Things Take Time

Brian Kenny
 

In the Spring of 2021, casual readings in journal subscriptions fomented an idea that things were not entirely right, and that Archaeology could do better.  A community of scholars standing on the shoulders of Giants in the fields of Anthropology and Regional Public History took to an idea that George McJunkin was a ‘set piece’ tale, a self-contained section of New Mexican history, which a writer might rearrange in an elaborate or conventional pattern for maximum effect. 

For forty years or more, there had been a steady ‘churn’ in McJunkin short stories in the popular press, in the rag trade of hotel, tourism and travel magazines, and in weekend news subscription Sunday supplements, much of it centered on McJunkin’s bone pit discovery near Folsom and the subsequent excavation of the Folsom Site.  The place, the story, and the cowboy were famous regionally and world-wide, and much of the redeployed data and information was derived from Dr. George Agogino’s and Franklin Folsom’s works in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, all of which was taken as truth-telling meant to elevate McJunkin and herald his reputation as an everyman who deserved more credit and recognition in all aspects of his life.  George McJunkin is a foundational story for New Mexico.  

Earlier works tried to moniker George McJunkin as the ‘Othello of Union County New Mexico,’ possibly because McJunkin was Black as was the Moor, the main character in Shakespeare’s play The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. More likely, the George McJunkin foundational myth should have placed him as a modern Gilgamesh – there was a great flood that devastated the region, and George McJunkin traveled widely and had significant friendships and exploits on the road to eternal life and immortality.  However, everything fades, and the Folsom site, and the long-lasting Folsom hotel (McJunkin’s death site) and the stories recounted are the nearest to immortality that Gilgamesh McJunkin can achieve.

Contrary to the epic tales noted above, meant for marketing and money-making, the processualism paradigm of American Archaeology is the obverse side of the coin for the George McJunkin story. 

The obverse side is its 'head' or front principal surface, and as such, it represents the Processual paradigm of American Archaeology, a methodology that discounts McJunkin’s story in a variety of ways. We see this approach in the excellent scientific works on Folsom written by David Meltzer, and in review science articles written by Stephen Nash and others.

Processualism involves theories of general processes which explain variation and change, and progress is based in outcomes that assume objectivity grounded in observer-oriented interpretation. Archaeologists credit the origins of such scientific approaches to positivist philosophers such as Carl Hempel. 

Processual Archaeology argues that ideas and theories mean nothing without an ability to prove them. 

The scientific method applied to archaeology prioritizes objectivity, while the material record of archaeology ensures replicability.  What archaeologists find gets compared to what already was found, while newer or advancing technologies (materials science and physics) provide for a changing view or a segue in thought and new classes of isotopes and molecules concentrated or modified in variations by human agency and cultural practices.  Such additive approaches build upon the fixed past, and they sometimes change knowledge and beliefs in revolutionary thought.

The coin flip is the push pull dialectic that informs the George McJunkin story today, and if you get heads, you get processualism. If tails, you get romanticism and travelogue approaches.

Into this mix, American society has injected a driving need for more equity and representation. This is a social demand based partially on the founding principles of the Nation, and in the contract strengthened and challenged in popular culture and law after World War II with the successes of natural rights and freedoms in the civil rights era. 

In the new mix, Anthropologists, Archaeologists and Historians write of George McJunkin as an early exemplar of a man rising to full equity in a society otherwise flawed, and of the cowboy ethic — in and around Folsom Village (and the West) — as the social element in a natural history ecological crucible that demonstrates in situ change. Bonnie Pitblado has noted how George McJunkin is used to thrill archaeology students and tell of the discipline’s origin stories (as they trot him out on a regular basis). It is the dominant culture White Caucasian scientific version of the up-by-the bootstraps self-made person story imposed on McJunkin to affirm philosophically and materially that order and progress exist in the world.

Having trained as a processual and post-processual archaeologist, I felt disquietude each time I bumped into George McJunkin.

Post-processual archaeologists view objects or artifacts in more subjective ways. They must account for the context that the artifacts were found in, and for other objects found in association, as well as considering scale (e.g., individual vs site vs landscape vs region) and human behaviors, and as well the culture of the period studied. Such an approach allows one to reach interpretive and factual conclusions which can be offered for rejection.

