and its domination by prehistorians, served as the crucial organization in nurturing and building the discipline. The SHA was soon joined by the smaller Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology (1966–1967) in Europe, the Society for Australian Historical Archaeology (1970) in Oceania, and more-specialized associations such as the Society for Industrial Archaeology (1972) in America.

1970–2000

American historical archaeology entered the 1970s as an organized and expanding discipline but still clearly secondary to prehistoric studies. The influence of anthropology and various cultural themes initiated in the previous decade now greatly enriched the field and its public appeal, and entirely new topics were added to its subject matter. The study of ethnicity and “peoples without history” began with the work of Charles Fairbanks and his graduate students on mestizo sections of St. Augustine, Florida, and slave plantations of the Old South, and their excavations created a distinct topical specialization on the archaeology of African Americans. Roberta Greenwood and her colleagues started to explore overseas Chinese sites, and urban archaeology, traceable to the early work of Arnold Pilling in Detroit and John Cotter in Philadelphia, now spread to other cities on the East Coast (New York City; Alexandria, Virginia; Paterson, New Jersey; and Lowell, Massachusetts) and in the West (Tucson, Arizona; Ventura and Sacramento, California).

Topical additions to subject matter occurred as the result of a general debate, begun in the late 1960s, concerning the merits of a “historicalist” versus an anthropological framework for the growing discipline; by the end of the 1970s, the debate was clearly decided in favor of anthropology. In 1977, Deetz published In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life, the first book on the subject to achieve substantial public sales, and in 1978, the first source book for the field, Historical Archaeology: A Guide to Theoretical and Substantive Contributions, reprinted thirty-five classic papers and served as a text or supplementary text throughout the 1980s.

During the 1980s and 1990s, new topics—the archaeology of gender, class, race, and labor—were added to continuing work on sites ranging from the contact period to the industrial age. Historical archaeology played a secondary but again quite visible role in the rise of postprocessual archaeology, and many overly speculative interpretations of this countermovement to processual archaeology were at least understandable and sometimes testable in a documented context.

Yet it was not the new research topics, or even the general theoretical debates, that most fundamentally altered historical archaeology after 1970 but the hard realities of politics and economics. In 1966 Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act, and it was followed by Executive Order 11593 in 1971 and the Archaeological and Historic Conservation Act in 1977. These and related bills created the National Register of Historic Places and State Historic Prevention Office (SHPO) offices on the state level, and soon most large-scale building projects in the United States were required to carry out exploratory archaeology and, if required, mitigation(completely digging the site). Massive public and private funding soon moved both prehistoric and historical archaeology into the maelstrom of the general marketplace, and although universities tried to incorporate these new funding opportunities, they were mostly replaced by private companies practicing cultural resource management (CRM).

On 26 April 1976, the Society of Professional Archaeologists (SOPA) was incorporated to meet the changing environment for archaeology in the United States. Interestingly its first president, Edward B. Jelks, was a leading historical archaeologist, and both anthropologists Charles Cleland and Bert Salwen served on its board. SOPA was only partially successful, drawing just over 700 practicing archaeologists into its membership during its short existence, and in 1998 it was restructured as the larger and growing Registry of Professional Archaeologists (RPA). Again, historical archaeologists took a leading SOPA-RPA) and Donald L. Hardesty as the first elected RPA president.