Section 106 in its entirety:

The head of any Federal agency having direct or indirect jurisdiction over a proposed Federal or federally assisted undertaking in any State and the head of any Federal department or independent agency having authority to license any undertaking shall, prior to the approval of the expenditure of any Federal funds on the undertaking or prior to the issuance of any license, as the case may be, take into account the effect of the undertaking on any district, site, building, structure, or object that is included in or eligible for inclusion in the National Register. The head of any such Federal agency shall afford the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation established under Title II of this Act a reasonable opportunity to comment with regard to such undertaking.

It appears that the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation is about to undertake a review and rewrite of the main implementing regulation of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, namely 36CFR800.  Last formally revised in 2000, it has served multiple agencies as the go-to regulatory guidance for implementing that Section of the NHPA.

Some of my fellow historic preservation peers have already begun to put pen to paper.  After 30 years working with this regulation through the eyes of a state department of transportation, I think I may have some things to say about any revision.

The first two observations about 36CFR800 are this: the Regulation is exquisitely flexible in its application and can be customized to fit nearly every agency or situation.  By design, it is a streamlining regulation.  Secondly, to unlock the full potential of the Regulation, you need to know what you’re doing. I’ve always likened the Regulation to a Maserati.  A good driver can move through compliance at great speed and efficiency, but if you don’t know what’s up or down, you will crash very quickly.

PennDOT, as well as many other transportation agencies, both state and federal, have figured out how to make the Regulation serve both the letter and intent of the Section 106 law. In some cases, it took more than a decade of trial and error to get there, but get there they did. And to throw metaphor upon metaphor, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel, especially if it’s holding a Pirelli Scorpion tire.

Most of the trial and error in making best use of the Regulation was in identifying those pain points that appear within the Regulation, then finding ways to work through them.  I believe that recreating that thought process is useful in trying to revise the Regulation going forward. Identifying the problems faced by an Agency attempting to comply with the Regulation and grasping the solution could lead to regulatory revisions that might anticipate and avoid the problems in the first place.

The alternative to this approach is a more traditional line by line comment and revision. I think looking at specific issues and addressing them provides more context, more “why” and again shows why the current Regulation is largely worth keeping.

Pain Point 1: Projects or Activities that have little or no potential to affect historic properties, by their nature.

The classic starting point is line painting. (Although line painting is routinely part of maintenance, which usually is not Federally funded, work with me here, folks.) It’s an activity undertaken by an agency. Does it have the potential to affect historic properties? I know of no example where it has. And under 36CFR800.3(a)(1), it clearly states that “If the undertaking is a type of activity that does not have the potential to cause effects on historic properties…the agency official has no further obligation under Section 106 or this part.” Done and done.

Line painting is the extreme case, but if you move through larger and more complicated activities and undertakings, the certainty of 800.3(a)(1) begins to blur.  At some point, reasonable people can agree that an undertaking could have the potential to cause effects.  The problem is everyone has their own opinion on just where that point is, which leads to uncertainty, disagreement, confusion, and delay.

Routine and repetition is the norm, so it is reasonable to look at types and classes of undertakings that occur over and over again and decide which qualify under 800.3(a)(1) and which don’t.  PennDOT and other transportation agencies do not undertake an infinite variation in types of projects or undertakings. Bespoke has no place here.  For the ones where everyone agrees, it is a simple matter to put these into a program-wide programmatic agreement and treat like undertakings and activities as exempt from Section 106. When the agency does this specific set of activities, they have no further obligation than to name it as exempt. Many transportation agencies have taken this route, and in the evolution of an agency’s programmatic agreement, this is often the baby first step.

The language is all there currently in the Regulation to do programmatic agreements.  The language could be more persuasive or more forceful, but in any case, I would argue this is the lowest of low fruit for improving the functioning of Section 106. Agencies that haven’t availed themselves to this have no one to blame but themselves.

There is one hiccup in programmatically exempting undertakings.  If an agency makes an exemption, and there is no further action required, how does the SHPO or public know that it occurred? What keeps the agency from using the programmatic agreement elastically so that undertakings are exempted that others might think would warrant a Section 106 review? Language is after all, imprecise, and I’ve yet to write or review an agreement that is misunderstanding-proof.

The practical solution to that is full transparency, which is accomplished in two ways. First, every exemption is publicly noted in a publicly accessible database.  These are not hard to build and maintain. With each exemption, the SHPO would get a notice with a link to the entry.  Again, not hard to build. Secondly, on a period basis – annual or otherwise – the signatories to the programmatic agreement would sit down and review all of the exemptions programmatically. At a holistic level, any discrepancies or differences in interpretation should emerge, and be dealt with together.

Because the ability to develop such programmatic agreements already exists in the current Regulation, I would not recommend a major revision.  At 800.3(a)(1), at the end of the text, a sentence or two could be added to encourage the development of a programmatic agreement to codify similar projects.  Such guidance exists for emergency situations, under 80012(b)(1). What’s good for emergencies is good for exemptions.  In addition, language should be inserted that pushes agencies to use publicly accessible databases to share results.

Pain Point 2: Emergency Procedures

The lesson of having in-place procedures for emergencies hit home to me when we had major flooding throughout multiple counties after a large storm event. Overnight, we needed to fix or replace dozens of bridges and roadways, but in theory, we were still bound by Section 106, in particular Part 800.12.   There seemed to be a 7-day window for activities, but after that, we pretty much needed an MOA or PA, neither of which we had. That was a lesson we needed to learn exactly once. Since then, PennDOT has had emergency procedures written into its PA.

I would argue that for any agency that has built infrastructure to manage, not having an in-your-pocket set of available emergency procedures is close to malfeasance. The Regulation absolutely welcomes development of such procedures in advance of any emergency, but I would argue the language should be sharper and the costs steeper for not creating one.  I would eliminate 800.12(b) allowing no out for Section 106 consultation, except for preserving life. The ACHP should insist that any program-wide PA for an Agency include emergency provisions if they are not already encoded elsewhere.

This restriction should also have the added benefit of preventing the President, a tribal government, or the Governor of a State to declare a false state of emergency for the purposes of circumventing Section 106.

Pain Point 3: Level of Effort to Solicit Interested Parties and the Public

 Section 800.2(d) and 800.3(e) have much to say about involving the views of the public. I wish I could locate the Section 106 underpinning of this effort in the law language, but I am largely at a loss.  The one place where it does appear to show is in “…take into account..” I am not a lawyer, let alone a historic preservation lawyer, so I will presume for the case of argument that public involvement is very much part of the NHPA. Clearly the benefits of having a historic preservation role for the public is laid out in Section 1 of the NHPA. 

For an agency attempting to comply with the Regulation and honestly seeking to solicit interested parties and the public, the wording feels like pushing peas around the plate. OK, we seek the views of the public. Got it. But then we are advised to look at the nature and complexity of the project, effects on historic properties, likely interest of said public, and relationship of the Federal involvement and the undertaking, as well as confidentiality concerns. 

As if this wasn’t enough, the Agency is also charged with developing a plan for each project that identifies when the public will be solicited and ensuring that they are notified of proposed actions.

That’s a lot to juggle. The good news is in the Regulation we can ride on the back of NEPA to satisfy public involvement. Great. the bad news is that other than non-categorically excluded projects (about 2% of the program), there really isn’t any substantial public involvement under NEPA. Mostly, it’s coordinating with the local officials for traffic detours, etc., during construction. At PennDOT, the CE’s were published, but only after being approved. That doesn’t leave room for public input. This also gets at the tension between the meaning of significant environmental impacts and adverse effects – two very different beasts.

One of the benefits of working at a transportation agency is that the projects are everywhere all the time, in every community.  This has two effects. First, you can’t hide anything from anyone. It’s all out there in the open. Secondly, an agency like PennDOT needs public support to operate, so it is in everyone’s best interest to get folks on board early and often.  Management understood the need and value for public involvement, for both popular and unpopular projects. 

The problem was always how to match all of the above directives with a particular project. Time pressures were generally not an issue, as Section 106 public involvement occurred during preliminary design, before final design, before the letting and contracting, and before construction. Level of effort to engage the public was the more immediate challenge. Is it too much or too little? Is it the right format for an audience? One of the maddening aspects of working for PennDOT was the general lack of interest from the public until the bulldozers started moving. Then all hell could break loose, including on projects that had multiple public plans meetings, newspaper and web notices, and public hearings, all with single digit attendances again until construction started. With that were accusations that the agency was stealthily springing the project on the good people of North Southtown.

In truth, the historic preservation staff at PennDOT relied heavily on the institutional knowledge of the District environmental and engineering staff. They knew their regions better than anyone and through years of experience could anticipate the level of interest on historic preservation issues for any project in any community. Each District had its own flavor ranging from total indifference to intense interest.  For a number of years, PennDOT operated this way. When Project PATH (Now just PATH) was developed, along with a substantial handbook, the agency developed a certain level of efficiency and proficiency. https://path.penndot.pa.gov

There’s no need to go deep into the of PATH, other than to state that it is a web-based platform that organizes all Section 106 activity and ensures the findings of eligibility and effect, and mitigation, as well as the documentation are shared with the SHPO and the public in close to real time. The guiding principle was to build a glass house to ensure that its inhabitants – PennDOT – don’t throw stones. In addition to the web site passively showing the Section 106 process, it also automatically sent notifications to the SHPO and any interested parties that were consulting on a project, and on a subscription basis, send a notification to any member of the public or group that expressed interest in a related geographical area or type of project, soliciting their participation in the process.

The PATH scaffolding tended to normalize cultural resource specialist behavior, putting projects with similar likely resources or effects into groups, so that similar levels of effort to solicit interested parties was consistent. The handbook reinforced that scaffolding, with the result that PennDOT now had a baseline level of effort that sufficed for most projects.  On an as-need basis, more intensive solicitation could occur, again based on all of the criteria outlined in 800.2(d)(1). PATH and the handbook essentially established a predictable floor for level of effort in seeking interested parties, but did so in a very transparent manner.

It is 2026. We are one-fourth into the 21^st century.  The National Historic Preservation Act has been around for 60 years, not quite as long as practical machine computing. The Internet as we know it today is over 35 years old. I do not think it unreasonable to write into any revised Regulation a requirement that agencies adopt something like the PATH model to both show an agency’s work and to solicit interested parties. There are already calls amongst the profession to push for the use of Geographic Information Systems to manage historic properties. A PATH-like system could manage the Section 106 process.

Pain Point 4: Area of Potential Effect.

I’ve listed the Area of Potential Effect as a pain point largely to humor those agencies that do not have sufficient in-house or contracted expertise to guide them in establishing the APE. PennDOT didn’t have usable in-house expertise to establish the APE until around the year 2000, but they were earlier to the game than a lot of agencies. For both above-ground resources and below-ground resources, the solution to accurately and properly establishing the APE is two-fold: first, ensure that the project design engineers have thought out what is needed to construct the project, not just the roadways or bridges, but the settling ponds, staging areas near the project, etc. It was maddening to get a preliminary project plan, act on it to establish an APE and then see stuff suddenly appear outside the APE as the design progressed, often expanding the APE incrementally. A giant waste of time.

The second secret ingredient to accurately setting the APE is to see the project area on the ground in person, and early. This was accomplished at PennDOT by having cultural resources staff participate in what were known as scoping field views, with the design team and the environmental team. It sometime seemed time-consuming, but these in-field meetings successfully broached potential issues, and sometimes led to change in plans on the fly to avoid unnecessary impacts, but still deliver a usable project.  At PennDOT, which was a decentralized agency where design occurred in each of the 11 Engineering Districts, the cultural resources staff needed to be equally dispersed, leading to regionally based professionals tagged to work with individual Districts. Initially, they were consultants and eventually PennDOT employees, but both models worked as long as there was some stability in the stationing.

Ultimately the solution to this pain point was crude but immensely effective – eyeballs in the field.  Like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography, the delineation of an APE is basically, you know it when you see it. Cultural resources professionals are trained to understand what an APE is and how to draw one. More experience is better, but the solution to the pain point ultimately is having available expertise frontloaded on the project, whether it be at the project scoping or some other early preliminary design stage.  This is a pain point that doesn’t require Regulatory revisions, just adequate professional investment by the agency, whether contracted or hired.  

If there were any Regulatory revision here, under 800.2(a)(3), instead of talking about the use of contractors, maybe more words should be spend on the importance of professional expertise available to the Agency Official.  In my experience, FHWA was the Agency that held the Agency Official, but PennDOT was the agency that held the professional expertise. We needed to work together to deliver the program. You would be surprised how a little bit of respect and a working relationship between agencies can unlock that expertise. If FHWA through PennDOT could have a successful program, any Federal Agency could.

Pain Point 5: What is the Difference between No Effect and No Adverse Effect?

If you ask any historic preservation professional what the difference is between an No Effect call and a No Adverse Effect call, you can expect a long and involved digression pinpointing the precise differences between a project that has no effect on an historic resource and one that does have an effect, but that effect is not adverse.  When you respond after that 20 minute recitative that the outcome is the same and there really is no difference, you can expect a disgusting look and a wave of their had to tell you to leave.

In all likelihood they are upset because you are actually correct. There is no difference -with one caveat; a no adverse effect finding might have some conditions attached to ensure the historic property is not adversely affected.  One twist in this jumble is that a project that can have a positive impact on a historic property can still be an effect and not adverse.  In this world there are no positive effects, just effects that are not adverse. Got it?

In the NEPA world there are two states to projects – either no significant impacts or significant impacts. And in baseball you are either safe or out (Spring Training is on my mind).   I think the same should apply to Section 106. Either a project has an adverse effect to an historic resource or it doesn’t.  This simplification removes an unnecessary call. Historic resources are still determined eligible or not eligible. The criteria of effects and criteria of adverse effects can be combined and applied in one step. Nothing is really lost, except for confusion.

Sections 800.4(d) and 800.5 can be combined into one 800.5 section. This is a minor simplification in the process, but if we’re going to revise the Regulation anyway, this opportunity should not be passed up.

Pain Point 6: Community Valued (but not Historic) Properties pushed into Section 106

The facts of life of someone working in transportation is that not all projects are universally popular. Some are unpopular to all or some of a community. A community that opposes a project will use the tools available to it to fight it. And sometimes they find they need to use a screwdriver as a hammer.

Section 106 is supposed to be about historic properties. However, some communities find that Section 106 could be applied to places that don’t rise to the level of historic properties, but for the purpose of opposing a project, need to become historic. Given the expansive interpretation of national register eligibility and the willingness of most SHPO’s to err on the side of “yes,” getting a positive eligible determination is often easier that you might think.

The root of this problem isn’t with the community, nor with the SHPO, nor with the nature of projects, nor frankly with NEPA. Under NEPA, community concerns are supposed to be considered in both assessing the NEPA Classification and taking public input to mold the final product. In theory, under NEPA, the local VFW meeting hall might be an important community resource, and therefore considered under NEPA; however, there is no specific law that requires that consideration, like there is under Section 106. Sometimes the project is just plain unpopular among a segment of the community, but again there’s no specific law that is available to address those concerns.  So, Section 106 becomes the life raft on which the opposition sails. The VFW Hall might be 50 years old. Bingo! Somehow an argument is made that it is a historic property under Criterion A, or C.

I find this approach to be putting a round peg into a square hole. It would be much better and cleaner to take the community’s concerns under NEPA directly, than searching for a historic preservation hook.  Let’s say the community does get the VFW Hall determined eligible. And let’s say it’s going to be taken for the project, and therefore an adverse effect. Mitigation might be a recordation, or some other alternative mitigation, but it simply won’t stop the project, which was the opposition’s goal in the first place. People simply misunderstand that Section 106 does not block projects the way they think it will. So the result is anger and frustration that the work the community or a segment of the community put into stopping this project does nothing.

Specifically, for transportation projects, there’s Section 4(f) considerations. On paper, it is stronger than Section 106 as it requires the Agency to demonstrate there’s no prudent and feasible alternative to “taking” a property. One would think this would be a stronger tool in the toolbox for addressing community concerns, as it covers not only historic properties, but parks and recreational areas, for example a schoolyard.

However, the 4(f) test can be met relatively easily when there is no prudent and feasible alternative to a project. A road project through a community might have its only alternative be a total bypass, which generally wreaks more havoc. Feasible, but not prudent. The follow-up requirement for an Agency is minimization, which in the case of a taking of all or part of a schoolyard could be mitigated by providing comparable space or equipment nearby. If the goal is to sensitively develop a project through a community, this can be a plus. If the goal is to stop the project because it is unpopular, it is no more effective than Section 106.

Before we leave this pain point, I do want to be clear that the community concerns we are discussing here are not the same as those of Tribes, who can have serious and legitimate concerns over places of religous or cultural importance.  Those properties are covered by law under the 1992 amendments to the National Historic Preservation Act, and it is perfectly appropriate to raise those concerns through Section 106.  Unfortunately, it would be better if 36CFR60 were revised to take properties of traditional or cultural importance into account, but it hasn’t happened. Although this commentary is mainly about 36CFR800 as the Regulation under revision, we should not lose sight of the fact that 36CFR60 also needs revision.

Can any revision to the Regulation fix this pain point. I don’t think so. But it does point to needed revisions in NEPA and perhaps a separate community impacts law to address community concerns.  I truly believe this pain point is outside of Section 106.

Pain Point 7: Archaeological Data Recovery after NEPA

When an archaeological data recovery is part of a resolution of adverse effects, it is typical to write a memorandum of agreement that allows the mitigation to occur in final design or construction.  This is needed because although Section 106 is a self-contained process and stands on its own, NEPA is a process that requires the fulfilment of other laws before it can be completed. Specifically, NEPA can’t get to a finding until the Section 106 process is completed.

The fiction here is that the execution of a memorandum of agreement concludes the Section 106 process, and with an MOA, a NEPA finding can be made. This also occurs in large and complicated projects with multiple alignments where archaeological survey, determinations of eligibility, and mitigation can all occur after Section 106 through the execution of a programmatic agreement. Section 800.4(b)(2) outlines the process under which a PA can be used. There’s no problem there.

The problem with the fiction of concluding Section 106 through an MOA isn’t in its legality, but in the very practical matters of contracting and tracking a project. In transportation, a project is often delineated into three separate stages: preliminary design, final design, and construction. Each stage might have its own set of contractors and consultants, and even within an agency there may be handoffs from one group of engineers to another. With each stage handoff, papers are shuffled and instructions are transmitted, so with each handoff there’s an opportunity for something to fall of the plate, to be misunderstood, or worst of all, not budgeted for.

An archaeological data recovery is one such example of something that can get missed, especially if the agency’s archaeological professional is not bird-dogging it throughout. Because in many instances consultants are used to manage the process on behalf of an agency, when there is a handoff, the archaeology management can also be handed off. These are sensitive points in which there may be an archaeologist in the room when the contract is being drawn up, or not. Archaeological data recoveries are quite a complicated beast. It’s not just the digging, but the laboratory work, the analysis, the writing, and the preparation and disposition of the collection. Some of this can happen a decade after the ink is dry on the last contract. Institutional memory isn’t permanent, people move or retire. Ensuring everything is done by spec all the way through can be difficult. In my own experience, it led to many orphaned collections in a wake of uncompleted work, and no active contracts to ensure their deposit.

The one change I would make in the Regulation is to really emphasize the responsibility of fulfilling an MOA or PA, as well as more care and consideration in writing these documents.  While it is difficult if not impossible to anticipate all contingencies that might occur when undertaking an archaeological data recovery, clearly there can be better and tighter provisions than often occur.

I do note that there are a lot of words spent on the signatory process under the current Regulation, under 800.6(c)(1), but very little about the importance of establishing clear and executable commitments within an agreement. I would add an 800.6(c)(10) to do precisely that. Also, I would add an (11) to state the importance of following the mitigation commitments made in an agreement. Unless there are specific deadlines expressed in the agreement, commitments are standing until they are met.  Finally, I would suggest that not meeting all of the commitments is failure to resolve adverse effects and puts the project firmly back into Section 106 consultation, with the possibility of forcing an NEPA re-evaluation or Supplemental.

Conclusions

All of the noted Pain Points cited above can and were addressed through the use of the existing Regulation.  The recommended changes cited above are relatively minor, but I do believe they will improve the process and help other Agencies avoid similar problems.  

Again, there’s enough flexibility in the Regulation to do a lot.  There is a mistaken belief that Section 106 and its Regulation hold up projects. If you know what you’re doing, that’s simply nonsense.  The Agencies that apply Section 106 properly know it. The SHPO’s know it. If you don’t know what you’re doing, or are too lazy to learn, or as I suspect is the too often the case,  are opposed to any and all regulations, then I have nothing to offer you.

(Originally published Feb 22, 2026; revised April 3, 2026.)

Like a nagging cold, I just can’t seem to shake the East Wing of the White House. The National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) has opened public comments on the proposed 90,000 square foot ballroom addition to the White House. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has sent out an e-mail to me and others asking for our comments to be provided.

Given the recent meeting by the Trump-appointed U.S. Commission of Fine Arts that approved the ballroom project (even before receiving plans?), completely ignoring public comment, I am hesitant to waste any time or electrons in what appears to be an exercise in futility.  That said, I do believe it is incumbent on all of us to speak up when called upon.  Not speaking up can only be interpreted as assent. Please note that comments are due by March 4^th, about a week away. Here is the link.

Dear NCPC,

I speak as a historic preservation professional with 40 years of experience in both Maryland and Pennsylvania. I have a PhD in Anthropology from The Penn State University with a specialization in archaeology and have worked for governmental agencies for over 30 years as well as having previously served on my State’s Historic Preservation Board.  I believe the destruction of the East Wing of the White House was both capricious and illegal. There is a standing Federal Lawsuit over it, which as of this moment hasn’t been decided.  In no uncertain terms, the construction of a 90,000 square foot ballroom should not be undertaken at that spot.  Instead, the Federal Government should undertake to reconstruct the East Wing as it was in 2025, both in plans and materials.  National Park Service Standards for Reconstruction should be followed.  Presumably, the East wing has been fully documented, so that plans for its reconstruction should be available.

Reconstructing the East Wing resets the conversation over the current and future use of the East Wing in such a way that a legal path forward toward any renovations can be taken.  This path should include the same public and congressional notice and involvement that previous major renovations to the White House have taken. To entertain discussions of a ballroom or any future use of the space at this time and in its current condition is to condone the illegality as a fait accompli. The full reconstruction of something so recently destroyed may seem counterintuitive; but there is no other moral option that keeps to the principals on which this Nation was founded.

Regarding the cost of the reconstruction, previous commitments by named and unnamed private donors should be declined, as an obvious conflict of interest in those donors holding or seeking government contracts.  The unfortunate and needless cost of this reconstruction must be borne by the American People, as appropriated by Congress. However, to the degree that the pottery barn rule can be invoked, it should (see Colin Powell).

As an update, on March 31, 2026, Judge Richard Leon of the US District Court for the District of Columbia issued a Memorandum Opinion granting a preliminary injunction that blocks construction of the East Wing until Congress authorizes its completion. The opinion is here.

I broke into a sweat upon waking up from a fever dream the other night:

Fresh off his victory with the East Wing of the White House, President Trump announces further upcoming improvements:

Gettysburg Battlefield Casino and Resort

Cemetery Ridge will be upgraded with a Resort and Casino, including a 100 foot tower, from which the entire Battlefield can be seen.  Slot machines will be added to the Cyclorama, so that Patriots can play with special blue or grey tokens while observing the battlefield enactment.

Statue of Miss America

From New York Harbor, visitors can see a renewed 21^st century Statue of Liberty, more becoming of America’s beauty – short dress and heels, bigger boobs, and a smile. Oh, and not copper colored but white, as God intended.

Mount Rushmore Trump Tribute

President Trump’s visage will be the only one to be seen on Mount Rushmore. To paraphrase The Princess Bride: “Have you ever heard of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt? Morons!”

Linked-In Misery

Shortly after the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, I committed a cardinal sin by posting about it on Linked-In. Actually, multiple sins. First, I let my heart rule my head on the post. Never a great idea for social media. Secondly, I usually shy away from topics that are likely to get widely discussed by others. My happy place is that lonely dirt road that no one else travels. Finally, Linked-In is not built for long form discussion. It’s not even built for discussion.  Replies get buried down below.  Anyone coming in fresh can get lost in the thread.  Like it’s click-bait cousin Facebook, Linked-In thrives on controversy, and now apparently AI slop featuring kittens riding dogs and the like. Not to mention the ubiquitous corporate ads.

The post got a lot of clicks, some supportive, and some dismissive. Probably par for the course. The main post and related comments I provided on the East Wing are attached, should you feel an urge to read them.  If I were you, I wouldn’t bother. However, it did lead to a brief exchange that forms the subject of this blog. Thanks goes to Allyson Brooks, the Washington State Historic Preservation Officer and an outstanding preservation warrior.

After I noted that nothing is safe after the demolition of the East Wing, she quickly responded (correctly) that “You (Ira) know very well that no historic building or site is safe. It is all consultation.”  After the dust had settled on the Linked-In imbroglio, it got me thinking. Given the weakness in the current federal historic preservation laws, just how is it that anything gets preserved?

What the Laws Say

A quick review.  The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 establishes the National Register; Section 106 of the Act requires consideration of the effects Federal Actions have on historic properties through project construction, funding, licensing, etc. Nothing in the National Register requires protection to properties that are listed therein. Nothing in Section 106 guarantees protection of historic properties. As of the Summer of 2025, approximately 2,500 National Register Listed Properties have been removed from the list, the vast majority from loss. These are just from the listed properties and does not include those lost that were determined eligible for listing in the National Register but not listed.  This is against a backdrop of over 100,000 listed National Register properties. I am leaving out National Monuments designated under the Antiquities Act of 1906. There are currently 129, most of which are protected.  It was the mother of all losses, the 1963 demolition of New York’s Pennsylvania Station, that spurred the passage of the act in the first place.

Section 106 is usually wrapped within the umbrella National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and its processes, so when you hear about an Environmental Impact Statement or Environmental Assessment, it almost always embeds a Section 106 review. Categorical Exclusions (the third of the NEPA actions) sometime contains a Section 106 review.  And finally, within my world of DOT, there is a parallel law within the USDOT code referred to as Section 4(f). It requires USDOT (in my case FHWA) to demonstrate that there is no prudent and feasible alternative to “using” (the technical term for whacking and similar to an adverse effect) a historic resource in a project. Putting Section 106 and 4(f) side by side is one way we at the DOT drive ourselves crazy as there is a lot of overlap, but significant differences, and both have to be applied generally to historic resources. Leave it suffice to note that 4(f) sets a higher bar than Section 106, but again FHWA is particularly adept at demonstrating that there is no prudent and feasible alternative to use, especially with regard to historic bridges. The bottom line is that protection is not assured.

Many states also have historic preservation legislation, but none that I know of guarantee preservation, especially for properties that are privately owned. There is a 20% tax credit for rehabilitation of historic properties under the Internal Revenue Code, Section 47. Local ordinances in the form of Historic Architectural Review Boards (HARBs) exist within the NHPA, but again, these do not guarantee preservation, although HARBs do exercise a lot more control. Unfortunately, not many municipalities have them.

We live in a country where private property rights are highly valued. This condition permits historic properties that are privately owned to be altered or demolished by the owner using their funds and resources, with very little legal recourse. In fact, there is a whole cottage industry of lawyers whose only purpose is to prevent governments and public institutions from “taking” historic properties, i.e., impinging on the property rights of owners.  Privately owned historic properties may be eligible for the National Register, but can only be listed with the permission of the owner. But within this rule lies the seed of historic property protection.

