The Public Lands Institute is an ongoing photographic index and open-access archive of American public lands. The project pairs field photography with structured documentation, treating each site as a subject with multiple layers of recorded history rather than as scenic landscape. The index currently holds 91 sites across 20 states, documented in 746 photographs, all dedicated to the public domain.
Site records draw on primary repositories: EPA Superfund and cleanup databases; National Park Service administrative histories; National Archives Civilian Conservation Corps records; Library of Congress Chronicling America; federal and state court records; Royce cession maps and treaty texts; native-land.ca territory data; and iNaturalist research grade observations. Travel writing, tourism copy, and managing agency press releases are not accepted as sources.
The map's Indigenous territories layer lists two kinds of entries for each site. Nations come from two sources combined: the territories on Native Land Digital's map that contain the site's coordinates (a point-in-polygon lookup against Native Land's territories layer, retrieved October 14, 2026), and nations documented at the site in its own record. Archaeological cultures, such as Adena and Hopewell, are scholarly designations for past communities known from the archaeological record, not names of present nations; they come from each site record only. Native Land's boundaries are approximate and do not represent official or legal boundaries of any nation.
A reference glossary defines the geologic time terms, managing agency types, archaeological culture designations, and Indigenous nations named throughout the site records.
Every photograph is dedicated to the public domain under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal. Full resolution TIFF and RAW files are freely downloadable from the archive and from Wikimedia Commons. No attribution is required and no permission is needed for any use. Fieldwork and archive costs are listed on the support page.