 My pleasure to introduce Dr. Justin Donovan, who is a UC President post-doctor fellow at UC Santa Cruz. He sent me his CV and publication which was impressive, including access to denied African-Americans and access to end-of-life care in 19th-century Washington DC in historical archeology in 2017. He's a good chapter on history and community that is interviewing and education or history in our hands. So as you can see that what he's doing is really relevant to our continuing discussion on campus. And Bill knows Justin very well, so I want Bill to say a few words. Yeah, I can't tell you how happy I am now, my friend Justin. Justin and I have known each other since he founded the Society of Black Archaeologists 2011. And what he announced to us doing it, I was like, we can do that. Since then, I've been following Justin in his work, his PhD in Ethiopia, and now he's moving on to do work and for child. So, Justin, thank you. Thank you all. Thank you, thank you. I have to apologize first of all. I lost my voice this weekend. I was sick and then I got a little bit better, so it's coming back slowly, but I got a lot of water, so hopefully things come together. Thank you all again for inviting me. This is really good, this is really exciting. We put together this project, we launched it for the first time this summer, and so it's really great to be able to talk about it now in a context that we've had some time to sit down, think about it, and look into next steps and future plans. Just a quick question, how many of you are graduate students in the room? Perfect. Okay, so I just got my PhD, so please ask me questions related to that, and I can tell you things such as some of the struggles about starting a new project while finishing a dissertation work at the same time and reasons not to do that, and potentially reasons to do that. So yes, please feel free to let me know. All right, so this is, again, this is part of a larger project that we embarked upon in part collaboration with Society of Black Archaeologists, and in part to create a new model, a new framework for archaeological practice, which we're calling Sustainable Archaeology. Now, Sustainable Archaeology really has many progenitors. There's a lot of origins to this. A lot of people have talked about community archaeology, community engagement. For decades now, there's been questions about how do we engage with communities, whether they're stakeholders or descended communities, and a lot of that began initially with talking about knowledge dissemination, and then from there it looked into identifying diverse stakeholder communities, not necessarily ones in the immediate vicinity, but those who may have some type of social memory or cultural ties to a group or a site, and then looking at sites of knowledge production, and how do we interpret these sites? We look at these sites in ways to incorporate various and diverse knowledges, and then now today we're looking at these ideas of public archaeology, community-based archaeology, community-based participatory archaeology, and many variations and iterations of that. But all of that is rooted into this idea of community engagement and the, quote-unquote, future of archaeology. How is it that we remain relevant to communities, and what does that look like? And it takes many different forms. Many of you may know of the African burial site in New York City. This was a very key site in terms of African-American and African diaspora archaeology when we look at community engagement. Without going into too much detail, there was a construction project, bones remains were found of an ancient burial site cemetery, community got involved and lobbied for a specific group of archaeologists to have a say or participate in this work, and then it led to a series of research and publications related to African diaspora research in New York and into the city. So what we're trying to do now is we're trying to develop a model of what we're calling sustainable archaeology. Now I know it would be nice if we said we were the first ones to think of this, but we'd be lying to ourselves. So Sonya Adelaide has mentioned this term and used this term before. In a 2010 publication she talked about sustainable archaeological practice and in her bigger book, the community-based archaeology book, she has an entire chapter called Sustainable Archaeology. So we went through that and we reviewed it, and we noticed she talks about one community participation, the idea that community engagement is central to a sustainable archaeology, community capacity building and training. That's a key part of it as well. And she talks about training heritage professionals and having internships for young people. A lot of this is actually based on her work at Chattel-Huyuk. And then having mutually beneficial outcomes. So it's not just about the archaeological research, but also creating things that communities can see as potentially beneficial beyond research, history and the archaeological work. And then using and identifying multiple sources of knowledge and indigenous knowledge forms and formations and recognizing things such as oral histories, maybe considered historical work and how to dissect and interact with those in a way that's actually engaging and meaningful. So this kind of encompassed her idea of what a sustainable archaeological practice would look like. Ours is slightly different. So we pulled more so from the definition that we use in sustainable tourism. Now, sustainable tourism