Air, Water, and Work in Ottawa County, Oklahoma
|
We are partnering with the community-based organization, the Local Environmental Action Demanded (LEAD) Agency to coproduce a deep mapping project that blends audiovisual and archival materials with a geospatial database comprised of historical Census and environmental data to showcase - in an extremely accessible way - embodied experiences of air, water, and work in Ottawa County, Oklahoma, which is home to the Tar Creek Superfund Site and other sources of great environmental, public health and safety risk, as well as ten sovereign Tribal nations.
|
Project Team
|
The Boom, Bust, Repeat Community Map of Foothills County, Alberta
|
The “Boom, Bust, Repeat” Community Deep Map of Foothills County, Alberta will cover the period from the first oil discovery to today (1914 – 2024). The geographical boundaries will cover Foothills County only (an area of about 3600 km2, an hour south of Calgary, AB). The sources we are hoping to incorporate into the Deep Map include: 1) archival documents of historical industrial projects in the area, specifically holdings by Imperial Oil, British American Oil, Royalties Oil, Gulf Oil and some minor local companies. We especially want to focus on incorporating photographs into the map. These documents are found in the University of Calgary’s Glenbow Western Research Centre, specifically in its Glenbow Library and Archives Collection; 2) oral histories of Foothills residents who participated in different energy industries. These oral histories will be drawn from the University of Calgary’s Turner Valley Oilfield Society Oral History Project Collection representing 71 individuals, as well as the Energy Stories Lab’s current and upcoming oral history interviews with an additional 50 individuals; 3) photos from the personal collection of Chris Goss, former employee at the Turner Valley Gas Plant, as well as his mother, Christine Lund, who grew up in Mill City, a company town near the Anglo-American Refinery; 4) 3D scans of industrial heritage sites: the Turner Valley Gas Plant, the original Dingman well, the Twin Cities Saloon, the Royalties Memorial to the residents of Little Chicago and Little New York (mid-20th century company towns), the remains of the British-American Refinery as well as 3 workers shacks that remain on site – all collected by the Energy Stories Lab; and 5) the full locations and details of all orphan wells in Foothills County, locations courtesy of the Orphan Wells Association’s Site-Specific Inventory.
|
Project Team
|
Counter Mapping Landscapes of Indigenous and Black Resistance and Survivance in Colonial Dominica
|
Our project focuses on developing a Historic Spatial Data Infrastructure (HSDI) that synthesizes historical, archaeological, and geospatial data from across the Caribbean Island of Dominica. We're specifically looking to create visual representations of Black and Indigenous geographies to examine resistance and resilience that confront and challenge histories dominated by European perspectives. By overlaying diverse data sets across time, our map will track the movements, settlement patterns, and histories of Indigenous, enslaved, Maroon, and post-emancipation communities. Through this process, we are creating counter-maps of colonial geographies and phenomena, and investigating their spatial connections over time. The HSDI will integrate spatial, visual, material, historical, and methodological data from three archaeological sites, demonstrating how archaeologically recovered materials can uncover suppressed histories. The project will also incorporate local perspectives through collaborative, participatory mapping with descendant communities. The end product is intended to reach the Dominican and broader Caribbean public, as well as interested scholars and researchers. The HSDI will be open access and interactive. We are partnering with the Create Caribbean Institute, a Dominican-based research organization focused on the digital preservation and dissemination of Caribbean culture and heritage.
|
Project Team
|
Exploring Descendant Communities within the Spatial History of Charleston
|
The Spatial History of Charleston (SHOC) is a deep history of the Charleston region from the colonial period to the mid-20th century (c. 1670 – 1950). Developing over time, the aim of SHOC is to:
• Serve as an aggregator of spatial and spatially informed data from agencies and NGOs that bear upon Carolina Lowcountry history and society. • Develop base data on historical landscape use via georectification and geocoding efforts to transform analog (e.g., historical maps and plats) or non-spatial resources (e.g., burial, genealogical, census records) into spatially empowered data. • Provide a service to colleagues in the academy, NGOs, community leaders, and regional planners who have questions about the history and societies of the Carolina Lowcountry • Serve as a means of public engagement to assist the broader Charleston community in learning about the region's history, empowering citizens in building a more just and equitable society. • Support public history initiatives via the developed platform with community partners. 
|
Project Team
|
Glacier, Prairie, Farm: Deep Mapping the Red River Valley
|
As an understudied state with a low population density, North Dakota is often viewed as marginal to the national narrative. And yet, it played a significant role in the western expansion of Manifest Destiny. Trains were central to the White settlement of this area, transporting people, goods, and capital interests westward. Major rail lines cut through the northern prairie lands, connecting northeastern metropolises with the raw resources of the frontier. While rail companies actively recruited and relocated both domestic and foreign-born Whites to the region, transforming the land into industrial agricultural landscapes. Notably, the glacially formed landscape of eastern North Dakota entails a deep history of human-environment interaction, as Indigenous peoples have inhabited this area since the time of glacial movements. However, White settler colonialism led to increasing containment and enclosure of Indigenous communities, to the point that North Dakota remains home to five federally recognized Tribal Reservations. Despite broken treaties, forced assimilation campaigns, and continued oppression and marginalization at local, state, and national levels, North Dakota’s Tribal communities have been at the forefront of national and international Indigenous rights movements.
