A cultural landscape study and history of the San Francisco Mining District and Frisco, Southwest Utah, United States

摘要

In the early 1990s, English Heritage conducted a series of pilot studies in Cornwall through the Cornwall Archaeological Unit, examining historic industrial mining complexes as a means to conserve and manage a growing number of individual historic sites and monuments. During these studies, a discrete methodology for conducting Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) modelling has been developed. Models such as these have been presented in an assortment of scholarly publications and have been applied in portions of Europe and New Zealand. With few exceptions, the English Heritage HLC model has not been applied in the United States. Rather, the United States’ National Park Service has provided guidance on the identification, evaluation, and documentation of historic mining sites and landscapes. The present study incorporates social history, archival evidence, and the physical setting of the San Francisco Mining District (SFMD) and associated boom towns in Beaver County, southwest Utah, into a Geographic Information System (GIS) in an effort to apply HLC modelling. Minor comparisons are drawn between the SFMD and mining districts in the United States, United Kingdom, and New Zealand. Several advantages of the HLC methodology for the SFMD include the creation of population, building and archaeological databases that may be applied to the GIS for better management of the resources on a broader scale.