Yeah, I worked for the Bureau of Land Management for two summers,
and the guys there thought it was really funny:
They got me a T-shirt that said, Is it an artifact or is it trash?
And artifacts are people's trash,
for the most part.
There's a little bottle here.
Oh, swamp root, nice!
Really popular in the late 1800s.
Lorelea has dedicated her life to archeology
and really our local and regional history.
My thing about artifacts is, that's not the story, it helps tell the story.
The story is where that artifact was found.
You know, what's their relationship to each other?
That's the important part.
It's the story that it tells.
I just have really learned so much
from her about all of the pieces that make our environment
and all of the people that have lived on the land.
Big projects we worked on, of course, was the Alaskan Way viaduct
before they decided to do the tunnel.
These collections of Asian ceramics, these artifacts
came from down in what's now Sodo.
That's what's interesting is you get to learn so much
about different people and how -- the City of Seattle and how it was built.
And the different communities that were in here, strong ethnic communities
that are still here.
And they were here early on.
So I worked with the Neely Mansion.
They had a Japanese bathhouse there from a Japanese family
that live there prior to the war.
It was an opportunity to do a project with the community.
Anybody who wanted to come kids, adults.
That was a lot of fun.
When we do archeological work, this is where our pieces
end up, is in a bag marked appropriately,
you know where they were found, when they were found, who found them.
There's a lot of material in this museum here
that people could use to tell better stories.
Being able to look back and see
all the things that people use for everyday living is really fascinating.
Every time I put something in the trash now, I think about
what are people going to learn from us in the future?
Archeology is able to broaden our understanding of ourselves,
because I think people are interested in their communities and in the history.
They like to kind of be tied in to that.
If we didn't have people before us, we wouldn't be where we are.