The Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interaction in the Americas 2020058068, 2020058069, 9780367222826, 9780429274251, 9781032021119

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF INDIGENOUS-COLONIAL INTERACTION IN THE AMERICAS

The Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interaction in the Americas brings together scholars from across the hemisphere to examine how archaeology can highlight the myriad ways that Indigenous people have negotiated colonial systems from the fifteenth century through to today. The contributions offer a comprehensive look at where the archaeology of colonialism has been and where it is heading. Geographically diverse case studies highlight longstanding theoretical and methodological issues as well as emerging topics in the field. The organization of chapters by key issues and topics, rather than by geography, fosters exploration of the commonalities and contrasts between historical contingencies and scholarly interpretations. Throughout the volume, Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors grapple with the continued colonial nature of archaeology and highlight Native perspectives on the potential of using archaeology to remember and tell colonial histories. This volume is the ideal starting point for students interested in how archaeology can illuminate Indigenous agency in colonial settings. Professionals, including academic and cultural resource management archaeologists, will find it a convenient reference for a range of topics related to the archaeology of colonialism in the Americas. Lee M. Panich is an associate professor of anthropology at Santa Clara University. In his research, he employs a combination of archaeological, ethnographic, and archival data to examine the long-term entanglements between California’s Indigenous societies and colonial institutions, particularly the Spanish mission system. Sara L. Gonzalez is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Washington and Curator of Archaeology the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. An anthropological archaeologist by training, she works at the intersection of Indigenous studies, tribal historic preservation, and public history.

“This collection of essays represents some of the most innovative, provocative, and insightful approaches to colonial studies in the past decade. Merging novel theoretical approaches from Indigenous archaeology, post-colonial and critical settler colonial studies, the authors represent much of what makes colonial archaeology the most innovative and exciting field in contemporary archaeology.” Michael Wilcox, Stanford University, USA

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF INDIGENOUS-COLONIAL INTERACTION IN THE AMERICAS

Edited by Lee M. Panich and Sara L. Gonzalez

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Lee M. Panich and Sara L. Gonzalez; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Lee M. Panich and Sara L. Gonzalez to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Panich, Lee M., 1978– editor. | Gonzalez, Sara L., editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of the archaeology of indigenous-colonial interaction in the Americas / edited by Lee M. Panich and Sara L. Gonzalez. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020058068 (print) | LCCN 2020058069 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367222826 (hbk) | ISBN 9780429274251 (eb) Subjects: LCSH: Archaeology and history—America. | Social archaeology— America. | Archaeology—Methodology. | Colonization—Social aspects—History. | Colonies—America. | America—Antiquities. | Indians—Antiquities. Classification: LCC CC77.H5 R684 2021 (print) | LCC CC77.H5 (ebook) | DDC 930.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058068 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058069 ISBN: 978-0-367-22282-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-02111-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-27425-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of figures List of tables List of contributors

ix xii xiii

PART I

Methodological and theoretical foundations 1 Situating archaeological approaches to Indigenous-colonial interaction in the Americas: an introduction Sara L. Gonzalez and Lee M. Panich 2 Deep histories and the archaeology of colonialism Martin Gallivan 3 A double coloniality: the modern/colonial underpinnings of mission archaeology in South America Cristóbal Gnecco and Adriana Schmidt Dias

1

3 14

30

4 Colonialism and Indigenous population decline in the Americas Matthew Liebmann

44

5 Climate and colonialism in the Americas: comparing exemplary cases Dennis B. Blanton

64

6 Colonialism and historical ecology: livestock management as a case study in the American Southwest Nicole M. Mathwich

79

7 Interpreting documentary and archaeological evidence: intercultural interactions in Santafé de Bogotá (Colombia) Monika Therrien

94

v

Contents

8 Theorizing Indigenous-colonial interactions in the Americas Craig N. Cipolla

109

PART II

Core issues and topics

127

9 Pathways to persistence: divergent Native engagements with sustained colonial permutations in North America Kent G. Lightfoot, Peter A. Nelson, Michael A. Grone, and Alec Apodaca 10 African-Indigenous interactions in colonial America: from divisions to dialogue Terrance Weik

129

146

11 Indigenous negotiations of missionization and religious conversion Charles R. Cobb

163

12 Labor and natural resource extraction in Spanish colonial contexts Mary Van Buren

180

13 Objects of change? Revisiting Native material culture and technological traditions in the post–1492 Americas Lee M. Panich

195

14 The archaeology of conquest and accommodation: a view from the Valley of Mexico Patricia Fournier García

210

PART III

Archaeological explorations of Native-lived colonialisms

225

15 Social networks and colonial adaptation in the Caribbean Jorge Ulloa Hung, Roberto Valcárcel Rojas, Andrzej T. Antczak, Marlieke Ernst, Menno L.P. Hoogland, and Corinne L. Hofman

227

16 Indigenous persistence in the face of imperialism: Andean case studies Di Hu and Kylie Quave 17 Reconceptualizing the Wichita middle ground in the southern Plains Sarah Trabert and Brandi Bethke 18 Indios bárbaros: Nomad-Spanish interactions on the northern frontier of New Spain Lindsay M. Montgomery

vi

246 261

276

Contents

19 Indigenous agency and limits to the colonial order in South America Silvana Buscaglia

292

20 Landscapes of strategic mobility in Central America: San Pedro Siris during the Caste War Minette C. Church, Christine A. Kray, and Jason Yaeger

308

21 The adorned body in French colonial Louisiana: exploring cosmopolitan materialities of bodily objects Diana DiPaolo Loren

324

22 “Politics of regard” and the meaning of things: the persistence of ceramic and agroforestry practices by women in São Paulo Marianne Sallum and Francisco Silva Noelli

338

23 From hybridity to relationality: shifting perspectives on the archaeology of Métis emergence Kisha Supernant

357

24 Battling the Alamo: toward preservation and protection of Coahuiltecan legacies and camposantos Alston V. Thoms, Ramon Juan Vasquez, and Art Martinez de Vara

374

25 Lived heritage of colonialism at Tahcabo, Yucatán, México Patricia A. McAnany, Maia Dedrick, and Adolfo Iván Batún Alpuche

396

26 Monumentalizing Nipmuc heritage and emplacing Indigenous presence Heather Law Pezzarossi, Stephen A. Mrozowski, and D. Rae Gould

411

PART IV

Decolonial futures

429

27 In small islands forgotten: lessons from CHamoru lands Sandra Montón-Subías

431

28 Unsettling the archaeology of reservations: a view from Grand Ronde, Oregon Ian Kretzler and Sara L. Gonzalez 29 Survivance storytelling in archaeology Nathan P. Acebo

449 468

30 The Hoofed Clan story and storywork: Red Lake Ojibwe foodways and Indigenous food sovereignty Ashleigh BigWolf Thompson and Tristan Reader

486

31 Indigenous archaeological approaches and the refusal of colonialism in archaeology Ora V. Marek-Martinez

503

vii

Contents

32 The limits of repatriation’s decolonizing abilities Dorothy Lippert

516

33 Changing museum narratives: a conversation with culture curators at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture Sven Haakanson Jr., Holly Barker, and Sara L. Gonzalez

524

Index

542

viii

FIGURES

2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 5.1 6.1 6.2 7.1 11.1 11.2 11.3 12.1 12.2 13.1 14.1 14.2 15.1 15.2 16.1 16.2 17.1 18.1 18.2

Werowocomoco’s location within the Chesapeake region. Trench features at the Werowocomoco site. Map of the 30 mission sites in colonial Paracuaria and their current locations in Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. A Mbyá Guaraní family selling handicrafts outside the museum in the ruins of the São Miguel mission, Brazil. Map of southeastern United States with locations of key sites. Map of Pimería Alta colonial settlements, circa 1700. Bulk oxygen samples compared to modern precipitation. Aspect of Santafé de Bogotá in 1852, which does not differ much from previous centuries. Metal devotional objects including a cross and a medallion with the inscription “Mater Salvatoris” (Savior’s Mother). Reconstruction of council house at Mission San Luis de Talimali, Florida. Brafferton School, campus of William and Mary. “Estos yndios están guayrando.” Sixteenth-century watercolor from Atlas of the Sea Chart. Carlos Cuiza repairing a huayrachina. Arrow points from the Native neighborhood at Mission Santa Clara de Asís in central California, USA. Map of Mexico City, known as Uppsala Santa Cruz map, around 1550. Ceramic samples from la Traza and Tlatelolco, early colonial period. Map of the Caribbean with case study areas. Ceramic sherds from different colonial villages and remains of the villages. Excavated areas and materials from Yanawilka and Cheqoq. Artifacts recovered from excavations in the obraje of Pomacocha. Map with locations of sites discussed in the southern Plains and Southeast. a. Artifact assemblages at Apache tipi sites (0–20 km proximity interval). b. Lithic materials preset at Apache tipi sites (0–20 km proximity interval). Distribution of Ute, Apache, and Plains tipi sites in relation to Spanish colonial period settlements. ix

22 23 31 34 66 85 86 100 170 171 173 185 187 198 215 219 229 234 250 255 264 283 287

Figures

19.1 20.1 20.2

21.1 21.2 21.3 22.1 22.2 22.3 23.1 23.2 23.3 24.1 24.2 24.3 25.1 25.2

25.3 26.1 26.2 27.1 27.2 27.3 28.1 28.2 28.3 29.1 30.1 33.1

Location of the Spanish settlements in Patagonia at the end of the eighteenth century. Map of San Pedro village clusters, after Jones (1977, 142). House built of traditional materials at Trek Stop/Tropical Wings Nature Center, San José Succotz, Belize and decaying plaster floor on excavated site of San Pedro Siris. “Sauvages Tchaktas Matachez en Guerriers qui portent des chevelures,” Alexandre de Batz, 1735. “Sauvage en Habit d’Hiver,” Alexandre de Batz, 1735. Shell ear pins from Brakebill Mound, Knox County, Tennessee, 1300–1600 ce. Map of Paulista settlements (sixteenth–nineteenth centuries). Paulista settlements within biodegradable forest clearings and residential structures. Tupiniquim ceramics, Portuguese coarse ware, and Paulistaware examples. Map showing the sites discussed in the text. Representation of the various archaeological and historical threads in the sash framework. Beadwork from Chimney Coulee Métis wintering site with medicines. Photo of Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan tribal members gathered in front of Mission San Antonio de Valero, the Alamo, in 2015 Map of South Texas and northeast Mexico showing missions, presidios, settlements, and rivers in Coahuiltecan homelands. Plan-view map of the Mission Valero compound in the mid-1700s and map of the Alamo and Alamo Plaza redevelopment area. Tahcabo, back of colonial church and pre-Columbian pyramidal shrine. Tahcabo, showing the bull-fighting ring on the left, the archway of the colonial church in the background (center), and a wall of the current church on the right. Interior of community museum at Tahcabo. A portion of Nipmuc homelands that includes heritage sites referenced within the text. An 1895 reproduction of the Nichols and Stone Co. building at 82 Logan Street in Gardner, Massachusetts. Location of Guam and the Mariana Islands. Latte set from Inapsan and McDonald’s with Latte pillar. Magellan’s monument at Humåtak and local business by Humåtak’s main road. Map of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon’s ceded lands and the original boundaries of the Grand Ronde Reservation. Grand Ronde Agency School material belongings. Grand Ronde belongings and the Uxyat Powwow Grounds. Map of Indigenous ancestral homelands and missions in southern Alta California, and the location of Black Star Canyon Puhú Village. Map showing major holdings of Red Lake Reservation Map in Minnesota, USA. Tsi;li’xw (far left) visiting the New Burke for the first time seeing his welcoming robe and quote.

x

293 311

316 328 329 333 339 342 349 361 363 369 377 378 381 397

398 406 421 423 432 435 438 450 459 461 476 493 529

Figures

33.2 33.3 33.4

Photo of Sugpiaq students—the next generation—paddling the angyaaq at the Akhiok Kids Camp, Cape Alitak, Alaska. Four Research Family sisters celebrate the arrival at the Burke of a Yapese sail woven by the family and community of Rachael Tamngin. Peter Lape and Sven Haakanson Jr. holding up the Kayak Alfred Naumoff made for the New Burke Exhibit Culture is Living.

xi

531 533 538

TABLES

6.1 9.1 9.2 10.1 17.1 21.1 22.1 23.1 23.2 23.3 24.1 24.2

Correlations between δ13C and δ18O for specimens in this study. Examples of managerial, missionary, and settler colonies. Three pathways initiated by Native people to mitigate the impacts of sustained colonialism. Subpopulations in Indigenous territories of southeastern North America, ca. 1830. Documented Wichita-European contacts. Piercings recovered from Tunica locations along the Mississippi River. Ceramic production contexts. Average distance and number of places traveled by Métis in their lifetimes. Counts and percentages of identifiable fauna from Chimney Coulee and Buffalo Lake wintering sites. Artifact counts and percentages from the Chimney Coulee and Buffalo Lake Métis wintering sites. Genealogy of Raymond R. Hernandez, whose eighth-great-grandparents were interred at Mission Valero. Genealogy of Jesus Jose Reyes Jr., whose tenth-great-grandparents (ca. 1655–1725 and ca. 1665–1726) were interred at Mission Valero.

xii

88 133 139 149 263 334 351 364 366 367 387 388

CONTRIBUTORS

Nathan P. Acebo is an assistant professor in anthropology and Indigenous studies at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on Indigenous epistemologies, decolonizing research methodologies, subaltern autonomy, political economies, and multiethnic Indigenous communities in California and Hawaii. He was Fellow in the University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral-Critical Mission Studies program (2020–2021) at the University of California, Merced, and a recipient of the Mellon Foundation Humanities Fellowship, Stanford University Institute for Research in the Social Sciences Fellowship and the Charles E. Rozaire Award for Student Research in California Archaeology by the Society for California Archaeology. Andrzej T. Antczak is an associate professor in Caribbean archaeology, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, and Senior Researcher in the CaribTRAILS project at the KITLV, Netherlands. His interests include island archaeology, Indigenous ontologies, colonial encounters, zooarchaeology, and community archaeology. Since 1982, together with Marlena M. Antczak, he has carried out systematic archaeological research on the offshore islands of the Venezuelan Caribbean and has published extensively on this project’s scholarly results. Alec Apodaca received his bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of California Santa Cruz and is currently a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. Before joining the doctoral program, he worked as an environmental planner for the California Department of Transportation and has several years of experience in cultural resource management. His current research focuses on the archaeology of Indigenous resource stewardship and historical ecological studies in California. His ongoing work involves using paleoethnobotanical data to provide guidance for tribal and agency resource managers involved in ecological restoration projects. Holly Barker is a teaching professor of anthropology at the University of Washington (UW) and Curator for Oceanic & Asian Culture at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Dr. Barker’s teaching, research, and scholarship focus on capacity building, particularly for Pacific Islander students. Together with her Pacific Islander students at UW, Dr. Barker built Research Family, a museum-based research opportunity connecting museum collections to students’ families, communities, values, and Indigenous languages. Classes Dr. Barker teaches xiii

Contributors

include “Indigenous Epistemologies & Oceanic Canoes,” “Decolonizing Museums is our Responsibility,” and “Polynesian Migration, US Colonialism and American Football.” In addition to her work at UW, Dr. Barker is one of three commissioners appointed by the president of the Republic of the Marshall Islands to serve on the RMI’s National Nuclear Commission seeking nuclear justice for Marshallese communities impacted by US nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War Adolfo Iván Batún Alpuche holds a PhD from the University of Florida. He is a professor at the Universidad de Oriente in Valladolid (Yucatán, México) and a member of the National System of Investigators of México. His research focuses on Maya agrarian systems from precolonial to colonial times, cultural resource management in Yucatán, and decolonizing approaches within Maya archaeology. He is codirector of Proyecto Arqueológico Colaborativo del Oriente de Yucatán (PACOY) and former director of the Yucatán State Historical Archives. Brandi Bethke serves as Laboratory Director and Research Faculty at the Oklahoma Archeological Survey, University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on understanding interactions between humans, animals, and the landscape in the North American Plains from the late precontact period to the present day through the integration of zooarchaeology, ethnohistory, computer modeling, and Indigenous knowledge. She is especially interested in the engagement of Indigenous communities with various forms of colonialism and the long-term consequences of these processes. Her most recent work has involved collaborative projects centered on bison hunting and processing activities, the adoption of horse pastoralism by the Native peoples in the United States and Canada, and the survivance of Indigenous cultural practices during the reservation period. Dennis B. Blanton is Associate Professor of Anthropology at James Madison University. In addition to contemplating the factors of climate and weather in human affairs, he is actively documenting the archaeological record of Native–European entanglements in the American Southeast. He has coedited Contact in Context (University Press of Florida) with Julia King and has a new book called Conquistador’s Wake (University of Georgia Press) describing archaeology at an early “contact” site in Georgia. Silvana Buscaglia holds a PhD in archaeology (University of Buenos Aires) and is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council. Her field of specialization is historical archaeology, and particularly the study of interethnic relations in the context of the colonization of Patagonia, Argentina. Her main theoretical concerns are social theory, postcolonial theory, and subaltern studies for the analysis and discussion of Indigenous agency to alter the structures of colonialism. Her research has been published in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, and Archaeometry, among other venues. Minette C. Church holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and Faculty Director of the UCCS Heller Center for the Arts and Humanities. Her regions of interest are British Honduras and the US-Mexico borderlands in the nineteenth century, with foci in landscape archaeology, border regions, parenting and childhood, and colonial/post-colonial transnational identities. She also writes about the intersections of documentary, oral, and material data in the course of archaeological research. She codirects the San Pedro Maya Project and directed the Lopez Plaza Archaeological Project in southern Colorado. Recent publications include: “‘La Luz de Aciete xiv

Contributors

es Triste’: Nighttime, Community, and Memory along the Santa Fé Trail” in Archaeology of the Night; “Introduction–Intimate Interdependencies: Colonization, Capitalism, and Impositions of Public and Private” in Reading the Intimate Past: Beyond the Public/Private in Ethnohistorical Contexts; and “Re-Centering the Narrative: British Colonial Memory and the San Pedro Maya” in Archaeologies of the British in Latin America. Craig N. Cipolla is Vettoretto Curator of North American Archaeology at the Royal Ontario Museum and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His recent publications include Archaeological Theory in Dialogue (with Rachel J. Crellin, Lindsay M. Montgomery, Oliver J.T. Harris, and Sophie V. Moore) and Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium (with Oliver J.T. Harris). His research interests include North American archaeology, collaboration, colonialism, and archaeological theory. Charles R. Cobb is Curator and James E. Lockwood Jr. Professor of Historical Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida. He specializes in the archaeology of the southeastern United States and has a particular interest in Native American engagements with European colonialism. In a collaborative project with the Chickasaw Nation, Cobb is currently exploring the complex interactions between the Chickasaws, English, and French in the colonial era. He also is involved in the development of an online database related to the history of archaeological investigations at Franciscan missions. Adriana Schmidt Dias holds a master’s in history (area of concentration in archaeology) from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul and a PhD in archaeology from the University of São Paulo. She is an associate professor in the department and in the Graduate Program in History at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and Effective Professor in the Graduate Program in Social and Cultural Anthropology/Archeology at the Federal University of Pelotas. She has carried out research and published in the following areas: Brazilian pre-colonial archaeology, theory and method in archaeology, Indigenous history, and cultural heritage. Maia Dedrick holds a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a Hirsch Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University. Her research interests include the archaeology of colonialism and food systems and community-collaborative and participatory methods. She has worked with the Proyecto Arqueológico Colaborativo del Oriente de Yucatán (PACOY), codirected by Patricia A. McAnany and Adolfo Iván Batún Alpuche, since 2012. Marlieke Ernst is a PhD researcher within the NEXUS 1492 project at Leiden University, Faculty of Archaeology, and an affiliated researcher in the CaribTRAILS project at KITLV. Her research focusses on ceramic material transformations and transcultural processes within intercultural communications through ceramics from Hispaniola and Cubagua. Her research assesses the resistance of Indigenous pottery traditions and the amount in which new techniques and forms were created in the colony. Patricia Fournier García has a PhD in anthropology from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She is a senior professor of archaeology at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City. She specializes in historical archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, and archaeometry. Her recent publications include the chapters “Archaeological Distribution of Chinese Porcelain in Mexico” (Springer, 2019, with Roberto Junco); “Postconquest Technological Innovation and Effect on Ceramic Traditions in Central Mexico” (University xv

Contributors

of New Mexico Press, 2019, with Cynthia Otis Charlton); and “Material Culture, Status, and Identity in Postindependence Central Mexico: Urban and Rural Dimensions” (University of New Mexico Press, 2018). Martin Gallivan is a professor at William & Mary and chair of the Anthropology Department. His research centers on the culture and history of Algonquian societies in the Chesapeake. He holds a bachelor of science degree from Georgetown University and a doctorate from the University of Virginia. His publications include James River Chiefdoms: The Rise of Social Inequality in the Chesapeake (2003), Werowocomoco: The Powhatan Center Place (2015), and The Powhatan Landscape: An Archaeological History of the Algonquian Chesapeake (2016). From 2003–2010 he directed archaeological research at the Powhatan capital of Werowocomoco, research organized around close collaboration with contemporary Native communities. Cristóbal Gnecco is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Universidad del Cauca, where he works on the political economy of archaeology, geopolitics of knowledge, discourses on alterity, and ethnographies of heritage. His latest book is Antidecálogo. Diez ensayos (casi) arqueológicos (Universidad del Cauca-JAS Arqueología-Ediciones del Signo, PopayánMadrid-Buenos Aires, 2017). Sara L. Gonzalez is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington and Curator of Archaeology the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. An anthropological archaeologist by training, she works at the intersection of Indigenous studies, tribal historic preservation, and public history. Her research contributes to the growing field of Indigenous and community-based archaeologies, which feature the direct engagement of Indigenous peoples and are committed to the ethical integration of Indigenous knowledge and methods into archaeological practice and heritage management. She currently codirects Field Methods in Indigenous Archaeology with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon’s Historic Preservation Office, which enhances the capacity of the tribe as well as archaeologists to care for, protect, and represent tribal heritage for future generations. In addition to this work, Dr. Gonzalez is a cofounder of the Indigenous Archaeology Collective, a network of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars within archaeology and related fields that provides mentorship to Indigenous archaeology scholars and support for Indigenous Nations and advocates for the rights of Indigenous peoples as outlined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. D. Rae Gould is a member of the Nipmuc Tribe (Massachusetts) and serves as Associate Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University. She has a PhD in anthropology from the University of Connecticut, and her research and publishing focus on the history and culture of southern New England Native peoples, critical heritage studies and cultural landscapes, and NAGPRA. Among other publications, she is a coauthor of Historical Archaeology and Indigenous Collaboration: Discovering Histories that have Futures (University Press of Florida, 2020). Michael A. Grone received his BA degree in anthropology from San Diego State University and recently completed his PhD in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. His research focuses on the archaeology and historical ecology of Indigenous management of marine resources on the central coast of California, applying archaeological data

xvi

Contributors

to inform and revitalize traditional ecological knowledge and stewardship of intertidal resources such as shellfish and seaweed. Sven Haakanson Jr. (Sugpiaq), Associate Professor in Anthropology at the University of Washington and Curator of North American Anthropology at the Burke Museum, is a cultural archaeologist who uses anthropology to engage with and repatriate knowledge back to his community through his research and hands-on engagement with collections and communities on Kodiak Island, Alaska. His research started with conducting ethnoarchaeology with Nenet reindeer herders from the Yamal Peninsula, Russia. This experience changed how he engaged with museums and his own community by learning how powerful and important it is to have your culture in a living context. Starting off as the Director of the Alutiiq Museum to becoming a curator at the Burke Museum, he has been collaborating with communities to take their knowledge that is held within museum collections to use and celebrate as their own living cultural history. Corinne L. Hofman is a professor of Caribbean archaeology at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University and is currently PI of the CaribTRAILS project at KITLV. Her research is highly multidisciplinary and focuses on colonial transformations, intercultural dynamics, mobility and exchange, settlement archaeology, artifact analyses, and provenance studies. Her projects are designed to contribute to the historical awareness, preservation and valorization of Indigenous heritage. Between 2013 and 2019 she was the CPI of the ERC-Synergy project “Nexus 1492.” She is the (co-)author of many articles and books. Recent books are The Caribbean Before Columbus (with William F. Keegan), Oxford University Press 2017, and Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas (with Floris W.M. Keehnen), Brill 2019. Menno L.P. Hoogland is an associate professor in the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University and Senior Researcher in the CaribTRAILS project at the KITLV. He is an expert in Caribbean archaeology and archaeothanatology. He has conducted fieldwork in many of the Caribbean islands together with Corinne Hofman. Hoogland’s research focuses on settlement organization and funerary practices of precolonial and early colonial Amerindian societies in the Caribbean. He is the (co-)author of many articles and book chapters and is currently preparing an edited volume on the bioarchaeology of the Caribbean for Routledge. Di Hu is an assistant professor at James Madison University, focusing on the archaeology of the Andes. She uses the lenses of political geography and landscape to develop a long-term understanding of political strategies of consolidation and control, bottom-up social movements, and identity transformation. She has particular area expertise in the Andes, with research on multicommunity polity and state formation in the southern Titicaca Basin in Bolivia (Chiripa and Tiwanaku) and rebellious social landscapes in Peru (Inca and Spanish colonial). She is the author of a forthcoming book entitled The Fabric of Resistance: Textile Workshops and the Rise of Rebellious Landscapes in Colonial Peru, to be published by the University of Alabama Press in 2021. Christine A. Kray holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and is Professor of Anthropology and Program Director for Sociology and Anthropology at Rochester Institute of Technology. An ethnographer and historical anthropologist, she is the author of many articles and book chapters on the Yucatec Maya in the context of Spanish and British colonialism, global capitalism, evangelization, and US neocolonialism. She is coeditor of Nasty Women and Bad

xvii

Contributors

Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 Presidential Election (University of Rochester Press, 2018) and a forthcoming manuscript on political culture in the Trump era. Ian Kretzler received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Washington and currently works as a project archaeologist for Cultural Resource Consultants in Seattle. Dr. Kretzler’s approach to archaeological research and historic preservation follows from the position that acknowledging archaeology’s role in the development of European and US colonial projects confers a scholarly responsibility to develop archaeologies responsive to the needs and interests of contemporary Indigenous communities. To that end, Dr. Kretzler draws on Indigenous and collaborative archaeologies, GIS analysis, archival research, and material belongings to examine Native histories in the Pacific Northwest. In partnership with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Dr. Kretzler has worked to identify stories of survivance among western Oregon Native communities from the nineteenth century into the present. Heather Law Pezzarossi is an assistant professor in anthropology at Syracuse University. She earned her doctorate in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2014. She has helped to foster a collaborative research relationship with the Nipmuc Tribal Council since 2006 through her work on the Hassanamesit Woods Project in Grafton, Massachusetts. Her research focuses on Indigenous histories in Eastern North America, with particular interest in remapping and monumentalizing Indigenous homelands, especially urban areas, to reflect Indigenous heritage and celebrate contemporary Indigenous artists. She is coauthor of Indigenous Persistence in the Colonized Americas (University of New Mexico Press) and Historical Archaeology and Indigenous Collaboration: Discovering Histories that have Futures (University of Florida Press). Matthew Liebmann is a professor of archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. His research interests include the archaeology of the Southwest US, historical archaeology and historical anthropology, collaborative archaeology, the archaeology of colonialism, archaeological theory, and postcolonialism. He has conducted collaborative research with the Pueblo of Jemez since 2001 and formerly served as Tribal Archaeologist and NAGPRA Program Director at the Jemez Department of Natural Resources. He is the author of Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in 17th Century New Mexico (2012) and the coeditor of Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique (with Uzma Rizvi, 2008) and Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas (with Melissa S. Murphy, 2011). Kent G. Lightfoot is a professor in the Anthropology Department and Curator of North American Archaeology in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1987. He received his BA from Stanford University and his PhD from Arizona State University. He has undertaken archaeological work in New England, the American Southwest, Alaska, Hawaii, and the Pacific Coast of North America. His recent investigations have focused on the archaeology of colonialism, shell mounds of the greater San Francisco Bay Area, and Indigenous landscape management practices along the central coast of California. Dorothy Lippert is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and an archaeologist, having received her doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a tribal liaison in the Repatriation Office of the National Museum of Natural History, where she responds to repatriation xviii

Contributors

requests from US tribes according to the provisions of the National Museum of the American Indian Act. Her outside research interests include the development of Indigenous archaeology, repatriation theory and practice, archaeological ethics, and the protohistoric Southeastern United States. She is proud of her work as a member of the Executive of the World Archaeological Congress and as an expert member of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, having been named to two terms by President Obama. Diana DiPaolo Loren holds a PhD from SUNY Binghamton. She arrived at Harvard in 1999 and is currently Senior Curator at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. Loren specializes in the colonial period Southeast and Northeast, with a focus on the body, health, dress, and adornment. Loren is the author of In Contact: Bodies and Spaces in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Eastern Woodlands (2007) and The Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment in Colonial America (2010). Ora V. Marek-Martinez (Nez Perce, Hopi, and tribal citizen of the Navajo Nation) received her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and is an assistant professor of anthropology and the Executive Director of the Native American Cultural Center at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Marek-Martinez’s research interests include Indigenous archaeology and Indigenous heritage management and research and approaches that utilize cultural knowledge, oral histories, archival sources, and material culture in the creation of archaeological knowledge. Other interests include southwestern archaeology, Indigenous futurisms, and decolonizing and Indigenizing archaeological narratives of the cultural landscape on Indigenous homelands as a way to reaffirm Indigenous connections to land and place. Art Martinez de Vara is an attorney and counselor at law with The Martinez de Vara Law Firm, PLLC, Von Ormy, Texas. In that capacity, he serves as general counsel for American Indians at Spanish Colonial Missions’ Legal Defense Fund and represents Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation in various matters. He also has an academic interest in Spanish Colonial Texas, having authored several books in the field, including Mission Espada After Secularization, El Carmen: The Chapel of the Battle of Medina, and Tejano Patriot: The Revolutionary Life of José Francisco Ruiz. Nicole M. Mathwich is an assistant professor of anthropology at San Diego State University. She studies the ecologies of colonialism and the emergence of ranching in the southern Southwest US/noroeste of Mexico. Her research has appeared in Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, and International Journal of Historical Archaeology, among other venues. Patricia A. McAnany holds a PhD from the University of New Mexico and is Kenan Eminent Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. She has received research awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and the Archaeological Institute of America, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the John Carter Brown Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and Dumbarton Oaks. She is co-investigator of Proyecto Arqueológico Colaborativo del Oriente de Yucatán, a communityarchaeology project at Tahcabo, Yucatán, México. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including Maya Cultural Heritage: How Archaeologists and Indigenous Communities Engage the Past (2016). xix

Contributors

Lindsay M. Montgomery is an assistant professor in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona whose research investigates interethnic interaction, Indigenous resistance, persistence, and the long-term impacts of settler colonialism on Native communities in the North American West. Her work has appeared in a variety of academic publications and popular venues, including PBS, SAPIENS, the Journal of Social Archaeology, American Indian Quarterly, and the Journal of International Heritage Studies. Sandra Montón-Subías is an ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain). She currently focuses on processes of identity, change, and continuity that relate to the incorporation of Guam by the colonial network of the Spanish empire, with a special emphasis on gender and the consequences that colonial politics had on maintenance activities and Native bodies. Her recent publications include “Gender, Missions, and Maintenance Activities in the Early Modern Globalization: Guam 1668–98” (International Journal of Historical Archaeology 2019), and “Modern Colonialism, Eurocentrism and Historical Archaeology: Some Engendered Thoughts” (European Journal of Archaeology 2018). Sandra is currently PI for the projects ABERIGUA and GenderGLOBAL and coordinates the UPF research group CGyM (Colonialism, Gender and Materialities). Stephen A. Mrozowski is the founding director of the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology. His research encompasses the growth of complex societies and the roles of colonization, urbanization, and industrialization in shaping the modern world. His current research examines the intersection of commodity production, climate change, and issues of universal employment through the lens of historical archaeology as well as the intersection of time, space, and sovereignty through the idea of historical gravity. His continuing work with the Hassanamisco Nipmuc and Wampanoag of Massachusetts focus on the rewriting of Indigenous histories through collaboration and the mapping of the Indigenous landscape. He is the coauthor of Historical Archaeology and Indigenous Collaboration: Discovering Histories that have Futures (University Press of Florida, 2020), the co-editor of The Death of Prehistory (Oxford University Press, 2013), and Contemporary Archaeology in Theory: The New Pragmatism (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), among others. Peter A. Nelson (Coast Miwok and tribal citizen of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria) received his PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. Dr. Nelson works at the intersection of anthropological archaeology, Indigenous environmental studies, and Native American studies in collaboration with Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples in California and abroad on issues of cultural heritage preservation, settler colonialism, climate change, and Indigenous landscape management. Dr. Nelson engages Indigenous archaeology and community-based participatory research (CBPR) methodologies to achieve community partner goals and utilizes a suite of approaches to his research such as geophysical survey (ground-penetrating radar, magnetometry, and resistivity), LiDAR, GPS/GIS mapping, paleoethnobotany, and ethnographic methods to document, learn from, and manage tribal cultural and ecological landscapes. Francisco Silva Noelli is currently a PhD student and member of the Center of Archaeology (UNIARQ) at the University of Lisbon. He was previously an assistant professor at the State University of Maringá, Brazil (1995–2007), where he conducted archaeological and xx

Contributors

ethnoarchaeological investigations about the Guaraní and Southern Jê peoples and underwater archaeology of the colonial period and WWII. His current research centers on the archaeology of colonialism, exploring the relations between the Tupiniquim and the Portuguese in the formation of the society in São Paulo, Brazil (1502–1700 ce). He has published in Brazilian journals, as well as Antiquity, Latin American Antiquity, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Encyclopedia of Historical Archaeology, and Oxford Companion to Archaeology. Lee M. Panich is an associate professor of anthropology at Santa Clara University. In his research, he employs a combination of archaeological, ethnographic, and archival data to examine the long-term entanglements between California’s Indigenous societies and colonial institutions, particularly the Spanish mission system. He has conducted investigations of Indigenous life at Mission Santa Clara de Asís and Mission San José in Alta California, as well as at Mission Santa Catalina in Baja California, Mexico. With Tsim Schneider, he recently codirected a collaborative research project focused on autonomous Indigenous villages that existed at the crossroads of the Spanish, Russian, Mexican, and American frontiers in northern California. Panich is the coeditor of Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory (University of Arizona Press, 2014) and the author of Narratives of Persistence: Indigenous Negotiations of Colonialism in Alta and Baja California (University of Arizona Press, 2020). Kylie Quave is an archaeologist and assistant professor of writing at the George Washington University. Her work in the Andes reconstructs the contributions of marginalized peoples to the development of states and empires. Her research on the development and dissolution of the Inka and Spanish empires (eleventh to eighteenth centuries) draws from household archaeology, material culture analysis, and archival sources. She recently coauthored Quantitative Anthropology: A Workbook with Leslie Williams (Academic Press, 2019) and has recently published papers in Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, and Journal of Field Archaeology. Tristan Reader is an assistant professor of practice in the University of Arizona (UA) Department of American Indian Studies. Prior to joining the UA faculty, he spent 20 years working with Tohono O’odham Community Action (TOCA), a community-based, grassroots organization he cofounded. While at TOCA, he coordinated a series of nationally recognized efforts to rebuild a sustainable food system on the Tohono O’odham Nation in southern Arizona. He currently serves on the Leadership Council of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance (NAFSA). Marianne Sallum is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of São Paulo (Brazil), member of the Archaeology Center of the University of Lisbon (Portugal), and collaborator of the project “Crafts of Pre-Hispanic Mexico: An Ethnoarchaeological Study” at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She was previously a visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts-Boston (2015–2016). Her research focus is the relationship between colonialism and the long-term communities of ceramic practices in São Paulo, including a comparative investigation of colonialism and Native practices between São Paulo (Brazil) and New England (United States). She has published in journals such as International Journal of Historical Archaeology and Mana: Estudos de Antropologia Social. Kisha Supernant is Métis, Director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology, and an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta. An award-winning xxi

Contributors

teacher, researcher, and writer, her research interests include the relationship between cultural identities, landscapes, and the use of space, Métis archaeology, Indigenous archaeologies, and heart-centered archaeological practice. Her research with Indigenous communities (including Métis and First Nations) in western Canada explores how archaeologists and communities can build collaborative research relationships and develop community-driven projects. She leads the Exploring Métis Identity Through Archaeology (EMITA), a collaborative research project that takes a relational approach to exploring the material past of Métis communities, including her own family, in western Canada. She is codirector of a new interdisciplinary research project on Métis kinscapes of Lac Ste Anne with a team of Indigenous scholars (recently funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant), as well as coinvestigator on Cartographies of Deep Time, a recently funded SSHRC Insight Grant project that explores the complexities of history and different ways of knowing with Tsimshian communities in British Columbia. Recently, she has been increasingly engaged in using remote sensing technologies to locate and protect unmarked burials at the request of First Nations communities in Alberta and Saskatchewan. She has published in national and international journals, and two books that she coedited were published in 2020, Archaeologies of the Heart, with Springer Press, and Blurring Timescapes, Subverting Erasure: Remembering Ghosts on the Margins of History, with Berghahn Books. Monika Therrien is an anthropologist from the Universidad de los Andes, with a master’s degree in history from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Dedicated to historical archaeology since 1988, she has developed long-term research programs in this area in some of the main regions of Colombia. Her other areas of research and experience in the academic field focus on urban history and cultural heritage, more specifically intangible cultural heritage and industrial heritage. Ashleigh BigWolf Thompson is a citizen of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians and a member of migizi dodem (eagle clan). She holds four BAs—in anthropology, American Indian studies, English, and multicultural studies—from the University of Minnesota–Morris and an MA in anthropology from the University of Arizona. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and a Graduate Teaching Assistant in American Indian Studies. Her research interests include collaborative and Indigenous archaeology, Indigenous food sovereignty, and Indigenous storywork. She is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program recipient. Alston V. Thoms, a sixth-generation Texan, is a professor in the Department of Anthropology’s archaeology program at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas. His missionrelated work since 1990 has been in collaboration with Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation and, in 2016, as a consultant in the initial development of the Alamo Master Plan. Thoms’ interests in mission-based colonialism stem from his academically and archaeologically oriented research into the Native peoples of south Texas, specifically their roles at Missions San Juan de Capistrano and Valero. Sarah Trabert is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. Her research centers on understanding how Indigenous communities on the Great Plains responded to the many direct and indirect effects stemming from European colonial activities in adjacent regions. She has a forthcoming volume for the Society for American Archaeology Press on contemporary perspectives on Great Plains archaeology that stresses the importance for all

xxii

Contributors

North American archaeologists, regardless of the time period in which they work, to understand the contact period, Indigenous survivance and persistence, and the histories of contemporary descendant communities. Jorge Ulloa Hung is a research professor at the Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo (INTEC) and Head of the Department of Archaeology of the Museo del Hombre Dominicano. Currently he is a guest senior researcher at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, and affiliated with the CaribTRAILS Project at Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean studies KITLV/KNAW. His current topic of research is archaeological landscapes on the island of Hispaniola. He is also interested in the transformations, interactions, and continuity of Indigenous cultural legacies in the current regional cultures of Dominican Republic and the wider Caribbean and its impact on the formation of Creole society through material culture, the transmission of experiences, and symbolic aspects. Roberto Valcárcel Rojas is a professor of the Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo (INTEC), Dominican Republic. He was a postdoctoral researcher, in the ERC-Synergy Project NEXUS 1492 at Leiden University between 2013 and 2019. His research interests include the Indigenous societies in the Caribbean and their legacy, the study of museum collections, ethnic and cultural interaction, archaeometallurgy, and archaeology and history of the early colonial times in the Americas. Valcárcel Rojas is author of several books and articles about Cuban and Caribbean precolonial and colonial archaeology including Archaeology of Early Colonial Interaction at El Chorro de Maíta, Cuba (University Press of Florida, 2016). He was the main editor of the book De la desaparición a la permanencia. Indígenas e indios en la reinvención del Caribe (INTECFGA, 2018). Mary Van Buren is a professor of anthropology at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. Her research interests include the historical archaeology of the Andes and Rocky Mountains, colonialism, long-term history, and mining and metallurgy. She has published articles in American Anthropologist, Latin American Antiquity, and Historical Archaeology, and is currently working on a book about the long-term trajectory of small-scale metal production in Bolivia. Ramon Juan Vasquez is an enrolled member of the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation and the son of Ramon Vasquez y Sanchez, Senior Tribal Council member. He is the executive director of American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions, San Antonio, Texas, where he has devoted 22 years toward reversing extinction of the Coahuiltecan Nations of South Texas and Northeastern Mexico. He is also a cofounder of the National Urban Indian Family Coalition headquartered in Seattle, Washington. Terrance Weik is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Weik is an historical archaeologist who takes an anthropological approach to life in the Americas. His research methods employ multiple lines of evidence such as documents, oral history, geophysics, GIS data, and material culture. His research explores African Diasporan cultural origins, African-Indigenous interactions, freedom-seeking initiatives, community-building processes, human inequalities, and social identities. Weik’s publications include The Archaeology of Antislavery Resistance. Weik is also editor of The Archaeology of Removal in North America, a collaborative effort that explores various forms of dispossession and forced displacement examined by archaeologists (University of Florida Press).

xxiii

Contributors

Jason Yaeger holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and is President’s Endowed Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Texas San Antonio. He studies Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations and seeks to understand the practices, institutions, and constructs that linked rural householders into extra-community sociopolitical entities. He has surveyed the countryside in Belize’s Mopan River valley, mapped hundreds of houses and agricultural terraces, and excavated several rural houses in detail. His current research project focuses on changing relationships between Xunantunich and the rival center of Buenavista and their impacts on people’s lives in the intervening countryside. Investigations have also taken him to Tiwanaku, Bolivia, and he is Codirector of the San Pedro Maya Project.

xxiv

PART I

Methodological and theoretical foundations

1 SITUATING ARCHAEOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO INDIGENOUS-COLONIAL INTERACTION IN THE AMERICAS An introduction Sara L. Gonzalez and Lee M. Panich

The archaeology of Indigenous-colonial interaction in the Americas is emerging from a decadeslong shift in orientation, one that has moved the field to the forefront of theoretical and methodological debates in archaeology. Whereas many foundational works focused on the lasting legacies of European and American colonialism for the Native peoples of the Americas, such as demographic losses and acculturation, more recent approaches acknowledge the hardships of colonialism but also work from the premise that Indigenous societies persisted in various ways (Atalay 2006b). Indeed, largely as an outgrowth of Indigenous concerns, repatriation debates, and archaeology’s engagement with the postcolonial critiques of the 1980s and 1990s, the field today acknowledges the varied trajectories and outcomes of Indigenous entanglements with European and American governments and colonists. Contemporary approaches thus balance studies of local, micro-scale histories of intercultural encounters with an awareness of the global aspects of imperial and colonial projects in the Americas (Cobb 2019). There is also a widespread and growing acknowledgment of the active presence of Indigenous peoples, today and in the past, who negotiated, contested, and articulated their interests and needs in relation to the colonial projects and successive waves of colonists they encountered (Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018; Panich 2020). Taken together, these current approaches address the colonial period not as a rupture with the past but as part of long-term Indigenous histories and ongoing colonial processes and struggles for sovereignty that continue into the present. This volume seeks to establish common ground about the archaeological study of colonial entanglements in the Americas and to chart more equitable and decolonial ways for such research to proceed. The book’s focus is primarily on the ways in which Indigenous peoples have long dealt with the imposition of colonialism rather than those colonial institutions themselves. Still, it is worth noting here that the Americas were the site of intense colonial activity by several European countries, including Spain, Portugal, England, France, the Netherlands, and Russia. From the perspective of Indigenous people, colonialism has continued unabated despite the independence of former colonies that today constitute settler states like Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Brazil. From the fifteenth century through the twenty-first, these settler 3

Sara L. Gonzalez and Lee M. Panich

entities have each developed their own unique strategies to implement their colonial agenda, confronting Indigenous peoples with a variety of demographic, ecological, geographic, and temporal challenges. The chapters of this book, therefore, range in scope from Native peoples’ earliest encounters with Europeans all the way through to the continuing colonial relations between the contemporary field of archaeology and Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Emerging trends In many areas, the past three decades have seen a major transformation of how scholars examine the archaeology of colonial entanglements in the Americas, shifting from a focus on colonialism itself to an examination of how Indigenous people met the challenges of the times. Early historical archaeologists—particularly in North America—largely focused their efforts on defining site types, classifying European-introduced material culture, and determining the extent of architectural and economic features at sites founded by European colonists (e.g., Fontana 1965 and see Zarankin and Salerno 2008 for a discussion of similar developments in South America). As Americanist historical archaeology matured, it added the study of European colonialism’s “impact on Indigenous people” to its charge (Deetz 1977, 5). This shift reached its zenith with the quincentenary of Columbus’ first voyage, as archaeologists throughout the hemisphere broadened their perspective to examine not just the experiences of the colonizers but also what European colonialism wrought for the Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas (Rubertone 2000). The emerging paradigm was perhaps best represented by the landmark three-volume Columbian Consequences series, edited by David Hurst Thomas (1989, 1990, 1991), who explicitly advocated for a “cubist” perspective that considered a range of vantage points on hemispheric colonialism. A full generation later, archaeology is experiencing yet another paradigm shift with regard to the investigation of Indigenous-colonial interactions in the Americas. Instead of scholarship that simply examines the impact of colonialism on Native people—setting up a false dichotomy between Euro-American actors and Indigenous victims—archaeologists are today using a variety of means to center Indigenous voices and experiences in the archaeological study of colonial entanglements in the Americas (Jordan 2016; Silliman 2020). Importantly, much of this research is led by or is in collaboration with Native scholars and their communities (e.g., Cowie et al. 2019; Gonzalez et al. 2018; Ferris 2009; Gould et al. 2020; Oland et al. 2012; Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018; Panich et al. 2021; Schneider 2020; Sunseri 2017). Such Indigenous archaeologies are critical for addressing the colonial legacies of the study of the precolonial past (Gnecco and Ayala Rocabado 2010; Silva 2012), but they are equally important for the archaeological approaches to post-1492 Indigenous histories given that settler society has long mobilized archaeology to erase the continued presence of Native people (O’Brien 2010; Wilcox 2009). While these developments are manifested differently in the various archaeological traditions of the Americas, as well as in academic, governmental, and private-sector archaeology, we see the foregrounding of Indigenous histories and experiences as a unifying theme that cuts across several interrelated shifts since the Columbian quincentenary. These emerging research foci, moreover, have invited critical reflection about how archaeologists and heritage professionals disseminate Indigenous histories to the broader public, and indeed, about the coloniality of archaeology itself. Below, we briefly highlight these issues with reference to the chapters included in this volume.

Conceptual advances To better account for how Indigenous people experienced—and continue to experience— colonialism in the Americas, archaeologists have revisited a host of core concepts. First to fall was 4

Introduction

the notion of acculturation, which served as the underlying framework for many early studies (Cusick 1998, and see Chapter 8), along with the related focus on “culture contact” that frequently served to downplay issues of power and sustained colonialism (Silliman 2005). Similarly, the prehistory concept has suffered a long, and perhaps fatal, critique in the literature for its ethnocentric nature and the attendant limitations for understanding the role of colonialism in long-term Indigenous histories (Lightfoot 1995; Schmidt and Mrozowski 2013). As explored by Gallivan (Chapter 2), different time scales focus our attention on different phenomena, and processes in play prior to the arrival of Europeans to the Americas often established critical antecedents to the upheavals of colonialism. For example, local Native groups in some regions had long experience with various Indigenous empires (Chapter 16; see also King 2020; VanValkenburgh 2019). In others, hunter-gatherer peoples interacted with each other and their environments in ways that made the disruptions of missionary and settler colonialism particularly devastating (Lightfoot et al. 2013). Archaeologists have also expanded their temporal and spatial focus to better account for more recent Indigenous histories. Though initial encounters remain an important area of study (Chapter 15), current approaches have moved forward in time to include various examples of “sustained colonialism” (Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018; Chapter 9). Chapters in this volume consider these issues from the perspective of Indigenous peoples who negotiated various types of enduring colonial impositions, including the reservation system in the United States (Chapter 28), the emerging national borders of Central America (Chapter 20), and long-term intercultural exchanges in Brazil (Chapter 22). This growing temporal range also invites reflection on public memory and other heritage practices, in which Native histories have too often been downplayed or distorted (Chapters 25 and 26; and see Schneider et al. 2020). As other chapters in the volume attest, museums and the very practice of archaeology continue to be additional sites of colonial contestation (Chapters 31–33). Archaeologists are also reconsidering the geographic extent of colonial encounters. Colonial outposts such as religious missions remain important, if contested, foci for archaeological research (Chapters 3 and 11). However, in recent years, archaeologists have moved well beyond the traditional historical archaeological focus on forts, missions, and other European outposts to examine the broader landscape of Native-lived colonialism (Cobb 2019; Ferris 2009; Panich and Schneider 2015; Schneider 2015). As exemplified by several chapters in this handbook, Indigenous homelands were critical hubs of economic, spiritual, and political autonomy throughout the colonial period. In some cases, settlers moved to violently eliminate these centers of Native power, but in others colonists had to contend with their own tenuous position within broader Indigenous landscapes (Chapters 17–19 and 29). Conversely, archaeologists are looking for new ways to acknowledge the presence of Indigenous people in colonial spaces (Silliman 2010). Chapters in this volume by Fournier Garcia, Therrien, and Law Pezzarossi and colleagues all examine how Native people lived in and among colonists in the urban spaces that grew up in different locales across the Americas. These advances serve to break down dichotomous thinking between European and Indigenous, between colonizer and colonized. As several chapters demonstrate, the Americas today reflect centuries-long processes of cultural entanglement (Chapter 15). Chapters explore these processes through the lenses of the documentary record (Chapter 7), material culture (Chapters 13 and 22), religion (Chapter 11) and environmental management (Chapter 6), among others. Several chapters also point out the importance of Africans—both free and enslaved—in myriad pluralistic contexts throughout North and South America, a topic that is treated thematically by Weik (Chapter 10). Here again, a common thread is that colonial processes reverberate into the present in ways that undermine detached scholarly treatments of colonialism as something that existed only in the past (Chapters 25, 27, 28, 31, and 32). 5

Sara L. Gonzalez and Lee M. Panich

Methodological advances Other advances are methodological in nature, including the use of sophisticated analytical tools to ask important questions about colonial entanglements. For instance, archaeologists are using various forms of trace-element analysis (e.g., XRF, INAA, LA-ICP-MS) and isotopic analysis to illuminate persistent Indigenous exchange networks and landscape management practices (Andrews 2019, 211; Chapters 6 and 13). In many cases, methodological advances are providing archaeologists and community partners with the fine-grained data needed to contextualize the roles that external factors like disease, environmental fluctuations, and introduced animals played in colonial contexts (Chapters 4–6). Importantly, archaeological methods are well suited to recentering the social aspects of colonialism, which often exacerbated the effects of disease and environmental degradation for Indigenous societies (Chapter 4; and see Jones 2015). In thinking about how archaeological data are generated, a growing consensus is that archaeological investigations of colonial entanglements can and must move beyond dirt archaeology. Part of this shift is simply the recognition that the material record can be complemented by an array of other datasets including the innovative use of archival documents, ethnohistorical information, and, where appropriate, Indigenous oral histories (Frink 2016; Chapters 7, 12, and 28). But, as discussed later, Indigenous scholars and their communities have also pointed out crucial weaknesses in the ability of archaeological epistemologies to fully account for postcontact Indigenous histories (Schneider 2020). Indigenous and collaborative archaeologies offer potential solutions, as communities are empowered to take a primary role in defining research questions, though scholars must also be attentive to the real harms and risks associated with the archaeology of colonial places (Cowie et al. 2019; Chapter 28). In such cases, low-impact field methods may offer ways to minimize community harms and/or impacts to sacred sites (Gonzalez et al. 2006; Gonzalez 2016).

Comparative approaches to the archaeology of colonialism Given the diversity of temporal, geographic, and social contexts of Indigenous-colonial interaction in the Americas, comparative studies are one way to highlight common themes or disjunctures, as well as to disrupt the “grand narratives” of colonial success and Euro-American cultural superiority (Funari and Senatore 2015). Enriching this perspective is the recognition that colonialism itself was and is not monolithic and instead is often suffused with diverse and contradictory objectives. As Deagan (2003, 3) noted of Spanish colonialism, it was “simultaneously an invasion, a colonization effort, a social experiment, a religious crusade, and a highly structured economic enterprise.” To these observations, we would add that the Indigenous societies of the Americas encompassed the full scope of social organization—from small-scale hunter-gatherers to Indigenous empires—and occupied homelands that ranged from tundra to desert to tropical forest to high plains. Given that a full accounting of all the varied and textured colonial encounters and means by which Native people dealt with them is beyond the scope of any one article or monograph, archaeologists and ethnohistorians have turned to comparison at various scales. A sampling of recent edited volumes is illustrative: some volumes offer a global focus, exploring archaeological approaches to understanding colonialism across disparate temporal and geographic contexts (Beaule 2017; Cipolla and Hayes 2015; Ferris et al. 2014; Murray 2004; Stein 2005). Several other thematic volumes address particular colonial systems active in the Americas and elsewhere (Beaule and Douglass 2020; Funari and Senatore 2015; Montón-Subiás et al. 2016; Orser 2019; Panich and Schneider 2014; and see Thomas 1989, 1990, 1991). Though a few volumes have focused on particular time periods (e.g., Hofman and Keehnen 2019; Mathers et al. 2013), many take a regional approach within the Western Hemisphere. These include the American 6

Introduction

Southeast (Bourdreaux et al. 2020), the American Southwest/Northwest Mexico (Douglass and Graves 2017), California (Hull and Douglass 2018), and Mesoamerica (Alexander 2019). Still others attempt to frame the comparison from the vantage point of the Native people who encountered European colonial institutions in different times and places (Äikäs and Salmi 2019; Liebmann and Murphy 2010; Oland et al. 2012; Panich and Schneider 2014; Law Pezzarrossi and Sheptak 2019; Scheiber and Mitchell 2010). This handbook follows the lead of the latter set of volumes in centering Indigenous experiences of colonialism, as well as highlighting current debates about how scholars can use the tools of archaeology and related historical disciplines to better understand those experiences and their legacies in the present day. Here, we recognize the tension between the celebration of contemporary Indigenous communities and the need to provide “a sense of the struggle” related to the violence—both physical and structural—of Euro-American colonialism (Atalay 2006b). While comparative frameworks can bring into focus the brutal commonalities of colonial systems of power (Voss 2015), we argue that they can also highlight broad patterns of Indigenous persistence and their survivance across geographic regions and colonial contexts (Chapter 9; Panich 2020).

Critiques of archaeology For a volume on the archaeologies of colonialism and Indigenous persistence in the Americas, it is important to acknowledge that North American archaeology has effectively set the agenda for global investigations of colonial entanglements (Funari et al. 1999; Chapter 27). As noted by Murray (2004, 2), part of this trend is the surge of archaeological work surrounding the Columbian anniversary of 1992 but also the cultural hegemony of the United States and other Englishspeaking countries—a situation that applies throughout the Americas as well as to Africa, Australia, and Asia. Like other volumes on similar topics (e.g., Funari and Senatore 2015), we argue that it is critical to engage scholars from outside of the United States—and particularly Indigenous scholars and communities, as discussed in the next section—in our discussions of the lasting legacies of colonialism in the Americas. Transnational and transdisciplinary conversations allow for more robust theoretical debate and encourage a more nuanced understanding of the varied outcomes of colonialism and, importantly, the continued neocolonialism of archaeological practice today (e.g., Brooks and Torres de Souza 2020; Funari and Ferreira 2016; Martín et al. 2012). Indeed, archaeology has its own deeply entrenched colonial nature (Atalay 2006a; McGuire 1992; McNiven and Russell 2005), and questions remain about whether it is even possible to separate archaeology from the relations of colonialism in the archaeology of colonialism (Martindale and Jurakic 2015). For example, Gnecco and Dias (Chapter 3; and see Gnecco and Dias 2015) argue that the archaeology of colonialism, as practiced in South America, represents a form of “double coloniality” with regard to the control over and study of Indigenous heritage. Similarly, Cipolla (Chapter 8) points out that even as archaeologists move past outmoded theoretical frameworks like acculturation, we still must be attentive to the risks of how we apply theories—largely drawn from the western, academic tradition—to Indigenous realities. These observations resonate with recent calls to “undiscipline” or “unsettle” archaeology (Chapter 28; Haber 2012; Schneider and Hayes 2020). These critiques of the coloniality of archaeology question the validity placed on archaeological evidence and methods as a means to uncover Indigenous experiences of colonialism when many Indigenous peoples’ own understandings of their history are regarded as unscientific (and see Nelson 2020; Chapters 31 and 33). As these authors and others argue, only through interdisciplinary, community-based research can archaeologists effectively decenter our engrained western epistemologies to support Native peoples in an equitable manner and to work against the structures of settler colonialism. 7

Sara L. Gonzalez and Lee M. Panich

Looking forward: Indigenous archaeologies One of the most important developments of the past few decades has been the increased collaboration with Indigenous communities in the study, interpretation, and preservation of their own heritage. Several chapters in this volume touch on these issues, including those by Acebo, Cipolla, Haakanson et al., Kretzler and Gonzalez, Law Pezzarossi et al., Lippert, Marek Martinez, McAnany et al., Supernant, Thoms et al., and Thompson and Reader. These advances can be seen as an outgrowth of the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and the National Museum of the American Indian Act (NMAI), which legally mandated repatriation of Indigenous ancestors, burial goods, sacred items, and items of cultural patrimony in the United States. Yet as Atalay (2012, 39) notes, these laws were precipitated by decades of Indigenous activism that forced archaeology to reckon with its colonization of Indigenous bodies, heritage, and lands (see also Chapter 32). In addition to Indigenous advocacy, broader ethical debates in archaeology including the contemporaneous New York African Burial Ground project that brought terms like “descendant community” and “ethical client” into regular discourse have prompted archaeology to reconsider its relationship with and to Indigenous and other descendant and colonized communities (Blakey 2020). Twenty years after Nicholas and Andrews (1997, 3) and Watkins (2000) first introduced the concept of Indigenous archaeology, there now exist a broad array of approaches to archaeology that are committed to integrating Indigenous perspectives and peoples into archaeological practice (Nicholas 2008, 1660, 1666–1668). There is tremendous range to the types of projects included within the subfield that makes direct comparison between individual approaches difficult (Atalay 2012, 65–77; Colwell-Chanthaphonh et al. 2010, 229; Silliman 2008); however, they are unified in their commitment to recognizing the sovereignty of Indigenous Nations over and in relation to their heritage (Atalay 2006a; Colwell 2016). So, too, are Indigenous critiques and collaborative approaches gaining ground across Latin America, providing important insights from Central and South American contexts that serve to strengthen Indigenous archaeologies throughout the hemisphere (Gnecco and Ayala Rocabado 2010; Silva 2012). Engaging with the concept of tribal sovereignty in the context of archaeologies of colonialism connects past and present in important ways. While not considered a traditional aspect of archaeologies of colonial entanglements, we suggest that an archaeology of colonialism is about more than just the study of Native experiences of colonialism in the past. It also involves critical evaluation of the contexts of colonialism that Indigenous communities and archaeologists face in the present. As archaeologists generate new and more nuanced understandings of the interrelationships between colonial power and Indigenous autonomy in settings across the Americas, we also have the opportunity—or better, the obligation—to turn our gaze inward. Given the blatantly colonial nature of much of Americanist archaeology over the past century and a half (Chapters 31 and 32), there is perhaps an irony in the continued coloniality of the archaeology of colonialism (Chapters 3 and 27). Yet several of the chapters collected here offer examples of how archaeologists can work with and for Indigenous communities (Chapters 24, 25, 28, 29, and 31), while others offer glimpses of what a reimagined archaeology might look like when archaeology for the sake of knowledge takes a backseat to the sovereign rights and interests of particular Indigenous communities (Chapters 26, 30, and 33).

Organization of the book The Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interaction in the Americas brings a hemispheric perspective on current issues in the field through essays and case studies by a diverse 8

Introduction

group of scholars. The book is comprised of four main sections. The first section will explore the methodological and theoretical foundations of the field with special attention to how these approaches have been and are currently conceptualized by scholars working in different parts of the broader region. Many chapters in this section offer case studies that demonstrate how archaeologists have deployed different conceptual frameworks over time and the prospects for future developments that more robustly center Indigenous intention and worldviews in the archaeology of the post-1492 Americas. In the second section, chapters provide overviews of several core topics in the archaeology of colonialism today, examining the range of questions that scholars use to illuminate diverse aspects of the lived experience of Indigenous peoples and colonists. Several chapters in this section provide detailed explorations of particular themes, such as missionization or African-Indigenous interactions, while others demonstrate how core concepts such as labor or accommodation can be operationalized in particular contexts. The third and largest section—Archaeological Explorations of Native-Lived Colonialisms— offers a series of case studies intended to highlight the wide range of research questions and conceptual approaches that currently drive research in the discipline. These chapters cover the broad range of political, economic, geographic, and temporal contexts that structured colonial entanglements across the Americas, as well as collaborative interventions in contemporary public memory. By offering a blend of regional case studies, the chapters in this section illustrate archaeological approaches to both regionally specific issues and broader, hemispheric concerns regarding the ways in which Native people navigated an array of colonial impositions. These chapters, in particular, provide fine-grained detail of particular contexts, but taken together challenge the metanarratives of colonial success by demonstrating how Indigenous groups throughout North and South America made do in a variety of colonial circumstances ranging from first contacts to fully entrenched settler colonialism. The handbook concludes with a final, forward-looking section that explores how archaeology might contribute to the goals of decolonization. Many chapters in this section discuss the practicalities and opportunities of working with Indigenous communities, while others present thorough examinations of key decolonial concepts such as survivance and Indigenous food sovereignty. The through line of this final group of chapters is the appreciation for the continued autonomy of Indigenous groups throughout the Americas to tell their own histories and to chart their own futures.

Acknowledgments We thank all the contributors to this handbook for their important chapters. We especially appreciate their perseverance and patience as we endeavored to complete this volume in a year marked by a global pandemic, racial injustice, environmental catastrophes, and political unrest. These developments have disproportionately affected Black and Indigenous scholars and women, and we acknowledge the unfortunate fact that several of the original contributors to this volume are not included in this final version. We look forward to celebrating your important scholarship in other venues, and we commit as editors to ensuring that your work gets published. At Routledge, we appreciate all the members of the production team whose attention to detail kept this project moving forward. In particular, we thank Matthew Gibbons for inviting us to take on this task and for his support and understanding as we steered it toward completion.

References cited Äikäs, Tiina, and Anna-Kaisa Salmi. 2019. The Sound of Silence: Indigenous Perspectives on the Historical Archaeology of Colonialism. New York: Berghahn Books.

9

Sara L. Gonzalez and Lee M. Panich Alexander, Rani T., ed. 2019. Technology and Tradition in Mesoamerica after the Spanish Invasion: Archaeological Perspectives. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Andrews, Anthony P. 2019. “European Technology and Native Traditions in Mesoamerican History: A Commentary.” In Technology and Tradition in Mesoamerica after the Spanish Invasion: Archaeological Perspectives, edited by Rani T. Alexander, 207–212. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Atalay, Sonya. 2006a. “Indigenous Archaeology as Decolonizing Practice.” American Indian Quarterly 30 (3–4): 280–310. Atalay, Sonya. 2006b. “No Sense of the Struggle: Creating a Context for Survivance at the NMAI.” American Indian Quarterly 30 (3–4): 597–618. Atalay, Sonya. 2012. Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Beaule, Christine D. 2017. Frontiers of Colonialism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Beaule, Christine D., and John C. Douglass 2020. The Global Spanish Empire: Five Hundred Years of Place Making and Pluralism. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Blakey, Michael L. 2020. “Archaeology under the Blinding Light of Race.” Current Anthropology 61 (S22): S183–S197. Bourdreaux, Edmond A. III, Maureen Meyers, and Jay K. Johnson, eds. 2020. Contact, Colonialism, and Native Communities in the Southeastern United States. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Brooks, Alasdair, and Marcos André Torres de Souza. 2020. “Historical Archaeology in South and Central America.” In The Routledge Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology, edited by Charles E. Orser, Andrés Zarankin, Pedro Paulo A. Funari, Susan Lawrence, and James Symonds, 758–779. London: Routledge. Cipolla, Craig N., and Katherine Howlett Hayes, eds. 2015. Rethinking Colonialism: Comparative Archaeological Approaches. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Cobb, Charles R. 2019. The Archaeology of Southeastern Native American Landscapes of the Colonial Era. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Colwell, Chip. 2016. “Collaborative Archaeologies and Descendant Communities.” Annual Review of Archaeology 45: 113–127. Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip, T. J. Ferguson, Dorothy Lippert, Randall H. McGuire, George P. Nicholas, Joe Watkins, and Larry Zimmerman. 2010. “The Premise and Promise of Indigenous Archaeology.” American Antiquity 75 (2): 228–238. Cowie, Sarah E., Diane L. Teeman, and Christopher C. LeBlanc, eds. 2019. Collaborative Archaeology at Stewart Indian School. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Cusick, James G. 1998. “Historiography of Acculturation: An Evaluation of Concepts and Their Application in Archaeology.” In Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick, 126–145. Occasional Paper No. 25. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, Center for Archaeological Investigations. Deagan, Kathleen. 2003. “Colonial Origins and Colonial Transformations in Spanish America.” Historical Archaeology 37 (4): 3–13. Deetz, James. 1977. In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life. New York: Doubleday. Douglass, John G., and William M. Graves, eds. 2017. New Mexico and the Pimería Alta: The Colonial Period in the American Southwest. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Ferris, Neal. 2009. The Archaeology of Native-Lived Colonialism: Challenging History in the Great Lakes. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Ferris, Neal, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox, eds. 2014. Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fontana, Bernard L. 1965. “On the Meaning of Historic Sites Archaeology.” American Antiquity 31: 61–65. Frink, Liam. 2016. A Tale of Three Villages: Indigenous-Colonial Interactions in Southwestern Alaska, 1740– 1950. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Funari, Pedro Paulo A., and Lúcio Menezes Ferreira. 2016. “Historical Archaeology Outlook: A Latin American Perspective.” Historical Archaeology 50 (3): 100–110. Funari, Pedro Paulo A., Martin Hall, and Siân Jones, eds. 1999. Historical Archaeology: Back from the Edge. Abingdon: Routledge. Funari, Pedro Paulo A., and Maria Ximena Senatore, eds. 2015. Archaeology of Culture Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America. New York: Springer. Gnecco, Cristóbal, and Adriana Dias. 2015. “On Contract Archaeology.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 19: 687–698.

10

Introduction Gnecco, Cristóbal, and Patricia Ayala Rocabado, eds. 2010. Pueblos Indígenas y Aqueología en América Latina. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes and Banco de la República, Fundación de Investigaciones Arqueológicas Nacionales. Gonzalez, Sara L. 2016. “Indigenous Values and Methods in Archaeological Practice: Low-Impact Archaeology through the Kashaya Pomo Interpretive Trail Project.” American Antiquity 81 (3): 533–549. Gonzalez, Sara L., Ian Kretzler, and Briece Edwards. 2018. “Imagining Indigenous & Archaeological Futures: Building Capacity with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.” Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 14 (1): 85–114. Gonzalez, Sara L., Darren Modzelewski, Lee M. Panich, and Tsim D. Schneider. 2006. “Archaeology for the Seventh Generation.” American Indian Quarterly 30 (3–4): 388–415. Gould, Rae D., Holly Herbster, Heather Law Pezzarossi, and Stephen A. Mrozowski, eds. 2020. Historical Archaeology and Indigenous Collaboration: Discovering Histories that Have Futures. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Haber, Alejandro. 2012. “Un-Disciplining Archaeology.” Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 8 (1): 55–66. Hofman, Corinne L., and Floris W. M. Keehnen, eds. 2019. Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas. Leiden: Brill. Hull, Kathleen L., and John G. Douglass, eds. 2018. Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Jones, David S. 2015. “Death, Uncertainty, and Rhetoric.” In Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America, edited by Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, and Alan C. Swedlund, 16–49. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Jordan, Kurt A. 2016. “Categories in Motion: Emerging Perspectives in the Archaeology of Postcolumbian Indigenous Communities.” Historical Archaeology 50 (3): 62–80. King, Stacie M. 2020. “Pluralism and Persistence in the Colonial Sierra Sur of Oaxaca, Mexico.” In The Global Spanish Empire: Five Hundred Years of Place Making and Pluralism, edited by Christine D. Beaule and John C. Douglass, 105–129. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Law Pezzarossi, Heather, and Russell N. Sheptak, eds. 2019. Indigenous Persistence in the Colonized Americas: Material and Documentary Perspectives on Entanglement. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Liebmann, Matthew J., and Melissa S. Murphy, eds. 2010. Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Lightfoot, Kent G. 1995. “Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship between Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology.” American Antiquity 60 (2): 199–217. Lightfoot, Kent G., and Sara L. Gonzalez. 2018. “The Study of Sustained Colonialism: An Example from the Kashaya Pomo Homeland in Northern California.” American Antiquity 83 (3): 427–443. Lightfoot, Kent G., Lee M. Panich, Tsim D. Schneider, Sara L. Gonzalez, Matthew A. Russell, Darren Modzelewski, Theresa Molino, and Elliot H. Blair. 2013. “The Study of Indigenous Political Economies and Colonialism in Native California: Implications for Contemporary Tribal Groups and Federal Recognition.” American Antiquity 78 (1): 89–103. Martín, Juan G., Alasdair Brooks, and Tania Andrade Lima. 2012. “Crossing Borders and Maintaining Identities: Perspectives on Current Research in South American Historical Archaeology.” Historical Archaeology 46 (3): 1–15. Martindale, Andrew, and Irena Jurakic. 2015. “Glass Tools in Archaeology: Material and Technological Change.” In Oxford Handbooks Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199935413.013.4. Mathers, Clay, Jeffrey M. Mitchem, and Charles M. Haecker, eds. 2013. Native New Worlds: SixteenthCentury Entradas in the American Southwest and Southeast. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. McGuire, Randall H. 1992. “Archeology and the First Americans.” American Anthropologist 94 (4): 816–836. McNiven, Ian J., and Lynette Russell. 2005. Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Montón-Subiás, Sandra, María Cruz Berrocal, and Apen Ruiz Martínez, eds. 2016. Archaeologies of Early Modern Spanish Colonialism. Cham: Springer. Murray, Tim, ed. 2004. The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, Peter A. 2020. “Refusing Settler Epistemologies and Maintaining an Indigenous Future for Tolay Lake, Sonoma County, California.” American Indian Quarterly 44 (2): 221–242. Nicholas, George P. 2008. “Native Peoples and Archaeology.” In Encyclopedia of Archaeology, edited by David M. Pearsall, 1660–1669. Cambridge: Academic Press.

11

Sara L. Gonzalez and Lee M. Panich Nicholas, George P., and Andrews, Thomas D. 1997. “Indigenous Archaeology in the Postmodern World.” In At A Crossroads: Archaeology and the First Peoples in Canada, edited by George P. Nicholas and Thomas D. Andrews, 1–18. Burnaby: Archaeology Press, Simon Fraser University. O’Brien, Jean M. 2010. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Oland, Maxine, Siobhan M. Hart, and Liam Frink, eds. 2012. Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Orser, Charles E. Jr., ed. 2019. Archaeologies of the British in Latin America. Cham: Springer. Panich, Lee M. 2020. Narratives of Persistence: Indigenous Negotiations of Colonialism in Alta and Baja California. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Panich, Lee M., GeorgeAnn DeAntoni, and Tsim D. Schneider. 2021. “‘By the Aid of His Indians’: Native Negotiations of Settler Colonialism in Marin County, California, 1840–70.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 25: 92–115. Panich, Lee M., and Tsim D. Schneider, eds. 2014. Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Panich, Lee M., and Tsim D. Schneider. 2015. “Expanding Mission Archaeology: A Landscape Approach to Indigenous Autonomy in Colonial California.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 40: 48–58. Rubertone, Patricia. 2000. “The Historical Archaeology of Native Americans.” Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 425–446. Scheiber, Laura L., and Mark D. Mitchell, eds. 2010. Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400–1900. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Schmidt, Peter R., and Stephen A. Mrozowski, eds. 2013. The Death of Prehistory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schneider, Tsim D. 2015. “Placing Refuge and the Archaeology of Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California.” American Antiquity 80: 695–713. Schneider, Tsim D. 2020. “‘Dancing on the Brink of the World’: Seeing Indigenous Dance and Resilience in the Archaeology of Colonial California.” American Anthropologist. https://doi.org/10.1111/ aman.13509. Schneider, Tsim D., and Katherine Hayes. 2020. “Epistemic Colonialism: Is it Possible to Decolonize Archaeology?” American Indian Quarterly 44 (2): 127–148. Schneider, Tsim D., Khal Schneider, and Lee M. Panich 2020. “Scaling Invisible Walls: Reasserting Indigenous Persistence in Mission-Era California.” The Public Historian 42 (2): 97–120. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005. “Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America.” American Antiquity 70: 55–74. Silliman, Stephen W., ed. 2008. Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge: Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Silliman, Stephen W. 2010. “Indigenous Traces in Colonial Spaces: Archaeologies of Ambiguity, Origin, and Practice.” Journal of Social Archaeology 10 (1): 28–58. Silliman, Stephen W. 2020. “Colonialism in Historical Archaeology.” In Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology, edited by Charles E. Orser, Andrés Zarankin, Pedro Paulo A. Funari, Susan Lawrence, and James Symonds, 41–60. London: Routledge. Silva, Fabíola Andréa. 2012. “O plural e o singular das arqueologias indígenas.” Revista de Arqueología 25 (2): 24–42. Stein, Gil, ed. 2005. The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters: Comparative Perspectives. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Sunseri, Jun U. 2017. Situational Identities Along the Raiding Frontier of Colonial New Mexico. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Thomas, David Hurst, ed. 1989. Columbian Consequences, Vol. 1: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Thomas, David Hurst, ed. 1990. Columbian Consequences, Vol. 2: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Thomas, David Hurst, ed. 1991. Columbian Consequences, Vol. 3: The Spanish Borderlands in Pan-American Perspective. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. VanValkenburgh, Parker. 2019. “The Past, Present, and Future of Transconquest Archaeologies in the Andes.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 23: 1063–1080. Voss, Barbara L. 2015. “Narratives of Colonialism, Grand and Not So Grand: A Critical Reflection on the Archaeology of the Spanish and Portuguese Americas.” In Archaeology of Culture Contact and Colonialism

12

Introduction in Spanish and Portuguese America, edited by Pedro Paulo A. Funari and Maria Ximena Senatore, 353– 361. New York: Springer. Watkins, Joe. 2000. Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Wilcox, Michael V. 2009. The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zarankin, Andrés, and Melisa A. Salerno. 2008. “‘Looking South’: Historical Archaeology in South America.” Historical Archaeology 42 (4): 38–58.

13

2 DEEP HISTORIES AND THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF COLONIALISM Martin Gallivan

In his discussion of culture contact studies published 25 years ago, Kent G. Lightfoot (1995) proposed that archaeology was poised to play a pivotal role in reconfiguring historical anthropology. With a common baseline in the material record, Lightfoot pointed out, archaeology possesses a unique capacity to cross the boundary between prehistory and history to open a vista onto the “deep past.” With methods keyed to long-term social change and comparison across temporal and geographic scales, archaeology offers a historical lens missing in other disciplines. With an evidence base that spans social classes and ethnic categories, archaeology is well positioned to trace the development of pluralistic communities at the roots of the American colonial experience. Engaging with similar themes at the same time, Patricia Rubertone (1996, 2000) noted that historical archaeologists had largely ignored Native societies, despite the considerable potential of the field to shed light on the lived experiences of Native people during and after colonial encounters. Rubertone called for new approaches to Native societies’ colonial histories that are attentive to material meanings, creolized communities, and constructed landscapes. In the two-plus decades since these programmatic statements appeared, a body of archaeological scholarship has built upon Lightfoot’s and Rubertone’s ideas to emphasize Indigenous societies’ resistance, creolization, ethnogenesis, and revitalization, among other themes. Much of the research in this tradition is aimed at Native North American contexts (e.g., Cobb 2019; Ferris 2009; Frink 2016; Hantman 2018; Liebmann 2012; Lightfoot 2005; Loren 2008; Oland et al. 2012; Panich and Schneider 2015; Rubertone 2008; Schreiber and Mitchell 2010; Silliman 2004, 2005). Influential studies starting from the same departure point have focused on other regions as well (e.g., Stahl 2009; Wernke 2013). Such research has begun to breach the precolonial/historic divide by bridging the deep pasts of “prehistory” with Indigenous societies’ responses to colonialism. The focus of much of this work has been to develop narratives that flow “downstream” from deep pasts to Native responses to colonialism. As Native societies have persisted in the present, in defiance of colonial frameworks emphasizing disappearance, the deep past has become a resource for communities seeking to resituate the present and reimagine the future (e.g., Gould et al. 2019; Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018; Panich 2013; Spivey 2017). In fact, as researchers turn toward collaborative approaches, history that is deep may in fact refer to the depth of interpretation and to the richly textured narratives drawn from a variety of sources—oral traditions, documentary sources, archaeological studies.

14

Deep histories

Largely independent of these conversations, a cadre of historians have offered their own programmatic statements calling for a new paradigm of “Deep History” (e.g., Smail 2007; Shryock and Smail 2011). As with archaeologists’ efforts to break down the divisions between prehistoric and historical archaeology, deep historians seek to eliminate the history/prehistory divide by eradicating the nineteenth-century admonition, “No documents, no history.” Partnering with archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and historical linguists, Shryock (a historian) and Smail (a cultural anthropologist) have called for ending use of the term prehistory and replacing it instead with a set of metaphors drawn from coevolutionary processes—“kinshipping,” “fractal replication,” and “scalar integration,” among others. The resulting analyses provide the basis for metanarratives that combine human evolution, exchange, migration, and other historical processes on an extended timescale. “Big History” (e.g., Brown 2007; Christian et al. 2013) expands these horizons even further by offering a framework for understanding all of the past, from the Big Bang to the present day. Not only do such macrohistories cross the boundary between documented events and deeper pasts, they construct narratives that span the cultural traditions and social frameworks that provide history’s structure and contingency. In the process, however, the lived experiences of those bearing witness to the continuities and changes of historical changes fade into the background. The following review of deep histories and the archaeology of colonialism hews more closely to the conversations emanating from Lightfoot’s and Rubertone’s programmatic calls than to the deep history framework proposed by these historians. Several questions emerge from this scholarship: What is the best unit of analysis for understanding the complicated mix of continuities and changes when we bring deep histories together with histories of colonialism? What are the best temporal scales for examining the deep past that offer real insights into the lived experiences of those responding to colonialism and its aftermath? Can deep historical research contribute to decolonization by connecting the eventful pasts of Native societies prior to the colonial era with current-day experiences and imagined futures?

What is history? When is it deep? Differences between archaeologists’ and historians’ invocations of deep history highlight the slipperiness of terms like “deep” and even of “history.” For Smail (2007), history that is deep is fundamentally about change over the long run, offering stories of migrations and conquests, of changing environments and new diseases. Oriented toward Native societies before and after colonial encounters, the deep histories considered by North American archaeologists and their Indigenous colleagues are considerably more limited in temporal scale than those approached by deep historians. In fact, a key finding to emerge from such studies is the importance of cultural continuities enmeshed within the changes wrought by colonial histories (e.g., Hart et al. 2012; Silliman 2009). As the proponents of Big History emphasize, we can think of history as a term for the entirety of the past, subsuming everything that has happened from the origins of the universe to yesterday’s news. More conventionally, a history (singular) is an account of past events arranged around a specific time and place and woven together into a coherent narrative as national history, social history, intellectual history, environmental history, military history, or some other subgenre. As a scholarly discipline, history is also the means of producing the story. Historians have their own rich methodological tradition, one that emphasizes the careful analysis of archival records to construct convincing narratives, often organized around pivotal events and identifiable individuals (e.g., Collingwood 1946). At least some of these historical accounts are more trusting of

15

Martin Gallivan

documentary sources than seems warranted, as colonial chroniclers constructed archives out of an array of motivations, biases, and blind spots entangled within colonial histories. Alternatively, we may understand history as the logical development of material conditions that structure economic production and social reproduction, bringing about continuities and ruptures on a broad social scale (e.g., Marx 1967). Then again, history can refer to the array of cultural values and social processes that change slowly over deep time—i.e., the longue durée— dependent upon continuities in the deepest structures of a society (e.g., Braudel 1972). In the formulation of some Annaliste historians, these deep rhythms of history intersect with shortterm events and with social movements that unfold within medium-term cycles, or conjonctures. Additionally, history may refer to the culturally specific ways that people understand the relationship between the past and the present, framing how people recognize events and absorb them within a social tradition (e.g., Beck et al. 2007; Sahlins 1985; Sewell 2005). Central to such understandings are subjective notions of time and of agency, that is, the capacity for individuals and groups to act in ways that influence historical trajectories (Dawdy 2016). The following traces a genealogy of conversations related to deep history and its impact on North American colonial encounters before turning briefly to an archaeological history of a Powhatan settlement in the Chesapeake region. Three themes emerge from these conversations that are particularly useful in studies of the Powhatan past. The first is the notion that landscape provides a conceptual and geographic frame, or unit of analysis, that offers a means of bringing the histories of the deep past into conversation with the archaeology of colonialism (Rubertone 2000, 435). The second stems from the recognition that numerous archaeological approaches to colonialism highlight complicated histories of both continuity and change (e.g., Silliman 2009). Here, it is useful to foreground an understanding of deep history not in terms of the almost unchanging longue durée of “prehistory” or the fleeting circumstances of events, but rather as a medium-term cycle that rises and falls over the course of several decades or centuries, a scale that Braudel (1972) refers to as a conjoncture. Critically important to the understanding of colonial history in the Chesapeake Tidewater are the culturally specific ways that Native societies in the region connected deep historical cycles to colonial-era developments. The third theme influencing how we study the Powhatan past relates to our Indigenous colleagues’ insistence that we turn our attention toward precolonial histories. Native communities in the region have their own oral traditions referencing the deep past that do not depend upon archaeological research. Nonetheless, collaborative archaeological studies have brought deep histories to the broader public that challenge dominant historical accounts. Today, dominant historical narratives normalize a colonial history in which we understand Native societies’ precolonial pasts as disconnected from present-day identities and from imagined futures. Deep historical studies conducted in conversation with descendant communities hold the promise of mending these ruptures, reconnecting deep histories with a decolonized future.

Archaeology as long-term history Across archaeology’s disciplinary development in North America, understandings of history and its salience have shifted over time. A short review of this disciplinary genealogy helps contextualize the role of deep history in the archaeology of colonialism today. During the first half of the twentieth century—the Classificatory-Historical Period in Willey and Sabloff ’s (1993) framing—archaeologists focused primarily on ordering the archaeological record in deep time. History here was synonymous with chronology, understood as a time ordering of settlement forms, subsistence regimens, and diagnostic artifacts. Building on the stratigraphic revolution ushered in by Nels Nelson (1909) and A.V. Kidder (1915) during the early decades of the twentieth century, the Pecos Classification 16

Deep histories

sought to exert temporal control over the archaeological record of the American Southwest. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Midwestern Taxonomic Method proposed a similar system for the archaeology of the Midwest and East. These classifications systems—both incredibly valuable for making sense of the archaeological record—depended on a suite of traits reflected in assemblages of artifacts and architecture. With these classification schemes, archaeologists in much of the twentieth century amassed evidence of regionally specific modal patterns of material culture (i.e., phases) that shifted abruptly over time, typically without much explanation behind these shifts. The direct-historical approach embraced by archaeologists during the 1930s and 1940s complemented this understanding of deep history as the record of material patterns that developed in a stepwise fashion (e.g., Wedel 1938; Strong 1940). Working backward from historically documented sites, including Native settlements and colonial outposts, proponents of the direct-historical approach sought to project historical ethnographies of Native practices into the deep past. By serving as a basis for a backward glance at prehistoric developments through a process of “upstreaming,” the direct-historical approach embraced an understanding of colonial-era sites as signaling the end of Native history with the demise of traditional practices (Rubertone 2000, 427). With an explicitly conservative and pessimistic understanding of Native social history, the direct-historical approach offered little room for examining Native societies’ responses to colonialism. Later, scholars of the “New Indian History” school would write Native histories that proceeded “downstream” from the precolonial past and into the colonial era, noting continuities and changes in the process (e.g., Axtell 1979). Nonetheless, a considerable range of archaeological scholarship at the time understood Native history during the colonial era as acculturation, whereby scholars compared Native societies with a precolonial baseline deemed more authentic. Native sites represented an appropriate subject for historical archaeology “only when their basic cultural and ecological patterns were altered by contact” (Schuyler 1978, 28). As a result, scholars represented deep histories of Native societies as having little bearing on colonial histories or on Native responses to imperialism. The reemergence of evolutionary theory in American anthropology during the 1950s set the stage for the Processual archaeology in the 1960s in which history, understood as narrative accounts of a group’s eventful pasts, receded into the background. Leslie White’s (1959) model of culture and Julian Steward’s (1951) notion of multi-linear evolution exerted considerable influence over archaeological thought during this period. White envisioned culture as comprised of the technological, the social organizational, and the ideological. “Technology is the hero of our piece,” wrote White (1949, 390–391), and as the “leading character of our play,” technological advancements drove cultural changes through the increased harnessing of energy, leading to efficient adaptations to environmental settings. Steward’s cultural ecology focused on a “cultural core” of subsistence practices to identify cross-cultural regularities and general principles of social change, constrained within a range of possibilities by environmental parameters. Building on these ideas, Lewis Binford (1962, 224) posited that archaeology’s goals should be to “directly test hypotheses concerning the processes of evolutionary change.” Binford saw trade, migration, and diffusion as accidents of history that were secondary to the processes of adaptation. With this turn, specific histories served as background noise in the search for universal patterns of cultural development. Deep histories mattered, though primarily in the sense that they offered alternative natural experiments for understanding processes of cultural evolution and adaptations to environmental settings. We can see a harbinger of the pivot in North American archaeology back toward history in Bruce Trigger’s (1980) “Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian.” This short, prescient article did nothing less than signal the potential for archaeology to challenge colonialist narratives at a time when scholars often viewed the Native past through the lens of positivism. In subsequent statements, Trigger made repeated calls to bridge colonial history and archaeology. 17

Martin Gallivan

The lack of direct interaction between archaeologists and Native communities, Trigger suggested, fed stereotypes of Indians as inherently unprogressive. Even as processual archaeologists shifted their gaze toward the internal dynamics of social change within Native societies, the New Archaeology continued to treat Native peoples as objects of scientific inquiry rather than as agents of history. Trigger (1980, 672) pointed to evidence that Native responses to colonialism drew from the deep, precolonial histories of these societies, even as New Archaeologists rarely considered such links. Trigger argued that archaeologists should instead work to find common cause with contemporary Native communities by studying deep histories in conversation with these communities, resulting in narratives free from reliance on the colonial archive. Collaborative research along these lines would lead to new research questions and to novel interpretations. Trigger’s advice remains as salient today as it was 40 years ago, and archaeologists have widely accepted his suggested approach as best practice. Arriving shortly after Trigger’s manifesto, at a time when anthropologists in North America sought new approaches for understanding deep historical change beyond Neo-evolutionary models, Eric Wolf ’s (1982, 3) Europe and People without History offered a framework for connecting the precolonial and colonial histories of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Wolf ’s approach centered on the manifold, the totality of social relationships and interconnected processes powering culture histories. In the centuries before 1400 ce, societies outside Europe made their own histories through long-distance trade, political consolidation, and state making, among other processes. Connecting these deep histories with the colonial era, Wolf challenged the notion that non-European societies were isolated and static entities—billiard balls bouncing into one another—before the advent of European imperialism. With its ironic title, Wolf ’s book demonstrates that pre-Columbian societies were perpetually changing and deeply intertwined in economic systems at various scales. His approach emphasized political economy, drawing on Marxian analysis to posit the historical dynamics of different modes of production. With the advent of the colonial era, these societies contributed to the development of global capitalism in ways that are often overlooked. Over the next decade, North American archaeologists began to turn away from evolutionary models of deep time back toward historically oriented approaches. Hodder’s Reading the Past (1986) and Archaeology as Long-term History (1987) identified shortcomings in processual archaeology, calling for a shift toward archaeological practice that emphasizes contextual interpretation of material meanings and explanations rooted in human agency. Archaeology, Hodder suggested, is properly understood as long-term history, whereby history entails the social changes shaped by the structural constraints of a particular context and the meaningful actions performed by people acting within and against those constraints (Hodder 1987, 2). Hodder also gestured, somewhat vaguely, toward the usefulness of Braudel’s (1958) tripartite model of historical processes, building on earlier Annales historians who focused on the development of mentalités over the long term. The emphasis for Hodder here is on the longue durée, with its slowly changing mentalités, and of rapidly transformative events, through which agents introduce change as new practices confronted deeply rooted structures. Mentioned only fleetingly in Hodder’s (1986, 140) discussion, the moyenne durée, or conjunctural history, refers to economic cycles, demographic trends, and changes in sociopolitical structures that unfold over decades to centuries. Several archaeologists have worked to apply the Annaliste notion that different historical processes develop across different timescales, with varying degrees of success (e.g., Bintliff 1991; Knapp 1992; Smith 1992). Where Braudel favored the importance of the longue durée, questions concerning material meanings and agency often seem poorly matched to studies of the long-term. In addition—and contrary to the “Pompeii premise”—the archaeological record does not often yield direct evidence of specific moments in time (Binford 1981), presenting challenges to the archaeology of events. While defined 18

Deep histories

somewhat broadly, the conjoncture or moyenne durée points toward an historical scale with considerable promise in linking deep history to the archaeology of colonialism.

Archaeological histories of colonialism The quincentennial of Columbus’s original voyage prompted an array of innovative and introspective scholarship on colonial histories in the Americas (e.g., Axtell 1995; Cusick 1998; Deagan 1996; Dirks 1992; Rogers and Wilson 1993; Waselkov 1993; Wylie 1992). Picking up a thread from Trigger’s earlier work, the 1992 Society for American Archaeology Plenary brought together archaeologists and Indigenous scholars to “Rethink the Quincentennial” by raising questions concerning the sociopolitical entanglements and consequences of archaeology as part of the legacy of colonialism (Wylie 1992, 591). Archaeology’s narratives of long-term Native history could no longer ignore the contemporary political context in which Native societies had little sway over how scholars constructed these stories (Thomas 2001). Vine Deloria’s (1992) powerful contribution to the plenary session called for archaeologists and Native people to work together to investigate culture contact and diffusion in the deep past and to clarify the locations of sacred sites. An overarching goal here for Deloria (1992, 595) was to find ways to bring his Native ancestors out of the land of prehistory and onto the stage of world history. In the wake of Lightfoot’s (1995) and Rubertone’s (1996, 2000) calls for a revamped historical archaeology of Native Americans, archaeologists have shifted from studies of culture “contact” toward Native histories of perseverance through adaptation, continuity, resistance, and avoidance (e.g., Ferris 2009; Hart et al. 2012; Scheiber and Mitchell 2010; Lelievre 2017; Panich 2010, 2013, 2014; Panich and Schneider 2015; Schneider 2015; Silliman 2005, 2009, 2014; Wilcox 2009). This scholarship has shaped the archaeology of colonialism in significant ways by working “downstream” from deep pasts to colonial histories, rather than the reverse. Writing a decade after Lightfoot’s initial statement, Silliman (2005) decried the conflation of “culture contact” with colonialism in the archaeology of Native North America, pointing out that this framing stands in the way of understanding the lived experiences of colonialism for Native societies. By emphasizing fleeting encounters (i.e., events) and downplaying the profound difference of power, archaeological approaches to the early colonial era often overlook the structural frameworks, historical processes, and extreme violence implicated in colonialism. Varied though they are, colonial histories often include a process of creolization in which Indigenous societies have found creative ways to adapt, resist, and survive (Silliman 2005, 65). Archaeologists and historians have too often understood these responses to colonialism in terms of a dichotomy of change versus continuity defined in comparison to a precontact baseline Silliman (2009, 211). Through a process of “survivance” (Silliman 2014), the Eastern Pequot and other Native communities actively maintained homelands and community identities in the face of colonial usurpation, at times by changing to remain the same. Developing similar themes in a comparative study, Ferris’s (2009) consideration of colonialism in the Great Lakes region connects Native people’s lived experiences during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with their precolonial histories. In different ways, Native communities retained social cohesion through centuries of colonial disruption by maintaining ties to deep traditions. For the Ojibwa, this meant moving seasonally, among other traditional practices. For the refugee Delaware, this meant maintaining religious practices distinct from Christian influences while borrowing selectively from the dominant society. Other studies have pursued related themes, tracing Native persistence within missionary settings (e.g., Panich 2013) and beyond the gaze of colonial officials. For example, Native communities in the San Francisco Bay area 19

Martin Gallivan

of California sought out places of refuge, making commemorative pilgrimages to shell mounds (e.g., Schneider 2015). Continuing to focus their gaze “downstream” from deep histories, other researchers highlight linkages between deep pasts and colonial histories through the archaeology of transitions (Hart et al. 2012). Without minimizing the destructive and violent impacts of colonialism, these authors seek to decolonize archaeology by tracing Indigenous histories as a continuous process, drawing explicit links between deeper histories and colonial narratives. The notion of transition provides a framing device for moving beyond dichotomies of continuity versus change and prehistory versus the colonial era. Decolonization here is about dismantling structures of thought that emphasize colonizers’ narratives at the expense of Native societies’ agency. Decolonization includes not only collaboration with descendant communities, but yielding to descendant communities a measure of control over the questions, research designs, and reporting protocols tied to Native archaeology. Hart and colleagues (2012, 7) seek to find ways to make archaeology useful to descendant communities and to challenge master narratives, even when no contemporary communities identify with a region’s archaeological record.

Landscape, placemaking, and mobility As suggested by Rubertone (2000, 435), one of the more promising ways for bringing deep histories of Native societies into conversation with their lived experiences of colonialism and its aftermath draws ideas from archaeologies of landscape and placemaking (e.g., Beck et al. 2007; Cobb 2005; Rubertone 2008; Lelievre 2017). The notion of landscape may be defined and understood in several different ways. Considered as a network of spaces connected by people’s activities, landscapes include not only settlements, activity areas, and natural places. Residual changes to landscapes often anchor meaningful places and channel people’s movement across space (e.g., Lelievre and Marshall 2015). In many instances, communities rework their built environments, and memories of previous construction often influence this rebuilding process (Sewell 2005, 363). Leaning on a landscape frame of reference, Cobb (2005) has called for a “deeper historical anthropology” that examines the processes through which Native societies migrated, constructed new places, and remade old ones prior to the colonial era. In this deep past, Cobb points out, Native people in North America engaged actively in displacement and emplacement, processes often seen as the hallmarks of the postmodern world. Building on archaeological histories of mound centers in the Mississippian world (e.g., King 2002; Pauketat 2004), Cobb highlights the ways population movements reshaped the physical spaces and associated meanings of prominent centers. Native people marked these landscapes through a continuous process of making, unmaking, and remaking. As noted in Ferris’ (2009) study, mobility practices rooted in deep historical traditions may also influence Native landscapes after the colonial encounter. For example, Lelievre (2017) has demonstrated that continuities in Mi’kmaw mobility practices played a central role in the maintenance of sovereignty in post-contact Nova Scotia. The Mi’kmaw organized their relationships to one another and to important places around patterns of movement, such that mobility within a homeland was (and remains) central to their identity as a grounded, sovereign people.

Landscape and conjunctural history at Werowocomoco This rather selective review of conversations about deep history and the archaeology of colonialism points toward the changing role and understanding of history in the archaeology of Native 20

Deep histories

North America. Apparent in these conversations is the usefulness of a landscape perspective for bridging the deep pasts of Native societies and their experiences of colonialism. Landscapes combine space and time by bundling lived practices, sensory perceptions, and imagined conceptions together with spaces constructed by earlier generations. Native people retained linkages to ancient places and constructed new ones during the precolonial past. They continued to do so during the colonial era, at times using mobility practices drawn from the deep past to respond to colonial structures of authority. In this way, landscapes combine geography with a sense of deep time. Questions remain concerning the appropriate temporal scale for examining a deep past that offers insights into the lived experiences of those experiencing colonial encounters and their aftermath. Where colonial histories generally reference pivotal events, the archaeological record typically offers evidence of historical processes that developed over a longer time horizon. The almost unchanging time of the longue durée of Annales, though, seems ill suited to understanding Native responses to colonialism in North America, with their blend of creative improvisation and dogged continuity. Studies of eventful pasts using the archaeological record (e.g., Beck et al. 2007) offer persuasive explanations of transitions, including those that shaped precolonial and postcolonial trajectories, though such a framing does not easily accommodate deep histories. Sticking with the Annales framing, the conjoncture or moyenne durée offers an intermediate-term temporal scale only rarely explored by archaeologists working on the precolonial/colonial interface. For Braudel, conjoncture referred to an historical duration lasting from a decade to a few centuries keyed to the history of groups and groupings. Conjonctures here include price cycles, wars, industrialization processes, and the rise and fall of political powers. In this way, conjonctures follow the logic of a cyclical phase with a rise and a fall—of prices, populations, political authority, or cosmological orientation (Wallerstein 2009, 162). With its intermediate scale relevant to the lived experiences of Native people, conjoncture offers a potential frame for considering history as the culturally specific ways that Native societies understood the relationship between the deep past and the colonial present. The conjunctural history of Werowocomoco, a prominent Powhatan town during the early seventeenth century, offers a means for recasting the early colonial history of the Chesapeake. Located on the northeast bank of the York River, Werowocomoco was the political and spiritual center of the Powhatan world when Jamestown colonists arrived in the Chesapeake in 1607 (Figure 2.1) (Gallivan 2007, 2016). Across a series of colonial encounters between 1607 and 1609, Jamestown’s leaders visited Werowocomoco to negotiate with the paramount chief of the Powhatan—also known as Powhatan. During the best known of these events, Powhatan’s brother captured English colonist John Smith and brought him to Werowocomoco, where he met the paramount chief and his daughter Pocahontas. Colonists’ accounts of events at Werowocomoco suggest that the town was a place of frequent ceremony, including events aimed at absorbing Smith and the other colonists into the Powhatan world. The name Werowocomoco translates as “Place of the Antler Wearers,” and antler-wearing religious specialists orchestrated a series of rituals during the short period when English colonists visited the settlement. A remaining challenge is to bring these colonial events into conversation with the settlement’s deep history. Starting in 2003, the Werowocomoco Research Group developed a program of fieldwork at the site in conversation with Native communities in Virginia (Gallivan and Moretti-Langholtz 2007). We worked to make our research program responsive to the priorities of the all-Native Virginia Indian Advisory Board and the leaders from Virginia’s coastal tribes. Rather than focus on the events of the colonial encounter, such as Pocahontas’s purported rescue of John Smith, our Native colleagues urged that we turn our attention to the precolonial 21

Martin Gallivan

Figure 2.1 Werowocomoco’s location within the Chesapeake region. Source: Author’s creation.

history of the settlement and its relationship to the Powhatan chiefdom’s development. “What I’d really like to learn about,” Rappahannock Chief Anne Richardson let us know, “are the Native people who lived at this site before Jamestown. . . . There’s a lot of talk about Jamestown these days, but I’d prefer to hear more about Indian towns like this one before all of that.” Other Native leaders asked us to address the question of why Powhatan moved to Werowocomoco when he was from a town on the James River, 40 miles to the west. Rather than provide us with their own answers to such questions, they advised us to look beyond the English narratives and toward the precolonial history to understand Werowocomoco’s significance. Bearing in mind this guidance, our investigations at Werowocomoco uncovered a biography of place marked by a shifting set of settlement forms and landscape features. While short-term encampments at the site stretched back to at least the Archaic period, Native residents significantly expanded the size and scale of the settlement circa 1200 ce. Along with a short period of forest clearing and house construction, the archaeological record traces the abrupt establishment of an agricultural town early in the thirteenth century. At the same time, Werowocomoco’s residents constructed a trench within the site’s interior (Figure 2.2). The first of several linear earthworks constructed at Werowocomoco, the trench surrounded an area located 300 meters from the residential core of the community along the riverfront. Constructed about 150 years later, two additional trenches surrounded a larger area in the same interior portion of the settlement. 22

Deep histories

0

100 feet

0

30 meters

N Feature 161 Feature 162

Opening in trenches

Large postmold pattern

Feature 161 Feature 552

Projected path

Feature 162

No features identified Feature 552

Heavily eroded area Feature 952 Feature 956 Feature 162

No features identified

Figure 2.2 Trench features at the Werowocomoco site. Source: Author’s creation.

23

Feature 955

Martin Gallivan

Radiocarbon assays from these features suggest the initial construction of a relatively small trench—likely an enclosure—circa 1200 ce. This early trench predates the larger pair of trenches constructed at about 1350 ce. Residents rapidly refilled the interior trench circa, at the same time that they constructed the outer features. Patterning in the radiocarbon dates and construction activities suggests that population at Werowocomoco peaked during the fifteenth century ce and declined significantly during the sixteenth century. In fact, we have found almost no cultural deposits at the site dating to the first half of the 1500s. During the final decades of the sixteenth century, Native residents returned to the settlement, as seen in midden deposits and in the construction of a large post-in-ground building located within the trench enclosure. Wood charcoal recovered from this structure returned a radiocarbon date late in the sixteenth century, suggesting that the building was probably in use when Powhatan resided at Werowocomoco. The building is considerably larger than all other houses we have identified in the settlement and the largest Native structure recorded in Tidewater Virginia. Based on its age, size, configuration, location, associated materials, and documentary references, we believe that this structure was likely Powhatan’s residence and the location of the events of 1607 involving Powhatan, Pocahontas, and John Smith. Werowocomoco’s landscape history between 1200 and 1500 ce represents a deep history of settlement and subsistence changes embraced across the Chesapeake region. Native communities constructed agricultural towns along the region’s principal rivers during these centuries, establishing significantly larger settlements occupied for longer portions of the year (Gallivan 2003). Marked by palisade enclosures, ditch constructions, and secondary burial grounds, a number of these towns anchored regional interaction, hosting seasonal gatherings over several generations. The historical processes unleashed by these developments were still unfolding in the sixteenth century “protohistoric era.” During the 1500s, fishermen, missionaries, privateers, and traders from France, Spain, Portugal, and England sailed through the Chesapeake estuary and interacted with the Native people they encountered (Potter 1993, 161–166). The preceding three centuries between 1200 and 1500 ce represent the history of a conjoncture—an intermediate scale cycle that included rising settlement populations and widely shared landscape changes. The increasingly common presence of European visitors in the region during the 1500s unleased a different set of historical processes across the region, possibly including pandemic diseases that affected social structures and political organizations (Barker 1992). Four decades before Jamestown’s settlement was the short-lived Spanish Jesuit colony of Ajacán, likely located on the York River directly across the river from Werowocomoco (Lewis and Loomie 1953). During the 1580s, English colonists briefly established an outpost at Roanoke, 120 miles southeast of Jamestown, before its settlers became “lost,” likely by joining Native groups inland (Horn 2011). At Werowocomoco, the conjunctural history of 1200–1500 ce began with the rapid establishment of a large town and significant landscape changes—a process of emplacement. It is difficult to argue from the absence of evidence, though the archaeological record suggests that Werowocomoco held few if any residents during much of the sixteenth century. The overall absence of features dating to the early 1500s points toward a process of displacement, possibly related to disease or disruptions introduced by European visitors to the region. Until Powhatan established his residence at Werowocomoco and constructed a large building there late in the 1500s, the town appears in the archaeological record as largely uninhabited. It is important to point out that the causes of these population changes are difficult to parse given the limits of the archaeological record. The sparse sixteenth century presence at Werowocomoco may, in fact, have resulted from historical processes unrelated to the sporadic appearance of European visitors in the region or the unsuccessful Spanish and English colonies in the area. Powhatan remarked, somewhat cryptically, “Having seene the death of all my people thrice, and 24

Deep histories

not any one living of those three generations but my selfe, I know the difference of Peace and Warre better than any in my Country” (Smith 1986, 196). Whether these remarks referred to waves of population loss or simply Powhatan’s old age remains unclear. Studies of Afro-Eurasian diseases in colonial North America indicate that individual disease events often affected local populations and did not spread long distances until late in the seventeenth century (e.g., Jones 2014). Still, the region surrounding Werowocomoco saw a considerable number of early colonial encounters during the sixteenth century that may have introduced epidemics. The town’s unique landscape features and its status as “Place of the Antler Wearers” likely influenced Powhatan’s decision to relocate his residence to Werowocomoco. The archaeological record and colonial descriptions indicate that late in the 1500s the paramount chief constructed his large residence in the area with trench enclosures that were first constructed around 1200 ce. Residents filled the earliest of these ditches and replaced them with a much larger set of trench enclosures circa 1350 ce. The late sixteenth-century construction of a large structure associated with Powhatan marks a third phase in the occupation of this portion of the settlement. This sequence of placemaking, unmaking, and remaking at Werowocomoco calls to mind histories of revitalization (e.g., Faulseit 2015; Liebmann 2012; Wallace 1956). In Wallace’s original model, a revitalization movement is “deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture.” Studies of revitalization movements often trace a process of social stress, cultural distortion, and reformulation of cultural patterns through revival or reaffirmation of selected features. The archaeological record of Werowocomoco aligns with elements of these models in terms of the use and reconfiguration of the site’s built environment between 1200 ce and the late 1500s. Powhatan moved to Werowocomoco as he consolidated a regional polity, settling in a location with monumental landscape features marking spaces constructed centuries earlier. Trench features constructed at the site circa 1350 ce echoed those built 150 years earlier. Prior to the colonial era, the earthwork construction at Werowocomoco marked the town as a place of monumental architecture and possibly of ceremony. A significant population decline at the settlement followed these landscape changes during the sixteenth century. By the end of the sixteenth century, Powhatan moved his residence to Werowocomoco as he consolidated control over a regional chiefdom. Werowocomoco’s conjunctural history points toward the revitalization of place during the late 1500s. A similar process of reaffirming and reconfiguring landscape features also occurred generations earlier, with the construction of new trenches circa 1350 ce. The deep historical conjoncture of 1200 to 1500 ce offers a framework for seeing the colonial-era events at Werowocomoco through a different lens. As a place of seasonal gathering and periodic ceremony for centuries, Werowocomoco represented one of several center places in the Chesapeake landscape. As “Place of the Antler Wearers,” the town had a unique role in the religious landscape of Virginia Algonquians. Over a deep, conjunctural history lasting several centuries, residents continually returned to the location and renewed its spaces by constructing landscape features and a massive house for Powhatan. By 1607, Powhatan brought John Smith to Werowocomoco where he attempted to incorporate the colonist and his compatriots into the network of Tidewater towns linked to Werowocomoco, an effort to build an expansive community that echoed earlier cycles. The settlement’s deep history suggests that it was Werowocomoco—and the power of place—that shaped the Powhatan’s initial responses to English colonialism in the Chesapeake.

Conclusion Building on the discipline’s intellectual history and pivotal statements from Lightfoot (1995), Rubertone (2000), and Trigger (1980), archaeologists have adopted several approaches to link 25

Martin Gallivan

the precolonial past with the colonial histories of Native North America. A recurrent theme emerging from this scholarship is that colonial histories are contingent, that is, as simultaneously innovative and conditioned by cultural traditions and social practices inherited from the deeper past. With an orientation “downstream” from the deep past, these studies focus more often on Native responses to colonialism rather than on linkages to the precolonial pasts. This orientation is understandable given the lack of attention archaeologists previously paid to Native people’s experiences of colonialism. A remaining challenge is to identify temporal and social frames that allow researchers to look backward across the colonial/precolonial divide. As previously suggested, social landscapes and the moyenne durée offer frames of reference that draw attention to the deep histories that shaped colonial events. At Werowocomoco, we see evidence of a shifting landscape of power and of ceremony that anchored regional social networks for several centuries. In the earliest stage of colonialism, these social networks shaped the early colonial history and the tactics through which the Powhatan sought to incorporate the Jamestown colonists into their world. The three-century-long conjunctural cycle recorded in Werowocomoco’s archaeological record traces a history of placemaking, unmaking, and remaking. In the early days of the Jamestown colony, the Powhatan went to great lengths to bring one of Jamestown’s leaders to Werowocomoco to incorporate the settlement into the Powhatan orbit. Today, Powhatan descendant communities retain close connections to Werowocomoco as an icon of their deep history. While our excavations at the site helped to reinforce Native communities’ ties to the site, these ties preceded our project and will continue after archaeologists turn our attention elsewhere. Even with the commitment of the Indigenous community to revitalize Werowocomoco’s place in narratives about the colonial past, there is much work left to do for decolonization to take hold in the Chesapeake region. After the completion of our fieldwork at the site, the National Park Service purchased Werowocomoco to create a heritage site focused on the Native past. In a landscape of sites aimed squarely at the English colonial past and the early American experience, this was a bold step toward highlighting counternarratives of Native history. Administratively, though, the National Park Service initially incorporated the site into the Captain John Smith Water Trail, casting its history in this light. While understandable given the National Park Service’s limited funding and administrative capacity, the park’s name failed to dismantle structures of thought that emphasize colonizers’ narratives at the expense of Native societies’ agency. Werowocomoco is now under the umbrella of the Colonial National Historic Park, and National Park Service leadership and staff are committed to developing the park in close collaboration with descendant communities of Native peoples. This process faces numerous challenges, of course, though a shift toward decolonization here and elsewhere will, no doubt, benefit by highlighting deep histories.

References cited Axtell, James. 1979. “Ethnohistory: An Historian’s Viewpoint.” Ethnohistory 26 (1): 1–13. Axtell, James. 1995. “Columbian Encounters: 1992–1995.” William and Mary Quarterly 52 (4): 649–696. Barker, Alex W. 1992. “Powhatan’s Pursestrings: On the Meaning of Surplus in a Seventeenth Century Algonkian Chiefdom.” In Lords of the Southeast: Social Inequality and the Native Elites of Southeastern North America, edited by Alex W. Barker and T. R. Pauketat, 61–80. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association. Beck, Robin A., Douglas J. Bolender, James A. Brown, and Timothy K. Earle. 2007. “Eventful Archaeology: The Place of Space in Structural Transformation.” Current Anthropology 48 (6): 833–860. Binford, Lewis R. 1962. “Archaeology as Anthropology.” American Antiquity 28 (2): 217–225.

26

Deep histories Binford, Lewis R. 1981. “Behavioral Archaeology and the ‘Pompeii Premise’.” Journal of Anthropological Research 37 (3): 195–208. Bintliff, John L. 1991. The Annales School and Archaeology. New York: New York University Press. Braudel, Fernand. 1958. “Histoire, Sciences Sociales.” Annales 13 (4): 725–753. Braudel, Fernand. 1972. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. New York: Harper & Row. Brown, Cynthia S. 2007. Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present. New York: The New Press. Christian, Davis, Cynthia Brown, and Craig Benjamin. 2013. Big History: Between Nothing and Everything. New York: McGraw-Hill Education. Cobb, Charles R. 2005. “Archaeology and the ‘Savage Slot’: Displacement and Emplacement in the Premodern World.” American Anthropologist 107 (4): 563–574. Cobb, Charles R. 2019. The Archaeology of Southeastern Native American Landscapes of the Colonial Era. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Collingwood, Robert G. 1946. The Idea of History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cusick, James G., ed. 1998. Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology. Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University. Dawdy, Shannon L. 2016. Patina: A Profane Archaeology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Deagan, Kathleen. 1996. “Colonial Transformation: Euro-American Cultural Genesis in the Early SpanishAmerican Colonies.” Journal of Anthropological Research 52 (2): 135–160. Deloria, Vine. 1992. “Indians, Archaeologists, and the Future.” American Antiquity 57 (4): 595–598. Dirks, Nicholas B. 1992. Colonialism and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Faulseit, Ronald K. 2015. Beyond Collapse: Archaeological Perspectives on Resilience, Revitalization, and Transformation in Complex Societies. Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University. Ferris, Neal. 2009. The Archaeology of Native-lived Colonialism: Challenging History in the Great Lakes. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Frink, Liam. 2016. A Tale of Three Villages: Indigenous-Colonial Interactions in Southwestern Alaska, 1740– 1950. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Gallivan, Martin D. 2003. James River Chiefdoms: The Rise of Social Inequality in the Chesapeake. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Gallivan, Martin D. 2007. “Powhatan’s Werowocomoco: Constructing Place, Polity, and Personhood in the Chesapeake, C.E. 1200–C.E. 1609.” American Anthropologist 109 (1): 85–100. Gallivan, Martin D. 2016. The Powhatan Landscape: An Archaeological History of the Algonquian Chesapeake. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Gallivan, Martin D., and Danielle Moretti-Langholtz. 2007. “Civic Engagement at Werowocomoco: Reasserting Native Narratives from a Powhatan Place of Power.” In Archaeology as a Tool of Civic Engagement, edited by Barbara J. Little and Paul A. Shackel, 47–66. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Gould, Rae D., Holly Herbster, Heather Law Pezzarossi, and Steve A. Mrozowski. 2019. Historical Archaeology and Indigenous Collaboration: Discovering Histories That Have Futures. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Hantman, Jeffrey L. 2018. Monacan Millennium: A Collaborative Archaeology and History of a Virginia Indian People. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Hart, Siobhan M., Maxine Oland, and Liam Frink. 2012. “Finding Transitions: Global Pathways to Decolonizing Indigenous Histories in Archaeology.” In Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/ Colonial Transitions in Archaeology, edited by Maxine Oland, Siobhan M. Hart and Liam Frink, 1–18. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Hodder, Ian. 1986. Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodder, Ian. 1987. Archaeology as Long-term History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horn, James 2011. A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Philadelphia: Basic Books. Jones, Eric E. 2014. “Spatiotemporal Analysis of Old-World Diseases in North America, A.D. 1519–1807.” American Antiquity 79 (3): 487–506. Kidder, A. V. 1915. “Pottery of the Pajarito and Some Adjacent Regions of New Mexico.” In Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association, Vol. 2, 407–462. Lancaster, PA: American Anthropological Association.

27

Martin Gallivan King, Adam. 2002. Etowah: The Political History of a Chiefdom Capital. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Knapp, Bernard A. 1992. Archaeology, Annales, and Ethnohistory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lelievre, Michelle A. 2017. Unsettling Mobility: Mediating Mi’kmaw Sovereignty in Post-contact Nova Scotia. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Lelievre, Michelle A., and Maureen E. Marshall. 2015. “‘Because Life It Selfe is but Motion’: Toward an Anthropology of Mobility.” Anthropological Theory 15 (4): 434–471. Lewis, Clifford M., and Albert J. Loomie. 1953. The Spanish Jesuit Mission in Virginia, 1570–1572. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Liebmann, Matthew. 2012. Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in 17th Century New Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Lightfoot, Kent G. 1995. “Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship between Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology.” American Antiquity 60 (2): 199–217. Lightfoot, Kent G. 2005. Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lightfoot, Kent G., and Sara L. Gonzalez. 2018. “The Study of Sustained Colonialism: An Example from the Kashaya Pomo Homeland in Northern California.” American Antiquity 83 (3): 427–443. Loren, Diana D. 2008. In Contact: Bodies and Spaces in the Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Eastern Woodlands. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Marx, Karl 1967. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. New York: International Publishers. Nelson, Nels C. 1909. “Shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Region.” University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 7 (4): 319–348. Oland, Maxine, Siobhan M. Hart, and Liam Frink. 2012. Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Panich, Lee M. 2010. “Spanish Missions in the Indigenous Landscape: A View from Mission Santa Catalina, Baja California.” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 30 (1): 69–86. Panich, Lee M. 2013. “Archaeologies of Persistence: Reconsidering the Legacies of Colonialism in Native North America.” American Antiquity 78 (1): 105–122. Panich, Lee M. 2014. “Native American Consumption of Shell and Glass Beads at Mission Santa Clara De Asis.” American Antiquity 79 (4): 730–748. Panich, Lee M., and Tsim D. Schneider. 2015. “Expanding Mission Archaeology: A Landscape Approach to Indigenous Autonomy in Colonial California.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 40: 48–58. Pauketat, Timothy R. 2004. Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians. New York: Cambridge University Press. Potter, Stephen R. 1993. Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs: The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Rogers, Daniel J., and Samuel M. Wilson, eds. 1993. Ethnohistory and Archaeology: Approaches to Postcontact Change in the Americas. New York: Springer. Rubertone, Patricia E. 1996. “Matters of Inclusion: Historical Archaeology and Native Americans.” World Archaeological Bulletin 7: 77–86. Rubertone, Patricia E. 2000. “The Historical Archaeology of Native Americans.” Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 425–446. Rubertone, Patricia E. 2008. Archaeologies of Placemaking: Monuments, Memories, and Engagement in Native North America. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Sahlins, Marshall 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schneider, Tsim D. 2015. “Placing Refuge and the Archaeology of Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California.” American Antiquity 80 (4): 695–713. Schreiber, Lauren L., and Mark D. Mitchell. 2010. Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400–1900. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Schuyler, Robert L. 1978. Historical Archaeology: A Guide to Substantive and Theoretical Contributions. Farmingdale, NY: Baywood Publishers. Sewell, William H. 2005. Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shryock, Andrew, and Daniel L. Smail. 2011. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Silliman, Stephen W. 2004. Lost Laborers in Colonial California: Native Americans and the Archaeology of Rancho Petaluma. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005. “Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America.” American Antiquity 70 (1): 55–74.

28

Deep histories Silliman, Stephen W. 2009. “Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England.” American Antiquity 74 (2): 211–230. Silliman, Stephen W. 2014. “Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence.” In Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology, edited by Rodney Harrison, Neal Ferris, and Michael V. Wilcox, 57–75. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smail, Daniel L. 2007. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, John. 1986. “Generall Historie of Virginia.” In The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580– 1631), Vol. II, edited by P. L. Barbour, 5–475. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Smith, Michael E. 1992. “Braudel’s Temporal Rhythms and Chronology Theory in Archaeology.” In Archaeology, Annales, and Ethnohistory, edited by A. Bernard Knapp, 23–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spivey, Ashley. 2017. “Knowing the River, Working the Land, and Digging for Clay: Pamunkey Indian Subsistence Practices and the Market Economy 1800–1900.” PhD Dissertation, College of William and Mary. Stahl, Ann B. 2009. Making History in Banda: Anthropological Visions of Africa’s Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steward, Julian H. 1951. “Levels of Sociocultural Integration: An Operational Concept.” Journal of Anthropological Research 42 (3): 337–353. Strong, William D. 1940. “From History to Prehistory in the Northern Great Plains.” In Essays in Historical Anthropology of North America, 353–394. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute. Thomas, David H. 2001. Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity. New York: Hachette Book Group. Trigger, Bruce G. 1980. “Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian.” American Antiquity 45 (4): 662–676. Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1956. “Revitalization Movements.” American Anthropologist 58 (2): 264–281. Wallerstein, I. 2009. “Braudel on the Longue Durée: Problems of Conceptual Translation.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 32 (2): 155–170. Waselkov, Gregory A. 1993. “Historic Creek Indian Responses to European Trade and the Rise of Political Factions.” In Ethnohistory and Archaeology: Approaches to Postcontact Change in the Americas, edited by J. Daniel Rogers and Samuel M. Wilson, 123–131. New York: Springer. Wedel, Waldo R. 1938. The Direct-Historical Approach in Pawnee Archaeology. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute. Wernke, Steven A. 2013. Negotiated Settlements: Andean Communities and Landscapes under Inka and Spanish Colonialism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. White, Leslie A. 1949. Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization. New York: Farrar, Straus. White, Leslie A. 1959. The Evolution of Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill. Wilcox, Michael V. 2009. The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact. Berkeley: University of California Press. Willey, Gordon R., and Jeremy A. Sabloff. 1993. A History of American Archaeology. New York: W.H. Freeman. Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wylie, Alison. 1992. “Rethinking the Quincentennial: Consequences for Past and Present.” American Antiquity 57 (4): 591–594.

29

3 A DOUBLE COLONIALITY The modern/colonial underpinnings of mission archaeology in South America Cristóbal Gnecco and Adriana Schmidt Dias

Colonial legacies the world over have been investigated by archaeology since the second half of the twentieth century, when the recent past began to be a central disciplinary preoccupation. Although some trends of that research, such as that of Marxist public archaeology, have highlighted the coloniality of colonial legacies (not a redundancy, however), most have merely unfolded the tenets of modern archaeology, themselves also colonial, over the evidence of those legacies. This operates a curious, although predictable, double coloniality that does not seem to trouble archaeologists, yet it is a sign that the discipline fully participates in the construction of the modern-colonial order. We will explore these issues by describing a specific archaeological practice in South America (as well as the heritage interventions linked to it), that of the Jesuit-Guaraní missions. Our aim is to show how such research reinforces and reproduces the coloniality of the mission experience by deploying strategies of objectification, distance, and otherness and by celebrating such an experience from the viewpoint of the legitimacy of the colonial logic. Although this paper focuses on South America and in a specific colonial experience, the remarks we make may go well beyond this area and that case. Coloniality, after all, is well and alive, and thrives all over the world. Coloniality is not a thing of the past; it is a living monster. The archaeology of colonialism should be concerned with the very fact that the discipline cannot escape the iron bars of modernity-coloniality; rather, its escaping attempts can only be premised in un-disciplining itself (Haber 2012; and see Schneider and Hayes 2020). In this sense, we do not see how disciplinary research into colonial legacies does not reinforce the coloniality it seeks to question. Whether based on the tenets of alternative archaeologies—public, Marxist, Indigenous, feminist, and the like—and whether practiced in the tropics, the deserts, or the coasts of the Americas, the archaeology of Indigenous-colonial interactions is trapped in a fraught situation: to confront the horrendous legacies of colonialism while probing the principles in which it bases its search. It is to this productive introspection that we want to contribute, not making useless generalizations from our findings but pointing out areas where more reflection is needed.

The missions Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Jesuits created 30 missions (also known as “reductions”) in the territory of the Guaraní Indians in what is now southwestern 30

A double coloniality

Brazil, southeastern Paraguay, and northeastern Argentina (Figure 3.1), a region known in colonial times as the “Jesuit Province of Paraguay,” or Paracuaria, and located mainly between the Paraná and Uruguay rivers (Necker 1990; Maeder 1992; Wilde 2009). The missions were true towns (some with up to 6,000 inhabitants) grouped around imposing stone churches and other buildings. The Indians were drawn to the missions and settled in or around them, though not without a great deal of resistance to subjection (Melià 1999; Fausto 2005). There they were instructed in religion, literacy, weaving, wood carving, iron works, stonework, agriculture, and music. The missions established by the Jesuits in Guaraní territory between 1632 and 1767 (which subsisted, albeit in diminished form, until the early nineteenth century) organized communal life, built temples and houses, tilled the land (especially with yerba mate and cotton), established ranches, and created a centralized, large-scale economy. At the height of their power (around 1730), the 30 missions gathered some 130,000 Indians (Maeder and Bolsi 1980). One of the main features of the missions was their relative autonomy—religious, of course, but also political, administrative, and economic. That virtue was their doom: by the mid-eighteenth century the missionary project clashed with the Spanish and Portuguese crowns (and colonial settlers) because it had become a loose wheel with its own purpose (the conversion of souls), at times quite at odds with imperial policies, economic and otherwise (e.g., Becker 1982). This clash and several others in the metropolitan and colonial realms ended with the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Portuguese and Spanish empires, in 1759 and 1767, respectively. Although other orders, along with civil administrators, took over after the expulsion of the Jesuits, the remaining missions were abandoned or closed by force in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The Guaraní population in the missions was dispersed, resettled, or “liberated” (Fausto 2005).

Figure 3.1 Map of the 30 mission sites in colonial Paracuaria and their current locations in Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. Source: Drawn by Jonathan Duarte Marth, 2020.

31

Cristóbal Gnecco and Adriana Schmidt Dias

The gradual abandonment of the missions also meant their collapse as population centers; their fate seemed sealed and confined to oblivion. Yet once the missions disappeared as functional projects their civilizing saga remained, albeit read differently by the national histories of the three countries created where their ruins now stand. Although the nationalist rhetoric of those three countries could not be more different, the “civilizing” deeds of the Jesuits in Indigenous territories mostly appears in them as a notable example, either as an idealized and bucolic model of coexistence or as peaceful insertion of Indians into modernity (a civilized way to civilize, that is, the Lascasian dream)—never mind that it occurred through religious violence (Halperin 1995; Maeder 2000). The civilizing meaning accorded to the missions survived in the life of the local communities formed in the nineteenth century on or near their former locations, especially of European immigrants and, also, in the national imagination. More recently, the inclusion of the ruins of seven missions in UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 1984 and 1993 has placed their renewed heritage meaning in a formerly inexistent global discourse—that of a humanistic/mercantile heritage—that is currently challenged by Indigenous peoples, eager to claim the historical/mythical meaning of the missions as their own. Indeed, the mission experience also lingers in ethnic (nonnational) memories, such as in the oral traditions of the Guaraní currently inhabiting the area (de Souza 1998; Garlet and Assis 2002; Ladeira 2007; de Souza et al. 2012). Well after the ruins of the missions appeared on the radar of heritage concerns, archaeologists pitched their tents, literally, in old mission sites mostly in ruins and deployed their modern-colonial weapons, which we will now examine—heritage arguments, which ultimately tie, legitimate, wrap archaeological practice, will be considered further down. This rhetorical circularity embodies the modern relation between disciplines and contributes its share to the functioning of the modern-colonial (onto)logic.

The archaeology of the missions (of their ruins . . .) In their review of historical archaeology in Latin America, South America, and Brazil, Fournier (1999), Funari (1997), and Lima (1993), respectively, include mission archaeology as part of that subdisciplinary practice. What compelled these authors to do so? Further, what does “historical” mean in that regard? A reading of their papers makes it clear that historical archaeology deals with the modern world and, consequently, with capitalism and colonialism. Fair enough. Does the archaeology of the missions deal with that as well? Fournier (1999, 81) points out that mission archaeology “has offered unparalleled sources of information about the acculturation of the Guaranís, as well as about their eventual, almost total extermination.” Funari (1997, 196) notes that “there are common concerns of historians and archaeologists . . . such as the study of everyday resistance . . . (and) acculturation.” Lima (1993, 227) stressed that the archaeology of the missions provided the rationale for studying interethnic contacts and the resulting acculturation in other parts of Brazil. Good intentions notwithstanding, historical archaeology, in general, and mission archaeology, in particular, share the tenets of the modern-colonial order and therefore could hardly fulfil those aims, as we will describe in this paper. Lima (1993, 228), for instance, states that historical archaeology began “to give voice to ethnic minorities and subaltern, oppressed, disadvantaged, or marginal segments who could not record their own history.” The coloniality of those words speaks for itself: it is historical archaeology that gives voice to the oppressed, who could not record their own history. No further comment is necessary. Mission archaeology partakes of the epistemological and ontological ruptures established by the modern-colonial order, the most prominent of which in this regard is that between the Indigenous past and the disciplinary present: from modern temporality (the time of archaeology) 32

A double coloniality

the time of the Other is studied, assessed, gauged, and objectified. (There is an additional rupture, also disciplinary, with multiple colonial underpinnings: history deals with documents— which therefore are part of culture—archaeology with “material culture,” a part of the natural world, that of the Other and their things. This is not an inherent division but the way modernity partitioned its reality to distribute it among the disciplines.) This problematic relationship is overlooked by archaeologists, who assume it as an unquestioned and reified disciplinary fact that they perform but never examine. Such a rupture can be seen from a disciplinary perspective: the Guaraní of the missions (as part of the ruins and through their objects, if not as objects themselves) are dealt with by archaeology, while current Guaraní are the concern of anthropology, as if there were not a circular relation between past and present, as if what happened then was unconnected with what happens now. In this instance, there are no communicating vessels between anthropology and archaeology (each of them preserving their parcel of knowledge, their parcel of otherness) regarding the current Guaraní and the mission experience—which they inherited, mythologized, and still sense as violent and catastrophic—which is tantamount to say that there are no connections between the present and the past. Disciplinary separations are political expressions of what modernity does; in this case, the brutal separation of past and present, as if they were just events in the arrow of time that simply pass but do not connect. The present thus discards the past as something that happened and disappeared but that does not linger, as something that can be delivered to the firm grip of heritage. Historical connections between mission and current Guaranís are thus severed. The unacknowledged deep logic in all this, the logic that makes the archaeologists feel comfortable, is that mission Guaranís vanished into thin air; that being so, archaeologists do not have to deal with the awkward presence of the Guaranís they nowadays spot selling handicrafts (Figure 3.2) when going to their digs—to say nothing of when the Guaranís press for their cultural and historical claims (which are the domain of the anthropologists, anyway, in the modern distribution among disciplines). Although historians have documented that this was not the case—that mission Guaranís did survive, disperse, mingle, went to work into the cities (Neumann 1996; Wilde 2001; Poenitz 2012)—the archaeologists bypass these historical findings. This is not surprising, though, because archaeological discourse recurs to a centuries-old archive that talks about catastrophes, disappearances, ruptures, degradation. The mission Guaranís may have well been the ideal civilized Indians, but the destitute Guaranís of today can only be their degraded heirs. Disciplines thrive amidst a praised civilization and an overlooked misery—as if they had not participated in their joint constitution. Mission Guaraní were a part of a civilizational time (as they were subjected to it), while current Guaranís belong to another time that is premodern, primitive, savage, and in short, Indigenous. In this way, mission archaeology participates, and not unimportantly, in what Rita Segato (2007) has called “national regimes of otherness,” historical regimes of creation of the others of the nation and, now, of the post-nation. Even a brief look at some archaeological reports on mission sites rapidly reveals their structure and purpose: the description of locations and research activities (Ocampo et al. 2019; Poujade and Salvatelli 2014; Roca 2013; Poujade et al. 2016) and of “material” findings (Kern 1998a; Ribeiro et al. 1998; Tocchetto 1998; Barcelos 2000). Description is not a disciplinary bias, just an old-fashioned “empirical” burden in archaeological research; description is the way modern disciplines engage with the world they create. By describing a reality “out there,” modern representation not only pretends to bring it into being, it also establishes an epistemological relation: that between the absent knower (whose no-place is occupied by technicalities and protocols of all sorts, from theory to method and technique) and a reified, independent, and exterior reality. Description is an integral part of modern-colonial disciplinary procedures. Not surprisingly, the bulk of such descriptions in mission archaeology is taken up by the objects “found” (especially 33

Cristóbal Gnecco and Adriana Schmidt Dias

Figure 3.2 A Mbyá Guaraní family selling handicrafts outside the museum in the ruins of the São Miguel mission, Brazil. The picture was taken from inside the museum, pointing out issues of exteriority and interiority, nature and culture. Source: Photo by Adriana Schmidt Dias, 2013.

the omnipresent pottery sherds) in the investigations carried out in their ruins, especially while excavating—digging being the ultimate archaeological means to reach representational certainty (Gnecco 2013). But objects are the very subject of archaeological inquiry, some may say, so the objects “found” ought to be described. Well, yes. Precisely. Objects “found” ought to be described. Archaeology, after all, is a modern-colonial discipline. Objects and descriptions pertain to objectification, that procedure by which the representing subject disappears, to be replaced by instruments. Further, objectification is entangled with the other pillars of modernity’s knowing machine: neutrality (distance), universality, and exteriority. Description in mission archaeology thus supports, enlarges, enforces, its coloniality. It is not enough to describe the locations where Indigenous life unfolded in the past (their houses, for instance). It is not enough because such a description is underpinned by colonial principles, such as the separation of past and present, objectivization, etc. So entrenched are colonial principles that even a recent, important twist in mission archaeology, the inclusion of a gender perspective (Roca 2013; Rocchietti 2014), is trapped by them. That twist is historically informed (the segregation and submission of woman; the imposition of Christian values, etc.), but the archaeology it engages remains untouched (remains modern-colonial). Gender issues fly over a quiet landscape of sherds, digging units, research activities; they fly over description, objects, distance, otherness. Rocchietti (2014, 92) states it clearly, “The relationship between material culture 34

A double coloniality

and gender is an absent object because it has no evidence in the excavations of the Cotiguazú, neither in the excavation of an Indian dwelling next to the square” (italics in the original). This absent object actually enacts mission archaeology neatly because its absent character is not a sort of a natural, immanent elusiveness, but the condition of its archaeological existence: it is absent because it is not there, cannot be there. Its absence trumpets its being otherwise—as objects, as distance, as exteriority, as creations that only reflect what matters to archaeology. The bottom line of all this excess of description is simple: that ethereal thing with which archaeology deals, the past, materializes as objects. Here is Arno Kern (1998a, 68), the mission archaeologist par excellence: The tradition of Guarani culture has survived within the missionary villages far more than one could imagine from the historical documentation and accounts of the Jesuits. Indigenous people continue to knap and polish the stone, make their pottery and work on their traditional handicrafts. “Far more than one could imagine” looks like an absurd exaggeration, but it is not. Archaeologists are convinced that the “material culture” they study (well, which they create) is the entrance door to the past—indeed, the only possible entrance door (the archaeologists, we all know, are material culture experts). Culture, however conceived, is reduced to its “materiality.” At any rate, the reading of “material culture” is absolutely tautological: first, some archaeologists define the “types” (especially of pottery) that they consider Indigenous, or European, or even mixed, which they see as ethnic (or cultural) manifestations; then, other archaeologists find evidences that they classify matching the types already defined; and lastly, they read them as evidences of past cultures or ethnic groups (Tocchetto 1998). A circularity, beyond which lies something much bigger: the utter reduction of “past cultures” to material objects. Past cultures in general, in this case that of the Jesuits and the Guaranís alike? Not quite. Kern (1985, 108) claims that an (historical) emphasis on documents is equivalent to an emphasis on the Jesuits, the colonial ofcers, the caciques, while the (archaeological) investigation of material culture can render useful insights into the daily life of Guaraní commoners. (Here we have more of the modern-colonial recipe: history is not only written by the winners but tells their deeds, while archaeology can deal with more modest endeavors, such as documenting the petty lives of the defeated.) From Kern’s arguments it follows that archaeological “material culture” mostly reveals Indigenous things beyond the times. Is this so? Is Indigenous life revealed by archaeology? It depends. If by “revealing” we submit to the modern canons of representation, and if Indigenous life is seen through objects, then yes, archaeology reveals Indigenous life. But the story is quite otherwise if we escape from the traps of modernity and objectification. Then Indigenous life is entangled in a wide living net of relations, of which materiality is but a part—but even so, never as the marked pair of modern dichotomies. Then no, archaeology does not reveal Indigenous life. It simply enacts it the archaeological way. If archaeology utterly eludes Indigenous life—simply because it is not there to grasp it—what are mission archaeologists after? Let us see what Kern (1998b, 12, 19) has to say (with the necessary apologies for quoting him so insistently, but he is about the only archaeologist who has worked in the South American missions who indulges in theoretical matters, venturing beyond empirical hardness, a hallmark of mission archaeology, and because of the ideological and disciplinary breadth of his writings): “The aim is to elaborate a new memory that will be accessible to the community in the form of an expanded and reinterpreted cultural heritage. . . . These archaeological remains allow the production of an important social memory.” What “important social memory” is he talking about? That of the Guaranís, subdued by the mission experience? If 35

Cristóbal Gnecco and Adriana Schmidt Dias

it were so, the most we could say is that Indigenous historicity would be trampled by the temporality of modernity. But this is not the case, even though public (even Indigenous) archaeology would welcome it. The archaeologists are not concerned with Indigenous social memory, not even when they talk of collaboration or participation of nonacademics in their research. That concern falls, if anything, in the side of anthropologists and historians, another expression of the compartmentalization of reality by disciplinary frames. No, the social memory Kern is talking about is that produced by archaeology: a curious “social memory” built upon the shared idea that the past is buried and somehow encrypted/codified in things. (The procedures for uncovering/decoding have changed through the years, from unregulated common sense to highly ritualized scientific protocols; the definition and meaning of what is covered/codified and hence awaiting to be uncovered/decoded for the sake of archaeological knowledge, has not. The latter is thoroughly naturalized.) If this “social memory” is not that of the Guaranís but of archaeology, which is its place? Which is its relation with the community (an anthropological token for Indigenous diversity)? Well, their rapport is directional, teleological, and mono-logical: archaeology, as a part of the modern-colonial way of enacting reality, teaches its “social memory” to the unfortunate Others, those poor fellows without history, as we are constantly reminded: “We still have the task of discovering the most important data of this cultural transformation that led the Guaraní to cross the level of Prehistory to History” (Kern 1998a, 69). Great! The Guaraní are now in the hands of historical writing, that of the archaeologists, where they can safely abandon their premodern darkness. For this “social memory” to be “accessible to the community” archaeology engages with heritage education, which we will consider shortly. Tellingly, Kern (1998a, 67), again, states that “Archaeological documents inform us about the daily life of the natives without the ideological distortions of the conquering white.” Here, archaeology appeals to a reified, nonideological reality (a single and unified reality outthere, a reality as is, an empirical reality), while historical accounts are fooled by interpretations. The conquering white speaks (ideologically) through history while a neutral, external, objective truth speaks through archaeology. Archaeology, in contrast, un-deforms historical deformations! In this view, mission archaeology cannot be but a part of the ongoing moderncolonial (onto)logic. Whatever it is, the archaeology on the missions is closely linked to their fate as heritage object-signs, which we now consider.

