Preservation Technology Podcasts (U.S. National Park Service)

Episodes

November 7, 2023

141. Archaeological Field School at Kisatchie National Forest

Transcript

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst:  Hi, my name is Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst and I'm here with:  Erlend Johnson: Erlend Johnson, I'm the project director of this project for the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, Louisiana Public Archaeology Lab.  Matt Helmer: And I'm Matt Helmer, I'm the Forest Archaeologist for Kisatchie National Forest and an affiliate professor with Louisiana State University.  Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Thank you all for letting us come and visit the field school today. I guess you could start off by telling us a little bit about this site and why there's a field school happening here.  Erlend Johnson:  OK, so there are a couple of sites that we're at right now. They were first identified about 20 years ago in 2003, by a phase one survey by Pan American Associates. They did a number of shovel tests, and this site was considered to be especially relevant because they were coming up with a large area and large densities of artifacts. They were finding as many as 500 flakes in a 50 by 50 centimeter unit, and they were finding a variety of points. There's a possible base of a Clovis, there's San Patrice points, and there are a number of earlier points as well. So, there's a whole spectrum of remains all the way from the historic period to possibly Paleoindian, and there are three large concentrations. This was deemed by the Forest Service to be one of the more relevant sites to study. That’s why we came here and why we decided to do a field school here. I don't know if Matt has any other things to add to that.  Matt Helmer: This particular site that we're working on was part of a large hurricane relief project that we initiated after hurricanes Laura and Delta significantly impacted western Louisiana, almost flattening the entire district here. The upturned trees were everywhere, and this district has thousands of archaeological sites, and the archaeological sites were particularly hard hit as trees fall down and basically the root balls pull up archaeological material to the surface and rip archaeological contexts out. We basically put together a relief request in association with all of our other resource areas for the Forest Service, like salvage timber and all of our other resources. We put some of the money that we received from Congress towards both archaeological salvage that we're doing here as well as doing archaeological testing on some of our impacted sites to see if they're eligible for the National Register of Historic Places or not. This site immediately, as Erlend mentioned, stood out to us because it's about 100 acres in size, combined. It’s broken up into two sides, but it's really one very large site. We’re on the Drakes Creek drainage here, it basically follows a big floodplain. We're on a high point just above that, just a few miles from the Whiskey Chitto River. It's a very important location that would have been a great place to set up a camp or possibly have a village site. We have the entire sequence of occupation, as Erlend mentioned, of the peopling of the Americas, potentially from 13,000 years ago and the Ice Age, all the way through up to the present day. That’s why we chose this particular site. In addition to the hurricane damage here, there is a significant amount of looting. It's illegal to excavate on public lands. This particular site was heavily looted because of, I assume, the materials that the looters were finding. In fact, we convicted a looter on this site a couple of years ago. Combined between the storm damage and the looting, we really thought we've got to get some information and some salvage out of this archaeological site and get some attention towards it for preservation before it's completely lost. Erlend Johnson: What we did today was we brought one last unit down to the level where the post molds were. We trowel cleaned everything, we sprayed it down, we took some pictures, we did a drawing, and what we're starting to do now is we're starting to excavate below the level of the post molds. We're going to move our way back and we're going to bisect see their shapes and all that. We're also just curious to see how much further down this goes. At least from what we're seeing here, this is Late Archaic possibly, maybe Woodlands. Even in one of the shovel tests close to here, there was a scraper that looked to be maybe Early Archaic or older. In phase one, in this area, they came up with a San Patrice point, which is Paleoindian to Early Archaic. They came up with another Paleoindian to Early Archaic point as well. I can't remember that off the top of my head. There might be some old stuff further down. That's what we're waiting to see. Matt Helmer: Post moles doesn't sound very exciting, but in this part of Louisiana, we're very far from the Red River Valley, the Mississippi River Valley, where you typically have larger, more permanent village-type settlements. Most of, if not all the archaeological digs that have happened in this part of western Louisiana, have not come up with evidence of more permanent occupation. It all looks like small, ephemeral campsites where people are just coming through (short-term campsites) and then they leave. We don't have a lot of evidence for intensive occupation. One of the significances of a post mold is that shows us that there was at least some sort of permanent structure here that would lend us to believe that this could have been a more permanent, a hamlet, a village site, something like that. This would be the first of its kind that far out of the Mississippi River Valley or the Red River Valley. So that's what we're really trying to better understand, here is the intensity of occupation as well as the time depth. You know the chronology of occupation, too. Erlend Johnson: So, at the University of Louisiana Lafayette, we've given students a lot of opportunities to work with NRCS (Natural Resource Conservation Service) and do phase one shovel testing. A number of the people that are working here with us now have participated in that sort of research. There have been other field schools in the past. A couple of years ago, there was a field school with the Coushatta (Tribe of Louisiana). This is a pretty unique opportunity to do large horizontal excavations. They’ve taken part and learned all the different steps from setting out units, to screening, identifying material, to how to dig with a shovel, how to trowel clean. As we've gone along, we've integrated them into work, and they've gotten opportunities to try their hand at different things. This is a great opportunity for people to learn more about Louisiana archaeology, one of the few. Evergreen (Field School), of course, is another very different sort of opportunity that's going on right now for that. Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Will there be opportunities like this in the future?  Matt Helmer: We've excavated with this project less than 1% of this site. I would foresee whether for an academic investigation, or Forest Service work down the line, potentially. We are moving to a second phase of this particular project with the agreement that we have with UL Lafayette, and we're going to be moving to another area that was heavily impacted by the hurricane on the east side of our forest. Where there's potentially new mound sites that are undiscovered as well as a series of Course Creek village sites. Yeah, there is certainly more to be done here as sometimes you go home with more questions than answers, but I certainly hope that this will ignite a renewed interest in this area. Typically, we're doing Section 106 compliance. We’re doing surveys to identify sites and avoid them. We're not really investing in actually studying the sites that that we manage and steward. One of the great things about this project for me has been to see the positive reception that we've received from Forest Service leadership and others that they really see, “Oh, wow. You guys aren't just out there digging for little pieces of flakes.” You know, they don't really understand what we do, so this has been a great opportunity, not only to train students in the next generation of Louisiana archaeologists, but for us to show all of the other folks that work in the Forest Service that this is the significance of the resources that we manage. These are folks that we work with every day—in silviculture, fire, biology, botany—for them to better understand what we do [is rewarding]. Hopefully in the future, there will be more support for projects like this from Land Management agencies. Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: How can we keep up with the progress of this project?  Matt Helmer: Well, after this UL Lafayette is going to do a laboratory portion of their field school. Students will also have an opportunity to see the full circle from the excavation portion of the project and the design, all the way through to the laboratory analysis. Dr. Rees (of UL Public Archaeology Lab) and Dr. Johnson will both be putting together a technical report based on this work. Fortunately, the Society for American Archaeology is meeting in New Orleans this April, which is timely for us. We hope to be able to have students present posters. We'll have talks and presentations as you know, it's still going to be pretty preliminary. It takes a long time for us to get from excavation, to analysis, to write up, to really make sense of what we're looking at here. That would be the big the next big event, an SAA poster session potentially, or working into the LAS (Louisiana Archaeological Society) session that we talked about, and then after the technical report, we'll look into publications that we can publish based on this work, potentially including a book. We've got a lot of ideas in the works. One of the things that I'd like to do is increase what we call interpretation. So [this would be] something along some of our hiking trails on this district or recreation sites where we can put some of the information out here for the public. This is all public land, and a lot of people are really interested in the archaeology of this area. We hope to be able to put some informational panels and things like that out on some of our trails so that people know the history of the place that they're coming to recreate in. Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Awesome. Thank you all for talking with me. And I wish you all luck with the rest of the work here.  Matt Helmer: Yeah. Thank you. Erlend Johnson: Thank you.  Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Can't wait to hear more. 

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst speaks with Erlend Johnson, from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, Louisiana Public Archaeology Lab, and Matt Helmer, Forest Archaeologist for Kisatchie National Forest, about archaeological explorations at Kisatchie National Forest.

October 24, 2023

140. Organic Residue Analysis of Archaeological Pottery

Transcript

Sadie Whitehurst: Hi, I'm Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst, and I'm here today with:

Nora Reber: Nora Reber.

Sadie Whitehurst: We're going to talk about Nora’s book, which is a guidebook called An Archaeologist’s Guide to Organic Residues in Pottery. It's written in a way that really is digestible for the archaeologist with little experience and chemistry. It’s got tons of amazing case studies, visuals, and examples, and it's just explained quite well. I'm excited to hear a little bit about how this book came to be and her perspectives on it. Nora, could you speak a little bit to what inspired you to make this guidebook, and what pulled you into studying organic residues in archaeology?

Nora Reber: Thank you for all the kind words. I guess that’s kind of two questions. I first got involved in residue analysis sort of almost by accident in undergraduate. I started out actually as an anthropology major, and I sort of got kind of sucked into chemistry and learned how to use a GCMS, which is a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, which is the primary chemical instrument used to analyze residues, as an undergraduate, and kind of got interested in the concept of residues at that time and then continued that in graduate school and enjoyed it for a variety of reasons. It's really interesting problem solving. It's an interesting body of knowledge. The book I actually wrote after doing residues for a fairly long time, but I got interested in doing it in part because people kept asking me the same questions over and over at conferences and in emails, and I was always happy to answer them. But it seemed to me that it would be nice for people to have a reference ready to hand to answer these questions. Then, I was approached by University of Alabama Press, and, you know, they asked if I'd be interested in writing a book on the topic of all those questions people have asked me at conferences through the years and what I think archaeologists should kind of know as a basic introduction to residue analysis, what it does, what it doesn't do, that kind of thing. I sort of thought about it and I thought, you know, I kind of would be.

Sadie Whitehurst: What are some of the questions that people were asking?

Nora Reber: The first question people usually ask is, can you detect this one specific thing? Can you detect nuts, or can you detect fish, or can you detect this one specific type of fish? And the answer is usually a little bit disappointing to the archaeologists because you can detect fish in general, but you can't detect exactly what sort you've got there or what sort was processed. Nuts are tricky. I'm pretty sure they're there in a lot of North American residues, but you can't say for certain, generally speaking. You can't tell the difference between, say, deer or any other meat animal. Usually, people want to know about specific resources and usually the answer is quite disappointing. So that's kind of too bad.

Sadie Whitehurst: You can never get very specific, can you? You can just get closer to the right answer, a little bit closer to getting a full picture.

Nora Reber: That's a really good way of thinking about it. Because of sort of the chemistry, you can get closer to the true picture with some resources than others. For example, if you're not working in North America and you're interested in dairy, the results on dairy are really good Using isotopic work on residues. But since I work mostly in the southeastern United States, I don't get to answer that question, which is kind of too bad. But we can detect isotopically unique things often in most unglazed pottery. That's where residues really absorb kind of the best. From what we can tell, everything kind of absorbs and mixes together. When we're looking at a residue, we could be looking at fats and oils or their byproducts from everything ever cooked in a vessel over its entire lifetime. And you know, that could depend. It could be they started using the vessel and then someone accidentally dropped it, and it was used for a month or two. Or we could be looking at someone's absolutely favorite pot that was used for, you know, five, six, ten years, even more. But we can't really tell very well. People have done some interesting things with wear patterns and so on. The best guess is that when we do a residue, we're looking at things from everything ever cooked in the pot over its entire use lifetime. It's as though someone took an average of all the pots in your kitchen and tried to figure out what you were eating.

Sadie Whitehurst: That's a really interesting way to think about it. Do you have a favorite case study from the book?