Historic Preservation and Soft Power

I live in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, a small town of around 8,000 with a small downtown.  I like living there for a number of reasons, but this is no Colonial Williamsburg. There are a handful of historic properties that are eligible for listing in the National Register, but none of these are listed. The three local landmarks are the Iron Bridge (built in 1936), the West Shore Theatre (1940), and the Public Library (founded in 1976 in a building that was built in 1819). For various reasons none of these are on the National Register, although all are older than 50 years.  Yet each one is highly valued and treated with respect as the cultural places they are.  The Theatre was closed several years ago and nearly abandoned, but community support and funding led to its restoration and re-opening in 2022.  It won a Preservation Pennsylvania Award for Public Impact in 2024. The Bridge is a steel truss and nothing particularly special, except it is the namesake for several business around town and an annual music festival. It is in pretty good shape currently. There are no plans to replace it that I’m aware of, but I swear there would be hell-to-pay if that were to occur.  The Library’s core is a 19^th century farmstead, which has been heavily modified and added to over the years, but again the family associated with the property, the Benjamins, are very much part of the historic fabric of the community, and central to the story of the town. The building is owned by the borough, and it is very much protected and cherished.

All three of these places live in the netherworld of not quite National Register, but small “h” historic. It is possible that someday, they may become Historic. Standards change and comparable properties may become increasingly rare. But for now, they are protected – not by any set of Federal or State or Local laws, but by community interest and support.

A few miles down the road is the 1887 Sheepshead Bridge. Built by the Phoenix Bridge Company, the 114-foot Pratt through truss connects Cumberland and York Counties across the Yellow Breeches Creek. It is National-Register eligible.

In January, 2020, the bridge was closed to traffic and not considered repairable to be reopened for vehicular traffic.  Typically, this is the death knell of historic bridges that can no longer meet a transportation need. However, with the active support of the local community and the West Shore Historical Society, prospects for the bridge improved considerably.  In 2022, the project was awarded a $1.4m PennDOT Transportation Alternatives Set-Aside Grant, along with an addition $600k in PennDOT funding.  With this commitment, the bridge will be rehabilitated for bicycle and pedestrian use and after restoration will be put back on its original location. Upon project completion, estimated for the Spring of 2026, ownership of the bridge will be transferred to the West Shore Historical Society.

Historic Bridges.org rated this bridge 9/10.  As noted above, being historic, even being highly historic (not a technical term, as all eligible properties are on an equal footing legally, but not practically) does not offer protection or preservation. Yet, this particular bridge is being preserved, through a combination of public interest and support, and special funding provided by PennDOT.  One might suggest that it was only money that made the difference.  The reality is more complicated.

PennDOT and Historic Bridges

I am dwelling on historic bridges here because this property type is the one I most frequently encountered while working at PennDOT, and in many ways the most frustrating.  Bridges are part of the transportation infrastructure and Pennsylvania is an old state. This means that there are a lot of historic bridge here. At the same time, the transportation infrastructure needs to function for its citizens, and when a bridge is no longer safe to cross because it can’t handle the loads of modern trucks or is too narrow for two lanes or otherwise functionally obsolescent, it is the responsibility of PennDOT to do something. From an engineering perspective, the simplest thing is to replace the bridge with a new one which will meet load requirements, allows at least two lanes of traffic, and is cost effective.  The Section 106 consultation requirements (usually the project has Federal Funds) or 4(f) requirements (even with state funds there is an equivalent State 4(f) called Section 2002), would suggest a rehabilitation might be recommended instead of a replacement, which stands in contradiction to the elegant engineering solution.

Any bridge project – historic or not – will greatly affect the local community.  Simple bridge replacements can close a crossing for months. Bigger ones can take years. Public involvement and coordination with stakeholders is crucial and necessary, and preserves whatever good will PennDOT has in the local community. By the way, this is the same community that owns cars and trucks and pays licensing fees and buys fuel, all of which funds PennDOT.  And they have long memories and they vote for their state representatives and senators that oversee PennDOT. You catch my drift?

Within all that discussion and coordination, if there is a historic bridge involved that’s on the table, too. More often than not, the fate of the historic bridge depends on the degree of local support for that bridge. (This also holds for other historic properties as well.)  In some communities and regions, there is much greater interest and support for historic properties than in other areas.  If you drew a straight line between Erie and Philadelphia, that would pretty much define a gradient of historic property (and bridge) support with a high in the east and diminishment as you traveled west and north. This is excepting enclaves like State College and Pittsburgh.

What is in play, then? Bridges that are under consideration for replacement have usually been posted for weight. By the time a bridge is being considered for replacement, large trucks including ambulances and fire engines have been prevented from using that bridge. When there are other routes in a redundant system, this presents less of a problem, although response times to fires and other emergencies is a real consideration. When there is no other route to a home that may need, say heating oil, this can make that home unlivable. Never a good thing.

If the bridge can be rehabilitated to lift the load restrictions, rehabilitation can suit the project need. Sometimes this can be done. Sometimes not. If it can, then the question of costs comes into play. I have great respect for civil engineers. Give them enough money and they can do practically anything.  But PennDOT is a public agency and has a responsibility to spend prudently.  It is then when the question of whether a rehabilitation that may last 30 years and costs as much as a replacement that may last 75-100 years bumps up against the prudent part of prudent and feasible. Which argument prevails?

I do not wish to portray this as some David versus Goliath or good versus evil dynamic. I have seen some spectacular bridges lost and some questionably significant bridges saved.  I have seen some PennDOT administrators unwilling to fully embrace Section 106 and 4(f) and some local communities using the bridge project as the tool to achieve local planning, totally disinterested in the actual historicity of the property.  Finally, and this is an important point, there is no slide rule plug in a number answer for whether a bridge should be saved or not. Frequently, the decision revolves around a matter of degrees – can the community live with a weight restriction? Is a new bridge a need or a wish? Would a cheaper rehabilitation that lasts 30 years be good enough for now?  Could the bridge be closed without significant loss of access? And for local communities that might need to freight the 5% or 10% of the cost of a new bridge- tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars – can they afford to make that decision now? Oh, and for any local community that has more than 2 families, there’s going to be a pro-replacement contingent and an anti-replacement contingent. Unanimity of local opinion only happens in North Korea.

It’s in this soup that community support for a historic bridge, or frankly any historic property, plays out. If the local community is strongly in favor of a historic property, the decision needle moves a few degrees one way. If few people care, the decision needle moves a few degrees the other way. And in those cases where a rehabilitation is feasible and possible prudent, those few degrees can make the difference between save and lost. Earlier, I mentioned the ability for private landowners to block a national register listing on their historic property. A national register listing still means something. It’s not nothing.  And although FHWA and PennDOT (receiving federal funds) will treat a listed property the same as a determined property, in the local community a listed property is much more visible, has more cachet, and is woven more tightly into the historic fabric, i.e., the community’s local story and narrative than a mere determination. And let’s remember that PennDOT’s primary mission is to maintain an efficient and modern system to move people and goods.  Almost as important is the need to not piss off the local communities in which its projects are done.

The Larger Picture

I’ve been using PennDOT and 4(f) and historic bridges to talk in some detail on how things can be preserved. Even outside of DOT (no 4(f)) and bridges as a property type, I do believe that the principles of community interest and support remain. Local community support for historic properties is what preserves them in the face of progress, modernity, late stage capitalism, what have you.  Laws and regulations provide the pathway when there is sufficient time and consideration given to public input as strongly suggested in NEPA and Section 106. Laws and regulations alone do not protect historic properties. As corny and flip as it sounds, people organized in groups, people who learn about and care about the history of their community – these are the ones that protect historic properties. Lyndon Johnson and Congress didn’t wake up one day and pass the National Historic Preservation Act because they felt like it. The law was passed because other people, lots of people, were screaming over the loss of Pennsylvania Station and other important historic places.

Would the loss of the East Wing bring a similar response and result as was done in 1966? I don’t know. It was 59 years ago. Times were different.  The political landscape was different. Then, historic preservation was much more of a Republican ideal, with roots in Teddy Roosevelt.  The Democratic ideal might have been characterized more by urban renewal and Robert Moses. We are more mobile now than ever. It’s harder to have a sense of place when you don’t put down roots anywhere.

Still, as a species I believe we are rooted in story. It is perhaps the only way we make sense of the world. The sense of place and its associated story is what we crave, whether our family has been there 5 generations or moved in last year.  We can adopt places just as we adopt families if we don’t have ready access to a rooted past.  Perhaps the East Wing was just my macguffin to get to the larger question of how and why do we protect any historic places at all, given the inherent weakness in current laws and regulations. If we can learn about our history and about our historic places, we can care about them. If we can care about them, we can take the time and energy to protect them. Not just against federal project impacts, but against rampant development, not just against something happening a thousand miles away, but at home in your own community.

The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources is planning on having a hearing on the National Historic Preservation Act the last week of October (potentially 10/29). On October 19^th, I sent the following to Senator David McCormick of Pennsylvania, who is on the Senate Committee.

Senator McCormick,

I am writing you regarding the National Historic Preservation Act (of 1966).  My observations are informed by a 40 year career as a professional archaeologist who has worked with the NHPA for most of that time.  I was employed by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and the Maryland State Highway Administration; my experience was largely with Section 106 of the NHPA.  I am currently retired from PennDOT.  Please note that my comments are my own and do not reflect the views of PennDOT or Maryland SHA.

In the nearly 60 years since its passage, the goals of the NHPA are unchanged.

“The Congress finds and declares that — the spirit and direction of the Nation are founded upon and reflected in its historic heritage; the historical and cultural foundations of the Nation should be preserved as a living part of our community life and development in order to give a sense of orientation to the American people;…”

The responsibilities of the Federal Government with regard to these goals are also unchanged.  Amongst other things, 

“It shall be the policy of the Federal Government, in cooperation with other nations and in partnership with the States, local governments, Indian tribes, and private organizations and individuals to — use measures, including financial and technical assistance, to foster conditions under which our modern society and our prehistoric and historic resources can exist in productive harmony and fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations;…”

My own experience has largely been with Section 106, one of the shortest Sections in the law. I can restate in its entirety here:

“The head of any Federal agency having direct or indirect jurisdiction over a proposed Federal or federally assisted undertaking in any State and the head of any Federal department or independent agency having authority to license any undertaking shall, prior to the approval of the expenditure of any Federal funds on the undertaking or prior to the issuance of any license, as the case may be, take into account the effect of the undertaking on any district, site, building, structure, or object that is included in or eligible for inclusion in the National Register. The head of any such Federal agency shall afford the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation established under Title II of this Act a reasonable opportunity to comment with regard to such undertaking.”

As far as transportation and other agencies are concerned, the main implementing regulation for Section 106 is 36CFR800, last revised in 2004. As implemented by Federal Agencies, what is important to know is that Section 106 and its regulation are procedural and not prescriptive.  Agencies must take into consideration the impacts their projects have on historic resources, but are not told how to implement. Secondly, within 36CFR800 is enormous flexibility to implement Section 106.  This flexibility is not limited to the Federal Agency level, but exists at the State level, for types of actions, and even within a specific action. Finally, the law and regulations put public input into the decisionmaking.  This does not mean that individuals or small groups are given the power to change or stop projects, but it does mean that all voices are meant to be heard.

Using the flexibility in existing law and regulations, at PennDOT we were able to streamline the Section 106 process to accomplish the following: by definition or by a quick check, most of the projects using Federal Funding were exempt from further Section 106 review. Section 106 was finished instantly or in a few days.  This was with the blessing of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, FHWA, the State Historic Preservation Officer, and other signatories to our agreement, which included Federally recognized Tribes.  A further slice of our projects were determined in-house to have No Effect or No Adverse Effect on historic resources.  Our findings were made public and unless there were objections from the State Historic Preservation Officer, were final.  Section 106 was finished in days or weeks, and well before the NEPA approval could be made.

Only those projects that had an adverse effect on historic resources– around 3% of all projects –   required more extensive consultation with other parties.  In 25 years at PennDOT, there wasn’t a single instance where this consultation held up a NEPA decision or held up construction.  It wasn’t just the up-front consultation that expedited conclusion of Section 106, but also the flexibility in Section 106 to find workable solutions. Sometimes engineers were able to avoid the adverse effect by redesigning the project. Sometimes archaeologists completed field excavations after NEPA approval but before construction.  And it is important to note that Section 106 does not require preservation of historic properties, although that could be an outcome.  In many cases, the action to address adverse effects involved recording and sharing local history, saving and re-using parts of historic buildings and structures, or protecting similar properties not in the project area, but at risk.  In all cases, costs to complete these mitigations were required to be reasonable and in each case, the benefit to the local community needed to be shown.  For PennDOT, all projects are local and benefit and impact real people.

Successful Section 106 implementation creates no noise, no angst, no blowback.  In 2025, PennDOT is expected to spend $4+ billion in Federal, State, and private funding on more than 1,200 highway and bridge projects. How many of these have come to your office as Section 106 problems?

There is no question that the regulations can be improved and updated, and over the 60 years of the Act, regulations have been regularly revised.  That said, the NHPA and Section in its current form provides PennDOT the tools to meet the goals of the Act in an efficient manner. Projects were never delayed, and in certain instances, design changes spurred by the Act led to improved and better projects, appreciated by the community in which they were built.

Today, I sent Department of Interior my comments (below) on the “interim final rule” on their Implementing Regulations for the National Environmental Policy Act.

Thank you for accepting comments on this proposed “interim final rule,” even though you state it is not necessary that you do so.  My comments reflect 30 years of experience as a NEPA practitioner and Section 106 specialist in transportation. I am not a lawyer.

I find it completely baffling what this “interim final rule” is. Is it regulatory, guidance, both, or neither?  You make repeated claims that this is not regulatory, that it is mere guidance and procedures. If they are binding, then they should have been put through the regular regulatory process.  If they are not binding, not legally binding, then you have made no improvements to the process you had before. I presume that you intend them to be procedures and guidance, which is why I am not providing any specific comments on any of the recommendations. I will leave it to the courts to sort out what follows the law and what does not, because it will be the courts that will have to clean up the mess you are creating. Lawsuits and court challenges are what have dogged DOI, with their lengthy delays. You are ensuring this continues.

