Public Archaeology

ISSN: 1465-5187 (Print) 1753-5530 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ypua20

Experiments in Public Archaeology as Civic

Engagement: My Five Years with the New College
Public Archaeology Lab in Sarasota, Florida

Uzi Baram

To cite this article: Uzi Baram (2015) Experiments in Public Archaeology as Civic Engagement:
My Five Years with the New College Public Archaeology Lab in Sarasota, Florida, Public
Archaeology, 14:1, 66-74, DOI: 10.1179/1465518715Z.00000000085

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1465518715Z.00000000085

Published online: 23 Jan 2016.

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public archaeology, Vol. 14 No. 1, February 2015, 6674

PROFILE

Experiments in Public Archaeology as

Civic Engagement: My Five Years with
the New College Public Archaeology Lab
in Sarasota, Florida
Uzi Baram
New College of Florida, USA

Creating a programme in Public Archaeology

A few years after I took an assistant professor position in Anthropology, Teaching
Archaeology in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Susan Bender and George S. Smith
(2000) was published and sits on my shelf alongside The Teaching of Anthropology:
Problems, Issues, and Decisions (Kottak, et al., 1997) reminding me to centre students
in my archaeological endeavours.
Over the last decade, my research energies have focused on a building a student-
centred community-based heritage programme through public archaeology. The pro-
grammes began from practical considerations of offering nearby experiential learning
opportunities for undergraduates, but moved to larger goals as experiences built up and
as more and more public archaeology programmes provided inspiration for expanding
research. The social impetus has been based on the simple proposition that when we
know what happened around the places we live, work, pray, play, and so on we get a
sense of place; the unique attributes of our surroundings, and that sense of place helps
build community because the historical knowledge is a commonality. When the com-
mon heritage is commemorated by the community, we can build up social ties among
residents and even visitors. This simple proposition makes sense to community leaders
and the inclusive, critical multiplicity for heritage can avoid the racism and chauvinism
recognized for heritage as a nationalistic homogeneous singularity.
The public archaeology programme started slowly. Like many assistant professors
with expertise in archaeology, when I started a tenure-track position in Anthropology
at New College of the University of South Florida (now New College of Florida), I was
encouraged to provide undergraduates with local excavation opportunities to augment
my then ongoing research in the eastern Mediterranean. I was new to the west coast of
Florida but, as I had done since childhood, I explored historic sites and tried to learn
about the past of my surroundings. It was challenging. New College, a residential lib-
eral arts college of about 800 undergraduates, sits at the border between two counties:
Sarasota, which is best known for its namesake city, and Manatee, with Bradenton as

W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2015 DOI 10.1179/1465518715Z.00000000085

