James

Really Important People

RIP

(Not to be confused with Rest In Peace)

James E Miller Jr

04 May 2018

Today was like any other day at the Archaeology Working Lab at Cosumnes River College, the students were busy cataloging artifacts and getting them ready for storage back at the State Parks warehouse. Sometimes the cataloging can be a bit boring and uneventful, unless of course you find a piece of newspaper with words still legible and then find the article and paper it was printed in, but that already happened. We have been working with the same artifacts from the privy pit from the Enterprise site and it is starting to get a bit boring. We need to get our hands on some new artifacts from the collection.

Our professors informed us that our lab would be getting some visitors today and that we must be on our best behavior. We did not make any promises, only that we would try to keep the cursing and shenanigans down to clean jokes and harmless pranks. Diane Abrams and Mary Kell stopped by our lab to see what we are doing with the artifacts that they dug up. You see, they were on the original team with Professor Abrams and had first had knowledge of what was going on at the site back in the late 70s and early 80s. We were able to ask them questions about their experience at the site, but mostly we just listened to them tell stories and reminisce. It was very surprising to me that they could still recall almost everyone that participated on the dig and who had what grid.

We also showed them all of our research on some of the artifacts from the collection. From Laura’s work on Peter Zackarius and Johanne Heigal, the loaded dice, medical devices, 3D imagining of the site from an etching and our newsprint story, just to mention a few. Now you may be wondering why Diane has the same last name as David, that’s a great observation, you see that’s his wife or I should say widow since he passed on some years back. Diane came with some photos from the site that showed everyone of Prof. Abrams students and volunteers working at the site and having a good time excavating. Diane and Mary were able to recall almost everything that they did during their time at the Enterprise Hotel site; it’s having an experience like this that puts everything in perspective. It’s like having Howard Carter, the person who discovered King Tuts tomb in Egypt giving us a lecture and having the chance to ask him any question you want. That’s what it was like having Diane and Mary at CRAWLs lab today; the pictures were literally worth a thousand words and having Diane and Mary there to explain the photo to us, really brought the whole picture into focus for me. Now I knew without a doubt what and how the excavation

The Presentation of Doom

(Stumbling over my words)

James E Miller Jr

06 April 2018

Today is the day of the Sacramento Anthropological Society’s symposium at California State University Sacramento’s campus and Cosumnes River College Archaeology Working Lab will be presenting a lecture on Engaging Public Anthropology for a Changing World, which is the topic of the symposium and we still have the nervous jitters. Here we are at the student union getting ready to present to the faculty and Anthropology students from some major universities and it still feels as if we are strangers in a strange land, like we are not being taken seriously. It’s as if we are not qualified or have the experience to stand behind the podium and speak to such an esteemed audience but we do and we prove them wrong all the time.

The majority of the presentations were given by Anthropology students at Sacramento State with a few from San Francisco State and UC Davis with topics ranging from pre-historic sites to anthropological studies of diverse groups of humans. We were able to see the first few lectures before we started rehearsing one last time before our turn came up. Of course we were still nervous and only hoped that we got our act together up on the podium, which we did. After our lecture I stayed to listen to a few of the last lectures with one in particular.

One of the Sacramento State students did an anthropological study on the fans of the music group Phish. The lecture focused on the ultra-fans of this group better known as Phish-heads and their use of lyrical words from the songs by Phish that are used to communicate with other ultra-fans. I knew of Dead-heads who are fans of the Grateful Dead and who are known for following the band from gig to gig and Juggalos who are extreme hard-core fans of the band Insane Clown Posse, but this was the first time I had heard of Phish-heads. I am now enlightened.

I missed a lecture titled “The Ugly Truth behind Farm to Fork”, but reading the abstract I knew what the subject would be about. I had an idea of what this lecture would be about, that only perfect and normal looking fruits and vegetables get put on display and are more widely sold, while the so called ugly ones get thrown away. The Heirloom tomato was almost lost to extinction because it was so ugly; it did not look as good as the Roma or Beef tomato yet has a taste that cannot be compared to other tomatoes. I understand why people are attracted to and buy the pretty fruits and vegetables, we have become conditioned to see them as perfect and bearing no defects due to the convincing ploys of a great marketing campaign. I will have to be more aware of the choices I make at the grocery store, no more perfect yellow bananas for me; I’ll take the one with all the spots.

