1
Volume 1: Presentation Papers
Proceedings
of the
Maritime Cultural Landscape
Symposium
October 14-15, 2015
University of Wisconsin-Madison
2
Front cover: Split Rock Light Station, Town of Beaver Bay, Lake County, Minnesota. Built in 1909-
1910 as part of a concerted eort to upgrade the Great Lakes navigation system, the Split Rock
Light Station served the ports of Two Harbors and Duluth-Superior. From these ports, tons of iron
ore were shipped to eastern industrial states and grain was shipped throughout the Great Lakes.e
light station and associated buildings were designated a National Historic Landmark in 2011. Photo
by John N. Vogel, October 2007; courtesy of the National Historic Landmarks Program.
3
Volume 1: Presentation Papers
Proceedings
of the
Maritime Cultural Landscape
Symposium
October 14-15, 2015
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Barbara Wyatt, Editor
National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior
Washington, DC
2018
e contents and opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reect
the policies, guidance, or procedures of the National Register of Historic Places, the
National Historic Landmarks Program, the National Park Service, the Department
of the Interior, or any other Federal program or agency.
4
Acknowledgments
e Maritime Cultural Landscape Symposium resulted from conversations held by participants in the
National Register Landscape Initiative webinar series. e National Park Service thanks those whose
energy and vision inspired the gathering on the University of Wisconsin campus to share ideas and
ndings about maritime cultural landscapes and their inclusion in historic preservation initiatives.
e symposium was planned and carried out by the following committee:
Brad Barr, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
James Delgado, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Valerie Grussing, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
James Moore, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
Daina Penkiunas, Wisconsin Historical Society, SHPO
Michael Russo, National Park Service
Barbara Wyatt, National Park Service
is publication has been made possible by funding from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
e committee also appreciates funding provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin-
istration, the National Park Service, and the Wisconsin Historical Society. e National Conference of
State Historic Preservation Ocers is thanked for its eciency in carrying out symposium registration
and reimbursement. e National Center for Preservation Technology and Training is thanked for its
contributions to this publication.
e committee appreciates the service and hospitality provided by e Pyle Center and the Lowell Center
Conference and Lodging Facility, both operated by University of Wisconsin-Extension on the University
of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
e services of Matthew Payne, publications designer, are greatly appreciated.
5
Table of Contents
Introduction to the Volume 1 Proceedings
Barbara Wyatt .................................................................................................................................................. 7
Keynote Presentation
Sink or Swim: Addressing Maritime Cultural Landscapes in the National Register Program
J. Paul Loether, Chief, National Register and National Historic Landmarks Program, NPS .......... 9
1. Perspectives on Maritime Cultural Landscapes
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 13
NOAA Perspectives on Maritime Cultural Landscapes, James Delgado .............................................. 14
BOEM Perspectives on Maritime Cultural Landscapes, James Moore ................................................. 17
SHPO Perspectives on Maritime Cultural Landscapes, Daina Penkiunas ............................................ 19
NPS Perspectives on Maritime Cultural Landscapes, Barbara Wyatt .................................................... 20
2. Characterizing Maritime Cultural Landscapes
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 23
Characterizing MCLs from First Principles: Cultural Landscape Approaches and MCLs,
Valerie Grussing ...................................................................................................................................... 24
Characterizing MCLs in the Great Lakes: Western Lake Michigan, John Jensen ................................ 27
Identifying Indigenous Cultural Landscapes in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, Deanna Beacham ... 33
3. e MCL Approach: Pros and Cons
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 35
Using the MCL Approach in National Marine Sanctuaries: e North Carolina Coast,
James Delgado ......................................................................................................................................... 36
Challenges of Using the MCL Approach on the Outer Continental Shelf, Brandi Carrier ................ 40
e Many and Varied MCLs of New York State, Daria Merwin ............................................................ 44
Submerged Archeological Sites and National Register Guidance on Landscapes: Do We Need
Maritime Cultural Landscapes?, Michael Russo ................................................................................. 48
4. Case Studies
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 55
Drakes Bay NHL Historic District, Paul Engel ......................................................................................... 56
Landscape vs. Discontinuous District: Florida Dugout Canoes, Julie B. Duggins .............................. 59
Delineating Maritime Cultural Landscapes at National Parks:
Dry Tortugas National Park and St. Croix Scenic Waterway, Bert Ho ............................................ 65
Lake Superior’s Apostle Islands: A Maritime Cultural Landscape Case Study, David Cooper .......... 68
e Quincy Smelter Complex as a Maritime Cultural Landscape, Brenda Williams .......................... 72
Mallows Bay as a Maritime Cultural Landscape, Susan Langley and Deborah Marx ......................... 75
Waves of History: Maritime Cultural Landscapes in Hawai‘i, Hans Van Tilburg ................................ 80
Risk, Salvage, and Exploring the Concept of the Maritime Frontier: Utilizing eory to Frame a
Maritime Cultural Landscape Approach in the Florida Keys, Josh Marano ................................... 84
From Land to Sea, or Sea to Land: Reconciling Key Features of Terrestrial and
Maritime Landscapes, Brinnen Carter ................................................................................................. 94
Archaeological and Biological Assessment of Submerged Landforms o the
California and Oregon Coasts, David Ball .......................................................................................... 98
6
5. Non-submerged Prehistoric Maritime Landscapes
Introduction ................................................................................................................................................101
12,000 Years of MCLs on California’s Northern Channel Islands:
From Paleocoastal Lithic Workshops to Chinese Abalone Fishing Camps, Todd Braje ............. 102
It’s Not Just Garbage: Identifying Ceremony and Cosmology in Shell Middens, Jerey Shanks ..... 110
Island Landscapes of the North American South Atlantic:
Deep Histories and Endangered Resources, Matthew Sanger ........................................................ 115
Maritime Cultural Landscapes in Motion: Futures Past along the Northern Gulf Coast of Florida,
Kenneth Sassaman ................................................................................................................................. 120
MCLs on Eastern National Forests: e Example of Late Woodland
Landscapes in the Eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Sean Dunham .................................... 126
Constructing Shell Landscapes in Southwest Florida, Margo Schwadron .......................................... 131
6. Native American, Alaskan and Hawaiian Landscapes
Introduction ................................................................................................................................................135
Sitka Indian Village: A History Unpreserved?, Jessica Perkins ............................................................. 136
Hawaiian Maritime Cultural Landscapes: Integrating Knowledge Systems,
Protecting Heritage Areas, Trisha Kehaulani Watson ...................................................................... 140
Ceremonial Stone Landscapes of New England and Developing Best Practices to Assess
Submerged Paleocultural Landscapes, Doug Harris and Doug Jones ........................................... 147
e Grand Ronde: Linking Tribal Cultural Landscapes and MCLs, Briece Edwards ....................... 154
Bad River Water and Culture Maps Project: Countermapping with Bad River Ojibwe,
Jessie Conaway ......................................................................................................................................157
7. Management and Protections of MCLs
Introduction ................................................................................................................................................161
An Introduction to the American Battleeld Protection Program, Kristen McMasters ................... 162
USS Huron: From National Tragedy to National Register, Anna Gibson Holloway .......................... 167
NPS Response to Climate Change and Cultural Resource Preservation, Susan Dolan .................... 178
e Epic Saga of the Confederate Sea Raider Shenandoah: A Dierent Type of “Battleeld”
on Multiple Maritime Cultural Landscapes, Brad Barr ................................................................... 182
World War II and the Battle of the Atlantic, Joe Hoyt ........................................................................... 185
8. Legal Considerations: Maritime Cultural Landscapes Panel Discussion
Introduction ................................................................................................................................................191
Summary of MCL Legal Considerations, David ulman .................................................................... 192
9. MCL Symposium Conclusion
Introduction ................................................................................................................................................ 197
Concluding Remarks about the MCL Symposium, Ben Ford ................................................................ 198
10. Summary
Maritime Cultural Landscape Workshop, Brad Barr .............................................................................203
Recommended Readings for Participants in the Maritime Cultural Landscape Workshop ...............207
7
is publication reects the essence of the infor-
mation and ideas that were shared at the Mari-
time Cultural Landscape Symposium, held on the
campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison
in the fall of 2015. Much of the conversation about
these remarkable landscapes took place aer the
sessions—over drinks, meals, coee—but the basis
of such conversations was the research, eldwork,
and government and tribal initiatives that were the
subject of the presentations given during the two-
day symposium.
e gathering was the result of nearly two years
of planning by three federal agencies and one state
agency: the National Park Service, the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, and the
Wisconsin State Historic Preservation Oce. It
provided a venue and an opportunity for scholars,
representatives of government and tribal pro-
grams, and consultants to discuss their common
interests in maritime cultural landscapes—MCLs.
It may have been the rst such gathering of Amer-
icans who have a scholarly interest in MCLs and
their recognition and protection under federal
regulations related to the National Historic Pres-
ervation Act.
Questions remain about how MCLs are and
will be evaluated for eligibility for the National
Register of Historic Places. eir eligibility is a
critical consideration in the environmental review
process, with great repercussions for their pro-
tection. To that end, it is essential that we con-
tinue to explore the range of properties that may
be recognized as MCLs and how they should be
evaluated.
Maritime cultural landscapes are found across
the nation—on the mainland and islands; in coast-
al areas, waterways, and inland waterbodies; and
aboveground, subsurface, and underwater— in any
imaginable combination. Many speakers gave a
nod to Christer Westerdahl, the Norwegian schol-
ar generally attributed with rst using the term
“maritime cultural landscape.” e presentations
given at the symposium revealed the breadth of
the denitions of MCLs and the recognition that
one shipwreck, one coastal historic district, and
one collection of ceremonial stones are best un-
derstood in the context of a broader setting. is
physical context will embody essential historical
signicance and constitute the “landscape” part
of the MCL concept. e research, concepts, and
motivations expressed in these papers provide both
inspiration and fodder for moving forward. What
does that mean?
To explore that question, the day aer the sym-
posium, a group of participants met in a workshop
format to discuss what we had learned, essential
questions that linger, and how those interested in
the recognition and protection of MCLs can pro-
mote better inclusion in the National Register. e
last chapter of this publication presents a summary
of workshop ndings. While it does not provide an
actual roadmap forward, it indicates the necessity
of involving many in the discussions that lead to
a fuller understanding of the role of MCLs in the
National Register program, including representa-
tives of various state and federal agencies, tribes,
scholars, and interest groups.
e publication compiles the papers presented
at the MCL gathering in Madison. When the sym-
posium was planned, there was no intent to publish
the presentations as papers, but it became clear that
the collection of presentations provided a sweep-
ing glimpse of research and policy considerations
across federal agencies, states, tribes, and univer-
sities. Aer the symposium, presenters were given
an opportunity to contribute a paper version of
their presentation for this publication. ose who
did not have a written record of their presentation
allowed the transcription of their talk to be edited
for inclusion. e contributions of all participants
is greatly appreciated.
Introduction to the Proceedings
Barbara Wyatt
National Park Service
8
Volume 2 of this publication includes links to
the videos of the presentations. ose are particu-
larly useful for seeing the images that accompanied
the presentations. Together, the two volumes pres-
ent valuable documentation of the symposium and
a tool for moving forward with other initiatives,
particularly in regard to the National Register.
Note on spelling: e editor acknowledges that both
“archeology” and “archaeology” are correct spellings
and has respected each contributing author’s pre-
ferred spelling.
9
Summary of Paul Loether’s Presentation
Before I started my job with the National Park
Service about seven years ago, I was the Director of
Culture for the Connecticut Commission on Cul-
ture and Tourism. at was an amalgam that was
put together from the old historical commission,
the arts commission, and the oce of tourism.
My portfolio included the State Historic Preserva-
tion Oce, which is what I had come up through.
Prior to that, I worked with both local and regional
non-prot preservation organizations.
I am going to spend most of my presentation
discussing some maritime cultural landscapes.
What I would like to try to do is give a sense of
those kinds the National Register Program consid-
ers maritime cultural landscapes—provide a little
bit of the philosophy behind our perspective as to
what maritime landscapes are and are not. I want
to be clear upfront that, at least currently, maritime
cultural landscapes are not a National Register
property type. ey are an area of specic signi-
cance usually contextual in framework.
I have very much considered the philosophy
of what we are trying to do at the Register with
maritime landscapes in particular, and cultural
landscapes in general. is denition is specic to
cultural landscapes:
Cultural properties represent the combined
works of nature and of humans.
It actually mostly came from, oddly enough,
Wikipedia. I like the philosophy behind this de-
nition (even though I question the syntax of the
English) just because it identies what we are try-
ing to get to as we work with cultural landscapes
and especially maritime cultural landscapes.
So, in essence, what is the dierence between a
cultural landscape and a maritime landscape? I was
putting together a care package for my daughter at
the College of Wooster, doing shopping at a Giant
supermarket, and came across a box of Swiss Miss
cocoa mix—the dierence between a cultural land-
scape and a maritime cultural landscape? Just add
water. at is a simplistic approach, but essentially
that is what we are talking about here.
In my talk, I review the following maritime
cultural landscapes, which are listed below with
links to their National Register or National Historic
Landmark nomination, if listed or designated and
if available.
• Stony Creek/imble Islands Historic District, CT
https://npgallery.nps.gov/nrhp/GetAsset?assetID=cf-
62b50e-87a1-4858-a41c-50b6f3e070ba
• Edgartown Village Historic District, Martha’s
Vineyard, MA
https://www.ncptt.nps.gov/download/43685/
• Kennedy Compound, Hyannisport, MA (Na-
tional Historic Landmark) Menemsha, MA
https://npgallery.nps.gov/pdost/docs/nrhp/
text/72001302.pdf
• Nantucket Historic District (National Historic
Landmark), MA
https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/165b0948-ca3e-
452d-b39e-32af922435a4
• Dune Shacks of the Peak Hills Historic District,
Provincetown, Cape Cod, MA
• Smith Island Historic District, MD
• Fishtown Historic District, Leland, MI
• Turtle and Shark, American Samoa
https://www.nps.gov/nr/feature/places/pdfs/14000925.pdf
• Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands
Keynote Presentation
Sink or Swim: Addressing Maritime Cultural Landscapes
in the National Register Program
J. Paul Loether
Chief, National Register/National Historic Landmarks Program
National Park Service
10
Cape Wind
One of the most important Maritime Cultur-
al Landscape determinations in the Section 106
process involved Cape Wind in Nantucket Sound
in Massachusetts. I want to emphasize this case,
because it became an important precedent in the
recognition of maritime cultural landscapes.
A number of years ago, the National Register
Program became involved in a Section 106 com-
pliance case that is known as “Cape Wind.” Cape
Wind primarily involved a determination of eligi-
bility request for Nantucket Sound, though we also
looked at the project’s impact on the Kennedy com-
pound and the island of Nantucket (both NHLs).
One of the things that really came to the fore in
Cape Wind was the Wampanoag Tribes’ claim
that this area, particularly Nantucket Sound in its
entirety, was a traditional cultural property (TCP).
We had the good fortune to engage in what was
essentially a government-to-government consulta-
tion with both tribes involved—the Wampanoags
of Gay Head and the Mashpee Wampanoags—
which are the surviving branches of two federally
recognized area tribes. We had an opportunity to
work with them and learn “rst hand” about the
historic signicance they ascribe to this area.
Just to give you a sense of what we learned from
our consultation: the pink area to the right on
Figure 1 is where their cultural hero Moshup and
his wife Squannit supposedly came from in the
very dim past. When Moshup moved, the path is
roughly a red line. Tradition holds that the body of
water between the Cape Elizabeth Islands, which is
the small string above Martha’s Vineyard, and
Martha’s Vineyard itself, is a channel created by
Moshup dragging his toe through the water. Nan-
tucket, in their tradition, was also created by
Moshup. For those of you who do not know the
area, it gets very foggy, gets very misty, and the
tradition is that the fog was caused by Moshup
smoking his pipe, and then one day his pipe
burned out, so he turned it over and then created
Nantucket.
All of the little sites that are plotted as small red
dots on this map relate to the traditional cultural
property aspects of this area with the tribes. What
we saw when we mapped them—and again, this
map does not include any archeological sites per se,
and there are many in this area as a whole—these
are just some of the sites signicant as TCPs that
we talked about when we were there. is map
helps one to understand the nature of the resources
they are talking about; it becomes very clear that
what the tribe recognizes is an indigenous cultural
landscape with many resources that relate to their
traditions. Many of these resources are “not built.”
ey are belief-driven. And as we plotted this, the
visual representation resulted in an epiphany that
that’s what we were looking at—a large cultural
landscape.
e image in Figure 2 provides a view of Gay
Head, which is a National Natural Landmark. It is
on the southwestern end of Martha’s Vineyard. It
is the point central for the Wampanoag tribe of
Gay Head. Gay Head, traditionally, is where
Moshup settled when he nally made that move-
ment o of Cape Cod and down into Martha’s
Figure 1: Map of area inhabited by Moshup and Squannit;
courtesy of NPS CRGIS.
Figure 2: Sunset over Nantucket; courtesy of NPS.
11
Vineyard. If you look at the landscape, you’ll see
streaks of red and streaks of black. e red is
where Moshup, aer he shed and caught his
whales, killed them. e black traditionally is
where he cooked them. ere’s a strong relation-
ship with the tribe in terms of belief, signicance,
symbolism, and ceremonial intent.
e center of the seal of the Wampanoag Tribe
of Gay Head Aquinnah depicts Moshup standing
in front of Gay Head with his whale. It gives you a
sense that for indigenous landscapes, signicance
oen does not require built things. It is very oen
mostly belief driven. Signicance that is ascribed to
places is oen important to recognizing a cultural
landscape. And in the case of Nantucket Sound
and Cape Cod and the Islands… it is very much a
maritime landscape.
One of the most signicant aspects of this is re-
ected in Nantucket Sound itself, which the Keeper
of the National Register determined in 2010 to be
signicant as a traditional cultural property within
the context of the larger Cape Cod and the Islands
Historic District. is is because of the Sound’s im-
portance ceremonially to the tribe at the junction
of the sky, the sun, and the water at dawn.
Wampanoag, roughly translated, means, “people
of the dawn,” and that’s a responsibility that both
tribes take on, not only for their own people, but
also as representatives of tribes across the nation.
While you may see a channel marker, beyond that,
really what you see is entirely natural. It is the
belief-based association with the very natural
maritime landscape that makes Nantucket signi-
cant for the tribes. People may ask, how is it a
“landscape? It’s really all water?” For the purposes
of eligibility for the Register, districts that are
signicant landscapes oen include bodies of
water, large or small—some call them (informally)
“riverscapes,” “lakescapes,” or “seascapes”—and a
cultural landscape district can include anything
that has to do with a broad natural expanse with
natural features that may relate historically to a
group or groups of people, including water.
Concluding Comments
We in the National Register Program do not think
we necessarily have all the answers; therefore, the
purpose of the presentations at the MCL sym-
posium are to record the work, suggestions, and
challenges of many who work in the eld. at
said, the Register program has some strong feelings
about the importance of cultural landscapes and
maritime landscapes in particular, so the following
discussions and presentations are of great interest
to the future of this work.
Paul Loether is now the Keeper of the National Reg-
ister of Historic Places.
(A link to the full transcript of Mr. Loether’s pre-
sentation can be found in Volume 2.)
Figure 3: e Seal of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head
Aquinnah; accessed at http://www.wampanoagtribe.net/
pages/wampanoag_way/other.
Figure 4: Channel Marker in Nantucket Sound; courtesy of NPS.
12
13
e Maritime Cultural Landscape Symposium ses-
sions began with comments from representatives of
the agencies who organized the symposium. Sta
who represented their agency in the nearly two
years of discussions leading up to the symposium
were invited to comment on why they consider
MCLs important, why preservation programs need
to address them, and how they are incorporating
them into their program planning.
Proceeding alphabetically, James Delgado of the
NOAA Oce of National Marine Sanctuaries spoke
on behalf of the agency that may have the most
expansive involvement with the nation’s maritime
history. NOAA’s Maritime Heritage Program has
deepened its engagement with coastal communities
and Tribes, recognizing that the management and
protection of both individual maritime resources,
such as a shipwreck, and more extensive maritime
cultural landscapes require signicant community
engagement. Ultimately, achieving a better under-
standing of MCLs as an agency and sharing that
understanding with the public will help win people
over to a more holistic vision of maritime history
resources and their relationship to the present.
James Moore was the spokesman for the Bureau
of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the newest
federal agency of the group, but one with a profound
interest in understanding and recognizing MCLs.
BOEM’s jurisdiction spans the Outer Continental
Shelf—some 1.7 billion acres—of distant and deep
waters. Although the relatively small agency’s re-
sources are somewhat limited for carrying out exten-
sive studies, they have accomplished important work
with Tribal partners and other agencies. BOEM is
especially interested in contributing to a better un-
derstanding of underwater cultural landscapes.
Daina Penkiunas, Deputy Historic Preservation
Ocer for Wisconsin, had no trouble demonstrat-
ing Upper Midwestern interests in MCLs. Between
the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River—and
myriad smaller waterways—Wisconsin’s maritime
history and its interest in MCLs (although per-
haps not by that term) is not new. She recounted
the various historical manifestations of maritime
culture, from steamboat trac to logging the north
woods to industry, agriculture, and tourism. e
state has acknowledged this history through Na-
tional Register nominations and innovative pro-
grams like the maritime trails program.
Barbara Wyatt, a historian and landscape spe-
cialist with the National Register and the NHL
Program, developed her presentation around the
words “concept, collaboration, and results.” She
explained that the concept of a landscape approach
to resource evaluation was introduced with the
rural historic landscapes bulletin in 1989. It has not
been widely embraced for other landscapes, but the
National Register is interested in collaborating with
other agencies to explore the potential for broaden-
ing the landscape paradigm, including as a means
for evaluating maritime cultural landscapes. With
other participants in the symposium, she hopes that
an increased understanding of MCLs will achieve
results, notably the listing of MCLs in the National
Register as historic districts and the development of
guidance tools for nomination preparers.
e agency representatives for the Perspectives
session set the stage for the presentations that fol-
lowed. Many of the subsequent speakers were from
BOEM, NOAA, NPS, or the Wisconsin SHPO, and
it was useful to have a fundamental understanding
of how these agencies support, encourage, inspire,
and use the research described throughout the
symposium.
Barbara Wyatt
National Register of Historic Places
National Historic Landmarks Program
National Park Service
1. Perspectives on Maritime
Cultural Landscapes
Introduction
14
I would like to start by being the rst of a group to
talk a bit about perspectives from the various agen-
cies: why we care, what we are doing, why we’re
doing what we do, and a bit about where we go as
the next few days evolve.
NOAA, as the nation’s ocean science agency, is
more than just the NASA of the seas, more than a
weather bureau, and more than even a collection
of unique sites out there in the marine sanctuary
system. NOAA is an agency with a specic task of
dealing with the environment. In that, you get at
the heart of why NOAA, as an agency, and why the
Oce of National Marine Sanctuaries, like the idea
of the maritime cultural landscape. At its simplest,
and as we have now adopted as policy, we see
maritime cultural landscapes as a means by which
we can start to deal with this very basic concept of
human beings responding to the maritime envi-
ronment, and increasingly, and particularly for us,
how human beings now have shied as a species
to being an organism that not only responds to the
maritime environment, but inuences and is in fact
changing the maritime environment. I think we
saw that powerfully with the demonstration of an
island disappearing in Paul Loether’s presentation.
With apologies to anybody who wants to get
into that argument, climate change is real. Sea level
rise is going to happen. Indeed, we also see other
issues, such as ocean acidication and things that
concern us particularly in sanctuaries, which are
special places in the sea to preserve not only the
unique natural resources, but also those cultural
resources, those heritage resources. What I like
particularly, and what we have also adapted as our
own policy, is that in large measure, particularly
for us in the ocean, we are not splitting the two,
that is, in terms of natural resources versus cultural
resources. In many ways, they do overlap. ey in-
terconnect powerfully in indigenous culture where
what some might perceive as a natural resource is a
cultural resource. Talk to the Makah Nation about
whales, for example.
e Maritime Heritage Program, which is now
little better than a couple of decades old, was
established by our then director, Dan Basta, to
look at and to engage the sanctuaries in maritime
heritage as well as cultural resources. Initially, I
think, as one might see, particularly looking at our
own past, that was then very powerfully focused on
shipwrecks. I have to say, being a shipwreck type of
person, I like that. I like it a lot, but it didn’t really
re on all cylinders, in particular as we went out
and we began to engage with communities. When
you take a certain community and you go to talk
to them about their shipwrecks, you nd rather
quickly that, in some cases, people may respond
to them. ey may like them. In other cases, they
simply do not like them. At Stellwagen Bank
National Marine Sanctuary, the traditional shing
community sees the wrecks of the shing boats out
there as something not to be celebrated or even
recognized. ose are the losers. It is the ones that
are out there that are actively shing and work-
ing that are the winners. ey are the culture that
needs to be celebrated, not those who went down.
I think, as well, what we also found was that we
were not really engaging with our communities if
we only focused on shipwrecks out there, and did
not somehow relate them back to the communities
ashore. Now, we do try to engage in a variety of
ways. Out at USS Monitor National Marine Sanctu-
ary, the engagement with the Battle of the Atlantic
does link people specically to shipwrecks because
they have families who served on those vessels and
who in some cases died on those vessels. In that
way, we have seen people suddenly get it, or care
about something that hitherto they may not have,
even if they are in the heartland of the country,
because Uncle Joe or their grandfather was on one
of those tankers or one of those freighters and even
in one of those U-boats.
With that, I think we began to look at this as
part of a critical question for us, which was how do
we not only manage and protect, but how do we
NOAA Perspectives on Maritime Cultural Landscapes
James Delgado
Oce of National Marine Sanctuaries, Maritime Heritage Program
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
15
engage? How do we share? How do we connect?
How do we become more relevant? In that, how do
we deal with a variety of audiences, in particular
people who don’t have a connection or, perhaps,
that is what they think? How do we engage with the
indigenous communities? I think we needed to do
more, and we certainly knew we needed to do more
than simply address something as seemingly simple
as dierent indigenous peoples or dierent ethnic
groups who happened to serve on ships in historic
times. We needed to look at water and uses of water
throughout a wider spread of time and in multi-
ple contexts. We needed to look at the submerged
prehistoric landscapes. We also needed to look at
ongoing, persisting, indigenous traditional uses.
In that vein, yes, I think Paul Loether is abso-
lutely right. I think the drowned Celilo Falls on
the Columbia River, a powerful landmark in the
maritime cultural landscape of peoples on that
river, even though drowned by dam construction,
for the tribes there it remains something that tugs
at their hearts and is part of their ongoing land-
scape as well as their belief system. When that dam
nally comes down or that water is lowered and
that dam once again roars and the sh move along
it and the people can use their traditional dip nets,
then I think something will come back out of this
landscape and be back in that landscape.
From our perspective in sanctuaries, we have
adopted maritime cultural landscapes in their
broadest sense as our policy in terms of how we
deal with cultural resources. We are increasing-
ly focusing more resources on that, not only by
conducting studies, but by actively going out and
doing, listening, taking things like a white paper
developed by the Marine Protected Areas Center
with Val Grussing and so many others here, and
using it as part of our management plan, and as
part of our consultations. Ultimately, what we
would like to see is how we can actually sit down
and not just do, say, National Register nominations
for ships or collections of ships, but address the
landscape itself. Even if we do not end up doing a
nomination, using that criteria, adapting, blending
it into our own decision making I think is going to
be key for us.
One of the most dicult aspects for us is that,
indeed, the maritime cultural landscape is not
always tangible. It is as simple and as powerful as
an ocean current which has been used as a high-
way, either by prehistoric Polynesian navigators or
by people who followed that route, some of whom
ended up shipwrecking, but others just consistently
and persistently using it. It can be as powerful as
a means by which through this area of the water
souls passed to the next plane of existence. It can
be as powerful as a sacred place, as I saw when I
was out at Bikini. In that maritime cultural land-
scape, when we were diving when I was in the
National Park Service back in 1989 to 1990 on the
eet, it became very clear that the maritime cul-
tural landscape, even though irradiated, still was
powerful and resonated with the people. When one
of the Bikinians came back and, with us, went out
and took us to the sacred reef and was again able
to gather the grasses that grew on that reef .... How
could you not get it? How could you not connect
with these people in this sense?
Indeed, in that vein, as well, I think moving
forward for us, a couple of other things are essen-
tial as we grapple with some of our responsibilities.
For better or for worse, probably for worse, NOAA,
thanks to Congress and the courts, has a fair
amount of the ball when it comes to dealing with
Titanic. For us, in looking at that, and particular
answering hard questions at times from dierent
places, why should Americans care about a British
ship sitting out there in international waters? Well,
we care for more than just the simple fact that it is
an iconic shipwreck, that, in the treatment of that
shipwreck, perhaps certain messages are sent to the
broader public. We care for that reason. We also care
because Titanic is a powerful element in the broader
American maritime cultural landscape. ere are
the homes of the lost and the survivors, memorials
and graves. It cuts across all sorts of lines.
I am not sure we could ever do something per-
haps with a National Register nomination for Ti-
tanic’s cultural landscape, but just imagine if, as an
ocean agency such as us or BOEM or the National
Park Service, with its own submerged lands, we
were able to link up and say, “Titanic is more than
16
this site. It is the Wagner Library, built to honor a
dead son. It is Molly Brown’s house in Denver. It is
the monument put up in Washington, D.C., to the
men who stepped aside and let the women into the
life boats. It is this chapel. It is this group of graves.
Indeed, it is also those graves up there in Halifax,
and it is that place that it was built out there. It is
part not only of an American maritime cultural
landscape, but a Western, European, perhaps, mar-
itime cultural landscape.”
If we are to deal with whaling, it is more than
just shipwrecks. It is more than just Charles W.
Morgan as a National Landmark oating out there.
It is shore whaling stations. It is indigenous and
persistent whaling traditions, like those of the
Makah. It is the Basque whaler wreck San Juan
in Canada. It is whalers’ churches. It is whaling
grounds, known and charted on the oceans but,
otherwise, for most people, just a big old patch of
blue until you understand that these places have
ongoing cultural signicance because of what
happened there. In that, I think moving forward
for us in NOAA we see there is not only an ability
to better understand and deal with resources, but
also to then take something that hitherto has been
out of sight and out of mind for most people, not
merely under the water, but on the water and part
of the water, and get them to care about it.
To get people to care about it, to get them to
support what we do as the government, what we do
as practicing professionals who care about heri-
tage and culture and tradition, to get them to care
about it as people who are actually paying the bills
is key. What’s also key is then taking that and using
those oceans, using those messages, to encourage
the type of things that need to be happening today
in society—discussion and dialogue, not merely
drawing lines. Talking about how these themes
unite us, talking about how these themes speak not
just to the past but to the present and to the future.
Coming back to the start of where I was with this,
for our mission, using it as well to get people to care
about the oceans themselves because they are in
trouble. at, ultimately, is why my bosses believe
in a Maritime Heritage Program in an ocean sci-
ence agency.
17
I am a Marine Archaeologist in BOEM’s Oce of
Environmental Programs. At just over four years in
existence, we are the youngest of the agencies and
partners that are being involved with this event.
Before, BOEM was known as MMS, the Minerals
Management Service.
In 2010, you may have heard of an incident
called the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Aer that,
MMS was designated as BOEMRE, the Bureau
of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and
Enforcement. In 2011, that was split again into
two separate agencies. BOEM and also BSEE, the
Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforce-
ment. For its size, BOEM is actually on the smaller
size compared to the jurisdiction that it has. Our
jurisdiction is about 1.7 billion acres, which is the
Outer Continental Shelf of the United States and its
own territories. Also, given its size, we have eleven
archaeologists, which is on the low-side as well. We
are here to explain some of the challenges we face
within our regulatory framework.
We have our headquarter oces in Sterling,
Virginia, which also houses our Oce of Oshore
Renewable Energy Programs and also our Minerals
Management Program. We also have our Gulf of
Mexico oce in New Orleans, Louisiana. en we
have an oce in Camarillo, California, which is
our regional base for our Pacic studies. en we
have an oce in Anchorage, Alaska, which is the
homebase of our Alaska studies.
Overall, BOEM is charged with the responsi-
bility of overseeing the responsible development
of our country’s oshore energy industry and also
with the extraction of sand and gravel, our miner-
al resources. We also have to balance our natural
resource studies with our cultural heritage and
historic preservation responsibilities.
I think for the most part given the younger age
of BOEM, we have all sorts of studies going on,
which cover an entire array of our responsibilities
for historic and archaeology studies. We are doing
Paleocultural studies o of Rhode Island, trying
to better dene what constitutes an underwater
landscape where Paleocultural sediments may
have been, where they may have been located.
Given the challenge of working in such extreme
environments so far oshore and in deep water,
we are balancing the Native American tradition
and perspective with the environmental data we
are getting out there with remote sensing surveys
and our coring surveys. We are also going to kick-
o another study o the Pacic Coast, which our
archaeologist Dave Ball explains in his presentation
about the Paleocultural study we will be doing o
of California.
We are also doing studies in the Gulf of Mexico,
trying to dene environmental eects from the
Deepwater Horizon oil spill on shipwrecks and cul-
tural resources, to better understand how oil-spills
and disasters of its kind are aecting the degra-
dation of shipwrecks, and how they are actually
impacting the natural environment and organisms
that inhabit shipwrecks. Also, by studying biolog-
ical communities and microbes, we have deter-
mined that over time they actually have a strong
impact on how fast wood and steel shipwrecks
degrade, and how they can override the system of
how shipwrecks can corrode over time, and their
site formation processes.
We are also doing surveys on nineteenth centu-
ry historic shipwrecks to get a better sense of the
trade routes that were going on at that time, and
to get a better sense of that type of landscape and
the culture. We have also sponsored studies of the
Battle of the Atlantic to give a sense of maritime
battleelds and those landscapes. We do appreciate
the opportunity to come here and help us better
nd what can be constituted as a landscape.
BOEM itself is unfortunately very restricted
with the type of funding that it can give out to
studies that it can be participants with. Because
BOEM Perspectives on Maritime Cultural Landscapes
James Moore
Oce of Environmental Programs
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
18
we are very mission focused, we do not have grant
authority, unfortunately. e studies that we engage
with have to be done by either competitive con-
tracts or we have to do it as cooperative agreements
with state-owned institutions in aected states.
at limits us to coastal states and those state-
owned institutions.
Our third avenue for study involvement is inter-
agency agreements with other Federal agencies. We
do seek any and all opportunities to reach out with
those partners to get the data we need, so that we
can build upon our multidisciplinary studies. As I
mentioned, one of the challenges we face is further
identifying what can constitute an underwater
cultural landscape, especially o the Outer Con-
tinental Shelf where we are talking about features
that can be hundreds of miles, hundreds of square
miles in area, and the scientic data that we have
are comparatively limited.
We do appreciate all opportunities to reach out
to our Tribal and cooperative partners to try to get
more data, so that we can help corroborate the oral
history of those Tribal entities and get further data
from the sea oor, so we can better dene these
areas, and we can actually pinpoint them better. We
will also work with the Park Service with expand-
ing the denition of what constitutes a landscape
under the National Register assessment program.
19
Monday night it is the Green Bay Packers, right?
Cheese, beer, Packers, cows. at is the stereotype
of what people think of when they think of Wis-
consin. However, our state seal and our state ag
reveal a great deal of Wisconsin’s history. It in-
cludes a miner and a mariner. It also has an anchor
and a caulking mallet, further demonstrating a
strong maritime inuence on our state’s history.
Wisconsin has somewhere between 800 and
820 miles of Great Lakes coastline and 200 miles
of Mississippi shoreline. Over 1,000 miles of our
boundaries are dened by waterways. at puts
us in the top 20 for the country for the amount of
coastline that we have.
We have many of the traditional maritime re-
sources. Many of our lighthouses are listed in the
National Register of Historic Places, and we will
be listing others as the Coast Guard transitions
lighthouses out of federal ownership. Our histor-
ic property inventory has about 50 lighthouses,
so it is a pretty substantial body of resources in
the state.
We also have shipwrecks, lots and lots of ship-
wrecks. We know that there are over 750 ships that
were lost in Wisconsin waters. Of those, 178 have
been identied and we have listed 59 in the Nation-
al Register.
But there are challenges in dealing with the
broader maritime landscape, both in how we
interpret that landscape and the issues of National
Register evaluation. For example, in the late nine-
teenth century the city of Ashland, located on Lake
Superior in northern Wisconsin, considered itself
“the metropolis of the new Wisconsin.” e Great
Woods had not yet been harvested, and the emerg-
ing city was based on maritime commerce. e
scale of this commerce was huge, reected by ex-
tensive ore dock and railroad development. Entire
train cars would come to the docks and dump the
ore into the waiting vessels.
What has happened to the docks? Today, they
are being dismantled, replaced by a lakefront park.
is change in the physical environment is not
limited to the Great Lakes; it is also true on our riv-
ers. e city of La Crosse on the Mississippi River, for
example, was also a huge rail and shipping location.
River boats brought both passenger and trade trac.
Today, there is a scenic walkway along the river that
expresses the changing mentality of how people now
think of waterways and the focus on tourism.
e transformation of the maritime landscape
is not limited to larger communities. ere is also
change in rural locations. Historically, Jacksonport in
Door County was a huge lumber center with a water
based transportation system. ere were very few
roads, and the railroad did not arrive until the 1920s.
However, by the early to mid-twentieth century, the
docks and lumber yards were disappearing because
of the changing commercial aspects of that commu-
nity. Submerged portions of the piers and shipwrecks
are listed in the National Register as a historic dis-
trict, and today there is a park where there was once
a thriving maritime based community. People now
come to these areas for vacations, for tourism.
We do still have major shipping ports in Wiscon-
sin, such as Milwaukee, Superior, and Green Bay. But,
even in those communities, there is a change in the
focus of the waterways and how people think about
water these days. In Milwaukee, for example, his-
toric warehouses and industrial buildings have been
converted to condos and oces, and residents want a
balcony overlooking the river. is is a very dierent
perspective than what existed there 100 years ago.
In conclusion, I can say that in our oce, we are
comfortable with the evaluation of resources such
as shipwrecks, lighthouses, buildings, and the like,
and this has been our focus. We investigate them,
evaluate them, and list them on a regular basis.
One of our responses to the changing landscape is
a maritime trails program, where we tell the story
of the historic maritime landscape.
SHPO Perspectives on Maritime Cultural Landscapes
Daina Penkiunas
Wisconsin Historical Society
20
Good morning, everyone. In this brief talk, I’ll
explain my reasons for helping to plan this sym-
posium. I’m going to touch on three aspects of the
symposium that I consider of great importance to
preservation in general and the National Register
program in particular. ese aspects are represent-
ed by the words concept, collaboration, and results.
Let me explain.
First the concept: My interest in MCLs springs
from a landscape perspective. I’m not a maritime
historian nor an archeologist, but I am a land-
scape architect doing what I can to promote the
incorporation of landscapes into the development
of contexts and evaluations of signicance for all
properties. By these eorts, we can better under-
stand resources within their evolving environmen-
tal context and their many-layered cultural context.
Current research on maritime cultural land-
scapes, as a category of archeological and historic
districts, came to my attention within the frame-
work of the National Register Landscape Initiative
(NRLI). e concept of using a landscape approach
to understanding areas that encompass terrestrial
and marine components—and studying them as a
landscape continuum within an evolving natural
environment and layers of cultural development—
struck me as eminently reasonable. Although
broadly based on the work of Christer Westerdahl
and others—including people in this room—the
MCL concept seems to descend from a broader
cultural landscape approach put forth by cultural
geographers, beginning with Carl Sauer, whose
perspectives on landscapes, although not intended
for historic preservation purposes, are inuencing
an analysis of the signicance and integrity of what
we might consider “historic” landscapes. Studies in-
volving MCLs are contributing to the development
of a methodology that has enormous scholarly im-
plications but also practical implications for cultural
resource management in the United States. Could
this be a harbinger for more widespread acceptance
of a landscape approach in general? is is what I
hope is possible, and why I wanted to learn more
about the MCL approach from you who are work-
ing in the eld and how the work you do might
apply more broadly to non-maritime landscapes.
e landscape approach to understanding cul-
tural resources is not new, but it is becoming better
understood by the preservation community and
has been used for a number of years by the Nation-
al Park Service to inventory, interpret, and manage
cultural landscapes in national parks.
e National Register may so-pedal the con-
cept in its landscape bulletins, but the rural historic
landscape bulletin, essentially, presents a landscape
approach to evaluation as do the battleeld and
designed landscape bulletins and others to a cer-
tain extent. Simply put, the landscape approach is
a holistic means of considering the unique cultural
traditions and distinctive physical resources of a
place; it can be key to achieving an understanding
of the development and signicance of a place and
its individual components.
Several federal and state preservation programs
are on board with this more holistic approach to
the study of cultural resources. e U.S. Army, for
example, states this in a guidance document titled
Guidelines for Documenting and Evaluating His-
toric Military Landscapes: An Integrated Landscape
Approach. I quote:
Recently, the Army has emphasized the
need for integrated cultural resources
management—this is a “cultural landscape”
approach to planning and management,
whereby the military installation is viewed
as an integrated landscape of natural and
cultural resources and processes including
military operations. Rather than a strictly
compliance-driven approach to cultural
resource management, the Army is moving
towards a comprehensive integrated plan-
ning concept.
NPS Perspectives on Maritime Cultural Landscapes
Barbara Wyatt
National Register of Historic Places
National Historic Landmarks Program
National Park Service
21
Wow. is sounds reasonable. rough the
National Register Landscape Initiative webinars,
(you can nd the 50+ presentations on the Na-
tional Register website), I learned about the work
of NOAA, BOEM, and several tribes and their
application of the maritime cultural landscape
approach broached by Westerdahl and further
explained by others, including Ben Ford and the
many contributors to his book e Archaeology of
Maritime Landscapes. e participating agencies
and tribes, though, were not simply interested in
leading the National Register into new realms of
conversation, but in beginning a dialogue that
could lead to the development of guidance that
could address tricky questions about the com-
patibility of the concept with National Register
conventions, including boundaries, integrity, and
areas of evaluation.
is leads to the next aspect of this symposium
that attracted me: collaboration. rough the
NRLI webinars, participants achieved an under-
standing of the remarkable range of landscape
research, context development, and registration
concepts being developed by various feder-
al and state agencies, tribes, and the academic
community. e National Register sta receives
summaries of some of this new research through
National Register nominations; however, we need
more in-depth engagement to achieve a compre-
hensive understanding of research methodologies
and conclusions, so that the guidance we provide
is based on current research and practice. is
symposium presented an opportunity for such
engagement among federal and state agencies,
with each contributing ideas and resources. It
would have been dicult for any one of us to pull
this o alone.
Times have changed since passage of the Na-
tional Historic Preservation Act. Everyone was
desperate for guidance in the early years, and NPS
was in a position to develop and dispense guid-
ance based on its understanding of best practices.
All programs have matured, and today we need to
tap the contributions of other agencies and other
programs within NPS to develop new guidance
and update the old. Such collaboration is a means
of broadening perspectives, sharing the cost
load, and developing a more widely understood
and accepted product. As we move forward in
updating and possibly expanding our guidance
documents— the National Register Bulletins—I
envision a collaborative approach that, perhaps,
can be based on the model we’ve developed for
this symposium.
at leads to the last word, results. Exchanging
information and listening to each other’s perspec-
tives is a stimulating experience. But, we need
more than a good conversation. e exchange
can be more fruitful if we have plans to take those
conversations to another level of understanding.
And that is exactly our plan for the information
exchanged here. On Friday, some of us will meet
to assess what we’ve learned, what it means to our
programs—particularly the National Register—
and how we can move forward to develop these
ideas into constructive and acceptable guidance.
From my personal perspective, I am watching
this process carefully to see how the process we’re
engaged in here, from concept to collaboration to
results, may be a new model for getting the work
done that has been elusive. In these lean times,
NPS needs to “do more with less” and that leaves
little room for the task of updating bulletins. It is
my hope that the process we’re all engaged in here
will foster a better understanding of the place
of MCLs in the National Register program and
lend a broader understanding to the landscape
approach in general. Understanding conceptually
and practically how to consider resources within
these constructs has the potential to benet re-
source evaluation and protection and help dene
a new denition of “best practice.” is may be
something we all want to consider moving into
the next 50 years of the National Historic Preser-
vation Act.
22
23
Maritime Cultural Landscapes (MCLs) are the
product of collective human use of marine and
coastal environments across time. Areas of geo-
graphic space become “places” only when people
give them meaning and value for the resources and
qualities they possess. ey are places where we
work and recreate, and many are deeply connected
physically and spiritually. MCLs provide a record
of human use of these places throughout history,
demonstrating how humans have shaped and been
shaped by these places. Understanding the charac-
ter of the MCL provides insights into the evolution
of that environment over time, how the humans
who lived there found and used important resourc-
es there that sustained them physically and spiritu-
ally, and what lessons this place-based history can
provide to help insure that the value people contin-
ue to attribute to these places is not diminished by
contemporary human uses.
Following the seminal work of Christer West-
erdahl, MCLs can be characterized as the sum
of “human utilization of maritime space by boat,
settlement, shing, hunting, shipping and its atten-
dant subcultures” comprising the “whole network
of sailing routes, old as well as new, with ports and
harbors along the coast, and its related construc-
tions and remains of human activities, underwater
as well as terrestrial.” It includes not only this cul-
tural history of the physical environment but also
how this place is perceived, at a deeper level, by hu-
mans who have lived and worked there over time.
MCLs oer a lens through which the totality of this
human/ environment relationship can be viewed.
As the history of a place is a tapestry woven over
time, the study and characterization of MCLs
provides an opportunity to recognize, understand,
and appreciate the threads each culture who called
this place “home” contributed to what we observe
today. Characterizing MCLs and pursuing a deeper
understanding of these important places may be
a useful tool to inform contemporary marine and
coastal preservation and management. It also pro-
vides a way to answer these fundamental questions
“what makes this place special?” and “what we can
do to keep it that way?”
e presentations in this session oer approach-
es to characterizing MCLs and examples of how
those approaches have been implemented. e
active inclusion of indigenous voices is particularly
emphasized. is perspective is sometimes not giv-
en as signicant an emphasis as it deserves in plac-
es where long histories of these cultures’ habitation
and use have shaped, and in many cases continue
to inuence, the MCL we observe today.
James Delgado
Oce of National Marine Sanctuaries
Maritime Heritage Program
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
2. Characterizing Maritime
Cultural Landscapes
Introduction
24
Although landscape-level studies can be said to date
to the 1960s or 1970s, it was in his 1992 article in the
International Journal of Nautical Archaeology that
Christer Westerdahl coined the term (in English).
He dened it as “human utilization of maritime
space by boat, settlement, shing, hunting, shipping
and its attendant subcultures and features.” As his
own work on this evolved over the years, he has
claried that maritime culture indeed “covers all
possible angles of man’s relationship to the sea and
the coasts.” He emphasizes the importance of the
cognitive landscape: “the ‘remembered’ landscape
of nature,” and “the landscape at the back of your
mind.” Getting at this naturally requires multiple
ways of knowing.
e concept grew into a dull roar by the mid-
2000s, when a critical mass of folks realized that
implementation was lacking. Ben Ford organized a
maritime cultural landscape (MCL) session during
the 2008 Annual Conference on Historical and
Underwater Archaeology which grew into his 2011
compilation of 18 articles that represents a crucial
transitional phase for the concept. To paraphrase
Dave Stewart’s preface of the volume, it was time
to put the wheels on the bandwagon: to graduate
from theory to method, and then importantly, even
further into cultural interpretation – which, again,
requires an interdisciplinary approach. Ford states
succinctly and powerfully that “landscape exists at
the intersection of culture and space,” and that it
therefore “falls neatly within and between the dis-
ciplines of history, geography, and archaeology.” As
the various chapters in his volume illustrate, repre-
senting a fraction of recent scholarship on cultural
landscapes, this has to mean archaeology as a branch
of holistic anthropology – “taking into account all
aspects of humanness.” Multiple sources of data and
ways of knowing are required: geology, biology, eth-
nography, oral history, folklore, and many more.
Around this time, there was a perfect storm of
brain power being devoted to this topic. In addi-
tion to all the work described in Ben’s book, folks
on several other fronts were also trying to, as a
colleague said to me, “gure out how to do this, or
stop talking about it.” Tapping into this capacity, a
number of federal initiatives began grappling with
the question of implementation. I started in my
current position in 2009.
Here is a bit of background on my oce; e
Marine Protected Areas Center was established by
Executive Order in 2000 to help protect and con-
serve the nation’s natural heritage, cultural heritage,
and sustainable production (or sheries) resources.
By developing a national system of Marine Protected
Areas (MPAs), existing MPAs can build partnerships
and networks to better accomplish these common
goals and areas can be identied where new MPAs
would be benecial. e MPA Center serves as the
Nation’s Hub for Building Innovative Partnerships
and Tools to Protect Special Ocean Places, and last
year we merged with the Oce of National Marine
Sanctuaries (ONMS). Existing MPAs include federal
programs and sites such as National Marine Sanctu-
aries (NMS), national wildlife refuges, and national
parks with a marine component. ey also include
federal/state partnerships such as National Estuarine
Research Reserves and Papahanaumokuakea Marine
National Monument, as well as state and territorial
programs and sites such as state marine or ship-
wreck reserves, state parks with a marine compo-
nent, and sites under tribal authority.
I had the privilege of assembling a cultural
heritage working group under the MPA Federal
Advisory Committee, which was a really formida-
ble brain trust including some of the folks in this
room. In fact, John Jensen was the one who said
to me, with that conspiratorial gleam in his eye,
“what we really need to do is cultural landscapes.”
e group’s work culminated with a white paper in
2011, Recommendations for Integrated Management
Using a Cultural Landscape Approach in the Na-
tional MPA System (http://marineprotectedareas.
Characterizing MCLs from First Principles:
Cultural Landscape Approaches and MCLs
Valerie Grussing
Oce of National Marine Sanctuaries, Maritime Heritage Program
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
25
noaa.gov/pdf/helpful-resources/mpafac_rec_cul-
tural_landscape_12_11.pdf). Although MCL was
not our abbreviation du jour, the recommendations
focused on a landscape level approach to managing
marine protected areas, beginning with more in-
clusive denitions and criteria for cultural heritage
— encompassing not just sunken vessels eligible
for the National Register, but other archaeological
sites, paleoshorelines, sites than span the land/
sea boundary, and sites and resources important
to indigenous communities, including biological
resources and intangible attributes and values.
A cultural landscape approach takes into ac-
count the fact that cultural heritage and resources
are part of the ecosystem and part of the broader
landscape, and it examines the relationships among
all resources of the place and their environment
over time. is is in order to integrate management
of cultural and natural resources at the ecosystem
and landscape level– similar and analogous to
ecosystem-based management, adding the element
of the past. is comparison helps non-cultural
resource folks (at NOAA I call them the “sh peo-
ple”) understand why it’s important.
At its most basic, this approach is based on the
understanding that humans are an integral part
of the landscape, both shaping and being shaped
by it. Because of this, people in a community have
an intimate knowledge of place, oen over a deep
time scale. As Brad Duncan states in his chapter in
the book e Archaeology of Maritime Landscapes
(2011), “the local knowledge held by community
members is the product of many generations of
collective knowledge.” Recognizing this, we then
try to use that knowledge to inform planning and
future management. Doing so, particularly with
regard to indigenous communities, can not only
lead to more eective and appropriate management
of a landscape’s cultural resources, but also better
management of its natural resources. One of the
key points from the white paper is the articial
administrative divide between cultural and natural
resources. ey are considered and managed under
separate policy and mandates, even though on
the ground, they are interrelated, interconnected,
and frequently one in the same, as with biological
resources possessing cultural value.
One logistical question that has been raised is:
does a holistic approach mean that everything is im-
portant? If so, that would make the task of preserva-
tion overwhelming and impractical. Not everything
in the lens is worthy of preservation. An example
from the white paper is “scour marks from drag-
gers, ballast dumps, sunken logging timber, or old
navigation markers, may not need preservation, but
they can provide important evidence about the way
humans interacted with the marine environment.”
Following the white paper, and around the
time that the MPA Center got assimilated into the
Sanctuaries Oce, the Maritime Heritage Program
convened an internal workshop involving expertise
from the good doctors Ford and Jensen. is led
to the MCL Initiative, intended to implement this
approach in existing sanctuaries, but also taking
into account broader regional perspectives, since
landscapes don’t have the decency to stop at Sanc-
tuary boundaries.
Beyond cultural interpretation and resource
preservation, we’re also charged with management.
In Brad Barr’s 2013 article on MCLs, he outlines
some of the “wicked problems” confronting coastal
communities. Some are “more traditional resource
management issues, such as maintaining water qual-
ity and the status of living marine resources, but also
extend to issues such as jobs and economy, the im-
pacts of large seasonal changes in population, insuf-
cient transportation and infrastructure, and even
more fundamental social problems such as crime
and poverty.” Typical approaches to addressing these
problems, “from local coastal zoning to formulation
of national ocean policies,” tend to focus on individ-
ual sectors, or on the snapshot of current conditions,
or on large geographic areas, of a scale people do not
feel a connection to. An MCL approach considers
multiple sectors and perspectives, incorporates local
historical knowledge as context for managing today’s
problems, and is grounded in people’s “back yards,”
places they know and value.
Speaking of articial divides and boundaries,
another important one worth mentioning is the
shoreline as bridge, not boundary. It’s the title of
Ford’s own article in his edited volume, and it’s a
phrase that really resonates. Whether we’re talking
26
about the wreckage of errant ships, lost during
their passage from one shoreline to another, the
remains of ancient communities now submerged as
the shoreline itself has risen, or modern indigenous
communities that conduct subsistence harvest
from the sea using traditional knowledge, the uni-
fying element is their connection to the marine and
coastal environment. As government managers, we
are required to use lines to mark land from sea, but
these too are administrative. MCL has the power to
break down this divide.
A number of other federal initiatives and projects
have begun in response to—and hoping to take ad-
vantage of—the collective brain power and capacity
being devoted to cultural landscapes. In 2011, the
Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP)
and the National Park Service (NPS) held a forum to
discuss Native American traditional cultural land-
scapes in Seattle. is led to ACHP’s Traditional Cul-
tural Landscape Action Plan later that year. Around
2012, project ideas regarding tribal cultural land-
scapes and paleoshorelines converged from multiple
directions to be funded by BOEM. Not only do they
involve indigenous communities in the characteriza-
tion of their own important places and resources, but
they are pioneering methods for pre-consultation,
so that coastal tribes and agencies can build rela-
tionships in advance of any proposed undertakings
and tribes can have a stronger voice in planning and
management. e Captain John Smith Chesapeake
National Historic Trail has an Indigenous Cultural
Landscape Team, which you’ll hear about in this
session. In 2013, the National Register Landscape
Initiative began as a forum for discussion of the way
cultural landscapes are considered in the Register,
and it led to the Maritime Cultural Landscape Sym-
posium in 2015. In 2014, the MPA Center received
a small grant to create an online cultural resources
toolkit for MPA managers, in which we outline a
7-step process for implementing a cultural landscape
approach. I’m sure there are other initiatives that
I’m not mentioning, but you get the idea. e MCL
movement is big (Arlo Guthrie says we can call it a
movement if we have 50 people a day, which you can
see that we do), and it is happening now.
I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity
to share my excitement over the announcement last
week that two new sites have started the designa-
tion process (and I emphasize process) to become
new National Marine Sanctuaries: Mallows Bay
in the tidal Potomac River in Maryland, and an
875-square-mile area of Lake Michigan right here
in Wisconsin—both based on the areas’ collections
of shipwrecks and maritime heritage. A third site,
based on Chumash Heritage in southern California,
has had its nomination accepted by NOAA and has
been added to the inventory of areas under consid-
eration for potential designation. ese nominations
were among the rst to come in when a new grass
roots process was created last year for sanctuary
designation, following a long hiatus. In an era when
we’re constantly challenged, as historic preservation-
ists, to demonstrate relevance and justify funding,
I’m gratied and excited that when people are given
a chance to convey what’s important to them to pre-
serve and celebrate, it turns out that it is heritage.
It is truly an exciting time to be in historic pres-
ervation, with many opportunities to inuence the
future direction of our collective eld. Research-
ers, practitioners, managers, and ocials seem to
be in agreement that the time has come to work
more appropriately—using a cultural landscape
approach, including its indigenous and maritime
components—which will help us all better accom-
plish our common goals of preserving what’s im-
portant from our past, learning from it, and using
it to be better equipped for the future. Δ
Valerie Grussing is the Cultural Resources Coor-
dinator for the National Marine Protected Areas
Center. She works with federal, state, academic and
NGO underwater archaeologists, coastal tribes,
and other marine resource managers to foster
partnerships and create information and tools to
help protect and preserve the nation’s coastal and
marine cultural resources. Her current projects are
coordinating the creation of a Cultural Resourc-
es Toolkit for MPA Managers and coordinating
the Characterizing Tribal Cultural Landscapes
project, funded by the Bureau of Ocean Energy
Management. She has a BA in History from North
Carolina State University, an MA in Anthropology
from the University of Iowa, and a PhD in Coastal
Resources Management (in the Maritime Studies
track) from East Carolina University.
27
e overall goal of the Maritime Cultural Land-
scape symposium held in Madison, Wisconsin, in
2015, was “to suggest standard denitions and best
practices through the preparation of preliminary
guidance materials for incorporating Maritime
Cultural Landscapes into National Register eval-
uations.” Determining clear standards for includ-
ing marine cultural landscapes with the National
Register program represents a vital step toward
bringing order, and I hope more quality and con-
sistency, to the management of cultural heritage in
the coastal zone and continental shelf.
e symposium objective was “to provide a plat-
form for an exploration of the Maritime Cultural
Landscape (MCL) concept and its role in the inves-
tigation, evaluation, and management of terrestrial
and submerged maritime cultural resources.” is
objective is, I believe, even more important than
the goal. For the objective, with a little imagina-
tion, emphasizes increasing our understanding of
complex historical and contemporary human re-
lationships and policy issues. is is critical, given
the intensity of human uses on coasts, the impacts
of climate change, and rapid expansion of human
economic activities oshore.
anks in large part to the visionary work of
David Cooper, the rst state underwater archae-
ologist, Wisconsin has long been at the forefront
of submerged cultural heritage preservation in the
U.S. With Cooper and Paul Kriesa’s 1991 Multiple
Property Nomination Great Lakes Shipwrecks of
Wisconsin as a foundation, generations of Wiscon-
sin Historical Society aliated archaeologists, his-
torians, partners and volunteers have added more
than y shipwrecks to National Register.
e late 1980s and 1990s represented the pio-
neering days of public underwater archaeology in
Wisconsin and across the nation. Perhaps we came
across as brash and maybe a little righteous, but we
also had a zeal that extended beyond just technical
preservation of shipwrecks; we wanted to make them
accessible and meaningful to the public. We were
trying to preserve and recover—not just things—but
ideas and those forgotten relationships between the
people of Wisconsin and the Great Lakes and Rivers
that formed her borders. In order to preserve ship-
wrecks, we needed to nd their broader meanings—
not just their ocial historical signicance.
Although we began documenting individu-
al shipwrecks, we organized our eld work and
inventories regionally—Door County, the Apostle
Islands, Mid-Lake Michigan, and the Mississip-
pi. is spread into outreach and the inuential
Wisconsin Maritime Trails Program. Looking back
more than two decades, I see that we were thinking
in Cultural Landscape well before we began to use
the term. We naturally began using cultural land-
scape approaches to look critically at the coastal
and maritime world and embracing outreach.
e rst attempt to explicitly use cultural land-
scape in underwater archaeological preservation in
Wisconsin began in the wake of a closely watched a
legal dispute over the wreck of the Rosinco, a yacht
found, looted, and claimed in Admiralty Court by
well-known wreck hunter and salvage diver Paul
Ehorn. e United States Court of Appeals, Sev-
enth Circuit, decision in Ehorn v. Sunken Vessel
Known as the Rosinco rearmed the Abandoned
Shipwreck Act of 1987 proviso that wrecks in state
waters determined eligible for or listed in the Na-
tional Register belonged to the state. e decision
elevated the importance of the National Register as
a maritime preservation tool and added some teeth
to the National Register, at least in the states within
the Seventh Circuit district.
At the time, the logical conclusion was that
securing National Register eligibility or better yet
listing, now oered tangible legal protection to his-
toric shipwrecks. Getting DOEs or listings for more
wrecks in a cost and time ecient manner seemed
the logical next step. Working rst with then
Wisconsin State Underwater Archaeologist Russ
Characterizing MCLs in the Great Lakes:
Western Lake Michigan
John Jensen
University of West Florida
28
Green and his successor Keith Meverden, I took on
an ultimately unnished eort to nominate a large
section of Wisconsin’s Mid-Lake Michigan Waters
as an archaeological district. I chose to develop this
nomination around the idea of cultural landscape.
Ultimately I synthesized my research and de-
veloped an unpublished technical report Pieces,
Patterns and Pasts: Toward a Cultural Landscape
Approach to Maritime Cultural Resource Manage-
ment and Study in Western Lake Michigan. e
report evaluated western Lake Michigan and its
shipwreck-related cultural resources as dening
features in a rural historic landscape I called the
“Western Lake Michigan Transportation Corridor.”
Aer laying out the theoretical foundations for
a cultural landscape and Atlantic cultural context
for the corridor, the report described in some
detail how each of the four processes and seven
component categories in National Register Bulle-
tin 30, Guidelines for Evaluating and Documenting
Rural Historic Landscapes, applied or may apply
to the region and its submerged resources. e re-
port recommended integrating emergent cultural
landscape-based archaeological and preserva-
tion theory with the new analytical and mapping
capacities of GIS through a cultural landscape
framework. Embracing the results I argued, would
improve the analytical content of Wisconsin’s
maritime historic preservation documentation
work, while expanding National Register coverage
over a much larger number of Wisconsin ship-
wrecks in a fast and ecient manner.
I pushed things too far and too fast for the time.
Technical issues associated with dening bound-
aries stopped the dra nomination in its tracks.
However, the intellectual content was solid and the
technical report became one of the foundations for
a more developed applied cultural landscape ap-
proach framework we called CLA. e discussion
of Mid-Lake Michigan as an MCL that follows is
adapted from the report and the dra nomination.
1 On the history of the ag’s images see John O. Holzhueter, “Wisconsin’s Flag,” in Wisconsin Magazine of History, 63 (1980).
2 V. Coleman, Cultural Landscapes Charrette Background Paper, New South Wales Heritage Oce, 2003. R.W. Stoe, D.B.
Halmo, D.E. Austin, “Cultural Landscapes and Traditional Cultural Properties: A Southern Paiute View of the Grand Canyon
and Colorado River,” American Indian Quarterly 21 (1997); K.F. Anschuetz, R.H. Wilshusen, C.L. Scheick, “An Archaeology of
Landscapes: Perspectives and Directions,” Journal of Archaeological Research 9 (2001).
e Wisconsin ag contains powerful examples
of the maritime imprint on the state’s culture. e
emblazoned anchor, caulking-mallet in grasp of a
powerful hand and arm, and blue-jacketed mari-
ner can be read as cultural and historical symbols
that represent the introduction of Atlantic World
technology and culture to the freshwater frontier
during the nineteenth century. Sharing iconic
space with images of a miner, bars of lead, a cor-
nucopia, pick, shovel, and plow, the ag depicts in
graphic terms the implicit and explicit interplay
between the natural environment and Wisconsin’s
pioneers. To move “Forward” as instructed by the
text at the top of the seal on the ag, one had to
break up the soil to unleash its fertility, delve into
earthen depths to release trapped mineral re-
sources, and tame the tempestuous Great Lakes by
converting stands of virgin forest into good ships
manned by strong and able mariners.
1
e complex interplay between culture and
nature, whose signature is written boldly across the
Wisconsin ag, is a hallmark of the cultural land-
scape; an important way of organizing our under-
standing of the historically evolving and continuing
relationships between society and the environment.
e cultural landscape is increasingly recognized by
historic preservation and cultural heritage profes-
sionals and agencies worldwide as both heritage re-
sources and as an important concept for preserving
and interpreting the material remains of the past.
Cultural landscapes recognize cultural plural-
ism, incorporate complex cultural, environmental
and historical processes, and value the participa-
tion and competing interests of a heterogeneous
public. Put dierently, cultural landscapes reveal
much about the interplay between places and pro-
cess, which leaves ample room for multiple cultural
groups to derive or to impose meaning upon a
geographic space.
2
With roots extending to Europe in the nine-
teenth century, American ideas of the cultural
29
landscape rst blossomed in the 1920s with the
work of Carl Sauer. Sauer’s seminal idea, that “the
cultural landscape is fashioned from the natural
landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent,
the natural area is the medium, the cultural land-
scape is the result,” remains central to more recent
conceptions espoused by a variety of disciplines.
3
In the 90 years that have followed Sauer’s formula-
tion, scholars have developed a variety of schema
for dening and evaluating cultural landscapes.
e interplay between nature and culture, however,
remains essential. For anthropologically-focused
archaeologists, the cultural landscape contains both
material and symbolic elements, but key for archae-
ologists, historians, and preservationists is that cul-
tural landscapes reect patterned human behavior.
In the Great Lakes region (among other plac-
es), the shipwrecks and other cultural materials
deposited on the bottomlands and along the shore
can be evaluated as single resources or as a series
of nested cultural landscapes that reect distinct
(though oen related) historical contexts and
cultural orientations.
4
e study of maritime cultural landscapes has
great potential for yielding archaeological, histor-
ical, and cultural information about Wisconsin’s
past. is potential is especially great for the
nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth cen-
turies. Depending upon the question being visit-
ed, applying the landscape framework to western
Lake Michigan’s submerged cultural resources has
the capacity to shed light on historical and an-
thropological questions that both encompass and
transcend state and local boundaries and will allow
Wisconsin’s maritime past to be read in the light of
national and international processes.
5
Although tied to quantiable material culture
such as shipwrecks, marine-related objects, and pat-
terns of geographical dispersion, the cultural land-
3 C. Wilson and P. Groth, eds., Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies aer J.B. Jackson, Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press (2003), p. 5.
4 (Anschuetz et. al., citing Binford, 1983, 380).
5 C. Cameron and M. Rossler, “Global Strategy: Canals and Cultural Routes,” World Heritage Newsletter 8 (1995).
6 G. Fry, “From Objects to Landscapes In Natural and Cultural Heritage Management: A Role for Landscape Interfaces,” in H.
Palang and G. Fry, eds., Landscape Interfaces: Cultural Heritage in Changing Landscapes (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
2001), 240.
7 “e Great Lakes” e Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History, (London: Oxford University Press, in press).
scape framework encourages asking broader the-
oretical questions. For example, how did the early
mariners of the pioneer period “see” these lakes,
and how did their perceptions inuence the design
of the vessels they built and the ways in which they
operated them? Did the nineteenth century Amer-
ican spirit of frontier enterprise aect the relation-
ship between commercial mariners and the natural
environment? In what ways did the conuence of
agricultural, lumbering, and urban frontiers on the
Great Lakes encourage innovations in transpor-
tation technologies? Did specic ethnic-oriented
maritime strategies practiced by mariners on the
Atlantic Ocean transfer to the Great Lakes? Care-
fully designed archaeological projects examining
Wisconsin’s shipwrecks and associated cultural
materials can help to answer these and other broad
questions, when isolated events and individual sites
are approached through an integrating paradigm
such as the cultural landscape approach.
6
Wisconsin’s maritime cultural resources are
especially rich for the years between about 1830 and
1930. During this period, the western Great Lakes
evolved from a distant frontier served by a few small
sailing vessels associated with the fur trade into a
segment of the world’s busiest and most ecient in-
dustrial waterway.
7
Adopting the cultural landscape
approach means recognizing that this system and
its evolution are historically important, as are the
economic, technological, geographical, and cultural
objects and structures that helped to dene it. It
suggests that the whole of Wisconsin’s collection of
maritime heritage resources is more valuable than
the sum of its individual sites and objects.
e West Central Lake Michigan Maritime Her-
itage Archaeological District is a long, linear, rural
historic cultural landscape that qualies for listing on
the National Register of Historic Places under crite-
rion A and D. A watery highway of national impor-
tance, the Transportation Corridor is intimately asso-
30
ciated with transportation, settlement, and industry
in Wisconsin. e natural environment and related
collection and spatial organization of objects, sites,
and structures associated with historic maritime
transportation on Lake Michigan oer a rich tapestry
for exploring human responses to the problems and
opportunities associated with frontier shipbuilding,
settlement, commerce, and the advent of large scale
agricultural and industrial development.
e West Central Lake Michigan Maritime
Heritage Archaeological District consists of a
section of the navigation corridor that constituted
the principle route down the western side of Lake
Michigan during the nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries. A regional highway, the corridor
also provided critical points of access, connection
and exchange between maritime communities,
both large and small. During the mid-nineteenth
century hundreds of thousands of Americans and
immigrants followed this maritime pathway to new
lives and lands in Wisconsin and other Midwestern
states. As these settlers developed the landscape,
the corridor provided a critical avenue for carry-
ing surplus products to market and for bringing
in goods from other regions and other nations. In
the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the
corridor became an essential component in the
circulation networks for the rapidly industrializing
Midwest. Included in district are the lake’s surface
waters, weather patterns, and subsurface natural
and cultural features. When analyzed using cur-
rent archaeological theories and methods, these
elements come together to form an important and
coherent segment of Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan
maritime cultural landscape. is landscape has
documented associations with three of the historic
contexts identied and well developed in the mul-
tiple property documentation Great Lakes Ship-
wrecks of Wisconsin: e Early Industries: Fishing,
Lumber, Mining, and Agriculture,1800-1930;
Settlement, 1800-1930; and Package Freight, 1830-
1940 (Cooper and Kriesa 1991). Further research
could well identify additional historic contexts.
In 2013-2014, working with ECU graduate stu-
dent Phil Hartmeyer, I developed what we called
a cultural landscape source book for Wisconsin’s
Mid-Lake Region. e intent was to provide cul-
tural landscape approach-based interpretive and
management insights and data to assist with the
possible establishment of a new National Marine
Sanctuary. Embracing interdisciplinary perspec-
tives and combining historic and contemporary
coastal data in a Cultural Landscape Approach
analysis, the source book included general observa-
tions to help the future managers and interpreters
of cultural resources in the proposed Sanctuary.
General Observations on Shipwrecks and
Environment in the Mid-Lake Region
1. e Mid-Lake Michigan Region’s coastal
and marine cultural landscapes embody the
intertwined histories of harbor engineering,
shoreline change, regional maritime com-
merce, and local economics
2. “Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan shoreline is
generally vulnerable to shore erosion from
the Illinois state line to the Sturgeon Bay
Canal, a distance of 185 miles. From the
Sturgeon Bay Canal around the northern
tip of Door County to Green Bay, shore
erosion is largely limited to bays and clay
banks. Erosion rates are particularly high
along sand plains and high blus composed
of till. Short-term erosion rates of 3 to 15
feet per year have been recorded along sand
plains and 2 to 6 feet per year along high
blu lines” (Wisconsin Coastal Management
Program 2008).
3. From a maritime perspective, the physical
coast lacks natural harbors or sheltered wa-
ters, has unstable sediments including sandy
patches that make poor holding ground for
anchoring, and oers few distinctive visual
or submerged landmarks.
4. e location, shape, and composition of the
contemporary shoreline and near coastal
area are the product of long-term geological
and geographical factors and the intensive
human modications that began with the
early U.S. settlement of western Wisconsin.
5. e Mid-Lake Michigan Maritime Heritage
31
Trail follows a long linear 92.4-mile shore-
line dominated by sand dunes and blus.
e U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)
has classied 30% of the present shoreline as
articial and 20.5% as industrial. e dom-
inant shoreline vegetation (51%) is classied
as manicured lawn.
6. e large pier and breakwater structures
detailed in USACE Table 7 and the articial
shoreline in Table 5 are a product of nearly
180 years of planned human engineering of
the Mid-Lake Michigan Region’s shoreline.
7. e Mid-Lake Michigan region’s coastal
geomorphology has aected the composi-
tion and likely the condition of the historic
shipwreck population.
8. Nineteenth century coastal engineers viewed
the natural Great Lakes as a static environ-
ment and attributed changes observed aer
1836 to human agency: e.g. harbor structures.
Harbor locations and engineering char-
acteristics contributed signicantly to the
patterns of shipwrecks occurring in the Mid-
Lake Michigan Region.
9. Engineers designed Mid-Lake Michigan
piers to create protected transportation lanes
from harbor fronts along the rivers out to
safe deep water navigation.
10. From 1836 into the early twentieth century,
federal engineers and local leaders engaged
in a leapfrogging war with coastal sedimen-
tation. While an extensive pier expansion
and dredge usually brought temporary
improvements to harbor access—the engi-
neering brought unintended consequences,
including the shoaling of the waters ap-
proaching the harbors, the creation of sand
bars dangerous to navigation, and damaging
wave conditions inside harbor areas.
11. e standard development of East – West
parallel piers created narrow and some-
times dangerous or even deadly entrances
to harbors.
12. Highly detailed records exist of harbor sur-
veys, construction projects, and waterfront
areas that can allow for a comprehensive
historical reconstruction of shorelines and
the build environment of harbors in Man-
itowoc, Sheboygan, Two Rivers, and Port
Washington.
Observations on Coastal Geomorphology and
Shipwrecks
In the Mid-Lake Michigan Region, a combination
of soer, geologically-unstable shorelines and un-
consolidated, near-coastal sediments—principally
sand—have resulted in a lack of natural harbors or
good anchorages. is explains several things about
historic shipwreck resources of the region including:
1. Temporal patterns and a physical concentra-
tion of wrecks near the principal harbors;
2. e high number of “wrecked” vessels re-
turned to service;
3. e presence of well-preserved but undis-
covered shipwrecks in shallow water.
