Idaho National Laboratory Cultural Resource Management Plan

4. A description of the research strategies necessary to collect the data needed to answer the research
questions
5. An operations management plan that describes how the project objectives were completed.
All of the above five elements are presented in this appendix.
Theoretical Orientation
Cultural materialism (Harris 1979) provides the theoretical framework for the approach taken to
interpret the archaeological sites recorded at INL and surrounding region. Both explicit and implicit in the
theory are five assumptions that form the framework of the approach:
1. Cultural systems consist of numerous interrelated parts or subsystems such as technology, social
organization, and ideology, and changes in one system cause changes in the others in predictable
ways
2. Culture is an energy-transforming system of objects and behaviors that draws all of its raw materials
and energies from the natural environment via technology; therefore, technology is viewed as the
“prime mover” of culture
3. A great deal of cultural behavior is oriented toward energy and raw material acquisition, and most of
the archaeological record results from this interaction of culture (via technology) with the natural
environment at particular behavioral loci resulting in debris that directly reflects those technological
activities
4. When stress is experienced by a culture (e.g., when the acquisition of resources becomes overly
difficult due to population pressure or environmental change), that culture will respond by
intensifying production (i.e., technological development) and/or by migration to areas where the
existing technology is sufficient
5. The spatial and contextual patterns exhibited by the archaeological record reflect the settlement and
technological behavior of the culture.
These assumptions outline a theory relating human culture, material remains, and environment. An
important implication is that archaeologists should be able to directly interpret subsistence and
technological activities from the archaeological record, and, as a result, should be able to indirectly define
parameters of the other interrelated cultural subsystems, such as social organization and ideology.
Research Design Organization
The objective of archaeological research is to answer questions about the histories, lifeways, and
processes of cultural change of past and present cultures (Thomas 1979). As previously discussed, the
sole reason for conducting cultural resource surveys is to mitigate the adverse effects of development
projects on the research potential of archaeological sites or regions; in other words, those sites that appear
to have the potential for answering questions about history, lifeway, or process are mandated by law to be
preserved or subjected to scientific excavation prior to disturbance. Those questions, therefore, must be
designed and organized in a clear and defensible manner, and they must be expressed so that they are
answerable. Then, research procedures must be designed to effectively extract the needed information
from the total body of observable data.
For projects conducted strictly for academic research purposes, the investigator has the distinct
advantage of being able to formulate his interests first, postulate the questions, and then seek the sites or
regions that have the potential for answering those questions. The research procedures, therefore, can be
designed to acquire the data of interest. The ideal approach is reversed for cultural resource projects, such
as those at INL. The study region is defined by the project along with portions of the research procedures.
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