Opening Titles:  

Amanave, American Samoa -- February 18th, 2010

A Historic Recovery

Transcript: Charles Bello - FEMA Archaeologist:  The archaeological sites are protected by any FEMA project by virtue of doing sufficient background historical research to identify areas of archaeological or cultural historical sensitivity.  If we determine there are particular areas of cultural sensitivity, we then explore them at a phase one, two, and three level to make sure that they are indeed significant sites, and if they're significant, that the FEMA action is not gonna harm those.  If the FEMA action cannot be avoided, we go through a mitigation process, whereby we excavate or test the archaeological site, and sometimes avoid the site altogether.  The stuff we find, we take back to the archaeological laboratory.  We clean it, we process it, we number it, we analyze it, we put it into a database, and we look at it from a whole variety of different ways, depending on what some of our research topics are.  Most of the artifacts are owned by the landowner or the county or the municipal government wherever the project is, but we encourage the grantees to give the artifacts to a bona fide museum, college, university, or sometimes a state historic preservation office for furtherance of scientific research.  A good question is why do we do archaeological studies before construction.  Well, our cultural heritage is truly a limited environmental, non-renewable resource.  We're making archaeological sites every day, but the sites that are back in the past back in Samoa's past maybe upwards of three thousand years ago -  this is all we have - there's only a finite number of them.  When we have a project, we're caretakers.  We're custodians of the cultural resource.  Once they're gone, and if they're gone without any care, they cannot be replaced, so that's why scientific archaeology is painstaking techniques, it's thorough, it's an examination process to understand and interpret the archaeological record for the future generations.

Closing Title:  For more information, visit FEMA.gov