“Archaeology and the First Americans”: Randall H. McGuire’s Seminal Article

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Praxis Makes Perfect: Celebrating the Academic Life and Times of Randy McGuire" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Somewhere in the mid-1990s I began to fall out of love with archaeology. The reason? A rising and profound discomfort with the discipline’s bankrupt relationship with Native Americans. When I turned to the library stacks for help (as we did back then), I found only a few voices in the wilderness that spoke out about archaeology’s tangled colonialist, nationalist, and racist legacies. It was Randall H. McGuire’s “Archaeology and the First Americans” that most inspired me to action. Published in 1992 in American Anthropologist, the article arrived at the transformative moment between NAGPRA's passage and the field’s turn towards more collaborative practices with Indigenous peoples. McGuire’s historical analysis was not only uniquely insightful but also penetrating in its politics. Both a look backward on how we got to where we were, and a call to action for where we should go. Through the years, my printed copy became filled with so much marginalia and so marked up that essentially every single line was underlined, if not triple underlined. Now, more than 30 years later, I pause to reflect on how this paper was truly “seminal”—for its originality as much as its influence on the development of future events.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Praxis Makes Perfect: Celebrating the Academic Life and Times of Randy McGuire

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50374