The Presentation of Impending Doom

(I may be exaggerating just a little)

James E Miller Jr

23 March 2018

The members of Cosumnes River Archaeology Working Lab (CRAWL) will be presenting at the Sacramento Anthropology Society (SAS) Symposium on April 6th 2018 and all five of us presenting are feeling the pressure to make sure we represent Cosumnes River College in the best possible light. After all we are just a community college that just so happens to have a state of the art laboratory on campus. And when I say state of the art, I mean what is within budgetary limits. This means improvising, adapting and overcoming our limitations and making some significant discoveries with the Enterprise Hotel collection.

We have only rehearsed our parts once as a group and have made a few corrections to our power point as well before the symposium, and I feel we will be making a few more as the time nears. Even while rehearsing I am a real mess. I have never been this nervous before in my life and I have given a lecture before in front of an audience. I guess it’s just been so long since I have had to speak in front of a group of people that I start tripping over my words. That’s what happens when you only take math courses; you can only speak and understand in numbers.

I have to admit something I am not proud of and that is I sometimes cuss…..a lot. I like to think I have it under control and am able to use it sparling when the situation dictates its use but all those years in the military has had its effect on my speech pattern. I know when to use a cuss word and when not to but sometimes I am subject to a Freudian slip now and then. I just hope I don’t let one out while I am speaking during our lecture.

With the creation of a new website, CRAWL will have more of an influence to the general public and a further reach to potential new members while at the same time contributing to the greater academic realm of Anthropology. As CRAWL presents more at conferences, symposiums and dusty lecture halls, they are solidifying their place among their peers and intellectual superiors.

My Friend went to the Smithsonian and All I got was this T-Shirt”

By James E Miller Jr

09 March 2018

One of the most exciting and terrifying experiences of all time other than a huge stone ball rolling after you in a dark tunnel with poison darts flying past your head, is presenting a paper or poster at one of the Archaeology academic conventions. It requires a lot of hard work and tons of patience. The hardest thing to do is write the abstract, so frustrating. But once that is done the poster or paper will carry the rest of the work for you. Except maybe creating the poster, that can be difficult if you do not know how to use Power Point, like me. It is a great way to get used to speaking in front of a group of educated professionals and also to get information on other sites and studies in the field of Archaeology.

I had my first presentation at the Society of California Archeology at Yosemite I believe last year. Don’t hold me to that. It was an experience that every student of Archeology needs to have because being able to present ideas, thoughts and new information to the rest of your colleagues will help further our studies, preserve our history and keep the general public aware of our past. Ok, enough of that. Let me step down from my soap box. I presented our findings with the glass bottle and newspaper which I thought was the bee’s knees with our Enterprise Hotel artifact however, there were a lot of posters and presentations on pre-historic sites and artifacts. It seems like that is and was the major focus of almost all of the papers, presentations and posters at the conference. Historical Archaeology to me seems like it does not get enough credit when comparing it to pre-history. Everyone wants to discover the next new site of a Neo-lithic camp site or tool cache, not about something happened in the near past.

For me, Historical Archeology is a bit more fascinating than discovering a Neanderthal camp site; I want to find Jimmy Hoffa or a lost battle site from World War One. I mean I already know where Jimmy is, he’s buried under a White Castle in Hoboken New Jersey. I want to find those lost pieces of our recent past the will help solve some of those missing gaps in our history, the bits of information that will complete the whole story as a society and people of the United States and the World.

The Confusing Map of “You Are Here”

By James E Miller Jr*

22 February 2018

While cataloging some of the many glass artifacts form the Enterprise Hotel site the CRAWL team made a remarkable discovery, a discovery so momentous that it will forever change the history books written about Sacramento…..I mean that’s just my personal opinion. There have been more significant discoveries that deserve more credit and attention, like the recent discoveries of Mayan structures in the Amazon rain forest or the USS Lexington found off the coast of Australia. Had the CRAWL team not have access to these artifacts from the site we would not have found a piece of newsprint lodged inside the neck of a glass bottle, this artifact would have wound up in a box on a shelf sitting in a State Parks warehouse. (Don’t forget about that warehouse scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark).

Now I know what you are probably thinking, “what’s the big deal, so what, you found a piece of newspaper lodged into the neck of a bottle.” Yes, yes we did however; some of the printed words were still legible. By taking a picture and enlarging the image we were able to decipher the words that we could still read and entered them into an online archive of newspapers created and maintained by the University of California at Riverside. And sure enough, a printed story was recovered using those words from a paper that was regional to the Sacramento area. The story was titled “Both Her Boys” and it appeared in the June 13^th 1877 issue of the Sacramento Daily Union. Of course the words were so commonly used that during the online search other papers from other areas of California and other states as well. We were fairly certain that the paper was local to Sacramento and that it was used for a bottle stopper.

