Video
Historic Archeology, Climate Change, and Wildland Fire
Transcript
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Stan: ... [Inaudible 00:00:40] between cultural resources and climate change. Climate change affects cultural resources while in turn cultural resources contain valuable information about long-term human capacity to adapt to changing climates. The National Park Service Climate Change Response Strategy for 2010 set out 4 pillars of climate change response: science, adaptation, litigation and communication. Work is now underway to merge these 2 approaches integrating the 2-fold perspective of cultural resources with each climate change response pillar.
The result is a full complex strategic vision for our national climate change and cultural heritage program. This presentation identifies roles and examples of National Park Service archeology in this program and I would encourage everyone to tune in for this particular seminar because you're going to learn a lot about what's going on with climate change and archeology within the National Park Service and where our archeological programs can fit in our understanding of climate change.
To move on, I wanted to introduce Jay Sturdevant who's our speaker today. Jay is an archeologist at the Midwest Archeological Center. He's also worked at the Southeast Archeological Center. He holds a BA from Colorado State University and a Master's degree from the University of Nebraska. Jay has had a broad variety of experiences in the field and he's worked quite a bit on 106 and NEPA projects. He has a broad experience in wilderness and, of course, in this topic, he has quite a bit of experience with fire. He served as head READ for Hurricane Sandy and as the 106 coordinator for the BP oil spill.
When you look at Jay's resume, you can see there's a long list of reports, publications and presentations and has memberships in numerous professional organizations. Here in Washington, we’re especially appreciative of his help with the ASMIS database and with the integration of the ASMIS database into an interface with GIS. Jay's presentation today is “Historic Archeology, Climate Change and Wildland Fire: A Midwestern Perspective on Future Threats to Resource Preservation.”
Environmental change brought about by shifting climates has the potential to drastically influence archeological resource preservation throughout the world. Protection of archeological resources depends upon our ability to adaptively manage threat in ways that cross cut resource types and preservation scenarios. Studies in the Midwest region have identified historic archeological sites as vulnerable to significant damage from wildland fire. Projections of increasing wildland fire frequency, fuel accumulations, and fire intensities combine with longer fire seasons predict the growing threats to the preservation of historic archeological sites in the Midwest.
How will a greater variability and uncertainty of our changing world affect efforts to protect these sites? This presentation will provide an overview of threatened sites in the Midwest, discuss the potential for increased impacts from climate change and propose strategies to protect sites through management actions. With that, I will turn this over to Jay, once I pull up his presentation. Take it away.
Jay: All right. Thank you, Stan, so much for that really kind introduction and thank you for inviting me to talk today. I’m really excited to get the opportunity to give this talk. It’s something that I've been thinking about for a while now so this is a good chance to kind of pull atalk like together and think about how climate change and wildland fire may affect the preservation of archeological resources in Midwest right now and in the future.
Stan, just to let everybody else know, we have a whole room full of people here at the center in our large conference room and they've all promised to be quiet. Hopefully, we won’t give too much rustling of wrappers and things on the other end there, but can you hear me okay?
Stan: I can you hear you fine and I’m presuming everybody else can. I guess before you start out I want to just ask everyone that's on the line to please put their phones on mute so the rustling of papers and whatever activities there might be occurring in your office won’t disturb your presentation. If everybody could please put their phones on mute, I know Jay would greatly appreciate it.
Jay: I certainly would. With that, I think we can get started. I’ve got to figure out how to advance this slide here. Before we go too far, I want to start by thanking a huge number of people that have helped with fire and fire-related research in our region over, probably, for about the last 10 years. I started ... I think my first fire-related project was I started in 2004, and so, really, for about the last 10 years, off and on, through various projects, we sort of have been looking at fire at a couple of different angles in our region and so first let us start with the regional fire program.
Jim McMahill and Cody Wenk and Scott Beacham and the guys in the regional office have been just outstanding supporting us over the last 10 years and making our research efforts bear fruit. The Joint Fire Science Program is the interagency program run out of Boise. I can’t really say enough good things about that program. They funded our experimental research project and they were really a joy to work with and do a lot of ... fund a lot of interesting research related to wildland fire. I would encourage everybody to go take a look at their website.
