Future
archaeologist at work: Jim digs in with his first shovel with
his grandfather Frank in Federal Way, Washington in 1962.
He began his career as an archaeologist just ten years later!
My first opportunity
to touch the past came at age 14. At the end of each work day,
when the construction workers ended their shift, walking alone,
I passed mounds of earth plowed by bulldozers, and deep trenches
cut by backhoes. And as I looked closer, I realized that I was
not alone. I was surrounded by the unearthed dead. An outline
of golden-stained ribs and the curve of a skull protruded, fossil-like,
from the sidewall of a trench. Broken stone tools, from bowl-like
mortars to projectile points for spears and arrows, lay discarded
in the back dirt with broken bones.
Collecting
what I could, I sketched out a map in my school notebook to mark
where my finds had come from, and realized that I needed to do
more. As the days turned into weeks and then months, I returned
daily, salvaging what I could at the end of each day when the
construction workers went home. Acting boldly, I presented myself
to the construction supervisor one day when I arrived before they
all went home, and was rewarded with an extra set of blueprints
for the new subdivision’s streets, sewers and power lines.
Now I had a base map on which to plot each day’s finds.
Some were isolated and meager – a single shell bead, all
that remained from a necklace – while others were more complete
and poignant.
My mother
suffered daily with a dirt-caked, dusty son coming home and promptly
disappearing in the bathroom to gently wash the finds he carried
with him. She was horrified, but did not scream when she opened
the door one day to see me kneeling over the family bathtub, gently
scrubbing the mud from a skull. My parents worried, but were comforted
by the fact that their weird child was not on drugs and was studying
hard at school. They didn’t even perceptibly bat an eye
when I started running around with an older crowd. That crowd
included the graduate students of an archaeology class from San
Jose State that I encountered digging at the construction site.
They took me under their wing. I turned over all my finds to the
University except the human remains I had saved from the bulldozer;
they were repatriated to their descendants and reburied in a traditional
ceremony.
I passed the
days and months of high school in other digs and surveys. Thanks
to new laws that protected the past, archaeological surveys and
excavation now had to precede construction. With local archaeologists
Rob Edwards and Chester and Linda King, I happily spent weekends
and afternoons walking through fields and orchards about to vanish
beneath new subdivisions looking for the telltale traces of prehistoric
settlements.
At this time,
another mentor, Constance “Connie” Perham, founder
and curator of the New Almaden Museum, entered my life. Connie,
an older and wise woman, lived in a small, then isolated area
outside of San Jose, the former mining town of New Almaden. North
America’s greatest deposit of cinnabar (mercury ore), New
Almaden flourished from the 1850s through the Second World War.
When the mines closed, Connie and her late husband Doug had moved
in, saved relics, collected reminiscences, rebuilt an old adobe,
and in the midst of raising a family served as the caretakers
of New Almaden’s past.
Connie took
me in as a fifty cent per hour assistant, putting me to work sweeping
the floors and washing the large picture window glass cases with
vinegar, warm water and newsprint. Other tasks, eagerly accepted,
included excavating and rebuilding (albeit poorly) the brick walkway
that once had formed New Almaden’s sidewalk in front of
Connie’s adobe. Counting on the energy but also the endless
capacity of a teenage boy for boredom, Connie carefully watched
from a distance as hours of sweeping and window washing were alleviated
by studying every artifact and every label in the cases. Once
she was sure I had learned, I graduated to tour guide. One of
the many lessons she taught was that collecting the past meant
nothing unless you could share it with others and make it relevant
and exciting for them.
At age 20,
I found myself out of suburbia and in the big city when I transferred
from San Jose State University to San Francisco State and joined
the ranks of the U.S. National Park Service. I also found myself
standing, one afternoon as I searched for an apartment, at the
corner of Clay and Sansome streets in the heart of the downtown
financial district. There, in the midst of a huge hole, the black-stained
bones of the ship Niantic had been revealed by construction.
Transfixed by the sight, the crowd of onlookers, myself included,
stared at this relic of San Francisco’s Gold Rush past,
unearthed amidst high-rises after a 129-year slumber beneath the
landfill that buried the old waterfront.
