Hi all,
I am posting this on behalf of Joe JOSEPH and Mark Warner. This is the SHA response to the discussion about modifications to field recording practices in CRM in Utah and Wyoming. 
Best,
Tim
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We are writing on behalf of the Society for Historical Archaeology and want to share some deep reservations we have with the proposal to unilaterally eliminate an array of historical resources from any recoding requirements by archaeologists.
 
As anthropologists and cultural resource specialists, it is important to remember that we are recording cultural landscapes composed of individual sites and resources. Regardless of the eligibility of the individual resources, their broad patterns of distribution can yield insights on how the natural landscape was used by humans at various points in time, which in turn can better help us to understand both landscapes and sites.  The bulk of the effort in any survey is involved in the fieldwork itself, so failing to record certain classes of sites yields only minimal savings of time and funds, while compromising the data we have collected in perpetuity.  
 
It is also important to recognize that National Register significance is not static.  A resource’s evaluation today may not be the same in 25 or 50 years, so it is important that we have complete datasets to assess the frequency and meaning of various resource classes over time.  There was considerable debate in the Southeast in the 1970s over the need to record and evaluate tenant sites – at that time,tenant houses and their archaeological footprints were common occurrences dotting the rural landscape.  Today, tenancy has virtually ceased to exist and can no longer be read on the land. Fortunately, CRM archaeologists agreed to record these sites in their inventories and we thus have a record of their former presence and distribution.  Sites that may seem common and insignificant at the moment may ultimately become unusual and meaningful as markers of a time past. Indeed, much of the current research of environmental historians of the West focuses on systems that we, as archaeologists, encounter, and should record.
 
The National Historic Preservation Act and its implementing regulations provide mechanisms for states to assess and treat classes of resources as a whole, through the development of historic contexts and through Programmatic Agreements (PAs) with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation on resource eligibility and treatment.  The Department of Defense, for example, executed a PA for World War II Temporary Buildings that circumvented the need for installations to communicate with the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) on a case-by-case basis.  PAs for the eligibility and treatment of historic artifact scatters make sense from a regulatory basis.  Allowing individual surveyors not to record them does not.  Failing to record classes of resources diminishes the integrity of our inventories, can result in legal challenges to the inventory as whole, yields potential other biases (failing to inspect scatters may in turn eliminate the recognition of other site types co-occurring with scatters), and reverts resource evaluation to the surveyor rather than the agency and SHPO, where the authority is invested by law. 
 
Historic sites and historical archaeology are the tangible legacies of the majority of U.S. citizens.  Refusing to record certain types and classes sends a message to many Americans that we do not value their heritage, a heritage they have shown increasing interest in and support of through public outreach.  Eliminating classes of resources from survey has been presented as a means of improving the efficiency of the discipline; that is akin to improving our physical health by amputation.  Alternatively, there are a variety of technological improvements that we could make better use of to conduct our work more time and cost efficiently.  A smartphone app to record can scatters coupled with a PA on their eligibility and treatment as a class would allow us to collect and manage such resources with little expenditure of time and effort.  We all need to work to improve the health of our discipline and industry, but as President and President-Elect of the SHA, we recommend we do so through smarter and more efficientprocedures and collaborative discussions with archaeologists of all emphases, from the distant to the recent past.
 
JW Joseph and Mark Warner

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