Petersburg National Battlefield conducted the first year of a planned three-year overview and assessment project through a cooperative agreement with the University of Maryland in 1988. Focusing first on the Five Forks Unit, the project began by examining the nineteenth-century landscape Chris Calkins, park historian, examined an extensive collection of post-Civil War maps dating between 1865 and 1880 to reconstruct the pattern of farm fields, forests, and roadways at the time of the battle. Richard Easterbrook at Petersburg incorporated Calkin's research into a geographic information system (GIS) map that compared field boundaries in 1865 with those in 1995. This map revealed that the overall proportions of fields to woods around Five Forks is approximately the same as in 1865, but the distribution of cleared to wooded lots has often changed.

Virginia land tax records were used to trace the emergence of large and small tobacco plantations; the 1860 Federal Census records provided the names of family members who owned these plantations and of numerical lists of the African-American slaves who labored on all but the smallest farms. Two farm houses were documented as standing within the current boundaries of the park unit at the time of the Civil War: the Boisseau/Young dwelling and the Sydnor dwelling. These structures were apparently built in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century and may have stood into the early twentieth century. The site of the "Chimneys" is indicated on post-Civil War maps of the battlefield and evidently indicates the location of farm dwelling that burned in 1851, leaving only brick or stone chimneys on the landscape. The battle of Five Forks represents one component in a sequence of cultural occupations with historic and prehistoric dimensions.

Archeologists of the Valley Forge Center for Cultural Resources initiated a testing program at the site of Union Fort Morton, constructed during the final seige of Petersburg, to assess whether or not portions of the fort remain under the modern level field. Intact deposits reflecting the historical dimensions of this large construction were found to remain.