History is under attack. And time is running out to save it.
To understand how and why, a bit of background is in order. The history of archaeology—as well as its immediate offspring: historic preservation and cultural or heritage resource management—is a long and complicated one, but it can best be summarized as a series of phases not unlike archaeological chronologies themselves.
From about 1492 to 1850 there was the Pioneer or Speculative Period, characterized primarily by antiquarians and other hobbyists collecting old things and making wild-ass guesses. For about fifty years following the end of the Mexican-American War, when the United States extended from sea to shining sea, we had the Descriptive Period which consisted of exactly that: careful note-taking and documentation without much inquiry. Then came the Comparative-Historic Period running from about 1920 to 1950, where construction of chronologies and investigation of historic processes came to the fore. And then finally the overlapping Interpretive and Conservation Periods from then until now, when most of academia spiraled into increasingly convoluted rabbit holes of theory and inquiry while the newly emerged field of cultural resource management (or CRM) marched the opposite way toward mandated compliance with protective legislation.
Granted, archaeology and government mandates have been joined at the hip for a long time, but the modern need for CRM archaeology really got its start in the 1930s. Passage of the Antiquities Act in 1908 helped make unpermitted looting illegal, at least in theory, but the Historic Sites Act of 1935 established that “it is a national policy to preserve for public use historic sites, buildings, and objects of national significance for the inspiration and benefit of the people of the United States.” There’s a lot of ambiguity in that statement, but the general effect was to try to save as much history as feasibly possible so people could visit it on weekends. Along with this came New Deal projects, including Civilian Conservation Corps excavations, which created enormous archaeological workloads and set into motion the broad trend of needing to actually hire archaeologists as a profession.
Then came legislation like the Reservoir Salvage Act of 1960, followed not long after by the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), and the associated River Basin Surveys of the 1940s–1960s made the prospect of doing archaeology as a profession even bigger and more attractive. The Glen Canyon Dam Archaeological Salvage Project alone employed hundreds of them, and the subsequent Dolores and Animas-La Plata efforts kept the snowball rolling and growing well into the early 2000s.
At the granular level, however, things get a bit more complicated. Who these “archaeologists” were, and—more importantly—the organizations for whom they worked, changed and evolved in a manner not wildly dissimilar from most domains with a major public footprint. In the earliest days it was almost all government employees doing the heaviest lifting, with academics digging their little square holes here and there to answer arcane and often asinine questions for which they could just as easily have asked Indigenous people and been done with it. But by the middle of last century, the big public projects were also increasingly run by academic institutions hiring teams of what were effectively archaeological laborers—the Glen Canyon Project, for example, was joint-run by the University of Utah and the Museum of Northern Arizona.
A lot of money changed hands as a result of all this, attracting the usual types, and by the end of the 1980s most CRM was being done by for-profit companies in the private sector.
Fast-forward to 2025 and, according to Jeffrey Altschul and Keith Kintigh, about 90% of US archaeologists work in CRM rather than academics, and closer to 93% of all money spent on archaeology is directly or indirectly tied to CRM projects. They also report that an estimated 11,000 to 17,000 professional CRM archaeologists were working for government agencies or—far the greatest proportion of them—private CRM firms across the country by the time they published their findings last summer. Estimates of economic totals are a lot harder to surmise, given the fluidity of the sector and the presence of non-disclosure agreements for a lot of major projects like data centers, but it’s comfortably in the high millions or low billions. That’s what you get when your work is legally mandated.
Downsides of this are legion, and a lot of them are probably self-evident based solely on the fact that private firms comprise the bulk of archaeological work and archaeological workers in the modern era, but one stands far above them all: good old-fashioned greed. Archaeology’s graduation from academics and agency personnel to for-profit industry has attracted the attention of all the same sharks that invariably swirl when there’s chomping to be done.
Take the case of PaleoWest, one of my former employers and an ideal anecdotal target because they no longer exist and therefore can’t come after me with pitchforks. The firm started when a small handful of archaeologists working for SWCA Environmental Consultants, one of the biggest environmental consulting firms and arguably one of the best (taking as given that they’re also among the most corporate) broke away to start their own firm. This happens a lot, although most of them don’t get very far before they’re swept aside or bought up by increasingly large corporate entities like in any other industry. But in this case the gambit worked, especially after PaleoWest won a contract for the immense and very lucrative Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Cultural Resource Project in 2010.
The snowball grew apace from there, with offices opening all over the country, and by the time I joined their team in late 2020 they were even starting to open them overseas. I worked for them as a regional project manager for three years, routinely managing between six and a dozen employees and running projects totaling millions of dollars at a time.
Those were the glory days.
Then the owners decided to sell.
I had a long chat with founder and former principal owner Tom Motsinger, recently, and from him learned that the sales process was apparently heinous, but in the end they sold controlling majority to a private equity firm called The Riverside Company. According to Tom, they assured him and the other owners that they would be “hands off” and a “silent partner,” that the archaeologists who ran the company clearly knew what they were doing, and that the firm would never, ever, ever “go corporate.” All of which were plain and simple lies.
