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

Episodes

February 15, 2013

41. KeckCAVES, Immersive 3D Visualization System for Cultural Sites (Episode 41)

Transcript

Church: Marshall, I saw a poster presentation you did at the 3-D Digital Documentation Summit about doing LiDAR scans of sacred Native American sites. Can you tell us more about that project?

Millet: Absolutely. Thank you for having me here today and putting on the Summit. Altogether it’s just pretty much wrapped up and there’s been all these incredible places for input on 3-D data and what it means for archeology and preservation, all these ideas and then all these private institutions as well, so it’s been a phenomenal opportunity to meet and actually converse with people about where this is going in the future.

So for myself, I started exploring 3-D data a little while ago based on a couple of projects I had in the Sierra Nevadas and we just found these rock art sites on these granite cliffs and stuff. I’m from the southwest. I did a lot of archeology out there, and I knew there was abundant rock art in those regions but exploring the Sierra Nevadas has been really interesting because I’m finding out there’s actually pretty much rock art everywhere.

So the best methods for me as an archeologist, exploration of the best methods is really important to me and documenting the rock art and 3-D technologies became a part of that and became a huge interest. But as I did the research and tried to develop a research design to guide people for mitigation for these rock art sites, people knew about it but they weren’t doing it.

So that was my interest in general. I was also influenced, I’ve seen some of the work the Smithsonian has done, and I did the literature research and England has been ahead on all this stuff and so it motivated me to really pursue 3-D technology.

So that’s what this started out as was a pilot project, a local pilot project working with some of the tribal groups that I’ve developed these processes and been out in the field with. They knew me and we had a mutual interest in exploring mainly some of these ideas. I wanted to compare the technologies.

I wanted to learn about them and figure them out for myself because I wasn’t finding anyone who was doing it. So that’s how the project started but it very quickly turned, once I actually did that field work and I investigated with all of them, so we did stereo photometry of the site, we did laser scanning using, you know, total station 360 phase shifting LiDAR and then we also did white light scanning.

So my ultimate goal, one of the largest influences I have is what it actually means when you get on a site. There’s actually a presence that you feel when you’re recording a site and you’re identifying attributes and artifacts and you are defining constituents of it. But there’s also an experience that you get from an archeological site or a historic site and my goal with this was how do you convey that, because I’ve had this great opportunity, unique opportunity to be all over the country on projects, places I can never have access to again, and that concept is a problem that tribes face as well or even the general public.

They don’t have access to these sites. I was addressing that end of what 3-D digital documentation meant for access. Some of the goals of this, I was imagining ten years down the road, there would be a nice system of putting all this together in a cohesive way and then experiencing it.

So I was imagining somewhere in the future and through a couple of contacts that started getting interested in my project that was starting, they introduced me to a program at UC Davis in California and that was KeckCAVES. The KeckCAVES program is a collaborative effort of thirty or more geologists and earth scientists and hydrologists and computer programmers. Their goal was to create a visualization that allows scientists to access through data and use it as a tool. So Joe Dumit who’s there, he’s the Director of the Science & Technology Center at UC Davis. His goal, he’s an anthropologist, so he started connecting on these ideas of, you know, we had a similar background platform to work on, anthropology and his work is focused on how scientists access 3-D data and how to use it and what the benefit is.

So in that effort, the KeckCAVES folks, the Director is Louise Kellogg and then Oliver Kreylos is the computer programmer. They put these meetings together and collaboratively attacked how to make a visualization better so you can access the data. So they put together this project.

They were originally exploring fault lines and then they were investigating mudslides and stuff like that, and I came to them and I had these site environments and I said I just want to experience a site environment and they hadn’t really approached it from that as a cultural experience yet. So they were really interested in where I was coming with this and part of my goal was to work with the people that have been gracious enough and humble enough to put all this data together.

I was working with the Maidu Museum and historic site in Roseville, California. So they have there, it’s a very recently developed museum, but they have a trail and it has petroglyphs, but it’s also a sacred site and it’s also protected in that it’s a National Register site and it also has archeology there. But the tribe is very, they manage it and oversee it and are stewards of the site and they work with the museum and everyone.

They were the ones that graciously allowed me to do the 3-D project to begin with. But once I had this 3-D data, and we looked, at the Summit at all these amazing examples of people collecting 3-D data from an artifact level, a museum level or from a site environment or big object level, my goal was to completely facilitate context and environment over an archeological site and approach all the scales of collecting that data from a wide general tomography or topography in the surrounding area, then to site environment like trees and things. The setting that you really feel when you’re on that site and put in a virtualization room, which is KeckCAVES and see if there’s a value to experiencing the digital site environment separate from the real site.

So the KeckCAVES, to talk a little bit about it and the technology behind it, is everything as an open source project and you can actually check them out at www.keckCAVES.org and it’s a three-walled room about 10 X 10 X 10 feet and its three walls, front-projected, and it’s a floor that’s a mirror and excuse me, the three walls are rear-projected and the floor is front-projected below you. So you take off your shoes so you don’t scratch up the surface and you step in there in your socked feet and little slippers and it uses shutter glasses and it uses hand-held wireless remotes that you can hold and then it also employs head tracking.

So the question is what does that all mean? It’s hard to put together when you talk about it, and it’s hard to show it on a picture but the idea is that you are actually stepping into your data. So with the walls surrounding you and with the glasses and the 3-D projection, you literally, your data comes alive in front of you and now because of these interaction tools that UC Davis developed to have them interact, you’re in a virtual environment, a full visual virtual environment.

So I wanted to see what it meant for a tribal agency or an archeologist or a managing agency to experience that process. I guess once I had access to KeckCAVES and once they were gracious enough to move forward with the project and bring all this 3-D data in there, it affected me so dramatically, and I was convinced that there was a real value to this. It answered a big question that was on my mind, which was, what to do you with all this data? My original approach was for analytical, scientific, archeological purposes and I want to maintain those methods for that type of analysis because you can use the data to do it but now there is also an experience value. So we did that. We brought the tribes in. We had a couple of different sessions with both the museum and tribal folks and came in and played with the data and has experienced remotely this 3-D environment.

So what does that mean? I’ve been involved with programs and studied the idea of digital diaspora or diaspora in general but digital diaspora, because of our internet and our technology, now is able to connect cultural groups that have disseminated in different areas, and they can maintain a cultural identity through talking and getting ideas and food and all the things that define culture and doing that on the internet.

Well something like this can allow digital diaspora to continue to flourish and exist because now, if you can experience the location you can get location used to define culture. It’s a huge part of archeology and a cultural study or a historic background or a context, everything’s location dependent and as our world becomes more and more globalized that’s starting to change. With a digital world like this, it’s changing even more. So I saw a real shift, a cultural shift and I started believing that KeckCAVES or a visualized virtual environment is going to affect this.

So my research questions were what is the value, what does it mean for the tribes, how can they use it. So the next future of that or where the project is now going is to collect 3-D data at a few more sites. So that you can and we actually, I recently did this, we’ve been working with some wonderful folks at Tahoe National Forest and the DLM office, the Redding branch, trying to get a few more sample sites so the idea is you can remote access sites at a very wide distance apart. So now you can start comparing rock art or whatever archeological constituents that are out there, if it’s a historic building that is colonial in Massachusetts and maybe you have an early colonial piece here in the City of San Francisco, you can bring those environments together and you can start experiencing them independent of location. That is such a big idea that I want to continue going there. I think it has a huge utility and they had so many ideas too, because I had my own ideas as an archeologist, but as a people in this cultural, groups can come in there and they’re going to develop their own ideas of how it has a use and utility.

So there’s some pretty exciting ideas and a lot of them were actually based on artifacts. They like to see baskets in there, they like to visualize the basket weaving and the process and also artifacts that you can’t have people touch all the time can be properly scanned and a 3-D image made of them and then the public can interact. Kids can interact with it on an iPad and you actually get a sense of touch because you’re interacting with the screen. You can manipulate it. So there’s an idea of free exploration that allows people to get a valuable experience from that.

So that’s the next step. The Smithsonian and all the museums in the world have all these artifacts and collections that are out of their geophysical locations now. I would love to see a project develop where exploring and bringing artifacts that have been excavated fifty or seventy years ago, back into the context of their sites and even with CyArk we are obviously seeing some big developments, but if you scan an environment you can use appropriate historic data to give that site agency and even return it to an understanding of what the site was like maybe five hundred years ago or maybe a thousand years ago, bring some of these artifacts back in context and let people interact with it in a way that is hopefully very valuable and very compelling and gives a huge vision of the project in general.

That was however my pilot project turned into a few questions that turned into a different direction and output and then a larger, bigger idea that I hope to continue to work towards.

Church: I hope to hear from you in the future about how the project is going and you know, what gains you’ve made and what other areas it’s being used in. So we look forward to hearing from you again about the future of this project.

Millet: Yeah, thank you for having me. There are some great areas to explore and excavate and like you said putting that together and again, it’s just a tool to visualization as a way to give people access. I’m excited about where that can go as well. So thanks for everything you’ve put together for this week and the right people in the right place. It’s a really exciting time both for the technology and archeology in the field in general. So, thank you Jason.

Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information check out our podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

Jason Church speaks with Marshall Millet, owner of MMars 4-D. Today they are talking about Millet’s work with U.C. Davis and the KeckCAVES visualization facility.

January 13, 2013

40. Thin Section Petrography for Conservation (Episode 40)

Transcript

Striegel: Good afternoon Chandra. We’re coming today from the National Conservation Training Center. We would like to talk a little bit about the petrographic analysis course that just took place here. So tell me a little bit about your areas of research.

Reedy: Well, I do thin section petrography of stone and [?] materials, although lately I’ve been working mainly on projects with ceramic materials and working to modernize this technique by bringing in digital image analysis technologies.

Striegel: So, I know you use thin section petrography to study ceramics. Can you tell us what thin section petrography is and how you use it?

Reedy: Okay. For thin section petrography, you have to take a small solid sample from your material. If you have a stone sculpture, you might take a sample from the underside of the base where it’s not visible, and you would never sample a whole undamaged ceramic piece, but when you have shards, which in archeology we tend to have a lot of shards, it’s easy to take a sample as a small slice. Then you mount it in an epoxy resin on a glass slide and grind it down to exactly 30 microns thickness where you can then use the optical properties visible in minerals to identify the material that you have and to also look at different aspects of technology or deterioration.

Striegel: How difficult is it to learn this technique?

Reedy: It is a bit time consuming because you have to learn to identify [?] minerals and you have to be familiar with mineralogy so I learned this at UCLA when I was a graduate student taking geology courses. I took a one year sequence in mineralogy and another in different aspects of stone. But if you don’t have a course like that available, well you can learn on your own, especially if you’re working with a specific type of material. You can really study the components of that material and become an expert in that particular material type.

