It may come as no surprise in some circles to learn that prehistory is passe. That prehistory may have outlived its usefulness as a concept has been anticipated by its increasingly depleted vitality as a way of conceptualizing and representing the past. The literature has been hinting towards a lingering passing since Kent Lightfoot’s milestone essay (1995), often referenced in this book for his keen insights into the harm and difficulties of labelling prehistory in the experiences of North America First Nations. Our contributors to this volume came together with a common concern: we bear witness to the harm the prehistory label visited upon the Other, vast numbers of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and Asia who today are trying to reclaim histories erased or denied through the application of ‘prehistory’. That label signifies alterity and the absence of history and its making of identity. Rae Gould and Joseph Aguilar in this volume both write from a first-person native perspective, more than mere witnesses to the disjunction of their histories by prehistory. Indeed, part of their reason for entering the academy was to bring their standpoint into scholarship in hopes of shaping a future without prehistory.
Not surprisingly, prehistory as a trope for time before written history has had less deleterious impacts on identities in Europe. The practice of prehistory in Europe has been less denigratory than where it has been relatively recently imposed as part of colonization by colonial bureaucracies and settler societies. Yet even in Europe, the concept of prehistory has had detractors who did not accept the fundamental idea of a time before history. If history was linked to the trajectory of human development on the earth, then how could there be a time before history? How could there be a prehistory? (Daniel 1962: 10). Instituted among
Scandinavian and other northern European scholars to assert nationalities independent of Roman civilization (Kehoe, this volume), prehistoric archaeological studies called into question the antiquity of humankind, its tether to literary sources, most notably the Bible, and a broader debate concerning evolution and religion (Trigger 2006: 125-37).
We in this volume are not writing prehistory’s obituary. Instead, we work to construct history and historical narratives that utilize oral testimonies and indigenous knowledge while incorporating archaeological data. Deep time history, often indigenous history, is a purposefully open-ended concept, unburdened by divisions that have set early history against literary history. Deep time history has no particular beginning or ending points (see Chapter 14 for more on ‘deep history’), both will shift as change occurs in the issues and institutions being examined by archaeology and history. Concurrently, our focus on many colonial contexts where manipulations and abuses of historymaking still occur is a necessary part of this discussion. Archaeological practice, if it is conceived as praxis, engages us in overturning some of the misrepresentations of peoples outside or encapsulated within the West, their pasts silenced or erased.
1.1 HISTORY-MAKING AND ANCESTORS
One thematic thread running through the chapters of this book is how ancestors enter our daily lives, often cajoling and giving guidance (Schmidt, this volume), evoking social memories, and bringing the past into the present, what Ray (1987) and Lane, following Ray (this volume; also see Walz, this volume), call presencing the past. Aguilar and Preucel (this volume; see Ferguson and Preucel 2005) vividly relate how ancestors are instrumental in keeping deep histories alive at sacred places in ancient pueblos. As we invoke ancestors who move to and fro, from past to present and back, through an unbounded liminal space, neither past nor present, not pre or post, we move through this slipway of knowledge— hoping to find a way to gather the bits and pieces of knowledge (material remains, texts, narrative, oral testimonies, performance) from the past and refabricate them to make histories appropriate for the present setting. Negotiating this liminal domain along with the ancestors (on occasion this can be unsettling) allows us to build afresh, pragmatically marshalling our best imaginings to diminish the divide between prehistory and history and improve the lives of those whose histories we engage.
Our reasons for invoking ancestors are multiple, including one clearly articulated by Fabian (1983) when he observes that a central issue in anthropological treatments of the Other is a denial of coevalness, a denial that archaeologists effect through the labelling of precolonial histories of the Other as primitive, prehistoric, or mythological. When other cultures are labelled thus, or as technologically backward rather than industrial, they are placed outside our temporal experience and denied coevalness with ourselves. This alterity is more than a colonial device for keeping primitives out of history. It is an everyday occurrence manifest in how we think about and practise archaeology. When we, as archaeological anthropologists, can invoke ancestral presence or accept them in the lives and materiality of contemporary peoples, then we erode alterity. This is quite a different perspective from that of Lucas (2005) who sees the past being our own ancestry as the Other.
We, the editors, both unhesitatingly feel a deep and profound respect for ancestors, our own as well as those who enrich the lives of those with whom we work in communities around the world. As archaeologists closely engaged with contemporary heritage politics, we daily interact with local or indigenous peoples, attuned to their sensibilities and to historical perspectives that include our as well as their interactions with ancestors. What we understand from these experiences is that our successes as archaeologists lie in trust and mutual respect with those with whom we wish to build more vital futures. This requires that we must comprehend ways of thinking that are different from our own and that we must deal with the way time is organized and the manner in which it is often imposed on contemporary spaces that have been deemed backward and equated with prehistory. Going beyond participant observation, at best an artificial construct in anthropology, this standpoint engages us in living daily life, participating in the rhythm of history and ritual, and developing trust and insight into local historical thinking. Some of the contributors to this volume live partly in a world in which people do not divide time into prehistoric and historic periods, people who see only history with the punctuation of literacy marking one of the attributes of the modern era. Their history is one long social process running far into deep pasts. For those living in worlds in which the notion of prehistory is often an oppressive reminder of their political, cultural, and economic disenfranchisement, archaeologists are not viewed as detached and benevolent scientists. Rather, they may be seen as agents of an empirical imperialism that for centuries poked and prodded both the living and the dead with little thought about the welfare of the people whose histories are investigated. It was Bruce Trigger (1980) who exposed the shortcomings and harm brought by scientific archaeology within native communities, first bringing this concern into our consciousness. With such awareness, we work to replace negative perceptions held by native and indigenous people about prehistory with archaeologies that respect and incorporate all forms of knowledge, including the importance of ancestors in daily lives (as illustrated by Aguilar and Preucel, this volume).
