Exploring South Carolina Archaeology with Chris Judge

Season Return And Museum Setting

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to a new season of Voices of Inspiration. I am so glad that we are here together again since the last season where we talked about different areas of China. There's been quite a bit happening. My book, 100 Things to Do in South Carolina Before You Die, was released back in April. And much of this year since then has been really full of time spent traveling across the state for book signings and events and speaking engagements. It's given me the opportunity not only to share the book, but to have some really interesting conversations along the way. So I thought a great way to start this new season would be to share one of those special interviews with you that I actually had over the summer. I had the opportunity to speak at the South Carolina State Museum, where I sat down with South Carolina State Archaeologist Chris Judge. Chris has spent more than 35 years studying Native American history and archaeology across the state. We talked about the stories beneath our feet, what archaeology can reveal about the people who came before us, some of the remarkable discoveries being made across South Carolina, and why preserving the past is about so much more than just protecting artifacts. Chris brings decades of experience to this work, but he also brings a genuine enthusiasm for sharing it with others. And I think you'll hear that throughout our interview. I hope you'll enjoy listening to our discussion at the South Carolina State Museum as much as I enjoyed being a part of it.

Travel Storytelling And New Book

SPEAKER_00 2:11

And the last decade, I have been focused on travel storytelling. I host a podcast called Voices of Inspiration, and I've been very fortunate to travel across the world telling stories of other people in other places. Most recently, I went to Zhejiang Province in China, where I recorded eight podcast episodes there. So that was a really great experience. I'm also the author of 100 Things to Do in South Carolina Before You Die. I really appreciate all of you being here today. And of course, thank you to the South Carolina State Museum for hosting all of us. There truly could not be a more fitting place for this conversation about the stories beneath our feet and why preserving them matters. The title of my book makes it sound like a checklist, and it can absolutely be used that way. It is a travel guide. You can pick a page, plan a trip, start checking places off. The book takes readers across the entire state. I spent two years working on this project, and it includes museums and historic sites, trails, restaurants, farms, small businesses. Some of the places are well known, and other places you may have passed by for years. Them is that each one reveals something about South Carolina, its history, its landscape, its communities, and the people who have shaped it. But while I was researching the book, I realized the places themselves were only part of the story. I would go somewhere expecting to learn about the destination, and I would leave thinking about the person who had spent years protecting or teaching its history and making sure it survived. We tend to think that we know the places closest to us. We know the roads that we drive every day, the towns we grew up in, and the places that we take visitors to when they come to town. But we have all convinced ourselves that we've already seen everything that there is to see near us. There's nothing to do. We don't have anything to do here. And eventually we stop really paying attention to what's around us and we stop asking questions. But travel changes our perspective because it forces us to pay attention. We notice details in a new city that we would never notice in our own town. We read the historical marker, we wander into the small museum or the family-owned shop simply because we've never seen it before. We slowed down enough to ask questions and actually listen. And that kind of changed the way I traveled across the state when I worked on this project. I started paying closer attention to what was beneath the surface, sometimes figuratively and once quite literally. One reason archaeology has always held my attention is that it can reveal parts of the past that written history cannot. Written records tell us when someone chose or was able to record. Archaeology can preserve evidence of people whose names never appeared in official documents at all. Archaeologists can learn a remarkable amount from evidence most of us would walk past without noticing. When those pieces are studied together, the routines of everyday life begin to come into view. And that matters in South Carolina just like anywhere else, because the landscape itself has always shaped human life. The coasts, the rivers, the wetlands, the mountains, it all offers different resources and different challenges. An archaeological site is not simply a collection of objects. Once a site is disturbed without being documented, the relationship between its pieces may be impossible to reconstruct. Development, erosion, flooding, storms, they can all expose sites, but they can also destroy the context that makes the sites meaningful. Most of us encounter archaeology only after the work is finished. We come to a museum like this and we see artifacts in a case or we read a panel on a wall. What we do not see is the long process of surveying, documenting, analyzing, and deciding how the evidence should be protected and interpreted. That is one reason I wanted to have this conversation here at the State Museum. A museum gives us the opportunity to see what has survived. Archaeology asks us to consider what was lost, what may still beneath the surface, and what decisions must be made before the next piece of the story disappears.

