Addressing Tribal Environmental Justice and Historic Preservation for Levee Infrastructure through Value-Added Geospatial Risk Analysis

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This study focuses on concerns for levees that tribal, state, and federal historic preservation staff have anecdotally observed, but have not fully quantified. It was designed in direct response Tribal Historic Preservation Officers’ concerns following flood events in the Mississippi River Valley in 2019. The research design was developed in coordination with staff at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Headquarters as well as the USACE Tribal Nations Technical Center for Expertise and completed under a detail assignment with the USACE Institute for Water Resources. The study addressed two problems: 1) USACE-authorized levees vary in their level of compliance with current historic preservation laws and, 2) consulting tribes who were removed historically from the jurisdictional area have never been provided the opportunity to review archaeological or other tribal cultural concerns on a systemic scale. The project delivers an indexed dataset of levees and a geospatial data layer which can be used to make the internal USACE review process more efficient and effective while supporting tribal sovereignty and co-management in preserving culturally significant sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52008