Embattled Excavations Colonial and Transcultural Constructions of the American Deep Past

American national self-invention is fundamentally entwined with cultural constructions of American "prehistory" - the human presence on the continent since the earliest arrivals at least 16,000 years ago. Embattled Excavations offers exemplary readings of the entanglements between reconstr...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Mackenthun, Gesa
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Waxmann Verlag 2021
Series:Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship
Subjects:
Online Access:
Collection: Directory of Open Access Books - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
LEADER 03053nma a2200349 u 4500
001 EB002048887
003 EBX01000000000000001192553
005 00000000000000.0
007 cr|||||||||||||||||||||
008 220822 ||| eng
020 |a 9783830943860 
020 |a 9783830993865 
100 1 |a Mackenthun, Gesa 
245 0 0 |a Embattled Excavations  |h Elektronische Ressource  |b Colonial and Transcultural Constructions of the American Deep Past 
260 |b Waxmann Verlag  |c 2021 
300 |a 1 electronic resource (240 p.) 
653 |a Social and cultural anthropology / bicssc 
653 |a History and Archaeology / bicssc 
653 |a c 1500 onwards to present day / bicssc 
653 |a Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography / bicssc 
653 |a American Studies; New American Studies; American Isthmus; settler colonial studies; history of science; postcolonial studies; decolonial studies; Colonialism; colonial discourse analysis; ciritical empire studies; Fossils; Archaeology 
653 |a Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 / bicssc 
041 0 7 |a eng  |2 ISO 639-2 
989 |b DOAB  |a Directory of Open Access Books 
490 0 |a Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship 
500 |a Creative Commons (cc), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ 
028 5 0 |a 10.31244/9783830993865 
856 4 2 |u https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/74503  |z DOAB: description of the publication 
856 4 0 |u https://www.waxmann.com/buch4386  |7 0  |x Verlag  |3 Volltext 
082 0 |a 900 
082 0 |a 301 
520 |a American national self-invention is fundamentally entwined with cultural constructions of American "prehistory" - the human presence on the continent since the earliest arrivals at least 16,000 years ago. Embattled Excavations offers exemplary readings of the entanglements between reconstructions of the American deep past and racialist ideologies and legal doctrine, with continental expansionism and Manifest Destiny, and with the epistemic and spiritual crisis about the origins of mankind following nineteenth-century discoveries in the fields of geology and evolutionary biology. It argues, from a decolonial perspective, that popular assumptions about the early history of settlement effectively downplay the length and intensity of the Indigenous presence on the continent. Individual chapters critically investigate modern scientific hypotheses about Pleistocene migrations; they follow in the tracks of imperial and transatlantic adventurers in search of Maya ruins and fossil megafauna; and they triangulate colonial and transcultural reconstructions of the events leading to the formation of Crater Lake (Oregon) with previously ignored Indigenous traditions about the ancient cataclysm. The examples show a deep-seated colonial anxiety about America's foreign pre-colonial past, evinced by popular archaeology's nervous silencing of Indigenous knowledge - a condition now subject to revision due to a growing Indigenous presence in the discursive field.