Dr. Babits is military historian and marine archaeologist at Eastern Carolina
University.  We have for several years used a chapter by Prof Babits on the use of
 military records in archeology [Documentary Archaeology in the New World Series: 
New Directions in Archaeology] .  We've long suspected demographic estimates for the back-
country and Prof. Babits' chapter seems to add support to our concern.  While
 studying some of Cornwallis' records for the southern campaign, Prof Babits found
that sixty percent of the civilian names appearing on the records don't appear in
any other colonial record.

Dr. Davis, Research Archaeologist at the Research Laboratories of Archaeology (UNC-CH) since 1983, received his BA in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1974, an MA in archeology from the University of Calgary in 1976, and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Tennessee in 1986.

Dr. Davis' knowledge of the archeology of Native Americans of the Trading Path during the contact era is unrivaled. His dissertation was titled "Stability and Change in Aboriginal Settlement within the Lower Little Tennessee River Valley.", and he has almost 20 years of archaeological field experience in North Carolina. His primary research interest is the late prehistoric and contact periods, looking specifically at the impact of European colonization on native populations. In pursuit of this research interest, he has excavated and studied more than a dozen archaeological sites in the North Carolina piedmont.

He has authored or co-authored more than 40 books and research monographs, 8 book chapters, 13 articles, 20 contract reports, and presented more than two dozen papers at professional meetings. He is currently editor of North Carolina Archaeology, is a past editor of Southeastern Archaeology, and he has also served on the publications committee of the Society for American Archaeology.

Brian Dobyns
Brian Dobyns has a MFA in landscape design from the Conway School of Design in Conway, Massachusetts, and has spent many years in work related to planning and landscape design. His recent work is primarily conservation planning as a partner with Piedmont Planning Associates. His projects include plans for Maple View Farm, the Lloyd/Andrews Farmstead, and Pisgah Covered Bridge.

Though currently working as a full time dad, Brian continues to provide consulting services to landowners, is serving as the Director of the Cullowhee Conference, and is on the Board of Counselors for the Conservation Trust of North Carolina.

Jaki Shelton Green
Ms. Green is a community activist and writer with a special interest in collecting and sharing family histories and stories. She works as an Arts and Education Consultant and as a Community Economic Development Consultant for Legal Services of North Carolina. She has performed her poetry (much of which is based on her own family history) and taught workshops in the United States, the Caribbean, Europe and Brazil. Her eclectic experience and network of community activists are of particular utility for this start-up project.

Ms. Shelton Green's writing has appeared in textbooks, journals, anthologies and publications including Crucible, The African-American Review, Essence, and Obsidian. Her books include Dead on Arrival, Dead on Arrival and New Poems, Masks, and Conjure Blues. She is the author of "Blue Opal," a play, and was a contributing author to Pete and Shirley: The Great Tar Heel Novel. She is currently completing a collection of short stories, a new poetry manuscript and navigating her way into writing a first novel.

Don Higginbotham
As Dowd Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Dr. Higginbotham is perhaps the foremost scholar of Colonial and Revolutionary America. His books include: Daniel Morgan: Revolutionary Rifleman; George Washington and the American Military Tradition; The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763-1789; War and Society in Revolutionary America: The Wider Dimensions of Conflict; Papers of James Iredell, and the narrative content of the Rand McNally Atlas of the American Revolution. His journal contributions are numerous and essential reading for scholars of America's early years.

Bill Holman
Visiting Scholar at the Nicholas School of the Environment of Duke University, Bill is the former Executive Director of North Carolina's Clean Water Management Fund and the Former Secretary of North Carolina's Department of Environmental and Natural Resources.  He advises the TPA on funding sources, preservation strategies, and is works especially closely with the TPA in developing bridges between natural and cultural resource preservationists.

John D. Loftin
Dr. Loftin has been a Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University's Department of Religion, at the University of North Carolina and at Guilford College. He has authored two books and a number of articles for scholarly journals, on religion in general and American Indian religion in particular. His most recent publication is A Short World History of Religions. Professor Loftin brings us an appreciation of some of the subtler aspects of the exchange of values in the contact era.

James H. Merrell
Professor Merrell was born and raised in Minnesota, received a B.A. from Lawrence University (1975), an Honours B.A. from Oxford University (1977), and did his M.A. and Ph.D. at The Johns Hopkins University (1979, 1982). He has been on the faculty of Vassar College since 1984, and is currently Chair of the History Department and Lucy Maynard Salmon Professor of History.

Professor Merrell's The Indians' New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (UNC Press, 1989) won for him the Bancroft Prize, the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, and the Merle Curti Award. His most recent work is Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (W.W. Norton, 1999), which earned him the Bancroft Prize.

