Video
Heritage Monitoring Scouts- The crossroads of citizen science and climate change
Transcript
Sarah Miller: All right. Well, thank you very much for that introduction, Michael. And I’m really thrilled to be talking to you all on this call today. I just want to encourage and foster any conversation as it comes up.
I did structure the time, given the charge of what people might be interested in into a couple of different portions.
So first, there’s me just in case you haven't seen me in the video box, to put a face with a name. And doing some of my favorite things related to archeology. I’m going to spend the bulk of the first part talking about the building blocks of our heritage monitoring scout program. To do that justice, I really need to jump into our cemetery resource protection training, and why that came about, how it came about. And when we transitioned into talking about climate change and sea level rise, why we looked to that model, what were the affordances and constraints of that model, and share kind of the who, what, when, where and why of how that came about. A lot has happened since—oh, can you hear me okay?
Yeah, I’m sorry.
Yeah, we can hear you. Someone out there, please mute your mics.
Miller: I’ll just keep going. But a lot has happened in the last year. I also wanted to update you. You may be interested kind of the new direction that HMS is going. Some relate to software and usability. Some relates to different kind of resource types, such as submerged resources. And we have done a formal assessment of the program in its first year. So I’m not sure if I’ll get to all that. But if you have questions related to that, I back-ended some slides at the end of the presentation.
So I have a lot of acronyms. I think a lot of us have acronym jars. So I’ll get my quarters out and start adding there. As Michael mentioned, I work for the Florida Public Archeology Network. So that’s one of the first acronyms I wanted to make sure I share.
And we are, in a nutshell, we exist to help stem the rapid deterioration of the state’s buried past through education and outreach. And when I started 12 years ago, I’ll say the main threat at the time seemed to be development. Seemed to be a lot of choices helping communities make decisions about their historical resources. And now I feel like the pendulum has swung a bit. Some of the threats are really different from when I started. And it’s been interesting to see FPAN’s mission be flexible to what those other threats may be, and particularly in relation to climate change, how we’ve been able to continue education outreach, but sincerely help our local government and our state’s division of historic resources, but in really different ways than how we started out.
We are statewide. So we have eight regions. And I’m the director of the Northeast and East Central. So I go all the way from the red line on the Florida/Georgia border, up at Nassau County, all the way down to the end of the lighter green, near Lake Okeechobee. So it’s a big stretch of coastline.
So the next acronym I wanted to talk about was CRPT. This is our Cemetery Resource Protection Training. As Michael said, I do have a special relation in historic cemeteries.
Did a lot of work before I came to Florida, this is me in a six-foot burial shaft in Kentucky. We were excavating at the state monument. We got involved with another project where we had to move about 600 individuals in about six weeks’ time. And it definitely dawned on me at that time, what can we do while these sites are still above the ground to help make sure we don’t have to get involved underneath the ground later on? So when I moved to Florida, one of the things I developed was this CRPT training course. And I’m just going to lead you through some of the steps of a typical CRPT workshop. Because you’ll find some are familiar with what we went on to do with sea level rise. And [more?] important in those building blocks. But then certain areas didn’t fit, either.
So I thought, that’s an interesting discussion and want to bring you into that. So our cemetery workshops start with an icebreaker of having people draw their final resting place. It seems fair if we’re going to consider other people’s final resting place the rest of the day, to put some thought into what is yours going to be? That cemeteries are about population. And it can be as vague as just all these people are buried in the same place at this same time. So it’s a really good starting point for people who haven’t really thought about cemetery studies before, and gets us prepared to move out into the field in the afternoon.
The first formal presentation in a CRPT workshop is about managing historic cemeteries. And we go through a lot of documentation and survey and outreach and trying to get people to develop cemetery management plans, but also to establish friends groups where a lot of that work can go on. What we want to stay away from is flash in the pan cleaning days that don’t last very long. (laughs) We want to keep these places intact for the next hundred years, so what are the skills people need to do that?
The second presentation in a CRPT workshop is about human burial laws. People need help navigating what law pertains to what their problem is, and a lot of that depends on what kind of land the cemetery’s located on. So we discuss some scenarios, some case studies, and move people through that. And a lot of people are coming with a very specific cemetery problem in mind.
The third formal presentation of a CRPT workshop, we’re talking about the Florida Master Site File. That’s our database of all historical resources, includes cemeteries. We’re lucky to have a cemetery [form?]. But of course archeological sites, buildings, bridges, etcetera, etcetera. So we demystify that for the public.
