Native Narratives and Settler Colonialism in the Rocky Mountain West

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recognizing and Recording Post-1492 Indigenous Sites in North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The study of the social and material effects of European colonization on indigenous inhabitants has been a regular topic of archaeological discourse in the United States for the last twenty years, with strong publication records in the Southeast, Southwest, and California. A generation of recent scholars embraced a redefinition of prehistoric and historic archaeology in the 1990s, but in practice the divide between the two remains strong. The use of the Protohistoric as a term continues despite its inherent flaws. Extensive European contact in the Plains and Rocky Mountains occurred much later than other areas, with a florescence of culture change in the nineteenth century. Archaeological investigations here often remain in a liminal state, in part because of the invisibility of Native presence in post-reservation periods. In this presentation, I will discuss my research exploring historic-period sites of the mountains and Plains in northwestern Wyoming, an area deeply influenced by Cowboy-Indian dichotomies. I give examples of ways that archaeological sites and culturally-significant places played their own roles in historic narratives of the twentieth century, with legacies that continue today.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Recognizing and Recording Post-1492 Indigenous Sites in North American Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25697