What Is "Historical"?
Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2024
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "What Is "Historical"?," at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.
Historical archaeology has been redefined through the years but a constant has been the focus on colonial-era histories in the North American archaeology tradition. However, this temporal definition often centers on settler experiences resulting in ever-disappearing Native/Indigenous subjects. The rigid temporal divisions promote writing about the “other” without allowing the knowledge of people marginalized as “other” to exist in the same temporal space. Exclusion of Indigenous people’s histories from the same temporal space as Western histories effectively excludes Indigenous archaeology and Native/Indigenous community partners from historical archaeology spaces. This session questions what ‘historical’ means today, whether a temporal division still exists (in definition or in practice), and the effect this designation of Native and Indigenous histories as ahistorical has had on perceptions of contemporary Indigenous communities or our relationships with community partners.
Other Keywords
Indigenous •
Historical •
Native American •
Gold Mining •
Memory •
collaboration •
Indigenous Archaeology •
Temporality •
Native •
indigenous landscapes
Geographic Keywords
California •
Hawai‘i •
Hawaiʻi •
Northern Illinois •
Southcentral Missouri
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-5 of 5)
- Documents (5)
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E Ola Mau ka ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi: Pushing for more ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi-centered research in Hawaiian archaeology (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "What Is "Historical"?", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The separation of the past into “pre-historic” and “historic” has often been criticized for creating an artificial division that prioritizes Eurocentric written histories over Indigenous oral histories. However, this bias towards Eurocentric histories persists even when Indigenous written histories are available. In Hawaiʻi, texts that are written in...
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Historical? Post-Contact? Post-Colonial? Industrial?: The Issues with Temporal Categorizations (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "What Is "Historical"?", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper examines the history of historical categorizations in the North American archaeology tradition, tracing the reconfigurations of these temporalities through time. The shifting terminology is an attempt at decolonizing the temporal categories in archaeology but only serves to mask or reframe colonial narratives while subsuming Indigenous...
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Paved Paradise: Searching For Indigenous History Beneath The Parking Lots Using DEMs Of Difference. (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "What Is "Historical"?", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The removal of indigenous peoples from the American midwest in the 18th and 19th centuries contributed to the erasure of indigenous lifeways, languages, and sovereignty from public and historic discourse by obscuring indigenous spaces from the visible landscape. Northwestern University was founded on indigenous land in 1850 and has paved over important...
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Surviving ‘despair in its thickest blackness’: Archaeological approaches to visualizing Cherokee Removal (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "What Is "Historical"?", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 1889, Wahnenauhi (Lucy Keys), a survivor of the infamous “Trail of Tears”, wrote, that “despair in its thickest blackness” settled down on the Chiefs of the Cherokee as they prepared their people to relocate from their traditional homelands to “Indian Territory” in 1838. Her words are compelling—both for how intimate they feel and for the imagery they...
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When Sites Collide: Bridging the Gap Between History and Prehistory in Cultural Resources Management (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "What Is "Historical"?", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper examines the ways in which historic period activities have impacted indigenous sites, with a focus on gold mining in California, and how this is documented in the Cultural Resources Management (CRM) industry. Using previous research and geoarchaeological data, we analyze multicomponent archaeological resources comprising historic period mining...