Early work recommending the establishment
of a National Marine Sanctuary in Mid-Lake
Michigan/Wisconsin focused almost exclusively
on well-preserved deeper shipwrecks. What has
been largely overlooked is the potential presence of
dozens of shallow water wrecks that have received
natural protection from the coast’s shiing sands.
A stronger understanding of historical and con-
temporary coastal geology and development pro-
vided through a CLA study will provide knowledge
critical in protecting and interpreting the full range
of underwater and coastal historic resources locat-
ed within the boundaries and along the shores of
the proposed Sanctuary, and has clear implications
in applying sections 106 and 110 of the National
Historic Preservation Act of 1966.
e designation process for the Mid-Lake Mich-
igan Sanctuary seems to be going forward quite
rapidly now, and I’d like to think that when the
area does become a Sanctuary it will benet from
a holistic Cultural Landscape Approach that had
32
its early roots in the Wisconsin State Underwater
Archaeology and Maritime Preservation Program.
One thing that my colleagues and I have
learned through studies in marine areas across
North America is that applying a cultural land-
scape approach as a way of looking at the world
and structuring your research genuinely expands
and can substantially alter how we understand the
history of a maritime region and, by extension, the
signicance and meaning of its cultural heritage
resources.
Circling back to the symposium’s goal of consid-
ering potential National Register standards for Mar-
itime Cultural Landscapes, based on two projects in
the Mid-Lake Region, several others in the Mid-At-
lantic, New England, and Alaska regions, and
through committee work in Marine Protected Areas,
I suggest that in most instances the most eective
approach would be to develop specic maritime
additions and adaptations for existing National Reg-
ister cultural landscape categories. While maritime
space, time, and integrity can be quite dierent than
what historic preservation professionals typically en-
counter on land, the human elements that underpin
the history and landscape are largely the same.
Ten years ago I tried to convince Wisconsin’s His-
toric Preservation sta that adopting a cultural land-
scape paradigm would help the state remain at the
forefront of maritime cultural heritage management
in the United States. Lacking an accepted profes-
sional language to merge the technical requirements
of the National Register with the environmental,
historical, and policy realities of maritime heritage,
I could not make the case for the radical change a
maritime cultural landscape approach represent-
ed. Since that time, many people, including several
attending the symposium, have done tremendous
work over the past decade to expand our under-
standing and rene the use of cultural landscape
concepts in coastal and maritime contexts. It is time
to develop the language needed to bring the Nation-
al Register into alignment with these eorts. Δ
John Jensen began working to understand and
preserve Wisconsin’s maritime heritage resources
in 1990. Before beginning a career in academia, he
served as underwater archaeologist, historian, and
a cultural resource manager for the Wisconsin His-
torical Society. More recently, he has collaborated
with the NOAA Oce of National Marine Sanc-
tuaries to study the potential for a Lake Michigan
shipwreck-based Sanctuary. John has participated
in projects relating to North American maritime
frontiers and westward expansion from the Grand
Banks of Newfoundland to the shores of the Bering
Sea. For more 10 years, John and colleague Dr. Rod-
erick Mather have collaborated on eorts to develop
an applied cultural landscape approach to maritime
heritage and its management. He holds an M.A.
(Maritime History and Underwater Archaeology)
from East Carolina University, as well as M.S. (His-
tory and Policy) and Ph.D. (Social History) degrees
from Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently
assistant professor of History and Historic Preserva-
tion at the University of West Florida.
33
Summary of Presentation
Indigenous cultural landscapes (ICLs) in the
Chesapeake Bay watershed demonstrate aspects of
the natural and cultural resources that supported
American Indian lifeways and settlements in the
early seventeenth century. Considered trail-related
resources to the Captain John Smith Chesapeake
National Historic Trail, these evocative places may
be important to descendant communities today, as
well as to conservation strategies in the Chesapeake
watershed. Ongoing research is helping to dene
and identify these large landscapes.
e concept of indigenous cultural landscapes
originated during conversations organized in
response to the Chesapeake Bay Executive Order
of 2009, during attempts to explain an indigenous
perspective of large landscapes. is indigenous
perspective reveals that American Indian places in
the Chesapeake Bay watershed were not conned
to the sites of houses, towns, or settlements. It also
demonstrates how the American Indian view of
one’s homeland is holistic rather than compart-
mentalized into the discrete site elements typically
utilized in popular accounts today, such as “hunt-
ing grounds,” “villages,” or “sacred sites.”
e original paper that was referenced in the
2010 comprehensive management plan for the
Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic
Trail, “e Indigenous Cultural Landscape of the
Eastern Woodlands: A Model for Conservation,
Interpretation, and Tourism” (Deanna Beacham)
includes the criteria posited by the initial advisory
team (see https://www.nps.gov/chba/learn/news/
upload/ICL-Banner-Update-April2015.pdf). e
concept was introduced in a video recorded in
2013, “Chesapeake Landscapes through Indigenous
Eyes” and a rack card was developed for distribu-
1 Kristin M. Sullivan, Erve Chambers, and Ennis Barbery. “Indigenous Cultural Landscapes Study for the Captain John Smith
Chesapeake National Historic Trail.” (Annapolis: University of Maryland College Park and National Park Service Chesapeake
Bay, December 2013). See https://www.nps.gov/chba/learn/news/upload/FINAL_CAJO-ICL-Study-Report-2.pdf.
2 Kristin M. Sullivan, Erve Chambers, and Ennis Barbery. (Annapolis: University of Maryland College Park and National Park
Service Chesapeake Bay, December 2013). See https://www.nps.gov/chba/learn/news/upload/Nanticoke-ICL-Report_PUBLIC.pdf.
tion at conferences (see https://www.nps.gov/chba/
learn/news/upload/ICL-Rack-Card.pdf).
e paper “Examples of ICLs in Virginia”
(Deanna Beacham, published in the George Wright
Society, 2011 Conference Papers) describes exam-
ples of indigenous cultural landscapes along pro-
posed segments of the Captain John Smith Ches-
apeake National Historic Trail in Virginia. is
paper was updated in 2015 (see https://www.nps.
gov/chba/learn/news/upload/Examples-of-ICLs-
in-Virginia-8-2015-nal-update.pdf). Each ICL
example includes lists of which National Register
criteria apply and information on how the sites can
be interpreted as indigenous cultural landscapes.
ICL research began in 2012, and by 2013 a team
from the University of Maryland had completed
a prototype methodology summary titled “Indig-
enous Cultural Landscapes Study for the Captain
John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail.”
1
It includes recommendations for further research,
and a pilot study of the Nanticoke River watershed
titled “Indigenous Cultural Landscapes Study for
the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National His-
toric Trail: Nanticoke River Watershed.”
2
During
that same time period, a team working on the
implementation of the Captain John Smith Ches-
apeake NHT Lower Susquehanna segment also
produced a report on their ICL ndings, but lack-
ing an extant descendent community, there was no
tribal input to include.
Building on the prototype methodology for
documenting ICLs and earlier studies, researchers
from St. Mary’s College of Maryland completed a
thorough study of the Nanjemoy and Mattawoman
Creek watersheds in November 2015. is study, ti-
tled “Indigenous Cultural Landscapes Study for the
Identifying Indigenous Cultural Landscapes in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed
Deanna Beacham
Chesapeake Bay Oce
National Park Service
34
Nanjemoy and Mattawoman Creek Watersheds,”
added the dimension of predictive modeling,
which was eld tested with excellent results.
3
Using similar predictive modeling on a much
larger scale, the same team of researchers also
completed an ICL priorities report for the entire
tidal Chesapeake Bay watershed in February 2016.
Titled “Developing Watershed Priorities for Map-
ping Indigenous Cultural Landscapes of the Ches-
apeake Bay,” this report was commissioned to help
the National Park Service prioritize ICL research
areas over the coming years.
4
Currently, researchers are working on iden-
tifying the indigenous cultural landscapes on a
segment of the Rappahannock River in Virginia.
Information from the priorities report indicates
that the York River (including the Mattaponi and
Pamunkey rivers) and the James River (including
the Nansemond and Chickahominy rivers) are
likely candidates for future research. All research
reports will be published by the National Park Ser-
vice when they are nal.
3 Scott M. Strickland, Virginia R. Busby, Julia A. King, et al. Indigenous Cultural Landscapes Study
for the Nanjemoy and Mattawoman Creek Watersheds (St. Mary’s City, MD: St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Nov 2015). See
https://www.nps.gov/chba/learn/news/upload/NanjemoyMattawoman-ICL-FINAL-red.pdf.
4 Scott M. Strickland and Julia A. King. Developing Watershed Priorities for Mapping Indigenous Cultural Landscapes of the
Chesapeake Bay (St. Mary’s City, MD: e Chesapeake Conservancy, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, 2016). See https://www.
nps.gov/chba/learn/news/upload/NPS-ICLPriority-FinalReport.pdf.
e NPS envisions indigenous cultural land-
scape research being informative and useful for
future National Register of Historic Places eligibil-
ity determinations of historic districts that are part
of the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National
Historic Trail. Δ
Deanna Beacham, Weapemeoc, is the American
Indian Program Manager for the National Park
Service Chesapeake Bay. She previously worked
as American Indian Program Specialist for the
Commonwealth of Virginia and served on the
Advisory Council for the Captain John Smith
Chesapeake National Historic Trail. As an Advisory
Council member, she participated in the Nation-
al Park Service response to the 2009 Chesapeake
Bay Executive Order and authored an essay on the
Indigenous Cultural Landscape as a way to explain
an indigenous perspective of the unspoiled large
landscapes in the Chesapeake Bay region. e con-
cept is now being utilized and further explored by
NPS and other organizations. Deanna received her
undergraduate degree from Duke University and a
Master’s degree from the University of Colorado.
35
Jim Delgado and Daria Merwin present examples
of the wide range of maritime types with the po-
tential to contribute partially or wholly to maritime
cultural landscapes. While Merwin classies the
dierences and diculties inherent in identifying
and describing maritime sites as MCLs, Delgado
stresses the need to involve modern communities
in the nomination process. He argues that living
folks are part of the MCL, not only for the tradi-
tional memories they may hold of a site or land-
scape, but because through their oblique or pur-
posefully memorial practices, their actions oen
become part of the MCL’s cultural story.
Mike Russo concurs that maritime archeological
sites are ever-changing, due to cultural and natural
activities that do not similarly aect the typical
static archeological and structural land-based sites.
He suggests that, as such, if the National Register
criteria require sites and landscapes to remain
largely undisturbed and unmodied, it would
preclude MCLs from being eligible for listing in
the National Register. However, varying degrees
of integrity are acceptable with certain categories
of properties, including landscapes, and National
Register nominators and reviewers alike are mind-
ful that maritime cultural landscapes are dynamic
phenomena.
Brandi Carrier notes that because the guidelines
for Traditional Cultural Properties (TCPs) require
continuous use of a site to be classied as a TCP,
MCLs seem to be a better alternative for nominat-
ing maritime landscapes to the National Register.
Although Delgado notes that no maritime site or
sites have been listed as landscapes in the National
Register yet, he, Merwin, and Carrier are generally
optimistic that the MCL concept will aid in recog-
nizing the signicance of maritime landscapes as
eligible for National Register listing. On the other
hand, while recognizing the utility of the MCL
concept, Russo is more cynical about the National
Register guidelines, suggesting that major rewrites
and exibility need be added to accommodate the
unique characteristics of MCLs.
Michael Russo
Southeast Archeological Center
National Park Service
3. e MCL Approach:
Pros and Cons
Introduction
36
Edited Transcript of Presentation
For us in the Oce of National Marine Sanctuar-
ies, we are one of those places where we hope to
be the pointy end of the spear or where the rubber
meets the road when it comes to managing with the
concept of maritime cultural landscapes. is has
meant an interesting journey as we transition from
conceptual papers to management plans – a goal
not yet reached. Particularly, we are a system which
is largely dened by a sense that it is natural re-
source-based with only a few maritime heritage sites.
Indeed, one of the biggest concepts of all that
we’ve had to grapple with was that if site does not
have shipwrecks, therefore, there is no maritime
heritage in that sanctuary.
I think we’ve evolved through that perception.
We’ve started to apply a landscape perspective in
our sites in a couple of ways. We’ve yet to actually
do a National Register nomination for a maritime
cultural landscape. We continue to do sites or
districts. But, we’ve started to line things up so that
when and if the time comes, we can start looking
at it though that maritime cultural landscape lens.
Applying criteria and if not actually writing nom-
inations, than at least preparing documentation,
pulling it together in a way that can serve as the ba-
sic source that we will then extract from for section
106 or 110 consultations. We also draw from our
initial maritime cultural landscape assessments for
developing historic resource studies or archaeolog-
ical resource studies.
Also, I think, in a large part as well, we also use
the concept and the reality of maritime cultural
landscapes as a key part of the ongoing message
that we present to the public.
Rather than talk generally about how Maritime
Heritage Program (MHP) and NOAA use MCL,
I’m going to run really quickly through an exercise
we did recently to support the expansion, knock on
wood, of USS Monitor National Marine Sanctuary,
out there o the North Carolina coast in an area
known as the “graveyard of the Atlantic.”
is is a rather important area of ocean and
coastline when you look at the history, not only of
the United States, but global maritime culture and
history. e world converged on this place in large
part, not just because there is a group of barrier is-
lands, but because it’s a key spot on an ocean high-
way. e Gulf Stream has been and remains a very
powerful presence there. But as well, this is a place
on and near the water that people have gathered,
encountered, and used for millennia.
In looking at this place, being with NOAA, we
started way up in space with satellites, but then be-
gan to zoom down, looking at it in the microscale,
in particular, how these barrier islands surrounded
by water are a maritime landscape in every way,
shape, and form.
is is apparent not only from space, but down to
the perspective that you have from a small cra or
standing on the beach. What’s also key is that it’s also
an evolving, changing landscape, not only in terms
of sea level rise from the last post glacial maximum
when that plain now oshore most denitely was
inhabited by people. It is also a landscape that has
continued to change dramatically in our own time.
is is true whether you map that in terms of
changes in inlets and the eects of the environ-
ment or in terms of changes over time in local and
regional maritime culture. You can look at it in
terms of the ongoing ways by which humanity has
responded to those changes: constructing bridges,
adding ferry systems, building settlements in and
around key inlets, and then abandoning them as
those inlets closed and a new inlet opened.
All of that experience of the ongoing human
interaction in this landscape is important, especial-
Using the MCL Approach in National Marine Sanctuaries:
e North Carolina Coast
James Delgado
Oce of National Marine Sanctuaries, Maritime Heritage Program
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
37
ly as we measure, based on the past and its lessons,
what may be the consequences of not heeding what
happens with changes in that landscape. With that,
the Outer Banks will to a certain extent “disappear,”
if you will, out of the landscape, from most people’s
perspective, or perhaps from people’s minds—as
certainly houses and roads have washed away due
to storms that will increase what they take as a
result of sea level rise.
But, for each and every person who has an
ancestral tie to those Outer Banks, they will never
disappear. is is as true as it is that the islands of
Kiribati and every other nation in the Pacic will
not disappear from the collective cultural memory
or the maritime cultural landscape of the people
out there as sea level rise and atolls are submerged.
at awareness and deep-rooted connection
starts with ancestors. It starts with traditional uses.
But, indeed, as we began to assess the Outer Banks
and developed our rst document in the system
that looked at the MCL, the key thing was not to
relegate ancestral indigenous people to merely hav-
ing been there in the past. We recognize, of course,
that these are people who had been there for a long
time. People that still persist to this day and are
actively involved. We nd that there are similar
connections throughout our system.
I certainly got that years ago while working and
living in the Pacic Northwest where the large por-
tion of the shing community remained to be the
people who had been shing there for thousands of
years. ey never le, and they retain their ances-
tral ties to the sea and its resources.
e other aspect we investigated was how the
Outer Banks had been ground zero for a number of
folks with that cultural context that came as a result
of that maritime highway. How that earlier world
encountered by Europeans was not only depicted,
charted, and mapped, but then became a center of
their activities in the Colonial era, driven by ships
and trade. Ultimately, that led to the establishment
of non-indigenous settlements and communities.
In looking at maritime cultural landscapes out
there, what we have ended up doing is incorporat-
ing a sense of each and every maritime community
such as it is. Be it a Smith Island on Chesapeake
Bay, or communities like Bath or Beaufort. ere,
we focus on how the people in these communi-
ties have interacted with and used that landscape.
at may be the construction of piling-supported
boardwalks across the shallows of the sounds, or
the construction of large hotels, or windmills that
take advantage of the natural ocean environment.
Over time, that landscape, as settled and occupied,
became a center point for tourism, for develop-
ment, to establish a national seashore, and ulti-
mately designate a National Marine Sanctuary o
those shores, albeit a very small one centered on an
iconic Civil War shipwreck.
But, also, and this is key, this landscape is one
in which large numbers of people who came and
continue to come, do so in the true meaning of
recreation, to “recreate” themselves in that unique
ocean environment. To this day, then, people still
use it and interact with the ocean environment,
even from shore.
is to me is a fascinating concept: that value
comes from qualities of multiple uses and percep-
tions that can be described and discussed in terms
of interactions, and to do so without placing a val-
ue judgment on them, but simply describing them
and why they have meaning or value to some, even
if not to all.
It’s a very fascinating thing for me, therefore,
to be addressing this issue with some of our su-
perintendents, not here but elsewhere, when we
talk about ocean energy and environment. is
includes topics and resources such as oshore oil
drilling and platforms. ey are, no matter how
you chose to characterize them, as good, bad or
otherwise, important elements in the maritime cul-
tural landscape going way back in terms of how we
as humans have harvested energy from the sea.
As we have looked at the maritime cultural
landscape in and around North Carolina, it’s also
been key for us to engage with those communities
that might see us as a threat that will close o and
build a fence around a vast area of the ocean. Hav-
ing a document that speaks to their ongoing uses of
38
the landscape is important, including the cultural
traditions of beach driving, beach campres, sh-
ing, recreational shing, and commercial shing.
We have worked at developing a document that
speaks to these ongoing cultural traditions that is
non- judgmental. We would be remiss, however,
if we did not point out things like the diminishing
size of sh since historic (i.e. the 1950s) times and
then talk about the size of sh being caught today.
We talk about elements that are iconic, that
speak to people, that if inputted to a maritime
cultural landscape document for a sanctuary does
not mean that we are trying to stake a claim or say,
“Hey! We own a piece of that!” Rather, the point
is that they are interconnected. Whether they are
the iconic lighthouses, some of which are in the
national seashores or elements that no longer
exist, or, they’re simply on the landscape or in the
memory, such as the light ships. Or, in the case of
Diamond Shoal Lightship, the actual wreck itself,
or the now abandoned Texas Towers.
We talk about fortications and how the ocean
highway met at this key area to be defended. We
talk about seacoast fortications throughout all
periods of history, from prehistoric times and
palisades all the way up to the modern era. We do
talk about shipwrecks as well. Not only oshore,
but where they crashed ashore on the beaches and
indeed where that was responded to by the United
States Life Saving Service, later the Coast Guard.
ese are all key interrelated elements on this
section of highway of the sea and reect centuries, if
not millennia or more, of ongoing human activity.
Hopefully, what these documents show is that
we get it to a certain extent and are interested in
more dialogue.
at of course also includes shipwreck remains
on beaches that are still there in the boundaries of
the national seashore and shipwrecks that are no
longer there.
Anna Holloway of the NPS and I were just
talking on the ight in to these meetings about
shipwrecks on the landscape that “got away.” As an
archeologist, it took me a long time to realize in the
maritime cultural landscape it’s not just the wrecks
that are there that have le their tangible bones, it’s
the ones that crashed ashore and were later pulled
o. ey maybe le nothing but a powerful memo-
ry or an iconic photograph. But they remain part of
the story and of the landscape.
Battles fought, and perhaps not so tangible as
physical remains on the seabed, are also key and
important. is includes things like a chart of the
placement of ships in the bombardment of Fort
Fisher. So too are wrecks that have le tangible
traces, such as the iconic wreck that lead to the
creation of the rst National Marine Sanctuary,
USS Monitor.
Monitor is not alone. ere are other Civil War
wrecks out there that speak to this. Of course, there
is the ongoing battleeld that Joe Hoyt will talk
about later. at battleeld has its own elements
ashore as well as out in the water. It also reects
ongoing interaction and use, as the wrecks there
are an active focus of ongoing recreational diving.
Underwater archeology, in and by itself, is also
a key part of that landscape. is is seen not only
now but also in terms of what has happened in
the past with iconic projects. ey include Mon-
itor or Queen Anne’s Revenge or others. Wheth-
er the archaeology is past, present or future in
terms of projects, they are important elements
as archaeological resources that help inform
and inspire. In that, those who do the work and
curate the nds and recoveries are also part of the
landscape. at includes places like East Carolina
University, known to several in the room, and its
ongoing role in shipwreck archaeology. ere is
also e Mariner’s Museum, the home of the USS
Monitor Center.
I want to close with one other aspect that has
helped us, that is NOAA‘s ties to our ancestral
agency, the Coast Survey. anks to the work of
centuries, we have access to a wide range of doc-
umentation that includes original Coast Survey
charts—not only those published, and there are a
wide range of them that document the landscape,
39
but also manuscript charts that also speak to other
elements. Whether they are documenting the
presence of a Civil War shipwreck, or several, or,
manuscript charts such as these that grapple with
every aspect that you will only nd archivally, such
as changing shorelines, shoals, and inlets, or the
presence and position of early oyster beds.
In particular, the T-sheets (manuscript charts)
have been a powerful resource for us and we in-
tend to use these and share these with any and all
partners. One example is in North Carolina where
the manuscript chart depicts not just Cape Fear,
but also the actual blockade running port to which
all of these vessels would wait once they cleared
through and got past the blockading eet. at lit-
tle landscape, that portion of the landscape, was all
documented along with obstructions and tempo-
rary fortications during the Civil War.
In this way and in this fashion, we’re helping use
these documents to drive our own maritime cul-
tural landscape look at the banks and at the indus-
tries and at the people who have been molded by
and have in time molded their ocean environment.
For us, the most critical element has been and will
remain engagement with the public.
e only way I think we are going to move
forward in all of this is not only to help dene
and categorize maritime cultural landscapes, or to
gure out how to use what we can in the existing
tool kit, but to continue to be collaborative and
work together. No one agency, no one group, no
one CRM rm, no one practitioner is going to get
us through this. Together, I think we can come up
with something that, sounds to me, will probably
be the next best great idea in cultural resources and
management. Δ
James Delgado recently retired as Director of Mar-
itime Heritage in NOAA’s Oce of National Marine
Sanctuaries. His four-decade long career has includ-
ed a 13-year tenure with the NPS, including serving
as the Service’s maritime historian. He currently
serves as the Senior Vice President of SEARCH, a
leading nationwide and global provider of cultural
resources services. His interest in maritime history
and archaeology has remained a constant passion
and focus, and his favorite maritime sites and sub-
jects remain the next ones he will encounter.
40
Edited Transcript of Presentation
I am a marine archeologist, and a scientic diver,
and I work for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Man-
agement. I spent most of my career working on
terrestrial sites, and I transitioned to working in
a marine archeology realm about four years ago
when I joined the federal government. It’s been a
really unique opportunity to move from terrestrial
archeology, where we have a pretty solid under-
standing of how to apply Section 106, what good
faith identication eorts mean, how we go about
identifying areas of potential eect, and so forth.
Moving oshore has not been necessarily as clear
and easy as I expected when I took the position;
it’s an ongoing education for me. As many of you
know, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is
an Interior Department agency, and its mission is
environmentally responsible development of energy
on the Outer Continental Shelf. is includes oil
and gas exploration, marine minerals extraction,
and renewable energy development. And I work for
BOEM’s Oce of Renewable Energy Program. is
is the oce within BOEM that regulates oshore
wind and marine hydrokinetic generation.
Today, I’m going to discuss the challenges and
opportunities as I have experienced them of ap-
plying the MCL approach on the outer continental
shelf, which is where BOEM holds its regulatory
authority to regulate developments like these. But
just what is this Outer Continental Shelf? As Jim-
my Moore introduced this morning, we are talking
about a legal term that refers to a vast submerged
landscape of some six-and-a-half billion square
kilometers.
BOEM’s operations and its regulatory responsi-
bilities extend throughout this ocean frontier. My
oce’s primary area of operation is the Atlantic,
from Maine down to the tip of Florida, and this
ranges from about ve to 370 kilometers from
shore. So it’s a pretty large area.
When we refer to the OCS, or the Outer Conti-
nental Shelf, we are really talking about a legal de-
scription of a piece of land, that is now submerged,
from an archeological and a geological perspective,
though this is a much more interesting place than
that legal description may infer. As you probably
know, sea level on earth operates on a geological
cycle. Much of the continental shelf is exposed dry
land during glacial periods, but during interglacial
periods, the shelf is submerged under relatively
shallow waters, at least on the Atlantic side.
So, from a geological standpoint, we are just in
another interglacial period, during which sea level
has risen to cover a relatively shallow continental
shelf. is is an important point to consider be-
cause we expect to nd evidence of human habi-
tations that date to the last glacial period in areas
that are very far oshore now. Although these areas
are now submerged under several hundred feet of
water, they were actually terrestrial during their
times of occupation.
So we have to give some consideration to g-
uring out during what time span coinciding with
human history these areas were exposed dry land
and therefore habitable. As the sea level rose, this
terrestrial and marine interface transgressed across
the surface and sometimes it protected those
archeological sites, and sometimes it totally demol-
ished them.
e challenges of working out here in this vast
landscape are quite innumerable, but I’ll share just
a few of the more pertinent ones to this discussion.
First, the OCS is a large area and, outside of the
National Marine Sanctuaries and other protected
areas, BOEM is pretty much the exclusive federal
agency that’s protecting these submerged feder-
al lands, and we are doing so with very few sta
compared to our sister agencies. Jimmy mentioned
this morning; we have eleven sta for just over
7,000 square kilometers of submerged federal
lands. I’ll just add at this point that we do not have
Challenges of Using the MCL Approach on the Outer Continental Shelf
Brandi Carrier
Oce of Renewable Energy Programs
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
41
a single ethnographer on sta: not a single expert
in recording oral history; not a single expert in ac-
knowledging the existence and recording properly
those dierent ethnographies.
Second, in this extensive remote area, there is a
complex jurisdictional environment. ese issues
are complicated, and so are the legal protections
that are aorded to the submerged cultural resourc-
es. is is the norm of what we are dealing with
here. One very quick and short example is that the
Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979
(ARPA) does not apply. It’s specically exempted
from application on the Outer Continental Shelf.
ese challenges greatly reduce the ecacy of
any underwater cultural heritage work that our
eleven sta can hope to perform. Also, accessing
this remote area is expensive; it requires specialized
equipment and expertise. Not every Section 106
consulting party that has an interest in these areas
and these resources has the training or the exper-
tise to understand the data being collected and the
resulting meaning behind the ndings.
So, even basic responsibilities under Section
106, like consulting with interested parties and
agreeing on good faith identication eorts, are
incredibly complex endeavors on the OCS. Perhaps
the biggest problem that we are facing is what to
do about submerged relic landforms. Submerged
relic landforms are not archeological sites. ey
are landforms that may or may not contain arche-
ological sites, and, as I mentioned earlier and we’ve
heard several other presenters discuss today, as
sea levels rose, the terrestrial and marine interface
transgressed across the surface of the shelf. And
sometimes the geological activity accompanying
this transgression protected archeological sites, and
sometimes it demolished them.
So, we can nd these landforms pretty easily;
our technology and our expertise can do this, but
identifying an archeological site or other historic
property type within this landform on the Outer
Continental Shelf—this remains an elusive goal.
We haven’t given up on it and there are other
mechanisms that we are using to try to access it.
One mechanism is the two primary paleo-land-
scape studies that we are engaging in, but the
current status in nding these archeological sites
is still not something that we have a great deal of
condence in.
So what we do with these is default to avoid-
ing possible sites as an administrative shortcut to
our Section 106 reviews. is fullls the agency’s
responsibility under 106, but frankly it fails to help
us learn anything about these sites and it does not
meet the stewardship and management responsi-
bilities for submerged federal lands.
On top of this, the application of maritime
cultural landscape theory to the Outer Continen-
tal Shelf introduces some diculties of its own for
BOEM from the very start. Amanda Evenson and
Matthew Keith wrote extensively about the compli-
cations inherent in applying the MCL approach to
submerged precontact sites and I’ll add a few issues
that further complicate our Section 106 reviews.
Using Traditional Cultural Property (TCP)
designations for the protection of landforms is
problematic, because integrity, as dened in the
National Register bulletin, does not neatly apply
here. Continued usage in a traditional manner
does not exist. Native American communities were
separated physically from these lands as a result of
sea level rise since the last ice age, and they were
separated culturally and socially as a result of the
federal government’s assimilation policies. So, they
no longer have, at least as far as they have been
sharing with us, place names for these submerged
landscape features.
We are not talking about something that hap-
pened a few generations ago, we are talking about
19,000 years ago. No one interacts with these land-
forms in the same way that they traditionally did.
We hear regularly that once we nd an archeologi-
cal site, then of course there will be cultural recon-
nection with that, and the various constellations of
values surrounding these places will be rewoven
into the rich tapestry of Native American history.
In other words, once we nd an archeological site,
it will, ipso facto, become a TCP, but until then
these submerged relic landscapes lack the richness
of cultural cohesion that’s inherent in the MCL
42
theoretical approach, and it would warrant a very
easy TCP integrity designation under the National
Register.
Similarly problematic, we can’t know whether or
not there is a solid archeological research potential
in the area that we are considering for develop-
ment. is isn’t a case where we know we have a
site and we are saving it for a future time when we
may have better equipment or methods for explor-
ing it. No, instead we don’t even know if we have
a site. On land, this would be very cut and dry:
the development would be approved because no
historic property had been identied. But beneath
hundreds of meters of water, it’s far more compli-
cated than that.
If we don’t have the condence that a site is or is
not there, how can we move forward with develop-
ment? If we don’t have condence that a site is or is
not there, how can we stop development? I’m asked
this question almost every day, so we continue to
struggle with this question: Is a landform alone,
without any integrity of cultural connection, with-
out any evidence of an archeological site present,
is this landform a historic property? And we are
still struggling with these questions, but with these
questions or these challenges, I think comes some
great opportunities.
When we talk about submerged terrestrial
archeological sites out on the Outer Continental
Shelf, we are really talking about habitation and
working sites that are now submerged, and I think
this is a really nice little shi. So, our rst opportu-
nity is here, in having this discussion. I think this
is great. I think it indicates that there is an oppor-
tunity to acknowledge this complexity that I’ve
outlined, and to address it directly.
Also, we are shoring up and extending our
network of partnerships through the federal sphere
and into the private sector. Our work with Moni-
tor National Marine Sanctuary on the Battle of the
Atlantic project and our work with various uni-
versities and tribes on our paleo-landscapes proj-
ects—these are good examples that illustrate that
we’re taking this issue seriously. We are continuing
to work on it; we’re not giving up. We are asking
the dicult questions, and we are stretching our
theoretical paradigms to accommodate the reality
of working on the OCS.
Second, I think we need to request updates
to our National Register Bulletins from our col-
leagues at NPS, and guidance from the Advisory
Council that can help address this complexity.
Otherwise, the landscapes will disappear under the
developments because the need for them is very
high. I always get such great refreshment to my
commitment to historic preservation by coming to
these meetings, because everyone in the room is
committed to preservation. But then I go back to
my day job, and I’m constantly asked the question,
“how can you propose to stop this very import-
ant renewable energy development from moving
forward?”
So we have to keep in mind that there has to be
a balance, and frankly, I have to have it in writing,
because the question I’m asked always is where is
that in writing? Where is the National Register Bul-
letin that says that this is how we can apply it? So I
guess my short answer is the development will not
wait, so please let’s come together and rewrite some
of this guidance to address it.
And nally, I really think that responsible Fed-
eral agencies have to abandon the project-driven
paradigm. ey have to instead embrace a resource
stewardship model. is is, I think, very essential
for long term management of Maritime Cultural
Landscapes and using MCL as the signicance
factor for identifying other historic properties. e
OCS remains the largest area of federal lands, and
it lacks the protected stewardship of management
activities provided by every other land managing
agency like the BLM, the Forest Service, Reclama-
tion, and Park Service.
Our Federal Preservation Ocer and my fellow
regional preservation ocers are making headway
in this arena, but it is slow-going and fraught with
resistance. But from my perspective, this transition
is really essential to raising the bar for all underwa-
ter cultural heritage on the OCS. It’s an important
step toward resolving the challenges of applying
the MCL approach here, and the primary reason is
43
that many of the landforms that we are discussing,
they lay within the horizontal areas of potential
eect that we are permitting under Section 106
activities, but they do not lay within their vertical
area of potential eect. What I mean is that we may
have a cable going across the top of an area and
the landform that we are interested in is far below
that. So our Section 106 activities are never going
to investigate those landforms. ey are going to
be le there because they are not being impacted
by the outcome. If BOEM were to accept Section
110 responsibilities, it would have an obligation to
identify those landforms and to work on under-
standing them.
I think that if we can do that, we will be embrac-
ing this important opportunity to learn more. As
we learn more about what these landforms hold,
and where they are, we will be able to better im-
prove our identication eorts. ey will become
more accurate, and this positive feedback loop will
create a more eective underwater cultural heritage
construct.
In conclusion, I think there are many challenges
and many opportunities as well, when conducting
traditional section 106 review activities for devel-
opments on the OCS. Δ
Brandi Carrier is a Registered Professional Archae-
ologist with more than een years of experience
in cultural resources management, and an MA in
Archaeology and Prehistory. She has extensive ar-
chaeological eld and laboratory experience, having
directed historic and prehistoric Phase I, II, and III
surveys and mitigations throughout een states, in
the United Kingdom (UK), and in Greece. She has
been responsible for all aspects of cultural resources
management, including project design and imple-
mentation, eld survey, artifact analysis, and report
writing on projects ranging from corridor survey
to urban construction monitoring to historic and
prehistoric site excavation to large-scale records
reviews and predictive modeling. In addition to a
thorough knowledge of Sections 110, 106, and 304
of the National Historic Preservation Act, Ms. Car-
rier has had extensive experience applying the Na-
tional Register of Historic Places eligibility criteria.
She joined the Bureau of Ocean Energy Manage-
ment in 2011 as an archaeologist and subsequently
became the Atlantic Regional Historic Preservation
Ocer. (In 2017 Ms. Carrier became BOEM’s Dep-
uty Federal Preservation Ocer and transferred to
the agency’s Oce of Environmental Programs.)
44
New York State has roughly 1850 miles of shore-
line along the Atlantic Ocean, Lake Erie, and Lake
Ontario, as well as two major rivers (the Hudson,
actually a tidal estuary for a substantial length, and
the Mohawk River), the historic Erie and other
canals, the Finger Lakes, and countless smaller
streams and lakes — all of which should add up to
many opportunities to apply the maritime cultural
landscape concept to a wide variety of submerged
and terrestrial cultural resources, including archae-
ological sites and historic structures and buildings.
Many of these resources are already listed on the
National Register of Historic Places, though rarely
with an explicit focus on the maritime setting, and
the New York State Historic Preservation Oce
(NY SHPO) has only started to assess the challeng-
es of identifying, evaluating, and perhaps listing
new Maritime Cultural Landscapes (MCLs) here.
Native peoples have lived in New York for more
than 10,000 years, but ancient coastal archaeolog-
ical sites are under-represented here in terms of
National Register listings. One exception is Fort
Corchaug, located on a stream that empties into
Peconic Bay in eastern Long Island, listed in 1974
(NR number 74001308). Much of the documen-
tation for the site is focused on the archaeological
evidence of a small fort occupied between roughly
1640 and 1660. e nomination does not go into
detail regarding the maritime context and instead
deals mainly with the military aspects of the site:
the fortied palisade walls, and artifacts related to
weaponry, such as European gun ints, lead shot,
and an iron sword, as well as Native-made brass
and iron arrowheads, though there is no documen-
tary evidence that the Corchaug people ever fought
with the European colonists.
e site may have been a temporary refuge used
in times of trouble, but something else was going on
at Fort Corchaug, and it takes on more prominence
if we consider the maritime landscape: the site was
also a protected place for making wampum, the
traditional shell beads that by this time had become
the currency of choice in coastal New York (Solecki
1993). Finds include tools and debris from the man-
ufacturing of wampum. e shells were procured
from Peconic Bay—shellshing here by Native
American groups has been going on for thousands
of years—but following Contact with Europeans,
shellshing morphed from being an important part
of the diet to something resembling a maritime in-
dustry. Adding an MCL context to the nomination
might expand our public interpretation of the site.
A more recent Register listing dealing with
Native American shing, added in 2012 (NR num-
ber 12000578), implicitly addresses the maritime
cultural landscape. e Lower Niagara River Spear
Fishing Docks Historic District is signicant for
its association with Iroquoian spear shing from
around 1831 to 1958, when access to the site was
cut o by construction. Spear shing is a deeply
rooted tradition among Iroquoian peoples; the
Tuscarora brought this tradition with them when
they migrated to New York from North Carolina in
the early 18th century and adapted it to the unique
environment of the Niagara River (Wallace 2012).
Fish not only provided an essential source of food
but were also sold to supplement incomes.
Features include a path at the foot of the steep
embankment and the remains of stone docks built
parallel to the shoreline from readily available shale,
now marked by boulder piles. e rock oor of each
dock was lled to make a smooth surface, and a
small pool of calm water was created on the down-
stream side of the dock to attract sh. While their
locations remained constant, the dock structures
were rebuilt each year aer being damaged by harsh
winter weather. Few remnants of these structures
survive today, but their locations are recognizable
by the shoreline topography and river currents, and
are known through oral history. e district doc-
uments the strong connection between the people
and the natural environment, as well as the impor-
tance of sh and shing in Iroquoian culture.
New York State has innumerable maritime sites,
ranging from a diverse array of important ship-
e Many and Varied MCLs of New York State
Daria Merwin
New York State Historic Preservation Oce
45
wrecks and historic oating vessels which could
perhaps t into an MCL context, to many water-
front communities with National Register-listed
historic districts. For example, just beyond the
bustle of Manhattan were several shorefront com-
munities, like the National Register listed Far
Rockaway Beach Bungalow Historic District (NR
number 13000499). In the early 1900s, several
bungalow communities were developed in the
Rockaways, generally segregated by ethnicity. In Far
Rockaway, most of the owners were Jewish families
(Kaplan and Kaplan 2003). Although each was a
separate enclave, the bungalows themselves were
nearly identical in appearance: three bedrooms, a
small kitchen, bathroom and porch, typically on a
twenty-ve by y-foot lot. Just steps from these
summer homes lay the boardwalk and the beach
where residents could swim in the Atlantic Ocean.
is nomination hints at the relationship between
people and the sea —and could certainly be expand-
ed. e maritime setting is the reason such summer
resorts were built, and bungalow communities once
spanned nearly the entire length of the Rockaway
Peninsula. Over the years, demolition and remod-
eling took their toll, and most recently the area was
hit by Superstorm Sandy. Amazingly, the Far Rock-
away historic district survived relatively unscathed.
Storms and climate change will present some
major challenges to historic preservation in mari-
time environments, but there are others, especially
in terms of the National Register nomination pro-
cess. First, we oen face a challenge of integrity, as
many maritime sites have witnessed substantial al-
terations as needs and functions change over time.
Also, in many places, there have been intrusions so
that the maritime landscape is no longer a contig-
uous one. For example, in New York City there are
still many elements of the harbor rail freight system
visible along the shore, but we have never evaluated
the system as a whole. Instead, our determination
of disparate elements mostly has been done as part
of Section 106 compliance review, one parcel at a
time, where individual sites need to have retained
a high level of integrity to be considered National
Register eligible. If we used an MCL lens to look at
the port-rail system as a whole, would we make the
same determination?
Another potential challenge we have in New
York involves threats posed by waterfront develop-
ment. ere are parts of the state where waterfront
property has always been in demand, like New
York City, where one of the most iconic maritime
sites, South Street Seaport, is currently threatened
by redevelopment (Bagley 2015). In other places,
the waterfront was at the fringes of landward-based
society, a place where sometimes smelly and dirty
activities such as sh processing and industrial
manufacturing took place. But with development
pressure and a fairly new interest in cleaning up
our waterways, the price for these marginal wa-
terfront properties has increased, leading some
communities to question what is the best use for
such land. And sometimes, communities decide
that historic preservation is not part of the answer.
One such case of a maritime resource in a his-
torically marginal environment recently came to
our oce for review, and aer some debate the NY
SHPO determined that the property is eligible for
listing in the National Register. is is the story of
a shing community known as “e Shacks” on the
outskirts of the City of Hudson at North Bay, on
the shore of the Hudson River. e community is
currently comprised of 17 shing cabins or shacks.
In recent decades the site—also called the Furgary
Boat Club—was largely recreational in nature, but
maps provide evidence that the existing buildings
evolved from sh market buildings on the site at
the river’s edge dating from at least as early as the
late nineteenth century.
e modern community of Hudson is split re-
garding what should happen to the shacks: demolish
or save them (Gilson 2016). e shacks were basical-
ly tolerated until recently, even though it was discov-
ered some years ago that the grounds belong to the
city. In the summer of 2012, the shacks’ owners were
evicted, and the site secured. Demolition has been
pending now for four years. Proponents of demo-
lition and rebuilding the site as a park are skeptical
of the historic nature of the shacks, frequently citing
the ramshackle architecture as evidence that the
buildings are an eyesore in need of removal.
On the face of it, the demolition proponents do
have a point—the buildings that exist today show
46
evidence of having been patched and repaired—
some with salvaged local materials, others with
vinyl siding and various new building materials.
e shacks facing the water are on piers and feature
exterior wooden decks, walkways, and docks; there
is also a boat ramp. e buildings are of frame con-
struction, generally one-story in height with side
or front gable roofs, wood or vinyl windows, and
contain one or two multi-purpose rooms.
If we were to rely solely on the built environ-
ment, assessing only the property’s architectural
signicance and integrity, we would fall short in
telling the full story here. But if we bring in the
maritime context, we can say that the property is a
rare surviving collection of vernacular buildings,
which represent a time when sturgeon and shad
were abundant in the Hudson River, and when
people made their livelihoods shing the river and
selling their catch on the shore. ese people, com-
monly called “Furgarians” today, formed a commu-
nity where the buildings were handed down gener-
ation-to-generation.
Fishing and hunting along the Hudson River for
small scale commercial operations and personal
subsistence or recreation are largely undocument-
ed activities in terms of history and the material
record of archaeology and architecture. Buildings,
such as shing shacks and storage for small wa-
tercra, and structures like duck blinds and net
drying racks were oen located on isolated river
banks, accessible only by boat. Sites that survived
into the twenty-rst century tend to be located
in what might be perceived as marginal environ-
ments. e shacks are adjacent to a wastewater
treatment plant, with railroad tracks on a causeway
to the west. A similar shing shanty existed adja-
cent to a wastewater treatment plant and industrial
ruins in Poughkeepsie until increasing riverfront
real estate values led to the redevelopment of the
site with upscale restaurants and a marina.
e buildings, structures, boats, and other
shing equipment are part of the maritime cultural
landscape of the Hudson River. ey are also the
tangible remains of a traditional way of life that
is rapidly disappearing as habitat loss, pollution,
over-harvesting, and other causes have nearly end-
ed commercial and recreational shing here. For
example, today all non-migratory sh and crabs in
the estuarine portion of the Hudson River (New
York Harbor to Troy) are o-limits for women of
childbearing age and children under een due to
pollution (New York State Department of Health
2016).
Shad is among the most important sh species
of the Hudson River, valued for both its meat and
roe. Adult shad live in salt water, but return to the
freshwater streams from which they hatched in or-
der to spawn. Shad return each year to the Hudson
River, typically starting in early April for roughly
two months, to spawn in the sandbars north of
Kingston. In the past, shad could be taken by the
hundreds during this spring run, so that by the
mid-nineteenth century the shad’s arrival had be-
come a major annual event (Lossing 1868:144-145).
By the early twentieth century, however, shad
shing on the Hudson River was in decline. Dredg-
ing for ship channels on the approach to Albany
impacted spawning grounds and in other areas,
riverfront development projects, such as the Pali-
sades Interstate Park (opened 1909), resulted in the
removal of shing shanties. is decline in shing
was reversed during the Great Depression, when
economic necessity led to the rebirth of shad sh-
ing for subsistence, which in turn led to rebuilding
shanties along the river’s banks. e commercial
shad shery regained importance during World
War II, peaked in the late 1940s, and experienced
major declines aer the 1950s (Hattala 1997). Shad
shing in New York waters has been banned since
2010 due to stock depletion. It is likely that shad
shing was the major economic activity at the ear-
liest incarnation of the Furgary Boat Club, though
other seasonal and year-round shing (sturgeon,
bass, eel, crab) and hunting (muskrat, deer) were
also carried out. e chronology for “e Shacks,”
starting in the late nineteenth century and peaking
during the mid-twentieth century, coincides with
the boom and bust cycles in shad shing on the
Hudson River. By looking beyond architecture to
consider the natural history of the maritime land-
scape, we were able to build a case for the signi-
cance of the shacks. Δ
47
References
Bagley, Charles V. (2015). South Street Seaport
on List of Imperiled Historic Sites. e New York
Times, June 25, A22.
Gilson, Roger Hannigan. (2016). Furgary Boat
Club Site to be Opened to the Public, Former
Residents of Fishing Shacks Take Issue with Future
Plans. Columbia Register-Star, May 23, 1.
Hattala, Kathryn A. (1997.) Managing Hudson
River American Shad: A Biologist’s Perspectives on
the Shad’s Ups and Downs. Shad Journal 2, 3.
Kaplan, Lawrence and Carol P. Kaplan. (2003).
Between Ocean and City: e Transformation of
Rockaway, New York. Columbia University Press,
New York.
Lossing, Benjamin. (1868). e Hudson, from the
Wilderness to the Sea. Virtue and Yorston, New
Yor k.
New York State Department of Health (2016)
Hudson River: Health Advice on Eating Fish You
Catch. Pamphlet available at https://www.health.
ny.gov/publications/2794.pdf.
Solecki, Ralph S. (1993). Indian Forts of the Mid-
17th Century in the Southern New England-New
York Coastal Area. Northeast Historical Archaeol-
ogy 22: 64-78.
Wallace, Anthony F.C. (2012). Tuscarora: A Histo-
ry. SUNY Press, Albany, New York.
Daria Merwin has more than 20 years of experi-
ence in cultural resource management, conducting
research in both archaeology and architectural
history. She received an MA degree in Nautical Ar-
chaeology from Texas A&M University, with a the-
sis on vernacular boatbuilding on Long Island, and
a PhD in Anthropology from Stony Brook Universi-
ty. Her dissertation eldwork entailed scuba diving
to recover submerged evidence of prehistoric Native
American sites in the Hudson River and New York
Harbor. Daria joined the Survey Unit of the New
York State Historic Preservation Oce in 2014 and
serves as the Oce’s point person for underwater
archaeology and maritime heritage matters.
48
What is a Maritime Cultural Landscape (MCL)
and can an archeological MCL exist? ough the
term was coined by Westerdahl (1979) originally
as a tool to get archeologists working separately on
underwater and terrestrial features to view their
apparently disparate sites as materially and histori-
cally related, today “Maritime Cultural Landscape”
is being used by federal land managers to classi-
fy and protect submerged shipwrecks and other
near-shore or submerged water-related cultural
and natural features found in marine sanctuaries
and parks. Under the National Register Landscape
Initiative (NRLI), MCLs are one of several types of
landscapes being considered for increased atten-
tion in National Register nominations. In partic-
ular, the NRLI asks of landscapes “if additional
guidance is needed, where do inconsistencies need
to be resolved, and what types of landscapes need
to be better addressed by the program?”
As the case currently stands, virtually no National
Register (NR) guidelines specic to Maritime Cul-
tural Landscapes exist and certainly none specic to
archeological MCLs exist. Given that the National
Register, by design and law, recognizes only ve
property types: building, structure, object, site, and
district; and given that landscape is not considered
one of these types (although any specic landscape
may contain one or more of the property types
among a panorama otherwise dominated by natural
features), the general absence of NR guidance on
MCLs is understandable. It wasn’t until the NR was
well up and rolling that the greater urban, rural, and
natural contexts of property types became increas-
ingly and fully viewed, if not ocially sanctied, as
property types themselves.
at there are no descriptions for maritime
landscapes in NR bulletins is not surprising. ere
1 But the word “archeology” is mentioned only twice in the 14-page document, and those mentions do not discuss at all how
to integrate archeological resources into nominations for standing historic properties usually nominated under Criterion C for
period, master-work, or artistic distinction.
2 Editor’s note: is bulletin was not intended solely for urban designed landscapes.
are also no specic National Register bulletins on
mountain landscapes, subterranean landscapes,
aerial landscapes or specic site types like subway
tracks, turpentine camps, rollercoasters, migration
trails and the thousands of other kinds of places
that constitute geophysical/historical aspects of U.S.
history. NR guidance is purposely general in char-
acter to accommodate the nearly innite historical-
ly signicant places that make up the country. Spe-
cic places are perforce t into one or more of the
ve types allowed by law, oen with some diculty.
Only a few specic place types suciently dis-
tinct in character from modal historic property
types have warranted their own guidance docu-
ments. For example, ships, cemeteries, mines, and,
pertinent to this discussion, urban and rural land-
scapes have their own NR bulletins. e rst Na-
tional Register landscape bulletin (18, How to Evalu-
ate and Nominate Designed Historic Landscapes) was
published in 1987, some 20 years aer the establish-
ment of the National Register. It dealt with designed
urban landscapes, whose contributing elements
primarily included buildings and structures, but also
open lands such as parks and gardens.
1
(Figure 1)
is bulletin still serves well the National Register
nomination of historic urban landscapes.
2
e second landscape bulletin, on rural historic
landscapes, was released in 1990 (Figure 2), Guide-
lines for Evaluating and Documenting Rural Historic
Landscapes. It provides guidance on nominating
all non-urban landscapes, distinguishing urban
from rural landscape primarily by dierences in
the ratio of the built environment consisting of, for
example, ranch houses, fences and roads, to the
natural environment consisting of landforms such
as mountains, elds, and streams and vegetation
cover, including forests, brush and crops on natural
Submerged Archeological Sites and National Register Guidance on
Landscapes: Do We Need Maritime Cultural Landscapes?
Michael Russo
Southeast Archeological Center
National Park Service
49
or modied lands such as farm elds. As long as
people had worked in, manipulated, or otherwise
aected the natural environmental features in some
historically signicant way, and as long as there
were far greater amounts of natural or modied
lands than buildings or structures, rural landscapes
were seen as potentially eligible for the National
Register, usually as a district or site. Under NR
Bulletin 30, natural features could not be seen as
part of the rural landscapes unless they “reected
the day-to-day occupational activities of people
engaged in traditional work” who “have developed
and evolved (the natural features) in response to
both the forces of nature and the pragmatic need
to make a living.”
3
at is, the historic signicance
of a rural historic landscape in the view of the NR
under Bulletin 30 was that it reects people’s adap-
tations to the natural environment.
3 Editor’s note: Many rural historic landscapes include large portions of land that have not been manipulated “to make a
living.” e full sentence in the bulletin reads, “Rural landscapes commonly reect the day-to-day occupational activities of
people engaged in traditional work such as mining, shing, and various types of agriculture” (page 2).
4 Editor’s note: is term is not used in Bulletin 30.
5 Editor’s note: Criterion A is more widely used to nominate rural historic landscapes.
For archeology, Bulletin 30 was far more sub-
stantial than Bulletin 18 had been. It mentioned ar-
cheological sites 19 times, stressing their potential
as landscape features akin to buildings and struc-
tures when observable in such things as relic house
foundations, stone fences, or old dirt roads. Calling
such a view of archeology sites “landscape arche-
ology,” is probably not appropriate.
4
Archeological
deposits, in fact, were not dened as holding the
potential to constitute a landscape in their own
right, except in the case where man-made struc-
tures, or human modied vegetation or natural
features remained observable and sustained integ-
rity under Criterion C.
5
at is, no clear denition
as to what may or may not constitute a Criterion D
“archeological landscape” or its features was pre-
sented. In fact, the term “archeological landscape”
never was and has never been used in NR 30 or any
other NR guidance.
Figure 1. National Register Bulletin 18, How to Evaluate and
Nominate Designed Historic Landscapes.
Figure 2. National Register Bulletin 30, Guidelines for Evaluat-
ing and Documenting Rural Historic Landscapes.
50
Why the omission? One part of the answer can
be found in Bulletin 36, Guidelines for Evaluating
and Registering Archeological Properties (Figure
3). It states that “Under Criteria A, B, and C, the
National Register places a heavy emphasis on a
property looking like it did during its period of
signicance.”
6
at is, landscapes from the typ-
ical NR perspective were viewable entities pre-
served in time. None were constituted solely of
unobservable soil stains or artifacts buried un-
derground that needed technical interpretations
to reckon their historical signicance. Unlike
almost all other Register property types, archeol-
ogy sites, under Criterion D, were seen as signi-
cant for the information or potential information
they held, not for their appearance and high
degree of preservation that evoked their original
setting. Like previous bulletins, 36 presented
6 Editor’s note: In the Bulletin this sentence is preceded by, “All properties must be able to convey their signicance. Under
Criterion D properties do this through the information that they contain” (page 38).
7 But the Bulletin did present a potential example of an archeological landscape in which the only above ground visible
landscape feature was vegetation reecting the historic period of interest. e potential archeological components were unob-
served possible features lying underground.
no clean denition of, or guidelines for dealing
with, strictly archeological landscapes that lacked
above-ground features.
7
If not in outline, Bulletin 36 did present by
example what at least one potential archeological
landscape might look like.
. . . natural features of oak groves and grass-
lands, demonstrates the management of hunt-
ed and gathered resources through burning to
promote particular environments (2000: 23).
In this example, the recurrent processual theme
and requirement of Bulletin 30 for rural historic
landscapes is stressed—rural landscapes could be
identied through material evidence that people
worked or adapted to the natural environment, and
Figure 3. National Register Bulletin 36, Guidelines for Evaluat-
ing and Registering Archeological Properties.
Figure 4. Bulletin 21, Dening Boundaries for National Register
Properties.
51
the major historical signicance of the archeologi-
cal landscape was the information it provided
. . .to understand the eects of environ-
mental change and population pressure and
the impact of human actions on the land-
scape (2000: 7).
In Bulletin 21, Dening Boundaries for National
Register Properties, (Figure 4) no denition of land-
scapes is presented, but it does oer examples of
landscapes as bounded sites and districts, some of
which might contain archeological deposits. Again
in these descriptions, however, all landscapes are
evaluated only under Criterion C, that is, for their
standing structures and/or visible natural fea-
tures.
8
Archeological features are seen as cultural
lagniappe. It was the visible structures, not the hid-
den deposits that made the landscape. e bulletin
cautions the reader to:
Remember that many buildings have asso-
ciated contributing landscape and archeolog-
ical features. Consider these resources as well
as the architectural resources when selecting
boundaries and evaluating the signicance of
buildings (1997: 7).
Under the examples from Bulletin 21 as to how
to bound NR sites in general and not landscapes in
particular, 6 out of 17 are described as landscapes or
as containing landscape features, including archeo-
logical sites with no surface expressions. But when
the reader turns to the section entitled “Boundaries
for Archeological Sites and Districts,” wherein Crite-
rion D is the primary criterion of signicance, none
of the sites or districts mentions landscapes or land-
scape features at all. at is, none of the buried or
sealed archeological sites are viewed as landscapes.
In one example, archeological components are ex-
plicitly excluded from landscape feature recognition
because, I suspect, the archeology is not apparent on
the surface. Again, as shown in the quotation above,
examples of landscape features are seen as being
8 Editor’s note: Criterion C is most commonly applied to designed landscapes or collections of architecturally distinguished
buildings. e examples in this bulletin applied a range of criteria, although the emphasis is on how the boundaries were drawn.
9 Editor’s note: Unless the author of a nomination makes the linkage from the perspective of the period of signicance, the
criteria applied, or the areas of signicance.
10 Editor’s note: is is not the case in the rural historic landscapes bulletin, #30.
restricted to the observable natural features:
Archeological components include a vil-
lage midden area with a depth of about 2 feet,
while the landscape features include rocks,
a grove of trees, and a waterfall. Within this
site there is signicant linkage between the
archeological record and traditional cultural
features (1997: 58).
e only conclusion to draw from Bulletin 21
is that there may be historically signicant archeo-
logical components and there may be a historically
signicant landscape, but the two are not the same
thing when bounding NR sites.
9
Archeological
components are not landscape features.
10
As stated, I suspect the fact that no buried arche-
ological sites or districts have ever been identied
as NR landscapes is due in large part to their appar-
Figure 5. National Register Bulletin 20, Nominating Historic
Vessels and Shipwrecks to the National Register of Historic Places.
52
ent invisibility. When cultural components are not
observable, as is the case for most subsurface arche-
ology, then they are simply not considered as part
of a landscape. e common denition of landscape
of course, stresses the visibility of features,
11
and
archeology most oen lacks the requisite visibility.
12
If observable features are a necessary prereq-
uisite for archeology to be included in an NR
denition of landscape, we might ask how such
restrictions might aect the nomination of an
archeological maritime landscape if all contribut-
ing elements are buried underground or in deep or
murky waters. Are these features observable at all
or enough to qualify the landscapes for listing as
described by NR bulletins?
Although it does not talk specically of land-
scapes, the 1986 Bulletin 20 Nominating Historic
Vessels and Shipwrecks to the National Register
provides a good overview of the unique problems
inherent in locating and describing shipwrecks, one
potential type of an archeological maritime cultural
landscape (Figure 5). It notes that for National Reg-
ister review purposes, wrecks and wreck elements
are always seen as archeological sites. As discussed
above, if the Register indeed holds to this stance,
then shipwrecks’ classication under Criterion D, for
information potential rather than their aesthetic, pe-
riod, or master-work aspects, would almost always
preclude their identication as landscape features.
13
On the other hand, as Bulletin 20 notes, “the
application of the National Register criteria to ship-
wrecks has not been well defined or understood.”
As such, I think, clarifying when and how ship-
wrecks should be classified as structures and not
archeological sites, or at least as observable features
would be critical to any attempt at involving them
as contributing elements in historic landscape dis-
tricts, at least under present NR guidelines.
11 “Landscape,” typical dictionary denitions: 1. an expanse of scenery that can be seen in a single view, 2. the aspect of the
land that is characteristic of a particular region, 3. grounds arranged aesthetically.
12 Editor’s note: Many archeological sites exhibit surface evidence; ruins are the obvious example, but subsurface sites can
have surface evidence as well.
13 Editor’s note: Shipwrecks, individually or as a collection, may be a nominated resource that is united by the land they
occupy. e setting and other land that contributes to the information potential should be a contributing part of a nominated
site or district.
Current Register guidance describes the process
of nominating shipwrecks as archeological sites. But
to get theses site as being seen as whole or parts of
landscapes, Register guidance needs updating. If
the Rural Historic Landscape criteria are applied to
shipwrecks, and it is perhaps the closest fit the NR
currently has, some major issues will need to be
addressed.
One is the requirement for people or cultures
to have worked or shaped or modified the land
in order for archeology to be considered a cultur-
al landscape. In the case of shipwrecks, with few
exceptions, most historic and prehistoric sailors or
passengers did not work the ocean bottom. Rather,
the working life of the vessel was typically restricted
to its time as a floating entity, not its brief tenure as
a sinking or sunken one. We may have to reconsider
the land in landscape to include water (and air?), or
redefine the landscape concept to include seascapes,
lakescapes, airscapes, etc.
We may also need to clarify if the water column
is essentially a proxy for a soil column on land. That
is, is the water simply the archeological equivalent
of soil overburden atop a buried terrestrial site?
Is the ship that now sits on the ocean bottom still
considered in situ for being in the “geographical
area that historically has been used by people, or
shaped or modified by human activity, occupancy,
or intervention”? That is, if the water is the “scape”
of concern that defines a submerged maritime
“landscape,” should it matter if the ship is on top or
below the surface water?
Can a submerged maritime “landscape” not
include the water under which the cultural fea-
tures now lie? Academically, probably not. But on a
managerial level, different agencies and interested
parties may hold separate rights and concerns to
water and benthic resources, while governments
and agencies and insurance entities different than
53
those holding benthic and water authority may
hold rights to the wrecks. For the Register, this is
a concern in that agreement of all property own-
ers is needed for listing.
14
But more to the point of
nominating the wreck as a landscape feature, unless
current NR understandings of landscapes are mod-
ified, the Register requires the nominator to know
how much and exactly what land was “modified” or
“intervened” upon in the culture’s pursuit of placing
that structure on the ocean bottom—a nonsensical
requirement in the case of most wrecks.
15
Finally, what land, if any, becomes part of the
natural landscape aspect of a shipwreck landscape?
Bulletin 20 does a nice job outlining boundary
determinations for nearly complete hulls and
isolated remains, noting that the location of each
must be demarcated by measurements. That is,
the guidance suggests that the ocean, lake or river
bottom is not part of the archeological site unless
physical remains of the ship or its wrecking event
can be found. If this idea is extended to a shipwreck
landscape, this could be problematic. Think of a
large naval battle with scores of ships scattered
across the bottom, but great expanses of unmodi-
fied and un-littered ocean bottom between them,
or a so-called ship’s graveyard, where notorious
weather, tides or topography have worked to send
hundreds of ships to the bottom over the course
of centuries. How do we tie the ocean bottom
thematically or historically to the wrecks? Current
NR guidelines do not allow boundaries to include
“buffer” zones. As such, boundaries designed to
include a measured amount of land within the NR
to protect the wreck from looters or to account for
possible scatters of unseen objects become prob-
lematic. Of course, the National Register is remark-
ably flexible in allowing theories and theoretical
approaches to be applied to boundary justifications.
Often “reasonable, predicted, estimated, or partial
boundaries” are accepted, but they must include
historic, archeological, or practical justifications.
With shipwreck’s enormous costs related to arche-
ological survey to get these boundaries defined,
and with the inability to predict how long those
14 Editor’s note: Actually, the regulations are not this stringent they specify that “the property will not be listed if a majority of
the owners object the listing” (36 CFR 60.6(g))
15 Editor’s note: is simply is not true.
boundaries can stay defined under the landscape
altering effects of tides, currents and storms, the
definition of submerged landscape boundaries may
require special dispensations. Because of these, and
many more characteristics unique to underwater
and near-shore archeological sites, I would suggest
rather than working, and tweaking current NR
guidelines, new guidelines and bulletins may be
required to bring maritime cultural landscapes into
the NR fold.
As for interpreting drowned terrestrial sites
as whole or part of maritime cultural landscapes,
similar considerations may need to be taken. In
many cases of drowned prehistoric sites, linking the
cultural items to a maritime setting may be difficult
due to logistical problems and costs. For example,
in Florida Paleoindian and Archaic lithic points
are often found offshore, in the Gulf and Atlantic
along drowned river valleys. But whether these are
associated with terrestrial, coastal or maritime land-
scapes is often difficult to figure out due to the lim-
ited capacity for subsurface testing. As with ship-
wrecks, the question arises—should the NR adhere
to stringent archeological contextual demands that
the rare cultural artifacts must be proven to have
direct associations with a dateable, submerged, ter-
restrial environment, or should different standards
be allowed for these drowned potential historic and
cultural landscapes? Are drowned terrestrially ori-
ented sites a kind of subclass of a maritime cultural
landscape even if there is no evidence of the culture
having been linked to the water under which the
site now lies? For an historic landscape of any kind
under current NR guidance, not only do temporal
associations between cultural and natural landscape
features need be made, but also direct material and
physical linkages. In the case of drowned land-
scapes, one might ask how essential is the linkage?
After all, Criterion D demands of an archeological
site or district only that it have yielded or may be
likely to yield, information important in history or
prehistory. For terrestrial landscapes submitted to
the NR, adherence to this criterion has resulted in
sites with both megafauna remains and paleo points
54
being turned down because the archeologist could
not connect the resources to a common context.
Should drowned landscapes be held to the same
standards?
My reading of the current NR process suggests
that virtually any landscape associated with mar-
itime resources would encounter few problems in
being nominated as an historic district if criteria
are met and minor guidance issues are handled.
Barring any problems with owner consent, com-
bining on- and offshore landscape features into one
Westerdahlian maritime cultural landscape could
certainly be facilitated in the NR process, if minor
questions about the underwater landscape features
are resolved. The operative question for the Na-
tional Register program becomes, I think, whether
such manipulations of current underwritten and
ambiguous NR guidance best serves the many his-
torically significant archeological maritime cultural
landscapes awaiting nomination, or if new clearly
stated formal guidance for MCLs would more effec-
tively serve those resources. Δ
Michael Russo received his M.A. and Ph.D. in
Anthropology from the University of Florida. Over
30 years he has written extensively on prehistoric
cultures of the Southeast U.S. coastal zones. He
currently serves as the NHL archeologist for the
Southeast Regional Oce of the NPS, and served as
acting NHL archeologist for the NPS Washington
Oce in 2015. Mike wrote the NHL eme Study,
Archaic Shell Rings of the Southeast U.S., and nom-
inated the Fig Island shell ring complex as an NHL.
55
What is a Maritime Cultural Landscape? Where are
they found? Do they have common characteristics?
e Case Study session explored these questions
by examining the breadth of maritime resources
found across the country. From an overview of
the variety of cultural landscapes found in Lake
Superior’s Apostle Islands to the concentration of
shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico’s Dry Tortugas
National Park, the session’s presenters examined
both terrestrial and submerged resources, both rel-
atively recent and precontact sites, the relationship
of both natural and man-made features, and both
coastal and mid-continent examples.
e case studies, with their broad geographical
distribution and varied resources, provide a broad
understanding of the types of maritime cultural
landscapes that exist, their richness, and the chal-
lenges faced by each. For example, what can we
learn from the distribution of dugout canoes in
Florida? And, how were environmental concerns
addressed at Michigan’s Quincy Smelter site where
slag piles are part of the historic landscape?
Together with other papers presented at the
symposium, the case studies explained at this ses-
sion contribute to the growing body of knowledge
about maritime cultural landscapes. e increased
understanding of the maritime cultural landscape
concept will enable agencies, tribes, Alaska Natives,
Pacic Islanders, and State Historic Preservation
Oces to more eectively preserve and protect
their maritime heritage through interpretation,
management, and listing in the National Register
of Historic Places.
Daina Penkiunas
Wisconsin State Historic Preservation Oce
4. Case Studies
Introduction
56
Coming from Point Reyes National Seashore, as
you might guess, we have a lot of historic properties
that can be looked at through this lens of maritime
cultural landscapes. I am going to focus on the
Drakes Bay Historic and Archaeological District
and maritime cultural landscapes, and how these
properties are documented within the framework
of the National Register of Historic Places. To give
you a quick roadmap of this presentation, I will rst
introduce the basic information about the district,
followed by a discussion of aspects of the district
with reference to the maritime cultural landscape
concept. Lastly, I will evaluate how these attributes
were addressed in the documentation for the dis-
trict and some of the implications for management.
e Drakes Bay Historic and Archaeological Dis-
trict is situated along the shores of Drakes Bay and
Drakes Estero which is roughly forty miles north of
San Francisco. e district is a nationally signicant,
sixteenth century landscape that provides material
evidence of one of the earliest instances of contact
and interaction between European explorers and
native peoples on the west coast of what is now the
United States. e district is centered on two such
historical encounters, Sir Francis Drake’s 1579 Cali-
fornia landfall and the 1595 shipwreck of the Manila
galleon San Agustín within Drakes Bay.
e district was determined eligible under Na-
tional Historic Landmark (NHL) criterion one for
its association with these events, and criterion two
for its association with the nationally signicant
gure Sir Francis Drake. It is also eligible under
criterion six for its ability to yield information
about these early contacts and their short-term and
long-term consequences. If you aren’t familiar with
the NHL criteria, the analogous National Register
of Historic Places criteria are criterion A, criterion
B, and criterion D.
e Drakes Bay Historic and Archaeological
District consists of seventeen contributing sites.
ese include the Port of Nova Albion which is the
most likely site of Drake’s California landfall, the
1595 shipwreck of Manila galleon San Agustin sit-
uated in Drakes Bay, and een California Indian
sites. e een California Indian sites are associ-
ated with the Coast Miwok peoples and were found
to contain sixteenth century European artifacts
from these early colonial encounters. As an archae-
ological district, the signicance of the district and
how it is conveyed is relatively straightforward. e
seventeen contributing sites contain archaeological
materials with potential to address research ques-
tions about these early interactions, their conse-
quences, and the degree of variability compared
to other contact period sites. As a historic district,
however, these contributing sites, which are either
subsurface or submerged in Drakes Bay, do not in
themselves convey these historical events of the
sixteenth century. Rather, this part of the district’s
signicance is really conveyed through the site lo-
cations and the combination of landscape features
that were imbued with meaning by both European
explorers and the Coast Miwok.
In the case of Sir Francis Drake’s 1579 California
landfall, Drakes Bay was a well needed stopover that
allowed Drake and his crew to re-provision and ca-
reen their ship, the Golden Hind, in order to prepare
a leak in its hull. e sheltered harbor of Drakes Bay,
the navigable inlet of Drakes Estero, and its sur-
rounding sandbars, are tangible features that, at the
time, made Drakes Bay a suitable harbor to Drake
and his crew. e white clis of Drakes Bay were a
prominent landmark that make the bay easily visible
and reminded the Englishmen of the southern coast
of their homeland, leading them to name the land
Nova Albion and claim it for England. All of these
features are prominent in the accounts of the voyage,
and they were essential in the identication of Nova
Albion as the landing place of Sir Francis Drake.
ese remain evocative of the scene today.
Once again, in this case of the 1595 shipwreck of
the San Agustin, the sheltered shoreline of Drakes
Bay enticed Sebastian Rodriguez Cermeno to make
Drakes Bay Historic and Archaeological District
Paul Engel
Point Reyes National Seashore
National Park Service
57
anchor in 1595 in order to re-provision and as-
semble a small launch for coastal exploration while
enroute from the Philippines to New Spain. is
route was part of the regular trade between Manila
and Acapulco, where Mexican and South American
silver were shipped out of Acapulco and exchanged
for Chinese luxury goods that were shipped back
to Acapulco. is return trip brought the Manila
galleons along the coast of Northern California
leading, in this case, Cermeno to land in Drakes
Bay. However, shortly aer their arrival at Drakes
Bay, a southerly storm drove the San Agustin
ashore causing it to wreck in the surf. e Span-
iards were forced to modify their launch to allow
the whole crew to return to Mexico leaving the San
Agustin behind in Drakes Bay, which they referred
to as la Bahia de San Francisco.
For the Coast Miwok, the wreck of the San
Agustin added to the landscape of coastal gather-
ing areas along the bay in the area that they called
Tamal-huye, or Bay Point. is is the area where
subsistence and material resources were routinely
gathered. As suggested by the distribution of Coast
Miwok archaeological sites along the coastal mar-
gins of Point Reyes, the Coast Miwok relied heavily
on marine and estuarine resources. During this pe-
riod of contact, the European explorers would have
entered a developed landscape of coastal villages and
camps, processing sites, and collecting areas. e
Coast Miwok likely harvested materials from the
wrecked San Agustin routinely, not unlike the clam
beds and intertidal reefs along the Point Reyes coast.
e materials the Coast Miwok harvested from
the cargo of the San Agustin, especially the Chinese
export porcelain, were modied and utilized sim-
ilar to how the Coast Miwok modied traditional
material types, such as shell and lithic materials. For
instance, Ming Dynasty porcelain vessels were bro-
ken into pieces and modied as ornaments similar
to abalone pendants and clam shell disk beads. Iron
spikes and other metal implements were also likely
utilized similar to modied stone implements.
As the variety of names associated with Drakes
1 Editor’s note: If the National Register boundary encompasses the clis, they can be evaluated as a contributing site or as a
character dening feature of the overall contributing site.
Bay indicates, the bay and surrounding landscape
have held meaning for many cultural groups over
the centuries. As a maritime cultural landscape, the
Drakes Bay National Historic Landmark demon-
strates how both human constructed features and
natural landscape features are imbued with cultural
meaning to those interacting on the landscape. It
is also an example of how maritime cultural land-
scapes oen have a greater radius of human activity
and are more open to outside inuence compared
to their terrestrial counterparts. In this way, the
Drakes Bay National Historic Landmark represents
this burgeoning global economy of the sixteenth
century, and provides a view of its short-term and
long-term impact on traditional cultures.
Although all of these aspects of the district that
I have just talked about are addressed through-
out the documentation for the National Historic
Landmark, they are not so well represented in
the discussion of the district’s signicance and
how it is conveyed by the contributing resourc-
es. is shortcoming seems to reect some of the
constraints of the National Register framework.
Many of the district’s more visible features, such as
the clis at Drakes Bay and the navigable inlet to
Drakes Estero, do not really t the property catego-
ries dened by the National Register.
1
As a result,
these types of features are not listed as contributing
resources. Instead, the way the authors managed
to incorporate these cultural landscape elements
was by including these features by explicitly calling
them out in their discussion of integrity, especially
as part of the setting and feeling of the district.
