Video
Thinking Like an Archeologist
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the NPS Archeology Program Speaker series for 2014. My name is Karen Mudar. I'm an archeologist in the Washington Archeology Program Office. So, it should be a very interesting talk. I encourage everyone to join us here next week. Today however, we're very fortunate to have Carol Nash talking to us about a teaching project that she's been conducting at Shenandoah National Park. Carole is an assistant professor in Integrated Science and Technology at James Madison University. Her talk today is “Thinking Like an Archeologist: Undergraduate Experiential learning in a Blue Ridge Compliance Setting.”
She says that archeologists who teach undergraduates commonly offer anecdotal evidence of the transformative power of experiential learning. Really, I hadn't thought about this before, but they are the hallmarks of archeological training. Much of our training is hands on, but our contributions to the scholarship of teaching and learning are limited, which is true. We don't often have opportunities to document and measure the effects of this type of training.
The application of foundational knowledge and technique in a field setting is presented here in her study from a decades-long research program in Shenandoah National Park, where undergraduate students engaged in archeological field schools, and short-term surveys continued to receive training. I'm very glad that Carole has agreed to speak with us today. I welcome her. Thank you very much for joining us, Carole.
Carole: Thank you so much, Karen. Welcome to everyone who has joined us. Let me get myself oriented here. I have to say that I have been waiting for this opportunity. I'm simply glad to have the chance to talk with folks about the work we've been doing in Shenandoah, but also to talk about teaching archeology. In addition to being a professor at JMU - James Madison University - I'm also an associate with our Center for Faculty Innovation. I work with faculty extensively on teaching and teacher training.
As I was doing this work, and I was giving examples of good practice, I found that I was constantly giving examples from my own experience and from archeology, so I thought, "It's time to do some real work on this." This presentation was first developed for a poster session at SAA this past April. That poster session was called “Bootcamp for Teaching Undergraduate Archeology.” It grew out of some discussions with colleagues about the way we in academia are preparing students for archeological practice.
In the Middle Atlantic, of course, where I am, our undergraduate programs tend to emphasize experiential learning, but as well as intensive training, and again, at the undergraduate level, so the model that I'm going to present to you today comes from that region, but also a very specific context and that is a long-term cooperative agreement between James Madison University and the National Park Service. Our archeological training is built around compliance-based research.
If you all later come back and want to use this, the abstract is there. It's very much what Karen was just reading to you all, but I do want to say that the goal of this project, or the goal of this presentation today is to demonstrate the strength of archeology to not only enhance anthropological education, but education in general through mastery of skills and dispositions that can be applied to other areas. We've definitely gotten some feedback on this as we have continued to work.
Our presentation today is in four parts. I'm going to lay out for you the relationships that James Madison University has with Shenandoah National Park. I'm going to talk about archeology and active learning. I'm going to give some examples of compliance projects and teaching. Then I'm going to talk about the ways in which archeology actually takes students to what are recognized by educational specialists as the highest orders of learning.
I hope that this will come together and make sense to all of you. I will try to not use much jargon from the teaching world, because believe me, we think archeologist have jargon? You should see what the teaching people do! What I'll do is weave some threads from each of this through the presentation. Beginning, just to tell you a little about the JMU partnership with Shenandoah National Park, since 1999, our university has entered into a series of cooperative agreements with the National Park, Service, specifically Shenandoah National Park largely to help with NHPA work, certainly, what we would consider to be a basic compliance setting.
One of the things that some of you may know about Shenandoah is that Shenandoah has never had an archeologist on staff. There have been park service archeologists that have been brought in to do work there from time to time, but there has never actually been an archeologist on staff. What we are doing through this cooperative agreement is basically creating a situation where we are helping Shenandoah take care of its compliance needs, but also of course getting student training.
Some of the things that we do for Shenandoah, the archeological services will seem very familiar to most of you. Of course, we do identify and evaluate for the National Register. We do condition assessment, and we work with ASMIS. That has been a pretty interesting process in and of itself. As you can imagine working in a heavily forested environment, finding archeological sites that were previously documented is not always easy. We also have worked with the interpretive staff, and have developed some interpretive programs based on our findings.
We have become quite adept at working with the database for recording and cataloging artifacts as well as working through some backlog collections that Shenandoah has housed. We work with ICMS. We do a great deal of database management. We do geospatial analyses. One of the things you're going to see today is that the undergraduate students contribute to technical reports, research presentations, and publications. Then one of the most important things, and I'm becoming aware of as I grow old in my career is the importance of archiving project materials. That's exactly what we are working on at this point in the season as we're getting ready to go into the winter here.
