Video
Interview with Retired NPS Archeologist David Orr
Transcript
Orr: So thanks to all who made this possible. You know, for people like me from the Cretaceous period, I thought webcams were for recording the intricate life of arachnids. So, you know, that’s about as funny as it probably will get. It’s good, though, to talk to tribal leaders before they’re translated to tribal deities, in which case they’re very silent indeed. I know some of those that you have previously heard in their NPS careers have really made a difference. I always thought of my career as a voyage. Like Thomas Cole’s great painting series you can see at Utica, for example. The Voyage of Life. My favorite works of literature were always about quests, about seeking things. Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Aeneis, The Divine Comedy, Faust, On the Road. They all involve what is singular about our profession, and that is discovery. And it isn’t discovery of things that are secondhand and opinions related through various intermediaries. They’re actual material objects. They are the honest objects. However, they are usually mute and we need to speak for them. And that is a considerable gift that some archeologists have to accomplish that. My favorite poem was always C.P. Cavafy’s great poem, Ithaca. He was a Hellenized Jew, lived in Alexandria during the late Ottoman Empire. And Ithaca starts with a phrase that I always remember. “When you set off for Ithaca, ask that your voyage be long, filled with adventure, filled with instruction.” And I’ve been doing archeology since 1963 and I can assure you, it’s always been filled with instruction and filled with adventure. Fifty-three years later, I’m still doing it. First slide. Oh, we’ve got to get to this. Sorry. There we go. So, enough of that. That’s a prelude. Here’s really the beginning of my Ithaca. Right to the left, where the pole is, right here, is probably where I was born on September 8, 1942. It’s an archeological site. It’s a very important site. It was one of FDR’s earliest public housing projects in Westlawn, in Warren, Ohio. It’s a total archeological site. This picture was just taken a few months ago. It’s not been disturbed so far. Sooner or later the economy will change and they’ll build something there. But you can see the alley in front. There were barracks buildings where we lived during that time. And as an early inhabitant of that, I began to read and wonder and look out my window at other cultures in faraway times and places. So I had what I called Egypto-Tut-o-Philia And there was a book called Gods, Graves and Scholars where I learned about Egyptian excavations and the adventures of Howard Carter and others. But in 1963, I actually got a chance as an undergraduate at Ohio University to go out to Pony Creek Drainage in Glenwood, Iowa, south of Council Bluffs, which was being turned into a reservoir, and work with the man in the middle there, with the camera, Lionel Brown, who still I’m in contact with on email. And that’s me with the baseball cap. And at the right, or one of the sites, which turned out to be an archaic, early archaic, lithic reduction site.
When I went to Pompeii, though, things changed dramatically. And I came under the tutelage of this wonderful woman on the left, Wilhelmina Jashemski, professor of ancient history and classics at the University of Maryland. And I wrote my dissertation under her. And she was a friend for life. And she was interested in gardens. All the things about gardens. I first came across Mark Leone, for example, at the University of Maryland, who was also interested in gardens. And we actually had some sort of program at Dumbarton Oaks with Jashemski’s Gardens of Pompeii were presented on the same stage, if you will, of the Gardens of the Paca House, for example, in Annapolis. And on the right, that’s me in the middle in one of those more hilarious moments. My PhD was in Roman domestic religion. When I came to Pompeii, this particular painting was fresh in the House of Polybius. On the main street. And it wasn’t completed. There was an earthquake in ’62. And by the time of, the total destruction was in ’79 Common Era, this painting still hadn’t been completed. (laughs) There was a graffito on the bottom that talked about a servant praying for his master who was up in Germany fighting. But you can see the heads of the figures, the Lares, the tutelary gods here are not finished. And this plaque doesn’t have any inscription in it. It would have had an inscription. Here’s another type of house shrine that I was involved with. This one, again, damaged during the earthquake of ’62. And it’s got filled in. It was a niche. You can see, here. Let me go back to that for a minute. You can see the infill, and a couple of these I had permission to take the infill out and see the painting inside. For whatever reason, they desanctified that area. In the house of the ship Europa, I really became enamored of the holistic view of culture. And there my advising professors was one of the first landscape archeologists in the profession, really. And she was incorporating the past and the present. She would take me out into the vineyards of Pompeii and say, “See, they’re still planting them, David, the same way.” Blah, blah, blah. And that was very useful and very instructive. In the house of the ship Europa, she discovered a vegetable garden. And on the wall, this fantastic graffito of a Roman merchant ship and one of the best such examples. Not without its humor. You know, the guy perilously hanging on here at the top of the main mast. And then at a later date, most embarrassing and obscene inscriptions by various trysts between servants, one of whom is named Nymphet. Then I went to the University of Pennsylvania. So going through here, talking about the people. I was asked what people influenced you. Well, Jashemski, and this guy, Tony Garvin, who was my boss at the Department of American Civilization. Where I really had this holistic view hammered into me. And it really didn’t need to be hammered. It was something that I accepted all too willingly. And Penny Batcheler, a wonderful woman who was describing architectural events that were beyond me. And this giant of a person. When I first met her, she said, “Oh, I’m so glad to meet you. Now tell me all about vernacular architecture.” So she wanted to know from me, (laughs) because I was studying vernacular architecture at the time. But that shows you the kinds of giants that were in that land. And there were giants. I also met and became, met regularly every month with Charlie Peterson, the founder of the Historic American Building Survey. And Henry Glassie and Mary Murphy and all sorts of people that were in the department and followed me when I went to the Park Service in ’77, their memory was strong. Including this guy, John Cotter, who was one of the founders of historical archeology, I really believe that. Dan Roberts and I wrote this book on him because he always said, “I always thought of myself as a witness to the past. Not a player, not an actor.” He was a marvelous individual and I learned a lot from him during that time, also. And of course, one of the early giants in historical archeology in Philadelphia at that time, again at the transition period when I went into the Park Service, the Venturi/Batcheler/Cotter, I call it, the ghost house. Robert Venturi’s firm put it up. But Penny Batcheler and John Cotter were responsible for suggesting the concept of outlining an archeological site so you’d have the site that’s been already excavated down here, and you put the shaft of what you imagine the building to be on top. Because we didn’t have a really good idea of what the exterior, but we knew where the chimneys were, we knew where the rooms were, and we were able to accomplish that during that time. All right. I’m going to be emphasizing things I really