has a wider definition. According to the UN World Tourism Organization, they identify sustainable tourism as taking into account social environmental impacts as well as looking at stakeholder needs in various groups. What we did is we kind of transferred that to an archaeological perspective and said that we want to actually look at an archaeological practice or practice that takes into account the social and environmental impacts of archaeological work that we engage in. Now, that environmental impact is a significant component. And then address and identify the various stakeholder needs and try to find ways that we can both build capacity and create sustainable futures for those in the community engaged in that work. So it's a broad definition. It's a large task. We're just trying to find one site, one chunk, and kind of take a bite out of this and see what it would look like from a methodological, practical standpoint. So, again, we're looking at stakeholder communities. We're looking at partnering with stakeholder communities. I could use this as a pointer, but I won't. And then we're also looking at mitigating the environmental impacts that are caused by the destruction of excavation. You know, one of the few sciences where we actually destroy a lot in the process of trying to uncover and reveal a lot. So it's important that we pay attention to those factors. Then we're looking at natural and cultural heritage stewardship and trying to create, in our case, young people to become these future stewards, both of the natural and the cultural heritage. And then training local stakeholders in archaeological practice. So they don't only know how to dig a site, but they could eventually go to university, become an archaeologist, and eventually lead their own archaeological project, whether it's on island or in a different location. So they can begin to answer these questions more longer-term and engage in the research identification component. So that sounds like a tall order, right? Yes. We don't claim to have the magical pill. But starting last year, 2016, we embarked upon this endeavor with a group called Diving with a Purpose. Now, they actually approached us, by us, I mean the Society of Black Archaeologists, in 2014. Diving with a Purpose is a non-profit organization. They do underwater archaeology advocacy work. They call it advocacy work because they're not actually trained as archaeologists. Some of them are engineers at NASA. Some of them are electrical engineers. Some of them are ex-Navy divers. Some of them are instructors and teachers. But they have this idea and this desire to contribute to understanding this natural heritage work underwater and the marine resources. So they'd been partnering with organizations like the National Park Service and the Slave Rex Project, more recently identifying slave ship wrecks off the coast of Mozambique in South Africa and doing some similar work in the Caribbean. And they wanted to try to find a way that they could partner with us to build capacity. They said a lot of them are getting older now. They have no plans of going back to university, pursuing degrees in archaeology. But they wanted to know how they could get archaeologists in the water. So they said it's a lot easier to train an archaeologist how to dive than to just train a diver how to be an archaeologist. So we said that'd be great. But let's work together then not just to train us as divers, but then to make sure that we create the pipeline where we can work to train a future generation of divers as well. So based off of that 2014 meeting, two of us got certified. Bill recently got certified now, so that's three. And we're working on training some other PhDs in archaeology to get certification in scuba diving and then participating in some of their endeavors. And with a purpose, currently runs two maritime programs. One is a core restoration program. The other one is a maritime archaeology program. And both of them have an adult and a youth component. So the adult component targets anybody over the age of 18. The youth component is mainly geared between 12 and 18-year-olds. They've been able to do some incredible work. The adult branch has been running since 2003, so almost 14 years now. And the youth branch has been running since 2013, 2010, somewhere around there. So that's a little earlier. But they said they want to take this model that they've been using and transplant it into the Caribbean. And not only transplant it into the Caribbean, but also begin to think of ways that we can do archaeological work that's terrestrial and maritime and linked by a common narrative. So again, another tall order. But we said we might be able to do something like this. So this is just a short video. I'll just play it while I'm talking. This is some of the work they currently do in Key Biscayne. These are all high school students that work with the National Park Service. They go diving down there once a year. They learn the basic techniques of underwater survey and mapping. And they contribute to mapping additionally new sites that have been located and identified. Some of them also learn magnetometry, so they can do some underwater metal detecting as well. For the terrestrial component, we wanted to create a field school site where we could train elementary, I'm sorry, not elementary, high school students, mainly affiliated with the Boys and Girls Club in the Virgin Islands, which I'll talk about in a little bit, in terrestrial archaeological practice. And so we wanted to train them not only in excavation, but in analysis, and then prepare them to think about university and what research would look like as an undergraduate student as a graduate student. So again, this is a longer term project, but some of these students actually worked for the National Park Service this year as interns, and some of them hope to pursue cultural heritage work in college and university when they start next year. Alright, so just a little bit more than about the Society of Black Archaeologists. It was formed in 2011 with the idea of diversifying the field of archaeology, as well as recognizing, identifying, and encouraging the proper care and promotion for artifacts related to African diaspora peoples and African peoples. And we've identified a large group in constituency. When this project came about, we decided to pull together a team of researchers that could really pull this off. So myself and Ayanna self-funded our trips down to St. Croix for the first three trips last year. We identified, we did reconnaissance missions, so we identified a series of five potential archaeology sites we could work at during terrestrial archaeology. We looked at the research questions we could ask at some of those sites and identified which site would be most beneficial or useful for this type of collaborative research. We also looked at partners with the Boys and Girls Club. We worked with these other organizations to identify the students that would take place, that would take part in this program. We got to meet with some of the parents. We explained to them some of the work that we're trying to do, so. That component was taken care of. Dr. Alicia Odewale, who I recently received her PhD as well. Looking at the African American community associated with Danish slavery down there. So we brought her on because she has a good understanding of the context in the area. Dr. Antoinette Jackson is an ethnographer. She's a cultural anthropologist. She's done a lot of work with National Park Service, specifically conducting oral histories. And she's conducted oral histories with people in St. John, St. Thomas and St. Croix already. So we said this would be a perfect marriage to try to get these students to understand the value of oral history work. And this could potentially lead to another avenue of employment or research for some of them. We brought UC Berkeley's own, Dr. Alexander Jones' own. She graduated here a few years ago with a PhD. She founded the nonprofit organization Archeology in the Community, specifically tasked with training and teaching kids of this grade school age, Archeology and Archeological Methods. So we brought her on in part for that training. But then also she said, you know, this would be a prime example of her education to begin to explore some ideas that she's looking into. One of which is tracking students over a longer period of time. A lot of times schools will call her in to give a class every year, but she's working with different students each time. With a firm program in the Caribbean, we can begin to track the students to route and see how effective these lessons are. So we supplied her with the science curriculum for the Virgin Islands for high school. And she used that science curriculum then to develop the curriculum for the Archeology that we'd be teaching to these kids. And then finally, you all know Dr. Bill White here. We tried to bring him down this summer, but you all got to him first. So he joined you all here. But he was very instrumental in helping us put together the research proposal. I didn't actually tell you this, but the Shippewa officer down there said, this is one of the best research proposals he's ever seen. I think we handed him about a 50-page document about what our proposed research was and everything. So that worked out good. It identified not only what we planned on doing in terms of the research questions we were asking, but it also explained this project and the context of what we're doing with the kids and then future work and what we'd like to see happen. We also interested in some of his work that he's done with cultural resource management because one of the prime keys of capacity building that we're trying to work on is, again, not just building this site for the community immediately, but building these students to then take on research and careers of their own. So that was a significant component. So the first step in doing all of this was getting these kids certified as open-water scuba divers, and that was completely out of our warehouse as a society of black archaeologists. So one of our community partners, junior scientist in the sea, does specifically this. They're based in the DMV area, DC, Maryland, Virginia area, and they've been successful in training kids as young as 12 years old as open-water scuba divers. Some they've actually taken on a little bit younger as well. So they train them from the ground up from swimming through to the written exams, through to the tests, and all the way through. So again, we've been going down here since June of last year. We identified archaeology site in October. They identified the students in December, and then January these students had started the scuba diving class. So it's a pretty rapid turnaround and a very successful way that we were able to come about it. And we have to say in large part this was also based off of community collaboration. We had a number of divers that were already on island, that were