Cultural Landscapes
Description
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TRANSCRIPT:
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Ian: Where Two Deserts Meet is an official podcast of Joshua Tree National Park. Joshua Tree National Park acknowledges the Serrano, Cahuilla, Mojave, and Chemehuevi people as the original stewards of the land on which the park now sits. We are grateful to have the opportunity to work with the indigenous people in this place. We pay our respects to the people past, present, and emerging who have been here since time in.
Ian: Hello, I'm Ian.
Donovan: And I'm Donovan.
Ian: And we're both park rangers here at Joshua Tree National Park. Where Two Deserts Meet is a podcast where we investigate topics that often require a bit more detail and sometimes the help of an expert in the field to gain perspective. Through interviews and investigation, we bring you the unique details, research, and stories that make Joshua Tree National Park remark. Speaking of, what is remarkable is the number of cultural landscapes that reside within Joshua Tree National Park that most visitors don't know about. Now, I know the idea of a cultural landscape probably sounds pretty unfamiliar to most people. Imagine if you were told that even just driving through the park for an hour, you likely passed multiple cultural landscapes. You'd probably wonder if you missed that part of the park map.
Donovan: I mean, even just talking about it, I'm starting to think that I might have missed one or two here and there on the park map as well. Could I drop a finger randomly on the park map and it would be part of a cultural landscape? Is Hidden Valley a cultural landscape? Skull rock, even Oyster Bar. Okay. Well, sometimes it just feels like every time when I'm explained to what cultural landscapes are, there's always more to unpack.
Ian: All right. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. I totally understand. Cultural landscapes may be confusing at first, but they are certainly important to the National Park Service, and that's because the spaces where the works of nature and humans combine provide a sense of place and identity. They map our relationship with the land, yet the subtle details are not as easy to find as one may think. An important sign of Joshua Tree National Park's history is the historical structures and artifacts found tucked within the rocks and the different areas of the park provide diverse resources, often causing human life to gather in areas that provide essential needs, leaving behind vast amounts of historical evidence. This evidence on the landscape can take many forms. A common one within Joshua Tree National Park is homesteads and the large amounts of materials used in mining operations that may have been left hidden within the land where Joshua Tree National Park exists.
Donovan: Wait a second. Ian, you are telling me that if I go wandering through the park, I might come across some historical treasure. Last I check, the visitor centers don't have treasure maps.
Ian: All right. why well, yes, but no. Well, one of the amazing things about cultural landscapes is the collection of archeological evidence. They hold those artifacts and items. Are more than just historic trash. They also have significance by simply being within the context in which they are found. That context is an essential part of what a cultural landscape is. While there is no secret treasure or map, even a simple hike on a trail found on the park map can reveal hidden stories.
Donovan: And of course, if you do find something, you must leave it where you found it. In order to preserve that context. For example, visitors could potentially come across a surely useless rusty can in a seemingly random part of the park. But what a lot of people don't realize is that that can has been left there on purpose. That's because that can, being left where it was last used provides context as to who might have used that area before. It reminds me of one of those most common principles of leave no trace, which is take only pictures, leave only footprints. This not only applies to natural resources, but cultural and historical ones as well.
Ian: Totally. And with Joshua Tree National Park's vast history, there are quite a few cultural landscapes found within the park, but you know what? We should talk to Joshua Tree National Park's very own historical landscape architect, Genna, she's awesome and will have a lot to share on this subject.
Genna: I'm Genna Mason Bjornstad. I'm a historical landscape architect at the park here, and I'm the lead for the Historic Preservation program. A cultural landscape is a place that represents an important thing in history. It could be associated with a person. It could be associated with an event in history or could be representative of a design, a theme in Joshua Tree. We have quite a few cultural landscapes that are associated with the mining that took place in the park. There's the Lost Horse historic Mining District. There's the Northern Pinion Historic Mining District. There's the Pinion Mountain Mining District. There's also the Keys Ranch Historic District, which is associated with the mining, but it's more of a habitation site where there was a family living and home studying. Here we have five that are currently documented with a cultural landscape inventory. We have two more cultural landscape inventories in the works right now, and there are many other cultural landscapes within the park too that have not been fully documented, but have been recorded either as archeological sites or parts of them, but we'll get there.
Ian: All right, let's quickly break all that down. Defining a cultural landscape is all about looking at the interaction of historical or manmade resources and the chunks of natural landscapes they exist in and even possibly change with their presence. It takes a lot of work to determine where the cultural landscape ends and the natural and largely undisturbed landscape begins. This process of defining helps to identify things like developments, significance, natural register of historic places, and other valuable information. The landscapes can illustrate many things though, and they can even paint out broad patterns of American history that are more recent than people may imagine, like Mission 66 architecture.
Genna: Mission 66 historic districts that incorporate areas of development from the Mission 66 building program time when throughout the park service there was a lot of construction going on in development in national parks to celebrate the 50 year anniversary of the Organic act. And in Joshua Tree, we have the Cottonwood Mission 66 Historic District, which incorporates the Cottonwood Ranger Station and the housing area and the campground as well. And also our entrance monuments are from the Mission 66 era entrance monuments.
Ian: Do you mean the signs that everyone likes to take their picture in front of?
Genna: Yes. We are kind of inventorying everything that's associated with that historic period. or even the things that aren't associated with it, just so that we can understand what's in that landscape altogether. And you know, the cultural landscape inventory itself is kind of a framework for standardizing and identifying what is within that landscape we are looking for. The NPS has identified 13 different characteristics that are part of a cultural landscape that can kind of incorporate everything that is in there. It includes circulation networks, like roads and trails. It includes natural systems and features, the topography, buildings and structures, constructed water features. Vegetation, that's an important one for cultural landscapes. Small scale features, the archeological sites, the cultural traditions. That's one that can be a little bit less obvious on the landscape. The arrangement, the cluster arrangement of things on the landscape too. Views and vistas, and social organization and land use. Some of these kind of overlap a little bit. Landscapes…as small as just the landscape around a house, for example. Or it can be a whole neighborhood, a whole mining district. I think the Lost Horse historic mining district is over 8,000 acres. There's a lot out there and there's a lot of different features that take a while to access because you have to hike to all of them. Well, some of them you can drive to, but it involves a lot of data organization too and keeping track. What we've looked at, where we've been and a lot of research to make sure that we're identifying things that are historic versus things that are not historic. What is actually associated with that period in time. The period of significance and what has been added afterward. The rule of thumb is that if it's fifty years or older, we need to evaluate it for historic significance which the significance can be one or more of the four criteria. If it's associated with an important person in history, an important event. If it has the potential to yield future data, like archeological information or a historic style of design or a method of construction. If it's representative of that, and of course some of these things can, some historic buildings or cultural landscapes can be associated with more than one of these criteria.
Ian: Keeping a comprehensive inventory of all historically significant landscapes is very important to the National Park Service. The information from the service-wide cultural landscape inventory, or CLI, is useful at all levels of the Park Service. If we zoom out to a national or regional perspective, it's useful for planning efforts and budget decisions. On a park to park level, i
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