Did the Lost Colony live at "Site X"? Clues point the way

Evidence is mounting that at least part of John White’s lost colony may have ended up in Bertie County.

Archaeologists have excavated 850 square feet of the tract in question and found dozens of artifacts including bale seals used to verify cloth quality; 16th-century nails; firing pans from snaphaunce guns of the day; aglets used to form tips on shirt lace strings; tenterhooks used to stretch hides; pieces of pottery jars for storing dried and salted fish; and bowl pieces like those found in Jamestown.

The findings do not prove Lost Colony residents lived there, but they certainly show they could have, said Clay Swindell, archaeologist and collections specialist at the Museum of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City. A member of the First Colony Foundation, Swindell reported last week on the recent findings and conclusions drawn from them at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh. He shared them with a reporter Thursday.

The rural site south of the Chowan River bridge has been inhabited for centuries first by Native Americans, then early English settlers, Swindell said. Later it became the site of a governor’s plantation. The ground is high and dry and lies next to the river, ideal for habitation.

“It’s got lots and lots of different time periods represented,” Swindell said.

A series of events led to the discovery of Site X. In 2007, a developer planned to build a large subdivision there. As usual, the state first required a search for historically significant sites or artifacts. A team found early English pottery and signs of a Native American village. Meanwhile, the development never panned out.

In 2012, researchers looking at a map that John White drew of eastern North Carolina in the 1580s found a patch covering what looked like a fort. The map is still preserved at the British Museum in London.

The fort symbol sat at the western end of the Albemarle Sound in what is now Bertie County, matching where the English artifacts were found.

“We put two and two together,” Swindell said.

Before he left for England in 1587, John White told the colony to “remove 50 miles into the main.” That clue did not help archaeologists much at first, since a 50-mile radius from Roanoke Island covers most of northeastern North Carolina.

“No one had a good understanding where the 50 miles might be,” Swindell said.

The Bertie site lies 49.32 nautical miles (or 56.76 miles) from Roanoke Island, according to Google Earth.

Researchers are continuously discovering how the artifacts and writings may tie the Lost Colony to the Bertie site. The North Devon baluster jars used to provision ships with dried or salted fish were used in the late 1500s. The Surrey-Hampshire Border ware matches hundreds of pottery fragments found in early Jamestown, but was not used that much past the early 1600s. The explorers of the day wrote about the Chowan River and the tribes that lived there.

“That location is something they were familiar with,” Swindell said.

John White was part of all three Walter Raleigh expeditions from England to the North Carolina coast. In 1585 and 1586, he made the map preserved at the British Museum. In 1587, he returned to Roanoke Island with a group that included his daughter, Eleanor Dare, and son-in-law, Ananias Dare. Eleanor gave birth on Aug. 18 to Virginia, the first English baby born in the New World. He left the colony shortly afterward to resupply.

White could not return until three years later. By then, the colony was gone. He found the word “Croatoan” carved in a post and CRO carved into a tree. The Croatoan tribe lived around Buxton.

Years later, Jamestown leaders sent a party south to search for the colonists, but bad relations with Native Americans hindered the effort. The party never made it to the Bertie site, Swindell said. The recent discoveries do not indicate a fort as was shown on the map, but only show evidence of a smaller group of early English there.

“We have new clues,” Swindell said. “That’s all we can say, there are new clues.”
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Reference:

Hampton, Jeff. 2016. “Did the Lost Colony live at "Site X"? Clues point the way”. the Virginian Pilot: Pilot Online. Posted: July 16, 2016. Available online: http://pilotonline.com/news/local/history/more-clues-appear-showing-lost-colony-may-have-gone-to/article_ddedefad-c4ea-5e54-88a6-44b388fb8e75.html

Philly's Poo: Old Toilets Reveal Early America's Secret History

A treasure trove of artifacts tossed down the loo is revealing the secret life of pre-Revolutionary America.

The nearly 300-year-old privies, which were uncovered in the heart of Philadelphia, have yielded more than 82,000 artifacts that span nearly three centuries, from the city's pre-Revolutionary roots to the modern day. Among the historic treasures were a ceramic punchbowl that provides a snapshot of Revolutionary America, shattered glasses from a back-alley tavern and the foundation of the city's first skyscraper, which was erected in 1850.

