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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.
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?
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”
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.
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.
