Two of my long-time clients, the National Park Service and the Delaware Department of Transportation, make archaeological reports available to the public online. These have been redacted to remove sensitive information, especially the locations of the sites.
Because the sensitivity of site locations is such an issue for archaeologists, my company worked with the NPS to develop a two-volume format that we use for major studies. The first volume is written as a narrative, drawing on the archaeology done for the project but not including any detailed discussion of the sites. The second volume contains the mass of detailed archaeological findings. The idea is that the first volume can be provided to the public and might also be useful to Park educators and interpreters, while only cultural resource professionals or planners would need the second volume. This has worked very well and the NPS has made many of those Volume I reports available online.
NPS Reports
"Few Know that Such a Place Exists": Land and People in the Prince William Forest Park. (2004) A historical and archeological study of what is really a pretty average 13,000 acres in eastern Virginia, which is part of the fascination. Includes some material on the search for the first European and African settlers, who are very hard to find. Incidentally I did eventually find Westwood Plantation, which I searched for during this project, across the road within the Quantico Marine Corps base.
Bold, Rocky, and Picturesque: An Archeological Indentification and Evaluation Study of Rock Creek Park, Washington, DC. (2008) I think this was the most successful of our NPS studies, patly because the size of the park and the number of historic maps available meant that we could do a really good job within the available budget. We found many different kinds of sites: extraordinary Native American camps, colonial tenancies, nineteenth-century farms and mills, a Civil War battlefield, and the homes of African Americans who came north to Washington after the Civil War.
The People of the Mountain: Archeological Overview, Assessment, Identification, and Evaluation Study of Catoctin Mountain Park, Maryland (2011) Another park where the manageable size meant that we could learn a great deal about it. The main interest was in trying to link the multipe kinds of data sets –archaeology, historic maps, other records, and oral history – into a coherent story.
Archeological Overview, Assessment, Identification, and Evaluation Study of Newly Acquired Lands at Antietam National Battlefield Maryland. (2014) I feel disappointed that we didn't find more during this study, but it did give me a chance to delve very deeply into one part of the battle, the exercise that I feel made me into a professional military historian.
The C&O Canal NHP Study
The most remarkable thing I have done in my career was to take part in, and lead the second half of, a nine-year archaeological study of the C&O Canal National Historical Park. The C&O NHP follows the Potomac River for 184 miles, from Washington, DC west to Cumberland in the Appalachian Mountains. Here we found so much we could not come close to dealing with it all: a site with a 10,000-year stratified sequence, half a dozen Indian villages, a fortified site from the French and Indian War, colonial farms, iron mines, Civil War earthworks, plus sites related to the canal itself. The reports include what I think is the best available introduction to the history of the upper Potomac Valley in colonial times; we certainly couldn't find anything to work from, so we ended up doing a ton of research on our own. The project was done in three segments.
Cohongorooto: The Potomac Above the Falls: Archeological Indentification and Evaluation Study of C&O Canal National Historical Park, Rock Creek to Sandy Hook (Mile Markers 0 to 59) (2005)
Through the Great Valley and Into the Mountains Beyond: Archeological Indentification and Evaluation Study of Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park, Sandy Hook to Hancock (Mile Markers 59 to 123) (2009)
River and Mountain, War and Peace: Archeological Indentification and Evaluation Study of Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park, Hancock to Cumberland (Mile Markers 123 to 184) (2011)
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