Modern ceramics and glasses are two main remains in historical site, except scholarly articles, there are many useful websites we can use to support our analysis. Here are two for Japanese porcelain after 19th century and trademark of glass bottles in the US.
Japanese porcelain 陶片窟 TOUHEN-KUTSU
Although these are very useful resources, we still need to keep caution to everything.
This week’s readings touched on the Japanese American experience during WWII. I thought it might be nice to have some more information on Amache, the camp discussed in Clark and Skiles (2010)’s article.
http://coloradopreservation.org/projects/current-projects/granada-relocation-center/
What is most surprising to me is the scale of these camps. Hawaii never experienced this scale of relocation, only a small number of politicians and teachers were relocated as a result of the War Relocation Act, so to realize that 8000 people were forcibly moved to just one of these camps is astounding. Aside from the work done at Amache, I am not familiar with other archaeological projects that have looked at Japanese internment.
Given that this coming week’s readings focus on colonial contact between Russians/Spanish and indigenous groups, I couldn’t resist throwing in a little bit about “Hawaii’s Russian Adventure”, because it speaks very clearly to issues of differential colonial processes, indigenous agency, and mainstream interpretations.
My undergrad mentor’s dissertation work was focused on Pa’ula’ula o Hipo heiau (temple/ritual complex) located on Kaua’i Island (http://www.hawaiistateparks.org/parks/kauai/russian-ft-elizabeth.cfm). It is a National Historic Landmark, but interestingly, it was listed as an NHL because of its association with the Russians during the early colonial period, rather than as a monument that depicts a very complex and dynamic period of history for the Hawaiian Kingdom. Historical documents and maps reinforced the early ideas that the fort was built for Russians, but archaeological work at the site shows that despite the incorporation of Russian architecture in the foot print of the fort, the internal structure and occupation sites on the exterior of the fort are typical of Hawaiian ritual organization.
The article does it more justice than I can pretend to do, so read it here http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/anthpubs/ucb/text/kas081-009.pdf
The book that he wrote based on his dissertation research is available in our library, and is a great read if you are bored over the summer.
After long months of procrastination, I’ve finally updated my own blog, Improbable Artifacts. I’m not going to cross-post here, because the latest post is very long, and more travelogue and cultural commentary than historical archaeology (though I did name-check James Deetz). However, the blogging we’re doing in this class has got me thinking about renewing my own efforts, and I thought it would be worth sharing a link.
I have been trying to return to the kind of writing I enjoyed in college, which is to say lots of free-association that somehow ends up looking like an argument after a while. Obviously this isn’t the kind of thing one sees in Nature, or even in a halfway-reputable middlebrow publication like The New Yorker, nor do I encourage you to emulate it at all, as it will probably get you banished from polite academic and literary circles.
Writing travelogues is especially tricky for obvious reasons: dropping in on an unfamiliar culture and commenting on it as if it were a coherent whole is perhaps acceptable in archaeology, but doesn’t fly when we’re talking about living, individually distinct people. (why archaeologists still get away with it is a bit of a mystery to me, but that’s another story). At the same time, anyone who’s traveled will know that there are certain senses of place and culture that are worth remarking upon, even at the risk of generalization. Talking about another culture is still one of the most convenient ways to comment on one’s own, through comparison. So, I try to convey those impressions while at the same time acknowledging that there are other realities out there that I haven’t touched on.
However, if my most recent post has value for the purposes of this class, it’s as an example (albeit kind of sloppy) of creative nonfiction style, of a sort that works well in blog posts. Notice that I alternate between reporting experiences and interpreting them, back and forth. Too much of one or the other will bore the reader to tears, but moving between the two allows for a number of things besides keeping the reader entertained. You can constantly refer from experience to theory or interpretation and vice versa, so that each remains a readily available reference for the other. This in turn adds a kind of hermeneutic quality that usually doesn’t survive the rigid division of academic papers into sections of theory, observations, hypotheses, etc. Finally, it ties the abstract, argumentative qualities of your theory and interpretation to a more concrete, graspable narrative, which, as we’ve seen, has many functions that go deep into the human subconscious. For those reasons, alternating story and interpretation every couple paragraphs or so is a useful thing to do in your blog posts, when it’s possible. Sometimes it doesn’t work–that’s always a judgment call you’ll have to make on your own. In the case of my own post, perhaps it didn’t work, but I be you can find others out there where it does.
You’ve seen it, I’ve seen it, it’s shown in glass cabinets, hidden under sauces, or buried in the dirt of historical sites.
A classic platter in willow pattern (Image source: http://civilwartalk.com/threads/blue-willow-china.91070/)
It’s got a pagoda, a fence, some pastorality, a boat. It’s a game of telephone played with pictures across a few centuries. You’d better believe it, it’s the Willow Pattern, and it is one of the most-seen images of the past few hundred years.
You might not’ve ever thought about it before. You might have never looked too closely at your grandmother’s plate collection, and their subtle variety. You might have even assumed that this famed icon of china was from, oh, I don’t know… China.
A set of willow pattern ceramics. Image source: http://civilwartalk.com/threads/blue-willow-china.91070/
Nope. It’s unknown who designed the Willow Pattern, but it’s a toss-up between two English dudes from the late 1700s. If anything, the pattern’s an icon of Orientalism: wanna-be aesthetics on wanna-be porcelain.
It was even marketed with a wanna-be legend–two youngin’s in love, an accountant and a Mandarin’s daughter, who run away to be together and are ultimately murdered by the megalomaniacal Mandarin. The gods take pity, and transmogrify their corpses into birds (the story can be found in the form of a delightfully lulling tune by Momus). Yep–those two gallivanting doves you stared down during all those dull family meals–they’re lusty dead youth, transmogrified.
I know a lot of people are interested in local archaeology, particularly in the Fort Vancouver area. This is a recent report regarding cultural resources at the fort. There is a nice discussion in the director’s letter about Places of Abjection versus Places of Memory, and an article on historical ceramics that is particularly relevant to this week’s lessons:
A few years back I had the good fortune to listen to Bonnie Clark from the University of Denver discuss her community-based work with the families and descendants of Japanese-Americans interred at Amache. She described the careful excavation of a small rock feature; a scene of rocks emerging out of the soil, artfully arranged; she and her students recognizing it as a rock garden carefully assembled by the residents of Amache.
For several years the cultural resources team at Manzanar National Historic Site has been working alongside former internees and their families to restore similar gardens at Manzanar.
Most recently, the team has resotred the Arai fish pond and Block 12 Mess Hall gardens, small monuments that, like the gardens at Amache, attest to the perserverance of internees and their struggles to maintain home and community during WWII.