"Although Squier is best known today for the classic book he coauthored with Edwin H. Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, Terry A. Barnhart shows that Squier's fieldwork and interpretive contributions to archaeology and anthropology continued over the next three decades. He turned his attention to comparative studies and to fieldwork in Central America and Peru. He became a diplomat and an entrepreneur yet still found time to conduct archaeological investigations in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Peru and to gather ethnographic information on contemporary indigenous peoples in those countries.".

Say you found that a few dozen people, operating at the highest levels of society, conspired to create a false ancient history of the American continent to promote a religious, white-supremacist agenda in the service of supposedly patriotic ideals. Would you call it fake news? In nineteenth-century America, this was in fact a powerful truth that shaped Manifest Destiny. The Mound Builder Myth is the first book to chronicle the attempt to recast the Native American burial mounds as the work of a lost white race of “true” native Americans. Thomas Jefferson’s pioneering archaeology concluded that the earthen mounds were the work of Native Americans. In the 1894 report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Cyrus Thomas concurred, drawing on two decades of research. But in the century in between, the lie took hold, with Presidents Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Abraham Lincoln adding their approval and the Mormon Church among those benefiting. Jason Colavito traces this monumental deception from the farthest reaches of the frontier to the halls of Congress, mapping a century-long conspiracy to fabricate and promote a false ancient history—and enumerating its devastating consequences for contemporary Native people. Built upon primary sources and first-person accounts, the story that The Mound Builder Myth tells is a forgotten chapter of American history—but one that reads like the Da Vinci Code as it plays out at the upper reaches of government, religion, and science. And as far-fetched as it now might seem that a lost white race once ruled prehistoric America, the damage done by this “ancient” myth has clear echoes in today’s arguments over white nationalism, multiculturalism, “alternative facts,” and the role of science and the control of knowledge in public life.

Writing the history of American archaeology, especially concerning eighteenth and nineteenth-century arguments, is not always as straightforward or simple as it might seem. Archaeology's trajectory from an avocation, to a semi-profession, to a specialized, self-conscious profession was anything but a linear progression. The development of American archaeology was an organic and untidy process, which emerged from the intellectual tradition of antiquarianism and closely allied itself with the natural sciences throughout the nineteenth century--especially geology and the debate about the origins and identity of indigenous mound-building cultures of the eastern United States. Terry A. Barnhart examines how American archaeology developed within an eclectic set of interests and equally varied settings. He argues that fundamental problems are deeply embedded in secondary literature relating to the nineteenth-century debate about "Mound Builders" and "American Indians." Some issues are perceptual, others contextual, and still others basic errors of fact. Adding to the problem are semantic and contextual considerations arising from the accommodating, indiscriminate, and problematic use of the term "race" as a synonym for tribe, nation, and race proper--a concept and construct that does not, in all instances, translate into current understandings and usages. American Antiquities uses this early discourse on the mounds to frame perennial anthropological problems relating to human origins and antiquity in North America.

A collection of essays from distinguished international scholars that explore the idea of a literary geography of the American Tropics.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a widening set of opportunities in the public sphere opened up for ambitious men and women in the loosely structured stratum of “the middle class.” Much of the attention to the marketplace between 1820 and 1910 has described entrepreneurship and the beginnings of a more sophisticated economy, but not much has been paid to the commodification of the self. This book sets out to explore the promotion of the self in the rapidly growing economy and political flux of the nineteenth century. Its geography extends through New England, New York, the new states of the Midwest, and the great cities of the Mid-Atlantic, with an occasional trip to New Orleans, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The approach is biographical, using representative middle class figures to illuminate cultural and social history. Aided by more cheaply produced print and the clamor of the American public for entertainment both high and low brow, the figures described in this book strove for fame, sometimes achieved good fortune, and acted out desires for sexual pleasure, political success, and achieving the ideal in society. In doing so they questioned and rearranged the ideas of the early Republic. Poised between the dying class structure of the late eighteenth century and the rise of a more hierarchical one in the early twentieth, they took advantage of a society in flux to make their mark on American culture.