Joseph Porter
Visiting Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, earned his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin in 1980, Professor Porter has been Curator of Western American History and Ethnology at the Center for Western Studies, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, and Director of Publications at the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis. He has published widely in Western American and Native American studies, and taught at universities in Texas and Nebraska. He has worked on museum exhibitions and television documentary films relating to Native American studies and Western American History. He has worked as a private consultant in cultural resource management, and he was an active member of the state humanities councils' speakers' bureaus in Nebraska and Missouri. His book Paper Medicine Man: John Gregory Bourke and His American West won three awards and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 1986. He has written articles and chapters in books, museum catalogues, and reviews for scholarly periodicals and the popular press. Professor Porter has done fieldwork among several Great Plains tribes, and he is at work on a biography of the Oglala Lakota war chief, Crazy Horse.

John Shelton Reed
John Shelton Reed is William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology and director of the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the preeminent scholar of the South. Among his recent books is 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South, written with Dale Volbert Reed. His is coeditor of Southern Cultures. He has probably done more than any other individual or group to clarify what is and what is not "the South".

Al Stuart
Al Stuart is Emeritus Professor of Geography at UNC Charlotte, and has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors. His areas of special interest are: demographic and economic patterns and trends in North Carolina and the South, locational analysis for commercial and industrial facilities, and trends analysis for strategic planning and economic development. In his most recent book, co-edited with Dr. Doug Orr, the North Carolina Atlas: Portrait for a New Century, he notes the impacts of rapid development makes a most powerful argument for Smart Growth.

Carole Troxler
Professor of History at Elon College, Elon College, North Carolina, earned her doctorate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1974). Her particular interests address Loyalists after the American Revolution and the American Revolution in the Southern Backcountry. Professor Troxler, immediate past president of the North Carolina Historical Society, has received numerous awards for her studies of Revolutionary Loyalist and the Southern Backcountry in the eighteenth century. These publications include her book on The Loyalist Experience in North Carolina (1976), fourteen monographs and chapters in her field, and contributions to various dictionaries and encyclopedias. She is just completing co-authorship of Shuttle and Plow: A History of Alamance County, North Carolina.

Harry Watson
Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, received his AB from Brown University (1971) and completed his Ph.D. at Northwestern University (1976) after which he joined the faculty at UNC-CH where he is now a full professor in the History Department. Professor Watson contributes a profound familiarity with the political culture along the Trading Path at the moment it was absorbed into settled society. Dr. Watson's fields of study focus on Southern political and economic history in the 19th century with emphasis on North Carolina.

Professor Watson has published four books and numerous articles in these fields, and he has been called to provide expert testimony on race and politics in North Carolina history at various U.S. District Court proceedings. Professor Watson has been a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a co-recipient of the James Harvey Robinson Prize of the American Historical Association and of the Binkley-Stephenson Award of the Organization of American Historians. He is co-editor of Southern Cultures and is currently the director of the Center for the Study of the American South.

Peter Wood
Professor of History at Duke University, Dr. Wood received his BA (1964) from Harvard and, after two years at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, completed his Ph.D. at Harvard (1972). After three years as the Assistant Director for Humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation, Dr. Wood joined the History Department of Duke University, where he is now a full professor. From 1988 to 1995 he served as the Director of Graduate Studies in the History Department, and in 1992 he launched Duke's first survey course on Native American History in the US and Canada.

Professor Wood has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Harvard's Warren Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Wood is a co-author, with Elizabeth Fenn, of Natives and Newcomers (UNC Press, 1983), a brief history of early North Carolina which received the American Historical Association's Robinson Prize. He has been an elected Overseer of Harvard University, and he has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Southern History, Ethno-history, South Atlantic Quarterly, Southern Cultures, and the William & Mary Quarterly.

Tom Magnuson, President
Tom Magnuson received his BA (1972) and MA (1977) in History from San Jose State University.  Tom is a member of the Historical Society of North Carolina, he is currently a visiting scholar at the University of North Carolina Institute for Southern Studies, and he is a member of the North Carolina Humanities Forum through which he gives public lectures on colonial transportation in Carolina. In the seventies he worked in the integrated circuit industry and for the Navy's Special Projects Office (SSPO), and after post-graduate work at the Naval Post Graduate School (1977) and Duke University (1978-1982), where he studied doctrine development processes, he spent much of the eighties and nineties doing organization design and nurturing start-up ventures. In 1998 he turned an avocational interest in piedmont history and geography into the Trading Path Association. As founder and current President, Tom is responsible for making this venture a success.

Joe Caddell, Director of Research
Joe Caddell, Director of Research, is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at the North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC and a Visiting Lecturer, History Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. Joe earned his BA from the University of North Carolina (1973) and completed graduate studies in history at Duke University earning there his MA (1978) and Ph.D. (1984). He has taught undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate courses at five colleges and universities and three advanced military schools. He was the editor of three advanced texts produced for the US Air War College. As Research Director he is responsible for academic liaison and for the supervision of volunteer and contracted researchers.