A Community Approach to Data Recovery Investigations at the Dimond Knoll Site, Harris County, Texas

Summary

The Dimond Knoll Screening Project has been one of the most successful Public Outreach efforts undertaken to date by the Texas Department of Transportation’s Archeological Studies Branch. Excavation of this small floodplain mound in northwestern Harris County was completed 2012, revealing a record of regular visitation by mobile foraging groups across nearly ten millennia. Once the upper sediments of the knoll were extensively sampled through meticulous hand excavation, the remaining sandy mantle was stripped away in order to more effectively expose and investigate deeply buried cultural deposits. Rather than simply discarding the stripped soil, TxDOT made arrangements with the Houston Archeological Society to have the sediment moved to an off-site location for screening. Hundreds of artifacts were recovered over the year-long screening project, including chipped stone tools, pottery, and faunal material. The project has been featured in various local media outlets, resulting in an increased awareness of the archaeological heritage present in the Houston area. Artifacts recovered at the screening site will be cataloged, analyzed, curated and reported along with those recovered in the hand-excavated units at the site, rewarding the many community groups who participated in the screening project with a tangible contribution to their regional heritage.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Creative Public-Centered Approaches to Compliance Archaeology

Keywords

Spatial Coverage