believe in in the Park Service. And you know, you’re going to hear me say a million times, when I went into the Park Service in 1977, it wasn’t as challenging as what you people are experiencing, are about to experience. This is going to be a great challenge to all of us with vigilance and courage and strength to keep the preservation mandates. And one of the ways I’ve always found to do that is aggressively have a volunteer program. When I went into the Park Service, I hardly ever excavated. Hardly ever. Okay. I probably didn’t excavate without having a strong volunteer corps. This is one of my students at Valley Forge with two volunteers. And it was always like that. I developed a volunteer program at Lower Marion High School with Steve McCarter, who is now a delegate in the House of Delegates at Pennsylvania. Just elected to his fourth term. He and I worked out about a 12-year program from 1982 to 1993 where he would teach a course in historical archeology at the high school to students. And then we would take them to a park for two weeks. And the park would give the housing, provide the housing, and we would provide the labor and archeological expertise with myself and my incredibly capable assistants, Douglas Campana, PhD from Colombia, prehistorian, and Rick Blades, PhD from NYU who also had a long tradition in historical archeology. So we were able to give one-on-one, you know, constant supervision, to this program. Very proud of it and very proud of its achievements. The Smithsonian selected us in 1987 to go to China and do this in Changsha. And we took our 1987 high school intern program to China. But I did this at every park I could, except for some small compliance things. And those of my students and people that have studied with me have followed through on that in their various ambitions. So my advice to everyone listening to me, if you think you have a good, educational public outreach program, look at it again and double it. Because in the months to come or the year to come, I think this will be the thing that will bring our story to the most people and give us the springboard to accomplish the NPS mission. Here’s some volunteers at Valley Forge working on the objects. Okay, you’re looking at that. This is Valley Forge. This is another group called BRAVO under Dan Sivilich. These are amateur metal detector people. And I’ve used them for twenty-some years. I’m still using them. I just came from Princeton Battlefield where we’re using Bravo. I’m working with Wade Katz’ CRM group. So here’s a close-up of a metal detector object by Bravo, Dan Sivilich’s group at Valley Forge. We knew that underneath this was probably a lock plate from an 18th century musket. And when we did the x-rays, sure enough, there it was. My last day at Valley Forge, this is the honest to God truth, now I didn’t put this in here, we found 30 bayonets. As in 30 bayonets. Not one or two. Which is a spectacular find in Rev War terms. And my student, Jesse Roosevelt West is currently using a lot of that data for his dissertation. Including this. I thought, what should I leave you with at Valley Forge for some of the archeology? And my career with the National Park Service started in 1976-7 when we got Valley Forge from the state, NPS got it. And I implemented a survey designed by Doug Scovill, in between Cotter and me. And when I replaced Cotter as the regional archeology in the Mid-Atlantic Region, we had a survey that was pretty much geophysics. So we had remote sensing, aerial photography, magnetometer resistivity, ground-penetrating radar. A lot of that stuff resulted in anomalies that we were to test later. This one was not one of those, but we’ve seen these in such anomalies that we were to test later. This one was not one of those, but we’ve seen these in such anomalies because they make profound impacts. Camp kitchens, the mound of dirt in the middle. Let’s see, where is it? Come on, [unclear], there it is. This mound of dirt is insulating the cast iron rectangular oven inserts that are in there, pushed in there. And then you pile the dirt up on that and the soldiers could sit and then either cook on top or bake on the bottom and eat their meals here. According to the general orders by General Washington during the time of the Valley Forge encampment in ’77-’78, it was forbidden to eat in your hut, because they were afraid you might burn the hut down, etcetera. So you’re supposed to eat at these things, too. So they’re very important. Archeologically, they’re not too hard to mistake. You could see that the ring of the trench here, before it was excavated, and here’s the hard-packed stuff on the front. This one is from what we call the chapel site at Valley Forge. I did other things that carried me over into the National Park Service when I was at Penn. One of them was a lot of my interest in popular culture with McDonald’s. McDonald’s industry leader. And I thought if I studied this, I could understand more about American culture, American popular culture. That’s the first McDonald’s, by the way, on the left there. And then a pretty nasty poster that I got from collecting this stuff. I collected the paper ephemera of McDonald’s. I’ve got like 70 boxes, 70 Hollinger boxes, all sort of documenting and recording, some 4,000 items, 5,000 items. I’m in the process of disposing of that. And I did that as a graduate project at the University of Pennsylvania. I started it as a graduate project. And then I became very interested in vernacular architecture. Some of my early students at Penn, Herb Levy and especially Bernie Herman went on to great careers in vernacular architecture. And this is one of the earliest houses in Delaware, the Ashton house, built around 1708, 1712. And this one is a slave quarter in Bremo, Virginia made out of rammed earth. So it’s miraculously survived. So these are the kinds of structures that I saw in the parks. And I wanted to see if we had not only mitigative measures, but also preservation mandates for recording this kind of stuff. And so I had my work cut out for me there. But I certainly pushed that envelope a lot. And hopefully a lot of buildings were saved. I also did a lot of oral history. Now you’re talking about holistic study. If you’re interested in coal miners, for example, this is a pension coal miner, Alec Payne, that Bernie Herman and I interviewed in southwestern Virginia in 1975 or so. And that’s a basket that he did. And all he asked all the time is, “Do you know how to get my pension? Do you know how to get more money? I’m not getting enough money.” So we saw, before I became involved two years later in New River Gorge in West Virginia, in coal mining culture. But the idea of coal mining culture is everything. Not just the structure, not just the archeological site, but the folk memories. The craft memories, the amazing syncretism of these craft memories. African Americans using a splint ash tradition, very much like Europeans. But with their own spin to things. So I studied folk life very diligently during this time. Another thing that I introduced into the National Park Service, at least in my region, I was the, Bob Vogel once told me that I taught the earliest graduate course in industrial archeology in 1973 at the University of Pennsylvania. Well, if it wasn’t the earliest, it was one of the earliest. And I had a student named Herb Levy. And for his master’s, he worked on the Philadelphia Gas Works. And we both recorded it and wrote a history and some, I don't know how many sheets. You can look them up and take a look at the stuff we did of the buildings that we recorded. This building was gone before, but I thought I would show it to you. When we arrived there, the workers thought it was built by Swedish monks. And we told them, no, no, no, these buildings were built in 1853. Because the meter house that we studied was just like this big gothic thing with lancet