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Blukis Onat Applied Sciences, Inc. (later simply BOAS, Inc.) is a Washington corporation registered in 1982 by Dr. Astrida Blukis Onat. Classified by the North American Industry Classification System under 541690, "Other Scientific and Technical Consulting Services," this Seattle-based firm specializes in archaeological and ethnographic work authorized under federal and state regulations to provide for the management of cultural resources.

Astrida Blukis Onat's professional life in the Pacific Northwest began in 1966 with an appointment as an Anthropology and Sociology Instructor at the newly formed Seattle Community College (later Seattle Central Community College) from which she retired nearly 30 years later. During a 1973-1974 sabbatical, Blukis Onat continued graduate studies at Washington State University (WSU) and in 1980 completed her PhD in anthropology.

For the first couple decades of her teaching career, Blukis Onat organized summer archaeological field schools for her students. Because of opportunities for consulting work separate from her academic position, she founded in 1974 as a sole proprietorship Blukis Archaeological Consulting Service (BACS) and characterized it as "perhaps the second private contract archaeology company in Washington State" (Blukis Onat, "BOAS History").* BACS and Blukis Onat joined others around the United States in cultural resource management (CRM), a term and a profession that emerged in the 1970s.

Blukis Onat's WSU affiliation gave access to the emerging contract arm of the university's anthropology department, Washington Archaeological Research Center, as well as to private contracting firms such as National Heritage, Inc., co-founded by WSU anthropology professor Richard Daugherty. Through BACS and working for or sub-contracting with WSU-associated groups, Blukis Onat completed archaeological projects for government entities and private firms. By late 1978, though, the advantages of an approach outside of university/college bureaucracies that allowed not only quicker response times but also collaborations with nearby professionals for more complex projects resulted in Blukis Onat teaming with Seattle Central colleagues in the Institute of Cooperative Research, Inc. (ICR), a Washington corporation, and within a year directing large projects such as for the Washington Public Power Supply System and Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. Blukis Onat left ICR to found Blukis Onat Applied Sciences (later BOAS, Inc.) in October 1982. Blukis Onat's progression from consulting within college or university structures to business incorporation mirrored a national trend from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s of private industry replacing institution-based groups in the management of cultural resources. Some American archaeologists characterize this transition as the discipline's bifurcation between the contract-based work of CRM professionals and the research focus of academic archaeologists.

Cultural resource management flourished during this era because of the confluence of historic preservation with natural resources protection in the stream of governmental regulations. The 1906 Antiquities Act articulated the federal government's interest in protecting historic and prehistoric sites on public land while the 1935 Historic Sites Act asserted that the protection of resources identified as of national historical or archaeological significance was in the public's interest. But before the 1960s, policymakers had not systematically applied those acts to foster a preservation ethic for a variety of cultural resources. Preservation measures for archaeologists, in particular, involved not the management of cultural resources but attempts to "salvage" data as infrastructure projects such as dam building inundated huge areas from the 1930s into the 1960s. Although the 1960 Reservoir Salvage Act mitigated the ad hoc nature of these information collection efforts, the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) solidified a national commitment to preservation in its call for "productive harmony" between "our modern society and our prehistoric and historic resources." NHPA orchestrated that harmony through provisions that constructed a management apparatus for cultural resources that included federal-state partnership in the formation of state historic preservation offices (and, after 1992 amendments, tribal historic preservation offices too), national oversight in the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, a more expansive definition of significance for cultural resources deemed eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places that the act created, and the Section 106 review process that was critical for the development of the field of cultural resource management because it mandated that federal agencies consider the effects on cultural resources of any projects they carried out, approved, or funded.

Albeit NHPA's Section 106 established a management process for cultural resources affected by federal undertakings, cultural resource management's rapid expansion waited until after the 1969 National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA). That statute called for "productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment" to be achieved by establishing the role of the federal government in assessing the effect of federally funded actions on the environment through its Environmental Assessment/Environmental Impact Statement process, which took into account "historic, cultural, and natural aspects of our national heritage." Thus NHPA and NEPA instituted a federal planning process to identify the effect of actions on the environment and on cultural resources. In 1971 President Nixon's Executive Order 11593 reinforced NHPA's preservation ethic and also called for locating and evaluating sites on federally owned or controlled properties. The 1974 Archeological and Historic Preservation Act authorized all federal agencies to fund investigations in order to mitigate the impacts of their projects on important archaeological sites.

The resulting historic preservation and environmental protection regulatory structure standardized a bureaucratic procedure of identifying and mitigating effects of actions on cultural resources that then created a market for CRM firms who could respond quickly to private and governmental requests for assessments. BOAS was one such firm. It competed for and secured many projects from the 1980s through the 1990s and into the 21st century.

