Archaeology and the Crooked Timber

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

-Immanuel Kant

Sometimes, despite the best of intentions, an idea was just never going to work out. Virtually every system or institution created to solve a problem is, to some degree, constructed on the sands of compromise; a footing that, sooner or later, is destined to give way.

I am a consulting archaeologist – which is to say an archaeologist for hire, in Ontario Canada. I work in the development industry to ensure that, before a project breaks ground, that ground is inspected for archaeological sites. If any are found, they are tested to determine their cultural heritage value. If that value is found to be lacking, they can be bulldozed away. If significance is demonstrated, those sites can either be protected (rarely) or excavated to remove them from harm’s way – which is, I suppose, another way of saying that they can be harmed, so long as it is done by professionals who thoroughly document their results.

Prior to the proclamation of the Ontario Heritage Act in the mid-1970’s, and the later integration of archaeological work into the land-use planning process, a landowner in this province had almost unlimited rights to alter, pillage, and outright destroy any archaeological sites that might be on their property. This didn’t sit well with many who wondered, uncomfortably, whether urban sprawl and infrastructure projects would leave us stranded in a concrete sea and alienated from our history. And so the archaeological consulting industry was born. Archaeologists, working for developers and proponents, would be hired to scour project lands for archaeological sites and, in the case of notable finds, remove them.

Because they were working in a development context, the procurement of archaeological services was handled in the same way as any other professionals might be. Like drywallers, roofers, framers, and plumbers, archaeologists were asked to bid on projects and, per the prescriptions of capitalism, work was typically awarded to the lowest bidder. This was problematic, of course, because unlike those other trades, archaeologists rarely know the scope of their work until it is already well underway. For we archaeologists, the object of our study is necessarily hidden – buried beneath the roads, fields, parking lots, and streetscapes of a landscape that we have been busily modifying for centuries. The net effect of this procurement structure has been that the margins in archaeological consulting are razor thin; if an archaeologist both “guesses” right about the archaeology of a property, and manages to outbid their competition, they can make money. If they guess wrong, they lose. There is little margin for error. As the old expression goes, “Some days you get the Bear. Some days the bear gets you.” Survival in the business meant that archaeologists had to develop a pretty comprehensive understanding of 12,000 years of land-use history in the province. But the industry as a whole was left with little room for frills such as living wages and job security. Accordingly, for much of its history it consisted primarily of a handful of year-round professionals supported by an army of low-paid, seasonal workers; largely students.

Over time, broader social changes made their mark on the archaeological consulting industry. In recent years, the business has found itself challenged by changes in the relationship between Canadian society and Indigenous peoples. Given that the first 12,000 years or so of the country’s history was exclusively Indigenous, it seemed like “justice” that the First Nations should be given more than mere “stakeholder” roles in determining how their archaeological legacy was to be explored, interpreted, and protected. Accordingly, in the last decade and a half, most major archaeological projects in Ontario have come to be conducted with some form of input from Indigenous communities. Sometimes that input takes place in terms of report review. Increasingly, we have seen those communities ask for community representation on archaeological field crews. The presence of these Indigenous community “monitors” on archaeological sites has improved the quality of the fieldwork being done by archaeological consultants and built bridges between the archaeological community, the development community, and the First Nations whose traditional and treaty rights (and sovereignty over their own archaeological past) is being impacted by development.

As an archaeologist, I am grateful that I have the ability to do what I do. Canada has far more million-dollar lottery winners than it has archaeologists and I count myself lucky to be among them. And yet, from the founding of the industry, its inherent contradictions have had, and continue to carry, the seeds of its own destruction within it.

While Indigenous participation in the industry is a genuinely positive development, clearly undertaken with the best of goodwill on all sides, it is an inescapable fact that the parameters under which the archaeological consulting industry operates are set by the provincial government. When archaeology must be done, who is allowed to do it, how the work must be conducted, which sites are considered significant (and which may be destroyed), and what happens to the artifacts afterward, are all determined by the province – which finds itself in an immediate conflict of interest because it is also charged with managing development, promoting growth, and supporting industry. Indigenous issues, however, are considered a Federal problem. Leaving aside the obvious fact that Canadian governments have a long history of placing Indigenous interests at the “back of the bus,” (with tragic consequences as detailed in the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada), placing the fox in charge of the henhouse has never been a winning strategy for constructing institutions that need to be fair and just.

The economic model on which the consulting industry is built, where archaeological work is estimated and procured in the manner of skilled trades acts as an amplifier on these contradictions. By placing archaeology with the other trades in the development industry, we have been thinking of it all wrong. The nature of archaeological fieldwork has much more in common with say, diagnostic medicine, than it does with carpet or ductwork installation. As noted above, those professionals have the benefit of having a reasonably complete understanding of the scope of the work that they are expected to do. Not so for archaeologists. We are seldom able to be completely certain of what may lie beneath the modern landscape until we have put a shovel into it. Here in Canada, no one looks for the “best deal” on oncological or surgical procedures. We look for the best oncologists and surgeons. Market capitalism may be a problem for hospital boards looking to source the best deals on air conditions and tongue depressors, but it is supposed to end before it reaches the person in the white coat. It must for the system to be fair.

In consulting archaeology, however, this is not the case. Archaeological contracts are routinely awarded to the lowest bidder, often by clients and procurements specialists who have little notion as to the difference between good work and poor – which, in turn brings us back around to the other problem. For over 400 years, successive Settler governments have engaged in sharp dealing with Indigenous communities. The First Nations have seen their land, their resources, and in the worst of cases their very persons, stolen by those Settler institutions. For a government to say, “Don’t worry, we will take care of your heritage for you” and then allow the exploration of that heritage to be raffled off to the lowest bidder is exactly on par with the myriad other interactions which see Indigenous peoples and their interests put behind those of Settler governments and Settlers. The system is not only lacking in justice, but structurally incapable of being just.

Despite this, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone in government, development, or archaeological consulting who is not keenly aware of, and sympathetic to, Indigenous interests. But structural problems need structural solutions and no one seems to be able to come up with any that do more than nibble at the edges of these concerns. Archaeology may have some qualities that make it analogous to health care, but there is little appetite for it to be nationalized. Similarly, training developers, proponents, and procurement specialists to be able to recognize “good” archaeology so that they can pay more for it seems like a tough sell. It may be that Indigenous communities, as they reach out to assert more stewardship over their own archaeological legacy, will find a solution that we have not. If nothing else, it would go some way to addressing the sharpest stone in our industry’s shoe.