Why We Shouldn’t Wait until a Project is Proposed

Summary

Tribal officials suggest the National Historic Preservation Act should more appropriately be called the National Mitigation Act. For several years we worked to develop policy to direct more effort into identification of areas of cultural concern even before projects proposals were received. We advocated production of appositely designed projects to reduce the amount of adverse effects and mitigation. This effort included encouraging the use of the planning process to assemble data and add protections to important areas. The recent rescission of the Bureau of Land Management’s Planning Rule creates challenges in our effort to refocus cultural resource management away from mitigation. In light of current administration policies to open lands for development, what can be done to protect important resources before a project is proposed? We will examine several available options.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20161