Think Like a Mediterranean

First there was the lovely Friday evening beer cafe with the group known as 'the usual suspects', followed by the most sublime Thai garlic eggplant chicken I think I've ever had.  Celebration #1.

Saturday was a splendid day spent outdoors, ending with an another lovely evening spent with some new kids in town going over the best of David Sedaris' audio works, sipping hot coffee and cognac around a big table in the low orange mood lights.  Celebration #2.

Sunday I spent about three or four hours in the strong hot sun with my neighbors' free-ranging chickens acting like housecats and keeping the weeds down.  Other than allowing myself to get much too dehydrated, it was pure Eden, glowing down into sunset and porch time til after 10.

Spring Term 2008 is over, put to bed, now a stack of course materials and textbooks in my living room, and the anxiously awaited grades online tomorrow.  No lingering regrets this time, I am glad to wrap this term up, so I can go back to focusing on why I'm back in school in the first place; to savor the whole experience, not hoping it's over as soon as possible.  Like being washed up on Trigonometry Island with just a box of damp matches.

Summer Term is one big Time Machine, Oregon history and two Ancient Greek Civilization classes to finish out my transfer student requirements.  I've seen the syllabus for one 400-level class and there's a 12 page research paper due with a pre-approval bibliography submission.  What have I done?  The Fall Term will finish off the Greeks and bring in the Egyptians, Sumerians and pre-Greek Macedonians.  What does any of this have to do with anthropology?

Well---not much really, but I needed some electives to fill out, and there weren't many anth. classes offered this summer, most of the department is going to be doing field work in the archaeology aspect of the field, and I needed to stick around to work and stay in school.  Maybe next year.

Needing to stay disciplined to take an online class should prove a challenge, I've never taken one before that wasn't some kind of corporate training of brief duration.  So this slides right in to the porch time, why not, better than caged in a classroom from 3:30 on every afternoon for a month.  Out on the porch, laptop and books and pretending my tomatoes are really growing and becoming my nectar and ambrosial lunch. 

Can't discuss tomatoes now, I wasn't planing on crying this early in the day.

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?

Archaeology is a Contact Sport

Who knew? I thought it would be a bunch of wonks, Star Wars alumni, Tolkien freaks, time travelers, anti-Indiana Joneses, Outcasts of the Curious Anachronism Society and RenFest drop outs. Well shame on me, although I'm a tad disappointed to see that they seem to look alot like me, except for the manly men with earnest expressions and one or two with Merlin beards. At least here in downtown Portland, it isn't a Summer of '69 reunion either attending the Anthropology Department's "First Thursday" Lecture event at 4pm yesterday afternoon. Of course I was going to go, and it has nothing to do with the extra credit essay, because the topic was establishing a Cultural Resources Preservation Program for the City of Portland, to enforce the national, state, county and municipal historic sites' laws as well as bringing it to a higher profile in the community.


Honestly, I was stunned. You mean Portland doesn't have this already? I thought. You've got to be kidding me.

The presenter was Wendy Ann Wright, a PSU student in the Anthropology department, a Powells Books alumna, mom, and passionate member of Sam Adams' staff at City Hall. OMG!!
What better person to catalyze this idea in the city, and she had a great slide presentation of the research she's done in other cities nationally, to find models that are community-based and effective already. Again, I sat there looking at her slides of St. Mary's Academy Wall demolition that she may as well have downloaded from my blog, as well as hurried excavations of privies and Chinese cemetery graves with a row of bulldozers and backhoes hovering in the background.

Portland doesn't have this in place already? I can't believe this! When she concluded, my hand shot up. "Hi, I'm really uninformed about the whole City permitting process, but everyday I see the progress of the building project at the base of the Hawthorne Bridge, and they're already 50 feet down---before the contractor started digging, he had to find out about gas lines, water lines,
how strong the soil barrier is between the hole and the river---I would think historic maps of municipal locations are available to check this just like the gas and water companies survey and OK going ahead with excavating, right? Couldn't a City of Portland Archaeologist or Historic Site Manager Office be layered in here at this point so at least within the city limits sites aren't just plowed up?"

Well, she mentioned the standard fire maps, and archived city maps, but no, there isn't really anything like this in Portland at this time, it would be a budget issue certainly.

An older gentleman stood up. He was concerned that there was a punitive attitude coming off of archaeologists and site preservationists that would actually have the opposite effect of discouraging people from coming forward with asking for site assistance if an artifact showed up in a shovel of dirt or their basement bricks collapse and there's old bootlegger paraphrenalia falling onto the floor. Why couldn't the utilities and industrial corporations be asked to underwrite some of these efforts and also cooperate with the city in recovering some of their own industrial history and be seen as caring about the community preservation movement instead of being told to absorb the time and costs of investigating sites all over the city? He started out seeming a bit hostile to Wendy's anti-looting attitude that makes all collectors and antique markets suspect, but she was able to agree with him and turn his question into an approach almost everyone could agree with. She said there was an African American Art exhibit that Sam Adams' office was involved in that had had an antique bottle collector involved, but he pulled out after getting some flack from the archaeologists in town about his collection being "looted", which in strict trade terminology means removed from its historical context (or dump pit). It is a comment on we everyday townsfolk that most of us need to be educated that saving a cloudy antique bottle (it's blue and says 'poison', cool!!) from your backyard compost pile of 103 years ago constitutes "looting". But it is. Strictly speaking. Even if you own the property.

This is where the contact sport part comes in.

Needless to say, in Wendy's research to find a working preservation model that has widespread and cooperative community involvement, she finds that there are plenty of struggles with individuals' and commercial property rights when it comes to designating something 'historic' or a 'cultural resource' , and different cities have varying levels of success with this issue. She mentioned Alexandria, VA and Vancouver, WA as two cities with viable programs and great community involvement and support. These agencies get the kids involved with introductions to archaeology with a "kids dig"; artifact copies that the kids get to use methods of excavation to "find" and analyze. Also, many Native American Nations are active in community awareness and education to preserve sites and ways of life, often coordinating with municipal and county agencies to work with the public and commercial interests. Often, she said, there are laws in place already that are poorly enforced or thought of as arcane, and educating officials about these laws would be a place to start with raising preservation with the public.

There's already a faint sound in my head, "You should do this, you love Portland so much, what a great project this would be to get involved with and help launch!" I haven't had a huge ambition in a few months, it's about time to have a new one, isn't it? Halfway through my first term, after 25+ years out of school, and already I'm the department expert in my own delusional brain. Too funny, isn't it? And the fact that these "First Thursday" Anthropology lecture attendees are about my age, already have my interests, and go to a pub afterwards to eat and drink and talk shop would be the perfect arm-twister to get me to keep going. And earning extra credit. And blogging about it. Until maybe I finally dive in and present Sam Adams with a plan.