Introduction

“CRM archaeology is so boring. We never find anything other than flakes. I wish we could find something cool.” -some archaeological field technician, probably.

The above statement is a paraphrased version of a complaint that I have heard all too often, over my decade of experience in the CRM (cultural resources management) industry. It’s a sentiment that I have voiced myself, especially when I was younger. But now that I’ve had time to think and grow, I would like to offer this rebuttal to my former self:

“Even if you did encounter something ‘cool’ in the field—if you were to come across some revolutionary discovery that could re-write the textbooks—would you know it when you see it? Or would you walk right over it without even noticing it?”

For the vast majority of archaeological field technicians, the answer to the first question is probably “no.” They wouldn’t know an earth-shattering discovery if they saw it. We complain that we never find anything other than flakes, but often, we don’t know how to recognize much of anything else. And that wouldn’t be a problem if we were willing to learn new things, but all too often, we’re ignorant of how ignorant we are—we’re not even self-aware enough to recognize (and fix) the gaps in our own knowledge.

Before I go any further, I need to back up and explain a few things for the average reader. This blog is aimed towards archaeological field technicians working in the CRM industry, as well as anthropology students thinking about becoming field technicians after they graduate. But such a narrow readership will necessarily share a narrow body of knowledge that does not belong to the general public, and I would like to make this blog as understandable to the general public as possible. So before I delve too deeply into the intricacies of CRM archaeology, I need to get the average reader up to speed.

In fact, I should probably start by explaining what “archaeology” is, because apparently, this is not common knowledge in the United States. Archaeology is the scientific study of past human cultures through the analysis of physical remains, such as man-made artifacts, human remains, and any plant or animal remains associated with human activity. In the popular imagination, archaeology is often conflated with paleontology, the study of extinct lifeforms (such as dinosaurs). Everyone from Clive Cussler to Cracked.com has mistakenly claimed that archaeologists dig up dinosaur fossils. But that isn’t what we do. Archaeologists study people.

In North America, archaeology is a subfield of anthropology, which is often vaguely defined as the “study of people,” but I think it would be more accurately described as the study of human diversity. This may come as a surprise to some international readers (if I have any), because in many countries, archaeology stands alone as its own discipline. I will try to briefly explain why archaeology would be affiliated with anthropology in some countries, but not others. Anthropology began as the study of so-called “primitive” peoples around the world, especially in places such as Australia, New Guinea, and sub-Saharan Africa. If that sounds vaguely racist, it originally was. In the Western Hemisphere, anthropologists such as Franz Boas and A.L. Kroeber focused their efforts on recording Native American cultures, which meant that American anthropology has largely been the study of Native Americans. Because Native Americans have lived in the Western Hemisphere for at least 16,000 years (and possibly much longer), the bulk of North America’s human history belongs to the Indigenous people. Archaeology is the study of the human past, and thus, American archaeology—like American anthropology—is largely concerned with Native American cultures. That is why North American archaeology was subsumed under the larger field of anthropology. Meanwhile, in European countries, archaeologists have traditionally studied aspects of European history, such as the material culture of ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. European history has typically not fallen under the purview of anthropology, until recently. Thus, European archaeology often stands alone as a separate academic discipline, though it may be closely affiliated with history or classical studies in some universities.

The only reason I bothered to specify that North American archaeology is a subfield of anthropology is because it may come up later. This blog will occasionally make reference to “anthropology majors” becoming field archaeologists, and that might not make sense to the average reader unless said reader understands that archaeology can be a major source of employment (though not a particularly lucrative one) for people with anthropology degrees. The casual reader might also find it useful to know that North American archaeology is largely (but not entirely) the study of Native Americans; otherwise the remainder of this blog will not make much sense.

If you’re a little ahead of the learning curve, you might have already known most of this. If so, good for you! But there’s a little more you need to know before the beginning of this blog starts to make sense.

In the United States, most professional archaeologists work within an industry known as “cultural resources management,” or “CRM” for short. CRM archaeologists are paid to help private companies and government agencies comply with the federal laws that protect historic properties. More specifically, we help people comply with Sections 106 and 110 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) of 1966. Sometimes the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970 also comes into play, because that legislation also contains some language that protects archaeological sites. But I’m going to focus on the NHPA.

Section 106 of the NHPA is the main catalyst for employment in cultural resources management. This piece of legislation requires that any construction project be preceded by an archaeological survey if the project meets one of the following three criteria:

1. Uses federal funding

2. Occurs on federal land

3. Requires a federal permit

These criteria encompass a wide variety of development projects, including (but not limited to) oil and gas pipelines, transmission lines, wind farms, highway re-routes, etc. All of these kinds of construction projects entail some kind of ground disturbance with heavy machinery, such as backhoes and bulldozers.

Backhoes and bulldozers destroy archaeological sites. The individual artifacts may survive intact, but they no longer have any context if they’ve been removed by machinery, and thus they yield little scientific value. An archaeological site is not just a collection of artifacts. An archaeological site is a piece of land where artifacts have remained mostly in situ—that is, they are still lying in roughly the same spot where they were left by the people who last used them. We learn about the past by documenting artifacts in situ, in much the same way that crime scene investigators learn about the past by studying physical evidence in situ at a crime scene. If evidence has been removed by an unqualified individual, it is no longer in situ, and thus the chain of custody has been broken, meaning that the evidence might not be admissible in court.

Artifacts are never perfectly in situ, because nature can move things around over thousands of years. At that time scale, soil behaves like a fluid. But there’s a big difference between a plant root that pushes an artifact 15 cm. deeper into the earth, and a backhoe that scoops up artifacts and randomly deposits them in fill dirt at a construction site in a nearby city. The point is that construction activity can eradicate any scientific context that an artifact may have once had.

And this is why federal law requires that some construction projects be preceded by an archaeological survey. During an archaeological survey, a team of archaeological field technicians will investigate tracts of land that are slated for construction, and document any archaeological sites within the APE (area of potential effects). Most of the sites they find will probably not be significant enough to merit legal protection. But in some cases, the client may be advised to route their project area away from significant archaeological resources. In rare cases, the client may even be required to fund a data recovery—a large-scale excavation that seeks to extract as much information from a site as possible, before it can be destroyed.

That is a brief overview of the Section 106 process. It gets much more complicated, but that’s enough for now. Section 110 of the NHPA also requires archaeological surveys, but not necessarily due to impending construction projects. Section 110 simply mandates that federal agencies actively make an effort to locate historic properties on the land they manage. This means that the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Bureau of Land Management will occasionally hire teams of field technicians to survey land within their jurisdictions.

Teams of archaeological field technicians (or “field techs,” as we often call ourselves) often discover “new” archaeological sites during these routine surveys. “New” to science, that is—but not new to the ancient people who actually made the sites, and often, not new to the farmers and ranchers who actually live on the land. Most of these sites are not particularly noteworthy to archaeologists, because they don't yield a lot of new information, but the descendants of the people who made these sites may value them for other reasons.

We often find pre-Columbian Native American sites (places that were occupied by Native Americans before European contact). Most of these sites are what we call “lithic scatters.” A lithic scatter is simply a place where fragments of lithic debitage—or knapping debris—are scattered across the ground. Native Americans made a variety of chipped stone tools, such as projectile points (arrowheads and spearheads), knives, scrapers, gravers, hoes, and drills, and they made these tools through a process known colloquially as “flint knapping,” whereby they slowly chipped away pieces of sharp stone until they had fashioned their flint into the desired shape. The sharp stone chips that are left over from this process are known as lithic debitage, but field techs often refer to them simply as “flakes.” The production (and occasional re-sharpening) of a chipped stone tool can leave behind dozens or even hundreds of these stone flakes, making lithic debitage the most common type of surviving pre-Columbian artifact.

Figure 1. Dorsal side of lithic debitage, showing flake removal scars. Flaked from Burlington chert.

