1947 and 1951 by Wilfrid Jury, after which Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons was reconstructed as a tourist attraction by the Ontario government. Kidd’s monograph on that site was a milestone in the early development of historical archaeology in North America.

Historical archaeology tended to interest the Canadian public more than prehistoric archaeology, and governments viewed the reconstruction of historical sites as a way to encourage tourism, especially in poorer areas of the country. In 1961, the federal government established the Canadian Historic Sites Service (now the Archaeology Division of the Canadian Parks Service) with John Rick as senior archaeologist. This service was intended to encourage the excavation of historic sites as well as their reconstruction for historical and recreational purposes. Among the numerous projects that provided cultural images for Euro-Canadians were the excavation and rebuilding of the French fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia and the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. Between 1962 and 1966, six research positions were added to the service and large amounts of contract funding were made available by the federal government. In more recent years, there has also been growing interest in industrial archaeology, which is supported by conservation groups.

For a long time, the Historic Sites Service and the Archaeological Survey of Canada tended to divide the work according to whether sites dated from the historical or prehistoric periods. Because of the specialized skills required to carry out historical archaeology, many of the original archaeologists attached to the Historic Sites Service were recruited from abroad. They had little interest in prehistoric archaeology and initially had few connections with the existing archaeological community. After the merger with Parks Canada, a growing number of Historic Sites Service archaeologists were knowledgeable about prehistoric as well as historical archaeology. The archaeology departments at Calgary and Simon Fraser Universities were generally more willing to train historical archaeologists than were anthropology departments, which remained focused on prehistoric archaeology, but Canada still does not have a major center for educating historical archaeologists. Individuals who were trained in prehistoric archaeology but have done major work on historical sites include the late Walter Kenyon of the Royal Ontario Museum and James Tuck at Memorial University of Newfoundland. The Canadian Parks Service issues its own publications dealing with historical archaeology, and relatively few articles on this subject appear in the Canadian Journal of Archaeology.

Heritage Management

The oldest heritage legislation in Canada is the British Columbia Historic Objects Preservation Act of 1925, which was designed primarily to prohibit the removal of rock carvings and other aboriginal artifacts from that province. Between 1954 and 1980, expanding provincial government bureaucracies, following the examples of other countries, passed heritage acts to provide legal protection for cultural resources and allocated funds to conserve and manage them. The powers granted to regulatory bodies included requiring assessments of archaeological potential in advance of land use, licensing archaeological activities, and the obligatory reporting of the findings of archaeological research. The implementation of the legislation varied according to the strength of the provincial legislation, the will of the provincial governments to enforce it, and the highly variable resources of the different provinces.

Federal antiquities legislation, though not integrated in a single body of law applying to all contexts, is incorporated within several acts, the principal ones being the Canada Environmental Assessment Act and the Canadian Cultural Property Export and Import Act. The drafting of comprehensive legislation has been impeded by interdepartmental jurisdictional disputes and by the refusal of some aboriginal peoples to acknowledge government ownership of archaeological remains.

The growth of archaeological resource management provided two new categories of employment for archaeologists. A significant number of civil service posts were created within government departments to deal with a mixture