Jim O'Donnell Guest Blog: Oil and Gas Industry to Pay for Archaeological Excavations in New Mexico?

This is a guest blog by Jim O'Donnell, author and former coordinator of the Coalition for the Valle Vidal in northern New Mexico:

For seven years, I worked as a contract archaeologist for the oil and gas industry in the Southwest. Essentially, my job was to go out and locate archaeological resources on public lands that were threatened with oil and gas development. We recorded the archaeological sites, marked them both on maps and in the field for the industry folks to avoid and, in some cases, excavated them prior to development.

That's why I found this interesting:

The Bureau of Land Management announced Tuesday that it has signed an agreement with the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division and the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation that will give oil and gas developers an option of funding excavation work and other studies rather than paying for archaeological surveys when they propose new development.

Over the past few years, I have written a number of times on my experiences as an archaeologist working on public lands in the Southwest. It wasn’t pretty.

The oil and gas industry in New Mexico is completely out of control, taking private property, poisoning water supplies and leaving taxpayers to fund the clean up. Destruction of archaeological resources by the oil and gas industry was also wide-spread when I was in the field. Often times it was done right in front of the archaeologists who were working to protect those sites. It was worse in New Mexico than any of the other states I worked in. Most often, the contract archaeology higher ups and the bosses at the land management agencies (mostly the BLM) turned a blind eye to this destruction. They didn’t want to lose the contract. It got to be so bad that I eventually quit archaeology. Seeing those sites destroyed drilled a hole in my heart.

Under the new agreement, oil and gas developers who participate in the voluntary program will not have to pay for a survey but they will be required to pay a special fee that will go toward excavation and other research. The BLM expects to raise about $1 million a year.

I'm suspicious.

Typically, when industry wants to develop a chunk of public land, they have to pay a contract archaeology company to survey the area and record the sites. Then, the company decides if they want to excavate the site or go around it. In my experience, they often simply go through the site.

This new agreement covers only the portion of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land down in the southeast corner of New Mexico where oil and gas development has been going full-bore since the 1930s. It is an area I know well. I’ve walked literally hundreds of miles in the area on archaeological survey. Because development has been going on there for so long, by far the majority of the archaeological sites on public land in the area have been found and recorded - some many times over.

However, not much is known about the sites themselves, making it difficult for the agency to manage them accordingly.

"We haven't excavated hardly anything so we have a very poor handle on what kind of data they contain, what kind of information we can learn from them, what they're telling us about human adaptation to the desert in that part of the trans-Pecos area," he said.

True. If we are to expand our knowledge of the people that were in the area before Euro-Americans came on the scene, we need to do some excavations. We need to find out what is in those sites. What kind of artifacts? What kind of pollen sits at the bottom of the fire pits? Its a lot of information to get a hold of. Excavations are expensive and so, throughout the West, our knowledge gathering abilities when it comes to ancient cultures have been hampered over the past two decades by a lack of money.

Essentially, what this agreement says is that industry can go ahead and develop public lands without paying for archaeological surveys prior to the project. Instead, they simply have to pay into a BLM fund geared toward excavating some of the sites in the area that have been already recorded.

There are critics who make some good points:

... archaeology can damage the very resources it's designed to protect, said Jim Walker, director of the national nonprofit Archaeological Conservancy's Southwest region.

"An archaeological site is a set of clues and we'll never have those clues again in the same order. An archaeologist destroys an archaeological site as he or she excavates," Walker said. "And we also know that archaeology is a changing science and we're always coming up with new ideas and new techniques and the only way we can test a new idea or new technique is on an unexcavated archaeological site."

Another concern is that a few sites could be lost each year if companies decide to participate in the voluntary program rather than pay for an archaeological survey. But Fosberg said the benefits outweigh the potential loss.

"We can excavate sites ... and actually do some real science and learn from them," he said. "The fact of the matter is we're losing sites anyway because of this cumulative effect of development."

While these critiques are valid and need to be closely considered, overall, it seems to me like this agreement is a good idea. I almost can’t believe I'm saying this because this is the New Mexico BLM ... an agency geared towards the production of oil and gas above all other values. Yet, excavating even some of the sites in that area will advance our knowledge of long-dead cultures tremendously.

To be sure, this is a win for industry. Development projects will move forward much faster and much cheaper under this scenario. Without a doubt, many previously unknown sites will be destroyed in the process – but they destroy a lot of them even when they know about them. It is also a win for the BLM. That agency is under tremendous stress. Not only because they have fewer personnel and money by the day but because the state-director has almost all the remaining personnel busy processing drilling permits as fast as possible. They don’t want to deal with the 'problems' caused by the laws protecting archaeological resources.

But it’s clear that the State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) sees a possible benefit to this approach. The state archaeologist’s office knows full well that many sites are destroyed by the oil and gas industry and they are essentially powerless to do anything about it. Also, they know that most of the sites in this area are already recorded. They’re trying to make the best of a bad situation. Until this nation gets itself off the drug of fossil fuels, we will continue to be forced into the false choice of bad options.

My worry is that BLM will use the money they collect for the excavation program for something other than excavation – like processing more drilling permits.

I'm going to remain suspicious. I don’t trust the New Mexico BLM. Let's see if they use that money for excavations.

Let's just see.

This is a guest blog by Jim O’Donnell, who is the former coordinator of the Coalition for the Valle Vidal. He is also the author of "Notes for the Aurora Society," due out later this summer. He writes, walks and marvels from northern New Mexico.

Guest blogs provide our readers with an opportunity to express their opinions on pertinent political issues. If you'd like to submit a piece for consideration as a guest blog, contact me by clicking on the Email Me link on the upper left-hand corner of the page.

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