Private equity firms operate by buying companies and then profit from doing so by overhauling those companies—or breaking them up and selling off parts. That’s foreshadowing for later. The companies they buy can be in any economic sector so long as they look like they could yield profits with an overhaul or a yard sale of assets, which means they almost never know or care about the nature of the business itself. As a broad example, private equity and other active asset management firms own a combined total of roughly half the daily newspapers in the United States today, which explains a lot about the current state of news in this country.
At the time they bought PaleoWest, the good folks at Riverside also had controlling ownership of DAWGS Vacant Property Security, FlavorSum (an artificial flavor manufacturer), and a company called Momentum Group that specializes in sustainable textiles. Their “exited” assets include Agri-Max, Baby Jogger, DHD Healthcare, Future Metals, HerbThyme Farms, Outward Hound, and Salt Lake City’s once-beloved Uinta Brewing Company—which makes for an instructive side story.
Their stake in Uinta ran from 2014 to 2019, at which point they sold it to credit asset management firm Golub Capital, who held a controlling stake in the business until they were bought out in 2022 by a Connecticut-based sales and marketing firm called United States Beverage. Sales ebbed and flowed during all this hand-changing but have generally declined since about 2017, at the same time their geographic sales footprint has grown exponentially, with predictable results: you can now buy Uinta beer in every state, and you probably shouldn’t bother. According to a former bartender at their brewpub whose name I’ll leave out, “It’s just an average beer now, nothing impressive but it doesn’t suck either. I’ll buy it at the store if it’s on sale. But they definitely peaked in the early 2000s when they were making beers like Wyld and Dubhe. Creative and experimental stuff that was uniquely theirs. Now it’s just the same generic-tasting ‘IPA’ and ‘pilsner’ and whatnot. There’s really no reason to buy them over anyone else, anymore. Just another homogenous American grocery store beer.”
Now take that tale of beer homogenization and port it over to the business of heritage management. Generic, bland, perfectly serviceable but without any real reason to buy it over any other option unless it happens to be on sale. No longer unique or creative. No longer fun to work for. No longer human. And ever-teetering on the precipice of sustainable profitability.
Immediately after Riverside acquired PaleoWest, they rebranded and relaunched it as Chronicle Heritage, and with a few other acquisitions tied into the mix they were able to immediately begin advertising themselves as the largest heritage management firm in the world. Which was technically true, but only because bigger firms than them—like the aforementioned SWCA—handle both cultural and natural resources consulting. That was three years ago, and it was also the time myself and some of my closest friends at the firm bowed out. By early 2026, they were doing work all around the world, including Saudi Arabia, where consultants of every stripe have been cashing in on the exorbitantly expensive Neom boondoggle—this being one of many huge projects on which they hung their profit projections as if it would be there forever. A cash cow that never dies. Same with massive federal contracts, all of which were drafted and signed by administrations very much unlike the current one. That, too, is foreshadowing for later.
In late 2026, as of the week I’m finishing the first draft of this piece, Chronicle was abruptly dissolved. Roughly 800 employees were given two days’ notice, and no severance of any kind, as Riverside realized their cash cows were mortal after all and decided the best way to end their ownership of this once-impressive heritage management flagship was to dynamite it. Hundreds of archaeologists and administrative staff across the country got a whole 48 hours to polish up their resumes and clean out their desks.
This particular horror story is a cautionary tale for the rest of the CRM world in the United States, partly because it was so predictable but also because it’s so familiar. Private equity is easily the most poisonous aspect of modern capitalism, a way to tiptoe around anti-trust laws by having a third party own a controlling interest in a vast array of companies in industries that are either separate, overlapping, or one and the same. Prior to their collapse, for example, Chronicle employees told me they were being forced to use hardware and software solutions that were also owned by Riverside whenever and wherever possible, keeping everything in-house as it were.
Private equity is also a grand-scale example of the growing pestilence of gambling legalization in this country, if you—like me—consider stock market speculation to be a form of gambling. Speculation differs from investment because it involves making leveraged bets based on the vibes around how profitable a company will or will not be in the future, ballooning said company’s valuation in the process. What’s more, companies themselves will often make these bets on each other’s profit forecasts, effectively causing billions of dollars in valuation to appear out of thin air as they swing the pendulum of wishful thinking back and forth between them. The AI industry works entirely like this, at least at the moment, which is why companies like Nvidia and SpaceX are valued in the trillions despite technically not being profitable by a single cent. Their valuation is based entirely on speculation about future profits. Remember those immortal cows…?
Where private equity plays into this is their tendency to do the same thing not with companies or contracts, but with bundles of companies and contracts. The most famous example occurred in 2008, when private equity firms made highly profitable speculative moves on bundles of subprime mortgages—right up until it resulted in the largest economic collapse since the Great Depression. Millions lost their jobs because of these moronic gambles, and of course the American government responded by giving away massive bailouts….to the gamblers. The millions without jobs and increasingly without homes were plain out of luck.
