light rail archaeological pork
by the piggies dont get this pork! Tuesday, May. 23, 2006 at 12:37 PM

i was riding my bike along stadium drive in tempe from where it angles between mcallister ave and university down to 5th street and college where they are installing tempes light rail and i noticed 3 or 4 workers who appeared to be goofing off and not working. I asked them if they archaeological work.

to my suprise they said that yes they were doing some archaeological digging. i asked them if they were students working for free as slave labor towards there degree in archaeology. again to my suprise they said NO.

they told me that there are federal laws that say that any time the feds give away money for projects that it is required to do an archaeological study that no lost archaeological stuff will be destroyed and that they worked for a company that did these studies.

they told me that along the whole construction route they have a few people standing by to make sure that nobody with a backhoe accidently destroys an archaeological find.

they said that only in areas where know archaeological remains or previous finds existed did they have to go thru and did up the ground looking for stuff. and thats where they were doing. digging up the ground and siffing the ground thur a screen looking for stuff.

the guy told me that nothing major or even minor had been found. just a bunch of useless pottery shanards and stuff.

but anyhow my point is that there are companies that specialize in getting this archaeological pork money from the feds and that is what they were doing here. and i guess there are a whole bunch of laws demanding that these archaeological companies get their pork for all federal construction projects.

the guy told me that there was lots of stuff on the web about what they were doing. he told me the key words to google on but i didnt have a pencil to write it down. but it was something like construction and archaeology.

on the web i found 16 USC 469 - "archaeological and historical preservation act" which i suspect is the law.

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