About 30 or 35 years ago my parents were asked by The University of Manitoba for permission to dig a 1 foot trench near the river which bounded one side of their property to look for artifacts of Canadian aboriginals. The plan was do do a long trench across twenty or thirty houses. They answered the letter with "of course you can" or something like that. Got a letter back a couple months later. It thanked them, but said that they were the only ones that answered in the affirmative. Apparently all their neighbours cared more about protecting their future right to build a shed over the priceless history of the people who lived there first.
That's a very bad faith take on their decisions.
Edit: And back then there was a lot more open racism in Winnipeg than there is today, so it could be for even worse reasons.
So the claim here seems to be: A university archeologist may decide to place a (modern) brick in your backyard, which they will use to support their claim that it's an archeological site, so that they can have the opportunity to waste thousands of combined hours of work and a million dollars of their undersized budget digging up a site that they don't actually think has any artifacts of interest. To which I say:
What?
I used to be a part of volunteer group that "lobbied" for climbing access so I had a lot of exposure to that bureaucracy.
You’re welcome to do that but knowing that these people will try to kick me off my land and lock it away like a nuclear waste dump in a time of housing crises means I’m going to deny access too.
Big projects like Crossrail have uncovered a lot of archaeology in London over the years.
Others might argue it’s “technical debt”.