Although this is a common approach that is
used to document cultural landscapes within the
framework of the National Register of Historic
Places, this approach could lead to some potential
negative implications in the later management of
these resources. Resource managers tend to put a
lot of emphasis on the list of contributing resourc-
es, and use it almost as a short list of what is im-
portant in the preservation of a historic property.
is could result in signicant landscape features
being neglected in terms of their preservation and
58
in the overall interpretation of these properties to
the public. is will become a greater issue as we
think about the management of maritime cultural
landscapes and other historic properties within the
context of climate change, and its associated eects
of sea level rise and increasing rates of coastal
erosion. ese maritime cultural landscapes will
become increasingly vulnerable over time.
Given the increasing vulnerability of these
properties, it is important that resource managers
nd eective ways to incorporate the maritime
cultural landscape perspective within the frame-
work of the National Register of Historic Places
so that these values are clearly communicated to
future decision makers. e documentation for the
Drakes Bay Historic and Archaeological District
relies on its discussion of integrity of setting and
location to capture several aspects of the maritime
cultural landscape. Although this approach does
recognize these values within the historic land-
scape, elevating these components to the level of
contributing resources would be a more eective
way to communicate their importance within the
2 Editors Note: Landscape features can be categorized in the nomination as “character dening features.” ey cannot be enu-
merated as buildings, structures, and objects, but they should be described as part of the contributing site and their signicance
should be noted in the statement of signicance. In the inventory, they can be listed as “signicant character dening features.”
district to both the public and future decision
makers.
2
Other approaches and case studies that
successfully integrate the maritime cultural land-
scape concept within the framework of the Nation-
al Register should be identied and shared beyond
this symposium to inform future documentation
eorts. Additionally, in some way redening the
National Register property categories to better
include cultural landscapes or signicant landscape
features might be an approach to better document
the signicance of these types of properties. Δ
Paul Engel is the Archeologist at Point Reyes
National Seashore, and has served in that capacity
since 2010. In addition to managing the Archeol-
ogy Program, Paul is the Park’s National Historic
Preservation Act Coordinator and is responsible for
managing compliance with this and other cultural
resources laws, as well as coordinating consultation
with Native American Tribes, the State Historic
Preservation Ocer, and the public. Paul holds a
BA in History and an MA in Cultural Resources
Management from Sonoma State University.
Drakes Bay Historic and Archaeological District, Point Reyes
National Seashore, California. e district was designated a
National Historic Landmark in 2012. It is directly associat-
ed with the earliest documented cross-cultural encounter
between California Indians and Europeans, leaving the most
complete material record on the West Coast. e nearly
6,000-acre district is part of the Gulf of the Farallones Na-
tional Marine Sanctuary. Photo by Robert Campbell, 2011;
courtesy of the National Historic Landmarks Program.
59
Florida is home to the largest concentration of dug-
out canoes in the world. e national signicance
of these resources is uncontested due to sheer sam-
ple size and because dugouts represent the oldest
direct evidence of watercra. In addition to signif-
icance, there is agreement that the fragile, organic
artifacts are worthy of preservation. e Depart-
ment of State’s conservation lab has treated nu-
merous canoes over the years, and, perhaps more
telling, private citizens have repeatedly paid out of
pocket for polyethylene glycol (PEG) or spent their
free time delicately unwrapping and rewrapping a
slow-drying canoe. If there is agreement that Flor-
ida’s canoes are signicant on a worldwide scale
and worthy of preservation, why, then, are only a
fraction of the hundreds of dugouts from Florida
listed in the National Register of Historic Places?
I argue that restrictive National Register cate-
gories mirrored by research questions with limited
breadth have reduced the number of canoe nom-
inations from Florida. I combat both problems by
reframing research questions and, more practically,
by rst exploring solutions in two NR categories:
the Discontiguous District and the Landscape.
Conventional Categories
More of Florida’s canoes are not recognized
collectively, it seems, because Florida’s canoes are
physically scattered and not all individual canoes
have individual research potential. Canoes are
recorded as archaeological sites, therefore people
assume the nomination category would be “site,”
even when a district or landscape might be more
appropriate.
1
is hurdle mirrors a problem in
canoe research, where analysis and documenta-
tion focuses on single canoes within constricted
areas or specic time periods. Listed in 2001,
the Pithlachocco Canoe Site (Newnans Lake)
was nominated as a “site” with National Register
boundaries much smaller than the archaeologi-
1 Editor's note: Sites and districts are property types recognized by the National Register; “landscapes” can be nominated as
sites or districts. Both can be wide-ranging in size and signicance. A district should not be considered a limitation to nomi-
nating collections of related sites.
cal site boundaries. e Pithlachocco Canoe Site
is the world’s densest concentration of canoes in
a single lake (Smith 2002), but the site does not
adequately represent the full distribution of Flori-
da’s dugouts, which spans 6,000 years of maritime
navigation in lakes, rivers, creeks, and the ocean.
One underlying problem is that most canoe
“sites” are in fact just a single artifact, the canoe.
Canoe recording, much like other boat recording,
has been highly focused on methodology and data
collection from the vessel itself. Methods include
detailed sketches, thin sections of wood, radio-
carbon dates, and a concerted eort to stabilize
the artifact. Because recording methods oen lack
peripheral vision, even site-level interpretations of
canoes focus on the boat.
As single artifacts, and as objects recognized
as archaeological sites, Florida could individually
nominate many of the 423 canoes. An individual
canoe may establish the earliest direct evidence
of watercra in the western hemisphere (De Leon
Springs), or one unnished canoe may illuminate
canoe manufacture methods (Wakulla Unnished
Canoe). An Archaic period canoe with a thwart or
projecting bow may singlehandedly overturn the
notions some researchers used to hold about the
unilinear nature of canoe typology (Wheeler et al.
2003). is information is important, and site-level
research and individual nominations are some-
times appropriate. But, to recognize only the indi-
vidual signicance of Florida’s canoes would be to
miss an opportunity to use the largest sample size
of log boats in the world. I argue that collectively,
Florida’s 423 dugout canoes hold exponentially
more information potential.
Discontiguous District v. Landscape
To recognize the signicance of all of Florida’s
canoes, there are two options: the Discontiguous
Landscape vs. Discontinuous District: Florida Dugout Canoes
Julie B. Duggins
Florida State Historic Preservation Oce
60
District and the Landscape.
2
I will briey con-
sider each with respect to Florida’s dataset. “For
scattered archaeological properties, a discontigu-
ous district is appropriate when the deposits are
related to each other through cultural aliation,
period of use, or site type” (Little et al. 2000).
Covering forty-one of Florida’s sixty-seven coun-
ties, dugout canoes are dispersed and spatially
discrete. e space between canoes does not
diminish the signicance of the resources com-
prising the district. As a discontiguous district,
Florida’s canoes are related to each other through
site type rather than cultural aliation or peri-
od of use. As dened, a district must “possess a
signicant concentration, linkage, or continuity of
sites,” and as the densest concentration of canoes
in the world, the canoe district would exist state-
wide.
3
Recognition as a district would imply that
all of Florida’s canoes represent a unied entity,
even though they are dispersed across a large
geographic area.
4
As NPS denes it, a Cultural Landscape is
a “geographic area, including both natural and
cultural resources . . . that has been inuenced by
or reects human activity . . . “ (NPS 2013). is
denition is broad enough to encompass areas of
canoe use, but it stresses physical features and ig-
nores the cognitive aspects of other landscape de-
nitions (McClelland et al. 1999). More specic to
prehistoric boats and navigation routes, a maritime
cultural landscape is “the whole network of sailing
routes,” which for canoes would be the riverine
transportation network of interconnected lakes and
waterways (Westerdahl 1992, 6). Unlike a discon-
tiguous district, a maritime cultural landscape in-
cludes old as well as new routes, meaning the now
out-of-use transportation routes can be considered.
Canoes have become isolated on the modern land-
scape as some waterways are no longer navigable
due to natural water uctuations and man-made
2 Editor’s note: “Landscape” is not an option as a property type, but landscapes can be nominated as sites or districts. Another
option is preparation of a multiple property documentation form (MPDF) for canoe sites and districts (including discontig-
uous districts) that presents the context and property types. e MPDF would establish integrity standards to help determine
the eligibility of sites and districts.
3 Editor’s note: Instead of a discontiguous district that encompasses the entire state, an MPDF that applies to the entire state
would be recommended.
4 Editor’s note: A discontiguous district is dened as a district “composed of two or more denable signicant areas separated
by nonsignicant areas.” (How to Apply the National Register Criteria for Evaluation, page 6)
alterations. Last, the “ports and harbors along the
coast” or the villages near canoe concentrations fall
within the landscape (Westerdahl 1992, 6).
Supercially, a discontiguous district seems
to be a more appropriate t for Florida’s canoes,
because the National Register denition for land-
scape currently focuses on physical elements not
cognitive constructs implied by physical elements
(NPS 2013). Most of Florida’s canoe sites lack the
classic associated features of a port. Almost no
canoe sites have associated docks, or physical evi-
dence of interface between the water and the land.
Many canoe sites probably lie adjacent to villages
or campsites, but most adjacent uplands are un-
surveyed, so no sites have yet been identied.
Whether through a district nomination or a
landscape nomination, canoes fall under Criterion
D: “have yielded or may be likely to yield, informa-
tion important in history or prehistory.” What is
the information Florida’s canoes might collectively
yield? And, should the nature of the information
inuence the category of recognition? To nominate
canoes as a discontiguous district held together by
site type and separated in space, is to imply that we
are analyzing canoes site by site.
But what if it is the spatial relationships them-
selves that yield important information? Recent
research suggests that the information potential
of Florida’s dugout canoes lies not in the discrete
objects but, rather, in the association of canoes
with navigable water bodies. And despite the lack
of associated villages and ports, if this association
and context are the important information in
prehistory and history, it follows that one might
use a Maritime Cultural Landscape to recognize
the context, rather than a Discontiguous District to
recognize the site type.
61
Why Are Florida’s Canoes Signicant?
Over the past three years, my agency has digitized
the dugout canoe les—transforming a physical
ling cabinet into a Microso Access database and
GIS. Digitization enables the ability to lter by one
of over y variables, such as time period or bow
shape or wood type. It was my assumption that by
isolating these variables, we may begin to under-
stand them better, and perhaps realize the potential
of previously collected metrics: thin sections of
wood, radiocarbon dates, and, in some cases, asso-
ciated artifacts and sites.
But previous syntheses of Florida’s dugouts have
already manually isolated variables, for example
Newsom and Purdy’s 1990 morphological typolo-
gy. In another synthesis and reevaluation ten years
later, Wheeler et al. (2003) overturned the tele-
ological concepts within this typology by focus-
ing on Archaic period canoes from a single lake.
Somewhat ironically, despite the arduous journey
of separating all the canoe data into seventy-four
elds, my recent research on canoe distribution
suggests that looking at the entire dataset, rather
than picking out one or two canoe features, will
capitalize on the information potential of dugouts.
erefore, it is not the database and GIS’s power to
isolate variables that has provided the most in-
sight, but it is the ability to compile all of the data
in one digital location, zoom out, and infer broad
patterns by asking big anthropological questions.
I have found that the important anthropological
information potential of Florida’s dugouts lies not
in measurements and wood samples from the boats
themselves, but in a deliberate consideration of
overall canoe distribution in space and time.
Analyzed together, with consideration of the
spatial distribution across Florida and the temporal
span of 6,000 years, canoes have the potential to
answer questions bigger than site-specic research.
Big questions I am ready to ask are “Now that we
have established that canoe morphology does not
indicate a chronological typology, what do dierent
canoe shapes indicate?” (Curci 2006; Wheeler et al.
2003). “Are canoe shapes functionally dierent or
are shapes indicative of stylistic changes?” “If sty-
listic, can we begin to make inferences about canoe
use within social groups or geographic culture ar-
eas?” “Geographically, how do Florida’s prehistoric
populations map on to the landscape of rivers and
lakes?” and “Do prehistoric populations and histor-
ic period groups use navigable rivers in the same
way?” Archaeologists are not ready to answer all of
these questions, but I am ready to answer one two-
part question “Is the spatial distribution of Florida’s
dugout canoes non-random? And, if it is non-ran-
dom, does human behavior explain the pattern?”
Space
First, distribution of canoes in space is non-ran-
dom. e majority of canoes come from the lakes
district in north-central Florida, nevermind for a
moment that one-fourth of the entire canoe sample
comes from a single lake. ese observations do
not require GIS, as University of Florida research-
ers drew this conclusion twenty-ve years ago. But
“does human behavior explain the pattern?” In
1990, Newsom and Purdy argued that the expla-
nations for the non-random distribution did not
lie in patterned human behavior, but instead in (1)
environments conducive to preservation, and (2)
researcher bias—which I have to point out meant
proximity to the University of Florida—(Newsom
and Purdy 1990, 167). In their own words, Newsom
and Purdy wrote that the distribution was “more
of a function of geology and hydrology than a
reection of the greater cultural importance of the
dugout in the north central highlands” (1990, 167).
I disagree and argue that human behavior
explains the non-random spatial distribution.
Although researcher bias and preservation play
roles in shaping the canoe dataset, I look to other
factors that may play a part, namely, a geographic
distribution favoring edges of basins or what I call
“drop spots” at major transportation interchang-
es. Westerdahl (1992, 6) calls these areas “transit
points,” or “places where a river-based cultural area
meets the outer world.” In the interest of time, I
will not explain the entire drop-spot hypothesis by
presenting specic analyses of the data, and I will
not even describe the ethnohistoric evidence we
have for canoe caching. Instead, I have chosen to
use four simple examples of canoe concentrations
to illustrate my point. ese four sites, Pithlachoc-
co, Stricklin’s Peat Bog, Lake Hollingsworth, and
Lake Traord, represent the four largest canoe sites
62
in Florida. Notice that the rst two examples are
in the North-Central Lakes Region, but, impor-
tantly, the second two are in Central Florida and
South Florida. I concur with Newsom and Purdy
that the lakes region is of paramount signicance,
but I will demonstrate why I have concluded that
the concentrations of canoes in the lakes district
reects the area’s cultural importance as a major
interchange, connecting the Atlantic Ocean with
the Gulf of Mexico.
First I should orient you on Florida’s natural
landscape. Florida has a central ridge, which acts
like the continental divide. Rivers west of the ridge
drain to the Gulf of Mexico, while rivers east of the
divide drain to the Atlantic Ocean. e pre-drain-
age Everglades used to have a prehistoric extent.
Florida has nine major basins, three drainage
directions, and 314 plotted prehistoric and histor-
ic canoe locations. Each of Florida’s four largest
canoe concentrations sits at the edge of two drain-
age basins near the headwaters of a river. e rst
example is Pithlachocco, the densest site with 101
canoes. What is now called Newnans Lake used to
feed into a once wet Payne’s Prairie, which was con-
nected to Orange Creek and eventually fed into the
St. Johns River. e St. Johns, which ows north-
ward, ultimately ows into the Atlantic Ocean. Just
ten miles to the northeast by overland travel is Lake
Santa Fe, which ows into the Santa Fe River, which
meets the Suwannee River and ultimately ows into
the Gulf of Mexico. Where does the concentration
of canoes at Pithlachocco lie? On a relict of the
northeastern shore, the closest point to the inter-
change with transportation to the Gulf of Mexico.
Second, Stricklin’s Peat Bog is also near Lake
Santa Fe, located approximately ten miles to the
Northeast. With nineteen canoes, it is the second
largest canoe concentration from Florida. Strick-
lin’s is situated on the western edge of the St. Johns
River Basin, connected to the Atlantic through
creeks that feed into the St. Johns. Less than ten
miles by overland travel is Lake Santa Fe, which
feeds into the Santa Fe River, and reaches the Gulf
through the Suwannee River. Again, this concen-
tration of canoes is situated in a critical natural
environment, at the same Gulf to Atlantic junction.
Yet Stricklin’s represents a dierent interchange
because although Pithlachocco and Stricklin’s Peat
bog are only twenty miles apart by overland travel,
by river travel they are 125 miles apart. Stricklin’s
may represent the north St. Johns junction, while
Pithlachocco represents the Middle St. Johns sta-
tion. is major interchange is even easier to see
when all canoes are mapped. Note that the canoe
locations are not within the St. Johns Basin or
within the Suwannee Basin, but the concentration
lies at the interface between the two.
e third largest canoe site is Lake Holling-
sworth with fourteen canoes, located at the very
northern extent of the Peace River watershed. Lake
Hollingsworth is connected to Lake Hancock,
which ows into the Peace River and eventually
reaches the Gulf of Mexico. Less than ve miles by
overland travel is the Alaa River, which connects
to the Gulf. Also less than ve miles from Lake
Hollingsworth is Blackwater Creek, which ows to
the Gulf via the Hillsborough River.
Lastly, in South Florida, is Lake Traord, a site
with ten canoes. Lake Traord is located at the
westernmost extent of the historic Everglades and
at the headwaters of the Caloosahatchee Basin. e
Everglades reach the Gulf, the Keys, and the Atlan-
tic. Lake Traord lies at the headwaters of Cork-
screw Swamp, which ows through the Imperial to
the Gulf of Mexico. To summarize, the distribution
is nonrandom, and it can be explained by human
behavior. e natural landscape inuenced human
use, and the cultural landscape is controlling of
the natural environment. e location of Florida’s
most dense canoe sites at the beginnings and ends
of navigable waterways indicates important land-
scapes used as transportation interchanges. ese
interchanges create linkages between the riverine
routes and the overland routes, representing a
physical interface between the water and the land.
Drawing on cultural geography, I identify
interchanges as critical transit points in a greater
cross-basin transportation network. From this per-
spective, the natural landscape, or the orientation
and location of rivers within what is now Flori-
da, inuenced human interaction and use of this
landscape. e cultural landscapes that emerged
and persisted over time have the potential to help
63
archaeologists and historians recreate specic
ancient mental maps. us, the mental imprinting
and mapping of functional attributes of the envi-
ronment (Lofgren 1981 in Westerdahl 1992), or
cognitive landscape, is writ large in a canoe dis-
tribution that shows specic spatial connections.
ese spaces became places on the mental map,
existing only because the location was embedded
with cultural meaning (Dappert 2011, 247).
Time
e nonrandom distribution in space is repeat-
ed and mirrored over time. In an eort to make
accurate and specic statements about canoe use,
researchers have tended to separate the dataset by
time period (e.g., Wheeler et al. 2003; Newsom and
Purdy 1990; Hartmann 1996; Meide 1995), such
as Kandare’s 1983 conclusions about Mississippian
canoes or Wheeler et al.’s Archaic period canoes
(Wheeler et al. 2003). Formerly, archaeologists
viewed outlying dates as a problem. We should
probably recondition ourselves, at least in the case
of canoes, to view such dates not as problematic,
but as evidence for continuity of use.
e largest canoe sites are all multicomponent.
Radiocarbon dates from Lake Traord range from
1420 BP to 250 BP. Canoes from Stricklin’s Peat Bog
dated between 1000 BP and 320 BP. And Pithla-
chocco canoes range from 4210 BP to 460 BP. Mul-
ticomponent canoe sites are important because they
indicate a “tradition of usage.” Further evidence that
a mental map exists and persists: canoe sites with
long time spans are evidence of “well-used havens
and routes” (Westerdahl 1992, 8), which implies
that the cognitive landscape was so real and so im-
portant that the central places on the mental map
remained relevant generation aer generation.
Place names like “Pithlachocco,” meaning “place
of many long boats” (Smith 2002, 150), demon-
strate the importance and persistence of places over
time. Seventy percent of the boats at Pithlachocco
are Archaic, yet the place name comes from the
Miccosukee language, as recorded at contact. e
long tradition of use demonstrates that generation
aer generation learned that Pithlachocco, Traord,
5 Editor’s note: An MCL also could be nominated as a site.
Stricklin’s and Hollingsworth were places important
enough to incorporate into the cognitive landscape.
Conclusion
To summarize, canoes are signicant and worthy of
preservation but are typically studied site by site or
canoe by canoe. Some of Florida’s canoes hold infor-
mation not at an individual scale, but at a large scale.
Florida’s canoes collectively hold answers to bigger
research questions, such as “does human behavior
explain the nonrandom distribution of canoes?”
e densest concentration of canoes in the
world could be viewed either as discontinuous
resources in a related district or as elements of a
landscape, more specically, a maritime cultural
landscape which could be nominated as a series
of districts. Preservationists are le with a choice
between the two categories.
5
I regard the source
of canoe signicance as inuential in making this
decision; in other words, the scale of signicance
relates to the category of nomination.
In response to big research questions, I identi-
ed four maritime cultural landscapes in Florida’s
canoes. ese landscapes recognize the signicance
of the space as a place on the natural landscape and
long traditions of usage in addition to the log boat.
e underlying importance of identifying ancient
landscapes in concentrations of canoes is a better
understanding of the cultural geography of Florida’s
ancient groups, and a realization that log boats were
not static objects scattered across Florida. ey were
made, used, and deposited by humans. Viewing
Florida’s canoes collectively as a maritime cultural
landscape is the rst step in recognizing that the log
boats hold value beyond the information stored in
the carved wood alone, and that the contexts—in ad-
dition to the objects—are worthy of preservation. Δ
References
Curci, Jessica Lee. 2006. “Logboats of the South-
eastern United States: Investigating the Question
of Form.” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, De-
partment of Coastal Resources Management, East
Carolina University, Greenville.
64
Dappert, Claire P. 2011. “US Shipbuilding Activ-
ities at American River, South Australia: Finding
Signicance of ‘Place’ in the Maritime Cultural
Landscape,” in e Archaeology of Maritime Land-
scapes: When the Land Meets the Sea, edited by B.
Ford. (New York: Springer), 247-66.
Kandare, Richard. 1983. “A Contextual Study of
Mississippian Dugout Canoes: A Research Design
for the Moundville Phase.” Unpublished M.A.
esis, Department of Anthropology, University of
Arkansas, Fayetteville.
Little, Barbara, Erika Martin Seibert, Jan
Townsend, John H. Sprinkle, Jr., and John Knoerl.
2000. National Register Bulletin Guidelines for
Evaluating and Registering Archaeological Proper-
ties. NRB 36. U.S. Department of the Interior, Na-
tional Park Service. Accessed online at http://www.
nps.gov/nr/publications/bulletins/pdfs/nrb36.pdf.
McClelland, Linda Flint, J. Timothy Keller, Gene-
vieve P. Keller, and Robert Z. Melnick.1999. Guide-
lines for Evaluating and Documenting Rural Histor-
ic Landscapes. NRB 30. Accessed online at http://
www.nps.gov/nr/publications/bulletins/nrb30/.
Meide, Chuck. 1995. “e Dugout Canoe in the
Americas: An Archaeological, Ethnohistorical, and
Structural Overview.” Unpublished Florida State
University paper, accessed online at https://www.
academia.edu/3250221/e_Dugout_Canoe_in_
the_Americas_An_Archaeological_Ethnohistori-
cal_and_Structural_Overview.
National Park Service (NPS). 2013. “Landscape
Denitions Used by the National Register.” Nation-
al Register of Historic Places Program: Landscape
Initiative. Accessed online at http://www.nps.gov/
nr/publications/guidance/nrli/index.htm.
Newsom, Lee Ann, and Barbara A. Purdy. 1990.
“Florida Canoes: A Maritime Heritage from the
Past.” Florida Anthropologist 43 (3): 164-80.
Smith, Roger. 2002. “Florida Frontiers: From Ice
Age to New Age,” in International Handbook of
Underwater Archaeology, edited by Carol V. Ruppé
and Janet F. Barstad. (New York: Springer), 143-68.
Westerdahl, Christer. 1992. “e Maritime Cul-
tural Landscape,” International Journal of Nautical
Archaeology 21 (1): 5-14.
Wheeler, Ryan J., James J. Miller, Ray M. McGee,
Donna Ruhl, Brenda Swann and Melissa Memory.
2003. “Archaic Period Canoes from Newnans Lake,
Florida.” American Antiquity 68 (3): 533-51.
Julie B. Duggins is a Senior Archaeologist at the
Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research, Divi-
sion of Historical Resources. She earned an M.A.
in Anthropology at Florida State University in
2011 and a B.A. in Anthropology at Wake Forest
University in 2005. Julie has worked for cultural
resource management rms, the Indiana Histori-
cal Bureau, Tallahassee Community College, and
the National Park Service. Currently, her research
focuses on identifying spatial patterns in Florida’s
dugout canoes to better understand how prehis-
toric groups used rivers and navigable chains of
lakes for transportation.
65
Edited Transcript of Presentation
anks for the invitation. anks for thinking of
us, our little oce in the National Park Service, to
give this presentation. When Mike Russo emailed
us about participating, he specically referenced
the work we were doing at St. Croix Scenic Water-
way, which is not too far away from here. I have
my own opinions about that park and how it ts
into the National Register, and I’m going to try not
to voice my opinions on it too strongly, so I’m not
going to say things like “it’s perfect, it’s a perfect
riverway cultural landscape”. I’m not going to tell
Barbara or Paul or Mike Russo, if you need an
example here you go. It’s on a silver platter; we just
nished the dra report. I’m not going to share
those opinions, but if you come to that same con-
clusion, maybe I did my job.
We’re the Submerged Resource Center of the
National Park Service. We’re archeologists and
photographers and we work throughout the Park
Service unit. We do work internationally with
partners. e National Park Service does manage
a lot of waterways and seashores and lakes, includ-
ing areas that sometimes you don’t really think
about, like Lake Mead outside of Las Vegas. We do
a variety of things. You have to go from the Chan-
nel Islands, which is cold water, to Dry Tortugas
at dierent time periods. Sometimes you’re diving
on a house in Lake Mead or an airplane, and next
you’re working on trees in Jackson Lake outside of
Grand Teton. at’s spires. Sometimes we get to do
natural resources.
A lot of what we do for parks is Section 110
and Section 106 work.
1
is is kind of where I
feel like we have a unique job, because as eld
archeologists, we get to make management rec-
ommendations, but we don’t really have to make
any decisions. at’s great, right? You’re not really
1 Editor’s note: Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act requires review of the impacts of proposed work on
historic properties if federal funding, licensing, or permitting is involved. Section 110 essentially refers to federal agencies’
responsibility to survey and protect historic properties under their jurisdiction.
responsible for the decisions that parks make, but
a lot of times they’re relying on us to do the under-
water work. It also helps that we get to meet a lot
of the people. We get to meet a lot of the resource
managers and archeologists in parks and that’s
great, we make new friends, but then the ip side is
that we also are like their sounding board. We hear
the budget complaints, how they’re asked to do
more with less, and in some cases they’re actually
asked to do less with less, which just like everyone
in this room and every resource manager, natural
and cultural, doing less with less is just not accept-
able. It’s not something that any resource manager
is going to allow themselves to do.
We can help with 110, we can help with 106,
and we try to do as much as we can. I guess if any
of you guys know us personally or see our oce’s
Facebook page, you probably think we’re never at
home, which sometimes it does feel that way. e
St. Croix National Scenic Riverway is a perfect
example of some of the 110 work that we’ve been
asked to do this year. Geneva Wright and Jessi-
ca Keller just nished the dra report; it’s being
reviewed by the park and it’s a couple of hundred
pages about dams, which I’ll talk about. Actual-
ly, this is why I’m not going to share my opinion
about it. Hopefully you’ll see that this was a great
example of where the landscape is being altered by
human activity and it’s continuous, they are inte-
grated, and there are a lot of examples.
St. Croix, if you’re familiar with the area, is actu-
ally not too far away. It’s the border between Min-
nesota and Wisconsin. We primarily worked out
of park headquarters on the Wisconsin side at St.
Croix Falls, but we actually stayed in Stillwater. e
states had money for our travel and food purchas-
es on both sides of the river, so that was good. We
also got to work with regional archeologists who
Delineating Maritime Cultural Landscapes at National Parks Dry Tortugas
National Park and St. Croix Scenic Waterway
Bert Ho
Submerged Resources Center
National Park Service
66
we don’t usually work with, and that’s the MWAC,
Midwestern Archaeological Center. We work with
SEAC, the Southeast Archaeological Center a lot in
the southeast, but Erin Dempsey and Nora Dry-
mon were great. ey’re MWAC archeologists in
Lincoln who are terrestrial archeologists. We’re pri-
marily underwater archeologists. is a park where
both of us are working together, so it tells you this
is a true maritime cultural landscape where land
and water meet.
If you are familiar with Minnesota, and this
area as well, timber was a big industry in the early
nineteenth century. Starting around 1830, they
were using the St. Croix River to transport the
lumber from north on down, eventually though the
tributaries of the Mississippi. ey built a num-
ber of wing dams and closing dams to manipulate
the river—to manipulate the ow of the river and
also to help guide deeper channels. ey were also
using closing dams to close o areas around islands
to store some of the timber so it didn’t jam up the
river and create a log jam. ey had these struc-
tures built by the Army Corps of Engineers starting
in 1878 to 1896. In a matter of eighteen years they
built well over a hundred structures. ese struc-
tures are mainly rocks with brush, and some of
them have timbers in them. ey would carve out
some of the deeper channels so some of the boats
could travel more easily, as well as just oating
more logs down the river.
e project was rst to do historical research,
and they were able to locate some of the historical
maps, which they georectied. We took our side
scan. We could see quickly the water is not very
clear, but you could see the structures in the side
scan. You could see them sometimes from the
surface of the boat, sometimes when you ran your
boat into them, but you could see that they’re
there. We tried to pick examples that were diag-
nostic, a good wing dam and a good closing dam
where there’s still a lot of structure le. e brush
isn’t going to last in a river that freezes every year,
and some of the logs aren’t going to last either, but
the rocks are still there, because we ran into them.
2 Editor's note: Landscape is not a "designation," but could be emphasized as a contributing site in a district.
We mapped a number of them; I think there
were about thirty in the report and they’re rep-
resentative of the dams. ere are, I think, one
hundred, twenty-seven. We documented around
thirty of them. ey are examples of humans
modifying the landscape. ere is a lot of structure
remaining in them. I understand that a single dam
may not meet the criteria of having all the struc-
ture, or maybe not even most of it, but the way I
look at this, is it’s more of a system and the system
is still intact. It’s still guiding the river. You can go
there and you can see that there’s growth all over,
closing o on one of the closing dams. It’s changing
the river. It’s still aecting how people operate on
the river. Obviously they have to go around these
things that are sticking out.
As a riverscape, or as the landscape (if we don’t
want to add riverscape as a term), it does t most
of the criteria. e report has been written and one
of the recommendations that the authors made was
that this could be a district. I think as a district the
report would be pretty complete for a nomination,
but if we are to create a landscape designation, I
think this could also t as well.
2
I don’t know if I’ve
convinced any of you guys. I’ve tried to share my
opinion. You can read the report. at might sway
you if you’re on the fence.
e next site is Dry Tortugas National Park. is
is a beautiful park. e Park Service has been doing
underwater work here for decades, well before I
was around. It’s seventy miles west of Key West
in the Florida Straits. e primary feature is Fort
Jeerson, which was one of the third system forts,
a large brick fort. It was never really completed, but
it’s a Civil War era Union fort way down in South
Florida. e Fort Jeerson National Monument
was designated in 1935. Not to plug another con-
ference, but I’ll talk about that more at the Society
for Historical Archaeology meeting in January
(2016) in Washington, DC.
e fort has a lot of shipwrecks, probably well
over a hundred shipwrecks. As far as designat-
ing sites, there are probably fewer sites because a
lot of them are isolated nds, such as cannons,
67
anchors—I don’t know how many anchors and
cannons we found just in a couple weeks. is
summer we found three more shipwrecks, and not
just shipwrecks with ballast, but with actual struc-
ture underneath them. Like my co-worker, Dave
Conlin, says, “You can’t sling a cat without hitting a
shipwreck in Dry Tortugas National Park.” Not that
we would sling cats, but they are everywhere.
e reason I’m using this example is because
there are a lot of construction wrecks that con-
tain the construction material that was destined
for Fort Jeerson. ere’s granite, greywacky, and
cement barrels, which are barrels that were full of
cement powder, and when they hit the water they
turned into concrete barrels and the wood fell o
over time. ere are a lot of examples of that.
ere are about eight shipwrecks with signi-
cant amounts of construction material. My sugges-
tion is that these could be added to the designation
of Fort Jeerson. ese are directly related to the
fort. ey are archaeological sites that are features
of the fort, in my opinion. Dry Tortugas could
encompass more of the cultural resources, because
there are a lot and they span hundreds of years. It
might be possible to add these features as part of a
landscape.
Under the designations right now, I think just
the construction wrecks could t some of the
criteria. ey are kind of unique. I don’t know
how many of the systems of forts actually have
shipwrecks in their vicinity with this amount of
construction material. In that sense, maybe these
are unique. Maybe Dry Tortugas is unique for that
time period and this kind of material that was des-
tined for these forts. at’s my argument for this
one. I wrote this a little while ago, but by listening
to some of the remarks this morning, maybe it
could be a discontiguous district. Obviously, you
could try to link these construction forts and the
bricks that are there to some of the areas where
they came from in Pensacola and Massachusetts
and Apalachicola, where a lot of the bricks for Fort
Jeerson came from, but we are parks, we do have
boundaries.
I know as a society we draw imaginary lines
and this site is mine and that site is yours. You take
care of this, you take care of that. For management
purposes, we do have to have some boundary, or
else it’s just unfeasible for any agency—state, local,
or federal—to try to manage what’s there. My
boundary is based on an activity. It’s based on the
construction of the fort, and that’s what I would
propose, is that you take these construction wrecks
and if they’re unique, great. ere are cement
barrels, and there are also cement sacks which are
interesting. It may meet criteria A, C and D, or I
would just say add the shipwrecks to Fort Jeer-
son’s monument designation, if that’s possible, and
add the concrete barrels and sacks as archaeologi-
cal features that are associated with that.
I don’t know if I swayed anyone with my strong
opinions, but I just want to say thank you for
having the Submerged Resources Center represent-
ed here. I know Dave Conlin wished he could be
here, as well as the other archeologists in our oce.
ank you. Δ
Bert Ho is an underwater and marine survey ar-
chaeologist with the National Park Service’s Sub-
merged Resources Center (SRC). Prior to joining
the SRC, Mr. Ho worked for NOAA as a eld
hydrographer supporting the Oce of Coast Survey
by collecting various marine survey data to update
charts, locate navigational hazards, and respond to
emergencies in ports on all coasts. Since joining the
NPS, Ho has conducted underwater archaeological
site documentation, exploratory marine survey, and
a variety of submerged resource science throughout
the NPS system in all regions, and with interna-
tional partners in various countries in Africa, South
America, Central America, and the Pacic Islands.
His interest and focus are to aid parks and resource
managers, both domestic and international, in their
eorts to locate, document, and interpret sub-
merged cultural resources from prehistory through
the historic period, and continue to explore new
regions of the world to discover these resources.
68
e Apostle Islands are a National Lakeshore, a
unit of the national park system. In a sense they are
a maritime cultural landscape (MCL) conceived of
through an act of Congress. Some of the problems
that other agencies and organizations have had
in conceptualizing MCLs were dealt with rather
simply at Apostle Islands by Congress drawing a
suciently large park boundary around the islands
to encompass the area’s major maritime cultural
resources, associated landscapes, and surrounding
waters.
Much of what I will be talking about in this pre-
sentation is the actual nitty-gritty problem of man-
aging MCL resources. A designation process is just
the rst step in management. If you are going to
designate a “protected” resource, you are eventually
going to need to manage it. at is our daily chal-
lenge at Apostle Islands: moving from the abstract
“60,000 feet up” view down to management on the
ground — and water!
ere are twenty-two islands in the Apostles
archipelago, which is located on the southwest
shore of Lake Superior. Apostle Islands sits near the
twin ports of Duluth-Superior, which were and are
still two of the busiest shipping ports in the world.
e Apostle Islands maritime history is very much
tied to the development of Duluth-Superior, and
both areas are part of a larger Lake Superior mari-
time cultural landscape. e Apostle Islands is the
homeland and spiritual center of the Anishinaabe
(Ojibwa) people, as well as an important place in
Great Lakes fur trade history. Logging, shing,
farming, shipping, lighthouses, and quarrying were
later important Euro-American maritime activities.
e park preserves a broad spectrum of cultural
and natural resources reecting the story of both
native heritage and European-American use of
Lake Superior. Apostle Islands is also home to the
largest collection of lighthouses in the National
Park system (seven light stations containing ten
historic towers). e lights are important tourist
attractions, with the local tourism industry, cruise
boats, and the community all promoting lighthouse
history and the iconography of lighthouses.
Every one of the Apostle’s lighthouses has an
interesting maritime story tied in with shipping
and shipwrecks. e light stations (or at least their
individual towers) are all listed on the National
Register of Historic Places. e cultural landscapes
for each light station have been individually evalu-
ated and determined eligible for the national regis-
ter. e National Park Service (NPS) has a specic
process to inventory and evaluate cultural land-
scapes, as well as develop treatment recommenda-
tions. e NPS Cultural Landscape Inventory is the
basic documentation for each landscape. Following
the inventory, Cultural Landscape Reports are
developed which are the treatment documents for
physically managing the landscape. e Apostles
light station cultural landscape reports are avail-
able online at the park website (https://www.nps.
gov/apis/learn/management/hlrclr.htm). ese
are good examples of on-the-ground NPS cultural
landscape management documents.
Some of the Apostles light stations have multiple
light towers, and all have multiple structures, ev-
erything from boathouses to barns, so each station
is dierent in its complexity. e light stations have
a great deal of historical integrity down to original
owerbeds and ornamental plantings, even grati
from the keepers’ children in some cases: they are
altogether a very rich resource. e light stations
collectively are congured as a means for safely by-
passing the islands or navigating within the islands.
e outer chain of lights helped keep cross-lake
Duluth-Superior shipping safely away from the
islands, while an inner chain of lights guided ship-
ping trac in and out of Chequamegon Bay.
e Apostle Islands is a very ancient maritime
landscape. We have at least 5,000 years of docu-
mented human use in the islands, and on the main-
Lake Superior’s Apostle Islands:
A Maritime Cultural Landscape Case Study
David Cooper
Apostle Island National Lakeshore
National Park Service
69
land around 10,000 years of human usage. Because
the islands had inundated due to inter-glacial lake
level changes, much of the area’s earliest archaeolo-
gy is now underwater or was disturbed by lake lev-
el change. Still, around one hundred archeological
sites from the Archaic and Woodland periods have
been documented in the Apostles area. Fishing was
probably the most ancient of human activities here
and carries through to the present day. e Apostle
Islands still has an active commercial shery, dom-
inated both by native Ojibwe shermen and also by
Euro-Americans, particularly descendants of the
Norwegians, Swedes, and French. ese represent
many ethnographic traditions with an evolved mix
of shing technologies, practices, and watercra.
ere are also a number shipwrecks through
the islands, remnants of historic shipping in the
iron ore, logging, grain, stone, passenger, pack-
age freight, and shing trades. Other underwater
archeological resources include remnants from
allied industries, such as stone quarries, sawmills,
and wharves. e Wisconsin Historical Society
with support from the University of Wisconsin Sea
Grant Institute has been conducting an inventory
and evaluation of these underwater resources since
1990. Many of the Apostles’ underwater arche-
ological sites are listed on the National Register,
and many are popular recreational sites for sport
diving, snorkeling, kayaking, and visitation by
glass-bottom boat.
Logging was an important activity throughout
the western Great Lakes, and the Apostle Islands
were generally logged somewhat later than the
mainland because of dicult access. is challenge
brought about some interesting “maritime” meth-
ods of logging, foreshadowing some of the technol-
ogies used later in coastal Alaska. ese methods
included the use of bush planes, logging railroads,
mechanized equipment, and barges, although
conventional horse-logging was done in the islands
as well.
In the wake of the loggers came the hard-scrab-
ble Apostle Island farms. ese farmers were
predominately Scandinavians. Many of them were
farming as part of a subsistence shery, or farming
for subsistence with sh as the “cash crop.” A study
of the Sand Island commercial shing and farming
community is currently under way, with the goal of
preserving and managing the cultural landscapes
that have survived from those activities.
e human inhabitants of the Apostle Islands
have le behind many physical imprints on the
landscape. ese include surviving structures,
features, ruins, and artifacts and of course major
changes to the vegetation. All of these resources
require varied preservation approaches. In some
cases it is a matter of keeping natural forces or
human forces from impacting the resources. But
in a lot of cases, it means direct management and
treatment by the park. is means examining a
range of options, depending on management ob-
jectives and available funding and resources. is
process can get very complicated: you cannot take
something that was built with a steam hoist and try
and manage it with a pencil.
is challenge really comes home when trying
to manage something like historic lighthouses.
Lighthouses can be very dicult types of proper-
ties to maintain, especially when in challenging
environments for access. In 2009 Apostle Islands
National Lakeshore began a six-year lighthouse
preservation project using a special Congressio-
nal appropriation. e project was to conduct
long-overdue rehabilitation and stabilization work
on the light stations, the largest historic preser-
vation eort ever undertaken at Apostle Islands.
It was largely done through contractors, from the
architects and engineers to the carpenters, roofers,
painters, plasterers, landscapers, and masons. e
project covered ve light stations and their asso-
ciated cultural landscapes. Planning occupied the
rst two seasons, including development of goals,
management alternatives, environmental analysis,
public and agency consultation, design work, and
project cost-estimating. Of course, we didn’t have
enough money to do everything needed, but we
established a prioritized list of maintenance tasks
and goals for rehabilitation including detailed
landscape treatment recommendations. We were
able to fund $4 million worth of the highest and
most urgent priorities. Michigan Island Light Sta-
tion was selected for the most intensive treatment,
including interior and exterior rehabilitation of the
70
old lighthouse, creation and installation of indoor
exhibits, and rehabilitation of landscape features
such as ornamentals, garden beds, and an orchard.
e project presented numerous logistical
challenges. ese Lake Superior light stations are
located on widely separated islands up to thirty
miles oshore. Maintaining these lights requires
trained personnel and a small eet of work boats,
including high-speed landing cra. e park also
occasionally uses commercially available vessels,
including an LCT (Landing Cra-Tank) that is
actually the last surviving World War II LCT still
operating in the United States. A variety of landing
cra are required for the heavy liing involved in
light station preservation, including transport of
construction materials (such as concrete, riprap,
and ironwork), heavy vehicles (excavators, skid
steers, and drilling rigs), and transport of proj-
ect debris (logs, contaminated soil, asbestos, and
broken concrete). All of this was and is done in
one of North America’s more challenging maritime
environments: Lake Superior.
A key but oen overlooked part of maintaining
a lighthouse is, obviously, you have to be able to
see it from the water. e light cannot do its job if
the forest is allowed to grow up and around it. It is
amazing how quickly historic light stations can be-
come overgrown, and the level of eort needed to
bring the station grounds back to even a semblance
of their historic openings. is brings up the prob-
lem of vegetation clearing and disposal. It’s not a
matter of just whistling up a truck and wood-chip-
per for hauling away debris. ese clearing eorts
become small-scale logging operations when con-
ducted on an island and doing the work to modern
environmental and work safety standards. e
basic tools for light station landscape maintenance
are chainsaws, brush cutters, and brush mowers.
Portability is critical. e largest equipment that
could be transported up the steep slope at Michi-
gan Island were Bobcat-sized skid steers. Much of
the vegetative clearing work had to be done using
mechanized hand tools. We are generally not able
to fully reclaim large historic openings but the park
is trying to maintain sucient openings to pre-
serve structures and the historic scene.
Landscape management serves many important
functions. Much of Apostle Islands visitation is by
cruise boat. Proper landscape management allows
boaters to be able to see and understand the light
stations and to experience the lights in the man-
ner they were seen from historic watercra. Good
landscape management provides breaks against
wildre and windthrow which could damage and
destroy these historic sites. By reducing vegeta-
tive encroachment, landscape management is also
reducing moisture and moisture damage in and
around the structures. Apostle Islands also uses
prescribed re as part of landscape maintenance
and the park is considering larger broad-scale
burning operations on some stations to more
cost-eectively maintain historic landscapes.
Light station restoration work has included re-
placing missing or deteriorated landscape elements
such as orchards, windbreaks, and garden beds.
Some light stations have required major erosion
control, including bank and shoreline stabilization,
such as riprapping and bio-retainment. Preserva-
tion work is also needed on circulation routes such
as sidewalks, to meet modern accessibility stan-
dards, as well as installation of modern accessible
toilets. All of these issues become concerns when
developing a location for public visitation. ere
are numerous concerns, from removal of hazard-
ous materials, to visitor safety, to visitor accessibil-
ity that must be addressed. Historic preservation
is not of course just a matter of restoring places to
historic conditions and appearances, but also meet-
ing modern expectations and needs as well.
Not all MCL management need be as mechan-
ically-intensive as the examples I have discussed.
Management approaches and treatments are all
scaled to each type of cultural resource and to
management goals. For example, we have many
non-built landscapes in the Apostle Islands such as
seasonal shing camps, berry and medicinal plant
harvesting areas, sugar bushes and spiritual sites.
ese areas oen were and are very important to
native peoples and (in NPS jargon) may qualify as
traditional cultural properties and/or ethnographic
cultural landscapes. Understanding ethnographic
MCLs and their management needs is another set
of important challenges for Apostle Islands Nation-
71
al Lakeshore, and I look forward to joining in that
dialogue with our tribal partners.
Before I started working for the National Park
Service, I viewed lighthouses and other maritime
landscapes in a generalized and perhaps rather
romanticized way. Aer six years of labor-intensive
work on these islands I now tend to look at historic
landscapes in a very dierent, very pragmatic way.
I am no longer faced with just the question “Why
should we do this?” e question has become “Ex-
actly how do we do this?” is is a necessary reality
check when we move from the intellectual side of
maritime cultural landscapes to the actual manage-
ment and preservation of these resources. Δ
David Cooper works as an archeologist and cultur-
al resource specialist for the National Park Service
at Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Bayeld,
Wisconsin. He formerly served as state underwater
archeologist for the State of Wisconsin and also as
underwater archeologist for the US Naval Historical
Center. His interest in cultural landscapes stems
from his work as an archeologist, wildland reght-
er, and park resource manager.
72
The Quincy Smelter Complex (QSC) is a com-
pelling example of a nationally significant indus-
trial maritime cultural landscape, where preser-
vation of historic resources, environmental
concerns, and development pressures must be
addressed in concert. The Quincy Mining Com-
pany (QMC) National Historic Landmark Dis-
trict was designated in 1989 as an outstanding
example of the growth and development of the
United States copper industry from its earliest
years through 1920.
1
The district is part of Keweenaw National
Historical Park, located north of Wisconsin on
the Keweenaw Peninsula. Hancock, Michigan,
is about 330 miles north of Madison. The
national park features two separate units that
help to interpret the region’s copper mining
past. The landscape is rich in natural resources
and scenic beauty, and contains a spine of
copper bearing rock and minerals that extends
more than 100 miles in length along the penin-
sula. The area has attracted people seeking the
red metal that we call copper and that Ameri-
can Indians referred to as “Miscowabik” for
thousands of years.
e Quincy Smelting Works was constructed
on land created from stamp sands deposited into
1 Lidfors, Kathleen. Potential National Historic Landmark Eligibility of Historic Copper Mining Sites on the Keweenaw Pen-
insula, Michigan, 1987; and Kathleen Lidfors, Quincy Mine Historic District, National Register Nomination, 1988.
2 www.coppercountryexplorer.com; Horace Jared Stevens, e Copper Handbook, Vol. 3, 1903; and Quinn Evans Architects,
Woolpert, Inc., and Keweenaw National Historical Park, Quincy Mine Historic Landscape Cultural Landscape Report / Envi-
ronmental Assessment, 2010.
Portage Lake by a stamp milling operation in the
1880s. Opened in December 1898, the original
smelter featured a furnace building, 84 feet by
144 feet, with four reverberatory furnaces vented
by 75-foot-tall smokestacks. Numerous other
structures supported the operation and the
complex was continuously expanded and upgrad-
ed until diculties began in 1913. Although the
smelter closed in 1931, it reopened several times
over the ensuing decades before, faced with
increasing environmental regulations, it closed
permanently in 1971.
2
In 1986, the Torch Lake Superfund site, in-
cluding the Quincy Smelting Works, was estab-
lished when the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) had concerns about heavy metal
runo into Portage Lake. EPA undertook remedi-
ation of the shoreline and a large area that had
Figure 1: e Quincy Smelter Complex viewed from Hough-
ton, Michigan, facing north, 2007. (source: Dan Johnson, NPS)
Figure 2: Keweenaw National Historical Park is a partnership
park located in northern Michigan. (source: NPS)
Figure 3: Early 20
th
century view of Quincy smelter with Quincy Hill in the background, as seen from Houghton, across Portage Lake.
(Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division and HAER MICH, 31-HANC, 1-17; photocopy courtesy of L. G. Koepel)
Figure 4: Aerial view of the Quincy Smelting Site, ca. 2012.
(source: Google Maps)
e Quincy Smelter Complex as a Maritime Cultural Landscape
Brenda Williams
Quinn Evans Architects
73
Portage Lake by a stamp milling operation in the
1880s. Opened in December 1898, the original
smelter featured a furnace building, 84 feet by
144 feet, with four reverberatory furnaces vented
by 75-foot-tall smokestacks. Numerous other
structures supported the operation and the
complex was continuously expanded and upgrad-
ed until diculties began in 1913. Although the
smelter closed in 1931, it reopened several times
over the ensuing decades before, faced with
increasing environmental regulations, it closed
permanently in 1971.
2
In 1986, the Torch Lake Superfund site, in-
cluding the Quincy Smelting Works, was estab-
lished when the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) had concerns about heavy metal
runo into Portage Lake. EPA undertook remedi-
ation of the shoreline and a large area that had
Figure 3: Early 20
th
century view of Quincy smelter with Quincy Hill in the background, as seen from Houghton, across Portage Lake.
(Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division and HAER MICH, 31-HANC, 1-17; photocopy courtesy of L. G. Koepel)
Figure 4: Aerial view of the Quincy Smelting Site, ca. 2012.
(source: Google Maps)
been used for slag piles. ree layers of environ-
mental concerns relate to the site, including the
land itself, created from dumped stamp sands;
slag piles that are waste from the smelting pro-
cess; and industrial materials related to the
operation of the buildings and equipment on the
property.
3
Each of these is also a signicant
historic resource. Since typical approaches to
mitigation of environmental concerns would
create impacts to the historic integrity of the
property, the EPA endeavored to minimize
negative eects by capping selected areas and
3 Scott See, Director, Keweenaw National Historical Park Advisory Commission, personal communication, September 30, 2015.
4 Ibid., and www.coppercountryexplorer.com.
allowing others to remain intact. A nine-inch
ground cover was placed over the stamp sand in
selected areas, and turf was planted in former
locations of slag piles. e new green space on
the waterfront drew attention from the local
community, which initiated pressure to establish
a park at the location.
4
The Keweenaw National Historical Park
Advisory Commission purchased the property
in 2014 and plans to eventually transfer it to the
National Park Service. Concepts for use include
Figure 5: Casting Shed prior to stabilization, 2010. (source:
Scott See).
74
a joint visitor center for Keweenaw National
Historical Park and Isle Royale National Park.
Currently, the Isle Royale headquarters is located
on the opposite side of the lake. The commission
continues to work to stabilize structures and deal
with remediation of contaminants while the NPS
considers long-term costs associated with the
operation of the site. Δ
Brenda Williams, ASLA, is a Senior Associate at
Quinn Evans Architects, a consulting rm dedi-
cated to preservation and sustainable stewardship
with a perspective informed by history and place.
Ms. Williams’ career has focused on the conser-
vation of cultural landscapes, particularly those
in the public arena. She facilitates a collaborative
approach to the planning and management of cul-
tural landscapes, a process that educates stakehold-
ers about the signicance of historic landscapes
and integrates multiple viewpoints. Her design
solutions integrate natural and cultural elements
of sites to develop environments that are engaging
and inspirational.
Figure 6: Casting Shed following stabilization, 2012. (source:
Scott See)
75
Introduction
Mallows Bay and its environs in Charles County,
Maryland, as well as tidal portions of the Potomac
River, are situated approximately thirty miles south
of the nation’s capital (Figure 1). Although re-
nowned for the eet of nearly one hundred World
War I-era wooden steamships which forms its
nexus, the region is home to diverse other ship-
wrecks and vestiges of the cultural history enhanced
by scenic beauty and recreational opportunities.
e Maryland Historical Trust (MHT), which
houses the State Historic Preservation Oce
(SHPO), has long recognized the importance of
Mallow Bay’s cultural heritage, and it was formally
recognized by the National Park Service as the
Mallows Bay-Widewater Historic and Archeologi-
cal District in the National Register of Historic
Places on April 24, 2015 (Figure 2). e District is
considered nationally signicant under the main
criteria A, C, and D: A. sites/areas that are associat-
ed with events that have made a signicant contri-
bution to the broad patterns of our history; C. that
embody the distinctive characteristics of a type,
period, or method of construction, or that repre-
sent the work of a master, or that possess high
artistic values, or that represent a signicant and
distinguishable entity whose components may lack
individual distinction; D. that have yielded, or may
be likely to yield, information important in history
or prehistory. For Mallows these are:
A. Association with the World War I U.S. Shipping
Board Emergency Fleet and the related shipbreak-
ing activities;
C. e eet represents the largest assemblage of
wooden and composite steamships in the world
and a substantial component of the entire U.S mer-
chant marine eet built between 1917-1922;
D. Archaeological sites provide information on
vessel design, use, and adaptation along with
Figure 1. Location of Mallows Bay; map courtesy of Google Maps.
Figure 2: Boundaries of the Mallows Bay- Widewater Historic
and Archeological District; map courtesy of NOAA ONMS.
Mallows Bay as a Maritime Cultural Landscape
Susan Langley
Maryland State Historic Preservation Oce
Deborah Marx
Oce of National Marine Sanctuaries
Maritime Heritage Program
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
76
shipbreaking and salvage operations, site formation
processes (taphonomy) and landscape alteration.
e District encompasses over 11,000 acres within
Maryland State waters and, although Maryland
claims the Potomac waters to the mean low water
mark on the Virginia shore, there are some areas
that fall under the jurisdiction of the Common-
wealth of Virginia and cooperative management to
include these is a future goal.
History of the WWI Fleet
e U.S. Shipping Board’s Emergency Fleet was
a civilian endeavor to ferry supplies overseas to
Allied nations and serving forces. Supplies were
short due to aggressive U-boat activity. e re-
sponse was the decision to produce 1000 ships in
eighteen months to meet this need. e magni-
tude of this eort becomes clear when considering
this would surpass by about four times the total
blue-water shipping of the U.S. for the previous six
years combined. While there was a metal-hulled
sector, mostly constructed on the Great Lakes,
those built completely of wood or wood and metal
strapping, called composites, were created at 70
shipyards using nine designs. ese yards were on
the West, Gulf, South and East Coasts, demon-
strating the nation-wide aspect of this project. In
addition, when the contributing industries such as
lumbering, metal extraction, smelting and engine
construction are taken into consideration, the level
of industry and employment of those not actively
in the theatre of combat becomes apparent. is
turned the U.S. into the shipbuilding powerhouse
of the 20th century.
is shipbuilding eort also had a profound
eect on the U.S. Merchant Marine. While Ameri-
ca has always had merchant mariners, the need to
have mariners sucient to man 1000 vessels, with
all trained to the same standards, led to a uores-
cence of a formal Merchant Marine.
e Fleet’s obsolescence was due to a number
of factors: the war ended before the majority were
completed; many experienced problems during sea
trials having been built so rapidly and some with
green wood which led to leaking when the steam
engines caused them to shake; they were not as fast
and carried less cargo than anticipated, and they
were outmoded by returning metal-hulled vessels
with diesel engines. Partially completed vessels
were nished and those already completed had
cost between $750,000 and $1 million dollars each.
Some vessels were sold o to businesses that used
them for coastal shipping; some of these ended
their days in Curtis Bay near Baltimore. e ma-
jority were nally sold, aer several unsuccessful
eorts, for the cost of one vessel to the Western Ma-
rine and Salvage Company for breaking and most
of these ended their days in the Potomac River at
Widewater and in Mallows Bay as discussed below.
History of the Mallows Bay Region
All aspects of the region’s heritage are evident at
Mallows Bay. is section of the Potomac River
forms part of the traditional homeland and cul-
tural landscape of the State-recognized Piscataway
Indian Nation and the Piscataway Conoy Tribe of
Maryland. Evidence for the depth of American In-
dian occupation of this area of the Potomac, from
the Archaic Period to the Post-Contact Period,
is provided both through archaeological investi-
gations and cultural traditions of the Piscataway
people. e Piscataway have identied Mallows
Bay and Liverpool Point as areas of signicance
within their cultural landscape (Strickland, Busby
and King 2015:45). It is very likely that Nussamek,
one of the villages visited by Captain John Smith
during the summer of 1608, is in the area. Howev-
er, no archaeological sites have yet been identied
in a submerged context.
Possibly located in Liverpool Cove at the back of
Mallows Bay may be the remains of a patriot long-
boat used by Protector, a Virginia Flotilla galley,
which anchored near Mallows Bay so its men could
join forces with the Maryland militia (Shomette
1996, 206-207; NRHP 1992, Sec. 7, 3). On July 23,
1776, the patriots from Protector arrived in Mallows
Bay aboard two longboats and were quickly set-up-
on by Lord Dunmore’s Loyalist Flotilla which was
led by Virginia’s deposed governor James Murray,
the Earl Lord of Dunmore, and manned by loyalists
and freed slaves. Dunmore entered the Potomac to
try and secure water for his crew and to “harass and
annoy the Enemy by landing at dierent places”
(Shomette 1996, 206-207; NRHP 1992, Sec. 7, 3).
Dunmore’s eet exchanged gunre with the local
77
patriot militia and attempted to seize both of Pro-
tector’s longboats. e patriot forces retreated, but
before they ed, they smashed a hole in the bottom
of one of the longboats to prevent its capture.
During the Civil War, Camp McGaw was sited
above the bay and recently a shipwreck suspected
to date to the Civil War was conrmed to be an
armed Civil War vessel known lost in the area.
In addition, commercial sheries were prevalent
throughout the nineteenth century including sig-
nicant sturgeon sheries and caviar canning near
Liverpool Point which forms the downstream edge
of Mallows Bay. Historical records indicate that
three sturgeon skis, Black Bottom, W.S. Childs,
and Edythe, were abandoned in the area in 1926.
ese ships were built in 1888 in Philadelphia and
imported into the area via train by Captain Morgan
L. Monroe who used them in his sturgeon shing
and processing operations. ese skis were the
last “foreign vessels” to gain popularity on the Po-
tomac (NRHP 1992, Sec. 7, 5).
Another workboat, the two-masted pungy
schooner Capitol, was involved in the rst recorded
maritime tragedy in the area. In 1896, two pungy
schooners, Capitol and Dove, were sailing in tandem
when they were swamped during a storm o Sandy
Point. Dove and its crew were eventually saved but
all personnel aboard Capitol, including the Captain,
perished and the ship foundered (NRHP 1992, Sec.
7, 5). e remains of at least one centerboard canoe
were found in Liverpool Cove. ese vessels were
common workboats from the seventeenth through
the twentieth centuries and have a unique shell-
rst design. For shell-rst construction, the frames,
which only provide lateral support for the ship and
do not dictate its shape or form, are only added to
the vessel aer the hull has been assembled (Shom-
ette 1996, 331). Near the centerboard canoe lies
the remains of a centerboard schooner (Wreck No.
114 in Shomette 1998) which has a at-bottomed
sharpie conguration. It might be the largest sharp-
ie on record in the Chesapeake and the only one
archaeologically documented on the Potomac River
(Shomette 1996, 333).
Other intangible but important aspects of the
area include the rst use of hot air balloons in
North America for military surveillance during the
Civil War, tethered to purpose-built barges. Samuel
Pierpont Langley catapult-launched his successful
heavier-than-air experimental ight from the roof
of his “houseboat laboratory” at Widewater on May
6, 1896. On a more infamous level, John Wilkes
Booth’s escape route from Washington, DC to Vir-
ginia passes through the area.
e majority of the U.S. Shipping Board Emer-
gency Fleet Corporation vessels were brought to
the Potomac in 1922 by the Western Marine and
Salvage Company when it purchased them to break
them for scrap in Alexandria, Virginia. Other
vessels, some unnished hulls, from the eet end-
ed up in the Neches and Sabine Rivers, Texas, the
James River, Virginia, and Curtis Bay, near Balti-
more, Maryland. Originally moored o Widewater,
Virginia, the vessels would break loose in storms
becoming hazards to navigation or catch re and re-
sponse oen came from the U.S. Marine Corps base
at nearby Quantico. e company was subsequently
required to corral the hulls and did so in Mallows
Bay; cramming one hundred nearly three-hundred-
foot long ship hulls into a half-mile wide embay-
ment. e Company suered various nancial ills
and nally failed permanently during the Great
Depression, with most of the vessels still present.
Residents from southern Maryland began
salvaging the steamships as a means of deriving
income during the depression and this wild-cat
period continued until the outbreak of World War
II (Figure 3). At that time the Bethlehem Steel
Corporation determined to undertake shipbreak-
ing on-site to recover metals needed for the war
Figure 3: Shipbreaking at Mallows Bay; photo courtesy of
the Library of Congress.
78
eort. It constructed a lock-like burning basin at
the back of the bay. However, aer reducing about
a dozen hulls to scrap, it pronounced the endeavor
not to be cost-eective and operations ceased
(Figure 4). Not only do the hulls and burning basin
remain, there are also vestiges of marine railways,
donkey engines, barges and other associated
shipbreaking detritus and artifacts. In a combina-
tion of traditional boat disposal methods and the
litter philosophy of if-someone-leaves-litter-it’s-al-
right-to-add-to-it, other vessels accrued in Mal-
lows Bay throughout the twentieth century, the last
being the metal-hulled ferry Accomac (ex.Virginia
Lee) as recently as 1973.
As numerous plans and schemes for their
removal failed or crumbled in scandal, the vessels
remained and began to become integral parts of the
landscape and play an important role in the envi-
ronment (Figure 5). As recreational uses increased,
such as bass shing, bird watching, and kayaking,
heritage tourism and general visitation has in-
creased commensurately adding the most recent
dimension to the maritime cultural landscape.
National Marine Sanctuary Nomination
Since the Mallows Bay National Register of His-
toric Places Historic and Archaeological District
nomination focuses on the WWI-era vessels
and the efforts to reduce them, the decision by
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin-
istration (NOAA) to re-open nominations for
new National Marine Sanctuaries was welcomed
as an opportunity to address the other signifi-
cant historical and natural aspects of Mallows
and Bay and its environs. NOAA’s nomination
process has been reinvented to mandate nom-
inations be the result of a community-driven
effort. The key agencies in the State of Maryland
formed a steering committee to develop a nom-
ination and ensure as many representatives of
the community as possible were included and
more than one hundred fifty groups, organi-
zations, agencies and individuals responded in
support of the establishment of a sanctuary. The
main agencies are the State Historic Preservation
Office as the stewards of the shipwrecks proper
and all heritage resources, the Department of
Natural Resources as the managers of the State’s
bottomlands and living resources, and Charles
County government as the manager of the land
base in the form of the County Park at Mallows
Bay. The steering committee worked diligent-
ly to ensure the nomination for the Mallows
Bay-Potomac River National Marine Sanctuary
was submitted on September 6, 2014, to coincide
with the initiation of global commemorations
of the centenary of World War I. On January 12,
2015, NOAA officially accepted the nomina-
tion into its Inventory for consideration, and on
October 6, 2015, President Obama announced
that the process to establish the Sanctuary would
go forward and the announcement was placed in
the Federal Register on October 7, 2015, to begin
the public comment period. Two public scoping
meetings have been held with resounding sup-
port for the Sanctuary, and the comment peri-
od continued until January 15, 2016, when the
Figure 4: Mallows Bay February 2, 1946, Washington Star.
Figure 5: Mallows Bay in the 21
st
century; photo by Donald
Shomette.
79
Steering committee, now the Partnership Com-
mittee, began the Draft Environmental Impact
Statement (DEIS) and draft Management Plan
taking into consideration the suggestions, ques-
tions, and concerns expressed online, by post, or
at the public meetings.
e DEIS and Management Plan will provide
the means not only to better protect, manage, and
interpret the WWI ee, but also to extend these to
other heritage resources, natural resources, edu-
cational outreach, and recreational activities. e
potential of the proposed Sanctuary as a living
laboratory is enormous. To paraphrase Aristotle, at
Mallows Bay the whole is indeed greater than the
sum of its parts. Δ
References
Federal Register Notice:
https://www.federalregister.gov/arti-
cles/2015/10/07/2015-25510/notice-of-intent-to-
conduct-scoping-and-to-prepare-a-dra-environ-
mental-impact-statement-for-the
Mallows Bay National Marine Sanctuary nomina-
tion:
http://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/mallows-bay/
Mallows Bay Park
https://www.charlescountyparks.com/parks/mal-
lows-bay-park
Maryland Department of Natural Resources
http://dnr2.maryland.gov/ccs/Pages/mallowsbay.
aspx
National Register of Historic Places.
2015. Nomination for the Mallows Bay- Widewater
Historic and Archaeological District. http://www.
nps.gov/nr/listings/20150424.htm.
Shomette, Donald G.
1996. Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay and Other Tales
of the Lost Chesapeake. Tidewater Publishers, Cen-
treville, MD. (www.amazon.com/Ghost-Fleet-Mal-
lows-Other-Chesapeake/dp/0870334808)
1998. Shipwrecks of Mallows Bay: Inventory and
Assessment. e Mallows Bay submerged cultural
resource survey. Prepared for the Maryland Histor-
ical Trust. Crownsville, MD.
Strickland, Scott M., Virginia R. Busby, and Julia A.
King.
2015. Indigenous Cultural Landscapes Study for
the Nanjemoy and Mattawoman Creek Watersheds.
Prepared for the National Park Service, Annapolis,
MD. St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St. Mary’s
City, Maryland.
Susan Langley has been the Maryland State Un-
derwater Archaeologist for more than twenty years,
directing the Maryland Maritime Archaeology
Program. She is an adjunct professor at several
colleges and universities, where she teaches under-
water archaeology and the history of piracy. She
also taught maritime archaeology in ailand for
several years for the Southeast Asian Ministers of
Education Organization (SEAMEO) which is part
of UNESCO. She is an active PADI Master SCUBA
Diver Trainer, and lectures globally on a variety of
subjects including the aforementioned, as well as
textile technology, food ways, and the archaeology
of beekeeping and current regional practices. She is
also the Governor’s beekeeper.
Deborah Marx is a maritime archaeologist with
NOAA’s Oce of National Marine Sanctuaries. She
has an MA in maritime archaeology and histo-
ry from East Carolina University and is a NOAA
science diver. Since 2002 she has worked with a
number of National Marine Sanctuaries including
Stellwagen Bank, Olympic Coast, Channel Islands,
Florida Keys, Monitor, and under Bay. Her work
also includes interpretation, outreach, and media
eorts related to NOAA’s Maritime Heritage Pro-
gram projects, such as live internet broadcasts and
exhibit management. Lastly, Deborah has extensive
knowledge on preparing National Register of His-
toric Places nominations, and has co-authored over
a dozen shipwreck nominations, including three
multiple property submissions and one historic and
archaeological district.
80
Edited Transcript of Presentation
ank you for having me here. It’s really been
an interesting day for me to hear these fantastic
presentations and I look forward to tomorrow. I’ll
oer my apology and a caveat: this is going to be a
very informal presentation. I just felt what I had to
oer were some thoughts and questions, and a look
at some assumptions on potential maritime cultur-
al landscapes in Hawai‘i.
We don’t actually have any nominated shipwreck
sites in Hawai‘i, with the exception of the Arizona
and the Utah inside Pearl Harbor as part of that
park, which is now called Valor in the Pacic Na-
tional Monument. It’s not that cultural resources are
not important in the islands. It’s exactly the oppo-
site. ey have been so important that the topic of
shipwrecks is simply the new resource at the table,
because those are properties, and Hawai‘i has not
been focused on properties. ey have been focused
on relationships and cultural landscapes, relation-
ships to marine areas, and use of resources, but it’s a
very interesting environment in which to work.
is is timely for me as well, and for folks in
Hawai‘i, because, of course we have the National
Marine Monument, Papahanaumokuakea (there
will be a test on how to pronounce that at the end
of this talk). at’s also a UNESCO World Heritage
Site. It’s a mixed site, cultural and natural resourc-
es, but submerged maritime elements were not part
of that nomination. And then, we have a sanctu-
ary in the main Hawaiian Islands, the Humpback
Whale Sanctuary, which, unlike the rest of our
sites, is a single species sanctuary right now. It does
not directly manage or engage cultural properties,
per se. Now, that site is in transition and under
review to expand its mandate to become ecosys-
tem-based—include properties, cultural resources,
shipwrecks, et cetera. at review’s in process and
it’s a very interesting process.
But what I want to emphasize throughout this
talk is the multicultural and multilayered nature of
elements for landscapes in the islands, and here, if
you can make out the dierent colors on the map,
is simply an overlay of waves of history. In this case,
one being the Pacic voyaging migration eastwards
into the Pacic, the Lapita culture migration, even-
tually achieving the discovery of Hawai‘i; another
being whaling exploits, historic whaling beginning
in the nineteenth century; and the third being activ-
ities in World War II, with the bulk of the activities,
many of the battles, and their overlays that wrap
around each other and sometimes are related to each
other. So, it’s a complicated area. ere’s not one sin-
gle maritime cultural landscape. ere are multiple
landscapes to talk about.
I’ll mention the whaling landscape though, the po-
tential for one, because this is something for us that’s
very important and for our system, because most, if
not all, of our sanctuary sites include historic whaling
elements. And so, discussing a landscape like this can
unite, and does unite, our eorts in various ways, and,
in fact, ways beyond individual sanctuaries. We’ve
been doing research work in Alaska, certainly in
the East Coast, and also West Coast sanctuaries. We
have ten recorded whalers lost in the marine national
monument, ve of which have been discovered. And
there are at least 19 lost in the main Hawaiian Islands.
And I thought, “Well, that’s obviously a maritime
cultural landscape” and then I thought, “Is it a whaling
landscape?” Now I believe it is, but I think it’s import-
ant for someone to ask the question, because they’re
not actually ocean whaling in those atolls. ey’re
transitioning to whaling areas. And there are about
50 or 60 other shipwrecks in the monument. So, there
are vessels that wrecked, so it’s a shipwreck cultural
landscape. Is it a whaling landscape? We claim it is,
but someone could probably look at that assumption.
at whaling as a theme has importance for
a landscape analysis, of course, is, I think, fairly
obvious: huge impacts for the Pacic and Hawai‘i.
You know, sailing in the wake of old Captain Cook,
trickles of vessels came slowly, maybe one or two
a year. e whalers started coming out in 1819 to
the Hawaiian Islands. en it quickly ran up in the
mid-nineteenth century to 600 or 700 whalers a year.
Waves of History: Maritime Cultural Landscapes in Hawai‘i
Hans Van Tilburg
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
81
To call them cultural ambassadors would be nice,
probably not our best example. But the impact on
the islands socially, economically, and in every way
is quite signicant as a trans-shipment port. ere
were shore whaling stations that were established, a
handful of them, we don’t have the remains of those,
they haven’t been identied on land yet, but a num-
ber of whalers were lost in the main islands, and
up in the northwesterns. e elements of whaling
resources then include those shipwrecks, include
whaling museums, include the archival materials,
and a number of other things that can be included
in a landscape, or go beyond landscape. e most
signicant impacts of those whalers was for the local
population of course. e number of Hawaiians
and Pacic Islanders that were involved with the
American whaling industry is staggering. At times,
one-h of the entire eet were Pacic Islanders and
Hawaiian whalers. When the eets were crushed up
there in the Chukchi Sea, about half of the survivors
of the 1871 incident, which crushed about 33 vessels
in the ice, were Pacic Islanders and Hawaiians, and
no one lost a life with that incident.
Signicant impacts: an obvious one for cultur-
al landscapes, whaling cultural landscapes. ese
are a little small, but these maps simply show the
fact that the located populations of whales didn’t
include the islands of Hawai‘i. ey’re south of
the groups where they were looking. So it was a
trans-shipment rest and recreation port. ey’re
going to the whaling grounds, for instance in the
lower right map, the Japan grounds or o the Japan
grounds—farther to the west of Midway and Kure.
at’s the business end of whaling. at’s the signif-
icant areas the whalers would have identied. And
there’s nothing there. Say nothing there, it’s not a
bounded area. It wouldn’t be included as a cultural
landscape element. So I have interesting questions
about that, but I think it’s clear that we’ll continue
with a look at the whaling landscape in many ways.
Marine transportation would be another obvious
one, especially for the islands, and especially with
the advent of harbors. Now, here’s another example
of interaction between environment and cultural
practice and eect to the environment, cultural
footprints. I’m reminded of Honolulu itself, Honolu-
lu Harbor. at’s not where the ships began to come
in, they were on roadstead o of Waikiki. But the
freshwater stream from Nu’-u-anu that ran down to
the shore prevented the coral growing in one area,
which lead to a kind of natural alcove underwater,
and the whalers and the ships started going over
there. And so all the merchants shied to what is
now Honolulu Harbor and established the whole
city out of that natural footprint. is is an import-
ant one for us as well, because we’re engaged in an
island-wide inventory as part of our BOEM funded
project—maritime resource studies in preparation
for understanding the impacts of oshore energy
development as Dave Ball will talk about. And we
get accumulations of shipwrecks around these har-
bors. It’s not a random distribution at all.
So the harbors themselves, besides the hundreds
of shipwrecks that have been reported in Hawai‘i
and the many that have been found, although we
have a very high energy environment, would be
elements of a transportation maritime cultural
landscape. Here’s an image of one (Figure 1). e
traditional harbor up in Mahukona on the Big Island
was once the formal entry point for the Kingdom of
Hawai‘i, and there are a number of resources le
there. What are we talking about? Mooring systems,
wharves, piers, landings, anchorages, anchors,
chains, all kinds of implements dropped over the
side, in addition to the harbor itself. is is the
conjunction point or transit node of the railways.