T Jason and
the Argonauts, Sinbad, and Ulysses, all portrayed dramatically
on the screen to excited young eyes, and reading Jules Verne and
Robert Louis Stevenson, had also fired my soul when young, but
I thought my destiny as an archaeologist was on dry land. Niantic
changed all of that. The saga of that ship, wrested out of the
timbers and thousands of well-preserved artifacts found inside
the hull, and the story that emerged from the archives of the
San Francisco Maritime Museum, was a life-changing encounter.
Drawn by the
immediacy of the ship’s story, and of the dramatic saga
of the Gold Rush and the hundreds of ships that still lay buried
beneath downtown San Francisco, I was hooked. The discovery of
another buried ship, the whaler Lydia, a few months after
Niantic’s accidental resurrection, and then the
February 1979 excavation of another Gold Rush ship, William
Gray, at the base of Telegraph Hill firmly set the course.
At both of those buried ships, I met archaeologist Allen Pastron.
Allen let me join his crew at the bottom of a deep pit that had
just reached the top of the hull of William Gray. Thanks
to Allen, the siren song of the sea, and the drama of a lost and
buried ship now filled my archaeologist’s soul.
I joined the
cultural resources management team at the Golden Gate National
Recreation Area as park historian at the same time as the William
Gray dig. The GGNRA was then a 36,000-acre national park,
euphemistically called a “national recreation area”
because its urban setting was primarily intended to provide a
range of locales that embodied “outstanding natural, cultural,
recreational and aesthetic” values for the people of the
city and visitors. My nine years in San Francisco were an intensive
lesson in the documentation and preservation of historic and archaeological
sites in the park.
Thanks to
a supportive and mentoring boss, Doug Nadeau, I was able to stretch
my job assignments into archaeology and diving. One early project
was the wreck of the Gold Rush steamship Tennessee in
Marin County. Our labors in the sea and the beach sands were rewarded
by hundreds of artifacts that we carefully mapped and recovered.
The pieces of Tennessee graphically demonstrated how
the steamer had been ground into tiny pieces by the surf and spit
out onto the beach after Tennessee’s captain missed
the Golden Gate on the foggy morning of March 6, 1853 and crashed
ashore in the cove.
I also began
to work outside of GGNRA, thanks to the NPS’s growing awareness
of a vast array of shipwrecks within the boundaries of national
parks. Another Gold Rush steamship wreck in a national park, S.S.
Winfield Scott, in southern California’s Channel
Islands, led to a project to map its remains and nominate the
wreck to the National Register in April 1982. In deeper, calmer
water than the fragmented wreck of Tennessee, Winfield
Scott nonetheless was a broken hulk buried by shifting sand.
Pieces of the wooden hull peeked out of the bottom in a sea of
waving kelp. Pieces of the engine, and the two paddlewheel shafts,
with portions of the wheels, are the most prominent features of
the wreck. Diving on the “Winnie” added to my understanding
of the first steamers to navigate the Pacific Coast, and reminded
me of the importance of the Gold Rush in the early history of
California’s development.
But the great
breakthrough into the fascinating world of shipwrecks and underwater
archaeology came that same year thanks to a project up the coast
in nearby Drakes Bay. The project was run by the NPS’ new
Submerged Cultural Resources Unit (SCRU), a team from Santa Fe,
New Mexico headed by Dan Lenihan. His team included Larry Murphy,
a big, brisk and competent diving archaeologist who would become
one of my best friends. Dan had single-handedly built his organization
out of the apathy and outright hostility of some in the NPS who
thought the agency should be doing things other than hunt for
shipwrecks. The iconoclastic Lenihan and his “damn the torpedoes”
attitude were just my idea of right-thinking archaeologists, and
Dan and Larry became my new mentors.
