I personally often think that if the laws were being followed there would be
more work, when I have no work or I am told that the project I worked on
along the St. Lawrence Seaway, was the only archaeology project being done,
to the client's internal reviewer, who was just back from the Colorado
River. I am not sure what that reflected at the time but I have some
theories, some of which have come to pass as newer guidelines in the review
process.

Another part of the puzzle to me has been the decentralization of projects
which once had archaeology as a component, i.e., public sewerage treatment
became a local responsibility, and the Federal funds were last spent on a
project called Tri-Municipal Sewer Treatment, which became Bi- and then
Mono, and later a corruption trial, partly in the County park deemed for it,
though one of the earliest known settlements along the Hudson River,
complete with the cemetery thought to be 1/4 acre actually 1/2 acre even
though a local resident had provided evidence to the Tri- project she said.
In legal terms, the fact the gravestones had been moved and replaced and
then their lcation lost over a number of years as the park was used as a
"juvenile farm" and other uses, did not help the archaeology, and the plots
were impacted by the bulldozers, and remediated later, with the distrubed
remains reburied in a Dutch Reformed ceremony. I had worked on various
phases of this project, some under a greenhouse in the winter with a
generator on a toboggan.

So partly, I think it is evolving as a process, though some of the work has
often not involved Federal funds per se, but the guidelines to preservation
or mitigation of cultural resources has helped creat the background for it.
As the Advisory Council in the US changes (unknown appointees of a current
Presidential term to my knowledge, "found out" or "discovered" in the next
administration) its criteria, I think there has been more knowledge of the
process but not necessarily more work it seems from where I am sitting. All
sorts of other conflicts however are still around, labor laws and practices,
procedures, repositories, distribution, "errors and omissions" (and
so-called), etc.

George Myers