News

SHA 2013: 46th Annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology
University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom
January 9–12, 2013

The Call for Papers for the SHA conference in Leicester, UK, opened at the beginning of May, and session proposals have already started to roll in.

All of the information you need to put together a proposal for a symposium, paper, or poster, is in the Call for Papers, which can be downloaded from the conference webpage, and there is a short summary in this blog post from March. Proposals can be submitted electronically here. The deadline for all submissions is 10th July 2012. Last month we featured some of the symposium proposals that are already doing the rounds, and we will feature more of them on this blog later this week. If you would like to advertise your session proposal on this blog, do get in touch. You can also post information about your session on the conference Facebook page, and tweet using the hashtag #SHA2013.

Booking your travel to Leicester and accommodation in the city early is the best way to find good deals; the SHA 2013 conference committee has put together guides to travelling to Leicester and places to stay when you get here; all of this information is available to download from the conference webpage.

We’re looking forward to seeing you all in Leicester in January!

I recently returned from a week in Oulu, Finland, where I attended the Nordic Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference.  A UK version of TAG originated in 1979 and has met yearly afterward (for more on the conference’s roots, Colin Renfrew details the origins of TAG, and a 2008 TAG session details its lineage), with Nordic TAG conferences held beginning in 2001 and American TAG meetings since 2008.  TAG conferences have encouraged discussions on broadly defined “theoretical archaeology,” an expansive umbrella term that encourages novel uses of philosophy and theory that creatively frame materiality, scholarship, and archaeology itself.

Like its British and American counterparts, the Nordic version of TAG is broadly conceived, including a host of straightforward archaeological case studies as well as more abstract theory-driven deconstructions of materiality.  In that sense it is not really all that much different from the British and American versions of TAG, and a vast range of the papers would be perfectly at home in an SHA conference as well.  Most of the Nordic TAG attendees were Scandinavians working with northern European data, and the case studies reached from distant prehistory to contemporary materiality.  Much of the conference would be familiar to archaeologists outside the Nordic world, but some modest distinctions about northern European archaeologies were underscored at Nordic TAG.

Seventeenth-century ceramics from Tornio (courtesy Risto Nurmi)

Historical archaeology is defined myriad ways in northern Europe (when the discipline is even recognized at all), and it encompasses truly interdisciplinary methods and questions and a breadth of theoretical frameworks.  Some of its distinction revolves around the material data featured in Nordic archaeologies, which routinely focus on architecture, space, and idiosyncratic things.  Tiina Aikkas, for instance, gave a paper on sieidi stones, sacrificial sites at which indigenous Sami left offerings of animals, metal, or alcohol to ensure hunt success (for more details, see her co-authored paper in Norwegian Archaeological Review).  Aikkas outlined complex material, spatial, and ritual analysis to ambitiously examine the full breadth of sounds, actions, odors, and material practices associated with these sacred stone sites that date as early as the 11^th century AD, with use well through the historic period if not the present.  The paper included zooarchaeological, ethnographic, and GIS data that would be familiar in any archaeological study, casting these rituals as evidence of the inseparable relationships between Sami ritual, religion, materiality, and subsistence.  Lots of Nordic TAG papers examined a comparably broad range of data and defined materiality in its broadest senses, and this is increasingly what archaeology looks like in many places.

Some of the distinction in northern European archaeology revolves around its theoretical ambitions.  For instance, Bjornar Olsen’s session “What About the Things Themselves?” advanced the absurdly clever proposition that material culture studies are not compelled to include humans as a compulsory dimension of the analysis; that is, instead of focusing on the relationship between humans and things, can archaeologists understand things unto themselves?  Olsen punctuated his ontologically novel contribution to the session with a stream of oddly aesthetic images of discarded things and vacant places (for similar work, compare the thoughtful Ruin Memories project).  Northern European archaeologists tend to read theory very broadly and borrow from a vast range of challenging and often-creative philosophical foundations when they focus on theory, so TAG always expands my bibliography.  Still, much of northern European archaeology is firmly rooted in material description, highly focused research questions, and dense scientific methodology that does not devote much if any of its energy to explicit theorizing.

In the foreground, the Keminmaa Old St. Michael’s Church was built between 1519-21. Besides being a fascinating medieval building, it holds one of the most interesting spectacles in northern Finland: when Lutheran priest Nikolaus Rungius died in 1629 he was buried under the church and is on display in the church floor today. The church in the background, the new Saint Michael’s, was built in 1827.

