Awareness is indeed one of the beneficial results of contracting.
 
Cynics will say that a contract archaeologist will find significance
anywhere that might result in a data recovery contract. Maybe that's so.
Maybe we dig sites that really aren't significant, just because some
fat-cat agency, lusting after a permit, will do anything to keep us quiet.
 
Oh, do I ever wish it worked that way in the real world!
 
I'd have a new Land Rover.
 
In fact, however, contract archaeology has forced a lot of attention on
sites that could have been ignored. In my experience, contracts have
provided me with research avenues I could never have dreamed.
 
For example, Delaware tomato canneries were common as fleas on a dog until
fairly recently, when canning gave way to freezing and the tomato fields
went to soybeans and subdivisions, now our main crops. Historians had
ignored the canning industry, except as a column on the economic
statistics, and the technologies were quick disappearing both from the
factories and from the memory of the population.
 
When DelDOT decided to run a road through a nineteenth-century cannery
site, the SHPO was cool at best to the idea of digging the site. I was able
to convince him that the industry had huge impact and that it had not been
studied from the physical (i.e. archaeological) point of view. Our final
report not only contained comparisons of catsup recipes, but a directory of
the state's canneries and considerable data about can-making technology.
This report, in turn, inspired the SHPO to commission a context paper for
the canning industry.
 
The standards and guidelines require CRM reports to consider the background
and the larger picture in which a site exists. If we exercise that
requirement, we can actually control the direction of research and
awareness. We can even influence people. Too frequently, CRM is done in
blinders, which results in narrow thinking, narrow writing, and even
narrower usefulness.  If we are writing about people, we are writing about
all aspects of them, including their genealogy, their skills, their
economic activities, and whatever we can find about their hopes and
aspirations.
 
Sometimes we can even influence the course of future human history.
 
Another series of DOT projects brought us into contact with the history and
genealogy of a local Native American isolate community. Five published
reports and fourteen years later, the community has become organized and is
seeking official tribal recognition. Our "discovery" of the community in
the course of CRM has helped these people to develop their self-awareness.
Our latest CRM site report contains a biographical directory of Native
American population in Kent County, Delaware, during the eighteenth
century. It's not strictly archaeology, but it is very much in keeping with
the spirit and the letter of CRM.
 
Unfortunately, most sponsors are not as open-handed or publicity-sensitive
as the Delaware Department of Transportation. This summer they have
conducted two  major  prehistoric  excavations with public participation,
fancy brochures, and conferences on site. The payback to DelDOT has been
significant, and the contribution to public acceptance of CRM has been
gratifying.
 
It helps to be able to see around corners once in a while.
 
Fifteen years ago I was told by a state preservation official (himself an
archaeolgist) that there were no valid research questions associated with
digging up European-American graves.
 
Times change, and so do we.
 
 
    _____
___(_____)                When all is said and done,
|Baby the\                there is too frequently
|1969 Land\_===__         more said than done.
   ___Rover   ___|o
|_/ . \______/ .  ||
 __\_/________\_/________________________________________________
Ned Heite, Camden, DE  http://home.dmv.com/~eheite/index.html