Seeing African-Native American Identities Through Gendered, Multifocal Lenses

Summary

African Seminole and African Chickasaw archaeologies present us with opportunities to explore the multiplicitousness of identity and facets such as gender that have cocreated social beings, material culture practices, and communities.  Much work remains to be done to address the silences and biases that chroniclers and scholars have perpetuated in their writings on enslaved people and women in Native American territories. Interpretation and analysis can be advanced by a theoretically plural approach that embraces various themes. Concepts such as simultaneity and bivalency can be borrowed from linguistic anthropology and modified to address culturally specific, diverse behaviors and meanings that can be inferred from archival and artifact evidence.  The messy multiplicities of gender that archaeologists have addressed provide additional models of how to approach features, artifacts and landscapes.  These issues need to be integrated with insights that ethnogenetic and creolization proponents have also offered.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018   •
• Refuge and support: Historical Archaeologies of Multiracial Native American and African American Sites and Communities

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 801