Film of Archaeological Excavations at Pemaquid, Maine

A Work in Progress

In 1978 I borrowed an early semi-pro video camera from a local cable station and filled several of the old 3/4" UMatic tapes with video of an archeological dig near South Bristol, Maine that had begun a decade earlier and continued for another decade after that. An amateur archeologist and delightful woman, Helen Camp, had spearheaded the activities beginning in the mid-sixties when a neighbor, plowing his field, turned bits of bricks and clay pipes. The photo is a still from that 28 year-old video.

Three forts had been built on the site, largely on top of one another: Ft. Charles, 1677; Ft. William Henry, 1692; Ft. Frederick, 1729.

Digging began in earnest the spring of 1965 and by 1973 they had excavated fourteen structures and found a Native American burial ground.

I'd been interested in film since I was a kid. (In fact, I was an internationally known filmmaker by the time I was fifteen, having edited a bit of 8mm film I'd taken of a series of hydroplane races on the Detroit River. A neighbor helped me edit it and suggested I send a copy to her friends in New Zealand. They responded with kind letter and a souvenir model Maori dugout canoe.) In the mid-seventies I was exploring work in video and thought a short piece on the Pemaquid excavation might make a nice addition to a demo reel.

I made perhaps three or four trips to the excavation and interviewed Mrs. Camp, Bob Bradley, then Maine State Historian and three young volunteers, one identified as Ray Johnson who was then studying Egyptology at the University of Chicago, A fellow I know only as Chuck and a third, English fellow whose name I never got. We filmed outside and inside on rainy days .

Ironically, as I was traveling to another site to film some establishing footage from across the bay, I ran into a newsworthy event, filmed it, edited it and with it got a job doing professional video work. As a result I never found time to edit the Pemaquid footage. Years passed. I moved three times, married, had two children, ran a business for eight years, changed careers three times, sent my kids off to college and in the past year once again began to think of the Pemaquid footage. After 28 years was there anything left on the tapes? Could I even find a machine to play them?

I work at a small college and called the Instructional Technology person who told me that they only had one of these old machines and were barely able to keep it running. I was welcome to use it but I knew I'd need one for a block of time and I'd want to set it up to dub to digital format. In August, I went on eBay and found one for under $50 including shipping. It was a first rate Sony VP7020 in excellent condition and proved to be the perfect machine to dub my eleven tapes to digital8 format.

I've spent the past month or so reviewing the footage, teaching myself to use Adobe Premiere Pro and making trial edits. In an odd way, waiting until digital video had made its way down to consumer video ultimately should make for a better film. The video was marginal at best. This was early on in field video history. Local news stations were still using film to gather news items; the most common professional news gathering camera, the RCA TK76 cost $42,000. I was using a pretty basic camera at a fraction of the cost and of considerably lower quality. Had I edited it then, using the standard method of dubbing from one tape to another, I would have lost what little information I had. Furthermore, I never could have afforded the editing time to complete the project. Today, I have a full palate of tools, including color correction and other technical enhancements that were simply out of reach 28 years ago.

So, I'm in mid-edit. If anyone has information on the Pemaquid excavations during that era, I'd love to hear from you. I've made contact with a local historian and hope to work with the Maine Historical Commission and the Friends of Colonial Pemaquid on this project. My main goal, though, is to bring closure to the project and to honor Helen Camp and the folks who worked with her.