Landmark Archaeology, Inc. provided cultural resource management support for a major environmental restoration program at the New Boston Air Force Station (NBAFS) in Hillsborough County, New Hampshire, from 2009-2011.  The 2,826-acre Station straddles the towns of New Boston, Mont Vernon, and Amherst and has a long and diverse land-use history.  NBAFS was nominated to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004 as the “New Boston Air Force Station Archaeological District”, and it includes over 50 contributing properties representing thousands of years of human use of the landscape. Sites include short-term pre-Contact sites, 18th and 19th-century farmsteads and rural-industrial sites, and military sites related to WWII and the Cold War.

Beginning in 1942 the U.S. Military used NBAFS as a bombing and strafing practice range for aircrews out of Grenier Field, regional Army Air Corps Squadrons, and later for Navy pilots. Pilot training continued until 1959 when the Air Force built a satellite tracking station on 60 acres in the northeastern portion of the property.  Between the 1970s and 1990s, areas of the vast, undeveloped parcel were also used to conduct ground-training exercises by several branches of the U.S. military. As a site containing munitions and explosives of concern and munitions constituents, the Station is now covered under the Department of Defense military munitions response program. A Memorandum of Agreement, between the U.S. Air Force and the State Historic Preservation Officer required cultural resource management support for this effort. In providing that support, Landmark Archaeology, Inc. continued building on almost two decades of historical and archaeological research at NBAFS begun by other CRM firms in the 1990s and 2000s. This work provided a unique opportunity to investigate the ways the U.S. military used and altered the Station’s natural and cultural landscape through their training activities. It also provided valuable information regarding the nature and location of cultural resources on the Station, permitting NBAFS to better protect and manage the Archaeological District.

Remedial investigation work at NBAFS consisted of surface clearance and subsurface investigation with Schonstadt magnetometers and Digital Geophysical Mapping equipment, hand and machine excavation of finds and disposal of munitions. To facilitate surface clearance, unexploded ordnance (UXO) technicians divided the project area into 200-foot square survey grids. During surface investigations, UXO technicians flagged any non-munitions related items they encountered and recorded these items on a rough sketch map of each grid.  Archaeologists, escorted by UXO technicians for safety, then walked all of the surface-cleared grids and documented the flagged materials, along with any additional cultural artifacts or features they encountered. Each artifact or feature was measured, photographed, and recorded using a sub-meter, high-precision GPS receiver. Commonly encountered cultural resources included historic foundations, wells, stone walls and other farmstead features, agricultural tools, household items, vehicle parts, barbed wire, C-ration can scatters, and bomb craters.