My first experiences with the Pennsylvania History Code (Title 37 of the Pennsylvania Statutes) happened in the late 1980s. I was in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania and working as an archaeologist. My employers had lucrative regulatory compliance contracts: working for agencies and private sector entities required to comply with federal and state laws. These laws (the National Historic Preservation Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Pennsylvania History Code) required parties receiving federal and state funds, permits, and licenses to identify historic places, evaluate their significance, and resolve adverse effects to them introduced by the projects triggering regulatory compliance.

Until 1995, compliance with the Pennsylvania History Code meant doing intensive and costly archaeological surveys and excavations. At the time, Pennsylvania’s state archaeologist had a thing for deeply buried prehistoric sites. Consultants had to prove to his satisfaction that they had dug deep enough and used the appropriate technical expertise to reach soils deeper than what the first Native Americans who lived in Pennsylvania ever walked upon. That meant very deep holes and hiring expensive soils science specialists called geomorphologists.

I remember cursing the state archaeologist many times as I dug or supervised the excavation of neat square holes — sometimes using backhoes and other heavy machinery because the soils were so deep — to identify sites that dovetailed with his research interests. Some of my most vivid archaeology fieldwork memories involve working in subfreezing cold temperatures with negative windchill numbers to meet project deadlines and the state archaeologist’s obsession with so-called Paleo sites.

Back in late 1990 I and a colleague excavated a deep test unit in temperatures so cold that the dirt re-froze between the excavation unit and the screen being used to recover artifacts — if any were to be found. It was so cold that we had to use a mattock pick (typically used for breaking rock) to excavate in the usually fine river bottom soil because it was frozen. We then had to wait in the cold for the geomorphologist to arrive to tell us what we could see for ourselves: there was no archaeological site where a Weis supermarket was going to be built.