And also talk about data gaps of how, I have a list in a second. For example, this shows all of the Clay County cemeteries that are listed in Florida for Clay County. The real number is near a hundred. So talking about how you can’t protect what you haven’t identified, and how important it is to get sites listed on the site file.
I was mentioning those data gaps. We have about 1300 cemeteries on the Florida Master Site File. But if you look up Find a Grave, there are four thousand listed there. And the Division of Cemeteries in Florida has estimated the number really to be about eight thousand cemeteries that exist. And we have just a fraction of them on the site file. So we need the public’s help for that and to do some documentation and recording.
In the afternoon, this is everyone’s favorite part, we go and have a site tour, do some documentation, do some recording, and then also clean with either water or a D2 solution, if appropriate.
These workshops kind of took off like wildfire. We ended up doing 52, I think we’re actually up to about 80 CRPT workshops. We have about a thousand graduates. This number needs to be adjusted a little bit. And again, in many counties across Florida, many cities. And now we’re up to three annual conferences for graduates of this program. So we tapped into something that was truly statewide that had a really clean template that other centers could follow, and had pretty clear direction of what we wanted the scouts to do after graduation, which was be good cemetery stewards, but also help fill in those data gaps.
If you’re interested in the CRPT program, we do have an article out in AAP. And it’s open source. So I’d be happy to send that link to you, or you can look it up in the AAP.
So moving from, talking about CRPT to HMS, and why it’s a natural fit for me to talk about one and then the other, is it was one of our local planners who attended a CRPT workshop. And she is in charge of making the management plan for a cemetery that was in one of our towns.
And she said, “Sarah, what are we going to do about sea level rise? I have to make this management plan for this cemetery. But it’s not looking very good for inundation and for erosion where this place is located. That conversation happened about six years ago. So I really didn’t know how to answer her at the time. So I said, give me a little time, let’s look into this. So again, it was a bridge from looking at endangered cemeteries that made us take a look at the broader problem.
This is an image from Chip Birdsong at the site file who had this graphic already created and sent it to me. He’s been very gracious giving us permission to use it. It was the first time I really saw, this is just a bathtub model, of what could happen in Florida with a one meter to two-meter rise. And [unclear] those numbers if you see with a one-meter rise for archeological sites, we’re looking at just shy of three thousand. And then for the two-meter rise, looking at about four thousand sites to be impacted. While it was scary, it was also an important moment to realize wait a second, that four thousand, we could maybe do something about this if you divide it by eight regions, eight FPAN centers and all the staff we have, what is it that we could do?
So we started to look into what things could we do to educate ourselves, what could we do to help the local government. We have a mission to support, and also help with education and outreach of the public.
So we tried a series of sea level rise workshops, and we tried to work from the CRPT model. I even have some of the early agendas. We did three pilots. We had similar goals and outcomes to CRPT. But we really had a hard time cracking the nut of the [afternoon?]. Whereas we could educate people, and tell them what we knew and look at different kind of site types and threats, it wasn’t the same as in the cemeteries, you could go and work for a little bit. And it was relatively safe to release people out to do good work in the public. Here, it was different. What would be the activity? What would be the culminating event people would do? And what would they do to go have an impact? We didn’t want to just upset or frighten people. We wanted to give them a real practical thing they could go do to make a difference.
So we struggled with that for a little while. But a real ah-ha moment came at the SAA a couple of years ago when we saw our colleagues from Scotland Coastal Heritage at Risk Program give a paper, and how they had released the points of data to the public. Had the public go out and verify site locations and look at threat levels and report that information back. And I was just so inspired by that potential model. So I called [Belize?] up and said, I think there’s something more we can do here with sites. And with permission, I’d like to move forward. And he said, “Don’t be afraid, go out and do it.”
So we put together a pitch, where, when why, how our baby would look. The Heritage Monitoring Scout program. So my next few slides kind of go over what those initial steps were, and the initial pitches that we gave to our partners across the state who have been very encouraging.
And keep in mind while we get a lot of questions, what are you doing with the data in some of the scientific parts of it, we're also committed to this being a public engagement program. And it was built as a public engagement program, and continues to operate as a public engagement program. So we’ve kept this engagement pyramid very close at heart, trying to figure out what are the different steps people can go through to go up and down this pyramid. And what are some of the activities or benchmarks just to make sure we’re keeping people engaged at different levels.
