Leetown hamlet relics unearthed, researched
Grid by grid. Line by line. Experts in geophysical remotesensing crisscrossed nearly every meter, every centimeter, of the Leetown hamlet and adjacent cemetery site at Pea Ridge National Military Park. Roughly 30 archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and researchers from around the state, nation and world came to the park for a workshop in the latest technology, presented May 15-19 by the Midwest Archeological Center of the National Park Service in Lincoln, Neb.
By land or by sea
Daniel Koski-Karell, a historic and cultural resource specialist (an archaeologist) with the U.S. Coast Guard’s office of environmental management in Washington, D.C., might seem like a strange candidate for a workshop based on hard ground.
“The Coast Guard owns a lot of land property, such as boat houses, air stations and training centers,” Koski-Karell explained. “And every time the Coast Guard enters a construction project — which includes updating utilities, installing pipelines or building a hangar — it must complete a preconstruction investigation.”
Many of the older stations now must be renovated to include quarters for females, he added.
“My work also covers architecture and architectural history,” he said. “The Coast Guard owns several hundred lighthouses — 50 or 60 of which are listed on the national historic register.” Part of Koski-Karell’s job includes completing the paperwork for nominations to that National Register of Historic Places.
“And we have Coast Guard stations up and down the Great Lakes region that were built more
than 50 years ago,” KoskiKarell continued. “And some of those lighthouses date to the late 1800s.”
Decommissioning and transferring the property to another agency or owner also requires investigation.
Koski-Karell currently works with 14 Coast Guard “cutters,” some built in the 1940s and 1950s, that have become more expensive to maintain than replace and will be decommissioned, he said.
The equipment shown at the workshop can be expensive, with many agencies and schools not ready to foot the bill, Koski-Karell said. But the equipment can be rented, or he might contract with a company that specializes in such research to complete a survey.
America easy
As Meliha Dogan pushed the ground-penetrating radar over the Leetown cemetery site, she simply was extending her lifelong learning. Of Turkish descent, Dogan currently works at the University of Cologne in Germany as an expert in resistivity, and she served as an instructor at the local workshop.
“I teach students and instruct them, but I am learning my whole life,” she said, as she became familiar with an instrument of technology new to her.
Most recently, she has been working at ancient Zeugma, the remains of a third-century Roman military town that has yielded beautiful mosaics, and Gobelslitepe, a prehistoric temple site, dating to circa 10,000 B.C. (12,000 years ago), both in southern Turkey.
“In 1994, (the Gobelslitepe) was nothing but trees,” Dogan said. “But they’ve explored and discovered so many things there. It was built thousands of years before Christ. They knew how to focus worship on God, based on the monuments they erected. It is a very important site in history.”
Dogan’s daily work “is quite different than working in this (Arkansas) field,” she said. “It’s easy to get magnetic evidence using GPR. Your history goes only two centuries back.
“It’s so easy to discover American history, it’s just 1 centimeter below the surface,” she said with delight.
Editor’s note: This is the third and final in a threepart series.