Coping With The BP Oil Spill
The nation’s largest environmental disaster poses great challenges and uncertainties for archaeologists. By Keith O’Brien
An archaeologists walks along the coast of Mississippi’s Cat Island to determine if oil has affected the archaeological resources there.
18
winter • 2010-11
Alvin Banguilan
T
he steel-bottomed boat was bouncing on the waves now, streaking east through the shallow waters of Barataria Bay. Just off the bow, dolphins were trying to keep pace while overhead brown pelicans were soaring, moving through the air on wings the size of oars. Even the shrimpers were out today, the moratorium against fishing having been lifted months ago. But just beyond the shrimp boats, the remnants of America’s largest oil spill were still plain to see. Cleanup crews moved across a spit of Louisiana beach in yellow haz-mat suits. Front-end loaders collected trash bags full of oil and dumped them into a mammoth garbage bin. And miles of yellow and orange boom, the floating barriers that keep oil from reaching shore, ringed the land in an attempt to ward off the 4.9 million barrels of oil that had surged into the Gulf of Mexico last summer. “You think the shrimp is good?” archaeologist Alvin Banguilan asked the boat pilot. “You think the shrimp is okay here?” The pilot nodded. Like most people, Banguilan was curious about the environmental impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf. But on this late summer morning, he and the other archaeologists on the boat had other concerns as well. They were interested in surveying a prehistoric site that hadn’t been inhabited in hundreds of years; a remote shell beach, with three squat mounds, that doesn’t show up on most maps, but which once supported a thriving population; a place that, until the oil spill, hadn’t been visited by archaeologists in almost a decade.
