Historical Archaeology

Course Description

Historical Archaeology covers the principles and methodology of historical archaeology, and includes the history of this specialty and theoretical development. The catalog notes the course is detailed and is required for Historical Archaeology graduate students prior to taking ANG5172, and that it includes field trips to local historical archaeology sites and museums, with permission required.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, ANT is the Anthropology prefix. UWF publishes this at 3 semester hours, with ANT3101 as prerequisite.

Historical archaeology studies periods that also left written records, and the interesting question is what archaeology adds when documents already exist. The answer is consistent and important: documents were written by the literate, about what they considered worth recording, for purposes of their own. The archaeological record is produced by everyone — including the enslaved, the poor, the illiterate, and the deliberately undocumented — which makes it a partly independent check on a written record that is systematically incomplete in predictable ways.

Pensacola is an unusually good place to study it, with Spanish, French, British, and American occupations layered in one small area.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's course catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, prerequisites where they exist, and a description. It does not publish contact hours, a lecture and laboratory split, or terms of offering for any course. It does publish a material and supply fee notice on the minority of courses that carry one — and maintains a separate Material & Supply and Equipment Fees section of the catalog — so the absence of a fee notice on this entry is meaningful, while the fee amount is not published here. There is therefore no institution-stated figure to quote, and every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is derived.

The figure shown applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, corroborated within this prefix by the live ANT2000 (Introduction to Anthropology) at 3 credits and 45 hours. Confirm the actual meeting schedule with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe historical archaeology as a sub-discipline and its scope.
• Describe the history and theoretical development of the specialty.
• Describe the relationship between documentary and archaeological evidence.
• Identify the systematic biases of documentary sources.
• Use archival research alongside archaeological method.
• Describe how the two lines of evidence are integrated.
• Describe research design in historical archaeology.
• Describe site types characteristic of the historical period.
• Describe the analysis of historical ceramics and their dating value.
• Describe glass, metal, and other historical material classes.
• Apply mean ceramic dating and similar techniques.
• Describe the interpretation of consumer behaviour from assemblages.
• Describe the archaeology of colonialism and culture contact.
• Describe the archaeology of enslavement and the African diaspora.
• Describe the archaeology of class, gender, and ethnicity.
• Describe industrial and urban archaeology.
• Describe military site archaeology.
• Describe standing structures and above-ground resources.
• Describe the regulatory context and its effect on the specialty.
• Describe descendant community engagement in historical archaeology.
• Evaluate published historical archaeology critically.
• Describe curation and documentation requirements for historical collections.
• Relate archaeological findings to broader historical questions.
• Write about historical archaeological evidence rigorously.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe maritime historical archaeology.
• Describe plantation archaeology in depth.
• Describe mission archaeology in the Southeast.
• Describe historical archaeology of the twentieth century.
• Describe heritage tourism and site interpretation.
• Describe historical archaeology in cultural resource management.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• The sub-discipline and its scope
• History and theoretical development
• Documentary and archaeological evidence
• Biases of documentary sources
• Archival research
• Integrating evidence
• Research design
• Historical site types
• Historical ceramics and dating
• Glass, metal, and other materials
• Mean ceramic dating
• Consumer behaviour from assemblages
• Colonialism and culture contact
• Enslavement and the African diaspora
• Class, gender, ethnicity
• Industrial and urban archaeology
• Military sites
• Standing structures
• The regulatory context
• Descendant community engagement
• Critical evaluation
• Curation of historical collections
• Relating findings to historical questions
• Rigorous writing

Optional Topics

• Maritime historical archaeology
• Plantation archaeology
• Mission archaeology
• Twentieth-century archaeology
• Heritage tourism and interpretation
• Historical archaeology in CRM