"We can tell the whole story of Philadelphia," said Rebecca Yamin, the lead archaeologist on the project. 

Accidental find

The team uncovered the toilets before the construction of a new building for the Museum of the American Revolution, which will be just steps away from Independence Hall in Center City, Philadelphia. Because the site lies atop 26 historic land parcels, archaeologists expected to find historic artifacts, Yamin said.

While surveying, they discovered several privies on the old property (essentially brick-lined vault toilets). To excavate them, the archaeologists had to go deep into the toilet shafts, spraying water into piles of excrement to break it up.

"It doesn't smell like fresh human waste, thank goodness, but it does have a characteristic smell," Yamin told Live Science.

Though the team expected to find interesting artifacts, they were unprepared for the sheer volume of detritus they uncovered, Yamin said. Because there was no municipal trash service for much of the time the toilets were in use, people didn't just do their business in the privies; they also threw their refuse there.

As a result, the new finds represent an unfiltered, hidden view of city life.

"The wonderful thing about doing this kind of archaeology is that we're going where nobody thought we would be going," Yamin told Live Science. "The people who were throwing this out in their privy certainly didn't think we would come around and dig it up."

A walk through history

Amazingly, three centuries' worth of pee and poo creates a sticky, gooey coating that actually acts as a fantastic preservative for artifacts. The finds create a historic timeline for the city.

Some of the earliest artifacts are pieces of waste from the privies of ancient tanneries, which were among the first industries in the city. The team also uncovered fragments of broken pottery and cups from an illegal back-alley tavern that was run by a woman during Revolutionary times.

"You can really feel the people drinking and talking politics and arguing," Yamin said.

One of the most exciting finds was a shattered Delft punchbowl with the words "Success to the Tryphena" emblazoned on it. The Tryphena was a merchant ship that regularly sailed to Liverpool, England. At one point, the Tryphena carried petitions from merchants hoping to repeal the Stamp Act, which required colonists to pay a tax on every scrap of paper.

Privies behind an area called Carter's Alley produced typeface going back to the 1760s  that came from several print shops. Several decades later, the city's newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, got its start in that same alley.

Later, the site was home to the Jayne Building, the city's first skyscraper, which sold over-the-counter medicines like deworming medicines. Researchers also uncovered myriad shells that were likely used by a button factory on the premises from just before World War I until World War II.
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Reference:

Ghose, Tia. 2016. “Philly's Poo: Old Toilets Reveal Early America's Secret History”. Live Science. Posted: July 6, 2016. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/55301-toilets-from-old-philadelphia.html

Sleuth finds a lost Spanish settlement in Florida Panhandle

Amateur archaeologist Tom Garner had time to kill and took a drive along Pensacola Bay in the Florida Panhandle. Spying a newly cleared lot, he poked about, hoping to find artifacts from the city's rich history dating back centuries to the Spanish explorers.

Garner stumbled upon some shards of 16th Spanish pottery.

"There it was, artifacts from the 16th century lying on the ground," said Garner, a history buff whose discovery has made him a celebrity in archaeological circles.

Experts have confirmed the find as the site of the long-lost land settlement of a doomed 1559 Spanish expedition to the Gulf Coast led by Tristan de Luna. The discovery bolsters Pensacola's claim as the first European settlement in the modern-day United States, six years before the Spanish reached St. Augustine on Florida's Atlantic seaboard. The expedition was scuttled by a hurricane in September 1559, shortly after the fleet arrived in Pensacola. Five ships sank. Archaeologists diving in Pensacola Bay found part of Luna's doomed fleet in the '90s, including the anchor of one ship. But the exact site where Luna and 1,500 soldiers, Mexican Indians and Spanish settlers lived for about two years had eluded searchers—until now.

Many believed Luna's fleeting settlement had washed away in storms or was entombed beneath centuries of development. Archaeologists from the University of West Florida are now digging in the quaint, waterfront neighborhood of homes and businesses. John Worth, an associate professor of anthropology with the University of West Florida, specializes in Spanish colonial history and has studied Luna expeditionary documents. The university confirmed the find this fall and announced it to the archaeology world just before the beginning of the year.