Nora Reber: In a lot of ways, my favorite case study is probably the one that was least helpful, which was the Florida shell cup. That was a really unusual case study within the book. It’s kind of atypical in that it's the only non-pottery case study. It's based around a shell cup, you know, those big busy-con shell cups you get on the eastern seaboard. This one was from Florida, and we were specifically looking for black drink, which has a unique compound in it for this area. The biomarker caffeine and methylxanthines which are theobromine and theophylline. Nancy White in Florida had excavated, and she covered it up immediately. She packed it up all full of the soil, put it in a covered box, which is amazing. We didn't have any of those problems with caffeine contamination from open shelving that you get. We had the dirt from inside it, so that was great. Normally you can't trust non pottery vessels for residues because in pots, when they're fired, it basically burns out all the residue, so it starts fresh. But shells are made by sea creatures which are all full of lipids. Shells actually have their own lipids. But those, you know, sea creatures, don't have caffeine in themselves. So, any caffeine we found in the shell cup couldn't have come from the original shellfish but must have come from processing with caffeine. It was a really interesting little study and we developed a method together. Me and DiDi El-Behaedi, who was an undergraduate at the time, got together with a chemist at UNCW with a good HPLCMS, which is better for caffeine than the technique I usually use. I got up there and we extracted our cup, and we ran it and there was caffeine in it, and we were so thrilled! And then we ran the blank and it also had caffeine in it. And so, we knew that some form of caffeine contamination had somehow got into the blank during our laboratory processing. And to this day, I don't know where it came from.

To this day I (A) don't quite know what we did wrong and (B) don't really know if the shell cup was used to process black drink or not. The reason it's one of my favorite examples is because it shows the importance of blanks and the importance of keeping really good track of contamination. So that's why I think it’s probably my favorite example, even though it was a truly crushing moment, you have that potential in any residue. You have to keep very tight control on possible contamination. You're always looking for sunscreen and bug spray and we're often finding it. We run laboratory blanks in parallel with all of our archaeological residues. If they're not clean, we have to stop and scrub the lab down and figure out what happened, and if we're lucky, go back and rerun everything. If you've got a sherd that you know you're going to take for residue analysis, you should wrap it in tin foil in the field. You should probably refrain from washing it if possible, but that almost never happens. Like I do my own excavations and it doesn't always happen with me either. You know, sometimes I get back to the lab and I do collect—if I'm doing a prehistoric site, I do collections for residue in the field. But, you know, sometimes I get back to the lab, we wash things, and, you know, there's what I missed in the field, and I still want to take it, so I do. But yeah, it's sort of an increasing order of contamination. You know, you can take it from the field in paper bags and then wash it. That's not too bad. You can keep it in plastic bags. You'll have plastic in it for sure because the plasticizers just essentially soak within the pot. Even if you draw them all off the surface, there's always plasticizers in that case. But luckily most plastic bags are pretty limited. They just have a few plasticizers, no fats or oils. We just kind of discount all those plasticizers. Trickier is if they're labeled, particularly with Wite-Out and ink and nail polish and all that. We can work around it but we’re working around more things at that point. Plasticizers, the ink, the white out, the nail polish; the list is kind of getting longer there. And then the real problem for us, which is really hard to judge actually, is if the people in the field had a really creamy drippy sunscreen on, particularly one of those natural ones. Normally a biomarker is a compound that's unique to something. So, you know, caffeine maybe a biomarker for black drink in the southeastern United States or maybe a biomarker for cocoa in America and so on. And there are biomarkers for, you know, sunscreen too. All those active ingredients you read when you're reading the back of your sunscreen, that's your biomarkers generally. DEET is like a lovely biomarker for bug spray, super convenient for us. Now we can usually tell if we've got a sherd and it's got biomarkers for sunscreen and there's all kinds of one fatty acid just way out of balance, then it's probably from the sunscreen. Now people put natural things in the sunscreen. That's actually the worst, because if they're modern synthetic fragrances, then obviously they can't be archaeological. That's very easy. But natural fragrances and natural things, well, being natural could have come from the archaeological record. If it's a fragrance, we can usually tell it's modern because most fragrance compounds will wash out of the sherd archaeologically, and so we never see them. But yeah, it gets kind of trickier with those issues. Sadie Whitehurst: There are so many factors for contamination, and it sounds like you just really need to build experience in this field to be able to interpret your results.

Nora Reber: Interpretation is really the toughest part of residue analysis for sure. Sort of a weird body of knowledge. Most chemists do, synthesis so we can get along with the natural products chemist really well. But all their stuff is recent, like nice fresh plants, but all of our stuff has been sitting in the ground for several hundred years usually. The closest thing is really an organic geochemist. Their area of interest tends to be in a more narrow range of compounds. It's its own particular sort of chemistry, like a cross between organic geochemistry and natural products. And in terms of contamination, I find it really most useful to come up with a percentage. If you can work out what percentage of the residue is contaminated, then you can say to yourself, well, that's pretty high. I'm worried about this residue. I don't think I should interpret it as much confidence or, wow, that's really low. I'm happy with this.

Sadie Whitehurst: Do you have any advice for archaeologists or chemists interested in studying organic archaeological residues?

Nora Reber: I would say read the publications and read my book. If you're really interested in going further with it, apprenticeship training is probably the most useful way of doing it. It really helps to go into someone's lab and kind of do the work, which is very easily teachable in a couple of weeks. And then the interpretation, which is harder and takes a lot more time. It's a pretty young subfield, but traditionally, you know, in the 20 year, 30 year tradition of the field, that's how people are trained. They essentially go into other people's labs and do apprenticeships there.

Sadie Whitehurst: If there's anything that you hope people take away from reading your book, what would that be?

Nora Reber: I would say the residues aren't magic. Like we can't we have some little wand and tell you people are cooking rabbits or whatever you want them to be cooking. But it is really useful. It's worth doing. If you're lucky, you can come up with some unique resources if they're isotopically unique and it allows sort of a big picture interpretation of what people were cooking in their pots. So that can be really helpful. There's a lot of data there, but it may not be quite as specific as people generally want, you know, when they first think about it.

Sadie Whitehurst: Thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge and your experience with making this book. How can we keep up with you?

Nora Reber: I have a lot of research going on right now. I mostly work, you know, collaborating with archaeologists since I've been largely excavating on historic sites these past few years. But I'm working with Ahana Ghosh at the Indian Technical Institute of Gandhinagar, which is actually some residues from outside the United States, which is kind of different for me. So she's working on an Indus Valley Project. I'm working with Emily Bartz on some Stallings pottery from Georgia, so that's a lot of materials. I'm working with Tim Baumann on some experimental sherds looking for beans. And then I'm also working with Paul Eubanks of Middle Tennessee University on some salt pans.

Sadie Whitehurst: Thank you so much for talking to us again and for letting us have a little conversation about your book!

Nora Reber: Okay! Thank you, really enjoyed it.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst speaks with Nora Reber about her book An Archaeologist’s Guide to Organic Residues in Pottery

October 10, 2023

139. Southern Pine Beetles and Archeological Site Modeling

Transcript

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst Hi, I'm Sadie Schoeffler, and I'm here today with:

Tad Britt Tad Britt, and our guest today is:

Zac Selden Zac Selden, from the Heritage Research Center at Stephen F. Austin State University.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst Thank you, guys, alright. Today we're going to talk a little bit about Zac's grant through NCPTT. He's going to tell us a little bit about his research: Archaeological Site Modeling for the Sabine National Forest in Advance Preparation of the Southern Pine Beetle. If you would, tell us a little bit about your project.

Zac Selden I think this really all spun up after I met Tad and went to a predictive modeling seminar up at the University of Arkansas. There, after [the seminar, I] met with the Forest Service folks and we had discussed different ways of modeling the Davy Crockett National Forest at that time. While all of that was spinning up, I also had been in conversation with Tad about what's the best way to go about predictive modeling, what are the best techniques, what can we use, and what is the cutting edge. We worked then to use a bibliometric survey to identify the tools and techniques that would kind of give us the edge we needed to be competitive. Identified the software and the methods that we wanted to use, and once we had all of that ready, [we] moved the collections from the national forests and grasslands in Texas to my lab where they were documented, and we've been chasing predictive modeling kind of ever since. This particular project was designed knowing that we have a native species that will impact the forest and the forest responds to that impact in a particular way. However, to date, they've been managing it mostly through informed guesswork, and if we had a model like the one we're trying to build, that would help them to better manage those properties and hopefully make a more data-driven decision in terms of how they manage those situations where potential cultural heritage resources are impacted.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst Could you tell us a little bit about the Southern Pine Beetle and what it does?

Zac Selden It eats trees [laughter]. It heavily impacts pine, as you can imagine, and because of climate change, the range of that beetle is expanding. Where it was this traditional American southeastern pest that you know occurs, it kind of flash mobs a forest and then decides, “alright, well, we're going to move west or we're going to move east,” wherever it starts that particular season. Well, now they're moving west. They hit Mississippi, I think 2-3 years ago and are in Louisiana now. The goal is to have the Sabine national forests model up and rolling before they are impacted by the southern pine beetle. They have now spread upward to northern New York and now New Jersey. It has become a much larger issue and hopefully, at least it's our hope, that once we have the model built in the code and everything is ready, we can make that exportable to other forests, other properties where they could use it.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst How does the process of building a predictive model work?

Zac Selden So, it begins with sites. The site information is just XY data. We wanted to know what variables we should use in that model, and that took several conversations, not only back and forth with Tad originally, but then with the National Forests and Grasslands personnel. The personnel that were on the Davy Crockett helped us to pick what they saw as environmental variables that correlated with site locations. For that particular piece, we were looking at proximity to water, elevation, soil, and vegetation. For the Davy Crockett model, we threw absolutely everything at it just to see what's stuck, and there are ways to get the model through using a bootstrap method. It gives us a means of identifying those variables that most closely articulate with your sites. When we use those that were most impactful as a means of really kind of trying to squeeze as much accurate information out of the model as possible without going too far if you go too far, it's called overfitting, so you get these high accuracy levels, but it's not generalizable. The goal with the Davy Crockett was design, research, and development and kind of really tweak and learn, as a group. We wanted it to be useful for predicting prehistoric sites generally, and historic sites, and then they were going to use a model for all sites for more CRM-based endeavors. For me though, so I guess it's twofold. You know, any kind of predictive model is going to have applications in applied research, which is what we're doing there. My own kind of selfish motivation was to look at how these resources change through time for the Caddo period. I haven't made a whole lot of headway there admittedly, but it is something that's on my radar, particularly with this model, because I think that it's really the first test of how generalizable DE David Crockett model really is.

Tad Britt Zac, can you elaborate on the maximum entropy model approach that you take?

Zac Selden So, we started with a GUI, a graphical user interface, where everything was point and click, and we have since evolved since Maxent went open source and is now available through R. We wanted the code to be completely exportable and user-friendly to the extent possible so that folks can plug and play that model anywhere that they have these kinds of resources and these kinds of risks. I think the crux of that would then be what variables you plug in, it's going to differ in every location, but the algorithm that we're using, it's a machine learning procedure. It gives us a means of using 80 or 70% of the sample to really define our predictions, and then the remaining 20 or 30% to then test those predictions and get a good idea about how accurate they are. We're using these to make predictions for the forest. One of the side projects that I've been kind of slowly whittling away on is, is it possible to then look at maybe something as simple as mounds? Where do we have mounds that are occurring in the woodland period, deformative early cattle period, middle, then late historic, and how does land use change? Do we see the intensification of populations around certain resources, and do we see the movement of people across space? We absolutely do. I think that raises a whole bunch of questions about if they're moving, what are they taking with them? What new tools are they developing along the way and how do those tools evolve as well? Pairing this I think with other advanced tools, maybe geometric morphometrics, can be useful in looking at not only the evolution of how folks use space, but maybe the evolution of the tools that they took with them, and the ideas that they took with them. I think there's a there's a lot of different things that you could plug into it, and it could be anybody's passion project. If you wanted to look at Munsell colors, if you wanted to look at the geology, maybe the correlation of a certain environmental variable or a certain lithic. Do you have obsidian occurring in one place and not in another, and then did those folks move across that boundary? We definitely have boundaries in the Caddoa region that we know exist, but mapping movement has been a challenge. Having a tool like this where we could not only look at and kind of better understand that movement but also, in the end, get a model that would tell us those regions where the recipe is right for other resources to exist, gives us a means of better managing maybe those invisible resources that perhaps we haven't discovered yet. The ultimate goal: I guess the production of reliable knowledge would have to be number one, and for that knowledge to be useful for the folks that come behind to be able to use it and to maybe build upon it to better understand guesswork that we're putting into understanding this patchwork that is the past. I would like to say thanks to NCPTT for helping by funding the project. I do need to give a shout-out to the National Forest and Grasslands in Texas who funded the fieldwork component of all of this. We're not only building the model, but we're going out to test those models. That is exciting and fun and hopefully will help to mitigate some of the survey bias through the years.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst Absolutely! Ok well, thank you, Zac.

