the law, well Section 106 is four sentences long: it doesn't tell you anything about how the process works. You're not going to read the rags because they're way too long, you know? And so, just as we were talking as we were discussing Trudy's stuff this morning, what you need to do if you've got willing teachers, but who don't know anything about the stuff they'd like to teach, you've got to give them bite-sized chunks of information that they could easily incorporate.

What I did, just as an example, I've never been involved directly in Section 106 in the process, so I no first hand experience with it. And I remember years ago when ?? and I taught archaeological research strategies, even back then we thought it was a good idea to have a little bit of this in there, so I invited a colleague who had a lot of experience in this to come and give a talk, and what he did was give a really nice lecture on historic preservation law, in capsule fashion and in historical context he sort of reviewed the history preservation legislation in the US. And I sat there, the first time he did this, and I took notes, and I have like one page of notes that sort of captures the essential points, and I've used that since then, when I need to get up in front of a class and talk. And it's not just that I read those notes, but those give me a structure so that I can elaborate, but at least with something like that now when I read, when I get that little blue booklet that the National Parks Service publishes with all their historic preservation laws, I can look at that and I'm not approaching it cold. I have a sense of where each of these things fits into a bigger picture, and it makes easier for me to think about how I am to present this to students. So jumping ahead to deliverables, I mean, two immediate deliverables come to mind: one is, again sort of a bibliography, but with 2 or 3 key things starred that might give somebody who knows nothing about historic preservation process or issues a kind of background. And/or a little, you know, handouts that sort of summarize–things like, and I'm not fishing for yours–

Lynn: I've already volunteered to do this. I will put together something for this group to use for doing this.

VS: So two things are key, a 3rd thing if it can be done, although this is a lot more work, is to come up with a sort in class exercise, or some creative way to have a class engaged in this . . . [someone: like a case study] a case study that could be used directly or could be a model for someone else making up their case study. And the 3rd thing, this gets back to the point that we discussed earlier, if we see stewardship, ethics and values, if we see those principles as the sort of key thing we're trying to get across, I think that we have to recognize in a North American archaeology class or an Introduction to Archaeology taught in the US, Section 106 might be the ideal example to go with. But if Rick is teaching a course on Old World archaeology . . . if he's going to use an example it's going to be the UNESCO convention or some other Act on preservation that applies more closely to the class, or what the teacher is familiar with.

AP: But the important point is that even if he's not teaching 106 in an Ancient Mesoamerican course, some relevant version of 106, relevant to the culture area, should be in there.

VS: the key is preservation, and stewardship [AP: the law], the law. I mean that's the key point. So I think we should recognize that, and I also mention that because SAA is always being accused, and I think understandably of being US-centric. We say we're an International organization, so if we put up a detailed lesson plan for Section 106 on the web, we should maybe have a little preamble that says, "This is an example of what you could use. Similar things could be done with Canadian Preservation Law."

AP: One of the things we should keep mind is that I think we should begin to come up with some lists of free things. Free pamphlets, free brochures, free government information. We can have lists on our web-site–a complete set of brochures for their class to have to work from. There are lots of government publications and things that we could actually get free, and also lists of URLs that we can use to teach with so that the documentation is also free. Again, we are already coping with the fact that there ain't no textbook for this course, for any of these courses. So putting together sources materials is going to be a perpetual difficulty, and I was just talking to Toby about the American Antiquity. It's about to go on-line through, up to 5 years previous? So that colleges and universities that have J-store will be able to download. So you could presumably create a reader, a reading packet from American Antiquities. So combining that with this project is very elegant, I think it makes really good sense.

Dean Snow: An important thing to work towards, we don't want to dump this on Toby right now. As a service, and part of this project, to have somebody at SAA going through those URLs periodically to scan them because they go down, disappear, what 10% a year? There's some rate at which they disappear, and there is some rate at which new ones appear. And it's probably not cost-effective for all of us, who are out there in the teaching world to be doing this individually. We need to know which ones are still alive and which ones aren't so that when we give the list to our students, they're not going to come back.

