Client: City of Monterey
Location: Monterey County
Timeframe: 2016–2017
Project Manager: Stella D’Oro

Project Highlights:

• The extensive experience of Albion’s senior staff in the City and County of Monterey allowed us to expediently and correctly identify and evaluate precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial cultural resources encountered during construction monitoring.

• Our skilled team of construction monitors provided cultural resource management training for construction crews, worked day and evening shifts, were on-call for emergency situations, and digitally submitted daily monitoring logs.

• Albion’s team of construction monitors, senior archaeologists, and Native American consultants helped the city to manage impacts to cultural resources, and meet project timelines within budget.

The City of Monterey is rehabilitating their sewer system, requiring the replacement or repair of sewer pipes and man holes across the entire City. The chance for encountering known or previously unrecorded archaeological sites is very high throughout the project area. In accordance with the Mitigation Monitoring and Reporting Program developed by the City, Albion was subcontracted by SWCA Environmental Consultants to monitor ground disturbing activities that intersect or fall within 300 feet of known cultural resources. The project area includes approximately 258 locations that require monitoring. Our archaeologists are available on-call to monitor these archaeological sensitive areas during day and evening shifts. The project often requires several teams working at multiple locations simultaneously to support construction goals.

Our archaeological monitors carefully observe ground disturbing activities to detect in-tact resources, conduct initial investigations when cultural deposits are uncovered, and communicate with Albion senior staff when a potential resource has been identified. Albion senior staff expediently respond to discoveries, and make in-field assessments of significance under Section 106 guidelines for precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial archaeological deposits. To date, we have re-identified four known sites and discovered one previously unrecorded site; we updated and created site records for these sites. We also consulted with the city and the project’s Native American Most Likely Descendent (MLD) regarding data recovery required within one of the identified sites (CA-MNT-298). Albion provided a team of archaeological monitors, senior archaeologists, and Native American consultants to assess all types of archaeological discoveries encountered during the project, and assist the City of Monterey in successfully executing their project.