The presence and influence of ancestors in daily life is a condition that most of us raised in the West experience differently from cultures in which there are daily ritual observances for ancestral well-being. Our direct ancestors are often represented by images in photographs or in oral histories of our families that are passed on from generation to generation. In some instances ancestors are tucked away in remote places, deep in the earth under simple or elaborate marking stones, placed in storeyed niches, or scattered to the winds and waters rather than buried outside the front door or under the bedroom floor. Close proximities, along with attendant rituals, keep vital social memories that elevate the ancestors to an active presence in daily life. In the lives of many of the authors in the volume and in Others’ lives, ancestors are ever-present, joining in the telling of ancient tales, coming alive during dance and song, taking shape in eating and laughing as their traits are manifest in behaviour, as their guidance is acknowledged and sought in daily living and prayers. A history that reaches back through ancestors as far as a great-grandfather is a lineage history of relatively abbreviated depth, yet it very probably articulates with histories told by different social segments about ancestors who founded the larger social group to which the lineage traces its membership. To ignore the place and significance of ancestors in the lives of others maybe seen as disrespectful while it simultaneously occludes important insights into the cultural practices of those with whom we live and work.
1.2 AMBIVALENCE ABOUT IDENTITIES AND HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY
Juxtaposed to a world of history informed by daily discourse with ancestors is what we might call legacy thinking, a condition that often includes respect proffered to our predecessors (our intellectual ancestors) in an academic discipline such as prehistoric archaeology. This occurs as an unconscious everyday occurrence in terms of regular citation to founding thinkers in archaeology. The eminence of some ancestors such as Wheeler,
Kenyon, Childe, Braidwood, and Bordes is undeniably important, and their stature continues to sustain those who identify themselves as prehistorians and those who admire how they elevated interest in the social power of archaeology. One of our group remarked during the discussions of essays in this volume, ‘I was trained as a prehistorian and did prehistoric research in Britain. It just seems a natural part of my identity. I do not feel comfortable with what could be perceived as an attack on prehistory’ (see Lane, this volume). We agree and respect the embedded identities of prehistorians working in Europe and outside the colonized world. Many of us found our initial footing in archaeology as prehistorians (Lightfoot, Lane, Kehoe) or have on many occasions engaged the concept in our practice when examining the entire sweep of history, both deep time and more recent, historical time (Rizvi, Mrozowski, Schmidt, Hantman, Walz, LaViolette). It is not a trope alien to our own identities. Consequences of our language, the tropes we use, profoundly impact identity and ways of thinking about the past as well as the daily well-being of peoples around the globe. We seek to develop ways to observe and represent history before literacy without all the baggage that makes prehistory an unacceptable way of thought for so many people we work with (see Gould, Mrozowski, Hantman, Walz, this volume), including the professional colleagues that Schmidt (2005) and Lane (this volume) interacted with in Tanzania.
We may trace back some of our ambivalence about the role of history and archaeology in the treatment of the deep past by examining some legacies in historical studies. If we turn to the scholarship of a prominent academic ancestor, R. G. Collingwood, we find a characteristic formulation about this relationship. During his discussion of Croce’s perspective on how to write the history of a Neolithic Ligurian or Sicilian, Colling-wood (1972 [1962]: 199) presents an observation that underlies our theme here, ‘If you can enter into his [Neolithic man] mind and make his thoughts your own, you can write his history, and not otherwise; if you cannot, all you can do is to arrange his relics in some kind of tidy order, and the result is ethnology or archaeology but it is not history. Yet the reality of Neolithic man was an historical reality’ (emphasis ours). We have come some distance from the notion that our imaginations enter into minds of the past (unless we are writing historical fiction), leading us to Collingwood’s option to arrange artefacts into a tidy scheme, something he says is not history but is derived from a historical ‘reality’. We see here a separation of archaeology (classification) from history, a division that parallels the prehistory/history divide, a foundation stone of European concepts of prehistoric archaeology. The materiality of the past does pertain to ‘historical reality’, to use Collingwood’s own words, but not to history-making. If the life of so-called Neolithic man is the stuff of history, then exclusion of his material record would deny him the history that Collingwood argues for when he says, ‘When he made a certain implement, he had a purpose in mind; the implement came into being as an expression of his spirit, and if you treat it as nonspiritual that is only because of the failure of your historical insight’ (Collingwood 1972 [1962]: 199-200). The historicity of the objects associated with Neolithic man is already established by Collingwood’s discussion of ‘historical reality’.
Despite his ambivalence on the role of archaeology in history-making noted earlier, Collingwood, a practising field archaeologist and philosopher, modulated his linkage between materiality and history-making when he wrote, ‘at one time historians had worked out their methods of critical interpretation only as applied to written sources containing narrative material, and it was a new thing when they learnt to apply them to the unwritten data provided by archaeology’ (Collingwood 1972 [1962]: 210). This thinking anticipates Trouillot’s (1995) historicity 1 and 2, recognizing that both entail the same processes of writing and making history. We see the possibilities that arise for using historicity embedded in the materiality of deep pasts to examine, deconstruct, and re-represent narratives about ‘prehistory’ as well as more recent pasts within the orbit of the documentary record.
1.3 THE PREHISTORY TROPE IN POPULAR USE
Popular use of the prehistory trope brings into focus and amplifies some of the language that has shaped ideas about prehistory. These usages emphasize the exotic primitiveness of the ancient past, mixing and confounding time periods as well as creating metaphors that render prehistory as ancient life with creatures millions of years older than humankind. Film treatments are particularly susceptible to creating such tropes. In a review of the ten best ‘prehistoric films’, a Web-based critic writes, for example, ‘we. . . thought it might be a good time to look back over the various films that focus both on prehistoric man and prehistoric man’s best friend—the deadly, carnivorous dinosaurs’ (Monfette 2009).1 This misuse of prehistory to include dinosaurs leaves an enduring impression that prehistory is so far beyond history as to be the domain of beasts from the furthest reaches of time. Juxtaposing
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Ancient human history with the great antiquity of extinct animals creates an identity between the two, a powerful metonymy—the most transformational trope distorting prehistory’s meanings (see Schmidt 2010b).
