Abstract
Despite historical and linguistic connections, archaeology in North America and archaeology in Britain are alienated by a curious mixture of provincialism and mutual indifference. This estrangement is part of a larger cultural alienation that was decades in the making. Field methods and practice and academic organization of the discipline differ in ways that variously favor both regions. Yet, in other respects, British and North American archaeology share a cosmopolitan attraction to glamorous foreign places, a fondness that converged in recent years on China. Ironically, this shared worldliness does not extend to each one's serious contemplation of the other.
Notes
Michael Shott has worked for more than twenty-five years on the prehistory of Midwestern North America, on hunter-gatherer archaeology, and on how the archaeological record formed. He teaches at the University of Northern Iowa in Iowa, USA.