Questions that Will Count in the Future: Global Perspectives on Historical Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Silliman.

Historical archaeologists have been leaders in trying to revisit the interpretive frameworks used to study change and continuity in the past. For many, this is one of the fundamental questions addressed by archaeology. Multiple historical datasets, the engagement with postcolonial theory and decolonizing methodologies, commitments to working with descendent communities, and a critical eye for heritage issues have helped to stimulate these developments in historical archaeology. A variety of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timo Ylimaunu. Paul Mullins.

Historical archaeology has gravitated toward archaeologies of identity that revolve around how people consciously if not creatively construct themselves. We focus here on the distinctive Finnish diasporan experience to illuminate diasporan identities as social and ideological constructions shaped by distinct experiences of place and placelessness. We focus on how distinctive transnational experiences across ethnic and racial lines influenced Finnish and African American experiences of consumer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whitney Battle-Baptiste.

How does African Diaspora archaeology factor into the realities of African descendant communities outside of the United States? How does African Diaspora archaeology engage with the challenges of tourist-based economies? Through the infusion of critical heritage studies and expanding the scope of our work to include post-emanicpation sites, the questions (and answers) we ask have to change. This paper will discuss the early stages of a community-based archaeological project on the island of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rui Gomes Coelho.

Portuguese historical archaeologies (locally known as «post-medieval» or «modern») emerged in the 1990s as part of the academic diversification of the discipline and the rise of CRM projects in urban areas. Since late 1990s new generations of archaeologists have been committed to this sub-field, producing an increasing number of theses, dissertations, publications and international projects. However, much of the intellectual effort put in the sub-field is strongly attached to culture-history...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Per Cornell.

The colonization of the Americas was a violent and exploitative affair. While the European colonial project turned out a success in certain areas, from the view of the conqueror, the colonial process in general was difficult. There was substantial resistance in different forms, and the results of the efforts at colonize turned out quite different from the colonizers scenario. With varied examples, but mainly from areas not fully under colonial control in two regions, i.e. today’s Northwestern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pedro Paulo Funari. Lúcio Menezes Ferreira.

Historical archaeology has started in the USA as an endeavor for understanding the Anglo-American experience, but soon the discipline expanded to include the excluded pasts of such groups as African-Americans, Asian-Americans, women and a plethora of groups, interests and subjects. It spread to Latin America early on, first as an imported discipline to be adapted to the subcontinent. Epistemological discussions in the Anglo-Saxon world led to new contentions about the discipline as the study of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Hambrecht.

In 2002 Paul Crutzen proposed the term ‘Anthropocene’ for the period in which human action had reached a point where it equaled or outweighed the influence of ‘natural processes’ on Earth’s climate. An increasing number of scholars, when faced with the challenge of how to best utilize research towards understanding and possibly mitigating against the effects of anthropogenic climate change, are arguing that the social sciences need to establish explicit research agendas with the study of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Trigg.

A critical issue for historical archaeology in the Southwest US is understanding the relationships and activities within colonizers’ households during the 17th century. These secular sites, established during the early colonial period, have infrequently been the objects of research-based archaeological inquiry, but they provide an important context for the exchange of information between ‘Spanish’ colonists and local and non-local indigenous peoples who labored in the households. Transmission of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Hauser.

Sidney Mintz and Richard Price famously observed that the central contradiction of race based slavery was that ‘slaves were legally defined as property; but being human they were called upon to act in sentient, articulate and human ways’ (Mintz and Price 1992: 25). This observation brings to light a central question that archaeologists concerned with the colonial Caribbean have been grappling with for the past two decades. During a time in which slavery was the dominant social form, what was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Mrozowski. Heather Law Pezzarossi.

This paper explores the complementary concepts of mobility and historical gravity that are part of the larger issue of theorizing space in Historical Archaeology. Within the context of a collaborative project involving The Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the Nipmuc Nation, these two concepts ‘ mobility and historical gravity ‘ have been instrumental in developing our current understanding of the manner in which colonialism has influenced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Uzi Baram. Lynda Carroll.

The 2000 volume ‘A Historical Archaeology of the Ottoman Empire: Breaking New Ground’ highlighted the challenges of applying the methods and theories from historical archaeology to the eastern Mediterranean, and situated the archaeological study of the Ottoman Empire in global perspective. Starting with exposing the nationalist dynamics that obscured the archaeological finds from the recent past, research quickly expanded to analysis of global commodities, archaeologies of colonialism and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lu Ann De Cunzo. Jonas Nordin.

