Friday, Dec. 27, 2002 | 4:08 a.m.
WEEKEND EDITION
December 28-29, 2002
Two Southern Nevada archaeologists are trying to preserve remnants of 20th century conflicts -- ranging from World War I to the Cold War -- while history is still fresh.
Colleen Beck and William Gray Johnson are members of a new wave of scientists who are not only digging into the distant past of pre-history, but in the recent past of yesterday's newspapers.
Focusing their attention on the nearby Nevada Test Site and the remnants of hundreds of nuclear explosions, Beck and Johnson wrote two chapters and edited a new book about preserving physical evidence from the Cold War.
There is a new role for those who spend decades digging into the past, they said. Career archaeologists once peered back in time over millennia, research professor Beck said. Today they are combining the past, the present and the future.
"Archaeologists are moving more and more toward the present in order to preserve areas for future generations," Beck said.
Johnson, an associate research professor in the Desert Research Institute's Division of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences, said the book examines cultural, social and personal perceptions of conflict in the last century.
"It is also about the role of archaeologists in our modern world," Johnson said.
For example, in the past 20 years a couple of archaeologists have studied modern garbage piles, seeking a pattern into what people throw out.
"What people do and what they think they do are always different," Beck said.
Modern archaeologists are challenging the idea of a narrow research field by expanding and improving information-gathering, Johnson said.
"Too often we are relegated to a role of only being able to illuminate prehistory or history so distant that no living persons exist to tell about it," he said.
In fact, some of the subjects that interest archaeologists are alive, Johnson said.
Johnson and Beck are editors, along with John Schofield, of the English Heritage Monuments Protection Programme, of the book, "Materiel Culture: The Archaeology of the 20th Century Conflict." The book is focused on 20th century sites of conflict.
They define "materiel culture" as the materials remaining after a conflict.
The book's 26 chapters range from discussing the artistic culture based on bullets from World Wars I and II, the Berlin Wall, military medals and concentration camps to Vietnam-era sites such as Cambodia's "killing fields."
It's important to protect sites and to begin as soon as possible, Johnson said.
At the Test Site, where the United States conducted nuclear weapons experiments from 1951 through 1992, roughly 1,000 patches of ground containing evidence of early activity by people have been discovered, Johnson said.
"A lot of them are prehistoric, that is, they contained stone tools or grinding stones," he said.
Frenchman Flat on the eastern side of the Test Site contains 157 historic sites from nuclear experiments, enough to make it worthy for a listing in the Federal Register of Historical Sites, and many more than researchers expected, Johnson said.
Scientists in the 1950s exposed wooden and brick homes, steel bridges, a bank vault and other objects to nuclear blasts. Many objects were vaporized.
A forest of trees was shipped to the site, anchored in the ground, then exposed to an atomic blast. Scientists built a replica of a Japanese village, re-creating structures with rice paper walls similar to those destroyed by the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Many of those items were destroyed in the federal government's desert laboratory, Johnson said.
Entire towns, such as Survival Town and Doom Town, complete with homes, industrial buildings, electrical systems, radios, trailer homes, fire department equipment, food supplies and mannequins from Penney's, were built in the middle of nowhere.
Only two two-story houses and a few frames from other buildings survived nuclear blasts, Beck and Johnson noted.
What's left are massive objects such as train trestles or bridge girders.
The 1950s was an era of duck-and-cover drills when students dived beneath their classroom desks and parents attended civil defense classes. Archaeologists are attempting to compare civil defense architecture to the neon-lit resorts of Las Vegas.
"Civil defense was telling people you should build stronger structures, yet people chose to build structures least likely to survive," Johnson said.
"I think that was a denial of the threat of a nuclear blast and its consequences."
While it is the business of archaeologists to preserve important sites, not every site or every scrap should be preserved, they said.
"Not everything out there is worthy of preservation," Johnson said.
At the Test Site, objects that cannot be linked to a specific Cold War project have been disregarded and not catalogued.
A sign bearing the words, "ferris wheel project," baffled the archaeologists.
"We couldn't find anything that referred to 'ferris wheel,' " he said.
Johnson was leafing through an early report from Test Site researchers and discovered a reference to the project.
"It was a proposal that never went forward," he said.
The 384-page book illustrates the difficulties and challenges in preserving, presenting and interpreting historical evidence from modern conflicts.
The book was published by Routledge Press as the 44th issue in the One World Archaeology series organized by the World Archaeological Congress.
Beck and Johnson work at Desert Research Institute, a nonprofit, statewide division of the University and Community College System of Nevada. DRI pursues a full-time program of basic and applied environmental research on a local, national and international scale.
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