3 Aug 2018

It’s a headache few PMs have time for: digging on site reveals a bone, clay shard or midden that shuts down or stalls development. Critical paths come to a screeching halt as experts, and possibly government, traditional landowners and other stakeholders must be consulted.

Heritage and conservation may add risk, costs and complexity to an already complex project. By engaging an archaeologist early on, PMs ensure compliance and may find innovative ways to engage community and other stakeholders in preserving history that will settle a project into its place.

Tina King, Associate Director at Urbis, says clients sometimes see her as an obstruction when they should embrace her as an ally.

“Some project managers see heritage as a hindrance and I have had incidents where information has been held back or we find something is hidden and it ends up costing time and money unnecessarily,” King says.

Then it’s down tools for the construction crew, while the archaeologist records the find and deals with it. The best way to avoid a conflict between timelines and unearthing an artefact is to involve the archaeologist early in the project and set aside a contingency budget to find a flexible solution.

I’ve found by sharing information on finds with the community, they can be a lot more positive about development.

Tina King View Profile

“Heritage is best dealt with proactively,” King says. “In some cases, clients are very proactive and they’ll get us out in the predesign phase to do remote sensing and test excavation [to] inform the design.”

Finding links to our past is thrilling and creates a buzz that can resonate internationally. At Brisbane’s Queen’s Wharf casino development, Urbis recently dug up rare Edison tubes — power cables that revealed the city’s early electrical grid, one of the world’s first.

Designed by the US inventor Thomas Edison (the tubes date back to 1884), the tubes were sent to London’s Science Centre and Thomas Edison National Historical Park in New Jersey and housed in Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum and at Parliament House.

“The client really saw an opportunity to get stakeholders involved in the recovery and conservation of these artefacts, and they turned it into a big event,” King says. “I’ve found by sharing information on finds with the community, they can be a lot more positive about development.”

This article was first published in Project Manager magazine