While Cliff Boyd was working with South American farmers during a stint in the Peace Corps, a visit to the Inca fortress city of Maccu Picchu in Peru solidified his interest in ancient people and their cultures
Archaeologist seeks to uncover region's history
RU professor Cliff Boyd is one of the busiest public archaeologists in Southwest Virginia.
By Tonia Moxley
tonia.moxley@roanoke.com
RADFORD - Radford University professor Cliff Boyd sat in 109 Reed Hall preparing for his afternoon class. Beside him, lining a wall and rising to eye level, were a dozen white boxes that could have held a year's worth of office paper.
But they were full of bones.
Human bones, actually, all exhumed from an unmarked cemetery in Maryland. Construction workers developing a piece of property had run into something unexpected but not uncommon: a collection of graves, probably of German immigrants who died in the 1700s and 1800s.
Boyd and his physical anthropologist wife, Donna Boyd, are charged with identifying the remains as specifically as possible. Their names may never be known, but their life histories are written on their bones.
From those bones, the Boyds can determine how many were male, how many female. How many were children, how many adults. What diseases afflicted them. How much they had to eat. How hard they worked.
The pair will meticulously record that information and ship it, along with the bones, back to Maryland. The bodies may be reinterred or may take up residence in a lab. It all depends on whether or not someone claims them.
"It's like telling a little bit of their story. It means they are not lost. It shows us how we've changed over the past 150 years," Cliff Boyd said.
Boyd is one of the busiest public archaeologists in Southwest Virginia. Public archaeology, also referred to as "cultural resource management," seeks to preserve historical sites and information for the sake of public education and to encourage public interest in that preservation.
Boyd works on sites in Saltville, Radford, Blacksburg, Montgomery County and Hillsville, to name a very few. He also brings grant-funded projects - from $5,000 to $10,000 annually - to Radford University's combined department of sociology and anthropology, according to chairwoman Peggy Shifflett. The Maryland identification project, for instance, is funded by a grant.
As a boy growing up in eastern Tennessee, Boyd developed an interest in history while listening to his grandmother's stories of Civil War veterans she had known as a girl. While he was working with South American farmers during a stint in the Peace Corps, a visit to the Inca fortress city of Maccu Picchu in Peru solidified his interest in ancient people and their cultures.
"They had no written language, yet they built an incredible culture. They built roads, forts, temples," Boyd said. Exploring the ruins of a great indigenous population sparked Boyd's interest in the American Indians of his native Appalachia.
Today he works to answer basic questions about the first Southwest Virginians: Where did they come from? When did they develop agriculture? And why did they abandon the area after the 1650s, before white settlers moved in? He also studies sites important to the Civil War and slavery, including the Smithfield Plantation in Blacksburg and the Kentland Farm property in Montgomery County.
In addition to his grant-funded and public work, Boyd teaches several undergraduate classes, including introduction to archaeology, world pre-archaeology, method and theory in archaeology and summer field schools where students actually dig at sites.
On Tuesdays this semester, students in Boyd's method and theory class get to the hands-on laboratory work, identifying and analyzing broken pottery dug up at Saltville during last summer's field school. These pottery sherds are the remains of clay pots made 500 to 1,000 years ago by American Indians.
The students must determine what materials were used in the pots and what method of decoration the potter used. One group of students finds what Boyd thinks is a fingernail marking on one of the pieces. Other pieces were decorated by pressing a net into the wet clay or using other tools to stamp the surface. The pots can tell the students about old technologies and even trade routes.
Garrett Smythe, a senior anthropology major, helped haul these sherds out of an American Indian trash pit.
"It was a blast. You're in the sun all day, but there's a sense of satisfaction," Smythe said.
After graduation, Smythe hopes to go on to graduate school and work as an archaeologist in the Southwest. There are more job opportunities for archaeologists out there, he said.
Other students in the class also hope to follow in Boyd's footsteps, including Kat Ward. Ward has studied biology, geology, chemistry and anthropology at Virginia Tech and Radford.
"Archaeology is the synthesis of everything I've done. I can apply it all in one place," she said.
And studying under Boyd has its advantages for an archaeologist-in-the-making.
"When I go to conferences and mention him, I can see his colleagues really respect him. He's low-key, but he knows his stuff," she said.
John Kern, director of the Roanoke regional preservation office of the Virginia Department of Historical Resources, has worked closely with Boyd for 15 years. He is impressed with how hard Boyd works for the preservation of the region's historical treasures and with his tireless efforts to educate the public.
Boyd not only arranges for his students to help with public research projects as part of their classwork, he also donates his own time to projects, Kern said. He has in the past served as president of the Council of Virginia Archaeologists and works closely with amateur archaeologists. He speaks at gatherings of local historical societies and his students go on to jobs in public archaeology.
"He plays a statewide role," Kern said.
Boyd just sees himself as a public servant.
"The public pays our [archaeologists'] salaries, so the least we can do is give them back as much as they give us in terms of education. Every archaeologist should be a public archaeologist," he said.
Historical preservation can also have an effect on the economy. According to the Virginia Tourism Corporation, tourists added $12.9 billion to the state's economy and employed more than 211,000 people. Three of the top 10 Virginia attractions were historical sites: Colonial Williamsburg, Mount Vernon and Monticello.