"This gives us a whole new window on early Spanish colonialism here in the United States," he said. Luna's mandate from the Spanish king was to construct a village that would include a church, government house, town plaza and residential site. The archaeologists hope to find out how far the work progressed.

Had Luna succeeded in colonizing the northern Gulf Coast, it would have changed the history of North America, Worth said. A lasting Spanish foothold in the Panhandle could have checked later French influence on the region, he said. Spaniard Pedro Menendez founded the first successful Spanish settlement at St. Augustine in 1565. Cal Halbirt , city archaeologist for St. Augustine, said the discovery should add new understanding to Florida's colonial past. "Having actual, tangible remains from the Tristan de Luna site is very important," he said. "I think, from a level of wow factor, it ranks right up there."

Meanwhile, St. Augustine proudly maintains its claim as the oldest continuously occupied European settlement city in the present-day U.S. "There is definitely community pride because of that," he said.
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Reference:

Nelson-Gabriel, Melissa. 2016. “Sleuth finds a lost Spanish settlement in Florida Panhandle”. Phys.org. Posted: February 17, 2016. Available online: http://phys.org/news/2016-02-sleuth-lost-spanish-settlement-florida.html

Volunteers are struggling to maintain New Orleans iconic tombs

Many cemetery vaults are crumbling due to weather, vandalism and disrepair

New Orleans’ famous cemeteries are some of the city’s biggest tourist attractions. But thanks to the constant battle against extreme weather, vandals and lack of maintenance funds, repairing some of the crumbling tombs is falling to a handful of volunteer organizations that are struggling to save the city’s history, Michael Patrick Welch reports for National Geographic. The iconic above-ground cemeteries were first built to protect the bodies of the deceased from flooding that is endemic to New Orleans. While sealing the dead in stone tombs kept coffins and corpses from floating to the surface every time it rained, they also gave people without means a place to bury their friends and families by buying tombs in bulk and being able to store the remains of several generations. But many of the vaults across the city are in disrepair from extreme weather and vandals searching for treasure interred with the deceased, Welch reports. “A couple months ago someone broke into the musicians’ tomb. This guy who’d only been dead in there six months, someone pulled his whole body out of the tomb," Eddie Payne, a mason who works with Save Our Cemeteries, tells Welch. Back in January, a break-in at New Orleans’ most famous cemetery, St. Louis No. 1, left several tombs damaged and resulted in the Archdiocese severely restricting public access to the cemetery.

While some of the city’s cemeteries are owned by private companies that have the resources to maintain the historic tombs, as Richard Thompson reports for the New Orleans Advocate, that’s not the case for the city-owned plots, like Freret’s Valence Cemetery or the Garden District’s Lafayette No. 2. Welch reports that the $192,000 alloted for cemetery maintenance was cut from the city’s 2015 budget, leaving the crypts’ upkeep to the families of those buried, if they are still alive.

“Even if we can find them, the families don’t want to pay for us to fix the tombs,” Payne tells Welch. “And the city doesn’t want to pay for it. And Save Our Cemeteries can’t always pay for it. So they’ll just keep falling over unless someone fixes them up.”

In many cases, the families who once owned the crumbling tombs are long-dead, or can’t afford the expense of preserving the mausoleums.

That leaves it to groups like Save Our Cemeteries to perform emergency repairs to protect the historic landmarks, even if they have to do it for free.

“This is the second cemetery where we’ve had an emergency operation like this,” Adam Stevenson, president of Save Our Cemeteries tells Welch while observing emergency repairs at Valence Cemetery following a break-in. “Between here and Lafayette No. 2...there were about 20-odd open vaults. Something just had to be done.”
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Reference:

Lewis, Danny. 2016. “Volunteers are struggling to maintain New Orleans iconic tombs”. Smithosian. Posted: September 28, 2015. Available online: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/volunteers-are-struggling-maintain-new-orleans-iconic-tombs-180956755/?no-ist

New clues to the fate of America's Lost Colony

Archaeologists from the University of Bristol have uncovered artefacts that they believe may help solve the long-running mystery of the fate of the first English colonists in North America. Excavations on the Island of Hatteras (North Carolina) have discovered a number of artefacts, dated to late 16th century, which point to the possibility that the colonists assimilated into the local Native American tribe. It is hoped these early findings could solve one of America's greatest historical mysteries.