Parallel to this “interim final rule” is the interim final rule for FHWA, FRA, and FTA.  Those provide minor changes to previous regulations under 234 CFR 771, and largely limit changes to what is required to conform to the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 and the withdrawal of CEQ regulations in response to a Supreme Court Decision.  That interim final rule remains a useful regulatory tool for FHWA, FRA, and FTA actions, which have not weathered the controversy that other Federal Agencies have endured.  I would argue that strong and enforceable Federal regulations provide a predictable playing field for all actors. This point is demonstrated especially by FHWA, which not only spends many billions a year on transportation projects, but oversees many billions more in funding by state and local agencies.  While substantially different from the Department of Interior in that it is not a land-owning and managing agency (with a tiny exception of FHWA headquarters in DC), FHWA does have substantial impact across the nation in virtually every municipality.  That projects are delivered largely without controversy and in a timely way demonstrates the wisdom of firm regulatory oversight, while still maintaining great flexibility in implementation. Your protestations that the regulations themselves are the problem are simply not supported.

Yes, NEPA is a procedural law, but you have misrepresented it as merely a check-the-box process.  It is anything but. To quote Justice Sotomayor concurring in the same Seven Counties decision you are so fond of referencing, “NEPA requires agencies to prepare and publish a ‘detailed statement’ reviewing the environmental impact of any major federal action. 42 U. S. C. §4332. That ‘action forcing’ requirement serves dual purposes, ensuring both that an agency considers a project’s environmental consequences before deciding whether to approve it, and rendering the agency publicly accountable for environmental harms it decides to tolerate…The point, as this Court has recognized, is not merely that an agency produce a report but ‘that environmental concerns be integrated into the very process of decision-making.’…In that way, NEPA’s procedural requirements advance Congress’s aim that the Federal Government “use all practicable means [to ensure] that the Nation may . . . fulfill the responsibilities of each generation as trustee of the environment for succeeding generations.” (my emphasis)

The Department of Interior could have followed the lead of a sister agency and promulgated sensible regulations that follow the spirit and letter of NEPA. Instead, it has tried to thread the needle by issuing procedures and guidance that it intends to use as regulatory (?) but without the messy business of following the process for issuing regulations. In both the tone and tenor of this “interim final rule” and its purported guidance and procedures, the Department of Interior is bypassing public input and ramrodding a process that may or may not meet the letter and spirit of the National Environmental Policy Act, which still remains on the books. Who knows? I fear that this “interim final rule” is a preview of how DOI intends to consider its actions, significant or otherwise, to check-the-box in a rush toward a decision, the public and environment be damned.

This “interim final rule” should be withdrawn. You should restart with a regular regulatory process.

On June 4^th, the Transportation Research Board (TRB), an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) reorganized its Technical Advisory Council. The Committee for Historic and Archaeological Preservation in Transportation (AME60) was eliminated as were most of the Committees in its Group. AME60 was a hard-working and effective Committee. Its elimination is a self-inflicted error that will impact Transportation for a long time.

Recent History: A Recap

On June 4^th, the Transportation Research Board (TRB), announced a new structure for its Technical Activities Council, which is its meat and potatoes research arm. On June 3^rd, there were 181 active committees and additional sub-committees covering every nook and cranny in transportation.  On June 4^th, there were 100 committees and no subcommittees.  A number of Groups had their committees consolidated or eliminated.  It is the nature of TRB to constantly reinvent itself.  Efficiency in operation is always top of mind.  The last major reorganization was in 2019.

In the former Sustainability and Resilience Group (AM000), there were 19 total committees in 3 sections. Historic and Archaeological Preservation in Transportation (AME60) was in the Transportation and Society Section (AME00). In the new structure, AME60 and 2 other Committees were eliminated from the Transportation and Society Section. Both of the other Sections – Transportation Systems Resilience(AMR00) and Transportation & Sustainability (AMS00) – were completely eliminated. The remnant AME00 Committees were merged with remaining Policy and Organization Group (AJ000) Committees to form a new Organizations, Communities, and Legal Resources Group (AQ000).  This new Group hosts 16 of the remaining 36 Committees that were associated with AM000 and AJ000.  Only 5 of the 19 Committees in the former AM000 Group remain. AME60 is gone.

I cannot speak to the other Committees beyond Historic and Archaeological Preservation in Transportation: AME60 (formerly ADC50 and A1F05 before that).  Over the last 30+ years, I have been for a member of that Committee and a Friend of the Committee. I am well acquainted with its functioning.  

What is TRB and the Standing Committees?

 To quote a statement from a 2017 TRB handout:

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) are private, nonprofit institutions that provide expert advice on some of the most pressing challenges facing the nation and the world. Our work helps shape sound policies, inform public opinion, and advance the pursuit of science, engineering, and medicine. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are the nation’s pre-eminent source of high-quality, objective advice on science, engineering, and health matters. Most of our work is conducted through seven major program areas: Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, Earth and Life Studies, Engineering and Physical Sciences, Health and Medicine, Policy and Global Affairs, Transportation Research Board, and the Gulf Research Program.

Within NASEM, the Transportation Research Board (TRB):

provides innovative, research-based solutions to improve transportation. Part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, TRB is a non-profit organization that provides independent, objective, and interdisciplinary solutions. TRB manages transportation research by producing publications and online resources. It convenes experts that help to develop solutions to problems and issues facing transportation professionals. TRB also provides advice through its policy studies that tackle complex and often controversial issues of national significance.

The machinery of TRB is its standing committees and task forces:

TRB fulfills its mission through the work of standing committees and task forces, which arenetworks of professional individuals who share an interest in a particular transportation topic.  With over 250 committees, most every transportation topic is represented in the standing committee structure.  Each committee holds regular meetings, disseminates research findings, and most importantly provides a forum for industry practitioners to discuss the issues facing the transportation industry today.

To cut to the chase, the TRB Committees are problem solvers. The Committee members are professionals, subject matter experts for each of the Committees. Within AME60, there were architectural historians and archaeologists, from federal, state and local government, academia, and the private consultant sector. Many had more than 10 years of professional experience in their respective fields. They are truly the best of the best. The strength of the Committee was in its regional diversity. Any of the 50 states could be represented, along with Federal agency perspectives, e.g. FHWA, FRA, FTA. This meant that a problem arising in one state could be assisted by a member from another state that had seen and addressed the same problem.  To the degree the issue was repeated in multiple states or at the national level, the Committee could use the collective knowledge and experience from across the country to find workable solutions.  States are the laboratories for implementing historic preservation law and policy, not just laboratories for democracy.

The culmination of these discussions- not just in Winter and Summer meetings but also on the listserv – was active participation in the NCHRP, the National Cooperative Highway Research Program.  Started in 1962, this program is administered by TRB, but State DOT’s select and fund the specific research projects.  Over the last 10 years, AME60 (previously ADC50) has successfully submitted and overseen multiple studies, ranging from workhorse bridges in rural historic districts, to Section 106 delegation programmatic agreement best practices, to effects and mitigation for highway noise on historic properties.  These were undertaken through the NCHRP 25-25 program, which identifies quick hits using modest budgets. Considering AME60 was competing with other TRB committees for the small pot of funding, it was clear that AME60 punched well above its weight.

The need for AME60

There is an old chestnut among engineers that archaeology and Section 106 holds up projects. Section 106 is the problem, at best an annoyance to be tolerated.  This is simply untrue.  The genius of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act is its flexibility in implementation. Historic Preservation law and regulations are focused on process, public involvement, and intent. (See also Jeff Altschul’s 2025 article.) As such, they are not amenable to cookbook approaches.  In the hands of an expert, there is the flexibility to craft effective and tailored approaches to suit the situation.  I’ve likened Section 106 to a Maserati.  If you know how to drive it, it will outperform anything on the road. If you don’t, you are likely to crash.  Many state DOTs operate under statewide programmatic agreements that use Section 106’s flexibility and work exceedingly well.

Any state can look over its shoulder and copy another state’s best practices – call it an infection model for solutions. It doesn’t happen on its own. Committees like AME60 are the sources for these ideas, which are carried from member to member across the country.  In the annual Committee meetings, literally the room where it happens, the best ideas are shared from practitioners that have made them work in their respective states. I suppose you can buy this knowledge on the street from any of a number of consulting firms.  But the good will and common desire by historic preservation and archaeological professionals to make transportation programs more effective and efficient (not the same thing) provides the best environment for sharing successes. All of the members are unpaid, so essentially this is valuable knowledge given freely.

Having a topic-specific committee is important on two levels. First, it is the sine qua non for legitimacy.  It is being seen. In the land of civil engineers, having your own committee is proof that you are important.  Barring having your own committee, having a subcommittee is the next best thing. Secondly, The process of getting research funded, the NCHRP studies, requires that the proposal gets into a database by being forwarded by the Committees. If you are not at the table, you have little chance of getting your study offered, and hence little chance of it being supported.  Having your own committee gives you the opportunity to put forward research you think is important.  Lastly, being a member of a Committee confers certain rights and obligations. Committee memberships are limited in number.  Getting funding and permission to attend annual TRB meetings often rests on whether you are a member of a committee or not. If you are not attending the meeting because you are not on the committee (or because the committee does not exist), then there is less chance that you are in the room where it happens, etc., etc.

Whither Historic and Archaeological Preservation in Transportation?

AME60 is disbanded. For the reasons above, this is a mistake.  Many state DOTs do not have a problem with archaeology or historic preservation precisely because of the ideas brought forth and implemented by AME60. Historic preservation is well integrated into project design and construction.  There are few surprises. Section 106 issues rarely if ever slow down projects.  Usually funding issues are the culprits.  In some states, and with some agencies, Section 106 becomes a problem and a delay, but in these cases those agencies don’t take advantage of the skill sets of architectural historians and archaeologists to use the flexibility in Section 106. Essentially, agencies exist in one of two conditions. Either an agency efficiently takes advantage of the Section 106 flexibility or it doesn’t. For the ones that do, the heads of those agencies never hear about Section 106 problems. For the ones that don’t, those agency heads know only headaches and often lack the resources to fix them. TRB, AME60, and the NCHRP 25-25 program provide the remedy, but only if they’re around to do so.

If AME60 is not reconstituted, then where do archaeologists and historic preservation specialists do their work and be seen?  Again, with the civil engineering community, if you are not part of a committee, you become invisible. More importantly, your laws, your issues, your value to transportation becomes non-important, until you run into a problem with Section 106.

There is also a possibility TRB places remnant archaeologists and architectural historians into the Standing Committee on Environmental Compliance in Transportation Planning (AEP17).  AEP17 has some affinity to the former AEP70 – the Standing Committee on Environmental analysis and Ecology. AEP17 is the only remaining TRB Committee that encompasses environmental issues.  However, the mission of AEP70 appears different from the AEP17 mission.

TRB Standing Committee on Environmental Analysis and Ecology (AEP70) focuses on the integration of environmentally- and ecologically-sound principles in applied research, education, practice and policy associated with all modes of surface-based transportation.

Standing Committee on Environmental Compliance in Transportation Planning (AEP17) is concerned with research and innovation related to assessing federal, state, and local actions on the natural and human environments, including strategies to address all statutory requirements to improve and expedite planning, resource agency permitting, and environmental reviews.

In the former, the focus is on integrating environmental principles into transportation.  In the latter, the focus is jumping through regulatory hoops.  Not encouraging.  There will certainly be fewer seats available for archaeologists and historic preservation specialists.  They will be competing with other committee refugees for the ever shrinking slice of the research pie. The discussions would be thinner, the research thinner, the value to the greater transportation community thinner.

I hope that TRB reconsiders its decision and reinstates AME60. AME60 has a proven track record and has demonstrably helped transportation navigate federal laws and regulations when it is heard.  AME60 is an irreplaceable resource for both the state DOT’s and agencies that have a sufficient in-house historic preservation staff, but even more so for the state DOT’s and agencies that don’t.

Recently, I was at a banquet. The individual to my left got excited when they asked what I did and I replied I was an archaeologist. The conversation went as I might have expected. They always wanted to be an archaeologist when they were a kid. Check. Then they wanted to know what was my greatest find. Check.  Like the coward I am, I mumbled something about the 16^th century eyeglasses found on the I-95 dig near Philadelphia. A surprising and very cool artifact. I answered her questions politely but completely avoided the deeper point (not Clovis). Archaeologists and archaeology are not really about finds, or even artifacts. Sorry, Indy.

As a young adult, I also found archaeology and ancient history fascinating. Who didn’t?  However, my high school and college sights were set on aerospace engineering.  I was a product of the 1960’s, especially the space race, and was reasonably good in science and math. My father was an engineer.  The die seemed cast.  My encounter with college was humbling, very humbling. Anthropology became my life raft. After a course on Old World Prehistory, archaeology-specifically anthropological archaeology- became my north star.

It wasn’t the artifacts.  I had some modest coin and stamp collections as a kid, but they never really ensnared me. I am still not a collector, although I did have a brief fling with old radios.  I spent a summer at Monte Alban collecting pot sherds, one sherd at a time, one terrace at a time. Many thousands of sherds, lovingly carried down in rucksacks from the mountainside to the lab. Still, I had no real emotional attachment to these potsherds, these artifacts.

What caught me in the classroom and then in the field in Oaxaca were the big questions.  What was the origin of civilization? Where did agriculture come from? Who were the Neanderthals, and more importantly, if they showed up today in modern street clothes, would we be able to tell them apart from us on a crowded street?  After 150 years of intellectual scrutiny, we still don’t have definitive answers, but I do think we are getting closer to the Neanderthal question.

When I got to the field, even the smaller more mundane questions grabbed me. How did this site become this way; how did it form, and deform? Although the artifacts and environmental remains like seeds and pollen are the basic 1’s and 0’s of our information, what goes with what and when are critical questions in answering the question of what happened here.  At an individual site, we act like a bunch of Sherlock Holmes’s, looking for clues, free associations, datable material – anything to put the puzzle together. And Holmes had it easy.  If we are solving a jigsaw puzzle, we are doing so with most of the pieces missing and the remaining pieces damaged to some degree or another.  It is easy to find artifacts in a field. Ask any farmer.  It is much harder to accurately tell the story of a particular site, and by story I mean who lived there and how did they live, and when.