And, if you think back on your history, with folks
like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, he kind of saw those
steamship lines as simply an extension of railways,
although you could think of it in other ways, as well.
is raises the question of how much are we
going to nominate as a maritime cultural landscape
or an element? We have ships bringing railway
equipment and cargo in, we have rail ties and we
Figure 1: Mahukona Harbor today, once an ocial port of
entry on the Island of Hawai‘i. Image NOAA ONMS
82
have wheels on the bottom of the harbor, then we
have the rails leading right down to the harbor, and
then the elements of the railways themselves. I’m
not sure what the answer is to that one.
It’s a pattern distribution if you look at the
distribution of shipwrecks. Not a random one.
And these give you an idea of where the plantation
landings were, servicing all of those steamship
vessels beginning in the 1850s, 1860s. So you get
an idea of the landscape, the altered landscape,
for many of these landings. ere are only a cou-
ple with really safe harbors. It’s a very high ener-
gy environment, right? Many others are actually
wire rope landings. So a landing would be simply
anchors, boring systems on the bottom of the little
bay, we call them dog-hole ports there. And then
xed infrastructure in the clis, and they would
run a wire hawser down over the mooring area, the
vessel would come in, and they would run the car-
go down the wire and drop it right down into the
hold: wire-rope landings, very rough, treacherous.
Vessels would have to come in close to the clis.
So, if you look at an older map, for instance, we
know more sites now, but where were the known
shipwreck sites? Remember, this is a little bit mis-
leading because there’s been no comprehensive
directed survey for all of these underwater cultural
resources. It’s simply the ones we know about, so you
ip back and forth between where the landings are,
and you begin to see patterns of distribution in the
landscape for predicting and modeling wreck sites.
If you want to be more specic, if you want to
change the scale of a landscape discussion, you can
look at the steamship landings, because, it would be
a subset obviously of marine transportation. Why
would you do that though, why would you change
the scale? ere are all kinds of marine transpor-
tation going on. It’s a fairly broad category, but the
steamship landings are tied to the plantation era,
and the plantation era shapes the demography and
social—and economic—and political realities of
Hawai‘i for a long, long time. So it’s not until you
have a reason, the treaty in 1870, to ship the agri-
cultural products to the mainland that you have the
boom in plantations, which then support econom-
ically, the steamships, the small mosquito eet
coming out to the islands. Plantation heritage is a
recognizable resource heritage onshore. So, we have
a number of these steamship wreck sites, and heavi-
er material, of course, stands up very well underwa-
ter. e lighter stu, the wood, is simply all gone.
ere’s a specic area on one island, Lāna‘i
Island, which is the disposal site for many of those
steamships. So now we’re talking about a ship
abandonment paradigm, a subset of another
cultural landscape. Shipwreck Beach on Lāna‘i,
where dozens of these vessels were run up onto the
beach. Where is the intersection between environ-
mental features and wreck sites? is is one of
them (Figure 2). It’s a ship trap, due to the congu-
ration of the islands, due to the prevailing trade
winds, the fact of these reefs, and the private nature
of Lāna‘i Island. It was a dull plantation, nobody
was going to complain when those ship owners
took their vessels over there and abandoned them
on the reef and let them dri right up. We get
dozens of wreck sites there that are useful for
nding survey sites for the annual survey class.
So there are a couple of dierent ways to go with
the marine transportation; you have a couple of dif-
ferent scales you can discuss. It’s interesting to decide
which one you want to focus on. I’m glad to see the
image of surf sites that came up earlier today, because
this is something that’s, of course, a huge matter
in Hawai‘i. A surf site is not a shipwreck site, not a
property site, but we’re talking about the connection
between heritage and traditional practice and mod-
ern practice and environments. Surf sites are specic
to bottom topography and prevailing swells, et cetera.
Surng, of course, is a heritage activity that goes
back to pre-Western contact days. I think the Ha-
Figure 2: A 19th century steamship wreck at Shipwreck
Beach, north shore of Lāna‘i Island. Image J. Kuwabara,
NOAA ONMS
83
waiians had six dierent types of traditional surf-
ing, and some interesting books have been written
recently about the heritage of surng. My talk to-
day is on historic types or potentials for landscapes.
Tomorrow, we’ll hear from Trisha Watson on the
native Hawaiian multicultural landscapes perspec-
tives. So, we’ve broken it up a little bit, to have one
talk today, one talk tomorrow. is was traditional
practice which has become such a modern compet-
itive sport that we begin to lose sight of the heri-
tage cultural landscape.
e military landscape is a most important one
in Hawai‘i, and I can’t overstress this enough. It’s the
one I wanted to get to. ere’s no other example of
such potential to talk about all of these military sites
in Hawai‘i. ese are air bases across the islands.
ese are the coastal defense structures simply on
Oahu Island, which play a big role in heritage
interpretation. Pill boxes used onshore, remnants of
pill boxes underwater, now for articial barriers,
and lots of airelds. ere are some eighty plus U.S.
Navy ships and submarines in the waters around
the islands and over 1400 naval aircra. Large-scale
exercises that were done in the past le traces on
the bottom of landing cra and aircra exercise
areas: not combat, not battles, but losses during
massive exercises, amphibious training (Figure 3).
e questions I have about that kind of military
landscape are many, but one is simply of scale.
Where do you stop? You can’t understand the land-
scape of military activities and resources in Hawai‘i
today, why the military does what it does, unless
you realize that half of the world is controlled from
Pearl Harbor. e Pacic eet goes right into the
Indian Ocean, and so we have to have some kind of
articial limitation: y-years, one hundred-years,
landscapes of this size, landscapes of that size. To
understand those landscapes and elements, there’s
a question of scale that I’m interested in and don’t
have the answer.
Finally, I would simply say that the reason for
looking at whaling, transportation, surng, or even
these military landscapes for me is to engage the
public in something that they’ll understand has
great relevance. Unexploded ordnance is my best ex-
ample of that. We’re talking about the paradigm, the
assumption, and a good assumption that this eort
in cultural landscapes is done to protect and pre-
serve properties. But it can’t be just an assumption;
it has to be an intentional decision because we’re a
preservation program and a marine resource agency.
So we’ve talked about underwater ordnance, explo-
sive ordnance. Where is our responsibility for add-
ing those to our landscape studies? at ordnance
would not be part of an outstanding universal value
or something like that in a preservation objective
landscape, but it’s a huge topic for Hawai‘i. So, I have
questions about those objectives and those goals. Δ
Hans Van Tilburg has worked as a carpenter, sport
diving instructor, commercial diver, and science
diver in California, North Carolina, Louisiana, and
Wisconsin. He earned a BA in geography from UC
Berkeley (1985), an MA in Maritime History and
Nautical Archaeology from East Carolina University
(1995), and a PhD in history from the University of
Hawai‘i (2002), where he also ran the graduate pro-
gram in maritime archaeology and history under the
Marine Option Program. Hans has taught numerous
university courses in world history and maritime
history. He has edited readers and proceedings,
authored reports, contributed chapters, and pub-
lished over 30 articles and book reviews, as well as
several books. Hans has served as a consultant for
UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage program, as
well as co-instructor for Underwater Cultural Her-
itage Foundation courses in Southeast Asia and the
Caribbean. He is currently the maritime heritage co-
ordinator for the Maritime Heritage Program in the
Pacic Islands region, and the unit diving supervisor
for NOAA’s National Ocean Service in Hawai‘i.
Figure 3: LVTs en route to beach during maneuvers near
Kihei, Maui, in May 1944. Photograph No. 304281; General
Records of the Department of the Navy, 1795-1947: Gen-
eral Photographs 1913-1945 (prints); Record Group 80-G;
National Archives and Records Administration–College Park,
Maryland.
84
For centuries, the rocky shorelines of the Florida
Keys were oen littered with the sight of bloated
corpses, splintered masts, and jettisoned cargoes
brutally cast ashore aer meeting their fate on
the treacherous reefs lying just oshore. While
foundering upon the high seas meant imminent
death, the prospect of wrecking upon the shore
equally held little hope for any assistance (Marano
2012:1). Since vessels rst explored the area, the
approximate route of the Gulf Stream between the
Florida Keys and Bahamas, oen simply referred
to as “the Straits”, have been identied as a danger-
ous passage. e unpredictable nature of the Gulf
Stream combined with a limited knowledge of the
area culminated in a disastrous combination as the
reefs along the southeastern coastline of Florida
became the nal resting place for hundreds vessels.
As such, the rocky reefs and isolated islets of the
Florida Keys exemplify the risks associated with
navigating near a desolate and dangerous shoreline.
One of the primary goals of maritime archeol-
ogy is to identify convincing linkages between the
physical associations represented by shipwrecks
and the social institutions that helped create them
(Gould 2011:24). As such, this proposed study will
utilize the National Historic Landmarks (NHL)
Revised ematic Framework to examine the role
of salvage in the development of a unique mar-
itime cultural landscape throughout the Florida
Keys. While the ematic Framework has been
utilized to provide a means to identify and nomi-
nate landmarks through a comparative analysis of
similar properties associated within a specic ep-
och of American history, the framework does not
provide an eective means to easily analyze mar-
itime cultural landscapes. While not necessarily a
new concept, the eective application of a mari-
time cultural landscapes approach in the manage-
1 e author may be correct; however, the NHL program was intended as a designation program. e NRHP is a designation
and planning program.
ment of submerged cultural heritage within the
United States has been dicult. is is particularly
true in regards to eective identication, docu-
mentation, and analysis of maritime cultural land-
scapes through preexisting management doctrines
such as the National Historic Landmarks pro-
gram and the National Register of Historic Places
(NRHP). While otherwise ubiquitous institutions
within the cultural resource management practices
of the United States, the terminology, theory, and
approaches utilized in the study of maritime cul-
tural landscapes does not currently exist in either
these or any other resource management regimes
utilized today.
1
As such, the theoretical foundations of this work
will utilize maritime cultural landscape approaches
developed and successfully tested in Australia that
have only recently been introduced into the United
States. ese approaches acknowledge the di-
culties in conducting the systematic and scientic
study of less tangible ideals associated with human
agency and cognition in a variety of applications
(Duncan 2000, 2004; Richards 2008; Marano 2012;
Duncan and Gibbs 2015). Utilizing the methodol-
ogies advocated in these approaches, this work will
identify several contexts that begin to shed light on
local and regional dierences in the perceptions
and responses to risk in the maritime environment.
is approach can provide invaluable insight into
the cultural values of a local community that would
not otherwise be apparent through more traditional
historic, ethnographic, or archeological research ef-
forts. As such, this study will attempt to analyze and
explain the development of what could be called a
“maritime salvage landscape” through the applica-
tion of socio-cultural theories to highlight cultural
motivators contributing to this landscape. While
the development of maritime salvage throughout
Risk, Salvage, and Exploring the Concept of the Maritime Frontier:
Utilizing eory to Frame a Maritime Cultural Landscape
Approach in the Florida Keys
Josh Marano
Biscayne National Park
National Park Service
85
the Florida Keys represents only one of a number
of factors contributing to the area’s overall cultural
landscape, studying the establishment and subse-
quent evolution of wrecking and salvage practices
thematically can signicantly contribute to the
understanding of both the area’s physical and cul-
tural landscapes. Establishing this connection not
only helps resource managers locate, identify, and
interpret thematically related cultural sites, but by
understanding cultural factors contributing to their
deposition, value, and use over time, the applica-
tion of these theoretical paradigms can help explain
contemporary perceptions of similar resources.
e Florida Reef, the Concept of Place, and the
Identication of a Submerged Maritime Cultural
Landscape
While many wrecks undoubtedly occurred o-
shore, the vast majority occurred within sight of
land, oen only a few miles from the beach. ose
unfortunate enough to survive the initial wreck-
ing event were cast ashore onto isolated, lawless,
and mosquito-infested islands, many of which
lacked access to fresh water. While occasionally
uninhabited, many of these islands were home to
native populations that were oen hostile towards
the poor souls seeking refuge aer wrecking on
the perilous reefs. Survivors of wrecks were oen
captured, enslaved, or killed upon discovery by
local natives. Tales of torture, abuse, and violence
permeated many of the survivor’s accounts of
their captivity. Possibly due to the indistinguish-
able physical characteristics of the islands, or the
fear of the natives who resided there, historical
accounts emphasizing the physical characteristics
of the terrestrial landscape of the Florida Keys are
lacking. While detailed historical descriptions of
the islands forming the Florida Keys are scarce,
most sources denoting the locations for obtaining
fresh water, safe harbor, and obvious dangers are
vaguely described and are apparent in the region’s
toponomy. As the area was further developed,
major settlements in Key West and Indian Key,
fortications at the Dry Tortugas and Key West,
and shore-based aids to navigation all contributed
to the maritime cultural landscape.
eir importance, however, was secondary to
that of the shallow reefs lying just beneath the wa-
ter’s surface. While it could be argued that the pres-
ence of more prominent, tangible physical features
more traditionally considered landscape character-
istics ended at the water’s edge, mariners trained
by millennia of tradition actively maintained watch
for physical indicators of the shallow ats, jagged
patch reefs, and the wrecks of less fortunate vessels
that dangerously lurked just beneath the surface as
menacing threats to those unfamiliar with the min-
ute details of the area’s unique bathymetry. While
early sailing directions advocated avoidance of the
dangerous area, the early need for the detailed sur-
vey of the Florida Reef, as well as the establishment
of a series of lighthouses, buoys, and beacons to
identify and avoid the reefs are well documented in
the historic record. As knowledge of the area grew,
sailing directions cautiously advised mariners to be
on a constant lookout for breaking surf, contrary
currents, changes in watercolor (indicating a rapid
change in depth or bottom composition), aids to
navigation and any other physical indicators of po-
tential threats to their voyage. e ability to identify,
analyze, and mitigate the dangers of navigating in
an area are considered a staple of good seamanship
and remain a vital skill in navigating the treacher-
ous near-shore waterways of the Florida Keys.
While the tiny islets briey mentioned in ear-
ly sailing instructions have now been developed
beyond recognition, the shoals, rocks, and reefs
that form the Florida Reef tract have not appre-
ciably changed throughout the historic period and
remain similar to those encountered by mariners
throughout antiquity. As such, the study of the
discovery, documentation, utilization, and avoid-
ance of many of the unique physical characteristics
that remain prominent features in the landscape
embody both the historical and contemporary
diculties in utilizing the area and therefore pro-
vide insight into an element of a unique cognitive
landscape of the area. is insight is vital in devel-
oping an understanding of the complex role the
exploration, documentation, and utilization of the
region’s unique landscape plays in the cultural ide-
als emphasized in the identication and mitigation
of risk in the maritime environment.
86
Introduction to Maritime Salvage in the Florida
Keys
For those in peril along the coast of the Florida
Keys, the icy grip of death oen consumed sailors
with little hope of rescue. Prior to the establish-
ment of a systematic salvage system, their only
chance of surviving a wreck or disaster lay with
the solemn duty of his fellow seafarers to provide
assistance. As was oen the case, the isolation of
the Florida Keys combined with an early lack of
vessel trac, oen le little hope of discovery or
rescue and nearly ensured shipwrecked mariners
along the coast were doomed to their fates. e
loss of life and both raw and manufactured mate-
rial on what was considered the edge of the mod-
ern world led to the development of an informal
salvage network, rst amongst local native inhab-
itants and subsequently by more formal attempts
by the maritime empires sustaining the losses and
members of their colonial communities.
While not initially meant to serve as a means
to reduce the risk of navigating near the reef, the
abundance and constant presence of opportunis-
tic Bahamian wreckers found cruising the Florida
Reef soon became so ubiquitous that wrecked mar-
iners began to depend upon their presence for their
salvation and agonizingly prayed for their speedy
arrival in the event of disaster. eir exploits, both
negative and positive, were oen recounted as the
only means of survival in an otherwise perilous
situation. e reputations of the wreckers and the
informal salvage network they created developed
the preliminary foundations of a cognitive land-
scape in which help in the event of a disaster was
available and, as such, was considered when dis-
cussing the risk of operating in the Florida Keys.
While this activity aided in establishing a foun-
dation of a cognitive landscape of risk in the Flori-
da Keys, it was not until the annexation of the state
by the United States did this development begin in
earnest. Economic development, drastic increases
in shipping trac, and a prevalence of illegal activ-
ity throughout the region led to the establishment
of a port of entry at Key West in 1828, in addition
to the development of a salvage system unique to
the area and heavily inuenced by the area’s physi-
cal landscape. e subsequent survey, documenta-
tion, and the subsequent establishment of an aid to
navigation system in the area by the United States
Coast Survey provided some of the rst detailed
maps of the area and reected attempts to modify
and utilize the area’s unique physical landscape.
ese systems were in a state of constant devel-
opment throughout the nineteenth and early-twen-
tieth centuries during which time more than 640
vessels came to grief upon the Florida Reefs, the
peak of which was observed during the 1850s when
vessels piled up on the coasts at a rate of one per
week (Viele 2001:xiv). Aer the turn of the century,
advances in shipboard technology, the introduc-
tion and utilization of steam, and the continual
advancement of survey operations greatly reduced
the number of vessels wrecking along the reef. e
settlement and development of large portions of
the Florida Keys brought unprecedented amounts
of people and goods into the area, reducing the
need for the salvage of mundane goods, now more
easily obtainable through other means on shore. As
such, the focus on maritime salvage narrowed to
include only valuable, desirable, or illicit goods.
is preferential treatment is particularly mean-
ingful as it represents one of the rst major shis
in how local mariners perceived and reacted to risk
in the maritime domain. Focus moved from the
systematic salvage of all vessels in peril along the
Florida Reef to only those that the salvage of which
stood to provide a considerable nancial gain. As
commercial vessel trac decreased throughout
the area, systematic salvage opportunities likewise
diminished as the Admiralty Courts at Key West
closed in 1911. While the wrecking courts had
closed, wrecks and vessel mishaps continued to oc-
cur, though to a lesser extent than before. Lacking
the valuable cargoes of their predecessors, many of
the utilitarian vessels coming to grief in the area,
including barges, commercial shing vessels, and
recreational cra, most oen lacked the economic
incentive for individuals to salvage their remains.
Despite this perceived lack of interest advancing
technologies soon oered new opportunities to
exploit shipwrecks along the Florida Reef for nan-
cial gain. Coinciding with the advent of recreation-
al SCUBA gear following the Second World War,
87
the concept of salvage in the Florida Keys would
be resurrected and reinvented, this time focusing
on the recovery of the valuable cargoes of historic
shipwrecks. Considered long lost to the ravages of
the deep the concept of maritime salvage, both le-
gally and cognitively, was molded to include the re-
covery of historic cargoes. Early successes in these
ventures throughout the 1950s and 1960s energized
the populace. While tantalizing ctional tales of
treasures hidden amongst the isolated islands and
“lost” amongst the dangerous coral reefs through-
out the Florida Keys were prevalent throughout
popular culture throughout the mid-nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, the romanticized de-
scriptions of nding lost treasures of centuries past
aided in creating a treasure hunting culture that
captured the imagination of millions. Fueled by the
increasing number of major nds located through-
out the Florida Keys, the treasure hunting culture
developed an insatiable lust for the gold, silver, and
jewels once thought forever lost to the abyss, but
now once again within reach.
Unfortunately, the methods utilized by those
seeking to salvage historic shipwrecks for the sole
purpose of capitalizing upon the economic value
of their former cargoes were particularly detri-
mental to both the historic fabric of shipwrecks
themselves, and to the natural environment around
them, both of which were increasingly considered
sensitive resources worthy of protection. Mean-
while, development of the Florida Keys region
was progressing at an alarming rate. Following the
physical connection of all but the northernmost
Florida Keys to the mainland, rst by Flagler’s rail-
road in 1912 and later by the completion of a series
of roads in the 1920s, the settlement and develop-
ment of the once desolate island chain progressed
at a fever pitch. e construction of new homes,
marinas, roads, resorts, and other “improvements”
led to a radical transformation of the physical land-
scape, making many of islands readily distinguish-
able from the sea and grossly altering the area’s
viewscape. Following the successful development
of the areas along the Miami River and Miami
Beach throughout the twentieth century, develop-
ers sought to expand construction into the keys,
rapidly buying land and making preliminary im-
provements to islands that had previously escaped
development. Land was so scarce, that developers
even planned to create articial islands and build
structures and roads directly onto the substrate.
e imminent rapid development of the area,
combined with the systematic destruction of the
area’s submerged cultural resources in the insa-
tiable search for lost treasures, threatened total
destruction of the area’s unique natural environ-
ment and once extensive collection of nite cul-
tural resources. is realization coincided with
the development and advancement of a period
of political, environmental, and social awareness
known as the conservation movement. While the
initial focus of this movement centered upon
the preservation of natural resources, given their
similar goals of preserving resources for the better-
ment and enjoyment of this and future generations,
eorts eventually included cultural resources.
New pieces of legislation introduced during peaks
within this movement throughout the latter half of
the twentieth century supported the protection of
both cultural and natural resources and revolution-
ized resource management practices throughout
the United States. Renewed public interest in the
preservation of resources led to a pronounced de-
velopment of county and state parks, as well as the
National Park System (est. 1916), and the National
Marine Sanctuary System, which eventually ex-
tended new protections to the vast majority of the
cultural and natural resources of the Florida Reef.
e success of the conservation movement, the
creation of new legislation specically protecting
archeological sites, and the subsequent establish-
ment of protected marine zones throughout the
Florida Keys signicantly curbed development of
the area in the attempt to ensure its preservation
and protection for future generations. While insti-
tuted in good faith, each proposed change was met
with considerable resistance from those seeking to
develop the area in order to capitalize on the re-
gion's natural and cultural resources. Of these new
protections, the most important for the purposes
of this study included the end of the commercial
salvage of historic shipwrecks and the develop-
ment, application, and enforcement of legislation
designed protect submerged cultural heritage for
posterity signaled the beginning of the end of
88
commercial treasure hunting in the Florida Keys
and yet another shi in both the perceived role of
maritime risk in salvage and the cultural versus
monetary value of submerged cultural heritage
within society. is discourse represents current
management issues throughout the region as the
integrity of nite archeological resources, while
legally protected throughout the vast majority of
the study area, is continually under threat due to a
persistent cultural attraction of maritime salvage in
the area.
Recent Research Eorts and Alternative
Approaches
Given the breadth of human activity occurring
in the area associated with the discovery, explo-
ration, and utilization of the Florida Straits and
its importance on the local, regional, and global
scales, the area holds signicant potential for fu-
ture study. Unfortunately, many attempts to study
archeological remains in the area have focused
solely on individual wreck sites suering recent
damage from a variety of natural and human
factors (Lawson and Marano 2012; Marano and
Bright 2014a; Wilson 2015; Lawson and Lubke-
mann 2016) or are simply site specic documen-
tation surveys (Smith et al. 2006a, 2006b; Mc-
Clarnon 2007; Price et al. 2009; She et al. 2009).
Attempts to examine multiple sites in the area
have culminated in a series of regional invento-
ries, but have not yet ventured to tie any unifying
thematic elements that expand our knowledge of
local cultural elements (Fischer 1975; Wild and
Brewer 1985; Murphy 1993; Hallas n.d.). As such,
this study will utilize theoretical approaches that
have been successfully utilized to identify, delin-
eate, and interpret maritime cultural landscapes
in Australia. Specically, this study will analyze
the role of risk and frontier in the development
of a maritime cultural landscape framed by the
maritime salvage industry.
Risk
To most, risk is simply identied as the poten-
tial for a negative or undesirable outcome that
is usually synonymous with the terms hazard
or danger (Fox 1999:1). For the purposes of this
study, however, a better denition of risk may be
the, “systematic way of dealing with hazards and
insecurities induced and introduced by moderni-
ty [modern society] itself” (Beck 1992:21). Beck’s
denition provides a more insightful denition
of the term in that it explains the actual purpose
of risk in society whereas the concept of risk
may be most familiar only as a factor in personal
decision-making. As such, it can be much more
inuential in larger systems throughout society,
the remnants of which may be present as tangi-
ble components of cultural landscapes (Marano
2012: 34). It has been argued that, while not the
only factor involved, risk and the responses to it
play a major role in dening the use of cultural
seascapes (Duncan 2004:11). For the purposes of
this study it is argued that risk, and more speci-
cally the mitigation of risk in the marine environ-
ment, could be considered a near universal trait
observable throughout human existence. In order
to objectively identify and measure what could
otherwise be described as a feeling or an emotion,
a non-traditional research strategy is required
(Marano 2012:173). Several studies conducted in
Australia have developed methodologies to exam-
ine the behavioral responses to risk in the devel-
opment of regional maritime cultural landscapes
(Duncan 2000, 2004; Kimura 2006; Duncan and
Gibbs 2015). e methods utilized in these stud-
ies have only very recently been modied and ap-
plied to similar datasets in both the United States
and South Africa (Marano 2012; Borrelli 2015).
If the concept of risk in the maritime environ-
ment is to be considered a universal and unifying
cultural theme within maritime societies, one may
question how to systematically and scientically
approach such a cognitive subject and what could
be gained from its study. While the concept of risk
may be present in most societies, local and regional
variations in how society perceives and manages
risk provides vital insight into social structures,
values, and the development and modication of
both cognitive and physical landscapes within local
communities. As such, the study of the identica-
tion, mitigation, and management of risk within
maritime communities holds considerable potential
for future study. rough the utilization of broad
generalist and multidisciplinary approaches, such
studies could be utilized to eectively identify and
document maritime cultural landscapes through-
89
out the world. is approach has been successfully
utilized to identify a variety of cultural landscapes
formed as a direct result of human attempts to miti-
gate risk within the marine environment.
e physical landscape of the Florida Keys and
its associated reef tract has forced a series of unique
adaptations to manage the risk of utilizing the area.
Human adaptation to both the physical and cog-
nitive landscape of the area is present throughout
the historic period, though it is oen only made
readily apparent when studied thematically. It is
argued here that the unique physical landscape
present in the Florida Keys and the subsequent hu-
man adaptation to that environment has facilitated
the development of a unique cognitive landscape in
regards to the mitigation of risk utilizing the area.
It is argued here that the development of maritime
salvage throughout the Florida Keys represents a
physical manifestation of risk mitigation strategies
that, due to the local geophysical and environmen-
tal conditions present, developed a unique com-
ponent of the area’s maritime cultural landscape.
Specically, it is argued that the thematic study of
the development of marine salvage throughout the
Florida Keys provides invaluable insight into the
perception and management of risk in the develop-
ment of an isolated island community.
Salvage
It has been argued that for as long as vessels have
plied the world’s waterways, there has been the risk
of wreck or disaster, the occurrence of which should
be seen as a mere eventuality. e saving of property
from said disaster, the concept of maritime salvage,
is therefore potentially as old as the rst vessels to
venture from the relative safety of their moorings
(Muckelroy 1978:10). Salvage has been dened as
the “rendering of assistance to vessels and their car-
go in distress at sea, whether aoat, shipwrecked or
sunken,” the legalities and particulars of which are
dened through a series of laws as old as seafaring
itself (Delgado 1997:353-354). In his seminal work
on the subject, the late Keith Muckelroy describes
the role historic salvage operations played in the
maritime archeological site formation processes.
Muckelroy specically identies historic salvage op-
erations as both an extracting lter and scrambling
device as well as a means to introduce additional
contemporary historic material to an archeological
site (Muckelroy 1978:57, 159, 166).
While Muckelroy’s work is oen considered to
be one of the rst attempts to develop and apply
middle range theory, it has been critiqued that
while he did acknowledge both natural and cultur-
al factors in the formation of submerged archeo-
logical sites, his research primarily focused on the
environmental processes associated with the site
formation process (Gibbs 2006:4). Recent studies
have sought to identify cultural and behavioral
elements contributing to both the wrecking of
vessels (Duncan 2000, 2004; Kimura 2006; Marano
2012; Borrelli 2015), vessel reuse and abandon-
ment (Richard 2008), as well as their eects on sal-
vage and subsequent archeological site formation
processes (Gibbs 2006; Duncan and Gibbs 2015).
Variations in cultural values, perceived risk(s),
societal structures, and the physical characteristics
of the landscape can result in signicant varia-
tions in the human response to disaster that are
oen specic to a particular locale. e study of
the development of maritime salvage in the Flor-
ida Keys is particularly interesting due to its uid
nature over time. e development of maritime
salvage throughout the Florida Keys was dynamic
and varied considerably throughout history. is
variation reected changes in the perception of
risk as well as the variations in both the econom-
ic and cultural value of shipwrecks over time.
ese changes are particularly apparent in eorts
to mitigate that risk over time, tangible evidence
of which is oen preserved in the archeological
record. While the study of the development of
maritime salvage along the Florida Keys may shed
light on how coastal communities throughout the
isolated island chain attempted to mitigate the risk
of navigating in the area, it does not necessarily
explain why the unique system specically de-
veloped and utilized in the Florida Keys. ough
human utilization and adaptation to the unique
physical environment combined with simple
economic incentives inuenced the development
of maritime salvage in the Florida Keys, additional
cultural motivators that inuence local practices
should not be discounted.
90
Frontier
While the study of the development of maritime
salvage in the Florida Keys may provide insight
into how the local community worked to mitigate
risk during maritime activities and mishaps, it
does not necessarily answer why such eorts were
expended. While the obvious underlying theme,
particularly in its early stages, is economic in
nature, it could also be argued that the extreme
isolation, danger, and ruggedness of the area
forced those utilizing the area to develop a surviv-
al mentality similar to that developed and ro-
manticized on the plains frontier of the American
west. e concept known as the “Frontier esis”
was presented in a paper entitled, e Signicance
of the Frontier in American History by historian
Frederick Jackson Turner at the World’s Columbi-
an Exhibition in 1893. In his paper, Turner argues
that the settlement of the American frontier was
formative to the development of American ideals
and were particularly inuential in the develop-
ment of the country’s political, social, and cultural
ideals. Turner specically argues that the avail-
ability of free land and the process of developing
the frontier created a unique set of cultural ideals
that was the base for American democracy and
that the American west represented the “meeting
point between savagery and civilization” (Turner
1920:6).
While many of Turner’s ideas have been justly
criticized as being overly nationalistic and dis-
counting of the roles women, minorities, and native
populations in the development of the American
west (Pierson 1942; Limerick 1987) researchers
have also applied the Turnerian model in the iden-
tication of comparative frontiers across the globe
(Mikesell 1960). It is argued here that the core of
his frontier theory, particularly the idea that the
development of the frontier was formative to the
development of unique cultural ideals, is just as ap-
plicable to the study of the maritime frontier as the
vast expanses of the Great Plains. For those navigat-
ing in the vicinity of dangerous, isolated, and poor-
ly documented shorelines, the idea of a maritime
frontier aptly describe the dangerous and oen
lawless environments where help and hope in the
event of disaster are just out of reach. As such, it is
argued here that while Turner’s theories as a whole,
are limited by the social and political climate from
which they were developed, the underlying cul-
tural theme attributed to the frontier as discussed
by Turner can be identied as a cultural motivator
in the development of a unique maritime cultural
landscape in the Florida Keys. While the identi-
cation and mitigation of risk, the development
of maritime salvage, and the perception of value
of submerged cultural heritage vary as the focus,
nature, and extent of salvage changes over time,
the identication of underlying unifying cultural
motivators help explain regional variations and the
evolution of salvage activity throughout history.
Conclusions
One of the primary goals of maritime archaeol-
ogy is to identify convincing linkages between
the physical association represented by ship-
wrecks and the social institutions that helped
create them (Gould 2011:24). is task, however,
is oen made dicult by the diering historical
and archaeological practices utilized to identify,
document, and interpret underwater and terres-
trial cultural sites in coastal areas. Bass (1966:15)
argued that “archeology underwater, of course,
should be called simply archeology” meaning that
the theoretical approaches and overall goal to
examine human culture through their tangible
material remains are the same above and below
the surface of the water. While this may be true,
many of the dierences in approaching archeolo-
gy underwater, including the diculty in access-
ing underwater sites, dierences in nomenclature
and terminology, and the theoretical foundations
of the eld, oen prevent the eective application
of traditional archeological approaches in the
marine environment. As such, the development
of maritime cultural landscape theory has evolved
from the perceived dierences in the systematic
cultural study of human activity where land and
sea meet. While Westerdahl’s initial ideas devel-
oped the theoretical basis for the identication
and study of maritime cultural landscapes, their
eective application to resource management has
remained elusive. Originally utilized to describe
cultural resources located somewhere between the
terrestrial and underwater environments, the par-
ticulars of maritime cultural landscape theory can
be as ambiguous as the areas it seeks to dene.
91
It is argued here that many of the diculties
in identifying and dening maritime cultural
landscapes stem from the broad interpretation
of their individual components and the focus on
geophysical rather than cultural components of
the landscape. is study will utilize the National
Park Service’s National Historic Landmarks Re-
vised ematic Framework to examine the role of
salvage in the development of a unique maritime
cultural landscape throughout the Florida Keys.
As such, this study will attempt to analyze and
explain the development of what could be called a
“maritime salvage landscape” through the applica-
tion of socio-cultural theories to highlight cultural
motivators contributing to this landscape. While
the development of maritime salvage throughout
the Florida Keys represents only one of a number
of factors contributing to the area’s overall cultural
landscape, studying the establishment and subse-
quent evolution of wrecking and salvage practices
thematically can shed light on patterns signicantly
contributing to both the area’s physical and cul-
tural landscapes. Establishing this connection not
only helps resource managers locate, identify, and
interpret thematically related cultural sites, but by
understanding cultural factors contributing to their
perception and use over time, the application of
these theoretical paradigms can help explain con-
temporary perceptions of similar resources. Δ
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Monroe County, Florida. Submitted to the Florida
Keys National Marine Sanctuary, from Florida
Department of State, Division of Historical Re-
sources, Bureau of Archeological Research, Flori-
da Underwater Archeology Team, Tallahassee, FL.
Smith, Roger C., Jerey T. Moates, Debra G. She,
and Brian J. Adams (editors)
2006 Archeological and Biological Examination
of the Brick Wreck (8MO1881) o Vaca Key,
Monroe County, Florida. Submitted to the Florida
Keys National Marine Sanctuary, from Florida
Department of State, Division of Historical Re-
sources, Bureau of Archeological Research, Flori-
da Underwater Archeology Team, Tallahassee, FL.
Turner, Frederick J.
1920 e Frontier in American History. Frederick
Jackson Turner. Reprinted 1921 by Henry Holt
and Company, New York, NY.
Viele, John
2001 e Florida Keys Volume ree: e Wreck-
ers. Pineapple Press, Inc. Sarasota, FL.
Wild, Kenneth S., David M. Brewer
1985 Underwater Archeological Survey and Site
Assessment of Biscayne National Park. National
Park Service, Southeast Archeological Center,
Tallahassee, FL.
Wilson, Allen, D.
2015 A Fine Wreck in Shallow Water: Investiga-
tion into, and Conservation of, a Heavily Dis-
turbed 18
th
Century British West Indiaman, e
Soldier Key Wreck. Department ofAnthropology,
University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL. Δ
Joshua Marano is a maritime archaeologist who has
been working at Biscayne National Park since No-
vember 2012. Mr. Marano is a graduate of East Car-
olina University’s Program in Maritime Studies and
has earned an MA degree in maritime history and
nautical archaeology where his research focused on
the application of social theory to maritime archae-
ology. Mr. Marano has previously been employed as
an archaeological technician for the State of North
Carolina and has participated in several major mari-
time archaeological projects, including the digital
recording of the Swedish warship Vasa (1628) in
Stockholm, Sweden, and the excavation of Black-
beard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge (1718) shipwreck
site o the coast of North Carolina. In addition to
his interest in archaeology, Mr. Marano is an active
member of the United States Coast Guard Reserve
where he serves as a Second Class Boatswain’s Mate
at USCG Station Miami Beach, FL.
94
Edited Transcript of Presentation
You’ll have to excuse me, I changed my presen-
tation somewhat from the abstract I submitted.
I decided it would be deadly boring to just talk
about “From Land to Sea, or Sea to Land” so
I couched it within Alaska maritime cultural
landscapes. You’ll see me tacking (like a sailor).
I’m going to essentially be blown between two
winds: the method and theory wind, and the sort
of practical, landscape wind. You’ll see me tack
back and forth through the presentation, so stay
with me, please.
I want to start with a denition, because they’re
oen good to start with. I found our National Park
Service denition of what a cultural landscape is,
and I want to go over it for review. It’s a geographic
area that’s either associated with a historic event,
activity, or person, or exhibiting some other cul-
tural value or aesthetic value. It must meet those
basic characteristics. I also went back and reviewed
Westerdahl, and he sees it in a more broad way,
as focused on the past, but clearly referring to
ongoing cultural values. Note that is denition,
is focused on remains. e other thing I picked
up is that there may be a subtlety in the Swedish
word for “remains” that doesn’t translate well into
English. If anybody knows Swedish, and can look
at that word “remains,” it may have connotations
that aren’t eectively brought into English. It may
have as much to do with ethnographic remains, as
archaeological and architectural remains, which are
material as well (but conveyed by ongoing practice
rather than physical evidence). Now I’m tacking
back to Alaska, or the practical stu.
Alaska is huge; it’s 1.7 million square kilome-
ters. Traditionally, Alaska’s population has been
really tiny. The first accurate population num-
bers, which they may or may not be accurate,
are from 1880, when they did the census. There
were a little over 33,000 people in Alaska at that
point. Even today, there are only 710,000 peo-
ple, and the scale is deceiving. It’s about twice
the size of Texas, so keep that in mind. One of
the things that a small population in a large
area yields is a premium on inner-community
awareness and relationships. Also, they exhibit
a high degree of mobility and trusted connec-
tions across that mobile area, so that you can
go a long distance and know somebody in the
community who can put you up and feed you. I
didn’t really appreciate that until I moved there,
because in the lower 48 your type of com-
munity is different. It tends to be much more
geographically centralized. You have groups of
friends in a local community; your community
doesn’t necessarily extend over vast distances
into other communities. Another characteris-
tic is that trade is assumed to be widespread
and relatively regular. There’s a regular round
to Alaskan life. You move from place to place,
from a winter quarters, to a summer subsis-
tence camp, and so on. Subsistence resources,
on the other hand, are highly territorial, and
vigorously defended. In other words, you may
have people in other communities who you vis-
it, but when it comes to the resources you want
to harvest for your subsistence, those are very
territorial in nature.
My objective is to show that Alaska is a cul-
tural landscape, to show that maritime Alaska is
a maritime cultural landscape overlaying mul-
tiple marine ethnographic landscapes, and to
show that the most important aspects of mar-
itime cultural landscapes are overall historical
significance and physical integrity, not individ-
ual landscape characteristics, which I think are
units of analysis, rather than actual items.
I am really interested in the idea of cognitive
landscapes that Westerdahl went into. Has anyone
ever used Google Suggest? Does anyone know
what that is? When you punch terms into Google,
it automatically shows you a list that you can pick
From Land to Sea, or Sea to Land:
Reconciling Key Features of Terrestrial and Maritime Landscapes
Brinnen Carter
Sitka National Historical Park
National Park Service
95
from. ere’s a great little program online called
SEER that will take two Google Suggest terms,
and compare them, and show you the relationship
between the terms (http://hint.fm/seer/). It’s really
useful for marketing, because it allows a marketer
to gure out what people are looking for, when
you put a particular word in there and search for
it. I thought this would be a great little tool to
gure out the connections between cultural land-
scapes and maritime landscapes.
I started using SEER to see if I could figure
out what those relationships were. The first
thing I did was to compare cultural landscapes
and maritime landscapes. What pops out at
you right away, is that there is no relationship.
People who are looking for cultural landscapes
are not looking for maritime landscapes, and
people who are looking for maritime landscapes
aren’t looking for cultural landscapes. I would
conclude from that, that it’s not an overlapping
set. There’s not much cognition in the general
public about the connection between maritime
landscapes and cultural landscapes. The oth-
er interesting thing, if anybody is interested
in a job, the most common thing people are
looking for when they look for maritime land-
scapes is services. You want to start a contract
business, I would go into maritime landscape
services.
If you think about Westerdahl and Swedish
archaeology, maritime landscapes have a very
high prominence in Swedish archaeology. I
compared Swedish archaeology and maritime
landscapes and got a little bit of a connection.
It’s what you might expect: less connection from
Swedish archaeology to maritime landscapes, but
quite a bit the other direction. I then looked at
the Maritime Sanctuary program, and the Na-
tional Register program. You can see that there
is some connection, but about the same that you
see for Swedish archaeology.
Here it becomes very interesting. I think
of Alaska and Hawai‘i as kind of twin states,
way out there in the Pacific. We have a lot of
cultural connections. There’s a much stronger
relationship between maritime landscapes and
Hawaiian and Alaskan archaeology. That’s an
important point.
I wanted to back-check my information, be-
cause when you start using some of these tools,
you may not know what the hell you’re doing. I
checked archaeology and nautical archaeology
against each other, and it kind of makes sense.
People are interested in jobs, they’re interested
in what the salary is, and they’re interested in
how to get a degree. My off the cuff interpre-
tation of this is that everybody’s got to make
a living, and can I make a living doing either
nautical archaeology or archaeology? With that
in mind, I wanted to review this definition we’ve
already seen. Is Alaska a cultural landscape? It’s
a geographic area, that’s absolutely true.
Let’s see, it’s associated with a historic event,
I think I’d put the check in there that bought
Alaska: $7.2 million. The United States paid
about $200,000 extra, over $7 million, because
there was an ice plant in Sitka that was the only
source for ice for San Francisco, up until the
purchase. The Russians had been supplying
ice for San Francisco, and it was a very lucra-
tive market, obviously. The U.S. paid an extra
$200,000 for Alaska, just because of that.
Alaska is also associated with the resumption
of manifest destiny, the gold rush, the west-
ern Pacific exploration, whaling, and also the
expansion of fisheries. It’s also associated with
one of the most important diplomats in Ameri-
can history, William Seward. He was the vision-
ary leader who had the idea that the U.S. could
buy Alaska from Russia. One of the things that
he’s credited with is reinvigorating manifest
destiny or enhancing the prominence of Ameri-
ca on the world stage after the Civil War. Alaska
played a major role in that.
I think I’ve shown Alaska as a cultural land-
scape. I want to go over what that landscape
looks like. I blocked out the area of Alaska
where you don’t have a major influence of
the sea, and you can see from the amount of
area that is on the coast and connected by the
ocean, and from the major river systems in
96
Alaska, that clearly, a majority of Alaska, if not
two-thirds of Alaska, is all some type of mari-
time-influenced landscape that really overlays
with a number of language groups and ethno-
graphic landscapes that were very prominent as
late as the mid-1700s, and many of them con-
tinue today. About 30 percent of Alaska’s pop-
ulation is native Alaskan, and most of the folks
still strongly associate with these basic language
groups and cultural groups.
The cultural landscape of Alaska is overplayed
on these ethnographic landscapes. When I got
to Alaska, we had a couple of projects queued
up for funding. One was the Russian Bishop’s
House cultural landscape report. I thought it
would be deadly boring to just study the Russian
Bishop’s House in Sitka, Alaska, as a cultural
landscape, because it’s about an acre of land and
three buildings in a little cluster. I said, why not
repurpose that, and talk more broadly about the
ecclesiastical landscape of Russian American and
how it contributed to use of the Russian Bishop’s
House in Sitka. We’re the only unit in the Na-
tional Park Service that studies Russian America,
so why not use the cultural landscape money to
have a broader focus.
A number of folks are looking at Russian
American Orthodox landscapes all across Alas-
ka, how they’re connected, and how they con-
tribute to the significance of the Russian Bishop’s
House and the landscape in Sitka. I was also
very interested in expansion of the commercial
landscape, so we funded a maritime cultural
landscape project to study the commercial land-
scape of Russian America and the expansion of
Russian companies into Alaska. That includes
significant resources like the Erskine House and
the Baranov Castle in Sitka. They have parallels,
so they’re going to be merged together.
I’m going to tack back, and talk about the
various things that you would find in a typical
cultural landscape. These are basically charac-
teristics, so I don’t think I have to go through
them too intensively. They’re from Landscape
Lines, an NPS publication so you can look this
up. I’ll also mention that the characteristics of
the landscape have changed, so there’s an evo-
lutionary aspect that’s important to recognize.
That means that we can evolve into something
else, we can talk about something else if we
want to. I wanted to figure out where maritime
landscapes fit into this broad NPS perspective.
The important thing is there are some things
that change, and there are some things that
stay the same. I want to use an example in Sitka
(shows maps). This is the development of Sitka
early on, with an area from 1804 and one from
1867, so you can see development of a commer-
cial landscape here, with some elements of it
changing and some elements staying the same. I
think that’s important to recognize.
This is a brief review of Westerdahl’s mari-
time cultural landscape characteristics. I tried
to figure out how these could be merged into
some sort of system that would work for mari-
time cultural landscapes, using characteristics
from cultural landscapes and maritime cultural
landscape features that Westerdal identifies.
Natural features and systems could work as
maritime ecosystems and features. Land use is
fishing grounds, a coastal industry. Cultural
traditions, what Westerdal would call the cogni-
tive landscape, would be maritime traditions
and maritime ethnography. Circulation has a
special meaning in nautical terms; this would
be maritime routes and water-site circulation.
Westerdal would call those a “network of sail-
ing routes.” Topography and some specific sea
terms need to be included—things that are a
part of a maritime landscape that aren’t typical-
ly talked about in cultural landscapes.
There are celestial features—what a star
field looks like at sea—because it’s critical for
navigation and way-finding, and it has special
meaning in the Pacific Islands where there’s dif-
ferent systems of navigation. You need to have a
special category for winds, waves, currents, and
ice. Those are typically used as well for naviga-
tion, but are also special conditions at sea. You
also need to have some sort of special consider-
ation of weather, because weather makes all the
difference when you’re at sea.
97
With that, I want to switch back and talk
about significance and integrity. I think signif-
icance and integrity are as important, or more
important, than what I talked about before,
because the characteristics are really ontolog-
ical terms, and aren’t really a substitute for
the actual resources you see in the field. At
some point in the future, you’ll see some sort
of updating of the Russian American National
Historic Landmark theme study to incorporate
ecclesiastical landscapes and commercial land-
scapes of Russian America. Δ
Brinnen Carter is the Chief of Resources at
Sitka National Historical Park, the only Nation-
al Park Service unit to commemorate Tlingit
resistance to European colonial expansion, the
expansion of Czarist Russia, and the living native
culture of Southeast Alaska, as the state’s oldest
park. Previously, he was the Cultural Resource
Program Manager at Delaware Water Gap Na-
tional Recreation Area and a Museum Specialist
and Archeologist at the Southeast Archeological
Center. He has always studied the archeology of
submerged sites—when time has allowed—and
has advanced degrees in Nautical Archeology
and Prehistoric Underwater Archeology.
98
e Archaeological and Biological Assessment of
Submerged Landforms o the Pacic Coast project
was launched by BOEM in August of this year,
2015, and BOEM believes it has a lot of potential;
however, the previous project—the Inventory and
Analysis of Coastal and Submerged Archaeological
Site Occurrence on the Pacic Outer Continental
Shelf (POCS)—nished in 2013, provides excellent
background for understanding the new eort. e
Pacic Inventory project was basically a desktop
research eort to update our baseline information
on archaeological resources on the POCS, similar
to what was completed for BOEM in the Gulf of
Mexico in 2003 and in the Atlantic region in 2012.
is 2013 study of the Pacic updated previous
baseline studies that were completed in the Pacic
region in 1987 and 1990.
e Pacic Inventory had three components to
it. e rst was to update our database of historic
shipwrecks and provide a geo-referenced database
for management and decision-making. e second
component was to develop a geo-referenced data-
base of coastal historic properties in order to better
understand potential viewshed issues from oshore
renewable energy construction. e third com-
ponent of this 2013 study updated our predictive
model for submerged prehistoric sites on the POCS.
is included digital elevation modeling (DEM)
and a reconstruction of the paleoshorelines in 1,000
year increments, dating back to the Last Glacial
Maximum (LGM). For this, numerical values of
1-6 were assigned to 10-meter-grid squares across
the POCS, with higher values indicating higher
resource areas and more favorable areas for site
placement. Stream corridors were expected to have
the highest likelihood for containing submerged
pre-contact sites. is updated model demonstrated
that the southern portion of the POCS had better
overall resource potential. However, the southern
area also has a narrower shelf and limited stream
drainages. erefore, there are actually more higher
value areas concentrated in the northern half of the
west coast than in the southern half.
at brings us to this current study (November
2015), the Archaeological and Biological Assessment
of Submerged Landforms o the Pacic Coast. As
the title suggests, this is a multi-disciplinary ef-
fort, looking at both archaeological and biological
components of the submerged landforms o the
West Coast. It was awarded in August of this year
through the California Cooperative Ecosystems
Studies unit to San Diego State University. Unlike
the previous studies I mentioned, which were desk-
based research, this one has a strong eld compo-
nent, which will include geophysical and geological
surveys of areas that have a high potential for
intact submerged landforms. It’s a four-year eort,
building on the 2013 project. Information collected
through this eort will support BOEM’s environ-
mental analysis requirements through the National
Environmental Policy Act and National Historic
Preservation Act.
We have pulled together a strong team of re-
searchers for this project. Todd Braje of San Diego
State University is the principal investigator for this
project. We are also working with researchers from
the University of California Santa Barbara, Oregon
State University, SCRIPPS Institute of Oceanogra-
phy, the University of Oregon, California State Uni-
versity San Bernardino, the Smithsonian Institute,
Channel Islands National Park and the Submerged
Resource Center of the National Park Service, as
well as the Channel Islands National Marine Sanc-
tuary, the NOAA Maritime Heritage Program, and
NOAA’s Oce of Ocean Exploration and Research.
We are focusing specically on two areas o the
POCS, the Northern Channel Islands o of South-
ern California and the Central Oregon Coast. e
Northern Channel Islands are comprised of four
islands: San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz and
Anacapa. Previous research on these islands has
identied some of the earliest evidence for mari-
time culture in the Western Hemisphere with sites
dating back 9,000 to 13,000 years ago, when those
four islands actually composed 1 larger island,
Channel Islands, California. Chumash Tomol crossing to Santa Cruz Island, 2007. Photo
courtesy of Robert Schwemmer, NOAA.
Archaeological and Biological Assessment of Submerged Landforms o the
California and Oregon Coasts
David Ball
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
99
at brings us to this current study (November
2015), the Archaeological and Biological Assessment
of Submerged Landforms o the Pacic Coast. As
the title suggests, this is a multi-disciplinary ef-
fort, looking at both archaeological and biological
components of the submerged landforms o the
West Coast. It was awarded in August of this year
through the California Cooperative Ecosystems
Studies unit to San Diego State University. Unlike
the previous studies I mentioned, which were desk-
based research, this one has a strong eld compo-
nent, which will include geophysical and geological
surveys of areas that have a high potential for
intact submerged landforms. It’s a four-year eort,
building on the 2013 project. Information collected
through this eort will support BOEM’s environ-
mental analysis requirements through the National
Environmental Policy Act and National Historic
Preservation Act.
We have pulled together a strong team of re-
searchers for this project. Todd Braje of San Diego
State University is the principal investigator for this
project. We are also working with researchers from
the University of California Santa Barbara, Oregon
State University, SCRIPPS Institute of Oceanogra-
phy, the University of Oregon, California State Uni-
versity San Bernardino, the Smithsonian Institute,
Channel Islands National Park and the Submerged
Resource Center of the National Park Service, as
well as the Channel Islands National Marine Sanc-
tuary, the NOAA Maritime Heritage Program, and
NOAA’s Oce of Ocean Exploration and Research.
We are focusing specically on two areas o the
POCS, the Northern Channel Islands o of South-
ern California and the Central Oregon Coast. e
Northern Channel Islands are comprised of four
islands: San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz and
Anacapa. Previous research on these islands has
identied some of the earliest evidence for mari-
time culture in the Western Hemisphere with sites
dating back 9,000 to 13,000 years ago, when those
four islands actually composed 1 larger island,
Channel Islands, California. Chumash Tomol crossing to Santa Cruz Island, 2007. Photo
courtesy of Robert Schwemmer, NOAA.
referred to as Santa Rosae. As Todd Braje men-
tioned to me earlier today, the largest concentra-
tion of terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene
sites are found in this area, concentrated primarily
toward the Western end on San Miguel Island.
In addition to the strong evidence of early
maritime culture, the islands and the surrounding
waters are also protected areas, both through the
Channel Islands National Park and the National
Marine Sanctuary. A lot of oil and gas activity has
also occurred o this area over the last 40 or 50
years; there are at least 15 oil and gas platforms
in the area. As a result, there has been a lot of
geo-physical survey work done in support of those
eorts, and therefore a lot of existing data that we
can draw on to build a robust model for identifying
intact submerged landforms.
e Central Oregon Coast, on the other hand,
has very little existing geophysical survey data
available; however, the shelf extends almost 60 km
west of the current coastline. ere has also been
a lot of interest expressed recently in development
of renewable energy activity o the Oregon coast.
BOEM has actually received two unsolicited ap-
plications that we are currently reviewing: one for
oating wind turbines o the Coos Bay area; the
other application is for wave energy o the Newport
area, which is just northeast of the Stonewall Bank
area. We have identied the central Oregon coast
area as a target area of interest to test the model that
we develop o the Northern Channel Islands.
What we are hoping to do with the current
study is to provide an assessment of BOEM’s cur-
rent geophysical survey guidelines for identifying
submerged landforms, as well as assess sensitive
biological features and expand our knowledge base
for the potential for pre-contact sites on the POCS.
is supports some of the other research that
BOEM has been doing related to seaoor mapping
of hydrocarbon and methane seeps, archaeological
inventories, and sensitive habitat studies. It also ties
in with some related eorts we have going on in
the Gulf of Mexico region and the Atlantic region.
For example, in 2007, BOEM’s predecessor agency
funded Dr. Amanda Evans’ dissertation research
through a cooperative agree-
ment with Louisiana State
University, which looked at
submerged pre-contact sites
o the coasts of Texas and
Louisiana. We also current-
ly have an ongoing project,
which Doug Harris men-
tioned this morning, work-
ing with the University of
Rhode Island and the Nar-
ragansett Indian Tribe o
of the Atlantic coast, trying
to identify best practices for
identifying submerged land-
forms and also incorporating
oral history and traditional
knowledge into those best
practices. We are hoping to
work with some of the Na-
tive American communities on the West Coast in
the areas that we’re targeting for this project to see
if we can incorporate some of those oral histories
and traditional knowledge into this project as well.
e objectives for the submerged landforms
project are to develop and eld test a geo-spatial
model for identifying submerged landforms, with
the goal of improving the regional landscape model
to assist in BOEM’s decision-making process.
100
As I mentioned previously, the project was
awarded in August of this year (2015) and we have
already started compiling all available geophysi-
cal survey data. e team has also started rening
the 2013 Pacic Inventory model. Fieldwork will
focus on the Northern Channel Islands in years
one and two, conducting tight grid, high resolu-
tion geophysical surveys in four target areas. Once
those data are collected and analyzed, we’ll identify
areas for sampling with vibro-core and box-cores.
In years two and three we will further rene the
model and begin testing it o the central Oregon
coast. e nal year of the project will focus on
completing the analysis and writing up the results
of the project, which is scheduled for completion in
August 2019.
Beyond assisting BOEM in evaluating the
potential for encountering cultural resources on
the POCS during future energy development, the
results from this eort will contribute to the Pacic
marine spatial planning eorts and provide a better
understanding of the submerged landscape. Δ
Dave Ball is the Pacic Region Historic Preserva-
tion Ocer and the Regional Tribal Liaison for the
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).
Dave joined the BOEM Gulf of Mexico Region
oce in 1999 and transferred to the Pacic Region
oce in 2010. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree
in anthropology from Sonoma State University in
1992 and a Master of Arts degree in anthropology
from Florida State University in 1998. Dave has
almost twenty-ve years’ experience in archaeology
and has directed eld research on both terrestri-
al and underwater archaeological sites across the
country, including inundated prehistoric sites in
Florida and Washington, World War II shipwrecks,
and deepwater shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico.
Dave is a member of the Register of Professional
Archaeologists and is currently serving a second
four-year term on the Board of Directors for the
Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology,
an international advisory organization supporting
underwater cultural heritage preservation.
101
Archaeological research continues to provide
insights into the dynamic relationships between
humans and the coastal environments they inhab-
ited. Settlement sites along coastlines were not only
characterized by sustenance gathering, but were
prominent locations for ceremonial use, natural
habitat management, and for engaging with various
trade types. Due to the surrounding natural topog-
raphy following post-glacial sea level rises, several
precontact archaeological sites in proximity to
coastlines along present-day North America have
been preserved; Session 5 of the Maritime Cultural
Landscape (MCL) Symposium highlighted several
research studies conducted at these types of sites.
Presentations by Matt Sanger, Jerey Shanks,
and Michael Russo provided contexts for the
southeastern Atlantic, while Ken Sassaman and
Margo Schwadron discussed sites along the north-
ern and southeastern Gulf of Mexico coast, respec-
tively. While some of these sites are now in danger
of being inundated due to continuously rising sea
levels, they provide unique opportunities to learn
how humans have interacted with coastal land-
scapes since the earliest precontact periods. Sean
Dunham also provided insight from sites located in
the Great Lakes region, and Todd Braje discussed
research conducted on the Channel Islands in the
Pacic Ocean, which were never connected to the
mainland during the last glacial period and provide
a unique and continuous archaeological record.
Information gathered from these various types of
sites may help researchers learn about the distri-
bution of precontact settlement sites that are now
submerged along the Outer Continental Shelf.
James D. Moore III
Oce of Environmental Programs
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
5. Non-submerged Prehistoric
Maritime Landscapes
Introduction
102
Introduction
Since its introduction to archaeology by Christer
Westerdahl (1992) over twenty years ago, the idea
of maritime cultural landscapes (MCLs) has grown
to become a useful concept in anthropology and
archaeology. In particular, the model has evolved
to include the interconnections between human
use of both marine and terrestrial environments.
Indeed, maritime landscapes do not end at the
shore but include travel routes, subsistence patches,
and places of cultural signicance on both land and
water (Westerdahl 2008:212). is is also a useful
concept because what is terrestrial at one moment
in time may be submerged at another. For coastal
and island archaeologists, this is especially true
given the massive uctuations in eustatic sea levels
during the Pleistocene.
In much the same way, archaeologists and other
scientists must be careful to recognize the powerful
ways humans shaped and re-shaped MCLs through
deep time. One of the growing theoretical trends in
archaeology has been toward a historical ecological
approach. Historical ecology is an interdisciplin-
ary eld focused on documenting the long-term
dialectical relationship between humans and their
environments (Crumley 1994; Rick and Lockwood
2013). Historical ecologists recognize that modern
ecosystems are the result of lengthy processes of
natural climatic change and human inuences, and
humans have been key agents of ecological change
for millennia (see Balée and Erikson 2006; Swet-
nam et al. 1999). Historical ecology, while more
widely applied in terrestrial settings, has been used
in maritime venues and can be a key component
in helping to dene MCLs. Maritime cultures were
engineers of their aquatic and terrestrial environ-
ments for millennia, and their actions had a heavy
hand in shaping the modern state of land and
seascapes. Any discussion of MCLs, then, must
include the linkages between ancient and con-
temporary ecosystems and the role of humans in
creating both. Here, I oer a series of case studies
from California’s Northern Channel Islands that
demonstrate how hunter-gatherer-shers shaped
MCLs for over 10,000 years.
e Northern Channel Islands: Environmental
and Cultural Context
Southern California’s Santa Barbara Channel re-
gion has a Mediterranean climate that is character-
ized by warm, dry summers and cool, wet winters.
e mainland coast in this area trends east-west
and the region is bordered on the north by the
Santa Ynez Mountains and on the south by the
Northern Channel Islands. e Northern Chan-
nel Islands consist of four oshore islands, from
east to west: Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa,
and San Miguel. Although a wide variety of plants
and other organisms are present, compared to the
ecological diversity found on the mainland, island
terrestrial resources are relatively impoverished,
with few large mammals and limited freshwater
and native plants (Schoenherr et al. 1999). Ma-
rine ecosystems are exceptionally productive and
complex. Intensive local upwelling, a mix of cold
northerly and warm southerly currents, and high
basal productivity combine to create one of the
most productive marine systems in the world that
is home to a diverse assortment of ora and fauna,
including kelp, shellsh, birds, shes, and marine
mammals (Schoeherr et al. 1999).
e islands were rst settled by maritime hunt-
er-gatherers arriving in boats at least 13,000 years
ago (Erlandson et al. 20011; Johnson et al. 2002).
During the late Pleistocene colonization and into
the Early Holocene, the Northern Channel Islands
coalesced into a single island, Santarosae. Rising
postglacial sea levels since the Last Glacial Max-
imum, ca. 18,000 years ago, have submerged ap-
proximately 75 percent of Santarosae and inundat-
ed a vast landscape likely once occupied by Native
American hunter-gatherers (Reeder-Myers et al.
2015). Over the ensuing millennia, these small
colonizing groups transformed into the large,
sedentary populations of Chumash Indians that
were rst contacted by Spanish explorers in AD
12,000 Years of MCLs on California’s Northern Channel Islands :
From Paleocoastal Lithic Workshops to Chinese Abalone Fishing Camps
Todd Braje
San Diego State University
103
1542. Zooarchaeological analyses detail a general
shi from early subsistence systems focused on
low-trophic level shellsh to an increasing reliance
on higher-trophic level nsh and pinnipeds aer
about 1500 cal BP (Braje 2010; Erlandson et al.
2009; Kennett 2005; Rick et al. 2005). e Chu-
mash developed a sophisticated set of maritime
hunting and gathering technologies, occupied
large year-around villages, and participated in a
complex sociopolitical system. Spanish explorers
marveled at the large-scale harvest of local marine
resources and the shell bead trading network that
formed the basis of geopolitical connections from
the islands to the mainland (Gamble 2008; Rick
2007). Although archaeologists have identied a
gradual process of subsistence shis due to natural
climatic changes, growing populations and human
predation pressure, and technological innovations,
the bulk of the Chumash Islander protein diet,
according to both historical accounts and zooar-
chaeological data, came from nearshore and kelp
forest shing by the time the Spanish arrived in
Santa Barbara Channel.
e Construction of Maritime Cultural Land and
Seascapes
In the last two decades, a variety of archaeological
and historical ecological research has demonstrat-
ed that ancient peoples, including hunter-gather-
er-shers, acted as much more than passive organ-
isms in an environment, subject to the whims of
natural climatic uctuations (e.g., Grayson 2001;
Kirch et al. 1992; Redman 1999; Redman et al.
2004). Rather, indigenous peoples impacted, both
positively and negatively, their local and regional
environments in a variety of ways. rough hunt-
ing, gathering, re, and other means, for example,
hunter-gatherers encouraged the success of eco-
nomically important plants and animals (e.g., Kay
and Simmons 2002; Krech 1999, 2005).
Decoding the modern state of land and sea-
scapes, then, necessitates an understanding of
the ways humans inuenced their environments
through deep time. Interpreting MCLs requires
that we track how both natural and anthropogen-
ic forcing, through periods of stasis and change,
created modern environmental conditions. Land
and seascapes, then, cannot be divorced from the
human actions that helped create them. Research
on the Northern Channel Islands oer particularly
interesting examples of how human hunting and
gathering lifeways shaped and re-shaped both ter-
restrial and kelp forest ecosystems for millennia.
8,000 Years of Trophic Cascades and Marine Ecosys-
tem Engineering
For at least 13,000 years, Channel Islanders relied
on shellsh as a stable of their protein diet. Lacking
the diversity and abundance of terrestrial game on
the mainland, Islanders focused their hunting and
gathering economies on the rich marine resources
of local intertidal and kelp forest ecosystems. At
most Early Holocene (11,500-7,500 cal BP) sites
on the Northern Channel Islands with quantied
zooarchaeological data, for example, shellsh such
as California mussels (Mytilus californianus) and
black abalone (Haliotis cracherodii) dominate the re-
covered faunal remains and dietary reconstructions
suggest that shellsh provided most of the edible
meat, usually upwards of 90 percent by weight (Bra-
je 2010; Erlandson et al. 2004, 2009; Kennett 2005;
Rick et al. 2005; for a rare exception see Rick et al.
2001). At most Middle (7,500-3,500 cal BP) and
Late Holocene (< 3,500 cal BP) sites, shellsh meat
becomes less central to Islander diets, as nsh and
sea mammals provide a growing proportion of the
animal protein represented (see Braje 2010; Braje et
al. 2007; Erlandson et al. 2009; Kennett 2005; Rick et
al. 2005). is is likely a response to growing island
populations, the intensication of maritime econ-
omies, and expanding diet breath due to resource
stress (Kennett 2005). Still, even during the Late
Holocene when the bulk of animal proteins came
from nsh, Islanders harvested shellsh by the
millions and the shing pressure for highly ranked
California mussels, abalone (Haliotis spp.), and
other locally available species (see Braje et al. 2007)
must have been tremendous (Braje et al. 2011c).
About a decade ago, Erlandson et al. (2005)
proposed that Native American hunters may have
reduced sea otter populations in local watersheds,
which lead to exceptionally productive red abalo-
ne (Haliotis rufescens) sheries. Erlandson et al.’s
(2005) hypothesis was proposed to explain the
increased abundance of large red abalone shells in
many island shell middens between about 8,000
104
and 3,500 years ago. Since then, a variety of evi-
dence, including zooarchaeological, paleoecolog-
ical, historical, and modern catch data, has been
gathered that support Erlandson et al.’s (2005)
conclusions (Braje et al. 2013a, 2009). Not only do
these data explain the large sizes and densities of
red abalone shell in island middens during certain
intervals, but also the exceptional productivity of
the Chumash shellshery with very little evidence
of widespread degradation despite tremendous
predation pressure through time (see also Braje
2010). It now seems likely that Native American
hunters reduced sea otter (Enhydra lutris) popula-
tions in local watersheds as a deliberate strategy to
control predation pressure on economically im-
portant shellsh species. is enhanced the avail-
ability of abalone, California mussel, sea urchin
(Strongylocentrotus spp.), and other shellsh and
triggered a trophic cascade in local island kelp
forest systems, where humans replaced otters as a
prime ecosystem predator and kelp forest engineer.
Understanding these dynamics may be essential
for helping to manage and restore abalone pop-
ulations today. Braje et al. (2009), by combining
archaeological, ecological, historical, and mod-
ern data, argued that for at least 8,000 years San
Miguel Island waters acted as the nursery for red
abalone across the Santa Barbara Channel region.
Protecting these waters may be a key component
in rebuilding a red abalone shery based on the
successful strategies employed by the Chumash
for millennia. In much the same way, Braje et al.
(2016) argued that a historical ecological perspec-
tive which considers 10,000 years of human sh-
ing for black abalone can help abalone biologists
pinpoint the best locations for modern restoration
eorts across the Northern and Southern Channel
Islands.
e Unnatural History of Channel Island Pinniped
Communities
Today, California’s Northern Channel Islands
shelter more than 200,000 pinnipeds of six dier-
ent species (DeLong and Melin 2002), and the far
western extent of San Miguel Island, Point Bennett,
is one of the largest pinniped breeding grounds in
the world. ese are remarkable numbers given
the wholesale slaughter of marine mammals due
to historical overhunting. Most of the pinnipeds
that haul out on island beaches and rocky outcrops
today were brought to the brink of extinction in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the
result of the global fur and blubber trade. Northern
elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) oer an
excellent example of how dire the situation was for
many of these animals. In 1874, naturalist Charles
Melville Scammon wrote:
We have reliable accounts…of the Sea Ele-
phant being taken for its oil as early as the
beginning of the present century. At those
islands, or upon the coast of the main, where
vessels could nd shelter from all winds, the
animals have long since been virtually anni-
hilated (as quoted in Ellis 2003:192).
By 1884, no elephant seals were seen anywhere
by whalers, sealers, or naturalists, and eight years
later when a Smithsonian Institution expedition
located eight elephant seals on Guadalupe Island,
they killed seven even though they realized that
the animals represented “the last of an exceedingly
rare species” (Townsend 1912 as quoted in Ellis
2003:193). e Smithsonian scientists were certain
that elephant seals were doomed with extinction,
and they wanted specimens for the museum before
it was too late.
e recovery of many pinniped species in the
Pacic and along the shores of California has been
a remarkable success story for restoration ecol-
ogists and resource managers. State and federal
protection has allowed the populations of many
species to rebound in rapid fashion, so much so
that their growth has become, at times, a point of
contention between anglers, regulatory agencies,
and scientists (e.g., Cook et al. 2015). Most scien-
tists and managers have assumed that the recovery
of these animals followed a “natural” trajectory,
and species repopulated the Pacic in ways that
mirrored the biogeography and relative abun-
dances of pre-Columbian times. eir resurgence,
however, occurred in a demographic vacuum and
has created a non-analog system.
Archaeological evidence from both the Channel
Islands and California mainland of sea mammal
105
exploitation suggest that their abundances and bio-
geography may have been fundamentally dierent
in the deep past (see Braje et al. 2011b; Erlandson
et al. 2015; Rick et al. 2009, 2011). Zooarchaeolog-
ical evidence of marine mammal hunting is largely
absent in terminal Pleistocene and Early Holo-
cene archaeological sites, however, the presence
of barbed and serrated projectile points in many
early assemblages suggests that pinniped or sea
otter hunting may have been more important than
faunal analyses suggest (Braje et al. 2013b). ere is
limited faunal evidence for sea mammal hunting at
most Middle Holocene sites, but a dramatic inten-
sication of pinniped hunting appears between
about 1,500 and 1,200 cal BP (Braje 2010; Kennett
2005). By ~1,200 cal BP, perhaps earlier, pinniped
populations probably were restricted to oshore
islets and rocks due to large island populations and
Native hunters, who used redwood plank canoes
(tomols) to access hunting grounds. Today, massive
pinniped haulouts on island beaches, oen near
ancient villages and shell middens, suggest that
local distributions and behaviors of these animals
have shied since their release from ancient and
historical hunting (Braje et al. 2011b). e large,
breeding populations of seals and sea lions on the
Channel Islands today are a modern creation of
human depopulation of the islands and federal and
state protections – a novel, non-analog system for
at least 10,000 years.
Combined with this, zooarchaeological data
suggest that Guadalupe fur seals (Arctocephalus
townsendi) were the focus of the prehistoric marine
mammal hunting economy in the Late Holocene
(Rick et al. 2009). Elephant seals (Mirounga an-
gustirostris), on the other hand, are rare in archae-
ological sites and were probably not abundant
prehistorically (Rick et al. 2011), whereas today the
situation is reversed. is points to major biogeo-
graphic shis from the past to the present, with
Guadalupe fur seals and sea otters the most com-
mon targets for prehistoric hunters, now largely
absent in Channel Island waters, and northern
elephant seals and California sea lions hyper-abun-
dant today, but largely absent from archaeological
assemblages. e recovery of these animals from
the 18
th
and 19
th
century fur and oil trades resulted
in a biogeographic reversal and their present dis-
tributions are a byproduct of modern management
and conservation.
Today, the protection of sea mammals along
the Pacic and their growing populations on the
Northern Channel Islands presents a set of unique
challenges for resource managers. For example,
on northwest San Miguel Island at Otter Point,
this area was historically occupied by harbor seals,
elephant seals, and non-breeding, sub-adult Cali-
fornia sea lions, where they were largely restricted
to local beaches. Because of overcrowding at the
primary rookery at Point Bennett, a large pop-
ulation of breeding California sea lions recently
moved into the area and, today, approximately
2,500 California sea lion pups are born here annu-
ally. Braje et al. (2011a) documented the wide-scale
damage these animals can have on archaeological
deposits in just a single breeding season, as they
haul out atop shell midden sites, creating a conict
between the needs of these federally protected an-
imals and the management of non-renewable cul-
tural resources. From just a single archaeological
shell midden site, sea mammals caused the erosion
and destruction of nearly two million individual
shellsh, over 800,000 animal bones, and more
than 1,700 artifacts in twelve months (Braje et al.
2011a).
Anthropogenic Island Landscapes
Although terrestrial environments were not the
focus of prehistoric subsistence systems, the Chu-
mash and their ancestors and later Euro-American
ranchers did alter and shape Channel Island land-
scapes in powerful ways over the last 13,000 years.
Preliminary evidence suggests that coincident with
the initial arrival of humans in the late Pleistocene
and Early Holocene, re frequency increased and
may be linked to anthropogenic landscape burning
(Hardiman et al. 2016). While this also could be a
signature of natural climatic uctuations, it may be
linked to human landscape clearance and manage-
ment as such practices were an important part of
mainland Chumash resource management practic-
es described in ethnohistoric accounts (Timbrook
et al. 1982). More denitive signatures of human
burning were identied by Anderson et al. (2010)
during the dramatic human population increases
of the Late Holocene (ca. 3,000 cal BP), which may
106
have been part of landscape management systems
to create favorable conditions for corms and other
important plant foods (Gill 2013).
Using San Miguel Island as a case study, Er-
landson et al. (2005) argued that a combination of
natural climatic processes (e.g., sea level stabili-
zation, coastal erosion, climate change, wildres)
combined with anthropogenic burning during
the Middle and Late Holocene to accelerate dune
building activities. Rapid dune building fundamen-
tally altered the “geography, hydrology, biology and
soil regimes of the island” as humans began to play
a more central role to shaping local landscapes,
especially through episodic vegetation stripping
and soil erosion (Erlandson et al. 2005:1234). Dune
eld landscapes on San Miguel, and perhaps the
other Channel Islands, were stabilized by human
settlements over the last 3,000 to 4,000 years as
thick deposits of shell and other cultural debris
were deposited atop dune sheets, buering against
erosion and encouraging vegetation growth.
