Making Alternative Histories
The Practice of Archaeology and History in Non-Western Settings
Edited by Peter R. Schmidt and Thomas C. Patterson
After working in Third World contexts for more than a century, many archaeologists from the West have yet to hear and understand the voices of their colleagues in non-Western cultural settings. In Making Alternative Histories, eleven scholars from Africa, India, Latin America, North America, and Europe debate and discuss how to respond to the erasures of local histories by colonialism, neocolonial influences, and the practice of archaeology and history as we know them today in North America and much of the Western world. Making Alternative Histories presents a profound challenge to traditional Western modes of scholarship and will be required reading for Western archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians.
1995. 332 pp., 8 black-and-white illustrations, notes, references, index, 6 x 9
Contributors: Bassey W. Andah, Iraida Vargas Arenas, Jalil Sued Badillo, Michael L. Blakey, Partha Chatterjee, Russell G. Handsman, Augustin F. C. Holl, Thomas C. Patterson, Trudie Lamb Richmond, Peter R. Schmidt, Alison Wylie
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Making Alternative Histories inquiry:
—Carol McDavid, Historical Archaeology Vol. 32, no. 4 (1998)
“In 1992 a School for Advanced Research seminar brought together 11 scholars from Africa, India, Latin America, North America, and Europe to consider how archaeology and other historical research may be used ‘to recuperate the histories of peoples that have been erased, marginalized, or misrepresented…. [T]his collection … will make excellent, albeit challenging fodder for graduate student seminars and provocative reading for any practitioner confronting his or her own participation in the politics of writing the past.”
—Elizabeth Kryder-Reid, American Anthropologist 99, no. 3 (September 1997)
“In sum, this volume is an important contribution to the growing library of works that seek to demystify the production of historical and scientific knowledge… Undertaken as a collaborative endeavor that involved scholars of different backgrounds in the production of knowledge, the book is a signpost to the future.”
—Tamara L. Bray, Anthropological Quarterly Vol. 71, no. 1 (January 1998)
“This volume, the product of an advanced seminar at Santa Fe, provides a partisan view for the making of histories that are locally relevant and unencumbered by colonial and neo-colonial bias. It contains papers on Caribbean, Latin American, Native American, Indian and African archaeologies and histories… This volume … should be read by everyone working in the Third World today.”
—Mark Horton, Antiquity (1998)
“A very solid contribution to our understanding of what doing archaeology in society can (and should) entail.”
—Bulletin of the History of Archaeology
- Introduction: From Construcing to Making Alternative Histories
Peter R. Schmidt and Thomas C. Patterson - The Theme of the Indigenous in the National Projects of the Hispanic Caribbean
Jalil Sued Badillo - The Perception of History and Archaeology in Latin America: A Theoretical Approach
Iraida Vargas Arenas - Archaeology, History, Indigenismo, and the State in Peru and Mexico
Thomas C. Patterson - Confronting Colonialism: The Mahican and Schaghticoke People and Us
Russell G. Handsman and Trudie Lamb Richmond - Using Archaeology to Remake History in Africa
Peter R. Schmidt - Studying African Societies in Cultural Context
Bassey W. Andah - African History: Past, Present, and Future: The Unending Quest for Alternatives
Augustin F. C. Holl - Race, Nationalism, and the Afrocentric Past
Michael L. Blakey - Alternative Histories, Alternative Nations: Nationalism and Modern Historiography in Bengal
Partha Chatterjee - Alternative Histories: Epistemic Disunity and Political Integrity
Alison Wylie