VS: I don't want to pre-empt Toby's response to it, but my sense of the realities of what SAA staff can do, and given what they already do is that that's probably not something that we would want SAA staff to handle or whether they could handle even if we wanted them too. You're right, if we're going to put URLs up, they go dead. If we put a bibliography up, in five years that bibliography will be dated. I mean that's a real issue that we have to consider, but if it's going to be addressed, it will have to be addressed by a group like this, not by staff.

DS: How do you keep this alive and dynamic.

[multiple discussions]

Toby ???? : Well right now there is a mechanism in the sense of that the Taskforce exists in addition to this Matrix project. I don't know how long the taskforce is going to exist; it will exist as long as it chooses to essentially, and continue to work productively in this area. So I think there are mechanisms, I agree with Vins, as you all know, it's not a staff issue because it's more of a content issue, certainly staff can tell you where the dead links are, but we certainly can't suggest replacing them if we're not archaeologists.

AP: I would suggest that as we construct the website . . . classes, you might think about for the 3 years that you're going to keep your course updated, you might just as soon forward the information that you've taken from one of these URLs that may not survive. So you can get in touch with the Web page owner and say, "Look, is this page going to stay up, or can I take this article that's here and put it on my web-page for now."

RT: You can just save it in Internet Explorer as a web-source and download it to your desktop, and they you can always bring it up again.

AP: I think that that's the smart way to do it.

Jean Sept: It does become a long term structural issue though because you poor your hearts and souls into this wonderful web-page in the next three years, but when the grant blinks out, there are going to be cob-webs so fast. So it needs to be long-term structural planning, to figure out how to maintain this.

VS: That's exactly right, and that's exactly what I was going to bring up. Ruth and I were talking during the break. This is not an issue that we should discuss in detail now, but it's a very important issue. I think that we're going to have to block out time, perhaps at our next meeting to talk about a lot of these long term issues. One other thing that relates to that, that also involves some long term planning . . . to how the longevity of this project will be maintained has to do with the fact that even though we're 20 people in here, we're a very small group. And chances are that on a lot of these issues that we're talking about, we're trying to reinvent a wheel that already somewhere. For example, in the first morning session, Rosemary got up and gave us all these incredibly neat exercises that she'd worked out. If by some chance she had not been in this room, we still wouldn't know about them. So what might think about in conjunction with the long term planning of how to maintain this website is also strategies for tapping into our Society's membership to contribute to the website.

One could imagine a situation where the committee's initial role is to sort of get this off the ground to put it up as a model, but we could have a sort of place where resources can be placed by anyone, either completely open, which I'm a little nervous about or where the committee serves as a gatekeeper. People can suggest things that they've done . . . that the committee can review, and if it fits then they can put it up. At the same, the person putting it up gets the ??? 6479 of the committee, which helps them with their department chair and maybe with their dean. So there might be an incentive–

AP: Rich suggested that the SAA or even the AAAs might want to figure out a way to provide a special grant, at least a special title, maybe some actual support each year to a Master teacher, or Master teachers and their products with the teacher on the web. Course designs, readings, materials, projects, programs–so that after this project is finished, it might devolve into the Annual Master Teacher award. The first Master teacher would be asked, do you want to do something with this website as it stands, or do you want to just create your own. And we would have someone like that every year, and we could probably find–Geddy?6544 Or some larger organization that would like to say, "Yeah, yeah we would like to have the American Archaeology Master Teacher Career Program."

GD: And we could even send that person around the country to five or six different campuses as a speaker.

RJ: If I could just underline what Vins was saying, and I think what we're all saying that is that this project will have a set of problems at the end, deliverables. But if it ends then, then it is dead. That it isn't actually structurally transformative, so how do you get that structural transformation to go on and all these ideas are ways to have the project have an afterlife. But we do need, in doing those things to build in a requirement that these fundamental principles are the things that are going on, so that whoever–let's say that people are actually saying, "I've got this exercise, I think it would be great. I'd love to share it with people." That the recursion is then that some successor body or person goes through and says, "It doesn't do these things. If you can change, if you're willing to do that, then it will go up." That way we're actually then, potentially changing incrementally all those other people. You get the sort of distributive processing that everybody in this room is having the advantage of listening to.