The missions as heritage Heritage preoccupations started in the region in different moments, for similar reasons. The missions, in particular, came to regional attention in Argentina late in the nineteenth century, when the northern frontier (the current provinces of Misiones and Corrientes) struggled to find a place in the nation. Later on, the nation itself became interested. In Brazil, the elevation of the ruins of the missions to heritage started in the 1930s, in close association with the nationalism of the New State (Estado Novo). How those colonial ruins with a Spanish imprint became icons of things Brazilian in a modern guise could be intriguing, but it is not. It was their civilizational aura that won their respect. In Paraguay after the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), the process of national construction was exacerbated. The place of the Jesuits (and their missions) in the nation was bitterly discussed, but not that of the Indians, who had (and still have) no place in the national scene. These considerations—a mix of nationalism, regional pride, and civilization—explains a curious, and tragic, oxymoron: a colonial legacy becoming heritage for all in young nation-states that were striving to become modern and thus to leave behind their colonial ancestry! What is the relation of current Guaranís with this heritage? Whose heritage it is, anyway? In elevating the missions to heritage (well, their ruins at any rate)—regional, national, and 36

A double coloniality

nowadays global—has an erasure been exercised over their coloniality? No, it has not. Their coloniality is an integral part of them as heritage. What has been patrimonialized in/of the missions is the general idea of civilization, not the legacy of the societies subdued by that idea. That idea was genocidal, violent, and imposed on the Native societies because it was solidly based on the belief that it was better, superior, more advanced; it was based, that is, on the then undiscussed assumption that there were natural hierarchies articulated by racial and religious criteria. In the relationship between the Jesuits and the Guaraní, what has counted is the place of the former, not that of the latter. What has mattered is the modernity that the Jesuits still represent years after their fall. In that story (with few notable exceptions) the Guaraní are mute, the weakest link in the missions’ narrative chain. An assessment of heritage interventions on the mission experience (through the ruins, that is) cannot be comprehensively seen if the focus is not placed over the Guaraní—the main subjects (for subjection) of such an experience. The presence of the Guaraní in the missionary story, that story that lingers until today through heritage, is obscure, opaque and unequal and demands to ask: why convert into heritage the ruins of the missions in the first place, such objects-signs of a project that, in any case and from wherever one looks at (with a little or a lot of empathy, with a little or a lot of contempt), was part of the conquest of the Americas, one of the biggest genocidal enterprises in history? Although the national rhetoric of the three countries is different, the civilizing deed of the Jesuits in Indigenous territory appears in them as a notable example, either as an idealized and bucolic model of coexistence or as a peaceful way of inserting the Indians into modernity, bypassing that it happened through religious violence. Although heritage erases the original meaning, say, of what it patrimonializes and imposes new meanings, is it not in this case that the UNESCO heritage narrative portrays as humanistic the act of civilization of the Jesuits? Would this not come to re-signify the act of civilization and to renew its validity, now as development (through heritage)? These basic questions about the heritage meaning of the missions expose their protagonists, those of then and now: the Guaraní, the Jesuits, the settlers, the colonial and republican officials, the historians and the anthropologists, the heritage agents. They intersect, these protagonists, and erase the boundaries between past and present that exist because they have been so stubbornly reified by the disciplines. The missions and their ruins are central icons in the imaginary of three nation-states in which they now stand because they played major roles in building their respective “national formations of otherness.” To ask about the missions from the vantage point of those formations is to ask about the place of their Others, the place of the Guaraní, and to find that theirs is a rather opaque place filled in uneven ways in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay along the last two centuries. In particular, to ask about mission archaeology and its associated heritage is akin to asking how they participated in creating the national and post-national Others. When asking about the place of the Guaraní in the mission story, a lack of consensus emerges, not so much historical but contemporary. The canonical and dominant narrative about the missions was conservative, unidirectional, and static: it was an apology of the civilizing deeds of the missionaries, without recognizing the agency of the Guaranís and, if that, even of history. But the historiography on the Guaraní of the missions has changed, and it now investigates their active role (e.g., Chamorro 2009; Wilde 2009; Neumann 2015), moving away from the idea of their essential passivity that accorded, until recently, the central role of the story to the Jesuits. There, in that question about the agency of the Guaraní in the missions, a certain new consensus begins to form. The same thing does not happen when the question moves from the ghostly character of the missionary Guaraní to the utter concretion of the contemporary Guaraní. There dissent reigns, as if the real bodies (individual and, above all, social) challenge the possibility of establishing unequivocal answers. Dissension reigns because the place of the current Guaraní in 37

Cristóbal Gnecco and Adriana Schmidt Dias

the missionary story is no longer just an academic issue, as in the case of historiography (still dominated by disciplinary preoccupations), but a political one. This dissent can be seen by comparing the narratives about the missions and their others in the three countries. In Brazil, the story of the missions had the Jesuits as protagonists until the 1980s, when a dramatic change occurred: agency passed on to the Guaraní due, mostly, to academic militancy, especially around the demarcation of Indigenous lands. As a result, the relationship of the Mbyá with the Guaraní of the missions is not a matter of discussion any longer but of documentation (in ethnographies, workshops, documentaries). In the juridical dispute on land issues, temporal and territorial continuity matters much, and being heirs of the Guaraní of the missions provide rhetorical fuel to the Mbyá and their academic supporters. This does not happen in Argentina and Paraguay, where the approach to the issue is academic, not political—and where, not coincidentally, regulations for the demarcation of Indigenous lands are either nonexistent or not applied. In those two countries there is little doubt: the current Guaraní are not thoroughly related to the Guaraní of the missions, and therefore their relationship with the ruins (and the memories they trigger) is rather ethereal. To put it another way: while in Brazil the issue is already clearly discursive, in the other two countries it remains substantive; while in Brazil it abandoned the positivistic limits of disciplinary research and the modern criteria of reality, in Argentina and Paraguay such an abandonment (such an escape) is still far from happening. Anthropologists in Argentina and Paraguay claim not to know expressions of the Mbyá about the missions or their ruins, implying that the Indigenes are not interested in them. But, if so, should not that disinterest or distance be the subject of an investigation still unattended? It would not seem possible to affirm that the Mbyá are unrelated to the Guaraní of the missions, that they are not their heirs, except from the regime of truth of modern disciplines. In this, as in so many other things, disciplinary truths are ideological, although veiled: the missionary work is celebrated (even if the emphasis falls on the Jesuits, making the Guaraní inferior, poor infantile souls), while at the same time a place is denied to the contemporary Guaraní, who are said to have “arrived” in the mission area not long ago (even after the Eastern Europeans who populated the region since the late nineteenth century and who have created a very curious “missionary culture”) and whose life elapses between poverty and welfare. The differences between the three countries in this issue are also due to different and, to a certain extent, closed academic traditions. They do not know each other well, despite a certain fluidity and exchange. If the missions were a question of frontiers, not only geographic but also cultural, their academic research is another form of frontier, not because such a research is positioned in the frontier—in the postcolonial sense of Anzaldúa (1987)—but because it establishes rigid and quite insurmountable borders: the historians here, the anthropologists there; the Brazilians here, the Paraguayans there, as before the Indians of the missions here, the forest Indians there. Borders between themes, then, but also between academic traditions. The way the Guaranís are dealt with by heritage has yet another angle. Heritage interventions, formerly restricted to elevate certain things to patrimony (usually monuments, such as the ruins of the missions), gained momentum when heritage education was initiated, especially since so-called “public” and “historical” archaeologies became new exports from the metropolitan world in the 1980s, received with utmost relief in the periphery. The argument about heritage education posits that past evidences exposed by archaeology can be converted into heritage and then taught to local populations. Heritage education programs are booming as a means of countering the critiques archaeology receives from the outside world, especially regarding its esoterism and its isolation from various stakeholders, mostly local. Heritage education programs have allowed archaeology to become socially responsible—an expression formerly reserved to

38

A double coloniality

corporations, a symptom that archaeology has entered a corporate phase. The arrogance, coloniality, and utter modernity of heritage education are obvious: they pretend that local populations are ignorant about their pasts, which can only exist if exposed by the discipline (in the modern sense of unearthing, unveiling, stripping, that is, digging); and they make heritage educators the redeemers of the past, history, and even the cultures of local populations. The compensatory politics engaged through heritage education is not politics for the common good but plain and simple corporate politics. Corporate social responsibility, it is worth recalling, is a one-way action by which capitalism “gives back” to the people (normally local populations affected by development projects) whatever it deems worth giving—usually unimportant crumbs far removed from mitigating the social and environmental harm caused by such projects. Social responsibility, as altruistic action, acts along local resistance; while the former is widely publicized as good, the latter is routinely criminalized and silenced. The co-existence of social responsibility and local resistance and the uneven treatment they receive (in the media, in the legal systems, in the administrative apparatus) highlights that the former supports and reproduces capitalism, which is disdainful of local struggles that challenge its operation (Gnecco and Dias 2015, 689). Despite this (or, perhaps, because of it), de Moraes (2014) and Focking (2018) praise heritage education linked to mission archaeology. Communities, in their opinion, are eager to participate in what archaeology and heritage have to offer: “In the field of archaeology, it is possible to see that professionals are increasingly observing that communities have a sense of belonging to their own past and want to participate effectively in decision-making processes in order to bring their own ideas of heritage appreciation” (de Moraes 2014, 18). This is not surprising, either. Ever since Vine Deloria (1992, 598) put collaboration between archaeologists and Indigenous peoples at the forefront of a new form of (non-colonial) relationship, it became a token for socially and politically committed archaeologists; it even became a morality on its own. Collaboration with, and participation of, formerly disenfranchised parties is one of the aims of most brands of activist archaeologies—to which heritage education in mission archaeology would certainly subscribe. Both have been premised in the democratic agenda of a widened archaeology (and heritage), socially and politically accountable to a host of new actors by fostering inclusion and sharing. Yet bringing other peoples to share the bounty of archaeology and heritage (the cosmology of modernity) is a one-way inclusion that disregards crucial issues such as time, descent, space, and living as they are considered and experienced by not-so-modern worldviews. The sharing collaboration offers is fully developed within the conception of modern democracy and has become a new disciplining routine where, more often than not, what is shared is just the temporality of modernity (Gnecco 2015, 332). Again, the “social memory” being shared is that built and spread by archaeology, not by Indigenous agendas.

On the missions as Utopia The missions were utopian in a broad sense, that is, they were located nowhere—it mattered little that they were in the colonies of Spain or Portugal, their actual physical location being a handicap with which the Jesuits struggled for centuries. They were worlds apart in all respects, an unanchored idea, and were, therefore, perfect mirrors of what was possible. But this utopia, as seen from western eyes, was surgically separated from the ontology of modernity, from the relations of power it established, as if it had not been a fundamental beachhead in its advance over other ontological frontiers. Maybe because of this brutal separation, the utopia of the missions eventually faded away. The missions themselves suffered a similar fate. The Jesuits were expelled from Portugal and Spain; their colonies and the Jesuits’ work of conversion came to a

39

Cristóbal Gnecco and Adriana Schmidt Dias

halt, and what little remained of their buildings soon turned into ruins. Utopia was devoured by the jungle, like the ruins. It returned, let’s say, to its place in nature, to the world of the primitive—not a surprising destiny, though, if we consider its genealogy along savagery, masterfully depicted by Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003). Yet nothing can hide, not even the jungle, that the missions were the ruin of the Guaraní. The ruins of the missions, then, are places of consolidation of the Indigenous ruin, of its exaltation (regional, national, supranational) as a project of civilization—and so are the disciplines, such as archaeology, that celebrate the mission experience. The meaning of a ruin is imposed (because it glorifies, exalts, markets) over the meaning of another. What remains is the imprint of the ruin as ruin: a vestige of what there was, but an unmistakable emblem of what it remains. The civilizational imprint of the missions still lingers, no matter that their ruins now stand in three different countries with quite different national histories. It is a legacy from a colonial era that, for the most part, has been condemned in those histories—rhetorically, for the ideal of civilization still moves on at great speed, now dressed as development, of which heritage processes are but a part; its impacts (destruction, dispossession, infringement of cultural and natural rights) are as terrible nowadays as they were before. Because of this, at least since the late nineteenth century, the missions have become subjected to heritage attention and, eventually, to heritage declarations, even global. Their utter coloniality, however, has rarely been explicitly dealt with, save by some historians. In this sense, mission archaeology is yet another layer in the hardening of the mission experience as civilization. Its work is inscribed in a modern-colonial archive, which bespeaks of continuity, not of ruptures (showing once more, as if it were necessary, that mission archaeology stubbornly hangs on to coloniality as its ultimate explanatory resource; and showing that ruptures are only accorded to the Other, never to the Self). The words of Kern (1998b, 21) stating that “this historical reconstruction of the past of present-day society proposes to rewrite the history of the region in the light of new evidence” are thus entirely deceitful. History is not being re-written by archaeological and heritage discourses; the history we already know (as recounted by those who won), the history celebrated and commemorated in countless mnemonic spaces (from classrooms to TV and movie documentaries, from the media to the apparent seclusion of homes), is being recast time and again. That history, recounting a story of the past as past, insistently bypasses that what happened then is inextricably linked to what happens now: the Guaranís selling handicrafts in the ruins and struggling to survive in minuscule reservations, deprived of their former wide territories, are a consequence of the mission experience, of the place of Indigenous peoples in the nation-state and in post-national societies, of the concerted work of academic disciplines—archaeology among them. But if mission archaeology reinforces and reproduces coloniality, what about the Guaraní? Recently, after more than two centuries of twilight, utopia once again showed its face and, wonderful paradox, it did it in the hands of the Mbyá, those subjects on the margins (in every sense: on the margins of history, the countryside, cities). In the memory of the Mbyá, the missionary story, but not its modern heritage conversion, is a firm historical source, quite relevant for their struggle for territory and self-determination. Tava Miri, a mythical place of great cultural importance, is “recognized as a work left by the ancestors of the current Mbyá-Guarani” and “it marks their union with the gods” (de Moraes 2010, 15). Tava Miri keeps a kind of “petrified message” left to his descendants about the fact that life is made by successive challenges, that it is worthwhile to fight against death and decomposition knowing that victory is almost impossible, but motivated by the idea that there is an immortality and a fullness of existence here and beyond this world. (de Souza and Morinico 2009, 314) 40

A double coloniality

This centrality of Tava Miri is purely utopian, both as a no-place and as a horizon of possibility. The Mbyá, however, do not engage the authority of the heritage discourse from a diferent perspective, as if it were just an epistemological issue; they engage the ontological peculiarity of their historical narrative aside from how “heritage” is conceived and mobilized. Their bearing on heritage, which has not been entirely articulated yet, is thus ontological, not epistemological. It is not just another version of the historical reality naturalized by heritage; rather, it is quite at odds with it. Thus, seen from the discursive corner, not from the disciplinary one, the sharp separation between the Guaraní of the missions and the contemporary Guaraní, to which archaeology has so forcefully contributed, has catastrophist overtones, and it is a part of the reproduction of the civilized/savage dichotomy; a part of the enlightened meaning of heritage (the missionary Indians in the ruins, the contemporary Indians outside); a part of academic traditions (the Indians of the missions with the historians and the current Indians with the anthropologists); a part, alas, of the denial of coevalness (Fabian 1983). If this issue is seen instead from the discursive corner (which is also political), other things begin to emerge, even in terms of ontological divergences and multiplicities. The spaces for multiplicity must be gained in a field of struggle that has already been defined as a political ontology, centered “on the conflicts that ensue as diferent worlds or ontologies strive to sustain their own existence as they interact and mingle with each other” (Blaser 2009, 877). The consideration of multiplicity is ontological; the consideration of versions of reality that oppose or collide is epistemological. While the former ofers openness, freedom, creativity, the latter guarantees disciplinary closure. It is up to mission archaeologists to keep feeding the modern-colonial project or to engage multiplicity (to engage not-so-modern cosmologies) in alternative, generous, and caring ways.

Acknowledgments Our research on the heritage meanings accorded to the missions has been funded by WennerGren and the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq).

References cited Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute. Barcelos, Artur. 2000. Espaço & arqueologia nas missões jesuíticas: o caso de São João Batista. Porto Alegre: PUC. Becker, Félix. 1982. “La guerra guaranítica desde una nueva perspectiva: historia, ficción e historiografía.” Boletín Americanista 32: 7–37. Blaser, Mario. 2009. “Political Ontology: Cultural Studies without ‘Cultures’?” Cultural Studies 23 (5–6): 873–896. Chamorro, Graciela. 2009. Decir el cuerpo. Historia y etnografía del cuerpo en los pueblos Guaraní. Asunción: Tiempo de Historia. Deloria, Vine. 1992. “Indians, Archaeologists, and the Future.” American Antiquity 57: 595–598. de Moraes, Carlos Eduardo Neves. 2010. “A refiguração da Tava Miri São Miguel na memória coletiva dos Mbyá-Guarani nas missões/RS, Brasil.” Master’s Thesis, Universidade Federal de Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre. de Moraes, Tobias Vilhena. 2014. “Preservação arqueológica e ação educativa nas missões.” PhD Dissertation, Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre. de Souza, José Otávio Catafesto. 1998. “Aos fantasmas das brenhas: etnografia, invisibilidade e etnicidade de alteridades originárias no sul do Brasil.” PhD Dissertation, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre. de Souza, José Otávio Catafesto, Carlos Eduardo Neves de Moraes, Daniele de Menezes Pires, José Cirilo Pires Morinico, and Mónica de Andrade Arnt. 2012. Tava miri São Miguel Arcanjo, sagrada aldeia de pedra: os Mbyá-Guarani nas missões. Porto Alegre: IPHAN. de Souza, José Otávio Catafesto, and José Cirilo Morinico. 2009. “Fantasmas das brenhas ressurgem nas ruínas: Mbyá-Guaranis relatam sua versão sobre as Missões e depois delas.” In Povos indígenas, Vol. 5, edited

41

Cristóbal Gnecco and Adriana Schmidt Dias by Arno Kern, Maria Cristina dos Santos and Tau Golin, 301–330. Passo Fundo: Coleção História Geral do Rio Grande do Sul. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other. New York: Columbia University Press. Fausto, Carlos. 2005. “Se deus fosse jaguar: canibalismo e cristianismo entre os guarani (séculos xvi–xx).” Mana 11 (2): 385–418. Focking, Gabriel de Freitas. 2018. “Ações educativas na Arqueologia Missioneira (1985–1995).” Master’s Thesis, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre. Fournier, Patricia. 1999. “La arqueología del colonialismo en Iberoamérica: balance y perspectivas.” Boletín de Antropología Americana 34: 75–87. Funari, Pedro Paulo A. 1997. “Archaeology, History, and Historical Archaeology in South America.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 1 (3): 189–206. Garlet, Ivori, and Valéria Assis. 2002. “A imagem do Kechuíta no universo mitológico dos Mbyá.” Revista de História Regional 7 (2): 99–114. Gnecco, Cristóbal. 2013. “Digging Alternative Archaeologies.” In Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity, edited by Alfredo González-Ruibal, 67–78. London: Routledge. Gnecco, Cristóbal. 2015. “Historical Archaeology Bottom-up. Notes from Colombia.” In Archaeologies of Capitalism, 2nd ed., edited by Mark Leone and Jocelyn Knauf, 327–344. New York: Springer. Gnecco, Cristóbal, and Adriana Dias. 2015. “On Contract Archaeology.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 19: 687–698. Haber, Alejandro. 2012. “Un-Disciplining Archaeology.” Archaeologies 8 (1): 55–66. Halperin, Tulio. 1995. Proyecto y construcción de una Nación (1846–1880). Buenos Aires: Emecé. Kern, Arno. 1985. “A arqueologia histórica, a história e os trinta povos das missoes.” Paper presented in the First Conference on Historical Archaeology, IPHAN, Rio de Janeiro. Kern, Arno. 1998a. “Escavações arqueológicas na missão jesuítico-guarani de São Lourenço (RS, Brasil).” In Arqueologia histórica missioneira, edited by Arno Kern, 65–96. Porto Alegre: PUCI. Kern, Arno. 1998b. “Pesquisas arqueológicas e históricas nas missões jesuítico-guaranis (1985–1995).” In Arqueologia histórica missioneira, edited by Arno Kern, 11–64. Porto Alegre: PUCI. Ladeira, Maria Inês. 2007. O caminhar sob a luz: território mbya a beira do oceano. São Paulo: UNESP. Lima, Tania Andrade. 1993. “Arqueologia histórica no Brasil: balanço bibliográfico (1960–1991).” Anais do Museu Paulista Nova Série 1: 225–262. Maeder, Ernesto. 1992. Misiones del Paraguay. Madrid: MAPFRE. Maeder, Ernesto. 2000. “De las misiones del Paraguay a los estados nacionales. Configuración y disolución de una región histórica: 1610–1810.” In Missões Guarani. Impacto na sociedade contemporânea, edited by Regina Gadelha, 113–127. São Paulo: Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo. Maeder, Ernesto, and Alfredo Bolsi. 1980. La población guaraní de las misiones jesuíticas: evolución y características, 1671–1767. Corrientes: Instituto de Investigaciones Geohistóricas. Melià, Bartomeu. 1999. “La reducción según los guaranies: dichos y escritos.” In Missões Guarani. Impacto na sociedade contemporânea, edited by Regina Gadelha, 55–64. São Paulo: Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo. Necker, Louis. 1990. Indios guaraníes y chamanes franciscanos: las primeras reducciones del Paraguay (1580–1800). Asunción: Universidad Católica. Neumann, Eduardo. 1996. O trabalho guarani missioneiro no Rio da Prata colonial. 1640–1750. Porto Alegre: Martins. Neumann, Eduardo. 2015. Letra de indios. Cultura escrita, comunicação e memória indígena nas Reduções do Paraguai. São Bernardo do Campo: Nhanduti. Ocampo, Amanda, Alejandro Richard, Yamila Sastre y Soledad Candelario. 2019. “Aportes a la arqueología reduccional. El caso de Nuestra Señora de Ibitiracuá (Concepción de la Sierra, Misiones, Argentina).” Arqueología 25 (2): 235–246. Poenitz, Alfredo. 2012. Mestizo del litoral. Sus modos de vida en Loreto y San Miguel. Posadas: Edición del autor. Poujade, Ruth, María Victoria Roca, and Lorena Salvatelli. 2016. “Intervenciones arqueológicas en cuatros conjuntos Patrimonio Mundial: reducciones de Santa Ana, San Ignacio Miní, Santa María La Mayor y Nuestra Señora de Loreto (Misiones, Argentina).” In Primeros asentamientos españoles y portugueses en la América central y meridional, Siglos XVI y XVII, edited by Luis María Calvo and Gabriel Cocco, 339–352. Santa Fe: Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Poujade, Ruth, and Lorena Salvatelli. 2014. “Puesta en valor de la reducción jesuítica guaraní: Nuestra Señora de Loreto, Misiones, Argentina.” Teoría y Práctica de la Arqueología Histórica Latinoamericana 3 (3): 73–84.

42

A double coloniality Ribeiro, Pedro, Catharina Ribeiro, Sergio Klamt, and Joaquim Buchaim. 1998. “Escavações arqueológicas na missão de São Lourenco Mártir, São Luiz Gonzaga, RS-Brasil.” In Arqueologia histórica missioneira, edited by Arno Kern, 95–114. Porto Alegre: PUCI. Roca, María Victoria. 2013. “Las mujeres guaraníes del coti-guazú de la Reducción Jesuita de Santa Ana.” Suplemento Antropológico 48 (2): 294–326. Rocchietti, Ana María. 2014. “Santa Ana: arqueología de su cotiguazú.” Teoría y Práctica de la Arqueología Histórica Latinoamericana 3 (3): 85–98. Schneider, Tsim D., and Katherine Hayes. 2020. “Epistemic Colonialism: Is it Possible to Decolonize Archaeology?” American Indian Quarterly 44 (2): 127–148. Segato, Rita Laura. 2007. La nación y sus otros. Raza, etnicidad y diversidad religiosa en tiempos de políticas de la identidad. Buenos Aires: Prometeo. Tocchetto, Fernanda. 1998. “A cerâmica do guarani missioneiro como símbolo de identidade étnica.” In Arqueologia histórica missioneira, edited by Arno Kern, 151–176. Porto Alegre: PUCI. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilde, Guillermo. 2001. “Los guaraníes después de la expulsión de los jesuitas: dinámicas políticas y transacciones simbólicas.” Revista Complutense de Historia de América 27: 69–106. Wilde, Guillermo. 2009. Religión y poder en las misiones de Guaraníes. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sb.

43

4 COLONIALISM AND INDIGENOUS POPULATION DECLINE IN THE AMERICAS Matthew Liebmann

How many people were living in the Americas when Europeans, Africans, and Asians arrived at the end of the fifteenth century? How many Indigenous people died from disease, violence, famine, and colonial exploitation after 1492? Debated since Columbus attempted the first census of Hispaniola in 1496, these questions remain some the most difficult and perplexing in the history of Americas. Indigenous populations in the Americas declined significantly in the 400 years following the Taino discovery of Columbus. On this point all serious scholars agree (Henige 2008, 184). But beyond the mere fact of Indigenous population decline, these same scholars agree on remarkably little else. Archaeologists, historians, sociologists, demographers, and scholars of Native American studies have debated the severity, timing, and causes of Indigenous American population decline for more than a century. Was this the single largest loss of human life in world history, representing the death of 20 percent of the Earth’s population (Mann 2005, 108)? Or was depopulation more moderate, with Indigenous numbers declining steadily after European colonization (Ubelaker 2006)? Was the resulting population collapse a natural disaster spawned by unstoppable biological forces of genetic susceptibility, hemispheric immunodeficiency, and lethal pathogens (Dobyns 1983; Diamond 1999)? Or was this a human-made crisis, brought about by historically contingent factors and colonial agents, policies, and violence (Cameron et al. 2015)? Reasonable and intelligent researchers routinely analyze the same corpus of data about Indigenous population decline in the wake of Columbus yet somehow manage to reach diametrically opposed conclusions. As a result, historian David Henige castigates the entire field of enquiry as “forlorn attempts to answer a thoroughly unanswerable question” (Henige 1998, 9). But the answers to these questions, forlorn or otherwise, have ramifications beyond trifling academic debates. The answers lay the foundations for contemporary understandings of early American history and may have importance for public health policy today. From Indigenous perspectives, these debates raise the specter of genocide (Madley 2015). What role did military massacres and state-sponsored bounties play in population losses? Were colonial policies designed with intent to destroy Indigenous peoples and lifeways, either in whole or in part? Conversely, from a settler colonial perspective, these debates have legal ramifications for claims to American soil. The notion that Indigenous populations were sparse prior to the European invasion allowed large swaths of the Americas to be classified as terra nullius, 44

Indigenous population decline

“nobody’s land.” English legal tradition combined this doctrine with the invaders’ conception of America as a vacuum domicilium (“empty domicile”) to justify the seizure of American lands. Archaeological interpretations of the pre-Columbian past also hang on these debates. Ethnohistorians and archaeologists commonly glean data from early European accounts to retrodict the precolonial Indigenous past. This practice, known as “upstreaming,” assumes a continuity of Indigenous lifeways across the pre-contact/colonial divide. But what if the accounts of early explorers and colonists recorded something more akin to a postapocalyptic world, one which had already been vastly transformed as a result of Indigenous depopulation? Projecting analogies back into the past based on those records would result in fundamentally flawed understandings of the pre-Columbian archaeological record (Upham 1986). For all these reasons, questions surrounding the effects of settler colonialism on Indigenous population decline remain critical today more than ever. The stories we tell about the founding of America can change how we think about the world we have inherited and about the roots of contemporary inequality, justice, and culpability (Jones 2015, 24). These are not just academic debates, but moral ones. As Italian demographer Massimo Livi-Bacci (2011, 162) notes, we must understand the dimensions of the population at contact in order to assess the moral dimensions of settler colonialism in the Americas from 1492 down to the present day.

Major approaches to the study of Indigenous population decline More than a century ago, ethnologist James Mooney made the first scholarly attempts to reckon the pre-Columbian population of the Americas in a 1910 article for the Handbook of American Indians (Mooney 1910). He derived his estimate in response to speculation that North America had housed millions of people before 1492—an attempt “to magnify the glory of a vanished past.” Mooney arrived at his appraisal by tallying the earliest written records of tribal populations that he could find, or failing that, consulting with colleagues (Ubelaker 1976, 661). Ultimately he concluded that 1,150,000 people lived in North America (north of Mexico) before European contact (Mooney 1910, 287). French ethnologist and founder of the Musee de l’Homme Paul Rivet later expanded upon Mooney’s valuation to produce the first hemispheric estimate of pre-Columbian population, reckoning a 65 percent reduction in population between the late fifteenth and early twentieth centuries (Rivet 1924). Mooney’s initial study influenced subsequent academic debates regarding Indigenous population for the next 30 years. Anthropological estimates for North America ranged from 900,000 to 2,500,000 (Ubelaker 1976). The low end shared Mooney’s basic methodology and underlying assumptions, while the higher based estimates on environmental carrying capacities and constraints. Most influential among these was the evaluation of the doyen of California anthropology, Alfred Kroeber, who used Mooney’s methodology and assumptions to suggest a population of 8,400,000 for the entire Western Hemisphere in 1492 (Kroeber 1939).

The first great debate: high counters vs. low counters In the 1940s, the historical demography of the Americas took a radical turn. An interdisciplinary group of scholars at Berkeley began publishing shockingly high estimates for the fifteenth-century populations of Mexico and the Caribbean, led by geographer Carl O. Sauer, physiologist Sherburne Cook, and historians Woodrow Borah and Leslie Byrd Simpson (Sauer 1941; Cook and Simpson 1948; Cook and Borah 1960). These studies inspired ethnohistorian Henry Dobyns (1963) to generate continental estimates far greater than those previously produced by Mooney or Kroeber. Citing the “virgin soil” status of Native Americans, these new 45

Matthew Liebmann

assessments emphasized the role of pandemic disease in the crippling of Indigenous populations (Dobyns 1963, 494). These estimates theorized that Afro-Eurasian diseases spread out in waves from the Caribbean and Central Mexico in the 1520s, often outpacing colonial reconnaissance parties. In this scenario, pandemic diseases would have devastated most Indigenous populations before their first face-to-face contacts with Europeans. Dobyns (1963) argued that virtually all Native American populations suffered precipitous population declines long before Europeans had a chance to record any numbers; thus, estimates based on historical records (such as Mooney’s and Kroeber’s) inherently miscalculate the aboriginal population of the Americas. A year after Dobyns’s bombshell, Borah (1964) published a radical new assessment of the population of the Western Hemisphere on the eve of the European invasion: 100 million people. This jaw-dropping figure was nearly 12 times higher than that previously proffered by Kroeber (1939). Upping the ante of Rivet’s hemispheric assessment, Borah suggested that Indigenous populations shrank not by 65 percent but by “perhaps 90 to 95 percent in the relatively brief period of several decades or a century” following European contact (Borah 1964, 381–82). The work of Dobyns, Borah, and the rest of the Berkeley School profoundly influenced both scholarly and popular histories of Native America throughout the late twentieth century. Advocates of early and catastrophic depopulation models became known as “High Counters” (e.g. Cook and Borah 1960, 1971; Denevan 1992; Dobyns 1963, 1983; Lovell 1992; Newson 1985; Ramenofsky 1987; Upham 1986; Stannard 1993). Their vision of accidental pandemic disease outbreaks shaped the thinking of Alfred Crosby (1972, 1976), Jared Diamond (1999), and Charles Mann (2005), all of whom popularized the notion that biological and geographic factors best explained the drastic depopulation of the Americas. The millennia-long separation from Europeans, Africans, and Asians prior to 1492 doomed Native Americans to their deadly fate, writes Crosby (1972, 37): “[T]hose creatures who have been longest in isolation suffer the most, for their genetic material has been least tempered by the variety of world diseases.” Diamond’s Pulitzer-prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel (1999) simplified and expanded upon Crosby’s work. For Diamond, the east–west axis of Eurasia promoted the exchange of crops, technologies, animals, and disease in ways that were impeded by the north-south axis of the Americas. The result? When the two populations eventually met, up to 99 percent of Native Americans died, Diamond speculates (1999, 92, 211–212). These “modern broad-gauge biohistories suggest that all the conquerors had to do was to show up and somehow stay alive; their microbes did the rest,” writes historian Pekka Hämäläinen (2010, 173). “The result was what might be called a biological turn of American colonial history. Suddenly the conquest of Native America seemed a product not so much of Europe’s techno-organizational superiority as of blind biogeographic luck.” While geographic separation (and orientation), epidemic diseases, and genetic profiles remain the most popular explanations for Native American population trends over the past five centuries, not all scholars remain convinced by the epidemic collapse hypothesis. Contrasting with High Counter estimates are those of their more conservative critics, known conversely as “Low Counters.” Low Counters remain skeptical of the assumptions that underlie the loftiest appraisals (Henige 1998, 2008; Livi-Bacci 2006, 2011; Meggers 1992; Snow 1995; Snow and Lanphear 1988; Ubelaker 1976, 2006). They note that High Counter estimates are often based on mathematical possibilities rather than hard evidence, asserting that “scholars should not distort history by postulating events that might not have taken place” (Livi-Bacci 2006, 211). Whereas High Counters envision the introduction of new diseases in the sixteenth century as a “tsunami of contagion” (Collison 2013, 10), Low Counters liken the phenomenon to a slowly rising tide that eventually inundated the continent. Low Counters’ skepticism has been bolstered by more than 30 years of sustained archaeological research in the United States and Canada that have failed to support extreme High Counter 46

Indigenous population decline

models (Hull 2009; Hutchinson 2016; Larsen 1994). Despite Dobyns’s provocative hypothesis, evidence supporting his notion that waves of epidemic disease spread across North America in the early 1500s is lacking. In virtually every region of North America (north of Mexico) that archaeologists have looked, studies have shown time and again that sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Indigenous depopulation followed only after direct (and often sustained) contacts with European colonizers: in Florida (Hutchinson 2006, 2013; Larsen et al. 2001); the Northeast (Jones 2014; Snow and Lanphear 1988); the Great Lakes region (Ferris 2009; Snow 1995; Warrick 2003); the Middle Atlantic (Hantman 2001; Gallivan 2016); the Upper Mississippi (Betts 2006); the interior Southeast (Ramenofsky 1987; Wesson and Rees 2002); eastern Texas (Perttula 1992); the Great Plains (Collison 2013; Owsley 1992); the Southwest (Liebmann et al. 2016; Eckert 2005; Kulisheck and Ramenofsky 2013; Ramenofsky 1996); California (Hull 2009, 2015; Walker and Johnson 1992); and the Pacific Northwest (Boyd 1999). While the most extreme High Counter estimates are discounted by most scholars today, estimates of the Indigenous population of North America prior to European contact range between 2.4 million (Ubelaker 2006) on the low end to 7 million (Thornton 2000) at the high end. Milner and Chaplin (2010, 720) employed spatial analysis to arrive at a likely estimate of between 2.4 and 4 million people living in North America in 1492.

The second great debate: evolutionary biology vs. social contingency In the wake of the High Counter/Low Counter dispute, a second great debate has emerged, drawing in many of the same scholars and assumptions involved in the first. Rather than focusing on absolute numbers, however, this clash centers upon the causes of colonial-era Native American population decline. Was this an inevitable natural catastrophe? Or an avoidable, humanmade disaster? On one side of this recent debate are scholars that find biological explanations most compelling. They base their arguments on genetic diversity, blood types, human leukocyte antigen (HLA) profiles, and the particular characteristics of various infectious diseases—smallpox, typhus, measles, influenza, and diphtheria being the most common culprits (Black 1992; Riley 2010). Researchers have linked low genetic diversity among Indigenous Americans (ultimately stemming from the founder effect) to high susceptibility to disease and diminished cell-mediated immunity (e.g. Hurtado et al. 2003). Others focus on the characteristics of the viruses themselves, suggesting that particularly virulent forms explain high mortality rates (Riley 2010). Generally, these bio-determinists share common ground and conclusions with many High Counters. But as Henige (2002, 208) notes, “historical processes are seldom, if ever, monocausal, and imbalances in the recent study of the history of disease need correcting.” A growing chorus of skeptics have begun to question the assumptions that underlie myopically epidemiological approaches to Native American population history. These skeptics emphasize social factors over evolution, and biology and contingency over historical predestination. Early calls to temper overstatements of the role of germs came from none other than High Counter Alfred Crosby, who recognized a complex host of factors involved in Native American depopulation. In a 1976 essay Crosby wrote that “Native Americans have no special susceptibility to Old World diseases that cannot be attributed to environmental influences, and probably never did have” (1976, 291). Disease wreaked havoc upon both “virgin soil” Indigenous persons and disease-experienced Europeans. For example, during the Civil War, smallpox killed 38.5 percent of soldiers who contracted the disease—a number Crosby believes to be roughly on par with the percentage of Mexica (Aztecs) who died of smallpox in 1520 (1976, 292). Sociocultural reactions to disease, it seems, can be as important to mortality as disease exposure itself. 47

Matthew Liebmann

Others point to the variety of experiences endured by diverse Indigenous groups under different forms of European colonialism to question the assumptions of bio-determinist histories. This variation is often revealed through smaller-scale comparative studies of post-contact depopulation trends. Geographer Linda Newson was one of the first to point to these discrepancies in her studies of Spanish labor practices and Indigenous mortality rates in Mexico, Central America, and the Andes. “The variations in their levels of survival were related to the nature, profitability, and distribution of resources stimulating different demands on Indian lands and labor” notes Newson, “and cannot be understood by reference to a single factor such as the differential impact of disease” (1985, 65–66). Livi-Bacci points out that while some Indigenous populations were pushed to the brink of extinction by epidemic disease, others such as the Guaraní of Paraguay expanded under European colonialism (2011, 164). Similarly, medical sociologist Stephen Kunitz notes that mortality rates were higher among the Hopis than among their Navajo neighbors, among other examples. “The major determinant of differences” in the health outcomes of Native peoples, Kunitz writes, “are the different ways in which governments have dealt with Indigenous peoples” (1996, 22). Historian Suzanne Alchon argues against Native American exceptionalism in her 2003 book A Pest in the Land. The unifying factor in Indigenous American experiences of colonialism is not the fact that those who suffered were Indigenous, she maintains, but the fact that they were the victims of European colonization. Warfare, violence, forced labor, migration, and disruption of social and political institutions all contributed to the unique demographic history of the Americas. All human populations experience disease, she notes, and devastating epidemics do not generally discriminate by race or geography. “[M]ortality owing to virgin soil epidemics of smallpox, measles, and plague,” writes Alchon, “was no higher in the Americas than it had been in Europe, Asia, and Africa when the same diseases first appeared there” (2003, 3). Plagues ravaged Athens in 430 bce, Rome in the second and third centuries, and decimated medieval Europe. All these societies suffered devastating epidemics, just as the Americas did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But all the European examples recovered. Native American populations, on the other hand, did not. The exaggeration of virgin soil theory by High Counters and bio-determinists obscured the complex social factors that contributed to Native American population decline as germs became the sole agents in the story. “In its oversimplified and extreme version” writes Livi-Bacci, “the American catastrophe became a natural, ahistorical event, thus absolving the historian from further analysis” (2011, 163). Medical anthropologist and historian of science David Jones (2003, 2015) exposes the medical naivete that undergirds the work of Diamond and other popularizers. By casting Native Americans as “epidemiologically pristine” and “biologically defenseless,” they are contrasted with European colonists thought to have “almost universal immunity” (Jones 2003, 705–706). These naïve assumptions ultimately shift the blame off of Europeans and “onto morally neutral biohistorical forces” (Jones 2015, 4). Absent from these analyses is an acknowledgment of the disruptions promoted by settler colonialism that contributed to population losses: malnutrition, poverty, warfare, violence, dislocation, and famine. Native Americans were not born vulnerable, concludes Jones. They were made vulnerable through the horrors of settler colonialism (Jones 2003, 741).

Breaking the stalemates: archaeological approaches In the twenty-first century, ethnohistorical studies of Native American population history remain deadlocked. High Counters remain huddled on one side of the fence, Low Counters on the other. And while a plurality of scholars today favor biological and evolutionary explanations 48

Indigenous population decline

to account for Indigenous population trends after 1492, a growing faction prefer historically contingent narratives that consider the devastating effects of colonial policies. These stalemates have led some to give up hope of ever finding a resolution. Henige has thrown up his hands entirely, suggesting that we will never resolve these disputes. “[S]ince the debate is based on argument rather than evidence,” opines Henige (2008, 198), “it is hard to see just what could ever bring it to an end, or even to give one side or another a decided advantage.” Because new evidence is required to resolve these debates, which Henige believes is not forthcoming, “no one will ever be able to write an account of how this disputation was resolved.” Henige’s overtly cynical perspective makes sense if the only evidence we are willing to consider is that contained in written texts (and even then, new archival discoveries are still a distinct possibility). Henige disregards the single greatest source of new information to come to light over the past three decades relating to Native American population debates: archaeological data (Betts 2006, 234–235). Since the Columbian quincentenary of 1992, archaeologists have made significant progress in fleshing out the magnitude, timing, and tempo of depopulation events, producing detailed studies from across North America (Hull 2009, 220–282). Out of this research a new picture of colonizer-induced Indigenous population decline is beginning to emerge, and archaeological studies are beginning to break some of the logjams of longstanding debates. Archaeological evidence relating to Native American disease and population decline can be sorted into to broad varieties: direct evidence and indirect evidence (Hutchinson 2016, 142– 143). Generally speaking, we might think of these two categories as the inference of population change through presence or absence. That is, direct evidence tells us about colonial-era population change through indicators from material culture and human remains, while indirect approaches deduce depopulation via evidence of absence in the archaeological record. What follows in a brief review of some of the most influential archaeological studies in these categories over the past three decades.

Mortuary data Large-scale population losses resulting from European contact and colonization in the Americas can leave conspicuous signatures in the archaeological record. Archaeologists commonly cite aberrant mortuary patterns as possible evidence for epidemic disease events, such as mass burials, multiple burials within a single grave, increased cremations, rapid and successive vertical dispositions, and disproportionate age or sex profiles. Yet critics frequently point to the absence of these patterns in the archaeological record of North America to support the notion that Indigenous peoples were thin on the ground in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They argue that if thousands of people died nearly simultaneously, we should see evidence of this population purge in the mortuary record. For the most part, however, such aberrant mortuary patterns have not been documented in North America (but see Warinner et al. 2012). The general absence of “epidemic cemeteries” does not disprove the occurrence of epidemic disease events, however. When smallpox swept through the Connecticut River valley in the winter of 1633–34, thousands of both Indigenous and European descent died. The epidemic was so devastating that Native communities were reportedly unable to bury their dead. Puritan colonizer William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Colony, wrote that disease triggered “such a mortality that of a thousand [who contracted smallpox] above nine and a half hundred of them died, and many of them did rot above ground from want of a burial” (Bradford 1952, 270). While mass burials are not common in the contact-era record of North America, Tatham Mound might be the exception that proves the rule. Located on Florida’s central Gulf Coast, 49

Matthew Liebmann

Tatham Mound is the most complete and well-documented mass burial from sixteenth-century North America (Hutchinson 2006, 2013). The mound was also located directly in the path of the Hernando de Soto entrada of 1539–43, one of the earliest and largest European expeditions into the interior Southeast. Excavated in 1985–86, Tatham contained 339 burials dating to the early contact period. European artifacts associated with the burials suggest that the interments most likely occurred between 1540–1550 (Hutchinson 2006, 169). Maybe the most poignant and enigmatic element of Tatham Mound is its stratigraphy. Directly underlying the contact-period burials, excavators discovered an oleaginous layer of black soil, 20 to 30 centimeters thick. The lens was formed, Hutchinson speculates, by the accumulation of triglycerides (human body fats) following the interment of a large number of people within a short time (Hutchinson 2013, 146–147). Was Tatham Mound formed in response to the epidemic envisaged by Cook (1998) and Dobyns (1983) to have swept through the Caribbean and Gulf Coast region following the 1518 smallpox outbreak in Hispaniola? Or one instigated by contact with the Soto entrada? Hutchinson thinks not. While the individuals may have perished contemporaneously, he notes that the post-contact mortuary practices enshrined at Tatham do not differ significantly from prehistoric patterns. So while the individuals buried at Tatham may have died in a single event or within a short period of time, they also may also have been buried in the 10 years following initial contacts as they died sequentially (Hutchinson 2013, 147). Hutchinson identifies a continuation of pre-contact mortuary practices, with orderly interment of individuals with grave goods, rather than bodies hastily piled into mass burials. While the role of disease in accelerating mortality at Tatham is open to debate, there is no doubt that the people interred there endured violence at the hands of Europeans. At least two individuals “had direct contact with the Spaniards and suffered fatal wounds from hacking metal weapons such as swords” (Hutchinson 2006, 168). This trauma serves as a brutal reminder that epidemic disease is not the only cause of mass burials. Violence and warfare (along with natural disasters and large-scale sacrifice) can also produce aberrant mass mortuary patterns.

Bioarchaeology Direct evidence of contact-period epidemic disease in the form of pathological skeletal lesions is scant in the skeletal record. Acute infectious diseases rarely leave their mark on victims’ bones. Short periods of infection and high virulence meant that new illnesses were likely to kill those affected prior to the development of skeletal lesions. However, the longer-term effects of colonialism did leave indelible marks on Indigenous bodies that can be studied by bioarchaeologists. Colonial policies reoriented Native subsistence, residence, labor, and mobility patterns, and these changes are evident in contact-period human remains (Murphy and Klaus 2017, 4). Over the past 30 years, bioarchaeological studies have documented the varied consequences that European colonialism inscribed onto Native American bodies. C. S. Larsen and his students’ studies of mission populations in Spanish La Florida have documented a surge in morbidity among post-contact populations, declining fertility, reductions in childhood growth rates, and dramatic increases in osteoarthritis due to increased labor demands among mission residents (e.g., Larsen 2001; Larsen et al. 2001; Stojanowski 2013). In the Southwest US, bioarchaeological studies have documented similar declining health outcomes and increasing nutritional stress among mission populations (Morgan 2010; Spielmann et al. 2009; Stodder and Martin 1992; Stodder et al. 2002), as have studies of human remains recovered from the Franciscan missions of California (Walker and Johnson 1992). Even among non-missionized peoples in California, bioarchaeological studies find indicators of substantially increased violence after European contact (Schwitalla et al. 2014). On the Great Plains, osteological data indicate high mortality rates in 50

Indigenous population decline

the early seventeenth century (presumably from introduced infectious disease), with particularly marked declines in female and juvenile health (e.g., Collison 2013; Owsley 1992). And in the Pacific Northwest, Cybulski (2013) documents increased post-contact violence and mortality in nearly 600 historic skeletons.

Genetics Over the past two decades, anthropological genetics has begun to contribute additional direct evidence to the investigation of Indigenous population histories in the Americas (Bolnick et al. 2016). The nuanced evolutionary history of Indigenous America complicates the analysis of Native American DNA, due to factors including founders’ effects, population migrations, severe bottlenecks, and gene-flow with non-Native populations after 1492. Of all of these, researchers speculate that post-Columbian population decline should have left a conspicuous mark in the genetic structure of Native America, regardless of whether the causes of that decline are primarily biological and evolutionary or social and contingent. Comparisons between pre-Columbian and modern mitochondrial genomes detect an echo of large-scale depopulation in the form of a genetic bottleneck (e.g., O’Fallon and FehrenSchmitz 2011; Lindo et al. 2016). That is, genetics indicate that Indigenous peoples “experienced a significant contraction in population size some 500 years before the present,” during which the effective number of females was reduced by as much as 50 percent (O’Fallon and Fehren-Schmitz 2011, 20444–20445). This suggests that the impact of European colonization upon Native Americans was both widespread and severe. Some of the most promising genetic research in recent years has focused on the identification of specific pathogens. Researchers have identified tuberculosis (Braun et al. 1998) and syphilis (Kolman et al. 1999) in pre-Columbian Indigenous remains, but attempts to identify diseases from the Eastern Hemisphere introduced to the Western through European colonialism have not met with the same successes. To date, researchers have not yet identified the presence of smallpox, measles, or most of the other ailments typically assumed to have caused widespread Native American population diminution. However, human remains from a colonial Mexican cemetery at the site of Teposcolula Yucundaa, which suffered repeated epidemics of cocoliztli (“pestilence” in Nahuatl) between 1544–50, have revealed a number of genetic insights. Excavations in the early 2000s unearthed 30 graves containing 56 individuals, revealing “the first clearly epidemic-associated sixteenth-century cemetery” discovered in Mexico (Warinner et al. 2012, 483). Two-thirds of the burials in the main plaza contained more than one individual, with as many as five bodies interred in a single grave. But it was the analysis of DNA extracted from the teeth of Teposcolula individuals that was most telling. While no one knows exactly what disease the reports of cocoliztli refers to, metagenomic analysis suggests that salmonella is the likely culprit at Teposcolula. In the teeth of 10 individuals from colonial Teposcolula researchers found DNA fragments of Salmonella enterica, a common food-borne illness. Salmonella can cause enteric fever, a serious bacterial infection also known as typhoid. Because the researchers found no Salmonella enterica in the teeth of five pre-Columbian individuals, they suggest that typhoid was introduced into Teposcolula by livestock or human carriers from Europe, who may have unintentionally contaminated local water or food sources (Vågene et al. 2018).

Settlement pattern studies and spatial analysis In addition to the study of skeletal data, mortuary patterns, and genetics, archaeologists have devoted considerable attention to the “indirect data” concerning these questions in recent years. 51

Matthew Liebmann

Many of these studies incorporate spatial analysis and the mapping of settlement patterns to resolve questions relating to the population history of early European-American colonialism. Ambiguity has plagued post-contact Native American demography for decades, in no small part because precontact demographic trends have been poorly understood. Yet the processes that led to population reduction after European contact throughout the Americas cannot be neatly separated from all that took place before. The assumption that pre-Columbian populations were stable or constantly increasing prior to the arrival of Europeans ignores a mountain of archaeological data. Archaeological studies of sixteenth-century Eastern North America provide a case in point (Milner 2015; Betts 2006; Jones 2014). Stephen Williams (1990) first observed that large population centers typical of Mississippian settlement were abandoned throughout the OhioMississippi confluence area by the late-fifteenth century, labelling this region the “Vacant Quarter.” Although originally greeted with skepticism, the Vacant Quarter hypothesis is widely accepted today (Milner 2015, 54; Cobb and Butler 2002), and the region originally identified by Williams has been expanded to include much of the Midwest and Upper South (Milner and Chaplin 2010). Recent research suggests that much of the American midcontinent was sparsely settled during this time. Fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century settlement patterns show communities scattered in widely distributed pockets, dispersed across the landscape as widely as possible, maintaining large unpopulated buffer areas between population centers (Milner and Chaplin 2010; Jones 2014; Milner 2015). When new diseases were introduced by European settler colonists, the spread of pathogens (particularly measles and smallpox) was likely impeded by the relative isolation of these communities, contrary to the assumptions of Dobyns and other High Counters. As George Milner observes, “Distance alone would have interfered with the spread of crowd diseases that are at the heart of the scenario that features frequent and widespread sixteenth century epidemics” (2015, 60). Across the lands known today as the United States and Canada, archaeologists have found no evidence to support the notion that pandemic disease events swept across the continent prior to direct, face-to-face contacts with Europeans. In fact, Dean Snow has documented increasing population among the Mohawk Iroquois in upstate New York during the mid-1500s. His studies (e.g. 1995) suggest that significant depopulation did not occur among the Haudenosaunee prior to direct and sustained encounters with non-Indigenous peoples. The same is true for the Wendat-Tionontate, whose population remained stable until 1633, when it suddenly declined precipitously by 60% or more (Warrick 2003). This suggests that epidemic disease did not strike the Northeast and eastern Great Lakes region until the early 1600s, nearly a century after the first recorded epidemics in the Caribbean and central Mexico. One of the most widely cited examples of Indigenous settlement pattern shifts after European contact comes from the Lower Mississippi Valley (Ramenofsky 1987). When the Soto entrada moved through this region in 1541, approximately 49 settlements of chiefly hierarchies lined the banks of major tributaries. But when the next recorded European contact occurred 132 years later in 1673, only seven settlements remained in the same region. The interior Southeast appears to have witnessed similar settlement shifts. There, European reconnaissance parties separated by as little as two decades recorded radically different landscapes of settlement. Where Soto’s party described densely populated chiefdoms with extensive fields, the Luna expedition of 1560 found abandoned settlements and fields full of weeds. Social organization disintegrated as the population collapsed, as evidenced by the end of mound construction, changes in burial practices, and the cessation of elaborate craft production (Ramenofsky 2017, 252–253). 52

Indigenous population decline

Eric Jones (2014) has used spatial analysis to model the relationships between the timing and location of epidemic disease events across North America. His results found no evidence of diseases spreading widely over short periods of time in the sixteenth century. Individual disease events afflicted local populations during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries but did not spread over long distances until the 1690s. This finding corresponds with regional studies of the Upper Mississippi Valley (Betts 2006), the Northeast Haudenosaunee (Snow 1995; Snow and Lanphear 1988) and the Great Lakes Wendat-Tionontate (Warrick 2003), which all document highly localized disease and depopulation events that did not occur simultaneously. Snow and Lanphear (1988) point to children as critical vectors of disease, suggesting that infectious crowd viruses such as smallpox took hold only after settler colonialism was well established. When these diseases did strike, archaeological signatures of depopulated sites suggest that they wreaked havoc and demographic devastation on these nations.

Case study: the Pueblo Southwest On the eve of their first contacts with Africans and Europeans, the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest lived in an estimated 75–100 different villages scattered throughout modern-day New Mexico and northeastern Arizona (Schroeder 1979). These settlements generally consisted of multistoried stone or adobe dwellings surrounding a central plaza. Pueblo villages varied in size from just a few rooms to numbers in the thousands, with multiple plazas and specialized ritual architecture (kivas). Although their residents shared broad similarities in architecture, material culture, subsistence, religion, and political organization, they differed in significant ways as well. They spoke seven different languages, each with multiple dialects. As a result, they did not think of themselves as a unitary ethnic group of “Pueblo Indians” prior to European contacts. Rather, sixteenth-century pueblos were loosely organized into settlement clusters based on shared ethnolinguistic identities (Adams and Duff 2004). While the people who came to be known as “Pueblo” had yet to be plagued with the ills associated with European colonization prior to 1539, neither did they live in a disease-free paradise (contra Dobyns 1983, 34). Pueblo peoples suffered from chronic malnutrition as well as vitamin and mineral deficiencies in the century before the Spaniards arrived, with anemia ubiquitous in late pre-Columbian times (Stodder and Martin 1992, 58–59; Stodder et al. 2002; Kellner et al. 2010, 82). Heath deficiencies were tied to the haunting specter of recurrent droughts, and populations declined in the late 1400s and early 1500s. Internecine violence appears to have tormented the Pueblos during this period as well, revealed through a record of burned villages, defensive site layouts, and population consolidation (LeBlanc 1999, 44–54; Lambert 2002, 219–224; Walker 2002, 167). Is it possible that new diseases entered the northern Rio Grande region prior to the Pueblos’ first face-to-face contacts with Europeans and Africans? Previous researchers have suggested that sickness spread northward into the Pueblos via longstanding trade routes that connected them to Mesoamerica. This theoretical diffusion of pathogens from Mesoamerica to the northern Rio Grande would have resulted in catastrophic population decline among the sixteenth-century Pueblos (Dobyns 1983; Lycett 1995; Reff 1991; Upham 1986). However, archaeological evidence suggests that robust Mesoamerican-Pueblo trade (as evidenced by the remains of macaws, cacao, shell, and copper artifacts found at ancestral Pueblo sites) began to fade at the end of the 1100s, and that those connections were no longer maintained by the 1500s. Furthermore, three decades of archaeological research have failed to uncover evidence for substantial Pueblo population losses in the sixteenth century, prior to the first direct contacts with Spaniards (Eckert 2005; Kulisheck 2005; Liebmann et al. 2016; Ramenofsky 1996; Stodder and Martin 1992). 53

Matthew Liebmann

First contacts, early entradas Pueblo people first met Afro-Eurasian migrants when an enslaved Moor named Esteban appeared (and was quickly dispatched) at a Zuni village. (“The first white man we met” say Pueblo people today, “was a Black man.”) News of Esteban’s “discovery” quickly made its way to Mexico City, and in 1540 an expedition of 375 Europeans, more than 1,300 Indigenous allies, over 1,000 horses, and several thousand head of livestock followed Esteban’s tracks to Zuni. The Coronado expedition, as it is known today, sacked and pillaged its way across the Pueblo world over the next two years, covering more than 4,000 miles but ultimately returning to Mexico with nothing to show for its efforts (Flint and Flint 2011). Archaeological evidence of the violence visited by the Coronado entrada upon the Pueblos appears in the form of burned structures, lead balls, broken daggers, chain mail, and crossbow bolts and arrowheads (Mathers 2013; Schmader 2017). For nearly four decades after Coronado’s expedition, no foreign invaders laid foot in the sands of New Mexico. Then in rapid succession between 1581–93, five additional Spanish exploratory parties entered the Pueblo world (Kulisheck 2005, 27). All were significantly smaller than the Coronado affair (between 12 and 170 members), and all spent a relatively short amount time among the Pueblos (from four to 12 months). Judging from archaeological evidence and Spanish observations, Pueblo populations appear to have maintained equilibrium between the Coronado entrada and the Spaniards’ return 40 years later. Widely cited sixteenth-century Pueblo population estimates were penned by Antonio Espejo, a well-documented fabulist and leader of the 1583 Espejo-Beltran expedition (Hammond and Rey 1966, 213–230). His exaggerated accounts of the Pueblo world (nine-story buildings!) were embellished in an attempt to impress the Spanish crown, including eye-bulging Pueblo population estimates (248,000) far in excess of those produced by entradas before (130,000) and after (60,000) his (Ramenofsky 2017, 249). However, the fact that Espejo and the other Spanish voyagers of the 1580s–1590s did not record a land of abandoned villages decimated by disease (as did the second wave of explorers into the interior Southeast) bolsters the argument that significant Pueblo depopulation did not occur during the sixteenth century, nor in the decades following first contacts (Kulisheck 2005, 32).

The colonial era The arrival of settler colonists under Juan de Oñate in 1598 marked the transition from Spanish exploration to colonization of the Pueblos. The initial colonizing force comprised 129 settlers, but just 60 foreign settlers remained on the ground for the first decade of the seventeenth century. The establishment of a permanent Spanish presence, albeit a small one, seems not to have triggered immediate population losses among the Pueblos. Tree-ring studies indicate that the Pueblos continued to harvest wood for use in new construction (as well as heating and cooking) through the first two decades of the seventeenth century (Liebmann 2006, 114; Liebmann et al. 2016). Settlement patterns remained intact across the colonial transition, with no indication of large-scale abandonment of Pueblo sites (Barrett 2002). Nor are any other typical indicators of depopulation documented in the archaeological record, such as mass graves or radical changes in age and sex profiles of cemeteries during the first decades of the seventeenth century (Eckert 2005). While Pueblo populations remained stable in the early 1600s, colonization did inaugurate radical changes to Pueblo life. From their earliest days in New Mexico, Oñate’s colonists extracted extortionate tribute from the Pueblos. The Spaniards sent “people out every month in 54

Indigenous population decline

various directions to bring maize from the pueblos. The feelings of the Natives against supplying it cannot be exaggerated . . . for they weep and cry out as if all their descendants were being killed” noted one colonial observer (Hammond and Rey 1953, 2:608–610). Writing in 1601, Franciscan friar Lope Izquierdo complained that during the winter . . . our men, with little consideration, took blankets away from the Indian women, leaving them naked and shivering with cold. Finding themselves naked and miserable, they embraced their children in their arms to warm and protect them. The Pueblos were left with “nothing but what they had on,” according to the friars (Hammond and Rey 1953, 2:210, 680). Within the first three years of colonization, Pueblo people were driven to survive on “tomatoes mixed with sand and dirt . . . as they had nothing else to live on.” By their own admission, the Spaniards had “taken away from them by force . . . what [the Pueblos] had saved up for many years” (Hammond and Rey 1953, 2:687). The increasingly harsh tribute demands levied by the Spaniards are reflected in the archaeological record of seventeenth-century mission pueblos. Katherine Spielmann’s investigations of pueblos in the Salinas District document an increase in antelope hunting at Pueblo Blanco during the early colonial era, likely related to Spanish demands for animal hides. The faunal assemblage of the nearby pueblo of Gran Quivira records a corresponding increase in hide processing during the same period, suggesting that the residents of that pueblo may have developed a specialization in tanning during this period in order to meet the escalating tribute demands of the colonial government (Spielmann et al. 2009, 107–112). In 1608, the first formal encomienda was awarded in colonial New Mexico (Anderson 1985), which rewarded favored colonists with the privilege of extracting tribute directly from Pueblo people, theoretically in exchange for educating neophytes in the ways of Christianity. The granting of encomienda carried with it the right of repartimiento, forcing Pueblo workers to provide labor for Spanish farms and estancias. The marks of these increased labor demands were inscribed indelibly on Pueblo bodies. Bioarchaeological studies document increased stress on the shoulders and arms of Pueblo men during the colonial period, markers consistent with an increase in burden-bearing. Older women appear to have been drawn into the labor pool in increasing numbers as well, judging from the musculoskeletal stress markers on their spines, hands, and forearms (Morgan 2010, 37; Spielmann et al. 2009, 118). Under the repartimiento system the Pueblos commonly complained of being forced to toil in Spanish fields during the weeks when they were most needed at home: planting and harvest season. This caused a decline in the amount of food gathered annually by the Pueblos, reducing their reserves to dangerously low levels (Liebmann 2012, 33–34). All these stresses had negative health consequences for the Pueblos, likely creating conditions that promoted the spread of epidemic diseases. From 1610–1630, Franciscan missionaries significantly expanded their efforts throughout the Pueblos. The number of priests ballooned from just three in 1601 to approximately 70 by mid-century, laboring in 43 missions (Norris 2000, 8–9). The newly established missions served as access points for the redistribution of foodstuffs, storing the spoils of taxation and reallocating them to sufficiently subservient Pueblo subjects. With their reserves exhausted, Pueblo peoples increasingly turned to the friars for access to maize (Hammond and Rey 1953, 2:610, 687). By establishing missions as centers of redistribution, the Franciscans gained valuable capital in the New Mexican political economy as well. During times of hardship, mission silos became the sole source of subsistence, with the clergy serving as the gatekeepers of the storehouses (Liebmann 2012, 35–36). 55

Matthew Liebmann

Pueblo population decline The archaeological record clearly demonstrates that as Franciscan missionaries expanded their efforts in the early seventeenth-century, Pueblo populations plummeted in parallel. The prelate of the Franciscan missionary field in New Mexico, Fray Alonso de Benavides, wrote that between 1621 and 1626 over half of the Jemez nation died, reducing their numbers from more than 6,000 to around 3,000 (Liebmann et al. 2016). Interestingly, Benavides attributed this depopulation not to epidemic disease, but to the “two plagues” of “hunger and war” (Morrow 1996, 29). Spanish missionary activities among the Pueblos included the policy of congregación among the Jemez—an attempt to move people living in dispersed communities into fewer settlements to facilitate proselytization and instruction in European farming methods (Anderson 1985). Although not carried out systematically throughout New Mexico, these efforts caused a significant shift in Jemez settlement patterns (Barrett 2002, 141; Rothschild 2003, 96–119). While the Jemez occupied 18 pueblos on the eve of contact in 1540, missionary efforts reduced them to two main villages in the 1620s, and just one by 1680 (Liebmann 2012; Liebmann et al. 2016). Whether congregación was a cause or result of depopulation is a matter of debate (Barrett 2002, 142). Certainly, the disruption caused by forced migration introduced additional tensions into the lives of the Jemez. And the collection of more people into fewer, compact mission settlements facilitated the spread of communicable diseases. Coincident with the expansion of the Franciscan missionary effort, New Mexico’s climate fluctuated with some of the most extreme conditions of the past millennium. The period from 1638–1650 was the single coldest period in the Southwest over the past 1,000 years. This anomalously frigid interval overlapped with the second-wettest period (1627–1653) in the past millennium (Van West et al. 2013, 88–89). The connections between these anomalous climatic conditions, epidemic disease, and Pueblo depopulation are not well understood. But it may be more than mere coincidence that the earliest unambiguous evidence for epidemic diseases among the Pueblos dates to 1638. Colonial documents record an epidemic in the late 1630s that reduced the total Pueblo population by as much as one-third, according to the Franciscan commissary general. In 1638 the friar wrote that the Pueblos’ total number declined from 60,000 to 40,000 “or a little less . . . to that extent in account of the very active prevalence during these years of smallpox and the sickness which the Mexicans called cocoliztli” (Hackett 1937, 3:108). Another report two years later refers to a “peste” that had spread among the Pueblos, killing 3,000 persons or more than 10 percent of the total Pueblo population at that time (Scholes 1936, 324). It’s unclear whether this epidemic was distinct from the cocoliztli outbreak reported in 1638, but Pueblo peoples indubitably suffered a significant loss of life due to disease in the late 1630s–early 1640s. Among the Jemez, this outbreak appears to have further depleted the already-reduced population to 1,860 by 1644 (Scholes 1929, 48). Similar losses of life are evinced in burial data from the Zuni mission of Hawikku, where Suzanne Eckert (2005) reports disease-induced population decline from 1630–1680. Her study of mortality and life frequency curve patterns suggests that the Zuni population was struck by epidemic disease only after a mission was established there in 1629. The combined pressures of forced migration, malnutrition, subsistence stress, disease, and violence caused Pueblo populations to plummet in the mid-to-late seventeenth century. This rapid depopulation is evident in the settlement patterns of Jemez pueblos, which were largely vacated between 1630–50 (Liebmann et al. 2016). The terrain surrounding these villages was denuded of trees during the period of occupation (between 1175–1630 ce) due to demands for wood used in construction, heating, and cooking. But trees began to regrow at these villages in the 1630s–1650s 56

Indigenous population decline

only after Pueblo people left these villages en masse, providing terminus ante quem dates for these sites. In addition to reforestation, Emily Jones’s (2016) investigations of diet breadth during the colonial era in New Mexico documents increased numbers of deer, elk, and antelope during this period. This rebound in large ungulate species likely resulted from the decreased hunting pressure and an increase in forested environments instigated by plunging Pueblo populations. In 1671 another outbreak struck the Pueblos, according to Fray Francisco de Ayeta (Hackett 1937, 302). The Pueblos attributed these losses to the return of the Kliwa—literally, the “refuse wind”—a spirit who visited smallpox and other diseases upon the Pueblos (Parsons 1936, 110). The specific cause of this epidemic remains unclear, but it reduced the total Pueblo population to less than 17,000 (Rothschild 2003, 62). Ultimately, the Jemez population tumbled 87% in the six decades between 1620 and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (Liebmann et al. 2016). The timing of this precipitous decline suggests that post-Columbian Indigenous population loss was not simply a matter of exposure to new germs. Pueblo peoples did not suffer massive depopulation in the early sixteenth century, as predicted by radical High Counter models. Nor did they succumb to new viruses after their first face-to-face contacts with foreign invaders from 1540–1600. It was only after the establishment of permanent colonial settlements and the expansion of Franciscan missionary efforts that Pueblo numbers began to decline (Liebmann et al. 2016; Eckert 2005). Thus, Pueblo population losses during the seventeenth century were significantly affected by Spanish colonial policies. Taxation, labor demands, food shortages, and forced resettlement set the stage for disease. Their susceptibility to epidemics was not entirely natural or innate, but rather a condition imposed on them through European settler colonialism.

Conclusion “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” wrote Rudyard Kipling, the bard of colonialist apologetics, in 1889. The verse could just as aptly apply to debates regarding Native American demography in the colonial period. Over the past 70 years these disputes have alternately roiled with fury and quietly simmered, but never have they cooled off entirely. Today, High Counters still square off against Low Counters, while bio-determinists duel with those favoring social and historically contingent explanations for Indigenous depopulation. The question for all, however, is not if Indigenous populations declined throughout the Americas in the wake of European colonialism, but why? Increasingly, archaeology provides tentative answers. When the first generation of High Counters published their influential accounts of post-contact population collapse in the midtwentieth century, they envisioned North America as a single epidemic region, inhabited by interchangeable peoples in a homogenous landscape where disease and depopulation spread rapidly and evenly. At that time, the state of archaeological research was such that that their position could be neither refuted nor supported. But since the Columbian quincentenary in 1992, archaeology has developed a more nuanced picture of the wake of European contact in North America. Through the study of mortuary patterns, bioarchaeology, genetics, settlement patterns, and spatial analysis, archaeologists have documented variation in Indigenous responses to colonialism, which produced differing results with respect to the timing, magnitude, and proximate causes of Native depopulation. Modern tales of Native American depopulation have separated the actions of colonizers from the fate of Native peoples. Yet the timing of depopulation events indicates that Native nations were not “born to die” (Cook 1998). While the introduction of foreign viruses may have been inevitable, 57

Matthew Liebmann

their consequences were not. The contours of Indigenous depopulation were shaped not only by disease but also by complex colonial factors including violence, forced labor, exorbitant taxation, malnutrition, and dislocation. Archaeology has shown that Native populations were not destined to be decimated but were made vulnerable through the policies, choices, and behaviors of colonists. High Counter theories popularized in the work of Diamond (1999) and Mann (2005) depict Indigenous depopulation as a unique, one-time event in human history, determined by the particularities of geography and genes. Yet this perspective creates an artificial barrier between the horrors of settler colonialism in the past and in the present. Today, health disparities continue to haunt Native Americans. Indigenous Americans still suffer mortality rates from viral and bacterial infections at approximately twice the rate of other populations, as well as double the national rate of infant mortality and deaths due to cardiovascular disease and three times as many deaths from diabetes (Jones 2015). Historical narratives about Native depopulation in the wake of European colonization inform how we think about Native health and inequality today. When we naturalize Native American susceptibility to disease as an inevitable consequence of biology and geography, we create an aura of inevitability that serves to absolve settler colonists, whether in the past or in the present. But for Native Americans living under colonial rule, heath disparities are a persistent fact of life. It was smallpox in the 1700s, tuberculosis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and diabetes and COVID-19 in the twenty-first (Jones 2003). Contemporary residents of North America, Indigenous and non-Native alike, would be well served to reflect on how this situation came to be and how the stories we tell about the earliest days of European settlement in the Americas continue to affect our perceptions of American Indian health today.

References cited Adams, Charles E., and Andrew Ian Duff, eds. 2004. The Protohistoric Pueblo World, A.D. 1275–1600. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Alchon, Suzanne Austin. 2003. A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Anderson, Allen H. 1985. “The Encomienda in New Mexico, 1598–1680.” New Mexico Historical Review 60 (4): 353–377. Barrett, Elinore M. 2002. “The Geography of the Rio Grande Pueblos in the Seventeenth Century.” Ethnohistory 49 (1): 123–169. Betts, Colin M. 2006. “Pots and Pox: The Identification of Protohistoric Epidemics in the Upper Mississippi Valley.” American Antiquity 71 (2): 233–259. Black, Francis L. 1992. “Why Did They Die?” Science 258 (5089): 1739–1741. Bolnick, Deborah A., Jennifer A. Raff, Lauren C. Springs, Austin W. Reynolds, and Aida T. Miró-Herrans. 2016. “Native American Genomics and Population Histories.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45 (1): 319–340. Borah, Woodrow. 1964. “America as Model: The Demographic Impact of European Expansion upon the Non-European World.” In XXXV Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, Mexico, 379–386. Mexico City: INAH. Boyd, Robert Thomas. 1999. The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774–1874. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Bradford, William. 1952. Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647: The Complete Text. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Braun, Mark, Della Collins Cook, and Susan Pfeiffer. 1998. “DNA From Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Complex Identified in North American, Pre-Columbian Human Skeletal Remains.” Journal of Archaeological Science 25 (3): 271–277. Cameron, Catherine M., Paul Kelton, and Alan C. Swedlund, eds. 2015. Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Cobb, Charles R., and Brian M. Butler. 2002. “The Vacant Quarter Revisited: Late Mississippian Abandonment of the Lower Ohio Valley.” American Antiquity 67 (4): 625–641.

58

Indigenous population decline Collison, Patrick J. 2013. “Bastions, Beads, Baptisms, and Burials: Evidence for Epidemic Disease among the Arikara and Their Ancestors.” Plains Anthropologist 58 (225): 9–43. Cook, Noble David. 1998. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650. Cambridge University Press. Cook, Sherburne Friend, and Woodrow Wilson Borah. 1960. The Indian Population of Central Mexico, 1531–1610. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cook, Sherburne Friend, and Woodrow Wilson Borah. 1971. Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean, Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cook, Sherburne Friend, and Lesley Byrd Simpson. 1948. The Population of Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crosby, Alfred W. 1972. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Company. Crosby, Alfred W. 1976. “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America.” The William and Mary Quarterly 33 (2): 289–299. Cybulski, Jerome S. 2013. “Conflict on the Northern Northwest Coast: 2,000 Years Plus of Bioarchaeological Evidence.” In The Routledge Handbook of the Bioarchaeology of Human Conflict, edited by Christopher Knüsel and Martin Smith, 461–498. New York: Routledge. Denevan, William M. 1992. “Native American Populations in 1492: Recent Research and a Revised Hemispheric Estimate.” In The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, edited by William M. Denevan, 17–37. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Diamond, Jared. 1999. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Dobyns, Henry F. 1963. “An Outline of Andean Epidemic History to 1720.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 37 (6): 493–515. Dobyns, Henry F. 1983. Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Eckert, Suzanne. 2005. “Zuni Demographic Structure, A.D. 1300–1680: A Case Study on Spanish Contact and Native Population Dynamics.” Kiva 70 (3): 207–226. Ferris, Neal. 2009. The Archaeology of Native-Lived Colonialism: Challenging History in the Great Lakes. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Flint, Richard, and Shirley Cushing Flint. 2011. The Latest Word from 1540: People, Places, and Portrayals of the Coronado Expedition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Gallivan, Martin D. 2016. The Powhatan Landscape: An Archaeological History of the Algonquian Chesapeake. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Hackett, Charles Wilson. 1937. Historical Documents Relating to New Mexico. Translated by Fanny R. Bandelier, Vol. 3. Carnegie Institution of Washington. Hämäläinen, Pekka. 2010. “The Politics of Grass: European Expansion, Ecological Change, and Indigenous Power in the Southwest Borderlands.” William & Mary Quarterly 67 (2): 173–208. Hammond, George Peter, and Agapito Rey. 1953. Don Juan de Oñate, Colonizer of New Mexico, 1595–1628, Vol. 2. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Hammond, George Peter, and Agapito Rey. 1966. The Rediscovery of New Mexico, 1580–1594: The Explorations of Chamuscado, Espejo, Castaño de Sosa, Morlete, and Leyva de Bonilla and Humaña, Vol. 3. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Hantman, Jeffrey L. 2001. “Monacan Archaeology of the Virginia Interior, AD 1400–1700.” In Societies in Eclipse: Archaeology of the Eastern Woodlands Indians, AD 1400–1700, edited by David S. Brose, Wesley C. Cowan, and Robert Mainfort, 107–124. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Henige, David P. 1998. Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Henige, David P. 2002. “Book Review: Suzanne Austin Alchon, A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective.” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 11 (2): 206–208. Henige, David P. 2008. “Recent Work and Prospects in American Indian Contact Population.” History Compass 6 (1): 183–206. Hull, Kathleen L. 2009. Pestilence and Persistence: Yosemite Indian Demography and Culture in Colonial California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hull, Kathleen L. 2015. “Quality of Life: Native Communities within and Beyond the Bounds of Colonial Institutions in California.” In Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America, edited by Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, and Alan C. Swedlund, 222–248. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

59

Matthew Liebmann Hurtado, Magdalena A., Kim R. Hill, Wilhelm Rosenblatt, Jacquelyn Bender, and Tom Scharmen. 2003. “Longitudinal Study of Tuberculosis Outcomes among Immunologically Naive Aché Natives of Paraguay.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 121 (2): 134–150. Hutchinson, Dale L. 2006. Tatham Mound and the Bioarchaeology of European Contact: Disease and Depopulation in Central Gulf Coast Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. Hutchinson, Dale L. 2013. “Entradas and Epidemics in the Sixteenth-Century Southeast.” In Native and Spanish New Worlds: Sixteenth-Century Entradas in the American Southwest and Southeast, edited by Clay Mathers, Jeffrey Mitchem, and Charles M. Haecker, 140–151. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Hutchinson, Dale L. 2016. Disease and Discrimination: Poverty and Pestilence in Colonial Atlantic America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Jones, David S. 2003. “Virgin Soils Revisited.” The William and Mary Quarterly 60 (4): 703–742. Jones, David S. 2015. “Death, Uncertainty, and Rhetoric.” In Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America, edited by Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, and Alan C. Swedlund, 16–49. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Jones, Emily Lena. 2016. “Changing Landscapes of Early Colonial New Mexico: Demography, Rebound, and Zooarchaeology.” In Exploring Cause and Explanation: Historical Ecology, Demography, and Movement in the American Southwest, edited by Cynthia L. Herhahn and Ann F. Ramenofsky, 73–92. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Jones, Eric E. 2014. “Spatiotemporal Analysis of Old World Diseases in North America, A.D. 1519–1807.” American Antiquity 79 (3): 487–506. Kellner, Corina M., Margaret J. Schoeninger, Katherine A. Spielmann, and Katherine Moore. 2010. “Stable Isotope Data Show Temporal Stability in Diet at Pecos Pueblo and Diet Variation among Southwest Pueblos.” In Pecos Pueblo Revisited: The Biological and Social Context, edited by Michéle E. Morgan, 79–92. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kolman, Connie J., Arturo Centurion-Lara, Sheila A. Lukehart, Douglas W. Owsley, and Noreen Tuross. 1999. “Identification of Treponema Pallidum Subspecies Pallidum in a 200-Year-Old Skeletal Specimen.” The Journal of Infectious Diseases 180 (6): 2060–2063. Kroeber, Alfred Louis. 1939. Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kulisheck, Jeremy. 2005. “The Archaeology of Pueblo Population Change on the Jemez Plateau, A.D. 1200 to 1700: The Effects of Spanish Contact and Conquest.” PhD Dissertation, Southern Methodist University. Kulisheck, Jeremy, and Ann F. Ramenofsky. 2013. “Regarding Sixteenth-Century Native Population Change in the Northern Southwest.” In Native and Spanish New Worlds: Sixteenth-Century Entradas in the American Southwest and Southeast, edited by Clay Mathers, Jeffrey Mitchem, and Charles M. Haecker, 123–139. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Kunitz, Stephen J. 1996. Disease and Social Diversity: The European Impact on the Health of Non-Europeans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lambert, Patricia M. 2002. “The Archaeology of War: A North American Perspective.” Journal of Archaeological Research 10 (3): 207–241. Larsen, Clark Spencer. 1994. “In the Wake of Columbus: Native Population Biology in the Postcontact Americas.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 37 (19): 109–154. Larsen, Clark Spencer, ed. 2001. Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida: The Impact of Colonialism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Larsen, Clark Spencer, Mark C. Griffin, Dale L. Hutchinson, Vivian E. Noble, Lynette Norr, Robert F. Pastor, Christopher B. Ruff, Katherine F. Russell, Margaret J. Schoeninger, and Michael Schultz. 2001. “Frontiers of Contact: Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida.” Journal of World Prehistory 15 (1): 69–123. LeBlanc, Steven A. 1999. Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Liebmann, Matthew J. 2006. “‘Burn the Churches, Break up the Bells’: The Archaeology of the Pueblo Revolt Revitalization Movement in New Mexico, AD 1680–1696.” PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Liebmann, Matthew J. 2012. Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in 17th Century New Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Liebmann, Matthew J., Joshua Farella, Christopher I. Roos, Adam Stack, Sarah Martini, and Thomas W. Swetnam. 2016. “Native American Depopulation, Reforestation, and Fire Regimes in the Southwest United States, 1492–1900 CE.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (6): 696–704.

60

Indigenous population decline Lindo, John, Emilia Huerta-Sánchez, Shigeki Nakagome, Morten Rasmussen, Barbara Petzelt, Joycelynn Mitchell, Jerome S. Cybulski, Eske Willerslev, Michael DeGiorgio, and Ripan S. Malhi. 2016. “A Time Transect of Exomes from a Native American Population before and after European Contact.” Nature Communications 7 (1): 1–11. Livi-Bacci, Massimo. 2006. “The Depopulation of Hispanic America after the Conquest.” Population and Development Review 32 (2): 199–232. Livi-Bacci, Massimo. 2011. “The Demise of the American Indios.” Population and Development Review 37 (1): 161–165. Lovell, George W. 1992. “‘Heavy Shadows and Black Night’: Disease and Depopulation in Colonial Spanish America.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (3): 426–443. Lycett, Mark Thomas. 1995. “Archaeological Implications of European Contact: Demography, Settlement, and Land Use in the Middle Rio Grande Valley, New Mexico.” PhD Dissertation, University of New Mexico. Madley, Benjamin. 2015. “Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods.” The American Historical Review 120 (1): 98–139. Mann, Charles C. 2005. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Knopf. Mathers, Clay. 2013. “Contest and Violence on the Northern Borderlands Frontier. Patterns of NativeEuropean Conflict in the Sixteenth-Century Southwest.” In Native and Spanish New Worlds: SixteenthCentury Entradas in the American Southwest and Southeast, edited by Clay Mathers, Jeffrey Mitchem, and Charles M. Haecker, 225–255. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Meggers, Betty J. 1992. “Prehistoric Population Density in the Amazon Basin.” In Disease and Demography in the Americas, edited by John Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker, 197–205. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Milner, George R. 2015. “Population Decline and Culture Change in the American Midcontinent.” In Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America, edited by Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, and Alan C. Swedlund, 50–73. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Milner, George R., and George Chaplin. 2010. “Eastern North American Population at ca. A.D. 1500.” American Antiquity 75 (4): 707–726. Mooney, James. 1910. “Population.” In Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, edited by F. W. Hodge, 286–287. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 30, Part 2. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Morgan, Michéle E. 2010. “A Reassessment of the Human Remains from the Upper Pecos Valley Formerly Curated at the Peabody Museum.” In Pecos Pueblo Revisited: The Biological and Social Context, edited by Michéle E. Morgan, 27–41. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morrow, Baker H. 1996. A Harvest of Reluctant Souls: Fray Alonso de Benavides’s History of New Mexico, 1630. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Murphy, Melissa S., and Haagen D. Klaus. 2017. “Transcending Conquest: Bioarchaeological Perspectives on Conquest and Culture Contact for the Twenty-First Century.” In Colonized Bodies, Worlds Transformed: Towards a Global Bioarchaeology of Contact and Colonialism, edited by Melissa S. Murphy and Haagen D. Klaus, 1–40. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Newson, Linda A. 1985. “Indian Population Patterns in Colonial Spanish America.” Latin American Research Review 20 (3): 41–74. Norris, Jim. 2000. “After the Year Eighty”: The Demise of Franciscan Power in Spanish New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. O’Fallon, Brendan D., and Lars Fehren-Schmitz. 2011. “Native Americans Experienced a Strong Population Bottleneck Coincident with European Contact.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (51): 20444–20448. Owsley, Douglas W. 1992. “Demography of Prehistoric and Early Historic Northern Plains Populations.” In Disease and Demography in the Americas, edited by John Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker, 75–86. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Parsons, Elsie Clews. 1936. Taos Pueblo. Menasha, WI: George Banta Publishing Company. Perttula, Timothy K. 1992. “The Caddo Nation”: Archaeological and Ethnohistoric Perspectives. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ramenofsky, Ann F. 1987. Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Ramenofsky, Ann F. 1996. “The Problem of Introduced Infectious Diseases in New Mexico: A.D. 1540– 1680.” Journal of Anthropological Research 52 (2): 161–184.

61

Matthew Liebmann Ramenofsky, Ann F. 2017. “On the Question of Protohistoric Pueblo Population Change.” In The Archaeology and History of Pueblo San Marcos: Change and Stability, edited by Ann F. Ramenofsky and Kari L. Schleher, 247–258. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Reff, Daniel T. 1991. Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518–1764. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Riley, James C. 2010. “Smallpox and American Indians Revisited.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 65 (4): 445–477. Rivet, Paul. 1924. “Langues Américaines, III.” In Les Langues Du Monde, edited by A. Meillet and M. Cohen, 639–712. Paris: É. Champion. Rothschild, Nan A. 2003. Colonial Encounters in a Native American Landscape: The Dutch and Spanish in the New World. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Sauer, Carl O. 1941. Aboriginal Population of Northwestern Mexico. Ibero-Americana 10. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schmader, Matthew F. 2017. “The Peace That Was Granted Had Not Been Kept.” In New Mexico and the Pimería Alta, edited by John Douglass and William Graves, 49–74. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Scholes, France V. 1929. “Documents for the History of the New Mexico Missions in the Seventeenth Century.” New Mexico Historical Review 4 (1): 45–58. Scholes, France V. 1936. “Church and State in New Mexico, 1610–1650.” New Mexico Historical Review 11 (4): 297–349. Schroeder, Albert H. 1979. “Pueblos Abandoned in Historic Times.” In Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 9, Southwest, edited by Alfonso Ortiz, 236–254. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Schwitalla, Al W., Terry L. Jones, Marin A. Pilloud, Brian F. Codding, and Randy S. Wiberg. 2014. “Violence among Foragers: The Bioarchaeological Record from Central California.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 33: 66–83. Snow, Dean R. 1995. “Microchronology and Demographic Evidence Relating to the Size of PreColumbian North American Indian Populations.” Science 268 (5217): 1601–1604. Snow, Dean R., and Kim M. Lanphear. 1988. “European Contact and Indian Depopulation in the Northeast: The Timing of the First Epidemics.” Ethnohistory 35 (1): 15–33. Spielmann, Katherine A., Tiffany Clark, Diane Hawkey, Katharine Rainey, and Suzanne K. Fish. 2009. “‘. . . being Weary, They Had Rebelled’: Pueblo Subsistence and Labor under Spanish Colonialism.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 28: 102–125. Stannard, David E. 1993. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stodder, Ann L. W., and Debra L. Martin. 1992. “Health and Disease in the Southwest before and after Spanish Contact.” In Disease and Demography in the Americas, edited by John Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker, 55–73. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Stodder, Ann L. W., Debra L. Martin, Alan Goodman, and Daniel R. H. Reff. 2002. “Biological Stress and Cultural Longevity in the American Southwest.” In The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere, edited by R. Steckel and J. Rose, 481–505. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stojanowski, Christopher M. 2013. Mission Cemeteries, Mission Peoples: Historical and Evolutionary Dimensions of Intracemetery Bioarchaeology in Spanish Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Thornton, Russell. 2000. “Population History of Native North Americans.” In Population History of North America, edited by Michael Haines and Richard Steckel, 9–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ubelaker, Douglas H. 1976. “Prehistoric New World Population Size: Historical Review and Current Appraisal of North American Estimates.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 45 (3): 661–665. Ubelaker, Douglas H. 2006. “Population Size, Contact to Nadir.” In Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 3, Environment, Origins, and Population, edited by Douglas H. Ubelaker, 694–701. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Upham, Steadman. 1986. “Smallpox and Climate in the American Southwest.” American Anthropologist 88 (1): 115–128. Van West, Carla R., Thomas C. Windes, Frances Levine, Henri D. Grissino-Mayer, and Matthew W. Salzer. 2013. “The Role of Climate in Early Spanish-Native American Interactions in the US Southwest.” In Native and Spanish New Worlds: Sixteenth-Century Entradas in the American Southwest and Southeast, edited by Clay Mathers, Jeffrey M. Mitchem, and Charles M. Haecker, 81–98. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

62

Indigenous population decline Vågene, Åshild J., Alexander Herbig, Michael G. Campana, Nelly M. Robles García, Christina Warinner, Susanna Sabin, Maria A. Spyrou, et al. 2018. “Salmonella Enterica Genomes from Victims of a Major Sixteenth-Century Epidemic in Mexico.” Nature Ecology & Evolution 2 (3): 520–528. Walker, Phillip L., and John R. Johnson. 1992. “Effects of Contact on the Chumash Indians.” In Disease and Demography of the Americas, edited by John Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker, 127–139. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Walker, William H. 2002. “Stratigraphy and Practical Reason.” American Anthropologist 104 (1): 159–177. Warinner, Christina, Nelly Robles García, Ronald Spores, and Noreen Tuross. 2012. “Disease, Demography, and Diet in Early Colonial New Spain: Investigation of a Sixteenth-Century Mixtec Cemetery at Teposcolula Yucundaa.” Latin American Antiquity 23 (4): 467–489. Warrick, Gary. 2003. “European Infectious Disease and Depopulation of the Wendat-Tionontate (HuronPetun).” World Archaeology 35 (2): 258–275. Wesson, Cameron B., and Mark A. Rees. 2002. “Protohistory and Archaeology: An Overview.” In Between Contacts and Colonies: Archaeological Perspectives on the Protohistoric Southeast, edited by Cameron B. Wesson and Mark A. Rees, 1–11. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Williams, Stephen. 1990. “The Vacant Quarter and Other Late Events in the Lower Valley.” In Temples and Towns Along the Mississippi River, edited by David H. Dye and Cheryl A. Cox, 170–180. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

63

5 CLIMATE AND COLONIALISM IN THE AMERICAS Comparing exemplary cases Dennis B. Blanton

Introduction When Europeans began to broaden and intensify their colonialist-mercantilist enterprises in the sixteenth century, they were already operating under an extractive pattern that presaged global capitalism. And at the time western nations forced their way into the Americas, the Indigenous populations there were thriving under their own highly evolved systems. Today we recognize quite well the wrenching nature and the enduring legacies of the ensuing entanglements. The intersection of alien and opposed cultural systems are ingredients for discord. The question before us here concerns the extent to which a third, relatively fixed and ancient, system external to human developments contributed to the post-contact morass. I am referring to the matter of climate and its effects, the human-induced influences of the recent era notwithstanding (IPCC 2014; PAGES 2k Consortium 2013). Though independent of cultural processes in its actual operation, climate conditions have forever asserted influence over them, establishing limiting conditions that define, in significant ways, what it means for a culture to be sustainable. Typically, traditional cultural systems worldwide were the product of long, incremental calibrations, reasonably adaptive and extendable, that accrued in accord with sophisticated knowledge of the rhythms of the natural milieu. Thus, a culture that is sustainable is one effectively adapted to a given set of prevailing conditions, and one that also develops and maintains mechanisms that allow it to be fluid in the face of novel conditions. Already it will be apparent how complex the question is. To explore the juncture of opposing cultural systems in the context of a sometimes fluid historical climate requires command of many disparate factors. The broadest two of them are arguably the most manageable, those of the cultural and climatic patterns that prevail, for example, on a continental or regional scale. At that macro level, both kinds of systems are prone mainly to low-frequency shifts in character. To be sure, they are subject to episodic change, but relatively speaking, substantive alterations occur at decadal intervals, at best. Less tractable are the finer-grained perturbations in those same systems. Climate, defined as the atmospheric conditions prevailing over extended periods of time, will at times express itself in seemingly chaotic ways over much shorter intervals. Generally, we know those briefer conditions as “weather,” but occasionally a prevailing pattern will oscillate to produce outwardly anomalous, localized conditions that can persist on the order of a few seasons or years. 64

Climate and colonialism in the Americas

A prime example is the effects of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) (Allan 2000; Gergis and Fowler 2006; Ropelewski and Halpert 1986). Both weather and high-frequency climate phenomena may have meaningful and lasting effects on human affairs, but the ambiguities of our retrospective, historical perspective make them less apparent today. In the same vein, we must try to confront the complexity inherent to cultural systems, such as the operation of agency, the short-term, agenda-driven actions pursued by interest groups or individuals. These acts, events, and negotiations are considerably more difficult to track in the historical record than is the general ebb and flow of a dominant pattern, yet they, too, can have enduring consequences. My goal in this chapter is to illustrate through historical cases how cultural change may occur at the more granular scale within this triadic context of complexity. We can agree that change, generally imagined, is perhaps the most predictable of constants. Bearing that in mind, the focus here is on how particular variables influence the tempo and the character of ongoing cultural fluidity. I will be arguing, ultimately, that it is mainly cultural factors that steer the direction of change rather than the operation of the external climate system—even in its most anomalous states. And most relevant for this volume, I will maintain it was the stresses of the colonial experience in the Indigenous world, more than climatic anomalies, that coalesced into the most daunting challenges. The extent to which a Native population might successfully respond to the colonial experience was far less about the imposition of difficult climatic conditions as it was the overall resilience of the prevailing culture. And to be sure, my belief is that this kind of understanding has relevance for our own climate challenges today.

Source material A word is in order about the essential sources one must consult to evaluate such questions. Archaeology is, of course, among them, and it figures prominently for two reasons. First, it provides the longest perspective on cultural history of any source, allowing us to explore the nature of conditions prior to first contact with Europeans. Sufficient archaeological investigation has been done in enough places across the Americas that we have solid command of myriad dimensions of culture, including social-political organization, economic structures, demographic patterns, and belief systems, among others. It is also important because, much of the time, it yields the most thorough and least biased perspective on the Indigenous world, especially in the hazy, earliest stages of the colonial era. Vital augmentation of the archaeological record comes from archival and documentary sources. Though such sources are limited to the post-contact period, and even though they are almost always colored by prejudice and selective commentary, they remain vital records of intercultural encounters. Prominent among them are a variety of first-person, period accounts, official correspondences and documents, recollections, and even maps and illustrations. Some of the pioneering reconstructions of climate-related phenomena using such sources derive from the research of Quinn and Neal (1992) and Ortlieb (2000) in South America, later to be extended in places like Mexico (Mendoza et al. 2005, 2006). Lastly, it is necessary to consult an equally diverse range of sources that, in combination, allow for historical reconstruction of climatic conditions and the chronicling of extreme events. They include tree rings, contents of ice and sediment cores, and historical records. Done well, it has proven possible, throughout the Americas, to develop multi-century records of a host of climate variables, such as precipitation, temperature, and ENSO. Such reconstructions have their own intrinsic limitations, but at the same time, rigorous scientific practice can yield a high level of 65

Dennis B. Blanton

confidence in them (Acuna-Soto et al. 2002; Bradley and Jones 1995; Briffa et al. 1998; Cook et al. 2002; Cook and Krusic 2004; Cook et al. 1999; Crowley 2000; deMenocal 2001; Durkee et al. 2007; Feng et al. 2008; Hoggarth et al. 2017; Mann et al. 1998; Ortlieb 2000; Quinn and Neal 1992; Seager et al. 2009; Shimada et al. 1991; Stahle and Cleaveland 1992; Stahle et al. 1988; Stahle et al. 1998; Stahle et al. 2011).

Case study setting I have chosen to illustrate wider patterns in the Americas with cases from the region I know best, the American Southeast, and specifically the south Atlantic coastal plain (Figure 5.1). Arguably, the historical experiences there speak to the more universal experience in the hemisphere for two reasons. First, the region is defined by a temperate, well-watered environment that, other peculiar extremes notwithstanding, constitutes a relatively benign setting for human existence. It provides, then, a context especially well-suited for gauging the extent to which climatic fluctuations have real, measurable effects on societies. To the point, the Southeast is not a marginal environment, like the American Southwest can be, in which human societies, and especially those with agricultural economies, exist in perpetual precariousness, thereby guaranteeing societal consequences in the face of climatic downturn. Not to mention, the case of drought-induced challenges in the American Southwest are already as well or better known than anywhere else (Blinman 2008; Cook et al. 2007; Cook et al. 2004; Dean 2000). The second reason the Southeast is apropos of the hemispheric record is the sustained nature of the European entanglement. In La Florida, for example, Indigenous populations endured

Jamestown / Ajacan Roanoke

Santa Elena Santa Catalina de Guale St. Augustine

Gulf of Mexico 200 km

Figure 5.1 Map of southeastern United States with locations of key sites. Source: Author’s creation.

66

Atlantic Ocean

Climate and colonialism in the Americas

three centuries of European pressures in one form or another. The same is true in the English colonial setting of the Middle Atlantic, where Natives were forced to adjust to two centuries of contact. Thus, in each instance, we are provided virtual laboratories for the examination of extended interaction and the implications of it on both sides of the equation. Because my explicit focus is on the potential role of climate in the colonial setting, I will be emphasizing only the relevant aspects of the historical contexts of the two cases I have chosen to examine. Readers are referred to the voluminous and excellent body of historical and archaeological scholarship surrounding them both. Anticipating the comparative treatment of the Chesapeake and Florida cases that follows, it may be useful to set the table with some key facts. The first is that the two colonial enterprises, not surprisingly, are defined by differences more than similarities and that the contrasts extend to matters as basic as economic strategy, immigration policy, and religious rationalizations. It is only when those factors are considered in the aggregate that we approach true understanding. But where they were most alike, and where they were both most challenged by climatic perturbations, was in expressed reliance on Native domestic crops—most of all, maize. The timing and nature of the colonial demands for sustenance differed across each case, to be sure, but the universal result was hardship. Likewise, there were certain universal tendencies among the Indigenous populations of the region beyond coping with depopulation and territorial encroachments. Foremost among them was a palpable tension between pursuing policies of outright resistance versus manipulation of the new cultural landscape. Native leadership, for example, often employed shrewd strategies for parlaying exchange relations and information flows to bolster status (Deagan 1985; Francis and Kole 2011; Hann 1996; Milanich 1994; Saunders 2000; Worth 1998). Indeed, it was intentional action of this nature that contributed to the varying complexions of entanglement and resilience.

Lessons from La Florida The region originally known to Spain as La Florida was a vast, ill-defined territory ambitiously extending from peninsular Florida to the Chesapeake and from the Atlantic Ocean far to the west (Milanich 1990). The majority of it remained under Spanish control for nearly two centuries (1513–ca. 1700), though not without challenges from competing European states. Spain’s regional, colonial agenda evolved over that long period and beyond, and with it, so did the character of the cultural entanglements (Deagan 1983, 1985, 1990; Worth 2013). Strategic, imperialist aims remained an enduring impetus for maintaining a presence in the region, but the nature of sanctioned activities transitioned rather quickly from relatively disconnected ventures to better-coordinated yet modest commitments. Through the 1560s, activity consisted largely of self-funded explorations and colonizing attempts, undertaken often for the purpose of resource extraction and intelligence-gathering. Later, and influenced by low returns or outright failures, the official stance evolved into conservative maintenance of a regional capital and a Catholic mission system that was intimately connected to it (Hann 1996; Milanich 1994; Worth 2013). In effect, it was a policy built around hard-earned perceptions of sustainability, especially in view of the strains of managing a huge intercontinental empire. That small-footprint, low-investment model depended on American Indian food and labor to a high degree, equal or greater to the pattern elsewhere in the realm (Bushnell 1994; Deagan 1990; Jones 1978; Worth 2013). And in time, it was largely the purview of the missions to pacify and adapt the Natives to that scheme. Indigenous people were expected to fuel the regional system under an encomienda labor system and through tribute policies (Bushnell 1994; Deagan 1990). Operationalization of the strategy relied on aggregation of surviving Natives by the related policy of reducción, and it required clever cultivation of Indigenous leaders rather than the 67

Dennis B. Blanton

unseating of them (Deagan 1990; Worth 2013). Simultaneously, those same chiefs were working to influence the situation for their own purposes (Francis and Kole 2011; Worth 1998). The Natives never gave up full authority to colonial powers. The long-game Spanish strategy was also borne of a pragmatism steeped in a “landscape learning” process (Blanton 2013). With time, overblown appraisals of the lush region were tempered with knowledge that the local climate had a mercurial character warranting respect. That arrangement vis-à-vis the Indigenous population carried inherent vulnerabilities for the Spanish. Ostensibly, it was a somewhat symbiotic relationship, but in practice it was never without a degree of Spanish dependence on Native cooperation. Most of the time the Natives held the advantage of numbers in spite of massive depopulation, and they still pursued a proven, nimble subsistence pattern that blended agriculture with targeted foraging (Thomas 2008). La Florida’s protracted colonial history is largely one of complex political maneuvering on each side of the cultural divide. It was effectively a two-way process of acculturation that might have continued even longer were it not for other challenges to Spain’s claims, especially from the English (Deagan 1985). Climatically speaking, La Florida presented distinct challenges to European venturers. On one hand, its lushness inspired appraisals conjuring a virtual Garden of Eden, but it could also be a forbidding place in the warmer and stormier seasons, as some see it today (Saunders 2002). This was especially true for the earliest trekkers, like Hernando de Soto, whose entrada members cursed the miry and dense wetlands that so define large parts of the region (Hudson 1997; Worth 1993, 269). But those challenges, along with seasonally high water, are more symptomatic of the basic nature of the lower Southeastern ecosphere as they are anomalous deviation of the climate. In the case of Soto, it was wintertime conditions of extreme cold and frozen precipitation that seem to have posed the greatest challenge (Blanton 2013). It was not until later that genuine climatic extremes exerted meaningful pressure on the Spanish colonial enterprise in La Florida. After the 1560s, when prevailing activity shifted from periodic exploration to more permanent settlements, enclaves were built up at places on the coastal fringe and not far inland. It is no coincidence that this was precisely when the region experienced some of its greatest turmoil. Small, sedentary communities in an unfamiliar setting were far more vulnerable than movable exploring parties. Best documented of these climate-driven scenarios are two relatively intense drought periods, one between about 1564–1571 and the other from 1585–1595 (Blanton 2013). We know of them from two sources: tree rings and first-person accounts. Thanks largely to the work of David Stahle and his colleagues, a solid, dendroclimatological reconstruction of precipitation history is available for the southern Atlantic coastal plain, especially in South Carolina and Georgia (Anderson et al. 1995; Blanton and Thomas 2008; Burnett and Murray 1993; Stahle and Cleaveland 1992). Extending back to about 800 ce, it charts a record of average annual rainfall, demonstrating that significant deviations from the norm have not been unusual. Indeed, David Anderson (1994, 1996) applied the same data to explain observations about the ebb and flow of prehistoric societies in the area. As it happens, however, the downturn in rainfall in the late sixteenth century rivaled or exceeded any other in the full reconstruction. These southern Atlantic dry spells were a local expression of a continental-scale phenomenon popularly described as a megadrought (Blanton 2004; Cook et al. 2009; Stahle et al. 2000). Native populations across North America were simultaneously contending with the rain deficit. Well known, for example, is the difficult circumstances during the late sixteenth century of groups in the American Southwest (Blinman 2008; Woodhouse et al. 2010; Dean 2000; Van West et al. 2013).

68

Climate and colonialism in the Americas

One finds independent corroboration of these conditions in the documentary record. It is useful to point out that while it is in the comments of colonialist Spaniards that we discover explicit accounts of drought, it is obvious they were heavily dependent upon their American Indian informants for true perspective. A couple of decades of on-the-ground experience was still not sufficient for the Europeans to recognize normal from abnormal. Making this point, the commentary is less about the conditions themselves as it is the dangerous consequence of them: food shortage. In one exemplary passage, we are told, “It had not rained for eight months in this country, and their corn fields and farming lands were all dry, whereat they were all sad, on account of the little food they had” (Solís de Merás 1964, 170–171). An aspect of these drought-induced comments that has fascinated modern day scholars is the somewhat perverse opportunity it afforded the Spanish to manipulate the local political scene. Persistent dryness in the 1560s caused suffering among both Natives and Spaniards, and appeals for help were made in both directions. The Spanish, seeking to turn the situation to their advantage, made the bold claim that the drought was heavenly retribution for Native misdeeds. Solís de Merás (1964, 170–171) reported further that the regional governor, Menendez, “told them that God was angry . . . and would not give him water” because the local chief was at war with another chief the Spanish were trying to ingratiate. Tropical storms were another climate-related factor that plagued early colonial enterprises. Period records are rife with accounts of hurricanes and other severe storms that regularly devastated shipping and caused major communities to flood (Fraser 2006). Early on, storms redirected and hobbled multiple ventures, such as those of Panfilo Narvaez in 1528 (Hoffman 1994; Marrinan et al. 1990) and Tristan de Luna y Arellano in 1559–1560 (Hudson 1990; Hudson et al. 1991; Priestley 2010). In the case of the regional capital, St. Augustine, relentless storm flooding was cause to move its location to higher ground in 1571 (Deagan 1983; Sandrik and Landsea 2003). In fact, it was the ravages of storms on Gulf Stream shipping, in addition to piracy, that was a leading justification for the garrisoned harbor at St. Augustine. Yet the same storms sometimes proved beneficial, as the one in 1565 was when it interfered with a French fleet set on attacking St. Augustine (Barnes 1998; Ludlum 1963; Lyon 1995; Sandrik and Landsea 2003). It bears mention that there is no strong consensus around the question of whether sixteenthand seventeenth-century storminess was anomalous. Hurricane history does not reveal periodicity that can confidently be tied to well-recognized, robust patterns of climate oscillation. However, to the extent available records are representative of actual conditions, those centuries do seem to have experienced high tropical storm activity (Blanton 2013). In sum, climate and weather contributed to the direction and nature of colonial relations in La Florida, but never was it, alone, a deciding factor. In view of these and other cases of drought and storm, climate acted as a catalyst for adjustment rather than a factor of demise. Indeed, one testament to this pattern of resiliency was development of a creolized culture more synchronous with the region’s perceived limitations, both climatic and cultural (Deagan 1983; Hoffman 1997).

Lessons from the lower Chesapeake It was Spain’s rival, England, that successfully established a colony in the lower Chesapeake. Failure of the Spanish Jesuit Ajacan mission in 1570 left the door ajar, and by 1585 the English had organized an earnest colonizing effort just to the south on the Outer Banks. Dramatized tellings of the “Lost Colony” story have raised awareness of that difficult prologue to Jamestown’s eventual success. But the Roanoke attempt was not without value for the English, since, as a veritable teaching moment, it honed their strategy for colonization, revealing better over

69

Dennis B. Blanton

worse areas for settlement, how local Natives were prone to operate, and something about the environment (Noel Hume 1994; Quinn 1991). In effect, we see in this case another process of colonialist adaptation, even as lurching and painful as it was. The adaptive strategy here stood in fairly stark contrast to the one Spain pursued farther south. The explicit aim was full-blown colonization propelled by early capitalist ambitions (Blanton 2003). Under the initial banner of the Virginia Company, enterprising principals sought to reap the profits of natural resource extraction, agriculture, and industry, propped up by massive and relentless immigration. There was no meaningful place in that picture for the Indigenous population beyond its cooperation, if not servile participation (Fausz 1977; Mallios 2006). Native resistance to those expectations was readily met with aggression, often violent in nature. Ultimately, the English program developed into a plantation system requiring grand-scale exploitation of land and labor, and that, in turn, required Native relocations and institutionalization of a range of inequities (McCusker and Menard 1991). At first blush, the Chesapeake, like La Florida, did not present to colonizers an environment that could be considered desolate. To the contrary, this temperate region of vast estuaries is celebrated as one of the most productive ecological hotspots in the world (Curtin et al. 2001). That fact alone is reason enough to baffle students of the area’s colonial history, who have dredged up seemingly endless accounts of misery induced by starvation and disease. Explanations for the tragic conditions and events, especially in the earliest years, have run a gamut from ineptitude to the local environment. But seldom has any single variable been advanced to explain the full picture. This colonial undertaking, like all of them, has a complicated story. With respect to environmental challenges, the best known of the earlier considerations concerned a rather obscure condition of Jamestown’s estuarine setting. Carville Earle (1979) persuasively argued that a seasonal “salt plug” so affected the quality of both river and well water that the hemmed-in colonists suffered from extreme salt-poisoning and microbial disease. The specific mechanism that raised salinity and trapped waste in the adjacent section of the James River was the tendency, during summers, for reduced outflow to allow persistent upstream incursion of the oligohaline front. This fresh-to-saline zone happened to be most pronounced around Jamestown Island. When the phenomenon was defining river conditions, access to potable water, even as groundwater, was significantly diminished. And in time, with only equally risky options beyond the fort, the consumption of bad water took its toll, sickening and killing colonists in several resultant ways. Earle’s provocative thesis was influential, but debate continued to swirl around how determinative it was. Seeking to settle the matter in anticipation of observance of the colony’s 400th anniversary, the National Park Service sponsored new research to address it. The outcome, also based on a tree ring-derived precipitation record, was discovery of another incident of severe drought timed with an early colonial venture. And although the initial questions were Jamestown-centric, the results amplify our understanding of climate history’s role in the wider Chesapeake region. Strikingly, the reconstructed drought history for eastern Virginia–North Carolina recorded correlations between three successive colonial events and below-average rainfall (Blanton 2000; Stahle et al. 1998). The first such correspondence occurred around 1570, when Spanish Jesuits undertook establishment of the Ajacan mission (Lewis and Loomie 1953). Although the precise location of the Catholic settlement is not determined, it is generally understood that it was in the lower Chesapeake, very possibly along the York River not far from Jamestown Island. Reports from the short-lived compound are explicit about drought-induced famine. Father Segura wrote that, 70

Climate and colonialism in the Americas

Our Lord has chastised it [the land] with six years of famine and death, which has brought it about that there is much less population than usual. Since many have died and many also have moved to other regions to ease their hunger, there remain but few of the tribe . . . they have no maize, and have not found wild fruit, which they are accustomed to eat. Neither roots nor anything else can be had, save for a small amount obtained with great labor from the soil, which is very parched. (Lewis and Loomie 1953, 89) Tree ring data also establish that this dry period was a relatively long one of about nine years (Blanton 2000), linked with a continent-wide drought anomaly. During droughts of this duration, the toll of sparse rainfall, coupled with colonial strains, can cripple even traditional alternatives for sustaining a quasi-agrarian population. Thus, it may be argued that the added stress on Natives from Jesuit demands for corn was a factor in the Native annihilation of the enclave after less than a year (Blanton 2000, 2004; Stahle et al. 1998). At the same time, we now know that act of radical resistance was also precipitated by other complicating factors, like gift violations (Mallios 2006). In the second instance, we find that the first English venture in the region, that of the famed Lost Colony on the Outer Banks between 1585 and 1590, was also hampered by a period of unusual dryness from 1587–1589. This attempt to establish a colony coincided, statistically speaking, with the worst regional drought in the last 800 years (Stahle et al. 1998). But beyond an explicit strategy to rely on the Natives for much of their food, at least in the early going, we do not discover in English accounts many comments that clearly belie shortfalls stemming from drought (Blanton 2003). This we can only infer. More troublesome to the would-be colonizers, as judged from the period reports, was the issue of fresh water. The shortage of it was a vocal concern, as even in the best of times barrier islands offer relatively meager options (Blanton 2003). Complicating the colonizing attempt further was severe weather. Graphic accounts reveal how the small fleets were pummeled by tropical storms (Barnes 1995; Blanton 2003; Ludlum 1963). Four different storms hampered landings, resupplies, and rescues from 1586–1591. Here again, we must point not only to the stresses from drought-caused food and water shortages and storms but also to a constellation of intercultural issues intrinsic to so many colonial situations. The Roanoke failures may also be attributed to a plethora of shortcomings ranging from outright inexperience in the Americas, to neglect from absentee leadership, to a raft of naïve missteps in relations with the Natives (Blanton 2003; Mallios 2006). On the whole, we must ask if the brevity of this Lost Colony dry period (< 2 years) was sufficient to make a substantive difference in a colonizing venture plagued already by so many other factors. The Jamestown Drought was the third in this series of bad-luck coincidences. The 1607 landing occurred just as a seven-year (1606–1612) drought set in (Blanton 2000, 2004; Stahle et al. 1998). There is little that is ambiguous about the effects of dryness on the Jamestown colony, although it too struggled for a host of reasons. The veracity of the dendrological record is borne out by commentary in the accounts of John Smith and others who reported the English hardships and also made allusions to Native struggles. In one passage we learn that, “their corne being that year bad they complained extreamly of their owne wants” (Arber 1910, 27). And in another we are told how “he did believe that our God as much exceeded theirs, as our Gunnes did their Bowes and Arrowes, and many times did send to me to James Towne, intreating me to pray to my God for raine, for their Gods would not send any” (Arber 1910, 79). Elsewhere, the multiplicity of issues faced by the Jamestown colonists that can at least partially be explained by drought conditions has been described (Blanton 2000). Foremost among them are food shortage, water quality, health, and conflict. Briefly, the Virginia Company’s plans to 71

Dennis B. Blanton

rely on Native corn was stymied in significant measure by low yields, and fresh water became scarce as reduced river outflow raised its salinity and island-constrained groundwater concurrently failed to be recharged. In time, the malnourished and poisoned colonists, confined in large measure to their small fort, suffered and died from illnesses ranging from dysentery to typhoid fever. And the Native reaction to aggressive colonial demands of their own precious food, if not outright takings of it, eroded relations to the point that conditions of outright war ensued (Fausz 1977). It is probably no coincidence that interactions with the Powhatan and other Native groups improved notably when the drought abated (Blanton 2000). Once more, it is necessary to caution against outright environmental determinism. Climate was indisputably a factor in the Jamestown story, but it acted in concert with others. Prominent among them were political intrigue, mismanagement of exchange relations, industrial failures, and ethnocentrism (Noel Hume 1994). Tellingly, any awareness the English developed of drought conditions seems to have been gained second-hand from alarms sounded by Natives. Handicapped by a lack of local experience, the English were relatively oblivious to it. And to the extent they acted on the knowledge, it did not involve relocation to better-watered sites or energetic pursuit of alternative food sources but intensified demands on the Natives instead. With time, it was their relentless colonial campaign, bolstered by steady immigration and simultaneous Indigenous depopulation and, eventually, by agricultural innovation in the form of the “golden weed” (tobacco), that carried the day for them and undid a viable Native resistance. Climate anomalies explain some of the texture of the Chesapeake’s colonial experiences, but they were far less deterministic than the largely favorable prevailing conditions.

Observations Climate, in and of itself, and especially as it operates in concert with other natural factors to define environments or ecosystems, affords human societies with opportunities. And the myriad ways our species has engaged with specific natural systems have undeniably been a defining factor of observed cultural variability. What we refer to as sustainability is predicated, in healthy measure, on successful adaptation to prevailing, local conditions external to the cultural system. Climate, then, only becomes problematic for human societies when violation of the rules of sustainability create new vulnerabilities, namely when carrying capacity is exceeded, when levels of physical risk to body or property become pernicious, and when opportunities to adjust are neglected. Prevailing climates will always change, but ordinarily, substantive shifts in essential qualities of them are infrequent and gradual. For these reasons human cultural patterns typically have had the opportunity to shift incrementally with the tempo of the natural changes. That is the essence of sustainable adaptation. We must ask, then, what it is about the early colonial cases we have explored that made relatively short-term fluctuations of climatic conditions so problematic? One can argue that the challenges are largely attributable to the nature of the colonial contexts, the conditions internal to the novel cultural milieu as opposed to those outside it. Certainly, relative to the pre-contact conditions familiar to both colonizers and Indigenous groups, traditional patterns of conduct were not always reliable options. At the same time, there is good reason to believe the first century of North American colonization by Europeans coincided with an unusually unsettled climate, and we would be wrong in our final analysis to be completely dismissive of it. Generally speaking, that volatile period falls within the climatic interval commonly known as the Little Ice Age (LIA) (Mann 2001; PAGES 2k Consortium 2013; Shindell et al. 2001). Climatological scrutiny of the LIA concept now puts as much or more emphasis on climatic variability as it does unusual cooling (Blanton 72

Climate and colonialism in the Americas

2004, 2013). It is not unlikely that a series of remote volcanic events were also disrupting normal atmospheric conditions (Bradley and Jones 1995; Briffa et al. 1998; Silva and Zielinski 1998). The unevenness of its expression is also as much geographical as it is atmospheric, since climate historians document perturbations at different times in different places, and this is especially true in the northern hemisphere (Fagan 2001; White 2017). Most of the observable variability is in patterns of precipitation, and to a lesser extent temperature. From the perspective of multi-century reconstructions of hemispheric and regional climate, the frequency of drought episodes is measurably higher (Blanton 2013). The causes of this are debated, but consensus is emerging that complex interplay between a multitude of atmospheric patterns were driving it (Seager et al. 2009). Yet compared to the decades-long dry periods afflicting other regions at times, these droughts were relatively transient. To the extent lowered average temperatures did influence human affairs, the direct effects are most apparent at higher latitudes, where agrarian economies are inherently riskiest. The classic case of hardship is, of course, the Norse chain of settlements in the North Atlantic (Fagan 2001; Klimenko 2016). White (2017) has also documented implications of anomalous cold for colonials and Natives in New England. And even prior to sustained contact, as early as the fifteenth century, there is evidence of southward migration by some Native groups to extend the growing season for maize (Blanton 2004). In the south Atlantic region, LIA effects, temperature-wise, seem to have been less intense.

Conclusions Returning to the principal argument, in any instance that colonial affairs were exacerbated by climate change or climate extremes, it did not happen in a vacuum of other factors. It cannot be emphasized enough that the nature of the colonial experience itself was usually precarious enough to make societies more vulnerable to disruption, even under conditions that in noncolonial settings might prove relatively manageable. Colonialist enterprises were intrinsically risky, and they created “environments” that were newly marginal in different respects. This we can observe in the two cases I have described and, looking more broadly, we see at work a somewhat universal set of complicating conditions that allow climate change to play an outsized role. First, it is most common to observe any effects of climate during the true colonizing phase and not during the preceding period of exploration. Brief landings and transient explorations of the earliest decades were largely immune because they, by definition, had a ready exit strategy. But more importantly, the European parties to these encounters were not dependent on the agricultural produce of a specific location for an extended period. Neither did they have to concern themselves with, or live with, the political fallout of aggressive takings. By contrast, we observe the most obvious complications where the colonial food-getting strategy heavily relied, for a protracted period, on the produce of the local Indigenous population. As a corollary, it is also common to discover tensions arising where colonial extractions or controls of natural resources are sustained and intensified. Exploitive strategies of colonizers were socially and politically fraught, climate aside. And when conditions of climate intervened to reduce yields, the competitive drain on finite resources could turn perilous for multiple reasons. There is no sustained, colonial undertaking in the American Southeast whose demands on the Native food supply and vital natural resources did not go unchallenged, very often in the form of open revolt. Not coincidentally, these flare-ups align with intervals of drought and shortened growing seasons. Still, it is vital for us to recognize that most incidents of organized resistance to European colonization were the products of a host of unique strains that in concert defined tipping points. 73

Dennis B. Blanton

Colonizers had arrived during a period of unsettled climate, but they further compounded the disruption created by their mere presence and their hunger with their unwitting violations of gift-giving customs, their challenges to traditional power structures, their attempts to subvert religious beliefs, by violence borne of ethnocentric rationalizations, and from depopulation resulting from infectious disease. We all know that climate can have a measure of deterministic influence on cultural development, but we must caution against overstating that influence at finer spatial and temporal scales, such as concern us in this volume. In the colonial context, as it concerns events spatially measured at a regional or smaller scale, and temporally in terms of years or decades, we must give equal or greater footing to social and political conditions. In short, and on those scales especially, human societies tend to be the agents of their own vulnerabilities, and external influences like climate have a dispassionate way of amplifying them. We must also be mindful that Indigenous cultural systems, through population growth, landuse practices, external relations, and internal inequalities, sometimes created their own vulnerabilities well before European colonization. In the region that is my focus, particularly during the late prehistoric, Mississippian period, the effects of those conditions may be observed, among other ways, in what is referred to as a pattern of “cycling.” Scholars such as Anderson (1995, 1996) and Hally (1996) have documented how it occurred both under and without the added pressure of climatic anomalies. Comparatively, however, Native systems like these would have been better equipped to cope with short-term climate fluctuations. Immigrant colonizing populations, by contrast, relocated relatively rapidly from distant points of origin, are virtually destined to hardship. And when the arrival coincides with climate extremes, those probabilities are elevated. Colonists themselves were sometimes cognizant of this. At Jamestown, for instance, it became common knowledge that survival was anything but assured until a “seasoning” period had passed (Kupperman 1982, 1984). Ostensibly we are to believe this meant adjustment to unfamiliar natural conditions, but it stands to reason it applied to the full scope of colonial undertaking. Nothing about it was familiar; everyone was made vulnerable; and unusually rapid adjustments were necessary. In closing, it is laudable to see how climate has attained a routine place in the evaluations of scholars who assess the colonial experience. More than once it has been recognized as an important factor. But most of the same scholars are recognizing how we must temper climate’s role with fully contextualized analyses that demonstrate there exist myriad colonial histories defined significantly by many unique social and political factors.

References cited Acuna-Soto, Rodolfo, David W. Stahle, Malcolm K. Cleaveland, and Matthew D. Therrell. 2002. “Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8 (4): 360–362. Allan, Robert J. 2000. “ENSO and Climate Variability in the Past 150 Years.” In El Niño and the Southern Oscillation, Multiscale Variability and Global and Regional Impacts, edited by Henry F. Diaz and V. Markgraf, 3–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, David G. 1994. The Savannah River Chiefdoms: Political Change in the Late Prehistoric Southeast. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Anderson, David G. 1996. “Chiefly Cycling and Large-Scale Abandonments as Viewed from the Savannah River Basin.” In Political Structure and Change in the Prehistoric Southeastern United States, edited by John F. Scarry, 150–191. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Anderson, David G., David W. Stahle, and Malcolm K. Cleaveland. 1995. “Paleoclimate and the Potential Food Reserves of Mississippian Societies: A Case Study from the Savannah River Valley.” American Antiquity 60 (2): 258–286. Arber, Edward, ed. 1910. Travels and Works of Captain John Smith. Edinburgh, Scotland: John Grant.

74

Climate and colonialism in the Americas Barnes, Jay. 1995. North Carolina’s Hurricane History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Barnes, Jay. 1998. Florida’s Hurricane History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Blanton, Dennis B. 2000. “Drought as a Factor in the Jamestown Colony, 1606–1612.” Historical Archaeology 34 (4): 74–81. Blanton, Dennis B. 2003. “The Weather is Fine, Wish You Were Here Because I’m the Last One Alive: ‘Learning’ the Environment in the English New World.” In Colonization of Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Archaeology of Adaptation, edited by Marcy Rockman and James Steele, 190–200. London: Routledge Press. Blanton, Dennis B. 2004. “The Climate Factor in Late Prehistoric and Post-Contact Human Affairs.” In Indian and European Contact in Context: The Mid-Atlantic Region, edited by Dennis B. Blanton and Julia A. King, 6–21. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Blanton, Dennis B. 2013. “The Factors of Climate and Weather in Sixteenth-Century La Florida.” In Native and Imperial Transformations: Sixteenth-Century Entradas in the American Southwest and Southeast, edited by Clay Mathers, Jeffrey M. Mitchem, and Charles M. Haecker, 99–120. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Blanton, Dennis B., and David Hurst Thomas. 2008. “Paleoclimates and Human Responses Along the Central Georgia Coast: A Tree-Ring Perspective.” In Native American Landscapes of St. Catherines Island, Georgia: 2. The Data, edited by David Hurst Thomas, 799–806. Anthropological Papers No. 88. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Blinman, Eric. 2008. “2000 Years of Cultural Adaptation to Climate Change in the Southwestern United States.” AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment 37: 489–497. Bradley, Raymond S., and Philip D. Jones. 1995. “Records of Explosive Volcanic Eruptions Over the Last 500 Years.” In Climate Since A.D. 1500, edited by Raymond S. Bradley and Phillip D. Jones, 606–622. London: Routledge. Briffa, K. R., P. D. Jones, F. H. Schweingruber, and T. J. Osborn. 1998. “Influence of Volcanic Eruptions on Northern Hemisphere Summer Temperature Over the Past 600 Years.” Nature 393: 450–455. Burnett, Barbara A., and Katherine A. Murray. 1993. “Death, Drought, and de Soto: The Bioarchaeology of Depopulation.” In The Expedition of Hernando de Soto West of the Mississippi, 1541–1543, edited by Gloria A. Young and Michael P. Hoffman, 227–236. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Bushnell, Amy Turner. 1994. Situado and Sabana: Spain’s Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida. Anthropological Papers No. 74. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Cook, Edward R., R. D. D’Arrigo, and M. E. Mann. 2002. “A Well-Verified, Multi-Proxy Reconstruction of the Winter North Atlantic Oscillation Index Since AD 1400.” Journal of Climate 15 (13): 1754–1764. Cook, Edward R., and P. J. Krusic. 2004. The North American Drought Atlas. New York: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the National Science Foundation. Electronic Document. http://iridl.ldeo. columbia.edu/SOURCES/.LDEO/.TRL/.NADA2004/.pdsi-atlas.html. Cook, Edward R., D. M. Meko, D. W. Stahle, and M. K. Cleaveland. 1999. “Drought Reconstructions for the Continental United States.” Journal of Climate 12 (4): 1145–1162. Cook, Edward R., Richard Seager, Mark A. Cane, and David W. Stahle. 2007. “North American Drought: Reconstructions, Causes, and Consequences.” Earth-Science Reviews 81 (1–2): 93–134. Cook, Edward R., Richard Seager, Richard R. Heim, Jr., Russel S. Vose, Celine Herweijer, and Connie Woodhouse. 2009. “Megadroughts in North America: Placing IPCC Projections of Hydroclimatic Change in a Long-term Paleoclimatic Context.” Journal of Quaternary Science 25: 48–61. Cook, Edward R., Connie A. Woodhouse, C. Mark Eakin, David M. Meko, and David W. Stahle. 2004. “Long-Term Aridity Changes in the Western United States.” Science 306 (5698): 1015–1018. Crowley, Thomas J. 2000. “Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years.” Science 289 (5477): 270–276. Curtin, Phillip D., Grace S. Brush, and George W. Fisher, eds. 2001. Discovering the Chesapeake: The History of an Ecosystem. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Deagan, Kathleen A. 1983. Spanish St. Augustine: The Archaeology of a Colonial Creole Community. New York: Academic Press. Deagan, Kathleen A. 1985. “Spanish-Indian Interaction in Sixteenth-Century Florida.” In Cultures in Contact: The European Impact on Native Cultural Institutions in Eastern North America, A.D. 1000–1800, edited by William W. Fitzhugh, 281–317. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Deagan, Kathleen A. 1990. “Sixteenth-Century Spanish-American Colonization in the Southeastern United States and the Caribbean.” In Columbian Consequences: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives

75

Dennis B. Blanton on the Spanish Borderlands East, Vol. 2, edited by David Hurst Thomas, 225–250. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Dean, Jeffrey S. 2000. “Complexity Theory and Sociocultural Change in the American Southwest.” In The Way the Wind Blows: Climate, History, and Human Action, edited by Roderick J. McIntosh, Joseph A. Tainter, and Susan K. McIntosh, 89–118. New York: Columbia University Press. deMenocal, Peter B. 2001. “Cultural Responses to Climate Change During the Late Holocene.” Science 292 (5517): 667–673. Durkee, J. D., J. D. Frye, C. M. Fuhrmann, M. C. Lacke, H. G. Jeong, and T. L. Mote. 2007. “Effects of the North Atlantic Oscillation on Precipitation-type Frequency and Distribution in the Eastern United States.” Theoretical and Applied Climatology 94 (1–2): 51–65. Earle, Carville. 1979. “Environment, Disease, and Mortality in Early Virginia.” Journal of Historical Geography 5 (4): 365–390. Fagan, Brian M. 2001. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850. New York: Basic Books. Fausz, Frederick J. 1977. “The Powhatan Uprising of 1622: A Historical Study of Ethnocentrism and Cultural Conflict.” PhD Dissertation, The College of William and Mary. Feng, Song, Robert J. Oglesby, Clinton M. Rowe, David B. Looper, and Qi Hu. 2008. “Atlantic and Pacific SST Influences on Medieval Drought in North America Simulated by the Community Atmospheric Model.” Journal of Geophysical Research 113. https://doi.org/10.1029/2007JD009347. Francis, Michael J., and Kathleen M. Kole. 2011. Murder and Martyrdom in Spanish Florida: Don Juan and the Guale Uprising of 1597. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Fraser, Walter J., Jr. 2006. Lowcountry Hurricanes: Three Centuries of Storms at Sea and Ashore. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Gergis, J. L., and A. M. Fowler. 2006. “How Unusual was Late 20th Century El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)? Assessing Evidence from Tree-Ring, Coral, Ice-Core and Documentary Paleoarchives, A.D. 1525–2002.” Advances in Geosciences 6: 173–179. Hally, David J. 1996. “Platform-Mound Construction and the Instability of Mississippian Chiefdoms.” In Political Structure and Change in the Prehistoric Southeastern United States, edited by John F. Scarry, 92–127. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Hann, John H. 1996. A History of the Timucua Indians and Missions. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Hoffman, Kathleen. 1997. “Cultural Development in La Florida.” Historical Archaeology 31 (1): 24–35. Hoffman, Paul E. 1994. “Narváez and Cabeza de Vaca in Florida.” In The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521–1704, edited by Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, 50–73. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Hoggarth, Julie A., Matthew Restall, James W. Wood, and Douglas J. Kennett. 2017. “Drought and Its Demographic Effects in the Maya Lowlands.” Current Anthropology 58 (1): 82–113. Hudson, Charles. 1990. The Juan Pardo Expeditions: Exploration of the Carolinas and Tennessee, 1566–1568. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Hudson, Charles. 1997. Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South’s Ancient Chiefdoms. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Hudson, Charles, Marvin T. Smith, Chester B. DePratter, and Emilia Kelley. 1991. “The Tristan de Luna Expedition, 1559–1561.” In First Encounters: Spanish Explorations in the Caribbean and the United States, 1492–1570, edited by Jerald T. Milanich and Susan Milbrath, 119–134. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2014. Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. [Core Writing Team, R. K. Pachauri and L. A. Meyer, eds.]. Geneva, Switzerland: IPCC. Jones, Grant D. 1978. “The Ethnohistory of the Guale Coast Through 1684.” In The Anthropology of St. Catherines Island 1. Natural and Cultural History, edited by David Hurst Thomas, Grant D. Jones, Roger S. Durham, and Clark Spencer Larsen, 178–210. Anthropological Papers, Vol. 55, Part 2. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Klimenko, Vladimir. 2016. “Thousand-year History of Northeastern Europe Exploration in the Context of Climatic Change: Medieval to Early Modern Times.” The Holocene 26 (3): 365–379. Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. 1982. “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period.” The American Historical Review 87 (5): 1262–1289. Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. 1984. Roanoke, The Abandoned Colony. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld. Lewis, Clifford M., and Albert J. Loomie. 1953. The Spanish Jesuit Mission in Virginia, 1570–1572. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ludlum, David M. 1963. Early American Hurricanes, 1492–1870. Boston: American Meteorological Society.

