Video
Challenges and Opportunities of Archeology in Urban Parks
Transcript
Karen: Our second speaker today is Tim Schilling, an archeologist at the NPS Midwest Archeology Center. Tim is a geoarcheologist who has worked for the Park Service. Oh, thank you for doing that. See? I told you Tim.
Tim: I know. Nobody look.
Karen: Everyone close your eyes! I warned Tim if he left, if he didn't have his presentation at the beginning when he opened it up, it would start at the same place.
Tim: There we go.
Karen: Okay. Is everybody set? We are having some recording difficulties. All right. I'll start over. Our second speaker today is Tim Schilling, an archeologist at the NPS Midwest Archeology Center. Tim is a geoarcheologist who has worked for the Park Service for four years. He earned his Ph.D. from Washington University at Saint Louis. I asked him if he had actually worked on the Arch project for his dissertation but he said no, that he had actually worked at Cahokia and he did a post-doc at Indiana University at the Glen Black Center. Before that, he was working on archeology in Louisiana. I don't know if it was Mississippian or not but there's a lot of Mississippian archeology there.
Tim: Oh, yes. We'll take it away from here. Let's see. There we go.
Karen: Okay. I had more, but you can start. Thank you.
Tim: I'm sorry. I didn't meant to cut you off.
Karen: That's all right.
Tim: More accolades, I'm all for that. Let's go ahead and get started anyway, guys. It should be no surprise to this group that the National Park system contains a wide variety of places, from stunning natural wonders to important historic locations. Oftentimes, historic places are located in dense urban areas which have undergone tremendous subsequent development. Perhaps no place in the Park's system is this more acute than at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in Saint Louis where the construction of the park removed 40 square blocks of the historic city.
What I want to do today is talk to you about a renovation project at the park that's providing us the opportunity to investigate the potential for buried archeological resources and recover heretofore inaccessible materials using a combination of public and private archeologists in some novel ways. I want to talk to you about our project and what we're doing. There is my button.
In 2008, leading citizens of Saint Louis created the City Arch River Foundation. Their goal was, really, to connect the city to the river. The construction of the park in some ways between the construction of the park - let me get my pointer here - the park and the highway had cut the access between the city and river. The idea was to join the two. They also wanted to spruce up the Arch grounds, make it more compliant with ADA, more accessible and make it easier to maintain.
The Foundation partnered with NPS and they underwrote a design competition and they chose a plan. They dubbed the project the City Arch River or C-A-R, CAR 2015 project. All told, the scale of this project will spend about 380 million dollars of public and private money. We can talk more about the project as this discussion goes on, but from an archeological standpoint we were tasked with trying to figure out how this project would impact potential archeological resources, really, in the absence of a credible survey and in locations that neither traditional near-surface remote sensing or other types of testing would be able to get at, and deep testing methods would just be ineffective. That's the context of this talk today. Let me move on to the next slide.
The park in Saint Louis, Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, is really well known for the Arch. That's only really one part of a larger, more complex story. The park was authorized in December 1935 by President Franklin Roosevelt as the first national historical site. The enabling legislation recognized the pivotal place that downtown Saint Louis held in the history of our nation and it authorized the construction of a commemorative memorial. Just remember, the park initially was about these guys and we got an arch. In the Midwest, it's the most visited park in terms of visitation and it is a national icon park.
The park boundaries included 40 blocks fronting the Mississippi river in downtown Saint Louis. This area encompassed nearly the entire settlement laid out in 1764 by Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau in 1764. Then afterwards the city grew up into a bustling city. After an epidemic in 1848 and then a fire that swept away the epidemic in 1849 the river front area that encompasses much of the park was totally burned down and rebuilt out starting, really, after the Civil War. This rebuilding - we went from small wooden and brick structures to large multi-story brick structures that span sidewalk-to-sidewalk.
During the 19th century both residential locations and small-scale businesses initially focused on the fur trade and other river commerce filled the city blocks. By early in the 20th century the focus had shifted towards manufacturing, temporary warehousing; there were a lot of liquor distributors down there and a patent medicines. I guess the two of those are sort of interrelated business, and then the associated trades. You can see advertisements in the Saint Louis newspapers circa 1890. Here is a foundry on the right. There's the foundry on the right that was built down on the river front and it was taken away when they built the park. We're looking at a view from a hotel at 3rd Street overlooking - you can just see how tight it is in there, how built up it was.
At the same time that the river front was a bustling concern in the early 1900s settlement expanded beyond the traditional limits with the growth of new means of transportation like street cars and automobiles. This led to a growth of suburban neighborhoods. Likewise, investment was drawn away from the river front. At the same time you had federal legislation like the Clean Food and Drug Act and the Volstead Act that pulled the hammer down on the patent medicine and alcohol businesses that anchored the downtown river front.