So the who, who would do this kind of work, we have a lot of volunteers, as a lot of archeology programs do. But we also have a lot of former employees, students, teachers that we’ve been involved with. This middle photo shows me and my husband, who’s also an archeologist, and then our office manager and one of her best friends who lives right across from an island. So it just shows you there are people in the midst already who could go and help out to do this work. We have a lot of retirees in Florida, they’re excited to go help out. And certainly after storms, we get a big increase of people wanting to volunteer. Site location information is always a sensitive issue. But we noticed a lot of these people already had the information. For example, the woman in the middle who’s a friend of our office manager, she was already monitoring the island we wanted to go look at for oysters for the aquatic preserve. So she was already monitoring that. She just wasn’t aware of the archeological deposits to keep an eye on as well.
What did we want people to do? We took a look at site stewardship forms from across the country. We looked at some of those international partners, what kind of information people were recording, and started to test this form. This form is still up. If you go to the HMS website, you can click on and fill out this form. And notice, you can fill out this form without tying it to a location. And that was on purpose, so that we could send site location to the scouts who were assigned different places. But the information going back and forth wouldn't give up any of the site locations that might be sensitive. So we massaged this over quite a bit of time and got approval from the state to use it for the overall site conditions, looking at different threats that were workshopped, and then giving some priority, high, medium and low, to the sites. So our hope was to identify sites in good conditions, but sites that were at a high threat level, and those could be prioritized down the road.
It’s probably nothing to this group on the phone of why do monitoring. But I think it’s worth just pointing out in our public restroom in the grocery store, they have this sheet of who’s cleaning the washroom last, what was the conditions, what needed restocking. And it’s a good place to talk to the public about why you would need to report who was last at a site. We had a very real scenario after Hurricane Mathew, you can see in this screen what the coast looked like the day before, and then a short time after with these inlets opening. When I include this slide in particular when I’m talking to the public, it’s amazing how many people come up after, “I just walked that beach the day before, like you showed. And they didn’t realize we got a call that shoeboxes of sherds were coming out of that inlet. And by the time we could get to it, it had already been filled back in. So rapid response is important, and just knowing what it looked like before. It’s hard to put the picture back together.
Another thing that linked to cemeteries, cemeteries are really easy places to start. For Florida, they are not exempt from public information. And you can see the dots here. This was our GIS map we did for something called Cemetery Dash. We wanted as many people as we could encourage to go out and monitor a historic cemetery. A lot of them, the site forms had not been updated since they were first recorded. And a lot of them experienced change in condition due to the hurricanes or the storms, vandalism, development, etcetera. So we wanted to get some more eyes on them. So that’s what 1200 cemeteries look like in this single image. And we continue to do that each fall, and try to encourage people to get out there and visit them.
Another scenario, where we released some information to the scouts, was asking them to keep an eye on our Jewish cemeteries here in Florida, particularly after threat of vandalism in other states occurred. So we put this map together and asked people, and rewarded them for going out and monitoring these sites. And we like to do those kind of cross-section, scouts love to go and do the work, but they need a very specific direction on what to go do sometimes. So that was a good example of something that worked.
When we first launched Heritage monitoring Scouts, we had put together a pilot program to go out quarterly to one of our aquatic preserves, to the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve here in Saint Augustine. And this was already planned, if you look at the dates. And our idea was to give them some form of training, either in ceramic identification or glass or stratigraphy, or some kind of skill that would help them in monitoring, and then go out and monitor a site. Here we are in the lower rate at Sanchez Mound. And it was a wonderful day. I think you all can appreciate. We were up monitoring the site, and we saw a snake. So someone yelled, “Snake!” And half the group ran one way, and the other half ran towards the snake. So we had a good cross mix of people who could divide themselves very quickly between the snake haters and the snake lovers. That was a good thing to experience outside all together.
So we started, because we were going to do this pilot, we thought hey, let’s go out and monitor the site to make sure it’s all set for next week when we do the training. So out we went September 28th, monitored the Shell Bluff landing. This is a 6,000 year-old midden with a well that’s from a, it’s a Minorcan family from the Mediterranean that lived here in Saint Augustine, about two hundred years old. We went out to monitor the site. And you can look and see some of the failing coastal defenses, the tree that’s leaning. The well is kind of up to the right of that half fallen tree, up there on the bluff. And this has been a site long-studied, long-impacted , lots of thoughts on what to do to shore up this site.
