While McCormick's view may be too pessimistic for some advoccates of public archeology, it is important for public relations needs, especially when large-scale "mega-buck" projects come under intense public scrutiny, as in a recent GAO review of some large contract archeology projects. In cases like this we find that the profession and the discipline are in disarray, with no united front available to support an acceptable approach to data recovery mitigation (the primary reason for most of the actual expenditures in public archeology). In many ways we are back to square one, looking at the ancient problems of simple "salvage" archeology; we still haven't come to rational terms with the positive and negative aspects of this context. The several symposia on "mitigation" offered at the 1981 Society for American Archeology meetings in San Diego made some progress by airing views, but the disinterested observer surely must have come away with a strong feeling for the lack of any clear cut consensus.
