Tracing the Growth of Historic Preservation in the U.S. and the Arc of Tom Windes’s Career

Summary

The passage of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) in 1966 and the conferring of Tom Windes’s M.A. in Anthropology in 1967 appear to be causally independent, but thereafter the arc of historic preservation and Windes’s archaeological career are intertwined. We distinguish three major stages in cultural resource management over the last 50 years, each of which tracks almost seamlessly with the changing focus of Windes’s work. The challenges of defining the intent of the act, enforcing its legal mandate, and demonstrating the act’s public benefit were central elements of federal preservation’s first phase. Windes’s early career in southeastern Utah demonstrates the enforcement challenges, and his work with the Chaco Project in the 1970s illustrates how archaeologists increasingly expanded the research potential of Section 106 work. By 1980 to 1985 it was clear that implementation of the NHPA would require multidisciplinary specialists and a wide-ranging set of skills available only through a large CRM firm, or Tom Windes. Federal agencies and SHPOs focused on management issues and CRM firms took over many of the research and publication duties. As the NHPA and Windes both matured, the emphasis has shifted to balancing research and management needs with limited funds and time.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Its About Time: Contributions in Honor of Thomas C. Windes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage