that the museum became the first institution and intellectual seat of archaeology. More important, however, concern for conservation of the archaeological record led to the development of a particular kind of archaeology in the United States—CRM. But in the nineteenth century and indeed up until the 1970s, these concerns were pursued by the same people who were developing academic archaeology. Through lobbying by professional societies such as the American Anthropological Association and Section H of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, an active government role in preservation began with the creation of the casa grande National Monument in Arizona (1892). Legislation protecting archaeological materials on federal property was adopted shortly thereafter (the Antiquities Act of 1908).

The great amount of time it took for even these modest efforts to be realized can be related, at least in part, to the historical character of archaeology and its lack of scientific standing. The lack of scientific standing meant that archaeology did not enjoy the public support that science as a whole did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It remained an esoteric activity without any obvious justification. Archaeology’s historical character, however, served to prevent it from being embraced by physical scientists whose essentialist (sometimes obliquely characterized as “generalizing”) approach rejected all history as storytelling and seemingly precluded empirical testing. U.S. archaeologists would periodically be consumed by misguided efforts to make their field a generalizing discipline in pursuit of their scientific grail throughout the twentieth century. The same scenario has plagued biology (Mayr and Provine 1980).

The Emergence of Archaeology from Natural History

Although archaeology continues to be pursued as natural history today in the form of the various “amateur”societies of historical sciences, in which data have unique time-space coordinates, retain a role for amateurs long after their contributions to the ahistorical sciences cease. But the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the emergence of archaeology as a distinct discipline for the first time. Key was the development of a sense of professionalization, first through its incorporation into museums, most notably the smithsonian institution through the National Museum and the Bureau of Ethnology (later the Bureau of American Ethnology, or BAE). Universities, further contributing by training archaeologists, solidified this sense of profession.

These settings saw the first systematic efforts at artifact description. This, in turn, required the development of theory, that is, some principles or rules for how to conceive, tabulate, and discuss archaeological remains independently of common sense. The initial efforts were modeled on the physical sciences and focused on chipped-stone artifacts (e.g., Rau 1876; Wilson 1899; see Dunnell 1986b and references therein). Chipped-stone artifacts in North America meant “arrowheads, spearheads, and knives” (Wilson 1899); that they were tackled first when ceramics have since proved so much more efficacious reveals something of the inner working of the transition from common sense to archaeological theory. Object naming in English is largely functional, based on what the object does. Consequently, it “made sense” to organize only objects that had all their parts. Because sizable collections of whole chipped-stone tools were amassed in advance of more delicate whole ceramic pots, the former were deemed the “logical” starting place. Ceramics, which would come to dominate U.S. analytic efforts for those periods that produced them, followed somewhat later as, on the functional models, pots (and not shards) were deemed the relevant objects of typology (e.g., Holmes 1886a). Charles Rau and Thomas Wilson’s efforts based on geometric shape did not bear any intellectual fruit (no temporal or spatial patterns) and thus gained no currency (Dunnell 1986b).

william henry holmes’s ceramic analyses (1886a, 1886b) were more successful. His “philosophic approach” (Mason 1886) allowed him to crudely distinguish what today we would call functional and stylistic attributes, a distinction that would later prove critical to method