Technically, there is nothing in the National Historic Preservation Act, the
regulations implementing the National Register of Historic Places, or the
Advisory Council on Historic Preservation's rules explicitly stating that
all things older than 50 years old are fair game for listing in the National
Register of Historic Places. The National Register rules only mention "50
years" in Criteria Consideration G covering properties that have achieved
significance within the past 50 years (36 CFR ? 60.5(g)).

Fifty years is an arbitrary point chosen because it is a period that is
assumed to be sufficient for adequate context and scholarship to have
developed to adequately interpret a historic property. It would be a mistake
to discount material culture (or archaeological resources) solely on the
basis of the non-existent "50-year antiquity rule." Common sense and good
scholarship should be the rule in determining whether an object (or objects)
or an archaeological site is likely to yield significant information about
the past. The National Register rules imply that the person applying the
Criteria for Evaluation is familiar with the literature and type of site,
structure, building, etc. under consideration. One of the greatest
shortcomings of the cultural resource management industry is the idea that
one size fits all, i.e., that any "professional" archaeologist is qualified
to render judgments on the whole of the archaeological record. So, for
example, if you are a newly minted MA archaeologist trained in pre-Columbian
(or Old World) archaeology with only a cursory introduction to historical
archaeology, you are going to look for meaning in what seemingly appears
ubiquitous and mundane. You are going to search for hypotheses to test
because you've read Stan South's books or you know that there's such thing
as a Miller scale. You may not fully understand the things in these works,
but you know they're there and you somehow must use them. These folks are
easy to spot in the CRM industry: they are the ones who call themselves
"historic archaeologists."

I see the process above-described all the time in Section 106 architectural
surveys done by archaeologists. It's apparent that the folks have no clue
beyond a cursory introduction to the literature, yet they do the work
anyway. When you read it, it is abundantly clear that someone has done
fieldwork (taken photos, marked a few maps) and gone back to the office and
spent an exorbitant amount of time worrying over photographs of buildings
and poring through the Macalester and Macalester "Field Guide" to described
the properties surveyed.

-DSR.
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David S. Rotenstein, Ph.D.
Consulting Historian
Silver Spring, MD 20910
Fax: (301) 588-9394
Mobile: (240) 461-7835
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.dsrotenstein.com
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