What kind of students and research win the award? Mullins concisely described the work of last year’s two recipients and we were curious to learn a little more about Corey McQuinn and Adrian Myers as students. We interviewed McQuinn and Myers and the following is a summary of their responses.

Corey McQuinn, a master’s student concentrating in Historical Archaeology at the University of Albany, researches enslavement in the Northeast, an understudied topic. He examines the Mabee Farm in Rotterdam, New York, and how different archaeological models of enslavement and racialization apply to the Northern context. Through another project focused on the Underground Railroad in Albany, New York, he studies how the construction of a community that supported the Underground Railroad relates to New York’s earlier history as a slave state and its continued economic dependence on enslaved labor corps.

McQuinn working with students at the Schoharie River Center archeological field school in Montgomery County, New York. Dragon site on the Schoharie Creek (2008).

In addition to this academic research, as a project manager for the cultural resource management firm Hartgen Archaeological Associates, Inc., McQuinn says he must be flexible and cover a broad range of time periods and historic contexts. He has worked in a variety of historical contexts, including cemetery excavations, tavern sites, Shaker village sites, farmsteads and industrial contexts. He has also helped to run Hartgren’s youth archaeological field school summer programs, getting students involved in community archaeology.

McQuinn and students screening at Stephen and Harriet Myers house youth field school in Albany, New York, last summer.

The Ed and Judy Jelks Travel Award helped McQuinn attend his first SHA conference, where he presented a paper, met other professionals in his field, including authors of papers and books he has read. A highlight of the conference was getting to know people and learning about work in progress. He finds both the annual conference and quarterly newsletter valuable resources for identifying potential partnerships and opportunities in the future.

Though his three kids, Remember, Beatrix, and Jasper, are his greatest successes, McQuinn also received the New York Archaeological Association’s William Beauchamp Student Award in 1998 and the 1997-1998 Dana Student Internship Grant from Ithaca College. He is looking forward to completing his master’s thesis next semester and his PhD in the future.

Myers excavating at the PoW camp in Manitoba.

A PhD candidate at Stanford, Adrian Myers, learned of the Ed and Judy Jelks Travel Award through attending the SHA conference, SHA business meetings, and from the HISTARCH email listserv. The award enabled him to present a paper, “Dominant Narratives, Popular, Assumptions, and Radical Reversals in the Archaeology of German Prisoners of War in a Canadian National Park” in the session chaired by Michael Roller and Paul Shackel, “Reversing the Narrative.” The paper was about all the surprising and counterintuitive things he encountered while studying the history of Nazi soldiers in a prison camp in Canada during World War II. Long interested in the history of the Second World War, his dissertation research is a historical archaeological study of a prison camp in Manitoba, Canada. Over three seasons of work he and colleagues surveyed, mapped, and excavated portions of the camp. Myers also travelled to Germany and met with three men who had been prisoners of the camp.

Myers has participated in a variety of other projects, including the “Van Project” at the University of Bristol, the Stanford Gymnasium Dig, and Bonnie Clark’s field school at the Granada Relocation Center, a World War II Japanese internment camp in Colorado. He also used free Google Earth imagery to map the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, assembled and co-edited a book on archaeology and internment camps, did a study on 20th century porcelain electrical insulatorsand also manages to work part-time in CRM archaeology.

Myers interviewing German PoWs in Germany.

Also a recipient of the National Geographic Society Waitt Grant (2009), Myers suggests undergraduate students pursue ideas for projects, even if it seems impossible and incredibly far off, especially if they are passionate about the subject. He suggests finding a supportive graduate program and, with effort the research can probably be done. He also says having an awesome adviser helps.

Both McQuinn and Myers sound passionate about their research and actively pursue opportunities to participate in projects and make connections with their peers in historical archaeology. They recognize the SHA as a resource for students and advise them to participate in the organization by speaking or corresponding with other archaeologists and presenting at conferences. The Academic and Professional Training Student Subcommittee (SSC) is starting a group discussion on student professionalism and the Society for Historical Archaeology. Please become a member of the conversation by joining the SSC Yahoo! group. Email your request to JCoplin@gc.cuny.edu and include your email to join.

We look forward to hearing from you!

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

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.

Ellie: “I think that archaeology makes you learn a lot, and I like it a lot!”

