---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 5 Oct 1995 13:39:53 -0500 (CDT)
From: Kathleen M. Elliott <[log in to unmask]>
To: HISTARCH@ASU
 
Writing under my wife's e-mail address I would like to respond to a
recent controversy that I was only recently made cognizant of.
 
In early August it was observed here that the Mississippi SHPO, of which
I am an employee, "refuses to even give site numbers to late 19th and
20th century archaeological sites."  The response to this assertion was
to often attribute the policy to the backwardness and, yes, even racism
of the South.  I was relieved to see, in a later communication, that our
blighted worldview was shared by the definitely non-Southern state of
Massachusetts which, as is reported, "only considers pre-1840 sites as
possibly significant."
 
For the benefit of anyone who is interested, I would like to clarify our
policy, of which I am the author, with a few rambling observations.
First, we do not necessarily exclude late nineteenth and early twentieth
century sites from our inventory.  Our policy is to exclude sites that
post-date 1900.  This date was chosen for a number of reasons as outlined
below, but it was somewhat arbitrary as all such dates have to be.  The
terminus of the last century was chosen, in part, because it was a round
number and was not necessarily meant to indicate that anything from 1899
was of potential significance while anything from 1901 was not.  In fact
because of the difficulty or even impossibility of dating sites to the
precise year or even decade from surface scatters or shovel tests, any
dates assigned to sites are only approximations.  So a site that could be
dated by an omniscient mind to, say, 1907-1925, could by a small
collection only be dated to approximately "late 19th -early 20th
century."  Thus our cutoff date of 1900 in effect does not necessarily
exclude early twentieth century sites; indeed it effectively includes
much of this time period.
 
In a government agency as in all aspects of life we must always keep
fresh in mind the need to balance greatly varying concerns that involve
the interests of the archaeological community, management costs, and the
interests of the non-archaeological public.  Our policy behind the 1900
cutoff date is based upon these same considerations through trying to
achieve a balance between recording the most significant sites on one
hand without being sucked into the hopeless task of attempting to record
every site at which some form of material culture lies buried.
 
It often appears to me that there is some naivete when when dealing with
the concept of significance, which is at least partially fostered by the
generality and ambiguity of the National Register criteria.  Significant
archaeological sites are not simply out there to be discovered.
"Significance" does refer in part to the physical characteristics of the
site itself, but it also refers to the interplay between these
characteristics and the claims by the individual person who first
declares a particular site to be significant along with the morass of
values of several different communities and institutions.  A further
ambiguity is introduced when we attach the adjective "potentially" to
"significant."
 
Questions of significance often arise when someone serendipitously
encounters an example of what is conceived as being a new class of site.
So that arguments for significance often proceed along lines such as:  We
haven't considered these sites before, social context (what do we have a
perfect understanding of?), and these provide "a unique opportunity for
research."  such arguments are then supported by relating the site to
particular research questions that could be addressed through an
archaeological examination of the site, some of these are convincing,
others are not.  However just because someone may come up with, at best,
some innovative research pertaining to a representative of a particular
class of sites does not mean that we should consider all members of that
class as being potentially significant (particularly if the numbers of
that class are in the thousands or even tens of thousands).  For example,
should we list landfills in our archaeological inventory or consider them
to be significant because the University of Arizona has done some
interesting things with them?  I think not.
 
The sheer number of members of certain classes of sites is such that we
need not consider all of these sites to be of any real significance.  If
a few are to be destroyed by development it will be of little consequence
to the overall data source in that if anyone is interested in examining
some there will be numerous other surviving examples.
 
Attitudes of archaeologists were forged during a time when research was
focused primarily on prehistoric sites.  Because these are relatively
limited in number and are non-renewable, recording of all sites appeared
to be practical.  Now however almost everyday we hear about someone's
research interests moving closer and closer to the present.  If someone
thinks that we should record all sites that predate 1930 then there will
be someone who will want to move the cutoff date up to 1940 or 1950 or
later.  Someone even suggested to me that the date should be 50 years
before the present which would of course mean that the date would
constantly be moving.  Projecting these increasingly more inclusive
trends into the future it would not be long before 1995 sites would be
worthy of inclusion within the archaeological sites would be worthy of
inclusing within the archaeological site files.  If this were the case,
why wait around, why not begin recording everything now?  Of course this
would for the sake of cost efficiency intail abandoning traditional
archaeological survey techniques.  In that building sites are also
simultaneously archaeological sites we could take topographical maps and
begin assigning site numbers to every little black square on the map.  To
expedite matters we could give only one site number to entire urban
areas, so Jackson, Mississippi could be site 22HI57793.  Recognizing that
someone might be interested in the archaeology of road embankments we
could even assign site numbers to county and state highways which would
pose some interesting problems for site definition in that roads, unlike
settlements, are not discrete spatial units.
 
In the recognition that with (1) the braodening of definitions as to what
constitutes significant archaeological sites and (2) the growth of
demography, settlement, and material cultural, much of the surface of the
United States is rapidly becoming one great archaeological site.
consequently it seems to be critical that we use a cutoff date as a rough
selecting process for keeping site recording manageable.  The cutoff date
should attempt to represent an optimal balance of interests.  Like all
such balances or compromises, not everyone will be pleased, in part
because there is no perfect solution.
 
Of course I realize that archaeology (along with geology and
paleontology) deals with non-renewable resources and I have to admit that
they are not making anymore 1920ish or 1980ish house sites.  However we
have to remember that all reality is in flux (as Heraclitus said we only
step once into the same river).  The best we can do is to use our finite
resources as optimally as possible for studying the past.  For every
building that is demolished, every bit of earth that is removed, and for
every piece of paper that is burned, there goes a potential clue to the
past.  Yet we simply cannot preserve, nor even record, everything.  If we
could imagine having virtually endless resources for conducting
investigations into the past, it would never be completely understood.
It is forever gone and is only known vicariously through its preserved
traces and through our conceptual constructs.
 
For later periods where properties are more numerous it seems that the
usage of cultural resource surveys is of less value for addressing
problems.  During recent history there begin to appear large scale
maps--topographical and soil--with house sites and roads depicted.  There
are also fairly numerous extant houses, outbuildings and other structures
surviving along with occupants or former occupants of the houses.
Despite the vast quantity of surviving sources of information, very
little research has been conducted by anyone other than those who have
contracts for salvage work.  This suggests to me that independent
researchers are not greatly interested.
 
If I were to conduct an investigation into some matter pertaining to,
say, early twentieth century sharecropper housing, site files based upon
scattered CRM surveys would be the last place that I would look.  I would
begin examining less cost intensive data sources, e.g. surviving houses,
W.P.A. photographs, maps, aerial photographs, oral informants.  If
archaeological data were then needed a systematic survey designed to
address my research interests would be far more valuable than the
disparate data from CRM surveys.
 
So it is on the basis of the greater availability of alternate and
supplementary data sources for the twentieth century, the general lack of
nay independent professional interest, and the increasing number of these
sites that I have chosen the year 1900 as a rough cutoff date for our
department to record archaeological sites.
 
Jack D. Elliott, Jr.
Northeast Mississippi Field Office
Mississippi Department of Archives and History (SHPO)
c/o Cobb Institute of Archaeology
Drawer AR
Mississippi State University
Mississippi State, MS 39762
tel: 601-325-7892
fax: 601-325-8690