AP: It offers a national sanction, a national recognition to something to do with teaching because that's one of the things that we're all talking about doing, which is to convince our deans that teaching should count for something. So it's a kind of peer review. It's also an issue of having a committee to maintain that, review that kind of submission, while keeping the webpage going or not going, editing and controlling. It really needs to have a kind of committee.

RJ: Exactly, that I think from my perspective is the kind of structure that we should be seeking towards.

[multiple discussions]

GD: 6707 This next section where we talk about, you know, each of those potential site preservation strategies that we outlined in that previous page, each of those is divergently applicable in certain circumstances. And the factors that you have to take into consideration to figure out which one is best are basically on that page [get this?]. And there are some that I'm sure we've missed. First of, you've made a decision that this is a site worth preserving however you want to define that, and then this becomes a game. What type of site is it? Where is it? What kinds of Material are in there? What's the threat? This is all dynamic, this is a game known as destroying your site or preserving your site, and you win or you lose. I mean it really does have that capability. The question is: are we trying to preserve for a short term, or are we trying to think in terms of 100s of years. What are dealing with in terms of access to this site? What is the descendent community population involved in? Are they wanting it preserved, are they wanting it saved? Do they want to have access, do they want to no access? There's all of these things.

Is it close to a population center, that's a whole other set of dynamic issues that you have to deal with, and if it's out in the middle of nowhere and the only people that go out there are crazy archaeologists, like us. What's going to happen to this geographic location, generally speaking, within ten years . . . 20 years, 30 years. I mean we've saved some interesting sites in urban areas and now they're already been bulldozed because we thought we'd done a job with some of things and it didn't work out ultimately. You've got issues in terms of what's exposed above the ground, what's below the ground. What's the full range of inventories of material that are under the ground. You've got organic materials . . . a whole set of chemical issues, hydrological issues . . . So again, you can use these kinds of things as part of a, literarily part of a game program. And it also, obviously, when you start putting these things together are very much part of the critical issue, because there are no right answers. I'll be the first on to tell you, there's no perfect way to address any single site preservation goal, or task at a specific site. There are probably many ways that are going to be effective, whether or not they're cost-effective is another issue, whether you can implement them is another issue. So you've come up with a wonderful grandiose plan, but if you don't have the few dollars or the millions of dollars to do it, you're dead in the water. So you lose the game.

I can tell you though, there are some really bad ways of preserving sites. We saw one in Kennewick, which must be the most glorious examples of total incompetence by a core of engineers. They didn't read the manuals that they funded and published, obviously. They dumped huge quantities of rock on the site, then they put soil on top of it. Then they came back, and I think they planted willows. Now, I don't know if any of you people have ever worked around a willow tree, but they have incredibly aggressive root systems, and they just send out thousands of roots, and they honeycomb everything. Jim Ottovasio was asked to come in a look at what the core had done for Kenniwick, and he said, "Basically, you've destroyed the site. There's nothing left. You will not be able to get any information out of this location at all, ever again." On the hand it's almost comical that they ignored everything that some of the people in other places apparently knew, and they clearly didn't. So I think it was a very knee-jerk reaction. We've got to do something quick, and they did it and it was a disaster. So that site's gone.

VS: I just want to mention as another way of using that example in teaching. It was reported in the Washington Post at the time that decision to bury that site was made in the Whitehouse, at a meeting in the Whitehouse. So, I think this is more of an example of [GD: political reality] political issues in problem-solving.

BL: Well I think some of these cases. They bring together so many different issues and voices; they really can be simple little case studies where you have role-playing or at least consideration of all these interests that come to bear–political interests, economic interests, descendent community, researchers, etc. etc. They really are good for showing how archaeology really gets involved in many aspects of the larger topos.

GD: Anyway, if you look up there we've got plenty of other things that you have to take into account in this game program. And it really is a game, trying to figure out what's the best preservation strategy for a single circumstance.

