study of artifacts rather than on technology. The resistance to the use of radiocarbon dating, however, was an exception. Other methods of dating were more readily accepted, as were various methods and techniques for identifying the sources of stones and clay, for enhancing artifact conservation, or for extracting more information about the use of plant and animal resources.

The periodical Kokogaku to Shizen-kagaku (Archaeology and Natural Science) was inaugurated in 1968, and the Association for Natural Science Approaches to Cultural Properties (Bunkazai Kagakukai) was formed in 1982. Its membership in 1998 was 830 and was evenly distributed between the natural sciences and humanities disciplines. A relatively large proportion of the work in this category is published in English (e.g., Akazawa 1980; Akazawa and Watanabe 1968; Koike 1979, 1986a, 1986b; Koike and Ohtaishi 1985; Matsui 1995, 1996; Minagawa and Akazawa 1992; Sato 1999; Yamamoto 1990).

In contrast to specific methods and techniques for analysis and conservation, theoretical and methodological concerns, particularly those of “the new archaeology” of the 1960s and 1970s, were not popular in Japan. This lack of interest was owing to North American archaeologists’ concerns that archaeology should contribute to understanding the regularity of human behavior (Binford 1962; Longacre 1964; Taylor 1948)—a concern not shared by Japanese archaeologists. Archaeology in Japan had its roots in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of general anthropology in the 1880s, but early in the twentieth century it became a branch of history while anthropology came to mean biological anthropology alone.

One topical area in which the theoretical interests of both Japanese and Anglo-Saxon archaeologists overlapped was in the study of settlement systems. In the case of Japanese archaeology, however, this was the continuation of an interest that dated back to the 1930s (e.g., Akamatsu 1937; also see Sasaki 1999) rather than a new direction. North American settlement archaeology was presented in summary translations (Keally 1971) and its historical background explained (T. Kobayashi 1971). The large-scale excavations in Japan that began in the late 1960s provided an opportunity to put this methodology into practice. In the settlement pattern studies that developed as a result (T. Kobayashi 1980; T. Kobayashi, Oda, Hatori, and Suzuki 1971; Oda and Keally 1973), however, the emphasis was on the construction of settlement typology, in the empirical tradition of Japanese archaeology.

Economic Expansion and the Restructuring of Archaeological Operations

As the Japanese economy recovered through the 1950s and 1960s, large development projects threatened a number of archaeological sites. There was a popular movement to protect the nation’s cultural heritage, which led to the revision of the 1950 Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties in 1959, making it mandatory to investigate sites, at the developer’s expense, if the development project could not be modified to avoid site destruction. In the same year (1959), 345 notices of excavation were filed, of which 227 were purely academic in purpose and 118 were to investigate sites to be destroyed. The ratio of the academic to salvage excavations became reversed in 1963, when the former numbered 209 as opposed to 227 salvage operations. This reversal marked the beginning of a radical change in the nature and scope of archaeological operations in Japan.

Ten years later, in 1973, the figures were 203 academic versus 1,863 emergency excavation notices, for a total of 2,066. In 1983, academic excavations went down to 137 while emergency excavation notices shot up to 14,403. The figure for the fiscal year of 1997 was 409 academic excavations and 34,957 emergency operations, for a total of 35,366 notices (down from 41,555 in 1996, presumably the result of the economic situation). The total expenditure for emergency excavations in 1997–1998 was 132 billion yen (Center for Archaeological Operations 1975, 1989, 1999). The expenditure for the academic excavations is not known, but it would be miniscule by comparison.

Japan now has a very elaborate system of salvage archaeology involving three levels of government (national, prefectural, and municipal) and affiliated nonprofit corporations