In my senior year of college in 1973, I audited a lecture course taught by Gordon R. Willey and Jeremy A. Sabloff. It was a terrific course, and I thought at the time what a wonderful book it would make. Not long after, when I was a first-year graduate student, I discovered that these scholars had indeed put their words into print (Willey and Sabloff, A History of American Archaeology, 1974). I remember my excitement in showing the book to an older and wiser graduate student. His response was somewhat deflating, “Yes, it's great, but it kind of takes the fun out of discovery.” I knew exactly what he meant, because from then on the “Speculative Period,” the “Classificatory-Historical Period” (and its three subperiods), and the “Explanatory Period” framed my thoughts as to the structure of American archaeology. It all seemed so simple once the Willey-Sabloff structure existed. There were antiquaries, there were archaeologists, and the various practitioners were easily pigeonholed into categories. The basic theme, as it applied to eastern North America, was initially that there were those who believed in the presumptive lost race of Mound Builders, and then the dynamic switched with the weight of evidence favoring Indians. The Smithsonian Mound Survey tome (Cyrus Thomas, Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1894) was the coup de grâce to the myth of the ancient Mound Builder race. Numerous scholars in the last four decades have revealed that the story is far more convoluted, however, and that is because the characters themselves were so complex. Stephen Williams's Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory (1991) did much to put the fun of discovery back into the equation, but as its focus was largely on hoaxes, a more detailed study of the history of American archaeology was needed.

American Antiquities fits that need. Barnhart is a historian who knows his craft well. He has devoted more than three decades to studying and writing about early archaeologists, especially those of the Ohio and Upper Mississippi valleys, which is the primary arena of this book. Barnhart reminds us that people who wrote about the past in the 1700s and early 1800s, whether they were in armchair or field, were doing archaeology. We may now brand them as antiquaries, religious zealots, or the like, but we must be careful not to judge those writers by present attitudes. Any one time has to be considered on its own terms. A topic that comes up repeatedly is the misunderstanding of the terms or concepts that were used in the past, because what they mean now may be very different. As an example, it is confusion over what the term race meant to Squier and Davis in Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848) that has tainted their monumental work.

What is wonderful about Barnhart's study is that he writes with the fluidity of the best historians. As a historiographer, he has dug deeply into archives to compare, contrast, and understand voluminous sources (letters, unpublished manuscripts, diaries, etc.) and how they project on their times. The story that he tells stretches from the single burial mound excavation of Thomas Jefferson in the Commonwealth of Virginia to the Mound Survey of Cyrus Thomas, which involved hundreds of mound excavations across dozens of states. The usual characters are put forth, such as Caleb Atwater, Ephraim G. Squier, Edwin H. Davis, Henry R. Schoolcraft, Increase A. Lapham, Daniel G. Brinton, Frederic Ward Putnam, Cyrus Thomas, and the like, but new and interesting perspectives are offered on each of these scholars. Moreover, there is a considerable amount of fascinating information offered on lesser-known scholars such as Constantine S. Rafinesque, Montroville W. Dickeson, Stephen D. Peet, Wills De Hass, and many others.

A great value of this book is the endnotes (52 pages). I found myself continually flipping back and forth between text, endnotes, and bibliography (93 pages). The latter, which is divided according to unpublished archival sources, primary sources, and secondary sources, is an incredible tool for anyone interested in the history of U.S. archaeology up to about 1900. It should be noted that the first time American Antiquities was used in a book title (Josiah Priest, American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West, 1833), the book itself was enormously popular. Priest's volume went through three revised editions, with 22,000 copies made within 30 months, and all sold to subscribers! I'm not sure that Barnhart's volume will have as great a success in sales, but to my way of thinking it should. I highly recommend it to scholars of American archaeology and to the public at large. It is a marvelous work.