 Field archaeologist Seth Van Dam recently conducted a survey of Fort Allen Park. He will present his findings at the annual meeting of the Friends of the Eastern Promenade on October 3rd. Leslie talked with Seth and Friends President Diane Davidson about his hunt for history. Well, thank you Diane and Seth for being here today. Friends of Eastern Prome is live and kicking, but you have an annual meeting coming up. Diane, you want to start by telling us a little bit about the meeting and what's going to be happening there? Sure. We'll be hosting our annual meeting on October 3rd at East End Community School. And that's always a chance for us to kind of highlight what our accomplishments have been over the previous year and look towards the future of course. And we've got a lot of great presentations coming up for this coming meeting. Most of them centered around Fort Allen Park and the rehabilitation that we're taking under control or underway and that should go to bid in December and hopefully construction will start in March. And born out of that, we're really excited that Seth Van Dam is going to do a presentation. Seth is a research graduate student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and got in touch with Friends of the Eastern Prome through our website seeking to conduct a geophysical survey of Fort Allen's battery and surrounding areas and it was perfect timing, so we're very excited. Well, that sounds really exciting. So you're a geologist. No, I'm an archaeologist. An archaeologist. If I do geophysics. Okay. So tell us a little bit about what your talk will be about and what's happening up there at Fort Allen. Well, I'll discuss a little bit of the equipment that I used in my geophysical survey that I did ground penetrating radar and magnetic conductivity surveys and so it was challenging but it was very interesting and I found some very interesting stuff so I'll be showing what the preliminary work on me and there's still some more work to do. I got to verify what I actually see on the surface by some ground truthing which will involve mostly quarrying. So this will give you more of an archaeological history of what has happened in that project. Yeah, it'll give you an idea of a site formation process of essentially how it went from hopefully the earlier periods of colonialism all the way up but I've noticed a lot of the transformations in the Victorian period have done its effect on the site. It's very prominent. Well, I can imagine because during the Victorian period is where a lot of the transition took place up there after the fire and then building during that period. It's definitely there but there's definitely some interesting things that I didn't expect that I did find which was very interesting. Some were your tools rather complicated or mostly on computer now. They're all computers and stuff but they're like multiple computers talking to each other and so for every hour in the field it's about three hours of processing to go through and hopefully and some of the equipment you just don't know what if it's good data until you come home and download it and then you just have to pray. Now what made you choose this particular site? I always knew from my graduate thesis I wanted to do something in Portland. You're from Portland? Well, I've lived in Portland for like about 15 years now so yeah, I guess now. I can consider myself from Portland but so I knew I wanted to do something and I'm always been interested in military history anyways and so I came up with that doing and then they were working on it too so it was meant to be. So Diane, we don't have much time but once you get your study complete and your degree what do you hope to do with this information? Will there be some kind of a kiosk? Will there be something on the prom where we can find out or tourists can come and say wow this happened here? Yeah, well certainly Leslie once we get the groundwork of the Fort Allen rehabilitation in place and the landscaping etc. we will be looking at doing informational kiosk and this is going to serve as a great resource for us to be able to put all the information out there. Fantastic. Now to go to the meeting, we've got to wrap it up, the meeting is? The meeting is October 3rd, 6 to 8 p.m. at Easton Community School and you can also find out all the information, everything you want to know about the rehabilitation project. Seth's information will also be at our website at easternpromenade.org. Thank you both for being here, it sounds fascinating. Thank you.