The Last Sixty Years: Toward a Social History of Americanist Archeology in the United States

This paper provides an overview of the development of Americanist archeology in the United States.
Since the 1920s, there have been two, and sometimes more, interpretive communities among Americanist archeologists in the United States.
These reflect and are related to the development of U.S. society. One articulates the concerns of national capital and its allies; the other, the interests of
international capital and its allies. They are grounded in different theoretical traditions. The discourses produced by their proponents resonate with
particular world views that reflect different relations to power.