Zac Selden Thank you. Tad Britt Thanks.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst talks with Dr. Zac Selden about his NCPTT Grant research on archaeological site modeling for the Sabine National Forest in advance preparation of the southern pine beetle.

September 26, 2023

138. Preserving History in Maison Creole de Freetown in Lafayette, Louisiana

Transcript

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Hi, this is Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst, and I'm here today with:

Erica Fox: Erica Melancon Fox, I'm the executive director of Maison Creole de Freetown in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Thank you, Erica. Can you give us some background information on how the Maison Freetown Community Center came to be?

Erica Fox: Mason Creole de Freetown was a vision of mine for probably close to 12 years now, but it just recently manifested within the last year and a half. I always saw a need for a Cultural Center and representation, especially for African Americans, in Lafayette. It was birthed out of a vision for seeing an African American Heritage Center in Lafayette.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: I know the location of Maison Freetown de Creole is very significant. Could you tell us a little bit about why the location is important and what it means for the community surrounding it?

Erica Fox: Well, first of all, having had family that grew up in the area, I'd learned about Freetown through my family members, and was always enamored by the stories that they told of community. As I started to research more about Freetown, because it was something I had to learn as well, I learned that this was just an impactful community of African Americans and has been so for over 100 years. So, it seems like a great starting place to tell the story of black people in Lafayette.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: What about the role that the Freetown neighborhood played in the civil rights movement and a sense of community?

Erica Fox: So, the organization that we established, True Friends Society of Lafayette, is actually the grandchild, if you will, of an actual existing benevolence social group called True Friends Society that was established in the late 1800s in Freetown. This group was very important to other newly emancipated African Americans because they helped, one, in the uprisings and thwarting massacres, they helped keep people safe. They were true friends to each other. So, during a time when there was an ugly time in our history of the city, they helped to keep their African American brethren safe. They also provided insurance policies and burial policies for people of color. They did fish fries if someone was late on rent or needed help with making payments for bills. So, this organization was always there for each other and we continue that legacy one by reestablishing the organization, naming ourselves that and maintaining the Center.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: That sounds like it’s going to be very important for the legacy of Lafayette, and Louisiana, or the country as a whole.

Erica Fox: Absolutely. We have right now through the Equal Justice Initiative and Move the Mindset, which is a civil rights organization here in Lafayette, two displays. They are soil remembrance reminders of some places where African Americans were actually lynched in Lafayette Parish on display. That was one of the missions of True Friends Society, was to try to keep those occurrences from happening, but unfortunately, they still did in this area. So, we do have a display right now that is just a remembrance of that time so that we don't repeat those situations.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: What other sorts of things are happening in Maison Freetown de Creole that promote the initiative of the Center?

Erica Fox: Well, we just got off Mardi Gras, or Mardi Gras just ended, and the historical Mardi Gras association was first established here. For the last 65 years it’s been in existence. And so, we currently have some of the Mardi Gras Black Mascara regalia here. So, people that attend can see the craftsmanship of Mardi Gras costuming here in the Center. It also ties back to the history that the Mardi Gras Black Association actually started here in Freetown as well.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: What are some things we can learn about through your Center about the Maison Freetown site and the Freetown neighborhood as a whole?

Erica Fox: The neighborhood as a whole, I'd love for more people, especially our youth, to learn and know that this was a place where African Americans pretty much picked themselves up by the bootstraps, so a lot of entrepreneurialism was established here. Businesses were flourishing at certain times in the history of Freetown, and we kind of lost some of that. Like, some of those places are either no longer here or abandoned. One of our missions is to, one, put up plaques where we can show and designate those spaces and use them as educational tools so that people can learn about the impact that African Americans contributed not just to Freetown but to Lafayette as a whole. So, this space currently has a gift shop, which is also a Co-op made up of indigenous black people of color. It's a BIPOC store of handmade artisans, which also ties back to the history of entrepreneurship in the community. It's providing an opportunity for black small businesses, and then again, we want to celebrate those spaces throughout the community and the neighborhood that people may not know about- those hidden histories. We've had everything from a dance hall, places on the negro motorist registry, we’ve had barbershops and grocery stores, and just places of celebration. I feel like people need to know. I know for some it may just seem like another grocery store, but when you are part of a community that everything was taken away from you – you weren't allowed to read, you weren't allowed to write, you weren't allowed to vote, you weren't allowed to have a business – those firsts mean a lot to this community. So, it’s important that we celebrate those, what may seem like small wins to some. It's major in the African American community.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: So, you're doing a lot to share the history we have recorded already and showcase the continuation of the history today. But you're also involved in a couple of initiatives to add to the historical record, the archeological record, to provide more documentation of what Freetown was in the past and how it evolved to what it is today. What are some of the projects that have been going on to document that history?

Erica Fox: So, one that we're working on right now is documenting the language. I feel like that's one that's threatened, if you will. For me, our family's first language was French. And in the African American community, many of those working with the farms and the tenant farmers, they came from that background where they first spoke French before English. I think it’s important to tell that story and to hopefully keep it from dying. So, language is a project we're working on. We have Creole French tables being held here in the Center so that the elders that do continue to speak that old language if you will, can teach it to those interested in learning, and maybe brush up on some that may have heard it like myself in, you know, my family for years and years, but our grandparents didn't pass it on to us. It was their code, if you will, to speak with each other. But yeah, now I'm having an opportunity to learn and reconnect with my history through the language.

Another project we're working on is taking back the literary importance. So, we have a bookstore that we're going to establish so that we can highlight some authors, black authors, and poets that are writing and providing us a safe space for books that highlight African American culture, and that again is important because we are at a time when African American history and culture is being threatened. Especially in our libraries and public spaces, some of those books are being removed that have some type of basis that show cultural pride. We want to provide a safe space where people can still have access to those books, even if they're being taken out of school or library spaces. So, it's important to showcase a more diverse holistic view of the people that make up this community. Another project we are working on is our sound lab. We're building out a recording space where we are taking oral histories, first-person oral narratives, from community members. We started with those that are 80+, because we want to gather the stories of these culture bearers and these people that you know may not always be with us first. It's more critical to get the stories of the elders who lived here, experienced grandparents who you know, may have been some of those entrepreneurs we talked about, or remember different places in the neighborhood that may no longer still be standing. So, we're proud of our initiative to collect those oral stories in African American tradition. That's pretty much how we learned about things because you couldn't read or write, so oral stories were critical to our culture. So, we want to continue to gather those stories, and we've noticed there is a gap in some of those stories being documented. So, we definitely want our museum and our online presence to be that repository for those missing stories.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Why is it so important that the Community have such a huge role in documenting the oral history of this neighborhood?

Erica Fox: It's important for us to tell our own stories. Even when there is minimal documentation, it's always said from a lens outside of our community. It's just important for us to be able to tell our experiences that we've lived that aren't biased. Sometimes, when other people tell someone else's story, a lot gets lost. It's important to get these stories from the people that actually lived it. Going back to some of the places where some of the history of African Americans' may have been referenced, we weren't always seen as valuable. You'll see that in references where you'll see a family and maybe a black person in the picture. That person's never named or his occupation. It's just like, he's just in the picture. No one took the time to give that person relevance by giving a name or what he did. Same with some of the surveys or census records that aren't being found. You'll see a reference to a person, but there's no name, but it may say negro. We need to know who this person was. It's important to us, and I would hope that it's important to everyone to know about who these missing links to American history are.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Are there any other projects you want to mention?

Erica Fox: We want to start highlighting some of the African Americans that served in the military, especially those of the 6888 Battalion, during World War II. We have several members that lived in the community and nearby community that served to help solicit the mail during World War II, so our plan is to create an exhibit here that celebrates the African American contributions in the military. Then we are also doing for Juneteenth, we're telling the story of Marquis de Lafayette, who was a staunch abolitionist, and we want to tell the story of his efforts to end and abolish slavery. So, we're excited about those two exhibits coming up. It's also the bicentennial of Lafayette, so it couldn't have come at a better time.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: With all of the projects and initiatives and exhibits and all sorts of media that you're putting out, do you have an end goal with all your efforts that you're putting into Maison Freetown de Creole?

Erica Fox: The ultimate goal is just to have a safe space that the community can know is here and an activated space that they can utilize and share and learn, this was part of Ile Copal's sugar cane plantation, so some of the descendants that worked that land are still here. We want them to connect not just to that history but to know that they've been here a long time, and hopefully will be here a long time after. So much happened in this community that they can be proud of. You know, a lot of times, our story almost seems to start with slavery, but it did not. These people came from somewhere, and we want to be able to not only have a space where they can learn about that history, but also connect back to their African ancestry. So, we want this to be a loving space that folks can know about and utilize and learn about the rich past that is Freetown. Stay tuned. This space is always moving and evolving. We've got creatives that are showcasing their work, so we've got visual artists here on a regular basis and many exhibitions. People can learn more about us at maisonfreetown.org. That's our website. We just want them to stay tuned and find out what we're doing.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: And where is the museum located?

Erica Fox: Museum is located at 800 E Vermilion St. in Lafayette, Louisiana. It's very close to the downtown area.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst : Thank you, Erica. We're looking forward to seeing all your projects and future endeavors come to fruition.

Erica Fox: Thank you.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst speaks with Erica Fox about the work of the cultural and history center, Maison Creole de Freetown in Lafayette, Louisiana.

September 12, 2023

137. Activism in Archaeology

Transcript

Megan Reed: Thank you for joining us. My name is Megan Reed. I'm with the Preservation Technology Podcast and I am here with...

Dr. Christopher Barton: Dr. Christopher Barton. I'm an Associate Professor of Archeology at Francis Marion University.

Megan Reed: Thank you for joining us. Today, we're going to be talking about your book Trowels in the Trenches. Can you explain to me how you connected archeology as a tool for activism?

Dr. Christopher Barton: My work is not a standalone work. There's a lot of other archeologists who have done similar things. Randy McGuire, Megan Springate, Alexander Jones, have done a lot of similar work. When I was in graduate school, many, many, many years ago, I read Randy McGuire's, Archeology as Political Action, and it helped to inspire me and inspire the people I was working with to then develop a volume that had different contributors and people from all different parts of the world studying different times and different topics, and bringing them to discuss archeology and using archeology and our craft, or at least as a medium of social activism.

Megan Reed: Great. What motivates you to bring this book together?

Dr. Christopher Barton: Tenure. No, so it's a bunch of different things. I was raised in the Catholic household and in it, we were taught that I'm my brother's keeper, and those of us that were given certain privileges that we need to take care and we need to help and lift up people that have been less fortunate. In terms of archeology, I'm not trying to say that this is some type of white knight and shining armor. No, the idea here is that I have a unique set of skills, and with utilizing those skills, I can work with people, we can find meaning. The idea is me as an archeologist, I'm not the gatekeeper of the past. I don't turn around, and we don't go out to sites, and we don't excavate sites and look at sites and say, "All right, this is why it's important. This is why you should save it, and this is..." No, when you're talking to community stakeholders, when you talk to members of the public, the idea is that this is pragmatic, this conversation.

I live in South Carolina right now, and if you can't tell from this nasally accent, I'm from Jersey. I am a middle-aged white dude from Jersey, and if I'm going to come down here to South Carolina and I'm going to work in rural Pee Dee region where I'm at now, I don't hold a monopoly on that meeting. I don't know what it means to be from the Pee Dee, right? I sure as hell don't know what it means to be Black, but the idea is that I work with people as equal partners through this collaboration to go out and study the past.

What we try to do through this type of work is that we understand our situations where we are in the present today. How do we get here? Okay, well, we got here from issues that might have happened in the past. If we're talking about the Pee Dee, we're talking about slavery, we're talking about antebellum period, post bellum period, Jim Crow, all this. Well, if we can study that and understand these legacies, well how can we make that into a brighter future? How can we understand that this is the situation that we're in, and how we got here and how can we try to make positive changes to make it a better world for all people?

Megan Reed: That's a great point. For the book, did you find any difficulty in choosing which topics to talk about in the book?