In the 1980s, Blukis Onat continued as a full-time college instructor while directing the company and managing report production as principal investigator. Assisted by a limited staff of sometimes only a couple full-time employees supplemented by part-time workers, especially project-specific field crews, Blukis Onat and BOAS completed many small projects, most often surveys to locate prehistoric and historic sites within an area to be impacted by an undertaking such as highway realignment. Sometimes, though, the projects provided background used for planning. For example, Blukis Onat noted that in 1986 BOAS completed Washington State's first Resource Protection Planning Process (RP3) document ("BOAS History"). The National Park Service in the late 1970s advocated RP3, calling for each state to identify study units with common historical contexts and then to develop management plans for the cultural resources within them. Though RP3 generated much criticism and was replaced with more general guidelines for preservation and management plans, BOAS Project 198606 for the "Northern Puget Sound Study Unit" along with other study unit reports prepared for the state by other CRM contractors recorded early statewide cultural resource management efforts.

BOAS took on larger projects in the 1990s, some that included archaeological excavation for which data recovery required more temporary workers both for the field and the laboratory and demanded wide and deep data analysis to enable the synthesis necessary for reports that assessed responsibly the impact of an undertaking on the cultural resources. Blukis Onat characterized these projects as "equivalent to PhD dissertations" ("BOAS History") and noted the additional burden they imposed because clients often needed to be convinced that appropriate funding of report writing was as critical to compliance with CRM regulations as fieldwork. BOAS proved adept at these projects. In 2006, nearly a quarter century after the company's beginning, a principal with a competing CRM company remarked that BOAS had conducted more data recovery excavations than any other company in Washington state (Blukis Onat, "BOAS History").

The largest of these projects was a five-year contract with the Walla Walla District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to reassess the Palouse Canyon Archaeological District (BOAS Project 199212). That district included the famed but inundated Marmes Rockshelter with its evidence of occupation more than 11,000 years ago as well as dozens of other sites. The scope of this contract required the company to secure a Small Business Administration loan to bulk up for a project that required field crews for each October from 1992 through 1995 for site survey and extensive rock shelter excavations, the subsequent analysis of what was recovered, annual report production, and a culminating, eighth volume with a management plan for the Palouse Canyon Archaeological District. During these years, BOAS managed $500,000 or more in contracts. The expanded workload allowed Blukis Onat to accept an early retirement from Seattle Central in 1995 and devote herself full time to the company no longer only as principal investigator but also often as project manager.

Projects ebbed and flowed as cultural resource management evolved in changing governmental environments such as ones that favored public-private partnerships. Another complex excavation project brought BOAS into one of these partnerships beginning in 1997. For a Tolt River water treatment facility, Seattle Public Utilities teamed with CDM Philip, the company in charge of designing, building, and operating the facility once constructed. That private firm then subcontracted BOAS first for monitoring during construction that quickly became large-scale data recovery of cultural resources several thousand years old and resulted in a six-volume report. The Tolt archaeological site generated more than bureaucratic paperwork and gray literature. Because its location was known as an old Snoqualmie settlement Stuwe'yuqw, members of several Northwest tribes visited the site. Chairman of the Snoqualmie Tribe Andrew de los Angeles organized volunteer efforts to continue investigations after the contracted work concluded and involved Snoqualmie Valley public schools as well. Archaeology Month activities in 1998 and 1999 offered visits to the site and to the laboratory. King County integrated the site into middle school curriculum for Snoqualmie Valley schools. In addition to these public outreach efforts, BOAS informed the professional archaeological community through a series of poster and paper presentations at the 1999 Northwest Anthropology Conference and the 2000 and 2001 Society for American Archaeology conferences. Finally Stuwe'yuqw starred in a 2001 video production for "Seattle Focus," a monthly video magazine on Seattle's governmental access channel. In these outreach efforts, BOAS Project 199705 revealed the wider reach possible for some CRM projects.

The Palouse Canyon and Tolt projects focused primarily on prehistoric resources but another project highlighted the company's ability to work with historic resources including standing buildings in the Swanson Lakes Wildlife Area in the Channeled Scablands of Lincoln County, Washington (BOAS Project 199710). Along with prehistoric land uses, BOAS documented historic ones through oral history interviews with local residents who recalled agricultural uses and with members of the Spokane Tribe and Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation who traveled to the area to harvest seasonally available plants.