 PROFILE 67

its county seat. Tourism is the major industry, one focused on beaches and sunshine,
but with interests in expanding the types of touristic opportunities. Nearly one-third
of the population is over sixty-five; most residents came from elsewhere in the USA.
The past is not only alienated from the experiences of most of the regions inhabitants,
there are no obvious historic landmarks it can seem to be a place without history.
The materiality of the pre-Columbian past for Sarasota/Manatee pales in comparison
even to its neighbours to the south (Charlotte Harbor with the Calusa) and north
(Tampa Bay, with the Safety Harbor Culture/Tobago) and its recent history, the mate-
rials for historical archaeology, took off only in the 1920s (the Boom Times).
Yet, with its mild winter climate, the region is conducive to academic year fieldwork.
And I was fortunate that Sarasota County had just hired a county archaeologist whose
responsibilities were quite broad; when Susan Lynn White contacted me for collabora-
tive projects, she brought county resources together with the colleges undergraduate
enthusiasm. Together we organized a survey of a historic cemetery (the Rosemary
Cemetery, founded in 1886), directed excavations at an early twentieth-century train
depot (the Venice Train Depot, which turned out to be at the centre of memories
for many of the towns residents), and created an exhibit for the states Archaeology
Month; with the University of Miami, a January term field school focused on a ter-
restrial survey around Little Salt Spring. The New College students were keen par-
ticipants, with several of them producing honours theses on local archaeology. What
Jerald Milanich (1991) called archaeology in the sunshine provided an avenue to open
up the projects and the mass media eagerly announced and covered the excavations and
survey, and the public responded with visitations. The self-styled Public Archaeology
in Sarasota programme was limited, and, frankly, without any laboratory facilities or
even committed space for the archaeological projects, a bit frustrating. With tenure,
Iwas ready to allow the programme to fade away; I suspected few would notice.
But the public outreach efforts caught the attention of a community leader who was
organizing a group of scholars to look for Angola, an early nineteenth-century maroon
(escaped slave) community on the Manatee River. When Vickie Oldham contacted me,
I asked if Looking for Angola could focus on public outreach, to explain archaeology
to public audiences and encourage public participation from the beginning. Practical
concerns, my wife and I just had twins, and ethical ones, being interested in experi-
menting with the public aspect of public archaeology, propelled the suggestion; my
project colleagues readily agreed and the Florida Humanities Council provided funding
for an opening panel and a dozen presentations across Sarasota and Manatee. The pro-
gramme included small-scale test excavations but the widespread public presentations
to inform local communities about the history and to gather insights raised the profile
of the search. And the public response was overwhelming positive. A history hidden
for nearly two centuries captured the attention of the media and of local residents
(Baram, 2008). Because of the significance of the project and the enthusiasm of stu-
dents and community members for public archaeology, the college provost supported
grant proposals and in 2008 the college received a Fund for the Improvement of Post-
Secondary Education (FIPSE) grant (#P116Z080257) to build a public archaeology lab.
Opened in 2010 and named the New College Public Archaeology Lab (NCPAL),
the facility houses the preserving regional heritage programme that brings together
the archaeological investigations with ethnographic concerns for the past in the
68 UZI BARAM

present. NCPAL projects offer undergraduates the opportunity to experience archae-

ology, to contribute archaeological findings to local and descendant communities,
to employ ethnography to reveal the silences and meanings of the past for the pre-
sent, and has opened up understanding of challenging contemporary social issues.
Training the motivated students at New College in contemporary ethical practices
centred NCPAL. Posted on the walls of the lab are the codes of ethics from the World
Archaeological Congress, the Society for American Archaeology, the Society for
Historical Archaeology, and the Florida Anthropological Society. I require students
read and think about those codes of ethics as they embark on NCPAL projects in
order to stress the significance of collaboration and meaningful research. By engaging
community members and recognizing the legal framework for archaeological and his-
toric preservation efforts, the programme encourages civic engagement. Civic engage-
ment, really civic renewal, is based on people seeing themselves and acting as active
citizens. The public archaeology programme fits research goals of heritage study for
social justice, research engaged in the public sphere, and expanding theoretical discus-
sion for archaeology while facilitating experiential learning and civic engagement for
the undergraduates to chart their route toward continuing research and community
engagement. The goals are unabashedly idealistic and optimistic regarding the poten-
tial of anthropology to contribute to the present and future. The NCPAL is multi-
faceted, maybe too ambitious, offering opportunities for research, presentations, and
partnerships with underfunded community groups while being understaffed.
Early on, as I wrestled with the details of constructing the facility and explaining
the programme, both on campus and to community groups, I was inspired by radical
openness (see Baram, 2014). The mix of the practical and theoretical encouraged that
approach: I was open about my goals and requirements while raising a family and teach-
ing at the college, being an outsider when much of heritage is facilitated by those with
deep roots or kinship connections to the history, and driven by the lessons that the stu-
dents could learn from the process of creating a new, multi-faceted programme. It helped
that Black feminist scholar bell hooks came to New College for three years and sustained
the critiques of racism, classism, and sexism. The communities around the college are
marked by the continuing legacies of segregation and some questioned the commitment
to an explicitly anti-racist, anti-sexist approach but the community members interested
in archaeology, historic preservation, and heritage embraced the approach. For NCPAL,
projects needed to be based in local communities, committed to revealing hidden histo-
ries that could expose the previously ignored accomplishments of past inhabitants of the
region, and contribute to the growing scholarship for and about public anthropology.

