ABSTRACT
David Hurst Thomas (2000, 4) wrote about the impact of naming geographic features as part of the "discovery" and conquest of the Western Hemisphere—"The names established an agenda under which the rest of the encounter would be played out. . . . The power to name reflected an underlying power to control the land, its indigenous people, and its history." This passage might just as well have been written about the discovery and conquest of the indigenous past by archaeologists, for bibliographies of archaeologists are filled with the discovery, conquest, and naming of archaeological sites that established an agenda that has acted to control what Kehoe has called The Land of Prehistory (Kehoe 1998).
