1.3 The Cultural Heritage: Inventory and Assessment of a Non-Timber Forest Resource in the Practical World
Kent A. Schneider
1.3.1 Introduction
It is a delight to be with you today. It was about a year ago in May that I saw an IUFRO
sponsored conference announcement flash across my E-mail screen. I felt an instant rush of adrenalin. Forest Suvey Designs! Assessment of non-timber resources! Simplicity versus Efficiency! What enormously powerful concepts these are for people like me who are employed by a timber producer to manage non-timber resources. And then there is the IUFRO itself. I have been tracking IUFRO workshops and conferences for years. In 1990 I spotted an announcement for an IUFRO conference on inventory strategies and technologies. From that seed, IUFRO became the spiritual father, and partner, of a 1992 international conference on Environment and Archaeology attended by 21 nations in Puerto Rico. That conference gave birth to international heritage management which is why I came to this conference.
I am here this week to discuss with you formally and informally the importance of building into forest survey design and design implementation the structured inventory, evaluation and assessment and use of the cultural heritage. Although the activities differ, the process of capturing the cultural heritage and making it work to benefit present and future generations economically and culturally is nearly the same as it is for managing timber. It is best undertaken where the management conditions to work the equation simplicity equals efficiency, exist. More on this in a moment.
I am making some basic assumptions which I ought to lay in front of you now. Cultural heritage resources are legitimate grass and forest land-based resources that should be sustainably managed to benefit present and future generations. Obviously, this is not a stand-alone argument. Do cultural heritage resources directly contribute in any way to biodiversity? Do they have anything to do with the sustainable yield of timber? What can they tell us about the past that we don't already know? There are "yes" and "no" answers to all these questions. The issue of whether to account for cultural heritage resources is of course related to its perceived need and where a society ranks that need relative to other values. "Need" depends upon a number of internal and external factors topping the list of which may be the degree to which a nation values its past as part of its identity and what actions that nation has taken legally to ensure that the part of its heritage it considers important remains intact. There are external pressures too for conserving and using cultural heritage resources, the most powerful of which may be economic. Increasingly, the borrowing of money from institutions such as the World Bank is tied to conducting Environmental Impact Statements which now include assessment of project impacts on the cultural heritage.
1.3.2 Background
I am an anthropologist doing-business-as a heritage manager and sometimes as an arche
ologist, which is sometimes known in my country as "aggravateology" because you see archeologists often hold up timber sales. They don't mean to, its just that we are going
through adjustments in my agency regarding just what ecosystem-driven "multiple use management" means. I am one of 9 regional regional program managers employed by the USDA Forest Service, a part of the Executive branch as shown on the organizational chart.
Collectively, we are responsible for managing the cultural heritage on nearly 191 million acres of land in the United States. As an agency, we are the largest employer of heritage managers and most of these 500 specialists are archeologists. The Southern Region, where I work, comprises 28 million acres of land administratively defined by 15 National Forest boundaries in 12 states and one Commonwealth on a line from Texas to Virginia down to and including Puerto Rico. Currently, there are about 60 archeologists and 100 or so heritage resources technicians employed in the Southern Region who's job is to account for and put to use the cultural heritage. My budget to accomplish these tasks has increased steadily since I came to the Regional Office in 1979: from -$60,000 to nearly $5 million annually. In the 19 years since my Region has been in the "cultural resources business", we have captured information on more than 100,000 cultural heritage resources. We know their locations and basic identities well.
1.3.3 Cultural Heritage Resources: What they are
Broadly speaking, cultural heritage resources are all the evidences of human society and culture ranging in time from today to the most ancient reaches of the human past. I am making this definition sufficiently broad because I do not want you to believe that we are talking only about artifacts such as stone or bronze implements or pottery sherds, or such features as post holes and privy pits. Such thinking conjures up the image of just archaeological phenomena and thus erroneously relegates the task of cultural heritage resource assessment to the archaeologist. No, this task belongs to the Heritage Manager. If you think for a moment about the things you have done over your lifetime, you can see how the results of your actions will be left inscribed in many forms as traces of the past when you are gone. Its a matter of scale. Individually or collectively our traces can be viewed as a little or alot, depending on what one in the future may be looking for in the past. Indeed, this very moment is the synthesis of all that has past. It is connected with the past, a continuum. So when we look for cultural heritage resources we must look at the present, too. If one tours the ancient Maya cities of Coba and Chichen Itza, one will travel right through living Maya villages where people exist much today as they did during Classic Maya times. A cultural heritage assessment of forests in Borneo, Indonesia, Bolivia, or anywhere, must necessarily include the indigenous peoples there today.
