Archeology E-gram January 2021

Torres Acting NPS Chief Archeologist

Joshua (Josh) Torres has been selected for a detail as the acting WASO Chief Archeologist. Torres is an anthropologist specializing in the archeology of the Southeastern U.S. and Caribbean. Currently, he is the Supervisor, History and Culture Programs, and Regional Archeologist for Region 1-National Capital Area. Torres manages the Area's Cultural Anthropology, History, and Archeology programs.

Torres has over 20 years of experience in CRM working in both the public and private sectors. A native of northern Virginia, he holds a BA and MA in anthropology and archeology from the University of Colorado and a PhD in anthropology and archeology from the University of Florida. Torres previously served as the Cultural Resource Program Manager for Rock Creek Park, and for Christiansted NHS, Salt River Bay NHP and Ecological Preserve, and Buck Island Reef NM in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands.

Torres takes up his new position on January 31, 2021.

Cotter Award Call for Nominations

The Cotter Award application period is now open until March 31, 2021. The award recognizes the archeological accomplishments of NPS staff or a partnership researcher within a unit or units of the National Park System. Any NPS employee, participating partner, or non-employee may submit nominations. The Cotter Award recognizes two categories of achievement:

Project. Eligible archeological projects may be a single fixed-year activity or a multi-year effort focused on submerged or terrestrial NPS resources. This honor can be awarded to either an individual person or a group of people, depending on the nature of the project. Focused symposia, multiagency workshop or topical conferences, and publications about park archeological resource issues, as well as outstanding outreach to public audiences and/or descendant communities are eligible.

Professional Achievement. This award is open to candidates with demonstrated long-term service in the NPS, including those who are senior career still-practicing professionals, recently retired, recently deceased (posthumous recognition to their family/colleagues/home parks), and who have recently left after a long period of service. Nomination forms for the 2021 competition should be submitted through the NPS Awards Portal, accessed through the Inside NPS Awards and Recognition page (see link under “Bureau Level Awards”).

Nominations will be reviewed by the Cotter Award Committee. The recipient of the award is expected to make a presentation of approximately 30 minutes, in person or via webinar, to share their project findings or career highlights.

NPS archeologists created the John L. Cotter Award for Excellence in NPS Archeology to honor the long and distinguished career and pioneering contributions of Dr. John L. Cotter. This award was established as inspiration for student and professional archeologists to continue Dr. Cotter’s model of excellence.

Contact: Adam Freeburg, Cotter Award Committee Chair, [phone]; [e-mail]

John Broward Superintendent of Kaloko-Honokōhau and Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau NHP

The NPS has selected John Broward as the superintendent of Kaloko-Honokōhau and Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau National Historical Parks on the island of Hawai‘i. Broward has been the acting superintendent for both parks since May 2020.

Broward began his career with the NPS as a summer volunteer in 1983 at Biscayne NP. He later worked as a seasonal employee at Crater Lake and Everglades national parks as well as Canaveral NS. In 1994, he accepted his first permanent position as a backcountry area ranger at Crater Lake NP. In 2001, he moved to Hawai‘i Volcanoes NP where he served as a field ranger, and as chief ranger in 2015.

Broward graduated from Florida State University with a BS in archeology.

Man pleads Guilty to Charges of Archeological Depredation

Rodrick Dow Craythorn of Syracuse, Utah, pled guilty to charges of excavating or trafficking in archeological resources, and injury or depredation to U.S. property in U.S. District Court on January 4, 2021. He was indicted by a federal grand jury on September 16, 2020.

The indictment alleged that Craythorn was found digging in the Fort Yellowstone Cemetery between October 1, 2019, and May 24, 2020, inside Yellowstone NP while looking for the treasure buried by Forrest Fenn. Chief U.S. District Court Judge Scott W. Skavdahl accepted Craythorn’s plea and scheduled his sentencing on March 17, 2021, in Casper, Wyoming, at the Federal Court House.