IUPUI: This is probably building on that earlier conversation, but related to this. I'm thinking about the resources that could be compiled, just not to underestimate visual resources, for those who have thousands of binders of slides. Those would incredible valuable and now that there are JPEGs–

GD: That's actually one of our class activities that we have on the last page. . . . Let me get you to do something actively, and that's in . . . the NOS column. What do you think the number of sites that are excavated in your area, on an annual basis are? How many sites are excavated in you area? That's that NOS column.

[Discussion on how large ‘area' can mean, and the range of excavation possibilities]

GD: We're talking some really fuzzy data here, guys. Again, while you're doing that, I think I can ramble on. There are incredible linkages between these things that we have into account, and you can go on and on. But, we come back to the issue: part of figuring out which constellation of those process and events are going to be most valuable. You come back, try to figure what in the world was going on in terms of that sites formation. What were the human actors and geo-morphological events that allowed that material to be preserved in the first place, and that's where Joe takes over again.

JS: There are, you know we're probably going to run over. [AP discusses timing of lunch and the afternoon sessions etc.]

GD: We thought of . . . some things that you can take these issues right out into the community, and one of the ones that I think that would particularly fascinating . . . . Here are the things that destroy sites. Over the semester I want you to record what you see out there that might be considered a destructive process. If you can fill in more than 5 per semester, the kid must no be leaving his dorm room. Or you could use the newspaper as well–every construction project, every building, every storm should trigger them to say, "Oh yeah, that would work." And in some places, you could actually pull together from the existing data-base, like the Florida site file, and I could tell you, "Okay if you're getting down a foot and a half, a meter, two meters, here's the time period you're probably going to hit." So you could do, again a sort of a little model of: Well if it's this surface, we're probably talking about in the majority of the cases that we know, those are sites of the last 1,000 years." If that bulldozer over there is putting in a 25 foot hole, then I assure you that we're going into the Miocene. So, if there was anything from Paleo on forward, it's gone. I think it makes them aware that it's out there.

You could also . . . talk about the sites that you have worked on and what has happened to them, and Joe had some slides of places that had been investigated by archaeologists in previous decades we hope. And you would not recognize them today, and everyone of you has slides of those kinds of events, either looting, intentional destruction by development in some cases, unintentional destruction by development, and we think those things ought to be readily available to us or the lesson planners so that we could create truly a ‘Hall of Horrors.' If you want to see ten slides for looting beyond your wildest dreams, there they are. If you want to see erosion run amok, there they are. If you want to see livestock damage, we got you covered. I don't have them, but when you put all of us together as resource, we've got them so all you have to do is pick the ones, give us 2 sentences, and then send them to Joe and I, and we could go on.

 

JS: This goes all the way from the Paleolithic French caves, which are now . . . seriously deteriorating, have been for about 20-30 years. They finally figured out that opening them up to tourists is probably the worst thing you could possibly do.

GD: You mean there's biological stuff that comes of our skin and gets on those paintings?

JS: There it is! To the destruction of places like the Acropolis, the Parthenon. Italy has now got very serious preservation problems because of leaded gasoline that's accumulated residues over the past 15-20 years, and while they're exposed ruins, including the coliseum are just starting to fall apart, in ways that nobody had anticipated. And it's too late in many cases for the conservations, for the conservators, rather.

Lynn: Can I interject something here? I think it's important to have the ‘Hall of Horrors'. That's a good idea, but the whole point of the entire Federal Historic Preservation process is to come to an accommodation between preservation and development, what's amazing is how often it does work. I mean we want to talk about it not working, but I think it's really important to let, especially the non-majors but the majors too, to know that amazingly enough this works.

GD: You know we could have a ‘Hall of Halos' as well. Stewards of heritage . . .

Lynn: Stuff gets preserved everyday.

JS: There's no question. I think this is probably a good point to get ready to leave.

GD: The last column and then we're done is in that NODD make your estimate of the number of sites in your are, however you define it, that have been damaged or destroyed in the last year.

