Jack Patterson: Meaning and Memory

In a small room behind the exhibits in the Dominguez Rancho Adobe Museum, intern Jack Patterson (Class of ’07, B.A., anthropology) is busily cataloging books, photographs, paintings, and other artifacts belonging to the family that lends its name to California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH). The Paramount native, whose major concentration while at CSUDH was in archaeology, describes the feeling he gets from being surrounded by objects from a long-lost time.

“I used to go to antique stores with my mom and it occurred to me that all these old things were made by human beings and they’re imbued with meaning and memory,” he says. “And now, those people are dead, and [the things] are just lying around on a shelf, waiting for somebody to buy them to give them meaning and memory again.”

Looking to pursuing his master’s degree in museum studies with aspirations of one day becoming a museum curator, Patterson is gaining experience in the field in a number of ways. He has worked as an archaeological technician in the Sequoia National Forest surveying various project areas and mapped sites, been a volunteer at the Ralph B. Clark Regional Park’s Interpretive Center in Buena Park preparing an exhibit on Cenozoic fossils, and volunteered for the Downey Historical Society assisting a genealogist in compiling a list of the city’s residents in the 1920s.

“I like the educational aspect of a museum,” he says. “People can see [historic artifacts], perhaps even touch them, instead of just being told stories.”

Patterson hopes to enhance the adobe’s educational offerings with an archaeological exhibit and a field trip to the area’s three adobe houses: the Dominguez Rancho, and Long Beach’s Rancho Los Cerritos and Rancho Los Alamitos.

“We’ll learn about the local history and at the same time, [the students will be] immersed physically, intellectually, perhaps even emotionally, in a historic and anthropological environment,” he says.

Patterson, who as a student at Cal State Dominguez Hills traveled to Baja California on research excursions with professor of anthropology Jerry Moore, uses the skills he learned while excavating metates (Mesoamerican stone vessels used for grinding grain and seeds) to find artifacts a little closer to home. He shows off some shards of English ironstone pottery that he found on the grounds of the museum. He mentions that he also found similar items in a parking lot at the CSUDH campus.

“There’s a certain cultural ambience as well that is associated with this place that appeals to me,” he says of the Dominguez Adobe, whose original structure was built in 1826. “A lot of these things go back to a time when the culture was different, and things were more slow-paced. They didn’t work 40-hour weeks like we do now. They worked during the early hours of the day. When the heat was up, they relaxed in the shade. They just lived. And here I am, totally immersed in a space, in a piece of history that is distinct from [our] contemporary, modern world.”

- Joanie Harmon