DIGGING AROUND
HSNP has ‘dense’ archaeological record, park’s archaeologist says
Hot Springs National Park archaeologist Victoria Reichard discussed the intricacies of her job in identifying and recording the park’s archaeological sites, and why it’s important to the future of civilization, at last week’s Hot Springs National Park Rotary Club meeting.
“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” Reichard said. “So if we, for example, see time and time again that there are a certain three factors that perceive the fall of certain civilizations and we see our culture suddenly starting to do those three things, if we can recognize it we can turn that around and make sure that our culture persists. If we don’t recognize them, we may go the same way as Ancient Rome.”
Archaeology is defined as the study of material culture to understand the daily lives of people in the past, and history as a whole, she said.
Archaeologists “look at things like artifacts, structural remains … food remains, hunting traps … basically, anything made or used by people. We look at all of these things almost as puzzle pieces to see the big picture as a whole,” Reichard said. “For our purposes at the park and in federal agencies as a whole, we consider anything 50 years old or older to be an archaeological resource.”
So, why do any of these findings matter in the grand scheme of things?
“The first thing to note is archaeological sites are not renewable resources,” Reichard said. “Once a site is gone, we can’t put
it back together, and that means we lose any data that we had a chance to get from it. That’s why it’s really, really important to leave sites the way you found them, if at all possible.
“These sites can help us understand history from a time when there wasn’t great history; places that have gaps that we don’t quite understand yet; and they also can help us understand history from underrepresented groups.
“For example, what was dayto-day life like for an illiterate farmer in the 1800s, or what would life have been like when you were working at a boardinghouse, or even bigger picture questions like what kind of African cultures and religions survived trans-Atlantic slavery? It gives a voice to people who may be otherwise voiceless in our past records.”
While being an archaeologist in HSNP, Reichard said she often gets asked “Is there even archaeology in the park? Is that a thing?” And her answer is “absolutely, unequivocally yes.” There is a very “dense” archaeological record in the park, she said, noting she studies everything from historic bath houses to novaculite quarries to historic cemeteries postdating the Civil War to historic dump sites and homesteads.
As for what she does on a daily basis, Reichard said that changes pretty much daily.
“The main thing I do here at the park is to help the park stay in compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act, Archaeological Resources Protection Act and other cultural resource laws,” she said. “At its root, we as photo land managers are mandated to know what resources we have and how our actions will actually impact those resources. To meet those responsibilities, I spend a lot of my time conducting cultural resource surveys in the park.
“Sometimes that goes with specific projects, sometimes that’s just a ‘We haven’t looked in this area to see what we have, let’s find out.’ I go out and actually look at the area, decide what the best methodology for that area is and then actually do the work; and that would typically be either shovel testing, so digging holes in a grid pattern across the area to see what’s there, or recording whatever I see on the surface. Once I do that I then make recommendations about how to protect those resources, what needs to be protected, if a proposed project is going to negatively impact something.”