When Tropical Storm Fred made landfall on the Florida panhandle in mid-August of this year, I never imagined it would be a major threat where I’m currently stationed in Western North Carolina. Being someone who was raised on the coast of Florida, I’ve weathered my fair share of hurricanes and tropical storms over the years. And I’m familiar with the threats associated with those storm incidents – flash flooding, storm surges, wind damage, tornado activity, etc. So, as TS Fred crawled across the Southeastern U.S. and slowly edged into North Carolina, I expected the impacts to be relatively mild. I wasn’t prepared for the damage that would ensue when, in a 48-hour period, over 10 inches of rain accumulated in many parts of the Pisgah Forest and surrounding counties.

Rain pouring over the mountains triggered immense landslides, wiping out segments of underlying infrastructure. As water drained into swelling creeks and rivers, water levels rose several feet to record heights, causing flash floods that swept away trees, automobiles, and mobile homes. In some spots, the surge of rushing water was powerful enough to wash out bridges and roads. When the water began to subside, the human cost of the flooding became a reality as reports of at least six deaths and dozens of missing persons streamed in from local communities like Cruso and Canton.

In the days and weeks following the incident, my colleagues at the USFS Pisgah and Appalachian Ranger districts managed emergency response operations within the hardest hit portions of Forest Service land. Local district staff members and an interdisciplinary incident response team spent countless hours surveying and documenting roads, trails, bridges, and recreation areas for storm damage. Waterways and recreation areas where erosion and debris threatened public safety were closed off and monitored to prevent injury.

On a two-week emergency detail to the Pisgah district, I worked with heritage professionals to help survey badly damaged bridges, trails, roads, and archaeological sites throughout the district. We worked with NC Department of Transportation officials to identify, monitor, and preserve heritage sites while planning and implementation of repairs. During my details, our team was able to provide specialized feedback to state engineers, which allowed us to coordinate repairs to damaged infrastructure without destroying neighboring archaeological sites.

I’m glad I had an opportunity as a Resource Assistant to see Forest Service employees working with the state and local communities to help rebuild piece by piece in the wake of a natural disaster. It’s likely that the millions of dollars of damaged caused by TS Fred will take years to fully assess and repair. And the funding and resources required for recovery can be stretched thin as the other Forests deal with emergencies like wildfires and hurricanes striking other parts of the nation. While the looming threat of climate change makes the challenge of dealing these types of incidents even more daunting, it’s also heartening to see local residents, state officials, and federal agencies working together to support affected communities.

As an archaeologist, most of my work involves piecing together material traces of historical events and past human activities. Some of these material traces are physical objects or artifacts. Others include things like photographs and archival documents. When it comes to the day-to-day business of archaeology, maps are by far one of the most ubiquitous and critical sources of data we use.

Now that I’m a few months into my internship for the Forest Service and at a point where I’m taking on more projects, I consult maps daily. We analyze historical plat maps to locate historical sites. We use atlases and indexes to find land acquisition records. We make maps to plot survey data and recorded archaeological sites. We analyze maps that predate the U.S. government itself to reconstruct precolonial landscapes. And we depend upon a variety of probability maps to determine what areas of forest have the highest potential for archaeological sites.

Unfortunately, most of the maps that we use are products of a Western system of spatial representation that remains reflective of early colonial attitudes about how land should be surveyed, organized, and used. And because American archaeology as a field is largely rooted in Western empiricism, many of our methods and practices can unconsciously be limited by cultural biases.

Probability models used to delineate areas with the highest potential for finding remains of past human activity exemplify some of these biases. Many predictive maps we create are based on specific assumptions about human behavior. We might assume that humans would naturally choose to use travel routes that require the least amount of time and energy to move across. Or we might assume that humans would automatically consider specific environmental factors when choosing a place to live. Those models don’t capture the full range of human experiences that exist.

Prior to European contact, indigenous peoples throughout the Americas navigated and understood space through the construction of immense mound complexes and the creation of petroglyphs or rock art. Here in North Carolina, Native American petroglyphs such as Judaculla Rock have been interpreted by some scholars as representations of local geography showing landmarks and sacred places recognized in both oral histories and indigenous cosmologies. Cherokee histories link the petroglyph to Tsul’kalu’ (Judaculla), a legendary deity who was believed to live near the site and was said to preside over the neighboring hunting grounds and game animals.

Scholars have long debated whether the symbols on Judaculla rock should be considered visual form of storytelling, an ancient map, or something else altogether. Much of the skepticism surrounding its interpretation, however, stems from a tendency to view the symbolism as either an abstract form of art or a practical representation of space. This interpretive dualism is, in part, a product of Western biases that envision a separation between the spiritual world and earthly pragmatism. Archaeological sites and artifacts often resist these rigid, simplistic explanations. An image can serve functional and aesthetic or religious purposes all at once. And when we interpret archaeological remains, we must embrace ideas and worldviews wholly different from our own.

One of the challenges we face in mapping and predicting the location of archaeological sites is the reality that past peoples understood geography much differently than we assume. Throughout history, humans constructed paths and settlements in ways that might not make sense today. The spatial order of things may have been designed in accordance with celestial phenomenon or territorial boundaries that do not align with contemporary borders. These patterns of spatial organization necessitate alternative strategies for predicting where to find cultural sites and that means revising and refining predictive models to accommodate a more diverse range of cultural practices.

