Alice Beck Kehoe
Encyclopedia
Alice Beck Kehoe is an anthropologist. She attended Barnard College
and Harvard University
, from which she received her PhD in Anthropology. While a student at Barnard, she was influenced by James Ford, Gordon Ekholm, and Junius Bird
; she worked summers at the American Museum of Natural History
Anthropology Department. While at Harvard, she worked with Gordon Willey
and Evon Vogt. Many of her influences have been colleagues such as David H. Kelley
, Jane Kelley, Jennifer Brown, Robert L. Hall, George Carter and his students Stephen C. Jett and Carl Johannesen.
Kehoe taught at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln before teaching at Marquette University
, from which she retired in 2000 as Professor Emeritus. She currently resides in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
. Kehoe has held offices with the American Anthropological Association
(AAA), and was president of the Central States Anthropological Society (CSAS). She has done research in the field and has authored several books on Native America and Native American
history.
(SECC) (of the Native southeastern U.S.) and Mesoamerica
(Mexico
and Central America
). Her principal area of interest is the archaeology and cultures of the northwestern plains of the U.S. While searching for an ethnographic research topic for her dissertation, she happened upon the Saskatchewan Dakota New Tidings Ghost Dance
. Kehoe has worked many years with the Blackfoot
or Niitsitapi Nation, an Algonquian
Native American group of Browning, Montana
, with whom she visits each year to study their history and culture. She has studied Native American spiritual healers ("medicine people") and worked with Piakwutch, "an elderly deeply respected Cree
man who served his Saskatchewan
Cree community..." <2000:60>. She has also worked among Native Americans of Bolivia
at Lake Titicaca
, where she chewed coca
leaves with Native women of the region <2000:70>. Her interest in pre-Columbian transoceanic contacts led to her meeting Richard Nielsen
, who asked her to advise on archeological aspects while testing the Kensington Runestone
of Minnesota
, which Kehoe is satisfied was indeed not a 19th century hoax but rather actual runic writing by members of a Scandinavian voyage to North America in the 14th century.
The Kensington Runestone convinced Kehoe of a different North American history than what we've been taught for decades, and, in her own words, she has "continued to try to push the continental glacier of mainstream American archaeology to melt" (Kehoe, 2007, personal communication). She states:
In her many years of teaching and writing, Kehoe has emphasized the importance of critical thinking in looking at anthropology
, archaeology
, and history
, particularly as it pertains to Native America. She speaks of the "limited and biased archaeological record" (2007:personal communication) of the Americas and of how many archaeologists were molded by preconceptions of ancient Amerindians having been "savage" or "primitive" and incapable of having "real" civilizations in European terms. Kehoe minces few words in her distaste for such tunnel-visioned attitudes, stating, for example, "...the massive mounds of the Midwest, most of them larger than any prehistoric mounds in Europe, could not be accommodated in a scenario of virgin wilderness inhabited by Men-Brutes..." <1998:164> and "The history of American archaeology ... is a remarkable example of post-hoc objectification of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny
. From its inception, American archaeology has been politically charged, legitimating domination of North America by capitalists imbued with British bourgeois culture" <1998:xi>.
Kehoe emphasizes that, from these stale and false notions of ancient Native American history, much has been missed in the archaeological record of the Americas that is only just now coming to light. This history is now being reinterpreted through the new knowledge and understanding of peoples who built towns and even cities (e.g. Cahokia) of pyramidal mounds and other forms of monumental architecture surrounding huge ceremonial plazas. For instance, in examining the most recently discovered archaeological evidence of Cahokia
, Kehoe suggests that this largest known center of Mississippian culture should best be termed a state
. She argues that the Mississippian, often called "mound-building," culture had close trade and communication links with civilizations of Mesoamerica (Mayas, Aztecs, their predecessors and contemporaries) and that this link is readily apparent from the archaeological record. She argues that trans-Gulf contact between the Mississippi Valley and Mesoamerica was quite likely, with communication and trade occurring either on foot, by canoe, or both, leading to clear similarities in the culture, religion, and art of the SECC, Midwest, and Mesoamerica (Kehoe 2005 Wind Jewels and Paddling Gods: The Mississippian Southeast in the Postclassic Mesoamerican World. In Gulf Coast Archaeology, the Southeastern United States and Mexico, ed. Nancy Marie White. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Pp. 260-280).
