In previous chapters we have seen specific discussion of the archaeological work done by forest archaeologists under Sam Brookes’s supervision. What I am going to focus on here is his work as a “meta-archaeologist,” an archaeological administrator with the USDA Forest Service who created and maintained an environment in which good and ethical archaeology was done, leading to publications and other kinds of additions to the database of archaeological resources for Mississippi. Secondarily, Brookes has been instrumental in furthering and promoting the careers of the archaeologists under his supervision, as well as those of academic archaeologists and their students, mostly in Mississippi. Finally, Brookes was required to promote archaeology as another public value of forest preservation and management, and he used this work to move forest archaeology into a leadership position for promoting archaeology in Mississippi generally, spearheading many activities that have come to be routine today. I am therefore interested here in the importance to archaeology as a practice and profession of this example of what often remains “invisible work”: the creation of institutional infrastructure of which the well-known activities of archaeology are the outward sign. The USDA Forest Service award citation that was read at the 2011 Southeastern Archaeological Conference symposium honoring Sam Brookes’s work (see Appendix) addressed a lot of what I will say in the sense of citing what he was able to accomplish, as have many comments and acknowledgments in the preceding chapters of this volume, but did not specify how.
From a theoretical point of view, this investigation falls at a nexus between the social study of science and the anthropology of work, directed toward understanding the functioning and maintenance of an extended working environment that includes as human members people of multiple skills and tasks, partnering with others from other working contexts and also with descendant communities, avocational participants, and even children; and in addition a full range of nonhuman actors, including tools and equipment and theoretical constructs as well as the physical and intellectual objects of the archaeological work, in this case mostly (but not entirely) the discoveries yielded by survey and testing in aid of cultural resource management rather than full-scale excavation. I am going to argue, as is increasingly common in studies of work, that in a real sense all successful professional work environments are places where people learn together, and the National Forests in Mississippi’s archaeological work is no exception, although the team carrying it out has been distributed over the landscape rather than working together in a single location. As archaeologists, we have not until recently looked reflectively at our own work, but Ian Hodder and others working on the ethnography of archaeology have proved that we can do so with profit (Edgeworth 2006; Hodder 2003). In the case before us, I think we will see that the important advances that have come from the work of the National Forests in Mississippi archaeological team were no accident, but the result of the learning power of a community of practice and the importance of its efforts to share the results of that learning, leading to the active and sustained involvement of others not formally members of that community. I will draw together several anthropological concepts to help to sketch the process by which forest archaeology in Mississippi developed: community of practice, reflective practice, infrastructure, and epistemic culture.
First, I want to think about the forest archaeology that developed under Brookes’s leadership as a community of practice. The term was originally developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger along with their concept of “situated learning” (Lave and Wenger 1991). They argued that learning is not exclusively an individual phenomenon, but takes place as specific groups of people, engaged in a mutually interesting pursuit, interact and exchange information (Wenger 2006). Therefore to make a study of a community of practice it is necessary, according to Wenger, to define the domain of interest (in this case, archaeology in general and forest archaeology in particular), the specific community pursuing it (in this case the archaeologists pursuing forest archaeology in Mississippi) and the shared practice that develops as distinctive to the community (a forest archaeology developed in a specific geographical context, which I will suggest has itself been a source of discovery).
To enlarge on the process by which the members of a community of practice pursue their own development of understanding through practice, I think it is helpful to think of everyday work using the concept of reflective practice as developed by Donald Schön: a way of proceeding through practice as a questioning, experimental process where each task is a small experiment whose observed outcome drives the emergent course of the work (Schön 1983; see also Orlikowski 1996 for a conception of this process as “situated change”). Schön has successfully argued that this process is not just an ideal of scholarly research design, but a sign of professional practice during everyday work. Further, it is a good fit with archaeology, where it is well known that research designs and practice are frequently tweaked on a daily basis during field investigations to take account of unsuspected and often unsuspectable findings.
