Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology 0199696691, 9780199696697

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University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Title Pages (p.i) Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology (p.ii) (p.iii) Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology

(p.iv) Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2014

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Title Pages The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2014 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014931100 ISBN 978–0–19–969669–7 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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List of Tables and Figures

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

(p.viii) List of Tables and Figures Table 6.1. Population estimates of the Pueblos 1539–1638, organized by Entrada 165 Table 8.1. Manufacturer, place of origin, and dates of production of selected artifacts recovered from Fort Lane 202 Figure 1.1. Aboriginal shearing team, Corunna Downs, 1906. Courtesy State Library of Western Australia, Battye Library 001304D. 39 Figure 1.2. Distributing rations to Aboriginal people, Yarrie Station, 1911. Courtesy State Library of Western Australia, Battye Library 013953PD. 40 Figure 1.3. Belt buckles, trouser buttons, and a boot plate recovered from excavations and surface collections at Old Lamboo Station. 46 Figure 1.4. (a) Map showing hypothetical model of precontact Aboriginal patterns of movement and exchange along the Macleay River based on archaeological site patterning (after Godwin 1999). (b) Map showing the ways in which early pastoral tracks and settlements mapped on to the same pattern of movement along the river. 48 Figure 2.1. Location of study area in the northeastern United States with Connecticut highlighted in dark shade and the reservation location noted therein. Map produced by the author. 65

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List of Tables and Figures Figure 2.2. Photograph of remnants of an early to middle nineteenth-century house on the Eastern Pequot reservation, excavated in 2009. Photograph by the author. 67 Figure 2.3. Buckle, buttons, and beads recovered from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century houses on the Eastern Pequot reservation, excavated in 2004 and 2005. Photograph by the author. 68 Figure 3.1. Map of the British Columbia coast, showing places discussed in the text. Map drawn by Jenny Johnston. 83 Figure 3.2. Photograph of Metlakatla ‘row houses’ c.1880s. Image C-08,105, courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives. Photographer unknown. 84 Figure 3.3. Photograph of grave house, showing associated memorial. Image I-52,703, courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives. Photograph by John William Clark. 88 Figure 3.4. Billy Sepass’ map of the lower Chilliwack River c. 1918. Source: Oliver (2010). Adapted from Wells (1987: 79), drawn by Ana Jorge. 92 (p.ix) Figure 5.1. Map of the Mandlakazi area 129 Figure 5.2. Example of a munti (Macupulane). Photograph by the author. 132 Figure 5.3. Mapenguele: group of people accompanying visit to the khokholo. Photograph by the author. 136 Figure 5.4. Khokholo of Xirrime. Photograph by the author. 138 Figure 5.5. Collapsed house structure. Photograph by the author. 140 Figure 5.6. Xirrime: two palisade poles. Photograph by the author. 141 Figure 6.1. Colonial New Mexico and the borderlands of New Spain. 152 Figure 6.2. Ethnic groups of Northern Mexico with pan-Indian revolts. 157 Figure 6.3. Historic pueblos with inset: Southern Tiwa pueblos mentioned in the Coronado Entrada. 159 Figure 6.4. Pueblo population estimates: 1539–1638. 167 Figure 7.1. Location of Rito Colorado Valley in New Mexico. 174 Figure 7.2. Rito Colorado Valley overview. 176 Figure 7.3. Composite of GLO map features, USGS map features, aerial interpretation, GTS site maps, and hydrological model development elements. 182 Figure 8.1. The stone obelisk erected in 1829 by the Daughters of the American Revolution to commemorate the 1st Dragoon’s

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List of Tables and Figures tenure at Fort Lane. Photograph courtesy of the Southern Oregon Historical Society, Negative # 5797. 192 Figure 8.2. Excavations underway at the officer’s kitchen at Fort Lane. Photograph courtesy of the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology. 193 Figure 8.3. Commander of Fort Lane, Captain Andrew Jackson Smith, drew this plan of the fort in July of 1855. Plan courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration. 196 Figure 8.4. An 1854 quarter dollar coin recovered from Fort Lane. Photograph courtesy of the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology. 205 Figure 9.1. Location of Fort Moore and nearby Native American towns in the Savannah drainage. 217 Figure 9.2. Eastern portion of Fort Moore revealed by 1971 excavations. 222 Figure 9.3. Storehouse basement floor at Fort Moore. 225 Figure 9.4. Native American artifacts from southeast corner of basement: (a) chunkey stone; and (b) portion of colonoware bowl. 226 Figure 10.1. Location map. Drawn by Kara Rasmanis, Monash University. 235 Figure 10.2. Schoolhouse, Ebenezer, after 1874. Private collection. 236 Figure 10.3. ‘Chamberlain’s Cough Remedy’ bottle. Monash University. 239 Figure 10.4. Stone tool from mission settlement area. Monash University. 242 (p.x) Figure 11.1. Colonial stone button mould, Lincoln, MA. PM 24-7-10/94279, courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. 252 Figure 11.2. Reverse side of colonial stone button mould. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. 252 Figure 11.3. Portrait of Edward Winslow, unknown artist, 1651. Courtesy of Pilgrim Hall Museum. 260 Figure 13.1. Map of plantation-era Ireland. Elizabeth Mulqueeny, Queen’s University Belfast. 295 Figure 13.2. Detail of wickerwork, barrel vault of Ballycowan Castle, Co. Offaly. Photograph by the author. 301 Figure 13.3. Srah Castle, Ballydrohid, Co. Offaly, built after the Gaelic fashion by John Briscoe in 1588. Photograph by the author. 302

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List of Tables and Figures Figure 13.4. Excavation plan, Gortin, Co. Antrim subrectangular house. Courtesy of Professor James Mallory. 305 Figure 14.1. Map of North River showing the location of the site. Reproduced with the permission of the Canadian Archaeological Association. 316 Figure 14.2. The process of negotiation. 318 Figure 14.3. An 1893 picture of a Métis family from a nearby island. Reproduced with the permission of The Rooms Provincial Archives Division. VA 152–149, Pardy, wife, and family, Huntington Island, 1893/Eliot Curwen, Eliot Curwen fonds. 320 Figure 14.4. An 1893 picture of the inside of a sod house in Labrador. Reproduced with the permission of The Rooms Provincial Archives Division. VA 152–104, Interior of Goss’ tilt, Inner Sandy Islands, July 893/Eliot Curwen, Eliot Curwen fonds. 321 Figure 14.5. Site plan of FkBg-24. Reproduced with the permission of the Canadian Archaeological Association. 322 Figure 16.1. Map of the Eastern Caribbean. 350 Figure 16.2. (a) Cayo; and (b) Coco neg-type earthenware recovered from an early settlement at Sebastapol estate during the Northwestern University 2010 Archaeological Survey of Colonial Dominica. 353 Figure 16.3. Faience, Saint Cloud Polychrome (1675–1766); an example of Vallauris-type pottery (1500–1900); an example of local coarse earthenware (Coco neg, 1750–2000). 360

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List of Contributors

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

(p.xi) List of Contributors Matthew A. Beaudoin, is a sessional instructor at the University of Western Ontario and a Project Archaeologist at Timmins Martelle Heritage Consultants Inc. Beaudoin’s MA research at Memorial University (2008) was focused on the excavation and interpretation of a nineteenth-century Labrador Métis site as part of a larger project entitled Understanding the Past to Build the Future. He recently completed his PhD at Western (2013) with a project that explored the essentialist divide between the archaeology of the colonized and the archaeology of the colonizer and the effects this has on archaeological interpretation. Charles R. Cobb, is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of South Carolina. He specializes in the archaeology of the southeastern United States with a particular emphasis on Native American societies c.1000–1800 CE. He is currently engaged in a longterm project that examines Native American and European interactions along the frontier of the Carolina colony. Amy Cohen, teaches anthropology at Okanagan College in British Columbia. She is interested in how archaeology can be used to explore social inequality and resistance in the past. She is currently working on a long-term project examining the relationship between immigration and labour

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List of Contributors laws and the exploitation of temporary migrant workers in Canada. M. Dores Cruz (PhD, Binghamton University-SUNY, University of Porto, University of Coimbra, Portugal), is at the University of Denver. Her research interests include African archaeology, historical anthropology, ethnoarchaeology, comparative colonialisms and diasporas, Ghana, Mozambique, and Portugal. Her current projects focus on an African-American homestead community in Colorado, landscape and memory construction in Mozambique, and colonial landscapes in Portugal. James A. Delle, is a Professor of Anthropology and Chair of Anthropology and Sociology at Kutztown University, Pennsylvania. His research interests include historical archaeology, the archaeology of slavery, and the archaeology of working-class life. His research is primarily based in the Caribbean and the United States. His books include The Colonial Caribbean: Landscapes of Power in Jamaica’s Plantation System (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains (Plenum, 1998). (p.xii) Neal Ferris, holds the Lawson Chair of Canadian Archaeology at the University of Western Ontario, and is the Director of Sustainable Archaeology, a physical and digital research facility and repository. His research explores the archaeology of the last millennium in eastern North America, as well as the issues of contested heritage and other dimensions of archaeology—applied and academic—as contemporary practice and praxis. His books include The Archaeology of Native-lived Colonialism: Challenging History in the Great Lakes (University of Arizona Press, 2009—the inaugural volume of the Archaeology of Colonialism in Native North America Series), and he was co-editor of The Archaeology of Southern Ontario to A.D. 1650 (1990, LCOAS, with Chris J. Ellis).

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List of Contributors Chris Gosden, is Professor of European Archaeology, School of Archaeology, University of Oxford. He has worked in many parts of the world and currently is part of the Cultured Rainforest Project, Borneo, and is running a large European Research Council funded project, ‘English Landscapes and Identities’, looking at the history of the English landscape from the Bronze Age to the early medieval period. His recent books include Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884–1945 (Oxford University Press, 2007) and Technologies of Enchantment: Celtic Art in Britain 400BC–AD100 (Oxford University Press, 2012). He is a fellow of the British Academy and a Trustee of the Art Fund. Rodney Harrison, is a Reader in Archaeology, Heritage, and Museum Studies at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. His research focuses on the materiality of recent pasts and their entanglement in emergent presents and futures. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, and his recent books include Heritage: Critical Approaches (Routledge, 2013) and After Modernity: Archaeological Approaches to the Contemporary Past (Oxford University Press, 2010, with John Schofield). Mark W. Hauser, is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. His research explores the ways in which people adapt to landscapes of inequality and contribute to those landscapes in material ways. Using ethnohistorical, archaeological, and archaeometric approaches, his work examines the material record of slavery and the social and intellectual contributions of Africans in the New World. His books include An Archaeology of Black Markets: Local Ceramics and Economies in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica (University Press of Florida, 2013). Audrey Horning, is Professor of Archaeology and Head of the School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research focuses upon comparative colonialism in the early modern Atlantic world, and her most recent book, Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic 1550–1650 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) explores connections between English expansion in both lands, drawing from (p.xiii) archaeological and historical evidence to explore the nature and legacy of cultural interactions. In Northern Ireland, her archaeological projects are explicitly framed towards public

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List of Contributors engagement as a means of encouraging dialogue over contested histories as part of the peace process. Kurt A. Jordan, is associate professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at Cornell University. His research interests include the archaeology of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) communities; political economy; colonialism, cultural entanglement, and indigenous autonomy; and the production and circulation of marine shell, red pipestone, and red slate artifacts in the Northeast. He has conducted archaeological fieldwork in collaboration with members of the Seneca Nation of Indians since 1999. His books include The Seneca Restoration, 1715–1754: An Iroquois Local Political Economy (University Press of Florida, 2008). Paul J. Lane, is Professor of Global Archaeology at Uppsala University, Sweden, and an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand. He specializes in the archaeology of the last c.5000 years of sub-Saharan Africa, with particular emphasis on the transitions to food production in eastern Africa, historical archaeology of southern and eastern Africa, and the contributions of African ethnoarchaeology, and the use of analogy in archaeological interpretation. He is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology (Oxford University Press, 2013) with Peter Mitchell, and has research interests in indigenous archaeology, and the intersections of space, time, and memory in the past. Stephan Lenik, has taught in the Department of Anthropology at St Mary’s College of Maryland and the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of the West Indies, Mona. In 2010, he completed a PhD in Anthropology at Syracuse University, with a dissertation entitled ‘Frontier Landscapes, Missions, and Power: A French Jesuit Plantation and Church at Grand Bay, Dominica (1747–1763)’. His research focuses on plantations and missions in Caribbean frontiers and colonies, and he has published in Ethnohistory, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Journal of Social Archaeology, and the Proceedings of the International Association of Caribbean Archaeology.

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List of Contributors Diana DiPaolo Loren (BFA, Tyler School of Art/Temple University; PhD, SUNY Binghamton), is Director of Academic Partnerships and Museum Curator at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. She is a North American archaeologist specializing in the colonial period of the American Southeast and Northeast. Her research interests include colonialism, identity, social theories of the body, and artifacts of clothing and adornment. She is the author of In Contact: Bodies and Spaces in the Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Eastern Woodlands (AltaMira Press, (p.xiv) 2007) and The Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment in Colonial America (University Press of Florida, 2010). Jane Lydon, is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and the inaugural Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History at the University of Western Australia. Her books include Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Duke University Press, 2005) and Fantastic Dreaming: The Archaeology of an Aboriginal Mission (AltaMira Press, 2009), which won the Australian Archaeological Association’s John Mulvaney Book Award in 2010. Her most recent book The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the Emergence of Indigenous Rights (NewSouth, 2012) won the history category of the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards. Rob Mann, is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at St Cloud State University. He is an anthropological archaeologist with interests in historical archaeology, historical anthropology, public archaeology/CRM, Native America archaeology, and the North American fur trade. His current research centres on comparative colonialism and the process of ethnogenesis, and includes the French colonization of North America and the resulting creation of ‘fur trade societies’ in the Great Lakes region and ‘creole societies’ in the Lower Mississippi Valley.

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List of Contributors Andrew Martindale, is an Associate Professor in The Department of Anthropology at The University of British Columbia. Dr Martindale’s research explores the histories of Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America, specifically that of Tsimshian and Musqueam communities. Martindale’s work is an explicit evaluation of the links between the science of material history and the literature of Indigenous oral records. As the Principal of a series of SSHRC-NSF-funded projects, Martindale and his colleagues have pioneered new methods for sampling the archaeological record and rectifying the radiocarbon, subsistence economic, and architectural sequences of Tsimshian Holocene history. Jeff Oliver, is Senior Lecturer of Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He was awarded an undergraduate degree in archaeology and history at Simon Fraser University, and undertook graduate research in landscape archaeology at the University of Sheffield (PhD 2006). His principal research interests focus on the later historical archaeologies of western Canada and Britain. His books include Landscapes and Social Transformations on the Northwest Coast: Colonial Encounters in the Fraser Valley (University of Arizona Press, 2010). Stephanie Sapp, received her MA degree from the University of South Carolina. Her interests lie in colonial archaeology, military history, historic preservation, and museum studies. She currently serves as the Registrar for the US Army Basic Combat Training Museum at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. (p.xv) Peter R. Schmidt, is Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Florida and a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. He has held academic posts at Brown University, Makerere University (Uganda), University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), University of Asmara (Eritrea), Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology at Kelaniya University (Sri Lanka), and the University of California at Berkeley. He has written widely on heritage studies, historical archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, human rights, and postcolonial studies. The author or editor of nine books, his most recent book is The Death of Prehistory (Oxford University Press, 2013).

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List of Contributors Stephen W. Silliman (PhD, University of California, Berkeley), is Professor of Anthropology and Graduate Program Director of the Historical Archaeology MA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he has taught since 2001. His research interests include the archaeology of the East and West Coasts of North America, historical archaeology, indigenous and collaborative archaeologies, studies of colonialism, and heritage studies. Many of these research interests have manifested in his ongoing community-based archaeology programme in southeastern Connecticut. His books include Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge (University of Arizona Press, 2008), Historical Archaeology (co-edited with Martin Hall, Blackwell Publishing, 2006), and Lost Laborers in Colonial California (University of Arizona Press, 2004). Ann B. Stahl, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Her long-term research focuses on how daily life in rural Banda, Ghana has been reshaped through the area’s involvement in inter-regional and inter-continental networks over the past thousand years. Her research draws on broader theoretical and methodological interests in political economy, materiality, analogy, and the production of history in the present. Her books include Making History in Banda: Anthropological Visions of Africa’s Past (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and African Archaeology: A Critical Introduction (Blackwell, 2005), which was awarded the inaugural Society for African Archaeology book prize; and she is the series editor for Springerbriefs in Archaeology: Contributions from Africa. Kojun ‘Jun’ Ueno Sunseri, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the relationships between colonization and landscapes, foodways, and identities. His work uses multiple, complementary lines of evidence of varied types and spatial scales, including analysis of archaeological faunal and ceramic assemblages related to domestic foodways, as well as analysis of remote sensing, survey, and excavation data to recognize patterning of past tactical and engineered landscapes. He currently works in collaboration with descendant communities in New Mexico, California, and South Africa.

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List of Contributors (p.xvi) Mark Tveskov, is Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the South Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology (SOULA). His research interests include colonialism, identity, cultural ecology, and maritime cultures. Most recently, he has been researching fortifications and battlefield archaeological sites associated with the Rogue River wars of southern Oregon. Peter van Dommelen, is the Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. He previously taught at the University of Glasgow (1997–2012). His research interests include colonialism and rural organization in the west Mediterranean and he conducts long-term fieldwork on the island of Sardinia. His recent publications have appeared in the Annual Review of Anthropology (2012) and include Rural Landscapes of the Punic World (Equinox, 2008, with Carlos Gómez Bellard). He also serves as co-editor of the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology. Michael V. Wilcox, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. Professor Wilcox’s main research interests include Native American ethnohistory in the American Southwest, the colonial history of Pueblo peoples in New Mexico, the ethnography and archaeology of San Francisco Bay Area Native peoples, Hawaiian archaeology, Indigenous archaeology, ethnic identity and conflict, DNA, race and cultural identity in archaeology and popular culture, and the political and historical relationships between Native Americans, anthropologists, and archaeologists. His recent publications include The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact (University of California Press, 2009).

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Introduction

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Introduction Rethinking Colonial Pasts through the Archaeologies of the Colonized Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison Matthew A. Beaudoin

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords This book explores the archaeology of daily lived experiences of indigenous and other displaced peoples affected by Europe's colonial expansion over the last 600 years. More specifically, it examines the shared quotidian experiences of both the colonised and the coloniser within the pervasiveness of colonial contexts. It provides a synthetic overview of the common theoretical trends emerging from current innovative and revisionist research that focuses on the archaeology of the colonised arising from the European colonialism of the last halfmillennium. In addition to past and emerging issues in the conceptual analysis of the archaeology of European interaction with local indigenous peoples, this book investigates the materiality of self and identity as well as the social processes of identity reinforcement and revision. Keywords:   archaeology, displaced peoples, Europe, colonised, coloniser, colonialism, indigenous peoples, self, identity

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Introduction Over the more than a century and a half of Western historical research arising from the social sciences, scholars have often grappled with or unreflexively operationalized their own contemporary—and transitory— social concepts and understandings of how the world works onto their interpretive reconstructions of human history. It is not difficult, for example, to find various iterations of group and individual identity that arise from Western Enlightenment, post-industrial, and global capitalist intellectual sensibilities populating the deeper past within historical interpretive regimes (e.g. Croucher 2010). Within normative archaeological sensibilities, where material objects tend to be directly translated as proxies for human or functional behaviour and group identity, these essentialized tropes translate suites of material assemblages into definitive, socio-cultural qualities that rationalize narratives of the material past by reflecting back various contemporary national, colonial, class, gender, and ethnic/racial constructs (Jones 1997; Kane 2003; Liebmann 2008; Mullins 2010; Trigger 1984, 2006; Wilcox 2009). People, within this imagining, generally are denied the ability to be something more, less, or other than the categories imposed by cultural historical narratives, or motivated beyond essentialized constraints to assumed human behaviour (Russell 2004). We would argue that this is broadly the work that the ‘culture’ concept does in archaeology, in the sense in which it becomes what Michel Foucault would term a ‘transactional reality’ that has particular governmental implications for identifying and differentiating social groups and acting on populations in different ways (see Bennett 2013, 2014; Bennett et al. 2014). (p.2) It could be argued that much of day-to-day archaeology continues to operate across the globe as a material inventory of unreflexive cultural historical narrative description arising from such normative assumptions. Certainly this kind of conception dominates the overwhelmingly most common form of archaeological practice in the world today; that is, commercial archaeological resource management (Messenger and Smith 2010; Rockman and Flatman 2011; Sebastian and Lipe 2010). However, archaeology has also done much over the past century to expand its conceptual and methodological framing of the past in order to explore, draw out, and develop comparative meanings across time and space from the material record of: ancient social processes, structures, economies, and cultural systems; ecological determinism and human adaptation; ideological beliefs, group, and personal agency; material tradition, innovation, and agency; gendered, aged, ethnic, relational, and hybrid standpoints; and a host of other conceptual themes and dimensions of the lived life of past people and societies that demonstrate the potential, promise, and Page 2 of 47

Introduction relevance of archaeology beyond simple material description and inventory (e.g. Bentley et al. 2009; Bintliff and Pearce 2011; Cochrane and Gardner 2011; Funari et al. 2005; Hodder 2012b; Johnson 2010; Preucel and Hodder 1996; Preucel and Mrozowski 2010; Wylie 2002). This intellectual expansion has also meant that there has been a continual tension across the spectrum of philosophical and ideological positionings about what archaeology is or should be—anthropology or history; antiquities inventory, science-based testing, or humanist storytelling; and either a process for revising and generating an inclusive past or reinforcing colonial narratives and the marginalization of others. Indeed, even a basic consensus over how archaeology can and cannot interpret human behaviour and social meaning from the material past has been difficult to achieve, and the spectrum of what constitutes archaeological method, practice, interpretive focus, and contemporary relevance sorely stretches any definitional inclusiveness under the one term to encompass the full collectivity of practitioners ‘doing’ archaeology. Depending on where in the world archaeologists worked, an angst and set of theoretical wars emerged through the second half of the twentieth century over what is archaeology and how it makes meaning from the material past (Trigger 2006). These differences ignited and consumed the careers of many archaeologists, but the debate has waned of late, not due to the emergence of a single, unified vision for archaeology, but rather because it has collapsed under the weight of a broad splintering and diversity of intellectual framings as to what archaeology is supposed to be and how it makes meaning from the material past—a thousand ‘isms’, as Schiffer (1996) has suggested. As such, archaeologists of different intellectual stripes or orientations hardly seem to speak the same language, operate from a common glossary or terminology, or envision a similar reason for why they do what they do, let alone conduct and present the same form of interpretive research across this splintered spectrum. (p.3) Presently, archaeology at the early part of the twenty-first century can appear to be a cacophony of conceptual frames of practice, on the one hand, and a lack of discourse or even deeper understanding across those fractures, on the other. This plethora of approaches, imaginings, and attitudes towards archaeological practice can also allow archaeologists to be as engaged or not as they individually choose with the issues of contemporary practice and value in broader society. But this tends not to be an option for archaeologists who work in public or community contexts, given that these archaeologists are legislatively or collaboratively engaged in managing and exploring the record impacted by broader contested heritage, economic, and social values (e.g. Harrison 2013a; Okamura and Matsuda 2012; Phillips and Allen Page 3 of 47

Introduction 2010; Skeates 2000; Skeates et al. 2012; Smith 2004; Smith et al. 2010). And, critically for this volume, ignoring the values and conceptions of archaeology beyond archaeological practice is also increasingly difficult to do for archaeologists when they find themselves working on the more recent past. This is because much of their research is about interpreting and engaging with the global colonialism of the past half-millennium, and practicing archaeology within societies where the ramifications of that legacy, and ongoing self-identification with dominant and marginalized heritages, continues to play out. Operating within this recent past, where endpoints to historical colonial narratives are still playing out, poses distinct conceptual and methodological challenges for interpreting the archaeological record from this past that is readily known otherwise. Indeed, translating materially based social constructs such as ‘people’, along with the archaeological narratives we develop about these people, must bridge the temporal divide between a past solely represented by material remains, and the more recent past that allows the archaeologist and others to also imagine people from the written observations and accounts of others. What can be readily acknowledged, though often difficult to negotiate, is that the notions of ‘people’, ‘group’, ‘personhood’, ‘culture’, and ‘identity’ that arise from these different historical datasets are entirely distinct conceptual entities that only poorly translate onto common ground. For example, over the long term, identity—as a process of materiality reflected in the long-term archaeological record—appears to be continually re-imagined and reconstructed across generations. This material framing of identity implies a degree of fluidity to the concept that does not readily align with the seemingly permanent and fixed notion of group and individual identity found within the short-term temporal contexts of events and individual lives documented in historical documents (e.g. Clark and Wilkie 2007; Fowler 2004; Meskell 2001; Stahl 2010; Wells 2010; White and Beaudry 2009). This is especially the case for understanding identities arising from colonial contexts (e.g. Crowell 2011; Given 2004; Hutson 2010; Nassaney and Brandão 2009; Voss 2008, 2012). Here identity, as a conceptual mélange or ‘mash-up’ taken from written accounts, oral history, and the archaeological material (p.4) record, emerges as a fluid categorization and range of entities that, for various moments through time, are variously used to confirm difference on either side of the colonizer/colonized divide. These categorizations, birthed through the turbulence of initial contact and subsequent emergent colonialism over centuries, ultimately have come to frame contemporary interpretive engagements of identity as being both a heritage of that Page 4 of 47

Introduction colonial past, and a heritage arising from before that time. For archaeologists, translating ancient material identities into historically recorded identities has often worked in reverse, such as through the Direct Historical Approach, in order to illuminate those more ancient, material peoples through a kind of historical shorthand (see Rubertone 2012 for a discussion). That process has been especially problematic for understanding the experiences of local peoples through the centuries of global European colonialism, and has often been caught up in the contemporary process of translating those archaeologically defined identities into a heritage of relevance for contemporary descendant communities. Just how problematic those identity constructions are, and how archaeologists have intertwined, in their own heads, ancient, colonial, and contemporary identities from that colonial prism, is consequential to the implications and broader relevance the archaeology of the colonized has beyond archaeology (e.g Lightfoot 2012; Nassaney 2012; Stahl 2012). The mash-up of identity constructions arising from the archaeology of regionally indigenous peoples at the time of initial, documented interaction with globe-expanding Europeans conventionally has tended to consist of the normative superimposition of historic labels onto suites of material culture traits. As a result, concepts like group identities, recorded happenstance at a fixed point of encounter during the first few decades of European interaction, become rigid categorizations of race, language, and ‘Other’, both retroactively for the deep archaeological past of a region, and through subsequent centuries of colonial impact. As such, descendants can only ever be defined, or authenticated, as descendant from that early colonizer/colonized context (Liebmann 2012a; see also Paynter 2000; Russell 2005; Williamson 2004). Archaeologists thus can talk about the millennia of archaeological history for a region as directly connected to a group known from early European contact, and those peoples’ descendants as ever more descendant of that temporally and geographically defined essentialism. Conceptually, ‘identity’ is entangled by a range of definitional senses of self and collectivities, a complexity of belonging and means of understanding others encompassing a multiplicity of personal, sexual, familial, gendered, social, residential, political, spatial, economic, labour, and belief conceptions and categories that are at once more complex and contested than any single dimension can provide for, and yet generally self-evident to those individuals who situate themselves within that web of identities. The challenge for archaeology is to comprehend and explore meaningful dimensions of this concept from the (p.5) ancient material record. The added challenge for Page 5 of 47

Introduction archaeologists materially exploring the rise of global colonial patterns is that these categorizations of identity we define from the archaeological past constrain and are constrained by emergent contemporary identities, along with the heritage defined from those identities—contested, denied, or authorized by our archaeological sensibilities (e.g. de la Cadena and Starn 2007; Gnecco 2011; Habu and Fawcett 2008; Harrison 2013b; Leibmann and Murphy 2011; Lilley 2006; Lydon 2006; McNiven and Russell 2005; Merlan 2009; Schmidt and Patterson 1995; Sillar 2005; Smith 2006; Welch and Ferguson 2007; Zimmerman 2007). Intellectually, socially, and politically the archaeology of the recent past and the consequences of global colonialism are never solely about presenting archaeological narratives of the material past (e.g. Leone 2009).

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Introduction Archaeology of the Colonized It is against this intellectual and contextual background that the archaeology of the colonized—and the constantly revising iterations of interpretive frameworks arising from that research—has emerged. The archaeology of the colonized tends to operate as a distinct focus within a wider archaeology of colonialism that encompasses ancient as well as more recent expansionism, imperialism, and the consequences of those processes on local indigenous communities, and which explores all forms of colonialism within a comparative frame (e.g. Cusick 1998b; Dietler 2010; Given 2004; Gosden 2004; Lyons and Papadopoulos 2002; Paterson 2011; Stein 2005; van Dommelen 2011). The archaeology of the colonized, more specifically, has arisen, especially in the Americas and Australia, from the gap in conceptual frames of reference between the archaeologies of the ancient, pre-contact past and heritage of local indigenous peoples, and the post-contact or historical archaeologies of the global European experience of the past few centuries (e.g. Byrne 1996; Lightfoot 1995; see also Murray 2004b; Oland et al. 2012; Rogers and Wilson 1993; Scheiber and Mitchell 2010; Torrence and Clarke 2000). The distinction made here of a broader archaeology of the European experience beyond Europe itself is crucial. The archaeology of the global European experience has tended to stand as an intellectually and methodologically distinct form of archaeological practice as it developed through the second half of the twentieth century. This exploration of the archaeology of the last half-millennium, generally labelled ‘historical archaeology’, has been defined most famously by James Deetz (1996 [1977]:5) as ‘the archaeology of the spread of European culture through the world since the fifteenth century and its impact on indigenous peoples’. The archaeology of this period has also been interpretively characterized as methodologically and conceptually engaged in the (p.6) challenges and opportunities of intersecting written with material pasts (e.g. Andrén 1998; Beaudry 1988; Little 1992; Moreland 2001). Another, dominant theme in theoretically defining historical archaeology has pivoted around the notion that this archaeological endeavour is about exploring and researching the material rise of the global, modern world (e.g. Beaudry and Symonds 2011; Falk 1991; Hall 2000; Hall and Silliman 2006; Orser 1996), of understanding ourselves in that historical frame (e.g. Leone 2005; Leone 2010), or more specifically focused on the connected, material study of the history of global capitalism and consumerism (e.g. Johnson 1996; Leone and Potter 1999; Matthews 2010; Mullins 2011). Others have sought for a less totalizing framework for ‘Historical Archaeology’, one that doesn’t channel interpretations solely through the prism of Page 7 of 47

Introduction global capitalism (e.g. Funari et al. 1999; Horning 2006, 2011; Lucas 2006; Tarlow 1999, 2007), or at least seeks a multi-scalar framing for interpretive focus and context (e.g. Orser 2009, 2012). More recently, iterations of an historical archaeology have further pushed the conceptual focus of this field, by exploring the ‘archaeology of the contemporary past’, which examines the ‘late’ or ‘super’-modern era of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (e.g. Buchli and Lucas 2001; Dawdy 2008a; González-Ruibal 2008; Graves-Brown et al. 2013; Harrison 2011; Harrison and Schofield 2010; Myers and Moshenka 2011; Schofield and Cocroft 2007; Zimmerman and Welch 2011). Early historical archaeological research in the United States, Canada, Australia, and in other areas Europeans expanded into around the world, tended to focus on sites of military, industrial, fur trade, fort, marine, and architectural import, as well as on material studies and the industrial and temporal dimensions of those goods (e.g. Kidd 1969; NoëlHume 1969). Early expansion of the theoretical and methodological focus in historical archaeology began to appear in the 1970s, especially with the introduction of processual and humanist interpretive regimes exploring daily lived life (e.g. Deetz 1996 [1977]; Schuyler 1978; South 1977). Despite this intellectual maturing and reflexive consideration of the methods and aims of a historical archaeology, into the latter part of the twentieth century the practice remained dominated by ‘grand-scale’ colonialist manifestations in the archaeological record. Indeed, the institutional and nationalistic (as in nation-founding) dimensions that dominated historical archaeology through the mid twentieth century fuelled funding and much of its early research focus, making historical archaeology as much or more the domain of government agencies such as Parks Canada and the American Parks Service than of the academic world (Deagan 1982; Klimko 2004; Wylie 1993a). A strong sense that historical archaeology was about the material history of ‘our’ nation (i.e. the descendant nation state borne from earlier European colonialism) continues to dominate historical archaeology, even alongside increasing intellectual advances and self-reflexive critiques within the practice itself that have helped to advance broader conceptual frames (e.g. Beaudry 1988; Boyd et al. 2000; Burke 1999; Byrne 1996; Cleland 2001; Deagan 1982; Deetz (p.7) 1983; Funari et al. 1999; Hicks and Beaudry 2006; Leone and Potter 1988; Little 1992; Murray 1985; Orser 1996; Paterson and Wilson 2000; Schuyler 1978). Historical archaeology through this time included an interest in the period of ‘contact’ when European expansion first interacted, across various global contexts, with indigenous populations (e.g. Brose et al. 2001; Fitzhugh 1985; Quimby 1966; Trigger 1976, 1985). This Page 8 of 47

Introduction archaeology of the not quite prehistoric record tended to rely heavily on a prehistorians’ knowledge of local, pre-contact archaeological sequences and European written records to document typically rapid and massive change in material culture. As has been pointed out previously (e.g. Branstner 1992; Byrne 1996; Murray 1993; Rubertone 2000; Williamson 2004), reliance on historic accounts meant that archaeological interpretations of the material manifestations from that initial period of interaction tended to offer end-narratives of local indigenous peoples’ archaeological history—the final chapter of an inevitable decline and erasure from the archaeological record. As historical archaeology expanded in scope over the latter part of the twentieth century to encompass more than the monumental, institutional, political, military, and upper-class national histories of descendant colonizer states, and sought to be more than confirmation of the written accounts of the European experience, interest in the material left by all iterations of those conventionally marginalized in colonizer histories and archaeologies grew. Likewise, archaeologies of contact began to recognize that local indigenous peoples’ experiences reflected in the archaeological record need not, and indeed did not, reflect the European-centric assumptions and values reflected in European written accounts; nor did the archaeological histories for these local peoples end after initial ‘contact’ with Europeans under the weight of assimilation or acculturation, but remained, conceptually and methodologically, linked to the deeper archaeological history of a region before contact (e.g. Bedford 1996; Branstner 1992; Cusick 1998a; Farnsworth 1992; Ferris et al. 1985; Harrison 2000; Lightfoot 1995; Murray 1993; Rogers 1990; Rogers and Wilson 1993; Schrire 1995; Spector 1993; Torrence and Clarke 2000). This emerged as a historical archaeology that sought to reach beyond the constraint and biases of written histories and normative assumptions of ‘prehistory’, to bridge the archaeology of the recent past with deeper time, and it helped form a foundation from which to conceive of and explore the global experiences reflected in the archaeology of the colonized through the last five hundred years or so of European expansionism and the emergence of descendant colonial states. Through this same period, archaeologists also began to explore and unpack the archaeology of the ‘colonizer’. This work documented the diversity of European experiences in the colonized world and back in Europe itself, reflexively exploring the assumptions behind that previously monolithic concept of ‘colonizer’, ‘European’, and so forth. Also explored were the complexities and entanglements of European relationships with the dispossessed made in the (p.8) Caribbean and elsewhere, and the descendants of all these groups (e.g. Brighton 2009; Page 9 of 47

Introduction Dalglish 2003; Dawdy 2008b; Delle 1998; Delle et al. 2011; Horning and Palmer 2009; Lawrence 2003a, 2003b; Mullins 1999; Naum and Nordin 2013; Ogundiran and Falola 2007; Singleton 1985, 1999; Tarlow and West 1999). But it is within the research arising from an archaeology of the colonized, undertaken especially over the past couple of decades, where it could be argued that a distinct, if not common, conceptual and methodological frame has emerged (e.g. Alexander 2004; Casella and Voss 2012; Cipolla 2008; Ferris 2009; Harrison 2004; Hutson 2010; Jordan 2008, 2009; Liebmann 2012b; Liebmann and Murphy 2011; Lightfoot 2005; Lilley 2006; Loren 2007; Lucas 2006; Lydon 2006, 2009; Lydon and Ash 2010; Martindale 2009; Middleton 2008; Oland et al. 2012; Oliver 2010; Paterson 2008; Prince 2002; Rubertone 2001; Scheiber and Mitchell 2010; Schmidt 2009; Silliman 2004, 2005; Stahl and LaViolette 2009; Wagner 2011; Wilcox 2009; Williamson and Harrison 2004). These studies, arising from different, particular contexts across the globe, have challenged and significantly revised local conventional historical narratives of the history of indigenous and colonized engagement with Europeans, and what the presumed impacts those engagements were and continue to be on the identity, material, and social processes of the Indigenous/the Native/the Subaltern/the local—the colonized. This work commonly focuses on the everyday lived experience within emergent colonialism or within previous periods of entanglement, to access individual and community-specific experiences and negotiations of those times and worlds. The focus on the everyday, so accessible within the material remains that are the purview of the archaeologist, allows for insight into household and community patterns of material engagement, trans-generationally—reflecting how tradition and innovation, agency and marginalization, continuity and change, were negotiated through the rise of colonialist contexts. While this work has led to innovative archaeological research, what has been less thoroughly explored are the broader implications for the practice of archaeology more generally that arises from the common themes these disparate studies across the globe reveal. But these implications are significant. After all, the archaeologies of the everyday experience of the colonized regularly reference issues of identity maintenance and revision, hybridization, and expressions of material agency within and without mass-produced material culture. They tend to bridge, blur the line, and ultimately deconstruct the silos of practice that have existed between ancient and historical archaeologies, illustrating the artifice of the distinction and the interpretive constraints imposed on archaeologies that are seen to begin and end in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. These studies uniformly have Page 10 of 47

Introduction challenged conventional archaeological notions of a ‘trait list materiality’; have invited cross-cultural, global, and historical comparisons; provided insight into and modelled social (p.9) processes made more robust by written records and oral sources; and have bridged archaeology with contemporary issues of Indigeneity, voicing the Subaltern, and the ongoing outcomes of the colonialist experience as it plays out across the world and reverberates back to the colonial homeland, all in order to provide archaeological interpretations that are multi-scalar, multi-disciplinary, and fully engaged in the most current advances in archaeological theory.

Implications Arising from an Archaeology of the Colonized The subtle and nuanced complexities archaeologists are drawing out of the archaeological record within the frame of an archaeology of the colonized has helped change the way we understand the processes, narratives, and histories of the past five hundred years (Harrison 2004; Rubertone 2012; Silliman 2005; 2010; Stahl 2012). The implications for this focus, and the continually revising theoretical and methodological questions these developments allow researchers to explore, are really only now emerging as this field has advanced from the particular to the general, and from revised narratives to revised conceptions of archaeological meaning-making. That the field of study seems to invite continuing revisionism is really no surprise, since a hallmark of this focus of archaeological inquiry has been a consistent, continual interpretive revisionism of what has been ‘understood’ as the history of Indigenous and European interactions, and the peeling away, layer by layer, of historically ‘correct’ expectations that archaeologists examining the past half-millennium previously assumed would be present in the archaeological record, based on their understandings of the written documents of the colonizers. Of equal, if not greater importance, have been the challenges continually laid down by contemporary descendant people themselves to understand the histories of colonialism in alternative terms.

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Introduction Archaeological Histories

The continual revising of archaeologically exploring that recent and still unfolding history of emergent global colonialism and capitalism is reflected in several of the core themes raised across chapters in this volume. One core theme is the deconstruction of master narratives and a scholarly dependence on the written record that has built up deeply embedded assumptions about those experiences and the supposedly self-evident superiority of a European presence overwhelming local indigenous peoples’ lifeways, values, and identity. This deconstruction began by rejecting trait (p.10) lists of European-manufactured items as ‘measuring’ acculturation, or otherwise assuming that, by dint of the presence of these artifacts on local indigenous archaeological sites alone, it signified an indigenous embracing of the European socioeconomic values or meanings ascribed to those objects (Brantsner 1992; Cusick 1998a; Farnsworth 1992; Ferris et al. 1985; Ferris and Spence 1995; Harrison 2002a, 2002b, 2003, 2006; Kenyon and Ferris 1984; Murray 1993; Spector 1993; see also Thomas 1991). With this shift in interpretive gaze from European-centric values embedded in objects to indigenous-centric archaeological patterns of incorporation of non-local materials, it also became increasingly difficult to interpret the archaeological record as necessarily complimenting or corroborating written history, or otherwise ‘failing’ to do so. In a sense, this shift from a focus on European influences shaping the colonized to a greater emphasis on indigenous peoples’ lived material lives operates from the premise that these groups engaged with Europeans by drawing on their own sensibilities and logics of how the world worked. Rather than an abandonment of these sensibilities, local indigenous people continually negotiated life within and without the colonial enterprise by drawing on internal perceptions of their past and heritage, understandings of the present, and hoped-for futures. This is not to say that the colonized were separate from the colonial enterprise, but rather that they engaged with that enterprise on their own terms. The objects people used, the houses they lived in, and the livelihoods they pursued need to be understood as processes, agency, decisions, and actions arising from that internalist understanding of the world, rather than as a process of increasing mimicry of colonizer practices or sensibilities (Silliman 2010). Such an approach implies not only a sense of indigeneity which is relational, but is sensitive to the ways in which local indigenous identity was and is itself something which is subject to continual internal revision and remaking (Ferris, Harrison, this volume), and which has its own complicated and articulated history.

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Introduction A colonized-centric conceptualization of the colonial process encouraged archaeologists to look within the archaeological record for the simultaneous engagement with, and separation from, the goals of the colonial centre. The experience of the colonized is not removed from the reality of colonial settlers and governments that, especially with the emergence of colonial state administrations, were chronic dimensions of daily lived life; however, they are read by archaeologists of the colonized as dimensions of survivance and residence (Silliman 2010, see also this volume), cultural entanglement (e.g. Alexander 1998; Dietler 1998, 2010; Jordan 2009; Martindale 2009; Paterson 2008; Thomas 1991; Torrence and Clarke 2000), shared histories (Harrison 2004; Lydon 2009; Murray 2004a), or changed continuities (Ferris 2009, see also this volume)—conceptual frames that shift archaeological interpretation towards a colonized-centric archaeology.

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Introduction (p.11) Archaeology of the Everyday

Access to interpretive insight from the archaeology of the colonized— the colonized-centric perspective—has tended to arise from an examination of the processes of daily quotidian life, domestic residence, and prosaic materiality, in other words, those recursive social practices of the everyday that encompass much of how an individual, family, and community negotiate and experience life, but nonetheless structure and embody, beneath awareness, the various dispositions, assumptions, biases, and misunderstandings of how the world works (e.g. Bourdieu 1977; de Certeau 1984; Giddens 1984; Scott 1991). These social practices are readily accessible to the archaeologist through the material past reflecting foodways, dining conventions, the use and definition of domestic space and settlement, labour and gender roles, the material heritage of lifeways and worldviews, and the context within which European-made items were incorporated locally and made to have meaning internally to those who were the end users of those goods. On later sites from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these material patterns of daily life—reflecting the routinized ways people negotiated their domestic lives and in so doing reinforced dispositions and understandings of the way the world works—allow the archaeologist to reach beyond the masking of a mostly mass-produced material culture to explore distinctions and differences across and beyond the colonized. This emphasis on the archaeology of daily lived experiences within the colonial process helps provide the archaeologist with an archaeologically centric means of reading the available historic record for the period and context under study, and also allows those observed material patterns to be compared to similar prosaic patterns observed in antiquity. These two dimensions facilitate comparative analyses across time, by exploring interpretive frameworks made more robust through the inclusion of historical documentation, as well as across colonial contexts. The capacity to bridge the pre- and post- of colonial periods archaeologically offers more substantive interpretive and empathetic understandings of Indigenous ancient life, a deeper context from which to examine change in the colonial period, and a means of ‘testing’ interpretations arising from the ancient record on the basis of historically replicated material patterns (e.g. Schmidt and Morozowski 2013). By focusing on daily lived domestic experience, the archaeology of the colonized has been able to bridge categorization though the ‘equalizing’ consideration of human life lived. An upper-class settler family newly arrived from Western Europe to somewhere in the empire, a ‘traditional’, locally indigenous family, a Métis family of people from Page 14 of 47

Introduction varied backgrounds, a plantation foreman, a slave; all these people still negotiated the daily rhythms, bodily requirements, and materialities of life, albeit across multiple categories of group and personal identity (age, gender, race, socio-economic status, colonial/metropolitan, urban/ rural, and so on). The capacity to compare and contrast material (p. 12) practices and dispositions across such categories bridges and provides a common contextual frame for exploring collective experiences of colonizer and colonized in place, and all the various iterations that binary encompasses. Archaeologically that capacity also allows for a temporal bridge, to explore change and continuity to practices and dispositions trans-generationally, and across the deeper span of time from the ancient, pre-European past through the centuries of initial entanglement and then emergent colonialism, and into the contemporary legacies of that past. However, while this archaeological focus on prosaic, domestic lived experience bridging categorization provides a means to deconstruct normative types within colonial experiences, it nonetheless also allows for the recognition, within the variations found through comparison, of the role colonial identities played, and were played with, in daily life. This is not to say that people enacted daily practices because they existed within a colonizer/colonized dialectic, but rather that the dispositions and social processes of colonialism by which these practices were enacted and perceived—by both agents and people around them—can be visible archaeologically through material variations in those practices. Economic, social, and political differentials can be reflected in the degree of access to and incorporation of broadly defined colonial conventions. The spectrum of engagement with temporally transient conventions of foodways, dress, bodily adornment, alignment of domestic space, engagement with subsistence- or surplus-based livelihood, variations in public and private sensibilities, and so on, all reflect the degree of being simultaneously immersed in, revising from, and unable to access (externally or internally) colonial ‘norms of the moment’ in specific times and places. Likewise, degree of chronic colonial interference with lived life, ranging from warfare and slavery, to diaspora, dispossession or social marginalization, to State or religious institutional oversight on the colonized and displaced, and the degree to which those historically recorded impositions actually were manifest in material practices at any moment in time, can be accessed from the archaeology of daily lifeways. Indeed, the absence of the material manifestations of such external interference can reflect the failure of State programmes to

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Introduction undermine indigenous social structures, active resistance, or local indifference. As well, the material of the everyday, laid down by all iterations of colonized and colonizer alike, allows archaeologists to deconstruct all colonial-period identities. Archaeologists can also explore the range of change occurring to all lived experiences as a result of the experience and nature of colonialism, as it was manifested across all iterations of the colonized and colonizer. In effect, this focus on the prosaic provides a contextual and temporal frame to understand all iterations and selves of the colonized, and all iterations and selves of the colonizer, to explore more broadly the lived experience of colonialism through (p. 13) time and space (Beaudoin 2013). This focus also allows for an understanding of these changed continuities through time and iterations of colonialism, and its capitalist legacy, as a process of enculturation trans-generationally that replicates while also revising categorization, redefining those marginalized and those not, while giving rise to new categories of identification. The hybridity of changed continuities within tradition that are encapsulated in the everyday across generations—maintained, re-defined, and re-historicized even through displacement and diaspora—provides the archaeologist of the colonized and of global colonialism a powerful heuristic from which to understand long-term material processes of social change and continuity that extend far beyond the temporally specific period of the past five hundred years. This problematizing of colonial categories and seeing locally indigenous-centric agency mediating the pervasiveness of colonialism also speaks to other recent developments in the social sciences over the assumed categorical separation of humans, animal, and ‘things’. It is increasingly the case that agency is not considered an individual act of will, but something that is distributed in complicated and interconnected ways or webs across collectives. Importantly, these collectives (or ‘assemblages’) may be composed of both humans and nonhumans, and as such might be thought to include plants, animals, and objects. The potential animacy of ‘things’, and the familial relations between human and nonhuman ‘kin’, have long been emphasized within many locally indigenous worldviews; however, it is only recently that such relational perspectivism, which recognizes the inherent mixing and interaction across ontological boundaries, has been treated as a serious alternative to Western scientific rationalism (e.g. Barad 2007; Harvey 2005; Henare et al. 2007; Rose 2004, 2008, 2011; Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2004). Fundamental to this new notion of ‘the social’ is the dissolution of familiar, modernist dualisms such as ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’, ‘social’ and ‘natural’ (Latour 1993, Page 16 of 47

Introduction 2004, 2005; Law 1994). These approaches are having an important impact on archaeology, heritage, and museum practices (e.g. Alberti and Bray 2009; Haber 2009; Harrison 2013a, 2013b; Hodder 2012a; Ingold 2011; Knappert 2011; Olsen et al. 2012; Shanks 2007; Watts 2013; Webmoor 2007; Witmore 2007). In addition to exploring how such approaches might provide alternative archaeologies of the colonized and colonizer (e.g. Nordin 2012, 2013), this framing encourages a consciousness of the ways in which archaeology has been implicated in the development of ‘modern’ thought through the defining and maintaining of an inherent separation between these categories (e.g. Olsen 2010; Thomas 2004), as well as the way archaeology can explore the materiality underlying the emergent colonial perspectivism in Europe of the past half-millennium (e.g. Herva and Nordin 2013)— deconstructing sustaining hierarchies of knowledge and norms in which such Western notions of the ‘modern’ have remain unchallenged.

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Introduction (p.14) Present Past Colonialisms

The attentiveness to everyday life and relational contexts that has shifted the attention of researchers away from a single focus on either the experiences of the colonized or the colonizer to consider the shared quotidian experiences of both within the pervasiveness of colonial contexts invites tearing down those essentialized categories of ‘colonial actors’ (European/Indigenous, colonizer/colonized, etc.), to explore the ways in which multiple and conflicting identities and agencies play out within and between categories in these contexts and through time (Horning 2013; Stoler 1989; see also Harrison 2004, this volume). Moreover, this invites comparisons of similar contexts across the emergent global colonialism of the past five hundred years, and more broadly of the processes of colonialism and imperialism present archaeologically through all times and places (e.g. Gosden 2004; van Dommelen 2011). The implication of shifting away from a singular focus is that the exercise undermines any assumptions at play behind those essentialized labels (e.g. Russell 2005). For example, in pulling this volume together an early aim was to standardize terminologies, or even just the conventions of terminologies, when referring to ‘Indigenous peoples’. And yet there is no appropriate common term to all contexts and beyond regional and individual preferences (e.g. Aboriginal, Indigenous, Native, Indian, Indigene, Autochthonous, Subaltern), or even when and in what contexts it is necessary to capitalize whatever noun is preferred or not (e.g. people indigenous to North America; Indigenous and European people in North America). Indeed, beyond the Americas and Australia/New Zealand, the concept of capital ‘I’ Indigenous, as operationalized within the archaeology of colonialism, was and is problematic in ways which scholarly traditions in the Americas and Australia/New Zealand have largely not engaged with (e.g. Holtorf 2009; Lane 2011; see also Cruz, Lane, Schmidt, this volume). In the end, we opted to simply reflect the conventions individual authors adopted, reflecting the local contextual and disciplinary practices, issues, and meanings arising from individual backgrounds. In a sense, this seemingly straightforward exercise and failure in terminological standardization is a reflection of the cultural assumptions and baggage operational in terms and categorization (e.g. colonizer and colonized). Terms such as ‘Aboriginal’, ‘Native’, ‘Iroquoian’, or ‘Huron’ have no real fixed meaning in a given place or time, any more so than ‘Western European’, ‘colonizer’, ‘British’ or ‘Scottish’ do, since the meaning and assumptions behind these broad categories both change through time, break down along lines of gender, Page 18 of 47

Introduction age, class, or status, and only poorly filter out—or worse, reinforce— contemporary conceptions and meanings infused into the various interpretive pasts under study (e.g. Ferris, Lane, Oliver, this volume; see also Weaver 2001). Indeed, contemporary social, economic, and political meanings around concepts such as ‘Indigenous’, ‘Indigeneity’, and ‘Indigenous rights’ reflect particular (p.15) contemporary developments and applications arising from the second half of the twentieth century and the rise of a resurgent, increasingly global Indigenous movement engaged in the legacy of the global colonialism of the past five centuries (e.g. Niezen 2000, 2003; see also Hodgsen 2009; Igoe 2006; Taiaiake and Corntassel 2005). In the archaeological literature, these terms, and later twentieth-century conceptions embodied in those terminologies, can often become unproblematized labels of categorization for ‘peoples’ in the past. Indeed, even those revisionist archaeological histories of the colonized archaeologists have recovered from the margins of dominant historical discourses are still criticized as reaffirming colonial frameworks and dichotomies between colonized and colonizer (e.g. Trigger and Dalley 2010). The problematic dimension of mobilizing archaeological histories beyond archaeology and within contemporary frameworks of Indigenous heritage is readily seen in the difficulties archaeologists have in conceptualizing contemporary nonarchaeological values of heritage brought to bear over the archaeological record (e.g. Gnecco 2011; Meskell 2012; Smith 2006; Thorley 2002). Moreover, in transposing such concepts into the past, the archaeologist invites stumbling over consequentially invented issues in their scholarship around authenticity, ‘who’s Indigeneity’, ‘whose Indigenous’, and ‘whose heritage’ (Cruz, Ferris this volume); problematic challenges of a colonized/colonizer dialectic in the archaeology left by people of mixed ancestry (e.g. Beaudoin et al. 2010; Toft and Seiding 2013; see also Beaudoin, Delle, this volume); or concepts of colonialism within European contexts (e.g. Dalglish 2003; Horning 2006; Lucas and Parigoris 2013; see also Horning, this volume). As such, while any kind of assumed divide between colonized and colonizer was conceptually problematic through the history of the past five hundred years (see Delle, Harrison, Stahl, this volume), it is entirely an artificial assumption that archaeologists working in this period today are increasingly aware hampers interpretations arising from the archaeology of colonialism and any understanding of the complex processes at play for all actors in particular temporal and regional contexts. The ‘archaeology of the colonized’ as anything other than a particular focus of archaeological inquiry quickly becomes stripped of Page 19 of 47

Introduction classificatory meaning or application in the reflexive act of considering what that phrase means. In effect, embedded in the reflexive focus that an archaeology of the colonized invites is the ultimate making of that heuristic irrelevant. By this, we mean that the progression of reflexive turns within the archaeology of the colonized over the past few decades has steadily moved from deconstructing historically based narratives that validated the colonial enterprise and tropes of dependency and cultural ruin among the colonized; to deconstructing temporal constraints that the archaeology of the colonized could bridge between historical and more ancient archaeologies; to unravelling the essentialized categories of colonized and colonizer that fail to account for the complexities of changed continuities, survivance, residence, and shared (p.16) histories all historical actors and agents negotiated through the rise of a global colonialism; to deconstructing the archaeology of the colonized beyond being solely about an intellectual exercise that offers robust archaeological analyses of a past removed from the present. The archaeological act of creating historical narratives that arise from the emergence of a global colonialism and subsequent rise of a global capitalism over the past half-millennium cannot be divorced from the fact that these are narratives still playing out globally in the societies and descendant States that archaeologists, descendant colonized, and descendant colonizer are all members of, variably enculturated into, and required to negotiate their lived life through. The reflexive turn, then, has increasingly led archaeologies of the colonized to re-conceptualize what it is we are doing in the contemporary act of making meaning from the archaeological record, and recognize that this archaeological process has broad ongoing resonances, relevancies, and consequences beyond our basic archaeological inquiries (Nassaney 2012). That, in turn, feeds back and has further implications for archaeological practice broadly, as it increasingly needs to negotiate its place in a contemporary world that variably ignores, misconstrues, or differentially chooses to engage with the past we narrate, and creates contemporary heritages of value, contested or otherwise, regardless of whether archaeologists ‘agree’ with those creations (McGuire 2008). The notion that the past is made in the present is hardly a new idea in archaeology (e.g. Hodder 1999; Hodder and Hutson 2003; Shanks and Tilley 1987; Wylie 1993b, 2002), or that, as researchers of the past, we are active participants in shaping the production of that knowledge (e.g. Charest 2009; Haber 2007, 2012; Voss 2010; Wilcox 2009). The questions we ask, data we value, and interpretations we advance arise in our own present so that the past makes ‘sense’ to us. So a critical challenge for any archaeology of the colonized is that this practice is Page 20 of 47

Introduction entrenched within a broader archaeological—and especially historical archaeological—research environment that is itself embedded within colonial legacies and logics (e.g. Bianchi Villelli 2011; González-Ruibal 2010; Liebmann and Rizvi 2008; Lydon and Rizvi 2010; Nicholas and Hollowell 2007; Smith and Wobst 2005; see also Harrison 2013a; Smith 1999). To engage with these issues means further deconstruction of the many fundamental assumptions and essentialized categories arising from colonialism that premise our research, and the divide between scholar and subject of study. It also means constructing much more nuanced and robust understandings of the processes of colonialism, processes that frame and mask the past we explore, and frame and mask the present arising from that past. Further, recognizing the consequential use of these archaeologies beyond archaeology, either to reconfigure and validate Indigenous connections between past and present and claims on that heritage (e.g. Gnecco and Hernández 2008; Shepherd 2007), or by the State seeking to circumvent such claims in order to invalidate potential Indigenous assertions to sovereignty, land, and resources (e.g. Ferris, Martindale this volume) are (p.17) critical reflexivities that reveal colonial-based logics in practice. Moreover such reflexivities are necessary for tempering ‘academic pursuit of knowledge’ claims by some archaeologists that appear naive and selfserving by ignoring the consequential impact the archaeological enterprise can and does play beyond archaeology (e.g. McGhee 2004, 2008). Conceptual issues such as the meaning and relationality of ‘Indigenous’ in colonial contexts underscores that the contemporary practice of exploring archaeological histories within descendant colonial States precludes practitioners from not being aware of and engaged in the implications beyond archaeology of their findings, especially as that research is converted into heritage of value for descendant communities (e.g. Richard 2009; see also Schmidt, this volume). This dimension to the archaeology of the colonized—a recursive, self-reflexive process—is also one that resonates in the ethics of archaeological practice well beyond the thematic or contextual research presented in this volume (e.g. Ferris and Welch 2014). Across the globe, the archaeology of the colonized over the past few decades has had to grapple with many of the same theoretical reflexivities that have emerged in archaeology broadly during the same time. But the complexities of negotiating written, oral, and material records, colonial tropes and essentialized categories deeply embedded within long-established historical ways of knowing this period, and the contemporary legacies and implications of this research, has required a degree of reflexivity that forces archaeologists doing this work to confront core epistemological precepts behind archaeologically Page 21 of 47

Introduction knowing the past. While individual archaeologists may have come to this period of study with an enthusiasm and intellectual curiosity for trade goods, historically documented events, places, and peoples, or the implications of ‘cultures in contact’, the process we then embark on of coming to understand materiality within emergent colonialism, the undermining of otherwise self-evident truths in dominant historical narratives, and the continual interest from those beyond archaeology who seek meaning and value from that past we study, quickly forces us to engage broadly in theoretical discourses within and beyond archaeology. That process has generated a global literature of researchers grappling with these same challenges within local archaeologies of the colonized that further reveals common trends, and context-specific differences in that human history and archaeology of the past five hundred years, and with broader archaeologies of colonialism appearing across the globe in the more distant past. In a way, this global engagement with the archaeologies of the colonized and the archaeologies of colonialism, while broadening the individual archaeologist’s perspective and understanding of the past, distances them too from local regional archaeologies of cultural historical inventory and description. These more normative archaeologies that still tend to frame ‘contact’ within acculturation frameworks of local indigenous peoples’ ruin and decline, chafe against revisionist retellings and the archaeologists advancing those revisionist understandings. In effect, there is ‘no going back’ (p.18) once an archaeologist begins down the path towards a more nuanced understanding of the archaeology of the colonized and all that reflexivity entails.

Organization of this Volume This volume provides a synthetic overview of the common theoretical trends emerging from current innovative and revisionist research undertaken of the archaeology of the colonized arising from the European expansionism of the last half-millennium. Collectively, the chapters in this volume contextualize specific studies in relation to the broader theoretical contributions they provide for archaeology, and ultimately demonstrate how this specific area of research is furnishing an archaeology that practices and interprets beyond conceptual and constraining ‘borders’ (pre- vs post- contact, Indigenous vs European, history vs archaeology, theoretical ‘isms’ vs eclectic pluralism, archaeologist vs descendant, etc.). In addition, the contributions to this volume underscore how this revisionist archaeological gaze challenges conventional and dominant tropes that continue within the active colonialist histories of these descendant nation states, and contributes to de-colonizing the past. The implications this has for contemporary Page 22 of 47

Introduction archaeological practice, and for the contemporary descendants of the colonized who continue to struggle with the State over that colonial legacy, brings a relevance and immediacy to the politics of archaeology that resonates with the broader contested claims to the archaeological heritage archaeologists negotiate across the globe today. While not providing complete coverage of the disparate contexts within which the archaeologies of colonialism exists in the record and across the globe as a result of European-initiated colonialism, the contributions in this volume do explore global trends in the archaeologies of colonialism through chapter contributions by leading scholars of locally indigenous-lived colonial entanglements in North America, Australia, and Africa with expansionist Europeans post AD 1500. The volume also more broadly explores the implications and ambiguities of the archaeologies of the colonized by including the marginalized archaeologies of displaced peoples evident in the work of scholars from the Caribbean, and from places such as Ireland, and in grappling with the archaeological heritage of Métis or mixed ancestry peoples. The contribution of this work to the broader global discourse in archaeological theory is also commented on by archaeological theorists, who engage in the themes that emerge across chapters, and examine the implications of these archaeological interpretations for global archaeological practice more generally. Part I Ambiguous Definitions and Discordances Chapters in this initial section explore past and emerging issues in the conceptual analysis of the archaeology of European interaction with local indigenous peoples, such as around (p.19) the notion of ‘contact’, and risks of reessentializing concepts such as ‘European/Aboriginal’ and ‘colonized/ colonizer’. Contributions also explore the implications and hazards of importing contemporary values and conceptions, embedded in the ongoing legacies of descendant colonial states, back into a past where these contemporary understandings were not relevant to or operationalized within that lived experience. Part II Colonizing and Decolonizing Spaces, Places, Things, and Identities This section includes case-study contributions that provide topical examples of colonized and decolonized landscapes, communities, and households, and explore the materiality of self and identity and the social processes of identity reinforcement and revision evident through the archaeological material record. Chapters consider the negotiation of contested and ambiguous meanings of space and place, and the conceptual innovation or hybridization of these by the colonized, to both maintain tradition and accommodate revision. These contributions look inside and beyond the home, fort, or mission, and Page 23 of 47

Introduction across the physical and mental landscapes of memory and transitory colonial meanings tied to past, present, and hoped-for futures. They also explore examples of the maintenance of traditional material tradition and the selective integration, hybridization, and intentional undermining of mass-produced material manifestations of the colonizer to serve the polyphonic identities that were both a part of and apart from the dominant colonial world locally indigenous peoples negotiated. Part III Displacement, Hybridity, and Colonizing the Colonial This section provides an engagement with the ambiguities of ‘colonized’ and ‘indigenous’ beyond that of Aboriginal or Native peoples, to encompass the conceptualization of ‘indigenes’ and African diaspora within and across the islands of the Caribbean, the emergence of distinct identities and communities descendant from the intermarriage of European and locally indigenous people, and people of places like Ireland, as they negotiate identities which are set apart from but still a part of the British colonial enterprise. The archaeology of these groups grapples with the same issues that the archaeologies of other colonized- lived colonialism contexts does, and so is an ideal means for drawing out the broader theoretical implications and complexities within this focus of archaeology. Part IV Contested Pasts and Contemporary Implications Chapters in this section examine the implications of the alternative, revisionist conceptual framing of the archaeologies of locally indigenous-lived colonialisms, the constraining logics of archaeologically engaging with concepts like Indigeneity, and the contemporary, political contexts and contested heritages archaeology abets, validates, and invalidates. The implications for archaeological practice as praxis, and for a broader relevancy to archaeological interpretation, directly situates this archaeological research into the global discourse of who owns and writes the past, and what role archaeological interpretation, and the role the archaeologist (as descendent from the colonizer or from the colonized) finds themselves in when engaging with these broader contemporary implications. (p.20) Commentary and Afterword Finally, this section provides two commentaries on the broader themes raised throughout the volume, by archaeologists who can consider the implications of this work from the perspective of broader archaeological practice and theory. A final, concluding afterword provides the contextual framing for the archaeologies of the colonized as a theoretically robust contribution to contemporary global archaeological discourse, and looks to the future of an archaeology informed by its critical insights.

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Introduction Conclusions The focus on the everyday, lived experience of colonized and colonizer is having a profound influence on contemporary archaeological theory and practice. The work presented here represents no less than an intellectual ‘peeling back’ of the final layers within embedded assumptions and essentialized tropes of colonial histories. In so doing, the authors here, as well as the increasing number of archaeologists exploring the latest conceptual iterations of an archaeology of the colonized, are dismantling the category of ‘an archaeology of the colonized’ even as they advance scholarship from this focus. What remains may be labelled ‘archaeology of colonialism’, ‘archaeology of the Subaltern’ (see van Dommelen, this volume), or simply, an archaeology of the modern world that extends beyond global capitalism and regularly engages with the ongoing struggle to become postcolonial. This archaeology speaks directly to a broader, reflexive turn in global archaeological discourse, contributing to the ongoing theoretical revisionism and inclusive, multi-vocal expansionism that archaeology has been engaged with for the past several decades both within and beyond the academy. The coming of the archaeological turn and theoretical wave, as Dawdy describes (2010:762) has implications far beyond archaeological scholarship, as the practice engages with its place within contemporary social, ecological, and political concerns. The ongoing contributions from archaeologists exploring what has evolved from an ‘archaeology of contact’ to the ‘archaeology of the colonized’ and beyond will play a leading role in shaping these intellectual directions for archaeology as a discipline, and in fuelling archaeology’s broader theoretical turn. References Bibliography references: Alberti, Benjamin, and Tamara L. Bray 2009 Animating Archaeology: Of Subjects, Objects and Alternative Ontologies. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19:337–43. Alexander, Rani T. 1998 Afterward: Toward an Archaeological Theory of Culture Contact. In Studies in Culture Contact Interaction, Culture Change and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick, pp. 476–95. Occasional Paper No. 25. Center for Archaeological Investigations. Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. (p.21) Alexander, Rani T. 2004 Yaxcabá and the Caste War of Yucatán: An Archaeological Perspective. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

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Introduction Andrén, Anders 1998 Between Artifacts and Text: Historical Archaeology in Global Perspective, translated by A. Crozier. Plenum, New York. Barad, Karen 2007 Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina. Beaudoin, Matthew A. 2013 De-essentializing the Past: Deconstructing Colonial Categories in 19th-Century Ontario. PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario. Beaudoin, Matthew A., Richard L. Josephs, and Lisa K. Rankin 2010 Attributing Cultural Affiliation to Sod Structures in Labrador: A Labrador Métis Example from North River. Canadian Journal of Archaeology 34(2):148–73. Beaudry, Mary C. (ed.) 1988 Documentary Archaeology in the New World. Cambridge University Press, New York. Beaudry, Mary C., and James Symonds (eds) 2011 Interpreting the Early Modern World: Transatlantic Perspectives. Springer, New York. Bedford, Stuart H. 1996 Post Contact Maori: The Ignored Component in New Zealand Archaeology. Journal of the Polynesian Society 105:411– 39. Bentley, R. Alexander, Herbert D. G. Maschner, and Christopher Chippindale (eds) 2009 Handbook of Archaeological Theories. Altamira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Bennett, Tony 2013 Making Culture, Changing Society. Routledge, New York. Bennett, Tony 2014 Liberal Government and the Practical History of Anthropology. History and Anthropology 25:150–70. Bennett, Tony, Ben Dibley, and Rodney Harrison 2014 Introduction: Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities. History and Anthropology 25:137–49. Bianchi Villelli, Marcia 2011 Coloniality in Patagonia: Historical Archaeology and Postcolonial Critique in Latin America. World Archaeology 43: 86–101.

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Introduction Bintliff, John L. and Michael Pearce (eds) 2011 The Death of Archaeological Theory? Oxbow Books, Oxford. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Boyd, Matthew, John C. Erwin, and Mitch Hendrickson (eds) 2000 The Entangled Past: Integrating History and Archaeology. Proceedings of the 30th Annual Chacmool Conference, University of Calgary, Calgary. Branstner, Susan 1992 Tionontate Huron Occupation at the Marquette Mission. In Calumet Fleur-De-Lys Archaeology of Indian and French Contact in the Midcontinent, edited by John Walthall and Thomas Emerson, pp. 177–202. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Brighton, Stephen A. 2009 Historical Archaeology of the Irish Diaspora: A Transnational Approach. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. Brose, David, C. Wesley Cowan, and Robert Mainfort Jr (eds) 2001 Societies in Eclipse: Archaeology of the Eastern Woodlands Indians, A.D. 1400–1700. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Buchli, Victor and Gavin Lucas (eds) 2001 Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. Routledge, New York. Burke, Heather 1999 Meaning and Ideology in Historical Archaeology: Style, Social Identity, and Capitalism in an Australian Town. Kluwer Academic/Plenum, New York. (p.22) Byrne, Denis 1996 Deep Nation: Australia’s Acquisition of an Indigenous Past. Aboriginal History 20:82–107. Casella, Eleanor Conlin and Barbara L. Voss (eds) 2012 The Archaeology of Colonialism: Intimate Encounters and Sexual Effects. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Charest, Michelle 2009 Thinking through Living: Experience and the Production of Archaeological Knowledge. Archaeologies 5:416–45. Cipolla, Craig N. 2008 Signs of Identity, Signs of Memory. Archaeological Dialogues 15:196–215. Clark, Bonnie J. and Laurie A. Wilkie 2007 The Prism of Self: Gender and Personhood. In Identity and Subsistence: Gender Strategies of Archaeology, edited by Sarah Milledge Nelson, pp. 1–32. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland.

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Introduction Deagan, Kathleen 1982 Avenues of Inquiry in Historical Archaeology. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, 5:151–77. Deetz, James 1983 Scientific Humanism and Humanistic Science: A Plea for Paradigmatic Pluralism in Historical Archaeology. Geoscience and Man, 23:27–34. (p.23) Deetz, James 1996 [1977] In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life. Second edition. Anchor Books, New York. Delle, James A. 1998 An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. Plenum Press, New York. Delle, James A., Mark W. Hauser, and Douglas V. Armstrong (eds) 2011 Out of Many, One People: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Dietler, Michael 1998 Consumption, Agency, and Cultural Entanglement: Theoretical Implications of a Mediterranean Colonial Encounter. In Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick, pp. 288–315. Occasional Paper No. 25. Center for Archaeological Investigations. Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Dietler, Michael 2010 Archaeologies of Colonialism: Consumption, Entanglement, and Violence in Ancient Mediterranean France. University of California Press, Berkeley. Falk, Lisa (ed.) 1991 Historical Archaeology in Global Perspective. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Farnsworth, Paul 1992 Missions, Indians, and Cultural Continuity. Historical Archaeology, 26(1):22–36. Ferris, Neal 2009 The Archaeology of Native-lived Colonialism: Challenging History in the Great Lakes. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Ferris, Neal and Michael Spence 1995 Woodland Traditions in Southern Ontario. Revista de Arqueología Americana 9:83–138. Ferris, Neal and John R. Welch 2014 Beyond Archaeological Agendas: In the Service of a Sustainable Archaeology. In Transforming Archaeology: Activist Practices and Prospects, edited by Sonja Atalay, Lee Rains Claus, Randall McGuire, and John J. Welch, pp. 215–38. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California.

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Introduction Graves-Brown, Paul, Rodney Harrison, and Angela Piccini (eds) 2013 The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Haber, Alejandro F. 2007 This Is Not an Answer to the Question ‘Who is Indigenous?’Archaeologies 3:213–29. Haber, Alejandro F. 2009 Animism, Relatedness, Life: Post-Western Perspectives. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19:418–30. Haber, Alejandro F. 2012 Un-disciplining Archaeology. Archaeologies 8:55–66. Habu, Junko and Clare Fawcett 2008 Science or Narratives? Multiple Interpretations of the Sannai Maruyama Site, Japan. In Evaluating Multiple Narratives: Beyond Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist Archaeologies, edited by Junko Habu, Claire Fawcett, and John Matsunaga, pp. 91–117. Springer, New York. Hall, Martin 2000 Archaeology and the Modern World: Colonial Transcripts in South Africa and the Chesapeake. Routledge, London. Hall, Martin and Stephen W. Silliman 2006 Introduction: Archaeology of the Modern World. In Historical Archaeology, edited by Martin Hall and Stephen Silliman, pp. 1–19. Blackwell, Malden, Massachusetts. Harrison, Rodney 2000 Challenging the Authenticity of Antiquity: Contact Archaeology and Native Title in Australia. In Native Title and the Transformation of Archaeology in a Postcolonial World, edited by Ian Lilley, pp. 35–53. Oceania Publications, Sydney. Harrison, Rodney 2002a Archaeology and the Colonial Encounter: Kimberley Spear Points, Cultural Identity and Masculinity in the North of Australia. Journal of Social Archaeology 2:352–77. Harrison, Rodney 2002b Australia’s Iron Age: Aboriginal Post-Contact Metal Artefacts from Old Lamboo Station, Southeast Kimberley, WA. Australasian Historical Archaeology 20:67–76. Harrison, Rodney 2003 ‘The Magical Virtue of These Sharp Things’: Mimesis, Colonialism and Knapped Bottle Glass Artefacts in Australia. Journal of Material Culture 8:311–36. Harrison, Rodney 2004 Shared Landscapes: Archaeologies of Attachment and the Pastoral Industry in NSW. University of NSW Press, Sydney.

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Introduction Torrence, Robin and Anne Clarke (eds) 2000 The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross-Cultural Engagements in Oceania. Routledge, London. Trigger, Bruce 1976 The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal. Trigger, Bruce 1984 Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist. Man 19:355–70. (p.33) Trigger, Bruce 1985 Natives and Newcomers; Canada’s Heroic Age Reconsidered. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal. Trigger, Bruce 2006 A History of Archaeological Thought. Second edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Trigger, David S. and Cameo Dalley 2010 Negotiating Indigeneity: Culture, Identity, and Politics. Reviews in Anthropology 39:46–65. van Dommelen, Peter 2011 Postcolonial Archaeologies: Between Discourse and Practice. World Archaeology 43:1–6. Viveiros de Castro Eduardo B. 1998 Cosmological Dexis and Amerindian Perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4:469–88. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo B. 2004 The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies. Common Knowledge 10:463–85. Voss, Barbara L. 2008 The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco. University of California Press, Berkeley. Voss, Barbara L. 2010 Matter Out of Time: The Paradox of the ‘Contemporary Past’. Archaeologies 6:181–92. Voss, Barbara L. 2012 A Land of Ethnogenesis: Material Culture, Power, and Identity. In Contemporary Issues in California Archaeology, edited by Terry L. Jones and Jennifer E. Perry, pp. 303–18. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. Wagner, Mark J. 2011 The Rhoads Site: A Historic Kickapoo Village on the Illinois Prairie. Illinois State Archaeological Survey, Studies in Archaeology Number 5. University of Illinois, Urbana. Watts, Christopher (ed.) 2013 Relational Archaeologies: Humans, Animals, Things. Routledge, New York.

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Introduction Weaver, Hilary 2001 Indigenous Identity: What Is It and Who Really Has it? The American Indian Quarterly 25:240–55. Webmoor, Timothy 2007 What about ‘One More Turn after the Social’ in Archaeological Reasoning? Taking Things Seriously. World Archaeology 39:547–62. Welch, John R. and T. J. Ferguson 2007 Putting Patria Back into Repatriation: Cultural Affiliation Assessment of White Mountain Apache Tribal Lands. Journal of Social Archaeology 7:171–98. Wells, Peter S. 2010 Beyond Celts, Germans and Scythians: Archaeology and Identity in Iron Age Europe. Bristol Classical Press, Bristol. White, Carolyn L. and Mary C. Beaudry 2009 Artifacts and Personal Identity. In International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by Teresita Majewski and David Gaimster, pp. 209–25. Springer, New York. Wilcox, Michael V. 2009 The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact. University of California Press, Berkeley. Williamson, Christine 2004 Contact Archaeology and the Writing of Aboriginal History. In The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies, edited by Tim Murray, pp. 176–99. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Williamson, Christine and Rodney Harrison (eds) 2004 After Captain Cook: The Archaeology of the Recent Indigenous Past in Australia. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California. Witmore, Christopher L. 2007 Symmetrical Archaeology: Excerpts of a Manifesto. World Archaeology 39:546–62. (p.34) Wylie, Alison 1993a Invented Lands/Discovered Pasts: The Westward Expansion of Myth and History. Historical Archaeology 27(4):1–19. Wylie, Alison 1993b A Proliferation of New Archaeologies: ‘Beyond Objectivism and Relativism’. In Archaeological Theory: Who Sets the Agenda? edited by Norman Yoffee and Andrew Sherratt, pp. 20–6. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wylie, Alison 2002 Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology. University of California Press, Berkeley.

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Introduction Zimmerman, Larry J. 2007 Plains Indians and Resistance to ‘Public’ Heritage Commemoration of Their Pasts. In Cultural Heritage and Human Rights, edited by Helaine Silverman and D. Fairchild Ruggles, pp. 144–58. Springer, New York. Zimmerman, Larry J. and Jessica Welch 2011 Displaced and Barely Visible: Archaeology and the Material Culture of Homelessness. Historical Archaeology 45(1):67–85.

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Shared Histories

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Shared Histories Rethinking ‘Colonized’ and ‘Colonizer’ in the Archaeology of Colonialism Rodney Harrison

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords This chapter explores a framework that deals with the archaeology and heritage of cross-cultural interactions in the cattle and sheep ranching (‘pastoral’) industries of Australia. It first provides a historical background on government policies on aboriginal people and pastoral labour in Australia between 1788 and 1988 before suggesting some ways in which archaeology might address idealised notions of ‘coloniser’ and ‘colonised’. It then outlines the various strategic and mundane ways in which both colonised and coloniser engage with their social and Indigenous worlds, express notions of individual and group identity, and at the same time deal with the very real inequalities and conflicts that characterise colonial and postcolonial relations of difference. Keywords:   archaeology, heritage, cross-cultural interactions, ranching, Australia, coloniser, colonised, identity, pastoral labour, aboriginal people

Introduction

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Shared Histories The archaeology of colonialism has drawn extensively on postcolonial studies in its focus on the experience of colonized peoples and its attention to identity politics (Given 2004; Gosden 2004; Lydon and Rizvi 2010). While the archaeology of colonialism had previously been dominated by acculturation models which required the strict delineation of Indigenous and non-Indigenous archaeological materials, the identification of the simple binary categories of ‘colonized’ and ‘colonizer’ has come under question (e.g. Stein 2005; see Stoler 1989). Recent work has drawn on postcolonial theories of hybridity, in particular the work of Homi Bhabha ([1994] 2004), to explore the ways in which identity in colonial contexts is never ‘pure’ or uncreolized, but complex and mixed (e.g. van Dommelen 2005; chapters in Liebmann and Murphy 2011). However, in applying this concept to the realm of past material culture, it has often proved difficult to shift away from a model of hybridity perceived as a straightforward mixing of materialcultural forms belonging either to ‘colonizer’ or ‘colonized’, particularly in circumstances where mimetic forms and symbols are themselves emphasized and utilized strategically (cf. Spivak 1996) by Indigenous and/or non-Indigenous people in the present (e.g. Harrison 2010; Meskell 2010), or as these are encountered in the archaeological record (e.g. Harrison 2003a). There is a risk that by doing this, the archaeology of colonialism may simply come to reinforce old colonial stereotypes, rather than help us to move away from them to find a ‘third space’ to elude the ‘politics of polarity’ as Bhabha ([1994] 2004) has suggested. In this chapter, I want to explore a framework which was (p.38) developed to deal with the archaeology and heritage of cross-cultural interactions in the cattle and sheep ranching (‘pastoral’) industries of Australia to suggest some ways in which archaeology might trouble some of these idealized notions of ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’, and in doing so, contribute to the development of archaeological and postcolonial theory more generally. This framework acknowledges the need to simultaneously explore the various strategic and mundane ways in which both colonized and colonizer engage with their social and Indigenous worlds (e.g. Silliman 2001, 2005, 2010) and express notions of individual and group identity, while attempting to deal with the very real inequalities and conflicts which characterize colonial and postcolonial relations of difference (González-Ruibal 2010).

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Shared Histories Two Hundred Years of Entangled History: Aboriginal People and Pastoral Labour in Australia, 1788–1988 Australian government policies have had a profound impact on both Aboriginal people and colonial relations in Australia. From the early part of the nineteenth century, Christian missions, state, and later federal governments played a major role in the relocation and segregation of Aboriginal people. Aboriginal people were subject to various controls and legislation that isolated and controlled encounters with settlers. Under later policies, individuals were to be assimilated into settler society through processes of removal, most notably those now contested by members of the ‘stolen generations’. These Aboriginal children were removed from their families and placed under the care of non-Indigenous Australians. Although it has much deeper roots, the modern Land Rights movement emerged as a force during the 1970s coincident with the rise of international Indigenous rights movements. Drawing on the rhetoric of ‘Black Power’, it drew attention to the failure of the assimilation project, while asserting the rights of Indigenous people to exist as a distinct cultural group within settler society. The transportation of convict labour to New South Wales ended in the 1850s. With the discovery of gold in the southeast, and later in other parts of Australia, an employment gap was produced in the burgeoning pastoral industry which was met by Aboriginal men and women. Many Aboriginal men and women were employed as stock workers, shearers, and shepherds at this time. Aboriginal women were employed as domestic workers as well as outdoor labourers, and more rarely as shearers, on sheep stations (Goodall 1996; McGrath 1987; Figure 1.1). Aboriginal children often assisted their parents with domestic tasks and labouring work, such as feeding and tending to goats and pigs, (p.39) and watering homestead gardens and orchards. This was particularly the case where Aboriginal people formed large residential encampments on, or close to, pastoral stations.

Pastoralism, as a lowintensity, landextensive form of grazing, formed a slow and sporadic ‘moving frontier’ across the continent. The initial contacts between Aborigines and settlers that had been experienced in Sydney in 1788 (e.g. Clendinnen 2005) were played out as late as the early to Page 3 of 24

Shared Histories mid twentieth century Fig. 1.1. Aboriginal shearing team, in northern and central Corunna Downs, 1906. Australia (e.g. Paterson Courtesy State Library of Western 2003, 2008; Paterson, Australia, Battye Library 001304D. Gill, and Kennedy 2003). However in almost all parts of Australia where pastoralism was the dominant land use, Aboriginal people came to fill a crucial role in providing the labour force that was the backbone of the industry. In many areas, Aboriginal people worked for ‘rations’, an allowance of food and clothing, or wages well below minimum agreed rates paid to non-Indigenous labourers, until the late 1960s (Figure 1.2). In other cases, such as New South Wales in the 1940s and 1950s, Aboriginal ‘big gun’ shearers made a reasonably high cash wage. In most cases, the extensive nature of the work of pastoralism allowed Aboriginal people to continue to occupy, or dwell close to, their traditional country, and in many cases, community encampments of Aboriginal people were tolerated at or near pastoral properties. For those Aboriginal people who wished to continue to access their country and kin, pastoralism formed an (p.40) attractive employment opportunity, despite the often poor wages and living conditions that went with working in the industry.

From Contact Zone to Hybrid Space and Palimpsest: A Historiography of Australian Pastoral Labour Fig. 1.2. Distributing rations to Aboriginal people, Yarrie Station, 1911. Courtesy State Library of Western Australia, Battye Library 013953PD.

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Shared Histories The historian Anne McGrath (1987) has argued that Australian pastoralism represented a ‘frontier zone’ for cross-cultural negotiations and encounters. McGrath’s work, and other revisionist histories drawing on oral history undertaken with pastoral workers themselves, has been important in documenting the role of Aboriginal women in the pastoral industry, both in stock work and domestic labour (e.g. Hunt 1986; Laurie and McGrath 1985). Critics of McGrath (e.g. Brock 1995) have noted differences in the experiences of Aboriginal people working on pastoral stations attended by owner/managers and those run by larger corporate holdings with absent owners. The emergence of a historical literature composed by Aboriginal people themselves has contributed to a (p.41) more nuanced understanding of the pastoral industry as governed by a series of complex social and economic relationships between a number of different groups, including station owners/managers, white station workers, Aboriginal station workers, and other Aboriginal people who had not yet ‘come in’ from the bush (e.g. Boyoi and Walker 1991; Cohen 1987; Shaw 1986; see Rowse 1987, Harrison 2004c). Gillian Cowlishaw (1999) addressed these issues based on field research at a remote cattle station at Rembarrnga in Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory. Cowlishaw sees pastoralism and the pastoral domain as a complex system of negotiation of race and power, where urban dwellers developed ideas about the country, where anthropologists wrote policies for Aboriginal people, and where pastoralists and Aboriginal people created and sustained transformed social identities. She describes the pastoral domain as a palimpsest, as opposed to a hybrid space, emphasizing overlapping and co-existent forms of cultural difference in pastoral relations. Rowse (1987) has drawn attention to the pronounced seasonality of Aboriginal pastoral labour in northern Australia, and to the impact of this seasonality on the ability of Aboriginal people to maintain ritual and social obligations during the wet season, when they were temporarily laid off work (see also Head and Fullagar 1997). He also critically examines the institution of rationing in the pastoral industry, suggesting that ‘rationing was a pervasive institution of Central Australian colonialism’ (Rowse 1998:4). The notion that Aboriginal people understood rationing as reciprocity is also discussed at length by Rowse (1998), who suggests that rationing needs to be understood as much more than a simple exchange of labour for goods. Rationing provided a way for both pastoralists and the wider non-Indigenous community to conceptualize Aboriginal people, functioning as a technique of social

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Shared Histories and physical governance, as well as a way for Aboriginal people to conceptualize their relationships with pastoral managers and the state. In his seminal study of the life of George Dutton, an Aboriginal drover from western New South Wales (NSW) whose working life spanned the early to mid twentieth century, Jeremy Beckett (1978:2; see discussion in Murray 2004a) recounts the somewhat startling comment that: ‘I have heard drovers in bars rehearsing each step of a route, remembering what had happened here and there along the way, as though they were Aborigines “singing the country”.’ Beckett’s study informs this chapter in several important ways. He argues that the condition of Aboriginal labour on pastoral stations prior to 1920 was one of ‘internal colonialism’—a regime that preserved traditional institutions in order to maintain a supply of cheap, readily available labour (see also Paterson 2008). Cultural difference, he argues, obscured and legitimized exploitation; but at the same time it enabled Aboriginal people a degree of independence. However, Dutton’s narrative here reflects as much on the things that settler pastoralists learnt from Aboriginal people in their relationship with country, as it does on the ways that Aboriginal people remained autonomous on the pastoral frontier. At the heart of (p.42) the shared history of the pastoral industry lies ‘country’ or the landscape itself, and people’s interactions with(in) it. Pastoral landscapes formed the backdrop to the drama of Aboriginal and settler Australians coming to know both each other and the spaces in which they found themselves working. Rather than focusing on particular sites or artifacts associated with groups of colonized or colonizing people, this suggested we might instead focus on landscapes and the quotidian working spaces within them to develop more nuanced and integrated approaches to understanding the nature of pastoral histories.

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Shared Histories Shared Histories: The Mutual Heritage of Post-invasion Australia

In recounting this brief historiography of the Australian pastoral industry I have tried to emphasize the ways in which various models of colonial relations have not found a perfect fit as overarching models when applied to particular case studies, and how they tend to work only at particular scales of analysis. My own work has been an attempt to develop a framework which might allow historic Indigenous and settler archaeology and heritage to be considered together, within a model which had previously seen these as entirely separate domains. As had been noted by Lightfoot (1995) for North American archaeology, a situation had developed in Australia where the historical archaeology of Indigenous Australians tended to be carried out in isolation from nonIndigenous historical archaeology. To create a somewhat simple hypothetical situation, ‘contact’ archaeologists might focus on the Aboriginal fringe camp associated with a pastoral property, while ‘mainstream’ historical archaeologists recorded every brick and nail at the homestead with only tangential mention of the camps associated with its largely Aboriginal workforce (Byrne 1996; Harrison 2004a). In an attempt to overcome this pervasive separation of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non-Indigenous’ archaeological research and heritage management, as well as to emphasize the significant and complex cross-cultural interactions within the industry itself, I drew on the work of archaeologist Tim Murray (e.g. 1996a, 1996b, 2004a, 2004b) and the cross-cultural histories of Peter Read (1996, 1998, 2000) and Henry Reynolds (1982, 1987, 1990) to develop a framework which considered the ‘shared histories’ of the pastoral industry (see Harrison 2004a, 2004b, 2008). I use the term ‘shared histories’ to refer to an approach which draws on a range of different sources—archaeological, archival, and oral—and seeks to elucidate the relationship between the deep prehistory of indigenous people and the mutual histories of Indigenous and nonIndigenous people working and living together in settler colonial contexts (Harrison 2004a, 2004b, 2008). At one spatial scale, these mutual histories focus on the local, quotidian, lived experience of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people working and living together within the pastoral industry. This focus on shared labour histories and ways of ‘being’ allows us to move beyond racial categories to focus on the (p.43) everyday experiences of colonialism, and to consider the intersection of labour and colonialism with other forms of identity politics such as gender (Harrison 2002a). However, at broader scales of analysis, this model of shared histories also encompasses the shared experiences of segregation and frontier warfare, the ways in which racial differences are employed strategically, and how power and Page 7 of 24

Shared Histories authority are enacted through violence and conflict. Although clearly Aboriginal people and settlers experienced these arenas of racial violence and segregation differently, they are part of a history of Australia that has been mutually constitutive of whom both Aboriginal and settler Australians are today. Shared histories are about acknowledging the mutuality in racial relations in Australian history, and the role that these mutual self-definitions have played in constituting contemporary Australian identities. As Deborah Bird Rose and Darrell Lewis (1992:35) note: The histories of black and white people in this country are not disconnected. This is a rather dramatic story; it is not the story found in history books . . . but . . . it is the kind of history everyone has. We are suggesting that the doing of history—oral history, place oriented history, small-scale face to face histories of the real relationships between black and white people on this continent— recovers an area of silence. The recovery demonstrates that the concept of black and white history is too simple . . . [these are] the histories of people who have shared time and space, shared work and leisure, shared life and death. This approach presents a radically different perspective on an aspect of history that most Australians feel they know well. This new perspective provides a challenge to a series of deeply pervasive mythologies about the historical arenas within which both settler and Aboriginal Australians came to know each other, and the changing landscapes in which they lived. It uncovers the shared history of people becoming contemporary Australians. Its emphasis on an unfinished process of becoming (cf. Harrison 2011; see also Pruecel 2011) shifts our gaze away from idealized categories of racial difference to emphasize the quotidian experiences of individuals, groups, and communities at a range of different spatial and historical scales. While there has been some apprehension that the idea of ‘shared’ or ‘entangled’ histories may provide an opportunity for the cultural and historical appropriation of an Indigenous colonial experience by settlers (Lydon 2006; McNiven and Russell 2005), I have argued (2004a) that this concept of shared histories must emphasize violence, unequal power relations, and cultural misunderstanding while simultaneously recognizing the importance of cross-cultural engagement. Although people may experience and perceive historical events differently, the object of such research is to write a historical archaeology of Australia that includes both Aboriginal people and settlers, rather than one which isolates different forms of archaeology and subsequently denies the

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Shared Histories significance of colonial entanglements in the subsequent production of a postcolonial Australia.

(p.44) Beers, Steers, and Spears: The Shared Material Culture of Pastoralism in the Southeast Kimberley Region of Western Australia Many case studies of ‘contact’ archaeology and pastoralism in Australia have focused on the material culture of Aboriginal pastoral labourers and stock camps. The focus in such studies has been on those things which might be termed ‘traditional’ Aboriginal tools manufactured using ‘non-traditional’ raw materials: knapped bottle glass artifacts, metal spear points, and other ‘hybrid’ artifact forms (e.g. Harrison 2002c, 2003a, 2006; Paterson 2003, 2008; Smith 2001). While the issue of the meaning of the metaphorical ‘transformation’ of European into Aboriginal material culture has received some attention (e.g. Harrison 2003a), and its flip side in the collection of Indigenous objects by European collectors (e.g. Harrison 2002a, 2006), the shared nature of this material culture has not been examined explicitly. The invasion of the Kimberley region in northwestern Australia by nonIndigenous settlers occurred relatively late in comparison with most regions of Australia. Remote and with little infrastructure, much of the Kimberley region was taken up for cattle (and some sheep) grazing by 1900, and Aboriginal people formed a major labour source for this extensive and labour-intensive form of pastoralism. Aboriginal people often formed large community camps on the edges of pastoral stations, where they received rations in return for labour. The region’s long wet season allowed a ‘holiday time’ when people were released from work duties, enabling them to return to country and undertake traditional activities and ceremonies (Head and Fullagar 1997; Shaw 1992). This relationship between Aboriginal people and pastoral labour lasted until 1967, when award wages equal to those of settler Australians were introduced for Aboriginal people. At this time many Aboriginal people were forced off pastoral stations that were unwilling or unable to pay these new rates. Large numbers of Aboriginal people moved into rural towns, causing massive unemployment and overcrowding. I undertook intensive fieldwork in the Kimberley region of northwestern Australia over the period 1997–1999 (Harrison 2002c), exploring the long-term contact history of Indigenous Jaru language speakers and ‘outsiders’ in the region. A particular focus of my work was a detailed analysis of the surface artifacts and a series of excavations at the Aboriginal pastoral workers’ ‘fringe camp’ associated with Old Lamboo Station. This camp was known according to oral accounts to have housed up to several hundred Aboriginal workers over the period 1903– Page 9 of 24

Shared Histories 1967. The site was defined by a series of clearly visible hearths representing the remains of family camps, characterized by dense mounded concentrations of charcoal and associated knapped stone and glass artifacts (Harrison 2004c). Despite my focus on modified ‘Aboriginal’ objects in the initial stages of my research, many artifacts recovered from excavations and surface collections at the Old Lamboo Aboriginal workers’ encampment were unmodified, (p.45) manufactured ‘Western’ objects, such as tin cans, belt buckles, wax match boxes and tobacco tins. Although these items could not be identified as ‘Indigenous’ objects on the basis of an analysis of their form or fabric, the Aboriginal people with whom I worked nonetheless perceived many of them to be fundamental to their sense of identity and the ‘spatial story’ (cf. de Certeau 1984) of colonialism in the region (see further discussion in Harrison 2002b). That such unmodified ‘Western’ artifacts were considered significant by Aboriginal people contradicts their classification as non-Aboriginal artifacts in traditional archaeological typologies. For example, old tobacco and match tins are very important to Aboriginal people, as both the informants and their kin used them in the past. Their presence at these fringe camps was considered to physically attest to one of the important reasons for Aboriginal people ‘coming in’ to pastoral stations (see also Baker 1999); people frequently picked them up from the ground or pointed to them in conversations about the hunger for tea and tobacco that was one of the reasons for Aboriginal people moving in from the bush to live with Europeans. On the other hand, these are clearly objects that were introduced by gardiya.1 The entanglement of Aboriginal and settler material culture on the pastoral frontier belies any attempt to quantify ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘European’ artifact forms, as has been attempted in other archaeological studies of Indigenous– European contact in Australia (e.g. Birmingham 1992, 2000). The idea that such objects are not ‘traditional’ (e.g. Smith 2001) in the sense in which they now speak of the continued existence of the past in the present (after Sztompka 1993:59–60) is simplistic and runs counter to the meanings that these objects are attributed by contemporary Aboriginal people. Similarly, belt buckles, horse harness, and trouser buttons (Figure 1.3) were seen to be significant ‘Aboriginal’ artifacts by the contemporary Jaru people with whom I worked. The importance of stockwork and its ‘cowboy’ uniform and associated paraphernalia to Aboriginal men in the north of Australia has been discussed elsewhere by a number of authors (e.g. Baker 1999; McGrath 1987; Rowse 1987, 1998; Shaw 1986; Shaw and Sullivan 1983). Rowse has discussed the role of the patronage of pastoral station managers in assigning rank to cattle Page 10 of 24

Shared Histories station workers (Rowse 1987; see also Shaw and Sullivan 1983:10–27). A scale of prestige operated on pastoral stations that was expressed not only in the ways in which workers were treated, but also in the distribution of food, how they were dressed, how an individual was paid for their labour, and the physical distance at which an individual was commonly allowed to approach the homestead (Rowse 1987:89–90). ‘This one here must be a ringer’2 was what (p.46) one of my informants said as he picked up a fancy belt buckle from one of the camp-sites. The location of these objects within the fringe camp was thus understood by informants to be the result of a range of factors, and the presence of buckles and trouser buttons to be associated with the status of the person that camped in a particular place.

Fig. 1.3. Belt buckles, trouser buttons, and a boot plate recovered from excavations and surface collections at Old Lamboo Station.

At Lamboo, these ‘Western’ manufactured artifacts were reworked in a number of different ways, which makes their strict interpretation as ‘European’ or ‘Aboriginal’ artifacts impossible (Harrison 2002b). Objects were simultaneously symbols of control and inequality, while also demonstrating complex, shifting processes of identity expression and formation. The presence of such objects represents the results of quotidian decisions which were played out as part of intricate and longterm processes. These processes were fluid and ongoing, with their material correlates changing through time. Today, these objects represent part of the material heritage of both Jaru people and the region’s white settlers. Such objects elude classification using conventional racially based archaeological typologies, despite being fundamentally caught up in the politics of identity and racial difference.

Songlines and Mustering Tracks: Shared Pastoral Landscapes at Kunderang East Pastoral Station, Northeastern New South Wales, Australia Page 11 of 24

Shared Histories Another example comes from my work on the opposite side of the country at Kunderang East pastoral station, in the northeastern part of NSW in southeastern Australia. An analysis of the way in which preand post-invasion (p.47) archaeological sites are distributed across the landscape demonstrates how the activities of settler and Aboriginal pastoralists ‘mapped on’ to much earlier patterns of movement and occupation of the Kunderang ravines. This has important implications for the way in which we view the pastoral history in this area, as something which is intimately related to and ‘learned from’ Aboriginal people. In a very real sense, this provides an example of the fundamental entanglement of Aboriginal and settler histories on the NSW pastoral frontier, problematizing the distinction between Aboriginal and settler heritage in Australia. In my work I have pushed this line of argument to its logical extreme, arguing for the fundamental link between Aboriginal and pastoral understandings of the landscape, and suggesting a causal (per Harrison 2004a) link between the use of ceremonial pathways as mustering tracks and the relationship between pastoral narrative forms and Aboriginal songlines (see Harrison 2004a). Kunderang East pastoral station is located in the upper Macleay River valley, approximately 100 km southeast of Armidale in northeastern NSW in Oxley Wild Rivers National Park. It is situated in rugged gorge country, on the site of part of an earlier sheep station established in 1841. Kunderang East was established as an owner-occupied run in 1892, and for the next one hundred years its cattle, horses, and stockmen established an impressive reputation which was no doubt influenced by the rugged grandeur of the country in which it was located. An archaeological and oral history project involved mapping both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples’ memories of this landscape and places within it, focusing on trails and patterns of movement. During oral history interviews, people were asked to map their recollections of events and places on to topographic maps and aerial photographs, which were subsequently transferred as layers on to a GIS. The maps were then used to identify places such as remote huts and camps that had previously not been documented in detail, and trips to these sites were arranged with those people who ‘remembered’ them, so that the sites could be recorded (Harrison 2004a). Despite the previous interpretations of Kunderang as a place associated with settler heritage, through the process of mapping archaeological sites and the landscape biographies of former station workers, a picture of a shared pastoral history immediately underlain by pre-invasion Aboriginal places emerged. Prior to 1820 the rugged, dissected gorge country had been crossed by Aboriginal pathways representing a specific and archaeologically identifiable land-use pattern. Page 12 of 24

Shared Histories Encampments focused on the tablelands and river flats below, while pathways ran along spurs and ridges. During the 1830s, settlers were shown the locations of these pathways, which became the main travel routes for the passage of cattle in and out of the Kunderang Ravines (Figure 1.4). Mustering camps and pastoral huts were established at the same points that Aboriginal camping places had previously been sited—the landscape is a literal palimpsest. After a thirty-year period of protracted frontier warfare, many (p.48)

Fig. 1.4. (a) Map showing hypothetical model of precontact Aboriginal patterns of movement and exchange along the Macleay River based on archaeological site patterning (after Godwin 1999). (b) Map showing the ways in which early

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Shared Histories (p.49) Aboriginal pastoral tracks and settlements mapped people became on to the same pattern of movement incorporated into the along the river. early pastoral economy in response to a statewide labour shortage caused by the movement of many white labourers to the goldfields in the 1850s and 1860s. Aboriginal labour formed a fundamental part of the success and ‘culture’ of Kunderang pastoral station. Many of the Aboriginal and settler pastoral labourers who were interviewed during the course of the project shared a particular view of the landscape that was formed through the shared process of working together in the gorge country. Human–cattle metaphors were often used as the basis for understanding the relationships between people and the landscape (Harrison 2004a). This clear historical relationship between Aboriginal people and settler pastoralists in the gorges forms the basis for understanding this shared understanding of landscape. Despite the obvious impacts of white settlement on Aboriginal lifeways in this area, the influence of Aboriginal people on settlers was even more profound. It was as a result of the history of black and white encounters and negotiation that the shared pastoral culture in the Kunderang Gorges was created.

Like Jeremy Beckett (1978), I do not think it is too much of a stretch of the imagination to see the oral histories and storylines of pastoral workers as the pastoral equivalent of Dreaming songlines. Indeed, Rumsey’s (2001:23) generalized description of Australian Aboriginal Dreamings based on Strehlow’s work with the Aranda could also be read as a description of the relationship between pastoral narrative and place. People . . . are linked to country through these creative acts . . . through the connections among places that are established by the movements of the travelling dreamings. Knowledge of those creative acts, places, songs, and stories is itself localised, owned by the people for those places, as are the languages that were left in their country. Like Dreaming songlines, pastoral narratives are rhizome-like (after Deleuze and Guattari 1988). Deleuze and Guattari developed this concept as part of a theory of ‘nomadology’ that describes the predisposition of the ‘West’ to be dominated by arborescent or ‘treelike’ models of thought in which fixed, hierarchical relationships are emphasized. Rhizomes or rootstocks are non-hierarchical, forming a system in which offshoots from a rootstock can reconnect at any point. Rumsey (2001; see also Benterrak et al. 1996) perceives within this model a way of conceptualizing Aboriginal understandings of

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Shared Histories landscape, particularly those encapsulated within the framework of ‘Dreaming’. One of the defining features of the Dreaming is a set of non-hierarchical relationships that were developed between Dreaming ancestors and the places they interacted with and created as they moved along defined tracks across country. Aboriginal people own prescribed sections of a Dreaming songline for their own country: ‘People know the story for a particular segment of the (p.50) journey within their own country. It cannot be otherwise, because in an important sense the country is the story’ (Rumsey 2001:24). For the Aboriginal and settler pastoralists who I interviewed about Kunderang, those sections of the story which described their relationships with place were equally prescribed by their own and their forebears’ creative movement through the gorge country. Often one interviewee would refer me to another once we had mapped up to what they understood to be the edge of their storyline or country. Land ownership cross-cut these former pastoral workers’ appreciation of who owns the right to speak for various bits of country. This right is not so much constituted by land ownership, as by the creative power of people’s actions within it. The country, for both Aboriginal Dreamings and pastoral narratives, is the story.

Conclusion That the pastoral industry was an arena for the development of both shared and overlapping identities and ways of relating to the landscape for Aboriginal people and settlers is a startling revelation. Such notions have the potential to destabilize the discourses on which settler colonialism depends to maintain its ‘other(s)’. Ian Lilley (2006) has suggested that archaeologists in settler societies such as Australia might profitably theorize the condition of both Aboriginal people and settlers as diasporic (see also Harrison 2003b), as a way of developing integrated narratives of history. Lilley (2006:42) notes: Those of us who believe that an understanding of the dynamics of diaspora can help stop colonizers and the colonized from talking past each other thus need to make certain that the story of continuing Indigenous connectedness gets the same sort of hearing as that long enjoyed by the story of dispossession, while at the same time ensuring that settler sacrifices, attachments to land and fears of displacement are taken seriously rather than simply dismissed as corollaries of rednecked racism. Archaeology

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Shared Histories is well placed to help advance this effort through its emergent focus on cultural continuity as well as change and on shared histories flowing from colonial entanglement. An archaeological approach to shared histories does not deny the fundamental inequalities in relations of power that lie at the heart of colonialism (González-Ruibal 2010), which necessarily produce friction in both the contemporary world (Tsing 2005) and in the past. Neither does it deny the importance of the ethical and political issues which have been raised by international Indigenous rights movements, the political value of strategic essentialism (cf. Spivak 1996) for Indigenous people (see also Harrison 2010), nor the real need to acknowledge the social, economic, and material impacts of colonialism (p.51) on First Peoples. Instead, it focuses both on the quotidian ways in which human lives were lived in and through a particular landscape in which individual and collective identities were in the process of constantly being made and remade, and on the multiple categories of similarity and difference on which these identities drew. The idea of shared history was driven by an attempt to shift away from the racially determined categories which seemed to me to still be present within archaeological approaches to hybridity (the term does, after all, refer to the mixing of biological categories), under circumstances where it would be incorrect to refer to ethnogenesis due to the existence of fundamental and systemic inequalities. Instead, my approach is influenced by James Clifford’s (2001, 2004, see also 1997) discussion of Indigeneity as performed and emergent (see also Merlan 2008), and draws on Stuart Hall’s (1986) articulation theory (see further discussion in Harrison 2013). This couples an acknowledgement of the important work done by contemporary Indigenous activists and scholars to demonstrate their sustained experiences of cultural continuity, survival, and resistance (e.g. de la Cadena and Starn 2007; Deloria 1969) with a definition of Indigeneity which is innovative, emergent and mobile. Articulated models of culture put aside an organismic model of culture for an ‘articulated’ one, in which the arrival and departure of traditions and practices are perceived not as aspects of cultural decline, but as necessary moments of uncoupling and rearticulation. Articulation theory recognizes that cultures and cultural forms can and must be ‘made, unmade and remade’ (Clifford 2001:479). Thus the transformation of one aspect of culture, for example language, does not cause the ‘death’ of the ‘culture-asorganism’, but instead is seen as a moment of reassembling or rearticulation. This means that the question of authenticity is removed and cultural ‘invention’ is rearticulated as cultural persistence and continuity. But it is important to recognize that these processes of Page 16 of 24

Shared Histories Indigenous articulation for the colonized were occurring at the same time as a series of parallel processes for the colonizers. Despite the power of fixed categories of difference, colonizers such as those nonIndigenous pastoralists in East Kimberley and in northeastern NSW were also experiencing profound moments of cultural uncoupling and rearticulation. The archaeology of shared histories is thus an archaeology of becoming in which categories of colonized and colonizer must necessarily be troubled and treated with suspicion. This approach has implications not only for the way in which we approach the archaeology of colonialism in settler societies, but also for the ways in which we apply postcolonial theory to archaeology more generally, shifting our gaze away from the ‘politics of polarity’ to focus on local, regional, national, and ‘global’ processes of identity formation, and the varied articulations and rearticulations of culture which occurred as a result of these colonial entanglements and trajectories. (p.52) References Bibliography references: Baker, Richard 1999 Land is Life from Bush to Town: The Story of the Yanyuwa People. Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, New South Wales. Beckett, Jeremy 1978 George Dutton’s Country: Portrait of an Aboriginal Drover. Aboriginal History 2:2–31. Benterrak, Kim, Stephen Mueke, and Paddy Roe 1996 Reading the Country: An Introduction to Nomadology. Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, Western Australia. Bhabha, Homi K. [1994] 2004 The Location of Culture. Routledge, London. Birmingham, Judy 1992 Wybalenna: The Archaeology of Cultural Accommodation in Nineteenth-century Tasmania. The Australian Society for Historical Archaeology, Sydney, New South Wales. Birmingham, Judy 2000 Resistance, Creolization or Optimal Foraging at Kilalpaninna Mission, South Australia. In The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross Cultural Engagements in Oceania, edited by Robin Torrence and Anne Clarke, pp. 360–405. Routledge, London. Boyoi, Waddi and Johnny Walker 1991 Bush Time, Station Time: Reminiscences of 80 Years. Adelaide Aboriginal Studies and Teacher

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Shared Histories Education Centre, University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia. Brock, Peggy 1995 Pastoral Stations and Reserves in South and Central Australia, 1850s–1950s. Labour History 69:102–14. Byrne, Denis 1996 Deep Nation: Australia’s Acquisition of an Indigenous Past. Aboriginal History 20:82–107. Clendinnen, Inga 2005 Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Clifford, James 1997 Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Clifford, James 2001 Indigenous Articulations. The Contemporary Pacific 13:468–90. Clifford, James 2004 Looking Several Ways: Anthropology and Native Heritage in Alaska. Current Anthropology 45:5–30. Cohen, Bill 1987 To My Delight: The Autobiography of Bill Cohen, a Grandson of the Gumbangarri. Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra. Cowlishaw, Gillian 1999 Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: A Study of Racial Power and Intimacy in Australia. Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, New South Wales. de Certeau, Michel 1984 The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, Berkeley, California. de la Cadena, Marisol and Orin Starn (eds) 2007 Indigenous Experience Today. Berg, Oxford. Deleuze, Giles and Felix Guattari 1988 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Continuum, London. Deloria, Vine, Jr 1969 Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. MacMillan, New York. Given, Michael 2004 The Archaeology of the Colonized. Routledge, London. Godwin, Luke 1999. Two Steps Forward, One Back: Some Thoughts on the Settlement Models for the North Coast of New South Wales, in Australian Coastal Archaeology, edited by Jay Hall and Ian J. McNiven,

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Shared Histories pp. 211–17. Research Papers in Archaeology (p.53) and Natural History Number 31. Department of Archaeology and Natural History RSPAS, Australian National University, Canberra. González-Ruibal, Alfredo 2010 Colonialism and European Archaeology. In Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology, edited by Jane Lydon and Uzma Z. Rizvi, pp. 39–50. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. Goodall, Heather 1996 Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972. Allen & Unwin/Black Books, St Leonards, New South Wales. Gosden, Chris 2004 Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hall, Stuart 1986 On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall. Journal of Communication Inquiry 10:45–60. Harrison, Rodney 2002a Archaeology and the Colonial Encounter: Kimberley Spear Points, Cultural Identity and Masculinity in the North of Australia. Journal of Social Archaeology 2:352–77. Harrison, Rodney 2002b Australia’s Iron Age: Aboriginal Post-contact Metal Artefacts from Old Lamboo Station, Southeast Kimberley, WA. Australasian Historical Archaeology 20:67–76. Harrison, Rodney 2002c Ngarranganni/Ngamungamu/Jilinijarra: ‘Lost Places’, Recursiveness and Hybridity at Old Lamboo Pastoral Station, Southeast Kimberley. PhD dissertation, Department of Archaeology, University of Western Australia. Harrison, Rodney 2003a ‘The Magical Virtue of These Sharp Things’: Mimesis, Colonialism and Knapped Bottle Glass Artefacts in Australia. Journal of Material Culture 8:311–36. Harrison, Rodney 2003b The Archaeology of ‘Lost Places’: Ruin, Memory and the Heritage of the Aboriginal Diaspora in Australia. Historic Environment 17:18–23. Harrison, Rodney 2004a Shared Landscapes: Archaeologies of Attachment and the Pastoral Industry in New South Wales. University of New South Wales Press, Sydney. Electronic document, accessed 12 November 2012.

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Shared Histories Harrison, Rodney 2004b Shared Histories and the Archaeology of the Pastoral Industry in Australia. In After Captain Cook: The Archaeology of the Recent Indigenous Past in Australia, edited by Rodney Harrison and Christine Williamson, pp. 37–58. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California/Lanham, Maryland. Harrison, Rodney 2004c Contact Archaeology and the Landscapes of Pastoralism in the North-West of Australia. In The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies, edited by Tim Murray, pp. 109–43. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Harrison, Rodney 2006 An Artefact of Colonial Desire? Kimberley Points and the Technologies of Enchantment. Current Anthropology 47:63–88. Harrison, Rodney 2008 Historical Archaeology in the Land of the Black Stump. In Beyond the Black Stump: Histories of Outback Australia, edited by Alan Mayne, pp. 85–112. Wakefield Press, Kent Town, South Australia. Harrison, Rodney 2010 Stone Artefacts. In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, pp. 515–36. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Harrison, Rodney 2011 Surface Assemblages: Towards an Archaeology In and Of the Present. Archaeological Dialogues 18:141–96. (p.54) Harrison, Rodney 2013 Reassembling Ethnographic Museum Collections. In Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency, edited by Rodney Harrison, Sarah Byrne, and Anne Clarke, pp. 3–35. School of Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Head, Lesley and Richard Fullagar 1997 Hunter-gatherer Archaeology and Pastoral Contact: Perspectives from the Northwest Northern Territory, Australia. World Archaeology 28:418–28. Hunt, Susan 1986 Spinifex and Hessian: Women in North-West Australia, 1860–1900. University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands. Laurie, Amy and Anne McGrath 1985 I was a Drover Once Myself; Amy Laurie of Kununurra. In Fighters and Singers: The Lives of Some Aboriginal Women, edited by Dianne Barwick, Betty Meehan, and Isobel White, pp. 76–90. Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, New South Wales.

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Shared Histories Liebmann, M. and Melissa S. Murphy (eds) 2011 Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas. School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Lightfoot, Kent 1995 Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship Between Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology. American Antiquity 60:199–217. Lilley, Ian 2006 Archaeology, Diaspora and Decolonisation. Journal of Social Archaeology 6:28–47. Lydon, Jane 2006 Pacific Encounters, or Beyond the Islands of History. In Historical Archaeology, edited by Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman, pp. 293–312. Blackwell, Oxford. Lydon, Jane, and Uzma Z. Rizvi 2010 Introduction: Postcolonialism and Archaeology. In Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology, edited by Jane Lydon and Uzma Z. Rizvi, pp. 17–33. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. McGrath, Anne 1987 Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, New South Wales. McNiven, Ian and Lynette Russell 2005 Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Merlan, Francesca 2008 Indigeneity: Global and Local. Current Anthropology 50:303–33. Meskell, Lynn 2010 Ethnographic Interventions. In Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology, edited by Jane Lydon and Uzma Z. Rizvi, pp. 445–58. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. Murray, Tim 1996a Contact Archaeology: Shared Histories? Shared Identities? In SITES: Nailing the Debate: Interpretation in Museums, edited by Susan Hunt and Jane Lydon, pp. 199–213. Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Sydney. Murray, Tim 1996b Towards a Post-Mabo Archaeology of Australia. In In the Age of Mabo, edited by Bain Attwood, pp. 73–87. Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, New South Wales. Murray, Tim 2004a In the Footsteps of George Dutton: Developing a Contact Archaeology of Temperate Aboriginal Australia, In The

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Shared Histories Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies, edited by Tim Murray, pp. 200–25. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Murray, Tim 2004b Epilogue: An Archaeology of Indigenous/NonIndigenous Australia from 1788. In After Captain Cook: The Archaeology of the Recent Indigenous Past in Australia, edited by Rodney Harrison and Christine Williamson, pp. 213–24. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California/Lanham, Maryland. (p.55) Paterson, Alistair G. 2003 The Texture of Agency: An Example of Culture-contact in Central Australia. Archaeology in Oceania 38:52–65. Paterson, Alistair G. 2008 The Lost Legions: Culture Contact in Colonial Australia. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Paterson, Alistair, Nicholas Gill, and M. Kennedy 2003 An Archaeology of Historical Reality? A Case Study of the Recent Past. Australian Archaeology 57: 82–9. Pruecel, Robert W. 2011 Becoming Navajo: Refugees, Pueblitos, and Identity in the Dinéta. In Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of the Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Melissa S. Murphy, pp. 223–42. School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Read, Peter 1996 Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Read, Peter 1998 Sharing the Country. Aboriginal History 22:94–104. Read, Peter 2000 Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Reynolds, Henry 1982 The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia. Penguin, Melbourne. Reynolds, Henry 1987 The Law of the Land. Penguin, Melbourne. Reynolds, Henry 1990 With the White People. Penguin, Melbourne. Rose, Deborah Bird and Darrell Lewis 1992 A Bridge and a Pinch. Public History Review 1:26–36. Rowse, Tim 1987 Were You Ever Savages? Aboriginal Insiders and Pastoralists’ Patronage. Oceania 58:81–99.

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Shared Histories Rowse, Tim 1998 White Flour, White Power: From Rations to Citizenship in Central Australia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Rumsey, Alan 2001 Tracks, Traces and Links to Land in Aboriginal Australia, New Guinea, and Beyond. In Emplaced Myth: Space, Narrative and Knowledge in Aboriginal Australia and Papua New Guinea, edited by Alan Rumsey and James F. Weiner, pp. 19–42. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. Shaw, Bruce (ed.) 1986 Countrymen: The Life Histories of Four Aboriginal Men as Told to Bruce Shaw. Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra. Shaw, Bruce 1992 Historical Background. In When the Dust Come in Between: Aboriginal Viewpoints of the East Kimberley Prior to 1982, as Told to Bruce Shaw, edited by Bruce Shaw, pp. 13–26. Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra. Shaw, Bruce and Jack Sullivan 1983 Banggaiyerri: The Story of Jack Sullivan, as Told to Bruce Shaw. Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra. Silliman, Stephen W. 2001 Agency, Practical Politics and the Archaeology of Culture Contact. Journal of Social Archaeology 1:190– 209. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005 Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America. American Antiquity 70:55– 74. Silliman, Stephen W. 2010 Writing New Archaeological Narratives: Indigenous North America. In Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology, edited by Jane Lydon and Uzma Z. Rizvi, pp. 145–64. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. Smith, Pamela 2001 Station Camps: Identifying the Archaeological Evidence for Continuity and Change in Post-contact Aboriginal Sites in the South Kimberley, Western Australia. Australian Archaeology 53:23– 31. (p.56) Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 1996 Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography. In The Spivak Reader, edited by Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, pp. 203–36. Routledge, New York. Stein, Gil L. 2005 Introduction: The Comparative Archaeology of Colonial Encounters. In The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters, edited

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Shared Histories by Gil J. Stein, pp. 3–31. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Stoler, Ann L. 1989 Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule. Comparative Studies in Society and History 31:134–61. Sztompka, Piotr 1993 The Sociology of Social Change. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. Tsing, Anna L. 2005 Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. van Dommelen, Peter 2005 Colonial Interactions and Hybrid Practices: Phoenician and Carthaginian Settlement in the Ancient Mediterranean. In The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters, edited by Gil J. Stein, pp. 109–42. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Notes:

(1)  Word used in several southern Kimberley languages for nonAboriginal people. (2)  The term ‘ringer’ here refers to the expertise of a stockperson in handling cattle; it is roughly equivalent to the terms ‘vaquero’ or ‘buckaroo’ in southern U.S. cattle-ranching parlance. In the sense in which the word is used here, this old man was referring to the high status attributed to experienced cattle workers in the stock-camp. The informant’s name is omitted from the paper, according to Jaru custom in relation to deceased community members.

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Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence Navigating Colonial and Scholarly Dualities Stephen W. Silliman

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords This chapter explores the concepts of survivance and residence as novel ways of thinking about complex social and material outcomes, along with their political implications, for historical and archaeological research. These concepts are used to demonstrate the ‘archaeology of the colonised’ by focusing on an archaeological case involving the 225acre reservation of the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation in southeastern Connecticut. This case shows, in the contexts of the archaeology of colonialism and indigeneity, what is at stake — interpretively and politically — when measuring change and continuity in other times and places. Keywords:   survivance, residence, archaeological research, archaeology, colonised, reservation, Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation, Connecticut, colonialism, indigeneity

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Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence Introduction As the archaeology of colonialism and Indigenous peoples continues to mature, the theoretical models and terminologies applied to them continue to undergo refinements and seek a broader audience within global archaeologies. These refinements provide more secure anchors for our interpretive efforts as they try to rectify shortcomings in earlier models and classic studies, while still advancing along helpful trajectories founded by those very same studies. They also explicitly grapple with political contingencies and legacies that affect the practice of archaeology. Equally important, as this volume demonstrates, these refinements position the historical archaeology of Indigenous peoples, as Rubertone (2000) termed it, to contribute to broader global archaeologies. Over the past decade, contributions have been made in these ‘historical archaeologies of the colonized’ to the ways that archaeologists, both inside and outside of the study of colonialism, think about, study, operationalize, and critique core concepts of gender and sexuality (Voss 2008b, 2008c), labour (Silliman 2006, 2010; Voss 2008c), materiality (Harrison 2002a), bodies (Loren 2001, 2008), landscapes (Byrne 2003; Harrison 2004), resistance and revitalization (Liebmann 2008; Liebmann and Preucel 2007; Wilcox 2009), ethnogenesis (Voss 2008a), temporal scale (Ferris 2009; Silliman 2009), and the very nature of the interactions themselves that we variously call contact, colonialism, and entanglement across the epochs of human history (Gosden 2004; Jordan 2009, this volume; Silliman 2005; Torrence and Clark 2000). Our research contexts give unique purchase on these profound issues in worldwide archaeology, regardless of time or place. (p.58) Recently, my attempts in these areas have tackled a fundamental tenet of the historical archaeology of colonialism: the need to measure cultural change and continuity (Silliman 2009). My tackling has involved addressing, first, the so-called ‘need to measure’ aspect. What propels us to frame our questions in dichotomous either/or scenarios where Native people, communities, or their practices and materials either change or stay the same, as though remaining the same is the only option to have or express true indigeneity? What is the nature of this dichotomous thinking, and how deep-seated is it? Why do we have different standards when applying these same questions to settler/colonial populations during the same time periods? My efforts have also involved the exploration of several theoretical elements drawn from postcolonialist, decolonizing, and practice theories that emphasize agency, practice, hybridity, materiality, and social memory over different temporal scales. Herein lies real potential to advance the theoretical models used to interpret these complex Indigenous-lived Page 2 of 25

Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence colonialisms, as Ferris (2009) identifies them, and to turn these kinds of historical archaeologies towards wider relevance in anthropology, history, and the political world of today. In this chapter, I want to expand that theoretical discussion by further developing two concepts —survivance and residence—that may aid in these interpretive efforts. I do not propose them as unilateral replacement terms but rather as novel ways of thinking about complex social and material outcomes, along with their political implications, for historical and archaeological research. A brief application to an archaeological case from southern New England in the U.S. will demonstrate.

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Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence Survivance The first concept, survivance, was introduced by Gerald Vizenor (1994, 1998, 2008a), an Anishinaabe scholar and writer in Native American studies and literature. More accurately, he resurrected and reappropriated the term to speak to different interpretive issues than it had in its French-Canadian connotations and older English and French origins. To him, survivance ‘is more than survival, more than endurance or mere response . . . [S]urvivance is an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry’ (Vizenor 1998:15). With a slightly different inflection, ‘[s]urvivance stories are renunciations of dominance, detractions, obtrusions, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry’ (Vizenor 2008a:1). Vizenor uses this notion to frame stories of Indigenous persistence in nuanced ways that avoid the trap of treating history too neutrally or, conversely, too negatively. The neutral former involves representing Native survival as a simple and rather passive outcome in apologetic histories of colonialism, void of agency or struggle. The negative latter occurs when (p.59) Native survival is rendered as the victimized remnants of an oppressed people, a diminution that hardly ever grants agency, continuity, completeness, or authenticity. Despite being victimized by a variety of colonial and settler forces, many Indigenous peoples do not want their existence to be defined solely or primarily in terms of victimhood and certainly not always in reference to being colonized. In contrast, survivance emphasizes creative responses to difficult times, or agentive actions through struggle. It attempts to strike balance in these complicated interpretive realms. However, finding the right interpretive balance suggested by survivance is not easy to do. As Atalay (2006) outlined in her analysis of exhibits at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), a federal institution that opened on the National Mall in Washington, DC in 2003, one must be careful not to underemphasize the difficult circumstances that impinged upon community survival and not to forget the connection between those histories and current communities who proclaim that they are ‘still here’. To her, ‘the concept of survivance is not about avoiding or minimizing the horrors and tragedy of colonization. It includes agency and Native presence but does not refuse stories of struggle’ (Atalay 2006:609). As a result, Atalay finds the NMAI exhibit in the ‘Our Peoples’ gallery successful in its verbal explanation of survivance but lacking in its representation of the material contexts for it. In other words, do fairly neutral display cases of guns and bibles actually convey their historical, contextual materialities in people’s lives and deaths? Do they give a sense of

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Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence struggle? Given the multiple meanings of these objects in historically situated Indigenous lives, the displays convey a kind of decontextualized neutrality. Many have followed Vizenor’s lead and considered these issues of survivance in a variety of Native American written and spoken literatures. This has resulted in some additional contouring of the concept (Vizenor 2008b). ‘Survivance connotes survival with attitude, implying activity rather than passivity, using aggressive means not only to stay alive but to flourish. Contemporary Indians achieve survivance through reinventing who they are, finding new identities through telling traditional stories, and inventing new ones’ (Velie 2008:147). Native Americans in the past—that is, those not just ‘contemporary’—did the same thing, as exemplified by Krupat (2008) in his analysis of William Apess’ writings in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England as a Native American minister. Yet, historical efforts at survivance did not always require individuals to write or story their pasts in textual or oral form. They could live it, remember it, and inject it into their material culture. Therefore, we need more than theories and imaginings about textuality; we need analytical concepts about practice and materiality to develop the usefulness of survivance. Admittedly, Vizenor did not expound upon this term to develop fully an analytical concept outside of the literary realm, and anthropologists and archaeologists have not ventured far with it either (but see (p.60) some acknowledgement by Mancini 2009; Roscoe 1995), so I take some liberties in doing that here. Embedded in the concept of survivance is the ability—put somewhat simply—to change in order to stay the same. Survivance recognizes that these may well be the same process. People in the past may not have intended either to explicitly change or remain the same; instead, they may have sought simply, although never easily, to persist. The idea is similar to the process of (re)articulation, as Clifford (2001) has argued captures the ways that cultures can persist through making, unmaking, and remaking rather than simply falling into decline or becoming something else entirely (see also Harrison, this volume). Stated differently, survivance permits hybridity, a blending of new and old cultural materialities without invoking problematic ideas of cultural authenticity outside of legitimate ‘acts to persist’. It also simultaneously negates hybridity, when such an idea implies a simple mixture of earlier forms to produce something not particularly new, but not really old either. Similar arguments in different language have been made, for example, by Hodge (2005) for southern New England, and Prince

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Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence (2002), Tveskov (2007), and Oliver (this volume) for the Northwest Coast. Finally, survivance develops a position that does not give final authority to anthropologists or the non-Native public for deciding whether or not a culture has changed enough to become a different one. Survivance foregrounds a notion of community, whether of identity, relation, or practice, rather than the slippery concept of culture long held on to by anthropologists and long lost in analytical power in broader public discourses. It questions what ‘culture’ really means in these colonial and indigenous contexts outside of lived experiences. In its own way and alongside others, the concept of survivance counters notions of acculturation that still linger, sometimes subtly, in our terminologies and narratives. It helps create a new story, which is Vizenor’s key goal, albeit told through archaeological narration and not just Native ‘storiers’ (see Vizenor 2008a). Simultaneously, survivance situates community identities and authenticities in unique historical trajectories that involve community members looking back (social memory) and moving forward (intentional acts and repetitive practice). It offers an analytical perspective on persistence, which does not assume that all groups of people will continue in their same form, with their same boundaries, or with the same identities and membership, but rather makes the option of persistence equally available to the colonized and the colonizing, and the interstices between those dichotomies. In other words, survivance recognizes that people in the past may have acted to persist as individuals, as households, as communities, or as other entities. This act of ‘moving forward’ involved social actors sometimes thinking they would change things and other times thinking they would keep them constant, but not ever knowing with absolute certainty what effect those actions would end up having or how (p.61) they would be remembered. More often than not, social and material actions in the past were not designed or intended to promote continuity or change at a grand scale and certainly not at the scale that archaeologists evaluate them from the privilege of deep hindsight, but rather to move forward with some coherency and purpose. For example, did a Native American in the eighteenth century reach for a metal knife or a chert biface, or take a bit of beef or venison, to engage an explicit process of cultural— and therefore broad-scale and community-wide—change or continuity, or did they make that decision at that time in a complex mix of strategies, needs, functions, histories, and anticipations for themselves and in light of others? Survivance recognizes the fact that much of what

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Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence we call change and continuity are analytical projections backwards by us rather than projections forward by social actors who undertook those practices. Acting to persist and to survive gives a very different spin to what we once termed changing or staying the same.

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Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence Residence The idea of residence was introduced in 2001 in an article about the applications of practice theory—particularly notions of agency, doxa, and practical politics—to understand Indigenous negotiations of colonial situations (Silliman 2001; see uses in Cipolla 2008; Mitchell and Scheiber 2010:18; Silliman 2004). It was developed to pull away from the domination/resistance dichotomy, not because this dichotomy is not or has not been very real for many people in many times, but because the notion of resistance had lost some of its interpretive nuance due to over-application. In addition, I wanted to find a way to make theories of practice link explicitly to archaeological and anthropological attempts to understand the negotiations of power in colonial contexts. Since the residence concept was not developed fully ten years ago, I take this opportunity to further explicate the idea and explore the value that it might offer to archaeology. Although a notion of residence could be applied to any system of social and political inequality, my discussion of residence here is tuned to the theme of this book—the archaeological interpretations of Indigenous-lived colonialisms. Acts of residence involve individuals staking out claims for themselves, even under contexts of oppression and domination, that may have little to do with outright or even impromptu resistance and that relate more to living through or in those worlds (Silliman 2001:194–5). Certainly many Indigenous people acted in resistant ways in the colonial worlds that they inhabited, including a variety of practices such as displaying violence against colonists, fleeing colonial settlements, working through colonial legal systems to secure rights and demand justice, pilfering goods and food (such as livestock), feigning illness (p.62) and dodging labour requirements, and breaking work tools and religious imagery. These comprise the various acts of active and passive resistance, the latter of which is often considered a kind of ‘hidden transcript’, that archaeologists and anthropologists have been talking about for the past twenty-five years (e.g. Ferguson 1991; Paynter and McGuire 1991; Scott 1985, 1990). Such acts and their outcomes deserve our continued attention. Despite the clear admonitions to beware of the simple dichotomy between domination and resistance, archaeologists in the 1990s and 2000s trended towards seeing most actions of Indigenous individuals in colonial contexts as acts of resistance to counter claims of complete domination. These include everything from building houses in certain forms, to using stone tools, to eating their daily meals. Recently, more nuanced perspectives have been advanced that attempt to understand the actions of subordinate or subaltern individuals without relying on a Page 8 of 25

Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence kind of ubiquitous or ‘heroic’ resistance (Frazer 1999; Given 2004; Hutson 2002; Oliver, this volume; Scham 2001; see also Brown 1996). As Birmingham (2000:362) noted: ‘Resistance theory as it stands is illequipped to explore new values, initiatives, and innovative behaviours born out of the domination process itself and the dominance–resistance dichotomy constricts the systematic exploration of alternate behaviours.’ Because we seem to lack theoretical language for this phenomenon, other than the idea of creolization which I do not consider here due to space constraints, I return to the idea of residence. Many Indigenous people lived through colonialism and its attendant inequalities in everyday ways that may have had little to do with resistance, even when they may have resisted certain things at certain times during the course of those days or lives. For instance, not all, and perhaps not even many, meals prepared in Native households in colonial North America were designed explicitly to resist oppression and to make pronouncements of this resistance to people gathering to consume it and to those (e.g. colonists) who would likely have known little about it. Social agents conducted their daily practices, even when those practices became politicized, in ways that enabled them to go on, to adapt, and to survive in oppressive situations, either instead of, indifferent to, or while waiting for larger resistances. Their practices were geared to residing. Tying to the above, they were also about surviving, and not simply about changing or staying the same. As Scott (1985, 1990) and others have shown, many social agents are not active revolutionaries out to usurp the powers that oppress them, even if they desire such a role, but they may subvert or re-appropriate those powers or at least their materialities to some of their own ends. Individuals frequently organize their daily lives not around taking over a place but around forging residence in it. ‘Without leaving the place where he [sic] has no choice but to live and which lays down its law for him, he establishes within it a degree of plurality and creativity’ (de Certeau 1984:30). These acts of (p.63) residence, rather than resistance, are the ones that tend to form the basis of communities of practice and that more likely appear in the archaeological record. These are also the ones that gear towards duration, or what Oliver (this volume) has termed ‘life project agency’, without necessarily requiring negotiations or discourses of cultural identity. Although not always true, given the formation of maroon and resistance communities (e.g. Merrill 1994; Weik 1997), people usually coalesce socially around the way they live or perceive themselves to have lived—their residence and their

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Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence history—rather than around a focused and politicized attempt at resisting. Communities and individuals tend to transform or reproduce themselves through practices every day, and they do this by living in, rather than only against, the world around them. Scham (2001:201) has captured this issue nicely: ‘The reaction/ resistance model suggests that the need for establishing a cultural identity, a characteristic of the archaeology of the colonized, is subservient to the need to counter the dominant cultural paradigm.’ The concept of residence refocuses on the possibilities of cultural identity, persistence, and survivance, all while not ignoring potentially very important acts of resistance. It returns an agency to the colonized that is not just a reactive one and that gives more weight to how, rather than just against whom, they lived. This shift in perspective might permit, in some cases, a discussion of an outcome (e.g. residence) rather than an intention (e.g. resistance) for past practices that we seek to make sense of today through archaeological research. We can admit the slippery slope of tracking intentions in the past through the material record, even though we absolutely must consider these in our studies of the past. However, we have to recognize that all intentional action must contend primarily with the outcomes, not intentions, of others’ actions, for that is usually what social actors perceive or experience even at the same time that others act. These are the palpable and multiple interpretable exterior effects of what might be an internal state. What often matters most in these outcomes is how those actions and outcomes are remembered. For example, acts of residence can become acts of resistance when collectively remembered as such, depending on how events unfold after them, and how, when, and by whom they are summoned as heritage. This is contested terrain, though, as hinted above with the juxtaposition of change and continuity. Some may look back on their ancestors’ attempts to live through colonial circumstances as acts of heroism and resistance, even when those progenitors altered their material culture or food ways, because these permitted family and community persistence across generations. Others may reflect on those actions as not heroic enough, as not attempting more forcefully to overthrow the domination burdening them. These comprise memory work as they mobilize past events into contemporary heritage, and archaeologists participate in it as much as others do. The main point here is that whether an (p.64) act of residence becomes resistance may well be how it is recalled and how its outcomes are perceived by descendants, archaeologists, public officials, and many others. This leads back to

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Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence survivance and Vizenor’s (2008a) emphasis on stories. These remembrances, especially in the interplay between residence and resistance, and between change and continuity, may well lead to more contextualized survivance stories. The concept of residence does not imply a polar opposition to resistance, as though these exist as dichotomous categorizations of social action. It is not an either/or identifier. Rather, residence interferes in the pre-existing dichotomy of domination and resistance by offering a different node in the conceptual network. Finding a new intervention does not mean fence-sitting, as some might try to characterize this idea of residence. I do not propose residence as a sloppy compromise for what to call those things that do not look like outright resistance but clearly are not the result of utter domination either. Residence should not become a default state of interpretation, and it should not be used as an easy gimmick to keep from assessing real domination and real resistance. In other words, it is not an intellectual cop-out. Instead, it should be a fundamental theoretical concern about how to interpret the complexities of social action at different temporal scales, with variable social actors and agendas, and in light of opportunities and constraints in their daily and not-so-daily lives. Together, residence and survivance may open up more realistic views of Indigenous people and their ways forward in a wide array of colonial worlds. In an ironic twist, residence can be a strategy of simultaneously being dominated and resisting that domination, one that does not resolve a dialectic but works within it.

