Video
Maritime Cultural Landscapes
Transcript
Ford: So if people can’t hear me, I’m talking in a speaker phone, so please ping, say something or ping me or ping Mike, please. But thank you all for joining in here. And I saw some familiar names in the list of participants. So I hope I’m not going to bore anybody with things you’ve already heard. But I’m going to try to pitch this sort of towards a kind of general audience and hope to bring some folks that don’t know [a thing about?] maritime archaeology kind of into the fold a little bit. So what I’m going to plan on covering today is I’ll do a brief introduction and definition of what maritime cultural landscapes are. I’ll talk just briefly about how it kind of came to be. I’ll give a shorthand example from my own work, and then spend some time talking about what I see the key advantages and points of doing a kind of maritime landscape approach, as well as some things that coming from sort of a management perspective, having to manage these resources, things that I think are worth thinking about. So that’s my game plan for the next 45 minutes or so. In terms of defining maritime cultural landscapes, and I’ll just refer to them as MCLs for brevity, much of it comes back to Christer Westerdahl. And one of his more recent definitions of what a maritime cultural landscape is, is the whole network of sailing routes with ports, havens and harbors along the coast, and its related constructions and other remains of human activity underwater as well as terrestrial. And I think that’s a really good definition. I might expand it slightly to talk about all of the evidence of how people interacted with watery places, both on land and underwater. And this could include a wide range of locations and types of resources that are all tied together with how a particular group or groups interacted with the water. And since it tends to be linked to a specific culture or set of cultures, it will often be spatially bounded. So it’s bounded by where those peoples lived and used the water, so it does tend to have a spatial boundary on it. But the number of resources, the types of resources, can be pretty broad. It could be things ranging from resource procurement, wildlife and fishing grounds to everything that includes whaling and lookout stations on shore. It can include navigations of lighthouses. Westerdahl talked about ports and landing places, but also shore roads and coastal religious centers. So there’s a lot of monasteries, for example, right on the coast. But it also might include somewhat harder to quantify phenomenon, such as the fish themselves that the people are fishing for, and things like waves and tides, or bioluminescence. Any number of things along those lines. And because of that wide variety of types of resources or types of properties that it might intersect, the methods also tend to be pretty broad. Putting terrestrial and maritime archeological survey, but also ethnography, place name analysis, [taxonomy?], historical research, and other things that are sometimes are a little on the softer side, the more humanities side, such as art, literature, [definitions?] of religion, as well as those that tend toward sort of the more scientific side of archeology. Paleo-climate, paleo-environmental reconstructions, and those kind of similar activities. So it’s a broad spectrum of methods as well. The other thing I try to always start with is from my perspective, MCL is not a theory. MCL is an approach. It’s a way to come at the archeological record, and a way to come at how people interacted with the water. You can use pretty much any theoretical perspective you want within this. So if you want to have a Marxist MCL, you can do that. Or an electoral college approach. I mean, all of these things can fit within an MCL approach. It tends in modern usage to skew towards sort of cognitive approaches. So there’s a lot of discussion in literature on what did water mean to people, and how did those meanings influence their interaction. But it’s not itself like a theoretical perspective. So a brief little bit of history about it. The first use of the term maritime cultural landscape in English is in Christer Westerdahl’s 1992 article of that title. It does show up in Swedish before that. He uses the term at home before he publishes in English. But for much of the English-speaking world, it kind of comes on the scene in ’92. It’s been used somewhat in Europe. In the early 2000s, you start to see articles being published and books coming out that are heavily using it. Some of the early ones are the edited volume, The Rising Tide by Aberg and Lewis, that has a bunch of chapters in it, many of which are using maritime cultural landscape approach, and many are using it for management perspective. And one of the first real seminal works is the McErlean et al’s Strangford Lough survey, which is very much a heritage management survey that’s using a maritime cultural landscape for a largescale, integrated land and water survey. It’s a big huge book. That’s sort of where [unclear] a lot of attention. By the mid-2000s, you’re starting to see increasing interest in it, primarily in Europe and kind of spreading through there. That is not by coincidence, honestly. It is, I think, linked to changes in, from the UN legislation and other national legislation, that begins to sort of put—there’s two things. One that sort of starts to stress survey over excavation. Knowing where sites are, rather than excavating them. And also a sort of expanding definition of what maritime is, moving away from just shipwrecks. I think the sort of the rise of interest in maritime cultural landscapes is not simply because it’s a good idea. I think because it was an idea that they fit some other needs and desires that are coming from heritage managers. And in the US, we’re a little bit behind what’s going on in Europe and the rest of the world. But by the late 2000s, federal agencies and state and tribal heritage managers start to kind of chew into this and you see increasing use of, like the National Register-sponsored symposium that Mike mentioned earlier. And all of it, I’d kind of like to drive home that it does have a lot of roots in heritage management. Westerdahl himself basically kind of created the idea out of having done big sort of coastal surveys, and was trying to find a way to integrate this data he was getting both on land and on water. So that’s where much of the roots of it come from. And just as a personal aside, that’s why I got into it. I had a background in CRM, going into, working on a PhD and looking for a dissertation topic. And the methods behind MCL really appealed to me. I could ask theoretical questions with methods I already knew is what kind of drew me into it as well. So there are some linkages there that I think are useful for a wide variety of archeologists. Does anybody have any questions at this point? This is a good place to pause for a second. Hans: Yeah, Ben, this is Hans. In the material that went out, it referred to some attached readings for references for kind of additional readings, but it kind of got dropped from the email chain. It’s just a technical question. Ford: Yeah. Mike has them, I can send them to you. But we can definitely get those out to you. Hans: Thanks a lot, Ben.
