Archaeology AT THE OLDEST HOUSE By Andrew Bair
Archaeology is a lot of things, but the activity that figures most in the popular imagination is digging. At the same time, preserving the archaeological record—that is, all the physical remains of past people still preserved underground—is the primary ethical responsibility of all archaeologists. And therein lies the grand dilemma of archaeology: we want to learn more about the past, but archaeological excavation destroys the underground record of the past itself, which can never be studied exactly as it was a second time. Although archaeologists take painstaking notes to recover and preserve as much data as possible, once an archaeological site is excavated, that’s it. Preservation of the archaeological record in the United States and around the globe is further threatened by population growth, economic development, and environmental changes, but perhaps most urgently by amateur artifact collectors digging holes looking for buried treasure. In 1966, the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) recognized the significance of the Nation’s finite cultural resources and provided a mechanism to ensure that federal agencies take into account the effects of their undertakings on historic properties and archaeological sites. Subsequently, State Historic Preservation Offices were established in each state to implement the stipulations laid out in the NHPA, and to the extent possible, adapt those regulations at the state level. In cases where federal and state regulations don’t apply, archaeological sites are vulnerable to imminent destruction, and permanent loss of data. To balance the goals of collecting important archaeological site data while preserving these finite resources to the greatest extent possible, archaeologists have developed a number of best practices. At the outset, archaeologists coordinate preservation initiatives with the community to promote the development of laws, codes, and ethics that discourage the destruction of the archaeological record and promote preservation as a valuable tenet of community life. Next, as a research design is developed for a given project, the archaeological team identifies and prioritizes historic records, maps, community ethnohistory, reports of prior inves-
36 Historic Nantucket | Fall 2020
Harvard University graduate student Andrew Bair conducts a survey outside the Oldest House using ground-penetrating radar.
tigations, and warehoused artifact collections to develop goals, cultural contexts, and appropriate archaeological methods. Finally, central to the preservation commitment, whenever possible archaeologists use cool, non-destructive technology that allows them to study the archaeological record without digging it up.