Resources & Tools

• Society for American Archaeology (saa.org) — free Principles of Archaeological Ethics; read them in your first archaeology course, not your last. Student membership is inexpensive.
• Register of Professional Archaeologists (rpanet.org) — free; the eligibility criteria tell you exactly what a professional archaeologist is expected to have done, including a field school.
• Florida Division of Historical Resources (dos.fl.gov/historical) — free; Chapter 267, the permitting process, and the Florida Master Site File.
• National Park Service preservation briefs and the Section 106 guidance (nps.gov, achp.gov) — free, and this is the process most professional archaeologists work inside every day.
• Florida Public Archaeology Network (fpan.us) — free public programmes and volunteer opportunities across the state; an unusually good route to real experience for a Florida student.
• Florida Anthropological Society and its journal — regional research, and a genuine route into the state's archaeological community.
• Get to a field school. It is the entry requirement for professional work, it is what employers and graduate programmes look for first, and nothing substitutes for it.
• Society for Historical Archaeology (sha.org) — the professional body for this specialty; student membership, and its ethics principles and technical resources.
• Historic Pensacola and local archival collections — the documentary half of this subject is local and accessible, and combining an archive visit with a site visit is exactly the method the course teaches.

Career Pathways

• Anthropologists and archaeologists — SOC 19-3091.
• ⚠ Cultural resource management is where the jobs are. The great majority of professional archaeologists work in compliance archaeology for consulting firms, agencies, and tribes — driven by Section 106 and state equivalents rather than by research funding. Plan for that rather than for academia.
• Field technician ("shovelbum") — the entry-level role; project-based, travelling, and the standard first job after a field school.
• Crew chief, project archaeologist, and principal investigator — the CRM progression, with a graduate degree generally needed above field technician.
• State and federal agencies — State Historic Preservation Offices, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
• Tribal historic preservation offices — a growing and important sector.
• Museums, collections management, and curation — SOC 25-4012 and 25-4013.
• Historic preservation planning at local and state government level.
• Postsecondary teaching and research — SOC 25-1061; requires a doctorate and is highly competitive.
• ⚠ Be realistic about the entry conditions. Field technician work is seasonal, project-based, frequently far from home, and modestly paid; benefits are inconsistent. Many people do it for a few years and then either move up, move into agency or museum work, or leave. Knowing that in advance is better than discovering it.
• A graduate degree is effectively required to advance beyond field technician in this field — plan the pathway early.
• Historical archaeology is strongly represented in cultural resource management, because most Section 106 projects encounter historical-period resources.
• Historic site interpretation and museum work.
• Architectural history and historic preservation consulting — frequently paired with archaeology in compliance work.

Special Information

⚠⚠ The document and the deposit disagree — and that is the finding, not a problem

• When written and material evidence conflict, the reflex is to trust the document. Resist it. Both are evidence, both were produced by processes with biases, and the disagreement is frequently where the interesting history is.
• ⚠ Ask who wrote the document, for whom, and why. Inventories were made for probate or taxation, ledgers for credit, correspondence to persuade — and each purpose determines what got recorded and what was left out.
• ⚠⚠ The archaeological record includes people the documents omit. Enslaved people, servants, children, the poor, and Indigenous residents appear materially even where they were not written about — and in some cases the archaeology is the only evidence that they were there at all.
• Documents record intentions; deposits record practice. A regulation, an order, or a plan tells you what was supposed to happen; the assemblage tells you what people actually did, and the gap is routinely large.
• ⚠ Absence in the archive is not absence in the past. Under-documentation frequently tracks powerlessness, so reading silence as evidence of nonexistence reproduces the original bias.
• Date the deposit independently before correlating it with a documented event. Fitting archaeology to a known history is a circularity trap — assign the deposit a date on its own evidence first, then compare.
• Beware the named-site assumption. Identifying an excavated structure with a specific documented building or occupant requires argument, and it is asserted far more often than it is demonstrated.
• Historical ceramics are unusually good dating evidence because manufacture dates are documented — which is a genuine methodological advantage of this specialty, and worth using carefully rather than mechanically.
• ⚠ Descendant communities exist for historical sites too, including for sites of enslavement, and engagement is as much a professional norm here as under NAGPRA.