AFTER BREAK

JS: I'll talk until I get thrown out, but what I do want to do here is show you some. There's going to be an exercise interspersed in here, but basically I want to show you some audio-visual aids that will, I think, be very helpful in conveying the entire series of relationships between landscapes, archaeology and preservation in a way that I think is very student friendly and actual very professional friendly. I think we archaeologists . . . we don't necessarily tend to see the great picture of sites as these huge manifestations of cultural behavior, and especially the relationship between cultural behavior and landscape. I'm going to get into that so let me just start with a couple of slides here.

Okay, this is what I would call ‘site ugly'–most the sites are ugly in North America, I would say. Again, I don't want to offend anybody [some good-natured reaction to this]. Okay, let's talk about your basic site, basic site–yes there's human behavior here, you have to really look for it and this is how it gets disposed upon the landscape, very simple steps. Let's just very basically say that these are your general loci ? of human behavior. That spots that spot, mobilization of artifacts in this case, due to gravitational forces and changes in the landscape, the contour to some degree. Artifacts come to rest, artifacts are buried. You have to interpret the picture. Now, I would say 95% of our site population looks like that, maybe more. Especially hunter-gatherer types of sites. I'm going to whip out a question to you, What do we call this matrix? What's the material in which the artifacts for it contained? What do we call it?

Responses: Dirt . . .

JS: Dirt. [R: Secondary deposits] Secondary deposits. [Soil] Somebody said the magic word, somebody said soil. Do I get any responses to soil? Rosemary, go ahead, talk.

RJ: Well, but I saw where you were going.

JS: Oh okay, alright. I would say if we even had as well educated a group as this, 80% of the people would say soil. 80% of the people would be totally, unequivocally wrong. Soil is this . . . sediment is that [what's he doing?] Soil represents the weathering of sediment in place, which for archaeologists is an absolutely critical issue, because in order for us to understand the patterns of site formation, for us to understand how sites evolve, we have to understand that originally there was dirt. Dirt was moved, dirt stabilized and other things happened which means that the dirt, the sediments started weathering in place and a variety of different process happened. In terms of landscape change, all of this is connected to a dynamic landscape that at some point in time started to stabilize that stabilization is what's really critical for understanding behavior at the point of time in which it occurred. So that's probably the most important single piece of information that you have for trying to relate one to one the environment and the location. You want to freeze frame it in time as closely as possible to when the events happened.

Now, these are sometimes difficult concepts to explain to senior archaeologists, not to mention undergrads. The easiest way I've found to do this is to establish a timeline in which several things happen, and if you go out on many, many excavations a lot of people think that they understand the entire sequence of soil formation, the development. You know, they've picked up on one of the situations where a little bit of knowledge is just very dangerous, so they start looking at the soils. They say, "Well we got to look at the B horizon ." . . . and then they look at the C horizon and that's good. When they get to the D horizon, they've got problems. [agreement and laughter] Ain't no such animal! "Well we found this in the ‘D'!" Well, then the A's wrong, the B's wrong, the C's wrong and the D's wrong because they've excavated this thing in arbitrary levels and some guy came in or some woman came in there and said, "No no no no no No!" We have to go into the alpha numer . . .? Well that's wrong.

Basically, the very quick explanation is, "Let's say we have an occupation at 8,000 years ago, and this is very North American oriented right now. 8,000 years ago there was a flood plain. The flood plain is represented by sands or silky sands that dumped out, and then there was a semi-stable surface on which vegetation grew; it started to disintegrate. It created a humic horizon, which we call an A, and people said, "Well it's not flooding today, tomorrow, it's probably not going to flood the next day after that." Because people had a reasonable idea of scheduling even those days, and they said, "Okay, tomorrow there won't be a flood. It's a nice location; lot's of animals and . . . vegetation and a lot of resources. Let's live here." They laid down the artifacts; they're here. 4,000 years have gone by, and the only thing that's really happened in terms of the dynamic environment is that some more flood deposits were dumped off. These were also stabilized over the course of time; there was decomposition of the upper surface, you had yet another A horizon, and then all of a sudden, there are some other things happening because of this long duration of time in which there wasn't much flooding and there was a relatively stable environment. The sub-strait, the middle part of this package starts to change, and what happens is that the minute–very, very simply I'm not going to get into the details of this because I'll be here for another week–but what will happen is that the minerals will be leached out of the A horizon. They will move through the A horizon into what's known as a B horizon, where the minerals and the clays start to settle in. At the same time, these mineralogical transformations will tend to do what's called ‘overprinting' the artifacts such that the artifacts, basically, haven't moved much, although they can . . . . But by in large, let's say that the artifacts are in place, and they're stabilized in this transition zone, known as the AB horizon.