Practices do not exist in a vacuum, but are situated in and supported by existing conventions, which practices in turn alter by reproducing them with variations. To provide a framework for the emergent practices of forest archaeology I want to use the concept of infrastructure, as developed by sociologists Anselm Strauss and Susan Leigh Star (Star and Ruhleder 1996). Infrastructures are the frequently invisible, taken-for-granted structures that frame our everyday lives and practices, structures that we may change but must also work within in a dialogic way. They are characterized by their embeddedness in the situation, their transparency, reach or scope, association with a community of practice, embodiment of standards, dependency on an installed base, and (especially) they are most visible on breakdown (Star and Ruhleder 1996:113). For the issue at hand, the rich set of established infrastructures includes lithic and pottery typologies and time sequences, academic and bureaucratic systems of status and reward, legal frameworks governing cultural heritage preservation, field archaeology survey and excavation methods, routines and practices of forest care, and formal relationships among established institutional entities (for example, federal government represented by the USDA Forest Service, state government represented by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and state universities, and controllers of land use such as the US Army). All of these interlocking infrastructures (and others) constitute the environment within which the USDA Forest Service archaeological work has to take place, hence all of them had to be deployed or negotiated so that learning work and the production of knowledge could in fact happen (Strauss 1982), and at times the “creative destruction” wrought by new findings could make specific infrastructures visible and an issue for overt study. And here I intend to attempt to frame or map them using Strauss’s concept of social worlds and arenas as presented by Adele Clarke (see Clarke 2005). In such a mapping, other “social worlds” or communities are seen as related to the community of interest as participants in various aspects of the arena in question, in this case the archaeology of Mississippi.
Finally, I want to develop the argument that under Brookes’s direction the team constituted by the Mississippi forest archaeologists developed beyond that of a community of practice, which carries out work and improves its understanding of the work over time, approaching an epistemic community, which in the course of its work produces new knowledge by analyzing the objects of its attentions and actively pushing the boundaries of existing infrastructures. Karin Knorr-Cetina defines epistemic community as tied to a specific knowledge setting and making up one of the structures of a knowledge society. Such a cultural entity is constituted in her study by a field of scientific enquiry together with the institutions, practices, and physical objects that provide and are the context of its material support (Knorr-Cetina 1999:8). Like the communities she discusses, high-energy physics and molecular biology, I suggest that it is entirely appropriate to consider that the Mississippi Forests archaeological team, its external partners, and the infrastructural equipment of archaeological practice, participating in the larger arena of North American archaeology, constrained by a framework of statutory compliance in cultural heritage preservation, and directed at a set of geographical areas where potential evidences of previous human habitation may exist, together constitute an active laboratory where we know—on the evidence of the essays in this book—that new knowledge has been and is being created.
As I started out, I was going to put together an institutional history as seen from the perspective of a single biography. The appropriateness of such an approach emerges from the fact that although individuals working inside especially governmental institutions are working within the confines of a set of laws, regulations, policies, and procedures constituting a particular statutory infrastructure, all such workers—especially if they command a body of knowledge and skills that others need but do not well understand—negotiate their own micro-institution, not likely to be like that of anyone else, by the way they fill in and modify those parts of the infrastructure that remain ill-defined, just to get their work done. In Strauss and Star’s work this underspecified area calls forth “articulation work,” or the creative improvisation—articulated in the form of reflective practice as mentioned above—that emerges to bridge between defined and undefined regions of infrastructure (see also Strauss et al. 1997; Wiener 1991). If workers are successful in effectively defining formerly informal portions of infrastructure or creating entirely new infrastructural segments, they may leave behind at least some lessons and hopefully a functioning infrastructure that the next person can take advantage of rather than starting from scratch. I thought that would certainly be the case here; I wanted to portray the Brookesian micro-institution and how Brookes and the growing cohort of forest archaeologists constructed it in the give and take of everyday routine work by undertaking new activities that would become established fixtures.
