The PHAST Way: The PennDOT Highway Archaeological Survey Team

Summary

Since 2010, Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) have cooperated in the implementation of the PHAST program. PHAST is both a small, in-house transportation archaeology program and a professional development-apprenticeship program. The team is supervised by a PennDOT staff archaeologist and is composed of a graduate student Field Director and student intern field technicians. PHAST is deployed on small to mid-sized highway archaeology projects state-wide during the summer months. The program involves extensive and intensive professional training, and affords the participants professional experience they would be hard pressed to get anywhere else. It has also saved the Commonwealth’s taxpayers literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, placed almost all of its alumni in private and public sector jobs, and successfully completed dozens of projects from initial project scoping to the production of final reports. PHAST is a model for agency and university partnership, for professional development in CRM archaeology, and for the effective and efficient management of heritage resources.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Public Agencies and Universities: Partnerships for the Past

Keywords

Spatial Coverage