Blog of the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office
As 2024 winds down and all the social media platforms and streaming services summarize and wrap-up the year, the Pennsylvania Above Ground Survey (PAGS) program has the opportunity publish its BASELINE WRAPPED for 2020-2024.
Baseline Wrapped is going to summarize the changes in technology, highlight certain municipalities, provide some numbers, and even hint at what’s to come next..!
Two years ago, the Pennsylvania Archaeological Council (PAC) teamed up with Pennsylvania Hallowed Grounds (PAHG) to record Midland Cemtery in Swatara, PA . The goal of this pilot project was to document a cemetery using PAC’s membership and archaeological methods that could then be applied to other cemeteries with similar needs.
Spring is around the corner, and long-requested updates to Surveyor Manager functionality are the among the first new blooms of the season!
The Pennsylvania Baseline Survey Team is thrilled to share the final year of findings from the Pennsylvania Baseline Survey. From June 2022 to March 2024, Year 3 of the Baseline Survey took place in 20 counties. To date, over 6,854 new resources have been recorded in 503 municipalities thanks to the efforts of our Baseline Survey Teams!
A few years ago, the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP), in collaboration with the National Park Service Chesapeake Bay and the Chesapeake Conservation Partnership, launched an ambitious project called the Chesapeake Mapping initiative (CMI). The purpose of the project was to identify and map older and historic places that reflect African American history in the Chesapeake Bay watershed in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.
Now that 2023 is officially in the PASS, let’s look back on another successful year of archaeological site recording and survey efforts throughout Pennsylvania.
It’s been a minute since I did a “year in review” post for the blog, so I thought I’d treat our readers to PA SHPO’s version of the ubiquitous end-of-year list.
In the spirit ICYMI, here is a list of the best posts from 2023 that you want to be sure to read. If I had to sum up the blog’s year in one phrase, I think it’s “a year of education, entertainment, and everything in between.”
We’ve written quite a bit about PA SHPO’s Baseline Survey initiative over the last three years. We’ll be sharing even more in 2024 when we publish our Year 3 results but – spoiler alert! – I can say that we will have added over 16,000 NEW resources in 55 counties to PA-SHARE by the time this initial effort is completed.
“I can’t wait to get on the road again/On the road again/Goin’ places that I’ve never been/Seein’ things that I may never see again/And I can’t wait to get on the road again…”
-Willie Nelson, “On the Road Again,” 1980
With Pennsylvania’s long transportation history – from railroads and canals to the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the many beautiful bridges throughout the Commonwealth – it’s no surprise that the teams working on the Baseline Survey Project discovered and inventoried a multitude of Pennsylvania’s previously unrecorded roadside resources!
Many Pennsylvania Historic Preservation blog readers are familiar with the results of Year 1 and Year 2 of the Pennsylvania Baseline Survey but did you know that the Pennsylvania Baseline Survey is doing archaeology too? We have adapted to recording not just historic buildings, but also documenting the locations where important buildings once stood.
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