A Stone Point Sparks Questions

SPEAKER_00 7:22

A couple of years ago, while I was working on this book, I was having a really, really bad and heavy day. And I decided to step away from my computer. Sometimes that's the best thing, and not respond to the next email. And I we have a small little hobby farm. So I go outside and I'm with my mini donkeys and I have tears streaming down my face. And I just my head was just kind of hung down, and all of a sudden, at the tip of my toes, I noticed something on the ground. Now, for me, I am super interested in history and archaeology. So as soon as I saw it, I knew exactly what it was. It was a Savannah River point, almost completely intact. And for those that don't know, this was a stone tool that was used, estimated to be at least 5,000 years old. And so I want you to think about that for a minute. 5,000 years. I remember when I saw it, I kind of dropped to my knees, and I'm sure the donkeys could hear or feel my heart racing because I just couldn't believe what was just completely on top of the ground. Um, and I picked it up and I looked at it because I was thinking someone 5,000 years ago walked this land, worked on this land, and they lived a life that I will never fully know. But the point alone could not tell me who made it exactly when it was left there or what was happening on the land at that time. I had one object and a lot of questions. The space between the object and the story is where archaeology becomes important. Archaeology helps us understand what material evidence can tell us, what it cannot tell us, and why the place where something is found matters as much as the object itself. That is also where this connects to the book. I did not include places simply because they were enjoyable to visit. I wanted the book to encourage people to look more closely at South Carolina and consider what shaped the places that we see today. A museum, a trail, a restaurant, or a historic site. It can be somewhere that we all spend an afternoon. But it can also introduce us to a community, a period of history or a person whose influence is still present. The destination may be what gets us through the door, but the story is what changes the way we understand it. Writing the book made me think about who decides which places are remembered. Some places have plaques, exhibits, and organizations devoted to their care. Others are known only from someone keeping a box of photographs, or they wrote down a name, or they recorded an interview, or continued telling a story that might otherwise have ended with them. Preservation does not always begin with a major discovery. Sometimes it begins when someone notices that a building is about to be torn down and they ask what happened there. It begins when a family identifies the people in an old photograph, when a community records the memories of its elders, or when someone recognizes that an ordinary-looking piece of land may hold information that cannot be replaced. I think most of us have places like that in our own lives. It might be the house where several generations gathered, the school that no longer exists, the stretch of road that has changed beyond recognition or the piece of land we know well enough to notice when something is different. Those places may never appear in a guidebook, but they still help explain who we are. The book gave me a reason to visit places all over the state. But the more important result was that it changed the questions that I asked when I arrived. What happened here? Who is missing from the version of the story that I have been told? What survived, and what did it take for that evidence to reach us? And that is why we what we are talking about today, how South Carolina's past is uncovered, how it changes what we understand and what each of us can do to help preserve it. I cannot think of a better person to have this conversation with than Mr. Chris Judge. He has studied Native Americans in South Carolina for more than 35 years. His work has focused on the archaeology of pre-contact cultures as well as oral history research with living Native American communities across the state. For many years, his work at USC Lancaster's Native American Studies Center helped connect archaeological research with public education. Earlier this year, Chris was named South Carolina State Archaeologist. So if everyone could join me in welcoming Mr. Chris Judge.

Chris Judge Finds Archaeology

SPEAKER_01 12:33

Thank you, Amelia. Thank you, everyone.

SPEAKER_00 12:35

Thank you. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to share a little bit about yourself with everyone. I'm sure you're the one that they came to see.

SPEAKER_01 12:46

No one raised their hand.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

So before we talk about your new role, I kind of want to begin long before that. What first pulled you towards archaeology? And when did you realize that South Carolina was just going to become the center of your work?

SPEAKER_01 13:04

Well, in 1978, I came to USC to study economics. And I lasted 15 days before I realized I'd made a mistake, one of many. And uh I went to undeclare a major advisor, and they asked me what did I want to do when I was 10, and uh archaeology was one of them. It was the only one they could help me with. Sent me to the anthropology department, and I'd never look back. I wanted I was drawn to archaeology by National Geographic Magazine. And if it didn't have archaeology in it, I'd have to wait another month and hope the next issue had archaeology. And so but I didn't realize it was something you could study in college uh when I was uh 17 years old.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

Yeah, that's amazing. And you went to school here in South Carolina?