Archaeologists are largely storytellers, historians without texts in many cases. Science guides our pursuit. More precisely the scientific method. Hypothesis, data, test, analysis. More and more current archaeology relies on very sophisticated laboratory methods, in dating, botanical analysis, microscopic analysis of how stone tools were used, DNA, etc. But these are still only techniques and yield only data. 

The real science is piecing this all together to make a credible story, but one that can be challenged by further evidence. Real science is a process of throwing out ideas as hypotheses, gathering data to throw at the hypothesis and prove or usually disprove what is claimed.  In much of science, an experiment can be replicated and either supported or disproven.  In most cases, when an archaeological hypothesis is proposed, there is no way to replicate it. We don’t have time machines (and even if we did, there would be some serious ethical issues. Just ask any science fiction writer). So we are reduced to arguing by analogy, by finding comparable data, by finding parallels where they exist. We are often solving jigsaw puzzles for which there may be no other known copies nor any similar puzzles.

The individual sites and their stories become the building blocks to go after the bigger questions.  How did we evolve from small closely related groups of hunters and gatherers tens of thousands of years ago into complicated and stratified societies only a few thousand years ago? Is the concept of private property innate or something that evolved?  Is capitalism our natural state or is it something else? Are we innately competitive, innately cooperative, or both?  Even the question of what is a family is fair game? Our popular notion of the nuclear family with father, mother, children represents an eentsy, weentsy fraction of human experience. These stories are hard to tell, and because of that become highly contentious. We share that with science and increasingly with history. It does not stop us from trying.

Last April, I watched a session at the national archaeology meetings in April on Submerged Ancient Sites. In particular, several presenters discussed what may have been happening on a land bridge in the middle of Lake Huron called the Alpena-Amberley Ridge, 100 feet below the modern lake surface around 9,000 years ago. Yes, 9,000 years ago, this Ridge was indeed dry land. Using a multidisciplinary approach of remotely operated vehicle mapping, scuba excavations, artifact analysis, predictive modeling, and virtual world simulations informed by modern caribou hunters, these archaeologists were able to make a compelling argument for caribou hunting in this particular space, including the hunting strategy including specifics on the ground. This is archaeological critical thinking at its best. No other discipline could touch it.

Despite the difficulty in getting to answers, archaeologists ask these and other questions that no other field can answer or even try to answer.  We don’t have respondents; we don’t usually have written records; we don’t have all or most of the puzzle pieces. Sociologists and economists don’t see the full range of human behaviors and possibilities. Cultural anthropologists look at the here and now and generally don’t get to see societies changing over many generations.

We do have the two tools in our box other disciplines lack.  Journalists note that today’s news is tomorrow’s history.  But historians have at most 5,000 years of written history and only in a few select places.  Almost all of human history is unwritten, but this is our sandbox.  Our time zones are centuries and millennia – deep time.  With rare exceptions, like Herculaneum, we won’t be able to say what happened from one day to the next. We will go to the last Ice Age to look at cold weather adaptations.  We will go to Cahokia a thousand years ago and ask why? Deep time is a powerful tool.

Secondly, if we are grounded in anthropological thought and the concept of culture, we have at our disposal the variety of human experience across the globe for the last several centuries. It might not tell us how early farmers in the Southeast organized their marriages a thousand years ago, but it tells us what the range of possibilities might be. To the degree that human behavior is patterned and repetitive, this information give us some clues.  And like good cultural anthropologists we can be self-aware of our biases and prejudices in the application of science and analysis.

What are our big problems of today? Adapting to a rapidly changing climate? Increasing income inequality in our society and elsewhere that is destabilizing democratic rule? How do we bring back the family in an increasingly fractured and isolating society? What the hell is a family anyway? As a species, how do we adapt to rapidly changing technology, or more specifically, will AI kill us all and what can we do about it? Archaeology won’t solve these or other problems. It’s not designed that way.  But archaeology provides critical thinking and a frame for understanding these problems, and can point to many more examples where we as a species have been there before and how we dealt with those problems before.  We can help. I even have the conceit that if the US Administration had brought in archaeologists into the room after 9-11, bringing an understanding of the deep history of the Middle East, our approach to Afghanistan and Iraq might have been greatly different and much more successful.

As I was demolishing a pretty good carrot cake for dessert, I looked at the individual on my left at the banquet.  I wish I had the foresight and the words to tell them what I am saying here. Archaeologists can write fancy and use big words and explain big concepts, but we are notoriously bad at simple human communication.  There is an old joke amongst archaeologists on being anti-social.  We are anthropologists, but we like our respondents dead. That’s because we don’t have to talk with them or listen to them.  Like all caricatures, there’s an element of truth to it.  Today, we need all the critical thinking we can muster.  Archaeologists do this and bring stories of people who aren’t around to tell them. We do make the dead speak. Unlocking the past is not some academic exercise. Understanding where we came from provides the grounding for our future. Or as Robert Heinlein put it, “A generation which ignores history has no past – and no future.”

Last month at the SAA Meetings in Denver, the Society took a much-needed break from the never-ending chaos of the current Administration’s war on history and science to continue the Airlie House 2.0 effort.  Looking at the goals of this necessary effort, one almost sheds a nostalgic tear for those halcyon days.  Whether our profession survives the current onslaught remains to be seen. However, it is wise to prepare for the time after.  While this is not our version of Project 2028, for now it’s the best game in town.

The Thursday morning session was well attended, but under the circumstances I would have liked an overflowing room.  Here is the Session abstract.

Session Abstract

The passage of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and both the culmination of a series of topical Airlie House seminars in 1974 and the culminating 1977 Airlie House Report set the course of cultural resource management (CRM) archaeology in the United States for the next 50 years. Now, 50 years later, the profession is transforming, guided by newer and amended laws and regulations, technological innovations, a curation crisis, and social issues such as climate change, environmental justice, and the rights of descendant communities. These changes are affecting how CRM archaeology is practiced, and, in recognition, a workshop sponsored by the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) and National Park Service was held in May 2024 in West Virginia. The workshop drew on the expertise of professionals nationwide and considered four major issues selected by SAA membership that will affect CRM archaeology in the coming decades. This SAA forum will summarize the major topics discussed and recommended action items proposed by the Airlie House 2.0 workshop, which, if implemented, will affect our profession in the coming decades. Membership participation in this SAA forum and implementing change is expected and welcomed.

After brief comments on the various themes from the discussants – Rebecca Hawkins, Karen Mudar, Alex Barker, and Signe Snortland, as well as moderator Kimball Banks – the floor was opened for questions and comments.  My impression from the Session was that the SAA was moving methodically on this, not rushing, and willing to review and revisit any and all positions.

When the SAA solicited for comments a year ago April, I took the opportunity to weigh in, but did not post my comments on my blog or anywhere else publicly.  The SAA reached out to its membership with a status report last October. 

In retrospect and taking in all that happened in Denver that week, I am sharing my comments below.  Most still seem relevant a year later, but where appropriate I am annotating – commenting on my comments, as it were.  Slides were provided by SAA in 2024.

Workforce Training and Careers

It has been my long experience in a career in cultural resources management that everything starts and ends with a trained an motivated workforce, so it is fitting to begin here.

There are a couple of premises that I hold to be true and that drive the discussion with regard to the question, “How do you build an archaeologist?”

1. The very first thing to know is that archaeology is both a profession and a trade.  You cannot build a good archeologist from the classroom only. Remember the term, “armchair archaeologist?”  Likewise someone very good in the field, unless a true savant, cannot have the grounding and theory and method gained from a classroom education to be truly useful. It takes both education (the professional side) and experience (the trade side).
2. The current model of getting an undergraduate education in anthropology and then graduate school with a field school somewhere in there and then starting as a field crew member and working your way up to Principal Investigator is suitable for a small fraction of potential archaeologists.
   • It takes too long.  Eight years, if you include 4 years of undergraduate, 2 years of graduate and then 2 years of practical experience.
   • It costs too much for the return.  College is no longer affordable and even PI salaries aren’t sufficient to cover the up-front costs.
   • It effectively blocks all but those with resourced families that can support this ascent.  And this plays into the racial disparities in familial wealth.  It is possible this alone could explain why archaeology is such a “white” profession.
3. This also disregards the inherent bias against compliance archaeology by the mainline university graduate programs, who continue to train Mesoamerican archeologists or any other cultural region other than the US, who have no useful education or training that would prepare them for a CRM career. More on that later.
4. There is a lot of talk about alternative pathways to building an archaeologist and I think this discussion is worthwhile. However, it is also treacherous insofar as any who wants to pursue this alternative pathway needs a clear understanding of what are the consequences of veering away from the traditional model, codified in the Secretary of Interior Standards.
   • SOI standards are at the minimum, a standard. And generally, they can be applied to an individual to determine whether that individual can meet that standard.
   • Once you agree that there can be an alternative pathway, it is essential that there be national agreement on what is required within that pathway.  And the more flexibility you give in that pathway, the more urgent the need to settle on a national standard of competence.
   • For any student seeking to become that professional archaeologist along this alternative pathway, there has to be a clear plan, i.e., what exactly they need to know and do to get there. Part of the attraction to establishing an alternative pathway is two-fold: less classroom and more OJT meaning less cost and time, and, more ways for entry from a different career.  Choices come with costs. It is inexcusable to tempt a potential candidate with an alternative and have them spinning their wheels because the specific requirements weren’t specific enough.  They think they are making progress toward that brass ring, but are actually veering off into the weeds.
   • If there is an alternative pathway, there has to be some adjudicating group that will certify that the candidate has indeed gotten there and meets those standards. The more flexibility you give in getting to professional qualifications, the more important this becomes.  For geologists or engineers, there are state boards that certify candidates professionally.  Buttressing these boards is an infrastructure of standards, training, and testing, not to mention legal licensing. 
   • Finally, you can’t put dead ends into the mix, meaning you cannot offer a progression from a field-based experience to a Crew Chief and then offer no way to advance to PI other than the traditional approach.  There may be individuals that don’t want to become Professional Archaeologists but want to remain as highly skilled technical workers, but for those that want to advance to Professional status, there has to be a non-traditional route to get there, from each stage of accomplishment.
5. SOI standards have a gaping hole. They do not require any knowledge of historic preservation law or practice, such as Section 106, or NEPA, nor frankly anything to do with consultation with groups that have interests in the projects, such as Native Americans. This needs to be addressed somewhere in the standards we would adopt.

Focusing on the traditional method of getting to professional status, there are several things that can be done to lessen the time required and lessen the economic burden.

1. If we’ve learned anything since COVID it is that there is a useful role for remote learning. This was experimented through MOOC classes a decade ago, but we now know what we can teach remotely and what we cannot.
2. I would argue that any class that was traditionally taught as a survey in a large classroom is a prime candidate for remote learning.  Introduction to Anthropology, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Introduction to Archaeology, frankly any course that beings with the phrase “Introduction to….”  I am not saying these courses aren’t important, just that they aren’t necessary to take in person in a university setting.
3. We are already talking about bringing Community College students into universities as a cost-saving measure and as a pathway to an affordable university education.  Many of the courses that a Community College would offer are in the “Introduction to…” realm.
4. This is the opportunity for SAA and RPA and maybe a consortium of universities to assemble a core curriculum of introductory on-line courses that can be offered at any time and no cost to anyone.  If we can establish this curriculum with regards to minimum requirements, we can wipe a half dozen courses off the schedule, at the very least a full semester. For candidates with day jobs, this should be a godsend.
5. Going this route will also require a test of some type to ensure that the candidate has mastered the material.  Use the College Board as a model.

The trade aspect of learning is just as important. To that end, the traditional field school is inefficient, expensive, and non-standardized.  It may be time to bury the idea entirely.

1. Instead, hands-on experience could be gained through a trade union model – apprentice, journeyman, master. This is an opportunity, but there are some caveats:
   • In most trades, there is a union that takes responsibility for certifying the skill levels of its members.  (When I submitted my comments to SAA in 2024, I was unaware of unionization efforts for archaeological technicians. On Thursday afternoon, I heard a presentation from Freeman Stevenson, titled “The Return of Unions to the CRM Industry,” presented in the US Archaeology at the Crossroads Part I Symposium.  The long, hard effort toward unionization appears to be underway with the Teamsters. It remains to be seen if it catches fire.  I have no illusions that it will be easy. After all, virtually every effort at unionizing any sector of the economy took decades. Still, Stevenson and others give me hope.)
   • In this model, the unions set up off the job training and oversee it. (I confirmed with Stevenson that his efforts include this model of union training, currently housed in West Virginia.)
   • Work at any of these levels is paid work, through the terms of the contract. More skill means more pay.  Lower level trade members work under the supervision of a higher level. Archaeology has done training in this manner for decades, but we are loathe to call it that, since we are “professionals,” not plumbers. And we either grossly underpay our underlings, or not at all.
   • Industry is part and parcel of this arrangement. This is how they get trained workers. They offload the training and certification to the union.  Collective bargaining agreements manage the relationship.
   • Archaeology could unionize and set up an arrangement for training along these lines. (See comments above.) If they don’t, then following this trade union model (which I believe to be a good model for training), would require setting up some national or regional system for overseeing the training and certifications.
2. At the end of the line, there needs to be some certifying organization that would judge candidates, possibly at the levels of crew chief and Principal Investigator/Professional Archaeologist. Standards probably need to be national to allow movement between states.  There could be qualifiers for regional expertise built on top of the standards.

I haven’t spoken to some of the education that I consider essential to making a good professional archaeologist. That is coursework in cultural anthropology, especially political anthropology and, yes, anthropology of religion.  One of the shortfalls of current archaeological training is the overemphasis on practical field techniques over a strong grounding in anthropology.  Especially when working with descendant communities, a good anthropological background is invaluable. In the future archaeological environment, avoiding consultation with descendant communities is a non-starter.

Melding the professional and trade aspects will require some coordination. Schools like Drexel University already incorporate a strong internship practice within their programs. Aggressive merging of on-line classes, OJT, and a trade union model of apprenticeship could reduce the classroom component of professional training to 3-4 years (In my estimation), resulting in a Master’s Degree.  Overall, it may take a person the 6-8 years to get there, but they will be fully employed during most of it.

Will the academy go along with this? I doubt it. They haven’t to date and this disrupts their traditional models of education.  What I would say for land-grant institutions is this. “Not only have you received your charters from the Federal Government as well as much support, but also have built your institutions on land taken from the Indigenous Peoples that inhabited it earlier. You owe two debts in the telling of the history of this country, one to the public at large, and one to the original inhabitants. Archaeology is one method of telling a history that wasn’t written down or a history only told by the victors.  Establishing an archaeology program that doesn’t include the state you are in is simply negligence of duty.” SAA and RPA need to bring the full force of their influence on this point, not just to the university presidents and deans but the state legislatures that fund these institutions.

Is there an impending shortage of archaeologists or not?  I keep getting two different answers and I’m not sure everyone is speaking from the same data.  Altschul and Klein sounded the alarm 2 years ago in a deep dive of the future for the profession.  Yet at the SAA Meetings in NOLA, Chris Dore in Session 293: Transformations in Professional Archaeology, Industry Challenges for Cultural Heritage Consulting Firms in North America, strongly suggested the issue was overblown and there are sufficient archaeologists to meet future demand.  Can both views be correct?  I have my doubts.

Part of the problem may be on which data each argument rests.  Altschul and Klein seem wary of US Bureau of Labor Statistics data as showing the full picture, while Dore seems to rely heavily on that data. Dore also seems to accept that PhD’s generated from the academy will be suited to the CRM world.  My own anecdotal surveys show regional unevenness and unevenness in level of archaeologist.  Some parts of the country seem to be OK at the moment for supervisory archaeologists but are having trouble getting field crew. Other parts of the county see vice versa or any other combination.  So it is hard at the moment to see a national trend, whether there is one or not.  Perhaps the biggest difference is that Dore sees work declining in future years, while Altschul and Klein see an explosion shortly. (In any case, the recent wide-spread firings of Federal employees, including archaeologists and the intentional weaking of environmental and historic preservation laws and regulations may resolve the issue simply by eliminating the need for CRM studies, therefore eliminating the jobs.)

My own takeaway from this discussion is that we need to focus on the way we are currently producing archaeologists, which is inefficient, and socio-economically discriminatory.  I do believe the issue of field crew will be solved in the market. You have to pay people better to get folks who will work in that environment. Plain and simple.  It appears that this is starting to occur, but still there are gaps in matching a “trained” workforce with jobs.

A final thought. Bureau of Labor Statistics grossly underreports archaeology jobs, yet many universities rely on these numbers to gauge future student interest.  This is to our detriment.  As long as academia has a role in training future archaeologists, and I think they do, putting department after department at risk from dodgy numbers is a bad idea.  SAA and RPA need to be united in pushing the Labor Department hard in the direction of producing more accurate counting of the number of working archaeologists in the US. And they need to do this today. Having a certified and licensed category will point BLS in the right direction.

Diversity in the workforce (a good goal, regardless of what the current Administration thinks)

This continues to be a problem, but I do believe the underlying issue is the amount of family wealth needed to “front” a student through the long and expensive process to reach professional status. Otherwise, the student is likely to incur crushing student loan debt. Targeted scholarships and financial aid only goes so far and it probably unsustainable.  The only way to create diversity in the workforce is to radically cut the costs in time and money to get to professional status. I have offered some ideas above.  People aren’t stupid. You can be welcoming and accommodating ‘til the cows come home, but those economically disadvantaged won’t commit unless they can see a sustainable future in it.  And while better pay in the entry level field crew positions can help there, commensurate pay for professionals is also needed, not just in academia but in government and private employment.

Certification and licensing

I have written at some length about certification and licensing.  To summarize, we need to keep clear the difference between certification and licensing.  Organizations like SAA or RPA or state councils can certify. State or Federal Governments can license.  And while I do support certification at a regional level or national level, licensing should be a goal.  I think this will help with pay, respect (which translates to pay) especially within the private sector land of engineers, and clarity with regards to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I think licensing is much more important in cultural resources management than academia, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a segment within academia that are licensed.

Decolonizing-Engaging Descendent Communities

My first recommendation is that the word “decolonization” should be dropped.  It is not useful within the context of Airlie House 2.0 and CRM.  To me, it sounds like bumper sticker sloganeering.  It is designed to offend all but the true believers.  It invites the nativists in our country (an exquisitely choice term which really means the opposite of what it appears to mean) to jump down our woke throats and fight anything we might want to accomplish. Even within our group, we will waste a lot of time trying to define what it means and this is time wasted, when effort needs to be focused on doing. (Everything done since January 21^st vindicates this statement.)

Almost all CRM archaeology is conducted under Section 106, which is a Federal law administered by federal agencies, which are part of the United States Government.  Let me suggest a test. The next time you are in a project meeting with the design team and engineers, just casually suggest that we need to decolonize archaeology.  See what the response is.

There was a lot of good advice in the original Airlie House Report, produced in 1977, relevant to this topic. I think most of it has been ignored in the subsequent 47 years.  While there has been some advances in law and practice since then, it may be a good idea to start with Section 5: Archaeology and Native Americans, and proceed from there.

If 36CFR800 is the basis for most cultural resources management under Section 106, or Section 110 for federal land management, then the core singular point is this.  “As anthropologists, should it not be the archaeologists first responsibility to take into consideration living descendants of those cultures they study?” (their emphasis) (p.90)

There is a special role for consultation with Federally recognized Tribes in conducting compliance archaeology. It is specifically defined in 36CFR800.16
 
Consultation means the process of seeking, discussing, and considering the views of other participants, and, where feasible, seeking agreement with them regarding matters arising in the section 106 process. The Secretary’s “Standards and Guidelines for Federal Agency Preservation Programs pursuant to the National Historic Preservation Act” provide further guidance on consultation.
 
Most consultation takes place within a specific project and in that sense is limiting.  What is ultimately necessary for effective project consultation is building a trust relationship outside of projects.  Many state DOT’s and FHWA divisions have taken that extra step to build a working relationship and I think this is the way to move forward. And it takes respect, humility and hard listening to make it work.  The outcomes of these extra-project meetings and consultations can find value in program wide programmatic agreements.
 
If we can take a wider view of consultation, then some of these other issues will be addressed. We can sit down with the Federally recognized Tribes and figure out how to increase the number and presence of native archaeologists. But we would need to dig deeper and sit down with the Federally recognized Tribes and figure out what are the important questions to ask and what stories to tell.  Not on a project by project basis, but within the profession.  So ultimately, although this is a CRM exercise, the universities have to be willing to bring representatives from Federal Tribes into discussions of how and what to teach in archaeology. Only then will we be taking into consideration the living descendants of those we study.  Hiring one or two indigenous archaeologists to the faculty will not solve this problem, although it’s a good starting point. (See also, Bonnie Pitblado’s 2022 article in American Antiquity 87(3):217-235, On Rehumanizing Pleistocene People of the Western Hemisphere.)

Archaeological Collections, including Records

I don’t have all that much to add to this section, with one exception.  There is an inherent problem baked into the CRM process under NEPA.  The problem is a contracting and timing problem and is created when project schedules force the conclusions from a study to be produced before the collections are fully processed and designated for accessioning.  The NEPA decision depends on the conclusion of Section 106. It is almost always presumed that a draft executive summary serves as the results of Phase I or II investigations.  The design consultant and their archaeological team finishes their work, a NEPA decision is made, and then the contracts are closed out as the (obvious) work is completed.  However, if there are artifacts, a closed out contract doesn’t allow funds for the archaeological consultant to process or accession them.  And there is no obvious hammer to leverage over the consultant since processing the collections is rarely in the punch list of deliverables.  How could they, since it might not be completed until after the project is built years later?

Secondly, funding set aside for archaeology in the design stage is finite. It is spent in order – field work, essential lab work, executive summary, final report, artifact processing and curation.  Often field work and essential lab work consume the entire budget, so by the time the final report and artifact processing and curation is to be done, there is no funding.  Going back to the client and/or prime is out of the question. So the work doesn’t get done.

If there is a data recovery involved in the project, again there can be a contracting problem.  First, almost always there is a separate consultant involved due to the conflict of interest provisions related to NEPA.  The new consultant often acquires the collections from the Phase I or II and proceeds to Phase III.  As before, it may take years for the collections to be fully processed and accessioned and once the project has the ribbon cutting, the contracts are often closed. The total amount needed for curation is a tiny fraction of the total project cost, perhaps $100k versus $100m, so holding the contract open for such a small amount is difficult to sell.  Rarely have I seen adequate provisions set in the contract to reserve monies to complete the curation in a Phase III. It’s really hit and miss.

The Federal Agencies are often not much help. Archaeologists are rarely in the room when contracts are drawn up, and few agencies have the archaeological expertise to bring to bear even if someone thought to ask an archaeologist to help in putting the contract together.

Perhaps the only real solution is to set up a bond model for artifact curation, where the contractor puts up a bond solely for the processing of the artifacts and their ultimate curation.

CRM Archaeology Compliance

If we do the necessary work in fuller consultation with Federally recognized Tribes, we should expect to widen the range of questions we would want to ask from the archaeological record and expand and enrich the kind of stories we could tell.  If we lay the proper extra-project groundwork, we should also be able to achieve better project outcomes not just for those involved Tribes, but the larger society.

A specific comment regarding reporting and grey literature.  The traditional model of creating a standalone report with background (often boilerplate), setting, field methods (standardized), field results (including geospatial mapping and artifact catalog), interpretation, and results was born of the 20^th century. Maybe it’s time to leave it there.

A better way to envision a report is as a virtual document that is assembled for the reader, but the bits and bytes reside in different places.  Leave aside the background section and results and interpretation for the moment.  The setting could be pulled from a multi-layered environmental GIS, requiring only the delimiting of the project area as a polygon.  If the GIS is a cultural GIS, the known site information would be embedded automatically.  Field methods are generally standardized and usually reference guidelines. All that would need to be added are any exceptions to the methodology.  Field results belong in the cultural resources GIS, albeit at a much finer grain.  Every testing unit could be plotted in space, and linked to its stratigraphy and contents. The artifact catalog should reside in the state’s larger artifact collections catalog.  Photos, drawings, and the like could also be tied to units within the cultural resources GIS and reside there as well. What the reader would see is pulled from these various databases and linked through the common project identifier.  Instead of being written as a standalone set of data, each portion would be written once into their respective databases. When needed, they would come together into this “report.” A version of this could be found in the Digging I-95 effort.

The background section would also be pulled from another source. That would be the synthesis of the history of the region, or state.  Think of it like a Wiki-page that could include chronology, geography, themes, with regional syntheses (from Western and Indigenous perspectives), and research topics.  A model for this does exist in England, aka the East Midland Historic Environment Research Framework.

The point of establishing a Wiki-like environment is that it could be amended and modified one project at a time.  And it would replace any of the published state-level synthesis, titled, “The Archaeology of (fill-in-the-blank).” For the background section of a project “report,” the geographic location of the project would direct which section of the synthesis would be pulled.

The conclusions of the project, presumably stating what the important information was gained from the work, would be entered into the synthesis Wiki-site as new information, then pulled out again for the purposes of the “report.”  The important (Criterion D) information gathered from a project would always be within a context of what is known and clearly differentiated from it.  As much of the information contained within the Wiki-site would be available to the general public as could be done, recognizing that some of the information would remain sensitive.

There are several advantages to this approach. First, it would greatly standardize the collection of archaeological information.  It would also ensure the GIS and artifact catalog information would be entered into their respective databases up front, instead of chasing these data sets down after the fact, and either re-entering them, or figuring out how to translate field formats.  It would also lay bare what was learned from the project and presumably advance the state of knowledge one project at a time. And it would give the public a clearer view of that state of knowledge.

In late April, I had the privilege to attend the Society for American Archaeology Meetings, in Denver.  I wondered why I was attending not only this meeting but the Association of American Archaeologists (ATA) meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday prior.  I had been retired from PennDOT for 7 years and had recently ended my term as President of the Pennsylvania Archaeological Council.  What was I doing there? Fortunately, the answer awaited down in the bowels of the massive convention hotel, in a series of windowless rooms.

The ATA meeting always refreshes my batteries, and it is good to reconnect with professional colleagues, even if you are the only one in the room drawing a pension.  The mood in the room was not unlike that of a gathering storm.  Federal probationary employees were being terminated right and left, even those that had worked for a year or more and had come to FHWA, or FRA, or FTA service from lengthy service at state DOT’s, or consulting firms.  Permanent federal employees were being pushed out, but the DOGE reaper hadn’t pushed in the doors at FHWA, yet.  Yes, the mood in the room was like a gathering storm.  Typically at ATA meetings, it is larded with crisp, black humor.  It’s what archaeologists do, so that the meeting outwardly did not present as anything different from any other ATA meeting: playful abuse of the FHWA Preservation Officer, David Clarke (although David could only participate remotely due to one of many travel bans); preservation success stories, especially from the host state DOT; endless sidebar conversations over seemingly insoluble 106 problems, begging other state professionals for reaction, input, solutions.  This time, the conversation included queries over firings and who’s left in the offices, both at USDOT Agencies and at the Advisory Council.  The ATA chair had figured out how to hold a hybrid meeting on zoom. This was both good and bad. Good insofar as more archaeologists could attend. Bad insofar as the meeting was recorded and folks were talking on eggshells. The proverbial elephant in the room sat patiently in the corner as we conducted our business.

On Thursday, the SAA Meetings began in earnest. The elephant relocated, but did not leave.  Using the SAA Meeting App, I had booked a steady dose of “Whither Archaeology” sessions.  The membership was clearly alarmed over goings-on from the Federal Administration.  Everyone wanted some providential guidance on what to do, but none was forthcoming.  Opinions divided along classic lines.  In one camp, members argued for full-on resistance to Administration actions and executive orders, summarized by a t-shirt that appeared during the meetings- red with the image of an arm holding an upraised trowel and the message, “Resist.” Workers of the World Unite meets Orozco. For solutions, specificity seemed lacking.  The other camp argued care and caution.  Fighting back against the Administration required measured actions, to fight smart- legal action, avoiding DEI-tagged language, talk in code, etc. Again, for solutions, specificity seemed lacking.  Thursday was cry-in-your-beer day.

