Moving beyond Cowboys and Indians: Rethinking Colonial Dichotomies into Messy "Frontiers"

Summary

As part of its etymological "baggage," the term "frontier" evokes thoughts of action and excitement, conquering the unknown, and transforming the untamed and uncivilized into the managed and controlled. In North American colonial contexts this perspective privileges the experiences of European, colonizers at the interpretive expense of the multitude of other social actors (e.g., enslaved Africans, women, Native Americans) whose practices equally constituted the colonial project. In our paper, we examine the Lord Ashley site, a late 17th c. settlement near Charles Towne, South Carolina.  While this settlement can certainly be called a frontier, it was also a diverse diasporic community performed in the daily lives of European managers and indentured servants, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans. In exploring this perspective, we attempt to rethink the simple dichotomous relationships (e.g., frontier/civilized, colonizer/colonized, global/local) and preconceived notions that typically define what this sort of archaeological site is "supposed" to look like.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2017   •
• Advancing Frontiers in the 21st century: Reconsidering Colonial Encounters in the Atlantic World

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 589