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Date: | Thu, 28 Sep 1995 09:39:02 EDT |
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Chris Clement was requesting further suggestions for dealing with
turn-of-the-century farmsteads because a colleague of his in Vermont
was having some difficulties. Chris and/or his friend feel that
preparing a historic context statement may be impractical due to a
lack of information about such sites in Vermont.
I am not a big fan of "historic contexts," at least the way the term
is often used in CRM, but I recognize the practical value of such
things for convincing clients and rehgulators of the potential
importance of a site or class of sites. That there have been few (or
no) such sites yet studied in Vermont is the subject of the first
paragraph of the context statement. It should not be hard to write
such a statement based on local, regional and national agricultural
and rural history, on the theoretical approaches and findings of
similar projects in other areas, and by focusing on the sorts of
things archaeology can reveal better than other approaches. Even with
sites that are only a hundred years old, it's not hard to argue that
archaeology can provide insights into farm technology, landscape and
field arrangements, "evolution" of individual farm steads and farming
communities, etc. etc. Depending on the disposition of the clkient,
Vermont's SHPO, etc. (I assume this is CRM-based work), then Hester
Davis's and Smoke Pfeiffer's suggestion about preparing a solid
context is probably the best advice. The "no data" argument should
help, not hinder the preparation of such a statement.
Dan Mouer
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