We may be able to narrow that artifact down to a group of individuals who occupied that parcel of land too. The glass bottle was found at the bottom of a privy or outhouse that may or may not have been used as a common privy between the other residents of the parcel. It’s not uncommon for a group of buildings to share a common privy, so we know that it may have come from any one of the three or four buildings and any number of its occupants. However, by researching some of the census records one of our CRAWL members was able to narrow down a list of potential occupants and one Peter Zakaraus popped up as a possible person of interest. Not only was he a “Doctor” but also an amateur vintner and the bottle found could have been reused as a wine vessel.

The Really Expensive Gift Shop at the Smithsonian

26 January 2018

It almost feels as if I am doing something wrong, like I am not allowed to touch the vehicles at the Sacramento Automobile Museum behind the velvet rope or climb into the cockpit of a C-47 airplane at Aerospace Museum of California at McClellan Airfield and yet here I am holding a glass bottle form the late 1800s. Am I the only one who has ever thought about taking one of those 1956 Chevrolet Bel-Airs out for a drive down Broadway? Let’s just get past the fact that I know it’s considered grand theft and think hypothetically and say I have the owner’s permission.

I do not know if museums have incorporated some type of living experience where people could try to weave a basket, print a flier from a 17^th century press or fly in a B-17 Flying Fortress but if they did I would gladly spend my money at a museum that offers an experience like that of the book and movie, “A Night at the Museum”. Where actors and actresses take on the role of famous historical figures and reenact events or demonstrate early technological devices. I know that the Sacramento History Museum offers an experience like that with the Underground Tour. Having a live action ‘movie’ performed right there in front of you and where you could take part in would give children and adults a better understanding of history.

The members of the Cosumnes River Archaeology Working Lab or CRAWL are students and former students who are working on artifacts from a site called the Enterprise Hotel located in Sacramento California in the heart of Old Sacramento. Current CRAWL members are continuing the project which started back in the late 1970s and early 1980s by David Abrams and Anthropology students from Cosumnes River College. The project was placed on a shelf and forgotten until CRAWL advisers Dr. Panagakos and Professor Paskey rediscovered the artifacts at a State Parks warehouse, (remember the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Not at all like that, but close.) Since State Parks has conservator ship of the artifacts, a partnership has been created with Cosumnes River Colleges’ Anthropology Department to carry on with the research, preservation and cataloging of the artifacts. Guided by Dr. Panagakos and Professor Paskey student volunteers with a declared major or strong interest in Anthropology are continuing where David Abrams left off and are gaining experience only seen at a four year college.

The Extremely Long Line at the Buzz Aldrin Cosmic Snack Shack

(I’ve been waiting over two hours for an order of Saturn Onion Rings, the lines are sooo long)

By James E Miller Jr

09 January 2018

It seems like we have been cataloging artifacts for days, if not years and well, we have. With the CRAWL program at the community college gives students some advance experience in Archaeology that they normally would not get at a lower division educational institution. When the students of CRAWL transfer to a university, they will already have the experience that other students only get during post graduate work. So as we assign catalog numbers to the artifacts, box them up for storage and send them back to State Parks we get that rare chance to touch and examine artifacts that would otherwise be locked up in storage or presented for display behind a glass case with a sign that says ‘Do Not Touch’.

There is no standard way to catalog artifacts from a site; each Archaeologist will have a particular way on how to record items, it may or may not be organized in a way that may or may not be understood by others in their field of study. I know it sounds vague and a bit confusing, but until you get your bearings on a collection that someone else has started, you either have to learn their process or create a new one. Fortunately, David Abrams was an Archaeologist and Professor at Cosumnes River College when he started the dig at the Enterprise Hotel site along with some of his student volunteers kept detailed notes and journal on the site and their personal experiences and insights. These notes and journals have allowed us to continue their work where they left off and where we pick up with our own notes and experiences.

Having access to the Enterprise Hotel artifacts has allowed some of the CRAWL members to delve deep into the history, process and function of unique artifacts in the collection along with an attempt to place the origin of the artifact to a particular individual. One of the CRAWL members was able to identify at least two residents of the site. Before the Enterprise Hotel was built, the parcel of land it sits on was home to at least three to four buildings each belonging to an individual, through means of local insurance papers, census records and property deeds they were able to place a name to a parcel. This has allowed them to trace the resident’s lineage from their original start in life to their stayover in Sacramento. I find historical archaeology to far more fascinating than pre-historic archaeology because I can more easily relate and understand how people and artifacts along with recorded events all relate to each other.

Alannah | Ella | James | Nikki | Pearl