The Institute for the History of Technology and Industrial Archaeology, established in 1989, is a unit of the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University.
Expertise comes from various academic and professional disciplines.
The staff includes structural engineers, historians, delineators, landscape specialists, drafting specialists, architects, and multimedia communications experts. Assisting our professional staff are graduate students from a variety of programs. Together, professionals and students form the nucleus of an interdisciplinary approach to the scholarly study, documentation, and preservation of historic industries and engineering works. The Institute for the History of Technology and Industrial Archaeology carries out activities in scholarly studies in the history of technology professional consultations and sponsored research on America's industrial heritage for federal, state, and local agencies such as the National Park Service, Army Corps of Engineers, and State Historic Preservation Offices preservation of engineering works and development of techniques for structural analysis of historic and obsolete structural materials in cooperation with the WVU College of Engineering sponsorship and participation in seminars and conferences in the history of technology, industrial archaeology, and history and preservation of engineering works. The simplest IA technique is the resource survey.