In 1987, symposium participants invoked world systems theory in defining ‘Questions that Count.’ They encouraged us to examine the development of European imperialist hegemony, New World colonialism, capitalism, slavery and disenfranchisement, and environmental degradation, all familiar topics in Atlantic World scholarship today. Cross-cultural, comparative approaches were advocated. Having established this global agenda, most participants turned to methods of implementing it. In practice, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guido Pezzarossi.

The influence of new materialist perspectives in anthropology/archaeology has sparked a reconfiguration of the objects, methods and scales of study in the discipline by radically contextualizing human actors within the networks of diverse associations and dependencies with human and nonhuman entities that afford agency and action and structure events and processes. However, this move has entailed a necessary complicating of agency, intention and causality in archaeological interpretation that on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas McGovern.

Centuries before the rise and spread of the early modern world system after 1500 CE, Europeans colonized the islands of the North Atlantic and established a presence in the Western Hemisphere. Both Iceland and Greenland were initially settled by walrus hunters supplying prestige goods to a Scandinavian homeland experiencing rapid social and economic change. While Iceland developed into a substantial farming society of some 50,000 and eventually developed an active export trade in dried fish...

DOCUMENT Citation Only LouAnn Wurst.

In order to expand the intellectual depth of historical archaeology, we need to seriously question capitalism. Although the discipline has used capitalism to define the field for decades, practitioners have seldom confronted what capitalism actually is. Recent political transformations have made capitalism both more ubiquitous and invisible than ever. We commonly reify capitalism as a ‘thing’ that is fully formed and exists independently of people and their social relationships. Capitalism,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jane Lydon. Tracy Ireland.

Historical archaeology in Australia, as elsewhere, is shaped by heritage practice, which has become increasingly democratised over recent decades. New methodologies for future and socially engaged heritage practice must critically address issues such as the UNESCO concept of Outstanding Universal Value, in an increasingly plural and culturally diverse society; the nature of ‘Intangible heritage’; and the relationship between national and local and/or Indigenous values. Archaeological research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only D. Rae Gould.

After repeatedly encountering the concept of Indians as ‘marginalized’ populations in research on southern New England Indians, I began to ask what this meant and, more importantly, in comparison to whom Native people were marginal? This paper reconsiders the twentieth-century practice of categorizing Native people as ‘marginal’ (thus continuing the practice of seeing them as ‘other’). This reconsideration is necessary because this practice perpetuates the belief that Euroamerican culture...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Réginald Auger.

The objective of my presentation is to compare and contrast three sources of information to verify the veracity of a 400 year old riddle, namely, the hostage taking of five members of the 1576 Martin Frobisher expedition. When confronted and assessed in light of archaeological data, travel accounts and oral tradition, if we use the Frobisher accounts of his voyages as an example, appear to show various discrepancies. The narrators describe clothing discovered by the 1577 expedition as being...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Liebmann.

Questions about colonialism are integral to the field of Historical Archaeology. Indeed, according to some definitions, Historical Archaeology is the archaeology of Euro-American colonialism. Traditionally, the questions that historical archaeologists have posed about colonialism have tended to focus on the profound changes instituted by colonial systems. (E.g. how did colonists change the places in which they settled? How did indigenous and enslaved populations change as a result of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jun Sunseri.

Scales and levels of organization are important reference frameworks for archaeological explorations of past human behavior, but they are often confusingly interwoven in the literature. Overarching themes of investigation may include several, overlapping scales of evidence. For example, in organizing units of analysis to investigate community scales of action, archaeologists may contend with aggregates of organized human activity oriented along relationship continuums that include portions of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Asmeret Mehari.

A beginning question for the practice of archaeology in Africa in the future is how has Historical Archaeology been presented in classrooms and field schools thus far? Thus far Historical Archaeology is simply presented as a module in methodological approaches in archaeology. It is rarely if ever taught within field school settings. A key question for the future is how should Historical Archaeology be taught in African Universities and how might it be integrated with the teaching and practice of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin Breen. Audrey Horning.

In 1988, the questions that really counted in historical archaeology were those which challenged practitioners to be honest about theoretical standpoints, consistent in the application of methods, and increasingly interdisciplinary in approach. While clearly still fundamental, these aspects of practice are now more often viewed in relation to a far more challenging, yet basic, question: what is the relevance of historical archaeology in the contemporary world? In our paper, we will consider the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Schmidt.

The African continent presents poignant issues for historical archaeology as it has been framed in the West. Definitions linked to literacy and colonialism ignore the historical experiences of many Africa people before these distinctly Western and far Eastern phenomena took hold on the continent. If much of the African historical experience is left on the margins of our practice, then what questions are relevant for the future? The first question is how may historical archaeology enrich the...