windows made out of cast iron. And then at the top, you can see right at the top of the ridge, those are the exhaust chimneys from all the retorts, the ovens that were converting coal to coke, and burning the coal for gas, illuminating gas. Not coal to coke. I mean, they took the coke and were burning it to make gas, illuminating gas for the streets and houses of Philadelphia. And they looked like crenulations in the gothic tradition. Wonderful building. When I went to New River, I became involved, this was about 1978, ’79, I started to be a team member on a planning episode. So I became the archeologist/cultural resource person for the planning effort at New River Gorge National Recreation Area, which was a great adventure and a great education for me. Here we have some Italian, mostly Italian masons building beehive coke ovens, which are round stone structures. And they were fed, the coal was put in there, burnt to coke the couple days it took. Then they were opened again, and then the coke was loaded into the railway and sent off to Pittsburgh. The New River coke was very, very low-sulfur. It was an excellent coal used for metallurgical processes. And we studied this. We had a team under David [Firsco?], he was the archeologist, but we had industrial archeologists from West Virginia go through and record the other features. These are the fronts of the coke ovens. And then at Nuttalberg, we had this marvelous coal tipple, it went all the way up to the shafts. The coal level was right here. So the idea was, okay, we’ve got to get the coal out. And we have to bring it back down to the railroad down here. I’m sorry. I’ve got to be careful of that arrow. And the railroad is under the breaker building there at the bottom of the valley where the river is. So you just couldn’t roll it down a hill. So you put it on this conveyor. Tremendous piece of architecture. Unfortunately, it collapsed and is no longer there. The building on the right is there. You can go to Thurmond today and see the National Bank of Thurmond, which was right on the railroad, so there was hardly room for a sidewalk or anything else. So towns were built right on the C&O Railroad, which went through the gorge and allowed the entire industry to progress. Otherwise, you have the coal but you had to get it out. The additional thing to remember is who dug this stuff? The coal mines were integrated in really essentially a Southern state. And where they lived weren’t. There’s segregated black communities, segregated white communities. Segregated white church, segregated black church. But they worked together, as you can see in this picture. And the union auxiliary, the women, were also integrated. So it’s something to marvel at in one sense, and try and understand the hard world of a miner. And I did a lot of oral history there. And some of it you can read in Goldenseal, at least one article I remember doing in Goldenseal. Which is the West Virginia magazine of folklore. So we did this kind of stuff at the New River Gorge National Recreation Area. Even though the cultural history was something that was not pushed at that time. But I hope it will be, because there’s plenty of, and I know they’re doing their best there to get this story out. The first thing that really changed my perspective in archeology in the Park Service was none of what I just told you about. It was violence, battlefields. America, no stranger to conflict. You know, I was born, and my mother always pointed out to me, in the worst day of the Allied cause in 1942. (laughs) That’s what she said. I grew up in another war, Korea. I was drafted into another war, Vietnam. Did not get over there, but I was drafted into it. And I’m living in a war now, in retirement. So conflict is no stranger to this country. And conflict, not only in battlefield situations, but in social situations. In riots and various labor actions. It just goes on and on. Well, the Civil War was probably the most violent episode in American history. I think the latest figure is 700,000 dead. A lot more wounded, maimed. A lot more went back changed forever by what they had seen. At the Taylor House in Petersburg, I applied a lot of my experiences in understanding material culture at Penn. For example, this wasn’t the Taylor House. I knew that was a quarters kitchen, a slave quarter or laundry or something like that. And off to the right of it there in that green field with the tree is where I thought the house would be. So we did some radar and sure enough, we found it. This is a radar section showing the hit of the cellar of the Taylor House from here to there. And we excavated that. Bruce Bevin did the geophysics. And there it was. Since then, Julie Steele, who’s a cultural resources person, one of my colleagues when I was regional archeologist at archeological center, worked for me at Valley Forge. Julie has done more work in perfecting this and using it as something that we can learn more about the intense destruction of this area when the armies arrive. Virginia, in the valley, they did studies of this. Geez, it was an agricultural fruit basket. Basket. Grain, everything. Tobacco, grain, fruit, corn, cattle, everything. And the constant war for four years really changed it. And so I learned this. Not in the perspective of set pieces of battle. But how the battle worked with the entire socioeconomic deterioration of the country occasioned by this terrible conflict. I also found out that iconic things are important. I learned this from Marshall Fishwick, who’s a popular culture thing. I actually wrote an essay on icons for this book on American icons. And I knew that the cabin was an icon in American history from Valley Forge, for example. Over 1800, 2000, were built there to house the soldiers. Thomas Paine had gone out to Valley Forge and called it a log city, filled with the true rustic order. Well, during the Civil War, cabins again were using logs. And put together rather ephemerally, rather quick. Except for this cabin. This was the headquarters cabin of the gentleman sitting in the center there, right to the left of the biblical patriarch looking guy with the beard. That was Marsena Patrick, who was the provost marshal for the Union Army. Ulysses S. Grant is the man comfortably ensconced in the chair. Probably taken from Richard Epps, who owned the big house, which he did not occupy, Grant did not occupy during this stay there from 1864 to five. War was over when that picture was taken. Those soldiers literally left that picture that Matthew Brady took, called a grand parade picture in Marsena Patrick’s diary. And they never came back. We have no evidence that Grant ever came back. The cabin itself on the right was given to Grant’s friend Stuart, David Stuart, who had founded the YMCA but was also a key donor to the sanitary fairs that provided the troops with all sorts of things. And so after the war, so, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you my cabin.” He said, “Oh, thanks a lot, General.” Then he goes, whoa. So the cabin was disassembled, sent up the bay. No mean feat. Reassembled in Fairmont Park in Philadelphia. By August, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, by August first of 1865, there it was, the one on the right there. And then stood there until 1980 when it was given to the National Park Service. My crew and I excavated the site. And they brought it back, reassembled it on the site. So that’s carry me back to old Virginny archeology. All during that odyssey of this little structure, we were doing a survey of this bluff. And here this bluff had seen occupation since the earliest Native American period up until yesterday. So it was an incredible archeological site. One of the richest I’ve ever seen. And still needs a lot more attention. But battlefield archeology went apace. One of the problems with battlefield archeology is that we use metal