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Reconstructing a Lost Town with Edward Gonzalez-Tennant - Ep 104
204 Plays6 years ago
Edward Gonzalez-Tennant is a GIS and open source digital archaeology expert. We brought him on to talk about GIS but the conversation quickly turned to his work at historic Rosewood - a predominantly African-American town in Florida that was destroyed by riots and the Rosewood Massacre over 100 years ago. EGT is using digital archaeology and traditional methods to reconstruct this town so visitors and descendants can know what it was like to live in that area at in the early 1900s.
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Transcript
Introduction and Host Absence
00:00:18
Speaker
Hello, welcome to the Archeotech Podcast, episode 104. This is your host for today, Paul Zimmerman, our usual host. Chris Webster can't be with us today because he is currently on a CRM project in Arizona near Yuma, right along the border. He wants us to know that no, he's not working on the border wall, though he is, however, right in
00:00:23
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:39
Speaker
visual distance of the actual border itself and the fence or wall slat fence, I guess, as it is that's currently down there. It sounds like some very interesting work that he's been doing. I'm not sure if he'll be at liberty to discuss it in the future, but if he can, we'd probably like to get him on our own show to discuss what he's
Interview with Dr. Edward Gonzalez-Tennett
00:00:57
Speaker
doing. Instead of Chris being here today, I get the joy of interviewing Dr. Edward Gonzales Tenet.
00:01:06
Speaker
Dr. Gonzalez-Tenet is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Central Florida. He also serves as the principal investigator with Digital Heritage Interactive, LLC. He's published numerous articles and chapters on the intersection between digital archaeology, social justice, and public outreach. His recent book, The Rosewood Massacre and Archaeology and History of Intersectional Violence, is currently available in hardcover from the University Press of Florida.
00:01:29
Speaker
A paperback version will be published later this year, 2019. We'll post Dr. Gonzalez-Tennett's email address and other information on the show notes, of course. Today, we're going to discuss with him some of the work that he's been doing because he does an interesting job combining storytelling, digital storytelling, various digital kinds of data collection and representation. I think it's really stuff that will be up our alley here on Archeotech.
Digital Archaeology and Rosewood Project
00:01:59
Speaker
So, Dr. Gonzales-Dennett, thanks for coming on the Arceotech podcast. Really pleased to have you here today. Chris sends his apologies. He can't be here because he's currently in the field. The project he was supposed to be on and back by the time of this recording got pushed back a week, so he's scrambling to try to get everything reassigned and rescheduled, and right now he's
00:02:20
Speaker
in Southern Arizona. Anyhow, Chris has had on our Trello Stack, your name, a scan of your business card since, at least since when I started co-hosting this podcast, and I think it was on there for a little bit beforehand.
00:02:36
Speaker
And he's been really excited to have you on the podcast because he wanted to talk to you about GIS, said that you are an expert in GIS and a big proponent of open source. And those are things that are right up our alley. But then as he started handing me some of the notes and I started looking at your website, it looks like GIS is certainly not your only thing, though I suspect it's one major component of what you do.
00:02:59
Speaker
and that you're actually doing some very interesting work with digital heritage writ large. So would you like to tell our listeners what it is that you're currently working on?
00:03:10
Speaker
Yeah, of course. Please call me Ed. Thanks for having me on. I would frame what I do as digital archeology in a very broad sense. So definitely a long-time user of GIS. You know, I've taught GIS. I've done it as a sort of professional archeologist in the CRM world for a few years. So that continues to always inform a lot of the work I do. It's really that sort of geospatial component as often, I guess the foundation of anything I do. But of course,
00:03:38
Speaker
that broader digital heritage world includes things like 3D modeling and virtual world environments. And that's another, I guess, arena that I've spent a lot of time and effort working on. So things like the virtual Rosewood or virtual
00:03:56
Speaker
VR, Rosewood, Rosewood Heritage Project, I've sort of changed the name of it a few times over the years trying to figure out what I'm trying to highlight with the work. I'm working on a whole new version of that, which will be coming out in the next few weeks, much more immersive, much more interactive. We're actually finding ways of using these tools and technologies that are basically video game engines, right?
00:04:22
Speaker
software used by people who make video games to deliver not just a visual representation of past landscapes and sites, but also more clearly embed the types of data.
Research and Consulting with Digital Tools
00:04:35
Speaker
And I think really more importantly, how archaeologists, historians use that data to make decisions about things like what does a structure look like, where is it or why is it placed on a landscape?
00:04:48
Speaker
All of those sorts of things and so we're kind of rebranding that calling that Rosewood and interactive history and thinking about that that name change it really is all about finding a way to let people explore this world on their own and
00:05:05
Speaker
draw into that experience nearly 15 years of historical and archaeological and even oral testimony research that we're using to drive those reconstructions. And then, of course, all of those skill sets that I'm using on that one project allow me to wear sort of dual hats, one as a researcher and an academic.