A model for engagement

As I experimented with public archaeology through various projects, I started to build
up a framework. The model, at this point, consists of eight steps:
Step 1: Radical openness and partnerships
Radical openness means all parties involved in the partnerships understand the pro-
cess, offering avenues for furthering heritage collaborations. Being open makes for
vulnerability and working from the margins is challenging to sustain but creates
increased community engagement and opportunities for public education on chal-
lenging social issues.
 PROFILE 69

Step 2: Ethnographic engagement and participant-observation

Since we live in a world of social inequalities, the anthropology for a project needs
to be anti-racist and anti-sexist, to reveal histories that demonstrate alterity from
the present. Being conscious of community concerns and understanding, from an
ethnographic perspective, what is known and what can be revealed by research and
the partnerships.
Step 3: Landscape documentation
Mapping of the place, from Google Earth to archival sources to contemporary com-
munity views, of the past and present for the location.
Step 4: Outreach
Broadening communications with interested community members through outreach
events, meetings, and social media. Creating educational materials on the process
including worksheets for teachers to use, online activities, and videos these are
the preliminary materials.
Step 5: Archaeological research
Excavations and materiality studies to produce educational materials, heritage inter-
pretation themes, and visuals for online presence as well as the scholarly results from
research.
Step 6: Sustainable economic development
Figuring out the heritage tourism that would encourage visitors to spend a night near
the locale, to help historic preservation organizations continue their efforts beyond
the period of media exposure.
Step 7: Presentations on the place
Theming, motif development, and even branding to create a clear, productive, social
justice narrative.
Step 8: Organizing to build up capacity for sustainability
Connectivity connect the history and place to similar histories and places nearby,
particularly to offer visitors and residents opportunities to participate in stewardship
of a property in order to build up a place of social ties.

Projects
Three recent NCPAL projects illustrate the model and those steps. The central goal,
over the last five years, has been engaging undergraduates to learn techniques and
methods in order to train them to be able and willing to interpret the past for the
present in an ethical manner. The research goals come first, of course, partnered with
the concerns of community partners. But what unites these projects, beyond their
location, are the resulting abilities of students to present the past in meaningful ways.

Archaeological excavations and public outreach: Looking for Angola

As lead archaeologist for Looking for Angola, a community-based, interdiscipli-
nary public anthropology programme, NCPAL offered equipment and laboratory
facilities and storage of finds. In the search for the material remains of an early
nineteenth-century maroon (escaped slave) community along the Manatee River
70 UZI BARAM

in todays Bradenton, Looking for Angola has engaged local and descendant com-
munities, surveyed and excavated, analysed and interpreted recovered artefacts,
organized public lectures and community discussions, produced printed educational
materials for children in Florida and the Bahamas as well as films and an informa-
tive website. The goal has been to expand knowledge on Florida havens of freedom
from slavery.
At its height, Angola was a community of possibly 700 people who had congre-
gated in southern Tampa Bay from previous havens from slavery. A raid destroyed
the settlement in 1821 just as Spain transferred Florida to the USA. Many of its inhab-
itants were captured, but some escaped during the march northward; other survivors
resettled inland and some even fled to the Bahamas, where their descendants still live
today (Baram, 2008). With a radical openness, I organized New College students to
engage the research into the complicated history of Second Spanish Period La Florida
(17831821), contribute to analysis of remote sensing survey data and previously
excavated archaeological artefacts, and volunteer to aid excavations and laboratory
work as well to help present the archaeological insights at public events. The eight-
year endeavour located material traces of Angola, and in 2013 a Florida Humanities
Council grant to Reflections of Manatee1 provided funds to commemorate the history
near the Manatee Mineral Spring with interpretive signs (see Figure 1).