instructors. Some of them volunteered their time to certify them for free. In other cases, people donated dive gear. In cases where that wasn't available, parents actually helped and reached in their pockets to make sure that their kids could get certified as open-water divers. And again, to put this in a larger context, this is significant because scuba diving, the tourism industry are very significant in St. Croix. At the moment, there's one cruisin' that works in the scuba diving industry. And by dive industry, I mean dive shops in terms of selling gear, buying gear, and then also taking people out to do dives. So part of this capacity building is also then creating these people that can go ahead and do this stewardship work. On top of that, there are, there's no cruisin' archaeologists on island. So there are a number of cruisans that work in the park service, but a lot of them are trained as rangers and can't supervise their own research. So that's the other component. Okay, so the students went to the dive training in January. They finished their dive training in June. In June, we brought them on to the archaeological site where we're currently working at. So we identified this site called the Estate Little Princess. St. Croix is unique in a number of areas. One particularly is that the entire island was carved out into plantations at one point in time. It was a Danish version island for the longer duration of it, but it was actually occupied by the French, the Spanish, America, a whole host of different colonizing forces. So we said the Estate Little Princess would be a prime location. We actually stumbled upon this by accident as well. The Estate Little Princess is the headquarters for the Nature Conservancy on island, and their specialty is actually core refrigeration, which I'll talk about later, which fits perfectly into our idea of doing a sustainable archaeology project. But in addition to that, it's one of the few plantations with a number of still-standing structures. So we have houses from the enslaved quarters. They labeled them the enslaved laborers' quarters, the enslaved quarters. We have the main house, the Great House. We've got a hospital that's still standing. We've got a mill, a sugar factory, and an overseer's house. Now, the Great House and the hospital have been converted into the headquarters for the Nature Conservancy, but all these other remains are still-standing structures, some of which have dilapidated since. The estate was founded in 1749 by Frederick Moth, who was the first Danish governor of the island. They believe it was actually occupied and established earlier by the French, but we have no record of that formally yet. We're actually going to hope to do some archaeological work and try to uncover some French material if possible. And from there, it remained as a sugar plantation into the late 1800s. And then in the 1900s, it was converted into a household estate. It was actually donated. It was operated as a household estate until the 1950s and 60s. People actually lived in the enslaved quarters until the 1960s until the government built public housing and kicked everybody out. So you'll see some images of the quarters in a minute and see there's no roofs on the houses. That's because the government intentionally came in and knocked off the roofs to prevent squatters from sleeping there and staying there into the 1960s and 70s. So it's an extensive site with a long occupational history. In the 1990s, the owner of the estate willed the estate to the Nature Conservancy. And so they've been using it. They renovated some of the buildings and have been using it ever since. All right. So this is just the plan view of the overall site. Now, in addition to the dive training, we also wanted to ask some critical research questions. And we thought that this would be a prime location in terms of research to study what we're calling an ecology of enslavement. Trying to figure out how these communities dealt with the natural environment and how the natural environment dealt with them and shaped the way that they operated. More specifically, we're interested in combining some of these terrestrial landscapes with these maritime landscapes. We're trying to do that outside of just basic food ways. So we're not just trying to see what fish they're eating and what marine sources they're consuming, but also how they're using coral for architectural purposes. How they may be using shark vertebrae for, say, weaving, which has been a case in at least one site more recently. So these are some of the things that we had hoped to explore. So from a longer-term research perspective, we hope to look at food production and consumption, some health practices associated with the hospital, and then some of the architectural practices and site formations. And those would involve a number of excavations. You would see here at the enslave quarters. What we have here is a tamarind tree, which has been known to demarcate enslave cemeteries throughout the Caribbean. St. Quarry also has the largest concentration of baobab trees in the Western Hemisphere, which is significant for those of you who know some things about that occurrence in Africa. There's also the enslaved hospital, which was a two-story hospital, again, still standing. And then the great house, which is currently used as a meeting space, a sort of exhibition hall, and has some plaques related to the history of the site. We went to them and said, you know, we'd be interested in