00:05:29
Speaker
but also one as a consultant with Digital Heritage Interactive.
Historical Significance of Rosewood
00:05:33
Speaker
And so I'm using those skills and applying them to all sorts of different sites, all sorts of different time periods, really, and finding ways to use these digital technologies, these digital tools to do really like socially relevant work, but always based on the evidence, based on
00:05:55
Speaker
you know, I hesitate to champion, this is a science-based thing too much, but you know, that's really, that's the goal here is if we talk about something, if the goal is to do public outreach and socially relevant stuff, and that really is my goal that animates all my work, you know, having it be evidence-based, I think adds a crucial level to that, and one that when we go out and do
00:06:20
Speaker
archaeology in the community or I do a public talk or whatever, the fact that people can look at those tangible things and understand how we're working from things like field notes to a virtual reconstruction of a house and all the little decisions that go into that, that's not something that we necessarily reveal very well to the public as
00:06:42
Speaker
historical researchers. So that's sort of where I'm, you know, I'm trying to exist and move around that, I guess those various areas or terrains or that big cloud that I think encompasses all the permutations of digital heritage or digital archaeology.
00:07:02
Speaker
Well, that's great. That's actually very much in line with what other people I've discussed who do things like digital humanities are in, is trying to, a certain experimental aspect to it, you know, dealing with a whole bunch of different kinds of digital technologies, but always in the service of something else. The digital isn't the be all end all of it, it's the particular tool set, and then there's
00:07:25
Speaker
The experimentation that goes along with that, the various kinds of tool sets, the expertise that goes into learning, say Blender or QGIS or some particular software package or hardware for that matter, and trying to wrestle those tools in service of a broader goal.
Events Leading to Rosewood's Destruction
00:07:43
Speaker
Before we get too far into the weeds here though, could you define for us quickly what Rosewood is and why it's important? What's its historical significance to a listener who might not know?
00:07:55
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So Rosewood was an African American community located here in Florida along the Gulf Coast. So if one's familiar with Rosewood, this would be about two hours north of where modern day Tampa is. So this was a relatively prosperous African American or black town.
00:08:15
Speaker
And I say prosperous in the sense that citizens there were able to own property, own businesses, educate their children, all those sorts of things. Perhaps not wealthy, but I still think prosperous fits. It's well known in many ways, very unfortunately, because of the
00:08:34
Speaker
events of the first week of 1923, which have been referred to as the Rosewood Race Riot. So this is a week-long series of events, violent events that basically culminate in the
00:08:51
Speaker
complete destruction of every black owned building and the violent displacement of the local African American population. And this is all triggered by an initial event on Monday, January 1st, 1923, when a white woman in neighboring Sumner receives injuries from her
00:09:15
Speaker
extramarital lover. And we know that this is likely what occurred based on eyewitness testimony people who were there at the time and later gave oral history recordings or interviews. So instead of admitting to an extramarital
00:09:33
Speaker
relationship or affair.
Archaeology's Role in Rosewood's History
00:09:35
Speaker
The white woman constructed what at the time would have been a convenient lie and blamed an African American man. That sends the local community, the local white community, who'd been reading incendiary accounts of African American violence in
00:09:52
Speaker
the previous months across the state of Florida, and this sort of really drives escalation of violence over the following days that, as I mentioned before, culminates in the complete destruction of the town. It's interesting, or it's important, I guess, in a lot of ways historically, because Rosewood, and even though the state of Florida wouldn't necessarily term it this way,
00:10:14
Speaker
Rosewood is one of the first and perhaps one of the only communities to receive monetary compensation. There have been similar movements at some other sites like Tulsa, Oklahoma, but here in Florida, a state legislature decision in the 1990s awarded both monetary compensation to survivors and the descendants.
00:10:36
Speaker
but also did things like establish a scholarship for the descendants of Rosewood to go to college. So even though that was termed the Rosewood compensation bill, it really has become sort of a classic example of African-American reparations in the US. And so Rosewood is a relatively rural town, never incorporated. So there's nothing like the traditional Sanborns or
00:11:03
Speaker
or platt maps or anything like that. So understanding the spatial relationship of the town was a particular challenge and something that archeology was uniquely suited to address.
00:11:18
Speaker
It's interesting that you're using archaeology because normally I would think that something this recent, just under 100 years, I know that 50 years old is the federal limit, but generally this recent, it would fall mostly under history rather than archaeology, but you're using archaeological tools to study this tragic series of events in American history.
00:11:42
Speaker
and digital archaeology in particular. Could you go into some of the details of what kinds of tools you're bringing in to study and I suppose document and record the events at Rosewood?