figure 1 Anna Rodriguez and Nicole Ouellette presenting on Angola for a public outreach
event in east Bradenton in October 2013.
Photograph by Uzi Baram
 PROFILE 71

Historic preservation and community partnerships: the survey of the

Galilee Cemetery
During 201012, I trained students to conduct an historical preservation survey that
recorded grave markers at the Galilee Cemetery in Sarasota. The Galilee Cemetery
opened in 1935 as a segregated cemetery for African Americans; in 2010 it was
closed to new purchases of grave lots. That year, the Woodlawn-Galilee Cemetery
Restoration Task Force the community group responsible for the Galilee
Cemetery and another historic cemetery in Sarasota due to an early twentieth-
century segregation-era land deed organized a clean-up campaign, creating a
more appealing entrance and ensuring a peaceful cemetery, and recruited me to
document the lives of the interred. Having previously co-directed the Survey of the
Rosemary Cemetery, a process that recorded all the grave markers in Sarasotas
first city-owned cemetery, created background materials on those buried there, and
helped a successful nomination to the National Registry of Historic Places, I was
asked to contribute to the Galilee Cemetery. Building on the success at the Rosemary
Cemetery, the Survey of the Galilee Cemetery sought to model collaborative research
for the New College student-volunteers, getting students and community members
to sit around a table to lay out the documentation project. The cemetery, with its
twentieth-century burials, required confronting the legacies of segregation toward
revealing a hidden history of survival and success under challenging social conditions
during the age of legal segregation. The students joined members of the Task Force
in systematically recording all the grave markers under an ethic that every marker
represented a person worth remembering by the entire community. The collabora-
tive partnership included unleashing the creative energies of the students as seen
in the creation of a video programme on the survey, a web presence, and several
exhibits and works of art as well as training students to teach others to document
and interpret the history at the cemetery (see Figure 2) (Baram, 2012). The City of
Sarasota recognized the effort in July 2013 with a plaque and appreciation for the
efforts that produced a database as a step to adding new chapters to knowledge of
Sarasotas Black community.

Teaching about the past: coastal peoples of nineteenth-century

SarasotaPass
The documentation of a historic cemetery and the excavations and laboratory analy-
sis are important ways to engage undergraduates with public archaeology, but the
cutting edge of public archaeology is the public aspect. The opening of NCPAL
coincided with a decision by Sarasota County School District to create a database
of explores for elementary schoolchildren. With support from Southwest Florida
Coastal Watersheds Grant, I worked with educators to create a programme that
contains three components: 1) the history of the region focused on the area where
the Manatee River enters Tampa Bay and connects with Sarasota Bay and includ-
ing all of the Sarasota Bay watershed region (i.e. most of Manatee and Sarasota
counties), 2) exposure to the techniques of archaeological investigations including
excavation and archaeological analysis and interpretation, and 3) recognition of the
social uses of the Sarasota Bay watershed over the last few centuries. Since the end
of 2011, NCPAL has hosted several events, called A Day at the Lab, which brought
72 UZI BARAM

figure 2 Michael Waas and Roz Crews explaining how to document a grave marker for the
Survey of the Galilee Cemetery in Sarasota.
Photograph by Uzi Baram

children to the lab, with New College students volunteering to be trained in out-
reach to children and helping with the informal learning activities (see Figure 3).
The programme has brought a few hundred elementary school children to the New
College campus, provided hands-on pre-industrial technology activities, and intro-
duced archaeological concepts and information on the regions material heritage to
children and their families.

