Our friends at Thompson & Knight, LLP and the Houston Society of the Archaeological Institute of America have asked us to extend an invitation to TFN members and supporters in the Houston area to attend an event next week:
The First Wild, Wild West:
Jamestown Archaeology and the Origins of Modern America
featuring Dr. Bill Kelso
5:30 to 6:30 pm
Tuesday, November 15
Thompson & Knight, LLP
333 Clay Street, Houston, Texas, 77002
( free parking at the Allen Center Garage)
The topic should be of interest to TFN Insider devotees:
“The lecture will explore the earliest successful English settlement in North America and remember those days before the Founding Fathers crafted the First Amendment and separated church from state. In this Thanksgiving season, we’re going all the way back to Jamestown, where the first representative government in English-speaking North America, the Virginia General Assembly, met inside the Anglican Church just outside the fortress walls where Pocahontas married John Rolfe in 1614. There is no better way to see how much progress has been made during these last 400 years in America than to look with clear eyes and the best scientific tools available at the early colonial foundations of our modern world.”
The event is free and open to the public, but they do ask that you register to reserve your seat beforehand (which you can do by clicking here).
Speaking as an archaeologist myself, it is too bad that you cannot get the current conservative members of the Texas SBOE to attend this presentation. They might learn a little something about real American history and archaeology. The importance of the archaeology is simply this. It has the power to “fill in” knowledge gaps in the historical record. It also has the ability to “temper” and “correct” the historical record. For example, history may say that one thing was happening in some particular corner of the historical record for Jamestown. However, material culture remains in archaeological context are the direct residue of what people WERE ACTUALLY DOING, and they often tells us exactly what people were “actually doing.”
Of course, no “true” Texas Christian conservative would attend a lecture like this. Most American archaeologists that I have known drink more alcohol than Jack Daniels can produce, cuss worse than any sailor you ever heard, have worse sexual morals than a New Orleans whore, despise Christian fundamentalists, believe—almost to the man or woman—in evolution, and have only darkened the doors of churches for the purposes of archaeological excavations or weddings. And those are their virtuous points.
However, I would hasten to add that their are exceptions to this general rule. I am familiar with some of Bill Kelso’s work, but I have never had the pleasure of meeting the man. Therefore, I give him full benefit of the doubt and assume that he is not like the others.
Charles
P.S. A lot of the “others” are friends of mine.