Roger Desautels on Amchitka Island in 1969. Photographer unknown. Photograph courtesy of Max Farrar.
After being asked by Bill Doelle to co-author a paper on the growth of private, for-profit CRM in the Southwest, I became curious to know whether that field began in our region or somewhere else. In March 2001 I began e-mailing queries to ACRA-L, the list server for the American Cultural Resources Association. A number of ACRA-L subscribers responded with information based on their memories of the start of the field. Many of the following quotations are taken from e-mails in a relaxed format, and have therefore been edited for both grammar and clarity. I deeply apprecIate the contributions of my fellow ACRA-L subscribers.
As of this essay, in 2001, private-sector CRM is only 29 years old, but the knowledge of its origins is already being lost. A great deal of that loss is due to a lack of reflexive thinking: until recently, private sector CRM was just something we did, so we could do archaeology or whatever other studies we loved to do. Moreover, the field began as disjointed efforts across the country, with little sharing of information except through individual working relationships. It was only in the past few years that CRM realized that it was, in fact, an industry, and consciously began creating channels for internal communication. Moreover, the roots of private sector CRM were not a concern until it had become a major force in archaeology and in historic preservation in general. This is a good time to be collecting the oral history of the field; some of its founders of the field have died, others have retired or drifted from the profession, and the remaining pioneers will not be around much longer. As shown by the extracts reproduced below, the memories we do have of those early years are getting hazy. By setting the following information to paper (so to speak), I hope to preserve some of our tribal folklore for the next generation.
The linked table provides a state-by-state summary of the information contained in this essay. Before proceeding, I'll repeat a statement often made on ACRA-L, that CRM is much more than archaeology. At the same time, there is no doubt that archaeologists were the core of the emergent CRM industry.
When I began this survey, many CRM professionals (including myself) could not name the first person to do private sector CRM. Fortunately, a few people had memories of this earliest part of the story.
Roger Desautels on Amchitka Island in 1969. Photographer unknown.
Photograph courtesy of Max Farrar.
According to Mike Polk, "I have always been told that Roger Desautels in Costa Mesa, California [had] the first CRM firm to really operate similarly to how we do today. I can't remember his firm's name, however. His firm began, I believe, in 1962, and his first large and notable project was a cultural resources inventory of Amchitka Island in the Aleutian Islands prior to the test detonation of a hydrogen bomb."
In 1971, Desautels published a brief account of his business in The Masterkey (Vol. 45, No. 2, pp. 69-71):
Archaeological Research, Inc., was founded by Elerth S. Erickson and the writer as a non-profit scientific corporation designed to facilitate certain needs associated with archaeological research. These needs included ... providing research personnel and facilities for conducting field work anywhere and anytime....
ARI was incorporated in 1968....
Thus far, in two years of existence, we have engaged in over six months of field work (resulting in over 700 pages of reports).
From the various comments it appears that Desautels began as an unincorporated sole proprietor or partner, with the Amchitka job in 1962, and incorporated a few years later. This was not an unusual way to get started as a private sector consultant, even years later.
Corroborating responses came from Gerritt Fenega, Ron May, and Al McCurdy. May comments that "Desautels is deceased, but his children and his widow carry the torch." He explains Desautels's ability to establish his business as follows: "Roger was a showman, which means he was darn good at marketing archaeology. He managed to convince someone at the Department of Energy and Department of Defense to fund the survey of Amchitka Island and linked the ... Antiquities Act with their project. He convinced them that this was a positive public relations move."
Roberta Greenwood. Right photograph first published in Westways (Automobile Club of Southern California) in 1995. Photographs courtesy of Roberta Greenwood
If Roger Desautels was the father of private sector CRM, Roberta Greenwood may claim to be its mother. In 1965, Greenwood excavated Shisholop (CA-VEN-3) under contract to the California Division of Beaches and Parks. A year later, she excavated the Chapel of Santa Gertrudis (CA-VEN-168) and the Ventura Mission Aqueduct, under contract to the California Division of Highways and the Department of Parks and Recreation. She had been doing similar work before 1965, "but not with all-paid crews or with formal public contracts."