detectors, the devil’s stick. And when I was in the Park Service, I spent an incredible amount of time in court prosecuting people under first the Antiquities Act, and later under ARPA, Archeological Resources Protection Act, to in fact ensure that nobody would be able to continue doing this kind of stuff. Battlefield archeology, then, was to showcase studies of military sites like Huts and History on the left and one of the most recent ones on the right. Also, the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, which I was in charge of for a while from the park’s point of view. I first found out that [La Puensa?] there on the right by [Joseleas?], famous painting, has hardly any images of Native Americans. We’ve got more images of insects and turtles than we do of Native Americans. On the left is a very famous engraving of the Delaware Native Americans from the 18th century. And then [Joseleas’?] painting of [La Puensa?] on the right on the Delaware. But NAGPRA is basically an act to protect native sites from being despoiled. And we had a few examples of that in court, but not as many as we have in the Southwest. I turned to African American archeology when I left the Park Service and was at Temple University. There’s my crew on the left. Actually it’s the guy in the orange shirt in the middle, Chris Barton’s crew at Timbuctoo, with the principal excavator there on the left, Tricia Markert. On the right is the discovery of a house in Timbuctoo. But the geophysics, which I don’t have time to get into, are spectacular. Most of the houses are located and various other features, also, roads, alleys, shaft features. And all made possible by the tremendous cooperation of both the descendent community, to the right of Chris, and to the mayor that we work with there in the front, in the white t-shirt. Now, I have some time. Okay. I just hit these things. So I hope you have questions about, those are some of the things I remember. I didn’t talk about a lot of areas of the research I did when I was with the Park Service. But I thought I’d bring to you something that covers the transition from the Park Service to right now. I’m still conducting research in this area, which I’ll point out to you right here where the C&D Canal is, right here. I live in Delaware City, okay, get back here. I live in Delaware City, which is right on the coast there, right on the river. Right there. Okay. Delaware City had a satellite African American community. Not within the confines of the early white town. It was totally separate. It was called Polktown. This is not uncommon. Timbuctoo is the same thing. It wasn’t in Mount Holly. It was outside of Mount Holly. They were also united in that they were both founded in the 1820s by escaped slaves. They both had some degree of cooperation in the beginning with Quakers but we’re not sure of how powerful that was, but we suspect it. They both had their own churches and their own schools. In the map, as late as 1881, we have Polktown shown right here. That’s the African American community, linear. And then right across the canal there is, there we go. Oop, get back. Right across the canal there is the cemetery, which I’ll be showing you in a few minutes. I was a co-discoverer of that cemetery in 1980. And it took us 30, 35 years to get all the money together to totally restore it. It’s one of the most positive achievements of my life as an archeologist, so I thought I would show it. Here’s Polktown looking as what the cemetery looked like in the ‘90s with the phragmites of the marsh, overgrown totally. Here’s my wife and I cleaning up the cemetery. You can see the stones in the foreground here. I got a call from— And this is the way it looks now. Totally landscaped on the right with the fence around it. And it’s even better than this. It has lights and benches and five interpretive plaques lining that fence with a main gate. And a main trail to the right of it, which is a bicycle and pedestrian all-weather trail from Delaware City all the way to Chesapeake City, 14 miles. And it’s a marvelous discovery site for people to understand this conflicted past in what is a Southern state. Remember, Delaware City was a slave state. There were slaves. The freed blacks who are buried in the cemetery, and there’s probably slaves there, too, but unmarked—they had to negotiate slavery. They had to negotiate that. They had relatives that were slaves. They had to deal with that. You know, I can’t imagine how tough that is. So I learned a lot about the human condition, and how much tenacity this species really has when I discovered the life and tribulations of African Americans in slave states. United States Colored Troops was a product of the Emancipation Proclamation. It was authorized to also carry out Frederick Douglass’ comments that give a colored man—which was the name then—a gold eagle button and he’ll win his freedom through this kind of activity. Even though these were all free blacks to begin with, mostly. Some were, there were some amazing stories, especially in Delaware, where masters would turn in their slaves, because the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t mean a hill of beans in Delaware, as late as 1864. Turn them into the federal authorities, collect the bounty, and then they would be sworn in as USCTs and the master would go home. It’s just amazing. These are the five that are from Delaware City. And a book that’s about ready to come out will have an essay on Polktown. But I just heard today, just before I gave this talk, I heard that the area right behind Polktown looks like we’re going to acquire it for archeological survey. It’s called Cranberry. And it should be absolutely immaculate archeological, because the marsh took it over by the 1890s. These are the fellows that were buried there, most prominent of which was James Elbert. I researched his entire career through the National Archives, through diaries, through census records, through muster roles. This guy was court martialed. A tremendous story of that. He ended up in the sites that I had worked in in City Point, in City Point Hospital. He had fought at Darbytown Road in New Market in the Petersburg campaign. So this again is meshing together all these things that aren’t disparate. They all go together in the great web of history and culture. And African American stuff is really exciting because it presents that kind of opportunity. Willis is an accomplished actor. He calls himself a reenactor. He’s a 38-year army veteran, maybe more than that. And he plays Private James Elbert and uses the research that I have done to make it as vivid as possible. And that’s Elbert’s stone. The stones were given by the United States government. They still are today. If an American soldier’s killed in the Near East, he can get a free grave stone, just like the USCTs did. There’s a name, no date. But we were able to find out the shipping dates from the contractor in the National Archives, I’ve traced this down. So that we know when this was shipped from the Vermont supplier, I guess, of this kind of material. And in this case it was 1890. So we think, ah, James Elbert died in 1890. We plotted all the stones. While we landscaped it, we discovered 40 to 50 more of these stones. (laughs) So just incredible stuff! Including ones that are, as you can see, number 10 here, which has the initials of somebody scraped on it. A couple of the stones are elite. One of the USCT’s widow, Harriet Serena Byard had a grave in the middle of which she had an ornamental enclosure. When we were resetting the stones, we hit this. So Chris Barton and I excavated it enough just to expose it. And we have to go back and dig this out. It’s in the dredge fill. It sunk. It’s in the dredge fill, so we’re pretty well sure what’s going on there. And Polktown today has been the subject of a study by the University of Delaware. They’re interviewing