In the US, yes. But I know Italy and other places in Europe have laws that require an excavation to be done to look for historical stuff. It can end up cancelling entire projects if they discover something important which can't be extracted.
Well Europe has thousands of years of productive civilisation (not to denigrate the achievements of mesoamerican civilisations) - but density and continuous habitation of cities is different in Europe.
It seems madness to suggest we should mount an archological expidition to Mars before a colonisation mission but I hope efforts are made to explore it scientifically.
We have those laws in the US too, and I'm sure Europe has its fair share of developers trying to cover up archeological finds to avoid derailing a development project.
