Pennsylvania Historic Preservation

Blog of the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office

Category: Archaeology (Page 16 of 19)

1803 George Armstrong house, approximately 17 x 17 feet, now at Depreciation Lands Museum. Photograph by Charles Richmond, 2013.

Marketing Archaeology: A Non-Scientific Survey about Public Outreach Tools

August 24, 2016 / / 2 Comments

Fostering a public appreciation for historic resources and archaeology is one of the most important keys to protecting our history.

Unfortunately, many cultural resources professionals struggle with how to make their work accessible and interesting to the general public. In this blog post, we take on this challenge and announce the launch of a non-scientific, but very intriguing experiment to explore how the public responds to different avenues of communication – brochures, social media and web tools. Continue reading

Summer 2016 Interns

Summer 2016: New Faces at the PA SHPO!

July 6, 2016 / / 1 Comment

The warm days of summer almost always mean that the PA SHPO has a new group of interns on board and a number of special projects underway. That is certainly true for summer 2016 as new faces and new ideas brighten our cubicle world in the Commonwealth Keystone Building. This year we are hosting two PHMC Keystone interns, four collaborative PA SHPO/PennDOT cultural resource interns and three short-term project employees. Continue reading

June’s SHPO Shout Out!

June 29, 2016 / / 0 Comments

June… school’s out, summer officially arrives, vacations galore, and lots of great preservation work going on. I myself just got back from a nice long weekend in the PA Wilds, and they deserve a Shout Out for the amazing work they’re doing to promote the natural and historical wonders of this region. I didn’t want to come home from the quaint cottage we stayed in along Pine Creek but I knew you’d all be waiting for this month’s Shout Out and I didn’t want to disappoint. Continue reading

May’s SHPO Shout-Out

May 25, 2016 / / 0 Comments

We’re back to our regular SHPO Shout-Out post this month, and I get to tell you about some great local preservation activities, two national award winners, and a cool new park in Jefferson County. Two quick things before I launch into my list of happy news: have you taken our online survey for the next statewide historic preservation plan yet? Or have you registered for the upcoming Statewide Conference on Heritage? There is still time to do both! Continue reading

The image shows a white number 5 on a blue background.
5 Things

5 Things about the New and Improved Archaeological Guidelines

April 6, 2016 / / 0 Comments

What better way to celebrate archaeology during Preservation50 than to share the PA State Historic Preservation Office’s recently revised and newly issued of the Guidelines for Archaeological Investigations in Pennsylvania?  Another bit of big news is that the revised Guidelines are being released in tandem with the much-anticipated Pre-Contact Probability Model layer on CRGIS.

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Some of the artifacts uncovered during the excavation included bone pendants, fish hook and a notched spoon.

What is your most amazing discovery?

December 30, 2015 / / 0 Comments

by Christine Davis, Christine Davis Consultants, Inc.

After 30 years of excavating archaeological sites in Pennsylvania, I’m often asked about my most amazing discovery.  I would not hesitate for a moment to say it was our large-scale excavation of the Freeport Site in Freeport Township, Greene County, which revealed an extraordinary Native American archaeological site dispersed across 11 acres of land above the Monongahela River.

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Workers at the Harrisburg Nail Works. Used by Permission of the East Pennsboro Historical Society.

Clouds by Day and Fire by Night: Industrial Archaeology at the Harrisburg Nail Works

October 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments

by Jonathan Libbon, RPA

Perhaps no other theme in Pennsylvania’s history is more important than industry. With October being National Archaeology Month, it’s a great opportunity to highlight industrial archaeology in Pennsylvania. The archaeology of industrial sites focuses on the industrial process, the history of labor and management, and the artifacts and features that remain. Understanding the industrial past allows us to understand not only Pennsylvania’s past, but often our very own. Continue reading

The southern tip of Thompson's Island. Photograph by Kirk Johnson.

Into The Wilderness Part 2: Getting Our Bearings On Thompson’s Island

October 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments

In my last post about the Battle of Thompson’s Island, I gave a brief background on the conflict and discussed the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program (ABPP) grant our office received to find the battlefield.  Like the campaign itself, the project has continued moving. Continue reading

Ceramic figurine uncovered along I-95 in Fishtown. Courtesy of PennDOT.

Digging Deep: Pennsylvania and the Making Archaeology Public Initiative

May 20, 2015 / / 2 Comments

by Joe Baker, PennDOT Cultural Resources Program

Dr. Frank Vento along the banks of the Susquehanna River. Photo by Joe Baker.

Dr. Frank Vento along the banks of the Susquehanna River. Photo by Joe Baker.

On a lovely morning in early autumn, I arrive at an old farm along the Susquehanna River to find Dr Frank Vento in his natural element. That is to say, he is squatting down at the bottom of backhoe trench some eight feet deep, carefully examining the many layers of flood-deposited sediment left behind by the great river. Frank is a geomorphologist: a geologist and archaeologist whose specialty is the formation of floodplains, terraces, and other kinds of landforms created by the interaction of climate, gravity, water, wind, and sometimes, humans. Frank is down there looking for something, and as I walk up to the edge of the trench, he finds it.

“Hah! I knew it!” Continue reading

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