I knew that if I had to track down every word of report about Brookes’s activities I would, at my current distance from Mississippi, have a difficult problem on my hands. It would be difficult to access the records of his office because official recordkeeping in government generally eventuates in the retention of at most 1 to 5 percent of records, frequently those of the most uninformative kind with respect to actual governmental activity (Cook 2011:3). Further, because they generally tend to present the agreed story of what happened, leaving out struggles and improvised articulation work, they might even obscure the story I was trying to find. Accordingly, I decided to take advantage of a less formal, already existing temporal transect through those 24 years by using a printed source that reflected the grassroots effects of Brookes’s work, a source that was available to me directly: the Mississippi Archaeological Association Newsletter from 1987–2011. I had a fairly good idea of how representative this source was through my experience as its editor for about half of that time. It was also clear that for the period of interest, although the Newsletter was sponsored ostensibly by the avocational community, nearly all of the communities involved in Mississippi archaeology appeared in its pages and contributed to its content at one time or another, so it represented the multiple heterogeneous voices of the stakeholders in Mississippi archaeology and their views of changes and developments over time.
I then reread these sources from 1987 to the present. I found it possible to put together a list of USDA Forest Service activities in Mississippi on a reasonably accurate timeline. In doing this, I also compiled several other kinds of data that reflected historical context. I noted what issues in current archaeology were being discussed in the Newsletter—including looting of archaeological sites, the passing and implications of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), public outreach projects of the USDA Forest Service like the Passport In Time (PIT) program, and the Camp Shelby land swap—and how they were differentially interesting to amateur and professional audiences. It was also obvious that the realities of the actual ecology of the forest had a huge impact on the work of the archaeologists: environmental requirements as articulated in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the rhythms of timber harvests, and the vicissitudes of violent weather and pest infestations all appeared in the pages of the Newsletter, all of them reported by the forest archaeologists. Using the timeline I was also able to construct the growing network of USDA Forest Service staff in Mississippi, to add other active contacts to the network, and to inventory other non-field activities, including Delta tours, Mississippi Archaeological Association (MAA) chapter meetings, meetings of the Mississippi Association of Professional Archaeologists (MAPA), and formal relations with MDAH, the Mississippi Department of Transportation (MDoT), the US Army Corps of Engineers (CoE), and the three Mississippi public universities with archaeology programs, University of Mississippi (UM), Mississippi State University (MSU), and University of Southern Mississippi (USM). The data thus gathered enabled me to construct the narrative of the emergence of the National Forests in Mississippi archaeological team as a community of practice, tracing its activities within the controlling infrastructure created by federal and state laws, the USDA Forest Service as an agency charged with sustainable care of National Forests, and the interaction with other government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and significant individuals.
First it should be observed that Sam Brookes had at least two very relevant examples before him to draw upon for how to construct a community of archaeological practice around the National Forests in Mississippi task space. Legendary by that time was the work of the university-based Lower Mississippi Survey (LMS), with its core scholar-practitioners—Philip Phillips, James A. Ford, and James B. Griffin—and their students and the mobilized local archaeologists and avocationals who were vital to its success and progress in the generation of knowledge from archaeological survey and excavation in the Lower Mississippi Valley (Lee Arco, personal communication 2012; Williams 2002; see also Weinstein 2005). However successful the LMS was, however, the fact that the source of a good deal of its influence was the location of its principals in midwestern and eastern universities of significant prestige also meant that its representatives could not be active and on the spot at all times, hence its dependence on local archaeologists and especially the participation of independent avocational archaeologists as informants for the survey that the LMS could not undertake without their help. Thus the efforts of the LMS were only as sustainable as the loyalties of a founding partnership could make them, extended by the cross-breeding of student careers and the sustained infrastructural work of Steve Williams in maintaining the base of the LMS at Harvard, and all of these factors were potentially inspirational to Brookes and others who were well acquainted with LMS researchers and whose work dialogued with LMS findings. In fact, at the time when Sam Brookes was a graduate student and beginning his professional career, the LMS was beginning a new program of work in Mississippi, with Phil Phillips’s (1970) summative work on the Lower Yazoo Basin coming to fruition and that of Jeffrey Brain on the Tunicas and of later students like Ian Brown and Vincas Steponatis just beginning to be planned in the region (Brain and Williams 1971). Yet there was no really thorough account of how the LMS community had been constructed, so it remained a unique accomplishment rather than a detailed roadmap.
