Many archaeological sites related to aspects of African-American heritage have been investigated by Cultural Resource Management (CRM) firms, some of which are commercial entities and some of which are affiliated with universities. These CRM firms typically submit reports of their findings to the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO), or an equivalent State or federal agency, in the area in which the research and excavations were conducted. In turn, some (but not all) SHPO offices and federal agencies have supplied lists of these reports to the National Park Service (NPS) for inclusion in a searchable database. To obtain the most complete list of such reports, one would also need to contact all of the SHPO offices and all of the CRM organizations.
I have compiled an initial bibliography of such CRM reports by conducting "keyword" searches in October 2005 using the Reports Module of the National Archaeological Database (NADB), which was last updated in August 2004. That bibliography contains 529 entries. The NADB does not provide abstracts for each entry, so it is difficult to ascertain the degree of relevance and focus of each report reflected in a database entry.
I have also contacted numerous members of the CRM community to request that they send me lists of reports by their firms that they know were addressed to subjects of African-American heritage. I hope to make information on such reports related to African-American archaeology more accessible for researchers -- particularly academic researchers who often find this "gray literature" inaccessible -- by creating a series of bibliographies. Set forth below are lists of relevant reports provided to me thus far by archaeologists in CRM firms or related organizations. These reports are listed below under headings that provide the name of the person and organization that provided the information, and the headings are sorted in alphabetic order by organization names.
You can search within the report listings displayed here by using the "search on page" or "find" functions of your internet browser. For example, if you are interested in any reports from within the area of a particular State, you can search this list by that State's name and postal abbreviation (e.g., "Alabama" and "AL").
Many thanks to those members of the CRM community who have taken time to respond and supplied the report listings provided below. If you are a member of a CRM firm or related organization and can provide a comparable listing of the work conducted by or submitted to your organization on sites related to African-American heritage, please send me your report information and I will add it to this bibliography. At a later stage, I will consolidate this list with the bibliography based on NADB searches to create one list of relevant reports.
