Most mining projects treat cultural heritage as a construction phase problem. The impact assessment is done, the management plan is written, and the chance find procedure sits in a folder until the excavators arrive. By then the most dangerous phase has already passed.
Exploration is boots on the ground in places no assessment has yet reached. Sampling, trenching, drilling, pad and access road clearance, camp construction: every one of these disturbs ground that has never been looked at, often before anyone has asked the communities who live there what it holds. The intangible dimension is the easiest to miss and the most costly to get wrong. A stream, a grove, a single tree or a rock can carry cultural or spiritual value that is invisible to a geologist and absent from every map.
On a financed project, heritage that surfaces late shows up as delay, suspended disbursement, or a grievance that will not close. Caught early, it is cheap to manage. Caught late, it can stop the work.
I have set out what good looks like, the scoping before the field season, the chance find procedures trained into the whole team, and the heritage data your own boreholes already hold, in the full article:
Read it here: https://www.culturalheritageriskmanagement.com/insights-exploration
Neil Fairburn, Director, Cultural Heritage Risk Management Ltd
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