Portland Needs Archaeology!

('Mars Needs Women!'--- I know, I thought it too)

Whilst all of Portland was returning to their work stations from lunch yesterday, they had no idea that a brain trust meeting was being held in an office at PSU that would be gathering steam to completely change the future of urban life on the Willamette as we know it!

No, not free Cirque du Soleil tickets to all.

Some students and members of the Anthropology Department were discussing a new class being offered for the Spring 2008 Term on Community Archaeology, and how this can be a great threshold for educating and encouraging the people who live in an area (Portland, for the sake of this idea) to get involved in preserving the cultural resources surrounding them. No mere coincidence that I was there, seeing as I wholeheartedly believe that this is just what Portland needs, as well as being encouraged that one of the organizers is Wendy Ann Wright, a volunteer in the office of Sam Adams. The focus of the class will be creating an annual hands-on event, that brings together local land history with ways to investigate and preserve it, and ideally get attendees interested to get involved at different levels. There can be fun things for kids and their parents to do, as well as some more involved things like foraging skills, tool-making, indigenous plants and how they were managed by native peoples, techniques of archaeological digs, the devastation of site looting, before and after depictions of how the Portland waterfront was developed---and as dedicated as we Portlanders are about our city's well-being, I think we can accomplish some good things by getting started with an event like this.

Looking out over the Portland skyline, I see all these mega-cranes, new towers under construction for new Portlanders, 4 foot trenches in the roadways exposing old brick, holes the size of a square city block 50' deep near the river, restored 19th century homes with abandoned urban lots behind them, and I see all this hidden history. No where do I feel that this developing of places should be made difficult, but there are all these lost chances to know more about our town and the brave people who wound up here long ago when this was the frontier, and the thousands of years before all that. There was a creek through there? Really? This family had an orchard there, that bend of the Willamette was an early refrigerated warehouse (no way!) that shipped fresh seafood to Denver, that site was where native peoples from all over the Pacific Northwest came and harvested obsidian. Sitting in that meeting yesterday, I knew that there are hundreds if not thousands of people here who would love to know this, especially if they're walking over it everyday or live in the neighborhood built on top of someplace so important back then. Back in my book retail days, we had one of the most heavily shopped local interest sections of any store I'd ever seen, and we had to put a display table up, so the big Photographs of Historic Portland coffee table book could be left out for browsing over, and the Portland Streetcar book, and the Portland Baseball teams book, and the Portland Gardens book, the Hill Walks of Portland, Underground Tunnels, Portland Jazz and Blues, Portland Confidential, end of the Oregon Trail. We sold hundreds of these books.

So how is this going to change life on the Willamette as we know it? I think it could, I really do, because we can create a source point for further work going forward, create a living history of a place, a block, a neighborhood, a building, a shore, a bridge, a house, a street, and ultimately, a community. It's fascinating to hear the story of a place you know, who doesn't like a good true story?