Archaeology

With its five offices and broad staff experience, CRAI is able to take on archaeological projects in much of the eastern and western United States. Our staff has supervised archaeological projects in 33 U.S. states. We strive to make substantive methodological and theoretical contributions to our discipline within the framework of compliance-related archaeology. CRAI's has over 35 employees who specialize in historic, prehistoric, and industrial archaeology. They have over 250 years of combined experience.

Visit our Staff page to find out more about our archaeological staff.

To discuss how CRAI can help you, contact the office nearest your project.

Historical Archaeology

CRAI's talented team of historical archaeologists has studied a variety of historic period sites in the region. Some of the recent contexts in which our staff has worked include farmsteads, residential home sites, schoolhouses, tollhouses, taverns, a general mercantile, and an agricultural scales site. Our historical archaeologists are particularly interested in the materiality and spatiality of social relations -- notably those of class, gender, and ethnicity -- and utilize a variety of theoretical approaches and analytical models to interpret the historic past in Kentucky and elsewhere in the eastern United States.

Industrial Archaeology

Industrial Archaeology is defined as the recording, study, interpretation, and preservation of the physical remains of industrially related sites, artifacts, and systems within their historical and cultural contexts. As a discipline, Industrial Archaeology studies our industrial heritage through historical research as well as archeological investigation and theory. CRAI's industrial archaeologists have investigated and reported on a number of industrial sites in the southeast. Recent investigations include saw and grist mills, a hemp mill, salt works, iron furnaces, blacksmith shops, a wool-carding shop, coal mines, taverns and distilleries, and powder mills and mines. Investigation of industrial sites like these provides an abundance of unique information. Examples include technological information about the development of the industry and its related machinery; social information about the workers, managers, owners, and consumers associated with the industry; geographical information concerning settlement and land use patterns; economic information concerning the local, regional, and sometimes global markets, and environmental information concerning the impacts an industry has had on the surrounding ecosystems.

Prehistoric Archaeology

One of CRAI's research specialties is in the excavation and interpretation of archaeological sites with prehistoric components by conducting data recovery and analysis efforts at single and multi-component surface sites, unstratified and stratified buried sites, mounds, villages, and rockshelters. Our prehistoric archaeology specialists use a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches to; 1) define cultural chronology, 2) reconstruct prehistoric life ways, 3) study site structure and site formation processes, 4) investigate the nature of aboriginal settlement and subsistence, 5) model regional settlement patterns, and 6) explain cultural processes.

Online archaeology publications by CRAI employees:

General:

Discarding the Past? by JoAnn Wilson and Trina C. Maples
EAA Conference Review by Charles M. Niquette
Hard Hat Archeology by Charles M. Niquette
The Hidden Record: Soil-Geomorphic Landscapes and Settlement Archaeology in the Middle Ohio River Valley by C. Russell Stafford and Steven D. Creasman
In Consideration of Archeologists Serving Industry, Cultural Resources and the Profession by William B. Butler and Charles M. Niquette
Selected Abstracts From CRAI Reports - Includes abstracts from 1998 to 2005

Historic:

Measuring Modern Discipline: A Re-Examination of Type and Variant Indices Using Ceramics from the Monterey Site in the Central Bluegrass Region of Kentucky by Deborah L. Rotman and Andrew Bradbury
* This report is in pdf format (size: 249kb). Another browser window will open.

Industrial:

Archaeological Remains of a Mid Nineteenth Century Brick Clamp: A First Look at Brick Clamps in Kentucky by Derek M. Wingfield, Michael D. Richmond and Henry S. McKelway, Ph.D
Footprint of an Historic Sawmill Archaeological Investigations of the Crawford-Nurre Sawmill in Williamsburg, Kentucky by Grant L. Day and Jonathan P. Kerr
* This report is in pdf format (size: 1,134KB). Another browser window will open.
A Place Forgotten: Lower Howard's Creek, Kentucky as an example of changing industrial and consumer landscapes, the John and Rachel Martin House (Site 15Ck478) by J. Eric Thomason
* This report is in pdf format (size: 606kb). Another browser window will open.

Prehistoric:

The Archaic Period in the Falls of the Ohio Region of Kentucky by C. Michael Anslinger
* This report is in pdf format (size: 137KB). Another browser window will open.
Essential Features of Adena Ritual by R. Berle Clay
* This is a link to an outside webpage (www.gbl.indiana.edu/abstracts/adena/contents.html). Another browser window will open.
The Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia Radiocarbon Database by Robert F. Maslowski, Charles M. Niquette and Derek M. Wingfield
Late Woodland Zea Mays at the Vintroux Site, Putnam County, West Virginia by Charles M. Niquette and Gary D. Crites
Prehistory of the Upper Cumberland River Drainage in the Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee Border Region by Jonathan P. Kerr

| | | | | | |