Methodology and Sources

The Atlas of Drowned Towns is a digital public history project that brings together the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to understand the processes and experiences of displacement and disappearance caused by the construction of dams. The project draws on “traditional” archival research at a variety of levels (for example, in the United States, from the National Archives and Records Administration to local historical societies), oral histories and interviews, and community outreach and archiving events.

How do you define a “drowned town”?

“Towns” is a bit of a misnomer — we’re actually interested in any kind of home that was moved or eliminated as part of the process of building a dam. That’s anything from an incorporated city or defined village to individual farms and ranches or areas occupied, used, and valued by someone or some community — for example, an Indigenous community. Generally, we include only those places that were populated at the time of dam construction. For example, we would not (usually) include an old mining village that had already become a depopulated “ghost town” by the time a dam was built.

What about places destroyed by dam failures, floods, or other kinds of drowning?

These are fascinating, important, and tragic stories, certainly — but not the subject of the Atlas of Drowned Towns. We are interested in deliberate and planned (however poorly) acts of displacement, inundation, and disappearance to make way for large dams and their reservoirs.

How do you find these “drowned towns”?

Great question! Most importantly: you! We get great tips and suggestions through our Share Your Story page and through email at drownedtowns@boisestate.edu. Once we get a tip about a drowned town, we check whether it fits our definition (see above), try to find out as much as we can about the place, and add it to the database.

Other scholars and researchers into the topic — see our Learn More page (and let us know who’s missing)

Various websites, newspaper articles, and other sources of information, like this, this, and this.

We also query various search engines, Wikipedia, and various LLMs like ChatGPT — and, of course, we check all of those (sometimes illegitimate and even outright false) tips.

Where does the quantitative data come from; how is it formatted; etc.?

Information about dams (such as acre-feet of storage, dates of construction, etc.): US Army Corps of Engineers’ National Inventory of Dams; International Commission on Large Dams' World Register of Dams; Oakridge National Laboratories Hydrosource's 2026 Existing Hydropower Assets (EHA) Plant Database.

Information about communities (such as population-at-time-of-inundation, cost of displacement, etc.): usually a combination of information from local historical societies, real estate records from dam-building agencies, real estate transaction records at the county level, memories and stories from displaced people and their descendants, newspaper articles and other fragments in various archives, and census information (see below for that process).

Construction Cost: we try to convert all dam construction cost values into US dollars at the time of construction.

What software do you use?

The backend database is a custom and proprietary system developed by a computer scientist at Boise State University, who also developed the first version of the front-end and the website. This front-end and website were developed by Cloud Four. For geolocating and georeferencing artifacts (and georectifying historical maps and imagery), we use ArcGIS Pro. If you want to know more about the technical details, email us.