Barbara Wyatt: So our next presentation is by Brandi Carrier and �Challenges of Using
the MCL Approach on the Outer Continental Shelf.� Ms. Carrier is a regional professional
archeologist with more than 15 years� experience in cultural resource management. She has a
master's degree in archeology and prehistory, and extensive archeological field and laboratory
experience. Brandi has directed historic and prehistoric
phase I, II and III surveys and mitigations in 15 states, in the United Kingdom, and in
Greece, and she's been responsible for all aspects of cultural resource management. Brandi
has a thorough knowledge of Section 110, 106, and 304 of the National Historic Preservation
Act, and extensive experience of applying the National Register of Historic Places eligibility
criteria. She joined the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
in 2011 as an archeologist, and subsequently as the Atlantic regional historic preservation
officer to provide regulatory and marine archeological support for the nation's development of offshore
renewable energy, extending her competency to include marine archeology and maritime
historic preservation law. So thank you Brandi very much for being here.
Brandi Carrier: Thank you, and the first thing that I need to do is cut that bio down by
about three fourths I think. I want to start by thanking you in advance for your patience.
I had oral surgery recently, and I can here that my speech has not completely cleared
up. So we'll move through these very quickly, but thank you in advance for your patience
with me. As you heard, I'm a marine archeologist, and
a scientific diver, and I work for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. As you also heard,
I spent most of my career working on terrestrial sites, and I transition to working in a marine
archeology realm about four years ago when I joined the federal government. It's been
a really unique opportunity to move from terrestrial archeology where we have a pretty solid, I
think, understanding of how to apply Section 106, what good faith identification efforts
mean, how we go about identifying areas of potential effect and so forth.
Moving that offshore has not been necessarily as clear and easy as I expected when I took
the position. It's an ongoing education for me. But as many of you, the Bureau of Ocean
Energy Management is an Interior Department agency, and its mission is environmentally
responsible development of energy on the Outer Continental Shelf. This includes oil and gas
exploration, marine minerals extraction, and renewable energy development. And I work for
BOEM's office of Renewable Energy Program. This is the office within BOEM that regulates
offshore wind and rain hydrokinetic generation. Today I'm going to discuss the challenges
and opportunities as I have experienced them of applying the MCL approach on the outer
continental shelf, which is where BOEM holds its regulatory authority to regulate developments
like these. But just what is this Outer Continental Shelf? Well as Jimmy introduced this morning
for all of us, we are talking about a legal term. It refers to a vast submerged landscape
of some six and a half billion square kilometers. Now BOEM's operations and its regulatory responsibilities
extend throughout this ocean frontier. My office's primary area of operation is the
Atlantic from Maine down to the tip of Florida, and this ranges from about five and 370 kilometers
from shore. So it's a pretty large area. When we refer to the OCS, or the Outer Continental
Shelf, we are really talking about a legal description of a piece of land that is now
submerged; from an archeological and a geological perspective though this is a much more interesting
place than that legal description may infer. As you probably know, sea level on earth operates
on a geological cycle. Much of the continental shelf is exposed dry land during glacial periods,
but during interglacial periods, the shelf is submerged under relatively shallow waters,
at least on the Atlantic side. So, from a geological standpoint, we are just
in another interglacial period, during which sea level has risen to cover a relatively
shallow continental shelf. This is an important point to consider because we expect to find
evidence of human habitations that date to the last glacial period in areas that are
very far offshore now. So, though these areas are now submerged under several hundred feet
of water, they were actually terrestrial during their times of occupation.
So we have to give some consideration to figuring out during what time span coinciding with
human history were these areas exposed to dry land and therefore habitable. And as the
sea level rose, this terrestrial and marine interface transgressed across the surface.