Dr. Christopher Barton: I went back and forth with the editor, and I think it was one of the peer reviewers. In it, I was talking about the idea of archeologist social activism. A lot of people wanted archeology as social activism to be radical, and it very much should be radical. Literally, the title of the book of Trowels in the Trenches, the idea is that it was supposed to be like trench lawn, and this idea of this battling back and forth. And initially, that was what I wanted to run with, this idea of radical, punk rock archeology. But what I found out, at least in terms of my reading and talking with people in different fields and everything was that all archeology is a form of social activism.

You think of the archeologists who are out there working day in and day out, doing backbreaking labor, what are they doing? They're doing it so that they can try to inform us in the present about something happened in the past. Through that they're trying to teach us and trying to enlighten us to make again, us more informed in the future. So one of the difficulties that we had was basically arguing that, that all archeology is a form of social activism. Now granted, it's not all in the same medium as varying spectrum, so we kept getting back to was the idea that archeology social activism is not a product. There's no level of uniformity that comes out. Rather, it's a process, and it's a very, very varied process. There's a lot of trial and error that takes place. I always joke around that I've lost more hair becoming an archeologist than I ever did before. Could also be because I have a toddler, but here's the question for you. What do you think the role is of archeology?

Megan Reed: I feel like we are an educator to the public of things that happened in the past and how we can learn from it as a way of our educating our public and our fellow people about different aspects of the history, and how we can either improve upon it or learn from it in a way to take us forward to the future.

Dr. Christopher Barton: Yeah, and that's a great answer, but going up through undergraduate, graduate school, and all these other, you got a lot of old white guys like me that are teaching it, right? They were obsessed with lists, and they view archeology as essentially an inventory. This is what we found. We need to check off all these boxes, and that's what archeology is. But then over time, thankfully we've pushed that. We've had to work with people like Mark Leone and Ann Yentsch , and what happens is we start to push into talking about social meaning. What is the meaning that is imbued, that is both reflected and reconstructed through these types of objects? That was a foundational stepping point for us as archeologists.

I think we're in another stage now that we've understood that look, we understand about social meaning, we understand about lists, but we are in a very unique position as scientists, as craftspeople to utilize this knowledge that we've had to then use that as a form of social activism. Think about the work that archeologists can do. We can talk about issues of pollution. We can talk about issues of unequal access to healthcare, unequal access to food, all of these historical lineages that we can talk about and legacies that continue today, and we can have fundamental conversations.

With the book, we've basically created three ideas. One is can archeology be used for social activists? Do you think it can?

Megan Reed: Yeah, I think so, yes.

Dr. Christopher Barton: The idea to think that we as archeologists, at one site or in one site report most people aren't going to read except for some, is somehow going to take that, and that's going to create profound change. I don't think that's going to happen, and I think it would be beyond naive to think that a single individual is going to be able to create such positive change in the world. But the idea is that we are in a field that society has deemed important, and that if society has value in it, we have college courses that are dedicated. We have the National Park Services that has aspects that are dedicated. That since we have some type of value in that, then we can take that, and we can use that limited influence to then create some type of change. Even if that's small incremental change, it's still some type of positive effect.

Megan Reed: All topics of trying to connect archeology to social activism are important, but why did you choose these specific topics for your book more than other ones?

Dr. Christopher Barton: The idea is we're always talking about intersectionality, so the different idea. The idea is we want to get a lot of people from different places, and a lot of people are studying different things. Then one of the things that's kind of happened within this growing dialogue and discourse within historical archeology or within social archeology as social activism as archeology is that, and I'm very guilty of this, it's really kind of been curtailed to just historical archeology. What we wanted to do was broaden that to say that look, we have articles in here talking about the Paleolithic and gender identity. We have people studying Jihad takeover in Timbuktu, so the idea was we're trying to diversify it, say this isn't just U.S. Eastern seaboard historical archeology, that rather this can be global and it can have no temporal balance.

Megan Reed: That's great. How would you like our listeners or readers of your book to take away from reading it? Is there any specific things of how you want them to leave with when they read the book?

Dr. Christopher Barton: Yeah, so the idea is that don't ever think of yourself as being powerless in society. Even the fact that you're engaging, that you're reading with an archeology that might not be in your typical reader's list, or you might be thinking about something differently. Just the idea that you're getting somewhat out of your comfort zone, that you're starting to think about different things, in different ways, it's a positive thing for you.

What I would also say, and this is a much more personal note. I'm dyslexic. I have learning disabilities and my whole life, I had people telling me that college isn't for everyone. I was a construction worker, in oil refineries back in the day, and that maybe I should just stick with that. I think I talked about that in a book, but one of the things that I'd like people to take away is that we all have little bits of limitations that either society puts on us, or even sometimes we put it on ourselves. You can overcome those. Sometimes it's going to be a struggle and sometimes even overcoming might seem insurmountable, but I've struggled with writing my entire life. I've struggled even with reading my entire life. If you've helped to set your mind to it and you have a determination, and you help with others, no book that is ever written, is written by a single individual. It is a community that comes together, helps support them, and that's what this book is.

If you're thinking about this in your own personal life and you get done reading it, don't think that you're alone in your struggles, and your ups, and your downs, and everything. You are with a community of people that support and love you. That is really hippie.

Megan Reed: No, that was great. That was great. My last question for you is what advice would you give other archeologists who want to try and take their research to promote it as part of a social activism?

Dr. Christopher Barton: All right. So what I would say is I think the future of archeology needs to be is two things. This is a conversation that Paulette Steven has it right now in her amazing book, but we need to decolonize archeology, and we need to democratize. We need to push away from the pyramid structure where, the archeologist, is at the very top and then students are seen as labor. Community members are seen as somehow on the outside. We need to look this much more like very broad concentric circles that are constantly overlapping.

I mentioned earlier about how I'm not from South Carolina. When we discuss sites and we try to select sites for excavations, my students are part of it. My students have a unique knowledge of what it means to be from the Pee Dee, of the history of it. They have extended social networks. Don't look at students just as labor, right? Students are your collaborator. They have unique insights.

What I would suggest for somebody thinking about doing this, in terms of looking at social activism is never think that you're limiting yourself. If you're just going out and writing a site report, and you're talking... You might add a word that you never put in before. You might be talking about... For instance, I'm talking in another book about the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and I struggled over how to actually discuss that. How do you discuss that relationship? Eventually, I turned and used the word rape. Coming from my background and all the cultural baggage I bring, and it was a struggle for me to do that. Changing one word. Is that necessarily a form of a social activism? Well, probably not for most people. It's not radical, but the idea within my mindset, it took me a little bit out of that comfort zone, and then kind of progressed through it.

So again, what I would say is never think of this type of social activism that's just so radical. It's something that can be implemented in any site report. It can be implemented in any scholarly presentation. But the idea is that we need to understand, and to steal a line from Stan Lee here, but with great power comes with great responsibility, and we have tremendous power in our society, and we need to use that to promote good.

Megan Reed: That's great. Thank you so much for joining us and being a part of our podcast.

Dr. Christopher Barton: Thank you so much for having me.

Megan Reed talks with Dr. Christopher Barton about practicing activism through archaeology.

August 29, 2023

136. Preserving and Sharing the Story of Women's Suffrage

Transcript

Jason Church: This is Jason Church, Materials Conservator at NCPTT, and today, I'm talking with Joanne Westbrook. So what is your official title and position? This is for my own knowledge, actually. How is the Park Service tied to the National Women's Party?

Joanne Westbrook: So my name is Joanne Westbrook, and I work for the National Park Service. I am one of the museum curators for the National Mall and Memorial Park. It is a rather large park, with more than 32 individual sites and reservations across the District of Columbia. So we've got a pretty big reach, and my specific responsibilities are working with Ford's Theater National Historic Site, and the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument.

And the relationship with the Park Service and the NWP, the National Women's Party, goes back to the 1970s. So the National Women's Party have their final headquarters on Second Street, right across from what is now the Supreme Court. It wasn't there originally when they bought the house. And in the 1960s, it came under threat from development for the Hart Office Building, which is right next door now. And there was a large outcry from the Washington, DC community to protect the house, not only because of the work of the NWP and their contribution to women's suffrage and then women's rights throughout the 20th century, but also because it is one of the oldest standing buildings in Washington today.

So a lot of preservation support came out, and they were able to successfully lobby Congress to not take the main building. There were some other buildings next door that NWP owned that were demolished, unfortunately. But the main house, what used to be known as this Little Belmont House, is still standing.

In the 1970s, the National Women's Party wanted to take this a step further, to make sure they wouldn't have to have this discussion and this public outcry to help them again. And so in the 1970s, they were successful in getting the house listed both on the National Register and as a national historic landmark, and they were able to successfully lobby Congress to create a partnership agreement with Department of the Interior, through the National Park Service, who helped them maintain the grounds and the collection.

And then in 2016, President Obama issued an order to make the site a National Monument, so the National Park Service was given the house, and the National Women's Party was allowed to continue to use it as their headquarters and maintain the collections on-site. So we have been close partners for over four decades now.

Jason Church: Well, you brought it up, so let's talk about your amazing collection. There are other sites with also amazing collections, but in my mind, yours really stands out with your amount of textiles.

Joanne Westbrook: Yeah, absolutely. So the National Women's Party has actually been collecting since the 19-teens, when they were lobbying Congress for the right, for women's suffrage. And luckily, we had some women in the party who were very forward-thinking and knew that this was going to be an important organization and important work to commemorate for the future. So they began collecting a lot of two-dimensional objects, the archives, things like that. Some of them, they donated to the Library of Congress in the 1920s. And as you said, we have an incredible collection of textiles that they used in their marches, in their protests. Everything from the iconic tricolor banners that they carried on their banner poles to banners made in honor of different women, banners that were carried by different groups of professional workers, artists, women in the federal government, banners carried by state contingents who came in to lobby for women's suffrage.

So it's really incredible, and the collections also have quite a bit of other material related to the work of the NWP, so we have a lot of the printing blocks that were used to create their publications, first with the Suffragists and then with equal rights. We also have quite a bit of furniture that the NWP used, from the teens down into the 1990s, when they were still lobbying for women's rights and hosting different events and different people from Congress, all sorts of movers and shakers in the city of Washington, DC. So it's a fantastic collection.

Jason Church: So is the National Women's Party still collecting banners and protest material?

Joanne Westbrook: So the National Women's Party actually ceased their lobbying efforts in 1997 and became a 501(c)(3) organization focused really on education about their work and about the continued need for work for women's equality in the United States and around the world. So they're not collecting as heavily as they used to. However, they did collect a little bit around the Women's March back in 2017.

Jason Church: So if someone comes to visit the collection, what would they expect to see?

Joanne Westbrook: The collections that are on site normally and available for visitors to see include scrapbooks that were created by some of the founding members. There are a lot of bold materials, so some of their publications, a lot of the pamphlets they were handing out in their campaign for women's suffrage. We also have some really neat commemorative pieces that they would do as well, little ceramic figurines. We've got a makeup container branded with Logan for women's suffrage. We've got sashes of course. We also have, what I think are really cool are three pieces of textile that were stolen by one of the women who were arrested when they were being held in the workhouse. It's some really iconic, really important pieces talking about the work at the NWP and what it took to have this successful campaign for women's suffrage.

Jason Church: So we talked about these textiles, which are now 100+ years old. What is it like to store and conserve all of these variety of materials? I know a lot of them are satin. What is that like for you?

Joanne Westbrook: So I love textiles and I also hate textiles from a preservation standpoint. So I do have some conservation training early in my grad school career before I realized that I wanted to work with collections on more of a holistic level. So my lens in viewing collections is always from that preservation standpoint and textiles present very unique challenges, especially I think the textiles of the National Women's Party present even more unique challenges because many times when the women were putting together these textiles that were part of their marches and their protests, so it's costumes that they had in tableaus; there are tabards that they would wear over their clothing. They weren't making them like they would make their own clothing, like they would make textiles that they knew would be used many times and needed to have a long life.

So textiles are very fragile normally, light damages them and you can't undo it. It all adds up through the lifetime of an object. If they're dirty, the dirt can also damage them more when they're in storage. And we see that a lot with women's party textiles because as you can imagine, they were wearing these marching through the streets even when they were getting arrested. And so we find there's been a lot of wear and tear on these textiles and that ages them and makes them a little more vulnerable to the agents of decay. So part of how we deal with these challenges is we try and store them properly as much as we can.

