Indian burial grounds?

See those railroad tracks in the photo? They belong to the New York, Susquehanna & Western Railroad (NYS&W), formerly the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad (DL&W). They traverse the flat land of the Chenango River valley. Their railbed was laid down around 1870, long before we had any systematic archaeological investigations here. Our local archaeological group was started in 1950.

Since then, dozens of sites along the river and the railroad have been reported. The overall consensus is that the land everywhere along the Chenango River was used by the Native Americans for thousands of years.

Consequently, the chances are pretty good that the railroad was laid over many sites, some of which could have been burial grounds. Actually, the railbed is preserving these possible sites by preventing anyone from disturbing them.

If the New York Regional Interconnect (www.evesun.com/topics/news/NYRI/">NYRI) installs a powerline along these tracks, it will have to drastically disturb the railbed as well as the ground under and around it to construct foundations for the huge towers.

Federal law prohibits the disturbance of Indian burial grounds under the provisions of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. The only way to know whether a burial ground is present is to look for one. Therefore, an archaeological survey would have to be conducted for every tower -- every tower, not just a few arbitrarily selected representative sites. The railbed ballast would have to be removed and the ground under it would have to be carefully examined by licensed archaeologists. This is a delicate process, not one done with a bulldozer or a back-hoe.