Friday, February 28, 2014

“Like a box of chocolates” – a new and more eclectic blog theme

In late January, we celebrated the fifth anniversary of our blog site This week in Pennsylvania Archaeology. As is often the case, anniversaries bring on thoughts of reflection and review in preparation of the next marker. Now that we have finished our tour of Pennsylvania archaeology by county we are going to begin a new theme, one more eclectic in nature. It will include artifacts, collections curated at the State Museum, significant sites and important archaeological concepts. 

Our primary goal, as always, is to share the breadth and depth of Pennsylvania archaeology with our readers. A secondary goal is to increase awareness among  students and researchers of the resources and collections that are available for scholarly research at the State Museum.

We think the county report served an important function but now we are going to return to a less structured approach, similar to the ABC’s of Pennsylvania archaeology that we covered three years ago. In the coming months expect to see brief reports on unique artifacts, special collections available for research, artifact types and important sites in Pennsylvania archaeology.

 We are always interested in your input, so if there is something special you would like to read or see, let us know. In order to have more time to focus on museum renovations and public programming, we are going to switch to a biweekly presentation – a new posting every other Friday. We will be off next week (3/7) and begin our new series on 3/14.

This week, we are going to post the annual report from the Cultural Resources Geographic Information System. We included the map of site densities by county last week and this week we are including the sites per square mile organized alphabetically and listings of the top ten counties with the highest densities and the top ten with the lowest densities. This valuable resource aids immensely in our understanding of Pennsylvania’s history and prehistory with a comprehensive database that reflects upon the settlement and development of our Commonwealth.

For more information, visit PAarchaeology.state.pa.us or the Hall of Anthropology and Archaeology at The State Museum of Pennsylvania .

No comments:

Post a Comment