Striegel: Now I know you’ve received two grants from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. How have these grants helped you advance your work?

Reedy: Well the first one was comparing different image analysis packages in their application to cultural heritage issues and that was very helpful for me because I spent a year studying how we can use image analysis and looking at different types of packages and programs in software for image analysis and that helped me in developing that as a new research tool that I can use with thin section petrography.

The second grant was for helping to complete my book on thin section petrography of stone and ceramic cultural materials. It was very helpful in getting to that final completion stage for a book project that took about seven years from start to finish.

Editors Note: Grants; Digital Image Analysis of Petrographic Thin Sections in Conservation Research (2004-01) and Thin-Section Petrography of Cultural Materials: Comprehensive Resource and Training.

Striegel: Well, I’ve seen your book and it has beautiful images in it, and it’s really a useful tool when you’re using thin section petrography. Now what are some the most interesting observations that you have learned from looking at thin sections? What is perhaps maybe a favorite project you’ve worked on?

Reedy: Well, right now I think the one I’m working on right now is one of my favorites. I’m working with the Ancient Ceramic Technology Lab in Beijing at the Forbidden City and we’re collaborating on a project to look at the five great wares of the Sung Dynasty and Chinese ceramics are very, very interesting in general and Sung Dynasty period has some spectacularly interesting glaze technologies and ceramic production technologies, so I’m enjoying that project.

Striegel: Now how do different professions use thin section petrography? For example, how does an archeologist use the technique for say somebody who’s interested in historic architecture?

Reedy: Well, in historic architecture, somebody may be interested in looking at building materials or looking perhaps at deterioration and assessing the results of various conservation treatments to help in selecting the best treatment. Whereas, an archeologist may be more interested in what the technology of the ceramic material can tell you about the people who made and used them or about the different social systems and trade and exchange networks. They may be interested in stone or ceramics in trying to identify a provenance or a source of a material.

Striegel: Okay and how does digital imaging analysis help you with petrography or make petrography easier today?

Reedy: Well it gives you a mechanism for collecting quantitative data over a wide variety of types. You can look at the area percentage of different components and different shape characteristics and size characteristics.

You can get in apparently rapid manner, some quantitative data that is statistically valid because you can look at hundreds and hundreds of grains instantaneously. It can also help you in getting better qualitative data because you can use the image analysis to enhance some of the visual aspects that are harder to see just through typical thin section petrography methods.

Striegel: Well I know we’ve just finished up a two-day workshop here where we had ten participants and at the end of that workshop, you asked participants what they learned or enjoyed most about the workshop. Now, I’ll ask you what did you enjoy most about the workshop.

Reedy: Well, seeing people who had never done any thin section petrography before really get interested in it and to begin to see the potential of that technique in terms of the different types of research questions that you can address and understanding how you can get culturally relevant information if you ask the right research questions and go about it in the right way.

I didn’t know if people would actually be interested or if they would very soon find it boring or too much in range or just not comprehensible so it was good to see that coming in without much background, they were able to come away with a lot in just two days.

Striegel: Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us and for being an instructor at this workshop and we look forward to working with you again.

Reedy: Thank you.

Mary Striegel speaks with Chandra Reedy. Reedy serves as Director of the Laboratory for Analysis of Cultural Materials in the Center for Historic Architecture and Design at the University of Delaware. Today we are talking to Chandra about the importance of thin section petrography for conservation.

December 17, 2012

39. Cultural Resources in the Wilderness (Episode 39)

Transcript

Jenny Hay: Jill’s recent article with a number of colleagues in Park Science entitled “Integrating Cultural Resources and Wilderness Character” carefully considers the intersection of the cultural and the natural in the real world. Wilderness areas are untrammeled sites that are preserved and celebrated by our society, visited by millions of people each year, and protected by law from specific activities that might compromise the wilderness character.

For more information about Wilderness in the United States, please visit www.wilderness.net, a website full of information and educational resources on wilderness history, important and influential personalities, the values and benefits of wilderness, threats to wilderness, as well as resources geared toward professionals and federal agency staff involved in wilderness management.

Thanks for joining me today, Jill. I just have a few questions for you about wilderness. The idea of wilderness has been long debated in fields such as geography and environmental studies. How does the park service define wilderness?

Jill Cowley: The Wilderness Act of 1964 provides a definition of wilderness that is the basic reference for all federal land management agencies, including the National Park Service. And I’ll quote a couple of passages from Section 2(c) of the Wilderness Act where wilderness is defined. And this language is probably going to be familiar to many of your listeners: wilderness is “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain . . . an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence . . . affected primarily by the forces of nature . . . [with] outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation . . . at least five thousand acres of land . . and (and this is an important phrase for historic preservation) and may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value”. So, historical value is clearly stated as a possible value of wilderness.

A discussion of wilderness legislation and legislative history in the U.S. is included within the recent article in Park Science, “Integrating cultural resources and wilderness character”. For example, from that article, — according to Howard Zahniser, an early wilderness proponent, wilderness advocates and members of Congress who championed the Wilderness Act understood that wilderness included both the value of specific cultural features protected within a wilderness and the cultural significance of the overall environment of the wilderness.

[Jill notes that the Park Science article was very much a team effort, with five co-authors and numerous reviewers. Co-authors: Peter Landres (Ecologist, USFS Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute) , Melissa Memory (CR CHIEF Everglades), Doug Scott (Pew Trusts Wilderness Specialist), and Adrienne Lindholm (Wilderness Coordinator, Alaska Region)]

Jenny Hay: I see. Well, the organizational structure of the National Park Service separates ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ resources, so how do the two departments interact in the real world, such as park sites and wilderness areas?

Jill Cowley: This is a good and very broad question – I’ll respond somewhat specifically. At the Regional office level, where I work, and in the field, the separation between “natural” and “cultural” is still very alive in some ways, but is also being bridged in various ways. For example, the Servicewide Comprehensive Call for project funding is now more open to integrated natural and cultural projects.

Cultural landscapes projects address the integration of cultural and natural resources.

In wilderness management, a good example of cultural/natural integration is developing Minimum Requirements Analysis for proposed projects in wilderness that have potential to affect cultural or natural resources.

Jenny Hay: What kind of cultural values are evident in an area like wilderness? Why is it historically important to preserve these values?

Jill Cowley: Cultural values are an important part of the IDEA of wilderness, and an important part of ACTUAL wilderness areas. The idea of wilderness is itself a cultural construct – humankind has developed the concept of wilderness, and the Wilderness Act is the law developed within the U.S. which directs how to apply that concept.

Within actual wilderness areas, whether designated wilderness or areas that have been studied and proposed as wilderness, many kinds of cultural values can be present and evident within the wilderness landscape. The wilderness area may be ancestral homeland for American Indian tribes, with on-going meaning and value to those tribes.

Archeological resources within wilderness are evidence of past human habitation and use. Wilderness areas may contain evidence of historic trails and transportation routes, and activities related to settlement, agriculture, and mining.

This evidence may be in tangible, place-based form – for example, structures like early ranger cabins, cultural landscapes like homesteads and orchards, or landscape features like trails.

Evidence may be in tangible form but not located within wilderness – for example historical documents like oral history transcripts, written stories and other folklore that relate to wilderness. Or the evidence may be intangible – for instance unwritten stories, histories, and traditional ceremonies.

My work within the National Park Service’s Cultural Landscapes Program focuses primarily on tangible resources. From my perspective, wilderness areas are cultural landscapes that have been valued, used and in some areas modified by humans for thousands of years.

So part of your question was why is it important to preserve these cultural resources and values? As we know generally, The National Park Service and other federal agencies preserve tangible and intangible evidence of the past so the histories of all peoples can be remembered and valued, and so we can move into the future with an appreciation and understanding of our collective past.

Much of our collective past has been lived within what are now identified as wilderness. Agencies are directed by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 to identify, evaluate treatment options for, and to preserve our cultural heritage, and this includes heritage within wilderness areas as well as outside wilderness areas. National Park Service Management Policies are clear on the value of cultural resources within wilderness and the need to apply Sections 110 and 106 of the NHPA within wilderness.

Jenny Hay: Right – that leads me to a number of different questions. What value do cultural resources bring to wilderness areas? How does the presence of cultural resources affect treatment / maintenance of the wilderness landscape? And, how might the removal of cultural resources affect a wilderness area?

Jill Cowley: These are important and interrelated questions. All wilderness areas have a human history. In addition to preserving ecosystems, wilderness helps us understand human use and value of the land over time. Preserving and interpreting cultural resources that are within and part of wilderness is important to being able to understand that human history. It’s not so much a matter of what cultural resources bring to wilderness – cultural resources are part of the wilderness itself. We can’t necessarily remove cultural resources from wilderness – for example, archeological sites in wilderness are imbedded within and part of the landscape . . . traces of a traditional and/or historic transportation route, or remains of a nineteenth century settlement within wilderness, are part of the wilderness landscape.

While historic structures like ranger cabins built prior to wilderness designation could be removed from wilderness, this may go against the National Historic Preservation Act and may degrade the overall cultural meaning of an area within wilderness. Management of wilderness needs to respond to both the Wilderness Act and the National Historic Preservation Act. If cultural resources are removed from wilderness, part of the essence and meaning of the land is taken away.

The presence of cultural resources can affect wilderness management in various ways. Prescribed fire and vegetation management, for example, need to take into account potential effects on archeological and historic resources. Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico is an example of a park where the wilderness area encompasses many, many archeological sites and resources, and where protection and preservation of these resources is part of overall wilderness management.

Jenny Hay: While it may seem straightforward for cultural resources professionals to include cultural resources inside wilderness landscape, some wilderness proponents define these spaces by the absence of human influence. Are there any similarities in their goals, and how can these divergent perspectives come to an agreement on an appropriate treatment?

Jill Cowley: That’s a really good question – this gets to the heart of some of the debates about the management of cultural aspects of wilderness. Varying professional and personal perspectives derive from a basic difference in belief about the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world – whether or not humans are a part of nature. Both perspectives, and the range of perspectives between the two, may share the goal of preserving wilderness values and character, but how these values and character are defined may differ.

Whatever our individual beliefs, we need to go back to law and policy to work together on appropriate treatments of wilderness cultural resources. The two primary laws are the Wilderness Act and the National Historic Preservation Act. Neither law states that it trumps the other, so federal agencies must equally uphold both laws and the values they embody. The Wilderness Act requires the preservation of wilderness character.

The National Historic Preservation Act requires the identification and evaluation of all cultural resources, including those in wilderness, and a process through which potential effects of projects on cultural resources are evaluated. The National Park Service refers to the Secretary of the Interior Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties for guidance on treatment options.

