For over five decades historical archaeologists conducting research in the United States have produced important scholarship detailing how the material products and precedents of interactions among people from a multitude of cultural backgrounds created a distinctive plural American society. The American Experience in Archaeological Perspective (AEAP) book series was launched by the University Press of Florida in the early 2000s with the aim of focusing attention on the materiality of the United States as it is differentiated from other nation-states by circumstances of migration, race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and other sociohistorical phenomena. A major goal of the series is to reveal how archaeology can interrogate formative aspects of American history and culture—events, institutions, places, practices, and processes—and evaluate their legacies with respect to the country’s present-day social and political circumstances. This essay reflects on the AEAP series and the scholarship produced by its authors over the past two decades. As examples drawn from more than two dozen volumes in the series illustrate, archaeological investigations of the detritus and landscapes associated with core American values and activities—in all their diversity—provide insights into the foundations of the American experience and what it means to be an American. These studies also provide broad comparisons with historical and anthropological inquiries into lifeways, identity, and national character throughout the world. We conclude with a discussion of the directions the series editors plan to take in publishing the next generation of scholarship in American historical archaeology.

五十多年来，历史考古学家在美国进行研究，取得了重要的学术成果，详细介绍了来自多种文化背景的人们之间互动的物质产品和先例如何创造了独特的多元化美国社会。《考古学视角下的美国经验》（AEAP）丛书由佛罗里达大学出版社于 2000 年代初推出，旨在关注美国的物质性，因为美国因移民环境而不同于其他民族国家，种族、阶级、性别、民族、宗教和其他社会历史现象。该系列的一个主要目标是揭示考古学如何质疑美国历史和文化的形成方面——事件、机构、地点、实践、和流程，并评估其对国家当今社会和政治环境的影响。本文回顾了 AEAP 系列及其作者在过去二十年中所取得的学术成就。正如该系列两打多卷中的例子所表明的那样，对与美国核心价值观和活动相关的碎石和景观进行的考古调查（无论其多样性）提供了对美国经验的基础以及作为一个国家意味着什么的见解。美国人。这些研究还与历史和人类学对世界各地生活方式、身份和民族性格的调查进行了广泛的比较。