Roller: Yeah. I’ll resend those. Sorry it got dropped. Ford: All right. Yeah. Any other questions now? ?: Well I’d like to thank you for mentioning the natural resources as potential elements of cultural significance. I mean in Hawaii, we can’t mention the maritime cultural landscape without going beyond just navigational routes and things that were covered very well by Westerdahl. Ford: Yeah, for sure. I’m going to come back to that, because I see it as a way that we can actually intersect with big environmental concerns like changing sea levels and those kinds of things as well. So yeah, I think it’s [unclear] environment out of the landscape. ?: Exactly. Ford: Well, I’ll just sort of soldier on here a little bit. I’ve given an example from my own work. It’s not the best example, it’s just the example that I know the best, essentially. What I want to do briefly is just talk a little bit about kind of what we did up on Lake Ontario, what we found and how we interpreted it. I saw Brad Kruger is participating. So Brad, some of this will look familiar to you. [unclear] Seven surveys that were half on land and half on water, kind of spanning the boundary there, or the perceived boundary. And you know, up front there was informant interviews. So the ethnography is a big part of this. And talking to folks about what they knew about, what they’re aware, sort of their personal histories of these [unclear] Wherever we got permission from landowners, because the land is all private property. We did field walking and you know, just behavior standards, terrestrial surveys. [unclear] in a few places, a little bit of excavation, but primarily looking for surface exposures. Underwater, the standard marine remote sensing survey. In this particular instance, I don’t actually have a three-deck yacht. I had a small dinghy. And we only used side-scan and magnetometry. And if folks want more information about those technologies, we’ll talk about that later. But it’s a way to see under the water and, to a certain extent, under the sediment, from the surface. And ran a relatively tight survey grid, about 15 meters, as shallow as we could get, up to about three meters or ten feet of water. And then in the shallows did diver surveys. Again, [unclear] transects as well as, and then trying to overlap those with the remote sensing surveys so that we had complete coverage. We also worked the mag pretty close into land there. Because it would work in shallow water with some floats on it. We also did some supplemental work in terms of pouring. And actually in some places using ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry through the frozen surface to get better results in some places. But all in all, not particularly earth-shattering methods. Using existing methods to look at this both sides of the water line. So again, I’m going to talk about these two places up on Wolfe Island as well as Carleton Island. You can see that we surveyed a bunch of other locations. But a truism is that humans don’t use the environmental evenly, and the environment does not preserve human uses evenly. So some of these places were utilized less than others historically, it seems. Other ones had bedrock bottoms and they were scraped clean every year by the ice. So I’ll focus on the ones where I can say a little bit more meaningful. The first one, and some of you have seen the example before, because I really love it, because I think it’s one of the best examples of a cultural landscape, maritime or otherwise, that I’ve ever run across. Because it shows different groups using the same space iteratively and differently. It touches on trends that run throughout the Great Lakes, including Native American occupations, French, British, American, Canadian, military use, agricultural use, lumber production, connections across the border, tourism, economic collapse, because that’s big up there. And then the modern preservation ethic. All of these things sort of ball together in this one little space, back and forth across the water line. Before the Europeans showed up, the Native Americans were definitely using Carleton Island as a transit location and for some burials. And what I find interesting here is that throughout the Great Lakes, we see cultures laying their landscape on top of each other. So you see Native peoples using certain places for portage locations, and then the French come and put missions and trading posts there. And then the British come and begin to develop some of those as ports because many of them are river mouths. And by time, the Canadians and Americans are on the scene, these become the major cities. So the uses of previous groups of the landscape influences how later groups use the landscape. And we see that at Carleton Island. It becomes much more historically evident or visible in 1778, when the British make it a provincial naval base. And a trans-shipment point for goods coming down or up the Saint Lawrence, and then across the Great Lakes. They have a shipyard there. And they basically use Carleton Island for Niagara and Oswego, plus the ships that run between them, to control the Great Lakes. And control Lake Ontario. There’s a reason why during the American Revolution we don’t talk about the Great Lakes very much. And it’s because the rebels never really got a foothold there because of the British control coming out of, largely out of Carleton Island. And much of that is still preserved here. The fort itself is still visible, and the landscape with some archeological features, and it is very much a landscape feature. It sits on a high bluff sort of looking over the main military harbor. It’s called Shank Harbor on the map there, but it’s North Harbor, North Bay today. So it’s using the land as a way to control the [unclear] space. Within Shank Harbor, there’s still evidence of the major sort of British use. There’s a pretty massive now submerged dock that was part of their naval infrastructure. And also within the harbor, in the shipwreck. It’s not a wreck that occurred during the war. But it appears to be the wreck of a [Haldeman?], which was a British naval vessel during the American Revolution that looks like it’s scuttled after the war here. And so it’s a little bit post-hoc, but it does provide a pretty nice strong connection to place. Because this is a vessel that would have run back and forth from here to Niagara carrying soldiers and goods and officers back and forth to really form that sort of connection across the lake. So again, all of these things are there on the landscape to help us interpret how the British used the space. I often note that Shank Harbor, the bottom is littered with artifacts from when they decommissioned the fort and the island. And it’s a place that’s pretty heavily pillaged by divers. Unfortunately, a lot of them coming out of Canada, because Canada has much stronger laws