SPEAKER_01 13:50

I did. I got a BA and a master's degree at USC.

SPEAKER_00 13:53

So you spent more than 35 years studying Native Americans here in South Carolina. Was there a particular site or discovery or relationship that kind of changed the direction of your work?

SPEAKER_01 14:06

Oh goodness. Um back in 1996, uh I was the archaeologist for the Department of Natural Resources, and uh they had just purchased 2,800 acres for migratory bird habitat. And a guy came to visit us and said, when I was a teenager, I recorded an archaeological site with the state archaeologist's office. It had colonial uh materials and 4,000-year-old Indian pottery. And he said the state archaeologists would not send a crew because he didn't have money. I now have uh some money and I'd like for you to come study the site. So we did a one-week project in 1997 and then ended up going back for two weeks uh every year for 20 years. And so that kind of changed the trajectory of what I was doing. I was interested in the late pre-contact, pre-contact. We used to call prehistoric, our native colleagues don't like that term. Uh they say, why are you why is there no history before a certain period? But um, it kind of changed my trajectory. I was working on the uh Native American mounds in the Watery Valley that were visited by Spanish explorers in the 16th century, which I eventually got back to.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

So you were named South Carolina State Archaeologist earlier this

What A State Archaeologist Does

SPEAKER_00 15:24

year. For those that are outside of the field, what role does that role actually involve?

SPEAKER_01 15:29

Yeah, so I'm I'm one of uh four divisions at the Institute of Archaeology at USC. Uh I'm actually a state agency, small one, housed at the university, and I'm charged with a number of things. So there are 38,000 archaeological sites in South Carolina. We maintain a database of paper files. There's a four-page site form for each one of them, and then any other materials that come along with that. And then old USGS topographic maps. We have recorded all these 38,000 sites. Uh we also have that in an ARCIS program called ARCSite, and we can track architectural National Register sites and archaeological sites through that. I'm also charged with curating the archaeological collections of the state. Now, there are some in other places. The Chaucer Museum has some, this the State Museum has some in other places around the state. Uh, but we maintain an 8,800 square foot facility with uh artifacts from about 6,000 sites in South Carolina. Uh we are paid by the people that dig those up uh $200 a square foot to keep those in perpetuity. So it's a temperature and humidity controlled space uh with lots of those collapsible shelves, like you see in the doctor's office with your file, uh, with artifacts.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

Uh I'm also sort of the face of South Carolina archaeology. If someone finds something, they're gonna contact us. Uh what's what's this artifact we found? Uh we have this site, what do we do? So that's my division of the Institute of Archaeology.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

I think you were already the face of archaeology in South Carolina before this rock.

SPEAKER_01 17:12

There's there are many faces of South Carolina archaeology, a hot ones. Um one of four

