Rethinking archaeology and place

Pompeii. Machu Picchu. Stonehenge. Angkor Wat. The Great Pyramid of Giza.

Those of us who grew up in Western cultures tend to factor in archaeology because the learn about of a place — a point on the map where edifices or artifacts tell us something important about past people and cultures.

Archaeologists have tended to think this fashion, too. A web pages is identified; excavation ensues. Artifacts are discovered. The artifacts are studied, inventoried and thoroughly stored so that they will be available to the archaeologists of the long-term.

But what if the sacred relic that illuminates the past turned into neither a building nor an object? What if it turned right into a trail?

On this issue, we explore the efforts of Indigenous people in British Columbia to document and preserve trails a terrific technique to be records of their history and culture — records created through millennia of movement across the landscape. Social sciences writer Sujata Gupta traveled to northwestern Canada to have a check out efforts to mark the ancient Babine Trail network, which individuals used to carry goods from the coast to inland communities. Participants in the project include members of the local Gitxsan people, archaeologists and graduate students.

“It’s a portion of the field I’ve never been to, and it’s absolutely stunning,” Gupta told me. “Since it’s so some distance north, white settlers arrived late, and Indigenous communities remain strong.”

It turned into an apt assignment for Gupta; before becoming a journalist, she worked at national parks and preserves including Haleakala National Park on Maui, Acadia National Park in Maine and the Mojave National Preserve in California, where she changed into fascinated in regards to the parks’ human history. “My park rangering days were very way back,” she says, “but I turned into always very focused on culture and anthropology.”

In British Columbia, the mapping group used very old and really new technologies to find the overgrown trail. The old: using oral history to spot and tag vestiges of trail markers, including blazes cut into tree bark. The emblem new: maps made using lidar, a remote sensing technology that uses lasers on aircraft or satellites to reveal subtle differences in Earth’s surface. The ease of mapping remote areas with lidar (when compared with, say, thrashing through the barren region on foot) has accelerated a shift in archaeology’s center of attention from individual web sites to landscapes, at the identical time because the technology also proved to be a boon for research at traditional web sites such because the ancient Maya city of Caracol in Belize (SN: 12/2/23, p. 24).

There’s more at stake here than a deeper working out of the Indigenous people and their ancestral land. A planned natural gas pipeline would run through the Babine Trail, and get entry to roads and construction would impact the landscape some distance beyond the trail itself. Participants in the trail-mapping project hope that their work will lend a hand persuade the provincial government to dam, reroute or delay pipeline construction. But which can hinge on whether the federal government sees the region’s cultural heritage as an artifact or as something a lot bigger: a landscape where people wrote history with their feet.