DEFINITION AND EXAMPLES OF NEED

Archival Archaeology involves going back into accepted history to discover what was mistakenly omitted, what was changed, or what was modified to make those unpleasant moments in history more palpable to modern time, omitted and disguised because of the personal, political, and religious beliefs prevalent at the time, or simply revised for any number of reasons. It involves restoring the vocabulary at the time as it was after it has been modified by those preferring comfort over fact. It brings events and people to light for a full understanding. 

     It corrects the “historical record” and restores history to what was, warts and all, not what is wanted, and sometimes can prevent the passing on of purposeful or accidental revisionism by making the facts known before misinformation sets in.

     Simply put, Archival Archaeologists change the pronouns back to what they should be and reveal the actual facts about historic events and present people, whether liked or not, for who they really were.

     “Roommates” and “Companions” become who they were and events, positive or negative, are presented as it was and not in a way that makes heroes of villains and villains of heroes as needed.

     It prevents those looking back at history from passing on a filtered revision to future generations.

     As Romantic as some people would like to view the events at the Stonewall Inn in 1969, that first night was raw with good and bad actors among the police and the patrons. It was messy, unpleasant, mean, not the festive event that has been mythologized by those viewing 1969 from decades after, giving undue prominence to some while those who should have it have been forgotten and have become unknown to most. 

     On whaling ship crew lists of the first part of the 19th Century, along with the names of the crew members, these lists contain date of birth, place of origin, place of current residence, age and physical traits, height, and skin, hair, and eye color for very practical reasons.

     The first is that the whaling ship companies were owned and run by Quakers who in the beginning ran their business according to religious beliefs which eventually lost out to the dollar. They knew that anyone lost at sea wouldn’t have been had they not been on a whaling ship, so they had an obligation to that person and his family. If someone was lost during a whale chase or by falling overboard and the body not recovered, the captain would note the name upon returning to port. A Captain who found any bodies afloat would list what physical traits were recognizable before a Christian burial at sea, and by cross referencing the two lists the Quaker whose job it was could let families have closure by letting them know when a family member lost at sea was found and given the Christian burial at sea. Not all such bodies were recovered, but there was alway hope.

     Hence the importance to the Quakers of detail on the crew lists.

     The other purpose of the crew lists was to have a document attesting to the fact that these were freemen from the United States or a citizen of some non-slavery country regardless of color. It was protection and was extremely important during the Antebellum period before the Civil War when Northern ships with mixed race crews entered Southern ports where attempts were made to enslave Black crewmen using various ruses to do so.

     In the column on skin color, the Quakers, needing to be specific when it came to body identification, were. They used a variety of descriptives that not only indicated the various skin color shades for Black men but White men as well with words like “Florid”, “Freckled”, and “reddish”. The terms applied to the Black Crew also gave an indication of origin even the ship owners attempted to protect any self-emancipated crew members from bounty hunters in the home port and those in the foreign ports especially Southern ones. Crew members were Coloured, Black, BLK, Mullatto, Yellow, Charcoal, SAMBO, Kanaka, among others, and even if we in modern times will connect SAMBO with an uncomfortable story and modern usage and may want to make it less triggering, in those days it was a term designating a Black Man from South of the Border, perhaps Brazil. It may have taken a turn toward the derogatory meaning with time, but at the time it was a specific designation used for identification and protection in foreign ports.

     When submitting the completed crew lists to the people compiling such lists into a single database, there was a move to have all applicable designations changed to Black for the purpose of uniformity. The transcribing team argued that doing that would alter the historic record and would close doors to researchers because important and implied information would be denied so as not to offend some nebulous “someone” who might take offense.

     On one crew list having a large number of Black crew members, while they were all on the same ship, some were listed as Black, while others as BLK, sometimes one immediately listed after another while the next person might be listed either way. This one odd detail seemed to be part of a code as, depending on whether it was Black or BLK, comparing the spaces for place of origin it was found that if the place of origin was a slave-state, the present residence was omitted, in some cases present residence but not previous was listed, or neither, while anyone from a Northern state with a clearly free state residence from birth had all information included and were designated Black. If this was a code among the makers of the list to indicate that these crew members would need extra protection in foreign and Southern ports, and was used on more than that one ship, the Alliance, any research to answer that question, a question that would never be considered if the modification had been made would never be done if all crew members on that ship were listed with the blanket Black.

     It would also be lost to history that, in spite of the term being common in certain locales, no Black man on a New Bedford whaling ship was listed as Nigger, a Southern based, dehumanizing term that went against the Quaker belief in the equality of man and was used to quantify personality and humanity when the Quakers were listing physical traits. A minor point, but of interest to someone as its use in private might have been widespread, but not so on business papers.

    As crew members began to show up from there, the names of the Hawaiian Islands changed from phonetic spelling to the actual ones once people became familiar with them. Mowee eventually became Maui, and Howyee, Hawaii. If, for the sake of convenience and uniformity all the Mowees and Howyees were changed to the correct spelling, an historic detail such as the point at which the foreign names had become so familiar they were getting spelled correctly would be lost. 

     With spelling corrected for uniformity, that historical detail would be lost just as with making all racial designations of the various shades of Black uniform.

     Archival Archaeologists go back into the record to return the language to what it had been at the time so that we can understand the history without the filters we tend to apply so it is not actual history, but, rather, our comfortable version of uncomfortable events.

