Documenting America's Cultural Heritage

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Private archaeological collections are abundant in the United States, holding upwards of 90% of informative artifacts like "arrow points." The full story of how prehistoric cultures coped with adversity and environmental change demands incorporating into archaeological research the knowledge that resides in private collections. The Central Ohio Archaeological Digitization Survey (COADS) is the first systematic effort to map and digitize collections from a specific region of the United States, the remarkable prehistoric landscape of Ohio's central Scioto Valley. One of its chief innovations is to treat local knowledge as integral to the archaeological record and research. In the process, COADS documents prehistoric cultural transitions as responses to population growth, economic change, and landscape development. It uses archaeology's unique perspective to study tempo and mode of long-term technological change. COADS serves as a model for engaging the public in contributing to understanding of the human condition, and improves understanding of how prehistoric native cultures thrived over long periods. COADS also provides students and involved citizens training in proper mapping and documentation methods, and expands data-collection for preservation planning. COADS facilitates efficient and responsible stewardship of heritage resources, and planning more efficiently for development that capitalizes on heritage while maximizing preservation. Finally, COADS creates an enormous database of virtual collections that can be used for research and education purposes long after the physical material is dispersed.COADS integrates the materials from private collections with previous site- and region-based analyses into a composite model of distribution of human activity on the landscape over time. Previous work constructed a mutually reinforcing model of transition from mobility to residential stability (i.e., more sedentary populations) concomitant with a shift to increasing focus on, and eventual domestication of, seed crops. COADS employs geometric morphometrics to explore: 1) the implications of sedentism through the predicted effects on tool shape and degree of toolstone curation; and 2) the nature of transition of technology from one "type" to another. COADS creates the biggest archive of private collections for a region. Through high resolution 3D and 2D scanning, COADS serves as a portable research and education resource for the public and scholars. Increasingly it is realized that prehistory is not accurately characterized by the major excavated sites. One must examine all parts of the landscape and multiple aspects of past cultural systems. Documenting private collections fills many of the gaps in the official record.