And sometimes it protected those archeological sites, and sometimes it totally demolished
them. Now, the challenges of working out here in
this very vast landscape are quite innumerable, but I'll share just a few of the more pertinent
ones to this discussion. First, the OCS is a large area, and outside of the National
Marine Sanctuaries and other protected areas, BOEM is pretty much the exclusive federal
agency that's protecting these submerged federal lands, and we are doing so with very few staff
compared to our sister agencies. Jimmy mentioned this morning; we have eleven staff for just
over 7,000 square kilometers of submerged federal lands. I'll just add at this point
that we do not have a single ethnographer on staff. Not a single expert in recording
oral history, not a single expert in acknowledging the existence and recording properly those
different ethnographies. Second, in this extensive remote area, there
is a complex jurisdictional environment. These issues are complicated, and so are the legal
protections that are afforded to the submerged cultural resources. This is the norm of what
we are dealing with here. One very quick and short example is that ARPA does not apply.
It's specifically exempted from application on the Outer Continental Shelf.
These challenges greatly reduce the ethicacy of any underwater cultural heritage work that
our 11 staff can hope to perform. Also, accessing this remote area is expensive. It requires
specialized equipment and expertise. Not every Section 106 consulting party that has an interest
in these areas and these resources has the training or the expertise to understand the
data being collected and the resulting meaning behind the findings.
So, even basic responsibilities under Section 106 like consulting with interested parties
and agreeing on good faith identification efforts, for example, these are becoming incredibly
complex endeavors on the OCS. Perhaps the biggest problem that we are facing is what
to do about submerged relic landforms. Submerged relic landforms are not archeological
sites. They are landforms that may or may not contain archeological sites, and, as I
mentioned earlier and we've heard several other presenters discuss today, as sea levels
rose, the terrestrial and marine interface transgressed across the surface of the shelf.
And sometimes the geological activity accompanying this transgression protected archeological
sites, and sometimes it demolished them. So, we can find these landforms pretty easily,
our technology and our expertise can do this, but identifying an archeological site or other
historic property type within this landform on the Outer Continental Shelf, this remains
an elusive goal. We haven't given up on it and there are other mechanisms that we are
using to try and access it. And one of those is the two primary paleo-landscape studies
that we are engaging in. But the current status is finding these archeological sites is still
not something that we have a great deal of confidence in.
So what we do with these is we default to avoiding possible sites as an administrative
shortcut to our Section 106 reviews. This fulfills the agency's responsibility under
106 but frankly it fails to help us learn anything about these sites and it does not
meet the stewardship and management responsibilities for submerged federal lands.
Now on top of this basis, the application of maritime cultural landscape theory to the
Outer Continental Shelf introduces some difficulties of its own for BOEM from the very start. Amanda
Evenson and Matthew Keith wrote extensively about the complications inherent in applying
the MCL approach to submerged pre-contact sites. And, I'll add a few issues that further
complicate our Section 106 reviews. Using Traditional Cultural Property, TCP designations,
for the protection of landforms is problematic because integrity as defined in the National
Register bulletin doesn't neatly apply here. Continued usage in a traditional manner does
not exist. Native American communities were separated physically from these lands as a
result of sea level rise since the last ice age, and they were separated culturally and
socially as a result of the federal government's assimilation policies. So, they no longer
have, at least as far as they have been sharing with us, place names for these submerged landscape
features. We are not talking about something that happened
a few generations ago, we are talking about 19,000 years ago. No one interacts with these
landforms in the same way that they traditionally did. We hear regularly that once we find an
archeological site, then of course there will be cultural reconnection with that, and the
various constellations of values surrounding these places will be rewoven into the rich
tapestry of Native American history. In other words, once we find an archeological site,
it will ipso facto become a TCP, but until then these submerged relic landscapes, they
lack the richness of cultural cohesion that�s sort of inherent in the MCL theoretical approach,
and it would warrant a very easy TCP integrity designation under the National Register.
Similarly problematic, we can't know whether or not there is a solid archeological research
potential in the area that we are considering for development. This isn�t a case where
we know we have a site and we are saving it for a future time where we may have better
equipment or methods for exploring it. No, instead we don't even know if we have a site.