That’s what they get for trying to live their lives while others are gambling with their life savings, I guess. That’ll show them.
Ditto the archaeologists and admin personnel who worked for Chronicle Heritage, née PaleoWest, until now. Sorry about your bad luck. Maybe take a job with Southeastern Archaeological Research, who were recently acquired by Contract Land Staff, a Portfolio Company of Sentinel Capital Partners. Or maybe with Janus Research, a Florida-based environmental firm founded in the early 1980s and acquired by Andurra Group in June of 2025. Or with Geosyntec Consultants, another Florida-based firm founded in the early 1980s who call themselves “employee-owned and private equity-backed” as a way of lampshading how Blackstone Energy Partners bought a controlling stake in 2022. Kleinfelder is an engineering and environmental consulting firm founded in San Diego in 1961 that’s majority owned by investment firm Lindsay Goldberg as of 2018. Trinity Consultants was founded in 1974 and acquired by Veritas Capital—who bought it from Oak Hill Capital—just last month. On that note, WestLand Resources was acquired by Trinity three years ago, and announced their own rebrand as Trinity Consultants Water & Ecology the very morning I was drafting this story. And so on, and so on.
As for the material history itself, wish it the best of luck. The current administration cut funding for the Historic Preservation Fund down to $0, directed the American Council on Historic Preservation to tear the public-consultation portion of the NHPA down to the studs, gutted the National Environmental Protection Act and keeps trying to gut it further, and—with help from Elon Musk and his army of pimply tech-bro ghouls—stripped federal land management agencies to the bone.
Grants for things like cultural and historic preservation also fall under “DEI” according to those same characters, so academic programs focused on that and related fields are being culled from federal funding programs. Even the venerable Smithsonian Institute, beloved by such raging liberals as Theodore Roosevelt, is under attack for “ideological bias” on the grounds that it callously depicts actual history instead of the myths and lies that comprise the American DreamTM.
At the heart of all this, the one thread running through the story remains good old-fashioned greed. It was profitable for colonists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to loot trade goods from Indigenous graves—and yes, this literally happened, with the likes of British minister Roger Williams reporting in 1643 that “two great Beares skinnes sowed together to full length” were gleefully liberated from the grave of a Massachusett chief’s mother. It was then profitable in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to start hauling those same ill-gotten goods to museums where they could charge admission to see them. It also became profitable (kinda) following the Antiquities Act for state and federal agencies to charge admission to come see historical wonders like Colonial Williamsburg and Mesa Verde, now that preservation was a viable option. And it was increasingly profitable through the twentieth century up to today for private firms to acquire massive contracts in exchange for sending teams of often underpaid young Indiana Jones types to conduct surveys and data recovery after preservation went from optional to mandatory.
All this and more has been immensely profitable for the realm of American archaeology, but those profits all hinge on the notion—and consequent legislation—that Americans care deeply about our public lands and the rich material history they contain. Whether or not that’s still true is an open question, and I like to think it is, but fewer and fewer American politicians seem to care even the slightest. Instead, we have the likes of Doug Burgum giving the greenlight to every development proposal that tickles his boss’s fancy and Mike Lee openly calling for abolishment of associated protective legislation—and, while he’s at it, disposal of our public lands to whomever slips him and his ilk the fattest sacks of loot.
Worse still, even that wouldn’t be a death knell to heritage management and preservation if the opposition consisted of an army of small and medium-sized firms willing to fight back to maintain the practice that is both their passion and their lifeblood. But it doesn’t. Not anymore. Instead, and more and more each day, the “opposition” mostly comprises a small number of enormous firms owned by private equity vampires who can and will decide it makes more fiscal sense to wave a white flag, toss their staff out into the cold with no notice or severance, and sell the copper wire from the walls. Business as usual, in other words.
In addition to loving the Smithsonian, and while certainly not without his faults, Roosevelt was also famously a “trust buster” who went after monopolies with the fury of a trained attack dog. This has always been seen as a way to protect Americans from the tyrannies of economic oligarchy, where small numbers of plutocrats present them with limited options priced at whatever they choose, but in light of all this it’s also become one of the only ways left to help protect our sacred wild spaces and the history that they contain. Neither of these things is limitless, and neither of them is invulnerable, so it’s horrifying to think they can only survive so long as they’re profitable.
In the words of the late great Bill Lipe, who got his own start as a crew chief on the legendary Glen Canyon Project, material history is the ultimate non-renewable resource. The past only happens once. Its management and preservation belong in the hands of specialized stakeholders and descendent communities who know its value and treat it accordingly, instead of the same heartless money monsters in Washington and Wall Street who routinely bankrupt companies—and occasionally crash entire economies—with reckless greed-obsessed abandon. I can think of no worse custodians apart from literal robots.
Maybe that, too, is just a matter of time.
