Boots on the Ground: Archaeology and Community at Manzanar

Last month, about ninety volunteers spent a weekend excavating the former hospital site at Manzanar, a World War II incarceration camp about 225 miles north of Los Angeles. Some of those volunteers were students in Mary Ringhoff’s Cultural Resource Management class. One of those students was Save As producer Willa Seidenberg, who interviewed people on site about why they travel from near and far to care for this site of tragic memory. In this episode, we dig into the study of archaeology with Mary, hear Willa’s great reporting, and talk with student Dani Velazco about what she got out of the experience (besides getting very, very dirty).

	Dani Velazco is a Master of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism and Heritage Conservation graduate student. Her background is in place-based education, connecting children to one another and the intricacies of place through storytelling and hands-on experience. She sees the two degrees as a way to honor culture, hold histories in place, and connect people to the natural world.
	Architectural historian and archaeologist Mary Ringhoff is a Senior Associate at Architectural Resources Group in Los Angeles. She specializes in landmark nominations, historic context statements, and historic resource surveys. Mary is on the faculty of the USC School of Architecture, where she teaches the Cultural Resource Management course in the Heritage Conservation program. She is also an MHC alumna.
	Save As producer Willa Seidenberg was both a student and a reporter for this episode!
	Trudi Sandmeier is the Director of Heritage Conservation Programs at the USC School of Architecture and co-host of the podcast.

Want to know more about some of the ideas and places mentioned in this episode? Check out:

Photos by William Short (professional photographer and Willa’s husband) of Manzanar volunteers at work!

Manzanar National Historic Site

Manzanar Public Archeology volunteer information

Ansel Adams’s 1943 Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar from the Library of Congress

Forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans living in California during World War II (1942) – by Dorothea Lange, Clem Alpers, and Francis Stewart on behalf of the U.S. War Relocation Authority. Collection at the Library of Congress.

Healthcare in Manzanar – an illustrated outline created by the National Park Service for the project volunteers.

Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Historic Preservation (APIAHiP)

USC Heritage Conservation Programs

 Credits on About page