Archeology and the Third Americans
Author(s): Severin Fowles
Year: 2025
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.
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In 1992, Randy published “Archeology and the First Americans,” a timely analysis of archaeology’s culpability in promoting fantasy images of the Indigenous societies of North America that forced us to contend with the ideological implications of these images and the supportive role they have played in histories of land dispossession and U.S. imperialism. Here, I revisit Randy’s classic essay, placing it in dialogue with a parallel inquiry into the images that archaeologists have constructed, specifically in the American Southwest, of a “Spanish” society and of a “colonial period” that allegedly ended when Anglos invaded in the mid-19<sup>th</sup> century. The United States, of course, aggressively worked to dispossess both Indigenous and Hispano peoples of their lands. By the time of the invasions, in fact, most Southwest communities were complexly mixed and best characterized as “Indo-Hispano,” as recent scholarship in Chicano Studies has emphasized. Nevertheless, it was in the ideological juxtaposition of three discursive categories—innocent First Americans (Indigenous communities), failed Second Americans (Spanish settlers), and righteous Third Americans (Anglos)—that the U.S. imperial project asserted its legitimacy. And in our archaeological accounts of the past, I suggest, we, as a discipline, have largely complied.
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Cite this Record
Archeology and the Third Americans. Severin Fowles. Presented at The 90th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2025 ( tDAR id: 509318)
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Record Identifiers
Abstract Id(s): 50317