Perhaps a more applicable example, designed to be capable of organizing archaeological effort on a local level and of incorporating and thereby coopting avocational efforts more effectively, could be drawn from the creation, just across the river from Mississippi, of the Arkansas Archeological Survey (AAS) system of station archaeologists, under the rubric of “public archeology,” by Charles McGimsey and Hester Davis beginning in 1967 (McGimsey 1972; White 1999). The creation of the AAS, drawing on the best features of state archaeological programs all over the United States, was meant to serve as a model for state programs, and it rested on a set of principles and arguments for what services such a program ought to provide and how it might provide them. The Survey depended upon the claims of carefully crafted state law and the permanent and trusted presence of “station archaeologists” situated all over the state. This had already proved to be a sustainable infrastructure that depended on balancing the tensions of the employment of archaeologists as distributed university faculty, their devotion to the intensive study of the specific regions where they were located, and their loyalty to a distributed community of practice. Also important was the ability of the station archaeologists to persuade amateur archaeologists to cooperate in approved activities through the creation of the Arkansas Archeological Society in 1960 and support of its annual excavation and educational program, designed for individuals with an interest in archaeology to learn and qualify as avocational archaeologists.
The program worked in Arkansas and even gained national influence, but there was no similar infrastructure of a unified university system in Mississippi to start the synergy, nor in spite of efforts did the centrally situated MDAH have the funding to create stand-alone offices in all state regions. Brookes had at first worked in the MDAH Clarksdale office along with Sam McGahey, who moved to Jackson to become State Archaeologist, and then with John Connaway, who remained there alone after Brookes left; James Barnett, along with being site manager for the Grand Village of the Natchez Indians and Historic Jefferson College beginning in 1982, was an archaeologist, but his primary task was site management; and historical archaeologist Jack Elliot was eventually placed by MDAH at Mississippi State University, but not until 1987. It is also worth noting that when McGimsey wrote, the USDA Forest Service had only two people on its whole staff to advise on the implications of federal law for archaeology on all the National Forests (McGimsey 1972:111), so National Forest archaeology had been neglected in Arkansas as well as in Mississippi.
The primary difference from both of these models in the Mississippi USDA Forest Service setting, and a significant advantage in the absence of an established research program and an academic niche, was its federal leverage. The LMS was limited in being able to exercise its power through influence in person and through academic publication: it could make use of legal claims but did not do so, preferring to obtain access through private agreements that left it with greater freedom to retain materials for study as long as necessary. The AAS was a state entity but one that had limited power of enforcement, instead bringing persistent presence and surveillance to bear in order to mitigate what McGimsey and Davis had targeted as the greatest threat to archaeological sites in the Mississippi Valley: agricultural disturbance. But by the time that Brookes began working for the USDA Forest Service in 1987, several legal tools, influenced by the public archaeology work in Arkansas and elsewhere, were already in place to govern the treatment of federal government lands in the National Forests. The limitation here was that the tools alone were supposed to dictate the archaeological steps that could be taken. Pursuit of new archaeological knowledge was not the specific goal: instead the official purpose of archaeology for the USDA Forest Service was the performance of routine data gathering as a step in a decision tree for maximizing forest products yields while complying with several kinds of preservation laws (USDA Forest Service 1988).