The appropriation of the prehistory trope by popular writers and the film industry uses the trope without reference to human history, ancient or recent. It has become a powerful way to represent savage and exotic animals that no longer need the presence of humans. Prehistory signifies both the exotic and primitiveness of such beasts, as in the description of the film Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure, viz.: ‘[It] brings to life some of the most bizarre, ferocious and fascinating creatures to ever inhabit the ocean. Combines animation with recreations in a prehistoric adventure’ (Kuman n. d.).2 When the prehistory trope is layered with other metonyms that confound ancient beasts with humans, it is little wonder that prehistory is so widely associated with the primitive, the exotic, and a state of savagery. Such meanings are not lost on peoples whose ancestors we write about as archaeologists.
The dilution of the prehistory trope in pop culture significantly interpenetrates the thinking of other scientists if not archaeologists. In a recent New Yorker article about a palaeontologist (one Carl Mehling) who works for the American Museum of Natural History (Marx 2012), we learn that ‘He is so devoted to the pursuit of the prehistoric that, on a fossil expedition a few winters ago, he liberated a fish jaw encased in frozen soil by peeing on it’ (Marx 2012: 28). What captures our attention here is not Mehling’s unorthodox field methods but the author’s use of ‘prehistoric’—a generic trope that encompasses anything of great antiquity, fossils included.
1.4 THE PRAGMATICS OF PREHISTORY
The intersection of intellectual and political concerns in formulating an end to the prehistory trope brings us logically to the pragmatics of our mission. There is a philosophical reason for our stance that relates to tenets of contemporary, philosophical pragmatism that hold particular relevancy for our arguments: (1) willingness to consider all forms of knowledge; (2) commitment to an open-ended search for understanding that does not privilege a singular unity of science or path to knowledge; and (3) the value of an enterprise necessarily being measured by what it
2
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Contributes in concrete terms to problems confronting the contemporary world (Baert 2005; Mrozowski 2012; Preucel and Bauer 2001; Preucel and Mrozowski 2010). Pragmatism asks how archaeology can best address issues of political or cultural relevancy in today’s complex world. The chapters in this volume meet this challenge by addressing the connection between the place of prehistory in oppressive, colonialist pasts and the manner in which its continuing use contributes to oppression today, whether the context is North America, Africa, India, or other postcolonial societies.
The chapters by Aguilar and Preucel, Gould, Hantman, Mrozowski, Schmidt, and Walz all present instances where notions of prehistory make difficult attempts to collaborate with indigenous populations, as well as limit our avenues for understanding indigenous forms of knowledge. In the case of historical archaeology, an emphasis on the centrality of the written word precludes the search for connections between the present and deeper pasts. In North American contexts, this is particularly frustrating, given the strong American philosophical roots of pragmatism.
Pragmatism’s beginnings as a philosophy can be traced to Kant, through the work of American-born philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (see Baert 2005; Buchler 1955; Preucel and Bauer 2001). Peirce believed that those who spent their lives working in laboratories needed to have the purpose of their work applied in the real world, much as we have argued in this volume for archaeology. John Dewey (1925) took this thinking further by advocating a social theory that served practical purposes in meeting real-world needs as part of a larger educational enterprise for community-focused science, a point that reverberates with community-based heritage and archaeology today. Richard Rorty (1979, 1982, 1998, 1999) provides perspectives complementary to ours when he argues forcefully against the unity of science and for the open-ended pursuit of knowledge that respects all forms of knowing. We agree with Rorty’s insistence that our archaeological research be part of an engaged praxis. More recently, philosopher Patrick Baert (2005) draws on both anthropology and archaeology to argue for a pragmatism that rejects a detached form of knowledge production in favour of one based on a reflective, self-referential knowledge similar to that of the authors in this book. The central point of our concerns is that prehistory as a concept represents an archaeological past characterized by a detached form of knowledge production that implicitly or explicitly perpetuates colonialist notions of the Other and their timeless location in an unchanging past— fossilized, as it were.
1.5 NATIVE AMERICANS AND OTHER COLONIZED PEOPLE
The chapters in this book also address a significant issue that arises constantly in the treatment of Native American communities by archaeologists and historians. Archaeologists such as Aguilar, Gould, Lightfoot, Preucel, Mrozowski, and Hantman are either members of Native American communities or have worked closely with those communities and thus recognize the tendency to treat the recent history of these groups as corrupted and inauthentic because of exposure to Western culture and history-making. Based on a root notion that ancient times or prehistory marked a period of authentic Indian life untouched by colonizers’ debasing influences, this quest for authenticity writes Native Americans out of recent history, doctoring their distinctive historical profiles if they appear to be coloured by foreign elements. The romanticized authentic Indian is a construct that refuses to recognize the ‘irruptions’ (see Giard 2000 for this usage, and below) of the past in present life. When material culture of Western life is used by indigenous groups as key signifiers for identities running into the deep past, such materialities are often mistaken as failure to maintain an identity consistent with past ‘pure’ lifeways.
Silliman’s (2009) work with the Eastern Pequot of Connecticut illustrates how the recent past is just as important in shaping notions of identity as some mythical prehistoric past. Eighteenth - and nineteenth-century Pequot households were informed as much by active memory as they were by connections to older forebears. The importance of memory in shaping identity and cultural practice is critical because recognizing it counters the idea that authenticity must be linked to a longer past. Engaging memory, archaeologists can move beyond notions of static pasts, a view that contributes to the idea that interaction with Europeans set in motion a process that destroyed authentic indigenous societies (Gould, Mrozowski, this volume; Silliman 2005, 2009).
