Archaeological Inferiority Complex?

As noted, I have moved to Fresno. When I talk to people in my new town about what I do, most of them have the same basic reaction: "why would an archaeologist come to Fresno? There's nothing here!"

But, of course, they are wrong. Well before Europeans showed up in North America, the Yokut were living in the San Joaquin Valley. They left behind a rich material record. The remains of villages, hunting stands, plant gathering locations, and campsites riddle the land surrounding (and at some locations, within) Fresno. In fact, there is plenty here, and it is exciting to be an archaeologist in Fresno.

To be fair, though, it is understandable why many people think this way. Television shows and magazine articles about archaeology rarely focus on California at all, much less the San Joaquin Valley. What's more, the archaeological sites in this region are difficult to spot unless you have specialized knowledge of what to look for - a piece of flaked stone looks pretty clear to an archaeologist, but may look like just another rock to the untrained eye.

However, I think that I may have identified an interesting phenomenon. When I was living in Santa Barbara, I met many people who were surprised that an archaeologist would have anything to do there (of course, with the proximity of both four missions and a Presidio, people there were a bit more aware of the presence of Native Americans, and hence their sites, than folks in other parts of California); when having dinner with a friend in Los Angeles during a work assignment there, we found ourselves chatting with a few other people at the restaurant, and they were convinced that I was joking when I told them what I do for a living (they might have been more accepting if I had told them that I'm an aspiring actor/model who's just happened to fall into archaeology), and when they realized I wasn't joking they were shocked to hear that I actually had work to do in Los Angeles; Many a Santa Cruzan was confounded 'pon hearing that there were archaeological sites in the rather mountainous Santa Cruz County; I have had similar conversations in Wisconsin, Utah, Oregon, Washington, Indiana, Quebec, and several years back I visited a friend in Ohio, and her housemate was astounded to hear that there were archaeological sites in the area - despite the fact that there were numerous huge earthen mounds and walls in the area.

Subtle Jaspers, those mound-builders

To sum it up, my experience has been that North Americans seem to be largely unaware of the archaeological record that surrounds them and, importantly, seem to have difficulty processing the fact that there is one when they are confronted with it.

Again, in many places the sites are hard to find or hard to recognize, but the fact that people seem so shocked to hear of their existence is, to my mind, rather remarkable. I think there may be a couple of reasons for this. The first, alluded to earlier, is that media attention on archaeology tends to ignore much of North America (aside from the Aztec sites in Mexico) because it's not as photogenic as sites containing temples and palaces, even though the archaeology of the U.S. and Canada is pretty damn cool.

The other reason, I suspect, is that many North Americans (again, excepting Mexico) seem to have a sense of archaeological inferiority. When I tell people about the sites that are around them, they frequently follow up by asking me why I am working here and not in Rome or Greece or Egypt or South America. Even when I explain my research interests and the fact that most archaeology involving palaces and temples puts me to sleep, they seem to feel that I work on "dirt archaeology" because I have settled and given up my aspirations, not because anyone could be genuinely interested in the subject.

Or perhaps I am wrong in my thinking on this. If so, I don't know how to account for the surprise that so many people seem to have in hearing that there is local archaeology and that people are interested in it.

Fresno, Race Riots, and Historical Blindness

Some years back, I was assigned a project that involved a new electrical substation in Fresno. I performed the appropriate archaeological surveys, and wrote the requisite report. There are a few standard report formats for cultural/historic resource surveys, and the one that is used is dependent on the agency to which the report will be submitted. This was going to the California Energy Commission, and the report format for that agency requires that there be a section describing the history of the area in which the survey took place.

In this particular case, I was writing about an area outside of town, and so it was relevant to discuss the history of the hinterlands of Fresno*. This meant discussing the groups of people who lived in the hinterlands historically, which in Fresno largely meant non-white people. To this end, it seemed relevant to include a section on race riots that occurred in Fresno in the 1890s.

I submitted the report to the client for review, and a few weeks later received in back with a few comments, one of which was that they wanted me to remove all references to the race riots. The stated reason was that they didn't wish to "fan the flames of racial tension" within the region.