about these things. And so they often see America as sort of a little bit of a place where they can go and collect things with less repercussions. Which is an unfortunate part about being on the border there. After the war, it’s a lot of squatters living there. One of the sites from these sort of itinerant, or people who don’t own the land that are living on it, is this Voorhees site where there’s, it was collected somewhat unsystematically by a local guy. And amongst his collection is all kinds of interesting things to help us sort of see what the site was. But for me, at least, there’s a substantial number of British military buttons. So this is a person who either was in the military or took advantage of sort of the glut of clothes that were available after the war. But he seems to have had some connections to Britain. But then there’s a bunch of coins as well. Amongst the coins are British coins, Canadian coins, US coins, as well as these Brock tokens that basically talk about, commemorating Isaac Brock’s death at Queenstown during the War of 1812, but also talk about sort of commerce and trade. What you’ve got here is a person who’s sympathetic to Britain, but is living on an American island and participating in an economy that spans the border. It’s sort of transnational, trans-border economy with all these coins that he’s using. So we sort of see these inklings of people moving back and forth across the water line and across the border, using the water. This is followed by a period where they develop farms on the island, and there’s archeological evidence of this. Again, using the landscape. This is a dairy farm that was on the island based on the foundations. And their [unclear] which has got really good fields. But doing the dairying down on this sort of lowland neck near the water where it’s cooler and they have access to the cold lake water. So again, using the landscape and sort of modifying it group after group. With all those farms showing up, there’s also a need to connect this island to the mainland. And so there was a ferry that ran from the New York side to Carleton, and then on to Canada, to Wolfe Island and Kingston, connecting these places. So the transportation is sort of continuous across the border. And I’ll come back to that briefly with the next example. By the end of the 19th century, Carleton Island becomes actually one of the first islands in the Thousand Island region to be developed by industrialists. William Wyckoff of Remington typewriters builds this massive house up there in 1894. And he’s really one of the first sort of industrialists to try to escape the smoke and whatnot they had created with the Industrial Revolution and go up to what looks like a fairly untouched place and have his retreat. This doesn’t last super long. There’s some unfortunate events in the Wyckoff family. And eventually GE acquires the property right before the Great Depression, which basically ends GE’s plan, that included a massive resort on the island for their employees, that actually had a golf course that cut across the Revolutionary War fort. And the detritus of this is also evident, both on land and underwater. So the villa itself is now derelict. The docks, where they would have had the expensive yachts parked, are also derelict. And then littering the underwater portion of the area are all these things that just have fallen off, been thrown off, in many cases, I think, pushed out onto the ice and then allowed to melt through. Because there’s a washing machine out in the middle of the bay that wouldn’t be there any other way, probably. So just kind of a real decline of the area. And this kind of proceeds up into the 1980s. And by the 1980s, you start to get smaller homes being built on Carleton Island and throughout the region. And it actually kind of brings us up to the modern period where you now have an island that looks to a lot of people to be largely untouched, and actually has some easements on it to protect the natural and [unclear] the fort, the cultural heritage of the place. But that’s rubbing up against people’s ideas about their individual property rights. So there’s a constant debate on Carleton Island between sort of keeping it sort of “natural” quote unquote looking, or so-called natural, but also people having the ability to do with their property what they want. So like all landscapes, it’s still very much evolving. So taken all together, you’ve got this island that summarized a lot of different parts of the history of the region in terms of Native American use, and followed by specific use at specific times when either military strategy or specific economic boom/bust cycles made it worthwhile, and then it sort of goes away. So it becomes sort of a microcosm for how the region in general developed. And so that’s what I mean about being a really nice example of the landscape because it shows different groups’ use of modification and being modified by the environment. I’ll do a much briefer example here with Wolfe Island, which was just kind of adjacent, [unclear] but there’s Carleton Island, and there’s where we looked on Wolfe Island. And on Wolfe Island, we find all kinds of stuff. And I’m not going to try to list all the different types of sites we found. But one of the most striking things with Wolfe Island was the presence of a canal, that basically was designed to cut across, in the 19th century, across the island. It relates back to what I was saying before with the idea of these ferries that connected across. For people in the 19th century on Lake Ontario, Wolfe Island was a barrier, really. Because they were moving by water almost exclusively. And so Wolfe Island becomes this sort of roadblock. Because to cut around the west side of it puts you exposed to basically the full fetch of Lake Ontario. This gets slammed by storms, and on a good way, just heavy wind and waves. And then it’s got this long tail that goes around behind it, so it’s inconvenient to go around. So the notion at the time was to put a canal through it. And again, sort of, this canal functions during a period where Canada and the US are not necessarily friends. Throughout the 19th century, there are a series of scuffles and sort of back and forth where we’re not necessarily on good footing, starting with the embargo in 1812 and sort of running up through at least the Civil War, the American Civil War. But despite that, trade continues on in this region. So again, there’s a lot of evidence of sort of a [hand lake?] or cross-border identity because of the water. And one of the reasons that the Wolfe Island Canal doesn’t do well, is that it gets beat out by trains. And the development of trains. And initially Wolfe Island Canal was conceived to connect Canadian and US rails. But by the time they get around to building it, the Canadian rail system had developed such that it’s not