ABSTRACT
The first formal legal efforts to preserve America’s past began with the passage of the Antiquities Act of 1906, which was primarily aimed at controlling a lucrative trade in painted pueblo pots from the Southwest. Unfortunately, this act only extended protection to archaeological sites on land owned or controlled by the U.S. government; archaeological resources located on nongovernment lands continued to be looted. There matters remained until 1935, with the passage of the Historic Sites Act, when widespread archaeological surveys in areas threatened by federal dam projects yielded a mass of information on site distributions and key cultural sequences before the sites where they occurred vanished forever under man-made lakes.