The handful of northern Europeans who call themselves historic archaeologists sometimes struggle to define the discipline’s essential questions.  That struggle may be familiar to many North American historical archaeologists as well:  do we study a chronological period (since 1492, for instance)?; is our focus the transition to modernity?; is historical archaeology properly an archaeology of capitalism?; and so on.  Some of the battle is simply establishing the scholarly value of the “recent” past, which in Europe includes much of the period from 1700 onward.  For instance, with my Finnish colleagues Titta Kallio-Seppa and Timo Ylimaunu, I presented work on an 1822 creamware assemblage in Oulu, and such 18^th and 19^th-century ceramic papers would be absolutely commonplace in Atlantic World historical archaeology conferences.  However, Nordics often lump the period into 500 undifferentiated years of modernity; in some cases archaeologists have not devoted much if any time to artifacts from the last half-millennium; and relatively few northern European archaeologists have studied the 19^th and 20^th centuries (despite a rather rich contemporary archaeology scholarship).  Many of the mass-produced goods found on northern European sites after the early 19^th century are more familiar to North American archaeologists than they are to northern European scholars, but marketing, trade embargoes, and cultural distinctions shaped northern European consumption significantly, so the assemblages still have some concrete differences from the well-studied Anglo world.  The same material things in the Nordic world may not always mean the same thing they meant in places like North America, and some of our conventional questions on things like cost status or consumer display are not especially useful in the distant reaches of Finland.

This police officer lords over the Oulu Marketplace.

The most interesting and common question I was asked at this conference was some variation on “Why are you doing this archaeology here?”  That question is asked persistently, curiously, and without much self-consciousness by colleagues who rarely understand that they sit atop astoundingly rich post-1500 sites (and often curated collections) that can be woven into their existing medieval analyses of emergent globalization in exceptionally powerful ways.  Most European colleagues are open to the possibilities and keen to share their data and local sites, though, and in many places very creative scholars have built a strong foundation for historical archaeology that they are happy to share.

CRM archaeologists and academics alike recognize that much of our contemporary practice revolves around efforts to fund our research, and our Nordic colleagues share many of those same challenges.  There are precious few European academics who might be called historical archaeologists, and most Nordic countries have only a few archaeology departments and a handful of positions covering any period, so academic historical archaeology jobs are especially rare.  Salvage projects in northern Europe overwhelmingly focus on sites dating earlier than the 18^th century depending on specific national preservation codes, so there is not much compliance archaeology on “late” historic sites at all.  A vast range of Nordic scholars based in museums and state agencies work alongside post-doctoral researchers on a persistent enterprising search for extended funding, and Nordic TAG included continual hallway conversations about research partnerships, collaborations, and joint grant applications.  Despite the bleak North American job market, the shrinking opportunities for contract firms, and the demoralizing cuts to agencies like Parks Canada, there is still a well-established historical archaeology community in North America and a relatively firm footing in the academy and preservation law.  The UK likewise has an exceptionally productive historical archaeology community, and while they face many of the same challenges we deal with in the US the discipline has a strong foundation.

Nordic historical archaeology is in an early growth moment much like Atlantic World historical archaeology witnessed a half-century ago, and northern European historical archaeologists are actively building the discipline’s regional and national foundations.  This has included cementing international research partnerships, so there are some truly exciting possibilities for North Americans who want to expand their work to very new places.  Many of us in North America cannot contemplate European projects for concrete financial reasons, but increasingly more North American universities are supportive of faculty and students conducting international research and have modest but consequential “seed” grant funds for scholars beginning such projects; in my case, for instance, there was financial support for my travel to the Nordic world that I could never secure for work in my own hometown.  Those seed grants actually did produce more research opportunities for me and my students, so do not be too rapidly intimidated by the challenges of international historical archaeology research.  As Nordic TAG confirmed for me, there is a lot of interesting work beyond our narrow North American circles and lots of possibilities to borrow from it or even make a contribution to the discipline’s scholarly growth.

This statement came before I had arrived.

The use of digital technologies for cultural heritage work is a rapidly expanding field of research and engagement (Kalay et al 2007). The array of digital techniques presents a bewildering array of possibilities for the heritage professional. The Virtual Rosewood Research Project (VRRP) presents one approach employing multiple technologies for public outreach allowing researchers to present, manage, and disseminate both tangible and intangible heritage. In this post, I discuss the use of archaeological visualization and digital storytelling for collaborative purposes in Rosewood, Florida.

The use of virtual world environments to represent archaeological contexts encompasses hundreds of projects around the world and plans for a peer-reviewed multimedia journal are in the works (Bawaya 2010). Early work in the 1990s focused on creating images and video representing prehistoric and monumental sites. In the last decade research has moved towards visualization, or inferring complete contexts from the incomplete data recovered during archaeological research (Barcelo 2002).

