Did someone say GIS? Sanborn maps? Hopkins atlases? Yes, these are
excellent tools. Today's CRM historian or geographer can find most sites in
an area, using such standard tools.
But here we encounter yet another example of an inherent weakness of too
many large CRM survey organizations: the engineered approach to historical
research.
Many CRM people have come to believe that it is possible to routinize or
"engineer" the historical survey process, swoop down, and get definitive
answers. This method is espoused by large, faceless, CRM firms that
negotiate fixed-price contracts and deliver a fixed level of effort. Our
engineering and governmental colleagues love it. The results are uniform
and predictable, which makes engineers and bureaucrats very happy.
Historical research cannot be engineered.
Every site is a complex product of personal choices, driven by too many
historical accidents, to be interpreted through standard sources alone.
While we may expect potters to work on clay soil, or tanners to work near
streams, even our best predictive models are nothing but very expensive
educated hunches.
A document, such as a map, is witness only to itself, that can be relied
upon only in terms of the context for which it was created. A Sanborn map
is an insurance document, and nothing more. If a property was uninsurable,
it was not mapped. So there are no Sanborn maps for vast industrial areas
outside fire protection zones. I found this recently in the Wilmington,
Delaware, area, where a large industrial area of rolling mills, textile
mills, and snuff mills was totally ignored by Sanborn.
CRM field teams can't come in from outside and pretend to interpret the
local culture. Let me cite two recent examples from Delaware.
In rural southern Delaware, most large farmers had packing houses, which
are buildings with large "garage" doors and loading docks on two or more
sides. They were quite common at one time, but rare today. Every rural
Delawarean knows them at a glance. A recent corridor survey by one of the
biggie firms catalogued a stretch of road in Sussex County. Packing houses
became agricultural buildings of unknown purpose.
This blooper was committed by one of those big international firms, with
mucho expertise and an hourly rate that would knock your socks off, but
they couldn't interpret a packing house because they tried to do generic
history.
Another outside firm did a statewide bridge survey that fell far wide of
the mark by relying upon secondary sources. A former state law required
counties to maintain bridges and public roads over mill dams. As one can
imagine, millers were quick to ensure that the public roads crossed their
dams. After the mills went down, the highway department became the
proprietor of former millponds. The outside CRM investigator, ignorant of
this legal environment, described a former mill seat as "an example of a
highway structure which incorporates both a bridge and a water flow control
structure, a surviving example of this design solution to water management
in lower Delaware."
Water management had nothing to do with it, unless you understand mill
ponds. We had a good laugh at that one. The so-called background history
section of the survey was drawn mostly from secondary sources, which of
course did not uncover the many well-documented cases of the county
engineer building bridges over mill dams.
This same outside consultant published a picture of a "demolished" bridge
that was still in place, but could not be found by conventional means
because the road's name had been changed.
Such examples point up the problem with historians and archaeologists
depending upon routinized survey tools.
It is most critical, at the Phase I level especially, that the historical
research be conducted by a person who is familiar with the local
peculiarities. Phase I cries for special expertise, because too many
critical sites are missed at this phase and never corrected in subsequent
work.
There is no substitute for an intimate knowledge of local lore. The
engineered approach to CRM has led us up a primrose path, into believing
that a team of green journeyman historians can swoop into a local archives,
spot the sites, and take the next plane out, collecting a huge per diem and
hourly rate, just because they are the "experts" from somewhere else.
You can't do local history that way. You must become conversant with local
lore. You must read the tedious nineteenth-century histories and talk to
the old timers. Most of all, you must work only in areas where you are
familiar with the local traditions and the peculiarities of the records.
Any CRM historian who claims competence in all of five or ten states is a
baldfaced liar.
Four states is still chutzpah, and I claim expertise in four states on the
basis of thirty years' experience. I would prefer to work in a much smaller
area, but the nature of our business demands a certain itinerancy.
Maybe one can be a competent Phase I CRM historian in ten or twenty
counties. In order to cover so much territory, you need experience and lots
of study time off the clock. You need to understand the local demography,
get to know the local sources, and join some of the local historical
societies. This takes time and money, but there is no substitute for it.
Attachment to the local environment cannot be engineered. It cannot be flown in.
Too much CRM background history is being done by inexperienced people who
have no appreciation for the value of local lore. We are losing sites as a
result. While the big firms may boast "efficiencies," they don't possess
the ability to grok the fullness of a local scene, the way small local
operators can.
Therefore, I suggest that the CRM environment should be restructured to
recognize the role of local specialists. SOPA's code requires its members
to take only those jobs for which they are qualified, yet SOPA
archaeologists have attempted jobs outside their area of geographical
expertise, using historians without local knowledge, just because they got
the bid.
This itinerant system of CRM bidding must stop.
We must take into account the need for local expertise, and agencies must
ensure that local expertise is a significant factor in the approval process
for both contract awards and final reports.
_______
|___|__\__== Tread softly among dragons,
| _ | | --] for you are crunchy and taste <DARWIN><
=(O)-----(O)= good with catsup. " "
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Ned Heite, town crank, Camden, Delaware 19934
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