Rejecting a dichotomous rendering of prehistory and history allows a discourse to develop in which we may tease out many of the problems of hierarchy, economic advantage, class and gender differences that today afflict the practice ofarchaeology around the globe, particularly influencing how indigenous people regard the West and distrust Western concepts of the past. We both confront the real and pragmatic issues every day when we do fieldwork among living peoples; we feel, hear, and observe palpable disdain for how archaeologists have failed to deal with the harmful influences of the prehistory/history divide. Stephen Mrozowski (this volume) poignantly tells us in his discussion of collaborations with the Nipmuc nation, ‘to accept the notion that the history of a people is to be artificially divided is to end your collaboration’. This makes us pause to consider the barriers that have arisen between native peoples and archaeologists over practice, often not articulated but deeply held in silent objection.
Such polarizations are animated by Peter Schmidt’s (this volume) story about how the prehistory wedge between literary history and non-literary history was driven into him during an interview early in his research in Tanzania. A wise and well-educated elder asked, ‘Why do you Whites say our history is prehistory?’ The question pushed Schmidt to reconsider ways that he had been thinking about history in Africa and examine more closely how our usage of taken-for-granted concepts can offend sensibilities where the use of such tropes carries the stigma of erasure and enforced invisibility of local history.
Offensive speech—the use of labels that diminish, denigrate, and otherwise marginalize the histories of many peoples—compels us to reconsider the role of prehistory in the world today (see Watkins 2005). This is more than a matter of political correctness, for when the prehistory trope is used and offends, then it must be recognized as a device that disenfranchises whole cultures and regions, writing them out of history. Simultaneously, we recognize that not all contexts are similar and that the use of the prehistory trope in Europe, for example, may have different and less negative implications. In spite of national differences, the prehistory/history divide did not initially involve the history of nonEuropean peoples but rather recent and deeper histories of Europe itself. The need for different methods resulted in a division between the practices of prehistory and history, both often serving nationalistic programmes. The problem arose, and continues, in those instances when Western-trained archaeologists look to the indigenous populations of colonial-era Ireland, Africa, North America, or Australia as useful analogues for Palaeolithic or Neolithic Europeans.
Our stance here is one of political action that seeks to change our language about how we re-represent histories that have been affected, truncated, and distorted through active use of tropes like prehistory. Truncated histories are not repaired or recuperated by the use of alternative tropes (protohistoric, ethnohistoric, contact, entanglements—all are mere substitutes while also acting as politically correct speech). A key dilemma facing archaeologists who work among native communities is how to overcome the pejorative implications of the prehistory (or protohistoric, ethnohistoric, contact) label. Complete avoidance of the term is not sufficient because active renunciation is required. Issues of social justice emerge in any posture of avoidance, demanding a more pointed action and seeking ways of writing history that account for and incorporate native thinking and sensibilities as well as socio-historical process. Reaching beyond intellectual issues about how subaltern histories are created under colonialism, or how archaeology sometimes is a handmaiden to documentary perspectives within historical archaeology, archaeology engages how we interact with indigenous and local peoples and assists in the writing of their histories. Warped constructions prevent fruitful dialogues between those who write deep time histories and those who focus on historical archaeology. Barriers to such dialogue commonly take the form of indigenous histories conceived as prehistory, artificially ending at the point when history begins or when historical archaeologists truncate their research so that deeper connections are not explored. In North America this is sometimes manifest in a strange and often unconscious manner in which early colonial history is viewed as autochthonous or separated from earlier time, an approach that limits the search for deeper European, African, or Asian histories. Historical archaeologists who approach their research as if indigenous populations had no influence on the course of European-based cultures often, ironically, fail to consider antecedent precolonial European cultural practices. We do not see this as deeper histories consciously being made invisible, but as a failure to search for deeper histories that results ipso facto in their absence.
1.6 THE DEATH OF PREHISTORY AND HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY
The impending death of prehistory has been an increasing focus over the last several decades in archaeological circles. In Making Alternative Histories, Schmidt and Patterson (1995a, 1995b) argue that binary or dichotomous constructions of archaeology as history and prehistory diminish the making of history in non-literary settings:
Both archaeologists and historians of the First World widely accept the validity of prehistory as a concept that applies to preliterate or nonliterate societies, whose pasts can be known to us only through study of archaeological remains. This idea carries with it the additional implication that nonliterate societies lack histories, a view that represents their pasts as mythic because they are expressed through folk histories and oral traditions. (Schmidt and Patterson 1995a: 13)
At the same time Lightfoot (1995) presented an exegesis on the limitation of North American archaeological practice that emphasized concern over provincialism in North American archaeology. His diagnosis captured the tendency to make subaltern any treatments that extend the earlier past into literate times—banishing such attempts by lack of citation, a commonplace treatment of non-Western scholarship using such a perspective. Perhaps the most powerful tool of those favouring a prehistoric paradigm—regardless of which side of the practice divide they position themselves—can marshal, is what de Certeau (1988) identifies as a form of academic silencing: failure to cite non-Western scholarship (Schmidt, this volume). Though there is a strong record of extending history within the European tradition when using ethnographic analogy, the practice is relegated to a place outside theory, considered only a necessary method to shed light on premised continuity.
Academic silencing is a core problem facing historical archaeology in North America today. While Schmidt and Patterson came at the subject from an angle privileging the periphery, the subaltern, and the marginalized world, Lightfoot’s view of the problem is from the centre, making diaphanous some of the key problems arising out of this false separation within archaeological practice in North America: (1) long-term culture change cannot be studied if separation between early history and colonial-influenced history is maintained; (2) definition of historical archaeology as having a unique relationship with the written word makes it different from prehistory; (3) written accounts are privileged over other sources of evidence, even by so-called prehistorians who sometimes ignore archaeological evidence of earlier periods when making interpretations. Lightfoot’s central argument is elegant in its simplicity—you cannot understand how cultures change under conditions of contact and colonialism unless you understand their earlier histories. They are, ipso facto, entangled and not separated.