I immediately thought the following:

1) It's a compliance report. The only people who are going to read it are the government regulators, researchers who are looking for archaeological data on the region, and people who - due either to an over-developed sense of civic responsibility or (more likely) out of a desire to derail the project - are looking to make sure that the developer performed all necessary environmental review. The first two types will either not care or be interested in the race riots, and the latter group are likely to count their omission as a sign that the cultural resources contractor (me) didn't do sufficient background research and therefore may use it as an opening for attacking the project. So, really, no harm would be done by including this information, and some harm may have been done through the exclusion of it.

2) Fanning the flames of racial tensions? Really? Don't get me wrong, Fresno is an ethnically diverse and large city (a population of around 1/2 a million, not including the surrounding towns and unincorporated areas), and like any large and ethnically diverse city there are racial tensions. I am not naive about this. However, these tensions get enflamed by politicians harping on them, by police officers engaging in racially charged activities, by economic and social inequalities...but not by compliance reports that are only read by a small number of individuals. Our clients were either woefully naive about how the review process goes, or else seemed to be astoundingly arrogant as to the importance of their project to the community (assuming that a wide variety of people would read the reports).

3) Although there are certainly people currently living in and around Fresno whose ancestors were involved in the riots, Fresno, like most cities in California, grew due to a post-WWII population and migration boom. Moreover, like many cities int he San Joaquin Valley, Fresno has a short civic memory, meaning that even those who are descended from people who were involved in the riots are unlikely to remember them. Moreover, these occurred in the 1890s, when race riots were not uncommon throughout the United States (a fact that should be known to anyone who managed to graduate high school), so to describe them for Fresno within a compliance report is not going to increase the racial tensions existing in an area even if a large swath of the populace were to read it.

To be fair, I think that the request to remove the references was due to naivete on the part of the client. They were a new company, and clearly had extensive business an engineering experience, but were novices to the environmental review process. They probably were not aware of just how few people would review the document, and were concerned that it would be widely distributed. But in the end the riots did happen. They are a matter of historical record. There is absolutely zero point in changing a historic review in order to pretend like they didn't occur. And it has bugged me ever since.






*Yeah, yeah, all of the Bay Area and L.A. people can insert their "Fresno is a hinterland" joke here.

Kotoku-in, Japan

I spoke too soon - between the Thanksgiving Holiday, a friend visiting from Korea, a niece being born, and my own birthday...well, it's been busier than I had anticipated when last I said that I was going to start keeping the blog routinely. Hopefully this coming week will be less eventful.

In the meantime, another photo blog of a historic site, this one is in the city of Kamakura, Japan.

Located to the south of Tokyo, on a bay, the city of Kamakura is gorgeous. It's a popular tourist destination within Japan, and I can vouch from personal experience that the place bears a strong physical resemblance to Santa Barbara, California.



Kamakura has a fascinating role in Japanese history, but I would like to focus on a specific place, the Kotoku-in, and more specifically the Great Buddha within the temple grounds.



The Kotoku-in is a Buddhist shrine/temple located a 20-minute walk from the beach. The Great Buddha within it is an Amida Buddha, the principle Buddha of the Pure Land sect.





This statue was built around 1252, to replace a wooden statue that had been built in the 1240s but had been damaged in 1248. The bronze statue that now stands was expensive, but funds were raised, and the statue built.

The statue was originally covered in gold plating, but that has long since gone. It remains an impressive statue, though, standing 13.35 meters (approximately 40 feet) in height. And, interestingly, you can enter the statue.



However, you have to move through the statue quickly, and photos don't come out so well when you're using a cheap point-and-click camera.



I loved the irony of the atheist (me) and the western Pagan (Kay) walking through a giant statue of an eastern divinity.

Though the statue is the main draw, the rest of the grounds are quite impressive as well.




The statue is one of the better-known symbols of Japan, and it was an impressive site to see.