On land, this would be very cut and dry. The development would be approved because no historic
property had been identified, but beneath hundreds of meters of water it's far more
complicated than that. If we don't have the confidence that a site
is or is not there, how can we move forward with development? If we don't have confidence
that a site is or is not there, how can we stop development? I'm asked this question
almost every day. So we struggle to�We continue to struggle with this question. Is a landform
alone, without any integrity of cultural connection, without any evidence of an archeological site
present, is this landform a historic property? And we are still struggling with these questions.
But with these questions or these challenges I think comes some great opportunities.
Speaker: [inaudible] Brandi: Yeah I love this side, because I think
it's pretty poignant. When we talk about submerged terrestrial archeological sites out on the
Outer Continental Shelf, we are really talking about habitation and working sites that are
now submerged, and I think this is a really nice little shift. So, our first opportunity
here is that we are having this discussion. I think this is great, I think it indicates
that there is opportunity to acknowledge this complexity that I've outlined, and to address
it directly. Also, we are shoring up and extending our
network of partnership through the federal sphere and into the private sector. Our work
with Monitor National Marine Sanctuaries on the Battle of the Atlantic project, our work
with various universities and tribes on our paleo-landscapes projects, these are good
examples that illustrate that we�re taking this issue seriously. We are continuing to
work on it, we�re not giving up. We are asking the difficult questions, and we are
stretching our theoretical paradigms to accommodate the reality of working on the OCS.
Second, I think we need to request updates to our National Register Bulletins from our
colleagues at NPS, and guidance from the advisory council that can help address this complexity.
Otherwise, the landscapes will disappear under the developments because the need for them
is very high. I always get such a great refreshment to my commitment to historic preservation
by coming to these sorts of things because everyone in the room is committed to preservation.
But then I go back to my day job, and I'm constantly asked the question, �how can
you stop this very important renewable energy development from moving forward?�
So we have to keep in mind that there has to be a balance, and frankly, I have to have
it in writing because the question I'm asked always is where is that in writing? Where
is the National Register Bulletin that says that this is how we can apply it? So I guess
my short answer is the development will not wait, so please let�s come together and
rewrite some of this guidance to address it. And finally, I really think that BOEM has
to abandon its project driven paradigm. It has to instead embrace a resource stewardship
model. This is, I think, very essential for long term management of Maritime Cultural
Landscapes and using MCL as the significance factor for identifying other historic properties.
The OCS remains the largest area of federal lands, and it lacks the protected stewardship
of management activities provided by every other land managing agency like the BLM, the
Forest Service, Reclamation, and Park Service. For some reason, BOEM has been reluctant to
adopt its Section 110 responsibilities even in areas where it has the clear jurisdiction
to do so. Our federal preservation officer and my fellow
regional preservation officers, we're making headway in this arena but it's slow going
and it's fraught with residence within the bureau. But from my perspective, this transition
is really essential to raising the bar for all underwater cultural heritage on the OCS.
It's an important step toward resolving the challenges of applying the MCL approach here,
and the primary reason is that many of the landforms that we are discussing, they lay
within the horizontal areas of potential effect that we are permitting under Section 106 activities,
but they do not lay within their vertical area of potential effect. What I mean is that
we may have a cable going across the top of an area and the landform that we are interested
in is far below that. So our Section 106 activities are never going
to investigate those landforms. They are going to be left there because they are not being
impacted by the outcome. If BOEM were to adopt Section 110 responsibilities, it would have
an obligation to identify those landforms and to work on understanding them.
So, I think that if we can do that, we will be accepting this important opportunity to
learn more. As we learn more about what these landforms hold, where they are, we will be
able to better improve our identification efforts. They will become more accurate, and
this positive feedback loop will create a more effective underwater cultural heritage
construct. So, in conclusion, I think there are many
challenges and many opportunities as well when conducting traditional section 106 review
activities for developments on the OCS. I really appreciate your attention and your
patience, and I'd be glad to have any questions.