Currently, guidance on how to define, describe, and preserve wilderness character is being prepared by the interagency Wilderness Character Integration Team. How wilderness character is defined and described can determine how wilderness management balances and integrates the various wilderness values, including historical value and cultural resources. The documents being prepared by the Wilderness Character Integration Team are based on the Wilderness Act, and incorporate the possibility of cultural resources being an integral part of the character of a specific wilderness. So, professionals who have widely divergent views on what wilderness character should be will be able to refer to these documents for a definition of wilderness character based on law and policy.

Jenny Hay: Excellent.You mentioned earlier, as well as in your article that the Minimum Requirements Analysis process can be a useful tool for determining necessary and appropriate action on cultural resources in wilderness areas. What is this Minimum Requirements Analysis, and how can it be used by cultural and natural resource specialists in tandem?

Jill Cowley: Minimum Requirements Analysis is a process for determining first whether an administrative action within wilderness is necessary and second, the minimum and least disturbing method or tools with which to carry out the action. The goal is to meet the intent of the Wilderness Act where it says that management actions in wilderness need to be avoided “except as necessary to meet minimum requirements for the administration of the area…“, and to minimize impact to wilderness character. This analysis is ideally completed by a team including natural and cultural resource specialists. For more information on Minimum Requirements Analysis, and many other wilderness topics including cultural resources and wilderness, I recommend consulting the interagency wilderness website (www.wilderness.net). There’s a wealth of information on that website.

But let me give you an example. The Park Science article includes a section on Cultural Resources Management and Minimum Requirements Analysis. One example included in this section is the preservation of a historic stone cabin in the recommended wilderness at Arches National Park in Utah – this example shows how the Minimum Requirements Analysis process can address cultural and natural resources. Based on the Minimum Requirements Analysis for this project, access to the project area needed to be over a slickrock route, no backcountry camp was allowed, the work crew size was kept to a minimum, mortar soil was collected from multiple locations, and soil collection sites and footprints were raked out. So these requirements minimized impacts on natural and visual resources during a historic preservation project.

Jenny Hay: Wow. You also suggest that Traditional Ecological Knowledge held by many Native American tribes could be valuable to both preservationists and wilderness advocates. What is Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and why is it important to include Tribal leaders in the process of wilderness management?

Jill Cowley: Traditional Ecological Knowledge, or TEK for short, is experienced-based knowledge of the interdependence between humans and their environment, and ecological effects of certain human actions, held by groups with long-held traditional associations with the land. Now that is not necessarily a technical or agency definition, that’s my understanding of what TEK is.

Jenny Hay: Ok.

Jill Cowley: An example is the knowledge of how low level and localized fire can be used to manage vegetation – for instance in improving habitat or forage for herd animals or wildlife, or to avoid catastrophic fires. It is important to involve Tribal leaders and representatives in wilderness management in order to ensure that tribal perspectives on wilderness are included. Many areas today identified as wilderness have been, and continue to be, important to the traditional beliefs and lifeways of tribes: for example, wilderness areas may serve as hunting areas, plant gathering areas, and places associated with ceremony and spiritual sustenance. Tribal concerns may relate to cultural or natural resources or a combination of both, and may include maintaining access to sacred sites and reburials within wilderness, and maintaining the ability to propagate and collect ceremonial resources, such as specific plant materials, within wilderness. Also, traditional ecological knowledge held by tribal members may assist management decisions. For more information and examples, I recommend consulting the National Park Service’s Indian Affairs and American Culture Program located in Denver, CO.

Jenny Hay: Great. Well, we’ll provide links to both the wilderness website and that National Park Service site you just mentioned on our website for listeners to access.

Jill Cowley: At this time, jenny, I’d just like to say a few words of conclusion.

Jenny Hay: Wonderful.

Jill Cowley: The key points are that wilderness managers need to address both the Wilderness Act and the National Historic Preservation Act, and that tools like the Minimum Requirements Analysis and guidance on wilderness character can help management with differing perspectives on wilderness reach agreement on treatment of cultural resources in wilderness. And also, I recommend consultation with the Regional Wilderness Coordinators for more guidance. Thank you.

Jenny Hay: Thank you very much.

Jenny Hay speaks with Jill Cowley, Historic Landscape Architect for the Intermountain Region of the National Park Service.

November 28, 2012

38. Historic Landscape of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Part 2 (Episode 38)

Transcript

Jenny Hay: Thank you for joining me again today, Cindy, to talk a little more about the history of the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC, in Texas State Parks. There’s one state park in Texas that stands out in particular for its CCC heritage, and that’s Bastrop State Park. What evidence of the CCC is still visible in the landscape there?

Cindy Brandimarte: Oh, from the first moment you get there – the entrance portals are terrific, the park road, you can see fencing and culverts and curbing. There are bridges, there are two scenic overlooks. Arthur Fehr was landscape architect and architect for that park. There are stone tables and fire pits and an amphitheatre. There’s a custodians’ dwelling and a refectory that will knock your socks off. There are twelve cabins that the public is lucky enough to be able to stay in, a swimming pool and a pool shelter and a bath house and a great, a workshop that was – that burned in the early ’40s but was rebuilt, helped to be rebuilt by the National Youth Administration, which was a successor in part to the CCC. So that maintenance building, is what we use it for now, and that is still in use. And we are very proud of that.

Jenny Hay: Wow.

Cindy Brandimarte: Bastrop is one of the few parks, state parks, in the whole nation that’s a National Historic Landmark because so many elements survive. And Ethan Carr, an architectural historian formerly with the National Park Service, wrote that excellent NHL nomination.

Jenny Hay: Ok. Well, part of the value of documentation and educational tools such as the websites that we’ve discussed is revealed when sites like Bastrop State Park are threatened. I understand that much of that park burned last year in the Bastrop County Complex fire, which was one of the most destructive wildfires in Texas history. What happened to the park’s CCC structures?

Cindy Brandimarte: We estimate that what we lost were a wooden roof on one of the overlooks. I tell you, our wildland fire team, which got the Governor’s Award for Historic Preservation this year, pulled out all the stops, absolutely worked day and night for many days throughout that week, that awful Labor Day weekend and into the week.

This wildland fire team was established at Parks & Wildlife in 2005, and if we hadn’t had it, those buildings would be gone. These men and women who have day jobs at Parks & Wildlife – some of them are clerks and office managers and park rangers and superintendents, were out there on the line.

And at first, the fire was so vicious and the water was so scarce, people had to wait until the fire got within x number of feet of the building before they could start fighting it. People were hosing down roofs. We had to get – the local water department was running out of water.

As houses burned, there were no water sources. So we had to truck in a lot of the water. And businesses chipped in so magnificently to help. So we had water tenders come in, and we just circled the buildings essentially. The photo that I sent you shows you just how close the fire got. You can see just a little circle of green around that cabin. And that’s, that’s what these men and women did for almost a week. And we’re talking 24 hours a day, when it was safe.

Jenny Hay: Right.

Cindy Brandimarte: They did that. And so we lost very little historic fabric there. And I know I sound like a Pollyanna, but there were some actual good things to come out of it, if one can be an optimist in times like those. We had archaeologists go in who were able to uncover some landscape features that had been pretty much lost. I mean, those pines drop leaves and needles, and they had gotten so buried – and now we can see what the CCC intention of water drainage was in that park. So we’ve tried to make the best of a terrible, terrible situation. The buildings survived, and we are assured by the ecologists that the forest will regenerate, so we’re hopeful. And we hope we’re around to see it!

Jenny Hay: Well, NCPTT just awarded the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department a grant in relation to that fire at Bastrop State Park. What are you hoping to learn?

Cindy Brandimarte: Yes, and we are very grateful and optimistic again, because we want to sample the building materials – what’s been out there, the wood, the sandstone, the mortar, and see what effect cleaning and any sort of remedial treatment has had. And we want to make even better, be better prepared should it happen again here or elsewhere. This time we felt kind of in the dark about what had happened to our buildings, and we don’t want to feel that way again. We want to be better prepared and possibly protect the historic resources anywhere but inside and outside the Texas State Parks System.

And I know our three conservators from the University of Texas and independent conservators, Fran Gayle, Casey Gallagher, and Miriam Tworek-Hoffstetter are very interested in learning the effects of fire retardents on the structures, and even to consider replacement materials if appropriate. And we’ll have a training session for our maintenance specialists all around the state as a result of their findings.

Jenny Hay: That sounds like a really worthwhile project.

Cindy Brandimarte: I think so.

Jenny Hay: Well thank you very much for talking with me today, Cindy!

Cindy Brandimarte: You’re very welcome. Thank you for having interest in the project, Texas State Parks, and the CCC.

In Part 2, Jenny Hay continues the conversation with Cindy Brandimarte, Director of the Historic Sites & Structures Program in the State Parks Division of the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department. In the second and final installment of this two-part series, they’ll talk about Bastrop State Park, a National Historic Landmark in Texas that is the site of a 2012 NCPTT grant project.

October 17, 2012

37. Historic Landscape of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Part 1 (Episode 37)

Transcript

Jenny Hay: Thank you for joining me here today, Cindy. I just want to start with a pretty general question. What is the Civilian Conservation Corps, or the CCC, and why is it important to the Texas State Park system?

Cindy Brandimarte Many people know that the CCC as abbreviated stands for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and it was one of the key agencies that FDR created during, as part of his New Deal for America. And it was generally young men, although there were some veterans from WWI and even the Spanish-American War, who were part of it. And they were in general suffering the slings and arrows of the Great Depression, and it was a works program. And it became very important to Texas State Parks because they, we always say the Corps built the core of our system.

Jenny Hay: Wow – and what kind of work did they do in the parks?

Cindy Brandimarte Well, some of it, if you went, it would be invisible. They cleared brush, they planted trees – we can’t really see those kinds of things, except the mature trees. That’s kind of invisible – even road construction. But then there are these beautiful visible elements of the cultural landscape that get so much attention – or that got so much attention back in the 1930s. So much material, so much labor was invested in them. They are the refectories, which are also called combination buildings or concession buildings, they’re cabins, there are picnic tables galore, fire pits, shelters, that create just a masterful and beautiful landscape. Texas State Parks, and I’m sure other state park systems, are grateful – at least in Texas, before the CCC came here, we had convicts who were sent in to help fix up the parks. There were no master plans, there were no talented designers and architects, there was no large workforce that could be relied upon. And that took place from about 1923 to ’33, when the Civilian Conservation Corps first made its mark on our parks.

Jenny Hay: I see. And is there a distinctive CCC style?

