Cultural Landscape Assessment for the San Luis Valley-Taos Plateau

Summary

In support of the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM’s) recent shift toward a regional landscape-scale approach to resource management on public lands, Argonne National Laboratory is conducting a pilot cultural landscape assessment in the San Luis Valley–Taos Plateau region of Colorado and New Mexico. The cultural landscape assessment is a paradigm shift from looking at individual cultural resource locations on a project-by-project basis to a more holistic approach of land use patterns at a regional landscape scale. A landscape approach considers the connectivity among traditionally defined archaeological sites and culturally important places and will likely lead to development of a new suite of research questions, as well as new ways of approaching the protection and mitigation of these culturally important landscapes. The assessment will consider the current conditions and trends of these landscapes in light of several change agents, including human use and development, climate change, fire, and invasive species. The methodology follows closely with that for the Rapid Ecoregional Assessments BLM has been conducting throughout the Western United States. The cultural landscape assessment will be used to support development of Solar Regional Mitigation Strategies for the Colorado Solar Energy Zones, as well as other planning and development activities.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage