David Bush
Director of Center for Historic & Military Archaeology
Professor of Anthropology
I’ve written one book, a bunch of chapters and countless articles in books on Johnson’s Island. I’ve given a thousand speeches, probably. It’s a prison site (during the Civil War) and in the world of archaeology, prison sites aren’t the most attractive. It relates to the negative part of war. Even the winning side doesn’t like to talk about their own prison sites.
When I started work with Johnson’s Island I was 36 or 37. My kids are older than that now. At the time I thought I was OK and had everything together but people are so ignorant at that age. Even though I had a lot of experience prior to that and knew what I had to do, I was still so inexperienced. If I could approach the Johnson’s Island stuff today with all the knowledge of how the process works, it’d be so different. I would have a lot less anxiety and stress than I did.
When I give speeches, the question I get the most is always, “What’s the best thing you’ve ever found?” If it’s a younger crowd it’s always, “What's the most expensive thing you’ve ever found?” I hate those questions. You begin to have an appreciation for how everything has a unique story. People don’t have enough exposure to what context for something means. You can find the simplest of things. The prisoners carved hard rubber into jewelry. For me, there’s so much context to that. It tells me what they were doing, what they were using to make it and what they were creating from that. It’s unfortunate that our society values monetary value so much as opposed to what the significance is of something.
Director of Center for Historic & Military Archaeology, Dr. David Bush is also a professor of anthropology here at Heidelberg. His book, Johnson’s Island, I Fear I Shall Never Leave This Island, was published in 2011. Dr. Bush plans on writing at least two additional books based on his work and research at Johnson’s Island.