Truth and Power in American Archaeology

Alice Beck Kehoe is a professor of anthropology emeritus at Marquette University. She is the author or editor of twenty-one books, including North America before the European Invasions; The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology; and Girl Archaeologist: Sisterhood in a Sexist Profession (Nebraska, 2022).

“Alice Kehoe writes with force, pulls no punches, and generates a good deal of heat. This is a body of work done in service of disciplinary reflexivity. Kehoe is an established critic of American anthropology and has been an active contributor to many efforts to better include Indigenous perspectives. Her effort is contemporary and is likely to find a significant readership.”-David W. Dinwoodie, author of Reserve Memories: The Power of the Past in a Chilcotin Community “Truth and Power in American Archaeology provides students and scholars an overview of mid-twentieth-century Americanist archaeology, a time when a small group of senior and junior scholars dominated the discipline. Kehoe describes the power exercised by a male ruling cadre that limited women’s careers and their provocative and essential approaches. She captures how much our practices of choosing colleagues, grant funding, and publishing define ‘authority,’ and how strong shadows from that period continue to darken our discipline. I highly recommend her book for its personal and remarkable insights into the academic seas through which she has navigated. It also marks a course that American archaeology must follow to include underrepresented scholars, accept diverse understandings, and engage Native peoples.”-Timothy Earle, author of How Chiefs Come to Power and recipient of the 2023 Society for American Archaeology’s Lifetime Achievement Award “A collection of Kehoe’s ‘lost’ essays, unjustly rejected and unwisely overlooked. These important thought-pieces range from historical science to cultural landscapes, to chiefdoms and states, and to postcolonial and feminist social justice. Righteously undeterred, Kehoe situates each piece, and its fate, in its political and philosophical contexts.”-Stephen H. Lekson, curator of archaeology, emeritus, University of Colorado Museum of Natural History

• Dramatis PersonaeGreetings!Part 1. Archaeology Makes Histories1. Constructing Data2. Excluded from History3. Revisionist AnthropologyInterpolation: Metis and Rationality, a Classical Class StrugglePart 2. Archaeology Is a Historical Science4. Looking at Landscapes: Disciplinary Boundaries and Unrecognized Precursors5. How the Ancient Peigans Lived6. The Direct Ethnographic Approach to Archaeology on the Northern PlainsPart 3. Archaeology Lives in Social Contexts7. Chiefdoms8. Cahokia from a Postcolonial StandpointPart 4. Postcolonial: Scientific Standpoint and Moral Imperative9. Delgamuukw10. The Muted Class: Unshackling TraditionPart 5. The Themes that BindAcknowledgmentsReferencesIndex