Cindy Brandimarte Yes. In many, but not all of the parks, it is commonly referred to as ‘NPS Rustic.’ It’s distinctive in its – it’s been inspired by natural forms, local materials. For example, timber in East Texas, and stone in the Texas Hill Country, where these materials are plentiful. There’s a lot of handcrafted woodwork, they are set unobtrusively in the landscape. As Jim Steely, who was talking about Herbert Meyer, one of the architects in the National Park Service that helped design our parks, there was a horizontality about them and Meyer talks about the horizontal key. So they tend to be low to the ground, they’re not these vertical Victorian resorts of the 1870s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. That said, the NPS Rustic which is distinctive, the CCC was very conscious of the local setting in terms of cultural settings and local history. For example, in the Davis Mountains which is far West Texas, we have a pueblo style hotel: the Indian Lodge at the Davis Mountains State Park. It looks a little West, to New Mexican architecture, to Native American architecture. And we also have what’s called Goliad State Park and Historic Site which is a reconstructed 18th century mission that’s very much a part of the local history of South Texas. And then I would be remiss if I didn’t mention some of the more modern design that came in at the end of the CCC. We’re talking 1940, ’41, right before World War II. There’s an architect up in Northeast Texas by the name of Joe Lair, and he executed a really remarkable, modern design for Tyler State Park that was a clear break from the NPS Rustic. So we have a gamut, and we have some highly distinctive NPS Rustic architecture within our parks.

Jenny Hay: Yeah, that’s really fascinating – the wide variety of styles that you can see and yet the coherence that’s kind of woven through those parks. I’m going to bring us back up to today. The website “texascccparks.org” is an innovative website displaying the extensive documentation of the work of the CCC in the Texas State Park system. Can you tell me a little bit about the development of this resource?

Cindy Brandimarte Well we were quite fortunate, because there was something in the air in 2006 and 2007 that caused us all to look at earlier architectural models. Whether it was an awareness of sprawl, whether it was a sense of economic crisis soon to come – whatever it was, certainly at Parks & Wildlife and in more broad circles, the CCC was seen to be a good topic and a topical one. We started writing grants and we were so fortunate to get several Texas foundations, the Hillcrest Foundation and the Sturgis Foundation interested in our project. We wanted to help, we wanted to model what we imagined, what we believed is good design in these CCC parks, and have architects, architectural students wherever they might live, locally, globally, have access to these places – at least visually if not physically. And we wanted to do that by means of a website. We wanted to grow our base of advocates. We were very concerned that as these gentlemen who worked in the CCC died, they had passed along the torch I you will to their families, friends and colleagues. But there are people that come to the parks purely for recreation. And they don’t have this other story, and they don’t have this other personal connection. So wherever they were, we wanted the ability to reach them. And I think what really helped us so much in addition to these generous private foundations was that the National Endowment for the Arts was offering a new category on design. And this really seemed like the perfect fit. That if we could build this website and talk about the history and the good design and the cultural context in which it happened, then we could have people who love these parks for a variety of reasons and we might inspire some future designers to build on this human scale.

Jenny Hay: Are there other online resources that tell the story of the CCC in the Texas State Parks?

Cindy Brandimarte Well you named one, and that is one that the Interpretive Services group at Texas Parks & Wildlife did. Sarah Lisle was the “A New Deal for Texas,” and that was geared, that was funded by Humanities Texas, and it is geared to assist teachers of Texas history in the 4th and 7th grade to talk about the phenomenon of change in the 20th century. Teachers in Texas had, are stressed with teaching everything. The idea was that once you get to the 20th century, you don’t get to the present. You may get to WWII, but there’s a gap in what’s covered. The interpreters thought that this geared toward 4th and 7th grade school children in Texas who take Texas history would be attractive. And it has proven to be. There’s a lot of more national ones – if you’re interested, Living New Deal at Berkeley, it’s just one word strung together: https://livingnewdeal.org/.

There’s an individual by the name of Gray Brechin who’s trying to look at a lot – not just CCC parks but all New Deal infrastructure that is around us everywhere. And he’s done a really good job. And there’s another website you can go to: NewDealLegacy.org – it’s part of the New Deal Preservation Association. So I’d direct listeners to those.

Jenny Hay: Thank you for sharing those resources with us, Cindy. We’ll provide links to them for folks who are interested on our website. That’s all the questions I have for you this time – next time, I’ll ask you about Bastrop State Park and the work done to save its CCC heritage in the face of one of the worst wildfires in Texas history.

Jenny Hay speaks with Cindy Brandimarte, Director of the Historic Sites & Structures Program in the State Parks Division of the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department. In the first installment of this two-part series, they’ll talk about the iconic landscape of the Civilian Conservation Corps and their role in the development of the Texas State Park system.

August 20, 2012

36. Masonry, History, Integrity: Urban Conservation Primer (Episode 36)

Transcript

Stacey Urlacher: Thanks for being here today

Tom Russack: Well it’s my pleasure and an honor, thank you

Stacey Urlacher: You have written Masonry History Integrity: An Urban Conservation Primer, can you tell us more about this primer and the inspiration behind writing it?

Tom Russack: Well, I received a grant, and am very grateful for the opportunity to put my thoughts and experiences in teaching masonry conservation to inner city kids here in NY City into a book form. The inspiration is from the students, and the classes that I teach.

Stacey Urlacher: That sounds great, so it’s something that teaches kids at a younger high school age about conservation and hands on working. How is this primer organized and what kind of topics does it cover?

Tom Russack: Well, that’s a great question, because I have never written a book before, never written a textbook and that was part of the challenge. How do I get this huge amount of information palatable to a young mindset, and how do you make it interesting, and what aspects do you cover? That’s the challenge I have in class and that’s what I enjoy, is springing new ideas and new creations on them so that it’s not something disinteresting or stale. I want them to walk into class saying what are we going to do today, what is this?

So the book is filled with different activities from making homemade terra cotta clay, to making molds of hands, learning how to repoint mortar joints, and getting tools to carve stone. I think one of the basic needs we have today is to let kids explore what tools are. I mean, we give kids basketballs, baseballs; we send them off to gymnastic camps and swimming lessons, why don’t we give kids tools, and teach them how to fix things?

There are enough buildings out there that need restoration, let them go to work, and teach them how to do it correctly. The pride is in craftsmanship. When they are done, and in the process of doing this, let them look at what they have done, and feel that pride. That is one of the key goals to the book and the program.

Stacey Urlacher: Exactly, it really seemed when you read through it that it not only teaches these hands on skills, but it teaches history, a good work ethic, teamwork, and things like that that can really take you far after school.

So in creating this type of a resource for this age group, topic, and subject, what other kind of resources did you glean from and get inspiration from?

Tom Russack: Well, there is a wealth of information out there, and it is important and interesting. The students, they actually do appreciate finding out about buildings, and history. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the material isn’t as palatable to a younger audience, and I kind of had to reword it, and make it a little bit easier to understand and condense it in a way that they don’t get avalanched with so much information and dates.

Just give them a little snip-it to kind of say, wow that’s interesting, with the hope they will move on. The back has resources, websites mostly, because that is the most applicable and easiest to access. So they can not only revisit the things we discussed in class, but do some further research also.

Stacey Urlacher: That seems very important because this is such a good introduction to this subject. What is kind of the, next step after one learns about these different types of masonry, history, and skills like this in order to in hopes one day become a professional in the field?

Tom Russack: Very good question, the program I teach at here, in Harlem, is for inner city kids to get their high school equivalency, their GED, which is the main focus. This is a small portion of their understanding of some of the employment opportunities out there, some of the resources. It’s an investigation, it’s an experiment, it’s an exploration, and so if we get one out of ten who follows through and carries on in preservation or masonry then that’s ok, that’s a success.

We had one student accepted to the American College of Building Arts, we have had another student working for the Central Park Conservancy, we have had a couple of students working for a restoration masonry company, we have had one apprenticeship with Evergreene Architectural Arts, so these are success stories and we are incredibly proud of these students, even for those that haven’t gone on into careers or these studies.

I’m real excited when a student comes up to me and says Mr. Russack, here are some pictures I took with my phone of some plaster that I saw when I was in a theater the other day and it looked really interesting. So, if they can open their eyes, or look at brickwork and they say they tell their friends about the different bonds, an English bond, a Flemish bond, what a soldier course is. That’s the start of something, we are moving forward with something, it’s not just bricks and mortars, it’s their neighborhood, it’s something that somebody thought about, and put time and effort and energy into and they have stopped and noticed it.

Stacey Urlacher: It seems like it’s a great resource to help kids get excited about their surroundings, their context, and the built environment.

repair repair

Stacey Urlacher: One of the chapters in the primer was titled “Here Today, Green Tomorrow.” What do these students learn about in the primer and what is the mason’s role in encouraging a green ethics and a sustainable environment?

Tom Russack: It talks about buildings of the future and, I’m really big on green roofs and having green roofs on buildings. There is an example here, city hall in Chicago, with a great picture that was in National Geographic. It shows the fact that you could utilize a building that was constructed in 1911, and yet, a hundred years later with a green roof, make it useful and beautiful and something for generations to enjoy.

So, you’ve got tools, you’ve got buildings, you’ve got practices. One of the projects I have the students think about is: So, you’ve got a job, you are a contractor here in NY, and the owner of the building wants you to bid. You get the contract if you are greener than your competition. How can you be practicing green technology and get this job? What are you going to do?

So we talk about recycling of materials, we talk about not polluting when you are cutting mortar joints, when you are cleaning what do you do with the water runoff? So you take practical ways of work, and make sure they understand that by doing these, you have a better chance of getting the job, and you are helping the environment, and you are helping yourself. And this is what the future of restoration and construction looks like.

Stacey Urlacher: Well this has been great. Thank you for talking to me today and I look forward to hearing about what comes of this primer and resources like this in the future.

Tom Russack: Well I appreciate that, but I’m not going to let you off easy here. I end each one of my classes with this statement.

Nobody leaves the room until they can tell me something they learned in class that they didn’t know before they walked through those doors. So before we sign off here, can you tell me something you picked up on that you found of keen interest, that you would like to share with me after you have looked through the book?

Stacey Urlacher: Well, I really appreciated and learned about the tools. Each chapter covers tools that you would use to lay bricks or anything like that. As someone who studies preservation and I’ve even taken masonry courses, I have never learned about the tools that go into creating a masonry structure, and I found that to be very interesting.

Tom Russack: That’s very heartwarming, and very encouraging, and I appreciate that. Because what I’m hearing you say is, now that you have read about that, you can’t wait to get your hands on these things, and hopefully by following the instructions you’ll learn how to use these tools.

That’s dear to me, in the final chapter; I even have a special section on the maintenance of tools. I work for an architecture and engineering firm here at NY and I am inspecting buildings and checking out work on a daily basis. One thing that I do is, when I’m going up on this scaffolding, I’ll check the guys tools, because if the worker or mechanic takes care of his tools, then he is going to take care of his work. It shows a pride. The tools are an extension of your body and that means a lot. I am very appreciative that you picked up on the tools.

I don’t have a great closing to end this podcast, accept to say that, if you just teach masonry, and you teach history, there is going to be something missing.

