SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Paul Shackel doesn't want to do archaeology solely to dig up stuff.
"I want to do archaeology that's socially relevant to a larger community," Shackel said. "We need to move beyond what we already know. We need to start looking at different angles, the larger context."
Shackel, head of the Center for Heritage Resources at the University of Maryland, oversees a summer field school at the New Philadelphia site in Pike County. A $226,500 National Science Foundation grant brings nine students to the site for three summers.
Shackel highlighted the project in a program and displayed artifacts from the site this week at the Illinois State Museum Research and Collections Center in Springfield as part of the Paul F. Mickey Monthly Archaeology Lecture Series.
"Is New Philadelphia about one man, Frank McWorter, the African-American community and its ability to survive 100 years in a racist society? Is it about freedom? Is it about race relations in a biracial town, or is it about the other people that aren't recorded in the historical records," Shackel said. "My answer is it's all of the above."
That answer leads to more questions of how to interpret the site, whether to rebuild it or reconstruct it off site, build a museum or an interpretative center.
"These are all issues people will have to face when interpreting the history of New Philadelphia," Shackel said.
Shackel outlined three goals for archaeology as social justice:
* Critically analyze and ex-pose racism in the past and present and to dismantle the structures of oppression when we can.
* Explore diversity in the past and promote it in the present.
* Create a color-conscious past rather than a colorblind past. Be aware of what happened in the past.
New Philadelphia starts with Frank McWorter, born a slave in South Carolina. He moved to Kentucky to manage his owner's farm and worked in a saltpeter mine in his off time to make money to buy his wife and himself out of slavery. He came to Pike County in 1831, platted New Philadelphia in 1836 and started to sell 144 lots to make money to buy more family members out of slavery.
McWorter never lived in New Philadelphia — he lived and farmed just north of the town — but saw the community thrive as a home for blacks and whites. The town began to fade after the railroad bypassed it in 1869. Up to 30 percent of the town's population was black in an era and location with racial overtones. The last family left in the 1930s.
"I think racism did exist, but I think people worked together in the community to move ahead, especially in the frontier area," Shackel said.
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