When Brookes came to the USDA Forest Service he brought with him formal qualifications and professional connections. He had the Master’s-level training typical of professional archaeologists in the United States and gained at a Mississippi university, guaranteeing local experience (Brookes 1989, 2000). He had considerable experience as a government archaeologist, having spent 13 years doing county surveys and excavations for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History as a field archaeologist stationed in Clarksdale. He had also spent 2 years as a federal archaeologist with the Corps of Engineers at Vicksburg. He was therefore well acquainted with the communities of professional and avocational archaeologists in Mississippi and with the archaeology of Mississippi and the region, as well as with the state and federal legal frameworks for historic preservation work as they affected archaeology. What may also be very important, however, is the many years he spent as an avocational collector while a boy in Virginia, repeatedly surveying newly plowed fields, an experience that must have laid a valuable foundation for the recognition of the value of repeated survey as a mode of revealing archaeological features in space and time.
At the USDA Forest Service, Brookes was initially alone in 1987 as Heritage Program Manager, having succeeded Mark DeLeon. When he started his work the USDA Forest Service was mostly concerned with meeting its Cultural Resource Management (CRM) obligations under the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) of 1966 and the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) of 1979. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the environment of forest archaeological work was only based on this statutory framework. Instead, and I think very significantly, it had to include the culture of forest work, which entailed care of the forests, support of their harvest and use, and creation of recreational activities. CRM obligations plus timber sales equaled a need for archaeological surveys, which were far beyond the reach of a single archaeologist and were initially carried out by contractors. These surveys had been going on for some time but were poorly specified and left the lone Forest Archaeologist with impossible follow-up work to do to achieve adequate results (Peacock 1994). Clearly more than one archaeologist would be needed to do an adequate job of carrying out official tasks in the National Forests in Mississippi.
Even before the passage of NAGPRA in 1990, the National Forests in Mississippi under Brookes’s leadership, in the light of the Mississippi attorney general’s ruling in the 1980s extending the protection of the state’s grave desecration law to human burials of any time period, had moved proactively to create a memorandum of agreement with Mississippi tribal governments regarding consultation upon discovery of human remains, and after NAGPRA was passed the Mississippi forests were already positioned to comply. Then in 1991 the National Environmental Policy Act began to require environmental impact statements for land disturbance, while the new Passport In Time program of public participation in forest archaeology began to be promoted nationally, offering a program of public involvement that could provide assistance without cost to USDA Forest Service archaeologists in carrying out both required survey and archaeological testing. Mississippi was by that time well on the way to being able to take advantage of that program. In 1992, after five years, Brookes had put together a team of four forest archaeologists from graduate students of state universities who were placed on four of the state’s National Forests (Brookes himself was in charge of the Delta forest that he knew so well): David Fant (Holly Springs), Evan Peacock (Tombigbee), Robert Reams (DeSoto), and Joel Dukes (Homochitto). In 1997 the full team had filled out at six, and four members of the team (Fant, Peacock, Dukes, and Terry McClung) were made permanent. It had taken 10 years, but the Mississippi forests were covered in a pattern that echoed the distributed locational pattern of the AAS. Between 1997 and 2011 there would be times when one or another of the forests would not be staffed, but the core group of Fant, McClung, Dukes, and Reams held steady until Dukes left in 2003 and Fant in 2005. By 2004, however, other replacements were made, so that in 2005 four new archaeologists were on the Mississippi forests. Two of them remained in 2011, while two others were replaced (see Table 16.1). This process was not without difficulties of funding and availability of qualified archaeologists and support staff, but the longitudinal list is interesting to observe because in it we see the success of the first generational transition and the persistence of the established structure: it had been clearly established that there was enough statutory work to be done, that in the face of weather disaster archaeologists could make valuable contributions to the activities of forest care, and that with the expansion of university alliances and PIT projects, the work of the archaeologists could also build considerable goodwill for the USDA Forest Service at minimal cost.
