Well if you think Historical Archaeology is a relatively new discipline in
the United States, you should take at look at Canada, or at least the
province of Ontario. At the moment the only institutions doing any
significant historical archaelogy in the province are government
institutions such as Parks Canada and the Ontario Heritage Foundation (as
well as a few CRM projects at the municipal level). Within the university
structure there are NO institutions specializing  in Historical
Archaeology, and those institutions and faculty  that do (and there are only a
 few) dabble  in it, do so  out of marginal interest, or out of pity for those
graduate students such as myself who have "historic tendencies".
There are very few univeristies that offer courses in Historical
Archaeology (both at the graduate and undergraduate level)), those that
do, offer them on an irregular basis. Trent Univeristy and the Univeristy of
 Toronto for the most part are the only two universities that have some kind
 of program designed for historical archaeology interests.
     With regards to  the status of Historical Archaeology I would say it is
very low. Most practicing archaeologists in the the university sphere are
prehistoric archaeologists, who consider historic sites to be little more
than the "overburden" to  prehistoric sites. The antiquarian attitude of
what is `older' and `exotic' is more important, in my opinion, seems to
 prevail here.
     Of course I can not speak for the rest of the country however the
situation is somewhat better in British Columbia, and Alberta where for
example  Simon Fraser University (BC), has had a program established for
several years now. However, these programs are no comparison to what is being
offered at schools such as William and Mary, U Mass. etc...
Anyway I could go on,  but I like to limit my tirades to a few paragraphs -
it keeps me sane.
 
Vito Vaccarelli
Trent University.