Rehabilitating America’s Forgotten Excavations: Case Studies from the Veterans Curation Program

Summary

Since the passage of historic preservation legislation in the middle of the twentieth century, the pace of mandated excavation has always exceeded the resources devoted to preservation and curation of our national heritage.  Many of the archaeological projects conducted on public land have never been properly inventoried, preserved, or publicized.  As a result, these investigations remain largely inaccessible to researchers, and they create an immense burden on repositories.  In 2009, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, St. Louis District established the Veterans Curation Program (VCP) to address the problem of endangered and underutilized archaeological collections.  The VCP has rehabilitated more than 180 collections representing over 1,000,000 artifacts.  Each investigation is inventoried, cataloged, preserved, and photographed, and documentary records are used to reconstruct proveniences and contextual data.  The collections – which include an historic mill, a plantation, and protohistoric Mississippian villages – constitute an important new resource for education and research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2015   •
• Poster Session 2

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 31