Excavating or trafficking in archeological resources carries a potential penalty of up to two years in prison, a fine of up to $20,000, and one year of supervised release. Injury or depredation to U.S. property carries a penalty of not more than ten years imprisonment, up to a $250,000 fine, and three years of supervised release.

Retired NPS Archeologist Thomas Windes Featured in Santa Fe New Mexican

Archeologist Thomas Windes started taking tree-ring samples from very old buildings 35 years ago. That was at Chaco Culture NHP, where people lived in the 9th to 13th centuries. Windes has sampled wood at Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde NP and at the mission churches at Isleta, Santa Ana, Pecos, and San Miguel.

“When I get a call, [to take wood samples] I always ask them how much wood is there and then I multiply by 10 because I know they have no idea how much wood is there, because they’re not looking for it,” Windes said. “They don’t see it as a resource, as an artifact. But it can tell you about craftsmanship, it tells you what the climate was like when they got wood, and you can see how they treated the wood. The Chacoans were incredible. Nobody dealt with wood like Chacoans. They loved wood. And I think they loved it because it was hard to get.”

A resident of Albuquerque, Windes is adjunct research associate professor of archaeology at the University of New Mexico’s Chaco Culture NHP Museum Collection Facility. He also does volunteer work for the BLM, USFS, and NPS. For decades, he has worked with the University of Arizona tree-ring lab, which has deep regional records and thousands of samples.

“I get calls all the time. I love doing wood,” Windes said. “My main interest is to get the stuff out before something happens to it. It’s better to get it now, when you have the chance, because you never know what’s going to happen, especially in the parks that can be threatened in forest fires. In Utah, I’m working for the BLM because they have increased visitation due to the conflict over Bears Ears National Monument, and a lot of the sites there have never been mapped at the level we do it.”

From story by Paul Weideman, Santa Fe New Mexican

New National Historic Landmark Archeological Designations

On January 13, 2021, the Secretary of the Interior designated 21 new National Historic Landmarks and signed updated documentation for 2 more. The new and updated NHLs illustrate important aspects of American history and represent diverse historic periods, cultural groups, property types, and archeological sites from across our nation.

The new archeological NHLs are:

Fort Ouiatenon Archeological District, Tippecanoe County, Indiana
Fort Ouiatenon was the first European settlement in what is now the state of Indiana and was one of several French fur-trading establishments in the midcontinent. Turned over to the British after 1763, the post was later captured in a bloodless coup as part of the so-called Pontiac’s Rebellion. Indian Agent George Croghan had preliminary discussions with Pontiac at the fort to bring a halt to the uprisings. The British abandoned the stockade thereafter. In 1791, a punitive military campaign burned down the remnants of the fort, its associated Native villages, and their fields of crops. The associated village sites, discovered more recently and not yet examined intensively, possess high potential to yield nationally significant archeological data on identity, and culture change.

Minong Copper Mining District, Isle Royale National Park, Michigan
The Minong Copper Mining District combines remains of one of the largest, best preserved precontact copper mining landscapes with the largest historic copper mining operation on Isle Royale. Native copper formed the basis of a tool and ornament making tradition beginning as early as the Paleoindian period and extending through the seventeenth century. Beginning in the 1840s, American miners used precontact mining remains as a key guide to establishing a copper mining industry on Isle Royal and northern Michigan that by 1870 was producing the majority of the world’s copper. The Minong Copper Mining District figured prominently in a number of early archeological investigations, contributing to the development of archeological science with respect to understanding of precontact copper mining.

West Point Foundry Archeological Site, Cold Spring, New York
The West Point Foundry archeological site includes the most intact remains of large early iron and brass manufacturing plants in the U.S. The industrial complex is significant for its influence on trends and events in the nation’s military and political history from 1817 to 1867. The locomotives and steamships it manufactured expanded commerce between regions, its cotton presses increased production in Southern states, while foundry-cast pipes and mains supplied water to New York City, Chicago and Boston. The foundry produced steam engines and machinery that advanced sugar refining processes in the West Indies and flour mills and burr stones exported to Austria and Canada.

