Filmic memory texts: Seeing America’s archeological turn from salvage to conservation in Spadework for History

Abstract

Over two decades in mid-century America, the professional approach to sites endangered by post-war construction and development projects was to excavate and “save the data” from certain loss. Archeologists led such salvage efforts from 1945 to 1970, first meeting the increased demand for their labor and skills. Then, in seeing the permanence of destruction, they shifted by extending their concept of safe preservation into the future: an early conservationist archeology. One broad impact of the River Basin Surveys was in memorializing tribal histories and relationships to the land environment by the recovery of large swaths of biological, ecological, palynological, and geological data from excavations coordinated from branch offices in Nebraska, Oregon, California, Washington, D.C., and Texas. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Texas professor E. Mott Davis created a meticulous record of such archeological practices through a film series which captures that shift from the perspective of one of its practitioners. Spadework for History (1964), subtitled “Salvaging American History,” seeks to document the country’s anthropological archeology through a pioneering academic collaboration between film and archeology. Weighing scholarship on the production of archives—including an awakening to power in their production of history—this article considers the power of film in creating a memory text. In retelling Davis’s contribution, evidence from the films’ reception and memory studies perspectives together expand the temporal framework available to support further audiovisual collection-based analyses of professional work.