Well, we didn’t really realize that Hurricane Matthew was going to come through right at that time. So you can see the images as soon as it was safe to go back out. And huge chunks of our shell midden are gone, and that well is getting more precariously close to the edge.
And that wasn’t it. The following year, we went out after Irma and more of the bluff was taken away. And what was confusing to us is while Hurricane Irma certainly had impact, the Nor’easters that were before and after the hurricane, also kind of wreaked havoc. So you’re looking at less than a year of impact to one site in Florida. And that was one of the sites we had identified that we wanted to get scouts monitoring and keeping us posted.
This is just for some perspective. We used to take tour groups out by bicycle or hiking, out to that well and have conversations with people about the integrated environment. And this is what it looks like now.
And this is what it looks like now. The well is often inundated or in the water. And I think it will be gone definitely I would say within two years. But I wouldn’t have thought it would have accelerated as fast as it did, either.
So the program is evaluated in terms of sites monitored and recorded. And that high, medium low condition, and threat. But we also evaluate it in terms of the public engagement program. So we often shuffle things into the engagement pyramid just to have a place to say where people are at, how many people are observing, heritage at risk, how many people are [unclear] it and signing up, how many people are actually contributing and monitoring the sites, and who do we have that’s owning and leading at the time, knowing they may go up and down the pyramid at different points.
A lot of us were not trained to do this kind of work. So it started in the first year we had a Tidally United summit. We invited archeologists, preservationists, climate scientists to come and discuss topics, partially, selfishly, for our own education to get up to speed. But again, for that public benefit as well. That summit has continued. The following year it was conducted in partnership with the Seminole tribe, which we were very proud to have that association with, and very grateful that they had asked to host, and took a big leadership role that year. Last year it was in Sarasota, and then next year it will be in Pensacola. So that seems to keep continuing year after year.
If you’re interested in those building blocks of HMS so far, we just had an article come out like two days ago in Conservation and Management of Archeological Sites. And if you’re interested, let me know and I can send you a copy of the article. And it goes over kind of those building blocks and the case study of Shell Bluff Landing we dive into pretty deeply. And that was part of one of the learning library sessions at SAA.
Roller: Congratulations, it looks good.
Miller: Thanks. That was exciting to get out. I’m sure it’s the first of many, many HMS papers to come.
So I wanted to pause there for a second because I’m going to go into what has happened to the database. Because it started as just a simple Google Doc-based database. And now we have gone from the nice Honda into the Corvette. We have a four-gear car to help us drive this program. And then I also wanted to spend some time talking about submerged resources. We didn’t really build the program to monitor submerged resources, but there’s a big interest in doing that here in Florida. So how we adapted the program to do that, and then also that formal assessment. But now might be a good time to pause and see if there’s any kind of 101 questions about HMS. [pause]
Roller: Okay, we’ve got a question in chat, from Turk. How do you decide which site locations get released to the public? Are you worried about looting? Good questions.
Miller: We are very, very worried about looting. And you’ll see for Arches, one of the issues, we didn’t release any site information to the public. If anything, we had these maps that were places to visit that we had already had that were places interpreted for the public, protected. They wanted to be on our maps. So we had asked scouts if they wanted to go out and practice, like to go and monitor those sites. And again, historic cemeteries were kind of a freebie. We could encourage people to go out to those. It got a little more difficult. It depended where the scouts lived, what they wanted to monitor. If we had a site or location that needed a monitor, and trying to find a good fit. And also just tracking scouts over time. Were they following through? Were they interested? Had they been trusted with sensitive information before, and how had that gone? So we tread very carefully. And again, knowing a lot of these early scouts were also either former archeologist, or had access in other ways to site information. But it’s kind of a good question to dive into Arches, because there were limits to that. People would be right next to another site and not know it, and they could have easily gone and monitored two sites in one day. They just didn’t know the other one was right next to them. So we wanted to increase some spatial visibility for scouts. And also scouts using the Google Docs system, they couldn’t see what other scouts had done before. So it was important that scouts could build upon previous reports. How could they photograph what had changed over time if they didn’t see how it looked like last time? So we were bumping into some of those questions that require us to look beyond our simple Google Docs and start building the Arches system. So I’ll pause for one more second, see if there’s another 101 question, and then I’ll delve into the Arches program. [pause] All right, hearing none at this point, but feel free to save them. I’ll just go into what Arches was, is. We were looking for software that could do a lot of things we wanted. And again, I think of that same planner who asked us the first questions about cemeteries, had picked up a brochure on Arches and brought it to us and said, have you thought of this? And the more we looked into it, it seemed a very good tool for what we wanted. It’s built specifically for cultural heritage and for large landscapes.
