Pam Cressey: Community Based Archaeology
Pam Cressey: Okay, I'll go ahead and start, and people will filter back in to finish. When Maria and I discussed how to divide up this community situation, I think, we didn't exactly realize it at the time, but when we divided the principles up, she actually came up with examples of problems which were very important to have. And for whatever reason, maybe just because I'm sort of trying to look on the brighter side, or in fact I can show the brighter side of archaeology in communities, I actually don't have a presentation on problems; I have a presentation on partnerships. So, this is I think what I'm hearing people saying in the last three days, what we're looking to have happen in archaeology, and we want students to have happen.
Here I'm going to use examples from three communities: Pensacola Florida, as Glen has already referred to in Judy Benz's work, Linda Dairy's work at Catawba, Alabama, right outside of Selma, and our work in Alexandria, Virginia. And I'm going to show slides on Alexandria 1) because I have them, 2) I know when they really are, 3) I can at least present to you . . . a holistic approach of what we're trying to do. The three principles that I'm going to be dealing in my paper are volunteers–the training of people, public education outreach, and stewardship. And, I'll talk about each of them a little bit, but you'll see in each one of these community presentations, you can't extricate one from the other. They all fit together, and if you're doing one, literally you're reinforcing the others.
But first, I want to start with a quote by a person who is the president of our Friend's organization–Friends of Alexander Archaeology, a regular non-profit group, that's been established for about 12 years. And I want to read a quote to you [that comes from] when I said I'm presenting a paper, and this was at the SHA meetings in Long Beach on a session we did called ‘Beyond Public Archaeology, Community Partnerships.' And I said to our president, "what would you say about what we do in Alexandria, and why do you bother?" "What is the value of archaeology, and why do you put in the hundreds of hours that you have put in over last 10 years?" Now, I'll show you his picture while I'm talking. This is Tom Widdy. He is retired Navy . . . and I met him [while] giving a walking tour of Alexandria about 10 years ago, and we give our walking tours at various during the year, but particularly during Virginia Archaeology month, which is October. And, while I'm giving my walking tours, I always offer people the possibilities of ways they could participate with us, and when I said, "maps and computers" he jumped right in. He became a very potent force in our Friend's organization, and the development of our computer kiosk. So, this is his . . . response, "Why am I involved in Alexandria Archaeology? [And, I did not coach him, by the way] In a small word, people, in a bigger word, community. I feel for a society to be successful, it needs to be whole and connected. Today, too much of our society is fractured and isolated. Our industrial, mobile society in time have changed Alexandria to a place where too often its inhabitants don't know their neighbors, don't belong to a neighborhood. Or have a social identity beyond ‘I' or the job. Their roots are so shallow they could move tomorrow and not be missed, worse as inhabitants, not citizens, they lack the sense of belonging and too often feel no need to protect or nurture their community. Archaeology is the perfect tool to help connect people to both a past and one another. Unlike other community tools like sports, religion, or clubs, it doesn't require a specific skill level in order to participate." [laughter]
No, no, you've got to see what this means in terms of what we do, okay. You may all, some of you've I've known for years, okay, so you know all the kind of stuff I'm going to say. A lot of you may just drum me out of the room because you can't stand what we do, but I'm going to tell you what we do, and if you ride me out of town–that may be very . . . ? [laughter] "Alexandria Archaeology offers a broad spectrum of opportunities for people of all ages and skill levels, unlike something like school or soccer, everyone can participate. Children of all ages can contribute at family days, and ornament workshops. Teens to seniors can research, date, wash artifacts, process and catalog and learn. The fine staff and facilities . . . provide an open environment where each opportunity brings people together on shared tasks that do much more than teach a bit of art history. They help people gain a sense of our past; they help people grow bonds to one another and develop roots over our community. And, they let me help."
Now, if you go and speak to a public group and they say, "What's the value of archaeology." You're going to use a lot of words like that. The difference is that the guy has training as an engineer and moved missiles around or something in the Navy. I'm not sure–most of our volunteers who are military, can't talk about what they did. [laughter] They're all secret clearance people, but this to me. . . this is out of his heart, and this is a person with a linear mind in many ways. But, he's speaking from the heart of why he does what he does. Why does he contribute hundreds of hours a year? And he's actually not even doing any of the digging; he's doing a lot of the promotion, a lot of the administrative work. He fixes the computers; he does all kinds of stuff like that. He is also interestingly enough a single person, who lives in a townhouse. He does not live in an historic property; he doesn't come to us and state certain things like, "Well, I've always wanted to be an archaeologist, or I am a preservationist."
And, we only found out recently, for the last five years, more than half the time that he's worked with us, and certainly when he wrote this, he's been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But, he refuses to accept that diagnosis, and he's telling his doctors what they need to do. And, he has flown all over the country in order to determine what needs to be done, and then he's gone back to INH and forced them to do what they to do, and he is still alive even though he shouldn't be alive.
So this is a person with tremendous, tremendous depth. He also has all kinds of forms of dyslexia, so he just drives us crazy on the computer, you can never tell what he writes. But, he carefully wrote this out for me, because he wanted to express to this profession how he feels about his community and what he does. And I thought that's the best way to introduce to you what community archaeology can be.
Now, to the guts here. When I started in Alexandria almost 25 years ago, the only thing I knew about public archaeology was Bob McKenzie's book . . . . But what I knew when I left teaching was that I wanted to work with the public, and I had no idea what that meant, and some of you may know this story, but I said I wanted to work with the public, and the person that I spoke to said, "Well that's stupid, you're going to ruin your career. You won't have a career." And I said, "Well I don't know, but that's what I want to do. I can't tell you why." Well, not long after that he saw an Ad on the Columbia University bulletin board for a city archaeologist in Alexandria, Virginia. He called me up and said, "You're never going to believe it. Some really stupid people in some burb in the south want to hire a city archaeologist. Can you believe that?" And I said, "Gee I don't know it's just crazy enough to sound good." So I went down to a AAA meeting, and I was interviewed in a garret of 18th century tavern by people who were almost as old as the tavern itself. [laughter] And they grilled me something awful. But when I saw the commitment that they had to their past, not just objects, but buildings, streetscapes, and a way of interacting–and that they believed in a buried past too. And they didn't know what to do with it, but they knew it could be done. I said, "Okay, I want to do this, and I don't what is going to happen." What has happened though is I have been shaped by the community and by not only community issues, but also what people have said to me individually about what they want. So, I have been shaped by them, I think, many of them and the community has been shaped by what we do.