Barnard College
Barnard College is a private women's liberal arts college and a member of the Seven Sisters. Founded in 1889, Barnard has been affiliated with Columbia University since 1900. The campus stretches along Broadway between 116th and 120th Streets in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough...
and Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, from which she received her PhD in Anthropology. While a student at Barnard, she was influenced by James Ford, Gordon Ekholm, and Junius Bird
Junius Bird
Junius Bouton Bird , born in Rye, New York, was an American archaeologist who was appointed curator of South American Archaeology at American Museum of Natural History in 1931...
; she worked summers at the American Museum of Natural History
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...
Anthropology Department. While at Harvard, she worked with Gordon Willey
Gordon Willey
Gordon Randolph Willey was an American archaeologist famous for his fieldwork in South and Central America as well as the southeastern United States...
and Evon Vogt. Many of her influences have been colleagues such as David H. Kelley
David H. Kelley
David Humiston Kelley was a Canadian American archaeologist and epigrapher, most noted for his work on the phonetic analysis and major contributions toward the decipherment of the writing system used by the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, the Maya script.-Work and interests:From...
, Jane Kelley, Jennifer Brown, Robert L. Hall, George Carter and his students Stephen C. Jett and Carl Johannesen.
Kehoe taught at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln before teaching at Marquette University
Marquette University
Marquette University is a private, coeducational, Jesuit, Roman Catholic university located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Founded by the Society of Jesus in 1881, the school is one of 28 member institutions of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities...
, from which she retired in 2000 as Professor Emeritus. She currently resides in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Milwaukee is the largest city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin, the 28th most populous city in the United States and 39th most populous region in the United States. It is the county seat of Milwaukee County and is located on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. According to 2010 census data, the...
. Kehoe has held offices with the American Anthropological Association
American Anthropological Association
The American Anthropological Association is a professional organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 11,000 members, the Arlington, Virginia based association includes archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, biological anthropologists, linguistic...
(AAA), and was president of the Central States Anthropological Society (CSAS). She has done research in the field and has authored several books on Native America and Native American
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
history.
About
Kehoe has studied many aspects of Native America and is a strong believer in the theoretical link between the Southeastern Ceremonial ComplexSoutheastern Ceremonial Complex
The Southeastern Ceremonial Complex is the name given to the regional stylistic similarity of artifacts, iconography, ceremonies, and mythology of the Mississippian culture that coincided with their adoption of maize agriculture and chiefdom-level complex social organization from...
(SECC) (of the Native southeastern U.S.) and Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a region and culture area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, within which a number of pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and...
(Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
and Central America
Central America
Central America is the central geographic region of the Americas. It is the southernmost, isthmian portion of the North American continent, which connects with South America on the southeast. When considered part of the unified continental model, it is considered a subcontinent...
). Her principal area of interest is the archaeology and cultures of the northwestern plains of the U.S. While searching for an ethnographic research topic for her dissertation, she happened upon the Saskatchewan Dakota New Tidings Ghost Dance
Ghost Dance
The Ghost Dance was a new religious movement which was incorporated into numerous Native American belief systems. The traditional ritual used in the Ghost Dance, the circle dance, has been used by many Native Americans since prehistoric times...
. Kehoe has worked many years with the Blackfoot
Blackfoot
The Blackfoot Confederacy or Niitsítapi is the collective name of three First Nations in Alberta and one Native American tribe in Montana....
or Niitsitapi Nation, an Algonquian
Algonquian peoples
The Algonquian are one of the most populous and widespread North American native language groups, with tribes originally numbering in the hundreds. Today hundreds of thousands of individuals identify with various Algonquian peoples...
Native American group of Browning, Montana
Montana
Montana is a state in the Western United States. The western third of Montana contains numerous mountain ranges. Smaller, "island ranges" are found in the central third of the state, for a total of 77 named ranges of the Rocky Mountains. This geographical fact is reflected in the state's name,...
, with whom she visits each year to study their history and culture. She has studied Native American spiritual healers ("medicine people") and worked with Piakwutch, "an elderly deeply respected Cree
Cree
The Cree are one of the largest groups of First Nations / Native Americans in North America, with 200,000 members living in Canada. In Canada, the major proportion of Cree live north and west of Lake Superior, in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and the Northwest Territories, although...
man who served his Saskatchewan
Saskatchewan
Saskatchewan is a prairie province in Canada, which has an area of . Saskatchewan is bordered on the west by Alberta, on the north by the Northwest Territories, on the east by Manitoba, and on the south by the U.S. states of Montana and North Dakota....
Cree community..." <2000:60>. She has also worked among Native Americans of Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...
at Lake Titicaca
Lake Titicaca
Lake Titicaca is a lake located on the border of Peru and Bolivia. It sits 3,811 m above sea level, making it the highest commercially navigable lake in the world...