Between 1584 and 1587, a number of expeditions were sent out from England to establish the first English colony in the New World. Under the leadership of Sir Walter Raleigh, the new lands were christened Virginia, and a permanent colony was established in 1587, that included over a 100 men, women and children. An expedition to locate the colony on Roanoke Island in 1590 discovered the settlement, but found it abandoned. The only clue to their whereabouts were the initials CRO carved on a tree and CROATOAN carved on a wooden post.

With English settlement at Jamestown in 1607, there were reports that the colonists had moved inland, and some had been killed by the local Indians, but otherwise their fate remained unknown.

The University of Bristol's research, working with the local community archaeology society, has been focused on the island of Croatoan, now called Hatteras. Here a significant number of native American sites have been located, through the 16th and 17th centuries. At one particular location, a number of dated artefacts have been uncovered that point to both the presence and the survival of descendants of the Lost Colony into the mid-17th century. Some of these artefacts were found in late 16th century levels, and include German stoneware and copper ingots. One diagnostic find was a Nuremberg counter, of identical form to those found on Roanoke Island. Nearby in midden levels, were found a rapier handle, a writing lead pencil and a writing slate. Excavations in the 1990's at this same site discovered an Elizabethan gold ring and a snaphaunce (musket mechanism) of c. 1580-1600. These midden levels date to the mid-17th century, and suggest that some of these precious artefacts were curated over a period of time before being discarded.

Professor Mark Horton, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Bristol and the director of the excavations with the Croatoan Archaeological Society, said: "These are still just clues, we have no smoking-gun proof that the colonists survived into the 17th century, but the discovery of so many high-status objects in one place does suggest that possibility - the colonists moved into the local Native American community and became assimilated."

Scott Dawson, the president of the Croatoan Archaeological Society, which has been sponsoring the project, said: "We have always thought that the colonists survived on Hatteras Island, and it is very exciting that the archaeological evidence is now beginning to support this idea."

The excavation work will continue in 2016, and it is hoped that a full report on the finds and their detailed analysis will be published shortly after.
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Reference:

Phys.org. 2015. “New clues to the fate of America's Lost Colony”. Phys.org. Posted: August 13, 2015. Available online: http://phys.org/news/2015-08-clues-fate-america-lost-colony.html

Tribal Headhunters on Coney Island? Author Revisits Disturbing American Tale

New book examines troubled history of Filipino tribe brought to America in 1905.

Transplanted from the Philippines to New York's famousConey Island amusement park in 1905, a band of Igorrote (Igorot) headhunters went on to tour the United States, performing mock tribal ceremonies and consuming dog meat for millions of curious and horrified Americans.

But, once a national sensation, the Igorrotes—and the doctor arrested for exploiting them—have been largely forgotten, writes journalist Claire Prentice in her new book, The Lost Tribe of Coney Island: Headhunters, Luna Park, and the Man Who Pulled Off the Spectacle of the Century.

National Geographic recently discussed with Prentice how she pieced together the group's turn-of-the-century odyssey and how some of the forces that brought the Igorrotes to America and obscured the truth about them may still be in play today.

How did you discover the story of the Igorrotes?

I had been living in New York and working as a journalist. I had a fascination with 1900s Coney Island and took trips there often. One day, I saw these pictures of the Igorrotes tattooed, in G-strings and, well, not very much else. The energy of the photos drew me in and captivated me.

I researched through big institutions like the National Archives [and] the National Library of the Philippines, and smaller places like the Bontoc Municipal Library in the Philippines's Mountain Province. I found declassified [U.S.] government files, vital records, and newspaper articles that hadn't been read for a hundred years. So I read about the terrible things these people suffered at the hands of a man they had trusted, someone who they thought was a protector in a strange land, and who had treated them abominably.

So let's talk about the man who brought them here. Who was Dr. Truman Hunt?