I had hoped the SAA leadership would seize the moment and provide some specific actions that membership could take. Thursday brought several sessions dealing directly with the existential crisis. Discussion, but not action. Thursday turned into Friday, with the main General Membership Meeting that evening. Again, no action. Discussions continued into Saturday with further discussions.  When the Meeting ended, we slow-walked our way to the airport and flew home.

In mid-March, I sent the Pennsylvania Archaeological Council my last President’s blog.  This one was unusual insofar as I focused on the Administration’s attacks on both history and science.  Nothing between mid-March and late April had altered my views, and even in mid-May, I believe the comments stand on their own. Here is an edited version (cleaned up only a little bit):

President’s Report

(My apologies for not talking about all of the different orders and initiatives from the current Administration that give me heartburn, such as climate policy, environmental policy, foreign policy, domestic policy, tax policy, Ukraine, USAID, Israel, DOJ, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, human rights, DOGE, general chaos, etc., etc. I need to focus.)

Let me open this post as clearly as I can. There is no Republican science. There is no Democratic science. There is no Republican history. There is no Democratic history.  There is science. There is history.  Now this may be easily misconstrued. History is after all written by the victors and there is history of Republicans and history of Democrats.  Still, one history doesn’t blot out another one. And any single history from a single perspective simply fails to tell the full story.

Science and history have been weighing on my mind lately for two reasons.  First, archaeology could be framed as history told through scientific methods and techniques. We rely on both. Secondly, the current Administration appears to be waging war on both science and history.  In the national scheme of things, we are a flyspeck, an afterthought, a trifle.  But I find it inescapable that the current Administration is waging war on us, whether they know it or not.

The anti-scientific position of the current Administration is documented in who they are selecting to lead the important national scientific and educational institutions (Kennedy, Jr. for HHS, McMahon for Education, etc.), severe and arbitrary cuts in indirect cost reimbursements for research, staffing cuts at Federal scientific agencies (with a particular vengeance toward climate science), and even word censorship that permeates national policy.  The anti-history position is commensurate. And by anti-history, I mean anti- any history other than white (usually male) protestant history, something more in favor a century ago.  The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation has been gutted. One anecdote summarizes DOGE’s Ministry of Truth’s approach toward history.  In the Pentagon’s purge of DEI-related materials from its memory banks, photos of military firsts for women, Blacks, and Hispanics were scrubbed.  And of course, the LGBTQ icon of WWII, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the “Enola Gay.”

Under the guise of pushing back on DEI, I believe the current Administration’s goal is to erase the past, at least the past not in synch with its politics. Erase it to be able rewrite it to suit their needs and advance a particular political agenda. This is Authoritarianism 101.  Our job is to tell the past and expand on the telling, not erase it.

I could go on, but we don’t have time. Think for a moment on what the archaeological economy is built: the three-legged stool of academia, museums, and CRM.  Universities are already under attack for supposedly allowing antisemitic activities and DEI on campus.  Columbia is just the first and most prominent.  Understand that none of this has to do with actual antisemitism or diversity, equity, or inclusion policies or activities, and everything to with forcing universities to bow to the Administration’s power and Project 2025 goals. What does that have to do with us?  Check down some of the terms that are being scrubbed from national databases: anti-racism, cultural competence, cultural differences, cultural heritage, cultural sensitivity, culturally appropriate, historically, identity, indigenous community, intersectionality, multi-cultural, native American, race and ethnicity, sociocultural, socioeconomic, tribal, etc. 

Will our professional communication amongst each other be reduced to grunts and hand signals? And as universities feel the pinch from dried-up federal funding and pressure to give fealty to the current Administration, Departments like Anthropology will be even more at risk than they were a year ago.  The same holds for Museums.

CRM has proven to be the backstop of archaeological employment for nearly 50 years. Many good archaeologists, some who I know personally, have been fired from Federal government agencies for no cause other than being probationary. At the current pace, many others will be on the chopping block. The bigger threat will be the gutting of NEPA and Section 106, which governmentally can be done in ways other than Federal staffing reductions and changes to the law. CEQ regulations, which used to regulate NEPA are now just guidance. Large parts of 36CFR800 are not spelled out specifically in the National Historic Preservation Act, but have evolved and been adopted over the last 40 years. That and $3.50 will now get you a cup of coffee.  Two years ago, Terry Klein and Jeff Altschul declared an impending staffing shortfall in CRM.  Two years later, I guess we can thank the President for solving that problem, not by adding trained archaeologists, but by eliminating jobs.

What do we do?  In full confession, there have been days in the last 4 months where I just want to doomscroll, or curl up with a good scotch and binge-watch Ken Burns documentaries (Huey Long is still the gold standard and still relevant). That is not very helpful. So let me propose a few things:

1. Stay informed. As painful as it may be, the political and economic environment is rapidly changing, almost day to day. At the very least, be informed of changes to the Advisory Council, NEPA, Section 106, and any Federal Agency that you may work with. Lately, I have found that Linked-In has more information, especially through Allyson Brooks; Marion Werkheiser, Ellen Chapman and Cultural Heritage Partners PLLC; the SAA newsletters and e-mails.  Find reliable news sources that covers science and culture and follow them.
2. Stay engaged.  Whatever level of action you might have undertaken, please continue.  If protesting in the streets is your thing, great. If letter writing is more to your tastes, write. But there are two things we all could and should be doing. First, find out who your congressional representatives are in the House. Your Pennsylvania senators are John Fetterman and David McCormick.  Let them all know how you feel on specific executive orders that may be illegal under Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, and proposed legislation.  Tell them the importance of both science and history and by extension, archaeology.  Secondly, talk to your friends and acquaintances, especially the ones that aren’t archaeologists. Make the case for why what you do is important and then ask them to write their representatives and tell their friends. (In discussions in Denver, it became clear that Job 1 for archaeologists is to explain to the public why what we do is important.)
3. Stay defiant but stay positive.  The current Administration wants you to submit to the new status quo as quickly as possible. You can choose to not submit, but to do so you need hope and a vision for a better future (another definition of hope). Don’t give up.  Perhaps Elie Weisel offered the best perspective, “The greatest evil in the world is not anger or hatred, but indifference.”

Introduction

For over 90 years, archaeologists in eastern North America have used the Archaic to denote a time period that preceded the Woodland period.  The Archaic is the kind of term that archaeologists love, because it has become a shorthand for a whole lot of things, not just chronologically.  It is also one of those words that could give offense.  So it is worth our time to take a deep dive into its meaning, its origins, and whether it is defensible as a concept or a word choice.

As archaeologists, we try to use terms in precise ways.  It allows us to use them economically, as a signal of greater underlying meaning. In the moment, we rarely think about why we pick one term over another to indicate an archaeological idea.  As archaeology has evolved as a discipline and as society has changed, some terms lose their meaning. Some become offensive. So we adapt.

Finally, it is very likely that little of what is presented below is new or original. Numerous authors have plowed this ground over the last 30 years, and I weighed whether or not raising these points again are worthwhile. Ultimately, I decided that since there seems to be no current conversation over the Archaic and one is worthwhile, here it is.

Archaic, what?

Some years ago, I was confronted at a Tribal Summit with the fact that archaeologists routinely refer to the period of North American archaeology that existed before European contact as “prehistoric.”  It was considered offensive insofar as it suggested indigenous peoples in North America did not have a history.  Duly noted. Since then, I’ve been more careful in using that particular term, preferring pre-contact, which is descriptive and flexible in that it doesn’t set a specific date to start the subsequent proto-historic or historic time periods.

More recently, I came across a Guide for Referencing Indigenous Communities put out by the New York Archaeological Council suggesting more respectful terminology. Among the critiqued terms were “Archaic” and “Woodland” as well as “prehistoric.”

It got me wondering. Why do we call the time period after Paleo-Indian and before Woodland “Archaic.” What are we actually describing here? And as an aside, why do we go from “Paleo-Indian” to “Archaic” to “Woodland?” It reminds me of the flip flap books, where the top is a penguin, the middle is a bear and the bottom is a rabbit.

I had spent my entire professional career happily oblivious to these and other questions.  The current moment seems to call for other thinking.

Archaic With a Small “a”

Where does the term “Archaic” come from? And more importantly, when we say something is “Archaic,” what are we suggesting?  Should we start at the beginning?  During the last quarter of the 18^th century and first quarter of the 19^th, Scandinavian historians and archaeologists developed  the Three-Age System, a sequence of three stages in the prehistoric past: Stone, Bronze, and Iron (Daniel 1967:79).  Christian Jurgensen Thomson, in 1816 the curator of the newly established National Museum in Copenhagen, organized the vast collections from the peat bogs, burial chambers, and kitchen middens of Denmark into three successive ages of Stone, Bronze, and Iron, as much to get his arms around the collections as to interpret them.  The Three-Age system has been properly described as the “cornerstone of modern archaeology.” (Macalister in Daniel 1967).

Following the publication of Origin of Species in 1859, there was a flurry of scientific and archaeological discoveries.  By the late 19^th century, anthropologists and archaeologists had landed on a theory of unilineal evolution, going from savagery through barbarism to civilization. While the Three-Age system was found to be unworkable in the new thinking – the Three-Age System being mainly about artifactual materials – the developed evolutionary stages incorporated technology, social organization, alphabets, speech, and writing and the presence or lack thereof (see Morgan 1877)

In the first decades of the 20^th century, unilineal evolution had been discredited.  Each new archaeological or ethnological discovery seemed to poke holes in the cultural progressions so carefully worked out 30 years earlier.  Replacing it was a school of anthropology, led by Franz Boaz and others, that played a much smaller theoretical game and focused on description and specific artifacts and behaviors. What we describe as culture change was subsumed under the study of culture processes.

By processes of culture we mean those factors which operate either toward the stabilization and preservation of cultures and their parts, or toward growth and change. Changes, in turn may consist either of increments, such as new developments, inventions, and learned traits acquired from outside; or of losses and displacements.  Beyond these, there are minor alterations or fluctuations that are neither particularly additive nor deductive, as when the wheel base of automobiles is shortened, or the floor is lowered, or the engine is placed behind. (p. 344) (Kroeber 1948).

For anthropology, the work was now devoted to finding and explaining invention versus diffusion.  Archaeology soon followed, explaining cultural change as a product of independent invention or of cultural contact with another society, adopting the new whatever. The culmination of an archaeological methodology to address this historical approach is the Midwestern (or McKern) Taxonomic System, introduced in the early 1930’s. But we are ahead of ourselves.

In North America, the use of the term “archaic” to describe either a stratigraphic level or culture can be traced to 1910 with the description of the lowest level of human remains in the Valley of Mexico and also used by Spinden to describe an archaic people of Nahua stock (Byers 1959:229).  In eastern North America, the term appears as early as 1919, but each example is in lower case and used somewhat generically as an adjective to describe the earliest stage of Algonkian occupation (of New York): 

The first or archaic occupation yields crude implements, such as large and clumsy arrow points, but occasionally very fine spear heads, many net sinkers… (Parker 1923:50)

Archaic could more innocently be ascribed as simply old.  Emerson and McElrath (2009) noted the neo-evolutionary roots of the term archaic, “the Archaic pattern is a reflection of a primitive stage in a cultural-neo-evolutionary sequence.  As noted above, the common meaning of the archaic label itself was inherent in the archaeological definition – to be archaic was to be technologically and socially primitive.” (p.26)  I agree that archaeologists in the 19^th century thought of ancient societies as being technologically and socially primitive. I also agree that archaeologists in the last half of the 20^th century through today likely associate the Archaic with a less technologically and socially advanced society. During this early 20^th century period, I believe that archaeologists and their anthropological theoreticians applied the term more as being really old, but not carrying the bulk of unilineal evolutionary baggage. For me, the tipoff is the small “a” use of the term as an adjective, not a noun.

Archaic with a Capital “A”

This all changes in 1932. William Ritchie described his excavations at Lamoka Lake, ascribing to its inhabitants, 

“an early level of culture based on hunting, fishing and gathering of wild foods, and lacking pottery, the smoking pipe and agriculture.” (Ritchie 1932b; 1980)

He labelled the traits associated with this culture as the Archaic, Archaic Algonkian, and Archaic Algonkian Period (Ritchie 1932a).

In his formulation of a Midwestern Taxonomic System, W. C. McKern more formally established a pattern named Archaic within the five-level taxonomy – focus, aspect, phase, pattern, and base (McKern 1939).  It is important to emphasize that in the McKern system, the focus was on “hierarchically ordered categories of morphologically similar associated component assemblages” (Schwartz 1996).  McKern notes specifically the focus on cultural traits rather than time or space in using the taxonomic system:

In brief, the archaeologist requires a classification based upon the cultural factor alone; temporal and distributional treatments will follow as accumulating data shall warrant. Moreover, the archaeological classification necessarily must be based upon criteria available to the archaeologist.” (p. 303).

The close scrutiny of cultural traits, especially those discoverable archaeologically, fits well into the anthropological theory of the time, that of invention and diffusion, and of core area.  The goal was to figure out, based on traits, where the component in an archaeological site fit in time and space, but more importantly, whether these traits found at this particular site were the result of invention (meaning part of the core area) or a result of diffusion.

As noted by numerous authors (Willey and Phillips 1958, Byers, 1959, Stoltman 1992, Emerson and McElrath 2009), by the 1940’s archaeologists had found that the concept of archaic was too useful to be left to mere taxonomic usage.

Because it now appears that this nonagricultural, nonpottery, hunter-fisher-collector pattern of culture may have been widespread in the eastern United States in early aboriginal times, the term “Archaic” is here adopted to designate this patter manifestation in Kentucky and Alabama.” (Webb and DeJarnette 1942:319)

Ford and Willey applied Archaic to the earliest known cultural horizon in the East.

