Archeology E-gram December 2020

Passing of Former NPS Curator John Maounis

John Maounis, 71, died at home in Santa Rosa, California, on December 4, 2020. Born in New York City, he moved to California as a teenager and graduated from University of California, Berkeley. He spent most of his career working in the NPS in San Francisco; Boston; Philadelphia; and Annapolis, MD, where he was the Superintendent of the Chesapeake Bay Office until his retirement.

While origins of the NPS Northeast Museum Services Center (NMSC) date back to a small team of catalogers in the 1980s, John (known to his colleagues as JOMA) formed what is now the NMSC in the early 1990s. While bringing together museum cataloging, planning, research and technical assistance for the newly-expanded region, John was also a strong advocate of civic engagement utilizing NPS cultural resources and for planning to inform preservation/conservation efforts service-wide.

John also served as Superintendent of Chesapeake Bay Office, managing the Captain John Smith Chesapeake NHT, the Chesapeake Bay Gateways and Watertrails Network, and the Star-Spangled Banner NHT. He was also Chief of Staff to the NPS Northeast Regional Director; Deputy Associate Regional Director for Cultural Resources; Acting Superintendent of Edison NHP; and Acting Superintendent for the Longfellow House - Washington's Headquarters, Frederick Law Olmsted, and John F. Kennedy NHS.

So, why was he known as JOMA? As we all know, four letter acronyms are used for park units — generally the first two letters of the first word of the park name and the first two letters of the second word of the park name. Since John was larger-than-life in his impact on his work and his colleagues, he was affectionately known by his four-letter acronym —JOMA. When NMSC staff needed a name for the conference room in Building I, colleagues started calling it the JOMA room, since it was near his empty desk, and often asked "What would JOMA do?"

From remembrance by Giles Parker

The Archaeology Channel Announces New Streaming Service

The Archaeology Channel has created a new streaming channel with shows about archaeology and cultural heritage. The channel is for people who may be tired of mindless reality TV shows, or watered-down content disguising itself as science, and who might be interested in binge-worthy shows!

Heritage Broadcasting Service, or just plain Heritage, will launch formally on January 1, 2021. Developed by nonprofit Archaeological Legacy Institute (the same people who created The Archaeology Channel at archaeologychannel.org), Heritage already features more than 100 outstanding film titles from many countries on familiar subjects such as ancient Egypt, Stonehenge, Mesoamerica, and Peru, but also on diverse and rarer topics ranging from prehistoric astronomers to the only Japanese bombing of the US mainland in World War II. Many more titles are in the pipeline. Subscribers can watch all the shows on their desktop computers, tablets and smartphones. Beginning on January 4, 2021, subscribers will be able to watch on their smart TVs with Roku as well.

You can check out the Heritage site now at heritageTAC.org, where you can watch many trailers already, even without subscribing, and read descriptions of the dozens of titles posted there so far. Subscriptions ($5.99 per month, with discounts for longer terms) are available now, and gift cards (at http://heritagetac.org/gift_cards/new) are available as well for redemption immediately.

The Federal Archeologist’s Bookshelf:

The E-Gram’s holiday gift to our readers –articles by and about Federal archeologists! Since you can’t travel, grab your favorite beverage, and indulge in some quality reading.

Mitigating Engineered Disaster on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast
David J. Watt, Mark A. Rees, Tad Britt, Kory Konsoer, and Samuel M. Huey The SAArchaeological Record Vol. 20 (No.5); 16-22.

Nearly half of all previously recorded archeological sites along the Mississippi River Delta in coastal Louisiana are now partially or previously submerged, as a result of coastal erosion, subsidence, and sea -level rise. Sites at risk from anthropogenic climate change are being destroyed at a faster rate than can be mitigated by traditional CRM data recovery. A multi-institutional group that includes the NPS National Center for Preservation Technology and Training is working to develop GIS-based data to prioritize sites impacted by the effects of “environmental catastrophes involving the collapse of complex [engineered] systems of the Anthropocene” and offer mitigation strategies at a scale greater than individual projects.

