Elaine Herold is director of the Archaeological Survey in the Department of Anthropology.
What is the Archaeological Survey?
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The Archaeological Survey is the cultural resource management arm of the department. We do archaeological surveys for individuals and institutions that need to have this information collected before they can go ahead with development of such projects as subdivisions, shopping centers, new bridges or widening roads-anything that involves in some way federal or state money. The law says that anyone that does this kind of work with federal or state money has to have an environmental impact statement.
What exactly is cultural resource management?
It really involves the collection of information about any previous occupation of the property. Any prehistoric archaeological sites or historic sites, any historic buildings, anything like that. You have to go through and record where all these are or where they were at one time. We make recommendations. It's a three-phase process: In Phase I, we look for sites, in Phase II we test sites to determine if there is anything significant there, and in Phase III, we go ahead and do more intensive testing and mitigation of the site. The amount that is done depends on how the state historic preservation office views the site.
Have there been times that you have recommended that no development of a property be pursued?
In some cases, we don't find anything, so there's no problem. In other cases, we find something, but it's really not significant to do anything with. But it's not totally our decision. All of our reports have to go to the state historic preservation office in Albany, where they are reviewed. Their comments are the final word.
How do you undertake the surveys? Do you use students or volunteers from the community?
We have a lot of information (on sites) on file in the department that has been accumulated over the years. There's also information on sites in Albany and other places-we can get a list of all the sites within a 2-mile radius of a project area. And then we go out and look for sites. We have a crew that we hire, most of whom are graduate students. We dig at usually 50-meter intervals to get shovel tests, and we screen the dirt to make sure there's nothing in it. If we find things, then they get recorded and analyzed when we get them back here (to the UB lab). There are gaps in our knowledge about the State of New York; the State of New York has not been totally surveyed. Anything we do really needs a field survey in addition to what we get out of the literature search. Often there hasn't been any work in the area, so there really isn't any information.
A lot of the material you uncover is housed in the Marian E. White Anthropology Research Museum in the department. What types of artifacts are we talking about?
Most of the stuff is fragmentary-stone tools from the Indians, broken pottery. From historic sites, you also get broken pottery, fragments of tools, fragments of buildings, such as bricks. They're all catalogued and recorded so they're available to students in the future who want to review them or do something more with them.
What's the strangest thing you've ever uncovered.
That's a hard question-no two (surveys) are alike. It really depends on what we're working on. For awhile, we worked on the Center House Tavern, which is over here at North Forest Road at Heim Road. We had a lot of stuff out of that-foundations of an earlier building that preceded the tavern, a lot of pottery, glass. We found a well there.
How did you get involved in this work? Are you an archaeologist by training?
Yes. And all of my staff are archaeologists. The program in New York began more than 30 years ago when Marian White, a well-known archaeologist in New York State, was on the faculty here. The program continued after she died in 1975. In addition to the program at UB, there are others at Binghamton, Stony Brook and the State Museum in Albany. There are other (private) CRM (cultural resource management) firms around here, and there are some from out of state that come in occasionally do to projects.
Is there anything else about the Archaeological Survey that you'd like to add?
The whole purpose of the survey is to recover information before it's destroyed. Anybody who digs in an archaeological site destroys the site-you can't dig it up without destroying it. The advantage of having a CRM program in the state is that you record all this information and you save the things that you find and recover. Although the site usually can't be revisited, the notes and information about it can. We're learning a lot more every day about prehistoric and early-historic occupation. The sites written up in one student's dissertation are Native American sites in Clarence that we found as a result of an area being developed for housing. So if we hadn't had a CRM program, we would've lost a lot of information about how the Indians were living and the kinds of tools they made. In addition, at one of those sites, we got a lot of information about what they were eating from the animal bones, passenger pigeon bones and other food remains we found. In addition to what they were eating, we also could tell pretty much what time of the year the site was occupied. And all of that would have been lost if it had been bulldozed off into the foundations (of the houses being built).