working at this site. They would say that would be perfect, and we'd also like you to help us renovate our exhibition space. So hopefully next year we'll talk about some ways to incorporate some of the artifacts we're uncovering into museum exhibition space. Last year, this past year, we had a representative from the Smithsonian's New African American History Museum. She came down to the University of Virgin Islands and actually gave a short workshop for the university students there. So they got a short workshop on how to put together an exhibition, and their exhibition is actually going to go up in a rotating exhibition space in the Fort Museum in Christianstead, which is another site. So again, we're trying to expand it beyond just archaeology, but how can they begin to look at themselves as heritage stewards in a number of other fields, such as museum work and so forth. So our research goals for this year specifically were to identify, record, and excavate the enslaved quarters, both inside as well as the shared space between the two, to see how they dealt with and handled shared space. It was unique because at the height of production, this plantation had over 140 individuals living there, and there were around 38 recorded duplex structures that they were living in. So this was a very extensive operation. And on top of that, all these structures were built north-south, and they were built equidistant alignment. So this was a very intentional, rapid production of, these are the housing that's going to be for these quarters. And we want to see how people dealt with that. We also did some GPR work to see if we could identify a potential cemetery around that tamarind tree. In terms of the training, we had to certify the students as open-water divers first, and then we had to train them in basic methodological practices such as excavation analysis and oral history. And then finally, we had to identify different strategic partners that we could then look at in terms of getting internships, education, and careers in cultural heritage. So this was a lot of work that went on behind the scenes. But National Park Service already has an internship program set up. Alicia Odewale, who is at University of Tulsa, actually has funding as an assistant professor to hire and to bring on a PhD student fully funded. So we were able to use that. She's exploring options now to get cruisans into that PhD program. And I'll talk a little bit later about our next project coming up, working with the UCHBCU initiative to try to get some more students from there over here into programs. All right, so the first step is clearing the land. So that overview map looked very nice and clean and very laid out. Of course, when you get to an archaeology site, it never looks like that. So the image to the top left is an image inside what we call structure two. It's just one of the cabins looking out onto structure three, which you cannot see because it's covered by brush. So we had to clear out all the land in between. I only took video for a short period of time. I'll help that a little bit later. And then we cleared out the land in between the two and flattened the surface. From there, we weren't able to identify four standing enslaved structures, what we're calling structure one, two, three, and four. So we cleared out all the way to four. There's different levels of preservation, level, or structure one and two were probably the best preserved. Three slightly dilapidated. Actually, one of the walls caved in fairly recently. And then the fourth one there is barely standing, but we have foundational stones around. We believe that there are more as well in these directions, but these are covered in thick brush, which in part we didn't want to go through because of the work. Another part we didn't want to touch because of this whole idea of doing sustainable archaeological work. And so we wanted to keep it that way. We also had a representative from the Nature Conservancy point out to us the indigenous and the native plants. So they flagged all those off before we went in and we were able to cut down the brush that was non-native or considered quote-unquote invasive species. Then it came to the actual training of these students. We started off with libations. We had a professor from the University of Virgin Islands, poor libations, incorporated all the students into the libation pouring process. They gave honor not only to the enslaved people that lived and worked in this plantation, but also to the people who existed before them and the indigenous community that was there prior to. From that they went into the classroom. They were given a pre-assessment. What did they know about archaeology? What did they think about it? What did they know about the history of the island? We gave them a series of workshops on the history of the African diaspora on the island. How to identify different types of buttons, different maker's marks, glass bottles, ceramics, and so forth. And then they were engaged in two days of excavation. They did one day of laboratory analysis where they were taught how to clean and sort the artifacts. And then on the fifth day, they were given the oral history workshop. And we had two representatives from National Park Service who are accrued and come in and talk about what they do as tour guides. So that was specifically for these kids. We continued excavations actually for another four weeks after that. And those excavations continued to explore these units that the