UTILITIES: Help for Diggers

Outside the little town of Plains, Texas last week, bulldozers, trenching machines and jeeps were busy working on El Paso Natural Gas Co.'s $180 million pipeline across New Mexico and into Arizona. Along with the usual crews of laborers were two men equipped with some unusual tools—archaeologists' spades, trowels, notebooks, cameras, maps and paper bags. They were part of a larger team of archaeologists who will walk some 1,000 miles of the pipeline's right of way (including spurs in Colorado and Utah), scanning the surface for telltale signs of ancient Indian ruins before the bulldozers go to work. After the digging has started, they will retrace their steps to see what is found. Sponsor and paymaster of the expedition: El Paso Natural Gas.

El Paso first got mixed up with buried historical treasures when it started a smaller, 450-mile pipeline from New Mexico to Arizona three years ago. The National Park Service, backed by a federal law barring the disturbance of Indian relics, asked El Paso's President Paul Kayser, 65, to let archaeologists inspect the right-of-way before the bulldozers chewed up any valuable finds. Kayser, alert to a chance for some unusual public-relations, agreed to more than that. He promised that El Paso would pay all the costs and underwrite a follow-up study to boot.

As the pipeline progressed, no fewer than 146 new archaeological sites were uncovered by Park Service diggers. Hundreds of valuable relics were found, some of them dating back 4,000 years, and El Paso earned the good will of museums and scientists everywhere. Congratulations poured in from all over the world. Even the King of Sweden, a noted promoter of archaeological research, sent an appreciative message.

In its new pipeline venture, El Paso will spend an estimated $50,000 on archaeology, hopes to uncover still more ancient treasures. (More than 22 likely looking sites have already been found, one of them dating back thousands of years.) The scientists hope that other pipeline companies will take a leaf from El Paso's book, include archaeology as a normal cost of future pipeline construction.