The Land of Prehistory

This volume offers a history of the discipline of archaeology in America. The book reveals the 19th-century century bourgeois value system behind the field, its goals and its current condition. The author argues that American archaeology has been shaped by an ethic of Manifest Destiny. 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.