The Eastern Pequot Case Study To illustrate these concepts archaeologically, I offer a brief example from the Northeastern U.S. that not only benefits from the application of these ideas but also helped me to refine them for analytical purposes (Silliman 2009). Since 2003, I have been conducting a collaborative field project with the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation in southeastern Connecticut (Figure 2.1) that strives to recover and interpret aspects of their history through periods of colonialism overseen by British, American, and Connecticut State governments, and to train students and tribal members in the methods, theories, practices, and politics of collaborative archaeology (Silliman and Sebastian Dring 2008). The project focuses on their 225-acre reservation in North Stonington, Connecticut, that some members of the Eastern Pequot community have occupied for the past 325 years since its founding in 1683 by the Colony of Connecticut. (p.65)

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Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence The establishment of the reservation occurred in the volatile seventeenth century in southern New England. Within fifteen years of Dutch reconnaissance of the Connecticut River in 1613–1614, the Pequot— a large group that had leaders known as sachems, seasonal rounds, a mixed subsistence economy of horticulture and hunting and gathering, and a settlement pattern of Fig. 2.1. Location of study area in the large riverine and northeastern United States with coastal villages and smaller sites in upland Connecticut highlighted in dark shade and some coastal and the reservation location noted environs (McBride 1994) therein. —had established an Map produced by the author. exclusive wampum (shell bead) trading relationship with the Dutch and had begun to exercise political and territorial control over a large area (McBride 1994:13). Relations between Native groups and between them and Dutch and English settlers were tense by the 1630s (Cave 1996; Hauptman 1990; Salisbury 1982). A series of deaths and retaliations on colonial and Pequot sides of the interaction and the build-up of British aggression led to the Pequot War of 1636–1637 in which the British launched what many feel to be the first true attempt at colonial genocide in North America. The 1638 Treaty of Hartford following the Pequot War led to the distribution of surviving Pequot families to Mohegan and Narragansett communities, the selling of many survivors into slavery in the Caribbean, and the execution of others (Cave 1996; Salisbury 1982:222). The treaty stipulated that the remaining Pequot not return to their previous homelands, nor speak their tribal name again.

After several decades and the growing autonomy of Pequot groups that had reconstituted in the region under different leadership, the Colony of Connecticut placed the remaining Pequot on two reservations— Western (or Mashantucket) in 1666 and Eastern (or Pawcatuck) in 1683 —as a way of spatially and symbolically segregating a ‘conquered people’ in Connecticut (Campisi 1990; Den Ouden 2005). This was the colonial solidification of a divide within this once-united Pequot group, although intermarriage and cross-residence occurred frequently in the following centuries. The original 280-acre Eastern (p.66) Pequot Page 12 of 25

Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence reservation, later reduced to approximately 225 acres, had multiple effects. At one level, it provided a land base in a colonial landscape, albeit one that had some of the worst land for cultivation. It had to be constantly defended against settler encroachment from the late seventeenth century onwards by Eastern Pequot community members (Den Ouden 2005). At another level, the reservation served as a locale of spatial confinement away from their previous coastal territories and under oversight by European colonists and, later, Euro-Americans. It symbolized their marginalization in the economic world of colonial New England and their status as a supposedly conquered people, yet it became a vitally important land base in the transforming political and economic world of southern New England. Research thus far suggests that many Native Americans in southern New England in the mid-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries incorporated some features of European/colonial origin such as farming in new ways, raising and consuming livestock, and consuming industrially produced material goods, while they continued other longstanding practices from their Indigenous pasts or managed to use ‘European’ things in often distinctly ‘Native’ ways (Bragdon 1988; McBride 1990, 1993, 2005; Mrozowski et al. 2005, 2009; Silliman 2009; Silliman and Witt 2010; Silverman 2005). The eighteenth century witnessed shifts in housing from wigwams or weetus (bent saplings covered in bark mats) to framed wooden plank structures with nails and glass windows across the Eastern Pequot reservation, although the former remained, according to the archival record, a viable house form at the turn of the nineteenth century, despite their current elusiveness to archaeological detection. Reasons behind these changes in practices and the full diversity and timing of responses are not yet fully understood, although growing confinement to reservation lands may have prompted the shifts as a means of survival, at least at the nearby Mashantucket (Western) Pequot reservation (McBride 1990, 1993, 1996, 2005). To date, archaeological research on the Eastern Pequot reservation has focused primarily on five household sites, at the time of writing, spanning the period from the mid 1700s to the mid 1800s, which capture a century on the reservation starting about sixty years after its founding. Space constraints prevent any elaboration on details of these households (see Cipolla 2005; Silliman 2009; Silliman and Witt 2010), so I will focus instead on some broader patterns and some extension beyond previously published results that illustrate the points pertaining to survivance and residence. Four of the five sites reveal household

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Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence architecture comprised of framed wooden houses with nails, glass windows, and subfloor pits, crawlspaces, or cellars (Figure 2.2). The earliest of the five houses represents either a wigwam, a framed house without any foundational support, or a hybrid of these two technologies; further analysis should resolve this soon. All five sites reveal a range of market goods in use in these households, with ceramics such as redware, creamware, (p.67) pearlware, slipware, white salt-glazed stoneware, and grey and brown stoneware predominating (depending on the time period). All even have porcelain, a rather expensive type of ceramic during this period, albeit in small quantities. As revealed Fig. 2.2. Photograph of remnants of an in the material record early to middle nineteenth-century house and sometimes in the on the Eastern Pequot reservation, corresponding archival excavated in 2009. Maximum spread of one drawn from the rocks (A-B-C-D) represents stone chimney accounts of overseers collapse of rectangular wood-framed and store merchants home; line of rocks bisecting chimney (e.g. Silliman and Witt collapse (A-C) represents later 2010), each of the five scavenging of collapsed chimney stone to households had access build stone wall as part of larger field to glass bottles, metal tableware and vessels, system in late nineteenth century. white ball-clay pipes, Photograph by the author. and a variety of objects of personal adornment such as buttons, buckles, and glass beads (Patton 2007) (Figure 2.3). Residents in these households consumed a variety of meat products that blended livestock meat such as cattle and pig, both raised at home and acquired from markets and overseers along with plant foods, with wild foods such as fish, turtle, and shellfish (Cipolla et al. 2007; Fedore 2008). In one of these house sites dating to the late eighteenth century, shellfish remains were quite abundant, numbering in the tens of thousands in one midden location. Lithic materials are in relatively short supply at these houses, but we have recovered a few flakes, some gunflints, and rare pieces of worked window glass.

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Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence (p.68)

Survivance and Residence on the Reservation In decades past, one might have interpreted the archaeological record from the Eastern Pequot reservation as one of acculturation, Fig. 2.3. Buckle, buttons, and beads assuming that the recovered from late eighteenth- and early material culture from nineteenth-century houses on the Eastern these Native Pequot reservation, excavated in 2004 households and 2005. represented only Photograph by the author. culture change and therefore a diminution of indigeneity. Due to problematic analytical frameworks and historical politics, however, such groups could never really become more European, contrary to the tenets of such acculturative or assimilationist ideas, but only less Native. Thankfully, explicit acculturation approaches have faded from the discipline, but we still contend with its legacies in the ways that we conceptualize change and continuity, the ways that we value and approach these differently depending on whether the study population is the colonized or the colonizer, and the ways we culturally identify artifacts as Native or European (Silliman 2009). As Harrison (2002b, 2004, this volume) has also argued, we need to lose these categorical distinctions when looking at ‘shared histories’ of colonizer and colonized, not to render them equal and lacking distinction, but to emphasize the shared materiality and spatiality of co-existence. ‘Such objects elude classification using conventional racially based archaeological typologies, despite being fundamentally caught up in the politics of identity and racial difference’ (Harrison, this volume). For example, one way to interpret the Eastern Pequot archaeological information to date would be to examine it for evidence of cultural change and continuity. It would be much too easy to claim that the greater numbers of (p.69) ‘European’ artifacts in Eastern Pequot households in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, compared to that known about their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cultural practices (e.g. lithic use, local ceramic production, shell bead use), indicate that they had undergone significant culture change. Lithic

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Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence technology, in contrast, would be used to show some threads of continuity, although the significant reduction in use would also likely be used to discuss additional cultural change. An alternative would be to talk about resistance. Each inclusion of market goods could be interpreted as accommodation or acquiescence, whereas each flake of chipped stone or the flaked window glass conjures images of Native knappers resisting the influx of market goods and the loss of traditional practices. The same might be said of the shellfish, reptile, and fish remains scattered among the bones of European-introduced livestock, as Eastern Pequot held tightly to food practices that linked them to ancestral landscapes. As a result, one might conclude that the archaeological record indicated fairly little outright resistance or that it manifested more subtle everyday resistances, knowing the economic and racial politics that surrounded the Eastern Pequot community in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet, I am not comfortable seeing the consumption of meals as outright resistances when they may have more likely served to maintain families, and they may have alternated in content or preparation on a daily basis. Broad generalizations of change/continuity and accommodation/ resistance run the risk of swamping the complexity of the context and the historicity of material practices. They grant too much primacy to pre-given cultural identities of artifacts as either Native- or Europeanbased on their origin without considering the context of their use and meaning. These categorizations create false dichotomies that require people to either change or stay the same instead of having options of doing both or neither. They assume that the addition of new technologies, materials, foods, and lifestyles are not really additions at all, but rather subtractions or cultural losses. This is a fundamental problem that archaeologists need to reassess. They also assume, particularly in the case of resistance, that people are always acting against oppression rather than creatively persisting within its constraints and opportunities. To counter these interpretive conundrums, the concepts of residence and survivance capture a different nuance—the process by which this community persisted, not unchanged, not passive, and not without struggle. Survivance for the Eastern Pequot meant always negotiating what it meant to be Native in post-1600 New England in the context of daily household practices, social memory, market economies, racism, encroachment, and discourses forming the community from the inside and out. It sometimes meant resisting these processes (as represented by the petitions that they filed with government officials about Page 16 of 25

Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence problematic Anglo neighbours—see Den Ouden 2005 for examples), but it more often meant residing in these difficult circumstances (p.70) with goals of persisting rather than overthrowing, at least at the scale of everyday life. If Eastern Pequots used redware, nails, metal knives, and glassware to facilitate the raising of children, cooking food, and feeding families, or securing the household economy—and the archaeological evidence to date suggests that they did—then these indicate acts of residence that permit stories of survivance. They are not simply becoming more European, nor forgetting their traditions. Community members did not resist these objects per se, at least strongly or at least not by this period (since we have not recovered deposits from the first decades of reservation history), but rather made them their own. A multitude of decision factors could have resulted in the adoption of imported ceramics and the diminution of homemade pottery, but these were likely not in play in later generations when these items had become domesticated as one’s own. As I have argued elsewhere, they also subverted the identities that archaeologists otherwise assign to these as ‘European’ or ‘non-Native’ artifacts. That is, they made these particular objects—although not the entire class of object, of course, given their origins and their variable uses—Native American or specifically Eastern Pequot objects (Silliman 2009). As a result, people created stories of Native history, not only proximate to household members but also long term for the generations to come, that included these European/Euro-American-produced objects as everyday, household goods. These do not make less of a story of change or continuity, but rather a different story of survivance. They reveal how a community can move forward with memories near and far and with objects old and new.

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Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence Conclusion The ideas of residence and survivance were developed here with reference to the Eastern Pequot study, specifically, and for the ‘archaeology of the colonized’, generally, but they need not stop there. As this overall volume conveys, theoretical developments within this archaeological genre can and should have implications for global archaeological theory. We have the opportunity in the contexts of the archaeology of colonialism and indigeneity to see more clearly what is at stake—interpretively and politically—when we attempt to measure change and continuity in other times and places. This chapter should not be taken to deny that either change or continuity are real in objective or subjective terms, for they likely quite frequently are to both analysts and social actors alike, but rather that we apply these terms too loosely and sometimes too fundamentally in archaeological interpretation. If we face difficulty monitoring those two ‘states’ of change and continuity in the recent periods of historical archaeology when we have clearer convergences of material culture, archival (p. 71) records, oral histories, and other lines of evidence, we must surely need to revisit how we consider the archaeology of more distant pasts, especially those also involving imperialism, colonization, diaspora, and structural inequality. The bind we face, however, is not one of evidence, but rather of conceptual treatments of evidence. Dichotomous thinking can reveal sharp distinctions for analytical purposes, but it also closes off or at least demarcates variability, demands normativity, and misses subtle practices and materialities that work to undo those binary categorizations.

Acknowledgements I wish to thank Rodney Harrison and Neal Ferris for their invitation to be part of this volume and their thoughtful and considered comments on my work here. I also appreciate the ongoing conversations that I have had with the two of them, as well as Craig Cipolla, Kurt Jordan, Matt Liebman, Diana Loren, Alistair Paterson, Bob Preucel, Pat Rubertone, Barb Voss, and others, for these continue to help me refine my own thinking about these complex topics. In addition, I thank the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation—both its elected Council and its community members—for the opportunities to work with them to reveal more of their material histories and to continue publishing on the outcomes of that research. Some of the material contained herein is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0623532. References Bibliography references: Page 18 of 25

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Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence Silliman, Stephen W. 2009 Change and Continuity, Memory and Practice: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England. American Antiquity 74:211–30. Silliman, Stephen W. 2010 Indigenous Traces in Colonial Spaces: Archaeologies of Ambiguity, Origins, and Practice. Journal of Social Archaeology 10:28–58. Silliman, Stephen W. and Katherine H. Sebastian Dring 2008 Working on Pasts for Futures: Eastern Pequot Field School Archaeology in Connecticut. In Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge: Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology, edited by Stephen W. Silliman, pp. 67–87. Amerind Studies in Archaeology #2. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Silliman, Stephen W. and Thomas A. Witt 2010 The Complexities of Consumption: Eastern Pequot Cultural Economics in 18th-century Colonial New England. Historical Archaeology 44(4):46–68. (p.75) Silverman, David J. 2005 Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871. Cambridge University Press, New York. Torrence, Robin and Anne Clarke (eds) 2000 The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross-cultural Engagements in Oceania. Routledge, London. Tveskov, Mark 2007 Social Identity and Culture Change on the Southern Northwest Coast. American Anthropologist 109:431–41. Velie, Alan 2008 The War Cry of the Trickster: The Concept of Survivance in Gerald Vizenor’s Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point. In Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor, pp. 147–62. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Vizenor, Gerald 1994 Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, New Hampshire. Vizenor, Gerald 1998 Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Vizenor, Gerald 2008a The Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice. In Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor, pp. 1–23. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Vizenor, Gerald 2008b. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Page 24 of 25

Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence Voss, Barbara L. 2008a The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco. University of California Press, Berkeley. Voss, Barbara L. 2008b Domesticating Imperialism: Sexual Politics and the Archaeology of Empire. American Anthropologist 110:191–203. Voss, Barbara L. 2008c Gender, Race, and Labor in the Archaeology of the Spanish Colonial Americas. Current Anthropology 49:861–93. Weik, Terry 1997 The Archaeology of Maroon Societies in the Americas: Resistance, Cultural Continuity and Transformation in the African Diaspora. Historical Archaeology 3(2):81–92. Wilcox, Michael B. 2009 The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact. University of California Press, Berkeley.

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Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects A View from the Northwest Coast Jeff Oliver

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0004

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines Native-lived colonialism by focusing on the variable nature of different modalities of power as well as a more complex understanding of agency. After reviewing prominent ideas within postcolonial thought and how they have influenced archaeological agendas, the chapter considers some of the problems that arise from a narrow conception of agency before outlining a comparative approach on the structural relations of colonialism combined with a reconsideration of agency in terms of the varied affordances embedded in the colonial landscape. In particular, it discusses the agency of life projects and concludes by presenting three case studies of colonial entanglement from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Columbia. It argues that the Native people's experiences of the expanding webs of European power and influence produced responses that were as varied as the different ideas and objects that they encountered. Keywords:   colonialism, power, agency, life projects, British Columbia, Native peoples

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Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects Introduction If the burgeoning critical literature on colonialism is any indication, one might venture the point that archaeology is reaching a certain stage of academic sophistication. Taking its cue from disciplinary shifts across the social sciences and humanities, research priorities have been moving palpably towards theoretically informed studies that emphasize how intercultural relations produced consequences that question the upward swinging plotline of European expansion. Among indigenous peoples—the ‘colonized’ of the world’s four corners—this has had a marked effect. Whereas ‘the Natives’ were once written out of history, postcolonial revisionism has made a concerted effort to write them back in. The ‘savage’ dupe, virtually powerless to influence his inevitable decline, has been replaced by the Indigenous resistance fighter, a potentially shrewd and reflective operator who thoughtfully negotiated the unsettling and sometimes violent upheavals of colonialism. In terms of the history of thought, this represents an important milepost because it has served to deconstruct older stereotypes, to elicit a human face, a sense of agency, and an embodied form of encounter; what Neal Ferris (2009) fittingly describes as ‘Native-lived colonialism’. However, taking a step back to view the contours of an emerging postcolonial orthodoxy, where the pendulum of history writing swings the other way, can sometimes reveal a new set of creeping essentialisms. With our common commitment to defining aboriginal agency, particularly with respect to cultural reproduction, we risk an element of superficiality by placing too much emphasis on the idea that cultural (or ethnic) identity was an inalienable possession (p.77) worn on the sleeve (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 2009:22). Yet, bluntly put, culture and identity are not the same thing—as too many archaeological narratives imply. Indeed, the knowing subaltern protagonist who intentionally polices ethnic boundaries in the face of colonial pressures perhaps says more about academic fetishes and the ethnic politics of contemporary decolonization movements than it does about the multiple ways in which people understood their place in the world in the past. In this essay, I argue that Native-lived colonialism is better understood by examining the variable nature of different modalities of power as well as a more complex understanding of agency. It begins by reviewing how prominent ideas within postcolonial thought have influenced archaeological agendas and touches on some of the problems that a narrow conception of agency can produce. I then move on to develop a comparative approach that better contextualizes power within a distinct colonial region. In particular, the argument emphasizes how the Page 2 of 32

Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects agency of life projects, arising out of the conditions and affordances in the colonial landscape, carved out spaces, and temporalities of discourse that challenge these assumptions. Finally—moving from theory to practice—I compare and contrast three case studies from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Columbia on the Northwest Coast of North America. Each provides a unique understanding of colonial entanglements and new insights into the way that different life projects set up points of reference that in turn gave rise to both ties of similarity and lines of distinction, which emerged and dissolved in different social arenas.

Domination and Resistance in Postcolonial Discourse The study of colonialism has become one of the most hotly debated issues of recent decades. Spurred by decolonization movements from the Indian subcontinent to Africa and from the Americas to Australia, an emerging postcolonial discourse has provided the language and theoretical toolkit for analyses of, and critical responses to, the cultural legacy of colonialism. Liebmann (2008:4) provides a useful overview of the three principle intersections that archaeology shares with postcolonial studies: as a way of opening up the discipline of archaeology to a wider range of participants and voices; appreciating the role that archaeology plays in constructing and deconstructing colonialist discourses; and finally, as a means of interpreting events and processes within the colonial past. It is this latter area of research— interpreting (indeed reinterpreting) the past—which most concerns the arguments laid out here. Crosscutting all of these intersections, however, are two themes that have been, and continue to (p.78) be, influential to a broad spectrum of postcolonial writing: the politics of domination and resistance. Postcolonial theory emerged within a vanguard of literary scholars concerned with analysing cultural productions connected with the foundation and legitimization of European colonial territories. Their conclusions made for unsettling reading. Spurred by Edward Said’s (1978) now classic work, which exposed the unequal power relations bound up with the West’s representation of the East, postcolonial theorists concluded that Western authors portrayed non-Western peoples through the lens of an ethnocentric stereotype. Joined by an increasingly wide spectrum of interdisciplinary scholarship, deconstruction of a variety of ‘texts’, from maps (Carter 1987; Harley 1988) to ethnographic accounts (Clifford 1986; Crapanzano 1986), revealed these were not neutral accounts of colonized landscapes, but

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Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects artifacts of domination, which at best misrepresented Indigenous groups and at worst, erased them from the landscape all together. A second major area of research has sought to go beyond critiques of colonial oppression, and towards an emphasis on the ways in which the ‘colonized’ responded to the challenges posed. This strand of thinking has become particularly important in former colonies where Indigenous revitalization movements have taken root, taking shape through what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) term the ‘deterritorialization’ of colonialist narratives. Whereas earlier traditions of scholarship assumed that the civilizing forces of European conquest would disperse or assimilate the culturally inferior Native groups, closer examination of the evidence suggested that local peoples did not passively accept their fate. When shifting scales of analysis, from the grand narrative of colonial discourse to the ‘contact zone’ (Pratt 1992) of cultural entanglement, the central focus has rested on the powers of human agency and the ability to ‘act back’, despite colonial power structures. According to postcolonial dictum, there are always spaces for resistance. Reactions to colonial processes may take a variety of forms, from overt political acts of violence and dissent (Acheson and Delgado 2004; Lutz 2008:135–6) to more habitualized forms of cultural reproduction. It is the latter focus of research, on cultural reproduction, which has most concerned archaeology. Based on the now well-accepted axiom that artifacts are invested with particular values, attempts at eliciting resistance have focused on teasing out the ‘traditional’ within hybridized or composite cultural forms as a means of demonstrating how certain cultural imperatives were essentially sustained, despite assumed pressures to conform. Such arguments have highlighted, for instance, how the enduring patterns of indigenous architecture, from building materials to internal social organization, served to reinforce the cultural identity of the group (e.g. Lepofsky et al. 2009; Martindale 2006). Similar conclusions have been drawn by demonstrating that while Indigenous peoples eventually became dependent upon massproduced (p.79) products, their separateness as non-Europeans was asserted through manipulating commodities in distinctly home-grown ways (Blackman 1976; Carlson 2006; Jordan 2009; Lightfoot et al. 1998; Marshall and Maas 1997; Martindale 2009; Martindale and Jurakic 2006; Maas 2003). These ideas have served to redress the imbalances typically embedded within colonial history by demonstrating how the colonial process was intertwined with an important element of ambiguity.

A Warning About Indiginisms

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Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects Though the politics of domination and resistance continue to be important themes in postcolonial debates, recent years have also seen calls to go beyond it (Gosden 2004; Harrison 2004; Ortner 2001). In attempting to more clearly situate postcolonial accounts within the legacy of colonialism, an established critique turns on the notion that the very cultural categories that revisionist scholarship seeks to rescue from oblivion are themselves, not uncommonly, distillations created through colonial encounters (Béteille 1998:189; Kuper 2003; Liebmann 2008). In this context, we cannot ignore the efficacy that different forms of representing the indigenous subject, notably ethnography and census-taking, have had on establishing the very orderly boundaries of culture and ethnicity (Dirks 1992) universally employed to inform aboriginality in both the past and the present. This is not to suggest that precolonial societies are unknowable, but rather it is to caution us that throwing lifelines to the voices of cultural resistance can share a certain romantic naivety, which valorizes the agency of the colonized, at least a particular kind of agency (more on this later), over other affordances emergent in the colonial landscape. The implications for archaeologies of colonialism can, therefore, be reductive, to the extent that the ‘colonized’ become primarily defined by a single pole of experience: as defenders of their cultural integrity. Rather than moving beyond the familiar caricatures of colonialist history, we let them in again through the back door, only this time recast: while the colonist raises his familiar sword of progress, the Native fights back with tradition. A bird’s eye view of the postcolonial landscape is one where subalterns all inhabit the same theoretical space, not because the structural relations of their oppression are the same, but because they have been placed there by what Kaplan (1996:87–8) calls ‘a kind of generalized poetics of displacement’. With agency appropriated as a byword for ‘resistance’, a good deal of emphasis focuses on the policing of boundaries between nativeness and colonial intrusions, looking for what Jordan (2009) terms ‘indigenisms’; those aspects of Native culture, material or otherwise, that seem to retain an element of distinctiveness. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that narratives of resistance can descend into objectifications (p.80) about the status of a group’s potency or viability given the constraints placed upon it by European expansion (see Silliman’s discussion of survivance, this volume, for a similar perspective). As if social existence could be summed up with a metaphor about health or well-being, words like ‘persistence’ (Lepofsky et al. 2009; Tveskov 2007), ‘strength’ (Thornton 2008), ‘vitality’ (Miller 1997), and ‘coherence’ (Prince 2002) provide a new lexicon for measuring the status of indigenous identities (Oliver 2009:245) in a Page 5 of 32

Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects way eerily similar to certain nationalist archaeology projects (see Jones 1997; Trigger 1984). While it is entirely understandable, indeed justifiable, that contemporary Indigenous communities (or for that matter any community), should make such affirmations within the shifting upheavals of the present—where selectivity and intentionality can come into play for very good reasons (Clifford 2001; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Lydon 2006:296; for a good example see Schaepe 2007) —the marshalling of these views to interpret past identities is far more controversial (cf. Hillerdal 2009:12–36).

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Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects Comparative Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects How might we move beyond these essentialisms? In this section, I draw from two separate bodies of literature to suggest a way forward. This involves a fine-grained comparative approach on the structural relations of colonialism combined with a reconsideration of agency in terms of the varied affordances embedded in the colonial landscape. The objective is to move from abstract discussions of culture to a livedsense of the ever-shifting issues and tensions that gave definition to Native worlds. Dissatisfied with the potential pitfalls of interpretation as outlined above, increasingly archaeologists advocate a turn towards comparative research frameworks (Given 2004; Gosden 2004; Hall 1992; Lightfoot 2006; Silliman 2005; Webster 1997). Such approaches provide certain advantages. Most importantly, they sharpen our ability to make qualitative distinctions between different forms of social and cultural interaction, which tend to be overlooked by the micro-history model advocated by postcolonial discourse analysis. While a focus on the interstices of colonial surveillance gains resolution on the grand narrative, by zooming in on one particular (overlooked) contact zone, its downfall is that we learn little about how colonialism and its consequences varied over time and space. One approach, which is clearly gaining in appeal, involves separating out different modalities of power and authority. As Silliman (2005; see also Jordan, this volume) suggests, not all forms of cultural interaction are defined by an even playing field of power relations, otherwise we risk creating an ‘ideology of (p.81) harmony’ (Rowe and Schelling 1991:18). A plethora of examples within the social milieu of the North American fur trade suggest relatively short-term encounters where the ability to influence outcomes were more or less on an equal footing. From an Indigenous perspective, this meant that local cultural logics remained more or less unaffected and continued to shape the way outside worlds were incorporated (e.g. Hamell 1987; Saunders 1998; Turgeon 2004). In contrast, colonial regimes tend to be characterized by long-term forms of intercultural domination (Silliman 2005; for an example, see Bedford 2004). In these contexts, Western influences had more marked effects. Of course, as Jordan (2009) points out in a helpful synthesis of cultural entanglements from North America and Ireland, different contours of structural power produce what he terms a ‘continuum’ of consequences, from relative freedom, to limited colonial control, to contexts of overwhelming colonial domination.

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Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects A comparative methodology that crosscuts significant temporal and spatial scales provides a degree of analytical purchase often lacking within the micro-history approach concerned with ‘deconstructing’ the local. Nevertheless, working within such broad frames of reference tells us less about the vicissitudes, textures, and ambiguities of Native-lived experience across a particular region or colony in more restricted temporal frameworks. This is because colonial power was itself met with certain obstacles from geographical barriers and ‘the struggle with distance’ (Harris 1997) to the character of structural power, and its inconsistencies, which hinged upon differing agendas, resources, and materialities. Thus if we are to come to grips with better resolution about the limits of colonial authority, it is towards a nuanced regional assessment of its precise forms that we must work. Critical appraisal of the developing colonial power structures is an important start; however, it is not enough on its own. As postcolonial discourse has long advocated, an understanding of indigenous agency must be central to any project of analysis. Where the approach promoted here differs from a number of others is in its insistence upon a notion of agency that is relational, rather than reactive (e.g. Herva 2009; Ingold 2000; Oliver 2011; Robb 2010). Here it is important to note that agency is grounded within the possibilities of place that in turn informed choices, improvisations, and enunciations about a multiplicity of conversations (cf. Bender 2002). Such a position urges us to reconsider narrower definitions of agency as resistance—the power to derail pathways to colonization according to free will—which all too often dominate our discussions. This is not to suggest that the subaltern was unable to change things in their favour, only that such capacities are not infinite and are themselves tied to normative (albeit changeable) structures within the colonial landscape. A number of points lead outwards from this perspective if we are to move past a more narrowly conceived sense of what Native-lived colonialism was all about. Responses toward outside influences depended on the establishment of contingent sets of relationships among people, and between people and things. (p.82) These relationships acted not only to condition or impact social life, but also served to enable other kinds of associations and other kinds of meanings. Thinking about the consequences of colonialism in a creative light is not intended to diminish the destructive power that it had, but doing so urges us to consider that such transformations also had indelible side effects, which arguably formed the basis for novel forms of social categorization (Clifford 2001; Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Gosden 2004). One of the most important forms of agency for the present discussion is the agency of life projects (Ortner 2001:79–80; Page 8 of 32

Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects Robb 2010). This is the kind that gives the ordinary life roles people play and the careers they adopt a sense of purpose. In place of often short-term rebellious ‘acts’ and spaces of dissent where resistance commonly plays out, the temporal and spatial frameworks of life projects or social desires unfold as longer-term social responsibilities within routine landscapes of inhabitation. Such genres of activity are crucial for the maintenance of certain institutions because they specify the boundaries and obligations of practice, defining who could be involved as much as how members should conduct themselves. Articulated in this way, this conception of agency necessarily transcends the arena of individuals to include collectives of people and things acting in concert, meaning that undertaking these kinds of activities is itself a form of discourse (Robb 2010: 507; compare with Silliman’s development of the idea of residence, this volume). It follows on from this that agency is not so much a struggle for the maintenance of (a unique) identity, but rather describes the contingent emergence of an articulation of resources (including people, ideas, and objects), which in turn sets the stage for creating ties of similarity and lines of difference (Jenkins 2005; see also Oliver 2010). I will argue that to better understand the complexity of Native-lived colonialism, we need to examine the way in which different social projects gave rise to multiple lines of tension and that these were resolved at different scales of social existence. Keeping in mind my earlier discussion about the variable effects of colonialism, the task at hand, then, is to see how responses differed according to the issues that were at stake. As we shall see, the tensions that shaped cultural (or ethnic) identity were not the only debate.

Comparative Case Studies To illustrate the ideas raised above, the remainder of this essay compares three separate contexts of colonial entanglement from coastal British Columbia, a one-time colony of the British Empire, and more recently, a Canadian province (Figure 3.1). The temporal frame for this discussion is the second half of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth, a period commonly (p.83)

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Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects viewed as exemplifying increasing colonial control with its assumed correlate: indigenous submission (e.g. Duff 1997 [1965]; Fisher 1977). However, as Adams (1981:382) has noted, it would be a mistake to assume that colonialism was experienced evenly across the extremely varied physical and human geography of this region, or that responses towards it were in any way monolithic. Christianity at Metlakatla

Fig. 3.1. Map of the British Columbia For many newcomers coast, showing places discussed in the to the coast, the text pathway to social Map drawn by Jenny Johnston. advancement was through establishing a respectable agrarian living; for others, colonial labours were considered best spent winning souls for Christ, rather than land for agriculture. The competition for converts was fierce, and by the turn of the century dozens of Catholic and Protestant missions were in operation along the entire coastline (Duff 1997:132–46). One site in particular provides important insights into the agency of life projects arising out of the balancing act of Native-lived colonialism. Founded in 1862 by the Reverend William Duncan, the Anglican mission of Metlakatla played a crucial role in proselytizing the Coast (p.84) Tsimshian. Initially founded with a group of fifty converts, by 1879 it boasted a population of around a thousand Indigenous Christians and what was said to be the largest church west of San Francisco (Duff 1997:138; Neylan 2000:57–8). With other Protestant missions it shared not only the common goal of religious education but also sweeping transformations intended to inculcate its charges with the merits of European civilization (Neylan 2000:57–8). This included rituals appropriate to the strict timing and spacing of Protestant work habits and a sense of discipline becoming of a working class fit for an emerging capitalist economy. Transformations were best effected not through words alone but through disciplinary Page 10 of 32

Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects techniques associated with the control of space. Persuaded by the doctrine that there was no better education than ‘the object lesson of a good and well-ordered Christian home’ (Crosby 1914:74), Duncan encouraged his Tsimshian converts to abandon their vice-filled communal plank houses in favour of hierarchically organized nuclearfamily dwellings (cf. Glassie 1987). The emerging ‘model’ community featured houses patterned on British workers’ cottages, educational institutions, such as a schoolhouse, and industrial facilities including a weaving house, blacksmith shop, cannery, and sawmill. However, the ideals of Duncan’s utopian venture were not necessarily replicated in practice. By 1881, the population was re-housed within eighty-eight uniform semi-detached dwellings organized within geometric blocks, each with fenced gardens (Figure 3.2). The houses featured three bedrooms upstairs and two rooms on the ground floor (Duff 1997:138; Perry 2003:600). And yet, if the outward appearance of civility seemed to reflect the success of the mission, interior alterations to the plan suggested otherwise. Most of the houses (p.85) had central family rooms considerably enlarged in size, with only small end rooms for sleeping or storage. Fireplaces were located ‘Indian style’ in the centre of the room and in some cases a ‘guest room’ was constructed connecting two houses and both Fig. 3.2. Photograph of Metlakatla ‘row families would sit around houses’ c.1880s. one fire, leaving the rest of the rooms largely Photographer unknown. deserted (Neylan Image C-08,105, courtesy of Royal BC 2000:81; Perry, Museum, BC Archives. 2003:604). As Perry (2003:603) puts it, ‘while the row houses . . . superficially replicated the abodes of the English working class, their interiors demonstrated the persistence of Tsimshian models of kinship’.

How should we interpret such evidence? Perry’s (2003:601–4) examination of the correspondence of occasional visitors shows how the built environment could bring the issue of cultural identity into sharp relief. For some, Metlakatla’s row houses were ‘solid evidence of social transformation and spiritual conversion’. For others, who had witnessed the continued preference for communal living, they amounted to a Page 11 of 32

Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects ‘clever scheme’ for thwarting ‘civilized and sanitary ideas’; objectifications that drew the line between civilized newcomer and uncouth savage. But a more interesting question is whether such dwellings, as accommodations of an older cultural logic, were marshalled as ciphers of cultural identity by the Tsimshian themselves. Neylan’s (2000) analysis provides an intellectual space for rethinking identity politics at Metlakatla. A central pivot of her discussion hinges on how the mission encouraged transformations within established Tsimshian institutions. Nevertheless, as she points out, Tsimshian viewpoints about conversion can only be understood vis-à-vis ‘traditional’ notions of class. Christianity offered significant social advantages. It opened up new routes of mobility that contoured prescriptions about how status distinctions might be reinforced and who could participate in them. In common with other north coast societies, social rank was typically inherited and pathways to esteem, such as conspicuous forms of gift-giving, were narrowly prescribed. Moreover, with limited access to symbolic capital, it was much more difficult for commoners to climb the social ladder. What Christianity offered was the chance to gain new spiritual and material resources. As with the integration of mass-produced trade goods, at first experimentally, the consumption of ‘Christianity’ within local cultural frameworks tended to begin with elites and ended with commoners. Selectively in the beginning, and then more systematically, with the establishment of the mission and its disciplinary routines, Tsimshian elites gained familiarity with the values of the church (albeit one refracted through local cultural logic) because it provided a means through which to gain social leverage. Encouraged by their head men, kin groups followed suit. This was more than just about religious authority. An ability to perform using the knowledge competencies of Western society, such as literacy, industrial training, and a capitalist mindset, brought with it important rewards. Notably it enabled entry to and familiarity with the wage-labour economy (Lutz 2008), a strategy that not only brought financial benefits and (p.86) respectability within capitalist society, but was also used to fund ‘traditional’ Indigenous practices, such as the potlatch. In this way, the pursuit of the respectable Christian life path became tied up with a host of other institutions, some with older roots, and others with more recent ones. Examining social distinctions through the prism of the Christian life project allows us to move away from the tired language of domination and resistance. If the values of Metlakatla were constituted by its social and material practices, then the issue of cultural identity (or ‘Tsimshianess’) was not commonly at stake among the Tsimshian Page 12 of 32

Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects themselves, and would appear to be the objectification of outsiders trying to make sense of a world they little understood. Far more important among Metlakatla’s residents were issues that served to reify older lines of demarcation in novel ways and to create new lines of distinction previously unseen. For example, although the mission encouraged equality among its converts, not all were viewed equally. The chief, Paul Ligeex, lived in a house noticeably larger than the others (Neylan 2000: 81); an accommodation made by Duncan, which reified Ligeex’s role as the head of one of Metlakatla’s most powerful kin groups. While its prim façade satisfied Protestant ideals of order, its size reproduced the architectural scale of lineage households of noble birth. Within broader social arenas, the built environment of Metlakatla was mobilized by other concerns as well. Duncan is known to have written home about attempts among the non-converted to revive ‘heathenism’ among the local ‘Indians’ (Fisher 1977:140). The effect of Metlakatla was to divide the Tsimshian into pro- and anti-missionary factions. The consequent hostilities that arose produced lines of fragmentation that split society in new ways. This was a conflict between (Native) ‘Christians’ and (Native) ‘heathens’, a fault line that tore the caricatures of colonizer and colonized from their assumed frame. Indeed, within certain Indigenous circles, European-style houses became ‘a sign of membership within an elite cadre of the converted’ (Perry 2003:602). The point here is not to investigate such material tensions in any detail, but rather to show how the agency of life projects represents a flexible reworking of older structures, grounded in the improvisational nature of ongoing relations with a wider world that were only ever temporarily stable. Burial and Treatment of the Dead at Kimsquit

Beyond the islands of colonial settlement and missionary activity, pressure to conform was more limited. With its labyrinthine archipelagos, long and convoluted fjords and mountainous terrain, many parts of the coast remained relatively inaccessible until later in the twentieth century. One such place was Kimsquit, an Indigenous community among the Nuxalk people located deep within the Dean Channel, over one hundred kilometres from the outer coast and principal routes of navigation. While historical records are thin on the (p.87) ground, it is known that the Kimsquit earned a reputation with the colonial government for being backward and stubborn. Royal Naval vessels intervened in local affairs in the 1870s, once to protect railway surveyors, and a second time to punish certain residents for allegations of piracy and murder. In the 1880s, two decades after Metlakatla’s establishment, the Kimsquit Indian reserve was surveyed and local residents began to participate in the wage-labour economy, notably Page 13 of 32

Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects within commercial fishing and logging (Kennedy and Bouchard 1990:337). Although the Native community accepted a number of imported conveniences, they were disinclined to alter their subsistence economy or give up their communal plank-houses, though they did add a number of frame-built cabins to the settlement. What is more, limited missionary contact meant that the Kimsquit had an ambivalent relationship with Christianity, a situation which likely prevailed until the village was abandoned in 1927 (Prince 2002:51–2). A recent interpretation of the changing burial traditions at the historic cemetery by Prince (2002, 2003) provides a complex picture of how the Kimsquit experimented with objects and ideas initially derived from an ‘outside’ world. However, the site also provides important insights into the agency of certain life projects operating around the turn of the twentieth century, which continued to be instrumental to local world views. Mid-nineteenth-century inhumations, the earliest and by far the most numerous, were characterized by placing a squatting individual into a snug bent-wood box, which was lowered into a large hole and covered over by earth. After the cedar box decayed and collapsed, burials resulted in a circular depression. In contrast, late nineteenthand early twentieth-century burials were marked by the rapid integration of ‘European’ materials and methods. Notably, they were characterized by elongated depressions, the result of a shift towards extended burial and the use of coffins made of lumber, metal fasteners, and nails (Hobler 1972; McIlwraith 1948). Earlier interpretations put such changes down to acculturation (e.g. Fladmark 1973; Hobler 1986). However, as Prince’s assessment of form indicates, the Kimsquit simply integrated these materials and ideas into a ‘mortuary system’ with longstanding social and ideological structures (Prince 2002:52). This argument is supported by the range of associated burial features and artifacts, which approximate in form central coast mortuary traditions. At least ten grave houses, cabin-like dwellings for the ghosts of the dead, were found to incorporate non-traditional materials such as milled lumber, hinged doors, and glass windows (Figure 3.3). The adoption of objects like windows might outwardly suggest an accommodation of European values; nevertheless, the overall grave house form respected pre-contact burial architecture derived from their neighbours. In addition, grave sites were often associated with two broad types of memorials. This included wooden mortuary posts or planks carved with the crests of the departed, but also tombstones depicting the name (p.88)

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Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects of the deceased with family names. Both were likely related to the status of the dead and the rights and obligations of the lineage. Beyond these built structures, a wide range of mass-produced grave goods was located inside grave houses or loosely associated with elongated depressions. This included items as varied as metal basins, ceramic table wares, iron bed frames, and sewing machines. If the large volume of massproduced goods suggests at least some degree of dependence on ‘modern’ materials, the fact that they were treated as burial offerings is indicative of their significance within what might be described as a non-European burial rite.

The comparative value Fig. 3.3. Photograph of grave house, of the cemetery at showing associated memorial. Kimsquit serves to Photograph by John William Clark. foreground a number Image I-52,703, courtesy of Royal BC of issues. Beyond Museum, BC Archives. problematizing older arguments about the erosion of Native culture, it highlights the variability of responses to colonialism, given the unevenness of colonial power structures. Unlike at Metlakatla, with its routine disciplinary techniques and more narrowly accommodated forms of cultural negotiation, at Kimsquit colonial power was limited in scope, meaning that the community was able to experiment with nonlocal influences according to locally mediated notions of acceptability. While we cannot ignore colonial authority altogether, such as the infrequent visits by Indian agents and missionaries, who encouraged Western forms of ‘improvement’, their influence was nevertheless Page 15 of 32

Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects restricted. This is reflected in the peculiar admixture of (p.89) Indigenous and Christian symbols seen within the cemetery. Indeed, the most conspicuous grave sites were characterized by grave houses and Western-style headstones, suggesting an emphasis on cosmological syncretism (Prince 2002:61). The fact that grave houses are thought to have been introduced through ties with the neighbouring Heiltsuk around 1900 (Kennedy and Bouchard 1990:332), well after modes of colonial surveillance came into practice, helps to confirm this pattern of relative independence. It is for this reason that we might also cast doubt on Prince’s own conclusions, which see cultural continuity as an indication of ‘the assertion and redefinition of native identity in the face of acculturative pressure’ (2002:63). Ethnographic analogues have a long history of establishing continuities between prehistoric and historic cultures on the coast (e.g. Ames and Maschner 1999; Carlson 1983:198). But, as the old archaeological maxim goes, pots do not necessarily stand for people—as if capable of summing up some core characteristic (cf. Adams 1981:375). What is more, given the relatively few limitations imposed on the Kimsquit by this period, and the baggage of the term ‘Native’—itself a colonial label that we should not assume was used by local peoples as a means of self-identification—one wonders whether intentions were ever as volitional as this. More convincingly, inferences like this one say more about the working practices of archaeologists and relations of twenty-first-century ethnic nationalism than they do about identity politics in the past. In place of a narrative of resistance, what the site does provide is an inroad to the agency of community life projects seen within the social space of the cemetery: the proper burial and treatment of the deceased. As recent arguments within mortuary archaeology advocate, burial and commemoration were as much about the living as they were about the dead (Parker Pearson 1999; Tarlow 1999). Indeed, a socially efficacious burial and its complex of associated rites and obligations often served to reaffirm not only the status of the departed and their ancestry, but also the very cosmological foundations of existence. As far as we can tell from the imperfect ethnographic record, Nuxalk burial rites at the turn of the twentieth century afforded services for the underworld, while at the same time giving protection and purification for the living. As the possessions of the deceased were believed to be polluted, relatives would burn them to prevent sickness. Possessions burned on the first day of the funeral were distributed among the spirits of the underworld. On the fourth day, a second burning was exclusively for the use of the deceased and all incombustible items, such as metal and ceramic objects, were then laid at the grave side, where they could be later reclaimed by the ghost. After the burial, the relatives of the dead Page 16 of 32

Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects and others who had handled the corpse were purified and payment was made to those who had assisted with the funeral (Kennedy and Bouchard 1990:332; McIlwraith 1948). These performances served to mark people out in conspicuous ways, meaning that social identities would have come into focus over the course of the funeral, and after, according to the different roles that people (p.90) adopted (familial versus non-familial, ritual specialists versus the uninitiated, etc.). The point to emphasize here is that such activity was communal in nature and served to produce a space of discourse that satisfied certain desires associated with the lifecycle. From the outside looking in, it is tempting to acknowledge that traditions born of intercultural relations combine heterogeneous elements of old and new and that this should have been significant to people in the past. But from Kimsquit looking out, what had changed and what had stayed the same would have mattered little—if even registered—in the context of highly institutionalized practices (cf. Silliman, this volume). Rather, of significance was conducting one’s self in a socially efficacious manner. Improvement and Agrarian Discourse in the Fraser Valley

Attracted by its rich agricultural soils and access to early supply centres, European settlement formed an oasis of colonial interest in the Fraser Valley, on the south coast of British Columbia. Consequently, the power structures of colonialism, including a land system that served as a ‘disciplinary appendage’ of the colonial state (Harris 1997), developed more quickly here than along other parts of the coast. This process commenced with the surveying of a cadastre, which transformed ‘wilderness’ into parcels of ‘land’ for sale. At the same time, an Indian reserve system was implemented, corralling local Halkomelem speakers to the margins of this new colonial space. The first reserves were surveyed in the 1860s and were soon followed by a government-sponsored programme of social engineering (Carlson 1996:94; Harris 2002:269–70). Among its most important goals was to convert the ‘savages’ from ‘roaming-about people’ (Fisher 1977:184) to settled agricultural producers. Therefore it is not difficult to locate the root of tensions that served to mark out Natives as being different and racialized as ‘Others’. If cultural and linguistic peculiarities were not enough to draw the line, the fact that Natives lived, for the most part, behind the boundaries of Indian reserves as wards of the State was certainly sufficient to reinforce their identities as inferior. Given their systematic exclusion from many parts of colonial society, it is not surprising that Indigenous peoples participated in different kinds of protest (Carlson 2001; Harris 2002; Stadfeld 1999) and even novel

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Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects formulations of ethnic identity, hinging on the collective experience of colonial oppression (Oliver 2010:Ch. 9, 2013). However, as much as Native lives revolved around resistance, they were also concerned with adapting their situations to make the most of changing circumstances. By the turn of the twentieth century, many had lived their entire lives within the power structures of the colonial state and had acquired a certain fluency with which to negotiate its demands. One of the most important transformations to take place among the Halkomelem was in identifying that land could be converted to symbolic capital through its improvement. For reserves endowed (p. 91) with good agricultural soils and an appreciation of the social benefits that an agrarian living could bring, social desires coalesced around being a good farmer. While social advancement through agriculture was less accessible than via Christianity, because opportunities to obtain access to land were far more restricted in the Fraser Valley, nevertheless, a number of reserves became noted for their agricultural skills (Knight 1978:175). In fact, when respectability turned on matters of harnessing the soil, Native and settler lifestyles were not all that different (Kostuchenko 2000:20). Both struggled to clear stands of old growth forest, to work the land according to the rhythms of the season, and to deal with the instability of an emerging market. These kinds of comparisons were not usually raised at the broader scale of race relations. However, in a number of instances Indigenous agricultural ‘prosperity’ helped to create life projects that set the stage for far more ambiguity than the labels, settler, and, Native, normally imply. One of the most successful Native farmers in this context, regarded highly by Natives and settlers alike, was ‘Billy’ Sepass, Chief of the Scowkale Indian reserve (see also Oliver 2010:195–9, 2013:108). Unlike the Tsimshian in the north, high status among the Halkomelem hinged more upon the possession of particular bodies of cultural knowledge, such as ancestral names or an ability to manipulate important natural resources (Duff 1952:80–7; see for example Oliver 2007), than it did on right of birth. But by the late nineteenth century access to ‘traditional’ forms of symbolic capital became increasingly destabilized. Rather than succumb to these pressures, certain high-ranking individuals appropriated the knowledge systems of improvement traded upon by white society in order to help cultivate their positions of authority. This does not mean a simple abandonment of Native values. On the contrary, Sepass used his knowledge of agricultural practice, gained from experience as a farmhand for a local white settler, to guide his own

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Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects people towards agricultural security (Wells 1987:36). His acquired knowledge would not only reinforce his position as chief, it also helped him to gain social leverage within white society. That his knowledge of agrarian discourse was substantial is demonstrated by certain improvements he made to his land within the Scowkale reserve. For example, he constructed a frame-built house with steep gable ends and dormer windows. Around the house was a white picket fence that created a zone of exclusion between the domestic space of the home and the working space of the farm. Most importantly, social respectability was achieved through the improvement of his land. Transformations here included a large barn, a fruit orchard, and well-tilled fields (Wells 1987:36). If Sepass’s role as respected farmer bolstered his stature among Natives, it was also the medium through which he placed himself within broader social arenas. This is seen in a biographical map drawn by Sepass in 1918, prepared with the assistance of a local white farmer and past employer, A. C. Wells (Wells 1987:75). The map depicts a stylized and exaggerated view of the rivers and sloughs of the upper valley, suggesting places as they mattered to the lives of (p.92) these prominent farmers (Figure 3.4). Among the many features shown are English and Halkomelem toponyms, farmsteads, graveyards, roads, the Scowkale Indian reserve, and even the site of the Luckukuk Falls first picnic in 1871. A recent interpretation suggests that its juxtaposed Native and English place names ‘captures the ever escalating struggle between Natives and newcomers for land, resources and “place”’ (Schaepe 2001:126). To be certain, conflict was an important theme of this period. However, for Sepass the map seems to have served other ends. Of particular interest is the vision Sepass possessed of his own farm. Tellingly, he chose to depict his own space within the valley like the farms of white settlers, using the same rectangular ideograms. Therefore, if the farmer-cartographer chose to make any distinctions in this agrarian landscape, it was between his ‘property’ and the rest of the Scowkale reserve village, which was represented by a single homogenous rectangle. A compelling argument is that the separation on the map was linked to a separation in life, a further means through which Sepass constituted his role as chief vis-à-vis his lineage and the commoners who revered him. The ideas portrayed by the map were no doubt ‘of-the-moment’ (Kitchin and Dodge 2007) and do not represent the complex

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Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects (p.93) relationships that served to define him in different social arenas. Nevertheless, if we can ‘excavate’ intent from this particular inscription, then it was more about building social bridges than cultural boundaries, a strategy which placed him in good company with those who would mobilize agrarianism as a socially transformative Fig. 3.4. Billy Sepass’ map of the lower life project. The Chilliwack River c.1918. argument I am making is Source: Oliver (2010). Adapted from Wells more akin to Denis Byrne’s revealing, if (1987: 79), drawn by Ana Jorge. unexpected, findings of the Aboriginal colonial experience in New South Wales, Australia. Against the grain of common expectation, in that context some Aboriginal people developed ‘tactical’ relationships with white farmers that resulted in the creation of a web of friendly, or at least not hostile, relations towards them, often resulting in a good deal of mutual respect and knowledge of each other’s family histories— of present generations, parents, and even grandparents (Byrne 2003:180). Similar processes seem to have been at work here. Even if one questions the more conciliatory tone I favour, we cannot ignore the fact that Sepass had acquired a deep knowledge of the cultural grammar of two different social worlds, a position that provided him with an important amount of security. So as much as Native-lived colonialism was about conflict, it was also about compromise, about moving on and making something with what you had.

Discussion In this final section, I wish to draw out a number of more general observations and also to point towards outlooks for future thinking. In place of a view of colonialism linked to the concept of social inevitabilities, we see that it participated in creating an unanticipated variety of intercultural ‘traditions’. Where colonial power was concentrated, principally at missions and the few agriculturally productive regions where a settler landscape first achieved its toehold, a significant portion of the Indigenous population enthusiastically engaged with the possibilities of life presented by European newcomers (Lutz 2008:161). This should not necessarily be taken as evidence of acculturation. Indeed, as I have argued, European institutions such as Christianity and agrarianism were rationalized and ‘accepted’, at least

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Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects initially, through locally mediated cultural frameworks and accordingly incorporated into ways of living and working. Of course, there are also some important differences between places like Metlakatla and the Fraser Valley as well. Mission environments combined disciplinary techniques and close social monitoring with an ostensibly ‘egalitarian’ experience (Neylan 2000; cf. Harkin 1997, 2005), which, although viewed through local power structures, did provide a certain degree of social mobility to increasing numbers of individuals. This contrasts with the situation on reserves, where the compulsion to change was not necessarily as systematic. What is more, given that land was a finite resource and more easily acquired by (p. 94) newcomers, social respectability through harnessing the soil was less possible. Indeed, this situation is reflected to some extent in the fact that 90 percent of the aboriginal population of the province was nominally Christian by 1904 (Duff 1997:128), whereas only about 20 percent of the land cultivated by Native peoples had been acquired off reserve by 1910 (Knight 1978:184), a process constrained by the significant hurdles Natives had to overcome to compete with white settlers. Nevertheless, individuals like Billy Sepass remind us that agrarian living brought people from different walks of life together in ways that cause us to revisit assumptions about what ‘pioneering’ was all about. Native lifeways at power centres of colonialism tend to be partly defined by the desire of attaining proficiency with the cultural grammar of colonizers. By contrast, in areas where colonial power was more limited, such as at Kimsquit, life projects were mediated by more local concerns, although with time, this too was apt to change. The threat of colonial violence, such as ‘gunboat diplomacy’ (Gough 1984), could be used to soften the attitudes of even the most recalcitrant Natives, but in terms of actually affecting change over the conditions of everyday life, colonial power represented ‘little more than a thin white line amplified by pomp and bluster’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001:104). This situation held at least into the early twentieth century, when itinerancy encouraged by the opportunities of wage labour began to tear at the fabric of even more remote communities. As we have seen from the historic cemetery, non-European institutions continued to govern socially valued practices, such as burial and the treatment of the dead. Viewed from the outside looking in, agency in this context, enabled through local power structures, takes a more ‘traditional’ tone. While objects and ideas that made up the cemetery encouraged people to think externally about themselves in relation to others, we must be careful in suggesting that they necessarily indicate a ‘Native’ identity. Such categories are the words of colonizers and would only have begun Page 21 of 32

Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects to gain efficacy among Indigenous peoples once they had become objectified by the sharp end of colonialism as a homogenous ‘Other’, and consequently felt the experience of the label with its racialized overtones (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:57; Gosden 2004; Jenkins 2005). A similar argument can be applied to ethno-linguistic nomenclature. Consider the fact that older Northwest Coast ethnolinguistic maps never seem to agree on boundaries or terms of definition (Suttles 1990:9–11; Thom 2009). This is because the criteria used by ethnographers and administrators frequently differed and could hardly capture the complex web of overlapping and relational identities, which served to mark people’s affiliations in different social contexts (cf. Scott 2009:254–5). We would thus be wise to consider carefully whether the sanitized ethnic boundaries adopted by many Indigenous peoples today were the same as those operating in the past (e.g. Carlson 2007:138; Colson 1953; Oliver 2010:190). Finally, the case studies also bring to mind a further question, one that tends to be avoided by postcolonial discourse at all costs. Given time and the rising (p.95) intensity of colonial forms of control and cultural integration, should it be considered taboo to accept that in certain contexts Native lifeways and the agency of life projects did in fact become more like those of newcomers, so that being ‘Indian’ became a less important form of social distinction? If we are to create truly sophisticated accounts of indigenous colonial experience, we must also be prepared to accept that aboriginality, as a way of life, and as a form of self-identification, is itself a contingent and existential issue. We should therefore cast serious doubt on its uncritical and homogenous usage as if colonial society could be summed up by a single fault line separating people of Native ancestry from everyone else. While there were many spaces where the prying eyes of the State could not penetrate and therefore police (e.g. Amoss 1978; Lutz 2008:161; Martindale 2006, 2009), equally there were other spaces, from growing towns to residential schools, which shaped life projects and experiences of cultural learning according to a new and eclectic mix of social, cultural, and economic realities. How people objectified themselves, or were objectified by others, in these highly varied spaces of interaction, once again brings us back to context, to power relations, and what is deemed important and possible in any given place. Where and when the politics of decolonization ground into gear, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century, we might expect to find a range of ‘indigenous articulations’ (Clifford 2001), from those that mobilize the ‘old’ (Day 1985; Kennedy and Bouchard 1990:337–8) to those that appropriate the ‘new’ (Ingold and Kurttila 2000; Townsend-Gault 2004). And yet, in other social arenas, where the life projects of Native and Newcomer Page 22 of 32

Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects come together, where cultural differences begin to blur, the tensions that defined Aboriginality could also dissipate. Sometimes temporarily, sometimes temporarily, sometimes for longer, the relations that once brought cultural objectification into sharp relief were sidelined by more pressing forms of social distinction, those which continue to haunt humanity the world over. In these contexts, inequalities of gender, age grade, employment, political affiliation, religion, and the like, formed the substantive issues that served to draw the line (cf. Silliman 2004). Billy Sepass and his material articulations represent the thin end of the wedge of this kind of ‘Othering’, meaning that we have much territory to cover. The archaeology of the recent colonial past must face these issues head on, otherwise we risk historical revisionisms with only the slightest relevance to the past landscapes we wish to breathe life into.

Conclusion Native-lived colonialism was not constitutive of one set of relationships, but many. As John and Jean Comaroff (1997:5) put it, ‘it altered everyone and everything involved, if not all in the same manner and measure’. While it brought (p.96) endings to certain facets of Native life, it also encouraged novel beginnings by reinventing older institutions and pioneering new ones. The case studies reviewed here demonstrate that, as ever, the devil is in the detail. The landscape of colonialism in coastal British Columbia represented a complex patchwork of interests and power structures, phenomena that varied as much across space as through time. My central argument, a lesson applicable to many colonial contexts, is that Native experiences of the expanding webs of European power and influence did not produce a monolithic effect. Rather, their responses were as varied as the different ideas and objects that they encountered. Attempting to understand this variability, how it altered the way that people made sense of their changing surroundings, requires us to move beyond the narrow language of domination and resistance and towards an approach that begins to separate out the different modalities of power and agency. Only by recognizing how the particularities of place gave rise to agency will we begin to make sense of the social distinctions that really mattered. Native-lived colonialism at the turn of the twentieth century was many things, from struggles for independence to opportunities for social advancement. What it was not was a battle for cultural identity. That battle belongs to a different day: its time is now.

Acknowledgements A number of people have provided valuable feedback on earlier incarnations of the present chapter. I would like to thank Ana Jorge for her tireless critical engagement with the entire organization of the

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Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects piece; Paul Ewonus for encouraging comments and pointing out certain inconsistencies; and Neal Ferris and Rodney Harrison for their helpful thoughts and references on the penultimate draft. References Bibliography references: Acheson, Steven R. and James P. Delgado 2004 Ships for the Taking: Culture Contact and the Maritime Fur Trade on the Northwest Coast of North America. In The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies, edited by Tim Murray, pp. 48–77. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Adams, John, W. 1981 Recent Ethnology of the Northwest Coast. Annual Review of Anthropology 10:361–92. Ames, Kenneth M. and Herbert D. G. Maschner 1999 Peoples of the Northwest Coast: Their Archaeology and Prehistory. Thames & Hudson, London. Amoss, Pamela 1978 Symbolic Substitution in the Indian Shaker Church. Ethnohistory 25: 225–49. (p.97) Bedford, Stuart H. 2004 Tenacity of the Traditional: The First Hundred Years of Maori–European Settler Contact on the Hauraki Plains, Aotearoa/New Zealand. In The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies, edited by Tim Murray, pp. 144–54. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Béteille, André 1998 The Idea of Indigenous People. Current Anthropology 39:187–91. Bender, Barbara 2002 Time and Landscape. Current Anthropology 43:S103–S112. Blackman, Margaret B. 1976 Creativity in Acculturation: Art, Architecture and Ceremony from the Northwest Coast. Ethnohistory 23:387–413. Byrne, Denis R. 2003 Nervous Landscapes: Race and Space in Australia. Journal of Social Archaeology 3:169–93. Carlson, Catherine C. 2006 Indigenous Historic Archaeology of the 19th-century Secwepemc Village at Thomson’s River Post, Kamloops, British Columbia. Canadian Journal of Archaeology 30:193–250.

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Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects Kuper, Adam 2003 The Return of the Native. Current Anthropology 44:389–402. Lepofsky, Dana, David M. Schaepe, Anthony P. Graesch, Michael Lenert, Patricia Ormerod, Keith Thor Carlson, Jeanne E. Arnold, Michael Blake, Patrick Moore, and John J. Clague 2009 Exploring Stó:lō-Coast Salish Interaction and Identity in Ancient Houses and Settlements in the Fraser Valley, British Columbia. American Antiquity 74: 595–626. Liebmann, Matthew J. 2008 The Intersections of Archaeology and Postcolonial Studies. In Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi, pp. 1–20. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. (p.100) Lightfoot, Kent G. 2006 Missions, Furs, Gold, and Manifest Destiny: Rethinking an Archaeology of Colonialism for Western North America. In Historical Archaeology, edited by Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman, pp. 272–92. Blackwell, Oxford. Lightfoot, Kent G., Antoinette Martinez, and Ann M. Schiff 1998 Daily Practice and Material Culture in Pluralistic Social Settings: An Archaeological Study of Culture Change and Persistence from Fort Ross, California. American Antiquity 60: 199–222. Lutz, John. S. 2008 Mukuk: A New History of Aboriginal–White Relations. University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver. Lydon, Jane 2006 Pacific Encounters, or Beyond the Islands of History. In Historical Archaeology, edited by Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman, pp. 291–312. Blackwell, Oxford. Maas, Alexandra 2003 Clocks, Lamps, Cups and Stuff: Nineteenthcentury Ceramic Use among the Heiltsuk. In Archaeology of Coastal British Columbia: Essays in Honour of Philip M. Hobler, edited by Roy Carlson, pp. 253–32. Archaeology Press, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia. Marshall, Yvonne and Alexandra Maas 1997 Dashing Dishes. World Archaeology 28:275–290. Martindale, Andrew 2006 The Tsimshian Household through the Contact Period. In Household Archaeology on the Northwest Coast, edited by Elizabeth A. Sobel, D. Ann Trieu Gahr, and Kenneth M. Ames, pp. 140–58. International Monographs in Prehistory, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects Martindale, Andrew 2009 Entanglement and Tinkering: Structural History in the Archaeology of the Northern Tsimshian. Journal of Social Archaeology 9:59–91. Martindale, Andrew and Irena Jurakic 2006 Identifying Expedient Glass Tools in a Post-contact Tsimshian Village. Journal of Archaeological Science 33:414–27. McIlwraith, Thomas 1948 The Bella Coola Indians. 2 vols. University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Miller, Jay 1997 Tsimshian Culture: A Light through the Ages. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Neylan, Susan 2000 Longhouses, Schoolrooms and Worker’s Cottages: Nineteenth-century Protestant Missions to the Tsimshian and the Transformation of Class through Religion. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 11:51–86. Oliver, Jeff 2007 Beyond the Water’s Edge: Towards a Social Archaeology of Landscape on the Northwest Coast. Canadian Journal of Archaeology 31:1–27. Oliver, Jeff 2009 Review of Being and Place among the Tlingit, by Thomas F. Thornton. The Northern Review 31(Fall):242–6. Oliver, Jeff 2010 Landscapes and Social Transformations on the Northwest Coast: Colonial Encounters in the Fraser Valley. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Oliver, Jeff 2011 On Mapping and its Afterlife: Unfolding Landscapes in Northwestern North America. World Archaeology 43:66–85. Oliver, Jeff 2013 Reflections on Resistance: Identity and Being Indigenous in Colonial British Columbia. In Historical Archaeologies of Cognition: Exploration of Faith, Hope and Charity, edited by J. Symonds, A. Badcock, and J. Oliver, pp. 98–114. Sheffield, Equinox. Ortner, Sherry B. 2001 Specifying Agency. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 3:76–84. (p.101) Parker Pearson, Michael 1999 The Archaeology of Death and Burial. Sutton, Stroud. Perry, Adele 2003 From the ‘Hot–bed of Vice’ to the ‘Good and Well– ordered Christian Home’: First Nations Housing and Reform in Nineteenth-century British Columbia. Ethnohistory 50:587–610. Page 30 of 32

Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects Pratt, Mary Louise 1992 Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, London. Prince, Paul 2002 Cultural Coherency and Resistance in Historic Period Mortuary Practices at Kimsquit. Historical Archaeology 36:53–68. Prince, Paul 2003 Culture Contact at Kimsquit in Long-term Regional Context. In Archaeology of Coastal British Columbia: Essays in Honour of Philip M. Hobler, edited by Roy Carlson, pp. 217–32. Archaeology Press, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia. Robb, John 2010 Beyond Agency. World Archaeology 42:493–520. Rowe, William and Vivian Schelling 1991 Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America. Verso, London. Said, Edward 1978 Orientalism. Pantheon, New York. Saunders, Nicholas J. 1998 Stealers of Light, Traders in Brilliance: Amerindian Metaphysics in the Mirror of Conquest. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 33:225–52. Schaepe, David 2001 The Maps of K’hhalserten. In A Stό:lō-Coast Salish Historical Atlas, edited by Keith Thor Carlson, pp. 126–27. Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver. Schaepe, David 2007 Stό:lō Identity and the Cultural Landscape of S’ólh Téméxw. In Be of Good Mind: Essays on the Coast Salish, edited by Bruce Granville Miller, pp. 234–59. University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver. Scott, James C. 2009 The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press, New Haven. Silliman, Stephen W. 2004 Social and Physical Landscapes of Contact. In North American Archaeology, edited by Timothy R. Pauketat and Diana DiPaolo Loren, pp. 273–96. Blackwell, Malden, Maryland. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005 Culture Contact or Colonialism: Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America. American Antiquity 70:55– 74. Stadfeld, Bruce 1999 Manifestations of Power: Native Resistance to the Resettlement of British Columbia. In Beyond the City Limits: Rural History in British Columbia, edited by Ruth W. Sandwell, pp. 33–46. University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver.

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Native-lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects Suttles, Wayne 1990 Introduction. In Handbook of North American Indians, vii: Northwest Coast, edited by Wayne Suttles, pp. 1–15. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D C. Tarlow, Sarah 1999 Bereavement and Commemoration: An Archaeology of Mortality. Blackwell, Oxford. Thom, Brian 2009 The Paradox of Boundaries in Coast Salish Territories. Cultural Geographies 16:179–205. Thornton, Thomas F. 2008 Being and Place among the Tlingit. University of Washington Press, Seattle. Townsend-Gault, Charlotte 2004 Circulating Aboriginality. Journal of Material Culture 9:183–202. Trigger, Bruce 1984 Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist. Man 19:355–70. Turgeon, Laurier 2004 Beads, Bodies and Regimes of Value: From France to North America, c.1500–1650. In The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies, edited by Tim Murray, pp. 19–47. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. (p.102) Tveskov, Mark. A. 2007 Social Identity and Culture Change on the Southern Northwest Coast. American Anthropologist 109:431–41. Webster, Jane 1997 Necessary Comparisons: A Post-colonial Approach to Religious Syncretism in the Roman Provinces. World Archaeology 28:324–48. Wells, Oliver. N. 1987 The Chilliwacks and their Neighbours, edited by Ralph Maud, Brent Dougals Galloway, and Marie Weeden. Talonbooks, Vancouver.

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Pruning Colonialism

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Pruning Colonialism Vantage Point, Local Political Economy, and Cultural Entanglement in the Archaeology of Post-1415 Indigenous Peoples Kurt A. Jordan

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the archaeology of post-1415 indigenous peoples and calls on archaeologists to prune colonialism by adopting specific vantage points and spatial and temporal scales. It first describes a generalised methodology as well as concepts useful to the analysis of interactions between post-1415 indigenous peoples and European settlers. It then considers the intercultural balance of power in relation to political economy and adopts the term ‘cultural entanglement’ to describe intercultural processes of relative political-economic parity. It also illustrates the power of vantage point by starting with some readily recognisable and pertinent counters to acculturationist thinking. Keywords:   archaeology, indigenous peoples, colonialism, vantage points, European settlers, power, political economy, cultural entanglement

Introduction Over the past fifteen years, archaeologists who study Indigenous peoples impacted by post-1415 European expansion1 have engaged in an increasingly sophisticated debate over the theoretical models used to frame and characterize intercultural engagements (e.g. Cusick 1998; Page 1 of 24

Pruning Colonialism Gosden 2004; Lyons and Papadopoulos 2002; Oland et al. 2005; 2009; Silliman 2005, 2009; Stein 2005; Wilcox 2009). One trend emerging from this debate is that many scholars currently take the concept of colonialism to be the guiding force within the sub-discipline. Overall, this trend has been enormously productive, not least because the study of colonialism provides a crucial bridge from archaeology to other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. At the same time, archaeologists’ use of colonialism has had its excesses, and it is perhaps time to prune back the concept. In the 1980s and 1990s, scholars of the post-1415 world uncritically overstated the power and influence of European colonizers (I illustrate this point later through analyses of several influential older texts). Recent considerations of colonialism have vastly improved on these earlier, less self-conscious, assertions. Current archaeological analyses of colonialism can be divided into two main strands. The first is political-economic and macro-scale in tenor, with (p.104) an emphasis on intercultural domination. From this perspective, Dietler (2005:54) defines colonialism as ‘the projects and practices of control marshaled in interactions between societies linked in asymmetrical relations of power, and the processes of social and cultural transformation resulting from these practices’. A second, more micro-scale and culture-focused strand is related to the growing use of postcolonial perspectives in archaeology, which target especially ‘the hybrid and novel forms of culture that develop out of the processes of colonialism’ (Liebmann 2008:2), and the role that colonialist forms of discourse, definition, and representation play in enacting and reproducing inequalities in the past and the present (see also Mitchell and Scheiber 2010). New archaeological thinking about colonialism, however, may continue to pre-judge the impact of various cultural influences, rather than evaluating historical settings in an open-ended way. Postcolonial perspectives in particular have tended to find colonialism wherever novel intercultural forms of culture are generated, and wherever colonialist discourse is generated. For example, the ‘broad comparative framework’ introduced by Gosden (2004:19) for understanding the local results of intercultural engagement defines everything from interactions ‘within a shared cultural milieu’ to invasion and genocide as ‘colonialism’, and concludes that ‘colonialism is a relationship of desire’ for denizens of both cores and peripheries (Gosden 2004:153). Such broad-brush applications of colonialism (emerging both from global- and micro-scale perspectives) obscure the rich variety of past social settings and the exact contours of localized political-economic relationships that should be of clear analytical importance. Moreover, traces of Eurocentrism remain: the study of colonialism favours Page 2 of 24

Pruning Colonialism adoptions of vantages and analytical scales that privilege Europeans. Colonialism in some senses also provides a linear model with a predetermined outcome of inevitable influence, not unlike those that acculturation or modernization theory provided to an earlier generation of archaeologists. In short, where some scholars (e.g. Silliman 2005) argue that archaeologists have not sufficiently considered colonialism, I posit that archaeologists have deployed it too much. Note clearly that I do not advocate wholesale rejection of colonialism as a concept: this is an exercise in pruning, not uprooting. There are many historical contexts which can be productively analysed through the prism of colonialism, and archaeologists should continue to use it as a perspective for analysis. However, colonialism cannot be the sole standpoint used by archaeologists studying Postcolumbian Indigenous peoples. I assert that colonialism works best, and even only, when applied in contexts of intercultural dominance, instead of effectively acting as a general theory of interaction. To prune colonialism, archaeologists must adopt specific vantage points and spatial and temporal scales while assessing post-1415 Indigenous settings. These perspectives are vital to proper recognition of Indigenous agency and autonomy, political-economic concerns which are obscured by broad-brush (p.105) applications of colonialism. We need to assess the possibilities that engagement with outsiders and incorporation of some external influences took place without domination, and that Indigenous sovereignties were preserved and reproduced, by analysing case material at tightly focused temporal and spatial scales. Crucially, archaeologists must routinely and explicitly turn the tables on colonialism and peer outward from Indigenous homelands. While these may seem to be obvious points to make about archaeologies of Indigenous groups, the history of Postcolumbian archaeology suggests that these perspectives are not always adopted as consistently or as thoroughly as one might expect (see also Ferris, this volume). In this chapter, I briefly present a generalized methodology and concepts useful to the analysis of interactions between post-1415 Indigenous peoples and European settlers. While analysis should not by any means be limited to the viewpoints and scales I suggest, I assert that these specific perspectives are necessary entry-points to an accurate assessment of the intercultural balance of power and immediate political-economic dynamics. The analytical frameworks I advocate here also underscore the need to define additional concepts beyond colonialism to describe processes of Postcolumbian intercultural engagement. Specifically, I adopt cultural entanglement as Page 3 of 24

Pruning Colonialism a formal term describing intercultural processes of relative politicaleconomic parity (Alexander 1998; Dietler 1998; Jordan 2008, 2009a, 2009b).2 While I focus on Indigenous groups impacted by post-1415 European expansion, this framework has resonances with some work done in pre-modern contexts (particularly that of Michael Dietler [2005, 2010] and Gil Stein [1999, 2002, 2005]) and likely has applications in many Precolumbian settings. It may also be useful to the archaeology of other subaltern Postcolumbian populations, such as diasporic African communities, and for the analysis of non-European colonialisms (e.g. Scott 2009). Indeed, the concept may benefit analysis of intercultural engagements of all sorts, including relationships among Indigenous groups or among different populations of colonizers. Political scientist Bertell Ollman’s analysis of Karl Marx’s methodology, particularly treatment of what Ollman terms abstractions of extension, level of generality, and vantage point, is particularly helpful for framing these concepts. The volume Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method (2003) compiles Ollman’s revised writings on these subjects (see also O’Donovan 2002). Through Ollman, I realized that explicit consideration of vantage point, spatial scale, and temporal scale was necessary. Although I treat these concerns sequentially in order to clearly define them, this is an artificial separation; in practice, scholars tend to decide on viewpoints to use for analysis as a package, (p.106) and then apply them concurrently. While this packaging may be somewhat inevitable, greater self-consciousness about the elements of analysis should improve such decisions.

Vantage Point Marx’s basic exercise in vantage point was to look at capitalism from the perspectives of both the owner of the means of production and the wage-labourer (Ollman 2003). Each vantage provided unique insights; Marx’s explication of the worker’s viewpoint was revolutionary because this perspective was rarely taken into account by scholars or modern commonsense categories.3 It is important to note that any one vantage point (including the worker’s) does not provide a complete rendering of capitalism in and of itself. As Ollman (2003:100) observes: A vantage point sets up a perspective that colors everything that falls into it, establishing order, hierarchy, and priorities, distributing values, meanings, and degrees of relevance, and asserting a distinctive coherence between the parts. Within a given perspective, some processes and connections will appear

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Pruning Colonialism large, some obvious, some important; others will appear small, insignificant, and irrelevant; and some will even be invisible. The critical vantage point for archaeologists of Postcolumbian Native peoples to take is obviously the Indigenous one. Here I by no means imply that archaeologists can ‘get inside the heads’ of Indigenous peoples in an emic sense, or that non-Indigenous archaeologists should appropriate an Indigenous ‘voice’, which would create an unproductive sort of ‘playing Indigenous’ (in the sense of Deloria 1998) that would no doubt offend descendants. These roles are more appropriately taken up by members of the descendant communities themselves. Instead, archaeologists can gain insights by imagining themselves—in an etic sense—within the spatial and structural vantages of Indigenous groups. This is in some ways a straightforward exercise in turning the tables akin to the statement that what is a colonial periphery when viewed from the European ship is a homeland when viewed from the Indigenous shore. However, examples from studies of the impact of European expansion presented shortly demonstrate that it is quite possible to study Indigenous groups without turning the tables in this manner. I illustrate the power of vantage point by starting with some readily recognizable and pertinent counters to acculturationist thinking. The idea that (p.107) Native peoples in Northeastern North America irrationally engaged in trade by exchanging furs and skins for European ‘baubles and trinkets’ can be reversed with the observation that Europeans’ own motivation was to get raw materials for hats. Similarly, assertions that Native people became ‘dependent’ on European goods remain blind to evidence for the long-term persistence of Indigenous technological alternatives, including stone tools, ceramics, and organic containers and tools (Bradley 1987; Cobb 2003). Framing of stone tools as a primitive technology that is doomed to decline neglects the fact that Europeans persistently used stone tools themselves, including gunflints, sharpening stones, and millstones (McNiven and Russell 2005:14). Further, the particular claim that Native peoples became dependent on European-supplied firearms ignores the fact that in most contexts the gun trade was far from a monopoly and European powers often all but fell over each other to provide guns, ammunition, and smithing services to Native groups (see examples in Jordan 2008:Ch. 3). Sociocultural anthropologist James Scott provides an interesting use of vantage point in his analysis of oral traditions in The Art of Not Being Governed (2009:Ch. 6, 1/2). While most scholars view oral traditions as impoverished vehicles for the transmission of collective memory as compared to texts, Scott stresses the advantages of the flexibility of Page 5 of 24

Pruning Colonialism oral means for recording history. He writes that the ‘key disadvantage of monuments and written texts is precisely their relative permanence . . . Any written text makes a certain kind of orthodoxy possible . . . It is easy to see that, over time, a fixed account can become as much of a trap and impediment as an instrument of successful diplomacy’ (Scott 2009:227–8). In contrast, oral traditions ‘have substantial advantages for peoples whose welfare and survival depended on a fleet-footed adjustment to a capricious and menacing political environment’ (Scott 2009:237). Scott (2009:232) asserts that societies that record collective memory orally ‘can, as it were, have it both ways’ by preserving consistent detailed information about the past in some instances and rearranging or manipulating information about genealogies, political history, and the like when expedient in other cases. These exercises in table-turning provide a perspective on engagements between colonizing and colonized peoples that underscores the autonomy and resilience of Native peoples that might be obscured by conventional analyses focusing on the European world-system, the impact of colonial discourses, and the generation of hybrid cultural forms. Explicit consideration of the settler vantage similarly offers the possibility for novel insights into particular social settings. Vantage point thus is a key tool in providing a more comprehensive and wellrounded analysis of the balance of power between settler and Indigenous groups. It is exceptionally pertinent to earlier periods of engagement when colonies were poorly established, colonists few in number, and cultural boundaries obviously intact. (p.108) Eurocentric Vantage Points in Classic Studies of the Post-1415 World

Studies in historical archaeology and historical anthropology from the 1980s and 1990s rarely adopted the vantage I describe; they instead tended to overestimate settler power. To illustrate this point, I briefly examine three classic works in Postcolumbian Indigenous studies. I use these familiar works somewhat iconoclastically (and neglect their many virtues) in the hope of engendering a flash of recognition for those readers who have not previously considered the impact of vantage point on the description of the past. Eric Wolf’s anthropological macro-history Europe and the People without History (1982) is vexed by problems of vantage point (Jordan 2013). Wolf’s (1982:360) work centres on the study of broad-scale ‘web[s] of connection’ that ‘transcend separable cases, moving through and beyond them and transforming them as they proceed’ (Wolf 1982:17). While this might appear to outline a generic method that can Page 6 of 24

Pruning Colonialism be applied to any social group, Wolf’s analysis focuses almost entirely on processes centred in Europe and all but denies Indigenous groups the possibility of hosting broad-scale processes of their own. Wolf similarly overstates the global dominance of the European system, failing to account for those vast sections of the globe that were not fully incorporated into the European system—the Soviet bloc when he wrote in 1982, and China, which acted in the nineteenth century (and again today) as the ‘tomb of American treasure’ (1982:255). Many Indigenous and interstitial groups across the globe occupied similar bastions of autonomy, although more modest in extent. Lastly, Wolf’s claims that the widest impact of European engagements with Indigenous peoples took place in Europe itself, such as how the trade of European blankets for Indian furs led to the development of capitalist cloth production (1982:4), ignores the fact that circulation of European trade goods also created and reproduced Native social and political networks, often on a grand spatial scale. In his 1987 book Evolution of the Onondaga Iroquois, James W. Bradley ends detailed coverage of Postcolumbian events in 1655, the year before French settlers from Canada established a small colony in Onondaga territory. This colony, termed Ste Marie de Gannentaha, included a Jesuit mission, resident soldiers and craftspeople, and European livestock. Bradley (1987:175) attributes significant impact to this colony, claiming that with ‘resident Jesuits, a French settlement close by, and increasingly imperialistic European neighbors, the pressure for profound and substantial change in Onondaga would increase dramatically’. This is despite the fact that the French post was occupied for less than two years—from July 1656 to March 1658— before it was abandoned (Bradley 1987:115, 139), and sizeable populations of permanent European settlers were then kept out of Onondaga territory until after the American Revolution. (p.109) An ominous, melancholy tone inflects Carmel Schrire’s (1995) descriptions of Khoikhoi prospects in even the earliest years of Dutch colonization of southern Africa in Digging through Darkness. The book details Schrire’s excavations at Oudepost I, a small Dutch outpost garrisoned by between four and ten men during 1669–1732 (although abandoned during 1673–1685; Schrire, 1995:77–8, 95–6). Based on her analysis of faunal materials from around the fort and in a large seaside dump, Schrire (1995:110) claims that ‘whether we argue that the animals[’] bones from Oudepost reflect the way the Dutch invaded the wild food or the domesticated food base of the Khoikhoi, the process of colonial conquest and domination still emerges strongly from these findings’. This is a remarkably confident claim, given that Schrire analyses a settler site; while her argument remains logically plausible, Page 7 of 24

Pruning Colonialism it remains hypothetical in the absence of excavations at contemporaneous Khoikhoi sites that would determine exactly how their subsistence was impacted. This work on Indigenous sites had not been done at the time of her writing (Schrire 1995:104). Schrire makes another problematic assertion that prioritizes European regimes of value over Indigenous ones. She notes that ‘the pretty baubles [glass beads] lying in the Oudepost sand encode how the Dutch barred the Khoikhoi from entering the trade network as equal partners by keeping Natives on the bead standard while colonists grew rich on land and stock bought for beads and sold for hard cash, gold, and silver guaranteed in banks worldwide’ (Schrire 1995:112). This flatly discounts the possibility that the glass beads represented Indigenous social capital that could have energized relations both within and among South African Indigenous groups. The Structural Vantage Point and Indigenous–Settler Boundaries

In the examples presented so far, I have used what can be termed a structural vantage point contrasting perspectives grounded in Indigenous perceptions of historical situations against those rooted in the European world-system. Deployment of a settler–indigenous binary may seem to be a rearguard action in a volume that in part aims to avoid re-essentializing depictions of the various social groups involved in colonial encounters. I certainly agree with Barbara Voss (2005:462) that archaeologists should not presume that ‘the boundary between colonizer and colonized was self-evident or stable’. Identities and affiliations shifted on both sides of the boundary, as studies of ethnogenesis among both Indigenous (Weik 2007) and settler (Voss 2008) groups attest, and in some cases the boundary was blurred altogether. As a result, one is obligated to investigate ‘variation in the solidity, permeability, and dissipation of different social group identities and boundaries in different settings and across time’ (Fennell 2003:8). (p.110) I respond to the anticipated critique that a structural vantage essentializes the settler–indigenous boundary in three ways. The first is that the structural vantage point is not the only one possible. It acts as an entry point for analysis that is particularly pertinent to the matters about the intercultural balance of power that I am trying to emphasize. Use of the settler–indigenous binary for preliminary analysis does not impede analysts from proceeding to other vantage points, based on nation, class, ethnicity, gender, faction, alliance, or other cleavages that may have cross-cut, blurred, or erased the settler–indigenous divide.

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Pruning Colonialism Second, many empirical studies have shown that in many cases, the colonizer–indigenous boundary remained both intact and socially influential over time, including at Russian Fort Ross (Lightfoot et al. 1998), the San Francisco Presidio (Voss 2008), and in both Southwestern and Northeastern North America (Rothschild 2003). Moreover, other colonizer–colonized differences ‘would have been apparent from traits that are not archaeologically accessible, such as religion, language, hairstyle, and clothing’ (Rothschild 2006:98), not to mention bodily phenotype. In lived experience, settler–indigenous distinctions—even if contested and fluid—were likely to have been vital in many contexts, especially in moments of crisis. Contrary to Lightfoot and Martinez’s (1995:481) claim, clear-cut material boundaries were not ‘relatively rare and associated with distinctive circumstances that deserve special study’; to think so discounts what we should recognize as a common and important outcome of interaction. Lastly, this structural vantage point in no way proscribes that the interacting parties act only in stereotyped ways, such as where settlers attempt to ‘dominate’ and Indigenous peoples ‘resist’. The structural vantage does not limit the social options for either Indigenous or settler social actors; the analytical possibility remains for the full gamut of forms of interaction, including domination, resistance, alliance, reciprocity, accommodation, negotiation, cooperation, compliance, collusion, emulation, flight, and ambivalence, among others (see Liebman 2012; Liebmann and Murphy 2010).

Local Political Economy: Spatial and Temporal Scales

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Pruning Colonialism A closely related issue is that the Indigenous vantage point must not be a generic ‘view from the shore’, but one that is contextualized in a particular place and time. Choices about spatial and temporal scales have dramatic effects on scholars’ ability to perceive Indigenous autonomy, assess the intercultural balance of power, and specify the modes of and motivations for social interaction. Anthropologists and archaeologists studying the European expansion (e.g. Deetz 1991; Wolf 1982) frequently advocate a ‘global perspective’ that examines (p.111) broad-scale processes and interconnections. Analyses at this spatial scale overwhelmingly focus on the actions of Europeans, since they were most often able to enact connections over global-scale distances. This point is amply demonstrated in a statement by historian Robbie Ethridge, who explicitly adopts a world-systems perspective on Indigenous groups in eastern North America. She states that initial European settlements ‘may have been small and overwhelmed by Indian populations, but they were one conduit through which the economic power of the core countries flowed. Hence, one should not look on the American colonies and colonists themselves as wielding extraordinary transforming power over Native life, but rather it was the system in which they served that was so transformative’ (Ethridge 2009:19). But contrary to perspectives such as those offered by Ethridge, from the vantage adopted here I would argue that the local powerlessness of European colonies is precisely the point. One such outpost, the French Fort St Joseph in what is now Michigan, at first glance may appear to have operated as a conduit of French imperial might, yet in 1695 the fort seems to have functioned locally as a cage for Frenchmen, as Iroquois attackers fired at defenders through the gaps in the walls (Nassaney et al. 2007:5). While European-centred global-scale processes were both real and are of vital analytical importance, the scope of a process does not measure its strength or impact at the local or regional level. The change in vantage point to a focus on Indigenous communities requires a corresponding change in spatial scale from looking in from the global to looking out from the local and/or regional. This is the only way to ensure that smaller-scale processes emanating from Native communities will be analytically visible. A change in the temporal scale employed is also necessary. Similar to global, scalar viewpoints, long-term perspectives emphasize the influence of Europeans due to the eventual outcome of European expansion. This outcome was not in any sense predetermined, and incorporation of information from more recent periods may result in the misrepresentation of political-economic conditions in earlier eras. A Page 10 of 24

Pruning Colonialism prime example of this process can be found in Janet Spector’s What this Awl Means (1993), where Spector grants precognitive powers to the Wahpeton Dakotas living at the Little Rapids site. In the last sentence in the famous ‘awl story’, Spector (1993:29) writes that Dakotas ‘had troubling premonitions about the future’, despite the fact that land cessions and the disasters of the Dakota War were over a decade away. Bradley (1987:120) engages in similar foreshadowing by claiming that exposure to French lifeways ‘could not but help lay the groundwork for eventual adoption of these activities by the Onondaga’. Neal Ferris (2006:102) terms such cherry-picking of earlier evidence to connect to eventual settler triumph the ‘archaeology of anticipation’. Instead, archaeologists should examine time in as narrow slices as their evidence allows—ideally, in durations of a decade or less. Examining the dynamics of these narrow slices on their own merits allows for finegrained assessments (p.112) of the immediate balance of power: military victories and defeats, changes in alliances and trade partners, ecological transformations, and the establishment and abandonment of colonies and satellites (both European and Native). Stephen Silliman’s (2009) call to look at Indigenous material culture assemblages in shortterm swaths to capture the realities of social memory rather than comparing them long term to a prehistoric ‘baseline’ also uses tight time-frames to more closely capture the lived experience of Indigenous social actors. Narrow timescales allow the modelling of fluctuations and disjunctures, generation-level changes, and the waxing and waning of opportunities and adversities, rather than burying them in an essentializing linear model.

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Pruning Colonialism Local Political Economy and Multiscalar Analysis

In my 2008 monograph, I term an approach emphasizing localities and narrow slices of time local political economy (Jordan 2008:Ch. 2). This method does not restrict analysis to localities and brief time periods, but uses these perspectives as entry points for multiscalar analysis: studies of localities radiate outwards into studies of regions and subcontinents. For example, my examination of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Iroquois satellite communities (Jordan 2010; 2013) illustrates that Iroquois populations increased their influence by physically colonizing new areas distant from their ‘traditional homeland’, which was the spatial limit of the work of many previous scholars. Starting at the locality and radiating out offers the best method for finding the basis of Native power, which generally operated at smaller scales than did that of ship-based Europeans but still frequently reached subcontinental proportions. Similarly, building longterm sequences from a series of short-term historical views can outline the temporal extent of significant Native autonomy and those tipping points when European power became greater, or was overthrown. Supple consideration of space and time also can better reveal changes in the modes of and motivations for interaction (see examples in Liebmann and Murphy 2010). It is from perspectives like those just described that the spatial and temporal limits of the power of colonizers can readily be seen. It is productive in this context to consider the zonation of power, in ways similar to models derived from studies of the energetics of foraging, agricultural, and transportation systems (e.g. Binford 1982; Drennan 1984; Stone 1996), hegemonic-territorial models for states and empires (e.g. Alconini 2008; D’Altroy 1992; Scott 2009), and ‘distance-parity’ models for interregional interaction (Stein 1999:58–81). In essence, these models proclaim that social systems work with more certainty in ‘core’ spaces and that the frictions of distance and terrain impede operation in hinterlands. This is true for both colonizers and Indigenous groups—agency erodes as one moves away from demographic centres to areas to which access is less easy.

(p.113) Colonialism and Cultural Entanglement

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Pruning Colonialism Most definitions of colonialism describe a form of intercultural politicaleconomic relationship that encompasses some sort of exploitation or control of the colonized by the colonizer. In those many historical settings where Native groups remained relatively autonomous, and firmly in possession of their homelands (or the vast majority of their homelands), it seems a stretch to label interactions with Europeans on ships or cowering behind makeshift fortifications as colonialism. Yet this is exactly what appears to be taking place in archaeology: scholars increasingly label as colonialism many sorts of engagements where impacted Indigenous groups remained politically and economically autonomous. One example is Chris Gosden’s labelling of the diffusion of particular artifact styles—what was classically called a horizon style, divorced from issues of political-economic control—as ‘colonialism without colonies’ (Gosden 2004:41; see also Domínguez 2002). Gosden (2004:5) states that ‘what differentiates colonialism from other aspects of contact are issues of power, which, in the approach I am developing, is a differential power of material culture to galvanise and move people. Colonialism brings a new quality (or rather inequality) to human relations,’ This position takes micro-level changes in consumption practices as evidence for influence, and thus domination. While Indigenous consumption of foreign goods can lead to greater participation in foreign trade networks, alliances, and military endeavours (e.g. Dietler 2010), this is far from an inevitable process. Gosden’s (2004:81) depiction of ‘the grip that objects get on people’ as a form of intercultural inequality is exceedingly problematic given the long history among historical archaeologists of trying to disentangle Indigenous uses and values from the European sources of post-1415 material culture (e.g. Silliman 2009). Other scholars have focused on colonialism while leaving alternative political–economic relationships ill defined. Silliman (2005), for example, convincingly deconstructs the concept of contact by showing that it obscures the long-term nature of, and power relations within, intercultural engagements (see also Torrence and Clarke 2000). Despite these limitations, he retains a vague role for contact in the study of ‘initial encounters, first contacts, or intermittent visits’ (Silliman 2005:60). Silliman therefore hints that other concepts are needed, but does not provide them. I question even this limited use of contact, which should be dismissed as a description of any intercultural engagement based on Silliman’s own analysis. Even if one reserves the use of ‘contact’ for the earliest encounters between groups, it is uncertain that the concept has much utility for archaeologists. It is clear that substantial internal and intercommunity reorganization Page 13 of 24

Pruning Colonialism occurred in short order after (or even prior to) ‘first contact’, as is evidenced by the fact that Maine-area Natives were amply familiar with the European trade upon Giovanni da Verrazano’s visit in 1524 (Trigger 1985:129), (p.114) and Southeastern groups clearly informed each other and organized in response to the anticipated route of the De Soto invasion of 1539–1543 (Galloway 1995:116–20). It seems that ephemeral ‘first contact’ situations would be visible within ongoing Indigenous occupations at archaeological scales of resolution only rarely; the ‘contact’ temporal frame may in fact be too short. Cultural Entanglement

In my view, overzealous applications of colonialism and continuing use of unsatisfactory concepts like contact encourage just those sorts of vantage points and spatial and temporal perspectives that obscure Indigenous autonomy, innovation, and resiliency. The vantage from the shore demands that viable alternative concepts be developed that better capture Indigenous command of their own destiny. It is in this context that I advocate that cultural entanglement be formally conceived as a label for interaction processes where the balance of power among parties was relatively equal, or where Indigenous groups held power over colonizers. Use of entanglement in this sense as a formal complement to colonialism derives from an under-recognized article by Rani Alexander (1998). Elaborating on previous work by Thomas (1991) and Dietler (1998), Alexander (1998:485) defines entanglement as ‘a long-term, gradual, and non-directed process of interaction’, and colonialism as ‘an extreme case of core-periphery interaction’ (Alexander 1998:481) that involves political and/or military control of one group by another.4 In this two-choice framework, entanglement is not intended to act as a replacement for colonialism—planted in the same soil from which colonialism had been uprooted—but as a complementary conceptual tool that encourages scholars to explore Indigenous sovereignty and agency more deeply. The cultural entanglement designation serves to recognize predominance of Native agency and autonomy during some periods and in some places, but not in others, just as a scaled-back usage of colonialism would recognize the upper hand (p.115) of colonists only in certain places and times. Cultural entanglement will flourish in the light available when colonialism is pruned. It is entirely appropriate that colonialism act as the primary vantage in other contexts, particularly where colonial powers made the operation of Native settlement and subsistence systems impossible, truncated the Indigenous land base, or dominated the military landscape (Jordan Page 14 of 24

Pruning Colonialism 2009a). Over the past fifteen years, archaeologists increasingly have focused on these types of settings, and done excellent work on the archaeology of identity and gender formation, hybridity, ethnogenesis, and the survival of Native communities in difficult circumstances (e.g., Lightfoot 2005; Silliman 2004; Voss 2008). It is interesting to note that this same period has seen the rise of broad-brush applications of colonialism, while concurrently interest in the relatively autonomous homeland Native communities that dominated the archaeology of the 1980s and early 1990s has waned. Since much current work takes place on sites where the balance of power obviously favoured the colonists and thus fits the colonialism definition comfortably, archaeologists may have been lulled into a false sense of conceptual security. Even here, however, archaeologists must be sensitive to the spatial and temporal limits of colonial control, as is demonstrated by the existence of the relatively autonomous Kashaya Pomo Tomato Patch village only 5 km from Russian Fort Ross (Martinez 1997) and the semiautonomous maroon enclave at Fort Mose 3.2 km from Spanish St Augustine (Deagan and MacMahon 1995:20). The tools outlined here should help to define the limits to colonial power and their shifting boundaries over time. Use of this two-choice framework suggests that one of the first tasks facing an archaeologist is to assess whether processes taking place in a particular locality, during a narrow swath of time, represent cultural entanglement or colonialism. Analysis using these concepts as alternatives encourages focus on those periods when the balance of power tipped in one direction or the other, something obscured by a broad-brush application of colonialism. It also views colonialism as reversible, providing greater visibility and analytical definition to those instances of effective Native rebellion such as the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (e.g. Liebmann 2012; Wilcox 2009) and the nineteenth-century ‘Caste War’ in the Yucatan (Alexander 2004). The framework can be applied to state-hinterland relations in the present, such as ‘entanglement’ in the tribal zones of Afghanistan. Use of these terms certainly is not confined to engagements between Indigenous groups and colonizers; there is no reason not to use these concepts to describe relationships among Indigenous, or among colonizing, groups. This is not to say that the analytical choice between entanglement and colonialism will be straightforward or easy. While secondary sources are a good place to start for the characterization of particular eras, they are not infallible; my own study of eighteenth-century Iroquois communities found that the historical literature (e.g. Richter 1992) suffered from the same overemphasis on the settler vantage point as did prior archaeological texts (Jordan 2008). In (p.116) many, or most, Page 15 of 24

Pruning Colonialism cases, social relations in colonial outposts, borderlands, and the adjoining Native homelands were profoundly ambiguous and often contradictory (Sider 2003:Ch. 3), as were the material culture assemblages generated by those interactions (Silliman 2001).

Conclusion In almost all Postcolumbian settings, greater efforts are required to define basic political-economic parameters. Systematic use of Indigenous structural vantage points, locality-based spatial scales, and narrow swaths of time often will reveal significant Native autonomy in many places where broad-brush applications of colonialism obscure it. Such analyses may reveal the need for one or perhaps a host of other concepts for describing such interactions: scholars should be open to whatever direction the archaeological and historical records take us (see Thomas 2002). An approach that makes use of structural vantage points and analyses local political economies will not burn the bridge to other disciplines that the use of colonialism offers to archaeology. Scholars who use these tools and the concept of cultural entanglement will always be in dialogue with colonialism, albeit a pruned-back colonialism as compared to current usage. Systematic adoption of this two-option model in fact may strengthen Postcolumbian archaeology’s ties to other disciplines in that it identifies a domain that archaeology is particularly well positioned to address, given the dearth of colonial documentation in ‘entangled’ contexts and the temporal ambiguity in most descendant community depictions of daily life in the past. This framework additionally will facilitate comparison of similar political-economic situations across time and space. But most importantly, use of a twochoice framework will provide an infrastructure for keeping colonialism in its place—as something that haunts the Postcolumbian world (Orser 1996), but not equally in all times and places. Acknowledgements Conversations and exchanges with the editors, Adam Dewbury, Jasmine Gollup, Dan Hicks, Maeve Kane, Matthew Krohn, Chris Matthews, Jon Parmenter, Beth Ryan, Steve Silliman, and Barb Voss have influenced my thinking and honed my arguments. I also benefitted from presenting and discussing earlier versions of these ideas at the 2006 and 2009 annual meetings of the Society for Historical Archaeology; the 2007 Radical Archaeology Theory Symposium; a 2007 seminar at the Amerind Foundation; and in several seminars at Cornell University. (p.117) References

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Pruning Colonialism Bibliography references: Alconini, Sonia 2008 Dis-embedded Centers and Architecture of Power in the Fringes of the Inka Empire. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 27:63–81. Alexander, Rani T. 1998 Afterword: Toward an Archaeological Theory of Culture Contact. In Studies in Culture Contact, edited by James G. Cusick, pp. 476–95. Occasional Paper No. 25. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Carbondale. Alexander, Rani T. 2004 Yaxcabá and the Caste War of Yucatán: An Archaeological Perspective. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Binford, Lewis R. 1982 The Archaeology of Place. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 1:5–31. Bradley, James W. 1987 Evolution of the Onondaga Iroquois: Accommodating Change, 1500–1655. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York. Cipolia, Craig N. 2013 Becoming Brothertown: Native American Ethnogenesis and Endurance in the Modern World. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Cobb, Charles R. (ed.) 2003 Stone Tool Traditions in the Contact Era. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Cusick, James G. (ed.) 1998 Studies in Culture Contact. Occasional Paper No. 25. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Carbondale. D’Altroy, Terence N. 1992 Provincial Power in the Inka Empire. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Deagan, Kathleen and Darcie MacMahon 1995 Fort Mose: Colonial America’s Black Fortress of Freedom. University of Florida Press, Gainesville. Deetz, James 1991 Introduction. In Historical Archaeology in Global Perspective, edited by Lisa Falk, pp. 1–9. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Deloria, Philip J. 1998 Playing Indian. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut.

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Pruning Colonialism Dennison, Jean 2012 Colonial Entanglement: Constituting a TwentyFirst-Century Osage Notation. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. Dietler, Michael 1998 Consumption, Agency, and Cultural Entanglement. In Studies in Culture Contact, edited by James G. Cusick, pp. 288–315. Occasional Paper No. 25. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Carbondale. Dietler, Michael 2005 The Archaeology of Colonization and the Colonization of Archaeology. In The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters, edited by Gil J. Stein, pp. 33–68. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Dominguez, Adolfo J. 2002 Greeks in Iberia: Colonialism without Colonization. In The Archaeology of Colonialism, edited by Claire L. Lyons and John K. Papadopoulos, pp. 65–95. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Dietler, Michael 2010 Archaeologies of Colonialism: Consumption, Entanglement, and Violence in Ancient Mediterranean France. University of California Press, Berkeley. Drennan, Robert D. 1984 Long-distance Transport Costs in PreHispanic Mesoamerica. American Anthropologist 86:105–12. Ethridge, Robbie 2009 Introduction. In Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone, edited by Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, pp. 1–62. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. (p.118) Fennell, Christopher C. 2003 Group Identity, Individual Creativity, and Symbolic Generation in a BaKongo Diaspora. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 7:1–31. Ferris, Neal 2006 In Their Time: Archaeological Histories of Nativelived Contacts and Colonialisms, Southwestern Ontario A.D. 1400– 1900. PhD dissertation, McMaster University. University Microfilms, Ann Arbor. Galloway, Patricia 1995 Choctaw Genesis, 1500–1700. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Gosden, Chris 2004 Archaeology and Colonialism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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Pruning Colonialism Hodder, Ian 2012 Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, Massachusetts. Jordan, Kurt A. 2008 The Seneca Restoration, 1715–1754: An Iroquois Local Political Economy. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Jordan, Kurt A. 2009a Colonies, Colonialism and Cultural Entanglement. In International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by Teresita Majewski and David Gaimster, pp. 31–49. Springer, New York. Jordan, Kurt A. 2009b Regional Diversity and Colonialism in Eighteenth Century Iroquoia. In Iroquoian Archaeology and Analytic Scale, edited by Laurie E. Miroff and Timothy D. Knapp, pp. 215–30. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. Jordan, Kurt A. 2010 Not Just ‘One Site Against the World’: Seneca Iroquois Intercommunity Connections and Autonomy, 1550–1779. In Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400–1900, edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Mark D. Mitchell, pp. 79–106. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Jordan, Kurt A. 2013 Incorporation and Colonization: Postcolumbian Iroquois Satellite Communities and Processes of Indigenous Autonomy. American Anthropologist 115:29–43. Liebmann, Matthew 2008 Introduction. In Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi, pp. 1–20. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Liebmann, Matthew 2012 Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in 17th Century New Mexico. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Liebmann, Matthew and Melissa S. Murphy (eds) 2010 Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonization in the Americas. School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Lightfoot, Kent G. 2005 Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants. University of California Press, Berkeley. Lightfoot, Kent G., and Antoinette Martinez 1995 Frontiers and Boundaries in Archaeological Perspective. Annual Review of Anthropology 24:471–92.

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Pruning Colonialism Lightfoot, Kent G. Antoinette Martinez, and Ann M. Schiff 1998 Daily Practice and Material Culture in Pluralistic Social Settings. American Antiquity 63:199–222. Lyons, Claire L. and John K. Papadopoulos (eds) 2002 The Archaeology of Colonialism. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Martindale, Andrew 2009 Entanglement and Tinkering: Structural History in the Archaeology of the Northern Tsimshian. Journal of Social Archaeology 9:59–91. (p.119) Martinez, Antoinette 1997 View from the Ridge: The Kashaya Pomo in a Russian–American Company Context. In The Archaeology of Russian Colonialism in the North and Tropical Pacific, edited by Peter R. Mills and Antoinette Martinez, pp. 141–56. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, No. 81, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley. Mauss, Marcel 1967 The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by Ian Cunnison. Norton, New York. McNiven, Ian and Lynette Russell 2005 Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California. Mitchell, Mark D. and Laura L. Scheiber 2010 Crossing Divides: Archaeology as Long-term History. In Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400–1900, edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Mark D. Mitchell, pp. 1–22. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Nassaney, Michael S., Jose António Brandão, William M. Cremin, and Brock A. Giordano 2007 Archaeological Evidence of Economic Activities at an Eighteenth-century Frontier Outpost in the Western Great Lakes. Historical Archaeology 41(4):3–19. O’Donovan, Maria 2002 Grasping Power: A Question of Relations and Scales. In The Dynamics of Power, edited by Maria O’Donovan, pp. 19– 34. Occasional Paper No. 30. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Carbondale. Oland, Maxine, Siobhan M. Hart, and Liam Frink (eds) 2012 Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

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Pruning Colonialism Ollman, Bertell 2003 Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Orser, Charles E., Jr 1996 A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World. Plenum, New York. Richter, Daniel K. 1992 The Ordeal of the Longhouse. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. Rothschild, Nan A. 2003 Colonial Encounters in a Native American Landscape. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Rothschild, Nan A. 2006 Colonialism, Material Culture, and Identity in the Rio Grande and Hudson River Valleys. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 10:73–108. Schrire, Carmel 1995 Digging through Darkness: Chronicles of an Archaeologist. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville. Scott, James C. 2009 The Art of Not Being Governed. Yale University Press, New Haven. Sider, Gerald M. 2003 Between History and Tomorrow: Making and Breaking Everyday Life in Rural Newfoundland. Broadview Press, Peterborough, Ontario. Silliman, Stephen W. 2001 Theoretical Perspectives on Labor and Colonialism. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 20:379–407. Silliman, Stephen W. 2004 Lost Laborers in Colonial California. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005 Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America. American Antiquity 70:55– 74. (p.120) Silliman, Stephen W. 2009 Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England. American Antiquity 74:211–30. Spector, Janet D. 1993 What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village. Minnesota Historical Society Press, St Paul. Stahl, Ann Brower 2002 Colonial Entanglements and the Practices of Taste: An Alternative to Logocentric Approaches. American Anthropologist 104:827–45.

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Pruning Colonialism Stein, Gil J. 1999 Rethinking World-systems: Diasporas, Colonies, and Interaction in Uruk Mesopotamia. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Stein, Gil J. 2002 Colonies without Colonialism. In The Archaeology of Colonialism, edited by C. L. Lyons and J. K. Papadopoulos, pp. 26–64. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Stein, Gil J. 2005 Introduction. In The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters, edited by Gil J. Stein, pp. 3–31. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Stone, Glenn Davis 1996 Settlement Ecology: The Social and Spatial Organization of Kofyar Agriculture. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Thomas, Julian S. 2002 Taking Power Seriously. In The Dynamics of Power, edited by Maria O’Donovan, pp. 35–50. Occasional Paper No. 30. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Carbondale. Thomas, Nicholas 1991 Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Torrence, Robin and Anne Clarke 2000 Negotiating Difference: Practice Makes Theory for Contemporary Archaeology in Oceania. In The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross-cultural Engagements in Oceania, edited by Robin Torrence and Anne Clarke, pp. 1–31. Routledge, New York. Trigger, Bruce G. 1985 Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s ‘Heroic Age’ Reconsidered. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal. Voss, Barbara L. 2005 From Casta to Californio: Social Identity and the Archaeology of Culture Contact. American Anthropologist 107:461–74. Voss, Barbara L. 2008 The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis. University of California Press, Berkeley. Weik, Terrance 2007 Allies, Adversaries, and Kin in the African Seminole Communities of Florida. In Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora, edited by Akinwumi Ogundiran and Toyin Falola, pp. 311–31. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Wilcox, Michael V. 2009 The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest. University of California Press, Berkeley. Wolf, Eric R. 1982 Europe and the People Without History. University of California Press, Berkeley. Page 22 of 24

Pruning Colonialism Wylie, Alison 1992 The Interplay of Evidential Constraints and Political Interests: Recent Archaeological Research on Gender. American Antiquity 57:15–35. Notes:

(1) Following Wolf (1982:129), I use the Portuguese seizure of the North African port of Ceuta in 1415 as the date for the onset of European expansion. I also loosely refer to the period of European expansion as the Postcolumbian era, despite the temporal dissonance between 1415 and Columbus’ 1492 voyage. (2) Scholars have used cultural entanglement in disparate ways; here I emphasize the use of the term for political-economic and comparative purposes, while recognizing its employment similar to (e.g. Dennison 2012), and different (e.g. Hodder 2012; Martindale 2009; Stahl 2002; Thomas 1991) ends by others. (3) Obtaining fresh insights by changing analytical vantage points is certainly not unique to Marxian theory, as this procedure is also fundamental to feminist standpoint theory (e.g. Wylie 1992). (4) While I build on Alexander’s distinction between cultural entanglement and what she at the time called colonization (now better labelled as colonialism), it should be noted that I depart from her model in other ways. Alexander (1998:486) identifies symmetrical exchange as a third formal type, defined as ‘nonhierarchical interaction’ in which ‘[p]ower differentials between exchange partners are not evident, and similar transport technology is accessible to all members of the network’. In my view, most forms of exchange (classically, including ‘the gift’) involve at least the potential for inequality (e.g. Mauss 1967), although that inequality in many cases was more temporary and internally focused than what should be placed in the category of colonialism. For my purposes, Alexander’s symmetrical exchange is subsumed in the cultural entanglement category. I also seek to distance myself from those aspects of Alexander’s wording that imply that settings of entanglement teleologically were destined to evolve into colonialism (see Ferris 2006:47–50); I view entanglement as an openended, and constantly renegotiated, process.

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The Nature of Culture

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

The Nature of Culture Sites, Ancestors, and Trees in the Archaeology of Southern Mozambique M. Dores Cruz

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0006

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the role of landscapes and natural elements as historic and memory markers, focusing on sacred trees and tree groves as part of the archaeology of the Mandlakazi region in Southern Mozambique. More specifically, it explores how trees and tree groves relate to ancestral figures that held political power and how they are an integral part of local history, and how this connection legitimises identity creation. It also considers how intangible elements such as rituals, community history, and webs of kinship relations are at once embedded and made visible through the use of landscapes and elements of nature in their construction of a collective social memory that encompasses the community of the living and of the ancestors. Keywords:   landscapes, sacred trees, tree groves, archaeology, Mandlakazi, Southern Mozambique, political power, local history, social memory, ancestors

–Will you give me a ride? –You going far?

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The Nature of Culture –No, just down the road, by the ‘tambeira’ tree Mandlakazi woman

Introduction: Trees as Ancestors ‘Just down the road’ was over seven kilometres, but the tambeira was the landmark noticed and known by all. Tambeira (Portuguese, tsonzo/ tzontzo, Xichangana;1 tamba, Cicopi; Brachystegia spiciformis; Koning 1993) is a majestic tree that stands out in the Southern Mozambican landscape. The point of reference used by the woman looking for a ride that would take her closer to home is not an exception in Southern Mozambique, where trees (more concretely, specific trees and tree species) provide landmarks that define a landscape mostly characterized by the widespread (and non-distinctive) cashew trees planted as a cash crop during the colonial period, and by low brush, grasslands, and low-density short trees. Trees visualize and map historic events, personages, and remembrances in the landscape, mark ancestors’ graves, are loci for ancestors’ spiritual existence, and become material indicators for lineages’ legitimate relation with the power of the dead. Trees are places where (p.124) family descendants make propitiatory offerings, perform rituals, and ask for advice from ancestors, thus grounding social and power relations within the collective memory of local history. Trees anchor in space social memories that often operate in conflict with the state official narrative, reifying and building a historical map of remembrance, creating nonphysical dimensions of place that embed beliefs and cultural systems, while emphasizing social and spiritual aspects. The trees and tree groves discussed in this chapter are identified with ancestral figures that held political power and are an integral part of local history. This connection between historic ancestors and places articulates networks of social relations between ancestors and the living community becoming important tools in the legitimization of political power and identity creation. For example, today local social memory is used in the negotiation of family and individual rights to the reconstructed positions of traditional leadership and to community ownership of land (Convery 2006; Cumbe 2010).This chapter builds upon current ethnoarchaeological and archaeological research in the district of Mandlakazi2 (Gaza Province, Southern Mozambique), and aims to investigate issues of memory construction and the role of landscapes (particularly historic and sacred landscapes) that go beyond settlement patterns and distribution (for a critique see Lane 2008). Instead, I examine how intangible elements (e.g. rituals, community history, and webs of kinship relations) are at once embedded and made

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The Nature of Culture visible through the use of landscapes and elements of nature in their construction of a collective memory that encompasses the community of the living and of the ancestors. As is common for other sub-Saharan regions, in Southern Mozambique natural elements, particularly trees and tree groves, are endowed with cultural and historical significance. They participatae in interpretations and memorializations of local ancestors that transcend the Western nature–culture dichotomy by articulating physical aspects of space and nature in networks of social relations, especially dynamics of power among individuals, lineages, and communities (Cumbe 2000; Dava et al. 1998; Filimão 2007). Elements of nature are involved in processes of inscribing landscapes beyond their material attributes, and people associate them with supernatural worlds of sacred geographies. In this case study of sacred trees and tree groves in the Mandlakazi region, we encounter a local means of patterning social and cosmological relations between humans and non-humans, nature and society, in which the realm of nature is not dissociated from the realm of human society (p. 125) or from that of the sacred. Sacred trees and tree groves often associated with archaeological sites serve to anchor in space spiritual forces that unite the community of descendants, while creating a continuum between living descendents and ancestors. The worlds of human reality, ancestors, and nature blend into each other rather than being in stark disjunction, as the West perceives the social and symbolic relations between humans and elements of nature, or humans and the sacred (cf. Descola 1996, 2005). The trees and tree groves, in their association with ancestral beliefs and their relationship with historic events and personages, form a network of social relations among humans, ancestors, and the material world of nature, and archaeological evidence of these ancestors. The sacredness of natural elements and landscapes, and their participation in the construction of social memory and local community history, contrast with the official narratives of the state, based primarily in the use of Western-type monuments (e.g. statues and commemorative plaques), official heroes and performances, and the government’s legal control over land policies and political offices (see also Schmidt, this volume). Collective memory is maintained through cultural practices that reproduce and transfer social and moral orders through practices and enactments of memories (Hastorf 2003:307) that link generations, creating a social and political order. As such, ritual performances draw upon a community’s history, take place in specific settings, and are associated with memorial landmarks, creating group unity and solidarity between the living family or lineage and the spirits of ancestor authority figures. Consequently, local community is not simply Page 3 of 33

The Nature of Culture a group of people equated with a space (i.e. a landscape sensu lato) as a geographical entity, a lifescape that offers livelihood (Convery 2006:449; Howorth and O’Keefe 1999), and can define an individual’s intimate relation with locale (Bender 1998, 2001; Bradley 2000; Tilley 1994). Instead, community is a landscape embedded in social and cultural relations that include kinship ties; it is the group to whom one belongs that includes the living, as well as selected individuals who lived in the past and are now in a state of spiritual existence. Ancestors are understood within the family structure, and the authority of these ancestors is remembered by the physicality of places and things (e.g. archaeological sites, trees, and tree groves). Social memory is made visible and performances renew social relations, regulate membership to the community, and legitimize authority (Dillehay 1990; Hastorf 2003). The living human world, the spiritual world, and the natural world appear intertwined, and as such trees participate in the creation of a moral and historical geography. In the Mandlakazi district, and in addition to the sacred geography of trees and ancestors, there is a distinct level of local social memories that highlight other historic events and personages that exist outside the precolonial, local system of political leadership lineage. These events and personages are still anchored in the (p.126) landscape through trees and tree groves, but tend not to be associated with concepts of sacredness and religious ritual performances of places connected to lineage ancestors. My aim with this analysis of landscapes and uses of natural elements as historic and memory markers is twofold: first, to explore the significance of nature as integrated in forms of local traditional knowledge (Descola 1994; Fairhead and Leach 1998; Rival 1998; Ross 2008; Schmidt 2010) and in narratives of history performed by elders in Mandlakazi that associate archaeological sites, nature (particularly trees and tree groves), and ancestors; second, to examine how local communities incorporate both natural and non-natural elements (i.e. material culture) into a culturally mediated remembrance of the past that negotiates and legitimizes identity and power through spiritual authority over landscape and nature. Although I consider broadly differing discourses and contested meanings of Mandlakazi landscapes as the region became entangled in distinct relations with external political forces, including the nineteenth-century Gaza empire, the Portuguese colonial empire, and finally, the post-independence period (Chabal 2002; West 2005), I stress local interpretations and cosmologies that implicate archaeological sites and nature into a cumulative construction of social memory that goes beyond the

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The Nature of Culture inadequate binary oppositions of nature–culture/society and chronological precolonial/colonial boundaries. Alternative expressions of material agency and contested meanings of space and place have implications for the lived experiences of local populations, who through their engagement and understanding of the nature of local versus non-local (i.e. invaders) maintain distinctive identities. As a result, archaeological disciplinary frameworks—and the dichotomy of indigenous/colonized colonizer/settler—may need to be broadened and revised to account for the lack of relational significance they may have in certain post-colonial contexts (for a critique see Lane, this volume; see also Harrison, Silliman, this volume). Despite the contextual construct of local identity (Cruz 2011) and the colonial policies of ethnic identity homogenization, it is necessary to understand that local experiences and perceptions of heritage do not always align with postcolonial trends in the archaeology of a global colonial world. The discussion of the relationship between trees, ancestors, and archaeological sites as performance and visualization of local social memory raises questions of appropriateness (or not) of Western concepts such as (natural) shrines, sacred groves, and religious activities, based mainly on a dual semantic matrix of contrastive properties of sacred–profane and nature–culture when associated with the construction of memory in the Southern Mozambican landscape. Furthermore, it emphasizes intangible cultural practices that challenge the materiality of ‘doing’ archaeology, even in a postcolonial context.

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The Nature of Culture (p.127) A Palimpsest of Landscapes

The relationship between ancestors and elements of nature has a long tradition in anthropology, but more recently concepts and construction of landscape have become central in the debate over the social construction of memory that goes beyond the use of Western traditions of memorialization (e.g. Basso 1996; Feld 1996:109–13; Harrison 2004; Lambek 2002; Mather 2003; Rubertone 2008). Phenomenological thought has had a considerable influence on discussions of landscape, particularly among archaeologists, who bring to the discussion experiential dimensions of landscape, topographies, and nature (e.g. Bender 1998, 2001; Bradley 2000; Ingold 1993; Thomas 2008; Tilley 1994, 2008) to address how the physical world participates in negotiating senses of place and identity, as well as populations’ relationships with the world that they live in (or to use Ingold’s terminology dwell in (Ingold 1993); Forbes 2007). Landscapes, natural sites, trees, and animals can materialize and represent the physicality of social relations and identity, and express the relationship between societies, family, and ancestors (De Boeck 1994). In the dialectic of nature–culture, nature tends to provide a conceptual resource for understanding cultural forms, so that natural features unaltered by humans such as hills, rock outcrops, lakes, and rivers (Bradley 2000; Chapman 1997; Chippendale 2004; Tilley 2008; Tilley and Bennett 2001) emphasize permeabilities between place, time, and people (Forbes 2007; Hicks and McAtackney 2007:20). Seemingly, studies that examine rituals and ancestors from a cultural perspective (e.g. Fontein 2006; Greene 2002; Mather 2003, 2009; Ranger 1999) seldom explore natural elements as forms of material culture. This is mostly because such elements (e.g. trees) have limited life spans, while rock formations and rivers, unmovable and unaltered, are a constant on the landscape (but see Chouin 2002, 2010; Schmidt 2006, 2010). Conversely, analysis of such rituals and ancestors continues to build on uses of Western-influenced dichotomies and dialectics that divide the world of humans and non-humans, the sacred and the profane, material–non material, and tangible–intangible (for a critique, see Harrison 2004; Harrison and Rose 2010). In reality, and among indigenous populations throughout the world, the spheres of humans and non-humans (animals, plants, or ancestors) may not be distinctive but enmeshed through relations and communication (Harrison and Rose 2010:250). In the case of sacred trees and sacred groves in Mandlakazi, individuals, families, and lineages are not only in communication with the ancestors that are known to ‘live’ in areas where archaeological sites and sacred trees are located, but by their actions towards the ancestors—particularly the respect manifested Page 6 of 33

The Nature of Culture through the performance of rituals—people are responsible for the wellbeing of the community. Therefore, landscapes exist not only for the living, but cumulatively encapsulate the dead and the past in a temporal collage (Holtorf and Williams 2006:237). (p.128) In Southern Mozambique, the ritual engagement with trees is part of a complex system that assures permeability between present and past through the reification of ancestor places (cf. Chouin 2010; Dawson 2009; De Boeck 1994; Rival 1998): and so are loci of mediation where lineage histories and memories are performed. Contrary to views that restrict material culture to tactile residues of practices and actions taking place at ritual sites (Apoh and Gavua 2010), Mandlakazi sacred trees and groves designate the places where ancestors live, where living lineages can communicate with them, and where the ancestors’ world is a continuation of the world of the living. I suggest the nonphysical dimensions of a place—in this case, trees and tree groves—do not exist solely on the ground (as material culture), but are embedded in and embody spiritual aspects of that place. Sacred trees and tree groves display material and spatial dimensions, as well as a spiritual dimension that goes beyond the domestication of the natural world (Mather 2003). Importantly, sacred trees and tree groves are loci of power that confer authority to those in charge of serving the ancestors because by presiding over the well-being of the spiritual world, they are ensuring the well-being of the living community. Knowledgeable elders understand the family structure within which the ancestors are embedded, providing them with special authority that then overflows to other areas of life. For example, some of these elders are central in negotiating the return of lands to communities and on legitimating the reconstruction of traditional leadership through their knowledge of the genealogies of ancestors who connect today’s communities to the land. The intersection between nature, historic narrative, and ancestors within sacred landscapes provides a ritualistic and symbolic dimension to events that often resulted from European colonial contacts (De Boeck 1994; West 2005). In Mandlakazi, sacred trees and groves participate in the performance of remembrances of royal ancestors, resistance to foreign invaders, and a time when local political elites enjoyed autonomy. This association between nature and personalities is not ahistorical or located in a past too remote to give us specific details of such relations (Bradley 2000; Tilley and Bennett 2001), but rather participates in the local construction of history and in issues of power and identity, and how they relate to concepts of sacredness.

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The Nature of Culture By folding together people and things (e.g. trees, archaeological sites, material culture), past and present, the analysis of the Mandlakazi landscape engages with the local system of meanings and interpretations of collective identity (Geigenbach 1999). The interaction between nature and culture brings to light a landscape archaeology that seeks to use material engagements beyond conventional, Eurocentric perspectives. As well, it attempts to provide a meaningful interpretation of memory narratives that have a spatial and material dimension, yet at the same time possess an intangible dimension that emerges from ongoing human actions and the performance of rituals. Because this physical landscape is also a place for performance of official narratives of (p.129) history, the Southern Mozambican landscape is also imbued with political dimensions, with overlapping engagements and memories that are bounded by claims of power (Hicks and McAtackney 2007:18; Holtorf and Williams 2006:236). The spatial mapping of memories and narratives by indigenous populations created the stage (or a ‘legendary topography’, cf. Halbwachs [1992]) in which colonial and postcolonial narratives have been mapped, legitimized, and strengthened because they are connected with such meaningful landscapes.

Mandlakazi: Geographical Context The Mandlakazi district of Mozambique is located in the Southern region of the Gaza Province (Figure 5.1). The region is characterized by very low-altitude rolling hills, sandy soils, and small lakes—both along the coastal area and in the interior, and often disappearing during the dry season—and sandy, lowland plains surrounding the lakes. The climate in the interior tends towards dryness, with very irregular rains from November to March and arid conditions constraining agricultural production in the region, which represents the main occupation for the majority of the population. The cashew nut, introduced during the colonial period, continues to be perceived as a major cash crop by local populations, despite recent considerable reduction in production that has greatly limited its economic centrality for local farmers (cf. Bessa 2004). However, cashew trees (Anacardium occidentale) still represent the major form of

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The Nature of Culture (p.130) land coverage in most of the district. Natural land coverage is characterized by lowdensity, small-sized trees, classified as tall or short scrub (mato,3 Saket 1994), as well as grass cover with occasional patches or remnants of miombo Fig. 5.1. Map of the Mandlakazi area. woodland, relatively simple formations of wooded savannas. The Southern Mozambique miombo woodland is dominated by Brachystegia Spiciformis (tzontzo/tambeira) and Julbernardia globiflora (cheche, in some areas also known as tamba/tambeira; Sousa 1966–1967), a tree that produces hardwood timber and fibrous barks used in house construction (Salomão 2006; Wild and Fernandes 1967). Within this region, other associated vegetation types include the Afzelia quanzensis (chanfuta, Port.), a large hardwood tree, the Trichilia emetica (banket or Natal mahogany; mafureira/ mafurreira) and Sclerocarya birrea (marula; canhoeiro, Port.; nkanyi)—all these trees having considerable cultural significance in the cult of the ancestors. Diverse species of Fabaceae and Ficus are common, and some individual trees of these species occupy a space in the historical and ancestral geographies.

Mandlakazi: Historical Context

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The Nature of Culture Mandlakazi and its surroundings had a central role in the history of Mozambique at the end of the nineteenth century. Mandlakazi (Port. Manjacaze) was the name given to all the Gaza-empire capitals, and this specific Mandlakazi was Ngungunyane’s (the final leader of the Gaza empire) last capital before being defeated by the Portuguese in 1895 (e.g. Newitt 1995). In the early nineteenth century, socio-economic and political changes in neighbouring Southern African regions had led to the emergence of the Zulu kingdom and to the Mfecane/Difaqane,4 resulting in the emergence of vast, centralized, and militaristic states. In the aftermath of the Mfecane, the Nguni, originally from the area south of Delagoa Bay (Liesegang 1970:318; Newitt 1995:259; Omer-Cooper 1966:66), rapidly conquered large expanses of land and dominated local populations, building an empire that extended to the Zambezi River. Southern Mozambique, characterized by paramount chieftaincies in which heads of families occupied a ruling place within a loosely, nonstratified social organization, was easily conquered. The result was the integration of the region into the powerful, centralized Gaza state that came into existence c.1821 (Isaacman and Isaacman 1983:18; Liesegang 1975, 1996; Newitt 1995), with Nguni foreigners dominating the top echelons of the political hierarchy. In the late nineteenth century, European attempts to dominate (p.131) and control central Africa led to the expansion of the Portuguese colonial frontiers, incompatible with the existence of the Gaza state, the only independent African monarchy in Southern Africa after 1893 (Newitt 1995:375). In 1895, Portuguese troops defeated the Gaza armies at Coolela, burned Mandlakazi, and captured Ngungunyane. Today, most of the population in the Mandlakazi district identify themselves as Shangaan, speaking Xichangana, a Xitsonga language5 (Grimes 1996; Sitoe and Ngunga 2000; Zerbian 2007). The term, Shangaan, draws from Soshangan, the Nguni chief who invaded and subjugated the area in the 1820s, establishing the Gaza empire (Liesegang 1975; Newitt 1995:269–2). In their territorial expansion, the Nguni chiefs were accompanied by armies and a small number of Nguni communities that dominated the local populations already living in the region and whose memories still persist and deeply influence ethnic identities. For example, although local populations identify as ‘Shangaan’, a Nguni historical personage, the resistance to the Nguni occupation dominates the narratives of local memory that are paramount for identity construction. An 1896 colonial document (O Reino de Gaza 1896:146–7) indicates that the Nguni conquerors designated the local populations who adopted Nguni costumes as ‘Machangana’, elevating some local individuals to positions of power within Page 10 of 33

The Nature of Culture the Nguni state (see also Smith 1973). The visual symbol of assimilation was the adoption of pierced earlobes, where wooden tubes were inserted and in which men stored tobacco. Today some elderly people— both men and women—still display pierced earlobes, and consider this a sign of the Nguni’s political and cultural domination. A few kilometres south of the town of Mandlakazi, populations identify themselves mostly as Chope,6 a group that today shows a more defined and historically rooted identity built around, and strengthened by, their resistance to the Nguni foreigners. Paramount in the memory discourse of resistance to the Gaza-Nguni empire are narratives about Mahoho Bahule, a Chope chief who lived in the area of coastal lakes and who, during the period 1889 to 1893, opposed Ngungunyane’s political power and superior armies. The resistance by Mahoho Bahule and his dependants is presented as a major point in local narratives, and the fact that the Bahule were finally conquered, with many killed, is played down in the context of political and cultural resistance to the stronger and militarily better organized Gaza armies. Prior to the Nguni invasions, Southern Mozambique was characterized by several paramount chiefdoms whose political leadership was in the hands of (p.132)

Fig. 5.2. Example of a munti (Macupulane). Photograph by the author.

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The Nature of Culture specific lineages and lacked political centralization. Drawing upon lists of genealogies published in colonial documents (Ferrão 1909), and on oral tradition, it is clear that in the Mandlakazi region political leadership was in the hands of the Khambane-Mondlane lineage as early as the mid nineteenth century (also Liesegang 1974:306–7). Inheritance of leadership was patrilineal, and authority was transmitted to the first-born son of the first wife.7 Sons of chiefs had administrative duties, often being sent to build their own compounds and villages in frontier regions (Liesegang 1981:180; Nimande 2005; Xirrime 2010). Junod (1962:1:381–5) discusses the sacred, and sometimes dangerous, character of the political leader that set him apart from the remaining population. Socially and in terms of wealth he was not distinct from his subjects: his huts and compound (munti; see Figure 5.2) were similar to those of commoners, and the chief himself would undertake similar tasks to those of his subjects, particularly farming and herding cattle. Social prestige was associated with the occupancy of political positions, wealth in people (Guyer 1993), and their ritual role in the first fruits celebrations. Today, the Kuluma Nguva ya (p.133) Ukanyi (first fruits of ukanyi8), a ritual celebration that marks the opening of the consumption of ukanyi, is still widely observed in Southern Mozambique, a remnant of the rights that past political leaders held to the first fruits of the harvest.

Many of Mandlakazi’s Shangaan families trace their ancestry to the area’s pre-Nguni communities, particularly the Khambane-Mondlane family (more correctly a lineage identified by a common patronymic). By the mid nineteenth century, the Khambane were the local political elite whose two paramount chiefs, Bingwane and Xipenenyane, attempted to establish a small centralized state, before their ambitions were crushed by Ngungunyane (Liesegang 1981:181, 1996). Today, individuals and families (sub-lineages) stress their identity and historic relation with the Khambane. But some individuals who identify themselves as Shangaan have stated that in the past they and the Chope were the same. According to them, it was the Chope that resisted the Nguni invasion, while the Khambane and other communities from the Mandlakazi area did not, and adopted Nguni customs and material culture. Concurrently, the Chope’s position was also heightened during the colonial period by the fact that the Portuguese colonial administration named this region ‘the Muchope circle’, even if the administrative centre was located in the town of ‘Manjacaze’, whose population mainly identified themselves as Shagaan and primarily as Khambane descendants. The late-nineteenth-century colonial strategy was to integrate the Nguni and ‘Ma-changana’ leaders already in place into the colonial structure (O Reino de Gaza 1896:147–9). The colonial period marked the creation of régulos (Port., literally meaning ‘small kings’) and their administrative areas (régulados). Although these political structures were colonial impositions, they were rooted in customary governance Page 12 of 33

The Nature of Culture (Convery 2006:450–1; Cumbe 2010), using individuals and families who already occupied positions of power (Ferrão 1909:254–62; A. Langa 2005; M. Langa 2005; Moreira 2010; Thovele 2005). Such ‘traditional’ authorities continued to represent spiritual authority and led ritual ceremonies. With independence in 1975, FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique; Mozambique’s Liberation Front), introduced a new system of governance that ignored traditional leaders (Convery 2006; Cumbe 2010; Negrão 1995), which were perceived to be colonial creations, along with régulos, who in general were viewed as collaborating with the colonial regime. As a result, traditional authorities were abolished and the cultural, religious and/or spiritual roles of traditional leaders were ignored by the official power structure, disrupting practices of ritual performance around ancestors and the places associated with their memory. Both in 2005 and (p.134) 2010 most of my informants were quick to assert that the droughts, so common today in the area, resulted directly from the absence of ritual ceremonies honouring ancestors and the rupture with ‘traditional ways’. The community connection with the ancestors had been disrupted and the living were suffering the consequences. Elders’ discussions of claims to the land are frequently anchored in ancestral relations with the land. Lineages such as the Mondlane use the ancestral relationship with the land, particularly their roles in political leadership, to legitimize access to (or right to access) local and national political power. There appears to exist a contrast between the discourse of members of elite lineages and that of non-elite families that comes across, for example, in the legitimization of claims to land and power through the use of expressions such as ‘because X (a lineage ancestor) was owner of the land’, therefore giving today’s descendants the right to occupy an official political position. The elite narratives are usually connected to ancestors and the political symbolism of trees, which map local memories on the landscape, and are often in conflict with more formal and official meta-narratives.