From Drakes
Bay to the warm waters of Pearl Harbor and the battle-ravaged
remains of USS Arizona, to a wreck at the turbulent mouth
of the Columbia River to the atomic bombed fleet of Bikini Atoll,
with interludes in Cape Cod, and back home at GGNRA, Dan and Larry
taught me how to dive wrecks and how to “do” underwater
archaeology. Philosophical discussions over the role of anthropology
in underwater and maritime archaeology, as well as a strong preservationist
approach to saving wrecks from the ravages of treasure hunters
also formed a solid core in my education. That work also included
working outside the National Parks, helping friend John Foster,
California’s state underwater archaeologist, document and
identify wrecks that included Gold Rush sailing ships sunk off
the Sacramento’s “Old Town” on the Sacramento
River, and a wreck that another good friend, wreck diver Dave
Buller, had pointed out, which turned out to be a fascinating
Gold Rush wreck, the clipper brig Frolic. When I took
a year’s sabbatical from the NPS to go back to school and
gain a Master’s in the field, I left with a solid background
thanks to my friends.
My year at
East Carolina University was another intensive period of study
and work. A relatively new program founded by history professor
William N. “Bill” Still and Gordon P. Watts, the first
archaeologist to study the famous Civil War ironclad, USS Monitor,
the “Program in Maritime History and Underwater Research”
was one of only two schools in the U.S. to offer a graduate degree
and a strong partner (and rival) to Texas A&M’s nautical
archaeology program headed by George Bass, the founding father
of underwater archaeology. Together, the two programs have produced
the lion’s share of practicing underwater archaeologists
in North America, as well as museum directors, curators and professors.
Arriving at
ECU in 1984, I spent the year teaching basic U.S. history, studying,
and completing a required field season’s work by surveying
60 miles of Cape Hatteras National Seashore’s beaches for
shipwreck remains uncovered by seasonal erosion. With the loan
of a four-wheel drive ranger patrol vehicle, and happily back
in uniform for a few weeks, I surveyed dozens of wooden ships
and steam engines sticking out of surf and sand with a group of
fellow students, including Kevin Foster, who I would later hire
to join me in the ranks of the NPS.
Just before
I left North Carolina, though, came a phone call that once again
represented a crossroads. Edwin C. “Ed” Bearss, the
Chief Historian of the National Park Service, called from his
Washington D.C. office with a simple question. As the only NPS
historian with an impending graduate degree in maritime history
and archaeology, and a proven track record for production (I’d
written dozens of National Register nominations and studies),
he wanted to know if I’d like to join an NPS team to help
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration manage the
wreck of USS Monitor. I served as the project historian
for the USS Monitor for the next few years, writing the
study that made the wreck a National Historic Landmark. Assessing
Monitor, a famous “icon” shipwreck, was a
revealing look at why people think certain things are “historic”
and worth saving.
As an archaeologist,
I was, on one hand, disdainful of just studying “big name,”
famous wrecks, arguing that the unknown, workaday ships (the floating
equivalent of the “man on the street”) were more deserving
of study as they were more indicative of the common experience
at sea. But the how and why some ships become “famous”
was in itself a compelling area of study. Today, as an archaeologist
who has visited and studied a wide range of famous ships –
USS Arizona, USS Monitor, Titanic,
Carpathia, Mary Celeste, Somers, and
many others, I find the noteworthy and notorious to be yet another
archaeological window into the human soul.
The work on
USS Monitor led to a new assignment for Ed Bearss. In
early 1987, Ed tapped me to run a new program Congress had tasked
the NPS with. Known as the “National Maritime Initiative,”
the job was essentially to create a national maritime preservation
program for the US government. Inventorying every known historic
maritime resource, from floating ships and shipwrecks to lighthouses
and shipyards, developing standards for their preservation and
restoration, assigning priorities for preservation, and “appropriate
roles” for the government and the private sector filled
the next four years.
The NMI years
were the most intensive years of learning in my life. It was like
a graduate level program in maritime history, archaeology, preservation
and interpretation. I was hardly ever in Washington. I spent nine
months of each year in the field, visiting nearly every one some
330 historic ships in the United States, climbing up hundreds
of lighthouse towers, visiting shipyards and naval facilities,
and diving wrecks. I went to nearly every maritime museum and
library in the country, and visited others abroad in Canada and
Britain.