Now, given the fact that I LOVE this kind of thing (education + archaeology = awesome), my husband and children have visited many, many public archaeology events.  They have been to sites, helped wash artifacts, helped screen excavated dirt, and they have just about every “Archaeology for Kids” book in publication.  The girls are, in essence, experts in engaging public archaeology exhibits.

There were several booths set up in a side room in the visitor’s center at Fort McHenry, and several more were located in a heated tent outside (which turned out to be completely unnecessary, as the weather was sunny and warm and absolutely perfect). Among those displays we were able to visit were The Lost Towns Project of Anne Arundel County, NPS American Battlefield Preservation Program, the Prince George’s County and the Montgomery County Departments of The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Archaeology in the Community, The District of Columbia Historic Preservation Office, Monocacy National Battlefield, the Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum (representing both the State Museum of Archaeology and the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory), and the George Washington Foundation. Let me apologize in advance if I have missed any presenters, as I was there with my children and did not have much chance to linger and fully appreciate all the displays. Please drop your links below if you’re not represented in this list!

Abbie: “I liked the artifacts you could touch and the puzzles.”

In going back through the many flyers and brochures I picked up from the presenters, I noticed a few different flyers discussing “How to Report an Archaeological Find” with contact information for state archaeologists in Maryland and additional information on teacher training and children’s archaeology programs.  What a great venue in which to communicate such important information! There was also a free archaeology tour for SHA members, but I was unable to attend. If any readers participated in the tour and would like to comment below, I would love to hear more about it.

Almost every exhibit had a professional display describing their site and/or agency, and a few of the exhibitors had hands-on activities.  For the most part, my girls went immediately to the tables with some sort of interactive display.  The Lost Towns Project of Anne Arundel County and the Prince George’s County Department of Parks (part of The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission) had excellent artifact assemblages for the kids to handle, and the latter had both artifact photos and feature photos that had been turned into puzzles for the kids. 

The girls got so into the spirit of it all that they couldn’t wait to show me a brick they had discovered outside the visitor’s center!

The girls also enjoyed the display by the DC Historic Preservation Office.  The artifacts displayed were off-limits for handling, but the display incorporated questions on large cards that acted as a guessing game for the kids.  Ellie told me later “I like guessing the artifacts!”

When I asked them afterwards what their favorite part of the day was they both gave me the same answer: “I liked being able to dig with a spoon and find artifacts in a can!”  Montgomery County Department of Parks (part of The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission) had really wonderful interactive activities.  Both girls LOVED their “Archaeology Site in a Can” activities, and their ‘excavations’ revealed fascinating artifacts including projectile points and historic-period ceramic sherds.

The girls get their hands dirty.

I was super-impressed when the girls figured out (on their own, with no help from Mom!) that their sherds from each can would cross-mend.  Like I mentioned, these girls have become real experts at kid-friendly archaeological activities!

The other big hit of the day with my girls was a seed identification activity, also presented by the Montgomery County group.  The girls had to sort through a mix of sand and seeds to find and identify six different types from the ten listed with examples on the display.

Identifying Seeds.

Now, as a mom, I am totally thrilled when I see my girls really excited and interested in such educational activities.   As a member of the Public Education and Interpretation Committee, I would also be interested in hearing from other attendees about what they thought about the day.  Did you attend the Fort McHenry Public Archaeology Day?  What did you best enjoy?  What would you like to see more of as a member of the public? As an archaeologist, what more can we do to make these days as accessible and educational as possible?  Please leave your feedback, insights, and opinions in the comment space below!

Author note: See some more photos of our day at our flickr site.

This week’s Friday Links brings you a new feature: a photo of the week! This week’s photo is of archaeologist Adam Fracchia showing of a ceramic fragment, while a future archaeologist works in a unit.  The excavations were completed this summer in Baltimore, a co-project between Baltimore Heritage and the National Parks Service. Also, please let us know what additional links or blogs you have in the comments so that we can start following you, and share your content with others!

Headlines

DePaul students are excavating a house that was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Jamestowne Rediscovery was featured on C-SPAN! Watch the video here.

Conferences and Calls

the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training is offering a three day summit on 3D digital documentation for the preservation of cultural heritage.

Resources

At American Antiquarian, you can view their Staffordshire Pottery of John Ridgway collection.

The Blogs

The blogosphere was full of a number of posts recapping the Baltimore conference:

• At This Spatial Life, Edward Gonzalez-Tennant blogs about his experience in Baltimore, particularly the participation of his colleagues and students form Monmouth University.
• Mount Vernon’s Mystery Midden blog discusses their session about George Washington and archaeology.
• FPAN North Central writes about their time at SHA 2012 on their blog Shovel Bytes.

