Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
From the Grand Canyon to Governors Island, ancient Alaskan villages to Virgin Island reefs, American archaeology is quietly celebrating a centennial.
At two national parks -- El Morro (N.M.) and Montezuma Castle (Ariz.) national monuments -- simple commemorations Friday will mark 100 years since the federal Antiquities Act was signed by President Theodore Roosevelt.
"The Antiquities Act absolutely was a major step for professional archaeology," says archaeologist Jane Waldbaum, head of the Archaeological Institute of America. "The act raised up the public image of archaeology to a highly responsible one," she says, particularly after Congress chartered her organization two months after the signing of the law June 8, 1906.
"Teddy Roosevelt didn't waste any time," says El Morro superintendent Kayci Cook Collins of the National Park Service. Roosevelt proclaimed 18 national monuments, starting with Wyoming's Devils Tower on Sept. 24, 1906. Most notably, he set aside Arizona's Grand Canyon two years later.
The two-page act ("Government was simpler in those days," Collins says) allowed excavation and investigation of monuments only "for the benefit of reputable museums, universities, colleges, or other recognized scientific or educational institutions."
With a pen stroke, Roosevelt created a need for professional archaeologists, Waldbaum says, and spurred the field's growth.
The nation's legacy
The act's primary power allows presidents to preserve vast tracts of federal land. President Bush in June set aside the 124th national monument, 140,000 square miles of ocean acreage called the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument.
Other American treasures preserved as monuments include:
*African Burial Ground National Monument in New York. Set in lower Manhattan, the nation's oldest known urban African cemetery, where freed and enslaved Africans buried their dead as early as 1712, was set aside this year.
*Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. Archaeological investigations stretching back to the 1920s established Chaco Canyon as a center of Puebloan activities in the Southwest from A.D. 850 to 1250.
*Devils Tower in Wyoming. Archaeologists discovered that people living 11,500 years ago hunted mammoth and bison with spears.
"The act was put forward at a time, the beginning of the 20th century, when very few people were doing anything like archaeology as we know it today," says Francis McManamon, the park service's chief archaeologist.
Pot hunting and destruction of Pueblo sites by settlers had become notorious in the decades before the law was signed. It explicitly outlawed looting, although pot hunters remain a concern today. "A lot of places are still around today only because of (the Antiquities Act)," McManamon says.
"Archaeology is a field in transition," says archaeologist Stephen Plog of the University of Virginia. "There still are excavations in areas around parks, but very little in the parks themselves."
High-tech research
At Chaco Canyon, where Plog has worked, a typical pattern was followed. American Museum of Natural History and National Geographic Society-backed excavations took place in the 1920s. There were federal work projects to build facilities in the 1930s and more park service-directed excavations from the 1950s to 1970s. After that, major digging efforts halted as Native Americans' demands for a voice at the table became a central concern.
"Archaeology has been forced to grapple with issues it ignored for too long, and you can really see that at the parks," says Plog, who heads the Chaco Digital Initiative, an effort to digitize archives of archaeological digs at the monument and put them online.
In fields from cuneiform studies to Inca studies, archaeologists are pursuing these consolidating activities, he says.
Looking at old excavation records with a modern eye can uncover new findings, Plog says. At Chaco's Pueblo Bonito, a 600-room ruin that once housed perhaps 1,200 people, records from the 1890s are still yielding clues.
Compiled by 19th-century archaeologist George Pepper, archival records showed that 20 burials at the site considered haphazard may have had a deeper meaning. Pepper's notes showed the bodies were buried with care but, most unusually, were dismembered.
Such a practice is more reminiscent of how Central American cultures of the time, such as the Classic Maya, buried their nobility, rather than the normal Native American burials then.
"(The burials) suggest some people had higher status at Chaco," Plog says. That contrasts with the prevailing view of Chaco as an egalitarian society.
Using technology, such as ground-penetrating radar, to get more out of archaeological sites without destroying anything is a trend at the national monuments today, McManamon says.
"Don't worry, we haven't run out of archaeological sites or archaeological questions," he says.
"But we have the (Antiquities) Act to thank for allowing us to think there will be archaeologists to answer those questions 100 years from now."
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