One thing to show you is a map of Shenandoah. In particular, some of you may have been there. Others may not know, but it is actually a very narrow park in the Virginia Blue Ridge. It is focused around the 105 mile long Skyline Drive, and is divided into 3 districts. As you can see from the pull outs, we have worked all through the park with these four cooperative agreements. We've done just a huge number of projects over the years, some of which I will tell you about.
I think, one of the most remarkable things about our relationship is that I have been able to employ 70 students - 70 undergraduate students - and 24 of those have gone on and have stayed in some element of either archeology or cultural resource protection or presentation. I see that as a major part of the success story that has come out of this agreement.
One of the things that we are very aware of is that we're able to do this work in large part because we are so close, geographically, to Shenandoah National Park. One of the main entrances is only about 20 miles from our university, so it's not difficult for us to pop up to the park to do some research, but one thing that really got us started that made a huge difference in the establishment of our program was the use of the research and resource management center - the field camp - that Shenandoah National Park maintains in the central district. It's known as Pinnacles. It was part of the Pinnacles' Civilian Conservation Corps camp.
From 2000 to 2005, our summer program and field school ran out of this research station at Pinnacles. Every summer, we had 15 to 20 students who took up residence here from mid-May through late July. As you can imagine, that really developed a solid foundation for the program, and that was quite a windfall for us. We just really look back to those as halcyon days. Today, we continue to work in the park regularly, but our work is based at the university in Harrisonburg. We have not stayed at Pinnacles since 2005, but again, it was very important to us.
I would like to depart from that background, and just go a little bit into the discussion of what we know about archeology as a way of teaching and why it is so important, and why it makes such a difference in learning. This is where we get into some of that educational language, some of the pedagogy in other words. When we think about archeology, I think, for many of us, the first thing that comes to mind is that it was the practice of archeology that made it real for us, the active learning as we say in the educational world.
When we begin to consider why it is that people stay with archeology, why they continue to work in it, and why students decide that archeology is something that they want to go into, in most instances, people will talk about the importance of the experience, both the experience of working in groups, working on teams, working outdoors, working with resources, but just that active learning that really seals ideas, concepts, and skills.
One thing that is also important to understand about active learning that many of us intuitively recognize in archeology is that it is tied to problem solving. Archeology is the great problem solving discipline as far as I'm concerned, and so many of us long ago gave up the idea that we as the lecturers are the knowers of all, but rather that we learn with our students in the process of discovery. It might be surprising to you that it has taken other disciplines a long time to figure that out.
In fact, one of the things we pay a great deal of attention to in the world of educational enhancement is how well certain teaching activities promote learning and promote what we call sticky learning, learning that stays with students. Active learning can take many different forms, but it has been assessed for years, and it has found to be the most important and long-lasting form of learning that is out there. Lecturing is very low on the list, listening to somebody talk like you're listening to me right now. I've got nice pictures for you, but we're still very much doing this - you're the passive recipient of the information that I have.
Active learning which could be hands-on learning, it could be case studies, it could be simulations, just to name a few, shifts away from passive learning. The focus is on student engagement. The focus is on creating independent inquiry and pushing the students farther along their development in terms of scholars and practitioners. One thing that I have been very interested in recently is the fact that archeologist haven't been as vocal about the strengths of our discipline for teaching as have other disciplines.
If you look at the other life sciences in particular, you will see that there are massive literatures on good teaching practice, best practices and so forth. Archeologists, probably because we're so busy in the field and in the lab, haven't really delved into that literature. We haven't really jumped into that pool of literature and I think many of us have important stories to tell about the power of active learning.
If you were to talk with an educational specialist about active learning, what he or she would tell you is that it takes students from what most will consider to be low order thinking skills, just identifying and trying to remember, et cetera, all the way up to the highest order of thinking skills, which is creating, including hypothesis development, planning, and producing. If you look at the chart that is on the screen right now, you'll see that as we shift from remembering to understanding, to applying, to analyzing, to evaluating, to creating, you go from becoming a recipient of information to embracing information as your own.
That's the kind of transformative power that I think many of us see in archeology on a daily basis when we have the chance to work with students. Sometimes it takes some a little longer than others, but I believe there's a good way to talk about this that we're talking about, and education of attention or transfer of knowledge through craft, getting from the lower order thinking skills to the higher order thinking skills.