The establishment of a distributed team of archaeologists for the forests is only part of the story, though it is fundamental. But to understand how it worked, it is necessary to understand the context. At the same time that the forests in Mississippi were becoming better and better served by archaeology, the archaeologists themselves, encouraged and supported by Brookes, were participating broadly in Mississippi and regional archaeological activities, activities that further rooted them in the region and promoted their careers while making forest archaeology in Mississippi increasingly visible. An attempt at an overall view of the context of forest archaeology, inclusive of many more elements than can be explained here, is shown in Table 16.2.
A first important constituency was the avocational community, and the focus here must be on the MAA, with which Brookes had already established an active and supporting role well before 1987. The forest archaeologists all reached out to—and substantively supported—local MAA chapters by attending meetings, giving talks, and encouraging participation in excavations that chapters had been wanting for years: the beginning of PIT projects in Mississippi in 1993 helped with that. Where there was no MAA chapter, they worked to start, support, or revive one: Robert Reams served as Black Creek chapter president; when Brookes moved to Jackson, he acted to revive the Jackson chapter himself; Terry McClung served as MAA president. Further outreach to the MAA included support (and frequently program organization) for Mississippi Archaeology Week in the late 1990s, which grew into Mississippi Archaeology Month beginning in 2002. In connection with both, the USDA Forest Service supported and partnered with MAA to create an archaeology booth at the state fair, to be joined by MDAH somewhat later. In return this work with avocationals assisted forest archaeologists in many ways as well as meeting the USDA Forest Service’s interest in public outreach and putting the forests to use as recreational venues.
Much of this activity was reported steadily in the MAA Newsletter, especially after the regular USDA Forest Service column “Central Midden” was started in 1996 (MAA Newsletter 1996[3]). This column served to legitimate the new initiatives that Brookes was establishing and to introduce the new forest archaeologists to the avocational community more broadly. Although the forest archaeologists prepared individual reports, the whole column was regularly put together by one or another of them: Melissa Higgins during the early years and Terry McClung more recently. Through the years this column frequently dominated the content of the Newsletter and eventually encouraged similar though not so regular contributions from MDoT, MDAH, and Camp Shelby (Mississippi National Guard). The regular preparation of reports also assisted with the creation of identity and community for the forest archaeologists themselves, as well as providing opportunities for young archaeologists to begin to publish their findings and to formalize their outreach to the MAA membership.
Outreach of a more ambitious kind was also encouraged by Brookes, as he and forest archaeologist partners helped organize not only MAA meetings, but Mid-South Archaeological Conference and Southeastern Archaeological Conference meetings as well. These organizational efforts helped to support the regional knowledge-sharing infrastructure for the Forest Archaeologists’ larger community of practice, while at the same time reporting the new scholarly work on the forests to a broader professional audience. On the academic side, Brookes had also looked to establish relationships that connected USDA Forest Service archaeologists with the academic community by beginning partnerships with the three largest Mississippi universities early, in 1992, and then took advantage of special USDA Forest Service programs to involve anthropology departments and their students directly with forest archaeology work through internships and eventually jobs. In 1997 Mississippi was home to the only National Forest in the Southeast to receive foreign student volunteers in a program that lasted several years. An internship program for American graduate students led to multiple Master’s theses (see Table 16.3) as well as solid practical learning about day-to-day archaeology on the forests, survey as well as excavation. Andrew Triplett, working on the Tombigbee forest, described an active community of practice using reflection-in-action when in 2008 he observed a mosaic of theses developed by such students on the Tombigbee: “Perhaps the greatest benefit is the endless number of thesis topics that present themselves as we come across sites and then discuss as we trudge our way through the woods. There are several present and past students that have worked on the Tombigbee who have been able to use these impromptu brainstorming sessions to develop ideas for their thesis” (Triplett 2008b:6). At least three students would become forest archaeologists, while others entered CRM, government archaeology, and academic careers. Forest archaeologists published their work in Mississippi Archaeology as time went on, but their work also appeared in the journals of neighboring states and in the regional Southeastern Archaeology. And excavation projects on the forests, exploring sites found during routine survey, made excellent field schools for university archaeology programs, thereby expanding the archaeological information coming out of the forests and making the forests into venues that attracted academic archaeologists for their own research and teaching.