Underwater Sites And Deep Time

SPEAKER_01 17:19

divisions. The other ones are uh we have a maritime research uh division. Uh 500 of those 38,000 sites are underwater. They're either lakes, rivers, or in the on our shore. Uh, and so they do research on those. Some of the exciting work that they're doing right now is uh the Capitana is a ship that sunk in Winya Bay 500 years ago this August. Uh it was the flagship of Lucas Vacques de Allion, who came to Winya Bay, uh ended up having a settlement somewhere on the coast of South Carolina or Georgia, uh, but his flagship sunk. And Jim Spyrick, the underwater archaeologist for the state, uh, has been looking for that, which is really exciting, I think. Um, we also have a hobby diver license program uh for $5 for six months or $18 for two years for South Carolina residents. It's twice as much for the uh out of staters. Uh you are licensed to dive in the rivers of the state and collect artifacts or paleontological things, shark's teeth, and things like that. So that that's that's there. If you want to get one of those, it's mrd at sc.edu. You can get a hobby license. Um we have a research division. Our director, Adam King, is looking into uh, you know, the Mayans and the Aztecs had ceremonial chocolate beverages. Uh he is finding that they may be brewing those in the southeastern United States. So he's doing chemical analyses of uh pottery vessels to see if they can find evidence of that. Uh the tough part is it's very similar to a beverage, the the ingredients, uh the chemical makeup, the ingredients in Yopon Holly, which was brewed and drank ceremonially uh as well as every day sometimes. Uh it's got some qualities of caffeine and aspirin in it, uh, and it grows along our coast, those leaves. Um Shuster DePratter is working on Santa Elena, the 16th century town under the 7th, 8th, and 9th fairways of the Paris Island Marine-based golf course. Did research long ago and are working on uh writing up the final reports of amazing excavations that were conducted there. Um in your book is uh Al Goodyear's Topper site uh in Allendale County. Uh the entry in Amelia's book is to visit the exhibit at USC Salkahatchie on the campus there. Uh Topper is the oldest site in South Carolina, and in some ways, maybe even the southeastern U.S. uh has things that date between 16 and 19,000 years ago. Uh very, very early evidence of people that were here. It's a quarry site where a rock called Coastal Plain church, it forms in marine sediment when the ocean was up to Columbia and breaks very brittily and is shaped into very sharp tools. Uh and Al Al Goodjee worked there for about 20 years, pretty much the same years that we were at the Cope site on the Great PD, um working on that. Um let's see what else is going on. Gabby Purcell is our new paleoethnobotanist, someone who looks at the plants at the archaeological site and tells us what are people eating or what might be good for medicine or dye or for for making cordage. And she's about to go to London uh to look in the early records to see how the Cherokee were trading with the colonists uh in the 18th century uh for food, foodstuffs, and and trade. And then our associate director, Nina Schreiner, uh is gonna go and try to find these towns of the lower Cherokee. They were burned on the eve of the American Revolution uh in what is now Oconee County, uh, and they were forced out. Uh unfortunately, Andrew Williamson burned all their towns, burned their crops, uh, which was in the summertime, which you know took all of their food away. Uh and then Chris Moore, my colleague, one more, uh, is uh working on two really cool things. One is he has found evidence that a comet either hit the earth or near missed uh uh 12,800 years ago, and set fire to the earth and destroyed the megafauna, the mastodons and the mammoth, and maybe the human occupation. And what he finds is space dust has got a large quantity of platinum in it. And so elevated uh platinum in the soil is evidence of this. He's also doing immunological uh studies of spear points, like your Savannah River point, and blood. Trapped in the crevices in the rock that you can't see with your eye, is dissolved out in a liquid, and then they can tell you what animals. So he has found evidence of bison, uh, two extinct uh horse in Kershaw County, South Carolina, uh dog, uh, and deer and turkey.

SPEAKER_00 22:17

Wow. It's so amazing that all that you can do now, you know, compared to 20 or 30 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 22:23

Our field has become very technologically advanced.

Preservation Law And Project Review

SPEAKER_00 22:26

I would imagine. So if um a road, uh building project or other development may affect an archaeological site, what happens for those that might know that.

SPEAKER_01 22:37

Well, I'm glad you asked me that. Um The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 as amended does a number of things. It sets up State Historic Preservation Offices, the National Register of Historic Places, and a review process to look at the adverse effect to archaeological sites or historic resources, buildings, uh, traditional cultural properties of Native Americans. What does that affect? Can we avoid it? And if not, can we recover some of the information that's destroyed? Uh unfortunately, yesterday, the President's Advisory Council on Historic Preservation has voted uh some incredible uh fundamental changes to that law, which if they go, if they go into effect, will um destroy archaeology as we know it. But what the process is is let's say, let's just use your example of a highway. If the highway department's building a road, they're gonna look for the different possibilities of that route. Uh they're gonna look at wetlands impact, they're gonna look at endangered uh species, animals and plants, they're gonna look at the social impact to communities and then historic and archaeological sites. So they come up with a plan. If they can avoid them, that's the number one goal. Preservation in place is far better than uh destruction of the site. If they can't, they have to recover some information. Uh the State Historic Preservation Office, here it's in the Archives and History Department, uh state agency. They have architectural historians, historians, and archaeologists who review the project plan and decide if they uh concur with um the highway department. And usually the highway department will hire a consultant, uh private archaeological firm that does that kind of work we call cultural resource management. Um and so we will get some of that information out and try to uh interpret it and preserve it as best we can.

SPEAKER_00 24:39

As you begin this new role, what are your priorities and what do you see as the greatest threat to South Carolina's archaeological record?