Greenwood explains that private sector work was her chosen career path: "I did not aspire to teach or be closeted in a museum, but preferred active fieldwork and research." In 2001 she was awarded the J. C. Harrington Medal from the Society for Historical Archaeology.
Ron May writes, "I entered the field in 1970 as a contract employee with the California Division of Highways and Roger Desautels and [his company] split the assignment [with me]. He took Riverside and San Bernardino Counties and I took San Diego and Imperial Counties. I operated as an independent CRM consultant. The state Division of Highways projects led to contract work with the San Diego State University Foundation in 1971 and 1973. In 1972 I went to work for David D. Smith & Associates, which was one of the earliest post-NEPA and [post-]Section 106 firms in California. I took a leave of absence to do the 1973 Kitchen Creek dig on Interstate 8 but returned to DDS in 1973. DDS&A dominated the San Diego scene until Westec Services and Recon formed in 1973–1974. By 1974, CRM was commonplace in California."
Private, for-profit CRM started late in the Southwest, perhaps because of the strength of the institutional CRM programs. (The CRM era arguably began with a 1950 museum-based pipeline archaeology project in Arizona and New Mexico, and with the subsequent establishment of a permanent highway salvage program in New Mexico in 1954). The earliest private, for-profit CRM company in the region was probably ARS. In August 1974, Lyle Stone founded Archaeological Research Services in Arizona. He describes how it happened:
While in Michigan between 1965 and mid-1974, and while Staff Archaeologist for the Mackinac Island State Park Commission (For Michilimackinac and Fort Mackinac) I had the opportunity (taking one day per week leave from my state job) in late 1973 and into 1974 to work on a part-time consultant basis for Commonwealth Associates in Jackson, Michigan, and thereby had the opportunity to get involved in some very early CRM, helping set up the CRM division, doing research and writing reports, and I liked it. Also, I had a lot of what I thought were new and innovative ideas about archaeology and state parks but my position, while good and stable, wasn't one in which it was useful to rock the boat; I needed an outlet to do some things on my own. In addition, I found myself becoming somewhat of an officious bureaucrat and didn't like the feeling; at that point I knew that I could serve the resource, the profession, and the public in a better way. So .. my wife (an Arizona native almost) and I decided to set out for Arizona and go into CRM as our business and be closer to family; we also had two kids at the time and I wanted them to have the Arizona experience. So, partly personal and partly professional. At least I had some freedom of thought away from the university and bureaucratic atmosphere, and had some specific things in mind that I wanted to do in CRM. My business took off after a while, and I'm still at it full time.
Margerie Green writes, "I believe my company, Archaeological Consulting Services, Ltd., was the second [firm in Arizona]; we started in 1977. It is quite possible that there were others starting up in other parts of the state that we didn't hear about until later because everyone's operation was quite small back then." She adds, "I think the things that convinced clients to go private was the greater flexibility/availability of the little guys, the fact that they were cheaper than universities, and the fact that we weren't associated wit a large bureaucracy."
In 1981, after leaving a California teaching job, this author founded a branch office for New World Research (based in Louisiana) in Tucson. A few weeks later Bill Doelle and Linda Mayro returned to Tucson after doing MX missile surveys, and started Desert Archaeology. This was the start of the private sector CRM boom in Tucson.
Mike Polk provides the following account of the start of private-sector CRM in Idaho:
I was a graduate student at Idaho State University between 1973 and 1975 and worked under the two most prominent archaeologists in the state at the time, Earl Swanson and Bob Butler. I continued to have contacts (and still do) in that state and it was sometime after my departure that CRM as we know it today began there. Idaho State and the University of Idaho did quite a lot of CRM work during the 1973–1976 period, but private institutional work didn't begin until 1977.
Idaho has never had very many companies. From the most recent "Directory of Idaho Archaeologists' that I have (dated January 1999), there are only, at most, six consulting companies with more than one individual in them (three of which are local, the rest being satellite offices of out-of-state companies). From Loralea Hudson (now with Northwest Archaeological Associates, Inc. in Seattle), I received the following information ... She began, undoubtedly, the first CRM company in the state.
