Most of the people were delighted in the summer of 1969 how quickly the rubble was cleared away later that summer’s Woodstock Music and Arts Festival in upstate New York. If half a million people expect a mess on a single, 600-acre farm in the middle of a hot, drop of rain, muddy August is possible. But the city and concert organizers made quick work of everything plus the farm owner Max Yasgur return or less the same condition in which they found it. Half a century on, not everyone is happy with all the post-Festival storage. “Unfortunately, they cleaned up pretty well,” said Maria O’Donovan, a project director with the establishment of public archeology at New Yorkerem Binghamton University. “When you see the pictures, it’s amazing that they are always clean.” The Unfortunately, the archaeologist is obviously speaking in O’Donovan. What a waste of artifacts can be invaluable, and especially those who are still buried for decades or centuries or millennia and preserved, the most descendants of generations that have come before on who can learn. But this is not the Woodstock site, to say, not at Woodstock, but 46 miles away in Bethel was left completely unaltered. As part of a team of a reconstructed network of paths and installation of art in development time for the fiftieth anniversary of the concert, O’Donovan and his team, under the auspices of the Museum at Bethel Woods, and the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts have done an impressive job to learn what you can about the concert site from something that remained. Easily the most striking feature of the festival was the phase in which the Who, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, the Grateful Dead and 27 other acts performed. The stage was about 60 meters long and 45 meters deep, protected (imperfectly) from a large tent canvas above the head. Two towers speakers one of them the height of a seven-storey building projects the music that made the whole story. With no basis to support all dug, however, that the infrastructure is only one left of him whisper. “The stage is a fairly heavy piece of construction was,” said O’Donovan. “But it has been built primarily on the surface more than what would be expected for an internship. The only other support was provided by overhead cables.” That does not mean there’s nothing left. O’Donovan and his team is contributing marker for a fence that surrounded the stage. Working from aerial photographs and old concert tickets, could start at this point and the area frame rather than on the stage. Their work was made particularly difficult because unlike the rest of the 600 acres that have maintained their original topography, the side of the scene was changed. “It ‘was playing a gig as” O’Donovan says, “And you can see the grading and filling test” Much easier for the study was an area for the festival grounds, the Bazaar Bindy were informally known. Located off the main stage area, the bazaar has been set aside space for pop-up booth where concertgoers could sell as this is counter-culture, the exchange-crafts and clothing and other collectibles. The stands were extremely temporary “short term” as he describes O’Donovan lyrically, but they left their mark, usually in the form of stacked stones, or protected by trademark or a bag holder. This permanent sign of human intervention that would be difficult to do, of course, exactly the kind of evidence they are looking for archaeologists. “I guess more before we would find when we unearthed,” said O’Donovan, “but our work is similar to what our sponsors want to get it done.” For much of the Bethel Community Forest excavation falls outside of this range. O’Donovan find some wires hanging from the trees in the area that have been used could help stand. The concert planners displayed points in the bazaar for about 25 items, and the number of archaeologists had found more or less. But according to an event all to break convention, the exact locations of the stands had strayed from the plans. “Experience, Woodstock was a lot, so to speak, informally,” says O’Donovan. “It was not business. It was not Pepsi. It ‘was to replace only the people with things or sell.” It’ s always possible that a more thorough cleaning Yasgur farm produce other artifacts. The Binghamton archaeologists have found a dispersion of aluminum pull tabs beer or soda cans, removable type, it causes the additional litter before the pop-up tabs connected industry related. “You can actually come in as there is a time sequence in which they were stopped,” said O’Donovan. If it were left behind clothes, escape the initial cleaning, the painting would have long since decomposed, but the knobs or buttons or zippers could survive underground. lost shoes would also would be used on heavy pipes and other utensils for the large pot of proof that the concert. “And try archaeologists study last remnants of people’s material to interpret,” says O’Donovan. “These groups are constantly deposited.” Fifty years I am a nanosecond throughout history, and the four-day Woodstock Festival were still a little flicker. But it was to define a flick that helped the nation in a turbulent period, and their brands, such as its cultural stack of stones and abandoned pull-tabs-stay.
They cleaned well enough. ‘What archaeologists found the farm where Woodstock instead