Jean Sept: I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but I was just curious because time in geology is a real challenge for students, and I was wondering if you had any suggestions on ways to help students, maybe through an activity or something . . .

JS: We're coming up to that in 2 seconds [JS: Okay] Let's go through the ‘what's happening' and then we'll tell you how to recognize it.

Jeans Sept: Okay, I think a lot of folks probably actually . . . understand the process . . .

JS: Okay, in terms of students, I think that's what you're asking about, right? [Jean agrees] And then finally when you get to the present situation, you will very often find the artifacts embedded in this B horizon because this B horizon is developing for thousands of years and people erroneously say to you, "Well, they lived in the ‘B'." Well no, they didn't live in the B; they lived at a time after which the B formed. Okay, and this is the critical piece of information that we have transmit to senior archaeologists, not to mention students. For students, and for conveying this point, even to people in the field, I use what's known as the black-red-and tan formula. A horizons are black; C horizons, which are unweathered, are largely tan and brown, and the red horizons are the ones in which soil formation is actively going on. And so if you want to start explaining this to students–that's the way I would start to bring this information to their attention. That the artifacts are preserved in a condition in which they weren't originally laid down because what happened is that the stabilization processes of soil formation tended to mask the original surfaces in which the occupation occurred.

Jean Sept: What's something that the students could do that could help them understand this without having to explain it to them?

JS: Mmm. Good question. Probably, Ruth probably has a game that we could try. Can we? . . . What? Later, I'm not sure I have the answer to that–but I've noticed when taking students and in many cases–in some of the operations that I deal with–with CRM workers, when they go out there, and they look at this explanation. And they see that the artifacts are embedded in this red matrix; this makes a ton of sense to them because they understand this relatively, I would say, a least intermediately difficult concept, and when they start to look at it and to see it in the ground, in profile–they begin to get a grasp on that. And they're understanding of site formation process is really, really quite solid because they understand this, and the way to start looking at it, really, is just changing colors and changing textures. So, that was one of the major issues that I wanted to raise with respect to this. Now people who live or work in the desert west, they have some other issues related to this. Arid environments have different sets of soil formation processes, but by in large, they're not all that different. The main changes are two things: their carbonates and their salts. And those get introduced in from profiling, and by in large with the carbonates in the B horizon, and you will get hallites forming in the B horizon, or salts or vaporites . . . and it's not really all that much different from this. So, I think that you can teach this to undergraduates.

Ruth Tringham: I can comment now. I think it would be really easy to make this a very attractive series of animations, and it would be so . . . so much of what we do is, we need to visualize what your talking about with words, and I can kind of put it, as I hear the words, I can put it into a picture, but I've had the experience of having thought about . . . if you don't have any experience, and you've never done it, you have to help the person visualize it, and you could do by a series of animations, you could do it by a series of interactivities. They'd press on one thing . . . and the layers would . . .[JS: pop out]

Rosemary Joyce: I think though the layers popping in and out might be the wrong thing. Animation would be the right thing because you're talking about a continuous process over time and so your lines say to connect these three columns are actually–what you could do with an animation is actually make that continuous rather than discontinuous, which is where the misunderstanding on students' parts comes.

RT: Or you could have it animated and then once you've got . . .

RJ: You could analyze a segment . . .