If you think of archeology as the catalyst that is moving students along this continuum, it shouldn't come as any surprise that when undergraduate archeology students graduate, many of them are much more prepared to go into the job world regardless of whether they're going into archeology or not than our students from other disciplines. I also want to address one thing that I've been getting on my soap box about lately, that is, we keep hearing about the importance of transferable skills.
In my mind, when you tell a student, "Okay, I'm going to teach you transferable skills," it's almost like saying to them, "I really appreciate the fact that you've decided to major in archeology, but you're never going to get a job in it, so let's focus on the things you're learning that you can transfer somewhere else." I don't think that's correct. I think that we do a lot better than that, because I think there are dispositions that come along with archeological training that, I guess we could say, enhanced what some have called the far transfer of knowledge, not transferable skills but rather, we are helping our students.
We're helping students promote this disposition of critical and synthetic thinking that requires them to work across disciplines in different learning domains. That's much greater than saying to a student, "You know how to operate a transit from your days of working in the field with me, so now we can get you a job with a survey company." It is very, very different. I think that many of us who are engaged in archeology almost intuitively recognize the connections between all the elements of what we do and how the students at the end of the process come out being great thinkers, great problem solvers and, hopefully, very skilled in our discipline and in our practice.
I do think that we want to also mention that compliance work to take it back to this actual case study can provide a wonderful laboratory for this kind of training. We're going to talk a little bit more about that as we go along. The active learning approach to archeological training at JMU is pretty basic. It's something that some of you may have seen before, or maybe even experienced yourselves. You have a curriculum at the undergraduate level that is built around field, laboratory, and writing experiences,
no great surprises there. What we do however is we try to stage it so that the students move through or scaffolded through the experience so that they continue to build, and they themselves become leaders towards the end of their time. At the sophomore and junior level, after they've had field school, they will often apprentice as a crew member. At the junior or senior level, they will take on early leadership in the field or the lab, and they will act as guides for younger students, and they obtain analytical experience.
Then at the senior level, and we've also had a number of students who have stayed with us after they've graduated, and have worked with us for a year or two, developing leadership in field, lab, synthesis, and research. This is how active training at our university works, active training in archeology or active learning in archeological training. A student will begin with field school, and then as they stay with it, and the wonderful thing is because of our cooperative agreement and the funding that comes along with it, I have been able to employ these students as workers as they go through their undergraduate career.
It's really a win-win for everyone who is involved, but as they continue on through the process, they get more and more skills, more and more responsibility, and ultimately are doing independent research. I think until recently in the United States in particular, it was generally expected that you would take undergraduates in the field, and you would work with them, but it has been unusual for undergraduates to get this kind of intensive training and these opportunities.
I think that in the United States, this has largely been reserved for graduate students. If undergrads get it, it's been more hit or miss, but in our program, it's been very, very intentional in part because we don't have a graduate program in archeology at our university. We also want to mention that as the students develop over time, they move from lower order to high order thinking and learning skills. This is the sticky learning that we so like to see.
The research themes that we have been able to establish to guide our work in Shenandoah actually transform what I would consider to be straight-up compliance studies into context rich scholarship. It's not always easy to do this in a compliance setting. For example, we will get a call, and we'll look in PEPC and we need to go to AT shelters, and look at a spot where they're going to put in a bear-proof locker. It's like, "Okay, we're going out in the field to look at a spot where there is going to be a bear-proof locker."
That's a basic compliance project, so we will go and do that, but the beauty of our relationship with Shenandoah is that we have been allowed to explore ideas and questions that are typically associated with research archeology, because we have so many students, because we are so close by, and because we have the support of the Park Service. The long-term nature of our agreement has been key to this. Whenever we're in the field in Shenandoah regardless of whether there's a bear-proof locker going in, or whether there's a vault toilet going somewhere else, or we're in the lab, we're always thinking about these larger issues.
We have worked extensively at Big Meadows, one of the more famous places in Shenandoah National Park. We've done research on fire as a prehistoric management tool. We have done a lot of work on the Appalachian Trail, and study the impact of recreation on archeological sites. Because of the region we work in and because of the historic themes that pro grade this area, we've certainly done a lot of work on the archeology of agriculture and extractive industry.
