ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with some thoughts on what might come next as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) responds to the challenge of managing archaeological resources across all the gold on the map. The Bureau's archaeologists, working hard to meet the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and National Environmental Policy (NEPA) workload, have spent decades grinding out thousands of Class III inventories and feeding site forms and reports to State Historic Preservation Offices across the West. The various specialists added to satisfy the federal laws of the 1960s and 1970s are BLM's "NHPA, NEPA and Federal Land Policy and Management Act babies (FLPMA)." The BLM's "multiple-use mission" was written into law with the FLPMA of 1976. FLPMA is BLM's governing act, and it calls for the Bureau to retain the public domain, and to manage it for the sustained use as well as conservation of natural and cultural resources.
