Cultural Resource Assessment Phase I Study

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Download or read book A Collaborative Approach to Cultural Resource Risk Assessment Preservation, and Prioritization written by and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New and increasing threats to cultural heritage resources have pushed archaeologists, land managers, and Indigenous peoples to develop strategies to identify at-risk resources, determine condition, vulnerabilities, and value of said resources, and then provide mitigation and preservation prioritizations and recommendations for the future. One such strategy is the risk assessment approach. Typically, to guide ongoing and future management of vulnerable cultural resources, risk assessments consider preexisting archaeological data, alongside geomorphological and hydrological landform characteristics, to prioritize sites for preservation. While such assessments have been conducted around the globe, they have not been widely applied on the Lower Columbia of Oregon and Washington (U.S.A.), nor has a localized methodology been developed, particularly one that incorporates the perspectives and values of descendent communities, through a collaborative partnership. My research took such a collaborative approach to risk assessment, via a case study of the western shoreline of Sauvie Island, located on the Lower Columbia River, in partnership with one of several tribes with strong ties to the river, the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde. My project examined an area of cultural significance to develop a baseline prioritization assessment, using the novel strategy of waterborne survey via kayak to access my study area. I posed two primary research questions: 1) What forces negatively impacted cultural heritage resources? 2) How did tribal partners prioritize cultural resources for preservation? To address these questions, I conducted fieldwork over the course of several months along the ~34 km western shoreline of Sauvie Island, recording 18 archaeological sites, including 8 previously recorded sites and 10 newly identified ones. I recorded nearly 2,000 artifacts, as well as in situ cultural deposits, dateable features, and diagnostic artifacts. These elements of the physical archaeological assemblage factored into a series of six variables defining archaeological value. I also recorded factors which put each site at risk, such as erosion and modern cultural impacts. To obtain tribal input about their views of value, I had seven collaborative meetings with staff members of the Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO) from the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde. Through an iterative process of editing and review, we identified six variables that communicated how the Grand Ronde value cultural resources. Together, archaeological and tribal values and risk assessment scores were joined to create prioritization preservation scores for each of the 18 sites recorded during my project.