Alice Kehoe (1998, this volume) soon after examined critically the strictures of prehistoric thinking, arguing in The Land of Prehistory that the successful entrenchment of prehistory as conceptualized by Lubbock in his Pre-Historic Times (1912 [1865]) represented the success of class interests over more historically based treatments by Daniel Wilson, who conceded that ‘“peoples without history” did leave data that can be employed to construct “annals” (chronicles)’ (Kehoe, this volume). Kehoe’s discussion reminds us of the conflicting forces at the genesis of prehistoric archaeology’s creation in Europe, a history replete with controversy that, as this book demonstrates, has not been reconciled (see Daniel 1962: 10-49; Trigger 2006: 125-37). Reactions to the prehistory trope as exclusionary of local histories were also present in Australia (e. g., Frederricksen 2000, cited in Lane, this volume; Smith 1998) shortly after, affirming a growing discomfort among archaeologists working among disenfranchised and colonized peoples. Continuing the trend, Ken Sassaman (2010: 1) argues on page one of The Eastern Archaic, Historicized that prehistory is both ‘precedent for and product of Western notions of progress, dominion, and civil society. The subjects of prehistory are the subjects of primitiveness’, against which we measure our progress as a developmentally oriented culture. While many archaeologists working in colonial contexts such as Australia or North America may understand that indigenous populations have histories, their inability or the unwillingness of a significant portion of them to expand their research to include the study of oral traditions leaves us with the same result as accepting that there are no pre-European histories (Schuyler 1978, 1988; contra Beck and Somerville 2005; Schmidt 2006).
Insights into practice additionally unfold the recognition that North American historical archaeologists are rarely familiar with the historical archaeology of other world regions, such as Africa and Asia; this condition is readily verified by examination of the bibliographies of major North American case studies and more theoretical works. This practice marginalizes important contributions that have the potential to break down the very boundaries that American-centric studies in North America have erected. ‘The mixing of “prehistoric” archaeology with "mythic” oral information further reinforces the idea that such innovative research is not only unscientific (it confuses categories) but also ahistoric’ (Schmidt and Patterson 1995a: 13). Little has changed. As self-identified historical archaeologists, many contributors to this book would eschew such thinking and argue that this artificial division of history is a serious issue. Provincialism is an active exclusionary force: ‘ . . . historical archaeology is seen [only] as the history of European settlement and colonization, as well as the history of capitalism and its industrial expressions’, a condition that will cause its practitioners to ‘dismiss and ignore perspectives arising out of indigenous milieus in the Third World’ (Schmidt and Patterson 1995a: 13-14). As long as historical archaeologists accept the posture that the historical constructions of societies outside literate and printed expressions are not legitimate texts in the practice of historical archaeology, then they are in the midst of an anthropological conundrum: the denial of history made by others (Schmidt and Walz 2007a, 2007b: 129).
Dawdy (2010) concludes that historical archaeologists see their work as focusing almost exclusively on modernity because they want to maintain a separate identity from archaeologists interested in antiquity. From this perspective, the archaeology of Native American society is made to fall outside modernity and as such is outside history. It is encouraging to witness change in these perspectives among some Americanists who increasingly are more inclined to accept the histories of native peoples as their primary focus (e. g., Atalay 2006; Hantman 2001, 2004; Lightfoot 1995; Lightfoot et al. 1998; Mrozowski et al. 2005, 2009; Rubertone 2000; Silliman 2001,2005, 2009). These archaeologists do not see their work as being separate from that of other historical archaeologists. Nor do they view Native American history as outside modernity, static and timeless at the beginning of contact or colonialism. These changes represent an important new direction in North American historical archaeology, yet these developments belie another reality—that studies of Native American history, while increasing slowly in popularity, remain infrequent in historical archaeology.
There has long been a focus, albeit an underdeveloped focus, on the use of oral histories (Brown 1987; Echo-Hawk 2000; Yentsch 1988) in North American historical archaeology and historical anthropology, yet until recently these have focused primarily on the folklore generated by vernacular histories (e. g., Horning 2000a, 2000b; Schuyler 1978, 1988). The overarching emphasis placed on Euro-American or African-American societies by contemporary historical archaeologists is the status quo, but change is afoot in these intellectual circles. In large part stimulated by Lightfoot and his colleagues (1995, 1998), there is an emergent focus on indigenous archaeologies and greater collaborations with indigenous peoples, a phenomenon that is occurring across the globe (e. g., Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2008; Ferguson 2003, 2004; Heckenberger 2008; Lydon 2006; Smith 2007; Smith and Wobst 2005, Watkins 2000, 2005; Aguilar and Preucel, Gould, Hantman, Mrozowski, Schmidt, Rizvi, Walz, this volume). These historical archaeologists have eloquently argued for changes that we believe have contributed to a greater awareness of the value of ending the corrosive dichotomy between history and prehistory.
1.7 ENGAGING THE COLONIAL PROJECT
During discussions of these chapters, the contributors agreed that it is mostly those examining and revising the written record who have created the boundary between non-text histories and textual histories. This is a development of the nineteenth century, something that arose out of the Victorian era when imperialism carried into colonial settings as part of its baggage the certainty that history only resided within literacy. These imperialist practices were linked to the rhetoric of Empire which even in much earlier iterations, revolved around notions of indigenous groups being part of a different, non-literate reality (Parsons 2010). Once ensconced in colonial settings, such valorizations of literacy and the accuracy of the written word were used as cultural bludgeons against the historicity of native peoples with orally transmitted histories.
Colonial officials sought to manipulate local histories to make administration more efficient, more peaceful, and more legitimate in the eyes of subject populations. In some instances we find quite surprising and purposeful manipulations of history, for example in western Uganda where colonial authorities fabricated a bizarre pastiche of local oral traditions to create a new, synthetic myth about a major earthworks site for reasons of political expediency (Schmidt, this volume). Myth in the colonial lexicon was prehistory, but when politics entered the equation in western Uganda, when local history became critical for the legitimization of colonial indirect rule, then myth became history— evidence that could be analysed, synthesized, and put into narrative form.