They sent out annual requests for proposals every year for research on various topics so definitely check out the Joint Fire Science Program. There's just a huge number of parks units in our region that have helped over the years. It would probably take me 2 hours to go through all the people that have helped but I mean it's just almost probably literally hundreds of people with all the fire teams and the resource managers and folks in all these parks. I just can’t say enough about them. Their help has been really outstanding over the last 10 years.
The Nature Conservancy and the US Fish and Wildlife Service helped us do some of our prescribed burn experiments and then also all the current and former MWAC employees that have helped over the years. There's been a lot of people that have helped with fire project over the years. I’m really appreciative of everybody's help. The reason I wanted to thank everybody upfront is because, while my name is on this presentation, it really has been just a huge effort by all these people in the region to pull some of these stuff together so I really would like to thank everybody for that.
These are just some photos of every people doing fire stuff that I've accumulated over the years. So, it was a lot of fun the last few days to go through, a good 10 years' worth of photos and see everybody that's participated and … True, There's really been a lot of people. It's been fun!
Anyway, moving into our region which is what we're going to talk about and that's the reason why I titled this “A Midwestern Perspective” because fire conditions are so variable throughout North America and anywhere, really, that really to talk about this, we really have to look at it through our lens of the conditions and the resources that we see here in the Midwest. This is the Midwest region for the National Park Service. It includes 13 states and over 65 National Park Service units including the Midwest Archeological Center and the Midwest Regional Office.
What are we good at in the Midwest? We're really good at growing corn. You might say, "Well, what in the heck does corn have anything to do with wildland fire?" This is a really good … It gives you a really good idea of how much land is actually used in the Midwest region off for agricultural purposes and in some parts of our region, over 80% of the land mass is used for agriculture. In some ways, it can reduce the amount of burnable area and so between those 2 maps, you can see if you kind of look where Iowa and southern Minnesota are, you see a really interesting overlap of …
This map shows the probability that an area might burn and so you can see higher probabilities outside of that sort of zone of corn and, you know, our parks in the Midwest region are in those little pockets of red and yellow that you see in northern Minnesota and Missouri and Arkansas, Ozarks, and the western Dakotas, those areas that are little pockets around the region of burnable areas. I was really excited when I found those 2 maps the other day and just kind of a nice little fit. It was really an interesting thing.
How will climate change influence the fire and archeology interface? The interface between wildland fire and archeology is, like I said, highly variable and like this image shows can be patchy across the landscape and it's not going to behave the same way everywhere. How will climate change influence these environmental variables that affect wildland fires in our preservation of resources in our region?
I wanted to quickly run through some of the climatic modeling and projections of future climate episodes. I’m not a climatic modeler. This was pretty basic and I know a lot of folks, everybody has probably seen these charts, or graphs of some kind, that show future temperature increases and changes due to climate change. I thought it would be good ... some good background just to run through a few things to set the stage for our thinking here. One of the things to remember when looking at climate change modeling is that they'll always talk about scenarios, the different model scenarios based on what potentially the emissions are in the future and there's reduced emission scenarios, and scenarios based on if we stayed our current emissions level, and there's a scenarios for increased emissions in the future.
Each one of those can really change a lot of the outcomes that come out at the other end. In general, there seems to be consensus that there's increasing annual temperatures and the image on the left shows observed temperature change that has been recorded over the last few decades. You can see increasing temperatures with some real dark red in the upper parts of the Midwest. Then the image on the right is some of those climatic model projections. Each one of those maps shows a different projection based on a different emission so that upper left corner is the low mission and the bottom right corner is the higher emission scenario where you're getting temperature change in the order of 8 degrees or more in the next century. Those models are really extreme changes.
Another one that could be really important for understanding some of our questions about fire is the number of frost-free days. The number of frost-free days is expanding. The map on top shows the observed change that's occurred already since the 1970s and then, the bottom map shows projected changes and so increasing number of days that are frost-free across the continent.
