When the Land Was Young: Reflections on American Archaeology

A clay potsherd, a petroglyph, a flint spear point, a bone: archaeology is a dry business, sifting through dusty time to find the remains of long-gone life. But as immersed as it is in the details of the dead, archaeology belongs to the living. It is a tale of peopling that in North America extends our cultural perspective back at least twelve thousand years, a story that Sharman Apt Russell brings to vibrant, contentious life as it is enacted today, revealing past and present alike. A history of archaeology in America, written with clear-eyed wit and grace, Russell's book takes the study of our ancestors out of the museum and shows us the immediate, human implications of our forays into the past. Whether eyeing the theory that humans caused the extinction of Pleistocene mega-fauna, or the demands for the repatriation of Native American remains, or the meaning of burial mounds in Ohio, Russell keeps in clear view the idea that there are multiple ways of examining the past. She interviews an array of characters who have been instrumental in reshaping modern archaeology and speaks to those, such as Pawnee activists fighting for the return of ancestral remains or a Navajo archaeologist at odds with his people's prohibition against handling the dead, who continue to wrestle with the nature and practice of archaeology today.

Sharman Apt Russell is the author of Kill the Cowboy, also available in a Bison Books edition. She lives in the Mimbres Valley in New Mexico.