Public Archaeology--A Teacher's Guide

Introduction:

It is easy to find out about important things, important people and important events.The historical record is full of them; there are plenty of important artifacts buried somewhere for archaeologists to find and there are plenty of records to tell us what important people did with those artifacts. Viewed alone, they provide a one-sided or biased historical account of past cultures.

The artifacts that ordinary people made and used are also fairly easy to find. But, it is much harder to find written records that tell us what ordinary people did with those ordinary artifacts. Getting in touch with the now-vanished lifeways of the ordinary people of the past is difficult. Yet, without understanding their daily life we only have a partial--and misleading--picture of the past.

Reconstructing and understanding that past is the reason historical archaeologists study unimportant things, people and events: things like what kinds of houses ordinary people used, whether they owned or rented, how clean they kept their houses and yards, how they disposed of their garbage, what sorts of foods they ate, what kinds of clothing they wore and how they got them, what sorts of tools they used and for what purposes.

The artifacts themselves do not answer all of the questions archaeologists have. They also use written records to help them discover more artifacts, how they were used and why, and what various meanings they held for the people who used them. They study historical documents and combine these and artifact analyses to find out about peoples beliefs, ideas, and social roles and behaviors.

Sometimes it is easy to discover the secrets of the artifacts; sometimes not. One easy case involving Glynn County happened last spring. An Armstrong graduate student stumbled across several minie balls (a kind of bullet used during the Civil War) in the artifact collection of Fort Frederica National Monument. These minie balls were found at Frederica. How did they get there? Was there a battle at Fort Frederica? No. There was no fighting on St. Simons Island during the Civil War (1861-1865). What the student found was that runaway slaves sought refuge and freedom on St. Simons Island with the Union Army. Union recruiters enlisted many in the army, gave them uniforms, trained them how to march and how to use firearms. The records don't say exactly where the Black recruits were trained, but the minie balls found at Frederica suggest that it was at Frederica.

You can find more information on Black soldiers in the Civil War at the Massachusetts 54th Infantry site . You can find music specific to the Gullah people of Georgia's Sea Islands at Frankie and Doug Quimby's personal website . Another, more general site on music, The Civil War poetry and songs site , is also well worth a visit.