76

Climate and colonialism in the Americas Lyon, Eugene, trans. 1995. “Memorial of Pedro Menéndéz’ Ships Lost in the Florida Conquest.” In Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, edited by Eugene Lyon, 211–213. Spanish Borderlands Sourcebooks. New York: Garland. Mallios, Seth. 2006. The Deadly Politics of Giving: Exchange and Violence at Ajacan, Roanoke, and Jamestown. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Mann, Michael E. 2001. “Little Ice Age.” In Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change, edited by M. C. MacCracken and J. S. Perry, 504–509. London: John Wiley and Sons. Mann, Michael E., Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K. Hughes. 1998. “Global-scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing Over the Past Six Centuries.” Nature 392: 779–787. Marrinan, Rochelle A., John F. Scarry, and Rhonda L. Majors. 1990. “Prelude to de Soto: The Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez.” In Columbian Consequences: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East, Vol. 2, edited by David Hurst Thomas, 71–82. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. McCusker, John J., and Russell R. Menard. 1991. The Economy of British America, 1607–1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Mendoza, Blanca, Ernesto Jáuregui, Rosa Diaz-Sandoval, Virginia García-Acosta, Victor Velasco, and Guadalupe Cordero. 2005. “Historical Droughts in Central Mexico and Their Relation with El Niño.” Journal of Applied Meteorology 44: 709–716. Mendoza, Blanca, Victor Velasco, and Ernesto Jáuregui. 2006. “A Study of Historical Droughts in Southeastern Mexico.” Journal of Climate 19: 2916–2934. Milanich, Jerald T. 1990. “The European Entrada into La Florida: An Overview.” In Columbian Consequences: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East, Vol. 2, edited by David Hurst Thomas, 3–30. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Milanich, Jerald T. 1994. “Franciscan Missions and Native Peoples in Spanish Florida.” In The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521–1704, edited by Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, 276–303. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Noel Hume, Ivor. 1994. The Virginia Adventure: Roanoke to Jamestown, An Archaeological and Historical Odyssey. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Ortlieb, Luc. 2000. “The Documented Historical Record of El Niño Events in Peru: An Update of the Quinn Record (Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries).” In El Niño and the Southern Oscillation: Multiscale Variability and Global and Regional Impacts, edited by Henry F. Diaz and V. Markgraf, 207–296. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. PAGES 2k Consortium. 2013. “Continental-scale Temperature Variability During the Last Two Millennia.” Nature Geoscience 6: 339–346. Priestley, Herbert Ingram. 2010. The Luna Papers, 1559–1561 (2 Vols.). Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Quinn, David Beers, ed. 1991. The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590 (2 Vols). New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Quinn, W. H., and V. T. Neal. 1992. “The Historical Record of El Niño Events.” In Climate Since A. D. 1500, edited by Raymond S. Bradley and Phillip D. Jones, 623–648. London: Routledge. Ropelewski, C. F., and M. S. Halpert. 1986. “North American Precipitation and Temperature Patterns Associated with the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).” Monthly Weather Review 115: 1606–1626. Sandrik, Al, and Chris Landsea. 2003. “Chronological Listing of Tropical Cyclones Affecting North Florida and Coastal Georgia, 1565–1899.” NOAA Technical Memorandum NWS SR-224. Fort Worth, TX: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Southern Region. Saunders, Rebecca. 2000. Stability and Change in Guale Indian Pottery, A.D. 1300–1702. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Saunders, Rebecca. 2002. “Seasonality, Sedentism, Subsistence, and Disease in the Protohistoric: Archaeological versus Ethnohistoric Data along the Lower Atlantic Coast.” In Between Contacts and Colonies: Archaeological Perspectives on the Protohistoric Southeast, edited by Cameron B. Wesson and Mark A. Rees, 32–48. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Seager, Richard, Alexandrina Tzanova, and Jennifer Nakamura. 2009. “Drought in the Southeastern United States: Causes, Variability over the Last Millennium, and the Potential for Future Hydroclimatic Change.” Journal of Climate 22: 5021–5045. Shimada, Izumi, Crystal Barker Schaaf, Lonnie G. Thompson, and Ellen Mosley-Thompson. 1991. “Cultural Impacts of Severe Droughts in the Prehistoric Andes: Application of a 1,500-year Ice Core Precipitation Record.” World Archaeology 22 (3): 247–270.

77

Dennis B. Blanton Shindell, Drew T., Gavin A. Schmidt, Michael E. Mann, David Rind, and Anne Waple. 2001. “Solar Forcing of Regional Climate Change During the Maunder Minimum.” Science 294 (5549): 2149–2152. Silva, Shanaka L. de, and Gregory A. Zielinski. 1998. “Global Influence of the AD 1600 Eruption of Huaynaputina, Peru.” Nature 393: 455–456. Solís de Merás, Gonzalo. 1964. Pedro Menéndez de Aviles: Memorial. Translated by Jeannette Thurber Connor. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Stahle, David W., and Malcolm K. Cleaveland. 1992. “Reconstruction and Analysis of Spring Rainfall over the Southeastern U. S. for the Past 1000 Years.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 73 (12): 1947–1961. Stahle, David W., Malcolm K. Cleaveland, Dennis B. Blanton, Matthew D. Therrell, and D. A. Gay. 1998. “The Lost Colony and Jamestown Droughts.” Science 280 (5363): 564–567. Stahle, David W., Malcolm K. Cleaveland, and J. G. Hehr. 1988. “North Carolina Climate Changes Reconstructed from Tree Rings: A.D. 372 to 1985.” Science 240 (4858): 1517–1519. Stahle, David W., Edward R. Cook, Malcolm K. Cleaveland, Matthew D. Therrell, David M. Meko, Henri D. Grissino-Mayer, Emma Watson, and Brian Luckman. 2000. “Tree Ring Data Document 16th Century Megadrought Over North America.” EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union 81 (12): 121–125. Stahle, David W., J. V. Diaz, D. J. Burnette, J. C. Paredes, R. R. Heim, F. K. Fye, R. Acuna Soto, M. D. Therrell, M. K. Cleaveland, and D. K. Stahle. 2011. “Major Mesoamerican Droughts of the Past Millennium.” Geophysical Research Letters 38 (5): L05703. Thomas, David Hurst, ed. 2008. Native American Landscapes of St. Catherines Island, Georgia, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 88. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Van West, Carla, Thomas C. Windes, Frances Levine, Henri D. Grissino-Mayer, and Matthew W. Salazar. 2013. “The Role of Climate in Early Spanish-Native American Interactions in the US Southwest.” In Native and Spanish New Worlds: Sixteenth-Century Entradas in the American Southwest and Southeast, edited by Clay Mathers, Jeffrey Mitchem, and Charles M. Haecker, 81–98. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. White, Sam. 2017. A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Woodhouse, Connie A., David M. Meko, Glen M. MacDonald, Dave W. Stahle, and Edward R. Cook. 2010. “A 1,200-Year Perspective of 21st Century Drought in Southwestern North America.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (50): 21283–21288. Worth, John E. 1993. “Account of the Northern Conquest and Discovery of Hernando de Soto (Translator).” In The De Soto Chronicles, The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539–1543, Vol. 1, edited by Lawrence A. Clayton, Vernon James Knight, Jr., and Edward C. Moore, 247–306. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Worth, John E. 1998. The Timucuan Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Worth, John E. 2013. “Inventing Florida: Constructing a Colonial Society in an Indigenous Landscape.” In Native and Spanish New Worlds: Sixteenth-Century Entradas in the American Southwest, edited by Clay Mathers, Jeffrey M. Mitchem, and Charles M. Haecker, 189–201. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

78

6 COLONIALISM AND HISTORICAL ECOLOGY Livestock management as a case study in the American Southwest Nicole M. Mathwich

Introduction Over the past several decades, there has been a greater urgency to understand the origins of global climate change. Public and research interest in the emergence of the “Anthropocene” and the ramifications of global climate change has grown. These explorations require the study of the socioeconomic systems that fueled the massive population growth and natural resource extractions of the past centuries. Within the broader zeitgeist of climate change studies, one of the most exciting avenues of research in the past few decades has been understanding the place of the past 500 years of history in the Americas within the broader Holocene epoch. Archaeologists are uniquely positioned to offer information about human–environmental relationships in deep time but have struggled to include Indigenous perspectives and relationships to the land as part of these investigations. Archaeologists and other researchers have increasingly been concerned by how archaeological studies of Indigenous groups impact political self-determination and access to resources. Native peoples throughout the Americas have managed their landscapes in subtle and large ways, and it has only been in the past few decades that western science has developed the technology and methodologies to understand and appreciate Indigenous sciences. Colonial economic and social dynamics occurred within the constrained possibilities of local environments, which are themselves co-creations of organisms and the physical world. By placing past people in conversation with ecology, new dimensions of colonialism and Indigenous experiences can emerge. In this chapter, I review historical ecology and identify three methodological approaches of historical ecology in contemporary archaeology, using the southern Southwest of the United States as a case study to illustrate the practical applications of these approaches and their challenges. First, I briefly review the history of historical ecological perspectives in archaeology. Next, I review how archaeologists have studied seasonal cycles in colonial contexts and their significance to understanding Indigenous experiences of colonialism. I then explore how archaeologists approach animal and plants as agents with specific needs and abilities that humans organize around. I review projects that analyze the past 500 years in the Americas as part of a much longer trajectory of Native innovation and persistence in local environments. Finally, I apply these to 79

Nicole M. Mathwich

the introduction of livestock in the southern Southwest of North America and discuss how researchers might apply stable isotopes in archaeologies of colonialism to understand historical ecology. I situate this chapter within western science, but researchers should not feel bound by this framework and should be open to incorporating collaborative, participatory, or Indigenous science methods. While this chapter does not represent an exhaustive list of methods, I curate here a collection of interdisciplinary approaches and capture directions within historical ecology in archaeology.

Historical ecology of colonialism Traditionally, historical ecology has been defined in anthropology by its materialist interpretation of human–environmental interactions, which is particularly attractive to archaeologists. The basic postulates of historical ecology were laid out by William Balée (2018, 1998): (1) humans have altered nearly all environments; (2) human societies differ in their logics and structures and affect their environments in different ways; (3) human nature, broadly, does not increase or decrease species diversity; (4) the combination and interaction of these historical ecologies creates global ecology. Historical ecology begins with local, historical dynamics and approaches human–environmental interactions without prior assumptions about how a society’s size and complexity affects its environment. Historical ecology has encompassed historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, ecologists, and geographers and is not characterized by a particular method or theory (Szabó 2015). The broad framework aids the incorporation of diverse data sources such as flora, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), fauna, artifacts, geochemistry, and stratigraphy and contributes to various conservation challenges (Braje and Rick 2013; Keeley 2002; Wolverton and Lyman 2012). Historical ecology also uses deep-time chronologies of particular spaces (Braje et al. 2017; Lightfoot et al. 2013; Scharf 2014). For researchers who might otherwise limit their focus to changes after contact, the longue durée perspective of historical ecology maintains an awareness of the continuity between Indigenous peoples and their ancestors. As a result, archaeologists have become an important source of material evidence for biologists, conservationists, and Indigenous activists who seek to identify human-driven local extinctions and invasions, historical ranges, resource exploitation, and Indigenous environmental management strategies (Hofman and Rick 2018; Lepofsky et al. 2017; Stahl 2008). Taking the long view offers a distinct counter to the immense environmental changes brought by colonialism and the Industrial Revolution, which have been difficult to approach without post hoc reasoning about the character of European colonialism toward the environment. Many archaeologists view the human relationship with the environment as dynamic and adaptive, and this is a significant moderating view on other disciplines. When Nagaoka and colleagues (2018) surveyed the literature about the overkill explanation for Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, they found that ecologists were far more likely than archaeologists to view the overkill explanation as an accepted process because it fit into modern perceptions of humans as over-consumers. While the overkill explanation applies to Paleoindian and earlier hunters in the Americas, similar meta-narratives of human “nature” toward overconsumption follow narratives around colonialism. Colonialism by definition is an extractive, unequal social and economic relationship (Stein 2002, 28), and that definition may shade interpretations of evidence of Indigenous experiences of colonialism. Studies of colonialism are dogged by a history of cultural tropes such as the “noble savage” and “pristine myth,” which reduce and marginalize the agency of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and have served as a justification for settler-colonialism. Ecological historian Crosby (1972) introduced the concept of biological imperialism and the idea that at 80

Colonialism and historical ecology

the heart of European colonialism was a desire to recreate Europe in the Americas, with all the plants and animals and social structures that entailed. The biological phenomenon often called the “Columbian Exchange” was the global transfer of animals, plants, diseases, and people between the Americas and Africa and Eurasia (Crosby 1972, 2004). Ecological historians have sometimes portrayed aspects of the Columbian Exchange as broadly catastrophic and a tool of colonialism (Cronon 1983; Diamond 2011; Jordan-Bychkov 1993; Melville 1994). Others have emphasized the human impacts on all environments of the Americas without assigning an adversarial nature to human–environmental relations (Denevan 1992, 2011; Mann 2012). Archaeologies of environment have the methodological capacity to provide physical evidence of these claims at a local level and problematize meta-narratives. Recent archaeological work has largely been a moderating voice to catastrophic claims and has cataloged the heterogeneity of local responses. Researchers’ findings have highlighted the varied and strategically flexible ways Native Americans and colonists responded to the biological and social consequences of the Columbian Exchange, resulting in stable communities (Blair and Thomas 2014; Deagan 1996; deFrance and Hanson 2008; Silliman 2012; Sunseri 2017). In other cases, however, there is clear evidence of overconsumption, whether through widespread over-hunting, such as for the deerskin trade in the Southeastern US (Pavao-Zuckerman 2007), localized over-fishing (Reitz 2004), or depletion of local fuel sources for sugarcane production (Britt 2010). Archaeological investigations of colonialism contend with the effect of local constraints on the lived experiences on all peoples of the Americas. Archaeologists exploring these complex relationships with the environment have employed geochemical, spatial, and ecological analyses to capture the diversity of Indigenous experiences. In the following sections, I feature three broad approaches toward historical ecology that have been useful to researchers of colonialism.

Seasonality The continuity of seasonal movement and resource collection in colonial contexts represents an important intersection of lived human experience and historical ecology. Methodologies studying shellfish, pollen, phytoliths, stable isotopes, and migration patterns, to name a few, provide opportunities to look at human and nonhuman seasonal movement. These methods are significant because they offer evidence of the continuity and changes in Indigenous lived patterns and experiences of temporal cycles. In Alta California, disturbances stemming from the Spanish mission system, such as fire suppression and livestock grazing, had the potential to disrupt Indigenous landscape management, making some cyclical subsistence practices untenable (Peelo 2009). Other colonial introductions were game-changers for seasonal subsistence. Among O’odham speakers in what is today Arizona, the introduction of winter wheat filled an important lean time in the agricultural cycle and was adopted independently of direct Spanish colonization by Akimel O’odham (Strawhacker 2017). Beyond the annual agricultural cycle, Brenneman (2004) has tied Yaqui uprisings in southern Sonora in the 1740s to periods of drought from colonialera tree ring data. Cycles of drought and flooding, in additional to annual cycles of abundance and scarcity, are critical components to understanding Indigenous resistance, movement, and response to epidemic disease. As archaeologists consider climactic and annual cycles, they need to be cognizant of the ability of Indigenous lifeways to absorb colonial disturbance. These previous examples represent instances of disturbance and disruption, but while ruptures and change occurred, not all changes resulted in instability. A focus on seasonality provides an avenue for researchers to use environmental proxies to examine continuity in Indigenous subsistence practices. For example, 81

Nicole M. Mathwich

Schneider (2015) used multiple lines of evidence including Spanish mission records, radiocarbon dates, and shell midden deposits to identify continued visitation and seasonal shell collection in northern San Francisco Bay in Alta California. Here, historical records of seasonal absences and Coastal Miwok traditions of shell collection added seasonal information to archaeological evidence of enduring Indigenous subsistence practices through the colonial period. In New Mexico, Edwards and Trigg (2016) found palynological consistency in many of the farming environments throughout the colonial period and similarity between Indigenous and Spanish farmers in crops and land use, with a larger presence of invasive weeds most notable during the Anglo-American period. These case studies suggest that the assumption of drastic and catastrophic colonial disturbance ignores evidence of the resilience of Indigenous cultural landscapes and colonists’ application of Indigenous knowledge to European domesticates. Seasonality in historical ecology helps to capture disturbances as well as continuity and provides a framework for triangulating multiple lines of ecological evidence.

Animals and plants as agents The integration of new plants and animals into human societies in the Americas requires a foundational understanding of these organisms as agents. Studies in anthropology and related fields have highlighted the potential of viewing human–environmental interactions through a multispecies approach and decentering the human perspective to examine the agency of other species (Dore et al. 2017; Feinberg et al. 2013; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Locke and Muenster 2015; Ogden et al. 2013; Riley 2006; Singer 2014). When considered alongside colonialism, these introduced organisms occupy a liminal space between object and subject (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Koenig 2016). On one hand, these organisms supplied the raw material for human life, and on the other hand, their nutrient and habitat needs structured human life. Methodologies in archaeologies of colonialism have begun looking at animals as agents of change in human lifeways. The biological needs and characteristics of different species give them the ability to transform landscapes. Horses are a powerful case of animal needs shifting human societies at a landscape level. Horses became integrated in many Plains groups’ subsistence, spirituality, and economies. Horses arrived often ahead of and unaccompanied by European colonial expectations. Bethke (2017, 2020) used GIS and ethnohistory to examine how communities changed their residential camps’ locations to accommodate the needs of horses. These animals reordered much of life on the Plains. Horses created new opportunities for hunting, raiding, and movement but also required daily water and substantial range for feed. Sunseri (2015) examined the limitations of equestrian travel as a constraint on colonial settlement distance. The animals’ levels of endurance may restrain the distance a community feels it must distance itself from others, when arable land and water sources are not a factor. Horses had substantial effects on Indigenous cultural landscapes, and it is only the past decade that researchers have turned spatial modeling toward the full implications of the reintroduction of horses to North America. Indigenous people’s relationships with introduced species were intertwined with species’ attributes. In terms of social and material power, livestock became a moveable resource on the colonial borderlands. These animals were a source of labor and products such as meat, fat, hides, and wool, and this made livestock essential to the sustainability of colonial settlements. Domesticated animals were a key part of European colonialism that brought with it an intent to remake Indigenous landscapes and social relations to conform with European agropastoral societies. Livestock were not adopted immediately or evenly across the Americas. For instance, 82

Colonialism and historical ecology

work at Mission San Bernabé, Guatemala, illustrated how Maya continued to rely on freshwater aquatic species throughout the early colonial period, and the presence of missions increased the use of domesticates (Freiwald and Pugh 2018). European domesticates have behaviors and physical constraints that limit their distribution (Pavao-Zuckerman and Reitz 2006), and their presence or absence at post-contact Native settlements is a complex question of local ecology and sociopolitical dynamics. As archaeologists explore the facets of these relationships, GIS and stable isotope analysis offer opportunities to examine the influence of animal needs on human societies.

Taking the long view of colonialism The data archaeologists collect remain the discipline’s most powerful tool. Any discussion of methodologies about the environment must include a reevaluation of basic levels of organization, especially as these data are being reimagined as open-source and public resources and incorporated in disciplines such as geology and ecology. Decades of older data continue to be incorporated into shared digital databases, and these datasets are increasingly relevant in understanding the local effects of climate change. Disciplinary trends toward the aggregation of archaeological databases offer the opportunity both to rethink the standards of data collection and to engage with community stakeholders in new ways. In the best-case scenario, better accessibility could lead to greater engagement and conversations about data sensitivity and incorporation of new collection methods. Many archaeologists seek to decolonize archaeological practices, but there continues to be a tendency to cleave to the original categories used by the analyst. Various researchers collected legacy data at points in time where different assumptions and terminologies about Indigenous groups were standard. These data carry the assumptions from those periods. Terms such as “prehistoric” and “historical” remain problematic for the terms’ binarity, exclusion of pericolonial situations, and effective ontological break in the perception of continuity of Indigenous peoples in the Americas (Loendorf and Lewis 2017; Panich and Schneider 2014; Lightfoot 1995; Silliman 2012). Researchers share legacy data through large databases with disciplines outside of archaeology such as ecology and geology, and there needs to be a broader awareness about how non-archaeologists will perceive and use legacy ontology in data sets. The critiques have been around for decades, but the prehistoric/historical divide casts a long shadow in archaeology despite best efforts to reenvision it. A large group of researchers have successfully incorporated longer time frames in how they analyze data. These studies incorporate multiple lines of evidence ranging from sedimentary to ethnographic and archaeological sources and fit the past 500 years in the Americas within the greater human story. In northern New Mexico, researchers have looked for large-scale environmental change related to livestock grazing. Their research combines zooarchaeological data from 1300–1450 ce to elucidate patterns in animal consumption over the past three centuries (Jones and Gabe 2015; Jones 2018). This type of presentation helps naturalize Pueblo continuity and stability in the organization and presentation of data, and such methodological decisions communicate to anyone outside the discipline that there is no cultural break. The time depth of these patterns also profoundly influenced Euro-American expansion. Further east, in the South Carolina Piedmont, Euro-American colonists settled in “humanized” Native landscapes, taking advantage of centuries of Indigenous landscape alterations (Coughlan and Nelson 2018). In the Caribbean, the deep-time data sets have been key to understanding the landscape changes brought by colonialists in unique island environments (Bain et al. 2018; Castilla-Beltrán et al. 2020; Rivera-Collazo et al. 2018). Researchers studying fire and landscape management in California (Crawford et al. 2015; Lightfoot and Cuthrell 2015; Lightfoot et al. 2013) employ long-term views of human–environmental 83

Nicole M. Mathwich

interactions. Taking the long view seems so integral to historical ecological work that at first glance, it seems not worth a comment. A focus on human–environmental relationships on a larger timescale and structuring research around continuity, however, is one way to divorce archaeology from problematic time boundaries, which have proven to be a difficult disciplinary habit to break.

The Pimería Alta: a case study using stable isotopes Stable isotopes are a type of destructive analysis and provide well-established environmental proxies for historical ecology studies. Oxygen and carbon assays are relatively low cost compared to other stable isotope laboratory analyses. The ubiquity and abundance of livestock bone at many settlements after 1500 enhances the value of stable isotopes on livestock bone as a proxy for landscape management. Cultural sensitivity may pose a barrier to destructive analysis and can be problematic on animal burials and remains of ritually sensitive species, depending on the views of particular Indigenous stakeholders. Introduced livestock are generally considered a market-oriented species, and while there are exceptions, there are fewer barriers to destructive analysis on these taxa. Stable isotopic methods, however, require a firm grasp of local hydrology and vegetation and an awareness of a multitude of complicating behavioral, life history, and environmental factors that can influence interpretation. With bovids such as sheep and cattle, their herbivorous diets, ruminant digestion, and obligate drinking make them particularly valuable as environmental proxies (Cerling et al. 2003). Archaeological and paleontological studies of stable isotopes from domesticates have revealed early evidence of animal husbandry, transhumance, and migration (Arnold et al. 2013; Guiry et al. 2014; Gerling et al. 2017; Doppler et al. 2017; Knockaert et al. 2018; Nelson et al. 2012; Schulting et al. 2019). These studies explore various aspects of domestication and pastoral management and offer a template for exploring Indigenous labor and experiences of Eurasian domesticates in the Americas. The following case study focuses on the use of stable isotopes from the tooth enamel of livestock remains from Spanish missions and presidios in the Santa Cruz River Valley of southern Arizona, the northern part of the Pimería Alta mission system. Missionaries introduced Eurasian animals to the Pimería Alta including chickens, cattle, sheep, mules, burros, horses, sheep, and goats. These animals became integrated to the Tohono O’odham economic base by the late nineteenth century (Castetter and Underhill 1935; Underhill 1940); however, the predominance of cattle in modern Arizona and Sonora was a later phenomenon. The Santa Cruz River Valley lies at the northernmost tip of Spanish colonial influence in the region and within traditional lands of the modern Tohono O’odham Nation (McIntyre 2008). The sites selected for this study are all located in the same watershed of the Santa Cruz River (Figure 6.1): Mission Los Santos Ángeles de Guevavi (1691–1775), Presidio of San Ignacio de Tubac (1752–1775), and Presidio San Agustín de Tucson (1775–1856). Grimstead and Pavao-Zuckerman (2016) focused on the continuity of water management practices as reflected in stable isotope values from livestock at two different sites in the Pimería Alta, Mission San Agustín, and Mission Cocóspera. They found high levels of oxygen enrichment compared to meteoric water indicative of water storage, and carbon isotopes from both sites pointed to the significance of semi-desert grasslands. The data from this case study comes from Mathwich and colleagues (2019), who expanded on the work of Grimstead and Pavao-Zuckerman’s (2016) original findings through the addition of a mission site and two presidio sites. The expanded study found evidence for grazing partitioning among livestock species and the implications of water storage for Native communities. In this 84

Colonialism and historical ecology

Figure 6.1 Map of Pimería Alta colonial settlements, circa 1700. The four types of settlements depicted here include: a) A cabecera was the head mission and missionary residence; b) A visita was a mission location assigned to a missionary who visits regularly but does not reside in the village; c) A presidio was a Spanish military fort; and d) A pueblo was a Spanish secular town. Source: Map by Kathryn MacFarland, Arizona State Museum.

85

Nicole M. Mathwich

project, the authors used carbon (δ13C) and oxygen (δ13C) stable isotope assays to explore the interaction of livestock with the surrounding Santa Cruz Valley landscape. Animals incorporated stable isotopes in organic tissues, including bone and teeth, throughout the life of an organism via the consumption of food and water. Stable isotopes ratios found within the tissues of organisms therefore reflect those found in their food and water and can be used to reconstruct watering and feeding regimens.

Long-term continuity Cattle and sheep are obligate drinkers, meaning that oxygen isotopes in the body water of these animals can be used as a proxy for available water in the environment, in contrast to species that can survive solely on water from the animal’s consumption of plants (Bryant et al. 1996; Kohn and Cerling 2002). The arid conditions of the Sonoran Desert exacerbate this daily requirement of drinking water. Aridity and high temperatures can cause the extreme δ18O enrichment of standing water. As water evaporates, the proportion of the heavier 18O increases relative to the lighter 16O, making it possible to evaluate the animal’s consumption of stored water sources (Figure 6.2). The results showed that the δ18O from archaeological teeth was substantially more enriched than precipitation and was even higher than a modern cattle tank with standing water. These findings indicate the animals had regular access to stored water, which has implications for colonial labor and landscapes. Access to perennial surface water, irrigation, and water storage were an important factor in settlement locations in the Santa Cruz Basin. Archaeological and historical sources point to a long history of extensive and complex water systems for irrigation and water storage (Bayman et al. 2004). While the Spanish who entered the Pimería Alta brought with them knowledge of acequia (canal) systems, they entered a cultural landscape where O’odham already had extensive canal-making and water storage traditions. In areas with a long cultural history of water

Figure 6.2 Bulk oxygen samples compared to modern precipitation. *Isotopic range of meteoric water covers 98% of recorded rainfall events (Eastoe and Dettman 2016).

86

Colonialism and historical ecology

management such as the Santa Cruz Basin, the differences between Indigenous and European practices at colonial settlements are difficult to distinguish. Evidence for water storage comes from historical ethnographic sources, backed up by observation of contemporary landscapes. Ethnographic observations document water storage and redirection during the summer months using earthen berms and movement of much of the community to spring-fed wells during the winter (Castetter and Underhill 1935; Underhill 1940, 8). Larger water-storage features during the earlier Hohokam period may have been even larger than those recorded historically and supported more sedentary communities (Bayman 1997; Bayman et al. 2004). The intensity and scale of these practices were related to community size and land productivity. Water management features can be difficult to date, and their reuse in subsequent periods by ranchers compounds these dating difficulties. The broad patterns of water management, however, are consistent: shallow ponds or charcos, acequias, and multiple plantings in different watersheds helped communities mitigate the highly variable monsoonal rainfall (Underhill 1940, 8). Proxy evidence of their use during the Spanish colonial period from livestock teeth offers one way to evaluate the continuity of water management.

Seasonality in livestock teeth Colonists brought in species and cultural practices that followed distinct seasonal patterns, and they directed enormous amounts of Tohono O’odham labor toward the care of these animals. Livestock give birth in the spring and faced weather and forage challenges in the winter and in the summer heat. Carbon (δ13C) isotope ratios offer a proxy for dietary contributions of plants with different carbon fixation pathways. Plants with both C3 (cool-season grasses, trees, and shrubs), C4 (warm/wet season grasses, including maize), and CAM (cacti) pathways are present in the study area. The biotic communities in the Santa Cruz River Valley include lowland Sonoran and Chihuahuan desert scrub (mixed C4, C3, and CAM), riparian woodland galleries (C3 shrubs and trees), and semi-desert grasslands (predominately C4) (Brown 1994; Dimmitt 2000). Most bony tissues are constantly remodeled throughout the life of the organism, meaning that stable isotope values in most skeletal elements reflect a palimpsest of ambient conditions over a long period of time. Tooth enamel develops from crown to root and is not remodeled like other tissues. Serial sampling of the tooth crown captures seasonal changes in foraging and watering regimes. These serial samples contrast with bulk samples that represent a cross-sectional averaging of stable isotope values from across the entire crown. Serial sampling of cattle teeth from the two presidio and mission sites indicated a moderate to weak negative relationship between δ13C and δ18O, meaning that as δ18O became more negative—closer to precipitation averages for the region, δ18O of −7.3 ‰ −VSMOW (Eastoe and Dettman 2016) —δ13C becomes more enriched, which is typical of C4 becoming a larger proportion of the diet (Table 6.1). Growth of C4 grasses in this area are associated with the summer monsoon. It is interesting, as the animals’ access to fresher water, likely from the monsoon, correlated with increased consumption of C4 plants. This relationship is present, but not strong, which suggests there are other variables affecting these values, and indeed the correlations vary from animal to animal. Sampling more sites will be required to establish whether this pattern is consistent or indicates distinct water sources.

Livestock agency Among the taxa, the carbon ratios showed a partitioning between the carbon sources for the two species. There appeared to be little difference between the two presidios and mission. 87

Nicole M. Mathwich Table 6.1 Correlations between δ13C and δ18O for specimens in this study. The relationship between δ13C and δ18O was variable and generally negative. Specimen ID

# serial samples

Pearson r

p-value

209 226 227 228 229 231 244 245 26

7 9 7 7 7 5 5 7 7

−0.932 −0.668 0.447 −0.728 0.753 −0.396 −0.16 −0.656 0.493

0.002 0.049 0.315 0.064 0.051 0.509 0.797 0.11 0.261

Taxon, rather than settlement type, had more influence on groupings. Caprines had more flexible diets but averaged 50 percent C4 plants in the archaeological sample, suggesting that summer grasses and some cacti composed the other half of their diets. The biomass of each taxon created disparate nutritional requirements, which put differential pressure on local resources. The nutritional needs of both species, regardless of biomass, affected local vegetation and wildlife. The differences in diets among caprines and cattle may reflect taxon-specific grazing behaviors or human management. Modern wild and domesticated ungulates will naturally partition grazing zones to avoid direct competition, a self-organizing phenomenon often observed in the modern US West (Ager et al. 2004; Stewart et al. 2004; Torstenson et al. 2006). The contemporary observations of wild and domesticated interaction suggest that colonial cattle’s consumption of C4 plants in the archaeological samples may be a natural way for species to avoid competition. Livestock grazing has a variety of ecological impacts, even at low levels, and can negatively impact vegetation structure and the habitats of native species (Curtin et al. 2002; Flieschner 1994; Zwartjes et al. 2005). In terms of social impacts, O’odham hunters of wild ungulates such as deer and antelope potentially needed to travel longer distances to find game deterred by livestock. It is unclear whether this partitioning resulted from human decisions or reflected a natural division to avoid competition among species. As human-centered as archaeologies of colonialism are, it is important to remember than nonhumans can organize themselves independent of human intervention.

Significance The pattern of water storage and grazing at Guevavi and San Agustín arose as a result of longterm multiethnic interactions and remains important to Tohono O’odham, Mexican, and Anglo economies in the Santa Cruz River Valley. The multiethnic nature of colonial settlements is important to consider in evaluating this isotopic analysis. Deposits from Pimería Alta colonial settlements represent the activities of majority Indigenous labor but also colonists. While Tohono O’odham were the most likely laborers and community members at these sites, the middens are accumulations of multiple households’ activities. Missions and presidios were locations of conversion and coercion. It remains difficult to tell how much coercion was involved in the production of these faunal assemblages and the extent to which Tohono O’odham groups had a choice to use their knowledge of water storage and seasonal 88

Colonialism and historical ecology

rains to accommodate livestock needs. The Santa Cruz River Valley isotopic results are thus better viewed through a broader lens as evidence of the emergence of a valley-spanning pattern of landscape management. The introduction of livestock in the Southwest represents a significant shift in investment of labor, time, and resource use. Identifying livestock management and water storage as products of Tohono O’odham labor counters Euro-American narratives of ranching as an introduced activity and recenters them within Indigenous cultural landscapes. Native Americans have faced systemic discrimination and marginalization within US ranching and agriculture (Keepseagle v. Vilsack 2017). Archaeological methods and historical ecology can articulate with oral traditions and modern practices and provide physical evidence of the long history of animal management in Indigenous Nations throughout the Americas.

Final thoughts Historical ecology offers broad avenues of research into archaeologies in the Americas and Indigenous experiences of colonialism. First, historical ecology begins from a more neutral assumption about the human–environmental interactions, which is an important starting point considering the historical narratives around Indigenous peoples and the environment. Second, historical ecology’s broad definition encompasses a wide range of methodologies to study the unique and diverse ways Native peoples adapted their cultural landscapes. Historical ecologists can chronicle how local ecology and colonial demands affected seasonal cycles and provide another line of evidence to consider alongside oral histories. The role of nonhuman species, who can alter human societies and environments, requires a firm grounding in local ecology to identify their agency. Finally, positioning the past five centuries alongside the previous centuries fits recent changes within the longer trajectory of human-environmental relationships. Whether or not researchers choose to be advocates for Indigenous issues, they need to be aware of how archaeological research and interpretations have political implications for descendants. Longterm archaeological evidence of landscape use, along with historical evidence and oral histories, is an important component to legal arguments that Indigenous communities use to protect traditional cultural properties, sacred sites, and traditional homelands. The next decade of research will hopefully see more integration of diverse perspectives, and ecology can be a powerful focal point for multi-vocal research.

References cited Ager, Alan A., Bruce K. Johnson, Priscilla K. Coe, and Michael J. Wisdom. 2004. “Landscape Simulation of Foraging by Elk, Mule Deer, and Cattle on Summer Range.” In Transactions of the 69th North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, 687–707. Washington, DC: Wildlife Management Institute. Arnold, Elizabeth R., Haskel J. Greenfield, and Robert A. Creaser. 2013. “Domestic Cattle Mobility in Early Farming Villages in Southern Africa: Harvest Profiles and Strontium (87Sr/86Sr) Isotope Analyses from Early Iron Age Sites in the Lower Thukela River Valley of South Africa.” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 5 (2): 129–144. Bain, Allison, Anne-Marie Faucher, Lisa M. Kennedy, Allison R. LeBlanc, Michael J. Burn, Rebecca Boger, and Sophia Perdikaris. 2018. “Landscape Transformation During Ceramic Age and Colonial Occupations of Barbuda, West Indies.” Environmental Archaeology 23 (1): 36–46. Balée, William L. 1998. “Historical Ecology: Premises and Postulates.” In Advances in Historical Ecology, edited by William L. Balée, 13–29. New York: Columbia University Press. Balée, William L. 2018. “Brief Review of Historical Ecology.” Les nouvelles de l’archéologie 152: 7–10. Bayman, James M. 1997. “Water Storage in Prehistoric Papagueria and the Limitations of Ethnographic Analogy.” In Prehistory of the Borderlands: Recent Research in the Archaeology of Northern Mexico and the Southern Southwest, edited by Guadalupe Sánchez and John P. Carpenter, 85–93. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

89

Nicole M. Mathwich Bayman, James M., Manuel R. Palacios-Fest, Suzanne K. Fish, and Lisa W. Huckell. 2004. “The Paleoecology and Archaeology of Long-Term Water Storage in a Hohokam Reservoir, Southwestern Arizona, U.S.A.” Geoarchaeology 19 (2): 119–140. Bethke, Brandi. 2017. “The Archaeology of Pastoralist Landscapes in the Northwestern Plains.” American Antiquity 82 (4): 798–815. Bethke, Brandi. 2020. “Revisiting the Horse in Blackfoot Culture: Understanding the Development of Nomadic Pastoralism on the North American Plains.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 24: 44–61. Blair, Elliot H., and David Hurst Thomas. 2014. “The Guale Uprising of 1597: An Archaeological Perspective from Mission Santa Catalina de Guale (Georgia).” In Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider, 25–40. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Braje, Todd J., Thomas P. Leppard, Scott M. Fitzpatrick, and Jon M. Erlandson. 2017. “Archaeology, Historical Ecology and Anthropogenic Island Ecosystems.” Environmental Conservation 44 (3): 286–297. Braje, Todd J., and Torben C. Rick. 2013. “From Forest Fires to Fisheries Management: Anthropology, Conservation Biology, and Historical Ecology.” Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 22 (6): 303–311. Brenneman, Dale S. 2004. “Climate of Rebellion: The Relationship Between Climate Variability and Indigenous Uprisings in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Sonora.” PhD Dissertation, University of Arizona. Britt, Sean F. 2010. “Fueling the Fire: Examining Caribbean Colonial Relations Between Humans and the Environment.” Historical Archaeology 44 (3): 54–68. Brown, David E., ed. 1994. Biotic Communities: Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Bryant, Daniel J., Paul L. Koch, Philip N. Froelich, William J. Showers, and Bernard J. Genna. 1996. “Oxygen Isotope Partitioning Between Phosphate and Carbonate in Mammalian Apatite.” Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 60 (24): 5145–5148. Castetter, Edward, and Ruth Underhill. 1935. “The Ethnobiology of the Papago Indians.” In University of New Mexico Biological Series, v. 4, No. 3, University of New Mexico Bulletin, Whole No. 275, Ethnobiological Studies in the American Southwest 2. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico. Castilla-Beltrán, Alvaro, Henry Hooghiemstra, Menno L. P. Hoogland, Timme H. Donders, Jaime R. Pagán-Jiménez, Crystal N. H. McMichael, Steven Marinus Francisco Rolefes, et al. 2020. “Ecological Responses to Land Use Change in the Face of European Colonization of Haytí Island.” Quaternary Science Reviews 241: 106407. Cerling, Thure E., John M. Harris, and Benjamin H. Passey. 2003. “Diets of East African Bovidae Based on Stable Isotope Analysis.” Journal of Mammalogy 84 (2): 456–470. Coughlan, Michael R., and Donald R. Nelson. 2018. “Influences of Native American Land Use on the Colonial Euro-American Settlement of the South Carolina Piedmont.” PLoS One 13 (3): e0195036. Crawford, Jeffrey N., Scott A. Mensing, Frank K. Lake, and Susan R. H. Zimmerman. 2015. “Late Holocene Fire and Vegetation Reconstruction from the Western Klamath Mountains, California, USA: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach for Examining Potential Human Land-Use Impacts.” The Holocene 25 (8): 1341–1357. Cronon, William. 1983. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang. Crosby, Alfred W. 1972. “Old World Plants and Animals in the New World.” In The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, 68–125. Contributions in American Studies, No. 2. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing. Crosby, Alfred W. 2004. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curtin, Charles G., Nathan F. Sayre, and Benjamin D. Lane. 2002. “Transformations of the Chihuahuan Borderlands: Grazing, Fragmentation, and Biodiversity Conservation in Desert Grasslands.” Environmental Science & Policy 218: 1–14. Deagan, Kathleen A. 1996. “Environmental Archaeology and Historical Archaeology.” In Case Studies in Environmental Archaeology, edited by Elizabeth Jean Reitz, Lee A. Newsom, and Sylvia J .Scudder, 359–376. New York: Plenum Press. deFrance, Susan D., and Craig A. Hanson. 2008. “Labor, Population Movement, and Food in SixteenthCentury Ek Balam, Yucatán.” Latin American Antiquity 19 (3): 299–316. Denevan, William M. 1992. “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (3): 369–385.

90

Colonialism and historical ecology Denevan, William M. 2011. “The ‘Pristine Myth’ Revisited.” Geographical Review 101 (4): 576–591. Diamond, Jared M. 2011. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin Books. Dimmitt, Mark A. 2000. “Biomes and Communities of the Sonoran Desert Region.” In A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert, edited by Steven Phillips and Patricia Wentworth Comus, 129–280. Tucson: Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Doppler, Thomas, Claudia Gerling, Volker Heyd, Corina Knipper, Thomas Kuhn, Moritz F. Lehmann, Alistair W. G. Pike, and Jörg Schibler. 2017. “Landscape Opening and Herding Strategies: Carbon Isotope Analyses of Herbivore Bone Collagen from the Neolithic and Bronze Age Lakeshore Site of Zurich-Mozartstrasse, Switzerland.” Quaternary International 436: 18–28. Dore, Kerry M., Erin P. Riley, and Agustin Fuentes. 2017. Ethnoprimatology: A Practical Guide to Research at the Human-Nonhuman Primate Interface. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eastoe, C. J., and D. L. Dettman. 2016. “Isotope Amount Effects in Hydrologic and Climate Reconstructions of Monsoon Climates: Implications of Some Long-Term Data Sets for Precipitation.” Chemical Geology 430: 78–89. Edwards, Kyle W., and Heather B. Trigg. 2016. “Intersecting Landscapes: A Palynological Study of Pueblo, Spanish, and Anglo-American Land Use in New Mexico.” Historical Archaeology 50 (1): 135–153. Feinberg, Rebecca, Patrick Nason, and Hamsini Sridharan. 2013. “Introduction: Human-Animal Relations.” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4 (1): 1–4. Flieschner, T. L. 1994. “Ecological Costs of Livestock Grazing in Western North America.” Conservation Biology 8 (3): 629–644. Freiwald, Carolyn, and Timothy Pugh. 2018. “The Origins of Early Colonial Cows at San Bernabé, Guatemala: Strontium Isotope Values at an Early Spanish Mission in the Petén Lakes Region of Northern Guatemala.” Environmental Archaeology 23 (1): 80–96. Gerling, Claudia, Thomas Doppler, Volker Heyd, Corina Knipper, Thomas Kuhn, Moritz F. Lehmann, Alistair W. G. Pike, and Jörg Schibler. 2017. “High-Resolution Isotopic Evidence of Specialised Cattle Herding in the European Neolithic.” PLoS One 12 (7): e0180164. Grimstead, Deanna, and Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman. 2016. “Historical Continuity in Sonoran Desert Free-Range Ranching Practices: Carbon, Oxygen, and Strontium Isotope Evidence from Two 18thCentury Missions.” Journal of Archaeological Science Reports 7: 37–47. Guiry, Eric, Bernice Harpley, Zachary Jones, and Colin Smith. 2014. “Integrating Stable Isotope and Zooarchaeological Analyses in Historical Archaeology: A Case Study from the Urban Nineteenth-Century Commonwealth Block Site, Melbourne, Australia.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 18 (3): 415–440. Hofman, Courtney A., and Torben C. Rick. 2018. “Ancient Biological Invasions and Island Ecosystems: Tracking Translocations of Wild Plants and Animals.” Journal of Archaeological Research 26 (1): 65–115. Jones, Emily Lena. 2018. “Coming to Terms with Imperfection: Comparative Studies and the Search for Grazing Impacts in Seventeenth Century New Mexico.” In Zooarchaeology in Practice, edited by Christina M. Giovas and Michelle J. LeFebvre, 251–268. Cham: Springer. Jones, Emily Lena, and Caroline Gabe. 2015. “The Promise and Peril of Older Collections: Meta-Analyses and the Zooarchaeology of Late Prehistoric/Early Historic New Mexico.” Open Quaternary 1 (1): Art. 6. Jordan-Bychkov, Terry G. 1993. North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation. Histories of the American Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Keeley, Jon E. 2002. “Native American Impacts on Fire Regimes of the California Coastal Ranges.” Journal of Biogeography 29 (3): 303–320. Keepseagle v. Vilsack. 2017. Keepseagle v. Vilsack. United State District Court for the District of Columbia. Kirksey, Eben S., and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25 (4): 545–576. Knockaert, Juliette, Marie Balasse, Christine Rendu, Albane Burens-Carozza, Pierre Campmajo, Laurent Carozza, Delphine Bousquet, Fiorillo Denis, and Jean-Denis Vigne. 2018. “Mountain Adaptation of Caprine Herding in the Eastern Pyrenees during the Bronze Age: A Stable Oxygen and Carbon Isotope Analysis of Teeth.” Quaternary International 484: 60–74. Koenig, Dolores. 2016. “The Year 2015 in Sociocultural Anthropology: Material Life and Emergent Cultures: The Year 2015 in Sociocultural Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 118 (2): 346–358. Kohn, M. J., and T. E. Cerling. 2002. “Stable Isotope Compositions of Biological Apatite.” Reviews in Mineralogy and Geochemistry 48 (1): 455–488. Lepofsky, Dana, Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, Spencer Greening, Julia Jackley, Jennifer Carpenter, Brenda Guernsey, Darcy Mathews, and Nancy J. Turner. 2017. “Historical Ecology of Cultural Keystone Places of the Northwest Coast.” American Anthropologist 119 (3): 448–463.

91

Nicole M. Mathwich Lightfoot, Kent G. 1995. “Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship Between Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology.” American Antiquity 60 (2): 199–217. Lightfoot, Kent G., and Rob Q. Cuthrell. 2015. “Anthropogenic Burning and the Anthropocene in LateHolocene California.” The Holocene 25 (10): 1581–1587. Lightfoot, Kent G., Rob Q. Cuthrell, Cristie M. Boone, Roger Byrne, Andreas S. Chavez, Laurel Collins, Alicia Cowart, Rand R. Evett, Paul V. A. Fine, Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, Mark G. Hylkema, Valentin Lopez, Tracy M. Misiewicz, and Rachel E. B. Reid. 2013. “Anthropogenic Burning on the Central California Coast in Late Holocene and Early Historical Times: Findings, Implications, and Future Directions.” California Archaeology 5 (2): 371–390. Locke, Piers, and Ursula Muenster. 2015. “Multispecies Ethnography.” In Oxford Bibliographies-Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loendorf, Chris, and Barnaby V. Lewis. 2017. “Ancestral O’Odham: Akimel O’Odham Cultural Traditions and the Archaeological Record.” American Antiquity 82 (1): 123–139. Mann, Charles C. 2012. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. New York: Vintage Books. Mathwich, Nicole M., Barnet Pavão-Zuckerman, and Alexander Ruff. 2019. “Applying Indigenous Knowledge to Colonial Livestock: Isotopic Patterns in Water and Range Resources in the Desert Landscapes of the Pimería Alta.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 27: 101919. McIntyre, Allan J. 2008. The Tohono O’odham and Pimeria Alta. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing. Melville, Elinor G. K. 1994. A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nagaoka, Lisa, Torben Rick, and Steve Wolverton. 2018. “The Overkill Model and Its Impact on Environmental Research.” Ecology and Evolution 8 (19): 9683–9696. Nelson, Erle D., Jan Heinemeier, Jeppe Møhl, and Jette Arneborg. 2012. “Isotopic Analyses of the Domestic Animals of Norse Greenland.” Journal of the North Atlantic 3: 77–92. Ogden, Laura A., Billy Hall, and Kimiko Tanita. 2013. “Animals, Plants, People, and Things: A Review of Multispecies Ethnography.” Environment and Society 4 (1): 5–24. Panich, Lee M., and Tsim D. Schneider, eds. 2014. Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Pavao-Zuckerman, Barnet. 2007. “Deerskins and Domesticates: Creek Subsistence and Economic Strategies in the Historic Period.” American Antiquity 72 (1): 5–33. Pavao-Zuckerman, Barnet, and Elizabeth Jean Reitz. 2006. “Introduction and Adoption of Eurasian Livestock in North America.” In Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 3: Environment, Origins, and Population, edited by Douglas Ubelaker, 485–491. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Peelo, Sarah. 2009. “Baptism among the Salinan Neophytes of Mission San Antonio de Padua: Investigating the Ecological Hypothesis.” Ethnohistory 56 (4): 589–624. Reitz, Elizabeth J. 2004. “‘Fishing Down the Food Web’: A Case Study from St. Augustine, Florida, USA.” American Antiquity 69 (1): 63–83. Riley, Erin P. 2006. “Ethnoprimatology: Toward Reconciliation of Biological and Cultural Anthropology.” Ecological and Environmental Anthropology 2 (2): 75–86. Rivera-Collazo, Isabel C., Cristina Rodríguez-Franco, and José Julián Garay-Vázquez. 2018. “A DeepTime Socioecosystem Framework to Understand Social Vulnerability on a Tropical Island.” Environmental Archaeology 23 (1): 97–108. Scharf, Elizabeth A. 2014. “Deep Time: The Emerging Role of Archaeology in Landscape Ecology.” Landscape Ecology 29 (4): 563–569. Schneider, Tsim D. 2015. “Envisioning Colonial Landscapes Using Mission Registers, Radiocarbon, and Stable Isotopes: An Experimental Approach from San Francisco Bay.” American Antiquity 80 (3): 511–529. Schulting, Rick J., Petrus le Roux, Yee Min Gan, John Pouncett, Julie Hamilton, Christophe Snoeck, Peter Ditchfield, et al. 2019. “The Ups & Downs of Iron Age Animal Management on the Oxfordshire Ridgeway, South-Central England: A Multi-Isotope Approach.” Journal of Archaeological Science 101: 199–212. Silliman, Stephen. 2012. “Between the Long Duree and the Short Puree.” In Decolonizing Indigenous Histories Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology, edited by Maxine Oland, Siobhan M. Hart, and Liam Frink, 113–131. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Singer, Merrill. 2014. “Zoonotic Ecosyndemics and Multispecies Ethnography.” Anthropological Quarterly 87 (4): 1279–1309. Stahl, Peter W. 2008. “The Contributions of Zooarchaeology to Historical Ecology in the Neotropics.” Quaternary International, Neotropical Zooarchaeology and Taphonomy 180 (1): 5–16.

92

Colonialism and historical ecology Stein, Gil. 2002. “Colonies without Colonialism: A Trade Diaspora Model of Fourth Millennium B.C. Mesopotamian Enclaves in Anatolia.” In The Archaeology of Colonialism, edited by Claire L. Lyons and John K. Papadopoulos, 27–64. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. Stewart, Andrew M., Darren Keith, and Joan Scottie. 2004. “Caribou Crossings and Cultural Meanings: Placing Traditional Knowledge and Archaeology in Context in an Inuit Landscape.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 11 (2): 183–211. Strawhacker, Colleen. 2017. “O’odham Irrigated Agriculture Response to Colonization on the Middle Gila River, Southern Arizona.” In New Mexico and the Pimería Alta: The Colonial Period in the American Southwest, edited by John G. Douglass and William M. Graves, 331–354. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Sunseri, Jun U. 2015. “A Horse-Travel Approach to Landscape Archaeology.” Historical Archaeology 49 (2): 72–91. Sunseri, Jun U. 2017. “Grazing to Gravy: Faunal Remains and Indications of Genízaro Foodways on the Spanish Colonial Frontier of New Mexico.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 21 (3): 577–597. Szabó, Péter. 2015. “Historical Ecology: Past, Present and Future.” Biological Reviews 90 (4): 997–1014. Torstenson, Wendy L. F., Jeffrey C. Mosley, Tracy K. Brewer, Michael W. Tess, and James E. Knight. 2006. “Elk, Mule Deer, and Cattle Foraging Relationships on Foothill and Mountain Rangeland.” Rangeland Ecology & Management 59 (1): 80–87. Underhill, Ruth. 1940. Papago Indians of Arizona and Their Relatives the Pima; Illustrated with Photographs from the Bureau of American Ethnology and Drawings. United States. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Wolverton, Steve, and R. Lee Lyman, eds. 2012. Conservation Biology and Applied Zooarchaeology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Zwartjes, Patrick W., Jean-Luc E. Cartron, Pamela L. L. Stoleson, Walter C. Haussamen, and Tiffany E. Crane. 2005. “Assessment of Native Species and Ungulate Grazing in the Southwest: Terrestrial Wildlife.” U S Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station General Technical Report RMRS-GTR 142 (September): 1–74.

93

7 INTERPRETING DOCUMENTARY AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE Intercultural interactions in Santafé de Bogotá (Colombia) Monika Therrien

Intercultural interaction, contact spaces, and pluriverses In the broad discussion about the interactions in which Indigenous peoples were involved under colonial rule, historical documentation has a special place within debates in the fields of history and archaeology. The most frequent position regarding many document sources is that since they were produced by the colonizers—and largely by those in positions of authority in the colonial administration—they are considered another instrument of power, privileging the vision of the colonizers and their way of thinking, which in turn shaped the reality of the colonized (Zambrano 2000). This is, to a certain extent, indisputable. However, by the same token, beyond stating this fact, optimizing the analytical tools and diversifying the sources is imperative, in order also to discuss how to use these sources and question some standard interpretations in the field of archaeology. In fact, the current proposals for decolonization of research carried out by Indigenous peoples focus precisely on some of these premises (Tuhiwai-Smith 2012). Since my first experiences working in pre-Hispanic archaeology, and guided by my interest in history, I detected an almost total absence of Indigenous peoples in colonial historiography. In most accounts, the emphasis was placed on the devastation brought about by the violence and diseases introduced by the conquerors, leaving a few survivors at the service of their colonizers, either as personal servants or as tributaries in the encomienda system (Colmenares 1973). This absence posed several challenges for my research. On the one hand, it was reasonable to assume that historical documents about Indigenous peoples, which could potentially help to reconstruct their trajectories to the present, would be scarce. On the other hand, on the basis of this scarcity of document sources, it would be difficult to explore their post-contact histories, beyond the writings in which they are represented only as conquered subjects. These were the main challenges and motivations on which my initial archaeological projects had been based, with the intention of highlighting the trajectories of Indigenous peoples and other invisible groups that unfolded under the imperial regime in order to understand the effects of colonialism that persist today. Material culture has revealed many features of what contact brought about (Therrien et al. 94

Interpreting documentary evidence

2002), and this has disputed some aspects of traditional colonial historiography and has served to broaden perspectives, expand the range of document sources consulted, and, consequently, question the traditional methods of analysis (Mignolo 1995). The results of this initial research led me to another issue that has more recently become the focus of debate concerning colonialism, namely, the categories of indio, negro, and blanco, as well as the category of mestizo (Rappaport 2014), when in the use of archival sources and in archaeological interpretations (Deagan 2011; Therrien 2003, 2007). While these categories are constitutive of normative discourses to govern populations under colonial rule, they also hide the effects of contact and the diverse trajectories followed by hundreds of thousands of individuals classified by them. The assessment of different concepts, such as acculturation or transculturation, brought these issues to light as it became evident that they carried “old meanings of culture” (Wright 2004, 131) in which the interaction is framed as occurring between organized and self-contained entities, presumed as homogeneous and static cultural units. Additionally, in works produced under these notions, as well as in some adopting critical perspectives on colonialism or written to highlight the voice of the subaltern, there is a tendency to relegate colonizers, such as those categorized as blanco or Spaniards, to the hegemonic discursive plane. As an alternative to the colonizer–colonized discussion or to using colonial categories such as blanco, indio, or negro, the current archaeological research programs in Bogotá and Cartagena de Indias, and within them the uses of document sources, have focused specifically on understanding the complex interactions involving all actors, who assume different roles, in a continuum (horizontal and vertical, archaeologically speaking) of changing relationships. One of the notions that supports this position is intercultural communication (Grimson 2001; Rodrigo 1999), a concept that for some emerged in the 1950s with the publication of Edward Hall’s The Silent Language on nonverbal communication, defined as one that goes beyond verbal and, of course, written communication. This notion has been gaining currency since the 1980s, with the intensification of global migrations and displacements, as well as of social and gender movements, among others, in the face of which various authors propose ways to resolve the conflicts and misunderstandings (in the media, in education, in politics, etc.) that may arise in cultural interactions under these conditions (Samovar et al. 2012). Certainly, when analyzing archaeological and historical information based on material culture and documentary sources, it is not a question of resolving or dissolving the confrontations, the exercise of power, the acts of dispossession, or the violence of colonization. However, from a colonizer–colonized perspective, the latter tends to be perceived as defeated without even examining the scenarios in which all actors interacted and shaped multiple relationships, involving the deployment by all subjects of practices, discourses, codes, and materialities that have informed the development of present-day societies. Therefore, to delve into the intercultural interaction between people and groups with different geographical and historical trajectories (Pratt 1992) and to perceive these interactions from the particular semantics and sensibilities of each individual involved is also to try to break down the processes that have led to the naturalization of the current achievements, imbalances, hegemonic constructions, and subordinations, which are still expressed in verbal, nonverbal, and written or media communication. Every new contact—be it the product of migration or displacement, from different continents or within the same continent, from a pueblo de indios (Indian town) or palenque/quilombo1 to the city or from another city—as much as the emergence of a new institution or its transformation, or the occurrence of an unexperienced event, involves facing the unknown and reacting, not according to the law or to royal dictates, but in accordance with the logics of the people involved. As such, contact is revealed as pluriversal, where different worlds coexist ordered around different cosmologies, and not under the purported universality of the western imperial project (Mignolo 95

Monika Therrien

2015). In this way, understanding these interactions requires discerning what the people involved notice or not, what is implied, and what to accept or ignore (Rodrigo 1999). In intercultural communication, people acknowledge and embody their own realities by interacting with those they perceive as different (Rodrigo 1999), which can be analyzed, from an archaeological perspective, in what I have called contact spaces. These are relational scenarios where people of diverse origins and conditions converge—be it for a ceremony or a celebration, the kitchen and cooking, the church/cemetery, the public square, the house, the market or the shop, the school, a fort or a prison—in which communities of meaning are built through practices or activities. However, it is increasingly evident to archaeologists that these spaces do not necessarily lead to the homogenization of communities, despite the routines they impose, nor do they remain the same over time. In each space of contact, whether a new one or one undergoing transformation, intercultural interaction makes evident the logics of each person involved, generating tensions, negotiations, acceptance, impositions, and rejection. This is the case of ladinos, another of the social categories frequently used in HispanicAmerican documentary sources and hardly analyzed by itself (Fry 2004). The term refers mainly to a person who may have been cast as indio or negro but who spoke Spanish and, additionally, dressed and lived like Europeans. Thus, ladinos are commonly treated in colonial historiography as people who succumbed to acculturation, were defeated, and were absorbed by Hispanic culture. Although Covarrubias (1611) describes them as shrewd when dealing, in today’s colloquial language, the most common conception of ladino is that of its synonyms, namely, of a devious, cunning person who poses as naïve to take advantage of others. This notion probably emanated from the optics of the colonial officer or the evangelizer, for whom such individuals had not been fully Christianized (Rappaport 2014). Regarding the legal regime applied to the ladino, because of their indeterminate status, similar to that of the mestizo, being classified under this category had implications, especially for land ownership and tribute exemptions. However, for the purpose of establishing ties of sociability, work, or trade, ladinos sought to move between the different categories (Fry 2004; Velasquez 2014), mastering the most convenient way of representing themselves in intercultural interactions, which at the same time subverts their representation as a defeated and oppressed subject in the historiography.

Making ends meet The change that historical archaeology has undergone regarding perspectives on cultural interactions in the Americas and other continents is evident, from the timid initial steps on encounters (Thomas 1990) to the more recent critical positions on imperialism and colonialism (MontónSubías et al. 2016; Oland et al. 2012; Stein 2005), as well as the adoption of subaltern approaches (Dominguez et al. 2019). The discipline has abandoned the notion of acculturation, that of colonized peoples as passive and subjugated to active colonizers, and has introduced concepts such as power (Jamieson 2000), persistence (Panich et al. 2018; Therrien 1996), resistance (Liebmann and Murphy 2011), and resilience (Scaramelli 2019), among others, which have strongly permeated the scientific literature. Often, the adoption of these approaches has inspired or been inspired by a parallel questioning about the role of archaeology for today’s local populations, especially for marginalized, peripheral, or oppressed communities. The interpretation of the evidence is based on or oriented toward the need to provide answers to local groups so they can reinforce their political and social struggles (Scaramelli 2016), confront the marginality to which they have been relegated, and, to a lesser extent, have a basis for the construction of their own historicity. That is, theoretical

96

Interpreting documentary evidence

frameworks have benefited from collaborations between archaeologists and present-day communities, both when carrying out fieldwork and trying to make sense of the evidence. However, it is still common that the methodologies that mediate between the theoretical perspectives and their interpretations continue to be permeated by colonialist concepts, methods, and languages (Silliman 2012; Tuwihai-Smith 2012). Archaeologists working from a decolonial perspective usually focus on knowing and confronting official historical versions with those of present-day Indigenous or Black2 communities, incorporating their critical approaches to the interpretations of the evidence and even to methods of community outreach. The use of chronologies and historical timelines to illustrate long trajectories rooted in a remote past and marked by change and transformations, the creation of parks, or setting up exhibitions of objects in display cases, panels, and documents accompanied by the voices of the locals interpreting them are some of the codifications and strategies of the modern western world that have been introduced by archaeologists to legitimize and empower and reinforce the claims of these communities. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges in these scenarios is to denaturalize, decolonize, and deconstruct categories, methods, and tools to expand the spectrum of possibilities for information analysis, for the interpretation of its meaning and its effects. The development since 1996 of the historical archaeology programs in Cartagena de Indias and Bogotá, Colombia, has entailed the design of methodologies, particularly in the use of documentary sources, in the way the correlation between these sources and the archaeological evidence can be established, and even in how the resulting texts should be written and illustrated. An ambitious project to explore the existing archival documentation on Santafé de Bogotá under the colonial regime, En los orígenes de Bogotá: la construcción de su corpus documental, 1539– 1633 (The Origins of Bogotá: The Construction of its Documentary Corpus, 1539–1633)—a city that is still today a site of complex intercultural interactions in multiple contact spaces— involved at least two methodological approaches. On the one hand, it used a conceptual framework composed of categories and subcategories derived from the contexts most frequently associated with archaeological research, which allowed the search to be narrowed down and transcription of an infinite range of documents to those that would yield information that could be correlated with archaeological data. On the other hand, it applied methodologies of documentary analysis in order to expand the frameworks of analysis and interpretation of archaeological information. As for the conceptual framework, the archaeological study of the historical center of Bogotá was based on two umbrella concepts: the city sensed as urbs, a physical and discursive entity, and as civitas, as a human and practiced association (Kagan 2000); the city understood as a form of implantation—the most common today—which refers to how a society creates space and scapes in which diverse social configurations are deployed. In the context of the Hispanic-American colonial city, in order to achieve an ideal social order, a degree of Policía Española (Suárez 2015) and civility nourished a set of norms that, enacted by the authorities and followed by its inhabitants, demanded from individuals that they behave in certain ways and fulfill certain duties, while sanctions were imposed for transgression of these norms. So as to further expound these concepts and ideals, the document collections were organized into two necessarily interdependent categories. The discursive level included documents that refer to social control (defined as per Foucault, in Beaulieu 2008) both in the field of political government (discipline, governmentality) and of spiritual government (evangelization, indoctrination). On the level of practiced space, the category of transgression included documents regarding contempt or disobedience of that social control, organized under subcategories referred to the continuous practice of ancestral

97

Monika Therrien

customs and beliefs (borracheras [drinking gatherings], idolatry), lawsuits, assaults, or criminal acts (murders, robberies), which in the logic of the colonial administrator could evidently deserve indistinctively the same penalties. The bulk of colonial historiography, since the nineteenth century and throughout most of the twentieth century, has been written under the more restricted notion of legal control and usually supported by documents derived from legal institutions (ordinances, mandates, instructions, agreements issued by the cabildo). Based on these documents, the meta-narratives on Hispanic-American cities (Gutiérrez 1992; Mejía 2012) have been structured from the perspective of the colonial administrators and the secular clergy as main protagonists. This was followed by a new historiography, focused on the tensions between colonial power and the main actors of the colonizing process—conquerors, encomenderos, and religious communities—dealing mainly with the conflicts caused by moral and economic reasoning about dispossession of Indigenous territories and the exploitation of their labor (López 2001; Villamarín 1972). More recently, historical studies have focused on the transgressive actions of Indigenous peoples, thus inverting their passive role as servants or inhabitants to analyze their actions as resistance or resilience, in the face of the violent or authoritarian imposition of control measures (Herrera 2002; Zambrano 2008). Only very few studies begin to address the complex entanglements, with a more thorough investigation of documents that make it possible to weave these interactions and demonstrate the processes of translation, metamorphosis, and transition of some forms of representation or behavior to others as carried out by all the actors involved in control/transgression situations (Muñoz 2015, 2016; Rappaport 2014; Therrien 2008; Vargas 1990). In the documentary corpus project, the emphasis placed on practiced contact spaces was a conscious exercise to create distance from the historiography that produced versions of the city and of society based on colonial legal control, on imperial imaginaries, and not on the practices in each place where colonial norms were introduced. These are spaces in which a “set of procedures” (De Certeau 1984), operational modalities, strategies, and tactics took place and are documented in the multiple activities (sales, rentals, construction, supply, rituals, trades, etc.) that led people to act, day to day or cyclically, within their logic and practices. The documents record the practices and routines that led to formalize and legitimize the signification, adaptation, or appropriation processes to which the city dweller resorted to live and reproduce in the city. However, these approaches based on written documents still lack the ingredients provided by the transdisciplinary approach that archaeology can offer by linking architecture, urbanism, anthropology, history, and geography around concepts such as contact spaces. This approach, in particular, endeavors not only to capture the interrelationships on the discursive and intangible plane but also to locate them in practical and tangible spaces, from which the archaeological materiality emanates. Likewise, given the needs and demands for alternative analysis of archaeological evidence, the categories of social control and transgression are overly general abstractions that prevent discerning, configuring, and interpreting the data. It is critical to introduce categories and subcategories that enable the analysis of how or what provoked conflicts, alliances, changes in status, or negotiations, situating the evidence as immersed in the wefts and fabrics that made the events possible and with multiple meanings. Thus, in pursuit of more specific and relevant levels of abstraction for archaeological analysis, the revision of the corpus of written sources was organized around two categories that configure contact spaces: the built place (Lefebvre 1991) and social institutions (according to Mary Douglas’s theories on social institutions, revisited in Logue et al. 2016). In order to achieve compatibility and correlation between the data obtained from written documents and archaeological sites, specific subcategories were defined. On the one hand, for the built place, are the subcategories of private spaces (plots, housing, tiendas-shops, convents, workshops, and all 98

Interpreting documentary evidence

buildings and structures in the hands of individuals) and public spaces (squares, streets, markets, churches, water sources), nowadays conceived as structuring spaces, where practices, relationships, circulation, production, and reproduction of social life take place. On the other hand, the category of social institutions included all possible relationships that could be established in these spaces, through kinship ties (the domestic unit composed of genealogical or ancestral ties, servants, executors, guardians, compadres) and social organization (brotherhoods, guilds, trades, religious communities).

Settling and setting contact spaces One of the first archaeological excavations in the historic center of Bogotá was done in the house located in the southwestern corner of the main square, during its restoration process (Therrien 1998). Although there were already archaeological studies that evidenced the predominance of ceramic vessels of Indigenous tradition in Hispanic-American cities (Deagan 1983; Therrien et al. 2002), the number and characteristics of what was found in a seemingly privileged location contradicted the information collected in historical architectural and urban studies of the building and, in general, the history of the foundation and first centuries of the city of Santafé de Bogotá. In the historiography on Hispanic-American cities, the main square has been described as the space of power and prestige around which the solares (plots) were distributed among the conquerors and colonial institutions, the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church, as the poor and the craft workshops were located, in a gradient, toward the periphery (Figure 7.1). According to this narrative, in the privileged blocks where the colonizers had their dwellings, there were also Indigenous peoples who lived in those same buildings as servants, inhabiting the back orchards, where they held feasts according to the practices of their ancestors (Vargas 1990). Archaeological interpretations based on material culture have often contributed to reaffirm these ideas by assigning the sherds of European origin to the owners of the house, usually white or Spanish, and assuming that they also represent a form of prestige and power, while the materials from Indigenous pottery tradition are considered to belong to the servants and interpreted as utensils employed in the tasks they carry out, mainly in the kitchen and the orchard. However, the meager proportion of foreign materials, compared to those of local manufacture, obtained in the excavation of the site demanded further explanations. This was, among others, one of the reasons for consolidating the Historical Archaeology Program of Bogotá, with the project Cultura material y ciudad: civilidad y policía en la Santafé colonial, siglos XVI-XVII (Material Culture and City: Civility and Spanish Police in the Colonial Santafé, 16th–17th century), in which archaeological excavations were carried out at different points in the historic center at the same time that a review of documents was accomplished as another source of viable information to understand archaeological evidence in housing and institutional spaces. For this purpose, different archives were consulted: the cadastral archive of the city and the notary section (wills and deeds) in the Colombian archives (Archivo General de la Nación, AGN), as well as in Seville (Archivo General de Indias, AGI), in addition to old aerial photography, which resulted in the review, transcription, and analysis of approximately 200 documents to be correlated with the results of archaeological excavations. For the corner house, specifically, cadastral information was obtained, including the property registration,3 the title deeds for the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, wills, and other documents relating to the successive owners since the sixteenth century. Using this information, along with aerial photography of the area, it was possible to reconstruct the configuration of the property from its initial occupation. These archival sources enabled a reconstruction 99

Monika Therrien

Figure 7.1 Aspect of Santafé de Bogotá in 1852, which does not differ much from previous centuries. The archaeological excavations in the surroundings of the Plaza Mayor, located in a central place between the two main rivers, and of different sites in the historic center have evidenced their character as contact spaces. Source: Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia, fmapoteca 962, fbnc 8.

of the evolution of the site and the buildings on it, as well as a characterization of the owners and inhabitants, which provided information relevant to the stratigraphic analysis and not only a chronological interpretation but also the spatial, social, and cultural interpretation of the evidence obtained at the site. Likewise, with the help of these documents it was possible to trace the genealogies, provenance, and activities of some of the inhabitants of the site, identify inventories, and establish the distribution of goods in the house and the activities carried out on the premises. The interest in genealogies went beyond the political function of lineages or an apology for them, while acknowledging that they have been instrumental in the exercise of power and in sustaining social and economic alliances that granted access to the hegemonic layers of society. These genealogies were a useful tool to investigate the spatial location of the offspring in the urban environment, as well as the transfer of material goods and their permanence and redistribution over time. The genealogical record is usually easier to follow among Europeans and their offspring; however, in some cases it was possible to trace records of Indigenous peoples, both in their wills and in matters relating to their properties in the city. The results differ from the descriptions and interpretations of who lived within the select area of the main square or in the rest of the city, as well as with the characterization of the contact spaces and the archaeological material that would be expected to be found in them (Therrien 100

Interpreting documentary evidence

and Jaramillo 2004). Also, both the analysis of the documentation on this plot and on the Indigenous peoples who owned properties in what is known today as the historic center led researchers to question the concept of the house as such, not only in terms of the notion generally used by architecture or urban history to refer to the physical space but likewise as a social configuration of the household, which could include members with varying degrees of kinship, as well as slaves, servants, godchildren, apprentices, and even the occupants of the shops that functioned in the same building. This is a more complex notion than the one introduced by the colonizer, the naturalized and accepted as legitimate notion of family unit that persists today. In this sense, for the documentary and archaeological analysis, another concept of genealogy was required, one in which the aim “is not to reconstruct the past in the light of the present, but rather to start out from an issue that is challenging us in the present and trace its genesis” (Melgarejo 2000, 43). This would apply not only to the house but also to other emerging configurations in the city, in the public, and in the private sphere, regarding forms of sociability as much as antagonisms, to mention but a few.

Grinding and grounding data As a result of the initial archaeological and documentary analyses, which revealed a significant presence of Indigenous peoples in the city as proprietors, merchants, and craftsmen, further questions arose about how a large number of people from different social, cultural, geographical, and historical backgrounds occupied the contact spaces and evolved in them, whom they interacted with, and through which procedures, practices, and routines they did so. This led to further investigation, involving the identification and review of more than 800 archival documents (from such collections as Lands, Civil Affairs, Convents, Notaries, Real Audiencia, and Tributes). The conceptual framework filtered the documents for transcription and analysis, in the manner of a qualitative interview—as a question form—to verify whether the documents provided an answer to these questions. Taking up such a review might seem like a return to empiricism, to collecting data for the sake of data. In this case, however, it had to do with the discrepancy found between the data and analyses based on one or very few documents, which were then used to generalize explanations on one or more situations, a common practice in archaeology. For the purposes of the analyses and interpretations of the archaeological contexts and the corresponding evidence, the results of an analysis of such a large document corpus provide frames of reference on contact spaces covering interactions, connections, entanglements, interdependencies, and even different or parallel chronologies, which also leads to a revision of the timeline of the social process that was being researched, so that it would reflect the rhythms of other actors and not only those of the upper echelons of society. From this perspective, the analysis of the selected documents is based on the methodology used to develop grounded theory, the main purpose of which is to generate theory from the data, while providing techniques to organize conceptual descriptions or orders and to classify or develop concepts (Strauss and Corbin 2002). In addition to the procedures provided by this methodology, its principles are consistent with the positions of the archaeology program, inasmuch as its objective is to explore (c) the complexity and variability of phenomena and of human action; (d) the belief that persons are actors who take an active role in responding to problematic situations; (e) the realization that persons act on the basis of meaning; (f) the understanding that meaning is defined and redefined through interaction. (Strauss and Corbin 2002, 10) 101

Monika Therrien

As Charmaz summarizes it, “Strauss brought notions of human agency, emergent processes, social and subjective meanings, problem-solving practices” (Charmaz 2012, 7), to which the task of unraveling the colonialist conceptions that have been naturalized and internalized as legitimate must be added—as they are to this day factors of conflict in society—a process carried out by extricating their origins and trajectories using archaeological and documentary evidence. The procedure followed in the analysis of the documents consisted, in the first instance, of applying open coding (Strauss and Corbin 2002) to reduce the data, process it, and establish relationships (nowadays, qualitative analysis software programs are used to streamline these processes). Once 249 documents were filtered in terms of the aforementioned conceptual framework, the reduction of information began along with the transcription, by breaking down each document and extracting the words, sentences or paragraphs that refer to an event, an idea, or a meaning. The same document can be broken down several times, and different ideas can be derived from it. Ideas or events are classified under certain labels, then compared between them to determine their similarities and differences, after which they can be grouped. Any particular object can be named and thus located in countless ways. The naming sets it within a context of quite differently related classes. The nature or essence of an object does not reside mysteriously within the object itself but is dependent upon how it is defined. (Strauss 1969 in Strauss and Corbin 2002, 113) In this way, categories and subcategories are fed with ideas and meanings, the properties and dimensions of which are also examined. Grounding categories and subcategories with coding involves introducing questions that are essential to understand, as in this case, contact spaces. Who participates in these spaces? How do they participate? When? Why? Where do contacts take place? What goes on in these spaces? Likewise, in line with the purpose of understanding how interactions in contact spaces generate or display practices and routines, the time question refers not only to a particular date but to the frequency and duration of these interactions, a frequency or duration that cannot always be obtained from a single document, in the same way that a single archaeological stratum or a particular object would not yield this information. The comparative analysis between categories—a subsequent procedure called axial coding (Strauss and Corbin 2002, 135)—revolves, in turn, around answering such questions as to who interacts and how they interact. These answers are grouped, and then the category that prevails over others regarding the events is identified, as well as the issues or problems that lead different people to interact. This, in turn, leads to the question of why they interact. In short, the initial coding procedure involves breaking down a document into small significative sections by identifying the multiple meanings it contains and grouping them under the categories and subcategories of interest for the research project. The definition of categories, although initially mediated by the conceptual framework designed to filter through the documents, seeks to ensure, by means of the coding, that the voices of the people, their actions, and practices provide the meaning. The procedures applied in the analysis of documents are not unlike the methods of analysis of archaeological or even ethnographic contexts and materials; however, it must be stressed that the main purpose here is to expand the possibilities to create new frameworks for the interpretation of information.

Weaving categories and interactions In the archaeological excavations recently carried out in what used to be known as the Calle Real (Royal Street) in the colonial period, particularly around the squares that used to be marketplaces, 102

Interpreting documentary evidence

an abundant concentration of materials was found, including animal bone remains and ceramic and bone objects associated with the sale of products and the consumption of food in the street. As in private spaces, the higher proportion of ceramic vessels found in the public space are part of the so-called Indigenous pottery tradition (Therrien et al. 2002). The significant presence of these materials does not necessarily reflect a greater number of Indigenous inhabitants (although in Santafé they could be equivalent) but that their demand was high and constant in the multiple spaces in which they were used, which also indicates a considerable production of these utensils to meet this demand (Therrien 2016). In the historical accounts, there have been at least two common assumptions about the presence of Indigenous peoples in Santafé de Bogotá: one is their condition as servants of Spaniards, mainly in the latter’s homes and as such invisible in the city’s public spaces; and, secondly, that they did not own plots, so they could not acquire the status of vecinos of the city. Expanding the review of documents, in terms of quantity and of the centuries covered, to investigate day-today interactions in the city brought to light the fact that buying, selling, and renting properties and shops was the most common activity. This, in turn, meant that lawsuits over property, be they brought by Europeans or criollos4 against each other or against them by indios and vice versa, or by indios (ladinos, criollos, yanaconas,5 or from specific Indian villages) and mulattos against each other, were also frequent. Beyond the legal issue that motivated the lawsuit, these documents, depending on the coding applied to them, can become a source of additional information on the ways in which not only private spaces but also public spaces were inhabited, occupied, and practiced, on the trades that were exercised in these spaces, and even on genealogies. An example of coding on one of these documents demonstrates this. The dispute over the ownership of a plot in 1608 involved Francisco Reina, carpenter (it is unknown whether he was an indio or not) and Juan Pelador, an indio, married to Isabel, an india, the father of the india Juana, and grandfather of Agustina and Luisa. According to the testimony of Juan Pelador, secretary-diego de rrobles (sic), his master, gave Juan, an Anacona indio, my grandfather, some fifty years ago, this part [of the plot] in payment for the services rendered to him until he died, and when he died my mother [Ynes] inherited from him this part [of the plot], and upon her death I inherited said plot, so that I and my ancestors have held and had possession of it as our own and with deed and in good faith. (AGN, Fincas de Cundinamarca, Volume 7, F. 29r; translated by Erna von der Walde) Francisco Reina brought this lawsuit because he intended to assume the role of guardian of Agustina and Luisa, and with the role also the property, claiming that they were not natural granddaughters of Juan Pelador but mestizas who had been conceived by Juana while her husband was out of the city. However, at least ten Indigenous people (women and men, ladinos, criollos, and a Yanacona) and a criollo descendant of Spaniards and compadre of Juan Pelador rendered their testimony about the possession of the plot and about the kinship ties, revealing how these operated in public and private spaces, Ynes, the mother of said Juan Pelador, always displayed great love for the mentioned Juana, the mother of the mentioned Agustina and Luisa, and would carry her around in the street and would say publicly that she was her granddaughter and as such she was considered . . . for the love and the services that the mentioned Juana rendered to her, 103

Monika Therrien

this witness [Beatriz, an india] knows that the above-mentioned Ynes left her in her will half of that plot, the object of this lawsuit. (AGN, Fincas de Cundinamarca, Volume 7, F. 46v; translated by Erna von der Walde) However, almost simultaneously, when Ines was publicly demonstrating such afection for the orphan whose care she assumed and who would end up marrying her son, Juan Pelador, the president of the Audiencia de Santafé created the new position of “Administrator of indios and indias ladinos and mulatos of the city of Santafé” in 1594, and with it he issued the Instructions to control the disorders and excesses of this population (Muñoz 2016, 225) in public and private spaces. 4- Said administrator shall order that the indios that are to be given any kind of job must be present all working days from six o’clock in the morning at the main square of said city where they can be hired for a fair wage and salary. . . . 6- That the administrator shall often visit said indio men and women and their dwellings and that he shall not consent to their holding borracheras (drinking gatherings) nor possessing any botijas or basijas (vessels) beyond those required for their livelihood and that of their women and children, much less shall he consent to games of any kind because with these measures he prevents the problems that would otherwise ensue. (AGI, Audience of Santa Fe, File 93, n. 16, f. 500r-500v. Transcribed by Santiago Muñoz 2016, 231; translated by Erna von der Walde) The so-called borracheras (Herrera 2005) among some Indigenous inhabitants in Santafé, with brews kept and served in the vessels and botijas mentioned in the document, were held as a conflict-resolution mechanism and to strengthen friendships. This is recorded in the same year of enactment of these measures, when Geronima de los Angeles, an india, filed a lawsuit over a plot against Ines, also an india, and describes two of the five witnesses (two Indigenous and three presumably white) involved in the case thusly: Francisca de Cabrera, india ladina, because she is a comadre of the india Ines and her neighbor and a great friend of hers and an enemy of mine. . . . Francisco, indio ladino from Sogamoso, who has been at the house of said india Ines eating and drinking. (AGN, Fondo Fincas Cundinamarca, Volume 5, f. 257; translated by Erna von der Walde) The emphasis on who interacts, regardless of how and why (in the cases mentioned, property lawsuits), led to include the category of inhabitant (of Santafé de Bogotá) within the conceptual framework and to identify with it the origin, trade, genealogy, parish or neighborhood of residence, and the burial temple, among other subcategories. This coding enabled to unveil more details of the urban, social, and economic fabric. The category of inhabitant and its subcategories revealed the importance of trade, among the many routine activities, and of merchants as vital protagonists in the city (Therrien 2008). A good example of this is the many commercial transactions that Luis Feijó was involved in, one of the merchants in Santafé de Bogotá who carried out the most deals in the sixteenth century. Each activity in which he had a role (payment, collection, sale, holder of a power of attorney) is recorded on a diferent document in the

104

Interpreting documentary evidence

archive; however, in terms of the category and subcategories, they are combined as one, in order to understand both the range of people and of dealings that this trader handled and for how long. A similar case is that of Juan, an indio from Engativá, who in his will, drawn up in 1578, describes some of the deals he made within and beyond the city, riding his “dark chestnutcolored mare and a large foal.” Francisco, an indio ladino and espadrille maker, owes me for a horse I sold to him (ten gold pesos) Diego, an indio belonging to Captain Meneses from Ibagué, owes me for a horse I sold to him (10 gold pesos) Mateo Panche, an indio from Juan Gutiérrez’s encomienda, owes me for some white beads (3 gold pesos) Miguel, an indio and a resident of Ibagué, owes me for some dyed blankets6 (2 pesos) I have a sword with its sheath without chape that I gave to Captain Francisco Sánchez, who lives by the river of this city, for him to keep for me. Guacha, an indio from Pasca, has in his possession a blanket with maure (belt) that belongs to me (9 pesos) Tusacacha, Guacha’s nephew, owes me an undershirt (9 pesos) an indio called Chicachia, from the repartimiento of Chia, owes me half a peso Inquegue, one of Diego Romero’s indios, owes me three tomines (low denomination coins), and another one of Romero’s indios, called Fuchagula, owes me a coarse chinga (blanket). another indio named []teguguia, of Tenjo, one of Master Juan’s, owes me a blanket Luis de Tunja, an indio from Captain Suarez’s Icabuco repartimiento, owes me a blanket (half a peso) I owe to another one of Diego Romero’s indios a coarse chinga (blanket). (AGN, Fondo Notaría 3a, Volume 1, f. 293r-295r; translated by Erna von der Walde) These documents dealing with lawsuits, wills, transactions, or the purchase, sale, and rental of plots and shops are just a set of the many records from which information can be extracted on built places—private and public spaces—and social institutions—kinship and social ties—and their continuous transformation in the city, all pointing at the complex entanglements of intercultural interaction.

Expanding interpretative frameworks The idea of interculturality, drawn from the analysis of transactions and conflicts, does not refer to the interactions of people identified as blancos, indios, and negros in the documents. In the process of identifying and characterizing the people involved in the contact spaces—as in the lawsuits analyzed—we find evidence that Indigenous peoples of different origin, age, sex, and trade are subsumed under the denomination of indios (or blancos or negros, for that matter), peoples that enact their difference by variable ties and networks of sociability or antagonism. The questions posed to these categories that were drawn from the documents through coding procedures and the answers that can be obtained from them provided new information that enabled the expansion of interpretation frameworks, adding greater specificity, nuances, and pluralities. The result is also a contribution to the deconstruction of methods, categories, and narratives framed in a

105

Monika Therrien

colonial mindset, in order to move away from the glorification of the actions of those in power and their schemes to hold on to it (perhaps because they are largely in the mind of the archaeologist?) and from a view of cultural interaction understood as an encounter between those who impose and dominate and those who passively react or resist the imposition. By means of the methods implemented in the documentary analysis to inform the interpretations of archaeological investigations—in this case of contact spaces—a more diverse panorama of ideas, meanings, and events emerges and a better understanding of how identities mutate and are transformed through interactions, how people create and sever relationships of interdependence, produce and reproduce customs and habits, or adapt and transform them, in accordance with their needs and with the devices to which they can resort. To the extent that the contact is maintained, it becomes part of a routine; yet routines are never static. Each contact space is transformed through interaction, through events that mark changes and in which people act creatively and adjust the practices that have defined these spaces With these methodological and conceptual twists, chronologies, so dear to archaeologists, also come into question. Who and what do we want to denote with them? Can there be a single periodization in intercultural interaction and in pluriversal contact spaces? Periodization requires understanding that there are trajectories lived by hundreds of thousands of people, under different cosmological notions of time and space with fully different meanings, which must be harmonized with the material culture and contexts we analyze, the narratives we build, and the conclusions we draw. These and other problems posed by decolonial perspectives are part of an ample set of questions and debates pointing at the need for a turn in archaeological research. More specifically, the frameworks of the methods, techniques and sources ought to be contested, which can be achieved by tracing the genealogies of their inceptions and encouraging the introduction of reflection and critique, not only in the abstract level of theory—an arduous task to undertake.

Notes 1 Settlement founded by escaped African slaves. 2 Here, I am using the term Black not as it was understood in the colonial caste system but following the current self-definition. 3 In Colombia, this is known as a “Certificado de Tradición y Libertad” (Chain of title), which contains information about all the different owners the property has had and, occasionally, may include a brief description of the plot, of the buildings on it, or both at the moment it changed hands. 4 The term criollo usually refers to the descendants of Spaniards born in the Americas. However, in several of the documents revised for this project, there are witnesses described as indios criollos. 5 Yanacona was another denomination used in the documentary sources for a category of Indigenous people of different origins, ethnicity, rank, and trade settled in Quito (Matallana, 2013), who accompanied the conqueror Sebastián de Belálcazar in his journey from this city to Santafé de Bogotá and witnessed its founding (Avellaneda, 1992). 6 Under colonial rule, Indigenous peoples’ fabrics were classified into different kinds, but it is not clear if a wide variety already existed before the contact with Europeans (Londoño 1990).

References cited Avellaneda, José Ignacio. 1992. La expedición de Sebastián de Belalcázar al Mar del Norte y su llegada al Nuevo Reino de Granada. Bogotá: Banco de la República. Beaulieu, Alain. 2008. Michel Foucault et le controle social. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval. Charmaz, Kathy. 2012. Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis. London: Sage. Colmenares, Germán. 1973. Historia económica y social de Colombia, 1537–1719. Cali: Universidad del Valle.

106

Interpreting documentary evidence Covarrubias, Sebastián. 1611. Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española. Madrid: Impresor del Rey N.S. Deagan, Kathleen. 1983. Spanish St. Augustine: The Archaeology of a Colonial Creole Community. New York: Academic Press. Deagan, Kathleen. 2011. “Native American Resistance to Spanish Presence in Hispaniola and La Florida.” In Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas, edited by Mathew Liebman and Melissa Murphy, 41–56. Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research Press. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dominguez, Lourdes, Pedro Paulo Funari, and Alexandre Navarro, orgs. 2019. Arqueología del contacto en Latinoamérica. Jundiaí: Paco editorial. Fry, Michael. 2004. “De indígena a ladino: diferenciación étnica en la montaña guatemalteca, (1750– 1840).” Diálogos Latinoamericanos 7: 112–134. Grimson, Alejandro. 2001. Interculturalidad y comunicación. Bogotá: Editorial Norma. Gutiérrez, Ramón. 1992. Urbanismo y arquitectura en Iberoamérica. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra. Herrera, Marta. 2002. Ordenar para controlar: ordenamiento espacial y control político en las llanuras del Caribe y en los Andes centrales neogranadinos. Bogotá: Academia Colombiana de la Historia/Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia. Herrera, Marta. 2005. “Muiscas y cristianos: del Muiscas y cristianos: del biohote a la misa y el tránsito hacia una sociedad individualista.” In Muiscas: Cartografías, representaciones y etnopolíticas de la memoria, edited by Ana María Gómez, 152–179. Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Jamieson, Ross. 2000. Domestic Architecture and Power: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Ecuador. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Kagan, Richard. 2000. Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Liebman, Mathew, and Melissa Murphy, eds. 2011. Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas. Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research Press. Logue, Danielle, Stewart Clegg, and John Gray. 2016. “Social Organization, Classificatory Analogies and Institutional Logics: Institutional Theory Revisits Mary Douglas.” Human Relations 69 (7): 1587–1609. Londoño, Eduardo. 1990. “Mantas muiscas. Una tipología colonial.” Boletín del Museo del Oro 27: 121–126. López, Mercedes. 2001. Tiempos para rezar y tiempos para trabajar. La cristianización de las comunidades muiscas durante el siglo XVI. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia. Matallana, Susana. 2013. “Yanaconas: indios conquistadores y colonizadores del Nuevo Reino de Granada, siglo XVI.” Fronteras de la Historia 18 (2): 21–45. Mejía, Germán. 2012. La ciudad de los conquistadores, 1536–1604. Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Melgarejo, Maria del Pilar. 2000. “El pensar histórico como genealogía: acto interpretativo y construcción de subjetividad.” Fronteras de la Historia 5: 35–50. Mignolo, Walter. 1995. The Darker Side of Renaissance: Literacy, Terrotoriality and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2015. “Foreword: On Pluriversality and Multipolarity.” In Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge, edited by Bernd Reiter, ix–xvi. Durham: Duke University Press. Montón-Subiás, Sandra, María Cruz Berrocal, and Apen Ruiz Martínez, eds. 2016. Archaeologies of Early Modern Spanish Colonialism. Cham: Springer. Muñoz, Santiago. 2015. Costumbres en disputa. Los muiscas y el imperio español en Ubaque, siglo XVI. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes. Muñoz, Santiago. 2016. “Vagabundos urbanos. Las instrucciones para administrar indios, mestizos y mulatos en Santafé de Bogotá a fines del siglo XVI.” Anuario de Historia Regional y de las Fronteras 21 (1): 225–233. Oland, Maxine, Siobhan Hart, and Liam Frink, eds. 2012. Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Panich, Lee M., Rebecca Allen, and Andrew Galvan. 2018. “The Archaeology of Native American Persistence at Mission San José.” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 38 (1): 11–29. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Rappaport, Joanne. 2014. The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rodrigo, Miquel. 1999. Comunicación intercultural. Barcelona: Anthropos. Samovar, Larry, Richard Porter, and Edwin McDaniel, eds. 2012. Intercultural Communication: A Reader. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

107

Monika Therrien Scaramelli, Kay. 2016. “Historical Archaeology and the Politics of Empowerment in Venezuela.” In Archaeology of Early Modern Spanish Colonialism, edited by Sandra Montón-Subías, María Cruz Berrocal, and Apen Ruiz Martínez, 61–92. Cham: Springer. Scaramelli, Kay. 2019. “La Negociación de la Supervivencia en la Frontera Misional del Orinoco Medio.” In Arqueología del contacto Latinoamérica, organized by Lourdes Domínguez, Pedro Paulo Funari, and Alexandre Navarro, 379–396. Jundiaí: Paco editorial. Silliman, Stephen. 2012. “Between the Long Durée and the Short Purée. Postcolonial Archaeologies and Indigenous History in Colonial North America.” In Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology, edited by Maxine Oland, Siobhan Hart, and Liam Frink, 113–131. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Stein, Gil, ed. 2005. The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters: Comparative Perspectives. Santa Fe: School for American Research Press. Strauss, Anselm, and Juliet Corbin. 2002. Bases de la investigación cualitativa. Técnicas y procedimientos para desarrollar la teoría fundamentada. Medellín: Universidad de Antioquia. Suárez, Carlos. 2015. “El urbanismo humanista y la ‘policía española’ en el Nuevo Reino de Granada, siglo XVI.” Topoi 16 (30): 127–156. Therrien, Monika. 1996. “Persistencia de prácticas indígenas durante la colonia en el altiplano cundiboyacense.” Boletin del Museo del Oro 40: 89–99. Therrien, Monika. 1998. “Bases para una nueva historia del patrimonio. Un estudio de caso en Bogotá.” Fronteras 3 (3): 75–117. Therrien, Monika. 2003. “Subtle Differences, Refined Discrimination: Lifestyles in Confrontation in Colombian Historical Archaeology.” The SAA Archaeological Record 3 (4): 33–36. Therrien, Monika. 2007. “Más que distinción, en busca de diferenciación: arqueología histórica de Cartagena de Indias en el siglo XVII.” In Cartagena de Indias en el siglo XVII, edited by Haroldo Calvo and Adolfo Meisel, 17–66. Cartagena de Indias: Banco de la República. Therrien, Monika. 2008. “Indígenas y mercaderes: agentes en la consolidación de facciones en la ciudad de Santafé.” In Los muiscas en los siglos XVI y XVII: Miradas desde la arqueología, la antropología y la historia, edited by Jorge Gamboa, 169–210. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes-CESO. Therrien, Monika. 2016. “Displacing Dominant Meanings in the Archaeology of Urban Policies and Emergence of Santafé de Bogotá (Colombia).” In Archaeology of Early Modern Spanish Colonialism, edited by Sandra Montón-Subías, Maria Cruz, and Apen Ruiz, 11–38. London: Springer. Therrien, Monika, and Lina Jaramillo. 2004. Mi casa no es tu casa. Procesos de diferenciación en la construcción de Santa Fé, siglos XVI y XVII. Bogotá: Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá. Therrien, Monika, Elena Uprimny, Jimena Lobo Guerrero, Maria Salamanca, Felipe Gaitán, and Marta Fandiño. 2002. Catálogo de cerámica colonial y republicana en la Nueva Granada, producción local y materiales foráneos costa caribe-altiplano cundiboyacense. Bogotá: Fundación de Investigaciones Arqueológicas Nacionales-FIAN. Thomas, David Hurst, ed. 1990. Columbian Consequences. Vol. 2. Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Tuhiwai-Smith, Linda. 2012. Decolonalizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Vargas, Julián. 1990. La sociedad de Santafé colonial. Bogotá: Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular-CINEP. Velásquez, Jaime. 2014. “Indios urbanos: inmigraciones, alteridad y ladinización en Santiago de Chile (siglos XVI–XVII).” Historia Crítica 53: 13–34. Villamarín, Jaime. 1972. “Encomenderos and Indians in the Formation of Colonial Society in the Sabanna, Colombia 1573 to 1740.” PhD Dissertation, Brandeis University. Wright, Susan. 2004. “La politización de la cultura.” In Constructores de otredad. Una introducción a la antropología social y cultural, edited by Mauricio Boivin, Ana Rosato, and Victoria Arribas, 128–141. Buenos Aires: Editorial Antropofagia. Zambrano, Marta. 2000. “La impronta de la ley: escritura y poder en la cultura colonial.” In Memorias hegemónicas, memorias disidentes: el pasado como política de la historia, edited by Cristóbal Gnecco and Marta Zambrano, 151–170. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia/Universidad del Cauca. Zambrano, Marta. 2008. Trabajadores, villanos y amantes: encuentros entre indígenas y españoles en la ciudad letrada. Santafé de Bogotá (1550–1650). Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia.

108

8 THEORIZING INDIGENOUS-COLONIAL INTERACTIONS IN THE AMERICAS Craig N. Cipolla

Decolonizing theory, theorizing decolonization: an introduction Now two decades old, Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples still stands as a groundbreaking and revolutionary contribution to the global literature on decolonization. Smith wrote (2012[1999]), The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity. . . . It appalls us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations. This quotation points to the deep and problematic connections between western colonialism and research on Indigenous peoples. Smith highlighted the deep connection between uncritical forms of western scholarship and the unjust treatment of Indigenous peoples—including misrepresentation, disenfranchisement, and even violence. Key for this chapter, Smith challenged western researchers’ assumptions about the authority of their gaze and exposed the spuriousness of western science’s claims about working toward a “greater good.” Smith’s work built upon and paralleled earlier challenges to western paradigms voiced by activists and scholars associated with the American Indian Movement (AIM), such as Vine Deloria Jr. (1997, 2003[1973], 2012[1979]; see also Steeves 2014). Deloria (1997) warned against the closed-minded, insular, and sometimes faith-based dimensions of western science and showed how these weaknesses served to further colonize North America, cutting Native American ties to the land and marginalizing Native American expertise, knowledge, and experience. Critical perspectives like these show that archaeological research does not operate in a vacuum; it afects the world that exists beyond archaeologists’ journal articles, university courses, and tenure cases. More problematic than this, it can have profoundly negative impacts, particularly for those members of the “greater good” who are not members of the dominant group (i.e., western males). 109

Craig N. Cipolla

New decolonial directions in archaeological research suggest that there is still hope; there is still opportunity to rethink the discipline and to remake it with new attention to more-thanwestern sensibilities and “defaults.” Archaeologists can ask and pursue pragmatic questions, critically considering the differences—positive and negative—that research might make for a wider segment of society, including Indigenous communities and Nations. We can strive to design projects that work specifically toward improving Indigenous living conditions, that challenge and complicate colonial tropes and stereotypes, that engage earnestly with our discipline’s relationship with colonial trauma (cf. Methot 2019), and that incorporate or build upon local Indigenous ways of knowing and being (Silliman 2008). Many of these new directions take the form of Indigenous and collaborative archaeologies. In one form or another, each of these new directions values Indigenous self-determination (Smith 2012[1999]) or sovereignty. But how does all of this relate to archaeological theory? As writers like Johnson (2020, see also Harris and Cipolla 2017) note, archaeological theory has the potential to foster new and intimidating forms of jargon that tend to turn all but the most dedicated archaeological theoreticians away. Worse yet, some archaeological theoreticians use rhetoric that, in my opinion (Cipolla 2017a; Harris and Cipolla 2017; see also Fowles 2016), belittles Indigenous experiences of colonialism. For instance, symmetrical archaeologists such as Bjørnar Olsen (2010) likened archaeological objects and materials to subaltern Others colonized by humans in general. The utility of such arguments for the archaeology of Indigenous-colonial interactions is questionable at best, and in my experiences, only serves to strengthen the walls of our ivory towers rather than help to build new connections beyond them. Yet archaeologists tend to carefully think through how they want to conduct their research or interpret the past before they actually go out and do it. Likewise, archaeologists tend to recognize the importance of trying to make their approaches and any associated underlying assumptions explicit and clear as they think through their research. Finally, many archaeologists are open to continually rethinking and adjusting their work as they dig new sites, find new materials, and speak with new people. All of these activities involve theory! Moreover, some theories have the potential to help us identify, circumnavigate, or replace the defaults we inherit from our world— from my perspective, a good thing for any archaeology project that prioritizes decolonization. In this chapter, I consider the ways in which various theoretical trends in the history of Indigenous-colonial archaeologies of the Americas relate to the broader project of decolonization set out by thinkers like Smith and Deloria. I begin by reviewing the most influential lines of thought to date, including acculturation, practice, postcolonialism, and pragmatism. Next, I discuss more recent engagements, from object agency to posthumanism and from the ontological turns to Indigenous feminisms. I conclude by returning to decolonization, outlining what I see as the most promising lines of thought for the future of Indigenous-colonial archaeologies in the Americas.

Key lines of thought Acculturation Acculturation’s influence is undeniable in the history of archaeological studies of Indigenouscolonial interactions in the Americas (Cipolla 2013, 14–16; Cusick 1998a; Fitzhugh 1985; Rubertone 2000). This theoretical framework undergirded much of the early research on the Indigenous-colonial sites and assemblages. Initially part of nineteenth-century debates about citizenship and immigration in the United States, “acculturation” originally referred specifically

110

Theorizing Indigenous-colonial interactions

to the adaptations and changes that new citizens and residents made as they became part of the so-called “melting pot” (Cusick 1998a, 1998b; Rubertone 2000). These early discussions of acculturation reduce cross-cultural interaction to a rigid, deterministic, and asymmetrical process; such discussions assumed that “becoming American” meant the imminent erasure and replacement of “traditional” practices, traditions, and identities. In the 1930s, anthropologists adopted the term. In their “Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation,” Redfield et al. (1936) defined acculturation broadly as any change that resulted from the interaction of once-distinct cultural groups. In the same year, archaeologist Meyer Fortes argued for the dynamism and creativity of culture-contact situations. For him, culture contact was “not a transference of elements of one culture to another, but a continuous process of interaction between groups of different culture” (Fortes 1936, 53). In contrast to the melting pot discussions referenced earlier, Fortes highlighted the maintenance of differences in such interactions despite the exchange of materials, ideas, and practices that occurred therein. Notwithstanding the flexibility of these early anthropological definitions and applications, most research of the time reverted to a normative model of culture, treating Indigenous and colonial “cultures” as homogenous, discretely bounded entities. The assumption here was that sustained contact between previously separate groups always led to a reduction in difference (Jones 1997, 53–54). In the mid-twentieth century, anthropologists like Foster (1960) and Spicer (1961, 1962) argued for the complexities of cultural change and continuity in the Americas. Spicer’s work focused on the complicated interrelationship between artifacts and Indigenous practice and belief. In some examples, he showed how Indigenous peoples adopted new types of artifacts while keeping old ways of doing and thinking. In other cases, however, he found just the opposite: Indigenous peoples who drastically changed their “traditional” social structures and practices while continuing to use “traditional” artifacts (Spicer 1961, 542). Early archaeological studies of acculturation betrayed those nuances. Archaeological discussions of acculturation began with a return to the historical roots of the term, reviving a model based on reductionist material essences. Such studies usually drew influence from Quimby and Spoehr’s (1951) often-cited “Acculturation and Material Culture,” which outlined a typology of colonial-period Indigenous artifacts. They classified Indigenous artifacts based on the origins of their various parts (i.e., form, raw material, technology, intended function). For example, a Chippewa rattle made with a tin baking soda can instead of the traditional gourd combined the form and function of a “Native artifact” with an “imported material” (Quimby and Spoehr 1951, 136). These archaeological versions of acculturation (e.g., White 1974) assumed that observed material changes directly reflected the types of social and cultural change that took place in the past and that Indigenous peoples simply transformed into close replicas of western, colonial societies (Rubertone 2000). These studies categorized archaeological assemblages into one of a finite number of permutations of European and Indigenous essences. By emphasizing the origins of “foreign” materials and ideas over their local uses and meanings, archaeologists fell prey to a general pattern that literary theorist Roland Barthes (1977) critiqued in his influential essay, “The Death of the Author.” He argued that a text must be considered in terms of the multiple and contrasting meanings it evokes in its readers rather than the meanings intended by its author. For archaeologists, this meant that the meanings of artifacts— the text in this analogy—are not fixed and determined solely by its designers and makers. Once an artifact crosses into new social realms, the “text” in this metaphor is crucially separated from its original use contexts and meanings and is thus subject to redefinition. As archaeology matured, practitioners came to focus more on context and on local affects and meanings (as aligned with post-processual critiques), effectively “killing the author” in the spirit of Barthes.

111

Craig N. Cipolla

Social archaeologies and the practice turn Social identity became a major focus for archaeology beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s (see Cipolla 2013, 17–18). Examining interconnections between artifacts, discourse, and social classification, archaeologies of social identity investigated the roles that individuals and groups played in negotiating their places in colonial worlds. Archaeology began pulling away from the essentialist and dichotomous models of colonialism (exemplified in acculturation) by challenging the reductionist ways in which acculturationists frame artifacts and other forms of data (cf. Brown 1978; Ferris 2009) and by arguing for less rigid and systematic interpretive models. Written and oral records of colonial encounters added new depth to archaeological interpretations and mitigated acculturation’s heavy reliance on material essences. Beginning in the 1980s, the recursivity of post-processual critiques, specifically practice theory, influenced archaeologists to accept the complicated part that the “stuff ” of archaeology—artifacts—played in past colonial interactions. These trends turned attention toward issues of identity, leading archaeologists to acknowledge the significance of social categories such as personhood, gender, race, and ethnicity in processes of colonial entanglement and cultural reproduction (e.g., Deagan 1983; Deetz 1978[1963]; Lightfoot 2004; Lightfoot et al. 1998; Silliman 2001, 2004). Such studies vary in regard to the types of power they attribute to past people. In the contexts of the colonial Americas, Indigenous peoples were obviously constrained by overarching colonial power structures—such as the reservation system and residential schools—established by European settler colonists. The types of agency ascribed to Indigenous peoples in such situations depended upon the particular researcher’s theoretical stance. Some studies (e.g., Deetz 1978[1963]) treated power as a top-down phenomenon and explained most archaeological patterns as directly connected to the agency of European and Euro-descended settler colonists. Practice-based approaches of the 1970s and 1980s began to challenge these top-heavy models of power (Bourdieu 1977; Certeau 1984; Giddens 1979, 1984; Hodder 1982). Practice theory generally focuses on the recursive connections between individuals and their surroundings, which include other people, collectivities, and materials. These recursive ties shape a person’s choices and actions. Because they are recursively connected, however, there is a “duality of structure” (Giddens 1979), that is, social contexts influence practices and practices act back on social contexts. Practice approaches thus seek to locate the individual or agent within processes of cultural reproduction and social change. Rather than simply categorizing social entities as either powerful or powerless, practice approaches recognized the diffuse nature of power. Following post-structural thinkers like Michel Foucault (1990), archaeologists considered the agency of subaltern groups in situations with extreme power differentials. Coupled with related notions of performativity and materiality (Butler 1993; Jenkins 1996), these new directions shed light on the important—although not essentialized or deterministic—role that materiality played in the construction and expression of Indigenous-colonial identities. These theoretical shifts entailed rethinking the influences and choices that Indigenous peoples had in colonial contexts, whether in the form of outright resistance to colonial power structures (Liebmann and Murphy 2011) or through the seemingly mundane aspects of everyday life (Silliman 2004; see also Cipolla 2017b). In contrast to earlier perspectives, practice-based approaches noted that subaltern peoples always had some form of agency. The difficulty lies in interpreting just how this agency took shape from—and reflexively influenced—colonial power structures. Returning to Barthes, these works looked past the “authors” of the materials uncovered archaeologically to focus on the multiple meanings inscribed upon it by its “readers.”

112

Theorizing Indigenous-colonial interactions

Postcolonial praxis Beginning in the 1990s, Indigenous issues and Indigenous rights movements emerged as powerful critiques of western archaeology (Atalay 2006, 2008, 2012; Bray 2001; McGuire 1992; Nicholas and Andrews 1997; Preucel and Cipolla 2008; Smith and Wobst 2005; Watkins 2000; Zimmerman 2001; see also Cipolla 2013, 18–19). For some archaeologists, these forces first manifested themselves in the form of NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) legislation, which necessitated new interactions between archaeologists and federally recognized tribes in the United States regarding issues of repatriation. For others, these forces of change became evident in the advent and evolution of new ways of conducting archaeological research with, by, and for Indigenous peoples (Atalay 2006, 2012; Nicholas and Andrews 1997). The many labels applied to this type of work (e.g., Indigenous, Tribal, collaborative, covenantal, ethnocritical) demonstrates the variety of forms it takes across North America and beyond. In the general spirit of the postcolonial critique, these new forms of archaeology and collaboration share a common interest in decolonizing research (Smith 2012[1999]). A defining factor for these forms of archaeology is how they emphasize and value local Indigenous sensitivities, interests, and needs. By incorporating Indigenous perspectives into archaeology in this way, these postcolonial archaeologies concern themselves with the effects that research might have on stakeholders—often situated outside of academia. Postcolonial theory also serves to underscore the arbitrary defaults and errors (e.g., Steeves 2015) that undergird western views and representations of the subaltern and colonized Other (Said 1978). Thinkers like Spivak (1988) crucially asked if the subaltern can speak through western lenses and representational practices such as historical records written by elite colonists or outsider anthropologists. This question translates easily into archaeological practice. Are western archaeologists capable of understanding and representing subaltern histories free from the western colonial sensibilities of their discipline? Or, in Smith’s (2012[1999]) terms, can they decolonize their own vantage points? Similarly, Homi Bhabha’s (1994) writings on hybridity and colonial ambivalence offer alternatives to essentialism but, according to Silliman (2015), have yet to fully deliver in the archaeology of Indigenous-colonial interactions. In line with Bhabha’s work is Gerald Vizenor’s (1994, 2008) notion of “survivance.” As with postcolonialism’s problematizing of the west’s creation of the subaltern Other, Vizenor’s work also challenges western stereotypes and misunderstandings of Indigeneity (Gonzalez et al. 2018; Kretzler 2017; Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018; Silliman 2014). More than a combination of survival and resistance, survivance denotes the continued, dynamic, and active presence of Indigenous peoples. For example, Acebo and Martinez (2018) recently noted how the notion of survivance offers a useful framework for understanding Indigenous autonomy (e.g., Panich 2017) while explicitly embracing Indigenous knowledge systems (see Chapter 29). This notion offers the means of challenging cultural myths while “decentering cultural change as the penultimate cultural outcome for indigenous people when other forms of political, economic or cultural autonomy were at stake” (Acebo and Martinez 2018, 148). Of course, the advantages offered by various postcolonial critiques and approaches must be carefully weighed against the critiques it has received, particular from Indigenous scholars. The name “postcolonial” clearly presents a problem in places where settler colonialism continues on in the present (cf. Gosden 2004). Smith (2012[1999]) also emphasizes how the postcolonial critique is often seen as the domain of intellectuals and theorists rather than as a form of activism or as an avenue toward real material changes in the world.

113

Craig N. Cipolla

A new pragmatism Directly related to the critiques of postcolonialism just discussed, pragmatism concerns itself with the effects that knowledge has in the world (James 1907; Peirce Edition Project 1998; Rorty 1991; see also Preucel 2006; Preucel and Mrozowksi 2010; Saitta 2003, 2007; see Cipolla 2013, 19–24). American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce first developed this perspective in the late-nineteenth century, arguing that the importance and meaning of an idea was directly related to its effects on the general populace (Preucel 2006, 50). Although there are important differences, for the purposes of this chapter, there are clear parallels between this notion and the post-structural “death of the author” discussed earlier. Peirce assessed the clarity and utility of ideas based not on what they meant to the individual thinker but what they did in the world. Pragmatism is thus practical to its very core. It considers the differences that particular ideas or actions make in the world (see Voss 2019). This general premise is applicable to all ideas and actions, both past and present. It emphasizes communities over individuals and actual results over intentions. Also folded into this perspective is a tacit acknowledgement of the deep connections and continuities inherent in social life. These practicalities and continuities are crucial for archaeologies of colonialism as they complement, advance, and critique various components of archaeological notions of acculturation, social identity, and decolonization. Pragmatism offers productive means of rethinking how we collaborate on archaeology projects in the present and how we understand the history of colonialism in the past. In each of these areas, pragmatism asks “What difference does/did it make?”—shifting attention to actual results rather than virtual possibilities or intended outcomes. This line of thought also breaks with many of the theories discussed thus far in its connection with realism—a set of philosophical orientations that speculate on the mind-independent status of the world, that is, how things are (DeLanda 2006, 2016) compared to any particular human perspective on the world (i.e., ontology versus epistemology). This move represents a break with the postprocessual critiques and their emphases on relativism, cultural construction, and meaning. I return to realism and its role in contemporary archaeological theory next in my discussion of recent ontological turns.

Recent directions Object biography, object agency, and materiality Over the last decade or so, archaeologists have focused increasingly on non-dualistic and relational theories (for a synthesis, see Harris and Cipolla 2017). This is partially attributable to the popularity of practice approaches summarized earlier. But this trend also relates to an overall increased attention to objects and materials and the parts that they played or play in past and present worlds. This is evident in discussions of object agency (Gell 1998; Peers 1999; cf. papers in Joyce and Gillespie 2015), object biography (Harrison 2006), and materiality (Gosden 2004) in general. Like the move toward pragmatism, this change also relates to archaeological flirtation with realist theories and, concomitantly, a rethinking of humanity in general. Studies of object biography pushed back against static views of artifacts (e.g., acculturation theory). Following Appadurai’s (1986) volume, The Social Life of Things, particularly Kopytoff ’s (1986) chapter concerning the cultural biography of things, archaeologists began asking new questions about how objects transform as they age and move across social and cultural boundaries. Questions such as these are, of course, directly relevant to archaeologies of colonialism. Laura Peers’s (1999) oft-cited study of the “S BLACK” bag, an object currently in the 114

Theorizing Indigenous-colonial interactions

collections of the Pit Rivers Museum, Oxford, serves as an excellent example of object biography. In the nineteenth-century, an Indigenous or Metís woman likely made the bag for Samuel Black, an Aberdeen-born fur trader who worked in North America. Peers showed how the bag lived many “lives” even though contemporary views tend to reduce its complex past. An agent of the Hudson’s Bay Company collected the bag after Black’s death in the mid-nineteenth century, and it was accessioned into the Pit Rivers collection in 1880. There, it came to stand for Indigenous North American traditions even though the particular style of the bag only resulted from colonial interactions. The case of the S BLACK bag shows the potential dynamic nature of different objects as they move through space and time. Similar questions could be asked of the archaeological materials classified by previous generations of archaeologists as evidence of cultural loss or acculturation. For example, brass trade kettles associated with North American colonialism were often cut apart and made into other types of object in Indigenous contexts (Creese 2017; Howey 2017). They defy some of the key tenets of acculturation theory and require much more contextual consideration, including consideration of their histories and transformations. Object agency came to the fore through archaeologists’ discovery of anthropologist Alfred Gell’s (1998) Art and Agency. Gell notoriously set out two types of agency, “primary agency” (that of humans) and “secondary agency” (that of nonhuman things). For Gell, objects have agency only when a human recognizes it as such. So when Gell’s car breaks down in the middle of the night, he becomes angry and sees the car as an agent that has failed him; but ultimately, in this model, it is the human that possess most agency and therefore drives history and/or change. This approach appealed to archaeologists studying colonialism; for instance, Rodney Harrison used Gell’s work on technological enchantment to rethink Kimberley points in Australia. Gell used the notion of enchantment to explore how artifacts had the power to “enchant” people who could not understand how it was possible for another human to make such complex and beautiful things. Kimberley points, often made from bottle glass or ceramic telegraph insulators, were made largely in the nineteenth century by Indigenous peoples of Kimberly, Australia; they made them as part of a tourist industry—selling them to outsiders such as museum curators. Harrison argues for a unique form of power that these objects had over the collectors—they were enchanted by the flint knappers’ technical skills, which were materialized in these objects. What remains in these Gell-inspired models is a staunch dualism between humans and everything else in the world, an approach that only recently came under fire but that still has many advocates in North American anthropology departments (e.g., see papers in Van Dyke 2015). Studies of object biography and agency fed into archaeology’s general interest in materiality, usually vaguely defined in the literature. For the purposes of this chapter, I follow definitions provided by Meskell (2004) and Miller (2005); these sources frame materiality as the recursive ways in which humans make things and things subsequently shape and limit human abilities. Returning to the brass kettle example mentioned earlier, we could rethink projectile points made from cut up kettles in terms of the materiality literature. Various Indigenous groups in Ontario cut up brass kettles into small triangular projectile points. So in this case, humans made the points from European-made trade goods. Materiality studies ask how this example of remaking impacts people in unintended ways. Perhaps these brass projectile points partially replaced stone projectile points. With the proper tools, anyone could fashion a triangular brass projectile point, but this is not the case with stone projectiles. They required socially transmitted knowledge and significant amounts of time to hone the skill; anyone who has tried flint knapping will agree. We could ask how these new forms of brass projectile might have transformed social relations. Did they eliminate the need for flint knappers? Did this reshape gendered work in Indigenous societies? Did it reshape intergenerational relations? In the end, these questions show 115

Craig N. Cipolla

how human interventions in the material world has unintended consequences, especially over the long term, something that Ian Hodder recently began exploring as “entanglement” (2012).

Posthuman critiques and the ontological turns Posthumanism is a relatively new and still-controversial addition to archaeologists’ theoretical toolkits. It is a diverse body of thought that, like materiality, remains ill-defined in the literature. Archaeologists often associate it with the work of thinkers such as Latour (1993, 2005) and Ingold (2007), but it was introduced to archaeological theory largely through the writings of symmetrical archaeologists (Olsen 2003, 2010; Olsen and Witmore 2015; Olsen et al. 2012; Webmoor and Witmore 2008; Witmore 2007). Thinkers like Olsen (2010, 2012) used posthumanism as a means of challenging post-processual fixations on symbols and cultural construction. These thinkers argued that post-processual archaeology pushed us to artificially divide the world into subjects/objects and humans/world and, in so doing, to disregard the actual stuff with which we work. These thinkers argue that archaeologists need new theoretical avenues for giving things “their due,” and this means looking at artifacts as more than symbols standing for something else. Likewise, it means looking at more than just how past people interpreted the world (“after interpretation”) and opening up to new questions concerning ontology. These critiques ask archaeologists to rethink humanity with a new critical eye for our species’ deep and entangled status with the nonhuman, material world around us. Such projects, according to general posthuman arguments, will allow us to escape the tyranny of modernist worldviews that treat humans as separate from and above the worlds in which they live (cf. contemporary debates concerning climate change). This requires a non-anthropocentric “flat ontology” (DeLanda 2006, see also Cipolla in review) or a starting point of analysis that attempts to escape modernist dualisms while generally opening our minds to finding radically different pasts. One of the most misunderstood aspects of the flat ontology is that it is not meant to remain flat; it is a starting point from which researchers observe differences (e.g., between humans and stone projectile points). For instance, rather than assuming that people have one type of agency (primary) and everything else has another, lesser type of agency (secondary), these thinkers urge us to begin with a proverbial blank slate. Yet contrary to many critics of posthumanism, a nonanthropocentric or “flat” perspective does not entail stopping the study of human history nor always treating stones as having the same abilities as humans. It means beginning our analysis with as open a mind as possible to the ability of humans or stones to affect one another and other entities that they come into relation with. From these critiques spring a new series of exciting relational approaches that build upon the general spirit of the practice turn but in non-anthropocentric ways. Assemblage theory (part of the “New Materialisms”) is one such approach currently gathering momentum in archaeological theory. Associated with the writings of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), assemblage theory focuses on relationality, attending to the ways in which different components—human and nonhuman—“assemble” into social wholes that are greater than the sum or their parts. For example, two hydrogen atoms can assemble with one oxygen atom to create a water molecule, out of which emerges new properties not found in hydrogen or oxygen atoms in isolation. Yet the parts are not fully defined by these relations; they can break up again and bring their unique atomic properties to some other assemblage. This approach pays close attention to the qualities of materials and recognizes human contingency in the world. As will be discussed further, assemblage theory also offers fresh insights on the collaborative archaeological process. My recent work with Amélie Allard (Allard and Cipolla 2020; Cipolla and Allard 2019) on fur trade assemblages demonstrates how such an approach might work in the archaeology of 116

Theorizing Indigenous-colonial interactions

colonial North America. Unlike many historical archaeologies of the fur trade that begin their analyses with humans and human agencies, we elected to begin our analysis with nonhuman energy flows. More specifically, we found it useful to begin our analysis of Ontario’s fur trade with the rivers that helped make and break early modern history in the area. These nonhuman forces, what we call “river power,” have histories that run much deeper than the fur trade. This approach also made sense because our focus of study was a series of underwater fur-trade collections, almost all of which likely resulted from canoe accidents. In recognizing the ways in which rivers constituted the trade, clashed with capitalist temporalities, and sorted and preserved the archaeological records we studied, we advocated for a non-anthropocentric approach to the archaeology of the “modern world.” This approach stands in contrast to the sentiment of one of the most celebrated figures in historical archaeology, James Deetz (1996[1977]), who wrote, The earlier in time one goes, the more people were directly and intimately tied to their environment, so that such disciplines of paleontology and geology are essential to the proper understanding of life in the distant past. As culture became more complex, our removal from the natural world increased. This statement divides culture and nature and—through history—elevates culture over nature. According to Deetz, historical archaeologists need not study environmental archaeology because western people of the modern world were separate from and dominant over nature. I wonder what he would say today in the face of our climate crisis. In any case, this is not to say that all historical archaeologists mindlessly replicate Deetz’s modernist assumptions about nature and culture. There are many examples of rich environmental archaeologies of the colonial era. Instead, the point is that archaeologies of colonialism might be susceptible to more subtle forms of these modernist assumptions. For instance, with the fur trade example, we show how nascent forms of capitalism—a force often associated largely with humans and human intentions— actually depended on (and often failed because of) the flow of rivers. This flow often pushed back violently against capitalist attempts to harness it and make it conform to neat timetables (meeting delivery deadlines, etc.). Closely connected with relational approaches such as assemblage theory are the so-called “ontological” turns in anthropology and archaeology. These approaches often take relational approaches but orient their efforts around how we understand difference in the past, as free as possible from our modernist sensibilities. Archaeologists increasingly use the term “ontology” but spend surprisingly little time defining it (Cipolla 2019). A survey of the literature shows a few distinct uses. The first set of ontological turns use the term in similar ways as anthropologists or archaeologists traditionally use “culture.” The focus remains relativist, asking how specific groups of people understand the world (Zedeño 2008, 2009). For example, contemporary Indigenous views of the world might tell us that stones have certain special powers; archaeologists might use this special knowledge to rethink the archaeological record, using this cultural perspective to reinterpret the stone artifacts recovered archaeologically. The second set of ontological turns align with realist philosophies that seek to speculate on the mind-independent nature of the world. In this sense, the focus remains on how objects and their relationalities actually affect the world (as opposed to any particular cultural or epistemological perspective on those things and relations). As with all forms of realism, there is an element of universality with these approaches that clashes with the relativism of anthropology. The rivers example given earlier represents an ontological turn in the sense that we speculate on how rivers behaved and shaped the fur trade beyond any specific cultural understandings 117

Craig N. Cipolla

and beliefs about rivers. However, from this point, researchers might incorporate knowledge of different worldviews, all the while maintaining a realist base that is ontological rather than epistemological. The third form of ontological turn is the most radical of the three outlined here. Archaeologists taking this approach, like Benjamin Alberti and Yvonne Marshall (2009), draw inspiration from the work of anthropologist Viveiros de Castro (2003, 2007, 2015; cf. Nadasdy 2007). Following Viveiros de Castro, they seek an approach that takes Indigenous knowledge more seriously than other approaches. According to these thinkers, most forms of archaeology or anthropology fail to engage seriously with radical difference. For example, post-processual-inspired archaeologies valued symbolism and sought to address this dimension of the past that was neglected by previous generations of archaeologists. In so doing, however, they also translated different pasts and people via their contemporary interest in finding symbolism in archaeological traces; this mainly came in the form of looking for how material things we dig up might have symbolized something for some past group of people. This general fascination with symbols did two forms of harm. The first concerns pulling our attention away from materials and things, their affordances, and broader issues of non-anthropocentric relationality; that is, we wanted to know what things stood for in the past rather than how they stood. The second, and most egregious form of harm according to this third type of ontological thinker concerns a translation and glossing over of difference. This is a classic anthropological problem. Anthropologists are presented with information on how the world works according to their “informants,” but they typically explain this set of worldviews in terms of their usually western anthropological stance. This third type of ontological thinker seeks to problematize this stance and expose its arbitrariness. Rather than explain away instances or radical difference (e.g., when a person tells you that they sometimes transform into a jaguar) in terms of western common sense, these ontological thinkers want you to assume that you—the western observer— misunderstand your own world and to further explore this alternative way of being. Ethnographic or collaborative archaeological work stands a better chance of investigating and expanding upon these instances of radical difference. But when western archaeologists undertake such theoretical projects in isolation from actual Indigenous people, they run the risk of falsely claiming that they can escape their own western ontological and epistemological frames or that they can earnestly understand and accept a world very different from their own. In my reading, these approaches essentialize instances of difference while overlooking instances of continuity (of a shared world). These concerns seem quite valid for any archaeology of colonialism. For instance, in a missionary context, I would be remiss to only focus on objects that are clearly Indigenous-made or related to ceremony (e.g., effigy pipes) while overlooking European-produced materials related to proselytization and colonial violence (e.g., rosary beads). Thus, while continued interest in how we come to grips with potentially radical difference is a welcome part of colonial archaeology, the third iteration of the ontological turn might allow for old forms of anthropological colonialism to continue under a new set of terminology that makes big claims regarding the place of Indigenous knowledge but does not appear to deliver (Cipolla 2019).

Indigenous feminisms Metís anthropologist Zoe Todd (2016) made the last point abundantly clear in a recent article— developed out of a viral blog post—titled “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ is Just Another Word for Colonialism.” In the article, Todd offers a critical perspective on the ontological turns outlined earlier, mainly focusing on relational approaches

118

Theorizing Indigenous-colonial interactions

that often cite the works of big European male thinkers such as Bruno Latour (1993, 2005) and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987). She notes the significant overlap between these western theories and Indigenous ways of being and seeing. [I]t is important to think, deeply, about how the Ontological Turn—with its breathless “realisations” that animals, the climate, water, “atmospheres” and non-human presences like ancestors and spirits are sentient and possess agency, that “nature” and “culture”, “human” and “animal” may not be so separate after all—is itself perpetuating the exploitation of Indigenous peoples. (Todd 2016, 18) Todd argues for new citational practices that look beyond western thinkers and that, crucially, give Indigenous knowledge its due. Her essay recognizes this as a form of appropriation that operates on power asymmetries that have always characterized western academic institutions. First and foremost, she urged us to read and seriously engage with Indigenous theory and knowledge and to recognize the similarities between the thinkers we readily cite and those sources that do not make it to our bibliographies. Vine Deloria Jr. raised related but distinct themes throughout his career (e.g., Deloria 2003[1973]; see also Steeves 2014). For instance, his under-cited The Metaphysics of Modern Existence (2012[1979]) sought a hybridized western-Indigenous metaphysics of our (shared) world; key to this work was recognizing the value of Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies. Archaeologists have certainly begun to draw upon Deloria’s work (e.g., Fowles 2013), but feminist thinkers like Todd, Kim Tallbear (2014), and Joyce Green (2017) are also gaining new traction in anthropology and other social sciences (see also Estes 2019). Tallbear (2014), who frames her work in relation to that of Deloria and posthuman feminist thinkers like Donna Haraway (e.g., 1991), characterizes her relationship with various communities in terms of an Indigenous feminist approach. Her approach to community-based research “stands with” communities in that it seeks to critique and replace reciprocal models of research that seek to “give back” to communities, almost always by reifying a dualism between researcher and researched. As an alternative, Tallbear seeks continuities across these boundaries; she values research that operates upon shared “goals and desires while staying engaged in critical conversations and producing new knowledge and insights” (Tallbear 2014, 2), an approach that resembles Atalay’s (2008, 2012) work on braiding knowledge in collaborative Indigenous archaeologies. Drawing upon feminist thinkers, Tallbear takes a critical approach to objectivity, seeking to situate the process of knowledge production (cf. Battle-Baptiste 2011) and to care for the communities with which she works. There is a clear pragmatic dimension to such work, ultimately focused around Indigenous sovereignty (Tallbear 2014, 5; see Steeves 2015 for an excellent archaeological example). Tallbear’s (2014, 7) feminist stance on objectivity inquires “not at a distance, but based on the lives and knowledge priorities of subjects” and “helps open up one’s mind to working in non-standard ways.” In the field of education, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012, 2014) present a parallel line of critique, notably reminding scholars that decolonization is not a metaphor. Like Tallbear, they value real material change that will immediately improve Indigenous lives. They see value in challenging the unquestioned Eurocentric settler values embedded in many disciplines, but for them, this is not the same as literal decolonization, which they define as “the repatriation of Indigenous land and life” (Tuck and Yang 2012, 1). When scholars conflate metaphorical decolonization with actual decolonization, they domesticate it and, in turn, further insulate researchers from Indigenous critique. This powerful message serves to remind those archaeologists

119

Craig N. Cipolla

interested in theory that the journal articles and university courses mentioned in the introduction of this chapter are not necessarily decolonizing just because they theorize Indigenous worlds or rethink Eurocentrism in the discipline. Those things alone are not enough. We can use theory to accomplish those things (cf. Smith 2012[1999], 40–41), but these projects must articulate with—and open the door to—bigger, more profound, changes such as increasing the breadth and diversity of archaeological practitioners and developing alternative ways of doing archaeology that serve Indigenous interests and needs.

Conclusions: looking forward Where does this survey leave theory in the archaeology of Indigenous-colonial interactions in the Americas and broader projects of decolonization? Most of the archaeological theories reviewed here, with the exception of acculturation theory, promised new ways of challenging specific taken-for-granted aspects of archaeological (usually western) worldviews and ontologies. As noted by Todd (2016), in some cases there is significant overlap with the theories discussed and Indigenous knowledges, particularly when it comes to relational approaches and the ontological turns; she warns against colonizing Indigenous knowledge and theory without giving proper due or recognizing the context from which it derives, which is usually connected with struggles for sovereignty. Having noted these hazards, with which I fully agree, it is also important to point out that these new directions also hold promise for new discussions, collaborations, and interpretations with Indigenous archaeologists and Indigenous knowledge keepers. Non-dualistic and less-anthropocentric relational approaches—particularly assemblage theory and the New Materialisms—seem promising in this regard. Although they are not precisely the same as the Indigenous knowledges that I have encountered (e.g., Cipolla et al. 2019), they appear to mesh well with many Indigenous perspectives that are also often relational and nondualistic. One important direction for theory is to seriously unpack the relations between those western thinkers we often cite (Todd 2016) and local Indigenous theories; for instance, in my collaborative research teaching and writing with the Mohegan Tribe of Connecticut (Cipolla et al. 2019), we always strive toward recognizing and respecting our similarities and differences, perhaps in line with the way in which Tallbear describes “standing with” communities. Although it is rarely reported on in this way, collaborative Indigenous archaeology is a valuable source of theory building (Cipolla et al. 2019; McNiven 2016). We can frame collaboration as an assemblage of sorts, a social whole that is greater than the sum of its parts but whose parts are not determined by their relations. For instance, at Mohegan, we argue that we understand the past and the discipline of archaeology differently together than we do when we are apart. The key to developing this direction further is to unpack our theories and to discuss and refine them constantly. For me, archaeological theory, like archaeology as a whole, allows opportunities to question our defaults and to engage with different pasts in new ways. Returning to the epigraph from Smith, I believe that this offers a means of exposing the imperialisms and colonialisms that undergird our discipline and—in the spirit of pragmatism—for developing ways of thinking about the past and the present that serve a much wider segment of society.

References cited Acebo, Nathan, and Desireé Martinez. 2018. “Towards an Analytic of Survivance in California Archaeology.” Society for California Archaeology Proceedings 32: 144–152. Alberti, Benjamin, and Yvonne Marshall. 2009. “Animating Archaeology: Local Theories and Conceptually Open-ended Methodologies.” Cambridge Archaeology Journal 19 (3): 344–356.

120

Theorizing Indigenous-colonial interactions Allard, Amélie, and Craig N. Cipolla. 2020. “Failure and Colonialism in the North American Fur Trade: The View from a Riverine Assemblage.” Historical Archaeology. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s41636-020-00272-2. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Atalay, Sonya. 2006. “Indigenous Archaeology as Decolonizing Practice.” American Indian Quarterly 30: 280–310. Atalay, Sonya. 2008. “Multivocality and Indigenous Archaeologies.” In Evaluating Multiple Narratives: Beyond Nationalist, Colonialist, and Imperialist Archaeologies, edited by Junko Habu, Clare Fawcett, and John M. Matsunaga, 29–44. New York: Springer. Atalay, Sonya. 2012. Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barthes, Roland. 1977. “The Death of the Author.” In Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 142–148. New York: Hill and Wang. Battle- Baptiste, Whitney. 2011. Black Feminist Archaeology. London: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bray, Tamara, ed. 2001. The Future of the Past: Archaeologists, Native Americans, and Repatriation. New York: Garland Publishing Inc. Brown, Ian. 1978. “Historic Artifacts and Sociocultural Change: Some Warnings from the Lower Mississippi Valley.” Conference of Historic Sites Archaeology Papers 13: 109–122. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge. Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Berkeley. Cipolla, Craig N. 2013. Becoming Brothertown: Native American Ethnogenesis and Endurance in the Modern World. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Cipolla, Craig N. 2017a. “Postcolonial Archaeology in the Age of Things.” In Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology, edited by Craig N. Cipolla, 222–229. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Cipolla, Craig N., ed. 2017b. Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Cipolla, Craig N. 2019. “Taming the Ontological Wolves: Learning from Iroquoian Effigy Objects.” American Anthropologist 121 (3): 613–627. Cipolla, Craig N. in review. “Beyond Symmetry: The Breadth and Depth of Posthuman Archaeologies.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal. Cipolla, Craig N., and Amélie Allard. 2019. “Recognizing River Power: Watery Views of Ontario’s Fur Trade.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 26: 1084–1105. Cipolla, Craig N., James Quinn, and Jay Levy. 2019. “Collaborative Indigenous Archaeology in Theory: Insights from Mohegan.” American Antiquity 84 (1): 127–142. Creese, John. 2017. “Beyond Representation: Indigenous Economies of Affect in the Northeast Woodlands.” In Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology, edited by Craig N. Cipolla, 59–79. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Cusick, James G. 1998a. “Historiography of Acculturation: An Evaluation of Concepts and Their Application in Archaeology.” In Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick, 126–145. Occasional Paper No. 25. Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University. Cusick, James G., ed. 1998b. Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology. Occasional Paper No. 25. Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University. Deagan, Kathleen. 1983. Spanish St. Augustine: The Archaeology of a Colonial Creole Community. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Deetz, James. 1978[1963]. “Archaeological Excavations at La Purisima Mission.” In Historical Archaeology: A Guide to Substantive and Theoretical Contributions, edited by Robert L. Schuyler, 160–190. Farmingdale, NY: Baywood Publishing. Deetz, James. 1996[1977]. In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday. DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Bloomsbury.