As a background, each one of these communities that I'm talking about have individuals that have been there for 10, 18 or 25 years. So in each one these cases we're talking long term, which is why we can discuss what they're doing–they're not one shot things. And I think it's the ultimate. If I could say professionally, anything that would matter to me most, that you could put on my gravestone. You know, if you could write long enough and if I had a big enough gravestone, it would be that every, every community has it's own city archaeologist position, just like you have a city planner, or city arborist, or any of those other things. And that the city archaeologist would be working in tandem with lots of people and partnerships to create something distinct in their community, that wouldn't necessarily look like somebody else's community. But, that they would be united and joined together in a really interesting research framework and a sharing of data. I don't know if that will happen, and if any of you have a background in Japan, I'd appreciate it. Because I've been told twice now that every single major place in Japan has a city archaeologist and that they are linked together in a highly technological way.
Rosemary Joyce: We have a colleague at Berkeley–Duko Pablo–who you could ask about this.
PC: Thank you, because I'd like to be able to connect on to that.
Glen Doran: I can give you some names of a bunch of Japanese archaeologists.
PC: Thank you, thanks a lot. Okay, a key definition of being in partnership, I think, is the willingness of a community archaeologist to be shaped by the community. And to see the various publics as active participants, not just receivers, so rather than the idea of public education, which always sounds as if we are in the authoritarian role in the front of the class–and we're creating information and we're dispersing it, regardless of how fantastic our exhibits are. Each one of these projects . . . is seeing themselves as participants with the other people in the community, as a member of the community and as generating it together, not generating it alone. So, the arrow's not going to go one direction here. It's going to go back and forth, back and forth, and create almost a dialectic.
Second of all, the archaeological process is spiraling, rather than linear. At each part of the process, the archaeology and the citizens interact: thus affecting the goals, right at the outset, the questions, the personnel, the opportunities for using this information, or the application. Public dialogue of issues can start things and end things. Archaeologists are not the central in the archaeology process. Sounds bizarre, and that's kind of where you get when somebody, when Tom says, "Hey, everybody can participate." And that immediately [has the reaction]–"Wait a minute, I spent years getting my thing, why am I letting other people in?" And again, what have learned is that I do a better job with them than I do alone.
Another point that is made by all three of these programs is–I talked to Terry Sherer who has been a curator at the Smithsonian for many, many years, who does a lot of interesting exhibits, like what is intellect? You know, what is genius? I love what he does. He spends a week with Lion's ??? and interviews and finds out how do you get your genius ideas come from. That's kind of a heard exhibit to do. So I called Terry and I said, "What does this mean when a public wants to participate?" And we're seeing this more and more and more. Can we take things like the burial ground project, which sounds like conflict, but if you saw it as positive, where the public wants to participate in the past. If you take genealogy, if you all this stuff–antiques, buying old houses. If we talk about all the ways that people love history in the world, what is going on? And he says, "Okay, this is"–and other people have used this word–"a democratization that is going on in everything." It's going on in medicine; it's going on in law. Everybody wants information, everybody wants to figure what their own ailments are, go on websites, figure it out and tell their doctor what to do.
Same thing in archaeology and history, people want to acquire their own history. They want to do it with their hands; they want to get that genealogy, they want to get those photos, they want to preserve them, and if they don't have their own, they want to get somebody else's. They just call those antiques, so we've got heirlooms, we've got antiques, we've got artifacts. And the question is who are the stewards of this? And in a community, what can be done and perceived by everyone is that the artifacts, regardless of who put them there 10,000 years ago by whatever ethnic group, is that everyone in the community can lay claim to that and have it belonging to them in a stewardship of them, and respect them, where perhaps they might not respect somebody in that class, or that race when they're standing right next to them today. So it brings people together across time and space, but people want to be there, to getting access to history. They want their people's stories told; they want their stories commemorated, and they don't want history in a standard sense like they got out of a textbook.
Now many of you when into anthropology, perhaps because you didn't like history. Then you ended up that you liked history so you did archaeology. What is interesting, I refer a book to you called "The Presence of a Past" by Roy Rosenquite and David Faylen, and they had done surveys about how people know the past and how they feel about the past, and how they get the past–how is the past present in people? In the the American public?" They've done a lot of surveys, and one of the things that comes through is that the public does not view that they got their history through books, and through school, or through school experiences. Isn't that interesting? Their memory, their sense of history is a crystallized thing, and we've talked about this before. And where they remember their history is, interestingly enough, on those dreaded American family vacations, where you are forced to go places, the kids are screaming and yelling, and it used to be station wagons in our day–now Minivans, or whatever and I guess they have TVs now so they don't scream and yell. But it certainly was an American tradition for the last half of the century.
What he says is that the people who go to the historical places with their parents and have it as a forming experience, and they remember crawling around on the rocks, or looking at those sites, or maybe having to go to the bathroom and not being able to get there, or having Dad read every label, which my father did, and talking to the curator. That becomes a seminal experience in your life, and so hence, the going to historic, the believing in history as something of value is there because it's really coming from who you are in your personal experiences. And so what they really talk about in terms of interpreting history is that you have to personalize, and you have to get it beyond just here is information, really great content . . . . You have to get it inside, and of course, you know, there's lots that archaeology can do for that.
The other thing is that people right now, at least in our neck of the woods, want to preserve the environment, and history is only a limited part of it. And where I see the greatest hope of partnerships is in citizens who may not have thought anything about history, but they see history as a strong partner in trying to preserve the quality of life in their neighborhoods, their architecture, everything that means to them–their way of living. And archaeologists can be a part of that, just like anyone who studies the natural environment, or who does planning or traffic control.
I wrote out for this session in Long Beach several principles of a community archaeologist. I would just like to quickly, quickly run through those. This paper and others are going to be published in the new SAA book on community partnerships right Toby, and when will that come out?
