A Behavioral Archaeologist Responds

The final contribution to the 2010 Society for American Archaeology Forum, “Assessing Michael B. Schiffer and his Behavioral Archaeology,” is Schiffer’s response to issues raised by Michael J. O’Brien and Alexander Bentley, Robert L. Kelly, Linda S. Cordell, Stephen Plog, and Diane Gifford-Gonzalez in their published contributions. This paper addresses several long festering issues, reiterates and clarifies some positions, and presents a few unpublished views.     

Recovering a "Lost" Story Using Oral History: The United States Supreme Court's Historic Green v. New Kent County, Virginia, Decision

Abstract In 1965, New Kent County, located just east of Richmond,Virginia, became the setting for the one of the most importantschool desegregation cases since Brown v. Board of Education.Ten years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared "separate butequal" unconstitutional, both public schools in New Kent, theGeorge W. Watkins School for blacks and the New Kent Schoolfor whites, remained segregated. In 1965, however, local blacksand the Virginia State NAACP initiated a legal challenge tosegregated schools, hoping to initiate desegregation where theprocess had yet to begin and to accelerate the process in areaswhere token desegregation was the norm. In 1968, the U.S. SupremeCourt decision in Charles C. Green v. the School Board of NewKent County forced New Kent County and localities across thestate and nation to fulfill the promise of Brown. While thecase has been part of the court records since it was decidedin 1968, it has remained largely unknown to the general publicand many scholars of the era. This article is an attempt touse the tool of oral history to present the people and the storybehind Green v. New Kent County and to add another piece tothe puzzle that was school desegregation in this country.     

Cycle camping in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland

ABSTRACT

One of the most important aspects of cycling’s impact on Ireland in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods is that it made recreational trips to the countryside easier for the urban middle class and better-off workers who could afford to buy bicycles. As this article shows, many Irish and other cyclists in this period combined their love of cycling and the countryside with camping trips. Cycle camping appealed to enthusiasts for a number of reasons, including its relative cheapness, the welcome temporary release that it brought from conventional urban modes of living, and the perceived mental and physical health benefits that it brought. A close examination of the activities and mindset of cycle campers in Ireland reveals that they had much in common with their contemporaries, the “muscular Christian” enthusiasts for sports.