Embattled Excavations. Colonial and Transcultural Constructions of the American Deep Past
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".