Archaeology is an exciting topic. There’s the digging, the unearthing of evidence, and the exercise of imagination in reconstructing life on Earth hundreds and thousands of years ago, often based on fragmentary information. Currently there’s a sort of synchronicity occurring around the topic among the Dallas’ academic, cultural, and scientific institutions.

At the beginning of the year, the Nasher Sculpture Center mounted an exhibition titled “First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone.” The show was comprised of stone artifacts, some dating back more than 2 million years. Director Jeremy Strick said public response to the show was marked by “high visitation, significant repeat visitation, as well as an unusually high number of visitors who had traveled to Dallas expressly to see the exhibition.” One feature of the show that proved especially important, he said, was the ability of visitors to handle several of the objects. “Comments from visitors reflected both a fascination with the objects presented and ideas broached by the show, and an appreciation for the installation.”

Earlier this month, the Perot Museum of Nature and Science reopened the Being Human Hall. It had been one of the original halls that debuted when the museum opened in late 2012. In an effort to keep content “fresh and relevant,” the hall has undergone a complete transformation, said spokesperson Becky Mayad. “The content developed in the exhibit tells a broad human origins story from millions of years ago through present day.” When asked if the Being Human Hall might have room for local archaeology, Mayad responded: “While the focus is on paleoanthropology, we do see the Human Journey more broadly and may address more archaeological and anthropological topics as our programming develops.” For now, museum-goers can view casts of fossil skulls, hands, and feet of some of the earliest human ancestors. In addition, there are a dozen authentic stone tool artifacts on display, some more than 1 million years old.

When Sam Wilson acquired the leasehold rights to the old lounge at the corner of Knox and Travis streets on the outskirts of Highland Park in 1967, he took on the project as a lark. He knew nothing about the bar business, but he and his wife, Vi, loved food and drink and entertaining people. They decided to give it a whirl, and what a madcap adventure it turned out to be.

Wilson died at age 83 on April 18. A few weeks prior, he reflected on the decade in the early seventies that he owned the Knox Street Pub (not to be confused with another bar operating under the same name today in a different location). This was the period it became a magnet for artists, writers, actors, musicians, politicians, hippies, college students, and everyday philosophers—folks for which the city of Dallas offered few respites.

In those days, Dallas looked little like it does today in either physical appearance or social structure. Liberal thought tended to be drowned out by conservative ideology, and white culture overshadowed those of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. Far fewer people lived here, and it grew mostly by transplants arriving from smaller areas of Texas and surrounding states. Most natives thought of Dallas as a big hometown, not a sprawling urban center.

Few settings in Dallas provided a comfortable atmosphere for the expression of new ideas and opposing views. Those few people who came from the Northeast and other regions found a home at the Pub. Wilson’s open-minded philosophy set the stage for his bar to become a rare venue for local residents who embraced progressive political and philosophical thought. There seemed to be a place for everyone at the Pub.

Reporters approached Wilson over the years about sharing his thoughts on the iconic bar, but he demurred for decades. “I just didn’t want to look back,” Wilson said, weeks before his passing. “I enjoyed having been there and doing it, but I don’t talk about it much.” He finally agreed in his last years to sit down and talk about how it all started as a favor to a friend.

You’ll recall that last month a historic house in the Cedars was moved to a new lot in the neighborhood, saved from the wrecking ball and set on a path toward a brighter, better preserved future. The two-story home was moved in four pieces, and is gradually being reassembled at the corner of Browder and Beaumont streets. It will be spruced up over the next year, good as old.

In the meantime, its new neighbors have been gathering on the street corner every now and then to watch as the blue house starts to take its old shape in a new place. Preservation brings people together. On Wednesday evening, workers craned most of the second story and plopped it on top. Here’s where we’re at as of Thursday morning:

As Alex wrote earlier, any substantive decision about the future of Dallas’ Confederate monuments will have to wait for another day–likely allowing for a few more parades of historical and racial ignorance like the one the council was subjected to this morning during the open mic session of their meeting.

Not that the council didn’t take any action on Dallas’ links to its Confederate history today. Council members approved section 2 of the agenda item, which provided, “that streets with names linked to the Confederacy shall not be renamed.”

That’s it. So simple. If I’m reading that language correctly, it simply means that from here on out, if there is a street with a Confederate’s name on it, it can’t be changed. Which seems odd, and quite a reversal from last October, when the mayor’s Confederate Monument Task Force recommended the city change the names of a whole bunch of streets that honored less-than-honorable figures of the city’s Confederate past.

The new policy may not hold any weight, as council member Philip Kingston was quick to point out.

“Not only is this a bad idea, it is legally meaningless,” Kingston said. “We can’t bind future councils.”

Nonetheless, the provision passed. And a new citizens group called the Commemoration Committee to Honor Roy Williams and Marvin E. Crenshaw filed a suit yesterday in Federal Court in anticipation of today’s vote, alleging that the ban on renaming streets amounts to a restriction of freedom of speech.

Earlier this week in the Cedars, crews started moving a historic blue house, one of the city’s oldest. It’s not going far to its new home at the corner of Browder and Beaumont streets, but when you’re moving a two-story Victorian-style home built in the 1880s, every trip is a long trip. It’s also one that will occur in four parts, as the house had to be quadrisected for its journey.

Part One must have arrived Thursday, because where there was once an empty lot near Lee Harvey’s, there is now a home. Most of the first floor of a home, anyways.

It’s looking pretty good, if you ask me.

Tomorrow, the Dallas City Council will revisit the question of its Confederate monuments, months after a task force that deliberated the monuments’ history and significance recommended the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from Oak Lawn Park in Uptown and the removal of the Confederate War Memorial adjacent to the Dallas Convention Center. City staff has suggested revising those recommendations, and so the council now has an opening – based mostly on pragmatic questions of cost – to backtrack on the task force’s recommendations, keep the Confederate monument, and turn the entire public process into a sham.

The process was already rushed and insufficient. Mayor Mike Rawlings called the task force in response to growing fear that the many Confederate monuments and statues scattered throughout the American South were becoming totems of a new white nationalist movement. In Charlottesville last year, lest we ever forget, one of these white supremacist/white nationalists drove his car into a crowd of protesters who supported the removal of that city’s Lee statue, murdering a young woman.

In Dallas, the Lee statue was hastily removed, but the larger Confederate memorial still stands. Now city staff suggests it should remain standing because it would be too expensive to move or dismantle. It suggests adding “historical context” to help sort out all the icky-ness of its associations with white nationalism.

If the city staff thinks historical context is sufficient to nullify the monument’s lingering import as a conveyer of another generation’s ideas about the South, Anglo-culture, the Civil War, and the interpretation of its legacy, well, here’s some historical context.