They're typically called on to help identify and study archaeologically significant sites on federal land or when federal money is involved in development projects. Every so often a project comes along that provides an intriguing look into the state's cultural heritage.

"These are the cases we do in a much more face-to-face, personal way," said Christopher O. Clement, deputy of the Cultural Resource Consulting Division led by Steven Smith.

During the past several years, Clement has been principal investigator on four of the projects that contributed to an understanding of the state's cultural heritage that otherwise might have been lost to history. Clement and other archaeologists with the institute:

* helped members of the New Wappetaw Presbyterian Church and the Mt. Pleasant Presbyterian Church determine the site of their first church building, built in the late 17th century;

*provided guidance to the Columbia Historic Foundation by showing it where significant archaeological deposits were located on the Mann-Simons Cottage property in Columbia when the foundation wanted to landscape a garden area;

*helped the owners of Woodlands Plantation in Bamberg County determine the boundaries of a centuries-old African-American plantation cemetery so descendants of those buried in the cemetery could continue to be interred there; and

* assisted the National Council of Negro Women in determining the exact location of the house in which black educator Mary McLeod Bethune was born in Lee County.

Clement thinks of the smaller projects as a public service to the community, while documenting the resource. "That's important because once it's documented it can be protected," he said. "We're helping these groups preserve a part of their heritage."

The work is also providing a better understanding of the state's history, albeit in small doses since monies for privately funded projects are only a fraction of what's available for larger, publicly funded studies.

"There was a time not long ago when historical archeology sites did not receive much attention from archeologists in the belief that historic records told them all that they needed to know," Clement said.

Historical sites of economically disadvantaged people also tended to be given less attention than those of historical luminaries, though over the past 20 years that too has changed, he said.

"After archeologists started working on some of these smaller sites, they realized there is a lot of information that isn't written down that they can learn from the locations, which is particularly important on African-American sites," he said. "It's rare that African-Americans were the ones who were writing history, so their cultural perspective tends to be lacking from the actual documentary record. We can reconstruct it by looking at records and similar documents, but they weren't actually creating those documents, which makes African American historic archeological sites particularly important.

"They're one of the few ways that we have of studying a disenfranchised group, both from a cultural and an economic perspective."