Digital storytelling has its roots in a series of workshops in Los Angeles during the early 1990s (Lambert 2009). These workshops proved so successful that a Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) was created shortly thereafter and remains the national center for working with digital media to tell personal stories (Lambert 2009:1-10). The impulse to share personal lives continues to characterize digital storytelling.

The Development and Destruction of Rosewood

Rosewood was settled in the mid-nineteenth century by a diverse group of people, and experienced rapid economic growth following the Civil War. Rosewood’s population was majority African American by the early twentieth century. By 1910, Rosewood’s population was eclipsed by the neighboring community of Sumner following the construction of a large sawmill complex approximately one mile west of Rosewood.

On New Year’s Day 1923, a white woman in Sumner fabricated a black assailant to hide her extramarital affair with a white man. A white mob formed and headed for Rosewood, encountering the home of Sam Carter. They interrogated Carter by hanging him from a tree by the neck, and when it seemed the mob might release him, a man leveled his gun at Carter’s face and ended the day with Carter’s lynching.

Two days later, whites in Sumner heard (or fabricated) rumors that the black assailant was with Sylvester Carrier. Carrier’s distrust of whites was well-known and before the night was out, two whites lay dead on his doorstep after attempting to set fire to his family’s home. By the sixth of January three other blacks had been brutally murdered and the white mob, now numbering in the hundreds, began the systematic burning of every black-owned home and building in Rosewood. A train was brought through town during this time to pick up women and children, who were hiding in the nearby swamps following the gun battle at the Carrier home. The train took dozens of families to towns like Otter Creek, Archer, and Gainesville where descendants live to this day.

Image of Rosewood’s Destruction (Literary Digest – January 4, 1923)

My decision to investigate digital heritage was motivated by specific questions posed to me by descendants of Rosewood’s community. These began with deceptively simple questions such as “can you show me where my grandfather’s house was located?” These early engagements ranged towards more complex conversations centering on the exploration of new methods for “getting our story” to wider and younger audiences.

Workflow for Creating Virtual Rosewood

The first step in visualizing Rosewood involved reconstructing property boundaries by reviewing thousands of historic deeds in the local courthouse. There are no maps, directories, or other information about Rosewood’s spatial layout. Therefore, geographic information systems (GIS) were used to reconstruct the metes and bounds on hundreds of historic deeds dating between 1870 and 1930. Historic census, aerial photographs, oral histories, and preliminary archaeological investigations were added to the GIS. The resulting dataset  provides the spatial template for the virtual world environment.

Virtual Reconstruction of Carter Home & Blacksmith Shop

High cost and lack of training has, until recently, limited the use of 3D programs for archaeological visualization. Companies are creating educational licensing programs. For instance, Autodesk, the parent company for 3DS Max and AutoCAD, began offering free educational licenses in 2010 at their educational site. The structures were created using 3DS Max and are available as a virtual world environment via a web-based format developed with a game engine. Game engines are used to create video games, and are increasingly used by archaeologists to create interactive virtual world environments of archaeological contexts (Rua and Alvito 2011). Unity 3D was used to export the 3DS Max models to the web. The result is two-plus square miles of virtual land, which re-creates the spatial layout of Rosewood as it existed in 1922. Interpretive signs throughout the virtual world environment tell the story of Rosewood’s development and destruction.

Virtual Rosewood Museum in Second Life

In addition to the web-based virtual world environment, a Virtual Rosewood museum is available in the popular online world of Second Life. The basic design is that of a repurposed, historic building converted to a local history museum. Visitors explore the history of Rosewood through museum-like displays. The Virtual Rosewood Museum continues to attract students, educators, and the general public. In December 2011 I led a two-hour tour to the Virtual Pioneers, a group of educators who regularly meet in Second Life to explore the intersection of online worlds and social justice education.

Virtual Rosewood Museum in Second Life

Visitors to the Virtual Rosewood Museum in Second Life can also watch a 25 minute video exploring Rosewood’s history, which is also available at the VRRP website.

Digital Storytelling and Rosewood’s Heritage

Digital stories can be created with relatively little investment and freely delivered using the internet, making research immediately accessible to more people. The VRRP includes a 26 minute digital documentary (link) exploring the development and destruction of Rosewood, the lives of those who survived through oral histories, and an exploration of the various methods used to document the town.

A particularly touching moment in the documentary occurs when Robie Mortin describes meeting her father for the first time following the 1923 race riot. Mortin’s father recognized early on how the accusation of rape might turn into large scale violence. He sent Robie, who was seven at the time, to a nearby town with her older sister. After hearing about the destruction of Rosewood days later, and failing to meet their father, the two girls assumed the worst. They eventually made their way to Miami working as migrant laborers. Robie Mortin shares what happened one morning when she went to a newly constructed church.