And it is open use. It was a different program, though. Whereas the Google Docs, you can work in the field very easily, Arches almost requires you to be sitting at a computer. Although, they are updating it all the time, so there should be an app available. We wanted to do an app like Scotland had, except that that cost quite a bit of money, and then the maintenance on it also costs a lot of money we didn’t quite have. So we have invested in Arches to build in basically a second site file and allow us those features. So just a few slides to show you on how that works. Now when you go to log in, you have different portals. So you have the HMS scout portal, for the scouts. And then state land managers also have their own portals. Remember we created it as a community engagement program. What we hadn’t really thought is that the land managers who have to monitor the sites every year anyway, they thought what a great thing, let’s do that. So we built kind of this split portal system so state land managers could also get in there and monitor their site. And when they log in, they have access to their full land parcel.
This is what it looks like behind the scenes in Arches. So all the dots are there for all the sites. And then if they are assigned to scouts, we can assign them certain polygons or certain types of sites. So we can control that a little better, yet the database remains the same, and it allows you to upload pictures whereas before they were sending them in to us.
Again, here’s our caveat about site location protections, and just to say that they are protected with a system of permission levels. And then with the state park land managers, they have state park sites visible to them for the parks that they work at. And that is now including state forest and the aquatic preserves. And we keep bumping into new definitions of large parcels. So we’re excited to work with the land managers, because we require sites to go monitor, so we need close partnership with them. But also it starts to get a little further afield from the community engagement aspect the program was created for.
So if you, this just shows you can click on one of the state parks and the middens and there, and get some information and upload some of the reports there. And that’s a training site that we have used with the state park staff quite a bit.
So again, why did we do this [unclear] transition and it helped with some more [sincere?] monitoring, looking at the changes. It also allowed DEP and DHR staff, they can look at, they have like one of the broad keys that they can look into what’s coming in, where people are looking at, what’s been the follow up, what may have human remains visible, what is a priority and needs to be looked at now, or where the site file also may need an update.
So that was one big area we're continuing to massage. I’ll tell you the biggest problem right now is that our volunteers really liked the Google form. It’s easy just to go out there where you’ve been before, or a new place, do the paperwork when you’re out in the field, and then you’re done. Arches is a little trickier. It’s harder to load onto a mobile device. You kind of need to be at your computer to do it, and to upload the pictures. And that’s a commitment level that’s hard to get from the volunteers. But then again, it works great for the land managers. Another thing that has come up within the year has been submerged sites. HMS Florida was built as a community engagement program, but we also wanted to limit it to sites that were previously recorded. We knew we’d be kind of opening it up to start collecting new site information, but we really needed to have those points in place first, or it helped encourage us to get sites listed on the site file. So the biggest challenge with submerged sites so far is that a lot of them are not listed on the state site file. So this information I’m sharing right now is really being developed by Sara Ayers-Rigsby and Jeff Moates and our FPAN colleagues working in South Florida and in the gulf. And it’s very important to give attention to the submerged sites. I think people have a confusion in thinking that they’re already submerged, so they’re not threatened. And indeed, Geneva [Wright Plum?], other people have done really great work to show no, they are threatened, here are some things you can track and monitor, and a way that we could get volunteers engaged with HMS in a new way. I’ll say these divers are sending in sites just as fast as the terrestrial sites. So they’re a very engaged, very dedicated group of volunteers.
It’s just tricky because on top of needing a new form with some specialized data to collect for the submerged sites, we also have some jurisdiction issues, site location issues, and a lot of them, again, are not on the site file. So they’re not going to be in Arches, which was like creating a second site file. So right now we’re in the middle of trying to figure out, okay, we have one database, which is our Google Forms. We have a second database, which is our Arches, that we’re still trying to transition all the information to. And now we have a third database of these submerged resources that it’s important to track, but not everyone’s on the same page of where the site location—and for some very good reasons that have nothing to do with FPAN staff or decisions that we want to honor those different categories.
So some of the topics that are considered when talking to sport divers or enthusiasts who want to do some of this monitoring for us. There you can see there, chemical processes, and a different set of protocols, different set of conditions.
