Archaeology Series (master copy)

Archaeology, it's the key to our past that can help unlock doors to our future. I'm Anna Annover, your host, and this is our third program in the Lower Cascuqim School District series on Archaeology. In our first program, the fascination of our past, we looked at archaeology as a way of learning about our history, the ways of our ancestors, and the roots of our culture. We saw how artifacts, objects made by our ancestors, can tell us about the past even when there are no written records or traditional stories about those times. In our second program, Treasures of the Past, we visited the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. for a look at the Nelson Collection, a treasury of Eskimo artifacts from the Bering Sea region. We saw how those objects collected over a century ago can teach us about our past and teach others about us.

In our first two programs, we talked about what archaeology is. Archaeology is a living science, growing and changing with the times and with new technology. In many ways, archaeology is what the scientists make of it. In this, our concluding program will take a look at the archaeologists themselves, who they are, how they're trained, and how they go about their work. First of all, what kind of a person does it take to work in archaeology, the science of our human past? Well, I see an interest in history and the past. Somebody who had a lively imagination, not imagination in a proper sense, but who would look for meanings of things beyond the written word. Dr. Henry Collins is a pioneer archaeologist who's worked at the Smithsonian Institution for almost 60 years.

During his long career, he's helped to make important discoveries about the Indians of the southeastern and southwestern United States and Eskimos of Alaska and Canada. Archaeology is a relatively new science, and it's come to its maturity during the lifetimes of men like home. It's interesting that the Christ publication of the Smithsonian was an archaeology, but there was no such subject as archaeology and existence. This was quite on Davis' ancient monuments in Mississippi Valley. That was a Christ publication in the Smithsonian. But it was a subject that David Thompson, Amateurs, took the light in writing about, very learningly. Who built the barns? Who were they? These strange people, and so on. In Squadron Davis, were two laymen, and they wrote this book in the Smithsonian published it. Archaeologists didn't come into existence archaeology.

That is, certainly speaking, as a science and much later. And in Alaska, especially, it was very legal. In fact, I did the first work in archaeology up there. It was found very straight in the United States. Before the time of Collins and his fellow scientists, much that was done in the name of archaeology was little more than treasure hunting. Objects from the past were often gathered with little regard to where they came from or what they meant. Many valuable objects were placed in private collections where they were admired but not studied. The scientists of Collins' generation helped change that. It was through their efforts that the study of archaeology evolved into a systematic and reliable science. They insisted that all digging be done as carefully as possible and that precise records be kept of everything that was found.

Although they often had to work under difficult conditions in the field, they maintained high scientific standards. Susan Kaplan, one of the archaeologists working on northern archaeology projects for the Smithsonian Institute, provides some insight about working in the field. A number of people are really astounded at how tedious it is. In the North Country, how uncomfortable it can also be because it's cold and you're sitting in one place and you're meticulously stripping the earth back. You can't hurry things up because you might encounter a grass mat and just be cutting through it or troweling it away. So it takes a tremendous amount of patience. But it is something which students can experience and they can experience it either in Alaska or it's also valuable to look for excavation opportunities at other places. Today, there is a whole new generation of young archaeologists building on the works of archaeological pioneers.

In addition to doing new field work in many parts of the world, they are applying new ideas and new technology to the collections made in the past. In the early days of archaeology, a scientist's tools were basic, a shovel, a measuring tape and a notebook. But today's archaeologist must be familiar with many other technical and scientific fields and must work closely with experts in those fields. Modern archaeology makes use of many skills such as surveying, drafting, map making, photography, x-ray technology and chemical analysis. Because it's so important to know exactly where an object came from surveying tools are often used to pinpoint locations, both of the site itself and objects within the site. Drafting and map making skills are needed to get that information down on paper. Photography serves many purposes.

Aerial photography is sometimes used to locate sites. Progress of the work at a site is recorded on photographs and of course, the objects themselves are photographed for identification. This work requires people who are not only good at taking pictures but also interpreting those photographs. Understanding everything from large aerial views to pictures taken through a microscope. Once an object has been found and cataloged, the skills of many different people may be needed together information from it. X-ray pictures can help to identify objects that are covered with dirt or corrosion. Chemical analysis can be used to find out what an object is made from. And for objects that were made from one's living material such as wood or bone, a technique known as radiocarbon dating can help determine their age. Dr. Robert Shaw explains. If you find that sample down here and you send it to a laboratory where they do radioactive counts on it and you find out that that is 1,000 years old. You know that everything in this strata here in strata for is more than 1,000 years old.