Toby . . .: In 2002
PC: Okay, so there should be a book you can use from SAA that will deal with these kinds of partnerships. Okay some principles for somebody engaging in community archaeology:
1) Be an actual participant in the community, go to church and do community things;
2) Go beyond the linear top-down archaeological procedure and involve the community's members in selecting goals and research applications;
3) Establish boards and commissions wherever you can;
4) Join in partnerships regardless of how disparate they may seem to traditional archaeology–things like art, developers, environment, law enforcement, volunteerism, tourism, and seniors;
5) Ask others in the community what is need from their perspectives and then question how archaeology can assist in this–you'll see Linda Diary particularly exemplifies this; 6) Learn the local government and its staff and regulations and go to its meetings; 7) be receptive to ideas, skills, and talents which others offer, even if it doesn't fit into your agenda at the moment;
8) Don't expect to value archaeology as much as you do, but always look for the opportunity to produce some archaeology value;
9) Don't expect or need to get credit for an originating idea–this is sort of the opposite of the intellectual property–give everything away; but enjoy being an unsung catalyst or participant–you'll never know what you're going to get beyond your wildest dreams;
10) Envision archaeology in an expansive manner, see new ways for archaeological places, procedures, and processes to manifest in the community, don't discount others ideas as frivolous or unrealistic or too costly, as I've found there's virtually nothing too costly if somebody goes out to get it and they've been able to get to the right people;
11) Believe that archaeology in its fullest sense enriches individuals lives and contributes to a community identity and can act as an amenity, producing more livable communities;
12) Bring archaeological heritage issues into larger planning contexts, through preservation plans, master plans and the like;
13) Engage in archaeology as a service to the community, in the sense of mission;
14) Express your excitement and your core values to permeate your work;
The projects that we're talking about today all have had long term impact or continuous functioning parts of the community. They work–the people in these positions–Linda, Judy and I–work out of our commitment to the public value of archaeology, and to our sense of citizenship. This is our way of being citizens, and of being really, I think, strong advocates in citizens of archaeology. All our members of our communities that we work with, three archaeologists serve in different capacities though, I am at the local level as a city archaeologist. Linda is working for the state at Catawba, a state park, and Judy is operating as a University professor in Pensacola, and also runs her own contract firm, by the way. All have gone beyond what the job dictates–university professor, curator of a museum, city archaeologist–to make their position and their organization germane to the larger community. . . .We're all trying to deliberately form partnerships to go beyond traditional research; we all work with citizens as partners and defy a standard model of archaeology as authorities or instructors . . . . We all use our skills to ask questions, to collect data, and interpret; but we include others in the beginnings and the ends of the process, and as well as how much information, how much people involved in the process as we go along.
All of these things are influenced by contemporary means in the community, and all see problems as openings to increase partnerships and we generally don't sit around and whine and complain about how awful everybody in the community or how we're not getting support. If we don't get support over there, we just walk around over here. We just keep casting our net and being available to others to see where the application and value is. We generally are trying to be holistic and inclusive and raise the value of archaeology, and that's Judy's term. Judy's term is raising, or increasing the value of archaeology. Her sense is that archaeology is neutral in the community because it's invisible, you don't know it's there. It's just a neutral value to it. So what she wants to do is bring it out of its hiding, whether it's dug up or not, and make it very visible, so therefore it has a positive value. I think that's a nice way of looking at it.
Linda's work at Catawba is outside Selma. This was an antebellum town in the cotton belt. It was the first state capitol established in 1819. It was abandoned after a flood in 1865, the perfect archaeology site. The property though was not completely owned, the entire was not owned when Linda got there. Now, this is one of Linda's examples, and I think it relates to training and volunteerism. Linda tried for years to get an in into the African-American community. She wanted to have them participate, to work there as docents on archaeological sites, she wanted to do ethnographies with them. She just wanted them to participate because Catawba had had a very large black population. She didn't get anyone, nobody wanted to talk. And they deliberately said, "We don't want to talk about slavery?! We don't want to talk about the past! You're just over there and we don't want to talk about it." So she sort of let that go, went over doing something else. Well then, there was a lot of concern . . . that something be done to heighten–this is in the black community–20th century civil rights history. And [they were] particularly concerned about education, and the black community remembered that there was a black schoolhouse still standing at the Catawba site. So, they came to Catawba and said, "We want to use this standing structure as a place to interpret black education and the movements in black education." Well, so what they did was . . . Linda started working with them to collect ethnographies of people in town about education in the 20th century. Well guess what? Do you think people want to talk? Lots of talk, lots of collecting of information. And in that way, that community saw Linda as different person and Catawba as a different place; it is their agenda, what they wanted to do with the place, and rather than Linda say, "Well that doesn't sound archaeological to me? I'm not going to dig into the 20th century!" She saw it as a way of really building Catawba into what it should be, and that is a place that everyone can appreciate. There was a little side benefit she noted, which I love. Linda and Judy have very different personalities, but they interestingly get kind of similar places.
Some of those people were so appreciative of what was being done that they lobbied strongly at the state legislature to get more money for Catawba, and somebody left a lot of money, but anyhow it ended up buying more land for the park that Judy would have never anticipated, and actually rebuilding some of the slave cabins that were there. So she would have never anticipated if she'd gone out on a fundraising drive, "You want to rebuild the slave cabin?" No one would have donated. SO it changed their whole perspective of this place, and they were able to lengthen their history and what they wanted to acknowledge, and then go out advocate for it as citizens in a way that Linda couldn't have done as a state employee.
Here's an example of stewardship, various members of the community surrounding there could not become a member on their river management steering committee. Now this is a problem because the river there keeps flooding, there's all kinds of issues, and there's pollution particularly from up above by Birmingham, there's pollution coming down the river. So these people are downriver, and they wanted to have a member on the steering committee. And they were pooh--poohed because they were just country hicks . . . ‘you don't want to bring these country people on.' It was very controlled by the urban sector. Linda started doing flood studies, archaeological studies through out Catawba, measuring where the flood levels were, and then comparing with archival information maps. She produced maps of where the floods had been and during what times. That information, the people locally took to the steering committee, and said, "Look at the information we have about flooding, about what's going on in our community." And there was no time-depth at all to the steering committee's information, that leveraged them onto, a voting member, on the steering committee, which had more power than Linda imagined because that board only makes decisions by consensus. So everybody has to agree, which meant this person had as much power as anybody else. So that was a way then that the environmentalists saw Linda as a human being, as somebody trustworthy, and Catawba and archaeological expertise as something that application to the quality of life today.
Another she gives is that it was the year of the Indian at Alabama a couple of years ago, and she offered space to the Alabama Indian Affairs committee, commission, to meet there–so they'd have some meeting space. And again, Linda is soft-spoken, her personality is completely different than Judy's, which you'll find out in a moment if you didn't know already–I guess you heard about the bee study, so you know . . . . But Linda says, "Why don't you use my room, it's a nice room. Oh, and by the way, would you like to have an archaeology tour while you're here?" She felt that the relationships between the Indian community and the archaeologists weren't so hot because it was very much, ‘Lead them.' So she walked around showing them everything, they really appreciated it, and she talked about how the capital was designed around Native American sites, and that the circle there in Birmingham–I haven't seen that particular one, is actually a moat that was dug native populations and that the capital is actually sitting on top of a mound, and that these things were carefully selected the Europeans. Well, they got talking more and more and more, eventually Linda and others worked with the Indian Affairs commission to bring in archaeology to fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh grade curriculum, and they worked together on it. And one of the women involved in the Indian commission participated with Linda going around the state lecturing as well. So that was a complete shift in how things had been. I think that that is a nice case study, and Linda keeps doing that work, and she's very interested in corresponding with any of you, and she's a wonderful correspondent.
Next in Pensacola, here we have a town with about a half a million people, Judy says, in the surrounding area, not right in Pensacola, on the gulf coast. About half of the economy is run by government, another quarter by tourism. It was the first European settlement attempt, she always says, in 1559, and they have an ongoing combat, I guess with St. Augustine about who is the oldest European settlement. Anyhow, there's didn't last, but she started doing urban and historical archaeology in 1983 because of urban renewal. She had a University position there, and Judy doesn't take much just sitting down, and her position is that "if archaeology is going to be lost over there, I'm going to go over and do something." And rather than just inviting people into her shop, she walks into people's shops, like major energy companies, and simply says, "You will do archaeology, and you'll hire me to do it." And people listen to Judy, what can you say. They just listen to Judy, so she has been able to do this work for almost 20 years. And one of things she was able to accomplish through crises and mess, which is almost why all law comes about, was a protection plan that started in 1984. It's a local 106, that her University people do, local compliance on public land. It doesn't relate to private land, unfortunately. But, the way I guess she handles private land is, her word is to ‘interloom.' But anyhow, she trumps into people's offices and says, "You need to that."
A lot of her goal is to keep the word out constantly in the Pensacola community about how much archaeology is going on. There is never a moment that people do not hear about the quantity of archaeology that's going there. So this gets us into public education and promotion–media. She builds actual events; she stages events for people to come to. She has groundbreakings for instance; she creates press kits for the media, and if you've been by any journalist, you probably didn't come out sounding the way you intended to. If you produce, with the photos you want, with the quotes you want, then it's probably how you're going to come out. She learned that. She also runs out every time she hears the national media is coming to Pensacola or anywhere along the gulf coast; she makes sure she's in there for an appointment, and that she gets on ‘Good Morning America' or whatever. She does a one minute update on Pensacola archaeology on radio that's played two times a day, so two times a day, you get one minute with Dr. Benz, giving you an update of what's important on the national, public radio station. Don't you love that? So you get, you just can't help but get it. The 300 hundredth anniversary of Pensacola comes around, well what are you going to do as an archaeologist? Judy decides to find that very first site–"I'm going to find it!" And she does, and . . . she not only just finds it, but she completely recreates it, puts up markers, rebuilds the stockade, and her position is, she never walks away from an archaeological site without moving something on top. So you know what was there, you just don't walk away as a miner and put it in a box, no matter how beautifully temperature controlled and humidity controlled it is.
She went out and started doing underwater archaeology and found the 1559 ship that brought the Europeans there! [laughter] She's got the touch; she does. . . . . it was in 12 feet of water, that's it. So everybody could see her working the whole time, gangs of people lined up to see it. They had all tours and what not. Furthermore, they found 13? more ships in their harbor. So now this has become a very important thing in Pensacola, and she's established what's called a Colonial trail, so that as you move around Pensacola you have markers and you're reading about things. So she says, "The value of archaeology is tied to public awareness." So, if the public's aware, there is value. . . . So by promoting archaeology, it's no longer invisible, even if you can't see above ground anymore.
She can demonstrate archaeology's use; she believes strongly that to make your case in this kind of situation, and I have to support this, . . . she's got to have public monies to run all these compliance projects. She's got to get private money to buy the contractors to give her money to run the compliance projects. She's got to get the money to rebuild the stockade and put up the markers. She thinks that you've got to show economic value and make hard cases. And this is where students, as well as the rest of us, need to be trained in looking at just, hard cold numbers and figuring it out so that you can state your case. How many tourists are being brought in? What are the benefits to corporations and to universities? She actually goes into her University professor and says, "I make this University worthwhile to this community. I've improved your reputation. Therefore you need to give me more faculty." She says that.
So the one thing about promoting things is that if you say it, there's a good chance that others are going to believe. If you don't say it, they may not think it at all. This is Judy Benz's form of archaeology, and it's been very successful for her, for her students that she trains she publishes. And she says that the long term effects of these partnerships are that the buried past is a part of the visible landscape, that others use archaeology to meet more needs than she would have thought of, and it's good for archaeology by increasing public support which leads to more money and more support.