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The Nature of Culture Khokholo: Sites of Memory and Archaeology

Even though individual trees are identified on the landscape as indicating locales where Ngungunyane bathed, prayed, met with the heads of his army, had his enemies killed, and so on, it is in the khokholo (palisaded residential places, often archaeological sites, and tied to ancestors) that trees acquire a level of sacredness not observed when they identify historic events or personages that fall outside the local lineage system. In Mandlakazi, the tambeira outside the district administration building displays a marble plaque indicating that it was under this tree that Ngungunyane met with the chiefs of his mangas.9 While the plaque and the narrative of the last Gaza-Nguni emperor’s anti-colonial resistance ties Mandlakazi to the national, official narrative, the tree is a tool of local memory construction. Seemingly, when travelling through the district, one finds other trees mapping historic events of official narrative in the landscape. Nevertheless, when talking to elders belonging to pre-Nguni political lineages, the memory narratives do not centre on Ngungunyane, whose depiction appears to concur more with the colonial description of a bloodthirsty, drunken chief. This view reflects the fact that, for Mandlakazi local elders, Ngungunyane was also a foreign invader who enslaved and killed local populations (Bahule 2005, 2010; Mandhlate 2005; Sitoi 2010; Thovele 2005). (p.135) The true heroes of local narratives are the ancestral figures of the Khambane-Mondlane lineage, particularly Bingwane and Xipenenyane. They resisted Ngungunyane’s demand for heavy tributes in óleo de mafura,10 which he used as body adornment and to coat the walls of his houses. This frivolous use of the oil is central to local counter-narratives of oppression about the foreign invaders and often it becomes the primary motive for resistance. It is not the arrogance of the invader in extracting tribute that is most stressed, but the wastefulness of such a prized good and its unsacred use as an adornment. Unlike other tree species, the mafureira (nkuhlu) is not a sacred tree, but the role of the oil in ritual ceremonies confers a cultural significance on this species that finds its way into the discourse of resistance. For the mafureira, veneration is not embedded into its cultural meaning as is the case for other trees, but it is the mafureira’s main product that conveys significance. Conversely, it is not the species of a tree that confers sacredness to individual specimens, but rather their location and relation with ancestors. It is in the khokholo that the sacredness of trees becomes apparent because they are the sitting places of ancestors, and therefore assume the status of an ancestral shrine. However, it is the local history of the pre-Nguni ancestors’ political power that gives significance and Page 14 of 33

The Nature of Culture symbolism to the khokholo, distinguishing them from compounds belonging to regular people, and distinguishing the ancestors from ordinary individuals. Most of the khokholo sites identified and embedded in the local collective memory are related to the Khambane-Mondlane family, the paramount chiefs’ lineage since before the mid nineteenth century (Liesegang 1974:307, 1996). This lineage traces its origin to Dzovo, a common, historical ancestor for all the different branches of the lineage. Archival documents indicate that Portuguese troops assisted a Makwakwa chief against Dzovo in 1812 or 1813 (Liesegang 1974:305– 6), allowing for a chronology of his presence in the area. After Dzovo, the Khambane political lineage seems to have split into smaller sublineages; each of the heads of the split groups associated with a khokholo and sacred grove referred to by the name of the founder. Today, villages are still named after the heads of the lineage that established the first compound or installed the split group, and therefore most of these villages have a khokholo associated with them. This is consistent with the prevalent functioning of lineage groups in which fission occurs when group membership becomes too large to manage. In Southern Mozambique, it is still common for a patrilineal compound to split when space becomes too crowded and conflicts arise among different generations. A married son may move to create his own compound, or munti, but never too far from his father’s compound. The oral tradition referring to Khambane (p.136) compounds often mentions conflicts between siblings as the main reason for the split of the compound. In other versions, there was the need to protect areas bordering territories under the influence of other ruling families (e.g. the Langa, a Chope lineage) or that were under direct threat from the Nguni. In the past, when the head of a family died, the general practice was to bury him in front of his hut. The practice was documented in the early twentieth century by Junod (1962:i:136) and is still found among ‘traditionalists’ in more remote rural areas. The belongings of the deceased were buried, destroyed, and some objects were hung in a tree near the grave. The deceased’s hut was not to be destroyed, but once abandoned it would collapse and disappear within a few years (Figure 5.5). The family could continue living in the compound, but often the wives and non-married children moved away and the compound was soon forgotten, unless remembered as a khokholo. Admittance to the khokholo requires consulting with elders, and in some cases also requires ceremonies that include libations, sacrifices, and offerings. The khokholo, in which families continue to perform Page 15 of 33

The Nature of Culture rituals requiring more complex consultation, demands the presence and participation of a large number of current leading individuals within the sub-lineage community (Figure 5.3). During my visits to a khokholo, most of the individuals (p.137) present did not have an active role in telling the oral tradition or in the invocation of the ancestors, but their attendance was required at all times. In most of the abandoned khokholo, fewer elders (two or three) had the ability to request from the ancestor permission to enter the area, but typically because they Fig. 5.3. Mapenguele: group of people had leading positions accompanying visit to the khokholo. within the family Photograph by the author. structure and could make these decisions, since the family did not perform ceremonies anymore.

In the nineteenth century (and possibly in the late eighteenth century, although there is no archaeological data to confirm it), the khokholo were fortified (palisaded) residences of chiefs capable of mobilizing defensive armies in times of danger, but who were not part of a stratified socio-political structure. Today, some of the khokholo are archaeological sites, marked by scatters of artifacts, mainly ceramics, preserved by family elders and identified by tree groves. Within the khokholo, individual trees represent specific ancestors and it is in front of these trees that ritual ceremonies take place. The ancestors connected to the khokholo are always historic leaders—rather than mythic figures—belonging to local political elites, who while living had their residences in those compounds, and after death were buried there. Their spirits are revered as ancestors, and the trees they had used as altars (gandzelo) for ritual ceremonies, prayers, and sacrifices become the ‘house’ for their spirits. It is in front of such trees (Figure 5.4) that descendants of these ancestors now pray and do kuphahla;11 that is, the ceremonial invocation of the lineage ancestors with offerings of food, drink, and tobacco. The tree is simultaneously an altar and the visualization of the ancestor. It is of note that the tree is not the ancestor himself, but functions as his sitting place for ritual purposes. The elders agree that the tree does not have to be of a specific species, Page 16 of 33

The Nature of Culture but is the tree the ancestor had used as his personal gandzelo. In reality, the range of tree species able to be sacralized within the khokholo is very limited, usually restricted to majestic trees (chanfuta, tembeira, ficus), less often marula (nkanyi), and in one case the jatrofe (Jatropha, possibly Jatropha Curcas), which is the sitting place of an unusual female ancestor memorialized with her father Macupulane. The family organizes kuphahla with gifts presented in front of the tree, most having at their base one or two partially buried pots used to receive offerings. In the past, there were various ceremonies taking place within the space of the khokholo, with different levels of complexity and involvement of local and distant lineage members, from small gatherings to full lineage participation,12 though costs and the difficulties of scheduling people with urban (p.138) lifestyles today tends to mean more complex and elaborate ceremonies are not held anymore.

Occasionally, individuals or small segments of the family may still organize small celebrations to ask for specific favours, particularly rain. The goal of these ceremonies is to bring Fig. 5.4. Khokholo of Xirrime. the local lineage Photograph by the author. community together in recognition of the ancestors, particularly the one in whose ‘house’ the ceremony takes place. If the gifts are appropriate and well accepted, a snake will appear from somewhere in the tree, indicating that the ceremony is successful, the gifts liked, and the ancestor happy. In such cases, rain will follow right away. A common characteristic of the khokholo’s grove is that trees cannot be cut for any purpose, not even for construction materials or firewood. In the past, the khokholo was periodically cleaned prior to ritual ceremonies, but tree branches and leaves would have to be left within its demarcated space as they belonged to the ancestor. Because ceremonies rarely take place now, the space of the khokholo often looks unkempt and may be difficult to distinguish from a non-sacred forest area. However, its sacredness is understood locally and if someone, by Page 17 of 33

The Nature of Culture mistake, gathers firewood or building materials within the sacred space he/she has to acknowledge the fact, thank the ancestors, and make an offer of tobacco to appease them. (p.139) My informants stated that a khokholo was a compound not dissimilar from regular people’s compounds, except that it was palisaded. The term itself means ‘enclosure; fortification made with tree branches; fort; fortress; castle’ (Sitoe 1996:80), and elders stressed that it really meant a military enclosure. The initial meaning was certainly connected to the mid-nineteenth-century enclosures noted in Portuguese documents (Longle 1886). For example, Xirrime, Chalala, and Madzucane all have clear evidence of palisades.13 And while the khokholo at Bahule was never fortified with a palisade, it was a well-defended space built on a small island located in a coastal lake. Nonetheless, today the term is used more extensively, and applied to any sacred grove or sacred space. Several of the khokholo I visited had never been fortified compounds, though now are sacred spaces dedicated to ancestors that had initiated the settlement or compound. Therefore while the original settlements designated as khokholo were defensive spaces, the designation has come to mean a sacred space of ancestors, independent of its original form. These spaces of memory that celebrate family ancestors share with the original khokholo the fact that they are spaces set apart, bounded. Although its vegetation is often similar to that of surrounding areas, people know exactly when they cross into the sacred space. The ancestors have to be informed that people are approaching and would like to enter ‘their house’; in some cases, people entering the khokholo had to take off their shoes to show respect. Taking off shoes, praying, and informing the ancestors are all rituals connected to an idea of boundary-crossing associated with places of religious and symbolic power, as the ancestors may be more than benevolent guardians (Colson 1997:50–1). Ritual behaviours can make the sacred grove a shrine, and although it is not built by humans, its preservation is due to human agency. In some of the khokholo where elders regularly perform rituals (e.g. Xirrime, Machacahomo, Macupulane, and Bahule), descendants have built a small hut that marks the location of the ancestor’s grave. This hut is not distinct from domestic huts found in contemporary munti and as such they re-establish a connection with residential spaces, as the khokholo were originally compounds. In this sense, the hut makes the connection between domestic space and the space of the dead, indicating that there is no clear separation between the world of the living and the world of ancestors. Despite the difficulty

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The Nature of Culture identifying the archaeological remains of regular compounds (mostly due to materials and type of construction; Figure 5.5), the khokholo can be identified because they are sites of memory. (p.140)

The Archaeology of the Khokholo During my survey in the Mandlakazi district, I identified fourteen khokholo. Some yielded scatters of archaeological material, including ceramics, midden deposits, and possible remains of palisades (Figure 5.6), and, Fig. 5.5. Collapsed house structure. according to a farmer Photograph by the author. who works the land surrounding the Xirrime khokholo, beads, and metal bracelets. Xirrime is the khokholo where, according to tradition, Bingwane sacrificed himself to allow his son and dependents to flee Ngungunyane’s siege to request aid from Portuguese troops. According to Longle, who travelled through the area in 1885, this village’s size was considerable, including a wide street and approximately one hundred huts where the wives and children of Bingwane lived (Longle 1886). The local populations still maintain the memory of the locations of Bingwane’s brother’s house, one of his daughters, and his first wife, all marked by trees. The sacred space is a clearly delimited grove that stands out in the landscape. Although a small hut marks the location of the grave, the nkwa (Ficus) tree that was Bingwane’s gandzelo serves as the centre stage in the khokholo: it is the locale where the spirit is, where he has to be venerated, and addressed. For example, all the conversations I had about the (p.141)

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The Nature of Culture khokholo took place sitting in front of the tree as if to include Bingwane in the dialogue (Figure 5.4). Xirrime seems to have been the main settlement of the Khambane-Mondlane family and as such it is mentioned in the oral traditions of all the lineage segments as the centre for all the split groups who refer back to Bingwane and Xirrime as their point of origin.

Archaeologically, Xirrime is an exceptionally wellpreserved site, with a fairly large midden Fig. 5.6. Xirrime: two palisade poles. within the perimeter of Photograph by the author. the sacred grove and a wider scatter of materials that surpasses the khokholo’s perimeter. Machacahomo and Madzucane are two other sites that yield substantial archaeological scatters, particularly ceramics. In Machacahomo, the grave of the family ancestor displays a large quantity of ceramics collected from the adjacent fields. The ceramics, with a coarse paste and smoothed finish, are simply decorated, but are clearly different from those still produced today or those reported in colonial ethnographies (Cruz 2006a; Dias 1960). A common aspect of the three khokholo containing significant archaeological remains is that the (bounded) sacred spaces—the groves that house the ancestor’s grave—are much smaller than the scatter of artifacts that seem to indicate the extent of the compound. People seem to have kept the memory of the domestic space belonging to the paramount chief, (p.142) which later became his burial space, therefore acquiring a sacred character. In all the khokholo, elders were adamant that I could not collect samples of archaeological material. Everything had to be left in place because it belongs to the ancestor. In one case, the elder collected all the potsherds in sight outside the limit of the sacred space to take to the sacred grove, because they should be

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The Nature of Culture returned to him. Thus, although people define the space of sacredness to a smaller area, corresponding possibly to the lineage leader’s compound and hut, they recognize that the total settlement was bigger, and still connected to the ancestor. Because male heads of ruling families were buried in their khokholo, those spaces were transformed into shrines and sites of memory, and create a territorial relation to the lineage segments that confirms the khokholo as belonging to them. This is of particular importance in the postcolonial context in which land is state property and individuals can only acquire usage rights. Under recent legislation,14 local communities can claim title to the land through long-term occupancy based on oral traditions (Hanlon 2004). In this sense, the memory of the khokholo plays an important role in the negotiation of contemporary land rights and ownership, based primarily in the discourse of political elites that map and materialize their narratives in the landscape through archaeological sites associated with sacred trees and groves.

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The Nature of Culture Conclusion In Mandlakazi, local counter-narratives of memory performed by local elders belonging to chiefly lineages often deprived of political power by the Nguni expansion (Cruz 2006b) integrate natural surroundings into narratives of cultural heritage. In these counter-narratives opposing official memory, the landscape is inscribed with their version of local history, and with natural sites (ponds, trees, groves) often related to archaeological sites, forming essential parts of local identity and the geography of social memory. In contrast, the Nguni ancestors (e.g. Ngungunyane), who are heroes in the official Mozambican postcolonial narrative, are portrayed by local elders as oppressors and tyrants who forcibly extracted tributes from local people, killed men, and enslaved women and children. The memorialization of past local history through sacred groves and trees preserves temporally and spatially bounded loci where ancestors and living people appear connected. This has salience for the production of local political and cultural identities, as (p.143) narratives of the khokholo are used to participate in the construction of active political projects of contemporary local elites. For example, individuals belonging to the Khambane-Mondlane lineage see their participation in official political positions by reporting to their ancestors and the ancestors’ relationship to the land. Eduardo Mondlane, hero of the independence movement, first president of FRELIMO, and a cornerstone in the national (and nationalist) narrative is celebrated locally at the intersection of the official and the counter-narrative. Locally, he is contextualized by elders as a member of the Khambane-Mondlane lineage, the son of a regent chief (Khambane and Clerc 1990; Silva 1998), and as such, he is reclaimed in the context of local narratives, with trees mapping his life in the Mandlakazi district (the tree under which he rested when taking care of his father’s cattle, the tree near the mission school under which he would eat his lunch, and so on). However, as a Khambane he is also the legitimate heir to the highest levels of political power, including at the national level. Representatives of the central power and the official meta-narrative, when visiting the village where Eduardo Mondlane was born (now transformed into an open air museum), use the local cultural heritage system to celebrate this national hero. Joaquim Chissano, second President of Mozambique, and other dignitaries, have planted symbolic trees (mafureira and nkanyi) in this memorialized space. Unlike the figure of Ngungunyane, a Nguni invader, who locally is at odds with the official meta-narrative, the figure of Eduardo Mondlane is able to intersect the local and the meta-narratives through his association with the indigenous, pre-Nguni political elites.

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The Nature of Culture The symbiosis of local cultural heritage, elite lineage narratives, and post-independence official commemorations of anti-colonial heroes raises some interesting points around the construction of memory. On one hand, the elders of elite families represent the counter-narratives of resistance to foreign invaders and construction of a centralized, paramount chiefdom; on the other hand, the centrality of Mandlakazi in the official, postcolonial narrative allows for the memorialization of official heroes through traditional means—that is, by using trees to map events and personages not connected with local lineages, it embeds the national narrative into local history. Throughout the district, individual trees have acquired relevance in relation to historic events that are not related to the cult of the ancestors seen at the khokholo, yet these nonsacred trees continue to be places of collective memory and identity, materializing events and commemorating historic landscapes. In Mandlakazi, the tembeira marking the place where Ngungunyane met with the chiefs of his mangas has been commemorated by the official administration with a plaque, in a combination of Western and nonWestern memorialization. Not far from this location another tree has been part of the local narrative that recalls the origin of Mandlakazi as the Gaza capital. Designated as Xiviri by the local population, this tree is commemorated with a wooden sign by the government official administration. (p.144) According to local elders, the name of the town ‘Mandlakazi’ comes from the expression mandla ngati, hands of blood, and refers to the bloodiness of the war waged by Ngungunyane to conquer the region. The local resistance to his armies was fierce and only after many people had been killed was Ngungunyane able to conquer the region. The Xivire existed in the place where Ngungunyane settled his armies and capital. Like the tambeira in front of the government administration building, the importance of this tree is also celebrated by Western-commemorative means. Seemingly, another tree is connected through local cultural heritage to the meta-narrative of Ngungunyane as ancestor-hero of the state, although without losing the local counter-narrative of a sanguinary emperor. This case study of ancestors and trees in Mandlakazi illustrates that the historical archaeology of indigenous peoples needs to be positioned not only in relation to the indigenous/colonializer dichotomy, but also contextualized within other, broader colonialisms. This is not to say that European colonial forces were not at play in Southern Mozambique during the nineteenth century. They were, and were not in the background. However, the social actors of local narratives are African invaders, who dominated local populations and their elite ancestors. Local interpretations of past events related to archaeological sites are reproduced by contemporary descendants of indigenous political elites Page 23 of 33

The Nature of Culture as acts of resistance and heroism embodied in the spiritualism of specific places and landscapes. Visits to sacred groves are carefully monitored and orchestrated by family leaders reproducing narratives of lost power by linking archaeological sites to glorious ancestors. While their narrative is one of continuity of cultural identity, daily life and daily practices of populations changed under the dominance of both the Nguni and the Portuguese empires. But the residence (see Silliman, this volume) and resilience of local populations, the adaptations and adoptions of invading communities, are not evident in the ‘legendary topography’ (Halbwachs 1992) of the khokholo, their sacred groves, and the ancestral trees. As archaeologists working to integrate the diverse archaeologies of colonialism into mainstream historical archaeology—or even into the mainstream archaeology and history of colonialism—thereby increasing engagements with local populations, we have to address issues of multiple social actors and agendas that can be at play in these archaeologies. Socio-political contexts of postcolonialism are significant in practices and processes that keep the past alive. The inclusion of indigenous ontologies that do not overlap with traditional (Western) archaeological practice(s) lead us to rethink the appropriateness of concepts and practices, moving our focus beyond the boundary of tangible–intangible (that is, beyond the materiality of archaeological data) to consider instead the local, indigenous interpretations of sacred places and continuity between living communities and ancestors that selectively bind together nature, time, and culture.

(p.145) Acknowledgements Research for this chapter was supported by grants from the Archaeological Institute of America, the Gulbenkian Foundation (Portugal), and the University of Denver. The project was conducted under permit from Mozambique’s Direcção Nacional do Património Cultural (2005–2006), and Institute of Socio-Cultural Research (ARPAC; 2010). My research in Mozambique has benefitted from critical discussions with Drs Fernando Dava (ARPAC), Aurélio Rocha, and Mário Cumbe (University Eduardo Mondlane), each of whom supported my engagement with the topic and with Mandlakazi. Sincere thanks also go to Neal and Rodney for their kind invitation to publish this chapter and for their comments; and to colleagues and students for helpful insights, particularly Martin Quigley, who has kindly advised me in all things trees. A special word to the elders who shared information and stories of ancestors and trees with me and to all from whose support and patience I greatly benefitted: Khanimambu! References

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The Nature of Culture Bibliography references: Apoh, Wazi and Kodzo Gavua 2010 Material Culture and Indigenous Spiritism: The Katamansu Archaeological ‘Otutu’ (Shrine). African Archaeological Review 27:211–35. Bahule 2005 Collective interview with lineage members about Bahule. Bahule, 8 August. Bahule 2010 Collective interview with lineage members about Bahule. Bahule, 12 November. Basso, Keith H. 1996 Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Bender, Barbara 1998 Stonehenge: Making Space. Berg, Oxford. Bender, Barbara 2001 Landscapes on-the-Move. Journal of Social Archaeology 1:75–89. Bessa, Fernando 2004 Sistema Mundial, Manjacaze e Fábricas de Caju: uma etnografia das dinâmicas do capitalismo em Moçambique. PhD dissertation, Universidade de Trás-os-Montes (Portugal). Bradley, Richard 2000 An Archaeology of Natural Places. Routledge, London. Chabal, Patrick 2002 A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Chapman, John 1997 Places as Timemarkers: The Social Construction of Prehistoric Sites in Eastern Hungary. In Semiotics of Landscape: Archaeology of Mind, edited by George Nash, pp. 31–45. BAR International Series 66. Archaeopress, Oxford. Chippendale, Christopher 2004 Stonehenge Complete. Third edition. Thames and Hudson, London. Chouin, Gerard 2002 Sacred Groves in History: Pathways to the Social Shaping of Forest Landscapes in Coastal Ghana. IDS Bulletin 33(1):39– 46. Chouin, Gerard 2010 Forests of Power and Memory: An Archaeology of Sacred Groves in the Eguafo Polity, Southern Ghana (c.500–1900 AD).

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The Nature of Culture Greene, Sandra 2002 Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Grimes, Barbara F. 1996 Ethnologue: Language Family Index. Thirteenth edition. Summer Institute of Linguistics, Dallas. Halbwachs, Maurice 1992 On Collective Memory. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Hamilton, Carolyne (ed.) 1995 The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Southern African History. Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg. Hanlon, Joseph 2004 Renewed Land Debate and the ‘Cargo Cult’ in Mozambique. Journal of South African Studies 30:603–25. Harrison, Rodney 2004 Shared Landscapes: Archaeology of Attachment and the Pastoral Industry in New South Wales. University of New South Wales Press, Sydney. Harrison, Rodney and Deborah Rose 2010 Intangible Heritage. In Understanding Heritage and Memory, edited by Tim Benton, pp. 238– 76. Manchester University Press, Manchester. Hastorf, Christine A. 2003 Community with the Ancestors: Ceremonies and Social Memory in the Middle Formative at Chiripa, Bolivia. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 22:305–32. Hicks, Dan and Laura McAtackney 2007 Introduction: Landscapes as Standpoints. In Envisioning Landscapes: Situations and Standpoints in Archaeology and Heritage, edited by Dan Hicks, Laura McAtackney, and Graham Fairclough, pp. 13–29. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. Holtorf, Cornelius, and Howard Williams 2006 Landscapes and Memories. In The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, pp. 235–54. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Howorth, C. and P. O’Keefe 1999 Farmers Do it Better: Local Management of Change in Southern Burkina Faso. Land Degradation and Development 10:93–109. Ingold, Tim 1993 The Temporality of the Landscape. World Archaeology 25:152–74.

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The Nature of Culture Isaacman, Allen F. and Barbara Isaacman 1983 Mozambique: From Colonialism to Revolution, 1900–1982. Westview, Boulder, Colorado. Junod, Henri A. 1962 Life of a South African Tribe. Part 1: Social Life. 2 vols. University Books, New York. Khambane, Chitlango and André-Daniel Clerc 1990 Chitlango: filho de chefe. Cadernos Tempo, Maputo. Koning, J. de 1993 Checklist of Vernacular Plant Names in Mozambique. Agricultural University, Wegeningen. (p.148) Lambek, Michael J. 2002 The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Lane, Paul 2008 The Use of Ethnography in Landscape Archaeology. In Handbook of Landscape Archaeology, edited by Bruno David and Julian Thomas, pp. 237–44. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. Langa, Alberto 2005 Interview about Madzucane. Madzucane, 13 August. Langa, Marcus Jorge 2005 Interview about Macupulane. Macupulane, 9 August. Liesegang, Gerhard 1970 Nguni Migrations between Delagoa Bay and the Zambezi, 1821–1839. African Historical Studies 3:317–37. Liesegang, Gerhard 1974 A Survey of the 19th-century Stockades of Southern Mozambique: The khokholwene of the Manjacaze Area. In In Memoriam. António Jorge Dias, pp. 303–20. Instituto de Alta Cultura/ Junta de Investigações Científicas do Ultramar, Lisbon. Liesegang, Gerhard 1975 Aspects of Gaza Nguni History, 1921–1897. Rhodesian History 6:1–14. Liesegang, Gerhard 1981 Notes on the Internal Structure of the Gaza Kingdom of Southern Mozambique (1840–1895). In Before and After Shaka: Papers in Nguni History, edited by J. B. Peires, pp. 178–209. Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, Grahamstown. Liesegang, Gerhard 1996 Ngungunyane: a figura de Ngungunyane Nqumayo, Rei de Gaza 1884–1895 e o desaparecimento do seu estado. Arquivo do Património Cultural (ARPAC), Maputo.

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The Nature of Culture Longle, Armando 1886 De Inhambane a Lourenço Marques. Boletim da Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa 6:13–37. Mandhlate, Eugénio 2005 Interview about Chalala (Guachene) and Machacahomo. Aldeia das Laranjeiras, 5 August. Mather, Charles 2003 Shrines and the Domestication of Landscape. Journal of Anthropological Research 59(1):23–45. Mather, Charles 2009 Shrines and Compound Abandonment: Ethnoarchaeological Observations in Northern Ghana. In Shrines in Africa, edited by Allan C. Dawson, pp. 95–120. University of Calgary Press, Calgary. Moreira, Jorge 2010 Interview about Mapenguele. Mandlakazi, 16 November. Negrão, José Guilherme 1995 A Terra e a Economia da Família Rural no Delta do Zambeze. Paper presented at the Workshop on Integrated Analysis and Management of Renewable Natural Resources in Mozambique. Proceedings edited by P. V. Desaneker and L. Santos. University of Lund. Newitt, Malyn 1995 A History of Mozambique. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Nimande, Absalão 2005 Interview about Xirrime. Xirrime, 13 August. O Reino de Gaza ou o Domínio Vátua 1896 Portugal em África. Revista Scientífica 3(28):147–9. Omer-Cooper, John D. 1966 The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth-century Revolution in Bantu Africa. Longmans, London. Ranger, Terence O. 1999 Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the Matopo Hills of Zimbabwe. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Rival, Laura 1998 Trees: From Symbols of Life and Regeneration to Political Artefacts. In The Social Life of Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism, edited by Laura Rival, pp. 1–36. Berg, Oxford. (p.149) Rubertone, Patricia E. (ed.) 2008 Archaeologies of Placemaking: Monuments, Memories, and Engagement in Native North America. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California.

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The Nature of Culture Ross, Eric S. 2008 Palaver Trees Reconsidered in the Senegalese Landscape: Arboreal Monuments and Memorials. In African Sacred Groves: Ecological Dynamics and Social Change, edited by Michael Sheridan and Celia Nyamweru, pp. 133–48. James Currey, Oxford. Saket, M. 1994 Report on the Updating of the Exploratory National Forest Inventory. FAO/UNDP/MOZ, Maputo. Salomão, Alda 2006 Towards People-centered Woodland Management in Mozambique: Can This Make a Difference? Community-based Natural Resources Management in Miombo Forest in Mozambique and the Fight against Poverty. Manuscript on file, Centro Terra Viva, Maputo. Schmidt, Peter R. 2006 Historical Archaeology in Africa: Representation, Social Memory, and Oral Traditions. AltaMira Press, Oxford. Schmidt, Peter R. 2010 African Archaeology and the Ancestors: Bassey Andah Memorial Lecture, 2009. World Archaeological Congress. News/ Reports. Electronic document, accessed 26 June 2011. Silva, Teresa Cruz e 1998 The Influence of the Swiss Mission on Eduardo Mondlane (1930–1961). Journal of Religion in Africa 28(2): 187–209. Sitoe, Bento 1996 Dicionário Changana-Português. Instituto Nacional do Desenvolvimento da Educação, Maputo. Sitoe, Bento and Armindo Ngunga 2000 Relatório do II Seminário sobre Padronização da Ortografia de Línguas Moçambicanas. NELIMO/ Universidade Edurado Mondlane, Maputo. Sitoi, Domingos 2010 Interview about Chinzetele and Mapenguele. Mandlakazi, 15 November. Smith, Alan K. 1973 The Peoples of Southern Mozambique. Journal of African History 14:565–80. Sousa, A. Gomes e 1966–1967 Dendrologia de Moçambique: estudo geral. 2 vols. Imprensa Nacional de Moçambique, Lourenço Marques.

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The Nature of Culture Thomas, Julian 2008 Archaeology, Landscape and Dwelling. In Handbook of Landscape Archaeology, edited by Bruno David and Julian Thomas, pp. 300–6. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. Thovele, Eugénio 2005 Interview about Xirrime and Bahule. Zonduene, 7 August. Tilley, Christopher 1994 A Phenomenology of Landscape. Berg, Oxford. Tilley, Christopher 2008 Body and Image: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 2. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. Tilley, Christopher and Wayne Bennett 2001 The Archaeology of Supernatural Places: The Case of West Penwith. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7:335–62. Xirrime 2010 Collective Interview about Xirrime. Xirrime, 9 November. West, Harry G. 2005 Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Wild, Hiram and Abílio Fernandes (eds) 1967 Flora Zambesiaca. M. O. Collins, Salisbury. Zerbian, Sabine 2007 A First Approach to Information Structuring in Xitsonga/Xichangana. SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics 15:65–78. Notes:

(1) Except where indicated otherwise, I will use local Xitsonga/ Xichangana designations. However, I use the Portuguese designation when it is the most common designation used in the study area. (2) The spellings Mandlakaze and Mandlakazi have been used in Mozambique since the 1990s, substituting the Portuguese spelling Manjacaze associated with colonial administration. According to Cumbe (2010:3) the orthography Mandlakazi is more correct from a Xitsonga/ Xichangana perspective. Therefore I have adopted this spelling. (3) Literally meaning ‘bush’. (4) Nineteenth-century wars and populations movements (Hamilton 1995; Newitt 1995:256–62). (5) Xitsonga (alternately spelled XiTsonga, Tsonga, Thonga, and Tonga— not to be confused with Tonga spoken in Zambia and Malawi; Grimes 1996). For the purpose of this chapter, I use Sitoe’s proposed spelling

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The Nature of Culture (Sitoe 1996), except when the dictionary does not offer the term, in which case I use the spelling suggested by informants or other sources. (6) The Chope speak Cicopi (alternately spelled Chopi and Copi; Grimes 1996) and are referred to as Muchope in colonial documents. (7) Among the leadership lineage, the first wife was the one whose lobolo (bride wealth) was paid by the population (Moreira 2010; Xirrime 2010). (8) Beverage made with makanyi (marula; fruits of nkanyi—Scelerocarya birrea; Dava et al. 2009). (9) Bodies of army. (10) Also referred to as óleo de mafurra; oil produced from the fruit of the Natal mahogany (Trichilia emetica). This oil is highly regarded locally, used to season food and offered to the ancestors during ritual meals. (11) The verb kuphahla (phahla) means to make offers, sacrifices to the ancestors; that is, to evoke them. (12) More complex ceremonies may have corresponded to the national offerings mentioned by Junod (1962:ii:403–8). (13) Xirrime and Chalala still have wooden poles standing, while at Madzucane, the person who farms around the khokholo showed me fragments of burned poles that he interprets as remains of the palisade. (14) (Law no 19/97).

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 Social Mobility and Boundary Maintenance in Colonial Contexts Michael V. Wilcox

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0007

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines social mobility and boundary maintenance within the context of colonialism by assessing the disciplinary origins and faulty assumptions of terminal narratives using the Entrada (c. 1539–1600) period of New Mexico's history as a focal point. More specifically, it looks at the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 to illustrate how the abandonment of many post-contact villages in New Mexico was employed as a strategy by the Pueblos and their neighbours to avoid confrontation and interaction with colonists. It argues that violence, not disease, led to large-scale abandonments during the colonial period. The chapter identifies a very different set of social consequences of early colonialism and highlights the links between contemporary indigenous peoples and the material remains of the past. Keywords:   social mobility, colonialism, Entrada, New Mexico, Pueblo Revolt, Pueblos, violence, abandonments, indigenous peoples

Introduction

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 Since the passage of NAGPRA in 1990, the practice of colonial archaeology in North America has been dramatically transformed. Among the most salient and significant changes has been the initiation of dialogue with contemporary Indigenous groups, the transfer of material culture and human remains to descendent communities, the initiation of collaborative methodologies, and the development of Indigenous archaeologies. Broadly defined, Indigenous archaeology represents an attempt to reconnect indigenous peoples with the material remains of their ancestors (e.g. Atalay 2006; Conkey 2005; Murray 2011; Silliman 2008; Smith and Wobst 2005; Thomas 2007; Watkins 2000). Murray (2011) has synthesized the evolution of Indigenous archaeologies within a global context and emphasizes the reformulation of colonial and historical archaeologies as central features of this movement. The Native Title Act, passed in Australia in 1993, demonstrated the deep importance of documenting post-contact Indigenous sites and landscapes (Harrison 2004; Williamson 2004), and in confronting the ‘most deeply rooted assumptions about the impact of colonization on indigenous communities—that of the extinction of traditional societies and their replacement by descendent populations who . . . had in essence lost their culture’ (Murray 2011:370). This fundamental assumption of extinction has increasingly been challenged by a number of colonial archaeologists working in North America (e.g. Ferris 2009; Lightfoot 2005; Oland et al. 2012; Rubertone 2000; Silliman 2005). (p.151) In the American Southwest, however, while the material manifestation of NAGPRA has involved the physical transfer of materials, basic archaeological sensibilities arising from the historical accounts and sensibilities of the colonizer have remained largely unchallenged (Preucel 2002; Wilcox 2009). Defined here as ‘terminal narratives’, historical accounts of demographic collapse, missionization, military conquest, and acculturation have long dominated contact period studies and colonial archaeologies—particularly as they are reflected in explanatory models of disease-based population crashes (e.g. Barrett 2002a, 2002b; Crosby 1987; Dobyns 1983; Ramenofsky 1987, 1996; Reff 1991; Thomas 1989). Each of these narratives has contributed to an enduring (and ironic) mythology of the perpetually vanishing primitive, and affirmed a sense of disunity, rupture, and alienation between contemporary Indigenous peoples and the material remains of their ancestors. As the location for the earliest, most enduring, and violent interactions between Spanish colonists and Native peoples, the northern borderlands of New Spain have inspired a particularly lively and vibrant legacy of colonial history and historiography (Brooks 2002; Flint 2002, 2008; Weber 1986, 1988, Page 2 of 27

Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 1992). Surprisingly, little of this work has thoroughly explored the relationship between colonial violence and regional abandonments, relying more on wild fluctuations in population in order to emphasize disease as the central agent of destruction, and without considering the centrality of social violence and the responses of Indigenous peoples in the context of such early colonial encounters. Some authors (Guitierrez 1991) have not only denied the effects of social violence against Pueblo people, but suggested that Pueblo women willingly presented themselves as sexual objects to Spanish colonists in order to placate colonial aggression. As the following work demonstrates, the documentary evidence tells a very different story. In this chapter, I examine the disciplinary origins and faulty assumptions of terminal narratives using the Entrada (c.1539–1600) period of New Mexican history as a focal point (Figure 6.1). I argue that the abandonment of many post-contact villages in New Mexico was a strategy employed by the Pueblos and their neighbours to avoid confrontation and interaction with colonists. This suggests a very different set of social consequences of early colonialism, and for archaeologists provides an alternate interpretation of site and regional abandonments during that time. The close and critical examination of primary historical documents and the documentation of colonial violence within other contexts provides an important adjustment to the construction of colonial histories and the development of links between contemporary Indigenous peoples and the material remains of the past. While colonial archaeology has undergone a sophisticated renaissance and process of re-evaluation in the past decade (Ferris 2009; Gosden 2004; Harrison 2004; Rubertone 2000, 2009), this has only recently been applied in (p.152)

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 the American Southwest (Liebmann and Murphy 2011; Liebmann and Preucel 2007; Preucel 2002; Wilcox 2009). Critical re-evaluations of colonial history have been slow to materialize in the American Southwest because of three seemingly unrelated intellectual and epistemological trends. The first relates to the specific historiography of borderlands studies, in which advocacy for a Hispanic culture and Spanish colonial history are conflated and where the documentation and discussion of Spanish Fig. 6.1. Colonial New Mexico and the colonial violence is borderlands of New Spain. routinely and persistently avoided. The second trend stresses the introduction of Old World pathogens as a politically neutral agent of colonial destruction, helping to emphasize a conceptual break between a prehistoric landscape inhabited by Native peoples and a historical landscape in which Indigenous peoples are gradually reduced and marginalized. The third trend reflects the predominance (p.153) of processual archaeology in the region and its emphasis on rendering universal patterns and adaptation models as part of a universal (rather than local or Indigenous) human past (Wilcox 2009:47–9; see also Williamson 2004).

Developing models of Indigenous cultural continuity through the rise of colonialism requires two things: a re-evaluation of the literature and scholarship of colonization, and a reversal of the primary assumption that what needs to be explained is a disappearance—a social, historical, or cultural death. In contrast to this familiar model, I suggest that what is missing from the archaeology of the colonial period are explanations of presence, persistence, and continuity. Finding this persistence through the colonial period comes from the emergent collective disciplinary realignment known as Indigenous archaeology—and the revisionist critique of conventional narratives it enables—and uses as its focal point the main disciplinary arena in which Indigenous

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 disappearances were manifested: within early colonial historical and archaeological literature. The following section of this chapter explains how borderlands historians minimized the oppressive features of colonization and shifted attention to disease as the principal destructive feature of colonial interactions. The subsequent section discusses the ways in which the use of force was rationalized by the Spanish state through a carefully crafted moral and religious code of jus ad bellum (Latin for the ‘right to wage war’ or ‘justice to war’). Financial pressures within Spain contributed to the rapid expansion of silver mining ventures in northern Mexico, leading to an illicit slave trade, widespread Indigenous rebellion, and a persistent state of ‘total warfare’ in the borderlands of the Spanish Empire. The tactics and policies developed there were then exported to the Pueblo world with devastating consequences. The final section documents the use of force as an explicit colonial tactic during the Entrada (1540–1600) period and argues that violence, not disease, led to large-scale abandonments during the colonial period.

Mythologizing Spanish Colonial Violence: The Black Legend in Colonial Studies The legacy of what has come to be known as ‘the Black Legend’ continues to influence the scholarship of contact and colonization in New Mexico.1 For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, borderlands histories have (p.154) been characterized by two pervasive revisionist tendencies, each of which speaks to the legacy and controversy surrounding the use of violence in Spanish colonies. The first involves a strenuous advocacy for the inclusion of Spanish colonization within a larger Anglo-centric colonial history. The second, centred in the Berkeley School of Demographic studies, shifts entirely away from triumphalism and emphasizes disease as a primary (and more politically neutral) agent of colonial destruction. The concept of the Legend is remarkable for both its persistence and instability. Initially, the Legend referred to well-documented antiHispanic sentiment articulated by Northern European and North American historians (Gibson 1971). For example, Carbia (1943) linked the emergence of anti-Hispanicism to early colonial and Enlightenment histories, establishing a clear link with American criticisms of Spanish colonization. Other scholars also equated the Legend as arising from exaggerated claims made by Bartolome de Las Casas (Casas and Ontiveros 1552) that the excessive brutality of Spanish Conquistadores resulted in the total annihilation of Indigenous peoples on the island of Hispanola in the 1500s (Weber 1988). In effect, as Adelman and Aron (1999) and Keen (1985) have argued, early borderlands histories, in Page 5 of 27

Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 response to perceived anti-Hispanic biases, adopted a number of tendencies in their narratives by minimizing the oppressive aspects of Spanish rule, assumed the ‘rightness’ of Spanish over Indian interests, and generally being unsympathetic to Indigenous perspectives. They advanced a ‘relativism that shunned moral judgements’ and framed conquests as unfortunate but inevitable facts of life (Keen 1985:664). In spite of its limited coherence as a categorical term, the concept of the Black Legend can be directly related to a single stable notion: the idea that Spanish colonial violence is either a fiction or arose from some form of anti-Hispanic bias. In marginalizing the negative experiences of Indigenous peoples, mestizos, and Africans, and locating these histories outside of Hispanic culture, invocations of the Legend served only to reassert colonial hierarchies—effectively writing Indigenous and other marginalized group experiences out of history and affirming yet another manifestation of the terminal narrative. A second research trend that complimented the tendency to downplay colonial violence in the borderlands arose from the scholarship focus Herbert Eugene Bolton brought to the formative advancement of a borderlands history that was all about the colonial (Hurtado 2012). Working with geographer Carl Sauer and anthropologist A. L. Kroeber in the early twentieth century, Bolton founded the journal IberoAmericana and began to assemble an interdisciplinary team of researchers that would make up the ‘Berkeley School of Demographic History’. The Berkeley School initiated a number of important innovative and interdisciplinary research undertakings, demonstrating little of the triumphalism that characterized early borderlands histories. Rather than criticizing Spanish colonial policies directly, the Berkeley studies offered (p.155) evidence supporting a more neutral agent of Indigenous destruction: disease. Using sixteenth-century census figures, tribute rolls, and baptismal records drawn from the Valley of Mexico, the works of Carl Sauer (1934, 1935, 1948), Sherburne Cook (1976; Cook and Simpson 1948), Lesley Simpson (1929, 1934, 1952), and W. W. Borah (1951; Borah and Cook 1963) shifted attention and debate away from Spanish colonial violence or triumphalism and emphasized the introduction of Old World pathogens (smallpox, measles, etc.) as the main agents of colonial destruction. Despite the fact that the methods, figures, and extrapolations have been widely criticized by contemporary demographers (e.g. Farriss 1978; Henige 1978, 1986:700–21; Zambardino 1980:1–27), the levels of population crash in the Valley of Mexico were applied almost universally throughout the Americas, inspiring a whole literature devoted to the decimation of Indigenous populations before, during, Page 6 of 27

Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and after contact with Europeans (e.g. Barrett 2002a, 2002b; Cook and Lovell 1992; Crosby 1987; Dobyns 1963, 1976; Kiple and Beck 1997; Kroeber 1934; Levine and La Bauve 1997). It is almost impossible to find a discussion of colonial history that does not reference population crash levels among Native American populations. Citing losses of upwards of 90 percent or more, this model of Indigenous destruction has been widely incorporated by archaeologists and historians in their discussions of colonial archaeology (e.g. Baker and Kealhofer 1996; Ramenofsky 1987; Reff 1991; Ubelaker and Verano 1992; Upham 1986). Rationalizing the Violence of Colonization

While the invocation of the Black Legend downplayed and fictionalized the extent of colonial violence, a contextual analysis of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish history reveals that the social hierarchies imposed by military conquests were crucial to the development of the Spanish Empire. The contradictory objectives of economic exploitation, forcible conversion, and military conquests generated intense debate within Spain, but the rules of warfare had been clearly established during the Crusades in Europe and southern Spain. The Reconquista served as the template for the appropriation of land, the collection of tribute, and missionary objectives in the Americas. Institutionalized with the fifteenth-century expulsion of Jews and Moors during the Reconquista, the rejection of Christianity or resistance to Christian agents justified the initiation of jus ad bellum and Total War (un Guerra de sangre and fuego) between non-Christian combatants and Spanish officials. Despite the rhetoric of Black Legend revisionism, the use of violence and intimidation as a means of asserting social dominance within Spanish society was neither rash nor impulsive. The economic motives for conquest were deeply enmeshed with the ideologies of religiously sanctioned warfare. (p.156) Explained in languages that Native peoples had never heard, the Requirement served to rationalize and routinize the initiation of violence and threatened subject populations who resisted with death and enslavement (Williams 1990:1–118). Using the Petrinological Thesis (where Jesus anoints Peter and his Papal descendants as representatives of Christ), Spanish jurists stated that any assault upon Spanish Christians would serve as grounds for the initiation of a Total War:

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 With the help of God, we shall forcibly enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and their Highnesses: we shall take you, and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do all the harm and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey, and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him; and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their Highnesses, or ours, nor of these cavaliers who come with us. (Flint 2002:75) The larger statement (a document that must have taken several minutes to read) was famously derided by Las Casas as ‘unjust, scandalous, irrational and absurd’ (Hanke and Las Casas 1974:121). Whatever it may have meant to Indigenous populations (documentary evidence on this subject is lacking) the Requirement was one of many legal instruments that provided colonists with a kind of moral indemnification. While official pronouncements of Spanish authorities banned slavery among the Indians, slave raiding appears frequently as a subject of concern within Spanish colonial documents. While the much-heralded New Laws (forbidding the enslavement of Indians) were passed in 1542, Charles V was forced to repeal thirty of its provisions in order to stave off the rebellion of colonists in Peru and Mexico (Hanke 1949:111). As the result of these practices, several Indigenous revolts raged throughout mining towns in Zacatecas, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, and Pachuca from 1520 until well into the seventeenth century (Powell 1953:64; see Figure 6.2). The Mixtón War erupted in 1541 when Francisco Vázquez de Coronado vacated Nueva Galicia in search of the Pueblos of Cibola. The Chichimeca Rebellion began in the 1550s and lasted for nearly forty years (Weber 1992:212–27). Responding to the crisis, the fourth Viceroy of New Spain, Don Martín Enriquez de Alemanza (1568–1580) issued a region-wide order for a War of Fire and Blood, demanding the total elimination of all rebellious Natives on the Northern Frontier (Powell 1953:105). These aggressive tactics, legally sanctioned within colonial territories, were brought north into the Pueblo world by many of the same soldiers involved in quelling the rebellions. Revolts among Tarahumara and Acaxee peoples in the

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 sixteenth century were followed by the Xixime Rebellion in 1610 (Salmón 1990). In 1616, (p.157) (p.158) the Tepehuan Rebellion added to the strains between colonists and Native peoples (Deeds 1998). Faced with few economic opportunities, expensive supplies, and deflated silver prices on the frontier, Spanish adventurers looked for new opportunities along the northern borderlands.

From Coronado’s Fig. 6.2. Ethnic groups of northern failed expedition to Mexico with pan-Indian revolts. find the fabled inland empires described by both Cabeza de Vaca and Fray Marcos de Niza in 1540 to the eventual settlement of Juan de Onate at San Juan in 1598, interactions between the Pueblos and colonists were characterized by a series of violent confrontations. While evidence of epidemics are nonexistent,2 mobility and migration were strategies deployed by the Pueblos in an attempt to maintain (and impose) social distance between themselves and the colonists. Using primary historical documents—official reports, personal letters, and court testimony—the following section demonstrates the use of social violence by colonists as a tactic of intimidation, triggering Pueblo mobility and abandonment, and leading to reports of Indigenous population fluctuations.

Documentary Evidence of Entrada-Period Violence and Pueblo Mobility Charged with ‘excesses’ of violence against Indians during the Chichimeca Rebellion, Governor Nuño de Guzmán was arrested and recalled to Spain in 1537 (Naylor and Polzer 1986:150). Juan Vasquez de Coronado, a 28-year-old Peninsulare, was appointed as a replacement for Governor. By January 1540, Coronado was appointed as leader of an expedition to the Pueblos (see Figure 6.3). His force consisted of 230 horsemen, 62 foot soldiers, 1,000 horses, 600 mules, and 1,300 Aztec, Tlaxcallan, and Tarascan Indian ‘allies and servants from Nueva Galicia’ (Hammond and Rey 1940:87). By July, Coronado had reached the Pueblo of Zuni. After reading the Requirement, Coronado’s forces attacked the Pueblo. His official testimony (taken Page 9 of 27

Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 after his arrest) reveals a pattern the Spanish would regularly observe —the abandonment of villages. After a day-long battle in which neither side prevailed, Coronado discovered that the pueblo had been vacated during the night: ‘suddenly, the next day, they packed up their goods and property, their women and children, and fled to the hills, leaving their towns deserted, with only some few remaining in them’ (Hammond and Rey 1940:175). At Hopi Pueblo, Coronado’s party was attacked immediately (Hammond and Rey 1940:239). From here, Coronado moved east toward the Tiwa Pueblos. (p.159) Forcing the residents to evacuate a village called Alconfoor (Figure 6.3), Coronado would spend the next two years inhabiting the plundered villages of the Tiwas. The strain of supporting the colonists and their allies was compounded by the loss of two seasons of harvests. After a Tiwa woman was raped by a member of Coronado’s party, the Tiwas seized Spanish horses. A battle ensued in which Alconfoor and thirteen other Tiwa villages were burned. Maestra de Campo López de Cárdenas ordered the 200 Fig. 6.3. Historic pueblos with inset: surrendered captives Southern Tiwa pueblos mentioned in the burned at the stake ‘in Coronado Entrada. order to impose a punishment that would intimidate the others’ (Flint 2002:113, 122, 172; Hammond and Rey 1940:220–6). In his defence testimony held months later, Cárdenas corroborated the attack on the Tiwas but stated that his actions were legally sanctioned:

(p.160) Had been ordered to wage war by blood and fire if the Indians refused to submit, after summoning them to peace . . . If they exceeded themselves in severity in this case, it was to warn other pueblos in the neighborhood, in order that some would see Page 10 of 27

Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 it and others would hear about it, and none should offer resistance to the Spaniards . . . It was done thus to spare the other pueblos greater harm, as was the case . . . that the expedition might be carried out more peacefully. (Hammond and Rey 1940:356–7) Tiwa villagers retreated to the village of Moho (likely Piedras Marcadas), where they attacked colonial forces. The Tiwas remained in the besieged pueblo for fifty days until their water supplies ran out. In a desperate effort to escape, Pueblo men encircled women and children and attempted to cross the frozen river. They were attacked while crossing, ‘they fell back to the river, which was high and extremely cold, and as the men from the camp (soldiers) quickly rushed to attack, few of the enemy escaped death or injury. In the morning the army crossed the river and found many wounded Indians who had collapsed because of the intense cold’ (Hammond and Rey 1940:230, 290, 334, 395). At a third Tiwa village referred to as Arenal, a similar scene ensued. After an extended siege lasting two weeks, the remaining Indians were apprehended while attempting to leave the pueblo at nightfall: ‘the natives were leaving and going into the country . . . The soldiers left the ambush and went to the pueblo and, seeing the Indians in flight, they pursued and killed many of them. This siege was completed by the end of March, 1542’ (Hammond and Rey 1940:230). In retaliation for what he considered the Tiwa’s resistance, Coronado ordered his men to burn the ten remaining Tiwa villages (Hammond and Rey 1940:332–3). During Coronado’s two-year stay in the upper Rio Grande, the Tiwa villages remained completely vacant. According to chronicler Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera, ‘the twelve pueblos of Tiguex were never resettled as long as the army remained in the region, no matter what assurances were given them’ (Hammond and Rey 1940:233–4). From here, Coronado’s men visited Zia and an unnamed Keres settlement, where they found the villagers abandoning the pueblo in advance of their party, ‘at the first Pueblo, which must have contained one hundred residents, the people ran away, not daring to wait for our men’ (Hammond and Rey 1940:233). Short on supplies, Coronado’s men visited seven Jemez villages, where they received provisions. But at San Juan Pueblo, the Spaniards encountered an increasingly frequent occurrence. Wary of the activities of the colonists, the Pueblos increasingly exhibited the behaviour of abandoning their homes prior to the arrival of the Spanish and heading into the mountains: ‘Those of Yunque-Yunque abandoned two very beautiful pueblos which were on Page 11 of 27

Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 opposite sides of the river, while the army was establishing camp, and went to the sierra where they had four very strong pueblos which could not be reached by the horses because of the craggy land’ (Hammond and Rey 1940:244). (p.161) With the Tiwa Province evacuated, Coronado’s party spent the remainder of the winter at Alconfoor (Hammond and Rey 1940:243). Unable to find any mineral deposits, and receiving word of a Native rebellion in Nueva Galicia, in April of 1542, the Spaniards departed the region. Drafts of the New Laws were sent to Mexico in 1542, just as word of Coronado’s excesses was reported to the Crown (Flint 2002:30). In Nueva Galicia, Coronado learned that his party had been charged with crimes against the Pueblos. Under investigation, he returned to Mexico City and successfully appealed the charges. Cárdenas was similarly charged, found guilty, and sentenced to exile in Africa (Hammond and Rey 1940:341). For the next forty years, no entradas into New Mexico were recorded. Still, rumours and accounts of Coronado’s party circulated in the northern mining district. In June 1582, two Franciscan missionaries, Fray Agustín Rodríguez and Francisco Chamuscado, accompanied by a small party of eight soldiers, moved north from Santa Bárbara to explore the Pueblo region (Hammond and Rey 1966:81). Finding a recently abandoned pueblo (which they named San Felipe), they moved up the Rio Grande and encountered a larger complex of twenty fully provisioned villages. Here they ‘found no inhabitants. They had left the night before because they had noticed our approach’ (Hammond and Rey 1966:82). Tracing the route of the river northward through the Piro province, Hernando Barrando’s account of the expedition states that the party moved along the Rio Grande and counted sixty-one pueblos containing ‘more than one hundred thirty thousand persons . . . [and to the north were] . . . five pueblos in the said province containing fifty thousand souls . . . and eleven mining areas with extremely rich veins, all containing silver deposits’ (Hammond and Rey 1966:142–3). Unable to acquire Pueblo guides, Chamuscado moved northeast to the Pecos region in search of buffalo. Refused provisions at two other pueblos (Piedra Aita and San Cristobal), the party moved to the Tewa region, where they were again refused entry and provisions: ‘some of our men fired a few harquebuses, pretending to aim at them in order to intimidate them into giving us the food we needed. We wanted them to understand that they had to give it, either willingly or by force’ (Hammond and Rey 1966:94).

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 On their return to the mining districts, Gallegos and Chamuscado were arrested. A ‘rescue party’ led by Antonio and Pedro Muñoz de Espejo, two Franciscan priests, and fourteen soldiers (the Espejo Entrada) was organized. At the southern boundary of the pueblos, their report chronicles what might have been warning signals: ‘many smoke columns’, and an abandoned village ‘in ruins’ (Hammond and Rey 1966:171). Further north (presumably among the Piro Pueblos), they recorded four recently abandoned pueblos. Later they reached a separate province where they observed a village being evacuated, along with ‘many deserted ones [pueblos]’ (Hammond and Rey 1966:176). Finding two other large pueblos deserted (yet similarly fully provisioned), Antonio and Pedro Muñoz de Espejo reported that ‘the people had fled to the Sierra through fear, thinking they would be killed for having murdered the (p.162) friars’ (Hammond and Rey 1966:176). After gathering provisions, they recorded over a dozen additional deserted or abandoned pueblos, one of which they identified as Puala. They reported, ‘when the natives saw us, they fled into the sierra, where we saw seven or eight thousand Indians’ (Hammond and Rey 1966:177). For the nine months of the entrada (20 November–30 July), the Tiwa region remained largely depopulated. During their time in the Tiwa region, they were unable to find provisions and staged a pre-emptive attack on the villagers they did encounter: Efforts were made to have the Indians come peacefully to us, but though they said they were our friends, they would not bring their women to the pueblos. Instead they remained in the sierras and mocked us. Seeing that unless we administered some punishment, they would soon become impudent and try to kill us, we determined to do what I shall, record below . . . we began to seize those natives who showed themselves. We put them in an estufa [kiva]. As the pueblo was large and the majority had hidden themselves there, we set fire to the big pueblo of Puala, where we thought some had burned to death because of the cries they uttered. We at once took out the prisoners, two at a time and lined them up against some cottonwoods close to the Pueblo of Puala, where they were garroted and shot many times until they were dead. Sixteen were executed, not counting those who burned to death . . . This was a remarkable deed for so few people in the midst of so many enemies. (Hammond and Rey 1966:204)

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 Following yet another attack on the Tiwas, and unable to secure provisions, the group returned to the mining district, where the Espejos were also promptly arrested (Hammond and Rey 1966:208, 212). However, within two months yet another entrada was launched into New Mexico. Abandoning his position as Lieutenant Governor, Gaspar Castaño de Sosa led a party of 170 colonists up the eastern side of the Rio Grande, where they observed a pueblo (Pecos) that was ‘inhabited and that he thought the people were leaving it’ (Hammond and Rey 1966:262). Seeking shelter and provisions, the colonists attacked the village but were unable to gain entry. The next morning the party found the pueblo completely evacuated, At dawn the next day, not a single inhabitant was to be found in the town, a development which distressed us all greatly when they heard of it . . . they had abandoned their homes in the bitter cold of winter, with its strong winds and heavy snows, conduct which seemed incredible to us. Even the rivers were frozen. (Hammond and Rey 1966:279) Moving south and west through the Tewa Pueblos, the colonists observed the evacuation of another pueblo, ‘when we drew near this pueblo we saw many people leaving it’ (Hammond and Rey 1966:282). And when Castaño subsequently arrived at San Juan Pueblo he noted that ‘the very sight of us frightened the inhabitants, especially the women who wept a great deal. In view of this we circled the pueblo once, but no one appeared . . . As we approached the (p.163) settlement, the Indians, both men and women began to move away’ (Hammond and Rey 1966:286). Moving south into the Tiwa region, Castaño’s chronicler notes the presence of twenty (of the twenty-one) recently abandoned pueblos where ‘the Indians said that most of them had been abandoned by the inhabitants due to fear and that they had sought refuge in the mountains or in other pueblos’ (Hammond and Rey 1966:293). Castaño de Sosa’s party of colonists report finding several clusters of recently abandoned villages (one of which he attributed to attacks by other Pueblos; Hammond and Rey 1966:292). After learning about Castaño de Sosa’s unauthorized entrada, Viceroy Velasco sent Captain Juan Morlete into New Mexico to retrieve Castaño. After receiving his instructions, Morlete moved north with a party of forty soldiers and a priest. After reaching Castaño at San Felipe, Morlete arrested Castaño de Sosa. Although his account provides little information regarding the pueblos, Morlete reported Page 14 of 27

Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 finding ‘several deserted pueblos. It is said that the inhabitants fled to the mountains when Castaño and his men came to the land, since they feared that the Spanish would harm them’ (Hammond and Rey 1966:303). Morlete’s report led Viceroy Velasco to authorize the final entrada into New Mexico, this one led by founding governor Don Juan de Oñate.

Permanent Colonization: The Don Juan de OñAte Entrada of 1598 Within a span of fifty years, the Pueblos had encountered seven waves of colonists. The final entrada, led in 1598 by Nueva Galicia Governor Don Juan de Oñate, included 120 soldiers, ten Franciscan priests, and a Tewa woman (whom Oñate referred to as a second Malinche). The Oñate expedition is chronicled in several hundred pages of documents. By now a predictable pattern of behaviour had emerged: ceremonies of possession would be read, tribute demands would be stated, and if the colonists’ demands were refused, the villages would be attacked. The historical documents reveal that Pueblos exhibited three responses: abandonment of the village, provision of tribute, or armed resistance. At the southern edge of the Pueblo region (near El Paso, Texas), Oñate claimed possession of the lands of New Mexico. Travelling along the eastern side of the Rio Grande, Oñate recorded two of the southernmost of the Piro settlements had been recently abandoned. Camping for a month near a pueblo named Teypana, they were greeted and fed by a lone Pueblo Cacique, but found the remainder of the villages in the region similarly abandoned (Hammond and Rey 1953:318) Within a few months, Oñate’s party had contacted most of the major settlements in the Pueblo region. In his official report, Oñate described large tributary populations among the Pueblos (which he estimated at 60,000) and promised to deliver to the king, ‘a New World, greater than New (p.164) Spain’ (Hammond and Rey 1953:492). The reports of Oñate’s captains tell a different story. Writing from San Juan in March 1601, Captain Luis Gasco de Velasco recounts how the colony was sustained for three years through the forcible acquisition of food and clothing—acts which contributed to a mounting resentment against the colonists: ‘Because of this and other annoyances, the Indians fear us so much that, on seeing us approach from afar, they flee to the mountains with their women and children, abandoning their homes, and so we take whatever we wish from them’ (Hammond and Rey 1953:609–10). In letters written to the Viceroy, Oñate’s Lieutenant Governor Peñalosa and Fray Francisco de Zamora requested permission to abandon the colony, stating that within the first two years the colonists had

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 exhausted several years of surplus corn collected by the Pueblos as insurance against droughts (Hammond and Rey 1953:690, 693). As a result, the region was rapidly being depopulated: The Indians [have] run away. This witness has seen many pueblos abandoned, the people having fled for fear of ill treatment . . . The fact is that in order to induce the Indians to furnish corn and food, it has been necessary to torture the chieftains, even to hanging and killing them. (Hammond and Rey 1953:674) Oñate faced great difficulties in submitting the Pueblos to Spanish rule, extracting tribute from resistant populations, and keeping colonists from deserting the province. In January 1599, Oñate declared a War of Fire and Blood after his Maese de Campo Vicente de Zaldivar was killed in a confrontation over tribute amounts at the Pueblo of Acoma. In an infamous attack, several hundred Pueblos were killed in battle. Those who surrendered were burned alive in a kiva and the remaining males were sentenced to having one foot cut off and sent off to serve as slaves (Hammond and Rey 1953:326, 427, 475–6, 616). The remaining five hundred women and children were distributed among the colonists as servants.

Conclusion Historical documents of the Entrada and early colonial periods provide an invaluable portrait of the first encounters between Native Americans and European colonists. Selections of testimony, letters, and official reports of the period reveal the tensions and contradictions inherent in a colonial enterprise that simultaneously offered salvation, exploitation, and brutality. One important element of the terminal narrative deals directly with the subject of population estimates drawn from these historical documents, and the use of the population estimates extracted from such sources as evidence for large-scale demographic collapse— not only among the Pueblos but throughout the Americas. Population data collected from the documents for New Mexico (see Table 6.1 and Figure 6.4) reveal a high degree of variability in any of the population (p.165)

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680

Table 6.1. Population estimates of the Pueblos 1539–1638, organized by Entrada Year of testimony

Entrada

A) 1539 B) 1540

C) 1583

Chronicler

Marcos De Niza

Method of counting

Unit counted

Non-visual estimate Homes

Number of units

Dates: Amount of

counted

time among the Pueblos

100,000

Coronado (1540–

Pedro Castaneda de Second-hand

(20,000 men) total

1541)

Najera

accounts and visual estimate

population

F. Escalante, H. Barrando

Visual estimate

Persons

130,000

Diego Perez de Luxan

Visual estimate

60 villages

33,000

Chamuscado Rodriguez (1581–

80,000

July 1540–March 1542 (21 months)

1582) D) c. 1583

Antonio De Espejo (1582–1583)

February 1583–July 1583 (5 months)

E) 1583

Antonio De Espejo (1582–1583)

Antonio de Espejo

Visual estimate

61 villages

253,000

F) 2 March 1599

Don Juan de Onate

Don Juan de Onate

Visual estimate

Indians

60,000

(1598)

after 10 months (letter to King)

May 1598 permanent colonization (estimate is given after 10 months)

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680

Year of testimony

G) 22 March 1601

Entrada

Chronicler

Don Juan de Onate

Method of counting

Visual estimate

Unit counted

Number of units

Dates: Amount of

counted

time among the Pueblos

Persons

45,000

22 months

(after 22 months) H) July 1601

Interview of soldier Marcelo de Espinosa

Unknown

Persons in 125–130 pueblos

24,500

26 months

I) 1 October 1601

Letter written by Franciscan priest Juan

Visual

Indians

20,000

29 months

de Escalona to the Viceroy J) 2 October 1601

Petition to the Viceroy for aid by Captain Geronimo Marquez

Unknown

Persons

60,000

29 months

K) 1605

Fray Francisco de Escobar, letter to

Unknown

Souls

30,000

Unknown

Unknown/visual estimate

Self-reported baptisms

80,000

1623–1629

Never there

Self-reported baptisms

40,000

Never present in New Mexico

Viceroy L) 1630

Missionary

Fray Alonso de Benavides (Hammond and Rey 1945:35)

M) 1638

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Missionary

Juan de Prada (Hackett 1937:108)

Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (p.166) (p.167) estimates available for use by historians or archaeologists (Barett 2002b:65). Estimates drawn from documents created in 1583 ranged from 30,000 to 253,000 people. Colonial period estimates (1599–1638) varied wildly between 20,000 and 60,000 for the same year (1601). Fig. 6.4. Pueblo population estimates: When plotted out along a 1539–1638. graph (Figure 6.4), any two high or low points could be used as evidence for either a population crash or rebound. Note that all of the ‘counts’ are rounded numbers and appear to have been rough visual estimates at best. While suspect, disease impacts, it seems, can still be inferred from these variable figures for some scholars. But for colonial period archaeologists, perhaps the point is rather that this information should serve as a cautionary tale about the inference of disease-based population crashes among the Pueblos drawn from historic accounts. Colonial New Mexico was the site of a most lengthy and sustained interaction (1540–1680) between colonists and Native people. While there is an abundance in these historic accounts of evidence linking social violence to temporary or longer abandonment of settlements and regions, this dynamic has been largely ignored by historians and archaeologists of the colonial period.

Reading these historic accounts, one is struck by the consistent and chronic reference to the use of force by the colonists on Native populations. Unfortunately, very little of the character of these encounters (described by the participants themselves) is recorded or referenced in any archaeological studies of (p.168) contact— particularly in archaeological studies of disease (e.g. Ramenofsky 1987; Reff 1991; Upham 1986). Wary of being accused of contributing to antiHispanic sentiment, colonial aggression and its consequences have been persistently avoided—‘fictionalized’ by the equation of colonial violence with the Black Legend. While primary historic accounts reveal almost no references to sicknesses or epidemic disease (see Wilcox 2009:242), repeatedly the colonists mention a pattern of behaviour that has been largely ignored in colonial research—the use of abandonment as a social strategy. The consequences of regional abandonments due to disease, and abandonment as a social strategy, imply completely different sets of social consequences. Critically, the disease model implies cultural collapse, the death of a society, and invisibility. This ‘terminal narrative’ has contributed to a lack of scholarly attention and Page 19 of 27

Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 interest in documenting post-contact Indigenous communities throughout the Pueblo region (but see Liebman and Preucel 2007; Preucel 2002; Wilcox 2009). In the disease-based model, archaeological sites can be ‘read’ as skeletons of dying communities. However, in the abandonment as social strategy model, archaeological sites are conceived of as shells or skins that are shed in acts of self-preservation. Mobility, regional abandonment, and migration allowed the Pueblos to segregate and insulate themselves from the influences of Spanish society. While there is no doubt that excessive tribute demands, the appropriation of land, labour, water, and resources all would have severely compromised the health of Pueblo communities, the influence of disease has likely been vastly overstated in the Pueblo region. The myth of extinction and cultural discontinuity (Murray 2011) are often artifacts of specific regional colonial histories and support the notion that Indigenous peoples were uniformly decimated by epidemics that literally emptied colonial territories. Indigenous archaeology as a methodological reorientation towards the colonial past enables a conceptual re-reading of those primary documentary sources, and an exploration of the assumptions embedded within colonial-based scholarship. References Bibliography references: Adelman, Jeremy and Stephen Aron 1999 From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-states, and the Peoples In-between in North American History. The American Historical Review 104:814–41. Atalay, Sonya 2006 Indigenous Archaeology as Decolonizing Practice. American Indian Quarterly 30:269–79. Baker, Brenda J. and Lisa Kealhofer 1996 Bioarchaeology of Native American Adaptation in the Spanish Borderlands. University Press of Florida, Gainsville. Barrett, Eleanor M. 2002a The Geography of the Rio Grande Pueblos in the Seventeenth Century. Ethnohistory 49:123–69. (p.169) Barrett, Eleanor M. 2002b Conquest and Catastrophe: Changing Rio Grande Pueblo Settlement Pattern in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Borah, Woodrow W. 1951 New Spain’s Century of Depression. IberoAmericana 35. University of California Press, Berkeley.

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 Borah, Woodrow W. and Sherburne F. Cook 1963 The Aboriginal Population of Central Mexico on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest. Ibero-Americana 45. University of California Press, Berkeley. Brooks, James 2002 Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. Carbia, Rómulo 1943 Historia de la Leyenda Negra Hispano-Americana. Ediciones Orientación Española, Buenos Aires. Casas, Bartolomé des Las and Mariano J. Zúñiga y Ontiveros 1552 Breve Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias Occidentales: Presentada a Felipe II Siendo Príncipe de Asturias por don Fray Bartolomé de las Casas. Mariano Ontiveros, Mexico. Conkey, Margaret W. 2005 Dwelling at the Margins, Action at the Intersection? Feminist and Indigenous Archaeologies. Archaeologies 1:9–80. Cook, David Noble and W. George Lovell (eds) 1992 ‘Secret Judgments of God’: Old World Disease in Colonial Spanish America. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Cook, Sherburne F. 1976 The Conflict between the California Indian and White Civilization. University of California Press, Berkeley. Cook, Sherburne F. and Lesley B. Simpson 1948 The Population of Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century. Ibero-Americana 31. University of California Press, Berkeley. Crosby, Alfred W. 1987 The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchange, and their Historians. American Historical Association, Washington, DC. Deeds, Susan M. 1998 First Generation Rebellions in Seventeenthcentury Nueva Vizcaya. In Native Resistance and the Pax Colonial in New Spain, edited by Susan Schroeder, pp. 1–29. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Dobyns, Henry F. 1963 An Outline of Andean Epidemic History to 1720. Institute of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Dobyns, Henry F. 1976 Native American Historical Demography: A Critical Bibliography. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 Dobyns, Henry F. 1983 Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. Farriss, Nancy 1978 Nucleation versus Dispersal: The Dynamics of Population Movement in Colonial Yucatan. Hispanic American Historical Review 58:187–216. Ferris, Neal 2009 The Archaeology of Native-lived Colonialism: Challenging History in the Great Lakes. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Flint, Richard 2002 Great Cruelties Have Been Reported: The 1544 Investigation of the Coronado Expedition. Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas. Flint, Richard 2008 No Settlement, No Conquest: A History of the Coronado Entrada. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Gibson, Charles 1971 The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New. Knopf, New York. Gosden, Chris 2004 Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. (p.170) Gutiérrez, Ramon A. 1991 When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford University Press, Stanford. Hackett, Charles. W., Adolph F. A. Bandelier, and Fanny R. Bandelier 1937 Historical Documents Relating to New Mexico, Nueva Vizcaya and Approaches Thereto, to 1773. The Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC. Hammond, George P. and Agapito Rey 1940 Narratives of the Coronado Expedition, 1540–1542. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Hammond, George P. and Agapito Rey 1945. Fray Alonsode Benavides’ Revised Memorial of 1634, With Numberous Supplementary Documents Elaborately Annotated. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Hammond, George P. and Agapito Rey 1953 Don Juan de Oñate, Colonizer of New Mexico, 1595–1628. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 Hammond, George P. and Agapito Rey 1966 The Rediscovery of New Mexico, 1580–1594: The Explorations of Chamuscado, Espejo, Castaño de Sosa, Morlete, and Leyva de Bonilla and Humaña. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Hanke, Lewis 1949 The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America. Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas. Hanke, Lewis and Bartolomé des Las Casas 1974 All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb. Harrison, Rodney 2004 Shared Landscapes: Archaeologies of Attachment and the Pastoral Industry in New South Wales. University of New South Wales Press, Sydney. Henige, David 1978 On the Contact Population of Hispaniola: History as Higher Mathematics. Hispanic American Historical Review 58:217–37. Henige, David 1986 If Pigs Could Fly: Timucan Population and Native American Historical Demography. Journal of Interdisciplinary History XVI:700–21. Hurtado, Albert L. 2012 Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands. University of California Press, Berkeley. Juderías, Julián 1917 La Leyenda Negra: Estudios Acerca del Concepto de España en el Extranjero: Segunda Edición Completamente Refundida, Aumentada y Provista de Nuevas Indicaciones Bibliográficas. Araluce, Barcelona. Keen, Benjamin 1985 Main Currents in United States Writings on Colonial Spanish America, 1884–1984. Hispanic American Historical Review 65:657–82. Kiple, Kenneth F. and Stephen V. Beck (eds) 1997 Biological Consequences of the European Expansion, 1450–1800. Ashgate/ Variorum, Brookfield, Vermont. Kroeber, Alfred L. 1934 Native American Population. American Anthropologist 36:1–25. Levine, Frances and Anna LaBauve 1997 Examining the Complexity of Historic Population Decline: A Case Study of Pecos Pueblo, New Mexico. Ethnohistory 44:75–112.

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 Liebmann, Matthew and Melissa S. Murphy 2011 Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe. Liebmann, Matthew and Robert W. Preucel 2007 The Archaeology of the Pueblo Revolt and the Formation of the Modern Pueblo World. Kiva 73(2):195–217. Lightfoot, Kent G. 2005 Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers. University of California Press, Berkeley. (p.171) Murray, Tim 2011 Archaeologists and Indigenous People: A Maturing Relationship? Annual Review of Anthropology, 40:363–78. Naylor, Thomas H. and Charles W. Polzer 1986 The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain: A Documentary History. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Oland, Maxine, Siobahn M. Hart, and Liam Frink (eds) 2012 Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Powell, Philip W. 1953 Soldiers, Indians and Silver: The Northward Advance of Spain, 1550–1600. University of California Press, Berkeley. Preucel, Robert W. 2002 Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt: Identity, Meaning, and Renewal in the Pueblo World. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Ramenofsky, Ann F. 1987 Vectors of Death. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Ramenofsky, Ann F. 1996 On the Question of Infectious Disease in New Mexico, 1540–1680. Journal of Anthropological Research 52:161–84. Reff, Daniel T. 1991 Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518–1764. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Rubertone, Patricia E. 2000 The Historical Archaeology of Native Americans. Annual Review of Anthropology 29:425–46. Rubertone, Patricia E. 2009 Practicing Ethnohistory: Mining Archives, Hearing Testimony, Constructing Narrative. American Antiquity 74:398– 9.

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 Salmón, Roberto Mario 1990 Indian Revolts in Northern New Spain: A Synthesis of Resistance, 1680–1786. University Press of America, Lanham, Maryland. Sauer, Carl O. 1934 The Distribution of Original Tribes and Languages in Northwestern Mexico. Ibero-Americana 5. University of California Press, Berkeley. Sauer, Carl O. 1935 Aboriginal Population of Northwestern Mexico. Ibero-Americana 10. University of California Press, Berkeley. Sauer, Carl O. 1948 Colima of New Spain in the Sixteenth Century. Ibero-Americana 29. University of California Press, Berkeley. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005 Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America. American Antiquity 70:55– 74. Silliman, Stephen W. (ed.) 2008 Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge: Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Simpson, Lesley B. 1929 The Encomienda in New Spain: Forced Native Labor in the Spanish Colonies, 1492–1550. University of California Press, Berkeley. Simpson, Lesley B. 1934 Studies in the Administration of the Indians in New Spain. University of California Press, Berkeley. Simpson, Lesley B. 1952 Exploitation of Land in Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century. Ibero-Americana 36. University of California Press, Berkeley. Smith, Claire and H. Martin Wobst (eds) 2005 Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice. Routledge, New York. Thomas, David H. (ed.) 1989 Columbian Consequences, Vol. 1: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Thomas, David H. 2007 American Archaeology in the Twenty-first Century: Back to the Future? In Opening Archaeology: Repatriation’s Impact on Contemporary Research (p.172) and Practice, edited by Thomas W. Killion, pp. 57–78. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 Ubelaker, Douglas H. and John W. Verano (eds) 1992 Disease and Demography in the Americas. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Upham, Steadman 1986 Smallpox and Climate in the American Southwest. American Anthropologist 88:115–28. Watkins, Joe 2000 Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. AltaMira Walnut Creek, California. Weber, David J. 1986 Turner, the Boltonians and the Borderlands. American Historical Review 91:66–81. Weber, David J. 1988 Myth and the History of the Hispanic Southwest. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Weber, David J. 1992 The Spanish Frontier in North America. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. Williams, Robert A., Jr 1990 The American Indian in Western Legal Thought. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Williamson, Christine 2004 Contact Archaeology and the Writing of Aboriginal History. In The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies, edited by Tim Murray, pp. 176–99. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wilcox, Michael V. 2009 The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact. University of California Press, Berkeley. Zambardino, Rudolph A. 1980 Mexico’s Population in the Sixteenth Century: Demographic Anomaly or Mathematical Illusion? Journal of Interdisciplinary History XI:1–27. Notes:

(1) The concept of the ‘Black Legend’ appeared first in 1914 with the publication of Julian Judíeras’ monograph La leyenda negra y la verdad histórica (The Black Legend and Historical Truth). Here, Judieras first invoked the concept of the Legend as emanating from ‘distortions of historical fact committed by the enemies of Spain . . . as the home of ignorance and bigotry, an intellectual wasteland incapable of taking its place as a modern nation’ (Juderías 1917:20).

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Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (2) A single uncorroborated reference to a peste appears in a letter written by a Franciscan priest who never had been to New Mexico (Hackett et al. 1937:108; Wilcox 2009:242).

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Hiding in Plain Sight

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Hiding in Plain Sight Engineered Colonial Landscapes and Indigenous Reinvention on the New Mexican Frontier Jun Sunseri

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0008

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the cultural landscape of the short-term buffer fortress at Casitas Viejas within the context of indigenous reinvention on the northern frontier of eighteenth-century New Mexico, where farming communities comprised of both Spanish and Native Americans experienced terrible horseback raids from nomadic groups who carried off food, livestock, and human captives. The chapter shows how the combination of land grants, and what has been described as practices consistent with the cultural survival and legacy of other Native American peoples through the Spanish colonial era, gave rise to a rich historical and material record of Genízaro ethnogenesis. It also analyses one aspect of the material record of this process from an archaeological perspective via the engineered landscape, with particular reference to the hydrodynamics of New Mexican agriculture. Keywords:   cultural landscape, buffer fortress, Casitas Viejas, frontier, New Mexico, Native Americans, land grants, Genízaro, engineered landscape, agriculture

Introduction

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Hiding in Plain Sight The Rito Colorado Valley (Figure 7.1) of northern central New Mexico was part of a complex tapestry of Native American landscapes when the first Spanish colonial land grants were settled there in the mid 1700s. Millennia of Native American occupational histories in the region were as diverse as the Southwest landscape and included nomadic huntergatherer groups, sedentary farmers, and complex webs of trade, alliances, and warfare. The first Spanish explorers and settlers of the sixteenth century encountered Native American people as varied as buffalo hunters living in temporary shelters to agricultural townspeople living in multistorey roomblocks, as well as many types of languages and belief systems. As the New Mexican colony grew, the population came to include not only people with Native North American and Spanish heritage, but also many others, including those of African and indigenous Mexican descent. By the 1700s, the northern extent of Spain’s colonial project in North America was an important interface between the agricultural towns and villages of the Spanish administrators and their Pueblo allies, arrayed along the arable areas of major river drainages and basins to the south, and the nomadic Native American groups who occupied the Southern Plains and intermontane valleys of the southern Rocky Mountains to the north and east. The sedentary villages and agricultural societies of Pueblo communities lent themselves to Spanish ideas of cultural compatibility; descriptors such as the gente de razón (people of reason) contrast markedly with indios bárbaros (barbarian Indians) whom the Spanish regarded as their often hostile and nomadic northern neighbours. (p.174)

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Hiding in Plain Sight Yet it was to be the Fig. 7.1. Location of Rito Colorado Valley descendants of these in New Mexico. nomadic groups who would ultimately come to make the northern frontier a tenable and even profitable endeavour for the colony. They would challenge the boundaries of their own colonially ascribed statuses via a syncretic mixture of practices drawn from a complex of pluralistic identities at multiple scales of performance. At the household scale, making and serving food via ‘hearthscape’ practices of ceramic and faunal use can be located at one end of the analytical spectrum. At the archaeological scale of evidence, which I describe as a ‘homescape’ (a material correlate of placemaking processes that attempts to account for fluid identity akin to Appadurai’s (1990) ethnoscapes), the record might be explored successfully by close examination of tactical, ritual, and—in the case of my focus in this chapter—engineered aspects of landscape.

Colonial communities of New Mexico had intimate knowledge of Pueblo ideology and histories concerning the creation of cultural places out of landscape spaces (Ortiz 1969), and mapped themselves on to this landscape according to particular agendas. In some cases, this included building colonial settlements on top of ancestral Pueblo ruins, erecting Catholic churches on top of Pueblo kivas and other religious facilities (Lycett 2002), and even moving into occupied Pueblo community buildings and using stored resources. Spanish colonists and cartographers incorporated Pueblo ruins into conceptualizations of their new (p.175) surroundings (Miera y Pacheco et al. 1778) and these places retained names and valences for contemporary Native American groups (Harrington 1908; Poling-Kempes 1997:14). After the Great Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which saw the Spanish ejected from New Mexico for twelve years, returning colonial settlers made new accommodations in their policies regarding land appropriation, legislated by colonial authorities in the Recopilacion de Leyes de las Indies. These accommodations included not building on occupied Pueblo farming land or interfering with their agricultural systems. Conversely, though some colonial religious authorities began to incorporate Native American practices within the scope of Catholic theology, their understandings of an ancient Tewa landscape sometimes led to violence against not only Native American ritual items, shrines, and petroglyphs, but also to the people who practiced aspects of these Native American religions (Ebright and Hendricks 2006). In the Rito Colorado Valley itself, three hundred years before the little plaza at site LA 917—known to the descendant community as Casita Viejas—was settled in the eighteenth century, ancestral Pueblo peoples lived in one of the largest aggregated settlements in the American Southwest at site LA 306—known to Tewa defendant communities as Page 3 of 22

Hiding in Plain Sight Sapawe—and supposedly had completely abandoned it by the time colonial settlers arrived in New Mexico (Figure 7.2; Maxwell 2000; Skinner 1965). Unique to the eighteenth-century colonial settlement pattern at LA 917 is the way settlers divided and utilized space throughout the valley, while not incorporating the area of the large ruins at Sapawe. The part of the Rito Colorado Valley around Sapawe appears to have been co-opted as space for economic infrastructure only late in the American Period, rather than turned into a major locale for early colonial settlement architecture and agricultural industry in the valley. This contrasts markedly with settlement behaviour in other areas of Spanish colonial New Mexico. For example, just to the south colonial settlers built on the pre-contact ruins at Abiquiú (Carrillo 1997), as they did at the early capital at Santa Cruz, and its replacement at Santa Fe. Inhabiting a land grant community in the Spanish colonial era came with many legislative strings attached (see also Wilcox, this volume). Principal among these legal arrangements were notions about the social position and expectations of the land grantees. The Sistema de Castas, an institutionalized racism based on notions of blood purity (Bustamante 1989; Chance and Taylor 1977; Katzew 2004) ensured that lower-status people of mixed heritage would be the largest faction of the colonial population. With Spanish-born people at the top of the ranking and those of Native American and African descent at the bottom, the myriad blood quantums possible in these pluralistic New World colonies made for complex and often quite different rosters of possible casta labels that varied geographically (Katzew 2004). In New Mexico, those who were ascribed to the lowest rungs of the casta designations, people of mixed Native American ancestry, may have had to make the hard choice to risk the hazards of frontier locations for the rewards of social mobility associated with grants of land. However, it was in these locations, far from invigilation, where (p.176)

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Hiding in Plain Sight casta categories might have been most mutable and situational identity performances might have been most advantageous for the communities building their lives in the middle ground between colony, their Pueblo allies, and raiding nomadic groups such as the Ute, Comanche, Apache, and Navajo.

How closely did the practices of the Casitas community match the top-down colonial socio-racial identity classifications devised by Spanish officials? Elsewhere, I have Fig. 7.2. Rito Colorado Valley overview; described household triangle—Casitas Viejas (LA 917), square foodways at Casitas as —Sapawe (LA 306). a complex synthesis (p.177) of individual or family choices, constrained by differential access to tools and materials and framed by cultural constructs of appropriateness, prestige, and necessity, all operating at the scale of the hearth (hearthscape) (Sunseri 2009). While ways of preparing and consuming food might often have been privately enacted within household contexts, some scales of behaviour must have made it harder to conceal practices from invigilating eyes. In the context of lower casta people retaining land grants from the administration, rules for establishing and maintaining a new settlement (Nuttall 1921) were particularly important to follow, at least in ways that addressed some minimum requirements. Therefore, landscape-scale social performances, such as occupation and defence of a strategic buffer, as well as construction and maintenance of agricultural infrastructure, may have served in some capacity as overt declarations of subscription to colonial practice in order to satisfy administrators in distant towns like Santa Fe. From the mid to late 1700s, the precarious position of the tiny fortified settlement at Casitas Viejas on the northern frontier was one of only a few that would ultimately weather the worst violence of the raiding periods that ravaged both Native American and colonial communities. Page 5 of 22

Hiding in Plain Sight The communities that lived on and maintained the front lines of colonial strategy made this great success possible via a syncretic mix of site selection and irrigation practices. The descendants of the buffer settlement of Casitas Viejas, and those of other frontier communities like it, celebrate the successes of these hardy families in stories, dances, and rituals blending both pre-contact and Spanish customs (Ebright and Hendricks 2006; Gutiérrez 1991; Lamadrid 2003; Rodríguez 1996, 2002). These oral and performative traditions speak to the fluid nature of identities necessary for survival on a middle ground (White 1991) between colonial and Native American worlds. Knowing how important different identity performances were, not only to receiving and maintaining colonial land grants but also to building multiple alliances for frontier survival, exploring such a pluralistic society archaeologically becomes a daunting task. Yet a multi-scalar historical archaeology of landscape processes is exactly the kind of nuanced interpretation of identity-making that has been successfully brought to bear too rarely on pluralistic communities (but see Lightfoot et al. 1998 and Voss 2008). I suggest that the cultural landscape of the short-term buffer fortress at CasitasViejas reflects a multi-valent performance of identity tensions which might have played out right in front of colonial administrators’ eyes.

Genízaros All along the northern frontier of eighteenth-century New Mexico, farming communities both Spanish and Native American were experiencing terrible horseback raids from nomadic groups who carried off food, livestock, and human captives. Cycles of raiding and counterraiding for captives had long (p.178) histories in the American Southwest, yet the intensification of these cycles during the colonial period was the direct result of the Spanish disruption of previous Native American alliance and exchange networks and especially the introduction of horses. On this violent frontier, buffer settlements were granted by administrators to groups of colonial citizens who would not otherwise have had access to the upward social mobility which land afforded. Citizens labelled as lower ranking in the socio-racial strata of the Sistema de Castas were prime candidates to occupy such dangerous land grant locations. These buffer villages, and the practices of families creating and maintaining associated cultural landscapes, have been often characterized as different from other colonial New Mexican communities by their hybridized traditions (Chavez 1979; Gutiérrez 1991; Kessel 1979; Levine 1992; Magnaghi 1994; Swadesh 1974). Yet, ironically, the conditions for attaining legal title to land grants included requirements regarding not only legislated parameters for settlement,

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Hiding in Plain Sight irrigation, and defence (Simmons 1969), but also certain behavioural strictures related to ethnicity and religion (Jimenez 1972; Jones 1979). Reputations were built in these tense times and places. Amongst the most famous of colonial casta people, Genízaro militiamen and their buffer settlement families were fighters and traders renowned among colonial allies and enemies alike (Brooks 2002; Chavez 1979). In New Mexico, Genízaros were most often descended from, or were themselves captives taken from Native American communities by raiders who then sold them at trade fairs to be raised in colonial homes. By virtue of practising the Spanish language, customs, and religion, they were granted vecino status and those who earned their freedom could petition for grants of land from the colonial authorities like other citizens (Magnaghi 1994). From the perspective of colonial elites, having these families far from centres of administration served a dual purpose of protecting the frontier while distancing the kinds of cultural fluidities about which elite paranoia found expression in casta paintings of the period (Katzew 2004). The combination of land grants, and what has been described as practices consistent with the cultural survival and legacy of other Native American peoples through the Spanish colonial era (Avery 2008), resulted in a rich historical and material record of Genízaro ethnogenesis. At the ‘homescape’ scale, one aspect of the material record of this process can be explored archaeologically via the engineered landscape.

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Hiding in Plain Sight Engineered Landscape In New Mexico, acequia irrigation was based upon organizations of labour and principles of North African and Arabic hydraulic engineering and land use brought to Spain via the Moorish occupation before the Reconquista was (p.179) completed in 1492 (Beekman et al. 1999). The Arabic origins of the word ‘acequia’ and others associated with hydraulic engineering (such as qanat) reflect the degree to which northern African occupiers had integrated disparate communities of practice in the Iberian Peninsula. These same agrarian systems ultimately translated well into the New Mexican colonial situation. Practices institutionalized in colonial rules of settlement, or ordenanzas included rules such as 35 and 39, which required that new settlements should be located in areas with good and plentiful water supplies for drinking and irrigation (Nuttall 1921:751). Core aspects of community space, ownership, and identity were also organized around the acequia system by processes of parcelling land into suertes. These individual sections of land were set up in layouts conducive to irrigation infrastructure, organized around main acequias and intermediate ditches coming from an acequia madre or ‘mother ditch’ (Rivera 1998:6). Colonial frontier communities, such as the one located in the larger nearby village of Abiquiú, often staffed outlier settlements with extended family and other household members, who took with them practices and organizational skills perfected on their own ditch systems. The settlement at Casitas was likely established this way, as was the irrigation ideology upon which at least part of the surrounding landscape was organized. However, the homescape components of this irrigated agricultural buffer village were created and recreated by people who brought not only Spanish ideas of agriculture, but also intimate knowledge of Native American technomics (Binford 1962) to bear on their marginally productive environment. Creation, recreation, and management of the engineered system certainly did not occur in a conceptual vacuum, or on a blank landscape free from anthropogenic features. In fact, Native American systems of knowledge and landscape management had legal protection in colonial New Mexico. As enacted materially upon landscapes of the northern drainages of New Mexico, the Leyes de las Indies legislated that Native American lands under cultivation were not to be encroached upon by colonists. This was especially true for areas in which Native Americans had made improvements in order to grow crops ‘or any other benefit, with which by their personal industry they have fertilized’ (DuMars et al. 1986, cited in Rivera 1998:3). In the Rito Colorado Valley, the peak occupation at Sapawe had occurred hundreds of years before the settlement at Casitas. Nearby Spanish colonial towns, such as Santa Page 8 of 22

Hiding in Plain Sight Cruz and Abiquiú were established on top of or in close proximity to ruins of very similar age. However, GIS analysis (Sunseri 2010) suggests that at least one contributing factor for the location of Casitas was related to the potential for observation of raiding routes rather than necessarily maximizing agricultural potential. A different balance might have been struck by locating the fledgling outpost on the ruins of Sapawe, but this did not apparently happen. Given that historians generally agree that self-sufficiency was a cornerstone of colonial life in settlements of this era, especially concerning agriculture (Brooks 1996; Simmons 1969; (p.180) Swadesh 1974), it is telling that a community would make such a decision about settlement location. In either case, if the settlers at Casitas did not build upon the ruins of Sapawe, or take advantage of the arable lands in its vicinity, it stands to reason that some mode of hydrological engineering nearer to the site of Casitas Viejas itself would have allowed them to maintain an agricultural base. The style, technology, and execution of the engineered landscape around Casitas appear to have been more syncretic than a cursory examination of colonial settlement patterns might suggest. The village of Abiquiú, just south of the Rito Colorado Valley, has been well documented by historians as settled by Genizaros, including Native Americans of not only nomadic Southern Plains descent, but also Hopi and Tewa Pueblo cultural extractions (Ebright and Hendricks 2006; Horvath 1977; Poling-Kempes 1997). If the fortified plaza to the north at Casitas was established and maintained by a contingent of the Abiquiú community—such as the Noriega then Lobato families (Quintana and Snow 1980)—then people with Tewa Pueblo heritage and/or worldviews may have had a considerable stake in designing and living in the Casitas homescape. The distinct patterns of movement and cycles of occupation (as opposed to static ‘abandonments’) described as characterizing the Tewa use, abandonment, and reuse of sites in New Mexico (Anschuetz 2001; Lightfoot 1993a, b; Lightfoot and Eddy 1995; Rodríguez 2002, 2006) are an important factor in considering the longterm engagement of Native American communities with the colonial setting emerging at the inception of the Casitas settlement. Hence, this homescape analysis explores how the settlement sequence of the Rito Colorado Valley, considered with respect to tactical positioning and agricultural potential, might suggest that the pre-contact Pueblo site of Sapawe and knowledge of its agriculturally engineered landscape was a critical part of the practices of some cross-section of people still frequenting the valley, if not within the households at Casitas itself.

Documenting Agricultural Hydrodynamics

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Hiding in Plain Sight Acequia irrigation technology as practiced in New Mexico required a water source to supply the system with enough pressure to reach the farthest channels, or laterals along several serviced field borders. To accomplish this without too much flow cutting through the system banks, eroding the channels themselves, or overflowing other landscape features such as roads or plazas, careful design was required to ensure low and consistent flow angles for acequia features. Time and again, communities throughout the New Mexican colony mastered the mathematical and geometric rigours of these techniques and were able to deliver water to extensive field systems in the alluvial plain of river valleys (LaFarge 1954; Levine 2001; Rivera 1998; Simmons 1972). These examples (p.181) contrast markedly with the hydrological systems ancestral Pueblo people had used to bring water to their crops. In northern New Mexico, several pre-contact systems of irrigation have been identified and studied (Anschuetz 2001; Lightfoot 1993a, b; Lightfoot and Eddy 1995), most of which have been described by regional archaeologists under the misleading category of ‘dry farming’ technologies. Rarely is flowing water in long linear systems a feature of this technology in pre-contact New Mexico, though some hypothesize that arroyos between terraces may have had some capacity for carrying water between levels of planted beds (Anschuetz 2003). To explore the extent to which colonial irrigation practices were pursued by the community living at Casitas, quantitative measures of the hydrological performance characteristics of acequias were developed in a GIS environment. Historic Rito Colorado Valley acequias that are old enough to have names (such as the Acequia Jaral or Acequia Medio) and appearing in multiple maps drafted by the earliest cartographers, were prioritized in the digitization, ground-truthing, total station-mapping, and subsequent model-building to be representative of the acequia creation and management techniques of early valley settlement. Modelling the length-weighted slope characteristics of these known acequias allowed for adjustments to be tailored that accounted for topographic values in the adjacent terrain. Development of this technique was intended for use in scenarios where significant segments of an acequia could be recorded (historically, archaeologically, or by aerial interpretation), but where subsequent sections may have been unknown. A more critical assessment of the model derived from this methodology involved applying it to an evaluation of short unknown acequia segments between the ‘tributaries’ and ‘ditches’ recorded in historic maps created decades apart (i.e. in the 1860s, 1950s, and 2010s) and the archaeologically observed acequia sections adjacent to sites in the Rito

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Hiding in Plain Sight Colorado Valley (Figure 7.3). These tests verified the utility of the GIS model for interpolating the acequia’s direction and length. The resulting application of the model and subsequent analyses suggest that linear hydrological features observed near Casitas would have required headgates to tap the flow of the Rito Colorado more than twice as far up the valley as any known acequia system in New Mexico. Furthermore, in the hydrodynamic analysis of the topography of the valley between this critical elevation and the linear features at Casitas, any such feature would have had to cut across so many arroyos and topographic risers that it would have required more than ten times the number of wooden canoa flumes and deep ditches observed in any other known New Mexican acequia system to make such an irrigation system near Casitas workable. No such features have ever been observed on GLO maps, during archaeological survey, or through aerial interpretation. Therefore, evidence thus far strongly suggests that, if the linear features near Casitas were in fact irrigation related, they did not utilize the same hydrodynamic characteristics of (p.182) acequia irrigation as seen elsewhere in New Mexico or as established later and farther north in the Rito Colorado Valley.

If these linear features near Casitas were water-bearing, and water was not delivered to them by headgates like those that fed acequias elsewhere in the valley, where would the water have come from? While springs in the Rito Fig. 7.3. Composite of GLO map features, Colorado Valley area USGS map features, aerial interpretation, are well known GTS site maps, and hydrological model historically, and their development elements. Spanish names tie them to specific events or groups of people, no springs have been known to occur in the immediate vicinity of Casitas. Technologies such as an Archemides screw could have been used to lift water from the Rito Colorado up to a ditch system that integrated the linear features in question. However, this would have required full-time Page 11 of 22

Hiding in Plain Sight effort and most likely draft animal labour. The use of such technologies in New Mexico are unknown to this author and are proposed as unlikely because it would diminish both the human and animal labour needed elsewhere in subsistence agriculture, as well as requiring a vertical lift in excess of 8m, which is longer than similar screws used in North Africa for centuries (Oleson 1984:290). Additionally, it would put those human and animal resources at risk for captive raiding because of their predictable presence at the (p.183) facility and the increased ease of a surreptitious approach afforded by line-of-sight complications within the Rito gulch. The only other technological system in common use in northern New Mexico was the ‘dry irrigation’ practiced by Tewa communities for centuries (Anschuetz 2001). With this in mind, I turned my analytical focus to the agricultural systems that had been developed in the Rito Colorado Valley before the arrival of the Spanish colony. Sapawe (LA 306) has over fifty features that have been identified as agricultural or hydrological in nature (based on NMCRIS—New Mexico Cultural Resource Information System—data from 2006). Those features located in the valley bottom, on the west side of the Rito Colorado and near the pueblo itself, are all listed as agricultural, such as waffle gardens. However, on the east side of the Rito Colorado, agricultural features are located in conjunction with hydrological features, such as check dams, trincheras (waterspreading and velocity-arresting devices), cobble mulches, and other elements of water-control technology associated with so-called ‘dry irrigation’ systems. These features are located in areas of high topographic relief and which are part of the ridge system bordering the entire eastern margin of the Rito Colorado Valley. Mathematically characterizing the topography of this hydrodynamic network involved sampling slope and aspect cell values via a GIS neighbourhood analysis that incorporated all of the terrain associated with the hydrological features. The same techniques were applied to the topographical region nearest Casitas yet still overlapping the linear features in question. The entire ridgeline topographic area near Casitas was characterized by the grid values, to remain within the sampling parameters employed at Sapawe. The surprising result of this analysis was that the frequency distribution of cell values of the area near the features at Casitas almost exactly matched that which characterized the topography of the hydrodynamic system in use by those who lived at Sapawe.

Discussion: Homescape Practices

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Hiding in Plain Sight Hydrological modelling of known and historical acequias was evaluated first by testing unsampled acequias, then at historical and archaeological sites where partial acequias had been observed. Having found that the model adequately captured and predicted the flow dynamics associated with acequia irrigation, archaeologically observed acequia segments were linked to irrigation features captured only partially by historic cartography or remote sensing. Using this method, acequias were interpolated for the linear features associated with the agricultural complex at Casitas to explore how these features were linked to the engineered landscape of the rest of the Rito Colorado Valley. However, this analysis suggested that such a system of irrigation would be impossible at the site given the parameters implemented elsewhere. With flood-plain agriculture (p.184) precluded by nearsurface geography in the proximity of Casitas Viejas, it was unclear how the obvious agricultural features were irrigated. In other words, the settlers at Casitas established something that appeared to be acequia irrigation agriculture, as mandated by the colonial administration, but used some other strategy or set of principles to supply water to those ditches. This line of inquiry led to the development of a way to quantify the characteristic topography around the only other example of successful farming to precede the buffer settlement, at the Sapawe Pueblo. Ancestral Tewa peoples utilized ‘dry farming’ techniques to manage water flow to agricultural fields (Anschuetz 2001). The direct comparison of characteristic topographies revealed similar hydrodynamic parameters for ‘dry’ farming, techniques to those which contributed to irrigation at Casitas. This suggests that linear, acequialike irrigation facilities associated with the field system at Casitas more likely were based on pre-contact technologies for water supply, rather than facilities more closely aligned with the technologies in use elsewhere in the colony. In an agricultural society such as colonial New Mexico, people of many different ethnic descents relied heavily on the productive capacity of their field systems. In communities that had applied for and lobbied to keep land granted to them by the colonial administration, those attachments were intimately connected with Spanish mandates for settlement. At Casitas however, the processes used to hydrologically model known and historical acequias, in conjunction with an analysis of Pueblo agricultural space near the previous occupation at Sapawe, suggests that irrigation was not practiced in a way that was completely within Spanish colonial design parameters. Although settlers were supposed to have established irrigation agriculture as part of the process of taking possession of the land grant, at Casitas they could not have delivered water to those required ditches by colonial techniques Page 13 of 22

Hiding in Plain Sight alone. This necessitated a different amalgam of strategies, some of which may have incorporated the principles of the only other example of successful large-scale farming to precede the buffer settlement in the Rito Colorado Valley. Evidence for this farming technology is found in the array of archaeological features associated with farmers from Sapawe Pueblo, supposedly abandoned over three hundred years earlier. In fact, the site of Sapawe represents a very agriculturally productive location for the first colonial communities that settled there. Perhaps a half-century after the fortified plaza at Casitas was settled, after the end of the most violent raiding period in New Mexico, the descendant community and newer families moved north to the modern location of El Rito and began irrigating extensive fields much closer to Sapawe (though again, not on the site of the ruined pueblo itself). The apparently early decision not to use this site, unlike what was common in other colonial settlements in New Mexico, may have been motivated by more nuanced understandings of and connections to the cultural landscape of the valley. This suggests that a mixed composition of settlers made decisions about (p.185) where and how Casitas and its associated field systems would be built on their homescape. From such closely matching characteristic topographies, it appears that the engineers of the Casitas Viejas homescape may have utilized ‘dry farming’ technologies (Anschuetz 2001), similar to those once used by ancestral Tewa people at Sapawe, to bring water to their linear irrigation features. This most visible, intentional hybridization of technologies would give the appearance of acequia usage to any cursory observation by colonial administrators, but drew upon much older, deeply rooted understandings of sustainable agricultural techniques specially adapted to the marginal environment of northern New Mexico. Such means of ‘hiding in plain sight’ from colonial invigilation may have also had local repercussions for the traditional organizations of labour associated with acequia irrigation across New Spain. Traditional leadership roles, such as mayodomos and comisionados, may have required some reorganization to account for missing technical and social components of the formalized and transposed irrigation system (Rodríguez 2006). Conversely, for a community trying to survive in a situation of marginal security, tactical focus could have understandably been on near-site agricultural production to avoid becoming captives of Southern Plains nomadic groups to the north—in effect hiding ‘in sight of’ the Plains.

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Hiding in Plain Sight Communal efforts evidenced by cultural landscape features are by nature less amenable than those at the household or hearthscape level to resolutions of intersecting practices. However, landscape data does strongly suggest that people with differing suites of cultural expertise, as reflected in hearthscape food preparation and consumption practices at Casitas (Sunseri, in press), contributed to their homescape in ways that combined both traditional Pueblo and Spanish-translated North African practices in unique, syncretic ways. How those and other roles played out among the households at Casitas Viejas may have had much more to do with how these large-scale, public negotiations of community status articulated with differentiated, hearthscape performances of identity. If the approach outlined above is going to work for investigating the lived experiences of a dynamic, pluralistic colonial situation, appropriate contextualization of the communities and the locations of their identity-linked practices must precede its application. In this respect, focusing on both micro- and macro-scale practices such as hearthscapes and homescapes has the greatest potential to reveal diversity among identity expressions so long as such an endeavour is situated within an appropriate historical framework. New Mexican Genízaro buffer communities, documentary, oral, and performative traditions suggest that pluralistic heritages found expression at multiple scales of practice. As archaeologists dealing with a static material record, interrogating the residues of these practices requires that we use diverse data sets in specific performative (p.186) frameworks. At Casitas Viejas, an interpretive methodology focused on the stepwise acquisition, apportioning, consumption, and disposal of fauna is central to my investigation of hearthscape foodways (Sunseri, in press), while these practices in turn are evaluated in relation to larger processes of identity marking in the homescape of the Rito Colorado Valley. My intent is to identify material evidence for IndoHispano ethnogenesis within nested categories of performance to avoid categorizations of situational practice at any one scale or in any material category alone.

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Hiding in Plain Sight Conclusion: Complicating Identity Performances on the Frontier At the largest scale of analysis, I have used a landscape approach that might loosely articulate with Bourdieu’s (1977) analogy of language acquisition to describe habitus. This homescape approach focuses on specific grammars of spatial patterning (e.g. field systems, water access, and flow) and how multiple material vocabularies (e.g. check dams, acequias, dry farming features, roads, and shrines) could have crosscut and built tensions with each other, and other scales of practice such as the hearthscape domain of foodway practices (Sunseri in press). Others have described how these dynamics of cultural hybridity continue to be a part of Genízaro consciousness in oral and performative traditions (Lamadrid 2003; Rodríguez 1996). In particular, Lamadrid’s (2003:12) discussion of the concept of organic hybridity (Bakhtin 1981) resonates with the way both unconscious and conscious decisions would have created the engineered homescape surrounding Casitas. As applied to the Rito Colorado Valley, this approach departs from the structurally determined constraints of a single context of practice. In this case, the broader framework included what I call the ‘engineered landscape’. In discussing who lived at Casitas Viejas, creating and maintaining the associated cultural landscape, it seems that the community did not ‘perform’ culture as a homogenous unit; they were neither completely Spanish nor wholly Native American. Even the casta label of Genízaro itself requires a finer-grained perspective on what ranges and mixtures of practice such a moniker entailed. Interestingly, historical or anthropological models of dichotomous or creolized practices may be indicated at scales or organizations of material culture that are disengaged from one another and therefore mask how aspects of landscape experiences may cross-cut or be in tension with one another. A single practice might draw its roots from one or another tradition of pre-contact behaviour but lose context by evaluation at one temporal or spatial scale (see also Beaudoin, this volume). It is the nature of situational identity to mobilize different suites of behaviour, each resonant with practices that are the target of particular performances for appropriate (p.187) audiences. In a situation like that of the buffer settlement at Casitas, people brought different levels and aspects of cultural expertise to both hearthscape (Sunseri 2009, in press) and homescape (Sunseri 2010) performances. In doing so, a single community, which was likely composed of closely related kinsfolk (Simmons 1969; Swadesh 1974; Van Ness 1991:130), could draw deeply from various repertoires of practice in order to interact successfully with the diverse groups that surrounded them on the frontier.

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Hiding in Plain Sight Imagine the fortified door to the interior plaza at Casitas as it was occupied in the late eighteenth century. Depending on who walked or rode up to knock on it (or pound on it, or light it on fire, or bless it), a different set of cultural fluencies might have been advantageous to the community inside. If it were a colonial administrator, being able to offer him a pork-rich pozole at a table set with individual serving-sized, Spanish-style flange plates (Sunseri in press), might have served as the gracious prelude to a brief walk with the mayordomo along a select portion of what appeared, upon cursory inspection, to be a typical acequia system along planted fields. If a group of Tewa Native American pilgrims on their way to visit Sapawe stopped in with a gift of a decorated polychrome vessel, it might have been best to have shared a meal of venison stew from one large bowl together (Sunseri in press), discussing how the Casitas community might contribute mutton and local micaceous wares to the next big dance or event at the nearby pueblo of Ohkay Ohwinge. Given the limited tactical capacity of the small placita, a good set of relations with the much more heavily defended Pueblo villages would have served the community well. This may also have been the case when limited retreat from the site of Casitas could be spent with friends and kin outside of colonial centres, without administrators fully appraised of how long possession of the land grant was ceded. Of course, these scenarios would only be necessary if a household that incorporated rescued captives could not either demonstrate affinity or return kinsfolk to those raiding parties who often made appearances in the Rito Colorado Valley. It may have been very difficult for any one household to perform all such interactions with an equal measure of competence. But at the landscape scale, different expertise and worldviews were essential in creating a working agricultural system that was also embedded within larger, communal senses of place. A community that could integrate multiple households with varying levels of cultural expertise might have been at the greatest advantage in the fluid circumstances of the frontier. Comparing the contributions of those households at both hearthscape and homescape scales of analysis challenges simplistic models of ‘colonizer versus indigenous’ practices. Historical accounts of Genízaro people taking full advantage of blended experiences across diverse colonial circumstances elucidate how such practices may have worked. However, the archaeological record accounts for how lessillustrated genres of community practice played out at many levels to help a tiny village survive and prosper on the frontier. (p.188) References

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Hiding in Plain Sight Bibliography references: Anschuetz, Kurt F. 2001 Soaking It In: Northern Rio Grande Pueblo Lessons of Water Management and Landscape Ecology. In Native Peoples of the Southwest: Negotiating Land, Water, and Ethnicities, edited by Laurie Weinstein, pp. 49–80. Bergin and Garvey, Westport, Connecticut. Anschuetz, Kurt F. 2003 The Reflection of European History on Pueblo Water Uses: A Refraction of Indigenous Cultural-Historical Process. Paper presented at the Annual Conference, American Society of Ethnohistory, Riverside, California. Appadurai, Arjun 1990 Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. Public Cultures 2(2):1–24. Avery, Doris Swann 2008 Into the Den of Evils: The Genizaros in Colonial New Mexico. Masters thesis, Department of History, University of Montana, Missoula. Bakhtin, Mikhail. M. 1981 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holmquist. University of Texas Press, Austin. Beekman, Christopher S., Phil C. Weigland, and John J. Pint 1999 Old World Irrigation Technology in a New World Context: Qanats in Spanish Colonial Western Mexico. Antiquity 73:440–7. Binford, Lewis R. 1962 Archaeology as Anthropology. American Antiquity 28:217–25. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Brooks, James F. 1996 ‘This Evil Extends especially . . . to the Feminine Sex’: Negotiating Captivity in the New Mexico Borderlands. Feminist Studies 22:279–309. Brooks, James F. 2002 Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. University of North Carolina Press, Williamsburg, Virginia. Bustamante, Adrian H. 1989 Españoles, Castas, y Labradores: Santa Fe Society in the Eighteenth Century. In Santa Fe: History of an Ancient City, edited by David Grant Noble, pp. 47–56. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Hiding in Plain Sight Carrillo, Charles M. 1997 Hispanic New Mexican Pottery: Evidence of Craft Specialization 1790–1890. LPD Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Chance, John K. and William B. Taylor 1977 Estate and Class in Colonial Oaxaca: Oaxaca in 1792. Comparative Studies in Society and History 19:454–87. Chavez, Fray Angelo 1979 Genizaros. In Handbook of North American Indians, ix: Southwest, edited by Alfonso Ortiz, pp. 198–200. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Ebright, Malcom and Rick Hendricks 2006 The Witches of Abiquiu: The Governor, the Priest, the Genizaro Indians, and the Devil. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Gutiérrez, Ramon A. 1991 When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford University Press, Stanford. Harrington, John P. 1908 A Yma Account of Origins. The Journal of American Folklore 21:324–48. Horvath, Steven M. Jr 1977 The Genízaro of Eighteenth-entury New Mexico: A Reexamination. Discovery: School of American Research 1977:25–40. Jimenez, Petra F. 1972 Methods of Obtaining Title to Property under Spanish Law. In Land, Law and La Raza: A Collection Of Papers Presented for Professor Theodore Parnall’s Seminar in Comparative Law. University of New Mexico School of Law, Albuquerque. (p.189) Jones, Oakah. L., Jr 1979 Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Katzew, Ilona 2004 Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenthcentury Mexico. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. Kessel, John L. 1979 Kiva, Cross, and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico, 1540–1840. National Park Service, Washington, DC. LaFarge, Oliver 1954 La Acequia Madre. Sunstone Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Lamadrid, Enrique R. 2003 Hermanitos Comanchitos: Indo-Hispano Rituals of Captivity and Redemption. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Page 19 of 22

Hiding in Plain Sight Levine, Frances 1992 Hispanic Household Structure in Colonial New Mexico. In Current Research on the Late Prehistory and Early History of New Mexico, edited by Bradley J. Viera, pp. 195–206. New Mexico Archaeological Council, Albuquerque. Levine, Frances 2001 Traditional Use in a Changing Landscape. In Native Peoples of the Southwest: Negotiating Land, Water, and Ethnicities, edited by Laurie Weinstein, pp. 125–42. Bergin and Garvey, Westport, Connecticut. Lightfoot, Dale R. 1993a The Cultural Ecology of Puebloan Pebblemulch Gardens. Human Ecology 21(2):115–43. Lightfoot, Dale R. 1993b The Landscape Context of Anasazi Pebblemulched Fields in the Galisteo Basin, Northern New Mexico. Geoarchaeology 8:349–70. Lightfoot, Dale R. and Frank W. Eddy 1995 The Construction and Configuration of Anasazi Pebble-mulch Gardens in the Northern Rio Grande. American Antiquity 60:459–70. Lightfoot, Kent G., Antoinette Martinez, and Ann M. Schiff 1998 Daily Practice and Material Culture in Pluralistic Social Settings: An Archaeological Study of Culture Change and Persistence from Fort Ross, California. American Antiquity 63: 199–222. Lycett, Mark T. 2002 Transformations of Place: Occupational History and Differential Persistence in 17th-century New Mexico. In Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt: Identity, Meaning, and Renewal in the Pueblo World, edited by R. Preucel, pp. 61–74. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Magnaghi, Russell M. 1994 The Genízaro Experience in Spanish New Mexico. In Spain and the Plains: Myths and Realities of Spanish Exploration and Settlement on the Great Plains, edited by R. H. Vigil, F. W. Kaye, and J. R. Wunder, pp. 114–30. University Press of Colorado, Niwot. Maxwell, Timothy D. 2000 Looking for Adaptation: A Comparative and Engineering Analysis of Prehistoric Agricultural Technologies and Techniques in the Southwest. PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Miera y Pacheco, Bernardo de, Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, and Francisco Atanasio Domínguez 1778 Plano geogrâaphico, de la tierra

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Hiding in Plain Sight descubierta, nuevamente, áa los Rumbos Norte, Noroeste y Oeste, del Nuevo Mexico. George Peter Hammond copy and manuscript, Case XD, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Nuttall, Zelia 1921 Ordinances concerning the Laying out of New Towns. The Hispanic American Historical Review IV:743–53. Oleson, John Peter 1984 Greek and Roman Mechanical Water-lifting: The History of a Technology. University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Ortiz, Alfonso 1969 The Tewa World: Space, Time, and Becoming in a Pueblo Society. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. (p.190) Poling-Kempes, Lesley 1997 Valley of Shining Stone: The Story of Abiquiu. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Quintana, Frances Leon and David H. Snow 1980 Historical Archaeology of the Rito Colorado Valley, New Mexico. Journal of the West 19(3):40–50. Rivera, José A. 1998 Acequia Culture: Water, Land and Community in the Southwest. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Rodríguez, Sylvia 1996 The Matachines Dance: Ritual Symbolism and Interethnic Relations in the Upper Rio Grande Valley. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Rodríguez, Sylvia 2002 Procession and Sacred Landscape in New Mexico. New Mexico Historical Review 77(1):1–26. Rodríguez, Sylvia 2006 Acequia: Water-sharing, Sanctity, and Place. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Simmons, Marc 1969 Settlement Patterns and Village Plans in Colonial New Mexico. Journal of the West 8:7–21. Simmons, Marc 1972 Spanish Irrigation in New Mexico. New Mexico Historical Review 47:135–50. Skinner, S. Alan 1965 A Survey of Field Houses at Sapawe, North Central New Mexico. Southwestern Lore 31(1):18–24. Sunseri, Jun U. 2009 Nowhere to Run, Everywhere to Hide: Multi-scalar Practice at Casitas Viejas. PhD dissertation, Department of Archaeology, University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Hiding in Plain Sight Sunseri, Jun U. 2010 (Re)Constructing la Tierra de Guerra: An IndoHispano Gendered Landscape on the Rito Colorado Frontier of Spanish Colonial New Mexico. In Introduction to the Archaeology and Preservation of North American Gendered Landscapes, edited by Sherene Baugher and Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood, pp. 141–64. Springer, New York. Sunseri, Jun U. In press Get Away Closer: Buffer Village Foodways on a Spanish Colonial Frontier. In Are We What We Eat? Continuity and Change in Food during Culture Contact in North America, edited by J. Douglass and S. Reddy. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association (AP3A). Swadesh, Frances Leon 1974 Los primeros pobladores: Hispanic Americans of the Ute frontier. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana. Van Ness, John R. 1991 Hispanos in Northern New Mexico: The Development of Corporate Community and Multicommunity. AMS Press, Brooklyn, New York. Voss, Barbara L. 2008 The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco. University of California Press, Berkeley. White, Richard 1991 The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny The Changing Role of Fort Lane in the Cultural Landscape of the Oregon Territory, 1853–1929 Mark Tveskov Amy Cohen

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0009

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the connection between frontier forts and the ideology of Manifest Destiny by focusing on the role of Fort Lane in the cultural landscape of the Oregon Territory in the years 1853–1929. It considers the ambiguities of a colonial frontier and how they condition a more complex phenomenology for fortifications. More specifically, it describes fortifications as powerful but ambiguous signifiers of new concepts, precedents, and identities. It also shows how such ambiguities influenced the social experiences of officers, dragoons, pioneer families, gold miners, and local indigenous people that intersected at Fort Lane. Finally, it explores frontier fortifications in relation to frontier localisation and globalisation. Keywords:   frontier forts, Manifest Destiny, Fort Lane, cultural landscape, Oregon Territory, colonial frontier, fortifications, indigenous people, localisation, globalisation

Introduction

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny In October, 1929, members of the Crater Lake chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), with the assistance of the members of a nearby Grange Hall, erected a stone obelisk in an empty field in a remote corner of the Rogue River valley of southern Oregon (Figure 8.1). A bronze plaque affixed to the monument proclaimed that the field was the location of ‘Fort Lane, built by order of the government . . . [and] . . . occupied by troops of the regular army for three years’. This monument was one of many built by the DAR that celebrated the triumph of frontier events that were, at that time, not part of a far distant past. The first Euro-American families settled southern Oregon in the 1850s, and the ensuing Rogue River Indian Wars that saw the near-genocide and ultimate removal of the majority of Native people from the region began shortly thereafter. Within a generation, the complex and tumultuous events of that era had been worked and reworked into a familiar frontier narrative that emphasized and celebrated the ideology of Manifest Destiny, rugged individualism, and domination over the wilderness (cf. Robbins 1997; Slotkin 1973). Fort Lane, and the U.S. Army dragoons that were stationed there, occupied a prominent place in this celebratory narrative. In a 1907 memoir, Senator James W. Nesmith invoked the Federal army’s role while reminiscing about his own participation in the Indian wars. He described how fifty years earlier, during the negotiation of the Table Rock Treaty of September 1853, he (p.192) had witnessed how Captain Andrew Jackson Smith, the commander of Fort Lane, had: drawn out his company of dragoons, and left them in line on the plain below. It was a bright beautiful morning, and the Rogue River valley lay like a panorama at our feet; the exact line of dragoons, sitting statue like upon their horses, with their white belts and burnished scabbards and carbines, looked like they were engraven upon a picture. (Nesmith and Lane 1907:217) By the turn of the twentieth century, the by-then elderly pioneers and the next generation of Oregonians could well afford to mythologize the frontier process in this way. The communities of southern Oregon were established and civilized, with built-up downtowns, a reasonably prosperous agricultural economy, and a transportation system that linked the region by railroads and highways with the rest of the United States. Although Fort Lane was largely forgotten in the larger historiography of the American West—swamped by the

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny (p.193) well-publicized events of the American Civil War and the Plains Indian Wars—it continued to serve locally as an unambiguous monument to the success of the frontier process.

Driven in part by this continued local interest, in 2004 the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology began a programme of Fig. 8.1. The stone obelisk erected in research into the 1829 by the Daughters of the American archaeological remains Revolution to commemorate the 1st and ethnohistoric Dragoon’s tenure at Fort Lane. The record of Fort Lane monument, which still stands today, was (Tveskov and Cohen constructed from stones taken from the 2008). This work has foundation of the chimneys of the fort’s included consultation building. with primary Photograph courtesy of the Southern documents and Oregon Historical Society, Negative # archaeological 5797. excavation of the site that uncovered several fort buildings and other structures, middens, and a rich assemblage of artifacts, ecofacts, and features (Figure 8.2). We established the layout of the fort on the ground and its concordance with historic plans and maps, illuminated aspects of the social experiences of the inhabitants of the fort and their neighbours, and informed current efforts at conservation and public interpretation of the Fort Lane property, which was recently obtained by the Oregon State Park system. Additionally, and to some extent unexpectedly, this research also illuminated the ambiguous position of military fortifications within the frontier process; an ambiguity masked by the construction of local frontier narratives.

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny (p.194) North American frontier forts are a common and easily digested signifier within the mythology of the settlement of the West. Over a century of literature, historical research, movies, and television shows have constructed this Fig. 8.2. Excavations underway at the signifier clearly and officer’s kitchen at Fort Lane. The granite unambiguously. A stone footings of the fort’s buildings were frontier fort—be it Fort the most visible remains at the site. Astoria, the Alamo, Fort Apache, or others, Photograph courtesy of the Southern are bastions of Oregon University Laboratory of expanding empire, Anthropology. major architectural statements that represent a toehold of civilization, the success of Manifest Destiny, and the (violent) domination of the wilderness, of regional Indigenous peoples, and of international rivals such as Mexico, Spain, or Great Britain. Archaeological research has long contributed to the construction of this signifier, outlining the details of architecture, subsistence practices, and technology of frontier forts and contributing to their preservation and public interpretation in the form of parks and tourist attractions (e.g. Carley 1982; Chance and Chance 1976; Ivey and Fox 1997). Archaeological research at presidios, trading posts, military fortifications, and other heavily built frontier sites has increased in recent years, and has productively addressed more nuanced questions, particularly the complexities of how the identity, status, and gender of soldiers, traders, missionaries, Natives, and settlers were actively moulded and reformulated through the social experience of the colonial process (e.g. Boyer 1992; Chance and Chance 1976; Clements 1993; Clouse 1999; Cromwell and Gembala 2003; Halbirt 2004; Jordan, this volume, Lightfoot 2005; Rochchietti 2008; Romero 2005; Schablitsky 1996; Schroedl and Ahlman 2002; Voss 2008; Walter 2004; Wooster 2006). Our research at Fort Lane was initially shaped by similar questions of architectural form, technology, daily social experience, and the like (Tveskov and Cohen 2008). However, like other recent researchers Page 4 of 28

Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny (Clements 1993; Clouse 1999; Schroedl and Ahlman 2002) we came to appreciate a wider mode of inquiry into the phenomenology of the Fort itself. The remains of monumentally constructed places such as Neolithic or Bronze Age monuments or Georgian gardens (to name two familiar examples) are now commonly situated within cultural and social landscapes and productively examined by archaeologists as architecture, as built environments, as political theatre, and as socially experienced by varied factions (e.g. Bender 1993; Edmonds 1999; Leone 1984; Pauls 2006; Yamin and Metheny 1996). Frontier forts, alternatively, are weakly conceptualized in this sense, and are often left as unassuming and passive receptacles of social experience. Our archaeological and historical research has suggested that since its initial construction to the present day, Fort Lane was more than that. It was a contingent place and an ever-changing idea within a dynamic frontier moment and within a rapidly changing social and physical landscape, and this role worked on multiple scales from the very local, to the region, to the continent, and beyond. It is this dimension of the fort, and frontier forts generally, that we would like to explore in this chapter.

(p.195) Theorizing Frontier Forts Army installations, trading forts, presidios, and other fortified frontier places are panopticons of state power on a landscape or regional level (e.g. Bender 1993; Clouse 1999; Handsman and Leone 1989; Kelso and Most 1990; Mrozowski 1999; cf. Romero 2005; Shackel 2000). Such places are characterized by monumental architectural construction, standardized buildings, raw materials that are often imported, coordinated and amassed construction labour, and uniformed and heavily armed inhabitants that live social experiences that are highly structured. These factors combine to powerfully index the social and military power of an often distant but omnipotent colonizing state and the implied, impending, or actual domination over local indigenous landscapes. This is certainly true, and was often the starting point for conceptualizing forts in long-established historiography. The ambiguities of a colonial frontier, however, condition a more complex phenomenology for fortifications. Despite the obvious power differentials, colonial frontiers are contingent moments where identity, status, gender, and other accepted norms are re-negotiated through the agency of the individual participation of soldiers, missionaries, traders, bureaucrats, and Indigenous locals. Strategies and agendas vary and run in multiple directions at once. Participants attempt to replicate old identities, landscapes, and patterns of social relations by indexing cultural precedents that are no longer applicable in the same way, providing avenues for the creation or innovation of identity or political Page 5 of 28

Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny arrangements (Silliman 2009; Tveskov 2007). This is perhaps among the most interesting aspects of a frontier moment: despite the actual power wielded by the colonizer, the peripheral and unfamiliar setting challenges the precedence followed by all participants, and despite best efforts to replicate familiar social orders, the end result is inevitably novel for all (Tveskov 2007; see also Cobb and Sapp, this volume; chapters in Stein 2005; Torrence and Clarke 2000). Within this landscape of social reconfiguration, fortifications are powerful but ambiguous signifiers. Highly visible to all participants, they dramatically represent old orders to be replicated and new challenges to be overcome. At the same time, through the social experience of the ambiguities, novelties, and uncertainties of the frontier setting, they can be employed to process or signify new concepts, precedents, and identities. In turn, the lived experience and meaning of the fort itself is recursively altered, fluid, politically situated, and ambiguous. Forts are not unique in this way, certainly, but for the participants of the colonial process as well as for historians and archaeologists reading that process, they stand out prominently within a complex topography thanks to their public visibility, ostensible symbolism of the triumphant colonial process, and, archaeological/ architectural durability.

(p.196) Fort Lane and the Frontier of the Oregon Territory Fort Lane dominated the local social and physical landscape of southern Oregon in the 1850s. Captain Smith built Fort Lane in a commanding location on the south side of the Rogue River, directly opposite the newly established Table Rock Indian Reservation. The Fort was a collection of buildings arrayed around a parade ground that included officers’ quarters, a hospital, a guard house, a store house, and enlisted men’s barracks. Each was built from minimally dressed mud-daubed pine logs, with wood floors, glass windows, and stone fireplaces with brick chimneys (Figure 8.3). A flagpole equipped with a crows-nest-style observation platform was erected at the open end of the parade ground. Although the Fort’s architecture was relatively modest, Fort Lane and the U.S. Army’s presence in the Rogue River valley in 1853 was part of a frontier

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny (p.197) process that was profound on a local level and also mirrored and accentuated larger colonial processes (Tveskov and Cohen 2008). With the annexation of California from Mexico, the settlement of the boundary question with Great Britain, and the subsequent discovery of gold in northern Fig. 8.3. The commander of Fort Lane, California, the 1850s Captain Andrew Jackson Smith, drew this saw the rapid expansion plan of the fort in July of 1855. The long of the United States to the west coast. This buildings on the left are the enlisted expansion involved the men’s barracks, with kitchens behind. On political, economic, and the right are the officers’ quarters, with a military domination of single kitchen in the back. From left to local Native American right in the back row are the commissary, societies, changes in guardhouse, and the post hospital. The Federal Indian Policy, little building in the background is the and rising internecine blacksmith’s shop. tensions among EuroAmericans over the role Plan courtesy of the National Archives of the Federal and Records Administration. government that within a decade would erupt into the American Civil War. The events in southern Oregon at that time mirrored these trends in microcosm and in turn helped shape their outcome.

Captain Smith had been party to negotiations between Federal Indian agents and the chiefs of several bands of the Rogue River people that resulted in the signing and subsequent congressional ratification of the Table Rock Treaty of September 1853 and that, among other things, established the Table Rock Indian Reservation (Beckham 1971; Douthit 2002; O’Donnell 1991; Schwartz 1997). Smith was thus at the leading edge of the implementation of a new form of Indian Policy: The U.S. Government long reserved for itself—rather than to individuals or states—the exclusive right to treat with First Nations. Prior to the 1850s, Federal policy had been to remove Native people west of a monolithic ‘Indian Frontier’, a line that had moved with White settlement westward from the crest of the Appalachians to the Mississippi River (Prucha 1988, 1990; Utley 1984; White 1983). With the coast-to-coast expansion of the United States in the 1840s, this policy was no longer tenable, and a new strategy was developed. Page 7 of 28

Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny Federally appointed agents would now negotiate treaties with First Nations leaders that would extinguish title to the majority of Indigenous lands and open them to White American settlement. The Takelama, Athapaskan, and other Rogue River peoples, in turn, would ‘reserve’ title to a portion of the landscape. The Table Rock Treaty was thus one of the first experiments in this new ‘reservation’ policy, and the Table Rock Reservation was one of the first Indian Reservations established in the American West. The governments of individual states and certainly many private individuals did not often agree with this policy, and frequently continued to assume the right to deal with Native people on their own. From the time of its initial establishment until it was abandoned three years later, the officers at Fort Lane found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to enforce the terms of the Table Rock Indian Treaty in a maelstrom of conflicting interests: the authority of the treaty was not universally acknowledged. Some members of both the Native community and the Euro-American community refused to recognize the terms of the treaty or the existence of the reservation. Conflict was ongoing and frequently violent during the dragoons’ tenure at Fort Lane. Douthit (2002), O’Donnell (1991), and Schwartz (1997)—scholars of local history—have all emphasized and described the complexity of these interactions. On the (p.198) one hand were those pioneer settlers, infused with the ideology of Manifest Destiny, who regarded Native people as part and parcel of the ‘wilderness’ that they sought to tame. As much as clearing trees and ploughing fields, the dominion over, subjugation, and often outright genocide of Native peoples was by the 1850s part of the ‘frontier experience’ that was accepted, and in fact necessary, to the innovation of new, local EuroAmerican cultural identity (cf. Boag 1992; Drew 1860; Robbins 1997; Slotkin 1973). Contemporary documents reveal sharply the distain and acrimony between the members of local pioneer militias and the often collegeeducated and more affluent U.S. Army officers and gentlemen from ‘back east’—men such as Captain Smith, General John Wool, Joel Palmer, or even local residents such as the Quaker John Beeson (Beeson 1994). For example, as recalled in the memoirs of dragoon officer Lt Jacob Bowmen Sweitzer, the officers and men stationed at Fort Lane at times found themselves in a position requiring that they point their guns at pioneer settlers rather than at local Indigenous peoples:

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny A large party of miners had collected in Jacksonville and sent a deputation to Captain Smith saying they would attack the Indians on the [Table Rock] Reservation. Captain Smith told them he would advise them not to, as the soldiers would protect the Indians as they were placed under the guard of the military by the Indian Department. They said they would whip the soldiers too, if they interfered. Captain Smith said, ‘bring it on’. (Sweitzer n.d.:19) Captain Smith (1855:342) reported another incident following an expedition to escort a group of Natives to the Table Rock Reservation: News reached camp that [a] volunteer company had followed us . . . and were encamped at the ferry some seven miles above us . . . for the purpose of attacking the Indians . . . I left camp with 153 Indians and proceeded to the ferry determined to shoot the first white man that would attempt to molest them under my charge. On at least one occasion, the Federal soldiers actually fired upon and killed pioneers in defence of local Indigenous people. Dragoon officer Thomas Cram (1855:328) reported that in August, 1855, Federal Indian agent Ben Wright and a local Justice of the Peace confronted a group of pioneers, who, ‘in a state of excitement’ were determined to lynch a Native person accused of shooting a White man. They succeeded in getting the accused turned over to a U.S. Army corporal, but as the dragoons attempted to escort the prisoner via canoe to a military fort, pioneers attacked them. Although the prisoner and another Native person were killed, the dragoons returned fire, killing three of the nine assailants. Pioneer memoirs, penned years or decades later, gloss over these internecine conflicts, presenting a more unified picture that blurs the distinction between professional soldier, local militia, and lynch mob (e.g. Booth 1997; Colvig 1903; Drew 1860; Henry 1995; Sutton 1969). Native individuals, of course, were also participants in this colonial process. Individuals made complex and varied decisions about how to cope with the (p.199) overwhelming military power and the culture of Manifest Destiny driving this American incursion. An examination of the voluminous ethnohistoric documentation concerning Fort Lane and the Table Rock Treaty and Reservation suggests that for many First Nations leaders, the decision to sign the treaty and move on to the reservation was a rational one based on an assessment of the current demographic and political situation. Some, such as the Takelma Page 9 of 28

Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny headman Toquahar (aka ‘Chief Sam’), maintained their faith in the agreements they made with the government even in the face of violence from the pioneer militias—preferring, in the end, to seek the protection of the Federal dragoons at Fort Lane than fight back. Still others, as perhaps typified by the Dakubetede leader Tecumtum (known to both Native American and Euro-Americans as ‘Chief John’), seem never to have taken the treaty process that seriously, even while accepting gifts and annuities from the Americans. He and others continued to move on and off the reservation at will. Later, in the face of open pioneer aggression and genocide, Tecumtum and many others chose to fight back bitterly (Douthit 2002; Schwartz 1997). Traditional frontier narratives tend to present Indigenous people as accepting of their fate in the face of progress in either an extremely passive or irrationally aggressive manner. The actions of the First Nations leaders in the colonial process of southern Oregon suggest, however, that they had a more sober and subtle understanding of what was happening than they are often credited with. For example, early Oregon Territory pioneer, lawyer, and civic leader, LaFayette Grover, recalled in an unpublished memoir the efforts of a Methodist missionary attempting to preach to the Rogue River valley Native peoples on their new reservation on the northern Oregon coast immediately following the war and their removal from Fort Lane, a lengthy description worth quoting here: The Missionary went over there, and he could speak the jargon tongue. He explained to them the nature of the Christian theory, the crucifixion of Christ, his death, and the atonement. And spread it out in a light that would attract their attention. And invite their sympathies in order to get them to accept religion; he explained that by this atonement all men who were wicked and wrong could be saved. He gave them a full discourse upon the origin of the tenets of the Christian doctrine. They listened to him with a great deal of attention. And the chiefs, when he made a point, said ‘ugh’ in giving their assent or dissent. After he got all through he told them he would come there every Sabbath and preach to them, and he wanted to form a society. He wanted them to come and be good Indians, and to join this society. He gave them a pressing invitation. Well, they told him after the services were over that they desired him to meet them the next morning, on Monday morning. He was

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny going to leave them that day. They said they wanted to see him specially about this matter that he had been stating to them. ‘Well’ he said he would very happy to confer with them. They came, three or four of the principle chiefs, and said they wanted to ask him a few questions about what he had said to them the day before. They said we (p.200) heard all you had to say and we were glad to hear you talk. You made a good talk. We are interested in your talk. We want to be good Indians. We have given up our wild habits now. ‘Now we want to know,’ they said, ‘of these Jews you spoke of who killed Christ, were they Indians or White Men?’ Well, he said, he must state to them that they were White men. Then they thought they were very bad white men, as he had said. Now Christ, ‘he was a good man?’ ‘Yes’ ‘Now what was he? Was he an Indian or was he a White Man?’Well, he was a White man. He was a good White man. Then they went away and talked together, and came back and told him they did not want him to come up there any more; that they had often got into difficulties by taking up the quarrels of White men; that they frequently were led into difficulties by White men. They believed what he said, that this Christ was the best man of men, and that he suffered wrongly; but those who killed him were White men, they were not Indians; and they did not wish to be mired up in that matter. They told him he need not come any more. Grover 1878:19–22, all punctuation as in the original handwritten manuscript. Research into Oregon Territory frontier posts describes a rich and complex suite of social relations that developed between soldiers and local Indigenous peoples in such settings (e.g. Bensell 1959; Schablitsky 1996). There is little direct testimony for such relationships—which included hiring Native people as servants, developing friendships, meeting for sexual liaisons, and maintaining long-term romantic associations—between the Fort Lane dragoons and the Shasta, Takelma, Latgawa, and Athapaskan peoples that resided on the reservation. While there is some evidence that by the onset of the Page 11 of 28

Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny winter war of 1855–56, some of the officers had developed reasonably good personal relationships with First Nations leaders, accounts of dayto-day interactions are few and far between. Lieutenant Sweitzer, in his memoir, describes employing a 14-year-old Native boy—a survivor of a pioneer massacre—as a servant. According to Sweitzer (n.d.:20), the boy shared his cabin and proved ‘useful about [his] quarters and to run errands, etc.’. The next spring, this boy would be killed in the Battle of Big Bend. At least one other officer is recalled as having a relationship with a Native person: according to a story collected by Fred Lockley (1981:77–8), in 1854, a woman named Betsey bore a child with the commander of Fort Lane, who was named Andrew Smith, after his father.

