Cultural Heritage Assessment
- See also Cultural landscape, Values (heritage)
While archaeological sites remain the primary focus for many CRM professional, others research historical records or on ethnohistorical projects. Public outreach also falls within their purview. A recent concept is Traditional Cultural Property or TCP. These are places with cultural importance to a group that may not be either particularly historical or an archaeological site. An example would be a location used for contemporary Native American religious events that has no archaeological remains.
A phase of evaluation is considered important in assessing the significance of a possible cultural heritage site. This can comprise a desk-based study, interviews with informants in the community, a wide-area survey, or trial trenching. In North America, survey normally includes either walking ploughed fields in 5–10-metre transects or digging shovel test pits at the same intervals. The soil from the test pits is sifted through 6 mm mesh to look for artifacts. If artifacts are found, the next stage of investigation is usually digging and sifting a spaced grid of test pits (1 m by 1 m trenches) to determine how large or significant the site is.
Read more about this topic: Cultural Heritage Management
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