really a viable shipping route. And I think this is a good reason landscapes, you never want to just, [unclear] You never want to just think about your [unclear], you want to think about the site as a whole. With landscapes, not matter how big your landscape is, you always kind of need to look up and look around. Because much of what defines a landscape and influences how people interacted with that landscape might be outside influences. You see that with the Wolfe Island Canal. Along some of the same lines, we also see that with what [unclear] refer to as the Wolfe Island coal-scape, because there is a lot of evidence of the importation of coal to Wolfe Island. Because it was necessary to power what industry there was there as well as people’s homes. So there’s a series of docks that are now derelict that were for the importation of coal. And they all collapsed, basically, in the early 20th century. And there’s actually a shipwreck parked at one of these docks, which is the remains of a steam barge. The Scotia, it was named. It was built in 1871. It had a full career, about 24 years, which is a good run for a Great Lakes vessel. And then was actually in 1894, ’95, condemned, drug from Kingston over to Wolfe Island, and made into a dock. So it was intentionally sunk. It was filled with coal. And the idea was that [unclear] would provide storage and easy access for the loading and unloading of coal. In 1905, the side of it fell off and it dumped about 500 tons of coal into the Saint Lawrence River, which was not stellar for its owner. This is what it looks like now in terms of [unclear] And you can see the side laying actually on the bottom where it gave way. And this is what it would have looked like in its heyday. It looks like it was designed as a lumber hauler, or a lumber lugger, based on the way it’s built. But this again is sort of indicative of the change in the region. Because you’ve got basically a ship that had a useful life. And then when it stopped being useful, got used one more time. But when it finally gave way, instead of clearing it out of the way to keep using the dock and everything else, they just let it go. And that’s part of a bigger story about changing trade and changing commerce on the Great Lakes. Especially on Lake Ontario, where by the 20th century, there’s very little commerce on Lake Ontario. The only thing that really remains is coal [around?]. And by the 1920s, even that isn’t a job anymore, really. So when the Scotia finally collapsed in 1905, the owners, it wasn’t worth the time to salvage the vessel, let alone salvage the dock it was up against. They just sort of walked away from the industry. So again we can see these larger trends through the archeological record by looking at the maritime landscape. Some of that’s a little bit down in the weeds. But to sort of step back a little bit, we can also use data from all of these survey areas, and look at the maritime landscape of Lake Ontario and, to a certain extent, the Great Lakes, more broadly. And one thing I’d like to highlight is that we spent a lot of time looking at how people used the water, and how they used the shore. But throughout that, we had to recognize that there were lots and lots of things that we can’t find physically. That’s just true of archeology, that the archeological record is a poor representation of people’s very rich lives. Some of these things are obvious to us, like smells and sounds, that they influence how people operate. On Lake Ontario, one of the more substantive things is ice roads. And ice roads come up a huge amount in the historical record. People talk about using them. And they were incredibly important in terms of democratizing transportation. Because during the shipping months, you had to be able to get your commerce onto somebody else’s ship. In the wintertime, you could haul your goods in your own wagon. And it also made the place smaller. Because instead of having to walk around an embankment, now you could walk across the embankment. So islands became even more connected. And your neighbors sort of changed with these ice roads. But we spent three years doing archeology up there and we never found an ice road, obviously, because they melt. And we only never really found even where they hit the ground in many places, where they touched shore. The closest we ever got was occasionally you would find a vehicle underwater, and that’s probably a vehicle that went through the ice. That was about as close as we could get. But despite that, we know they were important. And in fact, they actually were sort of a, the laying out of them, you can see in this slide there’s a sort of Christmas tree off to the side. And that’s not uncommon, to take evergreen boughs and either make a pile of slush and stick them in, or melt a hole in the ice and mount them to mark the roads. Because the ice is not uniform. In places where there’s more current, the ice can be dangerously thin. And judging the ice was a skill that took years and years to develop. The people who laid these out represent a lot of traditional knowledge and so we wanted to try and capture that. But it had to be captured through ethnography and through the historical record, rather than through archeology. The other thing that we sort of had to deal with quite a bit was changes in the lake level. Like the oceans, the Great Lakes have changed over time. There’s about a 60-meter swing in Lake Ontario as the glaciers melt. It doesn’t quite map to glacier melting. It has to do with the way the water was flowing and various sills. But the lakes go up and down. And that probably had a profound effect on some Native American groups. For example, during the middle archaic period, the water was really low and began to come up rapidly. Because a [sill?] gave way and the lake began to basically fill as much as [unclear] hold water. And that would have probably effected not only, to see the water coming up is one thing. But also, there would have been a lot of sediment in that water, so it would have likely changed the habitat for the fish and shellfish they were used to getting, as well as marine plants. And this is sort of a double whammy, because it looks like from the paleo carbon record there was a [blank?] that was killing the hemlocks and the [unclear] which would have affected the deer population. So this would have been a rough time to be living in this area. And that very well could have had psychological, and definitely physiological effects for the inhabitants of the region. We don’t really know what they are at this point, but again, by looking at sort of both the land and the water, we can get at, sort of get at some of these things. The other sort of thing that became apparent was that different groups saw the lake very, very differently. And I’m going to grossly oversimplify here. But what became apparent from looking