Week 4 Internship Blog

 

Hello everyone, this is Patrick Callaghan posting another blog for indeed another week. This week was mostly focused on the other classes in my schedule finishing up the weekly quizzes and discussions they required including a substantial amount of reading. Through this external learning I wanted to discuss in this blog an interesting question I have thought about that relates to the Olustee project itself.

One of my classes I am taking is Ancient Near Eastern Societies where we study and discuss the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and more. The discussion that caught my eye that relates to the Olustee project is the restrictions these current day countries place on uncovering these ancient societies. Especially in Egypt, archeologists can only look through funerary cites or tombs and nothing of the habitation cites. Although the Battle of Olustee is not an ancient civilization, it is a battle lost by the Union (the current government of today) that has records about what happened, who fought and who were left on battlefield and buried in a mass grave. The question I have that relates to both the ancient civilizations and the Olustee project is why the governments of today, with the knowledge that these sites and the events occurring, refuse to do anything about them. In the case of the ancient Egyptian societies, the aura that plays into their tourism is built on the knowledge of these tombs and funerary cites and uncovering the habitation cites may affect that. However, in the case of Olustee, not only is it the soldiers of the Union (who won the war) but the efforts to honor them today are being blocked by groups related to the Confederacy. When restrictions or groups keep people from honoring or discovering the realities of battles and societies there is an issue. As of today I think the past notion of “victors write history” has changed to “modern governments edit or ignore vital information and history to mold the perception of themselves.”

I do not see this question as incredibly far reaching. But I hope this rant does not make you think I do not like learning or thinking about such things. In fact, quite the opposite. The mystery of the cites and the events yet to be uncovered creates theories of a thousand possibilities that for all we know even aliens could have been apart of, at least until we find the truth.

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