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Map of Fort Bliss, Texas, and the southern end of the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, showing major local landforms mentioned in the text.
Source publication
Despite advocacy of landscape approaches in cultural resource management (CRM) and critiques of the site concept, CRM data collection methods in the western United States continue to focus on individual archaeological sites as units of observation, analysis, and management. The transect-recording unit (TRU) method strikes a balance between conventi...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... TRU method was originally developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by archaeologists conducting cultural resource management survey on the US Army's White Sands Missile Range and Fort Bliss installations ( Figure 1) in the Tularosa Basin of southern New Mexico and the Hueco Bolsón of West Texas (e.g., Anschuetz et al. 1990;Lukowski and Stuart 1996;Miller et al. 2009;O'Leary et al. 1997;Seaman et al. 1988). The TRU system entails the recording of all areas within an APE using a systematic grid of uniformly sized cells, or TRUs, as the fundamental unit of spatial observation and recording. ...
Context 2
... of point-located ceramic isolates documented by a large survey conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Carmichael 1986), for example, resulted in the tentative identification of an extensive network of trails across the entire southern Tularosa Basin. Segments of the trail system have since been ground truthed during TRU survey work ( Garcés et al. 2011; Figure 10). ...
Citations
... More attention may need to be paid to functional and behavioral associations of artifacts, and to measurements of areas and densities of features and remains, than has been typical of documentation practices tailored to culture-historical purposes. Leckman and Heilen (2023) illustrate one such system that calculates these quantities using imposed grid cells. ...
Today, there is a growing movement to use accumulated archaeological information to contribute to discussions of general issues facing human societies, including our own. In this regard, the archaeological record is most unique and helpful when viewed at broad comparative scales. Most relevant data for these sorts of analyses are collected through the cultural resource management (CRM) process. Still, by and large, interpretation remains limited to individual projects, and data integration across projects is nearly nonexistent. What would it take for CRM to achieve real data integration? In this article, we discuss these issues and suggest one potential solution. The most pressing need we identify is for data products that integrate the primary data emanating from CRM at broad spatial and temporal scales, which are suitable for research by archaeologists and other social scientists. We argue that the time is right for the discipline to invest in organizations that produce such products.
... CRM efforts routinely carve archaeological landscapes into arbitrary pockets of time, space, and data-that is, sites. Although sites can serve as convenient units of analysis and management, relying on them as fundamental data collection units can distort the interpretation of the archaeological record (Colwell and Ferguson 2014;Dunnell 1992;Ebert 1992;Leckman and Heilen 2023; McCoy 2020) as well as frustrate reuse of primary data. Many survey approaches, for example, focus observation primarily on recording high-density scatters and rare artifact types. ...
... Focusing on only one segment of the archaeological record can lead to erroneous interpretations of behavioral patterns and cultural processes and, ultimately, to misapprehension and mismanagement of the archaeological record. In this issue, Leckman and Heilen (2023) present a pedestrian survey method that allows systematic and transparent delineation of sites and site components required for legal compliance and management while simultaneously generating standardized, reusable data that archaeologists can aggregate into cumulative datasets suitable for addressing unanticipated research questions, with or without sites as units of analysis (Heilen and Murrell 2015;Miller et al. 2009;O'Leary et al. 1997;Seaman et al. 1988). They show how the method allows archaeologists to aggregate relatively fine-grained primary data from multiple survey projects to infer landscape-level patterns and processes, such as identifying precontact foot trails and mobility patterns across their area of study (Miller et al. 2018). ...
Most archaeological investigations in the United States and other countries must comply with preservation laws, especially if they are on government property or supported by government funding. Academic and cultural resource management (CRM) studies have explored various social, temporal, and environmental contexts and produce an ever-increasing volume of archaeological data. More and more data are born digital, and many legacy data are digitized. There is a building effort to synthesize and integrate data at a massive scale and create new data standards and management systems. Taxpayer dollars often fund archaeological studies that are intended, in spirit, to promote historic preservation and provide public benefits. However, the resulting data are difficult to access and interoperationalize, and they are rarely collected and managed with their long-term security, accessibility, and ethical reuse in mind. Momentum is building toward open data and open science as well as Indigenous data sovereignty and governance. The field of archaeology is reaching a critical point where consideration of diverse constituencies, concerns, and requirements is needed to plan data collection and management approaches moving forward. This theme issue focuses on challenges and opportunities in archaeological data collection and management in academic and CRM contexts.
This article explores Indigenous perspectives on archaeology in Canada and the United States and the role of archaeologists in engaging with Indigenous communities. As part of our study, we interviewed Indigenous community members about their experiences in archaeology and their thoughts on the discipline. We analyzed each interview thematically to identify patterns of meaning across the dataset and to develop common themes in the interview transcripts. Based on the results of our analysis, we identified six themes in the data: (1) Euro-colonialism damaged and interrupted Indigenous history, and archaeology offers Indigenous community members an opportunity to reconnect with their past; (2) archaeological practices restrict access of Indigenous community members to archaeological information and archaeological materials; (3) cultural resource management (CRM) is outpacing the capacity of Indigenous communities to engage meaningfully with archaeologists; (4) the codification of archaeology through standards, guidelines, and technical report writing limits the goals of the discipline; (5) archaeological methods are inconsistent and based on individual, or company-wide, funding and decision-making; and (6) archaeological software offers a new opportunity for Indigenous communities and archaeologists to collaborate on projects.
