Historical Archaeology in Central Europe

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Paul Mullins

Western Bohemia has a rich archaeological heritage and a scholarship reaching back well over a century, but virtually none of that archaeology has examined the post-medieval period. In the wake of the Velvet Revolution, though, Pavel Vareka began a historical archaeology project at the University of West Bohemia that ambitiously reaches over most of the past millennium and pays particularly close attention to the last 500 years: In the present-day Czech Republic this ranges across the 30 Years War (1618-1648) to the Revolutions of 1848 to two world wars and 41 years as a Communist territory in the Eastern Bloc. Pavel is committed to partnering with global historical archaeology scholars, and an astounding number of well-preserved sites dot Western Bohemia. Many sites along the border have continuous occupations since the 14^th century into the 1960’s, and few places can make a more persuasive claim for being transnational and multicultural than the Czech Republic, with Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic peoples migrating into the region in prehistory and more recently Moravians and Poles among the flood of peoples settling in the region. Many Czechs migrated to the US beginning in the 1850’s, with one Chicago community dubbed “Pilsen” in reference to Plzen, the home of the University of West Bohemia. In 1900, only Prague and Vienna had more Czech residents than Chicago, and the US today claims about 1.6 million people of Czech descent.

The ruins of this church near Plzen were used well into the 20th century.

The shadow of World War II and communism hang over the contemporary Czech Republic, but they provide an exceptionally powerful setting to weave consequential historical narratives driven by archaeological materiality. Last week Pavel and his colleague Michal Rak took me and my University of Oulu colleague Timo Ylimaunu to see some of the numerous sites scattered between Plzen and the German border about 55 miles away. Pavel and Michal are documenting the cyclical abandonment of villages in the region during the 17^th-century, when numerous residents were driven from their homes by the invading Swedish Army and in many cases left villages standing with a rich range of domestic material culture in place. Ironically, after World War II the communists consolidated many of the villages in the region and razed those close to the border, some of which had been continuously occupied a half-millennium. The architectural and archaeological preservation on these sites is absolutely remarkable, and scores of such villages dot the region awaiting archaeologists. Nevertheless, as in many places in the world, the archaeological resources themselves are endangered, poorly protected, or not valued by some scholars and communities. While we were surveying a community cleared in the 1960’s, a metal detectorist was rooting through the ruins, casting aside nearly everything in search of World War II artifacts. At a remarkable medieval church ruin with 20^th century burials near Plzen, graves had been opened by looters seeking valuables.

Part of a 14th century village, this house stood until the 1960′s, when the residents were forced to move because of its proximity to the German border. The University of West Bohemia recently excavated this home.

The opportunities for global scholars to partner with Czech colleagues are immense, and the groundwork laid by Pavel and his colleagues—and their commitment to work with international scholars—makes such work much more practical. Learning the history of a whole new place can be truly exciting, and living in places like Plzen can be much less expensive than many American cities. Liberated by Americans at the end of World War II, Plzen also is especially warm to American visitors today, and reminders of the Czechs’ appreciation for American troops are all over the present-day city. Many historical archaeologists bring methodological training, material culture training, and a commitment to public engagement that can expand central European archaeology significantly. The scholarship that can be explored in the Czech Republic and in global connections between Western Bohemia and North America are enormously important to expanding a truly global historical archaeology.

Western Bohemia had an exceptionally traumatic 20th century history. At the very close of World War II, prisoners from concentration camps were driven on desperate “death marches” that claimed one in four prisoners. During one of these marches, 37 people were killed and buried in this mass grave near the current Czech border; the grave was exhumed and the victims moved in 1946. Michal Rak and the University of West Bohemia directed recent excavations of the the site, recovering 22 shoes and a spoon in the former mass grave.

Next year the European Association of Archaeologists’s annual conference will be held in Plzen and hosted by the University of Western Bohemia, so for those who are curious to visit the region and see these exciting sites this will be a valuable chance to visit and to meet our post-medieval colleagues in central Europe and beyond. The world is covered with enormously fascinating places to do archaeology, and West Bohemia’s rich prehistory, medieval landscapes, and sobering wartime and communist heritage rank among those places to which historical archaeologists should turn.