00:11:56
Speaker
Yeah, sure. I mean, so, you know, as a historical archaeologist, yeah, the last century, there are obviously a growing number of people who work in that period, but certainly when the public, even practitioners here, you know, or use the term archaeology, that is pretty recent.
00:12:12
Speaker
Part of the reason why archaeology is useful here, particularly the mixed methods approach within historical archaeology, which is always used three types of data alongside one another, obviously archaeological data, artifacts, that sort of stuff, but also documents and oral testimony, that combination
00:12:33
Speaker
Is particularly useful in rosewood. Again there's no plant map sand boards nothing that we could just sort of grab and very quickly understand the spatial layout of the community so going into the documentary and archival record.
00:12:48
Speaker
specifically property deeds, reconstructing the meats and bounds of those properties for really initially a 50-year period from 1870 to 1930. This is really reviewing thousands of deeds, reconstructing hundreds of
00:13:07
Speaker
meets and bounds descriptions, and then basically bringing all of that into a GIS, using that as a historical properties GIS, but also as a predictive model to help us understand where specific structures may or may not have been. And in the last
00:13:25
Speaker
10 to 12 years when we've really been doing more and more archaeology out there. We've tested or done work at sites that we believed had structures, but we also wanted to check those places that we thought would not. And so far, that combination of archival and archaeological work has done really well in allowing us to
00:13:49
Speaker
locate a variety of different structures. I mean, we're also going into more, if I want to say traditional, but, you know, we're using some remote sensing technology. So we do have access to the African-American cemetery in Rosewood, or at least one of them. So we have done ground penetrating radar or GPR work there. We'll actually be back out this summer to continue doing archaeological work. We have a sizable grant from the state of Florida Division of Historical Resources, which is funding
00:14:19
Speaker
all of those excavation sort of traditional archeological work. So that includes doing more GPR at other sites and then going in and of course doing more excavations.
Material Culture Misconceptions
00:14:29
Speaker
And so what we're learning about Rosewood is in some ways, this is archeology to reconstruct what the town was like, but it's also archeology to get the public interested and understanding that what we think of as a town today
00:14:48
Speaker
is not necessarily what people who lived in the town a hundred years ago thought of it. So in terms of how close structures are to one another, the types of material culture that people would have had access to, I think a lot of people assume there would be big differences in the material culture between black and white Americans, the historical archaeology and
00:15:09
Speaker
sort of the 19th and 20th century is showing that that's often not the case, or if it is the case, it's pretty negligible, mainly because this is an error of the Sears catalog and the mail order, you know, you get access to the same stuff. So yeah, I mean, it's, you know, without...
00:15:26
Speaker
archaeologists were early adopters. New technology comes out, we swarm it. This was definitely the case with GIS. We're one of the first social science or humanities and I think there are archaeologists who fit into both.
00:15:42
Speaker
And sometimes that's a single person who fits into both a science and humanities discipline. But we've been using GIS, you know, 30 something years now as a discipline, doing the same thing with 3D technologies, remote sensing technologies. And so historical archaeology, which has worked with the documentary record, people who do that even call themselves documentary archaeologists, all of these sorts of things come together really well.
00:16:07
Speaker
To analyze, you know, these ephemeral towns, these ephemeral black towns, which were so much more common, particularly in rural locations up until the early and mid 20th century across the US. So to illuminate that history that even though it's, you know,
00:16:26
Speaker
It's at the edges of living memory now, but even a generation or two ago, it was very much within living memory. And yet we've completely, as a society and a country, largely, I guess, not completely, but largely erased, I mean forgotten, but there's obviously some intentional aspects to that forgetting just how common this is.
00:16:50
Speaker
this type of a life these types of communities really were.
Public Outreach in Digital Archaeology
00:16:55
Speaker
I had the pleasure recently being at a symposium at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, that brought together a group of scholars doing this type of like mapping black towns. That was the name of the symposium. And you know, in some places like Texas, people have identified 500 or more historical black towns, the vast majority of which no longer exist, or if they exist, it's
00:17:20
Speaker
one or two structures. Maybe it's a historical marker, but they're not the same sort of vibrant communities they were a century or so ago. I don't even know how to summarize this because it sounds like you're doing quite a bit of work that's touching on a bunch of different methodologies and a bunch of different tools and for a few different purposes, but I do like this engagement idea that you're talking about here.
00:17:44
Speaker
This may be a minute or two earlier than you normally would, but as we were discussing before, you are also involved in public outreach as a component of the work that you do. So why don't we go to break and when we come back, we can discuss how you're going about engaging the public in the research, particularly around Rosewood, but whatever other research you've been doing and continue to do.
00:18:09
Speaker
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Speaker
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00:19:02
Speaker
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00:19:19
Speaker
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00:19:45
Speaker
Welcome back to the ArcheoTech podcast. As we finish up the last segment, I was teeing up a question about public outreach. And you're doing a lot of work, not just on digital collection and modeling and GIS work and so on. But outreach is definitely an important component of the work that you've been
Community Collaboration in Digital Storytelling
00:20:07
Speaker
doing. So I was wondering, what role do digital technologies, things like digital storytelling, VR, and so on, play in collaboration for you?