Several aspects of this effort are notable. One is that the database is being used to develop a risk matrix to facilitate planning. Both small scale and large scale mitigation prioritization tools will be essential to future management of archeological resources, and it will be interesting to see the criteria used to organize and prioritize a large corpus of sites threatened with destruction from the same causes. Another notable aspect of this work is the use of “a small, unoccupied aerial system” (that I assume are drones) to monitor site conditions. More cost effective than sending archeologists out into marshes, the system allows for sufficiently high spatial-temporal resolution to map yearly changes in elevation and shoreline.

The brevity of article, perhaps, did not permit a discussion of a coordinator or client for this work, or authority for consultation. The piecemeal nature of CRM is driven by problem-specific needs. Will it be possible for CRM companies to submit competitive bids that recommend responses to regional, as opposed to project-specific, needs? Is there a single state or federal agency that has the authority to direct a coordinated program of the magnitude envisioned? The collection of these important data is but one component of a needed program of cultural resource management, writ large.

Walking in mud: Remarkable Pleistocene human trackways from White Sands National Park (New Mexico) by Matthew R. Bennett, David Bustos, Daniel Odess, Tommy M. Urban, Jens N. Lallensack, Vincent L. Santucci, Patrick Martinez, Ashleigh L. A. Wiseman, Sally C. Reynolds Quaternary Science Reviews Volume 249, 1 December 2020.

This article reports on a second trackway of human origin identified at White Sands NP. While the first one identified was an amazing .8 km long, the trackway reported in the current article was even longer, 1.5 km in length. It memorializes a journey made by an adolescent male or a female who carried a younger child for half of the journey. Columbian Mastodons and giant sloths crossed the trackway between the two trips, suggesting that hours, rather than days, elapsed between the two trips. The sloth tracks indicate that the animal rose on its hind legs, perhaps seeking to locate the travelers. While dating the tracks is difficult, the team estimates that the journey occurred before 10,000 BP.

The Archeology E-Gram presented information about this remarkable project a year ago (December 2019), but the level of preservation of these ephemeral fossils and the technical sophistication of the researchers continue to astound and delight the E-Gram staff. We were happy to see that the rest of the world is catching up with us, because the White Sands NP trackways research was listed by PlOS SciComm staff Ella Beaudoin and Briana Pobiner as one of the top 9 discoveries of 2020!

The Preservation Paradox: How to Manage Cultural Resources in Wilderness? An Example from the National Park Service by Karen Mudar International Journal of Wilderness Vol. 26: 30-42.

Mandates to preserve both wilderness character and cultural resources, including archeological resources, have created a dynamic tension that Mudar and others call “the preservation paradox.” How should the federal agencies that manage wilderness areas comply with both the Wilderness Act and cultural resource laws? Mudar comments on court cases that examined management of cultural resources in wilderness and discusses an alternative reading of the Wilderness Act.

Both sides of legal cases about management of wilderness cultural resources have made arguments that relied on incomplete understanding of cultural resource laws, legal inconsistencies, and previous cases that have influenced subsequent cases in nonproductive ways. Mudar argues that a new reading of the Wilderness Act is needed to clear a path to consistent management of wilderness cultural resources. Using the NPS as a case study, Mudar identifies ways that the recognition of cultural resources as a legitimate element of the fifth component of wilderness character, and included in US federal agency wilderness character narratives, may influence future litigation. She points to a need to update guidance for developing a wilderness character narrative and the execution of a minimum requirements analysis.

The Stories of the Slave Wrecks by Paula Neely American Archaeology Magazine Winter 2020

When the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) wanted a piece of a slave ship to use in an exhibit about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, its curators surveyed maritime archeologists and historians around the world, and they searched the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade - Database (slavevoyages.org) for leads on wrecks, but to no avail. Excavated slave wrecks were rare, especially ones that were excavated by professional archeologists. Although there were over 10,000 slave ships and 1,000 documented wrecks spanning three centuries, few of the wrecks had been identified and excavated.

