Creative Mitigation: Alternative Strategies for Resources, Stakeholders, and the Public

Abstract

Standard mitigation treatment for adverse effects to significant cultural resources has historically been a combination of data recovery excavation along with artifact analysis, reporting, and curation, whose purpose is to move the undertaking forward. Over the past several decades, there has been increased interest and understanding of alternative, or creative, mitigation options in these situations, which may, in the end, be the best option for the resource and more meaningful to both project stakeholders and the public. This article, the first in this special issue on creative mitigation, introduces the regulatory and conceptual framework for creative mitigation and weaves themes introduced in subsequent articles in this issue.

Will It Ever Be FAIR?

“…and summary information on the archaeological contexts they are responsible for managing. Data reuse, therefore, can lead to improvements to client programmatic agreements related to creative or alternative mitigation efforts (e.g., community archaeology projects, predictive modeling, designation of traditional cultural properties, enhancement of online tools), which are increasingly sought by many regulatory agencies and tribes (Douglas and Manney 2020; Heilen 2020; Schlanger et al 2020; Sebastian 2020; Wollwage et al 2020). Making compliance archaeology data FAIR + CARE under thoughtful programmatic agreements can potentially yield more information about a particular region if research can be done by interoperating existing, disparate datasets.…”