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Cap on Research Stifled Digging; Archaeologist Says City Law's Spending Limit Should Be Raised

Posted on: Wednesday, 7 September 2005, 12:00 CDT

City officials would be prepared for archaeological finds like those generating controversy for the civic center project if the city ordinance requiring an archaeological investigation before construction in certain areas were better, an archaeologist with downtown experience says.

The ordinance needs to be rewritten to raise the cap on the amount spent on archaeological studies and the city needs to create a way to pull together all the information gathered from the many independent projects.

"If that had been done earlier, then the civic center wouldn't have been a shock," Cherie Scheick of Southwest Archaeological Consultants said.

Scheick, whose firm has created a database of past significant archaeological finds that shows the civic center was a likely place to find evidence of a pueblo, said the existing ordinance affects the quality of investigations.

"When the city ordinance was adopted, the amount to be spent was capped at 1 percent of the cost of the project," she said. "That limits the archaeology. It keeps archaeologists from being able to do everything that's required."

Her firm was able to fully investigate a pit house and outlying features found downtown because the pit house was found on federal property.

She said the city has extensive information on downtown's archaeology but that information has never been looked at as a whole, which would answer many questions.

"The biggest thing the city needs to do if it wants to understand the archaeology is come up with a research design. Our (database) project could tell us what to look for now. We have a lot of information; we need to build on it and go forward," she said. "If we really want to know the history, then we need to be more systematic."

Scheick said the ordinance was appropriate when written in the late 1980s -- the general feeling was that archaeological finds under downtown either were limited or had been so disturbed by subsequent activity that they could yield little information. She said the spending cap also made sense because it made the ordinance palatable to developers who have to pay the costs of the investigation.

But the city's history is important to the tourism industry and should be protected, Scheick said.

Source: Albuquerque Journal

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