121

Craig N. Cipolla DeLanda, Manuel. 2016. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deloria, Jr. Vine. 1997. Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing. Deloria, Jr., Vine. 2003[1973]. God is Red: A Native View of Religion. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing. Deloria, Jr., Vine. 2012[1979]. The Metaphysics of Modern Existence. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing. Estes, Nick. 2019. Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. London: Verso. Ferris, Neal. 2009. The Archaeology of Native-Lived Colonialism: Challenging History in the Great Lakes. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Fitzhugh, William W., ed. 1985. Cultures in Contact: The European Impact on Native Cultural Institutions in Eastern North America, A.D. 1000–1800. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Fortes, Meyer. 1936. “Culture Contact as a Dynamic Process, an Investigation in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast.” Africa 28: 24–55. Foster, George M. 1960. Culture and Conquest: America’s Spanish Heritage. Chicago: Quadrangle Books. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. Fowles, Severin. 2013. An Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and the Study of Pueblo Religion. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Fowles, Severin. 2016. “The Perfect Subject (Postcolonial Object Studies).” Journal of Material Culture 21: 9–27. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gonzalez, Sara, Ian Kretzler, and Brice Edwards. 2018. “Imagining Indigenous and Archaeological Futures: Building Capacity with the Confederated Tribes of Grande Ronde.” Archaeologies 14: 85–114. Gosden, Chris. 2004. Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Green, Joyce, ed. 2017. Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, 2nd ed. Blackpoint, NS: Fernwood Publishing. Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Harris, Oliver J. T., and Craig N. Cipolla. 2017. Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium. New York: Routledge. Harrison, Rodney. 2006. “An Artefact of Colonial Desire? Kimberley Points and the Technologies of Enchantment.” Current Anthropology 47 (1): 63–88. Hodder, Ian, ed. 1982. Symbolic and Structural Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodder, Ian. 2012. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationship between Humans and Things. Malden, MA: Wiley. Howey, Meghan C. L. 2017. “Sympathetic Magic and Indigenous Consumption of Kettles during Early Colonial Encounter in the Northeast.” In Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology, edited by Craig N. Cipolla, 162–186. Tucson: University of Arizona. Ingold, Tim. 2007. “Materials against Materiality.” Archaeological Dialogues 14: 1–16. James, William. 1907. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green and Co. Jenkins, Richard. 1996. Social Identity. London: Routledge. Johnson, Matthew. 2020. Archaeological Theory: An Introduction, 3rd ed. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Jones, Siân. 1997. The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present. London: Routledge. Joyce, Rosemary A., and Susan D. Gillespie, eds. 2015. Things in Motion: Object Itineraries in Anthropological Practice. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kretzler, Ian. 2017. “Archives of Native Presence: Land Tenure Research on the Grand Ronde Reservation.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 41 (4): 45–70.

122

Theorizing Indigenous-colonial interactions Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. (Re)assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liebmann, Matthew, and Melissa S. Murphy, eds. 2011. Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Lightfoot, Kent G. 2004. Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lightfoot, Kent G., and Sara L. Gonzalez. 2018. “The Study of Sustained Colonialism: An Example from Kashaya Pomo Homeland in Northern California.” American Antiquity 83 (3): 427–443. Lightfoot, Kent G., Antoinette Martinez, and Ann M. Schiff. 1998. “Daily Practice and Material Culture in Pluralistic Social Settings: An Archaeological Study of Culture Change and Persistence from Fort Ross, California.” American Antiquity 63 (2): 199–222. McGuire, Randall. 1992. “Archaeology and the First Americans.” American Anthropologist 94 (4): 816–836. McNiven, Ian J. 2016. “Theoretical Challenges of Indigenous Archaeology: Setting and Agenda.” American Antiquity 81 (1): 27–41. Meskell, Lynn. 2004. Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present. Oxford: Berg. Methot, Suzanne. 2019. Legacy: Trauma, Story, and Indigenous Healing. Toronto: ECW Press. Miller, Daniel, ed. 2005. Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nadasdy, Paul. 2007. “The Gift of the Animal: The Ontology of Hunting and Human-Animal Sociality.” American Ethnologist 34 (1): 25–43. Nicholas, George P., and Thomas D. Andrews. 1997. “Indigenous Archaeology in the Postmodern World.” In At a Crossroads: Archaeology and the First Peoples in Canada, edited George P. Nicholas, and Thomas D. Andrews, 1–18. Burnaby, BC: Simon Fraser University. Olsen, Bjørnar. 2003. “Material Culture After Text: Re-membering Things.” Norwegian Archaeological Review 36 (2): 87–104. Olsen, Bjørnar. 2010. In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Olsen, Bjørnar. 2012. “After Interpretation: Remembering Archaeology.” Current Swedish Archaeology 20: 11–34. Olsen, Bjørnar, Michael Shanks, Timothy Webmoor, and Christopher Witmore. 2012. Archaeology: The Discipline of Things. Berkeley: University of California Berkeley. Olsen, Bjørnar, and Chris Witmore. 2015. “Archaeology, Symmetry, and the Ontology of Things. A Response to the Critics.” Archaeological Dialogues 22: 187–197. Panich, Lee. 2017. “Indigenous Vaqueros in Colonial California: Labor, Identity, and Autonomy.” In Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology, edited by Craig N. Cipolla, 187–201. Tucson: University of Arizona. Peers, Laura. 1999. “‘Many Tender Ties’: The Shifting Contexts and Meaning of the S BLACK Bag.” World Archaeology 31 (2): 288–302. Peirce Edition Project, ed. 1998. The Essential Peirce: Volume 2 (1893–1913). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Preucel, Robert W. 2006. Archaeological Semiotics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Preucel, Robert W., and Craig N. Cipolla. 2008. “Indigenous and Postcolonial Archaeologies.” In Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi, 129–140. Lanham, MD: AltaMira. Preucel, Robert W., and Stephen A. Mrozowski. 2010. “The New Pragmatism.” In Contemporary Archaeological in Theory: The New Pragmatism, eds. Robert W. Preucel and Stephen A. Mrozowski, 1–50. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Quimby, George, and Alexander Spoehr. 1951. “Acculturation and Material Culture.” Fieldiana 36 (6): 107–147. Redfield, Robert, Ralph Linton, and Melville J. Herskovits. 1936. “Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation.” American Anthropologist 38: 149–152. Rorty, Richard. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rubertone, Patricia E. 2000. “The Historical Archaeology of Native Americans.” Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 425–446. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Random House.

123

Craig N. Cipolla Saitta, Dean J. 2003. “Archaeology and the Problems of Men.” In Essential Tensions in Archaeological Method and Theory, edited by Todd L. VanPool and Christine S. VanPool, 11–16. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Saitta, Dean J. 2007. The Archaeology of Collective Action. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Silliman, Stephen W. 2001. “Agency, Practical Politics and the Archaeology of Culture Contact.” Journal of Social Archaeology 1: 190–209. Silliman, Stephen W. 2004. Lost Laborers in Colonial California: Native Americans and the Archaeology of Rancho Petaluma. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Silliman, Stephen W., ed. 2008. Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge: Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Silliman, Stephen W. 2014. “Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence: Navigating Colonial and Scholarly Dualities.” In Rethinking Colonial Pasts Through Archaeology, edited by Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox, 57–75. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Silliman, Stephen W. 2015. “A Requiem for Hybridity? The Problem with Frankensteins, Purées, and Mules.” Journal of Social Archaeology 15 (3): 277–298. Smith, Claire, and Martin M. Wobst, ed. 2005. Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012[1999]. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Spicer, Edward H., ed. 1961. Perspectives in American Indian Culture Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spicer, Edward H. 1962. Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Spivak, Gayatri C. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Steeves, Paulette F. 2014. “Deloria, Jr., Vine.” In Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, edited by Claire Smith, 2091–2093. New York: Springer. Steeves, Paulette F. 2015. “Decolonizing the Past and Present of the Western Hemisphere (The Americas).” Archaeologies 11 (1): 42–69. Tallbear, Kim. 2014. “Standing With and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry.” Journal of Research Practice 10 (2): N17. Todd, Zoe. 2016. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ is Just Another Word for Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29 (1): 4–22. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1): 1–40. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2014. “R-Words: Refusing Research.” In Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, edited by Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn, 223–247. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Van Dyke, Ruth, ed. 2015. Practicing Materiality. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2003. “Anthropology (AND) Science.” https://sites.google.com/a/abaetenet. net/nansi/abaetextos/anthropology-and-science-e-viveiros-de-castro. Accessed August 15, 2018. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2007. “The Crystal Forest: Notes on the Ontology of Amazonian Spirits.” Inner Asia 9: 153–172. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2015. “Who is Afraid of the Ontological Wolf? Some Comments on an Ongoing Anthropological Debate.” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 33 (1): 2–17. Vizenor, Gerald. 1994. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Vizenor, Gerald, ed. 2008. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Voss, Barbara. 2019. “The Archaeology of Serious Games: Play and Pragmatism in Victorian-Era Dining.” American Antiquity 84 (1): 26–47. Watkins, Joe. 2000. Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Webmoor, Timothy, and Christopher Witmore. 2008. “Things Are Us! A Commentary on Human/Thing Relations under the Banner of a ‘Social’ Archaeology.” Norwegian Archaeological Review 41 (1): 53–70. White, John R. 1974. “Historic Contact Sites as Laboratories for the Study of Culture Change.” Conference of Historic Sites Archaeology Papers 9: 153–163.

124

Theorizing Indigenous-colonial interactions Witmore, Christopher L. 2007. “Symmetrical Archaeology: Excerpts of a Manifesto.” World Archaeology 39 (4): 546–562. Zedeño, María Nieves. 2008. “Bundled Worlds: The Roles and Interactions of Complex Objects from the North American Plains.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 14: 362–378. Zedeño, María Nieves. 2009. “Animating by Association: Index Objects and Relational Taxonomies.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19 (3): 407–417. Zimmerman, Larry J. 2001. “Usurping Native American Voice.” In The Future of the Past: Archaeologists, Native Americans, and Repatriation, edited by Tamara Bray, 169–184. New York: Garland Publishing Inc.

125

PART II

Core issues and topics

9 PATHWAYS TO PERSISTENCE Divergent Native engagements with sustained colonial permutations in North America Kent G. Lightfoot, Peter A. Nelson, Michael A. Grone, and Alec Apodaca

Introduction A significant research domain in the archaeology of colonialism is developing a deeper understanding of the diverse processes and outcomes of Indigenous and colonial encounters that unfolded across space and time in the Americas. A plethora of studies have documented the varied ways in which Indigenous peoples engaged with colonial intruders in their territories that ranged from avoidance, underground resistance, armed confrontations, population movements, and various strategies of interactions and negotiations (Axtell 2001, 295–307; Hantman 2018; Kulisheck 2003; Spicer 1962). This research raises questions about the different pathways that Indigenous groups pursued in their interactions with colonial regimes. Why did some Native people opt to war upon colonial intruders or retreat into the back country, while others opted to parley with these newcomers? And how did Indigenous strategies and tactics for engaging with colonial intruders transform over time? While many factors may have influenced the decision making of Indigenous communities, in this chapter we focus on two crucial variables that should be considered in any archaeological investigation of colonialism: Indigenous sociopolitical and economic organizations and the structure of colonial regimes. In centering our discussion on North American Indigenous societies, we recognize from the outset the tremendous variation of experiences that grew out of their engagements with colonial enterprises founded primarily by Britain, France, Spain, Russia, the Netherlands, and Sweden. In light of this historical complexity, we are interested in developing a better understanding of how and why Indigenous groups initiated specific kinds of responses to colonial intruders, how these strategies and tactics changed over time, and what commonalities and differences took place in how they negotiated with colonial regimes. We believe new insights about the kinds of distinctive colonial entanglements that took place across North America may be facilitated by in-depth comparative studies of the specific forms of Indigenous sociopolitical and economic organizations and how they interacted with different kinds of colonial enterprises over time. In building upon an earlier study (Lightfoot et al. 2013a), this chapter considers three related objectives in refining the theoretical framework for studying the entanglements of Indigenous

129

Kent G. Lightfoot et al.

societies and colonial regimes. The first objective is to emphasize the importance of developing a thorough understanding of the Indigenous societies under consideration. We believe the foundation of any archaeological study of colonialism in North America should be built on a deep appreciation of the Indigenous groups whose homelands were invaded. While such investigations will involve the elucidation of various Indigenous cultural practices and institutions, we focus on four dimensions here: polity size, polity structure, landscape management practices, and regional sociopolitical relationships. The second objective is to elucidate the diverse policies and practices of the colonial regimes that encroached upon Indigenous peoples and their territories. A significant challenge for all Native Americans is that they did not confront one standard form of colonialism but instead a multi-armed beast with many different grasping tentacles. The pathways chosen by Native groups in their engagements with colonial regimes were greatly influenced by the specific kinds of tentacles that reached into their territories, which might take some form of managerial, mission, and/or settler colonies. The third objective of the chapter is to emphasize the long-term, diachronic dimension of Indigenous and colonial entanglements. Here we stress that all Native American people confronted multiple forms of colonialism over time. A significant research domain in the archaeology of colonialism is examining not only the early encounters that Indigenous people had with colonial invaders but also the later entanglements that unfolded with the advancement of other colonists onto their lands, particularly settler colonists (e.g., Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018a). We argue that the study of colonial succession patterns in tribal lands is crucial to understanding the processes and outcomes of colonialism. This involves the study of the full spectrum of colonial entanglements that took place over time: that is, the combination and/or succession of different kinds of colonial enterprises that Indigenous people confronted in their tribal lands that continues to this day. The ultimate goal of the chapter is to advocate for more studies that examine the long-term interactions of distinctive tribal groups in their engagements with multiple colonial enterprises to better understand the various pathways that Indigenous people pursued in their negotiation with colonialism. The final section of the chapter highlights recent studies that discuss the creative pathways that some Native societies initiated to sustain themselves and even flourish in the face of encounters with multiple or successive colonial enterprises.

Indigenous sociopolitical organization and economy In this paper we argue that any study of colonialism should begin with the Indigenous people whose homelands were invaded by colonizers. Developing a thorough understanding of an Indigenous group’s cultural practices and institutions is best done via collaborative research with pertinent tribal scholars and elders that incorporates diverse lines of evidence drawn from tribal histories, archaeology, ethnohistory, and ethnography. In advocating for a long-term perspective of colonialism, we believe it is essential to obtain a thorough grounding of Indigenous societies prior to their initial encounters with colonial intruders. The ideal scenario is to examine developments of Indigenous cultural practices and institutions over the longue durée—optimally over many centuries prior to Euro-American contact to develop a better understanding of their sociopolitical organizations, trade practices, protocols for dealing with newcomers, etc. (Hantman 2018; Lightfoot 1995; Mitchell and Scheiber 2010, 118–119; Reo and Ogden 2018). The study of ancient history requires collaborative work with tribal members that employs both tribal histories and archaeological investigations. Such diachronic investigations are greatly facilitated by the incredible amount of archaeology on ancient Native history in most regions of North America.

130

Pathways to persistence

The plethora of information presented in the 15 volumes of the Handbook of North American Indians documents the incredible diversity of Indigenous languages, religious institutions, sociopolitical organizations, subsistence practices, kinship systems, and other factors that distinguish the tribal polities of North America. Clearly, there are many ways to examine the highly variable Indigenous societies of North America in any archaeological investigation. Elsewhere we have described three dimensions of Indigenous sociopolitical organization and economy that are useful for undertaking studies of Indigenous engagements with colonial enterprises: polity size, polity structure, and landscape management practices (Lightfoot et al. 2013a). We briefly review this discussion here, while adding a fourth one concerning the regional sociopolitical relationships of Indigenous polities. We also recognize from the outset the importance of considering Indigenous knowledge systems and production of knowledge and worldview in any of our archaeological investigations.

Polity size Polity size can be defined as the “largest autonomous or self-governing unit of a Native society” (Lightfoot et al. 2013a, 91). While it may be measured in different ways, we examined the total population integrated within a political entity and the territorial area that it claimed. The dimensions of both population and settlement size can be reasonably discerned from the archaeological, anthropological, and tribal records. Our discussion highlighted how polity size is a crucial dimension for considering how Native groups sustained themselves as autonomous political entities during extended periods of warfare.

Polity structure We employed the methodology outlined by Blanton, Feinman, and others (Blanton et al. 1996; Feinman 1995; Feinman et al. 2000) that defines political structure along two orthogonal variables: hierarchical differentiation and corporate-network strategies of political action. We argued that the political structure of Indigenous groups would have been an important factor in the decision making of local peoples in negotiating with colonial regimes about land use, work details, tribute, and trade (see Lightfoot et al. 2013a, 91). Different kinds of strategies and tactics might be made by a larger polity through a hierarchical system of Native elites compared to those initiated separately by smaller kin groups, families, and individuals (Deagan 1993, 88–90; Gamble 2008, 191–221; Gasco 2005, 92–93; Scarry 1999, 354–356). The political structure of Native polities was an important dimension that influenced how Indigenous and colonial enterprises negotiated with one another about fur prices, trade goods, labor, and the placement of missions (Blair and Thomas 2014; Crowell 1997; Lightfoot 2005, 140–144; Saunders 1998, 407–408).

Landscape management practices We defined landscape management practices along a continuum of increasing labor investment per unit of area: from diversified, low-level food producers that operate at the scale of the local region to more intensified agrarian practices that involve greater energy outlays in landscape modifications and facility constructions at the local or regional scale (Kirch 1994; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009, 124–140; Smith 2001). We argued that landscape management practices may be an important dimension for understanding why Indigenous groups engaged with colonial regimes in different ways. We discussed how Indigenous populations practicing diversified

131

Kent G. Lightfoot et al.

low-level food economies with extensive seasonal rounds might respond to colonial intrusions differently than those groups who had invested considerable time and energy in the construction of soil and water control features and had become more tethered to their production systems (see Hämäläinen 2008, 30–34; Lightfoot et al. 2013a, 91–92).

Regional sociopolitical relationships Another important dimension to consider is the relationship that Indigenous groups had with other Native polities in the region. Regional political networks of affiliation and enmity with other nearby polities are important factors in how Native societies engaged with colonial intruders moving into their territories. On one hand, polities integrated into broader political alliances had the capacity to recruit additional warriors to wage armed conflicts with foreign interlopers (Hämäläinen 2008, 275–280; Jordan 2008, 47). On the other hand, polities with antagonistic relationships with nearby Native populations may choose to create alliances with colonial regimes to obtain an upper hand on their neighbors in obtaining trade goods and arms, as well as protection from other Indigenous polities (Hantman 2018, 110–120). The dynamics of regional sociopolitical relationships are an important dimension in how Indigenous groups opted to engage with newcomers, particularly when multiple colonial enterprises were competing for Indigenous resources, labor, and land. Native people often depended upon their ability to play off rival colonial regimes to gain advantages in the acquisition of goods, prices of trade items, offers of allegiance, and defense from other Indigenous and colonial groups (Hämäläinen 2008, 19, 346–347; Jordan 2008, 57–70; Taylor 2001, 421–424).

The structure of colonial regimes A major challenge that complicated Native American responses to foreign invasion is that they did not confront one standard form of colonialism, but rather a multitude of colonial enterprises that Europeans and Americans unleashed beginning in the 1500s and that continues to this day. Native groups encountered colonial regimes who encroached on their lands for very different reasons and who had divergent policies and practices for interacting with Indigenous landowners. Consequently, Native groups could not rely on a stock response to a colonial invader but had to fashion creative, dynamic solutions that were tailored to specific kinds of colonial situations. Two issues we highlight here are the different kinds of colonial programs (managerial, mission, settler) they faced (Table 9.1), and how the implementation of these colonial programs varied greatly in time and space in North America—often in response to the kinds of Indigenous sociopolitical organizations and economies they encountered.

Colonial programs in North America Managerial colonies These colonial enterprises were predicated on the exploitation of resources and Indigenous people for economic gain in the international market. The primary types of managerial colonies included plantations, mercantile outposts, and fisheries. Plantations are defined as colonial enterprises that grew cash crops that profited planters and financial investors. Many excellent archaeological studies of plantations have been conducted in the Caribbean, where planters oversaw the production of sugar and tobacco, and the American South, where they produced cotton, rice, and tobacco (Farnsworth 2002; Singleton 1995; Wilkie 2000). Mercantile outposts were established by joint-stock companies and investors to exploit resources from tribal lands, including 132

Pathways to persistence Table 9.1 Examples of managerial, missionary, and settler colonies. Type of Colonial Enterprise

Aims

Managerial Exploit people and resources for a profit

Examples

Engagements with Native Peoples

Russian, British, Netherland, American, and French fur-trade outposts

Native people used as key source of labor; extractive activities (e.g., intensive sea mammal harvesting) highly destructive to environment and food webs Native people used as key source of labor; exposed to Christianity, field agriculture, livestock raising, European lifeways, and often cruel labor conditions and sadistic corporal punishments Devastating to Native peoples; systematically removed them from lands and instituted brutal and racial policies

Missionary Create enculturation Spanish, French, and British missions centers and selfsufficient agrarian/ craft production enterprises Settler

Indian removal and appropriation of land for colonists

British and American ranches, farms, and settlements

furs and skin, timber, minerals, and anything else that had commercial value. The best-known archaeological examples of mercantile colonies are fur-trade outposts established by companies from Britain (Hudson’s Bay Company, Northwest Company), France (Company of One Hundred Associates), the United States (America Fur Company, Pacific Fur Company), Netherlands (New Netherlands Company), and Russia (Russian-American Company). These outposts were founded in interior locations, often on navigable rivers, that served as central nodes in the exploitation of profitable terrestrial game (e.g., beaver, deer), as well as along the Pacific coast, where they served as transportation hubs for shipping pelts to market and for the harvesting of lucrative maritime mammals, most notably the sea otter (Lightfoot 2005; Nassaney 2015). Fishing/whaling ports were also established along the northern Atlantic coast of North America that served as processing facilities and transportation hub for the exploitation of cod, whales, and other Atlantic coast maritime products (Kurlansky 1997; Richards 2003, 547–573; Wolf 1982, 160). A common characteristic of managerial colonies was their commercial and profit-oriented purposes based on the extraction of resources from Native lands. Furthermore, mercantile colonies tended to produce severe environmental impacts to Indian country, which often led to a limited time span for the existence of these colonies. For example, the industrial monocropping practices of plantations led to deforestation, changes in local hydrology conditions, and soil exhaustion and erosion (Grove 1997; Mann 2011; Richards 2003; Watts 1987). The North American fur trade was notable for how quickly commercial hunting led to the decline of profitable species of game on Native lands. As the availability of the most lucrative furs (beaver, sea otters) declined in local areas, it stimulated the movement of fur companies to establish new mercantile colonies to exploit new lands in a western direction across North America and down the Pacific Coast. Both the beavers and sea otters were essentially exterminated across most of North America by the mid-1800s, which had devastating effects on local wetland environments and near shore maritime habitats (see Lightfoot et al. 2013b). Other characteristics of managerial colonies that faced Native communities were their small colonial administrative staffs and their dependence on Indigenous populations and/or imported 133

Kent G. Lightfoot et al.

workers for their labor. Most managerial colonies only housed a handful of Euro-American residents, typically planters and managers in plantations and company officials in mercantile outposts. The plantations in the Caribbean and American South initially used local Indigenous people as workers but later relied on enslaved Africans and indentured servants (particularly in the South) to produce and process their cash crops (Farnsworth 2002; Richards 2003; Merchant 2002, 39–58). Mercantile colonies, particularly fur trade outposts, typically depended on Indigenous people for their economic success. Depending on the location, colonial administrators recruited people from Eastern and Southeastern tribes, Métis from Canada, the Pacific Islands, Native Alaska, and local Indigenous populations (Crowell 1997; Lightfoot 2003; Nassaney 2015; Nassaney et al. 2007; Waselkov 2002; Wilson and Langford 2011).

Missionary colonies These settlements were founded with the primary goal of spreading Christianity to the Indigenous people of North America and beyond. Founded by various Protestant denominations, Roman Catholic orders (e.g., Franciscan, Jesuit, Dominican), and the Russian Orthodox Church, missionaries founded a multitude of colonial outposts across North America, where they worked with hundreds of tribal groups (Jackson and Castillo 1995; Lightfoot 2005; Weber 1992). Colonial administrators supported the creation of missions across tribal lands as a relatively affordable way to transform Indigenous populations into civilized Christians who could serve as laborers and taxpayers in newly established European colonies. Most missions were designed to be relatively self-sufficient centers involved in agricultural production, livestock grazing, and the production of goods and crafts needed to maintain the settlements. Common characteristics of missionary colonies were the small numbers of Euro-American people (missionaries, managers) who resided there and their dependence on Indigenous populations for their purpose, labor, and viability. Missions operated as enculturation centers for teaching Christianity, European work ethics, field agriculture, livestock raising, and about supposedly proper dress, food, and manners. Native people also served as the primary laborers in almost all economic activities and in the construction of the infrastructure (e.g., buildings, craft production areas, irrigation systems) that supported the missions (Lightfoot 2005, 6–7). Much archaeological research has been undertaken on Spanish, French, and British missionary colonies across North America (e.g. Bragdon 1988; Branstner 1992; Graham 1998; Panich and Schneider 2014; Waselkov 2002).

Settler colonies This colonial initiative involved the immigration of European and other foreign settlers onto Indian lands with the primary purpose of establishing permanent residences through the construction of homesteads, ranches, farms, and villages. Settler colonialism in North America was first initiated on a major scale by the British along the Eastern Seaboard and later by the United States and Canada in their territorial expansion westward to the Pacific Ocean. It proved to be devastating to Indian people, as they lost most of their lands to settler colonists. In contrast to many mercantile and missionary colonies that depended on sustained interactions with local tribes for their labor and upkeep, settler colonies were predicated on the removal of Indigenous people from their lands to make way for immigrant families (and other laborers) and their economic activities (Johnston and Lawson 2000; Murray 2004, 5–6; Wolfe 2006). Employing the “logic of elimination” (Russell 2001, 2), lands were taken away from Indigenous communities through conquest, treaty, or persistent land squatting and trespassing. The British employed a moral justification for taking the land based on their “higher” use of the property for more 134

Pathways to persistence

intensive forms of agriculture and ranching (Taylor 2001, 128–129). The process of Indian removal and land appropriation, the cornerstones of settler colonialism, often involved violence, purges, double dealing, and scorched-earth policies and other atrocities, which are well documented for the East Coast, California, and elsewhere (Axtell 2001, 295–308; Bailyn 2012, 497–510; Madley 2016; Norton 1979).

Variation in the implementation of colonial programs Not only did Indigenous populations confront a multitude of colonial projects on their tribal lands driven by different economic objectives, evangelical goals, and immigration policies, but these wide-ranging enterprises constantly morphed into new forms through time and space. Some of this variation stemmed from the homeland countries, who often instituted divergent policies and practices for working with specific Indigenous Nations. For example, while fur trade outposts depended on the assistance of local Indigenous communities for their economic viability, British, Russian, and American mercantile colonies developed different conventions for working with Native people in western North America. British merchants employed Indigenous people as porters, trappers, and camp workers in their interior fur trade outposts and created alliances with local tribes to obtain valued furs (beavers, sea otters) through the exchange of goods (cloth, metal hatchets, glass beads, blankets, knives) in both interior outposts and via shipboard emporiums along the Pacific coast (Crowell 1997). American merchants also exchanged a diverse range of goods with Native trappers at outposts and rendezvous places but also employed or paid freelance Euro-American trappers, the so-called mountain men, to obtain valued pelts on Indian lands. The Russians could not compete directly with other merchants in exchanging goods to tribal hunters for pelts, given the wider selection of trade goods and better exchange rates that American and British companies offered. Consequently, they brought to North America the practice of subjecting local communities to pay a tax or tribute (iasak) in furs, which was instituted in their colonies in Native Alaska (Crowell 1997). Another significant dimension of colonialism that varied greatly in time and space was the degree of militarism represented. The numerous managerial, missionary, and settler colonies founded in North America all depended, to some extent, on fortifications and armed combatants to protect these enterprises from uprisings and attacks by Indigenous polities and competing colonial regimes. However, there was great variation in the nature of the defenses constructed, the use of professional soldiers, and how they were financed (Babits 2013a, 2013b). Some of the mercantile companies, such as the Russian-American Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, erected stout wooden stockade complexes at trade outposts that were manned by company militia for the protection of the fur-trade enterprises in times of need. These settlements were essentially mercantile villages with fortifications, as exemplified by archaeological studies at the Ross Colony in California and Fort Vancouver in Washington (Farris 2012; Lightfoot 2005; Taber et al. 2019; Wilson and Langford 2011). Other fortified settlements erected by the French and British served as both commercial and military centers where fur trade and even missionary activities took place alongside garrisons of professional military troops who protected the financial and geopolitical interests of the homeland governments (for recent archaeological examples see Cobb 2019; Nassaney 2019). Spain established a series of fortified garrisons (presidios) in New Spain and Florida staffed by professional soldiers supported by the state to protect its colonial lands and investments (Deagan 2010). Soldiers stationed at both the presidios and missions played a crucial role in maintaining the peace and protection of missionary colonies that Spain founded in Florida and Alta California. 135

Kent G. Lightfoot et al.

A wide range of fortifications took place in settler colonies. Some forts built and staffed by civilian militias provided safe havens during attacks by Native and/or colonial forces, as illustrated by the archaeological investigation of Fort Juelson in Minnesota (Arnott and Malki 2019). Yet many settler colonies were defended as part of imperial military projects that employed professional soldiers to look after the resources, people, and lands of the colonizing nation. Recent archaeological studies of nineteenth-century United States military posts in western North America provide excellent case studies of this phenomenon (Eichelberger 2019; Eichner 2019; Tveskov and Rose 2019; Wilkie 2019). Colonial policies and practices for engaging with Native peoples were also tailored in relation to Indigenous sociopolitical and economic organizations. Large chiefdom-level polities supported by intensified agrarian production were often treated differently from smaller polities that depended largely on the stewardship of wild plants and animals for their food, raw materials, and medicines (Lightfoot et al. 2013a). For example, Franciscan missionaries implemented massive relocation (reducción) programs among most so-called hunter-gatherer populations in Alta California and Texas that removed Indigenous people from their homelands and placed them in new mission centers that housed people from multiple polities who often spoke different languages. Yet in working with larger Indigenous polities supported by agrarian production in the American Southwest and Florida, the Franciscans typically founded missions in already extant Native settlements that provided access to many potential converts who were already involved in agriculture production (Lightfoot et al. 2013a, 97–98). Colonial administrators often took advantage of Indigenous polities involved in intensified field agriculture systems by taxing them for produce and/or labor to provision colonial populations and to build colonial infrastructures that might include roads, irrigation systems, buildings, forts, and churches in such places as the American Southeast, the American Southwest, Hawaii, and Mesoamerica (Gasco 2005; Kirch 1992; Milanich 1995, 178–179; Sheridan and Koyiyumptewa 2017; Weber 1992, 124; Webster 2017; Wilcox 2009, 143).

Sustained colonialism In developing a better understanding of how and why Indigenous people developed their strategies and tactics for engaging with colonial intruders, we must recognize that not only did they face multiple forms of colonialism but that these diverse colonial enterprises invaded their lands in successive waves over time. The study of sustained colonialism involves the investigation of Native polities and their engagements with multiple colonial programs over the long term (Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018a). A crucial area of research in the archaeology of colonialism is examining the succession pattern of colonial programs in tribal territories. This involves not only the study of Indigenous encounters with first-wave invaders but with later colonists who might follow in various combinations or in rapid succession. We have emphasized elsewhere that the first-wave colonists in many tribal lands of North America were often associated with managerial colonies financed by various mercantile (furtrade) companies that moved rapidly across North America in competition with each other to gain access to tribes and lands with lucrative furs and skins (Lightfoot et al. 2013b, 103–104). Missionaries, particularly from the Franciscan and Jesuit orders, also moved rapidly into new lands as part of the front lines of the colonization programs of Spain and France. Successful British settler colonies were established on the eastern seaboard beginning in the early 1600s, and they continued to grow with the immigration of indentured servants, vagrants, prisoners of war, convicts, and Quaker and Puritan families (Bailyn 2012). However, the westward movement of British and American settler colonies tended to be a later phenomenon depending largely on 136

Pathways to persistence

homeland policies and practices that facilitated the movement of Euro-American settlers and other foreign people onto Native lands (Axtell 2001; Taylor 2001). The complex history of colonialism across North America led to divergent chronologies of encounters, as well as distinctive colonial succession patterns and synergies of engagements. The diverse combinations and varied succession patterns of colonial enterprises that confronted Indigenous people in their tribal lands have three implications for archaeological studies of colonialism. First, the unique histories of colonialism that unfolded across North America resulted in a wide range of strategies and tactics employed by Native communities in their engagements with colonial intruders. Indigenous polities of various sizes and structures faced different sets of opportunities and constraints in their negotiations with British, French, and American fur traders in the mid-continent than Indigenous groups in the American Southeast who entangled with tobacco planters, Franciscan missionaries, and early beachheads of colonial settlers (Gallivan 2016; Hantman 2018; Nassaney 2015). Likewise, as Rothschild (2003) has detailed in her important study, the kinds of social interactions and responses that Pueblo people in the American Southwest initiated with Spanish and Mexican missionaries, soldiers, and rancheros were diametrically different than those experienced by the Mohawk people in the American Northeast, who engaged with Dutch fur traders and later settler colonists. We also stress that Indigenous people in the same geographic region or even from adjacent territories often tangled with different combinations and successions of colonial regimes. For example, mid-size polities with economies geared toward the stewardship of wild resources confronted a diverse assortment of first-wave colonists in Native California, including Russian and British fur traders, Franciscan missionaries, Spanish/Mexican rancheros and soldiers, and foreign gold miners before having to contend with the full force of Euro-American settler colonists following the Mexican-American War (Lightfoot 2005; Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018a, 431). Second, the diverse pathways that Native people pursued in their interactions with newcomers were greatly influenced by the sequence of colonial regimes they encountered. Lightfoot and Gonzalez (2018a, 430–431) argue that Indigenous relationships with first-wave intruders may have had significant implications for how they negotiated with later colonial enterprises. Experiences accrued by Indigenous polities during their first protracted entanglements would have served as a “learning curve for experimenting with various responses to dealing with foreigners who trespassed on their lands.” Those strategies and tactics initiated by Indigenous groups that proved successful in these early encounters would have become part of their repertoire that they might draw upon in their engagements with later colonial people. Our point here is that we expect to see Native people pursuing multiple pathways for dealing with intruders that would have been colored by the specific sequence of colonial programs they encountered. For example, in California it appears that Native negotiations with Russian fur traders resulted in different kinds of experiences and strategies for dealing with colonists when compared to those employed by Indigenous polities in their engagements with Franciscan missionaries and Presidio soldiers (Lightfoot 2005). Lightfoot and Gonzalez (2018a) contend that the experiences accrued during entanglements with these first-wave colonists played a crucial role in how they were able to engage with later Euro-American settler colonists. Third, Native people continually faced new challenges over time as they engaged with a succession of colonial enterprises who showed up on their doorsteps. Tribal polities were typically at the height of their populations and operating at full capacities with regards to their sociopolitical structures, religious organizations, and landscape management practices when they engaged with first-wave colonists. This situation, however, changed dramatically for many tribes in North America over time. The onslaught of successive managerial, missionary, and eventually 137

Kent G. Lightfoot et al.

settler colonies led to the decline of Indigenous populations due to diseases, food scarcities, armed conflicts, massacres, and other atrocities, as well as major environmental degradations and impacts to Indigenous stewardship and agrarian economies (Anderson 2005, 62–121; Madley 2016). While the timing of these changes varied from region to region and tribe to tribe, the counterpoint to these transformations in Indigenous sociopolitical organizations and economies was the striking increase in the number of colonists from diverse homelands moving into Indigenous landscapes, particularly with the founding of settler colonies (Bailyn 2012, 500–514; Taylor 2001, 314–337). While much has been written about these developments, suffice it to say that the successive waves of intruders took their toll on the size, structure, and landscape management practices of Native societies, which in turn influenced how they chose to engage with the rising number of colonists on their lands. In some cases, tribes were able to employ similar kinds of strategies that they had successfully employed in their mediation with first-wave colonists (Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018a, 2018b). In other cases, new kinds of responses were initiated to combat the changing circumstances that involved explicit or covert efforts by settler colonists to eliminate or remove Indigenous people from their lands by violence, intimidation, trespassing, and treaties (Godwin 2001; Wolfe 2006). The upshot of this discussion is that Native people were continually revising strategies of engagements or creating new ones to respond to a never-ending succession of colonial enterprises that endures to the present day.

Examples of Indigenous engagements with successive colonial regimes In this final section, we examine the findings of recent studies that provide some insights on how Native people chose to engage with the succession of colonial regimes that intruded into Indian country. As outlined previously, many tribes experienced dark times during the later years of historic colonial engagements that took a significant toll on the size, structure, landscape management practices, and regional alliances of Native societies, as well as their traditional land holdings. In recognizing the monumental challenges that many Native groups faced in later colonial times, it is important to stress that they often initiated creative measures under these trying circumstances to persevere in their Indian cultures and even to thrive in many cases. The later phases of colonialism provided opportunities for tribes to selectively incorporate new technologies and ideas into their cultural practices; to absorb other people into their societies; to develop innovative trade connections and economic enterprises; to commence novel kinds of settlement strategies; and to play off different colonial regimes. It appears that many different pathways were taken by Native people in their negotiations with the later succession of colonial enterprises. Here we briefly outline three related pathways discussed in recent studies that exemplify how Native people transformed themselves to take advantage of ever-changing colonial conditions (Table 9.2). The first pathway was the forging of new relationships and alliances between introduced species of plants and animals in North America that revolutionized certain aspects of Native lifeways. Plants and animals are treated by many Native American peoples as relatives with personhood, and Indigenous protocols and perspectives on engaging with these newcomers provides alternatives to Native-nonnative binaries that are prevalent in academic discourse (Reo and Ogden 2018). One iconic example of these new relationships involved a strong alliance between the peoples of the Great Plains and the horse in conjunction with new tools, such as the gun, and the inclusion of new sources of people into local communities that culminated in new ways of hunting, fighting, and trading. An important case study of this pathway with the horse is the detailed investigation of the Comanche Empire by Hämäläinen (2008), who shows how the Comanche 138

Pathways to persistence Table 9.2 Three pathways initiated by Native people to mitigate the impacts of sustained colonialism. Pathways

Examples

Outcomes

Integration of nonnative plants, animals, technology Dispersal away from colonial settlements

Comanche transformation into mounted warriors, traders, and raiders

Increased power and proficiency of local communities that kept colonists at bay and on the defense

Monacan and Senecan dispersal and disaggregation

Forging new kinds of relationships with colonists

The Brotherton Indian community that fused traditional Indigenous practices with Christianity; New England tribes providing services and goods to colonists

Provided distance and lower visibility from colonial centers that facilitated the continuation of Indigenous lifeways, ceremonies, and trade relations Enabled people to continue their cultural and spiritual practices, albeit modified

people transformed themselves into mounted warriors, traders, and raiders who controlled much of the Great Plains and the American Southwest. During the years of 1750–1850, they incorporated various people into their local rancherias through adoption, kinship, and enslavement, while keeping various Native people (e.g., Apache) and the Spanish and French colonists at bay and on the continued defense. A similar pathway was followed by some California Indians in the 1830s and 1840s who joined the mounted warriors of charismatic and politically acute Indigenous leaders who raided Franciscan missions and ranchos in Alta California for horses, mules, and other livestock, which they then drove across the Sierra Nevada Mountains to trade with colonists from New Mexico (Monroy 1990, 196–199; Phillips 1975, 1993, 158–164). Also, research on tobacco use by Native people at Mission Santa Clara in California demonstrates how novel species of tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum and N. glauca) were cultivated and folded into traditional methods of preparation and consumption (Cuthrell et al. 2016). The second pathway was the dispersal of local Indigenous communities into smaller and more remote settlements, as recently described for the Monacan people of the Virginia Piedmont by Hantman (2018) and the Seneca people in western New York by Jordan (2008). They note that archaeologists often view this kind of population dispersal and disaggregation, particularly in the colonial period, as evidence for political disarticulation leading to the eventual abandonment of a region. However, rather than perceiving this settlement shift as a haphazard decision made in haste, Hantman and Jordan convincingly argue that this was often a carefully reasoned decision that accrued benefits for Native people facing successive colonial intrusions. Small, dispersed settlements provided a low-visibility option for Monacan people who intentionally placed themselves some distance away from colonial centers where they could still actively maintain a mixed horticultural, hunting, and gathering stewardship system and conduct ceremonies, dances, and other Indigenous practices. For Seneca people, dispersal was a strategic choice that facilitated economic gain by bringing them closer to resources in a time of peace while maintaining their position as middlemen in the fur trade through the Niagara portage. We have noted a similar dispersed settlement pattern in late colonial times in our work among the Kashaya Pomo in northern California, and the scattered Comanche rancherias in the Plains, as described previously, are other variants of this settlement strategy. We believe that an important component of these dispersed settlement systems was the creation of gathering places where people could come together periodically 139

Kent G. Lightfoot et al.

for ceremonies, marriages, political decision making, and the maintenance of social relations, as illustrated by the cyclical macrolevel and grand councils held among the Comanche (Hämäläinen 2008, 275–278), the earthen burial mounds of the Monacans (Hantman 2018, 66–77), and the dance houses of the Kashaya Pomo (see Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018a, 437–440). A third pathway involved Indigenous people forging relationships with colonial settlers as traders, cultivators, ranchers, herbalists, house laborers, field workers, sailors, and marriage partners and housemates. There are many variants of this pathway that might include Indigenous people living in or near colonial settlements or on nearby reservation lands. Recent archaeological work in New England exemplifies how local tribal members maintained their Indigenous identities and cultural values in the face of successive British and later American settler colonists. With the establishment of an early reservation program by the British in the mid-to-late 1600s that encouraged the teaching of Christianity, Native people in southern New England faced major hardships, living on small tracts of land with limited resources and economic opportunities (Bragdon 1988; Cipolla 2013, 4–5). Cipolla (2013) documents some of the Native people who moved from these New England communities to new lands in upstate New York and eventually to Brothertown, Wisconsin. In his study of Brotherhood ethnogenesis, he shows, using archaeological and archival sources, how they fused elements of Christianity and western material culture with Indigenous spiritual and cultural practices. Other archaeologists have focused on the Native peoples remaining in New England who initiated a diverse range of strategies involving farming, trading, basketmaking, lithic production, etc., that typically involved close interactions with diverse colonial populations (Bagley et al. 2014; Law 2014; Law et al. 2008; Law Pezzarossi 2014; Law Pezzarossi and Sheptak 2019; Mrozowski et al. 2015; Mrozowski et al. 2009; Pezzarossi 2014; Silliman 2009; Silliman 2010). These studies illustrate a variety of practices enacted by Native peoples that contributed to the continuity of traditional lifeways and cultural identity in the face of colonial pressures. While some of these tribes remain federally unacknowledged and face a common myth that they disappeared from their land, a critical finding from this recent archaeological research is evidence of Indigenous perseverance in the southern New England landscape over time to the present.

Conclusion The primary purpose of this chapter is to advocate for archaeological investigations of colonialism that take a long-term perspective in examining interactions that unfolded between distinctive tribal entities and the diverse kinds of colonial enterprises that encroached on their lands. In developing a better understanding of how and why Indigenous groups initiated specific kinds of engagements with colonial intruders and how these strategies and tactics changed over time, we argue that archaeological studies of colonialism should begin with a thorough consideration of Indigenous sociopolitical and economic organizations, including such dimensions as polity size, polity structure, landscape management practices, and regional sociopolitical relationships. We believe that developing a comprehensive grounding of Indigenous societies prior to and throughout their history of colonial entanglements is crucial for considering how specific tribal groups engaged with colonial intruders at specific times and places. A significant challenge in the study of colonialism in North America is that Indigenous people did not encounter just one type of colonist or colonial program but rather a plethora of colonial agents with divergent policies and practices who often invaded their lands for very different reasons. Native populations not only tangled with various iterations of managerial, mission, and/or settler colonies, but they continued to confront multiple forms of colonialism over many decades or centuries that continues today. Thus, we argue that it is important for our studies to consider colonial 140

Pathways to persistence

succession patterns in tribal lands that consider the full sequence of colonial programs that tribal people engaged. We believe new insights about Native negotiations with colonialism will result from such diachronic approaches. In some cases, lessons learned by tribal people in their negotiations with early colonists may have provided a rough template for dealing with later invaders. In other cases, particularly with the arrival of later settler colonists, new kinds of responses and negotiations were probably created to meet very different demographic, economic, and political circumstances. We recognize the monumental challenges that all Native American groups faced in their entanglements with colonists and the tremendous impacts that these sustained encounters have had on their population numbers and cultural practices. We also emphasize, however, that all was not doom and gloom. Indigenous groups were highly creative in mitigating colonialism and making the most of new technologies, trade connections, settlement arrangements, and economic opportunities. We concluded the chapter with examples of several innovative pathways that Native people initiated to take advantage of ever-changing conditions in historic times, including the incorporation of nonnative plants, animals, and technologies; the creation of new kinds of settlement patterns; and the forging of relationships with colonial settlers. These pathways exemplify how many Indigenous people across North America made the very best of very challenging and ever-changing circumstances.

Acknowledgments We thank Sara L. Gonzalez and Lee M. Panich for the opportunity and encouragement to write this chapter.

References cited Anderson, Kat M. 2005. Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources. Berkeley: University of California Press. Arnott, Sigrid, and David L. Malki. 2019. “Forts on Burial Mounds: Interlocked Landscapes of Mourning and Colonialism at the Dakota-Settler Frontier, 1860–1876.” Historical Archaeology 53 (1): 153–169. Axtell, James. 2001. Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America. New York: Oxford University Press. Babits, Lawrence E. 2013a. “Introduction.” In Archaeology of French and Indian War Frontier Forts, edited by Lawrence E. Babits and Stephanie Gandulla, 1–8. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Babits, Lawrence E. 2013b. “Conclusion.” In Archaeology of French and Indian War Frontier Forts, edited by Lawrence E. Babits and Stephanie Gandulla, 241–254. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Bagley, Joseph M., Stephen Mrozowski, Heather Law Pezzarossi, and John Steinberg. 2014. “Continuity of Lithic Practice from the Eighteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries at the Nipmuc Homestead of Sarah Boston, Grafton, Massachusetts.” Northeast Historical Archaeology 43 (1): 172–188. Bailyn, Bernard. 2012. The Barbarous Years: The Conflicts of Civilizations 1600–1675. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Blair, Elliot H., and David Hurst Thomas. 2014. “The Guale Uprising of 1597: An Archaeological Perspective from Mission Santa Catalina de Guale (Georgia).” In Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider, 25–40. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Blanton, Richard E., Gary M. Feinman, S. A. Kowalewski, and P. N. Peregrine. 1996. “A DualProcessual Theory for the Evolution of Mesoamerican Civilization.” Current Anthropology 37: 1–14. Bragdon, Kathleen. 1988. “The Material Culture of the Christian Indians of New England, 1650–1775.” In Documentary Archaeology in the New World, edited by Mary C. Beaudry, 126–131. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Branstner, Susan M. 1992. “Tionontate Huron Occupation at the Marquette Mission.” In Calumet and Fleur-De-Lys: Archaeology of Indian and French Contact in the Midcontinent, edited by John A. Walthall and Thomas E. Emerson, 177–201. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

141

Kent G. Lightfoot et al. Cipolla, Craig N. 2013. Becoming Brothertown: Native American Ethnogenesis and Endurance in the Modern World. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Cobb, Charles R. 2019. “Flat Ontologies, Cosmopolitanism, and Space at Carolina Forts.” Historical Archaeology 53 (1): 73–85. Crowell, Aron L. 1997. Archaeology and the Capitalist World System: A Study from Russian America. New York: Plenum Press. Cuthrell, Rob Q., Lee M. Panich, and Oliver R. Hegge. 2016. “Investigating Native Californian Tobacco Use at Mission Santa Clara, California, through Morphometric Analysis of Tobacco (Nicotiana spp.) Seeds.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 6: 451–462. Deagan, Kathleen. 1993. “St. Augustine and the Mission Frontier.” In The Spanish Missions of La Florida, edited by Bonnie G. McEwan, 87–110. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Deagan, Kathleen. 2010. “Strategies of Adjustment: Spanish Defense of Circum-Caribbean Colonies, 1493–1600.” In First Fort: Essays on the Archaeology of Proto-Colonial Fortifications. History of Warfare, Vol. 60, edited by Eric Klingelhofer, 17–39. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers. Eichelberger, Justin E. 2019. “Colonial Identities of United States Army Commissioned Officers: The Negotiation of Class and Rank at Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins, Oregon, 1856–1866.” Historical Archaeology 53 (1): 103–125. Eichner, Katrina C. L. 2019. “Frontier Intermediaries: Army Laundresses at Fort Davis, Texas.” Historical Archaeology 53 (1): 138–152. Farnsworth, Paul, ed. 2002. Island Lives: Historical Archaeologies of the Caribbean. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Farris, Glenn J. 2012. So Far From Home: Russians in Early California. Berkeley, CA: Heyday. Feinman, Gary M. 1995. “The Emergence of Inequality: A Focus on Strategies and Processes.” In Foundations of Social Inequality, edited by T. Douglas Price and Gary M. Feinman, 255–280. New York: Plenum Press. Feinman, Gary M., Kent G. Lightfoot, and Steadman Upham. 2000. “Political Hierarchies and Organizational Strategies in the Puebloan Southwest.” American Antiquity 65 (3): 449–470. Gallivan, Martin D. 2016. The Powhatan Landscape: An Archaeological History of the Algonquian Chesapeake. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Gamble, Lynn H. 2008. The Chumash World at European Contact: Power, Trade, and Feasting among Complex Hunter-Gatherers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gasco, Janine L. 2005. “The Archaeology of Colonization: California in Cross-Cultural Perspective.” In The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Gil Stein, 69–108. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Godwin, Luke. 2001. “The Fluid Frontier: Central Queensland 1845–63.” In Colonial Frontiers: IndigenousEuropean Encounters in Settler Colonies, edited by Lynette Russell, 101–118. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Graham, Elizabeth. 1998. “Mission Archaeology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 25–62. Grove, Richard H. 1997. Ecology, Climate, and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400– 1940. Cambridge: White Horse Press. Hämäläinen, Pekka. 2008. The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hantman, Jeffery L. 2018. Monacan Millennium: A Collaborative Archaeology and History of a Virginia Indian People. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Jackson, Robert H., and Edward Castillo. 1995. Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Johnston, Anna, and Alan Lawson. 2000. “Settler Colonies.” In A Companion to Post-Colonial Studies, edited by Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray, 360–376. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Jordan, Kurt A. 2008. The Seneca Restoration, 1715–1754: An Iroquois Local Political Economy. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Kirch, Patrick V. 1992. Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii. The Archaeology of History, Vol. II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kirch, Patrick V. 1994. The Wet and the Dry: Irrigation and Agricultural Intensification in Polynesia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kulisheck, Jeremy. 2003. “Pueblo Population Movements, Abandonment and Settlement Change in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century New Mexico.” Kiva 69 (1): 30–54. Kurlansky, Mark. 1997. Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. New York: Walker and Company.

142

Pathways to persistence Law, Heather B. 2014. “Traces of Residence: Indigenous Mobility and Materiality in 19th century New England.” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Law, Heather B., Stephen Mrozowski, and Guido Pezzarossi. 2008. Archaeological Intensive Excavation, Hassanamesit Woods Property, The Sarah Boston Farmstead, Grafton, Massachusetts. Part 2. Cultural Resource Management Study No. 26. Boston: The Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Law Pezzarossi, Heather. 2014. “Assembling Indigeneity: Rethinking Innovation, Tradition, and Indigenous Materiality in a 19th-Century Native Toolkit.” Journal of Social Archaeology 14 (3): 340–360. Law Pezzarossi, Heather, and Russel N. Sheptak, eds. 2019. Indigenous Persistence in the Colonized Americas: Material and Documentary Perspectives on Entanglements. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Lightfoot, Kent G. 1995. “Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship between Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology.” American Antiquity 60 (2): 199–217. Lightfoot, Kent G. 2003. “Russian Colonization: The Implications of Mercantile Colonial Practices in the North Pacific.” Historical Archaeology 37 (4): 14–28. Lightfoot, Kent G. 2005. Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lightfoot, Kent G., and Sara L. Gonzalez. 2018a. “The Study of Sustained Colonialism: An Example from the Kashaya Pomo Homeland in Northern California.” American Antiquity 83 (3): 427–443. Lightfoot, Kent G., and Sara L. Gonzalez. 2018b. Metini Village: An Archaeological Study of Sustained Colonialism. Volume 3, The Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Fort Ross, California. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, Archaeological Research Facility. Lightfoot, Kent G., Lee M. Panich, Tsim D. Schneider, and Sara L. Gonzalez. 2013b. “European Colonialism and the Anthropocene: A View from the Pacific Coast of North America.” Anthropocene 4: 101–115. Lightfoot, Kent G., Lee M. Panich, Tsim D. Schneider, Sara L. Gonzalez, Matthew A. Russell, Darren Modzelewski, Theresa Molino, and Elliot H. Blair. 2013a. “The Study of Indigenous Political Economies and Colonialism in Native California: Implications for Contemporary Tribal Groups and Federal Recognition.” American Antiquity 78 (1): 89–103. Lightfoot, Kent G., and Otis Parrish. 2009. California Indians and Their Environment: An Introduction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Madley, Benjamin. 2016. An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mann, Charles C. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. New York: Vintage Books. Merchant, Carolyn. 2002. The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History. New York: Columbia University Press. Milanich, Jerald T. 1995. Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Mitchell, Mark D., and Laura L. Scheiber. 2010. “Crossing Divides: Archaeology as Long-Term History.” In Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400–1900, edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Mark D. Mitchell, 1–22. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Monroy, Douglas. 1990. Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mrozowski, Stephen A., D. Rae Gould, and Heather Law Pezzarossi. 2015. “Rethinking Colonialism: Indigenous Innovation and Colonial Inevitability.” In Rethinking Colonialism: Comparative Archaeological Approaches edited by Craig N. Cipolla and Katherine Howlett Hayes, 121–142. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Mrozowski, Stephen A., Holly Herbster, David Brown, and Katherine L. Priddy. 2009. “Magunkaquog Materiality, Federal Recognition, and the Search for Deeper Meaning.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 13 (4): 430–463. Murray, Tim. 2004. “The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies.” In The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies, edited by Tim Murray, 1–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nassaney, Michael S. 2015. The Archaeology of the North American Fur Trade. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Nassaney, Michael S. 2019. “Cultural Identity and Materiality at French Fort St. Joseph (20BE23), Niles, Michigan.” Historical Archaeology 53 (1): 41–55. Nassaney, Michael S., José António Brandão, William M. Cremin, and Brock A. Giordano. 2007. “Archaeological Evidence of Economic Activities at an Eighteenth-Century Frontier Outpost in the Western Great Lakes.” Historical Archaeology 41 (1): 1–17.

143

Kent G. Lightfoot et al. Norton, Jack. 1979. When our Worlds Cried: Genocide in Northwestern California. San Francisco: The Indian Historian Press. Panich, Lee M., and Tsim D. Schneider, eds. 2014. Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Pezzarossi, Guido. 2014. “Camouflaging Consumption and Colonial Mimicry: The Materiality of an Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Nipmuc Household.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 18 (1): 146–174. Phillips, George Harwood. 1975. Chiefs and Challengers: Indian Resistance and Cooperation in Southern California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Phillips, George Harwood. 1993. Indians and Intruders in Central California, 1769–1849. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Reo, Nicholas J., and Laura A. Ogden. 2018. “Anishnaabe Aki: An Indigenous Perspective on the Global Threat of Invasive Species.” Sustainability Science 13: 1443–1452. Richards, John F. 2003. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rothschild, Nan A. 2003. Colonial Encounters in a Native American Landscape: The Spanish and Dutch in North America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Russell, Lynette. 2001. “Introduction.” In Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Colonies, edited by Lynette Russell, 1–15. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Saunders, Rebecca. 1998. “Forced Relocation, Power Relations, and Culture Contact in the Missions of La Florida.” In Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick, 402–429. Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University. Scarry, John F. 1999. “Elite Identities in Apalachee Province: The Construction of Identity and Cultural Change in a Mississippian Polity.” In Material Symbols: Culture and Economy in Prehistory, edited by John E. Robb, 342–361. Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University. Sheridan, Thomas E., and Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa. 2017. “Moquis, Kastiilam, and the Trauma of History: Hopi Oral Traditions of Seventeenth-Century Franciscan Missionary Abuses.” In New Mexico and the Pimeria Alta: The Colonial Period in the American Southwest, edited by John G. Douglas and William M. Graves, 239–260. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Silliman, Stephen W. 2009. “Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England.” American Antiquity 74 (2): 211–230. Silliman, Stephen W. 2010. “Indigenous Traces in Colonial Spaces.” Journal of Social Archaeology 10 (1): 28–58. Singleton, Theresa A. 1995. “The Archaeology of Slavery in North America.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 119–140. Smith, Bruce. 2001. “Low-Level Food Production.” Journal of Archaeological Research 9 (1): 1–43. Spicer, Edward H. 1962. Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Taber, Emily C., Douglas C. Wilson, Robert Cromwell, Katie A. Wynia, and Alice Knowles. 2019. “Transfer-Printed Gastroliths: Fowl-Ingested Artifacts and Identity at Fort Vancouver’s Village.” Historical Archaeology 53 (1): 86–102. Taylor, Alan. 2001. American Colonies. New York: Viking Penguin. Tveskov, Mark A., and Chelsea Rose. 2019. “Disrupted Identities and Frontier Forts: Enlisted Men and Officers and Fort Lane, Oregon Territory, 1853–1856.” Historical Archaeology 53 (1): 41–55. Waselkov, Gregory A. 2002. “French Colonial Archaeology at Old Mobile: An Introduction.” Historical Archaeology 36 (1): 3–12. Watts, David. 1987. The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture, and Environmental Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, David J. 1992. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven: Yale University Press. Webster, Laurie D. 2017. “Hopi Weaving and the Colonial Encounter: A Study of Persistence Through Change.” In New Mexico and the Pimeria Alta: The Colonial Period in the American Southwest, edited by John G. Douglas and William M. Graves, 115–141. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Wilcox, Michael V. 2009. The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wilkie, Laurie A. 2000. Creating Freedom: Material Culture and African-American Culture and African-American Identity at Oakley Plantation, Louisiana, 1845–1950. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

144

Pathways to persistence Wilkie, Laurie A. 2019. “At Freedom’s Borderland: The Black Regulars and Masculinity at Fort Davis, Texas.” Historical Archaeology 53 (1): 126–137. Wilson, Douglas C., and Theresa Langford, eds. 2011. Exploring Fort Vancouver. Vancouver, WA: Fort Vancouver National Trust. Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409.

145

10 AFRICAN-INDIGENOUS INTERACTIONS IN COLONIAL AMERICA From divisions to dialogue Terrance Weik

Introduction A significant void exists in archaeological discourses involving Africans and Indigenous people in the Americas. There are too few archaeological studies that bridge African Diasporan and Indigenous studies (Weik and Mathis 2005, 266; Weik 2004, 43; Weik 2007, 317). This state of affairs exists despite some relatively recent and ongoing efforts, as well as important critiques of the discipline. For example, Silliman (2005, 64, 68) noted the lack of dialogue that existed from the 1980s through the early twenty-first century between archaeologists studying African Diasporan enslavement on plantations and colonial-period Native American sites (see also Silliman 2020). Although there has been some growth in the number of studies since Silliman’s observation, the field continues to be sparse compared to other archaeological research areas. Ultimately, archaeology would benefit from synthetic approaches that addresses the two populations and the products (material, biological, and social) of their multicontinental human flows. There are a range of intersecting processes, parallel experiences, and enveloping events that make such archaeological dialogue logical and possible. Clearly, oppression under colonialism and enslavement have created comparable or similar experiences for African and Indigenous (American) populations. Foodways practices in places such as low country South Carolina are another topic that draw attention to the nexus of African Diasporas and Indigeneity (Ferguson 1992). Historical interaction could also be examined from iconographic or decorative arts perspectives as it materialized on artifacts such as cream-colored pottery that was on display in the De Rijks Museum (Amsterdam), which depicts enslaved Indigenous people and Africans working the tobacco plantations of seventeenth-century Suriname and Curaçao (Weik and Mathis 2005, 281). The field of investigation could also be widened by attending to the histories of free or freedom-seeking people who joined, coexisted with, or admitted African and Indigenous people in their enclaves (Rowlands 1999). Parallel types of ontologies, local knowledge, cultural ceremonies, and spiritual beliefs also have potential to serve as fields of study that can accommodate the interplay and intersection of African and Indigenous people and practices (Weik 2009, 231).

146

African-Indigenous interactions

The goal of this chapter is to encourage a more robust dialogue between African Diasporan and Native American or Indigenous archaeologies and to show the merits of archaeological attention to the connections between these populations. Along the way, this discussion will address the causes for archaeologists’ absent or slow progress in addressing the void, such as biases, indifference, unawareness, or provincialism. Some fruitful directions in building discursive bridges are suggested from past and present research: captive labor systems; material manifestations of colonial power; anticolonial or liberatory projects and critical challenges to Eurocentric thought; experiences creating agency; diverse settings and social spaces where a range of relations took place; politics and dynamics of identity creation; ideological forces (e.g. racialization) driving marginalization; physical and epistemological violence; mechanisms of social exchange; cultural genesis and social transformation; and economic interdependency.

African and Indigenous American studies Although archaeological research is the focus of this chapter, it is important to note the wider body of scholarship that archaeologists have drawn on and contributed to in order to frame material culture, social behavior, and other aspects of human life discussed later. African and Indigenous interactions and “Black Indians” (or “indian negroes”) have been of interest to scholars since the nineteenth century (Bier 2004; Chamberlain 1891; Katz 2012; Willis 1963; Wright 1902). Early research examined themes such as demography, intermarriage (or “miscegenation”), slave trading, racial terminology, legal classification, frontier guides, genealogical ties, military alliances, relational valences (e.g., cooperation or antipathy), and genetics. However, before the twenty-first century, research was “episodic and seldom continuous” (Jones 2001, 2). Newer perspectives are moving historical and anthropological inquiry into a broader spectrum of approaches and themes across the western hemisphere, particularly the literature on slaveholders and enslavement. Like in earlier periods, the last few decades of scholarship have focused on regional or household scales of analysis. More recent generations of researchers have addressed nationalism, race, transnational identity, sovereignty, cultural mixture, borderland politics, ethnogenesis, and creolization (Brooks 2002; Krauthamer 2013; Littlefield 1977; May 2016; Miles 2005; Miles et al. 2006; Monteiro et al. 2018; Saunt 1998; Sturm 2002). Archaeologists will have to remain attentive to this diversity of theoretical frameworks and approaches so that they can make unique contributions to established scholarship, take advantage of conceptual and methodological resources put forth by scholars, and recognize fruitful new research directions. In what follows, archaeologists’ handling of themes from the broader, multidisciplinary conversation are analyzed with reference to the implications for evidence, methods, and theory.

Obstacles and avenues to dialogue Archaeologists have been slow to study African–Native American interactions for a number of possible reasons. For instance, some early generations of archaeologists, like some earlier historians, internalized the biases of colonial chroniclers whom they read. This led scholars to carry forward a Eurocentric focus that assumed that interethnic conflict was the primary or usual state of affairs. This chronicler bias toward conflict was grounded in a Eurocentric agenda of controlling African and Indigenous people through divide-and-conquer tactics. This is not to say that one should dismiss the conflicts that did exist. There are documented cases of antagonisms that span centuries, such as Africans who aided colonists or settler societies (and nations) in conquests

147

Terrance Weik

of Native American communities. A case in point is “Estevanico the Moor,” whose role as an agent for Spanish colonialism made him a resonant figure in the oral histories of Indigenous descendants who have informed the archaeology of the Pueblo Revolt (Agoyo 2002, xii). Similarly, African and Indigenous people were employed in bounty hunting and “ethnic soldiering” over the colonial period as a means to destroy self-liberated African Diasporan and “maroon” communities (see various chapters in Restall 2005). On the other hand, there are a number of cases of alliances between Africans and American Indians within slave societies or colonial rebellions or remote enclaves inhabited by both Indigenous and self-emancipated African people (Weik 2012b). A number of archival researchers have been hampered by chroniclers’ racialized filtering of human identities, demography, and settlement information (Forbes 1993). This resulted in their inability to recognize or conceptualize Indigeneity and African bases for socially meaningful action or exchanges. Another older obstacle to dialogue involves the legacy of the culture concept, which manifested in institutions such as academic area studies programs (African American, African, and Native American), which used to emphasize single cultural areas or bounded cultures. This type of obstacle created a mindset that ignored groups that crosscut social boundaries, modes of transnational identity creation, and processes that maintained cultural boundaries (Hamilton 2007; Phillippi and Sheades 2019). One way that an archaeologist has overcome this obstacle is by integrating Diaspora and Marxist theory and formulating a consumption and production model informed by Indigenous material cultural production on the islands of the Dismal Swamp, where American Indians met “self-extricated” (liberated) Africans and created alternative, albeit alienated, economies on the peripheries of the European capitalist system (Sayers 2015). A potential impediment to African–Indigenous archaeological dialogue is the fear that inclusive studies could be used for political purposes. For instance, some supporters of Native American geopolitical sovereignty may fear that Indigenous claims on archaeological sites and historic places could be weakened by opponents who use the Eurocentric tactic of dismissing peoples’ identity claims because of dilution from African or European blood or interests (cf. Forbes 1993). This type of fear is rooted in tangible history. For instance, US nationalist citizenshipmaking projects, such as the Dawes Commission, imposed single identities onto American Indians who had trans-racial or multi-continental ancestry, reinforcing the “one drop rule” and a compartmentalizing system of racial categorization (Sturm 2002, 189). Conversely, identity politics have created some tense struggles over Freedmen or African American citizenship in Indigenous Nations or tribes (e.g., Seminoles) (Krantz 2002; Miller 2005). Scholars are showing that these contentious issues can be understood when theories about sovereignty are wed to concepts such as terminus (and genesis) amnesia and colorism. When these concepts are integrated, they can remedy the shortcomings of monogenetic or ethnoracially homogenous origin narratives at work in struggles over citizenship between groups such the Cherokee and their Freedmen peers in Oklahoma (Chin et al. 2016, 29). The revocation of citizenship in American Indian nations must be approached with sensitivity to the diverse ways Indigenous and African Diasporan people have created or managed interactions. For example, the Chickasaw Nation eliminated many freedmen claims to citizenship over a century ago. Fortunately, some descendants and cultural resource managers of the Chickasaw Nation have been willing to support archaeological research in Mississippi and join conversations emerging from archaeological presentations in Oklahoma that discuss topics such as African enslavement associated with their national heroes, like Levi Colbert (Weik 2015). Conversations with a few archaeologists suggest to me that monolithic notions of American Indian culture history persist that do not appreciate the significance of Africans in Native American territories. This may in part be the result of biases archaeologists have had toward Indigenous 148

African-Indigenous interactions

groups who were numerical majorities in their study areas. However, by the nineteenth century, significant numbers of Africans were present in a number of Indigenous societies (Table 10.1). Further commentary is needed to address critics who argue that critical masses should be the emphasis of archaeologists and to examine factors affecting scholars’ ability to uncover the presence of minorities. Certainly, archaeologists are sometimes limited in what they can say about undocumented people or poorly documented numerical minorities or marginalized groups. Another challenge to detecting African and Native American interaction involves Indigenous people (e.g., Seminoles in Florida) who actively resisted efforts to document the Africans in their midst (Weik 2009, 221). Census numbers have also been obscured by people who have self-identified as an unexpected racial or ethnic designation to evade enslavement, the imposition of a derogatory social status, or the control of dehumanizing laws (Brooks 2002; compare Simmons 2005). Similarly, archaeologists have discovered that colonial soldiers of African and Native American descent attempted to craft new identities and upward mobility by seeking to change the castas designations imposed on them (Voss 2005). However, despite these challenges, individuals and numerical minorities do matter in history, and their cultural or social relevance can always be factored into discussions. A related matter involves the problem posed by individuals or groups who leave no socially or individually emblematic objects that reflect their identity (Weik 2014, 297). Not all groups or persons leave behind materially tangible or culturally specific residues or signs of action, such as iconography, textual imprints, manufacturing marks, or use wear. However, as gender archaeologists have suggested, our conceptualizations or assumptions about who comprises the population(s) of artifact users or makers and our need to interpret and recontextualize invite thinking on hypotheses and models of behavior that factor in the contributions of marginalized, missing, or erased actors (Tringham 1994). Comparative and intercultural approaches provide a way through the problems posed by poor and biased documentation. For example, a study of pottery in Moquegua, Peru, addressed the seemingly invisible historical actor by making interpretations contextually comprehensive enough to cover the breadth of known social groups (Smith 1997). As a result, the agency of an African potter (known through documents) was exposed, even though raw material, stylistic, or technological aspects only could uncover Indigenous Andean and Spanish colonist potting Table 10.1 Subpopulations in Indigenous territories of southeastern North America, ca. 1830. Nation

Indigenous

African

Euro-American

Total

 

n

%

n

%

n

%

n

Cherokee Choctaw Chickasaw Creek Seminole

16,542 17,963 5,224 21,762 4,883

90 96 82 96 71

1,592 512 1,156 902 1,400

9 3 18 4 29

201 151 n.a. n.a. n.a.

1 1

18,335 18,626 6,380 22,664 6,283

Notes: These Indigenous, African, and Euro-American head counts are based on various types of population estimates taken from Doran 1978, Mulroy 1993, and Porter 1996. Secondary demographic data in these publications was derived from primary sources such as US military officers’ war campaign fieldnotes and “emigration” records (Indian Removal programs). The “n.a.” stands for not available. Percentages were rounded up for simplicity’s sake. The Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole territory population estimates for white or Euro-American were simply excluded from the “Total” column, and thus indicate the approximate nature of the figures used here. Euro-American represents self-defined white European or American-born European descendants.

149

Terrance Weik

practices. A parallel approach is offered by Silliman (2009, 214), whose work on the Pequot suggests a way out of the trap of seeking ethnic markers or succumbing to the legacies of Eurocentric acculturation theories. We need to replace outdated approaches that fixate on simplistic artifact categorizations (e.g., Native, European, or hybrid artifacts) that are derived from objects’ origins, inferred from the artifact maker’s identity or objects’ places of manufacture, or derived from social behaviors or beliefs that these origins of manufacture allegedly represent. New approaches demand a wider breadth of cross-cultural knowledge, multiethnic histories, and transatlantic data. Collaboration is one way to lessen the burden on scholars and approach the daunting task that often requires teamwork for the best results. But most archaeologists have accepted the fact that fieldwork, lab analysis, and other aspects of project progress depend on crews, assistants, consultants, and specialist collaborators to overcome limitations of training, knowledge, time, and money. Part of the reason why African-Native American interaction has been neglected in archaeology lies in the ways the field has historically formulated paradigms of colonialism and borderlands or frontier regions. Early definitions of historical archaeology saw it as largely the archaeology of European or “white” people and Native Americans (albeit in limited capacity) (Harrington 1955, 1121). Africans were viewed as a compartmentalized marginalized subgroup that were largely contained to the east coast until the expansion of slavery (caused by over-exploitive, plantation farming that created land exhaustion) and the US “Indian Removal” programs of the 1830s. However, Africans were often present with colonists from their earliest encounters with Native Americans, sometimes providing military support, allying with Indigenous rebels, or acting as “cultural brokers” or translators (Katz 2012; Porter 1971; Weik 2004; Wright 1902). Creolization theory has been useful for illustrating the creativity of synthetic processes that linked Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans (Dawdy 2000; Ferguson 1992). It has shown how new and transformed societies were connected by shared regional traditions such as subfloor pit construction (Samford 2007). Older archaeologies of southeastern (US) creolization tended to emphasize colonial and Euro-American powers (with a singular focus on adaptations to domination) in unique engagements with either Africans or Native Americans. Similarly, early “frontier” archaeologies of the Southeast focused on interactions between Native Americans and Europeans while neglecting extensive discussions about race. Some part of these older tendencies to neglect African-Native American interaction may lie in the delayed embrace of post-processual concerns by Southeastern archaeologies (compare South and Deagan 2002, 46–48). Other causes of these tendencies may derive from the chronological development of different topical concerns in historical archaeology in the region, such as the changing emphasis from a focus on colonists, to Native Americans, to enslaved Africans. In the Caribbean and South Carolina, early (e.g., seventeenth-century) plantations are among the types of sites that could be reexamined with more emphasis on African and Native American engagements (Weik 2004). The methodological obstacles to fruitful dialogue can be seen in the example of Colonowares, a ceramic product that derived from colonial interaction, production, and consumption. Colonowares are a low-fired, hand-made pottery that exhibits a blend of Indigenous, African, and European features and that usually was made in hollowware forms. This ceramic type stimulated research that falls into camps supporting either African or Native American origins (Ferguson 1992; Smith 1997). Critics of older studies have noted the problems stemming from compartmentalizing emphases on singular cultural influences and contributions (Singleton and Bograd 1995). The older focus of many North Americanists’ on origins has been replaced by more attention on symbiotic interchanges, which have been explored in Caribbean, Southeastern US, and New England Colonoware studies (Ferguson 1992; Malakoff 2004; Mouer 150

African-Indigenous interactions

1999; Smith 1995). Studies of Afro-Colonowares have focused on their roles as spiritual tools, forms of resistance, or inexpensive pottery made by enslaved people (Ferguson 1992). Recent debates have reexamined the spiritual, symbolic significance of Colonowares and their distribution on the landscape (Ferguson 2007; Ferguson and Goldberg 2019; Steen 2011). A number of publications that mention Colonowares at “Creek” archaeological sites view them as Native American traditions that incorporated European ceramic forms (Foster and Bonhage-Freund 2007; Waselkov and Smith 2000). Regardless of whether the identities of the potters can be determined, culturally informed aspects of production, use, and meaning have to be addressed to advance research.

Subalterns in colonist settlements Colonial history comprises shifting and variant manifestations of subjugation and negotiation in demographic developments, ideologies, economic relationships, cultural practices, and material life. African and Indigenous people worked through parallel and divergent struggles with colonial projects. Research in the Caribbean and Florida presents examples of these and other variables shaping Afro-Indigenous encounters (Deagan 1983; Deagan and Cruxent 2002; Kulstad-González 2015). Europeans asserted that their colonial projects were legitimate exercises in taking, using, and ordering people, places, and things. This assumed legitimacy was based on politically motivated aversion to ethical considerations and ethnocentric allocative rationales for economic access. Even in moments of moral regret, their blind spots prevailed. For instance, archaeological work in Panama points to the sixteenth-century lamentations of Bartolomé de Las Casas about the injustice of Indigenous enslavement, which failed to account for the problem of universal human rights violations caused by the enslavement of Africans who replaced Native American captive laborers (Ammann 2012). Archaeological discourses on ideologies are thus helpful in establishing the motivations and deterrents that created the built environment, that drove consumption of people and products, and that configured the archaeological record. The failure of a universal ethic to change the courses of colonizers and the motivation of human traffickers to make a profit are among the ideological factors that drove people to build forts and maintain captivity. Much more could be said of something approaching a “moral economy,” but that would take this discussion beyond its defined scope (Carrier 2018). While moral sentiments can sometimes hamstring some aspects of research (e.g., the taboo during the US Prohibition period concerning the study of alcohol’s socially or physically beneficial aspects), African Diasporan and Indigenous people (past and present) around the world have made it clear that sustained discussions of destructive values and ethical failings are necessary parts of decolonization, social justice, and heritage recovery (Ani 1997; Kopenawa et al. 2013; Smith 2008). Archaeologists are attempting to heed the call to decolonize scholarly practices and disassemble Eurocentrism (“de-Eurocentring”) (Montón-Subías and Hernando 2018, 455; Bradley et al. 2014; Ogundiran 2018; Smith and Wobst 2005; Harrison 1997). The previously mentioned spectrum of ideological practices and cultural criticisms has supported or subverted physical expressions of power since the early days of European colonization, particularly in the Americas. However, there has been an increasing recognition that macro- or social power must be juxtaposed with the quotidian power of subalterns who affect everyday life and material culture. For example, in La Isabela and Puerto Real (Española), Europeans had to adapt and improvise in ways that exposed the limits of their power and control over Indigenous and African people or their environment. At La Isabela, this manifested as a change from European medieval settlement configurations to the first criollo town layout. At Puerto 151

Terrance Weik

Real, early influences coming from Indigenous cooking and potting techniques resulted in manos, metates, and griddles replacing morteros and other Spanish forms of pots in colonists households (Deagan 1996, 144). Over the first half of the sixteenth century, coerced Taino labor was replaced with enslaved African labor. This demographic and labor change caused tangible changes on the physical plane, such as the emergence of new types of pottery at Puerto Real. The source and forms of pottery in Spanish households changed from Taino to African (Christophe Plain) Colonoware forms as the 1550s neared (Smith 1995). Out of need, proximity, or convenience, Spanish reliance on Indigenous and African laborers influenced the colonists in visceral ways, shaping the foods that colonists ingested daily. At times, colonists and slaveholders became situated in precarious positions (politically and logistically), which created moments of dependency that ran counter to conquest narratives of interaction (compare Mintz 1996, 37). Questions remain, such as to what extent or in what ways did Africans and Native Americans exchange recipes, potting techniques, or food preparation practices. Pottery use was affected by creolizing handlings of ingredients, utensils, food service dishes, taste, and culinary knowledge. Altogether, these factors formed part of the broader arena of social and material exchanges between Europeans, Native Americans and Africans (Deagan 1996, 147). Besides learning and sharing, manipulation and force marked colonial period work (Silliman 2004). Deagan (1996) raises the issue of gender’s role in what happened and ways these happenings were assembled by male-biased chroniclers, archaeologists, and historians of Puerto Real and other locales of circumcaribbean pottery making and service. This has resulted in the overemphasis on male roles in colonialism and the missing female agency in colonial households. Deagan also argues for a colonial division of labor in which male colonists more fully influenced settlement architecture and Indigenous females were more influential in culinary practices. Deagan sees an instrumental role for Taino women transforming Spaniards into Criollo colonists who had to develop unique social beliefs, technologies, and practices that differed from the European ideas and behaviors they carried with them from their homelands or Atlantic ports of departure. On the other hand, she also acknowledges that patriarchal power and intermarriage enabled the exercise of “Don Juanism” and European manipulation of local leaders. Some caveats to Deagan’s work are notable. For instance, Indigenous (and presumably African) male laborers were marginalized to the realm of menial work in this model, without asking to what extent male potting, home service, or supplemental kitchen help was possible. It is not clear, for instance, if potting was necessarily a gendered domain among every African society from which potential Diasporan potters who reached Puerto Real were taken captive (Ferguson and Goldberg 2019, 188). Voss takes issue with the gendered analysis of La Isabela and Florida, cautioning that sexual conquests and concubinage are absent in the intermarriage focus of household analysis (Voss 2008, 192). Deagan’s (2012, 874) more recent work accounts for this criticism by making reference to concubines and by use of castas paintings to allude to household violence between subaltern females and colonists. Outside of colonial settlements, there were always a small number of African and Indigenous people in colonial Española who realized the power of trans-ethnic collective action, which took various forms, including uprisings that shook plantations and colonial towns, and tarnished the reputation of Columbus and other leaders. Archaeologists and historians have been working on self-liberated or cimarron communities on Española (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), at locations such as Jose Leta. Fieldwork there has recovered Indigenous pottery, which complements the archival sources that speak to the transracial and cross-cultural coalitions and cohabitations that brought Africans and Indigenous Americans together from the fifteenth century onward (Arrom and García Arévalo 1986; Weik 2004, 20).

152

African-Indigenous interactions

Archaeologies of Africans in Native America Thus far, little archaeological research has investigated the role and representation of Africans in Native American territories (Foster, personal communication 2007). Historians and anthropologists have documented people of African descent who lived in Seminole, Creek, Chickasaw, and other territories (Brooks 2002; Miles et al. 2006; Perdue 1988; Saunt 2007). Archaeologists made note in brief reviews of the need for research on African-Native American issues pertaining to neighboring groups such as the Choctaw (White 2001, 550–551). Brief mention of enslaved Africans has been made in at least one work on Creek or Muskogean archaeology (Wesson 2008). Work on the Seminole has helped address this research gap (Herron 1994; Weik 2002, 2007; Weisman 1989, 2007). The archaeology of the African Seminole emerged in the 1990s, about the time that African-Native American historical and anthropological research was witnessing a phase of renewed productivity. Pilaklikaha (a.k.a. Abraham’s Old Town) is the African Seminole settlement that has been most intensively investigated by archaeologists (Herron 1994; Weik 2002, 2007, 2009). The settlement was largely inhabited by African Americans who escaped from Georgia plantations. Research there has focused on ethnogenesis, liberatory antislavery practices, and community building. Weik examined the pottery assemblage and landscape of the settlement in a comparative fashion, with reference to Indigenous Seminole and plantation settlements and archaeological sites, finding both similarity and difference. Pilaklikaha’s most numerous artifact type is Withlacoochee Brushed pottery, a type common at Indigenous Seminole sites in the region (Weik 2009, 2012b). The abundance of Seminole pots may have in part been explained by the fact that a Seminole leader resided at the town part time or by the greater incentive Indigenous people had to visit the town when he was present. Pilaklikaha’s Brushed pottery collection differed from Indigenous Seminole site assemblages in that the African Seminole assemblage had a much greater diversity of rim decorations. This may indicate pots were imported or locally derived from different Indigenous potters, especially if Weisman’s (1989) hypothesis, that most Seminole sites were inhabited by matrilineal kin groups who produced their own uniquely decorated pots, proves to be valid. However, such an interpretation of rim decorations is subject to the criticisms that have emerged in archaeology concerning the shortcomings of associating pots with people, such as the alternative symbolic meanings of signs. Regardless of what the rim decorations meant, African Seminoles benefitted from access to Brushed pottery because exchanges with local Seminoles for pots was less costly than traveling farther to colonial towns for pots. Further, African Seminoles had to shoulder the burden of acquiring cash to purchase refined earthenwares such as the whitewares and ironstone vessels they had at Pilaklikaha. Finally, less time spent at European markets looking for goods meant less exposure to bounty hunters looking for escapees from slavery. Other investigations of African Seminole archaeological sites have taken place at “Angola” (near Tampa), Boggy Island (central Florida), Fort Clarke (Texas), and Nacimiento (Mexico) (Boteler-Mock and Davis 1997; Weik 2009, 2012a; Weisman 1989). Archaeological publications focused more on Indigenous Seminole have discussed matters such as the Seminole accommodation of enslaved Africans within neighboring settlements, African enslavement’s fit in the wider operation of Florida plantation economies, ways race informed (African and American Indian) representations, cosmopolitanism, and antislavery ideology (Weik 2012a; Weisman 1999, 2007, 2012) Work in Mississippi, on Levi Colbert and his brother George Colbert, is uncovering Chickasaw families and their relationships with enslaved Africans during the Removal Era. There is an older historical literature that emphasizes political and economic contexts, genealogical 153

Terrance Weik

reconstructions, and culture history, along with specific analysis of the processes of Chickasaw social transformation, structural factors, (American) Indian Removal, and late-colonial intersocietal tensions (Gibson 1972; Littlefield 1980; McAlexander 1987). Much of the recent archaeological work, including a nineteenth-century homestead of a slaveholder named Chippewa (near Holly Springs, Mississippi), is not yet published. Students are entering the field, studying places like Charity Hall mission (Skipton 2019). The missionaries use of enslaved labor made Charity Hall a place where Native Americans encountered African Diasporans and religious conversion practices (Paige et al. 2010). At Levi Colbert’s Prairie, archaeological research is examining landscapes, historical anthropology, and agricultural practices. One line of archaeological research is using critical cartography to illuminate the ways that US government mappings performed different functions: depicting the physical landscape of archaeological heritage, facilitating past land (dis)possession, and obscuring the natural environment (Weik 2019b). This research showed how Indigenous people capitalized on and resisted land commodification and US nationalist geographic imaginings. It also exposed the intimate link between slavery and (American) Indian removal: settlers sought Native American lands so they could grow cotton on them with enslaved Africans. Indigenous Chickasaws who tried to work within the US removal program of land transfer made property claims, in part, based on “improvements” by Africans who marked it with their hoes and axes and in part by claiming Africans as part of their households. Trail of Tears sites (e.g., relocation way stations) and post-removal sites from Mississippi to Oklahoma have much potential to flesh out the shared African-Indigenous process of removal, versus just seeing it as an event (Weik 2019b). Another line of investigation exposed the tensions between (and within) Africans and Chickasaws and the diverse identities performed within the gendered labor system. This study carried forward certain interpretive tendencies of the literature on colonial period African-Indigenous interactions, such as preoccupation with intergroup conflicts. This research also suggested ways that seemingly utilitarian objects such as bridle bits can be used as foils for archival assertions about African and Chickasaw work and relations with horses and stimuli for new interpretations involving mutual corporality and animal subalterity (Weik 2019a). Archaeologists working on nineteenth-century Cherokee sites are providing rare glimpses into failures of the removal program created by a small number of American Indians who avoided forced migration. Greene’s (2011) comparative approach to mass-produced goods possessed by post-removal Cherokees, enslaved Africans, and white tenant farmers in southwestern North Carolina suggests that the benefits of military domination and racial status were not large enough to give all Euro-Americans a material advantage over African or Native Americans. The locally made objects such as stone pipes that were found at area sites inhabited by Africans, Native Americans, or Euro-Americans suggest there were significant shared components of the regional material universe and potential exchanges linking these populations. Faunal evidence from this Cherokee study area point to ethnic food preparation and acquisition (e.g., species targeted for subsistence) differences that were not apparent within the parts of the subassemblages comprising the dishes, beads, and other Industrial Revolution products. The zooarchaeologist’s ability to differentiate African American, Indigenous, and Euro-American assemblages may give some archaeologists hope that there are methods that may help researchers identify ethnic elements of sites having little or no archival sources. However, the potential pitfalls of associating artifacts with ethnicity (e.g., the diversity within many societies’ cultural practices) must be factored into such an undertaking (T. M. Weik 2014). Further, this Cherokee study would have benefitted from a consideration of the ways that Indigenous people had to cloak ethnic or racial visibility and avoid emblematic or ostentatious display. This would have 154

African-Indigenous interactions

led them to avoid public places like stores, which in turn could have affected the quality and quantity of tablewares and other commodities. Greene’s (2010) work on Welch Town, located about 6 miles south of the previously mentioned Cherokee study, builds on the sites in that comparative study and exhibits a more nuanced theorization about culturally specific production and consumption. The Welch Town study focuses on the interracial slaveholding Welch family and other Cherokees living with them, who all avoided removal by maintaining patron–client relations and camouflaging their presence, legally, racially, and economically. The Welches and their Cherokee peers maintained footing in both the capitalist, modernist world and the world of ancestral practices. This was evident in their participation in African American enslavement and commodity consumption and their exercise of Cherokee skills such as stone artifact making.

Native American people and culture on plantations and African American sites Historically, African American and plantation archaeology has touched lightly on the significance of Native American culture. However, newer studies are pushing for a much stronger recognition of Indigenous people in plantation and slavery contexts (Hayes 2013). Native American lithics have been found in plantation and African American sites from the east coast of the US to Texas, raising discussions about reuse of precolonial tools and the spiritual appropriation of bifaces (Baker 1997, 16; Russell 1997, 72–74; Wilkie 1995). The presence of Native American ancestry, pottery, or inhabitants at plantations or Maroon enclaves has been highlighted in a few discussions (Ferguson 1992; Weik 2004). Research has demonstrated the reuse of Native American mounds by African Americans (Jamieson 1995, 45). At urban, nineteenth-century African American sites such as the Seibels House in Columbia (South Carolina), Indigenous pottery and stone bifaces were collected either because of their novelty or their usefulness for ritual practices (Weik 2008). From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, people escaped from slavery and contributed to a new set of terms for people and places: Maroons to the Anglo colonists; palenques to the Spanish; quilombos to the Portuguese. Critics and some descendants decry these terms, suggesting that there are better alternative terms, such as self-emancipated. Similarly, the term “Native” is also criticized, as is Native American, Indian, and variants of these two. The label “Indigenous” has come to be accepted by a number of groups (Bird 1999). However, Indigenous (like other terms such as tribe) is controversial in some parts of the world, as it suffers from users’ attempts to universalize about many groups and it does not attend to other scales (e.g., house group) at which identity may be more significant for the people being labeled (Peters and Mika 2017). Some groups would prefer a self-defined ascription or a term from within their own language. The wider implication of this discussion is that archaeologists have to pay attention to past and present terms referencing African-Indigeneity (e.g., zambo or half-breed) or locales (e.g., “Mulatto Girls Town,” an African Seminole settlement) and situate them within a long view that accounts for contrasting viewpoints that derive from intersectional influences on speech, identity politics of citizenship and federal recognition, movements for self-determination, discursive contours and social practices shaping etymologies, (de)colonizing narratives, personal or scholarly commitments to reflexivity, and other forces of ethnonymy (Forbes 1993; Haley and Wilcoxon 2005; Phillippi and Sheades 2019; T. Weik 2007, 314–317). Beyond the relevance that naming has for theoretical frameworks that guide material culture and social analyses, archaeologists will also benefit from considering how they approach toponyms and their power to name archaeological sites, cemeteries, and historical places. Often, self-liberated Africans collaborated with Native Americans and Spanish or British colonists, creating settlements that became archaeological field sites in Florida, Panama, Virginia, 155

Terrance Weik

North Carolina, Cuba, Jamaica, Suriname, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil (Agorsah 1994; Arrom, Garcia Arévalo, and Fundacion Garcia Arevalo (Santo Domingo) 1986; K. A. Deagan and Landers 1999; Funari 2003; Poe 1963; Orser and Funari 2001; Weik 2012b; Hernández de Lara et al. 2012; White 2001; Sayers 2006). These collaborations are not surprising, as Native Americans were the first to escape from American colonial enslavement. American Indian pottery and stone tools have been found in many of the self-liberated African (Maroon) sites that have been excavated. Hence, some of the remote, frontier Indigenous American sites may serve as guides in the location of self-liberated African settlements. Despite their destruction, selfliberated communities are celebrated today in many places, including Jamaica, where Maroon oral histories, stone and ceramic artifacts, and genetic research are all shedding light on African and Indigenous connections (Agorsah 1994; Fuller and Torres 2018).

Multiracial, polycultural communities Multiracial, hetero-ethnic communities comprise a final context of African and Native American interaction. Multiethnic communities resulted from the convergence of family, religious, and other cultural modes of belonging. These culturally heterogeneous social groupings were present both within colonial towns and in distinct settlements. As ethnographic findings suggest, it is important to keep in mind that the role of heritage and ancestry (matters of great interest to many archaeologists) in these past communities was not necessarily any more important than more quotidian concerns (Matthews 2019b). Most archaeological studies of US multiethnic communities have emerged in the Northeast, while a few others are taking place in areas of the Southeast such as Mississippi and New Orleans. This archaeological coverage differs from a broad range of historic occurrences of diverse communities in other parts of the Southeast (e.g., the Melungeons of the Carolina– Tennessee region) of North America. Archaeological approaches to multiethnic communities have involved one or more of the following emphases: diverse community identifications and transformations, processes of ethnogenesis, divergent understandings of mixedness or hybridity, materiality of heritage, and racialization. Archaeologists have discovered a number of things about multiethnic US communities. For instance, they have uncovered the ingenuity, economic savvy, and ongoing struggles to make a living in New England and New York, even post-emancipation (Handsman 2019; Matthews 2019a). Matthews (2019a) uses a diverse array of evidence (paintings, a gravestone, faunal remains, and lithics) to put forth an archaeology of autonomy in an ambiguous period of racialization. He argues that shifting the emphasis from persistence and heritage to an archaeology of a “creole synthesis” allows one to see new ways of being that mirrored, if not borrowed directly from, local Indigenous cultural knowledge, subsistence practices, and material productions. Research in Nantucket has discovered that self-identification was differentially enacted in public and private and that there were sub-assemblages that speak to these variant representational modalities (Cacchione 2019). In New Orleans, grave goods and human remains have further supported a creolized biological and material basis for diversity (Gray 2019). Contested grounds of heritage remembrance and representation have been examined in New York’s Fowler House and North Amityville preservation district. They both involve wider society’s problem accepting hybridity or subaltern heritage as part or primary emphasis of public commemoration (McGovern and Mebane-Cruz 2019; Phillippi and Sheades 2019). Multiethnic communities certainly existed outside of what became the US. For instance, a multiethnic perspective has been offered as an alternative archaeological interpretation of the previously mentioned community called Palmares, in northeastern Brazil. This view challenges 156

African-Indigenous interactions

traditional scholars’ and activists’ idea of the quilombo as an African rebel enclave or Afro-Brazilian polity. The multiethnic explanation offers a contrasting model of a heterogeneous (African, Indigenous American, European) and politico-economically entangled colonial society. This direction has been pursued with emphasis on the local Indigenous pottery and sites as evidence for a pluralistic social identity (Rowlands 1999, 339–340).

Conclusion The presence, social roles, and cultural significance of colonial era African–Indigenous engagements merits attention from a variety of vantage points. Examining different experiences and entanglements across a spectrum of ethno-racial communities or cultural-demographical (majority, minority, or parity) social spaces is a useful way of organizing a review and applying a critique. But it is not an argument for formulaic ethnic studies that merely add Africans or Native Americans in superficial cultural reconstructions, nor is it an argument for arbitrary speculations about interactions. It is a call to attend to the diversity within all the landscapes, settlements, behavioral motivations, and human relations constituting the breadth of colonial interactions. The complexities and challenges of this discussion are relevant to many other parts of the world, as colonization has carried people long distances within and between continents. At the beginning of this chapter, an important problem was identified. The discussion that followed identified a number of causes. But it also hinted at cases that can be used to identify types of sites and approaches that can promote a lively discourse on African–Indigenous interactions. Moreover, it is helpful for archaeologists to follow patterns in historical and anthropological works that illuminate factors forcing or drawing African and Indigenous people into a range of settings, including missions, forts, plantations, cities, and removal way stations. These types of sites have accessible archival, architectural, and artifact evidence for encounters and relationships. However, family homesteads and other categories of sites may provide fruitful projects, if tangible evidence, good site preservation, navigable identity politics, supportive local networks, and collaborative plans are present. Otherwise, archaeologists must be willing to approach settlements and activity centers from a diachronic perspective that recognizes that places shift in their demographic compositions, toponymic and sociocultural identities, logistical functions, and scales of political-economic influence. These considerations will help archaeologists to avoid neglecting or overdetermining the roles of Africans and Indigenous people at sites and to formulate the most mutually inclusive approaches and interpretations for all parties involved, including the European colonists who helped to bring them together, whether in conflict, ambiguity, or cooperation.

References cited Agorsah, Emmanuel Kofi, ed. 1994. Maroon Heritage: Archaeological, Ethnographic, and Historical Perspectives. Barbados: Canoe Press. Agoyo, Herman. 2002. “Preface.” In Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt: Identity, Meaning, and Renewal in the Pueblo World, edited by Robert W Preucel, xi–xiv. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Ammann, Felipe Gaitán. 2012. “Besieged Genoese: An Archaeological Glimpse of the Slave Trade in LateSeventeenth-Century Panama.” Historical Archaeology 46 (3): 27–46. Ani, Marimba. 1997. Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behaviour. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Arrom, José Juan, and Manuel García Arévalo. 1986. Cimarrón. Santo Domingo: Fundación García Arévalo. Baker, John. 1997. “The Search for My African-American Ancestry.” Historical Archaeology 31 (3): 7–17. Bier, Lisa. 2004. American Indian and African American People, Communities, and Interactions: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport, CT: Praeger.

157

Terrance Weik Bird, Michael Yellow. 1999. “What We Want to Be Called: Indigenous Peoples’ Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Identity Labels.” American Indian Quarterly 23 (2): 1–21. Boteler-Mock, Shirley, and Mike Davis. 1997. “Seminole Black Culture on the Texas Frontier.” CRM 20 (2): 8–9. Bradley, John, Philip Adgemis, and Luka Haralampou. 2014. “‘Why Can’t They Put Their Names?’: Colonial Photography, Repatriation and Social Memory.” History & Anthropology 25 (1): 47–71. Brooks, James. 2002. Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cacchione, Victoria A. 2019. “Public Face and Private Life: Identity through Ceramics at the BostonHigginbotham House on Nantucket.” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 8 (1–2): 57–77. Carrier, James G. 2018. “Moral Economy: What’s in a Name.” Anthropological Theory 18 (1): 18–35. Chamberlain, Alexander Francis. 1891. “African and American: The Contact of Negro and Indian.” Science 17 (419) 85–90. Chin, Jeremiah, Nicholas Bustamante, Jessica Ann Solyom, and Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy. 2016. “Terminus Amnesia: Cherokee Freedmen, Citizenship, and Education.” Theory Into Practice 55 (1): 28–38. Dawdy, Shannon Lee. 2000. “Understanding Cultural Change Through the Vernacular: Creolization in Louisiana.” Historical Archaeology 34 (3): 107–123. Deagan, Kathleen. 1983. Spanish St. Augustine: The Archaeology of Colonial Creole Community. New York: Academic Press. Deagan, Kathleen. 1996. “Colonial Transformation: Euro-American Cultural Genesis in the Early SpanishAmerican Colonies.” Journal of Anthropological Research 52 (2): 135–160. Deagan, Kathleen. 2012. “From Español to Criollo: An Archaeological Perspective on Spanish American Cultural Transformation, 1493–1600.” In In Old and New Worlds, edited by André Texiera and Jose Btancourt, 873–882. Lisbon: CHAM, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Deagan, Kathleen, and José María Cruxent. 2002. Archaeology at La Isabela: America’s First European Town. New Haven: Yale University Press. Deagan, Kathleen, and Jane Landers. 1999. “Fort Mosé: Earliest Free African-American Town in the United States.” In “I, Too, Am America”: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life, edited by Theresa A. Singleton, 261–282. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Ferguson, Leland. 1992. Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650–1800. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Ferguson, Leland. 2007. “Comments on Espenshade’s ‘Marked Colonoware, Underwater Sampling, and Questions of Inference’.” The African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter, March 2007. Ferguson, Leland, and Kelly Goldberg. 2019. “From the Earth: Spirituality, Medicine Vessels, and Consecrated Bowls as Responses to Slavery in the South Carolina Lowcountry.” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 8 (3): 173–201. Forbes, Jack D. 1993. Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Foster, Thomas, and Mary Theresa Bonhage-Freund. 2007. Archaeology of the Lower Muskogee Creek Indians, 1715–1836. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Fuller, Harcourt, and Jada Benn Torres. 2018. “Investigating the ‘Taíno’ Ancestry of the Jamaican Maroons: A New Genetic (DNA), Historical, and Multidisciplinary Analysis and Case Study of the Accompong Town Maroons.” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies/Revue Canadienne Des Études Latino-Américaines et Caraïbes 43 (1): 47–78. Funari, Pedro Paulo A. 2003. “Conflict and the Interpretation of Palmares, a Brazilian Runaway Polity.” Historical Archaeology 37 (3): 81–92. Gibson, Arrell Morgan. 1972. The Chickasaws. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Gray, Ryan D. 2019. “Memories of Black Indian Materialities in Colonial New Orleans.” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 8 (1–2): 78–109. Greene, Lance. 2010. “Identity in a Post-Removal Cherokee Household, 1838–50.” In American Indians and the Market Economy, 1775–1850, edited by Lance Greene and Mark R. Plane, 53–66. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Greene, Lance. 2011. “Ethnicity and Material Culture in Antebellum North Carolina.” Southeastern Archaeology 30 (1): 64–78. Haley, Brian D., and Larry R. Wilcoxon. 2005. “How Spaniards Became Chumash and Other Tales of Ethnogenesis.” American Anthropologist 107 (3): 432–445.

158

African-Indigenous interactions Hamilton, Ruth Simms. 2007. Routes of Passage: Rethinking the African Diaspora, Vol. 1. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Handsman, Russell G. 2019. “An Archaeology of Prosperity and Its Meanings in Antebellum Communities of Color.” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 8 (1–2): 33–56. Harrington, Jean Carl. 1955. “Archaeology as an Auxiliary Science to American History.” American Anthropologist 57 (6): 1121–1130. Harrison, Faye Venetia, ed. 1997. Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology of Liberation. Arlington, VA: Association of Black Anthropologists and American Anthropological Association. Hayes, Katherine Howlett. 2013. Slavery Before Race: Europeans, Africans, and Indians at Long Island’s Sylvester Manor Plantation, 1651–1884. New York: New York University Press. Hernández de Lara, Odlanyer, Boris Rodríguez Tápanes, and Carlos Arredondo Antúnez. 2012. Esclavos y cimarrones en Cuba: arqueología histórica en la cueva El Grillete. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Centro de Investigaciones Precolombinas, Instituto Superior del Profesorado Dr. Joaquín V. González. Herron, Jordan Thomas. 1994. “The Black Seminole Settlement Pattern, 1813–1842.” Master’s Thesis, University of South Carolina. Jamieson, Ross W. 1995. “Material Culture and Social Death: African-American Burial Practices.” Historical Archaeology 29 (4): 39–58. Jones, Rhett S. 2001. “Black/Indian Relations: An Overview of the Scholarship.” Transforming Anthropology 10 (1): 2–16. Katz, William Loren. 2012. Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage. New York: Atheneum Books. Kopenawa, Davi, Bruce Albert, Nicholas Elliott, and Alison Dundy. 2013. The Falling Sky. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Krantz, Wendy, producer. 2002. “A Nation Divided.” 60 minutes. New York: Columbia Broadcasting System. Krauthamer, Barbara. 2013. Black Slaves, Indian Masters Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kulstad-González, Pauline M. 2015. “Striking It Rich in the Americas’ First Boom Town: Economic Activity at Concepción de la Vega (Hispaniola) 1495–1564.” In Archaeology of Culture Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America, edited by Pedro Paulo A. Funari and Maria Ximena Senatore, 313–337. New York: Springer. Littlefield, Daniel F. 1977. Africans and Seminoles: From Removal to Emancipation. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Littlefield, Daniel F. 1980. The Chickasaw Freedmen a People without a Country. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Malakoff, David. 2004. “The Vestiges of Northern Slavery.” American Archaeology 8 (1): 38–43. Matthews, Christopher N. 2019a. “A Creole Synthesis: Archaeology of the Culturally Mixed Heritage Silas Tobias Site in Setauket, New York.” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 8 (1–2): 8–32. Matthews, Christopher N. 2019b. “Refuge and Support: An Introduction.” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 8 (1–2): 1–7. May, Katja. 2016. African Americans and Native Americans in the Cherokee and Creek Nations, 1830s-1920s Collision and Collusion. London: Routledge. McAlexander, Hubert. 1987. “The Saga of a Mixed Blood Chickasaw Dynasty.” Journal of Mississippi History 49: 289–298. McGovern, Allison Manfra, and Anjana Mebane-Cruz. 2019. “Mapping Memories of Freetown: The Meanings of a Native American House in a Black Neighborhood.” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 8 (1–2): 131–146. Miles, Tiya. 2005. Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom. American Crossroads 14. Berkeley: University of California Press. Miles, Tiya, Sharon Patricia Holland, and Joy Harjo. 2006. Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds The African Diaspora in Indian Country. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Miller, Susan A. 2005. “Seminoles and Africans under Seminole Law: Sources and Discourses of Tribal Sovereignty and ‘Black Indian’ Entitlement.” Wicazo Sa Review 20 (1): 23–47. Mintz, Sidney Wilfred. 1996. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Boston: Beacon Press. Monteiro, John M., Barbara Weinstein, and James P. Woodard. 2018. Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America. Cambridge Latin American Studies 112. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

159

Terrance Weik Montón-Subías, Sandra, and Almudena Hernando. 2018. “Modern Colonialism, Eurocentrism and Historical Archaeology: Some Engendered Thoughts.” European Journal of Archaeology 21 (3): 455–471. Mouer, Daniel L. 1999. “Colonoware Pottery, Chesapeake Pipes, and ‘Uncritical Assumptions’.” In “I, Too, Am America”: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life, edited by Theresa A. Singleton, 75–115. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Ogundiran, Akinwumi. 2018. “Review of Peter R. Schmidt and Innocent Pikirayi, Eds.: Community Archaeology and Heritage in Africa: Decolonizing Practice.” African Archaeological Review 35 (1): 139–142. Orser, Charles E., and Pedro P. A. Funari. 2001. “Archaeology and Slave Resistance and Rebellion.” World Archaeology 33 (1): 61–72. Paige, Amanda L., Fuller L. Bumpers, and Daniel F. Littlefield. 2010. Chickasaw Removal. Ada, OK: Chickasaw Press. Perdue, Theda. 1988. The Cherokee. New York: Chelsea House. Peters, Michael A., and Carl T. Mika. 2017. “Aborigine, Indian, Indigenous or First Nations?” Educational Philosophy and Theory 49 (13): 1229–1234. Phillippi, Bradley D., and Eiryn Sheades. 2019. “Prospects and Pitfalls: Comments on Action Research at Sites of Mixed Heritage.” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 8 (1–2): 147–162. Poe, Stephen R. 1963. Archaeological Excavations at Fort Gadsden, Florida. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University. Porter, Kenneth Wiggins. 1971. The Negro on the American Frontier. New York: Arno Press. Restall, Matthew, ed. 2005. Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Rowlands, Michael. 1999. “Black Identity and Sense of Past in Brazilian National Culture.” In Historical Archaeology: Back from the Edge, edited by Pedro Paulo A. Funari, Martin Hall, and Siân Jones, 328–344. London: Routledge. Russell, Aaron E. 1997. “Material Culture and African-American Spirituality at the Hermitage.” Historical Archaeology 31 (2): 63–80. Samford, Patricia. 2007. Subfloor Pits and the Archaeology of Slavery in Colonial Virginia. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Saunt, Claudio. 1998. “‘The English Has Now a Mind to Make Slaves of Them All’: Creeks, Seminoles, and the Problem of Slavery.” American Indian Quarterly 22 (1/2): 157–180. Saunt, Claudio. 2007. Black, White and Indian Race and the Unmaking of an American Family. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sayers, Daniel O. 2006. “Diasporan Exiles in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1630–1860.” Transforming Anthropology 14 (1): 10–20. Sayers, Daniel O. 2015. A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Silliman, Stephen W. 2004. Lost Laborers in Colonial California: Native Americans and the Archaeology of Rancho Petaluma. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005. “Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America.” American Antiquity 70 (1): 55–74. Silliman, Stephen W. 2009. “Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England.” American Antiquity 74 (2): 211–230. Silliman, Stephen W. 2020. “Colonialism in Historical Archaeology.” In Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology, edited by Charles E. Orser, Andrés Zarankin, Pedro Paulo A. Funari, Susan Lawrence, and James Symonds, 41–60. London: Routledge. Simmons, Kimberly Eison. 2005. “‘Somos Una Liga’: ‘Afro-Dominicanidad’ and the Articulation of New Racial Identities in the Dominican Republic.” Wadabagei: Journal of the Caribbean and Its Diaspora 8 (1): 51–64. Singleton, Theresa A, and Mark Bograd. 1995. The Archaeology of the African Diaspora in the Americas. Ann Arbor, MI: Society for Historical Archaeology. Skipton, Tara. 2019. “Charity Hall: A Foundational Report of a 19th-Century Chickasaw Mission.” University of Florida Journal of Undergrad Research 21 (1): 1–13. Smith, Claire, and Hans Martin Wobst. 2005. Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Smith, Frederick H. 2008. The Archaeology of Alcohol and Drinking. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

160

African-Indigenous interactions Smith, Greg Charles. 1995. “Indians and Africans at Puerto Real: The Ceramic Evidence.” In Puerto Real: The Archaeology of a Sixteenth-Century Spanish Town in Hispaniola, edited by Kathleen Deagan and Rochelle A. Marrinan, 335–374. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Smith, Greg Charles. 1997. “Hispanic, Andean, and African Influences in the Moquegua Valley of Southern Peru.” Historical Archaeology 31 (1): 74–83. South, Stanley, and Kathleen Deagan. 2002. “Historical Archaeology in the Southeast, 1930–2000.” In Histories of Southeastern Archaeology, edited by Shannon Tushingham, Jane Hill, and Charles H. McNutt, 35–50. Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press. Steen, Carl. 2011. “Cosmograms, Crosses, and Xs: Context and Inference.” Historical Archaeology 45 (2): 166–175. Sturm, Circe. 2002. Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tringham, Ruth. 1994. “Engendered Places in Prehistory.” Gender, Place and Culture 1 (2): 169–203. Voss, Barbara L. 2005. “From Casta to Californio: Social Identity and the Archaeology of Culture Contact.” American Anthropologist. 107 (3): 461–474. Voss, Barbara L. 2008. “Domesticating Imperialism: Sexual Politics and the Archaeology of Empire.” American Anthropologist 110 (2): 191–203. Waselkov, Gregory A., and Marvin T Smith. 2000. “Upper Creek Archaeology.” In The Indians of the Greater Southeast: Historical Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Bonnie G. McEwan, 242–264. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Weik, Terrance M. 2002. “A Historical Archaeology of Black Seminole Maroons in Florida: Ethnogenesis and Culture Contact at Pilaklikaha.” PhD Dissertation, University of Florida. Weik, Terrance M. 2004. “Archaeology of the African Diaspora in Latin America.” Historical Archaeology 38 (1): 32–49. Weik, Terrance M. 2007. “Allies, Adversaries, and Kin in the African Seminole Communities of Florida: Archaeology at Pilaklikaha.” In Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora, edited by Akinwumi Ogundiran and Toyin Falola, 311–331. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Weik, Terrance M. 2008. “Presencing African Americans at the Seibels House.” South Carolina Antiquities 40: 107–128. Weik, Terrance M. 2009. “The Role of Ethnogenesis and Organization in the Development of AfricanNative American Settlements: An African Seminole Model.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 13 (2): 206–238. Weik, Terrance M. 2012a. “Race and the Struggle for a Cosmopolitan Archaeology: Ongoing Controversies over the Representation and the Exhibition of Osceola.” Historical Archaeology 46 (1): 123–141. Weik, Terrance M. 2012b. The Archaeology of Antislavery Resistance. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Weik, Terrance M. 2014. “The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis.” Annual Review of Anthropology. 43: 291–305. Weik, Terrance M. 2015. Founders, Women, and Fieldhands, Archaeology at Levi Colbert’s Prairie. Sulphur, OK: Chickasaw Cultural Center, Chickasaw Nation. Weik, Terrance M. 2019a. “Engendering Labor, African Enslavement, and Human-Horse Relations in Chickasaw Territory.” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 8 (1–2): 110–130. Weik, Terrance M. 2019b. “Mapping Chickasaw Removal.” In The Archaeology of Removal in North America, edited by Terrance Weik, 45–72. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Weik, Terrance M., and Ruth Mathis. 2005. “Not Just Black and White.” In Indigenous Peoples and Archaeology, edited by Claire Smith and Martin Wobst, 281–297. New York: Routledge. Weisman, Brent R. 1989. Like Beads on a String: A Culture History of the Seminole Indians in Northern Peninsular Florida. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Weisman, Brent R. 1999. Unconquered People: Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Indians. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Weisman, Brent R. 2007. “Nativism, Resistance, and Ethnogenesis of the Florida Seminole Indian Identity.” Historical Archaeology 41 (4): 198–212. Weisman, Brent R. 2012. “Chipco’s House and the Role of the Individual in Shaping Seminole Indian Cultural Responses to the Modern World.” Historical Archaeology 46 (1): 161–171. Wesson, Cameron B. 2008. Households and Hegemony: Early Creek Prestige Goods, Symbolic Capital, and Social Power. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

161

Terrance Weik White, Nancy Marie. 2001. “Review of Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal.” American Antiquity 66 (3): 550–551. Wilkie, Laurie A. 1995. “Magic and Empowerment on the Plantation: An Archaeological Consideration of African-American World View.” Southeastern Archaeology 14 (2): 136–148. Willis, William S. 1963. “Divide and Rule: Red, White, and Black in the Southeast.” The Journal of Negro History 48 (3): 157–176. Wright, R. R. 1902. “Negro Companions of the Spanish Explorers.”American Anthropologist 4 (2): 217–228.

162

11 INDIGENOUS NEGOTIATIONS OF MISSIONIZATION AND RELIGIOUS CONVERSION Charles R. Cobb

The nature of religious conversion has so many fascinating and complex dimensions that it has been explored under almost every banner within the social sciences and humanities. Conversions can be individual or collective, eventful or drawn out, revelatory or imposed, corporeal or cerebral, or any combination of these variables (and more) within a given setting. Of particular concern to Europeans attempting to missionize the Americas, conversions were highly variable in their rootedness: they ranged from tenuous attachments to Christianity to profound faithfulness. Indeed, they could even be faked. All of which is to say that the ambiguity of the conversion experience among Native Americans reflects that among peoples and faiths everywhere. It thus should not be surprising that the anxiety felt by Christian religious orders over spiritual deviation was not limited to the Other. In the sixteenth century, the first missions of the newly established Jesuits were placed in southern Italy and other regions of Europe that were feared to have strayed from the path of righteousness (Deslandres 1999; Selwyn 2004). By situating my overview in the anthropology and archaeology of missionization during the era of European colonization of the Americas, the profound variety of religious conversion experiences will be circumscribed by the following parameters: First, by default, the focus will be on Christianity, since this belief system was prevalent among Europeans of the era. Naturally, Christianity is a richly textured faith. Some of my examples thus will draw from various Catholic orders. With the rise of the Reformation, Protestant missions began to appear in the seventeenth century and became increasingly common in the eighteenth century. Their denominational variety makes for some intriguing points of similarity as well as contrast with some of the Catholic traditions. Another point of comparison involves the geographic range of respective churches. The spiritual reach of some, the Franciscans and Moravians, for example, was extensive throughout the Americas. Others, like the Dominicans or Presbyterians, were much more limited in scope and likewise in their influence. Second, although conversion is often viewed as a process of individual enlightenment, my emphasis will be on missions and collective efforts in religious transformation. Many of these endeavors had a strain of coercion behind them, explicit and/or implicit, and were intended to convert significant numbers of people in relatively short order. Thus, strategies of conversion were often developed with a notion of targeting key persons or interest groups who could facilitate this kind of spiritual turnover.

163

Charles R. Cobb

Third, the coercive streak of European missionization and conversion was closely enveloped within the ambitions of imperial expansion in the early centuries of colonialism and later frequently subsumed within the ideology of the market economy. This is not to say that all friars and pastors working among Native peoples were lackeys of political administrators; many were idealists who believed deeply in their calling, and they often conflicted with colonial governmental and military leaders on behalf of their religious charges. Nevertheless, in one way or another missionization was often supported by the state because of the widespread belief that secular civilizing policies and religious piety went hand in hand. Finally, I will avoid assessing the “reality” of conversion experiences, at least in terms of how successful various churches were in enacting a transformative change in spiritual world view among Indigenous peoples. One might venture that this would be a major challenge even in a modern setting. In my estimation, it is far more interesting to situate the archaeology of conversion and missionization within the larger conversation of anthropological approaches about this issue. This goal should lead us to address the materiality of systematic practices of conversion—whether successful or not—imposed by various religious orders (Brandão and Nassaney 2021). Equally important, it also leads to the exploration of the many ways that Indigenous cultures appropriated those practices. These appropriations were not just expressions of hybridity or syncretism or identity formation. In many cases, they represented important shifts in the practices of Christianity itself that were shared by Europeans and Native Americans alike. I should note that I will not be addressing the rich spiritual heritage of Africans in the Americas, a topic of longstanding interest in archaeology and not completely divorced from that of Native Americans (see Chapter 10). Practically speaking, however, missions were primarily aimed at Native Americans, so my ensuing overview will be limited in that respect. When one considers cases like the Jesuits, however, who by the mid-1700s were one of the largest slaveowning groups in the Americas (Weaver 2015, 2), or the North American Southeast, where American Indians and Africans were enslaved alongside one another in the late 1600s and early 1700s (Gallay 2002), it is obvious that the African Diaspora is a key chapter in the narrative of religious conversion in the colonial era.

Negotiating conversion “Conversion” can be a loaded term in the context of colonialism. Although it does imply a transformation from one state of being to another, even under the most draconian of impositions, it is an ambiguous transformation, nonetheless. Research on missionization and conversion emphasizes that Native Americans who turned to Christianity were not necessarily making a profound break with tradition, or at least with all elements of that tradition (Griffiths and Cervantes 1999; Klor de Alva 1982; Martin and Nichols 2010; Tavárez 2011). Even given the power asymmetries attendant in colonial relations, conversion was “neither syncretism nor absolute breach” (Austin-Broos 2003, 1). In practice, this ambiguity often fostered a situation where Indigenous people on missions may have accepted the Christian faith in their own perception— or else felt compelled to—but some of their activities continued to leave doubt in the minds of pastors and friars. As discussed later, two widespread Indigenous practices seemed to leave Catholic clergy in particular harboring what may have been unfounded doubts about the faithfulness of their neophytes, as baptized Native people were called, and other charges: (1) mobility and resistance to congregation and (2) inclusivism in the melding of different faith traditions, a custom that also concerned Protestant missionaries. 164

Missionization and religious conversion

First, in some parts of the Spanish Empire, religious orders were able to force dispersed populations into nucleated communities under policies known as congregacíon and reduccíon (Bushnell 1990). In some regions, literally hundreds of thousands of individuals were concentrated onto estates and missions. This kind of religious and economic centralization, meant to facilitate conversion as well as the exploitation of labor, was a key component of the geographies of management that typified the parallel evolution of colonialism and modernity (Given 2004; Johnson 1996; Trouillot 2002). In other regions, the centrifugal pressures on missions, combined with weak logistical support from church and state, frequently led Catholic clergy to temper their ideals of spatial emplacement with practical solutions. This was particularly true for the northern Spanish borderlands extending from California to Florida, where missions incorporated a wide range of hunting-gathering-fishing and agricultural societies who pursued various arrangements of sedentism and mobility. Missionaries often struggled to take peoples who had traditionally drawn their spiritual, cultural, and economic succor from an extensive landscape and restrict them to a single location. Many individuals and families would temporarily leave missions to visit family members in non-Christian settlements, to gather traditional foods and medicines seasonally, to trade with outlying communities, and for a host of other reasons. Rather than a rejection of the faith, as feared by missionaries, this was oftentimes an accommodation to the faith. Many of the northerly missions were placed at large villages or towns with the idea of encouraging an integration between these facilities and surrounding communities. At many missions in Alta California, the Franciscans were successful in replicating the forced centralization seen in regions like South America (Lightfoot 2005, 59–66). In many other areas of the northern frontier, reduccíon was more often a partial success, and compromises were common. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries at some of the last missions in northern California, friars still granted “paseos” to neophytes that granted them the right to return to their traditional homes for periods of two to three weeks (Arkush 2011, 83). At the missions of south Texas, often populated with formerly nomadic bands, periods of drought and diminished productivity often saw these groups dispersing into familiar hinterlands to resume their former lifestyles—sometimes they came back voluntarily, sometimes they only did so after fierce resistance (Walter and Hester 2014, 98). In Florida, Franciscan friars expressed their frustration with mission residents wandering away for extended periods to pursue traditional gathering activities (Bushnell 1990, 479–481). Recognition of this complex cultural and spatial dynamic has led archaeologists working in the northern borderlands to approach missionization as a flexible process unfolding across a landscape rather than simply a phenomenon restricted to a circumscribed cluster of buildings and related agricultural and ranching lands (Panich and Schneider 2014). Second, while it may be incautious to attribute religious flexibility as a universal feature of Indigenous belief systems, various Catholic and Protestant missionizing orders frequently encountered peoples who were much more open toward combining the old and the new than were the priests and pastors. Catholic and Mesoamerican religious world views seem to have had many areas of convergence, including activities like the placement of Mayan-style caches in Christian churches (Graham et al. 2013); in South America, Native peoples were already conversant with the Catholic appropriation of sacred places on the landscape, since this practice had been well-developed by the Inkas, as well as peoples before them (Besom 2013; VanValkenburgh 2017); and in Protestant New England, traditional healing practices, burial rites, and commemoration of sacred landscapes continued among Christianized American Indians (Winiarski 2010, 107). Although entangled religious practices were viewed as apostasy by some, in many cases missionaries could be equally flexible in their own mediation between Christian belief systems and 165

Charles R. Cobb

those of Native Americans—accommodations that likely would have been frowned upon by the leaders of their churches. Examples of this spiritual slippage demonstrate that clergy were often eager to elide Indigenous syntheses as perhaps imperfect attempts at grasping the faith. “Friars [in Mexico] knew of the sacred meanings of everyday objects in celebratory contexts, but were able to convince themselves that Nahua religious customs that immediately seeped into Christianity were actually markers of true faith and enthusiastic conversion” (Iverson 2019, 275). In Canada, many Wendats viewed baptism as a curative rite that could restore health, an idea that the Jesuits “tacitly encouraged” as a means of normalizing the practice (Anderson 2010, 145). With the recognition that Christian clergy could experience the same ambivalence and range of emotions regarding religious beliefs as could Native peoples, there has been a move by scholars away from the perspective that missionization was simply a cynical, political handmaiden to colonial conquests and cultural eradication (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 7; Martin 2010, 2–3). As a result of the complicated social field of conversion, the era of colonialism witnessed the appearance of individuals whose identity as both Native American and Christian allowed them to maintain a “creative dialog” between their cultures and their newly adopted faith (SleeperSmith 2001; Winiarski 2010, 96). They were not just cultural brokers, they were also spiritual brokers. This was particularly true for the British Atlantic World, where, by the 1700s, literally hundreds of individuals of African and Native American descent were themselves active as missionaries (Andrews 2013; Axtell 1982). Although they usually worked in service to recognized denominations, at the extreme some groups achieved a relative degree of independence as new faith traditions. Still, conversion within the context of colonialism always occurred within an arena of shifting power asymmetries. So creative dialogs and negotiations were not always without friction and perhaps are better construed as debates that oftentimes could be one-sided. Indeed, scholars of religious conversion have struggled to agree on the concepts that best capture this process and how it could be subject to multiple interpretations by all parties involved: terms like “hybridity,” “creolization,” or “syncretism” do not seem to quite capture the range of subtle and overt conversions expressed in various amalgamations of materiality and practice (Iverson 2019; Loren 2017; Panich et al. 2018; Tavárez 2011, 270–271). As one simple illustration: Matthew Liebmann (2013, 32–37) describes two fascinating instances of hybridity in northern New Mexico involving Catholic symbolism: a stemmed chalice made in a traditional Puebloan, Jemez Blackon-White style recovered from a convento complex and a rock art figure of a “Virgin Kachina,” seemingly a synthesis of Santa María and traditional elements of a kachina mask. These were surely multivocal symbols. While priests may have viewed them as an acceptance of the Christian faith, they also may have embodied subversive elements of appropriation and resistance on the part of Native Americans (Liebmann 2013, 37–39). Inequalities of power were most pronounced when the mutualism of colonialism and proselytization led to a spiritual divide-and-conquer approach. Recognizing that some in a society might be more receptive to conversion than others or else held important positions of leadership that could catalyze their community, clergy would often target their conversion practices accordingly. Liam Frink (2010) argues that “identity collectives” of Yupik Eskimo women were attracted to Jesuit overtures because the centrality of Yupik men in the European fur trade had led to a rise in their economic status, with a corresponding decline in that of women. These opportunities for conversion inevitably rested on fractures or tensions endemic to a given society, whether of longstanding tradition or else prompted by colonial interventions. Prominent individuals could also be the target of these attempts at spiritual leveraging. In 1713, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), affiliated with the Church of England, convinced an important chief of the Yamasees to allow his teenage son, George, to 166

Missionization and religious conversion

accompany a party back to London (Bossy 2014). Their hopes were for this future chief to become a Christian missionary to his peoples, who were an important Indigenous presence in the South Carolina colony. To that end he was baptized in London in 1715, but an outbreak of a major war in Carolina that same year between Native Americans and English colonists (the so-called Yamasee War) dispersed the Yamasees and dashed the hopes of the SPG. Native Americans may have been earnest in their conversions, but there were also gains to be made in the more immediate world of the secular. For the Yupik women, their assistance to the Jesuits led to new opportunities for wealth and status and was materialized in such ways as transforming the church building into the dual role of a place of worship and as a kind of women’s house that stood in opposition to the traditional men’s house (Frink 2010, 240). For their part, the Yamasees may have seen George’s trip to England’s capital as a form of “spiritual diplomacy” to help defuse growing tensions with the Carolina colony (Bossy 2014, 377). Conversion efforts by Europeans were frequently reframed by Indigenous peoples into transactions that were rarely one-sided or confined to the realm of spirituality and religion. The case studies that follow are organized under the broad rubrics of Catholic missionizing and Protestant missionizing (and encompass only the major denominational efforts), in recognition of the significant differences in doctrine and conversion efforts between the two major faith systems. It should be emphasized, however, that there was considerable variation toward evangelization even within these two larger traditions. At the same time, nominally distinct Christian orders could share similar structural approaches to proselytization, even as they diverged widely in their interpretations of the Bible. In this regard, both the Catholic Jesuits and Protestant Moravians envisioned a global enterprise overseen by a centralized, hierarchical administrative order, one headquartered in the Vatican and the other in Herrnhut, Saxony. Each church encouraged the regular circulation of missionaries; their missionaries were expected to submit regular reports to their administrations, and, in turn, those reports were widely circulated to disseminate knowledge about local cultures and conditions that might continue to facilitate the broad-spectrum success of proselytization (Arendt 2011, 373; Lenik and Heindl 2014, 100).

Catholic missionizing and conversion In the Catholic world of missionizing, representatives of the established mendicant Dominican and Franciscan orders (both of which had origins in Medieval times) accompanied the first forays into the Americas. Dominican friars commonly were included on some of the earlier expedition and colonizing efforts, but Franciscans, as the largest mendicant order in Europe, soon gained a prominent role as manifested in a wide swath of missions, ranging from the subarctic to the southerly reaches of South America. Dominican missions, in contrast, were mainly concentrated in the Oaxaca and Guatemala regions, although they also developed a limited presence in areas like northern Baja California (Aviles and Hoover 1997, 10). The Jesuit Order, the third major Catholic missionizing presence, was not established until the sixteenth century. Like the Franciscans, however, their spiritual ambitions would eventually lead to their emissaries living alongside Native peoples throughout the Americas—indeed, throughout the world (O’Malley et al. 1999). Although all part of the Catholic faith, the orders were distinct in many ways. Briefly, the Dominicans promoted educational rigor, adhered to Catholic orthodoxy and were active in the Inquisition; Jesuits were dedicated to the counter-Reformation and reinvigorating Catholicism, yet were strong advocates of learning and instruction in Indigenous languages; and Franciscans, the largest order, were vested in social work and church reform, while setting examples of humility through a life of chastity, poverty and obedience (Aviles and Hoover 1997). These 167

Charles R. Cobb

general differences, as well as variation within the traditions, led to considerable diversity in conversion practices. Despite this variation, they all actively followed the call from a series of Papal Bulls issued between 1493 and 1508 stipulating that the Christian faith be borne to Native populations. Archaeological research on missionizing efforts in South America under the Spanish Crown highlight their regional and temporal variation. Steven Wernke (2007a, 152–153) points out that the Catholic Church was deeply divided over the efficacy and morality of voluntary conversion versus the forceful eradication of idolatry. His research in the Colca Valley of Peru is an excellent example of how conversion practices responded to the changing nature of these theological debates (Wernke 2007a, 2007b, 2013). The pragmatics of living peacefully among Indigenous peoples while attempting to restructure their worldview typically led to improvisational approaches to conversion by the first Franciscan friars. This fostered an “analogical” strategy of conversion rather than one that relied on forced eradication. In an attempt to make the Christian faith more welcoming, friars translated it in ways that resonated with local customs—oftentimes paradoxically referencing the very Indigenous practices that were meant to be erased (Wernke 2007a, 152–153). As he describes the colonial town of Malata, rather than dissembling the monumental architecture of the Inka state (in the form of the plaza and the attached Inka hall), the Franciscans developed a new plaza and associated chapel. This was followed by a structured growth of the associated doctrina (mission with permanent friars) architecture in a manner that facilitated surveillance of the town’s citizens and fostered a refashioning of their subjectivities through the built environment (Wernke 2013, 206–211). The new plaza that was the focus of this shift represented an important secular and religious gathering feature in both the Americas and the Mediterranean world for millennia, thus providing a very familiar form of both spatial and cultural attachment. The early latitude shown by Franciscans in Peru toward proselytization was followed by increasing restrictions and an emphasis on religious orthodoxy throughout South America, driven in large part by events elsewhere. First, the threat to the Catholic Church represented by the rapid spread of the Reformation in the sixteenth century culminated in the CounterReformation in the 1560s. The Council of Trent’s (1565) mandate that Catholics adhere more closely to doctrine was echoed in a more formal organization and conformity in church practices. Second, in the Americas this formalization was further expanded by the surging practice of reducciones in the 1570s, where hundreds of thousands of Native peoples throughout the Americas were aggregated into holdings that facilitated spiritual oversight by pastors and economic power by landowners eager to exploit Indigenous labor (VanValkenburgh 2017, 124–129; Wernke 2013, 214–215). These transitions also witnessed a growing emphasis on the eradication of tradition. This was carried to an extreme by the viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, who ordered a systematic destruction of Andean ancestors in the forms of royal mummies and ancestor shrines, resulting in “an assault on Andean historicity, seeking to sever the region’s peoples from their pagan pasts by erasing the last remnants of Inka rulership” (VanValkenburgh 2017, 117). Similar attitudes were common elsewhere, as friars destroyed everything from kivas in the American Southwest (Liebmann 2012, 36) to wooden idols in the American Southeast (Oré 1936, 115). These measures were a multi-layered exercise in destruction: symbolic measures of the Catholic Church’s mastery over competing religious beliefs and a forced erasure from memory of potent touchstones used to initiate ritual activities. In these contexts, the loss of religious traditions could be accompanied by a considerable angst and loss of agency that are not always well captured by notions of hybridity (Iverson 2019). 168

Missionization and religious conversion

The built environment of conversion was much more than simply building over the past, however; it was also a matter of presentation and participation. The visual components of church architecture and the surrounding religious performances were intended to provide powerful inducements to accept the Christian faith. Although certainly a key aspect of Franciscan and Dominican outreach, this seems to have been central to the Jesuits. On both sides of the Atlantic, the Jesuit method consisted principally of attracting people and moving them sufficiently to induce them to convert. This explains the character of the missions as full of wonders and spectacle. . . . Missionaries were great connoisseurs of the heart. (Deslandres 1999, 260) Stephan Lenik (2011) has found this pattern to hold in his comparative work on the built environment of Jesuit mission plantations in the Caribbean: the key buildings and complexes were built in prominent places, not necessarily as a form of social control but to attract the gaze and to express aesthetic prestige. The built environment of conversion practices at their core were intended to cast a wide net across the colonial landscape. Catholic missionaries also relied on much more personal material transactions to move individuals to the adoption of the faith (Figure 11.1). In her work in southeastern North America, Diana Loren (2017, 102–103) argues that Jesuit rings, produced and distributed in large numbers, are very uncertain signifiers of conversion, since they were likely a regular feature of trade networks. In contrast, objects such as crucifixes and religious medallions are much rarer in the archaeological record of French colonial settlements, and they may have been bestowed to individuals who had shown the appropriate adherence to the sacraments. Her work in the Lower Mississippi Valley shows that after the construction of a Jesuit mission at the main village of the Tunicas in the early 1700s, these kinds of scarcer religious items do appear at Tunica sites; however, most occur in domestic and midden contexts (Loren 2017, 107). She suggests that these were likely incorporated into Indigenous dress, but not likely highly exalted, given their resting place. From the point of view of the Jesuits, however, it might also be argued that this pattern also reflects a successful normalization of the materiality of conversion. Shannon Iverson’s (2019) investigations of Franciscan missions in Tula, Mexico underscore the pervasive flexibility of the melding of various traditions, large and small, within Catholic conversion practices. She found that the original chapel, built in 1530, appears to have been a three-walled structure that opened onto a patio, which she interprets as a compromise between Indigenous and Catholic forms of worship. It was not until two decades later that a more traditional and massive monastery was built at this location. Even after this ostentatious building had been completed, European ceramics were rare at this location (as well as at the earlier chapel), in contrast to their common appearance elsewhere throughout the site. Instead, traditional Aztec censers and other religious pottery forms apparently were used in Catholic ceremonies for a protracted period. The complicated archaeological record of conversion practices at these loci seems to embody the imbrication of faith traditions driven by Indigenous agency and the ambivalence of missionaries regarding the imposition of religious orthodoxy. Catholic missions in frontier regions of the Americas pursued a much more marginalized existence in comparison to the major centers and interests of the Spanish Crown. For many Native Americans, this led to a life somewhat less spiritually and politically fettered from European interference. Even in sixteenth-century central Mexico, a central target of early Spanish colonization and missionization, the conversion process was hampered by a “desperate shortage of manpower” (Clendinnen 2003, 47). For more distant places like Florida and Yucatan, even 169

Charles R. Cobb

Figure 11.1 Metal devotional objects including a cross and a medallion with the inscription “Mater Salvatoris” (Savior’s Mother). Artifacts are from Fort St. Joseph, an eighteenth-century French colonial outpost in southwestern Michigan where Jesuit missionaries served a surrounding Native American population. Source: John Lacko Photographer; courtesy of the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project.

when Spain was able to establish some kind of permanent foothold, the hinterlands continued to enjoy considerable autonomy. In both areas, the Indigenous chiefly structure managed to persist intact, even if the towns were linked to Spanish administrative oversight (Oland 2017; Worth 2002). Under these circumstances, missionaries placed a premium on converting important individuals who in turn could provide a convincing role model to the remainder of the community. Typically, this meant the cacique or polity chief. Lacking the resources to resculpt the landscape and centralize populations through monumental architecture and reduccíon, Franciscans also approached conversion as they did in other, similarly undernourished frontier regions of New Spain: a protracted process of learning that had elements of being voluntary yet involved both mental and corporeal coercion. In fact, embodied spirituality was promulgated by Christian missionaries of all faiths, where routine postures and gestures were a central element of physical retraining and an overt sign of conversion (Clendinnen 2003, 47; Deslandres 1999, 263–264; Loren 2017, 99–100; Norris 2003, 171). For Franciscans and other Catholics, these practices included the sign of the cross, genuflecting, and so on. But bodily discipline also extended into a wider range of practices, particularly as compelled by living bajo campana (under the bell), where 170

Missionization and religious conversion

the tolling of the bell signaled various phases of the workday, meals, and other activities in addition to worship times or observances of sacraments (Bushnell 1994, 96). In Florida, despite the requirements that missionized American Indians provide labor and agricultural surplus to support the capitol of St. Augustine and its administrative and military needs, mission towns exhibit considerable consistency with the communities that existed before the arrival of the Spaniards. For example, archaeological evidence shows that the council house (Figure 11.2), an important focus of community political and social deliberations, continued to occupy an important place along the plaza, often opposite the church (Shapiro and Hann 1990; Thomas 1990, 382–383). In fact, outside of the compounds consisting of the church, living quarters, and related outbuildings of the missionaries, obvious signs of religious transformation are relatively scarce in missionized towns in Florida. Perhaps the strongest evidence for conversion practices in Spanish Florida is found in the mortuary record (McEwan 2001). With the construction of churches at mission towns, baptized Native Americans at death typically were interred in the consecrated floor of the building. Burial forms shifted from the bundled and flexed practices typical of pre-Spanish times to the rows of supine bodies associated with Christian cemeteries. Presumably, burial of the dead was also a performance, serving as a powerful message to the living that one’s rightful place in the hereafter would be in the heavenly realm represented by the church. But this was an inclusive message, because Native Americans continued the centuries-old tradition of including objects with the dead. These included items of both European (e.g., religious medals, rosaries, pottery)

Figure 11.2 Reconstruction of council house at Mission San Luis de Talimali, Florida. Source: Photo by the author.

