edwired

May 17, 2006

What's for dinner (cont'd)

In two previous posts (1) (2), I explored what happened when the historical archaeologists Julie Schlabitsky and Kelly Dixon used modern forensic archaeology techniques to investigate what happened at the Donner family encampment. I also described what happened to my edits of the Wikipedia entry on the Donner Party (which has now been edited 34 times since my edit on April 28).

Now I want to explore in a bit more detail what this sort of historical forensic archaeology means for historians. On the surface, it might seem that the techniques used by Dixon and Schlabitsky are largely useful for archaeologists alone or for answering such questions as the Donner family's menu or whether Lizzy Borden actually gave her mother forty whacks. But how significant are such questions to the larger issues historians are interested in? Sure, they might spice up a class lecture, but will they change our interpretation of things we deem more important?

This is where new breakthroughs in genetic archaeology hold incredible promise for historians. As Schlabitsky describes it on her website: "Genetic Archaeology is a specialization that applies forensic laboratory procedures, specifically DNA testing, to artifacts recovered from archaeological contexts. The ability to recover human DNA from artifacts rather than bone and tissue, plant remains, and visible stains, over 100 years old is a breakthrough in the forensic and archaeological fields."

Sounds cool, right?

But how would historians use such DNA evidence? We're all familiar with paternity testing, with perhaps the most famous American case being its use in determining the links between Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson (or at least one of the Jeffersons). But what might historians learn from DNA extracted from inorganic artifacts?

Here's an example from Schlabitsky's site. In her work on Virginia City, she recovered many items from a home at 18 North G Street that was both a dressmaker's shop and a residence until it burned in 1875. The excavation of the site turned up many things one would expect to find in such a structure--the flotsam and jetsam of family life and a commercial establishment. But it also uncovered a syringe that had been used to inject "morphine in at least four men and women, one of whom was probably of African descent." This latter information comes from the DNA Schlabitsky was able to extract from the syringe (as opposed to human remains).

Knowing that people who lived or worked in that house were morphine users and that both men and women (and possibly one of African American descent) raises all sorts of intriguing questions for historians. How common was drug use in Virginia City in the 1870s? What do we know about male vs. female drug use? Was it likely that the drugs were used in the family home or in the commercial establishment? How common was it for people of different racial groups to mix in something as intimate as the injecting of IV drugs? And what do the answers to these questions tell us about the larger history of the West at this particular historical moment?

I think it's safe to say that we can expect many new and challenging questions to arise from the work of scholars like Schlabitsky and Dixon. I for one can't wait.

Posted by mills at 03:22 PM

May 05, 2006

What's for dinner (cont'd)

My edit of the Donner Party entry in the Wikipedia lasted not quite five days. As I wrote in an earlier post, I changed one sentence in the entry to reflect the work of Kelly Dixon and Julie Schlabitsky on what happened in the Donner family camp.

The first paragraph of the entry I read on April 26 said:

The Donner Party was a group of California-bound American settlers caught up in the "westering fever" of the 1840s. After becoming snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1846–1847, some of the emigrants resorted to cannibalism.

My edit changed it to:

The Donner Party was a group of California-bound American settlers caught up in the "westering fever" of the 1840s. Accounts of the Donner Party's journey traditionally claim that after becoming snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1846–1847, some of the emigrants resorted to cannibalism, but recent research by historical archeologists now casts doubt on how much cannibalism actually occurred.

And the new version says:

The Donner Party was a group of California-bound American settlers caught up in the "westering fever" of the 1840s. After becoming snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1846–1847, some of the emigrants resorted to cannibalism, although this aspect of the tragedy has been exaggerated.[1]

The Wikipedia entry on the Donner Party is a good example of what one might call a “enthusiast entry.” This brief entry (around 480 words) has been edited more than 500 times since it appear in the Wikipedia in April 2002. There are a number of people who come back to the entry over and over, changing, polishing, and correcting it. Does this make it more correct or accurate?

Not particularly.

What it does do, instead, is make this entry the embodiment of a consensus among those in the Wikipedia community who care about this one small moment in history. Unlike the more contentious entries (see George Bush or Anarchism, for instance) this is not an entry that the Wikipedia aristocracy is going to have to lock down to prevent edit wars. Instead, it is a polishing down of the facts and the interpretations of those facts until they are smooth and acceptable to those who are committed to the editing of this entry.

For this reason, this particular entry would make a good example in a learning exercise that aimed to teach students the virtues and pitfalls of the Wikipedia and open wikis in general. Students might be asked to compare various versions over time and discuss the changes that appear and disappear and what that means for our understanding of the consensus that is emerging. They might be asked to compare the Wikipedia version of the Donner Party to several different scholarly accounts. In such a comparison, they could discuss the ways that scholarly interpretations changed and compare those changes to the ways that the Wikipedia entry changed. Or, they might be asked to consider what happens to history when it gets polished and smoothed down as the result of consensus building? Is it better history? Or is it just more palatable?

Posted by mills at 07:55 AM | Comments (1)

April 28, 2006

What's for dinner?

One of the enduring (and horrific) tales of the expansion of the American Republic westward is the story of the ill-fated Donner Party. A group of more than 80 emmigrants to California, the Donner Party set out for the West Coast in 1846, but made the mistake of following what was known as the "Hastings Cutoff." As with so many shortcuts, the Hastings Cutoff turned out to be problematic. In this particular case, it meant that the wagon train of the Donner Party ended up snow bound in a pass in the Sierra Nevada, where they attempted to survived the winter. Slightly more than half of the expedition's members made it.

That much is not in dispute.

What is in dispute is what happened to the remains of those who died before the rescue parties finally arrived. The accepted version of what happened is that once the expedition's animals had been eaten, the living began to consume the dead. Survivors later admitted to cannibalism, but the disputes have arisen over the amount of cannibalism (if any) actually occurred. The emmigrants had split into two encampents--one consisting largely of members of the Donner family, and the other consisting of others in their party. In the 1980s, Donald Hardesty of the University of Nevada found human bone fragments mixed in with those of butchered cows at the second of these sites, leaving little doubt as to what happened there. However, what happened at the Donner family camp has long been in dispute, largely because the testimony of survivors from that part of the expedition has been conflicting.

In an article in the April 24 edition of the New Yorker, Dana Goodyear offers a compelling narrative of the work of two historical archaeologists--Kelly Dixon of the University of Montana and Julie Schablitsky of the Museum of Natural History at the University of Oregon. Dixon and Schablitsky's excavations at the site of the Donner family encampment found 16,000 bone fragments, almost all of which showed signs of butchering, but none of which could be identified as human.

The analysis of those fragments is what is so intriguing. Read the article to get a sense for the techniques they used--it was all very CSI and must have cost a fortune just in electron microscope time. But the lesson for historians is that if the artifacts can be extracted from the ground, our colleagues in archaeology departments (or crime labs) can help us answer historical questions. One suspects that many more such analyses will appear as the years go by and the costs of these technologies drops.

For more information on the Donner Party, all of which take the cannibalism as fact, not as something in dispute, see:

- The Donner Party Diary, which is the number one link appearing following a Google search;

- The PBS episode on the Donner Party on American Experience;

- New Light on the Donner Party, a website maintained by a librarian in Utah;

- the Wikipedia entry. This last item is especially interesting, because it likewise offered cannibalism as a fact. I edited the entry on April 28 around 11:00 am EST to reflect some doubt about what actually happened. It will be interesting to see how long that edit survives. Given that the Wikipedia is where most of our students will go first to find out what happened to the Donner Party, I'll be particularly interested to follow the fate of this entry.

Posted by mills at 08:37 AM