VS: This is also an actual practice of finding one and looking at it. I mean a soil profiles are ubiquitous, unless you live in Manhattan, maybe even there. [Response: Oh we have those] Yeah, all you need is any kind of vertical soil cut, or for smaller classes look for augar?–it's a very cheap piece of metal that you could push down into the soil and pull it up and there it is.

RT: . . . the virtual experience should never substitute for the real one. It's always an addition . . .

Dean Snow: Your experience has been that undergraduates can not get the concept and the process from that . . . the colors . . . and the chart with arrows and so on–that's too abstract?

JS: No, no, no, I mean just talking about it without this visualization is impossible, and in most presentations when I first took soils, which was in the Pleistocene sometime, nobody bothered with this. They just didn't bother with it; they just kept talking about hydralization, and then we talked about ironization and chemical transformation matrix, you know people got lost.

Liz IUPUI: I have an embarrassing low-tech confession that I've used. I take cotton batting–like the real thick stuff that you wrap cloth around and make a baby quilt or something, and it has squares. I use it for a bunch of different principles, but actually the edges--it's white because I didn't dye the whole thing–but the edges are painted, so that's what you see. And, in the beginning I use it for, you know, super-position and association, really basic concepts. And then I also have students invent an activity that is then; they have to create the site formation processes, you know, and the other students have to interpret what happened here, and it can be garbage from the back seat of their car, or stuff they've found outside, but they have to–that's the generative part. And, I haven't done this, but I was thinking it would be really easy to do it with just a strip of gauze that you had dyed different color and talk about once this horizon gets buried, this is the transformation–it trickles down . . . You know it's about $5 worth of supplies, and I keep it in a box in the cabinet, haul it out, and I've actually presented it to kindergartners, and they love it too. They get that same layer, soil to layer cake idea, but I like the animation thing.

Nancy White: But you know Ruth's comment that there's no substitute for the real thing is something we need to think of too, and a field trip to the closest mound or museum or even . . . we just went on the public square in Bloomington right after lunch to see . . . but who are the statues on the courthouse–you could do it in your own downtown, or wherever you are on campus, pointing out social issues. You could see stratagraphies in road cuts, all these kinds of hands-on experience should also include seeing real things.

JS: Well let's look at a couple of examples of the real thing. I have about 8 or 9 examples of sequences, which I'm not going to go through because they're going to throw me out. But, I will show you a couple–I'm going to race through this. Here's an interesting study on preservation. This is a Neolithic village in Jordan, the . . . . , which was excavated and reported on in the sixties. It's in Jordon; it's one of the best Neolithic sites in that particular time frame. Once the excavations were done; the site basically started falling apart. There was no real stabilization–I'd pay anybody to tell me what those sandbags there on the top. I'm not sure I know what they are.

RT: I can tell you.

JS: You can tell me? Go ahead.

AP: I've seen them . . . . They're put on top on the wall, or anywhere to stabilize the soil.

JS: Understood, but the entire thing has been completely undermined since then. It's gone–I mean, the entire face fell off about 2 years afterwards. That's when I looked at it originally, came back to years later, the whole thing was gone because it was being undermined from the bottom, because the structure of this particular area, with these sands that were so loose, that they completely collapsed. And I'm not sure that the sandbags didn't assist them in collapsing because of the weight. So, these are ways in which things probably should not be done. This is the site of Harapo in Pakistan, where site formation process is a function of occupation, abandonment, deterioration for over a 100 years, no preservation plans at all, and looting. This site was occupied about 5,000 years ago, and the bricks that were fashioned at that time are now being stolen by contemporary villagers for construction. So in terms of trying to reconstruct this situation–good luck, because there are every possible, every possible site destruction process, and site formation process is contained in this.

Liz not Iupui: Well, I recognize that people who have been doing a lot of public archaeology have this too.

JS: Yeah.

