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Book

Sins of the shovel : looting, murder, and the evolution of American archaeology

Call Number

  • 970.00497 M8494 (CEN)

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Publication Information

Chicago, IL : The University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Physical Description

viii, 319 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Summary

"Rachel Morgan's frank and incisive history begins with Richard Wetherill's 'discovery' of Mesa Verde in Colorado in 1888. Subsequent expeditions by amateurs, looters, and budding professional archaeologists abetted the devastation of Indigenous sites throughout the Southwest. These expeditions became the proving grounds for different conceptions of what archaeology should be and how it should be practiced. Ultimately, revulsion at the work of nineteenth-century explorers led to more rigorous and ethical norms, as well as federal regulation, but the core issues of how we ought best to engage with the evidence and people of the past remain live ones today. Morgan, an archaeologist, knows well the field's history of racism and unethical behavior, and she is both unsparing and even-handed in assessing what happened in the Southwest and how it informs relations among people-and with the planet-today"--

Contents

  • Prologue
  • A palace in the sky
  • The robber baron
  • All the world's a fair
  • Toward the grand gulch
  • Whence and whither
  • Bonito, 1895
  • Cacao and turquoise
  • Return to the grand gulch
  • The trade
  • Digging deeper
  • Death by committee
  • Anni horribiles
  • All's fair...St. Louis, 1904
  • An act for the preservation of American antiquities
  • The race for the rainbow bridge
  • On the borderland of hell
  • Where the red rocks run under
  • Back to the gulch, again
  • New deal, new archaeology
  • From potsherds to process
  • The grand gulch under fire
  • People without names
  • Repatriation
  • The past
  • Epilogue
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index.

Subjects