the descendent community. One of the houses here at the end is a distinctly African American house. I’ll get back to that. Shotgun house. And during the course in the last two years of that study that we’re conducting, and also the University of Delaware’s conducting, we’ve discovered a wonderful treasure trove of pictures when the houses were standing and being used right after World War Two. So, a great future for the United States Colored Troops, honored and venerated at the African Union Church cemetery, which also honors and celebrates the experience of the black communities in northern Delaware. And I thought I’d close. This was my second PhD at Temple. My first was Chris Barton, his Timbuctoo work. This is Deidre Kelleher, who won the John Cotter award in the SHA for the best program. She did an educational program of public outreach and public participation that was a really splendid, splendid thing. And this is the day of her graduation, where proudly I put her hood on, which is something that I’ll always remember. And my wife, who I dedicate anything I say to her and the comfort she gave me for 47 years. Okay. Now, let me close with just a sort of a summation of some of the concepts that I hope you people and the sound of my voice might adhere to. Yes, we’ve seen broad changes in the National Park Service. They will accelerate in the coming year as a lot of what we do is castigated as red tape. We need to eloquently explain to the public the mandates and the truly unique preservation legacies that we have acquired. And we’re not the only ones. We need to link ourselves with local history groups, with all sorts of brother and sister groups. We must unite together. More so now than ever before. I don’t believe we’ve done that successfully. We need to do more than this. How about a civilization type, blockbuster Kenneth Clarkish series on archeology? Like his great series on western art done in the late ‘60s. The contextual identification of culture by a strong union of historians, architects, art historians, anthropologists, ethnographers under the lens of an archeologist. That’s one idea. Boundaries between academics and cultural resource management and cultural resource management and the National Park Service is strong. Where is our leadership now in the fields I have mentioned? I find missing the passion of an Ed Barrs, who I had the great pleasure of following once in a plenary program at the SHA in Richmond. I find missing the sprezzatura of a Charlie Peterson or a Penny Batcheler or a John Cotter or a dozen others that I can think of in that generation. We need them desperately. We need to inspire a virtual-minded cadre of young people with the quote “art and mystery” unquote of archeology, far beyond the [belle science?] in describing what truly is the gift of archeology to our own culture. The humanistic impulse were people like Lauren Isley wrote so eloquently. We are talking about real things. Not opinions. Real landscapes. Not recreations. Real people. Not fictive opuses. Real events, which are brought to life by the wondrous magic of our discipline. Now I haven’t been in the NPS line since 2006—oh, by the way, it’s 2006 that I retired. (laughs) He got me out of the Park Service three years early, maybe that, well, I’m not going to comment. So I need to begin a colloquy with all who are hearing the sound of my voice. It may be an unfinished conversation, but it will serve us well. Last week I worked for a CRM group at Princeton Battlefield, which had tremendous volunteer participation. Not only with Bravo, but with members of the public, under an historical society. Princeton Battlefield Association. It really was positive to see the enthusiasm, knowledge and passion of our volunteers. It’s a hopeful sign. I’m sure you have the same thing. I’m sure the Park Service can array the same gifted young people. Or old people. Both. Both are needed. Our parks are signposts in a common stream of cultural diversity. They are places which preserve memory. They depend on conversation. They are vulnerable. They can’t by chance talk about themselves. They are capable of being abused by ignorance. They are themselves inarticulate. We must speak for them. Their stories move us. They flow as Heraclitus has taught us so long ago. [Pon rein?], all things flow, you can never stand in the same river twice. Well, that’s the flow of cultural memory and history. These are holistic webs uniting past and present, physical and mystical, memory and action. The Art and Mystery of Historical Archeology, that was the title of Jim Dietz’ Festschrift. And I have always been struck by it. The great monument and the anonymous products of culture are both there for us to see within the sound of my voice here in DC. The Park Service has both of them for us to celebrate. My old mentor, John Cotter, always thought of himself not as a player, but as a witness to the past. How many literary references can I leave you with? (laughs) All right. I do hold by them, especially the last paragraph of The Great Gatsby. “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” And the Park Service expresses that metaphor. All of you within the sound of my voice and beyond will soon be facing great challenges to preserve and protect and conserve this legacy. This legacy from a faraway time and place. Our great building blocks we have recently celebrated. The national preservation mandates. NEPA, the Historic Preservation Act, ARPA, NAGPRA, even the reconstituted Antiquities Act, which is present in the Archeological Resources Protection Act. All these systems need to be reinvigorated in every state of our union. I hope we can start the next century of the NPS with confidence in our ability and passion to strengthen our resolve and our vigilance in all these matters. Thank you. Roller: Thanks. Thanks, David. That was great. Quite a journey. Quite a journey. Orr: Thank you. Roller: We can open it up for some questions and discussion. Folks out there, if you’re asking a question, please turn your mic on. Anyone out there? I will ask-- Orr: I was in a play once called Hello Out There. And the play started by going front and center of the stage and saying, “Hello out there?” The guy was in prison. Roller: Break the fourth wall. Orr: So I feel like that again. Roller: If we could reflect sort of broadly on disciplinary history, can you talk about the role of NPS archeology in terms of its contributions, whether they be technical or political or social in terms of archeology and discipline? Thinking back to some of the earlier generations of archeologists that you work with, who also work with an earlier generation of archeologists. Orr: Right. That’s right. Roller: And maybe you could talk about the good things that the Park Service archeology is able to do, and maybe some of the things that could work better on. Orr: Well I think from technology, I think we’re very strong in the ‘70s and ‘80s. We introduced a lot of geophysics. I know in my own program, we did geophysical surveys of several parks. And those are very valuable. We use the word “nondestructive.” And that was sort of a term that was a two-edged sword. We had to be careful of that. Because all these things had to be dug to understand. We weren't that knowledgeable about anomalies, what anomaly is in these geophysical constructs means no form. So we now can look at some of the things in our detection systems and pretty much understand what they are. That’s one thing. So I think we made great strides in that. I think that we’ve, as I’ve mentioned in my talk, I think we need to work more in the verbal area in communicating a lot of the things we do. Not because we can’t do it, but because we have so many other things on our plate. I understand that. But I think interpretation is very important right now. I think everything we do should be interpreted. And especially in