Marine archaeologist Stephen Lubkemann, George Washington University, NMAAHC curator Paul Gardullo, NPS archeologist Dave Conlin, and Jaco Boshoff of the Iziko Museums of South Africa formed an innovative project dedicated to searching for shipwrecks from the most horrific and extensive trade of humans in world history. The Slave Wrecks Project (SWP), an international and interdisciplinary network of researchers and organizations, provides a comprehensive approach to exploring and sharing this history. “Our work is bigger than just a search for shipwrecks,” Gardullo said. “It is about transforming the field and the way we talk about the slave trade and its connection to our world and ourselves.”

The E-Gram has previously reported on the Slave Wrecks Project (May 2017; August 2015) and Stephen Lubkemann was interviewed for the NPS ArcheoThursday webinar series. Listen to the webinar at NPS Archeology - Topics in Archeology Webinar Series.

GRANTS AND TRAINING

(No announcements)

SLIGHTLY OFF TOPIC:

Yukon Gold Miner Unearths a Mummified Ice Age Wolf Pup
from story by Kiona N. Smith, Ars Technica

In July 2016, miner Neil Loveless of Favron Enterprises was searching for gold in Canada's Klondike gold fields. But Loveless found something even more interesting than Klondike gold: a frozen, mummified wolf puppy.

“We thank [Loveless] for his keen eye spotting {the puppy] as she was melting out of the permafrost, ensuring she was kept safe in a freezer, and then reporting the discovery to Yukon Paleontology,” wrote Julie Meachen, paleontologist at Des Moines University, and her colleagues in a paper in the journal Current Biology. Taking samples from the puppy’s hair follicles, Meachen and her colleagues radiocarbon dated the tissue and studied the chemical isotopes in her body, which offered clues about what she ate and the climate in which she lived. They also sequenced her mitochondrial DNA.

The puppy probably lived around 57,000 years ago. At the time, sea levels were much lower than today, and Beringia connected Siberia and Canada. Animals moved freely back and forth between the continents, which is why Pleistocene wolves unearthed across Eurasia and North America are all so closely related. The pup’s mitochondrial DNA fit right into that group of closely related animals, or clade, with a common ancestor that lived between 86,000 and 67,500 years ago.

Because mitochondrial DNA gets passed down directly from mother to puppy, Meachen and her colleagues could tell that this pup’s mother wasn’t a direct ancestor of the wolves that roam the Klondike today. Sometime in the last 56,000 years or so, the Klondike wolf population died out or left the area, and another group of wolves replaced it. At the moment, there’s not enough data to tell if the newcomers drove off, outcompeted, or just absorbed the puppy’s relatives.

Based on how her bones had developed, the puppy was about 7 weeks old when she died. Since modern wolves in the area usually give birth in early summer, that means she probably died in July or early August, around the same time Loveless washed her out of the permafrost 57,000 years later. By then, the mother had probably weaned her pups from milk and started bringing them real food. Modern wolf puppies start eating solid food at around 5 or 6 weeks. In this case, that seems to have included a lot of fish, according to the amount of the isotope nitrogen-15 in her body.

How did the pup die and how did she come to be so well preserved? Isotopic analysis suggests she was well-nourished, so she probably wasn’t sick and definitely wasn’t starving. Meachen and her colleagues think the pup’s den collapsed, killing her instantly and burying her remains in the freezing ground.

Permafrost mummies of large mammals, like mammoths, bears, and even wolves, are rare finds for paleontologists. But smaller ones, like ground squirrels and ferrets, turn up more often in places like Siberia and the Yukon. Meachen and her colleagues speculate that animals who lived in burrows or dens, including wolf pups, may be more frequently preserved in permafrost, especially if they died in cave-ins.

The Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in First Nation First Nation have agreed to display the mummy at the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Center in Whitehorse, where the remains hves been cleaned, conserved, and studied.To read the full article, go to Yukon gold miner unearths a mummified Ice Age wolf pup | Ars Technica

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