171

Charles R. Cobb

and Native American manufacture (e.g., pottery, projectile points, pendants of quartz and shell) that spanned categories of “personal possessions, Christian symbols . . . and emblems of Native authority” (McEwan 2001, 640). As seen in other quarters of the Spanish empire, Native Americans and Catholic clergy pursued transactional conversions that embraced elements of multiple traditions.

Protestant missionizing and conversion From the point of view of Native Americans, the historical trajectory of Christian proselytization experienced a significant bifurcation when the first Protestant missionaries began arriving on the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean. These efforts lagged well behind Catholic missionizing since the Reformation took over a century to gel into major denominations with the resources to undertake major overseas expansions. But once the process began in the late 1600s, it accelerated rapidly. Although not all of these religious orders stemmed from Great Britain, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they were most numerous in the British Atlantic World, as well as the United States after it gained formal independence in 1783. While initially more geographically limited than the Spanish mission system, Protestant proselytization was extremely diverse. This variety was due in part to the absence of an overarching administrative structure like the Vatican that could promote some measure of orthodoxy. It was also stirred by the ongoing birth of new denominations. Notably, the Great Awakening evangelical movement that swept across Great Britain and its colonies in the 1730s and 1740s led to the appearance of new orders and the splitting of others, while having little effect on some of the major groups like the Lutherans. The Puritans achieved some very early success with the development of the so-called Indian praying towns in seventeenth-century New England (Axtell 1982; Cipolla 2013; Kirsch 2019). Under assault from both conflict and epidemic disease, many groups converted to Christianity and adopted many of the accoutrements of English colonial life. At the same time, they established formal communities for those opting for this transition. Although sponsored by Puritan missionaries, these endeavors were largely prompted by Native Americans. Praying towns exemplify the ambivalence of the evangelization process under conditions of great duress; certain Native American groups in New England apparently recognized that ethnic salvation could be paired with spiritual salvation if colonial peoples recognized them as part of the same larger church. “Indigenous individuals and communities utilized praying towns to maintain a hardwon degree of sovereignty, autonomy, and safety in a tumultuous borderlands world” (Kirsch 2019, 167; see also Axtell 1982, 36–37). The Puritans insisted on the erasure of all signs of traditional Native American ritual life in these towns as a visible commitment to the civilized life of a Christian (Kirsch 2019, 169). Archaeological investigations at two of the praying towns indicate that Indigenous peoples were equally adept at refashioning Protestant ideals as they were Catholic ones (Mrozowski et al. 2015). At the site of Magunkaquog, excavations revealed an apparent Puritan-style meetinghouse. The artifact assemblage largely mirrored the adoption of colonial mores: a large number of thimbles, likely reflecting a communal setting for sewing, furniture hardware, European ceramics and glassware, and the like. Notably, though, quartz crystals were placed in the house foundation, “emblematic of indigenous spirituality when the building was constructed” (Mrozowski et al. 2015, 129). Investigations at the homestead of a prominent Native American at the other town of Hassenamesit showed how even European material culture use was shaped to Indigenous customs. The recovery of an inordinately large number of utensils (knives, forks, and spoons) suggests that, rather than representing simply a nuclear household, the house may have further 172

Missionization and religious conversion

served as a more traditional gathering place where tradition and memory could be renewed (Mrozowski et al. 2015, 133–134). The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel became the Church of England’s missionizing arm in 1701 (Dewey 1975). Although postdating the initial New England praying towns, the SPG represented the first major systematic evangelizing effort by Protestants in the Americas. Members of the SPG were also active during the eighteenth century in developing schools of religious instruction for enslaved Africans in the American South as well as New England (Comminey 1999)—reminders that missionization was not restricted to Native Americans and that Africans experienced a more tolerant environment in the earlier stages of English plantation slavery. Overall, though, the primary goal of the SPG was to foster Anglican worship among Europeans in English colonies, so successes among Indigenous peoples were equivocal compared to many other Catholic and Protestant missionizing efforts. As an alternative to a reliance on formal missions, the SPG turned to its extensive system of schools, the goal being to convince Native Americans to send their children to these institutions to learn to read, write, and develop skills deemed important to the civilizing process—all in addition to converting to Christianity. The Brafferton Indian School built on the campus of the College of William and Mary in 1723 is a particularly well-known example of one of these institutions (Figure 11.3). As has been pointed out, the largest surviving artifact of this experience

Figure 11.3 Brafferton School, campus of William and Mary. Source: Courtesy of commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Smash_the_Iron_Cage; License: creativecommons. org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en.

173

Charles R. Cobb

is the school building itself (Moretti-Langholtz and Woodard 2017). Built in a Georgian style, it exhibits all of the attributes of symmetry and order that James Deetz (1996) famously attributed to a New World view of modernity ushered in by eighteenth-century English colonialism. Excavations there have recovered specimens of glass wine bottles and stemware apparently knapped into cutting tools by the children, evidence that their ties to tradition had not been completely severed (Moretti-Langholtz and Woodard 2017). Although the origins of the Moravian missionary movement postdated that of the SPG, it was far more ambitious and successful among Indigenous peoples despite the lack of a sustained backing of a governmental authority (Engel 2009). The order coalesced in Germany as the Unity of the Brethren in 1722 following an emigration from Moravia in the midst of the eighteenth-century Christian Evangelical revival. Its roots in Protestantism are deep, however, beginning with pre-Lutherian rebellions against the Catholic Church in the late fifteenth century. After establishing a North American headquarters in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1741, their missionaries rapidly radiated outward on the continent. The Moravians are a prominent example of the difficulty of parsing out conversion as a transcendental religious experience from what are commonly perceived to be quotidian activities. Faith was to be expressed by a life of humility and hard work without any obvious trappings of regalia or ostentatious worship. This kind of holism is evident from ethnohistorical and archaeological investigations at the town of Fairfield in Ontario, Canada (Ferris 2009). Fairfield was a planned Christian community, one of several Moravian missions on the Ohio River that emigrated northward in 1792 in the continuing violence in the region in the wake of the American Revolution. The town clearly had a European and communal veneer, with standardized log cabins laid out in a very orderly grid. Yet excavations indicated that Indigenous tradition persisted in the form of clay-lined floors; large, central hearths in the middle of the houses; and side storage features. This kind of architectural synthesis is “suggestive of changed continuity: a convergence of earlier traditions, contemporary contingencies and future hopes that reinforced family and social organization in the community” (Ferris 2009, 88). Moravians chose other tactics among peoples more resistant to conversion. Among the Inuits in Labrador they were less successful in developing stable mission towns as they had been in Canada and the United States. As an alternative, missionaries attempted to draw the Inuit to their missions by economic means. Moravian trade stores thus became important for importing and selling goods that were particularly symbolic of “the Christian ideal” (Arendt 2011, 372), such as cloth and ornaments that encouraged European styles of dress. In such cases, it seems that missionaries believed that consumption and participation in the market economy was an indirect route to conversion. One of the final North American chapters in the collaboration of church and state in the missionization process occurred under the auspices of the Civilization Fund Act of 1819 in the United States. This legislation was passed with the intent of subventing religious orders to proselytize and civilize the remaining American Indian territories east of the Mississippi River, particularly in the South (Prucha 2000). Although these were not colonies in the usual sense of the term, and in fact they enjoyed considerable autonomy, the Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Seminoles, and other groups were under considerable pressure to assimilate in some fashion into the young American republic. The act made provisions for modest funds to various denominations as seed monies to establish missions on territories where they could gain permission, with the aim of providing formal educations to Native American children and training them in EuroAmerican practices of farming, ranching, and cottage industries (Spring 2000; Tinker 1993). To date, archaeological investigations have been carried out at only two of these missions. Limited work has been carried out at the Charity Hall Presbyterian mission to the Chickasaws 174

Missionization and religious conversion

in Mississippi (Skipton 2019). More extensive investigations have been conducted at the Valley Towns Baptist Mission to the Cherokees in western North Carolina (Riggs 2017). This was in service from 1821 to 1836. It was eventually shuttered, as were similar missions throughout the South, following the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and subsequent mass exodus of Native Americans westward. Much of the immediate pre-removal material landscape of Native Americans was dominated by Euro-Americans goods, and the Valley Towns mission follows this pattern. The one exception was a number of Indigenous Catawba pottery fragments recovered in the mission complex. Brett Riggs (2017, 21) suggests that these can be attributed to Catawba women who were hired to be the mission cooks—a concession by the missionaries to the persistence of Indigenous culinary traditions. Otherwise, most of the recovered ceramics were typical of American and British types, and other artifacts such as nails and window glass are the norm for any site of this period. Interestingly, investigations failed to recover any smoking-related artifacts, remnants of spirit containers, or elements of firearms (Riggs 2017, 22). These absences correspond with missionary prohibitions on inappropriate behaviors and suggest that silences in the archaeological record may be just as important as presences in terms of assessing practices of conversion. What is particularly fascinating about some of the Presbyterian Chickasaw missions in Mississippi is that they also established churches meant to attract the surrounding population for community religious services. This population included enslaved Blacks owned by wealthy Chickasaws. Many of the enslaved were traditionally Christian and could speak both English and Chickasaw languages. As part of their conversion efforts, missionaries sought to persuade the slaves to convince non-Christian Chickasaws to attend church services—yet another piece of evidence of the complex history of the mission landscape in the Americas (Pickett 2015).

Discussion It seems that the one unifying theme to all of the Catholic and Protestant philosophies of proselytization was the belief that a fundamental manifestation of conversion was the adoption of a lifestyle that approximated that of Europeans. Even when given latitude for local dress, cuisine, and other customs, Native Americans were constantly prompted to adhere to standards of comportment that would be viewed as “civilized.” Not surprisingly, what passed as this kind of benchmark varied by denomination, by the geographic and cultural background of the resident missionaries, and by the evolving philosophies of modernity. Nevertheless, the ideology that Christian faithfulness and European-ness were two sides of the same coin led to a pervasive effort throughout the missionizing world to resculpt the subjectivities of Native Americans and their sense of self. The conjoining of colonialism and conversion became a project to “colonize the consciousness” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 4). In this light, it is easy to heuristically conceive of conversion as some sort of blending between two cultural worlds that was underlain by ambitions of Christian dominance. And, writ large, there is some basis of truth to that. Yet there is a historical trajectory preceding the sixteenth century that also must be given heed. Aside from the numerous and evolving religions of the Americas, Christians in Late Medieval times were engaged in multiple dynamic conversion fronts, including the Reconquista in Iberia, ongoing crusades to the Islamic Near East, and additional crusades to “pagan” regions of eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Although the Catholic Church had a deeply vested interest in these efforts, their successes and failures inevitably were the outcomes of local negotiations of multiple faith traditions that shaped regional variants of Christianity even as missionaries attempted to erase local religions 175

Charles R. Cobb

(Graham 1998; Thomas et al. 2017). The arrival of missionaries in the Americas was not the beginning of a major program of proselytization; it was the continuation of this melding of multiple, continually evolving faith traditions in a new setting. The materiality of this process indicates that there was inherent tension raised by the insistence of missionaries on dictating the terms of this transformation, but it was always an ongoing process subject to negotiation and renegotiation.

Conclusion Some scholars of religion have emphasized conversion as disjuncture, that it represented a fundamental break with the past (e.g., Meyer 1998; Robbins 2003). For those of the disjunctive school, their examples are often drawn from modern Pentecostalism, where there are certainly many cases of abrupt self-renewal. One suspects that the majority of the Christian missionaries over the past five centuries would have had it that way, as well. It is evident, though, that even when coupled with the coercive nature of European imperial ambitions, the attempted colonization of the spiritual consciousness of Native Americans was a protracted project marked by their variable enthusiasm, ambivalence, equivocation, and resistance—oftentimes by the same individual. Many Native Americans zealously incorporated Christianity into their lives. The vibrancy of their conversions combined with a continued adherence to many of their established customs promoted a new dynamic of local transformations within Christianity itself that resonated around the Americas and was well beyond the power of established church hierarchies to rein in. These changes were mediated through fusions in landscape practices, the built environment, portable objects, artwork, and other realms of materiality. To paraphrase Peter Beardsell (2000), in their religious conversions, Native Americans returned the spiritual gaze to become full partners in the construction of Christianities.

References cited Anderson, Emma. 2010. “Blood, Fire, and ‘Baptism’: Three Perspectives on the Death of Jean de Brébeuf, Seventeenth-Century Jesuit ‘Martyr’.” In Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape, edited by Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nichols, 125–158. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Andrews, Edward E. 2013. Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Arendt, Beatrix Joy Yvonne Michelle. 2011. “Gods, Goods and Big Game: The Archaeology of LabradorInuit Choices in an Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Mission Context.” PhD Dissertation, University of Virginia. Arkush, Brooke S. 2011. “Native Responses to European Intrusion: Cultural Persistence and Agency among Mission Neophytes in Spanish Colonial Northern California.” Historical Archaeology 45 (4): 62–90. Austin-Broos, Diane. 2003. “The Anthropology of Conversion: An Introduction.” In The Anthropology of Religious Conversion, edited by Andrew Buckser and Stephan D. Glazier, 1–12. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Aviles, Brian, and Robert L. Hoover. 1997. “Two Californias, Three Religious Orders and Fifty Missions: A Comparison of the Missionary Systems of Baja and Alta California.” Pacific Coast Archaeological Society Quarterly 33 (3): 1–28. Axtell, James. 1982. “Some Thoughts on the Ethnohistory of Missions.” Ethnohistory 29 (1): 35–41. Beardsell, Peter. 2000. Europe and Latin America: Returning the Gaze. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Besom, Thomas. 2013. Inka Human Sacrifice and Mountain Worship: Strategies for Empire Unification. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

176

Missionization and religious conversion Bossy, Denise. 2014. “Spiritual Diplomacy, the Yamasees, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel: Reinterpreting Prince George’s Eighteenth-Century Voyage to England.” Early American Studies 12 (2): 366–401. Brandāo, José Antonío, and Michael S. Nassaney. 2021. “The Jesuits at Fort St. Joseph in Southwest Michigan.” The Journal of Jesuit Studies (in press). Bushnell, Amy Turner. 1990. “The Sacramental Imperative: Catholic Ritual and Indian Sedentism in the Provinces of Florida.” In Columbian Consequences, Volume 2: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East, edited by David Hurst Thomas, 475–490. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Bushnell, Amy Turner. 1994. Situada and Sabana: Spain’s Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida, American Museum of Natural History Anthropological Papers No. 74. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Cipolla, Craig N. 2013. Becoming Brothertown: Native American Ethnogenesis and Endurance in the Modern World. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Clendinnen, Inga. 2003. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard, 1517–1570, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Comminey, Shawn. 1999. “The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and Black Education in South Carolina, 1702–1764.” The Journal of Negro History 84 (4): 360–369. Deetz, James F. 1996. In Small Things Forgotten: Archaeology and Early American Life, Revised and Expanded ed. New York: Anchor Books. Deslandres, Dominique. 1999. “Exemplo aeque ut verbo: The French Jesuits’ Missionary World.” In The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, edited by John W. O’Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy, 258–273. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Dewey, Margaret. 1975. The Messengers: A Concise History of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. London: Mowbrays. Engel, Katherine Carté. 2009. Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ferris, Neal. 2009. The Archaeology of Native-Lived Colonialism: Challenging History in the Great Lakes. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Frink, Liam. 2010. “Identity Collectives and Religious Colonialism in Coastal Western Alaska.” In Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400–1900, edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Mark D. Mitchell, 239–257. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Gallay, Alan. 2002. The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717. New Haven: Yale University Press. Given, Michael. 2004. The Archaeology of the Colonized. London: Routledge. Graham, Elizabeth. 1998. “Mission Archaeology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 25–62. Graham, Elizabeth, Scott E. Simmons, and Christine D. White. 2013. “The Spanish Conquest and the Maya Collapse: How ‘Religious’ is Change?” World Archaeology 45 (1): 161–185. Griffiths, Nicholas, and Fernando Cervantes, eds. 1999. Spiritual Encounters: Interactions Between Christianity and Native Religions in Colonial America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Iverson, Shannon Dugan. 2019. “Resignification as Fourth Narrative: Power and the Colonial Religious Experience in Tula, Hidalgo.” In Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas: Archaeological Case Studies, edited by Corinne L. Hofman and Floris W. M. Keehnen, 263–283. Leiden: Brill. Johnson, Matthew. 1996. An Archaeology of Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Kirsch, Taylor. 2019. “Indigenous Land Ownership in the Praying Towns of the Southern New England Borderlands.” In Historians Without Borders: New Studies in Multidisciplinary History, edited by Lawrence Abrams and Kaleb Knoblauch, 167–184. London: Routledge. Klor de Alva, José Jorge. 1982. “Spiritual Conflict and Accommodation in New Spain: Toward a Typology of Aztec Responses to Christianity.” In The Inca and Aztec States, 1400–1800: Anthropology and History, edited by George A. Collier, Renato I. Rosaldo, and John D. Wirth, 345–366. New York: Academic Press. Lenik, Stephan T. 2011. “Mission Plantations, Space, and Social Control: Jesuits as Planters in French Caribbean Colonies and Frontiers.” Journal of Social Archaeology 21 (1): 51–71.

177

Charles R. Cobb Lenik, Stephan T., and Brenda Hornsby Heindl. 2014. “Missionaries, Artisans, and Transatlantic Exchange: Production and Distribution of Moravian Pottery in Pennsylvania and the Danish (U.S.) Virgin Islands.” Historical Archaeology 48 (4): 95–117. Liebmann, Matthew. 2012. Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in 17th Century New Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Liebmann, Matthew. 2013. “Parsing Hybridity: Archaeologies of Amalgamation in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico.” In The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture, edited by Jeb J. Card, 25–49. Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University. Lightfoot, Kent G. 2005. Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Loren, Diana DiPaolo. 2017. “Christian Symbols in Native Lives: Medals and Crucifixes in the Tunica Region of French Colonial Louisiana.” In Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology, edited by Craig N. Cipolla, 94–109. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Martin, Joel W. 2010. “Introduction.” In Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape, edited by Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nichols, 1–20. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Martin, Joel W., and Mark A. Nichols, eds. 2010. Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. McEwan, Bonnie G. 2001. “The Spiritual Conquest of La Florida.” American Anthropologist 103 (3): 633–644. Meyer, Birgit. 1998. “‘Make a Complete Break with the Past’: Memory and Postcolonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostal Discourse.” In Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power, edited by Richard P. Werbner, 182–208. London: Zed Books. Moretti-Langholtz, Danielle, and Buck Woodard. 2017. “An Evidence-Based Reinterpretation of the Brafferton Indian School.” 83rd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Washington DC. Mrozowski, Stephan A., D. Rae Gould, and Heather Law Pezzarossi. 2015. “Rethinking Colonialism: Indigenous Innovation and Colonial Inevitability.” In Rethinking Colonialism: Comparative Archaeological Approaches, edited by Craig N. Cipolla and Katherine Howlett Hayes, 121–142. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Norris, Rebecca Sachs. 2003. “Converting to What? Embodied Culture and the Adoption of New Beliefs.” In The Anthropology of Religious Conversion, edited by Andrew Buckser and Stephan D. Glazier, 171–181. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Oland, Maxine. 2017. “The Olive Jar in the Shrine: Situating Spanish Objects within a 15th- to 17thCentury Maya Worldview.” In Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology, edited by Craig N. Cipolla, 127–142. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. O’Malley, John W., Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, T. Frank Kennedy, eds. 1999. The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Oré, Luís Geronimo de. 1936. The Martyrs of Florida (1513–1616), Franciscan Studies No. 18. New York: Joseph F. Wagner. Panich, Lee M., Rebecca Allen, and Andrew Galvan. 2018. “The Archaeology of Native American Persistence at Mission San José.” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 38 (1): 11–29. Panich, Lee M., and Tsim D. Schneider, eds. 2014. Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Pickett, Otis W. 2015. “T. C. Stuart and the Monroe Mission among the Chickasaws in Mississippi, 1819–1834.” Native South 8: 63–88. Prucha, Francis Paul. 2000. Documents of United States Indian Policy. Washington, DC: Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication. Riggs, Brett H. 2017. “Archaeological Investigations at the Valley Towns Baptist Mission (31CE661).” North Carolina Archaeology 66: 1–26. Robbins, Joel. 2003. “What is a Christian? Notes Toward an Anthropology of Christianity.” Religion 33: 191–199. Selwyn, Jennifer D. 2004. A Paradise Inhabited by Devils: The Jesuits’ Civilizing Mission in Early Modern Naples. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Shapiro, Gary N., and John H. Hann. 1990. “The Documentary Image of the Council Houses of Spanish Florida Tested by Excavations at the Mission of San Luis de Talimali.” In Columbian Consequences, Volume 2, Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East, edited by David Hurst Thomas, 511–526. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

178

Missionization and religious conversion Skipton, Tara. 2019. “Charity Hall: A 19th Century Presbyterian Mission to the Chickasaws in Northeast Mississippi.” Senior Thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, Gainesville. Sleeper-Smith, Susan. 2001. Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Spring, Joel. 2000. Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality: A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States. New York: Routledge. Tavárez, David. 2011. The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Thomas, David Hurst. 1990. “The Spanish Missions of La Florida: An Overview.” In Columbian Consequences, Volume 2: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East, edited by David Hurst Thomas, 357–397. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Thomas, Gabor, Aleks Pluskowski, Roberta Gilchrist, Guillermo García-Contreras Ruiz, Anders Andrén, Andrea Augenti, Grenville Astill, Jörn Staecker, and Heiki Valk. 2017. “Religious Transformations in the Middle Ages: Towards a New Archaeological Agenda.” Medieval Archaeology 61 (2): 300–329. Tinker, George E. 1993. Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2002. “North Atlantic Universals: Analytical Fictions, 1492–1945.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (4): 839–858. VanValkenburgh, Parker. 2017. “Unsettling Time: Persistence and Memory in Spanish Colonial Peru.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 24 (1): 117–148. Walter, Tamra L., and Thomas R. Hester. 2014. “‘Countless Heathens’: Native Americans and the Spanish Missions of Southern Texas and Northeastern Coahuila.” In Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspective from Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider, 93–113. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Weaver, Brendan J. M. 2015. “‘Fruit of the Vine, Work of Human Hands’: An Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Slavery on the Jesuit Wine Haciendas of Nasca, Peru.” PhD Dissertation, Vanderbilt University. Wernke, Steven A. 2007a. “Analogy or Erasure? Dialectics of Religious Transformation in the Early Doctrinas of the Colca Valley, Peru.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 11 (2): 152–182. Wernke, Steven A. 2007b. “Negotiating Community and Landscape in the Peruvian Andes: A Transconquest View.” American Anthropologist 109 (1): 130–152. Wernke, Steven A. 2013. Negotiated Settlements: Andean Communities and Landscapes under Inka and Spanish Colonialism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Winiarski, Douglas L. 2010. “Popular Religion in New England’s Old Colony.” In Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape, edited by Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nichols, 93–120. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Worth, John E. 2002. “Spanish Missions and the Persistence of Chiefly Power.” In The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540–1760, edited by Robbie Ethridge and Charles Hudson, 39–64. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

179

12 LABOR AND NATURAL RESOURCE EXTRACTION IN SPANISH COLONIAL CONTEXTS Mary Van Buren

The search for precious metals was the primary motivation for the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and although diversified economies rapidly developed in the wake of the initial plunder economy, resource extraction remained a key activity during the ensuing centuries. Control over labor, mostly Indigenous but augmented in some places and times by free people of mixed ancestry as well as enslaved Africans, propelled the development of institutions and practices that framed colonial life until independence and sometimes persisted, in altered form, into the twentieth century. Although in most cases the commodities produced have changed since colonial times, resource extraction has continued to be a mainstay of most Latin American economies. Analyzing the nexus of resource extraction and labor is crucial for understanding the effects of Spanish rule on Indigenous populations. Although Native people had varied roles in colonial society, the overwhelming majority were connected to the global political economy through their participation, often coerced, in extractive industries. These experiences shaped Indigenous life at many different scales, from daily practice to the emergence of new group identities. A focus on resource extraction and labor thus provides an analytical lens that captures a range of processes that unfolded under colonial regimes and also acknowledges the brute exploitation on which they were built. This chapter examines labor and resource extraction in Spain’s American colonies, a topic that has only recently started to receive the attention it merits from archaeologists. It begins by defining labor and resource extraction and then briefly and selectively reviews the investigation of this subject by archaeologists to date. The final section of the chapter provides a case study centered on Indigenous metal production in Porco, a mining center in south-central Bolivia. The application of Bertell Ollman’s method of “doing history backwards” (Ollman 2003; Wurst and Mrozowski 2014) to the long-term trajectory of small-scale mining in Porco provides an understanding of “traditional” silver production that acknowledges both continuities in Indigenous practice as well as changes due to transformations of the political economy.

Labor and resource extraction Archaeological interest in labor emerged in the 1990s and became more prevalent in the following decades, particularly among historical archaeologists. In most cases the concept of labor remains untheorized and is often elided with work, but a few more explicit theoretical trends 180

Labor and natural resource extraction

are apparent. Silliman, for example, (2006, 147) has argued for the central place of labor in historical archaeology, particularly the hierarchical forms associated with European expansion that were at “the crux of colonialism, mercantilism, capitalism, and class.” His work has examined labor from the perspective of practice theory, focusing on “the ways that labor played out in the everyday lives of those performing it” (Silliman 2004, 11). Voss (2008) employs a similar perspective, although she emphasizes the advantages of such an approach for examining phenomena at multiple scales. Both are interested in the intersection of labor with gender, ethnicity, and other identities. A second trend can be detected among historical archaeologists whose research focuses on industrial contexts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These scholars tend to adopt Marxist approaches that explicitly consider labor relations in the context of fully capitalist societies and often seek to make their research relevant to modern workers; they usually focus on class rather than ethnicity or gender (e.g. Saitta 2007; Shackel 2004; Wurst 1999). For Marx, the social relations established by different configurations of labor are central to the formation of historically specific societies and thus constitute a crucial starting point for their analysis. From this perspective, the relations of production and the differential distribution of wealth and power that they produce generate different classes and conflict between them that can cause social change. Labor provides a vantage point from which these relations and the historical processes that ensue can be viewed at different scales. This perspective allows researchers to analyze the relationship between local and more global processes that are mediated by community and regional institutions. Such a vantage point also facilitates the exploration of the highly variable ways in which societies have been incorporated within capitalism (Voss 2008). Labor entails the application of knowledge, skill, and physical effort with the goal of producing something for human use. This takes place within specific social configurations defined by who controls the means and organization of production as well as its products. Traditionally, only humans have been included in the concept of labor, but recently some archaeologists have argued that animals also engage in labor as sentient beings whose bodies are commandeered for work in the same economic regimes as humans (e.g., Corcoran-Tadd and Pezzarossi 2018). This spare definition of labor, however, belies the rich potential of the concept as a focus of historical study. The perspective adopted here combines these approaches. From an anthropological point of view, a focus on labor facilitates the examination of key aspects of social identity and everyday practice. Race, ethnicity, class, gender, and age were commonly, if not universally, used to organize labor in colonial societies (Voss 2008). Externally imposed labor categories were shaped by other forms of identity, and themselves generated new identities. While not totalizing in their effect, labor categories had a powerful influence on many everyday practices and bodily experiences. Resource extraction is generally defined as the removal of raw materials from nature for sale as commodities. The most restricted understanding of this term limits the definition of these resources to minerals, salt, gas, and other raw materials mined from the earth that have not been made into finished goods. A broader definition would include additional commodities such as timber, fish, and even agricultural products such as wheat, cattle, and coffee. Most interest in resource extraction in Latin America has focused on exports because these defined the economic relationship between Spain and its colonies, which was predicated on the removal of wealth by the former within a framework of state policy that inhibited the development of local industries in the latter (Wallerstein 2011; Wolf 1982). For the purpose of this chapter, resource extraction is broadly defined and includes agricultural products that undergo some processing prior to their initial sale. 181

Mary Van Buren

Labor and resource extraction in Spanish America: a review of recent research Following the initial decade or so of exploration and plunder, control over labor rapidly became the goal of Spanish colonists, who deployed it to produce mineral wealth as well as other commodities, such as food, clothing, and hides. A multiplicity of labor arrangements emerged that were combinations of forced and wage work as well as practices such as debt peonage that shared aspects of both. In places where hierarchically organized societies were encountered by the Spaniards, Indigenous forms of labor organization were co-opted and redeployed for Spanish purposes. While relatively few archaeological studies of labor and resource extraction in Spanish colonial contexts have been conducted, the corpus of historical research on this subject is enormous and has clearly revealed the diversity of labor practices. Pezzarossi (2015a, 2015b) suggests using the concept of antimarkets to capture this complexity and avoid unproductive arguments about whether colonial economies can be considered capitalist. Braudel (1985, 33, 56), who coined the term antimarkets (contre-marché), distinguished between markets, or free competition, and capitalism, which he believed is structured by the logic of monopoly and power. Leaving aside the issue of whether these are two separate phenomena, in practice they are almost always wedded. The notion is thus useful for highlighting the diversity of relations of production in colonial contexts, a diversity generated in part by local precedents but also by the fact that political power played a key role in these economic configurations, generating complex social formations involving various types of coercion as well as “free” market practices. Focusing on the interrelationship of political and market forces also suggests that the former did not disappear with independence from Spain but, while taking different forms, continued to be part of supposedly liberal economies even into the twentieth century. The earliest institutionalized form of labor appropriation in the Americas was the encomienda, a grant of Indigenous labor provided by a Crown representative to a conquistador as a reward for meritorious service. The encomendero, or recipient, could require tribute payments as well as labor from specific Indigenous groups. This institution had profound long-term effects on Native groups, as they were forced to sell their labor or produce goods for sale in order to pay tribute that was often demanded in gold or silver. Pezzarossi (2015a) argues that the Maya who resided at Aguacatepeque, in what is now Guatemala, drew on their pre-Hispanic experience with cacao production for tribute and exchange to become sugarcane producers after the conquest. The ultimate effect was their dependence on the market for everyday goods as the time and land they devoted to cash-cropping increased. While the New Laws promulgated in 1542 resulted in the attenuation of the encomienda system, Native people continued to be subject to forced labor, and most were also required to pay tribute, a head tax, to a state representative rather than to a private encomendero. Gasco (1989) found that in the town of Ocelocalco in the Pacific province of Soconusco, Mexico, the production of cacao for tribute and exchange—which was also based on pre-Hispanic precedent— resulted in a period of affluence in the 1600s that ended with the abandonment of the settlement in the mid-eighteenth century, perhaps because of the decline in cacao prices. This trajectory is typical of communities that undergo boom and bust cycles determined by global commodity prices. Kepecs (2005, 2018) has examined these cycles in Chikinchel, on the north coast of Yucatan, from the perspective of world system theory. Salt was produced in Chikinchel since at least Classic times, and during the early colonial period Spaniards claimed five encomiendas in the area and established a small port from which salt could be exported and wine, olive oil, and other goods imported. Little information about the deployment of Indigenous labor is available, but it appears that the Spaniards relied on Native allies to provide encomienda workers. Kin groups 182

Labor and natural resource extraction

who were opposed to the Spaniards, however, traded the salt south to a refuge zone that was not under European control, in exchange for cacao. Piracy, Native revolts, and the flight of Indigenous groups to the unincorporated south ended salt production by the late seventeenth century. Unlike salt, wine and brandy were introduced by the Spaniards and were consumed primarily by them. Rice and her students identified 130 bodegas, or wineries, in the Moquegua Valley of southern Peru. Native people as well as enslaved Africans worked in the bodegas, but since the work was seasonal, slaves formed a small component of the agricultural labor force (Rice 2011, 160–161, 167). Smith (Smith 1997a, 1997b) argues that the mixing of Spanish and Indigenous productive traditions is reflected in the technology of the wineries, from the organization of labor to the use of llamas to move wine and brandy from the Moquegua Valley to highland centers. The conscription of Native people to transport commodities produced under Spanish auspices was a common practice throughout the colonies. During the early colonial period, the movement of silver ore from the mines to the mills and then from the mining centers to the coast was accomplished almost entirely by Indigenous llama caravans (Beltrán 2016; Medinacelli González 2013). Corcoran-Tadd (2018; Corcoran-Tadd and Pezzarossi 2018) has examined the physical toll this would have taken on animals as well as humans in the highlands of Tacna in southern Peru. In regions where pack animals were unavailable, humans were conscripted to do the job. In what is today the southeastern United States, Spaniards deployed a variety of strategies for acquiring maize and wheat from Native groups, including requiring chiefs of mission villages to provide laborers (Milanich 1999, 149) and co-opting communal lands for private profit (Scarry 1993). Women processed the grain, and men were forced to transport it to St. Augustine, a task that was so onerous that its effects on the human body are clearly reflected in a dramatic increase in vertebral osteoarthritis, among other skeletal changes (Larsen et al. 2001). Slavery is another form of labor that has recently received increased attention by archaeologists working in the Spanish colonies. Enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas by conquistadors, and almost as soon as they arrived they began to escape, form Maroon communities, and to rebel against Spanish owners (Landers 1990). Slaves were assigned a variety of tasks but worked on sugar estates in the Caribbean by the early sixteenth century. Somewhat later they became the primary laborers on many haciendas and plantations that produced commodities such as wine, coffee, and sugar. Weaver (2018) investigated two such viticultural estates that were run by the Jesuits in Nasca, Peru, between 1619 and 1767. Drawing on Peircean semiotics, he examines the dialects of power as they were manifested in the polyvalent meanings attached to material culture produced within the aesthetic of these haciendas. Singleton (2015), in her work on a nineteenth-century Cuban coffee plantation, Cafetal Biajacas, also examines the dialectical relationship between owners and slaves, in this case focusing on an enormous wall that enclosed the slave quarters. The wall was erected to contain enslaved people and to hide them from view, but was also used to conceal machetes, which were potential weapons, and was subverted when a large contingent of runaways, or cimarrones, was given shelter there in the winter of 1837. Cuban archaeologists have produced the most sustained body of research on slavery, with a particular focus on architectural reconstruction, slave housing (Angelbello Izquierdo 2003; Bernard Bosch et al. 1985; Roura Álvarez and Angelbello Izquierdo 2012; T. Singleton and de Souza 2009), and especially marronage, or self-emancipation (La Rosa Corzo 2003). The Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century, followed by independence for most Spanish American colonies in the early nineteenth century, resulted in greater market integration, the acceleration of commodity production for export, and the spread of haciendas, which depended on debt peonage and limited amounts of more specialized wage labor (Alexander 2012). Two regions in which archaeologists have paid particular attention to these processes are California 183

Mary Van Buren

and the Yucatan. The production of cattle for hides, tallow, and meat was common on the California missions but became a mainstay of the economy during Mexican and then early US control of the region. Silliman (2004, 38) has documented the various ways by which Native Americans were recruited to work at Rancho Petaluma, California—including capture, debt, choice, and association with a leader allied to a local rancher—as well as the numerous types of labor they performed. Based on an artifact assemblage associated with Native Californian residences, he argues that while women often deployed material culture related to their work on the rancho to make identity claims, men appear to have negotiated their identity in terms of hunting, trading, and the continuation of flintknapping rather than by signaling their work as cowboys. Interestingly, Panich (2017) found the reverse in burial contexts associated with a mission and a colonial period Native community; he argues that among these groups the presence of horse trappings reflects the adoption of this new technology to perform work, enhance individual status, and—outside the realm of mission and rancho—maintain autonomy. Archaeologists working in the Yucatan have investigated nineteenth-century haciendas that produced a number of different commodities, including cattle, maize, sugar, and henequen. Labor was recruited primarily through debt peonage, a practice that was facilitated by encroachment on lands previously used by Indigenous communities for their own subsistence requirements. Alexander (2004) has documented the expansion of the Spanish and creole population in the community of Yaxcabá, as well as the effects of the Caste War, a long-lived Maya uprising, on the agricultural structure of the parish in the second half of the nineteenth century. At Hacienda Tabi, a sugar producing enterprise to the southwest, Sweitz (2012) employed Braudel’s concept of total history to examine how Maya households were affected by their incorporation into the evolving capitalist economy at different time scales. He found that this process altered the character of households, with decreasing variability among them but also clear differences in occupational status. The latter finding was also documented by Meyers (2005), who found unequal access to resources among debt peons at Tabi, a tactic for dividing the labor force to forestall insurrection, although a similar pattern has been interpreted by Newman (2014a, 2014b) at Hacienda Acocotla, Puebla, as an attempt at individuation and the destruction of communal values by the owner. Hernández Álvarez’s (2014) comparison of worker housing at San Pedro, a henequen hacienda, with Tabi, and Cetelac, investigated by Alexander (2004), also demonstrates variation in the nature of house lots, including the number and types of auxiliary structures used for agricultural activities. He understands this variability in terms of the diversification of subsistence activities in order to cope with the sub-living wages paid by hacienda owners. In addition to worker housing, archaeologists have begun to study the henequen industry from a broader geographical perspective. Henequen, a type of agave used to produce fiber for cordage, became the dominant crop in the Yucatan during the Porfirio Díaz regime, when policies favoring capitalism were aggressively applied, and foreign demand played a greater role in stimulating production. Meyers’s (2017) comparison of three haciendas in the core and outskirts of the henequen zone shows the standardization of worker villages and housing in the former, where attempts to impose efficiency and order on the residents was greatest. Archaeological survey in the northwest of the Yucatan has revealed the industrial infrastructure that linked interior haciendas to the coast and the role ports played in the export of salt, henequen, logwood, and other commodities (Andrews and Robles Castellanos 2009; Andrews et al. 2006; Andrews et al. 2012). Ancillary industries developed in conjunction with the export economy, including the production of rum, which was consumed in large quantities on haciendas (Mathews and Gust 2017). Archaeological research on extraction has thus produced fine-grained analyses of cases characterized by distinct labor practices, configurations that shifted over time from dependence on 184

Labor and natural resource extraction

coercion to a greater reliance on “free” labor. No matter how labor was organized, though, people found ways to resist, flee, or ameliorate exploitative and oppressive working conditions.

The long-term history of small-scale metal production in Porco, Bolivia Archaeologists interested in mining and metallurgy in the Spanish colonies have conducted research primarily in the southern Andes and have tended to focus on technology (Cruz and Absi 2008; Van Buren and Cohen 2010; Salazar and Vilches 2014; Becerra et al. 2014; Angiorama et al. 2018). The case study presented here follows this trend but examines small-scale silver production in terms of routine practices by households and the changing political economy in which such activities occurred. Porco is a mining center located in south-central Bolivia, 35 km to the southwest of the better-known mines of Potosí. The locale was chosen because historical sources indicate that Porco had been an important mine during Inka times, and it was also the first mine worked by the Pizarro brothers after the Spanish conquest. During the last two centuries, international companies have exploited industrial minerals there, first tin, then zinc, and now a complex composed of lead, tin, zinc, and silver. An important component of the archaeological record in Porco are the remains of small wind furnaces, called huayrachinas in Quechua, that were used to smelt silver and lead ores under the Inka and played a key role in production in early colonial times. They were used in conjunction with refining furnaces about which we know very little, since they were operated in the confines of Indigenous homes. Huayrachinas were described by colonial writers but fade from historical view after the seventeenth century (Figure 12.1). They reemerge briefly in a latenineteenth-century description of their use near Porco by a US engineer (Peele 1893). Since that time, huayrachinas had not been observed in use until 2001, when members of Proyecto Arqueológico Porco-Potosí, directed by the author, were introduced to an ex-miner, Carlos

Figure 12.1 “Estos yndios están guayrando.” Sixteenth-century watercolor from Atlas of the Sea Chart. Source: Courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America, New York.

185

Mary Van Buren

Cuiza, while he was repairing two huayrachinas on a ridge near his home. Over the following two years, he allowed us to record the entire metallurgical process. This information greatly aided the interpretation of the archaeological record but also led to a broader question: why had this small-scale Indigenous technology persisted into the twenty-first century in the shadow of the most sophisticated zinc mine in Bolivia? Assessing the nature and degree of change in Indigenous societies as a result of the European conquest is an intellectual challenge as well as a project potentially fraught with political consequences for the Native groups under study. The politics surrounding the issue vary depending on the social context but in the United States usually center on the perceived authenticity of Native groups who claim rights to resources, especially land. For example, assessments of Indigenous communities by anthropologists such as Alfred Kroeber inadvertently resulted in the loss of some Native Californians’ access to land, since they were not regarded as sufficiently culturally intact to warrant reservations (Lightfoot 2005; Panich 2013). “Terminal narratives” that relate the complete cultural and/or biological extinction of Indigenous populations are common (Wilcox 2009) and have excluded living groups from the political process as well as access to resources. In Latin America, however, terminal narratives appear to be rare, particularly in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Native populations in these regions are particularly dense, and due to centuries of intermixing, the boundary between Indigenous and non-Native is often blurred. In countries such as Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia, Indigenous politics enter into mainstream discourse in different ways than in the United States. Pre-Hispanic Native accomplishments are often employed as symbols of the nation state, while contemporary Native concerns are simultaneously discounted. In some times and places, however, Indigenous practices have been held up as a possible way forward, a strategy for development that follows a unique Indigenous path rather than succumbing to notions of progress and modernity imposed by the west. This indigenista political current, frequently espoused by non-Native intellectuals, has often been informed by an essentialist perspective that implicitly treats aspects of Indigenous culture as static. More akin to the cultural erasure seen in the United States has been the redefinition by the state and the public of Indians (indios) as peasants (campesinos). Cultural identity thus becomes subsumed by an economic category that is disparaged by urban dwellers and political elites as backwards and unchanging. In this context, the persistence of Native culture is negatively viewed as an expression of conservatism and an impediment to change. In general, then, countering the essentialist understanding of Indigenous culture that denies historicity is more of a challenge in Latin America than refuting terminal narratives. Andeanists have tended to regard cultural persistence as either the passive survival of ancient practices or as the assertion of cultural identity in the face of colonial and modern pressures to assimilate. How, then, could the coexistence of these Indigenous technologies with highly capitalized mining be explained in a way that recognizes the historicity of Native societies that have been incorporated into capitalist regimes as well as continuities with the deep past? One method for doing this is Bertell Ollman’s dialectical approach, which entails “doing history backwards,” or tracing an aspect of modern capitalism back in time in order to identify the preconditions that generated it (Wurst and Mrozowski 2014; Ollman 2003, 2014; Wurst and Mrozowski 2014). These preconditions—as well as their outcomes—are understood in terms of internal relations or mutually constituting practices. So, for example, in some historical contexts small-scale production can be viewed as economically intertwined with highly capitalized enterprises, a system in which each creates the conditions of the other’s existence. This perspective forces the investigator to examine the phenomenon under study not as a thing that endures over time unchanged but in terms of its dynamic relations with other aspects of society along a specific historical 186

Labor and natural resource extraction

trajectory; such an approach avoids leapfrogging from the present to some distant “traditional” past without examination of the intervening historical processes. In the case study presented here, small-scale production in Porco is examined between the turn of the twenty-first century, when the use of Native technology to produce silver came to an end, and the late fifteenth century, when the mines were first exploited by the Inkas. In the southern Andes, the Quechua terms kajcha and kajcheo have been used to refer to independent miners and mining, respectively, since at least the seventeenth century (Tándeter 1993, 6). These miners acted legally or illicitly to directly appropriate ores, often from mines that were owned by larger enterprises.

Silver production in republican-era Porco: the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries Carlos Cuiza, a retired miner who lived in a rural homestead 7 km from Porco, was apparently the last individual in the Porco area to produce silver using Indigenous technology, which appears to have become extinct with his disappearance in 2004 (Figure 12.2). Cuiza began the process by making charcoal from a half-dozen small queñua trees cut from a local stand. He then crushed the lead ore using an iron hammer to separate the gangue from the mineral and charged a huayrachina with layers of ore, charcoal, and pieces of hearth lining composed of lead oxide. Once ignited, the furnace was continuously supplied with more ore and fuel; after an hour or

Figure 12.2 Carlos Cuiza repairing a huayrachina. Source: Photo by the author.

187

Mary Van Buren

two, liquid lead metal would drip out of a hole in the side of the furnace into a small iron dish. This pure lead was then used in a second furnace, called a cupellation hearth or, in Quechua, a tocochimbo, to refine silver ore. The hearth, which in this case is a type of small reverberatory furnace, was located in an adobe hut in a quebrada below Cuiza’s house. It consisted of a circular hearth measuring 40 cm in diameter and was covered by a dome made of stone and clay. On one side was a chimney built against the hut wall, and on the other a fire box that emptied into the quebrada below through a hole in the opposite wall. Cuiza first prepared the hearth by lining it with ash and placing the lead on top. He heated the furnace with llama dung, and once the lead had formed a molten bath, he added large spoonsful of ground silver ore, continuing this process all night until all of the lead had been absorbed by the hearth lining and a button of pure silver remained. The details of silver production by Cuiza can be found in other publications (Van Buren 2003; Van Buren and Mills 2005; Cohen et al. 2008; Van Buren and Cohen 2010); here, I will focus on the historical context of this technology and how it changed over time, with a particular focus on labor. When we began observing small-scale silver production in 2001, the Porco mines were being leased to COMSUR, a multinational company whose largest shareholder was Gonzalez Sánchez de Lozada, then president of Bolivia. COMSUR controlled the entire mining concession but leased less productive deposits to local mining cooperatives, who exploited them with simple technology. Cooperatives are an officially recognized form of small-scale, independent production that in earlier years had been termed kajcheo. Despite the name, cooperatives are organized hierarchically; socios, who are members of the cooperative, control individual mine faces and employ peones, day laborers, to work them. Socios bear the risks—and sometimes the rewards—of exploiting deposits of uncertain yield; most of the time they can just support their families, but occasionally, when mineral prices are high and good ore is encountered, their profits can be impressive. Peones, on the other hand, labor for poor wages under miserable conditions no matter how much ore is recovered. Miners employed by COMSUR (and subsequent companies) enjoyed better working conditions and received benefits; they earned more than peones, and often even socios, but their salaries did not rise during boom times. All three types of miners (socios often work alongside their peones) occasionally encounter pockets of high-grade silver ore in the deposits they are working for industrial minerals. These are illegally appropriated, hidden in clothing and lunch containers, and smuggled out of the mine at the end of the shift. This practice is illegal because the silver technically belongs to the mine owners— not the socios, but the company that leases the mine and requires the ore to be sold back to it. This is the source of the silver that Cuiza refined; miners brought him the high-grade silver that they accumulated, and he smelted it for them, retaining half as his pay. Cuiza, otherwise a subsistence farmer who, together with his wife, raised llamas, grew potatoes and fava beans, and occasionally worked for wages, sold the silver to jewelers and used the cash to pay for household necessities. In this recent case, traditional smelting technology was used to produce a small cash income as part of a diversified subsistence strategy. While the practice appears to have been restricted to households of Indigenous descent and, even more specifically, a specialized activity in which mainly the Cuiza branch of a larger kin group called an ayllu participated, its use is only indirectly related to ethnic identity and can be better understood as a survival tactic employed by marginalized households with one foot in the wage economy and another in the peasantry. If anything, the identity related to this activity is that of miner; almost all miners engage in highgrading and acknowledge that fact in a joking way amongst themselves. They feel they have a right to ore for two reasons: first, their work in the mines entails incredible physical sacrifices that are not adequately compensated by their wages, and second, they—not the large-scale mine

188

Labor and natural resource extraction

owners—are the ones who regularly make offerings to the deities associated with the mines for increasing productivity as well as safety. Cuiza, on the other hand, was regarded by residents of Porco as somewhat of an outsider, an ex-miner who secretly enriched himself, working at night and refusing to share his knowledge with others. The conditions under which small-scale silver production occurred in the twentieth and late-nineteenth century appear to have been comparable to recent times. Pedestrian survey in the area surrounding the village of Porco identified a series of rural homesteads associated with huayrachinas and cupellation hearths. Most of these sites were coeval with the establishment of industrial tin mining in Porco by a series of foreign corporations. Households were attracted to the agriculturally marginal area by the possibility of wage work in the mines but maintained small herds and agricultural plots as a buffer against poor pay and unemployment; small-scale silver production was part of this mix of economic strategies. While most workers in the mines were “free laborers” who lived nearby, a diary written by a Cornish foreman in Porco between 1884 and 1887 hints at the status of some as debt peons, perhaps residents of a hacienda that was purchased, in part, to supply mine labor (Van Buren and Weaver 2012). Small-scale silver production in the two centuries following Bolivian independence was intimately linked to the development of large-scale industrial mining in terms of both the means and relations of production. First, it enabled physical access to small pockets of high-grade silver that typically occur within the deep veins of industrial ores in the Porco mines. Second, wage workers, whether for cooperatives or companies, exercise their right to the silver based on both the extremely risky conditions underground and their belief in a reciprocal relationship between the earth and those who derive sustenance from it.

Silver production in colonial Porco The Pizarros gained control of Porco in 1538, and, along with other conquistadors, began working the deposits using Native labor. Many smelter operators were yanakuna, specialists who had previously been attached to Inka elites and who, under the colonial regime, worked for individual Spaniards. Ethnic groups such as the Lupaqa, on the west short of Lake Titicaca, also sent contingents of workers to Porco to produce silver that was used for tribute payments. In 1545, the mines of Porco were eclipsed by the discovery of Potosí—the largest silver deposit in the world—and many miners shifted their operations to the Cerro Rico. Huayrachinas and traditional refining technology played a crucial role in the production of silver between 1538 and 1570, when mercury amalgamation was introduced to treat lower grade silver ores at an industrial scale. During this time, production was largely in the hands of Indigenous workers, who provided mine owners with a specified amount of ore and retained the rest (Bakewell 1984). One site at Porco provides particular insight into the organization of production during this time. At Site 35, residential and industrial features suggest that a few families seasonally worked the small mine above the site and processed the silver using a variety of small-scale technologies, including the earliest cupellation hearth recorded thus far, one that is almost identical to the furnace used by Carlos Cuiza. Interestingly, reverberatory furnaces appear to have been introduced to the Americas by Central Europeans, modified in the Americas, and then brought to Spain (Sánchez Gómez 1997, 101). The small cupellation furnaces found in Porco were downsized versions that could be fueled with llama dung, making them appropriate for household use, but did not originate entirely in the Andes. Judging from the visibility of the complex from the adjacent road, Site 35 was a legal operation by either kajchas working for themselves or families sent

189

Mary Van Buren

to work on behalf of their ethnic groups. While some Indigenous people, particularly kurakas, or ethnic leaders, accrued wealth during this period, most workers used the silver to pay tribute. The introduction of mercury amalgamation in the 1570s effectively excluded Indigenous people from the extractive process other than as low paid forced laborers, mitayos, or slightly higher paid mingas, wage laborers who were assigned to more specialized tasks. The use of small-scale technologies continued but, in a sense, disappeared from public view, in part because they were operated largely by Indigenous people but also because they began to be associated with the illegal procurement of high-grade ores.

Silver production under the Inkas In some ways, Inka organization of silver production at Porco was similar to the labor regime under the Spaniards; mitayos, recruited on a rotating basis from designated ethnic groups, provided the unskilled labor, and yanakuna, specialists attached to individuals, were responsible for smelting and refining the ore (see Chapter 16). Also like the Spaniards, the Inkas were concerned with ore theft and stationed guards at state mines to inspect workers as they exited (Berthelot 1986). Unlike the Spanish regime, however, the Inkas required only a small number of groups to provide miners and taxed them in proportion to the existing population. Another difference is that at Porco, the Inka operation was centralized, in contrast to the small, independent teams of laborers working for individuals or ethnic groups under the Spaniards; food, tools, and other necessities were provided by the state. The Inkas introduced the use of huayrachinas (Zori 2016) and, presumably, some form of cupellation hearth, or tocochimbo, for refining silver to the far southern Andes; this technology has not been found in pre-Inka sites in the region. Relative to smelting technologies in other parts of the world, huayrachinas and tocochimbos are small in scale, but the technology was appropriate for state needs. The Inkas used the silver to adorn the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco and the Inka’s litter; it may also have been employed to manufacture ritual or decorative objects gifted to allies and subject leaders, but it was not used as currency. The historical trajectory of huayrachinas and associated cupellation furnaces demonstrates the varied labor arrangements in which Indigenous metallurgical technology played a role. Prior to the Spanish conquest, huayrachinas and tocochimbos constituted cutting edge imperial technology introduced by the Inkas and operated by specialists working for elite individuals or kin groups. For a brief period during the early colonial period, many of these same individuals continued to use the technology, but under very different circumstances; they were largely sharecroppers who could retain a portion of what they produced for their own purposes. When smelting was replaced by mercury amalgamation as the predominant means for processing ore, huayrachinas and small reverberatories—which originated in Europe—became the technology of the poor, used to process ore scavenged from tailings or illegally appropriated from larger workings. In all of these cases, wind furnaces were strongly associated with Indigenous people, who drew on practices taught to them by their elders. The technology’s persistence, though, can only be understood in terms of the varied ways in which it was deployed under specific historical conditions. The context in which huayrachinas and tocochimbos were used becomes salient when doing history backwards, as this approach encourages the examination of the conditions under which such technologies were employed at specific points in time. In addition, the analysis of internal relations makes it clear that small-scale metallurgical practices are not simply holdovers from pre-Hispanic times but intimately connected to the development of large-scale mining enterprises.

190

Labor and natural resource extraction

Concluding remarks The archaeology of labor and resource extraction in colonial Spanish America is a relatively recent phenomenon that has thus far succeeded in producing fine-grained case studies that are analyzed in terms of the broader political economy and that, to varying degrees, demonstrate the articulation between local, regional, and global phenomena. Continuities in technology, the organization of production, and associated belief systems have also been examined at different temporal scales and often related to the persistence of ethnic identity in the context of changing and hostile conditions. More explicit attention to labor and, especially, to the internal relations engendered by historically specific labor practices would enhance such studies in a variety of ways. A consideration of internal relations would highlight the intimate connections between local and global processes and how they shifted over time. Such an approach would also open the question of cultural persistence to a wider range of potential explanations, interrogating the notion of ethnic identity and its relationship to continuity. Finally, on a more practical level, the consideration of shared concepts that transcend local contexts would facilitate dialogue within and among regional specialists, a discourse that would advance the study of labor and resource extraction in the colonial Americas and help make it relevant to contemporary populations that continue to be engaged in such processes today.

References cited Alexander, Rani T. 2004. Yaxcabá and the Caste War of Yucatán: An Archaeological Perspective. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Alexander, Rani T. 2012. “Landscape Change in the Maya Region, 1450–1910.” In The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology, edited by Deborah L. Nichols and Christopher A. Pool, 933–947. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Andrews, Anthony P., and Fernando Robles Castellanos. 2009. “La Arqueología Histórica del Noroeste de Yucatán.” In Arqueología Colonial Latinoamericana: Modelos de Estudio, edited by Juan García Targa and Patricia Fournier García, 115–131. BAR International Series. Oxford: Archaeopress. Andrews, Anthony P., Rafael Burgos Villanueva, and Luis Millet Cámara. 2006. “The Historic Port of El Real de Salinas in Campeche, and the Role of Coastal Resources in the Emergence of Capitalism in Yucatán, México.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 10 (2): 179–205. Andrews, Anthony P., Rafael Burgos Villanueva, and Luis Millet Cámara. 2012. “The Henequen Ports of Yucatan’s Gilded Age.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 16 (1): 25–46. Angelbello Izquierdo, Silvia T. 2003. “Azúcar, Modelos de Asentamientos y Tipologías Arquitectónicas en el Valle de Los Ingenios.” In Proceedings of the XX Congress for Caribbean Archaeology, edited by C. Talvárez María and M. A. García Arévalo, 717–724. Santo Domingo. Angiorama, Carlos I., M. Josefina Pérez Pieroni, M. Florencia Becerra, and Marco Giusta. 2018. “Cambios y Continuidades en La Puna de Jujuy (Actual Argentina) durante la Colonia.” Población & Sociedad 25 (1): 5–43. Bakewell, Peter. 1984. Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545–1650. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Becerra, Florencia M., Nicolás Nieva, and Carlos I. Angiorama. 2014. “Hornos, Minerals y Escorias: Una Aproximación a la Metalurgía Extractiva en La Puna de Jujuy en Época Prehispánica y Colonial.” Revista Arqueología 20 (1): 13–29. Beltrán, C. L. 2016. La Ruta de la Plata: De Potosí al Pacífico: Caminos, Comercio y Caravanas en los Siglos XVI y XVII. Plural Editores. Bernard Bosch, Luciano, Victor Blanco Conde, and Alexis Rives Pantoja. 1985. La Manuela: Arqueología de un Cafetal Habenero. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. Berthelot, Jean. 1986. “The Extraction of Precious Metals at the Time of the Inka.” In Anthropological History of Andean Polities, edited by John Murra, Nathan Wachtel, and Jacques Revel, 69–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braudel, Fernand. 1985. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. New York: Harper & Rowe.

191

Mary Van Buren Cohen, Claire, Thilo Rehren, and Mary Van Buren. 2008. “La Huayrachina por Dentro y por Fuera: Un Estudio Arqueo-Metalúrgico de la Tecnología de Fundición de Plomo en Porco-Potosí, Bolivia.” In Mina y Metalurgía en Los Andes del Sur desde la Época Prehispánica hasta El Siglo XVII, edited by Pablo Cruz and Jean-Joinville Vacher. Sucre: Institut de Rechereche pour le Développement Representación en Bolivia. Corcoran-Tadd, Noa. 2018. “Mulas, Tambos y Plata: Los Nuevos Materialismos en los Andes Coloniales.” Boletín de Arqueología PUCP 24: 77–98. Corcoran-Tadd, Noa, and Guido Pezzarossi. 2018. “Between the South Sea and the Mountainous Ridges: Biopolitical Assemblages in the Spanish Colonial Americas.” Post-Medieval Archaeology 52 (1): 84–101. Cruz, Pablo, and Pascale Absi. 2008. “Cerros Ardientes y Huayras Calladas. Potosí antes y durante el Contacto.” In Mina y Metalurgía en Los Andes del Sur desde la Época Prehispánica hasta El Siglo XVII, edited by Pablo Cruz and Jean-Joinville Vacher, 91–120. Sucre, Bolivia: Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement and Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos. Gasco, Janine. 1989. “Economic History of Ocelocalco, a Colonial Soconusco Town.” In Ancient Trade and Tribute, edited by Barbara Voorhies, 304–325. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Hernández Álvarez, Héctor. 2014. “Corrales, Chozas y Solares: Estructura de Sitio Residencial de la Hacienda San Pedro Cholul, Yucatán.” Temas Antropológicos. Revista Científica de Investigaciones Regionales 36 (2): 129–152. Kepecs, Susan. 2005. “Mayas, Spaniards, and Salt: World Systems Shifts in Sixteenth-Century Yucatán.” In The Postclassic to Spanish-Era Transition in Mesoamerica: Archaeological Perspectives, edited by Susan Kepecs and Rani Alexander. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Kepecs, Susan. 2018. “The Long Durée, from Salt to Sea Cucumbers: Kondratieff Waves in Chickinchel, on the Very Far Periphery.” In Colonial and Postcolonial Change in Mesoamerica: Archaeology as Historical Anthropology, edited by Rani T. Alexander and Susan Kepecs, 283–333. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Landers, Jane. 1990. “African Presence in Early Spanish Colonization of the Caribbean and the Southeastern Borderlands.” In Columbian Consequences, Vol. 2: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East, edited by David Hurst Thomas, 315–327. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. La Rosa Corzo, Gabino. 2003. Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba: Resistance and Repression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Larsen, Clark Spencer, Mark C. Griffin, Dale L. Hutchinson, Vivian E. Noble, Lynette Norr, Robert F. Pastor, Christopher B. Ruff, et al. 2001. “Frontiers of Contact: Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida.” Journal of World Prehistory 15 (1): 69–123. Lightfoot, Kent G. 2005. Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mathews, Jennifer P., and John Gust. 2017. “Cosmopolitan Living? Examining the Sugar and Rum Industry of the Costa Escondida, Quintana Roo, Mexico.” In The Value of Things: Prehistoric to Contemporary Commodities in the Maya Region, edited by Jennifer P. Mathews and Thomas H. Guderjan, 144–162. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Medinacelli González, Ximena. 2013. “De Sariris, Marcanis e Inkas: Contrapunto desde Carangas al ‘Ensayo de Interpretación’ del Libro Qaraqara-Charka.” In Aportes Multidisciplinarios al Estudio de Los Colectivos Étnicos Surandinos. Reflexiones Sobre Qaraqara-Charka Tres Años Después, edited by Ana María Presta, 245–264. Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos. Meyers, Allan D. 2005. “Material Expressions of Social Inequality on a Porfirian Sugar Hacienda in Yucatán, Mexico.” Historical Archaeology 39 (4):112–137. Meyers, Allan D. 2017. “Prerevolutionary Henequen Landscapes of Northwestern Yucatán.” In The Value of Things: Prehistoric to Contemporary Commodities in the Maya Region, edited by Jennifer P. Mathews and Thomas H. Guderjan, 124–143. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Milanich, Jerald T. 1999. Laboring in the Fields of the Lord: Spanish Missions and Southeastern Indians. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Newman, Elizabeth Terese. 2014a. Biography of a Hacienda: Work and Revolution in Rural Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Newman, Elizabeth Terese. 2014b. “Historical Archaeology at the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla, Puebla, Mexico.” Latin American Antiquity 25 (1): 27–45. Ollman, Bertell. 2003. Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

192

Labor and natural resource extraction Ollman, Bertell. 2014. “Historical Archaeology, Dialectical Marxism, and ‘C.F.U.G. Studies’.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 18: 361–373. Panich, Lee M. 2013. “Archaeologies of Persistence: Reconsidering the Legacies of Colonialism in Native North America.” American Antiquity 78 (1): 105–122. Panich, Lee M. 2017. “Indigenous Vaqueros in Colonial California: Labor, Identity, and Autonomy.” In Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology, edited by Craig N. Cipolla, 187–203. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Peele, Robert Jr. 1893. “A Primitive Smelting Furnace.” School of Mines Quarterly 15: 8–10. Pezzarossi, Guido. 2015a. “A Spectral Haunting of Society: Longue Durèe Archaeologies of Capitalism and Antimarkets in Colonial Guatemala.” In Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism, edited by Mark P. Leone and Jocelyn E. Knauf, 345–373. Cham: Springer. Pezzarossi, Guido. 2015b. “Tribute, Antimarkets, and Consumption: An Archaeology of Capitalist Effects in Colonial Guatemala.” In Archaeology of Culture Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America, edited by Pedro Paulo A. Funari and Maria Ximena Senatore, 79–102. New York: Springer. Rice, Prudence M. 2011. Vintage Moquegua: History, Wine, and Archaeology on a Colonial Peruvian Periphery. Austin: University of Texas Press. Roura Álvarez, Lisette, and Silvia T. Angelbello Izquierdo. 2012. Vivienda Esclava Rural en Cuba: Bohíos y Barracones. Artemisa, Cuba: Editorial Unicornio. Saitta, Dean. 2007. The Archaeology of Collective Action. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Salazar, Diego, and Flora Vilches. 2014. “La Arqueología de la Minería en el Centro-Sur Andino: Balance y Perspectivas.” Estudios Atacameños 48: 5–21. Sánchez Gómez, Julio. 1997. “La Técnica en la Producción de Metales Monedables en España y en América, 1500–1650.” In La Savia del Imperio. Tres Estudios de Economía Colonial, edited by Julio Sánchez Gómez, Guillermo Mira Delli-Zotti, and Rafael Dobado, 233–247. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. Scarry, Margaret C. 1993. “Plant Production and Procurement in Apalachee Province.” In The Spanish Missions of Florida, edited by Bonnie G. McEwan, 357–375. Gainesville: The University Press of Florida. Shackel, Paul. 2004. “Labor’s Heritage: Remembering the American Industrial Landscape.” Historical Archaeology 38 (4): 44–58. Silliman, Stephen W. 2004. Lost Laborers in Colonial California : Native Americans and the Archaeology of Rancho Petaluma. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Silliman, Stephen W. 2006. “Struggling with Labor, Working with Identities.” In Historical Archaeology, edited by Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman, 147–166. Oxford: Blackwell. Singleton, Theresa A. 2015. Slavery Behind the Wall: An Archaeology of a Cuban Coffee Plantation. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Singleton, Theresa A., and Marcos André Torres de Souza. 2009. “Archaeologies of the African Diaspora: Brazil, Cuba, and the United States.” In International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by David Gaimster and Teresita Majewski, 449–469. New York: Springer. Smith, Greg Charles. 1997a. “Andean and European Contributions to Spanish Colonial Culture and Viticulture in Moquegua, Peru.” In Approaches to the Historical Archaeology of Mexico, Central & South America, 165–172. Los Angeles: The Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles. Smith, Greg Charles. 1997b. “Hispanic, Andean, and African Influences in the Moquegua Valley of Southern Peru.” Historical Archaeology 31 (1): 74–83. Sweitz, Sam R. 2012. On the Periphery of the Periphery Household Archaeology at Hacienda San Juan Bautista Tabi, Yucatán, Mexico. Contributions to Global Historical Archaeology, 3. New York: Springer. Tándeter, Enrique. 1993. Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potos, 1692–1826. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Van Buren, Mary. 2003. “Un Estudio Etnoarqueológico de la Tecnología de Fundición en el Sur de Potosí, Bolivia.” Textos Antropológicos 14 (2): 133–148. Van Buren, Mary, and Claire Rebekah Cohen. 2010. “Technological Changes in Silver Production after the Spanish Conquest in Porco, Bolivia.” Boletín Del Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino 15 (2): 29–46. Van Buren, Mary, and Barbara H. Mills. 2005. “Huayrachinas and Tocochimbos: Traditional Smelting Technology of the Southern Andes.” Latin American Antiquity 16 (1): 3–25. Van Buren, Mary, and Brendan J. M. Weaver. 2012. “Contours of Labor and History: A Diachronic Perspective on Andean Mineral Production and the Making of Landscapes in Porco, Bolivia.” Historical Archaeology 46 (3): 79–101.

193

Mary Van Buren Voss, Barbara L. 2008. “Gender, Race, and Labor in the Archaeology of the Spanish Colonial Americas.” Current Anthropology 49 (5): 861–893. Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. 2011. The Modern World-System II Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weaver, Brendan J. M. 2018. “Rethinking the Political Economy of Slavery: The Hacienda Aesthetic at the Jesuit Vineyards of Nasca, Peru.” Post-Medieval Archaeology 52 (1): 117–133. Wilcox, Michael. 2009. The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wurst, LouAnn. 1999. “Internalizing Class in Historical Archaeology.” Historical Archaeology 33 (1): 7–21. Wurst, LouAnn, and Stephen A. Mrozowski. 2014. “Toward an Archaeology of the Future.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 18 (2): 210–223. Zori, Colleen. 2016. “Valuing the Local: Inka Metal Production in the Tarapacá Valley of Northern Chile.” In Making Value, Making Meaning: Techné in the Pre-Columbian World, edited by Cathy Costin, 167–192. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

194

13 OBJECTS OF CHANGE? REVISITING NATIVE MATERIAL CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGICAL TRADITIONS IN THE POST–1492 AMERICAS Lee M. Panich

Technological traditions and associated items of material culture have long been a central focus of archaeological investigations of Indigenous-colonial interactions in the Americas. Part of this interest stems from visible patterns in the archaeological record after the arrival of Europeans, when new forms of ceramics, metals, glass, plants, and animals became available to the Indigenous inhabitants of North and South America. These items offer a window into how Native people acquired, manufactured, and used various materials from 1492 onward. As discussed later, archaeological research questions related to these culturally situated patterns of making and using things intersect a variety of theoretical frameworks. Today, the skill and knowledge represented by Native people’s incorporation of new materials into existing technological and social traditions continues to be an important aspect of archaeological approaches across the hemisphere (Alexander 2019; Cobb 2003; Scaramelli and Tarble de Scaramelli 2005; Van Buren 2010). Despite these advances, popular understandings of the colonial period continue to posit a model of rapid technological change, in which Indigenous people quickly abandoned existing traditions in favor of supposedly superior European tools and other objects. Thus, the focus on technological traditions within archaeology also intersects deeply entrenched narratives of European cultural superiority that suffuse popular media. Bestselling books (e.g., Diamond 1997) dodge the core issues of colonialism—including genocide, land theft, and slavery—by largely reducing European “success” to a question of technological prowess (Rodríguez-Alegría 2008; Rogers 1990; Wilcox 2010). Like the interrelated narratives of Native peoples’ susceptibility to introduced diseases (Jones 2015; Chapter 4), such interpretations leave out crucial questions about power and human agency while simultaneously glossing over significant temporal and geographic variation that ultimately erodes their explanatory potential. In this chapter, I offer a review of how archaeologists are combatting these overly simplistic narratives, both through conceptual approaches and—as I demonstrate through a brief case study on stone tool traditions after 1492—the accumulation of evidence about how Native people

195

Lee M. Panich

made culturally informed choices about when, where, and how to use different materials and technologies.

Conceptual frameworks Archaeologists have approached the study of technology from a number of theoretical and conceptual vantage points. Within the archaeology of colonialism, acculturation was one of the earliest and most influential models for understanding Indigenous material culture and technological traditions after 1492. In many formulations, the flow of change was assumed to be largely unidirectional from colonists to Native people, an idea that resulted in a relatively narrow focus on technological replacement in many early studies (e.g., Quimby and Spoehr 1951). However, empirical evidence from several regions failed to meet these teleological expectations, and scholars accordingly refined their models to more fully account for a broader array of technological processes (Farnsworth 1992; Rogers 1990). This expansion of acculturation frameworks coincided with the 1992 quincentenary of Columbus’ first voyage, which moved the discussion of technological traditions toward broader issues of globalization and world systems (Deagan 2001; Funari 1999; Gasco et al. 1997). The following explosion of interest in the archaeology of culture contact and colonialism led scholars to experiment with a diversity of theoretical approaches to technological traditions, including those drawn from behavioral archaeology (Schiffer 2004), evolutionary perspectives (Ramenofsky 1995), and practice theory (Dobres 2000), as well as considerations of identity, power, and economics (Bayman 2009; Rodríguez-Alegría et al. 2015; Van Buren 2010). Recently, the term hybridity has attracted considerable attention from archaeologists studying post-contact material culture in the Americas (Card 2013; Loren 2015; VanValkenburgh 2013). In deploying hybridity as a concept to describe objects or practices that originated in the worlds of both Indigenous people and newcomers, archaeologists hoped to move past essentialist and static understandings of culture embedded in earlier acculturation models and toward a framework, rooted in postcolonial studies, that captures nuance, ambiguity, and even intentional subversion (e.g., Bhabha 1994). Yet in practice, the term has become detached from these roots. In some cases, hybridity is simply a catchall for the kinds of everyday blending that have been common throughout human history (but see Beck 2020). But in other, more problematic, instances, hybridity has drifted in ways that preserve the very notions of cultural authenticity and purity that archaeologists hoped to avoid (Liebmann 2015; Silliman 2015). One pathway forward is to focus on the practice of hybridization, especially when it involved the intentional reworking of antecedent forms in ways that challenged existing categories, such as colonizer and colonized. This usage stresses process over the resulting entities but also leaves out Indigenous actors’ use of introduced goods—like glass beads or copper kettles—as those items do not represent an “amalgamation of different things” (Liebmann 2015, 324). In this sense, archaeologists examining post-contact Indigenous technologies should think carefully about the application of the hybridity concept and whether or not it tells us anything new about the objects or technologies in question. Other archaeologists have turned to the concepts of entanglement and consumption to explore the primacy of material things in colonial encounters (Cipolla 2017; Forde 2017; Hart and Dillon 2019; Hofman and Keehnen 2019; Martindale 2009; Silliman and Witt 2010). While considerable differences exist between these approaches, a common element is their concern for the full use-life of objects, ranging from acquisition, context and manner of use, and ultimately deposition. Given that the technologies brought to the Americas were not simply “European,” nor were they necessarily superior, these frameworks may provide archaeologists with conceptual 196

Objects of change?

tools to understand how people and things interacted in more complex ways. While scholars must continue to reckon with issues of power, archaeologists are drawing on Hodder’s (2012; Hodder and Mol 2016) elaboration of entanglement theory and related network approaches to illuminate how existing Indigenous exchange networks shifted to accommodate new people and objects (Keehnen and Mol 2020). Similarly, consumption frameworks reject the idea that introduced goods were inherently superior and instead seek to understand the historically and culturally contingent processes that led Native people to acquire and use certain objects and materials in colonial contexts (Beck 2020; Cipolla 2017; Panich 2014; Silliman and Witt 2010). A hallmark of recent approaches, from whatever theoretical angle, is the recognition that existing Indigenous technologies—and the people that used them—need to be given greater consideration. As articulated by Montón-Subías and Hernando (2018), the focus on “change” in the archaeology of colonialism reflects deep Eurocentric and androcentric biases. Thus, in each case, what becomes most significant is not simply the presence of particular objects but rather how people in the past used them in culturally specific ways. Many Indigenous societies had long traditions that relied on the acquisition and incorporation of foreign or “exotic” goods, practices that may have accelerated with the availability of new classes of materials from EuroAmerican colonists (Cipolla 2017). These processes began from the time of the first contacts between Indigenous people and Europeans, involving materials that ranged from the ceremonial to the secular (Keehnen and Mol 2020; Legg et al. 2019). Sifting the evidence from across the Americas, several patterns emerge. First, Native technologies continued in various ways, particularly along the margins of the colonial world. Thus, it is not uncommon for sites dating well after the onset of colonialism to have few, if any, introduced items of material culture, a fact that has led to an underappreciation of post-contact Indigenous histories in many regions (HollandLulewicz et al. 2020; Panich and Schneider 2019). Second, Native people adopted certain Afro-Eurasian technologies that lacked local antecedents in ways that nevertheless made sense within existing practices and worldviews. In areas of the Americas without precontact ceramic traditions, for example, archaeologists have considered how Indigenous artisans used pottery to forge community in colonial contexts (Peelo 2011). Similarly, domesticated animals are an important focus of research, offering both novel pathways to status and group autonomy but also driving shifts in related technological and bodily practices, such as butchery (Delsol 2020; Panich 2017). Many imported materials defied purely functional explanations, as exemplified by Indigenous peoples’ use of imported copper or brass kettles in the North American Northeast and Great Lakes regions, in which kettles served as raw material to form other types of objects at the same time that the copper itself carried its own symbolic significance (Howey 2011; Walder 2019). Throughout the hemisphere, colonists imported massive quantities of glass beads from Europe to distribute among Indigenous people, but these objects did not render existing shell bead technologies obsolete. Instead, Native people in certain contexts expanded production of shell beads even as they incorporated glass beads into existing understandings of value and wealth (Hamell 1992; Panich 2014; Turgeon 2004). Third, many introduced goods were actively incorporated into existing Indigenous technological traditions. In regions where Native people practiced pottery making prior to the arrival of Europeans, ceramics have also been considered a medium of continuity and innovation, connecting the precontact past to the present day (Charlton and Fournier García 2010; Hernández Sánchez 2019; Sallum and Noelli 2020). Yet not all ceramics were used simply as vessels, as demonstrated by the spiritual power imbued in Spanish olive jars in certain parts of the Maya region (Oland 2017). Similarly, some Native groups drew on millennia of metal-working experience to navigate the expansion of mineral extraction during the colonial period (Van Buren 2021), while others used architectural traditions to buffer larger political and demographic shifts 197

Lee M. Panich

(Rodning 2009). Perhaps the most widely analyzed technological tradition in colonial contexts has been stone tools, with archaeologists considering the role of stone tools and related practices within long-term Indigenous histories in a range of geographic and temporal contexts (Cobb 2003; Forde 2017; Panich et al. 2018b; Rodríguez-Alegría 2008). This body of work will be the focus of the more detailed examination that follows.

Stone tool traditions after 1492 One of the most common tropes regarding technological traditions after 1492 is that imported metal implements were inherently superior to existing Indigenous technologies centering on stone tools and weapons (Cobb 2003; Rodríguez-Alegría 2008). Such assumptions underscored what was, until recently, the conventional wisdom in archaeology that stone tool technologies vanished relatively quickly after the onset of colonialism in the Americas. Yet a growing body of research demonstrates the persistence of stone tool technologies across the hemisphere. This work documents a wide range of materials used by Native craftspeople—including lithics from local and distant sources as well as introduced materials like bottle glass—and the economic and social relationships they were bound up with (Figure 13.1). A crucial point is that archaeologists cannot assume the inferiority of stone tools, nor should they rely solely on culturally loaded ideas about functional efficiency when interpreting post-contact stone tool assemblages (Silliman 2003).

Raw materials and tool types Throughout the Americas, obsidian has long been a prized raw material for the production of projectile points, cutting tools, and other objects such as mirrors and ornaments. These

Figure 13.1 Arrow points from the Native neighborhood at Mission Santa Clara de Asís in central California, USA. From left to right: chert, bottle glass, obsidian, and porcelain. Source: Photos courtesy of Mark Hylkema, Past Lifeways Archaeological Studies, Sunnyvale, California.

198

Objects of change?

technologies and associated exchange networks shifted in various ways after 1492, but archaeological research has demonstrated the continued importance of obsidian in many colonial-era contexts. In central California, for example, recent research explores the use of obsidian for projectile points and expedient cutting tools within the tightly controlled social spaces of the Franciscan missions (Panich 2016; Panich et al. 2018b; see Figure 13.1). Obsidian, particularly blades, also remained important throughout many regions of Mesoamerica in the years after the Spanish invasion. In central Mexico, the obsidian mines and workshops in the Sierra de las Navajas were so important that the Franciscans established a chapel there in 1528 to evangelize Native laborers and to obtain obsidian tools for colonists (Pastrana Cruz et al. 2019, 25–27). However, in other mission contexts—such as the Spanish missions of what is today Texas— obsidian use seems to have dropped off due to colonial disruptions (Walter and Hester 2014, 101). In areas where direct colonial influence was initially minimal, archaeologists have likewise documented both the continued use of obsidian for tools and distinct shifts in the use of material from particular geological sources (Scheiber and Finley 2011; Sobel 2012). Like obsidian, chert was widely used by Native people after the arrival of Europeans. In the American Southeast, for example, chert scrapers were an important part of the trade in deerskins and possibly bison hides in the seventeenth century, whereas chert scrapers have been recovered from fur trade sites in northern Alaska that date as recently as the turn of the twentieth century (Cassell 2003; Johnson and Parish 2020). Research in Argentina on materials dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries similarly suggests that Native people there used an array of raw materials such as chalcedony for tools like scrapers, many of which could have been used for processing hides (Buscaglia 2017). Chert was also used in obsidian-rich areas like California and Mesoamerica. At a mid-nineteenth-century ranch in northern California, Native laborers used local cherts for a variety of purposes even as they relied on obsidian for bifaces and projectile points (Silliman 2003; and see Hull and Voss 2016). In Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Native residents similarly continued to use chert alongside obsidian after the arrival of Europeans (Zeitlin 2015, 373). Indigenous people throughout the hemisphere also incorporated manufactured glass from bottles and other objects into their stone tool traditions (see overview in Martindale and Jurakic 2015). Ranging from the Pacific Coast of North America to New England to the southern tip of South America, glass offered an easily workable material that could be fashioned into projectile points, scrapers, and expedient tools (Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018; Martindale and Jurakic 2006; Mrozowski 2020; Nuevo Delaunay et al. 2017; Peelo et al. 2018; Warrick 2009; see Figure 13.1). In fact, ethnoarchaeological studies indicate that some Highland Maya communities continued to use bottle glass as a raw material throughout the twentieth century (Deal and Hayden 1987). Perhaps the best known example of Indigenous use of glass as a raw material is not archaeological at all but rather comes from the Yahi man known as Ishi, who produced an array of intricate bottle glass projectile points both in his ancestral homeland and while in residence at the University of California Museum of Anthropology from 1911–1916 (Kroeber 1976; Shackley 2000). Ishi’s life story raises many troubling ethical considerations about the discipline of anthropology, but his knowledge of flintknapping and expertise with both lithic materials and manufactured glass is a testament to the innovation of Indigenous stone tool technologies. Native manufacturers used a range of additional lithic and lithic-like materials to create tools in post-contact times. For example, quartz and quartzite remained important for the manufacture of cutting and scraping tools in some regions, particularly if colonial intrusions affected the availability of higher quality raw material (Bagley et al. 2014; Hart and Dillon 2019, 268–269; Zeitlin 2015, 373). Beyond glass, Native people employed other resources obtained 199

Lee M. Panich

from newcomers. Gunflints manufactured from English and European raw materials were used and repurposed by Native people in many regions, although some no doubt created their own versions from locally available lithics (Bagley et al. 2014; Church et al. 2019, 85; Odell 2003, 45). Certain fine-grained ceramics also lend themselves to knapping, a fact that Native people throughout the hemisphere used to create projectile points, scrapers, and other tools that were morphologically similar to those crafted from stone (Nuevo Delaunay et al. 2017; Peelo et al. 2018, 212–214; see Figure 13.1). Though they have received less attention than their flaked-stone counterparts, ground stone tools remained important for many Indigenous groups after 1492. Grinding implements— including mortars and pestles as well as manos and metates—manufactured from a range of lithic materials are commonly recovered from post-contact sites in the Americas (e.g., Peelo et al. 2018, 215–217). Many of these objects were utilitarian in nature, although in New England, Native women developed new forms of effigy pestles after the arrival of Europeans (Nassaney and Volmar 2003). Where available, Native people used steatite (soapstone) to craft an array of objects. In California, Chumash artisans continued to create soapstone vessels after the founding of local Spanish missions even as vessel forms and geological sources varied across the colonial landscape (Brown 2018). Stone pipes, often crafted from steatite, were also manufactured and used by Native men living in seventeenth-century New England (Nassaney and Volmar 2003). Perhaps more so than flaked stone implements, ground stone tools today remain important for many communities throughout the hemisphere, and their production offers insight into the persistence of various lithic technologies (Hayden 1987).

Acquisition and exchange Archaeological materials do not exist in a vacuum, and to understand how Native people used and valued different classes of objects in colonial contexts also requires an examination of how they acquired such materials in the first place. Due to the assumed disruptions of Euro-American colonialism, a critical research domain is the understanding of how Native people obtained lithic materials in post-contact settings. As their ancestors did for countless generations, Native people could obtain unworked or worked lithics through exchange networks, directly procure raw material from geological deposits, or recycle older stone artifacts recovered from archaeological deposits. The first option—participation in local or regional exchange networks—has received considerable archaeological attention, but there is good evidence from throughout the Americas that Native people relied on all three modes of procurement in particular colonial contexts (Liebmann 2017; Loendorf et al. 2013; Panich et al. 2018b; Pastrana Cruz et al. 2019; Sobel 2012). Given its chemical properties and limited geological availability, obsidian is one of the most useful materials for examining issues of exchange in archaeology. Early studies of lithic assemblages from colonized regions stressed that obsidian availability was subject to various disruptions, including loss of access to source areas, demographic shifts, and enculturation programs implemented by missionaries and others (e.g., Bamforth 1993). However, recent post-contact obsidian studies offer important insights into how Native people continued to acquire obsidian for tools, particularly in Mesoamerica and western North America (Hull 2009; Loendorf et al. 2013; Millhauser et al. 2011; Rodríguez-Alegría 2008; Rodríguez-Alegría et al. 2013; Scheiber and Finley 2011; Silliman 2005; Sobel 2012; Stemp 2016; Stemp et al. 2011). Documenting and tracing the extent of colonial-era exchange systems and land-use patterns redirects archaeological research away from colonial institutions—missions, forts, and the like—toward the vast Indigenous homelands into which they were implanted (Panich and Schneider 2015). 200

Objects of change?

Exchange remained a viable way to obtain material for many groups, even in colonial circumstances. In central Mexico, networks that had strong antecedents in precontact times, including both local markets and long-distance trade in luxury items, continued to convey obsidian artifacts widely for several generations after the Spanish invasion (Pastrana Cruz et al. 2019, 23). Indeed, the fall of the Aztec empire in 1521 may have opened up regional exchange of obsidian. Research at Xaltocan, just north of Mexico City, demonstrates that local people there actually enjoyed expanded access to obsidian raw material after 1521 (Millhauser et al. 2011; Rodríguez-Alegría et al. 2015). And in the Mixtec community of Achiutla, in Oaxaca, the end of Aztec hegemony allowed residents to acquire obsidian from a broader array of sources even as the overall quantity of obsidian they used diminished (Forde 2017). As that case suggests, colonial impacts to lithic exchange networks were variable across Mesoamerica (see discussion in Workinger and King 2020, 626). Other Native people retained direct access to geological sources of obsidian, despite the impacts of colonialism. Again, examples from the Basin of Mexico are illustrative. For instance, the Otumba source, which was not directly controlled by the Aztec Triple Alliance, seems to have increased in importance after the Spanish invasion as Native people living in that area of central Mexico shifted away from the green obsidian from the Sierra de las Navajas, which was often used to create prismatic blades. Gray Otumba obsidian was used locally well into the nineteenth century (Pastrana Cruz et al. 2019). In northern California, laborers at a mid-nineteenth century ranch exploited a wide array of locally available obsidian sources. These spatially circumscribed sources were rarely used in precontact times, when far-flung exchange networks instead focused on the largest geological deposits in the region (Silliman 2005). The recycling of older lithic materials was also an important source of raw material, particularly if colonial disruptions limited access to traditional sources or exchange partners. In these scenarios, nearby archaeological deposits often served as sources of finished tools as well as raw material that could be further reduced (Hull and Voss 2016). For example, evidence from some colonial-era Mesoamerican sites indicates that residents created new implements based on the recycling of earlier tools and blanks, although systematic research in that region is lacking (Andrews 2019, 208; Oland 2013; Pastrana Cruz et al. 2019, 30). In California, several studies have utilized obsidian hydration dating to examine potential patterns of lithic recycling. As many examples from the region attest, Native people recycled older obsidian artifacts in a variety of contexts including missions, ranches, mercantile outposts, and relatively autonomous Indigenous settlements (Hull 2009; Lightfoot and Silliman 1997; Panich et al. 2018b; Silliman 2005). Though less commonly studied, recent research suggests that the recycling of ground stone is additionally worth examining in colonial settings (Bagley et al. 2014; Brown 2018).

Meaning In addition to the acquisition and function of stone tools in post-contact settings, it is also important to consider the cultural significance of lithic materials for Indigenous producers and users. In some contexts, stone tools may have been easier to procure, were economically expedient, or were simply better suited to the tasks at hand (Bagley et al. 2014; Nassaney and Volmar 2003). But in other cases, Native people may have explicitly used stone tools in accordance with longstanding traditions or even as a political statement against the colonial order. Even practices such as the recycling of older lithic materials—too often written off as mere “scavenging”—may offer insight into continued memory and meaning (Silliman 2009). So, too, should archaeologists consider the broader landscapes in which lithic materials were embedded. As Liebmann (2017) argues for the Jemez region of the Pueblo Southwest, specific sources of lithic raw 201

Lee M. Panich

material were bound up with dynamic meanings for local people that shifted in important ways over time. Research across the Americas has demonstrated that obsidian continued to hold highly charged symbolic value for many groups after the onset of colonization. In Mesoamerica, obsidian played a central role in not just regional economies but also ceremonial life for millennia. Though Spanish colonialism certainly affected aspects of obsidian conveyance and use, as discussed earlier, the symbolic importance of obsidian in the region did not dissipate after 1521 (Levine and Carballo 2014; Saunders 2001). Indeed, the physical properties of obsidian, such as color or even sound, have long been vital components of its symbolic and mythical value among the Native residents of central Mexico (Pastrana and Athie 2014). The creation of prismatic blades, the most important obsidian tool in much of Mesoamerica, required great skill, with even Franciscan missionaries commenting on the craft (Forde 2017, 488), and the expertise required to create prismatic blades was likely an important part of individual and community identity. At Xaltocan, for example, obsidian made up 99 percent of the lithic assemblage from colonial contexts, marking a return to local production of obsidian blades after the Spanish invasion—a pattern that Rodríguez-Alegría (2008, 39–41) interprets as reflecting site residents’ desire to control the means of production. In central California, excavations at Spanish mission sites have yielded large numbers of obsidian artifacts—including cores, flakes, and formal tools—from geological sources more than 100 km distant, to the near exclusion of locally available cherts that are more common at nearby precontact sites (Panich et al. 2018a, 18–19; Peelo et al. 2018, 213). While this pattern has not been examined in depth, it nevertheless suggests that Native people valued obsidian, likely obtained through exchange, over materials such as chert or even bottle glass that could have been acquired within or near the mission estate. As in other Californian contexts, the prevalence of obsidian in these socially restrictive settings may suggest that Native people—men in particular—used obsidian and the ability to acquire it as a way to bolster their status and identity with specific tribal groups (Silliman 2001). A chipped obsidian cross found at a Coast Miwok site near Mission San Rafael may further speak to the potency of the material in the context of religious conversion and directed enculturation (Panich and Schneider 2015, 55). Of course, many Indigenous groups had long used metal alongside stone tools prior to the arrival of Europeans, in practices involving gold, silver, copper, and copper alloys. However, these metals were typically not used to manufacture utilitarian cutting tools, which were instead produced using flaked stone technologies and an array of local and imported lithic materials. These trends continued into the colonial period in many regions. In central Mexico, for example, metal cutting tools were relatively rare in the years directly following the Spanish invasion, and Native people often eschewed them or reserved metal tools for nonutilitarian purposes such as display (Pastrana Cruz et al. 2019; Rodríguez-Alegría 2008). And at the King Site in the American Southeast, dating to the earliest years of contact with Europeans, Cobb and Ruggiero (2003) indicate that most of the small number of metal implements recovered from the site were from the burials of individuals interpreted to be flintknappers. While perhaps ironic from a western perspective, this pattern underscores the fact that Indigenous people assigned their own values to metal and stone tools. Indeed, archaeologists are well positioned to contextualize post-contact stone tool traditions alongside regional historical developments (Cobb 2003; Liebmann 2017). In New England, for example, Native men may have elaborated on existing ritual stone pipe designs during the seventeenth century in order to safeguard the ritual nature of tobacco smoking as mass-produced clay pipes and imported tobacco became commonly available (Nassaney and Volmar 2003). In other instances, it was precisely the common nature of introduced materials that led Native 202

Objects of change?

people to employ them as tools. As argued by Martindale and Jurakic (2006, 425) for the Pacific Northwest, Northern Tsimshians may have assigned particular value to introduced goods in the years directly after the arrival of Europeans. However, as time progressed and imported objects became more common, materials like bottle glass lost their potency, and Native people instead began to view them as material to be reworked into other tools. These and additional examples across the hemisphere underscore the substantial variation of when, why, and how Native people employed stone tool technologies after 1492.

Discussion and conclusion Indigenous technological practices associated with stone tools parallel those of many other materials and artifact forms. Contrary to popular accounts, the spread and adoption of Afro-Eurasian technologies in the Americas was neither linear nor necessarily quick. The empirical evidence is messy and directly undermines models of rapid technological change and associated notions of European superiority. More than a decade after Rodríguez-Alegría (2008) called for a new narrative for post-contact technological traditions, archaeologists have yet to agree on a cohesive theoretical framework—and indeed, recent research has come from a variety of conceptual angles (Alexander 2019; Rodríguez-Alegría et al. 2015; Van Buren 2010). Still, Indigenous agency is a common component of most current studies, shifting the conversation from questions about the inherent superiority or inferiority of particular technologies to broader and more interesting inquiries about how Native people themselves viewed and engaged with various technological traditions. Thus, the emerging narrative can be thought as one of Indigenous innovation and survivance (Montgomery and Colwell 2019; Mrozowski et al. 2015). As the examples discussed here and countless others in the archaeological literature demonstrate, the incorporation of introduced materials into Indigenous technological traditions encompasses significant geographic and temporal variation, even within particular regions (Forde 2017; Liebmann 2017; Martindale and Jurakic 2006; Walder 2019). Such variation was the result of specific cultural patterns, including but not limited to differences in tribal or group practices, differential participation in regional exchange networks, and, in the case of imported materials, the vagaries of supply chains linking the Americas to production centers in Europe and Asia. Variation no doubt existed at the site level as well, as demonstrated by a number of recent studies including a comparison of specific dwellings at a California mission site and a reappraisal of foreign objects from household contexts in Hawai’i (Moore 2020; Panich et al. 2014). And as the archaeology of colonial encounters expands beyond the traditional focus on European outposts, future work will no doubt continue to illuminate how Native people maintained their own technological traditions while choosing whether or not to incorporate aspects of Afro-Eurasian technologies and material culture into their daily practices. A final observation is that change is a constant. Native traditions were not static prior to the arrival of Europeans, and Indigenous people across the Americas actively incorporated new objects and materials into existing technological traditions. Indigenous craftspeople used manufactured glass alongside obsidian and other lithic materials for the production of cutting implements, weapons, and other tools (Martindale and Jurakic 2006; Peelo et al. 2018). Imported and locally extracted metals were also incorporated into complex exchange networks, technological practices, and regimes of value (Howey 2011; Van Buren 2021). And people from diverse tribal groups eagerly sought out glass beads, which they used in much the same way as beads manufactured from shell or stone, including personal adornment but also as symbols of individual or group prestige and wealth (Hamell 1992; Panich 2014; Turgeon 2004). These practices collapse the artificial separation between “prehistory” and the colonial period and instead support 203

Lee M. Panich

interpretations of long-term Indigenous traditions rooted in choice, agency, and innovation (Mrozowski et al. 2015). Such processes are not bound by artificial temporal designations, and even in relatively recent periods of mass-produced material culture, it is worth reiterating the point that objects used by Native people became Native material culture regardless of their place of manufacture (Silliman 2009; Watkins 2017). If archaeologists hope to counter simplistic and harmful stereotypes about technological change and colonialism in the Americas, they will do well to continue examining these complex and interrelated phenomena from the perspective of those who participated in them.

Acknowledgments My thinking about stone tool traditions in colonial settings has benefitted from conversations with many people, including John Ellison, Mark Hylkema, and Tsim Schneider.

References cited Alexander, Rani T., ed. 2019. Technology and Tradition in Mesoamerica after the Spanish Invasion: Archaeological Perspectives. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Andrews, Anthony P. 2019. “European Technology and Native Traditions in Mesoamerican History: A Commentary.” In Technology and Tradition in Mesoamerica after the Spanish Invasion: Archaeological Perspectives, edited by Rani T. Alexander, 207–212. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Bagley, Joseph M., Stephen Mrozowski, Heather Law Pezzarossi, and John Steinberg. 2014. “Continuity of Lithic Practices from the Eighteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries at the Nipmuc Homestead of Sara Boston, Grafton, Massachusetts.” Northeast Historical Archaeology 43: 172–188. Bamforth, Douglas B. 1993. “Stone Tools, Steel Tools: Contact Period Household Technology at Helo’.” In Ethnohistory and Archaeology: Approaches to Postcontact Change in the Americas, edited by J. Daniel Rogers and Samuel M. Wilson, 49–72. New York: Plenum Press. Bayman, James M. 2009. “Technological Change and the Archaeology of Emergent Colonialism in the Kingdom of Hawai‘i.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 13: 127–157. Beck, Robin A. 2020. “Encountering Novelty: Object, Assemblage, and Mixed Material Culture.” Current Anthropology 61 (5): 622–647. Bhabha, Homi K .1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Brown, Kaitlin M. 2018. “Crafting Identity: Acquisition, Production, Use, and Recycling of Soapstone During the Mission Period in Alta California.” American Antiquity 83 (2): 244–262. Buscaglia, Silvana. 2017. “Materiality and Indigenous Agency: Limits to the Colonial Order (Argentinian Patagonia, Eighteenth-Nineteenth Centuries).” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 21: 641–673. Card, Jeb J., ed. 2013. The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture. Occasional Paper No. 39. Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University. Cassell, Mark S. 2003. “Flint and Foxes: Chert Scrapers and the Fur Industry in Late-Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century North Alaska.” In Stone Tool Traditions in the Contact Era, edited by Charles R. Cobb, 151–164. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Charlton, Thomas H., and Patricia Fournier García. 2010. “Pots and Plots: The Multiple Roles of Early Colonial Red Wares in the Basin of Mexico (Identity, Resistance, Negotiation, Accommodation, Aesthetic Creativity, or Just Plain Economics?).” In Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Melissa S. Murphy, 127–148. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Church, Minette C., Jason Yaeger, and Christine A. Kray. 2019. “Re-Centering the Narrative: British Colonial Memory and the San Pedro Maya.” In Archaeologies of the British in Latin America, edited by Charles E. Orser, Jr., 73–97. Cham: Springer. Cipolla, Craig N., ed. 2017. Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Cobb, Charles R., ed. 2003. Stone Tool Traditions in the Contact Era. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

204

Objects of change? Cobb, Charles R., and Dino A. Ruggiero. 2003. “Lithic Technology and the Spanish Entrada at the King Site in Northwest Georgia.” In Stone Tool Traditions in the Contact Era, edited by Charles R. Cobb, 13–28. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Deagan, Kathleen A. 2001. “Dynamics of Imperial Adjustment in Spanish America: Ideology and Social Integration.” In Empires: Perspectives from Anthropology and History, edited by Susan E. Alcock, Terence N. D’Altroy, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Carla M. Sinopoli, 179–194. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deal, Michael, and Brian Hayden. 1987. “The Persistence of Pre-Columbian Lithic Technology.” In Lithic Studies Among the Contemporary Highland Maya, edited by Brian Hayden, 235–331. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Delsol, Nicolas. 2020. “Disassembling Cattle and Enskilling Subjectivities: Butchering Techniques and the Emergence of New Colonial Subjects in Santiago de Guatemala.” Journal of Social Archaeology 20 (2): 189–213. Diamond, Jared. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton. Dobres, Marcia-Anne. 2000. Technology and Social Agency: Outlining a Practice Framework for Archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell. Farnsworth, Paul. 1992. “Missions, Indians, and Cultural Continuity.” Historical Archaeology 26 (1): 22–36. Forde, Jamie E. 2017. “Volcanic Glass and Iron Nails: Networks of Exchange and Material Entanglements at Late Prehispanic and Early Colonial Achiutla, Oaxaca, Mexico.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 21: 485–511. Funari, Pedro Paulo A. 1999. “Historical Archaeology from a World Perspective.” In Historical Archaeology: Back from the Edge, edited by Pedro Paulo A. Funari, Martin Hall, and Siân Jones, 37–66. London: Routledge. Gasco, Janine, Greg Charles Smith, and Patricia Fournier García. 1997. Approaches to the Historical Archaeology of Mexico, Central and South America. Monograph 38. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles. Hamell, George R. 1992. “The Iroquois and the World’s Rim: Speculations on Color, Culture, and Contact.” American Indian Quarterly 16 (4): 451–469. Hart, Siobhan M., and Katherine Dillon. 2019. “Entangled Things and Deposits in Early Colonial Native New England.” Historical Archaeology 53: 265–279. Hayden, Brian. 1987. “Traditional Metate Manufacturing in Guatemala Using Chipped Stone Tools.” In Lithic Studies Among the Contemporary Highland Maya, edited by Brian Hayden, 8–119. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Hernández Sánchez, Gilda. 2019. “Indigenous Pottery Technology of Central Mexico during Early Colonial Times.” In Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas, edited by Corinne Hofman and Floris W. M. Keehnen, 284–307. Leiden: Brill. Hodder, Ian. 2012. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Hodder, Ian, and Angus Mol. 2016. “Network Analysis and Entanglement.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 23 (4): 1066–1094. Hofman, Corinne L., and Floris W. M. Keehnen, eds. 2019. Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas. Leiden: Brill. Holland-Lulewicz, Jacob, Victor D. Thompson, James Wettstaed, and Mark Williams. 2020. “Enduring Traditions and the (Im)materiality of Early Colonial Encounters in the Southeastern United States.” American Antiquity 85 (4): 694–714. Howey, Meghan C. L. 2011. “Colonial Encounters, European Kettles, and the Magic of Mimesis in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century Indigenous Northeast and Great Lakes.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 15: 329–357. Hull, Kathleen L. 2009. Pestilence and Persistence: Yosemite Indian Demography and Culture in Colonial California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hull, Kathleen L., and Barbara L. Voss. 2016. “Native Californians at the Presidio of San Francisco: Analysis of Lithic Specimens from El Polín Spring.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 20: 264–288. Johnson, Jay K., and Ryan M. Parish. 2020. “Oliver and Orchard Thumbnail Scrapers: A Technological and Source-Area Analysis.” In Contact, Colonialism, and Native Communities in the Southeastern United States, edited by Edmond A. Boudreaux III, Maureen Myers, and Jay K. Johnson, 57–72. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

205

Lee M. Panich Jones, David S. 2015. “Death, Uncertainty, and Rhetoric.” In Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America, edited by Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, and Alan C. Swedlund, 16–49. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Keehnen, Floris W. M., and Angus A. A. Mol. 2020. “The Roots of the Columbian Exchange: An Entanglement and Network Approach to Early Caribbean Encounter Transactions.” The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology. https://doi.org/10.1080/15564894.2020.1775729. Kroeber, Theodora. 1976. Ishi in Two Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Legg, James B., Dennis B. Blanton, Charles R. Cobb, Steven D. Smith, Brad R. Lieb, and Edmond A. Boudreaux III. 2019. “An Appraisal of the Indigenous Acquisition of Contact-Era European Metal Objects in Southeastern North America.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 23: 81–102. Levine, Marc N., and David M. Carballo, eds. 2014. Obsidian Reflections: Symbolic Dimensions of Obsidian in Mesoamerica. Boulder: University of Colorado Press. Liebmann, Matthew J. 2015. “The Mickey Mouse Kachina and Other ‘Double Objects’: Hybridity in the Material Culture of Colonial Encounters.” Journal of Social Archaeology 15 (3): 319–341. Liebmann, Matthew J. 2017. “From Landscapes of Meaning to Landscapes of Signification in the American Southwest.” American Antiquity 82 (4): 642–661. Lightfoot, Kent G., and Sara L. Gonzalez. 2018. Metini Village: An Archaeological Study of Sustained Colonialism. Volume 3, The Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Fort Ross, California. Archaeological Research Facility, University of California, Berkeley. Lightfoot, Kent G., and Stephen W. Silliman. 1997. “Chronology of Archaeological Deposits from the Fort Ross Beach and Native Alaskan Village Sites.” In The Native Alaskan Neighborhood: A Multiethnic Community at Colony Ross: Volume 2, The Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Fort Ross, California, edited by Kent G. Lightfoot, Ann M. Schiff, and Thomas A. Wake, 337–354. Archaeological Research Facility, University of California, Berkeley. Loendorf, Chris R., Craig M. Fertelmes, and Barnaby V. Lewis. 2013. “Hohokam to Akimel O’Odham: Obsidian Acquisition at the Historic Period Sacate Site (GR-909), Gila River Indian Community, Arizona.” American Antiquity 78 (2): 266–284. Loren, Diana DiPaolo. 2015. “Seeing Hybridity in the Anthropology Museum: Practices of Longing and Fetishization.” Journal of Social Archaeology 15 (3): 299–318. Martindale, Andrew. 2009. “Entanglement and Tinkering: Structural History in the Archaeology of the Northern Tsimshian.” Journal of Social Archaeology 9 (1): 59–91. Martindale, Andrew, and Irena Jurakic. 2006. “Identifying Expedient Glass Tools from a Post-Contact Tsimshian Village Using Low Power (10–100×) Magnification.” Journal of Archaeological Science 33: 414–427. Martindale, Andrew, and Irena Jurakic. 2015. “Glass Tools in Archaeology: Material and Technological Change.” In Oxford Handbooks Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199935413.013.4. Millhauser, Jonn K., Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría, and Michael D. Glascock. 2011. “Testing the Accuracy of Portable X-Ray Fluorescence to Study Aztec and Colonial Obsidian Supply at Xaltocan, Mexico.” Journal of Archaeological Science 38: 3141–3152. Montgomery, Lindsay M., and Chip Colwell. 2019. Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience. Denver: Denver Museum of Nature & Science and University Press of Colorado. Montón-Subías, Sandra, and Almudena Hernando. 2018. “Modern Colonialism, Eurocentrism and Historical Archaeology: Some Engendered Thoughts.” European Journal of Archaeology 21 (3): 455–471. Moore, Summer. 2020. “Foreign Objects in Colonial-Era Hawaiian Sites: Change and Continuity in Nineteenth-Century Nu‘alolo Kai, Kaua‘i Island.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 129 (2): 193–326. Mrozowski, Stephen A. 2020. “The Archaeology of Magunkaquog.” In Historical Archaeology and Indigenous Collaboration: Discovering Histories that Have Futures, edited by D. Rae Gould, Holly Hebster, Heather Law Pezzarossi, and Stephen A. Mrozowski, 49–73. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Mrozowski, Stephen A., D. Rae Gould, and Heather Law Pezzarossi. 2015. “Rethinking Colonialism: Indigenous Innovation and Colonial Inevitability.” In Rethinking Colonialism: Comparative Archaeological Approaches, edited by Craig N. Cipolla and Katherine Howlett Hayes, 121–142. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Nassaney, Michael S., and Michael Volmar. 2003. “Lithic Artifacts in Seventeenth-Century Native New England.” In Stone Tool Traditions in the Contact Era, edited by Charles R. Cobb, 78–93. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

206

Objects of change? Nuevo Delaunay, Amalia, Juan Bautista Belardi, Flavia Carballo Marina, María José Saletta, and Hernán De Angelis. 2017. “Glass and Stoneware Knapped Tools among Hunter-Gatherers in Southern Patagonia and Tierra Del Fuego.” Antiquity 91 (359): 1330–1343. Odell, George H. 2003. “Wichita Tools on First Contact with the French.” In Stone Tool Traditions in the Contact Era, edited by Charles R. Cobb, 29–50. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Oland, Maxine. 2013. “The Fifteenth–Seventeenth Century Lithic Economy at Progresso Lagoon, Belize.” Lithic Technology 38 (2): 81–96. Oland, Maxine. 2017. “The Olive Jar in the Shrine: Situating Spanish Objects within a 15th- to 17thCentury Maya Worldview.” In Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology, edited by Craig N. Cipolla, 127–142. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Panich, Lee M. 2014. “Native American Consumption of Shell and Glass Beads at Mission Santa Clara de Asís.” American Antiquity 79 (4): 730–748. Panich, Lee M. 2016. “Beyond the Colonial Curtain: Investigating Indigenous Use of Obsidian in Spanish California through the pXRF Analysis of Artifacts from Mission Santa Clara.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 5: 521–530. Panich, Lee M. 2017. “Indigenous Vaqueros in Colonial California: Labor, Identity and Autonomy.” In Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology, edited by Craig N. Cipolla, 187–203. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Panich, Lee M., Helga Afaghani, and Nicole Mathwich. 2014. “Assessing the Diversity of Mission Populations through the Comparison of Native American Residences at Mission Santa Clara de Asís.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 18 (3): 467–488. Panich, Lee M., Rebecca Allen, and Andrew Galvan. 2018a. “The Archaeology of Native American Persistence at Mission San José.” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 38 (1): 11–29. Panich, Lee M., Ben Griffin, and Tsim D. Schneider. 2018b. “Native Acquisition of Obsidian in ColonialEra Central California: Implications from Mission San José.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 50: 1–11. Panich, Lee M., and Tsim D. Schneider. 2015. “Expanding Mission Archaeology: A Landscape Approach to Indigenous Autonomy in Colonial California.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 40: 48–58. Panich, Lee M., and Tsim D. Schneider. 2019. “Categorical Denial: Evaluating Post-1492 Indigenous Erasure in the Paper Trail of American Archaeology.” American Antiquity 84 (4): 651–688. Pastrana Cruz, Alejandro, and Ivonne Athie. 2014. “The Symbolism of Obsidian in Postclassic Central Mexico.” In Obsidian Reflections: Symbolic Dimensions of Obsidian in Mesoamerica, edited by Marc N. Levine and David M. Carballo, 75–108. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Pastrana Cruz, Alejandro, Patricia Fournier García, William J. Parry, and Cynthia L. Otis Charlton. 2019. “Obsidian Production and Use in Central Mexico after the Spanish Invasion.” In Technology and Tradition in Mesoamerica after the Spanish Invasion: Archaeological Perspectives, edited by Rani T. Alexander, 15–33. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Peelo, Sarah. 2011. “Pottery-Making in Spanish California: Creating Multi-Scalar Social Identity through Daily Practice.” American Antiquity 76 (4): 642–666. Peelo, Sarah, Linda Hylkema, John Ellison, Clinton Blount, Mark Hylkema, Margie Maher, Tom Garlinghouse, Dustin McKenzie, Stella D’Oro, and Melinda Berge. 2018. “Persistence in the Indian Ranchería at Mission Santa Clara de Asís.” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 38 (2): 207–234. Quimby, George I., and Alexander Spoehr. 1951. “Acculturation and Material Culture.” Fieldiana 36 (6): 107–147. Ramenofsky, Ann F. 1995. “Evolutionary Theory and Native American Artifact Change in the Postcontact Period.” In Evolutionary Archaeology: Methodological Issues, edited by Patrice A. Teltser, 129–147. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Rodning, Christopher B. 2009. “Mounds, Myths, and Cherokee Townhouses in Southwestern North Carolina.” American Antiquity 74 (4): 627–663. Rodríguez-Alegría, Enrique. 2008. “Narratives of Conquest, Colonialism, and Cutting-Edge Technology.” American Anthropologist 110: 33–41. Rodríguez-Alegría, Enrique, John K. Millhauser, and Wesley D. Stoner. 2013. “Trade, Tribute, and Neutron Activation: The Colonial Political Economy of Xaltocan, Mexico.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 32: 397–414. Rodríguez-Alegría, Enrique, Franz Scaramelli, and Ana María Navas Méndez. 2015. “Technological Transformations: Adaptionist, Relativist, and Economic Models in Mexico and Venezuela.” In Archaeology of

207

Lee M. Panich Culture Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America, edited by Pedro Paulo A. Funari and Maria Ximena Senatore, 53–77. Cham: Springer. Rogers, Daniel J. 1990. Objects of Change: The Archaeology and History of Arikara Contact with Europeans. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Sallum, Marianne, and Francisco Silva Noelli. 2020. “An Archaeology of Colonialism and the Persistence of Women Potters’ Practices in Brazil: From Tupiniquim to Paulistaware.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 24: 546–570. Saunders, Nicholas. 2001. “A Dark Light: Reflections on Obsidian in Mesoamerica.” World Archaeology 33 (2): 220–236. Scaramelli, Franz, and Kay Tarble de Scaramelli. 2005. “The Roles of Material Culture in the Colonization of the Orinoco, Venezuela.” Journal of Social Archaeology 5 (1): 135–168. Scheiber, Laura L., and Judson Byrd Finley. 2011. “Obsidian Source Use in the Greater Yellowstone Area, Wyoming Basin, and Central Rocky Mountains.” American Antiquity 76 (2): 372–394. Schiffer, Michael Brian. 2004. “Studying Technological Change: A Behavioral Perspective.” World Archaeology 36: 579–585. Shackley, Steven M. 2000. “The Stone Tool Technology of Ishi and the Yana of North Central California: Inferences for Hunter-Gatherer Cultural Identity in Historic California.” American Anthropologist 102 (4): 693–712. Silliman, Stephen W. 2001. “Agency, Practical Politics, and the Archaeology of Culture Contact.” Journal of Social Archaeology 1 (2): 190–209. Silliman, Stephen W. 2003. “Using a Rock in a Hard Place: Native-American Lithic Practices in Colonial California.” In Stone Tool Traditions in the Contact Era, edited by Charles R. Cobb, 127–150. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005. “Obsidian Studies and the Archaeology of 19th-Century California.” Journal of Field Archaeology 30: 75–94. Silliman, Stephen W. 2009. “Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England.” American Antiquity 74 (2): 211–230. Silliman, Stephen W. 2015. “A Requiem for Hybridity? The Problem with Frankensteins, Purées, and Mules.” Journal of Social Archaeology 15 (3): 277–298. Silliman, Stephen W., and Thomas A. Witt. 2010. “The Complexities of Consumption: Eastern Pequot Cultural Economics in 18th-Century Colonial New England.” Historical Archaeology 44 (4): 46–68. Sobel, Elizabeth A. 2012. “An Archaeological Test of the ‘Exchange Expansion Model’ of Contact Era Change on the Northwest Coast.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 31 (1): 1–21. Stemp, James W. 2016. “Coastal Maya Obsidian Tool Use and Socio-Economy in the Late Postclassic-Early Spanish Colonial Period at San Pedro, Ambergris Caye, Belize.” Journal of Field Archaeology 41: 162–176. Stemp, James W., Elizabeth Graham, and Jessica Goulet. 2011. “Coastal Maya Obsidian Trade in the Late Postclassic to Early Colonial Period: The View from San Pedro, Ambergris Caye, Belize.” Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 6: 134–154. Turgeon, Laurier. 2004. “Beads, Bodies, and Regimes of Value: From France to North America, c. 1500c. 1650.” In The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies, edited by Tim Murray, 19–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Buren, Mary. 2010. “The Archaeological Study of Spanish Colonialism in the Americas.” Journal of Archaeological Research 18: 151–201. Van Buren, Mary. 2021. “The Persistence of Indigenous Silver Production in Porco, Bolivia.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology. 25: 45–64. VanValkenburgh, Parker. 2013. “Hybridity, Creolization, Mestizaje: A Comment.” Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28: 301–322. Walder, Heather. 2019. “Picking up the Pieces: Intercultural Interaction in the Great Lakes Region Examined through Copper-Base Metal Artifacts.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 23: 316–342. Walter, Tamra L., and Thomas R. Hester. 2014. “‘Countless Heathens’: Native Americans and the Spanish Missions of Southern Texas and Northeastern Coahuila.” In Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider, 93–113. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Warrick, Gary. 2009. “Glass Tools at the Eagles Nest Site, Brantford, Ontario.” KEWA 9 (3): 1–16. Watkins, Joe. 2017. “Can We Separate the ‘Indian’ from the ‘American’ in the Historical Archaeology of the American Indian?” In Historical Archaeology Through a Western Lens, edited by Mark Warner

208

Objects of change? and Margaret Purser, 113–137. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and the Society for Historical Archaeology. Wilcox, Michael. 2010. “Marketing Conquest and the Vanishing Indian: An Indigenous Response to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse.” Journal of Social Archaeology 10 (1): 92–117. Workinger, Andrew, and Stacie M. King. 2020. “Obsidian on the Periphery: Importation, Production, and Raw Material Husbandry in Oaxaca.” Journal of Field Archaeology 45 (8): 621–634. Zeitlin, Judith Francis. 2015. “Locating the Hidden Transcripts of Colonialism: Archaeological and Historical Evidence from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.” In Bridging the Gaps: Integrating Archaeology and History in Oaxaca, edited by Danny Zborover and Peter Kroefges, 363–410. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, Boulder.

209

14 THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF CONQUEST AND ACCOMMODATION A view from the Valley of Mexico Patricia Fournier García

First steps: the conquest of Mexico In this chapter, I will examine the contexts of contact between Spaniards and the Indigenous population of central Mexico during the early colonial period (1521–1620 ce), based on findings from archaeological investigations conducted in the center of Mexico City during the last 50 years. These excavations provide important information related to the issue of colonization, contact, and consequent cultural changes. In addition, abundant data have been derived from documentary sources relevant to the case. In particular, I will refer to the center of the Valley of Mexico, an area that has historically and prehistorically been the most densely populated, with emphasis on Mexico City-Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco. To the Spaniards who had conquered and settled on Caribbean islands since 1513, the exploration of the mainland appeared to be a lucrative endeavor, but it was expressly prohibited by Spanish authorities. Hernán Cortés, a member of a family of lesser nobility from the Extremadura region of Spain, who had settled first in the Dominican Republic and a few years later in Cuba, nevertheless led an expedition including two military priests from Havana to the coast of Mexico in 1519, landing in what is now Veracruz. There he was met by representatives of the Aztecs, or Mexica, as they were actually known. By about 1350 ce, the Aztecs had begun to expand their hegemony through warfare, trade, and military enterprises and had imposed a system of tribute or taxation throughout their extensive domains, from central to southern Mexico. The exceptions were the extensive arid northern areas, mostly inhabited by hunter-gatherers, and the fierce Tarascan state to the west, as well as the Tlaxcalans to the southeast of the Valley of Mexico. Cortés was an opportunist who made alliances with different ethnic groups who were under the yoke of the Aztecs, the most important of those being the Tlaxcalans (e.g., Cortés 1960; Díaz del Castillo 1844; Martínez 1990). By 1521, Cortés led an army consisting of Europeans, Africans, Taíno Natives (580 individuals), and Indigenous allied warriors, who defeated the Aztecs in the nuclear zone of the empire, the lacustrine Valley of Mexico where the twin cities of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the seat of the Aztec emperor, and Tlatelolco were located. More than 60 percent of the conquerors died in different battles or were captured and sacrificed by the Tlaxcaltecans or the Aztecs (e.g., Gibson 210

Conquest and accommodation

1964; Grunberg 1994). Cortés, however, after multiple vicissitudes, defeats, and numerous rivalries with captains and members of his army, achieved his goal of obtaining gold, wealth, and prestige. Cortés and other conquistadors such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo marveled at the majesty of the capital, its canals, roads, and temples. To them, the city of Tenochtitlan, erected on an island in Lake Texcoco, appeared as large as Seville, and its main temple reached a great height, just as did Sevilla’s cathedral. At the sister city of Tlatelolco, built nearby on another island, the invaders were amazed by the wide variety of goods that were exchanged at the market, with a diversity of exotic fruits, vegetables, and edibles, in addition to glossy ceramics, among other consumable objects (e.g., Cortés 1960; Díaz del Castillo 1844; Gibson 1964; Martínez 1990). Cortés took possession of all the Mexican lands in the name of the King Charles I of Spain (or Charles V, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire). By 1523, priests—mainly Franciscans— sent by the Crown started to arrive in Mexico to convert the Indigenous population and to provide the Catholic sacraments to the conquerors (Ricard 1986; Rubial García 2014). By justifying his actions in favor of the Spanish empire, Cortés was rewarded by becoming the first member of the nobility in New Spain, as Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, a title bestowed upon him in 1528. Ten years after this honor, he was granted extensive lands and rights to Indigenous labor (García Martínez 1969). At the same time Cortés was toppling the Aztec empire, the Magellan-Elcano expedition made the first circumnavigation of the globe (1519–1522), claiming the Mariana Islands and the Philippines for Spain. Still looking for an easier eastern route to the Spice Islands for Spain, Cortés sent expeditions both to find a passage and to expand into new domains. Hence, in the 1520s several ports were established on the west coast of what would become Mexico, on the Pacific coast. A successful route eastward back across the Pacific was charted in 1565, establishing the Manila Galleon trade. By 1574, one of these ports, Acapulco, became the main port of trade with the Philippines, and Manila became the center of commerce for Chinese and other Asian goods shipped once a year to Acapulco (e.g., GarcíaAbasolo 1982).

Toward an understanding of Mexico City after the conquest Mexico has an area of approximately 2 million square kilometers and is located in what was the Viceroyalty of New Spain and part of the Captaincy General of Guatemala. Much of the territory of the country corresponds to the preconquest cultural area known as Mesoamerica. At the time of the first major contact with the Spaniards in 1519, the societies that the Spaniards found had reached the level of states or chiefdoms, the result of processes that began approximately two millennia earlier. The population in the Valley of Mexico between 1350 and 1520 ce was distributed among communities that differed in size, social organization, and economic and political complexity. The settlements varied from scattered hamlets to provincial centers to supra-regional centers with a high degree of urbanization, including plaza squares and architectural complexes with various ceremonial, political, and civic functions along their axes. Central among these settlements were the capitals of the Mexican Triple Alliance: the cities of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tacuba (Charlton 1986). Tlatelolco, a city dominated by Tenochtitlan after an earlier conflict, flourished in parallel as the headquarters of the most important market that existed in the Americas in the fifteenth century (Gibson 1964). Due to the characteristics of the environment of the Mexico basin, many of the settlements were located near the lake system, and both Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco were located on islands. 211

Patricia Fournier García

The Spanish conquest of Mexico, part of the expansionist and colonialist politics of Iberian mercantile capitalism, led to the modification of the pre-Hispanic economic and social structure, to the imposition of new ideological, legal, and political forms, and to disastrous environmental changes and the demographic depression of the Indigenous population as successive epidemics ravaged the area (cf. Charlton 1986; Charlton and Fournier García 1993). From the analysis of material and historical correlates, we propose that there are two basic contexts or axes through which it is feasible to understand the structure of colonization based on agency and structure in the interaction between the Indigenous people and the Spanish invaders and their descendants. The first of these involves the settlement patterns present in the Valley of Mexico. The second involves the material culture of the populations in those settlements. During the early colonial period, there was a differential impact of Hispanic culture between urban settings where Europeans lived and more outlying suburban settings where most Natives and mestizos resided in the Valley of Mexico (Charlton 1979). Thus, the basis of our model is the contrast between settlements located in these two zones and their variability with reference to their degree of urbanization, architectural features, and the characteristics of their residential units. Conspicuous ceramic objects used and discarded in and around these features are the most diagnostic material culture, evidence of differential access to regionally made and imported goods by both Native people and the European settlers and their descendants. The material correlates of the first context involve the settlement pattern of the Valley of Mexico, whose characteristics have been determined from surface surveys and excavations, as well as based on historical documents. The pattern involves a system made up of numerous small communities throughout the valley, dominated by one extremely large city prior to the conquest, Mexico City-Tenochtitlan (Charlton 1986). In the case of the second context, the material correlates include the differential distribution of consumer goods. In fact, given the position of most of the Natives and mestizos as marginalized segments in the social pyramid, and that of the Spaniards and Creoles as the dominant class, in economic terms there is a radical contrast in their consumer choices. The differential access of the different population components to ceramic materials from Europe and Asia as well as to those manufactured under Hispanic traditions in central Mexico is evident. This model also complements the fact that due to the high cost of these classes of artifacts, they become symbols of socio-ethnic and economic status. The evidence of material correlates of consumption come from various sites in the Valley of Mexico, predominantly recovered in architectural fill. Although the quality of the data obtained in secondary deposits can be considered low, we consider it possible to derive significant interpretations of global consumption trends from it, as well as the ethnic affiliation of the populations that generated such deposits and even the socioeconomic status of the inhabitants within settlements (cf. Wilson 1994).

Urban and suburban spatial organization on islands For the Tenochtitlan urban area, there are archaeological data from numerous excavations of postconquest contexts carried out in central Mexico City, among which the most relevant for our study are those of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan (e.g., Charlton and Fournier García 1993; Matos 2003) and the former nunnery of San Jerónimo founded in 1585, located on the southern limit of the city at that time (Fournier García 1990). Tlatelolco (particularly the SRE Project, Dirección de Salvamento Arqueológico, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia) (Charlton and Fournier García 1994; Fournier García 1998) also provides interesting samples of early colonial period material culture at a mainly Indigenous settlement. Of specific interest 212

Conquest and accommodation

is an area excavated under a burnt mud floor at Tlatelolco that sealed deposits rich in pottery fragments from this early period. In these three sites, the volume of the ceramic sample that we have analyzed so far is more than 1 million ceramic fragments. In all cases, excavations uncovered mostly architectural fill in secondary contexts, rich in postconquest ceramics dating from the early colonial period but mixed with preconquest and later materials (e.g. Barrera Huerta et al. 2017; Fournier García 1990), including majolicas made in Spain and Mexico, Chinese porcelains, and European wares (Fournier García 1990, 2018). These excavations as well as those carried out as part of the Templo Mayor and Urban Archaeology projects (López Cervantes 1982; Matos Moctezuma 2003; Rodríguez-Alegría 2002, 2016) have uncovered small sectors of the wide colonial-period metropolitan area. The study of ceramic materials has contributed significantly to understanding how colonialism impacted Indigenous populations by addressing issues related to cultural contact, hybridity, ideology, and consumption of local and imported pottery and their relationship to wealth, social status, ethnicity, identity, and power (Charlton and Fournier García 1993, 2008, 2010; Charlton et al. 2005; Fournier García and Charlton 1998, 2008; Rodríguez-Alegría 2005). The colony of New Spain was divided into two contrasting sectors: the first comprised the Indian Towns (pueblos de indios) and Indian Republics (repúblicas de indios), which, as the names imply, consisted of zones or regions with predominantly Indigenous and mestizo populations. The second was the Spanish Republic, made up of centers occupied by Europeans and their descendants, among which central Mexico City stands out. This separation simultaneously reflected rural and urban divisions of geographical concentration, economic exploitation, and the Catholic conversion of Natives (Broda 1979; Moreno Toscano 1976). In parallel, this division represented the origin of the disparity between the city and the countryside that, at the same time and to a large extent, is a reflection of ethnic and class differences. At the fall of the Aztec cities of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco on August 13, 1521, Pedro de Alvarado, captain of the army of Cortés, exhorted the defeated to: go and tell your superiors that they are obliged to provide tributes and services. . . . Let them come . . . (quietly) and enter their homes in Tlatelolco. . . . That . . . they must settle there . . . and none of them in Tenochtitlan, because this is the particular conquest of the [Spanish] lords and their abode. (Berlin and Barlow 1980, 75) In this way, it was stipulated that Tlatelolco would remain as a basically Indigenous settlement, while Mexico City-Tenochtitlan would be reserved for the conquerors, their descendants, and those Spaniards who would later cross the ocean in search of economic opportunities and wealth in the new Iberian domains. This order gave rise to the spatial separation between the Indigenous population and the Europeans within the city itself, thus establishing the area of residence and the seat of what would become the viceregal capital. The first settlers in New Spain were mainly Andalusians, Castilians, and Extremadurans (Valero de García de Lascurain 1991). Cortés himself was a native Extremaduran, and many arrived from diferent provinces of the Iberian Peninsula. The gestation of the colonial society was gradual, with multiple waves of European settlers who populated the new colony. Those who were not originally Christians were prohibited from moving to the colonies through a Royal Edict issued in 1526 (e.g., Qamber 2006), as well as the regulations of the Council of the Indies establishing that a license was required to go to the newly colonized lands, including papers that, among other points, certified “pure blood.” This measure was not always efective, as the authorities of certain places were extremely flexible in the face of the claims of newly proclaimed Christians, obviously in exchange for large sums 213

Patricia Fournier García

of money, especially when the general expulsion of the Moors and Jews was decreed following the final reconquest of Granada by the Spanish crown (Domínguez and Vincent 1979). Hence, Christians, Muslims, and Jewish converts, some crypto-Jews included, from various regions of the Iberian Peninsula all arrived in New Spain.

A city without walls for the conquerors, a city for the Natives on an island We may wonder in what way the emergence of one of the most important metropolises of the American continent under the dominion of the Spanish empire was possible, considering the arrival of the different classes of European settlers mentioned. The first gesture consisted of an act of symbolic, political, and psychological power (e.g., Bernard and Gruzinski 1996, 202), when Hernán Cortés ordered that Mexico City be built on the ruins of Tenochtitlan after dismantling temples and palaces and obliterating as many traces as possible of the “idolatrous” sculptures and “idols,” evidence of the complex preconquest religious system. The configuration of the postconquest city was based on European patterns of the time, while partially retaining patterns of pre-Columbian urbanism (Kubler 1982) appropriate to the characteristics of the lacustrine environment of the Valley of Mexico and taking advantage of the complex networks of canals and roads as well as other useful preconquest hydraulic infrastructure works already in place. By 1524, the so-called traza or urban design was delineated based on a regulated plan developed by the geometrician Alonso García Bravo, in which streets and squares were designated, conquerors were assigned land on which to build their houses, spaces were allocated for the construction of the headquarters of the viceregal powers, and a “hybrid village” emerged as well. While the conquerors continued to lead a life as soldiers in part, it was with the comforts provided by multiple Indigenous servants and enslaved Africans (cf. Bernard and Gruzinski 1996; Kubler 1982; Maldonado López 1988; Mondragón Barrios 2010). Cortés’s own house in the main plaza stood over the ruins of the palaces of one of the last Aztec emperors. Accordingly, the urbanization was square, with such order, and concert, that all the streets were even, wide . . . equal . . .; there were ditches or channels in four sides with three others that cross the city from west to east, for the communication of the roadways, so canoes were able to get to the city; the neighborhoods, and suburbs of it were left for the dwelling of the Indians, with narrow alleys, and chinampas [“floating orchards” separated by channels], as they had before the conquest. (Vetancurt 1697) This nuclear zone of the Spanish settlement covered approximately 14 intersecting streets at right angles that formed squares (Figure 14.1), with a regular arrangement that resembled a chess board (Kubler 1982). Toward the north side, a plaza was built that would house a rudimentary cathedral, and the building was consecrated on September 9, 1534, at the request of Emperor Charles V to Pope Clement VII. The Cabildo or City Hall building was erected on the left bank of the Royal Channel, and to the west the Merchants Portal as well as the Town Halls and the Portal of the Flowers were erected, which completed the arcades (Valero de García de Lascurain 1991). The provision of Indigenous peripheral settlements was maintained until 1571, when the viceregal authorities set organized plans for them as well, based on the model of central Mexico City (Kubler 1982). In the urban complexes, the houses of the Spaniards were characterized by their location in plots on rectangular or square lots, adjacent to each other, each oriented toward the streets that were about 12 meters wide, alternating in some areas with channels up to 214

Conquest and accommodation

Figure 14.1 Map of Mexico City, known as Uppsala Santa Cruz map, around 1550. The North is to the left and Tlatelolco is the architectural complex in this zone; in the center, the architectural complexes of la Traza and the downtown area of Mexico-Tenochtilan are depicted. Source: Courtesy of Uppsala University Digital Collections.