Abney Park Cemetery

Okay, finally done with most of the moving, and I finished edits to a paper so that it is prepared for publication (I'll update when it finally gets published). So, I'll soon be back on my normal bloggy schedule (three times a week, as time allows).

However, in the meantime, here's some more photos of a historic/archaeological spot. This one is Abney Park Cemetery in London.



Abney Park was laid out in the first half of the 18th century by Lady Mary Abney from lands that she held in the Stoke Newington area. The area was the home of Dr. Isaac Watts, a well-known writer of English hymns.

Grave of Isaac Watts

During the early 19th century, the park became the location of a Quaker school for girls. During the 1840s, it became the location of a non-denominational garden cemetery, allowing the burial of a larger swath of London's citizens than the sectarian cemeteries. It also contained an impressive arboretum, unsurprising given the popularity of botany during the 19th century.



The cemetery also contained a non-sectarian chapel, allowing anyone who wished to come worship, a radical idea in the 19th century. The chapel stood as a monument to religious tolerance, also a radical idea in the 19th century, but today is decaying and looks more like the set of a horror movie.








The trust cemetery was sold to a private company in 1880, who continued to run the cemetery until the company became insolvent in 1978. During this time, burials were packed tight in the cemetery, in it is clear from a casual stroll through the grounds that graves had begun to overlap each other.




This aspect, that material from one time is plopped right on top of and even mixed in with that from another, is one of the things that I find most fascinating about this place. It is what archaeologists refer to as a palimpsest* - a place where material from a wide range of time is deposited in one place, resulting in something that looks like a simple site but which is really a complex amalgam of many different uses of the same location over a long period of time.





In some cases, this includes finding new uses for old items.




Today, the park is preserved as an open space, and is a quiet, peaceful place to visit. Unfortunately, many visitors are not as good as they should be about taking their trash with them when they leave. However, this adds yet another layer to the palimpsest site that is the park.



*The term comes from medieval scholarship, where the term palimpsest referred to a scroll that had been written, the ink scraped away, and new writing placed on it. Sometimes the original writing could still be seen via depressions on the material where the pen had made its mark.

Knapp Castle

Still moving, so it's another photo blog. This one is for a legitimate archaeological site, one that is open to the public so this is not a breach of confidentiality, the ruins of a building in the Santa Ynez Valley in Santa Barbara County, CA.



The parcel was purchased in 1916 by George Owen Knapp, and a large, impressive house was built there. In 1940 Frances Holden bought the property and invited his friend, opera singer Lotte Lehmann to live there.




Within two months, the house burned down during a forest fire, leaving the ruins that have come to be known as "Knapp Castle."



Now it's a great place to walk to, just a short hike from the main road. It's also a place where a lot of annoying pseudo-hippies like to go on nights with full moons in order to sit in a circle and drum without a sense of rhythm.

Fort Point

So, I am in the middle of packing, and as such can't write too much, but I get alot of positive feedback on my photo entries, so here's a few to keep y'all entertained. In keeping with the general theme of the blog, these are of a historic spot that is also currently a park - Fort Point, a Civil War-era site in San Francisco.



This fort lies underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, in fact the Golden Gate Bridge was re-designed by its engineer in order to prevent damage to the fort, which he considered a historic treasure (I can't argue with him there).




However, as you can see in these photos, the ginourmous bridge does interfere with the appearance of the fort.

The fort has been well-preserved, and maintenance work has been done in a manner that maintains the general feel of what the fort had been like during the 19th century (sans the giant bridge overhead, that is).

This place is fantastic. It is a well-preserved bit o' history that I highly recommend visiting. It's also creepy as hell under the right conditions, and I expect that I will be posting some stories on my other blog.









Really, I don't know why this place hasn't been the subject of a horror movie.

It is worth noting that a fair amount of the historic archaeology done in North America is done on facilities that bear a resemblance to this place. So, while it isn't an archaeological site, it's worth visiting if you are an archaeology enthusiast.






Some of the strange angles and weird lighting int he place made for some great photographic opportunities, and some of these things look like something out of a steampunk fairy tale.