A project that develops smartphone tours for the museum to aid in social distancing and continued efforts to catalog their collections to increase online access.

Enfield Shaker Museum seeks to broaden visitors’ digital and physical access to the Museum’s physical site and website by: creating a digital collection and archive portal of objects and documents relating to the historic Enfield Shakers and to the history of the Museum and preservation of the core of the original Enfield Shaker Village; developing and posting related online educational activities and lesson plans; and creating a series of web-based smartphone tours to provide new interpretations of the historic site, its buildings, and its exhibitions, while ensuring visitor safety should COVID-19 pandemic restrictions allow. With these products the Museum will be able to continue to employ key personnel and fulfill our mission of preserving and sharing its historic structures, landscape, and Shaker cultural heritage with its multi-generational visitors, members, and the global community.

A series of six case studies in locations in the United States and internationally to further methods in aerial thermography, an imaging process that allows non-destructive photography and data collection for archaeological sites.

Archaeologists have known since the 1970s that aerial thermal images can reveal a wide range of ancient cultural features including buried architecture, artifact concentrations, as well as roads, fields, and earthworks. Until recently, technological hurdles have largely prevented aerial thermography from being deployed in archaeological research, but our work on a Level II Start-Up grant brought together a small drone, a lightweight thermal camera, and photogrammetry software to explore new methods for aerial thermal surveys. The proposed project seeks to build on this success by using a newly developed radiometric thermal camera, improved drone technology and new processing methods to undertake a series of aerial thermal surveys at sites in the US, Mexico, Cyprus and Iraq. Results of the project have the potential to transform understanding of the various sites under investigation, and will develop a new set of protocols for collection and processing of thermal imagery in archaeology.

The Enfield Shaker Museum in New Hampshire to create two new exhibitions, retain two positions, and create two new jobs.

Enfield Shaker Museum will plan, develop, and script two distinct but complementary exhibitions to open in 2024, the 250th anniversary of the arrival of the Shakers’ founder, Ann Lee, to America. These exhibitions—one a physical site and the other digital—will be integrated with the Museum’s website and social media during and after the project’s completion (2023-2026). The physical site exhibition will explore Shaker religious tenets and their social manifestations as communalism, gender and racial equality, and pacifism, as well as their reification in the Shakers' material culture and built environment and shaping of the natural environment. The exhibition website (#EnfieldEverywhere) will include Enfield artifacts and documents at Enfield and at other museums and libraries and in private hands, a database of Enfield Shakers (already in production), and an expansion of themes beyond the physical exhibition's capacity.