00:20:15
Speaker
Well, actually, this is a really important aspect that I think often gets overlooked with the potentials when we talk about digital archaeology. So obviously, I'm doing things and we've done things where we create virtual reconstructions for museums and stuff. But I think, again, I'm going to return to Rosewood and a story that's happened out there that's really illustrative of the true potentials of this stuff.
00:20:39
Speaker
So I've done digital storytelling and oral histories. We've done a lot of that work actually with the descendant community. When I started this project, actually two of the survivors were still alive. So these were two African-American women who were physically present in Rosewood in 1923. They were different ages. One was three, one was seven or eight. They've both since passed away. But I had the opportunity to do oral histories with them and that ended up forming the core
00:21:07
Speaker
of a digital documentary that I created. This was years ago now. It is on the virtualrosewood.com website. It looks pretty hokey. But I created it specifically to kind of talk about the history of Rosewood, the research we were doing for bus tours that some of the descendants run into the area around Rosewood. And so I did this as a way, it's a 45 minute bus ride out to the site from the nearest sort of
00:21:36
Speaker
of large town Gainesville, Florida. So I created this little documentary that they could play on the buses. And then I put that online and that along with some initial versions of the virtual world, started to get a lot of media coverage here in Florida. So a number of large newspapers ran stories about it. And after a few months, I actually was contacted, this opened up or invited somebody to contact me
00:22:05
Speaker
and it turned out to be the individual, the man who owns the property where the African American cemetery is located. And so he reached out because he saw the video, he saw the virtual reconstructions, all of this generated from the
00:22:25
Speaker
newspaper account that he read, he reached out, he invited us onto his property so that by 2012 we actually started doing some basic work, some GPR work in the years that have followed, and all of that, that connection, that access, none of that likely would have
00:22:46
Speaker
materialized because he had worked with researchers, academics specifically, in the past and had had a very negative experience. And so I think if I had not sort of started with the digital side of this, I don't think I'd be having the same levels of access. I don't think I would have had the doors open and in the years since the rapport built.
00:23:13
Speaker
that I've been able to do in Rosewood, a place where, quite frankly, previous researchers and academics have sort of poisoned the well of collaboration, the digital technologies not only provided a way to sort of mend those fences, but also just really greatly accelerate our ability. And so now we know
00:23:35
Speaker
all sorts of people and the local community is now much more interested in having a conversation about this. And so that's really a powerful, I think, example.
00:23:46
Speaker
That sounds like a great example of what we always hope happens, which is the archaeology informs the community, the community informs the archaeologist, increases the archaeology that can be done, and then becomes a collaborative back and forth between one group supporting the other, both working towards some sort of a common goal.
00:24:06
Speaker
What do you think it is about the digital technologies in particular that allowed you this greater access that other archaeologists weren't able to get because of whatever personal or methodological tools they were using?
00:24:22
Speaker
Well, I mean, I can certainly relate why this one individual reached out. And I think partly it was because in the video, I'm very upfront about why I'm doing the research and what I hope to accomplish. So there was no sort of, and this was, you know, very publicly stated for posterity.
00:24:42
Speaker
And he very it resonated with this individual. And, you know, it was and this has always been my interest. And it's a big part of what we're doing this summer when we're out there for a month doing excavations is I've always wanted to move the story of Rosewood and this type of a project beyond the single event which destroyed the town. It didn't destroy the community. The family stayed in touch.
00:25:09
Speaker
They had Rosewood family reunions. They still do that to this day. The community wasn't destroyed. It was just the built environment that was destroyed. And so I wanted to talk about what came before, what happened after, but also expanded to talk about the neighboring community of Sumner.
00:25:29
Speaker
which often gets represented as sort of the white town to Rosewood's black town. But in fact, Sumner was probably more 50% white, 50% African American. And so actually, a lot of the work we're doing this summer is moving into Sumner and starting to do archaeological work there and really talk about all of these communities. And so, you know, the digital
00:25:56
Speaker
technologies provided me, I guess, a venue or a platform in a very real sense to talk about, look, I'm not just here to sort of point fingers at local whites and call them nasty names. There's a very interesting history out here that proceeds and follows this event. And I think that we're doing
00:26:17
Speaker
short service by not following both of those. And of course, digital technologies allows me to, now that we're working in Sumner, target properties. Sumner's a company town. It's a sawmill town. It's a completely different sort of social structure than Rosewood, which was a mixed economy. And we can see a lot of this embedded in the documents. But of course, those of us who do archaeology and do public outreach, we know that when we
00:26:43
Speaker
We bring that out there and we have members of the public see this and we do the public talks. We show them the artifacts. We show them all this stuff. It just resonates that tangible aspect of archaeology is so much more powerful. I think that's another thing that resonates with folks as well.
