Bold, Rocky, and Picturesque: An Archeological Indentification and Evaluation Study of Rock Creek Park, Volume II & III

Louis Berger Group, Inc; John Bedell; Stuart Fiedel; Charles LeeDecker

Rock Creek Park is known today as a nature preserve, a recreational area, and a wooded refuge within the crowded confines of the nation’s capital, but the park landscape has served many uses over thousands of years, from hunting and quarrying stone to farming and milling. For a few days in 1864 it was a battlefield. All of these activities have left traces on the landscape, and as a result the park contains a treasury of archeological sites. Until recently, however, most of those sites were unknown. Many people know Rock Creek Park only by their daily automobile commutes from the Maryland suburbs to downtown, never realizing the wealth of stories in the landscape around them. Rock Creek Park is administered by the National Park Service (NPS), which has long sought to record the historic and archeological sites on its land so that they can be preserved and interpreted for the public. Part of that policy is the Systemwide Archeological Inventory Program (SAIP), which funds archeological surveys of park lands. Under this program the National Capital Region of the NPS has sponsored a four-year archeological survey of Rock Creek Park (Figure 2). This study was carried out by The Louis Berger Group, Inc. (Berger), from 2003 to 2007. During this project nearly 1,300 acres of park land was surveyed, and 51 archeological sites were identified. Of those sites, 11 were archeological components of previously known historic sites, such as Fort Totten and Peirce Mill, and 40 were entirely new discoveries. These sites include Native American camps and stone quarries, colonial farmsteads and mills, nineteenth-century tenant dwellings, and Civil War sites. In order to address multiple audiences most effectively—the general public, the park, NPS, review agency staff, and the archeological community—this report is organized in a way that differs from the standard cultural resource study. This volume (I) presents a narrative of the prehistory and history of the park based upon the archival and archeological field investigations; it is intended for the non-technical reader and does not contain specific information about site locations. Volume II provides a more technical description and assessment of the project’s research methods and findings. In organization and content, Volume II more closely follows the professional standards of the cultural resource management industry, and it is intended for distribution only within the professional community. Whereas Volume I contains the historical narrative, Volume II concentrates on a presentation of the prehistoric research. Volume III, also intended for limited distribution, contains additional technical materials and appendices, including artifact inventories, transcripts of the archival documents that are most important to the historical narrative contained in Volume I, and other supporting information.

Bold, Rocky, and Picturesque: An Archeological Indentification and Evaluation Study of Rock Creek Park, Volume II & III

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