NCPTT’s Andrew Ferrell and Kirk Cordell became LEED Accredited Professionals after recently passing the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) exam.

This improves NCPTT’s capacity to shepherd NPS preservation projects through the LEED certification process, and to help NPS architects, facility managers and other cultural resource personnel to become LEED accredited professionals.

The National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT), Cane River National Heritage Area (CRNHA), and Cane River Creole National Historic Park (CARI) will showcase recent research at the 9th annual Preservation in Your Community (PIYC) on August 11, 2009 at 5:30 p.m. at NCPTT’s Lee H. Nelson Hall on Northwestern’s campus.

This CD-ROM course, BPR 140: Mechanical Systems, is designed to familiarize the student with the plumbing, electrical, heating, ventilating, air conditioning, and insulation systems in historic buildings. The department recognizes that each of these trades is a career in itself and that this course can’t possibly teach you everything about these trades. What this course does attempt to do is to:

The purpose of this project was to develop improved consolidants for restoration of stone damaged by weathering. Conventional consolidants are organic polymers or silica gels, which are simple materials that do not permit matching of a range of properties of the stone.

Later improvement of the suspension procedure resulted in consolidants that are much more stable and fluid. Stone treated with the particle-modified consolidant (PMC) increases dramatically in stiffness and strength. Most impressively in a sodium sulfate test, the PMC provided better protection than a commercial silicate consolidant.

Schedule and abstracts for the Nationwide Cemetery Preservation Summit from October 19-21, 2009 in Nashville, Tennessee.

Register before September 11, 2009 for $299 ($399 thereafter).

Key sessions are expected to include Archeology, Mapping and Documentation, Landscapes, Engineering Challenges, Issues in National Cemeteries, and Materials Conservation.

Planetizen is offering a webinar on preservation and sustainability tomorrow, July 30, 2009, at 11:00AM PDT/2PM EDT. This $49.95 course defines sustainable development as keeping what is “valuable by meeting our needs without prejudicing the ability of future generations to meet other own needs.”

This course shows how sustainability and historic preservation work hand-in-hand to meet the goals of both.

The instructor, Hector Abreu Cintron, is well known in the preservation community as a cultural resources management expert.

NCPTT has completed the rewriting and editing of 12 Standard Treatments for the DOD.

Sixteen additional treatments are under review, and DOD comments will be incorporated as they are received.

This effort is directed at improving the technical content of the draft DOD treatment standards and the stewardship of DOD cultural resources.

NCPTT joined Tulane School of Architecture, Preservation Trades Network and Save our Cemeteries to host “Cities of the Dead: Above-Ground Cemetery Preservation, Conservation, Documentation Methodology and History,” July 13-31, in New Orleans, La.

NCPTT’s Executive Director, Kirk Cordell, joined representatives from the Southeast Region and the Washington Office to review current NPS policy and treatment of historic national cemeteries and to make recommendations to Deputy Director Quintana.

The review included site visits to Andersonville National Cemetery (ANDE), Andrew Johnson National Cemetery (ANJO), Fort Donelson National Cemetery (FODO), and Stones River National Cemetery (STRI) to examine operations at the national cemeteries managed by those parks.

NCPTT’s Mary Striegel participated in a National Science Foundation/Andrew Mellon Foundation workshop held to examine and improve the state of science used to study, preserve and protect cultural patrimony.

Forty participants met to identify areas where new research in basic science can provide a foundation for significant improvements in understanding the way art and artifacts were created and how best to preserve them.

NCPTT recently hosted Lorelle VanFossen, one of the world’s most popular bloggers, for a workshop on the art of writing for the web. VanFossen taught NCPTT employees how to connect to the Center’s audience through timely and effective content as well as search engine optimization techniques.

The workshop is part of a larger social media strategy that NCPTT is implementing to better serve the needs of the preservation field.

NCPTT’s Andrew Ferrell and Kirk Cordell served as guest instructors for the University of Florida’s Preservation Institute: Nantucket. They lectured on the role NCPTT plays in facilitating research and training in innovative technologies for historic preservation.

Particular topics included NCPTT’s grants program, sustainable preservation, preservation trades training, and disaster response and planning for cultural resources.

Today we are joining NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Claire Dean of Dean Associates of Conservation Services about using lasers to remove graffiti from rock art. Rock art or rock imagery is the common term for paintings and carvings on rock and in North America that is mostly associated with native communities.

Download Episode 7 as an mp3 or subscribe via iTunes.

A variety of materials and methods have been used to preserve ceramic vessels. Many have proven successful, while others are damaging. Monitoring and evaluation of past treatments is a documented research priority in the conservation field. The Arizona State Museum (ASM) has examined, recorded and analyzed the performance of past treatments on 20,000 southwest vessels and a modern storage facility.

This research has afforded the opportunity to look forwards and backwards to identify patterns in archaeological methods, museum management and conservation.

One of the biggest barriers to the rapid spread of cutting edge, innovative technologies in archeology is cost.  Let’s face it: things that end in “-ometer” or “-oscopy” tend to be pricey.  And if they are really new, or if their utility in some contexts has yet to be proven, the price remains in the stratosphere [...]

New Philadelphia, Illinois was the first town platted and legally registered by an African American in the United States. Founded by Frank McWorter, a former slave, in 1836, this town grew as a demographically integrated community through the late nineteenth century. The National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT) awarded funding of $14,800 to test the usefulness of low-altitude aerial surveys employing high resolution thermal imaging at New Philadelphia.

The success of this technique will provide an extremely useful resource for applications on numerous similar sites throughout the nation.

This project involved developing a new method for using the chemical content of freshwater mussel shell as a means of sourcing prehistoric, shell-tempered pottery and shell artifacts to their places of origin. By extension, this means that prehistoric trade and exchange networks can be mapped out.

Because each waterway is chemically different to some extent, and because mussels incorporate the chemicals into their shells, it is theoretically possible to identify where shell artifacts or shell-tempered pottery was made by chemically analyzing the shell.

Getting archeology onto the silver or flat screen has always been a tricky proposition: you have to entertain, but stick to the facts, all without encouraging site looting. One of the programs that seems to have done it, at least in the U.K., is Time Team. And now it’s coming to the U.S.

As Kris Hurst put it on her About.com blog, Time Team America “brings a Mission Impossible team of professional archaeologists to a different archaeological site in the United States,” where they spend “three days at each site, bringing along a raft of cutting edge remote sensing and geophysical survey techniques.”

Some natural science specimens and ethnographic artifacts in museums were historically treated with arsenic and mercury salts. This has created an environmental concern for museum workers and the public who may be exposed to these toxins. In addition, museums are frequently being asked to return sacred objects under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).

This report is an overview and assessment of the cultural landscape of the Tongue River Valley, its historic themes and cultural resource site types. Designed to accompany other project deliverables (the video documentary and map-based digital archive), the goal of the project is to demonstrate the national, state and local significance of the layers of prehistory and history located in one small corner of southeastern Montana.