Changing Times It used to be that most archaeology was done by universities, museums, and other institutions. Now cultural resource management is the name of the game. By Mike Toner
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t’s Tuesday morning in the conference room of Brockington Cultural Resources Consulting in suburban Atlanta and a dozen of the firm’s archaeologists are listening to a sales representative pitch the merits of a $100,000 3-D laser scanner. Down the hall, Scott Butler, one of three in-house specialists in battlefield archaeology, is reviewing his just completed survey at the San Jacinto Battlefield, where Texas won its independence from Mexico. In the firm’s spacious laboratory a new hire, Bronwen Morgan, is labeling artifacts from a recent dig at Fort Stewart, in southeast Georgia. Behind her, neatly packed boxes of artifacts awaiting analysis hold material from excavations in Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, and Connecticut.
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Boxes stacked to the ceiling along one wall hold nearly 100,000 artifacts excavated from the site of a planned waterfront development on the Savannah River in westcentral South Carolina. Archaeologist Tom Whitley says the previously unknown site was once a large town, complete with palisade walls, dating to the Early Mississippian period, around a.d. 900. It was also occupied in the 1600s, during the early years of European contact. “We’re always busy around here, Whitley says. “Right now we have active projects in 20 states.We have from 80 to 90 people on staff, but that can vary.” The Brockington firm is an example of how American archaeology has changed over the last several decades. The field had been dominated by universities, institutions, and museums that pursued their
summer • 2009
Archaeological Consulting Services, Ltd
While monitoring construction of a light rail transit project, researchers with Archaeological Consulting Services, Ltd. excavated sites in Phoenix, Tempe, and Mesa, Arizona.