⚠⚠ Excavation is destruction — this is the discipline's founding constraint

• An archaeological site can be excavated once. Removing an artefact destroys its context permanently, and context is where nearly all the information is — an object without its associations is a curiosity rather than evidence.
• ⚠ Which is why recording is the actual work. The excavation produces notes, drawings, photographs, elevations, and samples; the site itself is gone, and the record is all that survives of it. A dig with poor records has destroyed a site and produced nothing.
• ⚠⚠ Do not excavate what does not need excavating. Modern practice presumes preservation in place: survey, non-invasive methods, and leaving the deposit for better techniques later are frequently the professionally correct answer, and a research question that could be answered without digging should be.
• Sample deliberately and leave some of the site intact where you can, so future archaeologists with better methods have material to work with. Everything we can do now, someone will do better in fifty years.
• ⚠ Excavation without a curation plan is destruction with extra steps. See the curation note below — artefacts that cannot be housed, catalogued and kept accessible have not been saved.
• Publish, or the destruction was for nothing. Unpublished excavation is a recognised and serious failure in this discipline, and a substantial amount of twentieth-century fieldwork sits unreported in boxes.
• Record what you did not find as well as what you did. Negative evidence is evidence, and it is routinely discarded.
• ⚠ Stratigraphy cannot be reconstructed after the fact. If the layers were not recorded as they were removed, the sequence is lost, and with it the chronology.

⚠⚠ The antiquities market, human remains, and the curation crisis

• ⚠⚠ Do not buy, sell, or appraise antiquities. The professional societies' ethics principles treat commercialisation of the archaeological record as incompatible with the discipline, because market demand is what funds looting — and looting destroys context, which destroys the information, permanently.
• An artefact with no provenance is frequently a looted artefact, and authenticating or publishing one raises its market value and rewards the destruction that produced it.
• ⚠ Human remains require consultation, not just permits. Descendant communities have legitimate authority over the treatment of their ancestors, and the discipline's history here is genuinely bad — remains were collected, measured, and retained without consent for well over a century.
• Consult early and continuously, not at the end. Consultation presented as a formality after decisions are made is not consultation, and it is recognised as such.
• Treat remains with the care you would want for your own relatives, including in photography, in storage, and in how they are discussed.
• ⚠⚠ The curation crisis is real and it is the discipline's quiet failure. Repositories across the country are full; excavated collections sit uncatalogued, inaccessible, and in some cases deteriorating, and some institutions will no longer accept new material. Curation is expensive, it is permanent, and it must be funded before excavation, not after.
• Budget for curation in the project, and confirm a repository will accept the collection before a trowel goes in the ground.
• Existing collections are an underused research resource. A great deal of publishable work can be done on material already excavated and never analysed — and it costs no new destruction.
• ⚠ Archaeology has been used to support political claims about land and identity, sometimes disastrously. Interpretations carry consequences beyond the discipline, and stating the strength of the evidence honestly matters.

⚠⚠ Archaeology is heavily regulated — and most American archaeological work exists because of it

• The National Historic Preservation Act, and particularly its Section 106 process, requires federal agencies to consider the effects of their undertakings on historic properties. ⚠ This is the single largest driver of archaeological employment in the United States — the great majority of professional archaeologists work in compliance, not academia.
• The Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) governs archaeological resources on federal and tribal land, requires permits for excavation, and makes unauthorised excavation, removal, and trafficking a federal offence with substantial penalties.
• ⚠⚠ NAGPRA — the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act — governs human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. It creates consultation and repatriation obligations and it changed the discipline profoundly. Understand it as a legal requirement and as an ethical correction to a real history, not as an obstacle.
• ⚠ Florida: Chapter 267, Florida Statutes vests authority in the Division of Historical Resources and declares archaeological resources on state-owned land and on state-owned submerged land to be state property. Collecting from them without a permit is unlawful.
• ⚠⚠ Florida section 872.05 makes it a felony to knowingly disturb an unmarked human burial. Unmarked burials are common on Florida sites, and if human remains are encountered, work stops and the process defined by that statute is followed — this is one of the most important things a Florida archaeologist knows.
• The Florida Master Site File is the state's inventory of archaeological and historical sites; recording sites into it is a professional obligation, and consulting it is the first step of any project.
• State and local permits, and tribal consultation, apply on top of the federal framework.
• ⚠ Metal detecting and surface collecting are restricted on public land and prohibited on many sites; a hobby elsewhere is an offence here.
• ⚠ Rule 11 applies. Preservation law, regulations, and tribal consultation requirements change — verify with the State Historic Preservation Office and the relevant agency rather than relying on this guide.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement — and it is live across this prefix, most of which sits at the upper-division levels.

ANT4172 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida, with ANT3101 as prerequisite, permission required, and field trips included.