Don Verwayen is a Registered Professional Archaeologist with over seventeen years of experience surveying and recording the archeology of Northwest California. He has completed cultural resource investigations for the Bureau of Land Management, Caltrans, California State Parks, California Fish and Game and the National Park Service. Recently, for the Hoopa Valley Tribe he authored the National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Fort Gaston adobe officers' quarters. For the Smith River Rancheria he has prepared an ethnographic and landscape study of Tolowa sacred places including a methodology for protecting these places under CEQA and NEPA; and for the Karuk Tribe, he was lead writer for a National Register nomination of the Orleans White Deerskin dancegrounds. His current focus is Native American traditional cultural properties, including natural and monumental landscapes, social construction of place, the idea of "inscription" of landscape (how people attach meanings to place), and related CEQA and NEPA issues. His interests extend to archaeological recordation of the contact period when the landscape was contested by mining camps, ranches, military posts and logging operations.