Controlling the Present; Selling Out the Past

The archeological site, known as ORA-64, which sat atop a bluff overlooking Newport Bay, no longer exists. This sad fact is the result of “contract science,” an all too common contractual agreement between land developers and archeologists to comply with legislative guidelines by “scientifically” investigating a prehistoric or historic site out of existence.

Harbor Cove (ORA-64), San Joaquin Hills (Newport Coast Archeological Project), Hellman Ranch, Bolsa Chica and countless other tracts cradling our region’s prehistory are either under relentless attack or already have succumbed to the development industry and their facilitators, the “contract scientists.”

Contract science, born in the environmental movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, was created as an offshoot of state and federal legislation established to protect the environment from increasing depredations by building and industry. This body of legislation was designed to “ameliorate adverse impacts” to natural, cultural and historical resources.

These efforts were supposed to ensure protection of important resources for ours and future generations. Avoidance, accommodation, conservation and preservation characterize the vocabulary and philosophy of these legislative mandates. However, in Orange County, and Southern California generally, where private property abounds and property rights hold sway, environmental issues and implementation of environmental law have in recent years deviated from this path. The best example being that of “contract archeology.”

Enter the world of Orwellian “newspeak.” Mitigation, the lingua franca of contract science, is the life-blood of contract archeologists and developers alike. Successfully negotiating the mitigation maze means happy hunting for the landowner/developer and full larders for the contract archeologist.

But what of the resource, the archeological site? What does “mitigation” mean for it? Extraction. Elimination. Extinction. This is the unfortunate fate for most archeological sites for which mitigation measures are applied. Preservation of the resource it seems is no longer an important part of the “cultural resource management” process where private land is concerned.

The view that scientific investigation is an acceptable alternative to the protection and preservation of sites is implicit in the day-to-day operations of most contract archeologists and is reflected in their recommendation to clients. These practitioners appear to have lost sight of one of the overarching themes in modern archeology: conservation of the resource. Good conservation requires preservation of sites, as well as thorough study. One without the other does little to enhance our knowledge and understanding of the past.

Where history is often revisionist one needs occasionally to revisit the sites to assess what information or meaning it holds for the current generation. It’s much easier for those who “control the present” to “control the past” if the past no longer exists. Archeologists are in a position to contribute significantly to the maintenance of a free and democratic society by simply assuring that there is a past to be studied. Collections of artifacts and records of their extraction are only a part of that past, a part that cannot supplant the actual physical record existing in the ground. This bank of prehistory is being depleted and replaced by mutable, and often unverifiable, historical narratives.

During the last three decades, archeology by contract has increased as a portion of prehistory. The result has been the creation of an unholy trinity consisting of industry, archeologist and the past. I would argue the loser in this uneasy triumvirate is the latter. Archeologists are too willing to capitulate to the client and regularly form cozy consulting relationships with developers. In the arena of environmental preservation, these practices cannot be tolerated. They invariably compromise the archeological resources in question. Careful scrutiny is required on the part of a concerned archeological community and the public if things are to improve.

If the early promises of the environmental movement are ever to have meaning for the few remaining archeological sites of the Southern California coast, two things must happen. First, cultural resources must cease to be viewed as impediments to progress. Such an outlook only entrenches the quid pro quo between developers and contract archeologists. Under these conditions, mitigation studies seem to be mere autopsies conducted on sites pronounced dead by the real estate industry. Second, archeologists need to be cultural preservationists, first and foremost, not handmaidens to the destruction of our shared cultural heritage. We must stand actively for site preservation. Preservation, not simply mitigation, must be the goal of any true “cultural resource management.”