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Lake Pleasant Regional Park (LPRP or the Park) was in an undeveloped portion of Maricopa County, Arizona. However, population growth exploded in the Phoenix area in the past 30 years and new housing developments expanded and are still expanding ever northward. It is just a matter of time before the Park becomes part of the Valley of the Sun's crowded urban landscape. With an expansion in population will come an increase in land use demands and resource impacts. The purpose of the Cultural Resources Management Plan is to provide the County and Reclamation with a long-term management strategy to preserve and protect the significant cultural resources of the park.

In the summers of 1979 and 1980, Arizona State University (ASU) conducted a cultural resources survey of Lake Pleasant Regional Park (LPRP) (Rice and Bostwick 1986). The completion of New Waddell Dam in 1993, increasing recreational development, and new park boundaries spurred the Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation) to survey the park. Reclamation performed the new survey on their land to fulfill their Section 110 requirements of the National Historic Preservation Act. Upon completion of the fieldwork in July 1995, Reclamation archaeologists, under the supervision of Carol Telles, had identified 65 new sites, 19 isolated petroglyphs, and 308 isolated artifacts. A recent records search by ACS also revealed 87 previously recorded sites. Only two had been field-checked by the Reclamation crew. In addition to the survey and literature review, Reclamation undertook a separate rock art study that detailed each petroglyph panel and element identified during the survey. Once the fieldwork was finished, report preparation began, but personnel changes made it difficult to complete in-house. Therefore, Reclamation requested that Archaeological Consulting Services, Ltd. (ACS), revise and complete the draft under ACS’s on-call contract for cultural resources Class III survey and testing (Contract No. 1425-97-CS-32-028105).ACS performed the work based on existing documentation that Reclamation crews collected during their fieldwork and the cooperative recollections of Carol Telles and Dave Gifford. No field checking was involved. In total, this research identified 183 historic and prehistoric sites (104 previously known/79 newly identified) and 306 isolated artifacts.