In North America there are numerous examples of colonial histories that incorporate a myth of impending indigenous extinction. In New England, for example, the narrative of indigenous extinction has remained an essential part of colonial and nineteenth-century legislation involving land rights and sovereignty (Den Ouden 2005; Gould 2010; Gould, this volume). In virtually every piece of legislation there are clauses that explicitly state that the specific law will remain in effect as long as there are descendants of the groups mentioned. An exhaustive study of the underlying assumptions of colonial and nineteenth-century treaties involving the Pequot Nation of Connecticut (Den Ouden 2005) shows that most treaties include clauses that explicitly state that the treaties will be enforced until such time as no Pequots survive. Recent scholarship has countered the premise of the vanishing race by producing histories documenting the persistence of indigenous peoples throughout the region (Den Ouden 2005; Doughton 1997; Gould 2010; Gould, this volume).
Problems surrounding the use of oral traditions and histories also extend in some instances to documentary histories as well. Western archives contain primary documents rife with ambiguities, failings, and sometimes embarrassing erasures and silences. Very ancient archives such as those of China cross far over the boundaries erected in the West. These boundaries—the prehistoric/historic divides—also vary according to where and when colonial powers used history as part of their governing strategy. Colonialism often separated subjected people from their identities, taught them that they had no histories, and instilled in them the belief that any event before the coming of writing had no historical meaning. These actions conflated space and time, resulting in some spaces being categorized as prehistoric while others were part of history and, as such, connected to the present and future. Two examples from Africa illustrate this process—the characterizations of the Kalahari and of the Nyika (bushy hinterland behind the coastal littoral) of East Africa as timeless prehistoric spaces (Kusimba 2004; Kusimba and Kusimba 2005; Schmidt and Walz 2007a; Wilmsen and Denbow 1990).
Walz (this volume) and Pawlowicz and LaViolette (this volume) present allied discussions in which elements of time and space become conflated, resulting in contemporary spaces being assigned simultaneously to history and prehistory respectively. In these cases, coastal communities in East Africa interlocking with Eurasian histories are represented within history, while those in the interior are relegated to prehistory. As Walz notes, the assigned backwardness of hinterland communities resulted in a lack of attention by historians and archaeologists alike. The results were historiographies in which important economic connections between interior and coastal communities were never investigated. Through his research, Walz found a rich materiality that confirmed robust inland exchange with coastal societies, repudiating the notion that the coast resided in history while the interior remained prehistoric. Pawlowicz and LaViolette uncover similar spatial-temporal segmentations when they examine Swahili chronicles that attribute communities as historical when they are mentioned in Islamic and European chronicles, while those not chronicled remained suspended in prehistory during much of the nineteenth century.
These concerns raise the issue of historical archaeology’s engagement in the colonial project. Indigenous history and local history-making are excluded from its journals (with the growing exception of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology) and from mainstream book publishing. You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of historical archaeologists of African origin who have gained audiences through Western presses. The more innovative and controversial works— outside the idiom of the Western academy—are published by presses rarely patronized or read by Western scholars (e. g., Andah 1990; Chami 2006). For the production of knowledge in historical archaeology, colonial studies have centred on North America, rendering the colonized periphery in Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America invisible.
1.8 MEDIATING THE DIVIDES: RECOGNIZING LIMINALITY AND WRITING DEEP HISTORIES
The ambiguities that prevail over what is and what is not prehistory came to the fore during our reflections on the treatment of the Pueblo Revolt by Aguilar and Preucel (this volume). We found ourselves asking some obvious questions. Once the Pueblos expunged the Spaniards from their midst, did they return to a prehistoric condition during the period when there is no literate agent to record events? Or, are they to be consigned to the ‘Contact Period’, a kind of liminal status between the prehistoric and historic—the protohistoric escape hatch favoured by some? Similarly, after the Spanish returned, are the Pueblos thrust into their previous condition of being within history and outside of prehistory? These questions highlight the inherent arbitrariness of such distinctions while also making us aware that Pueblos will be conferred or denied historical agency depending on scholars’ answers—a circumstance that illuminates the power that contemporary archaeologists hold over the history of the Other (see also Silliman 2005, 2009). A similar slipperiness is found in Mesoamerica, where prehistoric is replaced by pre-Hispanic or preColumbian (Joyce and Sheptak, this volume), but neither are viable when boundaries become opaque as when discussing Cortes’s use of indigenous knowledge to make maps, or the variable dates at which colonial domination is imposed in different locales. Joyce and Sheptak, like others in this book, side with the notion that colonial and historic archaeologies inevitably encounter materials deposited by people who came before, and that our emphasis must be a focus on people and places, not periods into which archaeologists segment time in order to convey a sense of developmental progress.
The application of prehistory, protohistory, or pre-Hispanic to time creates anticipation of change along evolutionary trajectories, with history an inevitable movement as linear time moves from prehistory to history. This linearity submerges other forms of time—punctuated time, ritually rhythmic time—that are ignored, and linear designs are privileged at the expense of many cultures that reckon and think about time in non-linear ways. In a region where a sense of historical consciousness during the period before European contact is fundamental to use of calendrical systems as well in historicities that are the same as those in pre-Hispanic books from Mexican territory, the practice of archaeology as strictly historical is unthinkable. Joyce and Sheptak found that churches are not the anticipated strong sign of discontinuity marking a historic period. Instead, they are an expression of hybridity where
Communities experience an ethnogenesis in which it is impossible to separate the threads of continuity and intertwined histories from deep time and later. Parallel confusions in the use of segmented time arise when houses documented in colonial accounts are described by archaeologists as prehistoric or Postclassic remains. A proliferation of terms for segmented time testifies to the confusion that prevails over historymaking. This confusion is amplified by the Spanish tendency to see local peoples as historic, living actors living in settlements later described, variably, as ‘late prehistoric, pre-Hispanic, or Late Postclassic’. We readily agree when the authors declare the disjointed histories resulting from this approach are not sensible. Segmentary tropes used by archaeologists also carry terminal meanings: Late Postclassic completes prehistory and cleaves it from history.