Changes in precipitation again is another one that could influence dramatically wildland fire conditions and so you observe again on the left and project it on the right. All of these I pulled out of the third national climatic assessment that just came out in 2014. I would encourage everybody to go read that if they're looking for more information. It's a really nice website. You can pull down different regional pieces or you can look at pieces that talk about the entire United States. It's a really interesting document.
The basic scenarios - a couple of them from the Midwest in Great Plains - reduced amounts of lake ice in the Great Lakes area and upper Midwest could really affect a lot of the plant communities. There's talk about increasing temperate woodlands and decreasing boreal forests in the northern parts of the Midwest region so that you're getting a more southerly looking oak and hickory forest makeup rather than boreal kind of northern spruce species. Those changes in forest composition have the potential to alter fire conditions and the way fires burn in the Midwest, particularly in some of our northern borderland parks.
For the Great Plains, there’s a couple of things that's being discussed in literature –are increased amount of extreme rainfall events where you get really heavy downpours that dump a lot of moisture in one event rather than having it spread out over time -floods, pronounced drought events where you have more longer periods of higher temperatures where you have more periods of 100 degree, 90 degree temperatures. Increased demand for water both for agriculture, industry and in urban areas which could really affect the drying out of the landscape, expanding frost-free zones and changes to the availability of water and plant communities could influence our fire conditions and the frequency of fires.
Moving into some of the planning frameworks, this was an example that was in the National Climatic Assessment. It talks about some steps for planning to identify resource impacts and vulnerabilities. What resources do you have that might be impacted? What's vulnerable? How do you plan for that and address those problems and start to create this feedback loop where you're addressing problems and generating information to change strategies as necessary?
In the Midwest region moving from that planning cycle, what are our resources at risk? When we think about wildland fire and archeology what are the kinds of archeology that we might find to be impacted in the Midwest region and those could be really very different from what you might see in the Inter Mountain Region or other parts of the country. Does fire impact subsurface resources or is it only surface, and what kinds of archeology might have some potential for damage?
Here are a couple of studies that have really have been useful for me and I think are good places for folks to go if they want to learn more about fire and archeology and what those impacts might be. The report on the left was a dissertation by Brent Buenger. He did some experimental stuff in the fire laboratories at Rocky Mountain Research Station and produced some really good experimental data on impacts of fire and archeology. The Wildland Fire and Ecosystem, the “Rainbow Series” report is probably the best synthesis out there for most everything related to fire and cultural resources.
I would recommend both of those highly, for more information about impacts from fire. Generally, when you have heavier, drier, fuels, you're going to get increased temperatures and durations and the temperatures and the durations of the burns are the primary drivers for impacts to archeological resources. I apologize if the chart on the right isn't very readable. These are both in that “Rainbow Series R”eport, the Ryan et al.report and folks can go read more if they want. Generally, when you get increasing - when you get fires that burn longer at a hotter temperature - you're going to get more impact.
One of the things that most studies have shown is that the impacts to subsurface resources drop off really quickly after about a couple of centimeters below the surface. Generally, there isn't a lot of heat transfer to subsurface archeology. It doesn’t mean that there can’t be a stump that burns underground or some kinds of things that impacts subsurface, because there are. Those are really less frequent and very specific to the local conditions. For the most part, fires that are burning over the top of the surface are not transferring a lot of heat to the below surface, at least, certainly in the Midwest region.
Also in that, there is a chapter in the “Rainbow Series” report about historic archeology and fire. I thought this quote by Charles Haecker really caught the gist of why this is important that a lot of the past studies of impacts from wildland fire focus on prehistoric Native American archeology and those are all legitimate and very useful and needed studies. There's also a lot of historic sites that hadn’t been addressed. I think that's the part of what we are looking at is asking the question of what are the impacts to historical resources as well the prehistoric sites?