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny Globalization and Localization

Frontier fortifications lay at the intersection of a local frontier and a globalizing world. Permanent Euro-American pioneer settlement of the Rogue River valley dates to 1850. The archaeological record of Fort Lane, built only three years (p.201) later, demonstrates the interconnectedness of southern Oregon with national and international communities at what, at that time, was perhaps the most distant periphery in the United States. Analysis of the Fort Lane artifact assemblage has identified the makers and manufacturing location of dozens of individual artifacts (Table 8.1). These include a Dyottville Glass Works mineral water bottle manufactured in Philadelphia, tobacco pipes from Ohio, Holland, and Germany, a military button produced by Scovill & Co. Superfine in Waterbury, Connecticut, and a piece of a DuPont & Company black powder container made in Delaware. The presence of these items in the Fort Lane artifact assemblages shows that the soldiers were being supplied with goods from thousands of miles away. Documentary evidence likewise indicates a cosmopolitan origin for the dragoons’ clothing, equipment, food, and drink. The dragoons’ uniforms as well as other personal equipment and horse equipage were manufactured by Schuylkill Arsenal in Philadelphia and Thornton Grimsley & Company in St Louis (Steffan 1978). The U.S. Model 1842 Musketoons that the soldiers used were produced at the Springfield Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the .44 calibre Colt dragoon pistols were manufactured in Hartford, Connecticut. These clothing, arms, and other equipment brought the triumph of the emerging Industrial Revolution to the Rogue River valley; the uniforms worn by the dragoons at Fort Lane were the first in U.S. history to be made in a factory using sewing machines and the Model 1842 musketoons were among the first firearms used in the West to be manufactured with easily interchangeable parts. Likewise, the first extensive use of the Colt revolvers—the handgun-turned-icon that by the turn of the century was to become almost synonymous with the settlement of the West—took place at obscure dragoon outposts such as Fort Lane in the 1850s. These clothes and equipment, as well as a good portion of the food eaten by the dragoons and the very hardware and nails used to build the fort, were transported from their origin points in the busy cities back east to Fort Lane—at the very edge of the periphery—by ship via San Francisco to Crescent City. The last part of the journey to Fort Lane was by mule train over roads surveyed by U.S. Army engineers and constructed and improved by the labour of U.S. dragoons.

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny The presence of these military supply lines, in turn, tangibly accelerated the larger colonial process in the region. Local settlers were able to use the roads blazed and improved by the Federal army, and civilians were hired to run supply trains from San Francisco (Schwartz 1997; Tveskov and Cohen 2008). Local settler Peter Britt, for example, worked as a contract teamster for the dragoons at Fort Lane before he gained regional and national fame as a pioneer photographer, botanist, and vintner (Miller 1972). In the Rogue River valley today, Britt is a famous and colourful historical figure, and is credited in local historiography and tourist attractions as a major civilizing force of the region. Recent Southern Oregon University Laboratory excavations at Britt’s homestead site (p.202)

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny

Table 8.1. Manufacturer, place of origin, and dates of production of selected artifacts recovered from Fort Lane Artifacts recovered from Fort Lane: Specimen #

Description

Manufacturer

Place of manufacture

Dates of production

95.02–581

Mineral water bottle

Dyottville Glass Works

Philadelphia, PA

1846–1880

95.02–745

Possible glass oil lamp base

Edward Miller and Co.

Meriden, CT

1840–present

95.02–128 etc.

Clay pipe fragments

Point Pleasant Pottery

Point Pleasant, OH

1830–1920

95.02–326

soldier’s head pipe

Unknown

Probably Holland

1810–1840

95.02–332

Queen Victoria pipe

Unknown

Ulsar or Grossalmerode, Germany

Early nineteenth century

95.02–946

Washington pipe

Unknown

Ulsar or Grossalmerode,

Mid nineteenth century

Germany 95.02–492a

Lewis Cass pipe

Unknown

Ulsar or Grossalmerode, Germany

Mid nineteenth century

95.02–890

Zachary Taylor pipe

Unknown

Ulsar or Grossalmerode, Germany

Mid nineteenth century

95.02–329

Unidentified face pipe

Point Pleasant Pottery

Point Pleasant, OH

1838–1890

95.02–304

Military button

Scovill & Co. Superfine

Waterbury, CT

1840–1850

95.02–313

1854 quarter dollar spur

US Mint

LA, GA, NC, PA, NY

1854

95.02–1186

Screw cap from black

Du Pont and Co.

Wilmington, DE

1802–1880

powder can

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny

Material described in documentary sources as being used by the 1st Dragoons Reference

Description

Manufacturer

Place of manufacture

Dates of production

Steffan 1978

Dragoon uniforms

Schuylkill Arsenal

Philadelphia, PA

1850s

.44 calibre Colt pistols

Colt factory

Hartford, CT

1842–1860

US Model 1842 musket

Springfield Armoury

Springfield, MA

1844–1845

Saddle bags, bridles, horse blankets, canteens

Schuylkill Arsenal or Thornton Grimsley and Co.

Philadelphia, PA or St Louis, MO

Mid nineteenth century

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny (p.203) that dates to the mid 1850s have recovered clay pipe fragments identical to those found archaeologically at Fort Lane and Fort Orford— another contemporary army post located on the southern Oregon coast (Cohen and Tveskov 2008; Chelsea Rose, personal communication 2011).

The globalization of the new Industrial Revolution, then as now, brought with it its own sets of contradictions. When Lieutenant Jacob Bowman Sweitzer received orders to go to Fort Lane, he was stationed at Fort Leavenworth in what is today Kansas. Had Sweitzer mounted a horse and ridden west, it might have taken him six weeks to reach southwest Oregon. Instead, he travelled to Fort Lane entirely via the efficiencies of modern public transportation. In his diary (Sweitzer n.d.: 11), the lieutenant laments that there was no stage that travelled across the plains. Sweitzer departed Fort Leavenworth in October of 1854 for Pennsylvania to visit his mother via stagecoach, and then he travelled by train south to New Orleans via St Louis. In New Orleans, Sweitzer boarded a ship bound for Panama, and after suffering severe seasickness and a week-long layover in Havana, arrived at the isthmus. Sweitzer and fellow passengers travelled by train across the isthmus; Sweitzer was, in fact, among the very first to make this trip by rail. The Panama Railway was rushed to completion in the 1850s as a result of the demands of the gold rush in California and Oregon, and the first complete passenger trip across the isthmus took place in January 1855 as a result of the gold rush. Having reached the Pacific Ocean, Sweitzer boarded another ship to San Francisco, and from there took a steamboat up the Sacramento River to Red Bluffs, California. A stagecoach transported him to Shasta City, where he sent his trunks by pack train over the mountains to Oregon. Sweitzer himself rode a mule from Shasta to Fort Jones near Yreka and then over the mountains to Fort Lane, arriving at his destination in April of 1855. That this trip took seven months reflects some of the contradictory experiences on the frontier that resulted in the innovation of new identities. Sweitzer’s journey was accomplished using only the most public transportation, a fact that surely confirmed that civilization was reaching the Far West, whatever the cost in time or efficiency. Simultaneously, the extreme isolation and ruggedness of life in the Rogue River valley demonstrably affected the daily life of the soldiers living at the Fort. For example, despite the fact that the dragoons were wearing machine-made uniforms that had been transported over 3,000 miles from Philadelphia, the remoteness of Fort Lane caused interruptions in supply. Some of Captain Smith’s correspondence reflects frustration at the lack of available supplies and rations, lamenting at one point that ‘Fort Lane has no clothing on hand to issue, some men are quite naked, some of them barefoot’ (Smith 1855:281). The officers and men at Fort Lane also received their food provisions Page 17 of 28

Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny from San Francisco. Although no such similar document from Fort Lane has been located, an 1854 inventory from Fort Orford, located on the southwest Oregon coast, included 360 lbs of pork, 14 barrels of salt beef, 138 lbs of ham, 17,920 lbs of (p.204) barley, 120 lbs of flour, hard bread, 3½ bushels of beans, 326 lbs of rice, 74 lbs of coffee, 400 lbs of brown sugar, 36 gallons of vinegar, two bushels of salt, 158 lbs of meat biscuit, 80 gallons of pickled onions, 1,144 lbs of dried apples, and 80 gallons of molasses (Southwest Oregon Research Project Archive 2001, Box 8[1], roll 8:251–9). Mansfield (1855:168–9) reported that Fort Lane had its own garden and that fresh corn, wheat, barley, oats, and hay were also procured locally, as was beef (at 18 cents per pound) and flour (16 cents per pound). Like public transportation, which took seven months, ‘meat biscuits’ were likely another ambiguous harbinger of civilization. According to an article in Scientific American, March 23, 1850 (volume 5, Issue 27, page 213), in an era before canning technology, ‘meat biscuits’ were a kind of: ‘Portable Desiccated Soup Bread,’ invented by Mr. Gail Borden, Jr., a highly respectable citizen of Galveston, Texas. The discovery being fully secured by a patent recently granted, we will give a brief but clear description of it, as it is an invention of the first importance, both to our own country, and it may be said, to the whole human race. The nature of this discovery consists in preserving the concentrated nutritious properties of flesh meat of any kind, combining it with flour and baking it into biscuits. One pound of this bread contains the extract of more than five pounds of the best meat—(containing its usual proportion of bone)—and one ounce of it will make a pint of rich soup. Biscuits by Mr. Borden’s process may be made of beef, veal, fowl’s flesh, oysters, &c., and thus in a compact form the very essence of agricultural products, fitted for the traveler or mariner, or for the dwellers in distant cities, may be transported by sea or land, from distant rural districts, where flesh meat is comparatively cheap. The faunal remains recovered from Fort Lane indicate a certain degree of austerity, and there was virtually no difference between the animal bones found behind the officers’ kitchens and the enlisted men’s kitchens. Moreover, the mix of both domestic and wild species may indicate that the men relied on hunting in order to supplement their government-supplied rations. Documentary research indicates that the dragoons at Fort Lane, as elsewhere in the west at that time, augmented their daily rations of salted beef or pork and hardtack—a diet that was ‘repeated with deadly monotony day after day’ (Utley Page 18 of 28

Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny 1967:37)—with hunted, fished, or poached provisions. Officers frequently described fishing for trout and salmon and duck-hunting, and in his memoirs, Sweitzer related how: A ranchman came into [Fort Lane] and told Captain Smith [that] one of his men had killed one of his hogs. The men were paraded and the man picked out one of ‘C’ Troop as the one who killed the hog. Captain Smith asked him if he had killed the hog. He said he had killed a wild animal in the woods, he thought it was a bear. Smith told him he would have to pay for it. He said he was willing. The owner said it was worth $30. The soldier then said he had no money, but would give the man his note. The man looked vacantly at the soldier for awhile and said, (p.205) ‘have you no money?’ The soldier said no. The citizen gave an exclamation of disgust and turned on his heel and left. He had no idea of ever seeing the soldier again and he was the subject of a ludicrous joke. On the one hand, this story could point to the practice of dragoons, either out of boredom or necessity, augmenting their army rations. On the other hand, the underlying tension between the local rancher and the Federal soldiers seems typical of the hostile feelings on both sides at that time. Other examples of the ruggedness of life at Fort Lane can be inferred. The numerous broken bottles recovered from the site attest to the fact that alcohol was consumed on a regular basis, despite being against Army regulations, and the possibility of easy money from nearby gold mines often proved more enticing to the dragoons than a military life for military pay. Furthermore, the presence of the bones of deer, duck, and other wild animals in the trash dumps at Fort Lane suggests that like their pioneer neighbours, and despite the promise of Mr Borden’s meat biscuits, the dragoons had to supplement their provisions with food procured locally by hunting and gathering. An 1854 quarter recovered during the archaeological work is perhaps the most effective material metaphor for the intersection of the global and the local that occurred at Fort Lane—a token of a global economy that was massproduced of silver in a factory in Philadelphia or San Francisco, it made its way to the frontier within a year of its creation, only to be cut with hot iron into a spur as result of the stark necessities of that frontier (Figure 8.4).

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny (p.206) Conclusion The social experiences of the officers, dragoons, pioneer families, gold miners, and local Indigenous people that intersected at Fort Lane were informed by the contrasts and ambiguities of that contingent historical, geographic, and cultural frontier Fig. 8.4. An 1854 quarter dollar coin moment. The contrasts recovered from Fort Lane. The soft silver between the dragoons, coin was cut with a hot metal implement the pioneers, and into a star shape with a hole in the Indigenous people— middle, and likely used as a spur. One of exacerbated, of course, the tangs of the spur later broke off by the colonial reality (SOULA specimen 95.02–313). of the times—were Photograph courtesy of the Southern underscored and Oregon University Laboratory of emphasized by each of Anthropology. these groups’ experiences vis-à-vis the fort itself. The dragoons at Fort Lane lived a life that was structured by military hierarchy and that was spatially indexed and circumscribed by their association with the physical reality of Fort Lane. As the largest EuroAmerican architectural statement yet inscribed into the landscape of the Rogue River valley, Fort Lane represented a corporeal and dramatically visible achievement of Manifest Destiny and, by implication, the success of the pioneer effort to replicate American culture and society at the frontier’s edge. At the same time, a good number of the pioneers and gold miners—many of whom were advocates of Native genocide and who favoured the rights of states and individuals over those of the Federal government—could only have been conflicted by the presence of the fort and its mostly Yankee officer corp. As is appropriate to the local landscape, the new ‘Oregonian’ identity in general, and southwest Oregon identity in particular, emphasized (and continues to emphasize) rugged individualism, personal freedom, and libertarian values (e.g. Colvig 1903; Drew 1860; Henry 1995; Nesmith and Lane 1907; Robbins 1997). These new identities however, were also Page 20 of 28

Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny legitimized and confirmed by the reproduction of facets of familiar culture from ‘back east’. Thus, pioneer recollections likewise memorialize major milestones of the movement of ‘civilization’ such as the improvements, at government expense, of the wagon trail over the Siskiyou Mountains to California or, in later decades, the expansion of the railroad into southern Oregon (Tveskov et al. 2001). When Fort Lane was constructed, the interior Rogue River valley was sparsely inhabited, comprising only several dozen family homesteads and gold mining claims and a single grist mill at what is today the town of Ashland. Permanent Euro-American settlement was only two years old in the valley, and Jacksonville was the only community of any size. Despite the conflict between the Federal soldiers and the local settlers, Fort Lane, with its planned and symmetrical architecture, brightly uniformed and heavily armed soldiers, and implied and actual social power, surely represented the success of Manifest Destiny. The ambiguities of the role of Fort Lane were extensively discussed at the time, but faded in local memory against a now thoroughly colonized landscape, just as Fort Lane faded in the national memory. Pioneer memoirs, penned years or decades later, gloss over the internecine conflicts, presenting a more unified picture that blurs the distinction between professional soldier, (p.207) local militia, and lynch mob (e.g. Booth 1997; Colvig 1903; Drew 1860; Henry 1995; Sutton 1969). By the turn of the twentieth century, as the older pioneers registered their memories for posterity in speeches delivered at 4th of July celebrations or reunions of the volunteer militia companies, Fort Lane had become an icon unambiguously representing the triumph of the local frontier process. The ambiguities of the Fort’s tenure were not, for example, part of the discourse leading to construction of the monument at Fort Lane by the Daughters of the American Revolution. According to a commentator at that time, the monument was meant to be a ‘source of pride forever for all who love Southern Oregon and especially those who have helped in its erection’ (DeLosh 1929). The DAR’s monument reflected the role of frontier forts in traditional historiography and in popular culture as unambiguous facilitators of the triumphant colonial process. Alternatively, much contemporary theorizing and practice in archaeology, as exemplified by the chapters in this volume (see also Lightfoot et al 1998; Silliman 2009; Stein 2005; Tveskov 2007), emphasize the fluid, contingent, and political nature of identity as well as the resiliency, plasticity, and creativity of those participating (willingly or not) in colonial interactions. Forts, by virtue of their dramatic architecture, ostensible symbolism of colonial might, and actual military power, were indeed prominent peaks in the phenomenology of the colonial landscape. Their aspect was familiar to Page 21 of 28

Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny the colonizer and alien to the colonized, but always dramatic, and in unsettled and ambiguous times, they served as crucibles through which new and creative identities and social relations were forged. These new identities and social relations did not necessarily fit neatly within the ideology of what colonialism was attempting to accomplish: Indigenous people were not simply assimilated and the colonizers did not perfectly replicate their own culture in a new land. That this ambiguous and subversive process was negotiated (at least partially) through the contingent and active use of the fort itself by all the actors in the colonial drama, and that this point is often lost to subsequent mythologizing, is perhaps not surprising. Famously, Jacquetta Hawkes (1967:174) said that ‘[e]very age has the Stonehenge it deserves—or desires’ and perhaps the same could be said about frontier fortifications, whether it is Fort Lane, the Alamo, or the Bastille. One lesson of our present-day academic and civic engagement with Fort Lane is that this role continues well after the original use of the fort ceases. Forts are one of the most common tourist attractions in any given location, and our archaeological theorizing and practice is itself part of a long and dynamic negotiation about the meaning of colonialism, on many scales, from local to global. Since 1853, Fort Lane has changed from a symbol of the tyranny of the Federal government over intrepid settlers, to a symbol of the triumph of the frontier process and the heroism of the Euro-American pioneers, to now, a means through which to discuss the ambiguities and injustices of the colonial era.

(p.208) Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the editors for the opportunity to contribute to this book and all the staff and students of the Southern Oregon University Laboratory (SOULA) who participated in the Fort Lane Project. We would also like acknowledge our colleagues Andre Briggs, Deborah d’Este Hofer, Robert Kentta, Jeff LaLande, Nancy Nelson, Roger Roberts, Carol Samuelson, Julie Schablitsky, Karen Smith, Doug Wilson, and Josie Wilson for their contributions to the success of the research and conservation of Fort Lane. The thoughts expressed in this chapter, however, are our own. References Bibliography references: Beckham, Stephen Dow 1971 Requiem for a People: The Rogue Indians and the Frontiersmen. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny Beeson, John 1994 Plea for the Indians: His Lone Cry in the Wilderness for Indian Rights—Oregon’s First Civil-rights Advocate. Webb Research Group, Medford, Oregon. Bender, Barbara 1993 Stonehenge—Contested Landscapes (Medieval to Present-day). In Landscapes: Politics and Perspectives, edited by Barbara Bender, pp. 245–79. Berg, Providence. Bensell, Royal A. 1959 All Quiet on the Yamhill: The Civil War in Oregon, edited by Gunter Barth. University of Oregon Books, Eugene. Boag, Peter G. 1992 Environment and Experience: Settlement Culture in Nineteenth-century Oregon. University of California Press, Berkeley. Booth, Percy T. 1997 Until the Last Arrow. Maverick Publications, Bend, Oregon. Boyer, Gary C. 1992 The Archaeological Symbols of Status and Authority: Fort Hoskins, Oregon 1856–1965. MA thesis in Interdisciplinary Studies, Oregon State University, Corvallis. Carley, Caroline D. 1982 HBC Kanaka Village/Vancouver Barracks 1977. Reports in Highway Archaeology 8. Office of Public Archaeology, University of Washington, Seattle. Chance, David H. and Jennifer V. Chance 1976 Kanaka Village/ Vancouver Barracks, 1974. Office of Public Archaeology, University of Washington, Seattle. Clements, Joyce C. 1993 The Cultural Creation of the Feminine Gender: An Example from 19th-century Military Households at Fort Independence, Boston. Historical Archaeology 27(4):39–64. Clouse, Robert Alan 1999 Interpreting Archaeological Data through Correspondence Analysis. Historical Archaeology 33(2):90–107. Cohen, Amy and Mark Tveskov 2008 The Tseriadun Site: Prehistoric and Historic Period Archaeology on the Southern Oregon Coast. SOULA Research Report 2008–2003. Southern Oregon University, Ashland, Oregon. Colvig, William N. 1903 Address of Hon. William Colvig Delivered at the Reunion of the Indian War Veterans, at Medford on Saturday, July 28, 1902. Oregon Historical Quarterly IV (3):227–40. (p.209)

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny Cram, Thomas J. 1855 Letter to General John Wool from Port Orford dated 29 August 1855. Records of the Division and Department of the Pacific, Headquarters Records. RG 393 Records of the U.S. Army Continental Commands, 1820–1920. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. Cromwell, Robert and Danielle Gembala 2003 Archaeological Survey of the West Barracks Area, Vancouver Barracks, Washington: The Vancouver National Historic Reserve. Manuscript on file, Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, Vancouver, Washington. DeLosh, Irene (ed.) 1929 Women’s Interests and Activities: D.A.R. Marker to be Unveiled. Medford Mail Tribune, 27 October 1929. Douthit, Nathan 2002 Uncertain Encounters: Indians and Whites at Peace and War in Southern Oregon, 1820s–1860s. Oregon State University Press, Corvallis. Drew, C. S. 1860 Communication from C. S. Drew, Late Adjutant of the Second Regiment of Oregon Mounted Volunteers giving an account of the origin and early prosecution of the Indian war in Oregon. Senate, 36th Congress 1st Session, Misc. Document No. 59. Edmonds, Mark 1999 Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic: Landscapes, Monuments, and Memory. Routledge, London. Grover, LaFayette 1878 Notable Things in a Public Life. Manuscript PA 36–43(39). Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. Halbirt, Carl D. 2004 La Ciudad de San Agustín: A European Fighting Presidio in Eighteenth-century La Florida. Historical Archaeology 38(3): 33–46. Handsman, Russell G. and Mark P. Leone 1989 Living History and Critical Archaeology in the Reconstruction of the Past. In Critical Traditions in Contemporary Archaeology, edited by Valerie Pinksy and Alison Wylie, pp.117–35. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hawkes, Jacquetta 1967 God in the Machine. Antiquity 41:174–80. Henry, A. G. 1995 Speech of Dr A. G. Henry of Yamhill Delivered Before the Citizens of Corvallis on the Evening of Dec 3rd 1855. Ye Galleon Press, Fairfield, Washington. Ivey, James E. and Anne A. Fox 1997 Archaeological and Historical Investigations at Alamo North Wall, San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas.

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny Archaeological Survey Report, No. 224, Center for Archaeological Research, University of Texas, San Antonio. Kelso, William M. and Rachel Most (eds) 1990 Earth Patterns: Essays in Landscape Archaeology. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville. Leone, Mark P. 1984 Interpreting Ideology in Historical Archaeology: Using the Rules of Perspective in the William Paca Garden in Annapolis, Maryland. In Ideology, Power, and Prehistory, edited by Daniel Miller and Christopher Tilley, pp. 25–35. Cambridge University Press, New York. Lightfoot, Kent 2005 Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship between Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology. American Antiquity 60:199–217. Lightfoot, Kent G., Antoinette, Martine, and Ann M. Shiff 1998 Daily Practice and Material Culture in Pluralistic Social Settings: An Archaeological Study of Culture Change and Persistence from Fort Ross, California. American Antiquity 63:199–222. Lockley, Fred 1981 Conversations with Bullwhackers, Muleskinners, Pioneers, Prospectors, ’49ers, Indian Fighters, Trappers, Ex– barkeepers, Authors, Preachers, Poets, and Near Poets, and All Sorts and Conditions of Men. Rainy Day Press, Eugene. (p.210) Mansfield, Joseph K. 1855 Report of Joseph K. Mansfield, Inspector General. Manuscript on file, Southern Oregon Historical Society, Medford, Oregon. Miller, Alan Clark 1972 Peter Britt: Pioneer Photographer of the Siskiyous. Masters thesis, Department of History, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. Mrozowski, Stephen A. 1999 Colonization and the Commodification of Nature. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 3(3):153–66. Nesmith, James W. and Joseph Lane 1907 The Council of Table Rock, 1853: Reminiscences of Senator James W. Nesmith and General Joseph Lane. Oregon Historical Quarterly VI:211–22. O’Donnell, Terence 1991 An Arrow in the Earth: General Joel Palmer and the Indians of Oregon. Oregon Historical Society Press, Portland. Pauls, Elizabeth 2006 The Place of Space: Architecture, Landscape, and Social Life. In Historical Archaeology, edited by Martin Hall and Stephen Silliman, pp. 65–83. Blackwell, Malden, Massachusetts. Page 25 of 28

Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny Prucha, Francis Paul 1988 United States Indian Policies, 1815–1860. In History of Indian–White Relations, Handbook of North American Indians, iv, edited by W. E. Washburn, pp. 40–50. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Prucha, Francis Paul 1990 Documents of United States Indian Policy. Second edition. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Robbins, William G. 1997 Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story: 1800–1940. University of Washington Press, Seattle. Rochchietti, Ana Maria 2008 Archaeology of the Border Fort Achiras, Córdoba (1832–1869). International Journal of Historical Archaeology 12:195–208. Romero, Facundo Gómez 2005 The Archaeology of the Gaucho ‘Vago y Mal Entretenido’. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 9:143– 64. Schablitsky, Julie M. 1996 Duty and Vice: The Daily Life of a Fort Hoskins Soldier. Masters thesis, Department of Anthropology, Oregon State University, Corvallis. Shackel, Paul 2000 Agency and Resistance in American Historical Archaeology. In Agency in Archaeology, edited by Marcia-Anne Dobres and John E. Robb, pp. 232–46. Routledge, London. Schroedl, Gerald F. and Todd M. Ahlman 2002 The Maintenance of Cultural and Personal Identities of Enslaved Africans and British Soldiers at the Brimstone Hill Fortress, St Kitts, West Indies. Historical Archaeology 36(4):38–49. Schwartz, E. A. 1997 The Rogue River War and its Aftermath, 1850– 1980. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Silliman, Stephen W. 2009 Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England. American Antiquity 74:211–30. Slotkin, Richard 1973 Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut. Smith, Andrew Jackson 1855 Letter to Adjutant Townsend dated 30 May 1855. Records of the Division and Department of the Pacific, Headquarters Records. RG 393 Records of the U.S. Army Continental

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny Commands, 1820–1920. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington DC. Steffan, Randy 1978 The Horse Soldier 1776–1943, ii: The Frontier, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Indian Wars, 1851–1880. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Stein, Gil (ed.) 2005 The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters: Comparative Perspectives. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. (p.211) Sutton, Dorothy 1969 Indian Wars of the Rogue River. Josephine County Historical Society, Grants Pass, Oregon. Sweitzer, Jacob Bowman. n.d Memoirs of Jacob Bowman Sweitzer. Manuscript on file, Southern Oregon Historical Society, Medford. Torrence, Robin and Anne Clarke (eds) 2000 The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross-cultural Engagements in Oceania. Routledge, New York. Tveskov, Mark A. 2007 Social Identity and Culture Change on the Southern Northwest Coast. American Anthropologist 109:431–41. Tveskov, Mark and Amy Cohen 2008 The Fort Lane Archaeology Project. SOULA Research Report 2008–2001. Southern Oregon University, Ashland. Tveskov, Mark, Kelly Derr, Nicole Norris, and Richard Silva 2001 Archaeological Investigations of the Siskiyou Trail. SOULA Research Report 2001–2001. Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology. Prepared for the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, Medford Office. Utley, Robert M. 1967 Frontiersmen in Blue; the United States Army and the Indian, 1848–1865. Macmillan, New York. Utley, Robert M. 1984 The Indian Frontier of the American West 1846– 1890. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Voss, Barbara 2008 The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race, Sexuality, and Identity in Colonial San Francisco. University of California Press, Berkeley. Walter, Tamra L. 2004 The Archaeology of Presidio San Sabá: A Preliminary Report. Historical Archaeology 38(3):94–105.

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Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny White, Richard 1983 The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Wooster, Robert 2006 Frontier Crossroads: Fort Davis and the West. Texas A&M University Press, College Station. Yamin, Rebecca, and Karen B. Metheny (eds) 1996 Landscape Archaeology. University of Tennessee Press Knoxville.

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Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina Charles R. Cobb Stephanie Sapp

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0010

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the tensions of colonial power and their unintended consequences, with particular reference to the Yamasee War of 1715 and the construction of Fort Moore in South Carolina. More precisely, it juxtaposes two dimensions of English colonialism in the late 1600s and 1700s: first is the discourse concerning the place of Native Americans during England's sixteenth- and seventeenth-century imperial expansion into Southeastern North America; second is the lived reality among colonials and Native Americans at Fort Moore. The chapter highlights the contradictions between imperial prescriptions and everyday practices, especially in relation to the spatial management of people to offset fears of racial and cultural contamination between coloniser and Native living along the morally dangerous frontier. Keywords:   colonial power, Yamasee War, Fort Moore, South Carolina, colonialism, Native Americans, England, North America, colonials, frontier

Introduction Page 1 of 25

Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina It is no small irony that Native American dreams for salvation from the predations of England’s Carolina colony were launched on 15 April, Good Friday, in the year 1715. The so-called Yamasee War, instigated on that date by an uneasy alliance of tribes, probably came closer than any other conflict on the Atlantic seaboard to throwing an established colonial power back into the ocean. Within a matter of months, Native Americans were making raids into the vicinity of Charleston and a number of plantations lay burned and in ruins. It is estimated that 90 percent of the English traders living among the Native Americans were killed, and safe harbour was largely limited to a 50 km arc around the city of Charleston (Edgar 1998:99–100; Oatis 2004). For a time, colonials feared that an attack on the capital itself was imminent. Despite early successes, the Native American groups were unable to sustain either their coalition or the logistical demands of a prolonged war. By late 1715 colonials were able to turn the tide, although sporadic conflicts continued to fester well into the 1720s. The fact that the surprise attack in 1715 was spearheaded by the group considered the closest allies of the Carolina colonials, the Yamasee, did occasion some introspection in Charleston. Yet any self-doubt was overshadowed by English fury at the perceived treachery of the rebellion. This outrage was not satisfied until the Yamasee were effectively dispersed in the 1720s by a series of colonial attacks, which culminated in an expedition into Spanish Florida that devastated the remnants of the community that had taken refuge outside of St Augustine. (p.213) We aim to use one response to this conflict—the construction of Fort Moore on the Carolina frontier—as a window into the tensions of colonial power and their unintended consequences, not the least of which was the Yamasee War. Our more specific objective is to examine these tensions by juxtaposing two dimensions of English colonialism in the late 1600s and 1700s: on one side, the discourse concerning the place of Native Americans during England’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century imperial expansion into Southeastern North America; and, on the other side, the lived reality among colonials and Native Americans at Fort Moore. This contrast highlights the contradictions between imperial prescriptions and everyday practices, particularly as these related to the spatial management of people to offset fears of racial and cultural contamination between Colonizer and Native living along the morally dangerous frontier.

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Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina A ‘Neo’-Historical Anthropology Our study can be situated in the genealogy of historical anthropology associated with the likes of Sidney Mintz (1985) or Eric Wolf (1982). It is a logical outgrowth of that approach in several ways. First, it focuses on the ambivalent cultural spaces at the intersection of cultures, which requires moving away from a binary colonizer/colonized framework (Gosden 2004:82–113; Scheiber and Mitchell 2010; Voss 2008). Second, we follow Laura Stoler (e.g. 2002), the Comaroffs (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 1992), and others who have emphasized a ‘neo-historical’ anthropology (our terminology) that recognizes the non-materialist dimension of oppression, resistance, and accommodation so important in the postcolonial literature. This has been an important shift, since Marxist approaches traditionally neglected the moral aspects of statemaking and imperialism (Corrigan and Sayer 1985). As a result, ideology, discourse, and knowledge production are now situated alongside politics, labour, and economy within the historical framing of colonial subjects and subjectivities—a direction that now is as actively pursued in archaeology as it is in social anthropology (e.g. Jordan 2008; Silliman 2006; Voss 2008). Finally, we emphasize historical context and content rather than general representations. There is still considerable work to be done on breaking down the conception of a trans-historical colonialism in order to understand variation between European colonial projects and how they may have changed through time. While archaeologists who study the colonial era have been tremendously influenced by sociocultural scholarship under the rubric of historical anthropology, much of that work tends to be rooted in the latter-day colonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is not too surprising since this is the interval from which one can still draw on some primary forms of ethnography (p.214) to complement archival research. In contrast, many archaeologists study the material expressions of European colonial relations that date as far back as the fifteenth century. One cannot emphasize enough the underlying philosophical, political, and economic differences between earlier and later forms of colonialism, not to mention the variation between imperial projects (e.g. Bickham 2005; Patterson 2008; Rowlands 1998; Stoler 1989). Colonies governed under the mercantile policies of the 1600s were organized significantly differently than they were with the growth of industrial capitalism in the 1800s. Attitudes toward the ‘Other’ likewise underwent qualitative shifts through time. Some scholars, for instance, make a distinction between Renaissance- and Enlightenment-period colonial explorations on the one hand, where Indigenes were viewed as partial and imperfect Page 3 of 25

Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina Europeans (or exotics at worst), and post-Enlightenment strategies on the other, which were marked by an ‘extraordinarily confident racism’ (Dirks 1994:77), where the colonized were defined as qualitatively different beings from colonizer populations (see also Fabian 1983; Rowlands 1998). Moreover, in the early stages of European colonialism in North America the balance of power had not yet clearly shifted to the imperial powers. It is for the latter reason that Richard White (1991) coined the term ‘The Middle Ground’ for the European and Native American political, economic, and social terrain in the Great Lakes region in the eighteenth century. Here and elsewhere, when European expansionism was still far from assured, relations between groups often took on a nuance and balance that were not discarded by Europeans and Euro-Americans until disease, conquest, and economic entanglements had increasingly facilitated colonial ambitions. Yet even this progression is hardly subtle and evokes more of a metahistory that begs further historical treatment within national traditions. In this context, our own case study begins in the late seventeenth century, when the British monarchy had been restored, the stirrings of Enlightenment philosophy were at hand, and the racialization of colonial policy had yet to harden to the degree seen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Carolina as a Proto-Enlightenment Imaginary English intellectuals at the close of the seventeenth century displayed considerable concern with the nature of an ordered society. While this anxiety may have had pan-European philosophical ties to an emergent focus on discipline associated with modernity (Bauman and Briggs 2003; Foucault 1977; Pels 1997; Trouillot 2002), it was made very real by events at home. The 1600s saw England in both political and religious turmoil, manifested in a protracted Civil War, the beheading of Charles I, the ascension of Oliver Cromwell as Lord (p.215) Protector, and continued attempts by the Catholic Church to regain a foothold. The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 was an important turning point, not only for imposing order in the mother country, but also for reinvigorating colonial enterprises abroad. The newly crowned Charles II was able to repay his debt to eight of his powerful supporters by making them Lords Proprietors of the Carolina Colony, a massive tract originally defined to the north by the current North Carolina and Virginia border, and to the south by a line south of the modern Georgia and Florida border.

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Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina Although some forays had been made to this region by the English prior to the official founding of Charles Towne (Charleston hereafter) in 1670, these were relatively small-scale and in some ways were part of the rush to claim land that characterized colonial rivalries throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Americas. The Lords Proprietors initiated a more substantial effort consisting of three ships with the necessary people and supplies to found Charleston. Moreover, as a prelude to the ships’ departure from England, a charter had been drawn for Carolina that envisioned a new kind of colony, one that would be a laboratory for the implementation of the progressive ideas emerging with the philosophical currents that would become known as the Enlightenment. This formal charter, known as the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, is believed to have been a collaboration between one of the Lords Proprietors, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, and John Locke, who for a time served as a secretary to Ashley-Cooper (Edgar 1998:42). This document envisioned a disciplined society overseen by a titled, landed gentry, who in turn came under the purview of the Lords Proprietors. Although this model clearly reflected the English class-based political system, the Constitutions also outlined several liberal policies for the era, such as modest property requirements for (male) voting rights, elections by secret ballot, and a guarantee of religious freedom (Edgar 1998: 43–6). The original inhabitants of the territory received scant mention in this document, largely in the context of which colonial institutions had the right to engage in formal relations or treaties with ‘neighbour Indians’. The use of the nominally benign adjective ‘neighbour’ forebodingly assigned Native Americans as outsiders and semantically consigned them to the other side of a dividing line or frontier. Despite a popular conception of colonial projects as well-oiled juggernauts bearing down on Indigenous people, Carolina’s history was a fractious one, beset by conflict and rivalry among colonial factions within the colony as well as between Carolina and the Crown. The Constitutions was never formally ratified by voters in the colony (a requirement for its full implementation), and there was an ongoing struggle between Proprietors and colonials over the enactment of various tenets of this document. In addition, the Proprietors’ penchant for selecting incompetent or corrupt governors led to a turnover of governments that rivalled that of post-World War II Italy. So the utopia (p.216) envisioned in the drawing rooms of London remained part of the colonial imaginary.

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Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina Yet, there was one thread of John Locke’s philosophical musings conveyed to the colonies, and that was his articulation of the notion of res nullius, which justified dispossessing peoples of lands that were not being used to their full productive potential (Gosden 2004).1 Although it is doubtful that the average immigrant in Carolina was conversant in the writings of English intellectuals, the rapid dispersal of farmers and traders into Indigenous territories de facto pushed Native Americans further and further away from the coast, certainly with encouragement from the government in Charleston. As a result of these population movements and dislocations, a general frontier zone had become established about 100–150 km beyond Charleston by the late 1600s. The southwesterly portion of the Carolina frontier—the area of our research interest—consisted of a number of Native American settlements along the Savannah River, including many groups who had moved there of their own volition from much further west in order to take advantage of trade with Charleston (Figure 9.1). The Savannah River is thought to have been abandoned by sedentary Mississippian groups sometime in the mid fifteenth century, around seventy to eighty years before the first Spanish expeditions traversed this region (Anderson 1994). So the influx of Native Americans in the 1600s represented a resettlement of a region that was relatively vacant. The Westo (believed to be the Erie) migrated from the eastern Great Lakes region and in 1659, one year before Charleston was established, settled in the region of what is today Augusta (Bowne 2005). Their arrival appears to have been related to the pursuit of new sources of indigenous slaves that they provided for English plantations in Virginia. The Native American slave trade proved increasingly lucrative with the founding of Charleston, which came to rely on human exports to the Caribbean as a cornerstone of the early colonial economy (Gallay 2002). The settling of Charleston in 1670 prompted a veritable flood of migration into the Savannah Valley (DePratter 2003) (Figure 9.1). Shawnee from the middle Ohio River arrived in the 1670s. After locating to the area around present-day Augusta, they collaborated with the English in expelling the Westo from the (p.217)

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Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina region in 1682. They replaced the Westo as key providers of slaves and played an increasingly prominent role in the trade of deerskins to Charleston. The Yamasee, instrumental in fomenting the eponymous war in 1715, moved up from the coastal Georgia region to the lower Savannah River valley in 1683 and then on to the area surrounding Port Royal Sound near Beaufort Fig. 9.1. Location of Fort Moore and afterwards. Other important arrivals in the nearby Native American towns in the late 1600s and early Savannah drainage. 1700s included the Yuchi from eastern Tennessee, the Apalachicola from the Chattahoochee River Valley in western Georgia and eastern Alabama, and a sizable number of Apalachee forcibly brought to the Savannah Valley by former Carolina governor, James Moore, after he razed the Spanish missions among this group in panhandle Florida in 1703 and 1704.

These various groups lived along the length of the Savannah River in ethnically distinct villages and localities, although there was undoubtedly frequent movement between these locales. While the procurement of slaves was important to some of these communities, the trade in deer hides assumed an increasing prominence in the economy. Abuses by traders and the diminishing supply of Native slaves soon led to rifts between the Native Americans and colonists, and helped to instigate the Yamasee War in 1715. The conflict involved all of the (p. 218) groups in the Savannah Valley and, initially, Cherokee and Catawba allies to the west and north (Haggard 2006; Oatis 2004; Ramsey 2008). The Native Americans were eventually defeated, but the resulting out-migrations again left the Savannah River Valley uninhabited. Nevertheless, the colonials were anxious to maintain Native American allies in the region and the Yuchi soon returned. They were followed by Chickasaw migrations from Mississippi, beginning in 1723. Modest colonial forts, including Fort Moore, were erected along the Savannah River during and after the Yamasee War protecting the

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Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina southwesterly boundary of Carolina. However, these forts ultimately were more important for centralizing trade by drawing Native Americans to a central locus, rather than serving as defensive works that barricaded them from the colony.

The Frailty of the Fort Moore Moral Landscape The decades between the founding of Charleston and the outbreak of regional conflict in 1715 were marked by a familiar dialectic of colonial powers attempting to draw Indigenous peoples politically and economically closer while pushing them away culturally. Carolina leaders eagerly sought close relations with Native Americans because of their economic importance in providing the export commodities, human and otherwise, that were a critical mainstay in the fledgling colonial economy. Moreover, friendly Native American towns provided a convenient buffer to colonial encroachments from the south by Spanish and French rivals. On the flip side, officials in Charleston and in London fretted over the propensity of colonial men living on the margins to take on Native American wives, adopt local practices, and potentially ‘go Native’. Stoler’s work in Southeast Asia (e.g. Stoler 2002) has provided perhaps the most full-bodied anthropological exegesis of the colonial anxieties over policing boundaries of sexuality, race, and nation-state. While her focus has been largely on later colonial enterprises, the concern with the loss of European identity in the borderlands became an increasingly inscribed leitmotif throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in colonies worldwide. Even the French philosopher Diderot, considered a highly progressive figure in the mid 1700s, was moved to express his anxieties about cultural contamination of the unvigilant far from the metropole: ‘The greater the distance from the capital, the further the mask of the traveller’s identity slips from his face. On the frontier it falls away altogether’ (cited in Pagden 1993:160). Diderot’s overlapping German contemporary, Johan Fichte, expressed the growing European sentiment in the 1700s that nationalism and identity had closely entwined moral and physical boundaries. For a nation to establish itself, ‘the “external frontiers of the state” have to become the “internal frontiers” of the citizen’ (Fichte, cited in Balibar 1991; see also Stoler 2002). These separation anxieties were (p.219) highlighted in the Fort Moore landscape, where colonial practices could both support and subvert colonial philosophies, depending upon circumstances. Colonial Ambivalence over Native American Proximity

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Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina The anxiety over the dual face of European identity—powerful, yet particularly vulnerable on the frontier—served as a backdrop to the construction of Fort Moore. After the outbreak of the Yamasee War, Fort Moore, along with a handful of other fortifications, were built in a large arc some 150–200 km out from Charleston, in what was viewed as the effective frontier of the Carolina colony. Trade with Native Americans was so critical to the well-being of Carolina that even in the midst of the Yamasee War Charleston was determined to pull trustworthy Native Americans back to the Savannah drainage and into the colony’s orbit. Fort Moore in this context was much more than a military installation. It was purposefully built to be a ‘factor’ or trade entrepôt in a new, centralized economic system whereby the colonial government would remove the Native American trade from independent traders. In Charleston, these autonomous ‘Indian traders’ were widely blamed for precipitating the Yamasee War through a widespread pattern of physically abusing Native Americans and engendering huge debt obligations among them. By one estimate, in 1715 Native Americans owed Carolina colonials the modern equivalent of $9.2 million (Edgar 1998:99–100). Equally important, the factor system would allow Charleston to directly siphon revenue from the fur trade. As a result, the factors/forts were viewed as a way to provide relatively cheap trade goods to Native Americans to assuage their anxieties and hasten their return, while at the same time providing Charleston the opportunity to monopolize an extremely lucrative trade which heretofore had proven extremely difficult to regulate—and tax. At the time of the Yamasee War, as the trade in slaves was waning, the fur and hide trade was burgeoning and still very much on the upswing. Between 1699 and 1705 an average of 45,000 deerskins was exported annually out of Charleston, increasing to an average of 58,000 between 1706 and 1715 (Clowse 1971:166). Although deerskins were particularly prized, it should be emphasized that a broad spectrum of animals was also sought for pelts throughout the Southeast, including bear, fox, and beaver (Stine 1990). Thus, there were fortunes to be made in the colony based on increasing market demand in Europe for furs and hides throughout the eighteenth century. In return, Native Americans received a wide array of goods including cloth and clothing, mirrors, blankets, scissors, metal tools, brass kettles, guns and ammunition, pipes and tobacco, salt, and rum. Fort Moore was a fairly modest physical entity according to the few extant descriptions (Ivers 1970). The initial complex was described as a square, (p.220) wooden plank construction about 150 feet to a side, and manned by no more than fifty individuals even in the best of times. Inside the walls was the typical array of barracks and outbuildings, and Page 9 of 25

Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina a storehouse for trade goods. The fort was placed on a 65m-high bluff overlooking the east side of the Savannah River, which provided a commanding view of the waterway and the surrounding countryside. In addition to the strategic viewshed provided by this location, it sat alongside one of the major trails and trading arteries westward into the heart of Creek country. Fort Moore was built adjacent to a settlement known as Savano (and various other spellings) Town, a trading entrepôt established at least as early as the 1680s (Maness 1986:45–6). Although detailed descriptions of the town are scarce, both English traders and Native Americans are reported at this locale. Current evidence suggests that tribal groups from around the region travelled here to exchange goods and apparently settled for varying intervals of time. However, it is uncertain whether any of these peoples took up permanent residence around the fort or Savano Town en masse. Colonial accounts reflect the ambivalence and contradictions embodied in the fort’s explicit charge to be a magnet for attracting Native Americans and their deer hides, while keeping the Natives at arm’s length. Only a year after the start of the Yamasee War, and well before its conclusion, the list of orders to the fort command emphasized that, ‘you are to use your Endeavours in all your Discourses with the Indians, to induce them to come and trade at the Garrison you are appointed Factor for, informing them that you sell at cheaper Rates, then the Factor at the Charikees doth’ (McDowell 1955, 9 August 1716). These kinds of instructions were paired with admonitions to keep the Native Americans distant. Two decades later, for instance, after a group of Chickasaw had already settled in the Valley, the Chickasaws in their Mississippi homeland were formally invited to send another contingent to settle near Fort Moore, with the proviso that they live no closer than thirty miles away (Easterbury 1951, 25 February 1738). Behind the various entreaties and tactics to encourage Native Americans to trade their wares at Fort Moore, Charleston officials were always explicit with commanders about the importance of the fort walls for segregating colonial and Native American peoples and activities. In 1716, the fort factor was sternly warned, ‘in your dealings with the Indians, you are not to suffer one of them (even the Charikees themselves) to come into our main Store [the fort’s trade good storehouse], keeping the Doors thereof shut at such Times of Trading, otherwise, the greatest Precautions will be insufficient to secure you from their treachery’ (McDowell 1955, 9 August 1716). A reminder the following year seems to reflect the anxiety that earlier orders were being ignored or elided: ‘We repeat our former desire, by direction of

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Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina the governor, council and assembly, that on no account whatsoever you will admit any Indian, of any nation or quality soever, into the fort’ (McDowell 1955, 9 November 1717:224–5). (p.221) Of course, direct trade between two parties implies at least some intermittent contact that cannot be avoided, yet even this eventuality had been considered in the planning of the fort. In addition to a central storehouse for trade goods, there was also a separate trade house in the outerworks of the fort for the ‘conveniency of trading’ (McDowell 1955, 9 August 1716). This building served as a kind of cultural airlock, where Native Americans were to make their exchanges, but to enter no further into the fort. Whereas trade prior to the Yamasee War relied on a sprawling network of independent English traders who moved, lived, and even married among the local groups, a fort provided a discrete and more easily manageable locus for structuring the movement of people and goods— with the presumed added advantage of increasing the degree of scrutiny over fraternization between Europeans and Native Americans. Certainly, the memory of the recent conflict was a consideration in the prohibitions toward Native Americans entering the fort or moving too closely to it. But some of the regular visitors, such as the Chickasaw, were long-standing English allies—and the colonial accounts indicate that they steadfastly ignored the thirty-mile rule and settled a short distance north of Fort Moore. Likewise, the surrounding community of Savano Town was re-populated with a mix of Native Americans and colonials after the Yamasee War, particularly as the monopoly on trade was relaxed in 1718 and independent traders were allowed to apply for licenses. The intimacy of relations on the Savannah frontier often dismayed leaders in Charleston, who were only a little over 160 km from Fort Moore but culturally a world apart from their own agents, as reflected in this rebuke: ‘on examining the accounts of Capt. Pepper, Commander of Fort Moore, your committee find many extravagant and unnecessary charges . . . by the frequent Charges in the accounts for Entertainment of Indians, it looks as if he kept a House of Entertainment for all Indians that would come there at the Public Expense’ (Easterbury 1955, 19 March 1745). The fact that this was written in the 1740s emphasizes that even after Carolina had experienced several decades of increasing growth and development, the fringes of the colony continued to be a source of moral, political, and economic consternation in the capital. The Architecture and Practice of Segregation at Fort Moore

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Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina The archaeological record at Fort Moore emphasizes that the geographies of management and separation envisioned in European metropoles and supervised from colonial satellites such as Charleston were consistently undermined on the frontier. Although a handful of smaller-scale avocational and professional excavations were carried out in the known locality of Fort Moore in the 1960s, the work credited with actually identifying and excavating a significant portion of the fort was carried out by Stanley South and Richard Polhemus in (p.222) 1971 (Polhemus 1971; see also Groover et al. 2003; Sapp 2009). This work was undertaken in advance of a highway project, and involved substantial stripping that yielded the outline of the eastern half of the fort, including the entryway (Figure 9.2). Although a final summary report was never produced, the initial analyses were completed and this has allowed us to return to the collections and records to update and more fully synthesize the various lines of research. Investigations by South and Polhemus indicated that the archaeological record dovetailed relatively closely to existing descriptions of the body of the fort. Only the eastern wall was exposed in its entirety, but its length of roughly 55 m (165 feet) generally corresponds with the contemporary estimate that described fort walls as about 150 feet long. Entryway to the fort was presumably in the middle of this wall, where excavations revealed the outlines of a structure

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Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina (p.223) jutting Fig. 9.2. Eastern portion of Fort Moore outwards. This is revealed by 1971 excavations. believed to be the liminal trade house where Native Americans traded their wares, and beyond which point their admittance was forbidden. The trade storehouse lay directly behind (west) of the trade house, and, as discussed further below, yielded a layer of artifacts on its floor that appears to represent de facto refuse (sensu Schiffer 1987:89). There was also evidence for several other interior structures. Although none of these have been defined with respect to their exact function, they presumably represent the array of barracks, stables, storage facilities, and other buildings typical of frontier forts. In addition, there were a number of pit features inside the walls.

Archaeological evidence from this excavation has revealed that Native Americans and their lifeways were deeply insinuated into the everyday life of the fort, contra the edicts emanating from Charleston. In effect, we can see Native Americans engaging in an ‘appropriation of appropriation’ (see Beardsell 2000:174 ff), where a colonial outpost became subsumed into the currents of Indigenous lifeways. Three lines of evidence are particularly telling in this regard. First, although it is not possible to determine the contemporaneity of all features, there was a widespread occurrence of small pits filled with charred corncobs within and around the fortification itself (see Figure 9.2). This feature type, popularly referred to as a smudge pit, is believed to have served multiple functions among Native Americans, including the creation of a dense smoke useful for conferring a highly burnishable soot on to ceramics. However, smudge pits were also important for smoking and preserving hides (Binford 1967; Ferris 2009:50–1), and the upsurge in the prevalence of this feature type in the colonial era Southeast is widely attributed to deer hide processing (Lapham 2005). Of course, these various activities are not mutually exclusive and, in any event, the smudge pits speak to an interior Native American presence in the fort no matter what their origin, since they were not typically made and used by Europeans. Furthermore, the various activities associated with smudge pits are, at least as an empirical generalization, gender-based. Throughout the Southeast women are most commonly associated with the manufacture of ceramics. Further, Native women typically performed most of the work involved in hide processing, a laborious task that led to some conflict between the sexes (Braund 1993:68; Hatley 1989:235–6). One can only speculate as to the reasons why the final stages of processing might occur at Fort Moore. It was not unusual, however, for hides to be traded in an unfinished state, although these fetched considerably Page 13 of 25

Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina lower prices on the market (Braund 1993:68; Lapham 2004:175–6). It is possible that the commander or other persons stationed at Fort Moore had Indigenous women complete the preparation of hides that arrived in a semi-finished state. This would lower the weight for transport purposes and increase the value of the hides over what was paid to Native American traders, potentially representing a source of extra revenue to those at the fort. The presence in (p.224) the fort of activities typically attributed to Native women also emphasizes the likely intertwining of, in Stoler’s (2002) terminology, ‘carnal knowledge and imperial power’ along the Carolina frontier. It is worth noting that Native American groups could be as disapproving of these relations as could policymakers in London. For instance, Charlesworth Glover, one of the commanders of Fort Moore, formally petitioned the colonial government to intervene on his behalf with the Chickasaw, who had taken from him ‘a Tuscarora Indian Wench, which he hath had upwards of Eight years’ (Salley 1945, 24 March 1724). A second signature of the porosity of the fort’s boundaries is the occurrence of two Native American burials (as interpreted by the inclusion of grave goods) within the portion of the fort excavated in 1971 (see Figure 9.2). The child burial appears to have been a later intrusion into the adult one. Each was interred with goods of both European and Native manufacture. A Native American bowl and a pewter bowl were included with the adult, while an intriguingly wide variety of objects was found with the child, including iron padlocks, a mirror fragment, firearm components, and a metal cup that held a quantity of sulphur. Although we do not know the sex of the adult (the bone of both individuals was too poorly preserved for removal), the presence of a child burial inside the fort walls is further suggestive of women and family units being part of the interior life of Fort Moore. Intriguing though the range of burial objects may be, the paucity of systematic mortuary studies in the Colonial Southeast makes it difficult to even speculate about the meaning of the hybrid practices manifested in the interments. A third perspective on the degree of cultural interchange in and about the fort can be found within the storeroom itself. This was the building behind the trade house within the fort where all of the trade goods were held. The location immediately behind the trade room made for the expedient transfer of goods between the two locations. The 1971 excavations excavated the 36 × 16 foot (c. 11 × 5m) cellar in its entirety (Figure 9.3), revealing a number of soil strata filled with eighteenth-century artifacts. Importantly, South and Polhemus also Page 14 of 25

Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina found the cellar floor to be abundantly scattered with refuse, much of which appears to have been abandoned in place. Tellingly, there were distinct spatial clusters of artifacts, especially in the southeast corner of the cellar. This area consisted of a square, raised earthen platform surrounded by post holes, suggesting that it may have been a separate room within the basement. Within this corner there were discrete concentrations of gunflints, lead shot, mirrors, padlocks, kaolin pipes, spoons, and scissors (Sapp 2009). Although it might seem odd to fill in the cellar and, in effect, lose these trade materials, there are records of Fort Moore undergoing a major repair in 1743 (Easterby 1954, 26 March 1743), followed by a largescale renovation in 1746. The latter included the construction of brick buildings to replace the wooden ones (Easterby 1962, 11 April 1747). Given these accounts, it is possible that the (p.225) original storehouse was razed to be replaced by a newer one, although we have no firm documentary evidence for this occurring. However, the pipe stems recovered from the cellar floor (n = 253) have yielded a mean date in the 1740s based on stem bore diameters. This leads us to believe that an assemblage of in situ, stored trade goods was buried as part of the renovations and construction of new buildings that occurred in this decade.

Two other objects in Fig. 9.3. Storehouse basement floor at the southeast corner of Fort Moore. the storehouse attest to the transactions that served to dissolve the divide between colonial and Indigenous worlds on the frontier. One of these was a finely crafted chunkey stone (Figure 9.4a), located in the posited room in the southeast corner of the cellar. Southeastern accounts describe chunkey as an extremely popular

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Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina Native American game, where a stone disk was rolled along the ground while males (p.226) vied to land poles nearest its estimated resting place (Hudson 1976:421–5). We can only guess at the social ramifications underlying the placement of this gaming piece in the storehouse basement, and why it would be in the hands of the colonials. Chunkey was not an activity in which Europeans were known to engage, but their familiarity with the importance of this pastime may have led them to recognize the exchange value of a wellcrafted, labour-intensive gaming piece.

A colonoware2 bowl (Figure 9.4b) was also recovered near the chunkey stone, notable in that Indigenous Fig. 9.4. Native American artifacts from pottery would be found southeast corner of basement: (a) in the basement chunkey stone; and (b) portion of alongside the colonoware bowl. remnants of European ceramics. In addition, numerous Indigenous pottery sherds (n = 100) were found throughout the floor-fill deposits. Stanley South (1977:172–5) hypothesized that an inverse pattern of relatively high frequencies of colonowares and low frequencies of European wares at other forts in South Carolina relates to poorly remunerated enlisted men relying on Indigenous containers. A number of the recovered cellar-floor sherds at Fort Moore were shelltempered, cord-marked specimens. These are known to (p.227) be intrusive to the Savannah drainage in the colonial era and have further confirmed in our minds that Native American materials in this stratigraphic lens do not stem from Colonials disturbing earlier, preColumbian deposits when they originally excavated the cellar floor. Page 16 of 25

Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina Moreover, there was a widespread reliance on Native American ceramic vessels to varying degrees throughout English, Spanish, and French colonies in the Southeast (e.g. Riggs 2010; Vernon and Cordell 1993; Waselkov 1992) so the Fort Moore evidence is not altogether surprising. The pattern of economically marginal Colonials relying on Indigenous pottery, in conjunction with the presence of the chunkey stone, reinforces the importance of the European acquisition of Native American goods in the formation of colonial subjectivities. This recognition also helps us to balance the traditional emphasis on the Native American consumption of colonial goods. The importance of ceramics and other, borrowed ‘functional’ classes of materials to Native Americans and European livelihoods alike also is an important reminder —especially in a time of postcolonial theoretical emphases—that one can never forget the importance of labour and class relations in the formation of colonial hybrid practices (Albers 2002; Patterson 2008).

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Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina Conclusion Over two hundred years following Columbus’s voyages and the first encounters between Native Americans and Europeans, many Europeans continued to fear the edge of the earth. By the early 1700s this was represented by a cultural precipice, where the frontier was an unstable rim of empire that threatened European identity with a fall from grace. In this context, Fort Moore was both a physical and allegorical expression of colonial desire to safeguard the physical, moral, and spiritual boundaries of European subjects. As the documentary and archaeological records demonstrate, attempts to fence in Colonials faltered from the very beginning. Native Americans physically and culturally breached the successive perimeter lines conceived in Charleston as a buffer around Fort Moore—the landscape surrounding Fort Moore, the stockade wall of the fort itself, and the interior store room which represented the economic heart of the outpost. If we adopt Kurt Jordan’s (this volume) notion of switching vantage points, however, Fort Moore becomes more than just a narrative of unsuccessful European moral struggle or ineffective oppression. From the perspective of Native Americans, the outpost’s relative isolation and reservoir of trade goods made it one of many resources on their traditional landscape. Even with the adoption of maize agriculture around c.AD 1000 in the Southeast, Indigenous groups continued to engage in seasonal forays to collect wild plants and animals as well (p. 228) as to take advantage of anchored resources like chert quarries and salt springs. With the arrival of the English, Fort Moore became appropriated as another way-station within a framework of alternating village sedentism and fall/winter deer hunts as Native Americans travelled there to exchange their deer hides. Harrison (this volume) and Silliman (this volume), among others, emphasize the taxonomic dangers of construing objects of European origin as non-Indigenous when in fact many of those items were likely viewed as integral elements of everyday life by Native Americans. The same argument could be made for entire colonial outposts, as they were incorporated into Native American patterns of mobility that had been developing for over ten millennia—variations of the tethered resources that Binford (1980) used in his conception of logistical hunting and gathering. Fort Moore thus expressed the complicated duality of new colonial ambitions and longstanding Native American practices, manifested in shared histories (sensu Harrison 2004a, 2004b) of objects worlds and physical spaces that undermined strict ontologies of European/Indigene on the frontier.

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Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina Obviously underrepresented in our discussion is the varying agency of the different Native American groups interacting at Fort Moore, as well as the diversity of backgrounds among those who staffed the outpost. The latter included lower-class Englishmen, but also prisoners from the Jacobite rebellion and even a militia composed of free Africans. All of these groups converged on the frontier and created a partnership in subversion, whereby the ideals of English essentialism and economic monopoly gave way to the opportunities and realities of frontier life. As our analysis continues in this region, we hope to incorporate those experiences into a more balanced view of colonial expansionism. References Bibliography references: Albers, Patricia 2002 Historical Materialism in American Indian History. In Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies, edited by N. Shoemaker, pp. 107–36. Routledge, New York. Anderson, David G. 1994 The Savannah River Chiefdoms: Political Change in the Late Prehistoric Southeast. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Armitage, David 2000 The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Balibar, Etienne 1991 The Nation Form: History and Ideology. In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, edited by E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein, pp. 86–106. Verso, London. Bauman, Richard and Charles L. Briggs 2003 Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Beardsell, Peter 2000 Europe and Latin America: Returning the Gaze. Manchester University Press, Manchester. (p.229) Bickham, Troy 2005 Savages within the Empire: Representations of American Indians in Eighteenth-century Britain. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Binford, Lewis R. 1967 Smudge Pits and Hide Smoking: The Use of Analogy in Archaeological Reasoning. American Antiquity 32:1–12. Binford, Lewis R. 1980 Willow Smoke and Dogs’ Tails: Hunter-gatherer Settlement Systems and Archaeological Site Formation. American Antiquity 45:4–20. Page 19 of 25

Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina Bowne, Eric E. 2005 The Westo Indians: Slave Traders of the Early Colonial Southeast. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Braund, Kathry E. Holland 1993 Deerskins & Duffels: Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685–1815. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Clowse, Converse D. 1971 Economic Beginnings in Colonial South Carolina, 1670–1730. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia. Comaroff, John and Jean Comaroff 1992 Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado. Corrigan, Philip and Derek Sayer 1985 The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. DePratter, Chester B. 2003 The Savannah River Valley AD 1540 to 1715. In The Savannah River Valley to 1865, edited by Ashley Callahan, pp. 15–27. Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens. Dirks, Nicholas 1994 Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. Easterby, J. H. (ed.) 1951 The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly: November 10, 1736–June 7, 1739. The Historical Commission of South Carolina, Clumbia, SC. Easterby, J. H. (ed.) 1954 The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly: September 14, 1742–January 27, 1744. The Historical Commission of South Carolina, SC. Easterby, J. H. (ed.) 1955 The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly: February 20, 1744–May 25, 1745. The Historical Commission of South Carolina, Columbia, SC. Easterby, J. H. 1962 The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly: March 28, 1749–March 19, 1750. The Historical Commission of South Carolina, Columbia, SC. Edgar, Walter 1998 South Carolina: A History. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia. Fabian, Johannes 1983 Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. Columbia University Press, New York.

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Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina Ferris, Neal 2009 The Archaeology of Native-lived Colonialism: Challenging History in the Great Lakes. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Foucault, Michel 1977 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan. Random House, New York. Gallay, Alan 2002 The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. Gosden, Chris 2004 Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Groover, Mark D., Geoff Hughes, and Chris Thornock 2003 Exploring Fort Moore: Results of Site Survey and Testing, 2001–2002. Savannah River Archaeological Research Program, South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Columbia. Haggard, Dixie Ray 2006 The Native Spiritual Economy and the Yamasee War. History Compass 4(6):1117–32. (p.230) Harrison, Rodney 2004a Contact Archaeology and the Landscapes of Pastoralism in the North-west of Australia. In The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies, edited by Tim Murray, pp. 109–143. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Harrison, Rodney 2004b Shared Histories and the Archaeology of the Pastoral Industry in Australia. In After Captain Cook: The Archaeology of the Recent Indigenous Past in Australia, edited by Rodney Harrison and Christine Williamson, pp. 37–58. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California. Hatley, M. Thomas 1989 The Three Lives of Keowee: Loss and Recovery in Eighteenth-century Cherokee Villages. In Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, edited by Peter Wood, Gregory Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley, pp. 223–48. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Hudson, Charles 1976 The Southeastern Indians. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. Ivers, Larry E. 1970 Colonial Forts of South Carolina, 1670–1775. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia. Jordan, Kurt A. 2008 The Seneca Restoration, 1715–1754: An Iroquois Local Political Economy. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

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Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina Lapham, Heather A. 2004 ‘Their Complement of Deer–Skins and Furs’: Changing Patterns of White-tailed Deer Exploitation in the Seventeenthcentury Southern Chesapeake and Virginia Hinterlands. In Indian and European Contact in Context: The Mid-Atlantic Region, edited by Dennis B. Blanton and Julia A. King, pp. 172–92. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Lapham, Heather A. 2005 Hunting for Hides: Deerskins, Status, and Cultural Change in the Protohistoric Appalachians. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Maness, Harold S. 1986 Forgotten Outpost: Fort Moore & Savannah Town, 1685–1765. BPB Publications, Pickens, South Carolina. McDowell, William L. (ed.) 1955 Journals of the Commissioners of the Indian Trade, i: September 20, 1710–August 29, 1718. Department of Archives and History, Columbia, SC. Mintz, Sidney W. 1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Penguin, New York. Oatis, Steven J. 2004 A Colonial Complex: South Carolina’s Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Pagden, Anthony 1993 European Encounters with the New World. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. Patterson, Thomas 2008 A Brief History of Postcolonial Theory and Implications for Archaeology. In Archaeology and the Post-Colonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi, pp. 21–34. AltaMira Press, New York. Pels, Peter 1997 The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History, and the Emergence of Western Governmentality. Annual Review of Anthropology 26:163–83. Polhemus, Richard 1971 Excavation at Fort Moore: Savano Town (38AK4&5). SCIAA Notebook 3(6):132–3. Ramsey, William L. 2008 The Yamasee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Riggs, Brett H. 2010 Temporal Trends in Native Ceramic Traditions of the Lower Catawba River Valley. Southeastern Archaeology 29:31–43. (p.231)

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Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina Rowlands, Michael 1998 The Archaeology of Colonialism. In Social Transformations in Archaeology: Global and Local Perspectives, edited by Kristian Kristiansen and Michael Rowlands, pp. 327–33. Routledge, London. Salley, A. S. (ed.) 1945 The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly: February 23, 1724–June 1, 1725. The Historical Commission of South Carolina, Columbia, SC. Sapp, Stephanie 2009 Fort Moore/Aiken County, SC (38AK4/5): Evidence of Creolization Along the South Carolina Frontier. Masters thesis, University of South Carolina, Columbia. Scheiber Laura L. and Mark D. Mitchell (eds) 2010 Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400–1900. Amerind Studies in Archaeology. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Schiffer, Michael B. 1987 Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Silliman, Stephen W. 2006 Struggling with Labor, Working with Identities. In Historical Archaeology, edited by Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman, pp. 147–66. Blackwell, Oxford. South, Stanley 1977 Method and Theory in Historical Archeology. Academic Press, New York. Stine, Linda Francis 1990 Mercantilism and Piedmont Peltry: Colonial Perceptions of the Southern Fur Trade, circa 1640–1740. Volumes in Historical Archaeology No. 14, South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Columbia. Stoler, Ann Laura 1989 Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule. Comparative Studies in Society and History 31:134–61. Stoler, Ann Laura 2002 Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. University of California Press, Berkeley. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 2002 The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot. In Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies, edited by Bruce M. Knauft, pp. 220–37. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

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Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina Vernon, Richard and Ann S. Cordell 1993 A Distributional and Technological Study of Apalachee Colono-ware from San Luis de Talimali. In The Spanish Missions of La Florida. edited by Bonnie G. McEwan, pp. 418–41. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Voss, Barbara 2008 Gender, Race, and Labor in the Archaeology of the Colonial Americas. Current Anthropology 49:861–93. Waselkov, Gregory A. 1992 French Colonial Trade in the Upper Creek Country. In Calumet and Fleur-de-Lys: Archaeology of Indian and French Contact in the Midcontinent, edited by John A. Walthall and Thomas E. Emerson, pp. 35–53. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. White, Richard 1991 The Middle Ground Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wolf, Eric 1982 Europe and the People without History. University of California Press, Berkeley. Notes:

(1) It should be noted that Locke’s arguments with regard to Native Americans and res nullius display a nuance in the Fundamental Constitutions not always granted in standard treatments of his formulation, as reflected in the following excerpt (complete document is available at ): ‘since ye Natives of yt place who will be concerned in or Plantation are utterly strangers to Christianity whose Idollatry Ignorance or mistake give us noe right to expel or use ym ill’. Although we do not pursue this point here, Locke and his collaborators were making the argument that religious beliefs were not sufficient grounds for disenfranchisement, even for non-Christians, although the utilitarian agriculturalist argument did become a viable alternative for appropriating lands in French and Scottish Enlightenment philosophy (Armitage 2000). (2) Vessels with European shapes or attributes, made with indigenous pastes. The example depicted in Figure 9.4b has a footring on the base, a distinctive European trait added by Native Americans to various traditional container types.

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Intimacy and Distance

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Intimacy and Distance Life on the Australian Aboriginal Mission Jane Lydon

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0011

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the spatial and material history of the former Ebenezer Mission, near Dimboola, in northwestern Victoria, Australia. More specifically, it highlights the disjunction between Moravian missionaries' attempts to create an idealised didactic landscape that would inculcate order among the residents, and the actual complexity of cultural exchange between Aboriginal people and European colonisers. The chapter first considers the significance of former missions and reserves to the heritage and identity of Aboriginal people before turning to a discussion of the Aboriginal experience of colonialism as well as the role of missions as sites of encounter. It then explores the archaeology of ‘contact’ between white Australian settlers and Aboriginal people, along with the centrality of reformed gender and class order in the missionaries' vision for the Aboriginal people of Victoria. Keywords:   gender, Ebenezer Mission, Victoria, Australia, Moravian missionaries, cultural exchange, Aboriginal people, European colonisers, colonialism, archaeology

Introduction

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Intimacy and Distance Shortly after their invasion of Australia in 1788, British colonists began to consider management of the Indigenous inhabitants through their segregation on reserves of land. In establishing a system of Aboriginal reserves in the southeastern colony of Victoria around 1860, government officials and missionaries were guided by a culturally specific imagined geography that demanded the creation of idealized landscapes intended to teach through example and performance. Central to their conception of these settlements, and their vision for the Aboriginal people of Victoria, was a reformed gender and class order that would appropriately locate the Indigenous population within modern settler society. However, their utopian vision clashed fundamentally with Indigenous perspectives. The spatial and material history of the former Ebenezer Mission, near Dimboola, in northwestern Victoria, Australia, reveals the disjunction between Moravian missionaries’ attempts to create an idealized didactic landscape that would inculcate order among the residents, and the actual complexity of Aboriginal–European cultural exchange.

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Intimacy and Distance Indigenous Significance Former missions and reserves continue to occupy an important place in Aboriginal memory, as sites of recent memory, ancestral resting-places, historical landmarks, and the focus of social action in the present. During the 1960s, the important historical role of these places in maintaining familial and cultural ties began to be recognized by anthropologists, who argued that Koorie (p.233) (Victorian Aboriginal) communities shared ‘a strong attachment to the land, to the “home place” or region surrounding the Aboriginal reserves where their forebears lived, worked and lie buried’ (Barwick 1988:27). Many Aboriginal reserves and missions were established on traditional land, often including significant ceremonial sites or camping grounds. They were centres of Aboriginal life and community during the nineteenth century, serving as permanent bases for residents who nonetheless continued to travel extensively in maintaining familial ties or to pursue work. The substantial historiography that has now emerged argues for their ambivalent, dual, status: both as refuges that allowed survival for the dispossessed, yet at the price of paternalism and the loss of culture (e.g. Blake 2001; Brock 1993; Choo 2001). For many descendants, missions remain powerful symbols of home and country. Aboriginal attitudes towards the missions have ranged from nostalgia— even gratitude—to resentment. In 1980, elderly Aboriginal man Phillip Pepper wrote of the Moravians who established Ebenezer Mission, in northwestern Victoria, that ‘only for the missionaries there wouldn’t be so many Aborigines walking around today. They’re the ones that saved the day for us. Our people were finished before the mission came’ (Pepper and de Araugo 1980:15). Pepper represented the attitudes of many of his generation, choosing to become a Christian and to emphasize humour and the warmth of family over grief or anger. Today, however, many Aboriginal people lament the role these institutions played in actively disrupting their traditional culture, imposing restrictions, and especially in separating children from families (e.g. Koorie Heritage Trust 2008). Despite these sometimes conflicting views, today former missions and reserves are places of primary importance to the heritage and identity of Aboriginal people.

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Intimacy and Distance Archaeological Views Mainstream perceptions of these places prior to the 1960s were predominantly shaped by a humanitarian framework that emphasized redemption and the missionaries’ ‘success’ or ‘failure’ in transforming Indigenous people. During the 1960s, however, Australian historians began to break the ‘Great Australian Silence’ (Stanner 1979) regarding the Aboriginal experience of colonialism, and missions became recognized as important sites of encounter (e.g. Rowley 1972). This shift may be understood in the wider context of a global post-war movement towards decolonization, from the 1970s manifested within Australia in the form of Indigenous political critique, and a new political and intellectual concern with colonialism and its effects. While uneven in development and kind, the political and cultural ‘undoing of colonialism’—most notably that of the major European empires in the wake of World War II—has unfurled (p.234) around the globe. While aspects of these developments are common to settler nations throughout the world, colonialism’s historical and geographical heterogeneity has also generated diverse local disciplinary trajectories (e.g. Lydon and Rizvi 2010; McNiven and Russell 2005; Smith and Wobst 2005). But Australian archaeologists have been slow to acknowledge the research value of missions, largely because of the discipline’s traditional divide between the so-called ‘prehistoric’ archaeology of Indigenous peoples and the historical archaeology of European settlers, a schism linked to a bipartite heritage system (Byrne 1996; Harrison 2004). While it is true that a similar organization has been noted elsewhere, such as in the United States (e.g. Lightfoot 1995), where by contrast there has been a long tradition of mission archaeology, such research did not explicitly address the experience of the Native American inhabitants until the 1990s, focusing instead on the role of these places within settler histories. This configuration is itself founded upon the long-lived Western assumption that contact with Western cultural traditions brought with it the destruction of so-called ‘authentic’ Indigenous cultures. Aboriginal people leading a traditional way of life in northern Australia have long been perceived as primitive but ‘real’, and the preserve of anthropologists and ‘prehistorians’; those of the southeast, who sustained the earliest and most profound impacts of invasion, were considered to have lost culture and authenticity. These views shaped long-standing disciplinary paradigms that defined missions merely as places of Indigenous acculturation (Lydon and Ash 2010; Lydon 2009). In the following discussion, I consider how archaeological investigations of the mission landscape may challenge

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Intimacy and Distance these long-standing formulations, with implications for archaeology’s conceptual frameworks.

Missionary Views A substantial international literature has now addressed the role of gender organization in structuring life on missions in a wide range of periods and places (e.g. Jolly and Macintyre 1989; Levine 2004; Middleton 2010; Rutherdale 2002). Across Australia, missionaries sought to Christianize and ‘civilize’ the Indigenous residents through spatial and material practices, working to create idealized landscapes that were intended to teach through example, performance, and the creation of individual subjects. In Victoria, in southeastern Australia (Figure 10.1), a system of reserves was established around 1860, and during their first decade, these ‘civilizing experiments’ were framed by a narrative of successful transformation, evidenced by spatial order and European housing (Lydon 2005, 2009). Within the mission, the domestic sphere was a particular focus of scrutiny: for missionaries, the Aboriginal residents’ appropriation of domesticity, defined by material culture and everyday practices, was (p.235) an index of progress within a Western view that equated material goods and circumstances and outward appearances with moral and intellectual status.

I explore these issues through the example of Ebenezer Mission, established by Moravian missionaries Fig. 10.1. Location map. in 1859 on the Drawn by Kara Rasmanis, Monash traditional country of University. the Wotjobaluk people of northwestern Victoria. The Wotjobaluk spoke an eastern dialect of the Wergaia language, and comprised a cluster of around twenty adjacent clans, or named matrilineal descent groups that lived in clearly defined areas (Clark 1990:336–62; Hercus 1969). They knew this place as Banji-bunag or Banju-bunan, an important ceremonial ground approximately one square mile in extent, occupying a shallow grassy ridge encircled by the Wimmera River (Hercus 1969:280; Howitt 2001:54 [1904]).

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Intimacy and Distance Moravian Brothers Friedrich Spieseke and Friedrich Hagenauer named the place Ebenezer, ‘rock of the Lord’. Western criticism of Aboriginal social organization, and especially the place of women, was used as a means to justify intervention by missionaries. Colonists represented Aboriginal women as being under great subjection to men in the domains of sexuality, work in reproduction, labour, and the distribution of resources, ignoring evidence for women’s status within their own society (e.g. Langton 1998; Merlan 1988). On the reserves, the colonial administration attempted to reorganize Aboriginal gender arrangements through spatial and material practices. A primary objective of the reserve system was to prevent (p.236) sexual relations between white men and Aboriginal women, and to replace traditional customs, such as bestowal, with Christian marriage. Like all contemporary world religions, the Moravian worldview was fundamentally gendered, conceptualizing religious and secular authority in male terms, while women were largely confined to bearing and rearing children. The Moravian Church assigned particular importance to a conception of the family as both a theological as well as a secular model for social relationships. The entire congregation was seen as a family, with members assigned to ‘choirs’ according to age, sex, and marital status, making up the congregation ‘family’ (Henry 1859:41). The choir system enhanced the patriarchal structure of the Australian mission, with the effect of infantilizing the Indigenous people. While they were rarely mentioned in documentary sources, the missionaries’ wives supervised the domestic sphere, where the abstract distinction between spiritual and secular progress disappeared, and Indigenous women’s domestic management became proof of missionary success. While the missionaries encouraged the creation of nuclear families, a more communal understanding of the family as an organizing principle was the basis for incorporating young Aboriginal people into group forms of domesticity. A priority for the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines (BPA) was the ‘collection’ of ‘orphan and deserted children’ (Central Board 1861:11), their education, and the ‘moral protection’ of Aboriginal women. These initiatives required the construction of substantial limestone schoolhouse and dormitory buildings to define and contain them (Figure 10.2). Marriage was the basis of the community as well as a basic technique of missionizing, and missionary wives Christina Spieseke and Louise Hagenauer played an important part in

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Intimacy and Distance (p.237) teaching Aboriginal women through concrete example, modelling Christian family life through their own everyday performance as wives, mothers, and housekeepers (cf. Langmore 1989; Mitchell 2008). At Ebenezer, within the Mission-house Fig. 10.2. Schoolhouse, Ebenezer, after and their own small 1874. family huts, Aboriginal Private collection. women were taught Western methods of cooking, cleaning, sewing, and caring for children. Men worked in the garden and orchard, and at building, and shepherding the station’s sheep. When the girls left school, they began a ‘course of training by the missionaries’ wives in all manner of household work’ (BPA 1877:9), while the boys were taught carpentry, stonemasonry, and gardening by the missionaries. The Moravians shared contemporary ideas about civilization and savagery, and were doubly critical of Indigenous women, whom they considered to be merely an (inferior) appendage to the genuine ‘blacks’.

For European observers, the appearance of the reserves and their residents served as proof that these people had changed. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, idealizing views of the reserves sought to emphasize a shared humanity and the tractability of Aboriginal people, through demonstrating their success in adopting European culture, living as Christians, and cultivating the land. In particular, their perceived success in controlling Aboriginal women’s sexuality prompted a radical transformation in the value attached to this social domain: material and visual evidence of women’s respectable comportment as wives and mothers and their recreation of the domestic environment became an index of progress, offering proof of successful redemption. At Ebenezer, the Moravians’ emphasis upon ‘lovely built houses’ marked their importance as the space of the family. Aboriginal women were expected to keep their homes clean, to be good housewives, prepared for inspection at any time. For the missionaries, the homes created by Aboriginal people symbolized their obedience to the Christian values of religious devotion and hard work, as well as their commitment to the patriarchal family. The family expressed the apparently natural and non-violent affiliation between father and children within the Aboriginal community, as well as constructing this relationship between the Aborigines and their Page 7 of 26

Intimacy and Distance manager. However, feminist scholars have shown that domesticity is both a space and a relationship of power (McClintock 1995:45): from around this time, the evolutionist trope of the family of man became a widely used metaphor, contradictorily offering a single genesis narrative on a global scale, while at the same time becoming an institution void of history. Naturalizing hierarchy within unity, the family image came to be seen as an integral element of historical progress; for missionaries, Aboriginal people were part of this family by virtue of their conformance to civilized practices, but at the same time, as a race they were positioned as children. Managers’ representations therefore showed the Indigenous population successfully being re-made in the image of a European social order, marked by the appropriation of ‘natural’ gender roles, in an idealized spatial regime structured by a division between public and private, and ascription of the private sphere to women.

(p.238) Archaeological Evidence In counterpoint to these missionary views, archaeological remains recovered from Ebenezer’s mission-house, kitchen, and dormitory areas between 2003 and 2006 revealed something of the domestic lifestyle led by missionaries and Aboriginal people within the settlement over the second half of the nineteenth century (Lydon 2009; Lydon et al. 2004, 2007). The spatial arrangement of the settlement buildings and the physical remains of the Mission-house indicate its enhanced and pivotal role at Ebenezer. Evidence for the spatial and functional relationships of the mission-house, dormitory, and kitchen suggests that, despite the ideal of small family homes, life at Ebenezer retained a strongly communal flavour, facilitated by the Moravians’ emphasis on the extended congregational family. These arrangements replicated the Moravian choir system, instituting communal living arrangements in the central area for children, selected Aboriginal people, and the missionaries, with the nuclear households located further away, around the eastern and southern settlement edges. Overall, the archaeological evidence indicates the mission’s local, predominantly British, way of life—rather than a Moravian lifestyle. Evidence for diet, personal possessions, domestic goods, and recreation was broadly typical of contemporary colonial-period sites across Victoria. The faunal remains reflect standard contemporary dietary and economic choices, indicating that the settlement’s inhabitants relied predominantly upon introduced animals such as chicken and sheep. Evidence for use of native fauna such as kangaroo and possum was noticeably absent.

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Intimacy and Distance Glass vessels were mostly used for storing food and drink. Some of these items challenge the missionaries’ accounts of their own success in managing Aboriginal people. For example, alcohol bottles excavated from the river bank were unlikely to have been sanctioned by the Moravians, given their opposition to drink, and it is possible that alcohol was consumed by residents against the missionaries’ wishes. In 1881, for example, it was noted that Elderly Wergaia people had recently camped at the station, and there were two ‘cases of insanity’ brought on by ‘intemperance’ (BPA 1881:10). The glass bottles from the rubbish dump dated to the period of mission occupation were predominantly alcohol-related forms. ‘Chamberlain’s Cough Remedy’ bottles were also recovered, an American brand available from around 1881 to the twentieth century, offering a grim reminder of the prevalence among the mission’s Aboriginal residents of Western diseases such as tuberculosis (Figure 10.3). Toys, in the form of porcelain doll fragments, were also recovered, reflecting the ways that girls were introduced to domesticity through play (Baxter 2005; Wilkie 2000). Domestic and personal items and clothing-related artifacts included buttons, fasteners, and beads: massproduced, nondescript items that were used and re-used on clothing and reflect global networks of trade (Iacono 2008). Similarly, fragments of mass-produced Scottish clay smoking pipes (p.239)

Fig. 10.3. ‘Chamberlain’s Cough Remedy’ bottle. Monash University.

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Intimacy and Distance (Gojak and Stuart 1999) were distributed as rations, probably as an incentive to conform to the mission regime. The range of ceramics is relatively small, but comprises forms and decorations that are characteristic of Victorian sites for the period, reflecting standard European dining practices (Brooks 2005). Crockery was one of the new mass-produced consumer goods now accessible to ordinary people across the British Empire. Most of the assemblage is whiteware, the standard refined white-bodied earthenware that dominated production in Britain’s Staffordshire potteries from the early nineteenth century onwards. Several items seemingly made for the American market accentuate the mission’s incorporation into a global economy (Brooks 2005:57–60).

This evidence must be understood in the context of the mixed economy that prevailed on Victorian’s Aboriginal reserves, integrating rationing with work in the colonial labour market. The Board supplied basic supplies to the six stations as well as to Honorary Correspondents’ depots, and Aboriginal people supplemented these goods through their individual earnings. This arrangement falls somewhere in between the exclusive rationing relationship and the nineteenth-century consumer revolution that made a wide variety of shopping experiences available to city-dwellers (Crook 2000). Following invasion, Wergaia people quickly began to participate in the Western cash economy, while a range of occupations and tasks were available during the first decades of settlement that were precluded by the system of rationing instituted on the reserves. Prominent in the ration lists were foodstuffs, and items to assist with clothing and cleanliness, such as looking-glasses (e.g. CBACV 1862). As Tim Rowse (1998) has argued, rationing was a powerful social technology applied to assimilating Aboriginal people. In central Australia, the canteen was (p.240) a means of replacing Indigenous distribution and sharing practices. Archaeological evidence for the reorganization of Aboriginal camps around Killalpaninna Mission in South Australia also suggests that traditional economies were quickly altered by dependence on new resources (Birmingham 2000). In southeastern Australia, too, rationing has been blamed for preventing Aboriginal participation in the colonial economy, and creating dependence (Pope 1988). Despite their advocacy of rations as an inducement to a sedentary life, this tendency was also deplored by the Moravian missionaries, and control over rations became a means of inculcating thrift and discipline and an incentive to obedience. Nonetheless, many Ebenezer men worked in the nearby Bosisto’s eucalyptus oil refinery, which allowed them to buy their own rations, as well as ‘purchasing furniture (including sewing machines) [and] clothes’ (BPA 1884:14). It appears that residents had the means to

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Intimacy and Distance participate in the Western consumer revolution, even if not to the extent available to city-dwellers.

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Intimacy and Distance Deserted Huts But how did Aboriginal people regard these items? To an extent, the changed material circumstances of the Wergaia can be understood as an expression of new habits, tastes, and ideas. The archaeological evidence suggests that some chose to accept the missionaries’ new resources and to adopt domestic and other European practices. Australian archaeologists concerned with domesticity have focused on household ceramics, linking ornamental patterns, ware, and form to the expression of consumer taste and social status. Elaborately decorated teawares and tablewares are often seen to express feminine aspirations to the values of respectability, beauty, order, and domestic comfort. Decorative ceramics, despite their weight and fragility, were cherished by women seeking to construct a quiet and orderly home amidst the turmoil of the Victorian goldfields (Lawrence 2000). In urban contexts such as Sydney’s Rocks, loosely matched table settings asserted the respectability of an 1860s boarding-house run by a vulnerable single woman (Lydon 1995). At Te Puna mission in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, Angela Middleton (2007, 2008) argued that Hannah King, wife of a missionary of the Church Missionary Society, reproduced the social values of England during the early nineteenth century. The idyllic English pastoral landscapes that decorated King’s household service evoked a ‘calm and prosperous rural Britain’ (Brooks 1999) that was indeed unattainably distant from these consumers. The excavated fragments match intact vessels now on display in historic museums, which were evidently treasured and preserved by Hannah King’s descendants. For women such as Hannah King, such precious domestic furnishings may have exemplified the British ideals they wished to teach Indigenous people. (p.241) Certainly, missionaries and managers on Victoria’s reserves interpreted the Aboriginal residents’ acquisition of ceramics and other household furnishings in this way: that is, as evidence for their commitment to Western values of respectability and civilization. Inspector John Green’s comments in 1874 were typical, in remembering that ‘I asked several if they liked better to live in the huts than in the mia-mia [traditional bark shelter]; they said that they would not like to live in the mia-mia again. In several of the huts the occupiers have shown a good deal of taste in the well-arranged crockery and other household things’ (BPA 1874:67). However, in this same report Green also noted that ‘two huts are quite deserted; it appears someone has died in each one of them’. The observation of funereal tradition casts doubt upon managers’ conceptions of cultural change, pointing towards the distinctive use Aboriginal people may make of Western material Page 12 of 26

Intimacy and Distance culture—in this case, discarding it when polluted. There are other examples of the maintenance of tradition alongside new ways: in 1875 it was noted that ‘the Aboriginals still appear to be fond of hunting, fishing, and shooting’ (BPA 1875:17). Archaeological surveys record an intensification of use of the region’s waterways and especially the banks of the Wimmera near Ebenezer, following the mission’s establishment. The missionaries also noted the movement of the Wergaia on and off the reserve, as some continued to camp on traditional country, and in 1881 recorded that: Latterly the remnants of some of the Wimmera tribes have come to the station to take up their residence here. They are all old people, and several of them are blind. Having lived in camps all their lifetime, they have come to consider those primitive, and to our notions, most uncomfortable structures the very abodes of bliss, and cannot by any means be induced to live in one of the comfortable cottages on the station. (BPA 1881:10) The manufacture of stone tools also continued, as indicated by examples found during excavation throughout the occupation phases. These are mostly made of local milky quartz, and the presence of cores and flakes suggests some on-site tool manufacture (Figure 10.4). The evidence is consistent with early accounts of local tool-making practices, as well as more recent archaeological studies in the region (see Kamminga and Grist 2000:117–18; Stanin in Lydon et al. 2004). As archaeologists have often noted, new materials such as glass and metal were quickly appropriated into traditional tool forms (for Australian discussions, see for example Harrison 2000; Williamson 2002; Wolksi and Loy 1999). In 1864 one Moravian observer described how: The big Dr Charly, Hardy etc sat prudently and made spears; they placed a glass fragment on the front part, and cemented it with a pure substance similar to gum . . . The glass fragment they hit from the under part of a bottle and bit it into shape with their teeth. I would not have believed that one could work with glass in such a fashion, had I not seen it myself. (Quoted in Jensz 2000:133)

(p.242) Essentialism and Material Culture

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Intimacy and Distance Within a decade, Ebenezer was a flourishing village of tidy homes run by houseproud women, arrayed around the solid stone settlement buildings, focused upon the missionaries’ own communal household. However, alongside and often out of sight, traditional customs were maintained, such as the Fig. 10.4. Stone tool from mission abandonment of houses settlement area. after a death, hunting, Monash University. and the manufacture of traditional tools. Several aspects of the assemblage are significant. First, artifacts customarily classified by archaeologists as ‘European’ dominate the assemblage, but represent use by a mainly Aboriginal community that has continued to practice many traditional customs and beliefs into the present. While Moravian missionaries supervised the residents, and were pleased with their adoption of European material culture, Aboriginal people reject the notion that such adaptation undermines their Aboriginality. Such ideas stem from the colonial opposition between Indigenous people as either static, unchanged, and authentic or altered and inauthentic—a formulation used to constrain their choices and limit their claims to land and other rights (e.g. Beckett 1988; Clifford 1998; Colley and Bickford 1996). As archaeologists have often pointed out, classification systems that define artifacts as either (p.243) ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘non-Aboriginal’ mask the presence and activity of Indigenous people, for whom such distinctions were meaningless (e.g. Harrison 2004; Wolksi 2001). Such analysis retains currency, despite a well-established critique of this essentializing approach to artifacts as identity, and of cultural exchange and transformation as acculturation (David 2006; Jones 1997; Rubertone 2000, 2001). Specifically, analysis of evidence for Aboriginal missions has tended to be structured by this opposition, dismissing the European artifacts as somehow un-Aboriginal, invisible in their banality. As theorists of ‘whiteness’ have pointed out, the naturalization of this social category has acted to normalize and privilege non-Indigenous identity; whiteness is taken for granted, while Indigenous experience is denigrated (e.g. Carey et al. 2007). Descendants, however, express a keen interest in the everyday items used by residents as evidence for Indigenous experience.

Black and White Women Despite their successful appropriation of aspects of Western domesticity, a fundamental contradiction emerged between the European bourgeois ideal and its actualization on the reserves. Page 14 of 26

Intimacy and Distance Although colonizers represented the domestic sphere as a private familial haven, Aboriginal women were expected to continuously open their homes to inspection and surveillance. In 1873, for example, the Board’s annual report noted of Ebenezer that ‘Elizabeth’s hut is improved in appearance since last visit, and is more tidy. The dwellings of Margaret, Susan, and some others are clean, well-kept, and tidy’ (BPA 1873:13). Other comments could be more critical. This discrepancy was also a source of tension between black and white women, who generally carried out domestic monitoring. The daily routine choreographed by the missionaries’ wives involved the transgression of supposedly private Aboriginal domestic space. Where some scholars have argued for alliances between women on the reserves, more recent critique by Aboriginal scholars has revealed their often incommensurable objectives (e.g. Moreton-Robinson 2000). Class differences represented another inconsistency between managers’ avowed goal of civilization—and especially the missionaries’ rhetoric of shared humanity—and their actual programme, which was designed to produce a colonial working class of servants and casual labourers. As the Board’s first report explained, its plan was to establish a school to teach the Aboriginal children ‘useful occupations, so as to have fitted them for employment as servants’ (CBACV 1861: 11). Similarly, the supposed civilization of the residents was always qualified, equating them with the lower classes of non-Indigenous society. Such views stemmed from a global process that developed social categories across empire; the equation of British working-classes with foreign ‘heathens’ established a common (p.244) language for evangelists of the early nineteenth century working at home and abroad (e.g. Cooper and Stoler 1997; Hall 2002).

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Intimacy and Distance Mobility and Evasion However, the Western visual/spatial regime of the reserves in a sense ‘overlooked’ the different cultural orientation of Aboriginal people: beyond the purview of idealizing Western visions of Aboriginality, Indigenous people avoided scrutiny through strategies of mobility, evasion, and concealment. Aboriginal notions of power, meaning, and knowledge shaped their responses to the mission environment. Connections to kin and place were maintained throughout the mission era, sometimes assisted by misrecognition and evasion. Aboriginal tradition did not readily absorb the self-mastery of panoptical control, perhaps explaining the persistence of traditions surrounding kinship relations and collective identity, which remained invisible to white managers (Lydon 2005). Different cultural understandings of the station’s social and physical landscape therefore co-existed, and there is evidence that Aboriginal people continued their own practices within the mission landscape: for example, the bush remained a private Aboriginal domain, while some retained practices such as a camp lifestyle. The disciplinary spatio-visual regimes of the reserves established some parameters for the negotiation of social relations, but it did not fully determine them. This differential cultural orientation must be weighed against the increasing restrictions imposed upon residents’ lives towards the end of the nineteenth century. While women were confined to the ‘home’, their experience is difficult to recover: in particular, the importance attached by Europeans to the domestic sphere as a visible marker of civilization has been understood both as a sign of the increased status of women on the reserves, and as a sign of its decline (Barwick 1974). Where inscriptive models of bodily and spatial experience emphasize the processes by which power relations are mapped on the body as a surface for visible display, overlooking lived experience and corporeality (Meskell 1999), there is evidence that women deployed strategies of mobility and evasion to pursue their own objectives, played out across different levels and scales of colonial space. For example, up to half of Victoria’s Indigenous population was able to live off the reserves, choosing to work for European employers, or to receive rations from Honorary Correspondents’ depots (Penney 1997). Aboriginal people in northwestern Victoria were relatively mobile and dispersed, moving on and off Ebenezer for work with relative ease. However, the Board gradually tightened its control, particularly over Aboriginal women (Grimshaw and Nelson 2001). Aboriginal labour was common in the sparsely settled areas, where it was (p.245) a useful resource for pastoralists, and men worked as shepherds, shearers, stockmen, and casual labourers, while women worked as servants, Page 16 of 26

Intimacy and Distance sometimes establishing long-lasting relationships with particular pastoralist families. Some chose to live in camps in traditional country, utilizing traditional food sources where possible—such as along the region’s major waterways—and some supplemented their income and diet through fishing, shooting, and begging. These women’s lives were characterized by mobility and a degree of independence that defines some of the limitations of the European reserve system. Aboriginal cultural orientation, grounded in relations to kin and country, persisted in practices that were misrecognized by Western settlers.

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Intimacy and Distance Conclusion Central to the missionaries’ vision for the Aboriginal people of Victoria was a reformed gender and class order that would appropriately locate the Indigenous population within modern settler society. White observers focused upon women and the domestic sphere as an index of civilization, praising the apparent progress they had made in terms of personal comportment and domestic consumption. Despite the use of European domesticity as a tool of control and change, it must be acknowledged that Aboriginal people chose to accommodate new circumstances and become active participants in colonial society and economy. The experiences of Aboriginal women within the re-imagined Western social order of the reserves exposed a range of contradictions within the supposedly ‘natural’ organization of European gender relations. For Aboriginal women, the supposed haven of the private sphere was never the private refuge it was represented to be, rather being constantly open to inspection and discipline by managers. Similarly, despite the rhetoric of a shared humanity, Indigenous people were expected to occupy the lowest socio-economic rung in the colonial hierarchy—limitations expressed in the embodied and material dimensions of their lives. Nonetheless, such circumstances must be weighed against the capacity to maintain traditional practices, and the freedom of many Indigenous women to leave the mission regime when they chose. Material evidence for Aboriginal settlements such as missions or reserves challenges the contemporary opposition of spiritual and secular by showing the significance of the physical environment missionaries created. Such investigation also contests Western narratives of transformation—a framework that reiterates European missionaries’ values without considering Indigenous responses to new ideas and practices, from rejection to forms of interest and participation. Research that addresses the archaeology of ‘contact’ between white Australian settlers and Aboriginal people has only gained intellectual currency over recent decades. However, archaeologists increasingly acknowledge the development of (p.246) their discipline in complicity with imperialism, and its legacy of ideas and methods that distance Indigenous people from their heritage and facilitate structural disadvantage within present-day society. As a discipline, we have accepted the need to create new intellectual frameworks and practices that will bring about decolonization. Such research also has profound implications for archaeological paradigms within settler societies, in challenging the bifurcation of Indigenous identity as either primitive or

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Intimacy and Distance altered, and the related split in Australian archaeology and heritage practice between ‘Indigenous’ or ‘historic’ values. Such re-conceptualization also raises important methodological issues for archaeologists working in this field, who must acknowledge the insufficiency of essentializing artifact classifications such as ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘historic’. The missionaries’ own perception of material culture as an index of civilization—long a central tenet of Western thought—has persisted within archaeological analysis, in the continuing currency of essentializing interpretations that link artifacts unquestioningly to cultural identity. In this vein, the predominantly European origins of mission assemblages have been understood as evidence for assimilation to a European identity, and opposed to ‘traditional’ forms such as stone tools, understood as Indigenous, with the consequence that such objects have been interpreted unquestioningly as evidence for resistance to colonization rather than for creative engagement with a changing world. As Australian archaeologists (and those elsewhere— see e.g. Silliman, Oliver, this volume) begin to explore the social context for archaeological assemblages once considered significant only as settler heritage, new stories of Indigenous experience will build a more complex picture of the past. More expansive understandings of Indigenous—and settler—histories will start to emerge, shifting analytical focus from the identification of material culture and identities, in categorical terms, to the social processes and contexts that gave them form. In acknowledging the entangled, complex relationships generated by colonialism, such research may speak to more than its usual specialist audience, potentially engaging Indigenous people and the general public in accounts that continue to inform the present.

Acknowledgements This project was funded by the Australian Research Council between 2003 and 2008. I am deeply grateful to the Indigenous community members and organizations who supported this project, especially Barengi-gadjin Land Council, Wergaia Elder Eleanor Bourke, Yorta Yorta Alan Burns, Mark Dugay-Grist, Goolum Goolum Aboriginal Cooperative, and Wotjobaluk Elder Nancy Harrison. I also heartily thank colleagues and students who participated in this project, particularly Alasdair Brooks, Steve Brown, Bruno David, Ingereth Macfarlane, and Zvonkica Stanin, Alasdair Brooks. (p.247) References Bibliography references:

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Intimacy and Distance Barwick, Diane 1974 And the Lubras Are Ladies Now. In Woman’s Role in Aboriginal Society, edited by Fay Gale, pp. 51–63. Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra. Barwick, Diane 1988 Aborigines of Victoria. In Being Black, edited by Ian Keen, pp. 27–32. Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra. Baxter, J. E. 2005 The Archaeology of Childhood: Children, Gender and Material Culture. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California. Beckett, Jeremy 1988 Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality. Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra. Birmingham, Judy 2000 Resistance, Creolization or Optimal Foraging at Killalpaninna Mission, South Australia. In The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross-cultural Engagements in Oceania, edited by Robin Torrence and Anne Clark, pp. 360–404. Routledge, London. Blake, Thom 2001 A Dumping Ground: A History of the Cherbourg Settlement. University of Queensland Press, Brisbane. BPA (Board for the Protection of the Aborigines) 1873 Ninth Report. William Ferres, Government Printer, Melbourne. BPA (Board for the Protection of the Aborigines) 1874 Tenth Report. William Ferres, Government Printer, Melbourne. BPA (Board for the Protection of the Aborigines) 1875 Eleventh Report. William Ferres, Government Printer, Melbourne. BPA (Board for the Protection of the Aborigines) 1877 Thirteenth Report. William Ferres, Government Printer, Melbourne. BPA (Board for the Protection of the Aborigines) 1881 Seventeenth Report. William Ferres, Government Printer, Melbourne. BPA (Board for the Protection of the Aborigines) 1884 Nineteenth Report. William Ferres, Government Printer, Melbourne. Brock, Peggy 1993 Outback Ghettoes: A History of Aboriginal Institutionalisation and Survival. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Brooks, Alasdair 1999 Building Jerusalem: Transfer-printed Finewares and the Creation of British Identity. In The Familiar Past? Archaeologies

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Intimacy and Distance of Later Historical Britain, edited by Sarah Tarlow and Susie West, pp. 51–64. Routledge, London. Brooks, Alasdair 2005 An Archaeological Guide to British Ceramics in Australia 1788–1901. The Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology, Melbourne. Byrne, Denis 1996 Deep Nation: Australia’s Acquisition of an Indigenous Past. Aboriginal History 20:82–107. Carey, Jane, Leigh Boucher, and Kat Ellinghaus (eds) 2007 Historicising Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the Construction of Identity. RMIT Publishing in association with the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne, Melbourne. Central Board (Central Board Appointed to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria) 1861 First Report. William Ferres, Government Printer, Melbourne. Central Board (Central Board Appointed to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria) 1862 Second Report. William Ferres, Government Printer, Melbourne. (p.248) Choo, Christine 2001 Mission Girls: Aboriginal Women on Catholic Missions in the Kimberley, Western Australia, 1900–1950. University of Western Australia Press, Perth. Clark, Ian D. 1990 Aboriginal Languages and Clans: An Historical Atlas of Western and Central Victoria, 1800–1900. Monash Publications in Geography, Melbourne. Clifford, James 1998 The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Colley, Sarah and Anne Bickford 1996 ‘Real’ Aborigines and ‘Real’ Archaeology: Aboriginal Places and Australian Historical Archaeology. World Archaeological Bulletin 7:5–21. Cooper, Frederick and Ann Stoler (eds) 1997 Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. University of California Press, Berkeley. Crook, Penny 2000 Shopping and Historical Archaeology: Exploring the Contexts of Urban Consumption. Australasian Historical Archaeology 18:17–28.

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Intimacy and Distance David, Bruno 2006 Indigenous Rights and the Mutability of Culture. In Boundary Writing: An Exploration of Race, Culture and Gender Binaries in Contemporary Australia, edited by Lynette Russell, pp. 122–48. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. Gojak, Denis and Iain Stuart 1999 The Potential for the Archaeological Study of Clay Tobacco Pipes from Australian Sites. Australasian Historical Archaeology 17:38–49. Grimshaw, Patricia and Elizabeth Nelson 2001 Empire, ‘the Civilising Mission’ and Indigenous Christian Women in Colonial Victoria. Australian Feminist Studies 16(36):295–309. Hall, Catherine 2002 Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Harrison, Rodney 2000 ‘Nowadays with Glass’: Regional Variation in Aboriginal Bottle Glass Artefacts from Western Australia. Archaeology in Oceania 35:34–47. Harrison, Rodney 2004 Shared Landscapes: Archaeologies of Attachment and the Pastoral Industry in New South Wales. University of New South Wales Press, Sydney. Henry, James 1859 Sketches of Moravian Life and Character. J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia. Hercus, Luise 1969 The Languages of Victoria: A Late Survey, Part II. Australian Aboriginal Studies, Canberra. Howitt, Alfred W. 2001 [1904] The Native Tribes of South-east Australia. Facsimile ed. Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra. Iacono, Nadia 2008 Former Ebenezer Mission Site: Button Report. Manuscript on file, Monash Indigenous Centre, Monash University, Melbourne. Jensz, Felicity 2000 The Moravian-run Ebenezer Mission Station: A German Perspective. Masters thesis, Department of German and Swedish Studies, University of Melbourne. Jolly, Margaret and Martha Macintyre (eds) 1989 Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact. Cambridge University Press, Melbourne.

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Intimacy and Distance Jones, Siân 1997 The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present. Routledge, London. Kamminga, Johann and Mark Grist 2000 Yarriambiack Creek Aboriginal Heritage Study. Report to Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, Melbourne. Koorie Heritage Trust 2008 Mission Voices. Electronic document

accessed 30 March 2011. (p.249) Langmore, Diane 1989 Missionary Lives: Papua, 1874–1914. Center for Pacific Islands Studies: University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. Langton, Marcia 1998 Grandmother’s Law, Company Business and Succession in Aboriginal Land Tenure Systems. In Traditional Aboriginal Society edited by W. H. Edwards, pp. 109–29. Macmillan, South Melbourne. Lawrence, Susan 2000 Dolly’s Creek: An Archaeology of a Victorian Goldfields Community. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Levine, Philippa (ed.) 2004 Gender and Empire. The Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Lightfoot, Kent G. 1995 Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship between Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology. American Antiquity 60:199–217. Lydon, Jane 1995 Boarding Houses in the Rocks: Mrs Ann Lewis’ Privy, 1865. Public History Review 4:73–88. Lydon, Jane 2005 Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina. Lydon, Jane 2009 Fantastic Dreaming: The Archaeology of an Aboriginal Mission. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Lydon, Jane and Jeremy Ash 2010 The Archaeology of Missions in Australasia: Introduction. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 14:1–14. Lydon, Jane and Uzma Z. Rizvi (eds) 2010 Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. Lydon, Jane, Alasdair Brooks, and Zvonkica Stanin 2004 Archaeological Investigations at the Mission-house, Ebenezer Mission. Report

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Intimacy and Distance prepared for Aboriginal Affairs Victoria and Heritage Victoria. Copies available from Monash Indigenous Centre, Monash University. Lydon, Jane, Bruno David, and Zvonkica Stanin 2007 Archaeological Investigation of the Former Ebenezer Mission, Victoria: Stage II. Report prepared for Aboriginal Affairs Victoria and Heritage Victoria. Copies available from Monash Indigenous Centre, Monash University. McClintock, Anne 1995 Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Routledge, London. McNiven, Ian J. and Lynette Russell 2005 Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Merlan, Francesca 1988 Gender in Aboriginal Society: A Review. In Social Anthropology and Australian Aboriginal Studies, edited by R. M. Berndt and Robert Tonkinson, pp. 15–76. Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra. Meskell, Lynn M. 1999 Archaeologies of Social Life: Age, Sex, Class et cetera in Ancient Egypt. Blackwell, Oxford. Middleton, Angela 2007 Silent Voices, Hidden Lives: Archaeology, Class and Gender in the CMS Missions, Bay of Islands, New Zealand, 1814– 1845. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 11:1–31. Middleton, Angela 2008 Te Puna—A New Zealand Mission Station: Historical Archaeology in New Zealand. Springer, New York. Middleton, Angela 2010 Missionization in New Zealand and Australia: A Comparison. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 14:170–87. Mitchell, Jessie 2008 ‘The Nucleus of Civilisation’: Gender, Race and Australian Missionary Families, 1825–1855. In Evangelists of Empire? Missionaries in Colonial (p.250) History, edited by Amanda Barry, Joanna Cruickshank, Andrew Brown-May, and Patricia Grimshaw, pp. 103–14. History Conference and Seminar Series 18, School of Historical Studies, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 2000 Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism. University of Queensland Press, Brisbane. Penney, Jan 1997 Victorian Honorary Correspondent Supply Depots: Final Report. Report to Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, Melbourne.

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Intimacy and Distance Pepper, Philip and Tess de Araugo 1980 You Are What You Make Yourself to Be: The Story of a Victorian Aboriginal Family 1842–1980. Hyland House, Melbourne. Pope, A. 1988 Aboriginal Adaptation to Early Colonial Labour Markets: The South Australian Experience. Labour History 54:1–15. Rowley, Charles D. 1972 The Destruction of Aboriginal Society. Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria. Rowse, Tim 1998 White Flour, White Power: From Rations to Citizenship in Central Australia. Cambridge University Press, New York. Rubertone, Patricia E. 2000 The Historical Archaeology of Native Americans. Annual Review of Anthropology 29:425–46. Rubertone, Patricia E. 2001 Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Rutherdale, Myra 2002 Women and the White Man’s God: Gender and Race in the Canadian Mission Field. University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver. Smith, Claire and Martin Wobst (eds) 2005 Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice. Routledge, Oxford. Stanner, W. E. H. 1979 White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays, 1938– 1973. Australian National University Press, Canberra. Wilkie, Laurie 2000 Not Merely Child’s Play: Creating a Historical Archaeology of Children and Childhood. In Children and Material Culture, edited by Joanna Sofaer Derevenski, pp. 100–13. Routledge, London. Williamson, Christine 2002 Finding Meaning in the Patterns: The Analysis of Material Culture from a Contact Site in Tasmania. In After Captain Cook: The Archaeology of the Recent Indigenous Past in Australia, edited by Rodney Harrison and Christine Williamson, pp. 75– 101. Sydney University Archaeological Methods Series 8. Archaeological Computing Laboratory, University of Sydney, Sydney. Wolski, Nathan 2001 All’s Not Quiet on the Western Front—Rethinking Resistance and Frontiers in Aboriginal Historiography. In Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous–European Encounters in Settler Societies, edited

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Intimacy and Distance by Lynette Russell, pp. 216–36. Manchester University Press, Manchester. Wolski, Nathan and Tom H. Loy 1999 On the Invisibility of Contact: Residue Analyses on Aboriginal Glass Artefacts from Western Victoria. The Artefact 22:65–73.

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Casting Identity

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Casting Identity Sumptuous Action and Colonized Bodies in Seventeenth-century New England Diana DiPaolo Loren

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0012

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the materiality of colonial dress and identity in the context of seventeenth-century southern New England, with particular reference to the stone mould recovered by James Baker, an avocational archaeologist, from a field in Lincoln, Massachusetts in 1892. It analyses ‘the broader interpretive connotations around and beyond’ stone moulds, moving from a single stone mould to a larger discussion of Native American and Puritan dress in colonial Massachusetts. It also considers how the simple stone button mould enabled Native New Englanders to create, navigate, and transform identity through dress in relation to proselytising efforts, as well as colonial rules and restrictions. Finally, the chapter illustrates how the stone button mould reflects the ways that colonial peoples, especially Native Americans and Puritans, chose to outfit themselves on the seventeenth-century New England frontier. Keywords:   materiality, dress, identity, New England, James Baker, Massachusetts, stone moulds, Native Americans, Puritans, frontier

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Casting Identity Introduction: An Unprovenienced Stone Button Mould and Puritan Visions In 1892, James Baker, an avocational archaeologist, recovered a stone mould from a field in Lincoln, Massachusetts and in 1924, he donated the artifact to the Peabody Museum at Harvard University (PMAE 1924). No other artifacts accompanied the donation and Baker did not include a map or the provenience of his find. Accessioned in the museum’s collection, this unprovenienced object has since lived its life in museum storage (Barber 1984). One side of the stone is carved with hollows for a ring, a small buckle (likely a knee buckle frame), and two convex buttons: one shallow 1-cm button and the other a deeper 2-cm button (Figure 11.1). The reverse side of the stone is incised with an image of an individual wearing an English-style fitted frock coat (Figure 11.2). Stone button moulds such as the one collected by Baker have been recovered from other locations in southern New England, predominately from seventeenth-century Native American sites. But what sets this object apart is the representation of a figure wearing English-style colonial clothing. With that image, the stone button mould becomes an object that materializes some of the complexities of identity and dress in early colonial southern New England. It was a tool with which colonial peoples created closures and buttons used for clothing, while the reverse side of the object also includes a depiction of an individual wearing this material in practice. The identity of the individual wearing the coat is unclear; most likely a male, but otherwise undistinguished as English or Native American. I take this small object as a point of departure to explore the materiality of colonial dress and identity in the context of seventeenth-century southern New (p.252)

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Casting Identity (p.253) England. Admittedly, stone moulds used for casting buttons are rarely found in the archaeological record and the sample I discuss here is quite small. But the items cast from these moulds—plain shank buttons—are ubiquitous on historical sites. Following on the work of Mary Beaudry (2006, 2009), here I want to create an intellectual space to contemplate a ‘small find’: a stone mould. In this process, I reflect on ‘the broader interpretive connotations around and beyond’ stone moulds, moving from a single stone mould to a larger discussion of Native American and Puritan dress in colonial Massachusetts (Meskell 2004:2).

Fig. 11.1. Colonial stone button mould, Lincoln, MA. PM 24–7–10/94279, courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Dress in colonial Massachusetts was, as in many colonial contexts, integral to Fig. 11.2. Reverse side of colonial stone performing different button mould. aspects of identities, Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of including gender, Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard religion, race, University. ethnicity, class, and status (Loren 2010, 2013). Elements of dress could be used to transform identity, allowing one to embody another ‘social skin’. The ability to change identity, however, was threatening to imperial rule as it confused colonial order and racial categorization of Europeans, Native American, and peoples of mixed ancestries. Thus, the everyday practice of dressing was far from simple; rather, clothing and adorning one’s body was personal, social, political, and complex, fraught with tension and ambiguity. By extension, the stone mould used to cast buttons was entangled in the Page 3 of 22

Casting Identity embodiment of different identities and the materiality of the lived experience of colonialism; in particular, how Native New Englanders— Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Massachusetts peoples—dressed in response to English Puritan missionary activities as well as the changing social and political landscape. The colonial world was intentionally ‘fashioned’ (Comaroff 1996; Loren 2010). Imperial powers sought to enact racialized, ordered visions of colonies and colonized to control new and unfamiliar lands and peoples. In these visions, Europeans claimed moral, bodily, and cultural superiority over colonized peoples. Yet by no means was there a simple binary distinction between ‘colonized’ and ‘colonizer’ as imperial imaginings also meant to demarcate differences of status, rank, and breeding (Stoler 2009; see also Harrison, this volume; Oliver, this volume). Thus, how one looked marked their place in the colonial order (Chaplin 2003:9, 14). For all members of colonial society, the body was the area where sexual, racial, and cultural differences were played out, making it possible for various peoples to visually understand and portray notions of comportment, nature, culture, intention, religious preference, and economic and social status (Chaplin 2003; Comaroff 1996; Loren 2010, 2013; Stoler 2009; Voss 2008). Colonial officials enacted and (attempted to) enforce those visions through the creation of laws, edicts, and mandates when the structure of colonial order was threatened. Yet the reality of lived colonialisms— hybridized practices and identities, and material engagements of people living in colonies—rarely matched colonial visions (Stoler 2009). It is in these slippages between vision and mundane daily practices— and concomitantly, the creation of more (p.254) complex, hybridized colonial societies and identities—that we better understand the reality of lived colonialisms (Harrison, this volume). One such context for understanding these experiences is the bodily, religious, and sumptuous engagements between Puritans and Native Americans in colonial Massachusetts. Missionary efforts to Christianize Native New Englanders included the development of praying towns: communities for Christianized Native peoples who were to live, pray, dress, and comport themselves as Puritans (Calloway 1997:74–7; Lepore 1998). Missionary John Eliot, who was primarily responsible for this effort, constructed fourteen praying towns throughout New England in the 1640s, including Hassanamesit, Magunkaquog, Nashobah, Natick, Okommakamesit, Punkapog, and Wamesit (Cogley 1999; Mrozowski et al. 2005). As a member of the Harvard Corporation, Eliot was also instrumental in

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Casting Identity establishing the Indian College at Harvard for the residency of Native American students attending the College, to be trained as ministers. Puritan visions of a proper Christianized body in praying towns and at Harvard included the adoption of English cultural, material, and spiritual practices and ceasing long-standing Native American practices. As Mrozowski el al. (2009:437) note: ‘material culture played an important role in this transformation as Native styles of dress, personal appearance, and architecture were openly discouraged. Converts were also expected to openly reject Native cultural practices that were seen as sinful so as to demonstrate their adherence to Puritan doctrine.’ Native American responses to proselytization efforts were varied: some were convinced that Christian conversion was necessary for survival, while other individuals vocally rejected conversion efforts. In 1675, Wampanoag sachem Metacom (known to the English as King Phillip) led a major resistance against the English colonists. The resulting war was in some ways based on the fear of hybridity (Lepore 1998). Puritans were worried that they were losing their piety and becoming Native American, while many Native Americans had come to suspect the reverse, worrying that they themselves had become too much like their new English neighbours in religion, desire, and comportment. More than three thousand Native Americans and English colonists were killed in the war, which had long-lasting consequences for the people of southern New England. Those Native Americans living in praying towns were under suspicion and were forcibly moved to Deer Island in Boston Harbor until after the war ended in 1676. As Mrozowski et al. (2005:58) note, while some residents of the praying towns moved back to rebuild their communities, others decided to rebuild their lives elsewhere. Clothing was an integral aspect of identity creation and identification in this seventeenth-century context. For Puritans, clothing was next to godliness. For some Native New Englanders, English-style clothing bespoke one’s spirituality, while other Native New Englanders wore English-style clothing to create alliances with, or in some cases to confuse, Puritans (Loren 2013). The stone mould collected (p.255) by Baker was used to create buttons, specifically small buttons used as closures and adornments on English-style coats. These coats then embodied a certain identity when worn: that of the Christian or Christianized Indian. How then did the simple stone button mould enable Native New Englanders to create, navigate, and transform

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Casting Identity identity through dress in relation to proselytizing efforts, as well as colonial rules and restrictions?

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Casting Identity Dress and Identity in Seventeenth-Century Southern New England Drawing inspiration from the work of French phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I define colonial identity as conceptualizations of age, gender, ethnicity, and self that are constructed through the conscious use and performance of material culture at the intersection of object and self. A phenomenological approach places lived experience—the ways that a person experiences the world, embodies identity, and mediates social exchanges—at the centre of analysis (Merleau-Ponty 1989; for further discussion of these concepts see Butler 1990; Crossland 2010; DeMarrais et al. 2004; Fisher and Loren 2003; Joyce 1998, 2005; Kus 1992; Meskell 1999, 2004; Voss 2008). But identity is also constituted and performed through the use and manipulation of material culture. We understand our place in society—our being-in-the-world—not only through the experiences and actions of our bodies but also in our physical engagements within a social and physical landscape filled with things (Merleau-Ponty 1989; see also Butler 1990; Entwistle 2000; Fisher and Loren 2003; Loren 2001, 2010; Meskell 1999, 2004). It is not only important to consider lived experience and the embodiment of identities, but also the intersection of body and object—that is, the materiality of lived colonialisms. While definitions and conceptualizations of materiality vary widely within archaeology, a general goal of theoretical approaches to materiality is explicating how an individual both shapes objects and uses objects to shape identity (Crossland 2010; Gosden and Knowles 2001; Joyce 2005; Meskell 2004; Miller 2005; White and Beaudry 2009). Material engagements during periods of colonization carry the stamp of imperial desires and imaginations; how colonized and colonizers were expected to live in relationship to the politics of inclusion and exclusion. The lived experiences of colonial subjects—how they lived (or were forced to live or chose not to live) in their material worlds—redrew the contours of colonialism and often resulted in hybrid identities and material practices (Gosden 2005; Loren 2001, 2010; Silliman 2009; Voss 2008). The memory of lived experiences of colonialism resides not only in colonial histories, but also in the materiality of colonial engagements found in museums, archives, (p.256) and archaeological sites (see Cipolla 2008; Gosden 2005; Silliman 2009, this volume). Dress—defined here as both clothing and bodily adornments—is just one means by which identity was materialized and embodied (Anderson 2005; Calefato 2004; Colchester 2003; Entwistle 2000; Entwistle and Wilson 2001; Loren 2010). Colonial practices of exclusion and inclusion were centred largely around the body and its actions in the colonial world: how people lived, ate, worshipped, and dressed (Chaplin 2003; Page 7 of 22

Casting Identity Lindman and Tartar 2001; Loren 2010). This contemporary and historical focus necessitates that, as archaeologists, we are mindful of personal artifacts or ‘small finds’ that were worn on and around the body. While ‘small finds’, such as buttons, buckles, and stone moulds are rare in archaeological contexts, these objects have the potential to speak volumes about the embodiment and performance of identities in colonial contexts (Beaudry 2006, 2009; Deagan 2002; Loren and Beaudry 2006; White and Beaudry 2009). Especially relevant for this volume, ‘small finds’ provide insight into the materiality of colonialism —how imperial categories were lived and experienced in the quotidian. In early colonial New England, cloth and clothing constituted one of the most numerous classes of goods that were traded to Native New Englanders (Becker 2005; Loren 2010). Wool—warm, light, and dyed in an array of colours—was valued in the New England climate, constituting a new material for Native New Englanders along with European-manufactured metal and bone buttons, and sewing implements. The influx of this material into New England influenced Native American dress and fashion. By the mid seventeenth century, Native peoples were wearing European-style garments, or had incorporated these materials into entirely traditional forms. As well, a hybrid range of forms that made use of European-manufactured cloth and English clothing by Native New Englanders was commonplace, as were the items needed for constructing such clothing (Becker 2005; Little 2001; Ulrich 2001). This use of European cloth and clothing embodied a number of different meanings: it was a sign of status and alliance, and a symbol of religious conversion. English-tailored coats, particularly those made from red cloth, were often given to Native New Englanders as items of diplomacy or symbols of alliance to the English (Johannsen 1980:30). For example, in 1621, when Pilgrim leaders Stephen Hopkins and Edward Winslow visited Wampanoag sachem Massasoit (Ousamequin), they brought him a coat adorned with cotton lace (Heath 1963:60). And in 1655, a coat was presented to Masconomet, the sagamore of Agawam, in order to ‘encourage hime to know God and excite other Indians to do the like’ (Pulsifer 1859:140). Donning English-style clothing was also a distinct mark of conversion. Initially, English authors, following literary conventions common in early colonial literature, described Wampanoag, Narragansett, and other Native New Englanders as naked when they were in fact clothed in breechcloths, leggings, as well (p.257) as wool blankets and other English-style apparel (Lepore 1998:80). This perception of nakedness hinged on the English perception of civility, as only the civilized Page 8 of 22

Casting Identity properly dressed themselves with tailored clothing (Loren 2008, 2010, 2013). In conversion efforts throughout the colonial world, one aspect of ‘civilizing’ and ‘Christianizing’ was through the attempted assimilation of dress, in particular, the replacement of Native American dress and bodily adornments with European clothing, adornment, and comportment (see Comaroff 1996; Loren 2010; Lydon 2009; Voss 2008). In colonial New England, Native Americans were encouraged to forsake ‘nakedness’ (or a mix of Native- and English-style clothing) for English apparel. In 1674, Daniel Gookin, Superintendent of the Indians of Massachusetts Bay Colony, asserted that Christianized Native New Englanders were easily identified ‘by their short hair, and wearing English fashioned apparel’, such as cloth suits, linen shirts, breeches, stockings, shifts, and cobbled shoes (Gookin 1970:17; see also Welters 1993:15). Clothing not only covered unclothed flesh, but wearing tailored clothing also prohibited certain bodily movements so that posture and carriage were also transformed along with appearance. Puritan leaders provided residents of praying towns with these English fashioned goods. For example, a list of items requested by Eliot in 1651 for the Natick praying town included ‘20 dozen green and blue hose for men, 20 dozen green and blue hose for women, over 80 pounds of cloth, 21 dozen leather shoes, and haberdashery, especially thread’ (Brenner 1984:291). In 1698, when the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel visited Wampanoag converts at Mashpee, 263 of the members of the community were wearing English-style clothing (Welters 1993:23). Silverman (2005:191) indicates that by the early eighteenth century, cloth, clothing, and sewing items made up a significant percentage of items that Wampanoag individuals purchased from Anglo and other European merchants. The embodiment of social identities conveyed through fashion was also something to be manipulated. For example, while Native New Englanders were given access to items of ‘haberdashery’—thread, buttons, scissors, thimbles—some cloth was never fashioned into clothing. Native New Englanders wore English-style coats and shirts along with cloth they draped around themselves as cloaks (Little 2001:246). William Wood noted in 1634 for the southern New England Indians that: ‘if their fancie drive them to trade, they choose rather a good coarse blanket, through which they cannot see, interposing it between the sun and them; or a piece of broade cloth, which they use for a double end, making it a coat by day, and a covering by night’ (Wood (1976 [1865/1635]:73). Daniel Gookin (1970:17) also made

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Casting Identity reference to this in his 1674 Historical Collections of the Indians in New England: But, for the most part, they sell the skins and furs to the English, Dutch, and French, and buy of them for clothing a kind of cloth, called duffils, or trucking cloth, about a yard and a half wide, and for matter, made of coarse wool, in that (p.258) form as our ordinary bed blankets are made, only it is put into colours, as blue, red, purple, and some use them white. Of this sort of cloth two yards make a mantle, or coat, for men and women, and less for children. This is all the garment they generally use, with this addition of some little pieces of the same, or of ordinary cotton, to cover their secret parts. It is rare to see any among them of the most barbarous, that are remiss or negligent in hiding those parts. But the Christian and civilized Indians do endeavour, many of them, to follow the English mode in their habit. Massachusetts Bay Colony sumptuary laws and informal Puritan expectations of dress were intended to enforce a modest and conservative style of dress among those living in the region. Low necklines, short sleeves, gold and silver lace buttons, tall boots, and silk hoods were prohibited for individuals of lower income (De Marly 1990:35–8; Degler 1984:11). Although sumptuary laws enacted in the Massachusetts colony during the mid seventeenth century were never truly enforced, they did imply that a difference in dressing style was to be maintained between lower and higher ranks, and between those who were English and those who were not (De Marly 1990:37–8; Goodwin 1999:112); and, by extension, those who were Christian and those who were not, implying that dress was not to be manipulated once converted. Puritan dress was a sign and instrument of religious conversion and spiritual transformation (Comaroff 1996; Loren 2010, 2013). Wearing English-style clothing while maintaining the customs, speech, and manner of a Native American was unacceptable to Puritans. In reality, however, the knowledge that donning a certain kind of dress could affect status and stance in distinct communities translated into a strategy of social performance for many Native New Englanders. For example, in 1634, Roger Williams commented that the Narragansett, ‘While . . . amongst the English they keep on the English apparell, but pull of[f] all, as soone as they come againe into their owne Houses, and Company’ (Williams 1936:121). This kind of manipulation not only confused Puritans, whose idea of proper clothing was influenced by sumptuary laws and social protocol, but brought about fear as the distinction between converted and unconverted, ally or not, was more Page 10 of 22

Casting Identity malleable than initially imagined. The power of English clothing in this context, particularly during the period of Metacom’s Rebellion, was unmistakable. Clothing meant to transform the unconverted to Christianity was also used to deceive the viewer, as the same clothing could be used not only to disguise one’s allegiance but also to mock and pose a threat to English manners and masculinity (Little 2001:239; Loren 2013). This suggests that Native New Englanders were overtly aware of the importance of context when performing identity through dress. The use of clothing as a way to disguise allegiance was the one that filled the Puritan imagination with horror. For example, in Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 autobiographical account of her captivity during Metacom’s Rebellion, she (p.259) made reference to the dress of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag sachem, and Weetamoo’s husband Quanopen: He was dressed in his holland shirt, with great laces sewed at the tail of it; he had his silver buttons, his white stockings, his garters were hung round with shillings, and he had girdles of wampum upon his head and shoulders. She had a kersey coat, and covered with girdles of wampum from the loins upward. Her arms from her elbows to her hands were covered with bracelets; there were handfuls of necklaces about her neck, and several sorts of jewels in her ears. She had fine red stockings, and white shoes, her hair powdered and face painted red that was always before black. (Rowlandson 1828:63–4) For Rowlandson, Weetamoo’s dress signified sinful pride, a trait that was intolerable to Puritan ideologies. Rowlandson’s perspective as the wife of a Puritan minister did not allow her to see beyond what she considered to be a sloppy and haphazard wardrobe. From a Native American perspective, however, the varied and diverse clothing and adornments worn by Weetamoo and Quanopen embodied their status and power. Weetamoo, as a Wampanoag leader, and Quanopen as a warrior, were fighting to maintain and protect their communities and traditions (Arnold 1997).

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Casting Identity Materialities Of Identity: The Buttoned Coat Button manufacture was a cottage industry until the mid to late eighteenth century, when button manufacture expanded (White 2005:50; see also Aultman and Grillo 2003; Claasen 1994; Noël Hume 1969). Buttons manufactured in Europe were shipped to North America in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, often listed as ‘haberdashery’ in ship registers and historical accounts. Buttons were also produced at the local level in New England. Using slate moulds such as the ones described here, buttons were made by pouring melted lead or other white metals into the one-part moulds (Hinks 1988:60; Olsen 1964:389). Wire was then affixed to the back of the button, either during the process of casting or soldered on afterward, to create a shank (Zeising 1989). Once the buttons were cooled and set, they were removed from the mould and hand-finished (Olsen 1964:390). Thread could then be passed through the shank to attach it to the clothing. Although both Native Americans and English in the early colonial period were known to have used stone moulds for the casting of lead objects, the majority of archaeologically recovered stone button moulds are from Native American contexts in southern New England (Barber 1984; Willoughby 1935:243–4). In addition to the stone mould recovered by Baker from a field in Lincoln, Massachusetts, one-part stone moulds for casting buttons have been recovered from other seventeenth-century sites located in Yarmouth and (p.260) Natick, Massachusetts, a Narragansett cemetery in Rhode Island (RI-1000), as well as the mid-seventeenth-century Squakheag site of Fort Hill in New Hampshire (PMAE 1924; Rubertone 2001; Thomas 1979:379). A stone mould recovered from a seventeenth-century Wampanoag burial in Kingston, Massachusetts, was found in association with several lead buttons made from the mould (PMAE 1881). The buttons produced from the moulds described here measured approximately 1.5–2 cm in diameter. This size of convex, round shank button was primarily sewn on to fitted frock coats, such as the one worn in a 1651 painting of Puritan Edward Winslow, whose coat sported a modest row of buttons (Figure 11.3). The buttons depicted in this painting, however, are more fanciful than the plain buttons that would have been produced in moulds. While simple in form, buttons produced from stone moulds would have been used as a clothing fastener rather than as a form of adornment (White 2005). The clothing they fastened was markedly different to Native-American manufactured robes and skirts, which hung loosely off the body and were secured with finger-woven sashes, as opposed to tailored clothing cut along the

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Casting Identity shape of the body. Unfettered bodily movement was oppositional to Christian ideals as it (p.261) suggested nakedness and immodesty (Loren 2001, 2010). With this in mind, John Eliot’s 1651 request for clothing, cloth, and haberdashery for residents of the Natick praying town was even more critical for spiritual and cultural transformation (Brenner 1984:291).

While stone button moulds are often singular finds, buttons (both casted and Europeanmanufactured) have been recovered from Fig. 11.3. Portrait of Edward Winslow, numerous seventeenthunknown artist, 1651. century Native Courtesy of Pilgrim Hall Museum. American domestic and burial contexts in southern New England (Brenner 1984; Gibson 1980; Mrozowski et al. 2005, 2009; PMAE 1881; Rubertone 2001; Welters 1993; Willoughby 1935). In the majority of these contexts, buttons have been found alongside artifacts that suggest individuals were mixing Native American and English clothing and adornment styles. In some burial contexts, however, there is no evidence of clothing or adornments present, suggesting a burial common among Christians at the time: the body would be shrouded with a cloth and placed in a coffin (Hodge 2005). To date, only a few praying towns in New England have been subject to archaeological inquiry, notably Natick, Hassanamisco, and Magunkaquog, with the latter being the most extensively excavated (Brenner 1984; Gould 2010; Mrozowski et al. 2005; Mrozowski et al. 2009). While no stone moulds were recovered from Magunkaquog, numerous buttons of English manufacture were recovered from excavations (Mrozowski et al. 2005:65; Mrozowski et al. 2009:452).

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Casting Identity Archaeological and historical evidence indicates that Native New Englanders were adopting English fashions to wear with more familiar Native American clothing and adornments in daily life; even to some degree in praying towns, where English-style clothing was heavily promoted as a visual signifier of one’s allegiance to the Christian god. For converted and unconverted, buttons were integral as the closures on coats that brought the fabric close to the body. For Native New Englanders either working through conversion or struggling against proselytization, a broader and more flexible wardrobe, particularly an English coat outfitted with matching buttons, enabled them more power in political and religious situations, granting them the ability to move through more communities with ease.

Conclusion As archaeologists continue to analyse the details of colonialism and its impact on daily life, it becomes clearer that this past was, in fact, unclear. It was deeply textured and nuanced, and ripe with ambiguity, anxieties, and slippages in the application and negotiations of imperial visions. Current theoretical and methodological perspectives in archaeology, such as those discussed in this volume, seek to capture and embrace the ambiguity of the (p.262) colonial past along with the concurrent ambiguity of the material record and our need to reassess archaeological categories (e.g. Beaudry 2006, 2009; Gosden and Knowles 2001; Lightfoot 1995; Lydon 2009; Silliman 2009; White and Beaudry 2009). In this attention to the materiality of lived colonialisms, ‘small finds’ have emerged as a category of material culture that allow us to talk about the workings of the body in the colonial world; how imperial categories were lived and experienced in the quotidian and how different identities were embodied using material culture (Beaudry 2006, 2009; Loren 2008, 2010; Loren and Beaudry 2006; White 2005; White and Beaudry 2009). As this case study on colonial New England suggests, just one object from the colonial word—a stone mould— provides insight into Puritan and Native American views on the body, identity, and the importance of dress for those navigating the colonial world. The implications of this study move us far beyond previous understandings of the uses and meanings of material culture in colonial contexts, such as resistance and assimilation, into somewhat new and unfamiliar waters. In our navigation, however, archaeologists can now better understand the nuances and materiality of lived colonialisms, as well as the creation and embodiment of more complex, hybridized colonial societies and identities.

