Historic Preservation in Archaeology

Course Description

Historic Preservation in Archaeology includes a detailed review of basic historic preservation laws and regulations, the historic preservation system, and the articulation of archaeological resources in that system. Topics include historic preservation law, the historic preservation system, archaeological resource management, and the contributions of the field to anthropology.

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

This is the most directly employable course in the archaeology sequence, and students routinely do not realise it. The great majority of professional archaeologists in the United States work in cultural resource management — archaeology conducted because a law requires it before a project can proceed — and the law is what creates the work, defines the deliverable, and sets the deadline. An archaeologist who understands Section 106, the National Register criteria, and what a determination of eligibility requires is immediately more useful than one who only knows how to dig.

⚠ 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 the development of historic preservation law in the United States.
• Describe the National Historic Preservation Act and its structure.
• Describe the Section 106 review process step by step.
• Identify what constitutes an undertaking and when review is triggered.
• Describe the roles of the agency, the SHPO, the ACHP, and tribes.
• Describe the identification and evaluation of historic properties.
• Apply the National Register criteria to an archaeological resource.
• Describe integrity and its assessment.
• Describe determinations of eligibility and their consequences.
• Describe assessment of adverse effect and its resolution.
• Describe memoranda of agreement and mitigation.
• Describe data recovery as mitigation and its limitations.
• Describe the Archaeological Resources Protection Act and permitting.
• Describe NAGPRA and its application in the compliance context.
• Describe tribal consultation requirements and good practice.
• Describe state-level preservation law, including Florida's Chapter 267.
• Describe the Florida Master Site File and site recording requirements.
• Describe local preservation ordinances and their role.
• Describe the Secretary of the Interior's Standards.
• Describe professional qualification standards for archaeologists.
• Describe scopes of work, proposals, and reporting requirements.
• Describe curation obligations under the regulatory framework.
• Describe ethical tensions in compliance archaeology.
• Evaluate a compliance report against the standards it must meet.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe NEPA and its relationship to Section 106.
• Describe programmatic agreements.
• Describe preservation planning at state and local level.
• Describe tax credits and preservation incentives.
• Describe heritage protection in the marine environment.
• Describe international heritage conventions.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Development of preservation law
• The National Historic Preservation Act
• The Section 106 process
• Undertakings and triggers
• Agency, SHPO, ACHP, and tribal roles
• Identification and evaluation
• National Register criteria
• Integrity
• Determinations of eligibility
• Adverse effect and resolution
• Memoranda of agreement and mitigation
• Data recovery as mitigation
• ARPA and permitting
• NAGPRA in compliance
• Tribal consultation
• State law and Florida Chapter 267
• The Florida Master Site File
• Local ordinances
• Secretary of the Interior's Standards
• Professional qualification standards
• Scopes of work and reporting
• Curation obligations
• Ethical tensions in compliance
• Evaluating compliance reports

Optional Topics

• NEPA and Section 106
• Programmatic agreements
• Preservation planning
• Tax credits and incentives
• Marine heritage protection
• International conventions

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.
• Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (achp.gov) — free; the Section 106 regulations and guidance, from the body that administers them.
• National Register Bulletins (nps.gov) — free; Bulletin 36 on evaluating archaeological properties is the document the whole eligibility question turns on.
• Florida Division of Historical Resources compliance review — free; Florida's own process, forms, and expectations.
• Read real compliance reports. Many are public through SHPO offices, and reading three of them teaches the format faster than any description.

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.

Special Information

⚠⚠ Eligibility is the decision that matters — and criterion D is where archaeology lives

• The Section 106 process turns on whether a resource is eligible for the National Register, because eligibility is what triggers the obligation to consider effects. An ineligible site gets no protection at all.
• ⚠ Most archaeological sites are evaluated under Criterion D — that the site has yielded, or may be likely to yield, information important in history or prehistory. That framing has a consequence students find uncomfortable: eligibility rests on the site's research potential, so a site must be argued to be informative to be protected.
• ⚠⚠ The argument must be specific. "This site may contain information" is not an eligibility argument — it requires stating what research questions the site can address and why it can address them, which is why a research context is required and why writing them well is a professional skill.
• Integrity matters even under Criterion D. A heavily disturbed site may lack the intact deposits its research potential depended on.
• Sites can also be eligible under other criteria — association with events or people, or as a distinctive property — and sites of religious or cultural significance to tribes may be eligible as traditional cultural properties, which is a different argument entirely.
• ⚠ Data recovery is mitigation, not preservation. Excavating a site ahead of destruction is the standard resolution of adverse effect, and it means the site is destroyed with a record made — which is better than destruction without one and is not the same as preservation.
• Avoidance is the better outcome where it is achievable, and proposing it is part of the job.
• ⚠ Write the report so that it is usable. Compliance reports are the largest body of archaeological data produced in the country and much of it is grey literature that is never read — a report that records method, results and negative findings clearly is a contribution to the discipline rather than a box ticked.

⚠ The ethical tensions in compliance work are real — recognise them rather than pretending otherwise

• The archaeologist is usually paid by the party whose project the archaeology may delay or constrain. That is the structural tension at the centre of the field, and it is better acknowledged than ignored.
• ⚠⚠ Professional judgement is not the client's to direct. Findings, eligibility recommendations, and effect assessments are technical determinations, and pressure to find a site ineligible is a compliance concern, not a negotiation.
• Document what you found and what you recommended, and keep the record. It protects the resource and it protects you.
• ⚠ Deadlines and budgets are real constraints, and the honest response is to scope the work properly at the proposal stage rather than to compress the fieldwork afterwards.
• Consultation is not a delay to be minimised. Tribes and descendant communities are parties to the process with legitimate standing, and treating consultation as an obstacle produces worse outcomes and worse relationships.
• Report negative findings honestly. A survey that found nothing is a result, and under-reporting to avoid triggering further work is misconduct.
• ⚠ Know the professional qualification standards and do not sign off on work you are not qualified to supervise.
• Raise concerns through the proper channel — the SHPO and the agency are parties to the process, and the framework exists partly to make this possible.

⚠⚠ 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.

ANT4190 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida, with ANT3101 as prerequisite.

This is the most directly employable course in the archaeology sequence — cultural resource management is where the great majority of archaeological jobs are.