By the mid-19
th
century, indigenous commu-
nities had abandoned or were removed from their
island homes by Spanish colonizers and the islands
converted into commercial ranching outposts.
During this interval the most dramatic landscape
changes swept across the islands, including the
wide-scale introduction of herbivores and exotic
plants and deforestation of island oak and pine
stands. Island vegetation, dunes, soils, terrestri-
al ecology, and hydrology were transformed to a
degree unprecedented over the last 10,000 years.
While landscape changes certainly have been ex-
acerbated by droughts and other natural climatic
changes, the scale of change triggered by historical
overgrazing and mismanagement has been unprec-
edented. ese changes fundamentally transformed
island landscapes, so much so, that is oen dicult
to decode the pre-Columbian state and establish
appropriate restoration baselines and benchmarks.
Decoding Maritime Cultural Landscapes
In the coming years the MCLs concept can con-
tinue to be a useful construct in archaeology and
anthropology, helping researchers think about the
interconnections between land and sea, earth and
water, and how ancient maritime peoples inter-
acted with both in complex, interconnected ways.
Landscapes for maritime peoples are especially
uid and traverse from the terrestrial to the aquat-
ic, a division that uctuates daily with the tides
and through millennia with sea level oscillations.
Dening the cultural landscape for maritime peo-
ples, then, requires a framework that includes the
diverse ways in which they inhabit and conceptual-
ize their worlds. More than this, however, we must
also consider the ways maritime peoples created
and shaped their aquatic and terrestrial worlds,
building anthropogenic ecosystems. Historical
ecology provides a framework for how landscapes
become “cultural” or “anthropogenic” and the
complex role humans have played in creating the
“natural” world. From such a lens, we can come to
a more complete understanding of MCLs. Δ
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wards a eory of Maritime Culture. Sozialges-
chichte Der Schifahrt 30:191-236.
Todd Braje is an anthropological archaeologist
specializing in long-term human-environmental
interactions, the archaeology of maritime societies,
historical ecological approaches to understanding
coastal hunter-gatherer-shers, and the peopling
of the New World. As an Associate Professor of
Anthropology at San Diego State University, he
conducts much of his eldwork on California’s
Northern Channel Islands and currently is involved
in several research projects, ranging from the in-
vestigation of nineteenth century Chinese abalone
processing camps, the discovery of 12,000 year-old
lithic workshops and shell middens, the geo-physi-
cal mapping and coring of submerged island land-
scapes, and the radiocarbon dating and sampling of
a large, historical Chumash village (Qshiwqshiw)
on western Santa Rosa Island. He also serves as
the co-editor of e Journal of Island and Coastal
Archaeology and his book Shellsh for the Celestial
Kingdom: e Rise and Fall of Commercial Abalone
Fishing in California was published in 2016 by the
University of Utah Press.
110
Shell middens come in all shapes and sizes from
small pits in the ground, to surface scatters, to
enormous piles twenty meters tall and hundreds of
meters across (Figure 1). ere is a long-standing
controversy in America as to whether the big
prehistoric heaps of shell found along our coasts
and inland waterways represent little more than the
refuse of meals of former cultures or something
with more social, ceremonial or ideological func-
tions or meaning. Limited by their low opinions of
cultures other than their own, many nineteenth
century archaeologists concluded that yes, indeed,
the shell mounds were simply garbage piles, and
merely the refuse of feasting.
Today, archaeologists have largely abandoned
such ideas, and for at least the last ve decades
have concentrated on addressing what the shell
and vertebrate faunal remains in shell middens
can tell us about past environments and how shell
mound-building cultures adapted to those environ-
ments. is processual approach to shell middens
has been an era of “telephone booth archaeology”
in which the column sample reigned supreme and
ranked species lists served as the data of reckoning.
Such environmental explorations are, of course,
necessary and important to modern archaeological
understanding of prehistoric maritime cultures
and, up until recent years, shell mounds and rings,
when they were examined at all, were the subject
of these kinds of processual analyses—what did
the folks eat and discard at these rings, and what
did that tell us about their relationship with the
environment? In the early 1990s, however, during a
survey of NPS’s Timicuan Ecological and Historic
Preserve in Northeast Florida, two shell ring sites
were discovered, and these begged deeper analysis.
Shell rings were circular and semi-circular
“rings” of shell ranging from y to eighty meters
in diameter and about a meter or two in height.
Dating between 3,500 and 5,000 years in age and at
rst found only along the coasts of South Carolina
and Georgia, the peculiar shapes of the rings puz-
zled nineteenth century and early twentieth century
investigators who recognized them as being made
of the same kinds of shell refuse found in most shell
middens, but who speculated that their shapes must
have also held some social or spiritual signicance.
e two rings discovered in the Timucuan
Preserve were the rst to be recognized in Florida
and were a bit dierent. At two hundred or more
meters in diameter and up to four meters high,
they were much larger (Figure 2).
One of these, the Rollins Ring, actually consisted
of one large ring, with thirteen smaller asymmetri-
cally-shaped “rings” attached around its perimeter
(Figure 3). Nothing exactly like them had been
found in the heart of shell ring country in Georgia
and South Carolina.
In 2006, the known forty-two Archaic shell rings
along the South East U.S. coast were identied in a
National Historic Landmarks eme Study (Russo
2006) and the Fig Island shell ring complex of South
Carolina (Figure 4) was listed in the National Regis-
ter for its potential to yield important information
on a national level of signicance related to the
Figure 1: Shell middens
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
It’s Not Just Garbage:
Identifying Ceremony and Cosmology in Shell Middens
Jerey Shanks
Southeast Archeological Center
National Park Service
111
Dating between 3,500 and 5,000 years in age and at
rst found only along the coasts of South Carolina
and Georgia, the peculiar shapes of the rings puz-
zled nineteenth century and early twentieth century
investigators who recognized them as being made
of the same kinds of shell refuse found in most shell
middens, but who speculated that their shapes must
have also held some social or spiritual signicance.
e two rings discovered in the Timucuan
Preserve were the rst to be recognized in Florida
and were a bit dierent. At two hundred or more
meters in diameter and up to four meters high,
they were much larger (Figure 2).
One of these, the Rollins Ring, actually consisted
of one large ring, with thirteen smaller asymmetri-
cally-shaped “rings” attached around its perimeter
(Figure 3). Nothing exactly like them had been
found in the heart of shell ring country in Georgia
and South Carolina.
In 2006, the known forty-two Archaic shell rings
along the South East U.S. coast were identied in a
National Historic Landmarks eme Study (Russo
2006) and the Fig Island shell ring complex of South
Carolina (Figure 4) was listed in the National Regis-
ter for its potential to yield important information
on a national level of signicance related to the
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
builders adaptation to the 4,500 year-old environ-
mental conditions that existed at the time. And
those conditions were far dierent than they stood at
the time of nomination. e theme study recognized
that all shell rings were originally built on high land
in maritime forests. But contemporary Fig Island
stood in a saltwater marsh subject to daily tidal
submergences of its base deposits.
But for the rst time, the eme Study and nom-
ination recognized shell rings as something other
than just middens — as social places wherein the
deposits which consisted of little more than food
refuse held the potential to reveal insights into the
social rankings of individuals and groups within the
society, and communal events involving large-scale
feasting that culminated in the construction of the
rings as monuments. Using comparative analyses
from circular communities throughout the world,
and spatial theory of proxemics that analyzed “the
organization of space in houses and buildings, and
ultimately the layout of towns” (Hall 1963), the
nomination argued that all shell rings, regardless of
their shapes as circles, Cs, or Us, were constructed
of large piles of shell representing single, sequential
feasting events, with the most shell being piled at
points in the ring that spatial theory predicted were
symbolically signicant points in society oen held
by the economically and symbolically most import-
ant groups or individuals in a society in comparative
analyses. e evidence for feasting was represent-
ed in cross-sectioning of the rings that reveal not
sequential construction layers, but overlapping
large piles of shell representing temporally isolated
events. e nomination suggested that rings were
not built in construction sequences like Mississippi-
an mounds, but rather communally as the epiphe-
nomena of periodic feasting events that resulted in
large amounts of shell. Purposefully and intention-
ally, the shell from each feast was gathered in one
location in the ring over the course of time, enlarg-
ing and increasing the height of the rings, with more
shell being deposited in those particularly symbolic
points in the circle, C, or U plan of the construction.
112
Also in 2006, potential symbolic meaning was
beginning to be discovered in a dierent, much
younger type of shell ring along the northwest Florida
gulf coast. In northwest Florida, the Middle to Late
Woodland archaeological cultures were known as the
Swi Creek, identied by their complicated stamped
ceramics, and the Weeden Island culture, identied
by their intricate incised and punctuated ceramics
and a series of egy vessels that functioned primary
as mortuary ware (Figure 5).
Many coastal Swi Creek and Weeden Island
sites are demarcated by a roughly circular-shaped
shell-bearing midden surrounding a “clean,” level,
open area or plaza (Figure 6). ese sites have been
termed “ring middens,” “shell enclosures,” or “annu-
lar middens.” Aside from the organically-stained
soils, coastal ring middens contain mostly animal
remains (shell and bone) that are universally in-
ferred to reect the accumulated daily food discard
of long-term occupants, either permanent or
seasonal, and are most oen interpreted to be the
remnants of villages or base camps.
Many of the Woodland Period ring middens on
the northwest Florida coast are adjacent to sand
mounds that contained multiple burials, and it is
these mounds that have received the most atten-
tion over the years, many of them being excavated
over a century ago by avocational archaeologist
Clarence B. Moore (1900, 1902, 1918). During the
1970s the operating model tended to describe the
burial mounds as sacred areas and the adjacent ring
middens as secular spaces (Percy and Brose 1974).
is sacred-secular dichotomy is now recognized as
being overly-simplistic, and subsequent excavation
has shown that in many cases it is simply wrong,
as evidence of ceremonial activities can be found
throughout the ring middens and plazas (Russo et
al. 2014). But the inuence of that model has still
been pervasive, and the mounds and ring middens
are still oen thought of and discussed as separate
archaeological features, and in many cases even have
separate site numbers despite being nearly adjacent.
For the last ten years, the Southeast Archaeolog-
ical Center of the National Park Service has been
working on a series of Woodland mound and
midden sites at Tyndall Air Force Base near Pana-
ma City. e mounds were originally excavated by
Moore, but little archaeological work had been
done on the middens. e four sites at which NPS
did their most extensive work are the Swi Creek
Baker’s Landing site, the Weeden Island Strange’s
Landing site, and the Pearl Bayou and Hare Ham-
mock sites which have both cultural phases repre-
sented (Figure. 7). As a result of these excavations,
and the large number of radiocarbon dates that
were obtained, we have a very good understanding
of both the relative and absolute local chronology
for the area, as well as some intriguing observations
on the nature of the shi from Swi Creek Middle
Woodland to the Weeden Island Late Woodland.
e past two years we have moved our focus
farther east to Wakulla County south of Tallahas-
see, where we have found similar patterns in site
formation, ceramic seriation, and chronology at
several Woodland sites, particularly Mound Field
and Byrd Hammock. is suggests that certain
phenomena observable in the archaeological record
associated with the shi from Middle to Late
Woodland may have been regional in extent rather
than isolated locally to the Tyndall Peninsula.
Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7
113
Many of the Woodland Period ring middens on
the northwest Florida coast are adjacent to sand
mounds that contained multiple burials, and it is
these mounds that have received the most atten-
tion over the years, many of them being excavated
over a century ago by avocational archaeologist
Clarence B. Moore (1900, 1902, 1918). During the
1970s the operating model tended to describe the
burial mounds as sacred areas and the adjacent ring
middens as secular spaces (Percy and Brose 1974).
is sacred-secular dichotomy is now recognized as
being overly-simplistic, and subsequent excavation
has shown that in many cases it is simply wrong,
as evidence of ceremonial activities can be found
throughout the ring middens and plazas (Russo et
al. 2014). But the inuence of that model has still
been pervasive, and the mounds and ring middens
are still oen thought of and discussed as separate
archaeological features, and in many cases even have
separate site numbers despite being nearly adjacent.
For the last ten years, the Southeast Archaeolog-
ical Center of the National Park Service has been
working on a series of Woodland mound and
midden sites at Tyndall Air Force Base near Pana-
ma City. e mounds were originally excavated by
Moore, but little archaeological work had been
done on the middens. e four sites at which NPS
did their most extensive work are the Swi Creek
Baker’s Landing site, the Weeden Island Strange’s
Landing site, and the Pearl Bayou and Hare Ham-
mock sites which have both cultural phases repre-
sented (Figure. 7). As a result of these excavations,
and the large number of radiocarbon dates that
were obtained, we have a very good understanding
of both the relative and absolute local chronology
for the area, as well as some intriguing observations
on the nature of the shi from Swi Creek Middle
Woodland to the Weeden Island Late Woodland.
e past two years we have moved our focus
farther east to Wakulla County south of Tallahas-
see, where we have found similar patterns in site
formation, ceramic seriation, and chronology at
several Woodland sites, particularly Mound Field
and Byrd Hammock. is suggests that certain
phenomena observable in the archaeological record
associated with the shi from Middle to Late
Woodland may have been regional in extent rather
than isolated locally to the Tyndall Peninsula.
Figure 7
ese patterns only became apparent, however,
when we started to view these mound and midden
sites through the lens of landscape archaeology,
viewing the various components as part of larger,
integrated spatial complexes. ese complexes were
laid out in a generally concentric ring formation
from the central plaza to the outer edge of the ring
and beyond to the mound, constituting ve basic
zones where community activities took place
(Figure 8). e plaza represents the central, public/
sacred space, surrounded by a ring of houses
(temporary or permanent) oriented facing the
plaza. Outside the domiciliary ring, a concentric
ring of refuse lay behind the houses. is is where
discard, represented by shell and other waste, was
deposited. Among Swi Creek and Weeden Island
communities, a fourth concentric zone beyond the
refuse may be a vacant area between the ring
midden and mound, and the nal h ring is the
space in which the burial mound would be placed.
Together, these constituted the basic structure of
the built environment at coastal ring midden sites
in this area. In contrast to previous models that
spoke of the ring midden as the sole quotidian
component of the village, this model posits that all
concentric ring zones constitute the landscape of
the many and diverse activity spheres—including
the ceremonial and ideological—that constituted
village life.
When we expand our landscape view spatial-
ly to incorporate the greater coastal region and
temporally to include the shi from the Middle to
the Late Woodland, more patterns emerge (Figure
9). At the Swi Creek sites, the rings tend to be
smaller and shell refuse tends to be heavily con-
centrated and evenly distributed around the entire
circumference of the ring midden. With the Weed-
en Island sites, the shell is deposited only in certain
locations within the ring, usually one side, and the
ring itself is only fully discernable by looking at the
distribution of ceramics.
e Weeden Island ring middens are also larger
in diameter than their Swi Creek counterparts.
Based on the time of occupation of the sites and
the amount of shell in the middens, there is no
evidence of an increase in population. So there
had to be some other reason why the inhabitants
of the Hare Hammock ring midden required more
dispersed living areas with a larger plaza than their
Swi Creek predecessors.
One of the more interesting conclusions we can
draw from our extensive radio carbon dating is
how rapidly the shi from the Swi Creek sites to
the Weeden Island sites occurs. Around AD 650 to
700, the Swi Creek middens and mound go out of
use and new Weeden Island middens and mounds
appear, sometimes only a few dozen meters away
as at Byrd Hammock and Hare Hammock. Within
a very short period of time, coincident with the in-
troduction of the Weeden Island ceramics into the
area, the people of this region felt the need to not
only shi their villages to new, larger footprints ac-
commodating a much greater plaza area, but also
Figure 8
114
to construct a new burial mound with a possibly
solar-oriented placement. At Hare Hammock there
is even evidence suggesting that burials may have
been exhumed from the older Swi Creek mound
and reinterred in the new Weeden Island mound.
So what we may have is evidence in the archae-
ological record of a new religious idea, a new
mortuary cult that spreads through the region,
but this is only something that becomes apparent
when these sites are viewed collectively as a cultur-
al landscape.
So by shiing our focus from looking at certain
types of coastal shell middens as merely garbage
and food refuse, and recognizing them as part of a
larger cultural landscape, new social and ideolog-
ical patterns can emerge and new archaeological
and cultural signicance may become discernible.
Sites that when viewed in isolation may not meet
the threshold for nomination alone, can instead
become contributing elements of a greater cultural
landscape. Δ
References
Hall, Eward T. 1963. A System for the Notation
of Proxemic Behavior. American Anthropologist.
(65.5): 1003–1026.
Moore, Clarence B. 1900. Certain Antiquities of the
Florida West-coast. University of Alabama Press,
Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Reprint 1999.
_________. 1902. “Certain Aboriginal Remains
of the Northwest Florida Coast, Part II,” Journal
of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia
(12):127–358.
_________. 1918. “e Northwestern Florida
Coast Revisited,” Journal of the Academy of Natural
Sciences of Philadelphia (16): 513–581.
Percy, George W., and David S. Brose. 1974.
“Weeden Island Ecology, Subsistence, and Village
Life in Northwest Florida.” Paper presented at the
39th Annual Meeting of the Society for American
Archaeology, Washington.
Russo, Michael. 2006. Archaic Shell Rings of the
Southeast U.S. National Historic Landmarks,
Historic Context Study. Southeast Archeological
Center, National Park Service. https://www.nps.
gov/nhl/learn/themes/ArchaicShellRings.pdf
Russo, Michael, Craig Dengel, and Jerey Shanks.
2014. “Northwest Florida Woodland Mounds and
Middens: e Sacred and the Not-So Secular,” in
New Histories of Pre-Columbian Florida, edited by
Neill J. Wallis and Asa R. Randall. University Press
of Florida, Gainesville, 121-142
Jerey Shanks has been an Archaeologist with the
National Park Service for eight years. Prior to that,
he worked for the Florida Bureau of Archaeological
Research. He is currently the acting program leader
for the External Programs and NHL division at the
Southeast Archeological Center (SEAC) in Talla-
hassee. In recent years his primary area of research
has been Woodland period sites on the northwest
Florida Gulf Coast.
Figure 9
115
Island Landscapes of the North American South Atlantic:
Deep Histories and Endangered Resources
Matthew Sanger
State University of New York at Binghamton
Edited Transcript of Presentation
Although lines between oceanic waters and coastal
landmasses are subject to tidal uctuations, and
storm surges, and other intermittent changes,
we oen take the division between land and sea
as stable and intractable. Modern sea level rises
challenge these preconceived notions of shoreline
stability and may soon require a reworking of how
we speak of coastal landscapes. We may need to
develop a new vocabulary to talk about new, old,
and future coastlines, and to talk about inundated
cities and ever-encroaching sea levels.
While this is a terrifying reality, this is not the
rst time humankind has been faced with a volatile
and dynamic oceanic coastline. Archeological and
geological studies have uncovered numerous sea
level rises and drops over prior millennia. is pa-
per investigates one such point of dynamic change
coming to light through research in the American
Southeast.
Geologic studies show that sea levels stabilize at
or near modern levels roughly 4,700 years ago. Pri-
or to this time, levels were signicantly lower, and
the coast was more than 50 kilometers away. For a
variety of reasons, sea levels began to rise roughly
5,000 years ago, plateauing around 4,700 to 4,300
BP, at which point modern islands, coastlands, and
marshlands formed.
We know little about how these sea levels im-
pacted native peoples, but it’s very likely that fam-
ilies were displaced, homelands were inundated,
and residents of earlier coasts found themselves
retreating from ever-encroaching coastlines. Like-
wise, people who once lived kilometers away from
the oceans found the waters coming closer every
year, as well as perhaps the peoples displaced from
those coastlines. Arising at the same time as sea
level stabilization was a novel human construc-
tion, categorized by archeologists as shell rings.
1 Editor’s note: See paper by Jerey Shanks.
Generally, these mounded deposits are made of
oyster shells, with smaller numbers of clams, mus-
sels, and periwinkles. Mounded deposits encircle
open areas oen described as plazas, which con-
tain little or no shell.
Shell rings vary in size and morphology based
on where they are located on the coast. Smaller
circular rings, oen occurring in multiples and
near one another, dominate the coasts of Georgia
and South Carolina. ese rings generally measure
between 50 and 100 meters wide, and deposits
range from half a meter to a meter-and-a-half in
height. In contrast, larger single rings typically
formed as open arcs, are more common in Florida.
Florida rings oen measure several hundred me-
ters in length, and can reach heights of more than
four meters.
e function of shell rings has been much de-
bated. Earlier researchers saw them as sh traps or
defensive structures. Although still contentious, re-
cent research, such as what we just heard, discredit
these earlier theories, and instead suggest that shell
rings were places of residence, and perhaps also ar-
eas for communal gatherings.
1
e creation of shell
rings is of broader anthropological interest, as they
were constructed by non-agricultural peoples. Ring
builders were shers, and hunters, and gatherers,
who fed themselves without reliance on domesti-
cated foods or animals. e fact that these non-ag-
riculturalists invested signicant eorts in creating
such massive rings upsets traditional anthropo-
logical notions that assume hunter-gatherers lived
hand to mouth and had no time, ability, or inclina-
tion for the creation of large-scale constructions.
My current research focuses on two rings on St.
Catherines Island, Georgia. St. Catherines Island
is one of the many sea islands that populate the
southeastern seaboard. Sea islands are barrier
islands, meaning they are long, narrow deposits of
116
sand running parallel to the coastline. Separated
from the mainland by shallow bays and intracoast-
al waterways, and from one another by narrow
tidal inlets, barrier islands protect vast marshlands
from the open sea, and form a critical part of the
coastal ecozone. Prior to sea level stabilization, St.
Catherines Island was a high dune ridge, but as
sea levels rose and the lower elevations behind the
island lled, it became an island, and was quickly
populated by people.
e earliest sites that we have on St. Cather-
ines Island are two shell rings located on opposite
sides of the island. Almost 50 radiometric dates
have been drawn from the rings and show they are
largely contemporaneous. e St. Catherines Shell
Rings are moderate in size. Each is roughly about
70 meters wide, and shell deposits range between
half a meter to a meter-and-a-half in height. Al-
most a decade of research shows that these were
homes to small resident communities who held fes-
tivals and feasts that brought together people from
across the region. A key nding from this research,
and one that I want to focus on in this presenta-
tion, is how St. Catherines Island Shell Rings were
implicated in larger social networks, and likely
served as a critical locus of trade, interaction, and
communality.
ese ndings run counter to traditional nar-
ratives that assume ancient hunter-gatherers lived
in small groups that rarely interacted with one
another. Instead, traditional narratives prefer to
see the creation of large communities of deeply
interrelated peoples as arising alongside agriculture
and societal complexity. Instead, ndings from
the St. Catherines Island shell rings clearly show
that pre-agricultural peoples engaged in exchange
and communication at a variety of scales, many
far beyond the presumed norm. ese ndings are
important for a number of reasons, not the least of
which is that they show coastal peoples have long
been involved in expansive social networks, and
likely conceived of their landscape as extending
well beyond their immediate environments.
is is particularly important for the study of
island peoples, as archeologists are oen content
to study single island landmasses and assume the
boundary between themselves and the mainland
was an important boundary for past peoples as
well. e ndings oered in this paper clearly
repudiate this limited view, and instead show that
ancient Native American communities had an
expansive understanding of their social landscape
that did not stop at the water’s edge. As such, terms
like “maritime cultural landscapes” are vitally
important, as they blur lines between aquatic and
terrestrial spaces, as human actions and practices
commonly involve both realms.
To develop an appreciation of the scale of
movement, exchange, and communication oc-
curring at the shell rings, we can rst turn to the
most common object found at them, the shells
themselves. As already noted, oysters are the most
common component of shell rings. For a long
time, archeologists assumed that these were being
gathered from nearby local environments. To our
surprise, research on St. Catherines Island shows
that oysters were collected from relatively distant
waterways more oen than not. Using the shape
of the shells as proxy for their home ecozone, a
large portion of oysters did not originate in the
small intertidal creeks and marshlands abutting
the rings, but rather came from high-velocity or
more sandy conditions. We can not denitively
say exactly where these shellsh originated, but
they most likely came from areas closer to the
mainland, from marshes more distant, and from
intertidal coastways.
Our ndings are replicated on nearby Sapelo
Island, where research using isotopic data also
showed that shellsh built in shell rings were com-
monly gathered from locales several kilometers dis-
tant. Traditional interpretations assume that more
distant shellsh were collected because local sourc-
es were over-harvested, yet our data from St. Cath-
erines Island repudiates this idea, as we have no
evidence of over-harvesting. Specically, size and
age of shellsh, which are our two best indicators of
over-harvesting, remain the same throughout the
deposits of both rings. In other words, residents of
both rings were collecting shellsh from relative-
ly far away and bringing them back home, even
though their local sources seem to be unaected.
117
e fact that shells were brought back at all
strongly suggests that boats were being used,
because if boats were not used, native peoples
most likely would not have been bringing back the
bulky shells with them. ey probably would have
shucked them where they collected them. Even if
we assume boats were being used, we still need to
address why shell ring residents chose to gather
shellsh from relatively distant locales.
ere are several possible answers to this ques-
tion. Perhaps shellsh were being collected along-
side other tasks taking place around the islands.
Perhaps communities or families owned shellsh
beds that were more distant from their homes.
Now, I can’t disprove any of these theories, but I’d
like to propose an alternative hypothesis that ties
this data to the rest of the data that I’ll provide in
this paper. at is that shell ring residents were
very conscious of spacial and ecological diversi-
ty, and strove to bring objects and animals from
these dierent locales together within the rings
themselves.
To reinforce this theory, we can turn to the exca-
vations conducted in direct centers of the rings. At
the St. Catherines Shell Ring located on the west-
ern edge of the island, the ring’s center was marked
by at least six, maybe nine, maybe even 10 dierent
pits that all overlap each other. ese are large pits,
measuring about a meter to a meter-and-a-half
in width, most of them being more than a meter,
sometimes two meters deep, and reaching the wa-
ter table below. ey were isolated from any other
features around them. ese were places just in the
direct center of the ring with no other features in
their vicinity.
eir placement, isolation, remarkable depth,
and multiplicity in such a small space suggests that
these pits were meaningful, although we struggle
with what that exact meaning is. ey seem to lack
any clear utilitarian purpose, however, as they are
too large to be post holes. ey show no signs of
being used to haul trash or hearths. ey may have
been used for storage, but since they reach this wa-
ter table, they would have been a wet environment,
something not very amenable to storage.
e contents of the pits are somewhat equivocal
about what they were used for, yet they suggest
they were invested with cosmological meaning.
Specically, the most striking object found in the
pit was a discoidal stone, worked and polished to
form a smooth face. is is the only ground stone
found at either ring, and has no clear utilitarian
purpose. It certainly originated o the island, as
there are no natural stone sources either on the
island or nearby mainlands. Instead, a likely source
is roughly midway up the Savannah River, where
similar discoidal stones have been found in con-
temporaneous sites, such as Stallings Island.
We have other evidence for connections be-
tween people living along the Savannah River
and the residents of the St. Catherines Shell Ring,
including stone tools made from materials found
along the Savannah River and pottery that is re-
markably similar between Savannah River peo-
ples and peoples living on St. Catherines Island.
Now, at Stallings Island, discoidal stones were
oen found alongside human burials, and were
thought to have some sort of ritual purpose. It is
possible that the center pits at St. Catherines Shell
Ring were also used for human burial, because we
have found a number of heavily-fragmented and
calcine bones. Now, to date, none of these bones
have been identied as human, but rather appear
to be nonhumans, including deer and birds. is
data is incomplete, however, as the bones were so
burned and so broken that only a handful have
been identied.
A more complete picture is available from the
second shell ring on St. Catherines Island, Mc-
Queens Shell Ring, where, in consultation with the
Georgia Indian Council, a mixture of human and
nonhuman bones were recovered from a single,
central pit. Analysis revealed the presence of at
least six human individuals within this pit, as well
as an unusual conglomeration of nonhuman bod-
ies. Human and nonhuman bodies were treated in
much the same manner, as both were burned and
crushed into small fragments. Human and non-
human remains were then mixed together, either
prior to or while being placed in the pits in the
center of McQueen.
118
e nonhuman remains found in the center of
McQueen were almost certainly not the remains of
food consumption, or, if they were, these were not
normal foods. I make this assertion based on the
animals found in the ring center, including skeletal
remains from a sperm whale. To my knowledge,
this is the only whale found in an Archaic site
from the American southeast. Based on morpho-
metrics drawn from a vertebrae, this whale was a
fully-grown adult and, based on its condition, was
drawn from a complete body rather than being a
random element perhaps washed up on shore.
Beyond the unusual, even unheard-of presence
of a whale bone, the nonhuman remains included
other rare animals, including birds. e remains
of birds are rarely found anywhere else at the ring,
yet make up a sizeable proportion of the nds
from the center. e birds found in the center of
McQueen are even more notable, in that birds
recovered elsewhere include ducks, sparrows, and
ground-nesting species, while the vast majority
of birds found at the burial pit were birds of prey,
including falcons and eagles. Numerous alligators
and dog remains were also found in the burial pit,
along with an eagle ray—all animals rarely or never
encountered elsewhere in the ring. Finally, deer
bones were quite common, but unlike elsewhere in
the ring, where deer legs, ribs, and vertebrae were
typically recovered, almost all the deer bones from
the ring center were cranial elements.
How do we understand this odd conglomeration
of human and nonhuman bodies? Traditional ar-
cheological interpretations would assume some lev-
el of ritual imports to these animals, and likely leave
it at that. Perhaps this is all we can say, although
zooarcheologists Elizabeth Reitz and Carol Col-
aninno suggest that we can get more out of these
nds, as they posit these animals form a powerful
conglomeration of creatures that reference a tripar-
tite understanding of the world as divided between
above, middle, and below worlds—divisions that
translate into elemental divisions between air, earth,
and water. In Colaninno and Reitz’s interpretation,
each animal is chosen for interment because they
reside in particular elemental spheres, and likely
reect or symbolize the power of those locales.
Now, it’s possible that Elizabeth Reitz and Col-
aninno are correct, yet this is quite dicult to test
empirically. Something that we can say with more
certainty is that these animals that were drawn to-
gether, all originate in dierent spacial and ecolog-
ical locales. Specically, whales live in deep oceanic
waters. Rays are found in the surf. Deer live in
maritime forests, birds of prey in meadows and
along waterways, and dogs among human villages.
inking back to the shells that make up the ring,
which were drawn from multiple locales, I suggest
a theme of collection is occurring, a particular
type of collection in which spacial and ecological
diversity is being referenced even as it is being col-
lapsed to form these interesting conglomerations of
objects and animals and peoples.
Although this theory is clearly speculative, ma-
terial remains from McQueen echo this interest
in drawing together objects from diverse locales.
In contrast to the stones found in the center of
the St. Catherines Shell Ring, which were largely
sourced in the nearby Savannah River and local
waterways, stones found in McQueen oen orig-
inated in far more distant locales. ese include
dark chert in the Appalachian Mountains and
associated valleys, as well as pieces of petried
wood whose origin points are unknown but are
not local. Pottery from McQueen is also decorated
in manners unlike those from St. Catherines Shell
Ring, and are more similar to vessels found in
Florida. ese nds suggest signicant networks
of communication spanning much of the south-
eastern United States.
Although impressive, the distance incurred in
the movement of pottery and stone pales in com-
parison to the most surprising nd from Mc-
Queens Shell Ring, a piece of worked copper from
the ring’s center. is object may be an armband
or similar piece of personal adornment, as it has
been hammered at and is exceedingly well-made.
Copper use is extraordinarily rare in the American
southeast, particularly during the Archaic Period.
A few copper beads have been reported from Flor-
ida and South Carolina that may be Archaic in age,
and small items have been recovered from Poverty
Point, located in Louisiana.
119
ese items are not locally made, however,
and instead, originate much farther to our north.
ey originate from the Great Lakes region, where
copper working was relatively common at the time.
Preliminary compositional studies show that cop-
per from St. Catherines also originated from the
Great Lakes, some 1,500 kilometers distant. At this
time, we can only speculate about how this copper
object traveled from the Great Lakes to St. Cather-
ines Island.
On their own, each piece of evidence for ex-
change and communication is somewhat precar-
ious. Yet when taken together, a pattern emerges.
At a variety of scale, beginning at the local level,
animals from diverse ecological zones are brought
together, either to form the arc of shell, or to be
cremated and buried alongside human remains
in the center of the ring. Moving beyond the local
level, we nd a slight divergence between the two
rings, with people at the St. Catherines Shell Ring
drawing together stones and pottery styles from
the supra-local level, while people at McQueen
extend to the regional level. Finally, the extent
of interactions reaches a subcontinental level at
McQueen, where the copper object ties together
people living along the Great Lakes with those
from the southern Atlantic seaboard.
Taken together, the nds from St. Catherines
shell rings challenge traditional notions of simple
hunter-gatherers living along the coastline and,
instead, suggest an expansive network of social ties
spanning half the continent, including the coast as
an important node. ese nds are important to
our current discussion regarding marine coastal
landscapes, because they highlight the usefulness
of thinking about expansive social networks and
conception of space going back to the very forma-
tion of our current coastline, if not before.
Certainly, the adoption of agriculture and the
invention of more powerful modes of transporta-
tion allowed the creation of new types of maritime
landscapes, but this does not preclude the con-
sideration of hunter-gatherers engaged in similar
life-ways that cross traditional boundaries between
land and water. Because of modern sea level chang-
es, places like St. Catherines Island are threatened
by erosion and inundation. Current estimates
suggest vast portions of the island will be lost in
the next few decades, and with this destruction
will come an irreversible loss of the archeological
record, including sites like shell rings, which hold
valuable information demonstrating that human-
kind has adapted to and lived along the water’s
edge for millennia. ank you. Δ
Matthew Sanger is the Director of the Public Ar-
chaeology program at Binghamton University and
conducts research on hunter-gatherer sites across
the Eastern Woodlands. His primary research area
is in Georgia and South Carolina where he studies
Native American adaptions to coastal landscapes
that had rst formed during the Archaic period.
Depending on Native American philosophers and
writers, Sanger strives to expand archaeological
understandings of adaption and ecology to include
indigenous worldviews that embrace expansive
understandings of living landscapes, populated by
powerful non-human entities, and open to mean-
ingful communication. Sanger’s methodological
foci revolve around employing new technologies,
such as computed tomography, to better understand
the past through material studies.
120
Edited Transcript of Presentation
I don’t mind telling you that I’d never heard of
Maritime Cultural Landscapes before Mike Rus-
so called me a couple months ago to invite to this
symposium. He suggested that I read Westerdahl’s
1992 article and the introduction to Ben Ford’s
2011 edited volume. And so I did, nding a few
points of entry and the encouragement that I
actually could contribute something to this eort.
I also sensed an opportunity to address what has
been nagging me since my midlife crisis, which is
to make archeology more relevant to public policy
beyond historic preservation. e readings Mike
recommended also encouraged me to rethink
the landscape concepts that I had, until recently,
applied to only terrestrial settings. My theoretical
proclivity in thinking about landscape and dwell-
ing is phenomenology, a paradigm that is gaining
purchase on making sense of maritime cultures.
Phenomenology may sound a bit scary, but it is
simply the study of the subjectivity of experience.
Archeologists of ancient indigenous history do
not have direct access to the subjectivities of those
they hope to understand. We have less trouble
documenting experience we tend to objectify: we
can reconstruct the biophysical world that people
inhabited, and we can model how people made a
living in that world, the resources they collected,
where they chose to live, bury their dead, and so
forth. We tend to think of these as the more ob-
jective conditions of human existence, the stu
that impacts directly the biological well-being and
social stability of people.
e subjectivity of experience, as opposed to the
substance of experience, is not something archeol-
ogists can infer from material remains alone. One
would have to live through the experiences of a giv-
en time, place, and people in order to appreciate how
experience was perceived and how it informed ac-
tion or practice. is latter uncertainty underscores
the relevance of subjectivity to the material world
in that historically situated frames of references, or
ways of seeing, pregure material outcomes as those
very material outcomes pregure future experience.
e biggest impediment in this logic to arche-
ological inference is the dissonance between the
subjectivity of those whose experiences we hope
to understand and the subjectivity of the archeo-
logical enterprise itself. I am not descended from
the indigenous coastal people I study through
archeology; even if I were, I could never claim to
have experiential knowledge about life on the coast
1,500 or 4,000 years ago. “Who would?” I once
asked rhetorically in a public lecture in Berkeley. A
person of Native American identity suggested that
I “just ask any Indian.” By that she meant, basical-
ly, ask anyone who was not subject to (victim of)
the enlightenment, Cartesian reductionism, and
everything else that structures Western ontologies.
Nonwestern ontologies provide good alternatives
to western logic and have analytical value inas-
much as they are structured by actual experience,
for which we have some archeological purchase.
With an overarching interest in the impact of
sea-level rise on coastal living, my graduate students
and I started in 2009 a long-term survey project on
the northern Gulf Coast of Florida in partnership
with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Founded
in a phenomenological perspective, the project
was designed from the start to involve more than
archeology. It involved spending time with people
in the historic shing community of Cedar Key. It
involved experimental working the estuary. And it
involved living in that environment, being in that
place, learning what it was like to deal with the tides
and the winds and the storms. It involved being
stranded on an oshore island during a blowout
tide of winter, and enduring the interruption to boat
travel with an abundant supply of subtidal oysters.
e experiences of ancient coastal people most
relevant to own our futures are those associated
with sea-level rise. I am particularly interested in
understanding the connection between the per-
Maritime Cultural Landscapes in Motion:
Futures Past along the Northern Gulf Coast of Florida
Kenneth Sassaman
University of Florida
121
ception of sea-level rise and interventions taken to
avert its negative impacts, to basically anticipate
futures and not live by fate alone. Part of the bias
of a western mind is that we think of nonwestern
peoples, modern and ancient, as subject to fate
alone. It did not take me long to understand that
this would never be the case for those dwelling in
an environment of constant motion.
My emphasis on futures is more than theoreti-
cal posturing; it is intrinsic, I think, to the rational
for cultural resource management. e spirit of
statutes protecting cultural resources reside in
the potential to provide information important to
history. In this sense we can think of the historical
value of anything archeological, including MCLs,
to reside in futures planning. It follows that the
archeological record can be viewed as an archive
of futures past, the consequence of actions taken
in the past to intervene against uncertain futures.
I believe that when we suspend disbelief about the
passivity of ancient coastal people, we confront the
traces of temporalities that far outstrip the short-
term perspectives of modern planners. I contend
that indigenous people of the ancient past viewed
pasts and futures at the scale of centuries, and were
able to inscribe memories of change in material
forms that endured for millennia.
Living through, perceiving, and anticipating
change is the consequence of patterned variation
in motion. Maritime cultural landscapes are in
constant motion. ere are intrinsic movements
in coastal environments that are experienced at
various scales. Water moves constantly, but in
asynchronous rhythms: there are the tides, with
multiple temporal cycles; currents and winds that
ow constantly, but at dierent rates and direc-
tions; sediments move around eventfully; and
biota, including human bodies, travel out of sync.
ere is constant movement. at’s the rst thing
that struck me working on the Gulf Coast. To these
intrinsic qualities we can add extrinsic movements,
things that arrive from “outside.” I think that West-
erdahl, near the end of his classic article, raises
the point that MCLs have to be conceptualized
as open-ended, because there are movements of
things in and out of them—not only storm events
precipitated by global forcing variables, El Niños,
and long-term trends like rising postglacial seas,
but also migrations of humans, animals, and plants
with extralocal origins.
Synergies of movement take us to a higher level
of complexity for which long-term perspectives
and lived experience bear relevance. For instance,
we learned from our colleagues in geology that
the low-lying salt marshes of our study area are
oen able to keep pace with rising sea. Over the
past several thousand years, in fact, there have
been multi-century stretches of time during which
marshes aggraded at rates equal to eustatic sea level
rise. Critical to this synchronicity of change are the
health of oyster reefs, which entrap both the fresh-
water that empties into the Gulf of Mexico from
rivers and springs, as well as the sediment of marsh
aggradation. Given how sediment-poor freshwater
run-o is in the region, the coastal erosion of Pleis-
tocene sand dunes supplied the necessary substrate
for both marsh aggradation and the oshore sand
shoals that support productive sea grasses. Anything
that reduces the health of the oyster reefs has the
potential to diminish the overall quality of the estu-
ary. In recent years, for example, the extraction of
groundwater upriver has decreased freshwater input
in the Gulf, which then led to salinity levels condu-
cive to parasitism of oysters, the collapse of the reef,
and the loss of structural impediments to near-shore
erosion. Storm events under these circumstances
then have the potential to “overstep” shorelines and
erode marshes to the point of abrupt and impactful
sea-level transgression. e upshot is that change
can be very eventful, oen catastrophic, but it is
the result of long-term processes that involve many
moving parts, not all of which are in sync.
Maritime Cultural Landscapes of such historical
complexity pose several challenges for archeology.
One is the sense that although we study the past, it
is not for the sake of the past, but instead the present
and future. e spirit of the law may allow that we
study the past to plan for the future, but the letter of
the law does not clearly mandate that. ere is noth-
ing in law mandating that every archeological site
that is identied as being signicant provide results
that can be mobilized for futures planning. However,
federal agencies and programs geared towards futures
planning expect archeologists to look forward too,
122
not just back. When I rst started working on the
coast I looked into the Sea Grants program admin-
istered by NOAA. e rst thing the Sea Grants
administrator for Florida told me was, “Hey, arche-
ology’s cool and but how can you package it in a way
that will help the economic viability of coastal com-
munities? Or, how can you package it in a way to help
us understand the ecological sustainability of these
local environments?” He was insinuating, through
the lter of public policy, that archeological knowl-
edge had no intrinsic value to the modern world. As
far as Sea Grants was concerned, its relevance had to
be attentive to modern and future concerns.
is leads to a second implication. Instead of
looking at archeology as an archive of extinct expe-
riences and past humans who lived their lives and
then evolved into something else, we can look at
the archeological record as an archive of alternative
futures. By this I do not mean simply contrivances
about the past that we can mobilize for our own
futures, but the sense that all our ancient counter-
parts intervened in their worlds to determine their
own fates, that they anticipated, through mobiliz-
ing knowledge about their own experiences, what
was to come. is, I think, is largely a matter of
experience and social memory, a matter of recog-
nizing long-term patterns, and sensing when those
patterns are disrupted and demand intervention.
Certainly, there were many moments in ancient
time when events occurred for which people had
no prior experience and thus could not have antic-
ipated. Such events at times precipitated existential
crises, with consequences for daily practice and
land use, as well as ritual traditions. ese sorts
of revolutionary moments are what make up the
divides between our cultural-historical periods and
phases. In his presentation, Jerey Shanks provided
a good example: the cosmological transformation
from Swi Creek to Weeden Island, which in fact
may have coincided with a major environmental
event like the overstepping of rapid sea-level rise.
One nal implication before delving into our
project results is that our narratives about the past
need not be linear, nor dependent on continuity.
One of the dilemmas we face as archeologists is
that if we aim to mobilize knowledge about the
ancient past for our own futures, are we obliged to
establish continuity of practice or the continuity
of human lineages, the sort of evidence that would
allow us to use the direct historical approach and
talk about homologies of practice, not simply con-
venient analogs? I am not sure any of that matters
as much as we may think. I am reminded of a point
Jim Delgado made yesterday in regard to ship-
wrecks no longer on the beach. As long as there’s
a memory about that ship, there is the attenuation
of values and meaning that could be reinterpret-
ed and redeployed for various purposes, and that
does not require a continuity of physical reality
for that to happen. I think that is true generally of
the maritime landscapes of our study area. ese
landscapes accreted not only marsh sediments and
oyster reefs, but also massive amounts of anthro-
pogenic deposition that enabled a future no one
anticipated so long ago. e town of Cedar Key, for
instance, wouldn’t exist today were it not for the 2-3
meters of shell midden that accumulated between
4000-2000 years ago. It would instead be underwa-
ter. And its namesake industry, cedar harvesting,
would not have been possible were it not for the
calcareous soils of shell middens that enhanced
cedar production. Despite discontinuity of practice
and heritage, the experiences of coastal dwellers
hundreds, even thousands of years ago not only
provide relevant historical touchstones for dealing
with future change, but also the physical realities
that precongured recent life on the northern Gulf
Coast (i.e., where to live, how to make a living).
Lower Suwannee Archaeological Survey
Our long-term coastal project, e Lower Suwan-
nee Archaeological Survey, involves the inventory
and assessment of sites along a 42-km-long stretch
of the northern Gulf Coast of Florida, roughly
coincident with the Lower Suwannee and Cedar
Keys National Wildlife Refuges. is map in Figure
1 shows the study area and some physiographic
features worth noting. ere’s not much historic
bathymetric detail here, but the shoreline of 5,500
years ago is marked by the bold dashed line. e
dashed linear polygons in Gulf water are the major
oyster reefs that formed aer 5,000 years ago. e
shoreline today is crenulated with tidal creeks,
peninsulas, nearshore hammocks, and oshore
islands. Dividing the shoreline of the study area is
the Suwannee River and its delta, the major source
Figure 1: Map of the study area of the Lower Suwannee Archae-
ological Survey, showing archeological site locations, mound
centers, oyster reefs, and the shoreline at ca. 5,500 years ago.
123
establish continuity of practice or the continuity
of human lineages, the sort of evidence that would
allow us to use the direct historical approach and
talk about homologies of practice, not simply con-
venient analogs? I am not sure any of that matters
as much as we may think. I am reminded of a point
Jim Delgado made yesterday in regard to ship-
wrecks no longer on the beach. As long as there’s
a memory about that ship, there is the attenuation
of values and meaning that could be reinterpret-
ed and redeployed for various purposes, and that
does not require a continuity of physical reality
for that to happen. I think that is true generally of
the maritime landscapes of our study area. ese
landscapes accreted not only marsh sediments and
oyster reefs, but also massive amounts of anthro-
pogenic deposition that enabled a future no one
anticipated so long ago. e town of Cedar Key, for
instance, wouldn’t exist today were it not for the 2-3
meters of shell midden that accumulated between
4000-2000 years ago. It would instead be underwa-
ter. And its namesake industry, cedar harvesting,
would not have been possible were it not for the
calcareous soils of shell middens that enhanced
cedar production. Despite discontinuity of practice
and heritage, the experiences of coastal dwellers
hundreds, even thousands of years ago not only
provide relevant historical touchstones for dealing
with future change, but also the physical realities
that precongured recent life on the northern Gulf
Coast (i.e., where to live, how to make a living).
Lower Suwannee Archaeological Survey
Our long-term coastal project, e Lower Suwan-
nee Archaeological Survey, involves the inventory
and assessment of sites along a 42-km-long stretch
of the northern Gulf Coast of Florida, roughly
coincident with the Lower Suwannee and Cedar
Keys National Wildlife Refuges. is map in Figure
1 shows the study area and some physiographic
features worth noting. ere’s not much historic
bathymetric detail here, but the shoreline of 5,500
years ago is marked by the bold dashed line. e
dashed linear polygons in Gulf water are the major
oyster reefs that formed aer 5,000 years ago. e
shoreline today is crenulated with tidal creeks,
peninsulas, nearshore hammocks, and oshore
islands. Dividing the shoreline of the study area is
the Suwannee River and its delta, the major source
Figure 1: Map of the study area of the Lower Suwannee Archae-
ological Survey, showing archeological site locations, mound
centers, oyster reefs, and the shoreline at ca. 5,500 years ago.
of freshwater for this wind-driven estuary. As
noted, the river is not a great source of sediment,
but sandy dunes in the area make up the dierence.
ese are parabolic dunes that formed in the
Pleistocene, when sea level was as much as 100 m
below present levels and the shoreline 250 km to
the west. As the sea rose over ensuing millennia,
dunes eroded and the sands were redistributed in
spits, shoals, and salt marsh. Relict dune features
surviving erosion and inundation oen contain
archeological deposits, including cemeteries
emplaced on the ends of dune arms, a practice that
seems to have endured for at least two millennia.
Our survey methods are varied but generally
depend on reconnaissance of the ever-eroding shore-
lines of islands and the mainland, much as Todd
Braje described for coastal surveys in California.
We actually got a head start from local citizens who
collected eroding sites for years. Some individuals
not only shared everything they knew about the area,
but also donated their collections. In two cases the
collectors keep site-level provenience and they tend-
ed to pick up everything, even tiny sherds and akes
of chert. Some of the bigger sites in the area were
already well known to archeologists, notably those
with mounds of earth and shell, as well as cemeteries.
Bear in mind that the archeological record of coastal
dwelling in the study area, as with that of most of
the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, was truncated at about
5,000 years ago by rising sea. Coastal sites predating
5,000 years are today either inundated in water and
sediment, or eroded by transgressive shorelines. Sites
dating since then have at least ephemeral terrestrial
components, with the exception of the period of ca.
3,500-2,900 years ago, an apparent hiatus in coastal
settlement, or possibly a coastal regression. Settle-
ment aer about 2,000 years ago was at times inten-
sive, especially when Woodland-period civic-cere-
monial centers were constructed at several locations
in the study area, and beyond.
Our study area is divided into ve survey tracts
(not shown in Figure 1), each centered on a clus-
ter of known sites, at least one of which includes
mounds and the related infrastructure of civic-cere-
monial centers. In addition to the centers, sites with
shell deposited in rings, ridges, and other forms
signal diverse traditions of landscape architecture,
or, arguably, terraforming, meaning constructions of
cosmological design. Deposits are sited and formed
in ways that suggest attention to celestial cycles. e
placement of cemeteries, for instance, seems to ac-
knowledge the setting winter solstice sun. As I noted
earlier, cemeteries dating as early as 4,500 years ago
were sited on the ends of parabolic dune arms. As
nature would have it, dunes formed from Ice Age
winds blowing from the southwest, migrating on
an azimuth of about 60 degrees east of north, the
direction of the summer solstice rise. Its reciprocal
azimuth (240 degrees east of north), the direction of
dune arms, or horns, is the winter solstice set. Such
was the maritime landscape for people attuned to
the annual solar cycles, among other celestial cycles.
Like the periglacial ssures beneath Stonehenge that
pointed to the solstices, the dunes of the study area
inscribed solar movements on the earth that could
be used not only for calendrical purposes, but to
monitor changes on the land, relative to dunes, and,
if so inclined, impose temporal order to such change
by referring it to cosmic cycles.
124
Aer a history of experience dwelling in this
maritime setting, terraforming the landscape, and
emplacing the dead at the end of dune arms, civ-
ic-ceremonial centers cemented in place, for about
200-300 years, places of large-scale ritual gathering.
At the one known best to us, Shell Mound, just
north of Cedar Key, people gathered during sum-
mer solstices for ritual feasts. We have uncovered
traces of the massive infrastructure required to feed
large gatherings of people (Figure 2): many pits that
were used as earth ovens up to 2 m wide and just as
deep; the sherds of earthenware pots up to 15-gal-
lons in volume that were made, used, broken, and
discarded in the span of one event; and evidence for
large sh traps. We even have good evidence for
oyster mariculture thanks to the work of Jessica Jen-
kins. Inside the large pits at Shell Mound we nd
the bony remains of feasting, including large quan-
tities of mullet, drum, jack, and other large sh,
marine turtles, and edging sea birds. As Josh
Goodwin has shown, the bones of juvenile white
ibis are especially common and they provide some
of the best evidence for summer solstice timing.
Large-scale gatherings and the subsistence econo-
mies they intensied were suspended at about AD
650, but cemeteries continued to receive pottery, if
not also human bodies, through the 12
th
century.
Beyond sites of ritual activity, the study area has
some very well stratied sites—particularly on o-
shore islands tested by Ginessa Mahar—that register
changes in environment and land use over the past
5,000 years. ese sites also register the sedimentary
consequences of storm surge, and periods of aban-
donment following such events. Coupled with work at
centers and other sites, stratied sites provide excellent
opportunity for building a detailed chronology of land
use from radiometric assays. So far we have obtained
around 100 AMS assays from good contexts at about
18 sites. It will take hundreds more dates from many
more contexts to construct a chronology sucient to
monitor both environmental and human consequenc-
es of sea-level change. As the chronology now stands,
we have some substantial gaps, notably the one I men-
tioned earlier. We also must rene our reconstructions
of relative sea level and the magnitude and tempo of
overstep events beyond those already established by
geologists. e recent geoarcheological work of Pau-
lette McFadden is a big step in that direction.
Alternative Futures Past
Technical results of the Lower Suwannee Archaeo-
logical Survey are available in open access reports
through the Laboratory of Southeastern Archae-
ology, University of Florida (http://lsa.anthro.
u.edu/publications.html), as well as a variety of
academic publications (https://orida.academia.
edu/KennethSassaman). e work is ongoing, with
the hope that team members will monitor and
investigate sites as they succumb to inundation and
erosion as sea continues to rise in decades to come.
Here I want to close by briey touching on four ex-
amples of futures past, or alternative futures, in the
emerging archeological history of the study area.
e rst has to do with land-use patterns in the
Late Archaic period (ca. 5,000-3,500 years ago)
when, aer several prior millennia, the rate of
sea-level rise slowed to a pace that may not have
aected every generation. Still, they seem to have
maintained a land-use practice of siting settlements
back from the intertidal zone and accessing subtidal
resources via tidal creeks. Even with sea level down
at least one meter below present levels, Late Archa-
ic sites several kilometers from the subtidal zones
today contain the shells of high salinity species like
scallop. eir land-use reects a set-back sensibility
for places vulnerable to storm surge and inundation.
It is as if the permanent infrastructure of Miami
Beach were set back to the landward ridge of Hiale-
ah, which would be less vulnerable to ooding.
Figure 2: The infrastructure of ca. AD 550 summer sol-
stice feasting uncovered at Shell Mound (8LV42), Levy
County, Florida.
125
e second futures past also traces to Late Ar-
chaic practices, in this case the siting of cemeteries.
We had the experience a few years ago of rescuing a
cemetery—at the behest of the Florida State Archae-
ologist and with the consent of the Seminole Tribe
of Florida—that was washing out of the beach face
of an island known as McClamory Key. Two other
cemeteries of this age have also been exposed by
erosion on islands distributed evenly along the study
area coastline. ey were all emplaced at the end of
what at the time would have been a dune arm, and
they are all at the same elevation and orientation.
With sea level down at least one meter, these cem-
eteries would have been emplaced back from the
coast, like their settlements. More to the point, most
of the individuals in these cemeteries were second-
ary interments, meaning they had decomposed
elsewhere, probably were disinterred and then
reinterred in the cemeteries we see eroding today.
I have been working with the hypothesis that these
secondary burials were removed from cemeteries
that were being exposed by coastal erosion about
4,500 years ago, much as these are today, but farther
seaward, at now inundated coastlines. If so, Late Ar-
chaic people anticipated futures by relocating their
ancestors to future coastlines, all structured by cos-
mological principles involving dunes and solstices, a
practice that would endure for at least 3,000 years.
e third futures past involves a new form of
place-making, when at ca. AD 200, large civic-cer-
emonial centers were established back from the
coast. Geologists tell us that an overstep event at
this time resulted in 2-3 km of shoreline retreat.
e two biggest centers in the greater northern Gulf
coast region are Crystal River to the south of our
study area, and Garden Patch at the north end of
our study area. e former was sited about 7 km
back from the coast, the latter about 3 km land-
ward. Shell Mound is the exception but was sited
on top of a dune arm, just to the east of a cemetery
known as Palmetto Mound, as documented by
Mark Donop. All three of these centers were pre-
ceded by cemeteries, suggesting the dead continued
to lead the living into the future. It is in the memory
of their lives that future lives could be imagined.
en, nally, as places of gathering, civic-cere-
monial centers involved people who were spread
over vast stretches of the Southeast. e pottery
sourcing work of Neill Wallis attests to expansive
social networks of people who gathered at coastal
centers. e abandonment of such centers aer
ca. AD 650 may have been disruptive to coastal
people, but the networks of allies they enjoyed
across the interior Southeast provided options for
relocating in times of stress. is may be the future
for coastal populations in places like Miami, which
in some estimates is scheduled to be inundated by
sea by the end of this century. Perhaps the social
networks of Miamians could be used to plan the
relocating of vulnerable communities to places for
which they have existing ties.
e Lower Suwannee Archaeological Survey
will continue to investigate the history of coastal
dwelling along the northern Gulf Coast with an
eye towards modern and future challenges. It is
useful to remind ourselves that humans have not
experienced rates of sea-level rise projected for the
next century or two since the Middle Holocene.
Extreme projections involving the collapse of the
Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets would re-
sult in a rate and magnitude of rise not experienced
since the end of the Ice Age. Without getting lost
down in the discontinuities of history or, worse,
the western bias of an ancient past inhabited by
primitive people who could not possibly see what’s
coming, we could focus on long-term experiences,
in particular maritime landscapes to see how other
peoples’ futures may help to alleviate some of the
uncertainty of our own. Δ
Kenneth E. Sassaman is the Hyatt and Cici Brown
Professor of Florida Archaeology, Department of
Anthropology, University of Florida. He earned his
Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Mas-
sachusetts, Amherst, in 1991. His eld research in
Florida has centered on the mid-Holocene hunt-
er-gatherers of the middle St. Johns River valley,
notably on the circumstances surrounding the
construction of some of the oldest shell mounds in
North America. In 2009, Sassaman launched the
Lower Suwannee Archaeological Survey to devel-
op data on coastal living pertinent to the challeng-
es of sea-level rise today. He is the author or editor
of nine books and over ninety articles, chapters,
and monographs.
126
e Eastern Region of the Forest Service (R9) covers
a large portion of the Northeastern and Midwestern
United States from Maine to West Virginia and
Missouri to Minnesota (Figure 1). R9 Forests are
situated along the shores of the Great Lakes, along
the banks of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, as well
as countless other lakes and streams. e cultural
and historical relationships between this region and
its lakes, rivers, and streams are deeply woven into
the fabric of Americana. Native Americans and
French voyageurs used the waters as highways.
Lumbermen drove logs on the rivers and used those
same streams to power their mills. Keel boats and
barges are part of the past and present of the Ohio
and Mississippi Rivers and huge freighters continue
to traverse the Great Lakes today.
e lakes and rivers have also been important
for other reasons as well. People have camped
along these bodies of water for millennia, and they
continue to be used for this purpose today. Like-
wise, these waters have fed people for millennia,
and they continue to be a source of subsistence –
the inland shores shery on the Great Lakes and
wild rice being prime examples. In this presenta-
tion, I will delve into later prehistory and explore
the relationship between people and their physical
environment using an example from the Late
Woodland period from the Upper Peninsula of
Michigan (Figure 2). e Late Woodland period in
the eastern UP began about AD 700 and continued
until contact with Europeans (ca. AD 1600). e
dominant settlement model for this region derives
from a relatively small number of coastal Great
Lakes archaeological sites and is linked to the
development of the Inland Shores Fishery and
especially to the advent of deep water fall shing.
Cleland (1982) constructed a model in which
the development of gill net shery technology
represents the cornerstone of a series of changes
in resource use and site placement as well as so-
cial transformations in the Late Woodland period.
e shi towards the fall shery was the result of
new technologies and social practices – specically
deep-water gill nets and storage technology (drying
and freezing) which are thought to have led to the
development of larger settlements of increasing du-
ration of occupation and greater cooperation among
social groups.
e combination of gill nets, increased social
cooperation, and storage are critical to the success
of this process. e eort of capturing and process-
ing the sh was thought to require an increased
level of social organization, and this leads to a com-
bination of practical and social storage. In other
words, the intensive processing of sh for storage is
Figure 1. Region 9 National Forests. http://www.fs.usda.gov/
r9/?id=6140
Figure 2. Upper Peninsula of Michigan. James Montney and
Sean Dunham 2014
MCLs on Eastern National Forests: e Example of Late Woodland
Landscapes in the Eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan
Sean Dunham
Chippewa National Forest
United States Forest Service
127
carried out, in part, with the understanding that it
will be available for future use by all the members
of the group engaged in its processing.
e Late Woodland people in the region are char-
acterized as mobile hunter-gatherers. In basic terms,
the subsistence round is built around two axes—
spring and fall shing. e underlying logic is that
people came together to harvest seasonally dense
resources, in this case spring and fall spawning sh,
and dispersed when resources were more scarce such
as in the cold season, or were more broadly distribut-
ed across the landscape (as in the warm season).
is model was generated based on a relatively
small number of coastal sites. Recent research ex-
amines data from a larger set of archaeological sites
including both coastal and interior settings result-
ing in a fuller picture of Late Woodland settlement
dynamics. e results show that Late Woodland
peoples exploited certain settings and habitats
more extensively than others. Some site settings ap-
pear to change over time, and others exhibit char-
acteristics of culturally modied landscapes. is
presentation is concerned with the potential eects
of this pattern on Late Woodland site locations.
ere are 81 known Late Woodland sites in the
eastern UP (Figure 3). ese archaeological sites
were used to generate an inductive archaeological
sensitivity model as well as a site diversity use
index (for additional information see Dunham
2014). ese two exercises produced dierent types
of information. e sensitivity model found that
over half of the Late Woodland sites in the eastern
UP have been found in mixed pine habitats within
120 m of a major source of water (these are classi-
ed as high sensitivity areas) (Figure 4). e high
sensitivity areas account for only three and a half
percent of the eastern UP land base. e image on
the le of Slide 4 shows a slice of the eastern UP
and the one on the right is a close up of Grand
Island with Late Woodland sites depicted.
e diversity index identied three classes of Late
Woodland sites – extended, intermediate, and
limited diversity sites (Figure 5). e index is based
on the assumption that dierent tools are used for
dierent activities and that a greater diversity of tools
on a given site should reect a greater range of
activities (extended diversity sites). Conversely, a lack
of tool diversity on a given site could suggest a more
limited range in activities (limited diversity sites). In
a sense, the diversity index is a simple scale address-
ing a greater or lesser range of activities on a site that
may help dierentiate how that site was used.
Figure 3. Late Woodland Sites. James Montney and Sean
Dunham 2014
Figure 4. High Sensitivity areas. James Montney and Sean
Dunham 2014
Figure 5. Late Woodland Diversity sites. Sean Dunham 2014
128
Based in the diversity index, nine Late Woodland
components from seven sites were identied as the
most likely candidates for the larger, residential sites
that were used as the seasonal aggregation locales
where spring and/or fall shing took place (Figure
6). Williams Landing and the Juntunen site have
been highlighted because they will be featured in the
following discussion (Figure 7). Each of the extend-
ed diversity sites is located along the shore of one of
the Great Lakes; they produced spring and/or fall
spawning sh remains, and each is multicomponent
– including earlier and/or later occupations as well
as multiple Late Woodland occupations.
ese sites share many characteristics associated
with persistent places – high concentration of desir-
able resources (in this case access to spring and/or fall
spawning sh), include natural features that structure
reuse (the Great Lakes shoreline), and/or are created
and maintained over an extended period of time. For
example, the Native American occupation sequence
begins at least 4,000 years ago and continues through
the historic period at the Williams Landing locale on
Grand Island (Dunham and Anderton 1999; Skibo
et al. 2004). Likewise, the Juntunen site (20MK1) has
produced evidence for Native American occupation
from about 2,000 years ago to the early eighteenth
century (McPherron 1967).
Further, when the social signicance of the
extended diversity coastal shing sites is con-
sidered they become more than simply resource
procurement locales. e Juntunen site, for exam-
ple, includes ossuary burials in the late prehistoric
Juntunen Phase component which adds to the
social importance of the locale (McPherron 1967).
Ossuaries are associated with important integrative
rituals, such as the Feast of the Dead, in the late pre-
historic and early historic periods (Hickerson 1960).
Another critical aspect of persistent places is that
the presence of long term human occupation which
can alter the physical environment of the locale.
Considering the Juntunen site once again, the site
locale is interpreted to have been transitioned from
a forested area to an open meadow during the
course of its occupation which was, at least partially,
a result of human activity (McPherron 1967). us,
the environmental setting of the Juntunen site ex-
hibits evidence for a culturally modied landscape.
is pattern may also be illustrated by Late Wood-
land site locations on Grand Island (Figure 8). Note
that the Late Woodland sites are clustered in areas
with high archaeological sensitivity (with mixed pine
habitat). e farther one goes from the site, the lower
the archaeological sensitivity. e site location and
area immediately around the site ALSO include the
greatest level of human activity. In case you may
think this is a trick of being adjacent to water, the
image on the le shows the distribution of mixed
pine habitat on the island. While the Late Woodland
sites are adjacent to water, in this case Lake Superior,
so are most of the mixed pine habitats. is begs the
question of whether there is a relationship between
the increased, long term human activity at the Late
Woodland sites and areas that are coded as high
archaeological sensitivity locales?
Mixed pine habitats are a critical factor in high
sensitivity areas. Red oak is a prominent compo-
nent of the two habitat types where archaeological
Figure 6. Late Woodland Diversity sites highlighted. Sean
Dunham 2014
Figure 7. e Location of Sites with Extended Diversity. James
Montney and Sean Dunham 2014
Figure 8. Late Woodland site locations on Grand Island.
James Montney and Sean Dunham 2014
129
sites were encountered in the mixed pine group.
ese habitats also provide a variety of resources
that were attractive to Woodland peoples in the
region. e forest succession pattern is conducive
to beaver, moose, and warm season deer habitat.
Such habitats also include a higher incidence of
certain fruits, such as blueberries as well as other
resources, such as acorns, that were utilized as food
by Native Americans as well as by the animals they
hunted. Is the relationship between mixed pine
habitats and Late Woodland archaeological sites
the result of human activity on the landscape?
ere are numerous examples of how human
activity can modify the landscape. Small scale plant
management, patterns of residential mobility, or cer-
tain landscape management practices have the po-
tential to create heterogeneous habitat mosaics which
may increase the potential for subsistence resources.
Mixed pine habitats are the most likely to be
aected by natural disturbances and also share
many of the attributes of anthropomorphic land-
scapes. Native Americans in the Upper Great Lakes
region, and elsewhere, modied the composition of
the landscape through the use of re. Low intensity
res occurring at fairly frequent intervals shaped
forest composition around settlements. e areas
that were burned contained higher incidences of
mast and fruit producing species that were com-
monly used as food. While many of these studies
suggest forest and understory clearing for horticul-
ture as a primary rationale for the burning, habitat
improvement for wildlife and other resources, such
as nuts and berries, are other likely candidates.
ere is direct evidence for historic burning in
northern Michigan by Native American peoples.
A study conducted by Albert and Minc (1984)
demonstrated that modern stands of red oak at
Colonial Point were established as a result of An-
ishinaabek agricultural practices in the 1840s and
1850s. Charcoal recovered from plots within these
stands was predominately beech and sugar maple,
indicating that the original forest had been northern
hardwoods, and that Native American burning to
clear land for planting fostered the transition to oak.
Similarly, Loope and Anderton (1998) have
demonstrated a much higher incidence of re in
coastal pine stands in northern Michigan than in in-
terior stands in the eighteenth century through early
twentieth century. e re intervals in the interior
stands seem to correspond with naturally occurring
re regimes, whereas the coastal pattern is inter-
preted to reect Native American land use practices
– possibly burning associated with the maintenance
of berry patches near settlements (Native American
tribes in the eastern UP practiced such burning until
stopped by the USDA Forest Service in the 1930s as
part of wildland re suppression programs).
Andrew Blackbird’s (1897:10-11) childhood recol-
lection of Cross Village in the 1830s appears to reect
such a re altered, culturally modied landscape:
“My rst recollection of the country of Arbor
Croche, . . . there was nothing but small
shrubbery here and there in small patches,
such as wild cherry trees, but most of it was
grassy plain: and such an abundance of wild
strawberries, raspberries and blackberries
that they fairly perfumed the air of the whole
coast with the fragrant scent of ripe fruit.”
Recent studies of Anishinaabek traditional
landscape management practices in Ontario show
that re was, and is, used for a variety of purposes.
Fire is used to clear undergrowth for gardens, to
facilitate vegetation growth (such as berries and
other resources like birch bark), and for habitat im-
provement for wild game. Importantly, re is seen
by these people “… as beings which possess agency
and who intentionally create order in landscapes”
(Miller and Davidson-Hunt 2010:401). Miler and
Grand Island (Dunham and Anderton 1999; Skibo
et al. 2004). Likewise, the Juntunen site (20MK1) has
produced evidence for Native American occupation
from about 2,000 years ago to the early eighteenth
century (McPherron 1967).
Further, when the social signicance of the
extended diversity coastal shing sites is con-
sidered they become more than simply resource
procurement locales. e Juntunen site, for exam-
ple, includes ossuary burials in the late prehistoric
Juntunen Phase component which adds to the
social importance of the locale (McPherron 1967).
Ossuaries are associated with important integrative
rituals, such as the Feast of the Dead, in the late pre-
historic and early historic periods (Hickerson 1960).
Another critical aspect of persistent places is that
the presence of long term human occupation which
can alter the physical environment of the locale.
Considering the Juntunen site once again, the site
locale is interpreted to have been transitioned from
a forested area to an open meadow during the
course of its occupation which was, at least partially,
a result of human activity (McPherron 1967). us,
the environmental setting of the Juntunen site ex-
hibits evidence for a culturally modied landscape.
is pattern may also be illustrated by Late Wood-
land site locations on Grand Island (Figure 8). Note
that the Late Woodland sites are clustered in areas
with high archaeological sensitivity (with mixed pine
habitat). e farther one goes from the site, the lower
the archaeological sensitivity. e site location and
area immediately around the site ALSO include the
greatest level of human activity. In case you may
think this is a trick of being adjacent to water, the
image on the le shows the distribution of mixed
pine habitat on the island. While the Late Woodland
sites are adjacent to water, in this case Lake Superior,
so are most of the mixed pine habitats. is begs the
question of whether there is a relationship between
the increased, long term human activity at the Late
Woodland sites and areas that are coded as high
archaeological sensitivity locales?
Mixed pine habitats are a critical factor in high
sensitivity areas. Red oak is a prominent compo-
nent of the two habitat types where archaeological
Figure 8. Late Woodland site locations on Grand Island.
James Montney and Sean Dunham 2014
130
Davidson-Hunt (2010:410) quote Whitehead
Moose on the topic of re as saying:
“e Creator has a match and that match is the
thunderbird. He brings that match to the land
when the forest gets too old and can’t grow any-
more. So the thunderbird comes to earth. Aer
the forest is burnt new growth starts. Animals
get tired of eating old food. Just like you and
me. e Creator knows that animals need new
food. Aer the re there is fresh food to eat.”
e evidence outlined above shows that Native
Americans in the Upper Great Lakes region were
actively modifying their landscape throughout the
post-European contact period (post AD 1600).
Likewise, the evidence from Grand Island and the
Juntunen site makes a strong case for similar prac-
tices in the Late Woodland period.
e culturally modied landscapes described in
this paper were created by Late Woodland peoples
as a result of their dynamic settlement and sub-
sistence practices. e best shing locations were
situated in Great Lakes coastal settings and were
thus spatially constrained. ese archaeological
sites were occupied over long periods of time and
can be characterized as “persistent places.” e long
term and diverse occupations at these sites created
anthropogenic landscapes which became more de-
sirable as resource procurement locales over time.
ese were also cultural and normative landscapes,
such as those described by Andrew Blackbird and
Whitehead Moose, and provide a useful example of
cultural landscapes from Region 9. Δ
Works Cited in Text
Albert, D. and L. Minc
1987 e Natural Ecology and Cultural History of the Colo-
nial Point Red Oak Stands. University of Michigan Biolog-
ical Research Station, Michigan Department of Natural
Resources, Lansing, Michigan.
Blackbird, A. J.
1897 Complete Both Early and Late History of the Ottawa
and Chippewa Indians of Michigan. Babcock and Darling,
Harbor Springs, Michigan.
Cleland, C. E.
1982 e Inland Shore Fishery of the Northern Great
Lakes: Its Development and Importance in Prehistory.
American Antiquity 47:761-784.
Dunham, S. B.
2014 Late Woodland Settlement and Subsistence in the in
the Eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Doctoral dis-
sertation, Department of Anthropology, Michigan State
University, East Lansing. https://etd.lib.msu.edu/islandora/
object/etd%3A3165
Dunham, S. B. and J. B. Anderton
1999 Late Archaic Radiocarbon Dates from the Popper Site
(FS 09-10-03-825/20AR350): A Multicomponent Site on
Grand Island, Michigan. e Michigan Archaeologist 45:1-22.
Hickerson, H.
1960 e Feast of the Dead among the Seventeenth-Centu-
ry Algonkians of the Upper Great Lakes. American Anthro-
pologist 62:81-107.
Loope, W. and J. Anderton
1998 Human vs. Lightning Ignition of Presettlement Surface
Fires in Coastal Pine Forests of the Upper Great Lakes.
American Midland Naturalist 140(2):206-218.
McPherron, A.
1967 e Juntunen Site and the Late Woodland Prehistory
of the Upper Great Lakes Area. Anthropological Papers
No. 30. University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology,
Ann Arbor.
Miller, A. M. and I. Davidson-Hunt
2010 Fire, Agency and Scale in the Creation of Aboriginal
Cultural Landscapes. Human Ecology 38:401-414.
Skibo, J. M., T. Martin, E. Drake, and J. Franzen
2004 Gete Odena: Grand Island’s Post-Contact Occupation
at Williams Landing. Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology
29(2)167-190.
