Science, service and stewardship – a basis for the ideal archaeology of the future

Abstract

In the USA in the mid-1970s the term ‘conservation archaeology’ became popular about the same time as the phrase ‘cultural resource management’ first came into use. An important concept in the US conservation movement is ‘stewardship’. By the early 1970s in the USA archaeological sites and materials had come to be seen as ‘resources’ – ‘cultural resources’, analogous to ‘natural resources’. Consciousness of these characteristics of the ‘archaeological record’ developed among some North American archaeologists in the late 1960s, a few years before the concepts of ‘cultural resources’ and their ‘management’ became explicit. World archaeology has a similar regional ‘conscience society’ – the American Society for Conservation Archaeology (ASCA). The ASCA performs similar functions in similar ways: it usually sponsors a symposium at the Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, which focuses attention on fundamental issues.