his fieldwork and material culture studies, for he defined and synthesized historical archaeology as a recognized intellectual endeavor. His article “Archaeology as an Auxiliary Science to American History” (Harrington 1955) established the importance of such research as a contribution to both history and science. Harrington viewed the field as properly centered on Euro-American, not contact-Indian, sites and most naturally tied into the specificity of history although he did recognize its anthropological potential. His suggested name for this new specialization, “historic site archaeology,” highlights his theoretical position.

By the early 1950s, Harrington and his colleagues, including among others Louis Caywood in the Northwest, Arthur Woodward in the Southwest, John W. Griffin and Hale G. Smith working for the Florida Park Service in the Southeast, and Carlyle Smith on the Great Plains, had created historical archaeology as an established area of research. Work on historic Indian sites continued as an important theme, for example, George I. Quimby’s study of trade goods in the Great Lakes region and the excavation of sites like the Hopi historic pueblo and mission of Awatovi between 1935 and 1939. kenneth e. kidd’s 1941 excavations on a famous Jesuit mission site (1639–1649) in Ontario and his subsequent 1949 publication of The Excavation of Ste Marie I, probably the first site report in the field issued in book form, launched historical archaeology in Canada.

1960–1970: A Decade of Transition

By 1960 historical archaeology had been established as a research topic, but it was not yet professionally set off as a specialty. Ten years later it was a successfully organized, separate, publicly visible, and rapidly expanding, if small, discipline within anthropology. Four developments during the 1960s brought about this transformation: new institutional housing for the field, expansion of its subject matter, entrance into the academic world (which allowed formal training and education in the field), and professional autonomy with the founding of several scholarly associations.

After 1960, historical archaeologists found new positions in federal agencies outside the NPS in the United States and the newly active National Historic Sites Service in Canada, and individual states, such as Florida, California, and Texas, entered the field. In Texas, for example, the Office of State Archaeologist was established in 1965, and the Texas Historical Survey (after 1972 the Texas Historical Commission) had started exploring land and underwater sites by the end of the decade. Perhaps more significant, the field was brought into the academic world, as is exemplified by the career of john l. cotter (1911–1999). Like his predecessors, Cotter had a long worked on prehistoric, including Paleo-Indian, sites before he was assigned by the NPS to direct the second major project at Jamestown (1954–1956). By 1960, he was at the NPS office in Philadelphia, and that year, at the request of the Department of American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania, he taught the first class in the United States to carry the title “Historical Archaeology.” Within the next few years, other courses were introduced at Arizona by Arthur Woodward, Harvard by Stephen Williams, University of Florida by Charles Fairbanks, Illinois State University by Edward B. Jelks, University of California–Santa Barbara by james deetz, and University of Idaho by Roderick Sprague.

The subject matter of historical archaeology began to expand in the same decade. Excavators began to move beyond famous national heritage sites and limiting archaeology to restoration functions at such prominent locations. A telling example of this enlargement is the work of bernard l. fontana and his colleagues at johnny ward’s ranch in Arizona. These adobe ruins were originally selected as possibly being one of the oldest Jesuit sites in the area, but when the structure turned out to be a late American ranch house (1858–1903), the project was not abandoned but its purpose and goals were changed. Publication of “Johnny Ward’s Ranch: A Study in Historic Archaeology” (1962) marked one of the first reports on a common type of Anglo-American site in the West, and the detailed analysis of the recovered assemblage became a classic guide for later-nineteenth-century artifacts.