The new issue of Historical Archaeology, the Society for Historical Archaeology’s academic journal, 46(1) is hitting your desks and is certain to catch your attention.  This is the first in a new generation of the journal that features a glossy color cover with the contents listed on the back for easy reference.  But it deserves your attention for more than that. This thematic issue compiled by Uzi Baram and Dan Hughes looks at ethnogensis and other topics through the lens of the many cultures of Florida, and explores the ways in which archaeological and historical research can reveal the way the multiple cultural identities of Florida were created, negotiated, and reformed.  Baram and Hughes’ Introduction, attached, gives you a sense of the historical archaeology of Florida and the contents of this issue, which is one you won’t want to miss.

Download Baram and Hughes’ introduction to Historical Archaeology 46(1), Florida and its Historical Archaeology, for free here.

To receive Historical Archaeology quarterly, consider becoming a member of the Society for Historical Archaeology. 

Entrance to the boardwalk at Arcadia Mill (Courtesy of Arcadia Mill Archaeological Site)

Arcadia Mill Archaeological Site in Milton, Florida provides a multi-disciplinary educational experience for people of all ages. Arcadia Mill represents the first and largest water-powered industrial complex in northwest Florida. Between 1828 and 1855, the industrial complex developed into a multi-faceted operation that included two water-powered sawmills, a railroad, bucket factory, shingle mill, textile mill, and an experimental silk cocoonery. In addition to the industrial facilities, Arcadia had an ethnically diverse community populated by enslaved African American laborers, Anglo American workers, and an elite Anglo American management class. In the late 1980s, local awareness and efforts made by the Santa Rosa Historical Society and the University of West Florida helped to save a portion of the Arcadia Mill site from residential development.

Today, Arcadia Mill functions as an archaeological site that is open to the public. Our facilities include an elevated boardwalk with interpretive signage, a newly renovated visitor’s center and museum, and an outdoor pavilion with working replicas. Arcadia hosts thousands of visitors annually including a large number of students on scheduled field trips. Our educational programming at Arcadia has made great strides over the last few years, but we are always looking for new ways to reach our younger audience.

During the summer months when field trips have tapered off, Arcadia hosts a portion of the University of West Florida archaeological field school. This gives our visitors a chance to see an active archaeological dig; however we are missing part of our audience and the opportunity to use the dig as an educational tool for school children. With a little brainstorming, we came up with the first of several steps to take in order to beat the summer time slump.

A year ago we launched a pilot summer camp, Explore Arcadia Mill, as a new way to provide educational programming when school is out of session. The weeklong camp features a multi-disciplinary approach that is designed for upcoming 4^th through 6^th graders. Campers learn about geography, history, archaeology, and historic preservation through lessons that feature hands-on educational crafts, group projects, and outdoor activities. Arcadia Mill is a case study for many of the lessons such as understanding the landscape, how to use historical documents, and how historic preservation has helped to save the site.

Learning about stratigraphy (Courtesy of Arcadia Mill Archaeological Site)

The archaeology portion of the camp involves lessons and activities focused on principles and ethics. The campers learn about fundamental concepts such as the Law of Superposition and then test their knowledge on our stratigraphy canvas. We also teach them about the different tools that archaeologists use followed by a seek-and-find exercise using real photographs from our field school. Once we have completed the introduction to archaeology, the campers are taken to the field school excavations where they can visualize everything they’ve learned. The campers do not participate in the actual field work, but they observe and document the visit in their field books.

Campers visit the field school site to learn more about archaeological excavations (Courtesy of Arcadia Mill Archaeological Site)

The campers really enjoy the archaeology lessons and activities in the classroom, but the crowning achievement is the ability to incorporate an active archaeological dig. Aside from being an excellent visual aid, the ability to visit the field school helps us to educate the campers on ethics, stewardship, and professionalism. At the end of the week the campers combine everything they’ve learned and create a primary document, but for fun sake it is really a scrapbook! The parents or guardians of each camper are invited to come view the scrapbooks and learn about what went on throughout the week. Therefore, the campers become the teachers and the camp directors stand by with pride.

With one successful camp season behind us and another just around the corner, the possibilities for activities and lessons have become endless. The camp was giant lesson for us as professionals since we quickly learned what worked and what didn’t work. It will get much easier with time, but now we are ready to implement additional programming. Where do we go from here? The camp was such a great experience that we are now looking at large scale or year round programming. The idea of an after school program came into question, but is that too much? There’s a fine line between educational programming and babysitting. It would be a large undertaking, but it could be very rewarding and worthwhile. Have you tried an after school program or a similar concept?

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.