Funding Visibility And Coastal Threats

SPEAKER_01 24:51

Let's start with the challenges. The challenges are visibility for my agency. Uh a lot of folks don't know about us. I was excited to be on uh with Amelia here today to get the word out. Um and um so we we we kind of run the radar, and it's part it's partly our own fault. You know, we go dig a site and we're like looking around, like hope no one sees us, you know, and then we covered up. And, you know, a lot of times, you know, if you go out to a restaurant, you might what are you doing? Well, we're here doing something else. You know, we don't want to broadcast that because we're afraid someone will come in and find that site and loot it and destroy it. So we get we have to work on our visibility. Funding is another issue. Uh we do get some state and federal money, um, but we're very reliant on donations and grants. Uh we have the Archaeological Research Trust, which is a uh private group that is raising money for us. Uh it's tax deductible through the USC's Educational Foundation. Um and so we've we've got to kind of raise money to do a lot of the projects, particularly the research projects that we do. Um as you know, South Carolina is growing really rapidly. Uh where Amelia and Tim live, you know, Charlotte is growing out to Lancaster and on its way to Camden. And along the coast, if you've been to the coast, it's rapidly developing. And when that happens, archaeological sites are at threat. Uh the other one is sea level rise, whether you whether it's human-caused or naturally caused or combination of the two, it's happening. And that's that's destroying a lot of sites along our coast, uh particularly a very unique series of sites known as shell rings. They're uh around 4,200 years old, the Savannah River Point period that you mentioned that you're find. Uh and going from the, what did you say? You said from the object to the story, the space between. So let's do that. Um, the Savannah River point that Amelia found is actually a knife. We think it's uh it's so big, we think it's on a short handle. And one of the reasons we think it's a knife is because in these shell deposits along the coast, they have their shell garbage from eating oysters and clams and other things, and they manipulate them into circles and horseshoes and mounds. Uh they're they're monuments of 4,200 years ago. Um, in there is also the very first pottery. Uh the Gatavas continue to make that pottery, uh, the longest tradition and the oldest pottery tradition in the United States by Native Americans. Um, the shell preserves organic items. And back to my Savannah River point as a knife, we find antler and bone spear points in the shell. 10 feet away in regular soil, they're going to dissolve very quickly, maybe 10 or 20 years. But the calcium carbonate leaching out of the shell changes the pH of the soil. It makes it neutral instead of alkaline. And then you can find fish scales and bones and antler and other kinds of things that we use to reconstruct uh the um not only the environment that they're living in, but the things they're extracting out of nature for food and other things.

Working With Tribes And Repatriation

SPEAKER_00 27:52

What has changed in the way archaeologists understand and talk about native history? And what has the field had to unlearn?

SPEAKER_01 28:01

Aaron Ross Powell, What have we had to unlearn? Yeah. I'll start with that. We had to unlearn that we need to get other people involved in the archaeological process. For for a long time in the early years of archaeology, there would be no contact with local Native Americans. You may be digging the Native American site, it's part of their history, uh, and they're connected to it, and there wasn't not a lot of interaction with Native Americans. In the early 90s, there was a new law, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Um, Native people came to realize that across the country, at the Smithsonian, at museums, at the Institute of Archaeology where I am, that human remains were in storage there, uh, along with the objects that came out of their graves. Uh sometimes they had been studied, but not always. And so the law requires us to try to uh connect those ancestors with their lineal living descendants, and if we can make that connection to return them. And so we're we're in we're in the process of consulting with Native American tribes across the country. There are 16 tribes that consult on South Carolina, um, many of who were here briefly during the colonial era. Once Charleston is founded and the trade starts, natives from across the eastern United States are coming to Charleston, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, uh, the Cherokee, and many other groups. And so uh we're working with them on how best to return them and get them all back in the ground.

SPEAKER_00 29:43

If someone finds a point or a piece of pottery or another possible artifact, what should

What To Do When You Find Artifacts

SPEAKER_00 29:49

they do? Um, whether, for example, I'll go with this one, if it's not on their property.