the archeological world, those are the things that present us with these opportunities. And I’ll tell you, I’ll go to my, you know, translated to tribal deity world knowing that, full well, that archeology is intensely interesting! You know, I had, when I first worked in the Park Service, I had managers tell me, “Well, nobody’s interested in archeology.” And I said, “Well, I never experienced that. Every time I do an archeological program where I involve the public, they respond!” Like they did in Princeton, for example. And that was just a couple of days ago. They come out! They’re interested. And I think we need more of that. And I hope that we can get more of that. Other than that, our regulations aren’t the strongest. They’re not the weakest, but they’re not the strongest. They’re sort of in the middle. And we need to enforce them. I think we’re doing that. I know my colleague Julie Steele at Petersburg tells me that enforcement is going on. Maybe we need to do more in that, I don't know. I haven’t been in the Park Service since 2006, so I don't know. But I see the results out there in some of these preservation meetings that I’ve attended at the grassroots level. And I don’t see as much Park Service participation in some of those meetings as I wish we could have. In my generation, the Park Service people were out front. They were leaders. The historians, the archeologists, the architects. And we had great ones. And they were at the forefront of their profession. So I think that we need to recapture that in the future. And I hope we can do that. Roller: Mm hmm. Okay. Could you talk again a little bit about that earlier generation of Park Service archeologists or leaders? Orr: Well, yeah, the ones I knew, you know, I was a great fan of John Cotter. I’ll tell you that right up front. And I value every conversation I had with that extremely gifted and dedicated man. And my God I shared an office with him at the university museum for about a year and a half. I did two field schools with him. I wrote stuff with him. After his passing, Dan Roberts and I put together a book about him. I wrote his Festschrift with his blessing. So, yeah, John Cotter. But there are others. I remember in the mid-‘70s being impressed with the Midwest Archeological Center, and with the Southeast Archeological Center, and the people who were there, the mentors who were there. Bennie Keel, for example, and John [Aaronhart?]. And in the Midwest, people like Cal Calabrese and others my septuagenarian mind can’t recall. But I remember it was the Midwest Archeological Center several years ago that asked me for all my pictures, the RBS, because they’re accumulating all this. And I thought that was singularly something that you would know the older people of any discipline should be interviewed, should be talked to, should be done like that. Nobody in the Park Service ever interviewed me. You guys are the first ones, so I leapt at the chance. Roller: We’re glad to have you here. Orr: I’m happy to be here. So, I had no exit interview. Now maybe there were some personality differences, too, the way I behave. (laughs) But I would be willing for that. But there were a lot of people like that. I mentioned Charlie Peterson. He was a wonderful man to work with. Although a lot of my contemporaries thought him formidable. I never did. I learned tons of stuff from him. Everything from mortar and the substances of mortar, and the differences between ancient mortar and modern mortar, that he was greatly fond of, to architectural style and what they really mean. I learned from Henry Glassie, when he was at the University of Pennsylvania, and during my time with a student that I shared, a couple of students that I shared with Henry Glassie. And so I got to know where he was coming from. I learned from the people in the National Park Service who were still around then who were pretty amazing archeologists. People like that. Roller: You’ve done a lot of interdisciplinary work. It seems to be like one of the common themes in all the work that you’ve done, even outside the Park Service. Orr: Right. Roller: And do you think that came natural within the Park Service? Working with ethnographers, historians, or is that something that you feel like you brought to the projects that you did? Orr: Oh, I’d like to think I brought some of that to it, yeah. I would like to think that. I don't know how much of that’s true, but I would like to think that. I know in the RBS stuff, there wasn’t any of that, and you wouldn’t expect it. And I know that in my early work in the Park Service, I brought what I’d learned from Wilhelmina Jashemski. That’s where I learned the holistic methods, in Pompeii. I mean, that woman was just amazing. She was way ahead of her time. She was a great landscape archeologist, way before that became something that we all strive for. She was a tremendous contextual person. She had this gift to unite the present and the past. She would take me on walks right outside the walls of ancient Pompeii and show me things in the agrarian communities that are in the paintings of Pompeii. The continuities of life, you know, what we call the common stream. She was very well aware of that. She had a deep spirituality about metaphysical things and forces that were present with these ancient peoples and probably got diluted over the, I’m sure they got diluted over the course of centuries. But she had the ability to recognize these forces and extract them from the archeology and from the landscape and from the historical record. And I just marvel at that. She taught me more than anyone in my life. And when I went to the University of Pennsylvania, yeah, all those people were there, but they just contributed to that tremendous conviction that if you’re going to study anything, you’ve got to study it from every angle. I once studying, yeah, I’m going to go up to Strasburg tomorrow with a friend. We have a special tour of the steam engine workshop. So we’re going to look at the tools of putting steam engines back together again after they don’t work. And I thought of railroads. And when I think of railroads, I think you and I were talking about this earlier. When I think of railroads, for example, I think of New River. And there would have been no coal mining industry without the C&O going through there. And I think of myth. John Henry, and the ballads. All the ballads about New River trains and New River folk heroes. So you can almost sing the past. That’s the holistic interdisciplinary. I could no longer talk about coal mining without relating some of the amazing ballads and literature of coal mining than the man in the moon. I could no longer talk about African American communities without talking about that. And I think that’s, yeah, I’ve always, I seem to have had an interdisciplinary longing to connect all the written and unwritten products of culture together in some sort of force that is maybe Braudelian. Maybe when I read Ferdinand Braudel, and I first read that during my early graduate days, I think those kinds of products of the Annales School in France where they were doing this kind of work, I think were tremendous lessons to me. And by the time I arrived at the University of Pennsylvania, that was in full force. That was a given. So I had that reinforced. And the ability to talk about things. Our department, American Civilization Department, I hardly know what each one was. Yeah, there’s anthropologists, there’s historians. There was this sociologist. There was an architect. There was an art historian, archeology. But when we all talked, those great conversations we had, who knew what each one was? They were advancing various things in a very communal nature, and I think that’s important. Roller: Cool. Neat. Do we have any questions from out there? Orr: Boy. Roller: It’s a quiet group. Orr: Huh? Roller: It’s a quiet group. Orr: I did an