Blog of the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office
You spoke and we listened! After all the rave reviews about last year’s downtown-centered location for the Pennsylvania Statewide Conference on Heritage, this year we’re poised to take over historic Carlisle from Wednesday, June 14 to Friday June 16. Continue reading
This spring, change is in the air for the Pennsylvania Archaeological Site Survey (PASS)!
Archaeologists from the PA SHPO and State Museum of Pennsylvania have worked together to revise the PASS Site Identification Criteria and to devise new procedures for handling isolated finds and non-site collections. Continue reading
Head’s up! Changes are coming to the PA SHPO in 2017! As many of you out there may be aware, our office is working hard behind the scenes to construct and prepare for a 21st century system to manage our survey and resource data as well as provide a platform for electronic environmental review and consultation under all of our SHPO programs.
In June 2016, I was hired as the Transportation Special Initiatives Coordinator in the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO). This new position was created through a special funding agreement with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) and was developed to assist them in marketing the state’s historic metal truss bridges. My position has evolved over the last 9 months and I see my purpose as helping both PennDOT and the SHPO preserve the remaining population of historic metal truss bridges by either marketing them for an adaptive reuse at a new location or helping to develop and implement a management plan to rehabilitate these bridges as part of the transportation system. Continue reading
Potters Mills? Story Maps? What are these things? This week’s post from guest contributor Charles Richmond will answer these burning questions and talk about this creative way to use 21st century technology to connect people to place and preservation.
In May of 2015, Governor Tom Wolf appointed 48 people to serve on the newly-created Governor’s Pipeline Infrastructure Task Force, which was charged with creating a set of recommendations for responsibly guiding the extraction and transportation of natural gas in Pennsylvania. The purpose of the recommendations was to suggest best practices that would avoid or lessen environmental, community and cultural resources impacts and address safety issues. Below is the who, what, when, where, and how of this task force, the PA SHPO’s role, and the group’s accomplishments.
There’s a scene in the 1960 classic, The Time Machine, where Rod Taylor escapes the imminent nuclear war by throwing his machine fast into the future. Quickly, the ground rises all around him and for what appears to be an eternity, he is sitting there isolated from the outside world. At that moment, as we watch him shivering, we wonder with him what is going on above ground. An archaeologist would empathize with Rod Taylor at that moment, not because he has put himself into a tight spot, but because Taylor’s experience is the experience of all artifacts in the ground. They are part of the world, then they are no longer part of the world, having disappeared beneath the earth.
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
We’re all looking for ways to cool off these days – this heat wave is one for the records! Grab your iced tea, sit next to the AC, and take a few minutes to read this month’s PA SHPO Shout Out. We’ll cover an unusual historic marker, a really cool Section 106 project, and a reader submitted Shout Out. If you’re still looking for something to do while you cool down, catch up on any older posts that you might have missed and, if you haven’t already, take our Community Connections online survey to help inform Pennsylvania’s next statewide historic preservation plan. We’re at 1600 responses already! I really want to break last time’s record of 2,200 and I think we can do it. Continue reading
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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