ABSTRACT
This study attempts to understand how archaeology participates in the formation of the dominant political ideology of America. We start with the premise that the way in which any group of people charts its past, and what is valued from that past, are social practices, embedded in a larger logic and broader set of actions (Gero in press). The prehistoric past, like other aspects of knowledge, is mediated and constrained by a contemporary social context which provides an ideology for interpretation. At the same time, interpretations of the past play an active function, a political function, in legitimating the present context, naturalizing the past so that it appears to lead logically to present social practices and values (Conkey & Spector 1984, Leone 1984). In this chapter, we inspect how archaeology is presented in the pages of National Geographic Magazine and how, in this particular context, archaeology is touted, exploited, and capitalized upon to reinforce the dominant ideology that produced it. Thus, we hope to demonstrate the closeness of fit between archaeology as a particular means of organizing and presenting the past and the North American industrialized, capitalist state whose past it so effectively tells.