The proposed project for the NEH Deep Mapping Institute aims to use Cass County as a pilot for a larger effort to map this layered history. Situated on the North Dakota–Minnesota border, Cass County served as a key entry point for railroads and western expansion. As the Red River of the North forms the state boundary, the county also provides a compelling location to examine the relationship between the rise of railroads and the importance of waterways throughout the region’s history. Home to Fargo, the state’s largest city, Cass County offers insight into the dynamic relationship between small urban centers and surrounding rural, industrial, and agricultural development. Deep Mapping of Cass County would encompass a history that stretches back to glacial movements and lakes, the long presence of Indigenous peoples on the prairie lands, and the arrival of Manifest Destiny and White settler colonialism in the late 19th century. 
|
Project Team
|
Hidden Economy: A Spatial Analysis of Detroit’s Potomac Quarter
|
The Femme Beings Project is a community-based archaeological research collective involved in a multifaceted study on historical sex work in Detroit. Through the Community Deep Mapping Institute, we aim to study the interconnectedness of women engaged in sex work and their environment, including the brothels, saloons, pharmacies, and men’s workplaces in the Potomac Quarter-- a designated red-light district in Detroit. Our mapping project will explore how these spaces intersect and shape the social landscape of the area between 1880 and 1920. We aim to fill knowledge gaps on how these environments interact by creating a multi-dimensional, interactive map. The map will include locations where sex work occurred within the Potomac Quarter as described in historical documents. We will utilize data from the arrest records of women charged as “Prostitutes” and people charged with “keeping a house of ill-fame,” note their addresses of residence listed in court records, and refer to the newspaper accounts of these arrests. This data on individual sex workers will be combined with research from newspaper archives, city directories, photographs, advertisements, and Sanborn maps to create a full map of the Potomac Quarter that visualizes a rich, storied neighborhood near the riverfront in Detroit. To date, the Femme Beings Project has spent nearly 200 hours researching data in special collections in the Burton Historical Library located within the Detroit Public Library, which we will utilize as a foundation for this fellowship. We have identified additional archival sources (arrest records, court records, addresses, photographs) within the Burton Library, the City of Detroit’s Assessor’s Office (property records), and the State of Michigan Archives (arrest records, court records, addresses, photographs), that will further advance our research.
Our research aims to identify patterns or continuity within the collected data, focusing on whether the brothels are strategically situated to maximize visibility to potential customers and are positioned near businesses where large groups of men work nearby to optimize their financial success. The spatial data will push our research beyond the limitations of archival data to reveal the social and economic patterns associated with the lives and workspaces of historical sex workers. We aim to uncover insights about the locations they frequented, lived in, and worked within a specific historical and cultural context. Specifically, our research aims to analyze how proximity to certain types of establishments (like saloons, boarding houses, or entertainment venues), work sites (factories or dockyards), or transportation hubs affected their lives and opportunities. Additionally, we hope to identify patterns of spatial marginalization or integration within the broader urban or rural landscape. Our project aims to integrate personal narratives and contextual details within the mapped area. The Femme Beings Project was founded by anthropology graduate students at Wayne State University and includes community partners from Detroit’s Housing and Revitalization department, the State Historic Preservation Office, historians at the Hamtramck Historical Museum, and Wayne State University faculty and staff who are all focused on raising women’s voices from the rich historical past of Detroit. We take an intersectional approach through material culture to reconstruct women’s lived existence as sex workers with the societal factors that created the conditions. Our project-wide goals are fourfold. We combine historical documents and archaeological artifacts to 1) identify women who were sex workers; 2) understand the environments in which they worked and lived; 3) gain insight into sex work as a multi-faceted industry in Detroit; and 4) examine how public perceptions of sex work changed over time during the city’s transformative period of rapid industrial growth. The interactive map we create will function as a public resource, engaging our community partners, such as the Hamtramck Historical Museum, to share our findings and encourage discussions about new insights into women’s roles in Detroit’s social and economic history. By making this research accessible, we aim to promote a deeper understanding of the historical contributions and challenges faced by women involved in sex work, highlighting their vital role in shaping the city’s development. Working with GIS has sparked our interest in data visualization, and we enjoy discovering how technology can enhance research and storytelling in archaeology. We are also eager to expand our skills in GIS and explore other tools, like augmented reality and mobile technologies, as these can open up innovative ways to present and interpret data. Our approach to new technology is proactive. We are confident in our ability to learn and adapt, and we look forward to building on our skills with more advanced GIS and data visualization techniques. Learn more about the members of the Femme Beings Project here: femmebeingsproject.org |
Project Team
|
Map as Portrait: Canterbury Shaker Village, 1792-1992
|
Canterbury Shaker Village’s team is creating a deep map focusing on two understudied aspects of this southern New Hampshire village: the individuals who lived here and the built environment those individuals created, changed, and sustained. We seek both to map the people who traveled to create this place and to chart the place and its 200 years of constant change and, paradoxically enough, continuity.
