Smithsonian Magazine !

 

I am thrilled to announce that the Smith's Island Archaeology Project is the cover story of next month's Smithsonian Magazine, and will bring international attention to Bermuda's central role in the emerging English Atlantic! Click HERE to read it!

A huge thanks to Andrew Lawler and Nicola Muirhead for their fantastic writing and photographs as well as everyone who made Andrew's visit to Bermuda back in June a success. The one thing missing from this story is fully crediting the small army of students, supervisors, and supporters who enabled us to move so much dirt, clean and catalog so many artifacts, and work in an extremely expensive location - they are the unsung heroes of the project's success to date, and hopefully going forward!

Six of the 2024 veterans - Skylar, Aleksi, Skyler, Anjali, Chloe, and Juliana - have logged more than a hundred hours in my lab this fall entering 350 artifact inventory contexts (and counting) into our master database, scanning and georeferencing field drawings, and doing the vital legwork needed to perform high-level spatial analysis.  Meanwhile, Ty has committed six weeks to working in Bermuda to finish up the faunal identification and analysis of the two 1690s Oven Site and Smallpox Bay pits and SPB post holes associated with the 1612 First Town site. For every hour spent in the field, there is another 3-4 hours of processing - and we are racing to get a fair bit of it done before N'awlins...

... where we will host a two-session symposium on SIAP on Saturday, January 11 - the last of the whole conference (either we are being marginalized or they are saving the best for last!). It will be the first public US presentation of the past three summers' discoveries in the field and lab and will also showcase SIAP's public archaeology engagement and community partnership strategies, a re-evaluation of the pace of maritime environmental degradation, and cutting-edge research on the earliest settlers' cement-like daub and the surprising longevity of ostensibly ephemeral housing. Hopefully bridging the habitual divide of the SHA conference into underwater and terrestrial tracks, my own paper will present Bermudian archaeology broadly and SIAP specifically as fundamentally amphibious archaeology that embraces both approaches/environments as a necessary strategy for best understanding Bermudians' past and the elements that influenced their early cultural ethnogenesis.  

I am looking forward to presenting our work, catching up with my daughter (who is presenting a paper in another session), SIAP veterans, and old friends from my Jamestown and Colonial Williamsburg days, and exploring the Big Easy, which I have yet to visit.  I hear there is an indigenous drink there called a hurricane... and feel the need to comparatively study this alongside rum swizzles and dark 'n' stormies. For research purposes, of course.