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Casting Identity In colonial New England, dress was part of the language of inclusion and exclusion that was created at the intersection of Puritan and Native New England ideologies. How one’s body was clothed and adorned provided for a particular cultural reading based on contextual understandings of dress, body, and place. Quickly shifting and uncertain social, political, and religious interactions shaped the contours of daily practice in colonial New England. For some Native New Englanders living in praying towns or at early Harvard, wearing English-style clothing was the embodiment of their own and their community’s relationship with a Christian god. For other Native Americans, English-style clothing could be worn to achieve different ends: expressing status within Native American and English communities, alliances with the English, or as a way to mock or deceive the English—to be strategic in how dress was embodied and performed (Loren 2013). And whether or not Native New Englanders living within or outisde praying towns could modify their clothing and adornments to indicate their own ideas about the relationship between religion, politics, and identity. In this context, the stone button mould speaks to the ways that colonial peoples chose to outfit themselves on the seventeenth-century New England frontier. Both Native American men and women were known to have worn English-style frock coats (Little 2001:246). Initially traded to facilitate diplomatic relations, English-style clothes quickly joined the wardrobe of many Native New Englanders (Becker 2005; Little 2001; Ulrich 2001). Although such fashion was a sign of religious conversion in some communities, it also signalled high status and power within others. (p.263) While Little (2001:250) argues that Native New Englanders rarely made English-style clothing, the presence of stone moulds in Native New England contexts suggests that these tools for making buttons were more than just novel or exotic funerary objects. Rather, it suggests that these items were incorporated into the seventeenthcentury sumptuary practices of Massachusetts, Nipmuc, and Wampanoag peoples, who used them to make buttons and fasteners to maintain and create a specific wardrobe. The single button mould becomes a meaningful symbol in the social power of dress: it embodies the power with which one had the ability to fashion self and transform identity. But the ways in which these identities could be recast—taken on or off—essentially embodied and disembodied, allow one to move between worlds and express identity and allegiance contextually. Buttons, when attached to a fitted coat and worn in combination with

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Casting Identity distinct objects of adornment or other articles of clothing, permitted the wearer to embody a specific identity: Christian, scholar, leader, or warrior. References Bibliography references: Anderson, Fiona 2005 Fashion: Style, Identity and Meaning. In Exploring Visual Culture: Definitions, Concepts, Contexts, edited by Matthew Rampley, pp. 67–84. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Arnold (Leibman), Laura 1997 ‘Now . . . Didn’t Our People Laugh?’ Female Misbehavior and Algonquian Culture in Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity and Restoration. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 21(4):1–28. Aultman, Jennifer and Kate Grillo 2003 DAACS Cataloging Manual: Buttons. Digital Archaeological Archive of Chesapeake Slavery. Electronic document, accessed 8 February 2008. Barber, R. J. 1984 Treasures in the Peabody’s Basement. Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society 45(2):49–51. Beaudry, Mary C. 2006 Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing. Yale University Press, New Haven. Beaudry, Mary C. 2009 Bodkin Biographies. In The Materiality of Individuality, edited by Carolyn L. White, pp. 95–108. Springer, New York. Becker, Marshall J. 2005 Matchcoats: Cultural Conservatism and Change in One Aspect of Native American Clothing. Ethnohistory 52:727–87. Brenner, Elise 1984 Strategies for Autonomy: An Analysis of Ethnic Mobilization in Seventeenth Century Southern New England. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. University Microfilms, Ann Arbor. Butler, Judith 1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, London. Calefato, Patrizia 2004 The Clothed Body. Berg, Oxford.

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Casting Identity Calloway, Colin G. 1997 New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. (p.264) Chaplin, Joyce E. 2003 Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cipolla, Craig N. 2008 Signs of Identity, Signs of Memory. Archaeological Dialogues 15:196–215. Claasen, Cheryl 1994 Washboards, Pigtoes, and Muckets: Historical Musselling in the Mississippi Watershed. Historical Archaeology 28(2): 1–138. Cogley, Richard W. 1999 John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians Before King Philip’s War. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Colchester, Chloë (ed.) 2003 Clothing the Pacific. Berg, Oxford. Comaroff, Jean 1996 The Empire’s Old Clothes: Fashioning the Colonial Subject. In Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities, edited by David Howes, pp. 19–38. Routledge, New York. Crossland, Zoë 2010 Materiality and Embodiment. In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry, pp. 386–405. Oxford University Press, Oxford. De Marly, Diana 1990 Dress in North America: The New World, 1492– 1800. Holmes and Meier, New York. Deagan, Kathleen 2002 Portable Personal Possessions: Artifacts of the Spanish Colonies of Florida and the Caribbean, 1500–1800, ii. Smithsonian University Press, Washington, DC. Degler, Carl N. 1984 Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America. Harper Collins, New York. DeMarrais, Elizabeth, Chris Gosden, and Colin Renfrew (eds) 2004 Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge. Entwistle, Joanne 2000 The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social Theory. Polity, Cambridge. Entwistle, Joanne and Elizabeth Wilson (eds) 2001 Body Dressing. Berg, Oxford.

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Casting Identity Fisher, Genevieve and Diana DiPaolo Loren 2003 Embodying Identity in Anthropology and Archaeology. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 13: 225–30. Gibson, Susan G. (ed.) 1980 Burr’s Hill, A 17th Century Wampanoag Burial Ground in Warren, Rhode Island. Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Goodwin, Lorinda B. R. 1999 An Archaeology of Manners: The Polite World of the Merchant Elite of Colonial Massachusetts. Springer, New York. Gookin, Daniel 1970 Historical Collections of the Indians in New England; of Their Several Nations, Numbers, Customs, Manners, Religion, and Government Before the English Planted There. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Gosden, Chris 2005 What Do Objects Want? Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 12:193–211. Gosden, Chris, and Chantal Knowles 2001 Collecting Colonialism: Material Culture and Colonial Change. Berg, Oxford. Gould, Donna Rae 2010 Contested Places: The History and Meaning of Hassanamisco. PhD dissertation, University of Connecticut. University Microfilms, Ann Arbor. Heath, Dwight B. (ed.) 1963 A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Mourt’s Relation. Corinth Books, New York. (p.265) Hinks, Stephen 1988 A Structural and Functional Analysis of 18th Century Buttons. Masters thesis, Department of Anthropology, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. Hodge, Christina J. 2005 Faith and Practice at an Early-eighteenthcentury Wampanoag Burial Ground: The Waldo Farm Site in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Historical Archaeology 39(4):73–94. Johannsen, Christina B. 1980 European Trade Goods and Wampanoag Culture in the Seventeenth Century. In Burr’s Hill, A 17th-century Wampanoag Burial Ground in Warren, Rhode Island, edited by Susan G. Gibson, pp. 25–33. Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Joyce, Rosemary 1998 Performing the Body in Pre-Hispanic Central America. Res 33:147–65.

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Casting Identity Joyce, Rosemary 2005 Archaeology of the Body. Annual Review of Anthropology 34:139–58. Kus, Susan 1992 Toward an Archaeology of Body and Soul. In Representations in Archaeology, edited by Jean-Claude Gardin and Christopher Peebles, pp. 168–77. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Lepore, Jill 1998 The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. Knopf, New York. Lightfoot, Kent 1995 Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship between Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology. American Antiquity 60:199–217. Lindman, Jane Moore and Michelle Lise Tarter (eds) 2001 A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York. Little, Ann M. 2001 ‘Shoot That Rogue, for He Hath an Englishman’s Coat On!’: Cultural Cross-dressing on the New England Frontier, 1620– 1760. The New England Quarterly 74(2):238–73. Loren, Diana DiPaolo 2001 Social Skins: Orthodoxies and Practices of Dressing in the Early Colonial Lower Mississippi Valley. Journal of Social Archaeology 1(2):172–89. Loren, Diana DiPaolo 2008 In Contact: Bodies and Landscapes in the 16th- and 17th-century Eastern Woodlands. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Loren, Diana DiPaolo 2010 The Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment in Colonial America. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Loren, Diana DiPaolo 2013 Conisdering Mimicry and Hybridity in Early Colonial New England: Health, Sin and the Body “Behung with Beades.” Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28(1):151–68. Loren, Diana DiPaolo and Mary C. Beaudry 2006 Becoming American: Small Things Remembered. In Historical Archaeology, edited by Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman, pp. 251–71. Blackwell, Oxford. Lydon, Jane 2009 Fantastic Dreaming: The Archaeology of an Aboriginal Mission. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1989 Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge, London. Page 19 of 22

Casting Identity Meskell, Lynn 1999 Archaeologies of Social Life: Age, Sex, Class et cetera in Ancient Egypt. Blackwell, Oxford. Meskell, Lynn 2004 Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present. Blackwell, Oxford. Miller, Daniel (ed.) 2005 Materiality. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina. (p.266) Mrozowski, Stephen A., Holly Herbster, David Brown, and Katherine L. Priddy 2005 Magunkaquog: Native American Conversion and Cultural Persistence. In Eighteenth-century Native Communities of Southern New England in the Colonial Context, edited by Jack Campsi, pp. 57–71. Occasional Paper No. 1, The Mashantucket Museum and Research Center, Mashantucket, Connecticut. Mrozowski, Stephen A., Holly Herbster, David Brown, and Katherine L. Priddy 2009 Magunkaquog Materiality, Federal Recognition, and the Search for a Deeper History. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 13:430–63. Noël Hume, Ivor 1969 A Guide to Artifacts of Colonial America. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Olsen, Stanley J. 1964 A Colonial Button Mold. American Antiquity 29:389–90. [PMAE] Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University 1881 Accession File 81–62, donation of L. H. Keith. On file at Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. [PMAE] Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University 1924 Accession File 24–27, donation of James Baker. On file at Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Pulsifer, David (ed.) 1859 Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England: Acts of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England, 1643–1678/9, vol. 9–10. The Press of William White, Printer to the Commonwealth, Boston, MA. Rowlandson, Mary 1828 A True History of the Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Carter, Andrews, and Company, London.

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Casting Identity Rubertone, Patricia E. 2001 Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Silliman, Stephen W. 2009 Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England. American Antiquity 74:211–30. Silverman, David J. 2005 Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Stoler, Laura Ann 2009 Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Thomas, Peter A. 1979 In the Maelstrom of Change: The Indian Trade and Cultural Process in the Middle Connecticut River Valley: 1635– 1665. PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts. Amherst, MA. Ulrich, Laurel T. 2001 The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. Voss, Barbara L. 2008 The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco. University of California Press, Berkeley. Welters, Linda 1993 From Moccasins to Frock Coat and Back Again: Ethnic Identity and Native American Dress in Southern New England. In Dress in American Culture, edited by Patricia A. Cunningham and Susan Voso Lab, pp. 6–41. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, Bowling Green, Ohio. White, Carolyn L. 2005 American Artifacts of Personal Adornment, 1680–1820: A Guide to Identification and Interpretation. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. White, Carolyn L. and Mary C. Beaudry 2009 Artifacts and Personal Identity. In The International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by Teresita Majewski and David Gaimster, pp. 209–25. Springer, New York. (p.267) Williams, Roger 1936 A Key into the Language of America. Rhode Island and Providence Plantations Tercentenary Committee, Providence.

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Casting Identity Willoughby, Charles C. 1935 Antiquities of the New England Indians with Notes on the Ancient Cultures of the Adjacent Territory. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wood, William 1976 [1865/1635] New England’s Prospect. The Prince Society, Boston. Zeising, Grace H. 1989 Analysis of Personal Effects from Excavations of the Boott Mills Boardinghouse Backlots in Lowell, Massachusetts. In Interdisciplinary Investigations of the Boott Mills, iii, edited by Mary C. Beaudry and Stephen Mrozowski, pp. 141–67. National Park Service, North Atlantic Regional Office, Boston.

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Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse Aboriginal Pottery Production in French Colonial Basse Louisiane and the pays d’en haut Rob Mann

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0013

Abstract and Keywords This chapter focuses on pottery production by Native Americans in French colonial Basse Louisiane and the pays d'en haut, a region that encompasses the western Great Lakes as well as the upper Mississippi and Ohio River valleys. More specifically, it examines both places as a ‘middle ground’ or ‘native ground’ where Natives and newcomers became ‘entangled’ in complex webs of social relations. It also considers the Natives' technological responses to the increasing availability of European-introduced metal kettles, the abandonment of pottery production in the pays d'en haut, and the question of dependency as a trope of the dominant narrative of European colonisation. The chapter concludes by discussing the historicity of Aboriginal pottery. Keywords:   pottery, Native Americans, Basse Louisiane, pays d'en haut, social relations, metal kettles, dependency, colonisation, historicity

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Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse I am the dawn of that light, which is beginning to appear in your lands, as it were, that which precedes the sun, who will soon shine brightly and will cause you to be born again, as if in another land, where you will find, more easily and in greater abundance, all that can be necessary to man. Perrot 1911:1:330

Introduction This remarkable pronouncement is attributed to Nicholas Perrot, a French trader and interpreter, who was one of the first Europeans to record an encounter with the Miami and other Native American nations of the region the French called the pays d’en haut—that is the western Great Lakes, and the upper Mississippi and Ohio River valleys. Perrot, writing in the late seventeenth century, went on to express amazement that Native Americans had been able to survive without the material comforts of civilization: ‘I would not have believed that the earth, the mother of all men, could have furnished you the means of subsistence when you did not possess the light of the Frenchman’ (Perrot 1911:i: 327). I find this account of Perrot’s c. 1665 visit to a joint Miami and Mascouten village, on the Fox River, remarkable not only for its colonialist hubris but also because it sets up the basic categories (e.g. dark vs light, naked vs clothed, savage vs civilized, pagan vs Christian) that underlie subsequent attempts to understand the Miami and other Algonquian nations of the pays d’en haut. Linking these (p.269) categories are the concepts of otherness, inferiority, transformation, and dependency, one seeming to inevitably flow from the other. The transformation was to begin immediately; Perrot presented the young men of the village with a gun, ‘It will . . . be more satisfactory in hunting cattle (i.e. buffalo) and other animals than are all the arrows that you use.’ To the women he tossed a dozen awls and knives and told them to ‘Throw aside your bone bodkins; these French awls will be much easier to use. These knives will be more useful to you in killing beavers and in cutting your meat than are the pieces of stone that you use.’ Next he tossed out some glass beads, saying, ‘these will better adorn your children and girls than do their usual ornaments’ (Perrot 1911:i:331). He gave a kettle to the male elders, saying ‘I carry it everywhere without fear of breaking it.’ By the next week the process seemed to be complete, as Perrot reported that the great chief of the Miami ‘begged him to consecrate him to his Spirit [i.e. the Christian God], whom he would thenceforth acknowledge; he said that he would prefer that Spirit to his own, who had not taught them to make hatchets, kettles, and all else that men need; and he hoped that by

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Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse adoring him they would obtain all the knowledge the French had’ (Perrot 1911:i:332). The archaeological record of the Great Lakes region seems to bear out Perrot’s prophetic harangue and scores of archaeologists have documented the abandonment of Indigenous lithic and ceramic industries as ‘native peoples took up use of “functionally equivalent” kettles and knives’ (Ehrhardt 2005:21). Unfortunately, many archaeologists have also uncritically linked the disappearance of Aboriginal pottery and lithic production to the assumed technological and functional supremacy of European goods. These archaeologists have fallen prey to the same deep-seated colonialist notions of European cultural superiority and the inevitability of Indigenous dependency expressed by Perrot nearly 350 years ago. In this chapter, I seek to shed the baggage of acculturative and dependency models in order to critically investigate post-colonial Native American ceramic industries in the pays d’en haut and the French colony of Louisiane. Though both places were claimed by France as part of its North American empire, they might be more profitably characterized as a ‘middle ground’ (White 1991) or ‘native ground’ (Du Val 2006), where Natives and newcomers became ‘entangled’ in complex webs of social relations (Alexander 1998; Jordan 2009; Thomas 1991). In such contexts, Jordan (2009:32) asserts that power relations are ambiguous and that ‘it is difficult to tell who (if anyone) has the upper hand’. Under such circumstances archaeologists should not assume that changes in Native industries are inherently linked to the introduction of European objects. If the arrival of the French and their material repertoire was the determinative factor driving the abandonment of Indigenous ceramic technologies, as the dominant discourses and narratives profess, then it should hold equally true for the Native societies of both the pays d’en haut and Louisiane. The pays d’en haut was a middle or Native ground, but it was equally a ‘shatter zone’, characterized by ‘the disappearance of Native polities, movements of (p.270) people into tightly compacted and heavily fortified towns, a dramatic loss of life, multiple migrations and splintering of groups, the coalescence of some groups, the disappearance of many, and an overall decline in artistic life’ (Ethridge 2009; see also White 1991:1–2, 14). During the so-called Beaver or Iroquois Wars (c.1641–1701) many Algonquian-speaking groups in the pays d’en haut coalesced in refugee villages west of Lake Michigan to escape depredations by the Iroquois (Tanner 1987:29–35; White 1991:1–49). In the wake of the spread of devastating European pathogens and the decimation of local beaver populations, the Iroquois Page 3 of 30

Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse launched violent incursions into the region in search of beaver, new hunting lands, and human captives to replenish their own populations. The Iroquois campaigns were so effective that ‘a huge area between the Ohio River and the northern shores of the Great Lakes were emptied of inhabitants’ (White 1991:11; see also Drooker 2002). Such massive dislocations caused major social disruptions among the groups clustered together in the refugee centres. French traders, soldiers, and missionaries waded into the chaos with their ‘small but dazzling supplies of goods’, seeking souls, allies, and furs, adding another layer of complexity to an already fraught situation (White 1991:23). When the smoke finally cleared, many of the Algonquian-speaking groups from the depopulated Ohio, Wabash, and Illinois River valleys began to return to their former homelands during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. But these societies had been irrevocably altered during their time in the refugee settlements. For example, groups such as the Miami, Wea, Illinois, Kaskaskia, and many others appear to have abandoned their own ceramic traditions, relying instead upon the now widely available metal kettles and pots introduced by the French (see Anderson 1991, 2009 for the availability of kettles in the Great Lakes between 1715 and 1760). Although the abandonment of Native ceramic industries was neither temporally or geographically uniform across the pays d’en haut, it has been all too tempting for archaeologists working in those areas of the Great Lakes depopulated during the Iroquois Wars to link the absence of Native ceramics on sites occupied by post-refugee period groups to the seemingly natural and inevitable adoption of European kettles during their time in the refugee settlements, where they were encountered by traders such as Perrot. Jones (1988:109) asserts, for example, that by the time the Wea, a sub-group of the Miami, returned to the Wabash Valley in c.1717 they ‘were already dependent upon European trade goods’. So powerful is this assumption that the Aboriginal ceramics recovered from surface surveys at the Wea village site (c.1717–1791), opposite the French post of Ouiatenon, are not considered to be part of the colonial period assemblage of Wea material culture (Jones 1988:Tables 10 and 11). Borrowing Ortner’s (1984:143) metaphor, it is as if the French arrived on the capitalist ship of history, setting Native societies on a path leading inexorably to dependency, decline, and ultimately disappearance, through either (p.271) assimilation or annihilation. The continuity of Native pottery production in another ‘shatter zone’, Louisiane, for well over a century after the arrival of the French, however, belies any simplistic, functionalist understanding of Native Page 4 of 30

Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse responses to colonialism and its material accoutrements. Rather, an archaeology of ‘Native-lived colonialism’ (Ferris 2009) is adopted here, with the goal of coming to an understanding of the historically specific political-economic processes that facilitated both changes and continuities in the production of pottery among Indigenous groups in the pays d’en haut and Louisiane. In the pays d’en haut, the French colonial political economy revolved around the fur trade. The intensification of the fur trade is examined as a possible factor in bringing about fundamental changes in the gendered relations of production of the Native inhabitants of the region. Basse Louisane, that part of the French colony of Louisiane roughly coterminous with the Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) and the adjacent Gulf Coast, has been likened to the ‘middle ground’ of the pays d’en haut (Ethridge 2009:61, n. 123). Certainly, there are many similarities between the ethnogenesis of fur trade society in the Great Lakes and the creolized society of French Louisiane (see Dawdy 2000a, 2008; Mann 2004, 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2010). In Basse Louisane, however, French-Native American social relations took a slightly different historical trajectory. In addition to the fur trade (mostly in deer hides), various other means of production prevailed. Farming, gathering, hunting, fishing, and herding practices crossed intercultural lines, creating what historian Daniel Usner (1992:147) describes as a ‘frontier exchange economy’. In this face-to-face world, ‘foodstuffs produced in both Indian villages and colonial settlements circulated through a diffuse network of crosscultural exchange’ (Usner 1992:196–7). As in the pays d’en haut, women’s productive activities in Basse Louisane were undoubtedly altered by the coming of the French. In at least some groups, though, women continued to make pottery, including small containers such as bowls that were part of the mundane, everyday rituals related to social reproduction and identity maintenance, often revolving around foodways, gifting, and sharing. From a Native-centric perspective, then, Perrot’s harangue to the Miami and Mascouten looks less prophetic than haughty, just another arrogant European espousing the ‘standard view’ of technology and its role in Western culture and ideology (Ehrhardt 2005:12–15; Pfaffenberger 1992).

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Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse The Standard View In her recent work addressing the technological responses of the Illinois Indians to the increasing availability of European-introduced copper-based metal objects such as kettles, Kathleen Ehrhardt (2005:12–15), following (p.272) Pfaffenberger (1992), outlines the ‘standard view’ of ‘what happens when industrial artifacts or modern technologies are introduced into “traditional societies”’. The ‘standard view’ posits, among other things: 1) that Indigenous peoples instantly and irresistibly recognize the superiority of European goods and materials, leading to a ‘hopeless dependency’ upon them; 2) that traditional industries and technologies are quickly abandoned and that the skills associated with them are quickly forgotten; 3) that as European goods are adopted, so are European lifeways, including conversion to Christianity; and finally 4) that the outcome of this unilinear process is taken to be self-evident, predetermined, and inevitable (Ehrhardt 2005:13). Clearly, this ‘mythic’ narrative has its roots in the colonialist discourses of Perrot and other colonial agents. Just as clearly, it has influenced the interpretations of generations of Great Lakes archaeologists, who have seemingly documented this very process in the archaeological record. Perhaps no article of European manufacture has elicited the assumptions of the ‘standard view’ as much as the common metal kettle. The role of these mundane objects in the material transformation of Native societies has been the subject of much archaeological and ethnohistorical research (e.g. Anselmi 2008; Ehrhardt 2005, 2013; Fitzgerald et al. 1993; Martelle 2004:36–8; Martin 1975; Moreau 1998; Turgeon 1997; van Dongen 1996). Most of these scholars explicitly eschew the acculturative assumptions that flow from the ‘standard view’, and new frameworks for understanding the complexities of colonial interactions are becoming commonplace (e.g. Cobb 2003b; Cusick 1998; Dawdy 2000b; Ehrhardt 2005; Ferris 2009; Lightfoot 1995; Nassaney and Johnson 2000; Silliman 2005). Yet, much archaeological work in the pays d’en haut remains underwritten by the seemingly straightforward cause-and-effect relationship between the introduction of copper-based kettles and the abandonment of Native ceramic industries. Take, for example, Mason’s (1981:377–8) exuberant description of the impact of the introduction of metal kettles to the Native societies of the Great Lakes:

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Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse Consider the brass kettle . . . it was light and would stand up to abuse. Its sides seemed so thin that thumb and finger could almost feel each other when the vessel was picked up . . . Compare that with the thickness and capacity of a clay pot of equivalent capacity! Brass kettles cooked faster, traveled easier, and much more often bounced than broke when dropped . . . Brass kettles were marvelous things indeed. Once introduced into a community, their superiority over the traditional clay cooking pots ensured there was no voluntary turning back from their use.1 On the surface, Mason’s logic is difficult to assail. After all, the archaeological record in the Great Lakes does indicate the ‘abrupt decline in aboriginal (p.273) crafts—particularly pottery’ early in the historic period (Brown and Sasso 2001:212–13; see also Brose 1983:210; Ehrhardt 2010:263; Walthall 1992:156; Waselkov 2009:622). In addition, there are virtually no ethnohistorical accounts of pottery manufacture among Great Lakes Native societies. The Recollect missionary Father Gabriel Sagard-Théodat’s 1632 narrative of his ten months among the Huron in 1623–1624 is probably the most detailed mention of pottery-making in the pays d’en haut (Kinietz 1977:47; see also Martelle 2004:26). Detailed archaeological studies can be seen to back up these general sentiments. Analysis of Aboriginal pottery from an eighteenth-century Kaskaskia village in the Illinois Country, for example, indicated that the Kaskaskia had abandoned pottery manufacture by 1720 (Emerson and Brown 1992:107; Walthall and Emerson 1992). At the multi-component Rock Island site, Mason (1986:210) concluded that ‘Native pottery was the first to go. This native industry seems to have expired by the 1730s.’ In Mason’s (1986:210) analysis, the replacement of Indigenous technologies was an ‘immutable process’ and pottery, as opposed to lithic industries, for example, seemed especially vulnerable. According to Mason (1986:210) the reason that pottery-making reached obsolescence before the chipped stone industry reflected not only the ‘somewhat more complicated procedures required in pottery making, which would accordingly be more vulnerable to interference as social roles responded to the breakdown of native self-sufficiency and the demands of the fur trade, but also the simple fact that brass kettles became increasingly available’. But it was not only that European kettles were readily available, it was that the ‘efficiency and durability’ of metal containers over earthenware pots was of ‘a different order of magnitude than those between a flint and metal arrowhead’ (Mason 1986:210).

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Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse James Fitting’s (1976) study of Tionontate Huron villagers in Upper Michigan is a particularly striking example of an attempt to quantify the assumptions of the ‘standard view’. Working within an explicitly adaptationist framework, Fitting applied Leslie White’s formula for calculating the degree of cultural development to the relative efficiency of Native and European technologies (Ehrhardt 2005:17). Based on comparisons of weighted artifact frequencies from a Late Woodland village and the Huron village site, Fitting postulated that one European iron tool was as efficient as twenty-three Aboriginal stone tools and that one European copper kettle was equivalent to sixty aboriginal pottery vessels (Fitting 1976:329). Recent studies, however, call into question the durability of the kettles actually found on sites in North America (Martelle 2004:37). Further, as Ehrhardt (2005:18) points out, Fitting’s technological determinism does not take into consideration culturally specific understandings of ‘efficiency’ or desirability. Martelle (2004:37) notes that the adoption of metal kettles for cooking would have also entailed changes in not only how meals were cooked but to the whole rhythm of daily life for both men and women. Metal kettles (p.274) used in cooking may have also imparted undesirable tastes to the food cooked in them (Martelle 2004:37–8). The adoption of metal kettles in the pays d’en haut, then, cannot be reduced to supposedly universal impulses of economic rationalism, which ultimately transformed Great Lakes Native societies into the dependent ‘children’ of a benevolent and technologically superior French ‘father’.

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Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse Deconstructing Dependency Scholars like Mason and Fitting privileged the dependency discourse of Perrot and other colonizers when faced with interpreting the abandonment of pottery production in the pays d’en haut. Like the now thoroughly critiqued notion of acculturation, dependency is a hard-toshake trope of the dominant narrative of European colonization; a narrative that presupposes the material superiority of European goods and a capitalistic conceptualization of those goods. This perspective emphasizes the exchange and use-value of material objects over the social relations that they explicitly or implicitly entail (Galloway 2009; Mann 2004). In these narratives there is an undercurrent of economic formalism that paints Indigenous peoples as child-like capitalists-inwaiting, who quickly and passively become dependent upon European goods and acquire ‘mercantilistic or materialistic attitudes’ (Branstner 1992:188; Ferris 2009:13; Thomas 1991). Even though tempered somewhat by recent concepts such as Richard White’s (1991) ‘Middle Ground’, the ultimate fate of Native societies in most historical narratives remains one of decline, dependency, assimilation, and obscurity (Miller 1996). According to Ferris (2009:15) the insidiousness of dependency theory is that it ‘framed any consideration of Native peoples within the Euro-centric history of capitalist endeavors . . . There was no capacity, regardless of where food or supplies came from, to consider the multitude of complex human behaviors going on within and between communities, and the histories of these peoples occurring beyond the mercantile dimension.’ Ferris (2009:25–6; see also chapters by Oliver and Silliman, this volume) suggests a ‘conceptual shift’ away from acculturation and dependency models and towards a focus on ‘complex internal processes of identity maintenance and revision through acceptance and rejection of external innovations (ideological or material)’. This emphasis on ‘endogenous historicity’ allows us to better understand local worlds within the global processes of which they were a part (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:27). When it comes to the material objects recovered archaeologically from Native American sites of the colonial period, a fully endogenous historicity must seek to ‘rupture the basic tropes’ of capitalist ideology that have become ingrained in Western historiography and archaeology (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:27).

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Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse (p.275) Endogenous Historicity and Pottery Production in Basse Louisiane In 1832, a French traveller named C. C. Robin came across a group of Native Americans camping along the Black River not far from Marksville, Louisiana (Brain 1988:306). The camp consisted of about a dozen families living in small palmetto-thatched huts. Robin noted that each family had ‘its hut, its chickens, its dogs, some iron, copper, wooden and clay pots’. ‘These last,’ he went on, ‘are made by kneading ground up shells into the clay before firing’ (Robin 1966:130). Thus, over one-hundred-and-thirty years after the French began colonizing the Lower Mississippi Valley and Gulf Coast, at least some Native groups were still producing shell-tempered pottery. The persistence of Aboriginal pottery production in Basse Louisiane flies in the face of the acculturation and dependency theory models that archaeologists and historians have employed to understand Native American societies in the colonial period. Yet, so seductive is the economic rationalism of dependency discourses that Southeastern historians and archaeologists have largely accepted the underlying tenets of the ‘standard view’, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In a study of French and Native American relations on the southern frontier (1699–1762), Woods (1980:36) stated that ‘the Indians quickly discovered that metal cookware was nearly unbreakable and could endure the heat of an open fire for much longer than could pots made of clay’. Likewise, Kniffen et al. (1987:164), writing about the historic Native American tribes of Louisiana, assert that ‘after white contact, metal and mass-produced wares rapidly eroded the ceramic traditions of the tribes’. In the early 1980s, Stephen Williams (1981:116) summed up the thinking of many Southeastern archaeologists on this subject, ‘I am afraid that many of us, this writer included, have been led to feel that most southeastern Indians stopped making pottery in the eighteenth century, at least stopped making anything worth looking at from an archaeological point of view.’ Historic Native American pottery became an example of what Cobb (2003a:1) calls ‘data habitus’, empirical taken-for-granteds ‘that are seemingly unremarkable in and of themselves’. Indeed, despite the contradictory claims to the contrary, Southeastern archaeologists have long recognized that Native groups in the LMV continued to produce pottery well into the colonial period (Brain 1979:224, 1988:327; Brown 1985, 1992; Mann 2010:244–53; Waselkov 2009:622). The presence of Aboriginal pottery on sites from the historic period was foundational to the ‘edifice of Lower Valley culture history’, to borrow Brain’s (1988:48) metaphor. In the construction of this culture history, Henry B. Collins (1927), James A. Ford (1936), William Page 10 of 30

Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse G. Haag (1953), and other pioneer LMV archaeologists employed the Direct Historical Approach (DHA), which ‘sought to connect named Native tribes of the historic period with protohistoric and prehistoric (p.276) archaeological remains’ (Galloway 2006:59; see also Brain 1988:50–5). As a result of the application of the DHA, considerable effort has gone into locating, recording, and excavating colonial-period Aboriginal sites, resulting in the identification of a multitude of ceramic types made during the colonial period (e.g. Brain 1988; Brown 1985; Ford 1936; Neitzel 1983, 1997; Phillips 1970). Yet, due to the doxic assumptions of dependency and acculturation theories, few studies have attempted to understand the significance of postcolonial pottery production in Basse Louisiane beyond issues of ethnic affiliation (e.g. Cordell 2002; Silvia 2002). Here I focus on a particular style of historic Aboriginal pottery. Redfilmed (or slipped) pottery became widely popular in Basse Louisiane during the colonial period (Waselkov and Gums 2000:131; see Belmont and Williams 1981 on the persistence of red-filmed wares in the LMV from the early Marksville period onwards). Waselkov and Gums (2000:131) have noted that coloured films or washes were ‘important attributes’ of historic Aboriginal pottery and three major types of films —red, brown, and black—were used during the historic period. The films were applied by dipping dry, leather-hard pots into pigmented clay slurry before firing (Waselkov and Gums 2000:131). In the LMV, two primary types of red-filmed pottery have been identified: Chicot Red and Old Town Red. In general, Old Town Red encompasses all varieties of shell-tempered, red-filmed pottery in the LVM. The label Chicot Red, on the other hand, seems to be applied to both grog-tempered, red-filmed pottery in the Mobile Bay region of the Gulf Coast and finely, shell-tempered, red-filmed pottery in the LMV (see Brain 1988:344; Hunter 1985:89; Waselkov and Gums 2000:131). On the Gulf Coast, red-filmed, shell-tempered pottery (Old Town Red and Chicot Red in the LMV) is generally typed as Pensacola Red (Waselkov and Gums 2000:131). These types have been parsed into a number of varieties. Varieties of Old Town Red, for example, include St Pierre, Ballground, and Rapides (see Brain 1988:734; Hunter 1985:88– 90; Phillips 1970). At least four different LMV Native groups (the Yazoo, Koroa, Tunica, and Natchez) and various small, independent Gulf Coast Native groups have been associated with these types and varieties of red-filmed pottery (Brain 1988; Brown 1985; Cordell 2002; Hunter 1985; Silvia 2002; Waselkov and Gums 2000). These petites nations, as the French called them, did not coalesce with larger groups or join

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Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse confederacies, but rather ‘joined their lives with Africans, Europeans, and other Native refugees to develop a unique economy and Creole culture’ (Ethridge 2009:37). While this is not the place for a thorough discussion or critique of the type-variety system (see Gibson 1993), there does seem to be some typological angst surrounding the classification of red-filmed wares. In their discussion of red-filmed wares found on the Gulf Coast, Waselkov and Gums (2000:131) declare that since ‘the origins of red filming remains poorly understood, we have refrained from adopting any of these existing type names, any one of which (p.277) would imply a geographical source for this surface treatment that is still undetermined’. I understand and concur with Waselkov and Gums’ (2000:131) hesitancy. Not only do type designations imply possible geographical origins, the varieties of these types tend to make ethnic associations that may or may not be warranted. Furthermore, the dictates of the DHA and a culture-history paradigm have engendered a seemingly innate desire among Southeastern archaeologists to establish new varieties. As Jon Gibson (1993:28) put it, ‘literally any criterion, objective or prospective, could be used to justify a variety . . . Defining and naming varieties became a sort of coming of age ceremony for young southeasterners.’ Such typological quagmires are counterproductive. The important point here is that well into the nineteenth century, Native women throughout Basse Louisiane were producing a red-filmed pottery that looked very much the same regardless of group affiliation. It is as if Southeastern archaeologists have had difficulty seeing the pot for all the pot sherds; I am not referring simply to determinations of vessel form and/or vessel function, though these are clearly important. Equally important is the social life (Appadurai 1986) of the pots and visualizing them as constituent components of the daily practices of life in a frontier exchange economy—from production, to their use in local, Native American and/or multi-ethnic domestic contexts, to their transmittal to and use in French, Creole, and Anglo-American rural and urban households (see also Silliman 2009:214). The best documentary information concerning pottery production, use, and exchange during the French colonial period comes from two eighteenth-century chroniclers, François Dumont de Montigny and Antoine Simon Le Page du Pratz, both generally recognized as being reliable sources of ethnohistorical observations (Brain 1988:18). They make clear the gendered nature of pottery production, and Dumont de Montigny’s account further suggests the generational nature of the relations of pottery production: ‘the industry of these Indian girls and Page 12 of 30

Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse women is admirable. I have already reported elsewhere with what skill, with only their fingers and without a potter’s wheel, they make all sorts of pottery’ (cited in Waselkov and Gums 2000:45). Dumont de Montigny described the process in great detail, noting that the women collected ‘clay suitable for this sort of work’, cleaned the impurities from the clay, crushed shells ‘to a very fine powder’, mixed the temper with clay, and kneaded the mixture with their hands and feet to ‘make a paste from which they make long rolls of six to seven pieds (about 2 to 2.3 meters) and a thickness that suits them’ (Waselkov and Gums 2000:45). ‘With admirable speed and dexterity,’ he continued, ‘they make all kinds of earthen utensils, dishes, plates, pans, pots, pitchers, some of which hold forty or fifty pints’ (Waselkov and Gums 2000:45). Le Page du Pratz noted that the Native women of the Natchez Bluffs ‘made pots of extraordinary size’, as well as various other vessel forms including ‘pitchers with a small opening, plates, two-pint bottles with long necks, pots or pitchers for their bear oil that holds up to forty pints; lastly, large and small plates in (p.278) the French style’ (cited in Waselkov and Gums 2000:45). Le Page du Pratz was intrigued by these copy wares (colonowares) and ‘had some made out of curiosity upon the model of my faience, which are a rather pretty red’ (Waselkov and Gums 2000:45). In addition to providing one of the best historical references to Native American-made copy wares, Le Page du Pratz also provides perhaps the only historical mention of the red-filmed pottery discussed here. Interestingly, neither account mentioned bowls in the lists of vessel types produced by Native women. The archaeological record, though, demonstrates that bowls were an important component of the ceramics used in colonial households, be they Native American, French, Creole, Anglo-American or some combination thereof (Silvia 2002:32–3). For example, at the c.1765–1780 Augustin Rochon plantation site near Mobile Bay, nearly all of the Native American ceramics were plain or red-filmed, sand and/or shell-tempered, simple bowls (Waselkov and Gums 2000:48; see also Cordell 2002:47–8; Silvia 2002:30). Likewise, at the Red River Apalachhee village site, Hunter (1985:89) found that the majority of the red-filmed sherds from the site came from relatively small, shallow, and simple unrestricted bowls. A similar pattern seems to hold for the red-filmed wares found on sites ranging from the multiethnic trading community of Bayou Pierre in northwest Louisiana to urban French Creole sites in New Orleans (Dawdy 2000b:113; Dawdy and Matthews 2010; Girard et al. 2008:165–7; Matthews 2001a; Waselkov and Gums 2000:48).

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Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse This preponderance of bowls is significant because one of the arguments put forth regarding the presence of historic Aboriginal pottery on European sites is that they were merely containers ‘for some more valuable commodity, such as bear oil or hickory nut oil’ (Waselkov and Gums 2000:48). It is clear from the ethnohistorical record that bear oil was an important item of trade within the LMV frontier market economy (Brown 1992:20–1). Both Native and colonial inhabitants used bear oil for cooking and as a curative elixir for rheumatism (Usner 1992:206). While Le Page du Pratz (cited in Waselkov and Gums 2000:45) does mention Native-made ‘pots or pitchers for their bear oil’, bear oil seems to have been traded more commonly in deer heads plugged with a paste of ashes and fat, or in dried bladders. Usner (1992:206) notes that in the 1720s, one ‘Deer of oil’ was worth one gun or a yard of cloth (see also Brown 1992:20–1 for a mention of large ‘deerskin containers’ of oil). The problem with the oil container argument is twofold. First, and quite simply, the red-filmed bowls found archaeologically tend to be small and shallow, making them unlikely candidates for bear or hickory nut oil containers. More significant, though, is that the oil container argument is framed within the Eurocentric and capitalist-centric context of commodity exchange. Indeed, most explanations of historic Aboriginal pottery, especially when found in non-Native contexts, revolve around capitalist-centric notions of ‘market forces’ (cf. Matthews 2001a, 2001b; Voss 1995). Waselkov and Gums (2000:48, emphasis added), for example, suggest that since percentages of ‘plain and (p.279) painted bowls seem to be higher at colonial than at native sites, where incised and combed vessels are more prevalent . . . native potters apparently found a readier market for certain of their wares than for others among the colonists’. Likewise, Silvia (2002:32–3) suggests that the presence of large quantities of Native-made ceramics, ‘particularly bowls’ at French colonial habitation sites on Mobile Bay were due to a great market demand for these items. But it does not seem productive to explain away historic Aboriginal pottery production as simply a function of the market, ostensibly transforming Native women into petty commodity producers, much the way that male Native hunters were supposedly transformed into a ‘forest proletariat’ by the fur trade (Hickerson 1973). In French Louisiane, Galloway (2009:341) asserts that ‘during the eighteenth century, capitalism did not play a significant part in the Choctaw understanding of the proper functioning of their economy’. Among the Choctaw, the exchange of Native-made ceramics and other household utensils involved in the preparation and presentation of food falls within what Galloway (2009:345) calls the subsistence sphere of Page 14 of 30

Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse exchange. It was within the subsistence sphere that Europeans most fully participated in exchange relations with Native American groups (Galloway 2009:345). Furthermore, documentary evidence reveals that when food was gifted, women presented cooked or processed food (Galloway 2009:352–3), suggesting that gifts of food from Native women must have been presented in baskets, wooden containers, or ceramic vessels. Keeping in mind that the French also had a deep tradition of gifting food in the subsistence sphere of exchange (Zemon-Davis 2000:34–5), it seems possible that these consumable objects of exchange (food and food containers) were viewed as gifts by both Natives and Europeans. This may explain why, as Silvia (2002:29) notes, there are few if any historical documents that record transactions involving the exchange of Native-made ceramics for European goods. As I have argued elsewhere, the more formal forms of exchange (as in the exchange of furs for European goods) that are the subject of the bulk of the documentary record of the ‘fur trade’ brought to light the contradictions that inhere in and between commodities (in their fetishized capitalist form) and gifts, requiring trade rituals such as smoking tobacco to cover the contradiction thereby transforming gifts into commodities and vice versa (Mann 2004; see also Galloway 2009:341; Thomas 1991:29).

The ‘Dietary Frontier’ and a Native-Centric Approach to Historic Aboriginal Pottery Clearly, we need to refocus our analytical gaze if we want to see redfilmed bowls from a Native-centric rather than capitalist-centric perspective. It has been noted that a ‘near-universal absence of exterior charring or other (p.280) evidence of use wear’ rules out the possibility that they were being used in cooking or food preparation (Waselkov and Gums 2000:48). That leaves us with bowls—plain and simple food-serving containers. But as is often the case, even the most mundane practices of daily life are implicated in much larger social processes. Food in the LMV was not only an object of exchange but also a ‘means of exchange’ (Usner 1992:192). As Braudel noted, colonies were ‘dietary frontiers’, where ‘eating other people’s bread’ created, maintained, and reproduced real and fictive social relations (Braudel 1980:163–72, cited in Usner 1992:192). On the other hand, reluctance or refusal to partake of other people’s bread could lead to conflict, sometimes jeopardizing entire colonies (Usner 1992:194). Women’s roles as pottery producers in colonial times were also deeply implicated in the production and reproduction of the social rituals pertaining to foodways and gifting/sharing. Consider French carpenter André Pénicaut’s account of his visit to a Pascagoula village in 1699. Page 15 of 30

Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse Upon the arrival of a small party of Frenchmen, the Pascagoula gave them something to drink and eat, including ‘some of their sagamité, which is a kind of pap made from maize and green beans . . . They have some dishes made of wood and others of clay, which, even though made by the hands of savages, are nonetheless very well made indeed. The savages’ women also make great earthen pots, designed almost like big kettles . . . [and] in these they cook their sagamité for two or three families’ (Pénicaut 1953:18–19). Among many Native American groups, to eat from a common dish was a standard metaphor of peace, friendship, and alliance (White 1991:441). Within Native households, eating and sharing food from Native-made bowls would have been part of mundane daily practices that continuously produced and reproduced kinship and identity. Here it is important to consider the possible significance of the colour of the bowls found in Native American household contexts. Waselkov and Gums (2000:131) have intriguingly suggested that both red and black filming on historic Aboriginal pottery had significant ‘symbolic import’. They note that red and white represent the historic Creek moieties and that black and white were ‘symbolically interchangeable according to eighteenth-century Creek beliefs’ (Waselkov and Gums 2000:131). This leads them to speculate that the colour of filmed pottery might reflect clan or moiety affiliations (Waselkov and Gums 2000:131; see also Cobb and Drake 2008:87–8). This might have been particularly important during the chaotic and fractious eighteenth century, when identities were anything but stable. As Voss (1995:30) has asserted regarding the persistence of pottery production among the Choctaw, ‘to the extent that pottery was visible daily within the household and also during special rituals and feasts, it would have been a suitable vehicle for symbolizing social and ethnic identity at a time when promoting unity would have been particularly important’. (p.281) It is clear that food and the vessels it was served in performed both mundane and ‘deeply ritual’ functions within Native societies (Voss 1995). Thus, it should not be surprising that at least in some settings when food (and I argue here its pottery containers) was part of the exchange process between Native Americans and Europeans, it ‘was treated as a gift that held participants together in a kinship like relationship’ (Usner 1992:211, emphasis added). While Usner (1992:211) states that this was more likely the case in more formal relations between Natives and colonial officials, I argue that such a perspective is an artifact of the colonial archives. It seems just as likely that small gifts of food were part and parcel of the countless, small-

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Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse scale, face-to-face interactions between colonizers and the colonized that created and reproduced the Creole societies so commonly associated with French (and later Spanish) Louisiane. Shannon Dawdy and Christopher Matthews (2010:284–5) reached a similar conclusion, noting that the Native American pottery found on sites in French colonial New Orleans, ‘may have served to symbolize peaceful and productive relations that were enacted through gift exchanges between trading partners living on two sides of a politically dangerous cultural divide’ (see also Matthews 2001a:80–7). Rather than merely ‘symbolizing’ those relations, though, these vessels were constitutive components of those relations. The small red-slipped pottery bowls found in non-Native colonial contexts may have been the containers of socially charged gifts of food (perhaps along with Nativemade baskets and wooden bowls that have not survived in the archaeological record). In such contexts, the presentation of food in Native-made containers meant that these vessels were indeed the ‘materialization of the intercultural alliances that formed the basis of early New Orleans society’ (Matthews 2001a:85).

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Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse Conclusion Indigenous pottery production in the pays d’en haut and Basse Louisiane followed different historical trajectories during the colonial period. In the pays d’en haut, pottery production seems largely to have been abandoned by many groups within the first few decades after contact with Europeans, an outcome seemingly predicted by the ‘standard view’ of technological change in colonial contexts. Rooted in powerful colonialist discourses of dependency, which assume the superiority of Western technologies, the ‘standard view’ has provided archaeologists working on colonial sites in the Great Lakes with a ready-made explanation for the apparent correlation between the disappearance of Native pottery and the introduction of European metal kettles. The Native pottery produced in Basse Louisiane well into the nineteenth century, however, belies such simple, functionalist interpretations regardless of how seductive and parsimonious they may seem. Red-filmed, shell-tempered (p.282) pottery, mostly in the form of small, shallow bowls, are found alongside European metal containers on Native American, Euro-American, and multi-ethnic sites throughout Basse Louisiane. My contention is that these vessels were part of social rituals related to the preparation, sharing, and gifting of food on the gendered and dietary frontiers of Basse Louisiane. As such they helped to create and reproduce social relations within Native households and villages, as well as between both European newcomers and other Native groups—perhaps even those who had stopped producing their own pottery in the pays d’en haut (see Brose 1983:222; Walthall 1992:162–4). Although it remains unclear why Great Lakes Native peoples abandoned pottery production while Native potters in the LMV and along the Gulf Coast continued to make at least some traditional forms and styles of pottery, it does seem certain that we need to examine these processes from a Native-centric perspective. From such a view, we will be able to re-centre our focus on the gendered social relations of production and exchange that structured both the cessation and persistence of pottery production in Native communities. For instance, it is clear that the fur trade altered and reshaped the productive activities of Native women in the pays d’en haut (Albers 2002:119; Delâge 1993:161; Devens 1992:14–18; Martelle 2004:24, 31; SleeperSmith 2001:74–84; Spector 1993; Wolf 1982:161). Branstner (1992:191), for example, suggests that the cessation of pottery manufacture at a late seventeenth-/early eighteenth-century Tionontate Huron village site in Upper Michigan was related to changing postcolonial gender roles; the ‘selection of metal containers over Page 18 of 30

Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse ceramic suggests there may have been a reallocation of the pot maker’s time for other duties. Perhaps Huron women were spending more time producing a corn surplus for trade’ (see also Sleeper-Smith 2001; Spector 1993). Corn agriculture was labour-intensive and women in the pays d’en haut controlled the management and allocation of this resource (Martelle 2004:31; Sleeper-Smith 2001:32–3; Spector 1993:76–7). The intensification of corn production brought on by the demands of the fur trade meant that women devoted more time to the seasonally laborious tasks of planting, hoeing, monitoring, and harvesting corn crops. Once the crop was in, women then undertook the ‘time-consuming and physically demanding’ task of processing the corn—pounding, grinding, and sifting the grain into consumable products (Martelle 2004:31). In the pays d’en haut, pottery production was also a seasonal activity that was likely conducted during the most labour-intensive periods of the agricultural cycle (Martelle 2004:32). The long, cold winters, which characterize much of the pays d’en haut, would impede, if not prohibit, the production of pottery during much of the annual cycle that structured daily life (see Spector 1993:61–77). In the more temperate climes of Basse Louisiane, Native women did not have to contend with the same environmental constraints that hampered pottery production to the north. This is not to suggest that the changes to the productive (p.283) activities of Native women in Basse Louisiane brought on by the coming of the French should be minimized. It simply points to the fact that Native potters here had more opportunity to build pottery production into the seasonal rhythms of life. The red-filmed bowls and other Native-made ceramics recovered archaeologically are the material expression of the decision by countless Native women to persist in the socially significant practice of pottery production despite their ready access to (and indeed use of) supposedly more durable metal kettles and other reputedly technologically superior European objects. Colonialist discourses such as that espoused by Nicholas Perrot were part and parcel of larger Western ideologies and colonial practices that denigrated Indigenous technologies throughout the world. Much of this colonialist baggage still underlies Western assumptions about how, why, and when Indigenous technologies were abandoned or transformed in colonial settings. These discourses, as exemplified by the ‘standard view’, presuppose technological transformation and cultural assimilation to be the ultimate outcome of colonial encounters. Indigenous persistence, of course, puts the lie to such overblown assessments of European hegemony and to the notion that Native Page 19 of 30

Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse peoples felt an ‘irresistible magnetism’ toward European goods and technology (Thomas 1991:87). But as Silliman (2009, this volume) and others (Harrison 2003, 2006; Oliver this volume) note, persistence is not just, or even necessarily, about resistance. Dichotomies such as assimilation/resistance or continuity/change do not offer productive ways to envision the multitude of ways that people and things became entangled in colonial contexts (see Silliman 2009, this volume; Oliver this volume). It is within these disparate contexts that we must look for the reasons why Indigenous groups chose to maintain, alter, abandon, or even revive certain technologies, practices, or beliefs (Harrison 2003, 2006; Thomas 1991:88). All of these options are meaningful acts of Native agency that opened different paths to survivance (see Silliman, this volume). For many groups in the pays d’en haut this meant abandoning pottery production. This act of forgetting, though, does not mean that their culture became less ‘authentic’, that they became less Indigenous, or that they forgot their own histories or identities (Silliman 2009:223). Likewise, the persistence of pottery in Basse Louisiane does not indicate a stronger connection to traditional technologies. Neither does it signal an act of ‘resistance’ to colonialism, since metal kettles and pots were apparently readily adopted and used alongside earthenware vessels. The French who came to North America imagined that they were bringing light, as embodied in their bright, shiny objects, and enlightenment, as embodied in the Bibles of the Black Robes, to a dark and desolate land. In certain places and at certain times, Native peoples were indeed impressed by the possibilities that these new objects and ideas presented. The processes by which new items were adopted, modified, or rejected, however, were negotiated within Indigenous social contexts. As archaeologists, we must remain attuned to these contexts and to the material remains of the daily practices that reflect the (p.284) outcomes of these processes. While on the surface some Native decisions may seem to fulfil colonial desires and imaginings, we should be wary of interpretations that reproduce the untenable assumptions embedded within colonialist discourses of dependency and decline. Native groups in the pays d’en haut and Basse Louisiane charted different paths of persistence as they encountered and became entangled with the French and other Europeans in new colonial settings. Following these Native pathways, rather than a supposedly predestined road to ‘civilization’, will enable us to shine a new light on colonialism and its consequences. References

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Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse Perrot, Nicholas 1911 Memoir on the Manners, Customs, and Religion of the Savages of North America. In The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Region of the Great Lakes, 2 vols, edited by Emma Helen Blair. Arthur H. Clark, Cleveland. Pfaffenberger, Bryan 1992 Social Anthropology of Technology. Annual Review of Anthropology 21:491–516. Phillips, Philip 1970 Archaeological Survey in the Lower Yazoo Basin, Mississippi, 1949–1947. Papers of the Peabody Museum, vol. 60, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Robin, Claude C. 1966 Robin’s Voyage to Louisiana, 1803–1805, translated by Stuart O. Landry. Pelican, New Orleans. Silliman, Stephen 2005 Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America. American Antiquity 70:55–74. Silliman, Stephen 2009 Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England. American Antiquity 74:211–30. (p.289) Silvia, Diane E. 2002 Native American and French Cultural Dynamics on the Gulf Coast. Historical Archaeology 36(1):26–35. Sleeper-Smith, Susan 2001 Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounters in the Western Great Lakes. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst. Spector, Janet D. 1993 What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village. Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul. Tanner, Helen Hornbeck 1987 Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Thomas, Nicholas 1991 Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Turgeon, Laurier 1997 Tale of the Kettle: Odyssey of an Intercultural Object. Ethnohistory 44:1–29. Usner, Daniel H. 1992 Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

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Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse van Dongen, Alexandra 1996 The Inexhaustible Kettle: The Metamorphosis of a European Utensil in the World of the North American Indians. In One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure, edited by Alexandra van Dongen, pp. 115–74. Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Voss, Jerome A. 1995 The Persistence of Choctaw Pottery. Mississippi Archaeology 30(1):21–34. Walthall, John A. 1992 Aboriginal Pottery and the Eighteenth-century Illini. In Calumet and Fleur-de Lys: Archaeology of Indian and French Contact in the Midcontinent, edited by John A. Walthall and Thomas E. Emerson, pp. 155–75. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Walthall, John A. and Thomas E. Emerson 1992 Indians and French in the Midcontinent. In Calumet and Fleur-de Lys: Archaeology of Indian and French Contact in the Midcontinent, edited by John Walthall and Thomas E. Emerson, pp. 1–16. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Waselkov, Gregory A. 2009 French Colonial Archaeology. In International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by Teresita Majewski and David Gaimster, pp. 613–28. Springer, New York. Waselkov, Gregory A. and Bonnie L. Gums 2000 Plantation Archaeology at Rivière aux Chiens, c.1725–1848. University of South Alabama Center for Archaeological Studies, Mobile. White, Richard 1991 The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Williams, Stephen 1981 Some Historic Perspectives on Southeastern Ceramic Traditions. Geoscience and Man, xxii, edited by Frederick Hadleigh West and Robert W. Neuman, pp. 115–22. The School of Geoscience, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. Wolf, Eric R. 1982 Europe and the People without History. University of California Press, Berkeley. Woods, Patricia Dillon 1980 French–Indian Relations on the Southern Frontier, 1699–1762. UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Zemon-Davis, Natalie 2000 The Gift in Sixteenth-century France. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. (p.290) Notes: Page 29 of 30

Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse (1) But note Martelle 2004:37–8 for a discussion of the possible technological and cultural advantages of ceramic pots over metal kettles.

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Challenging Colonial Equations?

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Challenging Colonial Equations? The Gaelic Experience in Early Modern Ireland Audrey Horning

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0014

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the character of intercultural relations between the Irish and the English in the early modern period, when plantation was used as a mechanism to assert English and later British control: the planting of new people and settlements. In order to re-imagine the actualities of the plantation period and the efficacy of the colonial equations that purportedly knit together Native North America and Gaelic Ireland, the chapter looks at the character of Gaelic life in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It then considers more recent equations drawn between America and Ireland that have facilitated the force-fitting of Irish history into a straightforward colonial model. The case of Ireland highlights the blurring of the boundary between the coloniser and the colonised. Keywords:   plantation, colonial equations, North America, Ireland, history, coloniser, colonised, settlements, Gaelic, intercultural relations

In other countries the past is the neutral ground of the scholar and the antiquary, with us it is the battlefield.

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Challenging Colonial Equations? The Nation, Dublin 1852

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Challenging Colonial Equations? Introduction: Postcolonial Convergence? On 28 March 2009, the following headline ran across the front page of the Irish Times: ‘Native American chief asks NUI Galway to return “iconic” canoe’. The object itself, an early nineteenth-century birchbark canoe in the collections of the National University of Ireland at Galway, was claimed by the St Mary’s First Nations Wolastokwiyik (Maliseet) community of New Brunswick, Canada, as a significant item of cultural patrimony. The canoe had been originally presented by the ancestors of the contemporary Maliseet to the British Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick, Sir Howard Douglas, as a physical symbol both of their identity and of their allegiance to the British government. It subsequently made its way to what was then the Queen’s University at Galway in 1852, donated by an Irish officer under Douglas’ command who had brought the object home to Headford Castle near the city of Galway. In reclaiming the canoe and recasting its meaning, the Maliseet consciously invoked an opposition to the British that they believed would resonate with the Irish university leadership. Speaking on behalf of her community, Wolastokwiyik Chief Candace Paul emphasized how her ancestors had suffered from ‘many of the same forms of oppression as the Irish people at the hands of colonialism’ (Siggins 2009:1). The strategy worked. The canoe, a curiosity that had hung, slowly (p.294) decaying, from the roof of the university quadrangle building, was returned to the Maliseet with much fanfare in the summer of 2009. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a handful of English commentators found it politically and lyrically expedient to draw parallels between Native North Americans and the Gaelic Irish. Today, descendants of both those groups find political strength in the same equation, as exemplified by the rhetoric surrounding the repatriation of the Maliseet canoe. At one level, this construction constitutes a subversion and a potent form of resistance to the inequities of colonial experiences. At another, and ultimately more important level, such constructions reflect the continuing strength of mythic histories that obscure far more complicated pasts. This chapter questions the stark character of those mythic histories through a re-analysis of the character of Irish and English interactions in the early modern period, when English and later British control was asserted through the mechanism of plantation: the planting of new people and settlements. A first step to re-imagining the actualities of the plantation period and the efficacy of the colonial equations that purportedly knit together Native North America and Gaelic Ireland requires a careful reconsideration of the character of Gaelic life in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This discussion is followed by an evaluation of more recent equations drawn between America and Ireland that have facilitated the Page 3 of 28

Challenging Colonial Equations? force-fitting of Irish history into a straightforward colonial model. The overall aim of the discussion, in the context of this volume, is to blur the boundary between colonizers and the colonized. The case of Ireland, where such boundaries were highly permeable, demands a recognition that colonial processes are invariably incomplete, and colonial identities inherently ambiguous.

Historical Background In the wake of the Reformation, recalcitrant Catholic Ireland served as an ever-present cause of anxiety and an object of fear for Protestant England; soon translated into a subject for conquest. The efforts of the English crown to plant settlements peopled by loyal subjects, first begun in Counties Laois and Offaly in the 1550s, is often interpreted as a proto-colonial process and as such, a process critical for understanding later English activities in the New World (Figure 13.1). However, these sixteenth-century settlement efforts were short-lived, haphazard, and wholly reliant upon the participation of Irish elites. The Laois and Offaly plantations faltered almost immediately, while attempts by the Earl of Essex and Sir Thomas Smith to plant colonies in Ulster in the 1570s barely advanced beyond the drawing board. Following two rebellions spearheaded by Gerald Fitzgerald, the Earl of Desmond, Queen Elizabeth instituted a policy of planting English settlers on c.400,000 non-contiguous acres of (p.295)

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Challenging Colonial Equations? (p.296) forfeited Desmond lands in counties Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Waterford, and Tipperary, termed the Munster Plantation. Irish lords who were not deeply implicated in the rebellion retained their lands. Unsurprisingly, the Munster Plantation rapidly disintegrated into the violence associated with the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603).

It would not be until the seventeenth century that England would gain any successful ‘colonial’ hold over Ireland, when the 1607 departure of the northern Gaelic elite led by the Earl of Fig. 13.1. Map of plantation-era Ireland. Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill, Elizabeth Mulqueeny, Queen’s University freed up lands in Belfast. Ulster for the eventual implementation of James I’s Ulster Plantation scheme, first conceived in 1609. Despite considerable investment from the City of London, the ambitious aims of this Ulster Plantation scheme were never achieved (Canny 2001; Curl 1986; Gillespie 1993; Loeber 1991; Moody 1939). Native Irish were not wholly displaced, and the incoming British settlers never constituted a powerful or unified elite. Political uncertainty, the 1641 Irish Rebellion, and subsequent Cromwellian warfare in the mid seventeenth century ensured that the ambitious goals of the plantation scheme, in terms of landholding, urban development, and cultural change, went unfulfilled. Protestant control was in fact not assured until after the Williamite Wars of 1688–1690, with the defeat of the Catholic James II and the accession of the Protestant William of Orange (Barnard 2004; Canny 2001; Ohlmeyer 1993).

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Challenging Colonial Equations? Perceptions of the colonial past of Ireland and America as being similar are interlinked far more by a belief in the civilizing of wild lands and wild people—echoing sixteenth-century colonial rationalizations—than they actually are by any empirical evidence. Urban archaeological assemblages characterized by the abundant presence of French, Spanish, and Italian ceramics provide physical testimony to the integral links between medieval Ireland and the continent, links expressed not only through trade, but through centuries of political relationships, religious commonalties, and kinship networks. Very little about late medieval English society and material culture would have been truly unfamiliar to the Irish, particularly at the elite level, thereby invalidating any direct comparisons to the collision of worlds on the other side of the Atlantic wrought by the forces of early modern European expansion. In short, Gaelic Ireland was not an unknown land to the English, nor in any way can the literate Irish be ethnocentrically portrayed (analogous to the oral societies of the New World) as ‘people without history’. As noted by Diarmaid Ó Catháin (2009:18), ‘Latin was the second language of the educated in Ireland, and the normal medium used by the Irish chiefs in communication with the English and other foreigners.’ Common knowledge of Latin knit the Gaelic elite into the fabric of Western European society. A shared language is the requisite first step in rendering the seemingly unfamiliar familiar. To echo Frantz Fanon (1967:17–18): ‘a man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language’. Irish scholars themselves were also well aware of the ways in which their society and culture were often negatively (p.297) portrayed by English commentators, many of whom—even well into the seventeenth century —relied upon the polemical twelfth-century description of Ireland by Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales). In Book One of his 1625 Zoilomastix, the Irish historian Philip O’Sullivan Beare concentrated entirely upon countering Cambrensis and all those who relied upon him: ‘What I have taken up I seem to have accomplished: that Ireland is not deserted, without roads, and boggy, as Gyraldus would have it, but is heaped with glory under many headings’ (O’Sullivan Beare 2009:267). Yet it is significant that O’Sullivan Beare’s refutation was not published in his lifetime. In fact, it would not be until 1960 that excerpts in the original Latin would be published, and it would take until 2009 for a full English translation to appear (O’Sullivan Beare 2009). By contrast, Cambrensis’ writings were widely circulated in the sixteenth century, with the antiquarian William Camden publishing a further edition in 1602. The unequal power relations inherent to the plantation and postPage 6 of 28

Challenging Colonial Equations? plantation period, where Ireland as a separate kingdom (rather than as a colony) was nevertheless subordinate to the British crown, can arguably be seen as silencing the perspective of the Gaelic majority even as Ireland cannot be easily understood as a straightforward British colony. Therefore, insights gained from postcolonial scholarship regarding cultural entanglements can be usefully, if cautiously, employed to understand the exchanges and influences between Gaelic Ireland and the predominantly English and Scottish planters who made their way to the new plantation settlements of early modern Ireland. Of particular value is the work of Homi Bhabha (1994) in challenging essentialism through emphasis on the third space.

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Challenging Colonial Equations? Settlement and Society in Late Medieval Ireland: Elite Interactions Medieval Irish society is often characterized as dichotomous; divided between those regions directly influenced by the twelfth-century AngloNorman incursions, which brought new settlement patterns, architecture (particularly masonry castle construction), agricultural practices, and English laws to parts of Ireland, and the lands where Gaelic law and customs continued to hold sway, such as the majority of the province of Ulster. Sixteenth-century English commentators were clearly divided in their opinions of the descendants of the AngloNorman invaders, termed Old English or sean-Ghaill, many of whom remained resolutely Catholic in the face of the Reformation and were in many ways indistinguishable from their Gaelic neighbours. For example, the chronicler Fynes Moryson, secretary to the English commander Lord Mountjoy during the Nine Years’ War, criticized the Old English for ‘forgetting their own (p.298) country’ and for being ‘somewhat infected with the Irish rudeness’ (Moryson 1907 [1617] iii: 180). The political structure of late medieval Ireland was clearly characterized not by unity, but by factionalism and regionalism that complicated both English efforts at conquering Ireland and hampered the development of any unified Irish efforts at resisting England. Outside of the English administration in Dublin, political power was held by hereditary chieftains or lords, who maintained influence through control of inherited territories and a complicated system of mutual obligation. Society was structured by kin relationships, both familial and fictive, but the individual nature of those social relationships could vary between lordships, both Gaelic and Old English. In many lordships, customs of fosterage and gossiprid provided a means of ensuring loyalty and affinity between non-related families, usually at the elite level. In fosterage, a child was sent, often for a fee, to be raised by another family, intended to ensure lifelong obligation. Gossiprid ‘was essentially a pledge of fraternal association between a lord who thereby gained service, and his client who received protection, patronage and . . . preferential treatment of his suits in court’ (Fitzsimons 2001:143). The system was therefore founded upon the personal ties maintained by an individual lord, and thus competition between lordships was inherent and expressed through sporadic conflict. Bardic poetry helped to codify and publicize Gaelic lordly status, serving as a potent political tool. Such poetry, alongside the Annals produced by the hereditary class of scholars, provides an invaluable emic window into Gaelic values and understandings. However, since these sources were compiled by scribes and poets

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Challenging Colonial Equations? engaged in enhancing the political and cultural position of their lordly patrons, the nuanced interpretation of these texts is a challenging exercise (Cunningham and Gillespie 2003). While traditional Brehon law remained important throughout Gaelic society, Irish elites were well aware of the parallel system of English law operating in Ireland. Certainly, Gaelic elites in the late sixteenth century routinely made recourse to the English laws employed by the Dublin administration and the Old English lordships when it suited their strategic needs. For example, a 1580s dispute over the inheritance of the title O’Sullivan Beare between the brother (Owen O’Sullivan) and the son (Donal Cam) of the previous titleholder, illustrates the entanglement of English and Irish practices (Breen 2006:122–7). In traditional Gaelic practice, lordly succession was not based on primogeniture, where the eldest son would receive the title. Instead, in the Gaelic system known as tanistry title could pass to any male considered to be the most worthy within the clan. Inheritance was based less on descent than upon personal quality, and was often a source of considerable conflict within and between lordships. However, the O’Sullivan Beares do seem to have employed a version of primogeniture, perhaps inspired by the practice introduced to Ireland by the Anglo-Normans and maintained by the Old English. In making his claim to the title once held by his father and taken up by his uncle Owen O’Sullivan, Donal Cam employed this (p.299) precedent and turned to the English hierarchy to enforce his claim. The dispute was heard by the Privy Council and eventually lands were divided up between the claimants. Such close English involvement in the resolution of this dispute gives the lie to assumptions about the impenetrability of Gaelic culture claimed by English literary observers and employed to support narratives of ‘othering’. Considerations of architecture, settlement, and material culture are central to the debate over the dichotomous nature of society in medieval Ireland. The nucleated Anglo-Norman manorial-style settlements introduced in the thirteenth century can be readily contrasted with the more dispersed rural Gaelic settlements (Barry 2000:110–23). By contrast, the widespread distribution of the tower house in fifteenth-century Ireland has been cited as evidence for the ‘cultural uniformity that prevailed across most of Ireland’, materially representing the ‘fusion of cultures in medieval Ireland’, even if this fusion is evident only at the level of elite architecture (O’Conor 1998:104). Rather than fusion, ambiguity and dynamism may better characterize architectural expression. Certainly, the continued use of a range of Gaelic settlement types with early medieval origins, such as crannógs (artificial islands), and the ráth and caisel (circular enclosed Page 9 of 28

Challenging Colonial Equations? settlements) are reflective not of fusion, resistance, or cultural stasis on the part of the Irish. Rather their continued use reflects Gaelic political realities (Brady and O’Conor 2005; FitzPatrick 2009; O’Conor 2002). Such realities included the practice of tanistry, as well as periodic land redistribution within a lordship. Both practices discouraged lavish architectural expenditure by lords who were never assured of maintaining their seats, by contrast to feudal relations in England or within the parts of Ireland under Old English influence. While the Gaelic elite understood the symbolic language of castle-building as employed by the English, such architectural investments did not always translate into status in the Gaelic world. Military prowess and hospitality, on the other hand, were more commonly employed to establish, demonstrate, and maintain chiefly power. Another contributing factor was the nature of Gaelic warfare, which was less reliant upon defensive structures and more focused upon employing defensive elements of the natural landscape. Akin to their familiarity with Latin, some Gaelic elite were also clearly conversant in multiple architectural languages. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Gaelic O’Cahans, whose territory would be confiscated by the Crown in 1608 and transformed into the Londonderry Plantation, constructed a series of tower houses at strategic locations: overlooking the River Roe were the castles of Limavady and of Dungiven, while another tower house guarded the mouth of the River Bann near Coleraine. Yet while the O’Cahans relied upon tower houses in these locales, archaeological and documentary evidence shows that they continued to use a crannóg in Enagh Lough (Davies 1941; McNeill 2001:346–7). Similarly, in the sixteenth century, the O’Neills constructed a tower house on a crannóg in Lough Catherine, County Tyrone known as Island McHugh, attesting to a continuity of purpose. That both crannóg and tower-house forms were employed (p.300) simultaneously late in the sixteenth century informs us of the ready ability of Gaelic society to selectively retain ‘old’ practices while incorporating ‘new’ elements. Further evidence for the ability of Gaelic lords to code-switch can be found in the effort of the chief of the Ulster O’Cahans, Donal Ballagh O’Cahan, to employ English law to free him from his traditional obligation to pay tribute to his Gaelic overlord, Hugh O’Neill. In 1602, O’Cahan gave his allegiance to Queen Elizabeth, accepting an English knighthood and title to his lands, historically known as ‘O’Cahan’s Country’. When O’Neill continued to demand tribute, O’Cahan (1874[1607]:144) petitioned the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Sir Arthur Chichester, requesting to ‘be freed from this claim . . . and that the King’s attorney may be appointed counsel in the cause, the Earl Page 10 of 28

Challenging Colonial Equations? [O’Neill] being commanded to surrender his claims’. O’Cahan’s timing was poor, and his reputation for duplicity widespread. Following the Flight of the Earls and a 1608 revolt against the English led by Cahir O’Doherty, O’Cahan, who actually was not involved in either episode, fell under suspicion. Stripped of his lands, O’Cahan was imprisoned for treason (although never charged or convicted) and he eventually died in the Tower of London. Other Gaelic elites fared better than O’Cahan. Even under the more oppressive power structures of seventeenth-century plantation, Gaelic landholders selectively incorporated new practices as they negotiated their own positions with the new British hierarchy. In the midlands, Crown efforts to impose British control relied upon the active participation of Gaelic lords, in contrast to the reliance upon the planting of settlers and the reordering of landscape attempted in Ulster and in parts of the revived Munster plantation. In the midlands, Native lords pragmatically followed plantation precepts by constructing manor houses defended by masonry bawns. Outwardly English, the fabric of these new edifices more often than not retain traces of Native Irish practice, as exemplified by the employment of traditional wicker-work centring (Figure 13.2) to form arches, in preference over keystones or corbels. Castle Armstrong, associated with the Native MacCoghlan lordship, is one such early seventeenth-century manor house that betrays cultural ambiguity. The structure combines the defensive features of a late medieval Irish tower house with the symmetrical façade and soaring, ornate chimney stacks of the polite English architecture of the Jacobean era, while the use of wicker centring implies that it was constructed by Native builders (Lyttleton 2009). James Delle (1999:27–9) has pinpointed similar architectural ambiguity in the distinctly different Jacobean and Gothic doorways of Kanturk Castle, County Cork, constructed (but never completed) for the Gaelic Lord MacDonogh MacCarthy as the centrepiece of his plantation estate. Like Donal Ballagh O’Cahan, MacCarthy attempted to straddle two worlds, switching between his identity as a Gaelic lord with the title of the McCarthy Mor, and as an English lord with the title the Earl of Clancarr. Irish techniques were also employed on buildings constructed for the New English; a testament to their reliance on local artisans. Some New English settlers built entirely in a Gaelic fashion, as exemplified by midlands planter John (p.301)

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Challenging Colonial Equations? Briscoe, who constructed a tower house along late medieval lines at Ballydrohid in County Offaly in 1588 (see Figure 13.3; Lyttleton 2004). Evidence for syncretism in the Irish midlands in the early seventeenth century extends beyond the material. Offaly planter Matthew de Renzy, a German cloth merchant formerly based in London, studied the Irish language under the tutelage of the MacBruadeadha, the hereditary historians for the O’Briens (Connelly 2008:399–400; Mac Cuarta 1993). De Renzy’s interest in the Fig. 13.2. Detail of wickerwork, barrel Irish language was not vault of Ballycowan Castle, Co. Offaly. solely scholarly: he employed his new-found Photograph by the author. knowledge of the Irish Annals to justify plantation and to support his efforts to increase his own landholdings. Despite his self-serving approach to interpreting the Annals, de Renzy was clearly not despised by his tutors. Instead, his life and scholarly achievements were praised (p.302) in a eulogy that renamed de Renzy as Mathghaimhain Ó Rensi and provided him with elements of an Irish genealogy. At some level, then, de Renzy must have found common ground with the MacBruadeadha and some value in their culture beyond that which he could readily exploit.

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Challenging Colonial Equations? Other New English Fig. 13.3. Srah Castle, Ballydrohid, Co. also selectively Offaly, built after the Gaelic fashion by incorporated aspects John Briscoe in 1588. of Irish culture into Photograph by the author. their own repertoire. One of the most colourful documentary sources illustrating the ways in which the New English engaged with the practices of the Irish elite can be found in a remarkable narrative by the English surveyor Josias Bodley, brother of the founder of the Bodleian library at Oxford, in 1602–1603. Bodley vividly describes his visit to the home of Sir Richard Morsyon, brother of the caustic writer Fynes Moryson, in Lecale, County Down in terms that are very much evocative of bardic poetry. Bodley regales his reader with accounts of the effusive hospitality of his New English host: For at first we sat as if rapt and astounded by the variety of meats and dainties . . . But after a short time we fall to roundly on every dish, calling now and then for wine, now and then for attendance, everyone according to his whim. In the midst of supper Master Morrison ordered to be given to him a glass goblet full of claret, which measured (as I conjecture) ten or eleven inches roundabout, and drank to the health of all and to our happy arrival. We freely received it from him, thanking him, and drinking, one after the other, as much as he drank before us. He then gave four or five healths of the chief men and of our absent friends . . . And it is a very praiseworthy thing. (Reeves 1854:78–9) The New English and the Gaelic elite were not alone in seeking ways to capitalize upon the new political situation brought by England’s increased attention to Ireland. Loyal to the Crown but resolutely Catholic, the Old English lords found (p.303) themselves in an anomalous position when loyalty was increasingly tied to Protestantism. Many tried to play both sides, employing their own version of sly civility (Bhabha 1985) in capitalizing on their historic loyalty and acceptance at the court of Elizabeth I, while at the same time actively blocking efforts that would undermine their localized power. The career of ‘Black Tom’ Butler, the tenth earl of Ormond, is the quintessential example. Raised a Protestant at the court of Elizabeth I, Ormond used the Queen’s favour to ensure that he retained his lands and power base in Munster, even over the opposition of the new English military command. Ormond’s decisive role in quelling the rebellion of his Old English rival, the Earl of Desmond, Gerald Fitzgerald, led directly to the implementation of the Munster Plantation in the 1580s. Yet Ormond Page 13 of 28

Challenging Colonial Equations? was instrumental in reducing the extent of the Munster Plantation, in respect of the claims of Native Irish landholders (Canny 2001:140). That Ormond died in 1614 a practicing Catholic only further emphasizes his cultural liminality in the new Ireland.

Settlement and Society in Late Medieval Ireland: Non-Elite Interactions The elite of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Irish society, be they New English like Moryson, Old English such as the Earl of Ormond, or Gaelic lord such as O’Cahan, must be understood as selfaware, as evidenced by their strategies of variously appropriating, accommodating, circumventing, and subverting less familiar cultural norms. But what about the experiences of the lower orders of Irish society? The firmly hierarchical nature of both Gaelic and Old English society, with their considerable nodes of convergence, may have ensured that the lower orders of Irish society did not actually experience any greater uncertainty or disruption to their lives than that to which they were already accustomed. According to one commentator, the Irish lords ‘live uncontrolled to exercise their extortions upon their poor tenants and followers, over whom—not much unlike the race of Ottomans—they tyrannize with absolute power, confiscating both goods and lives at their pleasure’ (A Discourse for Ireland 1869:106 [1594]). While such comments and comparisons cannot be taken at face value, it is clear that fixity of tenure within a lordship was never assured: ‘the Irish tenants have their estates but from year to year, or at most for three years, in regard of which short and weak states, they have not any care to make any strong or defensible buildings or houses, to plant, or to enclose’ (Saxey 1869[1597]:208). Given the lack of permanence, intuiting, and identifying the material lifeways of the ‘mere’ Irish in the late medieval period has always presented challenges to archaeologists. In the estimation of Tadhg O’Keeffe (2004:20): ‘all strata of secular society beneath the castleowning élite . . . are very difficult to isolate in the archaeological record. In consequence, archaeologists cannot draw from their own reservoir of data to speak independently and authoritatively about any (p.304) subtle distinctions of social class and economic dependence around which mediaeval Gaelic society was organized.’ It will never be possible to assess the utility of culture-contact models in relation to the impact of plantation without a clearer understanding of the materiality of non-elite Gaelic life. A closer look at what evidence

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Challenging Colonial Equations? we do have suggests that pronouncements about the archaeological invisibility of ‘ordinary’ Gaels may be unduly pessimistic. One means of attaining insights into the experiences of the ‘mere’ Irish is to deconstruct sixteenth-century accounts of Irish ‘nomadism’. In attempting to impose authority as physically expressed through the reordering of rural settlement, Lord Deputy Sir Arthur Chichester decreed that the Irish were to be ‘drawn from their course of running up and down the country with their cattle, which they term “creatinge”, and are to settle themselves in towns and villages where they must be enforced to build houses like to those of the Pale, and not cabins after their wanted manner’ (Chichester 1608:65). Chichester was conflating the lack of land tenure that left many ‘wandering into other counties, often changing and not long continuing in one place’ (Weston 1593:142), with a deliberate misunderstanding of the practice of transhumance, known in Ireland as booleying. Under this system, cattle would be moved between lowland and upland pastures according to the season. Such long-established patterns of seasonal movement took place within a clearly defined territory, in contradiction to the English emphasis on nomadism (McErlean 1983). Wartime displacement during and in the wake of the Nine Years’ War likely impacted upon the character and frequency of seasonal movement, further provoking concern amongst the English military leadership. Examination of a selection of sites associated with transhumance in Ulster highlights the challenge and promise of using so-called booley sites towards improving our understanding of late medieval rural life. Some of these sites, characterized by single-room structures with occasional annexes, built of stone or sod, often incorporating open central hearths, and situated in clusters on high ground near water, continued to be in use into the nineteenth century, but likely had medieval origins (Estyn Evans 1945; Graham 1954; O’Conor 2002; Rathbone 2009). Investigation of thirty-eight County Antrim sites recorded as booleying locales revealed that few exhibit any clear chronology, with excavations unfortunately yielding only chronologically ambiguous deposits (Horning 2004). For example, in 1982 a sub-rectangular stone and sod building measuring 7.4 x 3.6 m was excavated adjacent to the Carnlough River in Gortin Townland, County Antrim, but no artifacts were recovered (see Figure 13.4; Gardiner 2010). In 1996, two small (2 m2) sub-rectangular structures were recorded and excavated in Ballyutoag townland, County Antrim, but again no finds were recovered (MacSparron 2002; Williams 1984). Also in north County Antrim, investigations in Glenmakeeran townland

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Challenging Colonial Equations? recorded three sub-rectangular sod-built houses. Finds recovered from the excavations of one of the structures (p.305) (p.306) included six sherds of everted rimware, or Ulster coarse pottery. This ware type is so far dateable only to the period of the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries, and is itself suggestive of considerable cultural continuity amongst the rural Gaelic Irish of medieval and early postmedieval Ulster (MacSparron 2007; Williams and Robinson 1983). More extensive settlement evidence was recorded at Craigs, County Antrim, including cultivation ridges. Finds from the excavation of a sub-rectangular structure at Craigs consisted entirely of Ulster coarse pottery, but were more helpfully Fig. 13.4. Excavation plan, Gortin, Co. augmented by the Antrim subrectangular house. radiocarbon dating of charcoal from the Courtesy of Professor James Mallory. central hearth and sod walls which support a sixteenth- through seventeenth-century date range (Williams 1988).

While ephemeral, these upland sites nonetheless begin to provide a window into the experiences of the ‘mere’ Irish. Certainly, the subrectangular house with central hearth identified at sites like Craigs and Glenmakeeran appears to be a vernacular Gaelic dwelling type in the province of Ulster. Such dwellings even make an appearance in the supposedly exclusive English villages of the Londonderry plantation, as indicated by their presence on the Plantation maps drawn by Thomas Raven in 1622, and evidenced archaeologically at the Mercers’ village of Movanagher (Horning 2001). Despite the regulations of Plantation, which insisted upon the construction of buildings ‘after the English manner’ and which attempted to remove or at least segregate the Irish Page 16 of 28

Challenging Colonial Equations? away from the new settlers, the use of Irish-style buildings in Plantation villages, and presumably by the planters themselves, speaks to a level of accommodation and adaptation on the part of the planters that is routinely denied in historical memory. Historical memories of the plantation period often prioritize the devastation of the Ulster landscape in the wake of the Nine Years’ War, providing ready justification for the taking of lands under the principle of res nullius. For example, chroniclers of the 1606 settlement of Protestant Scots under the leadership of Hugh Montgomery and James Hamilton on the Ards peninsula of County Down emphasized the empty and devastated character of the local landscape: Considering that in the spring time, Ao. 1606, those parishes were now more wasted than America (when the Spaniards landed there) . . . for in all those three parishes aforesaid, 30 cabins could not be found, nor any stone walls, but ruined roofless churches, and a few vaults at Gray Abbey, and a stump of an old castle in Newton, in each of which some Gentlemen sheltered themselves at their first coming over. (Hill 1869:58) Yet a set of 1625 estate maps produced by Thomas Raven pinpoint the presence of the same sub-rectangular Gaelic houses in the ‘new’ Scottish settlement of Dundonald as found in the London Company villages. Furthermore, landscape analysis of the Ards by John O’Keeffe (2008) clearly highlights the continued use of Gaelic place names and route ways by the incoming Scots planters. While Hamilton and Montgomery might have justified their takeover of the (p.307) Clandeboye O’Neill territory by employing the principle of res nullius, those charged with implementing the scheme on the ground clearly found it more expedient to appropriate Gaelic geography and architecture.

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Challenging Colonial Equations? Interpreting Plantation Despite historical memories which present the plantation efforts of the early seventeenth century as part of a straightforward and effective colonial episode, in reality the plantations as they played out did not live up to their detailed justifications nor to their colonial pretensions. In total, perhaps thirty thousand Protestants settled in Ireland as a direct result of the plantation schemes, a very small achievement considering that the overall population of Ireland at the mid-point of the seventeenth century was somewhere between 1.3 and 1.5 million (Barnard, 2004:13). It must be considered significant that the period from the 1610s, which saw the establishment of plantations, to the 1640s when Ireland became embroiled in the wider War of the Three Kingdoms, was characterized by a remarkable lack of violent conflict. That the Irish and the incoming planters were able to at least tolerate one another is evident as well from the archaeological record. Beyond the architectural exchanges discussed above, assemblages from Ulster Plantation villages juxtapose Ulster coarse pottery and English and continental imports (Donnelly 2007; Horning 2001, 2009). At some level, this evidence must speak to cultural interaction on a daily basis, however fraught or friendly those contacts may have been. While radical changes in landholding and settlement were implemented through the medium of plantation, in 1641 Catholics (both Gaelic and Old English) still owned 59 percent of profitable land in Ireland. By the eighteenth century, lands under Catholic ownership would drop to 22 percent (Barnard 2004:29). This erosion of Catholic power began with the 1641 Rebellion, when a small group of Irish and Old English elites attacked Protestant landowners (Mac Cuarta 1993). While the conflict was rooted in localized elite grievances, Ireland was soon drawn into the wider European constitutional crises which coloured the relationship between the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Ireland’s internal rebellion rapidly expanded into one front in the wider War of the Three Kingdoms and was no longer simply a conflict between Irish and British, or Catholic and Protestant. Instead, Protestants divided their allegiances between the Parliamentarian and Royalist forces, with both sides relying in part upon Gaelic Irish conscripts to fight their battles (Connolly 2008:100–1). Parliamentarian successes brought another effort to quell Ireland through land redistribution, with productive lands confiscated from Irish landholders and granted to a new wave of English settlers. Despite the complexities of the conflicts of mid century, it is the atrocities committed by both sides, such (p.308) as the drowning of Protestant settlers at Portadown in November 1641 and the slaughter of non-combatants by

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Challenging Colonial Equations? Oliver Cromwell’s forces in Drogheda in September of 1649 that ultimately shaped and hardened the sectarian attitudes that continue to colour community relations in Ireland today. The Williamite Wars of the end of the seventeenth century, which concluded with the defeat of the Catholic King James II by William of Orange, ushered in a new era in Ireland, one that codified the political power of a new group of Anglican elites made up of Cromwellian-era English grantees, descendants of early seventeenth-century planters, and members of the Old English and Gaelic aristocracy who had converted to Protestantism. Restrictions (the penal laws) were placed upon Catholics and upon dissenting Protestants, including considerable numbers of Ulster Scots Presbyterians who registered their discontent by emigrating in large numbers to the American colonies of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia (Akenson 1993; Cullen 1994; Leyburn 1962). Even with its exclusive new leadership, Ireland was still legally administered as a kingdom with its own parliament rather than as a colony. Direct control from London would not come until the Act of Union in 1803, which brought Ireland into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Despite the considerable inequality characteristic of post-medieval Irish society, the relationship between Ireland and Britain from the conflicts of the sixteenth century to the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 cannot be understood as purely colonial (Howe 2000; Kennedy 1996).

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Challenging Colonial Equations? Contemporary Concerns The complex and multi-faceted character of intercultural relations in Ireland in the late medieval and early modern periods expose the ahistorical and spurious character of claims equating the Irish experience with that of colonized and displaced New World Natives, while in no way challenging the equivalent complexity of New World cultural entanglements. Yet the ongoing strength and political utility of those literary conventions in today’s world ensured the rapid and favourable response to Chief Paul’s request for the Maliseet canoe, and has provided ready fodder for cultural theorists inspired by the potential for postcolonial comparisons. Writing in the journal Cultural Critique, Katie Kane (1999) explored the origins of the phrase ‘nits make lice’, employed by United States Army Colonel John Chivington to justify the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho families, linking it to its use by Charles Coote in the context of the 1649 siege of Drogheda. This etymological connection provided freedom from the constraints of the documentary record as the author then asserted that Cromwell’s Parliamentarian forces ‘liquidated’ all the inhabitants of Drogheda, (p.309) an interpretation sharply at odds with the historiography of the campaign. That the campaign against Drogheda was brutal is undisputed, but the principal targets were the combined military forces of the Royalists and Confederates, which included English as well as Irish combatants. Estimates of the actual deaths suggest that approximately one thousand civilians were killed, versus well over three thousand soldiers (Burke 1990; Connolly 2008:93–5; Gillespie 2006:178–9; Ó Siochrú 2008). As atrocious as the Drogheda campaign was, the population was not ‘liquidated’ and the town (itself populated by Old English and New English, as well as Gaelic Irish) continued to exist. Kane’s interpretation, which equates the overtly racist attitude of nineteenthcentury America towards Native people with the British strategy in Ireland in the seventeenth century, implies an intentional and analogous policy of genocide that itself elides the ‘Native’ experience in both lands. The more complicated reality that so many of those who served under Chivington were Irish or of Irish extraction, as was General Sheridan—to whom the aphorism ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’ is traditionally attributed (Joyce 2005)—is relegated to a footnote. In such broad-brush colonial comparisons, the simplest explanation is always the easiest, if not always the most accurate. Similarly, anthropologists have looked for, and found, similarities between marginalized people in Ireland and in Native North America that they interpret as rooted in a collective, parallel colonial experience. According to Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1987:57), who Page 20 of 28

Challenging Colonial Equations? compared the Pueblo Indians of Taos and Picuris to the fictitiously named Irish community of ‘Ballybran’ on the Dingle peninsula, County Kerry, ‘psychocultural conflicts [were] expressed in high rates of alcoholism, depression, suicide, and other forms of self-destruction’, signifying ‘a similar collective response to a similar collective tragedy: the violent and humiliating confrontation with a dominant, ambivalently despised and admired other culture’. Scheper-Hughes assumed comparability and in both locales sought to chronicle the remaining ‘shreds and patches’ of a ‘brave and vibrant culture violated, desecrated, finally rent’. Her anthropological gaze and lively prose about the decline of traditional society did not go unnoticed or unquestioned by its subjects, much to the shock of its author. On the Dingle Peninsula, residents ‘talked back’, betrayed and angered by their portrayal in Scheper-Hughes’ catchily titled 1979 study Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics. Scheper-Hughes’s ethical missteps in conducting her Irish ethnographic work have become legendary for sparking a reconsideration of ethnographic practice (Wilson and Donnan 2006:169–72). Her essentialist assumptions about the character of Irish history and presumed comparability with Native America unfortunately garnered far less attention. While Scheper-Hughes’s own identity as an American outsider fuelled some of the outrage at her negative portrayal of ‘Ballybran’, Irish scholars and artists looking to the west have similarly not accorded much diversity or interest to Native America: ‘Given the wealth of colonial experience that links Ireland and (p.310) Native America, it is perhaps surprising that when Irish culture has engaged with Indian culture it has so often been through the prism of an imagined or invented Indian colonial identity. The Irish have mainly engaged with Indian culture by co-opting it or “playing Indian”’ (Porter 2003:268). While the ‘wealth’ of shared experience is questionable, Joy Porter’s observation that Irish considerations of Native America tend to be based upon useable caricature is apt. Rather than engaging with the complexity of past and present Native experiences in North America, Irish appropriations of ‘Indian America’ concentrates upon well-known historic figures such as Geronimo (chosen by the Hunger Striker Bobby Sands as his code name) and Sitting Bull (a tragic figure in Seamus Heaney’s poem North). Otherwise, nuanced historical considerations of early modern Ireland rely on presumption and essentialism in their references to Native North Americans, as in the historian James Stephens Curl’s (1986:124) description of Ulster woodkerne as echoing North American ‘woodlands full of hostile Red Indians’, or the geographer William Smyth’s (2006:437) ready acceptance of tropes about disease and acculturation that allowed him to assert that Page 21 of 28

Challenging Colonial Equations? American colonial history was ‘straightforward’ because the Native population had been ‘decimated by epidemic diseases, demoralization, and war’. Where Scheper-Hughes found despondency in both lands, the subtext of Irish portrayals of a weakened and vanquished Native North America is to emphasize the resilience and strength of the Irish. In returning the Maliseet canoe, then, the Irish owners of this colonial trophy could concomitantly celebrate postcolonial commonalties with the Maliseet, while through this paternalistic gesture still maintain a contradictory yet deeply embedded sense of superiority borne not just of a belief in having more successfully overcome British rule, but borne as well from centuries of active participation in the colonial ventures of the British empire. Equating Gaelic Ireland and Native North America is not just inappropriate for the early modern period. In the contemporary world, it allows for the continual reification of the very colonial power structures the equation is supposed to challenge.

Conclusion In a volume dedicated to elucidating subaltern experiences, the inclusion of a chapter that challenges the colonial identity of Ireland and questions Gaelic marginality during the plantation-era may seem anomalous. However, the intertwined nature of Irish, Old English, and New English identities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should stand as a caution against the application of overly simplistic colonial discourse models in other colonial zones. The very complexity, ambiguity, and anomalous nature of the relationship between (p.311) Ireland and Britain over the past five hundred years provides a useful space to consider new ways of addressing colonial entanglements that de-emphasize strict dichotomies between colonizer and colonized (see also Harrison, Oliver, this volume). Perhaps, as we look closer and ever more critically at the intricate web of relationships found in colonial settings elsewhere around the world, the case of Ireland will no longer seem so anomalous. References Bibliography references: Akenson, Donald 1993 The Irish Diaspora. Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast. Barnard, Toby 2004 The Kingdom of Ireland, 1641–1760. Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke, Hampshire.

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Challenging Colonial Equations? Barry, Terry 2000 Rural Settlement in Ireland. In A History of Settlement in Ireland, edited by Terry Barry, pp. 110–23. Routledge, London. Bhabha, Homi 1985 Sly Civility October 34:71–80. Bhabha, Homi 1994 The Location of Culture. Routledge, London. Brady, Niall, and Kieran O’Conor 2005 The Later Medieval Usage of Crannogs in Ireland. Ruralia 5:127–36. Breen, Colin 2006 The Gaelic Lordship of the O’Sullivan Beare: A Landscape Cultural History. Four Courts Press, Dublin. Burke, James 1990 The New Model Army and the Problems of Siege Warfare 1648–1651. Irish Historical Studies 27:1–29. Canny, Nicholas P. 2001 Making Ireland British: 1580–1650. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Chichester, Sir Arthur 1608 Instruction to Sir James Ley and Sir John Davies 14 October. Calendar of State Papers of Ireland 1608–1610, edited by Charles William Russell and John P. Prendergast, pp. 54–65. Longman, London. Connolly, S. J. 2008 Divided Kingdom: Ireland 1630–1800. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Cullen, L. M. 1994 The Irish Diaspora of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. In Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800, edited by Nicholas Canny, pp. 113–49. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Cunningham, Bernadette and Raymond Gillespie 2003 Stories from Gaelic Ireland. Four Courts Press, Dublin. Curl, James Stephens 1986 The Londonderry Plantation. Phillimore, London. Davies, Oliver 1941 Trial Excavation at Lough Enagh. Ulster Journal of Archaeology 4:88–101. Delle, James 1999 ‘A Good and Easy Speculation’: Spatial Conflict, Collusion, and Resistance in Late Sixteenth-century Munster, Ireland. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 3:11–36.

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Challenging Colonial Equations? Discourse for Ireland, A 1869 [1594] A Discourse for Ireland. In Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts 1589–1600, edited by J. S. Brewer and William Bullen, pp. 105–8. Longmans Green, London. (p.312) Donnelly, Colm 2007 The Archaeology of the Ulster Plantation. In The Archaeology of Post-Medieval Ireland c.1550–1750 edited by Audrey Horning, Ruairí ÓBaoill, Colm Donnelly, and Paul Logue, pp. 37–50. Wordwell, Bray. Estyn Evans, Emyr 1945 Field Archaeology in the Ballycastle District. Ulster Journal of Archaeology 8:14–32. Fanon, Frantz 1967 Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, New York. FitzPatrick, Elizabeth 2009 Native Enclosed Settlement and the Problem of the Irish ‘Ring–Fort’. Medieval Archaeology 53:271–307. Fitzsimons, Fiona 2001 Fosterage and Gossiprid in Late Medieval Ireland. In Gaelic Ireland: Land, Lordship and Settlement c.1250–1650, edited by Patrick Duffy, David Edwards, and Elizabeth FitzPatrick, pp. 138–49. Four Courts Press, Dublin. Gardiner, Mark 2010 Excavations of a Late Medieval or Early Modern House at Gortin, Ardclinis, Co. Antrim. Data Structure Report, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast. Gillespie, Raymond 1993 Explorers, Exploiters and Entrepreneurs: Early Modern Ireland and its Context, 1500–1700. In An Historical Geography of Ireland, edited by B. J. Graham and L. J. Proudfoot, pp. 123–57. Academic Press, London. Gillespie, Raymond 2006 Seventeenth Century Ireland. Gill and MacMillan, Dublin. Graham, Jean 1954 Transhumance in Ireland. PhD dissertation, Department of Geography, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast. Hill, Rev. George (ed.) 1869 Montgomery Manuscripts. Archer and Sons, Belfast. Horning, Audrey 2001 ‘Dwelling Houses in the Old Irish Barbarous Manner’: Archaeological Evidence for Gaelic Architecture in an Ulster Plantation Village. In Gaelic Ireland 1300–1650: Land, Lordship, and Settlement, edited by Patrick Duffy, David Edwards, and Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, pp. 375–96. Four Courts Press, Dublin.

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Challenging Colonial Equations? Horning, Audrey 2004 Archaeological Explorations of Cultural Identity and Rural Economy in the North of Ireland: Goodland, Co. Antrim. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 8:199–215. Horning, Audrey 2009 ‘The Root of All Vice and Bestiality’: Exploring the Cultural Role of the Alehouse in the Ulster Plantation. In Plantation Ireland, edited by James Lyttleton and Colin Rynne, pp. 113–31. Four Courts Press, Dublin. Howe, Stephen 2000 Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Joyce, Toby 2005 The Only Good Indian Is a Dead Indian: Sheridan, Irish-America and the Indians. History Ireland 13(6):26–9. Kane, Katie 1999 Nits Make Lice: Drogheda, Sand Creek and the Poetics of Colonial Extermination. Cultural Critique 42:81–103. Kennedy, Liam 1996 Colonialism, Religion, and Nationalism in Ireland. Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast. Leyburn, James 1962 The Scotch-Irish: A Social History. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. Loeber, Rolf 1991 The Geography and Practice of English Colonisation in Ireland from 1534–1609. Irish Settlement Studies No. 3, Group for the Study of Irish Historic Settlement, Athlone. Lyttleton, James 2004 Seventeenth-century West Offaly: Accommodating New Realities. History Ireland 12(1):14–16. (p.313) Lyttleton, James 2009 Acculturation in the Irish Midland Plantations of the Seventeenth Century: An Archaeological Perspective. In Ireland and Britain in the Atlantic World, edited by Audrey Horning and Nick Brannon, pp. 31–52. Wordwell, Dublin. Mac Cuarta, Brian 1993 Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising. Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast. MacSparron, Cormac 2002 A Note on the Discovery of Two Probable Booley Houses at Ballyutoag, County Antrim. Ulster Journal of Archaeology 61:154–5. MacSparron, Cormac 2007 The Medieval Coarse Pottery of Ulster. MPhil thesis, School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast.

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Challenging Colonial Equations? McErlean, Thomas 1983 The Irish Townland System of Landscape Organization. In Landscape Archaeology in Ireland, edited by Terence Reeves-Smyth and Fred Hamond, pp. 315–39. British Archaeological Reports British Series 116, Tempus Reparatum, Oxford. McNeill, Thomas 2001 The Archaeology of Gaelic Lordship East and West of the Foyle. In Gaelic Ireland: Land, Lordship and Settlement c. 1250–1650, edited by Patrick Duffy, David Edwards, and Elizabeth FitzPatrick, pp. 346–56. Four Courts Press, Dublin. Moody, T. W. 1939 The Londonderry Plantation. William Mullan and Son, Belfast. Moryson, Fynes 1907 [1617] The Itinerary of Fynes Moryson in Four Volumes. James MacLehose and Sons, Glasgow. O’Cahan, Donal Ballagh 1874 [1607] Petition to the Lord Deputy and Council against the Earl of Tyrone. In Calendar of State Papers of Ireland, edited by C. W. Russell and John P. Prendergast, pp. 143–4. Longman and Company, London. Ó Catháin, Diarmaid 2009 Some Reflexes of Latin Learning and of the Renaissance in Ireland c.1450–c.1600. In Making Ireland Roman: Irish Neo-Latin Writers and the Republic of Letters, edited by Jason Harris and Keith Sidwell, pp. 14–35. Cork University Press, Cork. O’Conor, Kieran 1998 The Archaeology of Medieval Rural Settlement in Ireland. Discovery Program Monographs 3, Dublin. O’Conor, Kieran 2002 Housing in Later Medieval Gaelic Ireland. Ruralia 4:201–10. O’Keeffe, John 2008 The Archaeology of the Later Historical Cultural Landscape in Northern Ireland: Developing Historic Landscape Investigation for the Management of the Archaeological Resource: A Case Study of the Ards, County Down. PhD dissertation, Faculty of Life and Health Sciences, University of Ulster, Coleraine. O’Keeffe, Tadhg 2004 The Gaelic Peoples and their Archaeological Identities, AD 1000–1650. Quiggin Pamphlets on the Sources of Medieval Gaelic History 7, Cambridge. Ó Siochrú, Micheál 2008 God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland. Faber and Faber, London. O’Sullivan Beare, Philip 2009 The Natural History of Ireland, translated and edited by Denis C. O’Sullivan. Cork University Press, Cork. Page 26 of 28

Challenging Colonial Equations? Ohlmeyer, Jane 1993 Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randal MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim, 1609– 1683. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Porter, Joy 2003 The North American Indians and the Irish. Irish Studies Review 11:264–71. Rathbone, Stuart 2009 Booley Houses, Hafods, and Shielings: A Comparative Study of Transhumant Settlements from Around the Northern Basin of the Irish Sea. In (p.314) Ireland and Britain in the Atlantic World, edited by Audrey Horning and Nick Brannon, pp. 111– 30. Wordwell, Dublin. Reeves, William 1854 A Visit to Lecale, in the County of Down, in the Year 1602–1603 (English translation of Latin text from TCD Library copy of BL Add. MS. 4784). Ulster Journal of Archaeology 2:73–99. Saxey, William (Chief Justice) 1869 [1597] Advertisements and Petitions for the Furtherance of Justice and Reformation of the Government of the Province of Munster. In Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts 1589– 1600, edited by J. S. Brewer and William Bullen, pp. 205–12. Longmans Green, London. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 1979 Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland. University of California Press, Berkeley. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 1987 The Best of Two Worlds, the Worst of Two Worlds: Reflections on Culture and Field-work among the Rural Irish and Pueblo Indians. Comparative Studies in Society and History 29 (1): 56–75. Siggins, Lorna 2009 Native American Chief Asks NUI Galway to Return ‘Iconic’ Canoe. Irish Times, 28 March, 1. Smyth, William J. 2006 Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c.1530–1750. Cork University Press, Cork. Weston, Sir William 1593 Letter to Lord Burghley, 28 August, Dublin. In Calendar of State Papers, Ireland 1592–1596, edited by Hans Claude Hamilton, pp. 141–2. Eyre and Spottiswoode, London. Williams, Brian 1984 Excavations at Ballyutoag, County Antrim. Ulster Journal of Archaeology 47:37–49. Williams, Brian 1988 A Late Medieval Rural Settlement at Craigs, County Antrim. Ulster Journal of Archaeology 51:91–102. Page 27 of 28

Challenging Colonial Equations? Williams, Brian and Philip Robinson 1983 The Excavation of Bronze Age Cists and a Medieval Booley House at Glenmakeeran, County Antrim, and a Discussion of Booleying in North Antrim. Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 46:29–40. Wilson, Thomas and Hastings Donnan 2006 The Anthropology of Ireland. Berg, Oxford.

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The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis Matthew A. Beaudoin

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0015

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the process of hybridisation among the Labrador Métis in the nineteenth century by focusing on an ethnically mixed family on the northeast coast of Canada. More specifically, it considers how family members negotiated their daily lives within this ‘mixed’ household. After discussing the way a multi-ethnic household negotiates dispositions that define how they will enact their daily lived lives, the chapter turns to the Labrador Métis, the descendants of Inuit women and British men who inhabited the southern Labrador coast during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It also analyses Labrador archaeology and the archaeology of the colonised, along with the role of gender in the nuanced negotiations between two individuals. Keywords:   hybridisation, Labrador, Métis, family, Canada, multi-ethnic household, dispositions, archaeology, colonised, gender

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The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis Introduction Many recent studies of the archaeology of colonialism have suggested that when cultures interact, individuals negotiate their own relationships (Ferris 2009; Harrison 2004b; Silliman 2009). Neither side of these relationships is passive, and both act based on their own choices, practices, habitus, and doxa. This concept is neither new nor original, but is often applied to larger social dichotomies, such as European vs Aboriginal (see Ferris 2009; Jordan 2008; Silliman 2004, 2009, 2010). Looking at larger social dichotomies can make it easier to compare how individuals are acting, but it also assumes that these dichotomies exist. Dichotomies are an oft-employed analytical technique used to simplify social structures to a binary that can be easily compared and contrasted (Hall 2000; Silliman 2010; Stein 2005a; Stoler 1989; van Dommelen 2005, 2011). This techniue is framed as necessary, but can often result in oversimplifications that may not account for the nuances of personal negotiations. For example, most social contexts are pluralistic, with differences in culture, class, ethnicity, experience, gender, and personal choice, and rarely can be reduced to a dichotomy that effectively encompasses these varied groupings. When a dichotomous framework is used to contrast broad categories, many of the personal nuances of interaction are lost in the variability of the encompassed groupings; when used, however, at the household level, defined by the interaction of two individuals, the nuances become highlighted. This chapter explores the households of a nineteenth-century Labrador Métis household—an ethnically mixed family on the northeast coast of Canada (Figure 14.1)—and how they negotiated their daily lives within this ‘mixed’ household (Beaudoin 2008; Beaudoin et al. 2010). (p.316)

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The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis For this chapter, the household refers to a functional social unit that encompasses and enacts daily domestic life within a bounded structure. The household is an ideal venue to examine the interaction of people and families, as demonstrated by Barile and Brandon (2004) and Pluckhahn (2010). It is a structured space in which individuals simultaneously enact and negotiate their preconceptions of Fig. 14.1. Map of North River showing appropriate domestic the location of the site. life, enculturate the next Reproduced with the permission of the generation, and maintain Canadian Archaeological Association. a tension between private and public material expressions. While all three are important factors, the tension between private and public material expression is especially worth noting. During public interactions between cultures, practices are often formalized performances rather than the more informal negotiation between two individuals. Formalized performances are also representative of the constructed identities individuals and groups wish to embody and convey to one another. Smith (2007:413) describes this situation within public expressions of materiality as representing ‘visible symbols, in which items are acquired and displayed to validate one’s social claims and to emulate the behavior of higher-status groups for social gain’. The communal and purposeful nature of such public interactions and material expressions (p.317) makes it difficult to associate a single individual or group with a specific practice. This can be contrasted with the private interactions and expressions of materiality in a household, which can ‘often reveal more clearly the realm of everyday practices. Households may be spaces for contestation and transformation, but they are also contexts for repetition and familiarity’ (Silliman 2011:191). This suggests that the household can represent the archaeologically visible locus of indifference, accommodation, and resistance of the dispositions between two—or more in instances of multi-generational households—individuals. The private nature of households is compounded in remote areas in which long distances between households exist, such as along the Labrador coast.

Interactions of Dispositions

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The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis When individuals, be they of the same or different cultures, enter into a relationship where they create a nuclear unit, they must consciously and unconsciously negotiate dispositions that define how they will enact their daily lived lives. Their dispositions will be based on an understanding of how an individual should and should not act, which will develop out of their underlying perception of what is appropriate (doxa), and their personal histories and actions (habitus; see Bourdieu 1977). If both partners are from a similar background, they may require fewer negotiations of daily life, but with larger differences more negotiations will be required. In situations where different dispositions exist, such as a multi-ethnic household, more negotiations of daily practices will be necessary; however, not every aspect of daily life will be negotiated (Figure 14.2). Most dispositions will be met with indifference from either side and will be enacted as one side sees fit. These dispositions are either not perceived by the other individual, and are thus ignored and unconsciously accepted, or already fit within the framework of their own dispositions and thus become enacted without being questioned. Other dispositions will be accommodated into daily life as acceptable differences, while others will be resisted. These are practices where a more active negotiation between individuals is necessary. In accommodation, one individual adapts to the actions of the other by altering their dispositions, while in resistance both individuals will actively renegotiate the practice because it cannot be accommodated or accepted by either one. By examining which practices are treated with indifference, accommodation, and resistance in a multi-ethnic household, we have the potential to apply the archaeological gaze on to aspects of daily life differentially valued by each individual, and the cultural traditions and logics they individually embody. Additionally, the household is often the locus of enculturation for subsequent generations. Children are continuously immersed within the household environment and exposed to how the other members of the household think, (p.318)

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The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis act, and live. Within this environment, children’s initial dispositions are created and reinforced, in replication of the parents’ daily enacting out of their own negotiated dispositions (De Lucia 2010; Ruttle 2010:65). This does not mean that children are exact replicas of their parents, but that their Fig. 14.2. The process of negotiation. dispositions become framed by the imperfect, inconsistent, and revising replication of the roles and practices to which they are exposed (Silliman 2009:223). The flexibility and nature of dispositions are contextually dependant and retain fluidity as a child matures and establishes their own household. This is an important process, because the retention and alteration of dispositions between generations can illuminate broader social changes over time (Groover 2003).

Labrador as a Colonial Environment These processes of disposition creation and revision can be examined in any private negotiation between two individuals, even within individuals of the same culture, but this chapter examines the nineteenth-century Labrador Métis. The Labrador Métis self-identify as the descendants of Inuit women and British men who inhabited the southern Labrador coast (NunatuKavut 2007). As British men began permanently inhabiting the Labrador coast in large (p.319) numbers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and because of the lack of European women in Labrador, British men married local Inuit women (Kennedy 1995:246; Thornton 1977; Zimmerly 1975:103). Individuals of mixed backgrounds undoubtedly existed in Labrador prior to this time, but they are currently difficult to identify in the historic and archaeological records (Ben-Dor 1966). Nineteenth-century Inuit-British mixed families produced children who grew up exposed to both Inuit and European dispositions, and such children were often thought to have the more desirable attributes of both groups (Anderson 1984; Kennedy 1995:8–9; Stopp 2008:22). These mixed European and Inuit dispositions were also accommodated and accepted by regional inhabitants, in that both Inuit and seasonal Europeans perceived a benefit in tolerating, ignoring, or accepting ethnically mixed families, as they often functioned as a bridge between groups. Over time, ethnically mixed adults often intermarried with others like themselves,

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The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis beginning the process of ethnogenesis that reinforced their distinctiveness as a separate group and gave rise to a distinct Labrador Métis identity (Kennedy 1997). It is important to note that Labrador was a pluralistic society negotiated between Inuit, Innu (the local First Nations group), transient Europeans, and permanent year-round European inhabitants (Kennedy 1995). This variety of ethnicities, and economic classes subsumed within and across ethnicities, makes it difficult to effectively divide this society into a simple dichotomized binary. By the nineteenth century, these distinct groups had over four hundred years of interaction, and their public interactions had become ‘normalized’. From the perspective of the European colonial centre, Labrador was a marginal periphery in which enforcing and maintaining a European lifestyle was problematic at best. Year-round European inhabitants, who were almost entirely male, were obligated to adapt their lifestyle to the local landscape (Thornton 1977). In this context, comparing data related to the emic gender negotiations and roles within each culture to the etic gender negotiations and roles within a multi-ethnic household will highlight how individuals negotiated and enacted cultural roles and norms within the private space of the household.

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The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis A Site of Interacting Dispositions An opportunity to archaeologically explore such a household context arose from the results of an excavation at FkBg-24 (Porcupine Strand 18). FkBg-24 is an isolated sod house structure along coastal Labrador. Historic and genealogical research identified the structure as a midnineteenth-century sod house inhabited by the family of Charles Williams, a man from Plymouth, England, and Mary, a Métis woman, making FkBg-24 a site encompassing the emergence of a Labrador Métis identity. Charles and Mary had several children who (p.320) likely inhabited the house after Charles’ death in 1879 and continued to live in the area into the early twentieth century (Beaudoin 2008:30–31). An overall picture of the household can be developed from archaeological data (Beaudoin 2008; Beaudoin et al. 2010), supplemented by historical descriptions (Cabak 1991; Kennedy 1995; Stopp 2008), and photographs (Rompkey 1996; see Figures 14.3 and 14.4). The house was a rectangular, single-room structure and measured 10 m (east–west) by 4 m (north–south). The entrance was located in the centre of the south wall and faced the mouth of North River. The walls were wooden, had sod piled on the exterior for insulation and support, and glass windows were present. The floor was made of split logs. A roughly 1m-deep storage pit with a wooden door was found in the northwest corner of the floor (Figure 14.5). A stone platform for an iron stove was present at the centre of the north wall, across from the entrance, and was the structure’s primary source of heat/cooking. A small midden was located around the exterior of the entrance, and a pit saw (a pit with a wooden superstructure used for splitting logs), was located to the northwest. The artifact collection from FkBg-24 relates primarily to foodways and suggests that the inhabitants were consuming Inuit-style liquid-based meals out of hollowware vessels; flatware vessels, however, were also present in limited

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The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis (p.321) numbers (Beaudoin et al. 2010). This suggests that the inhabitants may have also been consuming more European-style solid meals (MacDonald 2004; Otto 1977). It is also possible that the flatware vessels served some other purpose within the structure. For example, considering the almost exclusive appearance of transferprinted designs on flatware vessel forms, it is possible that flatware vessels were selected strictly for their designs and were displayed as such. Hourglass-shaped, drilled ceramic mending holes were present within the artifact collection, suggesting that there was limited access to certain ceramic vessels, and thus, when a vessel broke, it was repaired following the Inuit practice used to mend soapstone vessels (Beaudoin et al. 2010:159).

Fig. 14.3. An 1893 picture of a Métis family from a nearby island. Reproduced with the permission of The Rooms Provincial Archives Division. VA 152–149, Pardy, wife, and family, Huntington Island, 1893/Eliot Curwen, Eliot Curwen fonds.

Fig. 14.4. An 1893 picture of the inside of a sod house in Labrador.

The faunal assemblage Reproduced with the permission of The confirms that mammal, Rooms Provincial Archives Division. VA bird, fish, and bivalves 152–104, Interior of Goss’ tilt, Inner were all important Sandy Islands, July 1893/Eliot Curwen, food sources, with seal Eliot Curwen fonds. being the most commonly consumed animal. While all of the animals identified in the faunal assemblage were present year round, many of the animals would have been harvested in specific seasons; the only season that is not adequately represented is summer. This may Page 8 of 22

The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis indicate that the structure was abandoned during the summer. Salmon may also be poorly represented because this resource had greater economic value as a trade item and thus may not have been readily consumed by the household occupants. Examples of nineteenth-century sites to the north of Sandwich Bay with both four-season and threeseason occupations have been recorded (Brice-Bennett 1977:179). (p.322) To optimize the harvest of seasonally abundant resources, for both personal use and trade with local merchants, the Labrador Métis practiced patterned seasonal movements to harvest specific resources at preferred locations. This transhumance often involved two, or sometimes three, resource procurement sites throughout the year (Brice-Bennett Fig. 14.5. Site plan of FkBg-24. 1977), but year-round Reproduced with the permission of the occupation was possible Canadian Archaeological Association. in ideal locations (Anderson 1984). The general pattern of resource procurement was to harvest salmon from rivers during the early summer, cod from outer islands in mid-summer, seals from the coast in the spring and fall, and fur-bearing animals from the interior in the winter (Anderson 1984; Kennedy 1995:106–9, 141–4).

Contextualizing the Patterns It is important to interpret FkBg-24 within the broader context of Labrador archaeology and the archaeology of the colonized (e.g. Ferris 2009; Harrison 2004b; Lightfoot 1995; Paterson 2003; 2008; Silliman 2001, 2005, 2010). Hybrid groups are often labelled as assimilated colonized peoples or colonizers that (p.323) have ‘gone Native’. This removes them from the discussion as a distinct group and makes them invisible to archaeological interpretation. This process is compounded by the tendency in historic archaeology to label sites as European by default (Byrne 1996; Byrne and Nugent 2004; Harrison 2004a, 2004b; Klimko 2004; Murray 2004). This forces the conversation to become dichotomized, with colonized groups being under-represented and Page 9 of 22

The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis hybrid groups ignored altogether. To counter this bias, a shift in how sites are thought of is necessary. The former inhabitants of Labrador were immersed within a pluralistic society where all of the actors, be they Labrador Métis, Inuit, or European, were participating in the local market economy. They harvested local resources to exchange for goods from local merchants and thus had similar access to mass-produced goods. Thus the presence/absence of a specific type of artifact, food item, or activity is not adequate enough to assign an ethnic affiliation to a particular assemblage (e.g. European goods or food do not indicate European people; see Cusick 1998:131; Ferris 2009:11; cf. Rubertone 2000). However, such evidence does allow researchers to examine people’s choices from within the spectrum of such goods available in the local market economy (Deetz 1996; MacDonald 2004); that is, the choices made by the occupants of FkBg-24 reflect their conscious and unconscious decisions as actors engaged in the material world and their understandings of how objects/activities functioned within their specific social contexts. A series of Labrador Inuit and European sites were selected for comparison with the patterning at FkBg-24. Extant European sites include a Moravian mission (Cary 2004), a seasonal sealing post (Burke 1991), a semi-permanent trading post (McAleese 1991), and a permanent Jersey farmer site (Temple 2006), which forces each site to be considered as an archetype for comparison. More Labrador Inuit sites have been excavated and result in several examples of nineteenthcentury households for comparison (Auger 1989; Cabak 1991; Jurakic 2007; Pritchard 2010; Woollett 2003). In this context, the Labrador Inuit sites are the stronger comparison sample for FkBg-24, with the European sites exposing possible explanations for variation from Labrador Inuit patterning in FkBg-24. Among nineteenth-century Labrador Inuit sites, the presence of an entrance passage and a sleeping platform or furniture used as such around the edge of the structures were commonplace and a reflection of a more ancestral form of layout, despite the incorporation of European construction methods and materials. As Whitridge (2004, 2008) suggests, elements of Labrador Inuit architectural design had a broad social value and as such were retained despite overt and subversive influences from contemporaneous European groups. The lack of these architectural features at FkBg-24 indicates that the builder placed little value on the Labrador Inuit features, or did not build to such a template, suggesting that the builder had a different background.

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The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis On permanent European sites, interior subsurface cellars are present. This is a feature that is not present on Labrador Inuit sites, as exterior caches would (p.324) have served a similar purpose; the presence, therefore, of a subsurface cellar at FkBg-24 suggests that the builder was familiar with, and preferred European cellar design. The presence of a saw pit further strengthens this proposition, as it is reported in Townsend (1911:56) that the Labrador Inuit did not use saw pits. Overall, the architectural patterns indicate that the builder was not Labrador Inuit and was likely European. Turning to artifact assemblages and faunal collections, a differing pattern emerges. The Labrador Inuit sites demonstrate a preference for hollowware vessels, an abundance of glass beads, a partiality for the consumption of seal, and the location of middens near the entrance of residences. This patterning is consistent with more traditional Labrador Inuit consumption patterns of mostly seal meat cooked in a pot suspended over a heat source, consumed from a communal hollowware vessel, and waste disposed near the entrance of the structure (Cabak 1991; Cabak and Loring 2000). Domesticates are rare, especially in more remote areas, and hourglass-shaped mending-holes on vessel fragments are common. These patterns are similar to those observed at FkBg-24, indicating that they were produced by an individual with similar culinary and foodway practices. At the available European sites there are more equal frequencies of flatware to hollowware (Burke 1991), and a predominance of wild birds and domesticates (McAleese 1991). The abundance of beads is another significant similarity between Labrador Inuit sites and FkBg-24. Their presence, and their absence at European sites, indicates that Labrador Inuit and FkBg-24 occupants’ clothing dispositions were similar. This means that an individual was either producing traditional Labrador Inuit-style clothing, and/or decorating European clothing in an Inuit style. Firestone (1992) has reported on the adoption of seal-skin clothing among Newfoundland settlers and has attributed this to Inuit wives. Overall, the foodways and clothing patterns indicate that the individual responsible was familiar with Labrador Inuit conventions more than European ones. Based on the analysis of the data and contextual information, I think the archaeological patterns reflect the ongoing process of hybridization, as per Bhabha (2004). This is not the result of any biological mixing of a British and Métis family to produce hybridized children, but is rather the practiced negotiation between all inhabitants to achieve a balanced understanding of themselves and each other as they functionally operated within their household and society. It is worth noting that there have been critiques of the use of hybridization within archaeology, such as Liebmann’s (2008) suggestion that it Page 11 of 22

The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis implies the pre-existence of two essentialized ‘cultures’. Certainly a greater consideration of how and when hybridity is used is necessary, so that it does not become a catch-all concept when an anticipated pattern is not observed, but there are still many benefits in its use. Nonetheless, for the Labrador Métis, the process of hybridization is apt because they exist today as a distinct group who self-identify as being the result of such a hybridization process. This is similar to (p.325) situations in colonial Spanish America where numerous castes existed and can be observed archaeologically (Voss 2008). This does not mean that hybridity can be uncritically applied to these contexts, but rather that it is a useful positioning when exploring how these varied identities emerged and interacted. The process of hybridization observed here could be associated with the negotiation and renegotiation of dispositions and practices by the occupants of the structure along gendered roles. The inhabitants of this site adapted, adopted, ignored, and insisted on various aspects of daily practice, depending on their personal understandings of how things worked in the world. But because of the similarities between Inuit and European gender roles (Giffen 1930; Guemple 1986), these activities were largely enacted within limited contexts of negotiation, or perhaps even emerged through indifference. Daily lived practices that were traditionally within more of a male domain, such as the design and construction of the home, are reflected at FkBg-24 within more of a range of European dispositions, whereas practices that were traditionally within more of a female domain, such as oversight of foodways and clothing, are reflected at FkBg-24 within more of a range of Inuit dispositions. This implies a household arriving at a common understanding of different and similar dispositions that bridged differing traditional worldviews. For example, archaeological evidence reflecting Inuit food preferences within the household of FkBg-24 may suggest that to Charles Williams, the fact that Mary prepared the meals was more important than what she prepared. Likewise, from Mary’s perspective, the preparation of Inuit foods was within her expertise and presumably some social authority in the household that she was able to maintain. Through such processes of negotiated daily lived life, some practices that were more ambiguously gendered may have been altered, such as the pattern of seasonal transhumance. This is similar to the patterns observed by Lightfoot et al. (1998) in the pluralistic society of nineteenth-century California, where multi-ethnic families would demonstrate different cultural traits within the household depending on the culture and gender of the main actor for the specific task or space under consideration.

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The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis The ethnographic and historic record help indicate how the Labrador Métis culture was and is broadly negotiated in society (Ben-Dor 1966; Kennedy 1995; Zimmerly 1975), but provide few indications for how individuals negotiated culture within the private space of their household. These records assume that a cultural binary existed and that the hybrid nature of the household was negotiated at the macrosociety level. Household archaeology can offer us a glimpse into an actual cultural negotiation between two individuals within a single household and allow us to explore the more nuanced aspects of those negotiations of dispositions at the micro scale. These dispositions become normalized, and once accepted by groups beyond individual households, become enacted at the macro scale providing for the emergence of a broader than household identity and materiality of expression. This creates a bottom-up approach to (p.326) understanding the manifestation of a hybrid cultural identity, rather than a top-down imposition of colonizer/colonized rules or categories. This does not mean that negotiation and change only occurs in a bottom-up fashion, but rather that the bottom-up approach has been underemphasized in the past, and thus should be more actively considered (Lydon and Rizvi 2010; see also Delle, Oliver, this volume). An emphasis on the bottom-up understanding of colonialism has emerged within a broader sensibility that individuals are responding to global intentions from the colonial centre, but their own daily lived experiences are framed within local specificities (e.g. Gosden 2004; Lyons and Papadopoulos 2002; Stein 2005b). Despite similar intentions emanating from the colonial centre for varied colonial contexts, the actions will be enacted through local actors, be they colonizer or colonized, to produce specific local ‘flavours’ of colonization (e.g. Lawrence 2003).

Discussion The archaeology of a Labrador multi-ethnic household demonstrates that nuanced negotiations between two individuals were visible and break down generally along gender lines. Dispositions and practices related to women’s roles, such as foodways and refuse disposal, relate closely to known Labrador Inuit practices. The household was harvesting local animals that Mary prepared into meals consumed from hollowware vessels. Other practices, such as clothing decoration and personal adornments, also followed Labrador Inuit dispositions. In contrast, other material dispositions reflect the European sensibilities of Charles Williams, such as decisions around household construction and the functionality of an in-house cellar. In both cases, dispositions and practices are not just the imposition of particular cultural norms

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The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis upon the household. Both sets of dispositions were negotiated. Mary incorporated European goods into Labrador Inuit foodways, and Charles incorporated European house features into a sod house. These practices required relatively limited negotiation between individuals, but other aspects required more negotiation. The pattern of seasonal trans-humance is a good example of accommodation. The inhabitants of FkBg-24 practiced seasonal movements similar to that of the Labrador Inuit, allowing them the flexibility to access seasonally variable resources, even though they participated primarily in the barter economy of the Europeans and were across the river from a trading post. Labrador Métis families focused on the trapping of furs in the winter, salmon fishing in the summer, and sealing when seals were available. While all of these activities were practiced by Labrador Inuit and Europeans, the intensification of trapping and salmon fishing was unique for mixed families. These ethnically mixed families adopted the seasonal transhumance (p.327) and focus on local resources of the Inuit, but adapted these traits to function more directly within the local colonial economy, effectively creating hybrid lifeways that were distinct from both Labrador Inuit and Europeans. These hybrid lifeways are more difficult to attribute to either gender, and likely resulted from a negotiation between the two and familiarity with both Inuit and European conventions, in order to effectively integrate household practices so as to ‘fit’ both. If we assume Charles was primarily responsible for resource procurement, and Mary aided in the processing and preparing of hunted food for consumption, this implies a dominant part of daily lived life necessarily required input from both individuals, and some form of accommodated consensus. Indifference and accommodation can be observed archaeologically with relative ease; examples of resisted dispositions, however, are more difficult to observe. By definition, these dispositions become framed by their absence, which can result from a variety of processes. The absence of polygamy or cousin marriage within Labrador Métis households is a good example of this difficulty. Within Labrador Inuit culture, polygamous or cousin-married households were observed if the male was a successful provider (Scheffel 1984). This practice was not performed within multi-ethnic households and may represent the possibility that the men were not successful providers by Inuit standards, that this practice was no longer performed by this time, that European men did not have access to Inuit social dispositions because of social taboos, or that there was an active resistance to this practice by European men.

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The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis After the indifferent, accommodated, and resisted dispositions have been identified within a household, the personal idiosyncrasies of the negotiations must then be separated from culturally normative aspects. By looking at several households and multiple generations, trends can become apparent that can then be compared to the wider society. Common trends demonstrate what practices and dispositions are normalized outcomes of negotiations, and which are reproduced in succeeding generations. For example, the similar patterning at FkBg-24 and a contemporaneous Labrador Inuit site within a European community in northern Labrador suggests that FkBg-24 was not an isolated, idiosyncratic household, but was rather representative of negotiations of broader dispositions occurring across specific households in this region (Cabak 1991). The tension between idiosyncratic negotiation and broader cultural dispositions are vital when discussing societies as a whole.

Conclusion If cultural interactions across the colonized/colonizer spectrum are reduced to a simple binary for analytical purposes, the micro-scale of the interactions between two individuals should be emphasized when possible. By dividing (p.328) cultures, classes, and ethnicities into dichotomized binaries, many of the subtle interactions and negotiations arising in specific settings and contexts, leading to the development of broader societal practices and sensibilities, are lost. By examining what practices are treated with indifference, accommodation, and resistance within the household, and comparing these within a macro-down and micro-up framework, a more holistic perspective in the creation of a group can be proposed, developed from both the structure of colonial society and the agency of the individual. The macro- and micro-scales are in continuous negotiation, and are influenced by, as well as influencing each other, but in order to understand that interaction it is ideal to be able to see the nuances of the individual agent and how they negotiated their place, and that of their household, from below and within the broader society and time they existed in.

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The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis Acknowledgements I would like to thank Neal Ferris for organizing the session at the SHAs from which this volume emerged and for inviting, and encouraging, me to participate. I would also like to thank him and Rodney Harrison for their constructive feedback on this chapter, as it helped to clarify some of my ideas. I also wish to thank the following individuals for their invaluable assistance and support at FkBg-24: Ryan Anderson, Susan Arsenault, Cecil Bird, Daryl Burdett, Gil and Joyce Davis, Lewis and Doris Davis, Kendra Dawe, Amelia Fay, Brenda Holwell, Tamara Hurley, Jessica Pace, Lindsey Swinarton, Patricia Way, and Emily Wiggen. This research was funded through generous contributions from the following agencies: the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), the J. R. Smallwood Foundation, the Northern Scientific Training Program (NSTP), the Young Canada Works program, the Canada Summer Jobs program, and the Provincial Archaeology Office of Newfoundland and Labrador. References Bibliography references: Anderson, David 1984 The Development of Settlement in Southern Coastal Labrador with Particular Reference to Sandwich Bay. Bulletin of Canadian Studies 8(1):23–49. Auger, Réginald 1989 Labrador Inuit and Europeans in the Strait of Belle Isle: From Written Sources to the Archaeological Evidence. PhD dissertation, Department of Archaeology, University of Calgary, Calgary. Barile, Kerri S. and Jamie C. Brandon (eds) 2004 Household Chores and Household Choices: Theorizing the Domestic Sphere in Historical Archaeology. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. (p.329) Beaudoin, Matthew A. 2008 Sweeping the Floor: An Archaeological Examination of a Multi-ethnic Sod House in Labrador (FkBg-24). Masters thesis, Department of Archaeology, Memorial University, St John’s. Beaudoin, Matthew A., Richard L. Josephs, and Lisa K. Rankin 2010 Attributing Cultural Affiliation to Sod Structures in Labrador: A Labrador Métis Example from North River. Canadian Journal of Archaeology 34(2):148–73. Ben-Dor, Shmuel 1966 Makkovik: Eskimos and Settlers in a Labrador Community. Newfoundland Social and Economic Studies, No. 4. Memorial University, St John’s. Page 16 of 22

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The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis Plantation. In Research Strategies in Historical Archaeology, edited by Stanley A. South, pp. 91–118. Academic Press, New York. Paterson, Alistair G. 2003 The Texture of Agency: An Example of Culture-contact in Central Australia. Archaeology in Oceania 38(2):52– 65. Paterson, Alistair G. 2008 The Lost Legion: Culture Contact in Colonial Australia. AltaMira Press, Lanham. Pluckhahn, Thomas J. 2010 Household Archaeology in the Southeastern United States: History, Trends, and Challenges. Journal of Archaeological Research 18:331–85. Pritchard, Brian 2010 Colonial Experiences of the Snook’s Cove Inuit. Paper presented at the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology, St John’s, Newfoundland. Rompkey, Ronald 1996 Labrador Odyssey: The Journal and Photographs of Eliot Curwen on the Second Voyage of Wilfred Grenfell, 1893. McGillQueen’s University Press, Montreal. Rubertone, Patricia 2000 The Historical Archaeology of Native Americans. Annual Review of Anthropology 29:425–46. Ruttle, April 2010 Neither Seen nor Heard: Looking for Children in Northwest Coast Archaeology. Canadian Journal of Archaeology 34:64– 88. Scheffel, David 1984 From Polygyny to Cousin Marriage? Acculturation and Marriage in 19th-century Labrador Inuit Society. Etudes/Inuit/ Studies 8(2):61–75. Silliman, Stephen W. 2001 Agency, Practical Politics and the Archaeology of Culture Contact. Journal of Social Archaeology 1:190– 209. Silliman, Stephen W. 2004 Lost Laborers in Colonial California: Native Americans and the Archaeology of Rancho Petaluma. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005 Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America. American Antiquity 70:55– 74.

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The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis Silliman, Stephen W. 2009 Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England. American Antiquity 74:211–30. Silliman, Stephen W. 2010 Writing New Archaeological Narratives: Indigenous North America. In Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology, edited by Jane Lydon and Uzma Z. Rizvi, pp. 145–64. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek. Silliman, Stephen W. 2011 Households, Time, and Practice: A Reply to Vitelli. American Antiquity 76:190–92. Smith, Monica L. 2007 Inconspicuous Consumption: Non-display Goods and Identity Formation. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 14:412–38. Stein, Gil J. 2005a Introduction: The Comparative Archaeology of Colonial Encounters. In The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Gil J. Stein, pp. 3–31. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe. Stein, Gil J. (ed.) 2005b The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters: Comparative Perspectives. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe. Stoler, Ann Laura 1989 Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule. Comparative Studies in Society and History 31:134–61. (p.332) Stopp, Marianne P. 2008 The New Labrador Papers of Captain George Cartwright. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal. Temple, Blair 2006 ‘Their House Is the Best I’ve Seen on the Labrador’: A Nineteenth-century Jersey Dwelling at L’Anse au Cotard. In From Arctic to Avalon: Papers in Honour of Jim Tuck, edited by Lisa Rankin and Peter Ramsden, pp. 43–52. BAR International Series S1507. John and Erica Hedges, Oxford. Thornton, Patricia A. 1977 The Demographic and Mercantile Bases of Initial Permanent Settlement in the Strait of Belle Isle. In The Peopling of Newfoundland: Essays in Historical Geography, edited by John J. Mannion, pp. 152–83. Social and Economic Papers, No. 8. ISER, St John’s. Townsend, Charles W. 1911 Captain Cartwright and his Labrador Journal. DRC Publishing, St John’s.

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The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Métis van Dommelen, Peter 2005 Colonial Interactions and Hybrid Practices: Phoenician and Carthaginian Settlement in the Ancient Mediterranean. In The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Gil J. Stein, pp. 109–42. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe. van Dommelen, Peter 2011 Postcolonial Archaeologies between Discourse and Practice. World Archaeology 43:1–6. Voss, Barbara L. 2008 The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco. University of California Press, Berkeley. Whitridge, Peter 2004 Landscapes, Houses, Bodies, Things: ‘Place’ and the Archaeology of Inuit Imaginaries. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 11:213–50. Whitridge, Peter 2008 Reimagining the Iglu: Modernity and the Challenge of the Eighteenth-century Labrador Inuit Winter House. Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 4(2):288– 309. Woollett, James M. 2003 An Historical Ecology of Labrador Inuit Culture Change. PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, The City University of New York, New York. Zimmerly, David W. 1975 Cain’s Land Revisited: Culture Change in Central Labrador, 1775–1972. Social and Economic Studies, No. 16, Memorial University, St John’s.

