ABSTRACT
More than 150 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville noted: “Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.”1 That is certainly true with the question of how to deal with the past. As I noted in the preface, the past is a tool is regularly used for political purposes. It should be no surprise, then, that legal issues play a major role in archaeology, both in the United States and elsewhere in the world. In this chapter, I outline some of the history of archaeological legislation in the United States and the impact it has had on research. I introduce the field of cultural resource management, a field that has transformed archaeology and through which most archaeological research is being done today. At the end of the chapter, I discuss the Society for American Archaeology’s code of ethics, which can be taken as a set of laws guiding the behavior of individual archaeologists.
