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The
stewardship of cultural landscapes provides the richness and complexity
of the human story of our nation -- a story that spans at least 12,000
years and includes the living traditions of today's Native Americans
and peoples whose roots lie in Africa, Oceania, Europe, and Asia. The
National Park Service has assumed a national leadership role in the
field of cultural landscapes, offering several programs that address
the identification, evaluation, protection, interpretation and treatment
of cultural landscapes for our national parks and other historic properties.
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Currents
Currents is an electronic information series dedicated to the treatment
and management of cultural landscapes. Its goal is to examine and promote
successful examples of the sound stewardship of cultural landscapes
and to share these success stories with the broadest possible audiences.
All featured projects successfully apply the "Secretary of the Interior's
Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties and the Guidelines
for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes." Currents is co-produced by
the NPS's Historic Landscape Initiative and the Cultural Landscape Foundation
of Washington, D.C. The current features are:
Heritage
Areas
Congress has established
23 National Heritage Areas in the U.S. to conserve and celebrate heritage
and special landscapes. Heritage conservation efforts are grounded in
a community's pride in its history, traditions, cultural identity, and
the physical surroundings of its traditional landscape. Heritage areas
encompass a wealth of resources, including scenic byways, walking and
cycling trails, wild, scenic, and recreational rivers, interpretive
and educational activities, and historic buildings and districts.
The
Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS)
The Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) is a permanent federal
program charged with recording historic landscapes in the United States
and its territories. Historic landscapes vary in size from small gardens
to several thousand-acre national parks. In character they range from
designed to vernacular, rural to urban, and agricultural to industrial
spaces. Vegetable patches, estate gardens, cemeteries, farms, quarries,
nuclear test sites, suburbs, and abandoned settlements all may be considered
historic landscapes. Like its sister programs, the Historic American
Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record
(HAER), HALS produces written and graphic records of interest to educators,
land managers, and preservation planners.
Historic
Landscape Initiative
The Historic Landscape Initiative develops a number of preservation
planning tools -- from guidelines to preservation case studies in printed
form and online -- that respect and reveal the relationship between
Americans and their land. The Initiative provides essential guidance
to accomplish sound preservation practice on a variety of landscapes,
from parks and gardens to rural villages and agricultural landscapes.
HLI staff
works in partnership with universities, government agencies, professional
organizations, and private nonprofit groups to raise awareness about
the planning, treatment and management of historically significant landscapes.
Olmsted
Center for Landscape Preservation
The Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation (OCLP) provides technical
assistance to historic properties in cultural landscape research, planning,
stewardship and education. As the only National Park Service center
for cultural landscape preservation, training, and technology development,
Olmsted Center staff works in partnership with national parks, universities,
government agencies, and private nonprofit organizations with specialized
skills to provide sustainable landscape preservation assistance.
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