Conference Agenda

Archaeological sites around the world are threatened with destruction and loss owing to environmental challenges brought on by climate change. This dilemma is even more evident among coastal sites in regions where intensifying storm surge and storm frequency contributes to an increase in coastal erosion. We cannot save or even study all sites threatened by such forces. We can, however, document as many as possible using 3D imaging so that at least some baseline record can be curated. 3D documentation will assist in site monitoring in the absence of full scale study. Using the island of Nevis as case study, current efforts to document threatened coastal sites in the Caribbean, and experiments with high definition images for reconstructing 3D images captured with 360 cameras are described. These landscapes include prehistoric and historic components. The method applied has utility for recording all sites at relatively low cost.

During the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, European and Euro-American fur traders brought exchange items, including vermillion pigment (mercury sulfide, HgS), as gifts and payments to their Indigenous trade partners around the Great Lakes region. The present study builds on previous work at the Grand Portage Fort Charlotte trade depot by testing soil from the c. 1793-1835 CE Northwest Company and American Trade Post site (47-As-0007) to investigate levels of anthropogenic Hg, Cu, Fe, As, and Pb as chemical elements indicative of human activity. Tribal monitors from the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa participated in the soil sampling and Ojibwe cultural practices including placing tobacco and gift-giving were followed during fieldwork. The mapped results of this collaborative study clarify spatial distributions of fur trade activities and identify potential areas of future archaeological investigation on Mooningwanekaaning, an island still sacred to Ojibwe descendants today.

The Assay Office in Boise, built in 1871, is a historical building in a park-like setting near the city center. Its grounds continue to yield a wealth of artifacts pertinent to the purification and estimation of gold and silver derived from mining operations in the surrounding territory. These artifacts, especially the cupels and crucibles, provide a historical record of the type of materials that the miners submitted and the process of assaying.

In a “fire assay”, base metals were absorbed by the cupel material and can now be determined by chemical means. The results have the potential of indicating from what part of the district the samples originated. The cupels and crucibles themselves are also of interest, as they were made from materials ranging from bone ash, to ceramics, to pure graphite. Some appeared to have been made locally, while others were imported from as far away as England.

Archaeology has been ongoing around Historic St. Mary’s City (HSMC) for more than a half century. HSMC is developing a new GIS platform to manage and visualize the wealth of assembled data shedding light on millennia of human habitation, from the presence of indigenous peoples, including the Yacocomico, who occupied the land prior to the arrival of the English colonists; the establishment of St. Mary’s City as Maryland’s first English capital; and development of agrarian settlements following the capital’s relocation. In preparation for opening HSMC’s new visitor center in 2026, the team has been using GIS to explore landscape changes from 1620 to 1740, which will be used to develop a new interactive display for the museum. This paper discusses the plans for and challenges of digitizing fifty years of archaeological data as well as how these new temporal visualizations are shedding light on the evolution of this significant site.

Geophysical survey techniques are increasingly employed in CRM to locate and interpret subsurface features on historic period sites. This paper presents and analyzes a series of case studies in which geophysical survey – specifically ground-penetrating radar (GPR), magnetometry, and/or electrical resistivity – played a pivotal role in identifying and contextualizing historic archaeological resources. Each example highlights how geophysical methods can refine research questions, reduce unnecessary excavation, and meet compliance-driven deadlines despite noisy data and complex archaeological conditions. By comparing geophysical results with ground-truthing, these case studies demonstrate the practical value and outline the limitations of geophysics in historic archaeology in a compliance context. The goal is to facilitate accessibility of GPR, magnetometry, and electrical resistivity techniques for a lay audience by promoting broader methodological transparency while highlighting geophysics as a cost-effective tool for identifying features that might otherwise remain undetected during CRM survey or mitigation.