Betty Meggers is an iconic and controversial figure in New World archaeology. She is a hero in Brazil where she and her late husband, archaeologist Clifford Evans, taught master seminars in 1964 which almost all Brazilian archaeologists attended. She founded PRONAPA-Projeto Nacional de Prospecção Arqueologica in 1965-1971 (a long-term collaboration between Brazilian and North American scholars to rapidly survey large tracts of Brazilian territory), and basically created the modern field of Amazonian archaeology. She is beloved by the many Latin American archaeologists whom she generously helped during their research visits to the Smithsonian Institution, where she has worked since 1954. She is deservedly admired by her American colleagues for her pioneering field investigations in the jungles of lowland South America. Yet field data has accumulated in prolific quantities to negate her principal theories.
Prehistoric America purports to be the “third expanded edition” of the first edition published in 1972. Nevertheless, it reproduces verbatim that first edition – save for a new 12-page introduction, which defends the author’s previous ideas while airing a new grievance.
Anthropologist and co-director of the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices
Dr Helaine Silverman, who holds a Ph.D from the University of Texas, is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her secondary appointments are in the Department of Landscape Architecture, Program in Art History, Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism, and Campus Honors Program. She also is a member of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies. She is the Co-Director of the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices.
Her primary research interests include heritage theory and management, critical museum studies, tourism, cultural memory, identity, globalisation, nationalism, appropriations of the past, urbanism, architectural and landscape history, spatial theory, cultures of death, Southeast Asia, Central Andean archaeology, and complex societies.
