Zack Overfield, RPA

“As equity and environmental challenges become more visible to American society, and as climate change and rising sea levels devour coastal heritage sites, the strategic importance of cultural resources management and historic preservation continues to become clearer. Cultural resources management ensures that vital infrastructure projects are built with the understanding of the things communities find most sacred about their past.”

Zack is a dedicated leader in cultural resources and environmental consulting with experience across the southern United States and Midwest. He provides vision and leadership for the South-Central cultural resources practice, which includes an expert team of archaeologists, architectural historians and historians. He supervises complex cultural resources investigations in support of major infrastructure projects. He ensures projects successfully navigate the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Water Act, National Historic Preservation Act, Antiquities Code of Texas, municipal development codes and other applicable regulations.

As a senior archeologist/principal investigator, Zack manages intensive archaeological and historic resources surveys, cemetery investigations, burial exhumations, evaluative testing, data recovery, alternative mitigation efforts, and historic preservation documentation. He authors and reviews technical reports for regulatory compliance and quality control across Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and the Southeast.

On a critical cultural resources investigation, Zack implemented an innovative solution to use Historic Human Remains Detection dogs in conjunction with ground-penetrating radar and a gradiometer to determine if human remains existed on a project site. He has presented and written about this project and advocated for broader use of this technology in infrastructure projects.