Breaking Boundaries: Exploring Colonialism in the Modern World and Beyond

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Over the last three decades, the archaeology of colonialism has reached a period of maturity under the direction of a generation of established scholars. The resulting knowledge and discussions have impacted the theoretical, political, and methodological landscape of archaeological practices and have opened up new avenues for comparative work within the field. However, much of this work has remained focused on discrete contexts associated with the "modern" world or with a particular set of "settler colonialist" encounters. This session seeks to explore whether the impacts of "colonialism" as a lens for archaeological analysis holds utility beyond such contexts. Specifically, we invite speakers to explore the potential applicability of the framework within diverse geographical, temporal, and social contexts that fall outside the traditionally delineated boundaries of colonial relations. The goal is not to propose a unified and unproblematic method of analysis; rather, it is an attempt to recover an intra-disciplinary dialogue, among at times disparate sections of the archaeological endeavor, centered on a common conceptual framework. In so doing we hope to highlight both the potential and limitations of applying the lens of colonialism to the archaeological record, but more importantly the common ground that creates archaeology with a "capital A."

Other Keywords
Colonialism • Colonization • Ireland • Britain • Fur Trade • Theory • Race • Emancipation • Caribbean • Interdisciplinary

Geographic Keywords
Europe • North America - Midwest • South America • Caribbean • North America - Northeast

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-10 of 10)

  • Documents (10)
Documents
  • Beyond Romanization and Colonialism: Roman Influences in Ireland (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Crowley.

    Currently, models of colonial theory are being broken down with better understandings of fluid frontiers and more complex systems of culture contact. These new frameworks offer greater insights into how groups interact and provide us with a substantial platform on which to discuss nuanced exchange networks. With recent renewed interest in exchange during the Late Iron Age in the British Isles, there has been greater advanced scholarship in our understanding of interactions between Rome and...

  • Castles and Colonialism: Exploring Meaning in Historic Irish Archaeology (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Immich.

    Castles, architecture embedded with colonial power, can be understood as communicating display, power, prestige, corruption, oppression in the periods in which they were constructed and used, only to see the meanings shifted, reemphasized, manipulated, and recreated in the modern period. This paper examines the multiple temporal and conceptual values of medieval castles in north County Tipperary, Ireland, as objects of material culture whose meaning has shifted in significance from the period in...

  • Colonial process in the Portuguese America: Tupi settlement at the Brazilian Southern shore (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Marianne Sallum. Plácido Cali.

    This represents a preliminary paper about the colonial process in Portuguese America and the development of the historical archaeology of indigenous peoples in Brazil. It uses as reference the archaeological remains of a Tupi settlement, on the south shore of the state of Sao Paulo, called Peruíbe. For many years Brazilian historiography built a history of America’s discovery and European colonization with indigenous peoples treated as passive victims of colonial encounter, fated to...

  • Colonization or Migration? Applying colonial theory to Post-Roman Britain (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Brooke Creager.

    Colonial studies has long ignored early medieval Britain. However thanks to archaeology it is possible to reconstruct enough the conditions of the fifth and sixth centuries to understand the impact of the multiple colonizations. England experienced two distinct occupations by foreign parties before the Norman Conquest: the expansion of the Roman Empire into Britain ending in 410 AD and the Anglo-Saxon migration beginning in the mid-fifth century. Neither of these occurrences has been discussed...

  • Colonizing Yourself: The British colonization of Britain (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Harkleroad.

    Often discussing Colonialism means discussing the colonized and the impact of the colonizers on them highlighting indigenous responses to the situation as well as looking at methods of resistance and signs of the agency of the colonized. All too often we overlook the impact of this process on the colonizer. I argue that during the rise of the British Empire the role of colonizer became such a part of national identity that it colored interpretations of British prehistory. This is most evident...

  • The Eighteenth-century Fur Trade: A Colonial Endeavor? (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Amelie Allard.

    The late eighteenth-century fur trade in the Western Great Lakes region offers a particular multi-ethnic context in which social relations between Indigenous peoples and men of European or mixed descent were created and negotiated on a daily basis. With his seminal book “The Middle Ground,” Richard White (1991) challenged prior views, often of a Marxist bend, of the fur trade as a strictly colonial endeavor that led to the inevitable acculturation of Native peoples. While the Montreal merchants...

  • Entangling Mississippian Identities: A case for postcolonial theory in the Upper Mississippian world (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Dull.

    Postcolonial theory has provided a useful framework that archaeologists have applied over the last several decades to confront issues of social identity in colonial encounters. However, few have considered its utility in addressing cultural interaction in prehistoric contexts. This paper considers the applicability of postcolonial theory in the Upper Mississippian world between 900-1200 CE. In particular, I consider the material evidence and site distribution at multiple scales to argue that...

  • A theory on cultural inversion: resistance, resilience and agency within the archaeology of colonialism (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison Carlton.

    Colonial studies have progressed exponentially in archaeology, but such studies can suffer from contextual limitations. Analyzing colonialism in many different social contexts adds to its potential as a lens through which to study the archaeological record. Diverse applicability would allow archaeologists an opportunity to make sense of colonialism’s profuse influence on the people it affects. Throughout the 19th-century, the Nipmuc from eastern Massachusetts faced many of the common processes...

  • The Value of Colonialism as a Model for Anglo-Caribbean Material Practices at Emancipation (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Devlin.

    Archaeologies of colonialism have presented models that draw out the complex political interactions of meaning making via material practices that take place at the intersection of daily lives between populations of colonized and the colonizer. Traditional approaches to the archaeology of slavery within the Anglo-Caribbean have tended to transpose these categories onto enslaved Africans and white settlers. The result is a tendency to emphasis meaning making through material in terms of...

  • Why Classics Needs Anthropology (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ivy Faulkner.

    While it is true that theoretical advancements are slow to cross disciplinary boundaries, when disciplines by necessity overlap, it seems almost willfull ignorance that perpetuates old frameworks. For example, it has been over thirty years now that anthropology and colonial studies have come to terms with the complexities of identity in colonial contexts and yet scholars in related disciplines, such as Classics, still argue over which label imposed by colonizers should be used for which...