Cultural Practices Revealed in Cemeteries
00:27:00
Speaker
I wasn't just going out to do a history and talk to a few people and then write my book and then sort of, you know,
00:27:06
Speaker
By, I was very much interested and by the point, by the time that he reached out, we started working on his property. I'd been doing this work for six or seven years already. So I think that's... That longevity, that contact. Yep. That sustainable aspect is really important. So not strictly the digital, but the way that you're using the digital tools in a long-term project and with a sensitivity to the local community.
00:27:32
Speaker
Basically, none of those things, theory, method, digital, outreach, none of that gets to supersede any other aspect. They really all have to operate hand in hand. I move them forward simultaneously.
00:27:49
Speaker
No, I like that. That's a great approach. Quick kind of methodological question here. You said that the material culture of the black communities and the white communities isn't especially differentiated. Are you then finding in this other town, are you expecting to find material cultural differences or are you finding the white-owned homes and the black-owned homes based off of historical documents?
00:28:15
Speaker
I need to probably, okay, so in terms of the homes, I think we're going to see a difference in Sumner, but I think the difference we're going to see in terms of size of homes, how they're arranged on the landscape, all of that sort of stuff, it's going to be much more a structural thing in the sense that the company owns the town, and so they design the town.
00:28:39
Speaker
But there are, I mean, there are some, and I do briefly sort of talk about this for a few pages in the book. What is interesting is the cemeteries. So the white cemetery that would have been associated with both Rosewood and Sumner is still in use today. People are still being buried there.
00:28:59
Speaker
there's a fence around it, but everyone tells us that there's more burials. So one of the first things we're going to do this summer is use GPR there and try to really locate the historical boundaries of that cemetery. But when you compare these ostensibly black and white cemeteries, if folks who are familiar with African-American folklore or cemetery burial traditions
00:29:24
Speaker
There's a lot of decoration of graves that occur with shells or glass or broken dishes or plates or all of this sort of stuff. And so shells have been a big part of many African-American burial traditions in parts of the Southern US. But here in this part of Levy County,
00:29:43
Speaker
if I took you to the white cemetery or the black cemetery and you were operating under the assumption that, well, black cemeteries are decorated this way and white cemeteries in this area, that's actually reversed. So shells, pottery, all this stuff is prolific at the white cemetery and almost completely lacking at the African-American cemetery. And so trying to understand. So there are actually
00:30:11
Speaker
differences. I don't want to suggest that there are none. In terms of the homes, those differences are probably more economically or structurally driven, but in terms of the cemetery, there's something very interesting and potentially I think at the regional, even national level, something very unique happening.
Public Feedback in Digital Reconstructions
00:30:27
Speaker
So again, we're doing, one of the things we'll do this summer is probably we'll fly our drone, we'll do photogrammetry, and on our, I don't know if the students will be into this, but on our downtime, we're gonna create or try to create a digital reconstruction of the quote unquote white cemetery so that people can sort of see and experience and visit this site even if they can't get out there locally. And that's something I've done
00:30:57
Speaker
you know, elsewhere, when I worked in the Caribbean, we actually reconstructed an entire Jewish cemetery on the island of Nevis. And so you can walk through, you use photogrammetry, you know, total station, all these, you know, sort of traditional and new emerging tools in archaeology to create a virtual world of how this Jewish cemetery, I mean, you can literally, okay, virtually, figuratively,
00:31:26
Speaker
walk around this Jewish cemetery, and as you do, you can click on the tombs and pull up information with translations of what's there. So finding a way again to use digital technologies to make sites that may not be accessible to people because of distance or whatever.
00:31:47
Speaker
accessible and make them a learning resource and a public outreach resource simultaneously. That's something else we'll be doing more of in Rosewood and Sumner, and I continue to do that elsewhere as well. That's very interesting work. How do you disseminate the reconstructions that you're doing? It sounds to me like
00:32:06
Speaker
It's not good enough just to do it, but as public outreach is an important component of the work that you're doing, you've got to actually get your work out to the public, both to show what you're doing and for feedback, for criticism, for compliments, whatever it takes. How are you actually managing that part of the project?
00:32:23
Speaker
Okay, see, that's a great question because I think a lot of folks who do this sort of work, there's some vital steps that we don't as archaeologists working in these domains, we probably don't take enough time to deal with. So the feedback, right? And I'm sort of looking at like interaction design. I have a paper that I'll be doing at the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods and Archaeology Conference later this month.
00:32:47
Speaker
I'll be having to do it in absentia because I won't make it to Poland for the conference. But talking about how do we get this feedback? How do we engage the communities that can either inform or will be the user basis for these reconstructions? And so I've explored a variety of different ways of doing this. I mean, a big one is to have a public event and literally walk the audience.