In American Anthropology and Company, linguist and sociologist Stephen O. Murray explores the connections between anthropology, linguistics, sociology, psychology, and history, in broad-ranging essays on the history of anthropology and allied disciplines. On subjects ranging from Native American linguistics to the pitfalls of American, Latin American, and East Asian fieldwork, among other topics, American Anthropology and Company presents the views of a historian of anthropology interested in the theoretical and institutional connections between disciplines that have always been in conversation with anthropology. Recurring characters include Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Redfield, W. I. and Dorothy Thomas, and William Ogburn. While histories of anthropology rarely cross disciplinary boundaries, Murray moves in essay after essay toward an examination of the institutions, theories, and social networks of scholars as never before, maintaining a healthy skepticism toward anthropologists’ views of their own methods and theories.

"Theodore E. White and the Development of Zooarchaeology in North America illuminates the researcher and his lasting contribution to a field that has largely ignored him in its history. The few brief histories of North American zooarchaeology suggest that Paul W. Parmalee, John E. Guilday, Elizabeth S. Wing, and Stanley J. Olsen laid the foundation of the field. Only occasionally is Theodore White (1905-77) included, yet his research is instrumental for understanding the development of zooarchaeology in North America. R. Lee Lyman works to fill these gaps in the historical record and revisits some of White's analytical innovations from a modern perspective. A comparison of publications shows that not only were White's zooarchaeological articles first in print in archaeological venues but that he was also, at least initially, more prolific than his contemporaries. While the other "founders" of the field were anthropologists, White was a paleontologist by training who studied long-extinct animals and their evolutionary histories. In working with remains of modern mammals, the typical paleontological research questions were off the table simply because the animals under study were too recent. And yet White demonstrated clearly that scholars could infer significant information about human behaviors and cultures. Lyman presents a biography of Theodore White as a scientist and a pioneer in the emerging field of modern anthropological zooarchaeology. "--

Knowing Global Environments brings together nine leading scholars whose work spans a variety of environmental and field sciences, including archaeology, agriculture, botany, climatology, ecology, evolutionary biology, oceanography, ornithology, and tidology. Collectively their essays explore the history of the field sciences, through the lens of place, practice, and the production of scientific knowledge, with a wide-ranging perspective extending outwards from the local to regional, national, imperial, and global scales. The book also shows what the history of the field sciences can contribute to environmental history-especially how knowledge in the field sciences has intersected with changing environments-and addresses key present-day problems related to sustainability, such as global climate, biodiversity, oceans, and more. Contributors to Knowing Global Environments reveal how the field sciences have interacted with practical economic activities, such as forestry, agriculture, and tourism, as well as how the public has been involved in the field sciences, as field assistants, students, and local collaborators.

Regna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the theoretical orientation of the Americanist tradition, centered on the work of Franz Boas, and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. History of Theory and Method in Anthropology reveals the theory schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell’s fifty-year career entails foundational writings in the four fields of the discipline: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology. Leading researchers, theorists, and fieldwork subjects include Claude Lévi-Strauss, Franz Boas, Benjamin Lee Whorf, John Wesley Powell, Frederica de Laguna, Dell Hymes, George Stocking Jr., and Anthony F. C. Wallace, as well as nineteenth-century Native language classifications, ethnography, ethnohistory, social psychology, structuralism, rationalism, biologism, mentalism, race science, human nature and cultural relativism, ethnocentrism, standpoint-based epistemology, collaborative research, and applied anthropology. History of Theory and Method in Anthropology is an essential volume for scholars and undergraduate and graduate students to enter into the history of the inductive theory schools and methodologies of the Americanist tradition and its legacies.

A comprehensive, ambitious, and valuable work on an increasingly important subject In the Preface to her new study, Latin Americanist Helen Delpar writes, "Since the seventeenth century, Americans have turned their gaze toward the lands to the south, seeing in them fields for religious proselytization, economic enterprise, and military conquest." Delpar, consequently, aims her considerable gaze back at those Americans and the story behind their longtime fascination with Latin American culture. By visiting seminal works and the cultures from which they emerged, following the effects of changes in scholarly norms and political developments on the training of students, and evaluating generations of scholarship in texts, monographs, and journal articles, Delpar illuminates the growth of scholarly inquiry into Latin American history, anthropology, geography, political science, economics, sociology, and other social science disciplines.