The Evergreen project illustrates the kind of public archaeology that combines education about archaeological methods with information that the residents of Fayetteville and farflung descendants of the people interred in Evergreen will find useful for years to come. Further, including volunteers from the residents of Fayetteville in conducting and designing this project has made this project part of a community wide effort. Recently, Gregory Vogel discussed his project and what he hopes from it, from his new office at the Center for American Archeology at Kampsville.
An Interview with Gregory Vogel
[About.com]: How did you get involved in this cemetery project?[Gregory Vogel]: I began the Evergreen Cemetery Recording Project in 2001, while teaching a class in archaeological method and theory at the University of Arkansas. I have always tried to incorporate 'hands-on' approaches in my classes, to have students actually practice what they are learning. Cemeteries are a perfect place to practice recording and interpreting the change of artifact styles through time. Gravestones are artifacts, and the dates are already on them (in most cases, at least, the stones were made shortly after a person died), so it is easy to order them chronologically to see how they have changed. This was the beginning of the recording project--the first semester it was a short one-day exercise, but it quickly grew from there.
During the recording session the first semester, I realized that many other topics I covered in class could be incorporated into the exercise: mapping and spatial analysis, feature recording and interpretation, and many others. I also discovered that Evergreen is on the National Register of Historic Places, but that there was no full accounting of all of the gravestones or other permanent features of the cemetery. I therefore expanded the class exercise to include a systematic mapping and recording of the gravestones and other features to document the entire cemetery in detail.
A lot of readers not in academics may not realize how often cemeteries are the focus of introductory classes in archaeology. What do you think makes a cemetery an ideal place to introduce students to the methods and ideas of archaeology?
Archaeology is concerned with material culture, and cemeteries present a very rich and easily accessible source of material culture. The material culture of cemeteries is particularly compelling because it reflects important personal beliefs about life, death, religion, and overall worldview, expressed in a public forum.
The course I taught was the mandatory archaeology course for all anthropology majors at the University of Arkansas, and because cemeteries are such rich sources of information I was able to help students come up with projects interesting to them no matter what their anthropological focus. Students interested in biological anthropology, for example, often focused their research projects on paleodemographics, and several of the cultural anthropology students concentrated on gender differences expressed on the gravestones.
Projects in cemeteries can be organized to create very 'manageable' datasets. Evergreen is a big cemetery, so each semester's work concentrated on one section of about 100 gravestones. This way, each student was able to be involved in every step of the research process, from fieldwork to data processing to interpretation.