students opened up. They also taught the students triangulation and trilateration and basic mapping and surveying. So they know how to read a compass now. They know how to take tape and line measurements and so forth. That was another component of it. And part of the reason why we did the terrestrial part first was because they use a lot of these skills in underwater when they're surveying underwater sites. They know how to pull a tape. They know how to do underwater navigation with a compass and so forth. Our youngest participant was 12 years old. The ages ranged. And then also then showing this to people who would come for various nature conservancy work as well. That's a key part of it. So this is part of the group. There's more as well. And some of the testimonies. Again, this was the first product of its kind in the Virgin Islands in St. Corps specifically. So there was news all over. We were on the radio station. We had a couple of reporters come. And at the end, we did a pre-assessment. We saw what they knew and understood about archaeology after. And then we recorded testimonials from these students, asking them what they liked about it, what they didn't like about it, and so forth. So we can develop this as a full-scale successful project that can then be transplanted to other sites and other locations. So the beauty of it was because they had experience with the diving and because they had experience with the terrestrial archaeology, some of them stuck to the terrestrial archaeology and were very attracted to it. Some of them found themselves more interested in diving, but at the end of the day, they all know how to identify these cultural sites and the significance of it. So we thought that was significant. All right, in terms of the actual archaeological work we did, we'll be analyzing this material over the next couple of months. These are just some of the interesting finds that we did come up with. We found one cowrie shell with the back shaved. We found a ceramic sphere. Could have been a potential marble. I'm not sure. And then the ceramic lion's headpiece. We found a lot of pipe stem bowls. We found a lot of beads, different colors, different makes, some glass, some ceramic, and so forth. From the architectural features, you can't see it very well, but up here you'll see there were a number of sort of divots in the bedrock. And we've identified these as post holes, essentially, that they carved into the bedrock. So we're trying to see now, for our next season, we want to expand it and see how far these extend. If they were building additions onto their houses, or if this was a separate structure in and of itself. In addition onto the house, that could potentially give us more information as to how they're using space outside of the immediate house facilities and how enslaved people, if this is the context in which it comes from, were modifying the structures and the households that they were given to adapt to their environments. So that's something we want to explore further. All right. This site was occupied until the 1960s. It was renovated upon a couple of times as well. So we believe that the cabins further back were abandoned fairly earlier. The cabins closer to the front were abandoned more recently. You see tile flooring here, which again comes from the 1960s occupation. We found out through informal conversations that this front patio was actually added onto this particular household structure as well. But from the overview here, you can see the basic dimensions of these duplex sites. There were two doorway entries, and each of them was probably an eight-by-eight room. So these are what families would live in these duplex structures. Again, 38 of them, 110 people. So you can do some math to figure out how many people were living in these conditions. All right. So we did the terrestrial work. We did the diving work. One of the main issues has been keeping these kids engaged in diving throughout the time that we're not there. Our ground team and our ground team are divers that live on Island, and they've agreed to actually take these kids out on dives just to keep them diving, keep their experience up. Again, Hurricane Irma and Maria had a significant impact, which I'll show in a little bit, but it kind of changed the direction of the project a little bit. So when we first started all of this work, our idea was to do a terrestrial site and a maritime site. The problem was the maritime site was too deep into the waters, and it's too deep to explore. That's when we shifted to this whole idea of a sustainable archaeology model. And so what we're going to do is the Nature Conservancy currently specializes in coral reef restoration. They have their own coral farm. We found out through one of our recon missions that actually to work on their coral farm we have to have scientific diving training. We said there's no way we can get these kids scientific diving level in a matter of a couple months. So what we did was we had a group of individuals come down about five senior divers, scientific divers, they went through the certification process themselves. So they went through that training process and now we're in talks of trying to set up a separate coral farm that we can specifically use for these students. So the idea is that they can then use that as the base of operations. If it's our farm, we can say it's located in a shallow area. We can control some of the context and structures around it. So the idea is that next summer we'll