Jim Kompanek holds a bachelor's degree in anthropology and a certificate in historic preservation from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as a graduate certificate in Geographic Information Systems from Pennsylvania State University. Presently, Jim is completing his master’s degree in Geographic Information Systems from Pennsylvania State University.
Jim has over seven years of cartographic, field, and laboratory experience in historic and prehistoric archaeology. Jim has conducted or participated in numerous phase I surveys, phase II evaluations, and phase III data recovery projects. This experience includes a wide variety of fieldwork, laboratory, cartography, and historic research throughout the United States, including Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Maryland, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and New York. His experience also includes eastern Europe, where he participated in the excavation and laboratory analysis of transitional Late Neolithic/Early Copper Age settlements along the Hungarian/Romanian border.
Jim is currently a CAD/GIS Specialist in CRA’s West Virginia office. He is responsible for all aspects of cartography, from proposal and preparatory field mapping to final report cartography. This includes georeferencing historic maps, 3-D terrain and site rendering, viewshed analysis, interpolation of raster data, predictive modeling, spatial analysis, maintenance and creation of geodatabases, and GPS/Total Station survey, as well as the general acquisition and integration of geospatial data. Prior to joining the West Virginia office, Jim worked as a Field Supervisor at the corporate office, where his duties included authoring reports for and supervision of fieldwork for phase I and II projects and crew chief on phase II and phase III fieldwork. Jim first joined CRA in 2001.