15 July 2008
Guardians of the Ancients
By Charlene Porter
The National Park Service works to preserve ancient monuments, present them to the public, and share knowledge of these activities with other nations.
Charlene Porter is managing editor of this edition of eJournalUSA.
Magnificent natural landscapes are the hallmark of the United States’ national parks, but thousands of prehistoric sites are also part of the system’s almost 34 million hectares, reminders of the lives of people who occupied the land long before European settlers proclaimed the discovery of a New World and founded a nation.
The National Park Service values ancient artifacts and architecture created by the ancestors of today’s Native American tribes just as greatly as the sweeping vistas created by nature and the historic sites where America’s Founding Fathers crafted a plan to make a colony a nation.
The U.S. Congress enacted a national policy to preserve archeological sites for the future in 1906. In fact, the Antiquities Act, as it is called, predates the 1916 law that consolidated the management of parks, monuments, and other sites under the National Park Service (NPS). The Antiquities Act made into law the idea that “those archeological resources and historic sites were to be protected, and they were not to be exploited for monetary gain, or personal whim, or because something else had to be built where they existed,” according to Francis P. McManamon, NPS chief archeologist.
The impetus for passing this law began building a couple decades before its enactment, as settlers began moving into the U.S. Southwest. Adobe buildings and pueblos built by American Indians hundreds of years earlier dotted the landscape. These structures were viewed as great artifacts of earlier civilizations by some, but as quarries of usable or saleable materials by others.
In the early 20th century, memory of the Indian Wars between the colonial or federal government and the indigenous people of North America was very fresh, and American Indians routinely suffered discrimination. The coincidence of these facts with the passage of the Antiquities Act is “striking,” McManamon said in an interview with eJournal USA.
“At the same time there were efforts to preserve these ancient monuments and ruins, the descendants of the people who created them were being systematically stripped of the remnants of that culture,” McManamon said. Government polices to move tribal groups off traditional lands and to purge Indian heritage from children’s schooling were common during that time.
Archeology in the Parks
Today, the National Park Service has recorded about 70,000 archeological sites in the monument and park areas it manages, and McManamon estimates there are tens, even hundreds, of thousands more discrete sites waiting to be discovered. The preservation of sites hundreds or thousands of years old is challenging in its own right, but NPS must also remain mindful of its mission to allow the public to see, understand, and appreciate the sites.
In the case of cliff-dweller villages and pueblo structures, McManamon said that “we have to stabilize some of the stone or adobe brick walls so the original fabric doesn’t get damaged” as visitors tour the sites. In order to do that, preservationists have to develop mortars that are earth-based, similar to the materials the builders originally used, and surface plasters to protect the original building adobe remains.
That challenge is shared by architectural conservators working on monuments, buildings, and statues in many places. McManamon, and his NPS archeological colleagues Terry Childs and Barbara Little, gained new insight on the shared problems of his profession in 2007 when a group of Afghan monument directors visited the United States to observe NPS practices in the management of archeological and historic parks and sites.
Like many monuments and historical treasures of the United States, monuments in Afghanistan might be made of sandstone, granite, or adobe. McManamon said the Afghan monument caretakers were eager to discuss techniques of material sciences involved in choosing the proper substance to use in stabilizing monuments.
The NPS chief archeologist also hopes that the exchange of information will help Afghanistan’s monument directors avoid some of the mistakes made in the United States over the years. “We are pulling out inappropriate mortar used for some of the early stabilization projects in the early twentieth century. We are replacing it with earth-based mortars that are softer and help to preserve the original adobe bricks and stone,” McManamon said. “That’s an area where our colleagues from Afghanistan were on the same plane of learning and interest with some of our field crews.”
Community Education
The Afghans visited sites in Washington and spent eight weeks at NPS units in the Southwest in a training program sponsored by the Cultural Heritage Center within the U.S. Department of State. As part of an effort to support cultural preservation in Afghanistan, the 2007 training program also counseled the visitors in community relations and public education.
With its almost 400 NPS parks, monuments, and sites located in vastly different communities across the United States, NPS officials have learned through the years that building close and cooperative relations between park and community officials is an important component of site management.
Education is another element of this relationship, and it is also standard policy for park officials to work closely with their communities to bring schoolchildren and other interested groups into their facilities. That was “kind of a revelation” for the Afghan visitors, McManamon said.
“They thought it was just terrific that while they were visiting, school groups came out on field trips and had a ranger-led interpretive walk around the courtyards at Tumacácori [a Spanish mission site in Arizona founded in the late 17th century], ” McManamon said. One Afghan visitor hoped to introduce similar education programs in the Bamiyan Valley. Though the Taliban destroyed two enormous Buddha statues there in 2001, the Bamiyan Valley remains an internationally recognized cultural site with still-extant evidence of its role as a landmark on the Silk Road in northern Afghanistan.
Historic sites from Afghanistan to Arizona are a critical tool in creating an understanding of past lives and cultures in every successive generation, McManamon said. If youngsters are given a first-person experience with the actual places, buildings and artifacts of lives and events gone by, they will “get a much richer understanding and appreciation” of the past.
