Aspen's Cultural Resources Team Achieves New Milestones
Aspen Cultural Resources Department continued to grow in 2024. Our now seven full-time and 20+ on-call staff are located throughout California, and were able to complete projects for federal, state, and local agency clients as well as private developers, primarily focusing on renewable energy, transmission, and wildfire management projects. Throughout 2024, Aspen’s cultural team were able to complete four large scale construction monitoring projects in both NorCal and SoCal for federal and local agencies. These projects were in the areas of utility infrastructure, stormwater capture, and flood control.
Other notable projects for the cultural team include intensive pedestrian surveys for local agencies, federal agencies, and private developers in SoCal and NorCal, and completing terrestrial and marine archaeology surveys and reporting for the first offshore wind project in SoCal. We have continued to expand our capabilities and the services offered to our clients. Most recent being our ability to provide GIS predictability modeling of archaeological sites, which helps our clients to better plan for future projects, and increase our capacity for digital site recording, allowing us to increase the speed and accuracy in which site records are processed. Also, we are currently exploring the possibility of integrating drones and 3D modeling into our fieldwork, and we are excited to offer this service to our clients soon.
In addition to archaeology, the cultural resources department continued to grow in the areas of paleontology and architectural history. In 2024, Aspen was able to assist agency and private clients with conducting paleontological assessments (record searches, surveys, testing and sediment processing, and monitoring) as well as the documentation and evaluation of historic age buildings and structures in support of NEPA or CEQA environmental documents and Section 106.
We look forward to continuing to assist our clients in cultural and paleontological resource management, and we are excited about the department’s continued growth in both size and the services we can offer our clients.