Hudson's information, provided by Polk:
I started my company in 1977; we actually got together in 1976 but I believe the incorporation (Idaho) papers were January 1977. The corporation, Cultural Resource Consultants, Inc. (CRC), was based in Sandpoint, Idaho and the owners were me, Gorge F. Gauzza, Jr., and Gary G. Ayers. All University of Idaho graduates, I might add. Gary and I were graduate students in Anthro and George received his B.A. in History. ... think my last contract at CRC was [in] 1977 or 1988. ... CRC was always the "biggest" CRM [firm] in north Idaho. ... Others ... Well, Dave and Jennifer Chance had a company in the late 1980s, but that [was] basically a one-person shop. ... For the most part it was one-person operations, maybe hiring (contracting!!) a person or two for a specific project.
Polk remarks that private sector CRM did not become commonplace in Idaho until the late 1980s, adding, "Even today, Idaho State University runs a contracting program and gets a fair share of work in southeastern Idaho."
In discussing Utah, Polk reports:
While I know that the University of Utah and Brigham Young University were doing archaeological contract work earlier, I believe (but am not completely sure) that Richard (Rick) Hauck began his company called AERC (Archaeological Environmental Research Corporation) in Bountiful, Utah about 1978. It is still in business under Rick's ownership. Another company that began about this same time, perhaps slightly later, was Utah Archaeological Research Corporation (UTARC), under the ownership of three to four people, including Clay Cook (now out of the field [and] living in California) and Diana Christenson, now archaeologist for the BLM Arizona Strip Field Office in St. George, Utah. UTARC folded in the early 1980s.
In a later e-mail, Polk corrects the founding date for AERC to 1976. He adds that another firm "close on the heels of AERC was K. K. Pelli (company name) of Moab, Utah. That was operated by Lloyd Pierson beginning in 1977. Lloyd is now retired and still living in Moab."
Polk goes on to describe subsequent developments in Utah:
By the early 1980s (before the big energy development business shakeout in 1985–1986), CRM companies were well established in Utah. At that time AERC, UTARC, Abajo Archaeology (in Bluff, Utah), Environmental Consultants, Inc. in Ogden (begun in 1981; later to become my company, Sagebrush Consultants), P-III Associates in Salt Lake City (begun in 1980), and, perhaps, Senco-Phoenix in Salt Lake City (later moved to Pleasant) were in place.
Adrian Anderson provides the following extended account of the early years of private CRM in Iowa:
When I become SHPO (SLO, then) in 1971 ... one of the first tasks became educating the professionals (academics, except for NPS archaeologists at Effigy Mounds National Monument) into the world of 106 and CRM. Everyone wanted contracts—they had been engaged in "highway salvage" projects since about 1966—and most absolutely refused to lay out a scope of work that required them to complete a project in a timely manner. The first meeting of the Association of Iowa Archaeologists was spent going through the law and rules, and the most acrimonious aspect of the meeting was the [failure] of participants to understand that SHPO could not keep bidders from outside Iowa out of "their" market. The State Archaeologist wanted to run the contracting—and engage in contracting—no conflict of interest there!
I think perhaps Mike Weichman (sp?) may have been one of the first to incorporate as an individual. He soon moved to Missouri, though, working for the state. David Stanley, with his Bear Creek Archaeology, was one of the first to actually form an ongoing business, early in the 1970s.
Michael Weichman provides slightly different information for Iowa. The first firm Weichman is aware of in that state was the Environmental Research Center in Iowa City. Weichman confirms that the Iowa SHPO played a role in encouraging the development of private sector consulting, and adds that such consulting was common in Iowa by 1979–1980.
According to Donald J. Weir, "I don't know who was the first, but I was hired in late 1973 by Commonwealth Associates, Inc., a for profit architecture and engineering firm, of Jackson, Michigan to undertake [an] archaeological project for large utility companies, primarily electrical transmission and power generation [companies]. I was hired by the late Dr. Earl Prahl and was the third archaeologist on staff." Also according to Weir and Tom King, in 1974 or 1975 Prahl was replaced by Jim Fitting. King adds, "Jim came out of academia and shortly after moving to Commonwealth began promoting 'client-oriented archaeology,' Earl moved East to take over the job I'd held at the New York Archaeological Council when I went to NPS-Washington in 1976."
