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PRESERVING THE PAST FOR THE FUTURE
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Historical Archeology in Arkansas
The French, Spanish, and Americans who settled in Arkansas beginning in the 1700s left us official and personal writings about their activities. And yet this evidence is incomplete. Too often the documents tell only of political leaders and legislative and judicial activities. While these affairs are important, the ordinary and fascinating details of how people lived frequently remain unknown. What was life really like on the frontier, in early towns, on antebellum farms and plantations? What was American Indian life like at that time? Historical archeology can help to answer these questions.
The sites of towns, farmsteads, trading posts, and Civil War camps or any other place people have lived, worked, or played contain physical evidence of everyday life. This evidence is in the form of ruins, bricks, nails, mortar, window glass, broken dishes, cups and bottles, tools, buttons, animal bones, and all the other broken, bent, discarded, lost, and abandoned things that people made, used, and threw away. These people have left us tangible and eloquent evidence of their lives, and it is literally under our feet.
Historical archeology is not dependent solely upon written documents and excavations of sites, however. Much is often learned from interviewing people who remember what happened in the past or whose relatives have told them about the past. By combining these sources of information—documents, ruins, and memories—a more complete story of the past can be obtained. Historical archeology is concerned with the people who were living here or who came here from the time of the first Old World contact with America to the present.
We, you and I, are much closer to this subject than to a study of prehistory, because in a sense WE are the subject since it is our ancestors who were here or who settled here.
The possibilities for historical archeology in Arkansas are many since few of the French posts, Spanish or pioneer American farmsteads, or contact period Indian sites have been located or studied. Historical archeology assists in the accurate restoration of historic buildings, and it is often concerned with the culture of minorities such as Indians after their contact with Europeans, blacks in slavery and freedom, and the various ethnic groups who came to Arkansas after the Civil War.
If you know of a site where people lived, worked, played, or fought in the past, please report it to the Arkansas Archeological Survey, the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, or your local historical organization. Each site is an unopened time capsule, and each should be handled carefully if we are to bring to life the people in the historical past of Arkansas.
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ARKANSAS ARCHEOLOGICAL SURVEY
Coordinating Office
P.O. Box 1249 •
Fayetteville, Arkansas 72702-1249