At the same time, Brookes began building a government and NGO network of support for archaeology as he took the USDA Forest Service into a variety of partnerships with other federal agencies—the CoE, National Park Service (NPS), and Department of Defense (DoD)—and with the state—MDAH and MDoT. Nongovernmental organizations with common interests also became partners. In 1992 Brookes became a founding member of the Mississippi Heritage Trust and began promoting the work of the Archaeological Conservancy in Mississippi, whose Mississippi field officer Jessica Crawford eventually became regional director for the Conservancy as a whole in 2006. Brookes recruited the interest of the Sierra Club through some of the earliest Delta mound tours he led; and together with the Lower Delta Partnership, a group of individuals, government agencies, and NGOs, he developed his work on the Delta forest into a set of archaeological tours referring to Teddy Roosevelt’s experience in the Delta that became part of the town of Rolling Fork’s “Great Delta Bear Affair” celebration in 2002. Finally, he drew on the funding possibilities for public programs from the Mississippi Humanities Council to bring well-known speakers to archaeological events and to bring in the public as well. Evidence of all this can be seen in the list of sponsors on posters for Mississippi Archaeology Month, of which the Humanities Council was a supporter from the beginning. Finally, Brookes was also able, backed by the cadre of six forest archaeologists and alliances with university, CRM, and other federal archaeologists, to help broker archaeological ethics and standards through the Mississippi Association of Professional Archaeologists.
I haven’t even begun to say anything about the archaeology that has been carried out on Sam Brookes’s watch, because so many of the papers gathered in this volume have addressed it. But I am interested in working through a few cases in which he was able to take advantage of the synergy of building a work situation where archaeology became naturalized as a USDA Forest Service activity in order to develop new ways of doing archaeology and new ways of observing archaeologically.
First, he established a principle of repeated surveys in one place after land use likely to expose new surfaces. In 1997 both Joel Dukes and Sam Brookes talked about the effects of this repetition on previous views of site depth and distribution on the forests (Dukes 1997; Brookes 1997; Dukes 1997). It is not surprising that Brookes took to the next level his experience of repeated field-walking after agricultural plowing as a boy and his geographically rooted work doing county surveys with John Connaway in the Delta for MDAH. But the next level was possible because the routine work of survey on the forests was tied to the routine timber harvesting that characterizes the southern pine forests. This fact led to partnerships with USDA Forest Service timber managers and their knowledge of what was to be found where archaeologists had not previously looked, because forest lands had been presumed less favorable for human settlement than for hunting. This experience was naturalized into the archaeological enterprise when a cadre of Timber Markers was recruited to work for four years as Heritage Technicians with the forest archaeologists (Schleidt 2005:7). And the agreements with the Army Reserve that covered compliance regarding heritage sites on forest lands used regularly for tank maneuver training practice included repeated surveys that brought the same kind of results as those made after the disturbances of annual plowing elsewhere, particularly in discovery of stratified sites—again, where nobody expected them.
Second, the Passport In Time projects and the university field schools bringing projects to the forests facilitated excavation of sites found in timber and environmental compliance surveys. These excavations in turn permitted the recovery of new information as a service to the public and in some cases to the bioscience of forest ecology, especially in connection with the newly discovered xeric sites in the Piney Woods of south Mississippi. Because the public could be involved, more extended projects were undertaken and another row of site names, referring in shorthand to an unsuspected chronological and typological variety of sites, entered the Mississippi archaeology lexicon: Swamp Child (22FO666), Gopher Farm (22WA676), Achin Head (22FR665), Dantzler (22HR652), Deathly Silent (22FO826), Stinking Water (22WI516), Tanya’s Knoll (22WA642), and Wade’s Tesoro (22WA1053)—not by any means to name them all.