Things take time, and the Gregorian centennial anniversaries of George McJunkin’s passing (January 2022) —and the incontrovertible professional affirmation of the antiquity of the Folsom Site by American archaeologists (September 2027) — allowed a five-year window of opportunity to calm that disquietude.  

At the 2021 Pecos Conference at Mancos Colorado, archaeologists reacted positively to a brief notional presentation that the profession could now move to examine a missing element of the story — the historical archaeological sites, all greater than 100 years old, that George McJunkin built, occupied and shared with cowboys and the Village of Folsom — and thus “Team McJunkin” was christened and valorized to find and engage the post-processual archaeological elements of the obverse side of George McJunkin.

This would be a sample of known sites, a small cluster of locations within in a wider McJunkin sphere of existence which ranged from 1851 - 1922 within the region of Texas and New Mexico, including Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, and northern Mexico. These sites would contain in situ materials which related to George McJunkin’s adult life and more sedentary existence after the railroad prompted the founding of Folsom New Mexico in 1888.

Team McJunkin, a mix of archaeologists, historians, Folsom community members and interested correspondents, visited the Village of Folsom and northeastern New Mexico on multiple occasions from September 2021 through June 2023. 

The team gathered survey-level data through archaeological fieldwork to confirm the existence of in situ historical deposits associated with McJunkin. 

The team also engaged in archival research in museums and databases, literature reviews, oral history and ethnographic-style interviews, and extensive correspondence with colleagues and interested parties.  Applying an open-source approach, public presentations of preliminary results allowed team members to obtain feedback from professionals and the public at large.

The past two years of work have been tactical in nature and contingent in multiple ways.  No official permits were obtained, and there are no State, Federal, Section 106 NHPA, NAGPRA, or development actions which serve as a project driver. 

Everything done to date was an act of imagination conducted on private lands with the explicit permission of the local community and the ranching families of the Folsom community.

As a principal engaged in the effort, I want to clear up one issue that keeps coming up.  Why is this George McJunkin historical archaeology project valuable to me? For me, the answer was spelled out in what l noted to a friend about it (the project) not being about giving " credit " to McJunkin [ a repeating problem over which some archaeologists seem to want to contend ] :

This project is not about demonstrating credit.  

Our work is a pure play on the reality that McJunkin's historical sites are worthy enough for study in their own right — although McJunkin discovered a bone bed paleontological specimen site that later became a famous archaeological site. McJunkin’s discovery and subsequent fame are useful prerequisites for us, but only to gain wider readership and appreciation for the utility of continued archaeological research.

McJunkin associated historical sites have everything an archaeologist might need in a set of archaeological sites: features, artifacts, contexts in situ and disturbed, charcoal, seeds, depth, activity areas, and administrative documents and databases and records to probe, and so on. Likewise, the modern community of Folsom has a historical past and a deep and unique set of oral histories and ethnographic traditions that provide everything an anthropologist might need to study culture and subcultures, and human behavior at scale.

George McJunkin's historical sites contain data sets that are unused to date, so in seeking this work and these materials appropriately we are also engaging in some measure of capacity building for the Folsom community and future work in northeastern New Mexico.

Other social scientists in the West are working the historical cowboy, colonial, Black, Native, and western genres as well, giving more agency and humanity to all ancestors in our diverse society, so it is an interesting sphere in which to address our professional career talents as Westernists. 

There Is a Lot of Work to Do Down Range of Where We Are Now

There is change afoot as archaeologists turn their attention to issues like “decolonizing” the archaeological profession, and how to recruit members of diverse communities to join our professional practice.  

The historical sites we visited are likely to reveal added information about a multidimensional Black cowboy who was well-practiced in the arts, skilled at making a living, and doing so on his own terms despite facing significant adversity.  It is a compelling story when told well, and research from an historical archaeological perspective will produce added details which are additive and go beyond what is known already.  We might learn a good deal about inequality and equality and the leveling of personhood.  

Since archaeologists classically investigate the causes of inequality and injustice contextually, these sites represent that ‘something more,’ that useful in situ context that we might seeking.  George McJunkin’s historical sites may provide the place and a context and theme to introduce Black, Indigenous and People of Color to the scholarly work of prehistory and history of the southwest for a season, or for multiple seasons in a field school setting for entry-level scholars. 

