The Land of Prehistory

First published in 1998. The Land of Prehistory reveals 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.

Alice Beck Kehoe is Professor of Anthropology at Marquette University. She is the author of Humans: An Introductionto Four-Field Anthropology (1998), published by Routledge. She has served the Society for American Archaeology as Public Relations Committee Chair and on its Public Education Task Force, and was nominated for President, Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association.