When saying historic sites, we're not talking about these kinds of historic sites. Lincoln’s home or Fort Union or Brown vs. Board where it's a kind of nice mowed lawn. Generally, it's historic sites that are going to be out in wilderness areas and places that are more prone to wildfire. In about 2004, we decided to try a pilot project at Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site in North Dakota to try to see if we could do some experiments that might give us some data that would help us understand the impacts a little bit better. This is ... I love this picture because we're all dressed up in our clean fire outfits. That's myself on the left and former parks program manager retired Tom Thiessen and then superintendent Cheryl Schreier when she was at Knife River and she's now superintendent at Mount Rushmore. It was really fun to find that picture the other day and remember. We had a lot of fun on the project.
After that pilot project, we put together a research proposal and submitted it to the Joint Fire Science Program and received a research funding for 4 years to look at ... conduct experiments in Midwest Region parks to look at fire and archeology impact. We picked two parks in each sub-regional ecozone that we defined. We had two Great Lakes eastern woodland parks, which include Voyageurs National Park and Effigy Mounds National Monument. We had two Great Plains parks which were Wind Cave National Park and Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. Then we had 2 parks from the Ozark Highlands, the Pea Ridge National Military Park and Buffalo National River, both of those in Arkansas.
That way, we were able to collect data in different environmental zones around the region but also looking at different kinds of archeology as well. Our experimental plots include both prehistoric kinds of archeology and historic materials, so we could get a range of different types of archeology that we're looking at.
The way that it would work, we would go out and we would set up these experimental plots. We'd have 6 experimental plots per park. We had essentially 2 sets of 3 in different parts of the park. Each experimental plot contained an electronic data logger in its center which 8 thermalcouple wires to report temperature information. At the end of each thermal couple, there was a series of 4 artifacts that were placed there that were subjected to a prescribed fire and recorded the temperature information and we would record the condition of the artifacts.
We did a real intensive analysis in the lab before the artifacts went out in the field to be burned. Then, we reanalyzed that same artifact when it came back from the field. Then we also subjected some of the artifacts to weathering and cleaning experiments as well to look at the permanent of some of these impacts. This is a nice chart. It gives just as a proxy measure, shows how you get growing impacts as you go to towards that upper right corner. When you get temperature, increasing temperatures and longer duration fires, generally, when you see more impacts and that help pretty well for the most part. Each one of these represents one of the plots and it was ... We took the duration of that plot and the maximum temperature that was reached in that plot and put these together and it actually came up pretty well to show the parks that had heavier, more longer burning fuels, those were the parks that we saw the more impacts in and the parks that had thinner, lighter, quicker-burning fuels like grassland fuels were generally towards the bottom that we saw,
we saw impacts in those parks but not as frequent and not as severe. Just to give people a couple of charts to look at. There's a couple of our data charts. I think the top 1 is from a woodland burn at Buffalo National River and the bottom one was a grassland burn at Tallgrass Prairie in Kansas. The Tallgrass curve definitely is much cooler and shorter timewise than the Buffalo River curve. Again, just some - a few more artifacts on the left just to give us a suite of different kinds of materials and what those impacts look like.
On the top you have a kaolin clay pipe or replica clay pipe that had a lot of burn residue on it when it came back from the field. On the center, you have the impacts to a lead, a replica mini ball. Then, on the bottom is a mammal rib and the arrow is pointing to an area on the rib that we were able to do some cleaning experiments on and remove a lot of the charring and stuff that was adhered to that bone after the fire. We're looking at different ways fire created permanent versus not so permanent impacts on possible materials.
If anyone is interested, the final report for the project is completed and will be available on our website hopefully within the next month so folks can check our website at the Midwest Archeological Center and download our report and see our results pretty soon. Our experimental program combined with field inventories, I think, have really given us a good idea of that historic sites are a type of resource that are more at risk from wildland fire and probably the other kinds of varied or other types of sites in our region.
Over the last 10 years, we've done a lot of burn surveys around our region, myself and many others here in the office have been conducting those kinds of surveys, and I think there's certainly suites of sites out there that have materials that are much more conducive to impacts from fire and then, maybe, some other sites. Homesteading and ranching, we see a lot of homesteads and ranches and these kinds of sites in various stages of preservation but you have materials that are easily impacted by fire including wood and leather, bone, perishable materials and of that sort.