James Robertson adds:
Fitting taught, I believe, at Case Western followed by his tenure as the first State Archaeologist in Michigan. Subsequently, Fitting joined Commonwealth Associates, Inc., which shortly thereafter merged with Gilbert and became Gilbert/Commonwealth, which ultimately gave birth to the independent company Commonwealth Cultural Resources Group, Inc. of Jackson, Michigan (and other office locations), headed by Don Weir, another board member of ACRA (who worked directly under Prahl and then Fitting before taking the helm himself at C/C and founding CCRG).
According to Charles Cheek:
When I moved to Oklahoma in 1972, I do not think there were any contract firms based in [the state]; perhaps some from Texas worked in the area. At least the other firms were not on my radar as I was busy with my first teaching job. My wife, Annetta, did not have a job, so she contracted with the Tulsa District Corps to undertake a survey in 1973. She was aware of NHPA and recognized the possibilities for gainful employment in it. We then formed a non-profit firm, Archaeological Research Associates (ARA), to do contract work in that year. (We found out later that there was a number of other firms that had that name in other states.) We became non-profit because we did not want to have to worry about the tax picture and may have felt that the clients would be more responsive to that as well. ... We were non-profit but had the same issues as for a [for] profit firm.
According to Joel Klein, "Ed Rutch founded his firm, Historic Conservation and Interpretation, Inc., sometime in the (early?) 1960s—long before NHPA. Ed was primarily an industrial archaeologist but he also did historic and prehistoric archaeology. He was/is based in Newton, N.J.
According to Ron Thomas, "My earliest recollection of a CRM firm operating in the Eastern U.S. was the one operated by Glen Little sometime in the late 1960s. I recall excavating at the Indian Queen Tavern in Charlestown, Maryland."
Charles Cheek expanded on this posting by stating:
Ron Thomas is right. Glenn Little hired me (while [I was] a graduate student) in 1967 to work as crew for his firm Contract Archaeology, Inc. Glenn was a graduate student at Catholic University at the time (where I had been an undergraduate and had done some volunteer work for him ...). I think he had been part of a cadre of students who had been mustered to lobby for NHPA in the mid-1960s. In conversations with him at the time, it was clear that he thought that private-firm archaeology was the future of archaeology. I was hired to work on a National Park Service project for Glenn in Washington, D.C. that summer. Harvard Ayers, now a professor at Appalachian State (Ph.D. from Catholic University) was the site supervisor.
Glenn also had other projects including the Paca House in Annapolis. This was during the restoration of the house and he hired Stanley South, whom he had worked for previously, to direct the project. I don't know if Glenn's firm was first, but it was close, and was directly inspired by the potential of NHPA. Unfortunately, Glenn had heart problems and left archaeology within a few years of starting his company and I lost track of him years ago.
According to James Robertson:
Alex Townsend was the first archaeologist with National Heritage Corp. (among the earliest firms to consider both archaeology and architecture in preservation), [which was] started by renowned preservation/restoration archaeologist John Milner. This was the predecessor [company to] John Milner Associates, Inc., of West Chester, Pa. (and other office locations). Townsend's successor was Dan Roberts of JMA, a current board member of ACRA.
Dan Roberts amplifies on Robertson's posting:
Bill Macdonald was the first archaeologist hired at National Heritage Corporation of West Chester, Pa. I believe this was in 1972. National Heritage Corporation was founded in 1968, primarily as an architectural restoration firm, and changed its name to John Milner Associates, Inc. in 1977. Alex H. Townsend was JMA's second archaeologist (McDonald left for the University of Michigan in 1975) and I was hired as the firm's third archaeologist in 1976.
