Anthropology 645 Historic Preservation Week 1 Introduction to the course, pass out syllabus, reading list, describe organization and requirements. Suggest that they read an introductory archaeology text if they haven't had an archaeology course before. Several changes made to the course over the past couple of years: 1. Includes the manner in which topics are integrated into presentation of laws and regulations. Reflects my concern that we often sped through the laws in order to get to the interesting portion of the course later in the semester. Hopefully, we can now find interest throughout. 2. There is another reason for this integration, and that is my belief that the legislative base and regulations are in constant need of examination. Historic preservation is itself a historical discipline and Issues continue to confront it over time. These issues can lead to legislative/regulatory reform on occasion. On other occasions, issues about interpretation of law lead to judicial decisions that alter the way the laws are implemented. Thus, I think it is useful to examine legislation, especially its history, subsequent implementation, and current interpretation. 3. I have also placed student presentations at the end of the semester and based on your research papers. Still, I will take note of your contributions to class discussion and alternative modes of communication (i.e., internet) will be given greater credit 4. I have made a research paper required and now it is the midterm which is a take home final. I've re-instituted the research paper because of the advantages I think comes of doing it, especially for a graduate course. I want to also encourage you to give me your views of the course as it progresses. I much prefer that to finding out at the end of the semester that you just hated something that might have been relatively easy to change or fix earlier. My intellectual biases will become apparent relatively soon in this class. That is as it should be; it's important, I think, to take a particular perspective. The notion that somehow we operate objectively is pretty much out-dated. However, that doesn't mean we won't consider alternatives to my ideas. In fact, I encourage diverse views. Additionally, fact that I don't subscribe to objectivity does not mean there is no way to decide among alternatives. We should be developing systems for understanding that connect our conceptual worlds with that we observe. This class does not need skirt controversy. In fact, I think differences of views, even deeply held views, is good. For me, it helps me to hone my perspective when I must face a challenge. But don't let the fact that I have a strongly held perspective make you think I am uninterested in your ideas. I am. The one very nice thing about seminars is that they are a great place for the presentation and discussion of difference--not just of opinion for that doesn't really help, but of different views about the world and the application of a consistent set of approaches for both perceiving through that view of the world and explaining or interpreting with it. Background 1. I use the term historic property throughout course. It will refer to those things potentially ranging in size from a portable artifact to a large areal multi-site district, and in age from early prehistoric to recent historic. A commonality which connects all these things is that they have occurrence in and potential significance to the past. Significance is a concept we shall spend some time discussing in this course for it works two ways: to introduce the disciplinary interests into historic preservation, and it is the basis by which decisions are made about preservation. Now, the past is also a concept that we, as humans, create. In some ways the past that we use in historic preservation in the U.S. is a peculiar cultural concept. The past is an imputed property, achieved by some form of convention. For us the past is part of the temporal dimension, including the present and the future, and typically, in the West we view it as a linear dimension. Our temporal order implies processes of becoming for things. Not static, but dynamic. What this means is that historic properties occurred (or became) in the past, but their significant attributes are wholly of the present in our minds. Both the things and our ideas of about the things, then, have historical trajectories. Not constant, rarely remain inviolate, never perfectly known. Just to make it more complicated, we often talk as if both the things and our ideas are just the opposite, that is constant and perfectly known. Historic preservation also often suffers from an attempt to determine significance of historic properties in terms of a single time period or interval. This can be problematic, especially for archaeological forms which can span several time periods. The focus on a single time of occurrence also leads to essentialist conventions in historic preservation; the notion that the thing is out there for us to discover rather it is the outcome of our concepts applied to the world around us. 2. For the discipline of historic preservation, knowing about the past has operated somewhat differently than in the disciplines (e.g., history and archaeology) whose interests and methods are historical or focused on time. In particular, in the historical disciplines, a good part of the structure and process of knowing (i.e., method and theory) constitutes a major source of study and learning in its own right. We won't cover method and theory extensively in this course, but we will find that such topics do impinge on what happens in historic preservation. For instance, theory in archaeology affects how we conceptualize the