West Point Foundry played an important role in the Civil War. It developed and manufactured the Parrott gun, a rifled cannon whose long-range accuracy made it the mainstay of the Union artillery, that was used in every major engagement after the first Battle of Bull Run. The 1,700 Parrott guns and 1.3 million projectiles produced at the foundry were so important to the North’s success that President Abraham Lincoln visited the ironworks in 1862. At the war’s height, the foundry employed 1,500 workers.

Lower Pecos Canyonlands, Val Verde County, Texas
The 35 contributing sites in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands Archeological District contain a superlative, unbroken record of human occupation spanning at least 11,000 years and have the potential to yield nationally significant information about a distinctive Archaic society.

Pecos River style rock imagery is the most abundant, well-preserved, and complex pictograph style in the Southern Plains and is among the most significant bodies of images in North America. Pecos River style art is one of the oldest dated pictograph styles in North America, dating between 4200 and 1465 radiocarbon-dated years ago. Analysis has shown that, unlike other Archaic period rock art in North America, the panels were created as planned compositions. They were governed by rules, and each element and figure contributed to the text displayed on the rock. These panels are composed narratives, representing the earliest “books” in North America.

Hueco Tanks, El Paso County, Texas
Hueco Tanks is the largest of the Jornada Mogollon pictograph sites, both in terms of distribution of Formative archeological deposits and abundance of rock imagery. The site contains over 200 examples of masks or face-like pictographs, the largest concentration in North America.

Excavations at Hueco Tanks have produced rare examples of pitroom residential features and a two-room pueblo. These features are representative of the Doña Ana phase of the Formative period and the pithouse-to-pueblo transition. Hueco Tanks is the only site in the southern Jornada Mogollon settlement area that includes both significant Doña Ana archeological deposits and likely Doña Ana rock imagery. Based on the rock art iconography at Hueco Tanks, the site was a rain shrine for the Jornada Mogollon inhabitants of the region.

Kalaupapa Leprosy Settlement, Kalawao, Hawaii
While Kalaupapa is significant for its association with nationally and internationally important events in the history of leprosy (now also known as Hansen’s disease), archeological research has yielded information about the relationship between pre-contact and early post-contact Native Hawaiian use of the Kalaupapa peninsula and the area’s development as a leprosy settlement beginning in 1866. This includes information about the everyday lives of the people of Kalaupapa that may not be available in documentary materials.

The Federal Archeologist’s Bookshelf:

Geophysical survey locates an elusive Tlingit fort in south-east Alaska by Thomas M. Urban and Brinnen Carter. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2021

In 1804, Russian colonizing forces fought a major battle against native Tlingit clans in what is now Sitka, Alaska. The Tlingit defended Shís'gi Noow, or ‘the sapling fort’, on a peninsula at the mouth of the Indian River, which was sheltered from Russian naval artillery by wide tidelands. After a failed Russian ground assault, Russian forces retreated under cover of naval gunfire. The Tlingit victory was short-lived. With gunpowder running low, Tlingit elders decided to abandon the fort. Russian forces razed the abandoned structure. The battle, considered a pivotal moment in both Tlingit history and the history of Russian America, resulted in the establishment of a Russian colony on Baranov Island. In 1910, President William H. Taft established Sitka National Monument (now Sitka National Historical Park) to commemorate the fort site and battlefield.

The definitive physical location of the Tlingit sapling fort has eluded investigators for a century, and a large-scale survey was necessary to rule out alternative locations convincingly for this historically and culturally significant structure. While the NPS had designated a probable location for the fort at an open area on the forested peninsula, alternative locations were suspected and the question remained unanswered. Building on clues from previous investigations, a large-scale geophysical survey that included electromagnetic induction (EM) and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) was recently undertaken in an attempt to settle the question. The EM survey was the largest archeological geophysical survey ever undertaken in Alaska, covering approximately 17ha.