We have worked with historic communities and cemeteries. I should mention that in Shenandoah because the descendant communities are so close both geographically as well as in time, there is a constant conversation between those descendant communities and the students. We get some very, very interesting feedback as well as interesting information in that way. Because of my training in Native American settlement patterns in the Appalachians, of course we do a lot of work with Native American mobility, settlement, and resource use.
We also have done some work in what I would consider to be the archeology of the recent past, the evolution of Skyline Drive. We've looked at how developed areas in the park have been created and changed over time, and of course the development of trails. One of the major cultural themes for Shenandoah is the Civilian Conservation Corps. We've looked at a number of those camps as well as projects that the CCC boys worked on.
We keep these in our back pocket. Whenever we're in the field, we're always thinking - the students and I are always thinking - "How can this little project fit into one of our bigger research questions?" Now, just to say a few words about compliance projects and teaching, this is getting into the third part of our presentation today, one thing about James Madison University is that the archeology program developed in a compliance-based setting.
Since the 1970s when the program was first introduced at the university, students and faculty together have worked with throughout Virginia as well as east and , West Virginia for a number of states and federal agencies. We've worked extensively for the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Virginia Department of Transportation, Fish and Wildlife, Dominion Power, National Trust, Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation. The list could just go on and on and on. This is the way of life for us.
In part, originally, the professors who established the program decided to go the compliance route, because in the mid 1970s, that's where the money was. That's where there was interest and where there was possibility. That became the basis of this new archeology program at this state university. Then as the program continued to mature, what we found is that these relationships we had established with federal agencies, in particular, just continued to grow.
One thing, though, that I would like to mention here is that we've been doing this for 40 years, and so we had a large number of student who have gone on to get Master's degrees and PhDs who are now teaching at other universities. Again, this is out of a university that has only an undergraduate program. I was one of those students. I am what we call a Double Duke. I teach at James Madison University. The Duke Dog is our symbol, but I also graduated from James Madison University. I was one of those students back in the '70s and early '80s.
To be quite honest with you all, it never ... Excuse me. It [the slide] won’t go. Sorry, I got to use my arrow here. You can tell I use PowerPoint in the classroom all the time. I am very much aware that we are modeling archeological practice for our students all the time. To be quite honest, I never knew that there was another way of doing this. It always made sense to me that there were compliance projects that needed to be done. I had come along in the age of CRM archeology. Why not take students out in the field to do this?
When the opportunity arose with Shenandoah, it seemed like just a natural fit for us. Continuing with this, if I can use the correct arrows, there we go. We want to mention that there is a great gift that is given to the university, and that is, these archeological projects are much more than just field outings and practice for the students, but our curriculum at the university benefits from this field research. We have a number of courses today that incorporate research projects that are part of this cooperative agreement from Shenandoah.
Every year, there will be many students, in some years, more than others, but there will be many students who go through coursework at James Madison University, where they are introduced to Shenandoah National Park through research projects and archeological research projects. The wonderful thing that comes out of this often is that students will want to continue, and they will undertake independent projects either Honor's projects or Capstone Research or independent research.
I have some examples of that to show you in just a moment. If we continue on, the last part of the talk gets back to the way that compliance project and focused research actually enhances and gets us to that stage of higher order learning. I have actually lost track of the number of students who have given papers at regional conferences, but I can tell you that the students are not only responsible for college credit, they have to perform at a professional level that meets the Secretary of the Interior and SHPO standards.
Their assessments in their classes will include contributions to CRM reports and conference papers and, to date, students have co-authored 41 reports with me in 15 years of work in Shenandoah. I think that's pretty remarkable, but again, when I graduated as an undergraduate, I had three technical reports under my belt. Much of this is what do you expect, what do you think an undergraduate student can do? What is your role as an academician? What is your role as someone with the other foot in the compliance world to bring these things together?
We feel like we've been able to do that in Shenandoah. Here are some examples. This is an article that was published in the Archeological Society of Virginia's quarterly bulletin. It was authored by one of our students there, Sarah Ellis, who now works for the park service’s Southeastern Center. She did research, and was part of our field crew on Mount Vernon Furnace, which was a very large hot blast furnace dating to the mid 19th century in the south district of Shenandoah National Park.
This particular project is one that has been ongoing now in fits and starts since 2005. We continue to go back to this as another piece of research comes up, or there's another reason for us to go back and look at the bridge for a compliance project, but the Mount Vernon Furnace is a very important piece to the work that we do. As an example of its continuation just this past spring, we had 3 students, 2 from geographic science and 1 from history, who together produced a report on a complex of 54 features that we believe are probably part of an enslaved community that was responsible for keeping the furnace in operation prior to the Civil War.