Truman Hunt went to the Philippines at the outbreak of the 1898 Spanish-American War. He was trained as a medical doctor, and he stayed on in the country after the war ended. He was later made lieutenant governor of Bontoc, where the Igorrotes lived, and got to know them well.

In 1904, the American government spent $1.5 million taking 1,300 Filipinos from a dozen different tribes to the St. Louis Exposition as part of a scheme intended to drum up widespread popular support for America's policies in the Philippines by demonstrating that the people of the islands were far from ready for self-government. Truman Hunt was made the manager of the Igorrote Village, which drew the largest crowds of all in the Philippine [part of the fair].

The enormous popularity of the Igorrotes gave Hunt the idea to return to Bontoc and gather another Igorrote group. He offered $15 a month to each Igorrote who volunteered to go to America with him and put on a show of their culture and customs. He planned to begin their tour at Coney Island and then move on to other amusement parks across the country.

You write that Truman Hunt was the mouthpiece for Igorrotes and the press just reprinted a lot of his tales. How difficult was it to find out what really happened?

To begin with, as a journalist, I didn't entirely swallow the news stories, though Hunt knew how to spin a story. By the time I got the key bits of the story and read the government files about his wrongdoings, it was clear just how distorted the picture was and how spun it really was.

Some of the "factual" stuff was entirely made up. In the newspapers, Truman talks about one particular incident: a huge fight between the Igorrotes and the white residents of Coney Island that ends up with the two groups fighting and grabbing pitchforks. He presents this whole scene of a savage battle, and it was entirely made up. In another one, he set up the theft of a dog—he had someone bring in a dog, unleash it, and told the Igorrotes to chase it. But the newspapers printed it as the Igorrotes were savage and wanted to steal this dog.

This was a time when human zoos were something of a trend. Ethnic peoples were exhibited in similar spectacles from Paris to Tokyo. What was special about the Igorrotes?

They were hardly in clothes. Their bodies had tattoos all over them. They had hunted heads in their home—and the dogs. Dogs were brought from the New York pound, chopped up, and put in a pot, and then people watched the Igorrotes eat the stew. This behavior scandalized Americans but also captured their imagination. But the zoo quickly came to be seen as shameful, and something Americans didn't want to remember, that people were exhibited in this manner, so it was forgotten. There were other examples where people were coerced, cultures were distorted, but in this case, the U.S. government had given permission to exploit these people.They were directly involved.

How did the presence of America in the Philippines in the 1900s factor into the Igorrotes' situation?

The U.S. backed the exhibition as a way to support their political goal of maintaining control over Philippine territory, by demonstrating that the Philippine people were far from ready for self-government. Coverage of the Igorrotes was in the newspapers, daily. People were talking about it. It was very controversial and very topical, and people were reading about and had an interest in it. The fact that they were from the Philippines was definitely another layer of attraction.

But I don't think Truman Hunt was trying to champion that cause. He was doing this out of his own interests. He was very charming, very opportunistic.

In your epigraph, Hunt is quoted in a newspaper saying, "I was healer of their bodies, father confessor of all their woes and troubles, and the final arbiter in all disputed questions," yet he basically put the Igorrotes in the zoos. Do you think he cared for these people?

That's something I thought long and hard about. Before he brought them to America, he did volunteer to work in a cholera hospital in Luzon. He genuinely did risk his life for his Filipino patients. The Truman Hunt at the end of the book wouldn't have done that. I think he became very, very badly corrupted. They were objectified so much, gawked at daily, that I think he came to regard them distantly and as a commodity.

The question of authenticity comes up a lot in the book—the authenticity of the record as well as the authenticity of the display of the Igorrotes themselves.

I don't think the display can really be considered authentic. The traditional ceremonies performed before head hunts and the other tribal dances—those were generally rare in real Igorrote life. Same with the eating of dogs. These things were ceremonial and so definitely didn't occur every day. But Truman wasn't bothered by authenticity. They were there to add a sense of drama to the show.

It seems abominable to us now that people were looking at these human zoos. But back then people went to ‘attractions’ like the Igorrote Village in the same way that they go to the movies today. They took their families. At the time it was mainstream entertainment.

You write that these zoos fulfilled a need for sensation and an ethnological obsession. Those needs don't seem unique to the 1900s. I kept thinking about reality television.

