Celebrating Alice: Recognizing the Many Contributions of Alice Beck Kehoe

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Celebrating Alice: Recognizing the Many Contributions of Alice Beck Kehoe" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Alice Beck Kehoe has been a multidimensional scholar throughout her amazing career in Anthropology and Archaeology. She has authored and/or edited over 20 books, the newest boldly titled, “Truth & Power in American Archaeology. Her interests are truly diverse, covering Native American nations (Blackfoot, Cree, Osage), Mississippian, and Mesoamerican Archaeologies, Pre-Columbian voyaging and contacts, Shamanism, and not least of all Engendering Archaeology. Alice has been an ice breaker through the frozen tundra of the “Old Boys Network” from the 1950s through to the current day. She has been a strong model for women in Anthropology and Archaeology and it is high time that Alice Beck Kehoe be honored for all her struggles and successes in academia. She is an omnipresent participant in conferences where she consistently challenges other scholars to think critically and creatively. In this SAA session we hope to highlight the many facets and influences of her illustrious career by hosting a conference session in her honor.

Other Keywords
Mesoamerica • Ethics • North America • Gender and Childhood

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-8 of 8)

  • Documents (8)
Documents
  • Bundles and the Maize God (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Karon Winzenz.

    This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Alice: Recognizing the Many Contributions of Alice Beck Kehoe" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. My master's thesis focused on sacred bundles and rituals depicted on Maya ceramics of the classic period. I am indebted to Justin Kerr and his Maya Vase Data Base. I studied bundles in both sacred and quotidian contexts. Today I discuss mythological scenes in which bundles are associated with the Maize God and...

  • Close Encounters with Alice Beck Kehoe (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharisse McCafferty.

    This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Alice: Recognizing the Many Contributions of Alice Beck Kehoe" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Alice Beck Kehoe has been a multidimensional scholar throughout her amazing career in Anthropology and Archaeology. She has authored and/or edited over 20 books, the newest boldly titled, “Truth & Power in American Archaeology. Her interests are truly diverse, covering Native American nations (Blackfoot, Cree,...

  • Counter-mapping the Blackfoot landscape - in Alice's footsteps (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerald Oetelaar.

    This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Alice: Recognizing the Many Contributions of Alice Beck Kehoe" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the constant encouragement of Alice Kehoe for the past quarter of a century, my wife Joy, the historian in this project, and I have adopted counter-mapping as an alternative approach to interpret the archaeological record of the Northwestern Plains as an imprint of Blackfoot oral traditions. This approach...

  • Decency and Dissent (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only K. Anne Pyburn.

    This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Alice: Recognizing the Many Contributions of Alice Beck Kehoe" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Alice Kehoe has been the reliable voice of reason in archaeology during my entire career. She championed women when the disciplinary hierarchy was a patriarchy that didn't see any problem. She advocated for Indigenous participation in knowledge production before terms like community and identity and colonialism...

  • Inferences Through a Glass Darkly: Interpreting Mesoamerican Obsidian in the Late Precontact/Early Contact Southwest and High Plains (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Barker.

    This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Alice: Recognizing the Many Contributions of Alice Beck Kehoe" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout her long career Alice Beck Kehoe has challenged us to recognize, on the one hand, the interconnectedness of past peoples, and to ignore, on the other, the blinders of accepted wisdom and strictures of the moment’s paradigm. This paper briefly discusses alternative ways of understanding the distribution...

  • An investigation into possible Veracruz origins for the Laud and Fejérváry-Mayer codices (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Cherra Wyllie.

    This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Alice: Recognizing the Many Contributions of Alice Beck Kehoe" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In October 1519, the Santa María de la Concepción arrived in the southern Spanish port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda from Veracruz carrying a letter to the crown from Hernán Cortés, along with an inestimable treasure of gold, silver, and featherwork. The cargo included a retinue of Totonac elites and indigenous...

  • One Tough Archaeological Mother: The Act of Mothering in the Field (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Hoag.

    This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Alice: Recognizing the Many Contributions of Alice Beck Kehoe" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In her recently published autobiography “Girl Archaeologist,” Alice B. Kehoe discusses the hurdles she overcame and trauma she endured as a woman looking to break into a professional space almost completely dominated by men. Her volume adds to the growing body of literature published over the last decade about...

  • Teaching Native America in the “Dark and Bloody Ground”: How the Mythological Super-Indian Evades Erasure (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Plank.

    This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Alice: Recognizing the Many Contributions of Alice Beck Kehoe" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Kehoe’s critiques of academic and popular treatments of the complex of orientations and practices associated with shamanism in particular, and Native religious practice in general, are as relevant today as they were 30 years ago. This paper uses years of student polling and student interviews with Native speakers...