Native American camps and villages, this is a site at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota and it's a temporary structure that was standing at one point, is now collapsed, but all the timbers and you can see in this smaller photo there, the ax-cut ends of a timber. The timbers are all still laying on the ground. A couple of years, we were able to protect site from a prescribed burn, fuels reduction, at the park.
In some of our northern parks, we have an Ojibway site that might have remains of a cabin or, in this case, there's some building remains and some shoes and some other things on the site there that look real sensitive to - if a burn came through. Logging camps is another one that we've seen a lot of materials that could be potentially impacted by fire. A lot of the logging camps in our northern parks have buildings that are in a really very well preserved state, including intact building logs, notched corners, leather, shoes, again, things that could be pretty easily burned up in a fire.
Fur trade sites - I'm curious if anybody can pick out the person in the photograph on the upper left. There's a person in there and some flag pins in that photo but that's the site of a fur trade post that the archeology is very shallow at this site. The fuel loads on this site are heavy enough that there could be enough penetration into the ground that you could see some damage. Then the lower photograph shows a chimney, collapsed chimney pile from one of the buildings at this fur trade site and this site dates to right around 1800 and it has a lot of features and artifacts that are very near the surface with heavy fuels that could be easily impacted and it's a site that's not very easily defensible. We're in discussions about how to treat fuels on that site to protect it.
Although not ... I don't know, not everybody would maybe consider this archeology but we do see a lot of cultural vegetation on modified trees on archeological sites that we visit in our region. These are some examples of birch bark harvesting in our northern parks and red pine harvesting and cutting that the impacts from climate change and fire and other things are going to make these a quickly disappearing resource in our region.
In that same vein we -a few weeks ago, we conducted a pedestrian inventory of the Elkhorn Ranch unit which was featured on CBS Sunday Morning and folks saw that last weekend but we were at the Elkhorn Ranch a couple of weeks ago doing a prescribed burn inventory because they're trying to save the old cottonwood trees at the Elkhorn Ranch that were there when Theodore Roosevelt was living in his cabin. There's a really unique historic type of cultural vegetation that we've been doing some help in the regional program out there to this some fuels out there so we can save those cottonwood trees.
Then site accessibility. Fuels buildups and fuels management can be a really crucial part of archeologists being able to access some parts of sites, being able to do geophysical surveys or excavations can be difficult if you have overgrown vegetation. Identifying sites that need thinning, can protect them from the impacts of wildland fire but also potentially make them more accessible to research.
Just to summarize that thinking about that planning wheel again that we started with, how do we identify the resources at risk? I think, really, you begin to do that by understanding your local conditions. Fire conditions are so variable across the landscape that it really is important to understand the local types of fuels that you have, how they burn, what kinds of archeology you have and how that might be impacted by different levels of fire. Understanding the local resources, I think, is really an important part of all this. What’s the fire suppression interval in your area, has it been a 100 years since the last burn? Fire suppression - the history of fire suppression - is a big driver of wildland fires and can increase the damage significantly if not treated.
GIS-based analysis to look at the overlap of fuels and where archeological sites are and where you might have problem areas. Problem areas is a good way to do this at a landscape scale. Then, moving into that inventory and evaluation, doing the field inventories and recording the sites I think is one of the most important things we can do to help preserve these sites. We’ve got to record the sites, if you don't where they are or what they have in them, we won't know how to protect them. Really getting that recording done and getting good information in our ASMIS and GIS database. I’ve got to put in a plug for Anne, get ASMIS in there.
Get the information into ASMIS and GIS and that will help ... The more information we have, the better we can plan and address the needs that these sites may require. Also, it's good information for prioritizing our actions across the landscape. With so many sites and so many potential impacts, how do you pick which ones to go first? Where do you put your resources? Coming up with ways to prioritize sites for treatment is really an important part, I think, moving forward.
