As part of its engagement at Wupatki, the Penn team and partners will also expand professional training, cultural heritage education, and career discovery opportunities for Native youth focused on the conservation of American Indian ancestral sites, including a 12-week summer program in partnership with Conservation Legacy’s Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps. The program will incorporate fieldwork, job shadowing, and mentoring by cultural resources advisors from Northern Arizona Tribes and a 10-week summer internship program for Native degree-seeking students through Northern Arizona University.
“Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps is excited to partner with Wupatki National Monument and Vanishing Treasures, Getty and the University of Pennsylvania on this great project, protecting and preserving these ancestral sites for current and future generations to enjoy and honoring the ancestors who built them generations ago,” says Chas Robles, director of Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps. “ALCC has partnered with the National Park Service to engage Indigenous young people in meaningful conservation and national service programs that create positive impacts for our communities, the environment and our participants. Projects such as this one are incredibly impactful for our participants, who are descendants of the original architects and builders of these places.”
The National Park Service has a long history of advancing the practice of built heritage conservation to protect and preserve natural and cultural resources for the American public. As the National Monument approaches its 100th anniversary in 2024 within the NPS, the Wupatki project is uniquely positioned to expand the scope of the typical Conservation and Management Plan, which addresses past and current conditions of and threats to structures and landscapes, management priorities, and applied solutions for continued conservation and interpretation. An important aspect of the project will be identifying how such classic heritage stewardship can be better informed by Indigenous values and practices. If successful, the methodology could serve as a model for similar sites in the region and beyond.
“One long-term goal of the project is to continue to develop and strengthen an already active community of practice. This includes a network of local Indigenous stakeholders, NPS staff, students, faculty, and other professionals from related fields to support conserving critical heritage resources in national parks in the West,” says Lauren Meyer, program manager of the NPS Intermountain Historic Preservation Services and project co-director for the National Park Service. “This will involve working closely with site stewards and stakeholders to understand the variety of resource values, as well as the many challenges to conservation and management to develop proactive and long-lasting solutions.”
Partners from the National Park Service include Wupatki Cultural Resources Program, Vanishing Treasures Program, and the Western Center for Historic Preservation, a preservation training arm of the NPS. Also on the team is Paulo Lourenço, professor of civil engineering at the University of Minho in Portugal and an expert in historic masonry and seismic risk, whose team will study the structural performance of Wupatki’s rubble stone and earthen mortar construction systems.
In carrying out its work at Wupatki, the Penn team draws on engagements currently underway at other climate-vulnerable cultural heritage sites throughout the American Southwest, among them Fort Union National Monument and Pecos National Historic Park, New Mexico and Tumacacori National Historic Site and Tuzigoot National Monument, Arizona. As public health guidelines allow, work will begin this fall with a final report in 2024.
Press Images
Images are available via this photo gallery from the National Park Service.