Sean B. Dunham, PhD, is the Heritage Program
Manager (Forest Archaeologist) at the Chippewa
National Forest in northern Minnesota. His cur-
rent research interests focus on the relationship
between people, their culture, and their environ-
ment. His dissertation addressed the interaction of
hunter-gatherers and low-level food producers with
their environment, as well as how their decisions
inuenced resource use and scheduling (including
the use of domestic plants) during the Late Wood-
land period in northern Michigan.
Before his career with the Forest Service, he
worked as a cultural resources consultant on many
projects in the Eastern Region National Forests.
He has also had the pleasure of working on ar-
chaeological projects in England and Germany.
rough the years it has become clear that he has a
real fondness for working in the “north woods” of
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
131
is case study details a new, important example
of prehistoric hunter-sher-gatherers from the
Ten ousand Islands region of the Everglades,
Florida. As the largest subtropical wilderness
in the US, the Everglades are an unparalleled
landscape which provides important habitats
for numerous rare and endangered species. e
Everglades are an international treasure recog-
nized as a World Heritage Site environmentally, an
International Biosphere Reserve, and a Wetland of
International Importance. While the natural and
environmental signicance of the Everglades have
long been recognized, the human history of the
Everglades is much less understood. is study
lls an important gap in understanding the role
of humans within this rich ecosystem and stands
as an excellent example of a prehistoric maritime
cultural landscape.
Studies on midden sites typically focus on diet,
subsistence and paleo-environmental studies with a
normative and long standing view of shell middens
as domestic refuse, simply the remains of daily
meals discarded in garbage piles. However, recent
work by some researchers has challenged this idea.
At the Southeast Archeological Center (SEAC),
we have expanded our interpretations to beyond
these strictly garbage pile contexts. is case study
examines a little known but signicant type of shell
midden site called “shell works”, which are among
the world’s largest, most-complex, prehistoric shell
built landscapes ever known. ey deserve far
more consideration than the simple garbage pile
perspective.
Shell works are complex sites that were socially
constructed landscapes that reect a unique mar-
itime-hunter-gatherer adaptation and tradition of
shell construction. ese shell works sites represent
some of the world’s best examples of prehistoric
maritime cultural landscapes, as their preservation
is unparalleled. Preserved in almost their entirety,
the Ten ousand Islands region is a vast prehis-
toric domain of waterways, islands, seascapes and
shellscapes that stretch for some hundred miles
along the southwest Florida coast.
South Florida contains an immense wetland of
marshes, swamps, rivers and estuaries dominated
by the Everglades, the largest sub-tropical wet-
land in North America. e lower southwest coast
contains the Ten ousand Islands, a vast maze of
lagoons, mangrove swamps and marine meadows
comprising one of the most productive sub-trop-
ical estuaries in North America. e region con-
tains over 400 recorded shell middens sites. Shell
middens take many forms, including small heaps,
linear or mounded accumulations, and are tra-
ditionally viewed as either primary or secondary
refuse, the results of daily refuse from domestic
garbage accumulations.
Another type of site is shell works, a parallel
term to earthwork. Shell works are more than
just large, happenstance shell middens accumula-
tions; they were purposefully constructed features,
intentional borrowed, piled, arranged and formed
into mounds, ridges, rings, platforms and depres-
sions. Shell works suggest planned landscapes and
terraforming to dene public, domestic, sacred
and ceremonial spaces, suggesting that organized
labor, community planning and the ideological
constructs of monumentality and ceremonialism
shaped these complex maritime cultural land-
scapes.
is investigation oers the rst large scale set-
tlement pattern of the region and employs the only
holistic maritime landscape approach. To date, 15
shell work complexes have been investigated, with
over 200 radiocarbon dates generated for the re-
gion. Sites range from very small, less than half an
acre, to architecturally non-complex ring shaped
middens, to massive sites comprising entire islands
constructed from elaborate shell work features
measuring up to 100 acres in extent. Comparison
of shell work forms throughout the region demon-
strates signicant similarities, including several
Constructing Shell Landscapes in Southwest Florida
Margo Schwadron
Southeast Archeological Center
National Park Service
132
recurring site forms such as ring shape features,
mounds and linear ridges.
ere are 13 major shell work sites, ranging in
size from 30 to 100 acres in extent, which like-
ly represent large, nucleated villages. ese sites
occur with a regular spatial frequency. Eight of
the largest sites occur three to four miles within
the northern part of the region and become less
frequent toward the southern end of the region.
irty-one small shell work sites and 12 shell rings
are also present.
e most well-known and northernmost of
shell work sites in the region was the Key Marco
site. Unfortunately, it is now mostly destroyed by
development. Frank Hamilton Cushing’s 1890s
map, digitized and brought into ARC-GIS, shows
the site’s occupants engineered the island landscape
with shell, creating features such as radiating nger
ridges, water courts, at top mounds, plazas and
canals. ese shell work constructions suggest or-
ganization and a planned maritime community.
Another larger shell work site, Dismal Key, is
a massive crescent shaped shell work island mea-
suring 75 acres, containing shell mounds, ridges,
plazas, canals, water courts, nger ridges and sea
walls. At the northern edge of the site is a small
crescent-shaped shell ring, similar in size and
shape to other southeastern shell rings. South
of the ring is the main portion of the site, which
contains elaborate shell work architecture, includ-
ing extensive shell elds and a central district of
shell mounds, ramps, and canals. Two 6-meter-tall
at top shell mounds are bisected by a long central
canal leading into the center of the site, suggesting
a high amount of coordinated labor to build and
maintain a functioning canal.
Archaeological testing determined that Dismal
Key’s inner shell ring, the earliest component of
the site, was built rapidly and dates to the termi-
nal archaic. Testing of 4 of the largest at top shell
mounds suggests that intensive mound building
occurred between 580 and 900 AD, a series of shell
midden nger ridges at the west margins of the site
are the most recently built features, dating from
AD 990 to 1290. Terminal radiocarbon dates and
ceramic chronology suggest Dismal Key became
abandoned just prior to AD 1300.
Fakahatchee Key is a massive 98-acre shell
work site with several curvilinear or ring shaped
shell midden ridges. Investigation determined it
contains elaborate shell works including mounds,
platforms, water courts, canals, and radiating nger
ridges. e curvilinear site plan of the site appears
to be oriented towards the interior of the site, fac-
ing a low central area of shell elds and a large, at,
plaza-like area. Much like the Dismal Key site, the
nested inner ring shaped middens of the site were
determined to be the earliest dated components of
the site, from BC 350 to AD 260. Also, the radiat-
ing nger ridges are the most recent features of the
site, dating from AD 710 to 1280. Yeoman’s Mound
is an isolated shell mound complex that appears to
be purposefully separated from the main portion
of the site and is to be discussed later. In tandem
with Dismal Key, Fakahatchee Key appears to be
abandoned just prior to AD 1300.
Survey mapping of Sandy Key show a series of
large nested crescents and rings. e earliest com-
ponents of the site are the northernmost ring arms
and two isolated sand and shell mounds, one of
which dates to the transitional period between the
Late Archaic and Early Woodland period. At the
southern end of the site, Sandy Key contains some
shell work features including a at top mound,
possible house platforms, sh traps, canals, water
courts and extensive shell elds. e shell work
features date most recently, suggesting that over
time Sandy Key residents shied from construct-
ing simple ring shape middens to construction of
more elaborate shell work features, suggesting an
expanding community population and perhaps an
increasingly complex social organization.
Russell Key is a 60-acre site and like other shell
work islands, is composed almost entirely of oyster
shell. Like Dismal and Sandy Key, the north-
ern end of the site contains a large, low shell ring
almost completely buried under mangrove swamp,
suggesting a post occupational sea level rise. Test-
ing of the shell ring suggests the ring is the earliest
component of the site and likely has much deeper
and earlier deposits, probably dating to late archaic.
133
South of the shell ring is the main portion of the
site. It displays bilateral symmetry with a central
plaza-like area. e central plaza is anked on the
east, west and south sides of the site with a series
of radiating shell nger ridges. e ridges occur
in distinct groupings suggesting that they were
constructed as part of planned, organized activity
areas, residential zones or habitation areas. Archae-
ological testing of these features indicated that they
were built rapidly and they are contemporaneous.
As is the pattern at all other shell work sites, the
radiating nger ridges at the southern edge of the
site were determined to date most recently, from
about AD 900 to 1200. is suggest a regional,
temporal signicance to these feature in that over
time, Russell Key inhabitants continually expanded
the site in a southern seaward direction, construct-
ing additional habitable landscapes by continuing
to build a new site area out of shell.
One of the most perplexing of shell work fea-
tures are basins or depressions found around the
margins of many sites. Collectively called water
courts, it is not yet known what these features
functioned for. ese features are almost always in
association with nger ridges, suggesting, per-
haps, some type of sh or shell sh storage or fresh
water impoundment structure. Along the southern
edge of the site is one single, large water court, the
largest found on Russel Key, measuring 15 by 50
meters. Radiocarbon dating places construction of
this feature around AD 1030 to 1290. e pres-
ence of one large water court may suggest a shi
towards a centralization or control of resources,
whether sh storage, water or another function.
Like the other large shell work sites, Russell Key
was abandoned by AD 1300.
Today the site is thickly surrounded by man-
groves. ARC-GIS spatial analysis is used to model
a two-foot rise in sea level. With this scenario, the
site appears more approachable by canoe and one
can visualize how some of the sites nger ridges
and water courts may have looked and functioned.
With a two-meter high sea level rise, the long n-
ger ridges are no longer encased in mangroves and
are surrounded by water. e nger ridges likely
functioned as canoe docks or jetties or functioned
as platforms for people to engage in group sh
netting with the nearby water courts functioning as
temporary storage ponds.
Shell works demonstrate similar spatial and tem-
poral patterns. Regionally there are strong temporal
similarities and site structures, forms and layouts
that imply nearby settlements must have been
socially connected communities, sharing similar
social, political and ideological characteristics that
became manifested within their socially constructed
landscapes. ese constructed landscapes reect a
dynamic and recursive relationship with the en-
vironment, the sea, communities and their shells-
capes. Shell works demonstrate not only a maritime
cultural landscape that reects changes in social
organization over time but that the landscape itself is
a repository for social memory and history and may
be imbued with meaning and signicance connect-
ed to a larger system of monuments and ceremonial
landscapes, seascapes, and shellscapes.
For example, the Fakahatchee Key 3 site shows
evidence of a possible ritual landscape suggested by
the re-appropriation of the landscape features with
the placement of a conical mound and two ramp
projections superimposed on top of a much earlier,
previously abandoned shell ring. is association
or re-appropriation of the earlier features suggests
that the builders of the conical mound may have
viewed their earlier shell ring feature with some
kind of signicance, perhaps reecting a material
persistence of memory that now marks the land-
scape. e mound may represent a communal
mortuary moment, perhaps to memorialize ances-
tors or it may mark a boundary, territory or forbid-
den place for the settlement.
A similar association is also found at Russell
Key, with a at top mound and ramp superimposed
on a much earlier shell ring. ese mounds may be
suggestive of monuments which may have served a
functional role, such as a special structure for elites
or for religious use, or may have served a more
ontological, cosmological or symbolic purpose.
Sandy Key is also suggestive of a ritualized or
ceremonial landscape, with a pair of conical burial
mounds, out of view and deeply hidden within the
mangrove swamp, surrounded by an extensive,
134
protective ring of shell midden and separated from
the rest of the site by water. e hidden nature of
the mounds suggests a sacred context and their
placement within a watery swamp may have fur-
ther symbolic signicance as water is oen viewed
by Native Americans as a sacred or protective
supernatural barrier or portal to another world.
Lastly, the Yeoman’s Mound complex is another
example of a ritual or sacred maritime landscape.
e site contains a pair of two six-meter tall conical
shell mounds, set along the edge of a ring or bowl-
shaped midden within an arena-like complex.
e interior is open and at and is encircled by a
raised ring of shell along its outer perimeter. At the
southwestern edge of the site is a ramp of shell that
gradually leads up into the complex, suggesting a
directed entrance or perhaps a processional route
into the complex. Its isolated position and separa-
tion by water also suggest secrecy or symbolic im-
portance—purposefully separated from the secular,
domestic areas of Fakahatchee Key. Human re-
mains reported from the mounds and found within
the plaza of the site suggest that it served special
mortuary functions for the community.
In conclusion, the shell works of the Ten ou-
sand Islands represent some of the largest and
most complex prehistoric shell constructions in the
world and are unique, preserved prehistoric land-
scapes that reect important hunter-gatherer-sher
histories. ese represent an exceptional exam-
ple of a prehistoric maritime cultural landscape.
Nomination of these sites as a maritime cultural
landscape and as a National Historic Landmark
would ll an important gap in documenting and
understanding the important histories of prehistor-
ic maritime people of the world. Δ
Margo Schwadron is an Archeologist with the Na-
tional Park Service Southeast Archeological Center,
and the Regional Native American Graves Protec-
tion and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) Coordinator/
Division Chief for NAGPRA and Applied Science.
Her research takes a landscape approach to archeol-
ogy, integrating paleoenvironmental and paleo-cli-
mate research, and applying science to document
and protect vulnerable sites from climate change
impacts. Recent work includes National Geographic
funded investigations of prehistoric shell works is-
lands and numerous publications on shell middens,
mounds and tree islands in Florida. Her doctoral
research focused on the shell work landscapes of the
Ten ousand Islands, Florida, for which she hopes
to complete a nomination for National Historic
Landmark designation.
135
is session illustrates the importance of incorpo-
rating multiple voices and perspectives into land-
scape-level analysis and management. Presenta-
tions feature indigenous MCLs in Alaska, Hawai‘i,
New England, Oregon, and Wisconsin. Unlike so
much research and work conducted in past de-
cades by outsiders on indigenous communities and
places, the projects presented here are grounded
in self-determination, and have been designed
and implemented by native peoples, sometimes in
collaboration with external partners. As places and
resources are able to be better documented and
preserved in this way, the benets are mutual—to
the resources, the communities, as well as to land
and water management agencies and potential
project applicants who frequently want to “do the
right thing,” and may need some help guring out
what that is.
Several key themes emerge in this session,
which highlight the role of the shoreline as bridge
rather than boundary, to borrow Ben Ford’s con-
cept. We see the importance of native peoples’
involvement in preserving their own heritage,
and associated positive outcomes for the land-
scape and resources, as well as to the people and
communities. We also see the interrelationships
of cultural and natural resources, rather than the
articial divide that has emerged through non-na-
tive management and policy. And through both
of these phenomena— self-determined research
and cultural/natural integration—we see increased
empowerment of native voices and perspectives on
the landscape, both in preservation of the past and
management for the future.
Valerie J. Grussing
Cultural Resources Coordinator
and NOS Tribal Liaison
National Marine Protected Areas Center, NOAA
6. Native American, Alaskan and
Hawaiian Landscapes
Introduction
136
Sitka is in the Southeast panhandle of Alaska, also
known as the Alexander Archipelago. It is on the
outer coast of an island and you can only get there
by ferry or plane. It is also within the traditional
territory of the Tlingit, and known by the Tlingit as
Shee Atika, or Sheet’ka. e Tlingit are nicknamed
the people of the tides. Not a lot of archaeology
work is conducted around Sitka, but local radiocar-
bon dating conrms humans were living near Sitka
for at least 5,000 years. It was also the capital of
Russian America from 1804 to 1867 and currently
it’s an isolated shing and tourist community with
a year-round population of about 9,000.
As I was researching this topic, I found a Na-
tional Park Service publication that described the
National Historic Landmarks in Sitka. (See Figure
1.) is is a fairly decent rundown of Sitka’s historic
milestones, but it is missing recognition of the rst
people of this land: the Tlingit. Is this because the
Tlingit have done nothing of national signicance,
or because the Tlingit history is under-represented
in the National Register program?
I think the Tlingit history in Sitka is national-
ly signicant. When the Russians rst arrived in
Sitka in 1802, the Tlingit attacked the Russians and
the Russians le. e Russians came back two years
later and they battled again. In 1804, the history
books say the Russians won. But, did the Tlingits
lose? e Tlingit retreated. at 1804 battle was
an important point and the Russians took over
Sitka harbor. But, the Tlingit survived. From 1804
onward, the Tlingit people endured—rst attack
and occupation of their land by the Russians, and
then, aer 1867, the United States. Despite the
attempts by the governments in power to eliminate
the traditional ways of living of the Tlingit people,
the Tlingit people and culture have endured, even
if not recognized.
Aer the 1804 battle with the Russians, the
Tlingit traveled north on foot to a seasonal sh
camp on the north part of the island at a strate-
gic location. You can only get to Sitka safely at
that time through the Inside Passage. ey set up
camp along one channel you need to pass to get
to Sitka, and staged
an embargo. ey
stopped all ships
from entering or
leaving Sitka. e
Tlingit relied on
the sea for food,
travel, spirituality
and clothing. ey
dene a maritime
culture.
In about 1825, the
Tlingit returned to
Sitka. e Russian
approach to dealing
with the Tlingit was
a segregated ap-
proach. e Russians
1. Chronology of Sitka’s National Historic Landmarks; courtesy of the National Park Service.
Sitka Indian Village: A History Unpreserved?
Jessica Perkins
Former Sitka Tribal Attorney
Sitka National Historical Park
National Park Service
137
built a wall separating the Tlingit Village from
New Archangel (the Russian name for Sitka).
e wall had guards in blockhouses and cannons
pointed at the Tlingit Village during the time of
Russian rule (1825-1867).
Starting in 1867, the American government did
not treat the Tlingit any better. When the United
States government took over control of Alaska,
the American way of life was brought to the
Tlingit people. Sanitary laws were used to tell the
Tlingit people that they needed to rebuild their
houses. All the old houses were burnt, and new
ones ordered to be reconstructed according to
American standards. (See Figures 2 and 3.)
In 1904, then territorial governor, John Brady
allowed for what they called the last great potlatch.
“In 1902, several members approached Gover-
nor Brady, a former Presbyterian missionary, and
requested that he issue a proclamation that would
command all Natives to change and that if they did
not they should be punished. Like other mission-
aries and governmental ocials, Governor Brady
considered the potlatch a practice that perpetuated
prejudice, superstition, clan rivalry and retarded
progress. He was committed to breaking up the
oensive clan system and replacing it with the
independent family unit, but he was not eager to
impose legal sanctions. erefore, in a dramatic
gesture, Brady decided to endorse one last potlatch
at Sitka.”
1
From 1867 through 1924, the Tlingit
were not permitted to own any land because they
1 http://www.penn.museum/documents/publications/expedition/PDFs/47-2/e%20Centennial%20Potlatch.pdf
were not citizens. e Tlingit weren’t recognized as
US citizens until 1924. ey were not permitted to
vote until 1945.
e Tlingit culture is a matrilineal society that
is built by clans, so you have parity, you have a
raven and an eagle, and then a raven would marry
an eagle and then you inherit your lineage through
your mother. My husband is an eagle, so his father’s
clan, the Kik.sadi, which is a raven clan, adopted
me and then my children, who are Alaska Native,
as part of that clan. We have all been adopted
through traditional ceremony and given Tlingit
names. My house is called Sh’teen Hit, which is the
steel bar house. e house was so named because
it had a steel bar. e Sh’teen Hit was located so
close to the stockade wall, a steel bar was necessary
to protect the house. e clan house in traditional
Tlingit culture was the seat of traditional govern-
ment. Traditional law was that you would bring
things to the clan house and the clan leader, and
they would decide things and use their own way of
dealing with things. e village here is the location
of the Sitka Clan houses.
Sitka Tribe of Alaska had a small historic preser-
vation grant from the National Park Service. is is
one of the many projects I worked on at Sitka
Tribe. I put together the possibility of the village
being a historic district. I did my best, but it was
2. Typical Tlingit sh camp, c.1890-1920; Alaska State Library,
Historical Collections, William R. Norton Photographs.
3. e Sitka Indian Village, 1889; photo courtesy of the Alaska
State Library Place Files, Photographs.
138
hard, because if you look at this picture, you can
tell that there is all sorts of development there. You
can see the traditional houses, but you can also see
sh processing plants, and you can see lots of boats
in the harbor and these other uses. I put together
the district nomination, but it was denitely a
discontiguous situation. It never felt like I was
doing the right analysis. I knew in my heart this
was a historic place that should be recognized and
protected. I knew in my heart that I held a lot of
history that was important to a lot of people. e
words I had to use on the paper to match up with
that history was a disconnect.
Each of the clan houses in this photograph
(Figure 4) has been determined eligible for the Na-
tional Register individually. ey stand on what’s
called restricted Indian property. ese properties
are transferred according to western inheritance
rules—to your surviving children typically. at
means the traditional clan people and the clan
members of those houses are not the current own-
ers. What you have is based the individual family
unit. e house on the le suered, the foundation
had some issues, and so we had to do some repair
work and during that time we went through the
Section106 process and it was determined eligible.
e house on the right was owned by a L’uk’nax.
adi clan (raven) leader when the deed was issued
in the 1950s. When he died, the house went to his
children, who were Kaagwaantaan (eagle), they
inherited it. As time went on, there are now 47
dierent owners who do not get along. ey are
not from that clan, and so it’s hard to get a mass of
folks to agree that this is what we want. Some folks
want to take it down and put something dierent
up. Some folks want to preserve it as it was. Some
folks don’t even want it. Originally, 43 clan houses
were within the Sitka Indian Village. Due to lack
of sucient resources, and impending health and
safety concerns, the Tribal Council has had to take
down two clan houses since 1995. ese houses are
2 of the last 9 standing clan houses in Sitka. It has
almost become too complicated to save some of the
most important history that still exists in Sitka.
In the end, it is clear to me that the village has
signicant historic resources. e historic district
designation doesn’t feel like the right t, but I can
make it t, by turning this word into that word and
checking the boxes. I think a maritime cultural
landscape should include the natural resources and
the cultural resources, because where there is a
herring house, there are people who associate with
the herring. Even in the village, we have something
that is a very old ceremonial place for the Kik.sadi
people—herring rock. It is truly a maritime cultur-
al landscape. It contains all the elements of ethno-
graphic landscapes, as well as those of vernacular
landscapes. It is also part of the larger Tlingit
maritime cultural landscape.
Figure 4. A Kaagwaantaan and L’uk’nax.adi Clan House;
photo by Jessica Perkins.
Figure 5. A look at the bigger picture cultural landscape
around Sitka. e yellow shading is National Forest land; the
orange areas are National Forest Wilderness Areas; and the
green dots are the approximate locations of historic sites with-
in the larger landscape. Map compiled by Jessica Perkins.
139
ere is also a larger cultural and natural land-
scape to be preserved. Alaska is still a lot like the
new frontier. If you look at Tlingit country as a
bigger picture, you have the area called the Sheet’ka
K’waan (the traditional territory of the Sitka Tribe).
rough the interviewing process of folks who still
speak Tlingit, the anthropologist we had on sta
at the time was able to collect place names. Every
red dot on that map is a place name. To me, that
documents a connection to the natural and cultur-
al resources throughout the region. When I think
about cultural landscapes and I think about scale,
I think about how each of the rivers that ow out
into the ocean was its own individual landscape,
but, back in the day when you would go from place
to place, it was one big landscape. We have evidence
of oyster farming, canoe haulouts, and individual
village sites throughout the area. ere is a lot of
development that folks think is still coming. Yes, it’s
currently a national forest, but that does not mean
it will always be a national forest. ere is a small
scale approach and a big scale approach. You can
tie landscapes together, or you can look at them as
small. I think in both cases, the types of resources
there are important for preservation. Based on the
tools available today, the Sitka Indian Village and
the greater cultural landscape of the Sheet’ka Kwaan
are dicult to preserve. But, with diligence and
perseverance, I am hopeful the history of the Tlingit
in Sitka is preserved for generations to come. Δ
Jessica Perkins grew up in rural Rhode Island and
obtained her BA in sociology with honors from the
University of New Hampshire. Jess received her
juris doctorate with a certicate in natural resourc-
es and environmental law with a specic focus on
American Indian Law from Lewis and Clark Law
School. Aer law school, Jess worked eleven years
at the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, serving as realty ocer,
resources protection director, and tribal attorney.
During this time, Jess spent many hours researching
and pursuing Tlingit land claims throughout the
Sitka area. She also married the son of a Tlingit clan
leader and became a member of the Kik.sádi clan.
Aer a short stint away from Sitka, Jess recently re-
turned to work at Sitka National Historical Park—
which was created to commemorate two important
pieces of Sitka’s history—the 1804 Tlingit-Russian
battleground and the 1843 Russian Bishop’s House.
140
In a traditional Hawaiian context, nature
and culture are one and the same, there is
no division between the two. e wealth and
limitations of the land and ocean resourc-
es gave birth to, and shaped the Hawaiian
world view. e ‘āina (land), wai (water), kai
(ocean), and lewa (sky) were the foundation
of life and the source of the spiritual relation-
ship between people and their environments.
– Kepa Maly, Cultural Practitioner
Introduction
Hawaiian cultural landscapes are well-suited to
support the emerging identication of maritime
cultural landscapes (Westerdahl 1992) and historic
sites across the United States due to the intrinsical-
ly holistic nature of Hawai‘i’s traditional cultural
landscapes, which, as articulated in the quote above,
were inclusive of the land, sea, and sky. is presen-
tation discusses how traditional cultural landscapes
contain a range of unique elements that signicantly
enrich the public’s ability to understand heritage ar-
eas and historic places. rough data sets enhanced
by indigenous knowledge systems and engagement
with native communities, the National Register
eligibility determination process expands to better
coordinate with other policies and regulations. It
also potentially sees better ecacy in implementing
historic preservation and environmental policies
such that heritage resources are better preserved.
e concept of a maritime cultural landscape is
critical to the development of a Hawaiian cultural
landscape, as it illustrates that the notion of land-
scapes are ultimately uid and dynamic. Maritime
cultural landscapes thereby play an important role
in creating opportunities for marginalized groups,
like indigenous peoples, to insert their histories
into formal, regulatory processes and the academ-
ic discourse.
1 Ahupua‘a literally means pig altar (ahu being the word for altar and pua‘a being the word for pig) as this referenced the stone
alter that served as the boundary marker for each ahupua‘a district. Traditionally a pig or another similar levy would be placed
upon the ahu as duty to the government.
Hawaiian Maritime Cultural Landscapes
Whereas archaeologists have historically focused
on tangible elements of landscapes, indigenous
peoples have additionally focused on spiritual and
intangible elements of landscapes. erefore, this
paper will discuss both the tangible and intangible
components of Hawaiian cultural landscapes, and
why all of these elements are critical to the future
of historic preservation. (For a new, comprehen-
sive listing of Hawaiian wao that extend from the
mountain peak to the deep sea, see Table 1.)
For example, O‘ahu is split into six dierent moku
or districts. In 800 A.D., the high chief, Ma‘ilikūka-
hi, developed a geopolitical land system called the
ahupua’a
1
system (Kamakau 2010). He took the
island, and then divided it into six districts. Within
each district, he further divided into the ahupua’a
system (Kamehameha Schools 1994). Each district
is then further divided into pie-shaped wedges that
extended from ridge out to the reef (Pukui, Elbert,
& Mookini 1974). Each basically watershed system
goes up all the way out and contains an ocean area.
It was either one mile or to the fringing reef. is
system, you can see, there are dierent divisions that
essentially correlate with biomes that basically had
a fully sustainable system (Minerbi 1999). What is
rather amazing is this basically survived to today in
various legal and policy forms. When we talk about
a Hawaiian cultural landscape, I very much, as do
others, think about this system.
Also, when I talk about a Hawaiian cultural
landscape, I am going to talk about rst settlement
versus second settlement. First settlement was re-
ally the arrival of Polynesians to Hawai‘i. While we
have talked about the impact of human settlement
throughout these two days, I think it is important
to remember that while there was human impact, it
was nominal and very minimal, the human impact
in the footprint that rst settlement le compared
Hawaiian Maritime Cultural Landscapes:
Integrating Knowledge Systems, Protecting Heritage Areas
Trisha Kehaulani Watson
Honua Consulting
141
to the second settlement, which is when foreigners
came to Hawai‘i.
Unlike some of the tribes here, Hawaiians
settled our islands much later and are therefore a
younger culture. ere is no evidence indicating
we have submerged settlements to the degree other
groups here may have. While we likely have some
submerged sites, like traditional Hawaiian sh-
ponds, we have record of most of these sites and
the submersion of these historic features occurred
comparatively contemporaneously. It is possible we
also have some submerged voyaging canoes, but
recoveries of those are unlikely. Most of our mari-
time cultural landscapes would therefore be associ-
ated with intangible cultural heritage features like
spiritual vistas or sites of historic events.
e ahupua’a system basically is where you have
the high waters that come down. ey come and
feed into the valleys of Hawai‘i. Water sources are
highest up. Forest areas are also high up (Lyon
1918). Agricultural systems are further down. All
these are what we call wao or realms (Malo 1951).
You have the living area of people in the lower
coastal areas, and then you have shing villages
along the coast.
We never really went up, in traditional times,
into the highland areas. at is why when you
look at images of or studies of ecological footprints
along rst settlements or the rst settlement peri-
od, you do not see that in upland areas. I think that
is something important that we have not talked
about is the fact that in traditional cultures, in
sacred places, you will not necessarily see that there
was human presence there. It does not mean that
we did not value those places if you do not nd
evidence of material culture there. It meant that
in certain cultures, to revere them, you did not go
there. at was specically because we valued the
ecosystem services that came from certain places.
We were not going to settle where our most valued
water sources came from, for example.
In this example of Pu’u Kukui, in the mauka
(toward the mountain) area, which is the mountain
area, you can see the value of the water source ver-
sus what happens down makai (toward the ocean),
which is equally valued, but is a far more habitable
area, which is why you are going to nd a lot more
archaeological activity.
e primary maritime culture of Hawai‘i was
the shponds. is was a picture, a drawing from
1825, of a shpond village in O‘ahu, actually from
the district that I am from. In addition to extensive
shponds, we had over 400 originally at the time of
the second contact, you had navigation (Baybayan
& Kawahara 1996). You had salt ponds. All of the
homes you can see at the bottom of the photo, that
there were homes and dierent just regular human
living along the coastal areas that were extensive.
A dierent area on the island of O‘ahu, illus-
trates it as well. You have these extensive land-
scapes that, even by the early 1900s, you still had of
the earlier 400, 100 traditional Hawaiian shponds
that were fully functional throughout the state of
Hawai‘i (Apple and Kikuchi 1975).
ere is one area where you can see the dierent
arrows pointing to all the dierent archaeological
sites that are shponds, heiau, which are religious
sites, salt ponds, and dierent archaeological sites
along the coastlines in just one district. Of 400, this
is just one area where you had extensive mari-
culture activity throughout the Hawaiian Islands.
is is not even the island where we had the most
concentration of traditional Hawaiian shponds.
What is important to remember, and I think an
extensive challenge in Hawai‘i, is that these sh-
ponds are still used. My company, for the last three
years, worked on a project to restore, to work on
programmatically restoring traditional shponds
throughout the state. For twenty years, traditional
Hawaiian shpond practitioners struggled, and I
mean struggled, with just getting the permits to
protect and restore shponds. It took seventeen
permits to be able to restore a shpond and hun-
dreds of thousands of dollars to be able to secure
those permits. It took twelve dierent agencies, and
these are community groups (Honua Consulting
2013). Even shponds that, and you can see clearly,
from the aerial photo on the le, are still there.
is was a twenty-year problem for the Hawai-
ian community. e EPA put a signicant amount
142
of money into looking at the problem, and it was
a multi-faceted problem consisting of jurisdic-
tional and administrative challenges. You had to go
through many dierent agencies; challenges of do-
ing this are discussed elsewhere in this collection.
We ultimately did a programmatic EA (environ-
mental assessment), and we did also implemente
a statewide program that now allows any com-
munity group to apply to a single state agency for
authorization to use the statewide programmatic
authorities. We proactively conducted the statewide
programmatic assessments on these historic sh-
ponds, inclusive of all the authorizations the com-
munity groups would need. We did an essential sh
habitat study. We went through the ESA. We did
the MMPA studies. We did everything. We brought
everybody to the table. By doing that at an agency
and state level where we looked at it as a system
instead of looking at them as sites, we were able to
create a comprehensive program where commu-
nities are able to now just come in to get approval
under this programmatic approval that we received.
We basically did it under a nationwide permit
with Army Corps. en we did a master CDUP,
which is a Conservation District Use Permit, at the
state level. Communities are able to go in and use
that to restore and protect and maintain these in-
dividual sites that way. Really, that was because we
stopped looking at them as sites, individual sh-
pond sites, and looked at them as parts of systems
that provide ecosystem services (Watson 2016).
When we work with communities, what is always
really important is that indigenous communities
do not always have a lot of capacity. For those who
talk about working on a planner level, that is really
hard for us, as Hawaiians, because Hawaiians do not
think on a two-dimensional level. We do not even
think on a three-dimensional level. We do not think
just terrestrially. We think about depth. We have
names for every point along the horizon. We go up
into the sky. We are navigators. We have celestial
maps. We think not only about the signicance
of a rock or an area or the depths of the sea or the
stars in the sky. We also think about the spawning
seasons. We think about moon calendars. en we
also think about the importance of ceremony. We
think about the importance of individual gods. We
also think about natural heritage, tangible cultural
heritage and then the intangible cultural heritage.
When we are working with communities, we
like to do baseline assessments that get commu-
nities to take stock of what they have along these
dierent grids. When you can meet communities
where they are from a traditional knowledge or
ancestral knowledge standpoint, you will nd that
there is a tremendous amount to gain from these
partnerships. Developing a quality relationship
with the impacted community as early as possible is
really the best way to reduce conict. Communities
have so much to oer a project. Too oen, project
leaders see the community as an impediment, but
people need to remember that the community has
to live with the project. ey have the most to gain
and the most to lose. Finding quality community
partners, especially from indigenous communities,
can add so much value to a project, because they
oen have so much understanding about an area.
As evident from the comprehensive nature of
the listing in Table 1 [and Figure 1], the Hawaiian
traditional identication of sites within a cultural
landscape were intricately intertwined with natural
heritage features (i.e., mountains, reefs), vegeta-
tion, agriculture, natural elements, and intangible
cultural features. When utilized, these physical
spaces intersect with temporal features and historic
events, truly engendering the need for further di-
alogue on how to revisit National Register criteria
to account for the complex and holistic nature
of indigenous landscapes. As the largest Native
population in the United States, with over 500,000
individuals, Native Hawaiians are a large living cul-
ture with a huge cache of native language resources
that remain grossly under-utilized in our historic
preservation activities (Nogelmeier 2010).
For this reason, we like to focus far more on
capacity building and education. is is a program
we are taking part in on Lāna’i. For years now,
we’ve been working with the students there, teach-
ing them about archeology, teaching them how
to restore their own landscapes (Maly, Watson, &
Osorio 2014). is past summer students did a lot
of building on the skills. ey are actually doing
143
the restoration currently, where they are restoring
shponds. ey are restoring terraces. is was the
third year of a three-year program, but we are get-
ting additional funding to keep the program going.
It demonstrates that you really can teach the next
generation, and there is so much potential in the
future of historic preservation.
Conclusion
We do all of this because we really, in the middle of
the Pacic, recognize that the elephant in the room
is the necessity to do renewable energy projects.
We realize that climate change is a very, very real
problem. We recognize the need to preserve his-
toric preservation sites, but we also recognize that
we have very, very close relations in the Pacic that
are facing real challenges, as are we in Hawai‘i. It
is just not about the individual sites, but cultures
and nations that may be lost. We realize it is about
much more than us, but about all the cultures in
the Pacic that need us to nd solutions to these
very real problems. Δ
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146
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147
Edited Transcript of Presentation
Doug Harris
Trisha (Watson), where are you? ank you. I’m
honored to follow all of what you had to say. ank
you so very much. You create a model for what I
need to be saying in the future, as we study more
and commit more to what we have to protect.
ank you very much.
In our tradition, we do not travel a lot. I arrive
here. I do ceremony. I invite the ancestors of this
place to join me and support me in what it is that
I have to achieve in this forum. I have been getting
strange ripples every now and then, certain terms
that come up. I’m going to make this quick. “Pre-
historic,” we have a problem with that. We, mean-
ing not only Doug, but all the spirits that came in
the room with him.
Our history is ancient. It is in this land, and it is
here, and in the study of what is here. “Prehistor-
ic” is an inappropriate term. I am oended by it. I
respect all of you. I am beginning to like and love
some of you. at term hurts me and hurts those
spirits that are in the room with me and with all
of us. I had to get that out of the way. Otherwise
I cannot go to balance and harmony, and that’s a
place where I like to live.
My partners have been identied. John Brown
is the [Narragansett] Tribal Historic Preservation
Ocer and the guide of much of the work that I
do. I am taught by those who taught him, the elder
Medicine Man, Lloyd “Running Wolf” Wilcox, and
Ella Sekatau and the new Medicine Woman, Weno-
nah Harris. I have got a very dicult process I’ve
got to engage in. I have got to start with ceremonial
stones and I have got to end up with submerged
landscapes, but that is what I have to do every day,
so I guess I can handle it.
Ceremonial stone landscapes. Anybody here,
never heard the term? at is great, we have got
a few, a few takers. Ceremonial stone landscapes.
Manitou hassunash, spirit stones. We are attempt-
ing as best we can to be bilingual in dealing with
ceremonial stone landscapes. What I found was
that when I tried to speak English to other tribal
people about what we were saying in our pro-
tective enclaves, they did not know what I was
talking about. I realized that it was a simple prob-
lem. It was not resonating in their spirits when
I would use words like ceremonial stone land-
scapes. But manitou, spirit, hassunash are stones
in groups. Our stones are identied as ceremonial
stone groupings, as you see here, as opposed to
stone piles, because in our tradition stones are
our grandfathers. If in fact you are talking about
grandfathers who are congregated out in the eld,
you would not call them a pile of grandfathers. At
least, I would not. I could not get away with that,
so manitou hassunash, spirit stones or ceremonial
stone groupings in English.
is is another type of ceremonial stone group-
ing, it is on a boulder. I will take you quickly
through these, I hope. is is a ceremonial stone
grouping on a large boulder that no longer exists
in this form. e landholder, when we began to
negotiate at this particular site, dealing with an
FCC project, the placement of a cell tower, became
enraged that Indians had anything to say about
what was on his property. He went up there with
a backhoe and played golf one day. Ultimately, he
apologized for that, but by that time it had been de-
termined by FCC that there would never be a cell
tower on his property. Could not be licensed.
Ultimately we went back and renegotiated,
there is now a cell tower. What was negotiated was
an opportunity to map every ceremonial stone
grouping on that property. Aer the mapping, to
be able to identify where they would be, areas of no
Ceremonial Stone Landscapes of New England and Developing
Best Practices to Assess Submerged Paleocultural Landscapes
Doug Harris
Narragansett Tribe
Doug Jones
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
148
ceremonial stones. Since there were no ceremonial
stones, we had an issue a mile away in the valley
with a hassunnegk, a ceremonial stone chamber
which viewed all of the stones on this hill. What
we sought was to create, to nd a void in that set
of alignments, where a cell tower could go but not
aect any of the alignments. We did nd that; ulti-
mately we agreed that a cell tower could go there.
Finally, what happened was that the land owner,
within a town meeting with both of his children,
told the people in the town that he had done some
impacts. He did not understand what he was en-
gaging in when he did it. He still does not under-
stand these stones but said that he would make
sure that that property was sold into preservation.
It only took two more years before we were able to
acquire the funds to buy the property from him.
e Narragansett Indian Tribal Historic Preser-
vation Trust now owns that particular ceremonial
stone landscape. ose stones, though, are no
longer in place.
is is an adjacent piece of property. is is a
shadow casting stone in an array of stones—Oka-
topsk, as it is called in the Mohegan language. We
have not done the ground-truthing yet to conrm
whether or not the shadow casting is by sunlight
or by moonlight, but we have identied that that is
what it is.
is is one of the egy gures that we have. If
you are not familiar with the animals of our region,
that is a turtle egy. You can see their head, the
carapace, paw, paw, and another paw. ere’s also
a tail in the rear. is is a serpent egy, and the
serpent egies are quite oen in dispute because
the presumption is that they are stone walls. Most
oen, they are too low to pen anything in, but we
identify them by other means. Usually they do have
a head, such as the one you see here. is partic-
ular one, just behind the head, also has a space
and an orange stone, because we believe that they
are related to the serpent egy that is in the area
of Scorpius that the Cherokee referred to as the
Uktena,that is a serpent with an orange stone. In its
terra form, it is a jewel and it is horned, but this is,
as below, so above.
is is a Manitou Stone, one of two forms of
Manitou Stone. is is one that takes a more hu-
man shape. is is another form of Manitou Stone.
It is a peaked stone. Both of those two are at a won-
drous place where we rst had our breakthrough
with ceremonial stones. It is called the Turner Falls
Airport, that in 2008 was the rst determination of
eligibility for a site that had ceremonial stones.
ank you, National Register for proving that
we were wrong. We assumed that if the Federal
Aviation Administration teamed up with some-
body in Washington D.C. to make a determina-
tion, that we did not have a chance, but that was
not the case. What we were told when we visited
the National Register is that we will give you a fair
hearing. We will give you a fair hearing and a fair
hearing is what we got. As a result, in December of
2008 was a National Register determination, much
to the displeasure of the state archaeologist of Mas-
sachusetts whose opinion was also published.
is, is also on that same hill. It is a stone row.
Some of the stones have been knocked down, but
this is an oval stone at a break. is is another oval
stone at that break, and o-center is this stone. at
creates a triangle. If you stand on the base of this
triangle, you are standing perpendicular to Mount
Pocumtuck, 15-1/2 miles away. August 11th, 12th,
13th, in that time frame the sun sets in a notch on
Mount Pocumtuck, 15-1/2 miles away.
It was that evidence that we presented to the
National Register to say that this is a place of cere-
mony, this is a ceremonial calendar. Our ancients,
for all of their proper reasons, identied this as a
ceremonial calendar. What do we nd coinciden-
tal with it? is is the highest concentration of a
Perseid meteor shower. It happens at this particular
time when the sun sets in that notch. Coincidental
with that, the Narragansett now are in the 340th
recorded year of an annual August meeting, an
August celebration. Some refer to it as a harvest
celebration. It happens coincidentally at this time
of year.
One of the key elements in it is an acknowl-
edgement of families who have lost loved ones
during the year. ey come into the circle from the
149
northeast and dance around towards the south-
west. Later on, there is an acknowledgment of the
individual families who have been lost. At this
time of year, for many tribes, this is the time of the
year when the deceased come as spirits across the
sky out of the northeast into the southwest toward
Kautontawit’s House, which is the preferred spot in
the western area for spirits to reside. We take all of
this coincidence and we acknowledge that we have
a landscape that has been created by our ancients.
is is on the Narragansett Indian reservation.
We were putting together a health center. e area
where they wanted to put the health center was on
the edge of a bowl. e bowl had ceremonial stone
groupings in it, so we said, we have got to have a
survey here. At that point, we had developed a sys-
tem of survey. at system of survey was developed
from the Turner Falls Airport experience. When
we went to our elder Medicine Man and we said,
“We are not going to win this one. It is clear that
the Federal Aviation Administration and the town
are mounting a battle. What do we do?”
He said, “In battling against the public and the
government, in trying to protect these places, do
not lead with oral history or with Tribal law. Allow
the landscape to speak for itself. Let the lore and
the oral history stand as its witness.”
When I got that piece of advice, I stepped out
of his oce knowing that I had the answer. It only
took me three days to gure out, I did not know
what the hell he was talking about. How do you
let a landscape speak for itself? I did not know. I
began to ask and I began to ask in ceremony. Ulti-
mately a few people began to surface in that region.
ere is one woman who is now part of our cere-
monial landscape survey work, who had identied
80 distinct ceremonial stone landscapes, and had
them mapped. She came forward with that. She
had been looking at ceremonial stone landscapes
since she was taken into the woods at age eight and
shown them.
Creator and the ancestors began to deliver the
people with all of the pieces of the puzzle. At the
reservation, one of the things that we found was
that we had buried, because you could only see
the very top of this, we had buried a seat for ob-
serving astronomical events. is is a young man
of the tribe sitting in that seat. is is the seat out
of silhouette. You can see at the very top of it, the
area that was visible. Just that. Once the area was
cleared, we realized we in fact did have a seat. e
photograph that I do not have is the back side of
this, that has a face. I will make sure in the future
that that is available.
It is time? ank you. I am much slower than I
thought I would be. Where I will go with this is that,
those set of alignments from that seat. at is one of
the stones that it is visualizing. is is a signal rock.
is is a chamber, a hassunnegk, our word for stone
chamber. is is an alignment for looking at ... at
is a seat, another seat. is is for looking at the Big
Dipper at the time of the Equinox. is is another
egy gure and I’ll make my transition with this.
ank you so much for checking me on my time.
is is a whale egy. A whale egy, with that
I would like to make this transition into our sub-
merged landscape work, where Dr. Ella Sekatau
gave us the pearl that we needed. at was that
more than 15,000 years ago the ancient villages of
the Narragansett were out where the ocean is now.
Where the ocean is now was an open vegetated plain
15,000 years ago. erefore, we can ask the question,
how will federal undertakings determine the pres-
ence or absence of those cultural resources out on
the continental shelf? I turn it over to my colleague.
Doug Jones
ank you, Val. ank you everybody else for
allowing us to be part of this today. anks, Doug,
for giving me a hard act to follow there. Doug’s
presentation did provide an eloquent illustration of
one of the primary objectives of the project that I am
going to be discussing, which is how do we as Fed-
eral regulators and Federal agencies utilize that vast
Tribal knowledge, to the extent that we are allowed
to be included in that Tribal knowledge, towards our
regulatory responsibilities? From an archaeological
perspective, how do we move past the conceptual or
theoretical approach of maritime cultural landscapes
toward actually nding, identifying, and managing
these sites oshore during our Section 106 process?
150
I think Brandi Carrier said yesterday in her talk,
how do we move past simply avoiding potential
paleo landforms that we observe in geophysical
data, and approving or denying Outer Continen-
tal Shelf (OCS) development projects based on
an assumption of what may or may not be pres-
ent, rather than based on actual, real data on that
presence or absence? Towards that end, in 2012,
the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management entered
into a cooperative agreement with the University of
Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography
and with the Narragansett Tribal Historic Pres-
ervation Oce to develop and fund a study titled
“Developing Protocols for Reconstructing Sub-
merged Paleo-Cultural Landscapes and Identifying
Ancient Native American Archaeological Sites in
Submerged Environments.” Or, since that does not
t on our PowerPoint Slide, just the “Submerged
Paleo-Cultural Landscapes Project.”
e study is being co-led by Dave Robinson
and John King at the University of Rhode Island,
and by Doug Harris of the Narragansett, and the
BOEM technical lead is Brian Jordan, who I am
sure most if not all of you are familiar with. He is
our Headquarters archaeologist and Federal Pres-
ervation Ocer. Unfortunately he was not able to
be here this week, so he asked me to give a brief
overview of this project in his place. Before I do, I
will back up a little bit.
We showed this slide once or twice yesterday,
but to go over a little bit about our BOEM pro-
gram, we manage oshore energy development for
around 1.6 billion acres on the outer continental
shelf. Our regulatory program is split up into three
separate program areas: oil and gas, renewable
energy, and marine minerals, which is essentially
sand and gravel extraction for coastal restoration
projects. Underlying and supporting those three
program areas is a fourth program area, which is
the Environmental Studies Program. is program
is mandated by the Outer Continental Shelf Lands
Act, which is the underlying Federal legislation
that gives the Department of the Interior responsi-
bility over OCS energy management.
e mission statement of the Environmental
Studies Program is to provide the information
needed to predict, assess, and manage impacts
from oshore energy and marine mineral explo-
ration and from development and production
activities on human, marine, and coastal envi-
ronments. It is another mouthful, but essentially
this program is a funding mechanism, whereby
our agency can conduct sound scientic studies,
the results of which are then fed back into our
decision-making process for all of our regulatory
program activities; again, oil and gas, renewable
energy and marine minerals. Since the 1990s,
BOEM has funded more than $14 million in ar-
chaeology related studies nationwide.
Several of those studies have attempted to an-
swer some of the questions we have been talking
about over the past couple days, namely trying to
model paleo-landscape recreations along all of our
coastlines. In the Atlantic, we had a recent study
in 2012 to inventory and analyze both ancient and
historic archaeological sites and assess archaeo-
logical site potential along the Atlantic coast OCS.
at study built on a few previous studies that
covered the entire Atlantic coast dating back to
the 1970s and early 1980s; one that covered from
Florida to Cape Hatteras [NC], and another from
Cape Hatteras up to Maine. ere have also been
more recent studies in the Gulf of Mexico and
Pacic, some which Dave Ball mentioned in his
talk yesterday.
One common limitation of all those studies
has been that they are essentially desktop studies
that necessarily have a very broad level of analysis
toward landscape recreations and modeling sea
level change. ey more or less look at the bath-
tub model because they are looking at the entire
coastline and have these very coarse hypotheses or
models about what site potential looks like on the
outer continental shelf because they are looking
at such a broad area. Of course, this does not take
into account the localized type of changes that are
really the determining factors in site preservation,
whether the site’s low lying areas are quickly inun-
dated and preserved or whether they are exposed
longer during the marine transgression process and
eectively obliterated throughout that destructive,
erosional process.
151
As one example that came up in this study that
John King had pointed out, and something that I,
particularly as a shipwreck guy, had never really
thought about, but as sea level rises so too does the
surrounding water table. At the project area that is
being studied here o the coast of Rhode Island, as
the sea level rose relatively rapidly between 15,000
and 6,000 years ago, you also had a corresponding
inland water level rise where inland lakes were
expanding or in some cases being created. en, as
those continued to expand, you had a subsequent
wider area that was attractive to Native American
use, and as those lakes continued to expand those
sites would be covered and theoretically preserved
and protected in a fairly benign ooding environ-
ment. By the time that the saltwater intrusion ac-
tually happened several thousand years later, those
sites might still be intact.
ose are the kinds of higher resolution data
that our previous studies were not able to capture.
Additionally, those studies did not include any eld
work components to attempt to ground truth the
modeling conclusions that they were coming up
with. Nor did they incorporate tribal oral histo-
ries or true tribal partners in the research designs.
ose are all limitations that this current study was
attempting to address. Namely, by bringing togeth-
er scientic knowledge from archaeologists and ge-
ologists, along with tribal knowledge and perspec-
tives, to create a best practices approach that can be
used by government resource managers to identify
and evaluate submerged paleo-cultural landscapes
and any preserved sites that they may contain.
I will just briey go over the specics of this
study. It is a fairly straightforward research design.
ere were four primary research areas beginning
inland and near shore areas and then moving in
a more or less linear transect out to the OCS. e
rst area is in the north part of Greenwich Bay,
specically Gorton Pond and Cedar Tree Beach,
which is an area in North Greenwich Bay that has
an abundance of Native American artifacts; points
and akes have been washing up on the beach and
being collected by locals for decades. e artifacts
themselves go back to at least 9,000 years I believe,
if not a little bit older than that.
e second study area is o of Block Island,
where we are looking at some analogous sites on
the western side of the island. e third study
area is called e Mudhole, which is one of these
former fresh water lakes that is east of current
Block Island. en nally, the Rhode Island and
Massachusetts areas of mutual interest, the large
red box in the lower right. It is an area of mutual
interest for a potential oshore renewable energy
development. e PIs for this study have outlined
a desired best practices approach that, at least
initially, has taken a ve-step process towards
looking at these sites.
e rst is a paleo-environmental reconstruc-
tion of known preserved land forms and preserved
archaeological sites in the inland environment. e
second step is to create a predictive model of site
locations based on seismic data oshore. en, to
take that merged Tribal knowledge along with the
remote sensing data, with the archaeological and
geological data, and reconstruct potential sub-
merged paleolandscapes. Finally, we ground-truth
those areas with the hopes of identifying sites and
moving on to excavation.
Along with this, but arguably equally as import-
ant to the eld work and data collection aspects
of the study, are objectives that are aimed more
toward the interest of Tribal coordination that was
at the heart of this study. ose additional eorts
include a series of multi-day workshops between
scientic, Tribal, and government regulatory per-
sonnel. ere have been two of those so far with
plans potentially for a third. ose meetings are
intended to come to an agreement, or at least have
a discussion about mutual needs between all the
parties, and everybody’s recommendation for best
practices. What works? What does not work? What
do they hope to see out of this project? What are
the next steps that should be taken?
Also there is an eort to train Tribal scientists
during this project. ere were several members of
the Narragansett that are now students at URI and
have successfully completed scientic diver train-
ing through the university. ey have been in-
volved with every step of the eld work so far, with
the hope that they will, as their careers progress,
152
pass that scientic expertise and that diving exper-
tise onto the next generation of tribal scientists
(Figure 1). Finally, there is a documentary lm that
is being developed throughout this process as well,
and I will show a short clip of the most recent
YouTube video of that at the conclusion.
I think I mentioned that this is a four-year study.
We are currently just wrapping up year three. e
rst year was focused on the Greenwich Bay part
of the study area. ere were basically coring and
diver excavations up in Greenwich Bay, along with
some geophysical magnetometer surveys. Year one
and year two were focused on that area. Year three,
we spent some time o of Block Island. A State of
Rhode Island archaeologist and an archaeologist
with the Mashantucket Pequot have been doing
some work on the island following Hurricane San-
dy, which exposed a lot of paleo-land forms on the
island itself.
Recently, some in situ trees in their original
growth positions and some exposed peat layers
were observed extending out to the west of the
island in the surf zone. We went back out with
Dave Robinson and the Tribal divers this past
summer to do a preliminary mapping of how far
that landscape extended out into the water. We
mapped out 40 to 50 meters before it was covered
over by the sand. ere was cultural material that
was preserved in that peat layer, as you can see in
some of those photographs (Figure 2). I believe for
year four, next year, the plan is to do a little bit
more work on mapping the area in Block Island
and also do additional coring and AUV surveys in
the OCS areas of the study, the Mudhole, and the
AMI (Area of Mutual Interest).
at is pretty much it. I will just conclude here
with a short clip from the documentary I men-
tioned. It is about two minutes long, and this just
will let you hear for yourselves from the words of
some of the Tribal participants and partners that
we have had, and what they have gotten out of this
project and hope to see moving forward.
Video
Tribal Diver 1 [Norman Machado, Narragansett
Indian Tribe]: But I do not only do this for myself,
I do this for my Tribe. I do this for my ancestors. I
do this for my son; I do this for my daughter. I do
this for the generations to come.
Tribal Diver 2 [Chali Machado, Narragansett Indi-
an Tribe]: It is very important to me because I am
very passionate about the people and obviously the
ancestors. is is a legacy for all Tribes, because it
is not just my people, it is all of us, we are all one. If
it is important to us, then Indian Country should
nd it important also and maybe look into it. If
they saw the things that we have found, they would
understand that.
Tribal Diver 1 [Norman Machado, Narragansett
Indian Tribe]: It is scientic in the research, all
that you usually do not nd them connect with the
spiritual and cultural world. What we are doing is
we are out in the eld searching for those things.
Figure 1: Narragansett Indian Tribal member and University of
Rhode Island student Chali Machado investigates an exposed
ca. 6,500 year old tree trunk and root structure o Block Island,
RI. Photo by David Robison, University of Rhode Island Grad-
uate School of Oceanography
Figure 2: URI divers record cultural material embedded with-
in a ca. 6,500 year old peat layer o Block Island, RI. Photo by
David Robison, University of Rhode Island Graduate School
of Oceanography
153
Scientist 1 [David Robinson, URI]: ose of
us who are doing the excavations are not just
non-Tribal scientists, but also Tribal scientists.
ey are the ones who are doing the majority of
the excavation work to identify cultural materials
and they are really taking an active leadership role
in the day to day operations out on site. We have
got young people that we’re working with, for some
of them, this is their rst opportunity at managing
and directing work in the underwater. is project,
because of the benign conditions that we are work-
ing in, it is close to shore, the water is quite shallow.
It is a perfect opportunity, it is a perfect classroom
for training the next generation of underwater ar-
cheologists who are also tribal archeologists in the
work that we are doing.
Scientist 2 [Doug Harris, Narragansett Indian
Tribe]: ese young people who we are training, it
would be my hope that with the inspiration of the
ancestors, they will reread the laws that we have
read and they will interpret the nuances that we
may have not yet interpreted. ey will push the
law to better serve tribal historic preservation.
Doug Jones
Sorry, that is the end of the audio. Sorry about
the lag there. is computer didn’t like that video.
ank you.
Doug Harris is a veteran of more than twenty years
of training and service to the cultural resource
mission of the Narragansett Indian Tribal Historic
Preservation Oce. He is a Deputy Tribal Historic
Preservation Ocer with a Tribal specialization as
Preservationist for Ceremonial Landscapes. In the
BOEM-sponsored partnership between the Uni-
versity of Rhode Island Graduate School of Ocean-
ography and the Narragansett Indian Tribal Histor-
ic Preservation Oce, Harris serves with Principal
Investigator, Dr. John King and David Robinson,
Co-Principal Investigator, in a ve-year research
project to establish protocols for determining the
presence/absence of ancient Tribal cultural re-
sources in submerged Paleo-cultural landscape
environments o the coast of Rhode Island on the
Atlantic Continental Shelf.
Doug Jones is the Senior Marine Archaeologist for
BOEM’s Gulf of Mexico Region. Jones has been with
BOEM for ve years and has worked as a profes-
sional marine archaeologist for fourteen years, with
a research focus on mid-nineteenth to mid-twen-
tieth century shipwrecks and general Gulf of Mex-
ico maritime history. Mr. Jones received his MA
from East Carolina University’s Maritime Studies
Program in 2007. His current responsibilities with
BOEM include Section 106 reviews of BOEM-per-
mitted oil and gas development and marine min-
eral extraction activities; oversight of archaeology
studies funded through the agency’s Environmental
Studies Program; scientic diving projects in associ-
ation with BOEM studies and interagency partner-
ships; and regional tribal consultation liaison.
154
Edited Transcript of Presentation
ank you, everybody. ank you for the invita-
tions. ank you to the people whose land, people
who call this place home. Because of time I’m going
to try and keep this short, so bear with me. I kind
of have three parts here. I apologize, but I kind of
need some stage setting before we can get to what, I
think, is the cool part with the pretty pictures.
First o you may have heard yet another land-
scape study project out there. Valerie Grussing
mentioned it, a couple of other people have, and
this is the Tribal Cultural Landscapes Project. It
is a little bit dierent. It’s a little bit unique from
other projects that are agency driven in that this
one started from a tribal perspective. It was initi-
ated by tribal response. It was found to be of value
by a federal agency, and that led to yet another
unique element, which was collaboration between
tribes. For the West Coast project that BOEM was
initiating, we received one of those lovely letters
that THPOs get: “Hey we’re doing cool things, tell
us everything you know about it”. We hate those
letters. is was a unique opportunity because nor-
mally we just brown le. In this case it was, “No,
this is signicant”. Here’s an agency that actually
is listening, so let’s turn this around. Let’s say we
appreciate what you’re aer, but you’re missing the
voice and perspective that can actually give, from
a tribal position, value and meaning to what you’re
aer.
ere it is. Meaningful consultation is what we’re
actually aer. We proposed, let’s look at developing
a methodology. Let’s look at proposing recommen-
dations at the conclusion, and let’s run a case study
to see if the methodology has legs. It’s great to have
ideas, but if it’s not going to work, if it’s not actually
going to make people's lives easier, it’s just going to
fall to the wayside. e products out of this propos-
al were an analysis guide and a case study.
e core participants were BOEM, NOAA, (the
Marine Sanctuaries Program), the tribes: Grand
Ronde, Macaw, Urlock, as well as 27 other tribes
and 25 federal and state agencies. You think getting
two guys to agree on something is hard, it’s a mir-
acle. We started from a position of, we’ve got this
concept, we kind of all have a sense of where we
want to go with it, but because we’re dealing with
agencies and we want something that has legs and
longevity, let’s nd a denition. at’s where we
started: let’s get a denition established and created
by tribes that other tribes can get on board with.
en let’s see how well that denition will stand
with technical sta in agencies. Whether it’s the
SHPOs, or the THPOs, how’s it going to do with
the Forest Service or National Parks? So we held
workshops. What we got out of this is that’s pretty
much the denition along with some modication.
It took a good solid 12 hours on day one to come
up with that.
It’s pretty simple. Loosely translated to “Tribes
say what’s important to tribes or to indigenous
groups*.” You’ll notice that’s there with an asterisk
because not all indigenous groups have federal
recognition. Whether it’s Hawai‘i, Alaskan corpo-
rations. is isn’t, and for those of you in federal
agencies, it's going to be your hurdle to determine
how you choose or not to apply this. Tribes deter-
mine what’s important to them. at’s not at the
exclusion of any other tribes understanding.
For instance, at Mount Hood, Grand Ronde
holds a lot of understanding about that place, about
the practices that go on there, and our neighboring
tribes also have connection. Our understanding
doesn’t exclude the others. is kind of comes back
to what was brought up yesterday, the multiple
lenses of understanding a landscape, whether we
dial it in for whaling perspectives, or whether we’re
dialing it in for the spiritual understanding across
the landscape, or world history epics. I’m going to
quickly try to page through this.
We came up with a framework to use. One of
the key points that came out of this amongst the
e Grand Ronde:
Linking Tribal Cultural Landscapes and MCLs
Briece Edwards
Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde
155
tribes that we were engaging with is to stop fo-
cusing on place. It’s good archeo training to start
from nding a place, but when it comes to actual-
ly understanding a landscape, shi the lens, take a
half step over. Look at it from a place of practice.
Once you understand practice it’s a lot easier to
go nd a place, and when you do nd place you’ll
actually have a better concept of what you’re
looking at. at’s easy to say from a West Coast
perspective. With tribes there’s a lot more under-
standing that’s not as fragmented as you nd in
other places in the country—but that information
still resides out there. It’s professionals scratching
the surface, digging a little deeper into it; looking
at how wide; looking for bounds. Looking for
ways of dening the extent of a shell midden or
the distribution.
One thing that we came up with in tribal
understanding is, again, shi the perspective,
step away from the desire to go with the intent
of drawing lines, but let’s say no. e landscape
is as big as it needs to be. It goes as far as it goes
until you stop thinking about it. It’s hard to put
a line around that and it probably makes every
federal agency cringe a bit, but we’re talking about
identication practices here. Not regulatory, not
enforcement, not necessarily protection, we’re
talking about identication. e other thing is,
and I already mentioned this, one tribe’s under-
standing, one group's, one individual's under-
standing is going to be dierent than another’s.
is approach is to be all-encompassing.
Now, again, I’m going to delve into a kind of
perspective here. You’ve seen this model in a lot of
dierent ways. Most of you have addressed this in
dierent ways—tangible, intangible concepts. We
use a model of a tree. Trust me, if I could make that
model cedar or spruce, I’d be much happier. Oaks
work too. Imagine culture as a tree. You’ve got the
tangible, that’s the part you can see. It’s very expan-
sive, it goes all the way out to the leaves of inti-
mate knowledge—the individual's experience on
a landscape. For everything you see above ground
it’s also reected below surface; that intangible, that
out of sight, but you know that it’s there. It’s as far
reaching. Any of you who do forestry or have been
ground foresters, the root system is as broad as the
reach of the branches above ground. Same concept
applies here. at is one of the founding elements,
one of the Legos, if you will, that we were operating
with when we set this up.
Methodology. is is a really simple method:
conceptualization, data acquisition, tear reference,
synthesis, and presentation. e cool parts in the
data acquisition and the synthesis. Presentation is
this: we set out with another kind of side board on
this project which was sensitive information—what
are we not going to present? We have elders telling
us, we have other traditionalists in the community
saying “We don’t want to talk about this.” We said
“No problem. How about if we can nd it printed
and published, or somehow already in the public
domain? Are you good with that?” Begrudgingly,
yes, so that’s where we went.
Oregon has had a lot written about it. ere’s
been a whole spread of historical work done in the
late 1800s, early 1900s, with a lot of world history
recorded. We sat down and went through those
ethnographic eld notes line-by-line and recorded
every man, animal, mineral, vegetable and place.
Where a sentence may refer to multiple things, you
kind of categorize or pigeonhole in each one. en
we geo referenced it.
What we came up with is that, as a resolution
on that, the further away we get from shore we get
a broader understanding, but it’s still a valid pre-
sentation of what’s understood out there from a
land-based community. What you’re seeing there
is the three study areas that we took. ese are
dened on land area, land forms, concentrations of
data, and diversity of information. e other side
board that we were operating on is a traditional
understanding of the landscape. Roughly on three
levels that would be described as time in western
concept. I apologize for the word historic. If you
imagine today, we feel our understanding of the
landscape is rm. We understand it because we
have a rst person experience with it. We have a
greater reliance on that understanding. Take a look
further back in time and we get a little less con-
dent. Maybe the sources we’re not familiar with
or we’re using newspaper articles from the 1820s,
there was yellow journalism, it’s a little spotty, but
156
the information is still there and you kind of pick
and pull, kind of squint and make sure that it ts
right.
With the Grand Ronde tribes, those that make up
the confederation, we also had the Ikanham. at’s
that myth time. at’s that time that sits in the back.
at’s the stories of south wind. at’s the stories of
coyote. ese are the foundations of understand-
ing life, how they live it correctly, how they read
that book that you’re seeing there. at landscape
is a chapter. Each component on that is a chapter
of understanding. It’s far back in time, so we have,
supposedly, a lot less reliance on what it’s telling us
in a western lens. What we did is we compressed all
that information, it’s all equal, in a dataset.
Quick notion of data sources: one of the rst
and foremost, and one that is oen forgotten, is
what’s actually happening there today. We want
to see tribes, indigenous understanding as some-
thing in the past—still canoeing on the ocean. I
love pointing out that they are these points. ose
red spots on the map are places where South Wind
set the world, or elements of the world, in order.
at’s a map of Lewis and Clark. It gives us great
ethnic graphic information. I’ll point out all this
cultural and tribal understanding in the landscape
and whaling and this and that and like “Oh, really”.
Lewis and Clark recorded it, “Oh, that’s really right
o n .”
is is an interesting point. ere’s a single point
of landform there. Surviving today, the lower le of
the foundations of that middle site and dock that
you see there photographed in the 1880s, 1890s.
at’s an advertisement from the Portland newspa-
per for taking the boat, I think Astoria, down the
general miles. Now the general miles had a crew
member on crew, a tribal member on crew coming
in. On their photograph there’s a plank house on
the top of that hill behind the mill. Half the mill
workers were tribal members, and, as you’ll see
later, that entire bay, Tilamek Bay, is a stories land-
scape going back to time immemorial.
I’m going to wrap up very quickly, with two
things. is is what taking all those data points
look like together—language, places, place names,
nal resources that have been recorded. e size of
the dot refers to how many times that boat shows
up in historical records and archaeological sight,
and then the amalgamation of all of them. What
that looks like when you start learning lines of
site between them because that seems to be a key
variable. is is the tool that we can use for man-
agement and development of future plans in the
area—so that we can start engaging with all of the
proprietary information behind the scenes. We
don’t run the risk of violating taboo, but we’ve now
got a tool and a mechanism to start talking. I’ll
point out there are some very cool hot spots o-
shore. is is all land-based for the most part, but
you see hot spots where there are strong cultural
connection based on lines of sight. With that, and
paleo-landscape stu, we can talk about that. Δ
Briece Edwards is archaeologist for the Con-
federated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of
Oregon, based in the Tribal Historic Preservation
Oce. He coordinates cultural resource actions
on Tribal Lands as well as develops and maintains
the Tribe’s Site Inventory. As an archaeologist, he is
dedicated to developing partnerships with agencies
and organizations for the protection of cultural
resources throughout the Tribe’s ceded lands. He
serves as the Tribe’s Cultural Resources compliance
review contact for multiple state and federal agen-
cies, as well as coordinating interns and special
projects within the THPO/Cultural Resources
Protection Program. He has also been responsible
for the development of the Program’s GIS system
to record, track, and monitor cultural resources of
importance to the Tribe, as well as the Traditional
Cultural Landscape Project. Briece has a BA in An-
thropology from the University of Maryland, MA
from North Carolina State University, and MPhil
from the University of Bradford.
157
Edited Transcript of Presentation
I’m here to talk about the Bad River Water & Cul-
ture Maps Project: Countermapping with the Bad
River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. As Val men-
tioned, my research partner is Edith Leoso. She’s
the Bad River Tribal Historic Preservation Ocer
and she was going to be speaking today as well, but
I’m here to let you know about this project that I
did as part of my Ph.D. research here at UW Madi-
son. Let’s get started.
ese are my funders and sponsors. is is
community-based research, so this image shows
the many small contributions that made this proj-
ect happen. So here’s what we’re up to today. I’m
talking about participatory mapping of Traditional
Ecological Knowledge (TEK). I’m going to tell you
a little bit about the people and the place, and then
talk about process cartography to reect and lever-
age traditional knowledge.
is is qualitative mapping, so we leverage story
and narrative alongside quantitative data about
watersheds. en I’ll nish up by talking about the
impacts of this project: local, regional, educational,
and policy. To get oriented, we’re up here on the
Great Lakes, western Lake Superior. is is Amer-
ica’s north coast. e Apostle Islands; Dave Coo-
per was talking to you about these yesterday. e
Apostle Islands are the spiritual and cultural hub
for Lake Superior Ojibwe people. e Bad River In-
dian Reservation is right there at the southern end
of the islands. Here’s a zoom-in on the Bad River
watershed and reservation. e light green shape
les show the Bad River watershed boundary and
then the light brown is showing the reservation
boundary.
e water ows north here out of the Penokee
Mountains into Lake Superior. at describes the
Nest of the underbirds that Edith Leoso was go-
ing to be talking to you about today. at’s the Nest,
that light green boundary there. is is an image of
the Penokee Mountains. ese rise eleven hundred
feet above the level of Lake Superior and then again
water ows north there. is is a very water-rich en-
vironment, rich in wetlands, waterfalls, and springs.
is is the headwaters of the Bad River, so this is one
of the headwater wetlands of the Bad River water-
shed. In Ojibwe, this is MashkiiZiibi which means
“wetland medicine river.” It got renamed the “Bad,”
but that’s a story for another day. Here is a picture
of one of the waterfalls in the highlands. is is on
Tyler Forks, which is one of the main tributaries of
the Bad River. en here’s one of the reservation
beaches, so where the Bad River comes out into
Lake Superior, this is what it looks like there.
is is the crown jewel of the Bad River Reser-
vation. is is called the Bad River and Kakagon
Sloughs. is is the largest coastal estuary that’s
intact on Lake Superior. It’s also the largest intact
wild rice bed on all of the Great Lakes. Here you
can see the Bad River coming out and then you can
see one of the old oxbows there. You can also see
on the bottom of the photograph some of the wild
rice beds. On the top of the photograph is a smaller
river called Kakagon coming out into the west-side
of this slough. is is an enormous cultural and
ecological resource that the Bad River Band are
stewards of. ese are the wild rice beds. Zooming
in on the sloughs, this is what it looks like when
you’re in a boat on the water and you’re looking at
the rice. Here’s a close-up of wild rice. Wild rice is
food that grows on water.
Lake Superior Ojibwe people were guided to
this place by prophecy, a migration story, which
is their origin story: from the east coast, up what’s
now called the Saint Lawrence Seaway, to the place
where food grows on water. is area was the
seventh stopping place and the place that then be-
came, like I said, the spiritual and cultural hub for
all of Lake Superior Ojibwe on the US and Canada
side. Again, it’s an enormous ecological and cul-
tural resource that the Bad River are keeping. is
is a picture of the Manoomin pow wow. In Lake
Superior Ojibwe tradition, the women are the
Bad River Water and Culture Maps Project:
Countermapping with Bad River Ojibwe
Jessie Conaway
University of Wisconsin
158
keepers of the water, and so here they’re depicted.
is is the Midewiwin, or women of the medicine
lodge, who are doing a water ceremony in these
copper kettles. Many of these of copper kettles
have been passed down for many generations.
You might have heard of Grandmother Josephine
Mandamin, who’s the Midewiwin of Lake Superior
Ojibwe from Grand Portage. She’s walked around
all of the Great Lakes in ceremonies for Great
Lakes water stewardship. ese ceremonies are a
big part of water stewardship.
For my project, I worked with youth and elders
in cultural mapping. is is a picture of two of
my helpers, Joe Rose, Sr., is on the le, and then
Tia Burns is one of my youth helpers. is project
resulted in four maps and four media: a cultural
atlas, a wall map, a web map that the tribal youth
made, and then also an enormous interactive wa-
tershed oor map that’s twenty by thirty feet, and
that has traveled all over the state. We wanted to
make maps for use and outreach, education, and
policy. Also, I wanted to, as an academic, contrib-
ute to best practices for outsiders and university
people who are working in indigenous communi-
ties and participatory mapping. I built on the work
of GLIFWC, the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wild-
life Commission. ey produce this Ojibwemowin,
Ojibwe language map. e pink on the bottom is
the Bad River Reservation. What we did was zoom
in on the reservation to map more of the local plac-
es that this larger area map did not depict.
What did this look like on the ground? is is
community-based research that we launched last
year. It took two years of planning and execution,
and then, like I said, it was launched in 2014.
Working with elders and youth, the goal was that
this was decolonizing, so collaborative, tribally-led,
using indigenous research methods, having local
research partners who are tribal members from the
community, and bringing in tribal priorities, such
as language. If you’re not familiar with the term,
“countermapping” means using western mapping
methods for indigenous purposes, and so that’s
where that term comes from. We’re leveraging a
counter-narrative. If I’m a tourist visiting Madeline
Island, for example, I might hear one narrative of
the people who are living there now, the Swedes
and the Finns, but the counter-narrative is a layer
below: the indigenous narrative, and so maps are
very eective at portraying this.
