After working in Third World contexts for more than a century, many archaeologists from the West have yet to hear and understand the voices of their colleagues in non-Western cultural settings. In Making Alternative Histories, eleven scholars from Africa, India, Latin America, North America, and Europe debate and discuss how to respond to the erasures of local histories by colonialism, neocolonial influences, and the practice of archaeology and history as we know them today in North America and much of the Western world. Making Alternative Histories presents a profound challenge to traditional Western modes of scholarship and will be required reading for Western archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians.
In sum, this volume is an important contribution to the growing library of works that seek to demystify the production of historical and scientific knowledge... Undertaken as a collaborative endeavor that involved scholars of different backgrounds in the production of knowledge, the book is a signpost to the future. --Anthropological Quarterly Vol. 71, no. 1 (January 1998)
In sum, this volume is an important contribution to the growing library of works that seek to demystify the production of historical and scientific knowledge... Undertaken as a collaborative endeavor that involved scholars of different backgrounds in the production of knowledge, the book is a signpost to the future. --Tamara L. Bray, Anthropological Quarterly Vol. 71, no. 1 (January 1998)
This volume, the product of an advanced seminar at Santa Fe, provides a partisan view for the making of histories that are locally relevant and unencumbered by colonial and neo-colonial bias. It contains papers on Caribbean, Latin American, Native American, Indian and African archaeologies and histories... This volume ... should be read by everyone working in the Third World today. --Mark Horton, Antiquity, 1998