You have to reach inside the individual to let them find within themselves, that which is important to bring out the pride in that work. Whether it is from a heritage, which I delve into a lot of African American history and Spanish Latino history, so people can sense that pride.

You have to put that into the mix, along with the history, and along with the skill training. So that you can look at something, be proud of it, and hopefully generations after will also be proud.

Stacey Urlacher: That is a very true statement, and thank you so much for all of this information and this discussion about the primer, it is a great resource.

Tom Russack: Thank you so much Stacey, it has been my pleasure.

Stacey Urlacher speaks with Tom Russack, Masonry Preservation Instructor at the Abyssinian Development Corporation Workforce Development Youthbuild Program in Harlem, New York City, and Project Associate at Rand Engineering and Architecture. NCPTT awarded Mr. Russack a grant to compile a masonry conservation primer to introduce preservation trade, skills, and knowledge to inner city high school kids in Harlem, New York.

July 12, 2012

35. El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail (Episode 35)

Transcript

Jenny Hay: Mr. Steven Gonzales, thank you so much for joining us today on this NCPTT podcast. Can you tell me a little about the history of the El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail?

Steven Gonzales: Sure. El Camino Real de los Tejas, in a nutshell, is what led to the founding of Texas. We would not be calling Texas ‘Texas’ without the trail today. Basically, in the mid 1680s, the first Spanish expeditions began over the Trail as they were searching for their French imperial rivals who had crashed here on the Texas coast. Eventually, they ended up finding a few of those survivors, and making the first trip out to east Texas to near present-day Mission Tejas State Park in far east Texas to establish Mission San Francisco de los Tejas, which was the first mission here in Texas. So the initial kind of expansion was all about colonial imperialism and battling for territory with the perceived French threat the Spanish saw here in their northern frontier of New Spain. The historic period of significance for the Trail is from 1680 to 1845, so well over 100 years later, after the initial entradas by the Spanish, you started having Anglo settlers come down from the East and heading down the road towards places like San Antonio and Austin. So it really is the trail that led to the founding of Texas and what it is today.

Jenny Hay: Wow, that’s quite a history. How did you become involved in preserving the historic landscape?

Steven Gonzales: Well, as an undergrad student at the University of Texas at Austin, I did a lot of study on Spanish missions and presidios on the northern frontier of New Spain. So I’ve had an interest in the history of the Spanish Colonial period for quite some time. Then I went to grad school at Texas State University-San Marcos a few years after that, and I took a class called ‘Theory of Parks and Protected Places.’ The instructor for that class was the president, the first president of our Association. His name is Andrew Samson. And so he was looking for a study to be done on the Trail, and Trail Associations, and those sorts of things. I thought it would just be an interesting way to continue my studies of Spanish Colonial history, and also to begin working on trails, because I’m fascinated – I’ve always enjoyed trails as well as cultural history. So it was just the perfect combination of being at the right place at the right time.

Jenny Hay: So the National Historic Trail was designated in 2004 – what was the process of designation like?

Steven Gonzales: Well, this was actually before my time with the Association. I came on in 2009 as Executive Director, but I can tell you some background I’ve come to understand about it. It was a little different than most trail designations that take place. Usually you have an advocacy group formed beforehand that’s petitioning for the designation of a National Historic Trial. This one was kind of the other way around, where there were Congressional Representatives from Texas really pushing for the designation of the Trail themselves, and they got the legislation passed. And so the Trail Association was formed after the fact, which is really unusual and different from most other trails.

Jenny Hay: Ok. Well, what’s happening today with the Trail?

Steven Gonzales: There’s all kinds of stuff going on with the trail nowadays. Some of the bigger things that are happening is last year, the Governor signed into law here in Texas some legislation that allows signage to be placed along the Trail here in Texas. Still to this day you cannot see one official National Park Service sign anywhere along the Trail. If you think about that, it’s been designated since 2004, here we are in 2012, and there’s still not one official sign on the Trail. So that legislation was a big step in allowing us to move toward getting signage on the road. The first places we’re going to have that are going to be in Milam County, which is about 50 miles, 60 miles east of Austin, at a place called the San Javier Mission Complex, and Victoria County, where some former sites, Mission Espíritu Santo and Presidio La Bahía, were at there in Victoria. So by the end of this year, we should see some of the first signage ever on the Trail in these two locations. We’re going to have big unveilings for that, particularly at Apache Pass where the first signs will go up. We’re really excited about that; we think that once signage is on the road it’s going to bring a lot more recognition to the Trail, because as with all National Historic Trails, it’s always a challenge to bring them into the eye of the public. And so this is a good way to help us to do that.

Jenny Hay: The National Parks Foundation just awarded the Association an “America’s Best Ideas” grant. What plans do you have for the implementation of this grant?

Steven Gonzales: Well this grant is going to allow us to create curriculum for 7th grade history students here in Texas. For the last couple of years we’ve done something called the Region 7 Educational Service Center Videoconference on the Trail. And so we’ve had over 1,000 students participate each year, and we’ve been very happy to see that this has happened from one end of the state to the other. But we’re hoping that through creating this educational curriculum, we’ll be able to have resources available for teachers to actually teach the Trail in classrooms, and get students out on the Trail for a stewardship project. And then they can turn around and present everything that they’ve learned and found out about the Trail, experienced about the Trail, during this Videoconference. It’s something we’re very excited about, and once these curriculum materials are developed, we’re going to be able to distribute them freely to any school that wants to participate in this program via websites such as ours, the National Park Service, or the Region 7 website. So we’re pretty excited about the whole project.

Jenny Hay: Sure! Why is service learning, like the stewardship project you mentioned, important for heritage education?

Steven Gonzales: I think it’s just hands-on learning, service learning, is just the best way to learn. I remember being a student, years ago, and some of the most meaningful and lasting studies that I ever did had some aspect of service learning to them. I think when you can learn about things in class and read materials on it, and then when you actually get out onto the landscape and you see it, you experience it firsthand – and then more so, do some sort of a stewardship project where you might help maintain to it or take care of it, it becomes more meaningful to you. It gives you, there’s just a longer lasting impression. I think people, the kids who are part of this educational program will take this with them for years to come and hopefully share the Trail with their kids so there’s this extended kind of care and stewardship that’s taking place for the Trail over the years because that’s going to need to happen.

Jenny Hay: Right. Well, what do you think the future holds for the El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail?

Steven Gonzales: I think it’s a good future – we have a lot ahead of us to do. As one of the newest trails in the National Trails system, there’s a lot that needs to be done, both to protect it and to develop it at the same time. Those can seem like they’re different kinds of goals. But we have to do all kinds of research to still find out where great portions, substantial portions of this trail really are: different campsites, river crossings, and actual swales and ruts along the way.

Once we can figure out where those are, in turn we need to work with people, the landowners who actually have those parcels on their land so that we can help to protect them, and hopefully open them up to visitation by the public. Over 99% of this Trail is on private land, so we have a big challenge ahead of us.

But we can see through what’s going on nowadays that there are landowners out there who are interested and willing to share what they have with the public. And so it’s just very exciting to think about all the possibilities that are out there for the trail. It’s so new that there’s so much to do, and we look forward to all of it. It’s a great challenge that we’re very happy to be a part of.

Jenny Hay: Well we look forward to seeing how the Association grows. It’s been wonderful talking with you today, Mr. Gonzales.

Steven Gonzales: Thank you very much, I appreciate your time and talking with you too.

Jenny Hay speaks with Steven Gonzales, Executive Director of the El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail Association. This National Historic Trail stretches from Natchitoches, Louisiana the home of NCPTT, west through Texas all the way to the Rio Grande on the Texas-Mexico border. Steven will tell us about the curriculum development and trail stewardship projects being supported by the “America’s Best Ideas” grant recently awarded to the Association by the National Parks Foundation.

October 3, 2011

34. Earthwork Stability Research at Poverty Point (Episode 34)

Transcript

Derek Linn: Hello, and welcome to the podcast Dr. Greenlee; it’s great to be with you here at Poverty Point today. How long have you been involved in archaeology here, and how does your role at the University of Louisiana at Monroe relate to your work and research here at Poverty Point?

Diana Greenlee: I’ve been at Poverty Point for five years now as the station archaeologist. Even though I’m employed by ULM, I’m actually stationed here at the site; my job has to do with archaeological research and management here at the site.

Derek Linn: Dr. Greenlee, I know Poverty Point is an earthworks landscape recognized as both a Louisiana State Historic Site and a National Monument, and recently you mentioned you’ve been involved with the nomination of this site to the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list. Could you introduce the listener and me to this place and also share a little bit on the significance of Poverty Point?

Diana Greenlee: Poverty Point is a very large archaeological site that dates from about 3700 to 3100 years ago during what we would call the late archaic period. It’s a monumental earthworks site.

There are four (4) mounds, six (6) earthen concentric ridges, and a large, flat plaza that all date to this time period; it’s a created landscape of mounds and ridges. What is so significant about Poverty Point is that it was constructed by hunter-gatherers. At the time that archaeologists first started working here, they didn’t believe that hunters and gatherers could carry out the work to build a monumental landscape like this. The existing model was that hunter-gatherers were barely making it from day to day, and that they didn’t have the time or energy to develop complex constructions like mound building. So Poverty Point really changed the way archaeologists and anthropologists looked at hunter-gatherers and what they could do. One other really interesting thing about Poverty Point is that literally tons of stone was brought here from throughout much of eastern North America: we get steatite from Georgia, chert from Ohio, and novaculite from Arkansas. There’s a large network where a lot of raw material was brought here to make tools and other items.

Derek Linn: And those materials may have been traded within this general area here or back in those original locations?

Diana Greenlee: They were redistributed among related sites around here. One of the interesting things is that when we go to those other places we don’t find items that indicate they were derived from Poverty Point. So we don’t know what the exchange mechanism was. It could have been an exchange of things that don’t preserve–like fish or other food items.

Derek Linn: NCPTT recently awarded a grant to ULM to investigate earthworks stability at Poverty Point State Historic Site. I was wondering if you could tell me what prompted your interest in this project and also some of the things you hope to learn from this study.

Diana Greenlee: Well the mounds here at Poverty Point were covered with trees, and they were an aging stand of trees; no young growth had been allowed to live and grow. So the trees were all mature: 60 to 130 years old, and they were beginning to die. They were falling over when we had good windstorms. And when they fall over and bring up a root ball coated with dirt, they disturb the archaeological resource. In the case of mounds where there is a steep slope, this can start an erosional sore that is hard to control.

Working with State Parks here, we decided maybe it was time to remove all the trees from the mounds–to have them cut down. When we were doing our research to help us decide if this was the way we should go, we found that the existing literature said mounds can be stable under grass, and they can be stable under trees if you don’t let them get too big. [The literature continued that] transforming groundcover from trees to grass or vice versa can be a very risky thing, but there wasn’t any real data to show us how risky it is or what could happen.

