Combating the Ongoing Erasure of Native Americans from Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Archaeological Landscapes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

It’s been over 25 years since Lightfoot published his seminal article on the ethnocentric and arbitrary dichotomy between prehistoric and historical archaeology, and numerous authors have since echoed his sentiment. Yet, problems of this nature persist in cultural resource management in California, as Panich and Schneider have demonstrated in their 2019 “American Antiquity” article. Precolonial and historic components of multicomponent sites are regularly treated differently, often investigated by different archaeologists and/or companies. This practice can result in a disjunction in recording methods, significance evaluations, and interpretive approaches that overlook the “invisible” time period between history and prehistory. As a result, sites occupied continuously across this temporal divide go unrecognized, as do single component historic-period Native American sites. This is especially true for the latter, which can be misidentified and deemed ineligible because they often contain a predominance of Euro-American artifacts and lack definable historical associations using standard archival sources. Such challenges can be resolved, or avoided entirely, by establishing a multidisciplinary collaborative team from the outset to include tribal consultants, ethnohistorians, and archaeologists. Ongoing investigations in Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra Nevada show how such problems arise, how they can be mitigated, and how they can be preemptively avoided.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35932.0