Cultural Landscape Studies Help Match Cultural Resource Identification and Assessment Efforts to Undertaking Size and Complexity in the Section 106 Process

Summary

Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act requires United States federal agencies and their applicants to consider historic properties affected by their proposed actions. Guided principally by architectural historians and archaeologists through the 1980s, Section 106 reviews focused on identifying discrete structures and sites, then evaluating these in terms of dominant society aesthetics, histories, and sciences. By the 1990s, Section 106 participation by consulting Tribes and other cultural resource stewards obliged federal agencies to address broader spectra of historic properties and values. Agencies soon began using cultural landscape studies and other research and consultation tools to “match” historic property identification and assessment processes to the scale and complexity of proposed undertakings. The Section 106 review for the SunZia interstate transmission line (2009-2024) shows that the Federal Government has yet to consistently meet mandates to identify and assess other-than-archaeological/architectural historic properties. Our surveys of historic preservation professionals and available cultural landscape studies underscore disconnections between practitioner preferences for, and federal agency conduct of, cultural landscape studies. Our analyses spotlight standards for use in evaluating the adequacy of cultural landscape studies. We recommend six attributes essential to all cultural landscape study designs, methods, and applications in the Section 106 process.

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contributor(s): Michael Spears; Sean O'Meara; Katie Portman; Alex Binford-Walsh

Principal Investigator(s): John Welch