Celebrate National Park Week! National Park Week is April 21-29, 2012. Entrance is free to all 397 NPS sites, including parks with archeology! Where will you go—the mounds at Hopewell Culture? Kingsley Plantation at Timucuan? Community gardens at Manzanar? Montezuma Castle? Get started on the Visit Archeology page, or find a park near you. Experience why the national parks are America’s best idea!

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We've got a new Chief Archeologist! Stanley C. Bond, Jr. has been named chief archeologist of the NPS. A native of Beaufort, South Carolina, Stan earned a B.A. in anthropology and a B.Sc. in geology from the University of Alabama and a M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from the State University of New York, Albany. His dissertation, “Tradition and Change in First Spanish Period (1565-1764) St. Augustine, Florida Architecture: A Search for Colonial Identity,” examined the role town planning and architecture played in the development of New World Spanish colonial identity.

Stan has worked on prehistoric and historic archeological sites throughout the east, southeast, Caribbean, and Hawaii. He has been an archeologist for the Historic St. Augustine Preservation Board and the U.S. Army Environmental Center, and an adjunct instructor at Flagler College in Florida.

Stan has also served as the integrated resources manager for Kaloko-Honokohau NHP in Hawaii and superintendent of the Juan Bautista de Anza NHT in California and Arizona. Stan received the Trish Patterson Student Conservation Association Award for Natural Resource Management in a Small Park in 2001. Most recently, Stan was the superintendent of Kennesaw Mountain NBP in Georgia.

The Archeology Program is proud to welcome Dr. Bond to the team, and we look forward to a long and fruitful collaboration!

The national parks are home to a wide variety of research and educational projects. Our Projects in the Parks series touches on all aspects of archeology, including site survey, analysis, curation, consultation, education, technology, and ongoing efforts to recover sites being destroyed by erosion.

We recently featured The History of the Spring Enclosure, Fort Davis National Historic Site. Historical archeology is often about testing assertions made in historical documents against physical remains in the archeological record. Historical archeologists often look at whether the archeological remains verify what is written, or tell a different story. If they do suggest something different than written accounts, what alternative version do they present and why might people have written down something else?

Projects in the Parks tackles historical mysteries like that of the spring enclosure as well as those for which there is little or no documentary evidence. From Making Prehistoric Music: Instruments from Puebloan Sites to 16th-Century Cross-Cultural Encounters at Point Reyes, archeology sheds light on the lives of people who would otherwise remain unknown. It also highlights the value of the National Parks as repositories of the raw data of the past, and the dedication of the people who protect, recover, and interpret those resources for our children and for those who are yet to come. Learn more >>