Capacities for a Sustainable Archaeology (original) (raw)

Archaeology has been increasingly successful over the last four decades in managing and recovering that portion of the archaeological record that otherwise would have been destroyed by land development. In Ontario the scale of this success has been staggering, but neither practitioners nor regulators have been able to find the means to sustain innovative research on the largely inaccessible materials and information that has accumulated as the result of legislated mitigation. We describe plans for a sustainable archaeological practice that closely links conservation with the capacity for ongoing research on the accumulated archaeological record. The result validates the aim of “preserving the past” implicit in the commercial harvest of archaeological remains found on development land. We describe plans for facilities to achieve a capacity for sustainable archaeology, which will be realized in the near future as the result of our institutions obtaining funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and Ontario Research Fund. Our plan is to develop an integrated archaeological practice - one that is also fully inclusive of descendant communities - that will ensure the long-term sustainability of research and the generation of knowledge the compliments the day to day accumulation of materials and field observations.