Current knowledge and interpretation of the Village’s inhabitants is based generally on the Village’s leadership, whose records and recollections have been preserved and published. We wish to dig deeper into who the “rank and file” Shakers were. By first mapping basic vital information, we may begin to develop a new communal portrait of these utopians. Portrait seems the right word here: it’s from the Latin portrahere, which means "to drag out, reveal, or expose.” Current Goals These two foci—membership and the built environment—will provide the bases of a deep map, which we define as a multi-layered representation of a place and its creators and maintainers over time. We will be able to visualize patterns now only vaguely limned and understood. The Village’s Archives possesses the 2,000-plus membership cards maintained by the Canterbury Shakers. This, and a demographic study undertaken in the 1970s, provide the two bases for this mapping project. Surprisingly, more individuals born outside of New Hampshire joined the Shakers, and this deserves more study. The membership cards contain the following information: birth date, birthplace, most recent residence, admission (signing the covenant) date, and removal date (for those who left or died). The cards also include information on close family members. Such information will be double-checked and augmented with research in Federal and other censuses, tax records, and other historical vital records. The Village’s elders kept accounts of daily life and events, including the Biographical Church Record, as well as other records in the Village’s extensive archives. Second, the team will create a historical map of the Village and its historic physical changes from 1792, when the Meeting House, its first building, was constructed, to 1992, when the last Shaker died. Over the course of these two centuries, the Shakers constructed, altered, moved, and razed between 100 and 150 buildings, while creating a water system to sustain their elaborate mill system, agriculture, and community members’ health. The collection holds important maps of the Village and the surrounding area made by Shakers and later archaeologists, Shaker-written building histories, and eyewitness records in the forms of accounts, journals, visitors’ reports, photographs, and paintings. Future Goals The deep map, as outlined above, looks outward and inward: outward, in that we wish to chart the Village’s inhabitants’ journeys to this place and, in some instances, where they lived when they left the Village (and Shakerism). At the same time, we are mapping the Village’s changing built environment over its 200-year history. In the next phase of this project, we will chart the movement of inhabitants and visitors within the site, using not only archival records but also the Village’s collection of artifacts. Canterbury Shaker Village became a museum in 1969, when a few Shakers still lived in its buildings. The last Shaker here died in 1992. Though documents and objects had been sold or left the site over its history (with some returned), what remains constitutes the most intact collection of a Shaker village’s daily life among all the remaining historic Shaker village sites. (This excludes Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, the present home of several Shakers.) This deep map will become part of what we are provisionally calling a “digital Canterbury Shaker Village,” a website/database being created through a Lilly Endowment, Inc., Religion and Cultural Institutions grant awarded to the Village in November 2024. This five-year project will build the Village’s capacity for research, interpretation, and visitor programming. This NEH Institute, then, could not have come at a better time. We need guidance as we navigate creating a larger database of documents, audio, images, and material culture with which to deepen and share our knowledge of this historic site, its inhabitants, its visitors, and its impact in American life, history, and culture. With this Institute’s help, we wish to tell both the stories of individual Shakers in their physical and spiritual journeys as well as map the larger portrait of this communitarian Christian sect in rural New England. 
|
Project Team
|
Mapping Forest to Furniture: Sumter, SC’s Hidden-in-Plain-Sight Wood Industries History, 1923-2023
|
This project explores the transformation of Sumter, South Carolina from 1923 to 2023, tracing its shift from a cotton trading hub to a center of wood products manufacturing. Led by faculty and students at the University of South Carolina, in partnership with local, regional, and national organizations, the Wood Basket (https://digital.library.sc.edu/woodbasket) project highlights how Sumter's civic leadership, racial labor dynamics, and environmental consequences reshaped the city. Despite its profound historical and economic impact, this story remains largely untold.
