were unchallenged. Even radiocarbon dating had little intellectual impact beyond putting absolute dates to archaeological chronologies and improving between-chronology correlation. Almost unnoticed, radiocarbon dating did confirm the accuracy of seriation-based chronology.

Cultural Resource Management

Field methods that could yield the kinds of data required to do culture-history were codified in the late 1930s. The context for codification was provided by an explosion in the number of field archaeologists needed to direct the large-scale excavations that were funded by the federal government to provide work for unskilled laborers during the depression. The ad hoc procedures employed by trained individuals who could be trusted to make the right decisions had to be replaced with a set of rules (in this case, forms) that could be counted on to generate usable data. One rationale for the federal programs lay in conservation (Quimby 1979), even if strategy was determined by political necessity. Still, the locations selected for excavation were usually chosen by professionals—typically to fill in time-space gaps and save spectacular sites—so this federal work contributed directly to the emerging culture-historical syntheses. The program came to an abrupt end with World War II.

Post–World War II conservation archaeology, now nearly synonymous with federal archaeology, restarted with the River Basin Survey program in the Missouri Valley, under the direction of the Smithsonian Institution. New legislation enlarged the federal mandate, especially during the 1960s. The Reservoir Archaeological Salvage and Archaeological and Historic Preservation Acts (1960) put the National Park Service (NPS) in charge of all federal archaeology, a position it maintained until 1974 when the Archaeological Resources Act (or the “Moss-Bennett” act of 1974) gave federal archaeology more stable funding and involved all federal land-managing agencies in archaeological conservation and research.

When the NPS oversaw federal archaeology, CRM was still done by academicians as a part-time activity. A benevolent and informal client-patron relationship between the NPS and universities existed. As the amount of money involved grew and the number of agencies increased, so did the formality of contractual arrangements. This expansion of federal funding and the involvement of less-benevolent agencies than the NPS coincided with a dramatic downturn in academic employment as the first of the bloated crops of Ph.D.’s created by the expansion of university archaeology programs in the 1960s entered the job market. For the first time a separate class of CRM archaeologists emerged, the for-profit contractors. And as luck would have it, this major organizational change took place at the very time that archaeology was in intellectual turmoil. The warranting legislation itself had been framed by culture-historians. That culture-history relied upon common sense was probably an essential ingredient in its passage, but by the time the impact was felt, culture-history was passé and in disrepute but had not yet been replaced by a paradigm of comparable robustness. During the critical years in which archaeologists ought to have been instructing new agencies in why cultural resources were valuable, what archaeology was, and how it was done, no leadership was forthcoming. In such an intellectual vacuum, procedure came to dominate process; compliance—compliance with the law—became the raison d’être. The amount of money spent on archaeology by federal agencies was staggering by previous standards, and soon the bulk of all archaeological fieldwork was CRM.

The Second Paradigm: Processualism—Theory without Practice

One of the distinctive features of U.S. archaeology is that, in spite of its natural history beginnings, it has been in close association with anthropology from the days of the BAE on. Indeed, nonclassical archaeology in the United States is usually called “anthropological archaeology” whenever its intellectual roots are called into question. Why this should have happened in the United States (and in the other places it did) is not obscure. The early linkages were institutional and to some extent political. But the association was lasting and effective in large measure because the methodological problems facing