“There was a ditch that separated Riviera Beach from the black neighborhood. There was a bridge across it, and there was a Hearst Chapel AME Church there. They had built that church right on our side of the ditch. So, we, my sister and I, went to church, and would you believe our daddy was there, and we didn’t know where he was, hadn’t seen him in months. We didn’t even know he was still alive, and there he was in the front of that church.” – Robie Mortin (2009)

The author conducting oral history interview with Robie Mortin

The ability of digital storytelling to share touching moments like these with a wide audience is an important aspect of social justice education. Robie Mortin’s words, delivered in her soft, ninety-four year-old voice, touch the viewer in an unmistakable way. The emotional impact of her story demonstrates the trials, and in this one example, happy surprises which make a life scared by trauma bearable.

Discussion and Concluding Thoughts

The creation of a website for my research into Rosewood’s past – including a data warehouse with census records and oral history transcripts –  has led to many unexpected engagements. This includes journalists, interested members of the public, and members of Rosewood’s multifaceted descendant communities. While the newspaper articles bring increased traffic to the VRRP website, it is the other engagements which demonstrate the collaborative potentials of new media for heritage. For instance, one property owner in the area where Rosewood was located contacted me after watching the digital documentary. His property is home to the African American cemetery in operation during Rosewood’s occupation. While allowing descendants to visit their ancestors’ graves, he has kept the property closed to academics after previous researchers  misrepresented his involvement in their projects. At present, myself and Dr. James Davidson of the University of Florida are documenting the property and its value to various descendant communities.

Documenting Rosewood’s African American Cemetery

The creation of new media represents a pedagogical toolkit. The new forms of knowledge produced by the synthesis between historical research and new media accomplish a number of things. It highlights the experiences of descendants and other interested parties, provides tools for critically engaging with history and media, and offers researchers new techniques for crafting the way historical knowledge is accessed and interpreted by others. In many ways, new media offers a new set of tools, ones not found in the master’s house (Lourde 1984:110-113) and potentially very liberating. New media is a constellation of approaches and technologies not regulated by gatekeepers and tradition – although certainly in dialogue with them. Obvious and sizable obstacles to full participation include the manifestation of a digital divide as well as the (re)inscription of negative identity politics (Nakamura 2008) within virtual spaces. Only time will tell if this optimistic viewpoint will produce transformative fruit or if mass standardization will assert itself and crush individual creativity and expression. I have chosen to be optimistic, and hope that the Virtual Rosewood Research Site motivates others to do the same.

References Cited

• Barcelo, Juan A.
  • 2002    Virtual Archaeology and Artificial Intelligence. In Virtual Archaeology, Franco Nicolucci, editor, pp. 21-28. ArchaeoPress, Oxford.
• Baway, Michael
  • 2010    Virtual Archaeologists Recreate Parts of Ancient Worlds. Science 327(5962):140-1.
• Kalay, Yehuda E., Thomas Kvan, and Janice Affleck
  • 2007    New Media and Cultural Heritage. Routledge, New York.
• Lambert, Joe
  • 2009    Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. Digital Diner Press, Berkeley, CA.
• Lourde, Audre
  • 1984    Sister Outsider: Essay and Speeches. Crossing Press, Freedom, CA.

Historical Archaeology and the Importance of Material Things, edited by Leland Ferguson (1977), was one of the formative works in the field that spurred the discussion of the connections between theory and material culture in our understanding of the past. Taking history as a cue, we were pleased to reignite the examination of how historical archaeology uses material objects to interpret the past and to present Historical Archaeology and the Importance of Material Things II at the SHA 2012 Baltimore meeting. Co-chairs and editors Julie Schablitsky and Mark Leone presented a symposium of noted scholars who addressed this topic from various geographic, chronological, and theoretical perspectives. Now, the SHA is pleased to offer both the original and new works as SHA Publications, available now in our SHA Bookstore at Lulu! These publications, as well as all our SHA publications are available as printed copies or as e-books.

The Call for Papers for the SHA 2013 conference in Leicester opens this week, and further information will be posted on the SHA website and this blog in due course. In addition to the stimulating conference programme, SHA 2013 will provide opportunities to sample Leicester’s cuisine, which is as diverse as the city itself. A later blog post will focus on the region’s home-grown food and drink, but this week we take a look at what has fast become Britain’s national dish (or one of several, at any rate): the curry.

