Definition of Cultural Resources

Cultural resources are fragile and nonrenewable resources that reflect human culture, or patterns of human behavior and thought (DeBano, Neary, and fFolliott 1998). Cultural resources contain information about human practices and beliefs.

Cultural resources are material and non-material items that represent contemporary, historic, and pre-historic human lifeways (Table:Three Types of Cultural Resource Sites). Artifacts, a similar term, are physical remains of humans including any materials manufactured or modified by people. Material items include natural or manufactured objects that have meaning to people in contemporary communities and artifacts left behind by past communities. Biotic cultural resources can be single specimen such as the Angel Oak on John’s Island, South Carolina. Or they can be a species, an ecosystem, or a landscape such as the Chickasaw-Blackbelt Prairie (Foppes 2001). Manufactured cultural resources include tools, single buildings, concentrations of structures, and built landscapes such as the Etowah Indian Mounds in Georgia.

The context of cultural resources is also important to protect because researchers depend on context to understand the significance of a cultural resource. Context is the relationship of artifacts to each other and the surrounding environment in which cultural remains are found.

Cultural resources are important, nonrenewable environmental constituents in many of the places where wildfires occur and where prescribed burning is used to manage ecosystems. In many ecosystems, prehistoric and historic resource sites have been periodically exposed to both natural and anthropogenic fires. Archaeological sites are spaces where collections of cultural remains occur. The most significant historic and prehistoric resources, according to federal regulations, have integrity in structure or design, have made significant contributions to society, are associated with significant people, or have yielded or may yield in the future important information about society. In the cases where contemporary cultural resources are natural features, they may have been subjected to fire over time or they may even be a product of periodic fires.