As the story goes, development went away from the river and the area went into a decline. By about 1930 the river front had deteriorated with a lot of empty lots and closed businesses. There was a gentleman in town named Luther Ely Smith who was working on a project in Vincennes, Indiana that later became George Rogers Clark Memorial, and that is a National Park unit. He figured he wanted something like that for the river front in Saint Louis. Smith decided, being a prominent local lawyer, was also a campaign supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. After a few years, a multi-year campaign, Roosevelt through a presidential order proclaimed Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.
In due time the NPS began acquiring land through eminent domain. We spent about 7 million dollars, which was a tremendous amount when you think about the aftermath of the Depression. We paid about 145% of the value of the property. In 1938, through condemnation, the historic city was removed. You can see here in the background they spared nothing. No, that's not exactly true. NPS historic architects determined that only the old courthouse, the old cathedral, Manuel Lisa's warehouse had integrity from the period of interest. The remaining structures were removed. This was the second time in less than a century that the river front was in ruins.
Today, the old court house and the old cathedral remain standing. The courthouse was restored in 1940 and is currently used by NPS as the park headquarters. The cathedral still operates as a church on the park ground. Manuel Lisa's warehouse has got a little more tortuous history. The warehouse was disassembled when they were removing the city. NPS restored it to original conditions and rebuilt it on the park grounds. Then later we disassembled it to make way for the Arch and the remnants are stored in the basement of the old courthouse, so now you know where that one is.
The grounds sat vacant for nearly the next 25 years until 1965 when the construction began for the Arch. Construction required a significant change to the landscape, including the relocation of a railroad, the construction of an underground museum space and the excavation of 60 foot deep foundations for each legs. When we think about the Centennial and the 100th anniversary, this was a mission 66 project, guys. I challenge you out there to come up with something nearly so grand.
NPS archeologist Zorro Bradley monitored the Arch construction, but because of a scarcity of real decent contexts and his changing assignments he never produced a final report. Later work in the 1970s further reshaped the park by the addition of a large berm along the western boundary and the installation of reflecting ponds. The last major change since then happened in 1984 when a three-story parking garage was installed in the northeast corner of the park. You can see we went from a city to a grassy field to a large arch.
The CAR 2015 project calls for substantial reworking of the present ground surface. Overall, across much of the park, the top soil will be removed down to about three feet and replaced with more appropriate soil that will make landscape easier to maintain. About 2,000 trees will be replaced with species that are resistant to the Emerald Ash Borer and the slopes and subsurface will be graded and enhanced around the ponds for environmental and accessibility concerns.
Other major efforts include a new entrance for the underground museum and replacement of the parking garage for a new amphitheater. Don't say anything will never happen in the Park Service. The parking garage we built in 1984 has been torn down. The park we built in 1948 was totally redone and we're now digging back up our underground museum some 50 years later.
For the CAR 2015 project at MWAC we developed a predictive model based on topography and did deep soil coring to determine the nature and the extend of the potential archeological deposits. By combining these data with historical research we are confident that any potential archeological materials will be found deeper than approximately one meter. However, this model is really only useful for understanding the recent past. This is a complex palimpsest of a landscape. We think that older, more significant deposits may be more deeply buried, or at least at the time that's what we were thinking.
In fact, an example of this can be seen where there's -the vertical accretion of landscapes can be seen just immediately south of the park where Missouri Department of Transportation crews were working underneath the Poplar Street bridge. There they identified a buried landscape that potentially dates back to the founding of Saint Louis in, let's call it 1780. Soil coring there initially suggested that the area consisted of multiple fill layers, which it did. Some of the fill layers dated to the 19th century. Historical research indicated that a warehouse occupied the lot during the late 19th and early 20th century. The warehouse didn't have a basement. It was just build slab-on-grade.
What they'd gotten here was some early features, early wall-trench houses that were preserved underneath a brick foundation, that the brick foundation was subsequently preserved. There was a parking lot here and there was another concrete parking lot here. You've got faience which is typically a French ceramic from around the late 18th century. There's a lead seal. MODOT's currently working on this, so I don't want to scoop them on that, but just to let you know that this should be very interesting forthcoming.
The MODOT work provided a cautionary tale for us here at MWAC. Even though the site formation processes on the Arch are dramatically different from those that are off of the park grounds because of different land use histories, the potential is there, or was there. Largely, we've finished most major excavation but we're still keeping an eye on it. Consequently, MWAC in consultation with the Osage Nation, the Missouri SHPO, and other federal and private entities we developed a conservative strategy for resource protection, where NPS archeologists would monitor deep excavations and any archeological features would be mitigated on the fly by local contracted archeologists.