And so as we decided to go ahead and do this project, I decided it was a good opportunity to collect that kind of information. That way somebody else down the line who is trying to make a similar decision can look at our data and see if it’s the right step for them.

Derek Linn: I know that dendrogeomorphology is a big part of the project, and I recognized Dr. Stahle’s name; I was wondering if you could tell me about his role in the methodology of this research.

Diana Greenlee: He is playing a pretty important role. One of the things we want to do is contrast past erosion [which we had] under the treed regime with the erosion that happens as we make that transition [to grassland]. [We also want to look at future erosion] once it is under stable grassland. Dr. Stahle is looking at how much erosion happened over the life of the trees. One of the things he’s looking at are the roots that have been exposed due to erosion. He can identify how long ago that happened from the changes in the anatomy of the wood cells of the roots when they’re exposed to oxygen. So we can see during the lives of the trees when the roots became exposed. [We can look to see] whether it was a big episode of erosion or whether it was a slow, gradual process. He’s helping us understand how erosion has been over the last 80 to 100 years.

Derek Linn: And you said Dr. Stahle has taken some samples thus far, but he still has some more to collect and study.

Diana Greenlee: That’s correct. He made one trip down to collect some samples, and he’ll be back.

Derek Linn: Dr. Greenlee, how do you expect this research to build upon or differ from currently available earthworks management recommendations or standards?

Diana Greenlee: Well I think we’re going to build on the current literature, because it is one more situation where we have taken an earthwork and altered the groundcover. In this case it’s going to be different because we’re trying to quantify what the impact of that change will be–and to help us assess whether or not we made the right move, which I think we did.

Derek Linn: And do you think your findings here can be applicable to other earthworks sites as well?

Diana Greenlee: I would hope so. I would hope that we provide a product that will be useful to other people; we sure wish we had this information when we were starting.

Derek Linn: Well I just have one more general question for you. I was wondering what most excites you about the future of Poverty Point and with your role here at the station archaeology program.

Diana Greenlee: Over the next couple years I’m going to be working on our nomination to the World Heritage List, and so I’m pretty excited about that. I sure better be; it’s going to be a lot of work.

I sort of have to have tunnel vision as we complete that. I hope Poverty Point becomes a World Heritage Site and that we can continue to learn more about the landscape here.

Derek Linn: I wish you the best with your research, and Dr. Greenlee, thanks so much for taking time to speak with us today here at Poverty Point.

Diana Greenlee: Thank you.

Derek Linn speaks with Dr. Diana Greenlee, adjunct assistant professor at the University of Louisiana at Monroe and station archaeologist at the Poverty Point National Monument. NCPTT awarded ULM a grant for a research project that uses dendrogeomorphology to investigate earthwork stability at Poverty Point.

September 5, 2011

33. Historic Uses of Lime Mortar, and Its Continuing Importance Today (Episode 33)

Transcript

Jeff Guin: Tell me about a few of the structures that you have worked on.

Andy DeGruchy: We’ve worked here in Pennsylvania with my other company, DeGruchy Masonry & Restoration, for the last 27 years we’ve been restoring brick and stone buildings. Some of those have included work at Hope Lodge, Daniel Boone’s Homestead, William Penn’s Homestead, James Hobin’s (architect of the White House) memorial in Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Washington DC.

Also, a myriad of historic Victorian homes, farmhouses in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I live and all sorts of accoutrements, smokehouses, and summer kitchens and basements–some not-so-glorious buildings, but just a lot of hard work in the maintenance using appropriate materials to fix these vintage structures.

Jeff Guin: So do you primarily work in the Pennsylvania area and the northeast or do you travel to other parts of the country as well?

Andy DeGrunchy Well we’ve concentrated our work within about an hour and a half driving radius of where I live and where my shop is in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. However, we’ve done work as far as Florida and consulting work on the use of our materials as far as Puerto Rico and Maine out to Oregon and all over.

Jeff Guin: …and to Nashville, I know, because that’s where I met you originally at the NCPTT Nationwide Cemetery Summit. Are cemeteries something you work on frequently?

Andy DeGrunchy We do not do a lot of cemetery work ourselves, although I did mention I restored the architect to the White Houses’ James Hobin and his memorial in Mt. Olivet Cemetery, and dotted throughout our history, there has been some work on statuary and memorials. But my connection with cemeteries has been at the prompting of a conservator and professor at Columbia who saw our laboratory and the work we are doing and said, “you know, you are the best kept secret, you really need to step up to the plate and tell the world that you are here,” and that is why we are even doing the radio interview now trying to get the word out that we have some great resources.

Jeff Guin: Taking that a step further, there is a lot of confusion around the terminology related to lime mortars and specifications. I wonder if you could break some of that down for me. Talk about the different types of lime and the differences between historically accurate lime as compared to the improved or modern types.

Andy DeGrunchy Yes, that’s a very good question, and it is a little bit of a peeve with me because, you know, really lime is lime is lime and has been the same raw material from the beginning of time until now. Nothing has changed, but a lot of smoke and mirrors and confusion puts the end user, building owners, architects, engineers, and masons in a state of confusion. Really, it is a very simple thing to understand: That is, lime has always fallen into two categories; it’s always been pure high calcium, 98% pure lime. When I say lime, I do mean the shells and bones of marine life that build up over millions of years without any impurities in it. If it was 98% pure, just comprised of that, then that is called high-calcium lime and then it falls into the second category, which is impure lime. Now we designate that into a breakdown of two areas. One would be dolomitic, which would have a smaller percentage of magnesium and then a magnesium lime which has a larger percentage of magnesium.

We look at ancient structures throughout the world, a lot of materials scientists will study them and say, “let’s not look at what is broken about this building, let’s look at what’s working so well that it is still here after 500 years.” They will find common denominators. And with the mortar, they find that the basic rule in masonry is, you never can fight water and win. Water will always win in the end. So, the mortars in these ancient buildings had a lime and sand composition that would help to process moisture out to the atmosphere again. It would not trap moisture. Had it trapped moisture, or reacted with sulphates and other negative reactions, then the demise of the structure would have been accelerated, and it would not be here 500 years later. But they found that when you use a lime that is a catalyst of processing water back to the atmosphere, now you have a symbiotic relationship with nature and with water. Therefore, you are now not in conflict with nature, but you are going to survive because you found a way to get along. The way that it does get along is that when the limestone, which could be a block of this sediment that I mentioned, is burned, it is the one stone that when you cook it for 48 hours, maintained at between 1,650 to 2,000 degrees, you will push off the carbon dioxide content in the stone. In doing that, after the stone has cooled, it weighs 44% lighter than it did when it went into the kiln. When you reintroduce water to it, it will violently take that water in what’s called slaking–like slake your thirst–and it will boil the water it sits in within a 10 minute period. However, a little known fact is that if you look at that same mortar now that has been made with that lime putty and sand has been added to this putty that has had the water reintroduced to the limestone, you can go with a future 10 years, 20 years and 30 years and the lime is always slowly converting back into a limestone again through carbonation. It violently draws carbon dioxide out of the slaking bath at first, and it is a young buck at that time. But 5 years later, 10 years later, 50 years later, it is still trying to convert back into a limestone and will always draw carbon dioxide out of the air. So that is the symbiotic relationship again with nature. When all these nor’easters and wind and water blow on buildings, they are delivering carbon dioxide and the lime mortar joints are hydrophilic. So these walls that get saturated actually give up their water towards the attracting lime mortar which then says, “can we have that carbon dioxide from you because we are still converting back into a stone” and then releases the rest of the vapor out to the atmosphere. So this dynamic that has been going on, which material scientists have come to understand, is something that has preserved historic fabric. Because no longer does the soft sandstones and bricks that had they had the wetting and drying cycles go through there, faces would have exfoliated and been damaged. Now the historic bricks and stones give up their moisture to the hydrophilic in attracting lime mortar.

When the Romans who were famous as architects and builders, they burned lime at this time-honored temperature to maintain the reactivity of the lime between 1,650 and 2,000 degrees, it had the ability to convert back into a limestone. However, today’s modern production dead burns lime and in many cases and overcooks it. When you say to the lime that you can get it at any hardware store available in the country today, and say well, I’m going to add water and sand to you, I’d like you to convert back into a limestone and become as hard as hopefully you were at one time as a stone: that inert dust can only be used for adding plasticity, a flowability to a cement mortar or controlling the setting time of a cement mortar. The majority of the available hydrated dolomitic Type S hydrated lime in the United States has just sand and water added to it as a stand-alone binder. It does not have the ability become as significant and durable as the historic mortars because of the burning temperature. So the problem–although there is only two kinds of lime in the world and always has been–the way the lime is cooked has been changed in that it is being sped up for the process of production because the key elements it’s only asked to do today is that plasticity and control of setting time of a cementitious mortar. We have personally not had any success with using a Type S hydrated lime and adding sand and water and then putting it into service as an exterior above grade mortar in extreme free stall cycles like the northeast, mid-Atlantic states where I am from.

The limes to reproduce historic mortar when we work at some local building, someone might say, “Are you going to go build a kiln and find local lime and reproduce every element as it originally was?” Well, the cost becomes a problem, so we import the natural occurring hydraulic lime, which is pure high calcium and evenly dispersed silica so that we know when we add certain percentages of sand, we are going to get a final result that is going to have a known value for liquid and vapor permeability, PSI strengths … So it is true that in the United States and Pennsylvania, maybe these historic structures were not built with French hydraulic lime but it is a suitable replacement that pound for pound and cost-wise, is reasonable and we are putting in an in-kind replacement that will do no harm.

Jeff Guin: Do you see lime being used just in historic applications or are there new applications for lime now?

Andy DeGrunchy We have a 100,000 bag order for a tropical resort that we are creating a lime for a green build. Because, as I mentioned, the mortars that we have used for historic restoration, our intent was only to use them to do an in-kind replacement like-to-like–instituting no material that was going to cause an associated damage to historic fabrics surrounding the stone or brick, you know, like the window frame or something expanding and damaging because of what we used. However, as I mentioned about people from the cemetery, conservators and fine arts finishing people–we’ve also found that it really meets the criteria for gold and platinum LEED credits. When you are trying to lower the embodied energy, the building of what has been used by reclaiming and recycling, you know, existing post consumer material and getting all sorts of energy advantages in improving indoor air quality, they find that the lime just to begin with–because there is 7,500 years of building history proving that it works, where modern cements although introduced in the 1870’s in the United States, in my opinion did not fully take hold until after WWII. So the window of time where cement absolutely dominated for all veneer mortars and building and stucco and everything, came like 1945 until now. But the embodied energy to create a pound of Portland cement, which is the binder for modern stuccos and brick laying mortar and stoneware is incredibly high. Matter-of-fact, I believe the efficiency is very low because there is more waste than there is usable product.