Conclusion
All the NCPAL projects are labour-intensive, requiring the recruitment of undergrad-
uates and training them for the activities. As many public engaged scholars will attest,
sustaining the community relationships is a challenge. But funding has been the most
difficult contest. The dirty campus laundry will not get aired here, but my commit-
ment to the possibilities of student-centred research and of heritage for social justice is
sustained by the support of community members and other academics. After five years
of NCPAL programmes with community groups and non-profits, the next project
is an engagement with local government a return to a partnership with Sarasota
County. Working with the Sarasota County office of historic resources produced the
Community Heritage Awareness and Management Program (CHAMP), with its ini-
tial project scheduled to start in October 2015 to increase the epochs covered for
 PROFILE 73

figure 3 Jessie Ploss teaching an elementary school child about the atlatl, right outside of
NCPAL.
Photograph by Alexis Santos

heritage interpretation at a county-owned park, using archaeological insights to gener-

ate heritage interpretation for the public. The shift from supporting community-based
non-profits to working with the local government grew out of practical necessity.
To conclude this review of NCPAL, I can note that working on public archaeology,
historic preservation, and heritage interpretation brings me in contact with historical
societies, interested members of the public, and elected officials, and many of them
have deep roots in the community. The programme, with its radical openness, out-
lined here is predicated on heritage as a catalyst for cosmopolitanism. Elijah Anderson
(2012) came up with the term cosmopolitan canopy to describe the social dynamics
at the Redding Terminal in Philadelphia: a place, according to the urban sociolo-
gist, where different people can see each other, interact, and acknowledge diversity.
It does seem there is an assumption that one would have a genealogical or cultural
connection for engagement with heritage, but I have none for the projects in Sarasota/
Manatee, so I have to explain and the cosmopolitan canopy offers a rationale for the
public archaeology programme: to create a sense of place based in archaeological
or other historic sites that offer insights into local history, to create an inclusive
commonality. As one who was born in Israel but came to the USA when young, but
retaining a distinctive name, my interest in heritage radiates out of learning history
by visiting historic places. Since I did not have a family lineage in North America,
or connections to the dominant European worldview in the USA, my experiences
in well-run heritage sites opened up connections to this land and its peoples; I have
taken that approach to the heritage of Sarasota/Manatee. The connection between
74 UZI BARAM

the goals of archaeology in the public interest builds upon the promise of heritage as
a public good, an inclusive vision that comes when everyone can have access to the
rich heritage of the region.
The first five years of the New College Public Archaeology Lab expanded exca-
vation, historic preservation, and heritage interpretation in a public manner. The
experiments in public archaeology illustrate that community-based approaches can
get undergraduates involved with local communities in meaningful ways along
with training them for public outreach, whether for archaeology or other fields. As
archaeologists wrestle with the possibilities of citizen science, the model developed
for Sarasota/Manatee has much promise for public archaeology to train the interested
public in being informed, ethical interpreters of the past. In places where few have
local roots, which frankly can be anywhere in our globalized world, having citizens
convey the archaeological insights into the past is a positive and significant contribu-
tion of public archaeology.
Those interested in following the trajectory of the NCPALs programmes
can go to the New College website (<www.ncf.edu/pal>), which includes the
annual newsletters, or its Facebook page (<https://www.facebook.com/pages/
New-College-Public-Archaeology-Lab/>).

Notes
1
The interpretative signs can be viewed on the Reflections of Manatee website: <http://www.reflectionsofmanatee.
org/history.html>

Bibliography
Anderson, E. 2012. The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life. New York: W. W. Norton&
Company.
Baram, U. 2008. A Haven from Slavery on Floridas Gulf Coast: Looking for Evidence of Angola on the Manatee
River. African Diaspora Archaeology Network Newsletter [online] [accessed 20 May 2015]. Available at:
<http://www.diaspora.uiuc.edu/news0608/news0608.html>.
Baram, U. 2012. Report on the 20102012 Survey of the Galilee Cemetery in Sarasota, Florida: Community, Race,
and Commemoration. Unpublished report submitted to the Woodlawn-Galilee Cemetery Restoration Task
Force. On file at the New College Public Archaeology Lab.
Baram, U. 2014. Radical Openness in Preserving Regional Heritage. Anthropology News, 55(56): 2829.
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