Archaeological Collaboration in Northwest Wyoming: Recording BLM Sites with College Students

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community-Based Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper reports on a developing collaboration in northwest Wyoming between Northwest College (NWC) and the Bureau of Land Management, Cody Field Office (BLM). The collaboration began as an informal partnership where college students visited prehistoric archaeological sites on BLM land as part of an extra credit field trip. This past fall, the partnership became more substantial as now an entire NWC course has been built around recording BLM sites. Using a range of recording techniques both ancient (tape, compass, paper) and modern (drone, photogrammetry) students documented a prehistoric stone circle ("tepee ring") site in Park County, Wyoming. The site has seen increasing impact from proliferation of Off-Highway-Vehicles, which instilled a tangible sense of stewardship for the students. In addition to learning field methods, the students applied the newly acquired data to complete a Wyoming Cultural Properties Form. The project is mutually beneficial in that NWC students get some hands-on experience doing archaeological fieldwork and the local BLM office gets much-needed documentation about cultural resources under their jurisdiction.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Collaborative and Community-Based Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23554