Kay Simpson remarks on the establishment of the Cultural Resource Division of Louis Berger: "Dr. John Hotopp founded the division in 1981 out of our corporate office in New Jersey. I've never worked in N.J. so I don't know we fit within the history of the state's CRM program [but] we've been around a long time (in CRM years!). The company of course is much older (founded 1953)."
Tom Padgett writes, "The earliest CRM work I know about in North Carolina was done by Contract Archaeology, Inc., a firm hired by the N.C. Dept. of Transportation in 1971 to conduct excavations at the North Carolina Arsenal Site in Fayetteville. ... The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had done some [reservoir] work previously ... but Contract Archaeology Inc. is the first private firm I know of for this state."
Thomas Sanders writes:
"The first individual/firm to do CRM work in Kentucky on a non-institutional, for profit basis was Ohio Valley Archaeological Research Associates (OVARA). ... The year was 1974." He adds, "In 1974 a new State Historic Preservation Officer (Eldred Melton) was appointed in Kentucky. [Melton] brought a professional staff to the SHPO's office. In particular, Section 106 and EO 11593 requirements were enforced. This resulted in numerous requests, starting in 1974, to the University of Kentucky's Department of Anthropology for archaeological assessments on small projects. The Department of Anthropology was not prepared for such work, though they had long been involved in substantial undertakings such as reservoir salvage and, more recently, federal highway construction projects. With the approval of Dr. Lathel Duffield, several graduate students (Lloyd Chapman, Roger Allen, C. Wesley Cowan, and Betty McGraw) went together and formed OVARA [Ohio Valley Archaeological Research Associates] to deal with these small projects. Lloyd Chapman did several of these small surveys in the weeks before OVARA was formed, and may have been the first private, non-institutional CRM archaeologist in Kentucky. OVARA continued to do these small projects for several years. It was re-formed about 1977 under the name ASK (Archaeological Services of Kentucky), by several of the same individuals.
Sanders concludes by stating that by 1980 there were several private firms working in Kentucky; by 1984 the industry was well established there.
According to Pat Garrow, "I was one of the first in the South to start a CRM program in a private firm. I built a program at Soil Systems, Inc. starting in 1976, that was billing $2–$3 million a year by 1980 or so." He later expanded on this:
I met the people at Soil Systems while employed at the North Carolina Archaeology Branch. [SSI] expressed an interest in starting an archaeology practice at their firm, and first tried to recruit Steve Gluckman, who headed the Branch. Steve told them he would consider it if they would also hire me to do the actual work while he saw to long range planning for the program. They then decided to bypass Steve and offer me the job instead.
The Soil Systems offer came at a good point in my life. I had just come off a serious illness that had kept me out of work for several weeks, and I had [used] that time to review my career and decide what I really wanted to do in the future. I had already tried teaching at the college level and decided that wasn't for me, and had done a year of barely supported research on a site in northern Georgia, and decided I did not want to live grant to grant. The private sector seemed to be a new and exciting area, and I decided to give it a try.
I was the first archaeologist hired at Soil Systems, and remained in technical charge of their archaeology practice until I left in 1983 to help my wife form Garrow & Associates, Inc. During my time [at SSI] the program grew to be either the biggest or one of the biggest in the country. Soil Systems was bought by a holding company in 1980, and they began to take real control of the program in 1982. The company was out of the archaeology business shortly after I left in 1983.
The person who made the decision initially to build an archaeological program was a Senior Vice President in charge of the environmental division. He thought it might eventually bring as much as $5,000 a month.
J. W. "Joe" Joseph provides additional information on early CRM in the Southeast:
I started work in the southeast in 1976, so a few years late to provide the earliest CRM history around here. At that time the major players, from my perspective, were the universities (South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and U. Tennessee anthro were my earliest employers). Leslie Drucker and Ron Anthony had started Carolina Archaeological Services (CAS) in SC ... between 1974 and 1976, I believe. Pat Garrow had been hired by Soil Systems, Inc. in Atlanta around this time ... and was beginning to build SSI's program. Prentice Thomas and Jan Campbell would have established New World Research in Florida [ed. note: Louisiana?] at roughly this same time, and a little later a company called Southeastern Wildlife Services would be created in Athens, Georgia by Hilburn (Billy) Hilstead (later of Law Environmental). [SWS] would include a cultural resource arm headed by Dean Wood—this would evolve into Southeastern Archaeological Services in the late 1970s.