So those are those projects, now let me just put you to sleep with a few slides and try not to go over my time too much. And then I have some case studies and exercises that I can give to you that you may want to think about. This is my archaeology facility; this is on the court of Alexandria, Virginia located just across the Potomac river from Washington, DC. We were actually included in the original District of Columbia, so it was Alexandria, DC for about 50 years. This is the Torpedo Factory Art Center, which was built for WWI, but they started putting in the pilings? The day Armistice was declared. It was a federal contract so they finished it anyhow . . . WWII. So ??? made torpedoes there in WWII, and . . . when the artists moved in there originally, they took it over kind of and started it because artists know something that was very important that, in many ways, archaeologists never get to . . . that is that if artists congregate together, just like antique shops, more people are going to come, rather than being in separate garrets. So we now have 165, they need juried–this is not Arts and Crafts, these people take their work pretty seriously. So you sure don't say "Crafts" around them.
We've got sculpture and pottery and oils and watercolor. We have a school that trains thousands of people a year here. They have hundreds of courses a year for people of all ages, and you can see we're right on the waterfront. This is an anchor for tourism in the city, about a million people a year come to the Torpedo Factory. You can see the artists work in these places. These are their studios, and they sell their work from here. But they also may have gallery showings other places and lots of travel and what not, but the whole idea of the Factory, and this was the invention of some of the people that are still there, is you walk in and you see art in action. And that's exactly what you get with us; we are a storefront museum and we're archaeologists in action. There is a tremendous relationship between the production of art and the production of archaeology, I find. As I see the artists and their evolution over time and how they look at their work and creativity they put into it and the skill levels they have to have, I see more and more how deductive and inductive in archaeology really works together.
Yu can see we are in this Torpedo Factory; we're on the 3rd floor so we don't get as many visitors, but maybe 40--50,000 people a year are coming through our facility or looking in our storefront. We glassed ourselves in so that you can see what's going on, and we're using, we're forming . . . partnerships with the artists, where one of our neighbors across the hall did woodblock prints of our artifacts. She sells those; that was her idea, it wasn't ours. I would have never been so arrogant as to go over and ask somebody who does really incredible work, if they would do something on our pots. She just came over and said, "Oh just think they're fascinating." And then we used them15 years later on the sign that we developed. When you walk in our museum is, in fact, our laboratory so we exhibit ourselves. We're exhibitionists, and that is what you see, whatever it is–if we're having an intellectual argument, which we do fairly frequently, among our staff–that's what the visitor hears.
Whenever you walk in, you can talk to archaeologist, and you can ask them any question. Do you know how many questions the public has that are really not about archaeology? I went to the doctor the other day, you know, you're sitting there partially dressed, and he says, "You know I went Monchupitu, and I have always had these archaeology questions?" I'm sitting there going, "I don't if I want to talk right here about this, just keep your mind on what you're doing and talk after I'm dressed." But, you know, it's like: "How does that stuff get underground? You know, do the artifacts worm their way down, or how does that happen? I want to know?" And everybody, and particularly now with the history channel . . . and archaeology is not in the Yellow Pages, where do you find an archaeologist? So here we are, and these are our volunteers working. We have about 100-200 volunteers a year to work with us; we have to put a limit on it. There's not enough of us; we can't work nights; we can't work all Sundays. We can't generate enough stuff for the public to do because it takes so much of our time to manage them.
Now when I say volunteers, just call it what you might call if you're a university professors, students. These people are coming in and devoting, in some cases, 10-20 years of their lives with us. But they are not people who are just walking in for the day and digging on a site. They have to go through orientations, and I also want to recognize to you, there is a certification program that the Archaeological Society of Virginia runs, and our companion, our county archaeologists in Fairfax, Virginia are involved in that certification program. Our volunteers voted not to do that; they wanted to actually not have some of that coursework, and we wanted to continue this–but we continue to ask them about that.
This is also where we do a number of public programs for people of all ages as well as our discovery kits, which are hands-on when you come in. We have museum education and museum studies graduate students do internships where they're producing these kinds of programs for us that we can then archive and bring up again, seasonally or whatever we want. The idea is that you walk in, you don't touch the artifacts that you're not supposed to touch, you don't touch the excavating the sites. We make a clear distinction between what you need training for, but other ways that you can begin to understand the archaeological process. This is just an example of this partnership where we were able to work through with the artists and process what she's going through, learn a little bit more about printing.
This is another example of a partnership and getting your name out. I go to the once-a-month luncheons of the Art forum. These are maybe 30 or 40 people representing different art groups, including performing arts and people that represent art groups like artists all along one avenue. And, they talk about what is needed in the art community and what they're doing–grants, etc. Sometimes I'm asked to present something about archaeology. Well the head of that forum called me one day and said, "We're meeting with the City Councilmen about a pedestrian underpass between a Metro station and a new development. And we think there's a lot of opportunity for public art. We want to bring in public history too." Now, it's not often that the artists think of history.
This is again in a community, each person–the recreation people are doing their thing, everybody's doing their thing–so I was very appreciative that she brought me into it. Well, as we're talking, I brought archaeology . . . this is contract work done as associated with, not a 106 process, but our own local ordinates, where the Norfolk Southern Rail line had to do a lot of archaeology before they had this development.
And this is a ??? that dates to the mid-19th century and it goes underneath the street of one of the earliest turnpikes in town, which is now the major clogged artery of Northern Virginia, where it's bumper to bumper. But, it's also very bad for pedestrians, so they want to put an underground walk to get people from one side of the road to the other. The artists said, "Oh, here's an opportunity to get some Art in." Then I said, "Well look at what we've got." And so everyone, including City Councilmen, got fascinated by this, and the Councilmen started coming up with ideas that a concourse could be made to replicate this, and that the whole aspect in this neighbor–which was our first suburb of the west end could be brought in and interpreted through the area. In fact he got so excited when he found there was a German beer parlor there that . . . German polkas being played on the loudspeakers and beer being sold, and he just went crazy and he's a businessman and he can see that. But we couldn't have gotten there if I had suggested to my boss; it wouldn't have gotten passed anywhere . . . German beer parlors by the Metro bus station would not have made it. But the fact that the artists brought us–they're . . . and flaky anyhow, so it was like, "Okay great, let's all be flaky together." And I think we're going to get a really project eventually out of this.
