Native American Archaeology in the Parks: A Guide to Heritage Sites in Our National Parks and Monuments

by Kenneth L. Feder

Historian Wallace Stegner characterized America’s National Park system as “the best idea we ever had.” One can quibble with that, but, indeed, it was a pretty good idea! This book specifically is a guide and a celebration of 30 of those national parks, national historical parks, and national monuments that, each in its own way, reveals the histories and cultures of America’s first inhabitants, the Native Americans.



Its pages will take you

great mounds in Ohio where the dead were laid to rest in sumptuous splendor 2,000 years agoa place in Iowa where 1,000 years ago, Native Americans sculpted earth into the forms of giant bears and birdsa quarry in Minnesota where Native People have, for hundreds of years, extracted blood-red stone for their ceremonial pipesthe remains of a village in North Dakota visited by Lewis and Clark in the early 1800s and the home of their guide Sacageweatruly breathtaking, more than 700-year-old cliff dwellings in Arizona and Colorado, that will astonish you in their ethereal beauty and architectural ingenuityphantasmagorical images of 7-foot-tall, wide-eyed spirit beings in Utah painted more than 1,000 years agoAnd many more.All of these sites have in common the fact that, at the insistence of Native and non-Native people, men and women, the federal government of the United States set them aside as places to preserve, study, and revere as part of the American story no matter where your ancestors came from, how they got here, or how long ago. Read this book and visit the historically sacred sites enshrined in our national parks, national historical parks, and national monuments, places that reveal the creativity and genius of the Native People of North America.



With 180 color photographs and complete visitor information, this is a wonderful guide to Native American archaeology in our national parks and monuments.

Genres: Travel, Archaeology, History

254 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 9, 2023

Reviews

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very informative and lots of color photos.

[Josh Liller · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another of my spontaneous pickups from the public library New Nonfiction shelf. I thought I might add some sites to my To Visit list.

The book covers 30 National Monuments and National Parks (mostly the former). 23 of the 30 are in a four-state area in the southwest, and only 2 are east of the Mississippi River. While I know federal public lands are disproportionately out west, the sites covered by this book seem disproportionately concentrated. (Doing some searching, Ancient America: Fifty Archaeological Sites to See for Yourself by the same author and publisher seem to have a more geographically even dispersal.) Little Bighorn Battlefield is a surprisingly inclusion. Most of the sites in the book involve pueblos and/or rock art. Mound sites are underrepresented in the book. I'm not sure how many are in NPS, but Natchez Trace and Shiloh NMP (yes, there are pre-contact mounds on the Civil War battlefield) are two that I know of not covered by this book.

Most sites are covered in 5-10 pages. There are good color photos with each chapter. Maps vary and some chapters don't have any.

What I disliked most about this book was the author's tone. He's practically a caricature of a woke academic, and unlike some people that's not a term I throw around lightly. We're not even allowed to refer to a site as "ruins" even if it had been abandoned for centuries because it remains "alive" with "stories and spirits."

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much info!

[Steven Kensinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is good as a guide to sites you may want to potentially visit, but I was hoping for a bit more archaeological analysis of the sites. The author's conversational style is distracting in most places, and he doesn't provide much historical/cultural context for each site. As a travel guide, its ok. As a piece of anthropological writing, severely lacking.