Earl Neller provides the information about Hawaii. He notes contract archaeology projects by the Bishop Museum in the late 1960s, but then provides information on an early non-institutional CRM operation:
In 1971, Francis Ching established Archaeological Research Center Hawaii (ARCH) to do contract archaeology in Hawaii. Early projects were a highway survey and salvage [excavation] and portions of a statewide inventory of historic places for the SHPO. At the time it was considered heresy for anyone to be taking on archaeology besides the Bishop Museum
According to Leonard Voellinger, "My first non-university experience was with the Arctic Company. In the early 1970s they surveyed the Alaska Pipeline. I worked for them in 1976." In a separate e-mail he explains that "The Arctic Co. was established as a contractor to do environmental work on the Alaska Pipeline, probably by 1973 or 1974."
When private sector CRM got started, it did so in the face of established institutional programs. How did the private sector operations manage this?
As one of the first private sector practitioners, Roberta Greenwood attributes her ability to obtain work to her existing track record:
I already had a substantial body of work which was recognized. [To provide] just one example, the work at the Browne Site (CA-VEN-150), which became SAA Memoir No. 23. I did not count that as a "first" [private sector job]—even though done in 1959–1960—because it was an unpaid undertaking accomplished with volunteers. I had directed other excavations as well, for UCLA and others, that were not direct contracts to me.
Ron May discusses the growth of the field in southern California:
Tom King served as Chief Archaeologist, University of California, Los Angeles in the late 1960s/early 1970s and promoted archaeology via federal historic preservation regulations. He recruited supporters from museums, academia, and SRS in his efforts to force the Bureau of Land Management an Army Corps of Engineers to do archaeology in the course of their projects. He got the Society for California Archaeology to host a two-day training course in either 1969 or 1970 for the California Division of Highway and then they created contract positions for "District Liaison Archaeologists" to serve as go-betweens to take engineering designs to institutional sources for record searches. He appointed me to one of those roles in 1970.
Speaking of the operation he started with his wife in 1973, in Oklahoma, Charles Cheek writes:
Actually, we did not have to do much in the way of convincing. We were about the only non-state agency doing work in Eastern Oklahoma. We had credentials (Ph.D. and ABD from U. of Arizona). I suspect we were competitive. Our overhead was ridiculously low, about 15 percent if I remember correctly. It was low only partially because we wanted to be competitive but also because we had no idea how a business, for profit or non-profit, was run.
Cheek states that private-sector CRM was commonplace in Oklahoma by the mid-1970s, "but much of it was from Texas [firms]."
Looking at the Great Basin area, Mike Polk remarks:
I believe the most persuasive part of the equation was oil and gas development in the Intermountain area in the late 1970s. Also part of this trend was oil shale development and the infamous MX [missile] project in adjacent Nevada. Business was exploding and companies were desperate for archaeologists to do clearance projects on well pads and roads and to do geophysical surveys in Utah and surrounding states. I understand from Clay Cook, formerly of UTARC, that in 1979 he had a three week backlog of well pad surveys charging out at $1,000 each! At this time in Laramie, Wyoming, John Greer and his company Archaeological Services, Inc. had 150 people stationed in various places in the field, from New Mexico to Montana, South Dakota, and Idaho. Universities and colleges with their schedules, long time frames, and academically oriented approaches were likely a frustrating option for private development people. Private enterprise was a welcome addition to the field.
In a later e-mail, Polk adds to this thought:
While oil and gas development was certainly the impetus for private enterprise to develop in CRM [in the Intermountain area], the underlying causes obviously relate back to increasing understanding and enforcement of NHPA and NEPA requirements by the BLM and, to a lesser extent, the USFS. Probably adding to this was the fact that most of the BLM districts were, at the time, hiring archaeologists for the first time so there was a person in each district beginning to enforce the requirements, whereas earlier it was generally up to a recreation planner or a generalized environmental office. While the BLM and USFS would say that their personnel would and could carry out inventories for the developers, the waiting time was usually one to two years. The urgent need for drilling and exploration thus demanded more immediate inventories ... Hence the hiring of cultural resource specialists, particularly those who could respond most rapidly, i.e., private firms.