00:33:14
Speaker
through the virtual reconstruction as we're all sitting in the room and get their feedback and use that as, you know, almost a final step. So get everything in the reconstruction almost finished
00:33:29
Speaker
and then share it with various communities. So the feedback you get is very mixed. Some of it is great, some of it can be a little strange depending on the sites you're working at, but people are very quick to recognize if the vegetation is wrong or the landscape looks unfamiliar. Basically, if you're not paying attention to those sorts of
00:33:57
Speaker
details, you know, those are things that user communities pick up on very quickly.
Transparency and Public Engagement
00:34:03
Speaker
And then, of course, the reason I am investing more and more in revealing the design decisions, which really for archaeologists and historians, you know, when we work from various data sets to interpret what a structure looked like, what a site looked like, the arrangement of X, Y, and Z, you know, all of those decisions that we develop
00:34:25
Speaker
We teach each other how to do. We understand those are obfuscated for the most part when it comes to the public or various communities accessing those final interpretations. So that's where I'm now moving with a lot of my work is finding ways
00:34:41
Speaker
at least in the sort of VR, virtual world realm, finding ways of uncovering or revealing those design decisions. I mean, I'm calling them design decisions, but there are interpretive decisions. And so letting the public know, yes, there is conjecture involved here, but it's not fanciful. When we talk about
00:35:00
Speaker
the homes in Rosewood, there's, you know, sometimes we know what they look like, because we have oral histories with the people who live there. And so, you know, is that going to give me an exact dimension? No. But if I do archaeology, is that necessarily going to help? Sometimes, but these are foundation-less
00:35:19
Speaker
homes, they're what we call locally and colloquially cracker architecture. So they're on supports, right to allow airflow. So you know, the ears, there is some conjecture, but then it also gets based on architectural history. So we do that work. And then just revealing to, you know, to the audience to the users to whatever, whoever, however, stakeholders, whatever I'm calling,
00:35:46
Speaker
those different groups. You know, okay, we painted this house because the child who lived here when we interviewed her 85 years later, she was struck by the color of the house and she remembers it being painted and this was something that her family was proud of because so many other houses weren't painted. You know, those are the details that we sift together and bring together and finding a way to
00:36:12
Speaker
reveal that decision-making to the public. I think all of those things are a big missed potential for archaeologists working on this. And I'm not saying that no one else is doing it, but I don't think enough of us is doing it. And then, of course, when they're finished, to get back to your original question, you know, we put them on websites with rosewood and interactive history. You can always get this stuff through sort of virtual rosewood.
Challenges in Virtual Reconstructions
00:36:37
Speaker
It always link, but I'm thinking
00:36:39
Speaker
likely we'll be releasing that final version on itch.io, right? So a big indie game marketplace where people put all sorts of video games and interactive novels and text-based adventure, all those sorts of things. And so hopefully that that'll open up a whole new
00:36:59
Speaker
user community or group of folks who will come to this these reconstructions because when I started doing this work, it was.
00:37:11
Speaker
It was in a very much, in a very real sense, driven by the descendant community that I was working with. Because we were brainstorming about how do we make the history of Rosewood relevant. And I sort of, and in hindsight, and I can admit this now, I sort of flippantly suggested why don't we virtually reconstruct the whole town. This was circa 2007, 2008. I didn't really understand what that meant.
00:37:38
Speaker
I didn't. I thought I did. I did not realize how much information it would really, you know, and when I try to communicate this to other archaeologists, well, let me back up. I mean, so when I suggested that to the descendant community, they loved it. And that was a big part of the reason I started exploring this technology, some of which
00:37:59
Speaker
like GIS and the geospatial foundations I knew, the 3D modeling, the virtual world stuff, I played with. But then it became a focus based on what the descendant community wanted. But then when I talked to other archaeologists, I think a lot of us forget just how involved that is. And so the analogy I like to use now is, you know, think about when you go to a park or a museum,
00:38:22
Speaker
that reconstructs the site every you know what's the color of the door knob where what kind of chair is there i mean all of those little design decisions have to be made and unfortunately.
00:38:34
Speaker
We don't find a lot of information in the archaeological record that gets us to that detail. So that's where we have to stay multidisciplinary. That's where architectural history, but also for me, visiting historic sites, you know, mining, the photographic archive, all of that stuff plays a part. And then I can reveal this is where my conjecture is coming from.
Future Plans for Rosewood Project
00:38:56
Speaker
All right, well why don't we take a little break here because I have a bunch of questions now. It sounds like you're doing some very, taking a very holistic and iterative approach to the work at all stages of it. So I'd like to find out on that notion of iterative work, where you expect this to be going and how you expect to improve upon it in the future.
