When Archaeology Disaster Strikes - Ep 334

Yeah, I guess I'm the one who brought up this topic.

But when archaeology disasters strike, because I don't think we acknowledge that projects don't always go exactly how we plan, right? Like we talk a lot about planning and we talk a lot about the broader issues in archaeology, but we don't always acknowledge that sometimes things stuff just happens and it has an archeology nexus, right? So sometimes sites are found when folks didn't necessarily think they were found.

And then sometimes other stuff happens, right? Sometimes you think that the company's doing the right thing, but they're actually not.

And so we kind of have two stories here to talk about.

The first one I want to talk about is During the construction of a stadium at UC Berkeley, where I work, by the way, the construction crews found Native American burials.

And so I want to put this in context.

First of all, the University of California is built along a creek in a semi-arid place.

Most of California is semi-arid.

And so it's just so logical that by water, there's going to be native sites and Then the city of Berkeley itself has huge sites.

It used to have shell mounds that were commercially mined for years and years for the shell.

Just in the early 1900s from UC Berkeley, went around and excavated a bunch of sites before there was Native American grave protection laws, before there was the National Historic Preservation Act.

and built this entire museum full of Native American sites from California and then other sites like the University of California used to travel the world looking for artifacts and antiquities to fill up museums because it thought it needed this flagship museum, right? So, of course, those were happening back in times where People who worked for universities had like zero concern for indigenous folks or local folks.

If you've ever seen any of the Indiana Jones movies, you know exactly what I'm talking about, how they're just going around the world, taking things from other cultures for their own purposes.

Well, UC Berkeley did that for generations.

And so now here in the 2026, we're living in a world where there's the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

There are other state laws that prohibit universities from teaching and using Native American antiquities and resources.

And so, you know, we're living in a completely different generation.

Nevertheless, the reasons why those laws exist, things like the university taking artifacts or finding Native American sites, you know, without having tribal engagement in that entire process, you know, that's why things are the way they are.

And so the short story is The university was constructing a stadium on campus and it inadvertently came across Native American burials.

But the longer story is Native people in the Bay Area have been telling the university that our archeological resources are all over this place and your construction has not eliminated every evidence or trace of our being here and that we wanna be part of the entire process of identifying and locating and looking for these artifacts, right? Well, the university does its very best to try to, well, I'll take that back.

I don't think that any university tries its very best to do anything except for get more money.

But in the case of UC Berkeley, I would have to say that there is an engagement between Ohlone people, which are the, there's several bands of Ohlone, which is the tribe that occupied the San Francisco Bay Area before Spanish arrived.

There is ongoing engagement with Ohlone bands in the city of Berkeley and with the university.

And I do know that the university does cultural resource management work before it does construction.

What's interesting in California is like there's pathways that the university could use to not have to do cultural resources work.