Segmentary time tropes commonly mark colonial responses to local histories—metonymic naming processes that arise out of imposed labels (Schmidt 2006, this volume). Rizvi (this volume) shows how colonial language in India—both naming and discourses about time—‘had severe effects on the politics of representation of particular communities in a contemporary world’, particularly long-term political implications. She notes that the prefixes in prehistory and protohistory are both evolutionary in their construction and also overlap while supposedly demarcating two pasts that are apparently distinct. Protohistory references to Harappa, which has text, shows again that text rather than process is linked to ideas of technological progress and is also a key reference point for segmentation. The multiplicity of durations that Rizvi identifies for the Mesolithic, for example, adds to the confusion that segmentation has introduced—much like what prevails in Mesoamerica. Added to this are local vernaculars of time, which ‘create[s] multiple dialects of time within the same region’, a pluralism that is further complicated by British use of religious and ethnic labels, e. g., the Muslim Period, for time durations. The legacy of such labelling can be found today when contemporary groups, for whatever reason, are assigned labels such as backward and prehistoric. When indigenous or Adivasi communities in India are represented as primitive, lacking technology, and backward, such language connects to colonial archaeological terminology that ‘statically locates these communities in prehistory’. Tied to stereotyped notions of segmented time (prehistory), the label raises significant issues of social justice. Moreover, repetition in Indian pedagogy means that texts that enshrine these stereotypes perpetuate ideas that uncivilized indigenous communities live in the Stone Age.
The use of protohistory in India to demarcate text-aided archaeology outside of the Western literary tradition illustrates, as Lane (this volume) notes, an ingrained British influence over the construction of narratives about ancient history. Lane’s explications are helpful for understanding the confusion that prevails when this trope for one form of segmented time is used in archaeological discourse. In parts of Europe it focuses on classical references to non-literate peoples, with the chronological nonliterate dividing line shifting over time, for example, with breakthroughs in textual decipherments such as for Linear B in ancient Greece. In North America, protohistory is arguably an extremely vague trope that occludes a sense of historical flow, with meanings varying from the ‘presence of material artefacts associated with text-using and text-producing societies’ to remote but not direct interaction of native peoples with literate societies, as well as the period between first European contact and colonial occupation (Lane, this volume; see Arkush 1990; Fontana 1965; Lightfoot 1995; Silliman 2005, 2009). This tendency to segment and classify time by the use of textual references, or the presence of exotic material culture belonging to literate societies, is quintessentially a manifestation of the archaeological project of classification. Lane (this volume) argues that it highlights a long-regarded fuzzy boundary between prehistory and history. As an intermediate period and as a further segmentation of history’s flow, we see it as liminal territory with vague boundaries—but boundaries nonetheless—that mark our discomfort with the abrupt divide between prehistory and history. It amplifies segmentation; it further erodes attempts to write deep time histories that emphasize historical process.
1.9 SEGMENTATION OF TIME AND ENTANGLEMENTS
Overcoming these multiple divides may take a variety of pathways, an open quality of exploration that does not advocate a doctrine or specific approach. Hantman (this volume) seeks one solution in what he calls history in sites and sites in history. The latter is familiar territory, referencing sites that have been featured in written observations and in fixing sites in linear and chronological order. History in sites is a different concept, demanding a deeper understanding of indigenous processes of knowledge and history-making, with an eye to how sites create history by attracting performance, events, and even occupation and thus bringing history to life in much the same way as presencing the past (Lane, Auguilar and Preucel, Gould, Mrozowski, Schmidt, this volume). Gosden and Lock (1998) provide an example from Bronze and Iron Age Britain in which landscape features such as large animal figures are shown to have been the focus of repeated repair over centuries. They argue that this is evidence of histories that were reinforced symbolically on the landscape over long stretches of time during a period many archaeologists consider prehistoric. We can envision that such embodiment of history unfolds through practice of rituals, recitations, and spiritual journeys when living agents infuse history into the household, at sacred shrines, or near potent, meaningful places such as rivers and mountain peaks. It also occurs when powerful sacred places are taken over as a means of gaining legitimacy, ensuring power, and establishing relationships with ancestors (see Basso 1996; Casey 1996; Feld and Basso 1996; Schmidt 2006).
For Hantman and others, an integral part of history-making is conjoining these two domains by bringing indigenous views into the narra-tive—Sapir’s listening to native perspectives as he said it so simply yet eloquently—while simultaneously staying within Western time and space conventions. Such an approach observes no boundaries and instead leaps over intellectual filters that remove thought and native actions from our understanding. Hantman illustrates this by his observations about the Rivanna River in Virginia, where in the territory of the Monacan people the river unites rather than divides the ancient town on the north with the burial grounds to the south of the river. One is reminded at this juncture of Chinua Achebe’s (2007) story of the school headmaster who, not understanding the unity of the living and dead, purposefully fences off a path through his school yard that runs between the village and cemetery, thereby earning the ire of the living community. Achebe’s story resonates with how Hantman initially puzzled the Monacan people by seeing the river as a dividing line. Oftentimes power and well-being flow from the proximal relations between leaders and places of power and potency, a relationship often of deep time meanings united with historic era sensibilities and needs—a unity across time that erases segmentation. Trying a different path to reconcile these dichotomies, Lane uses Lucas (2005) to find a way to reconcile the prehistory/history divide, which he argues contributes to our dual conceptualization of time in which ‘objects and periods subject to archaeological scrutiny are simultaneously accorded a prehistory—by virtue of being treated as “of the past”—and a history—by virtue of being tied to the present as a source of meaning about our origins, ancestry, and evolution’ (Lane, this volume). This removal or blurring of boundaries is situated within a liminal state similar to that accommodating protohistory, or as we will argue below, how historicities derived from both artefacts and documents are negotiated by archaeological agents acting within a liminal setting.