We, with all the banners, we roll them in, you get a tube and muslin and you wrap it and make sure that it's protected from light and other pollutants as you can. For as many of them as we can, we keep them in the Park Service’s Museum Resource Center, which is a 53,000 square foot climate controlled facility out in the suburbs of Washington DC to help prolong their life. We try and keep the textiles on a rotation when they're on exhibit. So if you go to the site in one of the rooms, you can see a cap and a cape, and we rotate that out every few months to try and limit the damage that we can. And we're actually really excited. We're looking to have a collection condition survey done this fall to have some expert conservators come in and kind of look at the collections and give us an update on our priorities for the second century of stewardship.

Jason Church: So as a curator, what is your favorite object in the collection?

Joanne Westbrook: Oh my gosh, that's so hard. That's like being asked about your favorite child.

Jason Church: We won't tell the other objects what you choose.

Joanne Westbrook: I appreciate that. Oh my gosh, that's so difficult. I'm new to working with the Women's Party with their collection. Previously I had been at the Museum Resource Center working with the collections of other parks in the region. So I'm still learning about the collection. And honestly, the banners are great. The banners are iconic, but it's some of the printing blocks, and I know that sounds really weird, but it's a plate of metal. It's a wooden block. But I'm more concerned about the work of history, how these organizations did the work that they did to create a change in our country. And so for me, the printing blocks are really emblematic of that because so much of the work of the Women's Party was constantly pushing out their own publications. So not only the Suffragist and Equal Rights, but their pamphlet, their broadsides, educating the American people about why this was so necessary for women, this way to become more equal with men and this fundamental right for them to have.

And it was so impactful and so influential and it really turned the tide in suffrage and the American people's perspective on women's suffrage and how essential it was for them to get this right. And so I love these printing blocks and just thinking about the number of hands that held it and the purpose they put it towards and how it was one of their fundamental ways to reach the American public and really change the tide on women's suffrage in America. And we do in fact have the printing blocks that they used for the program that they handed out for that first march in 1913. And we were just working with that the other day. And I think that's why it's foremost in my mind.

Jason Church: And you have the printed material that matches all the printing blocks?

Joanne Westbrook: I think we do, between what the Women's Party is still managing today and then also what they had given to the Library of Congress I'm pretty sure. No one has had the time to go through the printing blocks and start matching up the publications and how the images were used, but it's a future project that I'm already starting to plan out in my head to work with the Women's Party on getting all those things matched up.

Jason Church: That would be a fantastic project.

Joanne Westbrook: Absolutely. And I think the printing blocks are also a really cool way for our interpreters to have some hands-on activities with the kids. Because with museum collections, a lot of times they're behind glass, they're kind of remote, especially some of the printing blocks that have raised metal designs. So the Nina Allender cartoons, we have a lot of those. We could make those 3D printed and then that could be an activity that our interpreters have with students on teaching them this is how the work gets done, this is how you do the work of progressive action and activism and draw parallel with some of the things that are going on today and have them stamp and make their own publications, which I think would be really cool.

Jason Church: And that would be a really cool project. So does the museum and the collection loan out pieces, and if so, what are some of the more requested pieces from the collection?

Joanne Westbrook: The National Women's Party, I think has between six and eight loans right now. As you can imagine, it's a of climate increased attention. So right now we've got loans with the Brandywine River Museum, with the Library of Congress, with the National Archive, Virginia Historical Society, the Library of Virginia. The Skirball Cultural Center has actually borrowed two pins to do a really exceptional exhibit on Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and that's a traveling exhibit that will be coming around the country over the next year and a half or so. So yes, we do loan objects out. It's always really important museum collections, not only that we preserve them, but allow them to be used for the benefit of the American public and to educate those folks who can't come into the house. Not everybody who wants to come into the house can come into the house, just because it is a small historic site.

Not everybody can travel to Washington DC. So it's really important for the NWP and the NPS to make these collections more available to the entire country and even folks around the world. Some of the most requested things are the banners. They're beautiful, they're iconic. It's what people really think of when they think of the Suffragist marching, the Silent Sentinels and the work of the NWP in the 19 teens to advocate for women's suffrage. We also frequently have requests for some of the membership buttons and some of the other historic memorabilia that's associated with the NWP and their struggle for suffrage. But of course, much of the most prominent historic memorabilia is already on display at site. And so we really like to keep it at the site as part of our exhibits. And because they are such important talking points for our rangers who interpret the site. It's an incredible collection.

It's been created and curated by women for its entire history and by the organization that created it. And again, it's just a fabulous collection of some of the work that the Women's Party was doing.

And of course, it's not the only story when talking about women's suffrage. It shouldn't be the only story since this was just one organization that was working towards suffrage. And we do have issues with the legacy of the NWP and NAFA and their illusion of women of minority groups who are also trying to advocate for women's rights. Then of course, the split in order to get southern states to sign on to women's suffrage was often to exclude black women voters because there was still such degradation and resistance in the South. So it's not the full story, but I think it's an important story and it's one that I'm proud that the Park Service is hoping to preserve in perpetuity for the benefit of the American public.

Jason Church: Well, thank you, Joanne. We really appreciate you talking to us today, and we will definitely recommend all of our listeners to go look at your virtual exhibits.

Joanne Westbrook: That is our sincere hope too. And in the meantime, people have two avenues for accessing the collections online and the house itself. They can go to the official NPS website for Belmont Paul, and that's nps.gov/bepa for Belmont Paul. Or they can find the National Woman's Party, womanparty.org. And if you go online, you can find all of their collections have been made available. They've done a really fantastic job of getting their collections database online. So you can see an incredible amount of pictures and everything that tells the story of the historic work that the NWP has done. What we have today is only a small subset of what there was back in whatever period you're studying. And that's especially true with those banners because a lot of times the banners were ripped out of their hands, they were destroyed. So I am all the more grateful for the incredible collection banners that we have and their inspiring messages then, and I think a lot of them that are still applicable today.

Jason Church: Absolutely. Thank you, Joanne.

Joanne Westbrook: Absolutely.

Jason Church talks with Joanne Westbrook about preserving and presenting the National Women's Party collections at the Belmont-Paul House.

"...the National Women's Party has actually been collecting since the 19-teens, when they were lobbying Congress for the right, for women's suffrage. And luckily, we had some women in the party who were very forward-thinking and knew that this was going to be an important organization and important work to commemorate for the future..."

August 15, 2023

135. Pursuing a Career in Preservation Horticulture

Transcript

Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Erin Fogarty: Erin Fogarty, the Conservation and Historic Gardens Horticulturist at the Gardens at Elm Bank in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today. Could you talk about how you decided to combine horticulture and conservation?

Erin Fogarty: So, I want to preface it by saying that I grew up in an area with a lot of public gardens. My childhood home was more or less 15 minutes from Winterthur, Longwood, Hagley, the cream of the crop of historic gardens. So I had a lot of exposure to historic public gardens and horticulture from a really, really young age. I've always liked being outside. I've always liked history, especially in regard to architecture. And when I was looking at grads, I was given the opportunity by Dr. Jules Brook, a professor who later became my advisor that I really loved working with, who said, "Hey, I have this historic garden called Gibraltar in Wilmington, Delaware that we'd like to do some historic preservation planning on.

Little did she know that this is a garden I went to when I was nine years old. And ever since then I've wanted to make it beautiful again. I think that landscapes are really, really fascinating. They're constantly changing. So unlike a period room or a historic building, to a lesser extent, you could spend all the time in the world maintaining a historic landscape or you could leave it completely alone, put a fence around it, never touch it, and you're still impacting what it looks like 10, 15, 20 years in the future, which is terrifying, but it's also such a cool opportunity.

Catherine Cooper: So what does preservation horticulture entail?

Erin Fogarty: Really it depends on who you ask. It's in some ways a really old field. We have conservation of historic landscapes going back to the Ladies Mount Vernon Association in the 1860s, but as a data backed and records backed kind of systemic discipline, it's really new. For me it kind of has a similar vibe to translating literature. So you take every single thing you know about a garden or a piece of art or whatever, but also social context in which it was created. A lot of the landscapes that I've worked on were developed in a time before the estate and capital gains tax, which does really, really impact what people were doing and how they were doing it. And use all of that in combination with knowledge of what it's like right now. So how many people are there to take care of it? Is it open to the public? What's its environmental vibe? And use all of that to restore it in a way that honors that original vision, while also making sense for both its current environmental situation and also to the people who will be using it and interacting with it.

So, something that I always end up having to do is adjusting plantings for changing shade conditions. So they plant trees, they want them to be little, the trees were left alone, now they're 60 feet tall. That changes what you can do there. That has happened to me before. Transitioning from it just being a garden in someone's backyard to a garden that is now visited by the public, tens of thousands of people per year; knowing if the owner had access to a greenhouse that would impact what plants they could put in, things like that. Basically finding out what made it special when it was created, and finding a way to convey that specialness. And on the day today, it's a lot of just being covered in dirt.

Catherine Cooper: Congratulations on your new position with the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Could you tell us about your current project for them?

Erin Fogarty: Yeah, so Massachusetts Horticultural Society is a public garden in an old Estate in Wellesley. So about half an hour outside of Boston, give or take. And the garden was designed in 1916 by Percy Gallagher. He worked for Olmsted Brothers Firm and it was designed for Alice Cheney Baltzell, whose father had a major role in the founding of both American Express and Wells Fargo. So what we’re talking about is like unlimited money. [Olmsted Brothers] designed a bunch of gardens, but one of the gardens they designed was a kind of Asian inspired water garden. So it’s an Asian Japanese garden made by a white guy who’d never really been to Japan, if that makes sense. But it’s a time period where everyone was really, really interested in that style of design. Elm Bank was not really gardened for about 70 years from 1938 to 1996, in which time that this Asian garden was not managed and all these plants which were brought over and kind of introduced to American gardens from Japan, many of them did so well in the area that they’re now invasive plants.

So right now, my job is to rehabilitate this water garden in a way that, again, honors the original design while making sense for us right now. It’s a super cool design. It’s basically a kidney shaped pond with a bridge in the center modeled after the Shinkyo Bridge in Nikko, Japan. If you’ve seen that Japanese red bridge, that’s what it looks like surrounded by really dense, overflowing beds of mostly woody perennials that continue in a curated woodland for about a little bit over an acre. And I’m holding off because the main things that define the project are its challenges, which I know you’re going to ask about in a second.

Catherine Cooper: Feel free to go right into the challenges.

Erin Fogarty: Okay. So there are three major challenges. The least challenging thing is that we don’t really have any pictures of the site. The woman who commissioned it, Alice, was really, really private, like so private that the only photos we have of the garden were those that were taken by force when the garden won a Massachusetts Horticultural Society award. So, an award for garden design in the 1930s. As part of winning the award, the garden had to be written about [and photographed] in a landscape magazine. So we have those, but those are mostly detail shots. So there’s nothing really showing the whole garden. And I have plant lists, I have blueline drawings, but it’s really difficult from the shots we have to tell what in that design was and was not implemented. But that’s not a huge deal. I have the designs, I know what they meant to put there.

The second most challenging thing is our site. So,the garden is located within a protected wetland area associated with the Charles River. And because of that, any decision we make will have the potential to impact someone’s garden 10-15 miles downriver. We are working with a local Conservation Commission, and, we file permits and they give us permits to tell us what we can and can’t do with the site. So right now what I am allowed to do is I can use any mechanical means, any physical means of removal I want. I can’t use any chemicals, I can’t use any stump treatments, which again considers that we’re so close to the water. And the river does have a really, really big impact on the people of who live here in eastern Massachusetts; it’s great, but being that close to the river does lend its challenges.

And we also have a really, really significant population of invasive species. So the site after Alice Cheney died in 1938, there was a minors seminary, so like a seminary but for children who used the site until 1971 and they practiced what’s known as mow and blow maintenance. So they would mow the grass, they would blow out the leaves, leave everything else alone. Then it was a tech school for a couple of decades until Massachusetts Horticultural Society took it over in 1996. And again, when the tech school was there, they didn't really do much in terms of maintenance of this area, especially because it's kind of out of the way of the main drag of the estate. So we have a ton of invasive species that were allowed to grow functionally unchecked for 60 or 70 years. What that means is that there's a lot of cutting, there's a lot of sawing.

