a coalition of community members, politicians, and scholars, in 1992 the House Subcommittee on Public Works held budget hearings for GSA in New York, at which it heard testimony from a wide variety of critics of GSA's handling of the project and also heard from the GSA Administrator. Several changes occurred. Control of the burial site was transferred from an archaeological firm in the city to the physical anthropologist Michael Blakey and his team at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C., for study at the Montague Cobb Biological Anthropology Laboratory. This ensured that African-American students would participate in studies of their ethnic ancestors' remains. Effects of protests In large part due to activism by the African-American community, the United States Congress passed, and on October 6, 1992 President George H. W. Bush signed, HR 5488 “The Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government Appropriations Act” (which became Public Law 102-393) which ordered the GSA to immediately cease construction, archeological excavation & skeletal exhumation on the pavilion portion of the Ted Weiss Federal Building (where the remains had been found) and to appropriate $3 million to modify the pavilion foundation, prevent further deterioration of the burial ground & memorialize the site. The southern portion of the building, slated to be built on the parcel by Duane and Elk Streets, was eliminated to provide adequate room for a memorial. In addition, activists lobbied for landmark status for the burial ground, and gathered 100,000 signatures to send to the U.S. Department of the Interior. On April 19, 1993, 0.34 acre of the African Burial Ground was listed on the National Register of Historic Places (#93001597) and became a National Historic Landmark. Given its importance, GSA proposed partial mitigation of the adverse effects to the burial ground of the construction of 290 Broadway, by undertaking programs of data analysis, curation, and education. There was also growing support for a museum on the site to interpret African-American experience and history in New York. The discovery and long controversy received national media attention, raising interest and awareness in public archaeology projects. Theresa Singleton, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution said, The media exposure has created a larger, national audience for this type of research. I've been called by dozens of scholars and laypeople, all of them interested in African-American archaeology, all of them curious about why they don't know more about the field. Until