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Hans Hildebrand used the term and concept of archaeological typology in the first section of his great book The Prehistoric Peoples of Europe (1873–1880). But it was his great knowledge and synthesis of anthropology, paleontology, geology, and Paleolithic prehistory in this book that was probably more remarkable—it was one of the first examples of a modern European prehistory.
In 1879 Hildebrand succeeded his father as the King’s Custodian of Antiquities and director of the National Museum, a position he held until 1906. His book Medieval Sweden (1879–1903) remains essential reading today.
See Blegen, Carl William; Dorpfeld, Wilhelm; Schliemann, Heinrich; Turkey
Historical archaeology as the archaeology of the modern world involves the excavation of sites and analysis of assemblages dating from approximately the last half millennium of human cultural history. Ironically, two of its distinctive hallmarks, its worldwide scope and the interconnected nature of its subject matter, are shared only with Paleolithic archaeology. This topical unity derives from three overlapping phases of modern world history: the early emergence and spread of major cultural innovations across Europe, Asia, and North Africa between a.d. 1400 and 1600; the subsequent creation of the first truly global world system, primarily a product of European expansion between a.d. 1500 and 1800; and the transformation of this planetary cultural system as a result of the Industrial Revolution (a.d. 1800 to the present).
Because the formation of the modern world spans six centuries and occurred at different times in different places, historical archaeology currently has a number of distinct subfields: postmedieval archaeology in Europe, archaeology of the colonial period in the New World (and by extension elsewhere), industrial archaeology in Europe and North America, and the exploration of post-1400 shipwrecks and submerged sites by underwater archaeologists around the world. Potential new subfields, such as Ottoman archaeology and archaeology of the twentieth century, are on the horizon.
Like its subject matter, historical archaeology arrived late in the sequence, and thus its professional history is limited to the twentieth century. Geographically, it is most developed in North America, with a continuous history extending back to the Great Depression of the 1930s; in western Europe and Oceania (Australia), it appeared only in the 1960s. Outside of Europe, in other regions of ancient Old World civilizations, it is almost nonexistent. With the exception of early work in the West Indies, the field is visible but only now developing in Latin America and parts of sub-Saharan Africa. A discussion of this discipline must therefore concentrate on North America.
In North America, historical archaeology has two separate but interrelated origins: the excavation of historic contact–Indian sites and the study of the archaeological record left by Europeans and other Old World peoples in the New World. Numerous encounters with both types of sites, and in a few instances excavation of historic sites, occurred in North America during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. After the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, they dug into local burial mounds and found combinations of aboriginal artifacts and European trade goods. After the American Revolution and the closing of the colonial period, a British boundary commission in 1796 excavated the 1604 site of the du-Monts and Champlain colony in canada on the St. Croix River in an attempt to set the border between the new United States and British Canada. Examples of such work on historic sites increased in the nineteenth century, and in 1856, John Hall, a civil engineer, scientifically excavated the foundation of Myles Standish’s house in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Hall not only made a site plan and noted stratigraphy but also plotted the location of individual artifacts.
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