4.5 m wide. Due to municipal regulations, a high degree of uniformity in the appearance of the buildings themselves was achieved. In contrast, the Indigenous residential units were located in cultivated areas and were spaced apart from each other, generating a dispersed pattern even in the vicinity of urban concentrations (Kubler 1982; Lockhart 1992). By 1524, there were barely 2,200 European settlers in Mexico City (Cruz Rodríguez 1991) who, until 1528, had an improvised chapel. Meanwhile, the Indigenous people continued as much as they were able with many of their preconquest religious practices, except for the forbidden human sacrifices (Bernard and Gruzinski 1996, 293–295). In fact, some idolatrous practices and rituals were maintained sporadically until the seventeenth century (cf. Gibson 1964). By 1539, the conquest was consolidated, and after the period of turbulence, the efforts of various edicts to make peace among the new settlers, and the struggles between factions for power, the city had palaces, residences, chapels, nunneries, and convents under the government of Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza (cf. Bernard and Gruzinski 1996). The Europeans were not supposed to live outside the traza, their designated area, but by 1558 the Cabildo, the municipal council, assigned them properties beyond the limits previously set, and the houses of the Natives were increasingly intermingled with those of the invaders and settlers (Gibson 1964). In fact, during the first century after the conquest, the area of the city of the “whites” gradually expanded, especially toward the north and east. During the sixteenth century in the urban sphere, the ruling class was primarily made up of people from the Iberian Peninsula, that is, the aristocracy of the conquerors and their descendants, the nobility, the officials, and the encomenderos, the Spanish who were granted lands and 215

Patricia Fournier García

Indigenous workers who paid tribute to them (Valero de García de Lascurain 1991). Nevertheless, a large number of Indigenous people continued to live in the cities, since they, along with enslaved Africans, provided services to the Spaniards on a daily basis. In addition, the former engaged in artisanal and commercial activities. The capital of the viceroyalty was never fortified, so during the first five decades after the conquest, many of the houses had parapets and battlements along the front walls due to Europeans’ fear of potential Indigenous uprisings (Kubler 1982), none of which ever actually took place. In a narration dating from 1554, the wealth of the city and the architectural characteristics of its residences are recorded: All are magnificent and made at great cost, which corresponds to such noble and opulent neighbors. According to their strength, anyone would say that they were not houses, but fortresses. . . . The jambs and lintels . . . are . . . of large stones, placed with art: on the door are the owners’ coats of arms. . . . [In] the main plaza . . . could fit . . . an entire army. . . . Here fairs or markets are held [masquerades, parades, and jousts, too], the auctions are made, . . . merchants come from all this land . . . and . . . to this square comes everything that is best in Spain. . . . It can rightly be said to have gathered here as much as is noticeable in the whole world. . . . All Mexico is a city, that is, there are no suburbs, and everything is beautiful and famous. (Cervantes de Salazar 1978, 42–43; Orozco y Berra 1853) However, in the same narrative, the contrast is marked between the area inhabited by the Spaniards and the neighborhoods occupied by the commoners who lived in several towns nearby, such as Tlatelolco: “the shacks of the Indians . . . are . . . humble and barely rise from the ground. . . . They are placed without order. This is their ancient tradition” (Cervantes de Salazar 1978, 51–52). It is estimated that before the conquest of 1519, there were more than 145,000 inhabitants in the pre-Hispanic city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. By 1570, the Indigenous population fell to between 80,000 and 90,000, whereas the number of Spaniards reached about 1,700, and there were more than 11,000 Blacks (Gibson 1964; Kubler 1982; Mondragón Barrios 2010). By that time four parishes had been established in the city: that of the Cathedral with the richest settlers; that of Veracruz, which was a settlement of mestizos and Europeans of low economic status; and those of Santa Catarina and San Pablo, with workers, European merchants, and artisans as well as Indigenous people in some of their dependencies; and on the periphery were the parishes of the Natives at San José and Santiago Tlatelolco (Gibson 1964; Kubler 1982). By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the ratio between Indigenous and European and Creole had been reversed, as there were 7,500 Natives and between 12,000 and 15,000 whites (Gibson 1964) at the beginning of the middle colonial period (1621–1720), a demographic process in parallel with the growth of the city and the periodic epidemics leaving vacant Indigenous land lots. In 1625, it is recorded that: The Spaniards are increasingly invading their lands . . . and three and even four Indian houses were suitable to build a beautiful and large Spanish style residence, with gardens and orchards . . . the number of Spaniards living in these lands reached forty thousand, all . . . vain and . . . rich. (Gage 1838, 174–175) Not only did the growing Spanish population spread into Native residential wards over time, but the central area itself was inhabited by a diverse mix of people of diferent racial and ethnic 216

Conquest and accommodation

backgrounds segregated into upper and lower social tiers (Cope 1994). Upper-class residences in the colonial period usually had a vestibule that connected the main patio with the street, granting privacy to the families and a circulation zone for the servants. Rooms with diferent functions were arranged around the patio, which often had its own fountain (Weckmann 1983). Unfortunately, there are no intact residences dating to the early colonial period, as the urban center of the city has suffered changes as a result of earthquakes, floods, and differential sinking of heavy buildings due to the collapsing water table, as well as due to renovations of colonial buildings in general. The only house partially standing was recently renovated, and it is impossible to tell, aside from some European architectural features and pre-Columbian construction materials (e.g., Mauleón 2016), if this house really dates to the sixteenth century. A small section of another house close to the Templo Mayor was constructed by Aztec builders with pre-Columbian techniques and construction materials, in a Renaissance style (Esquivel 2019). Excavations carried out close to the main colonial plaza uncovered houses of rectangular floor plans with stone or brick floors covered with plaster and the remains of walls made of stone blocks also covered with plaster, with traces of red paint on the surface (e.g., Barrera Rodríguez and Rivas García 2003; Terreros 2003). In Tlatelolco, based on ethnohistoric documents and maps, the downtown area illustrated how Indigenous and Spanish construction materials and styles converged. The Códice de Tlatelolco (Berlin and Barlow 1980; Flores Marini 1968, 51), dating to ca. 1575–1581, depicts the Indigenous market and the location of the foundations of the Franciscan church of Santiago (finished in 1609), and adjacent to the main temple is the Colegio Imperial de la Santa Cruz, dated to 1536 and dedicated to the education of the children of Indigenous aristocrats for their acculturation. All buildings were made with masonry walls. The Tecpan or town hall had Renaissance architectural features, and the Spanish authorities met in this building. This hall is described as A large reception house, with 19 rooms and 3 or 4 windows in the large rooms. This house would be destined to receive any viceroy or illustrious visitant. It should face south with 16 or 17 portals (inter-communal sections). . . . Another reception house (inn) to the north, with 12 pieces, a large one, where the rest of the lords who came from afar stayed, and in a corner would be the office of the notaries. (Flores Marini 1968, 51) A mid-sixteenth-century period masonry and mud “box” or cistern was excavated in 2002 between the Convento de Santiago and the Colegio de Santa Cruz. Water entered it and subsequently ran toward the east, to the tecpan, where it supplied its occupants and watered the royal orchards. The interior walls were covered with stucco, and over the north, west, and south walls surrounding the internal water pool, they were covered with fresco paintings depicting daily life scenes and traditional Indigenous activities carried out in the lacustrine landscape of the Valley of Mexico (Guilliem Arroyo 2007).

Postconquest food and ceramics in the Valley of Mexico Bernal Díaz del Castillo describes how, when the conquerors met the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma, he ordered his house steward to provide . . . the necessary provisions, consisting in maize [corn], fowls [probably turkey or duck], and fruits, and also grass for our horses; to furnish women to grind our corn with stones [metates], and bake the [corn] bread. (Díaz del Castillo 1844, 224) 217

Patricia Fournier García

Actually, corn, beans, and chili peppers were staple crops all over Mesoamerica, and basic in the pre-Columbian diet. There were diferent varieties of grains, and corn soaked in a mineral lime water was ground on metates, a woman’s daily task, and prepared in a dough, and then—in the case of “corn bread” or tortillas—cooked on a comal or pottery griddle, which was also used to toast amaranth, chili peppers, pumpkin seeds, or mushrooms, among other foods. Tamales were also made with this dough steamed in a corn husk, often covered with a spice sauce. Corn gruel (mazamorra or atole) is a drink made with the dough, water, and spices and, for the aristocrats, with the addition of cocoa. Fish, also important in the Mediterranean diet, and salt were abundant in the aquatic landscape of the Valley of Mexico, and fish from the Gulf of Mexico were also available smoked or salted (Ortiz de Montellano 1990). Stone mortars and pottery molcajetes were used to grind sauce ingredients, mainly peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, and even peanuts. Squash and pumpkins were also grown and widely consumed boiled (e.g., Mijares 1993). The Aztec diet was adequate in protein and vitamins as a result of the combination of corn, beans, squash, chili peppers, and tomatoes. Game was not an important part of the diet, but dogs such as the xoloitzcuintli were raised, as were turkeys, while deer, peccary, and other mammals were hunted. Fat to cook was not used, and most food was roasted or boiled. Pastes made from algae and insects were part of the aquatic sources of protein (Ortiz de Montellano 1990). Alcoholic beverages were mostly prohibited or drunk exclusively during religious festivities. The most important was fermented agave sap or pulque (Kepecs et al. 2018). Distillation was not a known process. The conquerors and their descendants did not like most of the Aztec diet, and they “believed that they would not suffer from the alien climate and unfamiliar heavens of the Indies if they ate European food” (Earle 2012, 5). Yet supplies from Europe or even Cuba were not readily available, and they had to conform. They missed dairy products, olive oil, and wine but especially bread and meat. A few years after the conquest, their farm laborers were able to grow wheat to bake bread and to raise cattle, pigs, chickens, and different domestic animals that customarily were used for food in Spain (e.g., Alexander et al. 2015; Mijares 1993). However, many imports from Spain were still required to supplement the conquerors’ diet. Olive oil and wine remained imports. There are a number of archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological reports of foods consumed in Mexico-Tenochtitlan, but no information from Tlatelolco is available except that, according to our observations, dogs and horses were found in postconquest deposits. Horses, being relatively rare and expensive, were not likely to have been a part of the diet. Clams were collected in the lakes and rivers of the Valley of Mexico. Fish included sea bass from the coast (Barrera Huerta et al. 2017; Guzmán and Polaco 2003). Wild boar was hunted. Species introduced include domestic animals such as sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, and horses and some types of dogs. Other species introduced include chickens (Montúfar López and Valentín Maldonado 1998; Valentín Maldonado 2003). Archaeobotanical samples studied consist of cactus (nopal), prickly pear, amaranth, epazote (Dysphania ambrosioides) used as a seasoning, squash or pumpkin, chili pepper, tomato, tomatillo, sweet calabash, mamey sapote, parsley, black cherry or capulín (Prunus capuli), and introduced peaches were also found (Montúfar López and Valentín Maldonado 1998).

Hybrid pottery and imports During the early colonial period, the inhabitants of Mexico City utilized a large variety of ceramic categories for food preparation, storage, and serving (Figure 14.2). Mold-made Indigenous burnished red slipped ceramics, based on pre-Hispanic traditions, were widely accepted by the conquerors and their descendants and by the Native aristocracy. The ceramic inventory 218

Conquest and accommodation

Figure 14.2 From left to right, top to bottom: Ceramic samples from la Traza and Tlatelolco, early colonial period. Glazed tripod molcajete (watercolor courtesy of Cuauhtémoc Domínguez); red tripod plate; majolica bowl, Fig Springs Polychrome bowl; late Wanli (transitional period) blue-on-white dish. Source: Photos by Patricia Fournier García.

also included lead-glazed and coarse earthenware, which form the bulk of our archaeological collections (e.g. Charlton et al. 2007). In Tlatelolco and other Indian towns, red wares were widely consumed, although mold-made burnished orange wares were more popular, occasionally with a lead-glazed surface finish, a technique Indigenous potters learned easily just a few years after the conquest. These represent clear evidence of hybrid technologies, albeit the use of the potter’s wheel was uncommon. It is interesting to note that European forms, such as candle holders and chamber pots, glazed or unglazed, were wheel-made, evidence that Native potters were not familiar with these forms. Glazed or unglazed shipping containers made in Andalucia to transport olive oil, olives, vinegar, and wine, among other things, found their way as trash into archaeological deposits (Pasinski and Fournier García 2014). The conquerors and their descendants yearned for the finest wares produced and used in Europe at that time, and Mediterranean red wares that were considered fine pottery made in Portugal, in the Estremoz region and probably in the Extremadura region of Spain, were among the objects they wanted. A Codex and ethnohistorical sources attest to 219

Patricia Fournier García

the Indigenous production of red ware vessels and its consumption among the “generation of the conquest,” meaning the offspring of the conquerors (Charlton and Fournier García 2010). Imported majolicas made in Andalucia, Castile, and ceramic centers in Italy were common during this period as status symbols, although the supply was often erratic. Consumers wanted majolica, and potters from Talavera and Seville requested and paid for the permits the Spanish authorities of the empire required to travel and settle in Mexico, to work their crafts and fill the demand (Gómez et al. 2001). These potters of “white ware” were able to almost perfectly recreate and copy Spanish majolica, which is fairly abundant in archaeological secondary contexts within the traza of central Mexico-Tenochtitlan and in the nunnery of San Jerónimo but almost nonexistent in sixteenth-century deposits in Tlatelolco, although it appears in low frequencies in later periods. Around 1574, once a trade route between the Philippines and the port of Acapulco was established, the fine ceramics available in New Spain were enriched with exotic Chinese porcelains of the late Ming dynasty that only wealthy people were able to afford (Fournier García 2014). We must emphasize that even the wealthiest households located in the traza, with many servants and slaves, required Indigenous ceramics for common household use including cooking jars and casseroles, tortilla griddles, grinding tripod plates or molcajetes, pitchers, goblets, different kinds of bowls and plates, plain or decorated, and wash basins of both red and orange wares. Most decorative designs were Indigenous and preconquest in style, but some introduced patterns were beginning to appear.

Final comments Many of the descendants of the conquerors squandered their families’ fortunes, some became conquerors themselves and headed to western and northern lands, and others became miners or merchants who accumulated great fortunes. All of them took advantage of Indigenous labor, and some had enslaved Africans, but the first years after the arrival of Cortés in the Valley of Mexico reshaped the economy and all power relations and destroyed the religious system, which was replaced by the Catholic faith, impacting even the Indigenous aristocracy. All of this occurred within the milieu of colonization, a colonization that extended to the technological and imaginary dimensions of culture. We must emphasize that in any colonial context, individuals, the colonized and the colonizers, struggle for power and negotiate to control or adapt to economic transformations that take place. Even if they are resilient, the construction or modification of social identities is created by negotiations between the Indigenous population and the colonizers. Traditions were reconfirmed or disappeared, and new standards were introduced, but some precolonial elements persisted in such a context (Silliman 2005). In the case of the Valley of Mexico and most of Mexico, many preconquest traditions such as food and diet persist in a hybrid form, even today. As Zeitlin and her collaborators state (2018, 121), the appearance of related European materials in the archaeological record can be assumed to mark the socio-ethnic and socioeconomic position of the consumers, especially when material correlates are supplements to ethnohistorical sources or architectural and other remains. But status, like gender roles and ethnicity, could be renegotiated by individuals during their lifetimes, and the cumulative footprint of these behaviors in the archaeological record may reveal patterns otherwise only hinted at in the documentary record. The postconquest Valley of Mexico illustrates how Aztec cities were cities in transformation. New urban landscapes based on pre-Hispanic urbanism were formed under the conquerors’ rule and were adapted and remodeled to the new conditions imposed by the new 220

Conquest and accommodation

rulers. These changes were shaped by political, economic, and cultural processes during the colonial period, with few changes after the 1810 War of Independence. Several centuries after the conquest of Mexico, the colonization effects continue, and during the twentieth century Mexico City (once Mexico-Tenochtitlan) and Tlatelolco as well as Indian towns have merged into a huge city. The lacustrine environment has been degraded by cultural and natural processes, and only small sections of Lake Xochimilco and Lake Zumpango still exist, threatened by corrupt politicians and many foreign real estate companies, still looting a country and its resources. Other societies that were colonized by the Spanish and the Portuguese experienced similarly drastic changes, as demonstrated by recent case studies (Funari and Senatore 2015). The Valley of Mexico, in this sense, is not a unique case for the archaeology of colonialism in the Americas. On the eve of the Spanish arrival to North and South America, the Aztecs may be compared to the Inka in their social and economic complexity. In the Andean area, rich in gold and silver, the Cusco region was the heartland of the Inka empire, a pluralistic state. After more than three centuries of expansion, economic centralization, and resettlement of populations as a means to control them to extract tribute, the Inka fell to the Spanish army led by Francisco Pizarro in 1532 (e.g., Covey 2008). Postconquest developments were similar in the Inka realm to those in the Valley of Mexico, but the areas were environmentally different, as were the resources available, impacting the colonial social and economic strategies. The Viceroyalty of Peru and New Spain were the most important and wealthy Spanish territories in the Americas, and colonial social developmental trajectories were analogous for European settlers and Indigenous nobility. Two recently published editions of the Boletín de Arqueología of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Perú contained papers illustrating the wide variety of topics that scholars are studying for the Andean area after the Spanish invasion, including colonialism (e.g., VanValkenburgh et al. 2016; Weaver et al. 2016). In this way, comparative archaeological research can illuminate the commonalities of conquest and accommodation in various colonial contexts.

References cited Alexander, Michelle M., Christopher M. Gerrard, Alejandra Gutiérrez, and Andrew R. Millard. 2015. “Diet, Society, and Economy in Late Medieval Spain: Stable Isotope Evidence from Muslims and Christians from Gandía, Valencia.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 156: 263–273. Barrera Huerta, Alan, Edsel Robles Martínez, and Norma Valentín. 2017. “Análisis de hueso animal procedente de un contexto Colonial Temprano.” In Desenterrando fragmentos de historia. Siglos XVI al XIX, coordinated by Ma. de Lourdes López Camacho, 325–340. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Barrera Rodríguez, Raúl, and Flor M. Rivas García. 2003. “Rescate arqueológico en el inmueble de la Librería Porrúa, Argentina y Justo Sierra. 155–170.” In Excavaciones del Programa de Arqueología Urbana, coordinated by Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, 155–170. México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Berlin, Heinrich, and Robert H. Barlow, compilers. 1980. Anales de Tlatelolco y Códice de Tlatelolco. México, D.F.: Ediciones Rafael Porrúa, S.A. Bernard, Carmen, and Serge Gruzinski. 1996. Historia del nuevo mundo, del descubrimiento a la conquista. La experiencia europea 1492–1550. México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Broda, Johanna. 1979. “Las comunidades indígenas y las formas de extracción del excedente: Época prehispánica y colonial.” In Ensayos sobre el desarrollo ecónomico de México y América Latina (1500–1975), edited by Enrique Florescano, 54–92. México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Charlton, Thomas H. 1979. “Historical Archaeology in the Valley of Mexico.” In Proceedings of the XLII International Congress of Americanists, VIII, 21–33. Paris, France: International Congress of Americanists.

221

Patricia Fournier García Charlton, Thomas H. 1986. “Socioeconomic Dimensions of Urban-Rural Relations in the Colonial Period Basin of Mexico.” In Ethnohistory, Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians, Vol. 4, edited by Ronald Spores, 123–133. Austin: University of Texas Press. Charlton, Thomas H., Cynthia Otis Charlton, and Patricia Fournier García. 2007. “La cerámica del periodo Colonial Temprano en la cuenca de México: Permanencia y cambio.” In La producción alfarera en el México antiguo, Vol. V, edited by Leonor Merino, and Angel García Cook, 429–496. México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Charlton, Thomas H., and Patricia Fournier García. 1993. “Urban and Rural Dimensions of the Contact Period. Central Mexico, 1521–1620.” In Ethnohistory and Archaeology: Approaches to Postcontact Change in the Americas, edited by J. Daniel Rogers, and Samuel M. Wilson, 201–220. New York: Plenum Press. Charlton, Thomas H., and Patricia Fournier García. 1994. “Tlatelolco and La Traza: Divergent routes after the Conquest.” Paper presented at the 1994 Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, Vancouver, Canada. Charlton, Thomas H., and Patricia Fournier García. 2008. “Geographic Overviews, The Americas (Central): Historical Archaeology in Mexico.” In Encyclopedia of Archaeology, Vol. 1, edited by Deborah Pearsall, 181–192. New York: Academic Press. Charlton, Thomas H., and Patricia Fournier García. 2010. “Pots and Plots. The Multiple Roles of Early Colonial Red Wares in the Basin of Mexico (Identity, Resistance, Negotiation, Accommodation, Aesthetic Creativity, or Just Plain Economics?).” In Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Melissa S. Murphy, 127–148. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Charlton, Thomas H., Patricia Fournier García, and Cynthia L. Otis Charlton. 2005. “The Basin of Mexico A.D. 1450–1620: Archaeological Dimensions.” In The Postclassic to Spanish-Era Transition in Mesoamerica: Archaeological Perspectives, edited by Susan Kepecs, and Rani T. Alexander, 49–63. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Cervantes De Salazar, Francisco. 1978. México en 1554 y Túmulo Imperial. “Sepan Cuántos . . .” Núm. 25. México, D.F.: Editorial Porrúa, S.A. Cope, Douglas R. 1994. The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Cortés, Hernán. 1960. Cartas de Relación. México, D.F.: Editorial Porrúa, S.A. Covey, Alan R. 2008. “The Inca Empire.” In The Handbook of South American Archaeology, edited by Helaine Silverman, and William H. Isbell, 809–830. New York: Springer. Cruz Rodríguez, Maria Soledad. 1991. “La emergencia de una ciudad novohispana. La ciudad de México en el siglo XVII.” In Espacios de mestizaje cultural. III Anuario conmemorativo del V centenario de la llegada de España a América, 89–115. México, D.F.: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. 1844. The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo: Volumes 1 and 2. London: J. Hatchard and Son. Domínguez Ortiz, Antonio, and Bernard Vincent. 1979. Historia de los moriscos. Vida y tragedia de una minoría. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Earle, Rebecca. 2012. The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race, and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Esquivel, Beatriz. 2019. “El último descubrimiento azteca enterrado debajo del centro histórico.” https://culturacolectiva.com/historia/descubrimiento-casa-construida-por-mexicas-centro-historico. Accessed August 19, 2019. Flores Marini, Carlos. 1968. “El Tecpan de Tlatelolco.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 10 (37): 49–54. Fournier García, Patricia. 1990. Evidencias arqueológicas de la importación de cerámica en México, con base en los materiales del ex-convento de San Jerónimo. Colección Científica 213. México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Fournier García, Patricia. 1998. “Tendencias de consumo y diferencias socioétnicas en el Valle de México: Contraste entre Tlatelolco y la ciudad de México durante los periodos colonial y republicano.” In Primer Congreso Nacional de Arqueología Histórica. Memoria, coordinated by Enrique Fernández, and Susana Gómez, 448–457. México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Fournier García, Patricia. 2014. “De China a la Nueva España: la comercialización y consumo de la porcelana Ming tardía en el registro arqueológico y documental.” In Las contribuciones arqueológicas en la formación de la historia colonial. Memoria del Primer Coloquio de Arqueología Histórica, coordinated by María de Lourdes López Camacho, 557–576. México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

222

Conquest and accommodation Fournier García, Patricia. 2018. “Material Culture, Status, and Identity in Postindependence Central Mexico: Urban and Rural Dimensions.” In Colonial and Postcolonial Change in Mesoamerica: Archaeology as Historical Anthropology, edited by Rani T. Alexander and Susan Kepecs, 161–182. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Fournier García, Patricia, and Thomas H. Charlton. 1998. “Tendencias de consumo y diferencias socioétnicas en el Valle de México: Contraste entre Tlatelolco y la ciudad de México durante los periodos colonial y republicano.” In Primer Congreso Nacional de Arqueología Histórica. Memoria, coordinated by Enrique Fernández and Susana Gómez, 448–457. México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Fournier García, Patricia, and Thomas H. Charlton. 2008. “Negritos y Pardos: Alfareros y vasijas asociados con la población afroamericana en la capital de la Nueva España.” In Perspectivas de la Investigación Arqueológica, Vol. III, coordinated by Fernando López Aguilar, Walburga Wiesheu, and Patricia Fournier García, 201–234. México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Programa para el Mejoramiento del Profesorado, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Funari, Pedro Paulo A., and Maria Ximena Senatore, eds. 2015. Archaeology of Culture Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America. New York: Springer. Gage, Thomas. 1838. Nueva Relación que contiene los Viajes de Tomas Gage en la Nueva España. Tomo Primero. Paris: Librería de la Rosa. García-Abasolo, Antonio Francisco. 1982. “La expansión mexicana hacia el Pacífico: La primera colonización de Filipinas (1570–1580).” Historia Mexicana 32 (1): 55–88. García Martínez, Bernardo. 1969. El Marquesado del Valle, Tres siglos de régimen señorial en Nueva España. Mexico: El Colegio de México. Gibson, Charles. 1964. The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519– 1810. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gómez, Pastor, Tony Pansinski, and Patricia Fournier García. 2001. “Transferencia Tecnológica y Filiación Étnica: El Caso de los Loceros Novohispanos del Siglo XVI.” Amerística 7: 33–66. Grunberg, Bernard. 1994. “The Origins of the Conquistadores of Mexico City.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 74 (2): 259–283. Guilliem Arroyo, Salvador. 2007. “La caja de agua del Imperial Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco. Pintura mural de los albores novohispanos.” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 38: 15–32. Guzmán, Ana Fabiola, and Óscar Polaco. 2003. “El consumo de peces en una casa del siglo xvi en la Ciudad de México.” In Excavaciones del Programa de Arqueología Urbana, coordinated by Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, 39–73. México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Kepecs, Susan, Patricia Fournier García, Rani Alexander, and Cynthia Otis Charlton. 2018. “Commodities Production and Technological Change. In Colonial and Postcolonial Change in Mesoamerica: Archaeology as Historical Anthropology, edited by Rani T. Alexander, and Susan Kepecs, 29–53. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Kubler, George. 1982. Arquitectura mexicana del siglo XVI. México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Lockhart, James. 1992. The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Sociocultural and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. López Cervantes, Gonzalo. 1982. “Informe preliminar sobre los materiales coloniales.” In El Templo Mayor: Excavaciones y Estudios, coordinated by Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, 255–282. México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Maldonado López, Celia. 1988. La Ciudad de México en el siglo XVII. Colección: Distrito Federal 21. México, D.F.: Departamento del Distrito Federal. Martínez, José Luis. 1990. Hernán Cortés. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Matos Moctezuma, Eduardo (coordinator). 2003. Excavaciones del Programa de Arqueología Urbana. Colección Científica 452. México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Mauleón, Héctor de. 2016. “Manzanares 25.” Nexos. www.nexos.com.mx/?p=29405. Accessed August 19, 2019. Mijares, Ivonne. 1993. Mestizaje alimentario. El abasto en la ciudad de México en el siglo XVI. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Mondragón Barrios, Lourdes. 2010. “La actividad comercial del siglo XVI y la población de origen africano en México.” In ¿Dónde están? Investigaciones sobre afromexicanos, coordinated by Emiliano Gallaga Murrieta, 11–26. México, D.F.: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Universidad de Ciencias y Artes de Chiapas.

223

Patricia Fournier García Montúfar López, Aurora, and Norma Valentín Maldonado. 1998. “Estudio arqueobiológico de los sedimentos del subsuelo en el edificio Real Seminario de Minas, 1772, México, D.F.” Revista Arqueología 20: 98–113. Moreno Toscano, Alejandra. 1976. “El Siglo de la Conquista.” In Historia General de México, Vol. 2, 1–81. México, D.F.: El Colegio de México. Orozco y Berra, Manuel. 1853. “Noticia histórica de la conjuración del Marqués del Valle. Años de 1565–1568. Formada en vista de nuevos documentos originales y seguida de un extracto de los mismos documentos.” In Documentos. M. Orozco y Berra, 1–502. México, D.F.: Tipografía de R. Rafael. Ortiz de Montellano, Bernard. 1990. Aztec Medicine, Health, and Nutrition. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University. Pasinski, Tony, and Patricia Fournier García. 2014. “Ceramics: The Ibero-American Shipping Container.” In Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, edited by Claire Smith, 1344–1352. New York: Springer. Qamber, Rukhsana. 2006. “Inquisition Proceedings against Muslims in 16th Century Latin America.” Islamic Studies 45 (1): 21–57. Ricard, Robert. 1986. La conquista espiritual de México. México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Rodríguez-Alegría, Enrique. 2002. “Food, Eating, and Objects of Power: Class Stratification and Ceramic Production and Consumption in Colonial Mexico.” PhD Dissertation, University of Chicago. Rodríguez-Alegría, Enrique. 2005. “Eating Like an Indian.” Current Anthropology 46: 551–573. Rodríguez-Alegría, Enrique. 2016. “The Material Worlds of Colonizers in New Spain.” In Archaeologies of Early Modern Spanish Colonialism, edited by Sandra Montón-Subías, María Cruz Berrocal, and Apen Ruíz Martínez, 39–59. Chan: Springer. Rubial García, Antonio. 2014. “Hernán Cortés y los religiosos.” Arqueología Mexicana 21 (27): 26–36. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005. “Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America.” American Antiquity 70 (1): 55–74. Terreros Espinosa, Eladio. 2003. “Excavaciones en el predio de Donceles 97 del centro histórico de la Ciudad de México.” In Excavaciones del Programa de Arqueología Urbana, coordinated by Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, 239–255. Colección Científica 452. México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Valentín Maldonado, Norma. 2003. “Análisis del material zoológico.” In Excavaciones del Programa de Arqueología Urbana, edited by Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, 27–37. México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Valero de García de Lascurain, Ana R. 1991. Solares y conquistadores. Orígenes de la propiedad en la ciudad de México. México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. VanValkenburgh, Parker, Zachary Chase, Abel Traslaviña, and Brendan J. M. Weaver. 2016. “Arqueología histórica en el Perú: posibilidades y perspectivas.” Boletín de Arqueología PUCP 20: 5–24. Vetancurt, Agustín de. 1697. Chronica de la Provincia del Santo Evangelio de Mexico. Cuarta Parte del Teatro Mexicano de los sucessos religiosos. México: Doña Maria de Benavides Viuda de Juan de Rivera. Weaver, Brendan J. M., Abel Traslaviña, Parker VanValkenburgh, and Zachary J. Chase. 2016. “Arqueología histórica en el Perú: la sociedad andina en la transición económica, política y social.” Boletín de Arqueología PUCP 21:5–12. Weckmann, Luís. 1983. La herencia medieval de México. México, D.F.: El Colegio de México. Wilson, Douglas C. 1994. “Identification and Assessment of Secondary Refuse Aggregates.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 1 (1): 41–68. Zeitlin, Judith, Patricia Fournier García, Joel Palka, and Janine Gasco. 2018. “Sociocultural Identities.” In Colonial and Postcolonial Change in Mesoamerica: Archaeology as Historical Anthropology, edited by Rani T. Alexander, and Susan Kepecs, 119–138. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

224

PART III

Archaeological explorations of Native-lived colonialisms

15 SOCIAL NETWORKS AND COLONIAL ADAPTATION IN THE CARIBBEAN Jorge Ulloa Hung, Roberto Valcárcel Rojas, Andrzej T. Antczak, Marlieke Ernst, Menno L.P. Hoogland, and Corinne L. Hofman

Introduction At present, the most iconic impression of the Caribbean comes from social media and marketing. In both, the region is presented as a tropical paradise where a broad sense of ludic and exotic experiences prevail (Cunin 2006; Prats 2006). This perception of the Caribbean downplays its historical complexity and prioritizes its contemplation rather than its understanding. Caribbean heritage is perceived as pleasant and straightforward. However, the perspectives of some social groups who played a crucial role in the making of this heritage are unknown or manipulated in national, regional, and global historical narratives (Hofman and Ulloa Hung 2019). From an anthropological perspective, this reductionism of the Caribbean is related to the idea of cultural area (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952; Murdock 1951; Willey 1971, 3–5), a heuristic tool that considers the Caribbean as a territory of specific and defined features in an ecological, historical, geographical, or ethnic sense. This has fostered a wide variety of approaches to try to delimit or understand the region (Gaztambide 2006; Geurds and van Broekhoven 2010; Horowitz 1971; Knight and Palmer 1989; Mintz 1971; Steward 1948; Sued Badillo 1992; Wilson 2007). Lately, however, emphasis has been increasingly laid on its diversity and complexity, and the dynamic sociocultural interactions (Curet and Hauser 2011; Hofman et al. 2010; Meniketti 2008; Rodríguez Ramos 2010). The extensive social networks that existed prior to European invasion were used, transformed, adapted, contracted, expanded, or discarded according to diverse purposes during the colonial era (Hofman and Carlin 2010; Hofman et al. 2014; Mol 2014; Rodríguez Ramos and Pagán-Jiménez 2006; Rodríguez Ramos 2011; Valcárcel Rojas et al. 2013). From a longue durée historical perspective, the Caribbean as a space of interactions is constantly redefined (Braudel 1958; Hofman 2019; Mintz 1977). Through social networks, the Caribbean materializes its extensions and contractions, the interaction of different social and ethnic groups, and the creation of new identities (Hofman and Carlin 2010; Valcárcel Rojas et al. 2014). In this sense, to understand the deep history of the Caribbean means to break with any divide that excludes any particular social or ethnic group. Archaeology has tried to overcome this by studying the long-term developments of social networks and Indigenous interactions, by integrating the Caribbean into the so-called world system 227

Jorge Ulloa Hung et al.

through the study of the different colonial processes (Hofman 2019; Meniketti 2008), and by developing research that trespasses the historical divide (Hofman and Ulloa Hung 2019; Valcárcel Rojas 2016a). Knowledge of precolonial structures and the functioning of Indigenous socioeconomic processes is increasingly essential as historical archaeologists document the relevance of these factors in the shaping of colonization processes (Voss 2015, 359). The focus on the agency of Indigenous people or other subjugated populations to adapt, resist, or survive in different colonial situations in the Americas creates an alternative to understand miscellaneous models of colonialism and to compare these processes with other regions of the world (De Corse 2019; Funari and Senatore 2015; Hofman and Keehnen 2019). In the Caribbean, these processes translate in an outstanding material representation (Hofman and Keehnen 2019). Cultural transformation is related to a commodification and exploitation of local resources and peoples, the introduction of new technologies and botanical and animal species, the collection of tributes, and landscape transformations through the construction of ports, fortresses, routes, outposts, villages, etc. (Antczak et al. 2019; Barrera 2002; CorcoranTadd et al. 2021; Deagan and Cruxent 2002; Hofman et al. 2018; Ulloa Hung and Sonnemann 2017, Woodward 2011). Many of these colonial strategies, however, had a transitory or ephemeral character, and their socio-material consequences have been marginally tackled in the grand narratives on the Caribbean (Kulstad-González 2019). The abandonment, modification, or improvement of colonial strategies due to administrative changes, interests of colonial enterprise, reactions of local populations, or resource availability highlight its complexity, diversity, and variations in a spatial and chronological sense. These must all be understood in a context of experimentation, innovation, social interactions, and transformation of all the social actors involved (Deagan 2002; Stevens-Arroyo 1993). This means that diverse strategies of adaptation to the colonial processes prevail over the idea of binary opposition or acculturation exemplified by the traditional historical narratives. It also helps to explain Indigenous resilience in current Caribbean societies (Hofman et al. 2020). This chapter highlights the role of Indigenous communities and their social networks in early processes of adaptation, exploitation, and colonial extraction in the Caribbean, as well as in the regional and global trade circuits created from these. Case studies of Hispaniola, Cuba, and Cubagua, all significant places in the early European colonization history of the Caribbean, are used as illustrations (Figure 15.1). Indigenous social networks in these places were crucial for access to gold and pearls. At the same time, these networks served as a tool in the Spanish settlement processes, as well as in the organization of the exploitation of the Caribbean landscapes and their populations through enslavement and the encomienda system. The chapter also considers the transformation of Indigenous peoples in the gestation of new cultures and identities and critically analyzes historical information on the initial phases of colonization. The aim is to implement a diachronic perspective of social interactions, break with the historical divide, and emphasize the plurality of the processes of interaction, adaptation, and colonial transformation that shaped the present-day Caribbean.

Social networks and diversity in the Indigenous pre-colonial universe Ideas about precolonial social networks and interaction spheres in the Caribbean were long marked by the dichotomous view of colonial historical sources (Fernández de Oviedo 1851 vol. 1; Las Casas 1875 vol. 2; Mártyr Anglería 1964 vol. 1). Through them, Indigenous societies were considered ethnic or isolated population blocks (Arawaks/Indios/Taino/Caribs) characterized by conflict and opposition, and their networks and social interactions limited to groups of islands (the Lesser Antilles or the Greater Antilles) or regions within these (Rouse 1992). 228

Social networks and colonial adaptation

Figure 15.1 Map of the Caribbean with case study areas. Source: Created by Menno L.P. Hoogland.

In recent decades, archaeological research has highlighted the precolonial Caribbean as a mosaic of cultures (Wilson 1993) with structured social networks and relationships of a different nature (e.g. Berman 2011; Cooper et al. 2006; Hofman et al. 2007, 2010, 2011; Mol 2014; Keegan and Hofman 2017). Through these relationships, Indigenous populations were able to create and sustain alliances, exchanges, confrontations, and conflicts. The differential access to resources and raw materials was partly a consequence of the geographic, geological, and environmental diversity of the Caribbean. For its precolonial inhabitants, this may have been the stimulus to maintain social relationships and develop interisland exchange networks (Hofman et al. 2007, Hofman and Hoogland 2011). The existence of such networks was facilitated by the intervisibility between most of the smaller and higher islands, the arc shape of the Antilles, climatic fluctuations, and microclimates (Cooper and Peros 2010). This was reinforced by technological skills, navigational experience, and knowledge of marine currents, channels, winds, routes, paths, and the best seasons to navigate or travel (Callaghan 2011; Fitzpatrick 2013; Slayton 2018). Social networks impacted the composition and materiality of Indigenous communities through the movement of peoples, animals, plants, objects and ideas (Hofman et al. 2011; Knippenberg 2006; Laffoon et al. 2014; Mol 2011; Pagán-Jiménez 2013; Valcárcel Rojas and Martinón-Torres 2013). The flow of relationships between different geographical and cultural spaces contributed to the formation of homogeneity and diversity in settlement pattern and organization, subsistence practices, adornments, funerary practices, and belief systems, among other practices. It also led to the creation of a mixed set of sociocultural practices and lifestyles within Caribbean landscapes (Hofman 2019; Ulloa Hung 2014). In summary, Indigenous networks were the result of social relationships generated by the continuous movement of individuals or groups with a wide range of motives (environmental, 229

Jorge Ulloa Hung et al.

sociopolitical, economic, ideological, and other). This movement of peoples also brought about widespread circulation of ideas and objects. These networks grew, contracted, merged, or were separated through time and revealed different rhythms of connection between the islands and between the islands and the continent (Hofman et al. 2007, 2011; Hofman et al. 2010; Rodríguez Ramos 2010).

Social networks, European invasion, and the construction of the colonial world At the time of the European colonial invasion, Caribbean Indigenous networks were used, manipulated, extended, changed, reinforced, interrupted, and incorporated to serve colonial purposes (Amodio 1991; Hofman 2019; Hofman et al. 2014; Samson and Cooper 2015; Valcárcel Rojas et al. 2013). The categorization of Indigenous peoples (peaceful Indians vs. warlike Indians) derived from European cultural conceptions and Indigenous reactions to colonization. As a result, it became one of the factors involved in reinforcing, transforming, or cutting some of these social networks. This was also linked to the availability of resources, the needs for mobility or transportation, and the administrative or extractive policy implemented at different times and by different colonial powers (Valcárcel Rojas and Ulloa Hung 2018). The colonial use and transformation of existing social networks had a programmatic character, with a purpose to modify the Indigenous universe. At the same time, it had a contingent character linked to different processes of exploration, conquest, and colonization tied to new local, regional, or global commercial networks born from the extractive economic processes and colonial adaptation. In these networks, experiences, knowledge, material culture, and Indigenous peoples as individuals played a transcendental role (Hofman 2019; Keehnen et al. 2019; Ulloa Hung and Valcárcel Rojas 2016; Valcárcel Rojas 2016b). These peoples sustained the initial colonial settlement and provided knowledge and experience of the environment and its resources. They were also the subjects in a trial run of the methods and strategies of social domination and control to be used in other regions of the Americas (Hofman et al. 2018; Valcárcel Rojas and Ulloa Hung 2018). Although Indigenous people from the Greater Antilles were initially sent to Spain to be sold as slaves, colonists on those islands also imported enslaved people, given the demand for labor in mining and agriculture and the growing disappearance of the local Native population (Deive 1995). The Indigenous slave trade mobility focused on different regions and was nuanced by economic and political ties, geographical proximity, and dynamics of exploration, conquest, and colonization (Mira Caballos 2009; Otte 1977; Saco 2006). It created new colonial routes and eliminated, transformed, or used many of the established Indigenous social networks (Hofman et al. 2018). The European settlers of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico concentrated their search for potential slaves on the Lesser Antilles, the Bahamas, and Tierra Firme, while the Spanish settlers on Cuba focused their slave raids on Florida, Colombia, Yucatan, Pánuco, and the Guanajas Islands along the coasts of present-day Honduras (Anderson-Córdova 2017; Valcárcel Rojas et al. 2020). On islands such as Margarita, Coche, and particularly Cubagua, the exploitation of the pearl banks generated a significant demand for Indigenous slaves that were brought in from regions off the South American coast and the Bahamas (Dominguez-Torres 2015). The town of Nueva Cádiz de Cubagua became a nexus in the Caribbean slave trade as well as the place from which enslaved Indigenous peoples were sent to the Greater Antilles (Mira Caballos 1997, 281–282). Enslaved Indigenous people became a highly sought-after commodity and prized property. In order to justify their capture and enslavement, intentional confrontations were instigated. This satisfied the legal requirement for enslavement (Sued Badillo 1992, 1995). The lack of gold or other resources considered of interest by the Spaniards in some islands was also used to justify the 230

Social networks and colonial adaptation

forced mobility of Caribbean populations to other areas. The inhabitants of these islands, declared Islas inútiles by royal decree, were taken as slaves or servants (naborias). The latter category was specifically used for people from the Lucayos or Bahamas and the “Islands of the Giants” (Aruba, Curacao, and Bonaire). Although the naborias could not be sold, they were subjected to similar living and working conditions as the enslaved (Mira Caballos 2009, 61, 298–300). The need to organize the exploitation of Indigenous peoples in a manner compatible with economic interests and the ideological justification of the colonial actions of the Spanish Crown led to the implementation of the encomienda system (Mira Caballos 1997, 78). It meant the assignment (repartimiento) of a group of people or Indigenous villages to a Spanish settler (encomendero) to work for free for several months of the year. The encomienda was established in Hispaniola in 1505, Puerto Rico in 1509, and in 1513 and 1515 in Cuba and Jamaica, respectively (Mira Caballos 1997, 77–93; Fernandez Méndez 1966). It considered the Indigenous individual as a free individual and vassal of the king but a person who would be educated in terms of religion and “civilization.” The encomienda had to allow the coexistence and regulation of the treatment of the Indigenous people by the Spaniards in order to avoid their return to old customs (Mira Caballos 1997, 101). In compensation for their instruction, under Spanish tutelage, the Indigenous people had to pay with their labor (Arranz Márquez 1991, 9–10; Castañeda Delgado 1971). However, the access and distribution of Indigenous people in encomiendas were dependent on colonial political dynamics. The fear of loss of the assigned population generated their intensive exploitation and was a significant factor in the Indigenous demographic decline. In fact, the treatment of Indigenous encomendados was similar to the enslaved, but, in contrast, encomendados could not be sold, and they had the right to a rest period once they fulfilled their labor obligations, during which they were allowed to return to their villages (Muro Orejón 1956).

Social networks, gold, and encomiendas in Hispaniola Hispaniola was the Caribbean island where colonial strategies were initiated and tested. During Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, relations and exchanges with local populations aimed to obtain information on gold, geography, forms of political organization, and customs. This information outlined a vision and categorization of the Caribbean populations and fostered social links that allowed the establishment of a first colony (Hofman et al. 2018). This trial colonization was mediated by the responses of the local population, the expectations regarding gold, and the Iberian experiences of colonization in other regions of the world (e.g., Reconquest of Granada in Spain, Africa, and Canary Islands) (Deagan 2003; Moreno del Río 2012; Stevens-Arroyo 1993). In that sense, Hispaniola during the initial period of colonial contact, with exchange relations and individual autonomy of the Indigenous peoples, transitioned into a situation of domination, with the disarticulation of local culture and society (Valcárcel Rojas 2019b). The manipulation of the existing social networks began in earnest during Columbus’s second voyage in 1493, when the Spaniards raided the interiors of the island of Hispaniola and developed a transport route for the extraction of gold and other resources (Corcoran-Tadd et al. 2021). This involved creating an outpost, La Isabela, the first Spanish town in the Caribbean. Expeditions to the Cibao valley, the region of gold, expedited the creation of a second colonial enclave, the fortress of Santo Tomás (Las Casas 1875 vol. 2, 28–29, 30–35; León Guerrero 2000, 300–318; Romeu de Armas 1989, 474; Ulloa Hung and Sonnemann 2017). The report sent by Columbus to the King of Spain, known as the Memorial de Torres (Romeu de Armas 1989), is illustrative of this process. 231

Jorge Ulloa Hung et al.

The connection between La Isabela and the inland fortress of Santo Tomás was the foundation of Columbus’s route (Corcoran-Tadd et al. 2021). This route helped to set the colonial administrative strategy of factoría, which involved a commercial management of the new territories, monopolized by the Spanish crown and administered by Columbus, a combination between private and monarchist rights and interests (Deagan 2002). It was expanded through the construction of a line of fortresses for military control; extraction of gold through exchanges, taxes, and exploitation of mining enclaves; and through the distribution of the Indigenous population among the colonizers (Arranz Márquez 1991; Sauer 1966). Archaeological surveys and excavations along the route of Columbus evidence a dense and diverse cultural landscape at the eve of European invasion (Guerrero and Veloz Maggiolo 1988; Herrera Malatesta 2018; Hofman et al. 2018, 2020a; Sonnemann et al. 2016; Ulloa Hung and Herrera Malatesta 2015; Ulloa Hung 2014). The settlements show the management of different landscapes: rockshelters, caves, coastal mangroves, mountain systems, and alluvial valleys associated with rivers such as the Yaque, Bahabonico, Mao, and Amina. The material culture suggests the existence of Indigenous social networks that connected these different landscapes, especially the coastal area with the interiors of the Cibao Valley. In this system, small and medium sites functioned as camps, viewing points, and collection areas, forming clusters of intervisible settlements located at different altitudes. This landscape management system indicates that regional social networks were necessary for sociopolitical control of the territory and to facilitate access to various resources. In general, it was a socially and culturally connected landscape, and the Spaniards developed an intense exchange of material goods with local populations (rescates) in order to penetrate it (Keehnen 2019; Ulloa Hung 2014). Historical chronicles reveal the colonial use of these Indigenous social networks that connected the coastal and inland zones. They highlight the use of guides and the crossing of mountain systems by Indigenous trails as well as the use of Native boats to cross rivers and use of alliances to obtain information on the location of gold in the region (Coma 1984, 200–201; Las Casas 1875, vol. 2, 25, 29–30; León Guerrero 2000, 270). Environmental studies along the route demonstrate the transition of an area of forests with possible small-scale cultivation (700–500 cal. years bp) to a degraded and open landscape. This was most likely caused by the introduction of new forms of cultivation and foreign animal and botanical species (Castilla Beltrán et al. 2018; Hooghiemstra et al. 2018). In general, the extractive military route initially conceived by Columbus formed the prelude to the creation of other Spanish villages, as well as gold mining centers (e.g., Cotuí, La Vega, and La Buenaventura) (Arranz Márquez 1991, 9–10). Within these, Indigenous people were submitted to a regime of intense and heterogeneous exploitation, mediated by the establishment of the encomienda system as well as by new commercial interests formed by the colonial expansion toward other Caribbean islands and territories. From 1505, the encomienda system was decisive to subjugate the Indigenous people (Arranz Márquez 1991, 9–10). Frequently, the encomendados worked together with the enslaved. This encouraged the interaction with Indigenous peoples from other areas as well as promoted survival strategies that included alliances, mixed marriages, trade, flight, and rebellion. Various linkages were established with Europeans who controlled workplaces or who lived in settlements where encomendados, enslaved Indigenous people, and Africans, provided different types of services. This suggests that social relations between Indigenous peoples and Europeans, and also between them and the first enslaved Africans, who were introduced into the island at a very early stage, were flexible and diverse (Keehnen et al. 2019). In addition to the encomienda, the slave trade transformed the Indigenous individual into a means of payment for salaries, freight ships, concessions, or gifts. The exploration of the coasts 232

Social networks and colonial adaptation

of Tierra Firme (from 1498) increased the Indigenous slave trade, and the wars to conquer other regions of Hispaniola after 1502 also involved the acquisition of slaves for profit. The organization and financing of these expeditions involved colonial authorities and villages heavily dependent on Indigenous labor. An example was the armada that, in 1522, was in part financed by the village of Concepción de la Vega. Consequentially, Indigenous people from Cubagua and Coro were introduced into Hispaniola (Julián 1997). Outside the parameters of the slave trade, the role of Indigenous people at the moment of colonial domination, characterized by the encomienda system, was marked by the labor in gold mines and its complementary economy. In Hispaniola, Concepción de La Vega and Cotuí were the two towns with the highest exploitation of gold and associated multiethnic coexistence. Concepción de La Vega emerged from one of the forts created by Columbus in the Cibao region and was the location for royal gold casting twice a year (Las Casas 1875, vol. 2, 120; Guerrero 2005, 40–41). It soon became a commercial and cosmopolitan place (Cohen 1997, 6). The gold was mined in the Cibao Valley, where one of the most important camps was Cotuí, founded between 1504 and 1505 (Rincón 2004, 22; Olsen Bogaert et al. 2011, 64–68) (Figure 15.2). As a result of the gold mining boom, a significant number of Indigenous people and Africans were sent as laborers to La Vega and Cotuí. Between 1505 and 1510, more than 200 Africans were brought to Hispaniola to work in mines and on sugar plantations, and perhaps these towns were two of their primary destinations (Guerrero 2005, 47; Olsen Bogaert et al. 2011, 14). The material culture repertoire of Concepción de la Vega and Cotuí display multiethnic coexistence through a blend of Spanish, Indigenous, and transcultural artifacts (García Arévalo 1978; Kulstad-González 2015, 2019; Ortega and Fondeur 1978). Locally manufactured ceramics (Ernst forthcoming) reveal continuity in the production and use of local precolonial styles during the contact period. Continuities include methods of vessel forming, clay and temper selection, vessel shapes, and wall thicknesses (Ernst forthcoming; Ernst and Hofman 2019; Hofman et al. 2020; Ting et al. 2018). Despite continuities, significant changes and new introductions to the precolonial ceramic register are recorded in the conceptualization of the vessels, in their shapes and uses, and in their decorations and surface treatment (Ernst and Hofman 2019). New vessel forms emerged that resembled Spanish containers (Deagan 1987, 27). These were created using traditional Indigenous or African techniques and sometimes finished using a potter’s wheel (Ernst and Hofman 2019, 134–135) (see Figure 15.2). Others were finished with a red slip to give them an Iberian appearance. The intermixture of Indigenous and African production or finishing traditions with Spanish ones is also perceptible through the stylization of traditional motifs. These seemingly respond to processes of domination and Christianization and in turn illustrate the transformation, adaptation, and persistence of Indigenous traditions (Ernst forthcoming). The encomiendas also provided livestock and agricultural products to the mining exploitations. This phenomenon accelerated the emergence of colonial trade networks in which products such as cassava (Manihot esculenta) and European animal species like pigs (Sus scrofa) acquired important commercial value. Additionally, this helped generate adaptations and transformations of existing Indigenous networks in support of this trade. Simultaneously, Indigenous populations were displaced to use their lands for cattle ranching or for extensive agriculture that satisfied the demands of the mining enclaves and of new expeditions of conquest and slave traffic in the Caribbean (Moreno del Río 2012).

Social networks, encomiendas, and slavery in Cuba The conquest of Cuba began in 1510 and echoed the implementation strategies and knowledge obtained in the colonization of Hispaniola, as well as the interest in new resources. Local 233

Jorge Ulloa Hung et al.

Figure 15.2 Left, ceramic sherds from different colonial villages (from Concepción de la Vega): a. early colonial transcultural red slipped vessel neck with excised motive; b. early colonial transcultural red and white slipped vessel, with excised motive on the neck; c. early colonial transcultural red slipped vessel neck with excised motive; e. early colonial red slipped jar with four hollow components and a closed base; h. early colonial transcultural red and white slipped vessel in Iberian shape made with Indigenous techniques; i. early colonial transcultural red slipped jar with quartz inlays (from Cubagua); f. early colonial Indigenous tri-legged vessel (from Cotui); g. early colonial Indigenous adorno; j. Indigenous turtle adorno. Right, remains of the villages: k. Concepción de la Vega; l. Nueva Cadiz de Cubagua; m. Cotui mining camp. Source: Photos by Marlieke Ernst, Andrzej T. Antczak, and Jorge Ulloa Hung; figure composed by Menno L. P. Hoogland.

networks facilitated the mobility and recognition of the colonizers across the island, giving them access to the main Indigenous settlements as a way of neutralizing resistance and controlling the workforce. Gold mining was implemented from the outset. The colonization process in Hispaniola had shown that, in addition to the search for gold, it was necessary to guarantee the 234

Social networks and colonial adaptation

population’s food supply, and so the enterprise was complemented by agricultural exploitation. Here, again, Indigenous experiences were vital. Both slavery and the encomienda system provided the labor force. El Chorro de Maíta, an Indigenous site in northeastern Cuba, was occupied from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth century. It has revealed Indigenous ceramics from Mexico (Azteca IV; Mexico painted red) that could be associated with Spanish ties and the import of slaves from that region (Valcárcel Rojas 2016b). The site includes a cemetery that was mainly used between ca. 1510 and 1550. Strontium isotope and osteoarchaeological studies reveal a mortuary population composed of both local and nonlocal individuals, that is, with origins in Cuba, the wider Caribbean, and areas outside the Caribbean (Laffoon 2012). Among the latter are a female, probably native to the Yucatan peninsula (Duijvenbode 2017; Laffoon et al. 2017; Mickleburgh 2013), and a male individual of African origin (Valcárcel Rojas et al. 2011, 240; Weston 2012; Weston and Valcárcel Rojas 2016). Both individuals have a geographical and ethnic origin that is consistent with the areas from which enslaved people were brought to the island. Local individuals display a relatively proportional representation of different sex and age groups, while nonlocal individuals are mostly adult males, a census that coincides with slave labor selection processes. These individuals were more frequently buried following standard Indigenous mortuary practices and were buried with body ornaments, some of great value. Nonlocal individuals were frequently buried in an extended position, unlike Indigenous customs. They were also buried without ornaments, suggesting that they were under pressure to acculturate as they lacked the few rights given to the local Indigenous population. The latter were considered free but subject to the encomienda system (Valcárcel Rojas 2016b). Paleodietary studies show protein consumption that differentiates the early colonial El Chorro de Maita mortuary population from precolonial populations and brings it closer to enslaved African populations in the Caribbean (Laffoon et al. 2020). This evidences the magnitude of the transformations associated with colonial impact. The origins of the local individuals from the settlement area or nearby places, their funerary traditions, and the relatively balanced representation in sex and age groups suggests a population with certain rights that was allowed to maintain community ties and some of its traditional cultural practices. This picture is closely related to the historical descriptions of a village of Indigenous encomendados and is far different from the population with an enslaved status. This may suggest that the local individuals, at least some of them, could have been encomendados, which would be consistent with historical data that refers to Indigenous villages under the encomienda regime in the region (Valcárcel Rojas 2016b). The early slavery and the encomienda in Cuba (1513) are evidenced by the patterns of European material culture found on the island, although a tendency exists to generalize the transfer of objects between Europeans and Indigenous people through exchanges and gifts. The Cuban archaeological record, including that of El Chorro de Maíta, suggests that materials associated with exchanges or gifts are less frequent. Conversely, weapons, tools, and objects associated with horseback riding are more common (Valcárcel Rojas 2019a). Most of these types of objects were not incorporated into the Indigenous ceremonial universe and were often discarded as waste. This suggests that these materials were transferred into environments associated with the act of colonization and related to places or settlements where Indigenous people worked or lived. Europeans apparently did not seek to obtain goods through trade but rather to extract gold and other resources through the intensive labor of the local population. The relation with the Indigenous peoples arises from a position of domination. European materials that passed to the Indigenous people have characteristics more associated with their functionality and effectiveness, to adjust to the requirements of life in the colonial environment (Valcárcel Rojas 2019a). 235

Jorge Ulloa Hung et al.

Social networks and extraction of pearls in Cubagua For more than five centuries the town of Nueva Cádiz, established by the Spanish on the small and semi-desertic island of Cubagua in what is today the eastern Venezuelan Caribbean, has monopolized attention from many points of view (e.g. Cruxent 1972; Dawson 2006; Goggin 1968; Otte 1977; Perri 2004; Romero et al. 1999; Romero 2003; Rouse and Cruxent 1963; Torres Merino 2018; Willis 1980; Wing 1961) (see Figure 15.2). The early sources regarding the town place emphasis in the Spanish “deeds” embodied by the industriousness, bravery, and endurance of the colonizers. This is despite the fact some have also stressed their greed, insolence, and cruelty (Antczak and Antczak 2018; e.g. Castellanos 1987[1589], 105–119; Las Casas 1997; Otte 1977). The havoc unleashed by the Spanish concerning pearls found in the waters around Cubagua during the first decades of the sixteenth century may be understood through the articulation of a deeper temporal perspective that goes beyond the threshold of the third voyage of Columbus in 1498. It is by understanding the sociocultural baggage with which the Indigenous peoples confronted the Europeans that we can understand which strings of precolonial social networks were severed by the colonizers and which underwent colonial grafts and transformations. During his third voyage, Columbus observed on the coasts of the Paria Peninsula (northeastern Venezuela) and on the island of Trinidad a diversity of Indigenous products that included weapons, black wooden benches, colorful woven scarfs, and body adornments, as well as foodstuffs and domesticated parrots and monkeys (Las Casas 1997, 131; Urbani 1999). They were particularly drawn to gold leaf sheets and pendants made of a gold alloy called guanín. Their interest was further raised by bracelets and necklaces of beads including perforated pearls, predominantly worn by women. Replying to Columbus’ inquiries on the origin of these accoutrements, the Indigenous peoples indicated that both gold and pearls came from places situated toward the west and north of Paria (Las Casas 1997, 136, 137). Columbus hurriedly named this area the Gulf of Pearls (Golfo de las Perlas) (Trevisan 1989[1504], 148). A few days later, he sailed along the eastern coast of Margarita Island without knowing that further to the west lay Cubagua, the future Pearl Island (Las Casas 1997, 141). Returning to Hispaniola in October 1498, Columbus sent to the Spanish king a letter-report and a map of his voyage, a sample of Indigenous painted scarfs from Paria, 160 or 170 pearls, and some pieces of gold (Las Casas 1997, 166). He argued that even if the pearls and gold were not numerous, what counted was their quality, the fact that these were the first known pearls coming from the west, and the certainty that there were plenty of them to be exploited. The information on the Indigenous pearl trade along the eastern coast of today’s Venezuela reported by Spanish sailors immediately after 1498 (see Perera 2000, Tables 8 and 10; Cunill Grau 1993, 23–25) is crucial in understanding that pearls were extracted by the local population from the pearl-oyster beds and exchanged in natural unmodified form or perforated as ornaments. Objects in gold and guanín were circulating in an opposite direction, from west to east, and their origin lay in northeastern Colombia and stretched further to the west (Antczak et al. 2015). That data may confirm the existence of the long-distance precolonial barter (Sauer 1966, 117–119) of gold from the Gulf of Darién in Panamá to the Peninsula of Paria (Donkin 1998, 315). However, only gold/guanín had such a far-reaching interregional exchange route. Many other exchange circuits had regional or even smaller local scales that varied diachronically in unison with the rhythms of the seasons and changing sociopolitical alliances (Antczak and Antczak 2015; Hofman et al. 2007). Smaller exchange circuits were present along the Caribbean coasts and adjacent mainland and included locally and often seasonally available manufactured commodities and/or natural resources such as pearls, salt, feathers, fish, marine shells, quiripa shell beads, hammocks, coca leaves, and other vegetal and animal products. On the majority 236

Social networks and colonial adaptation

of the islands of the Venezuelan Caribbean, archaeology of late precolonial times indicates an increasing interest of coastal mainland groups in specific resources as well as vibrant maritime mobility and sea-facilitated intersocietal interaction (Antczak and Antczak 2006). Almost all of these archaeologically reconstructed ancestral waterway routes that oscillated along the coast of the Tierra Firme in the Southern Caribbean suffered disruption in early colonial times (Corcoran-Tadd et al. 2021). They were interrupted by the early Spanish caravels sailing in the east-west direction along the mainland coasts of South America. This breakup was a result of the growth in volume of Spanish maritime traffic present in the new interconnected routes between Hispaniola and other Spanish settlements (Cubagua and Greater Antilles). The European settlement on Cubagua is clearly related to early colonial pearl collection. Here, soon after 1498, the Spanish began to obtain pearls from Native peoples who were enslaved and forced to dive for pearls (Otte 1977). The spiral of violence, enslavement, and mistreatment have become a common sign of destruction and death on the Indigenous perceptual and existential seascapes of the southeastern Caribbean. In 1528, the town of Nueva Cádiz was formally established on the island, but it was already a Spanish settlement for several years before this date. By the end of the 1530s, the pearl oyster beds were severely depleted (Romero 2003; Romero et al. 1999). Since 1538, the señores de canoas (the lords [owners] of the canoes) with their local workforce and enslaved Africans (Navarrete 2003, 37) began to move to a new pearl fishery center at Rio de la Hacha in northeastern Colombia (González 2002; Barrera Monroy 2002). In the early 1540s, the town of Nueva Cádiz was abandoned (Castellanos 1987[1589]; Vila 1948). Nueva Cádiz had a short life of circa 15 years. However, already many years before its formal foundation in 1528, the role of “bleeding, sweating and melting pot” ascribed to it (taking into account not only physical but ideational terms as well) had already been applied to temporary campsites or rancherías (Antczak et al. 2019). These ephemeral settlements swiftly expanded and appropriated terra nullis (lands considered as such by the Europeans ([Gosden 2004]). This land was seized from inhabitants together with their biotic and abiotic resources, cultivars, and objects. Additionally, a policy of converting the Indigenous peoples themselves into colonial subjects—enslaved, low-cost laborers, ethnic soldiers, and/or religious converts—was applied.

Final remarks The studies on the relations between Europeans and Indigenous people in the Caribbean have focused on the processes of “discovery” and conquest without considering the diverse circumstances in which these may have developed, their consequences, or the impact of Indigenous social networks. This emphasis is related to the traditional idea of the early disappearance of Indigenous people and the disregard, intentional or not, of their persistence in subsequent centuries. The latter also contributed to promoting reductionist ideas about the heritage and the cultural and ethnic makeup of current Caribbean societies. The Indigenous communities transformed by the European colonization of the Caribbean constituted a mosaic of cultures with diverse forms of political organization and socioeconomic development connected by local and regional social networks of exchange and interaction. Archaeological research has confirmed that these social networks had different extensions, contractions, and durations. At the same time, it constituted a continuum that profiles the configuration of this space, its dynamism, and its complexity. Each local or regional social network system formed a geographical and historical system that was transformed, modified, interrupted, or connected by European colonization. These transformations, new interconnections, or disruptions could be negotiated, forced, or imposed 237

Jorge Ulloa Hung et al.

through violence and involved new mobilities of resources, material culture, people, etc. In addition, in many cases, they encouraged the coexistence and interaction of individuals or populations from diverse origins. Examples of this are the contexts of El Chorro de Maita and the European villages of Concepción de La Vega and Cotuí. In these places, Indigenous peoples with different legal conditions (encomendados and enslaved), religious (Christian and non-Christian), and diverse territorial origins converged and interacted with Africans and Europeans. This reveals the diversity of social and cultural links and interactions that colonial domination could have generated in a single context. It also represents the coexistence of different forms of impact, adaptation, and transformation of Indigenous people to the colonial condition (Valcárcel Rojas 2016a). Indigenous social network systems influenced how the precolonial Caribbean universe was articulated to the emerging colonial economy and a global socioeconomic system. The colonization of the Caribbean fostered the emergence of local economies, new commercial and sociocultural networks where the traditional knowledge, routes, roads, and resources of Indigenous people were crucial. The networks that vary in their historical rhythms and trajectories led to the Caribbean’s entry into a global world. The interactions between the Indigenous people and the Europeans implied the transformation of their social networks and their sociocultural universe but also an agency aimed at survival. It involved the assimilation of European cultural norms and biological and cultural cross-breeding—in addition to the confrontation, differentiation, and resistance—as mechanisms of cultural, social, and ethnic persistence. These contributed to the presence of traditions, knowledge, symbolism, and economic practices of Indigenous people in the material and spiritual culture of current Caribbean societies.

Acknowledgments The research leading to these results has received funding from the ERC-Synergy project NEXUS1492 (grant no. 319309) and is also part of the results of the CaribTRAILS Caribbean Transdisciplinary Research Project: Archaeology of Indigenous Legacies Spinoza conducted at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV-KNAW). The authors wish to acknowledge the Caribbean institutions and communities for collaborating in the research and sharing their valuable knowledge. Thanks to Gregory Tonks for his editing of the English text and to Emma de Mooij for her help with the formatting of the text.

References cited Amodio, Emanuele. 1991. “Relaciones interétnicas en el Caribe indígena. Una reconstrucción a partir de los primeros testimonios europeos.” Revista de Indias 51 (193): 571–608. Anderson-Córdova, Karen F. 2017. Surviving Spanish Conquest: Indian Fight, Flight, and Cultural Transformation in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Antczak, Andrzej T., and María M. Antczak. 2015. “Revisiting the Early 16th-Century Town of Nueva Cádiz de Cubagua, Venezuela.” Paper presented at the EAA-SAA Joint Meeting Connecting Continents, Curaçao. Antczak, Andrzej T., and María M. Antczak. 2018. “Being in Nueva Cádiz: Social Interaction Across 1498 in the Early 16th-century Town on the Island of Cubagua, Venezuela.” Paper presented at the 16th ISISA Islands of the World Conference, Leeuwarden. Antczak, Andrzej T., María M. Antczak, Oliver Antczak, and Luis A. Lemoine Buffet. 2019. “Rancherías: Historical Archaeology of Early Colonial Campsites on Margarita and Coche Islands, Venezuela.” In Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas: Archaeological Case Studies, edited by Corinne L. Hofman and Floris W. M. Keehnen, 146–174. Leiden: Brill.

238

Social networks and colonial adaptation Antczak, Andrzej T., María M. Antczak, Roberto Valcárcel Rojas, and Andrzej Sýkora. 2015. “Rethinking Guanín: The Role of Northern Venezuela in Circulation and Valuation of Indigenous Metal Objects in the Circum-Caribbean Macroregion.” Paper presented at the 26th Congress of the International Association for Caribbean Archaeology, Sint Maarten. Antczak, María M., and Andrzej T. Antczak. 2006, Los Ídolos de las Islas Prometidas: Arqueología Pre-Hispánica del Archipiélago de Los Roques. Caracas: Editorial Equinoccio. Arranz Márquez, Luis. 1991. Repartimientos y Encomiendas en la Isla Española (El Repartimiento de Albuquerque de 1514). Madrid: Ediciones de la Fundación García Arévalo. Barrera, Antonio. 2002. “Local Herbs, Global Medicines Commerce, Knowledge, and Commodities in Spanish America.” In Merchants, Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, edited by Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, 163–181. New York: Routledge. Barrera Monroy, Eduardo. 2002. “Los esclavos de las perlas: Voces y rostros indígenas en la Granjería de Perlas del Cabo de la Vela (1540–1570).” Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico 19 (61): 3–33. Berman, Mary J. 2011. “Good as Gold: The Aesthetic Brilliance of the Lucayans.” In Islands at the Crossroads: Migration, Seafaring, and Interaction in the Caribbean, edited by L. Antonio Curet and Mark W. Hauser, 104–134. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Braudel, Fernand. 1958. “Histoire et Sciences sociales: La longue durée.” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 13 (4): 725–753. Callaghan, Richard T. 2011. “Patterns of Contact between the Island of the Caribbean and the Surrounding Mainland as a Navigation Problem.” In Islands at the Crossroads: Migration, Seafaring, and Interaction in the Caribbean, edited by L. Antonio Curet and Mark W. Hauser, 59–72. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Castañeda Delgado, Paulino. 1971. “La condición miserable del indio y sus rivilegios.” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 28: 245–335. Castellanos de, Juan. 1987[1589]. Elegías de Varones Ilustres de Indias. Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia. Castilla Beltrán, Alvaro, Henry Hooghiemstra, Menno L. P. Hoogland, Jaime R. Pagán-Jiménez, Bas van Geel, Michael H. Field, Maarten Prins, Timme Donders, Eduardo Herrera Malatesta, Jorge Ulloa Hung, Crystal H. McMichael, William D. Gosling, and Corinne L. Hofman. 2018. “Columbus’ Footprint in Hispaniola: A Paleoenvironmental Record of Indigenous and Colonial Impacts on the Landscape of the Central Cibao Valley, Northern Dominican Republic.” Anthropocene 22: 66–80. Cohen, Jeremy. 1997. “Preliminary Report on the 1996 Field Season at Concepción de la Vega.” Project report submitted to the Dirección Nacional de Parques. Florida Museum of Natural History, Gainesville. Coma, Guillermo. 1984. “Sobre las Islas recientemente descubiertas en el Océano Meridiano e Indico.” In Cartas de particulares a Colón y relaciones coetáneas, edited by Juan Gil and Consuela Varela, 177–203. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Cooper, Jago, and Matthew Peros. 2010. “The Archaeology of Climate Change in the Caribbean.” Journal of Archaeological Science 37: 1226–1232. Cooper, Jago, Roberto Valcárcel Rojas, and Pedro Cruz Ramírez. 2006. “Gente en los Cayos. Los Buchillones y sus vínculos marítimos.” El Caribe Arqueológico 9: 66–75. Corcoran-Tadd, Noa, Jorge Ulloa Hung, Andrzej T. Antczak, Eduardo Herrera Malatesta, and Corinne L. Hofman. 2021. “Routes and Resource Materialities in the Early Spanish Colonial World: Comparative Archaeological Approaches.” Submitted to Latin American Antiquity. doi:10.1017/laq.2021.6. Cruxent, José M. 1972. “Algunas Noticias sobre Nueva Cádiz (Isla de Cubagua) Venezuela.” Memorias (Transactions) de la 6ta Conferencia Geológica del Caribe. Margarita, pp. 33–35. Cunill Grau, Pedro. 1993. “Geografía y Poblamiento de Venezuela Hispánica.” In Los Tres Siglos de Venezuela 1498–1810, edited by Pedro Grases, 1–94. Caracas: Grijalbo, S.A. Cunin, Elisabeth. 2006. “Escápate a un Mundo fuera de este Mundo: turismo, globalización y alteridad. Los cruceros por el Caribe en Cartagena de Indias (Colombia).” Boletín de antropología Universidad de Antioquia 20 (37): 131–151. Curet, Antonio L., and Mark W. Hauser. 2011. “Introduction: Migration, Seafaring, and Cultural Contact in the Caribbean.” In Islands at the Crossroads: Migration, Seafaring, and Interaction in the Caribbean, edited by L. Antonio Curet and Mark W. Hauser, 1–10. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Dawson, Kevin. 2006. “Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World.” The Journal of American History 92 (4): 1327–1355. Deagan, Kathleen. 1987. Ceramics, Glassware, and Beads (Artifacts of the Spanish Colonies of Florida and the Caribbean, 1500–1800, vol. 1). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

239

Jorge Ulloa Hung et al. Deagan, Kathleen. 2002. “La Isabela y su papel en el paradigma inter-atlántico: la colonia española de la isla Española (1493–1550) desde la perspectiva arqueológica.” Paper presented at The 15th Coloquio de Historia Canario-Americana, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Deagan, Kathleen. 2003. “Colonial Origins and Colonial Transformations in Spanish America.” Historical Archaeology 37 (4): 3–13. Deagan, Kathleen, and José M. Cruxent. 2002. Archaeology at La Isabela: America´s First European Town. New Haven: Yale University Press. De Corse, C., ed. 2019. Power, Political Economy, and Historical Landscapes of the Modern World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: SUNY Press. Deive, Carlos E. 1995. La Española y la Esclavitud del Indio. Santo Domingo: Fundación García Arévalo. Dominguez-Torres, Mónica. 2015. “Pearl Fishing in the Caribbean: Early Images of Slavery and Forced Migration in the Americas.” In African Diaspora in the Cultures of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States, edited by Persephone Braham, 73–82. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Donkin, Robin A. 1998. Beyond Price, Pearls and Pearl-fishing to the Age of Discoveries. Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 224. Duijvenbode, Anne van. 2017. “Facing Society: A Study of Identity Through Head Shaping Practices among the Indigenous Peoples of the Caribbean in the Ceramic Age and Colonial Period.” PhD Dissertation, Leiden University. Ernst, Marlieke. Forthcoming. “Early Colonial Mosaics, Transculturation within Ceramic Repertoires in the Spanish Colonial Caribbean 1495–1562 (working title).” PhD Dissertation, Leiden University. Ernst, Marlieke, and Corinne L. Hofman. 2019. “Breaking and Making Identities: Transformations of Ceramic Repertoires in Early Colonial Hispaniola.” In Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas: Archaeological Case Studies, edited by Corinne L. Hofman and Floris W. M. Keehnen, 124–145. Leiden: Brill. Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo. 1851. Historia General y Natural de Las Indias, Vol. 1. Madrid: Imprenta de la Real Academia de la Historia. Fernandez Méndez, Eugenio. 1966. “Las encomiendas y esclavitud de los indios de Puerto Rico, 1508– 1550.” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 23: 377–443. Fitzpatrick, Scott M. 2013. “Seafaring Capabilities in the Pre-Columbian Caribbean.” Journal of Maritime Archaeology 8 (1): 101–138. Funari, Pedro Paulo A., and Maria Ximena Senatore, eds. 2015. Archaeology of Culture Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America. New York: Springer. García Arévalo, Manuel A. 1978. “Influencias de la dieta Indo-Hispánica en la cerámica taina.” In Proceedings of the 7th International Congress for the Study of Pre-Columbian Cultures of the Lesser Antilles, 263–277. Caracas: Universidad de Caracas. Gaztambide, Antonio. 2006. “La invención del Caribe a partir de 1898 (Las definiciones del Caribe, revisitadas).” Jangwa Pana 5 (1): 1–23. Geurds, Alex, and Laura van Broekhoven. 2010. “The Similarity Trap: Engineering the Greater Caribbean, a Perspective from the Isthmo Colombian Area.” Journal of Caribbean 3: 52–74. Goggin, John M. 1968. Spanish Majolica in the New World: Types of the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries. New Haven: Yale University. González, Tatiana. 2002. “Pesquería de Perlas durante la Colonia en Nuestra Señora de los Remedios: del Cabo de la Vela al Rio de la Hacha (1538–1545).” Jangwa Pana 2: 26–34. Gosden, Chris. 2004. Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guerrero, José M. 2005. Cotuí: Villa, Carnaval, Cofradía y Palos. Un estudio ethnohistórico. Santo Domingo: Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo. Guerrero, José G., and Marcio Veloz Maggiolo. 1988. Los inicios de la colonización en América. San Pedro de Macorís: Universidad Central del Este. Herrera Malatesta, Eduardo. 2018. Una isla, dos mundos: estudio arqueológico sobre el paisaje indígena de Haytí y su transformación al paisaje colonial de La Española (1200–1550). Leiden: Sidestone Press. Hofman, Corinne L. 2019. “Indigenous Caribbean Networks in a Globalizing World.” In Power, Political Economy, and Historical Landscapes of the Modern World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Christopher R. DeCorse, 55–80. New York: SUNY Press. Hofman, Corinne L., Arie Boomert, Alistair J. Bright, Menno L. P. Hoogland, Sebastiaan Knippenberg, and Alice V. M. Samson. 2011. “Ties with the Homelands: Archipelagic Interaction and the Enduring Role of the South and Central American Mainlands in the Pre-Columbian Lesser Antilles.” In Islands at

240

Social networks and colonial adaptation the Crossroads: Migration, Seafaring, and Interaction in the Caribbean, edited by L. Antonio Curet and Mark W. Hauser, 73–86. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Hofman, Corinne L., Alistair J. Bright, Arie Boomert, and Sebastiaan Knippenberg. 2007. “Island Rhythms: The Web of Social Relationships and Interaction Networks in the Lesser Antillean Archipelago Between 400 BC and AD 1492.” Latin American Antiquity 18 (3): 243–268. Hofman, Corinne L., Alistair J. Bright, and Reniel Rodríguez Ramos. 2010. “Crossing the Caribbean Sea: Towards a Holistic View of Pre-Colonial Mobility and Exchange.” Journal of Caribbean Archaeology 3: 1–18. Hofman, Corinne L., and Eithne B. Carlin. 2010. “The Ever-Dynamic Caribbean: Exploring New Approaches to Unravelling Social Networks in the Pre-Colonial and Early Colonial Periods.” In Linguistics and Archaeology in the Americas: The Historization of Language and Society, edited by Eithne B. Carlin and Simon van de Kerke, 107–122. Leiden: Brill. Hofman, Corinne L., and Menno L. P. Hoogland. 2011. “Unravelling the Multi-Scale Networks of Mobility and Exchange in the Pre-Colonial Circum-Caribbean.” In Communities in Contact: Essays in Archaeology, Ethnohistory and Ethnography of the Amerindian Circum-Caribbean edited by Corinne L. Hofman and Anne van Duijvenbode, 14–44. Leiden: Sidestone Press. Hofman Corinne L., Menno L. P. Hoogland, and Jaime R., Pagán Jimenez. 2020a. “En la vispera de la colonización europea: Los sitios indigenas El Flaco, El Carril y El Cabo, República Dominicana.” Boletin del Museo del Hombre Dominicano 48: 133–152. Hofman, Corinne L., and Jorge Ulloa Hung. 2019. “Nexus 1492: Encuentros del Nuevo Mundo con un mundo en globalización.” Ciencia y Sociedad 44 (4): 95–115. Hofman, Corinne L., Jorge Ulloa Hung, Eduardo Herrera Malatesta, Joseph S. Jean, Till F. Sonnemann, and Menno L. P. Hoogland. 2018. “Indigenous Caribbean Perspectives: Archaeologies and Legacies of the First Colonised Region in the New World.” Antiquity 92 (361): 200–216. Hofman, Corinne L., and Floris W. M. Keehnen, eds. 2019. Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas: Archaeological Case Studies. Leiden: Brill. Hofman, Corinne L., Angus A. A. Mol, Menno L. P. Hoogland, and Roberto Valcárcel Rojas. 2014. “Stage of Encounters: Migration, Mobility and Interaction in the Pre-Colonial and Early Colonial Caribbean.” World Archaeology 46 (4): 590–609. Hofman Corinne L., Roberto Valcárcel Rojas, and Jorge Ulloa Hung. 2020. “Colonization, Transformations, and Indigenous Cultural Persistence in the Caribbean.” In The Global Spanish Empire: Five Hundred Years of Place Making and Plurarlism, edited by Christine D. Beaule and John G. Douglas, 55–82. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Hooghiemstra, Henry, Thomas Olijhoek, Menno L. P. Hoogland, Maarten Prins, Bas van Geel, Timme Donders, William Gosling, and Corinne L. Hofman. 2018. “Columbus’ Environmental Impact in the New World: Land Use Change in the Yaque River Valley, Dominican Republic.” Holocene 28 (11): 1818–1835. Horowitz, Michael M., ed. 1971. Peoples and Cultures of the Caribbean: An Anthropological Reader. New York: American Museum of Natural History Press. Julián, Amadeo. 1997. Bancos, ingenios y esclavos en la época colonial. Santo Domingo: Banco de Reservas de la República Dominicana. Keegan, William F., and Corinne L. Hofman. 2017. The Caribbean Before Columbus. New York: Oxford University Press. Keehnen, Floris W. M. 2019. “Treating ‘Trifles’: The Indigenous Adoption of European Material Goods in Early Colonial Hispaniola (1492–1550).” In Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas: Archaeological Case Studies, edited by Corinne L. Hofman and Floris W. M. Keehnen, 58–83. Leiden: Brill. Keehnen, Floris W. M., Corinne L. Hofman, and Andrzej T. Antczak. 2019. “Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas.” In Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas. Archaeological Case Studies, edited by Corinne L. Hofman and Floris W. M. Keehnen, 1–31. Leiden. Knight, Franklin W., and Colin A. Palmer. 1989. “The Caribbean. A Regional Overview.” In The Modern Caribbean, edited by Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer, 1–20. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Knippenberg, Sebastiaan. 2006. “Stone Artifact Production and Exchange among the Northern Lesser Antilles.” PhD Dissertation, Leiden University. Kroeber, Alfred L., and Clyde Kluckhohn. 1952. “Culture a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.” Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology Harvard University 47 (1): 3–217.

241

Jorge Ulloa Hung et al. Kulstad-González, Pauline M. 2015. “Striking It Rich in the Americas’ First Boom Town: Economic Activity at Concepción de la Vega (Hispaniola) 1495–1564.” In Archaeology of Culture Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America, edited by Pedro Paulo A. Funari and Maria Ximena Senatore, 313–337. New York: Springer. Kulstad-González, Pauline M. 2019. “Hispaniola—Hell or Home?: Decolonizing Grand Narratives about Intercultural Interactions at Concepción de la Vega (1494–1564).” PhD Dissertation, Leiden University. Laffoon, Jason E. 2012. Patterns of Paleomobility in the Ancient Antilles: An Isotopic Approach. Leiden: Sidestone Press. Laffoon, Jason E., Reniel Rodríguez Ramos, Luis Chanlatte Baik, Yvonne Narganes Storde, Miguel Rodríguez Lopez, Gareth R. Davies, and Corinne L. Hofman. 2014. “Long-Distance Exchange in the Precolonial Circum-Caribbean: A Multi-Isotope Study of Animal Tooth Pendants from Puerto Rico.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 35: 220–233. Laffoon, Jason E., Roberto Valcárcel Rojas, Darlene A. Weston, Menno L. P. Hoogland, Gareth R. Davies, and Corinne L. Hofman. 2020. “Diverse and Dynamic Dietary Patterns in Early Colonial Cuba: New Insights from Multiple Isotope Analyses.” Latin American Antiquity 31 (1): 103–121. Laffoon, Jason E., Till F. Sonnemann, Termeh Shafie, Corinne L. Hofman, Ulrik Brandes, and Gareth R. Davies. 2017. “Investigating Human Geographic Origins Using Dual-Isotope (87Sr/86Sr, 18O) Assignment Approaches.” PLoS One 12 (2): e0172562. Las Casas, Bartolomé de. 1875. Historia de Las Indias, Vol. 2. Madrid: Imprenta de Miguel Ginesta. Las Casas, Bartolomé de. 1997. “Historia de las Indias.” In Margarita y Cubagua en el Paraíso de Colón, edited by Alí E. López Belando, 119–182. Mérida: Universidad de Los Andes. León Guerrero, María M. L. 2000. “El segundo viaje colombino.” PhD Dissertation, Universidad de Valladolid. Mártyr Anglería, Pedro. 1964. Décadas del Nuevo Mundo, Vol. 1. México, D.F.: José Porrúa e Hijos, SUCS. Meniketti, Marco. 2008. “Boundaries, Borders, and Reference Points: The Caribbean Defined as Geographic Region and Social Reality.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 13 (1): 45–62. Mickleburgh, Hayley L. 2013. “Reading the Dental Record: A Dental Anthropological Approach to Foodways, Health and Disease, and Drafting in the Pre-Columbian Caribbean.” PhD Dissertation, Leiden University. Mintz, Sidney W. 1971. “The Caribbean as a Socio-cultural Area.” In Peoples and Cultures of the Caribbean, edited by Michael M. Horowitz, 17–46. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Mintz, Sidney W. 1977. “The So-Called World System: Local Initiative and Local Response.” Dialectical Anthropology 2 (4): 253–270. Mira Caballos, Esteban. 1997. El Indio Antillano: repartimientos, encomienda y esclavitud (1492–1542). SevillaBogotá: Muñoz Moya Editores. Mira Caballos, Esteban. 2009. Conquista y destrucción de las Indias (1492–1573). Granada: Muñoz Moya Editores. Mol, Angus A. A. 2011. “Bringing Interaction into Higher Spheres: Social Distance in the Late Ceramic Age Greater Antilles as Seen through Ethnohistorical Accounts and the Distribution of Social Valuables.” In Communities in Contact: Essays in Archaeology, Ethnohistory and Ethnography of the Amerindian Circum-Caribbean, edited by Corinne L. Hofman and Anne van Duijvenbode, 62–86. Leiden: Sidestone Press. Mol, Angus A. A. 2014. The Connected Caribbean. Leiden: Sidestone Press. Moreno del Río, Justo L. 2012. Ganadería, plantaciones y comercio azucarero antillano. Siglos XVI y XVIII. Santo Domingo: Academia Dominicana de la Historia. Murdock, George P. 1951. “South American Culture Areas.” South-Western Journal of Anthropology 7 (4): 415–436. Muro Orejón, Antonio. 1956. “Ordenanzas reales sobre los indios (Las leyes de 1512–1513).” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 13: 417–471. Navarrete, María C. 2003. “La granjería de las perlas del Rio de la Hacha: Rebelión y Resistencia Esclava (1570–1615).” República, Negros y Castas 3 (8): 35–50. Olsen Bogaert, Harold, Santiago Duval, and Francisco Coste. 2011. “Sitio Arqueológico No. 11. Investigación Estructuras Coloniales.” Reporte de Investigación. Pueblo Viejo Dominicana Corporación, Proyecto Pueblo Viejo, Santo Domingo, República Dominicana, Museo del Hombre Dominicano. Ortega, Elpidio, and Carmen Fondeur. 1978. Estudio de la cerámica del período indo-hispano de la antigua Concepción de La Vega. Santo Domingo: Fundación Ortega Álvarez.

242

Social networks and colonial adaptation Otte, Enrique. 1977. Las perlas del Caribe: Nueva Cádiz de Cubagua. Caracas: Fundación John Boulton. Pagán-Jiménez, Jaime R. 2013. “Human—Plant Dynamics in the Precolonial Antilles.” In The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Archaeology, edited by William F. Keegan, Corinne L. Hofman, and Reniel Rodríguez Ramos, 391–406. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Perera, Miguel A. 2000. Oro y hambre: Guyana siglo XVI: Ecología cultural y Antropología Histórica de un Malentendido 1498–1597. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela. Perri, Michael H. 2004. “The Spanish Conquest of the Pearl Coast and the Search for the Province of the Meta.” PhD Dissertation, Emory University. Prats, Llorenç. 2006. “La mercantilización del patrimonio: entre la economía turística y las representaciones identitarias.” PH Boletín del instituto andaluz del patrimonio histórico 58: 72–80. Rincón, Francisco. 2004. La Mejorada Villa del Cotuy. Cotuí: Impresora Edison. Rodríguez Ramos, Reniel. 2010. “¿What is the Caribbean? An Archaeological Perspective.” Journal of Caribbean Archaeology 3: 19–51. Rodríguez Ramos, Reniel. 2011. “Close Encounters of the Caribbean Kind.” In Islands at the Crossroads: Migration, Seafaring, and Interaction in the Caribbean, edited by L. Antonio Curet and Mark W. Hauser, 164–192. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Rodríguez Ramos, Reniel, and Jaime R. Pagán-Jiménez. 2006. “Interacciones multivectoriales en el Circum-Caribe precolonial: Un vistazo desde las Antillas.” Caribbean Studies 34 (2): 103–143. Romero, Aldemaro. 2003. “Death and Taxes: The Case of the Depletion of Pearl Oyster Beds in SixteenthCentury Venezuela.” Conservation Biology 17 (4): 1013–1023. Romero, Aldemaro, Susanna Chilbert, and M. G. Eisenhart. 1999. “Cubagua’s Pearl-Oyster Beds: The First Depletion of a Natural Resource Caused by Europeans in the American Continent.” Journal of Political Ecology 6: 57–78. Romeu de Armas, Antonio. 1989 Libro Copiador de Cristobal Colón. Correspondencia inédita con los reyes católicos sobre los viajes a América. Estudio histórico-critico y edicion, Vol. I. Madrid: Alcaná Libros. Rouse, Irving. 1992. The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rouse, Irving, and José M. Cruxent. 1963. Venezuelan Archaeology. New Haven: Yale University Press. Saco, José A. 2006. Historia de la Esclavitud, Vol. VI. Casa de Altos Estudios Don Fernando Ortiz. La Habana: Ediciones Imagen Contempóranea. Samson, Alice V. M., and Jago Cooper. 2015. “History on Mona Island: Long-term Human and Landscape Dynamics of an ‘Uninhabited’ Island.” New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 89 (1–2): 30–60. Sauer, Carl O. 1966. The Early Spanish Main. Berkeley: University of California Press. Slayton, Emma R. 2018. Seascape Corridors: Modeling Routes to Connect Communities across the Caribbean Sea. Leiden: Sidestone Press. Sonnemann, Till F., Jorge Ulloa Hung, and Corinne L. Hofman. 2016. “Mapping Indigenous Settlement Topography in the Caribbean Using Drones.” Remote Sensing 8 (10): 1–17. Stevens-Arroyo, Anthony. 1993. “The Inter-Atlantic Paradigm: The Failure of Spanish Medieval Colonization of the Canary and Caribbean Islands.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35 (3): 515–543. Steward, Julian. 1948. “The Circum-Caribbean Tribes: An Introduction.” In Handbook of South American Indians, Vol. 4, edited by Julian H. Steward, 1–42. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Sued Badillo, Jalil. 1992. “Facing up to Caribbean History.” American Antiquity 57 (4): 599–607. Sued Badillo, Jalil. 1995. “The Island Caribs: New Approaches to the Question of Ethnicity in the Early Colonial Caribbean.” In Wolves from the Sea: Readings in the Anthropology of the Native Caribbean, edited by Neil L. Whitehead, 61–89. Leiden: KITLV Press. Ting, Carmen, Jorge Ulloa Hung, Corinne L. Hofman, and Patrick Degryse. 2018. “Indigenous Technologies and the Production of Early Colonial Ceramics in Dominican Republic.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 17: 47–57. Torres Merino, José Luis. 2018. Cubagua y su riqueza perlífera. Génesis del poblamiento de Suramérica. Sevilla: Punto Rojo Libros. Trevisan, A. 1989 [1501]. “Libro de Toda la Navegación del Rey de España de las Islas y Tierras Recientemente Descubiertas.” In El Mar de los Descubridores, edited by Marisa Vannini de Gerulewicz, 123–158. Caracas: Fundación de Promoción Cultural de Venezuela. Ulloa Hung, Jorge. 2014. Arqueología en la Línea noroeste de La Española. Santo Domingo: Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo.

243

Jorge Ulloa Hung et al. Ulloa Hung, Jorge, and Eduardo Herrera Malatesta. 2015. “Investigaciones Arqueológicas en el Norte de La Española entre viejos esquemas y nuevos datos.” Boletín Del Museo Del Hombre Dominicano 46: 75–107. Ulloa Hung, Jorge, and Roberto Valcárcel Rojas. 2016. Indígenas e indios en el Caribe: presencia, legado y estudio. Santo Domingo: INTEC. Ulloa Hung, Jorge, and Till F. Sonnemann. 2017. “Exploraciones arqueológicas en la fortaleza de Santo Tomás de Jánico. Nuevos aportes a su comprensión Histórica.” Ciencia y Sociedad 42 (3): 11–27. Urbani, Bernardo. 1999. “Nuevo mundo, nuevos monos: sobre primates neotropicales en los siglos XV y XVI.” Neotropical Primates 7 (4): 121–125. Valcárcel Rojas, Roberto. 2016a. “Cuba. Indios después de Colón.” In Los Indígenas más allá de Colón. Indígenas e indios en el Caribe Presencia, legado y estudio, edited by Jorge Ulloa Hung and Roberto Valcárcel Rojas, 7–47. Santo Domingo: INTEC. Valcárcel Rojas, Roberto. 2016b. Archaeology of Early Colonial Interaction at El Chorro de Maíta, Cuba. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Valcárcel Rojas, Roberto. 2019a. “European Material Culture in Indigenous Sites in Northeastern Cuba.” In Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas: Archaeological Case Studies, edited by Corinne L. Hofman and Floris W. M. Keehnen, 102–123. Leiden: Brill. Valcárcel Rojas, Roberto. 2019b. “Revisitando el universo colonial. Arqueología de la interacción entre indígenas y europeos en Las Antillas.” In Arqueología del contacto en Latinoamérica, edited by Lourdes S. Dominguez, Pedro Paulo A. Funari and Alexandre Guida Navarro, 397–422. Sao Paulo: Paco e Littera. Valcárcel Rojas, Roberto, Corinne L. Hofman, and Menno L. P. Hoogland. 2014. “Indios: Arqueología de una nueva identidad.” In Indios en Holguín, edited by Roberto Valcárcel Rojas and H. Pérez Concepción, 20–42. Holguín: Editorial La Mezquita. Valcárcel Rojas, Roberto, and Jorge Ulloa Hung, eds. 2018. De la desaparición a la permanencia. Indígenas e indios en la reinvención del Caribe. Santo Domingo: INTEC and Fundación García Arévalo. Valcárcel Rojas, Roberto, Jason E. Laffoon, Darlene A. Weston, Menno L. P. Hoogland, and Corinne L. Hofman 2020. “Slavery of Indigenous People in the Caribbean Islands: An Archaeological Perspective.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 24: 517–545. Valcárcel Rojas, Roberto, and Marcos Martinón-Torres. 2013. “Metals in the Indigenous Societies of the Caribbean.” In The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Archaeology, edited by William F. Keegan, Corinne L. Hofman, and Reniel Rodríguez Ramos, 504–522. New York: Oxford University Press. Valcárcel Rojas, Roberto, Alice V. M. Samson, and Menno L. P. Hoogland. 2013. “Indo-Hispanic Dynamics: From Contact to Colonial Interaction in the Greater Antilles.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 17: 18–39. Valcárcel Rojas, Roberto, Darlene A. Weston, Hayley L. Mickleburgh, J. E. Laffoon, and Anne van Duijvenbode. 2011. “El Chorro de Maíta. A Diverse Approach to a Context of Diversity.” In Communities in Contact: Essays in Archaeology, Ethnohistory & Ethnography of the Amerindian Circum-Caribbean, edited by Corinne L. Hofman and Anne van Duijvenbode, 225–251. Leiden: Sidestone Press. Vila, Pablo. 1948. “La destrucción de Nueva Cádiz ¿Terremoto o huracán?” Boletín de la Academia Nacional de la Historia 31 (123): 213–219. Voss, Barbara L. 2015. “Narratives of Colonialism, Grand and Not So Grand: A Critical Reflection on the Archaeology of the Spanish and Portuguese Americas.” In Archaeology of Culture Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America, edited by Pedro Paulo A. Funari and Maria Ximena Senatore, 353–361. New York: Springer. Weston, Darlene A. 2012. “Human Skeletal Report: El Chorro de la Maíta, Cuba.” Report on file at Leiden University. Weston, Darlene A., and Roberto Valcárcel Rojas. 2016. “Communities in Contact: Health and Paleodemography at El Chorro de Maíta, Cuba.” In Cuban Archaeology in The Caribbean, edited by Ivan Roksandic, 83–105. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Willey, Gordon R. 1971. An Introduction to American Archaeology, Volume Two: South America. Prentice Hall, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc. Willis, Raymond F. 1980. “Nueva Cádiz.” In Spanish Colonial Frontier Research, edited by Henry F. Dobyns, 27–40. Albuquerque: Center for Anthropological Studies. Wilson, Samuel M. 1993. “The Cultural Mosaic of the Indigenous Caribbean.” Proceedings of the British Academy 81: 37–66. Wilson, Samuel M. 2007. The Archaeology of the Caribbean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

244

Social networks and colonial adaptation Wing, Elisabeth S. 1961. “Animal Remains Excavated at the Spanish Site of Nueva Cádiz on Cubagua Island, Venezuela.” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 41: 162–165. Woodward, Robyn P. 2011. “Feudalism or Agrarian Capitalism? The Archaeology of the Early Sixteenth Century Spanish Sugar Industry.” In Out of Many, One People: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica, edited by James A. Delle, Mark W. Hauser, and Douglas Armstrong, 23–40. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

245

16 INDIGENOUS PERSISTENCE IN THE FACE OF IMPERIALISM Andean case studies Di Hu and Kylie Quave

Introduction How do Indigenous communities navigate and subvert imperial rule to preserve their cultural autonomy? In this chapter, we address this question by showing that historical social landscapes inform both imperial rule and Indigenous resistance to it. Just as empires are inspired and bolstered by previous imperial ideologies and infrastructure, so too are Indigenous resistance strategies informed by historical beliefs, practices, and social landscapes. Indigenous communities often survive, subvert, and even topple empires. Likewise, culture change is multidirectional, with the cultures of the agents of empire being changed as much as the Indigenous subjects’ cultures. While scholars have recognized that “indices” of material culture change do not map onto the degree of assimilation, there is nevertheless an assumption that imperial power was more transformative than the agency of Indigenous communities. This chapter explores these themes by focusing on the Inka and Spanish colonial empires in Peru (ca. fifteenth–nineteenth centuries). We show that the ways that Native Andean local cultures changed through two empires could be seen as assimilation, but only if we think typologically with regard to identity, as imperial agents conceptualized identity. If we think about the contexts and meanings of the ways that Native Andean cultures changed, then the narrative becomes one of persistence and resistance. Specifically, we focus on the Indigenous peoples of highland Peru in Ayacucho and Cuzco. Ayacucho and Cuzco are appropriate case studies because they were areas of high state intervention in both the Inka and Spanish colonial periods. In the Spanish colonial period, they were also areas where Indigenous leadership and participation in rebellions were frequent and effective leading up to the independence of South America. We show how even the most exploited Indigenous communities, those whom the Inka coercively removed from their original homelands, used cultural innovations grounded in traditional principles to push back against the material marginalization experienced in their new communities. This spirit of cultural innovation carried through to the Spanish colonial period and helped build a sense of community that could counter the socially divisive policies of colonial exploitation. For both the Inka and the Spanish colonial situations, cultural innovation took the form of unique ceramic styles and traditional ritual practices that incorporated the material culture of the empire. Cuzco and Ayacucho were centers of Indigenous resistance in Spanish colonial Peru. We trace the genealogy of resistance against imperial exploitation and how it manifested in 246

Indigenous persistence

material culture. Our archaeological case studies for the Inka period are the communities of unfree laborers called mitmaqkuna and yanakuna, who were coercively removed from their homelands to serve state and royal interests. The mitmaqkuna community, called Yanawilka (Hu 2019), was located in the region of Ayacucho, near the former Inka provincial capital of Vilcas Huaman. The mitmaqkuna were a category of temporarily resettled labor colonists from among non-Inka ethnic groups. The Inka required them to relocate for state service, and then they returned to their home provinces (mitmaq is a Quechua noun referring to colonists who are sent out in turns, while -kuna is a suffix denoting the plural). The yanakuna community called Cheqoq was located in the region of Cuzco, near the former Inka royal estate at Yucay and the Inka imperial capital of Cusco (Quave 2012). The yanakuna were similar to the mitmaqkuna except that their service was perpetual and their status inherited generationally once established (yana is often glossed as a servant in Quechua). For the Spanish colonial period, we focus on a community of textile laborers from Pomacocha (Hu 2016) whose ancestors were the mitmaqkuna at Yanawilka and other nearby communities. We also draw from historical accounts of innovative ritual practices that spanned both the regions of Ayacucho and Cuzco.

Theoretical perspectives on culture change in imperial and colonial situations How does one identify cultural persistence in the archaeological and historical record? What counts as cultural discontinuity, and does cultural discontinuity imply successful assimilation or cultural destruction by colonial imperial powers? The archaeological and historical investigation of Indigenous persistence is hampered by three factors. First, a typological or segmented view of culture persists in popular and academic thinking, which favors colonial understandings of identity (Panich and Schneider 2019). Second, Indigenous resistance to the destruction of their culture often took forms that favored impermanence and mobility, leaving fewer traces in the historical and archaeological record than colonial projects of domination (Holland-Lulewicz et al. 2020). Third, the presence of the material culture of the dominant group is often interpreted as evidence for a lack of Indigenous resilience, even when it is not in reality (Sallum and Noelli 2020). Even when there are historical documents describing Indigenous resistance, they are filtered through the colonial gaze (Panich 2020, 15). If we take historical documents at face value, the colonized either assimilate or erase their own cultures. Yet the strongest testament to the success of resistance strategies is the present-day persistence of vibrant Indigenous communities worldwide, who continue to resist sustained colonialism and imperialism (e.g., Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018; Panich 2020). We conceptualize cultural discontinuity as the permanent loss of traditional creative principles, not the discontinuity of certain material markers or subsistence strategies. Continuity does not mean stasis (Ghisleni 2018; Panich 2020, 13). Material culture change can indicate a vibrant continuity of traditional cultural principles that adapt to changing circumstances. After all, the only cultures that do not change are dead ones (Miranda 2013, xiv). Here, we present a synthesis and reconceptualization of how cultures change in imperial and colonial contexts. The theories of acculturation that dominated the social sciences until recently were rightfully critiqued for either ignoring or employing a superficial understanding of the role of power differentials in culture change (Cusick 1998, 137–142; Lightfoot 1995, 206–207; Singleton 1999, 4). Although proponents of acculturation theory did not explicitly argue that cultures of the dominant classes always disproportionately influence the cultures of the marginalized or subject classes, in practice this assumption was held more often than not (Howson 1990, 81–82). The 247

Di Hu and Kylie Quave

dominating Manchu adopting the customs of conquered China is a notable counterpoint, for example (Bartel 1980, 18–19). Although theories of acculturation originated with scholarship on how North American Indigenous cultures changed in response to European colonialism (Cusick 1998; Lightfoot 1995), many scholars studying ancient states and empires have adopted acculturation frameworks to explain how elites of subject groups emulate aspects of imperial culture to better distinguish themselves from the non-elite (e.g., Flammini 2010; Higginbotham 1996, 2000; Hodges 1989; Renfrew 1988). Theories of creolization, ethnogenesis, and hybridity came to the fore beginning in the late 1980s (Deagan 1998; Hu 2013; Silliman 2015; Singleton 1999; VanValkenburgh 2013; Voss 2008, 2015; Weik 2014). These theories of culture change recognized the role that creativity and agency played in the formation of new identities in multicultural contexts (e.g., Lightfoot et al. 1998). Scholars adopting these frameworks show how cultural influence flowed in many directions and was deeply affected by historical context (e.g., Ghisleni 2018). In rejecting methods that index cultural change vis-à-vis quantification of material culture styles (e.g., Farnsworth 1989; Quimby and Spoehr 1951), scholars recognize the need for contextual analysis of artifacts to uncover past practices (Kelly 1997, 362–366; Mann 2008, 333; Singleton 1999, 4). Nevertheless, these practices are still slotted into discrete cultural units (Silliman 2005; Woolf 1997). Analytical units of “ethnic groups,” “cultural logics,” and “core values” categorize material culture and practices, which is problematic because it implies that cultural mixing is one of “pure” ingredients (Deagan 2013; Grahame 1998; Silliman 2015; Stein 2002). Even when scholars “flip the script” and show that imperial cultures were just as influenced by subaltern cultures, the core assumption that cultures are discrete and segmented remains (Woolf 1997, 339–341). This segmentation of culture erases the complexity of political agency by making similar outcomes of culture change equal. For example, cultural change or persistence can both indicate active agendas of political resistance against the ruling classes, depending on the context. By operating on the level of analytical cultural units, these theories miss the heterogeneous political processes and strategies within each cultural unit and how these political strategies interact (Brather 2005; Woolf 2012). The politics of how social difference is created and maintained, especially in state contexts, are undertheorized in paradigms of creolization, ethnogenesis, and hybridity (though some scholars have applied entanglement theory to overcome this challenge, e.g., Norman in press; Silliman 2016). While these theories recognize that creativity and agency play important roles in social and cultural change, they do not explain how such creativity and agency play out politically (Gardner 2013). When outsiders impose a typological view of identity through the colonial and imperial legal system, they essentialize Indigenous identity. Unfortunately, these legal frameworks still persist and marginalize Indigenous peoples who are not considered “legitimate” according to outsiders’ static view of Indigenous identity (Panich 2020). On the other hand, Indigenous and postcolonial epistemologies emphasize the creative vitality of Indigenous strategies of persistence under difficult colonial and imperial situations. The term “survivance” captures the bottom-up creative vitality of Indigenous strategies of persistence (Vizenor 1999, 2008). Recently, “survivance” has gained currency in archaeology because it “pushes us to look for the ways that Indigenous people made pragmatic choices to resist, accommodate, or avoid various colonial impositions” (Panich 2020, 9). Furthermore, by focusing on the ongoing structures of colonialism as well as Indigenous social mobilization, survivance frameworks have broad contemporary significance (e.g., Gonzalez et al. 2006, Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018). Indigenous epistemologies emphasize that history is not linear and that the present is embedded in the materiality of the past (Parfait-Dardar 2020; Smith 1999; Steeves 2015, 58–59; TallBear 2011). Persistence and resistance draw creatively from powerful traditional narratives and more often than not involve 248

Indigenous persistence

Indigenous cosmopolitanism (Hu 2017), such as the Taki Onqoy movement (Mumford 1998; Norman in press), the Tupac Amaru II rebellion (Walker 2014), the Pueblo Revolt (Liebmann 2012), and the Ghost Dance movement (Andersson 2008; Du Bois 2007). Previously, theories of culture change based on a typological or segmentary view of culture were similar to colonial and imperial ideologies. In contrast, recent theoretical innovations in identity change and persistence have long been embodied in practice outside of academia. They have gained traction in academic venues mainly due to the participation of scholars and thinkers from diverse backgrounds and engagement with pluralistic communities and stakeholders (Atalay 2006; Cipolla et al. 2019; Colwell 2016; Kristensen and Davis 2015).

Cultural innovations in the face of Inka imperialism (fifteenth–sixteenth c.) With little opportunity to make or shape their own prosperity, forcibly resettled groups under Inka imperialism resourcefully acquired the materials needed to engage in particular cultural practices that required prestige goods (Hu and Quave 2020). At both Yanawilka (mitmaqkuna community) and Cheqoq (yanakuna community), we find offering contexts demonstrating that mitmaqkuna and yanakuna meant to acquire more wealth, even within their domestic lives marked by asymmetrical gifting and unfair labor arrangements. Furtive acquisition of Inka imperial goods and prestige goods made these offering rituals possible. The mitmaqkuna community at Yanawilka was only 5.2 km from the important Inka provincial capital of Vilcas Huaman and comprised around 60 to 70 domestic structures. The domestic structure with the richest household assemblages (Y1) was also the only structure excavated that had Inka narrow-mouth jar (urpu) lugs underneath the foundation stones (Figure 16.1a). The lugs, which are appliqued knobs typically shaped like faces and which are emblematic of the Inka imperial pottery style, had wear and tear; the wear indicates they were used for their intended function before being ritually deposited underneath the foundation stones. The inhabitants may have carried the lugs from elsewhere, perhaps Inka trash middens, given that only the lug zones of those vessels were present in the ceramic assemblage. In addition to the lugs, a non-Inka style miniature jar was also deposited in the floor and was oriented perfectly along the east-west axis (Figure 16.1a). The miniature jar was similar to other ritually deposited miniature jars in the Ayacucho region during the Late Horizon (e.g., Abraham 2010, 212). This structure appeared domestic, with evidence of diverse activities such as eating, feasting, ritual, stone tool production, and cooking. Although the inhabitants of this structure utilized Inka material culture in their ritual offerings, they did so in a non-Inka way. The Inka urpu represented the body of the Inka more than any other form (Bray 2018). This ritual interring of the Inka urpu lugs was likely done in private without participation from agents of the Inka state, given the discarded and well-worn nature of what was interred. Cheqoq, a yanakuna settlement on the Maras Plain some 20 km northwest of Cuzco, was associated with the royal lineage of the ruler Wayna Qhapaq (Quave 2012). At 22 ha, it is one of the largest domestic settlements outside the Inka capital city of Cuzco (Covey 2014, 155). The site consists of about 8 ha of imperial storage structures and 14 ha of domestic terraces with corrals and a ceramic production area. In one of the domestic complexes—Area Q—we recovered an offering dug into the floor 37 cm below an external wall facing a patio with multiple domestic structures around it. Thirty cm in diameter, the subfloor offering contained a complete, undecorated (Cuzco Buff) narrow-mouth jar (urpu/aríbalo); small fragments of burnt bone; ten small Spondylus fragments (one polished); charred coca seeds, quinoa/kiwicha, maize kernels, and Fabaceae seeds; and flakes of quartz in a matrix of soft, loose earth mixed with carbon and burnt earth (Figure 16.1c). 249

Di Hu and Kylie Quave

Figure 16.1 Excavated areas and materials from Yanawilka and Cheqoq. a. Structure Y1 at Yanawilka with the locations of Inka urpu lugs (1, 2, 3) and miniature vessel (4). b. Unusual spackled sherds from Yanawilka. c. Area Q subfloor offering at Cheqoq with the location of an unusual Inka urpu. d. Photograph of Inka urpu from Cheqoq Area Q offering. e. Unidentified decorated sherds from Cheqoq. Source: Figure by Kylie Quave and Di Hu available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12909875 under a CC BY 4.0 license.

250

Indigenous persistence

The Inka jar was of a lower quality than the Cuzco-Inka sherds found at the site, with crooked handles and an incompletely polished surface. It was made of the slightly coarser paste among the two primary paste types found at Cheqoq and was poorly fired, with visible fire clouding (Figure 16.1d). Spondylus shell in particular has been linked to fertility and water, according to ethnohistoric studies of the Inka (Blower 2001; Salomon and Urioste 1991, 116). Miniature Inka vessels were “typically linked to ritual and religious practices and associated with material wellbeing, prosperity, fertility, and ancestor worship” (Bray 2009, 120). Interring significant objects such as guinea pigs, camelid fetuses, stone, and ceramic figurines underneath foundations has been a widespread practice throughout the Andes as a way of bringing fertility to a household. Clandestine practices of ritual offerings of horseshoes have been observed in the colonial period at Torata Alta, for example (Rice 2011, 502). By interring miniature representations of the Inka in the form of urpu jars or parts of them—in addition to including the fertilityassociated Spondylus shell—the inhabitants of Cheqoq and Yanawilka may have intended to invoke the Inkas’ favor to secure future fertility. The incorporation of imperial elements into what is on the whole a local Indigenous framework at Yanawilka and Cheqoq was not unique. For example, the community of Canchaje in Huarochirí engaged with similar ritual innovation to gain political agency and community cohesion in the Inka empire, and those innovations survived the Inka empire into the Spanish colonial period (Hernández 2020). Pottery type frequencies also lend some insight into the process of colonization under the Inkas. In the case of Yanawilka, the name of the ethnic group of the mitmaqkuna were “Condes,” most likely referring to the Condes ethnic group that had their homeland in the region of Arequipa. None of the ceramic styles of the Arequipa homeland, however, matched those in Yanawilka. The pottery of Yanawilka most resembled the assemblage at Pulapuco, a settlement of the Lucana ethnic group. At Cheqoq, the overwhelming majority of decorated pottery was in the Inka imperial style, at 80 percent (Hu and Quave 2020, Table 2), yet some of that may have resulted from the residents’ proximity to the Inka imperial-style pottery workshop on site (Quave 2017). There were also decorated ceramics that were stylistically unusual or unique, raising the possibility that the inhabitants of Yanawilka and Cheqoq, as newly created communities, created or were linked to communities producing novel non-Inka styles of ceramics. At Yanawilka, there were ceramic sherds that had a spackled texture and reddish or orange slip, with an incision that demarcated spackled and smooth surfaces (Figure 16.1b). At Cheqoq, where multiethnic retainer laborers lived, one might expect to find the creation of a shared identity. However, other than imperial and Inka-related pottery, there was a minor proportion of Killke (early Inka/pre-imperial) pottery, but the next most common decorated category consisted of a mix of non-Inka, unidentifiable types (1 percent of decorated sherds). These types have not yet been linked to specific origin places of the yanakuna at Cheqoq, but they were heterogeneous in manufacture, paste, and exterior decoration (Figure 16.1e). In prior interpretation of these sites of resettlement (Hu and Quave 2020), we have critiqued the notion that coerced resettlement into imperial production enclaves like these might have resulted in greater cultural unification (Rowe 1982). What we found instead was that there was uneven investment into the material culture of the dominant identity of the Inka. Some types of material culture were adopted, but not all. Even while the retainers at Cheqoq produced the pottery used by Inka nobles in pursuit of their imperial hegemony, the retainers also used an unexpectedly high proportion of non-Inka to Inka serving dishes in domestic spaces (Quave 2012, Fig. 8.9). The use of pottery likely originating in diverse places and societies at Cheqoq, coupled with the reuse of discarded or low-quality implements of Inka ritual, reveals a cultural persistence that made use of what little could be had—the castoffs of the imperial workshop, the crumbs of the highly valued Spondylus—and forged a new version of cultural survival from the fragments. 251

Di Hu and Kylie Quave

The material culture of anti-government rebellions in late colonial Peru (1780–1824) In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Native Andean-led local revolts and widespread rebellions occurred with much higher frequency than any other period after the late sixteenth century (Langfur and Walker 2019; O’Phelan 2012; Sala i Vila 1996; Stern 1987). Despite excellent historical scholarship on this tumultuous and revolutionary period, the material culture of rebellion has not seen systematic study. In this section, we review the documentary evidence for the material culture that facilitated widespread Indigenous-led rebellions in the late colonial Andes. We show that Indigenous peoples used elements of Spanish material culture within Indigenous epistemologies and praxis. Native Andean elites and nobility used elements from Inka and Spanish material culture that signified elite status: khipus, paintings of nobility, and writing. Native Andean commoners incorporated Spanish material culture into domestic rituals invoking success in household fertility and prosperity and against enemies. Although many Native Andean commoners could not read or write, they nevertheless valued the materiality of rebellious political lampoons and proclamations and used them as badges of political kinship with other rebels. The material culture that facilitated rebellion was largely media of communication, most of which were not legible to Spaniards. Khipus were Native Andean recording and communication devices made of knotted strings. Although some Native Andeans, especially the elite, were literate in Spanish-style writing, they continued to use khipus throughout the colonial period and well into the twentieth century (Hyland 2016). Because the Spanish did not read or record with Native Andean-style khipus (though they did use a blended Spanish/Andean form called khipu boards to record numerical data), they were ideal communication methods for coordinating rebellion (Hyland 2017; Salomon 2004). On at least two occasions, messages facilitating rebellion were inscribed in khipus: 1750 and 1783 (Hyland 2017). Writing on paper also played an important role in fomenting rebellion. Widely circulated political lampoons (or “pasquines”) written in both Spanish and Quechua (the most commonly read languages) provided common points of reference that connected people of diverse backgrounds into wider political debates and urged rebellion (Armacanqui-Tipacti 1997; Richards 1997). Around the time of the Wars of Independence in South America (early nineteenth century), anti-royalist written proclamations were distributed to areas where the rebel armies planned to enter to win sympathy (Igue 2013). These proclamations often invoked both the Inka past and the international nature of the conflict. For example, Manuel Belgrano, the Argentinian rebel general, issued this proclamation to the villages of Peru in 1816, beckoning the utopian ideal of the Inka past: Already resolved, written, and sworn is our separation and Independence, ripped from the hands and power of those beasts. Our fathers of Congress have already resolved to revive and revindicate the blood of our Incas, so that they govern us. And I myself have heard from the fathers of our Country, together, with overflowing joy talk and resolve to make our King the sons of the Inkas. (Cornejo 1963, 13, translation by authors) Flores Galindo (1986) showed that invoking the idea of a shared utopian Inka past created unifying identities during times of general rebellion. Even among the creole Spanish (born in the Americas, often with Spanish ancestors who were also born in the Americas), claiming Inka ancestry was a way to diferentiate themselves from their hated rivals, the Peninsular Spanish, 252

Indigenous persistence

or recent immigrants from Spain (McFarlane 1998, 321). During the Wars of Independence in Peru, the rebel general Bernardo O’Higgins proclaimed “Brothers and compatriots: The day of liberty for America has arrived, from the Mississippi to Cape Horn in a zone that almost occupies half of the world, proclaiming the independence of the New World” (CNSIP 1971, 198–199, translation by authors). By contextualizing local conflicts in the global revolutionary milieu, people found the rebel cause more appealing. Colonial-era paintings of Inka nobility, drinking vessels with figurative scenes of Inkas called keros, and plays and costumes commemorating the Inkas were all proscribed after the Tupac Amaru II general rebellion in 1781, the largest Indigenous-led rebellion in the Americas in history (Stavig and Schmidt 2008; Walker 2014). The figurative imagery on the keros and the attendant ritual practices were seen as idolatrous by the Spaniards (Curley et al. 2020; Howe et al. 2018; Turner 2019). The ruling Spaniards feared the role these categories of material culture played in bolstering Inka-inspired millenarianism, even though they were equally “Spanish” in form and function (Martínez et al. 2016). Dissidents and loyalists fought both on the battlefields and over the control and interpretation of the visual arts to advance differing visions of a just world order (Cohen-Aponte n.d.). Everyday ritual paraphernalia also showed a mix of Native Andean and Spanish elements, but employed in fundamentally Native Andean ritual practices. During the Tupac Amaru II rebellion, local leaders sprang up in support of the Cusqueño leader Tupac Amaru II and viewed him as the legitimate Inka who will once again rule the Andes. In one such case, a family consisting of Pablo Chalco, Petrona Canchari (Chalco’s wife), and Maria Sisa (Chalco’s mother) were effective local leaders mobilizing people in support of Tupac Amaru II in the region of Ayacucho. According to witnesses, Pablo Chalco commanded authority among his supporters due to his family’s ability to become wealthy through “idolatry” and “witchcraft.” For example, he was accused of thanking the mountains using coca leaves instead of the Christian God for healing sick livestock. Petrona Canchari and Maria Sisa were accused of being witches who used various items in their rituals to increase the numbers of their livestock and to kill enemies. A yellow bag with ritual paraphernalia was confiscated from their house and included sea shells, coca, bread, sweets (chancaca), chili pepper, ashes, various small stones in diverse figures, ground chuño, pigs, young corn cobs, gold dust, rosary beads, knucklebone, lipe rock, bird excrement, camelid grease, a comb, and many other rubbish . . . as well as a bit of grass from the puna in round figures, each tied with belts of different colors, and a black stone made of volcanic rock shaped like a bone, which she said was of the Inka. (Hu 2016, 295) This was a mix of Native Andean elements (sea shells, coca, ground chuño, young corn cobs, knucklebone, chili pepper, lipe rock, bird excrement, camelid grease, puna grass, and extraordinarily shaped stones) and Spanish elements (pigs and rosary beads). The marine shells, coca, small stones, grease, and young corn cobs were integral parts of domestic ritual all over the Andes for thousands of years to the present, and the rosary beads show how incorporative of Spanish elements these ritual practices were. The ritual paraphernalia were instrumental in creating legitimacy for millenarian movements, giving ordinary people concrete examples of fertility and power against Spanish-imposed exploitative governance. The incorporative material culture that bolstered the idea of an Inka-led utopia helped people of diverse backgrounds—not just Native Andeans but also poor Spaniards, mestizos (people of Native Andean and European ancestry), and people of African descent—see themselves as 253

Di Hu and Kylie Quave

part of the same political project. When the Spaniards first arrived in the Andes in the sixteenth century, the many ethnic groups who had resented Inka rule allied themselves with the Spaniards and were mainly responsible for the defeat of the Inka (Espinoza Soriano 1971). More than two centuries later, many of the descendants of those groups who had fought against the Inka were invoking the just nature of Inka rule to rebel against the Spanish. The incorporation of Spanish elements into Indigenous millenarian material culture contributed to a powerful overarching “Indigenous” consciousness that did not exist when the Inka were originally defeated in the sixteenth century. Given material culture’s important role in Indigenous-led rebellion, we should understand how material culture reflected and reinforced cultural affinity and political unity in a socially fragmented and competitive world. Historical documents give us glimpses into the more spectacular and obvious examples of rebellious material culture, but archaeology can show us the more quotidian aspects of how this incorporative and cosmopolitan material culture evolved. Historical documents skew toward the elites, but archaeology can access the material world of the common folk, who made up the vast majority of the participants and ad hoc leaders in these general rebellions. Some of these common folk forged rebellious identities, such as the Morochucos. The Morochucos were a collection of Native Andeans, mestizos, and poor Spaniards in the region of Ayacucho who spoke primarily the Quechua Indigenous language and shared kinship ties and cultural practices from both Andean and European roots. This identity was formed in extensive economic networks of the obrajes and estancias (ranches) of the region of Ayacucho in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Aguirre 2017; Igue 2013). The Morochucos were effective rebels who played a pivotal role in winning the Wars of Independence in South America. In the next section, we examine how the formation of Morochuco identity can be seen through material culture.

The community of Pomacocha and Indigenous persistence and innovation in material culture (seventeenth—eighteenth c.) Our archaeology case study is the community of Pomacocha. Yanawilka, the mitmaqkuna community discussed earlier, was within the colonial limits of the community of Pomacocha. During the Spanish colonial period, the community of Pomacocha was an hacienda and obraje. An hacienda is an agricultural estate that has plantations and pastoral lands. An obraje is a workshop, usually for making textiles, and can employ anywhere from tens to thousands of people. Pomacocha was an hacienda owned by a mestizo family in the sixteenth and the first part of the seventeenth century until the nuns of Santa Clara of the city of Huamanga maneuvered to usurp the lands. The nuns of Santa Clara built an obraje on the lands they usurped in 1681, and the Native Andeans who were living on the lands were employed to work there. At first, the workers were exclusively Native Andeans from the Conde ethnic group, but as the eighteenth century progressed, the workers became increasingly diverse: mestizos, poor Spaniards, and people from other ethnic groups and provinces (Hu 2016). Obrajes were exploitative sites of labor where debt slavery and other forms of coercion kept the workers in place (Salas 1998). The Spanish administrators in obrajes employed divisive social policies to control the working populace by putting mestizos, people of African descent, and poor Spaniards in charge of the Native Andean workers and their physical punishment. Nevertheless, obrajes were also socially dynamic spaces where workers of diverse backgrounds interacted and innovated new identities and material culture, creating a sense of community despite the top-down pressures stoking intercaste animosity. The innovative material culture reflected a convergence of practices and manufacturing techniques from different social backgrounds. 254

Indigenous persistence

Eventually, these cultural practices made up the milieu that defined a new rebellious identity in the Ayacucho region: the Morochucos. Pomacocha became a Morochuco stronghold in the Wars of Independence. The excavations at Pomacocha reveal at least two examples of the material manifestations of the formation of the Morochuco identity. The first example was half a pig’s jawbone that was found intentionally embedded in a paved stone floor of the probable jail cell for men (Figure 16.2a, b). According to archival descriptions of the obraje of Pomacocha, there were two jail cells, one for men and one for women. The jail cell for men housed prisoners who were convicted of idolatry. They were described as “bruxos” or “shamans” (Hu 2016, 221). While we cannot be certain that the pig jawbone was part of a ritual, we also cannot rule out the possibility that it was, given that the jail cell was populated by Native Andean shamans. Embedding animals or parts of animals into the floor or foundations of buildings is a common practice throughout the Andes and has been for thousands of years. We see a parallel between the pig jawbone, an animal of Eurasian origin, and the Inka urpu lugs that were placed under the foundation and wall stones of Yanawilka. We are unsure of the purpose

Figure 16.2 Artifacts recovered from excavations in the obraje of Pomacocha. a. Location of the pig jaw embedded in the stone floor of the probable jail cell for men. b. Pig jaw found embedded with the teeth pointing downward. c. Modeled and incised ceramic piece found in a trash midden. d. Side view of the ceramic piece. e. Bottom view of the ceramic piece, showing wear. f. Back view of the ceramic piece, showing it was probably originally attached to a serving vessel. Source: Figure by Di Hu available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12909884 under a CC BY 4.0 license.

255

Di Hu and Kylie Quave

of the intentional embedding of the pig jawbone into the floor of the jail cell, but it might have pertained to increasing the available food for the prisoners and workers. Generally, the things people used in these rituals were related to the things they wanted to increase. In this case, it would be more pigs. The workers raised pigs within the walls of the obraje, along with guinea pigs, cows, and chickens. Asking the shamans to increase the number of pigs would have meant more food for everyone, as food scarcity was an ever-present problem for workers in obrajes. Under the rule of certain administrators, the prisoners were allowed to mingle with the normal working populace during the daytime, only returning to their cells at night. The prisoners were from different provinces and ethnic groups (Hu 2016, 221). The comingling would have contributed to a sense of community and ritual cosmopolitanism among the workers of the obraje, who generally lived inside the walls of the compound. The second kind of material culture innovation in the obraje of Pomacocha was the use of Spanish tile manufacturing techniques to make a traditional style of modeled pottery. In a trash midden dating to the early eighteenth century, a fragment of a ceramic vessel was found (Figure 16.2c, 16.2d). The surface treatment and paste was similar to the numerous roof tiles found during excavations inside the obraje. The roof tiles were produced in the same community, probably within the walls of the obraje. The form of the ceramic piece, however, resembled Late Intermediate Period (LIP, 1100–1440 ce) modeled ceramics of south-central Peru, with its appliqued decorations and incisions. Despite its resemblance to LIP ceramics, the style was still unique and not seen in published literature. The vessel that the ceramic piece was attached to is also a mystery. It appears that the piece may have been one of the feet of a serving vessel, judging by the wear on the bottom and its form (Figure 16.2e, 16.2f). If it was indeed one of the feet of a serving vessel, this type of decorated feet is unprecedented in Peruvian archaeology. The ceramic piece shows elements of traditional stylistic elements from the Late Intermediate Period as well as innovative elements not seen elsewhere. The mix of traditional and new elements in both style and manufacture reflected the cultural dynamism of the obraje. This kind of mixing was also seen in religious murals in colonial Peru, where Indigenous painting techniques and cultural emphases were evident in what were supposedly orthodox Catholic religious murals (Cohen Suarez 2016).

Discussion and conclusion: cultural persistence as incorporation of new elements, not stasis In this analysis we emphasized the processes that led to the identified material signatures of persistence, as opposed to focusing on the material outcomes themselves. By theorizing this work through the lens of Indigenous-led cosmopolitanism, we lend fresh insight into the directionality and character of culture change in a colonial setting. We challenged the assumption that in imperial contexts, the incorporation of imperial material culture by local communities is a sign of imperial imposition. Instead, it can be a manifestation of cultural persistence. The examples we highlighted were the innovative and incorporative ritual practices and ceramic styles and manufacturing techniques of local Indigenous communities that were profoundly affected by imperialism. The innovations were not a sign of imperial imposition but of local agency in pushing back against imperial exploitation. Counterintuitively, in the Spanish colonial period, the incorporation of new imperial elements into Indigenous forms and styles of material culture actually made the Native Andean framework more powerful, speaking to a wider range of people and ultimately mounting a more successful resistance against imperial power. From the Taki Onqoy movement to the Tupac Amaru II

256

Indigenous persistence

rebellion, Native Andeans creatively reimagined ritual paraphernalia to forge new, more cosmopolitan, cultural and political possibilities through the upheaval of colonial rule. In contrast to the Pueblo Revolt of the late seventeenth century, where Spanish elements were thoroughly rejected and destroyed in the American Southwest (Liebmann 2012), the Andean case studies we presented show how cultural persistence and resistance can also entail “Indigenizing” the material culture of the imperialists. The diversity of responses to the material culture of the imperialists in millenarian movements shows the fundamental creativity of Indigenous peoples rejecting exploitation. Native Andeans were able to create political cultures that spoke to people from different social backgrounds, creating the frameworks for the intercaste alliances that made the independence of South America possible.

References cited Abraham, Sarah J. 2010. “Provincial Life in the Inca Empire: Continuity and Change at Pulapuco, Peru.” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara. Aguirre Cárdenas, Max. 2017. El Ciclo Independentista Huamanguino: La Revolución de Los Morochucos y La Batalla de Ayacucho : Errores y Silencios. Lima, Perú: A&C Soluciones Gráficas. Andersson, Rani-Henrik. 2008. The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Armacanqui-Tipacti, Elia J. 1997. “Colonial Literature: Peru.” In Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, edited by Verity Smith, 403–409. London: Fitzroy Dearborn. Atalay, Sonya. 2006. “Indigenous Archaeology as Decolonizing Practice.” American Indian Quarterly 30 (3–4): 280–310. Bartel, Brad. 1980. “Colonialism and Cultural Responses: Problems Related to Roman Provincial Analysis.” World Archaeology 12 (1): 11–26. Blower, David. 2001. “The Many Facets of Mullu: More than Just a Spondylus Shell.” Andean Past 6: 209–228. Brather, Sebastian. 2005. “Acculturation and Ethnogenesis along the Frontier: Rome and the Ancient Germans in an Archaeological Perspective.” In Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis: Frontiers in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, edited by F. Curta, 139–171. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. Bray, Tamara L. 2009. “The Role of Chicha in Inca State Expansion: A Distributional Study of Inca Aríbalos.” In Drink, Power, and Society in the Andes, edited by Justin Jennings and Brenda Bowser, 108–132. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Bray, Tamara L. 2018. “Partnering with Pots: The Work of Objects in the Imperial Inca Project.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 28 (2): 243–257. Cipolla, Craig N., James Quinn, and Jay Levy. 2019. “Theory in Collaborative Indigenous Archaeology: Insights from Mohegan.” American Antiquity 84 (1): 127–142. CNSIP (Comisión Nacional del Sesquicentenario de la Independencia del Perú), ed. 1971. La Expedición Libertadora, Vol. 8. Colección Documental de La Independencia Del Perú. Lima: Comisión Nacional del Sesquicentenario de la Independencia del Perú. Cohen-Aponte, Ananda. n.d. “Imagining Insurgency in Late Colonial Peru.” Latin American Indian Literatures Journal, forthcoming. Cohen Suarez, Ananda. 2016. Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes. Austin: University of Texas Press. Colwell, Chip. 2016. “Collaborative Archaeologies and Descendant Communities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45 (1): 113–127. Cornejo Bouroncle, Jorge. 1963. Tupac Amaru, La Revolución Precursora de La Emancipación Continental: Estudio Documentado. Cuzco: Edit. H. G. Rozas. Covey, Alan R. 2014. “Local Populations, Royal Lineages, and State Entities in the Inca Occupation of the Xaquixaguana Plain.” In Regional Archaeology in the Inca Heartland: The Hanan Cuzco Surveys, edited by R. Alan Covey, 153–174. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology. Curley, Allison N., Alyson M. Thibodeau, Emily Kaplan, Ellen Howe, Ellen Pearlstein, and Judith Levinson. 2020. “Isotopic Composition of Lead White Pigments on Qeros: Implications for the Chronology and Production of Andean Ritual Drinking Vessels during the Colonial Era.” Heritage Science 8 (1): 72.

257

Di Hu and Kylie Quave Cusick, James G. 1998. “Historiography of Acculturation: An Evaluation of Concepts and Their Application in Archaeology.” In Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick, 126–145. Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University. Deagan, Kathleen. 1998. “Transculturation and Spanish American Ethnogenesis: The Archaeological Legacy of the Quincentenary.” In Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick, 23–43. Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University. Deagan, Kathleen. 2013. “Hybridity, Identity, and Archaeological Practice.” In The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture, edited by Card Jeb J, 260–276. Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University. Du Bois, Cora Alice. 2007. The 1870 Ghost Dance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Espinoza Soriano, Waldemar. 1971. Los huancas, aliados de la conquista: tres informaciones inéditas sobre participación indígena en conquista del Perú, 1558–1560–1561. Huancayo: Universidad Nacional del Centro del Perú. Farnsworth, Paul. 1989. “Native American Acculturation in the Spanish Colonial Empire: The Franciscan Missions of Alta California.” In Centre and Periphery: Comparative Studies in Archaeology, edited by T. C. Champion, 213–232. London: Unwin Hyman. Flammini, Roxana. 2010. “Elite Emulation and Patronage Relationships in the Middle Bronze: The Egyptianized Dynasty of Byblos.” Tel Aviv 37 (2): 154–168. Flores Galindo, Alberto. 1986. Buscando un inca: Identidad y utopía en los andes. Habana: Casa de las Américas. Gardner, Andrew. 2013. “Thinking about Roman Imperialism: Postcolonialism, Globalisation and Beyond?” Britannia 44: 1–25. Ghisleni, Lara. 2018. “Contingent Persistence: Continuity, Change, and Identity in the Romanization Debate.” Current Anthropology 59 (2): 138–166. Gonzalez, Sara L., Darren Modzelewski, Lee M. Panich, and Tsim D. Schneider. 2006. “Archaeology for the Seventh Generation.” The American Indian Quarterly 30 (3): 388–415. Grahame, Mark. 1998. “Rome without Romanization: Cultural Change in the Pre-Desert of Tripolitania (First–Third Centuries AD).” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 17 (1): 93–111. Hernández Garavito, Carla. 2020. “Producing Legibility through Ritual: The Inka Expansion in Huarochirí (Lima, Peru).” Journal of Social Archaeology 20 (3): 292–312. Higginbotham, Carolyn. 1996. “Elite Emulation and Egyptian Governance in Ramesside Canaan.” Tel Aviv 23 (2): 154–169. Higginbotham, Carolyn. 2000. Egyptianization and Elite Emulation in Ramesside Palestine: Governance and Accommodation on the Imperial Periphery. Leiden: Brill. Hodges, Richard. 1989. The Anglo-Saxon Achievement: Archaeology & the Beginnings of English Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Holland-Lulewicz, Jacob, Victor D. Thompson, James Wettstaed, and Mark Williams. 2020. “Enduring Traditions and the (Im)materiality of Early Colonial Encounters in the Southeastern United States.” American Antiquity. 85 (4): 694–714. Howe, Ellen, Emily Kaplan, Richard Newman, James H. Frantz, Ellen Pearlstein, Judith Levinson, and Odile Madden. 2018. “The Occurrence of a Titanium Dioxide/Silica White Pigment on Wooden Andean Qeros: A Cultural and Chronological Marker.” Heritage Science 6 (1): 41. Howson, Jean E. 1990. “Social Relations and Material Culture: A Critique of the Archaeology of Plantation Slavery.” Historical Archaeology 24 (4): 78–91. Hu, Di. 2013. “Approaches to the Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Past and Emergent Perspectives.” Journal of Archaeological Research 21 (4): 371–402. Hu, Di. 2016. “Labor under the Sun and the Son: Landscapes of Control and Resistance at Inka and Spanish Colonial Pomacocha, Ayacucho, Peru.” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Hu, Di. 2017. “The Revolutionary Power of Andean Folk Tales.” SAPIENS (blog). May 16, 2017. www. sapiens.org/archaeology/andean-folk-tales-revolutionary-power/. Hu, Di. 2019. “Making Space under the Inca: A Space Syntax Analysis of a Mitmaq Settlement in Vilcas Huamán Province, Peru.” Antiquity 93 (370): 990–1008. Hu, Di, and Kylie E. Quave. 2020. “Prosperity and Prestige: Archaeological Realities of Unfree Laborers under Inka Imperialism.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 59 (September): 101201. Hyland, Sabine. 2016. “How Khipus Indicated Labour Contributions in an Andean Village: An Explanation of Colour Banding, Seriation and Ethnocategories.” Journal of Material Culture 21 (4): 490–509. Hyland, Sabine. 2017. “Writing with Twisted Cords: The Inscriptive Capacity of Andean Khipus.” Current Anthropology 58 (3): 412–419.

