Smithsonian Folklife Festival
Canterbury Archaeological Trust has just returned from two weeks participating in America’s largest cultural event, the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival, held on the National Mall in Washington DC. Forty local people illustrated Kent’s rich cultural heritage alongside 80 Virginians at the festival’s ‘Roots of Virginia Culture’ programme to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the establishment of Jamestown, Virginia, widely regarded as the first permanent English settlement of what would become the United States of America.
The Festival has been an annual production of the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage since 1967 and each year celebrates cultural traditions of communities across the United States and around the world. This year saw ‘Mekong River: Connecting Cultures’ and ‘Northern Ireland at the Smithsonian’ programmes alongside the ‘Roots of Virginia Culture’. The Festival is a free event over ten days and commonly attracts over a million visitors. This year saw 1.6 million - the second largest visitor number in its history.
The Kent party of the ‘Roots of Virginia Culture’ programme was managed and supported by Kent County Council. During the past three years, researchers from the Smithsonian Institution have worked with KCC to identify cooks, musicians, fishermen, story tellers, craftspeople and others to illustrate aspects of our culture and inform festival visitors about attractions they can expect from a trip to Kent. Canterbury Archaeological Trust was invited to contribute to the theme of ‘Recreating the Past’. We (Marion Green, Education Officer and Enid Allison, Environmental Archaeologist and Education Service support) delivered a package designed to attract both adults and young people and over nine hundred children and thousands of adults took part in the activity over the ten days. The Festival attracts considerable media coverage and we were filmed and interviewed by local FOX News and by KCC and BBC Radio Kent.
For children, our Little Dig involved excavating and identifying parts of reconstructed buildings and real archaeological finds in two ‘trenches’ built by the Smithsonian’s Tech Crew (many thanks to Jen, Matt and Greg) to CAT’s specification. The idea was originally brought to Canterbury by the Museum of London Archaeological Service during the Whitefriars excavations and our own Little Digs are often used at public events.
The ‘digs’ were further adapted for the ‘Roots of Virginia’ theme of the Festival. American children learn about the English settlement of Jamestown in school and many of the young visitors had been on trips to the archaeological site of Historic Jamestown. So the top ‘layer’ had 17th century pottery fragments found on Kent excavations – pieces of the same kind of domestic jugs and jars the English settlers took with them when they sailed across the Atlantic in 1607, eventually to become lost in the Virginian soils and discovered by American archaeologists some 400 years later.
Kent’s archaeology goes a lot deeper of course and the Little Dig had a medieval and a Roman layer as well – more than enough for little diggers to take in! The unearthed fragments were then taken to reference tables of complete objects (again all from Kent excavations) to identify them. Many of the children came expecting to find dinosaurs but gained some experience of archaeology – and a great certificate.
The reference collection plus photographs, reconstruction images and a running powerpoint presentation of ‘30 Years of Canterbury Archaeological Trust’ also served as a ‘stand alone’ display for adult visitors. There were conversations with people who had been to Britain as tourists or had relations here. Some people had been on training digs and others wanted to know about places they could visit in Canterbury and Kent. Although we weren’t allowed to give out flyers, we did have posters publicising Canterbury, Dover and Maidstone museums – so there may have been some American visitors to the ‘Hidden Treasures’ exhibition!
Several people with education, archaeology and anthropology interests made themselves known to us and the Little Dig trenches have now gone to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History where they will be used for public education programmes in the Discovery Room, following the CAT example.
Sharing the ‘Historic Archaeology’ marquee with us was Amanda Danning, a facial reconstruction artist from Texas working on the skull of a 15 year old boy believed to be one of the first English settlers of Jamestown. Day by day we saw the features take shape. Alongside Amanda were people from Historic Jamestown, the educational visitor centre at the original site of the James Fort, featured earlier this year on a Time Team special in the UK.
We had some great volunteers to help with re-instating the ‘digs’ throughout the day, chatting to the visitors and making lemonade runs. The weather was hot and steamy when we arrived and the day we left the temperature hit 100F, but in between was mostly in the low 80s and the locals said it was like April weather. Enid and I were kept very busy on site. Working daily with a constantly changing audience (and episodes of song, dance and story telling on a nearby stage!) was demanding stuff, but we definitely rose to the challenge and the American visitors really appreciated our contribution and that we had brought original things of such antiquity for them to see and handle.
We found occasions to see what other participants in the Festival were doing. There was some great music from the Virginians and I could have spent a long time watching the Mekong River potters! We also had two days break when we took in Washington’s key sites and the free Smithsonian museums lining the mall – with air con.
This was a successful and enjoyable venture and I would like to thank both the Smithsonian Institution and KCC’s Smithsonian Project Team for this opportunity to share knowledge and experience with so many people and promote in particular, the work of the Canterbury Archaeological Trust.
To hear a podcast about CAT and the Festival go to the US Embassy site at http://www.usembassy.org.uk/rss/index.html and for pictures go to www.canterburytrust.co.uk
Marion Green
Education Officer
Canterbury Archaeological Trust
BOTTOM RIGHT: Marion and proud certificate holders.
