1. Kentucky mummy : encountering the American past -- 2. Antiquarian dreams : collections and competition in the early republic -- 3. "Too poetical a theory": antiquarian ambition, East and West -- 4. Antiquarian entrepreneurs : mounds and meaning in the Jacksonian era -- 5. "These places know him no more" : surveys, panoramas, and the landscape of ancient America -- 6. Idol pursuits : artifacts and authority after the Civil War -- 7. "Mementos of the prehistoric races" : antiquarians and archaeologists in the centennial decade -- 8. "Lost by being found" : the public and the material past in the nineteenth-century United States
Summary
"Relic Hunters is a study of the complex relationship between the people of 19th century America with the material antiquities of North America's indigenous past. As scholars struggled to explain their existence, farmers in Ohio were plowing up arrowheads, building their houses atop burial mounds, and developing their own ideas about antiquity. They experienced the new country as a "place with history" reflected in material traces that became important touch points for scientific knowledge, but for American cultural identity as well."--Jacket
