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i The Archaeology of Orange County Patricia M . Samford and R . P . Stephen Davis , Research Laboratories of Archaeology , University of North Carolina , Chapel Hill . Introduction When thinking about the historic cultural resources of Orange County , most people no doubt envision standing structures like the ones that form the primary focus of this volume . Just as important , but much less visible , are the county ' s buried archaeological resources . Like our historic structures , they are a non-renewable resource , but one that , unlike the structures , can extend back thousands of years our knowledge about the past residents of what is now Orange County . Wherever humans live and work , they leave behind physical traces of their activities . Some of these traces remain only as soil stains , or below-ground brick and stone foundations . Other evidence is provided by the debris of everyday life—the bits of flaked stone , animal bone , broken glass and dishes and other debris that accumulate as a result of people going about their daily lives . Over the past seven decades , archaeologists working in Orange County have uncovered these bits and pieces left behind when humans inhabited an area . With them , archaeologists can provide a form to Orange County ' s past . Much of this work has focused on the Native Americans who lived here long before the first English and European settlers arrived . The first excavations were conducted in the 1930s with the purpose of tracking down villages along the Trading Path recorded in the early eighteenth century by explorer John Lawson . These excavations , conducted under the auspices of the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , were large-scale and long-term research projects . Extensive excavations at one of these villages , the Wall Site (31Or11 ) , allowed archaeologists to begin describing in detail life in these settlements . With the advent in the 1960s and 1970s of federal regulations protecting cultural resources , the scope of many archaeological projects changed . Instead of the extensive excavations that characterized the earlier decades , many sites were identified through minimal levels of work designed to identify archaeological resources prior to federally funded projects such as highway or reservoir development . Often , unless a site and its remains were deemed significant enough to the history of the county , state , or nation to warrant further study , no information other than date and type of site may be known . Nevertheless , an inventory , even at this minimal level of detail , is enormously useful , since it allows archaeologists to discern patterns in the ways people used and settled the land at different times .