The way we think about this is on the ground resource protection is being done by NPS people, but it just makes better sense to have local folks on the ground who are more flexible with crew and staffing come and dig things when we identify them. This goes back to that same idea. At the same time, the scale of the undertaking and the tight schedule forced design and construction to be concurrent. They were designing some aspects of the project while other parts were being built. I'm talking about designs beyond conceptual, but down to actual construction planning.
The existing conditions were poorly known in many cases. There were a lot of unforeseen changes that we were predicting. Therefore, we believe that archeologists should be available and onsite during any large-scale excavations. NPS archeologists have the flexibility to halt construction in some areas while allowing work to continue in others based on their judgement. Because of the lack of archeological data from the park as well as the scarcity of other archeological projects in downtown Saint Louis any in situ archeological remains would automatically be considered significant, worthy of study and excavated. This strategy would ensure that construction would proceed with minimal delays, and only in instances of discovery of human remains or NAGPRA items do we forecast any significant delays.
Currently, the project is ongoing. Archeologists have spent nearly six months over the last two years monitoring various kinds of excavation at the Arch. In general, the results are as expected. There's been not much in the way of in situ archeological remains. You can get a sense of the landscape from this aerial photograph in about 1940. It’s pretty blasted out there. Generally, we are finding small amount of material culture consisting mostly of glass bottles, either soda bottles or beer bottles. These are typically found at the juncture of or within large heterogeneous fill deposits. In some instances we believe the artifacts probably represent the remains of construction worker lunches while they were tearing the place down. In other cases these items are likely brought in within the fill.
We have found at least one in situ feature. While excavating for a storm sewer south of the north reflecting pond MWAC archeologists identified the remains of a brick-lined cistern that contained numerous intact or nearly intact mid-19th century domestic wares, bottles and faunal remains. Later building foundations truncate and overlie the cistern. In this feature almost 100 complete or nearly-complete vessels were found, as well as about 1,400 pieces of bone, mostly domestic cattle and pig that were also co-mingled.
Currently, we believe because of the large number of duplicate items and the richness of the overall assemblage we believe the artifacts were once part of the Washington Hotel service. In perhaps a prescient move the Washington Hotel was subsequently renamed the Jefferson Hotel just before it burned. What you can see here on the right, this is interesting, it's a basalt ware ink well. Basalt ware was a popular ware from about 1830 to 1840. They've got a lot of duplicate or similar bowls of this style. One of the artifacts that a lot of people who've seen these who weren't necessarily archeologists have taken to is this vinegar bottle. It's a Parisian vinegar. The folks down there on the river front in 1840, 1850 were certainly participating in high society based on their vinegar at least.
Let me see where I am. The construction as initially planned would have not encountered these remains, but on-the-ground conditions dictated that a change happen. You can see they were constructing a large water cistern, but because of other unrealized utilities that were in this area they had to move the cistern about 10 feet to the east. If they would have kept the original plan we wouldn't have found our cistern. It made sense to have us really deeply embedded in what's going on.
I just want to bring a note here that the excavation of this cistern is the first controlled archeological recovery done in the park since its creation nearly 80 years ago. It sounds like, maybe, not much, a single cistern, but it's significant for the park because it is their first archeology there in terms of a controlled recovery from a discrete context.
In addition to the monitoring we were also able to test some locations. In the Luther Ely Smith square both soil coring and photos from the park show that the entire block was excavated in the late 1930s. Then it was later used as a parking lot before being filled and landscaped. Our monitoring also showed that, yeah, there wasn't anything intact within this and this, in fact, is a true picture. In fact, even this stone structure that we see in the background appears to have been removed sometime when they re-habbed the sidewalks.
We also did archeology testing in and around the courthouse because they're doing ADA work where they're building wheelchair ramps to allow disabled folks to get into the courthouse and see the interior. Our work has showed that landscaping throughout the course of the early 20th century and then associated with NPS activities in the 40s has removed all surficial materials there and we don't believe that there's going to be anything deeper there.
All right, what does this tell us? What are our take-home messages? Overall, I've got three take-home messages for you. First, even though the thorough destruction and subsequent earth moving occurred at the park, potentially interesting archeological features do exist there. Even the most heavily impacted urban context needs thorough archeological attention. You just can't write anything off out of hand because it's in a city. In fact, it may be the cities that have longer complex histories that we really need to focus on. In this instance, continued monitoring will be needed to mitigate the negative consequences of the construction.
Second, public-private partnerships do work. The way we were able to work it, we were able to come in and excavate that feature in the space of days, whereas it would have really put a strain, because the feature was encountered while we didn't have anybody in the office to go there and dig it. It was a very beneficial thing to have private people able to deal with this.