Mothballing Heritage: Closing the Georgia State Archives

Posted on September 22, 2012 by Paul Mullins

Historical archaeologists have long recognized that some of the most compelling biographical and historical tales can be told about prosaic folks, and we understand that many of those people who we think we know best have complicated and even challenging biographies. Imagine the complex accounts of American life that could be spun around the life stories of Jimmy Carter, Ty Cobb, Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Button Gwinnett, Fanny Kemble, Margaret Mitchell, James Ogelthorpe, Ma Rainey, Otis Redding, and Alice Walker. That seemingly random assortment of people includes the mother of the blues, an American President, one of the greatest baseball players of all time, a reviled gangster, and a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Their common link is that they spent most of their lives in Georgia, the last of the original 13 colonies, one of the seven original Confederate States, and one of the centers of the civil rights movement. Now imagine that the historical records of Georgia spanning nearly three centuries, including the details of all these famous figures and countless more people, were suddenly removed from the community’s reach. This is in fact the quite startling threat that now faces archaeologists, genealogists, and historians who were shocked when the Georgia Secretary of State announced that the State Archives would lay off seven of its 10 full-time employees on November 1^st and discontinue public hours. In his September 13^th press release announcing the closing, Secretary of State Brian Kemp (whose office administers the Archives) somewhat awkwardly and optimistically admitted that appointments to access the Archives “could be limited based on the schedule of the remaining employees.” Should this proposal be approved, Georgia will be the only state in the country with such restrictive access to state archival records, effectively closing one of the nation’s first State Archives (opened in 1918) and balancing a $732,626 budget reduction entirely on the state’s archives budget. Anybody wanting access to such records will be required to arrange an appointment amongst a flood of genealogists following new leads, neighbors documenting property lines, lawyers tracing historical precedents, and archaeologists researching sites throughout the state and region.

Kemp indicated in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the “Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget (OPB) instructed my office to reduce our budget by 3 percent ($732,626) for the coming year,” outlining the fiscal realities that face many archives, cultural institutions, and arts organizations facing a quite difficult financial climate. In September, 2010 the Archives had gone from a five-day week to a three-day week as a cost-cutting move, and it eventually moved to being open only on Fridays and Saturdays before the recent decision to close the facility. After November 1^st the remaining archives’ employees will be responsible for nearly every dimension of archival maintenance in an operation Kemp indicated is currently “unsustainable,” ranging from monitoring air conditioning in the building (leased for $2.7 million each year) to entering new material into storage to administering patrons visiting the archives on appointments. Kemp acknowledged that this move essentially “mothballed” the state’s archives and reduced the staff to only monitoring the most critical state documents. Since the State Archives received 14,624 reference questions in 2010, we can reasonably assume that even the three most energetic archivists in the world cannot manage even a modest trickle of those requests and the state will essentially provide no access to public records.

The news that the Archive would now be open only by appointment was greeted with a flood of complaints by a vast range of constituencies who use the Archives. At a somewhat ironically timed signing for a proclamation marking Georgia Archives Month on September 19th, a back-tracking Governor Nathan Deal awkwardly indicated that “We’re still working on our budget proposals right now,” he said, “but the archives will stay open.” Kemp cautioned afterwards, though, that “the governor did not tell him about his pledge before it was made. `If he funds it to keep it open, that’d be great,’ said Kemp. The secretary explained Deal would have to `tell me we weren’t going to have to come up with a $733,000 cut’ in order to fulfill the promise to keep the archives’ doors open.”

This would be an exceptional loss for Georgia and the nation alike, and it risks taking fiscal sobriety to an exceptionally draconian level. Archivists have pointed out that Georgia law does actually legally require the state to make all public records “open for a personal inspection by any citizen of this state at a reasonable time and place, and those in charge of such records shall not refuse this privilege to any citizen.” Yet at an ethical level, archives make governmental processes transparent and accountable to citizens, so they are not merely research institutions. Such a move essentially risks writing a whole state out of the nation’s historical narrative. Such archives are not simply the province of a handful of scholars and genealogists; instead, a vast range of citizens documenting property transactions, legal actions, and community historical details consult the state’s archival resources.

A facebook page Georgians Against Closing State Archives has over 3200 followers today and includes links to Georgia state officials for those of us who can stress how important such resources are to myriad community scholars; an online petition has been posted on change.org; and the Friends of Georgia Archives and History have followed the discussion closely. In the wake of the stunning cuts at Parks Canada and similar discussions throughout the country if not internationally, it is important for historical archaeologists and community scholars to register the profound consequence of such resources to all of us within and outside Georgia alike. It is impossible to interpret the nation’s narrative if we remove one whole state and countless people’s stories from the historical record, so this risks being a profound loss for all of us who respect heritage.