Here's another area of our work that has more to do with stewardship and that is we did a master plan. . . . Most cities have to do master plans or they do do master plans, and ours did not have anything on preservation, so we offered to do this historic preservation master plan chapter. No one else . . . any of the people involved in standing structures were involved in this; they just didn't do it. They weren't told to do it. Instead, we just said, "We'll do it." So we wrote the plan, and it was approved by City Council. So that gave a very strong, strong effort to the planning process, so that archaeology as well as standing structures we identified that weren't protected could be used at the early part of site planning.
Now, as a part of that, we have an archaeological commission. It's appointed by City Council, and I recommend that as one of the most important political tools to use in local archaeology. They speak directly at Council, and they advise on the archaeology of the City. They do not operate like a Board of Architecture Review where they go . . . . But they saw in the early 80s as development was increasing, that we could not work as City archaeologists by simply saying to a developer, "Oh can we work on your site for free?" And them saying, "Sure." They did, everybody let us dig on their site for free, but there were too many sites, and our first site was a courthouse, which was 25 years ago and was City project, so we were paid to do it. But it was a city block, and it's hard to do city block with only 3 people, which is our staff–3 archaeologists, and we now have 2 part time archaeologists on top of that. So, the commission lobbied to get an archaeology code–this is a mini-106 except for it does not relate to only city undertakings, it relates to any project over one house in the city. It has to go through our archaeological review process, whether you're putting the burden on the developer by just saying, "You've got to go out and find out what's on it and tell us."
We did a survey of the city, both archivally and on the ground with window-shield, collected data and we changed the way we held data. Instead of projects, we hold it by addresses and by streets, and by that way we can then go in, and we reduced our time to look at the potential of a project–from about 2 to 3 hours looking at lots of data sources to more like a half hour–we could determine what the potential is for archaeological resources. This would be like what some people might call a 1A; we do that 1A and provide an assessment back to the developer–this is before the enter the process of getting a site plan . . .the planning commission–and we say to them that 20% of the time that more archaeology needs to be done. So about 80% of the projects look to us, given our data, that they aren't going to have an impact on significant resources. Our code defines what significant is beyond the 106 criteria to also what is publicly significant, so even the integrity does not have to be fully there if it has some public significance.
This is a map of the archaeology zones. It is an overlay zone, like an historic district, and it covers every place that's blue . . . ; the white areas, however, we continue to review things and we put comments in on that as well. All our comments are done as a staff person, just like a planner would put in there comments. You meet with developers ahead of time, and in their site plans, which are many, many pages of blueprints, the have to include an archaeology resource management plan–if they're in this 20%--that says what they are going to do, and what needs to be done. We write the scope of work because it was too confusing just putting it out–and lots of people do different scopes of work–you write a scope of work, but then the contractors that bid on it, through the developer certainly can offer changes and amendments if they fit. And we work with the contractors to get a product to everyone's satisfaction, which is sometimes easier than others.
As a part of this, with our archaeological commission, the commission makes sure that the city officials are aware of what's going on. The man in the middle was the chairman of our archaeological commission for 21 years. He has now passed away; he was retired military, and he never took no for an answer, but what he taught me was–you can have a stick, but you better have a really, really big carrot. And he would drive developers and city council people around the city and say, "There's an archaeological site, but here's a good place to put your project, and I'll tell you why." And then he would help them get approval for a project someplace else, or if they archaeology was there, he would find a way to make archaeology come alive above ground. Here he has masterminded a little event that included the past mayor and the current mayor at that time, who is now a state senator.
So what we have done over the years now in this area is by our commission talking directly as friends and citizens with the elected officials and then those elected officials going on to higher levels, or even just the citizens. There is a constant awareness of archaeology . . . as Judy would say. Here's a case where our archaeology commission and our last chairman, Jack …ski, who actually does not work professionally as an archaeologist, but he's . . . . The commission decided that for the city's 250th anniversary it would be fun to do reverse archaeology. So rather than dig something up, they would bury the time capsule, and they got a big kick out of this, and city council thought it was fantastic that archaeologists were putting something in the ground. It was probably funnier then, than it is me telling it to you, but the commission took this on, and they meet monthly, as a major mandate–what are we going to put in this time capsule? And they talked and they debated and they ended up coming up with sort of a layer cake of culture, representative samples across the city of religion, economics, transportation, everything. They got school kids to write to the school kids of a 100 years from now about what they're lives are like, doing ethnographies. They got city councilmen and then county health director, and what not, to write to their predecessors a 100 years from now about what they're trying to do with planning and what they hope their predecessor will do. And so this is a buried time capsule in the new library in a plaza of that new library, and then we were able to get a stone mason married to one of our historic archaeologists to do the actual stone above ground.
Here's another example where the commission and the public spurs me on. This site, which no longer looks this way–this is the way it looked 25 years ago–on the waterfront, prime real estate held up by all kinds of lawsuits for more than 20 years in litigation because the citizens did not want it developed . . . high rises and watergate was going to go in here. So, one of the things our commission said is, "This is where the Alexanderia canal was." The canal was instrumental in forming Alexandria in the 19th century; we want you to find it and put it on the national registry. This is a case where me as an archaeologists–I don't like canals, well sorry, I don't want to say that. I'm not intrinsically in love with canals and industrial things, and I really hate doing national register stuff. [interruption about scheduling] How ‘bout if I finish up in about 10 minutes? Is that okay? [everyone in agreement] So, in this case the commission said that it probably needed to be done, working in cooperation with them. I thought, "Well, it's probably a good idea to find why they think it's important." This is what was underground; we were able to put in on the National Register, but more importantly what was really interesting about this is that it caused a tremendous amount of attention–this is what Judy has found in her community, something big and bold and on the waterfront. This gave our commission greater speaking power in the community and what they said was, "You know, the waterfront really should be open to public access and should be a beautiful and historic place. It shouldn't be a place of derelict cars or conversely highrises." So working together with the planning group, they came up with a waterfront plan which continues to exist today that requires all waterfront development to have a 100 foot public access and some historical interpretation where appropriate.