     They also comb the historical record for what would seem to have been inconsequential events but on closer examination or looking directly at the history without revision can be seen as the historical event that may have gone by unnoticed

     There were two types of acquisitions at the beginning of the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The first were those bequests formally received and acknowledged, the others were items donated at odd times and would be mentioned in the minutes of the annual meetings in conversational form and so, not being on a list, had to be searched in order to be listed. During this process it became obvious that, although women were donating things, often in memory of a husband and father who was a captain or other important local personage, small sentimental items that had some historic value to large, official portraits these women were listed according to the practice at the time, not with their personal names, but always in their position of wife, daughter, sister, widow of.

     Many items were donated by “the daughter of” or “wife of” the male named, or almost directly by ‘Mrs. husband’s name”. In some cases this designation was so obscure it was obvious the donor was someone known personally by the Board who, not being museum curators but businessmen and their wives with an idea, just referred to a person by a first name or perhaps a friendly comment, “Our good friend Elizabeth”. 

     However, there was a point at which more women making donations were being listed by their own names. Mr. Captain’s Name had her own name and it was suddenly being used. 

     As I was listing these obscure donations in the annual reports, it was not hard to see that the change, gradual as it was in the beginning, started around 1920, the year women got the vote.

     It was as late as 1925, with the museum having been in existence accepting donations for 22 years, that the first Portuguese name showed up as a donor. Although he may have had the courage to donate under his real name, there may have been other Portuguese who had donated things but were either the wife, daughter, sister, or widow of, or, perhaps, somewhere in the past a family member had Anglesized the name either tired of the mis-pronounciation or trying to be more “American” like the Pereiras becoming the Perry’s and the Ignacios family becoming the Enos family.

     Archival Archaeology does not change history. It goes back and saves it. History must be protected for the future the way it happened, not modified for the benefit of the future.

     What is also preserved is the spirit of the time.  

     I had been involved in advocating for Gay student inclusion in school district policies in the Buckle of the Bible Belt and it was not a pleasant experience. I was call “Faggot” in public, not “the F-Word”. I had to fight against and correct misinformation with the opposition claiming that protecting students and allowing them to be open about their orientation was just so older Gay people would know who the prey is, was condemn from the pulpit in a coordinated Sunday sermon move by local Baptist pastors, was dismissed from my job because of my advocacy, took the district to court and got it back, and got the words “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” added to policies. The process was nasty, raw, difficult, draining, and, at times, insulting. But that was all part of the story.

     When doing a retrospective of my time in Oklahoma, a  Gender Studies campus organization at a state university had mounted an exhibit about my political cartoons and my advocacy, being now in possession of all legal and personal papers involved in the student advocacy. However, in order to make the uncomfortable comfortable and less triggering for the present day audience, the unpleasant vocabulary was replaced, and although I had been advocating for the addition of the the two terms making sure there was no possibility that the advocacy for student inclusion in policies dealing with bullying, harassment, and nondiscrimination could not be connected to sexual activity so as not to confuse the issue and lose to a distraction. 

     Their wanting to avoid the discomfort of the history, they may have presented a mangled summation of the facts which was bad enough, but the chosen language, being less unpleasant took away from a fuller understanding of events, and made what was wild and, at times, ugly     seem like calm diplomacy.

     I had not experienced calm diplomacy.

     In spite of the timeline being proposal, advocacy, dismissal, reinstatement, the addition of words, my departure after two years of seeing the inclusion take hold, and eight years later, because they had had no problems with the original added words, added “gender expression” without debate or fanfare, according to what would have been the historical record had I not demanded edits, the timeline would appear to have been proposal, advocacy, collecting material, dismissal, reinstatement, my departure after having supplied the information to allow others to get the words added with the first and second additions happening at the same time but eight years after the first two had been added. Additionally, while I had emphasized “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”, the story, translated into modern texting vocabulary, had me advocating for sexuality and gender, the former implying, to me anyway, that I had, in spite of my protestations, actually been promoting sex and the reality that it was all about student protection got lost in the rewrite.

     That was not my history and I had to set the story straight. The added words did not come about because I supplied information to others for their use, but because of my work and what I had to deal with when getting it done.but 

     Softening the language for comfort had changed the story completely, and I, after reading the draft of my life story had no idea about whom I had been reading and did not recognize my advocacy as I saw my success erased for easy reading.

     Archive Archaeology was not needed in this case as the subject was still around to correct the record, but in the future, had the incorrect one became the official one, anyone reading about me would encounter an interesting person, but, definitely, not me.

     I would have been hidden in my own story.

     The task of the Institute is to go back and find the “me” in history; to go back and remove the euphemisms, the ambiguous terms, and, even when it ruins our idea of an event and/or a person, restore the terms, the vocabulary, and the actions as they really occurred.

     If, then, someone insists on perpetuating a revised fictional account, we still have the actual record.

     When it came to race designations on whaling ships, the transcribing team made copies of their work before submission to cross check what appeared on the site, and subsequently have gone back and ascertained how faithful the posted lists have remained.

     Our work is to correct where that was not done.

     I was still alive to correct the revised story and having seen the difference between my experience and its representation, I know what work would have to be done to set the record straight and protect the history as it happened.

    Archival Archaeology is going back and making the changes to people’s strories just as I had to do with my own.