Great Plains anthropology is not unique in possessing a strong link to federal and other sources of nonacademic funding. With the passage and implementation of national and state historical preservation statutes since the early 1960s, massive amounts of contract monies became available for cultural resources management (CRM) projects. On the Great Plains this influx of contract funding for projects, primarily oriented towards archaeology, had a profound impactone seldom documented or analyzed. A sociohistorical analysis of the impact that CRM funding has had upon the Department of Anthropology, University of Nebraska at Lincoln illustrates that this increased funding, during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, combined with departmental historical variables and special demographic factors of the “baby boom” generation to produce a unique period in Great Plains anthropology. It is entirely possible that, in years hence, anthropologists will view the dynamic period of CRM connected anthropology of the last twenty years as a unique sidelight to the normal growth of American anthropology.