The Long View

This was the week to stand atop Castle Hill and gaze upon spring in her wedding dress and foreswear all others… at least until sultry summer comes along. Taking the long view that the hill affords somehow makes it easier to watch the seasons spin out, one after another, as the world itself spins year after year in its own orbit of a star spinning in a greater orbit still. Somewhere in the midst of these head-spinning thoughts it occurs to us that this place we call Newtown has been inspiring humankind for 11,000 years. Before this place or the great river that holds it in the crook of its arm had names, before history even, there were people here gazing with appreciation upon spring. Of course, they are long gone, but not completely without a trace.

The town’s alluvial bottomlands still serve up pointed reminders of just how deep the human story runs here when arrowheads and other artifacts fetch up under plows and excavators. They are not just reminders, however. They are the plot points that help solve the mysteries of deep time, and for that reason Newtown’s Planning and Zoning Commission (P&Z) instituted a new set of land use regulations on Monday designed to preserve significant archaeological, historical, and cultural features of land slated for residential, commercial, and industrial subdivisions and resubdivisions.

This is not the first time someone has had the foresight to survey the archaeological resources in the area before disturbing the land. In the late 1980s, the Iroquois Gas Transmission System surveyed the corridor of the proposed gas pipeline that was later built across 55 miles of western Connecticut. In that survey, Newtown proved to be a particularly rich trove of prehistoric artifacts, which along with the field notes and maps describing their discovery in detail are now part of the archives at the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History and the Connecticut Archaeology Center.

P&Z’s move to protect Newtown’s archaeological record from the indiscriminate excavations of modern development is a worthy effort that most reasonable people can support without reservation. While it may be a widely shared goal, under the new regulations, the responsibility and expense is delegated exclusively to a few property owners. This is the local equivalent of the unfunded mandate, which we rail about routinely in this space when the state tries it.

It is fair to ask land developers to do no harm to the inherent cultural and historical value of their property, just as we ask them to do no harm to the environment. But our environmental responsibilities are shared; the town incurs considerable expense each year supporting a health department, a sewage treatment plant, and a bureaucracy to assess and oversee the environmental well-being of the town. If it is our collective wish to preserve the archaeological record buried in our land, our responsibility should extend beyond merely telling someone else to take care of it.

At the very least, Newtown should support land owners with assistance in seeking available grants and with temporary property tax credits that help mitigate the expense of comprehensive archaeological survey work. It may, in the end, determine whether the town ends up with a cooperative or adversarial process — a full- or half-hearted effort. Let’s take the long view on this and dig a little deeper into our own reserves of responsibility.