Sep 1, 2026
Cultural heritage is
under attack in the United States. The National Historic
Preservation Act’s Section 106 regulation, which balances
economic development and historic preservation, has been
rewritten to leave historic places in the path of the
wrecking ball at the federal government’s whim. Developers
contend that a new regulation is required because the
Section 106 process is too slow, too unpredictable, and too
costly. They argue that locking up lands from oil and gas
extraction, timber interests, and mining costs jobs and
denies the country needed resources. But they’re wrong.
Section 106 does not cost jobs, money, or time. Allowing the
public to comment on what happens on public land is not to
be deplored but celebrated. Most importantly, once
destroyed, cultural and historic sites are irretrievably
lost, and all of us diminished.
While currently
playing out in the United States, fights about heritage are
not unique to America. Battles between development and
preservation play out across the globe—in countries rich
and poor, autocratic and democratic, and new and old. Some
of these struggles escalate into loud, contentious,
take-no-prisoners pitched battles.
Economic
development is often a Faustian bargain for local and
affected communities. The lure of a better life must be
weighed against unknowable and incalculable costs to one’s
way of life. Most communities embrace the jobs,
improvements, and well-being that ensue from development.
What they fear is severing ties to land and places—some
known and others yet to be discovered—that hold meaning
and values essential for their community to persist. For
local, Indigenous, and diasporic communities, severing these
ties is yet another cut added to the thousands of previous
cuts that continues to transform their culture in ways they
do not like and that they cannot control.
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Many
developers and government officials mistake cultural
heritage as a “soft” or secondary concern for
communities. They base their arguments for development on
economic and material concerns, convinced that these are
paramount in the minds of community members. For some, these
arguments resonate. But for most, economic and
infrastructure improvements are only beneficial if they do
not transform society into something foreign and
unrecognizable. As one Mongolian camel herder explained to
me, “We would like the comforts promised by the mining
companies but not at the expense of being Mongolian. We’ve
been poor for a thousand years; being poor is not that big a
deal. Not being nomads or having nomads in the country would
be the end of our way of life and the end of
Mongolia.”
On August 27, 2026, more than 600
organizations sent an open
letter to Congress outlining their opposition to the
proposed changes to Section 106. Why the outrage? It’s
simple. Though couched as common sense reform to enable
economic development, the rewrite of the Section 106
regulation is nothing less than the federal government’s
attempt to usurp control over whose history counts and whose
can be disregarded. If the proposed regulation is simply
about the timeliness and cost of development projects, then
it would not have elicited so much opposition. Many in the
preservation community offered to engage in regulatory
reform. But the authors of the proposed change are not
interested in reform. Their objective is to control the
country’s historical narrative—whose story gets told and
whose story is forgotten.
History is replete with
attempts to legitimize the present by destroying vestiges of
the past. Ofttimes these attempts are resisted, sometimes
violently. In these clashes, groups are oppressed and their
material culture destroyed. Rarely are such attempts
forgotten or forgiven. Remarking on the guilty verdict in
the case of Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi for destruction of
ancient texts in Timbuktu, Mark Ellis of the International
Bar Association, stated in 2016: “Politically, there will
be those who will question why Bensouda [then-International
Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda] is focusing on
ancient sites rather than going after rape, torture and
murder convictions, but destruction of cultural heritage is
not a second-rate crime. It’s part of an atrocity to erase
a people.”
We need to wrest control of the past from
the federal government and give it back to the people of
this country. This is not a fight we sought. But it is the
fight we must win. All of us need to spread a message about
why Section 106 matters and why we will not let the
government destroy it. Simply put, we will not give up the
right to tell who we were and what we did through the places
we lived, as we want it to be known free from government
censure or control.
Author Bio:
Jeffrey H. Altschul is the co-president of the
Coalition
for Archaeological
Synthesis.
Credit
Line: This article was produced by Human
Bridges.