We have certainly a variation on that today, [with] wealthy Western tourists traveling to see authentic shows of ethnic peoples in Africa and Asia. It's a commodity. And absolutely, some of the TV shows today—you know, Beauty and the Beast types—are just awful. It's obviously deep within human beings to want to look at people different from themselves. That's just a fact.

There is a shred of justice administered at the end of the book. Truman Hunt is arrested. How did that happen?

The U.S. government's Bureau of Insular Affairs, which [was] part of the War Department, received a tip that Hunt was not taking adequate care of the Igorrotes. There were other rumors that he had stolen their wages and that two men in the group had died on the road and that he had failed to have their bodies buried. The government sent an agent to investigate the claims, and Hunt went on the run, taking a group of Igorrotes with him. The Pinkerton Detective Agency was hired to help track him down. Eventually, he was accused of embezzling around $10,000 in wages from the Igorrotes and of using physical force to steal hundreds of dollars more that they had earned selling handmade souvenirs.

Finally, after a manhunt across the U.S. and Canada, the government arrested him in October 1906. He was sentenced to 18 months in the workhouse after an incredible trial in Memphis.

After Truman Hunt's arrest, what happened to the Igorrotes?

In late July 1906, a couple of months after their contracts with Hunt expired, the government stepped in and sent home all of the Filipinos—except five who stayed on as witnesses in Hunt's trial. The court cases dragged on. Five Filipino witnesses were kept in America until March 1907. On March 20, they too returned to the Philippines.

It has been difficult to discover a great deal about their lives after they returned to the Philippines because a huge volume of the Philippines's vital records were destroyed during WWII. I have pieced together what I have been able to find and have included this in the Afterword. I hope that this book will lead to further discoveries about their later lives.
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Qiu, Linda. 2014. “Tribal Headhunters on Coney Island? Author Revisits Disturbing American Tale”. National Geographic News. Posted: October 27, 2014. Available online: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141027-human-zoo-book-philippines-headhunters-coney-island/

Being Gullah or Geechee, Once Looked Down On, Now a Treasured Heritage

The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor links historic African-American communities in four southern coastal states.

Emory Campbell remembers growing up Gullah on Hilton Head Island, before the golf courses and the resorts. He remembers hunting in the forests and roaming free in the marshes. He remembers an island where white people were a rarity and his family was part of a close-knit community of African-American farmers and fishers, of teachers and preachers. He remembers the curse and blessing found in the island's isolation, of having to take a ferry to get to the outside world. And he remembers the year it all changed: 1956, when the first bridge opened and the developers poured in. Campbell was 15. Today, the cemetery where his ancestors are buried is corralled by vacation homes set back from a fairway at the Harbour Town Golf Links. To visit, he needs to get waved through at a guardhouse.

"This part of the South used to be too hot for anybody to care about before mosquito control, before bridges and air conditioning," said Campbell. "We were the ones that endured, and ironically, it is us who is now suffering."

Most Threatened Places

The Gullahs or Geechees are descendants of slaves who lived and still live on the coastal islands and lowcountry along the coast of the southeastern United States, from the St. John's River in Florida to the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. (Gullah tends to be the preferred name in North and South Carolina, Geechee in Georgia and Florida.) Their communities dot the 400-mile strip, and they are slowly disappearing, casualties of progress and our love affair with coastal living.

In 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed the Gullah/Geechee Coast on its list of most threatened places. "Unless something is done to halt the destruction," the trust said, "Gullah/Geechee culture will be relegated to museums and history books, and our nation's unique cultural mosaic will lose one of its richest and most colorful pieces." (Read "Lowcountry Legacy" in the November issue of National Geographic magazine.)

Congress created the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission in 2006, and the agency published its first management plan in 2013. With limited funds and authority, it is working at the grassroots level across the region. It has teamed up with transportation departments in the four states to place road signs informing motorists when they are in the corridor. And it's also getting involved with public policy. You can see the commission's efforts in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, which lies just across the Cooper River from Charleston. The town is known for its sweetgrass basketmakers, who have sold their work from small stands along U.S. 17 for many years. Mount Pleasant's population is now about 75,000, up almost 60 percent since 2000.