And you know that everything above it is less than 1,000 years old. If you have another radiocarbon sample from here and you find out that this is 500 years old, then you're starting to date everything much better, aren't you? You know then that if you find an artifact in this between these two, it must be between 500 and 1,000 years old. And everything above this sample is less than 500 years old. But what about these artifacts that are away from the sample? You have to have some way to relate the artifacts that are over here to these radiocarbon dates. And you do that by the study of the stratigraphy studying the layers.

You see this artifact is below the strata upon which you find the 500 year old sample. So it must be over 500 years, but it is above the strata where you found the 1,000 year old sample. So it is less than 1,000 years old. Once an old object has been found, steps must be taken to preserve and protected. That's the work of conservators. People who are experts at cleaning and preserving all kinds of wood, bone, metal, cloth, or even stone. With the Eskimo artifacts from the Nelson Collection, for instance, conservators at the Smithsonian Institution had to be especially careful to protect things like old colors, feathers, and skins. Bill Fitzhugh, archaeologist and curator with the Smithsonian works extensively with conservators. When you're doing that kind of conservation work is, in fact, you map the whole artifact. It's very detailed time-consuming process.

You take a piece of paper and draw an outline of a mask. You plot in the locations of each one of these pegs. You mark on your map where the pegs had been removed from which holes. You'd save the broken pegs, carved new pegs out of a wood that was not sappy or going to damage the artifact. And insert them and then paint them in some unobtrusive color, not exactly the same color as the original pegs, so that you could tell that these were actually replacements. And then you keep that map of the artifact, along with the rest of the material documentation on it, because someday another researcher will come and will want to know that that, in fact, is a new peg. It's not a peg that was made by an Eskimo on the Yukon River, but something a conservator did to make the mask available for public display. So it's a rather difficult, tedious job when you think of the numbers of artifacts that this would have to be done to restore the whole Nelson collection that's absolutely mind-boggling.

These artifacts were, of course, used in the field. They were used in ceremonies. They were discarded. They were broken when used and went obtained by Nelson. So you have a long history of use, which continues right into the museum period of their life. And we have an obligation to Alaskans, to Nelson, to people in future generations, to maintain these collections as best we can and make sure that they're available 500,000 years from today. Although conservators sometimes repair or restore old objects, they are always careful to keep as much of the original piece as possible. Repairs are made in such a way that an observer can always tell the difference between a modern repair and the original object. The conservator keeps extremely good records for future research purposes. Perhaps the biggest challenge of archaeology is to discover information about the people who created and used old objects to understand life and spirit of those ancient cultures.

It's a job as big as the whole history of human life on this planet, and it demands the skills, talents and interests of many different types of people. If you're curious about the past, if you share some of those interests and you're willing to work hard to increase our store of human knowledge, then archaeology may be worth looking into. If you're interested in archaeology or one of its related fields, how do you go about learning more? How are archaeologists trained? Susan Kaplan is nearing the end of her training. The training of an archaeologist is really almost at the end of that training, and I liken it to an apprenticeship, an old-fashioned apprenticeship. You certainly have to do a lot of book learning, and you have to go to other collections, either archaeological collections or collections like this one, to learn, to recognize when you get in an archaeology site, you may get this part of a story.

That's all you get, and you, as an archaeologist, have to be able to pick that up and start getting a sense of what that might be. So there's book learning, which you really have to do in a university setting, or a high school setting, if courses are available. There's studying of existing collections. If people are available, certainly, as Bill just mentioned, interviewing older people. And then actually going to an archaeology site, but I have to emphasize with an archaeologist, because while we pull artifacts out of the ground, we're pulling a tremendous amount of other information out of the ground as well. When we go to these sites, we plot exactly where every single artifact is located on the surface, it's depth from the surface, so that we can understand the stratigraphic levels from which these objects are coming.

