Historical? Post-Contact? Post-Colonial? Industrial?: The Issues with Temporal Categorizations

Summary

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 cultures into Western history. This examination is concerned with the impact on and critiques from Native and Indigenous communities. I will specifically engage with Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) histories and literature to illustrate how these modes of categorization fail to account for the lived experiences or epistemology of descendant communities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• What Is "Historical"?

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow