INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

archaeological and historic sites, from preservation to excavation to interpretation to the public.
Cultural resources managers may be local, state, or federal archaeologists charged with
protecting significant resources during construction of a highway or park. Before they can
protect them they must first identify them, then determine which are significant. Often the Park
Service or Department of Transportation archaeologist cannot do all this alone for large tracts of
land, and so may hire specialists in contract archaeology, usually a small business or university
research institute or consultant.
Contract archaeologists do the fieldwork, often a great number of Phase I surveys, shovel testing
and doing background research, then they prepare a report with recommendations. If they find
sites that are not significant—say, a scatter of chert flakes with little stratigraphic depth—they
often recommend no further action and going ahead with the construction. They have to do a
good job because that is usually all the scientific attention that site will ever get before it is
nuked. If significant sites are identified, often during Phase II test excavation, they might work
with the managers toward preservation, redesign of the development, or rerouting of the road.
Usually the work is evaluated by the cultural resources manager at the public agency, who will
concur with the recommendation if the work is done well and within official guidelines.
Preservation is sometimes cheaper than digging more, but sometimes not. If preservation is not
an option—if the road must go through here or the public hospital must be built here—then
Phase III data recovery excavation may be
recommended.
What laws protect archaeological sites? As early as
1906, the Antiquities Act protected sites on federal
lands. But see the list of laws on p. 236 of the book.
With the environmental consciousness of the 1960s
and 1970s came many laws protecting cultural as well
as natural resources. You do not need to memorize all
the federal laws, and state laws differ across the
country a bit, not to mention local ordinances.
However, the general picture is that public lands are
protected, as we already discussed, but private lands
are not very much. In Florida, if a developer wants to
build yet another big gated community, it will require
various permits and compliance with state laws. If it is big enough, it will be a development of
regional impact or DRI. On the DRI application form, right in there with questions about the
projected traffic patterns, water use, endangered species on the land, and others, is question 19,
asking if there are any significant cultural resources that will be disturbed by the development.
To answer that question the developer usually hires an archaeologist to do a survey, and so on.
Sometimes the developer will say, no, there are no archaeological sites identified on this land, to
which the state reviewer will say, how do you know? Has anyone ever looked? Sometimes the
developer will change the development to be slightly smaller, so as to fall below the threshold
for a DRI (I think in Florida it is 600 units, apartments or houses or whatever).