This shows some of the recent monitoring that went on in South Florida, using some fixed positions but not letting any of the tapes drag. Setting up these monitoring stations. This shows the Brick wreck, which is one of the wrecks that we had been diving on for a long time as part of our Heritage Awareness Dive Seminar, and just the changes that staff have seen over the years, like complete depletion of the bricks of this wreck. It’s significant to track those changes.
The first submerged workshop was just this past July. And then we had a really nice mention in Atlas Obscura and a few other media postings. So you can see public interest is really high in this category. And we’re continuing to improve and try to marry up these different databases.
And then the final thing I’ll talk about is our assessment. We did formal assessment of HMS because the coordinating center for the Florida Public Archeology Network had a postdoc, had funds for a postdoc to look at okay, FPAN’s been around more than ten years. What kind of impact are we having on our mission? How do we even answer that question? So what Laura Clark did, and this is her work, there she is right there. She was kind of directed to look at a lot of different FPAN programs, and she used a self-determination theory to do her analysis. She really liked the Heritage Scout Monitoring program.
I think it was very easy to get scouts to participate and to share information. And it seemed to hit a lot of our work areas all at once. Plus, all the regions, kind of like CRPT, now all the regions are doing HMS-related activities. So it was good for cross-comparing. This is all background on the self-determination theory, but that people are volunteers to make a change in their behavior, which is what the FPAN mission is trying to do, to get people to change how they think about cultural resources and to get them, you know, a desire to protect them, to preserve them, that they really need this kind of triage of being able to do things on their own that’s related to their own work, and to be able to follow out things like monitoring with competence. So what training do they have? Are they able to do it in groups or on their own? And how do they feel about how it relates to them?
So this slide I like because on the right it just shows in a nutshell, people have to have fun doing this work or it’s likely not going to change their behavior. So we can sit them in a room and talk to them and it will have an impact. But we’ll have a greater impact if we can take them out in the field, have a good experience that day, let them know that they’re making a difference in helping protect our archeology in the state of Florida, or engage with it in a very positive way. And this is what Laura was testing through the HMS surveys and interviews that she conducted.
So I have a lot of slides at the end that relate to her findings of different things. But it’s also a whole paper for another time of the things that she discovered. But it was in line with what we were feeling, that FPAN staff who do these activities, they do need to have a certain amount of charm, or infectious enthusiasm, which I think we all bring to our activities. And at the end of the day, if these sites are destroyed, it’s important to me that people get out there and enjoy what they can and have a positive experience with it. Because you never know when it’s the last time that a site’s going to be seen. So getting respect to that site and even just discussing with the public what do they want to have happen is a way of honoring and respecting those places that may disappear in short time.
So that was all I had for our time together for the formal presentation. But I am here for questions, and I do have additional slides that may relate to questions if there was something you wanted to see.
Roller: Thanks, Sarah. Thanks for the infectious enthusiasm. Folks, if you have questions, you can either ask through the phone line or on the chat. I have one quick question. What do you find is the best method of communication for finding new recruits? It’s pretty cool to hear about how FPAN had already built a big network of public archeology volunteers for other programs, and then the shift to sort of quicker response for HMS scouts and the climate change threat. So clearly you’ve sort of built on a network. But what’s the best way to reach new recruits? Like you talked about a woman that was already monitoring an island. She was already basically doing the work. But then you managed to connect her to this perfect volunteering role. How do you reach people like that?
Miller: Yeah, some is word of mouth and some is presentation. And some of it is being thoughtful when you’re out talking in the public. Just remembering to add a slide. Like oh, by the way, I’m talking about plantation archeology today. But we do this other cool thing. And come sign up if you’re interested. We’ve done museum exhibits to try and funnel interest. Lots and lots of social media and blog posts and podcasts. I think the thing that’s important, you can capture people’s interest, I feel, pretty easily. It’s just what do you do to sustain and keep them feeling like they’re included when we have to recognize not everyone can always be a leader in these kind of activities. You have to allow them to come and go as they are able. So we do a monthly we call it the HMS Scout Report. And it comes out around the 15th of each month. We’ll probably have one that comes out next month. Those emails are important. It gives like a skill or a resource or something they can go to to learn a little bit more about heritage at risk. It gives them a task. Hey, do this thing, we’ll send you a water bottle, or we’ll send you a sticker, or some little scout challenge. Something that keeps it fun, but gives them an idea if they’re not really sure what to go and do that month. So, it said go visit on this kind of site, or go visit a site on that map. Or go visit, you know, something you’ve visited before. Or go and bring a friend. That’s important to keep that kind of trail of crumbs going. We recognize the scout leaders. It’s important to see like wow, some people have monitored 15 sites this month. Let’s give a little shout out to their scout ID and give them a little recognition for that hard work. So that’s an important part of sustaining that interest. And then another thing we’ve gone to, you know, the CRPT workshops are pretty formal. You know, there’s registration, there’s a day it happens, there’s the moment it ends. There’s evaluations given, there’s certificates, you’re done, you move on. Whereas with HMS, it’s a lot more hand-holding, and a lot more informal events. We’re doing Monitoring Mondays when we’ll go out with whoever wants to come, and we’ll go monitor some sites together as a group. And also, Emily Jane in our office has been doing some Friday monthly monitoring events. So I think those informal things keep it social and keep it a little easier. Because a lot of people really want to help, and really do something. They need a little more encouragement on where to go. Or they really like doing it together. And we shouldn’t be surprised as anthropologists that people like social behavior.