at sort of the archeological record in general was that there was a belief among, primarily among Algonquin speakers, but also Iroquoian speakers, that either a horned serpent or a horned panther that lived in the water. And it was responsible for sinking of ships and for stirring up the water. And I’ll refer to it as “he,” because when he’s personified, it’s almost always as a “he.” When he shows up, he’s the enemy of thunderers. So there’s a disassociation between waves and dangers in the lake like logs or those kinds of things, or just falling through the ice, frankly, and storms. On the other hand, the Europeans, when they talk about the lake, they’re mostly concerned about storms. They see the lake itself as relatively benign unless there’s a storm. And they frankly are really concerned about storms. There’s a number of Great Lakes, the way storms form, and the rapid [unclear] with which they form, and the wave length of waves make them fairly dangerous. As well as the fact that you can’t run ahead of the storm on the Great Lakes. Because eventually, you’re going to run out of lake. Whereas on the ocean, if you can stay ahead of the storm, you can kind of run ahead of it. And so we’ve got these two very different views of the lake. Some of this might go back to the lake level change. There’s no real, at this point, no real way to make that connection. Some of it may be attached to technology in that the primary sort of mode of transportation for [unclear] contact Native Americans of this generation were birch bark canoes, which are actually pretty impressive structures. They can be 30 plus feet long, they can carry more than 900 kilograms of, a ton, and they’re relatively stable, but are susceptible to being swamped by waves, are susceptible to having a hole punched in them by a submerged log. But really aren’t, don’t have to worry about storms that much. Because you tend to work them close to shore. So if a storm comes up, you can run ashore. So being hurt by thunderers is your own stupidity. Being hurt by the horned serpent is more of a surprise, more of a shock. And whereas for the Europeans, again, the storms are what sink their ships. And storms would drive them onto bars and onto the shoreline, which is their main concern. And I think one of the strongest arguments for this is that the traditional home for the horned serpent or horned, or great panther is rock faces, where a sheer rock face comes into the water. And that’s the only place you can’t pull a canoe out, really. And so again, I don’t want to oversimplify this, because both of these groups are working in long historical trajectories of interacting with the water that affect their economy as well as their religion and their technology. So to simplify it to just basically canoes versus rigged ships is, I think, an injustice. But it is something that comes out of looking at that whole area. So with that, I’ll stop boring you with stuff that’s sort of minutiae of Lake Ontario. And I just want to talk about kind of coming out of this and thinking about maritime landscape, what actually is sort of important points. One is, MCL is jargon. Maritime cultural landscape is jargon. And there’s a lot of jargon in archeology. I would say use if it’s useful to you. If it gives you some traction, something that’s helpful, helps you communicate with others, great. If you find using things like district or traditional cultural property, any of that other lingo is more useful, then use that. I think just the term “landscape,” actually, is a pretty handy term, as you guys are probably seeing in a lot of these webinars that landscape may allow you to communicate across agencies and across different specialties. And so whatever jargon works for you is fine. I don’t like the MCL thing because [unclear] kind of get fixated on it a little bit. In addition to that, I always kind of want to point out again, that the multiple contributing elements or property types are like lines of evidence here. I mean, you’re going to have archeological sites likely both above and below the water. But as you can see, there’s the built environment as well, so structures and buildings. Some of these may be grouped into districts. And then many cases, because the water is so important to people, traditional cultural properties of some sort, I think, also worth considering. And with each of those brings their own line of evidence. There’s different ways to access and deal with underwater and terrestrial archeological sites with built environment. There’s different ways to access PCPs. I do think in all of these, consultation is really, really important, because we’re talking about using sort of current paradigms to preserve things for future people. So I think it’s always useful, you guys all know this, to talk to current people about what they think is important. I would add, though, that one of the things that’s helpful about landscape approach in general is that western knowledge tends to be fairly temporally derived a lot of times. Whereas traditional knowledge for many cultures is more spatially derived. And so maritime cultural landscape approach, or any landscape approach, frankly, I think is one way to access different ways of knowing and put everyone on somewhat more of an even playing field. With all these different types of elements, contributing elements, I at least, those of you who know me know I’m not that bright, so maybe it’s just me, but I find it a bit daunting sometimes to try to deal with all these things. So what I’ve settled upon is there’s sort of an analogy of sites. Archeologists are good at, we’re trained at interpreting spatial arrangements and looking for context to understand how features and artifacts and eco facts all interact and look at their context and association to understand past activities. And when I look at a landscape, I just use that same logic, I just scale it up. So that individual sites, sort of think about them like features. And isolated finds become sort of like artifacts. And the sort of spatial logic of interpreting them is, I find to be sort of useful in terms of [unclear]. The only thing to remember then is when you scale up like that, you also scale up culturally as well. So you’ve moved from sort of a household level interpretation to maybe multi-group or inter-group level of interpretation. But for me I found this as sort of a way to break through my initial reticence with these sort of larger spaces. To change tacks slightly, I also like this because I’m trained to record ships. But ships have never been my favorite thing. And so maritime cultural landscapes help us expand maritime archeology beyond just shipwrecks, or beyond just shipwrecks and ports. And shipwrecks are really, really important. So they are among the most data-rich and really evocative sites out there in all of archeology. But they [unclear]. They’re a single dot on a map or a single dot in time. And what maritime cultural landscapes let us do is be able to connect those dots. Connect those dots along the trade route, connect the dots on land, link the dot to the land, to the hinterland, to understand what was being moved and why it was being moved. Because the reason for ships are the lines between the dots. That’s what they were built for, to run from place to place and to move things from place to place. And same for sailors. There are very few sailors who the point of seafaring was not to return to land, right? Most sailors want to get paid and come back to land to spend that pay. So shipwrecks sometimes distract us from that. And frankly, maritime cultural landscape approach allows us to invert that traditional narrative about underwater archeology from the ship and the disaster and look at why ships and shipping and maritime culture in general mattered to the people in that time and place. So I find it pretty powerful as a way to put ships in a context. It also, I think, makes it somewhat more inclusive. I’ll come back to this real briefly in a sec here. But not everyone built ships that leave shipwrecks. Not every culture’s ships are preserved. But maritime landscapes, most cultures left something that we can find in those landscapes. Again, it’s a way to make underwater and maritime archeology more inclusive. Additionally, I was going to point out that the boundary is not fixed. You guys are going to hear from I think Torben Rick next time talk about some more paleo sites. And this is a way to bring those into the sites that we have on land, right? Because the continental shelf, the shoreline has moved up and down the continental shelf throughout time. And so just because a site is underwater or on land doesn’t mean that’s where it was intended to be. So by thinking about it from a landscape perspective and thinking a little more spatially, I think allows us to incorporate things that cut across not only the waterline but also across this sort of other made up line we have, which is the sort of pre-contact/contact line. So it’s a good way to break down some of those boundaries. Both our literal boundaries and sort of our figurative boundaries. The inclusivity thing, I think, is also really, really important. You know, you can bring together multiple periods and multiple cultures together with the landscape approach. Because people shared that landscape. What I’ve been calling the landscape is just a place. And places are important to multiple groups for various different reasons. So one thing I think we can do here is begin to integrate them in this approach. Because cultures will come and go. That’s one thing I tried to highlight with the Lake Ontario example. But the place remains, right? The place is always there. And for most people, the place remains important. So the groups may not agree about why the place is important. But they can agree the place is important. I think it’s a way to increase our inclusivity. I also think it’s a way to increase inclusivity for underwater archeology by bringing in lands people. Not everybody’s a boater. Not everybody’s a kayaker or a diver. But many people who just like to wade into the water, also have an interest in the sea, in maritime and lake environments. So by taking a maritime cultural landscape approach, you can begin to tie those things that are off there, off shore, that are hard to [teach?] with things that are onshore. And again, sort of put them on a little bit more even footing, and kind of meet people where they’re at with their interests. And talk about how they’re all interrelated, and why they’re all important. And I think one of the things that increasingly everyone can agree on is that the environment is important. There seems to be increasing concern among the American population about our seas and our oceans. Both in terms of things like ocean acidification, and changing habitats and warming that’s affecting plants and animals, which also have an effect on archeological sites. So we’re concerned about saving our oceans and the damage to them. We’re also concerned about the fact that they’re becoming more dangerous, right, they’re increasingly coming into our domain either through rising sea levels or through storms and those kinds of things. And so I think this is a way to tie that in and bring how past groups dealt with these changes into the picture and look at-- I’m running long, and I apologize. This is my last major slide. Defining boundaries is a little bit hard because people move around. And because some of the things that we might want to include and be concerned about, like fish species that were being hunted in some areas, then migrated through, are going to transcend those boundaries. So I think that’s something to be worried about. And I heard Tom King’s talk on the last one of these. And his point about, you know, maybe we don’t have to draw a hard boundary. If we can agree that this area’s important, maybe that’s good enough. Issues of integrity, I think, are also going to be a problem, just because of the multiple property types and that they all sort of impact slightly different practical reasons or how we interpret integrity for them. But I think that’s something to consider. And then the last thing is that [unclear] England has this notion of characterization. Which is a way to look at landscapes, and allow the landscape to still change and move and adapt while still protecting what makes it significant and culturally important. I could talk more about that, but there’s also some really good reading, some people who actually do this kind of stuff. And I think that’s a real powerful way to begin to think about maritime cultural landscapes. So with that, I’ll end my spiel. Roller: Great. Folks out there. If you have any questions, feel free to jump in, either through the microphone or through the chat. I’ll be monitoring it. I had one question, Ben, from earlier, about submerged sites and how they fit into MCLs, how they’re considered as MCLs, submerged terrestrial sites. Ford: So I mean, I sort of conceive of [unclear] the moving water line in that a lot of sort of coastal people tended to live some of their life, or had some of their family on shore and then used the water for transportation, for trade, for resource procurement, whatever. So as the water line has moved, so have the habitation sites. So I think one way of thinking about the maritime cultural landscape, especially in sort of a diachronic through time perspective, is that the shoreline is not fixed. So we want to think about those sites that are submerged, but also think about sort of upland, paleo shore lines. So on the Great Lakes, the lakes were also higher at some point. So there are reported boat building sites that are now ten miles from the shore. I would include