Full Description
In Truth and Power in American Archaeology, archaeologist and ethnohistorian Alice Beck Kehoe presents her key writings where archaeological fieldwork, ethnohistorical analysis, postcolonial anthropology, and feminist analysis intersect to provide students and scholars of anthropology an overview of the methodological and ethical issues in Americanist archaeology in the last thirty years.
Truth and Power in American Archaeology brings together Kehoe's broad-ranging, influential articles and previously unpublished lectures to explore archaeology's history, methods, concepts, and larger imbrication in knowledge production in the West. With her contextualizing introductions, these articles argue for recognition of scientific method in the historical sciences of archaeology, paleontology, and geology; empirically grounded understandings of American First Nations' ways of life and scientific knowledge; discussion of archaeology as expanded histories; a view of American archaeology's social contexts of Manifest Destiny ideology, Cold War politics, and patriarchy; and a postcolonial historicist understanding of America's real deep-time history and of the imperialist racism entrenched in mainstream American archaeology.
Contents
Dramatis Personae
Greetings!
Part 1. Archaeology Makes Histories
1. Constructing Data
2. Excluded from History
3. Revisionist Anthropology
Interpolation: Metis and Rationality, a Classical Class Struggle
Part 2. Archaeology Is a Historical Science
4. Looking at Landscapes: Disciplinary Boundaries and Unrecognized Precursors
5. How the Ancient Peigans Lived
6. The Direct Ethnographic Approach to Archaeology on the Northern Plains
Part 3. Archaeology Lives in Social Contexts
7. Chiefdoms
8. Cahokia from a Postcolonial Standpoint
Part 4. Postcolonial: Scientific Standpoint and Moral Imperative
9. Delgamuukw
10. The Muted Class: Unshackling Tradition
Part 5. The Themes that Bind
Acknowledgments
References
Index
