Cultural Resource Management (CRM) is the largest employer of archaeologists and public historians in the United States and is currently the only employment sector for archeologists and historians that is growing rather than continuing a long-term decline. This is also, apparently, the case in Sweden.
One of the peculiar aspects to CRM’s rise is that it began its ascent largely as a recipe of social engineering to solve the political dilemna of preservation and development. Stefan Larsson’s paper about Sweden’s largest contract archaeology company UV as translated by Martin Rundkvist states that:
the way in which contract archaeology was created in the 1960s had to do with the expansion of public administration. There was a need for various kinds of ’social engineer[ing]‘ to find solutions to problems and the goals formulated by polititians. Research and administration became instrumental and was directed towards attaining chosen goals, regardless of the values these represented or possibly destroyed.
When weighing various interests against each other, science’s social engineers had the task of delivering ‘recipes’ for solutions to the polititians. The task of contract archaeology, specifically, became to solve the conflict between cultural heritage protection and societal [and economic] development ….
The National Park Service handles the bulk of Cultural Resource Management oversight in the United States.
As Martin so succinctly puts it “contract archaeology exists to solve an internal [political] conflict.” Acknowledging that legacy does not demean the value of CRM in Sweden or anywhere else. Instead, it helps those in CRM to recognize that society values both preservation and development, and the conflicts that we experience as CRM practitioners between these two poles are there by design.
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