Then, some examples of basic treatments and mitigations. We've identified the site. We think there might be some impacts. How do you address that? There's so many different combinations and strategies that you can use. These are just some examples. Mechanical fuel reduction where you go in and you hand remove or hand-cut fuels and remove them that way rather than burning them can be a good way to reduce risk. Sometimes, fire is actually a good thing. Sometimes, low intensity fires can be a good way to remove a lot of fuels on a landscape scale and not impact archeological resources.
You have to do some work in advance so that to be sure that you're not going to impact anything. That can be a good way to treat fuels buildups on a landscape scale. Sprinklers and wraps, wrapping shelters and wrapping sites, that's been done a lot at parks across the Service. Selective collection of materials, it might be worthwhile to collect some things that may burn ... if there is really no other way to save it. Site recording and prioritizing treatments, like I said before, those are really going to be important parts to the treatment and mitigation questions.
Then, monitoring. Monitoring is an incredibly important part of these treatments because how do you know if it worked? You really have to have this feedback loop where you're identifying sites, putting treatments in place, and then monitoring how those are working. [crosstalk 00:37:30] This is a good place, I think, for possibly building some of that cooperative inter-disciplinary monitoring strategy if you know. There's lots of programs in the Park Service that have monitoring programs and they might have information that really is useful for understanding some of this. I would encourage people to reach out to your INM networks and your fire program networks and find out what kind of monitoring data they're collecting and whether or not that might be useful for you.
A few takeaways I had I thought that maybe would summarize things. The interface between wildland fire and archeological resources really is defined by the local fire conditions and types of archeology that you have and so because it's defined by those local fire conditions, that's why climate change could affect that interface and maybe it causes increased impacts across our region. Historic archeological sites in the Midwest are at an elevated risk because they contain fire sensitive resources. Also a lot of times because they're on the surface and because there are more recent sites they haven't been buried yet. A lot of Midwest sites that we see on the surface generally tend to be historic sites within the last 200 years and those tend to be the sites that seem to be exhibiting the most risks from fire.
Then, a lot of those treatments and mitigation strategies that I proposed as examples are really what we can call in the national climactic action plan the No Regret Actions. Those are actions that we're already doing today and may ... We won't have any regret in the future if we did continue to do those actions. I think a lot of them are very low impact and can, with the low impact thing like a mechanical fuel reduction, you could really preserve a site into the future. I would encourage you to do some research and look at your own local conditions, find out if there's No Regret Actions that you can take and I think there's some good ways that we're already using to help protect sites.
I think, in a lot of cases, we're going to be able to continue to use those same strategies and maybe just have to change the scale of them sometimes. Sometimes, we may have to scale up certain kinds of monitoring or certain kinds of inventory if we're seeing more impacts or more kinds of sites that could be impacted.
Then, I would point everybody to the NPS Guide for Archeology and Fire. Karen Mudar worked really hard on pulling this thing together and it's got a lot of great information for folks in terms of links and background and all kinds of different aspects from fire in terms of compliance and prescribed burning and wildland fire response and all kinds of different stuff. Karen and others worked really hard to collect together and I think it's a great resource for folks. Definitely go take a look at that and with that, I think that's all I have.
I know it was kind of quick. I went through a lot of stuff really quickly. I didn’t cover everything that I could have but I thought it'd be good to just give an overview and if folks have questions or want to learn more, they can go read more or they can ask questions or give us a call. With that, I guess I'll take any questions, if anybody has any.
Female: Can you tell me how to get that publication you were referring to before?
Jay: It will be posted on our website and that's the Midwest Archeological Center. It will be listed under our technical report series. It's not currently posted yet. Our website guru still has to post it up there. I asked him this afternoon. He thought within the next month, it would be posted on the website.
Female: Okay.
Jay: You should be able to go to the website and find it and just ... The PDF should be there to download.
Female: Okay. Is the PowerPoint that you built, is that available online?
Jay: This will ... I think that they do keep these online. This is being recorded, this presentation. I think my narration and the PowerPoint should be available online in the future.
Female: Okay. Can I contact Karen about how to access that?
Jay: Yes.