Both the GPR and the quadrature EM component revealed a pattern that matches historical descriptions of the fort in terms of both shape and scale. The anomalous trends detected by both geophysical methods revealed a pattern that closely matches the shape and dimensions described in historical documents and transmitted through oral accounts. The geophysical survey has yielded the only convincing, multi-method evidence to date for the location of the sapling fort—a significant cultural resource in New World colonial history, and an important cultural symbol of Tlingit resistance to colonization.

GRANTS AND TRAINING

NAGPRA Grants Now Available for FY21
The National NAGPRA Program is currently accepting applications from non-Federal museums and Native American Tribes for their Consultation/Documentation and Repatriation grant programs. Access more information and the applications through the NAGPRA Grants website: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nagpra/grant-opportunities.htm. Deadlines to apply are March 12, 2021 for Consultation/Documentation grants, and May 14, 2021 for Repatriation grants.Contact: Sarah Glass, Notice and Grant Coordinator, National NAGPRA Program, 202-354-2201 or e-mail us (email preferred due to telework).

Public Archeology Event Planned at Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site
Brown v. Board of Education NHS and the NPS Midwest Archeological Center is partnering with the Kansas Historical Society and Kansas Anthropological Association to offer the 2021 Kansas Archeological Training Program (KATP) field school for the public. This training program, ongoing in Kansas for over 45 years, is an opportunity for non-archeologists to learn about archeology and get hands-on excavation and lab experience.

Brown v Board of Education NHS commemorates the 1954 Supreme Court’s decision to end legal segregation based on skin color in public schools in the United States. The park unit includes the 1874 and 1927 locations of the Monroe Elementary School and the pre-1927 Monroe School neighborhood with multiple residential dwellings and outbuildings. Both Monroe schools were segregated for Black children, one of four in Topeka, until the 1954 court decision.
The field school research will utilize both geophysical methods and traditional excavations to explore remains of a residential dwelling from the early 20^th century, and other areas of the park that contain neighborhood trash deposits. Archeological investigations will provide a better understanding of ways that the property was used and the lives of people living in the Monroe School neighborhood. The project will gather information to help tell the story of the crucial time between the Civil War and the Civil Rights era that had a profound impact on people’s lives throughout the country.

The KATP field school will be held June 4 - 20, 2021. A fee is charged for the program, but no prior experience is needed. Registration will be open and accessible through the Kansas Historical Society website www.kshs.katp April 1 - June 1, 2021. Depending on the course of the pandemic, the field school may be postponed until 2022. Postponement will be announced by April 1.

The field school organizers will also offer evening programs, including talks (focused on the history and archeology of topics related to Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights era) and tours to related historic sites in Topeka. These are free and open to the public.

Contact: Dexter Armstrong, e-mail us; Jay Sturdevant, e-mail us.

SLIGHTLY OFF-TOPIC:

Emergence Magazine

In assembling news items for the E-Gram, I monitor a number of listservs, blogs, websites, etc. In the excellent Southwest Archeology Today I found a link to an online “experience” in Emergence Magazine. Zuni Counter Mapping, by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughn-Lee, interviews Zuni representatives who create “memory maps” of their childhood and ancestral lands. It combines text with embedded videos and artwork to create compelling reading and an enjoyable visual experience.

Emergence Magazine is an editorially independent initiative of the Kalliopeia Foundation. Kalliopeia was founded in 1997 as an independent private foundation to help support people and organizations who are working to bring spiritual values into institutions and systems of everyday life and work. We can all use a little of that, right? Check it out! To read the article, go to Emergence Magazine.

Archeology E-Gram, distributed via e-mail on a regular basis, includes announcements about news, new publications, training opportunities, national and regional meetings, and other important goings-on related to public archeology in the NPS and other public agencies. Recipients are encouraged to forward Archeology E-Grams to colleagues and relevant mailing lists.

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