Archeology Today: ‘Digging for Dollars’? : Science: Some question practices of consultants builders hire to catalogue artifacts on land in O.C., elsewhere.

In the movies, archeologists are usually professors in pith helmets, whacking trails through the jungle.

In real life, though, they’re as likely to have a Chamber of Commerce membership and a payroll to meet. These days, archeology--the science of “gods, graves and scholars”--is a half-billion-dollar-a-year business.

The boom started 24 years ago when the federal government began demanding environmental impact reports on federal projects. A year later, California required many private developers building on their own land to file reports. Now, before the bulldozers roll, the government wants to know whether arrowheads or shards of pottery lie in the path of progress--questions only an archeologist can answer.

But as archeology has moved out of the ivory tower, the academics suspect that some of their colleagues in the consulting business--at the very least--cut corners to hike their profits.

At worst, consulting archeologists have been suspected of not reporting what they find, so the developer who hires them won’t have to stop and dig up the artifacts while the interest piles up on the construction loan.

More cynical archeologists have a name for these practices: “digging for dollars.”

“It’s no secret,” says Ricardo J. Elia, Boston University’s expert on archeological consulting, “that there are a lot of people around the country doing work that’s substandard.”

“After all, it’s usually not in the developer’s interest to find these things.”

A few years ago, the federal government decided to have a look at the state reports that archeologists must file after a dig. It wound up scolding the state Office of Historic Preservation in Sacramento for approving reports that were “minimally acceptable.”

Lynn H. Gamble, who as head of the Archaeological Information Center at UCLA reviews archeological reports for all digs in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties, concludes: “A lot of them are sloppy. There’s a real problem with it.”

California has 800 archeologists, more than any other place in the world. Half of them are full-time consultants.

Their firms range from one person eking a living out of a spare bedroom to the 200 people that Infotec Research Inc. in Fresno employs during its busy summer season.

They aren’t here because California archeology is sexy. There are no ruined temples or dead cities to discover. The Indians who first arrived at least 10,000 years ago lived simply, hunting and gathering food.

The consultants are here because the laws caused tens of millions of developers’ dollars to be pumped into archeological research. Ironically, although no more than 300,000 Indians lived in California at any one time, they have been studied more intensely than many better-known tribes.

Most of that research, the consultants like to note, has been done by them. In following environmental laws to the letter, they’ve wrenched so many beads and arrowheads and pots from the earth that museums and historical societies are running out of places to put them.

Consultants also resent the contempt in which they are held by some university archeologists, many of whom consult part time themselves.

Says Carol R. Demcak, president of a consulting company in Anaheim called Archaeological Resource Management Corp.: “I could tell you a number of academic archeologists who go out and excavate and never even file the required report to let people know what they’ve found.”

However well-intentioned, the state law has some problems. Cities and counties determine how tightly they want to regulate archeology. Some are pretty good, say archeologists; some have rules so vague as to be more or less on the honor system.

Also, state law says nothing about who can be a consultant.

“You can be a cabdriver and hang out a shingle as a consulting archeologist,” complains Michael J. Moratto, president of Infotec Research.

“There are many horror stories of people coming right off the street and starting to consult.”

Moratto is past president of the Society of Professional Archeologists, formed to police ethics in the burgeoning consulting business.

But SOPA, as it’s called, hasn’t been very effective. For one thing, only 600 or so of the nation’s 11,000 archeologists belong. And Moratto admits that SOPA can be “timid.”

Only once in its 17 years has it bounced someone out. It didn’t seem to hurt: That archeologist is still doing business.

Of the 150,000 archeological sites discovered in California, a few caused quite a stir:

* Consider the village of Puvungna, the center of a cult that worshiped the god Chinichnich. Part of it may lie under what until recently had been an organic garden on a narrow swath of campus at Cal State Long Beach. The college wants to lease the site to a developer for a shopping complex and condos.

Cal State declared late last year that there was nothing of significance buried under the garden, even though a study by one of the university’s own archeologists said there probably was.

When reminded that the plot has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1974--and that its own files on the land bulge with archeologists’ reports--the university claimed it had made “a mistake.” A lawsuit put the project on hold after the university ordered another study.

* There’s the shopping center in the small town of Paso Robles, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The developer wanted to level a knoll that Chumash Indians believe contains the bones of their ancestors. The town recently beat one lawsuit--in which one of the developer’s archeologists alleged that the developer tried to get him to alter his findings--and the city settled another with the Indians. Under this compromise, the knoll, which was probably created by farming, will be flattened; but bones or artifacts found there will be moved to a nearly one-acre plot that will remain undisturbed.