Jeff Guin: Now lime mortar does have to be re-applied occasionally because it does work with the environment. How often does that have to be done?

Andy DeGrunchy Well there are many historic structures that are in the United States that are only just receiving their first re-pointing. So, in the Philadelphia region, the area where I am from, we will see a historic building that you know, maybe was re-pointed in the name of preservation and maybe under the guidance of some government agencies and done only in the 1980’s, and yet it has to be re-re-pointed and it had a Type O or high lime content mortar with a little Portland cement added. Yet, the 200 year old buildings in this region (down the street from the one fixed in the name of preservation) we will find that sometimes these buildings are actually in better repair. What my goal was originally was to import lime from France and do the things that we were doing was kind of pursuing excellence and saying you know, if there is the concept of getting a 100-year fix because we see that these buildings are 100 – 200 years old and no one’ s re-pointing them. They did not have the budget to fix it and it is in better shape than the one they did have the budget to fix. Maybe we should try to mirror the properties of the original material. So, I would say that if a lime application is done appropriately, there is no reason–just like you see in Europe, old plaster over stone, brick and stone buildings or pointed buildings and no one is touching them for 100 years–there is no reason why you won’t get a 100 year life cycle if the project is done correctly.

Jeff Guin: Is using lime mortars and re-pointing something that everyday people can do or is it just something for the experts?

Andy DeGrunchy It’s all dependent upon the skill level of the individual. So, we’ve met homeowners who do better work than some masons that we know and then we know young masons that their skill level just comes right out. So what it comes down to, just what pointing is. It is not rocket science. It’s just binder and aggregate. It’s sand and lime and then it’s just placing that between bricks and stones but as you know and many who have observed historic buildings throughout the country, they will see blaring examples of bright white mortar that did not match the texture, the tooling, the color of the surrounding area and you have to wonder what were they thinking when they did that pointing job or built that wall like that and to this day, I still do not know what they are thinking but it is everywhere. So, I think it boils down to not that it is so hard to do, but is someone willing to take the time and care for the project. That being said, some of our best customers, the ones who we love to work with, who are just savvy homeowners who have done their own research, they concluded what they wanted, how to do it, they will take a class and then they will take the time if they are going to do point the whole home, they will commit themselves to: “I’m going to do maybe one square foot but I’m going to do it right.”

Jeff Guin: Tell me about Ian Cramb.

Andy DeGrunchy Ian Cramb is a great man, 83-year old Scottish stone mason who lives in Bangor, Pennsylvania. He and his family have been steeped in stone masonry since 1750 in Edinburgh, Scotland and along the way. I think the common denominator of all these craftsman and artisans is love for the trade, and that caused him to assemble a book back in 1992 called The Art Of The Stone Mason. What made it very popular was in it, you could see the love he had for the trade and just carefully sketching out details describing how to cut a stone or how to build a stone arch or naming parts of a wall. All these things were very popular with masons because it was a throwback to how masonry had historically been done and those details again that is a common denominator that is going to make the outcome of any project become excellent and last for the 100-year fix. So, he began to develop a following of people in stone masonry and I being one of them, bought his book years ago and then of course he is local and I touched base with him about some things and became friends with him. Next thing you know, he had to get all the information together for his second book, which is The Stone Mason’s Gospel According to Ian Cramb. As we drove along one day while on some projects we were building, he said, “You know, I can’t finish my second book and it’s all your fault,” and I said, “Well what you mean by that,” and he said, “You know, in all the conversations we have regarding the lime, you really have a better handle on the technical aspects and how to explain it than I do and I want to put that in this book.” So he asked me to edit and read through his book and understand what he is writing, then put some information that is going to clarify lime. So I helped him produce this second book with my computer science major son who is in college, to produce the book on the internet and we produced a few hundred copies and we have them now actually on our website for sale and that is The Stone Mason’s Gospel According to Ian Cramb.

Jeff Guin: So you kind of see it as part of your job, your responsibility, to pass the knowledge along; to make sure that people understand not just why it’s important but what the history of lime mortars is.

Andy DeGrunchy Yes, very much so. I think that there was a time when masons would of course hide the trade secrets. They had their mason marks and they would mark the stones that they produced and shaped and dressed and they got paid piecemeal that way and some of the ancient trade secrets that sort of trail off into the Masonic tradition of the non-operating masons. In today’s masonry, as we know, all our buildings are accelerating in degradation and as the buildings are getting older and older and fewer and fewer people are going into the trade, it has been my position to say there is no more time for trade secrets. If anybody wants to know a trade secret we are glad to share it because it just does not seem like anything that resembles close to actually doing physical hard work, is not getting much of an audience of young people wanting to get into it. However, those who do get into it, find it incredibly rewarding and then ask themselves, what was I thinking, I was going to go to college and I was going to be stuck in a cubicle somewhere, so I am very much in favor of disseminating knowledge, giving it away, but I see a lot of exploitation of historic resources for the sake of personal gain by keeping a patient sick and not getting in there and putting in a repair that would give a long service life, and so I am totally opposed to that and I want to blow the blinders off of that thing and I want to shed as much light on these subjects so that we can move on with the good and excellent conservation of our nation’s historic resources.

Jeff Guin: Andy thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Andy DeGrunchy I’m glad you could include me and hope that it was informative.

Jeff Guin speaks with Andy DeGruchy of LimeWorks U.S. Andy will talk about the role of lime mortar and built heritage and why this material is still important today.

August 1, 2011

32. Claire Turcotte on Campus Heritage Landscapes (Episode 32)

Transcript

The Journal of the Society of College and University Planning recently produced a volume of essays highlighting campus heritage and preservation planning. The special themed edition Planning to ensure the preservation of campus heritage details the many complexities of balancing student trends, new technologies , living landscapes, adaptive re-use and nostalgia on America’s college and university campuses. Aimed at the stewardship of these campuses, this volume is the result of collaboration between SCUP and the Getty Foundation’s Campus Heritage Program.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Hello, and welcome to the podcast Claire. It’s great to speak with you today.

Claire L. Turcotte: It’s wonderful to see you.

Addy Smith-Reiman: I’d love to start out with a history of the project and the role of the Getty Foundation.

Claire L. Turcotte: Well, the Getty Foundation initiated a Campus Heritage Initiative in 2002. It ended in 2007 and in the process, they, the Getty Foundation, gave away about thirteen and a half million dollars to eighty-six schools nationwide to develop preservation plans for their institutions.

This included historic buildings, campus sites, and cultural landscapes. So, it was a very comprehensive scope of work. What happened was, the Getty Foundation realized wisely, that there was a tremendous amount of information in these final reports that came back to the Foundation. At the same time, we began discussing this project with the Getty Foundation and applied for seed money in 2007 to organize a project here to analyze these reports and pull out the important information and then do something with it. We had not quite figured out exactly what.

So, we did receive a grant in 2007 to allow us to really organize and outline major tasks with this project. So for example, we interviewed people nationwide who are involved in preservation planning and our campuses across the country and asked them what they would like to have, whether it was a maintenance kind of manual or what. We kept hearing a searchable database, so that is what we have developed.

Addy Smith-Reiman: There is an impressive scope of work of the eighty-six institutions receiving grant funds, and I’m really intrigued by this forethought to develop the framework to disseminate the case studies to a broader audience of planners, managers, and preservationists who would continue the sharing of lessons learned and best practices. Can you explain how the collaboration materialized and how the database materialized.

Claire L. Turcotte: Well the first effort was to obtain these final reports. The Getty Foundation forwarded them to me and some of them I obtained directly from the schools. Oftentimes, this was a difficult task because the person in charge had moved or something. I remember getting an email one winter day saying, “Aloha Claire. I’m the person you’re looking for. I have the report, “and it was from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. So I did obtain about eighty of the eighty-five reports. One school closed so the field was eighty-five and those reports are all on our website. Further, we developed a template, a one page summary, outlining the planning process that was used, the outcomes and so forth. That is useful for anyone doing research. Perhaps Addy, you’ve discovered this yourself. It was a tremendous amount of work but very rewarding as it is being used.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Now I’m wondering, can this template be used by other universities and colleges if they start addressing their preservation needs?

Claire L. Turcotte: Well yes, and as a matter of fact, the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a professor there sent me a message saying she stumbled on this website, and her preservation planning senior level class was developing, as part of their class work, developing preservation plans in concert with the school itself, who were developing their own plans. They found, they identified twenty or so useful models for their school by virtue of either geographic location or size, and they could use the information in these reports as useful models. So it was key to their successful planning effort.

Addy Smith-Reiman: So there are really two components to the grant that you received from the Getty Foundation; one was the creation of the database which is accessible and online, and the other is this culmination of the essays that materialized in your Journal.

Claire L. Turcotte: Exactly, but let me go into a little more detail about the website. It also is a network. We now have two hundred and seventy-one members. Anyone can join. It’s free and it also has a whole listing of resources and links to organizations such as yours for example, the National Park Service, AIA, and others. So it has a tremendous amount of resourceful material on the website. The Journal itself is a collection of some wonderful images. It’s all in color and on the inside, it does cover many aspects of preservation planning, the economic angles. There are several articles about the mid-century buildings that now are historic and many are in need of improvement and so on. So again, this is another major resource and the third thing that we are doing as another resource is we are developing a symposium. It’s kind of a culmination of all of our work as the grant winds down at the end of this year. The Journal was kind of a nice prelude to the symposium.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Now this database will be accessible on the website in perpetuity. What are the plans in the future? Can people continue to add to this database or is it really just the project itself, the information is out there and it’s available for everyone to use.

Claire L. Turcotte: It’s available, it’s out there. We are planning to house it permanently. We have not quite decided, maybe internally, but it will be accessible to anyone over time.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Now let’s talk a little bit more about the Journal. As you said earlier, there are articles ranging from the economics to cultural landscape preservation. All seem to embody the greater goal of the project on the whole, which is, how best to integrate change while maintaining campus character. Why don’t you talk a little about some of the articles that really address that on the whole that can be a great resource for anyone out there in preservation planning on heritage campuses or any campus.

