The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology

by Kehoe,Alice Beck

• ISBN13: 9780415920551
• ISBN10: 0415920558
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-08-27
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The Land of Prehistoryreveals the powerful ideological function American archaeology has naively served, from the discipline's construction in Victorian societal reform movements to the present. Alice Beck Kehoe chronicles major movements and influences such as the support of racist Spencerian evolutionism and Manifest Destiny ideologies, and the 1960s New Archaeology pandering to Big Science money. She concludes with a discussion of the recent revolutionary shift to multicultural voices within the field.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Construction of the Science of Archaeology

models a science of prehistory on geology and the pre-Darwinian evolution of his mentor Robert Chambers of Edinburgh

Science Boldly Predicts Behind Wilson's science of prehistory were the Scottish reformers George Combe and Robert Chambers opposed to the Scots was the London scientific Establishment led

Lubbock Nineteenth-century mainstream science "boldy predicts"

Consolidating Prehistory Comparing Wilson's Prehistoric Manwith Lubbock's rival volume, it is Lubbock's more purely ideological, racist statements that, coupled with his influential social position, won his Pre-historic Timesits place in the Whig histories of archaeology

America's History A detailed examination of Wilson's presentation of American prehistory, in which he recognizes the civilizations of American Indian nations

Positivists of the New Frontier

Professional American archaeology took off at the time when Turner announced that the physical frontier was at last closed, challenging

Americans to go to new internal frontiers of research and economic development

American archaeology used positivist science to investigate the trans-frontier Land of Prehistory

Petrified Puddle Ducks Walter Taylor's 1948 monograph acidly criticized contemporary American archaeology

The New Archaeology Ten years after Taylor

Lewis Binford launched an attack on American archaeology Carefully planned strategies and rhetoric blatantly dressing up proposals as Big Science gained

National Science Foundation funding and made older archaeologists look naive

The Philosophy of the New Archaeology

An analysis of the much-touted philosophy of science of the New Archaeology

Cahokia: Hidden in Plain Sight

Mainstream American archaeologists' treatment of Cahokia, the awesome capital of an eleventh-century

Midwestern state, reveals how powerfully Manifest Destiny ideology still affects American archaeology

Burrowing Through the Chiefdom

Lewis Henry Morgan's "origin myth" for American industrial capitalism is carried on through White, Service, and their students such as Timothy Earle

The Taboo Topic

Mainstream American archaeology absolutely refuses to discuss prehistoric contacts across salt water, even across the Gulf of Mexico

This legacy from Wilson's interpretation of American prehistory has been reinforced

Manifest Destiny ideology

Land of PrehistoryPostmodernists, sociologists of science, and many members of America's First

Nations show little confidence in archaeologists' capacity to study the past

This final chapter outlines an approach to archaeological data that recognizes the social construction of knowledge without discounting empiricism or denigrating First Nations' own historical universes.

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