Blog of the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office

Category: Archaeology (Page 14 of 19)

Punching through the Plowzone

Archaeologists are always on the ready for the next mythical idea of what we are and what we do. We don’t dig dinosaurs or find buried treasure (at least the kind that entails riches untold). We don’t all work in academia and, yes, our parents likely told us there were no jobs in archaeology.

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Centre County’s Hatch Site

This past summer I had the opportunity, along with other members of the PA SHPO, to visit an archaeological field school underway in State College. It’s not often I get away from my desk, so it was a nice chance to get out in the field and get my hands dirty helping to screen soil, even if just for a day or two. The field school was run as a coordinated effort by the Juniata College Cultural Resource Institute and the PennDOT Highway Archaeological Survey Team (PHAST) at the James W. Hatch Site (36Ce544). Continue reading

The Keystone Grant and the Mystery of the Missing Piazza

Ever wonder just how much scholarship of construction chronology is behind your visit to a historic property in Pennsylvania?  Or how that research is funded?  Woodford is one of Fairmount Park’s most carefully documented and researched buildings because of its architectural significance and as its interpretive use as a historic house museum.  Recorded in the Historic American Building Survey (HABS) in 1932 and listed as a National Historic Landmark in 1963, the building was studied and theorized by architectural historians for decades.  The Naomi Wood Trust at Woodford Mansion turned to the PA SHPO’s Keystone Historic Preservation Grant program for financial help to plan the historic restoration of Woodford’s 1772 piazza on the west elevation of the 2-story main house. In addition to sifting through all of those relevant published sources and past theories, an archaeological investigation would be the foundation to restore this missing element. Continue reading

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