There is a lot to do to just peel back the layers and find out what the physical boundaries and any physical features of the site would be. So there's stuff growing over that flagstone path that I mentioned earlier, which allegedly the flagstones were taken from the restoration of Independence Hall in Philadelphia in the early 19 teens. I'm not sure if I believe that or not, but there's some big species everywhere. Our main issues are. Glossy buckthorn (Rhamnus frangula) and Multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora) round-leafed bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus), things like that. All but the bittersweet were introduced to the site intentionally as part of the original design. Which is cool. I mean, it's an interesting story to tell about how horticulture has changed, but trying to dig out the site from the growth has been a lot.

Catherine Cooper: What are your goals for the completion of the project?

Erin Fogarty: We are aiming for a really slow, really conscious rehabilitation. The traditional way things like this have been practiced are you pay an architectural firm six figures, they come in, they do a big plan for the site, and then you drop another six or seven figures in an all-in-one restoration where you take everything out and then you put new stuff back in. But the view we're taking is kind of gardening the garden back to life. So what that means is that we are just gardening it and making slow but meaningful steps towards turning it back into something, which allows us to use the area for education. So for training people in landscape remediation, landscape history, environmental stewardships, and it also allows us to find cool stuff that would've been lost if we were to rip everything out all in one go.

I found some mountain laurel and some snowball bushes that were covered by bittersweet for God how many years, and that granularity is really, really cool to be able to do. And also being able to get people out there, get them into the woods. It's a really once in a lifetime project, it's really cool. I want to retain the original feel of the design while adjusting for where it is now. Right now I am data gathering for the 198 species in the original design. So that means finding original descriptions in catalogs from the 1920s. That means figuring out where all the species are from, what kind of light conditions they like, both to figure out what that original design felt like and to propose potential replacements.

Catherine Cooper: Are you allowed to use invasive plants in remediation of a design?

Erin Fogarty: I don't think that the Conservation Commission would allow us to do that. Also, just because of the wet nature of the soil, it would be a bad scene. That's not to say we're dead set on using only native species. Because of the nature of the site, there are some native species that are really, really aggressive. I know I talk about dealing with bittersweet and buckthorn all the time, but one of our biggest tests have been native grapevines. Just trying to pull these huge, huge vines out of the canopies of trees. They're native, but that doesn't mean they're right for what is there. We'll probably end up using non-native species, but we most likely will not use any invasive species. That's not to say we'll be getting rid of some of our larger specimens of things like Norway maple (Acer platanoides). Those might stay, but I don't anticipate introducing any more invasives to the site.

Catherine Cooper: So how do you make recommendations for replacements in a plan like this?

Erin Fogarty: It all just depends on what each individual plant contributed to the landscape. What function it was playing, both ecologically and aesthetically. So I'll usually look at when it flowered or when it looked its best, which usually means flowering, but could be in foliage color and what textures and what colors it would be bringing to the landscape at that point in time. And finding something that would mimic that as well as it could for the site while not also causing an issue. How do you replace something like English ivy, which has something that non-invasives don't always have. Texture that was used as a ground cover that has the waxy leaves that's really, really low. How do you find something that has all of those things that won't stick out in the design but will also not be super aggressive and not climb up the trees?

Catherine Cooper: So what would you recommend for others who want to get involved in horticultural or landscape preservation?

Erin Fogarty: Truly the number one recommendation is to get out there and find a garden, and garden. You can find local historic landscapes through the Garden Conservancy. They're a really popular group that assists in preserving and transitioning private landscapes to public landscapes. You can also go on a website called Garden Visit to look for landscapes in your area. So find a landscape, find one that speaks to you, and start finding out how you can volunteer. That's the best way to learn and to understand landscapes is to actually spend a lot of time there working the land, engaging with it, learning its little quirks. There's a reason that if you're at a landscape for less than a year, you don't really know it. Your first year working at any landscape is just figuring it out. It doesn’t require a lot of skill and the gardeners would totally be thrilled to have you help out. I know I would. If you're in the Boston area, come hang out with us at Elm Bank.

You could also start studying the history of your area. One of the things that's really popular and that I like to do is in spring, go into the woods and go daffodil hunting. If you find daffodils in the middle of the woods, you're likely to find an old house foundation or an old sidewalk or a street. They're a pretty good indicator. So just learning the history of your area. But in terms of stuff you can do from home, looking at pictures and documents in the Smithsonian Archive of American Gardens, a lot of which is digitized for gardens that you might be interested in gardens in your area.

There are some good books by a person named Robyn Karson that you can check out at your local library that are a cool read if you're interested in historic landscapes from a historical design standpoint. If you're looking at colleges, looking at grad school levels, look at historic preservation programs. I'll always... University of Delaware's historic preservation certificate program. You're in an area with a lot of historic gardens, take a visit to Philadelphia so you can check out some historic landscapes, things like that. Number one recommendation is to just garden. That's the best way you can learn about plants, how they were used, is just to spend time outside.

Visit Elm Bank. Visit Gibraltar in Wilmington, Delaware if you have the chance. Gardens are cool. I mean spend time outside. A lot of people tend to overlook historic gardens as something for older people or something pretty traditionalist. But there's some really, really, really cool stuff happening in terms of historic landscape preservation across America right now. Check out places like Bartram's Garden, if you can. You're in the area. It's awesome.

Catherine Cooper: So if someone wanted to visit Elm Bank, are there particular hours or email in advance?

Erin Fogarty: We're open 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM or 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM depending on the day from April 1st through the end of October. We're also open at the Christmastime for a lights thing. But if you were to go on the website and sign up for the volunteer list, you would get emails when we are working in the water garden, and that is something that happens year round. You can find me on Instagram at @Old.Plants, I'm trying to put more of the gardening stuff on there. Also follow Massachusetts Horticultural Society at @Masshort, and that way you can keep on top of all the relay really cool stuff we're working on.

Catherine Cooper: Wonderful. Thank you so much for speaking with us and taking the time.

Catherine Cooper speaks with Erin Fogarty about starting a career in preservation horticulture and her current project at Massachusetts Horticultural Society.

August 1, 2023

134. Increasing Access to Primary Materials through Digital Portals

Transcript

Catherine Cooper: My name's Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Jake Mangum: Jake Mangum. I'm the project development librarian for the Portal to Texas History.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today.

Jake Mangum: Absolutely. I'm happy to be here.

Catherine Cooper: I'm wondering if you could tell us what the Portal to Texas History is and how you got involved?

Jake Mangum: Certainly. So, the Portal to Texas History is a digital repository for cultural heritage and historic materials from across the state of Texas. We've worked with about 465-ish partners to digitize and make freely available over 1.8 million items. That includes over 800,000 issues of newspapers, 450,000 photographs. We have 80,000 maps, we've got legislative documents, we've got books. We've got journals. Basically we've got 36 different media types all available on the Portal to Texas History. Again, all of our print materials are full text searchable. So if someone is looking for a specific name or a specific event, they can type that in and it'll pull up all the print instances we have of that.

I got involved with the Portal kind of by accident. I was a graduate assistant here in the library, finishing up my Master's in Library Science, and I happened to be at an event the same time that my current boss was at the event. And we were talking, she said, "You're in the library, I'm in the library, so we should sit together and talk a little bit." So we did. And she mentioned that she had a position open, and if you're wanting a position in an academic library, you take every opportunity and apply. If you're being told about it, you apply. So I applied and it turned out that it worked perfectly because the position that I'm in, I act as a liaison between the digitization lab and partnering institutions. My areas of specialties in library science school were academic libraries as well as digital imaging and archiving, so I was able to bridge those two different areas together in this position.

The Portal to Texas History, like I mentioned, has 36 different media types currently available on it. As well as we've been working on a project called Texas History for Teachers, in which we've worked with a historian here in the university, some Texas history teachers to create course curriculum based on the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) standards, that the fourth and seventh grade... Well every grade has to teach to specific standards within the state. And fourth and seventh grade specifically deal with Texas history, so we are focusing on creating course units for those grades in particular starting with seventh grade.

And one of the cool things that we're doing with that is we actually have been able to do work with a camera system called Matterport, which allows us to do virtual field trips to museums with historical significance that touch on, like the TEKS . So we're able to take students and do a field trip when typically like you're not going to be able to go to Goliad. Those aren't the field trips that schools tend to send students on. So you can at least get a better understanding of what the museum looks like and what the area looks like through these Matterport virtual field trips. The Portal to Texas History, is at Texashistory.UNT.edu. Whereas the Texas History for teachers is education.Texashistory.UNT.edu.

So, we just added an education dot in front of the website address and that is still a work in progress. We initially did some materials for it several years ago, and as learning standards changed, things got quickly out of date. And so now it was a 2020 project that is turned into a really great long-term substantial project.

It probably wouldn't come as any sort of real big surprise to know that probably a third of our users are genealogists. Since we do have such a large collection of newspapers, like I said, over 800,000 issues of newspapers. There's a lot that can be gathered there. Genealogists, teachers, students, historians of all different levels and expertise can access it. So those are the main groups. My position, I don't typically interact with them a whole lot directly unless they're having issues or concerns and sometimes they will contact me and ask for guidance and assistance through their searches.

What I really want to see the Portal do and be able to accomplish is to continue to expand the understanding of what Texas history is. Right now, my goal is to tell the stories of underrepresented communities within Texas. So typically history tends to be told by the older white men and there are a lot of other voices that need to be shared as well to fully understand what the story of Texas is. There are a couple of different ways that we are pursuing adding those materials to the Portal. One, we recognize that a lot of history has not really been preserved properly through the official institutions that are responsible for preserving everyone's history. They haven't really preserved everyone's histories, so the communities have had to find other ways of preserving their own history. So it's materials that are in churches, materials that are in families passed down from family member to family member. And one of the ways that we've worked with this to reach those different groups that wouldn't necessarily have funding to do a digitization project is we have a project called Rescuing Texas History in which we offer up to a thousand dollars’ worth of digitization, metadata creation, and hosting of materials on the portal for board applicants. And we've specifically in the last few years, made it a point to target those groups that have been disenfranchised, basically, in the past. So we're actively seeking those out and trying to reach out to those communities. My email is Jacob (J-A-C-O-B) dot Mangum (M-A-N-G-U-M) @UNT.edu. And if you go to Texashistory.UNT.edu and scroll down, there's also a section called Rescuing Texas History. I think we got it covered with everything.

Catherine Cooper: Yeah, I'm sliding other questions in here. Okay.

Jake Mangum: Yeah, it was perfect.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us.

Jake Mangum: Absolutely, absolutely. I'm happy to do it. It was really good seeing you again.

Catherine Cooper: Good to see you too.

Catherine Cooper speaks with Jake Mangum about working on the Portal to Texas History.