My time in
the NPS also included an annual summer expedition with Lenihan
and Murphy on a shipwreck project. Dives on the storm-ravaged
square-rigger Avanti at Fort Jefferson, in Florida’s
Dry Tortugas near Key West, as well as work at Pearl Harbor to
study USS Arizona and USS Utah and to search
for crashed Japanese aircraft and sunken midget submarines from
the December 5, 1941 attack filled some summers. Two years of
field work at Bikini, 9,000 miles from Washington in the heart
of the Pacific, brought the team face to face with the results
of nuclear testing as we dived into the graveyard of a fleet sunk
by the atomic bomb. I spent my last field season in 1990 leading
a team to Mexico to jointly study the remains of the 1846 US brig
Somers, a project introduced to me and the NPS by my
friend George Belcher of San Francisco, who had discovered the
wreck.
During my
13 years in the National Park Service, I had remained active as
an archaeologist outside of the National Park System thanks to
friends like George who involved me in their projects. My very
good friend, Allen Pastron, who runs a consulting firm of archaeologists
named Archeo-Tec
nearly single-handedly excavated much of downtown San Francisco’s
great sites. Thanks to Allen, I had joined the crew digging up
the ship William Gray in 1979, and later returned to
the field with him to unearth a Gold Rush store that burned and
collapsed into the bay in 1851, a shipyard where old Gold Rush
ships were dismantled between 1854 and 1857, and a sailor’s
boarding house that burned in the 1906 earthquake and fire. In
2001, we excavated another site just like Niantic. That
ship, General Harrison, lay only a block away from Niantic’s
grave. It was a wonderful opportunity to return to San Francisco
and help unearth another ghostly relic from the days of the Gold
Rush in the heart of the city. It was also, literally a return
to my roots as a maritime archaeologist. It also served as the
subject of a long-delayed Ph.D. dissertation at Simon Fraser University.
In early 1991,
with every task Congress had set before the National Park Service
as part of the challenge that formed the National Maritime Initiative
completed, I left the NPS. The years of travel had left a yearning
to find one place, one museum, ship, or shipwreck to focus on.
The opportunity to return to the Pacific Coast and to live in
Canada’s great port of Vancouver as director of the Vancouver
Maritime Museum lured me out of government service.
For 15 years
I worked with a great team of trustees, staff and volunteers at
the Vancouver Maritime Museum. That included organizing a $3-million
reenactment of the historic Northwest Passage and North America
circumnavigating voyages of the museum’s centerpiece exhibit,
the Royal Canadian Mounted Police schooner St. Roch.
It also included the rescue and reconstruction of the historic
oceanographic research submersible PX-15, Ben Franklin.
Having been in a small museum gave me the freedom to be hands-on,
not just in the research and the exhibits and programs, but with
the projects. Serving as a member of the crew of the St. Roch
II Voyage of Rediscovery meant visiting Arctic ports and
connecting with people who remembered the original ship and its
crew. Restoring Ben Franklin meant working with crane
operators and a volunteer to reassemble the sub a piece at a time,
bolting and hammering two storeys up, hoping to God that I didn’t
fall.
The last few
years also brought a new set of adventures thanks to John Davis,
producer of the National Geographic International television series,
The Sea Hunters. Working with John, co-host and famous
novelist, raconteur and shipwreck hunter Clive Cussler, master
diver Mike Fletcher, his diving son Warren, and a great crew behind
the camera has brought new adventures, “in search of famous
shipwrecks.”
Why do I love
what I do? Because the greatest museum of all is the sea. The
record of humanity’s achievements, its triumphs and tragedies,
rest on the seabed. My drive to see and touch the past and share
it with others that began for me nearly four decades ago continues,
thanks to friends and colleagues who join me in the ongoing quest.
What I’ve learned along the way from the dead ships, both
the unknown and the famous, is that they do tell their tales.
Sometimes their broken bones tell me who they are and how they
died. Sometimes the story of their birth, their careers, and the
personalities who sailed in them also come to light, resurrected
from the darkness of the deep. It is for these reasons that I
keep exploring.
"What
does an underwater archaeologist do on vacation?"
The answer is, go into the desert with his wife, Ann.