We do not really know yet, but Team McJunkin is inspired to think that good archaeological and archival work could be combined to confirm and strengthen the McJunkin story and add new and incontrovertible facts to our understanding in ways that we do not currently understand.

The artifacts and historical records suggest that George McJunkin was on the side of the Colonists in a Capitalist system, that he owned private property and had a keen sense of property, that he demonstrated Agency, and that he actively built his reputational status with his clothes, his tools and his built environment, and the discovery of the bone pit.  his leads us to wonder if we can talk about George McJunkin and his acts of “deep play”  in ways that Clifford Geertz similarly described deep play in his famous essay about the Balinese Cockfight.

George was a cowboy, so he was all about movement across the landscape.  Constant movement on the landscape brought McJunkin opportunity of knowledge, work, obligation, money, success, and a modicum of personal reputation and fame, even before he found the Folsom bone pit. 

So, let us look at other ways to theorize – let us look at movement, deep play within the system, strong belief in personal agency, reputation, and private ownership.  If we get to dig in these historical sites in a field school setting of the future, how much or how little of that shows up in the archaeological record as material fact to substantiate these proto hypotheses?  His personal and community artifacts lead me to wonder how he came by his personal agency and personhood, because the artifacts seem to show that he was actively seeking opportunities to demonstrate his skills and build his reputational status in the community. ​​​​​​​

• His spring box at George Spring on his homestead still functions after a hundred years, as do his fences, corrals, and irrigation ditches.

• A photo shows George on horseback, wearing a white shirt and playing polo at a community event.  It is said that he always wore a white shirt, even when cowboying or working as the ranch supervisor, and he kept it clean to demonstrate that he could work physically and still properly maintain his attire.

• His saddle and its maker’s marks reveal an expensive piece of equipment built in Cheyenne Wyoming by a well-respected saddle maker.  We checked at museums in the region, and all the saddles are local, but George’s saddle was higher quality, more expensive, and more exotic.  

Do these pieces of material culture demonstrate that George McJunkin was actively building his reputation among fellow cowboys and townsfolk?  It makes us wonder if we came to town and saw that saddle on a well-trained horse, if we would thing the owner was a man of means and skill and high reputation?

The things that McJunkin gathered in his movements got stuck in his historical sites during his later more sedentary adult life, and these locations may help represent the retired cowboy, ranch supervisor, and avocational scientist.  McJunkin’s sites have depth, context, material culture, and a variety of ecofactual remains and contexts, which can be subjected to traditional methods of analysis, with modern technologies bringing additional insights to these problems of understanding and appreciation. 

So, what is it about George McJunkin’s historical archaeological sites that professionals have missed?  We have been looking the gift horse in the mouth all along (literally). Now that we have identified his historical sites, we can speculate that George McJunkin was famous — but for the right reasons that we now have chance to extend and expand upon that idea more thoroughly.

The George McJunkin story is 172 years old (birth), or 135 years old (founding of Folsom), or one hundred (historic archaeology), 50 (Franklin Folsom publication), or 25 years old (David Meltzer’s Folsom Site excavation), depending on where one might choose to plug into the story.

Yes, he discovered bones that later led to important archaeological discoveries, but George becomes more real and less tangential to our discipline if we look at his quotidian life and the very ordinary sites that he built and where he worked and played.

We will need goodwill, institutional participation and newer creative methods to strengthen diversity in the profession. Team McJunkin was inspired to wonder about some of these issues.  If you are inspired to wonder about such opportunities, Team McJunkin will need your help. 

Bio:
Brian Kenny is an Applied Anthropologist and Southwestern Archaeologist. He worked for Colorado State University providing cultural, environmental, and climate change analysis to the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force SAF/IEE program at the Pentagon. Prior work included permanent employment in federal agencies for twenty years, and Arizona state agencies for twenty-five years. 

Brian holds degrees from Thunderbird the American Graduate School of International Management and from Arizona State University.  

Between 1995 and 2002, Brian created and lead the Southwestern Archaeology Southwest Interest Group and published the ‘Got Caliche’ online and email newsletter service using Web 1.0 Internet applications; He also founded a non-profit organization, Southwestern Archaeology, Inc., which was repurposed to serve as the organizational sponsor for the annual Pecos Conference (https://www.pecosconference.org/)

​​​​​​​