The company's ethnographic research into the communities who moved across the Swanson Lakes landscape exemplified another shift in the scope of and approach to cultural resource management. Though not specifically a piece of CRM legislation, the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) identified the federal government's role in protecting access to Native sacred places. For federal landholding agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service, the act motivated them to identify such sites. As mentioned above, one of ICR's large projects was for Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. In 1980 this forest contracted for an inventory of tribal peoples' religious use of the forest. Working with thirteen tribes and different ethnographers over three years, ICR produced a three-volume report not in this collection but held by the forest. This experience in applied ethnography and the contacts made with Northwest tribal members produced long lasting results for Blukis Onat and ultimately for BOAS.

The founding documents of cultural resource management referred to "resources" and "properties," but not often to the people who produced them. Unlike NHPA or NEPA, AIRFA referred first to people in its call "to protect and preserve for American Indians" their religious rights. Though the 1988 Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association Supreme Court decision eviscerated the law's provisions to protect sacred places, AIRFA marked a shift in federal legislation solidified in 1990 when the National Park Service issued "National Register Bulletin 38: Guidelines for Evaluating and Documenting Traditional Cultural Properties" and in it defined "traditional cultural properties." The Section 106 review process had always included consultation with living communities and through it had, for example, been used to protect places a community, especially tribal peoples, regarded as integral to their identity. These locations, not all with distinct boundaries, became known in the bulletin as "traditional cultural properties" (TCP). The bulletin then provided guidelines to assess their eligibility to the National Register of Historic Places. Nothing in the bulletin limited designation of "traditional cultural properties" to Native American spiritual sites, but cultural resource managers most often use TCP for such sites.

A reorientation of CRM practice to recognize cultural resources' significance as defined by living communities and not just by research potential aligned with Blukis Onat's broadened anthropological approach that combined archaeology and ethnography. While conducting field schools for her SCC students, Blukis Onat had since the late 1960s regularly consulted with members of the Swinomish Indian Community (SITC) and in the 1970s had met Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe (SSIT) members. By the late 1980s, Blukis Onat worked with and for these communities as an ethnographic expert in court cases and because of her friendship with the sisters Jean Bedal Fish and Edith Bedal, edited their "Two Voices, A History of the Sauk and Suiattle People and Sauk Country Experiences." Though the legal work belongs to and resides with the tribes, the "Two Voices" manuscript is accessible here (BOAS Project 200003). BOAS produced an ethnographic literature review for Mount Rainier National Park that also resulted in a volume of the "Journal of Northwest Anthropology" devoted to reproducing Northwest Indian peoples' legends about Tahoma (Mount Rainier). Each of the above along with the earlier inventory of tribal peoples' religious use of Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest laid the groundwork in ethnographic practice essential for the Sound Transit's Central Link Light Rail project (BOAS Project 200005). For it, in addition to the archaeological monitoring and data recovery on prehistoric and historic sites, BOAS interviewed tribal members and defined as a traditional cultural property a series of rock promontories associated with mythological beings and events for the Duwamish people. For researchers interested not only in the results for archaeological work on prehistoric sites and a historic 1930s Hooverville in the Seattle vicinity but also in the integration of TCP and ethnographic studies, the data recovery reports, "Epic of the Winds" TCP National Register nomination form, and "Winds, Waterways, and Weirs" ethnographic study of the Central Link Light Rail route are available here.

In 2006, founder Blukis Onat hoped to sell BOAS and retire, but when that plan fell through she chose to complete the remaining archaeological projects in the next few years and continue ethnographic work with tribal governments. As of 2017, constrained but active, BOAS, Inc., lives.

The collection's most obvious value lies in the diverse topics represented by different projects, most in Washington, including data recovery for sites several thousand years old to those only a few decades old as well as applied ethnography with a number of Northwest tribes. Those interested in following the arc of the discipline of cultural resource management from its first years into the twenty-first century may do so here through close examination of the types of projects and for whom they were completed and of Blukis Onat's narrative history of BOAS, Inc., found in the Processing and Collection Documentation file.

For scholars interested in small businesses, BOAS certified as a Women's Business Enterprise and as an Economically Disadvantaged Women-Owned Small Business. The narrative history tells tales of small business challenges: second mortgages; financial juggling necessitated by the nature of CRM work that required tremendous capital outlays to hire and equip field crews and sustain office staff sometimes for months before receiving any payment; the founder having to delay or default in paying herself; personnel management; billing overhead; and to the third of her three business lessons: "make sure one has access to loads of money all the time" (Blukis Onat, "BOAS History").

* "BOAS History" is not only a narrative history of BOAS, Inc., but also a professional autobiography of Astrika Blukis Onat. It can be found in the Processing and Collection Documentation file.