Did you write a post about your time at SHA? Any other headlines that we missed? Share them in the comments!

Some rights reserved by Baltimore Heritage

The Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology and the APTC combine for the annual student forum. This year, terrestrial and underwater archaeologists address issues of dealing with the media in a panel format. The discussion will be focused on student concerns and driven by their questions but all are welcome.

For a second year, the student subcommittee (SCC) has organized a different type of panel.  In informal roundtable settings, recent graduates and young professionals with both maritime and terrestrial research interests host small group discussions driven by student members. The Rap Session offers an opportunity to ask questions about topics ranging from job-hunting, to conference participation. Graduate and undergraduate students are encouraged to attend.

Finally, participation in the Society for Historical Archaeology is not just for senior members. Opportunities for students abound. All students are welcome to attend the SCC committee meeting. It is our opportunity to lend students voices to the SHA. Find out what the committee does and how you can get involved.  This year the SSC needs a social media liaison, writers for the SHA newsletter and organizers for future forums as well as other talents.  It may seem early (ok it is early) but you will meet other students; network with other SHA members and build your CV.

Saturday, January 7^th, 2011

Check the final program for times and locations.

7:45-8:45

Student Subcommittee of Academic and Professional Training Committee Meeting

Morning Proceedings

Brining the Past to Life: Archaeology and the Popular Media

Chair: Whitney Anderson and Moderator: Katherine Burnett

Afternoon Proceedings

Rap Session for Student Members

Chair: Jenna Coplin

The Technology Room, located in the Bibliotech (aka the Book Room), will feature archaeologists demonstrating and discussing their experiences with a variety of technologies. A series of brief presentations, listed below, are scheduled throughout the conference. The speakers will also be on-hand for the entire three-hour morning or afternoon slot in which their presentation is scheduled to give demonstrations, answer questions and talk more informally about their work.  You will also be to learn more about the SHA’s new social media initiatives, and we’ll even have table set up so that you can get connected on the spot to the new Facebook page and stay in touch year-round.

We are looking forward to seeing you there!

Tech Room Demos and Talks:

Thursday January 5, 2012 – 9:00‐12:00 Presentations

• 9:30 – Conservation in the MAC Lab with Nicole Doub, Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory
• 10:00 – GIS at Jamestowne with David Givens, Historic Jamestowne
• 10:30 – Naval History and Heritage Command Technologies with NHHC marine archaeologists
• 11:00 – Social Media & the SHA with Terry Brock, SHA Social Media Chair, PhD Candidate Michigan State

Thursday January 5, 2012 – 1:00 – 4:00 Presentations

• 1:30 – Conservation in the MAC Lab with Nicole Doub, Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory
• 2:00 – tDAR, the Digital Archaeological Record with Adam Brin & Frank McManamon, Digital Antiquity
• 2:30 – Integrating Data Sets: Results from the St. Augustine Seawall Phase I Archaeological Survey with JB Pelletier, URS
• 3:00 – Social Media & the SHA with Terry Brock, SHA Social Media Chair, PhD Candidate Michigan State

Friday January 6, 2012 – 9:00 ‐12:00 Presentations

• 9:30 – 3D Laser Scanning with Bernard Means, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virtual Curation Unit
• 10:00 – Integrating Data Sets: Results from the St. Augustine Seawall Phase I Archaeological Survey with Bradley Kruegger, URS
• 10:30 – New Media’s Role in Historical Archaeology and Social Justice with Ed Gonzalez‐Tennant, Monmouth University
• 11:00 – Trends in Emerging Media That Will Impact How Audiences Connect to Heritage with Jeffery Guin, Chemical Heritage Foundation

Friday January 6, 2012 – 1:00 – 4:00 Presentations

• 1:30 – tDAR, the Digital Archaeological Record with Adam Brin & Frank Mc Manamon, Digital Antiquity
• 2:00 – 3D Laser Scanning with Bernard Means, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virtual Curation Unit
• 2:30 – Naval History and Heritage Command Technologies with NHHC marine archaeologists
• 3:00 – The Value of A Good (Digital) Pen with Timothy Goddard, SHA Technology Committee, Michigan Technological University
• 3:30 – Trends in Emerging Media That Will Impact How Audiences Connect to Heritage with Jeffery Guin, Chemical Heritage Foundation