Then finally, on any project of this scale you need buy-in from multiple interest groups. While it's not a new discovery by any way, buy-in is very important, especially when you've got outside people, governmental agencies, and just the public in general. I think that's all I've got to say today. Can we take any questions?
Karen: Do we have any questions for Tim?
Speaker 3: I have a question. What methodology did you use - I might have missed it - to get your private people on board? Were they hired through the construction contractor?
Tim: They were contracted through the private foundation.
Speaker 3: Through the foundation. Okay. Thank you.
Speaker 4: [inaudible 00:25:59].
Tim: Oh, yeah. We did review their documents and were able to guide them because we… were working with them, in fact. Yeah, we had the private foundation but because we like to say we didn't land on the project, the project landed on us. Because they were the ones coming to it it was determined that they would mitigate any adverse effects. We reviewed it and worked closely with them in helping them choose an appropriate archeologist.
Speaker 3: Just knowing how not exactly speedy contracting goes I was just wondering how you had-
Speaker 4: The reasons.
Speaker 3: ... managed to have that happen. The fact that you went through the partners explains that. Thank you.
Karen: This is Karen. I was surprised to learn that the Arch was a Mission 66 project. Thank you for pointing that out. It was really interesting to see the pictures of the Arch construction.
Tim: Yeah, that's one of the interesting things about the park is that it was made a park and memorialized through the creation of an arch. Now the big thing about it is the Arch because the Arch itself is a national historical landmark in its own right. Sometimes you've got to convince people there really is a museum underneath there.
Karen: Yes. That's very true. Can you remind me, wasn't there another big excavation along the Mississippi River just north of the park? Wasn't there a big MODOT project?
Tim: Yes. It was the Stan Musuial Veterans Bridge. On the Saint Louis side, on the west side, very similar. That went right through the center of the old Saint Louis mound group. That appears to have mostly been removed almost entirely in the late 1870s through about 1900. They did find a couple of interesting historical features but nothing in terms of like they found on the east side of the river. The west side of the river is on a bluff of about 100 feet, I guess, maximum elevation, above the flood plain. The east side of the river is a swamp, so historical development on the east side of the river filled whereas on the west side of the river it cut.
What happened on the east side of the river they were running I-70 and they happened to catch right through the center of the east Saint Louis mound group. The Illinois Department of Transportation, they're called ISAS now, the Illinois State Archeological Survey excavated what's probably going to end up being the largest archeological site in North America. It's the East Saint Louis mound group. They found, if I've got my numbers right, somewhere around 2,000 prehistoric houses spanning about a 200 year period. All that work is still in publication, but I think they got about 4 million artifacts out of it. It just goes to show you how in a mile and a half you can have major differences in land use and formation processes.
Karen: They didn't expect to find anything there either because wasn't it under the railroad yards?
Tim: It was actually underneath the stockyards.
Karen: Oh, that's right.
Tim: I went and visited and there was about 8 feet of organic accumulations that they had to excavate through to get to the prehistoric stuff. It is a fact that that stockyard was put there about 1860 before you had major land leveling occur. That really preserved that circa 1200 era landscape. It's by a quirk of fate or quirk of elevation that you preserved that. I look to see really good things coming out of that in the next few years.
Karen: Yeah. I think it's going to have a big impact on our interpretations of Cahokia.
Tim: It will and that's why I've kept my eye on that hoping that we would find at least something prehistoric at the Arch grounds. Some of the buildings at the Arch grounds, they had buildings that were literally dug into limestone bluffs. They were digging basements in their limestone and building the buildings with the limestone. Not much for accumulated type deposits there. A little disappointing, but, still, it's just the way it is.
Karen: You found no prehistoric materials?
Tim: Nothing to speak of. Just the area was pretty blasted, although the MODOT folks underneath the Poplar Street bridge have found bits and pieces, mostly flakes and things like that. That's because they were within a stream bed. It's an alluvial context in that area. It wasn't until the French came in and dammed the stream that people really began living in that area. It's really interesting to talk about land use difference. The reason Saint Louis is where it is is because of the limestone bluff that we subsequently, in fact, this west entrance project they've had to break through about 10 feet of it and 10 feet deep and 80 feet wide and 100 feet long to put in the new west entrance. It's that interesting quirk that people were settling there because it was high and dry, but now it's causing us so much problems.
Karen: This is a very good argument for having archeologists on site and involved in all the planning. Are there any more questions? Tim, thank you very much for speaking with us today.
Tim: Thank you, Karen.
Karen: Have a good evening everybody.
Speaker 3: You too, bye.
Tim: Thanks.
Description
Tim Schilling, ArcheoThursday, 10/8/2015
Duration
30 minutes, 51 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
10/08/2015
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