Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter
Volume 6.1 (November 1998)

“Pinky” Harrington: A Remembrance
by Ivor Noël Hume

To historical archaeologists the Harrington Medal is the most coveted of accolades, but for those of us who were privileged to know him well, Pinky, himself, was a far greater treasure Although he scoffed at the idea, he was truly the father of our discipline, and his death on the 19 of April, 1998, left a void that can never be filled.

Like all good archaeologists, Pinky Harrington (only strangers called him Jean or Jean Carl) left behind a corpus of published works of inestimable value to future students and professionals. But more than that, he left his stamp on the earth of Jamestown, Fort Necessity, Nauvoo, and on Roanoke Island.

It is a curious failing among people who purport to understand history that they too easily dismiss the work of their predecessors as archaic and inadequate. The only question that has merit asks, “In the context of their time, were they good at what they did?” Throughout his long career Pinky’s work was not only good, but better than anyone else’s. His thinking was not governed or influenced by ideology or even by the desires of his National Park Service superiors. He was content to let the evidence of his shreds speak for themselves and to interpret their testimony as best he could.

Like most practitioners of his era, Pinky came to historical archaeology before the discipline had a name. Indeed, he used to joke that when, in 1936, he joined the Park Service and was assigned to Jamestown, he had never heard of the place. What he found there was a site which, through the best part of three previous years, had been the victim of two different methodological approaches to digging and two ego-driven philosophies. That he was able to get Jamestown’s archaeology back on track said more for his tact than for his prior knowledge of the seventeenth century—which was rudimentary at best. But Pinky was both a reasonable and a reasoning man. Trained as an architect and already a skilled draftsman, his principal accomplishment at Jamestown was not in his digging but in his correlation and interpretation of his predecessors’ records.

Pinky Harrington’s principal in-the-field achievement at Jamestown was his excavation of the glasshouse site which was first found (as are so many significant discoveries) by an amateur archaeologist, one Jesse Dimmock who, in 1928, had uncovered the remains of Governor Berkeley’s Green Spring Plantation. Neither Dimmock nor Pinky found enough shaped glass fragments to determine what was made there, either in 1608 or in the second attempt in 1621, and it says something about the state of early seventeenth-century English glass-making research that most of the drawings that Pinky brought back in 1950 from his researches in England were wrong. I say this in the knowledge that, in London and at the still precocious age of twenty-three, I had been one of his principal “expert” resources!

Every archaeologist dreams of making some spectacular discovery that will catapult him or her into the forefront of their profession and, better still, into fame and fortune. Among those who come to mind are Schliemann and Priam’s Treasure, Woolley and the royal cemetery at Ur, and Carter and the tomb of Tutankhamen. All three had one attribute in common: they yielded breathtaking gold—the ultimate currency of popular archaeological success. Jamestown had none to offer, any more than did Roanoke Island. In any case, those who worked for the Department of the Interior did best if they kept their faces in anonymous shadow beneath their broadbrimmed, Park Service hats. Consequently, Pinky’s achievements never made him a literary lion or a television personality. He was only a household name within his profession, but it was a name that earned him the admiration, the respect, and affection of his peers.

Pinky’s first significant espousal of the yet-to-be named discipline was voiced at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 1954 at which time he was Regional Archeologist for the National Park Service based in Richmond. By then his work at Jamestown and Fort Necessity were over, as were his major excavations at the traditional “Fort Ralegh” site on Roanoke Island. All were exercises designed to provide conventional history with a third dimension. He was not the first to do so. Colonial Williamsburg architectural draftsmen had been digging into buried foundations since 1928; Kenneth Kidd had dug on the site of St. Marie in Canada in 1949; Henry Chandlee Forman had dug at St. Mary’s Cittie in 1938, to name but three out of a list of perhaps a dozen. It is safe to say, however, that none of the excavations were directed by people trained to specialize in the period whose remains they were investigating.