Many more aspects of Brookes’s work are emergent from the MAA Newsletter dataset. During Brookes’s career, the USDA Forest Service has, for one thing, made a huge shift into technology to manage and mine archaeological data, and the forest archaeologists, Heritage Technicians, and student interns have translated that data into working order through databases and GIS systems: this has laid the groundwork for much more systematic archaeological management on the forests. Watching the patterns of work and the people and the shifts of staff and assignments as reflected in the Newsletter reports, I had other questions that cannot be answered here but are further suggestive of the importance of the Brookes example: how strong were the relationships across the cadre of forest archaeologists? There were certainly periodic organized face-to-face meetings, but how were they reinforced by the annual meetings of the MAA, MAPA, SEAC, Mid-South, and MAM? Perhaps more importantly, how united were they as a community of archaeological practice, given that forest work is characteristic of what they all encounter? Was it only the institutional constraints that they shared, or was there something more?
Perhaps a deeper question is: what does it mean to be a Forest Archaeologist, and does that difference contribute something to archaeology as a whole that hasn’t existed before in Mississippi? In 2002, Brookes wrote,
I read with pride the Central Midden in the last issue. The district archaeologists, student interns, and heritage technicians are . . . doing outstanding work. A few years ago the National Forest lands were considered cultural backwaters with no significant sites located on them. The work done by all the aforementioned folks has changed that forever. We have great sites on the Forest, ranging from mounds to stratified deposits to the fascinating xeric sites of the Piney Woods [Brookes 2002a].
Having read the same reports and especially having considered the temporal process of creating a “forest archaeology,” it seems to me that it is impossible to ignore the fact that of necessity, both in carrying out their own archaeological tasks and in taking on at times of need the duty to assist with controlled burns, pest control, and the aftermath of weather-created disasters, the forest archaeologists have also come to join a larger and different community of practice, to learn and share the tasks of forest care with a range of other professionals working for the Service. In this way Forest Archaeologists—and Heritage Technicians who assisted them, themselves having begun their work with the Forest Service in carrying out primarily forestry-related tasks—emerged as participants with commitments in more than one community. Perhaps central to the creation of a forest archaeology has been actually putting archaeologists on the forest, sending them not only after endangered archaeological sites, but also after pine beetles and tornado damage and even to manage and fight fires, setting them to learning the forest by working side by side with forestry professionals. Thus this community of practice evolved into something more, an epistemic community creating a set of archaeologists who were prepared to see the new kinds of sites and their new ways of manifesting so that now there can be a “forest archaeology” in Mississippi.
Finally, I would like to say something about the impact of this work and this brokering for archaeology in Mississippi in the larger sense. There is no contesting that more and better archaeology is now being done in Mississippi and by many people, in and out of the forest. But the USDA Forest Service’s control of very large tracts of land in the state (which offered lots of work to do and no bar to access apart from statutory requirements), plus the fact that its archaeologists were not competing for academic rewards, and finally the fact that the work was embedded in a value-adding activity from almost any public point of view—all this meant that archaeology on the forests constituted a win-win for everyone involved in it, and Brookes made it possible for that to happen, thus making the USDA Forest Service program a catalyst for the noticeable growth of archaeology all across Mississippi as no other institution had been before. Mississippi archaeology has come together in this way at least partly because Brookes always instinctively knew that at the core of the job is the need to institutionalize a community of practice embedded in the broader arena of the multiple stakeholders in Mississippi archaeology, and that part of that real work is to keep the social as well as the intellectual reward coming, to make sure it remains to some extent a joy. When you build a community like that, everybody learns and everybody wins.
