Doug Mooney

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Doug Mooney, is the current president of the Philadelphia Archaeological Forum (PAF). Doug has been employed in contract archaeology since 1987 when he graduated from West Virginia University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology. He received a Master of Arts degree in archaeology from Penn State in 1994. In 2017, he as President of the PAF was appointed by the Mayor of Philadelphia to the City of Philadelphia’s Historic Preservation Task Force. He also serves on the Philadelphia Historical Commission’s Committee on Historic Designation. Established in 1955, the Philadelphia Historical Commission is the City of Philadelphia’s regulatory agency responsible for ensuring the preservation of historically significant buildings, structures, sites, objects, interiors and districts in Philadelphia.

In past years Doug has worked for many of the major archaeology firms in this part of the country, including John Milner Associates, Inc., Lantz Research, Inc., 3-D Environmental Services, Inc., Greenhorne and O’Mara, Inc., Kittatinny Archaeological Research, Inc., KCI Technologies, Inc., and Kise Straw & Kolodner, Inc. He currently works as a professional archaeologist in the Philadelphia Area.

In recent years Doug served as the field director for some of the most important projects in Philadelphia. He directed a crew of 60 (at its height) during the excavation of the National Constitution Center (NCC) site on Block 3 of Independence Mall, and also directed the data recoveries on the James Oronoco Dexter site (also on Block 3), and at the President’s House on Block 1 of the mall. Doug became particularly interested in Dexter, a leader in the city’s late eighteenth-century African-American community, and conducted in depth research at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and other archival repositories to learn more about the man and his role in the founding of the African Episcopal Church of Saint Thomas.

Doug began his career in archaeology as a prehistorian, primarily working on Native American sites. Just before coming to Philadelphia to direct the work on the NCC site in 1999, Doug supervised Phase III investigations on the S.R. 11/15 improvement project in Perry and Juniata counties in Pennsylvania. The work involved concurrent investigations of five deeply buried stratified Native American sites along the Susquehanna River. The largest of the sites produced intact late Paleo-Indian and stratified Early Archaic site components dating back some 11,500 years B.P. Doug loves big projects and is neither intimidated by the archaeology nor the demands of managing a large crew. On the S.R. 11/15 project there were as many as 50 people in the field at once and they were at times recovering up to 10,000 artifacts a day.

Doug has given numerous public presentations on the NCC and Dexter excavations, and for the last thirteen years he has taken part in the annual, day-long, Archaeology Month celebration sponsored by PAF and Independence National Historical Park at the Independence Living History Center. He has also presented professional papers at the Society for Historical Archaeology, the Middle Atlantic Archaeology Council (MAAC) and the Council for Northeast Archaeology (CNEHA) meetings. He is a co-author, with Richard S. Newman and Roy E. Finkenbine, of the article “Philadelphia Emigrationist Petition, circa 1792: An Introduction”, William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 64(1). Doug is married and has one daughter.


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