258

Indigenous persistence Igue, José Luis. 2013. “De Cangallo y Huamanga a Fines de La Época Colonial: Antecedentes Populares y Políticos de La Insurrección Patriota Del Año 1814.” Huari: Boletín de Estudios Históricos y Sociales 2: 9–20. Kelly, Kenneth G. 1997. “The Archaeology of African-European Interaction: Investigating the Social Roles of Trade, Traders, and the Use of Space in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Hueda Kingdom, Republic of Benin.” World Archaeology 28 (3): 351–369. Kristensen, Todd J., and Reade Davis. 2015. “The Legacies of Indigenous History in Archaeological Thought.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 22 (2): 512–542. Langfur, Hal, and Charles F. Walker. 2019. “Protest and Resistance against Colonial Rule in Iberian America.” In The Iberian World 1450–1820, edited by Fernando Bouza, Pedro Cardim, and Antonio Feros, 617–634. New York: Routledge. Liebmann, Matthew. 2012. Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in 17th Century New Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Lightfoot, Kent G. 1995. “Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship between Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology.” American Antiquity 60 (2): 199–217. Lightfoot, Kent G., and Sara L. Gonzalez. 2018. “The Study of Sustained Colonialism: An Example from the Kashaya Pomo Homeland in Northern California.” American Antiquity 83 (3): 427–443. Lightfoot, Kent G., Antoinette Martinez, and Ann M. Schiff. 1998. “Daily Practice and Material Culture in Pluralistic Social Settings: An Archaeological Study of Culture Change and Persistence from Fort Ross, California.” American Antiquity 63 (2): 199–222. Mann, Rob. 2008. “From Ethnogenesis to Ethnic Segmentation in the Wabash Valley: Constructing Identity and Houses in Great Lakes Fur Trade Society.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 12 (4): 319–337. Martínez, C., José Luis, Carla Díaz, Constanza Tocornal, Gabriela Acuña, and Luz María Narbona. 2016. “Qeros y discursos visuales en la construcción de la nueva sociedad colonial andina.” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 73 (1): 15–43. McFarlane, Anthony. 1998. “Identity, Enlightenment and Political Dissent in Late Colonial Spanish America.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 8: 309–335. Miranda, Deborah A. 2013. Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. Berkeley, CA: Heyday. Mumford, Jeremy. 1998. “The Taki Onqoy and the Andean Nation: Sources and Interpretations.” Latin American Research Review 33 (1): 150–165. Norman, Scotti. in press. “Catholicism and Taki Onqoy in the Early Colonial Period: Colonial Entanglements of Church Interments at Iglesiachayoq (Chicha-Soras Valley, Ayacucho, Peru).” American Anthropologist. O’Phelan, Scarlett. 2012. Un siglo de rebeliones anticoloniales: Perú y Bolivia 1700–1783, 2nd ed. Travaux de l’Institut Français d’Études Andines 287. Lima, Perú: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos. Panich, Lee M. 2020. Narratives of Persistence: Indigenous Negotiations of Colonialism in Alta and Baja California. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Panich, Lee M., and Tsim D. Schneider. 2019. “Categorical Denial: Evaluating Post-1492 Indigenous Erasure in the Paper Trail of American Archaeology.” American Antiquity 84 (4): 651–668. Parfait-Dardar, Shirell. 2020. “We Have Been Here Since Time Immemorial: Demanding Climate Action.” Cultural Survival, March 2020. www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/ we-have-been-here-time-immemorial-demanding-climate-action. Quave, Kylie E. 2012. “Labor and Domestic Economy on the Royal Estate in the Inka Imperial Heartland (Maras, Cuzco, Peru).” PhD Dissertation, Southern Methodist University. Quave, Kylie E. 2017. “Imperial-Style Ceramic Production on a Royal Estate in the Inka Heartland (Cuzco, Peru).” Latin American Antiquity 28 (4): 599–608. Quimby, George I., and Alexander Spoehr. 1951. “Acculturation and Material Culture.” Fieldiana 36 (6): 107–147. Renfrew, Colin. 1988. Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rice, Prudence M. 2011. “Order (and Disorder) in Early Colonial Moquegua, Peru.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 15 (3): 481–508. Richards, Keith J. 1997. “Bolivia: 19th- and 20th-Century Prose and Poetry.” In Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, edited by Verity Smith, 237–244. London: Fitzroy Dearborn. Rowe, John H. 1982. “Inca Policies and Institutions Relating to the Cultural Unification of the Empire.” In The Inca and Aztec States, 1400–1800, edited by George Allen Collier, Renato Rosaldo, and John D. Wirth, 93–118. New York: Academic Press. Sala i Vila, Núria. 1996. Y se armó el tole: tributo indígena y movimientos sociales en el Virreinato del Perú, 1790–1814. Ayacucho: Instituto de Estudios Regionales José María Arguedas.

259

Di Hu and Kylie Quave Salas, Miriam. 1998. Estructura Colonial Del Poder Español En El Perú: Huamanga (Ayacucho) a Través de Sus Obrajes. Siglos XVI-XVIII. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú Fondo Editorial. Sallum, Marianne, and Francisco Silva Noelli. 2020. “An Archaeology of Colonialism and the Persistence of Women Potters’ Practices in Brazil: From Tupiniquim to Paulistaware.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 24: 546–570. Salomon, Frank. 2004. The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village. Durham: Duke University Press. Salomon, Frank, and George L. Urioste. 1991. The Huarochirí Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion. Austin: University of Texas Press. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005. “Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America.” American Antiquity 70 (1): 55–74. Silliman, Stephen W. 2015. “A Requiem for Hybridity? The Problem with Frankensteins, Purées, and Mules.” Journal of Social Archaeology 15 (3): 277–298. Silliman, Stephen W. 2016. “Disentangling the Archaeology of Colonialism and Indigeneity.” In Archaeology of Entanglement, edited by Lindsay Der and Francesca Fernandini, 31–48. New York: Routledge. Singleton, Theresa A. 1999. I, Too, Am America: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Stavig, Ward, and Ella Schmidt, eds. 2008. The Tupac Amaru and Catarista Rebellions: An Anthology of Sources. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Steeves, Paulette F. 2015. “Decolonizing the Past and Present of the Western Hemisphere (The Americas).” Archaeologies 11 (1): 42–69. Stein, Gil J. 2002. “Distinguished Lecture in Archaeology: From Passive Periphery to Active Agents: Emerging Perspectives in the Archaeology of Interregional Interaction.” American Anthropologist 104 (3): 903–916. Stern, Steve J. 1987. “The Age of Andean Insurrection, 1742–1782: A Reappraisal.” In Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries, edited by Steve J. Stern, 34–93. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. TallBear, Kim. 2011. “Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigenous Standpoints.” Society for Cultural Anthropology. November 18, 2011. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/why-interspecies-thinking-needs-Indigenousstandpoints. Turner, Andrew D. 2019. “Resistance, Persistence, and Incorporation: Andean Cosmology and European Imagery on a Colonial Inka Kero.” Estudios Indiana 13: 137–161. VanValkenburgh, Parker. 2013. “Hybridity, Creolization, Mestizaje: A Comment.” Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28 (1): 301–322. Vizenor, Gerald Robert. 1999. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Vizenor, Gerald Robert. 2008. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Voss, Barbara L. 2008. The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race, Sexuality, and Identity in Colonial San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press. Voss, Barbara L. 2015. “What’s New? Rethinking Ethnogenesis in the Archaeology of Colonialism.” American Antiquity 80 (4): 655–670. Walker, Charles F. 2014. The Tupac Amaru Rebellion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weik, T. M. 2014. “The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis.” Annual Review of Anthropology 43 (1): 291–305. Woolf, Greg. 1997. “Beyond Romans and Natives.” World Archaeology 28 (3): 339–350. Woolf, Greg. 2012. Rome: An Empire’s Story. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

260

17 RECONCEPTUALIZING THE WICHITA MIDDLE GROUND IN THE SOUTHERN PLAINS Sarah Trabert and Brandi Bethke

In North America, the southern Plains exchange system after 1600 ce was a complicated and fiercely competitive network of fluid alliances, rival interests, and conflict residing in the middle of overlapping cultural, economic, and physical power bases in the Southeast and Southwest. Within this system, the Wichita people occupied physical and social spaces between different environments, exchange networks, Indigenous groups, and later European colonies for generations, controlling the passage of goods, people, and knowledge through their territories. The Wichita people played a critical role in the southern Plains for millennia, occupying large villages, maintaining agricultural fields, and controlling hunting grounds. They remain in the region today as a Tribal Nation federally recognized by the United States and known as The Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, with four divisions: Wichita, Tawakoni, Waco, and Kichai. In this chapter we present an overview of the Wichita people’s experience by tracing continuity and change through time, drawing on multiple lines of evidence to better understand the “archaeological history” of this period (e.g., Ferris 2009, 3). The following sections provide a historic overview of the time period, focusing on the Wichita’s evolving relationships and mechanics of trade with Indigenous and foreign entities over time. Alongside this historic data we present the results from recent excavations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ancestral Wichita villages that highlight the ways in which settlement strategies, technologies, and exchange systems can tell us more about their inhabitants’ experience. This review of ethnohistoric literature and archaeological data from ancestral Wichita settlements highlights the pivotal role these “middlemen” or brokers played as well as the social and economic dynamics underpinning these networks. We then reexamine these data within multiple theoretical frameworks, employing a multi-scalar model to reframe these interactions within an Indigenous history of the fur trade. As this work illustrates, a detailed discussion of the significant role that one group played can be used as a launching point to consider the importance of recognizing Indigenous persistence and social flexibility in shaping the multiple and ever-changing middle grounds of the southern Plains.

The southern Plains fur trade: scales of power and influence Until their forced resettlement in the mid-nineteenth century, Wichita peoples lived and hunted across what are today the US states of Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and parts of Arkansas and New 261

Sarah Trabert and Brandi Bethke

Mexico. From approximately 900 to 1450 ce, ancestral Wichita groups lived in small, scattered settlements across the southern Plains, where they practiced a mixed economy of hunting, gathering, and horticulture. After 1450, significant changes to this settlement strategy occurred as the more isolated farming hamlets in the west largely disappeared and populations shifted and coalesced into much larger settlements in modern-day central Kansas and Oklahoma. These newly formed communities, many of which were fortified, likely housed a few thousand people each. While hunting practices continued, their subsistence economy shifted toward larger-scale dependence on agricultural production of domesticates such as corns, beans, and squash (Vehik 2006). By the start of the eighteenth century, Wichita populations were concentrated in the Arkansas River Valley of eastern Kansas and Oklahoma, and it was there that Wichita peoples first made contact with Spanish conquistadors, French traders, and other European travelers. To understand the Wichita people’s role within the fur trade, it is first critical to summarize and discuss the nature and extent of trade interactions in the region. Prior to European contact, the southern Plains were a place of changing negotiations for supremacy, economics, territory, and social tensions between the Wichita and their Native neighbors (primarily the Osage and Comanche, but also others such as the Apache, Pawnee, and Caddo). Evidence of these vast and complex precontact trade networks between ancestral Wichita communities and others is known from the archaeological record. Sites in Kansas dating between 1400 and 1700 ce have yielded minor quantities of obsidian from northern New Mexico and painted pottery and turquoise from the American Southwest. Alibates chert from the Texas Panhandle, Neosho Punctate ceramics from the Arkansas area, and Caddo pottery have also been recovered, pointing to exchange connections to the south and east (Hoard 2012, 495–496). Europeans entered into this space where competition over resources was already intense, and their presence alone was not responsible for changing social interactions between Indigenous groups (Odell 2002).

Earliest interactions with Europeans and Arkansas River Valley trade Europeans first visited ancestral Wichita communities as early as 1541, with the Coronado expedition to Quivira or what is now recognized as central Kansas (Table 17.1). Spanish expeditions in 1601, 1630, 1634, and 1650 all traveled through the southern Plains; however, it is not clear whether they visited the Wichita specifically or other Indigenous settlements (Vehik 2006, 211– 212). Despite early dates of initial contact, sustained interactions between Wichita and Europeans did not occur on a regular basis until over 100 years later, when the French moved into the eastern edge of the southern Plains following their claim of the Louisiana territory in the late seventeenth century. At this time, France was in economic turmoil, and the ruling powers saw the Americas as a way to financially recover by exploiting the rich fur trade in the Southeast and by establishing connections with the more commercial markets in Spanish-controlled Santa Fe (Elam 1971; Morris 1970; Vehik 2006). Following the establishment of the Louisiana colony in 1682, French agents were dispatched to make alliances with Native American tribes. The French needed to win over the Wichita for several reasons: (1) they wanted to safely cross Wichita territory to reach the global markets in Santa Fe; (2) the Wichita people were skilled hunters and could supply French traders with bison robes, deer hides, and other pelts; (3) Wichita communities had access to horses; and (4) the Wichita had long held a place of influence in the southern Plains, and establishing good relationships with prominent Wichita leaders could open doors for establishing connections with other Indigenous communities. While French agents were establishing trading posts near major rivers in Louisiana, such as the Arkansas Post (Figure 17.1), Pierre le Moyne d’Iberville proposed in 1702 to ask ancestral 262

The Wichita middle ground Table 17.1 Documented Wichita-European contacts. Year

Expedition

Country of Origin

Wichita Village Contacted

Reference

1541

Coronado

Spain

Quivira, central KS

Newcomb and Field 1967

1593

BonillaHumana

Spain

Unknown

Newcomb and Field 1967

1601

Onate expedition

Spain

Central KS, possibly near Arkansas City, KS

Newcomb and Field 1967

1719

Bernard de la Harpe

France

East-Central Oklahoma and Red River villages

Newcomb and Field 1967

1719

M. Du Rivage

France

Red River villages

Newcomb and Field 1967

1719

Claude Du Tisne

France

Fort Neodesha, KS (possibly)

Newcomb and Field 1967; Wedel 1981

1720

Colonel Pedro de Villasur

Spain

Unknown; All killed in Wichita territory

Newcomb and Field 1967

1721

Richard Pichart

France

Visited communities along Canadian River, OK; ran into Osage opposition

Schafer 1977

1739

Mallet Brothers

French Canadian

May have contacted Wichita in Kansas

Newcomb and Field 1967

1741

Andre Fabry de la Bruyere

France

Was to follow Mallet brothers; forced to turn back

Newcomb and Field 1967

1747

French broker alliance between Wichita and Comanche leaders

1749

Luis Febre, Pedro Satren, Joseph Miguel

France

Deer Creek and Bryson Paddock villages

Newcomb and Field 1967

1749

Felipe de Sandoval

Independent

Deer Creek and Bryson Paddock villages

Newcomb and Field 1967

1759

Parilla’s Campaign against the Wichitas in Texas

Newcomb and Field 1967; Elam 1971

1760

Calahorra

Spain

Visit Tawakoni-Iscani village on Sabine River

Newcomb and Field 1967

1765

Antonio Trevino

Spain

Longest site, Red River

Newcomb and Field 1967

1772

Athanese De Mezieres

French governor under Spanish-controlled Louisiana colony

Villages on Upper Trinity and Brazos Rivers

Newcomb and Field 1967

1805

Anthony Glass

American

Villages along Red River

Morris 1970

263

Hämäläinen 2008; Smith 2000

Sarah Trabert and Brandi Bethke

Figure 17.1 Map with locations of sites discussed in the southern Plains and Southeast. Source: Authors’ creation.

Wichita bands to congregate near the Arkansas River so the French could establish a post in their community (Elam 1971, 94). However, this plan was never enacted, likely due to the imbalance of power in the region, with Wichita leaders taking a controlling role in their trade with the French. Instead, many French traders entered into the southern Plains operating as independent agents, visiting and living in Native American households, learning their languages and practices ( John 1975). A few of these agents wrote about their activities, including Bernard de la Harpe, M. Du Rivage, and Claude Du Tisne in 1719, as they made the first alliances with the ancestral Wichita communities (Table 17.1). La Harpe, for example, visited a Tawakoni village in 1719 near the Red River, where he exchanged gifts of firearms, cloth, and knives to local leaders in exchange for bison robes, tobacco, colored stones, and an Apache captive (Smith 2000, 22). Other prominent Wichita Villages, such as the Deer Creek and Bryson-Paddock sites located along the Arkansas River in Oklahoma, likely served as important trade centers for decades, whereby Wichita and French relationships were negotiated and solidified (see Figure 17.1) (Perkins et al. 2016). Both were relatively large villages (Bryson-Paddock covers over 40 acres) capable of housing between 2,500 and 3,000 people each and were fortified to protect people, livestock, and goods against raids from other groups (Drass et al. 2018a; Trabert 2018; Vehik 2018, 201–202). While by all accounts French traders were welcomed by the Wichita once they reached them (Benard de La Harpe 1720; Wedel 1981), they faced a number of difficulties in getting to Wichita villages. The source of many of these complications were from competing tribal groups, who sought to limit the French’s access to the Wichita to ensure their own primacy as trading partners. In the east, Osage leaders often threatened French agents against trade with the Wichita, leading many French traders to stay in the Missouri River valley to trade for deer hides (Smith 2000). In 1719, Du Tisne visited Osage territory before heading west, trading metal objects for hides and horses that the Osage said they raided from Wichita villages. Du Tisne wanted to 264

The Wichita middle ground

continue west to establish connections with Wichita groups, but his new Osage allies tried to persuade him against visiting the Wichita, even threatening to cut the French off from Osage trade if he or others attempted trade with their rivals (Smith 2000, 23–24). Du Tisne was forced to leave most of his trade goods behind in the Osage village. He claimed that the Osage had tried to sabotage his visit to the Wichita villages by sending a messenger to the nearest Wichita community, spreading word that Du Tisne and other French traders were planning to enslave the Wichita (Wedel 1981, 64; Smith 2000). When he finally reached two Wichita villages (likely on the Verdigris river near present Neodesha, Kansas), he traded his remaining firearms for two horses and a mule with a Spanish brand (Smith 2000, 24). At the same time on the western border, competition between the Comanche, Apache, and Wichita over the resource-rich river valleys gave rise to conflict, threatening the ability of traders to conduct business (Hämäläinen 2008, 31). French colonists in the Louisiana colony were in need of furs, salted meat, tallow, bear grease, and horses, and conflict between Indigenous Nations on the central Plains was detrimental to France’s overall mission in the region (Duval 1992, 45–46; Perkins et al. 2008; Smith 2000, 25). The French, therefore, encouraged Wichita and Comanche leaders to agree to peace negotiations in 1746 to strengthen Wichita– Comanche trade relations, ensuring a steadier supply of horses and furs through Wichita villages and into the French colony (Hämäläinen 2008, 43–44). Although “brokered” by the French, this Wichita–Comanche alliance was, as Hämäläinen (2008, 43) describes, “in design and subsistence an Indigenous creation.” This alliance allowed the Wichita both to stabilize their northern and eastern borders by joining forces to repel the Osage and to further strengthen their position as trade brokers between the markets in the east and west (Hämäläinen 2008, 42–43). The Wichita often escorted French traders, who would travel to their villages by water and then continue west to Comanchería by land. Over time, Wichita settlements became commercial hubs, linking the Comanche, who would often make camp near villages, with French trade networks. Comanche groups found it difficult to secure enough desired European goods in New Mexico, and their agreement with several Wichita leaders after 1740 laid the groundwork for a rapid expansion of the Comanche trade network across the southern Plains (Hämäläinen 2008, 43–44). In the next decade, this trade partnership and alliance was seen as beneficial because it capitalized on the strengths and interests of both groups. Comanche traders exported horses, mules, bison products, and Apache captives to the Wichita (who resold these products to Louisiana) in exchange for firearms, ammunition, other French manufactured goods, tobacco, and produce from Wichita gardens (Hämäläinen 2008, 1998; Elam 1971).

Increasing tensions, strategic movement, maintaining alliances At the same time as these alliances were building, conflicts with the Osage intensified along the Arkansas basin in the east (Edwards 2018, 40; Hämäläinen 2008, 32). Osage raiding parties had long targeted Wichita and other Native American communities to capture horses, supplies, and people (Elam 1971; Hämäläinen 2008, 42; Rollings 1992). In the mid-eighteenth century, systemic conflict, population loss from disease, and a desire to maintain control of changing social and economic networks led most northern Wichita bands to gradually abandon the Arkansas River valley and move south to join other bands living along the Red River (Perkins et al. 2016; Vehik 2006, 218; Vehik 2018). When trader Anthony Glass traveled in Texas from 1790 to 1810, he stopped at one of these Red River villages and met with a Taovaya chief named Awahakei, who said he was born in the Arkansas River villages, but they had abandoned this area in the mid-1750s (Flores 1985, 48). Archaeological excavations of the Deer Creek and Bryson-Paddock sites support Awahakei’s statements, as the fortifications ditches at both were gradually filled in over time (Drass et al. 2018a; Trabert 2018). 265

Sarah Trabert and Brandi Bethke

Following their move south, the Wichita occupied the Longest site north of the Red River and the village later named Spanish Fort south of the river, although little archaeological work has been conducted at the southern village (see Figure 17.1). The Longest site was smaller than the earlier Deer Creek and Bryson-Paddock communities (Vehik 2018 estimates 2,000 people lived there) but was also fortified with a circular rampart and stockade surrounded by a ditch to guard against attack (Drass et al. 2018b). Several Wichita bands coalesced in this area, selecting a location that offered proximity to rich agricultural lands, secure access to water, expansive hunting territory, and grazing land for horses (Drass et al. 2018b). This move, therefore, was a conscious decision on the part of Wichita leaders to put more distance between themselves and the Osage, be closer to their Comanche trading partners, and position themselves better for trade with the French, all while maintaining their autonomy and lifeways. Initially, their decision to move proved successful, as the Wichita were able to establish lucrative trading networks in the region by reestablishing alliances with the Comanche, who followed the Wichita into the area (Hämäläinen 2008, 49–58). The Wichita’s decision to move also prompted the French to shift their focus from the Arkansas to the Red River, further demonstrating the important role the Wichita held as powerful agents in these trade networks (Hämäläinen 2008, 58). After the 1760s, the relationship between Wichita and Comanche communities continued to be lucrative, as both groups shared hunting and grazing territory, using the Wichita villages as commercial centers for trade with other Indigenous allies and unlicensed European traders (Hämäläinen 2008, 91; Flores 1985; Smith 2000). In both the Arkansas and Red River valleys, these central Wichita villages controlled trade with multiple Indigenous and European groups for a variety objects of both Indigenous and European manufacture. For example, pottery from Caddo groups to the east, Alibates chert from peoples to the south, and horses from Comanche traders to the west have all been recovered at Bryson-Paddock, Deer Creek, and Longest sites (Vehik et al. 2010; Trabert 2018). These same excavations yielded material support for ethnohistoric descriptions of the finished goods the French supplied. Metal kettles, knives, hoes, and axes, firearms, glass beads, scissors, and sheet metal have been recovered, although many of these objects were transformed by the Wichita for their own purposes (Leith 2008; Skinner and Hall 2018). Sheet metal became projectile points and tinkler cones, glass was knapped into points, and gun barrels into scrapers while other objects such as metal hoes and axes were accepted and used as is (Leith 2008). Drass and Clanahan (2008) note increasing frequencies of European manufactured goods at the Longest site compared to the Arkansas River valley villages, but this is to be expected, given the later date and the Wichita’s intentional move south, which ensured a steadier flow of goods to and from their village. Excavations at sites located in the Arkansas and Red River valleys have also yielded evidence for Wichita communities continuing to produce a diverse array of ceramic, bone, and stone objects, reflecting centuries of Indigenous technological development. Ceramic vessels for cooking and storage, ceramic pipes, stone projectile points, bone beads, and scapula hoes are found in high frequencies despite access to European manufactured goods that could perform many of the same tasks (Drass et al. 2018a; Trabert 2018; Vehik et al. 2010). However, change to some of these Indigenous technologies did occur. For example, Vehik and colleagues (2010) found Wichita communities switched from carefully made hafted stone scrapers to more expedient hand-held scrapers made from local cherts that would require less time to manufacture, so they could spend more of their time working hides. Bison and deer hides were clearly being produced for internal use and external markets, based on the large quantities of bones of each species and the frequency of hide scrapers, fleshers, grainers, needles, and awls recovered from Bryson-Paddock and Deer Creek (Trabert 2018; Vehik et al. 2010). 266

The Wichita middle ground

Expanding beyond the Arkansas and Red River valleys, Turner-Pearson (2008) reported similar material culture patterns at a 1770s Waco village (ancestral Wichita) on the Brazos River in central Texas. The Waco adopted European weaponry quickly without much modification, whereas other European goods were often transformed for other purposes. For example, no intact metal pots, kettles, or bowls were found, but a great deal of scrap copper fragments were recovered as objects were cut up and repurposed rather than replacing Waco pottery for cooking and storage (Tuner-Pearson 2008). At the same time, Indigenous technology, such as the use of lithic arrow points and scrapers, also continued well into the nineteenth century (Odell 2008; Tuner-Pearson 2008). In addition to these goods, horses also played a critical role in these exchange systems. Baugh and Blaine (2017) suggest the Wichita likely obtained horses well before 1700. New evidence has been uncovered to suggest horses had a greater presence at ancestral Wichita sites than previously appreciated. Our work at the Deer Creek site and in reviewing museum collections has found that while rare, horse bones have been recovered from all three of the major Wichita village sites in present day Oklahoma. Excavations of the Deer Creek site in 2017 uncovered an articulated lower limb of a horse from a trash mound within the fortification works and an astragalus from a possible entryway through the fortifications (Trabert 2018). A recent review of collections from other ancestral Wichita sites identified two horse bone awls from BrysonPaddock and a horse tooth from the Longest site. Our forthcoming research will combine osteological analysis, scientific testing (radiocarbon, isotopic analysis, and ancient DNA), and ethnohistoric data to better understand horses in Wichita society and their role in southern Plains exchange systems.

Declining relations, dispersal, and resettlement The period following their move southward (1740s–1760s) was prosperous for many Wichita communities, but unfortunately this position of power was short lived. Although the transfer of Louisiana from France to Spain did not initially disturb trade networks, the Wichita eventually lost many of their French trading partners as Spain attempted to exert control over newly acquired French claims. Spanish–Wichita ties gained momentum in 1769, when Athanase de Mezieres was appointed lieutenant governor of the Natchitoches district (Hämäläinen 2008, 93). These shifts in power allowed the Osage to gain even more traction in the southern Plains, as they began monopolizing trade in eastern Oklahoma, Arkansas, and southern Missouri to the point that Native Americans in the Illinois region complained the French gave the Osage their best goods (Edwards 2018, 44; Duval 1992, 62). This surge in Osage power worried the leaders of the Louisiana colony to the point where De Mezieres reported in 1770 that the Spanish should shore up their relations with Wichita communities, as the Wichita provided the only significant halt to Osage advancement, while doubly preventing Apache groups in the west from entering the southern Plains and beyond (Elam 1971). These new alliances negatively impacted Wichita–Comanche partnerships, since they repositioned trade relations to a Texas-LouisianaWichita axis that continued to isolate the Comanche (Hämäläinen 2008, 94). Wichita communities were struck by disease in 1751–1752, leaving remaining members of the Red River community divided, with some groups heading further south (Vehik 2006, 218). Smith (2008) estimates that the Wichita had lost approximately three-fourths of their population by the start of the nineteenth century from disease and conflict. Just a few decades later, many Comanche communities were also hit with disease. Despite these devastating losses to their population, many Comanche and Wichita communities were able to maintain their relationships until at least 1858 (Hämäläinen 2008, 146–147; Nye 1969). French and 267

Sarah Trabert and Brandi Bethke

British traders continued crossing the southern Plains to acquire furs and horses, and they along with later American traders in the early nineteenth century continued viewing the Wichita communities as critical trading hubs connecting them with the Comanche and other western tribes (Smith 2000, 42). However, Osage violence and threats continued into the nineteenth century, and American traders struggled to safely reach Wichita villages, resulting in little trade (Morris 1970; Nye 1969; Wedel 1981). Several Wichita leaders sided with the Americans in the War of 1812, sending 186 warriors to assist the Americans in their fight against the British (Nye 1969). Despite this assistance and their signing of a treaty with the US military in 1835, the Wichita lost much of their territory as the American government forcibly relocated other tribes onto their traditional lands. These events forced several bands to come together near present day Anadarko, where the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes remain today. Here the Wichita continued to engage in trade relationships even during the allotment period, engaging in limited trade outside of agency control with Comanche, Pawnee, Kiowa, Caddo, and other Indigenous groups (Elam 1971, 349–350; Hampton 1976, 139–140).

Framing spaces, processes, and entities in the southern Plains Rather than understanding the southern Plains fur trade as a dichotomy of European and Indigenous interests, the evidence presented in the previous sections highlights how the actions and policies of the Wichita did not rest in only this dichotomy. Instead, the Wichita participated in a complex and nuanced system involving multiple interests, both Native and foreign, that built off of existing practices and trade networks. To model the complexity of the southern Plains fur trade, this work explores the Wichita experience from multiple scales of inquiry. In the following sections, we use the theoretical frameworks of the middle ground, pericolonialism, and entanglement in tandem to present an Indigenous-centered understanding of the southern Plains fur trade. We argue that the localized spaces described here are middle grounds, the macro-scale global processes involving European colonization are modeled using pericolonialism, and the webs of decisions, actions, relationships, and entities resulting from these processes are understood through entanglement theory. These theoretical frameworks challenge previous narratives developed from the colonizers’ perspectives and recognize the agency and autonomy that Indigenous peoples have in the colonial process (Silliman 2005, 2016). Previous work on Wichita history and archaeology (e.g., Baugh and Blaine 2017; Bell et al. 1974; Drass et al. 2018a; Perkins et al. 2008; Perkins et al. 2016; Smith 2000, 2008; Vehik 2006; Vehik et al. 2010) has laid the groundwork for us to consider these larger processes entangling the Southern Plains middle ground.

Physical and social spaces as middle grounds “Middle grounds” were originally conceived by Richard White (1991) as a physical space where contact situations took place between Native and Euro-American groups in the Great Lakes region. White proposed this concept to describe interactions where there is a balance of power—all parties desire something from the other, creating a situation where it is difficult for one side to force the other to comply or change (White 2006, 10). The middle ground was one of mediation where diverse peoples from non-state and state societies engaged in novel intercultural forms of discourse and exchange to gain both economic and social advantage from the encounter (Gosden 2004, 83; White 1991, 33). Since White’s original work, the middle grounds concept has been used, altered, and expanded by researchers to reference places where Indigenous and colonial actors came together to compete over resources, negotiate alliances, 268

The Wichita middle ground

and share elements of their culture and identities (Dietler 2010, 354; Gosden 2004; Trabert 2017, 21). Even though middle grounds were not initially created as a theoretical framework for explaining continuity and change beyond the Great Lakes (White 2006), the concept has evolved into metaphor and a theoretical tool for understanding the process and effects of colonialism beyond direct colonial control (Dietler 2010; Malkin 2002; van Dommelen 1997, 2012). For our discussion of the southern Plains, we argue for a return to White’s original definition of middle grounds, albeit modified, as a physical and social space. The Wichita occupied a territory positioned not only between two major European powers, the French and Spanish, but also between the French and Comanche, the Spanish and Osage, and numerous other regional players (Pawnee, Apache, Caddo, British, Americans). Their localized actions and decisions within these spaces created multiple “middle grounds” where Indigenous peoples held a great deal of power and influence. The Wichita were considered to be important brokers or “gateway traders” who controlled the flow of goods to and from the Mississippi valley, and many other Native and European nations all frequented Wichita villages, in some cases establishing temporary and permanent residence in these space (Flores 1985; Hämäläinen 2008, 92; Smith 2000). The importance of Wichita villages as trading posts is evidenced by multiple ethnohistoric accounts of Indigenous and European agents going to Wichita settlements to trade, leaving the Wichita to rarely leave their villages to seek out economic opportunities (e.g., Bernard de La Harpe 1718–1720; Wedel 1981). These settlements, therefore, created buffer points that benefited multiple parties and served as major trade hubs in a region that lacked the establishment of official European posts or extensive rendezvous systems. Given the significance of Wichita villages as nexuses of trade, the Arkansas River and later Red River valleys were middle grounds operating within much broader social, economic, and political processes. Their strategic move south guaranteed that Wichita bands could continue in their role as brokers, as the Red River was the farthest west the French could travel by boat and it was the easternmost extent of Comanche traders (Smith 2008). By tracing these patterns of movement in both the archaeological and historic records, we understand the Wichita’s shift in settlement as accommodating Indigenous vs. European interests by ensuring that Wichita villages remained critical trading posts in the ever-changing social, economic, and political landscape. For example, it is important to note that their move south from the Arkansas River to the Red River accommodated Comanche (vs. French) interests, thus better positioning the Wichita as their trading partnership with the Comanche strengthened. This framework highlights how Indigenous communities, not European powers, were in charge of establishing when, where, and how goods, livestock, and people moved across the southern Plains. While this situation departs from White’s (1991) example in that power was not “balanced,” we maintain they were operating in middle grounds because the balance of power in these contact situations was constantly changing and not always in favor of the colonizers. In this way we build on the work of White and others but subvert the assumption that Indigenous control of trade actually creates a “balance” of power at any given time.

Pericolonialism as process and theoretical device To link the Wichita and European experiences to broader economic, political, and social processes while acknowledging Indigenous power dynamics, we suggest modeling these middle grounds within the framework of pericolonialism. Pericolonialism was developed by scholars in Native American literary studies to draw greater attention to the numerous ways Indigenous peoples navigated around, past, and through European attempts at colonization (Weaver et al. 2006). This theoretical framework structures our broader discussions of the relationships 269

Sarah Trabert and Brandi Bethke

between Indigenous and European agents because it explicitly draws attention to people and regions that experienced parallel effects of colonization without the more extreme power imbalances seen where colonial settlements are established, but also in which this power dynamic is ever-changing (Acabado 2017). Pericolonialism provides critical scaffolding for understanding processes in areas beyond the borders of direct colonial control where people are experiencing the consequences of the decisions, actions, and presence of colonizers yet maintain their own power and autonomy. For example, the Ifugao peoples in Acabado’s (2017, 22) study area countered threats of Spanish colonial subjugation through economic intensification (shifting agricultural production and increasing distribution of ceramic trade wares), political maneuvering (using feasting events to rally people against Spanish encroachment), and engaging Spanish officials on equal ground. Similarly, in the southern Plains, Indigenous peoples were neither colonized nor completely removed from these processes. Instead, they were negotiating changes brought about by European contacts in multiple localized middle grounds at the center of their powerbase rather than dealing with foreign traders in their colonies. Understanding the Wichita experience within this pericolonial framework allows us to acknowledge how power dynamics within these middle grounds may not always be balanced. Power often favored Indigenous communities over foreign interests as everyone negotiated and responded to the consequences of their decisions within larger global processes at work. The Wichita and others strategically utilized their geographic and social position to circumvent colonial centers and to counter external threats to their economic independence and control over the region. From their earliest interactions with Europeans, the Wichita held a position of power within the fur trade because French traders relied on them in order to navigate this complex geographical and social territory. The French and, later, Spanish clearly did not control the Arkansas or Red River valleys and were instead tolerated by the Indigenous groups inhabiting these regions, deciding which traders could conduct business within their territory (Duval 1992). As time went on, the Wichita actively sought to maintain these relationships by consistently placing themselves in positions where they controlled the flow of goods in and out of the region. They brokered the trade of European manufactured goods and the production and exchange of Indigenous commodities, such as of furs, hides, and agricultural products. Engaging in European trade networks, therefore, allowed Wichita bands to continue their way of life while also expanding their influence in the region by capitalizing on their expertise as bison hunters, agriculturalists, and diplomatic negotiators, a process witnessed in other Indigenous communities (e.g., PavaoZuckerman 2007, 5). However, this supremacy was never long-lived, and the Wichita had to frequently renegotiate their position because the dynamics of this system constantly changed. The presence of Europeans in the region and their fluctuating political and economic goals, therefore, were only one factor contributing to this fluidity and instability. At the same time, Indigenous interests, alliances won and lost, population fluctuation, and environmental factors affecting the availability of resources also equally contributed to the pericolonial processes in the region.

Entangled entities The Wichita were clearly engaged in multiple dynamic relationships that profoundly impacted their connections to larger global socioeconomic processes as well as to localized experiences with Indigenous and European entities embedded in the same complex systems. Navigating these systems necessitated creative responses to the introduction of new entities (people, animals, objects, disease, etc.). We draw on entanglement theory to model the webs of social relations and entities (both foreign and local) that were used, reused, and moved by Indigenous brokers. 270

The Wichita middle ground

The strength of entanglement theory is its ability to provide a heuristic tool for thinking about cultural trends resulting from the many intersections of people and “things” within contact situations that can be coupled with other theoretical frameworks to operate at different material, temporal, and cultural scales (Martindale 2009; Silliman 2016). As archaeologists, we must contend with conceptualizing highly localized Indigenous spaces where we find archaeological evidence for settlements, technology, goods, exchange, and decision making alongside largerscale global processes known from the ethnohistoric record involving multiple European powers, their competing agendas, and varying approaches to colonization, contact, and control. Entanglement, therefore, is a useful tool to help frame these complex, localized responses to the pericolonial process (where power relations are ever changing and at times ambiguous) within an ongoing trajectory of cultural development (Jordan 2009). The Wichita exerted a great deal of autonomy over these interactions, controlling who would be welcome to their villages, whom they would repel, how traders could acquire their desired goods, how significant items like firearms and horses were redistributed, and how those goods were used, understood, and valued. Material culture, for example, was often recontextualized within pericolonial encounters, and entanglement provides both a metaphor and a model for understanding change as well as the motivations, decisions, and power relations behind these choices (Alexander 1998; Jordan 2009; Silliman 2016). As the Wichita’s role in exchange systems fluctuated through time, the relationships entangling multiple Indigenous groups, French and Spanish colonizers, and local and foreign objects within these networks changed on an annual and often decadal basis. Therefore, it is important to consider the interplay between relationships and things as Native peoples simultaneously accepted, rejected, and redefined elements of Indigenous and European material culture within these pericolonial structures. The entities they chose to acquire from external markets and how they were used and understood is important for understanding why and how the Wichita sought to retain their position as brokers in the larger economic networks at play. At the same time, it is also critical to discuss those Indigenous technologies that Native peoples found to be most important to retain, modify, and trade. As previously described, excavations of Wichita communities have found a rich and diverse material record as objects of Wichita manufacture, items from other Indigenous groups, and goods from European traders were all used and manipulated to serve Wichita interests. In addition to large-scale patterns of change and continuity of material culture, it is important to understand how these “things” moved through the Wichita as brokers. Beyond wanting to acquire these goods and animals for their own use, the Wichita sought control of their redistribution. Unfortunately, we lack robust data on the motivations and decisions made by individual Wichita leaders as they engaged with and navigated the pericolonial process within these multiple middle grounds. However, it is likely there were charismatic leaders among various bands and communities with competing agendas and strategies that further shaped Wichita actions and responses. Being in control of the flow and redistribution of French manufactured goods allowed Wichita leaders to take priority and select what they want and what they would pass along to others. This control would offer them something extra to barter for with groups to the west— French objects, particularly guns, better positioned them to trade for even more sought-after goods like horses. Control over the flow of goods allowed the Wichita to maintain and form strategic partnerships with other groups in the region because their access to trade goods made them desirable allies. Forging alliances in turn helped the Wichita negotiate risk and help them combat external threats, such as shifting desires in the products traded, raids from competing Indigenous groups, encroachment on their territory, and natural resource loss. Understanding how these social processes manifest in shifts in settlement-subsistence strategies and how these systems were being constantly revised through time offers further evidence to 271

Sarah Trabert and Brandi Bethke

better characterize the change and continuity that occurred during this period (Ferris 2009, 29). The location and layout of Wichita villages known from both ethnohistory and archaeological investigations suggests that the Wichita were making choices that both allowed them to continue to access those resources they had relied on for centuries while also physically positioning themselves in areas that advanced their position as key players within the growing southern Plains trade economy. Ancestral Wichita groups had built their villages in strategic locations along large rivers and streams, identifying advantageous areas that were rich in natural resources necessary to continue their mixed subsistence economy centered on hunting and agriculture. This settlement system was in place for millennia prior to European contact and was robust enough to later be leased to French and other fur traders for hunting rights (Turner-Pearson 2008, 568). These areas also proved to be good for horses, providing access to water, fodder, and shelter. At the same time, the Wichita, Osage, Comanche, and many other groups living in this region incorporated Europeans into their exchange systems in such ways as intensifying their hunting, changing their land-use strategies, and adopting new technology. These accommodations were likely viewed as acceptable risks for the benefits yielded by new alliances and European goods (Kardulis 1990). Therefore, while the Wichita were being shaped by European economic and social systems, they maintained control over decision making, consciously deciding to accommodate change and deal with those factors that were out of their control (disease, raids, European policy making) (Vehik et al. 2010). In this way, the Wichita simultaneously reinforced their social identities and practices while also altering the mechanisms by which they negotiated their position in this changing world. Those groups interacting with the Wichita, both native and foreign, also had to go through similar processes, retaining and modifying their own social, economic, and cultural practices as they became entangled to varying degrees in this new reality.

Conclusion: power, persistence, and social flexibility Ethnohistoric and archaeological data highlight the power and influence the Wichita people had over exchange networks and social relationships with both European and Indigenous groups in the southern Plains. As Hämäläinen (2008, 92) points out, many of these trade networks “took place mostly beyond direct European observation.” Therefore, it can be difficult if not impossible to understand these interactions from only the historical record. As a result, often an Indigenous perspective is left out of this narrative, particularly that of those “middlemen,” who are frequently set on the margins of history. Both archaeology and ethnohistory, therefore, play a crucial role in understanding this period, since both lines of evidence contribute to multi-scalar investigations of the lived experiences of Indigenous communities (Ferris 2009, 21; Prince 2019). By integrating these lines of data with multiple theoretical perspectives, this work acknowledges this complexity at scales peoples in the past would have experienced. In this way we present a “contested narrative” of the southern Plains that seeks to tell histories of the “other,” the excluded voices from a written record dominated by class, wealth, power, and the colonizer (Ferris 2009, 10). If power relations during the fur trade are remodeled using this multi-scalar approach, then previous narratives of the southern Plains middle ground are subverted from a European story to an Indigenous-centered history. This approach is not unique, given postcolonial critiques, but we argue that an oversimplification of these complex contact situations tends to favor the European-centered understanding of broader social and economic networks, thus masking the significant power and influence of Indigenous groups residing in these middle grounds both before and after contact. Instead, this chapter has sought to flip the narrative of the southern Plains fur trade by focusing on Indigenous persistence, social flexibility, and power that stemmed 272

The Wichita middle ground

from a millennia of occupation, adaptations, and construction of economic and social relationships between Indigenous groups in the region. At the same time, history and archaeology are not objective. There was never just one story, one middle ground, or one group in power. Many Indigenous peoples outside of European control occupied similar spaces with diffuse and fluid boundaries and exerted a great deal of control over negotiations because of their status as go-betweens. Therefore, the southern Plains was, and in many ways continues to be, made up of multiple middle grounds residing in different places. The Wichita experiences presented here specifically demonstrate the complexity of something as simple as “the fur trade” when viewed from multiple perspectives.

Acknowledgments We would first like to express our sincerest gratitude to the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, particularly Gary McAdams, for their continued support of our work. A great deal of thanks is owed to the archaeologists who have been working on ancestral Wichita sites for decades— Susan Vehik, Richard Drass, and Stephen Perkins in particular, as our research would not be possible without the excellent groundwork they laid. We would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Sheila Savage and William Taylor in the analysis of horse remains from ancestral Wichita sites. Lastly, we thank the editors of this volume, Sara L. Gonzalez and Lee M. Panich, for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

References cited Acabado, Stephen. 2017. “The Archaeology of Pericolonialism: Responses of the ‘Unconquered’ to Spanish Conquest and Colonialism in Ifugao, Philippines.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 21: 1–26. Alexander, Rani T. 1998. “Afterword: Toward an Archaeological Theory of Culture Contact.” In Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick, 476–496. Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University. Baugh, Timothy G., and Jay C. Blaine. 2017. “Enduring the Violence: Four Centuries of Kirikir’is Warfare.” Plains Anthropologist 62 (242): 99–132. Bell, Robert E., Edward B. Jelks, and W. W. Newcomb. 1974. Wichita Indian Archaeology and Ethnology: A Pilot Study. New York: Garland Publishing. Benard de La Harpe, Jean-Baptiste. 1718–1720. Journal Du Voyage De La Louissianne fait Par Le Sr Bernard [sic] De La harpe Et Des Decouvertes Quil a fait Dans la Party De l’ouest De Cette Colonie. BN, Mss. Fr. 8989: fols. 1–36. Dietler, Michael. 2010. Archaeologies of Colonialism: Consumption, Entanglement and Violence in Ancient Mediterranean France. Berkeley: University of California Press. Drass, Richard R., and J. W. Clanahan. 2008. “Archaeological Survey Along the Red River in Jefferson and Love Counties, Oklahoma.” The Oklahoma Archaeological Survey, Report no. 57; on file with the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey. Drass, Richard R., Stephen M. Perkins, and Susan C. Vehik. 2018a. “Digging Ditches: Archaeological Investigations of Historically Reported Fortifications at Bryson-Paddock (34KA5) and Other Southern Plains Village Sites.” In Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains, edited by Andrew J. Clark and Douglas B. Bamforth, 211–236. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Drass, Richard R., Susan C. Vehik, Stephen M. Perkins, and Michael D. Carlock. 2018b. “Archaeology, Geophysics, and History: Assessing the Longest Site (34JF1).” In Neither Snow, Nor Rain, Nor Heat, Nor Gloom of Night Stays These Couriers: Essays Honoring Jay C. Blaine, edited by S. Alan Skinner and Molly A. Hall, 5–18. Richardson, TX: AR Consultants, Inc. Duval, Kathleen. 1992. “‘Faithful Nations’ and ‘Ruthless Savages’: The Rise and Fall of Indian Diplomacy in the Arkansas River valley, 1673–1828.” PhD Dissertation, University of California Davis. Edwards, Tai S. 2018. Osage Women and Empire: Gender and Power. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Elam, Earl. 1971. “The History of the Wichita Indian Confederacy to 1868.” PhD Dissertation, Texas Tech University.

273

Sarah Trabert and Brandi Bethke Ferris, Neal. 2009. The Archaeology of Native-Lived Colonialism. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Flores, Dan L., ed. 1985. Journal of an Indian Trader: Anthony Glass and the Texas Trading Frontier, 1790–1810. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Gosden, Chris. 2004. Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hämäläinen, Pekka. 1998. “The Western Comanche Trade Center: Rethinking the Plains Indian Trade System.” Western Historical Quarterly 29 (4): 485–513. Hämäläinen, Pekka. 2008. The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hampton, Carol. 1976. “Indian Colonization in the Cherokee Outlet and Western Indian Territory by Carol Hampton.” Chronicles of Oklahoma 1: 130–139. Hoard, Robert J. 2012. Archaeological Investigations at Arkansas City, Kansas. Topeka: Historical Society Contract Archaeology Publications, 26. John, Elizabeth A. H. 1975. Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540–1795. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Jordan, Kurt A. 2009. “Colonies, Colonialism, and Cultural Entanglement: The Archaeology of Postcolumbian Intercultural Relations.” In International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by Teresita Majewski and David Gaimster, 31–49. New York: Springer. Kardulis, Nick P. 1990. “Fur Production as a Specialized Activity in a World System: Indians in the North American Fur Trade.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 14: 25–60. Leith, Elizabeth A. 2008. “European Trade Goods on the Southern Plains: The Bryson-Paddock (34KA5) and Deer Creek (34KA3) Sites.” Plains Anthropologist 53 (208): 551–564. Malkin, Irad. 2002. “A Colonial Middle Ground: Greek, Etruscan, and Local Elites in the Bay of Naples.” In The Archaeology of Colonialism, edited by Claire L. Lyons and John K. Papadopoulos, 151–181. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute Publications Program. Martindale, Andrew. 2009. “Entanglement and Tinkering: Structural History in the Archaeology of the Northern Tsimshian.” Journal of Social Archaeology 9: 59–92. Morris, Wayne. 1970. “The Wichita Exchange: Trade on Oklahoma’s Fur Frontier, 1719–1812.” Great Plains Journal 9: 80–81. Newcomb, W. W. and W. T. Field. 1967. “An Ethnohistoric Investigation of the Wichita Indians in the Southern Plains.” In A Pilot Study of Wichita Indian Archeology and Ethnohistory, compiled by Robert E. Bell, Edward B. Jelks, and W. W. Newcomb, 240–395. Final Report for Grant GS-964. Nye, Wilbur Sturtevant. 1969. Carbine and Lance: The Story of Old Fort Sill. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Odell, George H. 2002. La Harpe’s Post: A Tale of French-Wichita Contact on the Eastern Plains. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Odell, George H. 2008. “Interpreting Wichita Lifeways at the Cusp of Contact.” Plains Anthropologist 53 (208): 471–486. Pavao-Zuckerman, Barnet. 2007. Deerskins and Domesticates: Creek Subsistence and Economic Strategies in the Historic Period. American Antiquity 72: 5–33. Perkins, Stephen M., Richard R. Drass, Susan C. Vehik. 2016. “Decolonizing the Borderland: Wichita Frontier Strategies.” Great Plains Quarterly 36 (4): 259–280. Perkins, Stephen M., Susan C. Vehik, and Richard R. Drass. 2008. “The Hide Trade and Wichita Social Organization: An Assessment of Ethnological Hypotheses Concerning Polygyny.” Plains Anthropologist 53 (208): 431–443. Prince, Paul. 2019. “Persistence and Meaning in Fur-Bearing Mammal Usage on the Nechako Plateau, British Columbia.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 23: 728–754. Rollings, Willard H. 1992. The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Schafer, Delbert F. 1977. “French Explorers in Oklahoma.” The Chronicles of Oklahoma LV (4): 392–402. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005. “Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America.” American Antiquity 70 (1): 55–74. Silliman, Stephen W. 2016. “Disentangling the Archaeology of Colonialism and Indigeneity.” In Archaeology of Entanglement, edited by Francesca Fernandini and Lindsay Der, 31–38. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Skinner, Alan S., and Molly A. Hall. 2018. “Wichita Recycling of French Brass Kettles at Spanish Fort.” In Neither Snow, Nor Rain, Nor Heat, Nor Gloom of Night Stays These Couriers: Essays in Honor of Jay C. Blaine, edited by S. Alan Skinner and Molly A. Hall, 19–40. Richardson, TX: AR Consultants, Inc.

274

The Wichita middle ground Smith, Todd F. 2000. The Wichita Indians: Traders of Texas and the Southern Plains, 1540–1845. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Smith, Todd F. 2008. “Wichita Locations and Population, 1719–1901.” Plains Anthropologist 53 (208): 407–414. Trabert, Sarah. 2017. “Considering the Indirect Effects of Colonialism: Example from a Great Plains Middle Ground.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 48: 17–27. Trabert, Sarah. 2018. “Partners and Power: Understanding Ancestral Wichita and French Trade at the Deer Creek (34KA3) Site.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 23: 444–461. Turner-Pearson, Katherine. 2008. “The Stone Site: A Waco Indian Village Frozen in Time.” Plains Anthropologist 53 (208): 565–593. Van Dommelen, Peter. 1997. “Colonial Constructs: Colonialism and Archaeology in the Mediterranean.” World Archaeology 28 (3): 305–323. Van Dommelen, Peter. 2012. “Colonialism and Migration in the Ancient Mediterranean.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 393–409. Vehik, Susan C. 2006. “Wichita Ethnohistory.” In Kansas Archaeology edited by Robert J. Hoard and William E. Banks, 206–218. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Vehik, Susan C. 2018. “Why Fortify? Force-to-Force Ratios and Fortification on the Southern Plains.” In Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains, edited by Andrew J. Clark and Douglas B. Bamforth, 190–210. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Vehik, Susan C., Lauren M. Cleeland, Richard R. Drass, Stephen M. Perkins, and Liz Leith. 2010. “The Plains Hide Trade: French Impact on Wichita Technology and Society.” In Across the Great Divide: Continuity and Change in North American Societies, A.D. 1400–1900, edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Mark D. Mitchell, 149–173. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Weaver, Jace, Craig S. Womack, and Robert Warrior. 2006. American Indian Literary Nationalism. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Wedel, Mildred Mott. 1981. The Deer Creek Site, Oklahoma: A Wichita Village Sometimes Called Ferdinandina, An Ethnohistorian’s View. Oklahoma Historical Society Series in Anthropology Number 5. Oklahoma City: The Oklahoma Historical Society. White, Richard. 1991. The Middle-Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650– 1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, Richard. 2006. “Creative Misunderstandings and New Understandings.” The William and Mary Quarterly 63 (1): 9–14.

275

18 INDIOS BÁRBAROS Nomad-Spanish interactions on the northern frontier of New Spain Lindsay M. Montgomery

Over the past several decades, western historians have documented the central role of equestrian nomads in shaping colonial life in the American Southwest from the sixteenth century onward. Although homogenizing, the concept of nomadism provides a convenient shorthand with which to talk about non-Pueblo peoples living in the region whose daily lives, ontologies, and epistemologies were not centered upon the village. Specifically, I use this term throughout this chapter to refer to those Indigenous peoples whose social institutions revolved around systematic seasonal mobility and who practiced a mixed economy based on hunting and gathering as well as pastoralism and trade. While the archival record offers keen insights into interethnic interactions from a colonial optic, the material record affords unique insights into the logistics and logics of nomadic interactions with Spanish administrators, settlers, and Pueblo communities in Nueva España. Although a wide range of equestrian groups appear within the colonial archives of New Mexico, this chapter focuses on Ute, Comanche, and Apache peoples, perceived by Spanish administrators to be indios bárbaros—uncivilized primitives deprived of the virtues of modernity and Christianity. Settler perceptions of these mobile hunter-gatherers informed the formation of new identities, spurred the creation of distinctive frontier traditions and mythologies, and intimately influenced colonial policies. Drawing on archival evidence, the first section of this chapter discusses colonial perceptions of Indigenous peoples in New Mexico, particularly focusing on the relationship between Spanish administrators and Comanche raiders-traders. Building on this discussion, I then use spatial trends across nomadic tipi encampments within the modern state’s boundaries as an alternative window into interethnic interaction on the far northern frontier of the Spanish empire. Rather than confirming colonial stereotypes of backwardness and simplicity, this spatial analysis suggests that equestrian nomads embraced a cosmopolitan ethos characterized by a complex and ever-changing set of relationships between different cultural groups across significant distances (Anderson 2009, 20–26).

Nomads in the colonial imaginary Deeply held beliefs about barbarism and the barbarian intimately shaped the relationship between Spanish administrators and equestrian nomads in New Mexico. The Spanish colonial understanding of who and what a barbarian was did not spring fully formed from the collective conscious of sixteenth-century explorers but rather has deep roots in the imperialistic enterprises of 276

Indios bárbaros

eighth-century bce Greeks, like Homer and Xenophon, who composed romanticized narratives of the non-Greeks they encountered on their journeys throughout Eurasia and Africa. For the next several centuries, the Greek understanding of the barbarian as a cultural and linguistic Other also informed the thinking and writing of a large swath of modern Europe under the control of the Roman Empire (roughly 27 bce to 476 ce). However, this perception took on new dimensions during the fourth century ce. It was at this time that the Emperor Constantine issued a formal edict linking the empire to Christianity; one empire, one emperor, one Christian god (Burbank and Cooper 2010, 17). Constantine’s conversion to Christianity radically transformed the barbarian from a general category of alterity used to refer to people outside of the empire into a specific signifier of paganism (Jones 1971, 387). As Rome’s power collapsed and the empire dissolved over the next millennium, the barbarian took on a new meaning yet again. Instead of denoting pagans living both within and outside of the expansive Roman Empire, the concept of barbarism came to refer specifically to Muslim groups seeking to invade the feudal kingdoms of Western Europe. During this period of transition, Christianity fused with a new geographic identity signified by the term European. The first explicit reference to a European identity comes from an account of the 732 ce Battle of Tours, fought between Arab forces led by Al-Andalus and Frankish peoples under the leadership of Charles Martel. In this account, penned by a Spanish author in 754 ce, the word Europenses is used to refer to the Frankish victors of the battle (Appiah 2016). The territorial struggle between Muslim nomads from northern Africa and Christian Europeans continued to inform Spanish identity and conceptions of barbarism for the next seven centuries. During this time, Spanish peoples were engaged in a series of battles to reconquer and re-Christianize the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors. This struggle ended in 1492 ce with the fall of Moorish-held Granada to the Spanish monarchy. In the wake of this victory, the Spanish crown enacted a series of anti-Muslim policies including laws against practicing Islam and forced conversion of Muslims to Catholicism. These draconian policies against Otherness solidified the dichotomy between Christian Europeans and non-Christian barbarians. The violent origins of European identity and its merger with Christianity deeply influenced the Spanish colonial project in the Americas. Indeed, the Spanish monarchy legally justified their imperial aspirations through Christian doctrine codified in a papal bull issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493 ce. This edict conveyed rightful title to unconquered lands outside of Europe to the first Christian nation to settle those territories. In addition to granting formal land rights to Christian nations, this law demanded that European conquerors provide financial and administrative support for the religious conversion of Indigenous barbarians into Christian citizens (Bolton 1917; Weber 2005). As in proceeding millennia, the trope of the barbarian continued to evolve as Europeans expanded their colonial efforts into new territories and encountered different Indigenous peoples. By the eighteenth century, the barbarian was not only understood to be un-Christian and un-European but was also considered uncivilized. The social evolutionary discourse of the day ordered human societies along a linear progression from savagery to civilization intimately informing what it meant to be “civilized” (Weber 2005, 39–40). Within this framework, societies practicing a hunter-gatherer socioeconomic system reliant on stone tools and lacking social hierarchy existed in an earlier phase of development than sedentary state-level societies. Of course, it is not surprising, given who the creators of this system were, that Christian European nations represented the apex of social development, while the Indigenous peoples they encountered were stuck somewhere between savagery and middle barbarism. In short, the Enlightenment-era barbarian was irrational, infantile, and backwards. As one Spanish officer wrote, they lived a “licentious and brutal life, without a trace of order” (de Mena 1916, 392). 277

Lindsay M. Montgomery

In scholarly and literary texts from this period, “civilized” and “savage” were oppositional states of being, much as Christianity and barbarism were in the late period Roman Empire. This new perception of barbarism was expressed in the writings of scholars such as Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Baron de Montesquieu, Jean Jacque Rousseau, Adam Ferguson, and FrançoisRené vicomte de Chateaubriand. For example, Chateaubriand’s Atala, a largely fantastical work, is overflowing with romantic depictions of “savage[s] more than half civilized” (Chateaubriand 1891, xiv). Composed in 1801 “in the desert, beneath the huts of the Savages,” Chateaubriand’s novella draws on his experiences living among the Natchez to create a poetic account of the relationship between Chactas, a mixed race man, and Atala, a Natchez princess and notably a Christian, living on the banks of the Mississippi River (Chateaubriand 1891, vii–viii). In a section titled “Chactas Story,” Chateaubriand writes that “The destiny, which has brought us together, my dear son, is a singular one. I see in you the civilized man become savage: you see in me the wild man whom the Great Sprit desired to civilize” (Chateaubriand 1891, 5). This reflection demonstrates the mutability of categories like savagery and civilization, indicating that is possible to be both socially advanced and culturally backwards based on where and how one lives. This reference to the “Great Spirit” also reveals the intimate connection between the Christian mandate to convert and the social project of civilizing Indigenous peoples. From a European optic, Indigenous people were in desperate need of both Christian salvation and social development. This perception of barbarism intimately shaped Spanish colonial interactions with the Indigenous inhabitants of what became Nueva España. However, who was or was not a barbarian changed over time in response to shifting political alliances and public displays of Christian conversion. In New Mexico, these perceptions fall into two broad temporal phases punctuated by the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. During the pre-revolt period, colonial administrators gradually acquired a more detailed knowledge of the various ethnic groups within and surrounding New Mexico, drawing linguistic and territorial distinctions between Pueblo agriculturalists living along the Rio Grande and semi-nomadic Athabaskan groups inhabiting the southern Plains. For the Spanish colonial project, which relied on the power of papal bulls for its legitimacy, these ethnic differences were less important than the fact that the Indigenous peoples of the region were non-Christians. The mission system sought to control and to civilize Indigenous bodies through mandatory labor requirements and religious education. Although missions certainly transformed Indigenous identities and cultural practices, the Spanish desire to create subservient citizens of God and the Crown was far from a reality. In true barbarian form, Pueblo and Apache groups continued to resist Spanish authority throughout the seventeenth century by moving away from settlements and martyring priests, eventually expelling the Spanish from New Mexico for 12 years (Liebmann 2012; Liebmann et al. 2017; Preucel 2002; Wilcox 2009). Although the truly “bloodless” nature of New Mexico’s “reconquest” is debatable, the eventual “agreement” forged between De Vargas and the Rio Grande Pueblos after 1692 ce marked an important transition in Spanish interactions in the region. By the early 1700s, colonial administrators saw most Puebloan groups as political allies successfully on their way toward civilization and salvation. Instead, Spanish administrators used the term barbarian to refer to a variety of equestrian nomads living on the peripheries of the colony, including the Ute, Comanche, and Apache. While Apache groups were the primary antagonists of and trading partners with Hispano villagers during the seventeenth century, by the early eighteenth century a new group of barbarian nomads came to dominate interethnic relations in New Mexico. The relationship between these nomadic groups and colonial settlers was tumultuous, vacillating between violent war, persistent raiding, mutualistic exchange, and intermarriage.

278

Indios bárbaros

From roughly 1706 to 1740 ce, a joint Ute–Comanche force systematically undermined Spanish authority in the region, persistently raiding Pueblo and Hispano settlements and denuding the fledgling colony of its valuable livestock. As captured in a letter from Juan de Ulibarri regarding an impending attack on Taos Pueblo, colonial administrators viewed Utes and Comanches as “infidel enemies” (Thomas 1935, 61). Emerging out of the anti-Muslim sentiment in Western Europe during the sixteenth century, the term “infidel” refers specifically to non-Christians. Ulibarri’s reference to Ute and Comanche raiders as infidels establishes a clear dichotomy between these equestrian nomads and the inhabitants of Taos Pueblo as “Christians.” The violent struggle that ensued between Indigenous nomads, like the Ute and Comanche, and Spanish colonizers was informed by Spain’s 700-year history of conflict with a nonChristian non-European Other (Campa 1942, 6). The struggle between barbarian nomads and civilized Europeans played out on the battlefield and in performances involving dramatic reenactments of the Spanish conquest and displays of Christian fervor. Written sometime between 1774 and 1779 ce, Los Comanches is one such performance. Performed by New Mexicans well into the twentieth century, the longevity of this play demonstrates the profound impact that Comanches had on the cultural life and collective memory of the region (Roeder 1976, 218). Both religious drama and Indigenous celebration, the play follows the general outline of the fifteenth-century drama Los Moros. A colorful display of song and dance, Los Comanches is set in a small New Mexican village at Christmas time. In the opening act, villagers move about busily preparing for the reenactment of the nativity. The piercing cries of Comanche warriors as they descend on the village interrupt this bucolic scene. Taking the Christ child hostage, the Comanche aggressor(s) flee the village, followed in hot pursuit by the villagers. Tracking the child’s footprints in the snow, the villagers soon come upon the Comanche bandits. Surprised when the villagers interrupt their evening meal, the Comanche’s leader attempts to trade with his would-be conquerors, offering a single blanket in exchange for the child. Baffled by his insolence, the villagers relate the story of Christ and his sovereignty over humanity. Upon hearing this story, the Comanche leader returns the stolen child and offers the villagers blankets, bows, and arrows (Campa 1942, 12–13). With this scene of contrition, the performance ends. This closing scene is meant to impress upon viewers the power of Christ to convert even the most savage of souls (Bolton 1917, 47). In addition to demonstrating the Christian mandate to civilize in action, Los Comanches also offers a window into Spanish perceptions of these nomads. These dramatized encounters are “rhetorical battlegrounds” that produce distinct cultural entities, in this particular case, Christian Hispanos and barbarian Comanches (Shefferman 2014, 137). By staging Otherness, Los Comanches generated a “fictive ethnicity” for Spanish colonial administrators and settlers as citizens of a Catholic European nation that had successfully triumphed over savagery in North America (Fuchs 2007, 93). While dramas like Los Comanches present the conquest over barbarism as a relatively straightforward process, off-stage, the disruptive power of equestrian nomads continued to grow. This Indigenous configuration of power began to change around 1740 ce, when the Ute–Comanche alliance dissolved, and with it the Ute’s position as barbarians. Although there is archival evidence of continued Spanish frustration over occasional Ute raids (Blackhawk 2008), after 1750 ce, Ute bands are no longer cast strictly as barbarians and are instead increasingly referred to as allies in an interethnic coalition of Christianized Pueblo and Jicarilla Apache fighters assembled to bring retributive justice against Comanche attackers. As the Ute challenge to colonial rule gradually waned, Comanche raiding in the colony steadily increased. Using a combination of extortion through raiding, border trade in subsistence goods, and long-distance exchange, the Comanche proved a formidable check on colonial

279

Lindsay M. Montgomery

control (Hämäläinen 2008, 1998). Colonial administrators began to reevaluate their approach to managing these interethnic relations in response to the growing Comanche threat. The ascendance of the Bourbon family to the Spanish throne also informed this policy shift. Influenced by the secularism of the Enlightenment, the Bourbon monarchy instituted a series of edicts that decentered the Catholic Church and transferred power toward the Crown. In the Americas, this shift toward secularism significantly diminished the influence of priests and the mission system. Rather than religious conversion, colonial administrators turned to political and economic accommodation to manage relations with these indios bárbaros. Under Bourbon control, there was also a transition away from organized military campaigns and retributive attacks. Instead, colonial officials in New Mexico turned to gift giving and formal treaties as mechanisms of rule. The treaty-making process formally ensured the economic interdependence of Indigenous and settler populations while encouraging political centralization among nomadic communities by assigning collective responsibility over socially and territorially distinct family groups to a single leader. The implementation of these new policies represented a tacit recognition by colonial administrators that they had come up against a group of barbarians in the Comanche that could neither be easily defeated nor converted (Weber 2005, 209).

Material traces of the “barbarian” on the northern frontier The archaeological record provides another lens through which to historicize the evolving relationship between Hispano settlers, Pueblo communities, and equestrian nomads. Although equestrian nomads left a comparatively light material trace on the landscape, evidence of temporary encampments in the form of tipi rings dot the New Mexican landscape and offer insights into the logistics of nomadic activities in the region. Tipi rings are ubiquitous throughout the southern and northern Plains and consist of circular arrangements of stones used to anchor the sides of hide tents. In New Mexico, these rings typically measure between 3 and 6 m in diameter and are most frequently located on elevated locations such as benches and terraces (Montgomery 2015, 45). While tipi ring sites range in size from isolated stone rings to hundreds of structures, most encampments in New Mexico contain a single ring (Montgomery 2015, 49). A pronounced absence of artifacts, particularly diagnostic ones, are associated with these structures, indicating that most tipi sites were used by small-scale activity groups rather than by large aggregated communities. The following analysis synthesizes data from 194 tipi sites within the Archaeological Records Management System of New Mexico (ARMS). These tipi encampments are culturally affiliated with Apache (n = 105), Ute (n = 24), and Plains nomad (n = 63) groups. The Near Distance tool in ArcGIS was used to assess the spatial relationship between tipi sites and 53 Pueblo, Hispano, and Genizaro villages georeferenced using Jerry William’s (1986) maps of eighteenth-century settlements in New Mexico. The Near Distance tool produces an output table, which presents the calculated distance in meters between each tipi camp and settlement. In order to identify patterns in the encampment practices of Ute, Apache, and Plains nomad encampments, I interpreted the results of this analysis using three criteria: (1) proximity between sites, (2) frequency of associated settlements, and (3) the relationship between artifact assemblages and proximity patterns. There are several biases that come with using legacy data as well as limitations to these spatial statistics that are important to recognize. First, the sites sampled are representative of ARMS holdings as of 2016, therefore this analysis does not include information added more recently to the database nor those sites that exist on private lands. Furthermore, the current sample of tipi sites is largely the result of archaeological work associated with road and pipeline projects, which tend to be concentrated in low-lying areas. This bias in survey coverage has a 280

Indios bárbaros

disproportionate effect on the identification of mobile campsites, which are typically located in elevated locations. Finally, in response to the general absence of diagnostic materials, many tipi sites are assigned to ethnically ambiguous categories like “unknown” or “Plains nomad”, creating a skewed understanding of which nomadic groups occupied the region. Specifically, the sample is highly weighted toward the Apache, while the Ute sample size is quite small. In addition to these sampling biases, there are methodological limitations associated with the Near Distance tool. This tool uses linear distance to assess the proximity between input (i.e., tipi sites) and output (i.e., eighteenth-century settlements) features and therefore does not realistically account for the time of travel between locations or the presence of topographical features, which may impede or facilitate movement between points. As a result, this analysis offers only a broad assessment of trends in the distribution of Apache and Plains nomad encampments. Future studies employing cost path analyses to calculate the least-cost path from one site to another offers one possible means of elaborating upon the patterns discussed in this chapter. In the following subsections, I provide a general overview of the results of the Near Distance analysis for nomadic tipi sites in New Mexico. This discussion is followed by a description of the proximity data for Apache and Plains nomad sites and a discussion of how this spatial data articulates with archival evidence of Apache and Plains nomad interactions in the region (due to the small size of the Ute data set, this sample will not be discussed in detail within this chapter). Finally, I compare spatial patterns across Ute, Apache, and Plains nomad groups to elucidate differences and similarities in encampment patterns and inferred interaction strategies between equestrian communities.

Trends in equestrian nomad encampment placement Overall, tipi sites were most frequently associated with Taos Pueblo (28 percent), Pecos Pueblo (17 percent), Abiquiù (15 percent), and Ohkay Owingeh (13 percent). The material evidence of nomadic encampments complements archival records, which document the role of northern villages as economic intermediaries and key targets of nomadic raiding throughout the eighteenth century. While a significant proportion of tipi sites were located at large distances from these settlements, 22 percent are within a single day’s ride (between 1 and 20 km away). These sites were either culturally affiliated with the Apache or Ute and were most densely clustered around Okay Owingeh (n = 28) and Abiquiù (n = 14). Sixty-eight percent of sites within the 11–20 km range had between one and two tipis, suggesting that these locations represent small-scale activity groups. While these trends offer spatial proxy evidence for interethnic interaction on the frontier, in general, tipi site are located at significant distances from Pueblo and Genizaro villages. Approximately 40 percent of tipi sites are located over 100 km from the nearest settlement (mean distance = 105 km). Large tipi sites—between 38 and 200 tipis—in particular were located at a significant distance, 143 km on average, from New Mexican villages. This pattern indicates that equestrian tipi sites, particularly large aggregations, were located in areas removed from the traditional territories of Rio Grande Pueblos and other arable lands subsequently occupied by Hispano settlers. The incorporation of horses into Indigenous socioeconomic systems facilitated the formation of this buffer zone pattern, making long-distance travel for raiding and trading more efficient.

Apache “nuclear centers” and logistical camps The majority of Apache tipi sites clusters within two proximity intervals: 0–20 km (28 percent) and 100+ km (30 percent). Overall, the Apache data offers material evidence for a nested encampment system in which small groups engaged in long-distance targeted activities, like 281

Lindsay M. Montgomery

hunting, while family groups moved between fixed points or “nuclear center” on the landscape (Eiselt 2012, 161). Apache encampments within the 0–20 km range contain Athabaskan-style micaceous ceramics (Figure 18.1a). Seventy percent of these sites also contain extensive stone tools assemblages, including chipped and ground stone tools indicating a wide range of on-site tool preparation and food processing activities. These lithic assemblages include locally available andesite, quartzite, chalcedony, and rhyolite artifacts along side nonlocal high-quality materials like Santa Fe and Pedernal chert as well as Jemez and Polvadera obsidian. These nonlocal materials indicate that Apache groups were engaged in significant levels of long-distance travel and/or trade to acquire raw materials (Figure 18.1b). The diversity of Apache chipped stone assemblages along with the widespread presence of storage vessels and ground stone at sites within 20 km of a village suggests that these encampments represent medium-term base camps where families would aggregate in order to trade or participate in celebrations (Eiselt 2012, 161). The placement of these nuclear centers was likely influenced by the location of important geological features and raw material sources as well as their proximity to northern Rio Grande Pueblos, like Okay Owingeh (n = 24). The close spatial proximity of tipi camps to Ohkay Owingeh (between 4 and 15 km) suggests that this pueblo served as an important nuclear center for Apache groups in the region. This interpretation is supported by the associated assemblage data from these sites, indicating a more intensive domestic occupation: fire cracked rock (n = 70%), macro botanicals (n = 58%), and Athabaskan-style micaceous sherds (n = 54%), as well as both ground stone and chipped stone tools (n = 79%). Ninety-nine percent of tipi camps near Ohkay Owingeh were placed on top of earlier Pueblo occupations, marked by diagnostic ceramics dating to the Pueblo III and IV periods, most frequently Smeared Indented Corrugated (1250–1550 ce), Santa Fe Black-on-White (1150–1425 ce), and Biscuit wares (1350–1550 ce). This trend indicates that Apache groups were reusing lands not concurrently occupied by Tewa-speaking peoples. The proximity of these tipi sites within a well-used Pueblo landscape as well as their robust artifact assemblages suggests that the area directly surrounding Ohkay Owingeh was a multi-vocal cultural landscape cocreated through friendly social relationships and intermarriage between Pueblo and Apache communities. Ethnographic and archival sources suggest that the Ollero (Sand People) division of the Jicarilla Apache typically camped along the Chama River, the Red River, and in Ute Park and are the most likely occupants of these tipi sites (Eiselt 2012, 168; Goddard 1911, 7; Opler 1936, 203). In addition to these nuclear centers, a significant number of Apache sites were located over 100 km from a Rio Grande settlement. These sites are small-scale encampments of under three tipis (78 percent) and were rarely associated with Athabaskan-style micaceous ceramics (n = 1). While artifacts were entirely absent at some sites (n = 5), the remaining encampments in this proximity interval were associated with stone tool debitage and/or chipped stone tools made from a variety of local and nonlocal materials. The absence of ceramic evidence, the preponderance of expedient chipped stone tools, and the small scale of these sites suggests that they are short-term activity group habitations associated with hunting on the Plains. Taos Pueblo was the nearest settlement to most Apache sites within the 100 km proximity interval (83 km away on average). This trend is particularly notable given archival, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence of the close relationship between the Jicarilla Apache and Taos Pueblo, a relationship that may date back to the early 1300s (Fowles 2018; Fowles and Eiselt 2019; Habicht-Mauche et al. 2018). In addition to shared material practices, like micaceous ceramics and Plains-style clothing, this social entanglement is supported by early-twentiethcentury ethnographies, which trace the emergence of Taos from local Summer People and Athabaskan-speaking Winter People (Fowles and Eiselt 2019, 174–175; Mooney 1898). 282

Indios bárbaros

(a) 35 30

NO. OF SITES

25 20 15 10 5 0

Lithic debitage

Chipped stone

Ground stone

Micaceous

ARTIFACT TYPE

(b) 25

NO. OF SITES

20

15

10

5

d oo

Pe t

rif

ie

d

lib

w

at

es

e A

lit yo

ite rtz ua

Rh

rt Q

al c

he

rt he Pe d

em

rt

Fe c

Sa n

ta

he

ia n

er al c en

ao er ad

Po

lv

G

bs

id

ia n sid ob

ez Je m

G

en

er

al

A

ob

nd

sid

es

ia n

ite

0

MATERIAL TYPE

Figure 18.1 a. Artifact assemblages at Apache tipi sites (0–20 km proximity interval). b. Lithic materials preset at Apache tipi sites (0–20 km proximity interval).

283

Lindsay M. Montgomery

Archaeologically, the Jicarilla–Taos relationship has largely been discussed in reference to the mutualistic exchange between Apache bison hunters and Pueblo agriculturalists that emerged sometime during the fifteenth century (Baugh 1984; Eiselt 2012; Gunnerson 1974; HabichtMauche 1987; Leonard 2006; Opler 1936, 1944; Speth 1991; Spielmann 1991; Tiller 1992). During the seventeenth century, economic ties between the northern Pueblos, like Taos and Picuris, and the Jicarilla Apache strengthened in opposition to the threat posed by Spanish colonization. As Sunday Eiselt has argued, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 may be more productively talked about as the “Pueblo-Athapaskan Revolt of 1680” (Eiselt 2012, 100). By the eighteenth century, other nomadic bison hunting groups began to participate in this Pueblo–Apache trade network including the Ute and Comanche. Despite these shifting economic dynamics, Apache ties with Taos and Picuris remained particularly strong due to the anti-slavery, pro-trade, and socially rebellious platform of these northern communities (Eiselt 2012). Couched within this larger history of interethnic interaction, Apache tipi sites associated with but spatially distant from Taos may represent temporary encampments made during seasonal trade excursions to and from the northern Rio Grande. Site LA 18476 offers some material evidence for this pattern in the form of Pueblo ceramics contemporaneous with an Apache occupation, specifically Tewa (Kapo) Black (1650–1920) and Pecos Faint Striated (1600–1700 ce) sherds. Forty-six tipis were documented at this location, along with a diverse lithic assemblage comprised of debitage, chipped stone, and ground stone tools, many of which were made from nonlocal materials such as Alibates from the Texas panhandle and petrified wood from Arizona. While this assemblage provides evidence for high levels of mobility and/or trade, many Apache tipi sites associated with Taos Pueblo are small, having between one and eight rings, and contain no direct evidence of exchange. While these sites represent short-term encampments associated with logistical mobility activities, whether their inhabitants were actually engaged in trade with the northern Rio Grande pueblos remains ambiguous archaeologically. Relatively few Apache tipi camps are near a Hispano settlement (n = 1). The 40 Apache tipi sites associated with but spatially distant from Hispano settlements are clustered around the villages of Santa Rosa de Lima in the north (n = 11) and Presidio San Antonio de Béxar in the south (n = 11). These sites are generally small, containing between one and three tipis. The small scale of these sites and ephemeral nature of these occupations, which included only trace amounts of lithic debitage and chipped stone tools, suggest that they were part of a logistical mobility pattern linked to raiding rather than nuclear centers. The comparatively light artifactual record associated with these sites reflects a broader shift in Apache encampment practices toward smaller tool assemblages and the relocation of lithic production areas away from dwellings in response to growing hostilities with Hispano settlers over the course of the eighteenth century (Seymour 2009, 270). While it remains unclear as to whether Apache raiders in particular used the encampments associated with San Antonio, documentary evidence indicates that the presidio in particular was a key target of periodic raiding (Dunn 1911, 1914; John 1996). Founded in 1718, San Antonio de Béxar is strategically located on the west bank of the San Antonio River in central Texas (de la Teja 1995, 47). This fort was one of the principal stopping places for settlers moving between trading hubs in the Rio Grande and East Texas. A diary entry by Father Damián Massanet offers documentary evidence of the hostile relationship between Hispano settlers and Apache groups: “The Apache form a chain running from east to west, and wage war with all. . . . They have always had wars with the Spaniards of New Mexico, for, although truces have been made, they have endured little”(Massanet 1691, 203).

284

Indios bárbaros

Spatial evidence of Plains trading and raiding in New Mexico The following analysis of Plains nomad sites focuses on tipi encampments assigned to the “Historic” period in ARMS, defined broadly as 1539–1993 ce. Compared to the Apache sample, evidence for post-1600 Plains encampments is relatively small. This sampling bias may reflect several factors, including the longer history of Apache occupation in the region, locational biases in mitigation and academic research, and the absence of temporally diagnostic materials at many tipi sites in the region. Plains tipi sites are typically located at significant distances (approximately 217 km on average) from a Pueblo, Genizaro, or Hispano settlement. This is particularly true for encampments with two or more features, which are further away on average, sometimes by over 100 km, than sites with single rings. These larger encampments represent long-term occupations marked by dense and multifaceted stone tool assemblages. For example, LA 48825 is a large, aggregated camp that contains 100 tipis and is located 171 km east of the northern Rio Grande. This site is associated with an extensive assemblage of chipped and ground stone tools as well as projectile points made from a wide variety of materials including andesite, obsidian, chalcedony, jasper, and Baldy Hill chert from Oklahoma. This site represents a longer-term aggregated base camp associated with tool production and food processing. Archival evidence suggests that aggregated base camps, like LA 48825, were strategically placed east of the Rio Grande within the protected river valleys in order to access grass and water for their growing horse herds (Hämäläinen 2008, 31). While most Plains tipi sites are located at significant distances from Rio Grande settlements, there are three notable exceptions, which are under 20 km from Pecos and San Ildefonso Pueblos. The artifacts at these three single-ring encampments demonstrate that Plains groups were engaged in a wide variety of logistical activities within the region. LA 129693 had no associated artifacts, and LA 118823 had lithic debitage and ground stone tools. The sparse assemblages at these sites suggest that they are short-term logistical camps. In contrast, LA 14148 had stone rings in association with debitage, chipped stone tools, and Pecos Faint Striated sherds, indicating that this site represents a trading expedition to Pecos Pueblo. The presence of Pueblo ceramics at LA 14148 offers material evidence for interethnic exchange. Although Plains sites may not be close to Rio Grande settlements, the Near Distance analysis does provide some additional material evidence for an association between Plains communities and the northern trading centers of Taos and Pecos Pueblos (n = 20 and n = 14, respectively), which are located an average of 151 km away from a Plains tipi site. The archival record indicates that during the mid-eighteenth century, Taos and Pecos became the primary outlets for Comanche captives, bison hides, tanned skins, dried meat, and salt (Hämäläinen 2008, 39). Documentary evidence suggests that tipi sites associated with Taos may have been occupied by Western Comanche peoples, particularly the Yamparika and Jupe, who focused their trade efforts on Taos, while the Kotsotekas interacted most frequently with Pecos (Hämäläinen 2008, 127). Of course, Comanche relations with Taos and Pecos were not always peaceful, and throughout the eighteenth century, there were intermittent periods of intensive raiding followed by years of mutualistic exchange. During the 1740s and 1770s, Comanche raiding in central New Mexico, particularly at Pecos and Galisteo, was intense. Some estimates suggest that 150 Pecoseños died at Comanche hands between 1744 and 1749 ce alone (Hämäläinen 2008, 43). Following the 1786 peace treaty between de Anza and the Western Comanche, peaceful trade at Pecos and Taos expanded. By the end of the eighteenth century, Taos and Pecos had obtained, through Comanche intermediaries, significant numbers of horses as well as a growing variety of manufactured goods from Chihuahua including soap, mirrors, saddlebags, hatchets, cigarettes, and various clothes and dyes (Hämäläinen 2008, 127). 285

Lindsay M. Montgomery

With the exception of sites like LA 14148, there is a general lack of diagnostic material evidence for interethnic interaction between Plains groups and the northern frontier Pueblos of Taos, Picuris, and Pecos, which were important outlets for Comanche goods as well as raiding targets (Hämäläinen 2008, 27). The general absence of archaeological survey work or publicly available reports related to lands owned by Pueblo communities offers one possible explanation for disparities between the documentary and material records. Alternatively, the lack of Plains tipi sites near the Rio Grande valley may reflect the incorporation of New Mexico into a distinctive equestrian raiding system. This system was characterized by the creation of “cold” camps—ephemeral occupations lacking hearths and/or domestic structures. This “cold camp” profile was a strategic means of avoiding detection prior to an attack and preventing tracking and retributive attacks by settlers. This cold camp profile is materially marked on the landscape by the absence of Plains tipi sites within the Rio Grande and the preponderance of such sites over 100 km to the east. The large number of single ring tipi sites (47 percent) located on the peripheries of New Mexico’s modern boundaries provide archaeological evidence for this cold camp profile. These sites tend to have sparse assemblages composed largely of debitage from tool refurbishment and formal bifacial tools. A wide range of materials were identified within these sites, including andesite, quartzite, chalcedony, obsidian, Alibates, jasper, petrified wood, and various types of chert, indicative of long-distance travel, sometimes over 150 km, in order to procure raw materials, either directly or through trade. The small size of many Plains tipi encampments along with the preponderance of chipped stone at these sites suggests that these encampments represent short-term activity group occupations, some of which may have been engaged in raiding. These small-scale sites are part of an emergent equestrian raiding tradition based on stealthy attacks followed by hasty retreats to longer-term base camps to the south and east. Governor Juan Bautista de Anza makes the effectiveness of this tactic clear in a report penned in 1773 ce: When they come to plunder, it is in small groups. Those groups penetrate deep into our province by following different routes along the more than one hundred leagues that border upon it. We have tried to pursue them, but we have not succeeded because they take refuge in the uninterrupted mountain ranges that surround this province. The country is so rugged that not even a track can be immediately recognized. From these mountains they spy on horses, mules, and cattle roaming the countryside and at night they round them up and drive them away. (Hadley et al. 1997, 5) As suggested by de Anza, Comanche raiders used the Sangre de Cristo Mountains as a strategic corridor through which to execute attacks and funnel stolen goods from New Mexico onto the northern and southern plains. This raiding strategy left a distinctive settlement pattern characterized by a general absence of archaeologically visible Plains tipi sites near the Rio Grande and a comparatively large number of small logistical camps located in the borderlands between the Sangre de Cristos and the Plains.

A comparative assessment of equestrian nomad encampments A comparison of the Near Distance results across Ute, Apache, and Plains sites reveals some additional insights into equestrian nomad interactions in the Rio Grande valley during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There are several differences between Ute encampment patterns and the Plains and Apache trends discussed in the previous sections (Figure 18.2). 286

Indios bárbaros

Figure 18.2 Distribution of Ute, Apache, and Plains tipi sites in relation to Spanish colonial period settlements.

While Ute relations with Abiquiù and other Rio Grande settlements appear to have been largely oriented around peaceful trade, the Plains and Apache data offer spatial proxy evidence for continued hostilities between equestrian groups and settlers. Although the Ute tipi site sample is small, it is notable that 91 percent of these sites are locate within 30 km of a settlement, specifically, Abiquiù. The close proximity of Ute encampments to this Genizaro settlement complements archival records that document the important role of Abiquiù as a Ute trading hub from the mid-eighteenth century onward (Montgomery 2020). In contrast to the Ute pattern, the majority of Plains nomad and Apache sites are located over 100 km from a Hispano or Genizaro settlement. The absence of tipi sites near the Rio Grande may reflect the tendency of Plains groups to establish longer-term base camps on the open grasslands to the east of New Mexico. Whereas Plains tipi sites appear to be located closer along the peripheries of New Mexico, the Apache tipi site data reveals a dual encampment pattern characterized by small logistical camps located significant distances away along with more intensively used camps situated within 20 km from settlements in the Rio Grande. Apache tipi sites located at significant distances from the Rio Grande valley likely represent shorter-term activity groups engaged in big game hunting or exchange, while Apache sites located near the Rio Grande valley served as base camps around nuclear centers, particularly Tewa and Tiwa-speaking Pueblos. A north–south settlement logic further distinguishes the Apache encampment pattern from that of Plains and Ute groups. Apache sites to the north of Santa Fe are significantly closer to Pueblo, Genizaro, and Hispano settlements than sites to the south (43 km on average for northern sites and 140 km for southern sites). This north–south division offers material evidence 287

Lindsay M. Montgomery

for the strengthening of preexisting bonds between Apache and Pueblo communities in the northern Rio Grande and a weakening of those relationships that were already tenuous prior to Spanish incursions into the Southwest (Eiselt 2006, 82). Apache slave raiding in southern New Mexico fueled these interethnic tensions. Although trade in captives existed among Indigenous communities of the region prior to Spanish colonization, European colonialism fundamentally transformed this preexisting system. Spanish demand for Indigenous labor coupled with legal protections for Christianized Pueblo citizens under the repartimiento system created a critical disconnect between the supply and demand for captive labor (Brooks 2002, 49). The forced capture of equestrian nomads offered one means of filling this gap within the colonial economy. Slavery was legally justified under the vale system, established in 1610 ce by Governor Pedro de Peralta. According to this just war doctrine, individual citizens could capture peaceful visitors to the Pueblos or purchase slaves directly from Indian captors coming to trade at Spanish and Pueblo fairs (Eiselt 2006, 85). Indeed, the Apache tactic of separating into small groups and reassembling at predefined strongholds was most likely developed in response to Pueblo and Spanish slave raiding (Eiselt 2006, 89). By 1659 ce, slave raiding had forced many Apache groups to abandon the practice of traveling into the Rio Grande with their dog trains, women, and children (Kessell 1979, 222). In addition to increasing tensions between Apache and Pueblo groups in southern New Mexico, slave raiding also had a deleterious impact on Apache–Hispano relations. Southern New Mexico and the Chama region were hit hardest by Apache hostilities, causing the widespread abandonment of the Piro, Tompiro, and southern Tewa villages as well as Spanish settlements in the region (Eiselt 2006, 89). A letter from Fray Francisco Atanasio Dominguez to the Provincial Fray Isidro Murillo El Paso dated November 4, 1775, describes the miserable state of panic in southern New Mexico Because of the repeated assaults that the barbarous Apache Indians are making on this whole New Kingdom. In addition to the outrageous hostilities they commit against every kind of traveler on the roads, they enter the pueblos, steal from them all the horses and mules they find, make captives of the little ones who fall into their hands, and leave their parents, if not completely dead, without the better half of their lives, which is their children. (Adams and Chavez 1956, 263) As Dominguez’s letter indicates, by the end of the eighteenth century, the Navajo, western Apaches, and southern Apaches were all at war with colonial Spain. The absence of Apache tipi sites near Hispano or Genizaro settlements in the region spatially signals this increasing hostility. In summary, differences between Apache, Ute, and Plains tipi sites indicate that evolving market demands and preexisting socioeconomic relationships shaped equestrian encampment patterns. Archaeological evidence of larger encampments located at significant distances from the Rio Grande valley document the emergence of a distinctive equestrian economy based on big-game hunting, long-distance exchange, and raiding—primarily for captives and horses. For Apache groups, the social relationships with Pueblo and Hispano communities prior to and during the Spanish colonial period had a strong impact on their encampment patterns. Apache sites in southern New Mexico are typically far away from Hispano and Pueblo settlements, reflecting the increasingly hostile nature of life on the frontier as the result of slave raiding. In contrast, Apache sites in northern New Mexico are significantly closer in proximity to pre-seventeenthcentury interethnic trade centers. Similarly, Ute tipi sites are overwhelming located at close

288

Indios bárbaros

distances to northern trading centers, offering preliminary material evidence of close social and economic ties with settlements like Abiquiù.

Conclusion Spanish colonial perceptions of Indigenous peoples in Nueva España were shaped by a series of historical developments, including encounters with Otherness in classical antiquity, the linking of Christianity to imperialism under the Roman Empire, military struggles against nomadic Muslim “invaders,” as well as the romantic and social evolutionary discourse of the Enlightenment. Archival documents indicate that colonial administrators applied the barbarian moniker to different Indigenous groups over the course of Spanish occupation in New Mexico. Who was and was not barbaric depended largely on whether that Indigenous group had accepted or rejected (at least outwardly) Christianity and whether they posed a threat to colonial control. While Pueblo, Apache, and Ute groups were all perceived as barbarous during the late sixteenth century, for much of the eighteenth-century colonial administrators viewed the Comanche as the most problematic and quintessential barbarians. The actions of Indigenous traders and raiders as well as larger political shifts occurring in the metropole influenced how the colonial state dealt with such barbarism. A comparative examination of Plains nomad and Apache tipi sites in New Mexico offers additional insights into the relationship between indios bárbaros and Hispano, Genizaro, and Pueblo inhabitants of the colony. The Near Distance analysis of Apache tipi sites points to a dual settlement pattern of local and long-distance encampments. The northern Rio Grande Pueblos of Taos and Ohkay Owingeh were nuclear centers around which Apache families established medium-term encampments. In contrast to these nuclear centers, less intensively occupied sites located over 100 km from the Rio Grande likely represent small-scale activity groups undertaking hunting, long-distance trade, or raiding. Unlike the dual pattern seen in the Apache data, Plains nomad sites are overwhelmingly located at significant distances from the Rio Grande valley. The spatial distribution of Plains sites likely reflects several factors, including the absence of archaeological survey work on lands associated with northern trading-raiding centers like Taos and Picuris as well as the development of a “cold camp” pattern through which raiders avoided detection by not constructing formal camps. Notably, the Near Distance analysis indicates that most Plains tipi sites are associated with Taos and Pecos Pueblos, even if they are not particularly close in distance to these settlements. This trend offers preliminary material evidence to support Spanish colonial reports, which document frequent raiding and trading between Western Comanche divisions and these northern frontier settlements. The material evidence suggests that nomadic encampment patterns represent spatially anchored political and economic strategies, strategies that challenge colonial perceptions of equestrian nomads as inferior and evolutionarily backwards. Instead, equestrian nomads participated in sophisticated socioeconomic systems organized around access to horses, captives, stone tools, and colonial goods, as well as a series of shifting alliances with Indigenous and nonIndigenous groups (Rifkin 2009, 21). Mobility was at the heart of this nomadic system, shaping the nature of interethnic interactions and associated encampment patterns.

References cited Adams, Eleanor, and Fray Angelico Chavez. 1956. The Missions of New Mexico: A Description by Fray Francisco Antanasio Dominguez with other Contemporary Documents. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico. Anderson, Gary Glayton. 2009. The Indian Southwest, 1580–1830. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

289

Lindsay M. Montgomery Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2016. “There is No Such Thing as Western Civilization.” The Guardian, November 9, 2016. Baugh, Timothy G. 1984. “Southern Plains Societies and Eastern Frontier Pueblo Exchange During the Protohistoric Period.” Papers of the Archaeological Society of New Mexico 9: 154–167. Blackhawk, Ned. 2008. Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bolton, Herbert E. 1917. “The Mission as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish-American Colonies.” The American Historical Review 23 (1): 42–61. Brooks, James F. 2002. Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Burbank, Jane, and Frederick Cooper. 2010. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Campa, Arthur L. 1942. Los Comanches: A New Mexican Folk Drama. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Chateaubriand, Francois Auguste de. 1891. Atala. Chicago: Belford-Clarke Co. de la Teja, Jesus F. 1995. San Antonio de Bexar: A Community on New Spain’s Northern Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. de Mena, Filiberto. 1916. “Descripción y Narración Historial de la Antigua Provincial del Tucumàn Escrita por don Filiberto de Mena en 1772 [1773].” In La patria Fieja: Cuadros Históricos; Guerra, Politica, Diplomacia, edited by Gregorio F. Rodríguez, 289–476. Buenos Aires: Campania Sud Americana de Billetes de Banco. Dunn, William Edward. 1911. “Apache Relations in Texas, 1718–1750.” The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 14 (3): 198–275. Dunn, William Edward. 1914. “The Apache Mission on the San Saba River; Its Founding and Failure.” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 17 (4): 379–414. Eiselt, Sunday B. 2006. “The Emergence of Jicarilla Apache Enclave Economy during the 19th century in Northern New Mexico.” PhD Dissertation, University of Michigan. Eiselt, Sunday B. 2012. Becoming White Clay: A History and Archaeology of Jicarilla Apache Enclavement. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Fowles, Severin M. 2018. “Taos Social History: A Rhizomatic Account.” In Puebloan Societies: Homology and Heterogeneity in Time and Space, edited by Peter Whiteley, 75–102. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press. Fowles, Severin M., and B. Sunday Eiselt. 2019. “Apache, Tiwa, and Back Again: Ethnic Shifting in the American Southwest.” In The Continuous Path: Pueblo Movement and the Archaeology of Becoming, edited by Samuel Duwe and Robert W. Preucel, 166–194. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Fuchs, Barbara. 2007. “The Spanish Race.” In Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, edited by Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, 88–99. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goddard, Pliny Earle. 1911. “Jicarilla Apache Texts.” In Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. 8. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Gunnerson, Dolores A. 1974. The Jicarilla Apaches: A Study in Survival. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Habicht-Mauche, Judith A. 1987. “Southwestern-Style Culinary Ceramics on the Southern Plains: A Case Study of Technological Innovation and Cross-Cultural Interaction.” Plains Anthropologist 32 (116): 175–189. Habicht-Mauche, Judith A., Jun Ueno Sunseri, and Steven Mack. 2018. “Early Dates for Taos Gray Pottery from the Southern Park Plateau, New Mexico and Its Implications for Northern Tiwa Origins and Identity.” Southwest Symposium, Denver, CO. Hadley, Diana, Thomas H. Naylor, and Mardith K. Schuetz-Miller, eds. 1997. The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain: A Documentary History, Vol. 2. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Hämäläinen, Pekka. 1998. “The Western Comanche Trade Center: Rethinking the Plains Indian Trade System.” The Western Historical Quarterly 29 (4): 485–513. Hämäläinen, Pekka. 2008. The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press. John, Elizabeth. 1996. Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540–1795. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Jones, W. R. 1971. “The Image of the Barbarian in Medieval Europe.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 13 (4): 376–407. Kessell, John L. 1979. Kiva, Cross, and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico, 1540–1840. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior.

290

Indios bárbaros Leonard, Kathryn. 2006. “Directionality and Exclusivity of Plains-Pueblo Exchange during the Protohistoric Period, AD 1450–1700.” In The Social Life of Pots: Glaze Wares and Cultural Dynamics in the Southwest AD 1250–1680, edited by J. A. Habicht-Mauche, Suzanne L. Eckert, and Deborah L. Huntley, 232–252. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Liebmann, Matthew. 2012. Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and REvitalization in 17th Century New Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Liebmann, Matthew, Robert Preucel, and Joseph Aguilar. 2017. “The Pueblo World Transformed: Alliances, Factionalism, and Animosities in the Northern Rio Grande, 1680–1700.” In New Mexico and the Pimeria Alta: The Colonial Period in the American Southwest, edited by John G. Douglass and William M. Graves, 143–156. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Massanet, Damian. 1691. “Aiario de los Padres Misioneros.” Memorias de Nueva Espana 27: f.100. Montgomery, Lindsay M. 2015. “Yndios Bárbaros: Nomadic Archaeologies of Spanish New Mexico.” PhD Dissertation, Stanford University. Montgomery, Lindsay M. 2020. “When the Mountain People Came to Taos: Ute Archaeology in the Northern Rio Grande.” In Spirit Lands of the Eagle and Bear: Numic Archaeology and Ethnohistory in the American Rocky Mountains and Borderlands, edited by Robert and David H. Brunswig, 257–280. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Mooney, James. 1898. “The Jicarilla Genesis.” American Anthropologist 11 (7): 197–209. Opler, Morris Edward. 1936. “A Summary of Jicarilla Apache Culture.” American Anthropologist 38 (2): 202–223. Opler, Morris Edward. 1944. “The Jicarilla Apache Ceremonial Relay Race and Its Relation to Pueblo Counterparts.” American Anthropologist 46: 75–97. Preucel, Robert W. 2002. Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt: Identity, Meaning, and Renewal in the Pueblo Revolt. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico. Rifkin, Mark. 2009. Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roeder, Beatrice A. 1976. “Los Comanches: A Bicentennial Folk Play.” Bilingual Review 3 (3): 213–220. Seymour, Deni J. 2009. “Distinctive Places, Suitable Spaces: Conceptualizing Mobile Group Occupational Duration and Landscape Use.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 13 (3): 255–281. Shefferman, David A. 2014. “Rhetorical Conflicts: Civilizational Discourses and the Contested Patrimonies of Spain’s Festivals of Moors and Christians.” Religions 4: 126–156. Speth, John D. 1991. “Some Unexplored Aspects of Mutualistic Plains-Pueblo Food Exchange.” In Farmers, Hunters, and Colonists: Interaction between the Southwest and the Southern Plains, edited by Kathrine Spielmann, 8–37. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Spielmann, Katherine A., ed. 1991. Farmers, Hunters, and Colonist: Interaction Between the Southwest and the Southern Plains. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Thomas, Alfred B. 1935. After Coronado: Spanish Exploration Northeast of New Mexico, 1696–1727. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Tiller, Veronica. 1992. The Jicarilla Apache Tribes: A History. Albuquerque: BowArrow. Weber, David J. 2005. Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wilcox, Michael. 2009. The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact. Berkeley: University of California Press. Williams, Jerry L. 1986. New Mexico in Maps. 2nd ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

291

19 INDIGENOUS AGENCY AND LIMITS TO THE COLONIAL ORDER IN SOUTH AMERICA Silvana Buscaglia

Introduction Although acculturation models have long dominated the archaeological approach to colonialism, this trend has been reversed by exploring more pluralistic and inclusive perspectives to address Indigenous–European relations. Of course, this does not imply denial of the profound negative impact that colonialism had on Native peoples over time. This change of perspective in archaeology has been made possible by investigations carried out in different regions of the American continents—as well as in other parts of the world—that emphasize Native agency and its role in altering colonial structures. Most of these approaches consider heterogeneity, ambivalence, and the multidirectional nature of intercultural relations (e.g., Beck et al. 2011; Buscaglia 2017; Butto 2015; Ferris et al. 2014; Jordan 2009, 2014; Liebmann 2008; Liebmann and Murphy 2011; Lightfoot et al. 1998; Meza and Ferreira 2015; Orser 1996; Quiroga 2005; Panich 2013; Saletta and Fiore 2019; Scaramelli and Scaramelli 2015; Schneider and Panich 2014; Silliman 2001, 2005; Symanski and Gomes 2015; Voss 2008, 2015, among others). Based on these ideas, this chapter updates and expands my previous work (Buscaglia 2017) to discuss both the agency and the diverse kinds of controls Indigenous groups imposed over the Spanish colonial order established on the Patagonian Atlantic coast (Argentina Republic) at the end of the eighteenth century. Agency is understood here as the actors’ capacity to gain some kind of control over social relations and the possibility of transforming or maintaining them (Sewell 1992). Social practices, material conditions of the colonial settlements, and, particularly, Indigenous people’s perceptions of the colonial outposts are thoroughly considered. This information intends to highlight the divergent trajectories of interethnic relationships as well as to approach colonialism in Patagonia from the Natives’ logics and experiences. By integrating historical and archaeological evidence, the discussion presents a comparative analysis of the interactions between the Indigenous group known as Aónikenk, or Southern Tehuelches, and different settings of the same colonizing project. The colonial settings include three isolated and peripheral colonial outposts known as Nueva Colonia y Fuerte de Floridablanca (San Julián bay, Santa Cruz province), the settlement of the Real Compañía Marítima, a fishing processing post in Puerto Deseado (Santa Cruz province) and the settlement complex made up of the Fuerte San José and the Puesto de la Fuente annex post (Valdés peninsula, Chubut province). These colonial outposts were distributed along 800 km of the Atlantic coast of Patagonia and presented an unequal lifespan in the period between 1779 and 1810 (Figure 19.1). 292

Indigenous agency

Figure 19.1 Location of the Spanish settlements in Patagonia at the end of the eighteenth century. Source: Author’s creation.

The analysis of these three study cases raises the question of their significance and related materiality from Indigenous people’s perception and logics (e.g., Sahlins 1985; Thomas 1991; Martindale 2009; Cipolla 2017; Saletta and Fiore 2019). I propose that the Native agents played a key role in structuring interethnic and power relationships in Patagonia at the end of the colonial period. It implies focusing on the conceptualization and relative control of the colonial process by the Indigenous inhabitants rather than solely resorting to colonists’ practices and Natives’ reactions (e.g., Silliman 2001, 2005; Du Val 2006; Panich 2013). As Russell states, this is another way to “acknowledge and present Indigenous people as legitimate historical actors and not mere victims of the colonial encounter” (Russell 2012, 20). From this perspective, in the particular scenario of Patagonia, the colonial period can be considered a context for Natives’ action rather than a mere restrictive framework set by European domination (Panich 2013, 108–109). Thus, I discuss the dynamics of interethnic relationships in the three settings, considering their heterogeneity, ambivalence, and particularities.

Native inhabitants of eastern Patagonia and Spanish colonization Since the sixteenth century, Patagonia and its Native inhabitants have always exerted a vivid fascination in the European mind. In the past, this remote region of the world was transformed 293

Silvana Buscaglia

into an object of curiosity and conflict among the main colonial powers throughout the centuries. First reported by Magallanes (also known as Magellan) and his crew at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the region was coveted for its strategic situation and natural resources and became a clear objective for colonization, mainly for the Spanish and British empires’ interests. The research discussed here considers the eastern coastal area of this territory, characterized by a semi-desert environment. Nomadic and semi-nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers generically known as Tehuelches—who were descendants of the first peoples to enter the region, at least 12,000 years ago—lived in Patagonia between the Río Negro river and the Strait of Magellan at the end of the eighteenth century. Their lifeway was based on seasonal movements that consolidated intra- and interethnic social networks. Social organization rested on the band, which was cemented in kinship relations under the guidance of a chief or cacique with limited power who dominated a defined region of the Patagonian territory. The introduction of horses in Indigenous Patagonian life in the seventeenth century implied a fast and drastic change in the complete social systems during historical times (Martinic 1995). They also secured direct access and exchange of resources, both with other Indigenous groups and Europeans. The origins of the Spanish colonization project on the Patagonian coast at the end of the eighteenth century depended on the Bourbon reforms and the diplomatic crisis between Spain and the British Empire. In 1778, the Reales Cédulas created a system of colonies and forts along the Patagonian Atlantic coast, conceived to strengthen the Spanish control of overseas possessions to promote their economic development. These settlements also functioned as a social experiment, following new ideals proposed by the Enlightenment and modernist ideology (e.g., Sarrailh 1992; Senatore 2005, 2007). The colonial project included the creation of two main settlements, complemented by two subsidiary posts built between 1779 and 1790 (see Figure 19.1). The former were Fuerte Nuestra Señora del Carmen and Nueva Colonia y Fuerte de Floridablanca. The two subsidiary settlements were known as the Fuerte San José and a fishing processing post in Puerto Deseado. In this chapter, I discuss the latter three enclaves, which are included in the historical archaeological research I have participated in since 1998. In this context, a specific policy was designed for the treatment of and interaction with Indigenous populations in the Pampa and Patagonia regions. Unlike other colonial situations, negotiation and peaceful relationships were much privileged here (e.g., Del Campillo and Cossío 1779; Weber 1998; Briones and Carrasco 2000). In the case of Patagonian colonies, the system of alms-giving implemented by the colonial government was widely used. The goods sent to the Indigenous groups aimed to secure their loyalty and peaceful behavior while reinforcing interdependence and complementary relations (Luiz 2006; Quijada 2002). Nevertheless, the alms and rations provided to the Indigenous populations became an important gear in the Native socio-political system, not only because they provided products which were increasingly considered necessary—i.e., prestige goods—but also because they represented a significant part of the reciprocity networks which regulated both intra- and intertribal Indigenous sociability and authority. (Quijada 2002, 118–119, translation by author) On the one hand, this peaceful policy tried to ensure the survival of the settlement project, due to its serious instability and the shortage of goods prevailing in the initial stages of the colonizing project. This strategy sought to discourage any possible hostile manifestation against the vulnerable colonial outpost and, consequently, to lower the costs of the colonizing enterprise. On the other hand, the possibilities for exchange, trade, and negotiations were capitalized upon 294

Indigenous agency

by southern Indigenous populations. It is important to mention that in most cases recorded so far, the Tehuelches incorporated the Europeans into preexisting logics and inclusive practices, where peaceful relations were dominant, particularly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is the background that contextualized Indigenous people’s interpretations of the foreigners and their material culture (Thomas 1991). One of the Indigenous groups who inhabited the southern border of eastern Patagonia played a key role in structuring the interethnic relationships with the southernmost settlements of the Spanish empire in South America. Leading this group was cacique Camelo, or Julián Gordo, acknowledged in Spanish documentary records as one of the most powerful caciques among the Southern Tehuelches (e.g., Viedma 1779; Viedma ([1783] 1972b; Peña 1790). Together with his relatives and allies, Julián Camelo was one of the main leaders who coordinated trade as well as personal and political relationships with three out of the four settlements included in the colonizing project of the Patagonian coast between 1779 and 1788. The cacique Julián Camelo had an absurd and premature death at the hands of the Spanish. As will be shown later, on the first friendly visit the cacique made to Fuerte San José in 1788, he was accused of stealing horses from the fort. As a consequence, he was captured and sent to Fuerte Nuestra Señora del Carmen, where he was killed in an escape attempt (Buscaglia 2015). Previous research has already stated the importance of materiality, together with redistribution and exchange mechanisms among the Tehuelches. The Indigenous groups who did not own horses or certain goods were deprecated by the richest and more powerful ones (Viedma [1783] 1972a and b; Martinic 1995). I believe these prestige logics also applied to the colonial settlements along the Patagonian coast, as discussed in this chapter. The power and prestige enjoyed by their commanders as well as the relative importance and the material richness of colonial outposts would have been evaluated and valued by Native peoples according to their own cultural frameworks. They were also crucial to set alliances and gain benefits from the settlers, placing the Tehuelches in an outstanding position in the power relations with other Indigenous groups and the colonial system as a whole. The next sections discuss Native agency and divergent trajectories followed by intercultural relations among the Tehuelches and the three colonial outposts. In each case, documentary and archaeological information is presented to explain the interethnic relations in the contexts studied, following the analytical guidelines mentioned at the beginning of the chapter.

Interethnic relations in the context of the Nueva Colonia y Fuerte de Floridablanca (1780–1784) Floridablanca was the southernmost colony, created in November 1780 (see Figure 19.1). With a basic agricultural subsistence, it was inhabited by Crown officers, chaplains, surgeons, maintenance staff, convicts, seamen staying at the coast, and farmer families who moved directly from Spain. It was regarded as the paradigmatic example of an experimental social project (Senatore 2005, 2007). The colony was abandoned in January 1784 by Royal Order, and the buildings were set on fire to prevent their use by foreign powers. The physical manifestation of the colony in the southern part of Patagonia must have introduced a drastic—though spatially limited—transformation of the ancestral landscape inhabited by Indigenous populations. The Spaniards built a settlement of some architectural magnitude, with several buildings of adobe, stone, tiles and wood. Furthermore, the land was divided into vegetable gardens, cattle pens, and cultivation fields near the water source. The colony, with a typical Spanish plan, was organized around a central square, where the fort shared the space with several houses for farmer families, a hospital, a bakery, an ironsmith, a kiln for tiles and bricks, 295

Silvana Buscaglia

general stores (pulperías), collective kitchens, and some houses paid by private individuals (e.g., Senatore et al. 2007). The colony of Floridablanca represented a singular case where the encounter and relationships with Indigenous groups were immediate, peaceful, and frequent until the colony was abandoned in January 1784. Due to the abundance of written sources and archaeological evidence for this case study, detailed information of the strategies and social practices developed by both Natives and colonists in everyday life can be traced. Furthermore, they illuminate the role played by materiality as well as the Indigenous people’s perceptions of the colony in structuring these interactions, as discussed later. When the expedition arrived at the coasts of Puerto San Julián in 1780, the Tehuelches suggested the colonists settle near a freshwater source, close to the place where their camp was established (Viedma [1783] 1972a). It was not a minor detail and could probably be related to cacique Julián Camelo’s intention of establishing direct relations with the colony, given the benefits he could obtain from their proximity. Before Floridablanca’s founding, the correspondence from Fuerte Nuestra Señora del Carmen indicated that in 1779, cacique Julián Camelo visited the fort so as to define political and commercial relations with the newcomers (Viedma 1779; Villarino 1779). However, this settlement was more than 1,000 km from his territorial influence area. While Floridablanca was in use, the traditional Indigenous movements toward the north to interact with other Indigenous groups as well as with Fuerte Nuestra Señora del Carmen and Fuerte San José became less frequent, as confirmed by the correspondence analyzed for these cases (Nacuzzi 2005; Luiz 2006; Buscaglia 2012, 2015). The interactions between the Tehuelches and the colony were not limited to exchange relations; in some cases, they went beyond economic and political aspects. Written records indicate that, whenever possible, the colony offered the Tehuelche a regular monthly provision of goods and supplies, with records of occasional special deliveries as a reward for favors or the purchase of horses (Buscaglia 2012). In certain cases, the Tehuelche’s preferences—particularly their leaders’—for specific kinds of goods and/or supplies were considered: blue or “milky-colored” beads, iron cooking pots, textiles, tobacco, different clothing items (preferably blue), accessories for horses, wine, yerba mate, and bread, among others (Viedma 1782b). Therefore, this information transcends the picture of Indigenous people as mere passive recipients and highlights their control over the negotiations. They were able to set limits and impose values to the flow of material culture by means of exchange and trade relations, mostly associated with the accumulation of prestige goods—highly estimated because of their rarity—while social differentiation was intensified due to colonialism and the restructuration of interethnic and power relations. Although the Spanish Bourbon policies for the encounter tried to establish peaceful relationships with Indigenous groups—which in many cases implied satisfying their demands—in practice, colonial settlements had few alternatives due to the extremely vulnerable situation they suffered: isolation, mortal diseases such as scurvy, food shortages, internal conflicts, low population, and deficiencies in the defensive system, among others. For instance, one of the main problems faced by the colony was the frequent shortage of food (Viedma [1783] 1972a; Marschoff 2007). In this context, Indigenous populations played a critical role in alleviating food shortage by facilitating information about local resources and, above all, by regularly providing guanaco (Lama guanicoe) meat, even without being rewarded when critical events affected the colony (Viedma [1783] 1972b, 906, 908, 934). These practices are supported by the archaeofaunal evidence discovered in most of the contexts studied (Marschoff 2007). Although the presence of this prey inside the settlement may also be related to the dwellers’ hunting expeditions, the limitations of eighteenth-century firearms made the Indigenous boleadoras a much more efficient hunting weapon (Martinic 1995). 296

Indigenous agency

The cooperation offered by the Tehuelches was not limited to the provision of food, though. They occasionally assisted the colony in many other ways, such as fattening mules, the capture of wild cattle, landscape exploration (Viedma [1783] 1972a), and the search for deserters (Viedma 1782a). These favors may not have been truly altruistic on the part of Indigenous groups, since this aid to colonists was rewarded by material benefits and the establishment of relief agreements in case of conflicts or other needs. As will be shown in the case of the Fuerte San José, disrupting the reciprocity system had irreversible consequences for the settlement in a climate of increasing tension in interethnic relations. Nevertheless, the relations between the Tehuelches and the colony were more diverse than mere economic and political questions. The superintendent’s diary and letters, as well as the material culture recovered, suggest closer relations between both populations. One of the more paradigmatic examples was the case of the settler woman who, suffering from a serious illness, gave her young daughter to cacique Julián Camelo’s sister to be breastfed (Viedma [1783] 1972a, 915–916). Or, as the superintendent indicated in May 1781, a few months after the colony was founded: “The Indians have remained in good terms, cacique Julián Gordo likes me very much; when he has his camp nearby, he does not leave my rooms” (Viedma 1781, translation by author). Unlike other cases—even in the same settlement project—the presence of colonial materiality in the Indigenous territory was not rejected; quite on the contrary, it was incorporated and capitalized upon by Native actors in their own logics and for their own benefit (see Schneider and Panich 2014). Both the historical sources and the archaeological record show the effective presence of Indigenous groups not only near but also inside the settlement. Systematic archaeological surveys define five surface concentrations (N = 428) near the Floridablanca fort and settlement. They evidence a high diversity of lithic artifacts and instruments of clear Indigenous manufacture associated with European artifacts dated to the eighteenth century. It is important to note that the archaeological remains recorded at surface concentrations are highly similar to the objects recovered in stratigraphic contexts and that these surface concentrations are interpreted as Indigenous residential camps (Buscaglia 2012). In order of importance, the lithic artifacts (n = 162) recovered include different kinds of flakes, scrapers, expedient tools, notches, knifes, blades, nodules, side scrapers, chunks, cores, and unidentified artifacts. European materials are represented by glass remains—including square gin bottles (n = 20), blue beads (n = 14), drinking glasses (n = 2), a scraper (n = 1), unidentified remains (n = 10)—and Spanish ceramics sherds: olive jars (n = 199), Majolica tableware (n = 16), and others (n = 4). Inside the settlement, the material evidence of interactions between Indigenous groups and colonists is identified both inside the houses and in the different areas excavated at the fort. Due to space restrictions, I only describe the findings recovered in different sectors at the fort (N = 9,172), because it is the context where the materialization of interethnic relations is more evident and controlled regarding post-depositional processes (see Buscaglia 2017 for more details of the rest of the archaeological contexts). The lithic artifacts recovered at the fort present a higher diversity and abundance than the rest of the contexts in the settlement. Most materials were found in the moat enclosing the fort, which was used as a discard area from the beginning of the colony (n = 77). It is followed by the residential spaces in the Northeast Sector (n = 18) and, lastly, the superintendent’s room in the West Sector (n = 14). The lithic assemblages recovered include standardized scrapers, flakes (mainly of the angular and sharpening types), knapping debris, knives, and a few cores, among other artifacts. These assemblages would indicate not only the circulation of Indigenous technology inside the settlement—particularly inside the fort—but also the performance of Indigenous people’s daily activities there, including the manufacture, use and maintenance of tools, 297

Silvana Buscaglia

probably in connection with the processing of raw materials and leather blankets or quillangos to be used and traded (Martinic 1995). Likewise, European artifacts typically related to the interaction with Natives, such as different kinds of beads (n = 17), sleigh bells (n = 1), and thimbles (n = 1) were also recovered inside the fort (Buscaglia 2012). The fort showed the most definite evidence of interethnic interactions represented by unquestionable Indigenous lithic technology and items from colonial exchange. The superintendent’s residence and the presence of single men inhabiting shared spaces who had probably had previous experience with Indigenous populations—the troops in particular—would have turned the fort into a more receptive space for interactions between Tehuelche men and women on the one hand and the settlers on the other (Buscaglia 2012). Spaces both inside and outside the settlement testify to the intersection of practices, identities and materialities typical of multiethnic and shared scenarios (Lightfoot et al. 1998). Summing up, the creation of Floridablanca, the conclusiveness of its materiality, and the superintendent’s cleverness inasmuch as the regular policy of feasting and reward to honor its Indigenous neighbors, placed the settlement in a privileged position in the Tehuelches’ view, who found in the colony and its authorities appropriate political and material allies. The presence of the colony implied the direct access in their own territory to certain goods highly valued in the Tehuelche sociocultural systems. Many of these objects reinforced prestige and power positions both inside and outside the group, in the broader frame of social and territorial networks. In this sense, the observation made in 1783 by the pilot Basilio Villarino is telling: “In this river [Río Negro] the Indians met the Tehuelches from San Julián, with whom they traded intensively as they were rich in the jewelry awarded by the Christians from this settlement” (Villarino [1782] 1969, 1123, translation by author). Furthermore, the direct and stable presence of the colonists offered the possibility of adopting personal and group strategic alliances with the newcomers. As already noted, these relationships went beyond the economic and political spheres, reaching an intimate and close nature, at least in some segments of both populations.

Interethnic relations in the fishing post of the Real Compañía Marítima (1790–1807) The analysis of interethnic relations in the settlement of the Real Compañía Marítima has been virtually neglected in previous historical and archaeological research (e.g. Deodat 1955; Silva 1978; Maeso Buenasmañanas 2007; Martínez Shaw 2008; Schávelzon 2008). In this section I will focus on the preliminary information available in historical records. Puerto Deseado was established as a fishing post and a presidio by the Spanish Crown and the Real Compañía Marítima in February 1790 (see Figure 19.1). It was commissioned to prevent the growing presence of British ships in Patagonian waters and to participate in cetacean and pinniped hunting activities and salt extraction. The initial expedition included 250 people, including company and Crown officials, surgeons, armorers, workers, fishers, sailors, soldiers, and a few colonist families. However, a short time later, their number drastically dropped due to scurvy (De Victorica 1790, in Braun Menéndez 1947, 331–344). In 1803, the company closed down because of low productivity, leaving behind a small detachment that was rescued in 1807 by a brigantine sent by the Commander of Fuerte Nuestra Señora del Carmen, after the unsuccessful English invasions to the Río de la Plata (Martínez 1807). Both on the northern margin of the Puerto Deseado estuary and on Reyes Island, some architectonic complexes were built—mostly of stone and wood—that exhibit larger dimensions than in the other three settlements. In the first case, historical records indicate the construction of two fortifications, rooms, a hospital, a blacksmith’s and a carpenter’s workshop, stone 298

Indigenous agency

and wood storage rooms, a movable wood chapel, a bakery, a flour mill, and some animal pens, among others. They also mention a graveyard and plots of cultivation land. On Reyes Island, located some 20 km to the southeast of the Puerto Deseado estuary, meat-curing plants to process pinniped skins were built, as well as cabins and a kiln, with its facilities to melt the fat (e.g. De Victorica 1790, in Braun Menéndez 1947, 331–344; Muñoz 1791a; Bordas 1793; Apocryphal 1796 in Martínez Shaw 2007, 613–615). Even though the case of Puerto Deseado presents many similarities with the colony of Floridablanca regarding the organization of interethnic relations, it resulted in a more ambivalent character. Unlike the latter, the contact here was not immediate after the arrival of the colonists. In fact, it was not until 1791, a year after the colonial enclave was established, that the Natives reached the post. This absence may be connected with Indigenous groups’ annual mobility circuits, as Puerto Deseado was a frequently visited location through time. The analysis of historical documents reveals that the Indigenous groups that interacted with the settlement were the Tehuelches who controlled the southern Patagonia territories. Furthermore, they had kinship ties and were allies of the group headed by the cacique Julián Camelo, who had been killed by the Spaniards two years before the foundation of the Puerto Deseado enclave (Buscaglia 2015, 2019). The documents available for Puerto Deseado testify that the creation of Floridablanca originated close and long-lasting friendships between some caciques and experienced Spanish sailors like José de la Peña and Bernardo Taford, who participated in the colonizing enterprise as well as in exploratory expeditions (e.g., Peña 1790 in Gómez Lagenheim 1939, 140; Malaspina in Sagredo Baeza and González Leiva 2004, 224). As they did for Superintendent Antonio Viedma, written records account for the good terms Juan Muñoz strategically established with Indigenous inhabitants during the period (1790–1792) when he was the first commander of Puerto Deseado (Rozas 1793b). Among the Natives, the main spokesperson and negotiator was the cacique Vicente, an ally of Julián Camelo. Furthermore, diverse historical documents highlight the close friendship between cacique Vicente’s wife and the pilot José de la Peña (Buscaglia 2019). Between 1791 and 1793, the Indigenous factions who interacted with the population at the Puerto Deseado enclave settled during several periods in a nearby location, with access to fresh water sources and pastures for the horses. During these stays, the interactions between Indigenous people and settlers took place almost daily, similar to the situation in Floridablanca (Muñoz 1791b; Rozas 1793a). Then references become less frequent, with mentions limited to 1796, 1798, 1800, and 1807. According to Martínez Shaw (2008), between 1792 and 1802 the news about the Real Compañía Marítima in Puerto Deseado was drastically reduced because of the confrontation with England that paralyzed their business. With regard to the number of Indigenous people present in Puerto Deseado, historical records largely fluctuate between 200 and 2,000 individuals, particularly during the initial phase of the colonizing enterprise (Muñoz 1791b; Elizalde [1792] 1938). Even if the count is imprecise and exaggerated, it would indicate that at certain moments the number of Natives exceeded the population at Puerto Deseado, representing a potential threat. Despite the current absence of official reports describing the reception of goods and provisions regularly destined to reward or exchange with Indigenous people (except for Floridablanca), these practices are described in the documents. On the one hand, they represent a difference with the Fuerte San José; on the other, they show some similarities with one of the main settlements. The situations that were used to justify these practices generally related to the need to guarantee friendship with the Indigenous inhabitants (Arredondo 1793) in a situation of isolation and scarcity, as well as to avoid potential alliances with the crews of foreign ships. Although the Spaniards tried to depict the English as a menace for Indigenous groups, in 299

Silvana Buscaglia

practice it was rather ineffective, according to historical evidence (Silva 1978; Maeso Buenasmañanas 2007; Buscaglia 2019). The collaboration of Native people in certain activities at the settlement was also compensated with goods. They included collecting and transporting salt (Muñoz 1791b), water provision—which was directed by cacique Vicente’s wife (Ratto 1930)—and acquisition of guanaco leather (Peña 1796) and fresh meat (Muñoz 1791b; González [1798] 1965), a practice also frequent in Floridablanca. In exchange, the Spaniards offered tobacco, cigarettes, alcoholic drinks, beads, coarse bread, and yerba mate, among other foods and articles of interest for the Natives, which were essential for the Spaniards’ subsistence as well (Muñoz 1791b; Elizalde [1792] 1938). Against the interests of the Real Compañía Marítima, the settlers illegally sold alcoholic drinks to the Natives or exchanged these for furs (Bustamante y Guerra 1800). According to the historical sources, the Natives would occasionally destroy vital resources such as agricultural fields (Muñoz 1791b) when material rewards were not considered enough or even prevent the Spaniards from hunting around the settlement, as declared by the last Commander sometime before the abandonment of Puerto Deseado (Martínez 1807). There was only one instance of interpersonal violence, when an illegitimate son of cacique Julián Camelo and his nephew killed a young Spaniard, an incident particularly relevant because of the agents involved (Muñoz 1791b). These situations completely differ from Floridablanca but resemble those reported from Fort San José. As a result, Puerto Deseado was an attractive locale for Indigenous populations where interethnic relations were structured in a way similar to Floridablanca. However, the historical information occasionally transmits an image of higher tension and pressure from Natives on that isolated post, which, as we will see, would reach its climax in Fuerte San José.