Female: Okay. Thanks very much.
Jay: Yeah. Thanks for the question.
Stan: Jay, this is Stan. Could you talk a little bit about how you built relationships between the Fire Program and the Center and maybe other programs that might go out and help you monitor fire and impacts for these sites?
Jay: Sure. I'm glad you asked that. It's really been a great working relationship, I think, with the fire program in our region and it was really the experimental project that brought us all together and gave us a fun project to work on as a team. I talked to those guys pretty frequently. We certainly have our ups and downs, occasionally, but for the most part, I think everybody wants to do the right things for the resources. A lot of times, it's finding the availability of funds and people and stuff to get things done. Generally, I think it's been a great relationship and everybody's wanting to protect sites. It's just figuring out how to get it done. Did that answer your question, Stan, or ...
Stan: Yeah. I think so. Basically, it started with a multi-disciplinary project.
Jay: Yeah. That project, I designed with Rod Skalsky who's the fire management officer at Theodore Roosevelt National Park and Cody Wenk who's the fire ecologist in the Midwest region and the Inter Mountain region and we worked very closely putting that proposal together and I couldn't have done it without them because without their expertise and their ability to do prescribed burn and stuff, we would have never been able to do the burns and collect the data in the field.
We planned … Each of our experiments was piggybacked on an existing prescribed burn so we didn't have to generate any new burns to do our experiments and we wouldn't have been able to do it without those guys. They were just a critical piece. In fact, sometimes, they would even have to be the ones that would have to go out in the fire and collect the data. I have a red card but I'm not rated for arduous duty and so to go out in the fire if we needed to, to collect some data. I had to rely on the fire teams to do that.
Stan: Have you got some examples of historic sites that have been affected by fire?
Jay: I'm trying to think of any ... I think … [crosstalk 00:45:45] Anne Vawser has just given the example from Jewel Cave.
Anne: Yeah. One that I can think of off the top of my head is the site at Jewel Cave when the Hell Canyon fire went through there, with the historic site that wasn't very well known had been recorded but there was a wood trim and that was pretty much destroyed by the fire that went through because it, primarily because really nobody knew about the site or that they should be concerned about it when, and, of course, they were more concerned about the historic cabin at the park. That's one that ... Thankfully, it had actually been documented before it was, before it burned
Jay: That's a good example where the documentation is really handy after the fact. Some of these sites if they burn, we may never know what was there or we may not, we may lose a piece of what was there in terms of the stuff that some of the artifacts are going to be more resistant to impacts from fire and so you may get a smaller assemblage of stuff after a fire goes through ... Another one that just popped in my head that was interesting link between the historical archeology and fire was the Little Bighorn project that Scott and Melissa Connor and those guys did at a Little Bighorn. That was done after a wild fire, I believe, it was grass fire that went through there on the, before they did their surveys at the Little Bighorn battlefield. Those are a couple of examples, I guess.
Stan: Thanks. Other questions out there, please Jay is here to answer whatever he can. I encourage other folks to ask ... Just a reminder, again, next week’s program is going to be Marcie Rockman with her topic as a National Strategic Vision for Climate Change and Archeology and I strongly encourage everyone to get the word out because this is a very important webinar when we're going to talk about to discuss, how archeology is going to fit into the National Park Services, a broader vision for dealing with the global climate change. If you can attend, then I would highly recommend that you attend this webinar as well.
Hey, Jay, any last words for us?
Jay: No, other than thanks to everybody for listening. I appreciate your time and attendance today and I really appreciate the chance to talk at the ArcheoThursday webinar series. This is a lot of fun. I had a great time pulling this presentation together and I hope it was useful for folks.
Stan: Very good.
Jay: Thank you.
Stan: I hope to have all of you on next week.
Female: Thanks.
Jay: Thank you. [crosstalk 00:49:05]
Stan: All right. Thanks, Jay.
Jay: All right.
Stan: Great job.
Description
Jay Sturdevant, 1/8/2014, ArcheoThursday
Duration
42 minutes, 42 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
01/08/2014
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