Contrary to Hantman’s call to recall Sapir’s injunction to listen to oral testimonies, in North America there is an actively doubtful and trenchantly polemical school that holds that history is absent from oral literature (see McGhee 2008; Mason 2000, 2008; Snow 2010). Among the more specious arguments to emerge from this school is the idea that some native testimonies are artful or expedient improvisations in response to a declared need such as legal recognition and, as presentist declarations, should be considered meaningless as history and therefore ignored. This point of view overlooks how history-making often involves a repository of limited possibilities and draws on fragments of the past to meet contemporary demands, much in the same manner as historians piece together past events to create new explanatory scenarios that more adequately meet the needs of contemporary times. To dismiss more recent oral literature as political lies is a blunder that diminishes understanding of how and why people fabricate historical identities. It also raises obvious questions concerning the motives of archaeologists who seek to denigrate oral traditions as a form of historical transmission. In counterpoint, Walz (this volume) presents a poignant discussion of how he was perceived by his Tanzanian informants (‘a student of snakes’), how this fits with their metaphorical world of change introduced by colonialism and postcolonial influences, and how it helped him to better understand why it was essential for him to incorporate their perceptions into his evolving understanding of their past.
The ongoing contests over oral traditions and their legitimate role in understanding deep pasts invite strong reactions from embedded beliefs inside and outside the academy. Lightfoot (this volume) does much to dispel such entrenched scepticism when he recognizes the pragmatics of indigenous knowledge kept in oral traditions about landscape management. Nevertheless, there is reason for concern over how precolonial studies of native-environmental interactions evaporate when the focus shifts to the historic period, marked by massive transformation introduced through Russian and Spanish colonialism in California. With this emphasis and a predominant interest in indigenous populations subsumed within the colonial labour regimes comes a parallel disappearance of indigenous interactions with the landscape—amplifying the divide between the prehistoric (precolonial) and historic periods. Ironically, historical archaeologists cannot hope to understand how environments that were previously anthropogenically modified and manipulated contributed significantly to a synthesis of indigenous landscapes with colonial practices if earlier practices are either frozen in precolonial time or excluded altogether. In other words, to assess how and to what degree colonial processes of landscape management were influenced by precolonial practices requires forms of enquiry that forget the prehis-toric/historic divide, as does any attempt to assess what changes have occurred over deep time up to the present. This last point reinforces Lightfoot’s (1995) earlier observation that such divisions make it impossible to assess culture change into the historic era.
As an archaeologist with indigenous citizenship, Gould sees the di-minishment of the prehistory/history divide as a means to open up opportunities for native populations to build their own hybrid histories, freely drawing on threads of continuity from deep time as well as more recent practices that they see as germane to their historical identities. Conscious awareness of processes of ethnogenesis allows people of native descent to retain and to leave behind remnant prehistoric attributes along with parallel ideas of authenticity while they simultaneously embrace the materialities of the contemporary world to complement their spiritual needs. Rejection of tradition rooted in prehistory, identified with authenticity, is a centrepiece of indigenous thinking in New England (and elsewhere in the Americas) about how and why change has occurred over the last half-millennium. Such concerns among native communities are a natural point of intersection with the interests of archaeologists and thus should figure strongly in how history-making is practised by archaeologists. Privileging materialities of prehistory is to ignore native ways of constructing identity and to perpetuate notions of a timeless past. Gould brings a perspective from the New England setting where authenticity is turned around to interrogate how contemporary structures on the landscape represent purposeful native practices that valorize elements of modernity as integral to a history that flows from deep time.
Gould’s exegesis of authenticity highlights the confusion that characterizes contemporary thinking about continuity and change amongst outside observers of North American native communities. In order to achieve federal recognition, native groups must demonstrate their authenticity, tracing current cultural practices back to ‘historic’ times— the point where the prehistoric/historic divide takes shape while a labelled prehistoric culture was still vital, another way to keep native groups timeless. This linkage between timelessness and prehistory poignantly illustrates how prehistoric characteristics valorize static culture and timelessness at the expense of change and hybridity. As Mrozowski observes (this volume) by privileging historical records the federal recognition process also subordinates oral tradition or archaeological evidence, creating circumstances where strategic essentialism with embedded notions of static and timeless cultures replace dynamic, contingent histories (see Liebmann 2008a). These implications are denied when native populations use places such as churches to presence the past, especially when bringing meaningful elements such as land and spirituality together during embodied rituals that connect past and present—a practice that contradicts arbitrary federal policy rejecting connections between a deeper past, the recent past, and the present.
Mrozowski’s (this volume) discussion of quartz crystals placed in the corners of the Magunkaquog building foundation focuses attention on parallel processes, a variety of liminality between the ancient past and present (late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries)—neither past nor present—when ancient beliefs with cultural plasticity were woven into Christian structures. The presencing of the past illustrated by this archaeological example, while no longer witnessed in extant practices, is nonetheless potent testimony that we cannot hope to understand processes of hybridization if we continue to dignify the prehistoric/historic divide.
Pawlovicz and LaViolette capture the ambiguities of the written record in a context where oral traditions remain strong. In Swahili towns where oral traditions were transcribed, the division between oral and written sources collapses, and with that collapse comes a blurring of the prehistory and history border. This parallels many other circumstances in Africa and the Americas where literary renderings of oral literature make meaningless the notion of a prehistoric past singularly marked by oral traditions. As such divisions collapse in the Swahili setting so, too, do the coastal (literate/historical) and interior (oral/prehistoric) cleavages diminish along with the dismissal of interior pasts that ironically helped to shape historical developments on the coast (see Walz, this volume). One of the more important observations to arise from the Pawlowicz and LaViolette study is that the tropes of origin or ancestral tropes (Persian [Shirazi] or Arab) used to transcribe oral traditions are key to understanding identity claims of local peopl
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