July 18, 2023

133. Analyzing Art Materials Used by Franz Kline

Transcript

Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with- Cory Rogge: Dr. Corina Rogge or Cory Rogge. I'm the Andrew W. Mellon Research Scientist at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Menil Collection. Catherine Cooper: Thank you for joining us. Cory Rogge: Pleasure. Catherine Cooper: Could you talk a bit about Franz Kline and why his art is so important? Cory Rogge: So Franz Kline, who was born in 1910 and passed away in 1962, was one of what's often known as the big three of abstract expressionist artists. So he was considered on par with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and yet when you go to the literature and look at him, there's not very much written about him. So while you might walk into a gallery, a museum and see his art, there's not really a lot known about him. And so we saw him as important both for the reason that his art's hanging on walls and should be studied. It hasn't yet been studied, but also to try to bring his name back into the fold, to have him be recognized as an artist on par with these artists and others of his time, like Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Philip Guston. We started the book with the nucleus of our own collection here at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, where we have four paintings and an ink sketch on paper by Kline. And as we began looking at artworks, we realized that they were all different. They were all aging differently. They were all made with similar materials, but he was using them in different ways. And we decided that we just couldn't understand our own works without extrapolating, without going to other works. And our works were from what we would consider his mature periods. So from 1950 to 1961 is our latest. And yet how did his early training impact how he was working later on? And so we began reaching out to other institutions who held works by Kline in their collections. And that included the National Gallery of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Harvard Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, and asking if we could come visit and look at them. And what was really amazing was that even though some of these museums have conservation scientists on staff like myself, not all of them do. And even the ones that did, they're overworked. They don't have enough time and bandwidth to look at or do all of the work that's requested of them themselves. And so we were met basically with open arms where these institutions came to us and said, "Look, take the samples you want, do the analysis you want. Tell us what you find, but please take this opportunity to help the field, to help us and to help yourself." So it was really gracious and welcoming. And then at The Metropolitan Museum of Art where we were looking at more paintings by Kline, they had a greater concentration, including some of his early works from the 1930s and 1940s. Their scientists were actually able to work with us, and so they did the sampling and collected the data, and then we collaboratively analyzed it together and it really created a richer experience because we were finding things in Kline's works that we didn't understand and just the ability to talk that over with a colleague, "I'm seeing this. What are you seeing? Are we crazy? Is this an artifact," really deepened the research and led to new avenues of research and new findings that went up beyond Kline himself. It was a really wonderful chance we got to visit all these institutions. We got to make new friends out of people that we had only maybe known slightly before. It was great. And that's the wonder of conservation and conservation science, which is that we're kind of all in there for the objects and it's just a very collaborative and welcoming community. It's easy to write an article about maybe one artwork or two, and I've written papers on things that have hundreds of samples, but here we were telling not only a story about his materials, but his materials through time, and then also trying to contextualize him in his time period. So how he worked compared to his friends and colleagues who were also working in New York at the time. Then also in doing this research, we realized that there were so many myths surrounding the abstract expressionists. Everybody thinks that they worked like the famous Han Namath movie of Jackson Pollock, which makes it look like he's just kind of almost randomly applying paint to a canvas. And so there was this idea that abstract artists encounter a canvas and painting is all action. It's all un-premeditated, and that leads the public to the idea that this is slap dash. This is easy, that it's something a child could do. And what we were seeing in Kline's work was so antithetical to that idea. His works were carefully planned out. He did do sketches and he worked from them. He very carefully considered his composition, and that's what gives his word a striking power that they have when you look at them in the galleries. Most of them are black and white. Most of them involve brushstroke lines, but they are so carefully composed that there's tension and balance and it's really difficult to do something that way. And so all of these things combined, the science, the art history, the contextualization, the myth busting meant that it was just too big for a research paper. And we really felt that to give him and our findings their due, we needed to make it into a book. One of the things that we were struck most about with Kline's works are the variety of condition issues that they have. So they can vary from the very simple, like his early paintings were largely small, but he moved a lot. So he moved studio to studio to studio. As he kept getting evicted, they'd tear down the place he was living, and that resulted in just sheer physical dents and dings to his artwork. So we've seen some of that. Later on in his works, he begins using a lot of zinc white paint, and a lot of artists still do, and a lot of artists his contemporaries did. So it's very common. But the problem with zinc white paints is that the zinc in the pigment can react with the oil binder and make what are known as fatty acids. So zinc bound to a fatty acid from the oil. And this is in some ways good. Metals can promote drying of oils, give you a nice film. But these soaps can also migrate through the paint layers and then form laminar layers in between different colors of paint layers, or they can conglomerate into little almost ovoid or spherical pustules. It's kind of a painting acne and lead paints do this as well, and zinc soaps in particular then if they are forming little pustules, they can spall the surface paints off. If they are forming laminates, these flat plainer films, they can cause paint layers to split apart so that you'll lose the upper paint layers and leave only the bottom most paint layers behind. And they also make paint films more brittle. So paint we think of when it's dried as being hard, but it actually is a little bit plastic. It can respond to mechanical changes to dimensional changes of the canvas or to the panel support caused by temperature and relative humidity. But if the paint film becomes too brittle and it can't do that, it just cracks. So we have zinc soap problems in Kline's paintings. And to be fair, not all zinc soaps are bad. So it's the films and the pustules that are bad. But zinc soaps that are just kind of hanging out there mixed in with the paint layer themselves can be perfectly fine. So we have a painting, Corinthian II, which has zinc soaps, but they're dispersed throughout the paint film and it's in perfect condition. But we have other paintings where we're getting these films and then that's causing issues because we're losing flakes of paint. But then there are other problems like Kline used in some cases, paints that were under bound that have too much pigment relative to media, and that produces a paint film that's very coarse and brittle. It's almost like sand. It just wants to fall apart, and that's not very good for it. So most of the time when he kind of knew what he was doing when he painted let's say straightforwardly, his paintings are thin for the most part. They don't have very many paint layers, but we have a painting where there are 17 paint layers because he kept struggling to get his idea across. And the weight of that paint film on the canvas causes mechanical issues. So there's this whole diversity of problems that potentially face people that have Kline paintings. And it's only really by looking at them closely evaluating whether they have multiple paint layers, perhaps taking cross-sections, looking for multiple paint layers, looking for these under bound paint layers, doing analysis to see whether you have zinc soaps and what kind they are that you'll know what's happening. And in terms of research, I think for everybody across the board who deals with these modern paintings, we'd like to know why the zinc soaps behave differently. We don't understand the driving force behind their movement within the paint films. And so that's a big issue. If we could figure out why they were moving in certain cases and not in others, we might be able to stop it and help paintings stay in the kind of okay state of having zinc soaps. The book response, it's gone out into the world, it's still new and young, and you can read reviews of it on Amazon where some people are like, "This is the most important book about Kline ever written, and that makes us feel good." And other reviews that are like, "Well, if you want pictures, don't buy this book." Well, we have pictures. They're just small because it's a modest sized book. This isn't a catalog from a gallery show. But I think that in general, it's really informing museums and all the private owners who own Kline's work on how to think about them going forward. And hopefully it will also in the future change the art historical scholarships surrounding him. So we're pleased with it. The individuals who are specialists in the field of abstract expressionism seem to have welcomed it, so it's good. And in terms of research going forward, we looked at a very small fraction of Kline's works. There's obviously a lot more to be done. What's really fun right now is that coming out of the book, we were contacted by a gallery who had one of Kline's easels that he used in his studio, and it's got paint all over it. And so we actually purchased it for a relatively modest price and are starting to look at the paint on the easel. And then Kline's second partner's son contacted us, said, "Hey, I actually have one of Kline's palettes." And he mixed his paints flat on a table and would use paperboard as a palette. And he asked if we would like it, and we of course said yes, and he very kindly donated it to the museum. And it's covered with colored paints. So now we have paints on the palette, paints on the easel, and paints on the painting, and we're trying to coordinate. And the palette's marvelous. It's got huge globs of paint, like he just squirted paint out of a tube, was going to use it, walked away for the night and then just never came back. It's a very human object in that way. We don't know when he purchased the easel. It occurs in photographs from the late 1950s. So we expect he was using it then. And in fact, in some photographs, you can actually see the easel in his studio and behind it, leaning against the wall is one of the paintings in our collection, which is fun. And then the palette was probably towards the end of his life. He passed away in 1962 and had kind of had to stop painting because of health issues late in 1961, early 1962. Kline's marvelous. I joke that I've spent so many years with him that I've really grown to love him as a person, even though I've never met him. And if I could go back and have dinner with one historical figure, he'd be high on the list. He seems like he was a really good person, a person who helped others, who was good friends with the artists of his time. One of the few people that didn't have arguments with other people. He wasn't ego driven in the way that some artists are. And he loved cats. And my favorite painting of his is a painting in The Metropolitan Museum of Art from the 1940s, and it's of his cat Kitzker. And the cat itself was a tuxedo cat, but the painting got these beautiful blues and magentas and purples in it. And to me it's just the cat poised, ready to go out, out of town over the roofs of New York out hunting, and it's just paused and is staring back at Kline. It's marvelous, and I hope that someday it will go on view for people to see. But there are photos of it in the book, so you can see it there. Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much, Cory. Cory Rogge: It's a pleasure.

Catherine Cooper talks with Cory Rogge about Franz Kline's art and examining the materials he used.

July 4, 2023

132. Stories of Colorado Women Serving in WWII

Transcript

Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Gail Beaton: Gail Beaton.

Catherine Cooper: So Gail, could you tell us what led you to deep dive into the history of Colorado women during World War II?

Gail Beaton: Well, I've always been fascinated with World War II and especially the Rosie the Riveter character, and then when I was a high school teacher, I wanted to present the home front to the students in a manner that would be very interesting to them. So I developed a character called Gail Murphy, who's a bullet maker in Denver during the war. One of our facilities here used to be a Remington arms plant, so I gave this presentation for years to my students, and then it kind of exploded on me and I started giving it to all sorts of organizations throughout the state. And one time in 2014, I was giving it to a 1940s Forever group, and a woman came up afterwards and said she loved the presentation, but I didn't say anything about the army nurses, and I said, "You're right. I concentrated more on the home front and just barely mentioned women in the military."

Didn't even say anything about the army nurses. So I said, "Were you an army nurse?" And she's like, "Well, yes, I was in France and Germany during the war," so I said, "Could I please interview you?" And she agreed, and after several hours I thought, “these stories have to be told.” I mean, there was so much I had no idea about that it was time for somebody to find out and tell the stories. So that's kind of how I got into it.

Catherine Cooper: Could you explain how you chose to create the umbrella of “Colorado” for Colorado women?

Gail Beaton: I was interviewing and finding more stories, I realized that there were women here in Colorado that maybe were from Tennessee and never touched base in Colorado until after the war, and I thought, "Well, their stories are going to be missed. A Tennessee historian probably isn't going to track them down in Colorado, so I need to include their stories too." So I kind of expanded into those who also were in Colorado perhaps after the war.

Catherine Cooper: How did you chase down all of these histories; how did you conduct the search?

Gail Beaton: A lot of it was done through the internet. Fortunately, many things are now digitized. Of course, I went to museums and archival collections throughout the state. There's oral history collections at the Library of Congress. The University of North Carolina has a wonderful one on women veterans. Of course, I looked at, it felt like all the books on the women in the Air Force, service pilots or defense plants, all the general books that one would expect. And then I found women through a number of different sources. One woman I interviewed that I'd met through a presentation actually was talking to a woman at her hairdresser and found out the woman was a cryptanalyst during the war. So there were all sorts of little avenues that I was able to make.

Of course, I did tons of reading between transcripts and newspaper articles, obituaries, the census records, ancestry.com, diaries, letters, so a lot of different sources were used. I chose the vignettes trying to show the breadth and depth of Colorado experiences. So I tried to get vignettes that were women from the eastern plains and the Western Slope as well as the front range. I tried to include Anglo women, Latinas, African American women, even a woman from Eastern Europe. So that was one reason to include the different vignettes, especially at the beginning of the book. I actually was able, I think, to make sure that I got all my favorite stories in there. Some of them, I had to push a little hard with the editor and the reviewers, but I managed to hold my line on that.

Catherine Cooper: You’ve organized the book by field of service; could you talk about how and why you chose that particular strategy?

Gail Beaton: It just seemed logical to me to split the women into the three major areas of their contributions, women in the military, and then on the defense plants and then in volunteer activities. In doing the military, a number of people said, "Just combine the Army Nurse Corps and the Navy Nurse Corps because they're military nurse corps," but they actually had very different experiences during the war, and so I wanted to split them out.

And then also it just seemed logical to me, I guess maybe I was thinking that the military women were so unusual. Let's start off with them. Then I organized them according to when that particular branch was organized. So the Army and Navy Nurse Corps were before World War II and then followed by the WAACs, which were the first ones with the Army Corps in 1942. Then I guess I chose the second most unusual, and that would be the defense plants. And then the third, the women on the home front was kind of typically women's work or women's jobs doing volunteer activities, whatever war it is or peace time, that seems to be something that women are especially told in to do is volunteer work. I also wanted to highlight a woman in each chapter so that the beginning of every chapter would highlight a woman and her experiences in that particular branch or volunteer activity and things like that. Again, trying to show the diversity of Colorado women and their experiences.

Catherine Cooper: Who do you hope reads the book and what would you like them to take away from it?

