Field Notes: Confessions of a Young Archaeologist

The graves beneath the park

In D.C.’s Adams Morgan, new finds in two old cemeteries pit remembrance against recreation.

On Friday the Washington Post ran an article on the Walter C. Pierce Community, Friends Burying Ground, and the Mt. Pleasant Plains Cemetery. The article highlighted the preservation efforts currently underway at the park in anticipation for the official release of the final report on Saturday. Well attended, Saturday’s event featured an abridged 167-page final report and a presentation to the community and descendants. The next step will be to chart a path for preservation and commemoration.

For more information on the park and the cemeteries check out the newly established Walter Pierce Park Cemeteries website.

P.S. Read the comments to the article, they demonstrate just some of challenges of preserving cemeteries in urban spaces. 

Books on Rotation

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So I currently have three four books on rotation right now. I’ve been trying to finish A History of Modern Ethiopia for my preliminary dissertation research, Faces at the Bottom of the Well to try and get a better understanding of Critical Race Theory, and Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture because I’m always interested to learn how black people studied Anthropology in the past. I almost forgot, I’m also reading Outliers: The Story of Success on the Ipad mini because I can read it in the bed at night when all the lights are out – and it pretty interesting. My plan is to have them all read before I head to Boston next week. Lets see how this works (Abby Lincoln on Spotify helps as background motivation).

Also feel free to keep updated by following my goodreads page.

SBA Update: Interview with Bill White on CRM

                                                        Bil White, founder and CEO of Succint Research

This month we had the opportunity to speak with archaeologist Bill White. White has been working in Cultural Resource Management (CRM) for more than 10 years and is the founder and CEO of Succinct Research, “dedicated to improving the quality of CRM consulting and consultants around the world.” We spoke about a number of topics related to CRM including present and future opportunities, the CRM Archaeology Podcast, Succinct Research, and his two most recent publications:

Resume Writing for Scientists
Small Archaeology Project Management

Check out our Oral History Project tab for the digital recording of this interviews.

M.A. Graduation

Spring semester is over and I finally got that MA in Anthropology. Although I still have a ton of work to do for this PhD, I had to walk at graduation just so I can officially feel like I graduated. Time to update the resume and the email signature.

Bibliographic Software: Endnote

After 3 years of graduate school I finally took the time to explore different types of bibliographic software. It seems they all have strengths and weaknesses: Endnote, Refworks, Sente, Zotero, Bookends, and many more. Some of them are free, some of them allow you to attach and annotate documents, some allow for 1000s of bibliographic formats … the list goes on and on. Sometimes too many options is worse than one or two. I didn’t have the time or the patience to try out each one and find the best fit, so I settled. 

I started with a simple good search “best bibliographic software for mac” and came up with several blogs and websites that listed the top 5 or 10 and the different strengths of each. In the end everyone seemed to agree that other than a few differences here and there, they all basically did the same thing. Its merely a matter of personal preference. Bibliographic software is one of those computer programs that does way more than the average person actually needs.

After about an hour of exploring online I eventually settled for Endnote. I’d heard good things about Endnote in the past but never really bought into it considering it costs over $100. It turns out, as a graduate student we have access to Endnote Web  for free. I explored the web edition a bit, looked up a couple of tutorials on youtube, and found it was pretty intuitive and self explanatory. I can attach pdfs, look up references through library of congress database, and export references directly from the school library website. Furthermore, it’s all online so I don’t have to worry about a harddrive crashing or taking up too much memory and I can export it to another bibliographic software program later if needed. I can add keywords, tags,  and notes, and it works fairly seamlessly with Microsoft Word and Apple Pages. I’ve decided to try it out for my next paper and see how it works. My hope is to be able to build a database to make it easier to organize my information when I start writing articles and preparing for the qualifying exams.

Next I need to look into Mind Mapping software and techniques, a good rss feed reader, and the pros and cons of Word vs. Pages.

liberatormagazine:

::: awakeningapril:

Between 1914 and his death in 1940, Harry Burton “The Pharoah’s Photographer” produced and printed more than 14,000 glass negatives; the majority of those negatives and prints are in the archives of the Department of Egyptian Art. To Egyptologists, Harry Burton’s photographs are among the great treasures of the department. For the art historian, he has left a complete photographic record of dozens of decorated tombs as they were preserved in the early twentieth century. For the archaeologist and the historian, he has left an invaluable record of the Museum’s excavations. Since archaeology is a process of removal and destruction, Burton’s stage-by-stage documentation of work in progress allows us to re-create the context of objects that are now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, and in New York. Burton’s photographs of the tomb of Tutankhamun, much better known than his work for the Museum, give the same thorough record of each new discovery within that tomb.

Source: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/harr/hd_harr.htm 

I still feel a certain way about museums having mummies and artifacts of tombs on display.  A corpse behind a glass?  C’mon its disrespectful.

Amazing images…

Singleton J.C. Harrington Award

Congratulations to Dr. Theresa Singleton for recently receiving the J.C. Harrington Award in the Historical Archaeology at the Society of Historical Archaeology’s Annual Conference in Leicester, England this year. The award, established in 1981, is presented annually to a scholar who has demonstrated “a life-time of contribution to the discipline centered on scholarship.” Past Harrington awardees include Drs. James Deetz, Kathleen Deagan, and Charles Fairbanks and Dr. Theresa Singleton is the first African American recipient. 

In 1980, Dr. Singleton became the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. with a concentration in Archaeology and has since conducted groundbreaking research in the sphere of African Diaspora archaeology. She is currently an Associate Professor at Syracuse University completing a publication on slavery in Cuba entitled Behind a wall enclosure: An Archaeology of a Coffee Plantation. 

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