(Historical) context is everything

First of two parts

One thing I learned down on the Columbia River last week: If I were left to survive using prehistoric technologies, I would starve if I did not die of exposure first. And it would not be the fault of early North American technologies, but my own lack of adaptation. As archaeologist Jeff Flenniken explained, Darwinian winnowing worked well in the old days. Our ancient predecessors were pretty damn smart.

That was one of my take-aways from a week-long "Cultural Resources Training" I attended in The Dalles, Oregon. The program is designed to immerse government workers — federal, state, and local — in a course in the pre-history and archaeology of the Pacific Northwest. It is currently sponsored by the Washington Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission, and the Washington Department of Transportation and has been conducted twice a year for 13 years.

The involvement of the first entity is obvious: If you're gong to teach archaeology, leave it to the archaeologists. The involvement of WSDOT is a little less obvious until you think about it: What agency of government plows up more ground and potentially disturbs more possible archaeological sites than the road and bridge builders? The fact is, you cut a straight line or dig a hole in any part of the region and you'll likely plow up a valuable chunk of our history.

This lesson was painfully learned earlier this decade when WSDOT found that it had located a Hood Canal Bridge construction project on the site of an ancient Klallam Indian village, Tse-whit-zen, near Port Angeles. The bungle resulted in the abandonment of the site. That combined with delays cost state taxpayers an estimated $86.8 million (pdf). That's a cultural and fiscal fiasco no one wants to repeat. Since then, WSDOT has added 10 archaeologists to its staff, a bargain if it saves another $80 million-mistake.

Paying attention to disturbing historic sites is a must for any major capital project. Cultural resources are, in essence, the new wetlands, and they are disturbed at legal peril. There are a host of state, federal and even local laws and regulations that make pawing up the ground illegal unless you identify and consider the impact on places that might be historically, or prehistorically, significant. And worse, ignoring the rules, or following them without rigor, can result in costly delays, cost-overruns, mitigation expenses, and even fines.

The laws aren't designed to stop projects so much as to minimize the damage they can do, if possible. A road might be re-routed; an archaeological site might be excavated and documented before construction; artifacts might be relocated. The state Department of Archaeology has 22,000 archaeological sites in their database, and those are just ones that have been recorded. There are plenty out there that are unregistered, or yet unknown.

There are some landscapes, like those along the Columbia, where you can barely step without treading on a Native American campsite, an old homestead, or fishing or hunting ground thousands of years old. And during the training, we visited these places. We also learned that the woods of Washington have old mines, logger's cabins, ghost towns, and Civilian Conservation Corps projects. The beaches are lined with ancient shell middens — which are frequently also burial sites. Oh, and by the way, there are another whole set of laws that add protections for graves and cemeteries, the disturbance of which can result in felony charges. It was the discovery of human remains at Tse-whit-zen that put a stake in the heart of that boondoggle.

So the stakes are high for state agencies, and they had better understand and follow the rules. Other agencies, like the State Parks Commission and the Department of Natural Resources, are also heavily involved in these issues due to the lands they steward and projects they oversee. Their staffers are among the attendees and instructors of the course, which helps state workers deal with the details of the laws and paperwork, and learn from others' mistakes.

The course also teaches context. Just as we've all had to learn that a wetland is no longer a swamp, so too historic resources need to be explained. That arrowhead on the ground means something according to where's it's located; pick it up, and it's archaeologically worthless, and you've irreparably damaged an historic resource. That bluff looks like a great spot for an overlook and a restroom, but to a nearby tribe, it might be sacred. The laws make you stop and figure out what you're doing and the relative importance of where you want to do it. In other words, the ecosystem of a landscape includes the human past, from 50 years ago (the age something can become eligible for the National Historic Register) to 10,000 or more years ago, when humans spread over the landscape as the glaciers retreated.