Persistent Places in Indigenous North America

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Indigenous histories are rooted in movement—movement between places, movement across sacred sites, and movement to ecological niches. Drawing on comparative archaeological evidence of the long-term use of landscapes in both the American Southwest and Northeast, this paper explores the concept of placed-based histories. The factors influencing the continuous use of individual places vary widely from the economic to ecological to the religious. What seems clear, however is that places have and continue to play a much bigger role in the shaping of Indigenous pasts, presents, and futures. This differs markedly from Western European/Settler Colonial histories that emphasize Christian notions of time such as BC/AD that western trained archaeologists have used during the field’s history. We argue that place-based Indigenous forms of history premised upon persistence rather than abandonment or collapse offer a better way of conceptualizing pasts that are part of a more complex approach to Native North American heritage.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2023 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow