American national self-invention is fundamentally entwined with cultural constructions of
American prehistory - the human presence on the continent since the earliest arrivals at least
16 000 years ago. Embattled Excavations offers exemplary readings of the entanglements between
reconstructions of the American deep past and racialist ideologies and legal doctrine with
continental expansionism and Manifest Destiny and with the epistemic and spiritual crisis
about the origins of mankind following nineteenth-century discoveries in the fields of geology
and evolutionary biology. It argues from a decolonial perspective that popular assumptions
about the early history of Settlement effectively downplay the length and intensity of the
Indigenous presence on the continent. Individual chapters critically investigate modern
scientific hypotheses about Pleistocene migrations they follow in the tracks of imperial and
transatlantic adventurers in search of Maya ruins and fossil megafauna and they triangulate
colonial and transcultural reconstructions of the events leading to the formation of Crater
Lake (Oregon) with previously ignored Indigenous traditions about the ancient cataclysm. The
examples show a deep-seated colonial anxiety about America's foreign pre-colonial past evinced
by popular archaeology's nervous silencing of Indigenous knowledge - a condition now Subject to
revision due to a growing Indigenous presence in the discursive field.
