In “Without a Roadmap: Reflections on the Emergent Methods of Community-Based Archaeology,” I examine the ways that working with community can shape and transform research design over the course of a project.

The article focuses on three practices that emerged from, changed through, or responded to community relationships during my doctoral work on the Old D’Hanis Archaeological Mapping Project: oral history, archival work, and close-range photogrammetry. For this blog post, I take a closer look at how community scaffolded the process of photogrammetry, from initial access to the site to the eventual outputs and outcomes that the models made possible.

Settings: Binghamton, New York; D’Hanis, Texas; Eugene, Oregon
Dates: April-August 2017 (Act 1); October-December 2018 (Act 2); September 2020-August 2023 (Act 3)

Act 1

April 2017. I use Google Earth to zoom in on the outline of a structure. In aerial view, the gray lines of its walls show a large rectangular ruin, its size surprising for a small rural town, with a footprint nearly as large as the 19^th century Catholic church. The ruin sits meters from a county road I had driven down a handful of times before, but it had not been visible from the street, obscured by a fence, brush, trees, the growth of decades.

Months later, at a church picnic in D’Hanis, TX, I mention the ruin in the satellite image to a group of people I’ve just met. They shout for another man and make an introduction. He owns the property, they tell me; he can show me the building. Polo speaks to me in rapid Spanish, switches to English to tease me for not keeping up, and we strike a friendship that scaffolds the project for years to come. A few days later, we drive in his pickup truck across the dry creek bed and I see the rubble-rock walls of the structure through the brush for the first time.

^{Image Credit: Structure 1, Old D’Hanis Archaeological Mapping Project. Photo by P. Markert, November 2018.}

Act 2

In October 2018, Polo, my advisor Ruth, and I walk through the ruin. We push aside branches and duck under a wasp’s nest as Polo tells us about his childhood memories of the building before it burned. The house had originally been a stagecoach stop and residence, built by German migrants in the 1850s. It was eventually purchased by his grandparents, who had fled Mexico in the early decades of the 20^th century to escape the Revolution. I remember it being so big, he tells us. But it is big, even now, through adult eyes – with six rooms on the ground floor, a cellar, and a dog trot opening that was later screened-in as a room for the children to sleep. Before the fire, it would have also had a half-story under its sloped roof.

My crew arrives days later, and we begin clearing vegetation. It takes two full days, but by the time we are done, the reddened sandstone walls of the building and its limestone addition are clearly visible for the first time in decades. We pull out tape measurers and graph paper for elevation drawings and draw sketch maps of the rooms, recording surface finds: a melted glass goblet, fragments of ceramic, an old gas stove, a rusted metal bedframe with a tree growing through it. As the crew finishes notes, I take out a dSLR camera and begin to take photographs, first with a board and scale, and then for close-range photogrammetry at systematic intervals around the building.

The Texas sky in early winter is clouded, consistent: ideal conditions that reduce contrast and shadow in the photographs. Through the camera lens, I pay attention to the dimensions of surfaces and wall fall, the shape of rooms and the transitions between them. The process takes longer than if I had done it by drone (which years later, I use for the large church ruin down the road), but it affords a type of noticing that I later realize informs the architectural analyses in significant ways. I take nearly a thousand photographs in sequence (ground-hip-shoulder-eye-above the head-repeat), and we return to our camp house to watch the sunset over the water tank and cattle. I lay on my back on kitchen floor, sore from the photography, surprised at how tired I can be when I didn’t even pick up a shovel.

We repeat this process for five other structures before the field season is complete, but this ruin was the first. It becomes Structure 1 on our forms. I align the photos, generate depth maps, and run the model on a 2018 MacBook Pro in my trailer, a process that takes nearly two days with an i7 processer and Agisoft Metashape Pro. I physically run the laptop over to the crew when it’s finally done, and we collectively buzz around the Formica countertops in the field house about how cool technology is these days.

Act 3

Several things happen in the year 2020: I receive a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a global pandemic grinds the world to a halt, and we move across the country from New York to Oregon in what feels like a mad dash between wildfires and facemasks. While the Camp Fire covers Eugene in dense smoke, I sit in a sparsely furnished apartment and give a Zoom talk to community members in Texas. The 3D model of Structure 1 fills my shared screen. Across one-thousand miles, we look together at the reddened walls and blackened plaster that evidence the fire that destroyed the building in 1980, the seam of the limestone addition that was added around 1860, the stove that Polo’s grandmother received from her grandchildren as a gift.

As we all adjust to life during COVID, the 3D models come to occupy different roles on the makeshift dissertation-writing desk in my living room. I map and draw them digitally, creating scaled plan views in Adobe Illustrator. I compare our hand-drawn elevations to the models, layering the images, noticing things in each that I might not have in either alone. Polo and I text at Christmas and exchange phone calls periodically. Are you going to write a book? he asks me. That’s the plan, I tell him, with my dissertation manuscript in mind. He’s more interested in the book than the model, but the model has already become central to the dissertation in a way I had not anticipated at the outset. When I upload the model to the online model-sharing platform SketchFab, I send a link to Polo’s email address, though I’m not sure how often he checks it. When I finish and defend the dissertation a year and a half later, I inscribe a copy and mail it properly, tagging the pages where I discuss Structure 1. Polo texts me that it may take him “a couple of hours days months hopefully not years to finish 300 pages,” but he’s sure he will read it.

Prologue

The next time I visit D’Hanis in August 2023, my 18-month-old daughter is with me. We spend an afternoon at Polo’s trailer. Across the creek, the ruin is overgrown again, barely visible through the trees. The project has taken new directions, but one of the architectural drawings from 2018 still hangs on Polo’s wall. The model is now uploaded to SketchFab; I have it ready at hand on my phone and have accessed it to share dozens of times, in as many places. But here, in such close proximity to the real thing and the memories Polo has of living there, we leave the model in the virtual world. We spend the time talking and joking, much like our first meeting seven years ago. When we part, we say until next time.

To learn more about the community-based methods we used for the Old D’Hanis Archaeological Mapping Project and see my daughter at work in archaeology, read “Without a Roadmap: Reflections on the Emergent Methods of Community-Based Archaeology”, out now in Advances in Archaeological Practice.

Acknowledgements

For Polo Rodriguez (1943-2025). Thank you for starting this with me and for seeing it through, with humor and friendship. We miss you.

A huge shout out and thank you to the 2018 field crew, Hunter Crosby, Nolan O’Hara, and Emily Sainz, who cleared and documented the ruins so beautifully; my dissertation committee, Ruth Van Dyke, Randy McGuire, and Sabina Perrino; and all the friends and partners in Medina County, TX who made and continue to make this work possible.

This work has been generously funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation; the National Geographic Society; the Council of Texas Archeologists; the Medina County Historical Commission; the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies; the Western University Faculty Research Development Fund; the Binghamton University Graduate Student Employees Union (GSEU), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and has received material, relational, and logistical support from the Castro Colonies Heritage Association and countless community members in Medina County, Texas.

“Without a Roadmap: Reflections on the Emergent Methods of Community-Based Archaeology,” is out now, open access, in the SAA journal Advances in Archaeological Practice.