Indian takeaway

Britain’s place at the centre of a global empire ensured that the spices and cooking techniques characteristic of a curry, and the people with skills and experience required to cook one, found their way from South Asia to Europe. Britain’s first dedicated curry house, the Hindostanee Coffee House, was opened by Dean Mahomed near Portman Square in central London in 1809, although curries catering to the tastes of returning colonial administrators and their families were served in coffee houses and at home since at least the middle of the eighteenth century.

Curry, along with all things Indian, grew in popularity during the nineteenth century; Queen Victoria, as the Empress of India, built an Indian-themed state room at her home on the Isle of Wight, Osborne House. Culinary tastes among the middle classes moved on, but in the major British ports, including London, Liverpool and Cardiff, former Indian sailors opened cafes, mainly catering for fellow Asians.

Immigration from South Asia after the Second World War, in particular refugees from the conflicts between India and Pakistan after partition and independence in 1947, war in the Sylhet region of Bangladesh in 1971, and the expulsion of Asians from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972, brought new permanent communities to Britain. Leicester was one destination for South Asians displaced from their homes by war or economic need; the city’s textile factories and post-war rebuilding schemes provided work and opportunities to settle. Some of the new arrivals entered the catering trade, and a distinctive British Asian cuisine has evolved.

One of the most famous sketches of the British Asian comedy troupe Goodness Gracious Me saw the group ‘going out for an English‘ on a Friday night in Mumbai. Having got ‘tanked up on lassis‘, they mispronounce the waiter’s name, ask for the blandest food on the menu, and over-order bread rolls and chips. The sketch gently mocks the stereotype of the British visiting Indian restaurants after a night in the pub, ordering aggressively spicy curries and too many portions of rice and naan. We’ve all done it. The three-minute sketch, originally broadcast over ten years ago, has now entered popular culture, and is frequently cited in academic papers and book chapters exploring the place of food and reflexive humour in representations of South Asians in modern Britain.

The 2013 conference committee has collated some of our favourite places to eat and drink in Leicester; to set your mouth watering we have added them to this map, and will continue to update it during the run-up to the conference.

CAT Instrument Survey Workshop at Bee Tree Preserve in northern Baltimore County (photo courtesy of author via http://marylandarchaeology.org)

Citizen-scientists didn’t just dominate Maryland archaeology until the 1960s…they were Maryland archaeology. But, as in all areas of scientific endeavor, they were marginalized by a growing body of professional, university trained scientists. The Archeological Society of Maryland (ASM) reversed this trend in 2001 with the creation of the Certified Archeological Technician (CAT) program, offering individuals the opportunity to obtain recognition for formal and extended training in the goals and techniques of archeology without having to participate in an academic degree program. Now in its eleventh year, the program honors its thirteenth and fourteenth graduates: Valerie Hall and David Frederick.

ASM took several years to develop and implement the program, drawing inspiration from several programs around the USA, notably those of Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Virginia. Principal challenges that confronted the organizational committee came largely from the professional community which was very skeptical about the value and wisdom of certifying individuals who did not come through conventional university programs and that insisted on a more thorough academic grounding (largely through a lengthy reading list of regional and national classic studies) than seemed consistent with the objective of the program. Some of those fears were allayed by including representatives on the CAT committee from the Maryland Historical Trust – the state’s principal historic preservation agency and institutional seat of the state historic preservation office – and from the statewide professional organization, the Council for Maryland Archeology. These representatives participate in all discussions regarding program modification and in the “defense” of each candidate for certification.

Most members of the organizational committee brought to the table preconceptions of the purpose of the program. Agency archaeologists saw the CAT program as a training ground for prospective volunteers. Other participants thought that successful candidates might use their credentials to take jobs away from those in the private sector who completed more conventional training programs. The more skeptical professional members feared that CAT awardees would use their certification as legitimization for unscientific collecting, misrepresenting themselves to gain access to sites on private and public properties for personal gain. In the end, the committee established the current purpose of the program: to meet the needs of ASM members seeking formal archaeological training, without assuming personal motivations, and a signed ethics statement providing sufficient insurance against misrepresentation. Since Annetta Schott became the first candidate to complete the program (2003), none of these fears have been realized, and the CAT program has become non-controversial and institutionalized.

The key to the success of the CAT program and the concept that has allayed most fears lies within the program name. The ‘T’ stands for technician; not scientist. Here we modify the citizen-scientist concept in recognition that archaeology differs from most fields of scholarly endeavor in that destruction of physical evidence often is unavoidable, a circumstance not generally encountered in cataloging stars, conducting bird counts, or observing whale behavior. Candidates and graduates work under the direction of professional archaeologists engaged in the ethical study of archaeological resources, helping CAT candidates and graduates recognize the difference between ethical and unethical work.

