Through the Great Valley and Into the Mountains Beyond: Archeological Indentification and Evaluation Study of Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park Sandy Hook to Hancock (Mile Markers 59 to 123)

Louis Berger Group; Bedell, John; LeeDecker, Charles; Fiedel, Stuart; Shellenhamer, Jason

This is the first of three volumes reporting the results of a three-year archeological survey of the central 64 miles of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park (C&O Canal Park) carried out for the National Park Service (NPS), National Capital Region, from 2005 through 2007. Although more than a hundred archeological sites have been recorded in the C&O Canal Park, much of the park remains unexplored, and little is known about most of the recorded sites. Since the park borders the Potomac River, the archeological potential of its 13,000 acres is enormous. To learn more about the archeological resources of the park, and to assist the park in managing those resources, funds were devoted to implement the Systemwide Archeological Inventory Program (SAIP) in this area. The SAIP was developed to address the requirements of the National Historic Preservation Act (specifically Sections 106 and 110), Executive Order 11593, and the Archeological Resources Protection Act. The rationale for the archeological survey was based primarily on the NPS’s resource management needs under Section 110 rather than being driven by development or capital improvement projects within the park. The park’s total length of 184.5 miles was divided into three segments for the SAIP project. The research reported here focused on the central segment comprising 64 miles between Sandy Hook and Hancock, spanning the Great Valley from the Blue Ridge to the Alleghenies (Figure 1). An earlier study covered the eastern 59 miles, from Georgetown to Sandy Hook (Fiedel et al. 2005). The NPS plans to fund future study to examine the archeology of the upper, western segment of the C&O Canal Park. In order to address multiple audiences most effectively—the general public, park staff, 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, designed for the general public, of the prehistory and history of the Potomac in the Great Valley, based on the archival and archeological field investigations; it is intended for the non-technical reader and does not contain specific information about site locations. In order to avoid excessive repetition, this volume treats briefly some topics that were extensively discussed in the reports on the eastern segment of the park. Volume II provides a more technical description and assessment of the project’s research goals, methods, and findings, and concentrates on a presentation of the prehistoric research. In organization and content, it more closely follows the professional standards of the cultural resource management industry and is intended for distribution only within the professional community. Volume III, also intended for limited distribution, contains additional technical materials and appendices, including artifact inventories, a summary list of radiocarbon dates, and transcripts of the archival documents that are most important to the historical narrative contained in Volume I.

Through the Great Valley and Into the Mountains Beyond: Archeological Indentification and Evaluation Study of Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park Sandy Hook to Hancock (Mile Markers 59 to 123)

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