chaeology in the 1960’s. Archaeologists looked more
at function and at how all of the objects at a given site
fit together in reconstructing the culture that pro-
duced them. Microscopic examination and chemi-
cal analysis were used increasingly to reconstruct the
paleoenvironment. Improvements in carbon-14 dat-
ing made it possible to date small fragments of or-
ganic matter, rendering the technique applicable to
many more sites.
New Interest in Marginal Communities The 1980’s
saw a great increase in public and academic interest
in African American history, the role of women in
historic and prehistoric cultures, and Native Ameri-
can cultures after European contact. Thus, sites that
previously would have been considered to contain
nothing of cultural significance proved to be valu-
able windows on the lives of people who left few writ-
ten records despite living in a literate society. Some
studies, such as the excavation of slave quarters at
Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate, were the result
of deliberate planning, but many were by-products
of conservation efforts, as cities and states increas-
ingly required archaeological surveys prior to devel-
opment. Whereas unearthed traces of poor urban
neighborhoods and rural communities would for-
merly have been dismissed as insignificant, survey-
ors now called upon professional archeologists to
remove and catalog artifacts before construction
proceeded. This proved to be a major task, when a
team working under the auspices of New York City’s
conservation laws retrieved 310,000 artifacts from a
waterfront area built on an eighteenth century land-
fill. Although often hastily done and inadequate,
such mandated studies greatly expanded knowledge
of everyday life in eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
tury America.
In 1980, construction on a commuter railroad in
Philadelphia halted, when workers unearthed a for-
gotten cemetery belonging to Philadelphia’s first Af-
rican American Baptist church. By analyzing the
skeletons, anthropologists were able to reconstruct
the health status and demographics of a free black
population in the early nineteenth century. The re-
mains were then re-interred at another location. In
the 1980’s, protection of Native American burial
sites from desecration had achieved widespread pub-
lic support, and a number of states had enacted legis-
lation prohibiting removal of skeletons and grave
goods from prehistoric cemeteries, but a federal law
in this area only took effect in 1990. Tension be-
tween the desire of the scientific community to study
human prehistory as thoroughly as possible and in-
digenous groups wanting their cultural heritage re-
spected operated throughout the 1980’s and is far
from being resolved today.
A construction site in downtown Tallahassee,
Florida, fortuitously turned up the remains of Span-
ish explorer Hernando de Soto’s winter camp, the
first incontrovertible physical evidence of de Soto’s
epic journey across the American South from 1539
to 1542. The discovery spurred excavation of other
sites along the route, helping form a more complete
picture of dense and sophisticated aboriginal settle-
ment along America’s Gulf Coast.
Looters, Private Collectors, and ARPA In 1979,
Congress passed the Archaeological Resources and
Protection Act (ARPA), which replaced the 1906 An-
tiquities Act. ARPA established a permit system for
excavation on federal land and included regulations
requiring that artifacts removed from a site be prop-
erly curated and made available to researchers.
These requirements were meant to curb fortune
hunters, who often used motorized equipment to re-
move a few highly prized artifacts for sale on the pri-
vate market, in the process destroying the rest of
a site’s value for future archaeological inquiry. The
requirements were also aimed at entrepreneurial ar-
chaeologists, who used standard techniques to pre-
serve sites’ integrity but then sold their finds piece-
meal to the highest bidders.
Archaeology on private land remained unregu-
lated. For artifacts in demand by private collectors,
the stakes were high and the pressures enormous.
The fate of Mimbres ware, a distinctive pottery type
found in northern New Mexico, is instructive. Sites
that included this pottery, mostly on private land,
were bulldozed, yielding hundreds of pots for collec-
tors while obliterating most traces of the culture that
produced them. Partly in response to this ongoing
rapacity, concerned citizens founded the nonprofit
Archaeological Conservancy in 1980. This organiza-
tion purchased vulnerable sites and preserved them
for posterity.
Underwater Archaeology The 1980’s saw a large in-
crease in underwater archaeology—primarily in the
investigation of shipwrecks. In the late 1980’s, the
Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M Uni-
versity instituted a systematic search of the Carib-The Eighties in America Archaeology 61