In writing about the success of CRC, Inc., started in Idaho in 1977, Polk notes that the founders were "local university products" so that "contacts and legitimacy had already been established" with potential local clients.
Writing about the East, J. W. "Joe" Joseph states:
From my experience there were two models of privatization. The first was engineering firms that branched into environmental studies and were then seeing a need for archaeology. This was the Soil Systems model, with Pat Garrow in Atlanta. [SSI was] Tom Wheaton's first employer in archaeology about 1977. While I never worked for SSI I did work for Commonwealth on the Russell Reservoir Project in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I think projects like Russell, ... Cooper River Rediversion, [and] Tennessee Tombigbee were too big for any university to take on and so opened the door for other CRM players, some of whom, such as SSI, Commonwealth, and Louis Berger, were becoming almost national in scope by the late 1970s.
The other model was independent archaeologists (in your CRM history make sure you have a place for the role of couples—Leslie Drucker and Ron Anthony of CAS, Prentice Thomas and Jan Campbell of New World, in 1984 Pat and Barbara Garrow, who would become my employers at Garrow & Associates) who saw a chance to make a living in something other than academic settings (or, conversely, who couldn't find academic or other university jobs).
My own impression is that the institutions unwittingly helped set the stage for their displacement by private firms. Until the 1960s, "salvage archaeology" had been done by those institutions in accordance with long-standing "gentlemen's agreements" under which each institution had its own territory or research interests (or both) and other institutions did not trespass. "Salvage archaeology" done in this milieu was consciously non-competitive. In the 1960s, however, institutions (or perhaps more precisely, a new generation of professors at those institutions) began actively competing with each other over the rapidly growing funding pool in salvage archaeology, and their efforts to get a crack at contracts helped turn the funding process into one that was openly competitive. This made it easier for private firms to break into the contract archaeology game.
This personal impression is supported by Leonard Voellinger's observations. He states, "During the late 1960s and early 1970s numerous professors and research assistants began "moonlighting" and hiring graduat students to assist them with projects. I suppose these moonlighting professors were the incipient professional CRMers." In a later e-mail, Voellinger provides his personal experiences along these lines:
I came into contract work in the early 1970s, as a student at George Washington University in D.C. We did contract work for the Corps of Engineers along the Potomac River, and [for the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission] along the Anacostia River ... The P.I. was a professor, and my pay checks came from the University ... Later he went to work for the Arctic Company's subsidiary, Iroquois Research Institute, and hired me to do more Corps work ... Early in my career in CRM I came across lots of people (namely Rollin Pangborn in Missouri, C. Wade Meade in Louisiana, [and] Gregory Perino in Oklahoma and Iowa) who had been working for professors at universities, as para-professionals who went out on their own (Meade was a history teacher doing archaeology)—as well as professors who were [consulting] (and still do).
Here again, we see evidence that the emergence of open competition among institutional sources of CRM (including those moonlighting professors)—in lieu of the former exclusive institutional turfs—helped set the stage for competitive private-sector CRM.
In 1976, the field was well enough established to merit a publication edited by William K. McDonald: Digging for Gold: Papers on Archaeology for Profit (Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor). The data gathered through the ACRA-L poll supports the idea that by that year, private, for-profit CRM was spreading rapidly in the United States. The polls results also indicate that the rapid growth of the field was preceded by years of effort by a few pioneers. Their early work undoubtedly was critical in building a sense among clients and public agencies that the private sector was a legitimate alternative to institution-based programs. Much of the current demand for CRM in this country is derived from the National Historic Preservation Act and other federal law, but nothing in that law mandated the emergence of a private industry to provide CRM services. Those who routinely provide such services on a private, for-profit basis owe a great deal to the handful of professionals who first did CRM as a business.