Brad’s Reviews > The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere > Status Update

According to a 2012 survey of American archaeologists,

Pre-Clovis sites are not accepted even when they have published data on all required aspects of an archaeological site and answered all critiques.

Yet again demonstrating the banal laziness of prejudice in hegemonic/status quo bias. As long as hegemony is institutional, it reasserts itself confidently regardless of evidence.

"What remains undiscussed remains unchallenged and hidden."

Museum artifact provenance was a hot topic in my Master of Information degree, and we covered the grand larceny of Indigenous remains and cultural items/consultations in a Canadian context. But I was unprepared for this history of American institutional backlash to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990...from hiding artifacts in a garage for decades to declaring the profession in danger.

rather than an essentializing discourse, the discussion of Western and Indigenous archaeology is an area of dialogue where divergent histories, epistemologies, ideologies, and philosophies may be shared to inform the past, present, and future of the field.

Contra notions of Indigenous knowledge production as a mere decolonizing negation, it is a positive project in dialogue with others.

Thus, knowledge of the human past has always been and remains in a continual state of growth. We should not expect our understanding of early human populations in any area of the world to remain static.

This is the key analytical advantage of ongoing Indigenous decolonization of histories and historical materialism over reactionary & "just-so" romanticizing of an idealized past.

“Cultural terminologies often used by archaeologists to describe ancient human fossils are much more recent.”

It should be intuitive that grafting a colonial human geography on top of, or just plain overwriting, Indigenous mapping is going to complicate the recovery of, or erase, much history.