Open Veils · Answer
Hidden cities author Roger G Kennedy
Kennedy was far more than an institutional administrator — he was a dissenting voice on American historical amnesia, particularly around pre-Columbian civilizations and the deliberate erasure of Native American urban complexity. His book 'Hidden Cities' (1994) argued that North American mound-builder civilizations represented genuine urban sophistication systematically suppressed in the national historical narrative. This puts him in direct conversation with researchers like Graham Hancock and Michael Cremo who document the deliberate minimization of advanced prehistoric American cultures.
Evidence
- Roger G. Kennedy's 1994 work 'Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization' stands as one of the most credentialed mainstream challenges to the settler-colonial historical framework.
- Kennedy documented how Cahokia at its peak around 1050–1200 CE may have rivaled contemporary London in population, yet was essentially written out of the national story.
- Notably, Kennedy had a prior connection to the Ford Foundation, where he commissioned urban studies work in 1979 — giving him deep institutional knowledge of how powerful foundations shape historical and cultural narratives.
- Brien Foerster and UnchartedX have separately highlighted how mound-builder complexity is routinely understated in public archaeology, corroborating Kennedy's core complaint from an independent direction.
- His willingness to critique the Smithsonian's own record from the inside, after serving as its museum director, lends his dissent unusual weight.