Cultural Resources
Aspects of a cultural system that are valued by or significantly representative of a culture or that contain significant information about a culture. A cultural resource may be a tangible entity or a cultural practice. Tangible cultural resources are categorized as districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects for the National Register of Historic Places and as archeological resources, cultural landscapes, structures, museum objects, and ethnographic resources for National Park Service (NPS) management purposes. The NPS strives to preserve and protect cultural resources in the park system that are listed in or eligible to be listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is a comprehensive list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects of national, regional, state, and local significance in American history, architecture, archeology, engineering, and culture. The National Register is maintained by the NPS under authority of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. To be considered eligible, a property must meet the National register criteria for evaluation, which involves examining a historic property’s age, significance, and integrity:
- Age and Integrity: Is the property old enough to be considered historic (generally at least 50 years old) and does it still look much the way it did in the past?
- Significance: Is the property associated with events, activities, or developments that were important in the past? With the lives of people who were important in the past? With significant architectural history, landscape history, or engineering achievements? Does it have the potential to yield information through archeological investigation about our past?
Historic properties are nominated to the National Register by the State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) of the state in which the property is located, by the Federal Preservation Officer (FPO) for properties under Federal ownership or control, or by the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (THPO) if the property is on tribal lands. Anyone can prepare a nomination to the National Register, but generally nomination forms are documented by property owners, local governments, historical societies or SHPO, FPO or THPO staff.
Definitions
Archeological Resources
Physical evidences of past human activity, including evidences of the effects of that activity on the environment. Archeological resources can be submerged (like a shipwreck), buried (like pottery fragments), or above ground (like adobe ruins).
Cultural Landscapes
A geographic area, including both cultural and natural resources and the wildlife or domestic animals therein, associated with a historic event, activity, or person or exhibiting other cultural or aesthetic values. There are four general kinds of cultural landscapes, not mutually exclusive:
- Historic Site: A landscape significant for its association with a historic event, activity, or person.
- Historic Designed Landscape: A landscape significant as a design or work of art; was consciously designed and laid out either by a master gardener, landscape architect, architect, or horticulturist to a design principle, or by an owner or other amateur according to a recognized style or tradition; has a historical association with a significant person, trend or movement in landscape gardening or architecture, or a significant relationship to the theory or practice of landscape architecture.
- Historic Vernacular Landscape: A landscape whose use, construction, or physical layout reflects endemic traditions, customs, beliefs, or values; in which the expression of cultural values, social behavior, and individual actions over time is manifested in physical features and materials and their interrelationships, including patterns of spatial organization, land use, circulation, vegetation, structures, and objects; in which the physical, biological, and cultural features reflect the customs and everyday lives of people.
- Ethnographic Landscape: Areas containing a variety of natural and cultural resources that associated people define as heritage resources, including plant and animal communities, geographic features, and structures, each with their own special local names.
Ethnographic Resources
A site, structure, object, landscape, or natural resource feature assigned traditional legendary, religious, subsistence, or other significance in the cultural system of a group traditionally associated with it.
According to NPS Management Policies, "[t]raditionally associated peoples generally differ as a group from other park visitors in that they typically assign significance to ethnographic resources—places closely linked with their own sense of purpose, existence as a community, and development as ethnically distinctive peoples. These places may be in urban or rural parks and support ceremonial activities or represent birthplaces of significant individuals, group origin sites, migration routes, or harvesting or collecting places. Although these places have historic attributes that are of great importance to the group, they may not necessarily have a direct association with the reason the park was established or be appropriate as a topic of general public interest. Some ethnographic resources might also be traditional cultural properties. A traditional cultural property is one that is eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places because of its association with cultural practices or beliefs of a living community that are (1) rooted in that community's history, and (2) important in maintaining the continuing cultural identity of the community."
Museum Objects
A material thing possessing functional, aesthetic, cultural, symbolic, and/or scientific value, usually movable by nature or design. Museum objects include prehistoric and historic objects, artifacts, works of art, archival material, and natural history specimens that are part of a museum collection. Structural components may be designated museum objects when removed from their associated structures. (Large or immovable properties, such as monumental statuary, trains, nautical vessels, cairns, and rock paintings, are defined as structures or features of sites.)
Structures
A constructed work, usually immovable by nature or design, consciously created to serve some human activity. Examples are buildings of various kinds, monuments, dams, roads, railroad tracks, canals, millraces, bridges, tunnels, locomotives, nautical vessels, stockades, forts and associated earthworks, Indian mounds, ruins, fences, and outdoor sculpture. In the National Register program "structure" is limited to functional constructions other than buildings.