Sometimes you find a house, and from the surface it looks like a simple house, and when you start excavating, you find out that people have come back to that one site again and again and again. And so it's extremely important to understand exactly where in the ground an object has been collected from what kind of soils, and then the soils contain tremendous amount of information, which tell us what kind of weather existed at certain times, charcoal that helps us date the sites, and gives us an indication of what people were using to heat their houses, so that there's a tremendous amount besides artifacts than an archaeologist collects from a site, and a student can certainly start picking that up. But needs to have an archaeologist on hand to do that, so it really, it is an apprenticeship.

There's no lack of research waiting for the archaeologists of the future, and the Eskimo culture of the Yukon-Kasukem Delta might well be one of the most exciting and challenging fields to study. Research needs to be done on tool use, trading patterns, and artistic styles. Many people wonder what a museum can possibly do with hundreds of bad fasteners or hundreds of any other kind of object, but by the nature of the fact that Nelson documented where they were from. We can do studies that look at stylistic relationships between villages, and they give us indications of marriage patterns, trade, interaction between these various different communities, so that there's really a wealth of information that we have here, really waiting to be uncovered waiting to be researched. The same right here we have these ivory story knives, which I'm sure many of the women in the Yupik-speaking areas still know about.

Today people use metal table knives, but again, we can do stylistic studies of these knives, how they were made. One thing that we discovered when we started to do this was the fact that there's a very specific way these things have been made. There's always the head of the beast at the top of the knife. Some kind of collar is usually there, and then there's the skeletal motif that you see down the middle. Here's another one where you see it, and then you get into a situation where they get very abstracted where you don't have the head of the animal anymore, but you have the skeletal motif. Unfortunately, Nelson didn't tell us what this would have signified, but here again, by studying a whole group of implements that seemingly look identical, we can start sort of reconstructing what kind of symbolic mythological meaning these things might have had.

If you think there might be a future for you in the study of the past, there are many ways to find out more. There are opportunities for high school students to get involved in archaeology related projects, as Bill Fitzhoe points out. One of the very common and most successful ways recently has been through the Foxfire programs. People may not know too much about these programs that started in the southeastern United States, and the idea was to get school children to interview old people about things that they knew about in the old days. And this has resulted in a series of oral histories and stories and books and descriptions of artifacts of how people made toys and the old days, all sorts of different things. And that's certainly one way that is very easy for and very productive to get students involved in these kinds of studies, and it is happening in Alaska, in various places.

Archaeological work is done primarily in summertime when the land can be excavated, and there are archaeologists working in the Cusco-Klimm and Yukon regions, the coast of Western Alaska. There aren't very many present projects going on, but there certainly is a great need, as we've seen here with all of this material. We know very little about the prehistory and development of these cultures in that region. So I would urge students to get in contact with people running archaeological programs. It might be possible for an archaeological program to be conducted under the auspices of the Cusco-Klimm Community College to find a couple of archaeologists who be willing to head such a program and to run excavations in the summer. It's a time-consuming, tedious job, but it's one that over the course of five or ten years would result in a tremendous amount of information about the prehistory of the area.

Perhaps not 10,000-year-old sites, but starting with some of the ones that are visible today, some of the old villages that have been abandoned within the last 50 or 60 years. Many of these are already mapped. We know where many of them are found. It's just a matter of getting out there and doing some work on them. Archaeologists employed by the state of Alaska have also worked with high school students. As Dr. Bob Shaw did recently with the students at Good News Bay Rocky Mountain High School. This television series has provided you with the glimpse of the fascinating world of archaeology. It's an introduction to an exciting and varied science. Archaeology is a growing and rapidly changing field. It's a field with room for many different interests and talents. Today, archaeologists are at work from the tundra of the Arctic to the jungles of South America. They are field workers, researchers, museum managers, and teachers.

They have the help of people from literally dozens of other professions, from surveyors to art historians. They are all involved in work that enriches our daily life. Because it restores our contact with all the people and cultures that have gone on before us. To know about our past is to respect the people who paved our way into this world. To respect the past is to respect ourselves and the cultures of others even more. To respect the past is to create a better future. To respect the past is to create a better future. To respect the past.

To respect the past is to create a better future. To respect the past is to create a better future. To respect the past is to create a better future.

To respect the past is to create a better future.