American antiquities: revisiting the origins of American archaeology

Prologue: historicizing the origins of American archaeology

American antiquities: a grand theme for speculation

Rediscovering the mounds: scientific enquiry and the westward movement

Antiquaries, ideas, and institutions: more testimony from the mounds

A dialectical discourse: constructing the mound builder paradigm

American archaeology: an infant science emerges

Origin, era, and region: an expanding field of archaeological enquiry

Archaeology as anthropology: the coming of the curators and professors.