Liz: And it's still ? . . . [voices too muffled . . . ]

JS: This is a very, very specific form of site destruction that is accelerated by a combination of land use and natural process. This is also in Pakistan, a project that we're doing along the Baez river, which is a drainage way that is outside the primary, in this valley, hinterland--heartland??, rather. What you're seeing is this huge mound that would be the equivalent of the Middle Eastern talb?, and what you're seeing here is what's called head-ward erosion, when you start to get destabilization of a surface because of a lack of education, you basically can not stop it. And what you're seeing in this criss-crossing network of railroads?–all of this is plotted as you can see probably–and cultural material, it's just unregulated, absolutely unstoppable . . . . In this case the site is completely deteriorating; it's just going to be eroded into nothing, other than gratuitous clusters of pottery occurring at the base of the ???? And this is just absolutely devastating.

Same situation over here, this is–what did you call them fire installations? Here's fire installations as well on this ???? period mound. What you're seeing in the background is the encroachment of agriculture. Agriculture will eventually get to here, then they will cut back on the mound, and they will go away, and then they will settle that area. And it doesn't get anymore stark than this; it's just a question of time between this point in time, which was about a year ago and when they start cutting away at this 5,000 year old mound, and it will be gone.

Okay, now what I want to do is just give you a couple more examples of modeling. We're going to skip a couple of these things . . . . This is what Vin was talking about. This is Manhattan about 10,000 years ago on the . . . ? This project was made possible by the excavations near the African American burial ground in an area that was–I don't know how much of you know about the 5 points excavations, but this was a 19th century slum in lower Manhattan, and we were brought on to look at the sub-surface relationships at the time that, approximately at the time that burial excavations occurred, because all of a sudden everybody was sensitive to this. And we said, "Well you could have caught the burial ground if you knew anything about the landscape history of the project area."–[their response] "Well maybe we ought to learn about it real quick!" And so they had us do this, and when we went down there, we started looking at the variety of different types of records. And one of the things that was very, very critical was the glacial history of the project area. New York was at the margins of the glacier, and what happened is when they started going down into the subsurface, once they got below all the urban debris, they found–surprise, surprise–a lot of glacial cobbles, outwashed sands, all sorts of deposits that are very, very characteristic. These deposits, it turned out, were mapped on 19th and 18th century maps of Manhattan such that this terrace, which they called ‘the big hill'–cadament's hill–was in fact a ??? terrace. And you needed to do was know a little about glacial geology to figure that out and to project the deposits that we found well underneath the ground, with what the 18th century maps, and we identified that these were glacial ??? terraces. And based on that and a variety of probes that we had found, including a buried soil that dated to about 5,000-6,000 years old, we were able to synthesize the earliest history of that landscape.

It gets better! In the early 17th century, the Dutch had started . . . channeling some flow of stream deposits that were held over from the old glacial period in a feature that was known during the Dutch and early British colonial period as the collect pond. The collect pond eventually became a place where the tanners of the Northeast developed their tannery industry, and we hit a number of tannery vats in the course of our excavation. So we were able to start putting together the history of this changing landscape by looking at the stratification that we actually observed in the trenches–from very, very fragmentary windows of exposure. The only thing we could see in some areas, because of the depth of this excavation, was the remnants of the tannery vats. We dated them, they, in fact, came back at mid-18th century tannery vats . . . . We dated five beautifully preserved specimens, and they came back to that time frame. We started to put together a systematic sequence of the changing land use and land use history until we hit the rubble. The rubble itself consisted largely of 19th century debris and refuse that was linked to a period of clearance of the landscape in preparation for reconstruction of the administrative center in the 18th century. We had, in fact, identified two distinctive fills' episodes, and based on that, and again on the maps, we were able to identify at which this crazy hill was leveled, coincided with the period of the original construction of the street grid of Manhattan, and then this picture starts to emerge. And finally, the construction of 20th century Manhattan, in which case the low-level commercial occupation of this site, gave way to a major administrative center, and we had the 19th century fill preserved at about 10 feet underneath–all these different types of land use histories, and the positional signatures that we were able to piece together. And this is in fact the entire sequence underneath lower Manhattan at this point picked up on the basis of about 5 or 6 test excavations, careful analysis of the sediments, some dating, and then extensive use of very well