Each candidate (aged 16 or older) applies to the program, paying a nominal one-time fee ($50) and agreeing to abide by the statement of ethics. Candidates pick or are assigned a mentor who: answers procedural questions; identifies field, laboratory, and archival research opportunities; recommends readings and provides copies of difficult to acquire publications; and serves in all other ways one might expect of a mentor. Candidates complete a course of directed reading; document in a journal as well as on a series of forms the required hours in different aspects of fieldwork (mapping, survey, excavation) and laboratory work; prepare forms for registering newly discovered sites; and participate in a series of required and optional workshops offered by professional archaeologists, including: archaeological law and ethics, overviews of state archaeology; historic and aboriginal ceramics; lithic analysis, etc. ASM’s annual field session in archaeology, conducted over eleven days each spring in partnership with the Maryland Historical Trust since 1974, provides opportunities for candidates to fulfill many requirements, but other state, county, and foundation programs, as well as some opportunities offered by the private sector, are integral to the program.

The CAT program appears to be an unqualified success, both in terms of meeting the specific personal goals of individual participants and in providing programs for ASM members who are not candidates. Presentation of awards to the two latest graduates at ASM’s annual spring symposium – which focuses this year on the archaeology of war and community conflict – publicly recognizes their achievements and inspires others to join and complete the program (current enrolment is 48 in an organization of just over 300). Producing one to two graduates each year, the CAT committee is considering other program developments, including a “Kitten” program for adolescents, an advanced level for CAT graduates, and prospective roles in future programs for graduates, most of whom remain active in ASM. The committee also has begun to work more closely with comparable programs in the neighboring states of Delaware and Virginia and encourages candidates to participate in legitimate archaeological projects outside of the state. I would like to see graduates directing field and laboratory projects under nominal professional direction, work proceeding without constant supervision. Would we realize the worst fears of the program’s early opponents? Or would we greatly expand the capacity of the professional community to explore the past? A worthwhile experiment?

The field of African American historical archaeology witnessed a boom in social and political consciousness from Black scholars during the 1990s. In 1994 Theresa Singleton and Elizabeth Scott broke new ground with the founding of the Society of Historical Archaeology‘s Gender and Minority Affairs Committee. Several years later, African American archaeologist, Maria Franklin (1997a;1997b) published on the lack of racial diversity in the field and archaeology’s affect on the African Diaspora. The 90s also represented a critical time in African American historical archaeology, in particular, with the excavation and later commemoration of both the Freedman’s Cemetery in Dallas, Texas and the African Burial Ground in Manhattan, New York. Cheryl La Roche and Michael L. Blakey’s (1997) article “Seizing Intellectual Power: The Dialogue at the New York African Burial Ground,” stressed the importance of community collaboration, while Theresa Singleton’s (1999) book, I, too, am America: Archaeological Studies of African American Life, addressed issues of African American representation, and the need for alternative methodological and pedagogical practices within the field.

In years prior, scholars and students alike have historically discussed the need to create an organization (or institute) to identify and address these social and political concerns as well as foster additional dialogue. However, the low numbers of Blacks in the field thwarted previous attempts to solidify an organization until now. More than four decades after the establishment of the Association of Black Anthropologists and a decade after these publications, the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA) was established.

The groundwork for SBA was laid in 2011 by a few students at the University of Florida who saw the potential to address some concerns within the field of archaeology. At this year’s annual SHA conference in Baltimore, Maryland a group of Black archaeologists came together to discuss their experiences as racial minorities in the field. The meeting brought together veteran and amateur archaeologists, reaffirming the organizations commitment to promote the development of five goals:

1. To lobby on behalf and ensure the proper treatment of African and African Diaspora material culture.
2. To promote archaeological research and recruit more blacks to enter the field of archaeology.
3. To raise and address contemporary concerns relating to African peoples worldwide.
4. To highlight the past and present achievements and contributions that blacks have made in the field of archaeology.
5. To ensure that the communities affected by archaeological work are not simply viewed as objects of study or informants. Rather, they should be treated as active makers and/or participants in the unearthing and interpretation of their history.

As of right now SBA currently operates as a listserv as opposed to a formal organization; however, it is currently engaged in two new projects. The first project is interested in exploring the history of blacks in archaeology. SBA is working to collect oral histories from individuals throughout the African Diaspora who have had exposure to archaeology. The Oral History Project was created to collect and archive oral history interviews of Blacks in the field to gain a better understanding of the roles and experiences Blacks have had in the past and present. The first interview was with Whitney Battle-Baptiste, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and can be heard online at the SBA website. Listeners can hear Dr. Battle-Baptiste discuss how her worldview influenced her research, and her humble beginnings in the field of archaeology.