Roller: Here’s a question on the chat. What do you find to be the biggest hook to keeping scouts keeping with the project?
Miller: Yeah, I think it’s that fun and recognition. I think just going out and seeing what they’re doing means a lot to them and validates the hard work that they’re putting into it. I think connecting them with other experts has been really fun, too. We’ve seen like through our summits that volunteers will come to that and we’ll connect them with other researchers who are doing different things in different areas. And then it’s surprising and delightful to see how they will cross-migrate to other events or other subject areas. And I think that’s something that they get a lot out of that, too. For example, we’ll connect them with a field school in their area, or with another kind of lecture or symposium. And then it just gives them, I guess, more validation with in that community of what they’re doing, whey they’re doing it and how they can share it with others.
Roller: I have a question. In terms of monitoring, where are your gaps? Do you have issues with access to private lands? Or federal lands? State lands? Any obstacles you have to filling in that four thousand sites? (laughter)
Miller: Yeah. There’s a lot. The hardest ones are the ones that aren’t mapped in the right place. But in looking at our numbers, we’re looking at majority, probably 75 percent are on state-owned land. But I think the state is really happy how many are on private land. A lot of the ones on federal land we have largely just left alone due to permitting. Or as we are invited in, we’ve done some monitoring Fridays at Canaveral, which have been really positive. And again, there are sites that are open and interpreted for the public. So we’re just treading carefully and moving these partnerships forward. I think initially they would just be postal sites that we’d be focused on. But to me, no site’s off the table. For one, the BEP here defines the coastal zone in Florida to be the entire state. So in a way, no site really is off the table. Plus, if there’s a lot of retreat or a lot of migration of people from the coast, they will be going into those inland areas. So I think that it’s interesting to look at the map and see there is a focus on the coast, but it’s getting filled in in other areas as well. And there’s so many sites just on state land to be looking at. But I am really proud of the city and county-owned sites that we have close relationships with a lot of those planning offices, and that has helped assist opportunities. The aquatic reserves have been a very big part of the program from the start. And to answer Teresa’s question, too, about the best hook, I think it’s also just being outside. There’s so much that’s inside that people are getting talked to our lectured at, which there’s a need and a time for that. But you know, we can go by paddleboard and go monitor the first lighthouse area here. That’s a really cool experience, and people like to get out there and feel like they’re contributing to cultural resources here in Florida. But doing it while they’re mountain biking or hiking or doing a coastal walk. I think that’s the biggest hook that we have as an advantage.
Roller: Cool. Very cool. Any other questions out there? How often do you have inadvertent discoveries during monitoring? Have you had many of those?
Miller: It feels like all the time where we’ll go out to do just a bundle of sites together with a group. And things aren’t where they’re supposed to be. We’re finding things that we didn’t know were there. So that’s been kind of an interesting like secondary part of housekeeping is how to keep up with those things that need to be recorded. I’m trying to think of other things. I guess we’ve also just been really surprised, I think, without really taking a hard work with a lot of these sites before. We didn’t know how fast they were changing. Shell Bluff is a perfect example. We’ve never had a bad day at Shell Bluff. It’s always just the highlight of our week when we can make it out to that site. But it freaks you out how rapidly it’s changing. Nothing was in the same place as it was last time, or bumping into new things out there that weren’t in before. So it does take a close relationship with the state to share that information, and to figure out what to do when you really can’t pick anything up. We have these cards now. We kept showing people the slide of the artifact and they’re in your hand. Oh, look, we found this. And I thought what a horrible message showing people the activity of normalizing picking up these things. So we got a little smarter and made some scales that we put on plastic-coated cards and hand those out to our volunteers so that that will encourage the artifacts, just don’t even pick them up. Just leave them down there. Take a photo. You’ve got a scale, you’ve got a north arrow, you’ve got some information. And just keep that information in the database rather than moving anything out of place as they shouldn’t be doing.
