Alice Beck Kehoe
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Overview
Where Are They Now Series
Her finalist year: 1952
Her finalist project: A paper arguing that Native Americans had contact with other cultures from across the Pacific
What led to the project: Alice Beck Kehoe always loved archaeology and anthropology. Her parents subscribed to National Geographic, and when she discovered Alfred Kroeber's lengthy textbook, Anthropology, in a public library, she read it straight through.
Because of that fascination, when the Mount Vernon, N.Y., resident looked for a summer job at age 16, she had her eyes on the anthropology department of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She wrote a letter to the department asking if they needed a typist. They did: She earned $25 a week typing up catalogues of various collections, finishing her assignment before the summer was over.
She used the extra weeks to help the curators. One of them, Gordon Ekholm, had recently put on an exhibit about pre-Columbian transpacific contacts between cultures in the Old and New worlds. Young Alice never worked for him, specifically, but she studied his research and reached similar conclusions—that there must have been contact by some New World populations with people from outside in the days before 1492—in a paper she entered in the 1952 Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Despite the fact that anthropology and archaeology papers were extremely rare among the top contenders, she was named a finalist.
The effect on her career: "My self-esteem and self-confidence were certainly strengthened by having been selected," she says. "On the one hand, I realized that I didn't have the kind of brilliance some people had." She was extremely impressed by the math and physics projects other finalists had done. On the other, "It was exciting to think I was counted, literally, in this company. For a girl in the 1950s, that really helped."
She went to Barnard College at Columbia University to study anthropology. Her first job after college was working at the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, Mont. She developed more than a professional interest in the young museum director, Thomas Kehoe, who hired her. She married him, and the two attended graduate school at Harvard University.
Kehoe found the subject of her dissertation in 1959 after Thomas took a job in Canada as the provincial archaeologist in Saskatchewan. Traditional anthropological theory maintained that the ghost dance religion—widespread among Native Americans in the late 19th century—had died out. Kehoe discovered that the practice was still alive and informing the spirituality of Saskatchewanian residents who were descended from Sioux refugees of the 1862 uprising and subsequent massacre of the tribe in Minnesota.
The fact that reality so clearly contradicted the theory made a big impression on her—and contributed to her lifelong battle against anthropological and archaeological theories based mostly on the prejudices of the day. "American archaeologists tend to be politically naive," she says. They go into archaeology because they aren't interested in economics or politics or things like that. "They want to go out in the country and dig in the ground and handle things." But just as the national myth of Columbus "discovering" the Americas stifled work on other cross-cultural contacts for years, Kehoe maintains that assumptions about the inferiority of non-European people or women have also led to a lack of scholarship. (For instance, the assumption that the people living in pre-Columbian America were "primitive" and therefore not up to much of importance led to a lack of study in their varied histories and cultures until relatively recently.)
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4 Comments
Add CommentA wonderful story.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlice is a courageous anthropologist and one who explores the evidence wherever it takes her.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have spent over 6 months reseraching the possibility of Proto-Japanese landing in Mesoamerica during the Jomon Period. An outstanding butseverely ignored book is that written by anthropologist Dr. Jorge Olvera, claiming lexical, cultural and social similarities between the Mixe-Zoque Indians of Mexico and those of the Proto-Japanese. Thank God for him; Betty Meggers and Alice Beck Kehoe who dared to question the Eurocentric Erikson/Columbus's "discoveries."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was just watching Dr Kehoe on the History Channel and for what it's worth, I want to say something about this Kensington Rune Stone. My mother's family has a large document of her maiden name going back to Lindesfarne until we came here to found Philadelphia with Billy Penn. This document contains listings of Templars from my family. The idea that we had already come to North American, more than the most North Eastern, is old hat. As far as I can remember, which is back in the 70's, these things my grandmother told us. Many times a visit from here was pretty much a history lesson it turns out and after viewing this documenting all of the history of my family with even the change of spellings of the last name throughout the years proved that none of this was made up.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am not going to disclose my mother's maiden name since I have no idea if anyone would be upset at any of what I say. As far as treasure and all that stuff, I've never heard of any of that. However, the basic idea that Templars would have come here is nothing surprising to me. And all that Templar Code stuff with Dan Brown's book was old hat too even though we do have that strain of unreasonable religious zealots which is the reason I wouldn't disclose the family name.
I believe when men meet for government, people should state that there is God and say nothing more about it. Read into that my friends.