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No standing structures remain from the periods when Native Americans were the only inhabitants here , and most of the houses and other buildings constructed by the early colonists of Orange County have also long since disappeared . In the wake of the county ' s rapid development , additional historic structures and archaeological sites are bound to follow the fate of these earlier buildings and sites . This chapter details what archaeologists have been learned about Orange County" s past through the study of its archaeological sites . At present , almost 400 archaeological sites have been recorded in Orange County . ' The level of detail and quality of the data for these documented sites varies . Most sites were recorded after archaeologists or artifact collectors discovered and collected surface scatters of artifacts , like chipped stone tools or broken pottery and nails , from plowed fields . Other sites were found through archaeological survey that entailed digging systematically placed holes along a road corridor or future ' landfill location. Such limited work often provides little information beyond a date for the site . Site size , function , and length of occupation generally cannot be garnered from such limited work . Other sites , such as the Native American villages at the Wall (310r11 ) , the Jenrette (31Or231a) , and Fredricks (31Or231 ) sites , have been extensively excavated (Dickens , 10 Ward and Davis 19879 Ward and Davis 1992) and as a consequence much more is known about these sites . Other large-scale projects have focused on nineteenth-eer y life, both on the University of North Carolina campus (the Eagle Tavern and the Poor House sites) , and on isolated rural farmsteads (Samford and Davis , 1998 ; Jones et al . 1998 ; Daniel and Ward 1993 ) . Additionally , the intensity of archaeological research or survey work has varied spatially across the county . Areas where development has been the heaviest , such as the southeastern comer of the county , have been studied much more intensively than other areas . The construction of roads or reservoirs also spur archaeological survey , which provides information on sites within these project areas . In other instances , research and planning goals guide archaeological survey . In the winter of 19934994 , an archaeological survey of portions of the county was funded by a Survey and Planning Grant awarded Orange County by the National Park Service . The survey , which was conducted by the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina , added 151 sites to the Orange County inventory (Daniel 1994) . This survey focused predominantly in the northern parts of the county . At present , the county site record is heavily weighted in favor of prehistoric sites ; less than fifty sites dating after European settlement in the eighteenth century have been recorded . These sites are predominantly house or mill sites , which by no means are representative of the types of historic period sites (commercial , industrial , mining , institutional) which are documented for the county . ' This total does not include 110 sites (31Or054 through 310r165) that represent unprovenienced groups of artifacts collected in the 1930s by Allen Godbey . Although these artifacts were gathered from sites in Orange County , site locations are unknown, and thus any recorded information is useless for this study . 2