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

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

It’s been 30 years since Lightfoot published his seminal article on the arbitrary dichotomy between prehistoric and historical archaeology. Yet, problems of this nature persist in California CRM. Precolonial and historic components of sites are regularly treated differently, often investigated by different archaeologists. 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. Consequently, sites occupied across this temporal divide go unrecognized, as do single component historic period Native American sites. The latter can be misidentified and deemed ineligible because they contain a predominance of Euro-American artifacts and lack definable associations using standard archival sources. Such challenges can be resolved by establishing multidisciplinary teams that include tribal consultants, ethnohistorians, and archaeologists. Recent investigations in Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra Nevada show how such problems arise and how they can be mitigated and preemptively avoided.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow