I’m reviewing applications to destroy 67 archaeological sites for TransMountain pipeline. That’s just one 80 km stretch of a 1,150 km route.

It’s not a good day to be an archaeologist.

I’m supposed to review these proposed “site alterations” as a professional, from a perspective of heritage preservation and defence of Indigenous rights and title, and my professional opinion is: this is very sad.

Yes, these permits require some archaeological data recovery before the sites get nuked. They call it “mitigation” but that’s a weasel word. It’s land clearance. The proponent is buying the service of heritage removal.

Can doing a bit of archaeology mitigate this degree of loss?

This is statutory site destruction, it’s authorized by BC’s archaeology bureaucracy as a transaction: physical sites will be exchanged for data.

Tables of measurements, bags of artifacts, that will languish in museum storage.

And folks have the balls to call this “research”

All because a filthy oil pipeline, being built on the eve of catastrophic climate change, to line the pockets of capitalist vultures, is deemed to be a greater “public good” than millennia of Indigenous heritage.

Oh Canada.

I recognize that I am basically seen as a class traitor to archaeology/CRM for saying any of this, but I don’t live in a vacuum, and all of this just plainly sucks.

Be very wary of the language of “preservation” that’s used around commercial archaeology.