1.3.4 Heritage Management: What it is
Heritage management is the oversight and higher level review of the archeological, ethno - graphic, historic, paleoecological, and related industries engaged in linking the synthesis of how humans have coped in the past to modern human concerns. It is "team" man
agement of the historical record, including managing what is being done on the ground. It involves policy making, program development and administration, planning and budgeting.
It redirects to better use the hundreds of millions of dollars spentannually investigating and reporting on archeological sites. Its products must contribute to improving the quality of human life. It is control, necessitated by these growing crises:
- exploding costs and scarce space to house collections
- need for order in the selection of resources to be investigated
- accountabilty with regard to how work is undertaken and the products which should come from heritage industries
- rapidly disappearing past and no order to the inventory and conservation of the resource base, globally
advancement in technologies to aid understanding the past and the need for their universal use
- make heritage products competitive and viable economically as future investments.
The goal of heritage management is to link the full measure of domain-specific information from a variety of disciplines (archeology, applied anthropology, geophysics, forestry, geography for example) with environmental science to solve key environmental problems. Training heritage managers, then, requires a totally different approach to the education and experience base for this new generation of resource manager. It means the development of new curriculum configurations and the formation of new academic-private sector partnerships in ways totally unheard of in the past.
A major task facing heritage management is the development of regional, continental and global scale syntheses of human development through time. Different data sets will have to be collected. A subset of this task is the development internationally of collective direction and agreement on what technological aids and scientific methods and activities should and should not constitute wise expenditure of public funds. New high technologies must be taught and universally applied. Consensus must be reached on just what approaches are necessary to guide decisions for a better world tomorrow.
1.3.5 Methods
In the United States, the amended National Historic Preservation Act (1966) and National Environmental Policy Act (1969) require that archeological and historic "properties" on federal land or federal jurisdiction be taken into account as a part of the environmental review process. The concept of "historic properties" is constantly undergoing redefinition to meet new sociocultural needs and now has been expanded to include sacred and traditional areas of value to living ethnic and American Indian populations. Every federal project must go through this evaluation process. I will use our national model as a basis for discussion. There are 4 components: Inventory, Evaluation, Assessment, and Use.
Inventory is the organized recording and documentation of contemporary and past human uses of the landscape. It includes archival research, local informant interviews, and it may or may not include on-the-ground investigation which we call "survey". "Survey" is usually conducted in those areas where previous information about heritage resources is limited or lacking. As our knowledge base grows, we rely increasingly upon predictive models to guide where surveys occur. In the USDA Forest Service, it is the responsibility of the Forest Supervisors and their District Rangers to carry out these activities by contract or hiring professional heritage specialists on their staffs to do the work. Since most Forest resources management activities are supposed to be planned out and budgeted years in advance, we will assume this as a given here. The heritage manager on a National Forest is notified that various timber sales, road constructions and other ground disburbing activities will occur. Usually, such a request comes during preparation of Environmental Assessment reports. He or she then reviews the records file to see if previous work had been done in the area and talks with local informants. If not, the next step is to conduct a field survey. Armed ideally with scarifying tools and a pen computer with GPS, the
archeologist heads to the field and walks over the area to locate, record and flag out on the ground previously unrecorded resources. subsurface testing using cores or scarifying tools are often employed. A report is then written describing the resources found and rec
ommends whether they are "signficant". The report is sent to the State Historic Preser
vation Office (SHPO) who concurs or disagrees with the finding of the archeologist regarding site significance. The report and the written SHPO opinion are then made a part of the Environmental Assessment which the decision maker reviews together with all other resource inventory results in making a decision on whether and how a project should proceed.
1.3.6 Discussion
It is very important to understand that federal environmental assessment legislation is driving the heritage management program. Hence, the conduct of field work and what is done with the results are tailored specifically to ensure that the person who makes a final decision on selling timber, for example, will make that decision fully cognizant of the effect of the decision on impacts to heritage and other resources. Avoidance, mitigation, compensation, monitoring and follow-up and community response to outside change are built into the decision making process.
Hence, the inventory is one of the most important parts of the heritage management process. It is the point from which resource accountability begins. The process of discovering heritage resources must necessarily be efficient and simple. Field work can be very expensive. It is imperative, then, that remote sensing imagery, topographic, soils and vegetative maps, GIS to allow predictive modelling, and other high tech tools be used extensively in advance of implementing field projects. Many of these are the same tools used in the design of forest surveys.
Evaluation. Once the inventory is completed, the findings if any are evaluated against a set of criteria established by the National Historic Preservation Act. "Significant" resources include those related to personages or events important in the history of the United States;
architecture, engineering or other unique features influenced by human activity; and prehistoric archaeological phenomena which contain information important in understanding our human past. Even "no finds" are important because they provide information important in validating predictive models. "Significant" resources are nominated to a National Register of Historic Places and may qualify for listing in the World Heritage register.
Assessment is a more difficult concept to tackle. It refers to the decision making process which separates those heritage resources we will conserve or use from those we will let go.
In the years to come, assessing the cultural heritage will depend heavily upon the visual and relational power of GIS techology. Many years ago, archeological "lithic scatters" - debris left over from making stone tools - were considered very important. Many were nominated to the National Register. Now there are thousands of recorded lithic scatters and their "significance" has paled.
Productive Yield (Use). I have chosen to characterize the final phase of cultural heritage activity as "Product Yield", or "use", to emphasize that these resources are not "dead".
You can make these resources work for you. I have already touched on the fundamental emotional link between heritage and national identity. There are two other interrelated
areas we should look at if we are going to talk heritage management: their scientific value and their economic power.
Scientifically, ancient sites hold a great deal of information about how humans coped with past environments. That information can not be retrieved solely by archaeologists.
Environmental data are most promising for reconstructing past climates, ecological conditions, and landscapes. Human skeletal pathology, palynology, geomorophology, limnology, remote sensing, and a whole host of allied sciences can and should be brought to bear in helping us come to grips with one of civilization 's greatest challenges:
conserving the world's natural resources and its biodiversity while at the same time substantially increasing their productive yield (UNCED, Guide to Agena 21, 1992: 50).
Tropical deforestation is bio-cultural phenomenon, not a natural one. It seems clear to me that some of the answers we are seeking to provide a better world for unborn generations lie right beneath our feet. From an economic standpoint, heritage tourism has become a dollar business. Some economists predict that by 2000 AD, it will be the largest industry in the world. In my agency, we are learning that recreation income, of which heritage tourism is a part, can far exceed green stem sales many times over. Knowing the location and identity of the cultural heritage in forest lands is just a beginning into this kind of venture.
Examining and interpreting for the ever-changing Global Village is where the challenge lies and where you, the Forest Scientists, come in. We know the forests of the world have changed in both composition and location over time. Animal extinctions and change in forest cover types have occurred rapidly with human occupation. Salination caused by accumulated mineral salts from evaporating irrigation waters has turned former
"breadbaskets" into infertile deserts. What can we help you discover about the beneficial and intractable ways inwhich humansactivities have affected global and regional forest resources? Or the effect of sustainable management decisions made today on human lifestyles and welfare in the future?
1.3. 7 Summary
I found it very interesting that the Conference Theme and Objectives address the assess
ment of non-timber resources as a given without asking the questions why assess them as a part of forest survey design? Or, why assess them at all? Certainly this question still stirs the most heated debate in my agency. If we are a timber producing agency, why do we have to undertake environmental assessments, including cultural heritage assessments, that seem unrelated to getting the cut out? This controversy continues separate the conduct of general forest inventory from heritage resources inventory. To me, ideally all inventories should be undertaken at the time a prescription is made. While the information needs are different, many of the sampling techniques are the same. Cultural heritage management relies heavily on the same technologies used in Forest Survey design and data collection systems: GIS, GPS, computer modeling, remote sensing. Some of the techniques we use, such as ground penetrating radar and magnetometers, have applications useful in monitoring the behavior of such other non-timber resources as the Gopher tortoise and other burrowing animals.
The Southern Region has internationalized cultural heritage management through an international charter and partnerships with NCOs and many nations. The Coalition offers training through workshops by export or in host nations on how to set up, update, and manage a cultural heritage program. It has experts skilled in the heritage management applications of GIS, GPS, GPR and other technologies, and soon an object oriented image
knowledge base, who stand ready to visit and work with you. Knowedge to benefit the human agenda is the engine. In the words of Baba Diom, from Senegal: "In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we know, and we will know only what we are taught".
1.3.8 References
Anonymous, 1992: United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, A guide to Agenda 21: 50 pp.