Roller: Can you upload photos to the original Google data?
Miller: No. The Google Doc at the end, when you got to the end, it said please submit photos to HMS@FPAN.us. Those photos, and still today those photos, come in triplicate to me and two other people in our office so we can make sure they’re downloaded in a way that makes sense with the filing of the Google Doc forms. We go back through and checkmark if photos were received, how many, try and track them that way. But it’s been definitely easier with Arches when people can self-upload to that. And we’re hoping that Arches, they are developing the app to go along with the software so that they’ll be able to have increased usability in the field, be able to upload those photos in the field.
Roller: And geolocation? Is that—
Miller: Yeah, and some is integrated into the photos already when they, if they’re sent in. We had a couple of scouts that figured out apps that were really helpful that would put the coordinate and the scale and the north arrow already into the photos as they were taking them. So things got pretty sophisticated for just the Google form. But it will be easier with Arches if people can load them in that way.
Roller: Great. Any other questions out there? I hear someone typing. [pause] One last question, I guess, is do you have plans for HMS scouts in the future? Do you have any hopes to ramp up certain areas? Or maybe take in a stronger role of the scouts at the top, in terms of giving them responsibilities or leadership roles?
Miller: They’re really great suggestions, and some of them are master naturalists, also. So they’re kind of coordinating with those groups and wondering if they can go out and help arrange activities. And given the right park, given the right scout, it’s a go, it works really well. We did write a grant last year to get more equipment and help with database QRQC. The secretary of state for Florida individually took it out of its order and plunked it from, I think it was 13th all the way down to 54th. So that wasn’t great. This year, we resubmitted. We’re ranked even higher. But I’m not really sure with impacts of Hurricane Michel, understandably the state budget’s very strapped. But what we were hoping to do was add 3D scanning, some LIDAR pucks, some tighter monitoring of the sites while working with the public to show them how these things work. And then again, get a little more firmer grasp on our databases that are starting to sprawl a little bit from us. So it takes constant vigilance. I’ll say one positive step is the coordinating center purchased a FARO scanner for us outright. So we went and [unclear] it feels like playing, but using that to record sites that were identified back in the ‘80s as being very fragile and trying to stabilize those sites. So we went, even last week, we were in a community that doesn’t often get a lot of attention in Florida, and had the scanner out there, and talking and working with the public. And while we were there, it was just a very enriching experience. And it goes to show how much you can do with even that focal point of that piece of equipment. It drew people to us like a flame, (laughs) coming over. And that’s the kind of engagement I really enjoy, too. It’s one end of the spectrum to talk and share with professionals or other preservationists or planners. But then being down in the ground with people just walking up and asking what you’re doing is just another really important part of outreach and getting the information across. So I think in our next steps, too, we want to just be careful to balance and make sure we are serving as much of Florida as we can, and not have blind spots of what public needs some attention or service. And just try and reach out to as many people as possible.
Roller: Great, great. Yeah, I really like the assessment with the civic engagement pyramid, where you assess the different levels of engagement, including the very top and the very bottom. They’re very important. Just checking the website and learning about this is an important part of engagement. As important, maybe, as the folks, small group of folks, that are passionate.
Miller: Indeed. Indeed.
Roller: Okay. Great. Thanks, everyone. Thank you so much, Sarah for your presentation. Fantastic. Thanks for kicking off the webinar, ArcheoThursday Webinar Series for 2018/2019. Next week we have another talk already. In one week, Bernard Means is going to talk about 3D scanning and printing and its usage in archeologic projects. Another great connection to archeological responses technology, new uses for technology for engaging the public and new research uses as well. So thank you again, Sarah. Thank you for tuning in, everyone out there, and thank you for your great questions. And I will see you next time. Thanks, Sarah.
Miller: Thank you, bye bye.
Roller: Bye bye.
56:08 [End Recording]
Description
Sarah Miller, 12/6/2018
Duration
56 minutes, 8 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
12/06/2018
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