You and I…

Hello again.

I am still sorting out the years in archaeology.   I have had quite a bit of field experience and what that often entails, a challenge, especially when people apparently just forget what was done and go back to previous simple procedures. I feel "our" experience and reputation is somewhat maligned though the reviewers should be shouldered with more responsibility for how things get done in my opinion, and actually, in New York state, are doing that I think.

Bernadette Castro, who once ran and lost against the powerful Democrat, US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a "Castro Convertible" furniture millionaire heiress, is no longer in charge of "Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation" though she will always appear on "This Old House" reruns with Bob Vila in Frederick Church's "Olana" (Arabic: 'on high') state historic site, the founder of the Hudson River School of landscape art I visited just before starting grad school. His painting "Niagara Falls" was the first artwork to be purchased by the US Congress. One of her last duties was to open Fort Montgomery state interpretative site, which you and I worked right near by on the cargo boat hulks under the Bear Mountain Bridge, which apparently the fort's features were "secretly" excavated over a number of years by a Bear Mountain State Parks employee. Parts of the nearby Fort Clinton are said to be under the Palisades Interstate Parkway traffic circle at the western approach to the Bear Mountain Bridge. A small suspension bridge to Fort Montgomery from inside the park, near Hudson River level, spans across Popolopen Creek, for foot travel, today right next to "our" boats site, and is shown on Google satellite maps.

A huge battle in the early Revolutionary War was fought on land and sea there, at one of the "Great Chain" locations once stretching across the Hudson River at a number of locations in the lower Hudson Valley, in an effort to stop or slow down, the British king's forces from their effort to "divide and conquer" the northern and southern colonies. They would have done this by controlling the Hudson River and with a chain of forts stretching into Canada from nearby Albany. Combined American and French troops, who arrived having marched from a debarkation in Rhode Island, crossed the Hudson River at the Kings Ferry, near Cortlandt, NY (coyote attacks there last night) and marched to Virginia and with the French fleet defeated General Cornwallis (Admiral Cornwallis was in charge of New York City. It's speculated there may have been a discussion about retaking nearby NYC). Something of the 6,000 French troops was left on "French sites" in their "long march" across New England and has been searched for recently.

Bernadette Castro's very last official duty may have been to announce the creation of the "US Purple Heart Center" at the New Windsor Cantonment, near Vails Gate, where we've met a number of years ago. As a teenager I had camped there in a pup tent in 9 degree weather as an Explorer Post 222 member, we carried on even though the Boy Scouts had canceled one early January. It has certainly changed for the better since and once when there for a Council for Northeast Historical Archaeology meeting, where we saw a film made of the "Hanover Square Site" (Nan Rothschild, PhD, the P.I.)  a NY state archaeologist, Paul Huey, showed me the cannons kept by the state there in another building. They also found offsite an original timber cabin from then and transported it back onto the site, there were many. More of those sites have been opened since too. General George Washington had asked the troops to winter-over after the treaty was signed with King George just in case further hostilities broke out instead. Many had some of their families there too. I more recently saw Paul Huey at a small lecture, on the early Dutch fort settlement of Albany excavated between highways and overpasses, in Yonkers, NY in the vicinity of another project we worked on, near the historic Otis Elevator factory. They are doing a lot of redevelopment in the Yonkers waterfront now, once home to jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, a statue there in her honor. US Senator Hillary Clinton has made the "Purple Heart" stamp permanent, not called up by politicians every so often as it suits them.

My last employer, Greenhouse Consultants, was scraping off the plow zone of a flood plain where eagles visit in Montoursville, PA with a couple of guys. There's at least 3 types of aboriginal pottery in small hearth features we documented in the early winter and spring, but for very short times, and fortunately shallow features. Nearby in the early winter near there, a 640 pound black bear was shot. As a child with my brother we had stayed as part of a NYC Police Athletic League program for two weeks (8 and 7 traveled there alone by train) on a Mennonite dairy farm of 200 acres about 65 dairy cows, just nearby there in Roaring Branch, PA probably what happens sometimes when it rains.

Hope things are fine. I feel like a gossip!