00:39:17
Speaker
Hey, everyone. Chris Webster here with the Arkansas Podcast Network. And if you like what you're hearing, considering becoming a member and supporting us, go over to arkpodnet.com forward slash members and support us at the supporting member level, standard member, or professional member. You can do five, 10, or $20 a month, and you can do those yearly at 42, 84, or $168 per year. Again, that's arkpodnet.com forward slash members. For more information, get early downloads of show stickers and a whole bunch of other swag.
00:39:51
Speaker
Hey everybody, Chris Webster here from the Archeology Podcast Network to talk about Timeular, one of our affiliates. Head over to archepodnet.com forward slash Timeular, click through there and you'll see this eight-sided cube that I use for tracking all my time as a project manager, all my time between the Archeology Podcast Network and everything else I do. All you do is label the sides and then you flip it, flip it, flip it, flip it for each thing that you do and it tracks your time exactly. You're able to export that as an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file.
00:40:18
Speaker
to add to your timesheets. So if you're doing project tracking or any sort of tracking, then use Timular. If you're out in the field, you can actually use it on just your mobile device as well. So get Timular at arcpodnet.com forward slash Timular, help support them and support archaeological education and outreach.
00:40:41
Speaker
Welcome back to the archaeotech podcast. This week, because Chris isn't here, instead of doing an app of the day segment, and because I'm having such a good time hearing what Dr. Gonzalez-Tenet has to say about the work he's doing in digital heritage, public outreach, and especially around the site of Rosewood in particular, he has a few extra questions and we're going to go into a third segment. Hopefully he can enlighten us on a few things.
00:41:08
Speaker
Like what is the future of the Rosewood project? Ed? Okay. Well, um, so the future is, uh, again, like the past, it's, it's multi-pronged. So we're, we're doing the big massive virtual world update and that should be out sometime in April of 2019. Um, and that'll be the immersive, the interactive stuff that you'll be able to get a virtual rosewood.com, but also itch.io.
00:41:34
Speaker
We're also doing, you know, more traditional archaeological work. So we'll continue to have the public outreach component that comes along with that. We'll have people visiting us while we do excavations and GPR work out in Rosewood and Sumner and the areas in that part of Levy County.
00:41:52
Speaker
Part of the grant we have is also funding the construction of a professional documentary. So, whereas I sort of incorporated digital storytelling and sort of made a digital documentary several years ago, which again is fairly hokey.
00:42:12
Speaker
we're going to do something much more professional and make this available to the PBS station, the public broadcasting stations here in Florida. And so what we'll do is we'll use that to drive more public outreach. So we'll do a premiere of that documentary in fall of 2019, so this fall, out in Cedar Key, which is the nearest town to Rosewood today that's still populated or occupied or a town.
00:42:40
Speaker
will be helping the local history museum, the Cedar Key Historical Society, create an exhibit, not just about Rosewood, but about African-American history in that area more broadly. And then, of course, the documentary
00:42:55
Speaker
We'll talk about the history of Rosewood, but also talk about how these different digital technologies, the geospatial ones, the various recording technologies, traditional approaches like excavation, and all the new digital technologies like 3D modeling and virtual worlds allow us to communicate this. So really, in some ways, a massive update to the first digital documentary, but also kind of summarizing for a more
00:43:23
Speaker
popular or public audience, the type of research that went into the book, the type of research that is animating this. And of course, the point with all of this is really to help ground and even drive public conversations in Rosewood and elsewhere around reconciliation, these sort of difficult histories.
Methodological Experimentation in Archaeology
00:43:46
Speaker
And I think when people encounter this and have an interaction with
00:43:53
Speaker
a visual representation, it just makes everything that much more real for them. Yeah, the virtual itself isn't necessarily enough, the human interaction, the meeting people face to face, the taking feedback, all that really goes into any successful project, I guess, especially one that like what you're doing with
00:44:14
Speaker
with people who are just outside of living memory, descendant communities of the site, for lack of better word, I feel a little weird talking about just like a site, it sounds a little sanitary, of the town that you're studying. That said, what can other archaeologists do to engage in this type of work? At any stage of this, what do you think
00:44:40
Speaker
If you can wave a magic wand and have other archaeologists behave better and do better work, what would you do? I think it is all about experimentation, methodological experimentation. I think that academic departments, when we're training archaeologists, we often do short shrift methodologies unless you happen to be studying with
00:45:05
Speaker
the one person who's an expert or the department that's renowned for this. And I'm not saying that everybody who's a professor or a lecturer or whatever of archaeology has to be a methodologist, but finding ways to give students or encourage students to have that methodological freedom, that experimentation. So sometimes that could be as easy as talking to students, what are you interested in? Oh, I've been doing this sort of work.