When the highway was widened two years ago, the gravel shoulders were eliminated. The commission was one of several agencies that devised a plan to rebuild the basket stands, and in some cases move them to the entrances of shopping centers. It's an imperfect compromise that made the road safer while still allowing the artisans some access to customers.

"People are taking note of the Gullah community and not making decisions without including them," said Michael Allen, a community partnership specialist with the National Park Service at the Charles Pinckney National Historic Site, north of Sullivan's Island. He has worked closely on the planning and implementation of the heritage commission.

In addition to the road project, Mount Pleasant has embraced its basketmakers in other ways. Council member Thomasena Stokes-Marshall is the executive director of the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival Association. She said the town has set aside areas where the basketmakers can gather their raw materials, a task that had become more difficult as development placed more of the lowcountry off-limits.

Stokes-Marshall was born in Mount Pleasant and moved away as a child, but returned in 1993 to care for her aging mother. She then became immersed in politics and preserving what is left of the Gullah culture. "It's woven into the fabric of this community, and many people don't even realize it," she said.

Pressures Intensifying

The pressures on Gullah communities are intensifying, she said. The soaring value of coastal property drives up property taxes. Regulations designed to make homes more storm-safe increase the cost of building, making it difficult for people of modest means to build new homes on long-held property.

In addition, the land is often held communally by numerous family members. This diffuse ownership can lead to forced sales under what is called "Heirs' Property" law. Stokes-Marshall and others say that these laws allow developers to pit family members against each other and push short-term profits at the expense of long-term community stability. "All the white-owned tracts are gone," she said. "Now they're coming for the black landowners."

An environmental impact statement published in 2005 estimated that 200,000 people of Gullah and Geechee heritage live along the southeast coast. But these numbers don't tell the full story. Many people left the area to seek opportunity in other cities, taking their culture and cuisine with them.

"It is everywhere," said Jonathan Green, an internationally acclaimed artist who lives in Charleston and whose paintings celebrate the Gullah world. "This is the beautiful thing about the Gullah culture. It is a culture. So it becomes submerged in groups of people. You hear it in the language, the tone in which people speak, the dialect, the words they use, the cuisine they favor, the facial attitudes, the expression. So the culture is very much alive."

Green grew up in Gardens Corner, a small community near Beaufort, South Carolina. In recent years he has turned much of his attention to researching the role of rice in the region's history. It remains a staple of Gullah cuisine and was the crop that brought his ancestors here in bondage from the west coast of Africa. Their labor and knowledge of rice cultivation—everything from the sweetgrass baskets used to winnow the crop to the construction of the dikes and canals that managed the flow of water—helped create enormous wealth, and it's a contribution that has been long ignored.

Hiding in Plain Sight

You can still see the remains of a rice dike near Bill Wilder's house on James Island, which is across the Ashley River from downtown Charleston. Wilder lives in the Sol Legare community, which is set behind a supermarket along a marsh and an inlet.

A few hundred yards from his house is the Seashore Farmers' Lodge No. 767, which once served as a gathering place and provided assistance for families facing hardship. Built in 1915, it fell into disrepair but was saved and now is a small museum that tells part of the story of Sol Legare and how its residents found strength in their isolation.

Like many Gullah and Geechee communities, Sol Legare is hiding in plain sight. It's also aging, said Wilder, filled with retirees like himself who don't mind the slower pace. He is worried about the future, about a time when his generation is gone, when Sol Legare yields to high-end development and there's little left but memories.

Almost all of the people involved in the preservation efforts are middle-aged or older, and they recognize the need to bring younger people into the effort. I met Shirley Carter as she was cleaning the Sol Legare Community Center, a former school built in the 1940s. "[Young people] don't see it the way that we do, but when you explain to them the heritage, they appreciate it."

In the past, many Gullahs and Geechees were looked down upon. They spoke their own language, a Creole that had roots in both English and African words and sentence structure and a singsong cadence that is still heard today. But not everyone was proud to be Gullah, said Allen, and that creates a need to build trust across the corridor and be respectful of privacy while telling the larger story.