hopefully set this up and these students will begin doing coral reef restoration work and out planning. So they'll get that experience as well. So the future of this project we have both research and training futures that we hope to see. One is the artifact analysis. The other one is actually creating the exhibition space itself. And then another aspect that we're exploring is actually connecting Diaspora, so doing works that are trans-Atlantic. We actually found out that one of our members in the Society of Black Archaeologists is running an archaeological dig in Ghana at Christianborg which is a fort, a Danish fort. So the Danes in St. Croix, there's Frederickstead and Christianstead, which are the two major cities. In Ghana, there's Fredericksborg and Christiansborg which are two major Danish forts. And so there's noted connections between the two that they were bringing to save people from this region into St. Croix and to other Virgin Islands. There's also been some archaeological work already done on Ghana, looking at Danish plantation sites in Ghana. So we're hoping to use that then to create a larger understanding of how Danish slavery and Danish plantation sites are working on both ends of the Atlantic and then also looking at how that diaspora works as well. Hopefully we can get some students to come back and forth during that process as well. These are some of the sites. Some of these forts, Christiansborg is here. The other project is, Fredericksborg is here. And then they have Danish plantation sites all the way inland into Ghana and Accra. For the training, the future of the training we're looking at core restoration work, of course. Dr. Cameron Monroe at UC Santa Cruz and I recently got a UC HPCU grant which will give us $45,000 to bring two students from the University of the Virgin Islands and two students from Howard University with us on our projects here in the Virgin Islands and then his project in Haiti. So they'll go ahead and do those projects for four weeks and then they'll fly back here to UC Santa Cruz sorry, not Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz Bay Area and they'll go through additional classroom analysis. They'll be trained in photogrammetry and they'll be trained in other geophysical work as well. With the intention then of exploring them to the idea of graduate school work in archaeology, if that's a stage you want to take. And then lastly we're looking at some more longer term more solidified projects one of which is establishing storage on island for artifacts. There's currently no public storage facility so every archaeological dig that happens unless it's done by the park service gets shipped off to the respective universities that these archaeologists work at which then means that St. Quarry material is dispersed around the United States. We're also working with the University to establish an archaeology program so a few of our members had a meeting with Smithsonian and President Hall at the University of Virgin Islands and we're outlining a proposal for what an archaeology program would look like at the University of Virgin Islands and then we can begin to create that pipeline then of high school students going into college doing undergraduate work in the Virgin Islands and then hopefully doing masters and PhD work here in the U.S. mainland somewhere. And then next year we're going back out again to do the work. Hurricane Irma and Maria had a devastating impact on the island as some of you may have heard. Virgin Islands as well as Puerto Rico were hit pretty hardly. So we had knocked off the roof off of the Great House a lot of the structures. We're not sure exactly what the archaeology looks like yet but you can see the leaves from the trees around the structures in the back here are all blown off. This was all full of foliage when we first went there. So we're hoping things aren't too too bad but it's not looking good yet. We still hope to continue in some capacity if at all we started a fundraiser for some of our collaborators that have been impacted and for the boys and girls coming out there at least. Hopefully we can continue to do this work without fail. And I wanted to say thank you. This was the youngest member of our archaeology team helping us clear. And this project was funded in part by the McKnight Doctoral Fellowship Program and then the Slave Rex project which funded most of the seed money for us to start this project. Thank you. One comment early on you identified one of the mandates as being re-identifying the cemeteries around community radar and forgive me if I'm saying stuff you already know already but I was seeing that you have these units in subsurface units that you've excavated out and my only recommendation of having a similar mandate from a community is to look for cemeteries that's not well marked on purpose. But that mandate I don't have the units to calibrate my instrument with so because you have them using that to check your dialectic and potentially know a little bit better about how that instrument is going to perform in those substrates might give you a leg up on doing that work. I'm sure you already have people to do that for you but just in case as soon as you said I had that problem I wanted to talk a little bit more about that but just in case that wasn't something you already knew that would be good, I appreciate it. The Park Service was one of our partners they had to fly in a GPR anyway they had one of their Park Service people do it and they've