00:45:29
Speaker
you know i'm interested in film or youtube videos or 3d modeling or whatever it is and then just finding a way to integrate them into your project i mean that's the sort of reciprocal thing where educators and students get to learn more but then of course flipping this out past the educational
00:45:48
Speaker
arena, which is of course not the only place this stuff happens. I think, professionally speaking, again, finding ways to make room in a professional setting for this sort of experimentation is crucial. The nice thing is, you know, when I first started doing this work,
00:46:08
Speaker
really in some ways 2005, 2007. My first virtual reconstruction of Rosewood was actually constructed in 2005 using, I think then it was Google Sketchup, which I think is now Trimble Sketchup or just Sketchup. Anyway, it looks awful.
00:46:29
Speaker
It looked awful, and it was me experimenting with it. But of course, now, a few years later, I went to 3DS Max, which was free as an academic or a student or whatever. But during that time period, using open source tools was really difficult. Some of them really weren't up to the tasks in some way. But in the last decade or so, open source tools like Blender,
00:46:55
Speaker
It's fantastic. I only use
Role of Digital Tools in Public Outreach
00:46:59
Speaker
Blender now. I would never go to another program to do 3D modeling. In fact, I even edit my videos with Blender because it has a video sequence editor built in. It's such a powerful program.
00:47:11
Speaker
And I don't have to worry about copyright issues or any of that sort of stuff. For years now, I'm doing the same with GIS and all the geospatial stuff. So I've moved, in fact, all of the rosewood material. I just finished this a few months ago. I've brought it out of the geodatabase format that I had, very SRE focused. And I've brought it into, again, mostly shapefiles.
00:47:34
Speaker
But I brought it into an environment where I can now do all the same work I used to do with paid software, the geospatial stuff with QGIS with free and open source geospatial software. So I think encouraging people to
00:47:48
Speaker
branch out, be experimenting with these open source tools. And I know that a lot of folks doing digital archeology, digital history, digital heritage are doing this sort of stuff. And I think that's one of the big keys. And just finding ways wherever you're at to open that experimental space is hugely important. And then I think a lot of that other stuff's gonna follow, right? You start doing this,
00:48:15
Speaker
The public outreach, the social relevancy, all of that gets amplified or magnified when you do these, I don't know, these alternative or these digital things.
00:48:28
Speaker
Right. Well, you're saying I've heard from a number of other people who work heavily in digital humanities in particular, but that the other boon that they feel of having really high quality open source tools available to them as teaching tools, experimentation, the playfulness that they can bring to bear when they're not spending tens of thousands of dollars on software to
00:48:53
Speaker
lock them into a particular system is really important. I feel from a lot of people that it's even an ethical obligation. And from what I'm hearing from you, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like you feel very similarly.
00:49:08
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. You know, this past weekend, I took some students out to survey some sites here in Central Florida, mostly prehistoric sites, actually, because in my department, I'm the only archaeologist who works in Florida. So, you know, those students who have an interest in Florida, we gravitate towards one another. And so I use QGIS, it's got some great add ons built into it now. I took some
00:49:36
Speaker
some of the state site file information, right? So some of the geospatial, just outlines of sites, mainly mound sites, put that into QGIS, cropped out, just selected and exported the area we were going to, put some aerial photos underneath that, set up a clicking menu. So when you click on each feature, it tells you basic information.
00:50:02
Speaker
And then QGIS immediately, like in two or three minutes, can spit out a web map. And so I loaded that onto my website, slapped a little password on it. We went out there. I met the students. I gave them the address. And so as we're walking around the landscape, they get to, on their cell phones, interact with this level of information. They get to see their little marker move around the map. They get to click on the sites. We've got elevation data.
00:50:31
Speaker
very quickly illustrating to, you know, and this was done on the fly. I mean this from start to finish this whole thing.
00:50:40
Speaker
creating a web application of the sites that we were going to look at that tracked the user in real time as they moved across the landscape, this was less than 10 minutes. And that's the sort of stuff that these tools, doing that with paid software is incredibly cumbersome, if not impossible. That's where the open source tools, I mean,
00:51:02
Speaker
We know those user communities are building stuff that user communities want, and so it's no surprise that when we want to do something creative like this and support, in this case, education, it's just right there and I can do it so rapidly.
00:51:16
Speaker
Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, actually, let's wrap up this conversation. I've got the feeling that I could ask you a million more questions and I could get a million more really interesting answers, probably about two million more really interesting answers. You did a great job of, I started out saying that you were going to talk about GIS based off of the notes that we had, and you draw it right back to GIS and the particular tools you're using and how you're using. So thanks for making my life a lot easier with this interview. Well, I'm happy to do it. That's what I'm here for.
00:51:45
Speaker
Well, I'm happy that you're doing the work you're doing and I hope to see more of it in the future. Thank you. Yes, thank you.
00:51:56
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:52:22
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:52:43
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to arkpodnet.com slash members for more info.