remarked, “If canals are left at the mercy of economists and scientific planners, before many years are past, the last of them will become a weedy, stagnant ditch” (Rolt 1944). Raistrick was not displeased that professional historians from the University of Birmingham did not become involved in the establishment of the museum at Coalbrookdale in 1959 (Raistrick 1980), and Buchanan thought that the development of industrial archaeology as an academic discipline was retarded because “it offers something to everybody” and was too closely associated with leisure-time pursuits (Buchanan 1972). By the mid-1970s, the people responsible for the “public face” of industrial archaeology—that is, the presentation of the subject to the paying public—were increasingly aware of the need for professional standards in such areas as visitor facilities, retailing, marketing, and curatorship.

Parallel concerns for the industrial heritage developed in most western European countries. In Belgium, the subject was fostered by Jan Dhondt (1915–1972) of the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Ghent. In france, the historian of technology Maurice Daumas launched a national survey of industrial monuments in 1975. In Germany, the first inspector of ancient monuments with specific responsibility for industrial buildings was appointed in 1973 in North Rhine–Westphalia. In most European countries, there are now provisions in conservation legislation for the protection of industrial monuments. The Projectbureau Industrieel Erfcoed (Institute for Industrial Heritage) in the netherlands is the most ambitious state-backed scheme to collect and disseminate information about Dutch industrial heritage. In North America, the Society for Industrial Archaeology was established in 1972, with a membership drawn from both the United States and canada.

During the 1980s, industrial archaeology in Great Britain became an increasingly professional concern. An Institute for Industrial Archaeology (subsequently, as its concerns were broadened, renamed the Ironbridge Institute) was established at Ironbridge in Shropshire, England, in 1980 by the University of Birmingham and the Ironbridge Gorge Museum. Since 1982, the institute has provided postgraduate programs in industrial archaeology, which have attracted students from Australia, Canada, denmark, greece, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and South Africa as well as from Britain. The institute’s research publications, many of them produced for English Heritage, a major British government heritage organization, have helped to establish new research methodologies (Alfrey and Clark 1993), and the first encyclopedia of industrial archaeology was edited at the institute and published in 1992 (Trinder 1992a).

Increased attention has also been paid to industrial archaeology within the conservation and recording agencies in Britain as individuals who had learned to appreciate its value were promoted. Industrial buildings and structures have been among the prime concerns of relisting projects and of the Monuments Protection Program undertaken by English Heritage. Royal commissions in England, Scotland, and Wales have produced some distinguished publications (Baker 1991; Calladine and Fricker 1993; Douglas and Oglethorpe 1993; Giles and Goodall 1992; Hughes 1988, 1990; Williams 1992). There has been an increasing concern in Britain about twentieth-century industrial buildings and about the archaeology of industries like food processing and road transport that were neglected in the first generation of national and regional surveys.

During the 1970s, there was a considerable debate about the objectives and scope of industrial archaeology and about its relationship to other disciplines. In Britain, some came to regard it post-postmedieval archaeology, the study of all types of physical evidence of the period since 1750, the declared period of interest of the Post-Medieval Archaeology Society (Crossley 1990). Raistrick (Raistrick 1972) was prominent among those who argued that industrial archaeology should be concerned more narrowly with manufacturing processes of all periods from the prehistoric onward. There now appears to be a consensus in Britain and elsewhere that industrial archaeology is a period-based discipline and that studies of such topics as weaving or the smelting of metals,