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Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ James A. Delle

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0016

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the archaeology of European colonialism and the dilemmas of daily life — the ‘tensions of empire’ — encountered by the colonised. More specifically, it considers how the tensions of empire can be used as a concept to imagine the archaeological past by focusing on colonial Jamaica at the turn of the nineteenth century. After discussing the concept of tension, the chapter describes how the tensions of empire arise from the process of negotiating the structures of daily colonial life. It then looks at some of the most widely influential nodes of tension, including the creation of human taxonomies based on the social constructs of race and ethnicity. It also explores issues relating to sex and family, wealth and consumption, gender, labour, and slavery before concluding by framing archaeology in the tensions of empire. Keywords:   archaeology, colonialism, tensions of empire, Jamaica, race, ethnicity, family, wealth, gender, slavery

Introduction Western thought has long been troubled by the relationship between fate and free will. To what degree do humans, either expressed as individuals or societies, control their own destinies and shape their own histories? To what degree are we shaped, both individually and collectively, by natural and social forces that are beyond our direct Page 1 of 19

Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ control? Questions like these have plagued not only historical actors, but the analysts who, hundreds or thousands of year later, try to understand the motivations and actions of those who came before. This latter group, of course, includes archaeologists of colonialism. Much of the recent scholarship on the archaeology of European colonialism has, either explicitly or inherently, been shaped by frames of reference emerging from this dialectical quandary. From one perspective, it is easy to argue that those who organized colonial enterprises made pretensions of being able to control and change the outcome of local, and sometimes even global, events, empowered in their pursuit by the licence to act outside of the boundaries of what, in Europe, would be considered appropriate, ethical, or legal behaviour. However, although such power was clearly and really expressed, it was never absolute; even the most European of colonialists, once in the colonies, had to interact with people and in ways not imagined in the public schools and coffee houses of the metropole. Those whose relatives, friends, bodies, and land were being colonized similarly faced the common and quotidian dilemma of deciding how and what to be in the constantly shifting realities of the colonial experience, and exerted great material and moral effort to maintain themselves in truly difficult circumstances. Despite their best efforts to influence the course of events within and surrounding their lives, both those who were ‘colonizing’ and those who were ‘colonized’ more often than not found themselves embedded in worlds that they had neither anticipated nor even imagined. The actually lived worlds of European colonies were complex, unpredictable crucibles of (p.334) social negotiation, formed as much (if not more) by the tensions existing between individuals and social groups than the stated goals and policies of colonial social engineers (e.g. Harrison, Oliver, this volume). Some years ago, the historical anthropologists Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper (1997) characterized these dilemmas of daily life as the ‘tensions of empire’. I find their definition of this concept useful, and explore here how the tensions of empire can be used as a concept to imagine the archaeological past, illustrating my thoughts with examples from the context I know best: colonial Jamaica at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The Concept of Tension

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Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ It should come as no surprise to those familiar with the literature that there has been significant disagreement about how historical archaeologists should approach the study of the materiality of colonialism. For example, some historical archaeologists have privileged the role that European culture played in the shaping of colonial society. Described sometimes as the ‘top-down’ approach, this approach to understanding the colonial past generally starts with the premise that because colonial societies were by their nature stratified through a variety of social constructs, it follows that those closer to the top of the social hierarchy would be better able to influence trends in material culture than those occupying positions further down the social pyramid. To take a famous historical example from the literature, when locally produced coarse earthenwares dating to the colonial era were first identified in what is now the U.S. Southeast, an early and influential interpretation of this form of material culture held that local Indigenous people were somehow translating European ceramic (and iron) vessel forms into their local ceramic tradition, but, it was originally thought, for sale back to the Europeans (e.g. Baker 1972; Noël Hume 1962). This is a classic ‘top-down’ interpretation of culture change. Another famous, and widely though unfairly criticized example of a ‘top-down’ approach to understanding the archaeology of colonial North America emerged in the 1980s, as a number of historical archaeologists began to interpret the landscapes of the colonial elite as having been conscientiously designed to be part of a culture of domination, through which those made wealthy and powerful by the development of colonial economies exerted their energies to control both subordinate people and nature itself (e.g. Delle 1998; Leone 1984). A number of historical archaeologists have taken issue with what they characterize as the ‘top-down’ approach, arguing instead that we should analyse society from the ‘bottom-up’ (e.g. De Cunzo and Ernstein 2006; Wilkie and Bartoy 2000). The underlying premise of much of this latter work is that all human beings exert some measure of agency over their lives, and even though (p.335) they may occupy a subordinate role in a given colonial society, each individual is empowered to make choices, ranging from consumer choices in the kinds of ceramics one uses to with whom one might choose to have sex and, possibly, beget or conceive children. Most archaeologists leave bottom-up studies with the belief that to imagine enslaved plantation workers, members of the industrial working class, and women of nearly all ethnicities and social classes as people exerting control over their own lives is to create an empowered and empowering understanding of the past, simultaneously de-victimizing those whose experiences have

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Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ been trivialized by normalizing generalizations of how these subaltern groups lived. As is often the case when intellectual arguments are transformed into polemics, those who are characterized as ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’ archaeologists rarely actually frame their own studies this way, but rather are labelled as such by those with whom they disagree. Most archaeologists of colonialism recognize, even if only implicitly, that material realities are shaped both from above and below—that there are social rules which structure society, yet individuals can act to transform their own behaviours outside of these structuring rules, particularly in the liminal spaces of the European colonies (see Beaudoin, this volume). In colonial contexts, those who claimed the mantle of the colonist—particularly those perceived and/or accepted by their peers as colonial, social, or political leaders—could in fact impose imperial will which people had to obey on threat of death. At the same time, the physical and social realities of the colonial context shaped the behaviours and choices of even the most straight-laced of European colonialists. That is to say, those who we define as the colonized often played leading roles in shaping the social realities of newly emerging colonial orders, influencing as they did the behaviours and attitudes of the colonials. It is within this process of negotiating the structures of daily colonial life—negotiated between multiple individuals shaped by varying experiences in the world—that we find the tensions of empire. There were, in fact, powerful agents who, with varying levels of success, imposed Eurocentric visions of the world on people that had been conquered, yet those visions were often interwoven with alternative visions emerging from hundreds or thousands of years of Indigenous history. Most people experienced the tensions of empire somewhere in the middle, negotiating the social realities of colonialism on many fronts and creating several nodes of tension that can be explored archaeologically. It is these nodes of tension that can and should inform our analysis of the material realities of the colonial experience, just as they shaped the daily lives of those living in the colonial world (e.g. Harrison, Lydon, Oliver, this volume). Although the list of these nodes of tension is exhaustive, here I would like to briefly explore some of the most widely influential, including the creation of human taxonomies based on the social constructs of race and ethnicity—the biological and social realities that emerged out of the practices of human (p.336) sexuality; the accumulation of material wealth and development of the ethos of consumerism; the division and requirements of labour; and,

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Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ finally, the degree to which individuals in a given colonial society were afforded control over the conditions of their own lives through the negotiation of the terms of slavery and freedom. Race and Ethnicity

Stoler and Cooper (1997) argued, I think quite rightly, that the nature of colonial social relations was constantly shifting. Such relationships were based on the now commonly understood concept of the ethnographic other. However ‘otherness’ is not inherently stable, but, like all systems of social categorization, is under a constant process of negotiation. Thus, the social taxonomies of colonialism were constantly shifting, both in their structure and their meaning. One of the primary and persistent systems of creating social taxonomies was the division of the world’s peoples into racial categories based on perceived physical difference. This was nowhere more evident than in the development of the racialized form of colonial labour commonly known as African slavery. European New World colonialism was racialized almost from its beginning, when the implementation of the Spanish encomienda system made it important to distinguish between indigenous and mestizo peoples. Like many of the shifting definitions of social hierarchy, racial thought evolved as the contexts changed. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, both in North America and in the Caribbean, the massive forced migration of millions of African people sharpened and renewed European conceptions of race. By the turn of the eighteenth century, racial assignation in the plantation colonies was based on the genealogical distance one had from ‘whiteness’. Analysing both the theoretical construction of racial categories and their reification through lived experience in the colonies reveals complex, shifting processes of social negotiation. For example, in the theoretical constructs of race in plantation Jamaica, one could occupy any number of racialized social spaces. In Jamaica, those immediately arrived from Europe—primarily from England, Scotland, and Ireland—were categorized as ‘white’; traditional sectarian and national divisions, so destructive in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, were subordinate to the solidarity of white supremacy in the colonies, where distinctions between white and black were more important than the albeit real but subordinate distinctions between Catholic and Protestant, Englishman and Scotsman, and establishment and non-conformist.

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Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ Once the plantation emerged as a primary socio-economic unit in the New World colonies, racial distinction was used to distance white from black. In eighteenth-century Jamaica, for example, the terms ‘negro’ and ‘black’ were both used to describe a person solely descended from African ancestors, and (p.337) assumed, in lack of evidence to the contrary, to be enslaved. People of mixed African and European heritage were racially defined along a spectrum ranging from ‘mulatto’ (one white parent, one black parent), ‘sambo’ (one mulatto parent, one black parent), ‘quadroon’ (one white parent, one mulatto parent), ‘mustee’ or ‘mestee’ (one white parent, one quadroon parent), ‘mustifini’ (one white parent, one mustee parent), ‘quintroon’ (one white parent, one mustifini parent), to ‘octaroon’ (one white parent, one quintroon parent). Anyone who was thought to fit into one of these racial categories could be enslaved; the children of a white man and octaroon woman, however, were considered legally white, and thus could not be legally enslaved. In theory at least, the British West Indian racial structure thus recognized eight races of African descent, based on their perceived biological and phenotypical distance from both whiteness and blackness. In explicating the differences between these groups, John Stewart, an early nineteenth-century observer of the colonial Caribbean, described the features of women of these various racial groups: ‘Quadroon and Mestee females are comely . . . as they partake chiefly of the European feature; but the Mulattos and Sambos . . . retain something of their thick lips and flat noses . . . As for the Africans, their ideas of beauty in the human countenance are almost the reverse of those of an European’ (Stewart 1808:304). This taxonomy was a crucial element used to define the social hierarchy of colonial Jamaica, but what is less clear is whether the genotype defined the phenotype, or the phenotype defined the genotype. Such a close and ambiguous definition of racialized identity was difficult to manage; individuals clearly could slide between categories, and most likely, people were identified as members of one of these groups based more on their physical appearance than the realities of their parentage. Those who were able to assume the identity of octaroon were empowered to liberate their children from slavery, and thus there was clearly a material motivation behind how a person was categorized into one of these racial groups. Likely because this complex system of racialization was difficult to manage, the human taxonomies imposed by Jamaican planters were refined as the social realities of the colonies shifted. As the hierarchy of race suggests, and despite truly horrific demographic realities, generations of the descendants of African captives were born and grew Page 6 of 19

Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ to adulthood in the colonies. While the Caribbean-born slaves were universally classified as ‘creoles’ (Delle 2000b), those who were transported directly from Africa were sometimes assigned to specific ethnic groups. In the minds of at least some of the white colonial elites, particular ethnic groups were prone to specific character traits that defined a person’s usefulness to a plantation. That usefulness was manifested in the occupations to which people would be put to work on the plantation, for example as supervisors (drivers), field hands, domestics, or artisans, and thus had a real material effect on the lives of those working in the colony. Members of the second generation—the creoles—presumably lost the behavioural dispositions ascribed to (p. 338) African ethnicities, as these dispositions were associated with cultural groups rather than biological races. The ethnic assignations used by the Jamaican colonists generally referred to the slave port from whence the captives were originally obtained in Africa, and likely had very little to do with how people perceived and identified themselves. For example, the West Indian historian Bryan Edwards, writing in the late eighteenth century, related that the term ‘Eboe’ referred to Africans transported from the Bight of Benin, an area encompassing ‘300 English leagues [about 900 miles] of which the interior countries are unknown, even by name, to Europeans’ (Edwards 1810:280–1; see also Delle 2000b). The missionary James Phillippo later noted that the ‘tribes’ or ‘nations’ from which captives were taken included the ‘Mandigoes, the Foulahs . . . the Whidahs, or Papaws, the Eboes, the Congoes, the Angolas, the Coromantees, and the Mocoes, from Upper and Lower Guinea’ (Phillippo 1843:239). Of these groups, the ‘Mandigoes, the Whidahs, and the Congoes, are said, in general, to have been docile, civil, obliging, and peaceable . . . Eboes are described as crafty, frugal, disputative, and avaricious . . . Coromantees . . . the tribe that had generally been at the head of all insurrections’ (Phillippo 1843:239–40). While the ethnic markers applied to captive Africans may have had little to do with their actual tribal or national affiliations, Europeans projected physical and personality characteristics on to these groups, in effect creating an ethnic hierarchy to rationalize the social order of Jamaican slavery. Numerous contemporary observers suggested that members of these assumed groups were better suited for particular kinds of plantation work (e.g. Edwards 1810; Laborie 1798; Long 1970 [1777]; Stewart 1808:235–6; see Delle 2000b for a more detailed discussion). For example, Dr David Collins characterized the ‘Cormarantins’ and other people originating on the Gold Coast as warlike and prone to ‘bringing with them into slavery lofty ideas of independence . . . [the] history of Jamaica exhibits very sanguinary Page 7 of 19

Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ examples of that disposition’ (Collins 1803:35). Collins noted that the ‘negroes from Senegal are a handsome race of people, in features resembling the whites . . . They are excellent for the care of cattle and horses, and for domestic service’ (Collins 1803:36). He believed the group called ‘Congos’ to be ‘a handsome race of Africans, generally very black . . . they make good domestic servants and tradesmen’ (Collins 1803:37). Collins described the ‘Mandingos’ as ‘much less ferocious than the Minna and Gold-coast negroes . . . Being reared in the habits of indolence . . . though unfit for the labours of the field, they may be employed as watchmen’ (Collins 1803:37). He characterized the ‘Ebbos, and Ebbo-bees, commonly called Mocos’ as ‘turbulent, stubborn, and much addicted to suicide; yet they are hardy and susceptible of labour, the women in particular’ (Collins 1803:37). The definition of these social taxonomies can be seen as a ‘top-down’ process through which colonizers attempted to control the nature of social relations in the colony. However, in practice, the distinction between individuals assigned (p.339) to each of these groups, either racial or ethnic, was difficult to make. It seems quite likely that racial assignation was a turbulent and contested process; one’s role in plantation society, and the status attainable by one’s children, was in part defined by this racial and ethnic hierarchy. This imperial tension, as it was used to define individual membership in collective groups, was likely resolved at the level of the individual, though this is difficult to demonstrate. However, in the later eighteenth century the colonial legislature in Jamaica, in a moment of imperial pragmatism emerging from the tension of a racialized social hierarchy, effectively condensed the theoretical racial hierarchy into four groups defined by race and privilege: whites, slaves, free people of colour having special privileges (e.g. to vote, hold office, or inherit property), and free people of colour without special privileges (Braithwaite 1971; Heuman 1981). Resolving the tension between the theoretical constructions of race and identity, and the lived realities of plantation slavery, resulted in a much simplified vision of hierarchy—one still based on racial assignation, but mostly tied to whether one was eligible to be enslaved, and the degree to which one was allowed access to civil and political rights.

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Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ Sex and Family

Civil and political rights were granted in colonial Jamaica based on the racialized social hierarchy created and imposed by the planter class, which in turn had emerged from the tensions of colonial sexuality. As was the case in many colonial contexts, the first waves of European settler groups were not gender-balanced; in Jamaica, for example, throughout much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries European men outnumbered European women. This gender imbalance resulted in many sexual unions between European men and women of African descent; the ensuing pregnancies resulted in a large mixed-race population on Jamaica, some of whom remained enslaved, others of whom were either born into freedom by virtue of their mother’s status, or else were manumitted by their fathers should their mothers have been enslaved. The Reverend Richard Bickell, who lived and preached for a time in Kingston, and was a former Chaplain at the Royal Naval station at Port Royal, commented in the 1820s that sexual relationships between European men and women of colour were so common as to be ‘looked upon by every person as a matter of course’ (Bickell 1825:105). According to Bickell, few white men of modest means chose, or had the opportunity, to marry white women, but instead co-habited with a woman of colour, usually referred to as a ‘housekeeper’. Bickell further relates that overseers on estates commonly entered into such relationships, and would just as commonly recognize and raise as their own the children of these unions. Bickell was scandalized that women of the white gentry socialized with such common-law spouses, treating them almost as equals (p.340) should their common-law husbands rise to wealth and local prominence (Bickell 1825:105). During the colonial era, this population was known as ‘free coloured’ or ‘free people of colour’. Gad Heuman has estimated that by 1834, the year that slavery was legally abolished in Jamaica, the free coloured population outnumbered the white by almost two to one, with about 31,000 free people of colour and 16,600 whites living on the island (Heuman 1981:7). The formation of a privileged class of people of colour clearly created imperial tension. As the size of the free coloured population increased in the eighteenth century, the island’s legislature, known as the Jamaica Assembly, acted to limit the economic and social power of this class of people. For example, in 1761 the Assembly passed an act prohibiting whites from bequeathing real or personal property valued at more than £1,200 sterling, or £2,000 local currency, to a person of colour (Braithwaite 1971; Heuman 1981:6). Only Christian whites were allowed to sit in the Jamaica Assembly, and after 1733 free people of colour were not allowed to vote. An act passed in 1711 prohibited free Page 9 of 19

Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ people of colour from being employed in a public office, and various other laws passed by the Assembly limited the rights of people of colour to serve on juries and testify in court. Examining the social roles played by people of colour from the ‘bottom up’ reveals that, despite the legal restrictions placed upon them by the legislature, some free people of colour were able to accumulate wealth and property, and many became planters and owned slaves. Such members of the community were occasionally granted Civil Rights exceptions, resulting in those free people of colour ‘having special privileges’, which could include the right to vote or hold public office. Nevertheless, Heuman notes that such privileges could only be granted through a specific act of the Assembly, and that such acts became rare after 1761 (Heuman 1981:6). While some free people of colour owned small plantations and lived on their estates, the vast majority of the free coloured population lived in Jamaica’s two largest urban centres, Kingston, which was the island’s primary port city, and Spanish Town, its eighteenth-century political capital. Several studies have concluded that many free people of colour were artisans or worked or owned shops. Many of this latter group included free women of colour who, because of what seems to have been a gender-bias on the part of white fathers to free their daughters but not their sons, outnumbered free men of colour by a ratio of almost 2:1 (Heuman 1981:8). Braithwaithe (1971:172) contends that a few free people of colour did serve as overseers on estates, and some even rose to the status of planter; he cites the example of James Swaby, the mulatto son of John Swaby, who inherited by will his white father’s sugar plantations and slaves, owning 217 slaves and 331 head of stock in 1828. It was more common for free people of colour to own more modest estates, or to work in urban trades as clerks, druggists, schoolmasters, or tavern keepers (Braithwaite 1971:172). Many women of colour owned and operated lodging houses on the island (Heuman 1981:9).

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Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ (p.341) Wealth and Consumption

By the middle of the eighteenth century, European colonies were deeply enmeshed in the political, social, and economic webs of their home empires. Not only did colonies provide raw materials and tropical produce that could be consumed in the metropole, they also provided theoretically easily controlled markets for the distribution of goods from the metropole and its other colonies. In last third of the eighteenth century, European markets, both at home and in the colonies, were flooded by an explosion of mass-produced goods. Attempts to control whose commodities were sold in colonial markets resulted in yet another node of tension, negotiated through such seemingly romantic historical processes as piracy, contraband smuggling, and conflicts over who would profit by the distribution and sale of manufactured goods. One of the contradictions that emerged in colonial slavery was the necessity by the enslaved to purchase industrial, mass-produced goods while not having the regular ability to sell their labour for a wage. Despite the heavy restrictions of slavery, by the early nineteenth century, enslaved Jamaicans had ready access to cash, and thriving consumer markets, controlled by the enslaved, existed throughout the island. While the enslaved rarely had the opportunity to work for wages, they often had the opportunity to sell the products of their labour—things like crafts, vegetables, charcoal, and meat—in organized Sunday markets (Berlin and Morgan 1991; Hauser 2001, 2008; Mintz and Hall 1960; Mullin 1995; Simmonds 2002). By the turn of the nineteenth century, much of the resulting capital was spent on the acquisition of mass-produced ceramics, textiles, and other goods manufactured in Europe. Most historical archaeologists recognize that the mass production of consumer goods after the 1760s dramatically changed consumer behaviour, and that this shift is visible in the archaeological record (e.g. Cook et al. 1996; Jones 1993; Klein 1991; Mullins 1999a, 1999b; Orser 1992; Shackel 1992). The ubiquitous presence of refined earthenwares in archaeological contexts—particularly creamwares, pearlwares, and whitewares—is a reflection of these shifts in behaviour. The results of this process in colonial Jamaica can be seen in the dramatic, diachronic shift in the percentages of mass-produced versus locally produced goods found in plantation village sites. Excavations of Jamaican plantations and urban sites dating to the first half of the eighteenth century and earlier tend to uncover a significant number of locally produced coarse earthenware pots, known in Jamaica as yabbas (Armstrong 1990; Hauser and Armstrong 1999; Hauser 2001, 2008; Matthewson 1972a, 1972b, 1973; Meyers 1999; Reeves 1997). These Page 11 of 19

Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ low-fired ceramics have long been produced throughout the Caribbean —primarily by women—and have been used for a number of utilitarian purposes, including the storage of food and water, as chamber pots, and for cooking stews and pottages. However, these kinds of vessels were replaced over time by mass-produced items like English refined earthenwares, (p.342) glass bottles, and iron cooking pots as these became increasingly available. By the early nineteenth century, factoryproduced goods were quickly replacing yabbas in Jamaica. For example, in the nineteenth-century context of Marshall’s Pen, only 1 percent of the ceramic assemblage was locally produced (Delle 2008, 2009). Barry Higman’s analysis of the ceramic assemblage recovered from nineteenth-century Montpellier, a contemporary sugar estate, reflects this same trend (Higman 1998:227). In his analysis of material culture from the early nineteenth-century enslaved households of Juan de Bolas and Thetford plantations in central Jamaica, Matthew Reeves (1997:193–282) notes a lower percentage of yabbas both in the more recently occupied households and in those households that had a relatively higher economic standing in the plantation hierarchy, reflecting differential access to mass-produced goods across time and social distance. Similarly, Doug Armstrong (1990:153) reports that locally produced earthenwares made up nearly 12 percent of the ceramic assemblage from the earliest contexts at Drax Hall, an early eighteenth-century sugar plantation site, while later contexts had increasingly smaller amounts of yabba. This shift occurred as imported manufactured goods circulated more freely than did locally produced goods, potentially because they were cheaper to procure or because they were more durable, particularly iron pots. Indeed, the accounts kept by the management of Marshall’s Pen indicated that in July of 1814, five dozen iron cooking pots were shipped to Marshall’s Pen, presumably for distribution to the working population; in 1825 another four dozen arrived. Similarly, the plantation purchased crates of sundry and assorted earthenwares, shipped from Liverpool, also presumably to be used by the enslaved plantation population. Wilkie and Farnsworth (2005) have argued that such massproduced goods may have found their way into local markets in the Bahamas, and thus may have been available for purchase by the enslaved (see also Wilkie 2000, 2001). This may also have been happening in Jamaica.

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Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ Gender, Labour, Slavery

While the wider availability of mass-produced, durable cooking wares may have led to the decline in use of yabbas, in his study of eighteenthcentury yabbas from several sites throughout Jamaica, Mark Hauser (2001) suggests that the observed drop-off in the manufacture and use of locally produced ceramics may be also related to the shifting role women began to play in the Caribbean following the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. For many and complex reasons, it has been generally recognized that women played increasingly important roles as field labourers in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Jamaica (e.g. Bush 1990, 1996; Delle 2000a, 2002; Mair 2001; Mintz and Hall 1960; for others see Hauser 2001:38–9). Hauser suggests that as Jamaican planters began incorporating women more directly into the production of export (p.343) commodities, women may have had less time for other kinds of activities, like the production of pottery for local markets. The drop-off in yabbas may thus be related to a relative shortage based on a decline in production. This interpretation is revelatory of a basic imperial tension running throughout much of the colonial world: millions of African people were transported to the New World, against their will, to live a life of forced labour. The racial hierarchies and complex social relations that developed between Europeans and people of African descent in places like Jamaica were epiphenomenal to the rise of the use of enslaved labour in the plantation colonies. Although people could, and did, work diligently to maintain their human dignity in the face of this brutal system of labour exploitation, the fact remains that in places like Jamaica, hundreds of thousands of people were compelled to work at the whim of those who claimed ownership over them. The regime of enslaved labour shaped much of the experience of individuals living in the plantation colonies. Enslaved people were compelled to work on plantations from the time they were 5 or 6 years old through to their death or disability brought on by age, accident, or disease. The division of labour required on colonial plantations meant that some segments of the population toiled in the fields, while others worked in artisanal trades, domestic or healthcare service, or surveillance and supervisory positions (e.g. drivers or head people). On an average Jamaican plantation, approximately half of the population consisted of field workers; the rest were divided between the other task groups, or else categorized as ‘unserviceable children’ or ‘invalids’. The material lives of those living in such a colonial context would thus vary depending on what occupation a person was assigned to fill, a decision over which the enslaved rarely had any choice. Their choices Page 13 of 19

Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ over where to live and what to eat were often similarly constrained. Nevertheless, enslaved people did work to create material worlds of their own. It is really through the analysis of the ways people negotiated the tensions of slavery, and the ways that institution influenced the nature of gender and labour relations, that we can truly begin to understand the materiality of plantation colonialism.

Conclusion: Framing Archaeology in the Tensions of Empire Perhaps the greatest legacy of the decade-long post-processual critique of archaeology was the argument, now widely accepted among archaeologists, that there are multiple and equally valid ways to interpret the past. Whether one begins from the frame of reference of the colonizers, or that of the colonized, analysing the material culture of the colonial experience can shed light on the ways that the tensions of empire were experienced and negotiated; (p.344) neither approach is more or less valid than the other, and in fact are two routes to the same destination. I myself have come to understand that the complexities of the colonial experience—even in seemingly small-scale and contained historical contexts like plantation Jamaica—make each archaeological site idiosyncratic and unique. In Jamaica, although the structures of the colonial social system impacted all, each plantation had its own history, its own experience of the tensions of empire, and has left its own material legacy. To try to create a single narrative out of this complex experience would be an exercise in futility. This is not to say that we must consider each case in any supracontextual way. Rather, as we study how people lived in the era of European colonialism, we must bear in mind that the materialities that emerged on each plantation, in each village, and in each colony, were experienced differently by those living there as they individually and collectively negotiated the tensions of empire. Coming to terms with, and of course analysing, the vast diversity in the ways the tensions of empire were negotiated is not an easy task, particularly for those who look too closely for similarity as they attempt to paint grand narratives of the past. This leads to a final quandary: how do we understand the lives of those who left behind the archaeological record of colonialism without falling into the trap of excessive particularism? While I cannot pretend to hold the answer to this difficult question, I am increasingly convinced that we must create research designs that are simultaneously aware of the power that European institutions and agents had over the lives of people living in the colonies, and sympathetic to the experiences of Page 14 of 19

Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ those individuals who were subjected to colonial rule. In the end, the top-downers and bottom-uppers are engaged in the same pursuit: to understand how the terms of colonialism were defined and negotiated. In this way, we can see that the intellectual distinction between these approaches is largely artificial. When we accept that the tensions of empire shaped the lives of people both from above and from below, we may better understand how the world of the colonizers and colonized actually was shaped. References Bibliography references: Armstrong, Douglas V. 1990 The Old Village and the Great House: An Archaeological and Historical Examination of Drax Hall Plantation, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Baker, Steven G. 1972 Colono-Indian Pottery from Cambridge, South Carolina, with Comments on the Historic Catawba Trade. Institute of Archeology and Anthropology Notebook 4: 3–30. Berlin, Ira and Philip D. Morgan 1991 Introduction. In The Slaves Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas, edited by Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, pp. 1–27. Frank Cass and Company, London. (p.345) Bickell, Rev. Richard 1825 The West Indies as They Are; or a Picture of Slavery: Particularly as it Exists in the Island of Jamaica. J. Hatchard and Son, London. Brathwaite, Edward K. 1971 The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Bush, Barbara 1990 Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Bush, Barbara 1996 Hard Labor: Women, Childbirth, and Resistance in British Caribbean Society. In More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, edited by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, pp. 61–78. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Collins, David 1803 Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves, in the Sugar Colonies, by a Professional Planter. J. Barfield, London.

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Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ Cook, Lauren J., Rebecca Yamin, and John P. McCarthy 1996 Shopping As Meaningful Action: Toward a Redefinition of Consumption in Historical Archaeology. Historical Archaeology 30(4): 50–65. De Cunzo, Lu Ann and Julie Ernstein 2006 Landscapes, Ideology, and Experience in Historical Archaeology. In Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry, pp. 255–272. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Delle, James A. 1998 An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. Plenum, New York. Delle, James A. 2000a Gender, Power and Space: Negotiating Social Relations Under Slavery on Coffee Plantations in Jamaica, 1790–1834. In Lines that Divide: Historical Archaeologies of Race, Class and Gender, edited by James A. Delle, Stephen A. Mrozowski, and Robert Paynter, pp. 168–201. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. Delle, James A. 2000b The Material and Cognitive Dimensions of Creolization in Nineteenth Century Jamaica. Historical Archaeology 34(3):56–72. Delle, James A. 2002 Women’s Lives and Labour on Radnor, a Jamaican Coffee Plantation, 1822–1826. Caribbean Quarterly 48(4):27–40. Delle, James A. 2008 An Archaeology of Modernity in Colonial Jamaica. Archaeologies 4:87–109. Delle, James A. 2009 The Governor and the Enslaved: Archaeology and Modernity at Marshall’s Pen, Jamaica. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 12:488–512. Edwards, Bryan 1810 The History Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies. Levis and Weaver, Philadelphia. Hauser, Mark W. 2001 Peddling Pots: Determining the Extent of Market Exchange in Eighteenth-century Jamaica through the Analysis of Local Coarse Earthenware. PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York. Hauser, Mark W. 2008 An Archaeology of Black Markets: Local Ceramics and Economies in Eighteenth-century Jamaica. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Hauser, Mark and Douglas V. Armstrong 1999 Embedded Identities: Piecing Together Relationships through Compositional Analysis of Low-

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Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ fired Earthenware. In African Sites Archaeology in the Caribbean, edited by Jay B. Haviser, pp. 65–93. Markus Wiener, Princeton, New Jersey. Heuman, Gad 1981 Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–1865. Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut. (p.346) Higman, Barry 1998 Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912. University Press of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. Jones, Olive R 1993 Commercial Foods, 1740–1820. Historical Archaeology 27(2):25–41. Klein, Terry H. 1991 Nineteenth-century Ceramics and Models of Consumer Behavior. Historical Archaeology 25(2):77–91. Laborie, P. J. 1798 The Coffee Planter of Saint Domingo. T. Caddell and W. Davies, London. Leone, Mark P. 1984 Interpreting Ideology in Historical Archaeology: Using the Rules of Perspective in the William Paca Garden in Annapolis Maryland. In Ideology, Power, and Prehistory, edited by Daniel Miller and Christopher Tilley, pp. 25–35. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Long, Edward 1970 [1774] The History of Jamaica. Frank Cass and Company, London. Mair, Lucille Mathurin 2001 Women Field Workers in Jamaica During Slavery. In Slavery, Freedom, and Gender: The Dynamics of Caribbean Society, edited by Brian L. Moore, Barry W. Higman, Carl Campbell, and Patrick Bryan, pp. 183–396. University Press of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. Matthewson, R. Duncan 1972a Jamaican Ceramics: An Introduction to 18th-century Folk Pottery in West African Tradition. Jamaica Journal 6(2):54–6. Matthewson, R. Duncan 1972b History from the Earth: Archaeological Excavations at Old King’s House. Jamaica Journal 6(3):3–11. Matthewson, R. Duncan 1973 Archaeological Analysis of Material Culture as a Reflection of Sub-cultural Differentiation in 18th-century Jamaica. Jamaica Journal 7:25–9.

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Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ Meyers, Allan D. 1999 West African Tradition in the Decoration of Colonial Jamaican Folk Pottery. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 3:201–24. Mintz, Sidney and Douglas Hall 1960 The Origins of the Jamaican Internal Marketing System. Yale University Publications in Anthropology, New Haven, Connecticut. Mullin, Michael 1995 Slave Economic Strategies: Food, Markets, and Property. From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves, edited by Mary Turner, pp. 68–79. Ian Randle, Kingston, Jamaica. Mullins, Paul R. 1999a Race and the Genteel Consumer: Class and African American Consumption, 1850–1930. Historical Archaeology 33(1):22–38. Mullins, Paul R. 1999b ‘A Bold and Gorgeous Front’: The Contradictions of African America and Consumer Culture. In Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism, edited by Mark P. Leone and Parker B. Potter, Jr, pp.169– 94. Kluwer, New York. Noël Hume, Ivor 1962 An Indian Ware of the Colonial Period. Quarterly Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Virginia 17:1. Orser, Charles E., Jr 1992 Beneath the Material Surface of Things: Commodities, Artifacts, and Slave Plantations. Historical Archaeology 26(3): 95–104. Phillippo, James M. 1843 Jamaica: Its Past and Present State. John Snow, London. Reeves, Matthew 1997 ‘By Their Own Labour’: Enslaved Africans Survival Strategies on Two Jamaican Plantations. PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York. Simmonds, Lorna Elaine 2002 The Afro-Jamaican and the Internal Marketing System: Kingston, 1780–1834. In Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage, and (p.347) Culture, edited by Kathleen E. A. Monteith and Glen Richards, pp. 274–90. University Press of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. Shackel, Paul A. 1992 Modern Discipline: Its Historical Context in the Colonial Chesapeake. Historical Archaeology 26(3):73–84. Stewart, John 1808 An Account of Jamaica and its Inhabitants. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, London.

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Archaeology and the ‘Tensions of Empire’ Stoler, Ann L. and Frederick Cooper 1997 Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda. In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler, pp. 1–56. University of California Press, Berkeley. Wilkie, Laurie A. 2000 Culture Bought: Evidence of Creolization in the Consumer Goods of an Enslaved Bahamian Family. Historical Archaeology 34(3):10–26. Wilkie, Laurie A. 2001 Methodist Intentions and African Sensibilities: The Victory of African Consumerism over Plantation Paternalism at a Bahamian Plantation. In Island Lives: Historical Archaeologies of the Caribbean, edited by Paul Farnsworth, pp. 272–300. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Wilkie, Laurie A. and Kevin Barto 2000 A Critical Archaeology Revisited. Current Anthropology 41: 747–77. Wilkie, Laurie A. and Paul Farnsworth 2005 Sampling Many Pots: An Archaeology of Memory and Tradition at a Bahamian Plantation. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean Mark W. Hauser Stephan Lenik

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0017

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the material practices and colonial chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean, with particular reference to the lowfired earthenware types that comprise the ceramics of the African diaspora (yabba, monkey, pepperpot, pan, lescuit, and canari). More precisely, it considers a ‘survivalist’ tradition with regard to Indigenes of the Caribbean and describes an interaction-based paradigm that manifests in the flexible and variable responses arising from migration to the islands. After offering a definition of ‘Caribbean place’, the chapter discusses broadly construed identities or groupings that are reified in the material realm and consequently obscure the variation which characterises the Caribbean place. Finally, it analyses the multiple displacements, the disruptive nature of enslavement, and the melding of different African, European, and Native American cultures within the context of pottery production. Keywords:   ceramics, Dominica, Caribbean, earthenware, African diaspora, Indigenes, migration, Caribbean place, enslavement, pottery

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean Introduction: A Caribbean Place Perhaps not unique to the Caribbean, but certainly highlighted by its unique position in time, place, and scholarship, is a somewhat muddied definition of a ‘Caribbean place’. Indeed, Caribbeanists have rejected the Americanist tradition of labelling it a ‘Culture Area’ (Curet 2004; Mintz 1966) and have instead focused on the notion of a ‘very heterogeneous cultural picture’ (Mintz 1966:914). Scholars from outside the Caribbean often view the region as an interstice between North, South, and Central America, defined by an archipelago whose relationship with ‘other’ world areas is often considered peripheral, and whose inhabitants, both pre- and post-colony, are migrants to the archipelago (Trouillot 1992). Thus the local, indigenous inhabitants of the Windward Islands, known as Carib or Kalinago, are grouped into the South American ‘Tropical Forest’ type in Steward’s (1946–1959) Handbook of South American Indians. Similarly, African Diaspora scholarship continues to use the various cultures and/or nations of West Africa as analytical units in the Caribbean, after the individuals who were forcibly transported there in conditions of enslavement. Perhaps we can detect the creation of new social and cultural forms in the Caribbean Creole, but these also tend to focus on antecedents from earlier places and times. Indeed, in defining the Caribbean place one is often faced with a tautology of a particularly post-modern, postcolonial sort. The Caribbean place is defined from its occupation by Caribbean people; and Caribbean people are defined by their habitation of a Caribbean place. While there is an emerging tradition of postcolonial studies in archaeology (see Liebman and Rizvi 2008; Lydon and Rizvi 2010) many of (p.349) the questions developed above arose out of a need to reconcile direct archaeological interpretations with a longstanding tradition of reconstituted Marxism and postcolonial scholarship in the Caribbean (see, for example, Cesaire 1976; Fanon 1967; James 1963; Scott 2004a). In this chapter, we aim to identify a ‘survivalist’ tradition with regard to Indigenes of the Caribbean, a tradition which proposes the persistence of certain homogeneous ‘whole-culture’ forms, in language, architecture, material culture, and so on. In place of this approach we advocate an interaction-based paradigm (see also chapters by Harrison, Silliman, and Oliver, this volume) which manifests in the flexible and variable responses arising from the migration to the islands. If, at its most basic level, postcolonial theory highlights that colonial ideologies can operate in the absence of colonization, then it is important to emphasize those material registers which move us beyond categories established through colonial administration. Such an emphasis brings light to the patterns of simultaneous persistence and flexibility which Page 2 of 26

Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean vex such categories. Even though this heterogeneity is acknowledged in summaries of the islands’ ecological or geological variation, for example, with regard to Caribbean peoples and cultures, there are tendencies for ideas about the persistence of past cultural traditions among the migrants and their descendants to outweigh the possibility of change. This point is particularly salient with regard to the ceramics of colonized Caribbean peoples, including those of African and Indigenous ancestry, and through our analysis of this artifact class we identify the promise of an interactionist perspective (see also Beaudoin, this volume; Clifford 2004; Merlan 2008). We begin by offering a definition of ‘Caribbean place’. As an operational definition, at least for the colonial and post-colony period, we see the Caribbean as a crossroad. This definition of the Caribbean place is useful in that it makes explicit reference to the historically grounded realities of the region, while at the same time admitting to heuristic utility for the scholar of these three intersecting themes of meaning. It is this question of the imposition of boundedness or boundaries upon the Caribbean which proves troublesome, particularly for the ceramics which are the topic of this chapter, in that broadly construed identities or groupings are reified in the material realm and consequently obscure the variation which characterizes the Caribbean place (Figure 16.1). The Caribbean as a region is as much a product of historical events, actions, and social relations as it is a region defined by a sea which was named after an Indigenous group occupying a series of islands which lie somewhere between the Americas and the rest of the world (Hirsch 1995; Marquardt and Crumley 1987). Formulations like those of Lefebvre (1991) and Harvey (1989), in which the Caribbean space is framed as a continuing history within a triad of materiality, sociality, and mentality, become incredibly useful (Lefebvre 1991:14). Indeed, we argue that the Caribbean cannot be defined through the boundaries of colonial regimes or pre-Columbian polities. Rather, the ‘Caribbean (p. 350)

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean (p.351) place’ contains geographies of practice in which there are three intersecting modalities: time, space, and identity.

Many scholars have argued that the Caribbean in time is a particularly modern place (Hicks 2007; Mintz 1974; Scott 2004b:192; Trouillot 1992). Much of the Fig. 16.1. Map of the Eastern Caribbean. academic discourse on Boundaries represented on the map are the Caribbean has depicted in Thomas Jeffrey’s ‘The West been dominated by Indies indicating. . . .’ , 1774. These anthropological boundaries were established after the inquiries into issues of Treaty of Paris (1763) in which Britain globalization and formally annexed Dominica. The ‘+’ signs attempts to extend indicate sites sampled in a regional these formulations into survey of colonial period sites (Hauser the past. The 2011; Kelly et al. 2008). Caribbean as a place within this literature has been variably viewed as an antecedent to (Delle 1998) or byproduct of these processes (Armstrong 2003). The reason for this is in some sense causal, in that ‘the scourging of the human landscape enabled Europeans to set the terms of their future colonialism in the Caribbean in ways very different from those available to them in densely occupied areas of the non-western world’ (Mintz 1966:918). While Mintz’s work advances the conceptualization of Caribbean people as being modern, or perhaps ‘precociously modern’ (Scott 2004a), displaced Indigenous peoples and forcibly imported Africans have been blocked into an earlier time, but one which manages to persist to the present. This form of analysis, in which Indigenous or African cultural antecedents survive through later time periods, is termed the ‘survival’ mode. It is also an historical by-product of the modern in the ways in which current imperial and national boundaries have dictated research agendas and influenced assumed domains of shared meanings of space. These same imperialist or nationalist agendas have guided interpretation of Caribbean peoples since the era of Columbus. In this manner, the Indigenous people Spaniards encountered in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were fitted into a dichotomy which paired the Page 4 of 26

Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean so-called warlike, cannibal Carib of the eastern Caribbean with the peaceful denizens of the Greater Antilles known as Arawak or Taino. While some intra-island variation was recognized, in language groups or chiefdoms on the island of Santo Domingo for example, these groupings were projected forward to the seventeenth century as Indigenous peoples were labelled Carib even after it was learned they may have self-ascribed as Kalinago (Allaire 1980; Davis and Goodwin 1990; Gullick 1980). This functionalist view shapes interpretations of prehistory, but it is also projected forward into the colonial period with little acknowledgement of changes which had occurred as European colonialism advanced. If we were to examine solely the parts of the Caribbean defined as the Greater and Lesser Antilles, there is a tacit assumption in some of the literature that the Caribbean is an English pond with the occasional Dutch and French interloper and Spanish holdover. This is a view of the Caribbean which stems from a distinctly post-Haitian-revolution Caribbean (Kelly 2004). Transformations in imperial strategies of production and control had real effects on the ways in which emergent global capitalism articulated into local landscapes (Hauser 2006). The Caribbean, as a modality of space, rests somewhere between the West and the rest of the world (Scott 2004b). As a landscape it can be seen as a media of action and social relations (Ingold 1993; Snead 2001; Tilley 1994:10). Certainly, (p.352) as a starting place, we can use the actual sea as the mechanism through which we create this space. Occupants of this space are not bounded by natural borders but are instead bound together through their contiguity to this body of water. This sea provides a fluid network of intra- and inter-island transit, avenues for the indigenous Carib/Kalinago to travel by canoe for raiding or exchange, as well as escape routes for maroons, or vectors for illicit trade in the islands’ many small harbours and hidden bays. Certainly, this definition has a degree of saliency in the accounts of de Acosta (2002:78), who defines the region as composed of the Windward Islands, the Greater Antilles, Panama, and New Spain. Even as early as the late fifteenth century, the region was also defined in part by the resources which were extracted and processed there, such as sugar, pepper, and hardwoods (de Acosta 2002:150). It is also remarkable that the population is identified as sparse (de Acosta 2002:150), as myths of the extinction of Native peoples contributed to legitimizing European claims to the islands. The third modality through which the Caribbean place is defined is through the identity of those who occupy it. This modality requires explication with specific and direct reference to the Caribbean: the Columbian event. It is impossible to essentialize the history or people of Page 5 of 26

Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean the Caribbean to a single system, history, or social organization, but what can be said is that during the period immediately following contact with Columbus, huge transformations in demography took place. Most notably, this included the devastation (not decimation or destruction) of Indigenous populations due to forced labour and disease and their subsequent replacement by enslaved Africans (Kiple 1984). The model in which African replaces Indigenous is not applicable to the entire region. On islands like Dominica there is continuous inhabitation by the Carib/Kalinago, as well as an extended period of overlap, as free and enslaved peoples of African ancestry were present on the island since before the colonial period. In spite of the persistence of the idea of the impending extinction of the Carib/Kalinago (Forte 2005; Hulme 2000), descendant communities are scattered throughout the Windward Islands and parts of Central America in the Garifuna, or Black Carib. With the exception of the work of a few scholars in archaeology (Deagan 2004; Hulme and Whitehead 1992; Wilson 1993) and anthropology (Helms 1988), there generally have been two Caribbeans defined in scholarship: one dominated by migrant indigenes (enslaved Africans of the post Columbian), and one dominated by indigenous migrants (the diverse and varied groups of peoples who migrated from mainland North, Central and South America and who eventually met Columbus). Both the ‘migrant indigenes’ and the ‘indigenous migrants’ possessed pottery traditions which have been grouped into a regionally applicable type, be it ‘Afro-Caribbean ware’ or ‘Cayo’. In a similar manner, African potting traditions were brought to the islands in the minds of Africans via the Middle Passage, and the Carib/Kalinago origin myths recorded by the French in the seventeenth century reference a migration from South America which supposedly would be reflected in shared pottery styles. Both of (p.353) these migrations, African and Carib/Kalinago, are in the survival mode characterized by a scenario in which the traditions of the home region are brought to the Caribbean islands, and continue to be consistently practiced by later generations. This includes clay pots, which were manufactured and used by these migrants (Figure 16.2). While an intellectual divide separates the history and prehistory of the Caribbean, themes central to the conceptualization of landscape emerge across the Columbian event. Individuals become identified through abstractions of homeland, whether Africa or South America, or perhaps a more refined unit (Bakongo, Akan, Carib, Troumassoid), rather than through an understanding of local interactions and dislocations from the past. Some suggest that Native peoples in the eastern Caribbean self-ascribed as Carib in order to benefit from the Page 6 of 26

Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean fierce reputation of this ethnonym (Forte 2005:54–5; Garraway 2005:39–42, 65; Hulme 1986:67–73; Whitehead 1988), and thus imagined identities became ‘real’ as the Indigenous placed themselves into these categories. It is important to note that across this event the theme of migration is paramount (Davis and Goodwin 1990; Mintz 1974; Rouse 1939, 1948a, 1948b, 1992; (p.354) Wilson 1993). While in the postconquest period, time tends to be segmented into periods of European capitalism and control (including, but not exclusively, Spanishdominated, mercantile, plantation-period, postemancipation), the preColumbian Caribbean has been segmented into chronologies loosely associated with ceramic traditions, and in the case of the Archaic, the lack thereof (Curet et al. 2004; Rouse 1992:52–3).

For the archaeologist, the Caribbean belongs to several partially Fig. 16.2. (a) Cayo; and (b) Coco neg-type overlapping spheres. earthenware recovered from an early On the one hand, it is settlement at Sebastapol estate during an aspect of Latin the Northwestern University 2010 American archaeology Archaeological Survey of Colonial where debates tend to Dominica. focus on the rise of complexity, migrations of populations, and interactions beyond directly contiguous regions. It is also a colony of larger imperial realms, with a fluid and often piecemeal transition from neutral islands or places subject to conflicting imperial claims to locales of formal colonization. This is the case when one looks at the relationship between island polities such as Jamaica and the planter’s imperial patron in the nineteenth century: Great Britain. It is also the case, however, that pre-Columbian polities within the Caribbean had similar relationships of colony and state (Curet 2002). Finally, the Caribbean can be viewed as a major intersection in the Black Atlantic Page 7 of 26

Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean as a place where the flows of ideas and identities arising from the African Diaspora emerged, though with only oblique and indirect references to a non-specified homeland (Gilroy 1993).

African and Indigenous Ceramics in the Caribbean The manufacture of pottery by indigenous migrants and migrant indigenes resulted in wares which exhibit no particularly special attributes, and which are in general poorly decorated and purely functional in nature. Knowledge about the manufacture and use of these pots derives from archaeological findings as well as scattered written records, paintings, and photographs. We summarize here the ceramics of the African Diaspora and of the Carib/Kalinago to illustrate the danger which emerges when concepts become reified into archaeological types. The complex histories of peoples making and using pots ossifies those dynamics into a single system of analytical value, which runs counter to the complexities of time–space, and identity in the Caribbean place. There has been a tendency of researchers working in the Caribbean to adopt the ‘survival’ mode when analysing these wares from either tradition. Emphasis on Carib survival and similarity to the past essentially ignores the many possible changes that may have resulted from contact with Europeans and others (Honychurch 1997; Lenik 2012). Likewise, analysts who impose a broad ‘African-Caribbean’ type, or who attempt to sidestep the issue by refining the scale to a smaller ethnic group, also posit the transference of certain traits to the (p. 355) Caribbean without accounting for networks of transmission, social settings, and dimensions of gender and kinship (Hauser 2008; Hauser and DeCorse 2003). Instead, we advocate here for an approach which emphasizes the everyday interactions, complexities, and heterogeneity of Caribbean peoples. While ceramics, particularly the handmade variety, can be rather plain, utilitarian vessels, these effectively demonstrate both the survival and interaction-based perspectives toward indigenous ceramics. By 1984, a number of researchers had brought attention to the archaeology of the African Diaspora (e.g. Fairbanks 1984; Posnansky 1984). What was remarkable about this work was not the framing of new data, or an illustration of the ways in which the contributions by peoples of African descent in the Americas had been overlooked. Rather, the remarkable intervention in this research was the decentring of the American south in the Black Atlantic and resituating the focus of the diaspora firmly on the shores of West Africa and the Americas.

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean The implications of this shift in research emphasis for ceramic studies in the Caribbean were not immediate. Scholars such as Douglas V. Armstrong (1990) and Kathleen Deagan (1983) attempted to resolve insights from the Southeast and West Africa into the time-space systematics of Caribbean prehistory and colonial archaeology through a recognition of generalized processes (e.g. the adoption of the term colonoware by Deagan in Hispaniola), or the use of island-specific categorizations of the archaeological record (see Hauser 2008; Hauser and DeCorse 2003). Both Deagan (1988) and Armstrong (1990) were arguing that there was a generalized and qualitative change in local utilitarian ceramics used by ‘folk’ living in the Caribbean. The entangled lives of indigenous populations and settlers (forced or otherwise) following colonization has proved to be a fertile ground for conversation in Oceania (e.g. Torrence and Clarke 2000), Australia (e.g. Lydon 2009; Murray 2004; Paterson 2008), and the United States (e.g. Jordan 2008; Lightfoot 2005; Rubertone 2000; Silliman 2009, 2010; Voss 2008; see also various authors, this volume). While each region has understood its more specific debates and colonial matters to be disentangled, it is interesting to note that in the Southeast—where we might see the strongest parallels to the Caribbean—the debate about the origins of ‘colono’ potters, a larger discussion initiated by Fairbanks (1962), Noël Hume (1962), and Binford (1965), addressed the degree to which the pottery could speak to such entanglements (see also Mann, this volume). In the Caribbean, while the work of systematically linking the materials and settlements of indigenous populations with ethnohistoric documents after colonization is still uneven and restricted to a few cases (Lenik 2010), it is important to highlight that there are models that can be sought out. Unfortunately, given the linguistic and political diversity of the insular Caribbean, such models are not readily apparent. For example, in the Greater Antilles, complex decorative styles and morphologies of ceramic types, referred to as the Cedrosan Saladoid style of pottery, have been a convenient topic of study for (p. 356) archaeologists exploring migration in the region (Rouse 1939). This has enabled a degree of nuanced analysis about indigenous populations before and immediately following colonization (e.g. Curet 2004; Deagan 2004; Deagan and Cruxent 2002; Wilson 1993; Woodward 2011). In the Windward Islands, the argument has been that pottery types which span the protohistoric and historic periods (e.g. Cayo, Troumassoid, or Suazoid) lack a clear cultural–spatial correspondence with the Carib/Kalinago. However, there is strong evidence for the Page 9 of 26

Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean correlation of at least one type (Cayo) with the ethnohistorically identified Kalinago (Hofman and Bright 2004; Hofman et al. 2007). This complicates ceramic reconstructions of the eastern Caribbean since diagnostic decorations and forms constitute only a small portion of assemblages, and to date there remains no clear archaeological evidence of a migration or invasion by the Carib/Kalinago. Focusing on the routes of diasporas requires a shift in perspective where the scale of analysis is regional and the focus is on the interactions between people and places—and the ways in which they are differently materialized in objects and their uses. In this way, pottery is no longer used analytically as a marker of identity, but rather as a residue of independent production, use, and exchange, which can reveal the complex social networks of the enslaved. In place of a priori identity markers, perhaps the premise that there was variation across sites on the same island or along the same coastline should be tested. Essentially, multiple sites from an island, coastline, or bay need not yield identical pottery types. Multi-sited research programmes will help to clarify this possibility, particularly on islands like Dominica, where there is a murky, less historically documented period before these islands became colonies. Pottery assemblages on the island of Dominica demonstrate the heterogeneity of the Caribbean place. Dominica is an island which did not formally become a colony until 1763, and so for a long time before that the island was a haven for people of many and varied ancestries. There is continuous occupation by people known as Carib or Kalinago. Settlers, mostly but not exclusively French-speaking, founded small estates and brought enslaved African labourers, as well as free people of colour, who came to the island for its land. In this multi-ethnic environment, further fragmented by a mountainous, heavily forested terrain, we find a far more variable context which may not lend itself to assumptions of types applicable to islands or regions.

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean Ceramics of the African Diaspora The focus of this section is the yabba, the monkey, the pepperpot, the pan, lescuit, and canari, all low-fired earthenware types that comprise the ceramics of the African Diaspora. Often, these wares can be a physical, embodied reflection of the particular knowledge people brought with them and their ability to adapt (p.357) to new conditions. As Leland Ferguson (1992:22) suggests, what attracts people to focus on this class of ceramics are the implicit and ‘complex processes of colonial creolization: [where] demography and culture varied from place to place’. They are, in effect, an ‘intercultural artifact’ (Singleton and Bograd 2000). In a sense, these authors argue that we need to simultaneously examine the routes of the people responsible for making the pottery (oceanic), and the roots of its production and use (situated context; Orser 1996). These pots are as oceanic in scope as European industrially produced ceramics. At the same time, their meaning and use are highly contextual. These ideas are what Ferguson (1992:22) refers to as the ‘Colono ware concept’. While there has been a florescence of literature on West Africa during the time of the Atlantic trade, part of the problem with attaching ethnic identities to material culture has to do with the state of knowledge about archaeological analysis in West Africa by North Americanists and Caribbeanists. As in many world areas, in West Africa there have been numerous ceramic studies conducted of varied theoretical sophistication and methodological rigour. And traditionally Caribbeanist archaeologists have looked to West Africa as a reservoir of cultural antecedents for New World ceramic traditions in the colonial period. This scholarship has sought confirmation of historical connections by comparing decorative inventories and stylistic motifs between African and Caribbean ceramics. This is problematic, since ethnoarchaeological research in Africa has shown that stylistic repertoires are sensitive to changing tastes and commercial preferences and thus flow across social boundaries irrespective of social identity. As well, the ‘reservoir’ model for seeking African connections to Caribbean ceramics is limited in that it uncritically presumes a certain endurance and stillness in modes of material expression and ceramic practice over space and time. Research in West and Central Africa has shown that continuity in cultural practice is something to be empirically demonstrated rather than taken for granted (Stahl 1993:236). Archaeological and ethnoarchaeological studies have illustrated that, if anything, African social boundaries underwent a great deal of social transformation and negotiation in at least the past five hundred years. Therefore, the mapping of contemporary social, linguistic, and political boundaries on

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean to those that may have existed at given points of the Atlantic period becomes precarious.

Carib Pottery in Dominica and the Eastern Caribbean The survivalist approach to ceramic analysis orients the analysis of stylistic and technological attributes of indigenous pottery towards finding survivals from the pre-Columbian Carib in the post-contact period. Interaction-based (p.358) modes of analysis, such as Creolization, transculturation, or various approaches to ‘culture change’ are, with few exceptions (Honychurch 1995, 1997; Hulme 2000; Lenik 2012), not applied to Carib material culture. It is accepted that there has been continuity of a discrete Carib population, whose members are identified either as Carib or Kalinago and who match the expectation of an Indigenous phenotype, but paralleling this premise is a tendency to overlook the myriad of historical and material changes which took place. Exemplifying this mindset is the linguist and anthropologist Douglas Taylor (1938), who searched for clues of Carib or Kalinago traits in linguistic data and other cultural manifestations. Taylor’s emphasis on survival overlooked changes to lifestyle and material culture, even as he lived in Dominica and was in frequent contact with Caribs. The proclivity among specialists in Caribbean prehistory to fixate on the notion of ‘survivals’ shapes interpretations of the ceramics presumably used and manufactured by the Carib, with the postColumbian period assumed to be the next phase or type in the sequence. Since seventeenth-century French chronicles report that the Carib/Kalinago migrated into the Antilles from South America (Allaire 1980; Gullick 1980), similarities among sherds recovered from preColumbian contexts does support the interpretation of a Carib or Kalinago ethnic group in these regions (Boomert 1986, 1995, 2004). While a discrete, securely dated Carib site remains to be discovered, this connection reveals persistence of stylistic or technological traditions from the pre-contact to the post-contact eras, but without a clear terminal date. Whereas the survivalist approach to interpreting ceramics assumes that all Caribs imported the same ceramic type to the Caribbean islands, along with shared patterns of kinship, technology, and so on (Vérin 1961, 1963, 1967), an interaction perspective reveals diversity and heterogeneity among the Carib resulting from processes such as forced displacements or the acquisition and re-appropriation of European goods. There were frequent contacts with heterogeneous populations of

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean Europeans, Africans, and people of mixed ancestry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and this needs to be recognized. Two examples illustrate the utility of an interaction-based approach as well as challenging the assumption of connecting indigenous people with hand-made pottery (Hofman and Bright 2004; Lenik 2010). First, two British maps from the 1760s (A Plan of the Island of Dominica; Atlas of the West Indies, British National Archives MFQ 1/1173/1; CO 700/DOMINICA5), show a village on Dominica’s north coast labelled ‘Caraibes’ (near a present-day village called Grand Fond, which was abandoned after Hurricane David in 1979). An indigenous presence at Grand Fond is supported by the discovery of a petroglyph site along with pre-Columbian pottery that dates to a phase far earlier than the Carib are thought to have existed. Collected artifacts in the location of the ‘Caraibes’ village include creamwares, pearlwares, and bottle glass, suggesting (p.359) a colonial period occupation (Lenik 2012). These European objects could have been used by people who called themselves Carib, as the mapmaker assumed, but they also could have possibly been used by maroons or people of mixed backgrounds. Essentially, earthenware pots need not be found at each and every Carib site, and the Carib identity itself may gloss over a great deal of variability (Lenik 2012). A second example is the mid-eighteenth-century French Jesuit plantation and church at Grand Bay on the south coast (Lenik 2010). Accounts from this mission outpost do not record the presence of Caribs after 1691. Excavations at this site recovered several diagnostic ceramic fragments suggestive of a Cayo or Koriabo type. Though there is no documentation of Caribs being present at the mission outpost in Grand Bay once the Jesuits arrived in 1747, the artifact assemblage includes ceramic fragments consistent with Carib pottery types described in documents and observed in artifact collections from Dominica, the Windward Islands, and South America. This evidence would seem to indicate that either these pots were made by the Kalinago and used at this mission outpost, or that these pots were produced by those who were emulating Amerindian traditions in a way that may or may not have been intentional. While the survival approach would perceive these Cayo and Koriabo fragments as evidence of Carib at this mission site, mid-eighteenth-century documentary evidence indicates that this region of southeastern Dominica was inhabited and frequented by a range of people of African, European, Native, and mixed ancestries. While we cannot ascertain the dynamics by which these pots came to be at this site, nor the meanings attached to these

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean vessels, much more is taking place at Grand Bay than any simple statement that Caribs were here would imply. Ceramic sherds exhibiting uniform shapes and decorative styles consistent with the Cayo type will undoubtedly continue to be recovered from archaeological contexts—for example, Boomert’s survey of northeastern Dominica in 2008, which found five additional sites bearing Cayo pottery (Boomert 2011). But this search for survivals is only a piece of the puzzle, as the people known as Carib encountered, with hostile intent or otherwise, the varied social groups and families who migrated to the islands. Capturing the Kalinago in space and time removes the chance for them to advance to the modern, and a continued search for a Carib pottery type does not escape this trend. People of Carib ancestry inhabit a number of islands today, in addition to Dominica, and their lifestyle and material culture is in many ways similar to that of their fellow citizens. It must be acknowledged that changes occurred, and moreover that this change need not be a uniform process experienced equally at each settlement inhabited by people who were called Carib, or self-ascribed as Kalinago. Perhaps searching for social units, in the household, kinship group, or village, may continue to establish the Carib/Kalinago heterogeneity previously overlooked.

(p.360) Dominica Colonial Ceramics Dominica’s colonial ceramic chronology is poorly studied and poorly known. The variegated history of colonization leaves no clear historical divisions, such as a shift from Spanish to British rule as seen for Jamaica. In Dominica, references to pottery manufacture are late and vague. One 1886 reference from the Royal Commission for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition stated: ‘coarse pottery is manufactured at the north end of the island and exported to Guadeloupe’ (Royal Commission 1886:367). Pottery made during the 1890s was often attributed to communities identified as ‘Island Carib’, with the assumption that it was a tradition predating European colonization (Ober 1913; Thomas 1953). By the 1930s, ethnographers identified local potters as Dominicans of African Descent (Delawarde 1937; Taylor 1938:140) using ‘Carib’ technology. These documents are vague about the function of the pottery shipped to Guadeloupe and the manner in which labour was organized. Figure 16.3 presents three objects that were recovered during a pedestrian survey of a ploughed kitchen garden due south of the Estate House of Bois Cotlette. Clockwise from the upper right corner the

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean objects include an item identified as St Cloud Polychrome Faience, Vallauris-type pottery from (p.361) Southeastern France, and a Coco neg which may represent the local production of enslaved labourers or indigenous Kalinago labourers. Found in the same field were Englishmade creamwares, dipmoulded bottle glass, stoneware jars, and terracotta roofing tiles. These materials bundled together speak to a material assemblage that is imperially ambiguous but provocative in the kinds of genealogies that they suggest.

Fig. 16.3. Clockwise from the upper right: Faience, Saint Cloud Polychrome (1675–1766); example of Vallauris-type pottery (1500–1900); example of local coarse earthenware (Coco neg, 1750– 2000).

Vallauris-type ceramics are utilitarian, lead-glazed coarse earthenwares originating from eastern Provence in southern France. The glaze is an internal clear lead glaze made from a local lead silicate known as ‘alquifoux’. The production of this ceramic dates as early as 1500 and continues into the twentieth century (Petrucci 2002). This ceramic is commonly found in nineteenth-century deposits in the French Antilles and the Danish Virgin Islands (Hauser and Kelly 2007; Kelly et al. 2008). Previous to the takeover of Dominica by the English, all of the vessels that the enslaved used to cook their food were made locally, either on the island, or on neighbouring islands. This is in contrast to the planter’s residence, where 50 percent of the cooking ware retrieved from the pre-1763 context was made in Vallauris, France, while the other 50 percent was ‘local’. After 1763, the enslaved started to utilize more Vallauris pottery for cooking (17 percent of the cooking vessel assemblage), while the planter’s assemblage remained relatively stable (51 percent). While these patterns certainly could have resulted from illegal or clandestine trade with neighbouring colonies, the sheer quantity of vessels indicates a continued trade. Hand-built, low-fired cooking vessels known in Martinique as Coco neg are also a significant component of the archaeological record (Hauser 2011; Hauser and Kelly 2007; Kelly et al. 2008), made by women of Page 15 of 26

Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean African descent and used as cooking vessels by labourers in the villages (Kelly et al. 2008). Unlike places like St Lucia, Martinique, Antigua, and Jamaica, Dominica has a poor ethnohistorical record of local ceramic manufacture (Hauser 2011). Contemporary ethnographic analogues come from neighbouring islands with an assumed affinity in manufacture based on similarities in form, apparent manufacturing techniques, and Creole terms. There are workshops of male potters making wheel-thrown and kiln-fired pitchers, coal pots, and goblets at Trois-Ilets, in Martinique (Beuze 1990; England 1994). Different labourers took part in the various stages of making this pottery. Potters also made roofing and floor tiles using extrusion techniques and gasfired kilns. In the southernmost part of Martinique, St Anne, a family of potters, living on the rue de Potterie, continue to make pottery in a hand-built tradition. Identified in the 1930s as Canari, these coil-built ceramics were produced in matrifocal compounds, though involved multiple members of the family. Local course earthenware, identified as Coco neg or Canari, provides an interesting glimpse into possible economic networks that were performed by the enslaved and unexpected by colonial administrators. Such networks linked the south coast of Dominica with the north coast of Martinique. The geographic (p.362) reach of these networks overlaps with those described in the protohistoric period. The ceramics recovered were subjected to chemical and petrographic characterization along with a suite of materials recovered from kiln sites in the French Antilles (Kelly et al. 2008). The characterization of materials revealed that the coarse earthenware was far more similar to materials recovered from Martinique than materials recovered from plantations on Dominica. This could suggest that the method of manufacture was similar or that the ceramics were derived from the same clay sources. It seems that in either case, many of the ceramics in the assemblage from Bois Cotlette came from everywhere but Dominica. There are several implications for these findings. First, while there is some distinction between pottery made and used by Kalinago in the seventeenth century, and pottery made and used by enslaved Africans before official colonization, there is also overlap of these potteries in stratified and dated archaeological contexts. While it is possible that such diversity indicates a co-presence of populations from different parts of the Atlantic, the co-presence of such materials indicates an interaction between both groups. Second, in the case of undecorated utilitarian pottery, there is also a persistence in the geography of networks both before and after official colonization. It is therefore Page 16 of 26

Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean important to highlight that the local in both cases should not be equated with the specific site or the island from which the pots were recovered.

Conclusion In the analysis of indigenous Caribbean ceramics, the multiple displacements, the disruptive nature of enslavement, and the melding of different African, European, and Native American cultures makes direct connections between particular ceramics and peoples unlikely and, in fact, unexpected. Indeed, the multiple colonial histories and heterogeneous populations involved require a more nuanced understanding of creolization and its material residues. Studies must recognize the productive and creative power of these many and differently displaced people struggling to create meaning and fashion their worlds anew in far-flung colonial contexts. Methodologically, such studies must begin with a strong grounding in historical contexts, coupled with a recognition of the dynamic and innovative nature of African-American societies. It is only within the context of local and regional interactions that variation and change in pottery assemblages becomes meaningful. The African Diaspora was not only a movement of people from one continent to another. It was, more importantly, a displacement born from emergent European capitalism that affected and transformed local communities. We see (p.363) the effect of the African Diaspora in the systems of belief, the political economies, and the material residues of communities on either side of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, and continuing into the present. It is important not to forget this broader perspective when we approach the Diaspora—a forced displacement of people. This did not have the effect of stripping culture from people, but rather it created contexts in which people had to reform social networks, reshape themselves, and use their skills and knowledge in order to make do in wholly new contexts. People brought these skills and knowledge with them. That does not mean, however, that they did not continue to learn, to adapt, and to appropriate technologies, ideas, and meanings. By aggregating this variegated class of material culture into a single type, we belie the complex, regionally informed interactions that brought about their use. The Carib label carried certain meanings as a category defined by imperialist Europeans, and whether we choose to replace this ethnonym with Kalinago, this still does not account for variation across different settlements and disruptions brought about by European colonization. This diversity speaks to the multiple forces shaping enslaved

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean independent production. Most importantly, the diversity speaks to the different industries that the enslaved engaged in to meet the market demand for their wares: imported, grown, or manufactured. Pottery offers different and unique sets of lenses on the cultural experience of the inhabitants of Dominica, as well as the wider Caribbean. As we have shown in our characterization of the survival mode of analysis, the reservoirs from which people may have drawn are far more complex and variable. Though future work may continue to identify possible ‘West African’ attributes of clay pots at Caribbean sites, and additional Cayo or Koriabo sites might also be located, this approach will continue to restrict our understanding of the Caribbean place. Instead, by acknowledging the many and varied interactions that occurred at multiple sites on land and at sea, an interaction-based approach will lend itself to a more nuanced and responsive interpretation to the indigenous migrants and the migrant indigenes of the Caribbean. References Bibliography references: Allaire, Louis 1980 On the Historicity of Carib Migrations in the Lesser Antilles. American Antiquity 45:238–45. Armstrong, Douglas V. 1990 The Old Village and the Great House: An Archaeological and Historical Examination of Drax Hall Plantation, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Armstrong, Douglas V. 2003 Creole Transformation from Slavery to Freedom: Historical Archaeology of the East End Community, St. John, Virgin Islands. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Beuze, Lyne-Ros 1990 La Poterie en Martinique. Cahiers du Patrimoine 7:39–46. (p.364) Binford, Lewis R. 1965 Colonial-period Ceramics of Nottaway and Weanock Indians of Southeastern Virginia. Quarterly Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Virginia 19(4):78–87. Boomert, Arie 1986 The Cayo Complex of St. Vincent: Ethnohistorical and Archaeological Aspects of the Island Carib Problem. Anthropologica 66:3–68.

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean Boomert, Arie 1995 Island Carib Archaeology. In Wolves from the Sea: Readings in the Anthropology of the Native Caribbean, edited by Neil Whitehead, pp. 22–35. KITLV Press, Leiden. Boomert, Arie 2004 Koriabo and the Polychrome Tradition: The Lateprehistoric Era between the Orinoco and Amazon Mouths. In Late Ceramic Age Societies in the Eastern Caribbean, edited by Andrew Delpuech and Corinne Hofman, pp. 251–66. British Archaeological Reports International Series S1273, Archaeopress, Oxford. Boomert, Arie 2011 From Cayo to Kalinago. Communities in Contact: Essays in Archaeology, Ethnohistory and Ethnography of the Amerindian Circum-Caribbean, edited by Corinne L. Hofman and Anne van Duijvenbode, pp. 291–306. Sidestone Press, Leiden. Césaire, Aimé 1976 Oeuvres Complètes (Complete Works). Three volumes. Éditions Desormeaux, Fort-de-France, Martinique. Clifford, James 2004 Looking Several Ways: Anthropology and Native Heritage in Alaska. Current Anthropology 45:5–30. Curet, L. Antonio 2002 The Chief Is Dead, Long Live . . . Who? Descent and Succession in the Protohistoric Chiefdoms of the Greater Antilles. Ethnohistory 49:259–80. Curet, L. Antonio 2004 Island Archaeology and Units of Analysis in the Study of Ancient Caribbean Societies. In Voyages of Discovery: The Archaeology of Islands, edited by Scott M. Fitzpatrick, pp. 187–201. Praeger, Santa Barbara. Curet, L. Antonio, Josh M. Torres, and Miguel A. Rodriguez 2004 Political and Social History of Eastern Puerto Rico: The Ceramic Age. In Late Ceramic Age Societies in the Eastern Caribbean, edited by Andre Delpuech and Corinne Hofman, pp. 59–85. British Archaeological Reports International Series S1273. Archaeopress, Oxford. Davis, Dave D. and R. Christopher Goodwin 1990 Island Carib Origins: Evidence and Nonevidence. American Antiquity 55:37–48. de Acosta José 2002 Natural and Moral History of the Indies: Chronicles of the New World Order, translated by Frances LópezMorillas. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina. Deagan, Kathleen A. 1983 Spanish St. Augustine: The Archaeology of a Colonial Creole Community. Academic Press, New York.

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean Deagan, Kathleen A. 1988 The Archaeology of the Spanish Contact Period in the Caribbean. Journal of World Prehistory 2:187–233. Deagan, Kathleen A. 2004 Reconsidering Taíno Social Dynamics after Spanish Conquest: Gender and Class in Culture Contact Studies. American Antiquity 64:597–626. Deagan, K. A. and José María Cruxent 2002 Archaeology at La Isabela: America’s First European Town. Yale University Press, New Haven. Delawarde, Jean Baptiste 1937 La Vie Paysanne à la Martinique, Essai de Géographie Humaine. Imprimerie Officielle, Fort-de-France, Martinique. Delle, James A. 1998 An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. Plenum, New York. (p.365) England, Suzannah 1994 Acculturation in the Creole Context: A Case Study of La Poterie Martinique. DPhil thesis, Department of Archaeology, Cambridge University, Cambridge. Fairbanks, Charles 1962 A Colono-Indian Ware Milk Pitcher. The Florida Anthropologist 15(4): 103–6. Fairbanks, Charles 1984 The Plantation Archaeology of the Southeastern Coast. Historical Archaeology 18:1–14. Fanon, Frantz 1967 Black Skin, White Masks, translation by Charles Lam Markmann. Grove Press, New York. Ferguson, Leland 1992 Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650–1800. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Forte, Maximilian Christian 2005 Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs: (Post)Colonial Representations of Aboriginality in Trinidad and Tobago. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Garraway, Doris L. 2005 The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina. Gilroy, Paul 1993 The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Gullick, C. J. M. R. 1980 Island Carib Traditions about their Arrival in the Lesser Antilles. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean for the Study of Precolumbian Cultures of the Lesser Antilles, edited by Susan Lewenstein, pp. 464–72. Arizona State University Anthropological Research Papers, Tempe. Harvey, D. 1989 The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Blackwell, Oxford. Hauser, Mark W. 2006 Hawking Your Wares: Determining the Scale of Informal Economy through the Distribution of Local Coarse Earthenware in Eighteenth-century Jamaica. In African Re-genesis: Confronting Social Issues in the Diaspora, edited by Kevin C. MacDonald, pp. 160–75. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. Hauser, Mark W. 2008 The Archaeology of Black Markets, Local Ceramics and Economies in Eighteenth-century Jamaica. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Hauser, Mark W. 2011 Routes and Roots of Empire: Pots, Power, and Slavery in the 18th-century British Caribbean. American Anthropologist 113:431–47. Hauser, Mark and Christopher R. DeCorse 2003 Low-fired Earthenwares in the African Diaspora: Problems and Prospects. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 7:67–98. Hauser, M. and K. G. Kelly 2007 What to Do with ‘Other Ceramics’: Inter-colonial Trade of French Coarse Earthenware. In Proceedings of the Twenty-First Congress of the International Association for Caribbean Archaeology, ii, edited by Basil A. Reid, Henri PetitjeanRoget, and L. Antonio Curet, pp. 579–87. University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad. Helms, Mary W. 1988 Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. Hicks, Dan 2007 The Garden of the World: An Historical Archaeology of Sugar Landscapes in the Eastern Caribbean. British Archaeological Reports International Series S1632. Archaeopress, Oxford. Hirsch, Eric 1995 Landscape: Between Place and Space. In The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, edited by Eric Hirch and Michael O’Hanlon, pp. 1–30. Oxford University Press, Oxford. (p.366)

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean Hofman, Corinne, L. and Alistair J. Bright 2004 From Suazoid to Folk Pottery: Pottery Manufacturing Traditions in a Changing Social and Cultural Environment on St Lucia. New West Indian Guide 78(1&2):5– 36. Hofman, Corinne, L., Alistair J. Bright, Arie Boomert, and Sebastiann Knippenberg 2007 Island Rhythms: The Web of Social Relationships and Interaction Networks in the Pre-Columbian Lesser Antilles. Latin American Antiquity 18:243–68. Honychurch, Lennox 1995 Caribs, Creoles and Concepts of Territory: The Boundary between France and Dominica. Caribbean Geography 6(1):61–70. Honychurch, Lennox 1997 Crossroads in the Caribbean: A Site of Encounter and Exchange on Dominica. World Archaeology 28:291–304. Hulme, Peter 1986 Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797. Methuen, New York. Hulme, Peter 2000 Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and Their Visitors, 1877–1998. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hulme, Peter and Neil L. Whitehead 1992 Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day, An Anthology. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Ingold, Tim 1993 The Temporality of Landscape. World Archaeology 25:152–74. James, C. L. R. 1963 Beyond a Boundary. Stanley Paul/Hutchinson, London. Jeffreys, Thomas 1775 The West Indies Indicating . . . In West India Atlas. Sayers and Bennett, London. Jordan, Kurt A. 2008 The Seneca Restoration, 1715–1754: An Iroquois Local Political Economy. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Kelly, Kenneth G. 2004 Historical Archaeology in the French Caribbean: An Introduction to a Special Volume of the Journal of Caribbean Archaeology. Journal of Caribbean Archaeology Special Publication 1:1– 10. Kelly, Kenneth G., Mark W. Hauser, Christophe Descantes, and Michael D. Glascock 2008 Compositional Analysis of French Colonial Ceramics:

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean Implications for Understanding Trade and Exchange. Journal of Caribbean Archaeology Special Publication 2:85–107. Kiple, Kenneth F. 1984 The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Lefebvre, Henri 1991 The Production of Space. Oxford University Press, New York. Lenik, Stephan 2010 Frontier Landscapes, Missions, and Power: A French Jesuit Plantation and Church at Grand Bay, Dominica (1747– 1763). PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York. Lenik, Stephan 2012 Carib as a Colonial Category: Comparing Ethnohistorical and Archaeological Evidence from Dominica, West Indies. Ethnohistory 59:79–107. Liebmann, Matthew and Uzma Z. Rizvi (eds) 2008 Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Lightfoot, Kent G. 2005 The Archaeology of Colonization: California in Cross-cultural Perspective. In The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Gil Stein, pp. 207–35. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Lydon, Jane 2009 Fantastic Dreaming: The Archaeology of an Aboriginal Mission. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Lydon, Jane and Uzma Z. Rizvi (eds) 2010 Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. (p.367) Marquardt, William H. and Carole L. Crunley 1987 Theoretical Issues in the Archaeology of Spatial Patterning. In Regional Dynamics: Burgundian Landscapes in Historical Perspective, edited by Carole L. Cruney and William H. Marquardt, pp. 1–18. Academic Press, San Diego. Merlan, Francesa 2008 Indigeneity: Global and Local. Current Anthropology 50:303–33. Mintz, Sidney W. 1966 The Caribbean as a Socio-cultural Area. Cahiers d’histoire mondiale 9:912–37. Mintz, Sidney W. 1974 Caribbean Transformations. Aldine, Chicago.

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean Murray, Tim (ed.) 2004 The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Noël Hume, Ivor 1962 An Indian Ware of the Colonial Period. Quarterly Journal of the Archaeological Society of Virginia 17(1):1–13. Ober, Frederick A. 1913 A Guide to the West Indies, Bermuda and Panama. Dodd Mead and Company, New York. Orser, Charles E., Jr 1996 A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World. Plenum, New York. Paterson, Alistair G. 2008 The Lost Legions: Culture Contact in Colonial Australia. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Petrucci, Jean Ferdinand 2002 Les Poteries et les Potiers de Vallauris (1501–1945). Thèse de doctorat en histoire des techniques, Archaeologie, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Posnansky, Merrick 1984 Toward an Archaeology of the Black Diaspora. Journal of Black Studies 15:195–205. Rouse, Irving 1939 Prehistory in Haiti: A Study in Method. Publications in Anthropology Number 21. Yale University Press, New Haven. Rouse, Irving 1948a The Arawak. In Handbook of South American Indians, iv: The Circum-Caribbean Tribes, edited by Julian H. Steward, pp. 547–65. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 143. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Rouse, Irving 1948b The Carib. In Handbook of South American Indians, iv: The Circum-Caribbean Tribes, edited by Julian H. Steward, pp. 507–46. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 143. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Rouse, Irving 1992 The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People who Greeted Columbus. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. Royal Commission for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition 1886 A Series of Original Papers Issued under the Authority of the Royal Commission. William Clowes and Sons, London. Rubertone, Patricia E. 2000 The Historical Archaeology of Native Americans. Annual Review of Anthropology 29:452–46. Scott, David 2004a Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina.

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean Scott, David 2004b Modernity that Predated the Modern: Sidney Mintz’s Caribbean. History Workshop Journal 58:191–210. Silliman, Stephen 2009 Change, Continuity, Practice, and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England. American Antiquity 74:211–30. Silliman, Stephen 2010 Indigenous Traces in Colonial Spaces: Archaeologies of Ambiguity, Origin, and Practice. Journal of Social Archaeology 10:28–58. (p.368) Singleton, Theresa A. and Mark Bograd 2000 Breaking Typological Barriers: Looking for the Colono in Colonoware. In Lines that Divide: Historical Archaeologies of Race, Class, and Gender, edited by James Delle, Stephen A. Mrozowski, and Robert Paynter, pp. 3–21. University Press of Tennessee, Knoxville. Snead, James E. 2001 Ruins and Rivals: The Making of Southwest Archaeology. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Stahl, Ann B. 1993 Concepts of Time and Approaches to Analogical Reasoning in Historical Perspective. American Antiquity 58: 235–60. Steward, Julian Haynes (ed.) 1946–1959 Handbook of South American Indians. Bureau of American Ethnography, Bulletin 143. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Taylor, Douglas M. 1938 The Caribs of Dominica. Bureau of American Ethnography, Bulletin 119:103–59. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Thomas, Léon 1953 La Dominique et les Derniers Caraibes Insulaires. Les Cahiers d’Outre-Mer 6:37–60. Tilley, Christopher 1994 A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, and Monuments. Berg, Oxford. Torrence, Robin and Anne Clarke (eds) 2000 The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross-cultural Engagements in Oceania. Routledge, London. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 1992 The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory. Annual Review of Anthropology 21:19–42. Vérin, Pierre 1961 Les Caraïbes à Sainte Lucie depuis les contacts coloniaux. Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 41:66–82.

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Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean Vérin, Pierre 1963 La Pointe Caraibe, Sainte-Lucie. Masters thesis, Department of Anthropology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Vérin, Pierre 1967 Quelques Aspects de la Culture Matérialle de la Région de Choiseul (Ile de Sainte-Lucie, Antilles). Journal de la Société des Américanistes 56:460–94. Voss, Barbara L. 2008 The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco. University of California Press, Berkeley. Whitehead, Neil L. 1988 Lords of the Tiger Spirit: A History of the Caribs in Colonial Venezuela and Guyana, 1498–1820. Koninklijk Instituut Caribbean Series 10. Foris Publications, Dordrecht, Holland. Wilson, Samuel M. 1993 The Cultural Mosaic of the Indigenous Caribbean. Proceedings of the British Academy 81:37–66. Woodward, Robin P. 2011 The Archaeology of the Early Sixteenthcentury Spanish Sugar Industry. In Out of Many, One People: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica, edited by James A. Delle, Mark W. Hauser, and Douglas V. Armstrong, pp. 23–52. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois A Thousand-year Heritage of Becoming Neal Ferris

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0018

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines and deconstructs the logics that have informed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conventional histories of contact between Europeans and Indigenous First Nations in the Northeast and Great Lakes of North America. It adopts a revisionist approach to the material and historical trends through this period as a means of deconstruction and suggests an alternative take on identity as a continually revising understanding of becoming (self and group) that is much more in agreement with long-term material trends in the archaeological record. This process helps elucidate a sense of self and others that is variably informed by all those previous, transitory moments of becoming and defining identity. The chapter first discusses the process of archaeologically becoming before, during, and after the rise of global colonialism before turning to the dispersal of Iroquois from southern Ontario to highlight becoming through colonial encounters and the consequences of those encounters. Keywords:   identity, becoming, sense of self, colonialism, Iroquois, Ontario, Europeans, Indigenous First Nations, Great Lakes, North America

Introduction Page 1 of 36

Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois This chapter, and indeed all the chapters in this section of the volume, will examine the implications of the colonial historical narratives we create from the archaeology of the last half-millennium, with the contemporary playing out of those narratives in the descendant Western colonial nations of today. In this chapter I wish to explore and deconstruct the logics that have informed sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury conventional histories of contact between Europeans and Indigenous First Nations in the region of the Northeast and Great Lakes of North America. I choose as a means of deconstruction a revisionist take on the material and historical trends through this period, one that connects the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to earlier and later material developments in the region. I also suggest an alternative understanding of identity and people, one that is not anchored to the cultural historical normative labelling based on seventeenth-century European group identifications that have dominated Northeast historical narratives for well over a century. Rather, I consider identity as a continually revising understanding of becoming (self and group) that much more fluidly aligns with long-term material trends in the archaeological record. This process more effectively and logically connects continually revising identities to before, during, and after initial European interaction in the region, and with more recent times, to understand that sense of self and others that is variably informed by all those previous, transitory moments of becoming and defining identity. Importantly, the revision and deconstruction of dominant conventional colonial narratives is essential to critically understanding the continuing contemporary marginalization of Indigenous heritage claims by the State, aided and abetted by the conventional archaeological narratives archaeologists use to (p.372) validate dominant narratives of, in particular, loss, ruin, and disconnects between past and present (see also Wilcox, this volume). These archaeological constructs of the past also tend to serve archaeologist-centric agendas and self-interest over the Indigenous archaeological record of the region.

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois Identity as Becoming In the past several decades, nuanced and robust understandings of self, identity, and ‘people’ arising from the social sciences and beyond (e.g. Barth 1969; Bhabha 1994; Bourdieu 1977; Harding 1986; Said 1979) have been variously absorbed into archaeological interpretations of material pasts. Likewise, the recursive, fluid multiplicities of these concepts are readily acknowledged, especially within archaeology, where temporally, transitory, reinforcing, and revising multi-scalar processes operate within a myriad of active subjectivities, both within the researcher’s time of study as well as the time being studied (e.g. Casella and Fowler 2004; Dobres and Robb 2000; Fowler 2004; Kohl 2011; Wylie 2008). Indeed, the ancient fluidity and continually revising of community living and residence that archaeology reveals, and the implications this has for likewise fluid notions of self, community, place, and others, is readily evident in the archaeological record when considering the emergence of coalescent societies, redesigned internal or external living spaces for members of those communities, shifting patterns of local and distant exchange of material expression, and lifeways across differentially permeable material borderlands (e.g. Mullin 2011; Naum 2010; Sutton 2008; Thomas 2007). Critically, what this long-term perspective speaks to is the multiplicities of identity operational at any point in time. These are neither fixed nor timeless, but rather in a state of constantly becoming, with past iterations at any point in time simply being the ‘pre-conditions . . . one leaves behind in order to “become”, that is, to create something new’ (Deleuze 1995:171). While Deleuze (e.g. 1990, 1995) and Deleuze and Guattari (e.g. 1987, 1994) have outlined a robust way of perceiving the multi-scalar perceptions of time and history, and the difference of historic events between the actuality of them and the historiography of their perceived after-effects (see also Faulkner 2006; Lampert 2006; Patton 2006), I more narrowly wish to invoke the concept of becoming here as an archaeological heuristic for understanding the recursive, revising process of material identity evident over the multi-generational expanse of the archaeological record (see also Harrison 2004, this volume). In this conception, the process of becoming represents that constant state of individual and group negotiation of life events; connecting past and future through a continuity built up from experiencing and recalling selected events that are arbitrarily joined together into a narrative that ‘makes sense’ to those who experienced that life history (p.373) (Radu 2010:411; see also Deleuze 1990). It is the living of these events in the present, as Badiou (2007:38) notes for Deleuze, and Radu (2010:411) reiterates, that opens up the possibility

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois of an alternative present: one that becomes the present as a result of the intended and unintended consequences of those events preceding the present (see also Biehl and Locke 2010). This process of continuously becoming means that the multiplicity of identities people negotiate and differentially revise, reinforce, remember, and forget—as well as those identities that are commonly agreed to, opposed, and misunderstood by others—are constantly open to revision through the process of daily lived life (the habits of living; e.g. Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Wise 2000), and the events that, through daily living, are connected into narratives of individual and group life histories (see also Patton 2009). Moreover, if becoming is a constant state of self, identities only then exist as ‘hard’ categories in that moment of continuity in the present between the events that frame past and future (see also Deleuze 1993). Constantly becoming, then, is informed by and logically connected to ‘pre-conditions’, even as those categories of identity themselves are continually revised in the living of them, regardless of whether or not labels change or stay the same. This is true for the continually revising notion of self through one’s life (as a child, young adult, parent, grandparent, elder, and so on), and for revising notions of nation or group through time (Roman, Saxon, English, British, Canadian, and so on). At any given moment in time these identities may appear permanent and ‘understood’ by oneself and others, but as time transpires, their definition revises, overtly by recognized moments of revision (e.g. birth, marriage, death, war, merger, revolution), but more often and continually through revision beneath awareness. This conception of life lived as becoming captures well the multigenerational patterns of materiality we observe in the archaeological record: descendant and ancestor, connected but not fully defined by each other as experiences of livelihood, dwelling, and identity determined over a single generation are themselves redefined as the pre-conditions left behind in the next generation’s act of becoming (see also Ingold 2000). The long-term change so evident archaeologically within definitional elements of material identity, such as the always doing of tasks across a landscape (or taskscape, to further the Ingold 2000 reference), the use of and dwelling in space, and the exchange and material interaction that occurs within and beyond that space (Gupta and Ferguson 1992), implies continually revising notions of self, group, place, other, and so on occurring through that deep time; a constant becoming reflected in the long-term

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois changed continuities documented in that record (Ferris 1999a, 2006, 2009). The notion of materially lived life as a process of constantly becoming also has important implications for reaching beyond the central role our own contemporary sensibilities and identity politics play when we explore the archaeology of the archaeological past, and especially in manoeuvring through the (p.374) material and written past of the emergent global colonialism of the past five hundred years—a legacy that is still playing out in the descendant colonial societies we as archaeologists have been enculturated within and are participants of (e.g. Gosden, 2004; Liebmann 2008). If people and communities are constantly becoming, they were and are something other than the categories defined for them at any fixed point in time by historical observers (colonizer and colonized), or subsequently by historians, anthropologists, or archaeologists, as these notions were continually no longer of the present in future iterations of becoming, either from generation to generation or arguably over the life of a single generation. Moreover, change during the interaction and entanglement of colonizer and colonized—however defined in scholarly discourse over the years as assimilative, acculturative, creolized, hybridized, a product of ethnogenesis, or other term—is still bound up in the process of becoming that was and is at play before, during, and through the happenstance of entanglement with Europeans. Change from, change to, and changed continuities are all constants of lived life revising from known prior conditions to a present that is only known and ‘made sense of’ in the constancy of living in the present. This conceptually underscores that Indigenous-centric becoming does not ‘become’ Eurocentric through colonialism, rather that, to refer to Stephen Silliman’s conception of survivance (this volume; see also Silliman 2009), colonized groups persist; changing (labels, lifeways, etc.) and in so doing being—becoming—the same.

Archaeologically Becoming Before, During, and After the Rise of Global Colonialism Methodologically and conceptually, archaeology can bring to the historical exploration of the European global colonialism the long-term perspective of becoming. Such a perspective links the generations of local peoples who lived, loved, and died in places across the globe over previous millennia and never knew or experienced European colonial exploration and expansion, with the generations of their descendants whose lives were increasingly entangled with those Europeans from away, and with the subsequent generations of Indigenous peoples who negotiated and continue to negotiate their lives lived within and

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois without the emergent global colonialism as it continues to shape the present (e.g. Harrison 2004; Matthews 2007; Mitchell and Scheiber 2010; see also Silliman 2010, this volume). On the one hand, some of the conceptual issues that archaeologists grapple with when studying global colonialism—issues of what constitutes a group and identity, when and where, and responses to events and change—are simply an extension of the theoretical constraints archaeology more generally has slowly (p.375) been thinking its way through over the past two centuries. On the other hand, there is also the added challenge that the assumptions and normative understandings of ‘people’ often embedded in archaeological narratives are connected to contemporary identity politics, remembering and forgetting the past, and power differentials that play out over heritage, which themselves are part of the continuing legacy of this global colonialism (e.g. Gullapalli 2008; Kohl et al. 2007; Meskell 2002; Ojala 2009; Orser 2012; Silverman 2011). This includes excluding Indigenous heritage from modern nationalist narratives, or marginalizing it to the point of being a footnote in the history of the emergent modern state we all inhabit today.1 As such, revisionist archaeological scholarship of the archaeology of the colonized, as reflected throughout this volume, has had to adopt a strong reflexivity, with archaeologists negotiating their own personal and professional habitus and dispositions, and heterodoxically engaging with what are deeply orthodox understandings of national histories and the absence of Indigenous-lived experiences within those histories we absorb and are steeped within. Moreover, the contemporary political implications of this scholarship, especially around the reassertion of, or challenges to, Indigenous rights and autonomy defined through the formation of colonial sovereigns, situates both the archaeologist and their research directly within ongoing contested discourses of heritage. This broader relevance is much more consequential in our society than whether or not an archaeologist engages with evolutionary or interpretive perspectives, or worries whether their interpretations are not objective or science-based ‘enough’ (Preucel and Cipolla 2008). That the research of Indigenous experiences during the birth of Western colonial states is directly connected to the descendant worlds we inhabit today means that revisionist scholarship not only challenges, revises, or rejects conventional archaeological narratives and scholarship of the colonial experience, but also challenges, revises, or rejects the ongoing political and legal denials those past conventional understandings of Indigenous history have aided and abetted.

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois In order to illustrate these connections and consequences of archaeological understandings of becoming and how group identity and historical events played out through emergent colonialism, and how that impacts contemporary issues of contested heritage, it is necessary to both understand the normative ‘logics’ that have been generated for the archaeological history of a specific (p.376) region, and then understand how that archaeological history is used beyond archaeology in the present. As such I provide below a critique of the archaeological culture history as conventionally engaged in for the lower Great Lakes region of North America, before considering the contemporary implications that the dominant tropes of this archaeological narrative have for descendant groups, archaeologists, and the State. I also consider what happens to that archaeological narrative, and to contemporary consequences of that narrative, when rethinking dominant tropes through the long-term lens of always becoming.

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois The Unbecoming of Conventional Great Lakes Archaeological History

Examples of the contemporary playing out of colonial legacies in archaeological interpretations of the past, and non-archaeological uses of that scholarship, are readily available in the literature (e.g. Gnecco and Hernández 2008; Mrozowski et al. 2009; see also Schmidt, this volume). In southern Ontario, where I work, despite the fact that the archaeological record is rich and uninterrupted through the first century of a European material presence, and then only briefly interrupted at the mid seventeenth century, archaeological practice still breeds ‘prehistorians’, ‘contact era specialists’, and Euro-Canadianfocused ‘historic’ archaeologists. Here, the archaeology of the material remains of Indigenous people generally refers to the ancient record—an archaeological history that conventionally is assumed to end by the mid seventeenth century (e.g. Ellis and Ferris 1990; Trigger 1985; Wright 2004). For this ancient record, the archaeological narrative is generally well defined. By about AD 1000 there emerge local village-based settlements: polities of people operating within a Neolithic-like pattern of complex horticultural subsistence, expanding demographics, and elaborate socio-political organization manifest in the emergence of longhouse residential life, structured village spatial organization, and in-village segment aggregation suggesting the emergence of deeper social network ties of similarity and difference inside and outside of the palisade (Ferris 1999a; Ferris and Spence 1995; Snow 1994; Warrick 2000). This in turn facilitated the emergence of larger villages through the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, and inter-connected territorial ‘clustering’ of distinct regional communities (e.g. Birch 2012; Lennox and Fitzgerald 1990). Evident throughout this period is a sophisticated sense of inter-site and inter-regional and wider entanglements of people and communities through shared markers of style and symbol (e.g. Fox 2004, 2008; Jamieson 1999). Significantly, there is also evidence that notions of ‘community’ and associations with fixed landscapes—or territoriality—were fluid concepts, as seen in patterns of village reconfigurations, multiple community consolidations, heightened revision (p.377) along material borderlands, and even the splintering off and relocation of subgroups to new regions altogether (e.g. Murphy and Ferris 1990; Sutton 1996). There is also evidence of the territorial expansion and contraction of regional communities (e.g. Lennox and Fitzgerald 1990; Watts 2008). This archaeological data clearly reflects a continual process of becoming, community-making, group (and presumably personal) identity, belonging, and difference, along with the constant influx of materials and ideas through inter-regional interaction. However, that Page 8 of 36

Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois conception of the archaeological record tends to shift for archaeological narratives of the early seventeenth century as a result of aligning the material record with initial descriptions and interactions recorded by European observers. In many ways, the rich dataset of European historical accounts has been both a blessing and curse for the practice of archaeology in the region (e.g. Ramsden 1996, 2006). Certainly, the written accounts of the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century arrival and interaction of Europeans with Indigenous groups offer a robust and descriptive narrative that archaeologists have readily mined to correlate with the material record (e.g. Bradley 1987a; Trigger 1985). But the European documentation of events, and the historical narratives they engendered, have tended to frame archaeological conceptions of what that Indigenous participation should look like in the archaeological record; that is, as driven by an insatiable desire for European goods in exchange for fur, with the essential tropes being an end to independent Aboriginal history and the beginning of being influenced, overwhelmed, and ultimately eradicated by the arrival of Europeans and their goods (Branstner 1992; see also Ferris 2006; Jordan 2008 for further discussion). Moreover, this early period of interaction—a period of about seventyfive years—has tended to conceptually colour the conventional cultural historical narrative developed from the archaeological record for arguably much of the last millennium. This has worked in a few ways. For example, embedded in cultural historical explanations is an archaeologist’s calculation that equates c.AD 1000 or 1400 material patterning with historic ethnic designations from the seventeenth century. This conventionally has meant that archaeological explanation of the record after AD 1000 often echoes seventeenth-century episodic events and themes. So, for example, a long-standing explanation for coalescence and growth in village settlement by the start of the fourteenth century in southern Ontario is assumed to have been the result of a conquest—an ethnic cleansing by a people wielding distinctive ceramic vessels moving from east to west across the north shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie (e.g. Wright 1992; 2004). While this notion is a conceptually consistent form of warfare described by European observers in the seventeenth century, it is not at all logical to the material processes or even basic chronologies documented archaeologically from this earlier period (e.g. Ferris 1999a; Ramsden 1991; Williamson and Robertson 1994). (p.378) Implicit in the logic of such constructions of late ‘pre-contact’ archaeology is less that historic observation can provide meaningful insight into ancient material and social processes, and more that the essential character of Indigenous antagonists arising from the Page 9 of 36

Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois sensibilities of seventeenth-century Europeans is timeless (see also Thomas 1991). Because of this reading forward of the archaeological record, the later centuries of the pre-contact period are often conceptualized as an ‘archaeology of anticipation’, wherein motivations and causes for change in the record are assumed to be anticipating European contact (Ferris 2006). For example, regional Late Woodland manifestations centuries earlier in time are ascribed historic-ethnic designations such as ‘Prehistoric Huron’, based solely on geographic correlation to those historically recorded entities (Ferris 1999a, 1999b; Ferris and Spence 1995). And the century or two before evidence of European interaction appears locally is often referred to as a ‘protohistoric’ period (e.g. Noble, 2004), where archaeologists interpret events that will affect two or more generations later in time as somehow also shaping the decisions those generations’ grandparents or great grandparents made—a kind of anti-Annales notion that negates patterns as connected to deeper pasts, in favour of being connected to a futurist narrative. This is the case regardless of how consistently or logically archaeological material trends otherwise connect to a deeper, longterm pattern of an entirely Indigenous-centric archaeological record. For example, the appearance of small scraps of copper derived from European kettles on Indigenous sites by the mid sixteenth century has been interpreted as a monumental event, triggering rapid changes and wholesale population realignments to geographically position settlements so as to best control anticipated future trade routes with Europeans (e.g. Trigger 1985, 1991; Trigger and Swagerty 1996), despite the fact that these settlement relocations are clearly linked to earlier centuries of population movement and the emergence of coalescent societies (e.g. Birch 2012; Warrick 2008). Some scholars have characterized the appearance of European-derived copper on Indigenous sites as the emergence of a ‘cult of metal scrap’ (Bradley 1987b, 2001). However, the archaeological record in the region clearly indicates that the earliest appearance of European-derived scrap metal (as well as the Aboriginal artisan-made objects shaped from that metal), are all identical in form and frequency to contemporaneous artifacts made from indigenous copper, which are consistently present on sites over much of the previous several centuries in the lower Great Lakes (Ehrhardt 2005; Fox et al. 1995; Murphy and Ferris 1990; Williamson 1990). In other words, archaeologically it is perhaps at least as logical to think of that European metal as simply a new material source being plugged into a broad Indigenous material expression—that is, connected to already existing historical trajectories—than to assume

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois these items were an early harbinger of rapid, European-induced change. Indeed, the fact that the archaeological record supports evidence of long-distance exchange and interaction (as indicated by the presence of (p.379) distantly sourced indigenous copper, silver, lithic, marine shell, and other exotic materials on local sites) in the centuries prior to European trade networks belies the assertion that communities in the region operated within a ‘profound localism’ with limited or no contact with distant groups (Turgeon 2004:30; see also Trigger 1991; Trigger and Swagerty 1996). Ignoring or de-emphasizing archaeological data from the region that suggests the contrary in order to argue for such a profound localism is only necessary if the interpretive point is to ensure archaeology substantiates the historical narrative of Indigenous peoples being overwhelmed by European goods and the European ‘invention’ and imposition of long-distance trade networks. In effect, it denies the social sophistication implicit within societies interacting widely and aware of the world beyond their community, and the obvious realization that Europeans and the experience of them were readily incorporated into Indigenous-centric world views. It papers over and ends the narrative of an Indigenous history that can be drawn from the archaeological heritage of the region in favour of those derived from European written accounts that re-cast Aboriginal agency and motives as shaped by and subservient to European world views and motivations. If decades and centuries before sustained engagement with Europeans are viewed as anticipating the events of the seventeenth century, then conventional interpretations of that seventeenth-century archaeology often can be about affirming the written narrative, which depicts a rapid decimation of cultural coherency among Indigenous groups due to an addictive fixation on furs for European goods. This not only situates the seventeenth-century material record as inherently disconnected to earlier, long-term archaeological trends, but also as ‘wrong’ if it cannot directly substantiate the historical narrative. For example, archaeologists have long worked to find the evidence of increased trapping of fur-bearing animals in the seventeenth century through faunal analyses from habitation sites (e.g. Kuhn and Funk 2000; Stewart 2000). But patterns of faunal representation consistently fail to show stark increases in fur-bearing remains, an absence of change often explained away as due to taphonomic processes. Likewise, researchers have developed relatively sophisticated, long-term paleodemographic trends for the entire Late Woodland based on ossuary data, village size, and hearth-in-house associations (e.g. Snow 1996; Warrick 2008). But to carry the pattern into the seventeenth century, calculations of archaeological data were adjusted for one model in Page 11 of 36

Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois order to account for recorded census totals in French Jesuit accounts (Warrick 2003:267). In other words, these examples reflect a tendency to either apologize for the perceived failings of the archaeological record to accurately mimic historic observation, or to make archaeological data ‘fit’ historic expectations. More evident change seen in the seventeenth century, such as the social consequences of warfare and the impact of epidemics, don’t need to be fitted into historic tropes of ruin and collapse (see also Wilcox, this volume), but can be (p.380) read as connected to longer-term historical trajectories preventing collapse. Indeed, written accounts do describe complex social processes that operated in all Iroquoian societies that allowed for the formal adoption of individuals, families, and even whole villages into another community, whereby both those adopted individuals’ previous identity, and their newly adopted community identity, were maintained (Engelbrecht 2003; Heidenreich 1990). Given the several-hundred-year pattern of household and village amalgamation evident archaeologically in the region, it could be argued that the historical trajectory of this practice reflects a vibrant, vital, long-term pattern of fluidity and the continual revision of social identity and community membership practiced by the ancestors of the descendant Iroquoian-speaking peoples of the lower Great Lakes; a mechanism ensuring the continuation of polities, even through the wholesale incorporation of other polities. In other words, this practice materially captures the long-term process of continually becoming that revises identity while ensuring its continuity through change both dramatic and beneath awareness across generations. So while social pressures and response to population loss in the mid seventeenth century led to the dispersal of Iroquoian groups from southern Ontario, conventionally characterized as abandonment and ruin, for many this may have been less diaspora and more coerced membership into an Iroquois Confederacy through the imposition of social adoption. This process served to replace and accommodate flexible social membership to restore community vitality after significant population losses or to manage community growth. And from the perspective of the descendants of these revised nations, the strategy was extremely successful: by the 1660s, overall population numbers for the Iroquois Confederacy are cited as being similar to or greater than pre-epidemic levels (e.g. Brandão 1997; Heidenreich 1990). Villages from the second half of the seventeenth century in what would eventually be known as New York State were noted at the time by visiting Jesuits as partially or mostly populated by non- Iroquois people, including large numbers of people from former northern Iroquoian communities, as well as non-Iroquoian-speaking Aboriginal Page 12 of 36

Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois people (e.g. Engelbrecht 2003; Ferris 2006; Snow 1994). This representation of Confederacy communities as made up partly or mostly of formerly distinct, non-New York Iroquois peoples rather tangibly speaks to the effectiveness of those social processes of fluid identity in order to sustain group vitality—changed, but not, and persisting while always becoming.

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois Summary

What is clear from these archaeological trends is that the process of becoming—whether as polities based on formerly distinct village communities, or connected, inter-village territorial groupings of formerly distinct (p.381) territorial difference—means that any concept of ‘Huron’, ‘Mohawk’, ‘Iroquois’, ‘Attawandaron’, ‘Wenro’, and so on from the seventeenth century was itself a transitory amalgam of people, households, villages, regional territories, and trans-regional collectives of communities that was both self-definitional in the moment, and subject to continual revision, re-conception, and, likely, relabelling and realigning. For communities of Iroquois and Huron-Wendat ancestry, becoming through colonial encounters and the consequences of those encounters occurred within an Iroquoian-centric process of persistence and survivance, not a European-centric process of un-becoming. Iroquoian people incorporated European materials, making sense of them internally while also responding to the disruptive consequences of historic events, and found ways to persist from within the diversity of Iroquoian world views, variously built up over the preceding centuries of being and becoming. Clearly, material and social realignments occurred, some past pre-conditions were forgotten, and novel strategies of residence adopted, but these were not changes to something other (see Silliman 2009, this volume), but rather changed continuities from within Iroquoian/Iroquois world views: entanglements, interactions, and consequential changes all the pre-conditions for the next iteration of still becoming (see also Jordan, this volume). Little surprise, then, that Iroquois and Huron-Wendat people who perceive themselves today to be something other than the dominant, descendant colonizer still can perceive pre-conditions of becoming that are alternative to, and yet part of, the colonialism of the last five hundred years. This conceptual shift away from the archaeologies of anticipation also facilitates a ‘death to prehistory’ (Schmidt and Mrozowski 2013), by eliminating the notion that somehow the archaeological enterprise must be something different either side of ‘contact’. This shift also has the potential to write back into these histories the descendant Indigenous peoples who have been so marginalized from that heritage relegated to prehistory, assuming archaeologists can reach beyond more than a century of framing the archaeology of this region as connected to a heritage of Aboriginal loss and end. The implications and consequences of negotiating that broader heritage invoked when

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois archaeological narratives move beyond archaeology are considered next.

Archaeology Becoming a Heritage Contested Conventionally for southern Ontario the Aboriginal archaeological narrative is completed with the dispersal of local Indigenous groups by the mid seventeenth century. The endurance of this narrative, imbued within the tropes of decimation and cultural collapse, and extinction in the face of European contact, remains deeply ingrained in the descendant colonial State’s perception of (p.382) its own national narrative. So the challenge for archaeological histories of the Indigenous living through emergent colonialism, as Chakrabarty (2007) points out for historical narratives of colonialism more broadly, is to avoid the exclusionary closure implied in that dominant narrative, and to engage with the historical narratives of the colonized that exist beyond the European experience. Advancing such a revisionist scholarship requires confronting the assumptions and biases the colonial master narrative has had on contemporary relationships between Indigenous First Nations and the State. Moreover, archaeologists also need to engage with the colonialbased formations of Aboriginal and Indigenous identity and the degree to which they are embedded in archaeological constructs and blithely used when archaeologists and others make the mistake of directly translating archaeological narratives and interpretations into a heritage of contemporary meaning, relevance, and authority (e.g. Trigger and Dalley 2010). The complexities of the Aboriginal archaeological history of southern Ontario invites a normative framing of that past as unconnected to contemporary First Nations, either due to perceived ethno-linguistic differences, historic disruptions, or any number of logics as to why Aboriginal ‘people’ today are qualitatively different from the archaeological ‘people’ that inhabited this place in the past. But this logic requires focusing on the ‘pure event’ of colonialism, to borrow Deluze’s notion (e.g. 1990:63), in order to extinguish Indigenous becoming through the emphasis on a narrow set of historically defined consequences (i.e. linear time). This focus fails to recognize that events also have a qualitative essence (event time) difficult to perceive in historiography but critical to understanding the ongoing process of becoming for people who engaged with and differentially will remember those and other events as the pre-conditions for revising and reinforcing self (see also Deluze and Guattari 1994:110).

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois The assumed rupture to becoming in conventional historical and archaeological narratives demonstrates just how deeply descendants continue to struggle with external, colonial constructions of their history imposed back on them, and serves as the basis for denying contemporary First Nations any connection to the archaeological heritage of this region, or for broader assertions of Indigenous sovereignty. For First Nations that linguistically are characterized as ‘Iroquoian-speaking’ today, that problematic understanding of colonial history cancels out contemporary claims to that past. This is done in two ways. The first is by continuing the fallacy from the colonial historical narrative that Ontario Iroquoian history ended at 1650 when these people were ‘decimated’ or ‘wiped out’ by the warring New York State Iroquois Confederacy. This effectively constructs descendants forevermore as a diaspora living somewhere other than Ontario, and without access to that heritage (see Sioui 1991, 1999; Trigger 2001). Secondly, a different historical narrative begins around 1784 when displaced New York State Iroquois (perceived solely as the descendants of (p.383) the ‘enemies’ of Ontario Iroquoian peoples) leave New York State following the Revolutionary War, and settle across southern Ontario (e.g. Ferris 2009). As such, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and Iroquois people that today reside within the contemporary descendant colonial space known as Ontario are assumed to post-date the Aboriginal archaeological history of the region. Thus the logic applied to both peoples, either those currently not in Ontario or those who ‘only’ recently arrived, is that their claims to the archaeology of the region are compromised. But this kind of logic only works if we accept that these contemporary communities are products of particular seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial events, unconnected to deeper archaeological pasts, and disconnected from more recent becomings. We have to actively ignore that Ontario Iroquoian communities were absorbed wholesale into New York State Iroquois communities, and ignore the contemporary relevance, vitality, and ongoing pre-conditions that groups such as the Huron-Wendat, residing outside of Ontario, continue to draw from the archaeological heritage and early history of southern Ontario as critical to selfdefinitional notions of themselves (Sioui 1991, 1999). In effect, our scholarship imposes an external form of becoming, one informed through our ‘understandings’ of ancient material events, which we assert as being the correct and sole means of connecting deep past, various colonial pasts, and present engagements with the past (i.e. heritage), regardless of how descendant groups define their own internal and continual becomings.

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois Excluding contemporary First Nations from the archaeological heritage of a region because they are not ‘correctly’ associated with that record, as defined by archaeologists, has the circular logic of substantiating an archaeological argument as to why such groups should have no say over the contemporary management, access, or control of the archaeological record (Dods 2010; Matthews and Palus 2009; Nicholas 2005). Indeed, disentangling contemporary claims from the ‘truth’ based on archaeological epistemologies protects as unassailable an objective Science of Archaeology, perceived by some to be essential to countering the erosion of that truth-making when non-archaeological understandings of the record creep into archaeological interpretations or otherwise expose archaeology to other ways of knowing or accessing the past ‘improperly’ (e.g. as argued by McGhee 2004, 2008, 2010). Of course, that kind of argument presupposes that archaeology is the only way to accurately translate the past into a meaningful heritage discourse of contemporary relevance, and that contemporary heritage claims can only exist and be validated from archaeological and historical scholarship. But heritage values do not arise from a simple translation of archaeology into a relevance beyond archaeology, and self-evident truths in archaeology are really only contested opinions of variable worth within this broader contemporary relevance (e.g. Harrison 2008, 2013; Holtorf 2010; Smith 2006). Moreover, a reflexivity in archaeological practice (Hodder 1999), especially the reflexivity that (p.384) necessarily occurs to archaeologists when engaging beyond archaeology and with descendant groups (e.g. Atalay 2012; Hodder 2004; McDavid 2002), reveals the limitations of any archaeological ‘truthiness’ to assertions that archaeology is the correct arbitrator of present heritages. While this reflexivity in archaeological practice and the interpretive turn it brings is being engaged with in the academy, archaeological practice overwhelmingly happens beyond the academy, in applied contexts of State-regulated, commercial management of the archaeological record. It is in this context that descendant groups most regularly interact with archaeological epistemologies over contested heritage, and it is within this context that normative assumptions, cultural historical sensibilities of the outcomes of colonialism, and scientific prerogatives that eschew an archaeological reflexivity, continue to dominate (Allen 2011; Ferris 2002, 2007; King 2009). Because it is in this context that archaeologists often act as advocates or agents for the State over who should, and should not, have a voice over the region’s archaeological heritage (Ferris 2003; Williamson

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois 2010), it is here that the consequences of archaeological conceptions of the archaeological record have the most impact, and experience the most direct challenge, in the world beyond archaeology (e.g. Smith 2004). This is particularly notable in southern Ontario, where commercial consulting archaeology regularly entangles the long-term archaeological record with the colonial legacy and contemporary First Nations communities of this place. For example, immediately west of London, Ontario are two Anishinabeg communities, along with an adjacent Oneida Iroquois reserve that was formed in the 1840s by Oneida relocating from New York State (Ferris 2009). In the last part of the twentieth century, consulting archaeologists working in the region tended to communicate more directly with the Oneida community, rather than with adjacent Anishinabeg communities, largely to deal with issues involving the accidental discovery of burials or local precontact archaeological sites threatened with development impacts. As the provincial archaeologist for the region then, I can attest that at least part of the reason why the archaeological community tended to prefer interacting with the Oneida community was both the result of a long-term working relationship begun in the 1980s, and, more subjectively, as a result of the fact that the local ‘pre-contact’ archaeological record was considered by archaeologists to be ancestral Iroquoian, and therefore ‘more’ relevant to the Oneida community than to adjacent Anishinabeg communities. Through the end of the twentieth and into the early twenty-first century, the Oneida First Nation increasingly sought to have burials that were discovered in development contexts remain where they were found, with development proceeding, or not, only when complete avoidance of those locales could be ensured. This was a change from past practice of removing burials and reburying them elsewhere, such as in an existing cemetery, in order to allow development to proceed unencumbered. The revised practice met with some success (p.385) and creative applications (e.g. ‘pillaring’ a burial locale then dropping it when adjacent grading had been completed; preserving burial locales left in place by establishing greenspaces co-owned by the City of London and the Oneida). The strategies employed tended to be a costly but ultimately effective means of mediating contested interests over burial discoveries. However, in 2004 two c.AD 1300–1400 sequentially occupied Late Woodland villages were excavated within Riverview Estates, a housing development east of London (Timmins Martelle Heritage Consultants 2004). The Dorchester site contained twenty-six burial localities. From Page 18 of 36

Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois the discovery of the first burial, the developer for this property was eager to avoid dealing with the Oneida First Nation because of their reputation for not favouring the relocation of burials from development land. While the trials and tribulations of resolving this issue were a decade-long process and object lesson in contested heritage (Timmins Martelle Heritage Consultants 2011), over a year after the first burials were discovered an arbitration hearing had to be held under the Ontario Cemeteries Act in order to impose a resolution to this contested heritage. That this occurred after the proponent had tried to service the development property without approval, managing to impact several of the burials in the process, made all sides extremely reluctant to work together. During that arbitration, Oneida’s position was that the burials needed to be preserved where found, and not relocated. Moreover, the Oneida viewed the deceased as ‘the ancestors of the Haudenosaunee of today’ (quoted in Timmins Martelle Heritage Consultants 2011:176), asserted that the burials represented vestige title and First Nations sovereignty, and challenged the Ontario’s Cemeteries Act disposition process as being unconstitutional of Aboriginal rights, by forcing a First Nation to negotiate with a landowner, not the State. The proponent’s position was that the remains had to be completely removed in order to allow development to proceed. The Province of Ontario also sought to challenge the broader, constitutionally related issues Oneida raised. In support of the Crown and proponent’s position, the Crown also paid for an expert opinion report undertaken by an archaeologist (the Oneida First Nation was obliged to obtain their own expert opinion independently). The Crown’s expert argued that the Oneida First Nation should be disqualified from having any authority to speak on behalf of the human remains discovered on archaeological and histroical grounds (von Gernet 2006a). The logic of the expert report was that the Oneida did not hold a close ethnic affiliation to the deceased and thus were not an appropriate representative to speak for the deceased. The expert opinion cited the conventional master narrative that the Confederacy Haudenosaunee people were descendant ‘New York Iroquois’ and so disconnected from the Ontario Iroquoian ancestors and the archaeological heritage at Dorchester. Moreover, while the report acknowledged that Ontario Iroquoian peoples were adopted wholesale and became a part of the Confederacy in the seventeenth century, this nonetheless meant these people had been ‘assimilated’ (von Gernet 2006a:9–10) in the sense of (p.386) becoming culturally no longer connected to the deceased, and so their distinctive culture ceased to exist in 1650. In other words, that adoptive process Ontario Iroquoian peoples underwent in the mid Page 19 of 36

Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois seventeenth century was a break and active rejection of their identity, sovereignty, and heritage. In effect, the expert opinion was that Ontario Iroquoian peoples went through an act of un-becoming, distinct from and contrary to the continuous becoming evident archaeologically for the centuries prior. Beyond the unspoken and self-serving implication that no contemporary Aboriginal First Nation could speak on behalf of the ancestors of an ‘extinguished’ culture, or interfere in the resolution of a burial discovery when development and capital were at stake,2 the report fully vindicated the colonial master narrative of Ontario Iroquoian history, compartmentalizing it from Iroquois history, and so denied contemporary Haudenosaunee any claim to that heritage. This is a logic that evinces archaeology and history as tools for constraining asserted heritage, and the privileges and responsibilities that assertion can entail for a community, all played out within the semi-judicial process of an arbitration hearing held by the State, though clearly this logic also is of exceptional utility for the State in more formal judicial issues of contested pasts, land claims, and asserted sovereignty (e.g. see von Gernet 2006b; see also Martindale, this volume). Also negotiating the continuing colonial consequences of being connected to an archaeological heritage of diaspora, the Huron-Wendat today outside and within Ontario seek to assert claim and stewardship over the archaeology of southern Ontario, which remains an important, definitional component of their heritage (e.g. Trigger 2001; Williamson 2010). This community has likewise challenged commercial practices on sites they assert are their heritage (at times in conflict with Haudenosaunee assertions to the same sites and heritage). These efforts are often informally supported by the State and archaeologists, but typically only where there is not a contested heritage that places the Huron-Wendat in opposition with other First Nations heritage claims, or interferes with the State land-development-approval processes, or challenges the commercial livelihood of archaeological practitioners. One recent example where these interests were contested occurred as the Huron-Wendat sought to protect a sixteenth-century archaeological site north of Toronto from archaeological excavation tied to land development. At various times over the past decade, their concerns were supported by Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg communities, or challenged, and were supported by the State, (p.387) or ignored. Most curious was the schism that developed in the local archaeological community over this issue, with the Ontario Archaeological Society (Warrick et al. 2010) supporting the Huron-Wendat right to have a voice Page 20 of 36

Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois in managing a highly significant archaeological site, while the Ontario Association of Professional Archaeologists (Jackson et al. 2011) challenged the Huron-Wendat claim to the site by questioning the ‘ethnic’ affiliation of the site, questioning claims that the site was of any kind of extraordinary significance, and strongly objecting to a commercial consultant not being allowed to pursue livelihood by stripping the site of topsoil to be screened subsequently. In the end the site was preserved through the efforts of the Huron-Wendat, the local municipality, and landowner (Ferris 2012), but the process revealed at least some tendency among archaeologists to wield archaeological conventional narratives to protect fairly blatant archaeological selfinterests and livelihood, and actively deny the asserted heritage of others. It is hard not to see archaeology, in this light, as actively perpetuating colonial legacies and defining the past as a continuing colonial process of First Nations un-becoming. While conventional archaeological sensibilities may allow archaeologists to come to know the past as divorced from contemporary heritages in southern Ontario, even while acknowledging the linked connections between various iterations of the colonized over the past five hundred years, it fails to account for the continuing process of becoming that still engages that archaeological heritage as relevant within contemporary Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee Iroquois, Anishinabeg and other descendant communities. That a contemporary connection to that heritage might be paradoxical to conventional archaeological reasoning simply underscores the paradoxical nature of the colonized having to negotiate the pure event of colonialism (dependant sovereigns belonging to a heritage within regions defined by terra nullius logics of colonialism, and so on; Deleuze 1990, 1994; Deleuze and Guattari 1994; see also Patton 2006; Robinson and Tormey 2010). Negotiating legacies of coloniality in the pseudo postcolonial of today is an endeavour beyond conventional archaeological logics. But embracing the reflexive turn within the archaeological interpretations and narratives that connect archaeological becomings through the last several centuries, not divorced either side of particular events, does help make archaeology a little less irrelevant, or at least not as hurtful, to future pre-conditions of becoming for the descendant people of the colonized in Western societies.

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois Conclusion That the conventional historical master narrative for southern Ontario, birthed of the European experience that began in the seventeenth century, continues to be validated in and resonates through contemporary society is because of the (p.388) deeply embedded relevance the dispositions this descendant colonial society has absorbed during its own becoming. That this construction of the past continues to serve the State’s needs, and continues to marginalize the descendants of the people who, collectively and over the past millennium, laid down a rich heritage across the lower Great Lakes and Northeast, are facts we may be aware of, but nonetheless are filtered through our continued use of essentialized notions of Iroquoian and Iroquois defined from fixed points in time during the rise of European colonialism in this part of the world. This use relies on the ‘truthfulness’ of those initial European experiences in framing understandings of Indigenous identities, communities, and heritage. It also fails to recognize that the long-term archaeological record confirms the fluid and always becoming nature of Iroquoian and Iroquois history across this region, connecting contemporary Haudenosaunee and Wendat to that heritage. That some Ontario archaeologists continue to perpetuate the construction of an Iroquoian history that ends in 1650, and an Iroquois history that begins in 1784 as oppositional to Ontario Iroquoian archaeology, is testament to the difficulty in surmounting our own dispositions and heritage. Within the contemporary revisionist scholarship of Indigenous-lived colonialism, we find ourselves continually confronted by the contradictions inherent in these constructions of the past, tripping over the artifice of colonial histories which so clearly are linked to the ongoing playing out of First Nation-State disputes. This makes our scholarship of particular relevance for descendants in their ongoing struggle with the colonial legacy of dispossession and marginalization, since this revisionist understanding of the archaeology of the colonized undermines, or at least challenges, some of the dominant tropes of colonial history. Certainly, contemporary descendant groups are as interested in using this scholarship as the State has been in using past conventional scholarship that appeared to substantiate the State’s construction of their colonial sovereignty. That these archaeological narratives can be used to buttress positions taken in the continuing disputes between the State and First Nations also underscores the point that, while archaeological description and cultural historical classification is relatively trivial to the range of broader social issues inherent in descendant colonial States, heritage and the use of

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois archaeological narratives are not, once they leave archaeology and are engaged with by the State and descendant colonized. Negotiating archaeological and historical narratives of descendant European expansionism over the past half-millennium is incredibly complicated and challenging. After all, while theoretically reflexive archaeologies of the colonized and colonialism engages with and deconstructs conventional historical narratives, they at the same time still operate within those colonial conceptual frames. Colonized/ Indigenous/Native/Descendants are all categories of identity for those whose ancestors engaged with people from Europe, but also are, by use of those categories, defined in the present by that colonial context. We recognize (p.389) them as such because we are enculturated in that narrative of nation-building, as either descendants of colonizer or of colonized, reflexive archaeologist or not. Challenging and revising these colonial categories while retaining the terms themselves, we continually reaffirm their validity as continuing colonial legacies even as we deconstruct them (e.g. Echo-Hawk 2010; King 1990; Starn 2011). In moving beyond the partitioning of recent from ancient pasts, it is critical to recognize that contested heritage is not arbitrated by archaeological ways of knowing. For contemporary descendant groups, the heritage of becoming is always an unfinished process, encompassing deep archaeological pasts, and also the many subsequent events and experiences of entanglement and emergent colonialism, including systemic marginalization, racism, persecution, dispossession, denial of autonomy, and so on, and also centuries of fighting for rights and attempting to redress those consequences within and without the strictures of the descendant colonial State, and also the somewhat ironic rediscovery of their material past as a subject of intellectual curiosity and object possession by descendants of the colonizer. This is not a heritage that also needs to be authorized by the State or archaeologists before descendant groups can access it. Even more critically, this is also not a heritage that can expunge any moment of becoming along the last millennium. All pasts along that narrative— ancient, entangled, colonial, marginalized and oppressed, revised and contemporary—will differentially contribute to present becomings through the selective emphasis of various pre-conditions, in an always recursive process of becoming and persistence. Archaeology of the colonized will not facilitate future becomings of broader relevance within descendant colonial states as multiplicities of ‘people’ struggle and remain within colonial legacies. But perhaps it can help revise contemporary understandings of the pre-conditions feeding our continual framing of the past as a legacy of colonialism that Page 23 of 36

Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois validates the present. It can do that by reaching back beyond the last five hundred years and providing connected narratives that speak to the millennia of becoming, and not centuries of un-becoming. This could allow for all of us enculturated within the conventional colonial historical narratives of this place to revise the selection and emphasize of various past events, in order to imagine a different heritage in the present based on reconfigured pre-conditions from those millennia of becomings. References Bibliography references: Allen, Harry 2011 The Crisis in 21st-century Archaeological Heritage Management. In Bridging the Divide: Indigenous Communities and Archaeology into the 21st Century, edited by Caroline Phillips and Harry Allen, pp. 157–80. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. (p. 390) Atalay, Sonya 2012 Community-based Archaeology: Research With, By, and For Indigenous and Local Communities. University of California Press, Berkeley. Badiou, Alain 2007 The Event in Deleuze. Parrhesia 2:37–44. Barth, Frederick 1969 Introduction. In Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, edited by Frederick Barth, pp. 9–38. Little, Brown, and Company, Boston. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994 The Location of Culture. Routledge, London. Biehl, João, and Peter Locke 2010 Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming. Current Anthropology 51:317–37. Birch, Jennifer 2012 Coalescent Communities: Settlement Aggregation and Social Integration in Iroquoian Ontario. American Antiquity 77:646– 70. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Bradley, James W. 1987a Evolution of the Onondaga Iroquois: Accommodating Change, 1500–1655. University of Syracuse Press, Syracuse.

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois Bradley, James W. 1987b Native Exchange and European Trade: Crosscultural Dynamics in the Sixteenth Century. Man in the Northeast 33:31–46. Bradley, James W. 2001 Change and Survival among the Onondaga Iroquois since 1500. In Societies in Eclipse: Archaeology of the Eastern Woodlands Indians, A.D. 1400–1700, edited by David S. Brose, C. Wesley Cowan, and Robert C. Mainfort Jr, pp. 27–36. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Brandão, José António 1997 ‘Your Fyres Shall Burn No More’: Iroquois Policy Toward New France and its Native Allies to 1701. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Branstner, Susan 1992 Tionontate Huron Occupation at the Marquette Mission. In Calumet and Fleur-de-Lys: Archaeology of Indian and French Contact in the Midcontinent, edited by John A. Walthall and Thomas E. Emerson, pp. 177–202. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Casella, Eleanor Conlin and Chris Fowler 2004 Beyond Identification: An Introduction. In The Archaeology of Plural and Changing Identities: Beyond Identification, edited by Eleanor Conlin Casella and Chris Fowler, pp. 1–8. Springer, New York. Chakrabarty, Dipesh 2007 Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Second edition. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Deleuze, Gilles 1990 The Logic of Sense. Athlone Press, London. Deleuze, Gilles 1993 The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Deleuze, Gilles 1994 Difference and Repetition. Athlone, London. Deleuze, Gilles 1995 Negotiations, 1972–1990. Columbia University Press, New York. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari 1987 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari 1994 What Is Philosophy? Columbia University Press, New York.

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois Dobres, Marcia-Anne and John E. Robb (eds) 2000 Agency in Archaeology. Routledge, New York. Dods, Roberta 2010 Nation/First Nations: Conflict in Identity and the Role of Archaeology. In Unquiet Pasts: Risk Society, Lived Cultural Heritage, Re-designing Reflexivity, edited by Stephanie Koerner and Ian Russell, pp. 49–62. Ashgate Publishing, Farnham, UK. (p.391) Echo-Hawk, Roger C. 2010 Working Together on Race. The SAA Archaeological Record 10(3):6–9. Ehrhardt, Kathleen L. 2005 European Metals in Native Hands: Rethinking Technological Change 1640–1683. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Ellis, Chris J. and Neal Ferris (eds) 1990 The Archaeology of Southern Ontario to AD 1650. Occasional Publications of the London Chapter, Ontario Archaeological Society 5. London, Ontario. Engelbrecht, William 2003 Iroquoia: The Development of a Native World. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse. Faulkner, Keith W. 2006 Deleuze and the Three Syntheses of Time. Peter Lang, New York. Ferris, Neal 1999a Telling Tales: Interpretive Trends in Southern Ontario Late Woodland Archaeology. Ontario Archaeology 68:1–62. Ferris, Neal 1999b What’s in a Name? The Implications of Archaeological Terminology Used in Nonarchaeological Contexts. In Taming the Taxonomy: Towards a New Understanding of Great Lakes Archaeology, edited by Ronald F. Williamson and Christopher M. Watts, pp. 111–21. Eastendbooks, Toronto. Ferris, Neal 2002 Where the Air Thins: The Rapid Rise of the Archaeological Consulting Industry in Ontario. Revista de Arqueología Americana 21:53–88. Ferris, Neal 2003 Between Colonial and Indigenous Archaeologies: Legal and Extra-Legal Ownership of the Archaeological Past in North America. Canadian Journal of Archaeology 27:154–90. Ferris, Neal 2006 In Their Time: Archaeological Histories of Nativelived Contacts and Colonialisms in Southwestern Ontario AD 1400– 1900. PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, McMaster University, Hamilton.

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois Ferris, Neal 2007 Always Fluid: Government Policy Making and Standards of Practice in Ontario Archaeological Resource Management. In Quality Management in Archaeology, edited by Willem J. H. Willems and Monique H. van den Dries, pp. 78–99. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Ferris, Neal 2009 The Archaeology of Native-lived Colonialism: Challenging History in the Great Lakes. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Ferris, Neal 2012 Skandatut Archaeological Site Preserved as a Result of an Historic Land Transfer Agreement. Arch Notes 17(3):11. Ferris, Neal and Michael W. Spence 1995 The Woodland Traditions in Southern Ontario. Revista de Arqueología Americana 9:83–138. Fowler, Chris 2004 The Archaeology of Personhood: An Anthropological Approach. Routledge, London. Fox, William A. 2004 Horned Panthers and Erie Associates. In A Passion for the Past: Papers in Honour of James F. Pendergast, edited by James V. Wright and Jean-Luc Pilon, pp. 283–304. Mercury Series, Archaeology Paper 164. Canadian Museum of Civilization, Ottawa. Fox, William A. 2008 Reciprocal Symbols: A Review of Ontario Iroquois Archaeological Evidence Relating to Long Distance Contacts. Northeast Anthropology 75/76:1–22. Fox, William A., R. G. V. Hancock, and L. A. Pavlish 1995 Where East Meets West: The New Copper Culture. The Wisconsin Archeologist 76:269–93. Gnecco, Cristóbal and Carolina Hernández 2008 History and Its Discontents: Stone Statues, Native Histories, and Archaeologists. Current Anthropology 49:439–66. (p.392) Gosden, Chris 2004 Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gullapalli, PraVeena 2008 Heterogeneous Encounters: Colonial Histories and Archaeological Experiences. In Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi, pp. 35–52. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson 1992 Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference. Cultural Anthropology 7:6–23.

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois Harding, Sandra G. 1986 The Science Question in Feminism. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York. Harrison, Rodney 2004 Shared Landscapes: Archaeologies of Attachment and the Pastoral Industry in New South Wales. University of New South Wales Press, Sydney. Harrison, Rodney 2008 Politics of the Past: Conflict in the Use of Heritage in the Modern World. In The Heritage Reader, edited by Graham Fairclough, Rodney Harrison, John H. Jameson Jr, and John Schofield, pp. 177–90. Routledge, London. Harrison, Rodney 2013 Heritage: Critical Approaches. Routledge, London. Heidenreich, Conrad E. 1990 History of the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes Area to A.D. 1650. In The Archaeology of Southern Ontario to A.D. 1650, edited by Chris J. Ellis and Neal Ferris, pp. 475–92. Occasional Publications of the London Chapter, Ontario Archaeological Society 5. London, Ontario. Hodder, Ian 1999 The Archaeological Process. Blackwell, Malden, Massachusetts. Hodder, Ian 2004 The Past as Passion and Play: Çatalhöyük as a Site of Conflict in the Construction of Multiple Pasts. In Archaeology Beyond Dialogue, pp. 11–22. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Holtorf, Cornelius 2010 Heritage Values in Contemporary Popular Culture. In Heritage Values in Contemporary Society, edited by George S. Smith, Phyllis Mauch Messenger, and Hilary A. Soderland, pp. 43–54. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. Ingold, Tim 2000 The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge, London. Jackson, Lawrence, Mima Kapches, and Dean Knight 2011 APA Investigating Committee Report on Keith Powers’ 2010 Excavations at the Skandatut Site Property Owned by Joseph Pandolfo. Report on file with the author, Association of Professional Archaeologists, and the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport, Toronto. Jamieson, Susan 1999 A Brief History of Aboriginal Social Interactions in Southern Ontario and Their Taxonomic Implications. In Taming the Taxonomy: Toward a New Understanding of Great Lakes Archaeology,

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois edited by Ronald F. Williamson and Christopher M. Watts, pp. 175–92. Eastendbooks, Toronto. Jordan, Kurt A. 2008 The Seneca Restoration, 1715–1754: An Iroquois Local Political Economy. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. King, Thomas F. 2009 Our Unprotected Heritage: Whitewashing the Destruction of Our Cultural and Natural Environment. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. King, Thomas 1990 Godzilla vs. Postcolonial. World Literature Written in English 30:10–16. Kohl, Philip L. 2011 Ethnic Identity and the Anthropological Relevance of Archaeology. In Archaeology in Society: Its Relevance in the Modern World, edited by Marcy Rockman and Joe Flatman, pp. 229–36. Springer, New York. Kohl, Philip L., Mara Kozelsky, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda 2007 Introduction. In Selective Remembrances: Archaeology in the Construction, Commemoration, and Consecration (p.393) of National Pasts, edited by Philip L. Kohl, Mara Kozelsky, and Nachman BenYehuda, pp. 1–29. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Kuhn, Robert D. and Robert E. Funk 2000 Boning Up on the Mohawk: An Overview of Mohawk Faunal Assemblages and Subsistence Patterns. Archaeology of Eastern North America 28:29–62. Lampert, Jay 2006 Delueze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History. Continuum, London. Lennox, Paul A. and William R. Fitzgerald 1990 The Culture History and Archaeology of the Neutral Iroquoians. In The Archaeology of Southern Ontario to A.D. 1650, edited by Chris J. Ellis and Neal Ferris, pp. 405– 56. Occasional Publications of the London Chapter, Ontario Archaeological Society 5. London, Ontario. Liebmann, Matthew 2008 Introduction: The Intersections of Archaeology and Postcolonial Studies. In Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi, pp. 1–20. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Matthews, Christopher N. 2007 History to Prehistory: An Archaeology of Being Indian. Archaeologies 3:271–95.