overall. God, you had to have questions. Roller: so we talked a little bit about the challenges and transitions the Park Service is facing now. Maybe challenges from outside the Park Service, or just a transition of an undisclosed nature. So can you talk about your experience in your Park Service history of big social or historical changes that might have affected the Park Service? I mean, how connected is the Park Service to historical changes? And how did that change your work, the work that you did? Orr: Well, I could tell you that, yeah, that’s a good question. And that’s certainly true in the fields of social history. So I go back to the ‘60s, when I got involved in civil rights movement at Ohio University with a couple of friends. And we brought in Dick Gregory and we brought in some of these people from Mississippi. And I remember I had visited North Carolina and I had a Confederate flag because I was studying the Civil War. Here I am [starting?] the civil rights movement, and I didn’t see the non sequitur of that. And it was pointed out to me by an African American friend of mine. “What’s that doing there?” I said, “What?” “That!” And he pointed to the stars and bars, right? And I said, “Well, you know, I’m a reenactor.” The Civil War centennial was going on. And I was a reenactor in the Second North Carolina. “You’re in a Confederate group?!” And I spent the better part of an hour and a half tap dancing myself out of that. And then I realized that I was naïve, profoundly naïve. That I didn’t realize that this hateful symbol to one group was totally neutral to me. So I learned about the nuances, more than nuances, of race. The second thing that I learned about that was working with Native Americans. And in NAGPRA, I worked with the Delaware, the western Delaware. And I used to go out there to do certain programs with people like Kurt Carr. I went out there with Kurt Carr and Julie Steele once. And that was an eye opener to me. And it reminded me of probably one of the seminal events of my career, when I was in South Dakota. And I was like 20 years old. And we had just dug up some grave sites and just put them in paper bags, you know. The water was coming up. It was salvage, right? This is what I was told to do. It’s the only grave, I think, I’ve ever excavated. As improper as it was. Well, the Native Americans, we were staying on the Crow Cree reservation. They found out about that. And they showed up at our campfire one night, two of them. And the guy out of the blue said, “Well, you guys dug up some of our ancestors, we understand.” “Yeah, yeah, that’s right.” And he said, he looked at me. He said, “How old are you?” And I looked up at him. They were on horseback. And I said, “Twenty.” And he shook his head. “Twenty.” And he looked at his friend. He said, “He’s twenty. He’s twenty.” And I’m looking, what’s going on here, you know, I’m thinking. He says, “You know, it’s terrible to be cursed for eternity when you’re twenty.” And then they left. So. Those are, you know, you have these collisions with other cultures when you’re young. When you’re old, then you realize through the perspective of time and circumstance, you understand them. But understanding them doesn’t remove the intensity of the feeling that you experienced when it first occurred. And I think in the National Park Service, I’ve seen lots of examples of that. Lots of examples. Those kinds of stories that I saw in New River, I saw certainly in the southern parks, and Virginia parks and the Civil War parks. Roller: Yeah. Yeah, you’ve met a lot of people. You’re one of those archeologists that likes living human beings. (laughs) Orr: Yeah, well. Roller: It seems like it’s affected you a lot. Orr: I think the thing that is the most immediate is the most obvious. When I worked in Pompeii, I couldn’t talk to them. They’re all dead. That’s real dead archeology. Dead to the what, hundredth degree. Dead, dead, dead, dead. They’re not there. They’re gone. That’s not true of New River Gorge. When I talk to the guys that were making the coke out of the coke oven that we were just recording. We talked to them! In Timbuctoo, we talked to the descendent community. Their grandparents, maybe by one generation, but some by no generation have lived there. Even in the Civil War, you know, I could tell you from my own life, the Civil War was yesterday. When I was born, my mother told me this, my great-uncle, great-great-uncle, I think, great-great-great uncle, maybe something like that, he was 94 at the time, put me on his knee. Well, he was a survivor of the Battle of Shiloh! Now I was like a month old, right, or two months old. I don't remember it. But I had touched the Civil War! I touched it. I felt it. It was there, the human dimension. That guy could have told me all I wanted to know about the Battle of Shiloh, if he would have talked. Who knows? A lot of them wouldn't talk. But my mother said he lived for another year or two. He died, he was 96. So he was very young when he fought the Civil War. But that was 1942. So you do the math, you figure he was about 15 when he was in the Civil War. So people were that young at the Battle of Shiloh from Ohio troops. So it’s the distance, you know, we sometimes are wrapped up in that, you know, how old is old? Paleo Indian site, Zinjanthropus, Australopithecus, and then, coal miners. Civil War soldiers. Or Vietnam soldiers. I taught a battlefield course where I had everybody, I think I was telling you this. For a long time, every battlefield course I taught, one of the requirements of the students was to interview a family member who was in conflict. War or whatever. And I had the most remarkable [unclear] because I told them, “Look, this is yours. I’m going to grade it, I’m going to give it back to you. I’m not even going to keep a copy. It’s not mine. This is your past, this is your stuff. So you don’t have to worry. You have to work it out with whoever you’re interviewing ethically.” I told them about the ethics of oral history. “But you don’t have to worry about me, because I’m not involved here. I’m not going to publish any of this.” Boy, was that a mistake. The stuff they told me was just unbelievable! Unbelievable. So, when you get into current studies of things that are more popular culture, you have a great opportunity for immediacy. And I think that’s a lesson there. Roller: So I think it’s a good—if anybody else has a question out there, I have one more. All right. Can you talk a little bit about the memoir that you’re planning about material culture? Because this is kind of about your own experience of history. Orr: Yeah. I think that I’ve broken my writer’s block since [the passing my life?] and I think I’m ready to write again. I’ve been working on something that is hydra-headed. It’s ostensibly my childhood from the ages of six to twelve as I recall them in this government project. We moved out of there when I was twelve. So it’s a great watershed year, you know, you’re in adolescence and you move. And you move to a huge steel town and everything goes to hell in a hand basket. But in Warren, the life in that project was more sheltered. And it was a great place for a kid to grow up. It really was. It was diverse. Every nationality, every race. I mean, it was very diverse. And so I got to know that. Then I went to a high school which was sort of like that. So the mission as well, the theme of that, I call the book Some Things of Value: Confronting the Objects of Your Childhood. So every chapter is a different object and how it influenced you and how you responded to it and how it was part of the fabric of your life. So the first one is architecture, and I call it light. And I lived in a barracks building. Well, I lived on the gable end. Well, the gable ends is two more windows than my buddy who lived in the middle, right? They didn’t have any windows, just on each side. And I’d go over there on Saturday. This is the most vivid memory. Vivid! And the architecture is determining this. So this is why I start with that. So the building, my parents had the good sense to get the gable end apartment, which had two more windows. So when I got up in the morning and went down into the one room, we had a really small kitchen and a table, they had one like living room, I guess you’d call it. And I had a piano in there, we crammed that in there. But the light was just flowing through that window! So at nine o’clock in the morning, I didn’t even have to turn a light on. I could play the piano and everything. I’d go right next door, open the door that’s like three feet away. Go out, get back in. it was like the world of a troglodyte! There wasn’t any light at all! They had a TV set. We didn’t have a TV. And they turned the TV on and it was like this blasting light coming out from the corner of this room. You couldn’t see your hand! There wasn’t any light. And I’m thinking, growing up in a room filled with light versus growing up in a room that had no light. That had to make an impact, right? Had to make an impact. It was very positive to me. I remember that was really positive memories. Well, that goes on. So I do lots of object genres. I do one, by the way, I presented parts of this at three different SHA meetings and it was pretty favorably received. I thought well, they’re going to think this, blah, blah, blah. But you know, I tried to get some of the theoretical bents of material culture. And I follow the works of Susan Stewart and her great work on the miniature and the giant and the grotesque. On Longing, is the name of the book. And I follow that. And I follow my old buddy, Umberto Eco, especially a book that, the books that he wrote where he’s a philologist. So I’m using symbols. There’s some symbolist content to this, but not that much. I’m doing real things. And I’ll just tell you, one more chapter section is dealing with comic books. It’s called “Comic Books.” I’m dealing with the comic books, which were a great world. This is the golden age of comic books, the ‘50s, early ‘50s. And there was a kid who couldn’t speak, probably couldn’t hear. My age. I saw him three times in my life. I can almost conjure up every line of his face in the age of eight and nine. In the depths of winter, there’d be a knock at the door and he’d come in with his comic books. And we would trade comic books. Well, what trading comic books meant, he pushed his pile to me, and I pushed my pile to him. It was all done in like two minutes. My mother would say, “Would you like some tea?” No. Out he went, into the winter. Never to reappear for another year. I think this happened three times. And yet the impact that that made on me, tremendous impact, social impact. And the artifact that was so human in this conversation was comic books. You know, it created this [contact?]. So it’s like that. That’s what I’m doing, throughout the book, that’s what I’m doing. So I have all sorts of different things like that. I’ll make it short and sweet. The problem is how much to avoid the horrible moniker of nostalgia. You’re just looking back at the good old days. No, it really isn’t. There’s some, it really isn’t. And even though it’s positive, that’s the way my life was. [More it was positive when I was young?], some was negative. I don't know if that’s a factor of growth or what. But that’s the truth. I was asked when I was a senior in high school, “Well, why are you going to college?” I says, “So I’ll never have to come back here.” Youngstown, Ohio. No. I looked out the window. There’s something else out there. And I never looked back. But that’s the tugs that are on you from these kinds of things. And I think archeologists are very susceptible to these issues. Roller: Great. I’m looking forward to it. Orr: Okay. Well, hopefully I’ll finish it. I hope there’s an audience out there. Roller: Oh, I have a question over text. Orr: Oh, okay. Roller: This is from Trish Markert in New York, one of your students. Orr: Oh, Trish Markert, yeah, right. Roller: Her question was about the differences or similarities in public engagement between the academy and NPS. Are there particular challenges unique to one or the other? Orr: No. I think they’re very similar. At least, in my career, they were. I think that the boundaries—I have a thing on boundaries that I’ve been writing, on [lemays?], the Latin word [lemaze?], frontiers, boundaries, touching points. And they’re different. But the challenges of academia as far—what was her question? Specifically, it was-- Roller: Are there particular challenges unique to one or the other? Doing engagement in academia or in the National Park Service? Orr: Okay. Well, obviously engagement is more important in the National Park Service. Obviously. As a public institution, one must really strive to do engagement, where a lot of people bury themselves in the proverbial ivory towers in academia and publish their wonderful treatises and tomes without touching people, without doing that. So I suppose in that sense, the Park Service, it’s more mandatory to do it. You can get away with that. I wouldn’t think you could get away with that just sitting in your office in the National Park Service and publishing stuff. I don't think you can get away with that, or doing stuff. You have to engage the public. Where in academia—although that’s changing, that’s certainly not true at Temple, you couldn’t get away with that in Temple, not in the department that I was part of—you had to be more touching, everybody was interested in that particular facet of your performance. So that’s what I’d tell my old buddy Tricia about that. And by the way, she was very good at that. Tricia was very good at public contact. Which was, in a sense, at that time, academic. She wasn’t working for a cultural institution. So that belies some of the things I’m saying. But it depends on individuals. But generally, you don’t see so many Tricia Markerts or Chris Bartons. In academia. As far as willing to engage the public. Whereas in the National Park Service, it’s mandatory. I don’t see how you could do your job in the Park Service. Right? You agree? Roller: Yeah. Orr: You’re in the Park Service, I’m not. Roller: I agree. Orr: That’s what I mean. I need a dialog, people tell me. Roller: Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. It’s sort of a responsibility, and also I think it’s a great benefit of the job, always interfacing with the public. Great. Well I think we’re going to wrap it up here. If you have any closing thoughts? Orr: Well, I think I gave all my closing thoughts. I think I’m out of closing thoughts. I’ve got some opening thoughts, if you want to start over. (laughter) No, but I guess my take on this is very direct. I used this as an opportunity. I’d hoped that there would be people out there—mostly younger people, too—who would respond to some of those things that I was talking about. Roller: Absolutely. So this presentation has been recorded. It will be posted, along with the presentation. I know a lot of folks are sometimes busy on the Thursday afternoons in the Park Service. But I always get responses and questions afterwards inquiring about wanting to listen to the presentation and react to it. So thanks, everyone, for participating this Thursday. This is the last presentation for 2016. And we’ll continue again in January. I’m going to have an interview with Vergil Noble, for our veteran park archeologist series. I just want to thank Dave Orr for the great presentation he gave. And I want to thank Archeology Southwest, our sponsors, for doing this. Okay, thank you, everyone. Signing off. 1:22:18 [End Session.]
Description
David Orr, 12/0/2016, ArcheoThursday
Duration
1 hour, 22 minutes, 18 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
12/08/2016
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