Diversity and Anti-Racism in the Society for Historical Archaeology

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Paul Mullins

The epilogue of Leland Ferguson’s Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650-1800 is a disarming and profoundly thoughtful account of his experience of life across the color line and how it informed his scholarly career. Ferguson’s book is justifiably heralded as one of historical archaeology’s most important contributions to the scholarship of African cultural persistence in the face of captivity, yet we risk overlooking the provocative epilogue that situates such scholarship in Ferguson’s own experience and in broader historical archaeology. Uncommon Ground’s succinct epilogue provides an important statement about the politics of historical archaeologies conducted across and along lines of difference, and a discussion about those politics can contribute to an increasingly rich and reflective scholarship and diverse archaeological community.

Ferguson’s epilogue relates a story of him and a boyhood friend watching an African-American railroad “gang” laying rails in a sweltering 1949 summer. An elder member of the group lorded over the workers, singing in a “rich, melodious voice” in time with hammers driving the rail, an experience that left the two boys “spellbound and envious.” That fascination and envy with African America has often been felt by many White people who have been equally spellbound if mystified by a rich culture that has persisted with strength, creativity, and dignity in the face of profound injustice. Many White historical archaeologists—myself included–have devoted much of our scholarship to illuminating African America’s centrality in American life because we share Ferguson’s humility in the face of the African-American experience, respect for this rich heritage, and conscious complicity in a half-millennium of anti-Black racism.

Ferguson acknowledges that he and his friend “heard and felt that workday performance in ignorance,” largely because they “had few black acquaintances and no black friends.” When his friend addressed the singer with a racist epithet, the boys were soundly rebuked and felt “rejected and confused.” Ferguson admits that through his “teenage years the alienation continued, and I alternately and somewhat arbitrarily enjoyed, scorned, and admired `colored people’ without ever knowing a single African American.”

That concession of fascination and admiration in conflict with apprehension and confusion is an exceptionally rare scholarly acknowledgement of the complications of life lived along and across color lines (compare Whitney Battle-Baptiste’s June 2012 SHA Blog for a similar example from an African diasporan perspective). Ferguson found himself in the midst of the South during the Civil Rights movement, and he recognized his White neighbors “struggled to rationalize away the guilt of imposing or accepting an inequality so familiar that most had never perceived it as unjust.” He acknowledges that he “came to see that the movement was reinforcing justice and compassion as basic American values,” and he began to comprehend that a deep-seated cultural heritage “beyond the eye and mind of the white majority” fueled the Civil Rights movement and rested at the heart of American heritage.

That recognition that racism was silently situated at the heart of American life and aspired to efface diasporan heritage provides an articulate coda underscoring the political significance of Ferguson’s study. Historical archaeologists have produced an enormous volume of illuminating, reflective, and even activist scholarship on the African diasporan experience and life along the color line for which we can feel justifiably proud. Nevertheless, Ferguson’s revelatory honesty is the sort of politics that we rarely see in print, and while many of us can honestly claim good works in our own local projects they often do not become public knowledge or accepted disciplinary practice, and they are not especially clearly stated as our common philosophical and sociopolitical interests.

Our pride in a rich African diasporan archaeology or our disciplinary attention to historical social complexity should not blind us to the need to ask difficult questions about diversity in contemporary historical archaeology, and SHA has the opportunity to lead a challenging and transformative discussion about the ways in which equity, privilege, and race shape every dimension of our lives, scholarship, and practice. We have collectively done an astounding amount of good research and community outreach, but we need to articulate that work in ways that acknowledge disciplinary inequalities; we should situate SHA in conscious opposition to structural inequalities in broader society; and we must continue to develop concrete mechanisms to make SHA a welcoming professional home for a broad range of members whose voices can shape archaeology and impact the communities in which we live. A historical archaeology practiced by a rich range of scholars that assertively examine global diversity is simply good scholarship that is true to a breadth of experiences and systemic inequalities throughout the world over 500 years.

Certainly many of the first archaeologists who gathered in 1967 to form the SHA were focused on British colonial heritage and the spread of European cultures and materiality in the New World. Questions about globalization and social diversity gradually trickled into the research questions and discussion: Charles Fairbanks, for instance, soon led archaeologists into African diasporan archaeologies, and James Deetz profoundly shaped the discipline by advocating archaeological attention to the many peoples ideologically forgotten in historical narratives. Many of us continue to justifiably focus on colonial European subjects, but that work is inevitably enriched by a rigorous and reflective focus on diversity, just as archaeologists examining race need to push beyond archaeologies of African America. For instance, there is the potential to do an exceptionally interesting historical archaeology of race among White consumers who often embrace—and routinely evade—the privileges of White subjectivity. This attention to social diversity certainly does not discard all the illuminating historical archaeologies of colonial European contexts, but scholarship revolving around race, patriarchy, classism, sexuality, or ethnicity can be embedded into many archaeological studies that sometimes are conceived by us as being somehow “outside” diversity. The “questions that count” in contemporary historical archaeology simply must address diversity to be rigorous and challenging scholarship. The weight of such scholarship can have profound effects on how many of our neighbors view our collective heritage and in turn how they view contemporary lines of difference, so confronting disciplinary and SHA inequalities and embracing diversity among membership and in our scholarship are important missions for SHA.

