My Life in Cemeteries

Last week I got to help give away one of those giant-sized checks—you know… like Ed McMahon.  It’s a great feeling to give one of those things away…nothing makes people feel happy like giving them an over-sized check.  The check was actually from the Arkansas Humanities Council and was destined for the Washington Hill Cemetery Association.  The money was a grant to help Washington Hill with their cemetery preservation project as a part of an AHC grant initiative geared at helping to document and preserve endangered African-American cemeteries.  My organization, the Arkansas Archeological Survey, is partners with the AHC in this initiative.  My services are a required, but free, part of the grant process…

The Arkansas Humanities Council gives the Washington Hill Cemetery Association a grant check for their preservation program: Left to right: Ronald Majors (Assoc. Pastor of Macedonia Baptist Church), George Wylie, Juanita Hopson, Gloria Majors, Herman Hopson (with check), Lasaundra Deloach-Williams (Arkansas Humanities Council), Paul Austin (Arkansas Humanities Council), Jamie Brandon, Ora Wylie, and J. A. Hale.

You may remember me talking about my take on cemeteries in earlier posts, but over the last 4 years I have become increasingly involved in cemetery preservation in southwestern Arkansas.  I’m often way behind on these projects, due to my busy schedule…but they are dear to my heart.  Archeology can be a very abstract and esoteric pursuit, but my cemetery projects are an example of concrete “good” that my discipline can do—actually helping real people with real problems.

You can see more pictures from Washington Hill Cemetery and the grant check ceremony on my Flickr page (follow the link below):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcbrandon/sets/72157623767580245/

This year two projects have worked to bring the issue of cemetery preservation to the public.  In March, AETN premiered “Silent Storytellers,” a film project by Hop Litzwire and Casey Sanders that explores some of the many issues surrounding cemetery preservation in Arkansas.  This film includes sections on a couple projects that involve the AAS/AHC…and mentions a few cemetery projects here in southwestern Arkansas; including the successful Paraloma Cemetery preservation project in Sevier County, the very endangered Oak Grove Cemetery in Hempstead County and Cedar Grove, a postbellum African-American cemetery in Lafayette County that had to be excavated and relocated by archeologists in the 1980s. You can find out more at the AETN website:

http://www.aetn.org/programs/silentstorytellers/homepage

The second documentary is “Buried Treasures – The Stories of the Bold Pilgrim Cemetery”–a short documentary that looks into the lives and final resting places of African-Americans who migrated to Conway County, Arkansas in the late 1800’s.  AETN has not aired this documentary yet…but you can view it online at:

http://www.aetn.org/programs/silentstorytellers/videoextras/media/buried_treasures_-_thestories_of_the_bold_pilgrim_cemetery

Also…you can see both of these documentaries if you are attending the April 30-May1 workshop put on by the Preservation of African American Cemeteries, Inc. to be held at the University of Arkansas at Monticello…Check out the below link for program details…

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~paac/2010paacregform.pdf

I’ll see some of you there…or maybe I’ll run into you in some cemetery in Arkansas.

Weirdness in Netflix suggestions…

I’ve become a big fan of Netflix (more about my particular netflix uses later)

But…I’m trying to figure out how liking Henry & June (the NC-17 film based on the unexpurgated diary of Anaïs Nin), Hedwig and the Angry Inch (the musical about the East German rock idol and victim of a botched sex change operation) or the Wilco documentary I am Trying to Break Your Heart (where the band implodes following a conflict with their record label) leads to Netflix suggesting the film based on the cool children’s book Where The Wild Things Are…any ideas?

You Can Help “The Dig”

An old friend and colleague of mine, Tony Chapa (o.k….so he’s more a legend than a mortal man) passed along an interesting e-mail today. If Tony wasn’t involved, I probably wouldn’t have given this a second look…but it does look interesting & I am VERY sympathetic to folks who want to keep creative control of the production of media about their archaeological work (has anyone actually watched that horrible show Digging for the Truth?)…so let me, in turn, pass the information on to you.

Paul Harmon has been working at Tiwanaku, Bolivia for the last several summers on an archaeological project with Alexei Vranich–a researcher from the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. In that time Alexei and Paul have developed ideas and have turned them into a couple of television documentaries financed by independent film companies. These things have gotten some air time (one on The Discovery Channel, The Science Channel, and in the European market, and the other is currently being marketed).

Now as these films were funded by an film company, the company maintains creative and financial control over the final product….as many of you may know that can be a bit frustrating to us academic types who don’t think imparting good information and entertainment are mutually exclusive endeavors, but don’t want to see one (information) sacrificed for the other (entertainment).

So Paul and Alexei (along with Dan Harmon, Larry Engel, Cindy Castano and good ol’ Tony Chapa) are working on launching a film-making enterprise–Sailmate Adventures. As part of this venture Sailmate is going to produce television documentaries in high definition. At Tiwanaku they’re calling the project The Dig. They are planning four films and podcasts to be shot in Bolivia this year.

They do have some product sponsors (Mountain Khakis, Chris Reeve Knives, Princeton Tec lights, and JetBoil camp stoves), but they tell me that on average it costs around $400,000 to create a prime-time television documentary. So….To raise the remaining funds for the project Paul is pre-selling the first two DVDs he plans to market (The Solstice Sacrifices & Reed Boats: The Vanishing Art). The price for both starts at $25…of course, since their goal is to raise as much money as possible, they wouldn’t turn your larger contributions away (hey, I know that some of you guys give that kind of money to R. Joe Brandon to finance Shovelbums.org!).

At any rate, if you are interested in pitching in…e-mail Paul Harmon…and check out The Dig‘s website.

You know, Chapa…I did always wonder what the heck you did over the summer…

Tags: archaeology, film, donate

Birth of a Nation

On this day (February 8th) in 1915, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation premiered in Los Angeles. This silent film was America’s first feature-length motion picture and a box-office smash–lasting an unprecedented three hours.

Released under the title, The Clansman (at least for the first few weeks) , the movie debuted only after Griffith sought an injunction from the court. The film provides a highly subjective history of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. It, of course, made a lasting impact on our collective cultural memories when it comes to framing race and the history of the South. Birth of a Nation caused riots in several cities and was banned in others but was seen by millions.

When Griffith released the film in 1915, many groups protested; the NAACP published a 47-page pamphlet titled “Fighting a Vicious Film: Protest Against The Birth of a Nation,” in which they referred to the film as “three miles of filth.” W. E. B. Du Bois published scathing reviews in The Crisis, spurring a heated debate among the National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures as to whether the film should be shown in New York. However, President (and former history professor) Woodrow Wilson viewed the film (it was the first film to be shown in the White House) and proclaimed it not only historically accurate, but like “history writ with lightning.” (Arrrgghhh!)The film set the stage for what would be an on-going struggle to improve the portrayal of blacks on film.