At the turn of the 20th century, visitors to Sumter, the county seat, would have seen fields of cotton, bustling train depots, and storehouses for agricultural goods. By mid-century, that landscape was dominated by sawmills, furniture factories, plants that produced wood finishes (shellac, paint, and lacquer), and the world’s largest cooperage. This radical transition was neither inevitable nor linear, but the product of calculated choices. By leveraging proximity to vast hardwood forests, extensive railroad lines, accessible ports, and good roads, Sumter emerged as South Carolina’s "lumber capital." Between the World Wars, it became a hub for wood products manufacturing, with companies like Williams Furniture, Korn Industries, and Brooklyn Cooperage, a wholly owned subsidiary of American Sugar Refining Company (Domino Sugar), leading the way. Sumter’s evolution as a major manufacturer of wood products was neither preordained nor inevitable but rather the result of visionary planning and active community support. The devastation wrought by the boll weevil, which halved cotton yields between 1920 and 1924, spurred this transformation. With agriculture in crisis, Sumter’s civic leaders sought expert advice and made a deliberate and innovative pivot to wood manufacturing, rather than textile mills so common in southern cities. The ripple effects of these changes are visible today in Sumter’s built environment, its brownfields, and its legacy industries. By articulating how a "second city" redefined itself, our work is revealing how local decisions shaped long-term regional and economic trajectories. We are exploring a range of themes illustrating Sumter’s development: o Civic Reinvention After Agricultural Collapse: The boll weevil infestation left Sumter reeling. In response, the Board of Trade engaged national consultants Lockwood, Green, and Company, industrial surveyors, and Frank Van Ness and Associates, industrial engineers. Their plans identified key assets: old-growth hardwoods, underemployed labor, and strong transportation networks. Local figures championed this shift, rallying support for industrial recruitment. When Brooklyn Cooperage agreed to relocate to Sumter in 1927, it received a deed to 70 acres southeast of downtown and adjacent to Turkey Creek for a new three-knife stave mill with a sawmill and head plant, the world’s largest of its kind. o Wood Products as Civic Identity: Williams Furniture and Korn Industries were among the South’s premier furniture producers, challenging High Point, NC. Marie Kirkpatrick, Williams’ first designer, introduced a range of styles. Specializing in mid-priced solid wood furniture, Williams ranked sixth in furniture sales regionally, while Korn produced a more upscale line. In the 1960s, Williams’ Village Square furniture line, designed by Charles Horton, was featured on "The Price is Right,” symbolizing the city's industrial success. Williams also supplied the Holiday Inn hotel chain’s furniture from the 1950s through the 1970s. o Labor and Unionization: Uncommon for the Deep South, Williams workers organized early, joining the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America in 1935. The Congress of Industrial Organizations arrived in 1942 and soon organized Williams, along with Brooklyn Cooperage, Korn Industries, and other Sumter-based wood products plants under the United Furniture Workers of America Local 273. Unionization at Williams lasted until the late 1960s when the locally owned plant and its extensive timberland were sold to Georgia Pacific. o Environmental Legacy: The wood industry’s prosperity came at a cost. Beginning in the 1980s, abandoned factories and chemical residues from finishing plants left behind brownfields. Sites like Turkey Creek still bear the scars. Nearby neighborhoods are plagued by disinvestment, the result of environmental injustice. Our research began in 2017 with an Historic Resource Study for the National Park Service’s Congaree National Park. That work, based on archival research, has expanded to include digitization projects, oral histories, GIS mapping, exhibitions (both actual and virtual), collecting, new scholarship, and public programming. Students and scholars have worked alongside Sumter residents in this county seat of 43,000 to gather artifacts, record memories, and build a more complete picture of the city’s industrial past. |
Project Team
|
Pauliceia 2.0: Collaborative Mapping of the History of São Paulo
|
The Pauliceia 2.0 Project is a collaborative platform mapping São Paulo’s history (1870–1940). Currently featuring 119 layers primarily created by academic researchers, the platform seeks to expand its reach to community groups, associations, and other non-academic entities, aiming to diversify its contributions. The current phase of this project focuses on two goals: (1) developing outreach strategies and technical adaptations to facilitate broader participation and (2) conducting a prototype deep mapping experiment for the neighborhoods of Bom Retiro and Liberdade, selected for their rich historical significance and existing partnerships.
The project utilizes diverse datasets, including historical cartography (1868–1930), property numbering books, and archival materials provided by researchers and community contributors. These resources support efforts to cross-reference historical layers and generate new insights. By engaging non-academic participants and enhancing accessibility, this initiative aspires to democratize access to São Paulo’s history, enriching public understanding of the city’s past while promoting open science and public history practices. We are convinced that the Pauliceia 2.0 platform, enhanced with deep mapping technology and strategies, enabling different communities to discover, share, and connect their own stories. 
|
Project Team
|
