Introduction

The archaeology of contaminated or toxic places can be, and often is, dangerous. It behooves the practitioner to be clear as to why and how it is done. As an arena that permits little room for knee-jerk solutions based on blind adherence to popular theories or paradigms, it also forces the profession, and regulatory agencies, to address some basic questions of feasibility and safety. Are traditional approaches and generally accepted field techniques adequate? Or, are some cases of compliance too difficult, too dangerous, and too costly and beyond the technical and logistical capabilities of the profession? Can the work be done to the highest standards without watering down quality, precision and range of recorded information? The premise of this chapter is, ‘Yes’, archaeology can be done safely, to the highest standards, and without scientific or regulatory compromise.

This overview will draw from two recent examples of emergency rescue archaeology in extreme settings, one site highly contaminated and the other damaged by natural disaster. Both illustrate the uses of applied technology to provide enhanced levels of data control in restricted time frames so as to do justice to the damaged or soon-to-be-lost resource. While the individual technologies may be transitory and quickly superceded by new innovations, the strategic and tactical reasoning behind them is not. Accordingly, the following case studies will highlight not the specifics of these strategies, but rather the assumptions, mandates and rationale behind their implementation.

Legal and Regulatory Mandates

The archaeological investigation of contaminated or hazardous environments generally takes place because it is mandated by law. As a result, major discoveries, including the two discussed here, were made in heavily developed, disturbed, and contaminated or toxic contexts. It is likely that many of these localities would not have come about without the ‘blind eye’, or - to be precise - the ‘regulatory objectivity of the law’. With the passing of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 (NHPA), agencies within the United States began undertaking evaluation studies to guarantee that significant archaeological resources are either avoided or documented before government monies or permits are granted. This early legislation addressed funded or licensed undertakings, but did not specifically mandate the need to address archaeology in contaminated or dangerous places.

The expansion of legal protections for work in dangerous and toxic environments came about between 1976 and 1986 through a series of new laws. In 1976, Congress passed the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and in 1980 the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) commonly known as ‘Superfund’, to mandate Federal management, response and funding to address environmental hazards. The Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986 (SARA) provided increased funding and required all Superfund actions to consider existing State and Federal environmental laws and regulations (see Environmental Impact Assessment and the Law), as well, including, by extension, the need to study the archaeology of contaminated settings. These new regulations mandated that all archaeologists and specialists receive hazardous materials training (HAZMAT) and be medically monitored as a separate set of considerations on top of standard archaeological tasks and guidelines.

In the 1970s and the early 1980s most emergency field situations were due to unexpected ‘discoveries under construction’. As of the late 1980s, however, unlikely and often heavily disturbed landscapes became venues of emergency and archaeological excavation in major Superfund projects to remove potentially dangerous chemical and radioactive contamination. The criteria for investigation and evaluation stayed the same: How big is the site? How deep is it? What are its limits? Is it significant under local, regional or national criteria? Can the project be redesigned to avoid or minimize impacts? How these levels of definition were achieved required the adaptation of new approaches and a re-evaluation of the traditional timing and scheduling of archaeological tasks.

These new health and safety mandates added several critical new logistical considerations to the planning and organization of archaeological investigations:

1. The need to work in ‘all-weather conditions’ regardless of season and temperature,

2.  The need to implement ‘non-random site testing and definition strategies’ that reduce the likelihood of chance encounters with dangerous areas or objects,

3.  The need to have immediate data control over number, function and age, as well as the relative conservation and stabilization needs of excavated materials,

4.  The need to ‘use remote recording’ technology to reduce the ‘duration, level of exposure, and proximity’ of the archaeologist to contaminated and dangerous objects or contexts, and

5.  The serous health and safety consequences of bad judgment, poor planning, or inappropriate techniques.

Finally, it can be said that while the structure and standards of archaeology are the same, the time frames for traditional tasks - planning, mobilization, deployment, excavation, data processing, analysis, documentation, and reporting - are generally severely compressed. They are commonly reduced from months or years down to, at times, weeks or days.

Assumptions and Antecedents

The baseline assumption behind each of the technologies and strategies discussed is that archeological evidence and resources are primarily three-dimensional, geospatial and quantified. This ‘geospatial’ view thus treats an archaeological site as ‘a stratified series of geo-referenced planes, deposits, or surfaces’, or simply put, as ‘a digital layer cake through time’. Given this set of premises, and regardless of the individual technologies involved, the following strategies use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as the primary organizational framework for the control and analysis of all of archaeological evidence, geophysical results, and existing conditions, surveys, etc., each treated as a layer in a scaled series of superimposed maps (see Remote Sensing Approaches: Geophysical).

Two archaeological strategies have been consistently applied to facilitate, and expedite, the safe and cost-effective compliance with preservation laws and standards: (1) ‘Technologies for safe discovery and definition’: GIS and air photo image processing (remote sensing), coupled with, non-random, target-specific geophysical survey to avoid ‘flying blind’ in dangerous places and (2) ‘Technologies for safe remote documentation’: High-speed, noncontact, 3D recording to quickly and safely record archaeological resources with minimal or no human contact. Both of these approaches were used to reduce the time as well as the level of on-site exposure and contact during the site ‘definition and recording’ activities while upholding the care and precision of traditional control of archaeological excavation and exposure.

Each category of applied technology was adopted as lateral transfer from other ‘unrelated’ disciplines or professions. Only after having been proved to be feasible and effective in nonarchaeological contexts, was it used to expedite and enhance archaeological capabilities. Each illustrates the concurrent deployment of multiple examples of ‘technologically integrated, synchronized and partially redundant’ classes of applied technology as a buffer against over-reliance on a single brand or category of hardware or software.

Some of the highlighted technologies are mundane or common place, others advanced. Several were initially applied in early emergency rescue archaeology projects dating back to the late 1970s. Although not contaminated, these early ‘discoveries under construction’ were commonly resolved though the adoption of applied technology solutions that would later continue as ‘core’ tool sets for the investigation and documentation of hazardous or contaminated sites. These included the 1978 introduction of a highspeed computer transit, or electronic distance meter (EDM), followed in the mid-1980s by the introduction of Total Station survey systems linked to integrated data collectors with built-in data storage and conversion. These early applications also included custom-built all-weather shelters, geophysical survey, and stereo-photogrammetry. Out of the field, these innovations incorporated the introduction of concurrent on-site laboratory processing, analysis, and conservation facilities as well as early micro-computers and early database management systems. Other technologies, including single-camera photogrammetry, advances in 3D geospatial visualization and modeling, satellite image projection software and most recently, laser-radar, represent critical advances in capacity, speed and precision. These in turn provided solutions to logistical challenges that would have been difficult or impossible to address otherwise. In some cases, such as those discussed here, these advances are helping to address difficult compliance issues that are simply beyond the capabilities of normative - and often peer reviewed - method and theory.