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois Matthews, Christopher N. and Matthew Palus 2009 About Face: On Archaeology, Heritage, and Social Power in Public. In Ethnographies and Archaeologies: Iterations of the Past, edited by Lena Mortensen and Julie Hollowell, pp. 131–50. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. McDavid, Carol 2002 Archaeologies that Hurt; Descendants that Matter: A Pragmatic Approach to Collaboration in the Public Interpretation of African-American Archaeology. World Archaeology 34:303–14. McGhee, Robert 2004 Between Racism and Romanticism, Scientism and Spiritualism: The Dilemmas of New World Archaeology. In Archaeology on the Edge: New Perspectives from the Northern Plains, edited by Brian Kooyman and Jane Kelley, pp. 13–22. Canadian Archaeological Association Occasional Paper Number 4, Calgary. McGhee, Robert 2008 Aboriginalism and the Problems of Indigenous Archaeology. American Antiquity 73:579–98. McGhee, Robert 2010 Of Strawmen, Herrings, and Frustrated Expectations. American Antiquity 75:239–43. Meskell, Lynn 2002 The Intersections of Identity and Politics in Archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 31:279–301. Mitchell, Mark D. and Laura L. Scheiber 2010 Crossing Divides: Archaeology as Long-term History. In Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400–1900, edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Mark D. Mitchell, pp. 1–21. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Mrozowski, Stephen A., Holly Herbster, David Brown, and Katherine L. Priddy 2009 Magunkaquog Materiality, Federal Recognition, and the Search for a Deeper History. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 13: 430–63. Mullin, David 2011 Border Crossings: The Archaeology of Borders and Borderlands: An Introduction. In Places in Between: The Archaeology of Social, Cultural and Geographical Borders and Borderlands, edited by David Mullin, pp. 1–2. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Murphy, Carl and Neal Ferris 1990 The Late Woodland Western Basin Tradition of Southwestern Ontario. In The Archaeology of Southern Ontario to A.D. 1650, edited by Chris J. Ellis and Neal Ferris, pp. 189–

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois 278. Occasional Publications of the London Chapter, Ontario Archaeological Society 5. London, Ontario. (p.394) Naum, Magdalena 2010 Re-emerging Frontiers: Postcolonial Theory and Historical Archaeology of the Borderlands. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 17:101–31. Nicholas, George P. 2005 The Persistence of Memory; the Politics of Desire: Archaeological Impacts on Aboriginal Peoples and Their Response. In Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice, edited by Claire Smith and H. Martin Wobst, pp. 81–103. Routledge, New York. Noble, William C. 2004 The Protohistoric Period Revisited. In A Passion for the Past: Papers in Honour of James F. Pendergast, edited by James V. Wright and Jean-Luc Pilon, pp. 179–91. Mercury Series, Archaeology Paper 164. Canadian Museum of Civilization, Ottawa. Ojala, Carl-Gösta 2009 Sámi Prehistories: The Politics of Archaeology and Identity in Northernmost Europe. Occasional Papers in Archaeology No. 47, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University. Orser, Charles E. Jr. 2012 An Archaeology of Eurocentrism. American Antiquity 77:737–55. Patton, Paul 2006 The Event of Colonisation. In Deleuze and the Contemporary World, edited by Ian Buchanan and Adrian Parr, pp.108– 24. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Patton, Paul 2009 Events, Becoming and History. In Deleuze and History, edited by Jeffery A. Bell and Claire Colebrook, pp. 33–53. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Preucel, Robert W. and Craig N. Cipolla 2008 Indigenous and Postcolonial Archaeologies. In Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi, pp. 129–40. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Radu, Cosmin 2010 Beyond Border-‘Dwelling’: Temporalizing the Border-space through Events. Anthropological Theory 10:409–33. Ramsden, Peter G. 1991 Death in Winter: Changing Symbolic Patterns in Southern Ontario Prehistory. Anthropologica 32:167–81. Ramsden, Peter G. 1996 The Current State of Huron Archaeology. Northeast Anthropology 51:101–12. Page 31 of 36

Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois Ramsden, Peter G. 2006 But Once the Twain Did Meet: A Speculation about Iroquois Origins. In From the Arctic to Avalon: Papers in Honour of Jim Tuck, edited by Lisa Rankin and Peter Ramsden, pp. 27–32. BAR International Series 1507. British Archaeological Reports, Oxford. Robinson, Andrew and Simon Tormey 2010 Living in Smooth Space: Deleuze, Postcolonialism and the Subaltern. In Deleuze and the Postcolonial, edited by Simone Bignall and Paul Patton, pp. 20–40. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Schmidt, Peter R. 2013 The Death of Prehistory. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Said, Edward W. 1979 Orientalism. Vintage Books, New York. Silliman, Stephen W. 2009 Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England. American Antiquity 74:211–30. Silliman, Stephen W. 2010 Indigenous Traces in Colonial Spaces: Archaeologies of Ambiguity, Origin, and Practice. Journal of Social Archaeology 10:28–58. Sioui, Georges E. 1991 Pour une Autohistoire Amérindienne. Les Presses de l’Université Laval, Laval, Québec. Sioui, Georges E. 1999 Huron-Wendat: The Heritage of the Circle (originally published in 1991 as Les Wendats). University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver. (p.395) Silverman, Helaine 2011 Contested Cultural Heritage: A Selected Historiography. In Contested Cultural Heritage: Religion, Nationalism, Erasure, and Exclusion in a Global World, edited by Helaine Silverman, pp. 1–49. Springer, New York. Smith, Laurajane 2004 Archaeological Theory and the Politics of Cultural Heritage. Routledge, New York. Smith, Laurajane 2006 The Uses of Heritage. Routledge, New York. Snow, Dean 1994 The Iroquois. Blackwell, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Snow, Dean 1996 Mohawk Demography and the Effects of Exogenous Epidemics on American Indian Populations. Journal of Anthropological Anthropology 15:160–82.

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois Starn, Orin 2011 Here Come the Anthros (Again): The Strange Marriage of Anthropology and Native America. Cultural Anthropology 26:179–204. Stewart, Frances 2000 Variability in Neutral Iroquoian Subsistence: A.D. 1540–1651. Ontario Archaeology 69:92–117. Sutton, John 2008 Material Agency, Skills and History: Distributed Cognition and the Archaeology of Memory. In Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach, edited by Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris, pp. 37–56. Springer, New York. Sutton, Richard 1996 The Middle Iroquoian Colonization of Huronia. PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, McMaster University, Hamilton. Thomas, Julian 2007 Mesolithic–Neolithic Transitions in Britain: From Essence to Inhabitation. In Going Over: The Mesolithic–Neolithic Transition in North-West Europe, edited by Alasdair Whittle and Vicki Cummings, pp. 423–39. Proceedings of the British Academy. Vol. 144. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Thomas, Nicholas 1991 Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Timmins Martelle Heritage Consultants Inc. 2004 Stage 4 Archaeological Assessment, Riverview Estates Subdivision (39TTC0301) Executive Summary, The Dorchester Village Site (AfHg-24), Dorchester, Ontario. Report on File, Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and Sport, Toronto. Timmins Martelle Heritage Consultants Inc. 2011 Stage 4 Archaeological Assessment (Preliminary Report) Dorchester on the Thames Plan of Condominium 39T-TC-CDM0801 Formerly Riverview Estates Subdivision (39T-TC0301) Containing the Dorchester Village Site (AfHg-24) Part of Lot 15, Concession B SRT Geographic Township of North Dorchester now the Municipality of Thames Centre, County of Middlesex. Report on File, Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and Sport, Toronto. Trigger, Bruce G. 1985 Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s ‘Heroic Age’ Reconsidered. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal.

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois Trigger, Bruce G. 1991 Early Native North American Responses to European Contact: Romantic versus Rationalistic Interpretations. The Journal of American History 77:1195–215. Trigger, Bruce G. 2001 The Liberation of Wendake. Ontario Archaeology 72:3–14. Trigger, Bruce G. and William R. Swagerty 1996 Entertaining Strangers: North America in the Sixteenth Century. In The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, i: Part 1 North America, edited by Bruce G. Trigger and Wilcomb E. Washburn, pp. 325–98. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Trigger, David S. and Cameo Dalley 2010 Negotiating Indigeneity: Culture, Identity, and Politics. Reviews in Anthropology 39:46–65. (p. 396) Turgeon, Laurier 2004 Beads, Bodies and Regimes of Value: From France to North America, c. 1500–c.1650. In The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies, edited by Tim Murray, pp. 19–47. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. von Gernet, Alexander 2006a The Oneida, the Iroquois, and the Dorchester Burials. An expert opinion prepared for the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General, Crown Law Office (Civil) in the matter of an arbitration under the Cemeteries Act (Revised) with respect to the disposition of aboriginal burials found at a Middle Ontario Iroquoian Village site near Dorchester, Ontario. Report on file, Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport, Toronto. von Gernet, Alexander 2006b The Influence of Bruce Trigger on the Forensic Reconstruction of Aboriginal History. In The Archaeology of Bruce Trigger: Theoretical Empiricism, edited by Ronald F. Williamson and Michael S. Bisson, pp. 174–93. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal. Warrick, Gary 2000 The Precontact Iroquoian Occupation of Southern Ontario. Journal of World Prehistory 14:415–66. Warrick, Gary 2003 European Infectious Disease and Depopulation of the Wendat-Tionontate (Huron-Petun). World Archaeology 35:258–75. Warrick, Gary 2008 A Population History of the Huron-Petun, A.D. 500– 1650. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois Warrick, Gary, Alicia Hawkins, Holly Martelle, and Neal Ferris 2010 Independent Expert Panel Review of September 15th Inspection Report under the Ontario Heritage Act Related to Licensed Activities Carried out at the Skandatut Ancestral Huron-Wendat Archaeological Site. Report on file with the author, Ontario Archaeological Society Inc., and the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport, Toronto. Watts, Christopher M. 2008 Pot/Potter Entanglements and Networks of Agency in Late Woodland Period (c. AD 900–1300) Southwestern Ontario, Canada. BAR International Series 1828. British Archaeological Reports, Oxford. Williamson, Ronald F. 1990 The Early Iroquoian Period of Southern Ontario. In The Archaeology of Southern Ontario to A.D. 1650, edited by Chris J. Ellis and Neal Ferris, pp. 291–320. Occasional Publications of the London Chapter, Ontario Archaeological Society 5. London, Ontario. Williamson, Ronald F. 2010 Planning for Ontario’s Archaeological Past: Accomplishments and Continuing Challenges. Revista de Arqueología Americana 28:7–45. Williamson, Ronald F. and David A. Robertson 1994 Peer Polities Beyond the Periphery: Early and Middle Iroquoian Regional Interaction. Ontario Archaeology 58:27–48. Wise, J. Macgregor 2000 Home: Territory and Identity. Cultural Studies 14:295–310. Wright, James V. 1992 The Conquest Theory of the Ontario Iroquois Tradition: A Reassessment. Ontario Archaeology 54:3–15. Wright, James V. 2004 A History of the Native People of Canada, iii (AD 500–European Contact), Part 1. Mercury Series Paper No. 152, Archaeological Survey of Canada, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Ottawa. Wylie, Alison 2008 The Integrity of Narratives: Deliberative Practice, Pluralism, and Multivocality. In Evaluating Multiple Narratives: Beyond Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist Archaeologies, edited by Junko Habu, Claire Fawcett, and John M. Matsunaga, pp. 201–12. Springer, New York. Notes:

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Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois (1) The recent re-imagining of the Canadian Museum of Civilization as the Canadian Museum of History, being the history of events important to the formation of ‘Canada’, came complete with an interactive online timeline that, in 2012, was presented at first as ‘beginning’ in 1608 with the founding of Quebec City, then later extended deeper in time to include earlier European moments, as well as an oddly labelled event at 10,500 years ago as being when the first ‘Canadians’ entered the New World (http://www.civilization.ca/myhistorymuseum/what-is-thecanadian-story; accessed 7 December 2012). This example is just one stark, ongoing reminder of the absence of a precolonial Aboriginal past in popular understandings the descendant colonial State delivers to citizens. (2) It is worth noting that in 2011, a formal disposition agreement was reached between the Oneida, the municipality, and a different developer that led to the preservation in place of most of the burials found. It also acknowledged Haudenosaunee claims that the deceased were their ancestors and that the Oneida shared title to those burial localities (see Timmins Martelle Heritage Consultants 2011).

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Archaeology Taken to Court

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Archaeology Taken to Court Unravelling the Epistemology of Cultural Tradition in the Context of Aboriginal Title Cases Andrew Martindale

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0019

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the epistemology of cultural tradition in the context of court cases involving Aboriginal rights and titles in Canada. Focusing on the global impact and the legal legacy of R. v. Delgamuukw, it considers how archaeology is used by courts to reinstate the double standard through an essentialised model of culture, along with its implications for indigenous peoples seeking rights and titles through Western systems of jurisprudence. The chapter argues that archaeological views of indigenous culture need not be as simplified as presented in recent court cases, a logic that challenges some of the fundamental principles of archaeological orthodoxy. Keywords:   court cases, Aboriginal rights, titles, Canada, R. v. Delgamuukw, archaeology, double standard, indigenous peoples, indigenous culture, courts

Introduction The relationship between archaeology and history, like the relationship between materiality and culture, is convoluted and subtle, qualities that foster a tendency to oversimplify. The temptation to abridge the complexity of the archaeological endeavour is understandable, Page 1 of 34

Archaeology Taken to Court especially in settler contexts such as the Northwest Coast (NWC) of North America, in which the asymmetry between Western scholarship and the Indigenous past is pronounced. This trend is apparent both within the discipline and among those who would employ archaeological analyses to clarify key issues in the Indigenous past. The motivations towards oversimplification for archaeologists are varied, but include the heuristic of theoretical clarity, a defence of our materialist epistemology, shifting our gaze away from potential ethnocentrisms in our fundamental assumptions, and the continued privileging of archaeological authority over the past. Motivations by non-archaeologists are less esoteric but similar, including preserving the expectation that cultural experience can be universally understood on one’s own terms, a discomfort with potential ethnocentric legacies of colonialism, and an expectation that complex phenomena such as history are reducible to simple fundamental principles shared as cultural norms. My thesis is that archaeological naivety in defining the nature of our interpretive challenges is evident in its successful exploitation by legal representatives of the Canadian Crown seeking to disenfranchise Indigenous people1 from their legal (p.398) rights and titles. The history of the use of archaeology in Canadian aboriginal rights and titles cases illustrates this larger phenomenon in part because of a suite of foundational legal decisions, including R. v. Delgamuukw, which set national precedent and have global influence. Specifically, the Canadian court’s use of an antiquated and essentialized model of culture from which practices derive creates an unreasonable barrier to the identification of an aboriginal right as defined in case history. Rights are evaluated primarily as traditional practices. However, the essentialized definition of culture minimizes practice as behaviour while abstracting rights as conceptual frameworks, and equates the presence and ubiquity of the former with the existence of the latter. This conflation, common in archaeological analyses, burdens a simple standard (did a practice exist) with the added but unacknowledged requirement that the practice must be shown to derive from an abstracted cultural system. Since the abstracted cultural standard is the Euro-Canadian cultural context of the court itself, Indigenous rights, almost by definition, cannot meet the implicit standard of the court. Once revealed, this logical syllogism can be challenged on theoretical grounds as anthropologists now argue the inverse: that cultural abstractions emerge out of practice. Thus any example of aboriginal behaviour arguably implies the existence of a conceptual construct, indeed many conceptual constructs, and thus represents evidence of an aboriginal right.

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Archaeology Taken to Court The case of R. v. Delgamuukw (hereafter Delgamuukw) brought archaeology to the court’s attention both as a means of challenging Indigenous claims to history directly and as an indirect critique of the increasing evidentiary weight of Indigenous oral records. The issues raised in Delgamuukw derive from and set precedent in other settler legal jurisdictions, including Australia (Veth 2003; Veth and McDonald 2002), and Africa (Rhodesia; Asch 2000). To some extent, the legal issues faced by courts evaluating Indigenous title cases are similar to those faced by archaeologists investigating history. As Veth and McDonald (2002:122–3) note, Australian courts face the same legal challenges defined by Delgamuukw (Thom 2001a:6). These include evaluating the various scales of social organization and their respective rights and titles within an Indigenous cultural system, identifying the cultural group that both holds contemporary legal constructs such as rights and titles and evaluating its continuity through the colonial period, and identifying the Indigenous legal views on these issues while using archaeological data to evaluate them. Archaeologists ask similar questions, and the crux of both is in the conjunction or disjunction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholarship. Non-Indigenous archaeological and legal authorities hold Indigenous history to a different standard than they do non-Indigenous history. Indigenous cultural practices must be collectively homogenous and their legal constructs must make functional sense in the eyes of Western jurisprudence and archaeology. In reality, proof of the functionality of cultural traits is effectively impossible (Orans 1975) and most cultural (p.399) constructs, Indigenous or non-Indigenous, exist in infinite variety because people create them arbitrarily. Although it has advanced the recognition of Indigenous historiography considerably, the legal legacy of Delgamuukw has seen courts use archaeology to reinstate the double standard through an essentialized model of culture. Given the global impact of the Delgamuukw decision and its legal legacy, these issues have relevance to all countries with Indigenous populations seeking rights and titles through Western systems of jurisprudence. I argue that archaeological views of Indigenous culture need not be as simplified as presented in recent court cases; this logic, however, challenges some of the fundamental principles of archaeological orthodoxy.

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Archaeology Taken to Court Archaeology in Canadian Aboriginal Rights and Title Cases The current evaluation of aboriginal rights (legal actions) and title (legal territory2) in Canadian courts is ostensibly focused on the nature of history prior to contact. Since history in this setting includes the structured arrangements between people over ownership of territory and resources, the relevant analysis is essentially archaeological: the reconstruction of collective cultural identity at one time (defined as the pre-contact period, the dates of which vary by contact history) and its changes over time. Courts have employed a variety of data sources in this effort, including Indigenous oral records,3 ethnographic sources, historic documents and, increasingly, archaeological data. This complicated interdisciplinary task is imbricated by the court’s ignorance of the different constructs defining cultural identity in each of these disciplines. In the absence of theoretical sophistication to balance the nature of historical data by the contexts of its production and interpretation, courts have sought to impose upon culture an essentialized and simplistic definition. In doing so, they have found the most complementary views and academic support in archaeological analyses. Until Delgamuukw, archaeology and its evaluation of culture in antiquity was largely irrelevant to aboriginal land and resource title cases in Canadian (p.400) courts. Archaeology had been referenced in issues of repatriation of human remains (Bell 1992) and artifacts (Bell and Paterson 1999; Simpson 1994–1995), and the administration of heritage resources and their archaeological mitigation had been an ongoing subject of legislative debate (Ferris 1998, 2003). Although the potential value of archaeology for defending aboriginal land title claims was recognized earlier (cf. Driben 1983; Elias 1989), the judicial legacy of Delgamuukw presented the first coherent analysis of its merit. Ontario v. Bear Island (1984) is a notable precursor as it rejected the title claims of the Teme-Augama Anishnabay and Temagami Bands, based in part on the refutation of archaeological evidence. Citing the testimony of prominent archaeologists, J. V. Wright and William Noble, the court ruled that there is, ‘not sufficient archaeological data in general to prove continuity or otherwise’ (1984 ONSC IV). Ontario v. Bear Island rejected the Temagami archaeological evidence on two grounds: first, that material data was not, and likely could not be, sufficiently specific to trace the ancestry of contemporary Indigenous people to before contact; second, that archaeological and anthropological experts for the Bands were effectively in collusion with the defendants and acting as advocates rather than neutral expert witnesses:

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Archaeology Taken to Court In summary, I believe that a small, dedicated and well meaning group of white people, in order to meet the aspirations of the current Indian defendants, has pieced together a history from written documents, archaeology and analogy to other bands, and then added to that history a study of physical features and other items, together with limited pieces of oral tradition. Even the name Teme-agama Anishnabay was not used in any printed form or record of the band or registered band until 1976. This leads me to doubt the credibility of the oral evidence introduced, and affects the weight to be given to the evidence of non-Indian witnesses. (1984 ONSC IV) Both of these premises have resonated in the court’s subsequent consideration of archaeological data. Delgamuukw is a gloss for a series of complex cases and subsequent analyses, although the core legal issues derive from a suite of three judgments: the original trial judge ruling4 of 1991 in the British Columbia Supreme Court ruling against the Indigenous plaintiffs, the 1993 Court of Appeal for British Columbia verdict5 that upheld the trial judgment, and the 1997 Supreme Court of Canada ruling6 that supported the plaintiffs’ appeal and rejected the two earlier rulings. Archaeology represented only a minor part of the plaintiffs’ legal argument and it received only brief mention in the original trial-judge ruling and subsequent appeal; both judgments argued that archaeological data (p.401) cannot identify the history of contemporary Indigenous peoples. Archaeology7 was also mentioned briefly in the Canadian Supreme Court ruling in a similar vein. Although modest, the premise of its original use and evaluation has laid a foundation that continues to support legal arguments. The original trial case represents many generations of scholarship and effort. As noted in a summary of the Gitksan and Gitenyow arguments (Sterritt et al. 1998), Indigenous peoples have been presenting their legal claim to their territory to the people they consider foreign invaders for more than two hundred years. In doing so, they have demonstrated both the specific title claims of rights and titles and the general issues of the complex Indigenous legal system within which they are defined. Indigenous people have a convoluted relationship with the Canadian judicial system, one that has presented an unsympathetic view of Indigenous legal systems and their oral historic documentation of rights and titles (Harris 2009). At the same time, it represents the only venue within which Indigenous peoples have seen progress, albeit Page 5 of 34

Archaeology Taken to Court incremental and slow, in the consideration of their claims. In Canada, governments have only acknowledged Indigenous rights when forced to by the courts. Although efforts by Indigenous leaders to argue their rights in the Euro-Canadian legal system date to the earliest contact periods (Culhane 1994; Foster et al. 2008:252), the Cowichan Petition of 1909 presented a precedent that other Indigenous leaders would follow. The Cowichan Petition was a document sent from the Quw’utsun’ (a First Nation with territory on Vancouver Island) leaders to the British Government regarding King George’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the transfer of France’s North American territory to Britain after the Treaty of Paris (1763, ending the French and Indian War; Thom 2001b:4). The Proclamation was used as the basis for arguing for the existence of the right of Indigenous title, since the Proclamation recognized Indigenous rights, while arguing that all new territory belonged to the Crown. Although the legal value of this apparent recognition of aboriginal title in the Proclamation remains debated (Calloway 2006), use of the Proclamation in the 1909 Petition was followed by the modern period in which Indigenous leaders, such as in the Nisga’a Petition of 1913, fought for their rights using Canadian legal practices and principles.8 Although aboriginal rights have been advanced by such efforts, the first challenge was establishing that Indigenous peoples had comparable title rights to non-Native people prior to colonization. Calder v. Attorney General of British Columbia (1973) was a Supreme Court of Canada case that indirectly established that aboriginal title both existed prior to colonization and had not been (p.402) extinguished, a ruling that was clarified and reinforced in the Supreme Court of Canada decision in R. v. Guerin (1984). The existence of aboriginal title is now an accepted fact in Canadian jurisprudence (Harris 2009). In 1984, the Gitksan (including the Gitenyow) and Wet’suwet’en First Nations sued the Province of British Columbia and claimed their unceded territory. The case was unprecedented in that the Indigenous plaintiffs built their evidence primarily on their own legal system and its oral documentation to define the territories and establish their ownership by their constituent 133 house groups. The concept of house group itself is not easily translated into Euro-Canadian legal or anthropological terms as it both owns rights and titles collectively and establishes individual positions of authority within it. Although social organizational structures exist that are polymers of house groups— subdivisions of house groups that cross-cut house group structures— the house group is an important legal entity in Tsimshianic society as the seat of legal rights and the cultural unit for framing history through the formal texts of the adaawk (oral history9) and the associated formal Page 6 of 34

Archaeology Taken to Court symbolism of the ayuuks (crests). The Tsimshian house group is the cultural unit (entity) of history by virtue of the fact that official Tsimshian history is owned and told by individuals on behalf of house groups. Part of my argument, developed more fully below, is that history is arbitrary and that if we are to rule on its legal content, we need to translate these complex ideas, rather than simply imposing an ethnocentric meaning on them. Thus, Tsimshian history is mediated by a construct for which there is no clear parallel in Euro-Canadian legal terms. In Delgamuukw, the Indigenous system of presentation of legal title was reconstructed for the court, essentially converting the courtroom into a ceremonial setting in which the long history of individual house groups was recounted to establish claim in the Indigenous manner. Again, this effort and its corpus of oral histories are difficult to translate into non-Tsimshian terms. Consider, for example, that Tsimshian historiography preserves certain texts (Limx’oy) in the preTsimshian language in which they were originally created (Sterritt et al. 1998:293). Thus, an ancient language is preserved simply to maintain the authenticity of the text, illustrating both the passion that Tsimshian people have for history and the sophisticated mechanisms they created for preserving its memory. Presentation of the oral data took three years. In addition, the plaintiffs presented a modest summary via expert witnesses of archaeological data in their territory. (p.403) The original trial was heard by Chief Justice Allan McEachern, whose judgment (1991 BCSC 2327) rejected the Gitksan and Wet’suwt’en claim. McEachern is now infamous for what is considered his profound ethnocentrism (Asch 1992; Cruikshank 1992; Culhane 1998; Fisher 1992; Riddington 1992). Three elements of his logic are relevant here. First, he concluded that in the absence of the political structures of civilization, defined essentially as the rule of law, the natural state of humanity is vicious self-interest. This is less of an ethnocentric view of Indigenous peoples than a philosophical one that in many ways defines Western views of culture and applies to its view of its own history (Sahlins 1996, 2008). McEachern’s ethnocentrism was to assume that this view applied to all people and specifically to Indigenous people prior to colonization. Second, he ruled that Indigenous oral records were fictions or at best hearsay, that had limited or no value in reconstructing history. As a result, his ruling relied on evidence drawn from historic texts, largely composed by Europeans unsympathetic to and ignorant of the cultural reality of Indigenous peoples. Third, he assumed that culture was a universally essentializable construct, that all people were cultural in the same manner. This allowed him to argue that all Gitksan concepts were easily Page 7 of 34

Archaeology Taken to Court translatable into familiar Euro-Canadian concepts. For example, since Limx’oy recount ancient history by noting the many challenges that ancestral house groups faced, they are often sung as songs of loss, sadness, or mourning. McEachern distilled this complex construct into the Western notion of a ‘funeral dirge’ and ignored its nuance and historical content (Susan Marsden 2002:103; personal communication 2011). McEachern’s analysis of archaeological data presented a rhetorical double-edged sword: archaeology could identify culture in the past, but no connection could be made between this cultural past and contemporary people: There is archaeological evidence of human habitation in the territory as long as 3,000 to 6,000 years ago . . . The evidence does not establish who those early inhabitants (or visitors) were. (1991 BCSC 2327: ix) . . . In my view, the archaeological evidence establishes early human habitation at some of these sites, but not necessarily occupation by Gitksan or Wet’suwet’en ancestors of the plaintiffs. (1991 BCSC 2327:158) In doing so, McEachern marshalled the arguments of two prominent Canadian archaeologists, Bruce Trigger (1978:126), quoting Knut Fladmark: There have been many doubts expressed as to the archaeologist’s abilities to attribute ethnic identity to archaeological assemblages . . . For example, Fladmark has stated: The ‘Athapaskan Question’ in the end, is the question whether archaeologists can distinguish any historic ethnolinguistic group in millennia-old simple stone tool kits . . . the answer must be ‘no’ at least until we seriously reassess our methods and realistically evaluate the true resolving power of archaeological data. (1991 BCSC 2327:120) (p.404) The McEachern decision was upheld on appeal to the BC Court of Appeal, whose 1993 ruling affirmed the original judgment’s logic: At p.182 the trial judge considered archaeological evidence. He said at p.184 this evidence established early human habitation at some of the sites with which the evidence dealt. He said it was helpful to the plaintiffs’ case because it was evidence of habitation Page 8 of 34

Archaeology Taken to Court for a ‘long, long time’ before the date of contact. He said the weakness of the evidence, however, was that it did not directly connect the plaintiffs to their ancestors. (1993 BCCA 013770 at para. 104) The case was then appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, where it was overturned in 1997, largely on the basis of the lower court’s rejection of oral evidence (LeClair, 2005; Thom, 2001b). In Canadian case law, the legal principles established and overturned by the Supreme Court represent a clear victory for Indigenous peoples in general and for the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en people whenever and however they choose to treat with the governments of Canada and British Columbia. Much of the impact of this ruling has been extensively evaluated (Asch 2000; Asch and Bell 1993–1994; Cruikshank 1992; Culhane 1994, 1998; Fisher 1992; Niezen 2003; Riddington 1992; Thom 2001a, 2001b). However, little attention has been paid to the court’s assessment of archaeological data and constructs, which essentially replicated McEachern’s logic without comment: There was archeological evidence, which he accepted, that there was some form of human habitation in the territory and its surrounding areas from 3,500 to 6,000 years ago, and intense occupation of the Hagwilget Canyon site (near Hazelton), prior to about 4,000 to 3,500 years ago. (1997 3 SCR 1010 at para. 10) The current legal obstacles facing Indigenous people derive from the establishment of Indigenous rights and title: to convince judges that an Indigenous legal system existed, to define the nature of these rights in terms of this legal system and translate them into Canadian jurisprudence, and to establish continuity between contemporary Indigenous peoples and these pre-contact cultures in terms of rights (defined by the court as practice), and title (defined by the court as occupied space). All of these ambitions are inhibited by the court’s use of an antiquated, mid-twentieth-century anthropological definition of culture that lingers within archaeological literature. Courts have considered the nature of pre-contact rights and titles using an ethnocentric cultural lens; this is not a political criticism of Canadian legal practice as it could not be otherwise. Courts interpret law based on defined or assumed universal rights and interpret those rights though a system of case-law to set precedent.10 The definition of these rights and the system of case law necessarily exist within the Page 9 of 34

Archaeology Taken to Court cultural confines of the legal system, a de facto Euro-Canadian context. The fundamental debate is not whether these reflect (p.405) universal human legal principles or culturally particular principles, since both legal systems recognize similar basic principles of rights and titles (Sterritt et al. 1998). Rather, the issue is whether the legal apparatus of the Canadian courts has or can evaluate the different Indigenous cultural context in which such rights are defined (Asch 1990:95). Delgamuukw indirectly establishes the existence of Indigenous legal practice through its acknowledgement of the existence and value of oral history as historical texts. The Delgamuukw decision included a rebuke of the McEachern ruling on the evidentiary value of oral records: The trial judge gave no independent weight to these special oral histories because they did not accurately convey historical truth, because knowledge about these oral histories was confined to the communities whose histories they were and because these oral histories were insufficiently detailed. However, these are features to a greater or lesser extent of all oral histories. The implication of the trial judge’s reasoning is that oral histories should never be given any independent weight and are only useful as confirmatory evidence in aboriginal rights litigation. I fear that if this reasoning were followed, oral histories of aboriginal peoples would be consistently and systematically undervalued by the Canadian legal system. (1997 3 SCR 1010 at para. 98) Significantly, the Delgamuukw decision argued that it was the responsibility of the courts to translate the historiography of the oral record: ‘In practical terms, this requires the courts to come to terms with the oral histories of aboriginal societies, which, for many aboriginal nations, are the only record of their past’ (1997 3 SCR 1010 at para. 84). Notwithstanding the challenges created by the use of oral histories as proof of historical facts, the laws of evidence must be adapted in order that this type of evidence can be accommodated and placed on equal footing with the types of historical evidence that courts are familiar with, which largely consists of historical documents.

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Archaeology Taken to Court (1997 3 SCR 1010 at para. 87) Although we might see this as recognition that it is the courts’ responsibility to understand these texts and the context of their use, it perpetuates the potential for ethnocentric assumptions by the inversion that such scholarship be conducted by non-Indigenous people and presumably outside the Indigenous cultural context.

Archaeology and the Logic of the Crown As Canadian courts evaluate aboriginal title, they struggle to define the concept of culture in a manner that permits them to evaluate the nature of culture in the past. As an adversarial system, court proceedings place the judge in a position of reviewer of arguments pro and con on any issue as presented by the Indigenous plaintiffs and the government Crown attorneys. Thus, the court’s definition of (p.406) culture in antiquity emerges both from rulings and from arguments presented that influence these rulings. Archaeology has been a pliable if unwilling foil in the efforts of Crown representatives to undermine efforts to link contemporary people to their archaeological histories, to define culture in such a way that it limits the capacity of Indigenous people of antiquity to achieve cultural traits such as legal or trade systems, and to enshrine ethnocentric obfuscations about the epistemology of the past (see also Ferris, this volume). The lens through which these efforts are apparent is the struggle with which the court defines culture in general and aboriginal culture in particular. The McEachern decision did not define culture per se, but employed the term variously as a means of essentializing the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en:

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Archaeology Taken to Court In a case such as this, however, where the plaintiffs and their ancestors are the only sources of these histories, the Court may not be the best forum for resolving such difficult and controversial academic questions. One cannot, however, disregard the ‘indianness’ of these people whose culture seems to pervade everything in which they are involved. I have no doubt they are truly distinctive people with many unique qualities. (1991 BCSC 2327: 121) Being of a culture where everyone looked after himself or perished, the Indians knew how to survive (in most years). But they were not as industrious in the new economic climate as was thought to be necessary by the newcomers in the Colony. In addition, the Indians were a greatly weakened people by reason of foreign diseases which took a fearful toll, and by the ravages of alcohol. They became a conquered people, not by force of arms, for that was not necessary, but by an invading culture and a relentless energy with which they would not, or could not compete. (1991 BCSC 2327: 359) The Supreme Court of Canada ruling in R. v. Van der Peet (1996 2 SCR 507) explicitly addressed this issue in its effort to determine whether the commercial trade in fish was a distinctive cultural trait that predated contact. Dorothy Marie Van der Peet, a member of the Stó:lō Nation, was charged with selling ten salmon caught by her husband and his brother. She was convicted on trial and at appeal, a ruling upheld in the Supreme Court of Canada. The aboriginal right to fish for sustenance was established in R. v. Sparrow (1990 1 SCR 1075), and this case evaluated whether trade in fish was a distinctive part of Stó:lō culture prior to contact. Although it ruled against the plaintiff, the judgment established a test for whether such rights exist that invoked traditional culture and defined an aboriginal right as a practice, custom, or tradition that made the culture distinctive. The concept of distinctiveness seems multifaceted but in its original use from Sparrow (quoted in Van der Peet 1996 2 SCR 507 at para. 45), it was defined as integral, significant, and associated with cultural and physical survival. In addition, the idea of distinctiveness is associated with time, both in the sense that a distinctive cultural trait be characteristic of a long time of cultural tradition, and that it represent continuity from pre-contact to contemporary peoples. (p.407) Van der Peet (1996 2 SCR 507 at para. 48–74) argued that an understanding of Page 12 of 34

Archaeology Taken to Court aboriginal culture must include the views of aboriginal people themselves, although the court rarely is able to achieve this. The ruling also demanded precision in the definition of an aboriginal right and the cultural traits used to demonstrate it, as well as a restriction of the right to a particular Indigenous community (see Thom, 2001b for a full discussion of this subject; Van der Peet qualified this as case-by-case and restricted its precedence). For a cultural trait to be an aboriginal right, it must be of central significance and not itself derivative of other cultural practices. It had to be a trait that ‘made the society what it was’ (1996 2 SCR 507 at para. 55). It must have been in place prior to contact, although the ruling equivocated on the nature of evidence brought by Indigenous plaintiffs, noting that the courts must be flexible in their evaluation of evidentiary standards for these data. However, the ruling also introduced the possibility of rejecting a claim to an aboriginal right if it developed as a result of European influence. The Van der Peet and Delgamuukw decisions were both composed by Chief Justice Antonio Lamer, and he employed his test in the former for the existence of aboriginal rights to reject McEachern’s logic in the latter. Significantly, however, neither Van der Peet nor Delgamuukw rebuts McEachern’s simplified view of culture. Instead, Lamer refutes McEachern on his ruling on the data used in the evaluation of whether such cultures existed in the past. Subsequent to Delgamuukw, rulings of aboriginal rights and title cases have employed the Van der Peet test, although there is evidence that when faced with the complexities of reconstructing culture, several qualifications of the test’s elements have hardened into absolutes. For example, in a recent marine resources rights case, R. v. Lax Kw’alaams (2008 BCSC 447), the Van der Peet test was modified such that the qualification regarding transformation of cultural practice over time was replaced by a requirement that aboriginal rights be defined prior to contact, defined in this case as AD 1787: Establish the aboriginal right protected under Section 35(1) by proving: (a) the existence of the ancestral practice, custom or tradition (i.e. the activity advanced as supporting the claimed right); (b) that the activity was integral to the pre-contact society (i.e. that it was marked as distinctive); and

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Archaeology Taken to Court (c) reasonable continuity between the pre-contact practice and the contemporary claim. (2008 BCSC 447 at para. 10) Similarly, the respect for Indigenous views of their history was not fulfilled as the trial judge effectively relegated the Indigenous oral record to hearsay and did not recognize the authority of Indigenous historical experts (chiefs): There is no doubt that the best evidence of historical facts is the most immediate evidence. Artifacts that existed, or the observations of a person who was present, at the relevant time and place provide direct evidence of what happened. Depending (p.408) on how much time has passed since the historical event, such evidence can be oral, written or demonstrative and is considered primary evidence. Secondary evidence usually consists of oral or written hearsay, composed by a person who collects or comments on the original information provided by the primary source. Tertiary sources consist of works where the author uses primary sources to provide factual data about the past that may be incomplete or selective, together with secondary sources to provide interpretations of the factual data, such as the theses and other scholarly works with which I was provided. (2008 BCSC 447 at para. 14) This logic replicates the dilemma for archaeology created in Delgamuukw. The judge argued that archaeology was among the most important and unambiguously factual data sets on history, while concluding that the history of Indigenous peoples is beyond the reach of archaeology. This replicates the paradox of the McEachern decision that archaeology is about the past but not history: In some ways archaeology may seem to be the most concrete form of evidence available to speak of prehistoric times. Extracting tangible objects from archaeological survey sites can produce information about many aspects of the society that occupied the lands from which the objects are uncovered. For example, the plaintiffs submit that the discovery of exotic materials in their Claimed Territories leads to an inference of trade. Archaeology alone, however, will not tell us how or when exotic material arrived at a site, only that it was transported from one place to another. To interpret their findings, archaeologists must rely on the ethnographic record and other data.

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Archaeology Taken to Court Furthermore, archaeology is limited by the durability of the object in question. Organic, faunal material is not usually preserved in a manner that allows it to survive through long passages of time, although shell casings and fish bone remnants have been recovered from areas of interest in this case. Therefore, archaeological evidence is useful, but too limited to support conclusions on its own. (2008 BCSC 447 at para. 17–19) Then the judge concluded that archaeology is appropriately used as a standard against which oral history can be judged. Since archaeology was argued to be ineffective in reconstructing Indigenous history, but given greater evidentiary weight when compared to oral records, the only role left for archaeology is to refute but not substantiate the oral record: Therefore, the rules of evidence must be adapted to accommodate oral histories, but the admissibility and weight of such evidence must be determined on a case-by-case basis. I agree with the list of factors that the defendant submits may affect the admissibility and weight to be given to oral history evidence: . . . f) a comparison of alternative versions of oral narratives historical or archaeological data. (2008 BCSC 447 at para. 41) This case presents an interesting parallel: following the advice of the Delgamuukw ruling, the plaintiffs relied heavily on the substantial record of adawx (oral histories) to demonstrate their claim, while the defence successfully used (p.409) a non-representative and largely non-existent sample of archaeological data to convince the judge to reject the adawx. The logic of the defence argument, almost wholly accepted by the trial judge, illustrates the court’s simplified view of culture and their use of archaeological analyses as justification for this logic.

The Essentialization of Culture in Courts and Archaeology Lax Kw’alaams is one of the first major trials to evaluate commercial fishing rights on the Northwest Coast after Van der Peet in the context of the Delgamuukw legacy. The sequence of judgments is especially relevant to archaeologists as it tracks an increasing use of archaeological data and analyses, especially by Crown representatives, to refute Indigenous oral records and their claims to history. Lax Page 15 of 34

Archaeology Taken to Court Kw’alaams presents a number of logical errors and concerns for archaeologists. A full evaluation of these is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, they include the following: • the logical tautology of relying on archaeological summaries of ethnographic data that derives from the oral record while simultaneously rejecting the historical value of oral records themselves; • the incorrect use of descriptive and analytical statistics to conclude general patterns of pre-contact settlement from a miniscule and nonrepresentative sample; • internal contradictions in the use of sources to argue that key sources conclude that a non-wealth/trading economy did not exist when the sources state the opposite; that is, that commercial trade existed prior to contact. However, the core of these concerns is the court’s definition of culture in the past. The court relied on a Crown expert witness who constructed a simplified view of the nature of culture and history primarily using archaeological summaries of ethnographic sources. While the latter is an error of omission, the former is a fundamental analytical error that has parallels in archaeological theorizing. The court defined culture as traditional elements of customs, language, traditions, laws, economic structures, and spiritual beliefs (2008 BCSC 447 at para. 91) that are observable in practice: In order to be an aboriginal right protected by Section 35(1) of the Constitution Act,11 an activity must be an element of a practice, custom or tradition integral to the distinctive culture of the aboriginal group claiming the right. (p.410) ‘Integral to the distinctive culture’ means: (a) a central and significant part of a society’s distinctive culture, one of the things that made this society truly what it was (R. Van der Peet); (b) ‘distinctive’ does not mean ‘distinct’. The use of the word distinctive as a qualifier is meant to incorporate an element of aboriginal specificity (R. v. Sappier); (c) ‘culture’ means the pre-contact way of life12 of a particular aboriginal community including their means of survival, socialization methods, legal systems and potentially their trading habits (Sappier).

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Archaeology Taken to Court In other words, the court must identify a practice that helps to define the distinctive way of life of this particular aboriginal group as an aboriginal community. (2008 BCSC 447 I, B, 6–7) The ruling also reinforced the Van der Peet requirement that the practice must be integral to the culture, but not necessarily significant to the Indigenous people themselves, in order to qualify as an aboriginal right (2008 BCSC 447 at para. 104). Thus the court must ‘look to the defining and central attribute, the core of the culture’ (2008 BCSC 447 at para. 121), among the ‘fixed inventory of traits’ (2008 BCSC 447 at para. 123) to assess the existence of a practice in antiquity that might constitute an aboriginal right. Thus, the court views culture as a homogeneous suite of norms from which practices emerge. This creates two undeclared standards in the definition of a right. First, it must belong to a community of people whose abstract concepts generate practices. Second, it assumes that the abstract concepts for the right must exist within the Euro-Canadian cultural suite of such concepts. Thus, for a right to commercial fishing to be demonstrated, Indigenous people must show the practice (fish were exchanged) and that it was integral to their culture, but also convince the court that this practice emerged from a particular abstraction (trade) that in the court’s view is definable in Euro-Canadian terms (commercialization). This seems to exclude the possibility that commercialization was an Indigenous practice. This transforms the burden of proof from explicit observable terms (practice) to implicit hidden terms (the existence of a market economy and the conception of exchange in market terms). As Asch (2000) has noted, the legal legacy of this definition invokes an implied and racist assumption that the social entities of such cultural essentializations exist within a progressive-evolutionary scale from simple to complex, as the source for defining aboriginal rights based on their similarity to or distance from aspects of western culture. (p.411) In this manner, the court established a definition of culture that focused on a central suite of traits common to members of the culture and aligns constellations of suites in an ethnocentrically defined hierarchy that valorizes the traits of the court’s own culture over other human experiences, a form of logic that Oliver (2010; this volume) identifies as ‘creeping essentialism’. This is essentialism to an ethnocentric purpose, a form of central-tendency logic that defines a complex phenomenon as a suite of common elements. This logic was common in early ethnographic work, but has been effectively critiqued since the mid twentieth century (Asch 2000; Asch and Bell 1993–1994; Page 17 of 34

Archaeology Taken to Court Kehoe 1998). The folk taxonomies of race are a familiar example of the flaws of both essentialization and the ethnocentrism of crude evolutionism. Any effort to define a cultural component to a biological construct creates groups for which the inter-group difference exceeds intra-group difference. Essentializations such as race exist when people select a non-representative subset of traits that define ‘core’ qualities, creating a pattern that does not exist. Such models have a long history of use in colonizing cultures as powerful internal legitimizations for ignoring the rights of the colonized13 (Kehoe 1998). Archaeological rejection of essentialization is less developed, especially in archaeological overviews of ethnographic sources for direct historical comparison to archaeological work. Processualism’s rejection of cultural norms recapitulated essentialization as function within an adaptive and selective milieu. McGuire (1992a) defines this as the atomistic model of culture, in which cultures are seen as separate, homogenous entities. Interpretive archaeology since the 1980s has shifted the definition of culture from essential traits within groups to the construction of consensus among volatile individual agents through discursive and less-discursive modes of knowledge, thereby shifting the historical consequentiality from an external environmental selection of traits to the internal cultural construction of choice (Harrison 2000; Martindale 2009; Martindale and Letham 2011). The court also skewed essentialization in a cultural materialist neoevolutionary manner by arguing that the significance of these traits might not be apparent to the people whose culture they describe (Asch 1992, 2000). Instead, the concept of observable practice was used to shift the perspective of historical truth from the participants to outside observers. Though subtle, this logical shift echoes the privileging of the anthropological view advocated by mid-twentieth-century anthropologists such as Marvin Harris (1968), who argued that the core of culture was revealed in the dissonance between what (p.412) people said about themselves and what they did. For Harris, the external perspective revealed a core that he associated with optimizing rationalities of energetics analogous to the selective mechanism of biological evolution (Asch 2000; Niezen 2003). Echoes of this rationale are also seen in the court’s association of the cultural core with survival. In Lax Kw’alaams, the judge subscribed to an essentialized view of culture directly from an archaeological argument. The Crown’s expert witness (Lovesik 2007) pandered to this view in three ways. First, she relied substantially on archaeological summaries of ethnographic data while illogically arguing that the Indigenous oral and ethnographic Page 18 of 34

Archaeology Taken to Court sources of these data were flawed. The judge agreed with the Crown’s expert witness that the archaeological distillation of complex cultural concepts constructed through multiple derivations from the original Tsimshian oral historiography was more accurate than the oral history itself. This logic reveals the court’s preference for Western academics, essentialized logics, and simplified and inaccurate translations of Indigenous concepts, a preference that was effectively exploited by the Crown and its expert witness. Second, the judge defined culture as a suite of traits excluding the relevant trait, that of the commercial sale of fish prior to contact, through a flawed argument of mutual exclusivity, a correlate of the essentialized model. Using Polanyi’s (1957) economic model as argued by Lovesik (2007), the judge ruled that since the pre-contact Tsimshian included elements of reciprocal economics, they could not also have had market principles, since these are a) antagonistic; and b) culture is essentialized and this must contain a common suite of traits. The fact that many societies include reciprocity (gift-giving within proximal social relations), redistribution (taxation), and market exchange, was not recognized. As Sahlins (2010:383) argues, the market system itself is not a neutral observation on economic transactions, but a cultural construct: Perhaps the famous distinction drawn by Karl Polanyi between the autonomous, self-regulating market economy and the so-called ‘embedded’ economies of societies without markets was too radical—because the market itself is culturally embedded. In embedded economies as Polanyi defined them, the disposition of goods and labour is ordered by pre-existing social relations among the parties concerned. . . . By contrast, Polanyi argued, the capitalist market economy, working autonomously through the supply-demand-price mechanism, is thereby separated out from other relations and institutions—distinct thus from religion, government, kinship, and other such ‘exogenous’ sectors of the society. But what about the meaningful differences between steak and hamburger or men’s clothes and women’s? The supplydemand-price system is itself embedded in a larger cultural scheme and driven by the values thereof. Operating through supply and demand, the market is an effective way of realizing the symbolic values of this cultural totality in material terms. But from an anthropological point of view, it has been all too effective in mystifying these meaningful terms as pecuniary values.

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Archaeology Taken to Court (p.413) Finally, the judge followed Lovesik’s (2007) framing of these pre-contact traits through McKern’s (1939) archaeological Midwestern Taxonomic Method’s linguistic convention of dissociating contemporary people from their past at the moment of face-to-face contact. Thus, prior to this instant, Lax Kw’alaams Tsimshian people became the archaeology-sounding Skeena River People, a term invented by the Crown that serves only to distance Lax Kw’alaams people from their history. Thus, in the progression from Delgamuukw to Lax Kw’alaams, culture has become increasingly essentialized, homogenous, and adaptive rather than negotiated, volatile, and arbitrary. The former are qualities that Western legal scholars would not apply to Western culture or history. Their application, via archaeology, to Indigenous history is a double standard that creates an unacknowledged and burdensome logical hurdle that de facto rejects the value of oral history, thereby unravelling the legal principle established in Delgamuukw.

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Archaeology Taken to Court Conclusion: Naivety in the Archaeological Endeavour Although the use of archaeological analyses to undermine Indigenous rights is unpalatable to many archaeologists, the issue for the discipline is not advocacy of these rights, which is ably managed by Indigenous peoples themselves, but defence of the discipline. The issue is complex, however, as LeClair (2005:109) notes: scholarship in any form is a political act with potential legal consequences. Harrison (this volume; see also Harrison 2005) argues that the issue is not a dichotomy and that archaeology can be both scientific and serve to legitimate Indigenous rights. Two avenues allow us to navigate this seeming contradiction. First, as Harrison (this volume) argues, the subject of our analysis is either of the shared history of postcolonial times or filtered through the cultural constructs of that shared history. The unpacking of these entanglements, and especially the unravelling of the asymmetries of colonialism to reveal the histories and historiographies of Indigenous people, are necessarily advocacies of histories otherwise obscured by or invisible to dominant colonial institutions such as courts. Collective ‘invisibling’ of Indigenousness and its histories (see Thrush 2007) can pervade all aspects of the non-Native world (see Ferris, this volume, for a discussion of how normative archaeology works to complicate efforts to redress collective invisibling of Indigenous history). Identifying both Indigenous history and the sources of its obfuscation to non-Native people is an act of advocacy that aligns the archaeological pursuit of historical accuracy with the Indigenous ambition of fair evaluation of their historical and contemporary rights. It is important to remember, as Thom (2001b:7–8) notes, that Canadian legal rulings are mixed and contradictory on aspects of test of aboriginal rights (p.414) and title. A bifurcation exists, echoing a key theoretical debate in archaeology, between opinions arguing that aboriginal rights derive from aboriginal systems of legal culture, and those which would impose universal (essentially Euro-Canadian) rights on to a history absent of such cultural traditions. Thus, any archaeological theorizing on history is ultimately a political stance on this issue. Second, historical facts can be both scientifically neutral and culturally and legally powerful (Harrison 2005). This alignment is perhaps most easily seen in non-Indigenous cases such as the use of forensic archaeology in war-crimes trials (Steele 2008) and in disaster-recovery contexts (Gould 2007). As Gould (2007:48–9, 75) notes, the collection of archaeological data in cultural contexts within which the archaeologists are community members generates emotional support and legal implications without concern for the activist nature of the research. Thus, the activism of Indigenous archaeology likely lies less with the

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Archaeology Taken to Court archaeology and more with the cultural difference that resonates from colonialism. However, the latter (the scientific facts of material history) is rarely sufficient to elucidate the former (history itself). Archaeology is in many ways an impossible endeavour. We seek to understand the complexities of history, the aggregate of innumerable experiences of innumerable people from a poorly sampled fragment of a material world that is itself an imperfect reflection of history. Facing this distance between the broken pieces of the archaeological record and the grandeur of history, we arrive at three options. We can attenuate our task and content ourselves with being technicians of archaeological materiality. We can seek to bridge the distance through general theoretical models of human nature that assume that cultural expression and history are understandable in the particular by explanations derived from the general. Our third option (see Harrison, this volume; LeClair 2005:116) is to embrace the assumption that culture and its histories are intentional and to a large extent arbitrary. Ricoeur (2004) argues that history is what is left after what we collectively and intentionally forget, a reminder that there is nothing natural or non-cultural about history. Thus, our most challenging task is not to see either history or the biases that obscure it, but translation: to understand that other histories, like other cultures, exist in terms that we do not yet fully understand, and to strive for a more consociative (Asch 1990) or constructive/incorporative (Miller 2011:163) approach, an ambition that is not well served by the adversarial nature of Western courts (LeClair 2005; Thom 2001a). Patterns in history exist for the same reasons that all cultural patterns seem to exist, including our own: because people decided to make it so. Any group large enough to be seen as macroscopically cultural or historical contains as much or more variation within its bounds as it does beyond itself, thus no cultural or historical boundary statistically exists. To find one we must create it, or as I suggest, we must acknowledge that cultures of history exist because the (p.415) people of antiquity constructed belief in them, and seek sophistication in our models of the ways that people are cultural. This effort is challenging in colonial contexts, where much of the traditional cultural legacy and its structured knowledge has been obscured by colonialism. However, the Tsimshian case illustrates that in contexts where, a) the traditional Indigenous community made the recording of history a priority; and b) where the original oral records have been accurately preserved in written or oral form, archaeology can be conducted in the context of Indigenous history. The caution here is that even though the Tsimshian case is among the strongest known examples of pre-contact Indigenous Page 22 of 34

Archaeology Taken to Court oral history, non-Native courts have sought and successfully undermined the historical veracity of this legacy. If the subject of our analysis is the arbitrariness of the past itself, then we are less likely to be cast in court proceedings, following Ontario v. Bear Island, as biased advocates of contemporary Indigenous peoples. If the Indigenous history itself demonstrates Indigenous rights and titles, then our efforts are not advocacy per se. However, we can be unabashed advocates in defence of history in general, rather than histories in the particular. The Canadian court’s assumptions that behaviour derives from culture rather than the inverse is a simplified projection of the court’s own cultural context on to the complexities of human expression and history. Until colonial courts begin to view Indigenous cultures as parallel but divergent legal and scholarly systems, archaeologists and others will confront its ethnocentric asymmetries. This is not advocacy either, since correcting bias is a necessary step to more neutral observations of phenomena. It is important to note that this is the inverse of the current legal view (see LeClair 2005:114) that requires Indigenous and archaeological knowledge to conform to its evidentiary standards. Fundamental to this is a movement beyond simple definitions of culture, archaeological or otherwise, as homogeneous norms from which emerge commonalities of practice (Harrison 2000:36). Moss (1992) identified the tendency among Northwest Coast archaeologists to use the culture-area construct as an ethnocentric projection of Western expectations about cultural identity on to the Indigenous past. Since then, research in this region has gradually focused on the apparent disassociation between expected demographic–environmental parameters (Mackie 2003), or their restriction to specific moments of significant and regional environmental constrictions (Lepofsky et al. 2005). Recent efforts aimed at explaining Indigenous history have invoked a construct of spirituality as a placeholder for the rationality of Indigenous peoples where it differs from Western expectations of universal economic optimization (Losey 2010; Martindale and Letham 2011; Oliver 2010). Indigenous historians are our allies in this endeavour. Texts such as the adaawk and adawx record the history of events, experiences, and the cultural interpretations and significance of those events for thousands of individuals through hundreds of generations. Our rebuttal to the courts must be the (p.416) same as our entreaty to Indigenous oral historians: we must be cautious when constructing comparisons so that

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Archaeology Taken to Court we do not simply subsume the content of oral history within our essentialized model of materialist causality. The challenge of understanding the content of Indigenous history is nascent and ongoing within archaeology. However, we have established models of culture that serve to deconstruct the essentialized orthodoxy within the discipline under the rubric of agency via social theory. Agency refers to the ability of individuals to affect consequential choices in the cultural genesis of choice. As such, it differs from selectionist models, in which the evaluation of choices by an external selective circumstance defines causality and thus history. Selectionist models require that, for choices to be historically consequential, they must fulfil some external criterion, such as economic rationality. Agency models assume that choices perpetuate simply because people make them, although at times choices are made for reasons that are universally rational. This shifts our focus to the creation of preference and choice by individuals within cultural contexts. Wolf’s (1990) four forms of power echo Mann’s (1986) four avenues of historical causality, but focus on strategic forms of decision-making such as those explored by Dietler (1998). Stahl (2002) reminds us that logocentric tendencies in such explanations ignore the significant effect of less discursive modes of knowledge in the construction of both appropriate practice (Giddens 1984) and aesthetic preference (Bourdieu 1977, 1984). The model of culture as a collective construct of expectations dynamically maintained between and within individuals inverts the archaeological project from the explanation of change, which is expected in such a volatile context, to the explanation of structure and stability. Thus, the very construct of traditional culture is itself an artificial imposition upon human variability. Rather than being an expected suite of adaptive traits, culture is an artificially stable form of expectations that is both enforced and subscribed to by its participants. Indigenous culture and its history is a conscious cultural construct of extraordinary complexity rather than an adaptive expression of simple biological drivers. Yet in the courts, as in much archaeological theorizing about culture, such materially driven normativity is commonly seen to have great analytical and explanatory power. However, this power is also one of the greatest faults of this logic—as it occurs in the absence of individuals, who strategically negotiate and remake their worlds through their own personal engagements in it, which collectively can be referred to as cultural practice(s). This view begins to resolve the internal contradiction in the Van der Peet definition of culture that requires culture to be distinctive traits, but at the same time permits mutability in those traits. Lax Kw’alaams Page 24 of 34

Archaeology Taken to Court resolves this by hardening the definition of culture as an entity from which practices emerge, essentially jettisoning the mutability. I suggest that the more theoretically accurate alternative is to broaden the concept of trait from simple behaviours to a) the capacity of behaviours to generate cultural knowledge; and b) the ways of being (p.417) or ways of knowing from which meaningful behaviour is generated. This shifts the definition from less cognizant actions that are more visible to the uninformed outsider to the more philosophical, metaphorical, epistemological, and culturally negotiated apparatus of understanding that is less visible to the outsider. The result is an inversion of the current implicit logic in Lax Kw’alaams that rights are conceivable as normative abstractions from which practices emerge, into a view that practices are themselves the genesis of culture and its apparent normative qualities. The extant logic creates the unreasonable hurdle of defining a right as a behaviour that proves a norm, along with the added obstacle of defining the abstractions of norms in Euro-Canadian terms. This is a heavy burden to place on the definition of an aboriginal right, and one that is not explicitly made in case law. Thus, I suggest it is an unacknowledged and ethnocentric standard that needs to be evaluated. The alternative cultural model derived from contemporary anthropology assumes that cultural norms are themselves constructs— beliefs in constructs, really that emerge from practice. By this logic, all cases of behaviours (such as the exchange of fish) could be interpreted as evidence of an abstract cultural norm (such as commercial trade). As outsiders, both courts and non-Native archaeologists have favoured the simpler and less realistic approach to culture as both a matter of convenience and as an element of the politics of assimilation (Kehoe 1998; Niezen 2003). The alternative is a far more complex endeavour than is currently recognized by either the courts (Asch 2000:135) or archaeologists (Nicholas 2000). This dynamic genesis of culture and its obvious arbitrary constrictions through abstract conventions such as Indigenous law, historiography, philosophy, and political discourse, (Asch 2000), all of which archaeologists tend to either ignore or subsume within the murky world of ‘spirituality’, allows for an elasticity between cultural traits and cultural identity permitting us to argue what most of us would not deny: that contemporary Indigenous people are the descendants of the archaeological cultures we study both through periods of extraordinary stability and through the dramatic transformations of the colonial era (Martindale 2009). It shifts our focus away from culture as behaviour to culture as knowledge that emerges from behaviour, from ideas, and from socially mediated negotiations about both. In some ways, the contemporary definition of culture is so far removed from its earlier Page 25 of 34

Archaeology Taken to Court form that the term ‘culture’ becomes obsolete (Mark Ebert, personal communication 2013). It provides a rebuttal to the court’s current expectations of a simplistic definition of Indigenous cultural identity that permits Crown representatives to disenfranchise Indigenous people from their traditional rights and titles simply by identifying transformations of practice through the colonial era. It shifts our attention away from simplistic sources on the nature of pre-contact Indigenous culture to the authoritative sources, those of the Indigenous people themselves whose oral history, on the Northwest Coast at least, defines and describes the complex and sophisticated cultural construct of traditional (p.418) culture. Van der Peet and Sparrow defined Indigenous rights and titles as distinct and pre-existing both colonization and Canada. The debate is now focused on the nature of that distinctiveness and whether it derives from their cultural primitiveness or the challenges of translating their cultural achievements into Canadian jurisprudence. Archaeology has faced a similar debate, and it is becoming apparent, I argue, that the former is simply a projection of archaeologists’ (and now the courts’) ethnocentric ignorance, while the latter requires more sophistication that we routinely muster in our analyses of history.

Acknowledgements I am indebted to Neal Ferris and Rodney Harrison for their invitation to participate in this volume and their careful reading of the draft of this paper. Mark Ebert generously provided careful reading and insightful commentary, and the paper is immensely more coherent for his help. Bruce Miller, Iain McKechnie, Lara Boyd, Chris Harley, Carla Hudson Cam, and Bryn Letham provided useful comments and editing, for which I am grateful. Richard Inglis drew my attention to the R v. Lax Kw’alaams case and provided helpful advice and documents. Susan Marsden continues to be an ongoing supporter of this research and instructor in matters of adawx, creating an intellectual debt that I will not be able to repay. A version of this paper was presented at the University of Victoria in 2010. All errors are mine. References Bibliography references: Asch, Michael 1990 Consociation and the Resolution of Aboriginal Political Rights: The Example of the Northwest Territories, Canada Culture 10(1): 93–102.

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Archaeology Taken to Court Asch, Michael 1992 Errors in Delgamuukw: An Anthropological Perspective. In Aboriginal Title in British Columbia: Delgamuukw v. The Queen, edited by F. Cassidy, pp. 221–43. Oolichan Books and The Institute for Research on Public Policy, Vancouver. Asch, Michael 2000 The Judicial Conceptualization of Culture after Delgamuukw and Van Der Peet. Review of Constitutional Studies. 1999– 2000:120–37. Asch, Michael and Catherine Bell 1993–1994 Definition and Interpretation of Fact in Canadian Aboriginal Title Litigation: An Analysis of Delgamuukw. Queen’s Law Journal 19:503–50. Bell, Catherine E. 1992 Aboriginal Claims to Cultural Property in Canada: A Comparative Legal Analysis of the Repatriation Debate. American Indian Law Review 17:457–521. Bell, Catherine E. and Robert K. Paterson 1999 Aboriginal Rights to Cultural Property in Canada. International Journal of Cultural Property 8:167–211. (p.419) Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Bourdieu, Pierre 1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, translated by Richard Nice. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Calloway, Colin G. 2006. The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Cruikshank, Julie 1992 Invention of Anthropology in British Columbia’s Supreme Court: Oral Tradition as Evidence in Delgamuukw v. BC. BC Studies 95:25–42. Culhane, Dara 1994 Delgamuukw and the People without Culture: Anthropology and the Crown. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby. Culhane, Dara 1998 The Pleasure of the Crown: Anthropology, Law and First Nations. Talon Books, Vancouver. Dietler, Michael 1998 Consumption, Agency, and Cultural Entanglement: Theoretical Implications of a Mediterranean Colonial Encounter. In Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change,

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Archaeology Taken to Court and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick, pp. 288–315. Occasional Paper No. 25. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Driben, Paul 1983 The Nature of Metis Claims. The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 1:183–96. Elias, Peter G. 1989 Aboriginal Rights and Litigation: History and Future of Court Decisions in Canada. Polar Record 25:1–8. Ferris, Neal 1998 ‘I Don’t Think We’re in Kansas anymore . . . ’: The Rise of the Archaeological Consulting Industry in Ontario. In Bringing Back the Past: Historical Perspectives on Canadian Archaeology, edited by Pamela Smith and Don Mitchell, pp. 225–47. Mercury Series Paper No. 158. Archaeological Survey of Canada, Canadian Museum of Civilization. Ferris, Neal 2003 Between Colonial and Indigenous Archaeologies: Legal and Extra-legal Ownership of the Archaeological Past in North America. Canadian Journal of Archaeology 27:154–90. Fisher, Robin 1992 Judging History: Reflections on the Reasons for Judgment in Delgamuukw. BC Studies 95:43–54. Foster, Hamar, A. R. Buck, and Benjamin L. Berger 2008 The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies. University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver. Giddens, Anthony 1984 The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration. University of California Press, Berkeley. Gould, Richard A. 2007 Disaster Archaeology. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Harris, Doug 2009 A Court Between: Aboriginal Treaty Rights in the British Columbia Court of Appeal. BC Studies 162: 137–64. Harris, Marvin 1968 The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture. Thomas Y. Crowell, New York. Harrison, Rodney 2000 Challenging the ‘Authenticity’ of Antiquity: Contact Archaeology and Native Title in Australia. In Native Title and the Transformation of Archaeology in the Postcolonial World, edited by Ian Lilley, pp. 35–53. University of Sydney, Sydney. (p.420) Harrison, Rodney 2005 Contact Archaeology and Native Title. Australian Aboriginal Studies 2005(1):16–29. Page 28 of 34

Archaeology Taken to Court Kehoe, Alice 1998 The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology. Routledge, London. Leclair, Jean 2005 Of Grizzles and Landslides: The Use of Archaeological and Anthropological Evidence in Canadian Aboriginal Rights Cases. Public Archaeology 4:109–19. Lepofsky, Dana, Ken Lertzman, Douglas Hallett, and Rolf Mathewes 2005 Climate Change and Culture Change on the Southern Coast of British Colombia 2400–1200 Cal. B.P.: An Hypothesis. American Antiquity 70:267–93. Losey, Robert 2010 Animism as a Means of Exploring Archaeological Fishing Structures on Willapa Bay, Washington, USA. Cambridge Journal of Archaeology 20:17–32. Lovisek, Joan A. 2007 The Lax Kw’alaams Indian Band and Others v. The Attorney General of Canada and Her Majesty the Queen in Right of the Province of British Columbia. Submitted to James M. Mackenzie, Department of Justice, British Columbia Regional Office, Vancouver, British Columbia. Mackie, Quentin 2003 Location–Allocation Modelling of Shell Midden Distribution on the West Coast of Vancouver Island. In Emerging from the Mist: Studies in Northwest Coast Culture History, edited by R. G. Matson, Quentin Mackie, and Gary Coupland, pp. 260–88. University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver. Mann, Michael 1986 The Sources of Social Power, i: A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Marsden, Susan 2002 Adawx, Spanaxnox, and the Geopolitics of the Tsimshian. BC Studies. 135: 101–35. Martindale, Andrew 2006 Methodological Issues in the Use of Tsimshian Oral Traditions (Adawx) in Archaeology. Canadian Journal of Archaeology 30: 158–92. Martindale, Andrew 2009 Entanglement and Tinkering: Structural History in the Archaeology of the Northern Tsimshian. Journal of Social Archaeology 9: 59–91. Martindale, Andrew and Bryn Letham 2011 Causalities and Models within the Archaeological Construction of Political Order on the Northwest Coast of North America. In The Archaeology of Politics: the

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Archaeology Taken to Court Materiality of Political Practice and Action in the Past, edited by Peter G. Johansen and Andrew M. Bauer, pp. 323–53. Cambridge Scholars Press, Newcastle upon Tyne. Mason, Ronald J. 2006 Inconstant Companions: Archaeology and Native American Indian Oral Traditions. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. McGuire, Randall H. 1992a A Marxist Archaeology. Academic Press, New York. McGuire, Randall H. 1992b Archeology and the First Americans. American Anthropologist 94: 816–36. McKern, William 1939 The Midwestern Taxonomic Method as an Aid to Archaeological Cultural Study. American Antiquity 4: 301–13. Miller, Bruce G. 2011 Oral History on Trial. University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver. Moss, Madonna 1992 Relationships between Maritime Cultures of Southern Alaska: Re-thinking Culture Area Boundaries. Arctic Anthropology 29(2):5–17. Nicholas, George P. 2000 Indigenous Land Rights, Education, and Archaeology in Canada, Postmodern/Postcolonial Perspectives by a Non-Canadian White Guy. In Native Title and the Transformation of Archaeology in the Postcolonial World, (p.421) edited by Ian Lilley, pp. 121–37. Oceana Monograph No. 50. University of Sydney, Sydney. Niezen, Ronald 2003 Culture and the Judiciary: The Meaning of the Culture Concept as a Source of Aboriginal Rights in Canada. Canadian Journal of Law and Society 18(2):1–26. Oliver, Jeff 2010 Landscapes and Social Transformations on the Northwest Coast. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Orans, Martin 1975 Domesticating the Functional Dragon: An Analysis of Piddocke’s Potlatch. American Anthropologist 77: 312–28. Polanyi, Karl 1957 The Economy as Instituted Process. In The Sociology of Economic Life, edited by Mark Granovetter and Richard Swedberg, pp. 3–21. Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado. Ricoeur, Paul 2004 Memory, History, Forgetting, translated from the 2000 original publication by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Page 30 of 34

Archaeology Taken to Court Riddington, Robin 1992 Fieldwork in Courtroom 53: A Witness to Delgamuukw v. BC. BC Studies 95:12–24. Sahlins, Marshall 1996 The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology. Current Anthropology 37: 395– 428. Sahlins, Marshall 2008 The Western Illusion of Human Nature. Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago. Sahlins, Marshall 2010 Infrastructuralism. Critical Inquiry 36(3):371– 85. Simpson, Theresa 1994–1995 Claims of Indigenous Peoples to Cultural Property in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Hastings International and Comparative Law Review 18:195–219. Stahl, Ann 2002 Colonial Entanglements and the Practices of Taste: An Alternative to Logocentric Approaches. American Anthropologist 104: 827–45. Steele, Caroline 2008 Archaeology and the Forensic Investigation of Recent Mass Graves: Ethical Issues for a New Practice of Archaeology. Archaeologies 4: 414–28. Sterritt, Neil J., Susan Marsden, Robert Galois, Peter R. Grant, and Richard Overstall 1998 Tribal Boundaries in the Nass Watershed. University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver. Thom, Brian 2001a Aboriginal Rights and Title in Canada after Delgamuukw: Part One, Oral Traditions and Anthropological Evidence in the Courtroom. Native Studies Review 14(1):1–26. Thom, Brian 2001b Aboriginal Rights and Title in Canada after Delgamuukw: Part Two, Anthropological Perspectives on Rights, Tests, Infringement and Justification. Native Studies Review 14(2):1–42. Thrush, Coll 2007 Native Seattle. Histories from the Crossing-over Place. University of Washington Press, Seattle. Trigger, Bruce 1978 Time and Traditions: Essays in Archaeological Interpretation. Columbia University Press, New York. Veth, Peter 2003 ‘Abandonment’ or Maintenance of Country? A Critical Examination of Mobility Patterns and Implications For Native Title. Land, Rights, Laws: Issues of Native Title, ii: Issues Paper no. 2, Native

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Archaeology Taken to Court Title Research Unit, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra. Veth, Peter and Jo McDonald 2002 Can Archaeology be Used to Address the Principle of Exclusive Possession in Native Title? In After Captain Cook: The Archaeology of the (p.422) Recent Indigenous Past in Australia, edited by Rodney Harrison and Christine Williamson, pp. 121–32. Sydney University Archaeological Methods Series 8. Archaeological Computing Laboratory, University of Sydney. Vogel, Joseph O. 2002 De-mystifying the Past: The Great Zimbabwe, King Solomon’s Mines, and Other Tales of Old Africa. In Archaeology: Original Readings in Method and Practice, edited by Peter N. Peregrine, Carol R. Ember, and Melvin R. Ember, pp. 378–97. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. Wolf, Eric 1990 Distinguished Lecture: Facing Power—Old Insights, New Questions. American Anthropologist 92:586–96. Notes:

(1) I use Indigenous here and throughout to refer specifically to First Nations people of Canada. However, my use could be generalized to all Aboriginal people, both in Canada and around the world. (2) Although see Thom (2001a:6) for a discussion of alternate legal interpretations that imply title derives from indigenous legal principles rather than occupancy. (3) Oral records are a complex suite of texts (Martindale 2006). I use the term ‘oral record’ to refer to the entire corpus of orally transmitted texts that represent the oral literature of many Indigenous peoples. I use the term ‘oral history’ to refer to a subset of these, the formal texts (adaawk, adawx) that are stewarded as historical records within the Tsimshian legal system. This use differs from some authors, who refer to oral history as the contemporary storytelling that weaves ancient metaphors and personal reminiscences into reflections and analysis of contemporary issues. (4) Ruling by Chief Justice MacEachern, 1991, known hereafter as the McEachern decision and cited as BCSC 2327 1991. (5) Ruling by Justices Taggart, Lambert, Hutcheon, MacFarlane, and Wallace, known hereafter as the Appeal Court ruling and cited as CA 013,770 1993.

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Archaeology Taken to Court (6) Ruling by Chief Justices Lamer, Cory, and Major, known hereafter as the Delgamuukw decision and cited as SRC 1010 1997. (7) The Delgamuukw decision misspells archaeology as ‘archeology’. (8) This process has not been without controversies within Indigenous society, most importantly the argument that access to Canadian courts has been used by some Indigenous groups to successfully claim the territory of their neighbours (see Sterritt et al. 1998 for an example). This problem illustrates the inability of the Canadian justice and legislative systems to understand, or even recognize the existence of, indigenous judicial and legislative systems. (9) Adaawk (Gitksan) or adawx (Coast Tsimshian) are documents within an oral history. Oral history in this sense is the formal preservation, transmission, and use of legal-historical texts in an oral system of recording. Although oral histories are sometimes thought of as reminiscences of individuals or metaphorical meditations on contemporary life as informed by ancient narratives, oral history in the Tsimshian sense is a more formal and legal construct. The existence of a similar system among other Indigenous peoples is likely (Martindale 2006), but debated. See Miller (2011) for a full refutation of the thesis (such as found in Mason 2006) that oral records are fictions. (10) However, at times courts reject precedence in favour of case-bycase criteria with the foundation of such distinctions unclear (Mark Ebert, personal communication 2013). (11) Section 35(1) refers to the part of the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982 that provides constitutional protection for but does not specifically define aboriginal rights. (12) In Sappier, the court replaced ‘culture’ with ‘way of life’, likely in part because of the history of anthropological debate about the difficulty in defining culture, although the term ‘culture’ remains the dominant term. Mark Ebert (personal communication 2011) argues that these difficulties remain, regardless of the terminology used. I agree that the court is using the terms interchangeably. (13) Numerous examples exist of this and of the mobilization of archaeology to this end. The myth of the mound-builders in the Mississippi watershed (McGuire 1992b), the Phoenician origin of the rulers of Great Zimbabwe (Vogel 2002) are famous cases in which essentialized definitions of culture have been applied to contemporary Indigenous people and their archaeological records by colonizing states

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Archaeology Taken to Court to sever the two in the interests of the legal rights of colonizing populations.

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Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa Contrasting Experiences and Their Implications for a Postcolonial Archaeology Paul J. Lane

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0020

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the contrasting experiences of being ‘indigenous’ and being ‘colonised’ in Africa and their implications for a postcolonial archaeology. More specifically, it considers the distinction between those who are ‘indigenous’ (i.e. of African ancestry) and those who are ‘Indigenous’, (i.e. lay explicit claim to an indigenous identity). It also discusses the potential ramifications of distinctions for how an African ‘Indigenous archaeology’ is conceived and for the type of archaeology that is produced and practiced. After providing an overview of the colonial origins of African archaeology, the chapter explores some of the constructs of being ‘indigenous’ and/or ‘autochthonous’ that became embedded during the era of European colonial rule, along with their influence on archaeological practice within contemporary Africa. It concludes by calling for greater precision and clarity in the use of such terms as ‘indigenous

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Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa archaeology/archaeologists’ and greater recognition of their referents when used in different contexts. Keywords:   indigenous, colonised, Africa, archaeology, Indigenous archaeology, autochthonous

African archaeologists have restored honour to the continent by returning the true history of the continent to its owners. Abungu 2006:145

Introduction Alongside the many practical, financial, and bureaucratic challenges that Africa’s archaeologists typically face, they are also often called upon to justify the need for their profession and the use of public resources to support their activities (e.g. Andah 1995a:151; Mabulla 1996:121; Musonda 1990:18). At least two broad conceptual issues lie at the heart of such challenges to the value of archaeology as a social good. I argue here that both of these are direct legacies of European colonialism on the continent, although contemporary national and global politics, constructs of ‘modernity’, existing formal education curricula, and relatively poor media coverage are all additional contributory factors. The first of these issues relates to the potential transformative value of archaeology within the modern nation state. As discussed below, older propositions regarding this tended to emphasize the value of archaeology as a means of recovering the ‘unwritten histories’ of Africa’s ‘precolonial’ populations, thereby refuting a common presumption within European colonial discourse (p.424) of an absence of history on the continent prior to the arrival of Europeans.1 Recovering this history, long denied during the years of European colonial rule, was also regarded as a means of inspiring pride in an African identity and citizenship of the newly created independent states. More recently, alternative propositions have been forwarded. These range from suggestions that archaeology, along with the cognate fields of paleoanthropology and evolutionary genetics, is one of the primary means of demonstrating humankind’s African ancestry (e.g. Barham and Mitchell 2008:1; Clark 1975; Deacon and Deacon 1999; Mabulla 1996:200), to those that see the discipline as playing a vital role in understanding the causes of many contemporary environmental, economic, and/or socio-political ‘problems’ (e.g. Andah 1995b; Lane 2009; see also Schmidt, this volume). The subtext of the former position is that the discipline is central to demonstrating that Africa is not just part of the global community but its originator, and thus everyone’s identity is, ultimately, African.2 The latter’s subtext is no less ambitious, Page 2 of 30

Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa in that it implies that an understanding of the past is central to devising more effective means of addressing contemporary problems, thereby stimulating economic and social development and, ultimately, creating a better future.3 While the first conceptual issue around the social value of archaeology has been a recurrent concern among African/Africanist4 archaeologists (e.g. Mapunda 1990; Sowunmi 1998) and their historian counterparts (e.g. Jewsiewicki 1989; Ranger 1976) for decades, a second conceptual issue has emerged only more recently, especially since the growth of postcolonial perspectives. At the heart of this issue is the suggestion that because of its ‘colonial’ origins the practices of academic and professional archaeology, as dominantly conceived, and the historical narratives that these practices generate, may be dismissive of, or insensitive to, alternative, ‘indigenous’ African constructs of the past (e.g. (p.425) Eze-Uzomaka 2000; Keitumetse 2009; Pwiti and Ndoro 1999; Schmidt 1995).5 This, in turn, gives rise to a number of tensions between archaeologists and local communities (e.g. Kankpeyeng et al. 2009). In other words, archaeology, by virtue of having been introduced as part of ‘the colonial project’, is now seen by some as having been part of a broader ‘colonization of consciousness’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991). In turn, such arguments have encouraged calls for alternative archaeologies liberated from the constraints of the ‘colonial library’ (e.g. Ndlovu 2009; Ndoro and Pwiti 2001; Schmidt 2009; Shepherd 2002), with the implication that these postcolonial archaeologies produced by Africans or peoples of African descent are also ‘Indigenous archaeologies’. Thus, for example, in his review of changing archaeological practices in eastern and southern Africa, the Kenyan archaeologist George Abungu (2006:144) contrasts the colonial era when ‘Africans did all the manual work’ but remained ‘passive and silent participants . . . without any hope of climbing the ladders of success or knowledge’, with the more recent post-independence decades during which ‘many indigenous [i.e. African] archaeologists’ have not only been busy ‘correcting past histories’ produced during the colonial era, but also in ‘carving a niche for themselves in the hitherto white-dominated field’ (Abungu 2006:145). While acknowledging that Africans are now actively engaged in the production of archaeological knowledge, and thus in this sense indigenization of the discipline on the continent is well in train, Abungu (2006) is less sanguine about the continuing influence of ‘colonial’ constructs of Africa and its past, and especially the power of the narrative trope of ‘discovery’. The latter, he suggests, continues to influence research agendas and archaeological practice on the continent, with more energy and resources typically being directed Page 3 of 30

Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa towards finding the ‘earliest’ evidence for particular practices, such as the use of symbols, plant domestication, or iron manufacture, than to investigating other themes and questions. Similar views that training African archaeologists and overcoming ‘colonial’ structures of thought that denied past African individuals and societies the power of agency, are essential steps toward establishing Indigenous archaeology on the continent, are commonplace in the published literature (e.g. Apak 2010; Holl 2010; Kense 1990:152–3; Kusimba 2010; Ndlovu 2010; Posnansky 1982:353; Robertshaw 1990a: 91–3; Usman 2010). Any construct of ‘Indigenous (p.426) archaeology’, however, also needs to address the question ‘Who is indigenous?’ This is important to answer in any context (Sillar 2005), but especially needs to be addressed with reference to Africa (see Kuper 2003 and the following commentary; also Barnard 2006), where the short answer is often simply ‘anyone of African descent’. However, at least within the wider public sphere on the continent, a distinction can be made, and often is, between those who are ‘indigenous’ (i.e. of African ancestry), and those who are ‘Indigenous’, (i.e. lay explicit claim to an indigenous identity). As elaborated below, such distinctions have potential ramifications not just for how an African ‘Indigenous archaeology’ is conceived, but also for the type of archaeology that is produced and practiced. To explore these, I begin with a consideration of the European colonial origins of archaeology on the continent and the legacy this has had for the structuring of much subsequent archaeological work in Africa. Following this, I examine some of the implications the divergent uses and understandings of the term ‘indigenous’ on the African continent have for asserting the global relevance (Murray 2011) of the concept of ‘Indigenous archaeology’ as it has emerged in recent decades in North America (e.g. Watkins 2000, 2005), Australasia (McNiven and Russell 2005) and New Zealand (Rika-Heke 2010). In particular, I explore some of the constructs of being ‘indigenous’ and/or ‘autochthonous’6 that became embedded during the era of European colonial rule, and how they still shape archaeological practice within contemporary Africa. The chapter concludes with a general plea for greater precision and clarity in the use of such terms as ‘indigenous archaeology/archaeologists’ and greater recognition of their referents when invoked in different contexts.

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Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa African Archaeology’s Colonial Origins In his Presidential address to Section E (Geography) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in August 1926, the Honourable William Ormsby-Gore, Member of Parliament for Stafford and Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, sketched out what he regarded as the defining climatic and geographical characteristics of ‘tropical’ Africa. In doing so, he observed that the development of Africa’s economic resources was as much a duty of the British as their right. Yet, as he saw it, the colonial authorities of Britain’s sub-Saharan territories were faced with two problems that needed to be overcome before Britain and its colonial African subjects could reap the social as well as economic rewards these offered. One was climate; the other derived from ‘the (p.427) wide differences in traditions and capacities between the ruling race and the native population’ (Ormsby-Gore 1926:258). As he went on to outline the nature of these differences, Ormsby-Gore articulated many of the more common narrative tropes in European colonial discourse about Africa. First, he noted that ‘before the advent of European rule there was astonishingly little contact between Tropical Africa and the outside world. Africa was practically a sealed continent, both as regards knowledge and trade.’ He then opined that the lack of a knowledge of writing inhibited communication between different individuals and communities, and that this absence of written texts meant that Europeans knew little about the history of the continent or its peoples, except what could be ‘dimly’ learned from oral sources. In his view, these suggested that prior to the arrival of Europeans, life in sub-Saharan Africa was characterized by ‘the continual movement of peoples, constant and almost universal warfare . . . slavery and the slave trade’ (Ormsby-Gore 1926:259). Money, he held, was ‘quite a new idea to the African mind’, as was the notion that land might have value or that it might yield an ‘economic crop’. The cause of disease was generally attributed to ‘the work of evil spirits’ and their prevention or cure best accomplished by the propitiation of these same spirits. Having drawn these contrasts with Europe and Europeans, Ormsby-Gore then proceeded to explain to his audience how Africans were responding to their exposure to European technology and expertise. At one and the same time he praised their ‘adaptability’ and lack of conservatism relative to the ‘ancient civilizations’ of Asia, while also infantilizing them by describing their perception of European technologies as if each were a ‘new and wonderful toy’ (Ormsby-Gore 1926:260). At the time Ormsby-Gore gave his lecture to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, archaeology was still a relatively young discipline on the continent south of the Sahara. Only in South Africa Page 5 of 30

Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa was archaeology being taught (Deacon 1990), and professional archaeologists were still relatively scarce on the ground even there, let alone other parts of the continent. The next few decades witnessed a steady increase in the number of surveys and excavations undertaken by expatriate professional archaeologists, drawn mostly from the countries of the European colonizing powers (see relevant contributions to Robertshaw 1990c), with most emphasis placed on documenting Palaeolithic (or Early Stone Age as it is now termed in sub-Saharan Africa) remains and, following discoveries in South Africa and at Olduvai Gorge in Tanganyika, on locating further fossil hominin remains (Derricourt 2011). This emphasis on humanity’s earliest traces, as has been widely discussed, underscored the widespread presumption within the colonies that settlement by ‘Black’ Africans across many areas of the continent was of relatively recent origin and thus outside the purview of archaeological study (e.g. Dubow 1995:66–74; Hall 1990). At the same time, this emphasis on the earliest archaeological traces also encouraged a perception—held by many archaeologists well into the second (p.428) half of the twentieth century—that after the initial appearance of the human species in Africa, the continent then became an evolutionary backwater (Robertshaw 1990b:4). By the time World War II had ended, more research had been conducted on archaeological remains associated with the more recent past, and in common with trends in Europe at the time there was a burgeoning interest in establishing chrono-stratigraphic sequences as a guide to the reconstruction of regional cultural histories (e.g. de Barros 1990; Kense 1990; Robertshaw 1990a). Innovations and material culture change more generally were still frequently attributed to migrations and the arrival (or presence) of technologically more sophisticated peoples from outside the continent. This reliance on migration or diffusion as the primary explanatory concepts to account for change in the archaeological record was closely in line with prevailing views within the wider discipline, especially Europe (Trigger 1989). However, it also echoed a more general colonial view about Africa’s history and peoples as expressed by Ormsby-Gore. One of the most pernicious consequences of the colonial retelling of such histories was the casting of the ruling elite in many of the ancient kingdoms of the Great Lakes region of Central Africa as members of a Hamitic branch of the Caucasian ‘race’, who had migrated south from Arabia or the Near East equipped with superior knowledge, technical skills, and intellect (see Sanders 1969). The Victorian geographer and explorer, John Hanning Speke, who with Richard Burton is attributed with having ‘discovered’ the source of the Nile, was one of the first to introduce this idea into European accounts of Africa, when he observed Page 6 of 30

Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa that: ‘In these countries the government is in the hands of foreigners, who had invaded and taken possession of them leaving the agricultural aborigines to till the ground, whilst the junior members of the usurping clans herded cattle’ (Speke 1863: 247). Speke regarded the origin of these ruling elites, described as being racially distinct from their farming subjects, to have derived from the ‘semi-Shem-Hamitic [peoples] of Ethiopia’ (Speke 1863:246). The idea of a local ruling elite derived from a superior and biologically distinct race was further perpetuated by colonial administrators such as Sir Henry (‘Harry’) H. Johnston (1913), the Reverend John Roscoe (1923), and the anthropologist C. G. Seligman (1913). The latter even claimed that ‘the civilisations of Africa are the civilisations of the Hamites’ (Seligman 1957:85). This emphasis on the superior skills of outsiders was stressed by many other colonial observers. Based on his studies of the peoples of Uganda, for example, Roscoe (1923:145) asserted that ‘the present inhabitants are not the descendants of those who originally dwelt in these lands. There must have been others who were superior in skill and art to those negro (sic.) races whom we regard as the aborigines and primitive inhabitants’, as evidenced by the material traces of a knowledge of mining, stonework, and art allegedly not found among the contemporary population. (p.429) As discussed by Straus (2001) and Reid (2001) among others, these ideas shaped colonial responses and attitudes to different communities in the newly emergent colonies of Rwanda and Burundi, and to a lesser extent the Uganda Protectorate. In Rwanda, in particular, the issuing of identity cards on ethnic lines by the Belgian authorities in 1933 further solidified these concepts. Specifically, selfidentifying ‘Nilotic’ Tutsi, who despite comprising only c.14 percent7 of the population, were politically dominant, were singled out by the Belgians as racially superior to the ‘Bantu’ Hutu majority, who comprised c.85 percent of the population. In turn, the latter were regarded as having previously subdued and ‘colonized’ the autochthonous, ‘Pygmy’ hunter-gatherer Twa, who comprised just 1 percent of the colony’s population. These essentialized, ethnic, and quasi-racial categorizations were reproduced in school history books of the era, and further sustained within the public sphere in Rwanda following Independence, with different reworkings tailored to suit the newly politically empowered Hutu. Thus, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hutu intellectuals turned the older colonial model on its head by using the notion of a prior ‘Bantu’ settlement and the related initial clearing of the land for farming as testimony of their legitimacy to rule (Straus 2001:58–60). By the mid 1990s, racial models of organic purity were dominant, as was the idea that Hutu were ‘foreign invaders’— Page 7 of 30

Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa views that, as has been extensively documented (e.g. Mamdani 2001; Newbury 1998), had a pivotal role in the 1994 genocide that saw the murder of upwards of 800,000 Tutsi, Twa, and to a lesser degree Hutu. As these and other analyses attest, the findings of earlier colonial, cultural, and physical anthropologists certainly helped to reify differences, while also downplaying or simply not noticing the degree of flux, exchange, and intermarriage between these populations in the precolonial period across the wider Great Lakes region (see Chrétien 2003; Newbury 2001). Essentialized categories founded on notions of fixed, immutable identities, racially determined intellectual abilities, and a general denial of African agency as a source of change in the precolonial past certainly featured in explanations and interpretations of the characteristics of the archaeological record in many other contexts across Africa. Whether, as Shepherd (2002:194) has argued, these archaeological constructs always and explicitly ‘provided a powerful legitimation for the colonial project itself’, is perhaps something that requires rather closer scrutiny, not least because European colonialism in Africa was far from being a single, hegemonic process. A further complicating factor is that ‘migration’, and ‘colonization’ of lands by outsiders who become ethnically or politically dominant, and the replacement or eradication of pre-existing ‘indigenes’, are widespread rhetorical motifs in the oral traditions and histories of a (p.430) great many African societies (see Cruz, this volume), and internal constructs such as these certainly shaped the telling and recording of local and ‘tribal’ histories during colonial encounters (see, for example, Zachernuk’s (1994) discussion of the use of the Hamitic hypothesis by Nigerian intellectuals during the colonial era). Equally, not all administrators or administrations were entirely indifferent to the task of recording and recovering Africa’s unwritten histories. Even Ormsby-Gore, despite his paternalistic attitudes, was in favour of documenting African traditions: ‘I believe it to be one of the essential aims, not only of every university but of every school, to preserve and enhance indigenous local tradition and culture’ (Ormsby-Gore 1937:168). In the French Sudan, the participation of educated Africans (such as teachers) in the collection of such information was also actively encouraged as early as 1910 at the instigation of Governor-General Clozel, and again in the 1930s and 1940s on the instructions of Governor-General Brevié (Jezequel 2007).8 This said, it has to be acknowledged that even interested colonial administrators and scholars were at the very least influenced by the kind of views as expressed by

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Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa Ormsby-Gore and couched their interpretations of the African past in these terms (see Holl 1990). These ‘colonialist’ (pace Trigger 1984) perspectives were manifested in a variety of ways. For example, pioneers of Swahili archaeology on the East African coast such as Neville Chittick (1963) and James Kirkman (1954) saw the origins of stone-built architecture and the transoceanic trading system that sustained the economies of these towns as being largely due to an immigrant Muslim presence. There were several reasons for this, including an uncritical reliance on written texts (e.g. the first- and second-century AD mariner’s guide known as the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, and various early Arabic sources), as historical testimony against which archaeological materials might be judged. More general beliefs that any material signs of ‘civilized society’—such as the use of stone architecture, artistic achievements, and urbanism— were indicative of external initiatives were another factor (Kusimba 1999:43–66). There were exceptions, however—such as Gervase Mathew (1956), who, although he regarded many of the ruined stonebuilt settlements as being comparatively recent, nonetheless saw them as essentially African in origin. It is also important to note that the notion of a foreign origin also served the interests of the Swahili elite, who found it politically and economically strategic, in the context of British colonial rule, to project their own ancestry as being Shirazi (Iranian) or ‘Arab’ rather than African (Willis 1993). (p.431) Perhaps a more fundamental problem with the archaeological interpretations of this era, which was also in keeping with wider archaeological and anthropological notions at the time (Trigger 1989:148–206), was the tendency to regard ethnicity as self-evident, primordial, and the primary factor behind the structuring of material culture variability. Archaeological ceramics in particular were often treated as material proxies of so-called ‘tribal identities’. Many early ethnological studies similarly documented different cultural traits, both material and intangible, as associated with particular ‘tribes’ and similar scales of social group. A classic East African example is G. W. B. Huntingford’s (1961) review of the distribution of different cultural elements found among speakers of the four regional language phyla.9 From this perspective, material culture change was routinely explained either in terms of population migration and replacement, or the diffusion of ideas and new technologies from ‘more advanced’ neighbouring communities. Equally, and critical for the argument developed here, these explanatory paradigms created the impression that being ‘indigenous’ was simply a matter of being an ‘African native’.

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Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa Defining Indigenous Defining the term ‘Indigenous’ is perhaps as complicated as trying to define ‘colonialism’, and like the use of the latter term, the appellation ‘indigenous/Indigenous’ can mean quite different things in different contexts (see also, Ferris et al. this volume). In one sense, we are all ‘indigenous’, at least in particular settings, since we all have some ties to a particular space within the broader global community (Naryan 1998). Yet, indigeneity is far more multi-faceted than this, since while being on the one hand ‘profoundly local in character, resting on a distinction between what is native and what is not’, it has also ‘become a global movement whose members coalesce around the defense of cultural differences and claims to the ownership of resources’ (McCormack 2011:281). It is from this global movement that the distinction between ‘Indigenous’ with a capital ‘I’ and ‘indigenous’ with a lower case ‘i’ has emerged. One of the earliest attempts to provide a working definition of the term ‘Indigenous’ for use within international arenas was provided by the International Labour Organization in the 1980s. This defined ‘Indigenous people’ as those individuals in independent countries who are descended from the original inhabitants of these countries prior to conquest or colonization by European powers, or the establishment of present state boundaries, and who, (p.432) ‘irrespective of their legal status, retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions’ (International Labour Organisation 1989, Article 1.b, my emphasis). Yeh (2007:69) notes that this ‘transnational’ concept is both a legal term and claimed by people with very diverse historical trajectories ‘to imply, among other things, firstness, nativeness or original or prior occupancy of a place; attachment to a particular territory or homeland; marginalization within a culturally or ethnically different wider society; and often, a history of colonization’. The definition characterizes fairly well the circumstances of Native communities in former settler societies (such as Aboriginal Australians, Maori, and Native Americans), where people of European descent comprise the dominant social, economic, and political group, and it is in these countries that the term ‘Indigenous’ has been most commonly mobilized to mark identities, descendant communities, and practices that are distinct from those associated with European settlers and colonial rule in these regions. The various calls for Indigenous Archaeologies have also come mainly from members of diverse First Nations and similar descendant communities in these countries, and current understanding within the broader discipline as to what constitutes Indigenous Archaeology derives principally from this

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Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa perspective (e.g. McNiven and Russell 2005; Murray 2011; Phillips and Allen 2010; Watkins 2000, 2005). Conversely, despite a legacy of European colonial rule across most parts of the continent, this international concept of ‘Indigenous’ from which the idea of ‘Indigenous Archaeology’ has evolved, has a more restricted usage and narrower range in Africa. Specifically, the term ‘Indigenous people’ typically is only applied to mostly poor, rural, politically ‘non-dominant peoples who are [or were until very recently] also primarily engaged in subsistence economies considered exotic or marginal by urban and agricultural peoples’ (Crawhall 2011:14); in other words, pastoralists, hunter-gatherers, or post-hunter-gatherers, and perhaps some fishing communities. Many of these groups experience various forms of prejudice, discrimination, and a lack of certain key human rights. Increasingly, especially since the adoption in 2007 of the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), these communities are also self-identifying as ‘Indigenous’ (Corntassel 2003:75). Thus, for example, the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee (IPACC), which coordinates the activities of approximately 155 different self-identifying Indigenous groups in twenty-two separate African countries, holds that the term refers to those groups who claim to ‘have been living by hunting and gathering; by transhumant (migratory nomadic) pastoralism . . . and those practicing traditional drylands horticulture including oasis cultures’.10 The International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs similarly considers Africa’s Indigenous Peoples to be ‘generally understood as nomadic and seminomadic (p.433) pastoralists and hunter/gatherers who live in situations of marginalization and discrimination’,11 a view that is in line with those of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR).12 As stated on the IPACC website, these collectives recognize that ‘all Africans should enjoy equal rights and respect’ and all of ‘Africa’s diversity is to be valued’. Nonetheless, Particular communities, due to historical and environmental circumstances, have found themselves outside the state-system and underrepresented in governance. These ‘first-peoples’ or ‘autochthonous peoples’ have associated themselves with the United Nations’ standards on the rights of indigenous peoples. This is not to deny other Africans their status; it is to emphasise that affirmative recognition is necessary for hunter-gatherers and herding peoples to ensure their survival.13

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Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa As one Maasai leader in Tanzania explained to the anthropologist James Igoe (2006:403) during his research, it is the shared experience of a loss of ‘cultural identity and the land that constitutes the foundation of . . . existence’ in particular that qualifies these groups as ‘Indigenous’ (see also Hodgson 2009; Lynch 2011a). However, across much of Africa, where the loss of land and sovereignty as a consequence of European settlement and colonialism had different manifestations, the ILO and more recent UN definitions could be said to apply to virtually all populations except white settlers and Asian migrants. Indeed, it is common for the notion of an ‘indigenous identity’ to be downplayed by African politicians on the grounds that ‘all Africans are indigenous’ (e.g. Crawhall 2011:17; Hodgson 2009:3). This view found particularly explicit expression in Botswana when the United Nations declared 1993 as the ‘Year of Indigenous People’ and various bodies began asking the Botswana Government what this might imply for its Basarwa (the Tswana term for Khoisan) population. The response to such questions by the then Minister for Local Government, Lands and Housing, Mr Chapson Butale, was telling. He declared, simply, that ‘All Batswana [i.e. citizens of Botswana] are indigenous’, and thus no special measures targeted at Basarwa were being planned by the Botswana Government as a way of marking the United Nations declaration.14 An obvious implication of Mr Butale’s remarks was that, in the opinion of the Government of Botswana at the time, ‘Basarwa’ had no more or less right to an identity as Botswana’s indigenous peoples than did members of the majority Tswana population or any of the other, smaller ethno-linguistic groups in the (p.434) country. This issue of indigeneity was politically loaded given the broader geographical, geopolitical, and historical context. In the first place, Botswana’s constitution, adopted at Independence in 1966, underscored the importance of guaranteeing ‘Fundamental Rights and Freedoms of the Individual’ irrespective of ‘race, place of origin, political opinions, colour, creed or sex’.15 In the thirty years following Independence up to the early 1990s, Botswana was singled out by the international community as having one of the best reputations for protecting human rights on the continent, and was praised by Western observers for its stability and democratic governance (Tsie 1996), especially in light of the turmoil that afflicted virtually all of the neighbouring states over the same period. That several of the latter had had institutionalized systems of racial discrimination against their majority, African population, also served to underscore the regional importance of Botswana’s political climate. By emphasizing equality under law of all its peoples, the Botswana Government gained considerable moral Page 12 of 30

Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa authority within the region, and rapidly came to be regarded as a shining exemplar of the benefits of Black majority rule (Molutsi and Holm 1990). Seen in this light, Mr Butale’s remarks could be interpreted as a valiant attempt to defend the non-discriminatory principles of Botswana’s constitution. However, then and increasingly more so now, in the view of many observers (e.g. Good 1993, 2008:103– 41; Hitchcock 2002; Lee et al. 2002; Saugestad 2001) and as recorded in personal biographies such as that of Khelo Kiema (2010), Botswana’s diverse San communities were experiencing considerable discrimination by both the nation state and sections of its majority populace.

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Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa Indigenous, Autochthonous, or Just African? As the foregoing has emphasized, in the arenas of human rights work and political lobbying, the concept of ‘being indigenous’ entails four inter-related notions—first arrival, cultural distinctiveness, selfidentification, and, perhaps most importantly, non-dominance (Saugestad 2001). However, within African contexts there remain several inconsistencies and ambiguities. In the first place, while the ‘term “indigenous” implies a primordial state, necessarily preceding that which is foreign or acquired’, nowadays ‘the idea of indigenous Africans does not represent some sort of miraculously preserved precolonial existence’, but is instead ‘an identity category that would not have made a great deal of sense prior to the turn of the 1990s’ (Igoe 2006:400–1).16 (p.435) Secondly, ‘unlike the peoples whose activism established the paradigm of indigeneity—Native North Americans, South American indigenous peoples, and Australian Aborigines’, many of the communities in Africa who now assert their ‘indigenous identity’, especially the San (but also many others) ‘are not struggling against a legacy of integrationist and assimilationist state policies; rather, they are fighting against a converse legacy of racial segregation and class exploitation, based on deeply essentialist conceptions of what constitutes cultural or ethnic difference’ (Sylvain 2002:1082; see also Hodgson 2009 for a broader discussion). Thirdly, several of those communities that now lay claim to being ‘Indigenous’ (and especially pastoralist groups), in terms of both their own oral histories, traditions, and established scholarship, make no claim to being the first settlers of the territories they now occupy. A case in point are the Maasai and related Maa-speaking populations of Kenya and Tanzania (Hodgson 2002:1087), who, depending on how these categories are defined, only first occupied the areas now most closely associated with them in either the ninth century AD (Sommer and Vossen 1993), or possibly as late as the 1700s (Galaty 1993). Regardless of which scenario is preferred, the first Maa-speakers encountered pre-existing farming and herding communities and groups of hunter-gatherers, with whom they often developed symbiotic exchange relations, while also categorizing the latter as il-tóróbò (Anglicized as ‘Ndorobo’) meaning ‘the ones without cattle’. This term subsequently took on derogatory connotations within Maa languages, and also was misused by European observers to refer to a great majority of hunter-gatherer groups in East Africa regardless of their origin and linguistic affiliations (Kenny 1981). Moreover, the expansion of certain Maasai sections in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to the decimation of other Maa-speaking communities (such as the Page 14 of 30

Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa Laikipiak during the Iloikop wars of the 1840s to 1880s). This expansion also facilitated shifts towards farming and agro-pastoralism among others (such as the WaArusha, N. Tanzania), and the adoption of a Maasai identity and the Maa language by former hunter-gatherers (such as the Mukogodo of central Kenya; for overviews, see Cronk 2004; Jennings 2003; Sobania 1993; Spear 1997).17 Several of these communities are now laying claim to an ‘indigenous’ identity, although along rather different lines. Thus, for instance, whereas Mukogodo adopted a Maasai identity in the 1920s and 1930s, they are reasserting their identity as ‘Yaaku’ and their ‘Cushitic’ origin, rather than a ‘Nilotic’ one like the Maasai (Carrier 2011). Conversely, WaArusha, having differentiated (p.436) themselves from pastoral Maasai in the nineteenth century, more recently now ‘at least in the company of donors, assert they are “Maasai” ’ (Hodgson 2002:1087). Also, as Hodgson notes (2002:1090–1), while some Maasai activists recognize that other pastoralist peoples, such as Barabaig, and huntergatherers such as the Hadzabe, have an equal right to call themselves ‘Indigenous’, others are more hostile to the notion—which perhaps may point to a continuing underlying emic categorization of huntergatherers in particular as ‘the Other’. Adding to such complexities is the distinction between ‘indigenous’ and ‘autochthonous’. The latter term, traditionally, has been more widely used in Francophone West and central Africa, partly because ‘indigène’ (the French equivalent to ‘indigenous’) was widely employed as a term of abuse during the colonial era (Pelican 2009). As critically, many African societies make distinctions within their own oral histories and traditions between ‘first-comers’ (‘les primo-arrivants’ in French) and late-comers (‘les nouveaux arrivants’), and even before the European colonial era such categorization was often the foundation for a social hierarchy that determined the distribution of rights and access to resources (Hilgers 2011:144). Derived from the Greek word ‘autochthōn’ (αὐτόχθων), autochthony means ‘born from the soil’ (Ceuppens and Geschiere 2005:386). The term was used initially in West Africa by French colonial authorities so as to distinguish those of their colonial subjects who were ‘of the soil’ and those who, despite being more recent migrants, were the ‘rulers’ (Ceuppens and Geschiere 2005:388–9). Hence, like ‘Indigenous’, it generally implies temporal priority of settlement and a degree of political subordination. However, in its more recent mobilization the term has come to signify more than this. In particular, as several recent studies (e.g. Jackson 2006; Lynch 2011b; Pelican 2009) have highlighted, the term is often used to reinforce a perceived sense of ‘belonging’ to a particular geographical space/terroir that is greater than the rights of ‘others’ to lay claim to a Page 15 of 30

Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa similar right to be there. A further significant difference is that unlike the categorization ‘Indigenous’, which is typically restricted to pastoralist and hunting-gathering-fishing peoples (or those who only recently abandoned these subsistence strategies), the term ‘autochthonous’, at least in contemporary Africa, is ‘more often used with reference to agricultural or industrial populations, who are not necessarily marginal but rather believe that their resources, culture, or power are threatened by “migrants”’ (Gausett et al. 2011:139). This modern usage is thus a reversal of how the term was first used in the colonial era, and as Pelican (2009) has explored with reference to Mbororo in Cameroon, the competing discourses of being ‘autochthonous’ or ‘indigenous’ can mean that international understandings are often at variance with local connotations of these terms. Thus, in the Mbororo case, ‘although internationally recognized as an indigenous people, the Mbororo are locally considered strangers, migrants, and latecomers with limited rights to land and resources’ (Pelican 2009:53).

(p.437) Conclusion: A Post-Colonial Future? Terms such as ‘indigenous/Indigenous’ and ‘autochthonous’ are relational concepts, which operate at different scales and have different connotations at these scales (Castree 2004; Merlan 2007). Temporal distinctions can also be made concerning how such terms, and especially ‘indigenous/Indigenous’, have been variously mobilized. Thus, in the early decades of decolonization, the concept of ‘being indigenous’ could be said to have applied to all of Africa as a means to differentiate African societies from European settler communities. Subsequently, and especially since the 1990s, the notion of being an ‘Indigenous people’ has become increasingly restricted to specific communities within nation states. An ‘indigenous/Indigenous archaeology’ on the continent thus needs to grapple with both dimensions and the ambiguities associated with these concepts. This may well require very different strategies. Specifically, because the modern discursive definition of being ‘Indigenous’ carries with it connotations of a loss of rights driven by institutionalized prejudice on the part of more dominant neighbouring groups, a Maasai or Samburu ‘Indigenous archaeology’ in Kenya, for example, might require identification of sites and other archaeological remains that can be used by these communities to document their presence within particular landscapes—and perhaps even to support claims that they occupied certain territories prior to other ethnicities (and not just Europeans).

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Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa However, while such a strategy might well be justifiable from a human rights perspective, and an ethical concern that archaeology be used to redress past injustices and benefit communities at a practical level (cf. Green et al. 2003; Haber 2007), it would be in danger of running contrary to most current theoretical and methodological arguments within the discipline regarding both the ability of archaeology to identify past ethnic identities, and the advisability of doing so. Moreover, it would also contradict much current postcolonial writing on this topic by African archaeologists who are challenging older, ‘colonial’ constructs of tribal identities by pointing to the considerable archaeological and historical evidence that, across Africa, ethnicity was highly fluid, that communities often moved between ethnicities, and that cultural landscapes were typically comprised of ‘ethnic mosaics’ (e.g. Kusimba and Kusimba 2005; Pikirayi 2007). There is also widespread recognition, inspired especially by the work of Kopytoff (1987), that African societies often reproduced themselves repeatedly at their internal frontiers. This partly explains the common distinctions in their oral traditions between ‘first comers’ and ‘late comers’, but also undermines the rationale for drawing clear-cut distinctions between First Nations and dominant societies (Pelican 2009:53). Finally, there is also a broader ontological challenge that still needs to be addressed. This has perhaps been most clearly articulated by Atalay (2006:301) who, in recognition of the colonial origins of archaeology, has called for the (p.438) development of a ‘collaborative approach that blends the strengths of Western archaeological science with the knowledge and epistemologies of indigenous peoples’ (2006:301). In a similar vein, in their discussions of what constitutes ‘Indigenous Archaeology’, Smith and Wobst (2005:394, my emphasis) have argued for ‘an archaeology shaped by indigenous knowledges . . . [capable of] decolonizing archaeological theory and practice’. Likewise, Nicholas (2010:233) has suggested that failure to incorporate indigenous approaches within the discipline ‘will limit significantly or marginalize the potential contributions of archaeology as a more representative and responsible discipline, and constrain its continued intellectual growth’. As noted in the introduction, several African and Africanist archaeologists have also acknowledged the disjuncture that may exist between ‘an African past’ as interpreted from the perspective of Western-style archaeology, and concepts of the past found among different African societies. However, research on this topic remains woefully limited (see, however, Lane 2005, for an example), and addressing this knowledge gap is likely to become an increasingly important priority in the future if Africanist archaeologists wish to deliver truly ‘indigenous’ archaeologies—that is, archaeologies that can Page 17 of 30

Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa accommodate intellectually and not just in a practical, collaborative manner, non-Western concepts of what constitutes valid historical evidence.

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Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa Zachernuk, Philip S. 1994 Of Origins and Colonial Order: Southern Nigerian Historians and the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ c.1870–1970. Journal of African History 35:427–55. Notes:

(1) As, perhaps, most infamously expressed by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (1963) in one of a series of public talks aired on the BBC and later published in The Listener (see Stahl 2005 for discussion). (2) As stated, for example, by the New Partnership for African Development in its 2001 manifesto: ‘Africa’s status as the birthplace of humanity should be cherished by the whole world as the origin of all its peoples’ (NEPAD 2001: 4, para. 14). (3) Such thinking, for instance, seems to lie behind the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) initiative which ‘aims to establish the basis for international recognition, dynamic conservation and adaptive management’ of these and their associated ‘agricultural biodiversity, knowledge systems, food and livelihood security and cultures’. Available at: accessed 18 September 2011. (4) Here, for simplicity, I use the term ‘African archaeologists’ to refer to archaeologists of African ancestry, and ‘Africanist archaeologists’ to refer to all archaeologists, irrespective of their ancestry, whose research interests lie primarily in investigating aspects of the archaeological record of the African continent (including its offshore islands). I recognize that neither of these definitions is necessarily ideal. (5) The reported comments made by Dr George Abungu, a Kenyan archaeologist and heritage consultant and former director of the National Museums of Kenya, at an international meeting in Spain in 2010 captured these dual sentiments especially well: ‘Dr Abungu . . . identified threats [to World Heritage sites included] lack of appreciation by the African governments of heritage as a source of pride, identity and sustainable resource for national development; lack of resources; neglect; lack of community involvement; the Eurocentric notion of heritage of outstanding universal value; greed; conflicts; and lack of investment in heritage’ (emphasis added). Source: Trust for African Rock Art website, accessed 15 September 2011. Available at: . (6) ‘Autochthonous’ is typically used in Francophone countries rather than the term ‘indigenous’; however, as discussed below, these two terms are not direct equivalents. (7) These percentages are often reported but are problematic. The current government argues that these cannot be relied upon because they were created by a colonial survey which used incorrect, racist, physiological indicators to conduct the survey (John Giblin, personal communication 2012). (8) Note, however, that while these efforts contributed greatly to the establishment of the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire (IFAN—later, Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire), and Brevié even established an annual prize for the best piece of ‘indigenous’ ethnography, and encouraged the training of Africans in research methods, the reports and publications the latter produced were never given much weight in the broader anthropological syntheses of the day (Jezequel 2007). (9) This lists a range of different classes of material object, from house types to hairstyles and headdress, and the different forms of these associated with particular, named ethno-linguistic groups. (10) Electronic document accessed 17 August 2011. (11) Electronic document accessed 17 August 2011. (12) See Report of the African Commission’s Working Group on Indigenous Populations/Communities, available at: accessed 21 March, 2014. (13) Electronic document accessed 17 August 2011. (14) ‘Don’t celebrate year of Indigenous, says Indigenous Minister’, Mmegi/The Reporter 12–18 March 1993, Vol. 10, No. 12, p. 21; see also Daily News (Botswana) 5 March 1993. (15) Constitution of Botswana, Chapter II.3. Gaborone: Government Printer.

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Being ‘Indigenous’ and Being ‘Colonized’ in Africa (16) During the European colonial era, for example, in Anglophone Africa, the term ‘native’ was much more widely used, while in Francophone countries the preferred term was ‘autochtones’ (Pelican 2009; see also Ceuppens and Geschiere 2005:388). (17) The geographical distribution of Maa-speakers in East Africa was further modified during colonial rule as a result of the creation of ‘Native Administration’ areas and ‘Tribal Reserves’, the establishment of National Parks (which required removal of communities that had once occupied these areas), and a series of other forced moves (Hughes 2006).

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Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism Making and Unmaking the Subaltern Peter R. Schmidt

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0021

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines subaltern disclosure within a cultural setting where subalterns spontaneously flourished and were accepted by large audiences, including local clans and sub-clan groups who challenged the given historical truths of the elite using the printed and written word. Focusing on the colonial intervention of history in Uganda, the chapter explores the role of archaeology in the creation of subaltern histories. It also discusses oral histories and colonial discourse in Uganda, how academic historians transformed the Bacwezi from local leaders and religious figures — best represented as political religious figures — to a major political dynasty quartered at Bigo at the end of the colonial period, and colonial fabrications of East Africa's history and the production of ‘subaltern’ accounts. The chapter concludes by looking at the proliferation of subaltern accounts in Uganda and Tanzania under British colonialism. Keywords:   archaeology, subaltern histories, oral histories, Uganda, Bacwezi, Tanzania, colonialism, East Africa

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Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism One of the objectives of African history, once it freed itself from an over-dependence on sources in colonial archives, was to look at African history from an African viewpoint with sources rooted in Africa. Merrick Posnansky, Inaugural Address, University of Ghana, 1969

Introduction Merrick Posnansky’s diagnosis of the changes that occurred in the writing of African history in the early postcolonial period captures a major shift in perspective as well as what came to be considered legitimate subjects for historical discourse—oral traditions and oral histories. Much of this initial shift came at the initiative of Jan Vansina (1965, 1985), but was soon followed on the continent by many Africanborn historians, such as Ogot (1967) and Kiwanuka (1971), as well as archaeologists who began to draw extensively on oral texts, especially those oral texts associated with royal houses and chiefly lines (Connah 1975; Garlake 1974, 1977; Maggs 1976; Posnansky 1966; Schmidt 1978; Van Noten 1972; Wright and Kus 1979). Posnansky’s representation centres on a time of academic turmoil, redefinition, and rediscovery, when oral traditions began to be accepted as legitimate sources of history—a revolutionary perspective in the treatment of African history. What goes unmentioned and uncharacterized in Posnansky’s account are two species of colonial treatment of oral traditions that drove the development of subaltern accounts: 1) potent colonial manipulations and transformations of (p.446) oral testimonies to serve the political and cultural agendas of the colonial regime—processes that led to local histories becoming subaltern when they were purposefully submerged by fabricated histories; and 2) the development of colonial technology, in particular print media accessible to elites, that privileged specific royal outlooks and created a backlash among other social groups that, once released from precolonial sanctions, wanted to publish their longheld subaltern accounts. This phenomenon, and specifically the spontaneous emergence of subaltern histories among social groups in Kiziba kingdom in Tanzania, East Africa, developed out of groups compiling, writing, and in some cases publishing their histories in response to the printed version. My thesis here builds on Spivak (1988, 1996) but leapfrogs the turgid discourse about academic agency in unveiling the subaltern. In this case, my role is to focus attention on subaltern disclosure within a cultural setting where subalterns spontaneously came to flourish and find acceptance among large audiences, where local clans and sub-clan groups used the printed and

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Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism written word to challenge the given historical truths of the elite. This is a subaltern movement that gained legitimacy without external intercession or explication.

The Colonial Invention of History in Uganda I will first turn to how colonial authorities in Uganda unconsciously created subaltern histories when they privileged an odd collection of oral traditions to underwrite the legitimacy of local authorities, their agents in indirect rule. This is a story that requires the unveiling of how archaeology is implicated in the subsequent creation of an elaborate historical illusion, now a central pillar of colonial and postcolonial history in East Africa—the Kitara Empire ruled by the Bacwezi from their capital at the famous Bigo earthworks in western Uganda. This potent colonial construct—forged in the field by a colonial administrator and later reified in the academy—would come to endure for a full century, achieving widespread popularity and acting as a rallying point in declarations of national identity by the Uganda Head of State, who uses references to the Bacwezi to establish his social, geographical, and historical legitimacy. Used in this manner, the Bacwezi remain very visible and recognized players in the political arena of contemporary Uganda when they are invoked to undergird the power of the origins and legitimacy of a unitary state. These potent images of Bacwezi grandeur, today shared across ethnicity and geography, are linked to a majestically imagined Bacwezi capital at the Bigo earthworks. In part because of its contemporary vitality and meaning, this Bacweziat-Bigo text persists in spite of penetrating postcolonial critiques that unveil the fabrication of the construct and the less-than-convincing archaeology supposedly (p.447) supporting it (Schmidt 1990, 2006), particularly serious problems over the dating of Bigo to the fourteenth through fifteenth centuries—dating that fits the late colonial and early postcolonial paradigm (Oliver 1953, 1955, 1963). We now have incontrovertible evidence—readily available, though assiduously ignored—that the oral texts supposedly linking the Bacwezi to Bigo are in fact ethnically heterogeneous—mostly dominated by Baganda accounts in a region that had been under Bunyoro hegemony for hundreds of years. As a collection, these texts amount to a hasty bricolage meant to help sustain British indirect rule over the Lost Counties, territories in eastern Bunyoro awarded to Buganda under the 1900 Uganda Agreement. The Lost Counties presented awkward if not difficult administrative conditions for British colonial officers posted to

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Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism areas where the Bigo earthworks and other alleged Bacwezi sites were located. British colonial officers faced the vexing complication of an indirect rule that had no legitimacy in the eyes of the local population—long self-identified as Banyoro, not Baganda. This contradiction actively contributed to political tensions and arose out of administration by Baganda chiefs and nobles (Lanning 1970), rather than local people whose identities and histories were endogenous to the Lost Counties. In the midst of this tension-filled governance, the local British District Commissioner (DC), D. L. Baines, reached into his grab bag of local knowledge—a reservoir of metaphors drawn mostly from his Baganda collaborators. His selections of oral traditions resonated with British sensibilities and notions of hierarchy and drew on deep time metonymies on behalf of Bacwezi rule—the Golden Age of Antiquity, the period of consolidation, and centrality at Bigo. These were familiar values to British administrators, who thoroughly understood ruling houses, royal lineages, and the importance of imperial palaces on the landscape. This colonial imprint of imperial grandeur was to prove enduring, a rewriting of East African history that displays an extraordinary resiliency—resisting critiques over time—to the point where the original construct dominates contemporary imaginations about the past, present, and future. When such a colonial construct, fabricated out of whole cloth, gains such widespread acceptance, it is only to be expected that alternative histories have been forced underground, to become subaltern and to slowly fade away as memories of oral traditions have collapsed under the HIV/AIDS crisis and globalization (Schmidt 2010). It is also hardly surprising that postcolonial critiques applied to these essentialized histories and their scholastic deficiencies have had negligible effect and though abundantly clear, remain hidden beneath the carapace of political expediency. That such colonial manipulations have endured after fifty years of postcolonial history-making—and still setting the scene for conventional history in eastern Africa—is testimony to a resiliency derived from the power of print media during the peak of colonialism as well as later academic valorization and participation in such fabrications. (p.448) Within the context of decolonizing archaeological practice, such legacies within the focus of archaeological inquiry summon us, and beg for our attention. Just how did this construct unfold, take on additional value, and become legitimized as history? Oral Histories and Ugandan Colonial Discourse Page 4 of 27

Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism When D. L. Baines (1909) published his bricolage of oral tradition about the Bacwezi at Bigo, he did so in a colonial newspaper, the Official Uganda Gazette, intended for other colonial officials in Uganda. While he had good reason to go to the trouble of compiling the accounts and publishing them to legitimize British governance through (false) ties to the past, his role in this affair terminates with the 1909 publication. Once in print, the stories took on their own agency, their own potency, and authority as the printed word. Seven years later, Baines was assigned to the first British administration in Bukoba, just south of Uganda in Tanganyika, where he was the first British DC. He immediately alienated the king of the largest kingdom—driving him to suicide—and demonstrated an uncanny inability to misunderstand local history and power relations. His machinations in Uganda appear to have prepared him well for his subsequent historical errors in Tanganyika. Imbuing the colonial landscape with deep imperial characteristics, Baines’ historical bricolage not surprisingly featured a Ganda oral tradition: ‘the most generally accepted tradition amongst the Baganda attributes the construction of this place to the “stranger” (Mugenyi) a personage who is supposed to have entered Uganda from the north . . . roughly 600 years ago’ (Baines 1909:138). Mugenyi means ‘stranger’, a name that is mentioned in the Bacwezi, but never as a major figure. Baines’ account lay dormant for eleven years until it was recapitulated in Pere Gorju’s (1920) influential book on interlacustrine societies. Gorju reified Baines’ treatments but added nothing to affirm that there were indeed oral traditions about the Bacwezi at Bigo, except to assert that the Mugenyi of Bigo was the Bacwezi figure of that name. The matter rested until resurrected by another colonial functionary, E. J. Wayland, a geologist and head of the Uganda Geological Survey, who took a keen interest in the earthwork sites of western Uganda. Using notes about Bigo from a 1921 report by a fellow geologist, A. D. Combes, he wrote a comment and reprinted the Baines article in its entirety (Wayland 1934). By this action, Wayland repositioned Bigo and its alleged oral traditions right back on to centre stage of Ugandan colonial discourse—given that the Uganda Journal—where Wayland published his comment—was an avidly read publication in both colonial and academic circles. It did not take long for the colonial literati to notice and take up the issue in greater detail. Sir John Gray, later knighted for his service as a judge in (p.449) Zanzibar, was then in colonial service as a lawyer in Uganda. Having a very scholastic bent (Merrick Posnansky, personal communication 2011), John Gray expanded upon Wayland’s key observations about supposed Bacwezi associations with Bigo in another Page 5 of 27

Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism Uganda Journal article the next year (Gray 1935). Cast in scholarly language and a definitive tone, Gray’s piece imbued the issue with authority and a degree of finality. Yet Gray’s ‘Riddle of Biggo’ is hardly a model of scholastic rigor, a conclusion that is buttressed by the absence of any sources for many of his claims. For example, he says, ‘one of the many traditions regarding the earthworks is that their constructor, Mugenyi, was buried there’ (Gray 1935:229), but he does not cite the origins of this information—be it his personal research in the area or some other source. Perhaps the most misleading treatment by Gray is his use of Baganda oral traditions to make his case for the Bacwezi at Bigo, something that amplifies Baines’ use of Baganda traditions as well as his assertion that there are many tales associated with Bigo. A paucity of Bacwezi evidence and a privileging of stories derived from Baganda —not previously associated with this region—demonstrate that the argument is skewed towards Baganda perspectives, with the effect, if not the intent, to sustain Baganda hegemony over the Lost Counties. Gray does mention Apollo Kaggwa (a Ganda author and important political functionary), citing his reference to one of the early kings of Buganda having lived at Bigo. This idea is convincingly challenged by Kiwanuka (1971) in his detailed analysis and translation of Kaggwa, who he shows was discussing another location for the Bigo sites mentioned in Buganda traditions (Schmidt 2006). Gray also cites an article published in a 1923 issue of Munno, a local Uganda newspaper, in which a story about a Kiziba (a Haya state in Tanzania) prince who recovered stolen cattle from Kagago, a neighbouring site, during the sixth Bunyoro reign—not a tradition that truly pertains to the Bacwezi at Bigo. Nor is Gray able to attach any direct association of the Bacwezi to Bigo, instead depending on Gorju’s translation of Biggo by Mugenyi as ‘the forts of Mugenyi’ rather than the ‘forts of the stranger’. Gray also cites a local Banyoro author, Bikunya (1927), as affirming the same point, but does not acknowledge that Gorju’s interpretation of Mugenyi was certainly known to Bakunya at a time when literate Ugandans were quickly adopting print media. Even Gray admits that the argument is shaky: ‘Mugenyi was one of these Bacwezi, but, apart from his name, tradition does not associate him with the regions of Biggo and does not picture him as a fighting man’ (Gray 1935:232). Nonetheless, this did not inhibit Gray from concluding that ‘alone of all the traditional rulers of the land, the Bacwezi, of whom Mugenyi was one, seems to fit in with the evidence afforded by the earthworks themselves’ (Gray 1935:233). This tautology concludes the colonial transformation of a careless political pastiche in 1909 into a definitive rendering of local history and landscape. It Page 6 of 27

Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism became concretized once in print within the pages of the Uganda Journal, soon to become a widely (p.450) circulated journal in academe.1 These ‘historical’ renderings lay within the pages of the Uganda Journal for another two decades, awaiting rediscovery and reawakening not by the colonial community but by the academic community. The Transformation of the Bacwezi by Academic Historians

The transformation of the Bacwezi from local leaders and religious figures—best represented as political religious figures—to a major political dynasty quartered at Bigo occurs at the end of the colonial period within the halls of the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London. There, Roland Oliver led the way in establishing African history as a new field of study. One of his primary interests was the role of the Bacwezi in Uganda history, a topic he took up in a 1953 article when he suggested that archaeology might be able to sort out the antiquity of the Bacwezi ‘capital’ sites, namely: ‘the earlier Bachwezi capitals . . . if found and excavated along with sites in Bwera and Mubende, would surely add a wealth of material evidence to support and qualify the allegations of traditions’ (Oliver 1953:137). Though he does not specifically mention the traditions he references, there can be little doubt that the earlier publications about Bigo form the backdrop to this statement. Oliver in this early period appears desperate to make a case for the Bacwezi at Bigo, going so far as to accept uncritically a pre-publication claim (Katate and Kamungugunu 1955) that Ruyanga—almost universally called Ruhanga, the supreme god—lived opposite Bigo on the Katonga river and was a Mucwezi. Such an assertion is contrary to all other evidence for Bacwezi myth, where there is no incorporation of Ruhanga into that pantheon. This manipulation of Uganda history is followed by a subsequent claim that the Bacwezi were an historical dynasty and the makers of Bigo (Oliver 1959). There was no oral evidence to support this claim, which remained unchallenged. But, hidden behind the scenes was Oliver’s knowledge that Peter Shinnie (1960) had excavated at Bigo in 1957 expressly to examine the question of historical problems connecting with ‘legends’. Though Shinnie’s excavations led him to conclude that the Bacwezi problem was no closer to being solved, Oliver seems to have gained confidence about his interpretations prior to Shinnie’s publication—as if it was enough that archaeology had been done at Bigo, regardless of the fact that it was inconclusive regarding Bigo being a capital site for the Bacwezi.

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Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism Merrick Posnansky was the next archaeologist to excavate at Bigo, in 1960 (Posnansky 1966, 1969). There he excavated a large number of trenches over a six-week period, reporting on it in broad outline (Posnansky (p.451) 1966). In the interim, however, Posnansky had been scooped by Oliver, still eager to find physical evidence for his thesis placing the Bacwezi capital at Bigo. Sharing information from Bigo with Oliver, Posnansky was co-opted by Oliver’s chapter in the 1963 Oxford History of East Africa. Oliver began to argue with much more rigour, but no evidence, that many versions of oral traditions had identified Bigo as the Bacwezi capital, ‘according to tradition, the last capital centre of the last of the Chwezi kings was in the celebrated entrenched earthwork site at Bigo on the Katongo river’ (Oliver 1963:181). Oliver called on archaeology to buttress his thin arguments regarding ‘traditions’, namely: ‘recent archaeological investigations have tended to confirm the traditional evidence that Bigo was the seat of a Hima dynasty’ (Oliver 1963:181), and that ‘the original layout of the central embankments was almost certainly similar to that of the typical orirembo or royal town, of the early Hinda kings of Ankole’ (Oliver 1963:182). Privileged knowledge of the archaeological evidence— regardless of its particulars—was sufficient to link ephemeral oral traditions to a capital site, a spurious construct dating back to 1909. Oliver’s sanguine interpretations of Bigo using Posnansky’s data placed Posnansky in an awkward position—not wanting to offend the most prominent historian of Africa in the Western world but also wanting to remain true to the evidence. His conclusions were notably more tempered than those of Oliver, accepting the interpretations of his more senior and powerful colleague about the oral evidence and concluding that ‘on the basis of the tradition, [I] would date the Bigo culture at 1350–1500 and would also accept the correlation of the Bigo culture with the Cwezi’ (Posnansky 1966:4). This is an important caveat by Posnansky, for he was only associating the Bacwezi with Bigo culture, as defined by a distinctive ceramic assemblage that includes Bigo as well as other nearby sites such as the Ntusi earthworks. But, entrapped in the prior and incautious interpretations of Oliver, Posnansky understandably came down on the side of Bigo as the Bacwezi capital site, to wit: ‘at the centre of Bigo an enclosure bank . . . has been interpreted as a royal enclosure (irirembo) . . . [and] supports the further suggestion that Bigo was the capital of this state’ (Posnansky 1966:5). He further added that the preliminary radiocarbon dates ‘reinforce the view that the occupation period was short and provide a date for that occupation of around 1350–1500 AD. The date is identical to that for the Bacwezi worked out from the traditional history’ (Posnansky 1966:5). Thus, the Bacwezi/Bigo construct finally Page 8 of 27

Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism had its material affirmation, despite the fact that the structural evidence cited—the so-called crescent-shaped mound at Bigo signifying a royal residence—was ephemeral, if not imaginary. Based on the supposition that part of the mound had been previously destroyed (Posnansky 1969), the mound shape was projected into a crescent shape without any structural evidence to substantiate such an interpretation. (p.452) The second archaeological issue to emerge from the 1969 report is the dating marshalled to support the idea that the Bacwezi occupied this and other nearby sites just before the mid-second millennium AD. Without delving into the details (see Schmidt 2006:239– 40, 244), the radiocarbon dates were adjusted between the 1966 and 1969 publications to change the occupation period at Bigo from the 1350–1500 AD period to 1290–1575 AD, with no explanation why such a change was necessary. My calculations show the dates range from: 1) 850 to present; and 2) two dates (GXO 516 and 519) range from AD 1365 to 1750, at a 95 percent level of confidence, and AD 1435 to 1660 at a 65 percent level of confidence. When GXO 517 (850 to present) and GXO 518 (recent) are included, the range becomes even younger. Clearly, this is much too late to fit the Bacwezi paradigm, which places the Bacwezi at Bigo during the fourteenth through fifteenth centuries.2 The most critical date in terms of establishing the antiquity of the crescent-shaped ‘royal’ mound was GXO 519: AD 1570 ± 90. It has been noted (Robertshaw and Taylor 2000) that this date was mispublished in 1966 and should be 1370 ± 90. As is often the case in discussions about the Bacwezi paradigm vis-à-vis Bigo, evidence is not closely examined for its accuracy. My conclusion for a later, post-1500 occupation at Bigo is made even stronger by the dating within the socalled crescent mound. Not accounted for is a blatant discontinuity in the dating: underlying GXO 519 (1370 ± 90) is a younger date, GXO 516 (AD 1505 ± 70), on the original ground level. This younger date invalidates any attempt to maintain Bigo within the Bacwezi orbit— setting to rest this most recent effort to force Bigo to fit the royal house of cards first erected over 100 years ago.

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Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism Colonial Fabrications of East African History and the Production of ‘Subaltern’ Accounts

The effect of these various positions that privilege a colonial fabrication has been to drive contrary accounts to the margins, making them subaltern within the literature of East African history and archaeology. Here I use subaltern in a manner that resonates with Mignolo’s (2000) usage, when hegemonic academic influences suppress and marginalize alternative ways of knowledge. Also, the long absence of any rigorous, direct research into the oral traditions that pertain to Bigo has created a subaltern space in East African historiography. It is now too late in a setting in which the Bacwezi feature almost daily in the national discourse to find uncontaminated accounts, let alone those that were pushed into the background and made subaltern as the colonial authority and (p.453) scholars rushed to valorize the colonial bricolage and memorialize Bigo.3 Archaeological research has continued in the region under the Bacwezi paradigm, though it has had to be adjusted when sites do not fit the image of capitals. Once Bigo had been disclosed as problematic (Schmidt 1990), then attention turned to another major site, Mubende Hill, more securely associated with Bacwezi oral traditions as a capital of the first Bacwezi, Ndahura (Lanning 1966). Excavations there did not confirm the presence of a capital (Robertshaw 1991, 1994; Robertshaw and Taylor 2000), forcing a significant readjustment of ideas about the Bacwezi presence on the western Ugandan landscape. Robertshaw now favours, correctly I believe, the Bacwezi being associated with chieftainship, which I would further imagine to be deeply imbued with ritual authority and divination, as the Bacwezi have been through deep time. The dating of Mubende Hill, with only two unsealed (and inadequate) radiocarbon dates to the fourteenth through fifteenth centuries AD, leaves many open and unanswered questions about its role in ritual and history, not to mention the diminished representation of the presence of an Early Iron Age occupation that is more than the ‘ephemeral’ characterization it has been given. The task of decolonizing the history and archaeology of Uganda may be beyond the capacity of our contemporary toolkit. Constant iterations, academic and popular, of the ‘orthodox’ position have virtually assured the perpetuity of its distortions, a phenomenon captured by Tosh when he writes: In societies where literacy is a recent accomplishment and is associated with the ruling group, the written word carries immense and indiscriminate prestige. In Africa the earliest

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Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism published versions of oral tradition, regardless of quality, acquired authority at the expense of other versions, and they often became the standard form in which the tradition was repeated orally. The outcome was a permanent distortion. (Tosh 2002:314–15; emphasis mine) More than one hundred years after the unattributed accounts of Baines, nearly eighty years after Sir John Gray, and fifty years after the undocumented claims of Oliver, we find that similar treatments continue to distort academic studies of the Bacwezi and Bigo. Farelius (2008), in an otherwise exhaustive study of the Bacwezi and kingship in East Africa, not only misunderstands dating at Bigo, but refers repeatedly to Bigo as the Bacwezi capital, reifying its supposed role without evidence. The only text examined is a short answer by an informant to a direct question and pertains to areas, such as Ntusi, that were supposedly (p.454) controlled by the Bacwezi as grazing lands. Even more problematic is to claim, as does Farelius, that ‘Bahima specialized herders in the former kingdom of Nkore know the Bacwezi traditions told about a perceived Bacwezi “dynasty” they connect with Bigo bya Mugenyi’ (Farelius 2008:239).4 This assertion, rolled into one authoritative claim, based on the ‘oral traditions say . . . ’ recipe seen long ago under colonialism in Uganda, is no longer acceptable (cf. Schmidt 2009).