archaeological record, what mechanisms and processes we think accounts for its structure and change, and our interpretations of the archaeological record. This affects what we think is important to preserve, because of its significance to archaeology. In historic preservation, the focus is not so much on understanding how we know the past, but rather with the application of historical knowledge to contemporary decision-making. This takes us into the realms of economics, politics, and contemporary culture. I will often call this political economy in this course. The context is generally thus: for a given place or space on this planet, there may be several different possible choices for its use by humans, not all of which are necessarily compatible, (i.e., one will preclude another). In capitalist countries, such as the U.S. land and water are treated as resources, and the changes made to them by humans are conceived often conceived of as capital. Increasingly, at different scales and involving different groups of people, decisions must be made about the use of space, containing resources of varying kinds, qualities, and quantities, and possibly some capital inputs. In capitalist countries, the factors which generally drive these decisions include cost, (and sometimes its reciprocal, benefit). An important distinction to keep in mind is that between resources and capital. Capital is usually any input that still has some economic value, or whose value can be increased by the application of additional capital. Resources obtain their value by their incorporation and/or transformation into capitalist economies. This is important, since sometimes historic properties are treated as capital (e.g., historic buildings slated for restoration, rehabilitation and reuse), but far more often they are treated as resources (e.g., many archaeological sites). This is a curious phenomena, since obviously most archaeological sites in the U.S. represent the former locations where capital inputs were made on the landscape. The major differences: most archaeological properties in the US were the product of native Americans or Hawaiians (not the European colonizers), they have often been abandoned for some time, their former uses are not easily integrated into a market economy, and ownership of the land has passed from natives to others. Thus, their value as capital has been so marginalized that they are thought of as resources. Depending on the situation they may be valued or not, but generally not because their potential can be increased by more capital inputs (the main exception here are large sites, sites with abundant artifacts or groups of sites that can serve to attract visitors and thus help economic interests. Many historic properties, on the other hand are treated as capital. That with rehabilitation (i.e., the input of additional capital) their value can be enhanced; converted to new office space, increase tourism, save on property taxes. Why would something like this occur? First, very little concern for archaeological properties by Euroamerican interests until earlier this century (and this has a political dimension to it--not until indigenous groups controlled by Euroamericans that their history became interesting). Then by lumping archaeological sites from prehistoric period or produced by indigenous groups into the category of resources, historic preservationists had an opportunity to identify and protect them. But at a cost: they are treated as natural aspects of the environment, such as ores, water, or soils. They may very well reflect the natural history origins of archaeology in the United States-it did not grow out of classical archaeology or antiquarianism, or nationalist interests as it did in parts of Europe. Rather, it grew out of debates about the antiquity of native Americans in North America, where they came from, and where they got to. Again, only about the turn of the century did Euro-Americans begin to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of indigenous past--pottery and architecture, mostly in the American SW. But by then the naturalist professional identification of Americanist archaeology had been secured. Equally important, archaeologists believed that they alone were capable of developing history from undocumented sources (i.e., prehistory) provided by study of material remains from the past. Historical archaeology, on the other hand, grew out of national interests of Euroamericans and until recently had a quite different intellectual history than that of the archaeology of indigenous groups. But from the very start, Euroamerican historic properties were conceived of not as something to understand, but as something to protect for the purposes of nation building, giving us a national identity, etc. 3 You can see that by the very categorization of historic properties, different approaches are instituted by different professional groups or otherwise interested parties. One of the lessons, however, we will learn in this course is that things are never so simple or forever the same. For the very conceptual basis of American archaeology which treated material remains as the equivalent of natural resources and which was one of the means by which indigenous historical properties were included with other types of properties under historic preservation law and statute has now been turned on its head. Native Hawaiians and Americans in some instances would prefer not to have these properties treated as resources in the sense of ores, minerals, soils etc. And these "resources" are now claimed by other than archaeologists, and their significance is as much cultural as it is natural, and they serve as a different kind of capital today.