European Journal of Archaeology

Gold-rush

I always enjoy being a tourist in the United States: numerous spectacular sights (and sites) and usually value for money… As I am about to leave for a three week break staying with relatives in Whitehorse in the Yukon, Canada, I am looking forward in particular to visit the Klondike Gold Rush National Park in nearby Skagway, Alaska.

For a European, history in the US feels short (especially so in Alaska where “history” begins only little more than a century ago - the long past before that is part of “anthropology”). But the past presented and experienced in the great visitor centres and museums is no less fascinating and has perhaps a particular kind of intensity which, in my view, in Europe only contemporary archaeologies reach occasionally (e.g. at Nazi and Cold War sites in Berlin!).