Research Trip to Eleuthera, Bahamas

I recently took a week-long trip, at the request of the Cape Eleuthera Institute, to the island of Eleuthera, Bahamas. The purpose of the trip was to investigate the heritage of the island in hopes of organizing a series of field projects on the island in the coming years. Rich Veit of Monmouth University also came down for a couple of days and we visited a number of  locations showcasing the island's fascinating cultural heritage.

Tarpum Bay, Eleuthera, Bahamas

Monmouth University @ SHA 2012

This year marked my first post-PhD experience at an annual Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) conference. What an experience to see the conference "from the other side" of the academic divide, as ephemeral as the divide is in a student-friendly organization like the SHA. The weather was nice, food was great, and excellent nearby attractions like the USS Constellation were close to the conference hotel. As a recently hired assistant professor at Monmouth University, it was exciting to be part of a new group of researchers and presenters at a conference I have attended regularly since 2004.

USS Constellation (photo: John Schlagcheck)

Introducing a Zombie Habitat Model

One of my primary interests as a geographic information systems (GIS) educator is exploring new ways of teaching GIS, and spatial analysis in particular. Lessons about network analysis and habitat modeling are some of the most difficult to explain because of their technical nature - not to mention the complicated process of arranging and changing data to accomplish various analyses.

Updates to the Virtual Rosewood Research Site

Greetings,

I have made two major updates to the Virtual Rosewood Research Site (VRRP) in the past couple of months. The first update is the addition of oral history transcriptions to the VRRP Data Warehouse. The second major update involves the completion of the Virtual Rosewood online world.

15 Winters in Rosewood, Florida

How cold is it? Is it raining? Will it be sunny today? Questions like these have surely been asked by humans since the dawn of time. Weather certainly plays an important role in human society. As such, scholars are increasingly looking at the ways weather affected the past (see Durschmied's The Weather Factor and Fagan's The Little Ice Age for recent examples).

The 1923 riot which destroyed Rosewood was actually a week-long series of events beginning on Monday January 1st and concluding with the complete destruction of all black-owned buildings on Saturday January 6th. Many of the survivors were forced to spend at least one night hiding in the cold swamps while thier homes were destroyed. Decades later several of these survivors related how that winter was one of the coldest they could remember. Was it? Daily weather observations from nearby Cedar Key warehoused by the National Climatic Data Center provide the answer.