Claire L. Turcotte: There are a great variety of wonderful articles here. One by David Newman from the University of Virginia that outlines a ranking system for example; how to prioritize, redevelopment, reuse, of some of the historic buildings and additionally the landscapes, which are sometimes a little more elusive because they are so dynamic. The University of Oregon developed a similar ranking system. Theirs was a matrix. The other important thing that we discovered in these reports and this is acknowledged in the Journal, is the idea of stewardship and in particular I think, the University of Kansas and the Cranbrook in Michigan, both of those reports address individual sites, individual gardens. The University of Kansas talks about view sheds and distances and avenues of site and the need to preserve these as the landscape changes. I have never been there but it sounds like a beautiful campus. It’s built on a ridge so the views are important. Individual gardens are important at Cranbrook. So each campus is significantly different from one another and the issues are quite different at many of these campuses. The importance of this grant initiative cannot be under estimated. There are benefits to the students as well, and the neighboring communities as they often were involved in the process. Mills College for example, comes to mind. They actually had classes for their students. The students were involved in inventorying their buildings. SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design included ninety something students in doing their inventory. So it was very beneficial to many groups and yes, the importance of the use of the US Department of Interior Standards and other guidelines by the reporting institutions and therefore; there was a common language that was useful. You know, integrated cultural landscape and so forth; this type of vocabulary. The required analysis and documentation to develop through preservation plans allows these plans to gain importance as standalone planning tools.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Now the symposium has many of the authors of the articles in the journal.

Claire L. Turcotte: Yes, that is true. David Newman is part of this from the University of Virginia. Frank Martin who is a landscape writer and historian, and Joan Weinstein from the Getty Foundation are attending. So yes, we will have Robert Melnick from the University of Oregon and others. So we are thrilled with the response that we are getting. It promises to be another excellent resource.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Well this is a huge resource for anyone involved in preservation planning at our nations’ colleges and universities. Thank you so much for sharing this with us today.

Claire L. Turcotte: You’re welcome. It was enjoyable.

Addy Smith-Reiman speaks with Dr. Claire L. Turcotte, Managing Editor for Planning for Higher Education, The Journal of the Society of College and University Planning, and Project Administrator and Researcher, Getty Foundation, Campus Heritage Initiative.

May 3, 2011

31. Cultural Heritage Recovery in Haiti (Episode 31)

Transcript

Jason Church: As we all know, on Jan. 12, 2010 there was a catastrophic earthquake in Haiti that devastated the country and Karen, you’ve just come back from doing some work in Haiti. What exactly were you doing there?

Karen Pavelka: I was helping to setup the lab at the Cultural Recovery Center in Port-au-Prince. I went down with two other conservators, a painting’s conservator, David Goist and an objects conservator, Bev Perkins, and the center was just getting started at that point. We were bringing materials in and organizing. There was a delegation of potential donors coming through and one of the reasons they had us there was to talk to the potential donors and tell them about the importance of the project and explain what conservation could and couldn’t do down there , and to try to build support. So, mine was pretty much, a planning and organizational visit. I got to do a little bit of treatment but not so much. Mostly, I got to lead tours, participated in workshops, help stand in as a teacher in workshops, it’s a very unstructured environment.

Jason Church: Who were you training in these workshops?

Karen Pavelka: Everything in Haiti is chaotic as you might imagine, and you don’t exactly know what you’re going to be doing day to day, so one day I showed up at the Center and some people from the West Indies happened to show up and said that they were going to be teaching a workshop to librarians and archivists the next day showing basic preservation techniques. So, I got to talk to them about basic conservations techniques and what one can and can’t do in a small space. It was two conservators from the West Indies who were working with people from Haiti, teaching people from Haiti.

Jason Church: The Conservation Resource Center that they have established now that you helped establish there in Port-au-Prince, what is that like? How large is it, who is it going to service, who’s funding it, that sort of thing?

Karen Pavelka: It’s not what you’re used to when you think of a conservation lab. It’s in a building that used to be a suite of offices. The building had been inhabited by the U.N. and the reason the site was chosen was because the building is very structurally sound. It didn’t fall over in the earthquake and it doesn’t look like it’s likely to fall over if there is another earthquake. It also happens to have a large fence around it; I guess about and 8 or 10 foot fence and a post where you can have armed guards. So, it was chosen for security and probably proximity to other environments, but it wasn’t chosen as an ideal lab space. We set up tables and shelves where we could get them and there are three labs there, they’re calling them labs, each one of them has a large room or a couple of large rooms and then there will be a smaller room down the hall that has a sink, and they all have bathrooms next to them. There is no real area for wet treatment. You carry all the water in and out of the working space. There are big jugs of distilled water, but you know, it’s pretty much an office space. It’s very beautiful, it’s quite a beautiful country, and the space itself is lovely but more of an office suite than a lab.

Jason Church: Who do they plan to be doing the actual work there?

Karen Pavelka: The project is organized by the Smithsonian. They are the ones who are spearheading the project, and they’re working with a number of other institutions, AIC being a very prominent member. So far, most of the conservators who have gone down have been organized through AIC, the American Institute for Conservation. AIC has served as a sort of clearinghouse to accept applications from conservators and coordinate travel and send them down. Stephanie Hornbeck is an American Objects Conservator, and she’s the chief conservator on the project. She is organizing all the conservation efforts. She is going out and selecting the objects for treatment and talking to the people in the collections, make alliances with people in collections. The very first thing people had to do was to convince people that it was safe to send their objects to the Center. Everything in Haiti as you might imagine, is pretty chaotic right now. So people weren’t exactly willing to say, “Oh good, I’m going to give you my most valuable object” because there’s a certain amount of distrust. Stephanie and the other staff at the Cultural Recovery Center have been making friends with the community doing outreach and letting people know that they can send their objects here, setting up tours, showing them some work that’s been done.

Jason Church: Well, how are the objects chosen that are being treated?

Karen Pavelka: They will work on things that people bring them. They are not choosing the objects, they’re telling people and the arts community that they can bring objects to the Center and the Center will treat them. They have a huge backlog of paintings. Right now the paintings are, I think they’re still mostly from private galleries but the thought is that they’ll be working with museums as well. They’re being pretty democratic about the work that they take in. They’ll take in work from pretty much everyone.

Jason Church: As it pertains to cultural materials and resources, what are the conditions in Haiti right now?

K. P.: Horrible, absolutely horrible. There’s rubble everywhere. I saw one dump truck the entire time I was in Haiti. The streets haven’t been cleared, the electricity is sporadic, all of the hotels are running on generators. There is no central power or very little. The houses of the more well to do people, the hotels that we were staying in, for anyone who can afford it, are running generators to keep power and even they go out periodically, so you know the power is going to go off periodically while you’re there. As I said the streets are just filled with rubble, they’re still clearing collapsed buildings by hand. You see people digging through piles of rubble and pulling out the bricks and the rebar that they might be able to fashion into some sort of dwelling. All those pictures of houses that you see, the blue tents that people are living in, those seem to be the upper middle class ones. A lot of what you see on the street is much worse than that, and I was there before the rains really began in earnest. There was some rain but not tons of rain. The conditions are unbelievable.

Jason Church: When you were there in July and saw the conditions you saw, that was really before the hurricane seasonal rains that they are having, so I’m sure that works of art on paper and of course canvases and mold issues must be extravagant right now. I can’t imagine what they must be seeing at the Cultural Center as they bring in these works of art. Are they having a backlog of objects and if so, how are they, I know with electricity issues, are they having to freeze objects to withstand the mold and that sort of thing?

Karen Pavelka: Freezing probably isn’t so much of a possibility right now because of the electricity. After the earthquake, they did a lot of work to salvage as many things as they could and just get them in a dry situation, you know, to pull them out of the rubble and just put them somewhere where they would be safe. I’m sure that there will be a lot more mold when their rains come because I have no idea what condition some of the buildings are going to be in where the artifacts are housed, so I can’t say anything about whether or not they have leaky roofs or anything like that. I’d be surprised if they don’t but who knows. The Center does have a backlog of materials that they work on. They had a backlog when I was there, and I’m pretty sure it’s only increased since I got back. They’re storing them in the Center and that was one of the reasons that they picked the space that they did. It had enough room not only to work on objects, but to store things that people would work on later on.

Jason Church: How were you contacted originally to get involved?

Karen Pavelka: I’m a member of AIC-CERT, a team of conservators that was trained to respond to disasters and the first call for conservators to work in Haiti went out to AIC-CERT members. I looked at it and thought no, not going to apply, not going to go, not me, because people said it was going to be very rough conditions, living in tents with spotty electricity. I don’t camp. I think of camping as living hell and you know I’m spoiled. I’m an incredibly spoiled middle class person. I like electricity, so I looked at it as I’m not going to go, not a snowball’s chance in hell, and then no other paper conservators signed up to do it. So what are you going to do? So, I ended up having to think, “Oh what the hell, I can do this.”

Jason Church: Tell us a little bit more about the AIC-CERT team.

Karen Pavelka: AIC-CERT is a group of sixty-one trained people who have all gone through a similar set of training in the incident command system and then in protocols that are used for responding to and assessing disaster situations. Sixty-one of course, is not enough people. Fortunately, AIC just got another grant to train another cohort of CERT responders, so that’ll be coming up soon. If you’re interested, keep an eye out, we can use more people, especially from the areas of the country like the gulf coast and Alaska. As you might imagine, so far most of the people are on the east coast. So AIC-CERT is a group of people who are trained to respond to disasters, and I was in the initial cohort of that training.

Jason Church: Aside from the work that they’re doing in Haiti, if there are other disasters, how would people, or say institutions and local governments contact AIC-CERT?

Karen Pavelka: There’s a link to AIC-CERT on the AIC Homepage and actually the work in Haiti is somewhat outside of what we thought of as the original mission for AIC-CERT. The original thought was that the teams would respond to disasters in the United States and would only respond if we are invited into a situation. So, we don’t go unless were invited. People can look at the AIC Homepage and there is a link to AIC-CERT there. There is a 24-hour hotline where you can ask for assistance or you can just ask for advice. If you find something that is underwater, you can just call up someone on the hotline and say can you give me some advice here and we’re always happy to do that. So far, AIC-CERT has responded to the floods in the Midwest and to Galveston after Hurricane Ike. AIC-CERT was formed as a response to all of the damage that was caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We found that we weren’t really as well prepared as we needed to be, but we also found that AIC was the natural clearinghouse to get conservators into a situation.

Jason Church: Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about your time in Haiti, any of the treatments you did, or any stories you want to share about your time there?

Karen Pavelka: I’m just really impressed with all of the work that people at the Center are doing there. They are working through amazing odds, absolutely amazing odds and they are doing it with grace, with dignity, and they’re doing good solid work. Stephanie Hornbeck is absolutely amazing. She coordinates the work, she works well with the staff, she’s setting up training and all of the staff at the center there. They are just amazing people. So I was just very proud and honored to be able to work with them. I was a tiny, tiny cog in the beginning of what I think will be a very impressive project in the end, and I was happy to be a tiny cog there.

Jason Church: Very good. Well Karen, thank you for talking to us today, and we appreciate the information you’ve been able to share with us, and we look forward to talking with you again in the future.

Karen Pavelka: Well you’re welcome and I’m very happy to talk to you and thank you for having me.

Jason Church speaks with Karen Pavelka, a lecturer in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Karen will talk about her experiences helping to setup a conservation lab at the Cultural Recovery Center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

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