These are students who, interestingly enough, had very little training in archeology. They love being outdoors. They love their disciplines of geography and history, but they found that archeology was the key to helping them synthesize much of what they had learned in their undergraduate career so that they could create a report on these 54 features. They did some beautiful overlays with map work. They did GPS work and GIS work as well as historical research. That was a great deal of fun and meaningful.
The student on the left just got a job; the student in the middle just got a job; and the student on the right is in graduate school. Those are the three success stories. We also have worked extensively at Big Meadows. We have a number of technical reports that have been co-authored by myself and other students that focused on Native American sites at Big Meadows as well as historic homesteads and Civilian Conservation Corps Camp Robert Fechner.
We just feel incredibly fortunate to have worked at Big Meadows. It has become important to my research, and I should probably mention that I think one of the reasons we have success in Shenandoah is our proximity, but also our familiarity. I grew up in this area. I had family members who were removed from the park when it was established in the 1930s. Some of my earliest memories of being in the woods are in Shenandoah National Park and being in Big Meadows, which in the 1960s was mowed to within an inch of its life, so it was like rolling around in a big lawn.
Because of these connections to local people, the local community and just the knowledge of place, we have been able to put together stories of this place that I think would have taken other researchers perhaps a lot longer. They could have gotten to them, but perhaps not in the way that we did. Big Meadows was a crystallizing element. This is where we were working when we were living at Pinnacles. It was just a very, very strong start for us.
We continue to do research on it. I've just published a paper on Native American fire management in the maintenance of the meadow. I'm pretty happy about that. This is a map that the students made based on our survey and excavations of the Civilian Conservation Corps camp, nothing standing any longer of course, but we were able to plot it, and we were able to find the individual buildings. You're looking at map works that was done by undergraduate students, and part of technical reports that are submitted to Shenandoah National Park as well as to the SHPO in Virginia.
Another example, and to me, this was one of our shining moments, was the ability to do oral history work with the CCC alums, those who were still living at that time in 2000 at Big Meadows. They continue to come back to Shenandoah every year for a reunion. The year that we had first found the camp and had started mapping it in, we were able to work with them when they came for the reunion, and showed them what we had found, and get their comments.
The students had the opportunity to interact, and it was a life-changing event. When we talk about sticky learning and active learning, you just can’t hope for more than for students to see the application of the work they have done right in front of their eyes. We also found a World War II training camp, again, the archeology of the recent past, but publications, myself with undergraduate students, so a very high level work, we believe.
On the backside of Big Meadows, more work there, a beautiful technical report that was put together with major contributions from undergraduates looking at a historic homestead as well a stratified Early Archaic to Late Woodland Native American site. The students who have worked on this continued on in archeology for a while. They've gone on to other careers at this point, but they harken back to this as one of the highlights of their undergraduate education.
We have also worked with, this was just a really significant compliance project for us. I should mention that the Big Meadows projects were all done because the Park Service was trying to determine how to best manage that space, and so we were literally studying the meadow to document as many cultural resources as we could so that management strategies would take those into consideration.
With this particular project though, this is one that was highly visible, a new amphitheater being built at Skyland, which is one of the most famous places, I guess, you could say in Shenandoah today. Many people visit Skyland. We actually found what we believe were the roots of Skyland when it was a tent camp long before there was Shenandoah National Park. Again, student work. We worked on fires. We come in after fires, and do large-scale surveys.
I'm getting old, and the students don't get any older. They stay the same age, and so it's harder for me to keep up with them in the field, but we do very large surveys for things like this when there have been fires or when they're going to be prescribed burns. They see that side of compliance as well. One thing that we have really gotten excited about is our project in the north district on the site called Belmont, which is a 19th century winery.
Many, many stories we could tell you about Belmont, very difficult field work, very challenging because it was so overgrown and so difficult to get to, and yet finding and still working on the story of one of the early wineries in Virginia that has been completely forgotten in a state where wine is now very important to the economy. We've had some fun with that one.
More recently, I am working with students in my regular classes at JMU through sandwiching this in between our compliance projects and more basic research. We've been looking the possibility of evidence for sacred mountains for Native people in the Blue Ridge. We have been doing what I call aural geography around waterfalls. This project started as I was surveying with students, and we recognized that there were a number of archeological sites near waterfalls that were in very strange locations.