Students classify artifacts found on a site-on-a-tarp activity. (Courtesy of Florida Public Archaeology Network)

students discover a new lens through which to view the world and the past.  However, I also recognize that with that great joy comes a serious responsibility: I must strive to spark imagination and interest, but also convey a need to cherish and protect archaeological resources.  My end goal in working with students, or anyone newly interested in our field, is not simply to fascinate them with amazing trinkets that can be pulled from the past into the present at the blade of a shovel.  I strive to help them become invested in archaeological resources on the whole as a means of understanding people and cultures of the past.

I have limited time in any given classroom, typically an hour or less to imbue students with knowledge and concern for cultural resources.  In that time I endeavor to introduce principles of archaeology, promote some understanding of methods and resources, and foster a value for past and the way archaeologists study it.  This is no small task, and I certainly have adapted my strategies and script in response to feedback from students.  Over time, I have found one activity to be ideally suited to this purpose, particularly when I only get to see a class once.  Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

"Shovel testing" on a pb and j site. (Courtesy of the Florida Public Archaeology Network)

This may not be anything brand new to you.  I know the lesson has been around for a while, and I certainly don’t claim it as my own invention.  PB&J works for my purposes because it lets me focus on those priorities listed above.  Artifact show-and-tells may be the rock star of public archaeology from an outsider’s perspective.  But to me leading with artifacts, from a preservation and protection standpoint, is leading with the chin.  Peanut butter and jelly lets me lead with the dirt.

A fully excavated pb&j revealing layers of occupation, features, stratigraphy, & artifacts. Photo courtesy of the Florida Public Archaeology Network.

For those who have no idea what PB&J can do aside from providing quick nutrition in the field, it’s also a lesson in which participants make, then systematically excavate, a sandwich.  The lesson can be complex, but may be simplified if necessary; the original version suggests three layers of bread, raisins arranged in the middle as fire pits, and small candies for artifacts. When the sandwich is complete, students become archaeologists and apply field methods, if methods writ small.  They conduct a visual “walking” survey, shovel testing (with straws), and finally open up a “unit,” selecting a quadrant of the sandwich based on shovel tests and removing the top layer of bread—our top soil.  The lesson ends with a brilliant analogy, likening unmitigated construction and looting with putting the sandwich in a blender.

I don’t mean simply to sing the praises of PB&J, but to encourage deliberation on how we strive to expose the public,school-age or older, to archaeology and preservation.  Certainly, activities that engage hands as well as minds have proven effective for creating thorough engagement with the material and memorable understanding.  We have even used this lesson in teacher workshops to provide a baseline of understanding, and find that adults are as enthralled with the process as children, regardless of how sticky it may get.

Let's not kid ourselves--grownups LOVE to learn by playing, just like kids. (Courtesy of the Florida Public Archaeology Network)

Fun and sugar highs aside, it is critical to consider what we give the public to hold onto about the discipline of archaeology.  If we lead with our chin, sites and resources will continue to take a beating.  However, if we find ways to share the wonder of the soil itself, we provide a more accurate understanding of cultural resources and have a better chance of fostering concern for sites as a whole.  We may tell ourselves that it’s tough to understand, that the lay public will be disinterested, but I don’t find that entirely fair.  If we can enjoy the secrets in the soil, why couldn’t others?

Get the original PB&J lesson here, or find FPAN’s Florida-friendly version here.

What types of lessons do you use for teaching students about archaeological methods? How do you encourage the public to become good stewards of the past? Have you used the PB&J lesson?

Headlines

A century old plantation and a possible African American cemetery are on land recently purchased in Danville, Virginia.

The Virginia Historical Society is featured on CNN for their recently launched database of enslaved Africans in historical records.

Archaeologists in York are developing an exhibit about their project on homelessness.

The Florida Public Archaeology Network has been working with communities to restore cemeteries.

Manuscript Calls

The African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter is looking for submissions for its next release.

Conferences

Winterthur Ceramics Conference is being held from April 26-27th.

The Visiting Scholar Conference is being held at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, with this year’s topic on: The Archaeology of Slavery: Toward a Comparative Global Framework. It is being held from March 30-31st.

To the Blogs!

Mount Vernon has a nice piece about the wine bottle glass assemblage discovered in their midden.

John R. Roby (@JohnRRoby) has launched a new historical archaeology blog called “Digs and Docs”. Add him to your RSS Feed!

Mick Morrison (@MickMorrison) returns from a blogging hiatus with a description of a 20th century site Presbyterian Mission Site in Weipa, Australia.

There are a couple sitings of papers being presented at this year’s SHA conference in Baltimore on various social media:

Mandy Raslow (@MrshlltwnMauler) and Heather Cowen Cruz have their paper “Excavating with Kids at the Farwell House, Storrs, CT” available on academia.edu, and Terry P. Brock (@brockter…also author of this post) has made his presentation “Place, Space, and the Process of Emancipation” available on his blog.

Have you put your presentation up on the web? Please let us know, we’d love to share it!

Photo:  All rights reserved by Tiffany.Brunson Used with permission from photographer.