Bigo and the Bacwezi on the Contemporary Stage The contemporary role of the Bacwezi and Bigo in Ugandan political life comes to light often when President Y. Museveni of Uganda invokes their presence as a means of rallying support for a united Ugandan state that resembles the enveloping Bunyoro-Kitara Empire. A more recent and potent expression of this historical invocation occurred in a speech given at the sixteenth anniversary celebration of the coronation of the Mukama of Bunyoro, held 21 June 2010. Museveni set out his vision without ambiguity when he turned to lecture the Mukama: Now, my Tullow; the people who briefed you about the history of this place were wrong. The kingdoms here are much older than 1400 [AD]. The excavations which were done in Ntuusi, in Bwera Sembabule which the Omukama was talking about, show that those sites were active in 900 AD and before. It is Babiito dynasty which started in 1400. Before that, there were the Bacwezi and before that, the Batembuuzi. When the clay pot ware and cattle bones excavated from Bigo bya Mugyenyi and Ntuusi were

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Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism examined, it was established that the settlements at Ntuusi were in 900 AD and Bigo bya Mugyenyi in 900–1350. Therefore, the kingship here dates far back.5 This is an intriguing use of historical citation to affirm the legitimacy and antiquity of Bunyoro-Kitara and the Bacwezi. We rarely finds heads of state citing historical genealogies and archaeological evidence—right down to clay pots and cattle bones, the materiality of which potently support the arguments that President Museveni of Uganda wants to make about the ancient hegemony of the Bacwezi—a mirror of what he wants modern Uganda to be. The setting is (p.455) filled with ritual potency; the President has already devoted considerable time to a discussion of ritual callings and the need for those with ritual callings (priests, kings, etc.) to stick to their prescribed duties, casting the Mukama into the role of a ritually committed person who will not stray from expectations. This recent and politically loaded event, with the President addressing the role of the current kingdom within a unified nation state, marks Uganda’s uneasy but necessary support of endogenous political entities like Bunyoro. The State needs the loyalty and cooperation of the kingdoms, their kings, and the people who hold them in respect. Thus, Museveni’s mission at this important ritual was to pitch the unitary state made up of critical parts, including the kingdoms, stressing repeatedly that working together will assure the prosperity of the people, the kingdom, the State, and East Africa. The quoted paragraph opens with a blunt admonishment to the Mukama, informing him that he needs to know more about the history of his country and his kingdom: ‘now, my Tullow, the people who briefed you about the history of this place were wrong’. He leaves absolutely no doubt—this is the head of state speaking—that what he will relate next will be the right or correct history. Museveni quickly takes on the guise of a historian and archaeologist, and as archaeologists and historians, we have no trouble following his narrative and his meanings: ‘the kingdoms here are much older than 1400 [AD]. The excavations which were done in Ntuusi, in Bwera Sembabule which the Omukama is talking about, show that those sites were active in 900 AD and before.’ Clearly, he knows his subject in referencing the antiquity of Ntusi to 900 AD and has likely read or had his speech-writers read the archaeological reports that scholars such as Andrew Reid (e.g. 1991) and Peter Robertshaw (e.g. 1991, 1994, 2001) have produced over the years. At this point in his short history lesson, Museveni has his facts right. Reaching this successful point, it is virtually inevitable that he will draw on Bigo as a national icon of unity to make his political point—that Page 12 of 27

Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism Bunyoro is terrific, that the Kitara-Bunyoro Empire provides a model for a united, common, prosperous Uganda. He does not disappoint us. His next turn is to genealogy: ‘it is [the] Babiito dynasty which started in 1400. Before that, there were the Bacwezi and before that, the Batembuuzi.’ Here, Museveni relates conventionally accepted periods in Uganda history. He then uses concrete material evidence from the archaeological record to substantiate his points: ‘when the clay pot[s] ware6 and cattle bones excavated from Bigo bya Mugyenyi and Ntuusi were examined, it was established that the settlements at Ntuusi were in 900 AD and Bigo bya Mugyenyi in 900–1350. Therefore, the kingship here dates far back.’ Museveni is on track for a high score in historical accuracy. But, and here is where the (p.456) manipulation of dates can significantly change historical meanings linked to political potency: Bigo does not date to 900–1350 AD. It dates to the post-1500 period, with the alternative claim for a 1350–1500 occupation discredited (Schmidt 1990, 2006; Sutton 1998). Perhaps President Museveni or his advisers misunderstood Posnansky’s (1966) ‘850–present’ radiocarbon date at Bigo, an archaeologically meaningless result. Whatever the source of the misinformation, this and other citations of early dating for Bigo provide a chilling warning about how a few unreliable and discredited dates have come to support a huge interpretive superstructure. Bigo is not contemporary to Ntusi. President Museveni goes unchallenged in this characterization, and Bigo suddenly grows 600 years older to fit the presidential argument. An additional event at the same coronation anniversary celebration ties in tightly with the hegemony of the Bunyoro-Kitara Empire and the make-up of Bunyoro kingdom before the British colonial administration assigned the Lost Counties to Buganda in 1900. Present at the ceremonies was Baker Kimeze, the leader (Sabanyala) of the Banyala people of Bugerere, one of the Lost Counties. At the ceremonies, in the presence of the President, he declared: ‘We are the prodigal sons of Bunyoro and not Buganda; so, we have come home.’ As the Observer newspaper reported, ‘his declarations didn’t go unrewarded, as Bunyoro Kingdom handed him a traditional robe and the head of the Babito (royal clan) in the kingdom wrapped a barkcloth around the Sabanyala, saying it is a ritual that Bunyoro performs for all kings who have ties with Bunyoro’.7 This symbolic political ritual returned a Lost County ruler to the dominion of Bunyoro, while simultaneously making a point against the Kabaka of Buganda, with whom the President has been feuding over what he sees as Buganda threats to the unity of the State.

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Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism Part of President Museveni’s public persona is now linked to his repeated declarations of unity affirmed by the deep time history of the Bacwezi at Bigo. This colonial invention is on its way now to the global stage, as Museveni is linked to this valorization of ancient kingdoms by his engagement in adventurist military campaigns in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the 1990s. Seen by some of his fellow heads of state in 1998 as being involved in a grandiose hegemonic project— creating a Hima-Tutsi empire—he was challenged by Robert Mugabe, who publically charged him (and walked out on him) with such an intention, declaring that he would fight to the death against it. The immediate issue was Uganda’s engagement with Rwanda in the DCR during 1996. Lurking in the background is the shadow of a very ancient model, the Bunyoro-Kitara Empire. The President of Gambia jumped to Museveni’s defence at the time, saying that he was the new hope for Africa, ‘not an ethnic (p.457) chauvinist bent on re-creating obsolete pre-historic empires’.8 Out of this denial comes a more precise understanding that indeed it is the ‘prehistoric’ empire of BunyoroKitara that Museveni has in mind, if not for Central Africa, at least for Uganda. The widespread popularity of the colonial design and its use as an umbrella concept for nationalistic pronouncement about Ugandan unity is now part of everyday discourse in Uganda. Witness this discussion on a safari website: ‘it’s important to note that the British were not the first people to unite Uganda. Before the British united Uganda, the Bachwezi dynasty controlled parts of Uganda between 1100 AD and 1600 AD. This is evidenced by historical sites like Bigo bya Mugenyi and Omunsa in Bunyoro (Hoima)’; yet another instance where dates from other sites are projected on to Bigo.9

The Printed Word and the Rise of the Subaltern The second subaltern issue I want to address is also related to the reification of historical knowledge through the printed word in East Africa, particularly the influences that printing technology introduced during the colonial and early postcolonial era. As mission presses opened their services to printing topics other than religious tracts, there was a growing literature devoted to culture and history. The effects of such printing have elsewhere been examined for their impact on the production of local history (Henige 1980; Vansina 1965, 1985). I have addressed the question of making subaltern narratives in Africa through the creation of hegemonic colonial interventions, yet this perspective taken alone runs the risk of overlooking other forms of

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Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism subalterneity, particularly when the subaltern speaks, and speaks openly under colonial strictures. As perhaps the most prominent expression of colonial power, the written word was widely emulated among local African historians. This is a trend that began during the colonial period and one that continues today, a process driven by the materiality of the written text as something concrete, complete, and final. Along with the materiality of printed oral traditions came another significant change—how people reacted to materialized representations that had been kept either private or taboo for generations. (p.458) The printing of local and regional oral traditions by mission presses had the effect of privileging histories expressed in printed form over oral texts. Colonial needs to validate oral texts had several major outcomes, one of which was the acceptance of symbolic language as literal historical representation—reifying local myth as historical fact. There were also political exigencies, when colonials needed to play social groups off against one another by calling for the submission of genealogical evidence that then stimulated local fabrication of genealogies with deep roots, in order to gain access to power over other African groups under colonial rule. Both of these processes submerged variation among historical testimonies and led to an almost exclusive focus on the histories of elite groups—resulting in the making of subaltern histories containing details about social conflict and political contests with the very elite groups whose histories were being elevated. Several examples demonstrate how this process has unfolded, as well as how subaltern voices spring up in resistance to hegemonic representation of written, published history. A particularly poignant case is seen in northwestern Tanzania during the late 1940s, when Francis X. Lwamgira—the equivalent of a paramount chief—published a 491-page volume in the Kihaya language about the history of Kiziba kingdom (Lwamgira 1949a; Schmidt 1978). Lwamgira’s history is illustrative of the influence that an educated person could command over the implementation of colonial power. Born into the royal house of Kiziba as a nephew to the King or Mukama,10 Lwamgira quickly became a royal favourite when being raised in the King’s household. By age 15 in 1893 he was appointed as King Mutatembwa’s royal treasurer because he was smart and deeply trusted (Zahoro ms., Francis X. Lwamgira personal files, 1969). He learned to read and write German under German instruction. As one of the first educated young men, he was employed by the Germans to act as a clerk and also assisted King Mutahangarwa (1903–1916) as a scribe, who recorded testimony about Page 15 of 27

Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism the kingdom from elders between 1904 and 1906 (Valbert Rugagarila interview; 16 June 1969, Bugandika), perhaps starting as early as 1903. The king presented his research to Lwamgira in 1906 with the plan that it be typed for eventual publication (Valbert Rugagarila interview; 16 June 1969, Bugandika). Between 1906 and 1914 the document was typed—including a portion that was published within the volume Kiziba: Land und Leute by Rehse (1910).11 Lwamgira attests that he used the writings of the Mukama in his 1949 book as well as the testimony of four elders, two of whom were affiliated with the Kiziba royal house and two who were, interestingly, from non-royal clans (p.459) (Lwamgira 1949a:2).12 An unknown author, evidently someone trusted by Lwamgira, wrote an unpublished preface to the second edition in 1949,13 saying that Lwamgira used the ‘whole manuscripts written by Mukama Mutahangarwa in 1907–1909 phrase by phrase, and discussed the same with the eldest of the Kiziba people with the view to fill the gaps of either missing chapters and paragraphs’.14 Lwamgira had used Mutahangarwa’s papers for his contribution to the 1910 book, but there was obviously much more to say about Kiziba history than the short account published then. The original papers of the Mukama, as well as Lwamgira’s additional research with key informants, remained in Lwamgira’s safekeeping during his various positions within the British colonial government, including the Secretary of the Council of Bakama as well as a stint as the royal regent for Kiziba Kingdom. He had the full account published in 1949 under his name as Amakuru ga Kiziba na Abakama Bamu: Second edition of Kiziba Complete History. He does not identify the press, though it would appear to be Rumuli Press at Bunene Mission in Bukoba, as he tells his readers in the historical pamphlet about Kymutwara Kingdom (Lwamgira 1949b), published the same year. He also stated that the readers would be receiving more publishing updates from Rumuli.15 Lwamgira’s view of Kiziba history as well as the other kingdoms of Buhaya elicited a storm of protest among many clans and lineages with subaltern views of history—long suppressed because of fierce royal sanctions during the precolonial period (Schmidt 1978).16 To speak of a history that contravened official royal history during precolonial times was sufficient cause to seize estates, banish subjects, and even impose the death sentence on heretics. Ironically, with the coming of colonial power, such sanctions could no longer be imposed. However, after centuries of keeping alternative histories subaltern in such settings, change came slowly as print media gradually gained in popularity, especially in missions. It was not until the publishing of this ‘official chronicle’ that many subaltern views were unleashed, in a spontaneous Page 16 of 27

Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism flourish that involved hundreds, even thousands of people who disagreed with the official histories. (p.460) Even more interesting, it also engendered a variety of responses within the royal clan. Voices long suppressed among royals holding different views rose to challenge the official view of the kingdom’s past. We must keep in mind that the later contributions of two non-Babito elders may have introduced views that departed from Babito knowledge and thus elicited reactions from within the royal clan. Though the narrative detail and richness of Lwamgira’s history exceeds most other examples of indigenous history in East Africa (with the notable exception of Apolo Kaggwa’s history of Buganda), its foreword was written in a combative tone—with the intent, as a member of the royal house, to silence critics and those with different ideas. No longer was there a Mukama who could quietly or perhaps publicly deal with a difficult historical heretic with the thrust of a spear or the chop of the royal axe. Instead, the printed word became the bludgeon, the instrument of suppression—something that Lwamgira (1949a:5) openly reveals in his preface, namely: Here is the relevant book which I have written, if you do not read it, you will always know our history only from hearsay in drinking sessions or in bereavement gatherings. Buy Kamampaka to settle arguments about historical facts. If you cannot read, your schooling person will buy and read this book lest he should be versed in foreign history and be ignorant of his own. This was meant to subdue debate and counter claims, working in tandem with the secondary title of the book, which appears on the third page (a second title page) simply as Kamampaka, which he translates as ‘arbitrator’, but which colloquially in this context comes closer to ‘The Final Word’. Instead of resolving historical arguments, it predictably fosters and drives debates, even to the point where Babito lineages outside of those vested with maintaining the Babito official history felt compelled to express their views. Several alternative histories were published, using the power of the printed word to counteract the royal history. The unpublished accounts are just as informative as those that reached print. All the histories drawn up to counter Kamarampaka result from groups who met and meticulously recorded their alternative perspectives, oftentimes copying the results by hand or on carbon paper for individual members and distributing them in lieu of extensive publication. Though perhaps not as effective as printed responses, this form of limited distribution was nonetheless an effective tool for preserving points of view that Page 17 of 27

Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism went against the official chronicles. Because they were copied and had limited distribution, they strongly resemble what we call ‘grey literature’ today—mimeographed papers and other reports of limited circulation. The other genre of subaltern texts includes the many individual accounts, surviving as manuscripts that people recorded over the years following the publication of Lwamgira’s book and pamphlets. This tertiary level of (p.461) subalterneity marks an important form of resistance against official royal and clan histories. They were not distributed, but kept within families to remind progeny that lineages had different histories from those being printed and distributed by other means, and that each lineage has its own particular contribution to feature prominently. In each of these cases, the spontaneous voicing of alternative histories is a powerful example of subalterns speaking for themselves—not dependent upon outside academics or other intermediaries.

Reprising the Subaltern in Uganda and Northwestern Tanzania Expressions of subaltern views through colonial print technology in Buhaya stand in stark contrast to what transpired in Uganda over approximately the same time period during the twentieth century. The Uganda setting differs significantly from Buhaya in the rapidity with which the printed word was adopted by the local elite in Uganda, such as Apolo Kaggwa (1971 [1901]) and others. Very early in the application of print technology, Bikunya’s 1927 history of Bunyoro reified Gorju’s (1920) acceptance of the 1909 colonial publication of alleged oral traditions tied to Bigo—the first of a number of an indigenous affirmations. The conditions for voicing subaltern views under British colonialism in Uganda were significantly restrained by the imposition of Baganda administrators in the Lost Counties of Bunyoro. After Baganda, historical representations about Bigo became concretized and valorized as popular history, the problems embedded in representing contradictory histories at the local level would have been palpable. Certainly, the colonial government would not have welcomed rebellious representations; subaltern views would have explicitly contradicted the imposition of Baganda rule over the Lost Counties. In Buhaya, indirect rule was substantially different in substance and tone, with local administrative officers always Haya kings—no matter how often the British authorities sacked those who did not meet their needs. British employment of Francis X. Lwamgira in privileged, powerful positions helped to set the scene for his local legitimacy, Page 18 of 27

Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism especially when in 1931 he, not one of the kings, was selected to represent the Haya in an official visit to Britain. Furthermore, his favoured position as Secretary to the Council of Bakama—as primus inter pares—laid the groundwork for the widespread receptivity that initially greeted his publications, if not their substance. The absence in Buyaha of a monumental site such as Bigo must also be seen as another way the Haya escaped colonial fabrications about their past and the concomitant constraints on alternative histories that infected Uganda. The (p.462) materiality of Bigo locked tight the idea that the Bacwezi once had their capital there, with archaeological evidence that made subaltern views even more remote and assured the propagation of a colonial myth into contemporary times. The role of archaeology with its potent materiality that so perfectly complemented the fabrications of oral traditions has made the decolonization of archaeology in Uganda a difficult undertaking. Decolonization of archaeology in Buhaya, by contrast, does not need to overcome the alignments seen in Uganda. There were no monumental sites about which fabrications could be constructed during the colonial presence. The one site of significance, the 500 BC shrine in Katuruka where ironworking was first practiced (Schmidt 1978, 2006), remained outside popular discourse until the end of the twentieth century—too late to influence or in any way affect how social groups represented their histories or responded to Lwamgira’s writings. History ownership and then the open voicing of alternative histories as seen in Buhaya mark the valorization of subalterns and their escape from oppressed conditions. This could only have happened when the harsh royal sanctions were interdicted and neutralized, a circumstance that arose with the coming of colonialism and its system of governance and privileged technologies. Printing, with its imprint of legitimacy under Western colonialism, opened a myriad of opportunities for writing oppositional critiques that challenged the State chronicles of history and provoked a plethora of views that deeply enrich the historical literature of East Africa. Twenty years after the publication of Lwamgira’s accounts, I began oral tradition research in Buhaya. It was within this atmosphere of open inquiry and readiness to challenge orthodox, royal representations that I found many informants ready to share their historical research with me. This same tenor of valorizing subaltern testimonies helped enormously in opening avenues to understand better the alternative histories surrounding Kaiija shrine, its ancient attributes as an ironworking centre, and its history (Schmidt 1978)—particularly subaltern Bacwezi histories that showed the history-makers of King Page 19 of 27

Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism Rugomora (seventeenth century) appropriated and wove Bacwezi histories into royal history for reasons of political legitimacy (Schmidt 2006). Had I used the account for Kihanja Kingdom published by Lwamgira, for example, critical ways of seeing this history would have been occluded and I would have missed the importance of the capital site of King Rugomora—the same place as the sacred Kaiija shrine. The proliferation of subaltern accounts in Buhaya is directly connected to the kinds of testimonies that were readily available to document the history of Kaiija shrine and its occupation by the Hinda dynasty under King Rugomora. The results of those inquiries have deconstructed key historical orthodoxies, many of them originating during the colonial era, about the untrustworthiness of oral traditions and their capacity to reach into the deep past.

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Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism (p.463) Conclusion The rapid and excited growth of subaltern accounts in Buhaya after six decades of colonial rule helps to resolve the conundrum that postcolonial thinkers such as Edward Said (1979) pose—that it is always better to let the subaltern speak for themselves—but at the same time we must recognize that it is a fiction that this can normally happen. The power issues that inform self-representation as a fiction arise also in the conundrum posed by Spivak (1988), who questions how elite academics can speak on behalf of the subaltern, while also acknowledging that ‘ignoring the role of subalterns continues the imperialist project silencing the oppressed and marginalized of history’ (Liebmann 2008:19). The Haya experience points to the total absence of academic actors during this dynamic eruption of alternative histories. Free from outside ties or underwriting, local clan voices were amplified and heard. We may now challenge the universalizing parts of Spivak’s construct given the impact of colonial printing technology on self-representation and identity among smaller social groups in Buhaya. As archaeologists of history, we come to realize that we are witnesses to historical process, not intermediaries or ‘voices’ for the marginalized (see also Martindale, this volume). The vital issue here for African archaeology, as well as archaeology in many other world regions, is to listen to and relate the subaltern voice precisely, fully acknowledging ownership of texts pertaining to history and culture—a process best allied with representing or speaking about the subaltern. This moment may be an ideal time to fashion such critical historical archaeologies. The twentieth-century history of Uganda and Buhaya history-making instructs that multivocality is silenced when multiple testimonies are homogenized and reduced to: ‘oral traditions say . . .’; a process that filters out contradictions and unwanted evidence to arrive at comfortable, often politically motivated syntheses. Our quick reprise of nationalistic posturing in Uganda using extensive references to this construct impresses upon us that the reification of colonial myth must remain a vital part of archaeological as well as historical inquiry that seeks to decolonize the past. Yet we must temper this goal with the realization that the envelopment of Bacwezi myth at Bigo into contemporary political rhetoric ensures, sadly, that attempts to decolonize this discourse will be like a mosquito trying to stop a speeding locomotive. That this did not happen in Buhaya, on the other hand, has allowed for free exploration of unofficial representations that have opened new ways to think about the African past, as well as to consider the subaltern in African history-making. References

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Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism Bibliography references: Baines, D. L. 1909 Ancient Forts. Official Uganda Gazette. 15 May:137– 38. Bikunya, Petero 1927 Ky’Abakama ba Bunyoro. Shelton Press, London. Connah, Graham 1975 The Archaeology of Benin. Clarendon Press, Oxford. (p.464) Farelius, Birgitta 2008 Origins of Kingship Traditions and Symbolism in the Great Lakes Region of Africa. PhD dissertation, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University. Garlake, Peter 1974 Excavations at Obalara’s Land, Ife, Nigeria. West African Journal of Archaeology 4:111–48. Garlake, Peter 1977 Excavations on the Woya Asiri Family Land in Ife, Western Nigeria. West African Journal of Archaeology 7:57–96. Gorju, Julien 1920 Entre le Victoria, l’Albert et L’Edouard: Ethnographie de la partie anglaise du Vicariat de l’Uganda. Oberthur, Rennes. Gray, John 1935 The Riddle of Biggo. Uganda Journal 2:226–33. Henige, David 1980 ‘The Disease of Writing’: Ganda and Nyoro Kinglists in a Newly Literate World. In The African Past Speaks, edited by Joseph C. Miller, pp. 240–61. Dawson, Folkestone, UK. Kaggwa, Apolo 1971[1901] Basekabaka be Buganda. Uganda Bookshop, Kampala. Katate, Aloysius, and Lazaro Kamugungunu 1955 Abagabe b’Ankole. Kampala. Kiwanuka, M. S. M. Semakula 1971 The Kings of Buganda. A translation of and introduction to Apolo Kaggwa 1901 Basekabaka be Buganda. East Africa Publishing House, Nairobi. Lanning, Ernest C. 1966 Excavations at Mubende Hill. Uganda Journal 30:153–63. Lanning, Ernest C. 1970 Ntusi: An Ancient Capital Site in Western Uganda. Azania 5:39–54. Liebmann, Matthew 2008 Introduction: The Intersections of Archaeology and Postcolonial Studies. In Archaeology and the

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Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism Postcolonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi, pp. 7–32. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Lwamgira, Francis X. 1949a Amakuru ga Kiziba na Abakama Bamu. Second edition of Kiziba Complete History. Publisher unknown. Lwamgira, Francis X. 1949b Amakuru B’Abakama ba Kyamutwara (Abankango). Rumuli, Bukoba, Tanzania. Maggs, Tim O. 1976 Iron Age Patterns and Sotho History on the Southern Highveld. World Archaeology 7:318–32. Mignolo, Walter D. 2000 Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledge and Border Thinking. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. Ogot, Bethwell A. 1967 History of the Southern Luo, i: Migration and Settlement, 1500–1900. East African Publishing House, Nairobi. Oliver, Roland 1953 A Question About the Bachwezi. Uganda Journal 17:135–7. Oliver, Roland 1955 The Traditional Histories of Buganda, Bunyoro, and Nkole. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 85:111–17. Oliver, Roland 1959 Ancient Capital Sites of Ankole. Uganda Journal 23:51–63. Oliver, Roland 1963 Discernable Developments in the Interior, c.1500– 1840. In History of East Africa, edited by Roland Oliver and Gervaise Mathew, pp. 169–211. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Posnansky, Merrick 1966 Kingship, Archaeology, and Historical Myth. Uganda Journal 30:1–12. Posnansky, Merrick 1969 Bigo bya Mugenyi. Uganda Journal 33:125–50. Rehse, Hermann 1910 Kiziba: Land und Leute. Strecker & Schröder, Stuttgart. Reid, Andrew M. 1991 The Role of Cattle in the Later Iron Age Communities of Southern Uganda. PhD dissertation, Division of Archaeology, University of Cambridge. (p.465) Robertshaw, Peter 1991 Recent Archaeological Surveys in Western Uganda. Nyame Akuma 36:40–6.

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Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism Robertshaw, Peter 1994 Archaeological Survey, Ceramic Analysis, and State Formation in Western Uganda. African Archaeological Review 12:105–31. Robertshaw, Peter 2001 The Age and Function of Ancient Earthworks of Western Uganda. Uganda Journal 47:20–33. Robertshaw, Peter, and David Taylor 2000 Climate Change and the Rise of Political Complexity in Western Uganda. Journal of African History 41:1–28. Said, Edward 1979 Orientalism. Vintage Books, New York. Schmidt, Peter R. 1978 Historical Archaeology: A Structural Approach in an African Culture. Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut. Schmidt, Peter R. 1990 Oral Traditions, Archaeology and History: A Short Reflective History. In A History of African Archaeology, edited by Peter Robertshaw, pp. 252–70. James Currey, London. Schmidt, Peter R. 2006 Historical Archaeology in Africa: Representation, Social Memory, and Oral Traditions. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California. Schmidt, Peter R. 2009 What Is Postcolonial about Archaeology in Africa? In Postcolonial Archaeologies in Africa, edited by Peter Schmidt, pp. 1–20. School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Schmidt, Peter R. 2010 Trauma and Social Memory in NW Tanzania: Organic, Spontaneous Community Collaboration. Journal of Social Archaeology 10:255–79. Shinnie, Peter L. 1960 Excavations at Bigo. Uganda Journal 14:16–28. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 1988 Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Brossberg, pp. 271–313. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 1996 Subaltern Talk: Interview with the Editors (29 October, 1993). In The Spivak Reader, edited by Donna Landry and Gerald M. Maclean, pp. 287–308. Routledge, New York. Sutton, John E. G. 1998 Ntusi and Bigo: Farmers, Cattle-herders and Rulers in Western Uganda, AD1000–1500. Azania 33: 39–72.

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Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism Tosh, John 2002 The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods, and New Directions in the Study of Modern History. Third edition. Longman, London. Vansina, Jan 1965 Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology. Aldine, Chicago. Vansina, Jan 1985 Oral Tradition as History. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. Van Noten, Francis L. 1972 Les Tombes du roi Cyirima Rujugira et de la reine-mère Nyirayuhi Kanjogera. Musée royale de l’Afrique Centrale, Tervuren, Belgium. Wayland, Edward J. 1934 Notes on the Bigo bya Mugenyi. Uganda Journal 1:21–32. Wright, Henry T. and Susan Kus 1979 An Archaeological Reconnaissance of Ancient Imerina. In Madagascar in History, edited by Raymond K. Kent, pp. 1–31. Foundation for Malagasy Studies, Albany, California. (p.466) Notes:

(1) A number of university libraries in the USA have had collections of the Uganda Journal from the earliest days of its publication. (2) It does fit with more recent histories of the site. (3) This assessment is not changed or affected by Farelius (2008:202), who argues that the testimony (1992) of one informant links the name of an area near Bigo with the name of the hole in which Wamara drowned with his white cow. Ferelius’s interpretation is highly speculative—much like previous attempts to link the Bacwezi to Bigo. Given the voluminous national discourse about this matter over the past two decades, testimonies linked to Bigo—and particularly opaque testimonies of this genre—are likely contaminated and lack the specificity and symbolic weight to sustain such an interpretation. (4) Farelius (2008), in an elaborate scenario, creates a Bacwezi court at Bigo. This type of imaginary narrative misleads while it simultaneously reifies the colonial invention. (5) A translation of a speech given by President. Y. Museveni at the coronation anniversary of Omukama of Bunyoro Kitara, Solomon Gafabusa Iguru. Written by the Observer, a Ugandan newspaper, also

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Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism published online. Accessed 11 November 2011 at: . (6) The use of ‘ware’ does not fit into the syntax and appears to be a leftover element from reports that discuss ceramic wares and clay pots; a non-archaeologist might not understand that they are equivalent and hence the inclusion of ‘ware’. (7) Edward Ssekika, 14 June 2010: ‘Museveni to Mengo: I’ll Cut off Your Head’. New Vision. Accessed 12 November 2011: . (8) A. Mwenda: The Moment Mugabe Told Museveni: ‘Your intelligence is exaggerated.’ newzimbabwe.com. Accessed 18 November 2011 at: . (9) A Brief History of Uganda: Uganda Before Colonisation (Pre– colonisation), Primate Watch Safaris Ltd. Accessed 12 November 2011 at: . The reference to Omunsa is to Robertshaw’s (2001) dating of the earliest occupation or use of Munsa to approximately 900 AD. (10) Lwamgira’s birth date appears as both July 1878 and 1875 in different documents from his personal files. (11) Rehse mentions that Lwamgira significantly assisted him in this endeavour and noted his contribution, dating it to 23 August 1903. This first effort was a very summary treatment and may have stimulated Lwamgira and the Mukama to continue their research effort over the next several years. (12) Charles Lwamgira, grandson of Francis X. Lwamgira, made the personal files of his grandfather available. (13) This ms. (no. 01), titled ‘Prefatory Note to the Kiziba History Edited in 1910’ is part of a larger essay in which Lwamgira is a contributor. (14) Mzee Rugagarila said Lwamgira helped with the research during 1904–1906, which does not take into account his earlier help with the Rehse volume. The period several years after 1906 referenced in this ms. (no. 01) may refer to the reworking of the first manuscript with four

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Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism elders, though the exact sequencing of events is no longer remembered. (15) According to Mzee Rugagarila, Lwamgira sent the manuscript to the U.S. for publication sometime between 1917 and 1932; the only dated copies bear the 1949 imprint. Interview, 19 June 1969, Bugandika, Kiziba. (16) Alternative views also arose in other kingdoms in reaction to the smaller volumes that Lwamgira published in 1949.

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Commentary

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Commentary Subaltern Archaeologies Peter van Dommelen

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0022

Abstract and Keywords This chapter explores the notion of subaltern archaeologies and the use of material culture for studying the colonised. It considers the implications of oppression and domination for the lives and experiences of the people who had to endure colonialism. It also reflects on how the conceptual emphasis on and concern with the colonised in general, perhaps more appropriately termed subaltern, drive colonial debates in intellectual terms. Keywords:   subaltern archaeologies, material culture, colonised, oppression, domination, colonialism

Introduction The colonized have come to feature increasingly prominently in archaeological research over the past fifteen years or so, as colonial studies in archaeology have thrived in the wake of the rise of postcolonial theory in Western academia. This trend has been particularly marked in the fields of Roman, Mediterranean, and Historical Archaeology, as colonial settlements and occupation have long played a key role in the regions and periods explored in these

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Commentary fields; it is therefore not surprising that postcolonial ideas and approaches have mostly been taken up in precisely these areas of the discipline (Liebmann 2008:4–5; van Dommelen 2011:1–2). It is no exaggeration to claim that drawing attention to and understanding the role of the colonized lies at the heart of postcolonial aspirations. Intellectually and indeed ideologically, they root in the conceptual decolonization and emancipation of the Third World that was proposed and practised in the 1960s by authors, activists, and intellectuals like Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Albert Memmi, and Mahatma Gandhi. The need ‘to liberate the past’ is explicitly included, because colonialism, in Fanon’s words (1967:169), ‘turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it’. Writing ‘decolonized histories’ in which indigenous people play their part and that enable them to reclaim their place in the present-day world, has therefore become a central plank in postcolonial studies ever since (e.g. Said 1989; Young 2001:159–334). While Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) did much to galvanize the wide variety of postcolonial ideas into a more or less coherent academic subject, it was the so-called Subaltern Studies group who most forcefully drew attention to the ways in which the colonized were systematically marginalized. This was a group of Indian historians who opened their first joint publication with the statement that ‘[t]he historiography of Indian nationalism has for a (p.470) long time been dominated by elitism’, rooted in ‘colonialist’ and ‘bourgeois-nationalist’ world-views (Guha 1982:1). Reacting to the ‘inadequacy of elitist historiography’, which ‘by virtue of its class outlook’ ignored the ‘politics of the people’ (Guha 1982:3; original emphasis), the self-styled ‘Subaltern Scholars’ borrowed the term ‘subaltern’ from the Italian political activist Antonio Gramsci to bring under one conceptual heading ‘the mass of labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and country—that is, the people’ (Guha 1982:3). As these quotes readily show, it was the Subaltern Scholars’ intention from the outset to shift the focus of academic representations to ‘the people’ and to write histories ‘from below’; while the colonial contexts of the Indian subcontinent were firmly in the picture, the conceptual net of the Subaltern Studies group was cast much more widely to encompass marginalized groups in society more generally, including women, peasants, and minority ethnic groups (Arnold 1984; Chaturvedi 2000).

People Without History—but with Material Culture Page 2 of 10

Commentary A different route towards the same goal of writing alternative nonWestern histories was pioneered around the same time by Eric Wolf. Working on a global scale and reacting in particular to the European bias of World Systems and centre-periphery theories, he actively attempted to de-centre Europe and the West and to foreground instead the ‘people without history’, who had been marginalized in conventional European and Western historiography (Wolf 1982:3–7). As both Wolf and the Subaltern Scholars have eloquently demonstrated, there is certainly scope in the available historical evidence to write such ‘Other Histories’. Many historians and anthropologists have indeed followed suit, taking up along the way Dipesh Chakrabarty’s explicitly postcolonial challenge ‘to provincialize Europe’ and to shift their perspective away from Europe by writing ‘Other Histories’ not just the Third World but also in Europe itself (Chakrabarty 1992, 2000; Hastrup 1992). There remains nevertheless a fundamental conundrum, which is neatly summed up by Gayatri Spivak’s famous question ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ (Spivak 1988). Under this title, she explored the extent to which subalterns may be able to speak their mind and to have a voice, pointing out that a scholarly, constructed, alternative view is not necessarily the same as a subaltern voice. This critique has laid bare a key assumption of the Subaltern Studies group, which is that, as Guha (1982:3) put it, subalterns constituted ‘an autonomous domain’ (original emphasis). In ensuing debates on peasant autonomy and subaltern agency, Spivak’s doubts have gradually been endorsed as the assumed (p.471) peasant autonomy was increasingly called into question in the 1990s (Adas 1991; Mitchell 1990; Scott 1990; see also Young 2001:337– 59). Reaching back to Antonio Gramsci’s prison notebooks once more, the notion of ‘hegemony’ has been taken up to understand the connections between peasant and more generally subaltern passivity and resistance in the face of elite and/or colonial power. Glossed generally as a ‘conception of the world’, hegemony has been described as ‘that part of a dominant worldview which has been naturalized and . . . [has] “hidden” itself in orthodoxy’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991:25; cf. Kurtz 1996): in other words, subaltern consciousness and agency can neither be divorced from nor reduced to elite normative social standards, colonial or otherwise. Subaltern agency may thus be seen as occupying what postcolonial scholars have called the ambivalent ‘Third Space’ created between and within the encounter of different social, ethnic,

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Commentary and cultural groups (Bhabha 1990; Ortner 2006:42–62; van Dommelen 2006:107–8). The implication is—as Gayatri Spivak surmised—that writing other histories is very difficult without other sources of information, because subaltern consciousness and agency are to a notable but varying extent implicated in and steered by elite views and attitudes. Alternative evidence can, however, be found in ethnographic interlocutors (cf. Said 1989:209–10) or in the material culture used by subalterns. The relevance of material culture for writing history is of course a point that has often and eloquently been made, most recently for instance by Ann Stahl (2010) and the editors to this volume. Even if substantial case studies have been realized, like Kent Lightfoot’s (2005) exploration of the Spanish missions in Alta California, the significance of material culture cannot be emphasized often enough when it comes to postcolonial theory, where material culture remains a relatively unknown quantity (cf. van Dommelen 2006, 2011).

Material Culture and Subaltern Practices One of the first substantial studies to draw extensively and explicitly on material culture for exploring the colonized has been Michael Given’s The Archaeology of the Colonized (2004). In a series of case studies ranging from Old Kingdom Egypt and Bronze Age Cyprus to British Palestine and the nineteenth-century Scottish Highlands, he demonstrated how archaeological evidence makes it possible to understand the lives and experiences of people in very diverse circumstances, in both colonial situations and other contexts of oppression and exploitation (Given 2004:162). While the label ‘colonized’ may comprise hugely diverse groups in the societies concerned, Given convincingly argues that they nevertheless share one major feature, which is their economic exploitation—which in his words was ‘the core of imperial oppression’ (Given 2004:163–4). (p.472) Oppression and domination are therefore not just a defining element of colonialism in general but they also mark and structure the lives and experiences of the people who found themselves at the receiving end of colonialism. Coming to terms with institutionalized inequality to find one’s place in colonial society loomed very large in these people’s lives and experiences and it is this very process that Gramsci captured with his notions of hegemony, subaltern consciousness, and resistance (Kurtz 1996). As Given describes both carefully and evocatively, these abstract concepts thus stand for very real practices on the ground like tax collection and tax evasion—and it

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Commentary is these activities and the material culture that was involved that can be traced and documented archaeologically. It is precisely these subaltern practices that archaeologists have picked up on, most notably in the fields of Roman, Mediterranean, and Historical Archaeology, where postcolonial ideas have been explored most widely. This is nicely demonstrated by the volumes Roman Imperialism: Post-colonial Perspectives (Webster and Cooper 1996) and the 1997 World Archaeology issue on culture contact and colonialism (Gosden 1997), which represent the earliest archaeological explorations of these matters. The contributions by Jane Webster in particular stand out as she explicitly sought to trace subaltern identities and practices, including overt resistance, among the indigenous inhabitants of Britain under Roman occupation (Webster 1996, 1997); she has since extended this line of work to studies of cultural resistance in the nineteenth-century Scottish Western Isles and Roman slavery (Webster 1999, 2008). In the wake of discussions about subaltern agency and practices, interest in the nature of these practices has steadily grown. Inspired in particular by studies of silent and cultural resistance, including archaeological work, the ambivalence of subaltern practice between elite standards and local customs has pushed the notion of hybridity into prominence (e.g. van Dommelen 2002; Webster 2001). As more archaeologists have begun to refer to this concept, in many cases emphasizing hybrid objects rather than practices, however, the subaltern dimension and the ambivalent connections with resistance and hegemony risk being lost sight of (van Dommelen and Rowlands 2012).

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Commentary Subaltern Archaeologies The variability and significance of subaltern practices, hybrid and otherwise, are well borne out by the contributions to the present volume, even if the range of colonial situations covered is restricted to European expansion in primarily the northern Atlantic, the North American continent, Australia, and Africa over the past two to three centuries. This book not only shows that historical archaeologists are fully engaging with the range of topics and concerns that are raised by the colonized as an academic object of study, but it also demonstrates (p.473) through its regional and chronological focus that historical archaeologists have risen to the challenge to deploy specifically local details of focused case studies and yet contribute actively to wider and more abstract or historical debates in colonial studies and archaeology at large. In doing so, this book may be seen as taking its lead from Leland Ferguson’s (1992) pioneering study of the so-called ‘Colono ware’ pottery, as it offers ample and solid evidence that studying the famous ‘small things forgotten’ may well go hand in hand with sophisticated theoretical reflection. More specifically concerning the colonized as a theme, the contributions to the present volume first of all leave the reader in no doubt that they do not regard the colonized as a single or coherent community. Many contributors are quick to dispel any notion that a concern with the colonized might imply accepting a binary understanding of colonial situations: the complexity and variability of colonial situations and the multiplicity of colonized groups within them are brought out very clearly. Of the topics and issues raised in the foregoing, it is material culture and hybridity that surely raise most debate and, at the same time, give rise to most interesting discussions of specific colonial situations and objects. The contributions by Rob Mann and Diana Dipaolo Loren are perhaps most emblematic in this regard, as they both demonstrate very convincingly how objects were actively used by local actors in ways that made material sense in the local contexts and that spun new webs of meaning around these objects that do not necessarily coincide with those conventionally contributed to them: the conclusion that using buttons does not automatically imply the adoption of colonial dress styles is a welcome reminder of the flexibility of material culture meanings. Worth noting in particular is that these meanings already coexisted in the colonial situations at the time and it is this multivocality that makes material culture particularly powerful in colonial situations, as was already argued by Nicholas Thomas with

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Commentary regard to so-called ponchos in nineteenth-century Polynesia (Thomas 1999; cf. van Dommelen and Rowlands 2012). Overall, it seems to me that the main message that comes through loud and clear from these contributions is that the conceptual emphasis on and concern with the colonized in general, perhaps more appropriately termed subaltern, may surely be seen as driving colonial debates in intellectual terms. References Bibliography references: Adas, Michael 1991 South Asian Resistance in Comparative Perspective. In Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia, edited by Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash, pp. 290–305. University of California Press, Berkeley. Arnold, David 1984 Gramsci and Peasant Subalternity in India. Journal of Peasant Studies 11:155–77. (p.474) Bhabha, Homi 1990 The Third Space. Interview with Homi Bhabha. In Identity: Community, Culture and Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, pp. 207–21. Lawrence and Wishart, London. Chakrabarty, Dipesh 1992 Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the Critique of History. Cultural Studies 6:337–57. Chakrabarty, Dipesh 2000 Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. Chaturvedi, Vinayak 2000 Introduction. In Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi, pp. vii–xix. Verso, London. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff 1991 Of Revelation and Revolution 1: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Fanon, Frantz 1967 The Wretched of the Earth. Penguin, Harmondsworth. Ferguson, Leland 1992 Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650–1800. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.

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Commentary Given, Michael 2004 The Archaeology of the Colonized. Routledge, London. Gosden, Christopher (ed.) 1997 Culture Contact and Colonialism. World Archaeology 28(3). Guha, Ranjit 1982 On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India. In Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Ranjit Guha, pp. 1–8. Oxford University Press, Delhi. Hastrup, K. (ed.) 1992 Other Histories. Routledge, London. Kurtz, Donald V. 1996 Hegemony and Anthropology: Gramsci, Exegeses, Reinterpretations. Critique of Anthropology 16(2):103–35. Liebmann, Matthew 2008 Introduction: The Intersections of Archaeology and Postcolonial Studies. In Archaeology of the Postcolonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Rizvi, pp. 1–20. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Lightfoot, Kent 2005 Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers. University of California Press, Berkeley. Mitchell, Timothy 1990 Everyday Metaphors of Power. Theory & Society 19:545–77. Ortner, Sherry B. 2006 Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power and the Acting Subject. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina. Said, Edward 1978 Orientalism. Vintage Books, New York. Said, Edward 1989 Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors. Critical Inquiry 15(2):205–25. Scott, James C. 1990 Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. Spivak, Gayatri 1988 Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice. In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, pp. 271–313. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Stahl, Ann 2010 Material Histories. In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by D. Hicks and M. Beaudry, pp. 150– 72. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

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Commentary Thomas, Nicholas 1999 The Case of the Misplaced Ponchos. Speculations Concerning the History of Cloth in Polynesia. Journal of Material Culture 4:5–20. van Dommelen, Peter 2002 Ambiguous Matters: Colonialism and Local Identities in Punic Sardinia. In The Archaeology of Colonialism, edited by C. Lyons and John K. Papadopoulos, pp. 121–47. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. (p.475) van Dommelen, Peter 2006 Colonial Matters. In Material Culture and Postcolonial Theory in Colonial Situations, edited by Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Külcher, Patricia Spyer, and Michael Rowlands, pp. 104–24. Sage, London. van Dommelen, Peter 2012 Postcolonial Archaeologies between Discourse and Practice. World Archaeology 43:1–6. van Dommelen, Peter and Michael Rowlands 2011 Material Concerns and Colonial Encounters. In Materiality and Practice. Transformative Capacities of Intercultural Encounters, edited by Joseph Maran and Philipp W. Stockhammer, pp. 20–31. Oxbow, Oxford. Webster, Jane 1996 Ethnographic Barbarity: Colonial Discourse and ‘Celtic Warrior Societies’. In Roman Imperialism: Post-colonial Perspectives, edited by J. Webster and Nick Cooper, pp. 111–23. Archaeology Monograph No. 3. Leicester University Press, Leicester. Webster, Jane 1997 Necessary Comparisons: A Post-colonial Approach to Religious Syncretism in the Roman Provinces. World Archaeology 28:324–38. Webster, Jane 1999 Resisting Traditions: Ceramics, Identity and Consumer Choice in the Outer Hebrides from 1800 to the Present. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 3:53–73. Webster, Jane 2001 Creolizing the Roman Provinces. American Journal of Archaeology 105:209–25. Webster, Jane 2008 Less Beloved: Roman Archaeology, Slavery and the Failure to Compare. Archaeological Dialogues 15:103–23. Webster, Jane and Nick Cooper (eds) 1996 Roman Imperialism: Postcolonial Perspectives. Archaeology Monographs No. 3. Leicester University Press, Leicester. Wolf, Eric 1982 Europe and the People without History. University of California Press, Berkeley. Page 9 of 10

Commentary Young, Robert J. C. 2001 Postcolonialism. An Historical Introduction. Blackwell, Oxford.

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Commentary

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Commentary The Archaeology of the Colonized and Global Archaeological Theory Chris Gosden

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0023

Abstract and Keywords This chapter discusses the archaeology of the colonised within the context of global archaeological theory. It stresses the need to avoid making a dichotomy between the coloniser and colonised, or Incomers and Indigenous. It also considers how colonialism alters people, values, and relations with other people and with things before concluding with a reflection on the gap in the broad general area of materiality and social ontologies. Keywords:   archaeology, colonised, archaeological theory, coloniser, Incomers, Indigenous, colonialism, materiality, social ontologies

Introduction This volume raises a great number of pertinent issues; many more than I can address within a short commentary. There are a number of issues I see as key, which I will outline below, but the overall impression of the chapters is of a burgeoning field, with a mass of new data, as well as one in which the debate is evolving and developing. The main point that pretty well all contributors make is that we should not create too stark a dichotomy between colonizers and colonized, or Incomers and Indigenous. There are a number of important reasons for not making Page 1 of 9

Commentary this division: it might lead to biased notions of agency in which the incomers dominate, but, more importantly, many of the identities that derive from the colonial encounter arise from the nature of that encounter and not from pre-existing modalities of class, gender, or ethnicity that people bring to it. As Marx and Engels wrote of capitalism (in The Communist Manifesto)—all that is solid melts into air; similarly, through colonialism, people, values, and relations with other people and with things are all radically altered. The questions are now not ‘Who were colonizer and colonized and what did they do to each other?’ but ‘How do we think of these modes of transformation in all basic sets of relations and what or who were the key agents in these transformations?’ However, many of us would accept that all human life happens in transformation, so that we need to ask the subsidiary question, ‘What is special about the transformations of colonialism?’ In this volume, Kurt Jordan poses this question most clearly and usefully, although I would not agree with his notion that discussions of colonialism necessarily lead us to take the vantage point of the colonizer. (p.477) I would certainly not assume that colonialism is the best lens through which to view interactions over the past few hundred years (or indeed the past few thousand). But it does have some strength as a term, in that it links archaeology with a range of discussions in other disciplines and it does focus our attention on issues of power and identity, so that an understanding of the past can link with a set of emancipatory moves in the politics of the present. For good political reasons, contemporary indigenous people are keen to assert their status as Indigenous (where the capital ‘I’ is important), and this may be in tension with those of us studying the past who want to temporalize all identities. The study of the past and of actions in the present have different imperatives, although they might be linked, and we need to work through these tensions. For me, as I suspect it is for Jordan, colonialism is a term which helps destabilize identities, not the reverse. To take an example outside the scope of this book, most working on the Roman Empire from a postcolonial point of view have critiqued the notion of ‘Romanization’ (Hingley 2000; Mattingly 2010; Woolf 2000), in part because the Romans did not impose a ready-made Roman culture on the provinces, but rather because what came to be known as Roman culture was created through the materials, people, and ideas that flowed through the empire. The Romans were ‘Romanized’ through their empire just as much as anyone else and were partly of an unstable and changeable cultural field just as much as the Mauretanians, the Britons, or Gauls.

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Commentary The empire is also striking back in the case of Britain, as can be seen in the work of Catherine Hall and others (Hall 2002, Hall and Rose 2006). British culture has for too long been seen as a product of history within Britain, then to be exported to the colonies. Now that culture can be seen as deriving from colonial interactions (we need only think of tea and potatoes, two ‘British’ items, not now marked in any way as foreign), and we need to question how things flowed and became local, not global. All the little interactions within colonies and beyond contributed to changing all parties to those interactions. Colonial relations were ambiguous, experimental, and dangerous—no party knew how relations would unfold, whether they were successful, or indeed the terms in which success could be measured. People did think they were in charge at particular points in history, but they were almost certainly mistaken and it is not a mistake we need to make in retrospect. Lastly, the colonizers are also strange to any of us in the present, whether they be sixteenth-century Spaniards in Florida or nineteenth-century Britons in northern Australia. For me the term colonialism is dangerous if it has a normalizing effect, making us think that we know any of the parties or modes of interaction well. Colonial relations represent as much a foreign country as any area of the past and it is difference that we need to be alert to, rather than any perceived similarity. Many of the chapters in this book make this general point, but perhaps not all of them destabilize the culture and mores of the colonizers as thoroughly as they might.

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Commentary (p.478) All Participants Create Colonial Forms In the bad old days all energy and innovation came from the colonists, leaving resistance as the most positive option for all other actors. Now we do not believe this, partly because the binary divide between colonizer and colonized is hard to trace and partly because actions are multiple, open-ended, and have unintended consequences. One paradox of this volume is that although most contributors make the same general point—that agency can be traced to all parties, including the natives—each chapter also insists on the local nature and particularity of the story it has to tell. As someone with an urge towards comparison, this led me to wonder whether there were any commonalities between any of the cases and, if so, what? Many chapters bring out the point that the discrete names given to indigenous people, whether in the Vancouver area, Victoria (Australia), Great Lakes, or the Caribbean, hid the multiple and variable sets of relations that made up native groups even prior to outsiders arriving. Relations can be best seen as unfolding at a variety of different scales, and important sets of exchange relations may well have crossed what might otherwise be seen as boundaries between groups. Outsiders (whether those around Fort Lane, Oregon, or pastoralist stations in Australia) varied a lot in background, attitude, and attempts to develop histories. Métis groups of various types and origins complicate things further. Nowhere can we see colonizer or colonized as simple and discrete groups with clearly defined ideologies or forms of practice. Indigenous groups did not die out, despite rumours of their demise, and can be found in the evidence of pottery and other often mundane material forms. A place designed to keep the natives out and in their place, such as Fort Moore, South Carolina, in fact let them in, opening up considerable possibilities for interchanges based around sex, food, artifacts, and violence. Once again, the fort’s inhabitants not only included natives, but a great range of outsiders with their own aims and values.

Gaps One gap in the literature cited in this volume was in the broad general area of materiality and social ontologies. This surprised me. We should not be citing or using areas of literature just because they are relatively current, but only if they are useful, and in this case I feel they might be useful for the following reasons. All parties to colonial encounters had notions of the world that differed from each other and differ from our own. New views of how the world works were generated by encounters—cargo cults being a famous Pacific example. It is (p.479) incumbent on us as analysts to try and Page 4 of 9

Commentary understand people’s notions of cause and effect, the inter-relationships they saw between people and people, as well as between people and other entities. Much anthropological effort has been expended recently on outlining notions of how the world works, often influenced by South American ethnographies. Descola (1994) lays out three different ways of conceiving of the world—animism, totemism, and naturalism. The last of these is the Western view, dividing nature (to be investigated by the physical or biological sciences) from culture (probed by social sciences and humanities) which is historically particular, having grown up in the last few hundred years. Both animism and totemism blur the difference between culture and nature. The former term does this by allowing aspects of personhood to animals, plants, rocks, rivers, and so on, which may have desires and intentions in some ways cognate with human motivations. Totemism mixes things up in the opposite direction as it were—if a wallaby or cockatoo can be emblematic of a clan or other human group, then people may share characteristics of behaviour or inclination with those species, which are not truly separate from the human group. A particularly influential account of such blurring between our categories of people and the broader world is contained in the work of Viveiros de Castro, who coins the term ‘perspectivism’ to understand the manner in which Amazonian plants and animals are seen as subjects who apprehend reality from their own points of view, but in manners which echo human perceptions and relations. Animals and spirits see themselves as humans of slightly different kinds and outward differences of the body conceal a human goal within a jaguar or tapir. He says that where Westerners see a world of multiculturalism in which there is both difference and equivalence between human cultures, Amerindian people see multinaturalism in which various species have their differences underpinned by basic similarities of spirit (Viveiros de Castro 1998:470, 2005). The echoes between varying types of being require particular kinds of respect, so that these schemes of reality have a moral element to them telling people what they need to do to live well. Recently there has been a growing discussion of ontology (or animism) within archaeology (see the special section in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal Volume 19, 2009 and that in Archaeological Method and Theory Volume 15, 2008). As with the broader discussions from which they derive, archaeological thoughts on ontology oppose two sets of dualisms: that between mind and body and the difference made between culture and nature. Things, plants, and animals can be mindful, purposive, and able to influence people, so that they might be seen as persons, having many of the key characteristics of personhood. Little of the literature on ontology refers to colonial situations, as far as Page 5 of 9

Commentary I am aware, and the same is true in reverse of discussions concerning colonialism. Given the centrality of issues of agency and causality to an understanding of colonialism, this is surprising. Quite what or who the actants were in any situation should not be taken for granted. People were just one of a range of (p.480) centres of cause and effect that definitely included spirits, but possibly also copper kettles, mirrors, furbearing animals, or trees. A number of chapters hint at these possibilities. Lydon’s work on missionary stations showing how ancestral landscapes for Aboriginal people became mapped out on to that of mission stations is intriguing. Dores Cruz’s exploration of the role of trees seems to indicate that they were active players in the colonial landscape of southern Mozambique, retaining power and agency to this day. The manner in which various items of exchange were valued derived from both their aesthetic properties and their links with a spirit world, so that kettles (Mann) or clothing (Dipaolo Loren) may well have been viewed as something other than purely pragmatic sets of qualities. Nor were Europeans immune from a range of different beliefs. The nineteenth-century view of European intellectual history was that religion triumphed over magic and then science over religion (Thomas 1971). However, the real story is more interesting: there was always a close interlinking between science and religion (Gaukroger 2006), and magic has waxed and waned, seeing peaks of popularity at the end of the nineteenth century (Gosden and Wingfield in press), and at the end of the twentieth (when there has been a lot of interest in archaeology on the part of Pagans, Wiccans, and others). We might see a colonial situation in which the natives believed that trees could talk, stones move, and spirits were everywhere, beliefs ridiculed by Europeans. But once again, life was more interesting, with possible congruencies between incoming and local beliefs, despite the official pronouncements of the missionaries. Archaeology should be well placed to explore how deposits of objects, bodies, and links with the landscape might indicate a range of beliefs by all parties. The conversion of natives to Christianity might well be part of a broader story in which Europeans and others were drawn into some form of local belief. We have made the incomers too clichéd and boring, with a great need to make them stranger, more multi-dimensional and open to a range of beliefs and local influences. Discussions of animism, focusing as they do on the active properties of things, link into the broader and often unsatisfying discussions on the agency of objects. There is no space or need to rehearse the arguments about object agency here, except to say that again there is little such discussion in this volume. The point I want to make is an analytical one, but it derives from a generally theoretical premise. If human life Page 6 of 9

Commentary unfolds through practices, often of a mundane sort, the items we use are not just tools in a utilitarian sense, but help shape those practices themselves. New sets of artifacts will change our muscular skills and routines (texting has brought about novel forms of manual dexterity), often with unintended consequences. Artifacts are agents too, adding to the complicated mix of influence in any form of life, including those we label colonial (Gosden 2005). My analytical point, which is not a novel one, is that we should follow the objects through the various contexts in which they occur. Centring our focus on objects will remove any lingering tendency to see binary (p.481) divides in the colonial encounter, giving also a sense of how objects might connect people, as well as distinguishing them through different patterns of making, use, and deposition. Dipaolo Loren’s detailed analysis of buttons, button moulds, and clothing provides a model here, as do the various chapters which use pottery as a barium meal to highlight sets of relations within and between groups which might otherwise remain hidden (Beaudoin, Hauser and Lenik, Mann, Oliver). A stress on artifacts can allow them to generate their own contexts and recontextualization rather than starting with sites and deposits we might label as native or incomer. As both Tsekov and Cohen, and Cobb and Sapp show, what might look like the most exclusionary of all sites, military forts, actually demonstrate intense interaction within and around their boundaries. An objectcentred approach also allows the long-term use and reuse of materials to be taken into full account (Ferris), breaking down the subdisciplinary divide between the prehistoric and historic periods. Ten years ago, I was writing my book on colonialism (Gosden 2004). Reading this volume, it has struck me how much has changed for the better in the study of colonialism in that time. There are many more high-quality studies and the debate has moved on, although some things have not changed so much, including the relative lack of work on Africa (Lane and Schmidt), and the almost total absence of work in Asia (not represented in this volume at all). Inevitably, I now think about the aspects of that book I would still defend (for instance, I think that broader comparative studies do have their place, but are not the only register to write in) and those I am less happy about now. At the heart of that book was an attempt to argue for an object-centred approach, partly as a means of playing to archaeology’s strengths and partly as a device that would help get away from binary approaches emphasizing colonizer and colonized. Frustratingly for me, this is not a point that came across as clearly as I hoped and this is partly because there is now a more useful and pertinent literature on both material culture and

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Commentary human relations with the material world. Consequently, I would urge the use of such a framework, aspects of which I have just discussed. Archaeology is still a net importer of ideas from other disciplines when it comes to colonialism (and a number of other areas). Tracking materials would allow a bridging of the global and local scales, bring in questions of aesthetics, value, and emotion, as well as the multiple notions people have of cause and effect, animacy, and cosmology. These are all things archaeology can do well. Ultimately, colonial encounters were about danger, experiment, ambiguity, and shock, where the values that all parties brought to the encounter were put at risk and often overturned. If the past is a foreign country, the colonial past was made up of a number of intersecting dimensions of strangeness: like the participants in the colonial encounter, we need to put our values at risk, so that encounters with the past will change the manner in which we think and act in the present. (p.482) References Bibliography references: Descola, Phillipe 1994 In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gaukroger, Stephen 2006 The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210–1658. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Gosden, Chris 2004 Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gosden, Chris 2005 What Do Objects Want? Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 12:193–211. Gosden, Chris and Chris Wingfield In press On Being English: An Exploration of the English Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford 1884–2003. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hall, Catherine 2002 Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867. Polity Press, Cambridge. Hall, Catherine and Sonya Rose (eds) 2006 At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hingley, Richard 2000 Roman Officers and English Gentlemen: The Imperial Origins of Roman Archaeology. Routledge, London. Page 8 of 9

Commentary Mattingly, David 2010 Imperialism, Power and Identity. Experiencing the Roman Empire. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Thomas, Keith 1971 Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century England. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London. Viveiros de Castro Eduardo, 1998 Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4: 469–88. Viveiros de Castro Eduardo, 2005 Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation. Tipití (Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America) 2(1):3–22. Woolf, Greg 2000 Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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Afterword

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

Afterword Vantage Points in an Archaeology of Colonialism Ann B. Stahl

DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.003.0024

Abstract and Keywords This book has explored daily life, locality, and improvisational practice as elements of an archaeology of the colonised, and how archaeology's material evidence illuminates diverse colonial processes in sites where arbitrations of policy, identity, and belonging occurred. It has also shown how archaeological studies of the colonised illuminate their social distance from the coloniser, actively produced through or eroded by daily practice. In this concluding chapter, the importance of other vantage points on colonialism is emphasised. More specifically, it argues for more encompassing vantage points that provide persuasive empirical support for the general proposition that Europeans were just as fully made through colonial processes as were those they colonised, and that takes into account the value of an archaeology of broader colonial theatres for understanding both ‘precolonial’ and ‘colonial’ pasts. The chapter also considers the ‘unfinished process of becoming’. Keywords:   archaeology, colonised, material evidence, identity, coloniser, colonialism, vantage points, Europeans, becoming

Introduction

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Afterword Daily life, locality, improvisational practice. As contributors to this volume make clear, these are the strong suits of an archaeology of the colonized. Grounded (literally) in sites where arbitrations of policy, identity, and belonging occurred, archaeology’s material evidence illuminates diverse colonial processes: those public and private; overt and covert; processes violent and forceful, and those worked at through more ‘congenial’ persuasion. Like their historical anthropological counterparts, archaeological studies of the colonized highlight the diversity among ‘local’ responses to colonialism; illuminate how social distance between colonizer and colonized was actively produced through or eroded by daily practice; and underscore the frequent disconnect between metropolitan colonial policy and practice on colonialism’s ‘front lines’. Studies in this volume demonstrate the value of archaeological approaches to our understanding of colonialism’s projects (sensu Thomas 1994:105–6) and how colonialism is lived (Cobb and Sapp, Hauser and Lenik, Loren, Mann, Oliver, Sunseri, Tveskov and Cohen, this volume), as well as the challenges to be addressed if we are to overcome the ongoing legacies of colonial relations (in access to land and resources, in juridical proceedings and so on as Ferris, Harrison, Martindale, Silliman and others, this volume, discuss). In an explicit move to counter vantage points that privilege European actors (Jordan, this volume), the focus in this volume is squarely and explicitly on the colonized of the last five centuries and, as the volume’s contributors amply demonstrate, we learn much of value as a result. My aim in this chapter is to press outwards from the spatio-temporal vantage point that informs this volume to argue the importance of other vantage points (p.484) on colonialism. Informative as an archaeology of the colonized can be, I argue more specifically, if not originally, the need for more encompassing vantage points that 1) provide persuasive empirical support for the general proposition that Europeans were just as fully made through colonial processes as were those they colonized (Cohn 1996; Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Hall 2002; Stoler 1989, 1995; Stoler and Cooper 1997; Wolf 1982); and 2) encourage us to consider the value of an archaeology of broader colonial theatres for our understanding of ‘precolonial’ and ‘colonial’ pasts alike. It is in relation to these themes that I take up issues of relevance to ‘global archaeological theory’ as engaged with in the contributions to this volume. With respect to the first theme, we need to be thoughtful of the ways in which an archaeology of the colonized potentially replicates the standard anthropological gaze (in the spatio-temporal referents of a social evolutionary grid, ‘outward’ and ‘downward’), diverting attention from just how thoroughgoing were the related transformations that Page 2 of 24

Afterword shaped ‘the West’. Despite the frequent references in the literature to colonialism as involving mutual—if asymmetrical—entanglements, our tendency to enter these relationships through a focus on the colonized and/or the colonies bears a degree of continuity with earlier anthropological and archaeological practice (Trouillot 2003:121). We may be convinced of the general proposition that Europe (the West) was just as fully forged through colonial processes as were the colonies, and that these processes too were bound up in daily life, locality, and improvisational practice (e.g. Blunt 1999; Callaway 1992). But there is considerable work to be done in establishing the specifics of how this occurred. To more fully comprehend the relationality of these processes, we need to seek alternatives to the either/or vantage points and analytics (studies of either colonized or colonizers, colonies or metropoles (sensu Cooper and Stoler 1997)) if we are to overcome the obdurate dualities of historical and political imagination to which Cobb and Sapp, Harrison, Lydon, and Silliman in this volume refer. The challenge before us is to develop archaeological vantage points and analytics that account for larger theatres of colonial action and mutual constitution of ‘us’ and ‘other’ in both the past and present. With regard to the second theme, I address the relevance of archaeologies of colonialism to broader projects in archaeology. As case studies in this volume illuminate, the life ways of colonized peoples were altered by colonial processes, albeit in ways not easily predicted from a metropolitan vantage point. Alliances shifted in a changing configuration of in- and out-groups; practices of diet, dress, and demeanour were refigured in the wake of altered political economies; and new regimes of production and consumption linked societies participating—unequally—in global-scale exchange. Documenting continuities and changes in these varied domains of practice is quite evidently relevant to archaeologists and other scholars who share interests in colonialism and its operations. But as I argue below, the substantive insights (p.485) that are emerging from an archaeology of colonialism are equally as relevant to scholars with interests in the ‘deeper’ past—so-called prehistorians or ‘deep historians’ (Christian 1991; Northrup 2003) whose sometimes anachronistic imaginings of distant pasts are informed by canonical ‘ethnographic’ knowledge of more recent societies (Stahl 1993, 2004; see also Ferris, this volume).

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Afterword Vantage Points and Scale Archaeology’s vantage points and scales have long been shaped by terminologies and constructs that parse socio-temporal landscapes into discrete units: prehistory, ethnohistory, history. Viewed through a nineteenth-century progressive developmentalist lens and the colonial contexts that moulded it (Stocking 1987; Trigger 1984, 1989:110–47), history was perceived as the domain of the civilized, prehistory the preserve of the uncivilized, and ‘ethnohistory’ the netherworld between (crudely put, where the uncivilized came into view of the civilized and thus entered history, albeit marginally; Voegelin 1954:168; cf. Trigger 1986). Disciplinary specialization followed these temporal and spatial contours, with archaeologists focused on prehistory, historians on history, and ethnohistorians on the ‘Indian of history’ (Black 1954:158). Disciplinary boundaries were partially breached in the post-war period with the claim that archaeology was relevant to history. In the U.S., the resulting ‘historical archaeology’ focused on colonial contexts (early colonies like Plymouth Plantation; plantations; frontier forts and so on; see Little 2009) and increasingly on plantations and the lives of enslaved Africans (Singleton 1985), but less clearly on the Indigenous colonized. Boundaries between history and anthropology were further challenged by landmark texts such as Wolf’s (1982) Europe and the People without History, Mintz’s (1985) Sweetness and Power, and Sahlins’ (1985) Islands of History (see also Sahlins 1981),1 while in North America the Columbian Quincentenary prompted attention to the effects of colonization (Mitchell and Scheiber 2010; see D. H. Thomas 1989, 1990, 1991; see also Thomas 1992) and growing archaeological interest in questions of ‘culture contact’ (Cusick 1998; Rogers 1990; for a critique, see Silliman 2005). Historical archaeology’s focus on literate societies gave way to the view that historical archaeologists endeavour to view ‘Europe in the world’ (Gaimster and Majewski 2009:xvii; see Beaudry and Symonds 2011; Funari et al. 1999; Lawrence 2003; (p. 486) Lyons and Papadopoulos 2002; Majewski and Gaimster 2009; Murray 2004), marking a growing analytical focus on the emergence of a modern world system (Orser 1996), at the same time as insisting on the importance of particularity and locality (Johnson 1999).2 The conceptual limits of conventional time/space units (prehistory/history; modern/non-modern) became increasingly evident with growing attention to the interconnections between societies previously perceived as ‘in’ or ‘outside’ history (Fabian 1983; Lightfoot 1995). Contributors to this volume rightly point out the need to surmount a ‘politics of polarity’ by moving towards a conceptualization of ‘shared history’ that brings to view ‘the mutual histories of Indigenous and nonIndigenous people working and living together in settler colonial Page 4 of 24

Afterword contexts’ (Harrison, this volume, see also Harrison 2004, Murray 2004; Scheiber and Mitchell 2010). Yet despite these efforts to overcome dualities (Johnson 1999)—for example, through comparative historical archaeology (Hall 2000)—geospatial (and disciplinary) boundaries persist in the study of colonialism and its consequences. While in principle we recognize that life in ‘the metropole’ was conditioned by connections to ‘the colonies’, the history and archaeology of metropolitan contexts is neither conceptualized in relation to a ‘colonial period’ (cf. Chakrabarty 2000), nor is metropolitan life typically analysed in relation to the colonial processes in which it was enmeshed (Johnson 2006). Part of the explanation for this lopsidedness lies in what historical anthropologists and archaeologists see as a strength of focus on particularity and contextually rich insight into the daily and quotidian at the ‘local level’ and the ‘centrality of localities in anthropological practice’ focused on ‘discrete groups and cultures’ (Trouillot 2003:120, 123). As Johnson (1999:35) observed, this ‘lead[s] us away from world systems and categories and towards a sense of the power of material culture in different local contexts’. But arguably there are lingering effects of obdurate disciplinary tendencies at work here—historical anthropologists and anthropological archaeologists typically specialize in the study of colonized regions, leaving the study of the ‘colonial period’ metropole (e.g. Europe from the fifteenth century on) to historians and archaeologists whose research agendas are seemingly less driven by questions of colonialism (Johnson 2006). As contributions to this volume demonstrate, we have become increasing adept at creating shared histories from an areal vantage point, ones that bring to view the relational production of colonized and colonizer within specific geographies (e.g. Delle 2008; Torrence and Clarke 2000); however, we have been less successful in finding the analytical ground from which to illuminate how daily life in the metropole was just as thoroughly constituted through colonial entanglements (cf. Haraway 1989: 26–58). In short, whereas the study of colonialism is on its way to becoming the ‘gateway’ issue (Appadurai 1986:357) for archaeologists focused on (p.487) recent centuries in colonized regions—with the attendant danger of assuming that it was the most salient force in the lives of colonized peoples always and everywhere (cf. Jordan, this volume)—it is perhaps all too easy for scholars of the metropole to assume that colonialism is an ancillary and specialized topic that one can choose to be interested in (or not), or, worse yet, a topic largely irrelevant to the study of metropolitan life ways.

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Afterword Though it is no panacea, circulations have the potential to open new vantages on the mutual production of modern colonial worlds—colonies and metropole alike (for a pioneering example, see Mintz 1985). As Anna Tsing (2000:327) observed in addressing the challenges of apprehending ‘global situations’, ‘to tell the story of this landscape requires an appreciation not only of changing landscape elements but also of the partial, tentative, and shifting ability of the storyteller to identify elements at all’. She advocates investigating globalist projects ‘without assuming that they remake the world just as they want. The task of understanding planet-wide interconnections requires locating and specifying globalist projects and dreams, with their contradictory as well as charismatic logics and their messy as well as effective encounters and translations’ (Tsing, 2000:330), a task apropos to the study of contemporary and past colonial worlds alike (see also Bennett 2009; Stoler and Cooper 1997; Thomas 1994:105–6). As Nicholas Thomas (1994:66) noted, there are ‘striking parallels between civilizing missions in colonies and those at home’ (see also Comaroff and Comaroff 1997). As such, there is work to do in exploring the interconnections between colonial ‘agendas, practices, and processes’ (Tsing 2000:334) as they circulated and became grounded in specific regions. Scholars of colonial South Asia have been particularly adept at considering the flows that simultaneously fashioned imperial Britain and India (Blunt 1999; Cohn 1996; Dirks 2001, 2006), for example in relation to how technologies of rule and tastes were shaped by the circulations of colonial officials between India and the British Isles (Gupta 2001), and by how goods on display at world expositions shaped European imaginings of the ‘Other’ (Breckenridge 1989). Taxonomies of race, class, and gender (Stoler 1989, 1995) have been another productive site through which scholars have tracked the circulation of images and practices of ‘body work’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:40–2) that shaped categorizations of self and other (e.g. Magubane 2004). Historical anthropologists and historians have traced the threads of colonial projects like village planning and sanitation that were conducted in relation to simultaneous metropolitan projects (N. Thomas 1990; see also Anderson 2006; Stahl 2001:103–5, 196–7, in press b). A burgeoning literature on metropolitan consumption (Berg 2005; Berg and Eger 2003; McKendrick et al. 1982; Stobart et al. 2007; Weatherill 1996) needs to take fuller account of what Hazareesingh (2009) terms the ‘interconnected synchronicities’ of imperial practice at the same time as retaining an appreciation of the contextual specificities of practice in both colonial and metropolitan (p.488) locales.3 We require studies attentive to how the social agency of consumers in colonies Page 6 of 24

Afterword shaped metropolitan production and consumption (Inikori 2002), as for example in Steiner’s (1985) study of circulations of textiles between Britain and Africa or Prestholdt’s (2004, 2008) accounts of how patterns in nineteenth-century East African consumption affected copper wire production in North America. There are insights to be gained into how circulating objects (Kopytoff 1986) affected regimes of value and how goods from afar served as media for social creativity (Graeber 2001:117–49, 2005:424; see also N. Thomas 1991), as for example in Ogundiran’s (2002) study of the recontextualization of cowries in Yorubaland (West Africa), or Turgeon’s (2004) study of beads that circulated between France and North America. Here we might take clues from what ‘agents of empire’ thought to compare and the political projects that made those comparisons salient (Stoler 2001:862). But we need to surmount the tendency to let colonial or imperial boundaries delimit the terrain of our studies by following the flow of goods, ideas, and people through their full circuits (from metropole to colony and back; e.g. Bennett, 2009) which sometimes run outside the ‘archived grooves’ (Stoler 2001:863) of imperial networks, as for example in Stein’s (2008) study of the networks through which ostrich plumes reached Europe. Where our analytical trail often runs cold is in understanding the circulations and effects of colonial imports within the metropole, as I’ve explored in a preliminary way elsewhere with respect to ivory (Stahl in press a). Here we should be attentive to the phantom presence of goods whose circulations appear pertinent primarily to colonized regions, but whose ghostly traces can be discerned in metropolitan practice on closer examination. As an example, cowries are known as the ‘shell currency of the slave trade’ and historians have tracked in considerable detail their movement from their Maldives Islands source to warehouses in London from which they were acquired by slave traders who used them as non-convertible currencies in the West African slave trade (Hogendorn and Johnson 1986; see also Guyer 2004:111). Here cowries were recontextualized and incorporated into a diverse array of ritualized practice (e.g. Ogundiran 2002; Şaul 2004), including the bridewealth practices of some interior West African societies. Though cowries passed through Europe, they did not circulate there and they became a thoroughly exoticized commodity through their associations with Africa and other colonized regions of the globe. Yet the circulations in which cowries participated were part and parcel of (p. 489) those implicated in the increasingly monetized dowry practices of eighteenth-century England (Grassby 2001; Peters 2000). In short, circulations of cowries were foundational to the production of wealth that secured ‘gentle status’—living well, seemingly without working Page 7 of 24

Afterword (Heyck 2008:49). The circulation of cowries was intimately—if invisibly —tied up in the well being of Georgian England’s ‘comfortably off’ (Vickery 1998:32, 36), and in the dowries that secured the status of both daughters and sons by forging favourable family alliances and financing the acquisition of goods that secured ‘a genteel effect’ (Vickery 1998:13). In sum, attending to the circulations of cowries in ‘colonized contexts’ takes us only part of the way in understanding how these Indian Ocean shells came to play a role in the marriage practices of rural Africans and genteel Georgian Englishmen alike (for a fuller discussion, see Stahl in press a). Our understanding of our mutually entangled colonial worlds would benefit from enhanced interdisciplinarity, for example bringing into conversation work on the social history of disease (e.g. Anderson 2006; Ballhatchet 1980; Vaughan 1991) with socially informed approaches to bioarchaeology (e.g. Sofaer 2006). There is a pressing need to bring into dialogue studies centred on metropolitan practice—such as Grassby (2001), Logan (2001), and Johnson (1996)—with studies of family and dwelling in the colonies and among the colonized (e.g. Blunt 1999; Chattopadhyay 2002; Plane 2000; studies in this volume). Projects like ‘improvement’ hold promise in this regard, as demonstrated by Tarlow’s (2007) study of the varying connotations and practices of improvement in Georgian and Victorian Britain. The challenge is to adopt vantage points that put such studies in dialogue with ones that explore how an ethos of improvement was shaped by colonial relations and conditioned life in metropole and colonies at the same time as avoiding the tendency to flatten variation among either the colonized or colonizers (Johnson 1999:29; Oliver, Sunseri, this volume). Of considerable interest, in other words, would be studies of how notions of improvement were shaped by circulations—of goods, people, and ideas—in ways that are attentive to the specificities of locality at the same time as attuned to broader shared processes and inheritances of the notion. Food practice is another arena where circulations hold considerable potential to illuminate the ‘interconnected synchronicities’ (Hazareesingh 2009) of colonial and metropolitan life ways through exploration of multiple lines of evidence (Bickham 2008; Carney and Rosomoff 2010; McCann 2009; Mintz 1985).

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Afterword Precolonial or Neocolonial Pasts? A key insight to emerge from contributions to this volume as well as broader literatures in historical anthropology (e.g. Amselle 1998; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Geschiere 2009; Lentz 2006) is what Harrison (this volume), (p.490) and Ferris (this volume), each separately term the ‘unfinished process of becoming’. A growing literature, this volume included, recognizes the importance of investigating how the foundational units of anthropological inquiry (e.g. ‘tribes’ or ethnic groups) emerged through historically dynamic, improvisational processes conditioned by colonial contexts.4 No longer can we presume that which should be the focus of our investigations; rather, we need to investigate how present configurations came to be (Stahl 2010b:255), understanding them as outcomes of colonial processes involving improvisation, turbulence, and loss rather than foundational entities that simply ‘are’ (Stahl 2004; see also Ferris, this volume). Whereas there is a broad and growing awareness of the need to historicize and contextualize ‘ethnographic’ practices among scholars who study colonial contexts (for a discussion, see Guyer and Belinga 1995; Vansina 1987), there is far less awareness of this issue among scholars whose projects centre on ‘pre’ or ‘deep’ history, a problem particularly notable in the burgeoning literature that casts genetic history in terms of contemporary ethnic units (for a discussion, see MacEachern 2007; on NAGPRA, see Liebmann 2008b; for an innovative genetic study that recognizes the dynamism of identification, see Gokcumen et al. 2011). Moreover, the ‘by-products of colonialism [have been taken] to be the core structures or hallmarks of tribal . . . authenticity’ (N. Thomas 1991:27) and in turn projected into the past in a process that envisions beginnings through the lens of outcomes in Whiggishly historical fashion. Mounting evidence for how practices of production, consumption, political organization, religious practice and more were reshaped through colonial entanglements—as much on the front lines of colonial expansion as in the metropole—should give us pause, encouraging us to recognize the anachronistic implications of imagining a ‘deep past’ through the (neo)colonial lens of more ‘fully documented’ recent contexts (Stahl 2004). Recognizing the role of colonialist categories, narratives, and discourses in the production of that documentation should have just as sobering an effect (Bickham 2005; Cobb 2005; Liebmann 2008a:6–8; Mitchell and Scheiber 2010). The question of how recent societies—European and non-European— compare to their ‘precolonial’ predecessors is an empirical question which archaeological data is well suited to address through comparative analyses of practices and patterns ‘across the divides’ (Mitchell and Scheiber 2010; see also Galloway 1998; Pauketat 2001a; Wagner 1998) of history/prehistory, as well as in relation to Page 9 of 24

Afterword diverse lines of evidence (Stahl 1993, 2001). Rather than constructing precolonial ‘baselines’ informed by presumptions about what constitutes ‘traditional practice’, scholars interested in pasts both proximate and distant should endeavour to discern (p.491) the variable contours of practice from carefully seriated sources that have been subjected to critical analyses that take account of the partialities and silences that inhere in seemingly complementary lines of evidence (e.g. Borgstede and Yaeger 2010; for an expanded discussion, see Stahl 2001:19–40). Archaeologies of colonialism are increasingly taking the long view, producing histories that span both colonial periods and those prior to the advent of colonial relations (Pauketat 2001b; Scheiber and Mitchell 2010; Stahl and LaViolette 2009). A key contribution of areally grounded studies that take a long historical view is their empirical documentation of the complex patterns of change and continuity that thread through precolonial/colonial ‘divides’ (Harrison 2000; Silliman 2009; Stahl 2012). Studies such as these illuminate the dynamism and malleability of tradition (Ferris 2009; Pauketat 2001a) at the same time as they challenge essentializing perspectives with attendant implications for what Liebmann (2008b:78) terms the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ of ‘strategic essentialism versus radical constructivism’ that conditions the uses of history in the present (Ferris, Martindale, this volume). Despite the challenges, these studies will help us to illuminate how models—of political organization, exchange, production, and so on —that have informed our interpretations of ‘remote’ prehistory perhaps emerged or gained distinctive casts through colonial entanglements. Carefully constructed comparative analyses also hold potential to yield insight into practices and principles lost through colonial entanglements, as for example in the shifting emphasis in West and Central Africa from a principal of leadership rooted in compositional practice (‘wealth in people’) towards one shaped by accumulation (of things; Guyer and Belinga 1995). In short, we need to attend to how model-building based on ‘ethnographic’ examples wrests social action from the historical, often colonial moorings that shaped it. Projected into the deeper past, there is potential for anachronistic understanding of ‘precolonial’ practice, particularly if models (e.g. prestige goods models) are not subjected to a careful comparative analysis that allows for both commonalities and divergences between ethnographic models and archaeological contexts (Stahl 1993; Wylie 1985). Comparative analyses aimed at constructing deeper histories of cultural practice in specific locales (e.g. Ferris 2009; Stahl 2007, 2010a) hold the promise of helping us to illuminate losses of practices characteristic of a deeper past that succumbed to the Page 10 of 24

Afterword pressures of colonialism. Finally, important as it is to overcome the false dichotomies between so-called history and prehistory, it is equally important to be aware of how a self-styled ‘historical archaeology’ reinscribes a boundary that makes it easy for ‘prehistorians’ to assume the irrelevance of historically informed studies to their intellectual projects (Stahl 2009), a trend that is perhaps exacerbated by the postcolonial mantle of recent historical archaeological literature that some will perceive as threatening, rather than contributing to ‘good science’.

(p.492) Conclusion No single vantage point will do when it comes to the study of colonial processes. Metropolitan vantages need to be augmented—indeed countered—by ones situated in the colonies; settler-centred studies with those contextualized in Indigenous spaces. Boundaries of expertise and disciplinary specialization need to be surmounted, as do the areal and temporal ramparts that shape our analytical terrain. Though not a panacea, attention to circulations moves us outwards from the comfortable space of our areal expertise, forcing attention to the relational character of ‘intercultural engagements’ (Jordan, this volume) and bringing the lived worlds of metropoles and colonies into the same analytical spaces. To accomplish this requires sustained conversations across sources (material, documentary, oral) and disciplinary divides. At the same time, we need to push beyond ‘colonial period’ boundaries, putting investigations into the ‘deep’ past in conversation with those centred on the ‘recent’ colonial past. Whether conceived as a postcolonial project or not (Liebmann 2008a; Rizvi 2008), we need to re-envision the ‘deep’ past in ways that recognize the effects of colonial processes on our imaginings of ‘times past’ and that illuminate the deeper histories of the improvisational practice and ‘mestizo logics’ (Amselle 1998) that thread through human experience in colonized and uncolonized spaces. References Bibliography references: Amselle, Jean-Loup 1998 Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. Anderson, Warwick 2006 States of Hygiene: Race ‘Improvement’ and Biomedical Citizenship in Australia and the Colonial Philippines. In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American

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Afterword History, edited by Ann Laura Stoler, pp. 94–115. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina. Appadurai, Arjun 1986 Theory in Anthropology: Center and Periphery. Comparative Studies in Society and History 28:356–61. Ballhatchet, Kenneth 1980 Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793–1905. St Martin’s Press, New York. Beaudry, Mary C. and James Symonds (eds) 2011 Interpreting the Early Modern World: Transatlantic Perspectives. Springer, New York. Bennett, Tony 2009 Museum, Field, Colony. Colonial Governmentality and the Circulation of Reference. Journal of Cultural Economy 2(1–2): 99–116. Berg, Maxine 2005 Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-century Britain. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Berg, Maxine and Elizabeth Eger (eds) 2003 Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods. Palgrave MacMillan, New York. (p.493) Bickham, Troy 2005 Savages Within the Empire: Representations of American Indians in Eighteenth-century Britain. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Bickham, Troy 2008 Eating the Empire: Intersections of Food, Cookery and Imperialism in Eighteenth-century Britain. Past and Present 198:72–109. Black, Glenn A. 1954 The Historic Indian of the Ohio Valley: An Archaeologist’s View. Ethnohistory 1:155–65. Blunt, Alison 1999 Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886–1925. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24:421–40. Borgstede, Greg and Jason Yaeger 2010 Notions of Cultural Continuity and Disjunction in Maya Social Movements and Maya Archaeology. In Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi, pp. 91–107. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland.

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Afterword Cusick, James G. (ed.) 1998 Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology. Occasional Paper No. 25. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Delle, James A. 2008 An Archaeology of Modernity in Colonial Jamaica. Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 4(1):87– 109. Dirks, Nicholas B. 2001 Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. (p. 494) Dirks, Nicholas B. 2006 The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain. Belknap Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fabian, Johannes 1983 Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. Columbia University Press, New York. Ferris, Neal 2009 The Archaeology of Native–lived Colonialism: Challenging History in the Great Lakes. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Funari, Pedro Paulo A., Martin Hall, and Siân Jones (eds) 1999 Historical Archaeology: Back from the Edge. Routledge, London. Gaimster, David and Teresita Majewski 2009 Introduction. In International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by Teresita Majewski and David R. M. Gaimster, pp. xvii–xx. Springer, New York. Galloway, Patricia K. 1998 Choctaw Genesis, 1500–1700. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Geschiere, Peter 2009 The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship and Exclusion in Africa and Europe. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Gilbert, Michele 1997 No Construction Is Permanent: Ethnic Construction and the Use of History in Akuapem. Africa 67(4):501–33. Gokcumen, Omer, Timur Gultekin, Yesmin Dogan Alakoc, Aysim Tug, Erksin Gulec, and Theodore G. Schurr 2011 Biological Ancestries, Kinship Connections, and Projected Identities in Four Central Anatolian Settlements: Insights from Culturally Contextualized Genetic Anthropology. American Anthropologist 113: 116–31. Graeber, David 2001 Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of our Own Dreams. Palgrave, New York. Page 14 of 24

Afterword Graeber, David 2005 Fetishism as Social Creativity or, Fetishes Are Gods in the Process of Construction. Anthropological Theory 5:407–38. Grassby, Richard 2001 Kinship and Capitalism: Marriage, Family, and Business in the English–Speaking World, 1580–1740. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gupta, Akhil 2001 History, Rule, Representation: Scattered Speculations on ‘Of Revelation and Revolution Volume II’. Interventions 3(1):40–6. Guyer, Jane I. 2004 Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Guyer, Jane I. and Samuel M. E. Belinga 1995 Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa. Journal of African History 36: 91–120. Hall, Catherine 2002 Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford. Hall, Martin 2000 Archaeology and the Modern World: Colonial Transcripts in South Africa and the Chesapeake. Routledge, London. Haraway, Donna 1989 Primate Visions. Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. Routledge, London. Harrison, Rodney 2000 Challenging the ‘Authenticity’ of Antiquity: Contact Archaeology and Native Title in Australia. In Native Title and the Transformation of Archaeology in the Postcolonial World, edited by Ian Lilley, pp. 35–53. Oceania Monograph 50. University of Sidney. Harrison, Rodney 2004 Shared Landscapes: Archaeologies of Attachment and the Pastoral Industry in New South Wales. University of New South Wales Press, Sydney. (p.495) Hawkins, Sean 2002 Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter between the Lodagaa and ‘The World on Paper’. University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Hazareesingh, Sandip 2009 Interconnected Synchronicities: The Production of Bombay and Glasgow as Modern Global Ports c.1850– 1880. Journal of Global History 4:7–31. Hazareesingh, Sandip and Jonathan Curry–Machado 2009 Editorial— Commodities, Empires and Global History. Journal of Global History 4:1–5. Page 15 of 24

Afterword Heyck, Thomas William 2008 The Peoples of the British Isles: A New History, ii: From 1688 to 1870. Third edition. Lyceum Books, Chicago. Hogendorn, Jan and Marion Johnson 1986 The Shell Money of the Slave Trade. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Inikori, Joseph. E. 2002 Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Development. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Johnson, Matthew H. 1996 An Archaeology of Capitalism. Blackwell, Oxford. Johnson, Matthew H. 1999 Rethinking Historical Archaeology. In Historical Archaeology: Back from the Edge, edited by Pedro Paulo A. Funari, Martin Hall, and Siân Jones, pp. 23–36. Routledge, London. Johnson, Matthew H. 2006 The Tide Reversed: Prospects and Potentials for a Postcolonial Archaeology of Europe. In Historical Archaeology, edited by Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman, pp. 313–31. Blackwell, Oxford. Kopytoff, Igor 1986 The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, pp. 64–91. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Lawrence, Susan (ed.) 2003 Archaeologies of the British: Exploration of Identity in Great Britain and its Colonies 1600–1945. Routledge, London. Lentz, Carola 1995 ‘Tribalism’ and Ethnicity in Africa: A Review of Four Decades of Anglophone Research. Cahiers de Sciences Humaines 31:303–28. Lentz, Carola 2006 Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Lentz, Carola and Paul Nugent (eds) 1999 Ethnicity in Ghana: The Limits of Invention. St. Martins, New York. Liebmann, Matthew 2008a Introduction: the Intersections of Archaeology and Postcolonial Studies. In Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi, pp. 1–20. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland.

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Afterword Liebmann, Matthew 2008b Postcolonial Cultural Affiliation: Essentialism, Hybridity, and NAGPRA. In Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi, pp. 73–90. AltaMira Press, Lanham, Maryland. Lightfoot, Kent 1995 Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship between Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology. American Antiquity 60:199–217. Little, Barbara J. 2009 Family Resemblances: A Brief Overview of History, Anthropology, and Historical Archaeology in the United States. In International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by Teresita Majewski and David R. M. Gaimster, pp. 363–81. Springer, New York. Logan, Thad 2001 The Victorian Parlour. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Lyons, Claire L. and John K. Papadopoulos (eds) 2002 The Archaeology of Colonialism. Getty Publications, Los Angeles, California. (p.496) McCann, James C. 2009 Stirring the Pot: A History of African Cuisine. Ohio University Press, Athens. MacEachern, Scott 2007 Where in Africa Does Africa Start? Identity, Genetics and African Studies from the Sahara to Darfur. Journal of Social Archaeology 7:393–412. McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb 1982 The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth–century England. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Magubane, Zine 2004 Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Majewski, Teresita and David R. M. Gaimster (eds) 2009 International Handbook of Historical Archaeology. Springer, New York. Mitchell, Mark D. and Laura L. Scheiber 2010 Crossing Divides Archaeology as Long-term History. In Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies 1400–1900, edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Mark D. Mitchell, pp. 1–22. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Mintz, Sidney W. 1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Viking Penguin, New York.

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Afterword Murray, Tim (ed.) 2004 The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Northrup, David 2003 When Does World History Begin (and Why Should We Care?). History Compass 1(1):1–8. Ogundiran, Akinwumi 2002 Of Small Things Remembered: Beads, Cowries, and Cultural Translations of the Atlantic Experience in Yorubaland. International Journal of African Historical Studies 35:427– 57. Ogundiran, Akinwumi and Toyin Falola (eds) 2007 Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Orser, Charles E., Jr 1996 A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World. Plenum, New York. Pauketat, Timothy R. 2001a A New Tradition in Archaeology. In The Archaeology of Traditions: Agency and History Before and After Columbus, edited by Timothy R. Pauketat, pp. 1–16. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Pauketat, Timothy R. (ed.) 2001b The Archaeology of Traditions: Agency and History before and after Columbus. University Press of Florida, Gainesville. Peel, John David Yeadon 1989 The Cultural Work of Yoruba Ethnogenesis. In History and Ethnicity, edited by Elizabeth Tonkin, Malcolm Kenneth Chapman, and Maryon McDonald, pp. 198–215. Routledge, London. Peters, Christine 2000 Gender, Sacrament and Ritual: The Making and Meaning of Marriage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Past and Present 169(1):63–96. Plane, Ann Marie 2000 Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York. Prestholdt, Jeremy 2004 On the Global Repercussions of East African Consumerism. American Historical Review 109:755–80. Prestholdt, Jeremy 2008 Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization. University of California Press, Berkeley.

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Afterword Rizvi, Uzma Z. 2008 Conclusion: Archaeological Futures and the Postcolonial Critique. In Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi, pp. 197–203. AltaMira Press, Lanham Maryland. (p.497) Rogers, J. Daniel 1990 Objects of Change: The Archaeology and History of Arikara Contact with Europeans. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Sahlins, Marshall 1981 Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Sahlins, Marshall 1985 Islands of History. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Şaul, Mahir 2004 Money in Colonial Transition: Cowries and Francs in West Africa. American Anthropologist 106:71–84. Scheiber, Laura L. and Mark D. Mitchell (eds) 2010 Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400–1900. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005 Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America. American Antiquity 70:55– 74. Silliman, Stephen W. 2009 Change and Continuity, Memory and Practice: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England. American Antiquity 74:211–30. Singleton, Theresa (ed.) 1985 Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life. Academic Press, Orlando, Florida. Sofaer, Joanna R. 2006 The Body as Material Culture: A Theoretical Osteoarchaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Southall, Aidan 1970 The Illusion of Tribe. Journal of Asian and African Studies 5(1–2):28–50. Stahl, Ann B. 1993 Concepts of Time and Approaches to Analogical Reasoning in Historical Perspective. American Antiquity 58:235–60. Stahl, Ann B. 2001 Making History in Banda: Anthropological Visions of Africa’s Past. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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Afterword Stahl, Ann B. 2004 Comparative Insights into the Ancient Political Economies of West Africa. In Archaeological Perspectives on Political Economies, edited by Gary M. Feinman and Linda M. Nicholas, pp. 253– 70. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Stahl, Ann B. 2007 Entangled Lives: The Archaeology of Daily Life in the Gold Coast Hinterlands, AD1400–1900. In Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora, edited by Akinwumi Ogundiran and Toyin Falola, pp. 49–76. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Stahl, Ann B. 2009 The Archaeology of African History. International Journal of African Historical Studies 42:241–55. Stahl, Ann B. 2010a Material Histories. In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, pp. 150–72. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Stahl, Ann B. 2010b ‘Route Work’ through Alternative Archives: Reflections on Cross–disciplinary Practice. South African Historical Journal 62:252–67. Stahl, Ann B. 2012 When Does History Begin? Material Continuity and Change in West Africa. In Lost in Transition: Decolonizing Indigenous Histories at the ‘Prehistoric/Colonial’ Intersection in Archaeology, edited by Maxine Oland, Siobhan M. Hart, and Liam Frink, pp. 158–77. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Stahl, Ann B. In press a Circulations through Worlds Apart: Georgian and Victorian England in an African Mirror. In Materializing Colonial Encounters: Archaeologies of African Experience, edited by François G. Richard. Springer, New York. (p.498) Stahl, Ann B. In press b ‘Remotely Global’ Village Life in Interior West Africa. In Oxford Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by James Symonds and Laurie Wilkie. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Stahl, Ann B. and Adria LaViolette (eds) 2009 Current Trends in the Archaeology of African History. Special issue of the International Journal of African Historical Studies 42(3). Stein, Sarah Abrevaya 2008 Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Commerce. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. Steiner, Christopher B. 1985 Another Image of Africa: Toward an Ethnohistory of European Cloth Marketed in West Africa, 1873–1960. Ethnohistory 32:91–110.

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Afterword Stobart, Jon, Andrew Hann, and Victoria Morgan 2007 Spaces of Consumption: Leisure and Shopping in the English Town, c.1680–1830. Routledge, London. Stocking, George W., Jr 1987 Victorian Anthropology. Free Press, New York. Stoler, Ann Laura 1989 Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule. Comparative Studies in Society and History 31:134–61. Stoler, Ann Laura 1995 Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina. Stoler, Ann Laura 2001 Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies. The Journal of American History 88:829–65. Stoler, Ann Laura and Frederick Cooper 1997 Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda. In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, pp. 1–56. University of California Press, Berkeley. Tarlow, Sarah 2007 The Archaeology of Improvement in Britain, 1750– 1850. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Thomas, David Hurst 1992 A Retrospective Look at Columbian Consequences. American Antiquity 57:613–16. Thomas, David Hurst (ed.) 1989 Columbian Consequences, i: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Thomas, David Hurst (ed.) 1990 Columbian Consequences, ii: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Thomas, David Hurst (ed.) 1991 Columbian Consequences, iii: The Spanish Borderlands in Pan-American Perspective. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC. Thomas, Nicholas 1990 Sanitation and Seeing: The Creation of State Power in Early Colonial Fiji. Comparative Studies in Society and History 32:149–70.

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Afterword Thomas, Nicholas 1991 Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thomas, Nicholas 1994 Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. Torrence, Robin and Anne Clarke (eds) 2000 The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross-Cultural Engagements in Oceania. Routledge, London. Trigger, Bruce G. 1984 Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist. Man 19:355–70. Trigger, Bruce G. 1986 Ethnohistory: The Unfinished Edifice. Ethnohistory 33:253–67. (p.499) Trigger, Bruce G. 1989 A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 2003 Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Tsing, Anna 2000 The Global Situation. Cultural Anthropology 15:327– 60. Turgeon, Laurier 2004 Beads, Bodies and Regimes of Value: From France to North America, c.1500–c.1650. In The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies, edited by Tim Murray, pp. 19–47. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Vansina, Jan 1987 The Ethnographic Account as a Genre in Central Africa. Paideuma 33:433–44. Vaughan, Megan 1991 Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. Vickery, Amanda 1998 The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. Voegelin, Erminie W. 1954 An Ethnohistorian’s Viewpoint. Ethnohistory 1:166–71. Wagner, Mark J. 1998 Some Think it Impossible to Civilize Them at All: Cultural Change and Continuity among the Early Nineteenth-century Potawatomi. In Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change

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Afterword and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick, pp. 430–56. Occasional Paper No. 25. Center for Archaeological Investigations. Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Weatherill, Lorna 1996 Consumer Behavior and Material Culture in Britain 1660–1760. Second edition. Routledge, London. Wolf, Eric R. 1982 Europe and the People without History. University of California Press, Berkeley. Wylie, Alison 1985 The Reaction against Analogy. In Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, viii, edited by Michael B. Schiffer, pp. 63–111. Academic Press, New York. (p.500) Notes:

(1) Although these texts are often taken as landmarks, it is important to note also the early work of Bernard Cohn (1962) whose historical anthropological work in India (Cohn 1996) tends to be overlooked by North American archaeologists. (2) For a collection that focused concern on the modern world system but did not take Europeans as its primary vantage, see Ogundiran and Falola (2007). (3) A research collaboration in the UK between the Open University and London Metropolitan University centered on ‘Commodities of Empire’ is endeavouring to explore the history of imperial commodities (foodstuffs, stimulants, industrial crops, and ores) from the vantage point of colonized societies (Hazareesingh and Curry-Machado 2009:2; see accessed 13 February 2014). To date the project appears not to have considered the value of archaeological perspectives on these issues. (4) There is a considerable literature on this issue in Africa, beginning with Southall’s (1970) ‘The Illusion of Tribe’ and extending through detailed investigations of the role of missionization (Lentz 2006), writing (Hawkins 2002), and governmental tactics in the configuration of African ‘tribal’ identifications and ethnogenesis (e.g. Gilbert 1997; Lentz and Nugent 1999; Peel 1989). For a review, see Lentz 1995.

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Index

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696697 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199696697.001.0001

(p.501) Index Note: Numbers in bold refer to figures and tables, letter ‘n’ following locators refers to notes Abungu, George 423, 425 acculturation theory 7, 60, 87, 93, 106–7, 234, 243, 269, 274–6, 310 binary categories 37 loss of indigeneity 68 measuring 10 ‘terminal narratives’ 151, 168 view of indigenous ruin and decline 17 see also colonial narratives/ discourse Adams, John W. 83 Adelman, Jeremy and Aron, Stephen 154 Afghanistan 115 Africa African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) 433 birthplace of humanity 424, 427–8 Botswana 433–4 Burundi 429 Cameroon 436 decolonization 77 Democratic Republic of Congo 456 diaspora 105, 348, 354–7, 362–3 Ethiopia 428 Gambia 456 Gaza empire 130–1 Great Lakes 428, 429

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Index history writing 445–63 Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee (IPACC) 432–3 International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs 432–3 Kenya 435, 437 Khoikhoi peoples (Southern Africa) 109 Kiziba kingdom (Tanzania) 446 Mfecane/Difaqane (wars and population movements) 130 New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) 424n2 Ngungunyane, emperor of Gaza 130–1, 133–5, 140, 143–4 Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania) 427 postcolonial archaeology 423–38 pottery traditions 352–3, 354–7, 360–2 racial categorization 336–8 Rwanda 429, 456 slavery 336, 343, 352 South Africa 427 Sudan 430 Tanganyika 427, 448 Tanzania 433, 435, 449, 458, 461–2 Uganda 428, 429, 446–57 Zanzibar 449 Zulu kingdom 130 see also Mozambique agency 59, 61, 416 acting back 78 autonomy 65, 104, 107, 110, 112, 114, 116, 375, 470–1 causation and 479–80 collective 13, 82 communities of practice 62–3 domination/resistance discourse 61–2, 64, 77–9, 96 life projects 63, 76–96 material 8, 126 objects and artifacts 480–1 power and 77, 96, 480 relational vs reactive 81 subaltern consciousness 472 see also practice theory Alemanza, Don Martín Enriquez de 156 Alexander, Rani T. 114 animism 479–80 Apess, William 59 archaeology collaborative 64, 150 comparative frameworks 80 conceptions of 2–3, 5–6 conceptual ‘borders’ 18 ‘contact’ 4, 7, 17, 19–20, 42, 44–5, 57, 113–14, 167–8, 234, 245, 381, 485 contested social constructs 3 Direct Historical Approach (DHA) 4, 275–7 endogenous historicity 274–9

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Index ethics of practice 17 forensic 414 global discourse 18, 20, 57, 476–81, 484 historical 5–7, 57, 485–6, 491 Indigenous 150–68, 424–5, 432, 437–8 interpretive 411 Midwestern Taxonomic Method 413 normative assumptions 1–2 politics of 18 praxis 19 processual 153, 411 (p.502) production of the past 16 reflexivity 375, 384 resource management 2 revisionism and deconstruction 9–10, 12, 15–18, 76, 153, 371–2, 375 ‘trait list materiality’ 8, 9–10 transformative value 423–4 see also archaeology of colonialism archaeology of colonialism archaeology of anticipation 111, 378, 381 archaeology of becoming 43, 51, 373–4 archaeology of the colonized 5–20, 63, 70, 322, 375, 388–9, 476–81 archaeology of the subaltern 20, 105, 445–7, 452–63, 469–73 ‘Black Legend’ 153–4, 155 borderlands studies 152, 153–4 challenge to binary/dichotomous distinctions 37–51, 294, 310–11, 327–8, 473, 476, 478 culture-focused 104 domination/resistance dichotomy 61–4, 78–9, 86, 96 Indigenous 150–68, 424–5, 432, 437–8 local political economies 112 political/economic 103–4 spatial and temporal scales 110–12 ‘terminal narratives’ 151, 168 vantage point 106–10, 227, 483–9, 492 world systems perspective 107, 109, 111, 470, 486 see also colonial narratives/discourse; colonialism; colonized peoples; colonizer/colonized; postcolonial studies; subaltern studies Armstrong, Douglas V. 342, 355 articulation theory 51, 60 artifacts agency 480–1 Australian Aboriginal 44–6, 46, 238–43, 239, 242 Caribbean pottery 352–3, 353, 354–62, 360 ‘Colono ware’ 226, 278, 355, 357, 473 data habitus 275 diffusion of style 113 essentialism 242–3, 246 Fort Lane (nineteenth/twentieth century, Oregon) 201–3, 202, 205

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Index Fort Moore (eighteenth century, South Carolina) 223–7, 226 ‘intercultural’ 357 Labrador Métis peoples (nineteenth century) 320–1, 324 modified/unmodified 44–5 New England 251–3, 252, 259–61 Nuxalk peoples (nineteenth/twentieth century, Kimsquit, British Columbia) 87–9, 88 Pequot peoples (seventeenth–nineteenth century, Connecticut, USA) 66– 9, 67, 68 ‘small finds’ 253, 256, 262, 473 use and meaning 69, 473 use in construction/expression of identity 45, 47, 243, 246 see also lithic technology; material culture Asch, Michael 410 Ashley-Cooper, Anthony 215 Atalay, Sonya 59, 437–8 Australia Aboriginal/Indigenous peoples 38–51, 232–46 artifacts 44–6, 46, 238–43, 239, 242 Board for the Protection of the Aborigines (BPA) 236, 239, 243, 244 cattle ranching 44–7 class system 243–4 convict labour 38 Corunna Downs (twentieth century, Western Australia) 38–40, 39, 40 cultural entanglement 47 Dreaming 49–50 Ebenezer Mission (nineteenth century, Victoria) 232–46, 235–6, 239, 242 ‘Great Australian Silence’ 233 Kimberley region (twentieth century, Western Australia) 44–6, 46 Koorie peoples 232–3 Kunderang station (nineteenth century, New South Wales) 46–50, 48 Land Rights movement 38 landscape 42, 46–50 missionary activity 232–46 Native Title Act (1993) 150 pastoral industries 38–51 patterns of movement and occupation 47, 48, 50, 244–5 racial relations 43 rationing 39, 40, 44, 239–40 reservations 232–46 spatial management/segregation 232, 235–6 ‘stolen generations’ 38 Wotjobaluk peoples 235 Yarrie Station (twentieth century, Western Australia) 40–1, 41 autonomy, see agency Badiou, Alain 373 Bahule, Mahoho 131

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Index (p.503) Baines, D. L. 447, 448, 453 Baker, James 251, 259 Barile, Kerri S. and Brandon, Jamie C. 316 bear oil 278 Beaudry, Mary 253 Beckett, Jeremy 41, 49 Berkeley School of Demographic History 154–5 Bhabha, Homi 37, 297, 324 Bickell, Richard 339 Bikunya, Petero 449, 461 Binford, Lewis R. 228 ‘Black Power’ 38 Bodley, Josias 302 Bolton, Herbert Eugene 154 Boomert, Arie 359 Borah, W. 155 Bourdieu, Pierre 186 Bradley, James W. 108, 111 Brain, Jeffery P. 275 Branstner, Susan M. 282 Brathwaite, Edward K. 340 British Association for the Advancement of Science 426, 427 British Columbia 77, 82–96 Halkomelem peoples (nineteenth/twentieth century, Fraser Valley) 83, 90–3, 92 Nuxalk peoples (nineteenth/twentieth century, Kimsquit) 83, 86–90, 88 Skowcale Indian reserve 91–2, 92 Tsimshian peoples (nineteenth/twentieth century, Metlakatla) 83–5, 83, 84 Britt, Peter 201 burial practice 87–90, 88, 94, 136, 261 grave goods 224, 260 see also spiritual practice burial sites 384–5 Burton, Richard 428 Butale, Chapson 433, 434 Byrne, Denis 93 Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar 158 Camden, William 297 Canada 293, 375n1 architecture 320–1, 323–4 artifacts 320–1, 324 Innu peoples 319 Inuit peoples 318–19 Labrador Métis peoples (nineteenth century) 315–28, 316, 318, 320–2 market economy 323 Métis peoples 11, 18 Onondaga peoples 108, 111 Parks Canada 6

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Index St Mary’s First Nation Wolastokwiyik (Maliseet) peoples (New Brunswick) 293–4, 310 see also British Columbia; Great Lakes (North America) Canadian jurisprudence Calder v. Attorney General of British Columbia (1973) 401–2 Canadian Constitution Act (1982) 409n11 Cowichan Petition (1909) 401 Delgamuukw case law (1991–7) 398–400, 405, 407–9, 413 essentialized model of culture 398–9, 403, 405–7, 409–13 house group concept 402 Indigenous legal rights 397–418 Indigenous legal systems 401–2, 404–5 Ontario v. Bear Island (1984) 400, 415 oral records as evidence 398, 399n3, 402–5, 407–9 rights as traditional practices 398 role of archaeology 398–418 R. v. Guerin (1984) 402 R. v. Lax Kw’alaams (2008) 407 R. v. Sparrow (1990) 406, 418 R. v. Van der Peet (1996) 406–7, 409, 410, 416, 418 Canadian Museum of History (formerly Canadian Museum of Civilization) 375n1 capitalism global 6, 16, 201, 203, 351 ideology 274 industrial 214 market forces 278–9 trade 108 Carbia, Rómulo 154 Caribbean studies 348–63, 350 African diaspora 348, 354, 355, 356–7, 362–3 Arawak/Taino peoples 351 Carib/Kalinago peoples 348, 351, 352, 354, 356–9 Dominica 356, 357–62, 360 interaction-based paradigm 349, 355, 357–8, 363 migration 353–4 pottery traditions 352–3, 353, 354–62, 360 survivalist tradition 349, 351, 354–5, 357–8, 363 see also Jamaica Catholic Church 215 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 382, 470 Charles I, king 214 Charles II, king 215 Charles V, king 156 (p.504) Chichester, Arthur 304 China 108 Chissano, Joaquim 143 Chittick, Neville 430 Chivington, John 308, 309

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Index Clifford, James 51, 60 clothing and dress 251–63, 260 button manufacture 252, 259–61 formation and expression of identity 255–62 perceptions of nakedness 256–7 ‘social skin’ 253 sumptuary laws 258 symbol of religious conversion 256–7, 258, 261 Cobb, Charles R. 275 Cohn, Bernard 485n1 Collins, David 338 Collins, Henry B. 275 colonial narratives/discourse 2–4, 16, 107, 129, 151, 191, 193, 213, 371, 490 culture abandonment, standard view of 272–3, 275, 281, 283 dependency discourse 274, 275, 276, 281 frontier narratives 191, 193 Manifest Destiny narrative 191, 194, 198, 199, 206 racialized 90, 94, 253, 428–9 colonialism civilizing mission 78, 201, 234–7, 240–1, 243–4, 256–7 cultural legacy 77, 374, 387–8 domination and oppression 61, 78, 81, 90, 109, 195, 197, 334, 471–2 European expansion 101–16, 214, 296 global 4–7, 18, 201 impacts on First Peoples 50–1 ‘internal’ 41 jus ad bellum doctrine 153 power relations 50, 80–1, 90, 95, 104, 107 tensions of empire 333–44 violence 151, 153–68 see also colonized peoples; colonizer/colonized colonized peoples constructed as ‘Other’ 4, 50, 90, 94, 95, 214, 336, 436, 487 defenders of cultural integrity 79 Native-lived colonialism 76–7, 80–96, 271 negotiations of power 61–4, 80–1 perceived as naked 256–7 resistance strategies 61–4, 69, 150–68, 472 shatter zones 269–71 social engineering 90 strategic essentialism 50 see also colonizer/colonized; cultural entanglement; descendant communities; everyday lived reality; identity; indigeneity; material culture colonizer/colonized 4, 7–10 boundaries 109–10, 294 categorization and essentialism 14–18, 19, 309 collective experience 11–12 cultural contamination, fear of 218–20 exclusion/inclusion practices 256, 262

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Index ‘going Native’ 218, 323 intercultural ‘tradition’ 93 mutual/shared heritage 42–51 power relations 43, 50, 78, 80–1, 95, 104, 113, 124, 244, 269, 297 shared histories 43, 51, 68, 228, 413, 486 spatial management/segregation 213, 220–7, 232, 235–6 see also cultural entanglement Columbus, Christopher 103n1, 227, 351, 352 Comaroff, John and Jean 95, 213, 471 Combes, A. D. 448 Cook, Sherburne 155 Cooper, Frederick 334, 336 Coote, Charles 308 Coronado, Juan Vasquez de 158–63, 159 Cowlishaw, Gillian 41 cowrie shells 488–9 creolization 62, 271, 357, 358, 362 Cromwell, Oliver 214, 308 cultural appropriation 309–10 cultural difference 41, 95, 253, 414, 431 cultural entanglement 18, 43, 47, 50–1, 77–8, 82, 105, 113–16, 311, 486, 490– 1 balance of power 114 engagement with the colonizer 10, 11–12 intercultural/social relations 76, 90, 200, 207, 236, 244, 269, 271, 282, 298, 308, 336 social hierarchy 245, 303, 334, 337–9, 342 symmetrical exchange 114n4 culture change 57, 60, 68–9, 269, 334, 431 culture abandonment, standard view of 272–3, 275, 281, 283 migration/diffusion models 428, 431 top-down/bottom-up interpretations 334–5 see also material culture culture concept collective construct 416–18 culture/identity distinction 77 essentialized model 398–9, 403, 405–7, 409–13 transactional reality 1 (p.505) culture history 275, 277, 376 Curl, James Stephens 310 Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) 191, 192, 207 Dawdy, Shannon Lee 20, 281 de Acosta, José 352 Deagan, Kathleen 355 decolonization 58, 77, 233–4, 246, 437 Deetz, James 5 Deleuze, Giles and Guattari, Félix 372, 373 deterritorialization 78 ‘pure event’ 382

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Index rhizome concept and ‘nomadology’ 49 Delle, James 300 descendant communities 8, 9, 106, 116 ancestors and sense of place 123–44, 232–3 colonial legacy 18, 19, 374, 387–8 heritage 3, 4, 15, 16, 17, 382–4 Indigenous archaeology 150–68, 424–5, 432, 437–8 mythic history 294 narrative legacies 16, 382–4 social action 232 see also First Nations; identity; identity politics; indigeneity Descola, Philippe 479 diasporas 50, 71, 105, 348, 354–7, 362–3 Diderot, Denis 218 Dietler, Michael 104, 416 disease and Indigenous destruction 152, 153, 154, 155, 168, 270, 310 Douglas, Howard 293 Douthit, Nathan 197 doxa, see practice theory Dumont de Montigny, François 277 Duncan, William 83–4, 86 Dutton, George 41 Edwards, Bryan 338 Ehrhardt, Kathleen 271–2, 273 Eliot, John 254, 257, 261 Elizabeth I, queen 294, 300, 303 enculturation 13, 317–18 England 214–15, 294–7 Enlightenment 1, 214–16 entanglement, see cultural entanglement ethnocentrism 78, 397, 403, 404 ethnogenesis 51, 109, 178, 186, 271, 319 ethnographic other 336 ethnography 78, 79, 89, 94, 213, 309, 409, 411, 491 ethnohistory 193, 199, 272–3, 277–8, 355–6, 485 Ethridge, Robbie 111 Eurocentrism 104, 108–9, 128, 274, 278, 335, 425n5 everyday lived reality 8, 10, 20, 42–3, 63, 213, 255–63, 277, 315, 317, 318, 326–7, 373 archaeology of the everyday 11–18 see also material culture; social practice exchange economy 271, 277, 280 Fanon, Frantz 296, 469 Farelius, Birgitta 453–4 feminist standpoint theory 106n3 Fennell, Christopher C. 109 Ferguson, Leland 357, 473 Ferris, Neal 58, 76, 111, 274

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Index Fichte, Johan 218 Firestone, Melvin 324 First Nations 200, 371 heritage claims 382–8, 402 treaties 197 Fitting, James 273, 274 Fitzgerald, Gerald 294, 303 Fladmark, Knut 403 foodways 11, 12, 176, 186, 271, 280–1, 320–2, 324, 325, 326 Ford, James A. 275 Fort Lane (nineteenth/twentieth century, Oregon) 191–207, 193, 196 artifacts 201–3, 202, 205 Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) 191, 192, 207 diet 204–5 Rogue River Indian wars 191 Table Rock Indian Reservation 196, 197, 198, 199 Table Rock Treaty (1853) 191, 197, 199 Fort Moore (eighteenth century, South Carolina) 212–28, 217 artifacts 223–7, 226 Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina 215–16 Lords Proprietors of the Carolina Colony 215 spatial management/segregation 213, 220–7, 222, 225 trade practices 219–21, 223 tribal groups 216–18 Yamasee War (1715) 212–13, 217–21 Foucault, Michel 1 fur trade 6, 81, 219, 271, 273, 279, 282 Galloway, Patricia 279 gender colonial vision 232, 235–7 domesticity 234–5, 237, 240, 243–4, 245 gendered production 223, 271, 277–8, 280, 282–3, 342–3 (p.506) home and family 236–7 household practices 315–28 identity politics 43 negotiation 319, 325 genocide 65, 104, 191, 198, 199, 206, 309, 429 Gibson, Jon 277 gift-giving 85, 114n4 food 279 potlatch 86 social rituals 280–1, 282 Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales) 297 Given, Michael 471–2 Gookin, Daniel 257 Gorju, Julien 448, 449, 461 Gosden, Chris 104, 113 Gould, Richard A. 414

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Index Gramsci, Antonio 470, 471, 472 Gray, John 448–9, 453 Great Lakes (North America) 214 agriculture 282 Anishinabeg peoples 384, 386 archaeological history 376–81 Basse Louisiane and pays d’en haut (seventeenth–nineteenth century) 268–84 Beaver/Iroquois Wars (c.1641–1701), 270 ceramics industry 269, 270–1, 273, 275–84 fur trade 271 Haudenosaunee peoples 385–6, 388 Huron-Wendat peoples 381, 383, 386–7, 388 Iroquois peoples 270, 380–3, 385–6, 388 kettles and cultural abandonment 269, 272–4 Miami peoples 268–9, 270 Oneida peoples 384–6 Ontario 376–89 Ontario Archaeological Society 387 Ontario Association of Professional Archaeologists 387 Ontario Cemeteries Act 385 Tionontate Huron peoples 273, 282 Green, John 241 Grover, LaFayette 199 Guha, Ranjit 470 Guzmán, Nuno de 158 Haag, William G. 275 habitus, see practice theory Hagenauer, Friedrich 235 Hagenauer, Louise 236 Halbwachs, Maurice 144 Hall, Catherine 477 Hall, Stuart 51 Harris, Marvin 411–12 Harrison, Rodney 68, 228, 413 Harvey, David 349 Hauser, Mark 342 Hawkes, Jacquetta 207 Hazareesingh, Sandip 487 Heaney, Seamus 310 hegemony Africa 447, 449, 452, 454, 456, 457, 458 dominant worldviews 471–2 European 283, 429 zones of power 112 heritage 3, 4, 15, 16, 17 contested 375, 381–9

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Index mutual/shared 42–51 see also identity; identity politics; oral history; oral traditions; social/collective memory Heuman, Gad 340 Higman, Barry 342 history writing colonial Uganda 446–57 ‘decolonized histories’ 469 print technology 457–61 subaltern studies 445–63, 469–73 see also oral history; oral traditions Hodgson, Dorothy 436 Hopkins, Stephen 256 Hunter, Donald G. 278 Huntingford, G. W. B. 431 hybridity 37, 60, 104, 253–4, 472 fear of 254 organic 186 racial categories 51, 336–8 shared histories 42–51, 68, 228 see also hybridization hybridization 315–28 identity ambiguous 294 clothing and dress 251–63, 252 collective 128, 399 community 60, 125 complex nature of 4–5, 37 constructions of 4, 45, 47, 51, 124, 316 cultural 63, 78, 85–6 cultural contamination, fear of 218–20 dichotomous thinking 58, 61–3, 69, 70–1, 126, 283, 315, 327–8, 476, 478 embodiment and performance 256 essentialized 4, 309, 388, 428–9 fluid nature of 3–4, 177, 207 imagined/real 353 indigenism, dangers of 79–80 individual/group 1, 3, 38, 51, 373 multiple/conflicting categories 13, 19 (p.507) phenomenological approach 255–9 process of becoming 43, 51, 371–89 public/private 316–17 shared 42–51 social 41 see also hybridity; hybridization; identity politics; indigeneity; residence; survivance identity politics 37, 43, 85, 388 protest and resistance 90 racial difference 68, 90 rights movements 38, 50, 242, 375 social action 232–4 ‘third space’ 37, 297, 471

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Index Igoe, James 433 imperialism 5, 14, 71, 213–14, 246 indigeneity authenticity 4, 15, 51, 60, 234, 242, 283 comparison with autochthony 425, 433, 434–6 conceptions of 425, 431–8 loss of 68 performed/emergent 51 true 58 voicing the subaltern 9, 463, 470–3 indigenism, dangers of 79–80 Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (formerly Institut Français d’Afrique Noire) 430n8 International Labour Organization 431–2 Ireland 18, 19, 81, 336 Act of Union (1803) 308 architecture 299–302, 304–6, 305 bardic poetry 298, 302 booleying (transhumance) practice 304 castles 300, 301–2 elite interaction 297–303 Irish Free State (1922) 308 Irish Rebellion (1641) 296, 307 Munster Plantation 296, 303 Nine Years War (1594–1603) 296, 297, 304, 306 nomadism 304 non-elite interaction 303–7 plantation settlement and colonies (sixteenth/seventeenth century) 293– 311, 295, 301–2, 305 siege of Drogheda (1649) 308–9 Ulster Plantation 296 War of the Three Kingdoms (1640s) 307–8 Williamite Wars (1688–90) 296, 308 Jamaica Jamaica Assembly 340 racialized space 336–9 sexual relationships 339–40 slavery 338, 341, 343 trade and consumption 341–2 James I, king 296 James II, king 296, 308 Johnson, Matthew H. 486 Johnston, Henry H. 428 Jones, James R. 270 Jordan, Kurt A. 81, 227, 269 Junod, Henri A. 132 Kaggwa, Apolo 449, 461 Kane, Katie 308, 309

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Index Katate, Aloysius and Kamungugunu, Lazaro 450 Keen, Benjamin 154 Kiema, Khelo 434 Kimeze, Baker 456 King, Hannah 240 kinship 85, 124, 125, 244, 296, 355, 358, 359 foodways 280–1 fosterage and gossiprid 298 Kirkman, James 430 Kiwanuka, M. S. M. Semakula 445, 449 Kniffen, Fred B. 275 Kroeber, A. L. 154 Krupat, Arnold 59 Lamadrid, Enrique R. 186 Lamer, Antonio 407 land/landscape 42, 46–50 agriculture 90–2, 129–30, 179, 178–86, 227, 282 colonial appropriation 174–5 community ownership 124 engineering and irrigation 178–86, 182 idealized 232 ‘legendary topography’ 129, 144 natural landmarks 123–4 patterns of movement and occupation 47, 48, 50, 180, 228, 304, 322, 326–7 res nullius concept 216, 306–7 reservations 90–1, 93, 197, 232–46 sacred geography 123–44 trees 123–4, 134–5, 137, 138, 143–4 wilderness transformation 90, 198 Las Casas, Bartolome de 154, 156 Le Page du Pratz, Antoine Simon 277–8 LeClair, Jean 413 Lefebvre, Henri 349 Lewis, Darrell 43 Liebmann, Matthew 77, 324, 491 Ligeex, Paul 86 Lightfoot, Kent 42, 110, 325, 471 Lilley, Ian 50 lithic technology 62, 67, 69, 107, 241, 242, 246, 269, 273, 379 (p.508) Little, Ann M. 263 Locke, John 215, 216 Lockley, Fred 200 Lovisek, Joan A. 412, 413 Lwamgira, Francis X. 458–62 McEachern, Allan 403–5, 407–8 McGrath, Anne 40 McGuire, Randall H. 411

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Index McKern, William 413 Mann, Rob 416 Mansfield, Joseph K. 204 Martelle, Holly 273–4 Martinez, Antoinette 110 Marx, Karl 105, 106, 476 Marxist studies 213, 349 Mason, Ronald J. 272–3, 274 material culture 4, 7, 37, 59, 113, 126, 235–6, 471, 481 domesticity 234–5, 237, 240 essentialism 242–3 gendered production 271, 277–8, 280, 282–3 hearthscape/homescape practices 174, 176–7, 183–7 index of civilization 246, 254 mass-produced 8, 11, 78–9, 342 natural features 123–44 shared 44, 45 subaltern practices 471–3 transfer to descendant communities 150 use in identity formation 255–62 see also social practice Mathew, Gervase 430 Matthews, Christopher 281 memory, see social/collective memory Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 255 Metacom (Wampanoag sachem; aka King Phillip) 254 Mexico 153, 156–7 pan-Indian revolts (sixteenth/seventeenth century) 157 Yucatan Caste War 115 Middleton, Angela 240 Mignolo, Walter D. 452 Mintz, Sidney 213, 351, 485 missions/missionary activity 83–90, 93, 199, 232–46, 251–63 Mondlane, Eduardo 143 Moore, James 217 Moravian Church 232–46 Moryson, Fynes 297–8, 302 Moss, Madonna 415 Mozambique 123–45 FRELIMO (Frente de Libertaçao de Moçambique; Mozambique Liberation Front) 133, 143 khokholo archaeological sites (nineteenth century, Mandlakazi district) 129, 132, 134–44, 136, 140–1 Mandlakazi district, history and peoples 123–44 Mrozowski, Stephen A. 254 Mugabe, Robert 456 Murray, Tim 42, 150 Museveni, Yuweri 454–7

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Index NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 1990) 150 Nájera, Pedro de Castañeda de 160 National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) 59 National University of Ireland 293 naturalism 479 Nesmith, James W. 191–2 New England 251–63 artifacts 251–3, 252, 259–61 cloth and clothing trade 256–8 Deer Island (Boston Harbor) 254 Indians of Massachusetts Bay Colony 257, 258 Metacom’s rebellion (1675) 254, 258–9 native peoples 253, 256–7 praying towns 254, 257, 261 Puritan mission 253–5 sumptuary laws 258 New Mexico 152 Abiquiú 175, 179, 180 Casita Viejas (eighteenth century, Rito Colorado Valley) 175–7, 176, 179– 87 colonial violence 151, 152, 153–63, 157 engineering and irrigation 178–86, 182 Entrada period (c.1539–1600) 158–64, 159 Genízaro settlers 177–8, 180, 185, 186, 187 native resistance to colonization 150–68 NMCRIS (New Mexico Cultural Resource Information System) 183 Pueblo population estimates 165–7 Pueblo Revolt (1680) 115, 150–68, 175 Rito Colorado Valley 173–87, 174, 176, 182 Sapawe (fifteenth century, Rito Colorado Valley) 175–6, 176, 179–80, 183–5 Sistema de Castas (seventeenth/eighteenth-century blood purity legislation) 175–7, 178 Tewa peoples 161, 162, 175, 180, 183, 184, 185, 187 New Zealand 14, 426 Te Puna Mission 240 Neylan, Susan 85 (p.509) Nicholas, George P. 438 Niza, Marcos de 158 Noble, William 400 Ó Catháin, Diarmaid 296 O’Donnell, Terence 197 O’Keeffe, John 306 O’Keeffe, Tadhg 303 O’Neill, Hugh 296, 300 O’Sullivan Beare, Philip 297, 298 Ogot, Bethwell A. 445

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Index Ogundiran, Akinwumi 488 Oliver, Jeff 63, 411 Oliver, Roland 450–1, 453 Ollman, Bertell 105, 106 Oñate, Juan de 158, 163–4 oral history 40, 43, 47–9, 402–3, 446–57 oral traditions 107 dance 177 stories/storytelling 58–9, 64, 70, 177, 399n3, 448–9 see also social/ collective memory; social practice; spiritual practice Ormsby-Gore, William 427–8, 430 Ortner, Susan 270 Peabody Museum (Harvard University) 251 Pelican, Michaela 436 Pénicaut, André 280 Pepper, Phillip 233 Pequot peoples, Eastern Pequot case study (seventeenth–nineteenth century, Connecticut, USA) 64–71, 65, 67 Perrot, Nicholas 268–9, 270, 271, 274, 283 Perry, Adele 85, 86 Pfaffenberger, Bryan 272 Phillippo, James 338 Pluckhahn, Thomas J. 316 Polanyi, Karl 412 Polhemus, Richard 221–2, 224 ‘politics of polarity’ 37, 51, 486 Polynesia 473 Porter, Joy 310 Posnansky, Merrick 445, 450–1 postcolonial studies 37–8, 58, 76–7, 348–9 cultural reproduction 76, 78 domination/resistance discourse 61–2, 64, 77–9, 86 micro-history model 80 neo-historical anthropology 213–14 practice theory doxa 61, 315, 317 habitus 186, 315, 375 prehistory 234, 351, 353, 486 ‘death to prehistory’ 381 deep past 4, 7, 42, 383, 462, 485, 490–2 normative assumptions 7 ‘remote’ 491 Prestholdt, Jeremy 488 Prince, Paul 87, 89 race categorization 336–8 essentialization 411 ethnicity and 336–9

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Index power and 41 racial violence 43 racialized discourse 90, 94, 253, 428–9 segregation 38, 43, 232, 435 Sistema de Castas (seventeenth/eighteenth-century blood purity legislation) 175–7, 178 racism 50, 69, 175, 214, 309, 389, 410, 429n7 Radu, Cosmin 373 Raven, Thomas 306 Read, Peter 42 Reeves, Matthew 342 Reid, Andrew 429, 455 residence 58, 61–4, 82, 144 evidence from artefacts 66–70, 67, 68 see also survivance Reynolds, Henry 42 Ricoeur, Paul 413 ritual, see social practice Robertshaw, Peter 453, 455 Robin, C. C. 275 Roman Empire 477 Roscoe, John 428 Rose, Deborah Bird 43, 45 Rothschild, Nan A. 110 Rowlandson, Mary 258–9 Rowse, Tim 41, 239 Royal Commission for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (1886) 360 Rubertone, Patricia E. 57 Rumsey, Alan 49 Sagard-Théodat, Gabriel 273 Sahlins, Marshall 412, 485 Said, Edward 78, 463, 469 Sands, Bobby 310 Sauer, Carl 154, 155 Scham, Sandra Arnold 63 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 309, 310 Schiffer, Michael B. 2 School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London 450 Schrire, Carmel 109 Schwartz, E. A. 197 Scott, James C. 62, 107 Seligman, C. G. 428 Sepass, ‘Billy’ 91–3, 92, 94 (p.510) Shepherd, Nick 429 Shinnie, Peter 450 Silliman, Stephen 80, 112, 113, 228, 283, 374 Silverman, David J. 257 Silvia, Diane E. 279 Simpson, Lesley 155

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Index slavery/slave trade 65, 153, 156, 216, 217, 336–8, 341, 343 Smith, Andrew Jackson 192, 196, 197, 198, 200, 203 Smith, Claire and Wobst, H. Martin 438 Smith, Monica L. 316 Smith, Thomas 294 Smyth, William 310 social/collective memory 58, 60, 63, 107, 112 memory work 63–4 landscape and sacred geography 123–44 social practice 60–1 everyday 11 practice theory 61 resistance theory 62 ritual 41, 90, 123–8, 132–9, 279, 280 see also spiritual practice Society for the Propagation of the Gospel 257 Soto, Ferdinand de 114 South, Stanley 221–2, 224 Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology 193, 201 Spanish Empire 153–64 encomienda system 336 see also New Mexico Spector, Janet 111 Speke, John Hanning 428 Spieseke, Christina 236 Spieseke, Friedrich 235 spiritual practice power and authority 128, 134 sacred geography 123–44 Spivak, Gayatri 446, 463, 470–1 Stahl, Ann B. 416, 471 Stein, Sarah Abrevaya 488 Steiner, Christopher B. 488 Steward, Julian Haynes 348 Stewart, John 337 Stoler, Ann L. 334, 336 Stoler, Laura 213, 218, 224 Straus, Scott 429 Strehlow, Ted 49 subaltern studies 445–63, 469–73 survivance 58–61, 64, 80, 374 evidence from artefacts 66–70, 67, 68 negotiation and resistance 69, 283, 315, 318 survival with attitude 59 Sweitzer, Jacob Bowmen 198, 200, 203, 204 symbolic capital 85, 90, 91 Tarlow, Sarah 489 Taylor, Douglas 358 Thom, Brian 399n2, 413 Thomas, Nicholas 473, 487

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Index tobacco 45, 131, 137, 138, 219, 279 Tosh, John 453 totemism 479 Townsend, Charles W. 324 transculturation 358 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 424n1 Trigger, Bruce 403 Tsing, Anna 487 Turgeon, Laurier 488 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) 432 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 424n3 United States American Civil War 193, 197 American Parks Service 6 California 197 Fort Leavenworth (Kansas) 203 Fort Mose (Florida) 115 Fort Ross (California) 110, 115 Fort St Joseph (Michigan) 111 frontier forts 191–207 gold rush 197, 203 Iroquois peoples 111, 112, 115, 270 Kaskaskia peoples 273 Panama Railway 203 Plains Indian Wars 193 Sand Creek Massacre (1804) 308 Wahpeton Dakotas 111 see also Fort Lane (Oregon); Fort Moore (South Carolina); Great Lakes (North America); New England; New Mexico; Pequot peoples, Eastern Pequot case study Usner, Daniel 271, 278, 281 Vansina, Jan 445 Verrazano, Giovanni da 113 Veth, Peter and McDonald, Jo 398 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 479 Vizenor, Gerald 58, 59, 60, 64 Voss, Barbara 109, 280 Waselkov, Gregory A. and Gums, Bonnie L. 276–7, 278–9, 280 Wayland, E. J. 448–9 Webster, Jane 472 Wells, A. C. 91 White, Leslie 273 White, Richard 214, 274 Whitridge, Peter 323 (p.511) Wilkie, Laurie A. and Farnsworth, Paul 342 William of Orange 296, 308 Williams, Charles and Mary 319–20, 325, 326, 327 Williams, Stephen 275

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Index Winslow, Edward 256, 260 Wolf, Eric 108, 213, 416, 470, 485 Wood, William 257 Woods, Patricia Dillon 275 Wright, J. V. 400 Yeh, Emily T. 432 (p.512)

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