Areas of Specialized Competence: With field experience in museum management, oral history/ethnography, and documentary research, Susan E. Dollar has participated in various Heritage Resource projects at local, state, and federal levels.  She was project historian on a Cultural Resource Management project for the Louisiana Army National Guard. Dollar has participated in a number of National Park Service projects relating to the various cultural groups connected to the Natchitoches area.  Among these projects were an inventory of items found in Oakland Plantation and a Rapid Ethnographic Assessment Project.  In addition, Dollar served three years as Assistant Director of the Arkansas Center for Oral and Visual History and in that role managed a number of large oral history projects related to Arkansas state history.  Just before leaving Arkansas, Dollar worked briefly on the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential interview project that will, ultimately, become part of the Presidential Library’s holdings.

Publications:  Dollar’s publications include a book on the Reconstruction period in Natchitoches Parish: The Freedmen’s Bureau Schools of Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana: 1865-1868 (1998) and a number of articles: “The Red River Campaign, Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana: A Case of Equal Opportunity Destruction” (Louisiana History, 2002); “Viney Grove Methodist Church: A View into the Frontier Ministry of Western Washington County, Arkansas” (Ozark Historical Review, 2000); and “A Brief History of Camp Beauregard, 1905-1997” ( Southern Studies, 1995).  Recent work has focused on the Creoles of color of Louisiana, as found in Dollar’s recently completed dissertation entitled, “‘Black, White, or Indifferent’: Race, Identity, and Americanization in Creole Louisiana.”

Areas of Specialized Competence: My research, teaching, publication, and advocacy integrate above- and below-ground archaeology, historical, and oral historical investigation of landscapes, communities, and the complex relationships between past and present. Recent work includes the nomination of an early 20th-century Virginia Indian School to the National Register of Historic Places, an overview and assessment of materials documenting traditional associations between Civil War reenactors in a NPS park unit, and a survey of several mid-century suburban communities to explore how knowledge, spaces and objects from the past are strategically deployed to negotiate personal, family, community, and national identity.

Publications:  Recent publications include (1) with Lu Ann DeCunzo.  Historical Landscapes, Ideology, and Experience.  In Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, eds. Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (2006), pp. 255-279; (2) with Anthea M. Hartig and Luis G. Hoyos.  Setting the Bar: The Pros and Cons of Holding the Recent Past to a Higher Standard. Preservation Forum (September 2005), pp. 23-29; (3) Landscape Archaeology and the Recent Past: A View from Bowie, Maryland.  In Deborah Slaton and William G. Foulks, eds. Preserving the Recent Past II. Washington, DC: Preservation Education Foundation, National Park Service, and Association for Preservation International (2000), pp. 2-97 to 2-103; (4) Shifting Land Use, Shifting Values, and the Reinvention of Annapolis.  In Paul A. Shackel, Paul R. Mullins, and Mark S. Warner, eds. Annapolis Pasts: Historical Archaeology in Annapolis, Maryland. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press (1998), pp. 147-168.

Professional Service:  I serve on the state of Maryland’s State Review Board for the National Register of Historic Places; am a member of the Governmental Affairs Committee of the Society for American Archaeology; am a member of the Landscape Advisory Panel at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest; am an officer and board member of the Recent Past Preservation Network (check them out at http://www.recentpast.org/); and recently served as grant reviewer for the Louisiana SHPO office in administering its Historic Building Recovery Grant Program—part of a Congressional allocation to the Gulf States for post-Katrina/Rita recovery efforts for historic properties.

Professional Memberships:  I am currently a member of several local, state, regional, national and international organizations, including: the Association for the Preservation of Historic Natchitoches; the Louisiana Archaeological Society, the Natchitoches Historic Foundation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Recent Past Preservation Network, the Society for American Archaeology, the Society for Historical Archaeology, the Society for Industrial Archeology, the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, U.S./ICOMOS, and the World Archaeological Congress.

Area of specialized competence:  Gregory’s early interest in human-land relationships led him to studies of regional cultural ecology, especially in central and northwestern Louisiana.   His fieldwork has been both archaeological and ethnographical in nature, with ethnic diversity and cultural continuity as major focuses of his research.  The work has involved Native Americans, Creole communities, Anglo-American and Louisiana French fishing communities, the African-American culture of the plantation regions, and the Anglo-Saxon culture of the upland South.  Active in cooperative programs with the Louisiana Indian communities since the early 1970s, Gregory has worked with seven of the eight tribal communities in Louisiana and with three tribes in Oklahoma.   He is also curator of the Williamson Museum at NSU.

Publications:  Together with Drs. Fred B. Kniffen and George A. Stokes, Gregory co-authored a major work on the Native Americans of Louisiana entitled The Historic Tribes of Louisiana.  He has contributed two major catalogues of Louisiana folk art and has authored papers on folkways, material culture, and archaeology in a number of refereed journals.

Area of specialized competence:  Hailey is director of the Northwestern State University Cultural Resource Office (CRO). CRO serves as the cultural resources management branch for the School of Social Sciences, with an emphasis on archaeological grants and contracts. One of CRO’s major projects is the Integrated Cultural Resources Management Project, a multiple-year project for the Louisiana Army National Guard, which is designed to provide the Guard with information and guidelines for preserving and protecting significant sites on National Guard properties throughout the state of Louisiana. Hailey’s primary research interests are in the application of new technologies and methods in archaeological field and laboratory research. The most recent development of this interest has led to the use of a powered parachute for low-altitude, large-scale aerial imaging of archaeological sites with digital still cameras, digital video, and thermal imaging cameras. Hailey, working with colleagues from a number of other institutions and agencies, has conducted aerial surveys of prehistoric and historic sites in North Dakota, Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Publications: Dr. Hailey's publications include "The Powered Parachute as an Archaeological Aerial Reconnaissance Vehicle” (submitted to Archaeological Prospection).  Other research efforts have resulted in "An Unlikely Endeavor: The Construction of Seagoing Vessels on the Western Rivers, 1792-1817,” "Lead Poisoning in the English New World Colonies of the 17th and 18th Centuries: An Analysis of Lead-Glazed Ceramics from Port Royal, Jamaica, " and numerous archaeological reports from projects in Texas and Louisiana.

Area of specialized competence:  Sinclair has worked at the federal government level in Washington, D.C. as a Geographer in the intelligence community as well as a City Planner and Deputy Director of Planning and Management for the City of North Charleston, SC, the third largest city in the state.  He has considerable experience working with Geographic Information Systems as well as Remote Sensing systems.  Sinclair has continued his work on the evolution of the urban South that he began at Louisiana State University, and is also interested in the development of the historic landscapes associated with the Kisatchie Hills.  Sinclair is the director of the Southern Studies Institute at Northwestern State University and is a member of the Natchitoches Parish Planning Commission.

Publications:  Sinclair has published articles in regional journals and given papers at regional and national meetings.  While working as a city planner he completed or participated in a number of projects involving downtown development and historic preservation.  He has also published several articles on planning history, numerous book reviews for geography journals, and is editor of the journal Southern Studies.