been doing GPR around the island for a while so they do all of that but just to follow up on that we did not locate any burial remains so we believe the Tamarind tree is probably a lot earlier than the enslaved structures so if there is a burial site it's located at a different area but there are Tamarind trees on island that have been demarcated as burial sites so there's potential. That provides an opportunity for the economy that haven't been developed like this that there will a self-sustaining economic thing as well that there will be these opportunities on island when I was working in the Bahamas with the site of Clifton one of the things that really emerged as a discourse is people felt that they've been pushed out by cruise boat tourism because it was superficial it didn't keep people on the island it concentrated wealth in just a few hands and it didn't create quality jobs and that eco-tourism and developing programs for eco-tourism within the College of Bahamas was going to give people education to develop this other aspect of tourism that actually has a much more it's got a different clientele they want to spend more time on a place they want to invest in historic sites they want to spend more time in local owned hotels and so creating Clifton as a national park was seen as part of an economic strategy to create the kinds of middle class jobs that you feel were there to keep them rooted in the island so there's also this kind of economic population sustainability and you're one student saying now I've learned something I can make money on I'm a professional diver there's a real strong aspect of that in these kinds of programs too so one of the things that you should also promote we're making it possible for people to develop other kinds of economies that allow people to stay out of the Caribbean there's a huge diaspora that started moving back to the Bahamas when they saw opportunities that were not just banking jobs one of the things I thought was really a neat part of this is the sustainability that you weren't being explicit about clearly is in your calculus in your design part of the driving factor behind this too was that I didn't go into it but in 2012 Hess Oil Company had a large refinery on the island it employed about over 2,000 people the island itself is a population of 50,000 the oil refinery shut down in 2012 2,000 people lost their jobs overnight so a lot of people either had to move off island if they could or if they couldn't they had to find some alternative means so there's actually a large population of people that joined the military because that's the only type of sort of income for that so we're really trying to see some ways that we can get sustainable work for people in the long term very cool I think I love the concept of sustainability and I think for your research question, research goals if you can incorporate more of that aspect I think that will make this project even stronger and those for research the training part and sustainability part it was very clear and I think it's even more and so your next step that you want to think about is how you can actually think about structuring your research goals that are tied to the discussion of sustainability and I deal with sustainability and resilience issues with my small scale economies project we had a very interesting seminar about a couple of years ago where Tom McGovern said sustainability of what for how long and at what cost which I thought were very a good way to phrase basic questions related to sustainability so sustainability is a concept that a bit in the grey zone depending on who you are talking to it could be used by the oil company to say sustainable development which the concept itself actually came from the discussion of sustainable development as opposed to the resilience discussion which is more applied to biological environmental concerns so you've got a lot of potential on how you can develop this project and you may want to think about the research question number one and two to have more discussion about sustainability and how to link our policy to the decision right, yeah that's a good point I should also mention too one of the models we've been working with was we're rotating the PI position for this project this year I was the PI for this project I just got my PhD, I was on the job market next year one of our other collaborators is going to have her PhD she's going to be on the job market she's going to be the PI for this project and we'll continue to rotate it out as graduate students come up with careers and ideas and maybe people go up for 10 years and so forth and so on and with that the research question will change slightly so we're hoping to keep it engaged and under that whole domain of ecology and engagement and slavery but also then have each member be able to pull off because the idea is that we're six of us all together we have all our projects in other locations if for any reason all of us can't be there we at least have one person that knows the site, that's worked there, that's run it that can continue to run this program so yeah, I appreciate that yeah definitely we're planning to go there hopefully by December to do an analysis or a recon of it Cameron told me he's actually got some drones in the lab so yeah we know a few people in the park yeah yeah this is Nature Conservancy so they've been really helpful with this that's a good point let me see yeah just don't cut down any native trees or plants thank you very much