SPEAKER_01 29:54

If it's not on their property, who? Let's probably talk to the landowner. Um now, what I would advise or leave it on state. What I would advise Amelia next time she finds one is leave it there. Raise your hand if you would do that. No hands went up. Uh what we realize is people are it's gonna be hard to not do that. We'd really like to know what it is and where you find it. Do I want it? Absolutely not. I've got a warehouse full of stuff, it's filling up, but the information is really important. So Al Goodyear, the topper site, he works on some of the oldest cultures that we know of, Native American in South Carolina. There's a type of spear point called a Clovis point, and they have mapped 800 of those in South Carolina. I think five or six were found by professional archaeologists. I've never found one. I was only on a site where one was found maybe twice in 40 years. Um, but we can map where they are, what the material is. So at the topper site it's coastal plain church. In the northeastern part of the state, uh, it's a volcanic rock called rhyolite. We look also look how far did it go? You know, there's a shotgun blast by the topper site of Coastal Plain Church and a couple of rhyolite. And where I worked in the Great PD River, it's all rhyolite and a little bit of coastal plain church. So it's telling us about trade, it's telling us about movement. So we have learned a lot from the general public finding these things. We had a we had an artifact collector surveyed in the 80s. We hired someone to go around and interview people and and uh inventory their collections. Uh the site I worked on for 20 years in the Great P D, Jonas Cope, that was found by a guy that uh just like to look for arrowheads and find things. Um so you if you find the site, call us, we'll record it. If you have an artifact, uh you can contact us, uh judge at sc.edu. Uh send pictures, text me a picture, email me a picture, or come by and see me. I'd be glad to see what people have and uh try to uh connect the object to the story.

SPEAKER_00 32:07

And I think it's important to add that if it is on at a state park or something, to leave it be because it is illegal to remove.

SPEAKER_01 32:14

Thanks for reminding me about the first half of it. So, yes, on state land, state parks, DNR wildlife management areas, uh it you're not supposed to collect. On federal land, you're not supposed to collect. So that's the Corps of Engineers Lakes, the National Forests, the uh Congregation National Park, places like that. Uh, it's unlawful to collect. Uh uh there are a lot of people who like to collect uh artifacts, the uh social media, you'll see people uh posting their finds and what they're finding. And uh but again, we don't want the object, but we sure would like to know what it is and where you found it.

SPEAKER_00 32:51

When you think about the next generation, what do you hope they inherit from the working and done now?

SPEAKER_01 32:56

Oh gosh. That's really tough. Um I hope that they inherit new ways of doing things. Uh, you know, when I was coming up, there was no laser surveying instruments, there was no ground penetrating radar, uh, there was no LIDAR shot from airplanes that can map the surface of the earth. Uh, the the blood residue. We used to scrub artifacts with a toothbrush and warm water, you know, to get all the dirt off. Now we don't do it because we don't want to uh scrub the blood away. Uh hope they learn from our mistakes uh and carry and carry forward in a better archaeology.

SPEAKER_00 33:39

So before I move into the closing, does anyone have a question for Chris?

Favorite Finds With Big Stories

SPEAKER_00 33:44

Any questions? So far, uh, what is your favorite artifact that we have here in South Carolina? Oh I know, it's hard to pick core. Sure. What has the coolest story, Maggie?

SPEAKER_01 34:02

I'm gonna tell you about my most recent find. And you're gonna be surprised. So our first day on the job, uh I learned that they were excavating a sewer line on campus and that they had found bottles. And I went over there and I had a look, and it was very modern. And it turns out it's from the 1950s. And the more research I did, I realized it's from the Wheeler Hill community. And Wheeler Hill was uh a working-class African-American neighborhood adjacent to the university, and when they wanted to expand in the 1960s, uh, they moved them out and raised 84 households. And I found a portion of a newspaper with the date May 17th, 1953. Does anybody know what happened one year later on May 17, 1954? Brown versus the Board of Education integrated the schools. The only thing standing from that community is the auditorium for Booker T Washington High School, uh, which is on campus, uh, which is part of the uh Bobby Donaldson civil rights uh study program at USC. So I found something with an exact date on it, which is pretty cool. Now that's not what you wanted to hear, I'm guessing. Um when we were working at Santa Elena in 1993, my colleagues who were working there, we found a Spanish kiln, a kiln that a Spanish potter had fired pots in. And that was that was really, really kind of neat. Uh and then at the Kolb site where I worked over in um uh the Great PD, it was a family, uh Johannes and Sarah Kolb and their nine children moved there in 1732. In the 1800s, it was a slave row, and we found a cellar, and in the cellar pit uh had been used as a garbage pit by an adjacent house after that slave structure had gone away. And there was a scissors, and there was a key, and there was domestic animal bone and wild animal bone and mortar and brick and glass. Uh and the scissors were perfect. Uh, and we wondered what they are doing in this in this pit. Uh, and one time I was watching the History Channel late at night and I fell asleep and I woke up, I heard a voice that I recognized, Marley Brown from Colonial Williamsburg, and he was talking about a scissors that he had found. I went, whoa, and I woke up. And they were digging a midwife's house. And he described how um a midwife would bring a scissors to a berth to do what? Yeah, what else? Oh, I don't know what that means.