But also in this case, by having it on the national register, when this property settled, when Reagan came in, all these lawsuits were immediately ended because he just said, "Feds give up. This belongs to the private land owners." Which meant it was open for grabs, but because it was on the national register, it came to the attention of the developers who were a dutch-holding company. They liked the canal; they thought that it was pretty cool. . . . . So they repositioned their architecture and changed the blueprints of their building to incorporate the canal . . . . They paid for the full excavation, about a half a million dollars, and then they rebuilt the canal on top because all the conservators we talked to said it was too expensive to converse the gates, it was beyond belief. So instead they reconstructed it on top and created a canal and then did public art because they saw the beauty of this project and the company and the architects won all kinds of awards through their professional societies for a project of humanities.
In this case I got a call . . . the homeless shelter was going to be built here, and it just looked like a big piece of land. In this case, and this is an example of going back and forth in partnership, we did an archival survey and found out it should be a black burial ground. In fact, it was the oldest known black burial ground that was actual generated independently by blacks for themselves. And so, we did some excavations to determine a little bit of what might be there. Eventually what this turned into was the Alexandria African-American Heritage Park, which is a 7-acre park that was donated by the developer to allow them for community goodwill. Because when the commission announced that one acre of this was minimally a black burial ground, the black community would you like to participate? A lot of things came together; the developer, on the other side of the street here to the left, wanted to develop. The black community had a task force going on where they wanted blacks commemorated somewhere in the city; the confederate soldier had just fallen over again in the street–the statue because it's always being hit, it always falls over . . . . So it was another time to say, well wait a minute, should we put the confederate soldier back up? Oh by the way, how come there's no black soldier, or no black person anywhere in Alexandria that there's a statue to? So the black task force recommended that the best way of having a black commemoration of their leadership in the city was to have the burial grounds serve as . . . for this heritage park. So the developer put in more than a million dollars to develop this park, which is now really an anchor for a seventy acre development in the Metro area there, and then Gary Burke, for instance, whose idea this was and who was the president of the Black preservation Society, was able to bring this into his community doing this for the community rather than archaeologists doing the work.
Well, why is public archaeology so important? Well, as you can tell, doing archaeology in a park like this, is not a pretty site, and so many of the places you're digging in cities are not pretty. They're not places where always the public can come, so what we've had to do is find ways to bring the public in, such as in our laboratory. I think the laboratory is one of the most hidden parts of the archaeology process, but to me is really the meats and bones of archaeology–it's really where some of the neatest stuff happens, where the real finds, the intellectual stuff is going on. So, that's why we have our laboratory; we have public days where the public screens the artifacts while our volunteers and staff dig and supervise. And then we go through the bags, and we discuss what it means and why they can't take it home with them. Interestingly enough, when we started this 10 years ago, the kids screamed sometimes that they couldn't take bags home because they looked like goody bags, that they always get when they go to parties . . . . And we had quite a discussion about this, well should we give them another goody bag with archaeology stuff? And we said, no, no, they've got to understand stewardship. If they walk into a marine sanctuary that says "Don't move the Seashells," they've got to follow that same thing in an archaeology site. So we don't let them take anything home.
Just like a regular archaeology person, you don't take anything home except in the notes you may have taken and brochures and that type of thing. And they've identified with this and now they're very proud, they come to the museum to see their artifacts, and they bring they're friends and family and even have they're birthdays there. We've even been asked to give slumber parties, which we refused! With volunteers, again, we ask them to participate, but none of them, well I should say maybe two or three people over the course of 25 years have been just too arrogant to be able to take orders. They just can not tolerate it, or they have more of a metal detection phase?.
Everyone else comes in, and they want to participate and they want to work in the county. In many cases as well, they're training us. For instance, this is Bill Livingstone; he's been working in our lab for a number of years, and he had been trying to cross-mend this pot for a long time. And he never could get the mend right on it, and it bothered him. And one day he said, "Couldn't I just pay somebody to do this?" We said, "Sure. We just don't have any money to hire a conservator." He says, "I'll pay for it!" We said, "Really?" He said, "Yeah, and furthermore you ought to ask other people." So given Bill's suggestion, we created an adopt an artifact program, and we put out the artifacts in need of conservation, or in some cases cross-mending and put them out for people to–and with a price-tag on it, anywhere from $50 to $200–and people do their anniversary presents to each other, birthday presents, a whole class will donate $50 to conserve the artifact. They get a certificate; they go in a book. And Bill's here–we didn't have all the pieces, but he was happier that it mended properly because he just couldn't do it. And I think that's really a charming picture of the attitude.
Another great thing about doing archaeology–this is working with one of our discovery kits, and you all know this, you've alluded to it–is bringing people together. It's not just the touching the past; it's the doing with other people, and here we've got the mother-child relationship, but we also just have kids working together, inactive and in a team-building process. Our adventure programs that we give for the students in summer camps are all hands-on, they deal with the archaeological method. Our theme as we interpret it as archaeologists at work. So we take our real dissertations, our real projects and then dumb them down–I shouldn't say dumb them down, give them bottom-line and the key points to be able to go through it in an hour. We offer summer camps for kids 12-15, where they're required to do what college students do under very, very controlled circumstances. And I've now been able to produce some people going on in archaeology.
We did a festival to commemorate the city's 250th anniversary, where we–all archaeologists in the whole Metro area in Virginia–came up, and 2,000 people came that day to our festival. Our friends group that designs it's own brochures and does many community programs we wouldn't normally do. For instance, they go out at Earth Day, and we participate, actually participating in other community events rather doing your own is very important to be seen as a team-player, not just an empire-builder. Another thing that we do is historic . . ?. where the historic properties are turned into . . . ? with stories. Our volunteers adore this; we had 40 volunteers a few weeks ago. And they worked for 6 months developing the story-line, and then they all have the behind the scenes–all kinds of things–and then we have about a thousand people come through our historic properties, and we always do our archaeology skit as a part of that.
Lastly let me show you a wonderful example of a partnership that again . . . is instigated by a member of the community, but where we can work in tandem. This is information that we had on a Freedmen cemetery, a grave-yard with a burial of contrabands who died . . . in a Catholic cemetery. That was the only thing in the newspaper, subsequently we were able to get more information about where the cemetery was located. We put this information into an abandoned cemetery survey that the State did, but we never saw anything more about that. Then, the Federal Highway Administration came to town to redo the Wilson Bridge, which is the major corridor between Virginia and Maryland and interstate 95, which is falling down. Not to belabor the point, but we'd gone through three different archaeological engineering firms trying to get just basic, basic historic archaeology done.
