Northeast Region National Park Service Archeological Landscapes and the Stories They Tell

Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Northeast Region National Park Service Archeological Landscapes and the Stories They Tell," at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

With the many historic events and cultures represented within National parks it is challenging sometimes for NPS to make decisions about which stories to highlight to the public. Choosing specific periods to highlight can come at the expense of others. When a park’s period of significance is narrowly defined it can be challenging to find spaces to interpret important events, people, or cultures outside the established period. The danger in choosing which stories to tell means other equally significant stories may become blurred, or at worst, ignored. There is a movement within the NPS to address this with the goal of creating spaces for additional stories to be told to the public. The Northeast Region Archeology Program supports these efforts through landscape scale archeological investigations – an approach that allows reconstruction of past landscapes with an emphasis to examine broad scales of change over time using state-of-the-art methodologies and technology.