, where she chewed coca
Coca
Coca, Erythroxylum coca, is a plant in the family Erythroxylaceae, native to western South America. The plant plays a significant role in many traditional Andean cultures...
leaves with Native women of the region <2000:70>. Her interest in pre-Columbian transoceanic contacts led to her meeting Richard Nielsen
Richard Nielsen
Richard Nielsen of Houston, Texas, an amateur researcher on the linguistics and runology of the Kensington Runestone, grew up in a Danish-speaking home in California, earned a doctorate in materials science from the Technical University of Denmark, and developed an intense interest in the...
, who asked her to advise on archeological aspects while testing the Kensington Runestone
Kensington Runestone
The Kensington Runestone is a 200-pound slab of greywacke covered in runes on its face and side which, if genuine, would suggest that Scandinavian explorers reached the middle of North America in the 14th century. It was found in 1898 in the largely rural township of Solem, Douglas County,...
of Minnesota
Minnesota
Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...
, which Kehoe is satisfied was indeed not a 19th century hoax but rather actual runic writing by members of a Scandinavian voyage to North America in the 14th century.
The Kensington Runestone convinced Kehoe of a different North American history than what we've been taught for decades, and, in her own words, she has "continued to try to push the continental glacier of mainstream American archaeology to melt" (Kehoe, 2007, personal communication). She states:
It has been conventional to treat American history as if it were identical with United States history. Such a myopic view cuts students off from the context in which the United States developed, a larger history that will not go away. America's history begins some fourteen thousand years ago ... Invading Europeans met no wilderness, but landscapes and resources rendered through millennia of human actions" <2002:1>.
In her many years of teaching and writing, Kehoe has emphasized the importance of critical thinking in looking at anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
, archaeology
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
, and history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
, particularly as it pertains to Native America. She speaks of the "limited and biased archaeological record" (2007:personal communication) of the Americas and of how many archaeologists were molded by preconceptions of ancient Amerindians having been "savage" or "primitive" and incapable of having "real" civilizations in European terms. Kehoe minces few words in her distaste for such tunnel-visioned attitudes, stating, for example, "...the massive mounds of the Midwest, most of them larger than any prehistoric mounds in Europe, could not be accommodated in a scenario of virgin wilderness inhabited by Men-Brutes..." <1998:164> and "The history of American archaeology ... is a remarkable example of post-hoc objectification of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny
Manifest Destiny
Manifest Destiny was the 19th century American belief that the United States was destined to expand across the continent. It was used by Democrat-Republicans in the 1840s to justify the war with Mexico; the concept was denounced by Whigs, and fell into disuse after the mid-19th century.Advocates of...
. From its inception, American archaeology has been politically charged, legitimating domination of North America by capitalists imbued with British bourgeois culture" <1998:xi>.
Kehoe emphasizes that, from these stale and false notions of ancient Native American history, much has been missed in the archaeological record of the Americas that is only just now coming to light. This history is now being reinterpreted through the new knowledge and understanding of peoples who built towns and even cities (e.g. Cahokia) of pyramidal mounds and other forms of monumental architecture surrounding huge ceremonial plazas. For instance, in examining the most recently discovered archaeological evidence of Cahokia
Cahokia
Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site is the area of an ancient indigenous city located in the American Bottom floodplain, between East Saint Louis and Collinsville in south-western Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. The site included 120 human-built earthwork mounds...
, Kehoe suggests that this largest known center of Mississippian culture should best be termed a state
State (polity)
A state is an organized political community, living under a government. States may be sovereign and may enjoy a monopoly on the legal initiation of force and are not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state. Many states are federated states which participate in a federal union...
. She argues that the Mississippian, often called "mound-building," culture had close trade and communication links with civilizations of Mesoamerica (Mayas, Aztecs, their predecessors and contemporaries) and that this link is readily apparent from the archaeological record. She argues that trans-Gulf contact between the Mississippi Valley and Mesoamerica was quite likely, with communication and trade occurring either on foot, by canoe, or both, leading to clear similarities in the culture, religion, and art of the SECC, Midwest, and Mesoamerica (Kehoe 2005 Wind Jewels and Paddling Gods: The Mississippian Southeast in the Postclassic Mesoamerican World. In Gulf Coast Archaeology, the Southeastern United States and Mexico, ed. Nancy Marie White. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Pp. 260-280).
External links
- Biographical sketch of Alice Beck Kehoe at the Scientific American website (December 16, 2008)