When we imagine our National Forests and Grasslands, the first things that come to mind are natural landscapes and resources. Media coverage on efforts to preserve our forests and grasslands tend to focus on the critical need to protect the biological ecosystems and fresh water supplies contained in those spaces. What we hear less about are the rich array of cultural resources tucked within these public lands. As an archaeological resource assistant, my work with the forest service has focused on preserving the cultural remains of thousands of years of human habitation.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve worked with archaeologists across the state of North Carolina who have been tasked with researching, evaluating, and monitoring archaeological sites on U.S. Forest Service lands. These sites range from prehistoric settlements built by early Native American inhabitants of North America to more recent contexts like Spanish colonial fortifications, Civil War gravesites, and vestiges of the Trail of Tears, which commemorates the traumatic history of Cherokee Removal. These significant pieces of human history are just a few of the hundreds of sites that exist in our National Forests. Unfortunately, our efforts to preserve these pieces of human history can be thwarted by modern human activities like looting, vandalism, and poaching.

Although these types of problems are difficult to combat, one of the most critical tools at our disposal is community outreach and public education. I recently had the pleasure of stepping out of the office and getting away from the field for a few days to spend some time doing public outreach with local schools in Yancey County, North Carolina. Summer camp students from elementary schools across the county came to participate in hands-on educational sessions taught by natural and cultural preservation specialists. I got to spend the day teaching kids about things like what archaeologists do, how we study the past, and why it’s so important to preserve the Native American sites and artifacts remain targeted by looters today. The kids got a chance to play some historic games while learning about the ways in which we can use material culture to understand human history and experience. These types of service events help us inform the public about the need to protect cultural resources and they help us strengthen our relationships with local communities and stakeholders who we serve. One of the things I value about the archaeologists I’ve gotten to know over the past couple of months is their conscious effort to engage with local communities even when it means volunteering on their time off. Ultimately, those efforts pay off in the form of long-lasting partnerships with local communities.

A couple of weeks ago, at the start of my tenure as an archaeology fellow for the U.S. Forest Service, I was invited to participate in a forest knowledge exchange visit with my supervisor, Scott Ashcraft, who serves as the Zone archaeologist for National Forests here in Western North Carolina. My first assignment was to accompany Scott on a trip to visit archaeologists working at Nantahala National Forest to compare various archaeological sites, artifacts, and features that seemed to be cropping up in unexpected places across neighboring forests. The motivation for this comparative survey was to improve existing models that predict where potential cultural sites might be based on things like topography or access to natural resources.

As I got to know my supervisor, we started chatting about our professional and personal backgrounds. Scott told me about his early fieldwork experiences and eventually shared a story with me, a story that I soon realized was a formative one that would reshape his professional career. At the time, he was a fledgling field technician working on a project with a team of archaeologists who were busy excavating a prehistoric Native American site somewhere near a local reservation. He and his colleagues had been shoveling dirt into their screens when a local man of Cherokee ancestry rode past the site and scornfully admonished the crew for disturbing the remains of his ancestors. I was surprised as Scott continued to describe how the encounter changed his worldview and humbled him. Suddenly, in that moment, he realized that he was, in the grand scheme of history, a naïve trespasser who had failed to recognize the enduring indigenous claims and connections to these ancestral lands. That pivotal exchange would later inspire Scott to prioritize collaboration with Cherokee and local Eastern Band of Cherokee stakeholders.

What I found compelling about Scott’s story was his self-reflective tone. Having worked as an archaeologist for over a decade, it was refreshing to hear my new mentor divulge some of the anxieties and fears that we all wrestle with when we consider what’s at stake in efforts to preserve remnants of past cultures that are often very different from our own. Hearing Scott’s story gave me the opportunity to share a very different set of experiences that shaped my own journey as a queer, Panamanian-American archaeologist. I described how my father, a Panamanian immigrant and self-described “cholo”, was born on a “comarca” – the Spanish equivalent of an Indian reservation – inhabited by the indigenous Ngäbe people of Western Panama. The stories that shaped me – queer stories, Latin American stories, immigrant stories – have traditionally been left out of archaeological textbooks. And the broader profession of archaeology remains an overwhelmingly white and male-dominated career field.

Archaeologists with backgrounds like my own haven’t always been given the same mentorship opportunities that facilitate these types of knowledge exchanges. What I’ve come to learn from my supervisor is that efforts to understand and preserve history are dependent upon the relationships we build with diverse stakeholders. And that means valuing the knowledge exchanged both through personal everyday exchanges and through more formal processes of tribal consultation, communication with local governments, and community outreach.

Agency: U.S Forest Service

Program: Resource Assistant Program (RAP)

Location: Pisgah National Forest Zone

Jamie Arjona is an anthropological archaeologist whose research focuses on questions related to environmental racism, citizenship, and the experiences of minority groups within racialized communities throughout the U.S. during the 19th and 20th centuries. Jamie received her B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Florida and completed her M.A. in Anthropology at the University of Illinois (UIUC). She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois where she has served as an instructor of record for undergraduate courses and archaeological field schools. Over the course of her career, Jamie has had the pleasure of working on numerous collaborative archaeological research projects and local historic preservation initiatives throughout the Southeast and the Midwest.