See attached
Overview
As you know from the Final Project Documents you reviewed in Module One, this project puts you in the role of the director of a cultural resource management (CRM) agency. Your agency has been tasked with doing a preliminary Phase 1 survey of a seemingly innocuous 50-acre tract of land in Mason Neck, Virginia. The state government wants to extend a four-lane highway through the 50-acre tract, connecting two prominent highways. The survey area you will be investigating is part farmland and part hardwood forest, some of which extends to a prominent bluff high above a major commercial river. Not much is known about the land before your agency investigates, but some preliminary research has led you to understand that the 50-acre property was recently sold to a privately funded university by a local family who owned the property for the previous five generations. You know that part of the surrounding area is home to nearby Native American groups, so you would not be completely surprised to find new archaeological artifacts or features. Previous information gathered by the state museum has generated a fairly impressive array of archaeological artifacts in its collection across the county. In fact, the 50-acre tract under investigation is roughly 20 miles away from a well-known tourist and archaeological site.
With this knowledge in play, your CRM agency not only discovers densities of stone tools and projectile points, but locates magnificent residential and burial mounds scattered atop the bluff. No looting seems to have occurred in the burial mounds, so you can assume there are ritual offerings, bodies, and rare cultural artifacts buried within the mounds. Beyond the bluff in the densely forested part of the 50-acre tract, you notice a barely recognizable, historical foundation of an old homestead. You are amazed that something like this was not already documented if it has any historical importance, since most of the old farmhouses in the area date to the early nineteenth century. Your team is then able to locate smaller but identifiable outbuildings associated with the historical home. Since it is likely that historical contexts of this type date to a time when slavery existed, it is quite possible the house could open up a much-needed chapter in early African American slave history. Both prehistoric Native American contexts and early African American slave contexts located in this 50-acre tract surely means the find of your agency’s lifetime! Undoubtedly, however, there will be a number of interested parties and complex ethical issues that must be dealt with after you report your findings.
Aside from your own ideas, you already know that the
previous landowners, the
private university, and the
state government are interested parties in this discovery, but you imagine there will be other potentially interested parties as well. Perhaps the other interested parties include the following:
· Local Native American groups
· The larger nation of American indigenous peoples
· The publicly funded state museum
· The U.S. federal government
· The local townsfolk and community government
· UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization)
Given all of the information above, this milestone requires you to complete the following three tasks:
1. This project will involve research and analysis on five total parties that claim to have a vested interest in this scenario. The first three parties have already been assigned to you (the previous landowners, the private university, and the state government). Now, in this first task, you need to select two
additional parties from the bulleted list provided above. Consider all of the parties listed and select the two that you think would be most interesting to investigate throughout our remaining class time.
2. Write a
brief statement of interest in which you answer the following two questions for the two additional parties you chose:
. Why do you think these additional parties would be most interested in the recent archaeological discoveries?
. What do the two additional parties have to potentially gain by the archaeological discoveries?
3. Compose a
description of invested parties that takes your reasoning one step further. From the total five invested parties (the three assigned to you plus the two you selected), briefly describe why each party would be more interested in one of the two sites (the burial mounds and the homestead) in the archaeological discovery. Be sure to think this through and weigh how each of the five parties would value the two sites differently. For example, possible reasons for interest might include historical, religious, or economic value.
What to Submit
Your paper must be submitted as a 1–2 page Microsoft Word document with double spacing, 12-point Times New Roman font, one inch margins, and any sources should be cited in APA format.