those all within sort of a diachronic landscape that would have looked different at different times. Roller: Great. Great. And Barbara Wyatt asked if you could share that last slide with some of your interesting looking sources. Ford: Sure. Yeah. Sorry. Roller: And again, for some of you, you might have gotten a forward of my announcement, so you may not have gotten the bibliography, the excellent bibliography that Ben had sent us. I’ll resend it and if you can find my email address, I’m at Michael_Roller@nps.gov, I can also resend it to you. I did some reading myself over the last couple of weeks, and there’s a lot of good stuff there. Ford: Now with these sources here, I’ll reveal the depth of my scholarship. If you Google “characterization historic England,” they’re the top couple of hits. So these are, so this is not, I mean, just Googling “characterization” and “historic England,” will [unclear] pretty rapidly. And a bunch of other really interesting and useful stuff. Hans: Hey, Ben, this is Hans. Great job. Fantastic talk. I’ve got a question for you. Obviously perspective on landscapes and place, very critical. My question’s about view sheds. Are view sheds in your ideas seen as kind of the same as other elements of the landscape? Or are they quantitatively different from other elements of the landscape, although obviously very important, or are they properties? Ford: That’s interesting. I never thought of them as properties. I would have included them as, in thinking about the boundary concern, sort of how I would have thought about them. Because if the view shed is an important part of it. So, for example, the rising or the setting of the sun over a particular body of water is part of how you conceive of why that body of water’s important. I wouldn’t have thought about it as a property, necessarily. But I would have included it within consideration of that landscape. Kind of playing off that a little bit, we often think of view sheds as I sort of described them, like you’re standing on land, looking at the water. But for many maritime people, the flipside is really important, right? Looking from the water to the land. A lot of people’s sort of uses of and interacting with coasts are informed by how it was coming from the water, in terms of either access or what you can see. And so I think in thinking about view sheds, I would think about it from both directions. Am I answering your question, Hans? I’m sorry. Hans: Yeah, yeah. I mean, “property” is kind of a management-loaded term, obviously. But you know, I’m still working on considering the qualitative differences between elements of a landscape and view sheds of elements of landscapes. But obviously they’re very important. And the two ways, the emphasis from sea back to shore is perfect for navigators. Ford: Yeah. And I think the other thing with view shed is, so “landscape” is sort of one of these terms, sort of like “culture,” the term “archeology” that gets used differently by different peoples, different fields, right? So my wife’s got a degree in, her degree as a lawyer, so she talks about the landscape of a problem. But sort of the art historical approach to landscape is this view from a single point, so like landscape painting, which would very much overlap with the view shed, right? I mean, it may be like the panoramic landscape painting, but still a view from a single location. And that’s definitely a way that landscape can be conceived of and used. I sometimes think about it as slightly broader in terms of it’s what you can see from a certain place, but also what you can see in your mind’s eye from that place. So you’re going to be tying your route or your view of the area around you to that what you can see, but also what you know is over the horizon. And then it gets fuzzier from there. And so, yeah, I think it’s kind of how you want to use and define the term “landscape.” Hans: Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Ben. Roller: Ben, so a question is, I know you come from a [Sierran?] background, as I do, as well, beginning my career. And I’m sure since adopting an approach like this, it caused you to sort of rethink your past labors. Strictly speaking of archeological survey, how do you think an MCL approach might change strategies for archeological surveys, specifically? Ford: Um, I think the only major change I would want to see or ask for or hope for, maybe hope for, would be more integration between what we see on land and what we see underwater. And when you go to these conferences, a lot, [unclear] Archeology is guilty of this, where they make you tick a box with terrestrial or underwater program, right? Sort of denying that there is overlap between the two of them. So I would like to see more cross talk between those who do submerged prehistoric, those who do submerged sort of more shipwreck-oriented, and those who work on land. Because that, to me, is what sort of begins to create the landscape. So that’s the only thing I would really say. I think our technologies and our methods for identifying things are strong. And you know, in the last, maybe five, ten years ago, I would have said we needed more ethnography and more consultation. But I think we are—we probably still need more of that. But we’re getting better at that, too, as a field. So I think our basic methods are good. I think it’s just getting out of our silos is what I would argue for. Roller: Great. Thank you, thank you. I think one comment I have, and you can respond, is that in terrestrial archeology, there is a long history of history of landscape approaches, particularly in historic archeology. That being planned landscapes or ideological landscapes or rural landscapes, etcetera. And in that way, the way that landscape is approached in terrestrial archeology is quite various, quite heterogeneous, such that they can’t always speak to each other. But what’s kind of novel is that in terms of maritime landscapes, we have one very, I can see a very cohesive approach. And maybe that’s because the sources often from Westerdahl and his approach, though. But I think it’s kind of interesting to think then about how that sort of cohesive, well-considered approach to landscape could be then applied to landscape, terrestrial landscapes as well. Ford: Yeah. I mean, I guess there’s an argument from not being on the cutting edge of things, in that, yeah, I agree. On land, landscapes have shifted quite a bit from the original use of the term, which is largely looking at gardens and sort of like people’s behind their homes, or next to their homes, and then expanded out pretty rapidly from there. By the time the maritime folks got a hold of it, they picked it up at a certain place. And a lot of the hard thinking had already been done by terrestrial folks. I think it would be a mistake for maritime cultural landscape folks to ignore that, because it’s a great literature to pull from. And I guess I don’t necessarily see heterogeneity as a bad thing. And I think the inability to communicate between other areas is not good. But the more ways we can communicate, the more different ways of looking at something, the more different lines of evidence, I see it as strengthening it. And again, sort of going back to that analogy if we can all agree that this particular landscape is important, it doesn’t really matter that we all agree why it’s important. If we can work together to preserve it, or work together to respect it, and respect each other, then I think we all can win in that respect. And you know, I’m not sure if I’m responding to the question or not. Roller: Yeah. