Reclaiming Deep Human Histories of the Western Hemisphere: Archaeologists Who Braved Prejudice to Reveal the Evidence

Reclaiming Deep Human Histories of the Western Hemisphere: Archaeologists Who Braved Prejudice to Reveal the Evidence

Discover the work of archeologists who put everything on the line to reveal the truth about the deep history of the Indigenous people of the Americas. Until very recently, most American archaeologists denied that idea that people had arrived in the Americas before the Clovis period, about 12,000 to 14,000 years ago. However, over the past century, there were several renegade truth-telling archaeologists who put their careers and reputations on the line to publish what they saw as the scientifically based truth about the human habitation of the America – that Indigenous people have been in the Americas for over 24,000 years. Reclaiming Deep Human Histories of the Western Hemisphere: Archaeologists Who Braved Prejudice to Reveal the Evidence highlights and celebrates these trailblazing archaeologists. Pre-Clovis site research in the Americans was so strongly denied in the past, that it was known as an area of academic suicide. Indeed, as this book reveals, many archaeologists suffered unusually cruel punishment for telling the truth; some were fired, some lost research grants and all were denounced as lunatics who did bad archaeology. They are now being vindicated, and a new group of archaeologists are proving these early and contemporary archaeologists were correct in claiming that people had been in the Americas long before the accepted dates for the Clovis technologies. Their work is pivotal to reclaiming, retelling, and rewriting Indigenous history, specifically the Indigenous history of the Western Hemisphere during the Pleistocene and healing and reconciliation for Indigenous people Paulette Steeves is the Canada Research Chair in Healing and Reconciliation at Algoma University. She is a Cree-Metis Indigenous archaeologist, is the only Indigenous archaeologist whose research is focused on the Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, the Americas.