They were on slopes. They were facing north. They were in the wrong places. They were not where the predictive models would tell you an archeological site should be. We started to think, "Well, is it possible that we are looking at a landscape of sound?" As native people hear waterfalls as they are approaching, they stop what they're doing, and they prepare to go to waterfalls, because in indigenous cultures, as many of you know, waterfalls are very sacred places.
We took decibel meters in the field. Let me go back for just a second. We had decibel meters on our iPad, went out in the field, and what we have found now in six different locations is that the archeological sites are found, literally, where the waterfall sound is the greatest, where it is magnified by the canyons, and so the possibility that we are indeed looking at vestibules, we're looking at preparatory places, where Native people were getting ready to go to waterfalls, interestingly enough, no sites by the waterfalls themselves,
But also interesting artifacts. We have found pottery in high elevations at these sites, which is very, very unusual. Undergraduate students helped discover this. Finally, one of our most recent projects and one that we're actually going to work on tomorrow in the archives in Shenandoah, we are lucky enough to have LiDAR for some of the areas in the park, and we have been developing a method of assessing features using LiDAR, and then going into the field and ground trothing to see where there is a match, and to try, I guess you could say, hone the use of LiDAR in archeological field work in heavily wooded settings.
I think those just to give you some ideas about what has been possible in the kind of learning that undergraduate students engage in when they have the opportunity. I really, really, really want to acknowledge our partners in Shenandoah, Reed Engle in the past before his retirement, now Ann Kain, and Kandace Muller, who we talk to all the time, and meet in the field and in the archives. They are just the best partners, and all the students who had been through our program, our Office of Sponsored Programs, and then Clarence Geier, the professor who established the Anthropology Program to begin with. Thank you so much.
Karen: Carole, thank you very much for that very interesting talk.
Carole: You're welcome.
Karen: Do you have any comments or questions for Carole? Not yet. While you're mulling over her presentation, I have a couple of questions and comments.
Carole: Sure.
Karen: I was really stuck by what a nice example this is of very cooperative relationships within the park and a local university or college. It was quite gratifying to see how many classes are taught that actually fold some aspect of this research into it. Are these taught by you, or are they taught by other instructors as well?
Carole: That's a great question, Karen. I have taught all of these courses that you see on the list in the slide that's before you now, but have also developed modules around the work that we've done and shared this with other faculty members who are now using it in their own classes.
Karen: I bet that's a great recruiting tool, too.
Carole: It is. There's always another agenda.
Karen: I know that Shenandoah has wilderness.
Carole: Yes.
Karen: Have you worked in the wilderness?
Carole: We have, largely with fire survey, after fires. Our work has primarily focused on the developed areas of the park, but when there is need, if a trail is being moved, for example, we will go into the wilderness areas, and do work for the park, yes.
Karen: Has the wilderness affected the way that you do research?
Carole: It certainly affects accessibility. There is no question. The logistics are different when we do that kind of work. Perhaps the best example I can give you is when we sometimes do condition assessments, we will have to go to sites that are in wilderness, and we will literally have to plan for quite a while just to figure out how we're going to get there, how we're going to get our equipment in and so on and so forth.
It's more logistics that anything, but I will also say, again, it is a wonderful teaching opportunity, because I follow the approach that William Cronon takes in his writing on cultural resources and wilderness. That is that what we are seeing is a rewilding, and so the evidence of cultural activity is everywhere. When I go into what is designated as wilderness in Shenandoah, I very much see a cultural landscape. We use that as another teaching opportunity.
Karen: Very interesting. You were talking about condition assessments. Do you often do the initial condition assessment for sites, or do you have to make arrangements for people from SEAC, in another archeological center, that come in and do the initial assessments?
Carole: What I will tell you is we typically, up until now, all of the condition assessments we have done are on sites that are already in ASMIS. They're sites that have already been documented. Now, since we've been working in Shenandoah, of course we have found many, many sites that are now in ASMIS. The technical reports that we have produced in a sense document condition, but there is not been enough time elapsed to go for the condition assessment process to kick in.
Karen: Thank you for that.
Carole: You're welcome.
Karen: Do we have any questions or comments for Carole? You need to unmute your phones, don't forget. It looks like we've got a quiet crowd today.
Carole: That's fine.
Karen: Thank you so much, Carole. I really appreciate it.
Description
Carol Nash, NPS, 10/23/2014, ArcheoThursday
Duration
1 hour, 6 minutes, 29 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
10/23/2014
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