In addition to the Oral History project, SBA members have been working to increase the presence of archaeology in the field of African Diaspora Studies and organized a panel presentation entitled, “Our Things Remembered: Unearthing relations between Archaeology and Black Studies,” at the National Council for Black Studies 2012 annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia. SBA has also been invited to organize an additional panel for the 2012 Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) convention to be held in Philadelphia this September.

If you have an interest in archaeology and would like to join our listserv please e-mail sbarchaeologists@gmail.com. The organization is still in its foundational stage and we are currently looking for relevant information to post on the website including job openings, internships, field schools, and articles for the blog attached to the website. We are always open to comments and suggestions.

Please check out the SBA website often for updates at www.societyofblackarchaeologists.com or find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/sbarchaeologists

References

• Franklin, Maria
• 1997a “Power to the People”: Sociopolitics and the Archaeology of Black Americans. Historical Archaeology 31(3):36-50.
• 1997b Why are there so few black American archaeologists? Antiquity: an international journal of expert archaeology 71(274).
• La Roche, Cheryl and Michael Blakey
• 1997 Seizing Intellectual Power: The Dialogue at the New York African Burial Ground. Historical Archaeology 31(3):84-106.
• Singleton, Theresa (editor)
• 1999 “I, Too, Am America”: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life. University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville

New Walk and De Montfort Square, Leicester

Once you get to Leicester for the SHA Conference in January 2013, you are most likely to travel between the university, and the shops, bars and hotels of the city centre, by taking a stroll down New Walk. New Walk isn’t really all that new; in 1785 the Leicester Corporation decided to lay out a pedestrian walkway which would link the town with the racecourse (now Victoria Park, which was laid out in 1883). This promenade still serves its original function, the passage of pedestrians unimpeded by vehicles to this day (although you might see the odd transgressive cyclist).

The New Walk Museum

The New Walk Museum and Art Gallery

Halfway down the New Walk, this museum and art gallery was originally built as a Nonconformist school in 1836, and became a museum in 1849, when the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society presented its collections to the city. The museum combines an ongoing series of temporary exhibitions with its own permanent collections of Picasso ceramics, art from the 16th to 21st centuries, natural history, and dinosaurs! Entry to the New Walk Museum is free, and the opening hours and access information can be found here.

Victoria Park

Having been the location of Leicester’s first racecourse (now relocated to Oadby, on the outskirts of the city), Victoria Park was laid out in 1883; a set of green lungs for the rapidly expanding city. Victoria Park is home to a number of festivities during the summer, including the Caribbean Carnival, the Summer Sundae music festival, and Leicester Pride. Throughout the year, Victoria Park acts as the University’s back garden, a venue for sporting endeavour, on the football and rugby pitches and tennis courts, and a place of reflection at Sir Edwin Lutyens‘ war memorial of 1923.

Victoria Park. It might look like this in January

1. [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

2. [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0], via Flickr

3. [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr

Students are an important component of the Society for Historical Archaeology, representing the future of the organization. The Society provides opportunities for professional growth for students in historical archaeology. Each year, the Kathleen Kirk Gilmore Dissertation Award Subcommittee honors a student who makes an outstanding contribution to historical archaeology. In her dissertation Change and the Era of the Atlantic Trade: Commerce and Interaction in the Niumi Commercial Center (The Gambia), this year’s winner, Dr. Liza Gijanto, takes a diachronic look at the impact of the Atlantic trade on the Gambia River. Dr. Gijanto completed her dissertation at Syracuse University, under the direction of Christopher DeCorse. To highlight her contributions and learn more about her work, I interviewed Dr. Gijanto on behalf of the Academic and Professional Training Student Sub-committee. Via email she answered some questions, explaining her perspective and sharing her experiences with current students.

What is your dissertation topic?

My research focuses on the nature of the impact of the Atlantic trade on the coastal Gambian polity of Niumi from the late 17th into the early 19th century. Niumi was the first point of contact for European powers trading along the river and was the Atlantic era commercial center. I examine local responses to increased commerce on the Gambia River tied to the opening of trans-Atlantic trade, situated in a long-term study comparing this period to pre-Atlantic and colonial settings. The Atlantic trade created a multi-ethnic setting where Mande, European, and Luso-African traders interacted on a daily basis through social, political, and economic exchanges. My approach incorporates theories of everyday life, value, and taste examining day-to-day happenings within the scope of larger events such as the opening and closing of the Atlantic trade.

