Abstract
The 1966 passage of National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) formally established as US government policy that the effects of federally licensed, funded, or approved undertakings on places and objects significant in the nation’s history and archaeology should be “taken into consideration” as such undertakings were planned. Amendments to NHPA in the early 1970s extended that consideration to properties not previously known and recorded and mandated efforts to identify and evaluate “cultural resources” including historic and archaeological sites. These requirements lead to employment for archaeologists, architectural historians, historians, and other specialists in federal and state government and as private sector consultants in what came to be called the field of Cultural Resources Management (CRM). Obviously, there was no formal training for this new field immediately available to its practitioners or for those seeking employment in this area. But it was not long before programs in the broader field of Historic Preservation were established, usually connected to schools of architecture. Specialized applied training for archaeologists, however, lagged behind, and by the mid to late 1990s it became increasingly evident that the formal training that archaeologists received and the demands of workplaces that was increasingly nonacademic were disconnected from each other. Zeder (1997) perfectly captured the problem when she stated, “Nowhere was the disjunction between academic and private/public sector archaeology more keenly apparent than in the latter’s responses of high dissatisfaction with their academic preparation for their current careers, and the discrepancy between their career expectations and their actual careers.” The pages of the SAA Bulletin in this period often carried essays analyzing the deficiencies of the educational preparation of archaeologists and offering proscriptive advice on how the perceived discrepancies might be addressed (e.g., Schuldenrein 1998a, b).
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Schuldenrein, J. (1998a). Changing career paths and the training of professional archaeologists: Observations from the Barnard College Forum Part I. SAA Bulletin, 16(1), 31–33. Accessed December 28, 2010, from http://www.saa.org/Portals/0/SAA/publications/SAAbulletin/16-1/index.html.
Schuldenrein, J. (1998b). Changing career paths and the training of professional archaeologists: Observations from the Barnard College Forum Part II. SAA Bulletin, 16(3), 26–29. Accessed December 28, 2010, from http://www.saa.org/Portals/0/SAA/publications/SAAbulletin/16-3/SAA12.html.
Zeder, M. A. (1997). The American archaeologist: Results of the 1994 SAA Census (Redux). SAA Bulletin, 15(4), 26–31. Accessed December 28, 2010, from http://www.saa.org/Portals/0/SAA/publications/SAAbulletin/15-4/SAA25.html.
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McCarthy, J.P., Brummitt, A. (2013). Archaeology in the “Real World”: The Training–Practice Disconnect in North American Consulting Archaeology. In: Jameson, J., Eogan, J. (eds) Training and Practice for Modern Day Archaeologists. One World Archaeology, vol 1. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5529-5_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5529-5_10
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