Proposal: relational micro-archaeology of pollen and seeds in erased cultural enclaves
A speculative concept for a means of learning about historical and ancestral food, health, and cultivation practices through micro-archeological practices.
In the Seeing Providence Chinatown project, I have focused on archival (primarily photographic) research and spatial/multisensory reconstruction as a pathway to understanding and being in relationship with the lives of erased community members. While this approach has led to exciting and immersive results, it has been challenging to recover or reconstruct more intimate details such as food, language, personal narrative and emotion. Food memories persist in some of the dishes prepared by today’s descendants of early Chinatown residents, as do stories from family histories (and the languages they speak), but these are mostly absent from institutional archives. What other lineages have sustained recoverable ancestral knowledge? I think of Ann Chen’s work in speculative historic soundscapes, the paper Ann shared on spatially reconstructing a market from an old song’s lyrics, as well as Yakov Kim’s work in recording songs by 1st generation Koryo Saram in Kazakhstan.
But in reading about the Market Street Chinatown Archaeological Project, by the Stanford Archaeology Center, the Stanford University Department of Anthropology, History San Jose, and the Chinese Historical and Cultural Project, I was stunned at the kind of knowledge it was possible to recover from soil samples — pollen spores traceable to Chinese heritage produce such as bitter gourd, peach, and jujube, evidence of various brassicas, as well as agave, soybean, and chili pepper. The analysis by PaleoResearch and the MSCAP team suggested vegetable markets, food preparation, medicinal and agricultural activities.
I began thinking of an early question that had been stuck in my mind — whether any artifacts or knowledge was actually still present at the site of Providence Chinatown, buried under Empire Street. The Public Archaeology Lab, which has conducted documentation in Snowtown and at the Providence Mall build site confirmed that they had no records of digs on Empire Street. And since no foundations have been dug there since Chinatown’s destruction in 1914, the only disturbances have been for underground pipes, sewer, gas and electrical utilities. If we opened the street today and dug ~8 feet down, what would we find? Would there be a possibility of a Jurassic Park-like recovery of a lost world from preserved microscopic remnants? Considering the likelihood that pollens and seeds are likely waiting below, I’ve begun to think of the empty cast iron tree grates in Empire Street as a kind of portal to the past.
What’s more, given my work in community science, and specifically in community-based microscopic work and DIY microscopes, as well as in creative microphotographic workshops, the idea of microscopic investigations into these kinds of histories was extremely resonant to me. I wonder if there’s a DIY version of the pollen extraction or flotation methods described in the MSCAP papers. Think how deep the food/plant/seed cultural roots go (how many diasporas carried seeds with them) and how intimate a relationship with one’s ancestors that could enable. Could people sift through and photograph pollens their own ancestors left behind, and infer what was being cooked? Could the dishes be reproduced? I could imagine running workshops to recover and take portraits of ancestral family pollen.
I had to try it–so I tried using the “box microscope” I built last year as a part of my MICROCOSMOS workshop series, and tried looking at pollens from a sunflower Ying Ye had brought to the Seeing Providence Chinatown opening. The landscapes I saw there were stunning–like Hubble telescope photographs.
This could open a new space for re-existencia (see reference on this page) through culinary, health, and agricultural practices, building with such work as the Ssiyagi project, Second Generation Seeds, Alexis Nikole (@blackforager), Sean Chen’s translation of historic Chinese cookbooks, and more.
I’m intensely curious about the potential for these techniques at other sites as well, including Snowtown in Providence (a historic erased Black neighborhood, c1830), Pachappa Camp (the first Korean community in North America, c1905), or even sites of personal familial history, such as the house my mother was born in Korea, and in which many of our ancestors probably lived going back centuries. What did they eat (differently?) 150 years ago — before colonization, or even before globalization brought red peppers to Korea? What was fermenting in their onggi? I’m reminded of efforts to analyze fermented remains from Korean and Japanese archaeological sites, and Ananda Gabo’s suggestion of attempting to resuscitate those cultures.
I’m also reminded of the stark differences I saw on a recent visit to Kyrgystan with my partner Aisha Jandosova; one afternoon we spent eating and visiting Supara ethno-village, where traditional dishes are served in a variety of traditional reconstructed buildings, including an interactive children’s museum where kids milled grain, made pottery, and tried sitting in old Kyrgyz saddles. What made this place so different from the morning’s visit to the national museum of history, which showed hundreds of beautiful Kyrgyz artifacts in well-lit, thoroughly explained exhibits? Why weren’t we outraged at the idea of a capitalist project selling Kyrgyz history back to the Kyrgyz people? Quite to the contrary, it was a beautiful and intimate experience that was fundamentally not touristic — no White people were present at all, and I seemed to be the only person present whose ancestors weren’t part of the story. It wasn’t Jurassic Park at all — more like an ancestral Jesa celebration than a cynical corporate exercise.
I’m not sure what the best next steps might be. My research in Providence Chinatown could help identify likely sites for soil sampling — by the old grocery site at 56 Empire, perhaps there might have been produce sold on the sidewalk, or vegetables in the yard, or maybe in trash bins by the stairs behind 53–69 Empire. Would a core sample dug in the sidewalk in front of Cafe La France bring up anything? Or should we try digging down to the basements under the On Leong Merchant’s Association? Would produce have been kept in the cellar? Would descendants of inhabitants of Chinatown be interested in collaborating on this kind of research, and what would the potential findings mean to them?
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