Archaeology at PennDOT
		As is true of most states, in Pennsylvania the Department of Transportation hosts the state's largest public sector archaeology program. Annually between five and fifteen million dollars are expended to identify, evaluate, protect, and learn from the buried evidence of Pennsylvania's past along the Commonwealth's highways. While this work is mandated by federal and state laws and regulations, our program is driven by more than legal requirements. When transportation
	projects produce unavoidable effects to important sites, the Department is committed to state-of-the-art approaches to archaeological excavation and analysis and to disseminating the results of our work to the professional community and to the public. Thanks to our commitment to excellence, our archaeology program is not just Pennsylvania's largest, it's also the best!
	Archaeology is a sub-discipline of anthropology. It's the study of past human cultures through the recovery and analyses of the objects, features (such as cooking hearths, storage pits, stone foundations, wells, or privies), and other evidence those groups left behind. Archaeologists ask a wide range of diverse questions in an attempt to understand day to day life in the past,
	and reconstruct some of the history and evolution of our own, modern societies. Archaeology isn't limited to the study of the distant past. In the broadest sense archaeology and its techniques can be applied to any time period, from the distant Stone Age to much more recent phases of our history. The age of archaeological sites is much less critical to archaeologists than the contribution those sites can make to understanding and reconstructing the past. As mentioned above, archaeological investigations at PennDOT are conducted within the context of federal and state historic preservation and environmental laws and regulations, and they've made significant contributions to Pennsylvania archaeology over the last 15 years. From evidence of the first Pennsylvanians over 12,000 years ago to the history of the rural farmsteads, Colonial settlements, or the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, PennDOT has likely played a role in what's currently known about the Commonwealth's past.
	For More Information Contact:
	Christine Kula Senior Archaeologist PENNDOT BOD/EQAD PO Box 3790 Harrisburg, PA 17105-3790 (717) 783-9700 (Voice) ckula@pa.gov