SHA has underscored its commitment to equity and diversity in the last year, with the ambition of being an increasingly diverse membership that provides a welcoming professional home for a wide range of scholars. One step in this process was my participation in a People’s Institute Undoing Racism workshop in Washington, D.C. in July. Gender and Minority Affairs Committee Chair Florie Bugarin attended the workshop with me and about 40 people who worked for a variety of non-profits and community organizations as well as neighborhood folks from Washington. This is quite a different group than virtually any scholarly conference, classroom, or excavation site, but in many ways it would be a familiar and illuminating discussion for the many historical archaeologists who conduct community archaeologies and are committed to engaged scholarship—often across color lines and power divisions.

Many historical archaeologists have given thought to the complications of scholarly/community partnerships, but we have not often considered how racism shapes such relationships or how White scholars exercise privilege without even recognizing it as such. A 2011 SHA Newsletter piece by Michael Nassaney and Cheryl LaRoche, for instance, discussed the persistent impression of racism on American life and the ways it and White privilege inevitably have an impression on historic archaeology practice and the very organization of SHA itself. Anna Agbe-Davies joined this conversation in the Spring 2012 Newsletter, arguing that Nassaney and LaRoche’s column underscores the need to encourage both organizational change in SHA and individual good works—for instance, as we transform structural inequalities vested in organizations like SHA, we can individually take small but consequential steps like those often-invisible trips to local elementary schools, the energy devoted to championing equity in our local institutions, and all of our voices advocating for an archaeology that reveals the historic roots of inequality. The People’s Institute experience framed a larger discussion about how power is vested in organizations like SHA, how a broad range of members with different degrees of access and power are served by SHA, and how all of our members can secure genuine agency and grow professionally within SHA.

These discussions have led to a series of initiatives that are intended to make our mostly unspoken disciplinary and SHA commitment to diversity concrete and increasingly part of our structural practice.

One of the first steps was a diversity training course at the June, 2012 SHA Board Meeting. That training session provided an all-day experience for the Board and the GMAC Chair to begin discussing the specifics of what diversity actually means in the context of historical archaeology and SHA; what are our expectations for what a diverse membership does for the discipline; and how can we make diversity a structural dimension of all historical archaeology and SHA practice, and not simply a research niche. I and Florie Bugarin then attended the People’s Institute Workshop a month later. These discussions are simply beginning to move all of our disparate thoughts into collective space, but they seem an essential prelude to developing any genuine initiatives.
At the June Board meeting two Minority Travel Scholarship Awards also were approved by the Board, and they will defray travel costs for two students attending the Leicester conference in January 2013.
The Board agreed in June that President-Elect and Ethics Committee Chair Charlie Ewen will direct a revision of the Ethics Statement that will include an SHA Statement on Sexual Harassment, Gender Equity, Antiracism and LGTB Inclusivity.
Directed by Membership Committee Chair Barbara Heath, a member’s survey will be conducted in 2013 to secure demographic data more recent and somewhat more focused on dimensions of diversity than the 2008 Member’s Needs Report.

Historical archaeologists have long embraced an archaeology of peoples who have been structurally silenced and ignored as their experiences are effaced from dominant narratives. SHA is committed to supporting such work because it is simply good scholarship that is true to our collective heritage, and working to mirror the same diversity in our membership is simply true to contemporary social life. As Leland Ferguson’s Uncommon Ground epilogue stresses, lived inequalities inevitably shape our scholarship, but we have not often examined how our collective experiences become part of the structural fabric of academic departments, cultural resource management firms, or the SHA itself. Many of us have had these conversations with colleagues for years on excavation sites, in department meetings, and even in the hallways of SHA conferences, asking ourselves how we can foster reflective transformations in institutions and everyday practice. We need to keep moving that discussion into our shared disciplinary discourse and make it part of good practice, pressing to ensure that historical archaeology and SHA practice genuine equity in our scholarship and advocacy and welcome a breadth of voices.

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