"The public has spoken: save our forests for future generations. At the U.S. Forest Service, that means taking a more holistic view of America's woodlands-their past as well as their present. Enter archeology."

Sandra Jo Forney

IN CONTEXT

Hidden Data  

FEATURE ARTICLES

The Archeology of Ecology

View From the Top of the Planet

The Nature of Our National Forests

by Francis P. McManamon

Effective management requires that the entity being managed is described, understood, and interpreted accurately. This is true for ecosystems as for anything else. The tendency these days, however, is to view ecosystems as purely "natural" phenomena. One has only to look at our most pristine wilderness areas to see the error in this assumption. There—and across the continent—archeological sites testify to the fact that human beings have been a "natural" part of their ecosystems for millennia.

From a management perspective, archeological sites and historic structures should be preserved if only because Americans have made it clear that they value their commemorative, associative, and interpretive qualities. But, beyond that, these cultural resources offer evidence of past environments that should be put to effective use in managing them in the future.

Archeological sites present a unique opportunity for managers to learn about the long-term functioning of ecosystems. The archeological record reveals how prehistoric human populations and their environments interacted over extended spans of time—with both changing as a result. At a minimum, these sites offer evidence about the evolution of a vast range of plant and animal species.

Scientists studying ecosystems would do well to start considering archeological sites as "scientific monitoring stations" put in place ages ago. These sites frequently contain preserved pollen, seeds, animal bones, wood samples, and other botanical or faunal remains that, upon excavation, immediately tell us about the nonhuman components of past ecosystems. With further examination and analysis in the lab, they can provide even more information.

In North America, human populations have been important actors in their ecosystems since reaching the continent at least 12,000 years ago. That means there is an enormous amount of data out there about our environment over a very long period of time. This information could potentially help us establish a baseline of ecosystems past to judge changes in ecosystems future.

Clearly, this data would be invaluable to managers. To maximize management effectiveness, however, all of an ecosystem's cultural resources would have to be adequately identified, described, evaluated, and interpreted.

In a March 1994 memorandum to senior managers in the Department of the Interior, Assistant Secretary Bonnie R. Cohen pointed out the importance of archeological and other cultural resources to ecosystem management. She highlighted their commemorative and interpretive value as well as their worth from the standpoint of understanding and monitoring the long-term changes in biological resources. Her main message to the senior managers, however, was that the ecosystem programs they were responsible for ought not have a blind spot where cultural resources should be, and that serious consequences could be expected if they did.

Cohen's concern—that the widespread development and implementation of ecosystem management by public agencies might ignore cultural resources—is well-founded. Most of the planning, development, and implementation of ecosystem management is being undertaken by natural resource scientists or managers whose background and focus is on the "natural" environment.

This problem is being dealt with on a number of levels. A series of recent documents—from the NPS Humanities and the National Parks to the Society for American Archaeology's Save the Past for the Future II—call for cultural resource experts to be more involved in developing and implementing ecosystem management. The NPS draft paper "Ecosystem Management in the National Park Service" presents a well-integrated role for cultural resources in ecosystem management.

These documents and the Cohen memorandum reflect the commitment of senior administration officials and national organizations to include cultural resources in ecosystem management. Statements from these documents should be used at all levels of public agencies by individual archeologists, historians, curators, anthropologists, and other cultural resource specialists to inject their areas of expertise into individual ecosystem management programs or projects.

We need to work at all levels—as well as publicize our successes—to ensure that archeological and other cultural resources are not ignored in the development and implementation of this new, comprehensive approach to resource management.