The Hamilton Family Archaeological Preserve in western Nevada sits high on a talus bluff overlooking the Lahontan Reservoir, within the ancestral lands of the Numu (Northern Paiute). The site was first recorded in 1991 by Dr. Eugene Hattori, the curator of anthropology at Nevada State Museum. Hattori described it as “a series of seventy-five to one hundred pits excavated into talus slope.”

Few artifacts were associated with the numerous pits, an omission that has only made the site more intriguing. The artifacts found – four in total – indicate that stone tool-making, hunting, and plant processing took place at the site during the Late Archaic Period (1,200-600 years ago).

Based on the uniqueness of the site’s features and the presence of buried deposits, the Conservancy recognized the site’s potential to add knowledge to the western Great Basin’s pre-contact lifeways, and purchased the nearly 22-acre parcel in December 2022. It is now the fourth preserve located in Nevada.

The Archaeological Conservancy has accepted a donation of a 100-acre tract of land in San Juan County, Utah from Conservancy members Ellie Caryl and Andrew McGregor, which adds to the Conservancy’s preservation of Hedley Pueblo. The pueblo, the core of the Hedley Community, was acquired in 1993 through a generous donation from Dr. Anthony Hedley. The new tract contains additional structures and features of the Hedley Community.

The Hedley Community is one of the largest ancestral pueblo communities in the central Mesa Verde region. It contains the largest sites in the area, experienced the longest spans of occupation, and includes public architecture used for things other than day-to-day domestic use, such as ceremonial activities for large groups of people. Hedley Pueblo was occupied over a period of at least three centuries. 

Nearly half an acre of wooded property within the River Oaks subdivision in Heath, Ohio in Licking County was generously donated to The Archaeological Conservancy by property owner Steve Layman. The parcel, as discovered by the director of archaeological geophysics at Ohio Valley Archaeology, Inc., Jarrod Burks, contains the remnants of a ditch, embankment, and a large conical mound, believed to be the last remnants of what has been referred to as Salisbury Hill Fort Number 2.

Given its configuration and location, the site – as mapped and recorded in the 1860s by Charles and James Salisbury – is a crucial part of the larger cultural landscape surrounding the elaborate Newark Earthworks.