ABSTRACT
The archaeological work on historic sites prior to World War II, and in particular the work conducted as part of the New Deal, established a role for historical archaeology in an emergent federal archaeology program that the Historic Sites Act of 1935 legitimized. The direct-historical approach was developed to address a specific archaeological problem, and was firmly seated in the anthropological thinking of the day. The direct-historical was one of the fundamental approaches used in the archaeology of the Great Plains primarily the Central and Northern Great Plains prior to World War II, and it continues to be important to this day. In 1969, the Smithsonian Institution's River Basin Surveys (RBS) Missouri Basin Project office became the National Park Service (NPS) Midwest Archeological Center (MWAC). As was the case with RBS historical archaeologists, MWAC archaeologists have also been leaders within the discipline of historical archaeology as evidenced, in part, by leadership within the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA).