SPEAKER_00 36:58

Sometimes the baby says we'll be able to get it.

SPEAKER_01 37:00

Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um perhaps. Um but in African American folk tradition, the scissors are placed under the mattress to cut the pain of labor. And so maybe a whole scissors had lost its magic and was discarded. Um sometimes in these cellar holes, the the cellars would be a kind of a combination between your closet and your refrigerator. You store stuff down in there, you put your vegetables there, you've canned down in there. Um so I think that one might be one of the neater ones that I've found to answer your question.

SPEAKER_00 37:36

Does anybody else have any other questions?

unknown 37:39

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 37:40

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 37:41

Thank you, Amazon.

SPEAKER_00 37:42

We really appreciate you being here.

SPEAKER_01 37:43

Enjoyable.

What We Choose To Preserve

SPEAKER_00 37:44

I think that this conversation makes it clear that archaeology is not simply about finding old things. It is about recovering relationships, even between an object and the place where it was found, between one generation and the next, and between the history we were taught and the fuller story still being uncovered. The Savannah River Point reminded me that the past can be present in the most ordinary places. But today's conversation is much larger than that object. It is about the land, the people who lived here across thousands of years and the knowledge held by their descendants and the evidence that we are responsible for protecting. It's easy to think of history as something that belongs to people who lived long ago, right? But we are producing evidence of our own time every single day. We are deciding which buildings remain, which landscapes change, which records are kept, and which stories are part of our community's memory. And even now we take more photographs and save more information than any generation before us, but context can still disappear. A photograph without names eventually just becomes a group of strangers. An object without its story becomes something no one knows how to interpret. A place can remain while the meaning attached can still be lost. And that raises a more personal question. If someone found the things that we leave behind a couple of hundred years from now, what would they understand about us? Which relationships, experiences, or parts of our communities would be missing that we because we assumed everyone already knew. The difficult part is that we rarely know while we are living through a moment what another generation is going to need from us. A record that seems routine today may answer an important question later. A familiar landscape may hold information no one realizes is there. A voice that we take for granted may be the only person who remembers why something mattered. Each of us is the only witness to certain parts of our own story. We know what particular moments meant from inside them. We remember what changed us, what we misunderstood at the time, and what we only came to understand years later. Because that knowledge feels ordinary while we carry it. We rarely recognize that it may be impossible for anyone else to recover. When the person is gone, the loss can be easy to underestimate. Life continues, but part of its meaning has disappeared. And oftentimes it's but because we always believe that we have another chance to ask. Maybe legacy is not only the name attached to something or the accomplishments people remember. It may also be how clearly someone else can understand the life we lived because we took the time to preserve the meaning. The person who made the point could have never known that all of this time later, someone would be standing outside with their donkeys in her paddock crying over a bad day and had to step away from her computer. They would have never imagined anything like that. And that might be what kind of sticks with me the most about this is because we rarely know which part of our lives will reach beyond us or what it will mean to someone that we will never meet. We only know that our time here will become part of what others inherit. The challenge is recognizing what matters before it's gone. And most of us are never going to excavate a site, although I'm gonna try to talk. So, can I volunteer? I want to be there. Or manage a museum collection. Most of us will never get that opportunity. But we still make choices that affect what survives. We can document change, share what we know. We can listen before speaking for someone else's history and pause before removing an object from the place that gives its meaning. We do not inherit the past as a finished story. We inherit pieces of evidence, memories, landscapes, and a responsibility to care for them. The story did not begin with us, and it's not going to end with us. But what happens to the chapter in our care is partly up to us.

Final Thanks And Farewell

SPEAKER_00 42:46

I really appreciate you taking time to be here with us today. And I really appreciate all of you taking time out of your Saturday to be here with us. And of course, to the South Carolina State Museum for hosting us. Thank you.