TY  - BOOK
TI  - Embattled Excavations: Colonial and Transcultural Constructions of the American Deep Past
T2  - Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship
SN  - 9783830943860
PY  - 2021///
PB  - Waxmann Verlag
KW  - c 1500 onwards to present day
KW  - bicssc
KW  - Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700
KW  - History and Archaeology
KW  - Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography
KW  - Social and cultural anthropology
KW  - 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
N1  - Open Access
N2  - 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
UR  - https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/74503
UR  - https://www.waxmann.com/buch4386
ER  -