The Advantages of Landscape-Scale Cultural Assessments for Public Land Management

Summary

This is an abstract from the "A Further Discussion on the Role of Archaeology in Resource and Public Land Management" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In response to a recent shift toward a regional landscape-scale approach to resource management on public lands, Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with multiple federal agencies developed a cultural heritage values and risk assessment strategy to support interagency land-use planning in the West. In contrast to project-by-project strategies, landscape approaches to managing America’s public lands allow for a responsive posture that is capable of meeting challenges generated by environmental and social change. These assessments are designed to achieve three objectives: (1) document the most important and at-risk cultural resources that have shaped regional history, (2) evaluate cultural resource vulnerability to change agents over time (e.g., human development, climate change, wildfire, and invasive species), and (3) focus regional mitigation efforts on the most important and at-risk cultural resources. While individual cultural sites may have unique management requirements, comprehensive assessments of site relationships across the landscape afford better long-term planning and adaptive management across economic, administrative, and jurisdictional boundaries. The approach supports tailored, multiscalar analysis strengthening collaboration across federal agencies, Tribes, the research community, and other stakeholders.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Further Discussion on the Role of Archaeology in Resource and Public Land Management   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37407.0