Archaeologist digs for understanding

By David Rolfe
Media General News Service
Published: August 13, 2008

“Is that a rock?” Hartley asks Alexandra Masem, “or a piece of glass?”

His affable tone carries a hint of South Carolina drawl, in the cadence of actor Jimmy Stewart.
Masem straightens so that she is sitting on her heels, brushing aside a strand of hair with the back of her gloved hand. Her forehead glistens with beads of sweat. At 9:30 a.m., the sun is already above the tree line and the temperature is rising quickly.

“I don’t know,” she tells Hartley.

“That’s a good answer,” he says with a nod.

Hartley suggests that she carefully expose the object with a chopstick, which reveals a grooved surface. Further cleaning with a soft-bristle brush shows the object to be the broken remains of a Moravian tobacco pipe bowl.

Hartley, Old Salem’s director of archaeology, has been teaching the techniques of archaeology for a quarter-century now, ever since he was asked to lead a field school at Old Salem in 1983. His work has, colleagues say, been critical to historical research and preservation in the area. And, as Hartley says, understanding the past and its people helps understand people today.

This is the 16th summer of the Historical Archaeology Field School led by Hartley in conjunction with Old Salem and UNC Greensboro. Since 2000, the “classroom” of the school has centered on the site of the Schaffner/Krause pottery operation and the first log cabin in Old Salem.
Dozens of graduate and undergraduate students have taken the month long course, which, among other things, teaches the basics of excavation, mapping, artifact analysis, photography and observation.

Each season’s dig has revealed new information about the pottery shop, the last to operate in Salem until its demise about the turn of the 20th century. This year, the students were looking for the pottery warehouse, which had been buried during road work in the mid-20th century.

“We’ve been digging for a long time,” Hartley says. “I’ve been digging for 37 years. And I’m beginning to figure it out, somewhat. Not entirely, thank goodness. If you know it all, there’s no point in digging.”

Six student archaeologists kneel on pads around a 25-by-5-foot trench in a grassy field along Old Salem Road, a pottery-shard’s throw from the Old Salem coffee pot.
Reaching down into the clay-walled trench, they scrape patiently with small trowels around projecting bits of brick, rock and the slowly emerging detritus of the long-vanished pottery work yard.

Hartley, 66, is dressed in khakis and a short-sleeve shirt of faded green cotton. A trowel and work gloves are in his back pocket. An Old Salem baseball cap sits atop his white hair. He has a full beard to match.

Hartley works his way around the site, speaking to each student, asking questions, making suggestions. He asks for their thoughts on what the objects they are finding suggest about the story of the site.

Born and raised in Darlington, S.C., Hartley graduated from the University of South Carolina in 1960 with a major in English and a minor in history. After a three-year tour in the Navy (“I had two brothers in the Marines, one in the Army Air Corps, and one in the infantry. I thought we needed one in the Navy”), he returned to Darlington and took a job as a reporter for the local television station.

“The most interesting part about that job being in the place where I grew up,” Hartley recalls, “was that it began to inform me ... in a way that I had never been exposed to, going behind the scenes and asking questions. I’ve always been interested in the history of place and people, particularly the history of the Carolinas.

“I began to think about, ‘Who are we? Who are we as a people? Who are Carolinians? And why are we who we are?’”
He realized that journalism would not allow him to delve into these questions with the depth he desired. So Hartley decided to try anthropology, in particular historical archaeology.
He returned to USC in 1971 to earn a degree in anthropology, and at the same time showed up at the door of Stanley Southern, an archaeologist he had met while working as a reporter. Southern was digging a Revolutionary War site at Charlestown Landing, S.C., and Hartley asked to be taken on as a member of his field crew.

“I was lucky,” Hartley says. He was entering archaeology just as the country was gearing up for the 1976 Bicentennial, and there was plenty of money around for digging Revolutionary War sites.

For the next four years, Hartley spent two to three months at a time digging at a variety of sites, gaining field experience that he says is harder to come by today.
The field experience was useful when, after completing a master’s degree at UNC Chapel Hill, he was asked to teach a field school at Old Salem in 1983.

“The second year that I taught the field school was when I began to be aware that there was more to this place than Salem,” Hartley says. “There wasn’t any real attention to what Wachovia is, and how it might play in the Moravian story.”

His work in Old Salem led Hartley to apply for a grant through the Winston-Salem Foundation to do a comprehensive study of the Wachovia Tract itself, which, according to John Larson, Old Salem’s vice president for restoration, had never been precisely identified “… in the broader context of its presence, currently, in the landscape of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County.”

One of the little-known corners of the Wachovia Tract was the village of Bethania.
“While working to re-establish Wachovia as a unique place,” Larson says, “he (Hartley) got involved in Bethania. And this was in part based on the Northwest Beltway issue that was going to be laid in between Bethabara and Bethania, or even ... almost through Bethania itself.”

As Hartley hiked and drove and surveyed the area around Bethania, which at that time was not considered truly Moravian, he discovered 18th-century features in the landscape that still existed. Together with Martha Brown, who helped him with the survey of Bethania and the Wachovia Tract - and whom he married in 1998 - Hartley was instrumental in expanding Bethania’s National Register district from 50 to 500 acres.

With the expansion of Bethania’s historical borders, the path of the Northwest Beltway project was diverted away from the village.
Larson calls Hartley “one of the unsung heroes of the preservation and research about the Moravian presence in North Carolina,” and credits him with raising historical awareness of Moravian heritage, not just in Bethania, but in the congregations of Friedberg, Friedland and Hope.

After nearly 10 years of cobbling together various state and local grants studying the Wachovia Tract, Hartley was asked by Larson to establish an archaeology lab in 1993 and resuscitate the archaeology program in Old Salem. Hartley came on staff at Old Salem in 1998.

Today, in the archaeology lab -a defunct Coca-Cola plant on South Marshall Street - Hartley removes his ball cap and leans back in his swivel chair. Behind him is a painting of a clipper ship under full sail.

“The general view is that we (archaeologists) do square holes in the ground, and occasionally find something that looks good on a museum shelf,” Hartley says.

The reality, he says, is that understanding the people of a given era by a “sound and rigorous examination of their stuff, their use of the landscape” creates an understanding of identity and culture. And that’s important to the future, he says.

“If a process is operating now, and it’s been operating for some time, then there’s a good likelihood that process will continue.”

On the final day of digging at the pottery site, Hartley surveys the square holes and declares the dig a success. His students established the location of the lost warehouse and its precise distance from the kiln.

“That’s one of the values of actually seeing where things are on the ground,” Hartley explains. “You look at ‘em on a map, and distance tends to fool with your head.”.
One of his students brings him something he had just dug up.

Hartley turns the piece over in his hand. It is another clay pipe bowl, carved with a wide-eyed face.

“Let’s hold this out,” he says. “If we get (tourists) by today, this will be a good little thing to say ‘This came out today.’”

David Rolfe can be reached at 727-7249 or at .