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When we want to know about the 17th century, we call "Tad" Baker. He is a public
archeoalogist with a special knowledge of the murky era in local history, and
an excellent ability to explain what was going on back then.
VISIT Tad Baker's professional home page
We know almost nothing about our founders. I don’t mean those straight-laced
characters who landed at the mythical Plymouth Rock. Volumes have been written
about the Puritans and the Mayflower. Their ship and their village have been rebuilt
for tourists. I’m talking, instead, about "our" founders, the men and women who
settled coastal New Hampshire and Maine in the early 1600s. Who were those crusty,
fishy-smelling, business-minded, superstitious, adventurous people?
Close your eyes and try to picture them. You can’t. There are almost no portraits
of early 17th century "Americans", except of the very rich and influential. There are no surviving
intact houses from the first wave of European immigrants. There are no gravestones,
few maps, some legends, a bunch of stone cellar holes and precious few written
records.
That’s why we have archeologists. We call them in when there’s almost no facts
to go on, when history has all but disappeared beneath the surface of the soil.
They are the super detectives, the last hope for lost and forgotten souls. But
where are the archeologists? Most are hidden in colleges and universities, locked
in museum archives, wrapped up in research that can last for decades, teaching
classes or working "contract" jobs paid for by private companies. And when they
do write up their scholarly research, its often dry reading for we average dudes.
It’s not easy to flush out members of this rare secretive breed, but I’ve spotted
one recently online. Prof. Emerson "Tad" Baker of Salem State College in Massachusetts
is a specialist in 17th century northern New England. For 10 years now he and a team of locals have
been excavating the Chadbourne archeology site in South Berwick. He recently worked
on a site in Kittery and is writing a book about the 1682 Rock-Throwing Devil
incident in New Castle, NH. (See related story in HISTORY)
"For far too many people, Massachusetts is synonymous with New England, "Baker
says. "That’s not the case now and it was not the case then."
"As a kid growing up in Massachusetts, loving history, I didn’t even realize
there were people living in Maine in the 1600s. That’s how sanitized the history
was."
Baker met his wife, a "Mainer", while attending Bates College in 1977. They have
lived there ever since. He commutes from a 200-year old farmhouse in York through
the NH coast to Salem, a town famous for its 17th century witch hunts.
THE WEB SITE MAKER
Baker heads the History Department at Salem State, a faculty of 14 full-time
and an equal number of part-time educators. He is also webmaster of the department
web site, a rare thing in an era when colleges and universities tend toward a
centralized (read "monolithic") online presence. He says his colleagues realized
early that history research has undergone a revolution since the Internet. Huge
amounts of historical content has been digitized. The National Archive recently
announced the release of 50 million documents on its web site alone.
"We had a web page ready to run even before the college had a presence established
online," Baker says.
About 80% of the department have some web presence, Baker says, some of it very
sophisticated. The history faculty also makes constant use of ’blackboard" web
sites, password protected pages accessible only to students. He makes a point
of teaching students how to separate good data from bad data online – a skill
all teachers need to emphasize.
Baker’s own homepage leads to a wealth of new data on the 1600s in the Maine
and Piscataqua regions, as well as links to "public archeology" and witchcraft
data. Especially important are the photos of artifacts discovered over the years
at the Chadbourne site, an archaeological time capsule of life for a first-generation
Maine family.
Because they were a wealthy family, over 20,000 artifacts have been recovered
so far. Each hand forged nail, button, clay pipe stem and broken tool tells us
more about our forebears. An elaborately decorated door hinge, a key, pairs of
iron scissors and even a coin shed more precious light on the 17th century Chadbourne history. This family purchased their land from the Indians
in 1643 and were burned out of their comfortable home by Native Americans during
King William’s War in 1690.
Baker’s homepage resides on Salem State’s "edu" domain. The school offers faculty
a block of space on its servers and a password from which they can FTP the data
to the Internet. Baker uses basic OCR text scanning software to create Microsoft
Word files. He uses Netscape Composer, an almost primitive web page tool for what
he calls "quick and dirty" posting of content. You have to remember to type the
"tilde" or you won’t find his homepage.
"It’s low tech stuff," Baker says. "I just try to get as much information as
possible up there. It can be out of date. I’m constantly ashamed about that.
The hard part is finding the time."
But we’re not complaining. The more Baker adds to his site, the more we learn
about the way America, in this neck of the woods, really began. And more than
all that, Baker’s email address is right there on his homepage. Besides giving
frequent and fascinating public lectures, writing highly readable books and responding
quickly to phone inquiries, the professor is accessible to the public via the
Web.
THE UP SHOT
"I am the department’s public historian," Baker explains on his web site, "meaning
I teach a variety of courses on topics like museums, archaeology, material culture,
and architectural history -- courses that relate to historians working in the
public sphere. Before coming to Salem State I was an historical archaeologist
and a museum director."
Indiana Jones has set the bar fearfully high for archeologists. The fictional
Jones (like his female counterpart, tomb raider Laura Croft) not only teaches
classes, but can fly any plane, shoot any bad guy and outrun any ancient booby
trap. Real life archaeologists spend much of their time hunkering just below ground
in damp rectangular pits. They wield small shovels, surgical trowels and paintbrushes
to preserve the delicate details of what dead generations left behind.
"Doesn’t it behoove us as historians to work with the public – to be willing
to act as advisors on movies and TV shows and to curate exciting exhibits?" Baker
asks. "I think that in most of these cases, the truth is more compelling than
the Hollywood mythology."
Baker points to his upcoming book on "Lithobolia", still a year or two away from publication. What could be more interesting, he
asks, than a 17th century devil battering a house with rocks for three months? Baker has added
the full text of the supernatural 1682 account to his web site. His work on the
true human origins of the deadly Salem witch trials offer insight to the way our
ancestors reacted to a dangerous and frightening world. Those are lessons we might
need to relearn in our own dangerous and fearsome times.
History is not as simple as school textbooks implied. Icons like Puritan founding
fathers became nationally accepted, but they over simplified the founding of the
nation.
"There was not one New England," Baker emphasizes. "It just wasn’t’ that simple."
Much of the real New England still lies under the soil of coastal New Hampshire
and Maine where settlers arrived as early as 1610. There are still untapped resources
here on property untouched for over 300 years. If enough artifacts surface, we
may come to know our 17th century founder much better – and gain a deeper insight into what America is
really about.
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