Public Interest Anthropology at Penn

Robert L. Schuyler is especially interested in how archaeological research relates to and interacts with descendent communities and the present day inhabitants of sites being explored. How can archaeology help to draw people back into their own immediate history and heritage as well as into general national American history? How can archaeology help to bring home this heritage to young people and demonstrate its importance and usefulness to local political institutions and social organizations such as historical societies and preservation groups. Since historical archaeology frequently deals with recent sites on which people are still living, how can it relate to the contemporary concerns and interests of such descendant or newly arrived populations?

Schuyler is conducting a long-term study of Southern New Jersey that has a strong PIA setting. This project will develop the concept of Historic Ethnography which combines historical archaeology, oral history, ethnography and documentary sources in a cultural reconstruction of this region, especially the town of Vineland, during the Victorian Period and the 20th century. The South Jersey Project is not only dealing with an almost unique environmental setting - the Pine Barrens - but the Vineland region has seen a succession of Anglo-American (and a few African American) settlers (1860 on) followed by Italian Americans (1870s on), Jewish colonists from the Russian Empire (1880s on) and since WW II Hispanic Americans (especially Puerto Ricans but more recently Mexicans). All these groups still live in the region but have little appreciation of either their own local heritage or certainly the heritages of other local groups. Archaeology may prove a direct and material way of demonstrating this rich history to the descendants of those of created and are creating it.