This last firm is doing a very good job, but in this regard, the idea was, where is this cemetery and how is it going to be affected by this bridge? Well, the lady that you see 2nd to the end in the Sari–Lilly?–read an article in the newspaper . . . . And in fact the journalist got it wrong three different ways, so the article was completely convoluted from the truth. But what came out in the article is, the Wilson Bridge project was going to destroy a Freedmen Cemetery, and the Freedmen cemetery, by the way, is underneath the gas station, so there is nothing above ground that you would know that this was a cemetery. Then there's an office building, and then there's part of the interstate, a bluff on the interstate. Lilly started calling Black churches and saying, "What are we going to do about it . . ." She couldn't get any response from anybody; she was really depressed. She talked to a strong environmental worker in the city, who's been working for the last 30 or 40 years, and said, "what can I do?" And Alex said, "Oh you got to go see Pam; she'll listen." So she came down, and we gave her what we had, which we had been working for the last 5 years to get the highway administration to put the cemetery on a map in any of the reports, which would never get on a map. So they continue to write that they were going to put the street over the cemetery, and that there would be no adverse impact, and then not even show it on a map because there was no adverse impact.
Anyhow, so we were stuck, and she was stuck. So she took our information, she then took a petition to City Council to have a resolution formed so that in one week of every year would be ‘remembering Freedmen's week.' And then she brought people out to this gas station and the chainlinked fence, put a sign up, and had a ceremony to commemorate these people. That was her idea, now as an archaeologist, I would not thought of replaying and commemorating, I would not have done that. That was her idea, and she developed a tremendous cadre of support of people. Next though, she did not let it stay there, this current archaeology company has done a lot of work. They have located 40 burials, a lot of remote sensing, that sort of thing, and the highway administration has backed off completely, and . . . now due to Lily and Paula over there to the left of Dunn, they've created a non-profit, 501C3 called ‘Friends of the Freedmen Cemetery.' They go to lots of meetings, and their plan is to have a commemorative park there. So, not only will the highway administration take the money that would have been used for some things and build a commemorative park, but now they have convinced the city to buy the gas station and the office building and combine it so there will be about an acre and a half park there. And now all they have to do–all I say–is discuss how the park will be designed. We've already had the designers put bushes where the graves are and to write on map; they don't see any problem with that.
The other great thing we did was go and get a highway marker, again something that I wouldn't think to do, to commemorate the site and have a major event associated with this whole activity. This is something that came out of her heart and out of her spirit that I think is really, really important. Just to finish . . . I just want to read to you for a moment what Lily wrote, "I've only lived in Alexandria 58 of my 61 years, and Black history has only recently become important to me. [she was not a history person particularly.] Archaeology is the reason why; we only spoke of Negro history once a week when I was in school. When I became the director of the ‘Friends of Freedmen Cemetery' and became involved with the archaeologists, it became very much part of my life. When I was at my lowest point and wanted to give up [and I didn't read scripture to her, but she said,] Pam often made me think of Psalms 27:13-14 ‘I would have fainted unless I could see the good of the Lord in the land of the living, wait and be of good courage' [and that's what she's done] I've become a volunteer, transcribed the Freedmen's burial records, typed historical data, participated in a dig. [And at present she's now joined the commission]. I truly love it. We're incorporated; we are well known in the area; we're on the internet. We raise funds to place a historical marker on the state highway. Today, city council approved the plans to purchase the land presently occupied by the gas station and make it a pass? Memorial park. We've come a long ways in 4 years, and now we're becoming a part of the heritage trail that we're doing." In other words, the Friends of Freedmen Cemetery and Alexandria Archaeology are joined at the hip, and then she put in parens a smile. What can I say, it's a love fest–except when it's not!
But, lastly what I wanted to show you is how we have pulled all this into a heritage trail. It was funny because I didn't know Judy had a Colonial trail; we hadn't actually talked about this for a number of years, and then at Longbeach we're both presenting papers on trails. We went ‘whoah'–maybe this is not too innovative. Our heritage trail is a 23 mile biking, hiking, rollerblading, wheelchair accessible trail that uses the city bike trails. We have joined in partnership with our bike city committee that has a 100 miles of bike trails on and off street, and we have now also joined the Potomac National heritage trails–Scenic national trails system, which goes from the Upper Ohio basin down to the Chesapeake. And we hope to be a permanent loop of this. This is a loop off a park service trail that goes along the Potomac river; it takes you through 10,000 years of human history in Alexandria and through many of the sites, some still present, some completely gone and architecture, which takes you into the 20th century with Gerald Ford's house, which was Nixon, and all the biggies a long the African-American neighborhoods. The sites are coded, with little logos by . . . Women's history, Civil War history, African-American history, Native American history, or Colonial history. And then we tell them where to go to the bathroom and all the rest of that. This . . . series of trails will now be published in a 80 page book being put out Capital Books that we're just finishing writing, and then our Friends organization will be getting part of the royalties from the book, and they intend to do more. And we have one volunteer who's already a 150 page manuscript on everything in 18th century related to George Washington that we will then bring in African Americans and the archaeology too. So we are also on the Alexandria Trail map system, so our goal is really to bring archaeology above ground, whether it's gone or still there, and make it a part of leisure services . . . so that people don't see archaeology as something disparate from daily life.
This is a Christmas ornament that we made, based upon a motif from a pot commemorating the War of 1812–the end of it. It says ‘Peace and Plenty.' So we made our Christmas ornament for the year 2000 with ‘Peace and Plenty' on it, which I guess it didn't turn out to be a very peaceful beginning of this decade, but anyhow that's what can be done, and this is based on a drawing that one of our volunteers made of this motif. So we ask people to volunteer with us to touch the past, and we made this poster at one of the SAA's years ago, is designed by one of our volunteers. So that's an example of our form of public archaeology.