The cultures of this period were “archaic” in the true sense; horticulture was lacking, pottery is either absent or makes it appearance later in the stage, and the abundance, variety and qualities of artifacts do not compare with the more complex later developments. On the other hand, the archaic cultures established a complex containing many elements which lasted on into later periods. This stage appears to provide a sort of foundation cultural pattern for the East into which new traits and complexes were intruded to form the later cultural stages. (Ford and Willey 1941:332)

Some archaeologists, Sears (1948) among them, found the Archaic concept difficult to fit into either the Midwestern Taxonomic System or into a cultural period.  Ironically, most seemed perfectly satisfied to adopt it into a unilineal cultural evolutionary stage, whether it was the earliest known culture in North America, or as a subsequent cultural period following Paleoindian inhabitants (see also Krieger 1953). Prior to effective chronological dating, there was even some disagreement as to whether the cultures so described as archaic were in fact old enough to warrant that moniker (Emerson and McElrath 2009:25). In the scrum over just what was the archaic, the contemporary anthropological goals of explaining culture change seemed to have been left aside.

The Periods They are a Changin’

A confession. I am a product of the New Archaeology. Where we trace our origins vary. Some put it with Walter Taylor’s 1948 A Study of Archaeology. Others with Leslie White’s 1959 The Evolution of Culture. The shot across the bow may have come in Willey and Phillip’s 1958 Method and Theory in American Archaeology, particularly the oft-cited statement that “American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing” (p. 2). As unkindly, but not unfairly described by Emerson and McElrath (2009), this led to a stampede of hunter-gatherer interest within Archaic period studies, with perhaps the neo-evolutionary or multi-lineal evolutionary theory running far ahead of the data.  What was clear was the accepted narrative of the cultures living during the Archaic period having a post-megafauna but pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer adaptation to an evolving Holocene landscape.

Almost overnight, the conversation over the Archaic and it’s taxonomic problems were swept under the rug of adaptation, so much so that by the time I entered graduate school in 1976, the origin story of the “Archaic” was never spoken.  The McKern Taxonomic System was relegated to a few paragraphs in the history of archaeology, and lumped with the Boazian particularistic historical approach.  This little trick neatly severed the term Archaic and its time period utility, from any other context or cultural or trait-laden attributes.

Except for a few ne-er-do-wells and post-processualists, this terminological sleight-of-hand has stood unchallenged for 60 years.  An early foray into the newer thinking comes from John Witthoft, who in a piece from 1961, diverges from Sears’ characterization of the Archaic as “a basic culture-complex subject to slight variation over huge times and regions”(1971:97). Instead, Witthoft sees a vast and infinitely variable series of simple technologies, with space and time units often as small as county and century.” He leans toward an anthropological definition, characterizing the Archaic as “the community of a single hunting territory- the band or horde, or the larger community of intermarrying family hunting bands – the tribe in the sense of Australian ethnology.” Later on, he contrasts Archaic with Paelo-Indian’s specialization on large game to Archaic man occupying “every sort of ecological niche available in our temperate regions”(p.101).

By 1985, the Archaic had largely been defined in cultural ecological terms.

With the end of the Pleistocene between 11,000 and 9,000 B.P. a newly diversified biome and moderate climate was established over most of North America. Milder temperatures and the retreat of the ice permitted a more heterogeneous vegetation and fauna to replace the subarctic biotic regime characteristic of the Pleistocene.  Cultural adaptations to this environmental change are characteristic of the Archaic period.” (Raber 1985:11)

The general pattern suggested for the Archaic is, in summary, one of seasonal movement by small bands of hunter-gatherers through a series of base camps, hunting/butchering stations, and special-purpose camps adapted to a wide variety of animal and plant resources. The greater variety of subsistence pursuits is indicated in the archaeological record by a greater variety of site types, artifact types, and floral or faunal remains.” (p.12)

A decade later, archaeologists use the concept of the Archaic as a heuristic, encompassing a time period, a temperate forest hunting-fishing-gathering/collecting economy, and as a tool kit that includes ground stone tools, varied stemmed and notched projectile points, netsinkers, etc. (Raber et al. 1998:121-122).  Also importantly (and we will get back to this later), they note two main problems with the Archaic, namely: 1) Archaic cultural patterns of a hunting-fishing-gathering economy persist well into the Woodland Period, and 2) Early Archaic patterns are “fundamentally indistinguishable from those of the late Paleoindian period” (p.121). Other than a chronological fence line, how would you know you were in one Period or another?

The characterization of the Archaic as an adaptation carries through to the current syntheses.  In its popular iteration (Carr and Moeller 2015), the Archaic is defined as “an adaptation to a forest environment and involves a new set of tools” (p.74).  

They begin to exploit a wide variety of upland environments along smaller bands. In contrast to the Paleoindian period, the bands are less mobile, they do not cover large territories, and populations increase dramatically by the end of the period. In addition, bands begin to regionalize…The Archaic period ends with the appearance of a new and very distinctive set of artifacts. These include broad-bladed spearpoints/knives aptly called broadspears.” (p.74)

The ”professional” version (Bergman et al 2020) is largely the same. However, they do provide some additional context.  They note Ritchie is credited with introducing the term “Archaic” in 1932.

…it is the Archaic period for which archaeologists are able to define and describe specific settlement systems…In the Middle Atlantic region, at least until the 1970’s, a cultural/historical approach dominated the research of the Early and Middle Archaic periods.”(p.107)

In addition:

The Early and Middle Archaic periods mark the transition from the landscapes of the Late Pleistocene into the deciduous forests of the mid-Holocene…This is a time of increasing cultural regionalization, involving band-level societies participating in a foraging economy…The Early Archaic is characterized by a distinctive change in projectile point design associated with significant environmental changes beginning at about 10,000 BP.” (p.105)

the Early Archaic is frequently characterized as the first adaptation to a Holocene environment.”(p.107)

Not everyone was with the program.  Nearly 30 years ago, Jay Custer (1996) chose to create a taxonomy of cultural periods that did not include the Archaic (nor Woodland for that matter) as a lifeway.  While accepting the use of the Archaic strictly as a time period (8,000-1,500 BC), he notes:

The major complication in the use of the chronological system in Table 1 arises from the fact that the main period terms (Paleo-Indian, Archaic, and Woodland) have come to be associated not only with chronological periods, but with types of prehistoric lifeways as well. (p.19)

Custer’s solution for the taxonomy of cultural periods (p.21, Table 2) was :

Hunter-Gatherer I

Hunter-Gatherer II

Intensive Gathering-Formative

Village Life

Contact

This taxonomy was not widely adopted, but certainly begs the question, “Why not?”

When We Say Archaic, What Do We Mean Exactly?

Since its introduction over 90 years ago, archaeologists have used the term Archaic to denote a stage in unilineal evolution, a pattern in an asynchronous and spatially floating taxonomic system, a pejorative, a time period, and a cultural adaptation.   If there is something like a consensus, archaeologists would agree that in the Eastern United States at least, “The Archaic” is pre-ceramic, pre-agricultural, post-Pleistocene, and post-Paleoindian.  As a time period, “The Archaic” (in Pennsylvania) starts around 10,000 years ago and ends around 3,000 years ago in the Upper Ohio Valley and Susquehanna Drainage Basins and 2,800 years ago in the Delaware Drainage Basin (Carr et al 2020).   Finally, “The Archaic” is associated with a hunter-gatherer-collector adaptation to a deciduous forest environment.  While noting some difficulties pinning down the specifics of the Archaic, especially when it starts, when it ends, what changes from one period to the next, its use as a cultural adaptation has largely been uninterrupted for the last 60 years.

For argument’s sake, let’s drop the word choice “Archaic.” We’ll call this thing “Fred” instead.  And my apology to all the Freds out there who might take offense.  How well does Fred hold together as a time period, an adaptation, etc.? Let’s start with pottery.  We now know the earliest pottery in the Eastern United States was produced during the Late Fred by the Stallings Culture in southeastern Georgia. In Pennsylvania, you see a continuum of hard vessel manufacturing from steatite to steatite-tempered during the Late Fred to Early Woodland time periods. This also does not take into account vessels not made from stone or clay, but which functionally served that purpose (Stewart 2003:8-9).  Anderson and Sassaman bluntly state “The appearance of pottery…no longer marks the end of the Archaic (now Fred) and the beginning of the Woodland period as it once did (Anderson and Sassaman 2012:107).

OK, what about agriculture?  Implicit in the adoption of an agricultural economy was the notion of moving away from a hunter-gatherer-collector economy.  Unfortunately, the peoples of precontact Pennsylvania didn’t drop their spears, atlatls and collecting baskets on a Friday and pick up corn kernels and a hoe on a Monday.  In Pennsylvania, the “Three Sisters-“ corn, beans, and squash did not appear in the diet at the same time. Squash seems to have come first, around 5,400 BP, and domesticated independently from Mesoamerica (Hart and Asch Sidell 1997). Maize followed around 2,000 BP, then Beans a thousand years later.  Beyond the Three Sisters, sumpweed and chenopodum were domesticated during the Late Fred, and sunflower was introduced from the west also during the Late Fred. When pressed, I believe all archaeologists would concede the journey from wild plant collection to domestication was uneven and falling under a long trajectory, one which in Pennsylvania certainly started in the Fred.

The Fred serves as a time period, lasting approximately 7,000 years. It is twice as long as the subsequent Woodland period, and is probably longer than the earlier Paleoindian period, 16,000 BP to 9,900 BP (Carr et al 2020).  7,000 years is a long time, so archaeologists have subdivided the Fred into Early, Middle, and Late sub-periods. The distinctions between these sub-periods are largely heuristic (Bergman et al 2020:106) and as much rely on changes in projectile point typology as anything else. In Pennsylvania, we have the Transitional period, which either embeds within the Fred, or follows the Fred and precedes the Woodland, depending on who you are talking to.

As suggesting a really old time, Fred may have had some agency when first coined, but since then has been pushed aside by earlier and earlier periods, first Paleoindian, then pre-Paleoindian.  We are now talking earlier and earlier dates for entry into North America. No one is really blanching anymore if someone throws out a date of 30,000 years ago. The Fred seems positively youthful in this context.  Any adjective tag suggesting this period is very old seems to have lost its sting.

Lastly, we have the hunter-gatherer-collector adaptation.  This brings our focus into cultural ecological questions of diet, hunting and gathering strategies, sedentism and settlement, and social organization. Yet all we know of the Fred is that people were pre-agricultural.  The Kalahari Bushmen were pre-agricultural. So were the Northwest Coast Chiefdoms. Prior to 9000 years ago, all human societies were pre-agricultural.  A hunting-gathering-collecting adaptation was common and highly varied in our ethnological past. If you looked at the entirety of the California Indian societies, you would see a lot of diversity, but all of it would be put into the hunter-gatherer-collector bucket. So what I am saying is that although the Fred adaptation could reasonably be categorized as hunter-gatherer-collector, I don’t find it all that helpful.

Michael Stewart (2003) believes that taxonomy matters. I concur.

Any discussion or synthesis must begin with a consideration of how we have segmented regional prehistory (periods like Early and Middle Woodland), what we want these segments to mean (or what we think they mean), and the archaeological systematics that we have employed in their definition (primarily, the methods that we use for “telling time” on archaeological sites, especially those exposed at the surface…What is the point of periodization? What do we want these periods to be? Are they to be defined as times during which cultures exhibit common themes in lifestyle, or are they simply a way to chronologically organize our discussions of archaeological data, a common language that makes communication between researchers easier? In any case, using the periods as they now stand presents some real problems in terms of how we tell time (one aspect of archaeological systematics) and how we gauge and explain cultural change through time. (p.4-5)

I do believe he was referring to the Fred, as well as the Woodland, and Paleoindian periods.

Is the Fred Still Worth Keeping?

When one of our terms are challenged, we naturally give a harrumph and expend great effort in defending it, both its utility and pedigree.  This is not always wise.  To the degree we see ourselves as scientists, we should welcome any and all challenges to our word choices, and put the terms to that ultimate test of whether it economically conveys what it intends.  If it does, we should file that test in our memory banks. If it does not, we should sit down and rethink what it is we are trying to say so economically, but perhaps incorrectly.  If the term is offensive to one group or another, we should sit down again and more carefully evaluate our choice of words. Sometimes a simple adjustment can suffice, e.g. pre-contact for prehistoric.  However, even in this change, there is an implicit shift in thinking about what constitutes history.  So there actually may be no simple adjustments in language.  Words convey meaning, whether it is our intended meaning or not.

For argument’s sake, let’s keep the concept of a period that follows the Paleoindian and precedes the Woodland.  To continue for argument’s sake, let’s no longer call it the Archaic if we are asked to no longer do that.  Does a word swap, be it Fred or something possibly more descriptive (mid-Holocene?) solve our problem?  I have my doubts.

This period doesn’t have a clear beginning nor a clear end.  It continues to be characterized by what it is not (pre-ceramic) more than what it is characterized by.  Even within the cultural ecological paradigm, the period remains too long, too vague, too non-descriptive to really propel effective archaeological research or theorizing.

Some have suggested dropping the idea of a period entirely and just refer to dates or date ranges when discussing archaeological sites and assemblages. While this certainly could be effective in many cases, it does not scratch my cultural ecological itch and seems like a step back into the Boazian world.  Stewart is again correct insofar as the choice of a period and the terminology to describe that period should be tooled to the kinds of questions one is concerned with, and might actually vary depending on those questions.  Whether you trot out the Transitional may well depend on whether your focus is on how cultures became the Woodland, rather than what people were doing some 2,000 years earlier.

For those of us still interested in cultural evolution and cultural ecological adaptations, dropping the old term could actually be liberating.  If we took away the one-to-one hunter-gatherer-collector association, we might actually be forced to look at the data and try to figure out what people were actually doing. Perhaps we could start scratching away at the wide variety of adaptations and localized histories to either tell that story or build a more compelling multi-lineal evolutionary one.  This might be the unintended missive from Emerson and McElrath (2009) and a gift from groups that find offense in the term.

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