Also, with the Bad River watershed, recently you
may have heard, it didn’t hit the national media
too much, but you may have heard that a mine for
Taconite was being proposed in the headwaters of
the Bad River. is project helped to address that
threat in real time. is is a picture of the wall map.
In the process of making these, I interviewed thir-
teen elders and other community leaders in Bad
River. ey interacted with two large poster maps
with Mylar over them and then used sharpies and
stickers to indicate areas that told a particularly im-
portant story about water in the Bad River water-
shed, but also in the whole Ojibwe seated territo-
ries, which stretches across Michigan, Minnesota,
and Wisconsin. at was the rst layer of data.
I also worked with a youth group. We did a wa-
tershed education program called Bad River Youth
Outdoors. at was another part of my project,
which was team taught by myself and communi-
ty members in Bad River, elders, natural resource
employees. is was a four week program in which
we developed a campus based on the maps that the
elders had helped me produce and then we devel-
oped our campus for the youth based on that. en
the kids went to these places and added their own
layer of data to our story maps. is is a picture of
us paddling on MashkiiZiibi, which is now called in
English, the Bad River. ese kids were clicking way-
points, so here’s one of them with a GPS, so they’re
clicking waypoints and then adding audio and pho-
tos to their layer of data for these story maps. is is
us at Sugar Bush Lake—that was our holy grail. en
here, that’s a picture of Edith Leoso. is is us out on
Madeline Island on the Bad River tribal land that is
on the east/northeast end of the island. One of our
products was the wall map, like I mentioned. is is
us at our map launch at the pow-wow grounds. en
here’s a picture of the oor map that has, like I said,
traveled all over the state. We’re at an audience of
over ten thousand now for this oor map.
e web map and cultural atlas and wall map
are all Ojibwe perspectives. I’ll pass this around.
e oor map was a blank slate, so this is a pub-
159
lic conversation starter. is map is made out of
billboard material and people add stories to it with
sharpies about the Bad River watershed and the
Apostle Islands. ere’s a picture of myself and one
of my assistant instructors on the oor map. People
are interacting with it, so they’re adding place
names, they’re adding personal stories. ese are
tribal and non-tribal stories that get added to this.
We went spearing here, and this is the kids talking
about spearing for walleye on Namekagon. e
kids are excited about their map. is is Tia show-
ing o the web map that the kids made the follow-
ing winter at one of our public launches in 2014.
Stories are missing from watershed data, so when
we think about watersheds, it’s mostly numbers
that contribute to our academic understanding.
What we did with this project was to look at
how narratives from tribal people can be mapped
as a layer of data, multiple layers of data. Like I
said, youth and elders, to contribute to both tribal
and non-tribal understanding of that watershed
and that place. is project showed that water and
stories are both organizing forces in communities,
and they’re also a common ground for myself as
an academic and a paddler, working in a tribal
community. Water and stories were what we really
found as common ground. is use of narrative in
mapping is appropriate for representing traditional
knowledge. is is more of the academic backdrop
to it, if you’re interested in that: looking at maps as
a middle ground and creating learning communi-
ties to make this work happen, leveraging indige-
nous research methods, like I said, talking circles.
To make sure that the products that we were
launching—that everybody in the community was
okay with those—we did multiple community feed-
back sessions with dras of the maps. People would
weigh in on what they wanted in the maps, what
they didn’t want in the maps, and so we did com-
munity feedback sessions over about six months
with these maps. Edith also helped me with dis-
claimers for the maps. Trying to map indigenous
perspectives about a place doesn’t always jibe with
what someone might expect when they’re looking
at a map. e way we explained that, was we used
1 Act 31 is Wisconsin legislation related to Ojibwe treaties and includes funding for Ojibwe education.
disclaimers to explain more of the native perspec-
tive backdrop to how these maps are produced and
used. You’ll see some of these in the booklet that’s
going around, those disclaimers. To wrap up, I’ll
just key in on a couple of our impacts.
e Bad River Band wanted to use these for ed-
ucation and outreach and that has been awesome.
In our rst year the maps were at een events all
over the state. We’ve also developed curriculum for
the maps for teaching middle school, high school,
and college level, using Act 31 as a local native
education policy that was implemented aer the
Walleye Wars here in Wisconsin, and so we used
the Act 31 statutes to produce our curriculum for
these maps.
1
All of this is available on our website,
which is BadRiverMaps.Nelson.wisc.edu. You’ll see
more about the project there, as well as the maps
that are featured there. e maps are copyrighted
to the Bad River Tribe and so now those are on the
website as well and people can download those or
use them in the classroom.
e maps are also used by Bad River Tribal
Council in regional politics and also in sustainable
economic development planning. ey actually
have another version, a blank version of the enor-
mous oor map that they use for regional plan-
ning. ose are some unexpected impacts that are
also very rewarding, and so the maps are working.
is is a picture of us. Here at UW Madison we
hosted a UW Native Nations Summit this past year.
It was the rst time in a hundred years that we had
leadership and other representatives from all the
Wisconsin tribes here on campus. is was a cen-
tennial event. Here are many of the tribal leaders
on the oor map. at’s a way to stay in touch. Δ
Jessie Conaway holds a Master’s Degree in experi-
ential education from Minnesota State University
and a doctorate in Environment and Resources
from the Nelson Institute of UW Madison. Her
PhD minor is in Cartography and GIS. She is an
avid paddler and incorporates her role as an Ameri-
can Canoe Association kayak instructor trainer into
outreach and research. Jessie works on collaborative
youth education and environmental stewardship
160
with the Native Nations of Wisconsin. Current proj-
ects include: water conservation; cultural mapping;
environmental education and natural resource ca-
reer pathways for tribal youth; and climate change
adaptation. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and is
now Faculty Associate for Native Nations Engage-
ment, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies,
UW Madison as of 2016.
161
e session on the management and protection of
maritime cultural landscapes provided an oppor-
tunity for two federal agencies—the National Park
Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration—to explain how these essential
activities are undertaken in MCLs within their
jurisdictions. In her talk on Coastal Battleelds,
Kristen McMasters, an archeologist with the NPS
American Battleeld Protection Program, provid-
ed an overview of the ABPP, with emphasis on the
special issues raised by underwater battleelds and
submerged battle resources. Anna Gibson Hollo-
way, maritime historian with the NPS Maritime
Heritage Program, demonstrated the educational
opportunities available when historic tragedies are
interpreted for the public. In her talk, “USS Huron:
From National Tragedy to National Register,” she
discussed the 1877 storm o Nags Head, North
Carolina, that resulted in the sinking of the USS
Huron, en route to Cuba, and the changing land-
scape around the sunken ship.
Most of the papers in this session revolve
around maritime landscapes and military history,
but Susan Dolan extends our consideration to the
realities of management of these sites—and other
cultural landscapes—in the wake of the impacts of
climate change. Brad Barr, a Senior Policy Advisor
in NOAA’s National Marine Sanctuaries, Maritime
Heritage Program, revealed a story of Civil War
intrigue and destruction in his talk about the Con-
federate Sea Raider the CSS Shenandoah. His topic
raised several provocative questions, including,
what are the associated cultural landscapes, given
the Shenandoah’s circumnavigation via the western
Arctic? To conclude the session, Joe Hoyt, a mar-
itime archeologist with NOAA’s National Marine
Sanctuaries, focused on sites associated with World
War II and the Battle of the Atlantic. He described
research, conservation, and interpretation eorts
being taken at the Monitor National Marine Sanc-
tuary, which safeguards one of the few World War
II battle sites near American soil.
Barbara Wyatt
National Register of Historic Places/National
Historic Landmarks Program
National Park Service
7. Management and Protections
of MCLs
Introduction
162
Edited Transcript of Presentation
I work for the American Battleeld Protection
Program (ABPP), which is part of the National
Park Service (NPS); however, you will notice I’m
not in uniform. at’s because I work for an exter-
nal program. e NPS external programs, like the
National Register of Historic Places and the Na-
tional Heritage Areas, are meant to be of service to
outside communities and people outside of Nation-
al Park Service units. In some strange way I’m an
archeologist who is not assigned a national park.
Our legislation directs us to work with nonprots,
governments and local communities to steward
battleelds:
“…to assist citizens, public and private institu-
tions, and governments…in planning, interpret-
ing, and protecting sites where historic battles
were fought on American soil during the armed
conicts …,in order that present and future gen-
erations may learn and gain inspiration from the
ground where Americans made their ultimate
sacrice.” 16 USC 469k-1, as amended
We are fortunate to have an explicit mission
statement, because then we don’t have to live with
the mission creep other managers may suer. We
have Congress telling us what to do. We are to be
assisting citizens, the public, private institutions
and governments in planning and interpreting and
protecting battleelds. ey’re to be on American
soil or territories. at includes all the territo-
ries, from the U.S. Virgin Islands out to Saipan or
Guam, so we have a pretty big span. As long as I
can call our technical assistance “domestic”, we
can be helpful. We’re here to preserve and protect
battleelds in perpetuity.
We were a product of necessity, to Congress,
aer the Disney event near Manassas. Disney was
going to develop a theme park 30 years ago around
Manassas. at issue got settled with a very ex-
pensive Congressional “taking of land” or use of
eminent domain. Essentially the question morphed
to, “How many signicant or principal battleelds
are there out there that are going to cause these
kind of disasters, where the government has to
come in and purchase land?” e Park Service
did not know. We manage our own land, and we
didn’t have an inventory of what was out there in
the rest of the world. ere was no good systematic
survey or inventory of Civil War battleelds across
the U.S. We started with a survey and inventory of
historic sites. We ended up with 384 of principal
battleelds discussed in a 1993 report to Congress,
to give them the condition of these signicant bat-
tleelds throughout the nation.
ese battleelds really were the principal ones
in the nation that had an outcome that aected
the Civil War’s actual unfolding, or a campaign, or
a famous person. By 1996 it was clear to Congress
and the ABPP that not just Civil War battleelds
needed attention and assistance, so our grant abil-
ities were expanded to include helping any battle-
eld at any time period in the U.S. For example,
there were engagements in the U.S. Virgin Islands,
like the one between the Dutch and the British.
As long as the battleground is on American soil,
we can be involved.
We also have created reports to Congress that
prioritize battleelds and their endangered status.
By 1998 we were oering funds to buy Civil War
battleelds in fee purchase or in easement; to date
we have leveraged over $87 million dollars that
have been given to us by Congress for land acqui-
sition. As a matching program, that means there’s
an equal amount 50% out there, at least $87 million
dollars that someone else provided toward securing
battleelds. By 2003 we were asked by the Presi-
dent’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation
to be of assistance on battleelds that had adverse
projects as determined through the National
Historic Preservation Section 106 process. So now
we help our sister agencies to try to come up with
An Introduction to the American Battleeld Protection Program:
Working with Coastal Resources and Underwater Battleeld Archeology
Kristen McMasters
American Battleeld Protection Program
National Park Service
163
good mitigation eorts, or to identify the battle-
elds that are under threat from Federal action.
By 2007, we were asked to create an equivalent
report to Congress for Revolutionary War and War
of 1812 battleelds, and over 270 battleelds were
assessed in that report for their priority for their
threat, and for their signicance. at report, titled
“Report to Congress on the Historic Preservation
of Revolutionary War and War of 1812 Sites in the
United States,” is available on our website.
In 2010 we were asked to update the Civil War
reports, since they were already dated. ey are
also available on our website on a state by state ba-
sis and can be found under the title of “Update to
the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission Report
on the Nation’s Civil War Battleelds.”
We have a specic philosophy for preservation
with all our battleelds. We see battleelds as cul-
tural landscapes. Each has a unique history, unique
resources, and are within a unique community.
We look at local advocacy as key for stewardship,
and essential for preservation. I nd it interesting
today to hear many of the conference presentations
discuss the importance of having a shared lingua
franca, a common language, and a common meth-
odology. Because we have so many battleelds in
the nation we found the same issues. Our program
has become very rigorous in our methodology, and
very rigorous in our labeling of how we identify bat-
tleelds. e labeling and the method are the same
whether the resource is terrestrial or underwater.
Of all the criticisms I’ve heard over the years of
our studies, perhaps our 1993 study was most criti-
cized. It was not because we got the battle action in
the wrong place, but because we didn’t have un-
derwater resources identied quite correctly or as
expansively as we should have. I think we’ve made
great strides to change that with our updated stud-
ies. How we establish the battleeld boundaries has
expanded since 2004.
Let me take a moment and talk a little bit about
dening battleelds. For us, a battleeld is any
space that has been fought over. e space must
have gun re and must have been taken or received
by two governments in conict. We automatically
consider any tribal activity as government sanc-
tioned. e engagement does have to be an actual
exchange of re. We don’t look at massacres or sites
of civil disobedience. For example, the 9/11 site in
New York would not be considered a battleeld, nor
would some Tribal massacres of women and chil-
dren.
Most Americans cannot imagine the number of
battleelds that exist in the U.S. ere are 3,000 bat-
tleelds related to the Revolutionary War and War of
1812, and over 10,000 sites of Civil War engagements.
In this paper, I will just discuss the principle
battleelds, and how we deal with those. Principle
battleelds are those that have an inuence on a
major campaign or the outcome of the war. ere
are a whole lot more places of conict than just the
three wars I have mentioned: French and Indian
War; plenty of Indian wars in the West and the
Mexican-American War. ere are also lots of en-
gagement sites in the U.S. I have to smile in think-
ing what a moment in archeological time battle-
elds are. Many of our places of conict were only
for a few hours, and what a slight signature that
leaves in the archeological record! What an instant
they are, and how dierently we look at our dataset
for battleeld sites. We are far less concerned about
stratigraphy and dating items; if you’re at Gettys-
burg and you don’t know when that Minie ball ew
from the gun, you can guess it is within three days
in time in 1863. We have dierent concerns, and
underwater battleelds actually allow us a certain
amount of freedom to think dierently as well.
To understand the submerged battleeld, it is
important to see whole strata from prehistoric
layers, to the battle layer, to layers above—reect-
ing all the activities that have happened since the
conict. Our program focuses at that middle,
that battleeld layer. It’s not that we disregard the
upper layers, and it’s not that the lower layers aren’t
important. However, Congress gives us a mandate
for top consideration for the battle layer, and we
consider everything within the battle layer. We
consider that battle layer the “middle of the Oreo
cookie.” We hope our program will be protecting
that battle layer and the other layers will be swept
164
up in that action of stewardship. Everything below
and everything above hopefully will be maintained,
but our focus has to stay with the battle layer.
I’m going to explain how we identify our bat-
tleelds and how we put boundaries around them.
ere was a time when we would go to a historian,
and ask, “Hey, where’s the battle?” ey would
give us a blob on a map. We would oen go to the
National Register of Historic Places and ask for
the blob that’s on their maps. We would take that,
and that would be our blob and that would be
how we would look at it. Nowadays, we’re actually
looking a lot closer at our battleelds, and we start
by looking for dening features. We borrow that
term from the National Register of Historic Places:
key dening features. We assign dening features
for battleelds for any spot, any location, that can
be found where the conict happened: that “tree,”
that “bridge,” that “fence,” that “rock,” that “corner
of a building.” If a spot where conict happened
can be located, they can be referred to as a den-
ing feature.
at leaves out that General’s order, that concept,
that specic movement. What concentrating on the
ground does is to pin things to a three-dimensional
spot on the planet. What’s a little bit revolutionary
about our program is we have always considered
natural resources just as important as cultural re-
sources. at rock where Turkey Foot stood mat-
ters. at escarpment where the men hid matters.
at ravine, that dele, that water crossing all could
be a dening feature. Even that swamp could be an
obstacle to be removed by troops (that’s a very big
dening feature!) We’ve always looked at the natural
and cultural as being tightly linked.
Once you get your list of dening features, you
just put them on the ground on a map. Once we get
our dening features on the ground, then we put
a boundary around it, a Battleeld Boundary area.
All dening features have to be within the battle-
eld. We don’t have dening features outside of the
Battleeld Boundary. e heaviest area of ghting,
the area that saw perhaps the most action, the area
that really has a key outcome to your objectives,
1 Patrick Andrus. Guidelines for Identifying, Evaluating and Registering America's Historic Battleelds (Washington D.C.: Na-
tional Park Service, 1992;1999)
that one area that really is very important, it’s called
the Core Area.
As preservationists, we’re beginning to think
that concept might be a little outdated, and the
reason is that people tend to say, “Where’s the
core area? Well, that’s all we’re going to put on the
National Register. Where’s the core area? at’s all
we’re going to say. at’s the only land we’re going
to buy.” We really are having trouble with that con-
cept of Core Area as only being part of the whole,
and that may be actually deleted as a program term
in the future. We’ll have to see what our next stud-
ies bring us.
On top of the Battleeld Boundary and Core
Area, we impose what we call a Potential National
Register area or PotNR. Some sections on the pe-
riphery may be removed from the Potential National
Register area. It might have a Walmart on it or there
might be something that so erased the readability of
the battleeld that it’s just clear from driving around
that there’s nothing le. e determinations are
based on windshield surveys, and to archeologists, I
know, that’s not very welcoming. ese surveys can
be done in a couple of days. You pull together your
dening features as you have your rst look around.
It gives us a way to begin our understanding of the
battleeld. Grant funds enable us to ush out a bet-
ter understanding as we go.
How do we put this concept underwater? We
nd the dening features, then we create the Bat-
tleeld Boundary. We also show troop movements.
On old maps features might have looked dierently,
reects the whole idea of using dening features.
is is pretty consistent with National Register Bul-
letin 40; our system is just an elaboration.
1
All those dening features can actually be bro-
ken down even further. We’ve found in battleelds
that it’s important to use, again, the same lan-
guage among dierent time periods in dierent
parts of the country and dierent engagements.
All our dening features actually can fall within
one of these ve rubrics, and can be Key Terrain
or a Key Position. Some people call Key Terrain
165
also a decisive location. It might be the way you
know that you’ve reached your objective. If you’re
told as a military unit to go take Hill #409, then
Hill #409 is Key Terrain. It is your decisive posi-
tion or your objective. Observation and Fields of
Fire could be another type of dening feature. I
think some of you may have seen KOCOA analy-
sis out there, where Observation and Field of Fire
has been considered in marine settings.
2
is can
include looking around the corners of islands.
Anybody who can do that is really smart, but
having that eld of vision to be able to see or re
around the corners may really inuence how that
battleeld event turns out.
Being able to see through fog, being able to deal
with weather, being able to deal with water cur-
rent patterns may be other factors in considering
battleeld outcomes. Conceal and Cover are terms
also within KOCOA. It is the reverse of what can
be seen. If you can’t be seen because of fog, or you
can’t be seen because you’re around the corner of
an island, then that’s concealment and cover. I was
on a plane once and I asked a military guy if he
knew what KOCOA was and, of course, he said
they teach it in basic training. I wish I was smart
enough to make up the system myself. e only
thing I did was apply KOCOA to archeology. I once
asked the dierence between Concealment and
Cover, and I was told, “Well, if you’re concealed,
the enemy can’t see to shoot you. If you’re covered,
the enemy can’t actually shoot you.” He said he’d
pick cover every time. I like that explanation.
Obstacles are those funny features that get in the
way of mobility or movement. A swamp can be an
obstacle. It can stop you from moving around on
the battleeld. In a marine setting it could be an
obstacle of wind, it could be an obstacle of current,
it could be an obstacle of getting into a river set-
ting. e obstacles can be many, and in an avenue
of approach the question is, how did you get to the
Field of Fire, or how did you get to that place of
contest? When did you know it began, and when
did it end, as the edges of the battleeld’s avenue of
approach?
2 KOCOA stands for Key Terrain Observation and Fields of Fire, Cover and Concealment, Obstacles, Avenues of Approach.
For all these principal battleelds—the 384 of
them we’ve done with this KOCOA system, the
270-plus for the Rev War and War of 1812—we
have them all in GIS. I oered to Jimmy Moore
with BOEM, if he thought that would be useful,
we’d be happy to share all that GIS data so that you
know where we think battleelds are right now.
We can be helpful with that. You don’t have to do
this from scratch, even though you might want to
challenge our thoughts and our ndings.
Here’s a way that we can rethink some of our
underwater resources. If you look at Credit Island
in Iowa, look at the most likely British gun posi-
tion. KOCOA ideas are imposed on the known
history to predict the gun location. Now, one
thing we’re doing, and I’ve got to give it to the
Mashantucket Pequot Museum, they have done
something called a Reverse KOCOA. ey don’t
have the best written backgrounds for their en-
gagements, but Kevin McBride actually took all
ve KOCOA principles and said, “Every battle-
eld has at least these.” Some dening features
fall within a couple of the categories. He said,
“What am I missing? Which KOCOA attributes
am I missing?” He did a reverse KOCOA. I think
at Credit Island, Iowa, they did the same thing—
looking for where the gun positions were based
on what was missing. KOCOA can help you with
your predictive modeling, if you’re interested in
doing that on battleelds.
You might say to me, “Kris, where can I nd a
list of battleelds that have had some basic research
by our grant oce?” You can look online, and we
have all of our grants listed. You can see where our
reports are for the Revolutionary War and Civil
War, and you can see GIS data maps online for the
Civil War Principal Battleelds. Otherwise, you can
contact me and I’m happy to get you some informa-
tion. Also, if you want to know where our program
projects are, like the Charleston Harbor one project I
was just talking about, you can go back through the
years of our previous grant winners and you can see
a little three-line write-up and the dollar amount,
and see the research proposed.
166
I suggest that we should be thinking outside the
box. For example, we have used heritage tours and
projects with mapping for dive shops and PSA’s
in tours in Saipan. We’ve considered Kiska and
Peleliu for island inventories, where we used both
terrestrial and underwater resources. At Kiska, we
actually considered the resources of the air, because
it was a reght using airplanes. at’s a third
dimension for airplane ghts we have to think
about. We’ve also done the handbook with the Lake
Champlain folks, which is available. I’ll step you
through a couple of our good examples.
In Saipan, we’ve worked with Dr. T. Carrell and
Dr. J. McKinnon, and Ships of Discovery. It seemed
the tourists were ripping o pieces of WWII tanks
and taking them home. We came up with a heritage
tourism trail to help the community. We did a basic
site inventory of materials underground, and we
came up with posters and public service announce-
ments in order to advise people not to rip stu o.
We trained the dive shop owners in how to treat
these archeological resources with respect, and I
hope it’s turning out well.
On Peleliu, we had some basic problems with
understanding the boundaries of the battleeld,
partly because landowners were concerned. We’ve
done at least two archeological projects in order
to work out ways to talk with folks about assuring
them how important it is to protect what we’re
nding. We’ve used archaeologists to get at issues
of landscape and issues of local cultural concern,
and the archeologists seem to like being used.
Valcour Bay has had a dive program for years,
and we have spent a couple of years supporting
that eort. We give seed money, we’re not really
meant for long-term preservation projects, but just
to spark things. We have sparked some research on
the zebra mussels on the Spitre. We have got our
underwater manual up on our website, and we’ve
done a compilation of some of the research from
Valcour Bay. We’ve done entire engagements, sur-
veys for entire river settings, and regional inven-
tories. You can always ask me for a bibliography.
Eligible sites are above ground and underground.
In sum, the ABPP can help with best practices,
and we can even help potential applicants form
grant requests. We have KOCOA Cheat Sheets and
we have a submerged resource manual on how to
do KOCOA on underwater battleelds. ese are
available through our oce, including online. Al-
though the sta is small, it is there to help. Δ
Kristen McMasters is the Grant Manager and Ar-
cheologist for the American Battleeld Protection
Program of the National Park Service, Washington
Oce. She has worked for the National Park Ser-
vice for over twenty years. Her background in-
cludes service as Park Archeologist for Gettysburg
National Military Park and Project Archeologist
for the Eastern Team of the Denver Service Center,
National Park Service. She holds a BA from the
University of Michigan in Anthropology and an
MA, also in Anthropology, from the University of
South Carolina.
167
‘Twas a dark stormy day when orders came
to sail;
Mountain high the billows ran, erce winds
did screech and wail.
Round the capstan sailors brave the anchor
quick did weigh
Of the noble steamer Huron, whose fate was
sealed that day.
Our story begins on November 23, 1877, as the
vessel (built in 1875), its sixteen ocers and one
hundred eighteen crew le Hampton Roads, VA
bound for Cuba on a survey mission. Shortly aer
1 a.m. on November 24, 1877, however, the Huron
ran ashore o Nags Head in a gale. Just two hun-
dred yards from the shore, it was well within the
range of the Lyle guns typically used by the U.S.
Life Saving Service, which had a presence both
up and down the shore from where the ship lay.
But there was no response from the USLSS—the
station was not scheduled to open until December
1, just six days later. Lack of budget and concerted
government support meant that the stations were
only open between December and April. In the
roiling surf, the Huron was a doomed vessel, and
most of its men were as well; only thirty-four of its
men would survive the night. Fishermen and their
families stood helpless on shore as they watched
the tragedy unfold—giving aid to those who did
make it to shore.
e ensuing inquiry into this tragedy—and
national embarrassment caused by this and the
subsequent sinking of the steamer Metropolis near
Corolla just two months later—ultimately resulted
in better funding and longer operating seasons for
USLSS stations. Not considered a hazard to navi-
gation, the Huron lies just oshore as the land, the
sea, and the world has changed around it.
e title of this presentation, which was deliv-
ered at the Maritime Cultural Landscapes Sympo-
sium in Madison, WI, in October 2015, serves as an
homage to Richard Lawrence, former State Under-
water Archaeologist of North Carolina. Richard,
along with East Carolina University graduate stu-
dent Joe Friday, wrote the successful National Reg-
ister nomination for the wreck site of the USS Hu-
ron in 1991. Shortly aer, Richard and his team at
the North Carolina Underwater Archaeology Unit
worked to have the wreck site designated as North
Carolina’s rst Shipwreck Preserve—essentially
an underwater state park. All of this, of course,
was a result of recommendations written into the
Abandoned Shipwreck Act to oer both access and
protection to submerged cultural resources.
e National Register nomination of the Hu-
ron indicates that the site of this 175 . vessel lies
approximately two hundred y yards from the
beach between mileposts 11 and 12 on North
Carolina Route 12 in Nags Head, just northwest of
the Nags Head Fishing pier, at the foot of Bladen
Street. Lying in approximately twenty . of water,
the site as described in the National Register nomi-
nation extends one hundred y . from the center
of the wreck in a 360 degree circular boundary. I
will argue that this physical boundary is correct. I
believe, however, that we can gain a greater sense
of the totality of this vessel’s particular maritime
cultural landscape by applying a more holistic
approach to this wreck, a method I have applied
successfully to the USS Monitor.
e Huron, which sank o the coast of North
Carolina on November 24, 1877, is part of a mar-
itime cultural landscape which is undeniably
physical, yet the ship has also created a landscape
that can be apprehended in far-ung places: in
gravesites and front page headlines, in doggerel
verse and in Instagram photos. While the listing on
the Register has long been established, what I am
talking about is a bit more theoretical. Yes—I will
deal with how this site has been successfully man-
aged and made accessible—but I also want to talk
about how we can use existing sites to broaden our
view of what can be a maritime cultural landscape.
USS Huron: From National Tragedy to National Register
Anna Gibson Holloway
Maritime Heritage Program
National Park Service
168
I came to be interested in the Huron in a less
predictable way than most. I am not a diver, though
I have been able to visit the displays about the Hu-
ron in Nags Head. I did not approach it rst from a
naval history perspective, nor from the perspective
of this wreck’s inuence upon the reforms that led
to an expanded life-saving service, though these are
all important aspects of this vessel’s signicance.
My interest began because of the salvage compa-
ny I have been researching. is was a company
so good at what they did that they rarely le any
discernable traces for an archaeologist (or a histo-
rian, for that matter) to nd. ey were the B & J
Baker & Company of Norfolk, VA, and they “were
not known for doing things by halves.” ey were
intimately, and tragically, involved with the Huron
and are very much a part of that vessel’s story.
But I also come at this from the perspective of a
historian interested in the micro-historical ap-
proach. I like to take a vessel and reach as far out as
I can to tease out the cultural milieu in which it op-
erated and nd the cultural memory derived from
whatever event associated with it most resonates
within the public consciousness. us, my vision of
a maritime cultural landscape is multi-dimension-
al, passing through time, space, and memory.
Using Keith Muckelroy’s work as a starting point,
and expanding on it with Brad Duncan and Mar-
tin Gibbs’ incredible exploration of responses to
“shipping mishaps” in Australia, which Josh Mara-
no discussed in his paper at this conference, I have
applied a modied framework with which to view
the maritime cultural landscape of the USS Huron.
e “shipping mishap,” in this case the wreck of the
Huron, forms the center of the landscape, and is
both an event and a place. e event, however, does
not need to be conned to a proscribed moment in
time, nor should the place be conned to a single
set of coordinates. In addition, the signicance of
the wreck has acquired multiple layers of meaning
in the ensuing years. ose layers stretch far be-
yond that 360 degree circle that extends one hun-
dred y . from the center of the wreck.
is is very much in keeping with Jim Delgado’s
remarks at this conference concerning the Titanic as
well as Hans Van Tilberg’s discussion of the poten-
tial global reach of the Hawaiian cultural landscape.
Delgado declared that the maritime cultural land-
scape is not always tangible and that the cultural
landscape extends far beyond the wreck site. Von
Tilberg challenged us all by asking, “How much
are we willing to include in a maritime cultural
landscape?” and “How far is too far, and where do
we draw the line?” I will argue that by pushing that
line further out to the intangible and cognitive and
by embracing the layers of memory associated with
this “shipping mishap,” we can protect and manage
sites such as the Huron far better for the benet of
the resource as well as for the benet of the public.
1. Pre-impact (threat): is aspect could
stretch back to the building of the vessel (or
before), the training of the crew, any mainte-
nance, or changes to the vessel, etc.
2. Pre-impact (warning): is is the more im-
mediate threat, and involves weather systems,
immediate surroundings, environmental condi-
tions, decisions made by ocers and crew, etc.
3. Impact (crisis salvage): e wrecking event
itself. Immediate decisions made concerning
safety of crew, passengers, vessel, and cargo.
4. Rescue: Attempts to bring people, cargo, etc.
out of harm’s way. is also involves any sur-
vivor camps that may arise as a result of the
wrecking event.
5. Post-impact (systemic salvage and immedi-
ate public response): is stage involves the
attempts at salvage at the request of marine
underwriters, ship owners, etc. Immediate
public response includes in-person response
as well as news reporting, courts martial, etc.
6. Post-impact (opportunistic salvage and
long-term public response): Long-term pub-
lic response involves editorial commentary of
event; art, literature, poetry, or music asso-
ciated with the event; mementos or popular
culture items; memorials, etc. Opportunistic
salvage is associated with either deliberate
action or happenstance. is phase continues
into the present.
7. Current Disposition: e current state of the
wreck site at the present time. is stage also
involves present protections, management,
and access.
Figure 1.
169
tial global reach of the Hawaiian cultural landscape.
Delgado declared that the maritime cultural land-
scape is not always tangible and that the cultural
landscape extends far beyond the wreck site. Von
Tilberg challenged us all by asking, “How much
are we willing to include in a maritime cultural
landscape?” and “How far is too far, and where do
we draw the line?” I will argue that by pushing that
line further out to the intangible and cognitive and
by embracing the layers of memory associated with
this “shipping mishap,” we can protect and manage
sites such as the Huron far better for the benet of
the resource as well as for the benet of the public.
1. Pre-impact (threat): is aspect could
stretch back to the building of the vessel (or
before), the training of the crew, any mainte-
nance, or changes to the vessel, etc.
2. Pre-impact (warning): is is the more im-
mediate threat, and involves weather systems,
immediate surroundings, environmental condi-
tions, decisions made by ocers and crew, etc.
3. Impact (crisis salvage): e wrecking event
itself. Immediate decisions made concerning
safety of crew, passengers, vessel, and cargo.
4. Rescue: Attempts to bring people, cargo, etc.
out of harm’s way. is also involves any sur-
vivor camps that may arise as a result of the
wrecking event.
5. Post-impact (systemic salvage and immedi-
ate public response): is stage involves the
attempts at salvage at the request of marine
underwriters, ship owners, etc. Immediate
public response includes in-person response
as well as news reporting, courts martial, etc.
6. Post-impact (opportunistic salvage and
long-term public response): Long-term pub-
lic response involves editorial commentary of
event; art, literature, poetry, or music asso-
ciated with the event; mementos or popular
culture items; memorials, etc. Opportunistic
salvage is associated with either deliberate
action or happenstance. is phase continues
into the present.
7. Current Disposition: e current state of the
wreck site at the present time. is stage also
involves present protections, management,
and access.
Figure 1.
At the center of this landscape is the Huron itself.
Built in Chester, PA by John Roach & Sons, this
Alert-class iron hulled sloop-rigged screw steam
gunboat was commissioned in November 1875.
is class (also Alert and Ranger) would be the last
iron-hulled steam vessels that would carry sail.
e Huron was thus a compromise: it was a vessel
caught between the old and new navies. Likewise it
carried both old and new ordnance. Civil War relics
sat next to a y-caliber Gatling gun.
Its length was one hundred seventy-ve .; its
beam, thirty-two ., and depth of hold, een .
Relatively small, it displaced only 1020 tons. Serv-
ing rst o Mexico under Commander Charles
C. Carpenter, it returned to Boston in late 1876
where it was overhauled. ere it received its new
commanding ocer, George P. Ryan. Under Ryan’s
command, the Huron headed south to conduct
cartographic surveys of the Caribbean and the
Gulf, touching in Barbados, Trinidad, Curacao,
Aspinwall (now known as Colón, Panama) Mobile,
AL, and Port Royal, SC, before returning to Hamp-
ton Roads. In Mobile, the crew surveyed the site of
a tragic shipwreck; that of the monitor Tecumseh in
Mobile Bay in which ninety-four U.S. Navy person-
nel lost their lives on August 5, 1864. Aer a brief
stay in Hampton Roads, the Huron sailed north
to New York in the late summer/early fall of 1877.
ere it was once more hauled out and received a
new propeller. is, then, is the Huron that makes
up the center of our landscape.
To continue with the template:
Pre-impact (threat)
e Huron returned to Norfolk, Virginia on No-
vember 17, 1877. e ocers made the social
rounds and were fondly received by the local com-
munity. But their time in Norfolk was to be brief.
Rear Admiral Stephen D. Trenchard, commander
of the North Atlantic station at Hampton Roads,
issued an order to depart when ready to Captain
Ryan. at departure was delayed, however, until
a draughtsman could be brought on board for the
survey mission. Even with the draughtsman safe-
ly aboard, however, the vessel was perhaps not as
ready as it should have been. e compass had not
been corrected since leaving New York. Moreover,
while the standard deviation of the compass had
been given to the commanding ocer, the devia-
tion calculated for when the ship experienced an
extreme heel had not been supplied. Professor Ben-
jamin F. Greene later testied that “e heeling co-
ecient was so small, and that her southern cruise
would take her where the heeling deviation would
become less and less.” us, the Huron’s ocers
were already operating on insucient information.
A low pressure system, which had entered the
Pacic Northwest on November 16, moved across
the country and strengthened when it made its way
oshore near the Georgia/South Carolina border
on November 22. e daily weather observations
dictated that cautionary ags y in Hampton
Roads, Kittyhawk, and Cape Hatteras stations.
ose ags had been ying since the Wednesday
before Huron’s departure. e barometer, however,
though falling slightly, gave no one cause for con-
cern. It had held relatively steady. Feeling no appre-
hension at the time, Ryan asked for permission to
leave Hampton Roads. Trenchard responded, “Use
your discretion.”
At 10 a.m. on November 23, the Huron le
Hampton Roads, passing Cape Henry between
1 and 2 p.m, at which time the harbor pilot was
discharged to return to Hampton Roads. Once on
the open sea, Ryan ordered a course of south by
east one-quarter east. e Huron was making six
170
and a half knots with her jib, fore, and main trisails
and spanker set. Ten miles south of Cape Henry,
it passed by a buoy that B & J Baker had le on a
wreck site, a marker which conrmed that their
course was true. Some crewmen unbent the anchor
chains and secured the anchors (which was not
standard procedure), while others shoved jackasses
into the hawsepipes to minimize water intrusion.
Several vessels passed the Huron—all headed
north. By 6 p.m. Currituck Lighthouse was o the
starboard beam, about seven or eight miles distant,
but the winds began to increase. e air tempera-
ture as well as that of the water hovered between
the upper 50s and lower 60s.
Pre-impact (Warning)
Shortly aer 6 p.m. both the jib-stay and the ying
jib-stay carried away. e men “secured the sail and
set the fore storm staysail; took in [the] spanker”
and by 8 p.m. had “put a single reef in [the] fore
trysail, and a double reef in the main trysail.” e
vessel moved on under both sail and steam at a
slower ve and a half knots. e ocer of the watch
reckoned the wind at east-southeast at force seven
or eight, which indicated a moderate gale at 26-33
knots to a fresh gale at 33-40 knots. Ryan’s course
was calculated to take the vessel far enough from
shore to not imperil the vessel, but not so far as to
enter the Gulf Stream, a mistake he had made o
Port Royal and did not wish to repeat. Constant
soundings with the lead line were consistent with
the assumed course. e gale was not considered
alarming, and ocers were more concerned with
whether they would be able to sleep while o
watch, since the course would take them into a
heavy sea. e barometer remained steady at 30.04
inches. e strong currents, though noted, were not
considered a matter for concern. But the storm in-
tensied. At midnight, Master French asked one of
the quartermasters what was the state of the weath-
er. e response was simple. “Bad,” the man replied.
Impact
Shortly aer 1 a.m. on November 24, 1877, a heavy
shock awoke sleeping sailors and startled those on
watch. Many initially thought that there had been
a collision with another vessel as there was the
clear sound of water rushing over the rail. e next
thump, however, told a worse story. e vessel was
aground, keeled over on her port side 30 degrees
to windward, but quickly settling at an angle of 40
to 45 degrees. e men could not stand upright
without holding on. e impact swept away all of
the ships boats on the port side. e main ga fell
and drove an awning stanchion through the star-
board ship’s cutter. Escape by boat was rendered
nearly impossible. Yet the hole was not so severe,
and some of the men believed they might be able
to take the boat to shore, carrying a line which
would help eect the escape of the rest of the crew.
But how far away was the shore? e air was thick
with spray and the men could not see clearly. Some
declared that they had struck a reef some eight or
nine miles o the coast, while others felt that they
were aground very near the shore. Captain Ryan,
who rmly believed the former theory, asked the
men to point to where they believed they saw the
shore. As he looked through the ying spray and
foam, he saw a chilling sight: they were on no
reef, they were near the breakers. e shore lay
scarce two hundred yards from their location. He
moaned, “My God! How did we get in here?”
In a heave of the ocean, the cutter swamped
and was carried away with no men on board. at
avenue was now closed, though there still remained
a few boats. Aer the near-paralysis of the rst
seconds of disbelief, the men quickly sprang into
action. Captain Ryan gave orders to lower the sails.
Executive Ocer Simmons likewise issued orders
to batten down the hatches, using the sails as cov-
ers on those hatches that could not be battened due
to downed spars and rigging. ose proved im-
perfect covers, allowing water to rush below decks
to the engine room. e men also made ready to
throw the guns overboard. As the vessel continued
to thump against the seabed, it became clear that
the masts should be cut away to keep them from
becoming deadly pile drivers which would hasten
the demise of the vessel. Men began hacking at the
starboard lanyards of the fore-rigging. e fore-
mast fell to windward, taking with it the jibboom
and main topmast. e guns, however, remained
where they were. rowing them overboard would
risk stoving a hole in the side of the vessel.
ere was equal action below decks. Ensign
Lucien Young retrieved two boxes of Coston ares
171
and rockets and sought a sheltered place from
which to light them: the captain’s water-closet. Us-
ing lit candles as ignition, he and Lieutenant Lam-
bert Palmer fashioned launchers for the rockets out
of wood stripped from the decorative trim in the
cabin. ey were able to launch ve rockets and
burned over a hundred ares before their position
became untenable. ey moved forward.
In the engine room, engineers stopped the
engine briey aer a signal from the deck. Lieu-
tenant Palmer then called down to them, “Can you
back her?” e chief engineer replied, “We can!”
and engaged the reversing gear. e engine began
to back, but to no avail. Aer a little more than an
hour, the engine stopped on its own and would
not restart. With each thump of the vessel, the hull
buckled inward, shiing the boilers. Still, the engi-
neers and machinists remained in their precarious
post, attempting to keep the boilers red to provide
steam for the bilge pumps. By 2:15 a.m. it became
clear that the engine room could soon become
deadly, so the res were hauled. e bilge pumps
ceased operation, and the steam whistle, which
had been blowing a distress call, slowly fell silent.
Captain Ryan ordered all hands on deck. With the
mechanical life leaving the vessel, the sea moved in
to dismantle it.
Only a few small boats remained on the ves-
sel—the ship’s launch and a knock-down bolsa that
required assembly and ination. e bolsa was
packed away below. Crewmen scurried below to re-
trieve it, and to extinguish any lights. e risk of a
re from an overturned lantern was too great. e
vessel settled into darkness as the ood tide rose
around them. Men began to make their way to the
forecastle and into the rigging to escape the churn-
ing seas as the waves broke over the vessel. ose
who did not have a rm grip were soon washed
overboard.
Near dawn, Captain Ryan ordered the launch
lowered. He and several men, including Lieutenant
Palmer were going to attempt to get a line to shore.
As they were attempting to lower the boat, the
sea carried it away to leave it dangling stern down
from one davit. Ryan fell between the boat and
the Huron and disappeared. Lieutenant Palmer
and another man clung to the davit until they too
were swept away. e launch and the remaining
dinghy then vanished in the roiling sea. Broken
apart by the force, the remains of the small boats
washed ashore, next to the bodies of the men who
had been washed overboard. Only the bolsa now
remained on board
Just before dawn, the men on the Huron saw
a light appear on shore. ey would be saved!
Giving three cheers for the light, the remaining
men briey found renewed energy. Ensign Lucien
Young and seaman Antoine Williams volunteered
to take a line to shore in the fragile bolsa. Howev-
er, the foremast rigging and spars which had been
cut away were dangling over the starboard side.
e bolsa became tangled in the mess and Young
and Williams had to use precious moments to cut
it free. e lifeline attached to the bolsa—the very
thing that might bring relief to the remaining men
on board, was also the very thing that hindered the
bolsa from leaving the vessel intact. At the insis-
tence of the men still on deck, Young cut the line
with a penknife and he and Williams were swept
to the stern where they capsized. Regaining the
bolsa, the two used it as a otation device, pushing
it before them while swimming behind it. ough
continually pummeled in the surf, the two made
for the light they had seen on shore and for the
telegraph poles which they rst took for masts of
a shing eet. ey reached the shore at the same
time, exhausted but alive.
Yet still, the men le aboard the Huron did not
believe that the men of the lifesaving stations they
knew to be nearby would not rescue them. With
Coston signals having lit up the sky and, for a time,
the steam whistle having sounded, and now with
Young and Williams ashore, there was no way that
help would not come.
And yet it did not.
ey began to go overboard—some falling from
exhaustion and some leaping deliberately. ose
remaining on board watched helplessly as their
shipmates were swept out to sea. ey could not
know from their vantage point that the currents
set back in towards shore, delivering a few men to
172
safety. Flotsam and jetsam from the vessel aorded
those lucky few who survived the plunge into the
sea assistance in their journey to shore. Some men
remained lashed to the rigging, waiting for rescue
as the cold and relentless sea slowly sapped their
strength.
Rescue
Local shermen heard the steam whistle and saw
the Coston ares, almost from the rst minute they
were red, but stood helpless (either in reality or by
design) to assist. ey gathered in clusters to watch
the tragedy unfold, too afraid to break into the Life
Saving Stations that were a few miles away. e
Kittyhawk station was seven miles up the beach
from the wrecksite, and the Nags Head station was
three miles to the south. e stations were not due
to open until December 1, exactly one week later.
e stations were locked, and the crews were safe
at their homes, many over on Roanoke Island.
ough word had been sent, the distance meant
that the crews would be unable to arrive in time to
save those who could be seen feebly waving from
the rapidly disintegrating rigging. ose who made
it to shore quickly apprehended the situation, and
those who were physically able fanned out across
the landscape to retrieve lifesaving equipment, to
retrieve one another, and to retrieve the dead.
Ensign Young, barefoot and bruised, ran to the
Nags Head station where he broke down the doors
and took out the Lyle gun, lines, and powder. Sher-
i Brinkley, driving a mule team, met him there.
Brinkley rushed Young and the equipment toward
the wreck. ey were less than a quarter mile away
when they saw the last mast go over, taking with it
all of the men lashed or clinging to the rigging. e
equipment would be useless.
Ninety-eight men had lost their lives only two
hundred yards from shore—well within reach of
the Lyle gun, and thus, safety, had U.S. Lifesaving
Service crews been on duty. But only thirty-four
survivors found their way to land, and they did so
under horric circumstances, with no assistance
from the shore.
Once ashore, however, they found clothing,
warmth, and food, readied for them by the locals.
While they may have been too afraid to break into
the Life Saving Stations, the local inhabitants were
not the heartless “wreckers” the papers made them
out to be, at least not to the living. e exhausted,
cold, and wounded men of the Huron found shelter
in beach shanties, huts, and private homes where
they were given clothing, blankets, and warm food.
Ensign Young recalled eating warm canned to-
matoes and corn supplemented by bread that had
washed ashore from the vessel. By Saturday eve-
ning, all thirty-four survivors were moved to cen-
tral locations; the four ocers were taken to Sheri
Brinkley’s house while the men were housed in
the Life-saving station. Wreckage from the vessel,
along with personal items and papers continued to
wash ashore. Only eight bodies had been recovered
at that point, however.
While the Lifesaving Stations may have been
closed, the weather observer from the signal corps
was at his station. He telegraphed to Norfolk for
assistance, sending messages to the Navy and to B
& J Baker & Co. Naval vessels Powhatan, Swatara
and Fortune prepared to leave for the wreck.
e old wrecker Captain Joseph Baker ordered
his partner Ebenezer Stoddard to ready the B &
J Baker for the journey south. Messages went out
around the waterfront in Norfolk, Berkeley, and
Portsmouth for the most experienced divers and
surfmen, for “the company well knew the highly
dangerous service they were about to enter on.”
Simultaneously, Baker telegraphed the Secretary
of the Navy in DC to nd if there were any special
instructions for the wreckers. Baker soon received
a dispatch from the Secretary asking the Bakers
to consult with Rear Admiral Trenchard before
departure. is Stoddard did, and le for the
wreck, stopping rst at Old Point Comfort to take
on two passengers: Captain John Julius Guthrie,
superintendent of the Sixth Life-saving District,
and Henry L. Brooke, a reporter for the Norfolk
Virginian.
e B & J Baker was rst on the scene the next
morning, the naval vessels arriving shortly aer.
Unfortunately, the fate of the Huron was already
sealed by the time this rescue eet arrived, the
vessel having already begun breaking up with no
173
living souls still visible on board. By means of wig-
wag signals from ship to the small survivor camp,
Stoddard discovered that those who had made it to
shore believed there might be sailors still trapped
inside the vessel. Guthrie wanted to gain the shore
as soon as possible, to deploy lifelines and life cars
from the shuttered Lifesaving stations, as no ves-
sels could approach the Huron in the current sea
state. ough the surf remained rough, Stoddard
launched a suroat from the B&J Baker to bring
Guthrie to shore. Nine men, including Stoddard
and Guthrie were aboard. Henry Earle, James
Saxton, Stephen Bell, Dennis McCoy, Willis Walker
and James T. King were all divers and surfmen for
the Baker company. Brooke, the reporter, asked to
be taken along. Brooke recalled:
When we had gotten within two hundred yards
of the beach the surf rose high, and the boat gained
speed. Further on an immense boulder swept
along, and on this it was attempted to go in. Capt.
Stoddard cried out, “pull for your lives,” and the
men bent to their oars. It was too late, however,
the billow passed, and the succeeding wave swept
the boat along at a prodigious rate. e oar in
the hands of Saxton broke, and in an instant the
cra was thrown sideways into the trough of the
sea, where she was struck by a huge mass of wa-
ter which completely capsized her and hurled her
occupants into the surging waves.
Clinging to oars and to the capsized boat, the
men fought to make it to shore. Brooke and Stod-
dard, along with King and Earle, succeeded. How-
ever, Saxton, Bell, McCoy, and Walker of Stoddard’s
crew, as well as Captain J.J. Guthrie of the Lifesav-
ing Service, drowned in the ill-fated attempt. e
Huron had claimed ve more victims.
Post-impact (systemic salvage and immediate
public response)
Stoddard took little time to recover, however. He
quickly sprang to action, telegraphing Captain
Sumner Kimball of the U.S. Life-Saving Service in
Washington DC for permission to “collect the life
station men, with the boats and apparatus, to assist
in recovering the bodies on the wreck and along
the beach. e necessary authority was promptly
granted and as there is every indication of settled
weather, the wreckers will get to work to-morrow.
It is to be hoped that under the skillful direction of
Capt. Stoddard, the bodies of the lost ocers will
be speedily recovered…” In fact, Kimball granted
Stoddard the authority to activate all the life-saving
stations between Cape Henry and Kitty Hawk to
patrol the shores looking for survivors, and bodies.
Over the next several weeks bodies of the Huron’s
men would come ashore in a 40 mile swath. A sur-
viving crewman marked each one with their names
in India ink, that is, if he could identify them at
all. ey were buried where they were found; their
resting places designated by how far they were
from Norfolk, and which telegraph pole they were
nearest. Unidentied bodies and body parts were
similarly listed.
Seas remained rough in the subsequent days,
and the Baker vessels had to seek shelter in Hamp-
ton Roads. While there, Stoddard met with the
commandant of the Navy Yard. He requested plans
for the Huron, which would aid his divers and
crew in salvaging the vessel. e New York Herald
reported that Commandant J. Blakely Creighton
remarked, “with a merry twinkle in his eye,” that
“ere is no use in your going for that strong box,
that safe; it will be labor lost. ere was nothing
in it but some old truck.” Stoddard, clearly not
amused with the insinuation, replied, “We are not
aer that. We merely want the plan, in order to
work more intelligently under water, as it is sup-
posed there may be several bodies in the ship.”
ough initially rebued as a grasping wrecker
looking for the paymaster’s safe, this would likely
be far from the truth for Stoddard. A former acting
master in the U.S. Navy, he had served on board
the USS Kearsarge during the Civil War. His atten-
tion to detail had helped to bring down the CSS
Alabama. at trait was needed in this dangerous
operation. e strong box would ultimately be re-
covered, however. It was seen in front of an antique
shop on Taylor Street in Norfolk in 1888, being
used as an advertising sign.
Stoddard nally deployed his divers to the wreck
as the seas calmed, looking for bodies as well as
items to salvage. By December 3, the divers had
nished their initial survey of the wreck. Stoddard
telegraphed the Secretary of the Navy the following:
174
Examined Huron a with divers. Find upper
works gone; both decks oated up nearly to
spar deck, so that divers could not get in ward
room. Will examine forward this aernoon.
e undertow and current are very bad. e
spar deck is entirely submerged, the port side
being eight feet underwater. Will be obliged
to blow up spar deck to see if there are bodies
in ward room. Ship seems to be hogged about
four feet forward. Pivot gun in place. E.M.
STODDARD.
Heavy weather plagued the recovery eorts, but
eventually guns, clothing, navigation US Life-Sav-
ing Service US Life-Saving Service US Life-Saving
Service equipment, machinery, and naval stores
began to reach the Navy Yard at Portsmouth.
e New York Herald reported on the ongoing
salvage eorts on December 20, 1877. “Such stu
as can be recovered from the Huron is now reach-
ing the Navy Yard. To-day there arrived a quantity
of working clothes and thirty packages of clothing,
&c., consisting of overshirts, undershirts, drawers,
stockings, blankets, annel, satinet, shoes, sheeting,
white pants and ducking; also one twelve-pound
howitzer and a quantity of carbines and navy re-
volvers.” More was expected in a few days.
ough Henry L. Brooke had been through a
nightmare, he continued to report on the Huron
disaster. Rival papers to the Virginian carried his
columns, and the Public Ledger congratulated him
on his professionalism and wished him “a long,
prosperous and happy reportorial life, and trust
that in the future, his search aer news may be un-
der a cloudless sky and over an unrued ocean.”
Ultimately, much of what was useful from the
Huron was salvaged and brought back to Hamp-
ton Roads. Yet the dynamic nature of the wreck-
site made complete salvage dicult. e strong
undertow made work dicult for the divers, and
many areas of the vessel were inaccessible. e
rm used explosives to open up areas of the ves-
sel. Aer many weeks of work in dicult condi-
tions, however, the salvage rm made the unusual
move to abandon the site, likely at the request of
the Navy. e Huron they le behind was a vastly
altered vessel. us, the Huron became a part of the
Graveyard of the Atlantic—and part of the cultural
landscape of those shiing sands.
Recovered portions of the Huron create their
own landscapes. e guns brought up by the
Bakers still maintain a silent vigil at Trophy Park
in Portsmouth, VA, while other recovered items
can be found in the collections of e Mariners’
Museum in Newport News, VA. B & J Baker & Co.
received $7,575 for working the Huron.
Bodies were exhumed: some nding their way
home to their loved ones in metal boxes; others
nding their nal resting place on the grounds
of the USNA. e inquiry into the causes of the
wreck was held in Washington DC in December
1877. e exhausted ocers and several crewmen
well enough to be questioned were all asked to give
their accounts. e superintendent of compasses
for the US Navy was questioned. Ultimately, it was
determined that “the evidence shows that many
well-found merchant steamers, wooden and iron,
commanded by experienced navigators of our coast
have been wrecked near the point on which the
Huron was lost.” Yet she was no merchant steamer.
e court found that Commander Ryan was pri-
marily responsible for the grounding and loss of the
Huron, as well as the navigating ocer, Lieutenant
Lambert Palmer. For ve years, the latter’s family
and friends worked to exonerate the young naviga-
tor. Finally in 1883, aer an impassioned letter from
Palmer’s widow, Secretary of the Navy William E.
Chandler agreed to publish the letters exonerating
Palmer, but refused to reopen the case.
Post-impact (opportunistic salvage and long-term
public response)
e Huron’s story was seared into the public’s con-
sciousness in 1877, commanding front pages for
weeks in newspapers across the country. Reporting
turned to editorializing with opinions oered about
the sorry state of the US Life-Saving Service. A
omas Nast cartoon in Harper’s Weekly showed
the apathetic visage of Uncle Sam staring at the
wreckage of the Huron, dead bodies lying in the
sand around him. e caption reads “U.S.: I sup-
pose I must spend a little on Life-saving Service,
175
Life-boat Stations, Life-Boats, Surf-Boats, etc.; but
it is too bad to be obliged to waste so much money.”
As survivors traveled to Washington to give depo-
sitions at the ocial inquiry, churches held fund-
raisers in Norfolk seeking to aid the families of those
lost in the Baker suroat. e wreck of the Huron
reverberated throughout the nation as large towns
and small communities alike mourned the passing
of so many young men. An op-ed piece in Norfolk’s
Public Ledger summed up the collective grief:
e loss of the sloop-of-war Huron … has
stirred the sympathies of our entire commu-
nity to an unusual degree. Although none of
the ill-fated crew were to the manner born,
the fact that the lifeless corpses of over one
hundred human beings were thrown upon
the shores of North Carolina, or whirled and
tossed amidst the maddened waves of old
ocean, who but the day previous were full of
life and hope in our own community, sent
a thrill of pain to every heart and carried a
settled gloom over our entire community.
is feeling was greatly intensied when,
on yesterday aernoon, the telegraph an-
nounced that Captain GUTHRIE, of Ports-
mouth, Superintendent of the Life-Saving
Stations from Cape Henry to Cape Hatteras,
with four others, residents of the city and
Berkley, had been drowned by the swamping
of the surf-boat in which they were attempt-
ing to go to the aid of the crew of the Huron;
for Captain G. was well known and universal-
ly respected in this whole section of country.
e expressions of grief turned to music and
prose. Poet Edith omas entreated the public to
Sing for the brave ship lost;
Chant for the lives that lie
In unknown haven tossed,
Under a sobbing sky.
George A. Cragg of Baltimore, MD. quickly
published a song in early December 1877 entitled
e Wreck of the Huron, which he “respectfully
dedicated to the survivors of the wreck.” Author
Frank Taylor of New York’s Daily Graphic visited
the scene of the wreck on the 7th of December.
Aer nding a letter on the shore amongst the
wreckage, he was moved to pen what is likely the
rst poem published about the tragedy:
HER LETTER.
We walked at night the wreck-strewn sand,
We walked and watched the dying storm;
With eager eye and ready hand
We sought to nd some sea-tossed form
And as we walked the guard and I,
e tide crept out till broad and gray
e shingled sand shone smooth and dry,
Beneath our tful lantern’s ray.
On either side, and everywhere,
Lay limp and broken bits of wreck,
Of clothing, ropes, of wooden-ware-
All kinds of things one nds on deck.
From out this scattered wreckage waste
I stooped and picked a little note:
A dainty monogram was traced
Above the lines the owner wrote:
”My darling:” but it gave no name,
As if he only of mankind
To such sweet title had a claim:
e words were coined her love to bind.
‘Twas written full, and crossed again,
All interlined with aerthought;
‘Twas spotted o’er with salter stain
an e’en the sea could yet have wrought.
“My darling,” there a fold was pressed,
e words just here were fainter yet,
As though ’twere worn upon his breast,
A prized and sacred amulet.
Anon, she wrote her hopes and fears,
Of ckle fortune’s smile or frown,
Of homelike joys in coming years,
When they were wed and “settled down.”
She spoke of Spring and Easter owers,
Of silk and satin for her bonnet,
176
Of sick friends, funerals, marriage dowers,
Her new suit and the trimmings on it.
And so this unknown maiden wrote
Her loving letter to its end,
And little dreamed the waves would oat
Her writing to a stranger’s hand.
Somewhere, to-night, a girlish face
Is raised to God in mute despair;
Somewhere, a woman prays for grace
And strength of soul her load to bear.
Somewhere along the wintry coast
Her hopes lie buried in the sand,
While this tells of the love that’s lost
is sea-stained letter in my hand.
us, pieces of the Huron were dispersed
throughout the country—through salvage, through
imagery, in poetry, song, and prose, and in the very
bodies of the men who lost their lives on the night
of November 24, 1877. at physical and cognitive
landscape stretched for countless miles, radiating
ever outward from the vessel’s resting place.
As with most tragedies, the nation’s grief began
to ease aer the rst weeks of shock. However, the
wreck of the Metropolis just a few miles north of
the Huron site on January 31, 1878, raised the spec-
ter of the Huron once again. e combined tragedy
of these two vessels cost two hundred and ve lives,
and altered so many more. e embarrassment
heaped upon the US Life-saving Service forever
altered that agency as well—for the better. Stations
were manned year-round, for, as the Huron and
other deadly wrecks had proven, disaster at sea has
no season.
Current Disposition
ough close to shore, the Huron lay largely un-
disturbed by man—though quite disturbed by
nature—until the advent of the popularity of sport
diving in the 1960s. As a near-shore wreck, it is ac-
cessible as a beach dive, though the unpredictabil-
ity of its environment can make it an intermediate
to advanced dive at times. Still—it can be appre-
hended from a kayak, suroard, and on the right
days—as a free dive or snorkel adventure.
But greater attention and unfettered accessibility
brought renewed ‘salvage’ eorts, thus leading to a
desire to protect this resource in a way that was at
once proscribed, yet still accessible. Further still,
it was understood that visiting the wreck was not
something that a large majority of visitors would
be able or willing to do, even on the best of days.
us, Huron became a site that is both underwater
and on shore, accessible to divers as well as beach
walkers. Interpretive panels in a gazebo located at
the beach access nearest the wreck make her more
widely available to all. e Shipwreck Preserve—
designated as such on November 24, 1991,—is
a partnership between the US Navy, the State of
NC, and the town of Nags Head. e wrecksite is
marked with buoys in season and lifeguards sta-
tioned nearby can make sure no one is walking o
with pieces of the vessel. Likewise, they are able to
maintain a count of visitors. omas Horn’s recent
thesis/study on seasonal corrosion rates on the Hu-
ron will be useful in developing a new management
plan for the site.
Last summer, there was a day where the condi-
tions for snorkeling the Huron were perfect. Outer
Banks diver and historian Marc Corbett took his
then 12-year-old daughter out on a suroard for
her rst trip to the Huron. He told her the story of
the vessel, the horric wreck, and the subsequent
salvage. Armed with her camera, she was able to
see all that her father had told her—and to take
pictures of several of the features of the Huron that
told the story. She was able to marvel at the vibrant
forms of sea life that had now made the vessel their
home. Physically, she and her father visited the
three-hundred foot diameter site just two hundred
yards o shore. But the stories that vessel told took
them much further away.
So what, then, is the maritime cultural land-
scape of the Huron? I believe it is multi-faceted and
contains both physical and cognitive elements. It
is not a landscape tied permanently to one place,
nor even one time. I have told you the story—I
have expanded our view beyond the boundaries of
the designated site—into the clouds, following the
telegraph poles up the coast to Norfolk, to DC, to
Annapolis and perhaps beyond. How far is too far
to look for a maritime cultural landscape? For my
177
part, I want to keep looking beyond the physical.
For me, that is just the starting point. Δ
Anna Gibson Holloway is the Maritime Historian
for the Maritime Heritage Program of the National
Park Service in Washington, DC. In that role she
acts as an advocate for and provides expertise relat-
ing to NPS maritime history in all of its forms. She
also serves as the NPS coordinator of Lighthouse
conveyance via the National Historic Lighthouse
Preservation Act Program, and assists in the admin-
istration of the National Maritime Heritage Grant
Program. Prior to joining NPS, she served as Vice
President of Museum Collections and Programs at
e Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia,
where she oversaw the Curatorial, Collections Man-
agement, Education, Conservation, Photography &
Licensing, Exhibition Design, Web and social me-
dia presence, and the USS Monitor Center functions
of the institution. As Curator of the award-winning
USS Monitor Center, she became known as one of
the leading experts on the Union ironclad, and has
lectured internationally, published several articles in
national magazines and journals, and has a mono-
graph forthcoming from Kent State University
Press. is Winston-Salem native graduated from
e University of North Carolina at Greensboro
with baccalaureate degrees in English Literature
and Medieval Civilization. She received her Mas-
ter’s degree in Tudor/Stuart History and her PhD in
American History from the College of William and
Mary. (Dr. Holloway now works for SEARCH, Inc.,
as the Museum Service Director.)
178
Edited Transcript of Presentation
I’m going to talk about Climate Change and Cul-
tural Resources Preservation in the National Park
Service. en I’ll talk briey about cultural land-
scapes and the National Register of Historic Places.
Barbara Wyatt asked me to talk about a policy
and guidance framework that the NPS is using to
respond to climate change and to protect cultural
resources, and also the tools we’re using to identi-
fy impacts associated with climate change phe-
nomena. e NPS established a Climate Change
Response Program in 2007. Marcia Rockman
is our Cultural Resources Coordinator with the
Climate Change Response Program.
1
e program
created a service-wide climate change response
strategy in 2010 and there are four basic tenets of
this strategy: science, adaptation, mitigation and
communication.
As an agency, the NPS is conducting scientic
research to support adaptation, mitigation and
communication. For mitigation, we’re reducing
the carbon footprint of NPS operations. For adap-
tation, we’re developing the adaptive capacity to
protect resources within a changing climate. For
communication, we’re developing tools to eec-
tively communicate about climate change to our
partners and to the public.
e four pillar climate change response strate-
gy is now integrated into all areas of natural and
cultural resources management. With cultural
resources management, “science” is where our
Section 110 baseline inventory work comes into
play. Cultural Landscape Inventories (CLI) are
part of this science eort. “Mitigation” is where we
implement rehabilitation treatments, to conserve
energy in the operation and maintenance of histor-
ic properties. For “adaptation,” we’re implementing
rehabilitation treatments to increase the resilience
of historic properties. For “communication,” we’re
1 e Climate Change Response Program website is https://www.nps.gov/orgs/ccrp/index.htm
developing tools to communicate how impacts are
aecting cultural resources.
We also have a brand new Climate Change
and Stewardship of Cultural Resources Policy
signed by the director in 2014. It calls for our
work in cultural resources management to take
a exible approach that integrates the type and
level of signicance and unique characteristics of
the resources in our decision-making. e policy
calls for the integration of cultural and natural
resources data in research, planning and steward-
ship eorts, and asks managers to use discretion
to respond to emerging threats rapidly, and to
incorporate cultural resources into sustainable
operations plans.
e policy encourages the NPS to engage fully in
cooperative conservation and civic engagement, and
to refocus our inventory eorts on the lands that
have not been inventoried and those that are most
vulnerable. e policy calls for us to try to under-
stand the fullest range of climate change eects,
including those that are perhaps more dicult to
recognize as they may be slow and less dramatic.
In the policy, the NPS director also talks about
loss, and the fact that we must recognize that some
of our decision-making may involve loss. We must
collaborate and move forward before we have all
the information, based on the best available infor-
mation. We should integrate new information as it
becomes available to us.
We’ve just talked about the NPS Climate Change
Response Strategy; well now there’s also a Cultural
Resources Climate Change Strategy. It divides our
process into research, planning, and stewardship—
how we think about cultural resources manage-
ment in the service. We have policy and guidance
for how we do research, planning and stewardship.
e research is about using climate change projec-
NPS Response to Climate Change and Cultural Resource Preservation
Susan Dolan
Park Cultural Landscapes Program
National Park Service
179
tions and vulnerability assessments on a landscape
scale to prioritize the areas to be inventoried on
the ground that have not been inventoried or are
already threatened.
What we want to come out of this rst eort is
a prioritization of resources that need action. In
the planning stage, we develop goals for vulner-
able resources, we identify a range of adaptation
options, and then we lter those options through
constraints and opportunities. In the steward-
ship stage, we adopt and implement maintenance
actions on a cyclic basis. We monitor and we
continue to make adjustments, if necessary, but if
conditions on the ground change, we return to the
planning stage. Or if climate projections change,
we return to the research stage again. is is the
NPS Climate Change Cultural Resources Strategy.
Tools that we’re using to identify cultural
re- source impacts from climate change on a ser-
vice-wide scale include stepping up and refocusing
our use of baseline inventory, our Section 110 work.
2
We do inventories for historic structures, archeolo-
gy and cultural landscapes, and we reassess condi-
tions on a periodic cycle. In other words, we do an
inventory and then we go back and do it again. We
update it, and we do a condition reassessment. Now
we’re using vulnerability to climate change impacts
as a driver to identify the interval at which we will
redo the condition assessment. We have adopted a
more extensive range of condition impacts to select
from in documenting the condition of the cultural
resources. ere are 40 standardized impacts that
we can pick from in our Cultural Landscapes Inven-
tory database to identify problems with the existing
conditions of a landscape. e picklist of impacts
allows us to query the service-wide database and
understand where patterns of similar types of im-
pacts occurring across the country. We’ve updated
the list of impacts in recent years that are particular
to climate change phenomena.
2 Section 110 of NHPA governs Federal agency programs by providing for consideration of historic preservation in the man-
agement of properties under Federal ownership or control. e amended Section 110 requires each Federal agency to estab-
lish a historic preservation program. e program must provide for the identication and protection of the agency’s historic
properties; ensure that such properties are maintained and managed with due consideration for preservation of their historic
values; and contain procedures to implement Section 106, which must be consistent with the Advisory Council’s regulations.
3 Courtney A. Schupp, Rebecca L. Beavers, and Maria A. Carey, eds. Coastal Adaptation Strategies: Case Studies (Lakewood,
CO, NPS Geologic Resources Division, and University of Colorado Boulder Geological Sciences Department, 2015)
Also, the NPS Climate Change Response Pro-
gram is working on a new tool that is a resource
vulnerability assessment framework. e underly-
ing philosophy behind it is that the vulnerability
of a resource to climate change impacts is based
on climate change phenomena present, and the
amount of exposure that the resource is getting
to those phenomena, minus it’s adaptive capacity.
Capacity to adapt includes our ability to adapt the
resource, or the resource’s own inherent ability
to adapt. About half the 408 NPS units now have
climate projection models on a park scale that can
be integrated into our research and planning and
stewardship eorts.
e NPS has also published a Coastal Adapta-
tion Strategies Handbook. It includes 24 case stud-
ies of national parks adapting to climate change.
3
e report highlights how climate change will
impact infrastructure and cultural and natural
resources in featured park units. e report is not
prescriptive, but illustrates examples of potential
actions that other parks might take with similar
circumstances in response to climate change. It
includes a map that shows trends in changing sea
levels. An example of a case study is Yellowstone
Lake in Yellowstone National Park, where a
Historic Peale Island Cabin on Yellowstone Lake is threatened
by shoreline change due to tectonic upli. Photo from Coastal
Adaptation Strategies: Case Studies, NPS.
180
historic cabin cluster is being inundated by lake
water. e report discusses the reasons for the
changing lake levels, and the adaptation options
the park is exploring. e report states that 111
out of 408 national park units are vulnerable to
sea level change.
Now I’d like to briey discuss cultural land-
scapes and the National Register of Historic Places.
e National Register property types are objects,
structures, buildings, sites and districts. e NPS
has cultural resource categories—archeology, his-
toric structures, museum collections, ethnographic
resources and cultural landscapes. So for the NPS
and the program that I manage, a cultural land-
scape is one category of cultural resource. Cultural
landscapes and archeology are identied by the
NPS as dierent cultural resource types, for with
the National Register, they share some common-
alities. Both are listed in the National Register
as a site or a district. A Determination of Eligi-
bility (DOE) with the SHPO is used to determine
whether the landscape or archeological resource is
eligible as a site or a district.
e NPS world of cultural resources can t
through the lter of the National Register property
types. Historic structures t into National Register
as objects, structures and buildings. Ethnographic
resources can be categorized as any of the ve Na-
tional Register property types. Museum collections
may be listed on the National Register as objects.
But archeology and cultural landscapes share the
phenomenon of being listed in the National Register
as sites or districts.
Universally, cultural landscapes are perceived
as any place on the globe where there’s an imprint
of humanity. at is not how the NPS denes a
cultural landscape. When the NPS uses the term
“cultural landscape,” we’re referring to lands that
are eligible for the National Register as a site or a
district. e NPS denition is more constrained
that the universal view. In other words, for the
NPS, we are only referring to properties that have
historic signicance and integrity and are there-
fore eligible for listing in the National Register as
sites or districts.
When NPS nominates cultural landscapes to
the National Register as sites or districts, we use
our typology of landscape characteristics to de-
scribe the property and evaluate its integrity. e
landscape characteristics are a system of patterns
and processes that were present historically but
still exist today. Landscape characteristics by de-
nition, inuenced the use or development of the
landscape historically and are still extant. So we
use these as a mechanism for identifying integrity
in the landscape. We include landscape charac-
teristics and their associated features in Section 7
and Section 8 of a nomination—the description
of the property and the statement of signicance.
e point is to build the case though these char-
acteristics, by describing how they are associated
with the signicance and are still evident today. It
is very important that they appear in both Section
7 and Section 8—they are reinforced by appearing
in both the description of the property and in the
statement of signicance.
Even though some of these characteristics, such
as “Vegetation” or “Spatial Organization” may not
end up in the contributing resources count on
the second page of the nomination, they are still
documented. e characteristics exist within the
boundary of the site or district, and are therefore
“counted” by being included in the narrative sec-
tions of the nomination. ere is a concern that the
features associated with these characteristics may
be overlooked, however, as they are not counted in
the contributing resources list.
It’s possible the recognition that landscapes as
places worth preserving may be short-changed
by using the National Register vocabulary ‘site’
or ‘district’ instead of “landscape.” “Landscape” is
oen a more comfortable term for land than “site”
or “district,” and we must select from “site” or
“district” for a nomination based upon somewhat
abstract concepts. If a landscape contains a single
concentration or locus of features, it is identied
in the National Register nomination as a site.
If the landscape has a series of interconnected
concentrations or loci of features, it is identied
as a district. Still, it can be done, and many cul-
tural landscapes are recognized by listing in the
National Register. Another limitation of the NR
181
property types with cultural landscapes is that it
is not possible to count districts within districts,
only sites, buildings, structures and objects within
districts, which limits our granularity of analysis
somewhat. Natural features with cultural signif-
icance can be included in nominations in those
narrative sections. In cultural landscapes, we
nd integrity in the natural systems and features
where they shaped the development or use of the
landscape historically, and are still evident today.
So we can include natural features in nomination
of sites and districts. ey do not end up in the
countable contributing resource list, but they are
still included in the nomination.
ere’s a need for more information from the
National Register on cultural landscapes, through
enhanced guidance and bulletins. We also need the
SHPOs to get on board and understand that sites
and districts do represent landscapes, and that they
are matrices of landscape characteristics – interwo-
ven historic patterns and processes that still remain
today. And we all need to do a better job of writing
quality nominations, that are holistic but well-jus-
tied through the description of the property and
the statement of signicance.
I’d like to make a nal point about cultural
landscapes and setting. Cultural landscapes are not
“setting.” ey’re a type of cultural resource that
are equivalent to two National Register property
types that can be surrounded by setting. All of
the National Register property types —those ve
property types—can have a setting. is is the area
outside the historic property boundary that con-
tributes to the historic character and signicance.
Setting is one of the aspects of integrity. Objects
can have a setting, and so can buildings, structures,
sites and districts. e setting of an object extends
outside of its boundary, just like the setting of a
structure or building. Sites and districts can have a
setting beyond their National Register boundaries.
