UCLA Professor and Atlantic/Caribbean History scholar Carla Gardina Pestana and her husband Don Pestana spent a week living and working with us and agreed to share her cross-disciplinary experiences. In the U.S., Historical Archaeology is overwhelmingly anchored in Anthropology Departments and generally ignored or neglected in History graduate training and scholarship - much to the detriment of the field, I would argue. Carla's post highlights for historians the considerable work that goes into archaeological excavation as well as insights historians might gain by blending material and documentary evidence in our broadly shared pursuit of better understanding the past.
When I accepted Mike Jarvis’s invitation to work at his
archaeological site on Smith’s Island in Bermuda, I expected to learn about the
process archeologists employ, the better to understand the work of colleagues
in that field. I discovered a great deal more than expected.
I now understand the loving attention to seemingly minor
details that archaeologists display. Spending
over a week at the site, clearing plants away, scraping up earth to sift for
objects, and accompanying some of those items to a lab there to wash and sort
them, I joined the students from the University of Rochester,
the more experienced participants who added their expertise, the volunteers
from Bermuda itself who came occasionally to join the workforce, and Mike
himself who has been digging in Bermuda for over three decades. As a historian whose
work centers on archives, I had no idea either how hard-won that lone pottery
shard could be nor how much knowledge went into understanding it.
While digging
on Smith’s Island, Don and I found numerous pottery shards which were
subsequently cleaned and recorded by the project participants. As these small
bits (usually not even an inch square) came out of the ground, Mike and other
experienced diggers identified these fragments, including their origin, the
period when they were produced, and the materials of which they were made. What
to me looked like just another bit of broken plate told them a great deal. We
got a glimpse of the depth of their knowledge and of our own ignorance in such
exchanges. Knowing how much these little bits could tell someone—if not us!—motivated
us to keep digging, despite blisters and scrapes from shovel, trowel, and occasional
clippers (needed to eliminate plant roots from our assigned “unit”).
Some items we found were unsurprising: fishbones, since we
were within sight of water at the dig site, and we saw numerous fish as we
crossed over to the island by boat each day; and the occasional pig bone, too, because
Bermuda had been overrun with hogs when the English had first arrived, animals
that had probably been planted there by the Spanish who used uninhabited
islands as livestock pens to hold animals that could be slaughtered when needed.
We also found other small items of everyday life from the last four centuries,
like pottery shards or glass fragments. Other items that we treated with care
surprised us, not so much for being there as for the importance accorded them:
bits of plastic from the modern era were washed in the lab on St. George’s
Island alongside the much older and to my way of thinking more important objects
that might tell us something about early Bermudian life. I had no idea that
these items helped in the dating of layers of soil.
We also learned that archeology is physically hard work. We
spent a full workday digging in the earth, often on our knees with a trowel in
hand. We filled 5-gallon buckets with sodden Bermudian soil and rocks, then
lugged them across the site to the sifting grounds (or cajoled some younger,
fitter compatriot to do the lugging), where the contents would be sifted
through a precariously balanced wooden frame holding a screen. Sifting, once
the heaving and dumping was accomplished, proved a good way to learn what we
were looking for. In the company with an experienced worker, I spent much of
the first day sorting through earth to find shells, pottery, glass, mortar, and
other bits, and being able to recognize these items helped when I got down on
my knees the next day to scrape up buckets of earth.
Having dutifully brought gloves to the site, in accordance
with the instructions Mike provided, I realized after one day of digging that
they were not intended to keep my hands clean as I assumed when I purchased
them. I can safely say that archaeologists not only don’t care about dirt under
their nails, but rather they embrace it. I haven’t been quite so muddy and
covered in dirt in years, not even backpacking in the often-dusty Sierras. Of
course, the near relentless rain for most of our stay didn’t help matters, but
I suspect being covered in soil is a routine experience at a dig site
regardless of weather. The gloves were in fact to protect one hand from the
damage caused by the unremitting use of the trowel. Many of my fellow diggers
did not wear them at all, but those who did tended to use only one, leaving the
other hand free to pluck up little bits out of the dirt. Starting on my second digging
day, after I figured it out, I bandaged my scraped skin and wore a glove on
that hand.
 |
Josh: Professional Archaeologist
& Carla and Don's "Dirt Whisperer" |
Our learning also included getting to know the community
that worked the site. We met students and some former students, as expected,
many of whom had been on Smith’s Island during previous years. More
unexpectedly, we encountered peripatetic archeology workers known as “contract
archeologists”. They have training and skills, and they travel from one dig to
the next, hired to do the work on a particular project. A highly specialized
itinerant workforce, these people go from site to site as the offers present
themselves, encountering project leaders and fellow workers in different
locations around the world. When two such people arrived after we had been on
site for about a week, it was fascinating to listen to them exchange stories of
other places where they had worked, who had hired them, how well they were treated
on this job or that, who else was on each project. It gave me a glimpse into a
community the existence of which I had never considered.
. . . and Mike was thrilled to have you, too! If any other Atlantic, Caribbean, and/or Early American historians would like to try their hand at historical archaeology next summer, please contact me (Michael.Jarvis@Rochester.edu) to explore possibilities!
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