Lessons Learned: Assembling and Implementing a Toolkit for Identifying Colonial Period Sites

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "“Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution”: Identifying and Understanding Early Historic-Period House Sites" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

                Over 20 years of cultural resource management survey in southern New England, we have learned that a suite of tools is essential to successfully identify colonial-period house sites in a variety of contexts. The “tools” range from developing an understanding of the local and regional colonial landscape and settlement patterns to a knowledge of material culture, house forms, and period construction methods, and developing a “signature” for assessing when artifact scatters signal a buried house. Perhaps the most important tool is learning to identify potential Colonial sites early enough to gather the time and funding for data recovery if sites cannot be avoided by development projects.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• “Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution”: Identifying and Understanding Early Historic-Period House Sites

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 514