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think the approach that you’ve set out here really makes a good case for integrity of different sorts of elements. And that isn’t always possible on terrestrial landscape. And I think one of the issues with the various approaches in terrestrial landscape is if we think about management and things like guidelines for the National Register, it’s made it difficult to talk about things like significance and integrity. Because are we talking about formal landscapes, garden landscapes, etcetera, etcetera. So it’s kind of profound to see the MCL folks sort of setting out a cohesive set of guidelines that can integrate or be inclusive to user language of a lot of different approaches. Ford: Yeah, I think, I mean, I’m not sure everyone would agree with me on this, but I would sort of argue that landscapes, I mean, there’s the, there is sort of a single definition of what integrity means. And then they break it out to sort of the seven aspects of integrity. And those can be applied broadly. But we do sort of have slightly different rules for archeological sites versus standing structures and those kind of things. But I would sort of argue that all landscapes are archeological in that they have developed over time and have been subjected to site formation processes, both cultural and natural. So I think of them sort of as archeological. And of course, being an archeologist, I think there’s probably some bias there. But in terms of thinking about all the pieces of a landscape and how they fit together, and thinking about integrity, I would argue that one way to approach that is to think about integrity from the archeological sense of integrity. I don't know if everyone would concur. Roller: Anyone want to chime in out there? One quick question, Ben. Do you see any emerging issues in the archeology of maritime cultural landscapes? I’m sure it’s a hot topic at conferences. For example, the Underwater Archeology Conference in New Orleans. Are there any trends in research that you see that may point towards future directions? Or even ways that you might now be rethinking your own dissertation work? Ford: I try not to think about it too much. Roller: Yeah. (laughs) Ford: But you mentioned, I just blanked on it, the National Register Symposium that was in 2015. And I would say that that is, in one place to look at sort of the direction that people are pushing this, and sort of the exciting direction that people are taking it, both from sort of a pure research perspective as well as from sort of a management and heritage perspective. I think that’s, you know, I would point to that as where a lot of, you know, people sort of taking it in myriad different directions. And so in terms of involving, seeing [SHPOs?], like with [Narragansett?] getting involved, I think there’s a lot of places that it could go. I’d be hesitant to try and say which one direction it’s going to head. I would point to that as if people are interested in seeing kind of a broader perspective, that would be the place to look right now. Roller: Mm hmm. Great. Great. And as I mentioned, Barbara Wyatt at the National Register is working along with collaborators to publish the proceedings from that. Which will be exciting. And in the future there will be a bulletin on, hopefully on maritime cultural landscapes issued by the National Register, so. Hans: Yeah, we’re looking forward to that. This is Hans. I’d also mention that the National Marine Protected Area Center has cultural heritage online toolkit. And if you don't know, the MPA folks a while ago kind of broke up marine protected areas into three categories, kind of that division you mentioned earlier: natural resources, cultural heritage and then kind of sustainable activities. Fishing. But obviously, there’s a lot of overlap. The cultural heritage toolkit online is landscape-heavy, cultural landscape analysis-heavy, and benefits from the symposium you talked about in 2015 and other meetings that have been held. And it’s really an idea that’s moving forward, so I appreciate the presentation today, Ben. Ford: And I find it incredibly gratifying and just exciting that NOAA and other groups are really kind of running with this. Yeah, I think it’s great that people are interested and want to try and use some of these ideas. Hans: Yeah, I’m working on this morning the [S3?] story map journal for a kind of an [in reach?] teaching tool for our own agency in maritime cultural landscapes and [forest?] sanctuaries, as a matter of fact. Roller: Great. So I got some chats. Please announce that the symposium proceedings will be on the NPS and [Bone?] website soon. The 2015 conference report has finally been published and is available online. And then I got a link, I’m not sure if everyone can see this. The proceedings from the 2015 Wisconsin conference were just released. So I’ll actually put the link in the main chat and I can resend this out for my next webinar announcement. So this is great to see out of these conferences and talks a lot of great, important literature that is going to set the foundation for future research in heritage and preservation, of course. Great. Any other questions or comments out there? Well, thanks, Ben. That was a great talk. We’ll record it and post it on the National Park Service website. Thank you, folks, that participated and listened in. Our next talk will be on April 19th at 3 pm. It will be on paleo coastal landscapes by Torben Rick at the Smithsonian. Anybody who’s interested who joined this time that wants to be on the list, please email me. And with that, thank so much, Ben, for joining us. I will send out Ben’s bibliography. And I’m sure he’s welcome to receiving questions. If you have any on this presentation. Ford: Thank you all for bearing with me. I love talking about this stuff, so thank you. Thank you. Roller: Thanks, folks, have a good afternoon. Thanks, guys. Thanks. [End Session.] 1:06:29
Description
Ben Ford, 3/22/2018, ArcheoThursday
Duration
1 hour, 6 minutes, 29 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
03/22/2018
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