* In 1990, the Mission Viejo Co. was grading a road in south Orange County when its backhoes churned up the broken bones of baleen whales, fish, a dolphin and a sea lion. The company’s consultant, in this case a paleontologist, had left them in the roadbed because, he said, they didn’t seem unusual enough to pick up.

The city of Laguna Niguel--atop one of the richest fossil beds in the nation--brought in the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the L.A. County Natural History Museum for his opinion. The upshot: The consultant, Archaeological Resource Management Corp., was ordered to pick up all the fossils.

In Orange County, fossils like these go to a warehouse in Santa Ana that was once used to store voter records, but now is home to thousands of arrowheads, stone knives, shells, even teeth from crocodiles that lived 45 million years ago.

Half the 1,300 recorded archeological and paleontological sites in Orange County no longer exist.

Until recently, the county didn’t even have detailed records of what it housed. Most of the local archeologists and paleontologists call the place “a disgrace.”

And it’s by no means the shabbiest place important finds have been housed.

A few years ago, the General Accounting Office found that the federal government couldn’t begin to account for all the fossils and artifacts that had been dug up on its lands and lugged off somewhere.

Even when the government did know where the material was, that didn’t mean it was safe. Some of it wound up in sagging cardboard boxes stacked on top of each other in damp basements or unheated garages.

The University of Utah told the GAO the only space it had left was a World War II barracks where part of the roof had fallen in. The basement that a New Mexico museum used to store artifacts flooded in heavy rains.

The federal government has the toughest rules on saving artifacts and fossils from construction. Since the Western states have millions of acres of federal land, a vast flow of material has inundated Western museums.

Says Raymond H. Thompson, director of the state museum in Arizona: “Museums that used to get a few cardboard beer boxes of artifacts a year are getting a couple tractor-trailer trucks’ worth now.”

The largest single cache of materials in California in the last five years was hauled up from a bare stretch of windswept hills looming over Coast Highway near Newport Beach. The land was being readied for $2-million houses that would overlook a pair of golf courses and as many as four hotels.

The builder, the Irvine Co., owns about a sixth of Orange County in a belt of tens of thousands of acres that straddle the county from the mountains to the ocean.

For this project, the company would destroy 32 different spots where Indians had lived; before it could build, they had to be researched. (Another one is now buried intact under a golf course.)

The company eventually ponied up $6 million for archeological consulting to an engineering firm called Keith Cos., which had never done a dig before.

It was nothing less than the largest dig ever done on the West Coast. And it didn’t quite go according to plan.

At several rock shelters, there was so much more material than expected that the crews dug up several tons of shells, fishhooks, beads and animal bones mixed with trash like pebbles and dirt.

After taking out some of the useful stuff to study in the laboratory, Keith Cos. simply boxed up the rest, including the dirt and pebbles, in 2,400 cardboard boxes and sent it along to the county warehouse in Santa Ana. There were so many boxes that the county had to get three tractor-trailer-sized cargo containers to hold them all.

Turning in material that hasn’t been analyzed is generally considered a shoddy practice in archeology. So is accepting it.

On the other hand, the material had been saved from the bulldozer; there was no place else to put it, and it would probably be of some use to researchers someday.

Keith blames archeologist Michael Macko, who quit in the middle of the project, for digging up so much material that it will take years and perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars to thoroughly study it all.

Macko concedes it wasn’t possible to study everything. But, he says, the engineering firm could have put at least a little more of the $6 million it was paid into research.

As for the material, it’s slowly being sifted from the debris by volunteers. It will take years--unless the county lands a $350,000 federal grant to hire help. So far it has been unsuccessful.

At least that material is accounted for. In 1987, Chambers Group Inc., a well-known Irvine consulting firm, dug up an old Mexican rancho in a Fountain Valley park.

After passing through the hands of several consultants, the collection of glass, ceramics and metal objects has disappeared.

Gary S. Hurd, a consulting archeologist, accused Chambers of losing the material and complained to the Society of Professional Archaeologists.

In March, SOPA declined to investigate. It said it didn’t have enough information to figure out who was telling the truth about how the objects disappeared. At Chambers Group, director of cultural resources Philip de Barros didn’t want to discuss it.

Says Hurd: “Eighty percent of the funding for archeology in North America now comes from contracts, not grants for academics. It is the greatest archeological opportunity since the excavation of Troy.

“We shouldn’t blow it like this.”