Colorado Historical Archaeology Context

The goals of the report were to develop an historical archaeology context for the State of Colorado for making decisions about cultural resources and to incorporate historical archaeological values into the State Preservation Planning Process.

In addition to developing a research plan for historical archaeology, our response to the project has been to develop a framework by which major issues can be resolved and some consistent goals established for historical archaeology in Colorado. These ultimate goals include increasing the standards for and meaningfulness of information known about cultural resources for use in theory building and testing, and in reporting the resources to the public. The framework we have developed generates questions which can be the bases of research designs for the conduct of historical archaeology in Colorado since it defines a structure within which historical archaeology and other disciplines interact in identifying, inventorying, manipulating, and explaining historical phenomena.

The framework for the historical archaeology context is based on ten variables including temporal periods, environmental zones, site function, and type, network type, population, ethnicity, behavior indicators, settlement type, artifact types, and historic associations.

The temporal element of the framework is used as the system of historic units for the research plan for historical archaeology in Colorado. Within the research plan, the quality and quantity of past historical archaeology work in the state is considered and research recommendations are presented.These historic units are a continuum of socio-politically significant time periods spanning the history of the state. This single system is utilized for the historical archaeology research plan for the whole state. It was felt that this was more appropriate than developing separate plans for various regions of the state. In this way, the single plan, which is based on temporal units, can be used in conjunction with Colorado regional historic contexts or with the engineering and urbanization contexts.

The research plan for Colorado is presented in the first section of the report. The framework for historical archaeology identification and evaluation is presented in the second section. One additional element of the project is presented in the Appendix to the reports. Appendix A presents examples of how to use the framework for identifying sites. The project methodology included the evaluation of the significance of local informants and participation in gathering information about the history of an area. A questionnaire was developed and a series of workshops were conducted in Pueblo, Colorado. A copy of the questionnaire and an evaluation of the results of this project are included in Appendix B.

Originally the information in this record was migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. In 2014, as part of its effort to improve tDAR content, the Center for Digital Antiquity uploaded a copy of the document and further improved the record metadata.