Preserving Our Not-So-Distant Past? Chester Liebs’s contribution to the ‘archaeology’ of the everyday

Abstract

The paper retraces part of the career of Chester Liebs (b. 1945), a multifaceted figure in twentieth-century American heritage preservation. A landscape historian, preservationist, and professor, Liebs is a photographic chronicler of U.S. cultural landscapes. Just a decade after the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act (1966), he issued a call for the field to broaden its scope, which led to the founding of the still-active Society for Commercial Archeology in 1977. Drawing parallels with industrial archaeology, he argued for the patrimonial value of commercial roadside forms – fast-food outlets, motels, gas stations, neon signs – structures vanishing yet increasingly appreciated. His landmark book Main Street to Miracle Mile (1985) advanced the idea of preserving not only individual buildings but also the wider landscapes shaped by car culture. Drawing on dialogue with Liebs, the essay examines his work and theories, tracing the connections and forces that contributed to shaping one strand of American cultural orientations toward the legacy of the recent past.