Gail Beaton: Obviously, I'd like everyone to read the book. I know that's not going to happen, but I think first and foremost, I would like that the children and grandchildren of this greatest generation read the book because I think it's very important for them to understand what women did during the war and their male relatives also. I put in the end of the introduction that when a person dies, it's as if a library burns, and I really feel that's true, and in writing the book, I interviewed a couple dozen women and a couple of men, and by the time I was done and the book was published, 10 of those had passed away. And then since then, two more have passed away. So I'm kind of down to three surviving women. This really saddens me, and so I hope that the children and the grandchildren would find out their parents or grandparents stories before they're gone, and then I'd like the younger generations to read it and kind of come away with two main ideas.

One is that women can meet any challenge. They just need to be given the chance and they need to grab the chance or force the opportunity. And secondly, I'd like them to know that Americans can set aside our differences economically, politically, social differences, and actually come together and do some pretty great things and accomplish a lot. So I think those are kind of my two main goals in it, and it's why I continue to do my Rosie character and do book talks and things because I think it's important. These women meant so much to me that I think it's important for their stories to be told. Rosie has changed so much, and I have gotten so many new things. First started out to be a 30 minute, "This is what bullet makers do and other women are doing other things," but now I can talk about the all-girl orchestra from Denver that traveled through the United States.

I can talk about women that were crop dusters during the war because the men aren't being crop dusters in Oklahoma. So it's made me so proud to know just the great things that women have done, and so many of these women that I interviewed became friends. My army nurse that kind of sparked this whole book just passed away in July at 100 years and one week, so I saw her two or three times a year until COVID, of course. And so they were always so humble. “We just did it.” “It wasn't a big deal.” “I'm proud of what I did, but it was just they asked us to serve, we served.” “They asked us to not go to school for the first two weeks of our senior year to pick skins off of peaches. We did it. We went back to school.” So it's made me very appreciative.

It's made me very proud. I think one thing that also really hit me is how much these women went through. We're sitting here in 10 degrees weather today, and I think of these women working on airplanes outside fixing the bomb mechanism and women who are washing their hair in a helmet out in Europe in the coldest winter in 1944 and 45. It amazes me, and I have to stop and think, "This is just amazing that these women did these things and I know their male counterparts went through the same thing also." Just the physical deprivations that they also went through as well. We also don't think about women with PTSD and things of that nature until we look at our recent female veterans, but the women I talked to went through a lot of that also and found that they couldn't talk to people about their war experiences, especially in the military.

Catherine Cooper: What would you recommend to people about trying to capture a bit more of these libraries before we lose them for the people in their lives?

Gail Beaton: I think if they would just ask them to maybe bring out the scrapbooks photographs, that generation has them. They're not on their phones, and that's what these women did for me. They brought out their yearbooks and their photographs and their medals and things like that, and let me pour over them and ask them questions. I think if you just get them talking, a lot of them will talk and they'll open up. Ideally, it would be wonderful if one could videotape it, but even to just have it on a recording and have that voice as it goes forward, I think as we lose our relatives, oftentimes we think, "Oh, if I just could hear their voice again," and so the women that I interviewed, I made a transcription, which was painful [transcribing is tedious work] of their oral interview, as well as DVDs to give to their families or to hold for themselves, and I think that's really valuable.

I could submit them to the Library of Congress's Veteran Oral History project. One of the gentlemen that I met in all of this regularly does that. He works up in Northern Colorado and he has gone to interview all sorts of male and female veterans for any war, and then he submits the DVD to the Library of Congress, so that would be something to do. I know a couple of the universities here also will accept those. I haven't asked the libraries, but I can't imagine that they wouldn't at least keep them in their archival things too.

Catherine Cooper: Absolutely. Gail, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us.

Gail Beaton: You're welcome.

NCPTT's Catherine Cooper speaks with Gail Beaton about her deep dive into collecting the stories of Colorado women who served both abroad and at home during WWII.

June 20, 2023

131. Telling Stories in Museums

Transcript

Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Adina Langer: Adina Langer.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today, Adina. You recently published a book called Storytelling in Museums. Could you talk about how or where storytelling is in museums in the public awareness and then also in the GLAM fields [galleries, libraries, archives, and museums]?

Adina Langer: I would say that storytelling as an approach within museums has really come of age within the past 20 years or so. Museums have undergone a kind of paradigm shift from being places that are primarily concerned with connoisseurship and preservation of the most exquisite artifacts of the human experience or the natural world to one where they are primarily about education and engagement and helping people to understand their place in the world and how connecting with the past can enable them to better experience the present, to make sense of their lives. And so museums have become sites of communication, and storytelling is at the heart of that process; and GLAM fields are all related to each other in this endeavor. When I think about what museums do and where stories are captured, where they are preserved, where they are interpreted, where people make connections across that spectrum in the GLAM fields, each one has kind of a different piece of that puzzle.

So if you think about archives as sites of gathering and preservation and accessibility, the key being to make what is within a repository available to those who are seeking it, to those who can benefit from those kinds of connections. Many museums have their own archives or book special collections, same with libraries. Really it's this preservation to interpretation kind of spectrum. And then if you are on that interpretation side of things, how do you select what you are going to focus your energy on as an institution, and where do you draw your inspiration and how do you serve your community? Story gathering, storytelling, has increasingly become central to, I would say, all of the GLAM fields in that way.

The book project has its origin story. I facilitated a session at the American Alliance of Museums conference in 2016. And the topic of that conference session was personal narratives in museums, so how museums use personal stories to then engage with these larger public narratives. And that came from my own experience as a curator and museum professional having recently transitioned, relatively recently from working at the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City, which was engaged in a huge oral history effort and also the startup process to create its inaugural exhibition experience for the public. And I had transitioned into a role as a curator of the Museum of History and Holocaust Education at Kennesaw State University, where we were also engaged in an oral history project. And we were in the process of beginning to emphasize the narratives from that first person testimony that we were gathering, really amplifying and emphasizing that in our exhibitions and public programs. And I wanted to engage more deeply with the ethics of that. Who were we as institutions to be excerpting to some extent from people's narratives in order to engage with these much larger historical topics, to serve diverse audiences, to serve this inter-generational kind of bridge purpose, the burden of collecting contemporary history to some extent, and even older history, when you have first person narratives available to you, the burden is to make sure you get that before you can't.

And I had seen that already at the 9/11 Memorial and some of the folks that we interviewed who had been responders, survivors, had passed since I had started there in 2006. And of course, in dealing with the World War II generation, we were really approaching the end of their natural lifespan. So that pressure was on us. And then what do you do then? What is your fiduciary responsibility as an institution, as an educator in both being the memory carrier now for these people who chose to share their stories with you? And then also understanding what the next generation doesn't know, what purpose bringing in diverse narratives can have in helping them understand the past. So I didn't want it to just be me. I actually reached out back then to history Twitter or museum Twitter, which was very robust back in 2015, 2016, and found some wonderful folks to be part of that original panel. Margaret Middleton, who is an independent designer and increasingly a scholar of the LGBTQ+ experience, and especially in museums and in public history.

I had contacts from the Tenement Museum, from the 9/11 Museum, and I found wonderfully through Twitter a contact in Australia who had managed multiple museums that were dealing with World War I memory and the integration of Indigenous stories. It was a great group of people to talk through these issues together. And I felt that just that panel, that there was more to do, there was more to say. So of course, segueing into the pandemic, I remember the day getting just the normal sort of outreach from AAM, "Hey, do you have a book idea? Something you've thought about doing?" Just a proposal. So I went ahead and did that and said, basically pitched that it was the right moment to capture the state of the practice. There were so many people doing amazing things in this area, why not create a book of essays that helped to illuminate what storytelling in museums is like in the 21st century?

As we were starting to move into the sort of second-third even decade of the 21st century. When my initial pitch was accepted, they basically said, "Hey, develop this further. What are your chapters going to look like? Who's going to participate? What's the overall scope of your project? And we'll let you know if we want you to develop it into a full book." So from there, I kind of reached out through all my networks of contacts, and my goal was diversity writ large. So both from personal perspective, diversity of people's lived experience and also diversity of the kind of museum professional they were or are. Were they working in education, curation, collections, social media, even sort of museum adjacent fields that weren't necessarily just engaged in creating exhibitions, in public programs, geographical location, etc. Lucky for me, a lot of my contacts back from graduate school and from my time in New York City had moved all over the country.

So I had this sort of built in geographical diversity through that. I had a wonderful contact who I had worked with in Morocco who agreed to write a chapter about the changing museum practice in Morocco in the 21st century. And then other people gave me other people. So I ended up with a designer who's worked in the U.S. and Canada and in various countries in Asia, and Margaret Middleton had moved to the U.K. So I had a little bit of an international element to this as well by the time I gathered all of these authors together. I've worked with the National Council on Public History on their blog History @Work for over a decade. So that was kind of what gave me the confidence to say, “Hey, I can edit a book.” I've done a bunch of editing, and I'm used to working with people who live all over the place. But I had never undertaken a project this big before. There was a lot of learning involved certainly.

There has been a marked shift in the field toward looking past this notion of shared authority, which I think when I was coming up in graduate school that was kind of the watch word, institutions has a certain kind of cultural authority, and by reaching to community members, we are sharing that authority. And this is still a good thing. But moving past that even further and really homing in on what members of the community want, what they're going to get out of this relationship. It's not so much a relationship of institutional largess, but it's one of partnership. And if people want their stories to be told, how can you help facilitate that? If they don't want their stories to be told and if they don't want them told the way you've told them in the past, what's your ethical responsibility?

And a particularly powerful conversation facilitated by the National Council on Public History's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force, (I'm not sure if that's exactly the name), on this notion of ethics of care, made a really strong impression on me [This event took place on July 8, 2020 on Twitter and was called “An Evening with Aleia Brown.” https://ncph.org/conference/other-programs/an-evening-with-aleia-brown-twitter-chat/]. This idea that it is more important to listen perhaps than to assume in your relationship with historical story keepers. But at the same time thinking through, “okay, well then as a museum, what are your ethical responsibilities? Who are the people who have a claim on that process?” And that includes the people who are entrusting you with their artifacts and their narratives, and those are deeply related, but also the future generations that you're holding this material for. And that you're changing your interpretation and you're looking to help people who are coming to you as a bridge between their own lived experience and that of others who they want to connect with.

They want to understand, whether that's the people of the past or people from cultures that are different from their own. So the chapters in this book all come out of that moment where there is a really deep reflection and orientation toward engaging with the institutional wrongs, certainly coming out of the pandemic and the period in 2020 when there was so much looking inward. And also looking across, and some people were calling for “death to museums,” right? This idea of “are these redeemable, these institutions?” Are they incurably colonialist? Are they incurably racist? Can you overcome your origins by playing a useful living responsible role in society today? And I can say, having written a book and connected with all of these professionals, that my hope comes from a place of seeing the deep desire among professionals to do that work and to use whatever privilege that they have in society to make the world a better place from where they are, and to repair some of the wrongs that were done to and within communities and across borders, and to do that by listening and by speaking, both.

This book is definitely for museum professionals, preservation professionals, public historians, art historians, all of us who are working in the fields using GLAM as a good basis there. But I do hope that it is accessible to people who are curious, who might not come from those fields. So that might include journalists, those who are used to covering museums in a particular way. And I've noticed this quite a bit. There's still a lot of assumptions being made in museum journalism about what kind of a hierarchy of museums there might be, the really big old institutions, are they more important than the small community institutions? And I hope that someone reading this book would see that within the field, things are changing in our understanding of what is important and of how we exist and why we exist, and people who go to museums and people who want to hear stories.

So if you've ever seen yourself in a museum and you wonder... Or you haven't seen yourself, and you wonder why, I would hope that there would be something for you in this book. And anyone who's interested in kind of that peeling back the curtain on a process. I know when I grew up, I loved going to museums. I never thought about them as places where real people work. It was sort of that magical, like, “oh, this stuff just kind of appears and oh, it's so cool.” And I think that there are still people out there and museums still do multiple studies, and they're still incredibly well trusted institutions within our society, which is increasingly challenged when it comes to trust. And so for people who want to understand how museums do what they do, this book can really provide multiple perspectives on that.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much, Adina.

Adina Langer: You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

Catherine Cooper speaks with Adina Langer about how people approach telling stories through museum exhibits.

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