Figure 2. Ventral side of lithic debitage, showing bulb of percussion

This is often what archaeologists find in the field during their routine surveys—dozens and dozens of flakes of debitage. In my experience, debitage constitutes about 99% of the pre-Columbian artifacts I’ve personally found (I've been doing this so long that I've found a variety of other kinds of artifacts as well, but debitage is by far the most common). Occasionally we find the finished stone tools themselves, often broken. If we’re lucky, we might even find pottery or bone tools. But when it comes to pre-Columbian Native American artifacts, we seldom find anything other than lithics, pottery, and the occasional bone, because these are the materials that do not decompose. Native Americans used a wide variety of organic materials during their everyday lives, ranging from wooden dugout canoes to birch bark wigwams, but most of these things are long gone, having decomposed centuries ago. Often, all that is left behind to mark a person’s presence is a loose scatter of chipped stone flakes where somebody was making or sharpening a tool.

This has led some field techs to glumly resign themselves to a fate of never finding anything other than debitage and the occasional broken stone tool. One of my former supervisors once summarized our entire profession as “digging holes and looking for shiny rocks.” Another one of my supervisors once said that you can learn everything you need to know about CRM over the course of a single summer.

And this brings us to my motive for writing this blog, because I believe this attitude is completely fallacious, and not only detrimental to science, but disrespectful to the Indigenous cultures we claim to care about. It is a fallacy to assume that you only need to know about the most common type of artifact you expect to find. You may assume that you will mainly just find debitage over the course of a survey, and that assumption would probably be correct, but if you don’t keep your eyes peeled for other things, you could walk right over something far more significant without ever knowing about it.

The surviving cultural material of pre-Columbian Native Americans consists of far more than just fragments of broken stone, though this may seem to be its most common manifestation. Every region has its own unique kinds of material remains, and field techs should be familiar with the cultural material of each region in which they work. In the Great Basin, the ancestors of the Shoshone used juniper branches to build large corrals, into which they drove herds of pronghorn antelope during their communal antelope hunts. Nevada’s desert climate has preserved many of these antelope traps in place, despite the fact that they are made of wood. Meanwhile, on the Northern Plains, Native Americans built a variety of surface features, such as cairns, stone circles, medicine wheels, and stone alignments in the shapes of animals or constellations. Not only are these informative, but they are often sacred. It takes time and experience to be able to notice and identify any of these things. There is far more than can be learned in a single summer, and to think otherwise is to underestimate the diversity and complexity of prehistoric Native American cultures, even with the understanding that most of their material belongings have not been preserved. Furthermore, there is a difference between “learning” about something and becoming proficient at it. Proficiency requires more than a summer’s worth of practice.

And some artifacts and features are significant precisely because they are so uncommon. Some time ago, a strange clay artifact was recovered from a village site known as the Uncas site in northern Oklahoma, and it sat in a curation facility for years, because nobody knew what it was. Only recently did archaeologist Susan Vehik realize that it is a star chart representing the Pleiades. I have a great deal of experience doing fieldwork on the Great Plains, especially in Oklahoma, and I have never seen a pre-Columbian Native American star chart. Or at least, I don’t believe I have. But even if I had found something like this in the field, would I have known what it was? Would I have even recognized it as a prehistoric artifact, or would I have simply tossed it aside? I certainly would not have known immediately that it was a star chart.

And that’s why I wish I could ask my former self this question: “Even if you found something more significant than a flake or a stone tool, would you know it when you see it? Or would you walk right over it without even realizing it? Do you know enough about Native American cultures to even have a grasp of what you don’t know?”

These are questions I would also like to ask every beginning field tech, if I could do so without sounding rude. Hell, it’s a question I would like to ask a few of my former supervisors, some of whom managed to advance in CRM without learning more than the bare minimum necessary to do their jobs. As a general rule, we CRM archaeologists are not even aware of our own ignorance.

Unfortunately, our ignorance extends to other areas as well. Because archaeology is (supposed to be) a science, archaeologists should know about more than just the artifacts themselves—we should also know at least a little bit about the taphonomic and geological processes that affect artifacts after they were left behind by their last owners. For example, it is very useful to know that artifacts left on a floodplain can be covered by successive layers of alluvial deposits, causing them to be buried deep below the modern ground surface (sometimes multiple meters deep). Archaeologists who lack this knowledge will probably not test very deeply into the ground when they survey floodplains, and they will almost certainly miss any deeply buried sites below their feet. Ironically, these deeply buried sites have great potential to be significant, because they’ve been protected from plowing and other destructive activities at the surface. But many CRM archaeologists don’t know much about geology, and worse still, don’t understand why they should learn about it.

Even if you don't find anything more than a paltry few flakes during a survey, statistically, those flakes represent more than most of us would initially realize. If you are surveying a parcel with limited ground visibility, you may have to resort to subsurface testing to locate buried artifacts. The standard subsurface testing method is "shovel testing." Even if you dig a shovel test every 15 meters, and each shovel test is at least half a meter wide (which is required in some states, but not always properly executed in the field), your sample size is still a little less than a tenth of 1% of the entire topsoil volume. With a sample size like that, even digging large shovel tests at 15-meter intervals, you probably won't find anything but the most common type of artifact during the initial survey. The site below your feet could contain any number of interesting and informative artifacts and features, but statistically, your first visit might not yield anything other than a few flakes. As a field tech participating in an archaeological survey, you have to remember that you are in the exploratory phase of archaeology. You are looking for sites that no one else knows about, by looking for clues that most people can't recognize, and with a little luck, those clues might eventually lead you to something truly significant.

In a nutshell, CRM archaeologists like to complain that they never find anything “cool,” but even if they do have the opportunity to find something significant, there’s a good chance they will miss it--either because they don’t know enough about the local cultural material, or because they don’t know enough about the physical sciences to properly test their survey areas.

I am firmly convinced that CRM archaeologists need to do better. It’s easy to get away with doing a bad job in archaeology, because if we fail to locate an archaeological site during a survey, chances are that nobody else will find it before it’s destroyed. A backhoe operator won’t notice he’s excavating through an unrecorded lithic scatter that the archaeologists missed. In most professions, your bad work is noticed quickly (and hopefully rectified) if the product or service you provide is dysfunctional in some way. When I was a steel fabricator, all the machine parts I fabricated had to be made correctly, or they simply wouldn’t fit right—and the people assembling them would notice if they didn’t fit right. But there are usually no such consequences if an archaeologist does bad work, which means that archaeologists can consistently do bad work without much in the way of negative feedback. This may be appealing to some—a chance to expend a mediocre effort without being held to high standards. But not to me. I think archaeologists should be held to higher standards. Archaeologists fancy themselves as the protectors of cultures that are not their own, and many Native Americans who actually belong to those cultures probably find that to be offensive. Our general incompetence can only make this more offensive. It’s arrogant enough that we tell Indigenous people that our expertise and education allow us the insight necessary to preserve their heritage. My opinion is this—if you willingly take on such a task, you had better make damned sure you don’t fail. Because this is the sort of task in which, if you can’t do it well, it’s better if you don’t do it at all.

The general public may not care much about this, but those readers who are in my target audience—namely, archaeological field technicians and anthropology students—may be feeling slightly offended by now. To be clear, I’m not trying to denigrate you, your colleagues, or your profession. But I do think the profession as a whole is due for a reckoning. I’ve known too many field archaeologists who proudly wear the mantle of “scientist” while generally being scientifically illiterate. And I’ve spent enough time in graduate school to know that anthropology programs (especially at the graduate level) do not impart a lot of practical (or even “factual”) information to students. Knowing Marshall Sahlins’ definition of a “chiefdom,” or being able to interpret a body of theoretical literature from a Marxian perspective, is not going to help you notice a sacred medicine wheel while you’re walking over the open range on the Northern Plains. The formal education that is offered by universities is not particularly useful to field archaeologists. One of the best field archaeologists I’ve ever known was a math major who, as far as I can tell, never took an anthropology class.

If I have one piece of advice for students or young field techs going into CRM, it is this—keep learning all the time. Keep learning about the earth and the people who lived on it. The whole purpose of this blog is to provide useful information for field techs, so they can avoid the mistakes being perpetrated every day within the CRM industry. But the truth is, you will never know which information is useful until you’ve made mistakes that could have been avoided if you had better knowledge (or better practice). At least you can still learn from my mistakes. The following blog posts will contain a combination of information from reputable sources and anecdotes from my own personal experience—so not exactly fit for peer review, but ideally, still more reliable than some of your crew chiefs.

Updated April 11, 2024