When did you first become interested in your topic and why?

As an undergraduate, I became interested in the Atlantic world through my history courses, and Africa after taking a historical archaeology course taught by Carmel Schrire. I decided that I wanted to work in West Africa on this period, but I did not know exactly where until my master’s advisor Kevin MacDonald was driving me to the airport to go to Syracuse to begin my Ph.D. He asked if I had decided on an area yet for my dissertation, and I told him that I had promised my mom I would only go places that were not dangerous. He said, “I know the perfect place no one is working in The Gambia.” So I went, and thus far it has worked out well.

Remains of the former British trading house at Juffure (Photo by Liza Gijanto).

How do you feel your work is relevant to contemporary communities?

Before I began reading academic and historical accounts of The Gambia, all I really knew about it was from Alex Haley’s novel Roots. When I first got there, I was not prepared for how engrained this story had become in the Gambian national identity, and specifically in Juffure and Albreda where I was living and working. Juffure is the village where Kunta Kinte is from in the novel. From the beginning, my work necessarily took on a heritage/community engagement aspect independent of my dissertation. I was able to help with public education days, and set up an exhibit for the Roots Homecoming Festival. I have also assisted in site preservation and interpretative efforts at James Island and in the capital of Banjul, which was established by the British to block the slave trade. The Gambia has had a unique relationship with the broader Atlantic World and the country has had a number of opportunities to really develop their sites, and present this past for heritage tourists. I am lucky that my research can be of use in this area, and that the National Centre for Arts and Culture in The Gambia has been receptive of my findings and involved me in many of their own projects.

What tips do you have for students identifying, working on, and finishing research?

This is really important. I received really great guidance from my undergraduate professors regarding graduate school. I was encouraged to take a year off working in CRM before going to graduate school and my various bosses and co-workers also influenced my decisions about projects and graduate school. I think it is important for anyone considering going into a Ph.D. program to first take some time off and work in the real world on a number of CRM projects. Everything I learned about managing a site, designing paperwork, all the basic management skills you do not get in a field school I got from CRM. I was hired as a staff member for the Feltville Archaeology Field School run by Matt Tomaso in Union, New Jersey and got to see the other side of a field school before taking on all the responsibility of its management myself. He really emphasized teaching skills students would need for CRM and involving all staff and students in all levels of the project. I do not think I could have gone out and excavated the sites I did and manage a local crew as well as field schools students in The Gambia without this experience. It is the kind of learning you cannot get in graduate school, but should have before starting your own project.

The other important thing to know early on is if you even need to excavate to answer your research question. There are so many collections housed in facilities in the US and abroad that could provide some really interesting information. I have a number of friends that have gone this route, and their projects are just as exciting and relevant as those that undertake excavation. I think there is a misconception that everyone has to find “their” site in order to be successful, but that is not the case anymore. What you really need is experience on a range of sites.

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the research process, and especially writing the actual dissertation. I had a supportive and engaged advisor that made the process flow more smoothly. In graduate school your relationship with and advisor and the faculty is crucial. In addition to this, having a strong cohort or group of graduate students at the same stage of the program with you is important. No one I know finished their dissertation at the exact time they planned or had a field experience that exactly matched their proposal. Things happen, and you often end up going to Plan C. If you have friends to help you figure things out who are going through the same thing, the process is a bit more bearable and even enjoyable.

What are current or future plans for your work?

I began working at a trading site on the south bank of the river in 2010 in order to gain a broader understanding of the trade on the river outside the formal commercial center. I am also working in the Gambian capital Banjul to help prepare for the city’s 200th anniversary in 2016.

What impacts do you foresee or hope for?

One of my goals is to assist the Gambian National Center for Arts and Culture to develop archaeological protocol and to find and train Gambians to implement this. As of now there are no Gambian archaeologists.

For my research, I hope that this works adds to our understanding of the Atlantic experience in West Africa. I consider my research to be part of African Atlantic studies and Atlantic studies more broadly, not just focused one West Africa or The Gambia. I hope this work proves useful for those working with Diaspora communities as well.

Is there anyone who you did not get a chance to thank who you would like to now?

I have had a really great transition from graduate school into a tenure-track position that would not have been possible without the continued help of my advisors, and the support of my new colleagues.

Fattatenda trading site adjacent to the Gambia River (Photo by Liza Gijanto).

Dr. Gijanto is a faculty member at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Non-student members of the SHA may nominate members who have defended their dissertations and received their PhDs within approximately three years of the award. Recent winners of the dissertation award include Gerard Chouin (2011), Meredith Lynn (2010), and Neil L. Norman (2009). To learn more, visit the SHA home page.