In his address to the AAA, Pinky put it equally bluntly: “Inadequate training of the directors of these projects,” he declared, “has certainly had something to do with the fact that significant contributions to American history have not been forthcoming.” He went on to say that “the really basic fault lies in the fact that
the results of the digging and the correlated documentary studies have not been oriented to specific historical problems of the sort that appeal to historians.” Nevertheless, more than forty years later, few archaeological projects are undertaken to supply information specifically requested by historians. That the early fortified Jamestown has not been washed into the James River as has so often been stated, that George Washington’s French and Indian War Fort Necessity in Pennsylvania was the shape it proved to be, or that the earthwork on Roanoke Island is not Ralph Lane’s “new Fort in Virginia” have done nothing to change the previously perceived course of history. To be sure, the resulting conclusions are of concern to those who must present the story to the visiting public, but in the broader scheme of historical perspectives, these sites are no more than artifacts too big to display in museums’ glass cases.

Pinky was correct in recognizing that in isolation a site of one type or one period could not alone provide the data required for comparative analyses that are the warp and weft of both historical and anthropological inquiry. Nevertheless, one has to begin somewhere, and Pinky Harrington did more than his share of laying foundations upon which to build broader historical and cultural conclusions.

Although Pinky had made his concerns abundantly clear in his AAA paper, and although historical archaeology now has a name (imparted to it in 1967 by Pinky and others of like mind), most of the problems he identified still exist nearly half a century later. I well remember Pinky’s sage advice that ineffectively running around trying to save countless threatened sites would be far less useful and praiseworthy than doing a little really well. In the mid-1960’s when he told me that, I thought his advice narrow and defeatist, but in retrospect I know that he was right. Fortunately, he considered his counsel wiser than I recognized, and in consequence his small number of major excavations at Jamestown, Fort Raleigh, Fort Necessity, and the Nauvoo Temple were models to emulate, and more importantly, they did not prevent him from living to the enviable age of ninety.

In 1963, ten years after his four seasons’ work at the Fort Raleigh site, Pinky returned there under circumstances all too common in the annals of archaeology. Utility laying on the perimeter of the site accidentally cut through features more datable than any he had previously revealed. But as on any construction site, time was money. Consequently, Pinky’s options were severely limited. In his careful report titled An Outwork at Fort Raleigh, he put the best face he could on a circumstance that should never have been as it was.

“Hand trenching of the area would have been prohibitive in cost and time,” he wrote. “Consequently, a heavy front-end loader, with a seven foot bucket, was tried; it worked surprisingly well. Three laborers were used, in addition to the loader operator, two to check suspicious features, and the third to cut tree roots . . . .” Had Pinky the time, he might very well have come to a different conclusion. Instead, on the basis of the hurry-up method and the fragility of the evidence being scooped into the bucket, it is astonishing that he was able to record so accurately and to interpret what he found with such insight.

Twenty-five years later, with our knowledge of sixteenth-century artifacts enhanced, and the freedom to dig as slowly as the stratigraphy demanded, we were able to reach very different conclusions. It was the measure of the man, however, that when Pinky honored us with a visit to his site, he readily conceded that the newly emerging evidence justified a reassessment of his “outwork” interpretation. He knew, as must we all, that as new information becomes available, long cherished beliefs will be challenged and even proved totally wrong. On another occasion, sitting on a bench beside me on one of my own sites, Pinky observed that every excavation is, after all, a learning experience, and once it ceases to teach and we to learn, historical archaeology will have outlived its usefulness.

I, for one, believe that as long as we remember and strive to overcome the problems voiced by Pinky in his seminal address to the AAA, historical archaeology will always have a place in the business of American historiography.

Pinky Harrington was not a forceful man, and his slightly nervous manner suggested an uncertainty that was far from real. He led by example and by consensus. And he could do so for a very good reason. At his side throughout his career in the field of historical archaeology was his wife, Virginia, who cared as much for his work as did he. She was his sounding board, his editor, his digging companion, and in his declining years his strength and his comforter. Those of us who were honored to call Pinky Harrington our friend are everlastingly grateful to Virginia for being wife to this wise and gentle man.

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