Since retiring in 2002 from the Penn Center, which was created in 1862 as a school for the Gullah Geechee on St. Helena Island and the other sea islands, Campbell has given tours of his Hilton Head. He takes visitors down Beach City Road, once the site of the Mitchelville community, created in 1862 as a town for freed slaves. It's gone now, but the town of Hilton Head and a local group have developed part of the area as a park, a place for recreation and paying tribute to the island's Gullah heritage.

As a former chair of the Gullah Geechee commission, Campbell is encouraged by what he sees, but he also understands the uphill nature of the struggle and the need to move quickly to preserve both places and a way of life. "Whatever happens," he said, "is going to require a lot of work, a lot of sweat, and a lot of cooperation."
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Otterbourg, Ken. 2014. “Being Gullah or Geechee, Once Looked Down On, Now a Treasured Heritage”. National Geographic News. Posted: October 17, 2014. Available online: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141017-gullah-geechee-heritage-corridor-lowcountry-coast-sea-islands-sweetgrass/

Groundbreaking research maps cultural history

New research from Northeastern University has mapped the intellectual migration network in North America and Europe over a 2,000-year span. The team of network scientists used the birth and death locations of more than 150,000 intellectuals to map their mobility patterns in order to identify the major cultural centers on the two continents over two millennia.

In the new paper, to be published Friday in the journal Science, the researchers found how locations such as Rome, London, and Paris have emerged as cultural hubs as more intellectuals died in these cities than elsewhere—regardless of where they were born. Additionally, the findings reveal that the distance between the birth and death locations of notable individuals has not increased much over the span of eight centuries—a remarkable showcase of human mobility patterns—despite the fact that colonization and transportation improvements have increased long-distance travel.

"By tracking the migration of notable individuals for over two millennia, we could for the first time explore the boom and bust of the cultural centers of the world," said Albert-László Barabási, Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and director of Northeastern's Center for Complex Network Research. "The observed rapid changes offer a fascinating view of the transience of intellectual supremacy."

In their paper, Maximilian Schich, the lead author and former visiting research scientist in the center, Barabási, and their co-authors presented a variety of new findings. For example, despite the arts' dependence on money, the cultural hubs that attracted the most intellectuals were not necessarily economic hubs.

In addition, they found that by the 16th century, Europe appeared to be characterized by two radically different cultural regimes: a "winner-takes-all" regime with countries where an individual city attracts a substantial and constant flow of intellectuals (i.e.: Paris, France) and a "fit-gets-richer" regime with cities within a federal region (i.e.: Germany) competing with each other for their share of intellectuals, only being able to attract a fraction of that population in any given century.

The team also found that there is no such thing as an average cultural center or average attractiveness consistent among locations. In fact, they scale and fluctuate heavily over time due to a variety of factors.

For example, while intellectuals have always flocked to New York City in great numbers, it was an even bigger source of talent in the 1920s, being the birthplace of a significant portion of individuals in the data set.

Additionally, locations like Hollywood, the Alps, and the French Riviera, which have not produced a large number of notable figures, have become, at different points in history, major destinations for intellectuals, perhaps initially emerging for reasons such as the location's beauty or climate.

The research has not only uncovered fascinating aspects of intellectual migration over two millennia, it also broke new ground in terms of its data-driven approach to understanding cultural history. The team used data going back several centuries to quantify qualitative knowledge and consulted vast amounts of literature.

They relied on large data sets, including the curated General Artist Lexicon that consists exclusively of artists and includes more than 150,000 names and Freebase with roughly 120,000 individuals, 2,200 of whom are artists. Through this novel approach, they identified a clear set of geographical patterns that would not be recognized using traditional quantitative historical methods. The third data set, the Getty Union List of Artist Names, was used to validate the results of the other two.

"We're starting out to do something which is called cultural science where we're in a very similar trajectory as systems biology for example," said Schich, now an associate professor in arts and technology at the University of Texas at Dallas. "As data sets about birth and death locations grow, the approach will be able to reveal an even more complete picture of history. In the next five to 10 years, we'll have considerably larger amounts of data and then we can do more and better, address more questions."
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References:

EurekAlert. 2014. “Groundbreaking research maps cultural history”. EurekAlert. Posted: July 31, 2014. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-07/nu-grm073114.php