Hardesty Donald L. - Assessing site significance: a guide for archaeologists and historians

Donald L. Hardesty is professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno. A native of West Virginia, he moved to Washington, D.C., after high school; worked at the National Bureau of Standards; and attended George Washington University at night, with the intention of becoming an electrical engineer. He first became interested in archaeology during weekend visits to the Smithsonian Institution, eventually moving to the University of Kentucky (B.A.) and then to the University of Oregon (M.A., Ph.D.) to pursue academic training in archaeology. Hardesty has conducted archaeological fieldwork in the American West, the American Southeast, Mexico, and Guatemala and has been the principal investigator of more than sixty cultural resource management projects. He is the author of several books and/or monographs, including The Archaeology of Mining and Miners (1988) and The Archaeology of the Donner Party (1997). Hardesty is a past president of the Society for Historical Archaeology, past president of the Mining History Association, past president of the Register of Professional Archaeologists, and a longtime member of the state of Nevada Board of Museums and History, which reviews National Register nominations.

Barbara J. Little has been with the National Park Service since 1992. Starting in the National Capital Regional office, she then became the archaeologist for the National Register of Historic Places and National Landmark Survey. She is currently an archaeologist in the Washington Office Archeology program, where she is responsible for education and outreach, among other program areas. She became hooked on archaeology after taking field school with Jim Hatch at Penn State University in 1978. She worked on the Archaeology in Annapolis project, writing her dissertation on the historical archaeology of the Green Family and its printing business, partly with the help of a Smithsonian predoctoral fellowship. After receiving her Ph.D. in 1987 from the State University of New York, Buffalo, she taught (and learned a great deal from wonderful students) at both George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and the University of Maryland, College Park. Little is an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is particularly interested in the ways in which archaeological places and collections are valued, recognized, and interpreted. She is coeditor of Heritage of Value, Archaeology of Renown: Reshaping Archaeological Assessment and Significance (2005) along with Clay Mathers and Timothy Darvill. This collection is a call to the international archaeology profession to reengage and reinvigo-rate discussions about site significance and public involvement in evaluation and assessment. She edited the volume Public Benefits of Archaeology (2002), which is a collection of viewpoints on the value of archaeology for the public. Her most recent book is Historical Archaeology: Why the Past Matters (2007), in which she writes about the goals and achievements of historical archaeology and discusses its role in public scholarship.