We can talk about the integrity and the historic
context of that setting.
e cultural landscape itself is not a setting, just
like the site or district is not its own setting. Where
setting retains integrity, it is worth describing in
a nomination. is can lead to the justication
for conservation easements, zoning and planning
codes, and design guidelines that could potentially
protect these places. It is a useful and productive
eort to identify setting in a National Register
nomination. It can be leveraged for great planning
work in the future. Many thanks for the opportuni-
ty to talk with you. Δ
Susan Dolan is a Historical Landscape Architect
and Manager of the National Park Service, Park
Cultural Landscapes Program. Her responsibilities
include developing, implementing, and overseeing
a service-wide landscape preservation program that
includes research, planning, stewardship, education,
and technology development. She previously served
as the Historical Landscape Architect for Mount
Rainier National Park. She has undergraduate and
graduate degrees in Landscape Architecture from
the University of Oregon and an undergraduate
degree in Horticulture from Reading University
in England. Susan has worked with cultural land-
scapes for the NPS for 18 years.
182
Summary
During the US Civil War, the Confederacy
launched a two-part naval strategy focused on
defending key Southern-held ports and commis-
sioning privateers and naval vessels to attack and
undermine the economy of the North. While there
remains some debate about the ultimate eective-
ness of this strategy, the South achieved some of
what they hoped to accomplish through the course
of the war. A number of Confederate “Sea Raiders”
were tted-out, and these were fast and capable
ships acquired by the South for the sole purpose of
harassing and taking Yankee ships of commerce.
It was a bold and desperate strategy by the Con-
federate Navy, which possessed many fewer ships
than the Union and was challenged by diminishing
resources and manpower as the War continued, so
it could not compete with the wartime shipbuild-
ing capacity of the North.
It was the last of these ships, the CSS Shenan-
doah, which arguably had the greatest and most
enduring legacy of the Sea Raiders. In October of
1864, the Sea King was purchased surreptitiously
by Confederate agents in England and then secret-
ly sailed to the Madeiras where it was armed, pro-
visioned, and manned with Confederate ocers.
Embarking under the new name Shenandoah with
orders to seize and destroy Union merchant ships,
it set o on a voyage that would take it around the
globe, leaving devastation in its wake.
e Confederates’ orders further directed that
their ultimate mission was to specically target the
Yankee whaling eet—whaling being a critically
important part of the North’s economy—and that
it head for the North Pacic whaling grounds, the
epicenter of American whaling in the 1860s. Head-
ing south and east on the rst leg of its circum-
navigation, the Shenandoah seized and burned ve
merchant ships and one whaler before heading to
Melbourne, Australia for repairs. Aer departing
Melbourne, the neutral Australians found them-
selves subject to great diplomatic pressure from
the US Government for having allowed the ship to
enter their port. e vessel then headed to Ascen-
sion Island, where four more Yankee whalers were
destroyed. is last of the Sea Raiders was perhaps
most notable for its actions in the whaling grounds
of the Western Arctic. It was late May of 1865
when the Shenandoah reached the Sea of Okhotsk.
While the South had already surrendered at Appo-
mattox Court House in Virginia, the captain, James
Waddell, was unwilling to believe the war was over,
having received no ocial reports in this remote
corner of the world. He had his orders. Seizing the
opportunity to fulll his mission, Waddell sailed
into the whaling eet, and over seven days in June,
captured twenty-four whaling ships. While four of
these ships were bonded and released, twenty were
reported to “light up the night sky” of the Bering
Strait as they burned to the waterline, fueled by
the remains of the whale oil that impregnated their
decks. Shenandoah destroyed a little less than half
the eet on the grounds that year. No ocer or
crew of any of the ships captured was intentionally
harmed, and all were released alive, set adri in
whaleboats or bonded vessels that were dismasted.
e Shenandoah, having quite successfully struck
the intended blow, and Captain Waddell, nally
accepting the war was over, hastily completed their
circumnavigation around Cape Horn, evading
the Union warships, and surrendered in England,
where the vessel’s fateful journey began. All told,
the Shenandoah accomplished a circumnavigation
of 58,000 miles in less than thirteen months, lost
only two crew members (to natural causes), and
took thirty-two ships with an estimated value of
around $1.1 million in 1865 (equivalent to approxi-
mately $1 billion today).
What insights do the compelling saga of the
Shenandoah oer with regard to maritime cultural
landscapes? While the denition and potential
criteria for what makes a maritime cultural land-
scape worthy of preservation are still yet to be de-
e Epic Saga of the Confederate Sea Raider Shenandoah: A Dierent Type
of “Battleeld” on Multiple Maritime Cultural Landscapes
Brad Barr
Oce of National Marine Sactuaries, Maritime Heritage Program
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
183
termined, the National Register evaluation criteria
provide some useful guidance. With regard to de-
termining the “quality of signicance in American
history,” the Register guidance states, in part, that a
property, district, or site should be “associated with
events that have made a signicant contribution
to the broad patterns of our history.” It has been
argued that the Shenandoah’s exploits contributed
signicantly to the demise of the American whal-
ing industry. When taken in context with other
major losses to the whaling eet in the Western
Arctic in 1871, 1876, and 1898, it had an undeni-
able and profound eect on the whaling heritage
of the Western Arctic, the United States, and,
ultimately, the global whaling heritage landscape.
Whaling was becoming economically less attractive
with the discovery of petroleum, and whale popu-
lations had been seriously depleted in the latter half
of the 19th century, but they may have persisted
longer into the 20th century had these losses not
occurred. Certainly, on a global scale, whaling did
continue elsewhere in the world by other coun-
tries, and it still persists today. However, American
whaling was the dominant player in the global
whaling trade through the beginning of the 20th
century, and its withdrawal from whaling undoubt-
edly altered the trajectory of history at this global
scale. While it may not have aected the outcome
of the Civil War, if it is indeed true that the Shenan-
doah “drove the rst nail in the con” of American
whaling, it could be argued quite convincingly that
this was a “signicant contribution to the broad
patterns” of American history.
As alluded above, the geographic extent of the
signicance of an event like the exploits of the
Shenandoah has some inuence over the appro-
priate boundary that might be drawn around a
maritime cultural landscape. Either individually or
as part of a cumulative signicance of a cascade of
events inuencing signicant changes to the broad
sweep of history, such as that described for Ameri-
can whaling in the Western Arctic, the appropriate
geography of the maritime cultural landscape is
formed and shaped by the history of that place. In
this instance, various potentially relevant maritime
cultural landscapes might be identied based on
the signicant inuence that event or events had
on the cultural landscape at various geographic
scales. e maritime cultural landscapes incor-
porating the story of the Shenandoah might be a
global landscape, encompassing the entire circum-
navigation, to the discrete parts of the story located
in the cultural landscapes of places like the West-
ern Arctic. Clearly, a reasonably compelling argu-
ment could be made for this event that signicantly
inuences the history of American whaling, which
has relevance to both the United States and global-
ly, given the prominence of Yankee whaling around
the world in the 19th century. However, the voyage
of the Shenandoah was perhaps also potentially a
somewhat signicant event in the maritime his-
tory of Australia, Micronesia, and England. e
relevance to maritime cultural landscape bound-
ary delineation appears to be that most signicant
historical events inuence heritage landscapes at
multiple scales, and selecting one or more land-
scapes that are most appropriate for preservation
may be linked to how much inuence, individually
and cumulatively, these events had on that land-
scape and how signicant the associated event or
events were in inuencing the “broad patterns” of
history of that place.
Another, and perhaps most critical, element of
determining the signicance of a maritime cultural
landscape—also still to be determined—is some
evaluation of the integrity of the cultural landscape.
e National Register criteria state that “integrity is
the ability of a property to convey its signicance,”
and identify seven aspects of integrity: location,
design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling
and association. Few of these aspects seem di-
rectly relevant to maritime cultural landscapes,
but more generally, the integrity of a maritime
cultural landscape might be how comprehensively
it integrates the full sweep of signicant historical
events that occurred in that place through time and
across cultures that they inuenced, and were in
turn inuenced by that landscape. rough time,
more than one signicant historical event likely
took place, and more broadly, elements of that
place’s history signicantly inuenced what we see
there today, and what may be unseen could still
potentially be important in dening that cultur-
al landscape today. erefore, the integrity of a
maritime cultural landscape may be the ability of
that landscape to convey its cumulative signi-
184
cance over time and across cultures. An event like
the Shenandoah saga may attract our attention to
a place, that event contributing to its historical
signicance, but this is only a snapshot of some-
thing important that happened there and not a full
representation of the cultural signicance of that
place. For example, while the Western Arctic may
be a highly signicant maritime cultural landscape
with regard to Yankee whaling, it is also possesses a
much longer and arguably equally, if not more im-
portant, signicance related to the whaling heritage
of native cultures, primarily the Iñupiat and Yupik.
e Western Arctic is also a place with a long, rich,
and compelling history related to Arctic explora-
tion, and below the Bering Strait it is important
with regard to the maritime history of the Alaska
Gold Rush of the 1890s. Again, while a maritime
cultural landscape may have a particularly signif-
icant event that calls our attention to this place,
such landscapes could be considered to have high
integrity when they are found to be more broadly
signicant through time and across cultures, pos-
sessing “cumulative signicance.”
e idea of maritime cultural landscapes may
be decades old, since Westerdahl rst proposed the
concept, but how we delineate these places, how
we evaluate their relative signicance, and how we
decide as a society what is worthy of preservation
remains unresolved. Taking a closer look at places
like the Western Arctic and its whaling heritage is
one way to address this challenge, helping to frame
the questions that need answers. Taking a mari-
time cultural landscape approach to identify what
we believe to be worthy of preservation potentially
has much to oer. ese landscapes represent a
“big-picture” view of what we collectively believe
are culturally signicant places. Landscapes can
contain and integrate more broadly valued cultur-
al elements, and their eective identication and
evaluation can help to prioritize our preservation
eorts. Like place-based ecosystem preservation
initiatives that oen are initiated and focused on
a particular “charismatic species,” events like the
Shenandoah saga can alert us to places that may be
worthy of more landscape-level preservation and
management. From one perspective, the historical
signicance of the Shenandoah is reasonably clear,
but whether the landscape—at whatever appropri-
ate geographic scale—is one we collectively believe
to be worthy of preservation depends on how we
ultimately dene and evaluate maritime cultur-
al landscapes. It may be that resolving how we
robustly dene “integrity” is the critical, yet elusive,
next step. Δ
Brad Barr received a BS from the University of
Maine, an MS from the University of Massachu-
setts, and PhD from the University of Alaska. He
is currently a Senior Policy Advisor in the NOAA
Oce of National Marine Sanctuaries’ Maritime
Heritage Program, Aliate Professor at the School
of Marine Sciences and Ocean Engineering at
the University of New Hampshire, and a Visiting
Professor at the University Center of the Westords
in Iceland and the World Maritime University in
Malmö, Sweden. He is a member of the Internation-
al Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World
Commission on Protected Areas, and the Interna-
tional Committee on Marine Mammal Protected
Areas/IUCN Marine Mammal Protected Areas Task
Force. He has served on the Boards of Directors of
the George Wright Society in the US, the Science
and Management of Protected Areas Association
(SAMPAA) in Canada, and currently on the Board
of Directors of the Coastal Zone Canada Asso-
ciation (CZCA). He also serves on the Editorial
Board of the World Maritime University Journal of
Maritime Aairs. He has published extensively on
marine protected areas science and management,
the identication and management of ocean wilder-
ness, and whaling heritage.
185
is paper is about theoretical approaches to
cultural landscapes, specically an applied cultural
landscape approach that we have internalized at the
Monitor National Marine Sanctuary. We opened
the USS Monitor Center in 2007, which put to
bed one era of the work that we were doing in the
North Carolina area and began an ongoing period
of conservation.
Around that time, we began to say “All right,
what’s next? We’ve got all of this experience and
all of this expertise working on heritage resources,
oshore North Carolina.” It was pretty exciting to
have the ability to begin the process of identifying
resources and to be able to frame them under the
lens of cultural landscapes; we could look at the
broad area and understand it.
We completed an overview study, Graveyard of
the Atlantic, An Overview of North Carolina’s Mari-
time Cultural Landscape, which is available online.
1
e rst step in the study was to wrap our heads
around the vast resources which exist around this
area. We developed a database that includes about
2,000 points of named shipwrecks and associated
terrestrial sites, lifesaving service stations, airelds,
things like this. We thematically stove-piped all of
this information so that we could begin to use it as
a roadmap to cherry pick individual points from,
and do in-depth analyses.
We framed our data sets by breaking them into
topics like the pre-Contact period, the Colonial era
period, maritime commerce, various conicts that
have happened along the coast, as well as proper-
ties and places associated with coastal vernacular
water cra and shing heritage. is is discussed in
more detail in the assessment.
1 Joseph Hoyt, James P. Delgado, Bradley Barr, Bruce Terrell and Valerie Grussing. Graveyard of the Atlantic, An Overview of
North Carolina’s Maritime Cultural Landscape, Maritime Heritage Program Series: Number 4 (National Oceanic and Atmo-
spheric Administration, Oce of National Marine Sanctuaries, September 2014). Available at https://nmsmonitor.blob.core.
windows.net/monitor-prod/media/archive/pdfs/gota-nal.pdf
Once we completed this approach, we consid-
ered what we should dive deeper into rst. e
natural progression was to begin with World War
II. ere are ten thousand battleeld sites in the
United States from various conicts. Very, very
few are from World War II: Pearl Harbor, Aleutian
Islands, a couple of isolated sites on the west coast.
e Battle of the Atlantic on the east coast of the
United States and the Gulf of Mexico is an Amer-
ican battleeld that has not been well interpreted
and made known to the broader public. We saw an
opportunity to apply some of the expertise of the
sanctuary program to characterize this story in a
way that has not been done before, and project it to
as many people as possible.
Right aer the attack on Pearl Harbor on De-
cember 7, 1941, Hitler declared war on the United
States (December 11), and by January 18, 1942, the
rst ship was sunk o of North Carolina. It is pret-
ty remarkable how quickly this happened. Clearly,
U.S. enemies were ready for a war that we were
trying to resist becoming involved in. As a conse-
quence, there really was not a lot of coastal defense
on the east coast, especially because the popular
support for the war was in the Pacic theater at
that time. We had all of these vessels operating up
and down the eastern seaboard that were relatively
exposed, with U-boats nearby, just sinking ships.
Why were they doing this? Predominantly,
because of oil. ere are huge oil elds in the Gulf
of Mexico. Oil was coming up the east coast to
Cape Hatteras, riding the Gulf Stream, then taking
a right, heading towards Europe, where it fueled
the RAF bombing raids and other initiatives. ere
was a huge resource of oil and tankers coming up
the east coast, and the thinking of the German
Navy was “We’re not going to be able to compete
World War II and the Battle of the Atlantic
Joe Hoyt
Oce of National Marine Sanctuaries
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
186
with Britain or the US; we’re not on par with their
surface eet. What we can do is cut o the supply
chain and, hopefully, squelch the ability for them to
wage war in the European theater.”
Most battles take place over a relatively short
period of time, maybe over the course of a couple
of days or weeks. e Battle of the Atlantic is just
dierent. It was a very protracted engagement that
took place from the onset of World War II all the
way to the end. It was underway in the North Atlan-
tic well before the U.S. was even involved in WWII.
How do you characterize wartime action that
took place over a long period of time, and really
understand how it worked, especially if it is a huge
geographic area, from Nova Scotia down into the
Gulf of Mexico? In order to make sense of it all
geographically and temporally we began a compre-
hensive shipwreck assessment of these World War
II resources o of North Carolina. rough this
process we really began to understand that North
Carolina played a unique role in this history, but
what made it unique?
We started to understand how incorporating
features of the landscape was applicable to the
overall interpretation of what was going on. North
Carolina has some really unique geological features
that made it particularly appealing, tactically, for
the way that U-boats were operating. e shipping
lanes were coming up on the Gulf Stream and two
major oceanic currents come to a head right o
of the Outer Banks. Historically, not just in the
World War II era, these were massively important
currents, because it was possible to get a few knots
of speed pushing you towards Europe. It resem-
bles one of those moving walkways in an airport.
All of these ships were laden with fuel oil, heading
across the Atlantic to support that war eort, and
they came right along Cape Hatteras that acted as a
natural bottleneck.
Also interesting about this particular naval
engagement is that up until this point in histo-
ry, prior to World War I and World War II, naval
battles took place predominantly on the surface
plane of the sea. ere, they were interacting with
the environment—during the age of sail they were
trying to gain the weather gauge or deal with shore
line features, but the action generally takes place
on a plane or surface. e Battle of the Atlantic was
involved with merchant vessels, surface cra, but
also submersibles, where the water column itself
has a role, tactically, and also the water depth where
they could operate. ere was also the atmospher-
ic column—air coverage was a massive threat to
the U-boats, one of the best defensive aids against
them. So there was this atmospheric 3-D column
of space within which all of these dierent players
were operating. Knowing this really allows us to un-
derstand and characterize encounters through that
lens and understand the players’ roles, tactically.
e signicance of some of the geographical
elements to the Battle of the Atlantic was that the
U-boats were a very good oensive weapon, but
a pretty terrible defensive weapon. ey relied on
stealth; they relied on their ability to make sneak
attacks. If they were spotted on the surface or they
had to engage with a surface vessel, their main
battery was still their torpedoes, and they had to
actually maneuver the vessel on the surface. ey
were quite easy to sink, because they were com-
paratively delicate not made to be great surface
cras. eir primary defense was to be able to
hide in deep waters. ey wanted to be close to
the shipping lanes, but they wanted to be able
to get to deep water quickly, to be able to evade
counterattacks.
e continental shelf is situated very far o
shore on the east coast, north of Cape Hatteras,
and it goes hundreds of miles o shore, heading
north to New York, Boston, and New England.
ere are still heavy shipping lanes there, but the
ability to get to deep water for safety is limited. So,
there was U-boat activity there but the shipping
lanes were more dispersed. It was better to operate
in areas where the continental shelf was close to
shore, narrow and in sync with the shipping lanes.
South of Hatteras, the continental shelf is very
close to shore and heading farther south, it remains
close to shore, but less favorable due to dispersed
concentration of shipping, and the water is much
warmer. Why is warm water a factor? U-boats typi-
cally liked to operate at night and there was a much
187
higher concentration of bio-luminescent algae in
that area. For that reason, they wanted to avoid that
region because it could make them easier to spot at
night by patrolling aircra.
us, there are all sorts of natural features that
made Cape Hatteras emerge as a hot spot of U-boat
activity. is became known to the Germans, who
were incentivized based on tonnage sunk, that this
was a place where a captain could make his mark
and hopefully gain a promotion. Cape Hatteras
was preferred as a hunting ground. Many of the
features in the landscape mentioned are relevant to
other elements in the broader study. ese condi-
tions provide a baseline understanding, not just
related to World War II history, but to other history
as well.
Specic to the battleeld, there are other ele-
ments that we have been assessing—mercurial ele-
ments, like cloud cover, weather, visibility, airspace.
Harry Kane, Jr., with the U.S. Army Air Corps out
of Cherry Point, North Carolina, was the pilot of a
Hudson aircra who was the rst person to sink a
U-boat with aircra o of the east coast. He sank
the U-701 just o Cape Hatteras. In the narrative
of his attack, he said he used cloud cover to conceal
his approach; the U-boats were very aware that
they were most vulnerable from air attacks. ey
actually had on the conning tower four people, any
time they were on the surface, specically to watch
dierent squadrons of air so that they could crash
dive if there was a threat of aircra attack.
Harry Kane knew this, so he knew that if he was
going to be on anti-submarine patrol that he had
to conceal, as best as possible, his approach, and
he did that using cloud cover. It is interesting that
even intangible, eeting elements have a role in the
way human beings interact in this landscape. In
World War II, it had an inuence on tactics, in the
battleeld sense.
ere are, of course, tangible elements related
to the battleeld, such as the proximity of air bases
like the Elizabeth City airship base, Cherry Point
Naval Air Station, and lifesaving stations along the
beach. Also, there were the proximity of deep water
ports; a defensive mine eld o of Hatteras that in-
uenced the way vessels operated in the area; and,
of course, the shipwrecks themselves.
We began this larger study looking from a
broad view for all of the types of resources we
knew about. We focused on about a six-month
period when there was heavy activity that resulted
in about 90 vessels sunk—this was quite alarming
because it was an amazing number of vessels to go
down in a short period of time just o of North
Carolina alone. We peeled that number back to the
vessels that, we believed, were on the continental
shelf, and that was about 50 sites.
at was quite a lot to manage and to try to
understand, so we started with a GIS exercise.
rough this, we were able to depict not just sites
where there is actual, tangible material deposited
vis-a-vis a shipwreck, but where there was any
type of engagement. For example, a U-boat may
have attacked and struck a merchant vessel with a
torpedo, but the merchant vessel was sailing bal-
lasted and it didn’t sink, and was able to be retted.
at was still recorded, because it is relevant to
the overall story of how vessels were interacting in
this environment. It allowed us to understand why
certain areas had more signicance than other.
We take this information, apply some statistical
analyses, and start to develop hot spots of areas of
battle-related events. is is important, not only
for helping us understand where these hot spots
are, but because we are a place-based manage-
ment program. In order to position ourselves to
argue for an expanded sanctuary in this area, we
need to be able to back it up with reasons. Why
an area like Cape Hatteras and not an area like
Wilmington or anywhere else along the coast?
is gives us the ability to, not only interpret the
events more accurately and completely, but to be
able to convey to the public, and anyone who is
consuming it, why we think an area has signi-
cance, based on real data.
at’s the 30,000-foot view. en, we began, also
through an American Battleeld Protection Pro-
gram (ABPP) grant, a partnership with East Car-
olina University, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy
Management, a more laser-focused study looking
188
directly at one discrete convoy battle. is broad
study started by looking at all the dierent activity
that was taking place over a six-month window.
Now, we are applying the same approach to one
particular aernoon in July of 1942. ere was a
convoy of 19 ships sailing from Norfolk, Virginia,
to Key West, escorted by ve vessels and some air-
cra, which was attacked by the U-576. A Nicara-
guan freighter called the Blueelds was sunk imme-
diately. Two other vessels, the J. A. Mowinckel and
the Chilore, were struck but did not sink. As a result
of this, the U-boat popped to the center of the con-
voy in broad daylight. An armed merchant vessel
called the Unicoi opened re and two Navy King-
sher aircra came in and sunk the U-boat. All of
this took place in the span of about 15 minutes.
We wondered, rst, how can we nd where this
happened? en, is it going to be applicable to
study it as a key part of our ABPP grant? e rst
thing that we did was to partner with East Caroli-
na University and grad student John Bright, who
worked on developing some of the modeling. We
collected archival material and started to gure
how the convoy would have been situated and how
it would have been moving through this space
based on what we knew of how it was set up. ere
were ve escort vessels that had zones set up along
the convoy. ere was a pattern to the position
of the 19 ships. We were modeling based on the
narrative of the event, which told us the most likely
position of the U-boat. In our model, lines of dif-
ferent colors depicted the operational restrictions
of the torpedoes, such as the maximum ranges and
the optimum ranges of where they could be red.
We could not know where something t in the
3-D space until tangible remains were found—that
was the focus of one of our projects. e survey
model could help us gure out where to look. e
model was permeated with elements of a landscape
approach. You’ll see here, this is just a probabil-
ity model that was developed based on all of the
historic information that we had. You’ll see these
individual positions are Aer Action Reports,
which is really frustrating because there’s a half
dozen Aer Action Reports. All talking about the
exact same event that only happened in one place
but they plot out like a 40 square mile area. It was
really convenient.
en, you have these other elements where we
know the typical convoy route was to follow the 100
fathom curve lines so that it could avoid the Dia-
mond Shoals. at’s what you’re seeing here, you’re
seeing this lighter, snaking line. at’s just were
we know the convoy ought to have been running.
en, if you see, coming into shore here, we know
that when the Chilore and the J. A. Mowinckel were
struck. ey were towed out of the eld of re and
into an area where they were ostensibly going to
be repaired, but unfortunately, were towed directly
into the mineeld where they also struck mines.
All of this information came together and we
developed a probability model, and then we broke
it down into areas that had the most likelihood to
survey. We ended up using this model to develop
and dictate the surveys we carried out. In the rst
year that we looked, we later found, we had been
within 160 feet of the U-boat.
Fortunately, last year (2014), we were able to
nd the remains of the Blueelds. Fortunately, for
interpretive reasons, the U-boat was about 200
yards away from the Blueelds. We’re hoping to get
back to get some better imagery of these sites. e
proximity of these features to each other is such an
easy way to digest this notion of a battleeld, where
you’ve got both of these elements that are really
close together, in this one space, that allow us to
interpret these activities. e remains of the U-576
were in deep water, about 700 feet down, so it’s got
a really good level of preservation.
at is the focus we’ve had and the way the cul-
tural landscape approach has directed our research.
I’d like to mention that it has also permeated every
aspect of our management, as we’ve been moving
towards looking at things like expanded boundaries.
I should also mention that by the end of 2015 we
will have about 12 of these sites nominated to the
National Register, working with Dede Marx who has
prepared a lot of the nominations, as well as a multi-
ple property documentation form for World War II
resources in the east coast and Gulf of Mexico.
189
To nish, this approach, this way of thinking,
has permeated every element of our management,
from research through the public process. It allows
us, not just in the Battle of the Atlantic aspect, but
in the broader approach, to help form and identify
stakeholders who we might not have had con-
nections with in the past. We now have advisory
councils made up of members of the public. We
ask them to inform us about the concerns in the
communities. We have to have something to say
to a restaurant owner, “Here’s what the resource
is, here’s the way that we interpret it. Now you
can have a voice that’s more informed on how we
should move things forward.” So, our advisory
council made a recommendation that we look
into expanding the boundaries to include other
resources. All of that has been funneled through
this lens of the cultural landscape approach, even
towards the development of the boundaries them-
selves, which are still in ux and up in the air.
en, ultimately if we do go forward with an
expanded eort, we can use the elements of this
cultural landscape approach to help develop re-
quired documents, such as our dra environmental
impact studies. We can use that to better dene the
aected resources. It really ends up being our guid-
ing framework, moving forward, at our little site. Δ
Joe Hoyt is a maritime archaeologist with NOAA’s
Oce of National Marine Sanctuaries. He spe-
cializes in archaeological recording of deep water
shipwrecks. He has worked on several NOAA
projects in the under Bay, Florida Keys, and
Monitor National Marine Sanctuaries since 2001.
In 2004, he was awarded the North American Rolex
Scholarship through the Our World Underwater
Scholarship Society. He has worked on underwater
archaeology projects in the Great Lakes, Atlantic
and Pacic Oceans, and several inland rivers. Joe is
also an avid underwater photographer and techni-
cal diver and has crewed documentary expeditions
on BBC’s Planet Earth and PBS. For the last 6 years,
Hoyt has been the PI on a multifaceted wide area
investigation of WWII era shipwrecks lost o the
coast of North Carolina. Hoyt holds an MA in Mar-
itime History and Nautical Archaeology from East
Carolina University.
190
191
is session was a panel discussion intended to
give participants with legal expertise an oppor-
tunity to comment on laws that may aect the
nomination of maritime cultural landscapes to the
National Register. Collectively, the panelists had a
wealth of knowledge about legal issues and cul-
tural resource designation and management. With
experience ranging from tribal law to international
law to environmental law, the panel was equipped
to address questions about MCLs and their inter-
section with the National Register.
e discussion encompassed the meaning of
“maritime cultural landscapes,” integrity consider-
ations, the application of federal laws and regula-
tions, and the adequacy of current NPS guidance.
e panel did not attempt to put closure on topics,
but raised further questions for consideration as
MCLs become better recognized by preservation
programs.
Barbara Wyatt
National Register of Historic Places/National
Historic Landmarks Program
National Park Service
Moderator
James Delgado, NOAA
Participants
Caroline Blanco, Assistant General Counsel for the
Environment, National Science Foundation
Chip Brown, Senior Compliance Ocer – Lead,
Wisconsin SHPO
J. Paul Loether, Chief, National Register and Na-
tional Historic Landmarks Program, NPS
Jessica Perkins, Former Tribal Attorney, Sitka Tribe
of Alaska
David ulman, George Washington University
Ole Varmer, Oce of General Counsel, Interna-
tional Section, NOAA
8. Legal Considerations:
Maritime Cultural Landscapes
Panel Discussion
Introduction
192
e purpose of the legal roundtable was to address
some important questions. First, are maritime
cultural landscapes (MCLs) legal under existing
statutory and regulatory authority? Second, if so,
what potential problems or obstacles could arise?
e legality question was quickly dispatched; the
consensus was a clear thumbs-up for the adequacy
of existing authority. “Just do it” was a common
refrain, meaning that if an MCL met all the existing
legal criteria for a cultural landscape, nothing about
it being adjacent to water or underwater prevents
an MCL from being considered or accepted for
listing in the National Register of Historic Places
(NRHP). What followed was a freewheeling dis-
cussion that touched on a number of issues but no
clear resolutions. e ideas tossed about identied
the potential power of MCLs to better frame re-
search and conceptions of the connectedness of cul-
tural resources, but also troublesome management
problems and questions about the utility of MCLs.
is paper is divided into sections that describe
some of the major issues raised and briey sum-
marizes positions expressed by panel members and
the audience. Most of the issues raised cut across
at least one of these boundaries, and some are not
limited to MCLs. Some questions raised in the
session deserving further consideration are listed at
the end of this summary.
e Legal Authority for MCLs
e consensus among all participants was that
MCLs are simply a subset of cultural landscapes
and they can be nominated as National Historic
Landmarks or as National Register sites or dis-
tricts on any level, as long as they meet the criteria.
Unlike other statutes that distinguish submerged
lands, as far as the NRHP is concerned, land is
land, regardless of whether it is wet or dry or both.
us, owners and land managers should “just do
it,” and move forward with MCLs using the criteria
for nominating and evaluating cultural landscapes
where appropriate.
MCLs Need Boundaries
e discussion made clear that MCL is not a
precisely dened concept anywhere in the many
NRHP bulletins, even those focused on landscapes
and marine resources; outside the NRHP guid-
ance, MCL may have as many denitions as people
dening it. However, within the NRHP, it is rarely
specically addressed. Some saw that as a problem,
whereas others saw the generality as facilitating
an expansive view that could encompass land-
scapes not yet imagined. is may suggest that the
NRHP guidance, including the relationship of the
landscape to water, is poorly dened in terms that
might distinguish an MCL. With these kinds of
nonformalized boundaries for an MCL, it seemed
to the panel that nearly any kind of connection to
water could be enough to dene a maritime land-
scape. us, unsurprisingly, water as economic life-
blood, as transportation corridor, as boundary to
landbased habitats dependent on maritime activi-
ties all constitute sucient nexus between culture
and sea, lake or river to constitute a maritime cul-
tural landscape. Interestingly, the panelists seemed
unconcerned whether a current water-based
landscape had little or no connection to the sea or
other water body during its historically signicant
use. erefore, a prehistoric terrestrially-oriented
cultural landscape that is now submerged due to sea
level rise or reservoir ooding thousands of years
aer occupation could be an MCL.
By denition, landscapes include lands, some
of which may be unaected by human activity.
As such, the panel thought that MCLs must in-
corporate the non-human environment as well as
modications such as docks, bridges, and the like;
it is the spatial organization of land use and ac-
tivities and human responses to the environment
that distinguish cultural landscapes from other
types of properties. However, an audience mem-
ber asked whether a geographic area considered
an MCL should integrate all cultures that used it,
or should each culture be considered a separate
MCL? e discussion seemed to arise, in part,
Summary of MCL Legal Considerations
David ulman
George Washington University
193
from what some perceived as the privileged place
that shipwrecks have in submerged situations,
when, in contrast, precontact cultural use of the
same or nearby ocean-bottom landscapes are more
rarely given attention in NRHP nominations. In
addition, several participants noted that native and
non-native groups might see, and thus conceive of,
very dierent landscapes while looking at the same
geographic area. Should their views also be consid-
ered in a nomination? Although not discussed at
the time, looking back, we might now suggest that
drowned prehistory landscapes have historically
gotten short shri in terms of NRHP nominations,
in part, because they are much more dicult to
investigate than many shipwrecks. And too, as
this conference demonstrates, many agencies are
attempting to x that deciency and are including
native and other cultural views into their surveys
beneath and near the shore.
As originally conceived by Christer Westerdahl,
MCLs can extend vast distances, especially when
including water transportation corridors. e panel
discussed the issue particular to agencies such as
BOEM, NOAA, and the states who owned most of
the nearby oshore water bottom and water column
rights. When multiple agencies control only part
of the maritime cultural landscape, it may prove
dicult to get consensus on nominating an entire
MCL to the NRHP. Given the potentially enormous
geographic areas of MCLs, they may include some
arbitrary boundaries by necessity.
Several issues concerning boundaries not raised
during the session deserve highlighting and further
discussion. Is the water column above an MCL
automatically included in the designation? What
happens to mobile cultural objects in an MCL that
are moved by storms outside the MCL boundary?
Such a circumstance can pertain to moveable ob-
jects such as ships, airplanes, and trains listed in the
National Register. What is the situation when such
moves are not anticipated? Is the property auto-
matically delisted, as suggested by the regulations
if permission is not granted in advance of a move?
What would happen if the object moves onto a
parcel owned or managed by a dierent entity who
objects to the nomination of an MCL?
MCLs as Frameworks for Conceptualizing
Cultural Landscapes
Near universal agreement was expressed on the
value of MCLs as conceptual frames for under-
standing and researching cultural landscapes. is
seemed especially so when water tied the cultural
use or conceptualization of the landscape together.
Hawaiian MCLs with linear geographic areas that
start with water sources in the mountains and end
at the ocean were presented as good representative
examples. By following the ow of water from the
mountains to the sea and the native Hawaiians’
concerted eorts to alter and manage the water-
scape for advanced farming and shing eorts,
the entire island can be seen as a vast and intricate
cultural landscape linked to both fresh and marine
water environments.
Like the dierent ways to conceptualize the
same geographic area mentioned above, some dis-
cussants were concerned that conict could arise
between cultural and natural resource managers of
the same area due to their dierent denitions of
preservation. Cultural preservation means retain-
ing some measure of integrity of the cultural asset.
On land, preservation typically means controlling
termites, cutting grass, and repainting the struc-
ture to stem natural degradation with a goal of
permanence, although several managers accepted
the ultimate futility of their eorts. In contrast,
submerged cultural objects are oen substrate for
aquatic organisms, many of which are agents of de-
struction. Natural resource managers are inclined
to preserve these organisms and manage accord-
ingly. e conict is obvious, but under most,
maybe all, federal and state environmental law, the
natural resources take priority to the cultural.
e MCL approach to a landscape that includes
culturally and historically signicant resources
may also help natural resource managers be more
integrative under NEPA, especially if humans are
considered as part of, rather than outside of, the
natural environment. e view of MCLs as part of
the natural ecosystem may be similar to the tran-
sition of the view of natural resources managers
from a strict focus on species management to the
more inclusive, integrated ecosystems management
that dominate many programs today. Alternatively,
194
it may reect the change from strictly watercourse
management to watershed management, both of
which have fundamentally changed how natural
resource managers view the interconnectedness
of the natural world. Similarly, some panelists
suggested that if cultural resources could be inte-
grated into current management strategies already
practiced for natural systems, MCLs might stand a
better chance for long-term protection.
Whatever the approach to integrating MCLs
into successful management practices and pro-
grams, the panel concluded that a more com-
prehensive MCL analysis could facilitate greater
concern for consultation and connection with
aected and interested parties. As we pull in more
connections, more time periods, more groups,
more people into the process, the complexity of the
temporal and spatial interrelationships of cultural
resources and their stewards grow, which improves
our understanding of the MCL. Perhaps the great-
est benet of such an approach would be to com-
pel natural resource agencies not to overlook the
human element and cultural resource agencies not
to diminish the importance of the environment.
Challenges in Managing MCLs
Whereas participants agreed that an MCL ap-
proach would improve research and understanding
of both natural and cultural systems, opinion was
split on whether an MCL would improve manage-
ment of individual cultural resources. Identifying
a vast amount of land and cultural objects and
sites as an integrated MCL, might just add a new
layer of complexity to an already complex task for
managers. Further, MCLs do not solve or simplify
existing challenges in the NRHP regulations and
guidance.
Many participants were concerned with what
constitutes appropriate management of the cultur-
al elements in an MCL. If a property is important
enough to nominate, why should it be allowed
to degrade? How actively should managers try to
preserve structures or shipwrecks? e process of
in situ preservation on land is well understood,
but what does that mean for submerged resources?
Many considered their responsibility was to pre-
vent humans from accelerating the natural de-
structive processes in the underwater environment.
Managed destruction, damage through neglect, and
proactive neglect were terms used to describe this
management approach. e notion that cultural
resources might be allowed to degrade made some
managers anxious, because it is so foreign to their
understanding of preservation under prevailing
constructs.
e problem of preservation is not just one of
conict with natural resource managers. e ocean
is a dynamic system, and many, if not most, MCLs
have been damaged by sea level transgression,
storms, and biological agents for centuries, if not
millennia, before they are nominated. What level
of preservation is appropriate in that circumstance?
Many wooden shipwrecks are mostly destroyed.
Storms may repeatedly cover and uncover wrecks
and move their location. We may have no good
handle on what the precontact landscape looked
like. On land, these conditions are relatively easy to
address, but below water?
One audience member suggested the conict
prompt a new approach to integrated manage-
ment of maritime cultural and natural resources.
However, it is dicult see how these views could
be reconciled without fundamental changes. An-
other audience member suggested archaeologists
might consider discarding their focus on preserving
the past in favor of collecting data before sites are
naturally destroyed. us, some cultural resources,
such as Native American mounds or cemeteries,
are allowed to degrade as the environment dictates.
Perhaps embracing the inevitability of change and
destruction would provide a fruitful paradigm for
integration. No resolution was reached on this issue.
Topics for Further Consideration
ese topics were culled from the session and
include some that were unarticulated but I think
implied.
• What is and what is not an MCL? Should the
denition be precise or general?
• What limits should be placed on the size of
an MCL that is potentially enormous? Should
the overlying water column be included?
195
How should mobile cultural items that could
be dislocated through natural processes be
addressed?
• Is MCL a useful research frame? Should it best
be used when water is the connecting or most
dominant thread, or is it useful whenever wa-
ter is present in a cultural landscape? Should it
include all cultures that used the landscape?
• Is the MCL approach better for ensuring that
the unused and unmodied environment of
a landscape is adequately considered in its
evaluation? Does this need to consider the
environment distinguish MCLs from other
cultural landscape approaches?
• Are historic uses overemphasized compared
to precontact uses of maritime landscapes? Is
there a bias in favor of historic uses? Is this a
problem that should be remedied?
• Is managed destruction a viable manage-
ment approach for structures or artifacts in
MCLs? When would active preservation be
appropriate?
• How should management of submerged cul-
tural and submerged natural landscapes be
integrated? Will environmental regulations
limit the ability of cultural resource managers
to retard natural destruction of submerged
resources and, if so, how should that be incor-
porated in a management plan?
• Would the nomination and management of
MCLs benet from specic guidance? Do
MCLs present unique problems that are not
easily handled by existing guidance?
Concluding oughts
Whereas little of the discussion in the legal session
of the MCL symposium concerned few purely
legal issues, the topics raised and discussed indi-
cate that further discussions are needed. Most of
the topics listed above are a mix of law and policy
and will take a while to esh out. My discussions
with audience members aer the session found few
who were satised, mainly because little guidance
was provided for practical problems. For example,
although clear legal authority exists to nominate
MCLs, practical issues abound concerning bound-
aries and other details for integrating MCLs into
current NRHP guidance. My sense is that MCLs,
or at least those that contain submerged cultur-
al resources, are distinct enough from terrestrial
landscapes to benet from additional guidance
addressing their unique issues.
196
Salem Maritime National Historic Site, Salem, Massachusetts. Once more than 50 wharves ex-
tended into Salem Harbor. ree remain at the NPS historic site, which interprets colonial trade.
Derby Wharf, built in 1806, is a half-mile long. e shorter Hatch’s Wharf and Central Wharf
were built in 1819 and 1791, respectively. e historic site includes some nine acres of land
along the waterfront of Salem Harbor, including historic buildings, a replica of a tall ship, and
the light station, built in 1871. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.
197
Ben Ford graciously agreed to provide conclud-
ing remarks at the Maritime Cultural Landscape
Symposium. During the two-day gathering of MCL
scholars, managers, and cultural landscape special-
ists, nearly 40 papers were presented, representing
an impressive diversity of site types and locations,
status of research and eld work, and management
issues. An individual with his extensive familiari-
ty with MCLs and their intellectual mooring was
needed to provide a fundamental understanding of
the collective vision suggested by presenters. His
concluding remarks did not disappoint.
Dr. Ford is internationally recognized for his
MCL scholarship, writing, and eld work. His
inuential book e Archaeology of Maritime
Landscapes (2011) is considered an essential text
and eld manual. In it, he draws on his consider-
able eld work and research to integrate marine
and terrestrial archeological techniques and thus
merge the history, culture, and archeology of
shore and water.
In his concluding remarks, Dr. Ford, in his own
words, focuses on “how I see all of the excellent
research and initiatives presented in the sympo-
sium dovetailing with the federal cultural resource
protection process. ese comments are based on
the papers presented in the symposium, as ltered
through my decade of attempting to apply an MCL
approach on the land and on the water.” His re-
marks were an excellent conclusion to the sympo-
sium. ey are presented in their entirety.
Barbara Wyatt
National Register of Historic Places/
National Historic Landmarks Program
National Park Service
9. MCL Symposium Conclusion
Introduction
198
Introduction
I have the daunting task of oering concluding
remarks aer what amounts to a two-day master
course in the theory and application of Maritime
Cultural Landscapes. I sincerely appreciate the
eorts of the organizers to bring the symposium
together, it has been a stimulating experience, and
I’m thrilled just to be involved. I am always in awe
of the depth of thought that John Jensen and Todd
Braje bring to these matters, and as a result of this
symposium I’ve added several others to my ‘must
read’ list. It is very exciting to see so many state,
tribal, and federal agencies interested in utilizing a
Maritime Cultural Landscape (MCL) approach, but
I am going to attempt to tamp down my excitement
about specic examples and focus my remarks on
how I see all of the excellent research and initia-
tives presented in the symposium dovetailing with
the federal cultural resource protection process.
ese comments are based on the papers presented
in the symposium as ltered through my decade of
attempting to apply an MCL approach on the land
and on the water.
I came to MCL studies early in my academic
career aer several years in terrestrial and mari-
time Cultural Resource Management (CRM). MCL
appealed to me because it allowed me to use the ar-
chaeological survey skills I had developed in CRM
to answer anthropological questions in a wide vari-
ety of environments. I was late to the MCL game. I
rst read Westerdahl’s 1992 article in 2005, only 13
years aer it was rst published, and saw that it was
clearly a management approach. Since publishing
that rst English-language article, Westerdahl has
moved on to more theoretical questions, which is
also exciting as it shows that MCL is an evolving
concept with room for growth and innovation.
e approach he laid out in his early work—the
approach that has been the foundation for much
of the discussion in this symposium—allowed me
to do anthropological maritime archaeology, to
combine terrestrial and maritime archaeology into
a unied eld of study, and explore the maritime
archaeological record beyond shipwrecks. Since
then I have read and thought widely about mari-
time cultural landscapes and integrated an MCL
approach into my Great Lakes research.
What follows will be organized into a discussion
of the benets of an MCL approach, the challenges
that such an approach might entail, and a few sug-
gestions for incorporating an MCL approach into
the federal management process.
Benets
MCL supports varying perspectives. Multiple
theoretical perspectives can be pursued under the
MCL aegis; cultural ecology to phenomenology
and Marxism to practice theory can all be explored
within an MCL framework. Importantly, MCL
also takes in a management perspective, allowing
us to organize and manage cultural resources. It
is a broad church. What we’ve been calling MCLs
are in fact places that are important to a variety of
groups with varying perspectives. e perspectives
of the public, managers, and scholars can all be
accommodated within an MCL approach and there
is a recursive relationship between these groups.
Scholarship today is grounded in the beliefs of to-
day, in how we currently see the environment, and
what we choose to study inuences what becomes
important to the public in the future. e relation-
ship between the public and scholars is grounded
in today and building towards the future. Further-
more, anthropological theory, as we’ve heard in
previous papers, helps give meaning to what the
public cares about. eory allows us to frame an
argument for what is important and worth preserv-
ing, it oers the motive for the story we tell about
a place, it provides the context that makes our
ndings relevant. eory transforms cool old stu
into places that matter for a reason.
e views of many publics as well as multiple
groups of professionals can coexist in an MCL
because space is what we all share. Cultures come
and go, but the places they create remain. Dier-
Concluding Remarks about the MCL Symposium,
Ben Ford, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Ben Ford
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
199
ent groups may interpret a space dierently, but
it is still the same location. e importance and
meaning that people invest in a place is tied to that
location along with everyone else’s. is fact of ge-
ography binds disparate groups together and gives
them a common understanding. I may see a place
one way and someone else may see it dierently,
but we are seeing the same physical space and that
is a commonality we can build on. MCLs also help
engage one group that is oen ignored in mari-
time archaeology—the landsmen. I believe that the
view from the water is important. e world looks
dierent when viewed from the water towards the
shore and what is a refreshing breeze on land can
make a small boat unpleasant to be in. However,
the MCL approach does allow maritime heritage to
stretch onto land and, when we consider sea level
change, to push the water back. In this way it en-
courages the non-diving, non-boating, non-swim-
ming population to participate. e result is larger
populations and multiple constituencies interested
in preserving a place.
MCLs also allow for linkages across multiple
preservation elds—built environment, archae-
ology, traditional cultural places (TCP), ecology,
etc. Ecology—the role of humans as animals in
nature— and links to environmental protection
pulls in even larger communities interested in
similar resources for dierent reasons. People like
old stu, but they really like clean water and livable
communities. Many maritime resources have both
environmental and heritage value, further building
the constituency that wants to protect them. In a
broader sense, water is universal; it links the world
through modern commerce, the history of global
expansion, and as the key to life. It is important to
all people. We don’t have to agree why it is import-
ant, just that it is.
e physical and environmental characteristics
that make up an MCL—the view, wind, sunset,
weather, etc.—give an inkling of the past and links
us to our forbearers. ose who came before us
experienced the storms, walked the ice, heard the
waves, and watched the clouds that we interact
with today. is means that scholars working in
these places share some of the same experiences
with those they study, possibly enriching their
understanding of the past. It also means that the
interested public can share experiences with their
cultural or geographical ancestors. is place-
based experience, plus the physicality of being in a
place, makes heritage tangible. Physicality is what
sets heritage apart from history. I can hand a stu-
dent a 10,000-year-old artifact and simultaneously
deepen their appreciation for the past and spark
their imagination. Landscapes allow us to do the
same thing on a much larger scale. is connection
increases the enjoyment of the user; it supplements
and deepens the natural beauty of a place.
Finally, I believe that an MCL approach allows
for better research and interpretations. For a long
time maritime archaeology treated the seas, lakes,
and rivers as blue plains with a few shipwrecks
scattered about. Shipwrecks are rich archaeological
sites that lead to important discoveries about the
human past, but an MCL approach allows us to put
them into a larger context and understand that all
ships were going from one place to another, oen
as parts of longer journeys for the cargoes and pas-
sengers on board. Exploring these connections, as
well as the ways that people wrote their perceptions
of water onto the landscape, allows for the syn-
thesis of multiple lines of evidence leading to new
discoveries. An MCL approach allows us to make
connections across space and time that draw in
First Peoples, as well as later waves of immigrants,
to explore how they aected the water and how
water aected them. All of these groups are linked
by place, and an MCL approach demands that we
treat them equally.
Problems
MCL is a broad church, a powerful tool, an oppor-
tunity to employ big data, and ask questions that
matter. I see a lot of promise in it for heritage man-
agement and interpretation but it is not without
problems, especially within the National Register
of Historic Places (NRHP) framework. e prob-
lems largely center on the interconnected issues of
scale, boundaries, and integrity.
Hans Van Tilberg brought up the scale question
of how far away from the water can be considered
maritime. Resources owed from the hinterlands
to the sea and back again, which could argue for an
200
expanded maritime landscape, but if the movement
of resources is the only requirement for being mar-
itime, we run the risk of diluting the distinction
to meaninglessness. Homer solved this problem
neatly when Odysseus was instructed to carry an
oar inland until the residents mistook it for a win-
nowing fan. Homer is exactly correct, what makes
a place maritime is linked to the lives of the people
who live there and the character of the place. How
humans use a landscape allows us to dene it as
maritime, and the requirements of this use limit
the landward scale of the landscape.
How far to expand an MCL seaward is also
worth considering. As Matthew Sanger showed in
his presentation, there were expansive networks
connected by water from long before written histo-
ry, and by the sixteenth century those connections
became global. It would be possible to argue for a
worldwide MCL connected through the trade and
transportation routes that dominated the postme-
dieval period. ese worldwide connections are
certainly worth considering and are a tool for tell-
ing a great story of how the modern world came to
be. A global MCL, however, risks losing its mean-
ing to the public. It will tend to lose the physicality
that draws people to a place and will leave many
people cold. It would also be nearly impossible to
manage. Conversely, an MCL that is too small loses
the power of a landscape approach to link people
together. An overly small MCL does not reect
the breadth of how people lived and experienced
the place and essentially returns us to a site-based
model. It will take careful consideration to nd a
happy middle ground between large and small and
draw a line somewhere.
Drawing a line—dening boundaries—is partic-
ularly dicult with MCLs because they are literally
uid. All landscapes are constantly in ux because
they are based in nature and it is the nature of
nature to change. For example, sea levels have
changed, shiing what is water and what is land,
and sediment dri alongshore can drastically alter
the shape of the littoral. Water also provides almost
frictionless travel allowing individuals to move
through maritime landscapes and across jurisdic-
tional boundaries with ease. An MCL approach
has the ability to break down cultural, temporal,
political, and environmental boundaries by focus-
ing on the entirety of a space. I see this as a gener-
ally good thing. It dissolves the prehistoric/ historic
boundary, which we’ve heard is insulting, but also
isn’t always useful. People were there before, people
were there aer; the landscape was present and
changing throughout. Where I work on the Great
Lakes, the international boundary was largely
ignored because it was easier to visit neighbors
across the lake then countrymen back East. Not
even the waterline is a hard boundary for maritime
peoples. ey moved back and forth across the
waterline seamlessly, leaving artifacts and creating
sites on both sides. However, the National Register
of Historic Places requires boundaries in order to
dene a property. Briece Edwards has made some
suggestions for dealing with NRHP boundaries in
an MCL context and this issue will require addi-
tional consideration.
MCLs have the additional complication that
some of the attributes that make the landscape
signicant may be transitory. e energy of moving
water and the frictionlessness of travel by water
cause water, sh, sediments, people, and birds to
continuously move through a maritime setting. In
some instances it may be the maritime resources
(sh, birds, etc.) that are important to dening the
landscape. eir movement might cause the land-
scape to move or a dening feature of a landscape
to be present only at certain times. For an ocially
recognized and bounded landscape this might
mean that important components of the landscape
cannot be exclusively managed within the land-
scape. We may have to consider ways to manage
and protect resources that dene a landscape while
they are outside of the boundaries of the landscape.
ere are therefore two problems with bounding
many MCLs: 1) the characteristics of the MCL
are uid and do not lend themselves to dened
boundaries, and 2) aspects of the MCL may exist
for periods of time outside of the MCL, placing
them at risk and making them dicult to manage.
Bounding an MCL can also present jurisdictional
headaches. In instances where an MCL cuts across
the waterline, private, state, tribal, and federal
jurisdictions can come into play complicating the
management of the landscape.
201
Many of the examples during this symposium
represent one facet of an MCL, for example a group
of shipwrecks, a series of fortications, or the First
Peoples’ sites and TCPs in a region. A landscape,
however, incorporates all of these things and more.
A landscape is a space and all of the human uses
of that space through time. Most MCLs will, as a
consequence, include multiple types of resources
including First Peoples sites on both sides of the
waterline, shipwrecks both lost and scuttled, per-
ceptions of the water’s surface, surf spots, naviga-
tional aids, places where Paul Bunyan dragged his
toe, and myriad other resources. is is a strength
in that it represents many dierent uses all linked
by place and environment, illustrating how dier-
ent cultures interacted with the same environment
and how those interactions built on one another.
However, this also means that you might have
structures, buildings, archaeological sites, districts,
and TCPs all overlapping in the same landscape.
Each of these property types has dierent thresh-
olds for integrity, which could make it dicult to
determine the integrity of the landscape as a whole.
I would argue that the entire landscape should
all be held to the archaeological standard of in-
tegrity. e landscape is not likely to look as it did
during its period of signicance. It is not even like-
ly to have a single period of signicance. e land-
scape is not frozen in time, it cannot be. It is not
strictly cultural like a building. It is part of nature
and nature changes. It is an archaeological land-
scape in that it has developed through time. It has
gone through what archaeologists call site forma-
tion processes—the natural and cultural processes
that transform a lived location into an archaeolog-
ical site. Pierce Lewis (1979) has called landscape
our unwitting biography. It is a biography that has
been written and erased and written again. Much
of it will be erased again, but by preserving a few
pages, even if the ink is a bit smudged and the
pages thin, we have a better chance of knowing our
ancestors on their own terms.
Suggestions
Do not get caught up in jargon. MCL is a useful
term, but if it is not helpful in a given situation
don’t feel compelled to use it. If you can call an
MCL a “district” or a “TCP,” and that makes it
easier to designate and manage a place, then do
that. It may also be easier to simply focus on the
term “landscape.” “Cultural” and “Landscape” are
redundant terms. All landscapes are the product
of human intervention and perception and are
therefore cultural. If there are no people involved,
no culture involved, that is simply the environ-
ment. “Maritime” denes the type of landscape.
e marine environment brings specic consid-
erations, such as frictionlessness and the scale of
maritime transportation, but all landscapes have
their peculiarities without requiring a special term.
If the term “landscape” allows easy communication
across agencies, specialties, and regions, then use
that term. Conversely, the term “MCL”, or the more
generic “cultural landscape approach” described by
Brad Barr (2013), might be useful for those places
that are an uncomfortable mix of TCP, archaeolo-
gy, structures, buildings, and districts; important
places that cross-cut our usual way of dealing with
properties. I particularly like the cultural landscape
approach, because it is an approach, an active way
of managing resources, which is how I view MCLs.
It is also worthwhile considering our goals. If
the goal is education and interpretation, National
Heritage Areas, Marine Sanctuaries, and National
Parks are good models that could encompass most
of the places discussed during the symposium. If
more broad-based management and protection
is the goal then we are in NRHP territory. For the
NRHP to work for landscapes, manageable bound-
aries will need to be established and managers will
need to have conversations about dening integrity
and signicance. I am less concerned about signif-
icance than integrity. I believe that landscapes lend
themselves to strong arguments under Criteria A
and D. As Michael Russo suggested, the consid-
eration of landscapes might require a shi away
from how the regulations are ordinarily practiced
and a reevaluation of what the regulations actually
say. Ole Varner mentioned the National Environ-
mental Protection Act (NEPA) during the Legal
Considerations Panel, and I agree that it may be
helpful to learn from the NEPA process. NEPA
takes the stance that the environment is import-
ant and denes “environment” broadly. e air
you breathe and the places that feed your soul are
both part of the environment. NEPA integrates the
202
cultural and natural environments and calls for
serious consultation as part of the scoping process.
e fact that we are using current paradigms to
preserve heritage for the future makes consulta-
tion essential. Consultation is the only way for the
process to remain responsive to the needs of people
whose heritage it purports to protect. In addition
to NEPA, John Jensen, Susan Dolan, and Brinnen
Carter have suggested other useful guidance such
as the NRHP Rural Landscapes Bulletin.
My nal suggestion is to consider Landscape
Characterization as practiced by Historic England
(Historic England 2016; Turner and Fairclough
2007). Rather than preserve a resource in an ossi-
ed moment, Characterization determines what
denes the character of a landscape through con-
sultation and study, and then engages the public to
protect that character. In the process, it determines
what must be preserved, what can be lost, and what
can change as long as it maintains its character (i.e.
what can be managed). is scheme respects that
culture and nature change; it preserves the vibran-
cy of a place by allowing it to change, breathe and
live, rather than making it a museum piece. In
some ways it is also easier to institute and manage
because it allows for change. For example, if use by
traditional shing people is important to a com-
munity and landscape, Characterization would
argue that the population should be encouraged to
keep shing and that the sh population should be
managed, but that the means of shing should be
allowed to change. e act of shing is important
to the character of the place, but the specic tech-
nologies have changed and will continue to change.
Since MCLs tend to cover large areas, this ap-
proach may make their application more palatable
for both residents and managers. For residents,
Characterization replaces telling them what they
cannot do with asking them to keep doing what
they are doing.
ank you for considering these comments. I
am very much looking forward to seeing where
federal, tribal, and state agencies take the idea of
MCL. Its application and use are only limited by
our ingenuity.
References
Barr, Bradley. “Understanding and managing ma-
rine protected areas through integrated ecosystem
based management within maritime cultural land-
scapes: Moving from theory to practice.” Ocean
and Coastal Management 84 (2013):184-192.
Lewis, Pierce. “Axioms for Reading the Landscape.”
In e Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes. D.W.
Meinig, ed. Oxford University Press, New York,
1979. 11-32.
Turner, Sam and Graham Fairclough. “Common
Culture: e Archaeology of Landscape Character
in Europe.” In Envisioning Landscape: Situations
and Standpoints in Archaeology and Heritage. Dan
Hicks, Laura McAtackney, and Graham Fairclough,
eds. Routledge, New York, 2007. 120-145.
Westerdahl, Christer. “e Maritime Cultural
L a n d s c a p e .” International Journal of Nautical Ar-
chaeology 21.1 (1992): 5-14.
Split Rock Light Station, Town of Beaver Bay, Lake County,
Minnesota. Built in 1909-1910 as part of a concerted eort
to upgrade the Great Lakes navigation system, the Split
Rock Light Station served the ports of Two Harbors and
Duluth-Superior. From these ports, tons of iron ore were
shipped to eastern industrial states and grain was shipped
throughout the Great Lakes.e light station and associated
buildings were designated a National Historic Landmark in
2011. Photo by John N. Vogel, October 2007; courtesy of the
National Historic Landmarks Program.
203
Background and Overview
e Maritime Cultural Landscape (MCL) Sympo-
sium organizers convened a working session the
day following the Symposium presentations. It
was facilitated by Alan Levy, whose rm Goaltrac
specializes in meeting facilitation. His follow-up
report contributed to this summary.
e purpose of this workshop session was to
provide guidance on key “next steps” in consider-
ation of MCLs within the overarching context of
the potential to oer opportunities to preserve these
places through recognition and listing in the Na-
tional Register. e intent of the symposium orga-
nizers was to share information and perspectives
about MCLs through presentations and discussion
at the Symposium sessions, and task the workshop
participants with assimilating the information from
these presentations and discussions to help identify
a possible path forward for more formal consider-
ation of MCLs within the process of listing “proper-
ties” in the National Register. e discussions at the
Workshop were focused on ve key topics:
• Summarizing MCL Concepts and Denitions
applicable to the National Register
• Applying the National Register Criteria to MCL
Signicance
• Dening MCL Districts, Sites, and Boundaries
• Developing Integrity Requirements for MCLs
• Creating Documentation Standards for MCLs
is working session was conducted over ap-
proximately ve hours, and engaged speakers and
participants in the Symposium who represented a
broad spectrum of Federal, state, and tribal agen-
cies and other institutions with familiarity and ex-
pertise with regard to MCLs—and more generally
cultural landscapes—and the National Register pro-
cess, objectives, and its eective implementation.
is summary of the discussions is provided to
foster continued discussion of the potential recog-
nition of MCLs by the National Register, and in this
regard, to assist in identifying issues and concerns
that require additional thought and deliberation to
achieve some consensus regarding these questions:
• Should the National Register more formally
recognize MCLs as a property category?
• If so, what issues and concerns must be ad-
dressed and resolved to advance consideration
of this recognition of MCLs by the National
Register?
is Workshop Summary has been prepared by
the Symposium organizers, and represents what
is believed to be an accurate assimilation of the
discussions conducted at the Workshop within the
context of the workshop goals as stated above. Not
all comments captured by the Workshop facilitator
have been fully and completely recounted in this
summary, but have been considered and integrat-
ed, where relevant, into the ndings reported here.
e summarized listing of comments made and
captured by the facilitator, as provided to the Sym-
posium organizers, has been included at the end of
this summary to provide interested readers with an
opportunity to see the original comments made by
all participants in the Workshop session.
MCL Concepts/Denitions applicable to the
National Register
As one comment succinctly suggests, MCL may be
“easy to understand as a concept,” but “very di-
cult to put into operations.” Clearly, developing a
robust and consensus-based denition of MCL,
within the National Register context, is a critically
important next step, as well as dening what the
key elements of that landscape might be (e.g. “Ob-
jects … sites … navigation corridors … commer-
cial points of access … connections … exchanges
… pathways … structures.”) It was mentioned that
there is precedent for recognizing some forms of
cultural landscapes in the National Register, but
10. Summary: Maritime Cultural
Landscape Workshop
204
this is still a work in progress, in large part, through
the ongoing discussions of the National Register
Landscape Initiative. Particularly with regard to
MCLs, the denition of “maritime” seems to be an
outstanding challenge, especially related to the po-
tential inclusion of both coastal lands and adjacent
waters. Resolving how MCL relates to other “cul-
tural landscapes,” “evocative landscapes,” and “trib-
al cultural landscapes,” among others, may oer
some insights and guidance for the recognition of
MCLs. Workshop participants generally seemed to
acknowledge the idea that MCL approaches would
provide some opportunities to embrace a more
“holistic approach” to preservation of coastal lands
and waters, that MCLs should be viewed as a way
to better account for and address the human/en-
vironment connection in our preservation eorts,
might oer opportunities for broader interagency
collaboration, should be multicultural and encom-
pass the full history of the landscape, and include
tangible and intangible values. Workshop partic-
ipants also recommended that whatever concepts
and denitions that might be put forward to ad-
dress these perspectives should be made available
to the broader community of interest and aected
agencies for their input and recommendations.
Applying the National Register Criteria to MCL
Signicance
Workshop participants oering comments on this
topic seemed to consistently suggest that, while
still lacking a consensus denition of “maritime,”
the current National Register signicance crite-
ria could be applied to MCLs. e encompassing
nature of MCLs should, as one commenter sug-
gested, be “beyond shipwrecks,” and some linkage
might be developed, through targeted interpreta-
tion, to use current “site” and “district” property
types as a way to recognize these, cumulatively, as
MCLs within a dened place identied as an MCL.
However, specic guidance would be needed to
operationalize this recognition within the National
Register framework, and the development of an
overarching MCL Bulletin was suggested.
1 Editor’s note: e National Register considers historic integrity to be the authenticity of a property’s historic identity,
evidenced by the survival of physical characteristics that existed during the property’s prehistoric or historic period. Historic
integrity is the composite of seven qualities: location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association. (How
to Complete the National Register Registration Form, page 4).
Dening MCL Districts, Sites, Boundaries
MCL boundaries seem to be another issue that
requires further discussion and analysis, and the
boundary delineation seems to be consistently
linked to the signicance of the landscape across
cultures and through time. Landscapes can be
identied at multiple geographic scales, and may
be inuenced by “natural features aecting human
activity and human activities changing the natural
environment.” Here again, comments reect the
essential need for guidance, recommending the
possible development of an MCL Bulletin.
Developing Integrity Requirements for MCLs
Input from the workshop participants was more
dicult to interpret for this topic, beyond that more
discussion is required to eectively ascertain what
“integrity” means with regard to MCLs. e present
aspects of integrity in the National Register guid-
ance seem to not “t” well with the idea of MCLs,
beyond perhaps “setting” and “feeling,” which may
also be challenging to dene and implement for
maritime landscapes.
1
While a comment suggested
that MCL “landscapes are archaeological … that
is the integrity that should apply,” archaeological
resources and values are but one element—albeit an
important one—of MCLs and perhaps this suggests
that more robustly dening what constitutes an
MCL might help to clarify other aspects of MCLs
beyond archaeology. Again, comments allude to
the preference for MCLs to be expressed across
cultures and the full sweep of time. Clearly, this is
another topic that could be discussed and deliber-
ated through the development of guidance and/or a
bulletin on MCLs.
Creating Documenting Standards for MCLs
is was another topic of discussion at the Work-
shop where there was clear preference expressed by
numerous commenters that documentation stan-
dards be developed as part of the needed guidance,
and specically as part of the draing of any Na-
tional Register Bulletin for MCLs. Also present in
this discussion is the need to address multicultural
and full sweep of time perspectives, particularly
205
eectively integrating local and traditional eco-
logical knowledge and ethnography with regard to
identifying and characterizing MCLs. e National
Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was mentioned
a number of times in the comments as providing a
potentially “good framework” for documentation
standards (and possibly process). e participants
from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
oered a very comprehensive list of challenges and
recommendations for documentation standards,
including the suggestion that others (e.g. Canada,
New Zealand, Australia, UNESCO World Heritage,
IUCN) have addressed this topic and their work
should be looked at for models of guidance. A
number of these comments also address tribal and
indigenous engagement in the preparation of any
MCL guidance and MCL nominations submitted
to the National Register for consideration. Tribes
should be enlisted to write relevant sections of the
documentation, and should be well represented in
any MCL process (and those who opt not to par-
ticipate also are given opportunities to oer their
perspectives). ese BOEM comments should be
thoroughly and carefully considered if and when
guidance, and/or a bulletin, is developed.
Conclusion and General Observations from the
Workshop Session
While considerable progress was made in the MCL
Symposium and Workshop in raising awareness of
MCLs, as well as in identifying the challenges they
bring, some common themes were highlighted in
the Workshop session that may oer the guidance
sought for determining “next steps.”
• A consensus-based denition of MCL needs
to be developed. e community of practice
that came together for this meeting was clearly
uncertain what MCL meant, in tangible and
clear terms, or perhaps many came to the
Workshop with some denition that others
may not have fully embraced.
• Any denition and description of what is
meant by MCL should meet National Register
criteria for signicance and integrity, but more
attention needs to be directed at adapting, tai-
loring, or expanding understanding of the cur-
rent criteria to make them relevant to MCLs.
Clearly articulating “integrity” standards may
be the greater challenge than signicance.
• MCLs should be multicultural and encompass
the full sweep of time. Broad engagement with
all cultures should be a part of any characteri-
zation of an MCL. All voices should be heard,
and all perspectives given consideration. Any
process descriptions and documentation stan-
dards developed for guidance should embrace
this requirement.
• Numerous times during the workshop, in
nearly all discussion topics addressed, the
idea of developing guidance, and potentially
a National Register Bulletin on MCLs was
recommended. e engagement essential to
the development of such guidance would oer
a framework for addressing and resolving the
suite of issues and concerns identied in the
Workshop, and the dra products developed
would oer some tangible and clearly artic-
ulated proposals that could be subjected to
broader review and comment by the various
communities of practice that would be inter-
ested in and aected by such a step forward.
Brad Barr
Oce of National Marine Sanctuaries, Maritime
Heritage Program
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Workshop Participants
Alan Levy, Facilitator, Goaltrac
David Ball, BOEM
Brad Barr, NOAA
Carolyn Blanco, NSF
Brandi Carrier, BOEM
Brinnen Carter, NPS
David Cooper, NPS
James Delgado, NOAA
Julia Byrd Duggins, FL SHPO
Briece Edward, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde
Ben Ford, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Rae Gould, ACHP
Russ Green, NOAA
Val Grussing, NOAA
Doug Harris, Narragansett Tribe
Chris Horrell, BSEE
206
John Jensen, University of West Florida
Doug Jones, BOEM
Susan Langley, MD SHPO
Deborah Marx, NOAA
David Mather, MN SHPO
Daria Merwin, NY SHPO
James Moore, BOEM
Daina Penkiunas, WI SHPO
Jessica Perkins, former Sitka Tribal Attorney
Michael Russo, NPS
Margo Schwadron, NPS
Ole Varmer, NOAA
Hans Van Tilburg, NOAA
Trisha Kehaulani Watson, Honua Consulting
Barbara Wyatt, NPS
207
Aberg, Alan and Carenza Lewis, 2001. e Rising
Tide: Archaeology and Coastal Landscapes. Oxbow
Books, Oxford.
Anschuetz, Kurt F. “Introducing a Landscape
Approach for Evaluating Communities’ Traditional
Senses of Time and Place”
Anschuetz, Kurt F. (1,4), Richard H. Wilshusen
(2) and Cherie L. Scheick (3). “An Archaeology of
Landscapes: Perspectives and Directions” in An
Archaeology of Landscapes: Perspectives and Di-
rections” in Journal of Archaeological Research, Vol.
9, No. 2, 2001.
Barr, Brad, 2013. Understanding and managing
marine protected areas through integrating ecosys-
tem based management within maritime cultural
landscapes: Moving from theory to practice. Ocean
& Coastal Management 84:184-192.
Benjamin, Jonathan, Clive Bonsall, Catriona Pick-
ard, and Anders Fischer, 2011. Submerged Prehisto-
ry. Oxbow Books, Oxford.
Christie, Jessica Joyce, 2009. Landscapes of Origin
in the Americas: Creation Narratives Linking An-
cient Places and Present Communities. University of
Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.
Delgado, James, Tomás Mendizábal, Frederick
Hanselmann, and Dominque Rissolo, 2016. e
Maritime Landscape of the Isthmus of Panamá. Uni-
versity of Florida Press, Gainesville.
Fairclough, Graham, 2006. “Large Scale, Long Du-
ration and Broad Perceptions: Scale Issues in His-
toric Landscape Characterisation” in Confronting
Scale in Archaeology, Issues of eory and Practice,
Gary Lock and Brian Molyneaux, eds., 203-215.
Springer, New York.
Ford, Ben, 2011. e Archaeology of Maritime
Landscapes. Springer Science & Business Media,
New York.
Hoyt, Joseph; James P. Delgado; Bradley Barr;
Bruce Terrell; and Valerie Grussing. “Graveyard of
the Atlantic”: An Overview of North Carolina’s Mar-
itime Cultural Landscape, NOAA, September 2014.
Jensen, John, Mather, Roderick, and Gray, Je,
2011. Viewing the Future through the Lens of
Maritime Cultural Landscapes. Sanctuary Watch.
pp. 2-3.
Jordan, Brian, 2011. Recommendations for Inte-
grated management Using a Cultural Landscape
Approach in the National MPA System. Marine
Protected Areas Federal Advisory Committee.
Meinig, D.W. 1979. “e Beholding Eye, Ten
Versions of the Same Scene,” in e Interpretation
of Ordinary Landscapes. Oxford University Press,
New York.
Marine Protected Areas Federal Advisory Commit-
tee, 2011. Recommendations for Integrated Manage-
ment Using a Cultural Landscape Approach in the
National MPA System.
McErlean, omas, Rosemary McConkey, and Wes
Forsythe, 2003. Strangford Lough: An Archaeolog-
ical Survey of the Maritime Cultural Landscape.
Northern Ireland Archaeological Monographs No.
6, Blacksta Press, Belfast.
Parker, A. J., 2001. “Maritime Landscapes” in Land-
scapes 2(1):22-41.
Rönnby, Johan, 2007. “Maritime Durées: Long-
Term Structure in a Coastal Landscape” Journal of
Maritime Archaeology 2(2):65-82.
Recommended Reading for Participants in
the Maritime Cultural Landscape Workshop
October 16, 2015
208
Stilgoe, John R., 1996. Alongshore. Yale University
Press, New Haven.
Vrana, K., and G. Vander Stoep, 2003. “e Mar-
itime Cultural Landscape of the under Bay Na-
tional Marine Sanctuary and Underwater Preserve”
in: J. D. Spirek and D. A. Scott- Ireton (Eds.), Sub-
merged Cultural Resource Management: Preserving
and Interpreting Our Sunken Maritime Heritage.
Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Press, New York, NY,
pp. 17-28.
Westerdahl, Christer, 1992. “e Maritime Cultural
Landscape” in e International Journal of Nautical
Archaeology 21.1: 5-14.
Westerdahl, Christer. “e Maritime Cultural
Landscape: On the concept of the traditional zones
of transport geography.” Accessed at https://www.
abc.se/~pa/publ/cult-land.htm on September 29,
2015.
Westerdahl, Christer, 2011. “e Maritime Cultural
Landscape” in Oxford Handbook of Maritime Ar-
chaeology, Alexis Catsambis, Ben Ford, and Donny
Hamilton, eds, 733-762. Oxford University Press,
New York.
National Register Bulletins Nominating Historic
Vessels and Shipwrecks to the National Register of
Historic Places (https://www.nps.gov/nr/publica-
tions/bulletins/nrb20/); Guidelines for Evaluating
and Documenting Historic Aids to Navigation;
Guidelines for Evaluating and Documenting Rural
Historic Landscapes (https://www.nps.gov/nr/pub-
lications/bulletins/nrb34/); and How to Complete
the National Register Registration Form may be
useful. ese can be found on the National Reg-
ister website (www.nps.gov/nr/). Information on
the National Register Landscape Initiative (https://
www.nps.gov/nr/publications/guidance/NRLI/in-
dex.htm), including the webinar on maritime cul-
tural landscapes, can also be found on the National
Register website.
209
210
Asan Bay Overlook, War in the Pacic National Historical Park, Guam; photo courtesy of NPS.
