Referring to sites built for student activities, Pat Reynolds wrote:
 
>Ah, to be in a country so rich that students can pay for such
>facilities!  It's a completely different culture here (despite the
>similarities in our earthenwares).  Here, students are hired or
>volunteer for rescue dig work (i.e. to work on sites which are going to
>be built upon, whether or not the students dig them).
 
 
This remark poses an interesting question. In both countries, there are
legal provisions for the salvage of certain sites under certain conditions,
but somehow the Brits have managed to preserve a tradition of volunteer and
academic salvage.
 
Back in the old days, before about 1974, most salvage archaeology in
America (off federal lands) was the province of an active volunteer and
academic community, who could scramble when needed and cooperate to get the
job done on a shoestring. Since there was no money to speak of, we selected
the most important endangered sites, and somehow managed to get a few sites
dug.
 
Then came professionalism. Federal law mandated CRM consideration whenever
a federal permit or other federal participation was involved. An industry
was born. University archaeology programs transformed into pay-to-play CRM
programs. Even the most trivial "site" was destined to receive as much
attention as could be squeezed out of the client's wallet.
 
When Stan South terminated the publication series of the Conference on
Historic Site Archaeology, he bitterly noted that barroom conversation at
conferences had turned from archaeology to the business of contracting.
Ever the visionary, Stan was one of the first to lament the change.
 
Under the new dispensation, we identify only sites on properties that have
been dragged into the Section 106 process by some technicality.
 
We do a "Phase I" ($5000 up) whenever anything is found, or might be found,
on the ground. Then, we do a "Phase II" ($9000 up) to determine if the site
is "eligible for listing in the National Register," which means that we
have been able to do a sales job on the SHPO. If we get the site
"determined eligible," we are fixed. Watching the client carefully, we
throw around numbers with six figures until the client blanches and falls
to the floor.
 
The upshot is that we discover endangered sites only if they are endangered
within a very narrow category of threat. When it comes to data recovery,
sites are chosen more frequently according to the client's ability to pay.
At least one SHPO frankly admits that public agencies are more likely to be
required to dig sites, because they have deeper pockets than individual
landowners and are less likely to complain.
 
Archaeological requirements were inserted into the laws during the early
seventies, so that there would be money for university departments and
museums to excavate sites that would further their reserch agendas. In that
environment, there was a scholarly purpose to each dig.
 
But when the money and the regulations came into play, sites were dug by
whoever got the contract, regardless of the diggers' research agenda. In my
own practice, I find myself on a Paleo-Indian site, then an industrial
site, and then an eighteenth-century farmstead in the course of a month's
work. While I have had the good fortune to assemble some research threads
from my CRM jobs, I have also dug a number of sites because the client
needed a property cleared and I needed to eat.
 
Volunteers today, in my area at least, tend to work on research sites, in
the mistaken belief that rescue is being done under 106. Professional
archaeologists, who dig all week for pay, can ill afford to give up their
weekends for more digging, thereby risking burnout. University programs
have been transformed from research and education into revenue producers,
so few of them can be driven by a research agenda.
 
In spite of these constraints, some excellent archaeology is being done in
the U S by the profit-making sector. But we are wasting a lot of money on
jobs that contribute nothing substantial to anyone's research agenda. To
cover this lack of intellectual content or purpose, the states are required
to create research questions in the state plan, but these questions
frequently have no relation to  actual research agendas.State plan
questions, in fact, are nothing but an intellectual fig leaf to cover the
nakedness of research for its own sake, or rather for the sake of the
almighty dollar.
 
Ned Heite