Saturday January 7, 2012 – 9:00 ‐ 12:00 Presentations

• 9:30 – Emerging Conservation Technologies with Emily Williams, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and Lisa Young
• 10:00 – Social Media in a Colonial Context with Lisa Fischer and Meredith Poole, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, CAA, and SHA Technology Committee
• 10:30 – Naval History and Heritage Command Technologies with NHHC marine archaeologists
• 11:00 – Social Media & the SHA with Terry Brock, SHA Social Media Chair, PhD Candidate Michigan State

Judy and Ed Jelks with a group of former students, taken at the 2004 SHA meeting in St. Louis, where the travel award was first announced. Judy is in the wheelchair, with Ed standing behind her. Mike Wiant, kneeling on Judy’s left, led the effort to create the award.

The SHA has long included a significant number of student members at the outset of their careers, but attending conferences is logistically and financially challenging, so students and advisers have developed many different strategies to make conference attendance feasible.  Eager to attend the conference but compelled to save some money, many of us have stories of piling into our cars for a long drive to the conference; lots of students have been part of groups crammed into a single hotel room; and many groups migrate from the hotel restaurant to eat local fast food.  Edward and Judy Jelks spent their careers supporting scores of students on such journeys, encouraging them to attend and participate in the conference during Ed Jelks’ 1968-1983 tenure at Illinois State University, which followed a position at Southern Methodist University in 1965-1968.  Edward Jelks was John Cotter’s assistant in excavations at Jamestown, Virginia in 1954-1956 and one of the founders of the SHA, serving as the Society’s second President in 1968 and eventually receiving the JC Harrington Award in 1988.  For more than 30 years, beginning in the early 1950s, his wife Judy accompanied Jelks on numerous digs, helping plan field logistics, conducting various fieldwork tasks, reviewing manuscripts, and serving as, in her husband’s words, “a surrogate mother for scores of students over the years.”

The Ed and Judy Jelks Student Travel Award was established in 2004, when some of the Jelks’ former students, looking for a way to recognize the roles Ed and Judy had played in their education and professional development, approached the SHA with initial funds they had raised from former students and colleagues, and proposed that this be used as seed money to establish the award.  Every year beginning in 2005 two students have been awarded $500 each to attend the SHA annual meeting.  A list of the past recipients is included at this end of this posting.

This year we received 50 applications for the Jelks Travel Award, so the program is exceptionally popular and competitive.  Many universities have decreased their student travel support or simply eliminated it entirely, and other student funding like teaching assistantships has dried up, so the scant material support for student scholarship certainly encouraged student members to apply.  With Board Member Mark Warner I read 50 student paper abstracts and letters on their scholarship that included research representing nearly every corner of historical archaeology.  This was exciting but also difficult, because virtually all applicants thoughtfully outlined research projects that will make an important contribution to archaeological scholarship.

We selected Master’s student Corey McQuinn (University of Albany) for his paper “A Continuity of Heritage: Outreach, Education, and Archaeology at the Steven and Harriet Myers House, Albany, New York.”  Corey’s SHA paper will examine his work in Albany’s Arbor Hill neighborhood, where he is part of a project examining an Underground Railroad site in a mid-nineteenth-century African-American community.  McQuinn’s work focuses on a broad 170-year history of the site’s built environment, examining how Underground Railroad histories are wielded in archaeological analysis and public heritage discourses.

The second award winner was PhD candidate Adrian Myers (Stanford) for his paper “Dominant Narratives, Popular Assumptions, and Radical Reversals in the Archaeology of German Prisoners of War in a Canadian National Park.”  Myers’ research examines the Whitewater Prisoner of War Camp in Manitoba, Canada, where 450 German Afrika Korps soldiers were imprisoned during the Second World War. His SHA paper examines dominant narratives on the materiality of national parks, Nazi prisoner camps, and the complicated heritage in such contexts.

The awards will be presented at the Business Meeting at the conference in Baltimore.   In 2012 the Society is committed to further develop such scholarship programs that can support more student scholars’ conference attendance.  If you’re interested in contributing to that discussion or supporting such causes, do contact me.

For more on Edward Jelks’ career, see Robert Schuyler’s 2001 interview of Jelks in Historical Archaeology at http://www.jstor.org/pss/25616950 If you do not have JSTOR access, the paper is in Historical Archaeology 35(4)

See a list of previous Ed and Judy Jelks Travel Award Winners.