Interethnic relations at Fuerte San José and Puesto de la Fuente (1779–1810) Fuerte San José was the first settlement founded on the southeast coast of the eponymous gulf (see Figure 19.1). Dating to the beginning of 1779, it was defined as a military post subsidiary to Fuerte Nuestra Señora del Carmen. It later incorporated productive activities when Puesto de la Fuente was created some 30 km away and was considered a salt extraction and cattle breeding station due to its location near a salt lake and permanent fresh-water bodies. In contrast to the other three colonial outposts, the population at Fuerte San José was basically administrative, military, and male. The population varied in number over time, up to about a hundred people, and was characterized by the substitution of all inhabitants, usually once a year. In 1810, both settlements were destroyed in an unexpected Indigenous attack. Fuerte San José represented the antithesis of Floridablanca and Puerto Deseado regarding the structuring of interethnic relationships. Not only are written references about the contacts between both populations significantly less frequent here, but the material expression is also quite different. Unlike other enclaves, the Fuerte San José was a precarious settlement. According to historical documents, the settlement nuclei on the coast would have been limited to wooden posts and leather tents, with some isolated examples of adobe structures with straw roofing. Archaeological investigations in five of the sectors connected with the settlement—settlement nuclei (San José 1), small fort (San José 2 and 3), cemetery (San José 4), and refuse area (San José 5)—confirm the precarious situation of the fort. It is also manifested in the low obtrusiveness and limited evidence of more durable buildings, that is, adobe remains, mud walls, tiles, bricks, stone. Regarding Puesto de la Fuente, while written sources provided isolated references to the 300

Indigenous agency

construction of precarious huts, animal pens, and possibly a shed for storing salt, archaeological research showed only one stone structure of unclear functionality (Structure 1), with signs of pillaging, together with two half-buried stone alignments nearby, which have not been studied yet (Bianchi Villelli et al. 2013; Alberti and Buscaglia 2015; Buscaglia and Bianchi Villelli 2016; García Guraieb et al. 2017; Bianchi Villelli et al. 2019). Even though Fuerte San José was founded in 1779, no historical records report relations between Indigenous people and the Spanish population in the peninsula until 1787. According to historical documents, interactions with Indigenous people were generally occasional and conflictive. Hostile events included interpersonal violence, horse and cattle theft, and killing of the latter. In most cases, the scenario par excellence was Puesto de la Fuente. Similar to other enclaves, the main protagonists of interethnic relations here were the Southern Tehuelches, particularly cacique Julián Camelo and his kin, such as cacique Patricio and his allies. In his first (and last) visit to Fuerte San José, cacique Julián Camelo manifested his disappointment for the poor reception he was offered (Lucero 1788). The visit concluded in his capture due to the identification of stolen Spanish horses in his drove (Lucero 1788). However, the cacique defended himself against the accusations, blaming one of his brothers for stealing the horses. Julián Camelo and another Indigenous person were sent by ship to the Fuerte Nuestra Señora del Carmen to be judged. During the transfer, the cacique and his partner fled upon reaching the coast, with the fatal outcome of the murder of the first and the capture of the second in an excessive act of retaliation at the hands of the Spaniards. The death of Julian Camelo produced a deep disappointment in his relatives and allies (Peña 1790) that likely had a negative impact in the relations with the fort. So far, the results seem to indicate a tendency where the presence of Indigenous groups in the Valdés peninsula may be connected with the abandonment of Floridablanca and Puerto Deseado. When such settlements were functioning, the garrison of Fuerte San José did not report the presence of Indigenous populations near the fort or Puesto de la Fuente. On the other hand, the absence of Natives in the Valdés peninsula may be also related to the increasing presence of ships to capture sea lions and whales along the eastern Patagonian coast at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century (Silva 1978; Caviglia 2015). The gift of monthly rations to Indigenous groups or references to the provision of articles to be offered or exchanged with them are absent in the historical sources revised for the Valdés peninsula. The only exception dates to 1809, when, after the massive theft of cattle in the area and the desertion of some settlers from Fuerte San José, the commander decided to reward the group of caciques who participated in the search with some goods. The information in the written records indicates that the Indigenous people came from Puerto Deseado and camped around the fort (Aragón 1809). However, the goods never arrived, and this is probably one of the causes that triggered the end of the colonial outposts in the Valdés peninsula, since now the commanders were exposed to the consequences of neglecting the strict protocols ruling Indigenous reciprocity systems. The absence of daily interactions between Indigenous people and the fort’s population as reported in the documents is partially supported by archaeological evidence. Unlike at Floridablanca, no artifact assemblages typical of the contact period—with the exception of a glass bead—has yet been recovered in the colonial settlements at Valdés peninsula. No evidence of the use of European raw materials (metal, glass, and pottery) or artifacts has been reported so far, even though they were usually considered exchange items, such as glass beads, thimbles, sleigh bells, and clothing items, among others. Indigenous camps have not been identified in the area of Fuerte San José, either, and the stratigraphic association with materials of a Native or ambiguous origin is relatively lower 301

Silvana Buscaglia

compared with Floridablanca, particularly considering the settlement was occupied for 31 years. Archaeological research reveals a higher representation of archaeofaunal remains, with dominance of European species, Spanish pottery, scarce metal objects, glass, and, lastly, lithic artifacts. Even though Fuerte San José also suffered several setbacks during its 31 years of occupation, the colonial narratives are silent about any assistance provided by local Indigenous groups. In this sense, the limited representation of Lama guanicoe specimens in the archaeofaunal record, despite their availability, indicates another difference with Floridablanca and Puerto Deseado. Lithic artifacts were mainly concentrated in the excavated sectors at San José 1 and San José 5. The former accounted for 12 artifacts: five flakes, two European gunflints, two indeterminate artifacts, a scraper, a nodule, and a piece of debris. San José 5 yielded five artifacts: a hammer stone, a grinding tool, a preform, a core, and an ecofact. From the two sites studied, Puesto de la Fuente presents the most significant evidence of Indigenous occupations in the nearby area. Excavations in Structure 1 showed few archaeological remains (n = 27) while the archaeological record found on the surface was mainly concentrated on the rock outcrop over the salt pan (Concentration 1, n = 429) and about 50 meters to the southwest of Structure 1 (Concentration 2, n = 508). The first concentration reports a mixed archaeological record where the techno-typological analysis of lithics suggests an Indigenous origin due to manufacturing techniques and the types of artifacts present, i.e., flakes, scrapers, projectile points, cores, among other things. Some other remains were found, including modern and, to a lesser extent, late eighteenth-century artifacts, such as Spanish majolica, olive jars, kaolin pipes, and fragments of bottles, similar to the record found at Fuerte San José. Surface archaeofaunal evidence indicates the dominance of indeterminate remains followed by European and local species. It should be mentioned that the accumulation found on the rock outcrop is a palimpsest, probably resulting from discard activities by both Indigenous and Spanish and Creole populations, looting, redeposition, and exposure to the natural dynamics of the environment. The second concentration presents lithic artifacts, followed by scarce bone, glass, and metal remains. Both assemblages are similar; the second, however, yields a greater frequency and diversity in the lithic assemblage (Alberti y Buscaglia 2015). The analyses performed indicate that both assemblages would have resulted from Indigenous residential occupations, dated between the middle-late Holocene (circa 1200 bp) and European contact. However, evidence is not solid enough to consider this record contemporary to the Spanish occupation (Alberti and Buscaglia 2015). Although the introduction of European cattle was attractive for Indigenous populations, the settlement of Puesto de la Fuente would probably have also implied some restrictions to key resources in the Patagonian desert environment. Among them, permanent freshwater springs, salt, prey animals, and pasture grasses in horseriding times were essential in a location reused for a long time in the annual mobility circuits, particularly in later periods (Gómez Otero et al. 1999; Alberti and Buscaglia 2015; Buscaglia 2015, 2019). Interethnic conflict in Valdés peninsula may be interpreted not only in terms of cattle and horse theft but also as disputes over the territory. For the Tehuelches, cacique Julián Camelo’s murder, as well as the disappearance of both Floridablanca and Puerto Deseado, would have implied the loss of the direct sources for Spanish articles and allies. The scarcity of material resources, the image of poverty reflected in the precarious facilities of the fort, the annual replacement of its commanders and the intrusion in a territory of resources that were valued by the Indigenous groups may have negatively affected the fate of the Valdés peninsula settlements in regard to their relationship with local populations. In this context, the failure to materially compensate the caciques who captured the deserters at Fuerte San José was the coup de grace that defined the destiny of the settlement. 302

Indigenous agency

Concluding thoughts The results summarized in this chapter broadly present the variable nature—in both practices and materiality—of interethnic relationships in the context of the Spanish colonizing plan, where the same actors frequently interacted, although they occupied different roles. The negotiations and tensions observed in the organization of interethnic relationships were articulated following the ambivalent logics of Natives’ practices. The relations between Indigenous peoples and colonists, as well as the contact with other ethnic parties, would have ranged from hostile to friendly situations depending on the specific circumstances and interests of the moment. The role of materiality, together with the conditions and heterogeneity structuring interethnic and power relations in Patagonia by the end of the eighteenth century, invites us to consider how effective colonial domination over Indigenous populations actually was. The isolation, unfamiliarity with the environment, limited military force, diseases, scarcity, and precariousness—in sum, the instability which characterized the colonies, especially in their initial phases—demands consideration of the strategic management Native populations imposed on these small and marginal settlements. In this sense, I agree with Beck et al. (2011) in thinking that Native agents took advantage of the opportunities offered by the colonial system and considered it a structural resource appropriate to achieve the many objectives defined in their own sociocultural organization. In the case of Floridablanca and Puerto Deseado, relations with the Tehuelches were based on complementarity and dependence. Nevertheless, negotiation and the honoring and satisfaction of Natives’ demands were the sole alternative in an extremely vulnerable context, given the isolation of the settlements and the lack of colonial assistance. This situation imprinted great complexity to the definition of interethnic relationships in these scenarios. Despite the peaceful and daily relations existing between both populations, control was always in the hands of the Tehuelches. Although they chose to negotiate with the settlers, uncertainty was always threatening the colonial project. Fuerte San José was in the opposite situation. Left on its own, the fort did not receive the material and symbolic resources needed to position it as a desirable and strategic ally for Native populations. The scarcity of goods and the poverty of its facilities (when compared with Floridablanca and Puerto Deseado), the capture and killing of cacique Julián Camelo, and the seizure of a territory with an atypical supply of natural resources all might have modified the course of interethnic relations. The impossibility of negotiating with and satisfying the local populations generated tensions that eventually decided the future of this post, despised by both colonial and Indigenous authorities. Fuerte San José was in fact the only one of the three settlements that was destroyed by an Indigenous attack, a real exception in the colonial context studied. The power and agency of Indigenous populations as active agents in structuring interethnic and power relationships must be acknowledged, introducing tension in the colonial order established in Patagonia at the end of the eighteenth century. Even the limited reach of colonialism in the area was the result of the cracks, uncertainties, and fissures that the colonial power itself created when advancing, such as the lack of effective control and assistance to the furthermost Patagonian colonies and forts. Finally, the case study presented in this chapter seeks to contribute to those perspectives that question the monolithic and universal character of “colonial power” (e.g. Comaroff y Comaroff 1997; Cooper y Stoler 1997; Gosden 2001; Silliman 2001; Du Val 2006; Jordan 2009; Russell 2012; Panich 2013, among others). The contexts presented show the possibilities and limits generated both by Native populations and by materiality and colonial practices in the southern limits of the Spanish empire in America, thus opening a “third space” (sensu Bhabha 1994) that denaturalizes the master narratives of post-Columbian colonialism. 303

Silvana Buscaglia

References cited Alberti, Jimena, and Silvana Buscaglia. 2015. “Caracterización de los conjuntos artefactuales líticos del sitio Puesto de la Fuente (Estancia Manantiales, Península Valdés, Provincia de Chubut).” Intersecciones en Antropología 16 (2): 397–409. Aragón, Antonio. 1809. To Francisco de León, Río Negro, September 20, Room X, File 2–3–15. Buenos Aires: Archivo General de la Nación. Arredondo, Nicolás. 1793. To Señor Duque de la Alcaldía, Buenos Aires, August 29, Estado 80, n° 3. Sevilla: Archivo General de Indias. Beck, Robin A. Jr., Christopher B. Rodning, and David G. Moore 2011. “Limiting Resistance: Juan Pardo and the Shrinking of Spanish La Florida, 1566–1568.” In Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Melissa S. Murphy, 19–39. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Bhabha Homi K .1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bianchi Villelli, Marcia, Silvana Buscaglia, Paula Calandrón, and Anabella Sellanes. 2019. “Entre cerros y cañadones. Avances sobre el plano arqueológico del sitio Fuerte San José (Península Valdés, Chubut).” Revista Arqueología 25 (1): 141–167. Bianchi Villelli, Marcia, Silvana Buscaglia, and Bruno Sancci. 2013. “Una genealogía de los planos históricos de los asentamientos coloniales del Fuerte San José, Península Valdés (Siglo XVIII).” Corpus. Archivos Virtuales de Alteridad Americana 3 (1): 1–14. Bordas, Gerardo. 1793. To Juan Muñoz, Puerto Deseado, June 2nd, Room IX, File 16–4–9. Buenos Aires: Archivo General de la Nación. Braun Menéndez, Armando. 1947. “Ensayo de colonización en Puerto Deseado durante la época colonial.” In Anuario de Historia Argentina, 329–344. Buenos Aires: Sociedad de Historia Argentina. Briones, Claudia, and Morita Carrasco. 2000. Pacta sunt servanda. Capitulaciones, convenios y tratados con indígenas en Pampa y Patagonia (Argentina 1742–1878). Buenos Aires: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs and Vinciguerra Testimonio. Buscaglia, Silvana. 2012. Poder y Dinámica Interétnica en la Colonia Española de Floridablanca. Una Perspectiva Histórica y Arqueológica (Patagonia, Argentina, Siglo XVIII). Saarbrücken: Editorial Académica Española. Buscaglia, Silvana. 2015. “Indígenas, borbones y enclaves coloniales. Las relaciones interétnicas en el Fuerte San José durante su primera década de funcionamiento (Chubut, 1779–1789).” Corpus. Archivos virtuales de alteridad americana 5 (1): 1–31. Buscaglia, Silvana. 2017. “Materiality and Indigenous Agency: Limits to the Colonial Order (Argentinean Patagonia, Eighteenth—Nineteenth Centuries).” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 21 (3): 641–673. Buscaglia, Silvana. 2019. “El origen de la cacica María y su familia. Una aproximación genealógica (Patagonia, siglos XVIII-XIX).” Corpus. Archivos Virtuales de Alteridad Latinoamericana 9 (1): 1–34. Buscaglia, Silvana, and Marcia Bianchi Villelli. 2016. “From Colonial Representation to Materiality: Spanish Settlements on Península Valdés (Patagonian Coast, 1779–1810).” Historical Archaeology 50 (2): 69–88. Bustamante y Guerra, José. 1800. To Marqués Avilés, Montevideo, December 10, Room IX, File 16–5–3. Buenos Aires: Archivo General de la Nación. Butto, Ana R. 2015. “Procesos de contacto en las fotografías de mapuches y tehuelches en Patagonia a fines del siglo XIX y comienzos del XX.” Relaciones de la Sociedad Argentina de Antropología 40 (2): 621–643. Caviglia, Sergio. 2015. Malvinas: Soberanía, Verdad y Justicia. Vol. II: Balleneros-Loberos-Misioneros. S. XVIIIXIX. Rawson: Ministerio de Educación de la Provincia de Chubut. Cipolla, Craig N., ed. 2017. Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 1997. Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier. Chicago: University Chicago Press. Cooper, Frederick, and Anne L. Stoler. 1997. “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda.” In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by Frederick Cooper and Anne L. Stoler, 1–56. Berkeley: University of California Press. Del Campillo y Cossío, José. 1779. Nuevo sistema de gobierno económico para la América. Madrid: Imprenta de Benito. Deodat, Leoncio S. M. 1955. “Fortificación de Puerto Deseado en el siglo XVIII.” Argentina Austral 293: 9–14. Du Val, Kathleen. 2006. The Native Ground: Indians and Colonist in the Heart of the Continent. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

304

Indigenous agency Elizalde, Juan J. (1792) 1938. “Viaje de la Corbeta San Pío a la costa patagónica y Tierra del Fuego en 1791.” Boletín de la Academia Chilena de la Historia 5 (10): 252–339. Ferris, Neal, Rodney Harrison, and Matthew A. Beaudoin. 2014. “Introduction: Rethinking Colonial Past through the Archaeology of the Colonized.” In Rethinking Colonial Past Through the Archeology, edited by Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael Wilcox, 1–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press. García Guraieb, Solana, Augusto Tessone, Silvana Buscaglia, Cristian Crespo, Marcia Bianchi Villelli, and Mariano del Papa. 2017. “Análisis bioarqueológico de un individuo recuperado en el Fuerte San José (Pla. Valdés, Pcia. de Chubut, 1779–1810).” Revista del Museo de Antropología 10 (1): 61–76. Gómez Lagenheim, Antonio. 1939. Elementos para la historia de nuestras Islas Malvinas, Tomo I. Buenos Aires: El Ateneo. Gómez Otero, Julieta, Juan B. Belardi, Alejandro Súnico, and Roberto Taylor. 1999. “Arqueología de cazadores recolectores en Península Valdés (costa central de Patagonia): primeros resultados.” In Soplando el viento, edited by Juan B. Belardi, Pablo M. Fernández, Rafael A. Goñi, Ana G. Guraieb, and Mariana De Nigris, 393–417. Neuquén: Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Pensamiento Latinoamericano and Universidad Nacional del Comahue. González, Francisco. (1798) 1965. Diario de Viaje que hizo por Tierra de Puerto Deseado a Río Negro. Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de la Historia. Gosden, Chris. 2001. “Postcolonial Archaeology. Issues of Culture, Identity and Knowledge.” In Archaeological Theory Today, edited by Ian Hodder, 241–262. Cambridge: Polity Press. Jordan, Kurt A. 2009. “Colonies, Colonialism, and Cultural Entanglement: The Archaeology of Postcolumbian Intercultural Relations.” In International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by Teresita Majewski, and David Gaimster, 31–49. New York: Springer. Jordan, Kurt A. 2014. “Pruning Colonialism: Vantage Point, Local Political Economy, and Cultural Entanglement in the Archaeology of Post-1415 Indigenous Peoples.” In Rethinking Colonial Past Through the Archeology, edited by Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael Wilcox, 103–120. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liebmann, Matthew. 2008. “Introduction: The Intersections of Archaeology and Postcolonial Studies.” In Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann, and Uzma Z. Rizvi, 1–20. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press. Liebmann, Matthew, and Melissa S. Murphy. 2011. “Rethinking the Archaeology of Rebels, Backsliders, and Idolaters.” In Enduring Conquests: Rethinking the Archaeology of Resistance to Spanish Colonialism in the Americas, edited by Matthew Liebmann, and Melissa S. Murphy, 3–18. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Lightfoot, Kent G., Antoinette Martínez, and Ann M. Schiff. 1998. “Daily Practice and Material Culture in Pluralistic Social Settings: An Archaeological Study of Culture Change and Persistence from Fort Ross, California.” American Antiquity 63 (2): 199–222. Lucero, Francisco. 1788. To Tomás Gil, June First, Room IX, File 16–4–5. Buenos Aires: Archivo General de la Nación. Luiz, María T. 2006. Relaciones Fronterizas en Patagonia. La Convivencia Hispano-Indígena a Fines del Período Colonial. Ushuaia: Asociación Hanis, Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco. Maeso Buenasmañanas, Juan A. 2007. Expediciones navales españolas a la Patagonia argentina durante el siglo XVIII. Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa. Secretaría General Técnica. Marschoff, María. 2007. Gato por Liebre. Prácticas Alimenticias en Floridablanca. Buenos Aires: Editorial Teseo. Martindale, Andrew. 2009. “Entanglement and Tinkering. Structural History in the Archaeology of the Northen Tsimishian.” Journal of Social Archaeology 9 (1): 59–91. Martínez, Crisóstomo. 1807. To Capitán General de las Provincias Unidas del Río de la Plata, Río Negro, December 28, Room IX, File 16–5–8. Buenos Aires: Archivo General de la Nación. Martínez Shaw, Carlos. 2008. “Economía e imperio. Los establecimientos de la Real Compañía Marítima en América.” Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos 54 (1): 593–630. Martinic, Mateo. 1995. Los Aónikenk. Historia y Cultura. Punta Arenas: Ediciones de la Universidad de Magallanes. Meza, Elis, and Lucio M. Ferreira. 2015. “Agencia indígena y colonialismo: una arqueología de contacto sobre la producción de aceite de tortuga en el Orinoco Medio, Venezuela (siglos XVIII y XIX).” Revista Amazônica 7 (2): 375–402. Muñoz, Juan. 1791a. Without Addressee, Puerto Deseado, July 16, Room IX, File 13–8–15. Buenos Aires: Archivo General de la Nación.

305

Silvana Buscaglia Muñoz, Juan. 1791b. To Nicolás Arredondo, Puerto Deseado, December 4, Room IX, File 24–1–8. Buenos Aires: Archivo General de la Nación. Nacuzzi, Lidia. 2005. Identidades Impuestas. Tehuelches, Aucas y Pampas en el Norte de la Patagonia. Buenos Aires: Sociedad Argentina de Antropología. Orser, Charles. 1996. A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World. New York: Springer. Panich, Lee M. 2013. “Archaeologies of Persistence: Reconsidering the Legacies of Colonialism in Native North America.” American Antiquity 78 (1): 105–122. Peña, José de la. 1790. To Juan Muñoz, Puerto Deseado, December 23, SGU, File, 7306, 1. Simancas: Archivo General de Simancas. Peña, José de la. 1796. Noticias de la Costa Patagónica por el piloto de la Real Armada, Don José de la Peña. MS-508 [4] DOC.1175. Río de Janeiro: Fundación Biblioteca Nacional Río de Janeiro. Quijada, Mónica. 2002. “Repensando la frontera sur argentina: concepto, contenido, continuidades y discontinuidades de una realidad espacial y étnica (siglos XVIII-XIX).” Revista de Indias 62 (224): 103–142. Quiroga, Laura. 2005. “Disonancias en arqueología histórica. La experiencia del valle del Bolsón.” Werken 7: 89–109. Ratto, Héctor. 1930. “Expedición del capitán de fragata Don Juan Gutiérrez de la Concha al Golfo San Jorge.” In Actividades marítimas en la Patagonia durante los siglos XVII y XVIII, 185–194. Buenos Aires: Ministerio de Marina. Dirección general de navegación y comunicaciones. Rozas, Manuel de. 1793a. To Juan Muñoz, Puerto Deseado, June 1, Room IX, File 16–4–9. Buenos Aires, Archivo General de la Nación. Rozas, Manuel de. 1793b. To Juan Muñoz, Puerto Deseado, June 6, Room IX, File 16–4–9. Buenos Aires: Archivo General de la Nación. Russell, Lynette. 2012. Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans. 1790–1870. Albany: State University of New York Press. Sagredo Baeza, Rafael, and José I. González Leiva. 2004. La expedición de Malaspina en la frontera austral del imperio español. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana, Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos. Sahlins, Marshall. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: The University of Chicago. Saletta, María J., and Dánae Fiore. 2019. “Nuevos artefactos en el Nuevo Mundo. La introducción de cultura material alóctona en contextos arqueológicos indígenas en Fuego-Patagonia durante el proceso de contacto (siglos XVI al XX).” Arqueología 25 (2): 141–167. Sarrailh, Jean. 1992. La España Ilustrada de la Segunda Mitad del Siglo XVIII. Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Scaramelli, Franz, and Kay Scaramelli. 2015. “Uncommon Commodities: Articulating the Global and the Local on the Orinoco Frontier.” In Archaeology of Cultural Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America, edited by Pedro P. Funari, and María X. Senatore, 155–181. Cham: Springer. Schávelzon, Daniel, ed. 2008. El Área Fundacional de Puerto Deseado. Estudios de Arqueología Histórica. Buenos Aires: De los Cuatro Vientos. Schneider, Tsim D., and Lee M. Panich. 2014. “Native Agency and The Margins of Empire. Indigenous Landscapes, Spanish Missions, and Contested Histories.” In Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider, 5–22. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Senatore, María X. 2005. “Enlightened Discourse, Representations and Social Practices in the Spanish Settlement of Floridablanca (Patagonia, 18th Century).” In Global Archaeological Theory, Contextual Voices and Contemporary Thoughts, edited by Pedro P. Funari, Andrés Zarankin, and Emily Stobel, 559–669. New York: Springer. Senatore, María X. 2007. Arqueología e Historia en la Colonia Española de Floridablanca. Patagonia, Siglo XVIII. Buenos Aires: Editorial Teseo. Senatore, María X., Silvana Buscaglia, Marcia Bianchi Villelli, María Marschoff, Paula Palombo, Victoria Nuviala, Cintia Milanés, and Claudia Bosoni. 2007. “Imágenes de Floridablanca. La construcción material y narrativa de la Colonia Española de San Julián (Siglo XVIII).” In Arqueología de Fuego-Patagonia. Levantando Piedras, Desenterrando Huesos . . . y Develando Arcanos, edited by Flavia Morello, Alfredo Prieto, Mateo Martinic, and Gabriel Bahamonde, 801–812. Punta Arenas: Ediciones CEQUA. Sewell, William H. Jr. 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98 (1): 1–29. Silliman, Stephen W. 2001. “Agency, Practical Politics and the Archaeology of Culture Contact.” Journal of Social Archaeology 1 (2): 190–209.

306

Indigenous agency Silliman, Stephen W. 2005. “Social and Physical Landscapes of Contact.” In North American Archaeology, edited by Tim Pauketat and Diana DiPaolo Loren, 274–295. London: Blackwell Publishing. Silva, Hernán A. 1978. La economía pesquera en el Virreinato del Río de la Plata. Buenos Aires: CONICET. Symanski, Luis C. P., and Denise M. C. Gomes. 2015. “Material Culture, Mestizage, and Social Segmentation in Santarém, Northern Brazil.” In Archaeology of Cultural Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America, edited by Pedro P. Funari, and María X. Senatore, 199–217. Cham: Springer. Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Viedma, Antonio. 1781. To Juan J. Vértiz, Floridablanca, May 10, Room IX, File 16–3–7. Buenos Aires: Archivo General de la Nación. Viedma, Antonio. 1782a. Letter to Juan J. Vértiz, Floridablanca, January 13, Room IX, File 16–3–9 Buenos Aires: Archivo General de la Nación. Viedma, Antonio. 1782b. To Manuel I. Fernández, Floridablanca, May 10, Room IX, File 16–3–10. Buenos Aires: Archivo General de la Nación. Viedma, Antonio. (1783) 1972a. “Diario de Viedma.” In Colección Pedro De Angelis, Vol. 8, B, 845–936. Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra. Viedma, Antonio. (1783) 1972b. “Descripción de la costa meridional del sur llamada vulgarmente patagónica.” In Colección Pedro De Angelis, Vol. 8, B, 937–966. Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra. Viedma, Francisco. 1779. To Juan J. Vértiz, Floridablanca, June 4, Room IX, File 16–3–2. Buenos Aires: Archivo General de la Nación. Villarino, Basilio. 1779. Diario de Basilio Villarino Bermúdez, ayudante de Piloto de la Real Armada [. . .], Room VII, File 193. Buenos Aires: Archivo General de la Nación. Villarino, Basilio. (1782) 1969. “Informe de D. Basilio Villarino, Piloto de la Real Armada, sobre los puertos de la costa Patagónica.” In Colección Pedro De Angelis, Vol. 4, 220–229. Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra. Voss, Barbara L. 2008. The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco. Berkeley: University California Press. Voss, Barbara L. 2015. “Narratives of Colonialism, Grand and not so Grand: A Critical Reflection on the Archaeology of the Spanish and Portuguese Americas”. In Archaeology of Culture Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America, edited by Pedro P. Funari and María X. Senatore, 353–361. Cham: Springer. Weber, David J. 1998. “Borbones y bárbaros. Centro y periferia en la reformulación de la política de España hacia los indígenas no sometidos.” Anuario del IEHS 13: 147–171.

307

20 LANDSCAPES OF STRATEGIC MOBILITY IN CENTRAL AMERICA San Pedro Siris during the Caste War Minette C. Church, Christine A. Kray, and Jason Yaeger

“These people are very keen on their independence from the white race, to the extreme of preferring the woods of the Petén rather than subjecting themselves to the Empire.” —Letter of Juan Bautista Aguilar (1866, quoted in Rugeley 2001, 126) “The colonial Maya changed residence with a facility and across distances that seem more typical of twentieth-century North Americans towing trailer homes along interstate highways than of peasant farmers traveling on foot.” —Nancy Farriss (1984, 199)

As Nancy Farriss observes, archaeologists and historians have had difficulty conceptualizing and recognizing the material ramifications of mobile farmers, never mind identifying them in the archaeological record. We know they exist; nevertheless, we often associate farming and mobility with opposing ends of a behavioral continuum between sedentism and agriculture on the one hand and nomadism and hunting-and-gathering on the other. Colonial authorities in the Americas such as Juan Bautista Aguilar, quoted here, also had difficulty coming to terms with farmers who did not remain rooted in one place, accustomed as they were to more tethered, multigenerational family farms and stronger European institutions of private property and land tenure. Our intent in this chapter is to build a broad argument about colonial landscapes and mobile famers in the southern Yucatan Peninsula. Although we focus on the nineteenth-century San Pedro Maya, we believe they are not unusual. As Farriss (1984, 19) further noted, the colonial-era Maya “seem to have been uncommonly restless for a people defined as ‘sedentary.’” We examine how San Pedro Maya villagers employed longstanding and widespread practices to create landscapes of strategic mobility that thwarted colonial efforts to territorialize their homes and fields and to consolidate new national borders. These practices included (a) a subsistence base relying on slash-and-burn milpa agriculture, forest farming (Crane 1996), and hunting (Carr 1996); (b) the establishment of dispersed hamlets around new milpa fields; and (c) the cultivation of sociopolitical networks across a broad region, which provided social connections that facilitated residential relocation. Finally, we explore the potentials and hurdles that this pattern of settlement presents to archaeologists. The basis of this regime was milpa agriculture. Rural Maya of the Spanish and British colonial periods created fields for corn and other crops by the shifting agricultural system called swidden. 308

Landscapes of strategic mobility

The swidden cycle began with cutting and burning patches of tropical forest, which they cultivated for several years until yields began to fall. At that point, they would leave the milpa to fallow and create a new milpa in another section of forest. This was a long-standing practice in the Yucatan Peninsula: pollen and charcoal evidence from Cob Swamp in northern Belize suggests that by at least 2400 bce, slash-and-burn maize cultivation was incorporated into a mobile hunting-gathering-fishing subsistence strategy (Pohl and Bloom 1996). Later pre-Columbian Maya farmers developed sophisticated systems of intensive agriculture using terraces and raised fields. The higher yields that resulted supported dense populations but also represented significant investments in agricultural infrastructure, and the resulting landesque capital tied people to these systems. In contrast, in nineteenth-century Yucatan, shifting milpa agriculture required little investment in agricultural infrastructure, thereby facilitating residential mobility. Residential mobility was inherent to extensive milpa agriculture. In 1934, in one of the first ethnographic descriptions of Yucatec Maya farming, Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas described processes of settlement dispersal around the village of Chan Kom (Redfield and Villa Rojas 1962). Farmers whose milpas lay at a significant distance from their homes would construct a simple lean-to or field house at their milpa. These shelters provided shade and shelter from the rain, but they also allowed farmers to stay in their fields for multiple days when the crops required more labor and near harvest, when crops were in greater danger of being eaten by birds and other animal pests. The lower population density around these distant fields made them better for hunting wild game, as well. If there was a reliable source of water nearby, over time a small hamlet might form as more farmers made milpas nearby and some began to relocate their families to the new hamlet. Eventually, tiny hamlets could turn into larger villages. These processes of milpa-based settlement foundation and the resulting landscapes of strategic mobility have proven to be remarkably persistent, as Christine Kray witnessed them during her fieldwork in eastern Yucatán and northern Quintana Roo in the 1990s and 2000s. Social and political factors could also drive the growth of these hamlets. By relocating, people could escape disagreements with relatives or neighbors, and they could vote with their feet during political conflicts and violence. As just one example of this phenomenon, the village of Chan Kom was established in the chaotic aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (Redfield and Rojas 1962, 24–27). The Maya use of residential mobility to navigate broader political and economic processes has a long history in the Yucatan Peninsula. For the Spanish colonial period, Nancy Farriss described three main types of Maya mobility (Farriss 1978, 202; also Farriss 1984; Jones 1992b; Restall 1997). The first is “dispersal” of settlements as farmers sought to live closer to their fields, which shifted over time, as described earlier. She also identified two types of movement the Maya employed to escape onerous colonial impositions, including taxes and tithes, census taking, forced labor, forced military service, and debt collection. In “drift,” they would move to another location within the zone of effective Spanish control, while in “flight,” they would relocate into the sparsely populated forested areas south of Spanish colonial control. The magnitude of Maya flight was such that the Spanish carried out frequent incursions (entradas) into the area in attempts to relocate runaway Maya to areas under colonial rule. In a broader comparative analysis of mobility, David Anthony (1990, 895) observes that “[a]rchaeologists . . . generally treat migration as chaotic and poorly understood,” but in fact, migration follows some basic patterns. For example, people often move “out of a sphere of control of a central polity” and into a zone that is already familiar in some way (Inomata 2004, 178; see also Anthony 1990). Population movement is actually an unsurprising feature of social life, one that is predictable under certain social, political, and economic conditions. Anthony (1990, 895–896) adds that migration is a “behavior that is typically performed by defined subgroups 309

Minette C. Church et al.

(often kin-recruited) with specific goals, targeted on known destinations and likely to use familiar routes.” For example, network migration and chain migration systems are characterized by people moving to areas where they have kin, as that facilitates their integration into the new economic and social networks and institutions they encounter. Unsurprisingly, Farriss (1984) has shown that the Maya were more likely to move to other colonial towns (“drift”) where they had kin. The southern frontier provided a refuge for Maya (and other) people practicing “flight,” fleeing economic and political pressures in the north throughout the colonial period and into the twentieth century. In this chapter, we focus on the nineteenth-century San Pedro Maya (Jones 1977), who established villages in territory that would eventually be divided between Guatemala and British Honduras (Church et al. 2019). These villagers adapted their structured practices (sensu Bourdieu 1977) of strategic mobility within a new economic and political context that bore some similarities to the Spanish colonial period but included significant new challenges. These new challenges included a major Maya rebellion in northern Yucatán (the Maya Social War, or Caste War), clashes over new national borders that were contested by British colonial officials and the nascent republics of Mexico and Central America, and expanding systems of export-oriented agriculture and mahogany extraction.

Origins of San Pedro Maya settlement clusters The Maya Social War conflicts began in 1847 as a rebellion undertaken largely by Maya peasants prompted for several reasons, especially heavy tax burdens. The war embroiled the northern half of the peninsula in conflict, social turmoil, and population displacement for a half-century. Shortly after it began, Maya rebels in what is now southern Campeche sued for peace with the Yucatecan government, and the resulting 1853 peace treaty created a major schism among the Maya rebel groups. Those who remained in rebellion established a political center at Chan Santa Cruz (also the center for religious observances of the Talking Cross) in modern Quintana Roo, and we refer to them as the Santa Cruz Maya. Those who normalized relations with Yucatán came to be known as the pacíficos del sur (the “peaceful” or “pacified” ones of the south), with their capital at Chichanha, and the treaty obligated them to assist the Yucatecan armies in their fight against the Santa Cruz Maya. During this era, the Hondo River formed an aspirational and unstable border that was disputed by the Mexican and British governments, a border that the rebel Maya recognized only when it was expedient (Church et al. 2019). Some pacíficos moved farther south to avoid escalating conflicts between pacífico leadership and Santa Cruz Maya (Belize Archives and Records Service [BARS], record 81, Seymour to Eyre, 12 Nov. 1862). Grant Jones (1977) designated this group the San Pedro Maya. They crossed into territory claimed at different times by Mexico and the British settlement in the Bay of Honduras, and sometime around 1857 they established three clusters of villages (Figure 20.1) in territory that would eventually be divided between Guatemala and British Honduras (Jones 1977, 142, Map 5–1; also Church et al. 2019). They may have joined small hamlets and households already dispersed in the jungle, inhabited by people often termed indios bravos (wild Indians) in scattered colonial references (Church et al. 2019, Figure 5.2). Asunción Ek led one group of migrants and settled in San Pedro Siris, the largest San Pedro Maya village and the focus of our work. The occupation of San Pedro Siris extended from roughly 1857 to sometime in the 1920s, with a hiatus beginning in 1896 corresponding to a smallpox epidemic. We began fieldwork at the site in 2000, at which point it was a modern milpa. That year, we also visited the site of San Jose1 Yalbac, one of the satellite villages of San Pedro Siris, which was occupied from roughly 1857 until the villagers were forcibly evicted in 1936 (Kray et al. 2017; Thompson 1963). The material culture we discuss here derives from our 310

Landscapes of strategic mobility

Figure 20.1 Map of San Pedro village clusters, after Jones (1977, 142). Source: Authors’ creation.

investigations at these sites, including surface materials observed at San Jose and surface collection and excavations at San Pedro Siris involving areal excavation of a house and associated yard (discussed in Dornan 2004).

Patterns of movement: intentions and colonial mischaracterizations In this section, we discuss various Maya strategies of mobility and common misunderstandings of those strategies by both archaeologists and colonizers. Careful attention to the words used to describe mobility is critically important: mischaracterizations are not only inaccurate but also can bear weighty consequences. In colonial Yucatán, the mobility of farmers vexed colonial enterprises, whether Spanish or British. Spain’s attempts to control its American territories included reducciones or congregaciones, which sought to gather dispersed farmers into larger, nucleated settlements. In northern parts of the peninsula, Spanish authorities forcibly relocated people into these settlements, where they could be supervised, counted in censuses, and made to comply with various systems of taxation, labor tribute, and religious observance. However, as mentioned earlier, the Maya remained persistently and strategically mobile (Farriss 1984). Colonial officials were consistently confounded by groups who exhibited behaviors familiar to them that they condoned such as farming, investment in place, and social hierarchies, while at the same time showing a disconcerting willingness to “abandon” (a loaded word, discussed later) their fields and farmsteads. Troublingly, from the point of view of colonizers, even “settled” farmers could pull up stakes and move on if the conditions of their lives were oppressive, especially if they had somewhere else to move 311

Minette C. Church et al.

(Wainwright 2008). Colonial documents convey consistent frustration with “runaways,” “indios bravos,” and others who persistently ignored the weak state institutions that authorities sought to impose (Church et al. 2019). In the nineteenth century, there were many factors that motivated Maya people to move from one place to another, and these pressures often converged in the life of a particular individual. Within both Mexico’s Yucatán and the British settlement, changing political and economic landscapes multiplied stressors in people’s lives related to export-oriented plantation agriculture, timber extraction, and capitalist land consolidation. In Yucatán, these pressures led to the uprising that settler colonists (problematically) dubbed the Caste War, itself a stressor that spilled across permeable and poorly defined borders. These strains were compounded by forced military service (whether within the Yucatecan army, Santa Cruz militias, or pacífico forces), indebted servitude, and predatory contract labor schemes. Within this context, some Yucatec Maya people sought the autonomy, flexibility, and security that could be found in smaller, more isolated hamlets maintained by swidden farming systems. Given the magnitude of these changes and the documented movement of people during the Caste War, we find it likely that most Maya people in southern Yucatán and British Honduras during the late nineteenth century would have moved at least once in their lifetime. San Pedro Siris appears to have been a destination to which many types of people relocated for different reasons. The Maya people who migrated from Chichanha to San Pedro Siris and nearby villages have been framed as “refugees” who moved en masse to escape Caste War violence. We offer two criticisms of this term. First, the inhabitants of San Pedro Siris may have come in multiple waves, and whatever the immediate stimulus, their moves followed a much older and well-established cultural logic and its structured practices of mobility. Second, the term “refugees” is problematic, as it typically refers to people fleeing from violence into a new polity where they are seen as outsiders and occupy a position of dependence. While many Maya who settled in San Pedro Siris were likely fleeing violence, they were settling in familiar territory. Maya men from Chichanha served as guides for a British expedition in 1852 that visited the settlements of “indios bravos” in the Yalbac Hills region (O’Connor 1852). In moving to the Yalbac area, people from Chichanha may have considered the Yalbac Hills region as home territory and paid little heed to any putative colonial borders, unmarked and unenforced, they crossed. The migration to San Pedro Siris is an example of strategic mobility on a regional scale. Another example on a smaller scale followed the first armed conflict between British forces and Maya peoples in the nascent colony of British Honduras. Initially friendly relations between San Pedro Maya and the British had deteriorated, in part due to conflicts between Maya villagers and the British Honduras Company that escalated to armed hostilities. A British military expedition was sent to pacify San Pedro Siris in December 1866 and was routed by Maya forces before reaching the town. In February 1867, a second sortie arrived at San Pedro Siris only to find the town empty: its inhabitants had fled. The expedition’s leader, Colonel Harley, wrote an exasperated note to Asunción Ek that he left in the settlement’s empty “Fiesta Hall”: You have however fled with your people and so escaped me for the present. I have now to destroy your town which you will never again be allowed to occupy, unless you make proper submission at Belize [town] and sue for pardon. (BARS 95, Lt. Col. Harley to Ek, 9 Feb. 1867) Perhaps in light of previous experience with Maya strategic flight, Harley went on to burn not only the town and neighboring villages but surrounding fields as well, in order to discourage

312

Landscapes of strategic mobility

reoccupation. The requirement that the Maya of San Pedro Siris sue for peace before reoccupying their village may reflect Harley’s concern that their flight did not signal their intention to abandon the town. Regardless, his declaration was not entirely enforceable. Two years later, some of the villages around San Pedro Siris had been reoccupied, and the lieutenant governor led an expedition to ensure that they were settling peaceably (BARS 98, Longden to Grant, 21 Jan. 1869). San Pedro Siris itself was reoccupied by 1872 at the latest (BARS 111, Johnson to Cairns, 13 Sept. 1872). This example shows the inadequacy of the term “abandonment.” The San Pedro Maya did not abandon the region. They relocated to other villages in the region, where they lived, made milpa, and waited for an opportune time to return to their old homes. Regrettably, both scholars and colonial officials of various ranks and kinds have used that word “abandon” with, it must be said, abandon. This term has weighty implications. Joel Wainwright notes that when twentieth-century British Honduran colonizers described Maya patterns of shifting agriculture as “abandonment,” it was both a trope and also a judgment with consequences regarding land rights. Colonizers read abandonment to mean that the Maya were not just leaving the farm, but that in so doing they are implicitly inviting another to take discretion for what they abandon. They walk away from the farm, as it were, with reckless abandon: they do so and relinquish claims to control the land. (Wainwright 2008, 86) Colonial British characterizations of empty settlements like San Pedro Siris as “abandoned” was convenient, as it implied that the land was up for grabs or ceded to the colonial state. In fact, Maya who fled San Pedro Siris and surrounding hamlets in 1867 appear to have moved to other San Pedro Maya villages, including those in the Peten region beyond the porous Guatemalan border, such as Yaloch (BARS 102, Chan to August, 20 Sept. 1868), Santa Rita (BARS 96, Faber to Austin, 10 May 1867; BARS 96, Edmunds to Cockburn, 31 May 1867), and possibly La Palmera, within the ancient site of Tikal (James Meierhof, personal communication; see also Palka 2005). Notably, Yaloch was identified as part of Asunción Ek’s dominion of the Holmul cluster of villages, and Santa Rita and La Palmera were located near that cluster. Many (perhaps most) later returned to the San Pedro region villages (see also Miller 1887, 422). The San Pedro Maya were again moving back and forth within a familiar region. Taking a longer-term view, the movements of San Pedro Maya back and forth across the aspirational Guatemalan border are examples of mobility that follow an enduring tradition founded on swidden: over centuries, the Maya of southern Yucatan had developed an agricultural system with low labor inputs that was easily moved locally or regionally, and they had cultivated social networks that enabled them to move to new locations as needed. In this case, their movement was reenacted transgressively across aspirational Guatemalan and British borders that were unenforced and which the San Pedro Maya may not have recognized as legitimate. Though “abandoning” a village appeared to colonizers as the ceding of rights to that land, it was in fact a calculated risk; if staying meant colonization or economic oppression, relocating offered survival with the possibility of eventual return. Furthermore, in the Maya swidden system, distant milpa fields provided locations to relocate households or even communities as necessary. Farmers often had multiple milpas located across the landscape. Matthew Restall (1997) stresses that colonial farmers worked a patchwork of fields including both communal village and privately owned lands that were located at various distances from their homes. During her fieldwork in Dzitnup, Yucatán, in the 1990s and 2000s,

313

Minette C. Church et al.

Kray noted that, similarly, farmers cultivated a mix of communal ejido and privately owned lands, some closer to the village and others at a greater distance. The decision to establish more distant fields could have proven advantageous during times of conflict, providing refuge after an attack. The dense vegetation of fallowed fields also hid isolated milpas and smaller settlements alike. Colonial officials often complained about the challenges of finding Maya settlements. Colonel Harley complained he could not find a guide to take his soldiers through the “execrable” route to San Pedro Siris, consisting of a “morass entangled with almost impenetrable bush” in a “labyrinth of trees and tendrils which tripped us up and deposited horse and man in the bush” (War Office, Record 32:6202, Harley to Austin, 4 Feb. 1867). We believe the convoluted navigationally difficult footpaths connecting Maya villages were intentionally so. The villages were invisible by design, even when occupied. Thomas Gann (1997[1925], 94–95) described visiting the San Pedro Maya villages of Chorro and Yalbac: The Indians . . . take every possible precaution to hide their villages, concealing them in the depths of the bush, where they are almost impossible to find. . . . To prevent such the approaches are made as narrow and inconspicuous as possible. . . . On riding through the bush one will sometimes strike a little narrow, inconspicuous track which if followed up will be found to lead to a settlement of considerable size. The villages are literally buried in the bush, the densest parts of which are chosen, and only just so much cleared as will accommodate the houses, the forest growing right up to the back yard. All round the settlement is a labyrinth of paths, amongst which the stranger may wander up and down and in and out for hours, the last place he is likely to arrive at being the village.

Investment in place and archaeological visibility Long-term occupation—whether anticipated or realized—often leads to greater investment of labor as people modify their surroundings by acts such as building more permanent houses, developing agricultural infrastructure, building churches and civic structures, and creating formal spaces for commemorating ancestors. These investments in a place simultaneously create economic, sociopolitical, and emotional tethers to place that can discourage mobility, as people are loath to leave these investments behind (e.g., Inomata 2004). We have argued here that many Maya in the colonial era lived in small, short-term settlements in the forest, and their traditions of strategic mobility anticipated regular movement. This was particularly true of those living beyond colonial control, who likely preferred not to be found. Given these factors, investment in place was often low and the resulting archaeological sites very difficult to locate, particularly in the absence of local informants or detailed documentary evidence. This is true across time in the Maya lowlands. Don Rice (1986) describes Postclassic Peten Lakes-district sites that consisted of pole-and-thatch structures placed upon a low platform consisting of only one course of masonry. Janine Gasco (1997, 41) notes that many colonial sites along the coast of Chiapas were virtually invisible on the surface, not only because “entire townsites [were] . . . buried beneath dense vegetation” but also because all of the structures, including churches, were perishable. This relatively limited investment in place was the result of practices of strategic mobility developed over generations, as described earlier. At San Pedro Siris, this facilitated people’s mobility in the context of war, regional border disputes, and capitalist expansion. In what follows, we describe our materials recovered in survey and excavation relating to architecture, burials, and subsistence that reveal how the San Pedro Maya lived lightly on the land. 314

Landscapes of strategic mobility

Architecture and mobility Houses and house lot walls In colonial and early Republican villages in northern Yucatan, house lots and streets were demarcated by low cobble walls called albarradas in Spanish. During the Maya Social War, albarradas were often repurposed and augmented for military purposes, complemented in some cases by low barricade walls that served to defend villages and channelized traffic for surveillance purposes (Alexander 2004). At San Pedro Siris, we found no extant walls beyond ephemeral lines of single course stones. This could indicate that the villagers were less tethered to place in case of military attack than their brethren to the north. Some houses in the northern Yucatan incorporated one or more masonry stone walls covered with thatched roofs, set on low platforms (e.g., Alexander 2004; Meyers 2012). However, many houses were entirely perishable there, too. In her survey of survey of three Maya Social War-era villages near Yaxcabá, Rani Alexander (2004) found that 67 percent of the 162 houselots demarcated by albarradas lacked any visible architectural features whatsoever, despite the assumption that they once contained houses. In our reconnaissance at San Jose and careful survey at San Pedro, we found little evidence of architecture—no platforms, building walls, or albarradas—despite the fact that surface visibility was excellent because the site had been burned off for a milpa. No surface traces of the documented church or fiesta hall at San Pedro remained. This may reflect architectural preferences of the San Pedro Maya. In the 1920s, Thomas Gann (1997 [1925], 108) described a house in the San Pedro Maya village of Yalbac as “rather a superior dwelling for an Indian hut, the walls constructed of straight sticks, the roof thatched with huana, or palm-leaf, and the floor of nice clean, hard-beaten marl dust.” A perishable house like this would rapidly decompose in rainy tropical conditions. In the 1990s, the Trek Stop Eco-Hostel in San Jose Soccotz had local workmen construct a traditional pole-and-thatch structure with a marl floor and cooking area for tourists to view. This provided an ersatz experimental archaeology project. The walls of the Trek Stop house were soon removed, and the floor and hearth allowed to deteriorate. As the floor gave way to neglect, the lime plaster leached away, and what was left were densely packed, uneven limestone cobbles such as those we found. Perishable houses made from forest materials—wood for posts, beams, and wattles, clay for daub, thatch for roofing, vines to tie all the components together, and a floor of packed marl or earth— were common in the Maya lowlands from at least 1000 bce. At times, they were the only kinds of houses built: Elizabeth Graham (2004, 225; see also Gasco 1997) observes that at the site of Lamanai, only perishable houses were built between the tenth and the thirteenth or fourteenth century ce. At San Pedro Siris, scatters of nineteenth-century artifacts, especially ceramics, metal, and bottle glass, were the only surface indications of a village that, in 1862, had an estimated population of 350 people (BARS 78, Rhys to Seymour, 3 Nov. 1862) and was occupied into the 1920s. At San Jose, we found surface scatters of artifacts—including a sewing machine—but they were harder to find in the high forest that covered the site. The site’s location was confirmed, however, by the presence of some domesticated fruit trees (bitter orange and avocado) and flowering shrubs, descendants of plants cultivated by Maya villagers 65 years earlier. The likelihood of identifying sites like these in a typical survey transect in the jungle is quite low. Indeed, we only located San Pedro Siris and San Jose Yalbac by talking to people who had hunted, made milpa, and collected forest products like sap for chicle (gum) across the area, asking them if they knew of areas with broken bottles and painted ceramics. Our excavations at San Pedro Siris revealed no walls, but they did reveal a feature of small cobbles creating a slightly elevated surface adequate for a house, very much like the decomposing 315

Minette C. Church et al.

Figure 20.2 House built of traditional materials at Trek Stop/Tropical Wings Nature Center, San Jose Succotz, Belize (upper left), decaying plaster floor and hearth of the same house (center), and decaying plaster floor on excavated site of San Pedro Siris. Source: Photos by Minette C. Church.

floor of the Trek Stop house. The stratigraphy of the floor surface suggested several refurbishing episodes (Dornan 2004, 209). The length of time between these episodes is uncertain, but they are plausibly the result of reflooring the house after a hiatus in occupation. This cobble surface was discovered in a trenching operation; it was entirely invisible during survey. The only indication of the house was a dense scatter of bottle glass, metal, nineteenth-century ceramics, and a bedrock metate.

Churches and communal buildings In the northern Yucatan, though masonry walls were common on larger buildings like churches, cabildos (town halls), and haciendas in smaller towns and earlier periods (Meyers 2012), churches sometimes had perishable naves or were entirely made of perishable materials (Alexander 2004). At San Pedro Siris and San Jose Yalbac, we found no evidence of the churches that documents and oral accounts confirm existed there. Even artifacts associated with public buildings were not present. As Jones (1992b, 201) notes, in 1630, when the Maya of two colonial villages in what is today Belize fled Spanish control, in an act of strategic mobility, they took the bells and ornaments from their churches. In coastal Chiapas, people who relocated took their church bells, candlesticks, and the statue of their patron saint. In fact, Gasco (1997) argues that patron saint names are reasonable ways for us to map mobility of some villages on colonial landscapes 316

Landscapes of strategic mobility

through time. Following Gasco’s hypothesis, when the villagers of San Jose Yalbac were forcibly evicted by the Belize Estate and Produce Company (a later manifestation of British Honduras Company) in 1936, company agents burned the church, but those evicted named the new settlement they founded San Jose Nuevo and San Jose Palmar, after their old patron saint. In addition to the church at San Pedro Siris, there was also a communal gathering place, Col. Harley’s aforementioned “Fiesta Hall.” This building left no substantial remains, either. In the 1920s, Sir J. Eric Thompson (1963, 119) described a similar community structure in San Jose Succotz as “a small shed with a floor of powdery lime which rose in clouds of acrid dust with each step we took.”

Burials Inomata (2004) mentions the burial of ancestors under house floors as a factor that anchored Classic Maya people to places, and Patricia A.McAnany (2013) discusses the importance of ancestors in pre-Columbian Maya place-making. While Classic Maya people often exhumed important ancestors and curated elements of their skeletons, that was not common practice in the colonial period. Thus, we expect burials in and around churches would not have been relocated when villagers moved. Although we actively sought to avoid burials at San Pedro Siris, our excavations did locate what we believe to be the village’s cemetery at the northeast corner of the site. This is consistent with Alexander’s (1997, 33) observation that smaller pueblos (villages) in nineteenth-century Yaxcabá parish often contained “shrines and cemeteries located at the edge of the settlement.” Moving ancestors to the periphery may have somewhat loosened emotional and ritual tethers to place, but ancestors might also have drawn people back after conflict.

Farming, hunting, and gathering Archaeological findings relating to foodways and farming at San Pedro Siris reflect the fact that swidden agriculture and wild game hunting and forest farming allowed people to relocate with much less disruption to subsistence than would have been the case had they been relying on pastured livestock, orchards, irrigated fields, and more intensive agricultural systems. Machetes and axes used for clearing field plots suggest milpas. The availability of machetes increased after 1826 when their mass production began in Connecticut (Otero-Cleves 2017). Compared to chert axes, metal tools significantly reduced the labor cost of cutting down the forest for milpas, thereby facilitating extensive slash-and-burn agriculture and increasing the potential mobility of Maya villagers in the nineteenth century. Despite the fact that metal artifacts have poor survivability in the humid conditions of the Maya lowlands, we found 276 whole or partial machetes and 61 axe heads. Machetes have a number of other everyday uses, such as collecting firewood, weeding fields, and keeping house plots free of weeds to deny snakes and other pests refuge. They also were weapons of war. In addition to their use in clearing fields, axes and machetes were critical tools in employment outside the village: axes were a basic tool for those who worked for British logging companies, while machetes were used to bleed sapodilla trees for colonial chicle contractors. The various economic options afforded by metal tools eased potential mobility. Returning to foodways and hunting, we exposed several shallow pits dug into the limestone bedrock with evidence of burning on their interior. We believe these were earth ovens for making pibil, pit-roasted stews with pig, peccary, or other meats. The diameter of the pits was such that the cast-iron, lidded Dutch ovens that we found in numbers at the site would fit in them. In her analysis of the faunal remains, Carolyn Freiwald (n.d.) identified domesticated pig, whitelipped peccary, and collared peccary amidst a broader mix of domestic and wild game including 317

Minette C. Church et al.

jute snails, tepesquintles, agoutis, and armadillos, indicating the villagers did not rely entirely on domesticated animals. Carolyn Freiwald found no evidence of cattle, although nearby British mahogany crews used oxen for hauling logs and the British Honduras Company probably employed San Pedro Maya to collect fodder for their cattle. We also know that in at least one case San Pedro residents suspected British Honduras Company crew members of stealing three bulls (BARS 89, Ek to Austin, 9 Nov. 1866, San Pedro), but in general the labor required to create and maintain pastures and care for large cattle herds was incompatible with milpa farming regimes or mobility, and the lack of faunal evidence means any village cattle were probably sold for use or consumption elsewhere. In contrast, families could raise hogs in their houselots, feeding them kitchen leavings. While we found no remains of horses, documents recount that horses were kept in San Pedro in the 1860s. The absence of horse bones or tack suggests that they were few in number and they could be easily tethered around the village or near milpas to graze. Village hunters apparently used guns, as we collected 107 gun parts, including flints for flintlock muzzle-loading muskets. Guns also could be deployed as a means of village defense when needed, as in the battle on the road to San Pedro in 1866.

Where to move: trade and social ties We have already discussed how regional social and kin connections were valuable for Maya who wanted to move to new locations or escape any number of financial or political burdens. To these incentives we must add trade and resource extraction, or what Restall (1997, 173) called “the scattered trans-peninsula nature of indigenous economic interests.” In the centuries prior to the Spanish Conquest, regional trade networks connected the Maya of Dzuluinicob, in what is now Belize, with the Itza, Kowoj, and Mopan Maya of the Peten and the Yucatec Maya in the northern part of the peninsula. Prudence Rice (1986) has documented trade connections between Postclassic villages in western Belize and the Peten, and based on the quantity of Topoxte pottery at the site of Tipu, she suggests that when the Kowoj Maya vacated their capital of Topoxte in 1458 due to conflict with the Itza Maya, they might have gone to western Belize. Thompson (1977) also postulates a deeply rooted link between the Peten Lakes region and the Macal and Mopan Rivers (which join to form the Belize River) based on ceramic incense burners, patronyms, and linguistics. These connections—economic, political, and social—continued after the Spanish conquest of the northern Yucatan and Dzuluinicob, despite the fact that the Peten remained unconquered until 1697. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Maya Tipu and other settlements in the region traded honey, beeswax, and copal resin incense with Yucatec Maya in the north in exchange for axes, machetes, and salt. To the Itza and Kowoj, they traded cacao, vanilla, and annatto in exchange for cotton clothing (Jones 1992a, 102–105). These trade networks were sometimes interrupted by Spanish expeditions to bring the Maya under colonial control and by waves of epidemic disease that decimated the population. Nevertheless, we might presume that some familiarity with these trade routes was passed on over the years and could be called upon when people needed to move. Thus, when the San Pedro Maya moved southward to settle in the Peten and Yalbac Hills in the late 1850s, they may have been moving into regions already familiar, at least by name and reputation. In addition, dates of imported ceramics, gun flints, and other artifacts at San Pedro Siris suggest that there may have been earlier populations in the region who consolidated with the Yucatec Maya groups arriving in the 1850s and 1860s (Church et al. 2019). Those people, like their predecessors at Tipu, might have had trade or

318

Landscapes of strategic mobility

kinship ties westward to the Peten such that when the San Pedro Maya chose to decamp, they did so to Yaloch, Santa Rita, and other familiar Peten sites (Palka 2005; Rice 1986, 297). The artifact assemblage at San Pedro Siris indicates a high volume of trade, as it is replete with evidence of mercantile goods including ceramics, cloth, cast-iron cooking pots, machetes and axes, and gunpowder and imported consumables such as tobacco, lard, patent medicine, and varieties of alcohol also found on other San Pedro Maya-era sites (Meierhoff, personal communication; see also Bonorden and Houk 2019; Palka 2005, 193). These goods were overwhelmingly derived from British and US sources rather than Mexican or Guatemalan, suggesting deep engagement with a trade network that began with the offloading of goods at the wharfs of Belize Town, their distribution via boats to nodal settlements like Corozal, Orange Walk, and Benque Viejo, and their portage via footpaths and mule trails to isolated villages and logging banks and camps. Much of this trade was accomplished through barter exchange. For example, laborer Felipe Fuentes’s employer sent him to San Jose Yalbac with 1½ demijohns of aniseed to trade for pigs. He was taken prisoner there, however, and marched to San Pedro Siris, still carrying the liquor (Colonial Office 123/126 Declaration of Felip[e] Fuentes, 25 Jan., 1867). Liquor is represented at both San Pedro and San Jose by the large numbers of demijohns and bottles that originally held wine, beer, whiskey, and gin, all of which could have been reused to hold other liquids. Locally produced alcohols would have included rum (sometimes anise-flavored), aniseed, and balche’ (a fermented brew of bark from the Lonchocarpus violaceus tree, honey, and water). The ceramics recovered at San Pedro Siris include imported refined earthenwares and lowfired local earthenwares. It is unclear whether local cooking wares were produced in the Yalbac Hills area or imported from Maya villages farther north or west. Joel Palka and Jason Yaeger noted formal similarities between the cooking wares at the site of La Palmera and San Pedro Siris, but many of the local wares at La Palmera have shell-tempered paste common in pottery produced around Lake Peten Itza (James Meierhoff, personal communication; Joel Palka, personal communication). We did not find this distinctive paste at San Pedro Siris, however, suggesting their local vessels came from other sources. The refined earthenware ceramics at San Pedro Siris are all from England and potentially Scotland. We observed no earthenwares from the industrial pottery workshops of central Mexico. Meierhoff and Church have noted similarities between the high-fired wares at San Pedro Siris and those at La Palmera, as well (James Meierhoff, personal communication, April 11, 2019). The La Palmera imported ceramics also began their journey inland at Belize Town, and we believe it is likely that they came first to San Pedro Siris and then were traded further inland. Because places across the region were linked by participation in the same trade networks, it may be that La Palmera and Santa Rita in the Peten were familiar sojourns for villagers from the Yalbac Hills. Such familiarity would have made it easier for them to relocate there after the British attack in 1867.

Conclusion: intentionally invisible settlements There is both documentary and archaeological evidence of factors that facilitated strategic mobility on the part of nineteenth century Maya villagers, even while farming provided the bulk of their diet. Both Catholic and secular colonial interventions unintentionally made village and house-lot level investments lower, moving burials out from beneath house floors to consecrated church or cemetery grounds away from domestic spaces. While a degree of mobility was built into an extensive farming subsistence strategy that predated the nineteenth century, some changes in the regional economy further enabled the Maya to move as needed. The increased

319

Minette C. Church et al.

availability of machetes and axes in the 1800s expedited the clearing involved in swidden agriculture, making it less laborious and easier to move and start over; guns made it easier to hunt wild game where they found it. These tools were staples of labor on haciendas, plantations, and logging camps, as well as being weapons of war. Later in the nineteenth century, machetes, axes, and cast-iron vessels allowed for a particularly onerous occupation, bleeding sapodilla trees and processing chicle. It is worth emphasizing again that it was local hunters and chicleros who kindly helped us locate these historical village sites. Neither documents nor traditional machete survey transects would have gotten us there. Moving into more thickly forested areas entailed reliance on wild resources and a form of forest farming long familiar to lowland Maya (Carr 1996; Crane 1996); witness the avocado and bitter orange trees we observed at San Jose Yalbac. In the course of survey, one might find some seemingly arbitrary plantings, as Thompson (1963, 158) wrote regarding travels along the Macal River in 1928: Little clearings with two to three palm-thatched huts were sparsely scattered on the high ground. Small dugouts of cedar hauled up on the banks, a few chickens and lean hogs, a patch of banana or plantain trees, a little sugar cane and, perhaps, a breadfruit tree. Banana or sugarcane may not survive or propagate, but stands of economically useful trees— breadfruit, ramón, avocado, cacao—in older, secondary forest should make an archaeologist pause, look down, and perhaps break out a trowel and collect some microbotanical samples (Cummings 2005; see Erickson 2008). Given the advantages afforded by strategic mobility, it is no wonder that there is such a gap in our knowledge of the eleventh through the nineteenth centuries in southern Yucatan. Sites in the northern lowlands are often named in documents, at least, and many have seen continuous occupation. Those in southern Yucatan are sparsely documented, and the documentary record is of less demographic help. Scholars working with archival materials have based population estimates on census data, which might or might not account for people living in dispersed hamlets and single-family settlements, seasonally (Farriss 1978; Restall 1997). Many, especially those fleeing tax burdens or otherwise fearful of colonial authorities, did not want to be counted by colonial officials and made their villages hard to find. Use of census data might be reliable for more densely populated areas or with stronger colonial presence to the north of Bacalar, but uncritical reliance on that data to estimate colonial populations or describe settlements in areas to the south, whether in the sixteenth or nineteenth century, seems unwise. Such sources need more context than we often have for them, such as who was taking the census and at what times of year (Church et al. 2019; see also Schuyler 1978). For example, they may overrepresent laborers as compared with semi-mobile or seasonal farmers. We have argued here that agricultural mobility was part of a centuries-long structured practice and was made possible by several fundamental facts: (1) there was relatively little architectural investment in place, so the cost of leaving (in terms of lost labor) was low; (2) the traditional milpa system (including hunting) involved very little investment in landesque capital (fields, orchards, terraces, etc.) or land-related political capital (land tenure), again minimizing the loss of investment that moving would have entailed; (3) the traditional milpa system provided for people’s basic subsistence, so although many residents in the San Pedro Maya area worked for wages, sold produce, and acquired imported goods, they were not strongly dependent upon them nor thereby economically tied to place; and (4) the traditional milpa system could be moved and recreated in a new location readily and would produce crops the first planting season. Since

320

Landscapes of strategic mobility

moving did not bring any significant delay in agricultural production, it did not bring significant subsistence dangers. Taken as a whole, we see that landscapes of strategic mobility, including extensive farming with the ability to construct shelter in diverse locations, made possible by larger sociopolitical networks was a strategy that enabled Yucatec Maya to survive across centuries. This was true during the Spanish colonial period in which the forests of Belize were a zone of safe haven from colonial predations. It was also true in the nineteenth century, as Yucatec Maya moved from the area of intense Maya Social War fighting into the Yalbac Hills and, later, across the porous Guatemalan border when under British attack, and back once again. The final move of San Jose residents in 1936, evicted, as they were, by the Belize Estate and Produce Company, was fundamentally different from what we have described because it was involuntary. The sandy soils of the coastal scrubland in “San Jose Nuevo” led to declining agricultural yields; the resulting hunger, combined with brackish water, signaled that this latest move threatened the survival of the community rather than ensuring it. This final move stands in stark contrast to the structured practice of mobility, at times normative and at times strategic, described in this chapter for nineteenth-century groups; these were truly refugees. We point out that “While the tangible heritage of the Yalbac Hills towns in large part have been destroyed, the intangible heritage of the Yalbac Hills Maya persists in the knowledge of subsistence milpa techniques and the association of forest living with a healthy life” (Kray et al. 2017, 53, emphasis added). This last, forcible displacement out of the forest and into swampy coastal scrubland was so much worse, causing trauma and death, than previous patterns of mobility within the familiar and forested hills. Still, they did rename their new village after their old village’s patron saint: San Jose. Did they intend to return to Yalbac someday, should the opportunity arise? One person who was a child at the time of the eviction told Kray that his family looked into returning but feared being displaced by the company once again. What is certain is that those who remember still mourn the forest home they were forced to abandon (Kray et al. 2017).

Note 1 We omit the diacritical mark on José to follow the spelling used in Belize.

Archives and Collections referenced in detail in the text Belize Archives and Records Service, Belmopan, Belize (BARS). Colonial Office Records, National Archives (U.K.), Kew, Great Britain. War Office Records. National Archives (U.K.), Kew, Great Britain.

References cited Alexander, Rani T. 1997. “Settlement Patterns of the Late Colonial Period in Yaxcaba Parish, Yucatan, Mexico: Implications for the Distribution of Land and Population before the Caste War.” In Approaches to the Historical Archaeology of México, Central, and South America. Institute of Archaeology, University of California, monograph 38. Alexander, Rani T. 2004. Yaxcabá and the Caste War of Yucatan: An Archaeological Perspective. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Anthony, David W. 1990. “Migration in Archeology: The Baby and the Bathwater.” American Anthropologist 92 (4): 895–914. Bonorden, Brooke, and Brett A. Houk. 2019. “Archaeological Investigations at Kaxil Uinic and Qualm Hill, Two Colonial Period Sites in Northwestern Belize.” Research Reports in Belizean Archaeology 13: 337–347.

321

Minette C. Church et al. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carr, Sorraya H. 1996. “Precolumbian Maya Exploitation and Management of Deer Populations.” In The Managed Mosaic: Ancient Maya Agriculture and Resource Use, edited by Scott L. Fedick, 251–261. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Church, Minette C., Jason Yaeger, and Christine A. Kray. 2019. “Re-Centering the Narrative: British Colonial Memory and the San Pedro Maya.” In Archaeologies of the British in Latin America, edited by Charles E. Orser, Jr., 73–97. Cham: Springer. Crane, Cathy J. 1996. “Archaeobotanical and Palynological Research at a Late Preclassic Maya Community, Cerros, Belize.” In The Managed Mosaic: Ancient Maya Agriculture and Resource Use, edited by Scott L. Fedick, 262–277. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Cummings, Linda Scott. 2005. “Exploratory Pollen Analysis of Samples from San Pedro Siris, Belize.” Paleo Research Institute Technical Report 04–111. Prepared for John Gust. Golden, CO: Paleo Research Institute. Dornan, Jennifer L. 2004. “‘Even by Night We Have Only Become Aware They Are Killing Us’: Agency, Identity, and Intentionality at San Pedro, Belize (1857 to 1930).” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. Erickson, Clark L. 2008. “Amazonia: The Historical Ecology of a Domesticated Landscape.” In The Handbook of South American Archaeology, edited by Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell, 157–183. New York: Springer. Farriss, Nancy M. 1978. “Nucleation versus Dispersal: The Dynamics of Population Movement in Colonial Yucatan.” Hispanic American Historical Review 58 (2): 187–216. Farriss, Nancy M. 1984. Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Freiwald, Carolyn. n.d. “Preliminary Analysis of San Pedro Siris Faunal Remains.” Unpublished manuscript prepared in 2006, in possession of authors. Gann, Thomas. 1997 [1925]. Mystery Cities of the Maya. Reprint, Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press. Gasco, Janine. 1997. “Survey and Excavation of Invisible Sites in the Mesoamerican Lowlands.” In Approaches to the Historical Archaeology of Mexico, Central and South America, edited by Janine Gasco, Greg Charles Smith, and Patricia Fournier-García, 41–48. Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles. Graham, Elizabeth A. 2004. “Lamanai Reloaded: Alive and Well in The Early Postclassic.” In Archaeological Investigations in the Eastern Maya Lowlands: Papers of the 2003 Belize Archaeology Symposium, Vol. 1, 223–241. Belmopan: Institute of Archaeology National Institute of Culture and History. Inomata, Takeshi. 2004. “The Spatial Mobility of Non-elite Populations in Classic Maya Society and Its Political Implications.” In Ancient Maya Commoners, edited by Jon C. Lohse and Fred Valdez, Jr., 175–196. Austin: University of Texas Press. Jones, Grant D. 1977. “Levels of Settlement Alliance among the San Pedro Maya of Western Belize and Eastern Petén, 1857–1936.” In Anthropology and History of Yucatán, edited by Grant D. Jones, 139–190. Austin: University of Texas Press. Jones, Grant D. 1992a. Maya Resistance to Spanish Rule. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Jones, Grant D. 1992b. “Rebellious Prophets.” In New Theories on the Ancient Maya, edited by Elin C. Danien and Robert J. Sharer, 197–202. University Museum Monograph, 77. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum. Kray, Christine A., Minette C. Church, and Jason Yaeger. 2017. “Designs on/of the Land: Competing Visions, Displacement, and Landscape Memory in British Colonial Honduras.” In Legacies of Space and Intangible Heritage: Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and the Politics of Cultural Continuity in the Americas, edited by Fernando Armstrong-Fumero and Julio Hoil, 53–78. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. McAnany, Patricia A. 2013. Living with the Ancestors: Kinship and Kingship in Ancient Maya Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyers, Allen. 2012. Outside the Hacienda Walls: The Archaeology of Plantation Peonage in Nineteenth-Century Yucatán. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Miller, William. 1887. “Notes on a Part of the Western Frontier of British Honduras.” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography 9 (6): 420–423. O’Connor, Major Luke Smith. 1852. “An Exploring Ramble among the Indios Bravos, in British Honduras.” The Living Age 34 (434): 513–517.

322

Landscapes of strategic mobility Otero-Cleves, Ana María. 2017. “Foreign Machetes and Cheap Cotton Cloth: Popular Consumers and Imported Commodities in Nineteenth-century Colombia.” Hispanic American Historical Review 97 (3): 423–456. Palka, Joel W. 2005. Unconquered Lacandon Maya: Ethnohistory and Archaeology of Indigenous Culture Change. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Pohl, Mary, and Paul Bloom. 1996. Prehistoric Maya Farming in the Wetlands of Northern Belize: More Data from Albion Island and Beyond. Information Systems Division, National Agricultural Library. Beltsville, MD and Washington, DC: Agricultural Science and Technology Information: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Redfield, Robert, and Alfonso Villa Rojas. 1962. Chan Kom: A Maya Village. Reprint, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Restall, Matthew. 1997. The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550–1850. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rice, Don S. 1986. “The Peten Postclassic: A Settlement Perspective.” In Late Lowland Maya Civilization: Classic to Postclassic, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 301–346. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. Rice, Prudence M. 1986. “The Peten Postclassic: Perspectives from the Central Peten Lakes.” In Late Lowland Maya Civilization: Classic to Postclassic, edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllys Andrews V, 251–300. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. Rugeley, Terry, ed. 2001. Maya Wars: Ethnographic Accounts from Nineteenth-century Yucatan. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Schuyler, Robert L. 1978. “The Spoken Word, the Written Word, Observed Behavior and Preserved Behavior: The Contexts Available to the Archaeologist.” In Historical Archaeology: A Guide to Substantive and Theoretical Contributions, edited by Robert L. Schuyler, 269–277. Farmingdale, NY: Baywood Publishing. Thompson, Eric J. S. 1963. Maya Archaeologist. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Thompson, Eric J. S. 1977. “A Proposal for Constituting a Maya Subgroup, Cultural and Linguistic, in the Petén and Adjacent Regions.” In Anthropology and History in Yucatán, edited by Grant D. Jones, 3–42. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wainwright, Joel. 2008. Decolonizing Development: Colonial Power and the Maya. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

323

21 THE ADORNED BODY IN FRENCH COLONIAL LOUISIANA Exploring cosmopolitan materialities of bodily objects Diana DiPaolo Loren

Introduction In the colonial world, dress—used as a term to encompass both clothing and adornment— communicated who you were and where you were located within society (Baumgarten 2002; Garber 1992; Loren 2010; McNeil 2018; White 2003, 2012). Much like today, dress is a vehicle for expressions of personal and group identities, a form of language by which to indicate who you are without saying a word. Dress allows for the mediation of social engagements between bodies and the world (e.g., Harris and Robb 2013; Hayeur-Smith et al. 2019; Joyce 2005; Levine 2020; Loren 2010, 2013a; White 2003, 2012; Voss 2008b). As White (2012, 2) notes, dress is “never simply a matter of self-expression but a cultural act subject to interpretation by onlookers.” It is the place where belonging and differentiation plays out, including gender, sexuality, status, ethnicity, and religious affiliation. As one example, dress constructs gendered differences, suggests certain sexual behaviors, and is an important aspect of sexual politics (Garber 1992; Hayeur-Smith et al. 2019; Voss 2008a). Dress makes these social engagements visible, including the constraints, negotiations, and imperatives experienced by individuals and groups (Harris and Robb 2013; Maynard 1994, 2). To these nuances about dress, add colonial concerns about settler and Indigenous bodies. In the early modern Americas, the body and dress were socially and politically charged. The body was a “key site for the inscription of difference” (White 2012, 3; see also Boddy 2011; Harris et al. 2013; Loren 2010; Stoler 2009; Voss 2008b). Through sumptuary laws, colonial powers sought to enact racialized, ordered visions of colonies and colonized to control new and unfamiliar lands and peoples. In these visions, Europeans claimed moral, bodily, and cultural superiority over colonized peoples. Slippages between imposed imperial boundaries through the disregard of sumptuary laws and other social actions, however, were commonplace and invoked anxieties about the stability of colonial order (Stoler 2009). For many individuals living in colonial contexts, the unspoken language of dress has no fixed interpretation but rather a multitude of meanings (Maynard 1994, 2; see also Maxwell 2014). In this way, sumptuary laws and other dictates regarding dress were then just an ideal configured by colonial leaders that rarely, if ever, were enforced in real life. Rather, they were a common reference for colonial officials, priests, and missionaries seeking to enact order, categorize individuals, and ease anxieties in colonial contexts. 324

The adorned body

While colonies were never meant to be direct copies of their European counterparts, each were invested in their own social hierarchies and practices (Stoler 2009; see also Boddy 2011). Cobb (2019, 77) uses the concept of cosmopolitanism to capture nuances of these practices, noting that it “engages practices of hybridity or creolization, but more specifically those that speak to the intersection of the local and global.” Cosmopolitanism in colonial communities encouraged “a cultural blurring,” and individuals began to develop their own looks, drawing from and also related to various European, African, and Indigenous traditions (Cobb 2019, 81). For example, in her examination of clothing in late-eighteenth-century New Orleans, Sophie White (2003) discusses dress and sumptuary regulations for freed and enslaved African Americans. She notes that dress, even those items supplied by masters, were one arena in which enslaved individuals could express agency, exert control over appearance, communicate status, and even “facilitate or disrupt interracial and intra-racial power relations” (White 2003, 532). The ways in which freed and enslaved African Americans participated in the city’s market economy threatened white colonists, especially with regard to how they wore certain clothes viewed as inappropriate to whites: the enslaved girl wearing a red skirt or male runaway slave who wore more than one kerchief around his neck. These sartorial expressions challenged existing ethnic and gendered differences expressed through dress. They eroded and at times mocked boundaries of social distinction while also allowing for new sartorial expression that communicated nuanced identities in that community. Numerous studies have shown that it was common for people to actively manipulate dress within colonial contexts, drawing from local and imported fashions (e.g., Levine 2020; Loren 2010; White 2012; Voss 2008b). Colonial dress in the Americas was more than just disregarding sumptuary laws and expected dress norms. While colonial dress elicited notions of conversion, resistance, colonial mimicry, or even ambivalence, cosmopolitanism remains an underlying concept in these histories (Cobb and Sapp 2015; see also Crossland 2010; Loren 2010, 2013a, 2017; Sleeper-Smith 2001). Limited access to resources, shifting alliances, and restructured identities in the Americas shaped some practices despite colonial concerns of maintaining sartorial and social difference. Such actions were purposeful, suggesting that hybridity of dress was part of the strategy from the outset of colonial encounters and that the practice of hybrid fashion was a common colonial experience, shared by people of different ethnic and racial descent as they created new communities and cosmopolitan sensibilities with varied forms of material culture in American colonies (Loren 2010). In what follows, I discuss one aspect of colonial dress in the New World—piercings in eighteenth-century colonial Louisiana. For French settlers, their knowledge of piercings was drawn from gendered understandings of bodily adornment. Indigenous communities, especially the Tunica, drew from other understandings to wearing new and familiar material culture as piercings to communicate multiple aspects of their identity. From the archaeological perspective, piercings are a relatively overlooked aspect of material culture, with attention often given to larger and more robust data sets, such as ceramics. Yet an in-depth examination of piercings yields important insight into the details of colonial dress and the construction of cosmopolitanism in the region. A closer look at piercings also raises questions about how we read these nuances in the archaeological record today.

Lower Louisiana in the early eighteenth century The French colony of Louisiana was incorporated at the end of the seventeenth century after several decades of exploration in the Lower Mississippi Valley and following the establishment of French settlements in Canada and the West Indies. When the first permanent settlement at Biloxi was created in 1699, diverse Indigenous communities had long occupied the Lower 325

Diana DiPaolo Loren

Mississippi Valley. By 1720, numerous households, posts, and concessions (plantations) were established along the Mississippi River beside Indigenous communities. The French developed a variety of tribal alliances to build a trade network, primarily for fur and salt (Brain 1988; Usner 1992). Enslaved Africans were brought to Louisiana beginning in the 1720s to work on the growing number of French indigo and tobacco plantations (Usner 1992). French émigrés to Louisiana included French noblemen (who were often officials), Jesuit priests, soldiers from a variety of backgrounds, middle-class craftsman, lower-class laborers and servants (both male and female), freed prisoners (again, both male and female), and some elite women (Usner 1992). Numerous Indigenous communities lived in the Lower Mississippi Valley during the eighteenth century, but here I focus on the Tunica. The principal Tunica village, Grand Tonicas (aka the Trudeau site), and satellite villages, known as Petits Tonicas, were located east of the Mississippi River, near the mouth of the Yazoo River in present-day Mississippi. The French mission among the Tunica was established in the early part of the eighteenth century, along with a small French settlement and the temporary fort of Lubois (Brain 1988, 297–299). By 1726, fewer than 100 French settlers and soldiers lived in the area, and no enslaved Africans were accounted for in the local population census (Usner 1992, 48). Interactions between the French and Indigenous people in the Lower Mississippi Valley were, as in many colonial situations, fraught with violence, which culminated in the 1729 movement against the French now known as the Natchez Revolt, in which most of the French inhabitants of Fort Rosalie were killed (Sayre 2005, 204). Historical accounts indicate that the Tunica allied with the French in this war. Ensuing violence between the French and the Natchez resulted in the dispersal of the Natchez from their homelands. In June of 1731, a (perhaps, the) Tunica chief was killed along with other Tunica community members in a skirmish against the Natchez (Dumont de Montigny 2012, 419). By the late 1730s, the Tunica moved just a few kilometers south along the east bank of the Mississippi, a location known in the archaeological record as the Trudeau site. Today, the Tunica-Biloxi Indian Reservation is located in Marksville, Louisiana (Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana 2019). Numerous archaeological investigations have taken place in the Tunica region. Colonial period material recovered from the Tunica region was published in two volumes: Tunica Treasure (Brain 1979) and Tunica Archaeology (Brain 1988). Tunica Treasure highlights the artifacts recovered from the Trudeau site by an avocational archaeologist in the late 1960s. The collections then came to Harvard for analysis in the 1970s. Through conversations with the collector and other interested parties, it was revealed that the collections were recovered illegally from private land (see Brain 1979); thus, they lack specific provenience information, although they were likely removed from burial contexts. Following a drawn-out litigious battle, the material that was removed from the Trudeau site was eventually returned to the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana in the late 1970s. The collections are now on view at the Tunica-Biloxi Indian Museum in Marksville, Louisiana. For the Lower Mississippi Survey (LMS) of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University conducted an archaeological survey of the Tunica region through the late 1970s and 1980s, culminating in the publication of Tunica Archaeology (Brain 1988). This volume details archaeological excavations conducted at the Trudeau site, as well as at some of the smaller villages, including the Haynes Bluff site. Funerary and domestic contexts were excavated at both of these sites. Funerary objects were repatriated to the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), while other non-funerary collections are currently housed at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. In the analysis that follows, I draw from Brain’s published research on Tunica collections and from artifacts in the Peabody’s collections. 326

The adorned body

Colonial dress and cosmopolitanism The body is at the center of this analysis because, simply put, the body matters in society. The ways that humans understand, represent, and constitute their bodily identities are historically and culturally contingent, as many authors on the body and embodiment emphasize (e.g., Crossland 2010; Csordas 1990, 1996; Harris and Robb 2013; Hayeur et al. 2019; Joyce 2005; Voss 2008a, 2008b). In colonial society, the body was paramount in interactions between settlers and Indigenous peoples. In the early modern period, social hierarchies brought to the Americas were inscribed with early modern notions of race and embodiment, leading to the assertion that anybody had the capacity (or not) to be civilized through engagement of the mind and soul (Harris et al. 2013; Lindman and Tarter 2001; Voss 2008b; White 2013). Material culture played a key role in the construction, embodiment, and communication of social identities, through clothing and other objects needed for bodily care. Clothing was a particular boundary marker: sumptuary laws created by colonial officials mandated certain fashions for different colonial communities based on race, status, and gender. Laws were meant to restrict the use of certain luxury items to higher status, mostly European, individuals, keeping them well away from lower classes, enslaved, and Indigenous peoples. In French Louisiana, sumptuary laws dictated the attire of noblemen, servants, soldiers, and Jesuit priests, while at the same time policing the clothing of Indigenous and African people (Roche 1994, 6; White 2003). While the imperial vision of dress visualized colonial schemes of inclusion and exclusion, these boundaries were made fluid by colonial peoples, who often manipulated clothing and adornment to afford social movement (Loren 2010, 2017; White 2013; see also Panich 2014). European authors often recorded Indigenous dress in their descriptions of the Americas, with an eye toward how clothing communicated gender, status, and perceived level of civility. In the Lower Mississippi Valley, French authors were particularly attentive to those individuals who were more fully clothed or covered their nakedness with white cloth or deerskin, as this indicated to them a willingness to become an ally in colonization efforts and convert to Christianity (Loren 2001, 2013b, 2017). Comparison to French dress was common. For example, André Pénicaut, who accompanied Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville on his 1698 voyage to Louisiana as ship’s carpenter, later wrote in his 1721 Annals of Louisiana that, The women are covered with a garment of white cloth, which extends neck to feet, made almost like the Adriennes of our French ladies. . . . The clothing of the girls is different than the women; they wear only a breechcloth, which is made like the little taffeta apron which girls in France wear over their skirts. (quoted in Swanton 1911, 52) Conversely, difference in dress and adornment was also a highlight, including those who wore combinations of Indigenous and European-manufactured clothing with different kinds of adornment. For example, in December 1721, Jesuit Father Charlevoix described his meeting with Tunica chief Cahura-Joligo, stating, “The chief received us very politely; he was dressed in the French fashion, and seemed to be not at all uneasy in that habit” (Swanton 1911, 312–313). French planter Antoine Simone Le Page du Pratz provides additional detail in his 1758 Histoire de la Louisiane regarding the dress of Natchez men: The youths here are as much taken up about dress, and as fond of vying with each other in finery as in other countries; they paint themselves with vermilion very often; they deck themselves with bracelets made of the ribs of deer, which are bent by the means of boiling water, and when polished, look as fine as ivory; they wear necklaces like the 327

Diana DiPaolo Loren

women, and sometimes have a fan in their hand; they clip off the hair from the crown of the head, and there place a piece of swan’s skin with the down on; to a few hairs that they leave on that part they fasten the finest white feathers that they can meet with; a part of their hair which is suffered to grow long, they weave into a cue, which hangs over their left ear. They likewise have their nose pricked, but no other part till they are warriors. . . . Those who have signalized themselves by some gallant exploit, cause a tomahawk to be pricked on their left shoulder, underneath which is also pricked the hieroglyphic sign of the conquered nation. . . . The warriors also pierce the lower part of their ears, and make a hole an inch diameter, which they fill with iron wire. (Le Page du Pratz 1975, 344–346) Similarly, French military engineer and Lieutenant Alexandre de Batz produced a series of watercolors of the Lower Mississippi Valley in 1729, in which he depicted the diversity of dress and adornment (Loren 2013b). In Sauvages Tchaktas Matachez en Guerriers, Choctaw warriors are depicted ready for war, tattooed, painted, holding stafs adorned with enemy scalps and wearing feathered headdresses (Figure 21.1). One of the warriors wears a powder horn and a European-manufactured metal knife. A chief reclines in the background, also tattooed, painted, and adorned with earrings and a feathered headdress, wearing an unbuttoned shirt of European style. Three boys are naked apart from painted scalps, and an African girl outfitted in a skirt and turban rests her hand on the back of a Choctaw child. In another image, a man in “winter dress” is depicted wearing a painted deerskin cloak and a breechcloth made from European red wool, distinguished by the selvedge (Figure 21.2). A small metal implement hangs from his waist

Figure 21.1 “Sauvages Tchaktas Matachez en Guerriers qui portent des chevelures,” Alexandre de Batz, 1735. Source: Gift of the Estate of Belle J. Bushnell, 1941. Courtesy the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM 41–72–10/19.

328

The adorned body

Figure 21.2 “Sauvage en Habit d’Hiver,” Alexandre de Batz, 1735. Source: Gift of the Estate of Belle J. Bushnell, 1941. Courtesy the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM 41–72–10/21.

329

Diana DiPaolo Loren

alongside a bag made from a small animal. Metal hoops hang from his ears, and a string of shell beads encircles his neck. Through these texts and images, a process of cosmopolitanism regarding dress emerges. While historical sources produced by the French could be read in a way to illustrate that Indigenous dress in the Lower Mississippi Valley was haphazard, the use of material culture in dress was complex. Dress was used in emulation or in combination with other bodily objects to subvert or manipulate how one’s body was understood in different contexts, such as was the case with the Tunica chief who wore the coat when meeting with French officials. Objects moved freely across cultural boundaries to acquire new meanings or were divested of their original meanings when used in ambivalent ways, exemplified by the chief in Figure 21.1, who wore an unbuttoned European-manufactured shirt with earrings and tattooed skin. With this in mind, I want to look more closely at piercings in the historical and archaeological records.

Eighteenth-century material culture of adornment and piercings Material culture related to the body and bodily concerns can be quite robust in terms of scope but relatively rare numerically. It can, and should, be considered broadly to encompass not just clothing and adornment artifacts, such as buttons and jewelry, but also objects related to bodily concerns, such as hygiene, health, and faith. These can include clothing, including portions of cloth and closures for clothing, such as buttons and buckles; adornment, such as jewelry and piercings; and tools needed for sewing and needlework tools, such as thimbles and needles (Beaudry 2006; Galke 2009; Loren 2010, 2013a, 2013b, 2016; Muraca et al. 2011; White 2005, 2013; White and Beaudry 2009). Material culture related to the body and bodily concerns also include items needed for bodily care and presentation: medicines to heal the body, medallions and amulets that speak to spirituality, tattoo needles used for inking skin with symbolic and commemorative designs, and even lice combs to clean the scalp and purify the body (Loren 2010, 2016, 2017). In terms of such a sparse material record, it is often common to interpret bodily objects according to their function. Yet, as many have indicated, it is in these small data sets of personal objects that one can explore more than just function but the ways in which identity was embodied and communicated with material culture (e.g., Loren 2010, 2013b, 2017; C. White 2005; White and Beaudry 2009; S. White 2003, 2013). Even a single category of bodily object had a variety of meanings across social and interest groups (White 2013, 17). For example, while a crucifix might have a certain meaning in the life of a baptized European-born Christian, that same object was understood differently when worn by an Indigenous boy along with shell necklaces (Loren 2017). Adornment exists in conversation with the body. It enhances the body, sits on or in the skin or clothing, moves with the body. As a bodily object, adornment communicates numerous understandings of bodily identity that are then understood within specific cultural contexts (White 2003, 2013). Here, I focus on one category of bodily objects: piercings as adornment. Piercings engage with the body differently. They interrupt the skin’s surface, the “interface between the hidden interior of the body and that which is externally available to visual perception” (Fend 2005, 311). In the eighteenth century, European perspectives on the skin shifted toward a greater understanding of the skin as a closed, individualized membrane (Bakhtin 1984; see also Fend 2005; Siena and Reinarz 2013). Skin was the key to identity, and during this period, it was something to be read. In the Enlightenment, as numerous authors have noted, skin color was a key aspect of racial categorization, particularly in the Americas (e.g. Block 2018; Fend 2005; Katzew 2004;

330

The adorned body

Lindman and Tarter 2001; Sayre 1997; White 2003, 2013). The surface of the skin, however, was also subject to imperial scrutiny. Legions and blemishes on the skin spoke to one’s health, as a clean, unblemished body was the aesthetic ideal throughout most of western Europe (Fanon 1967; Festa 2005; Sayre 1997; Siena and Reinarz 2013). Tattoos were also a source of contention. In the eighteenth century, they were used throughout western Europe and North America as a visible marker of enslavement or criminal behavior (Siena and Reinarz 2013). Marked skin, however, was a sign of beauty or honor within some eighteenth-century communities. Within French colonial society, for example, women of distinction pierced their ears, although though to some this practice was met with disdain. M. Lapeyre, author of Les Moeurs de Paris, noted that women of quality in Paris display themselves under every form in which the graces can appear. . . . They embellish their faces with a delicate pomade, and adorn their bodies with precious stones, whose brilliancy and flash dazzle the eyes. . . . One sees in them nothing but . . . a tissue of artifices, their inflamed ambition makes them undertake the most extraordinary things in order to seduce the virtue of the grandees. (quoted in Festa 2005, 36) Here, Lapeyre’s thinly veiled critique is similar to that made by Le Page du Pratz when he discussed the dress of Natchez and Tunica young men, which also suggest some masculine anxieties: “The youths here are as much taken up about dress, and as fond of vying with each other in finery as in other countries” (Le Page du Pratz 1975, 344). Here, these authors suggest that the intention behind piercing the skin lay in vanity. For others, however, piercings and tattooing were the mark of bravery. Dumont de Montigny described the process of tattooing among men and women from Tunica and other communities in the Lower Mississippi Valley, while also commenting on his own tattoo: The flesh of their body is tattooed with various designs. Some will have a series of dots; others, snakes or suns. The Indian men, the chief and the honored men who are like their officers, will also be tattooed. . . . This lasts for life, although I myself, having had a Croix de Saint Louis tattooed on my left arm when I was young man (Dumont de Montigny 2012, 348) He further explained that tattoos were given to Indigenous men who made themselves “renowned,” stating that, “The tattoo is the badge of honor among the warriors, just as we have among us the military Croix de Saint Louis” (Dumont de Montigny 2012, 351). Similarly, piercings were a mark of bravery, as noted by Le Page du Pratz (1975, 344–346) when he stated “The warriors also pierce the lower part of their ears, and make a hole an inch diameter, which they fill with iron wire.” In these instances, marking the skin communicated to both Indigenous and French one’s warrior status, bravery, and fortitude in colonial Louisiana. While metal was used for piercings amongst Indigneous men, shell seemed to be the preferred material for women. Le Page du Pratz (1975, 346) noted The women ornament themselves with earrings made of the core of a great shell called “burgo,” of which I have spoken. This ear pendant is as large as the little finger and at least as long. They have a hole in the lower part of each ear large enough to insert this ornament.

331

Diana DiPaolo Loren

Dumont de Montigny described how these shell earrings were made: they take the ends of them and rub them on hard stones and thus give them the shape of a nail provided with a head, in order then when they put them in their ears they will be stopped by this kind of pivot, for these savage women have their ears laid open very much more than our French women. (Swanton 1911, 55) While these authors suggest that Indigenous women living in colonial Louisiana pierced their bodies for aesthetic reasons, this practice seems somewhat underexplained in historical and contemporary descriptions. How did piercings difer for men and women, young and old, in this context? What was the history of this practice, and did it undergo a process of change during French colonization of the Lower Mississippi Valley? Archaeological excavations in the Tunica region along the Mississippi River by Jeffrey Brain and other members of the Lower Mississippi Survey in the 1970s and 1980s focused primarily on early colonial period sites (Brain 1979, 1988). Brain (1988, 266) speculates that the Tunica moved to their eighteenth-century location at the confluence of the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers from areas north along the Mississippi River, likely during the fifteenth and/or sixteenth centuries, near the time that the de Soto Entrada moved through this area. Archaeological investigations along the Mississippi River Basin north of Louisiana conducted by the Lower Mississippi Survey and others suggest a complex and nuanced history of interactions between and among different Indigenous communities prior to French settlement in the region, noting that prior to the late seventeenth century it is difficult to clearly define a specifically “Tunica” material signature (e.g., Brain 1978; Phillips et al. 2003; Williams and Brain 1970). Despite this, the ancestors of the eighteenth-century Tunica community known to the French clearly came from this region, from the late Mississippian period known through the archaeological record as large, hierarchical settlements organized around earthen mounds, people who were involved in corn agriculture as well as aquatic resources, with diverse and sophisticated forms of material culture that suggests a broad network of interactions along the Mississippi River (Brain 1988, 266–293). Of special significance to this study, material culture related to clothing and adornment included shell, bone, and clay beads, as well as shell ear pins and clay earspools (Phillips et al. 2003; Williams and Brain 1970). In particular, shell ear pins carved from whelk shell in particular are ubiquitous throughout the precolonial Southeastern United States. Figure 21.3, a shell ear pin from Tennessee, is just one example of many in the Peabody Museum collections (and for some wonderful 3D models, visit https://sketchfab.com/UNCarchaeology/collections/pins). Turning to the colonial period collections from the Tunica area, various forms of clothing and adornment artifacts have been recovered from burial and non-burial contexts, including shell ear pins, brass and copper tinkler cones, Jesuit rings, religious medals, bear incisor pendants, one- and two-part coat buttons, brass bells, shoe and belt buckles, and thousands of glass beads (Brain 1979, 1988). In burial contexts, Tunica men and women were buried wearing different combinations of European-manufactured clothing, such as frock coats and trousers, Europeanmanufactured items, brass jewelry and glass beads, as well as Indigenous-manufactured items such as shell ear pins and beads (Brain 1979, 1988). Such varied assemblages imply that Tunica dress was more complicated in practice than a simple unbuttoned shirt and a necklace of shell beads. Belt buckles and shirt buttons suggest clothing that was worn fastened close to the body, while shoe buckles imply that shoes were worn. Most compelling, however, is the combination of clothing and adornments that indicate that Indigenous people had varied wardrobes including

332

The adorned body

Figure 21.3

Shell ear pins from Brakebill Mound, Knox County, Tennessee, 1300–1600 ce. Peabody Museum Expedition, Rev. E. O. Dunning, Director, 1869.

Source: © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, PM 69–32–10/2258.

items of European and Indigenous manufacture and emerging cosmopolitanisms regarding clothing and adornment. Table 21.1 provides an overview of the kinds of piercings recovered from colonial Tunica sites from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. Although sample sizes differ greatly, shell ear pins occur throughout, with a noticeable percentage increase during the mid-eighteenth century at the heavily excavated Trudeau site. The greatest diversity of piercings is also recovered from this site: shell ear pins are predominant, but iron and brass coils as well as silver and brass earbobs are also present. It was during this period that the Tunica had significant interaction with the French, often as allies in their interactions against other European colonists and the Natchez. Metal coils as an important aspect of warrior identity is found in the historical accounts mentioned previously, by Dumont de Montigny and Le Page du Pratz, as well as in the writings of French colonial official Marc-Antoine Caillot, who remarked on the dress of a Natchez chief in 1730, stating “He has pierced ears, as do all the warriors, having two bits of iron going through them, which shows that he was a great warrior. They weigh at least a pound and a half ” (Caillot 2013, 91). Le Page du Pratz’s writing underscores this, as he stated, “All the attire of a warrior consists in the ear pendants, which I just described, in a belt ornamented with rattles—and bells when they can get them from the French” (Le Page du Pratz 1975, 200). This suggests a shift in the significance of piercings for warriors during this period when colonial tensions were at a high. Prior to French colonization, shell and bone were utilized as piercings, but during the mid-eighteenth century, metal was increasingly utilized as a piercing to communicate

333

Diana DiPaolo Loren Table 21.1 Piercings recovered from Tunica locations along the Mississippi River (data compiled from Brain 1979, 1988). Artifact type

Late 17th century: Haynes Bluff site

Early 18th century: Bloodhound and Burroughs sites

Mid-18th century: Trudeau site

Late18th–19th century: Pietrite site

Shell ear pins Bone ear pins Iron coil Brass coil Silver earbobs Brass earbobs Ceramic earspool

1 1 2 2 – – –

4 – – – – – 1

49 – 16 15 5 3 –

2 – – – – – –

warrior identity. These patterns indicate a cosmopolitan shift in clothing and adornment, a way to signify identity amongst male warriors in a new way that incorporated metal when previously shell or bone was used. Yet at the same time, shell ear pins remained important and stayed so after French colonization in the region ended. As discussed earlier, French authors remarked that Tunica and other Indigenous women commonly wore shell ear pins. While this practice of adornment was commonly linked to aesthetics or vanity, the reference to French women of quality wearing earrings is oblique, sometimes with reference to their sexuality and French desire (Loren 2012). Shell ear pins were worn in combination with other European- and Indigenous-manufactured items, such as shell and glass beads, crucifixes and earbobs, fitted clothing—including trousers, shirts, and frock coats—that required buttons, imported wool and cotton cloth, handspun cloth made from mulberry fiber, and dressed deerskin (Brain 1979, 1988; Loren 2010, 2012, 2017; White 2003, 2013). Their dress was as diverse and cosmopolitan as men in their communities, suggesting the construction of new identities, new perspectives on self in a colonial context, even though French authors could not describe it in the same ways as they did for warriors who wore metal in their ears. Rather than incorporate European-manufactured items as piercings, Indigenous women wore shell. Additionally, as Le Page du Pratz and others noted, women did the work of making shell ear pins. This labor is almost completely overlooked in archaeological interpretations of these past contexts, but the ubiquitous presence of shell ear pins in precolonial and colonial contexts speaks volumes. By continuing to wear and produce the fruits of their labor, Tunica and other Indigenous women positioned and marked themselves visibly as makers in colonial contexts, distinct from warriors, settlers, and enslaved peoples in their communities.

Conclusions As Janice Boddy (2011, 119) notes, “Colonialism was and is an inherently corporeal enterprise.” Not only is dress and presentation implicated in the workings of colonialism but, as many have noted, labor and intimate relations (e.g., Cobb 2019; Loren 2012, 2017; Panich 2014; Voss 2008a, 2008b). Throughout, new fashions and practices developed that drew on but were distinct from both European and Indigenous traditions (Cobb 2019). Tunica and other Indigneous men started to include metal as ear piercings to communicate their identities as warriors, and at times allies, during an anxious time when antagonisms among and between different communities were common. Metal shone differently than shell or bone, it embodied a different color, and often weighed heavy on the body, likely as a continual reminder of this facet of identity to 334

The adorned body

self and other. Shell as used as a piercing was no less common. While male warriors may have preferred metal, shell may have been worn by other men in Indigenous communities. Women, however, did the painstaking work of shell ear pins, and they wore light, white shell throughout the colonial period to communicate identities of maker, woman, and Indigenous even when other forms of material culture were present. There is something significant in the continued presence and persistence of this object category through the early nineteenth century. Shell as a form of adornment persisted. It speaks to silences in the historical record about labor and identity and practices of cosmopolitanism, as well as a gap in our archaeological interpretations of the colonial past. Piercings are just a small part of a larger story, but close attention to these items found in the archaeological record, when put into conversation with archival and historical accounts, reveal details on gendered identity in the colonial Lower Mississippi Valley that have been previously overlooked. A closer look at just one category of material culture, such as piercings, suggests ways in which we can expand our understandings and considerations about the archaeology of bodily adornment of the colonial period with an eye toward small nuances of gender, identity, dress, and labor.

References cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Baumgarten, Linda. 2002. What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection. Williamsburg, VA and New Haven: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Association with Yale University Press. Beaudry, Mary C. 2006. Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing. New Haven: Yale University Press. Block, Sharon. 2018. Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Boddy, Janice. 2011. “Colonialism: Bodies Under Colonialism.” In A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment, edited by Frances Mascia-Lees, 119–136. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Brain, Jeffrey P. 1978. “Late Prehistoric Settlement Patterning in the Yazoo Basin and Natchez Bluffs Regions of the Lower Mississippi Valley.” In Mississippian Settlement Patterns, edited by Bruce Smith, 331–368. New York: Academic Press. Brain, Jeffrey P. 1979. Tunica Treasure. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, 71. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brain, Jeffrey P. 1988. Tunica Archaeology. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, 78. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Caillot, Marc-Antoine. 2013. A Company Man: The Remarkable French-Atlantic Voyage of a Clerk for the Company of the Indies: A Memoir, edited and with an introduction by Erin M. Greenwald; translated by Teri F. Chalmers. New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection. Cobb, Charles R. 2019. “Flat Ontologies, Cosmopolitanism, and Space at Carolina Forts.” Historical Archaeology 53 (19): 73–85. Cobb, Charles R., and Stephanie Sapp. 2015. “Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina.” In Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology, edited by Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox, 212–232. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crossland, Zoe. 2010. “Embodiment and Materiality.” In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, 386–405. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Csordas, Thomas. 1990. “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology.” Ethos 18: 5–47. Csordas, Thomas. 1996. Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Body and Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dumont de Montigny. 2012. The Memoir of Lieutenant Dumont, 1715–1747: A Sojourner in the French Atlantic. Translated by Gordon M. Sayre; edited by Gordon M. Sayre and Carla Zecher. Chapel Hill, NC; Williamsburg, VA: University of North Carolina Press; Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. DuPlessis, Robert S. 2016. The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

335

Diana DiPaolo Loren Fanon, Franz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by C. L. Markham. New York: Grove Press. Fend, Mechthild. 2005. “Bodily and Pictorial Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine.” Art History 28: 311–339. Festa, Lynn. 2005. “Cosmetic Differences: The Changing Faces of England and France.” Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture 34: 25–54. Galke, Laura J. 2009. “The Mother of the Father of Our Country: Mary Ball Washington’s Genteel Domestic Habits.” Northeast Historical Archaeology 38 (1): 29–48. Garber, Marjorie B. 1992. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge. Harris, Oliver J. T., and John Robb. 2013. “Body Worlds and Their History: Some Working Concepts.” In The Body in History: Europe from the Paleolithic to the Future, edited by John Robb and Oliver J. T. Harris, 7–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris, Oliver J. T., John Robb, and Sarah Tarlow. 2013. “The Body in the Age of Knowledge.” In The Body in History: Europe from the Paleolithic to the Future, edited by John Robb and Oliver J. T. Harris, 164–188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hayeur-Smith, Michele, Gavin Lucas, and Quita Mould. 2019. “Men in Black: Performing Masculinity in 17th- and 18th-century Iceland.” Journal of Social Archaeology 19 (2): 229–254. Joyce, Rosemary A. 2005. “Archaeology of the Body.” Annual Review in Anthropology 34: 139–158. Katzew, Ilona. 2004. Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press. Le Page du Pratz, Antoine Simone. 1975. The History of Louisiana: Translated from the French of M. Le Page du Pratz. Baton Rouge: Published for the Louisiana American Revolution Bicentennial Commission by the Louisiana State University Press. Levine, Mary Ann. 2020. “The Fabric of Empire in a Native World: An Analysis of Trade Cloth Recovered from Eighteenth-Century Otstonwakin.” American Antiquity 85 (1): 51–71. Lindman, Janet M., and Michele L. Tarter, eds. 2001. A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Loren, Diana DiPaolo. 2010. The Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment in Colonial America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Loren, Diana DiPaolo. 2012. “Fear, Desire, and Material Strategies in Colonial Louisiana.” In The Archaeology of Colonialism: Intimate Encounters and Sexual Effects, edited by Barbara L. Voss and Eleanor Conlin Casella, 105–121. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loren, Diana DiPaolo. 2013a. “Considering Mimicry and Hybridity in Early Colonial New England: Health, Sin and the Body ‘Behung with Beades’.” Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28 (1): 151–168. Loren, Diana DiPaolo. 2013b. “The Illusion of Imperium: Visual and Material Perspectives of Colonial Louisiana.” World Art 3 (1): 83–99. Loren, Diana DiPaolo. 2017. “Christian Symbols in Native Lives: Medals and Crucifixes in the Tunica Region of French Colonial Louisiana.” In Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology, edited by Craig N. Cipolla, 94–109. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Maxwell, Alexander. 2014. Patriots Against Fashion: Clothing and Nationalism in Europe’s Age of Revolutions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Maynard, Margaret. 1994. Fashioned from Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McNeil, Peter, ed. 2018. A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Age of Enlightenment. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Muraca, David, John Coombs, Phil Levy, Laura Galke, Paul Nasca, and Amy Muraca. 2011. “Small Finds, Space, and Social Context: Exploring Agency in Historical Archaeology.” Northeast Historical Archaeology 40 (1): 1–20. Panich, Lee M. 2014. “Native American Consumption of Shell and Glass Beads at Mission Santa Clara de Asís.” American Antiquity 79 (4): 730–748. Phillips, Philip, James A. Ford, James B. Griffin, Albert Gordon, Paul Gebhard, and Donna Dickerson. 2003. Archaeological Survey in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940–1947. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Roche, Daniel. 1994. The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Regime (Past and Present Publications). Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Sayre, Gordon M. 1997. Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

336

The adorned body Sayre, Gordon M. 2005. The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Siena, Kevin, and Jonathan Reinarz. 2013. “Scratching the Surface: An Introduction.” In A Medical History of Skin, edited by Jonathan Reinarz and Kevin Siena, 1–15. Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine, Number 10. London: Pickering and Chatto Publishers. Sleeper-Smith, Susan. 2001. Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Swanton, John R. 1911. “Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico.” Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 43: 1–387. Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana. 2019. “A Promise from the Sun: The Tunica-Biloxi Indians of Louisiana.” www.tunicabiloxi.org/history-of-tunica-biloxi-tribe/. Accessed July 2, 2019. Usner, Daniel H. 1992. Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Voss, Barbara L. 2008a. The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press. Voss, Barbara L. 2008b. “‘Poor People in Silk Shirts’: Dress and Ethnogenesis in Spanish-colonial San Francisco.” Journal of Social Archaeology 8 (3): 404–432. White, Carolyn L. 2005. American Artifacts of Personal Adornment, 1680–1820: A Guide to Identification and Interpretation. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press. White, Carolyn L., and Mary C. Beaudry. 2009. “Artifacts and Personal Identity.” In The International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by Teresa Majewski and David Gaimster, 209–225. New York: Springer. White, Sophie. 2003. “‘Wearing Three or Four Handkerchiefs Around His Collar, and Elsewhere About Him’: Slaves’ Constructions of Masculinity and Ethnicity in French Colonial New Orleans.” Gender and History 15 (3): 528–549. White, Sophie. 2012. Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Williams, Stephen, and Jeffrey P. Brain, eds. 1970. Philip Phillips, Lower Mississippi Survey, 1940–1970. Cambridge: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

337

22 “POLITICS OF REGARD” AND THE MEANING OF THINGS The persistence of ceramic and agroforestry practices by women in São Paulo Marianne Sallum and Francisco Silva Noelli

Communities of agroforestry practices from Southeast São Paulo have a long historic trajectory. During the early colonial period, the networks of autonomous places were characterized by Tupiniquim and part of the Portuguese, articulating different practices and knowledge (Figure 22.1). These networks were mainly interconnected by the Tupí ontology of kinship and affinity. In different times and places, these relationships gradually forged communities, with its people known as “Paulistas” (i.e., “those from São Paulo”) in the seventeenth century. Some of these communities are still self-sustainable today, having transformed certain practices associated with women to survive as the social and economic system has changed, such as pottery expertise to ensure food security, educate new generations, and contribute to economic life. These women were able to keep their ceramic practices through generations connected by communities of practices (Stahl 2010), despite the changes brought by newcomers to the region. The relationship between some Tupiniquim villages and the Portuguese from 1502 onwards is quite different from other colonial relationships in Brazil. Women kept the autonomy they enjoyed before the massive new wave of six hundred thousand Portuguese entered the southeast region during the eighteenth century, when several changes redefined their role in most urban centers and plantations according to hierarchical rules. However, women possessed strategies for autonomy in some communities, and in recent decades the new generations have embraced a struggle for equality and education. In these places, people were socially defined by who they were or by what they wanted to do, not by their biological condition or social class. Misinterpretation of these concepts has led to perpetuated distortions concerning different ways of life, ignoring agency and social relations. One way to understand the relationships in a Tupiniquim sense is as a “politics of regard” in which one acts with regard for the other—a form of behavior mediation (Sallum and Noelli 2021). In such situations, not being regarded by the Other or not being a reference for the Other is tantamount to losing one’s own humanity. According Kelly and Matos (2020, 1), politics of regard may be defined as the separation of cause and agent structures action as a performance where persons retrieve from each other’s responses an always uncertain measure of their efficacy or capacity for influence . . . involves the interdependence of persons alternating their positions as causes of other’s acts and agents with other causes in view. 338

“Politics of regard”

Figure 22.1 Map of Paulista settlements (sixteenth–nineteenth centuries). Source: Authors’ creation.

In these relationships, including those with enemies, every action is also an interaction: one empowers the other, surpassing the narrow definition of the one who acts and the one who is led to action (Despret 2013). These women created a material culture that incorporated and transformed Portuguese objects and practices, such as ceramic vessels, connecting generations and sharing different knowhows, meanings, and languages. They were pivotal to developing “an archaeology concerned with gender [that] has drawn our attention to such processes as the establishment of social alliances and the social, and differentially gendered, relations of production” (Conkey 2003, 872). They were also responsible for: (1) interactions between coastal and hinterland Tupiniquim and Portuguese settlements; (2) transmission of knowledge; (3) logistics of food security; (4) maintenance of sustainable agroforestry systems; and (5) management of settlements, especially in important moments of social reorganization and warfare. Paulistaware was created in this context, as the Portuguese coarse ware was “appropriated and transformed in the sixteenth century by the Tupiniquim in the region of São Vicente for use at the colonial settlements, and produced until this day in the Southeast region of São Paulo” (Sallum and Noelli 2020). Today, women ceramists do not have a name for their set of vessels, naming each object according to its functions. Thus, for research purposes, we use the term Paulistaware to connect communities from different times who shared knowledge and technologies. The persistence of these pottery communities is explained by a gendered practice that emerged from the acknowledgment of the importance of sharing “collaborative” ways of doing things. The articulation of cultural practices and identity has connected ancient practices with new ones (Silliman 2009; Mrozowski et al. 2015). 339

Marianne Sallum and Francisco Silva Noelli

Some Tupiniquim practices had an unsuspected perpetuum mobile for archaeologists, an essential component of their relational memorialistic ethos that “make and remake the social life” (Perrone-Moisés 2015, 16): the feast and war of vengeance. It was a powerful social ingredient to continuously revive remembrance, annul the stagnation of routine, and stimulate the connection between generations. And revenge did not contain only personages but ways of living, with scenarios with specific materialities continuously repeated and transformed, including ceramic vessels. The persistence of practices encompassed change, resistance, appropriation, and continuity as different ways of social engagement, either to survive or to oppose colonization policies (Silliman 2009; Panich 2013). This meant “intentional rearticulation of certain practices and related identities in light of new economic, political, and social realities . . . effectively linking past and present in a dynamic but unbroken trajectory” (Panich et al. 2018, 11–12). The alliance between the Tupiniquim and the Portuguese had been encouraged by the Portuguese Crown since 1532 (Sallum and Noelli 2020). This was a strategy of the colonial project (Perrone-Moisés 1999). However, as individuals, the Portuguese sought a favorable situation among the Tupiniquim, aiming to create “a functioning society for themselves,” like the Spaniards amid the Pueblo people of the American Southwest (Trigg 2004). Indigenous people incorporated the Portuguese in their system of relationships and affinity, which was based on the collaboration between genders to maintain and (re)perform daily practices. Such relationships involved attitude and cosmology, encompassing specific processes to produce social existence and to equate individual efforts. The engagement strategies changed gradually, and collaborative and mercantile practices still coexist in some communities today. The collaborative system of these people made them deal with the market differently from westerners during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this context, their actions “consider the other” (Kelly and Matos 2020), unlike in the European mercantile world. Among these Indigenous groups, action is performed regarding the “incorporation of alterity” (Lagrou 2016, 13), with the convergence of different cosmologies and corporeal and material significances, permanently connected with internal and external worlds. The politics of regard, when concerning non-Tupí people, such as the Portuguese, unfolds in a different direction: incorporating the Other. This does not equate to cultural loss but to an “exchanged paradigm”; where an exchange event is always the transformation of a prior exchange event, there is no absolute beginning, since every act is a response, that is, a transformation of a previous token of the same type (Castro 2004, 477). No difference is indifferent for the Tupí for whom interaction with the non-Tupí is determined by the relation “between affines, between men and women, between the living and the dead, between humans and animals, between humans and spirits, and of course between enemies” (Castro 2018, 380). This means that difference is also socially determined by the appropriation of people and objects. Collaboration led to agroforestry management, and the production of material culture bound people to the land and to the water by managing river and sea resources. The colonial process was marked in São Paulo by a demographic crisis, with episodes of epidemics, mobility, and influxes of people from different places. Such communities lived a formation process, configured by bilingualism and identity displacements (Goldman 2017). In the seventeenth century, people lived in relative political independence from Portuguese colonial power were defined as the “Paulista autonomism” (Alencastro 1992, 139), with an onoff “identity game” that made the relationship between the Paulista and their Portuguese or Tupiniquim origin seem more or less prominent, depending on the circumstances (Monteiro 340

“Politics of regard”

2001, 9). These displacements were initiated by the Tupiniquim and, from the sixteenth century, by their descendants and foreigners; they became known as “Paulista”. After seventeenth century, some of them had moved to São Paulo from other Brazilian regions, Europe, and Africa. By acknowledging a host of autonomous Paulista communities, top colonial bureaucrats revealed their powerlessness over the people who lived in that southern portion of Brazil. On the one hand, they acknowledged the autonomy of the Tupiniquim social systems in which the Portuguese lived; on the other hand, this “identity game” seemed to favor the Tupiniquim who conveniently regarded themselves as being Paulistas when they were outside their territories, or when relating with Portuguese outsiders.

Communities of agroforestry practices These communities are characterized by the management of the Atlantic Forest Biome using an efficient continuous agricultural system that opened clearings in the the forest (Figure 22.2a). Farmed clearings were used for a shorter period than the fallow clearings (Pedroso et al. 2009). This precolonial system is still used, albeit with updates and transformations due to the use of new plants, tools, and techniques. In many areas, after centuries of management, this type of interference with the natural vegetal successional process contributed to boost local and regional biodiversity by managing hundreds of species that could be used as food, medicine, and raw materials. Their conservation was assured by collaboration and trans-generational knowledge, coordinated by social networks among household clusters until present times. In the system developed within the forest, collaboration was decisive to maintain and (re)do collective practices and relationships on a daily basis (Perrone-Moisés 2015). For the Tupí, living together in the forest requires reciprocity, because living under the canopy requires developing activities “almost unfathomable if not based on common collaboration” (Melià 1989, 318). Mutual demand organizes the relationships between individuals and collective entities. Politics of regards systems are the basis of these communities, which have lasted until the twenty-first century; memory “guarantees and sustains the possibility of life” (Baniwa 2008, 7). This notion is explained by Ailton Krenak (2019, 4): the River Doce, which we call Watu, our grandfather, is not a person. It is not a resource, as the economists put it. It is not something one can appropriate; it is part of our construction as a collective entity that inhabits a specific place. The territory controlled by the community within the forest revolved around the dwelling center. This was the departing point for tracks leading to gardens, crops, and fallow/recollection areas, hunting and fishing grounds, and the seasonal camps devoted to activities outside the village (similar to the Guaraní system in Noelli et al. 2021). Clearings were cyclically opened (annual, biennial, etc.), and the new plots of land had variable sizes, depending on the size of each household and the soil fertility. The turnover of the new fallows added up to the production of old fallows that had been transformed into recollection/hunting areas and places to plant annual and perennial species, particularly trees. These places attracted fauna, which was then captured with traps appropriate for each species. The final stage was the definitive abandonment of the managed area. Some areas had hyper-dominant botanic species (e.g., araucaria, arecaceae, fruit trees, bamboos, cedars, etc.). Biomass production resulted from the entire annual production of each nuclear family, which was usually related to others, forming extended families who inhabited the og (longhouse). There was no silage, so the food stock was available in natura et in situ, just like the raw materials and the medicinal plants. There was a sustainable plan for each 341

Marianne Sallum and Francisco Silva Noelli

Figure 22.2 Paulista settlements within biodegradable forest clearings and residential structures: a. Zo´é Amazonian longhouse with a swidden field as an agroforestry community model; b. a house with a pottery kiln in the background; c. a residence, Vale do Ribeira, 1973; d. Cyperus sp. mat production, 1973; e. Ana Pereira, a master of ceramics, Iguape, 1973; f. Ana Pereira shipping ceramics for trade, Iguape, 1973. Sources: a. Photo by Fiona Watson, courtesy Survival International–Brasil. b. Watercolor by Ivan Washt Rodrigues in Atlas Histórico Escolar (1960), courtesy of INEP-MEC. c. Photo by Aloysio Raulino, courtesy of Museu da Imagem e do Som do Estado de São Paulo (MIS-SP). d and e. Photos by Plácido de Campos Jr., courtesy of MIS-SP. f. Photo by Roman Bernard Stulbach, courtesy of MIS-SP.

342

“Politics of regard”

annual cycle. This system produced enough food for the annual feasts and for the politics of collaboration, reciprocity, and consideration, as we shall see later. These people incorporated new plants, animals, food habits, and some techniques from the Portuguese and other newcomers. The novelties were used and transformed, along with the ceramic practices, to form the basis of the colonial diet, later known as caipira cuisine (Dória and Bastos 2018), which combined several European and African ingredients—especially meat from domestic animals, which gradually replaced wild ones, along with seasoning and sweets. The system was created to assure autonomy and self-sustainability. The Tupiniquim called their managed territory tekoava (VLB 1952, 127), which should be translated as “place where people live/dwell” (Ana Suelly Cabral, pers. comm. 2019). Later, the tekoava gained many Brazilian synonyms: mato, roça, sítio, bairro (bush, swidden, site, neighborhood), referring to the location of the plantation, houses, and the entire settlement (Figure 22.2b, c). The base of its internal organization was not hierarchical; neither did it follow a market economy. Rather it coexisted, traded, and had social relationships with people from the plantations and urban settlements. There was no formal leader but rather an experienced person who was responsible for the household’s activities (Figure 22.2d, e, f). During eighteenth century, the family structure changed. On one side, they articulated interests and differences with the outsiders who kept coming. On the other, the colonial bureaucracy started to consider the descendants of these families as “mixed race,” describing them with gradations of colors to disqualify them in the racist logic of identity elimination (Wolfe 2006). This was a strategy to break the autonomy of the paulista and impose social inequalities and other territorialities under the fiction of a homogeneous and “whitened” society that, in one century, had radically transformed life in the paulista’s communities, which were rearranged to maintain their relationships. The og was gradually replaced by houses for neighboring nuclear families, either grouped or scattered in communities called bairros\neighborhoods (Queiroz 1973), that is, spatial units whose inhabitants were connected by family, collaboration, and reciprocity bonds (Candido 2010). The bairro is an administrative department that, in the eighteenth century, was a synonym for the “woods . . . place withdrawn from communication with people, unfarmed land” (Bluteau 1712, 16, and 1716, 567). The Tupiniquim rationale did not acknowledge personal land property, only community land. Social relationships also aimed at replicating the environmental management of controlled territory in order to pass it down to the next generation. The personal aspect was “essentially the preservation and usufruct of a place in the biosphere” (Fernandes 1963, 147–148). Underlying this we find the plans of food security, which were aimed at preserving intentional practices to match the phenological cycles of useful plants, along with the exploitation of animal resources. Any management interruption would impact production and disarrange relationships. Therefore, communities developed their practices on a permanent basis to ensure the involvement of as many people as possible in the conservation of the environment. Labor division among the Tupiniquim included two main phases with different durations: men opened clearings in the forest and burned the cut vegetation, sometimes planting a few species; women also planted and took care of the fields. Simultaneously, women picked the crops and made the foodstuffs, which were complemented by the protein men obtained by hunting, fishing, and collecting. Scheuer (1976) and Magrini (2019) have observed that women still lead today. Besides farming, they make pottery, individually or in cooperatives, supplying a handicraft trade that has become an income alternative and a way to educate the new generations. For the Tupí, memory and the transmission of knowledge about places, social relations and material culture defined the landscape and the policies of regard over time. In this way, the 343

Marianne Sallum and Francisco Silva Noelli

memory was “at the service of one destiny, not an origin, nor a future or a past”, and it “will appear as the way and place of accomplishing the social par excellence” (Cunha and Castro 1985, 203–205). The deliberate recapitulation of memory and past actions (Fernandes 1963; Fausto 1992) acted as a technique for the circulation of memory (Cunha and Castro 1985), thus creating new subjectivities and the “memory of the future” (Sztutman 2005, 163). In the ceramic practices, memory is a way of engendering knowledge and connecting people. This is a key element in the action of these communities of practices (Scheuer 1976), where the constant reminder of material culture and knowledge reinforced the “wish to not forget,” a “practice of memory daily kept by women,” as is the case of the Tikmũ´ũn villages (Magnani et al. 2020). This circulation of memory nourished the communities’ knowledge and persistence, continuously combining new and ancient practices.

Communities and women’s cultural practices In a 1692 report, Governor Antônio Sande (1917, 199) spoke about the role played by Paulista women. He stated that they were virile and their husbands usually entrust them with the administration of their houses and estates since they are industrious in this management. They prefer to marry their daughters to foreigners who acknowledge their authority, rather than to locals who ignore it. Antônio Sande stressed their role as managers of the settlements, a rare attitude for a nobleman who championed patriarchal relations, underscoring the key importance of knowledgeassociated autonomy, and stating that they were “virile” and “industrious.” The first word means women performed functions usually assigned to men, something common among the Tupiniquim. The second word now has an obsolete meaning in Portuguese, but in the preindustrial society it meant skillful and ingenious. In his dictionary, Bluteau (1713, 116) defined “industrious” as “which has industry, dexterity”; and he defined “industry” as “dexterity in some art,” meaning “more ingenious.” Sande incisively stated that those women played a prominent role in society, referring to their involvement in community management and intergenerational connections. Sande emphasized women’s freedom to choose someone who “acknowledged their authority”—not as someone in charge, but as someone to share decisions with, as a couple, since the Tupiniquim had collaborative relationships. Women prefer to marry a “foreigner,” someone from outside their community, instead of a “local,” someone born at the same place. The union between people from different villages to reinforce alliances was common, including Europeans and, later, Africans. At the end of the seventeenth century, Sande testified that part of the social structure of the Tupiniquim was kept during the early colonial period (Fernandes 1963; Fernandes 2016). This revealed that fathers did not rule the destiny of their daughters and that relationships were meant to secure cooperation between people, both within the nuclear and the extended family and with other relatives. These kind of relationships were erased during the construction of the colonial past in the Luso-Brazilian academia, and this erasure of women’s gender and role within society translates to a lack of consideration for the other. Male and female activities were complimentary, and an “index of symmetrical relationships between affines,” sensu Matos, Santos, and Belaunde. To the paulista, this symmetry entailed a “dynamic based on different possible combinations of relationships between people of the same gender, as well from different genders,” thus generating bodies, people, and relationships (Matos et al. 2019, 344

“Politics of regard”

395, 404). All this gradually changed, especially from the eighteenth century onward, due to the prevalence of the Portuguese hierarchic social rules and the eventual dominance of binarism by the imposition of the European social and moral standards. Identity diversity was suppressed by the colonizers to enforce cultural homogenization. Social norms changed, setting aside symmetry and gender collaboration and favoring asymmetry and unbalance toward the “patriarchal power” and the Portuguese political and economic organization. The ancient system of gender collaboration was progressively weakened until it was confined to some hinterland neighborhoods and coastal communities. These are the places where communities of practices and women continued to play their pivotal roles, engaging in new markets for trading their Paulistaware and other goods and foodstuff.

Tupiniquim-Portuguese relationships The Tupí people were part of a linguistic stock encompassing ten families whose members spoke 70 different languages (Rodrigues and Cabral 2012). When Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century, the Tupiniquim were part of one of the coastal Tupí societies. They inhabited vast coastal territories for over 600–700 years but had lived longer in the hinterland (Brochado 1984; Noelli 1998; Corrêa 2014). The 6,000 km strip of coast south of the mouth of the Amazon River was occupied by the Macro-Jê and the Tupí people. The largest areas were occupied by Tupí-speaking folk, grouped into settlement networks that shared similar cultural practices: (1) Tupinambá, from Maranhão to the north coast of São Paulo; (2) Tupiniquim, from the south coast of São Paulo to the north coast of Paraná; and (3) Guaraní, from the north coast of Santa Catarina to Rio Grande do Sul. The first Portuguese settlers initially made alliances with a few coastal Tupiniquim settlements, but they did not establish relationships with all of them. Instead, they gradually became part of the hinterland settlement cluster, living according to the Tupiniquim social order. The social roles of marriage and individual alliances were essential for the incorporation and survival of the Portuguese in these collaborative societies. Such alliances formed collaborative relationships with kindred and allied households of other villages related in the colonial structures. The interagency between the Tupiniquim and the Portuguese in São Paulo changed with the intensification of mutual demands. The relationship network included the agreement on strategic interests in order to coordinate contradictory concepts and practices—partially due to their status as “cultural novelties”—that have been replicated since a distant past (Cusicanqui 2010). We came to this conclusion because there are no reports on Tupiniquim groups enslaved by the Portuguese. This may have two main explanations: the alliance itself, and possibly the demographic gap, since the Europeans were always a minority during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Noelli and Sallum 2019). For their own benefit, the Tupiniquim gradually transformed their cultural practices redefining their meaning of war, such as the feast to celebrate a capture, action that they initially strongly opposed such change (Monteiro 2018). The resistance to capture resulted in combat and death, guaranteeing the essence of war and the social status of the “killer,” fundamental for the renewal of the prestige of men and in the passage of young people into manhood. The young would then acquired new names and the requirements to establish their households, because women “refused those who didn’t kill” (Cunha and Castro 1985). Wars progressively lasted longer and longer, taking months or even years, with the purpose of capturing Natives among non-Tupiniquim groups to enslave them in their own settlements or sell them to other colonies. In 1530, for example, Diego Garcia shipped 70 enslaved Guaraní bought 345

Marianne Sallum and Francisco Silva Noelli

in São Vicente to deliver in Spain, which had been commissioned to the “bachelor” of Cananéia and his Tupiniquim sons-in-law (Toríbio Medina 1908). Later, enslaving increased, becoming one of the pillars of São Paulo’s economy until the late seventeenth century (Monteiro 2018). For part of the Portuguese, joining the Tupiniquim communities was a possibility for identity and social change, whether intentionally or merely to ensure their survival. In a 1550 report, they were described as individuals “living a savage’s life” (Nunes 1953, 207). The Portuguese were not a group with homogeneous interests, and they were split by the social inequality that distanced them on the Iberian Peninsula. In São Paulo there was a majority of “ordinary people” from different social status who had the opportunity to leave the patriarchal “towering dominance” (Willems 1953), including convicts banished due to crimes or by the Inquisition (i.e., heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft, sexuality, and bigamy). Their choice to free themselves from the yoke of inequality was the driving force that shaped the legacy of relationships and communities of agroforestry practices. They soon realized that the Portuguese social strata system made no sense among the Tupiniquim. These Portuguese began to live according to the Tupiniquim social order, creating a cooccurrence system of market economy and collaborative relationships. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the difference between settlements was even clearer: that is, plantations ruled by the Atlantic economic system and communities ruled by collaboration. The data show that both coexisted, with social and economic relationships differing in intensity depending on their location. Generally speaking, the Tupí were simultaneously “the main source of an organized resistance against the purposes of the colonists, but also their best support” (Fernandes 1975, 11). While the Portuguese became allies in São Paulo, in the rest of Brazil, Indigenous peoples presented them with more than two centuries of “such cruel resistance and sharp disputes that they shed much blood and lost many lives to either subdue them, or make them retreat to the hinterland” (Pita 1730). “Sharp disputes” meant obstinacy and perseverance to preserve autonomy, resisting and fighting against domination, as Indigenous groups still do in Brazil today. Most plantations emerged from the money earned with Indigenous slavery until the seventeenth century. Although non-plantation communities eventually owned slaves, especially from the eighteenth century onwards, they supplied the plantations with agroforestry products, both farmed and collected, ceramic vessels, and other locally made crafts, as well as labor for odd jobs. Plantation owners initially paid them with produce and commodities, since currency only appeared in some areas in the nineteenth century and in the entire region only in the twentieth century. Plantations were large estates owned by slave-owning patriarchs who had been granted property deeds that strengthened their bonds to the Crown. These estates, interconnected by family or business relationships at the regional level, were integrated in the Atlantic system and produced commodities at specific cycles over five centuries: sugar, wheat, cattle, minerals, rice, coffee, fish, and bananas. The difference between communities and plantations/urban centers lies partly in the communities’ choice to preserve the Tupiniquim agroforestry management, while adding some European plants, animals, and equipment, and incorporating and transforming their technologies. This helped the Portuguese emerge from their vulnerable condition and join a society in which one’s value was determined by a continuous affirmation of one’s knowledge, merit, personal achievements, and collaboration skills. Most of them found a social, economic, and political life that did not exist in Portugal. Simultaneously, while living among the Indigenous demographic majority, relationships with the Tupiniquim allowed the collaborative system to survive, contributing to establish a way of life free from the hierarchy of nobles, bureaucrats, and clergymen.

346

“Politics of regard”

Most individuals who disembarked at São Vicente in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were Portuguese men; they were followed by other European men and, rarely, women. With the intensification of the relationships between the Portuguese and the Tupiniquim, mutual understanding of the language and other cultural practices also occurred. Historical sources show that several Portuguese colonists established their households according to the Tupiniquim social order, based on the consolidation of prestige and the enlargement of their social and collaboration networks. For the Tupiniquim, this ideal could be achieved either by war accomplishments or by social cooperation and the political strengthening of kin. The transition process from war skills to the communities’ production skills was interspersed with the political wisdom of the communities of agroforestry practices. This type of relationship prevailed in São Paulo’s communities over the centuries and was sociologically interpreted in the 1950s (Candido 2010, 240–241) as “neighbourhood solidarity practices.” São Paulo’s cultural building involved different family structures based on the relationships between the Tupiniquim and the Portuguese, which were dominated by polygamy during the first 200 years. Monogamy gradually became dominant in the eighteenth century, due to the European Christian influence. A case in point is the way in which a Paulista, who led the troop that destroyed the Palmares Maroon settlement, was described by a Portuguese bishop in 1697 (Ennes 1938, 353): This man is one of the most savage . . . when he talked with me, he brought an interpreter, because neither can he speak nor is he different from the most barbaric tapuia. He claims to be a Christian, but he has seven Indian concubines, even though he married recently. This quote is important because it shows how, at the end of the seventeenth century, the Tupiniquim way of life intersected with colonial society. This person, Domingos Jorge Velho, spoke Portuguese with an Indigenous accent and used his polygamic arrangement to assure an interconnected household, thus forming a village network. The polygamic family aimed to establish a powerful and populated household, capable of ofering collaboration to its allies. The Paulista descendants of the Tupiniquim and the Portuguese were the backbone of the seventeenth-century demographic majority. These descendants also came from relationships with other Europeans and Indigenous captives. This changed labor and relationships due to the appearance of slave drivers and the generations of people who were born from violence exerted over enslaved women. Most captives captured south of São Paulo up to the second half of the seventeenth century were Guaraní. Natives from other regions were also enslaved, though in smaller amounts. The number of enslaved African only increased significantly in the eighteenth century, when population increased due to the massive immigration triggered by the Minas Gerais gold rush. Some of the Africans and their descendants created Maroons and other types of agroforestry communities, maintaining relationships with the Tupiniquim.

Ceramic practices The production and consumption of vessels with known flavors and aesthetics are, simultaneously, ways to reaffirm memories, identities, and differences in the space of social interactions of daily life. In these communities of agroforestry practices, pottery is created by women who connected knowledge from different times and places through memory. On one hand, the replication of ceramic technology was intentional due to a “keen attachment to

347

Marianne Sallum and Francisco Silva Noelli

traditional forms” attributed to “a spiritual motivation. Aware of tradition, they remain loyal to it, passing down knowledge exactly as they received it” (Scheuer 1976, 6). On the other hand, willingly or unwillingly, memory work depended on the senses, and the senses depended on materiality, as each sensorial perception is filled with reminiscences, enabling the present to coexist with different collective and specific pasts (Hamilakis 2013). Women combine the politics of regard with senses/flavors and materiality/aesthetics, turning vessels into a relationship-based materiality. If we examine the records, we find that, up to the mid-twentieth century, production and use of Paulistaware ceramics were related to a regional way of processing, serving, and storing food. People shared a knowledge made of memories that included materials, sensations, tastes, and ways of consuming food in particular vessels, in which “any donation or loan is made within the framework of expected reciprocity” (Matos 2018, 54). Looking for raw materials in specific layers of the soil was important to give the vessels specific physical and chemical properties (Scheuer 1976) that added “flavor” to liquids and foodstuff, according to the prior common practice among the Natives (Magrini 2019) and the Portuguese (Casimiro and Newstead 2019). The production and use of vessels with known flavors and aesthetic appearance are, simultaneously, ways of reaffirming memories, identities, and differences in the space of social interactions of daily life. Alterity shapes relationships, regarding “projects, sporadic intentions, events and located agents” (Montero 2012, 22). This means that people knew and expected the aesthetics and shape of every Paulistaware vessel to serve a specific purpose. Knowledge transmission to the next generation intentionally produced vessels that surpassed mere needs: replication was a key link of sociability, as people expected to share foodstuffs and flavors associated with daily life and specific year-round events. These relationships motivated the communities of practices to produce Paulistaware for supplying the households of all social strata, from houses where they were the only pottery available (together with wooden vessels and gourds) to the richest ones, where those vessels accompanied imported pottery, industrially manufactured in Europe and Asia (Zanettini and Wichers 2009; Hora et al. 2020). We understand that people who shared those codes knew each type of vessel, regardless of their social status. They also knew what to expect from their manufacturers, as each ceramist was known in her community and beyond, for her ability to trigger sensorial and aesthetic effects. In the twentieth century, and certainly before that, the name of the potter was her trademark— and it was known in multiscale networks. Their fame preceded them, and their quality surely boosted trade, supplying regional markets and the Portuguese immigrants who settled in rural areas from the eighteenth century onwards. Access to the market enabled those practice-sharing communities to survive until today, producing pottery surpluses to supply the households and shops of nearby towns. Therefore, these ceramicists had a double intention. In addition to establishing relationships by way of materiality, they expected flavor and aesthetics to produce pleasure-inducing effects and wanted to be recognized for providing such sensations and pleasures—a decisive factor for public recognition, as commonly occurred in Brazil (Pereira 1957). According to Hamilakis (2013), we can say that those women produced attractive elements that favored socialization and affection.

Ceramics and language We consider three types of ceramics—Tupiniquim, Paulistaware, and Portuguese coarse ware (PCW)—interpreting cultural practices of the Tupiniquim that explain how they incorporated the Portuguese “Other” (both the people and their pottery practices) as a way of persisting. Tupiniquim women transformed PCW into Paulistaware, reproduced by different women and provided 348

“Politics of regard”

with different meanings until today. At first sight, the morphology of Tupiniquim precolonial ceramic pieces scarcely resembles PCW and Paulistaware (Figure 22.3). If we examine their details, however, we find similarities in terms of body, surface processing, and wall section of the vessel, combining two pottery techniques that involve the operating chain, languages and uses.

Figure 22.3 Left: Tupiniquim ceramics. a. Nha’ẽpepó, Museu histórico e Arqueológico de Peruíbe; b., c., and d. Camucim, nha’ẽ, Museu Nacional do Rio de Janeiro. Center: Portuguese coarse ware. e. and h. Centro de Arqueologia de Lisboa; f. Museu Histórico de Almada; g. private collection. Right: Paulistaware. i., j., and l. Museu Histórico de São Vicente; k. private collection. Sources: a.–d. Photos by F. S. Noelli. e.–h. Photos by Tânia Casimiro. i., j., and l. Photos by F. S. Noelli. k. Photo by Amanda Magrini.

349

Marianne Sallum and Francisco Silva Noelli

Paulistaware had two languages that shared the same time but not always the same space. It was not a mere circulation of words and ideas but its materialization in shapes defined by specific technological choices. They were reproduced and continuously used in a dynamic social reality marked by interactions between people, situations, and cultural values (Perrone-Moisés 1999). Just like the Native inhabitants of Martha’s Vineyard (Bragdon 2010), evidence suggests that some of the Paulista women ceramists navigated through a complex bilingual context, in which the ceramic language had the connection of Tupiniquim and Portuguese words. In 1554, for example, bilingual settlers enlisted by the Jesuits taught, on a daily basis, “the doctrine, repeating the prayers in Portuguese and in their own language. The frequency and presence of women are higher” (Anchieta 1957, 106). This seems more feasible than the dominant “model” (Holanda 1995, 124), which considers Paulista women as atavistic monolinguals. In 1694, António Vieira reported on the situation of bilingualism in São Paulo: “the language spoken by these families is Indian; little boys go to school to learn Portuguese” (Vieira 1756, 161–162). Regarding the ceramic language, our interpretation of the records suggests that women likely mastered Portuguese words and sentences relative to the exchange, production, and use of items in their daily interactions, as well as additional elements that were passed down from generation to generation, accompanying the persistence of the communities of practices. On the matter of linguistic relationships in 1585, Cardim (1937, 170–171) said about the Portuguese: Almost everyone that comes from the Kingdom and stays here and communicates with the Indians learns it [the language] in a short time, and the sons of the Portuguese who are born here know it better than the Portuguese, both men and women, especially in the Captaincy de São Vicente. He witnessed relationships in which the linguistic exchange could generate a mutual learning process, since it is hard to assume that only the Portuguese learned the Tupiniquim language and that women did not learn the Portuguese language. Here we highlight that women did not attend school, a situation that remained so until the nineteenth century. As stated earlier, most children were not literate, and this was an indicator of the preservation of communities of practice. Orality prevailed for a long time. In 1920, 78 percent of the children up to 12 years old were not literate (Mathieson 2018). In the rural areas, that number reached 80 percent of the adults born between 1870 and 1910, and it was even larger in the generation of 1870 (Ferraro 2012).

Comparing different contexts of pottery production Table 22.1 shows some aspects of coordination in ceramic practices. The most common items of the three production contexts were selected from the most complete syntheses: Corrêa (2014) for Tupiniquim; Fernandes (2012) and Bugalhão and Coelho (2017) for PCW; and Scheuer (1976), Tiburtius (1968), Nascimento (1986), Magrini (2019), and Noelli and Sallum (2020a, 2020b) for Paulistaware. Tupiniquim women, their female offspring, and other outside women mastered and replicated the production of ceramic vessels. In Portugal, men prevailed in pottery production, while in São Paulo they produced tiles, bricks, and vessels in some colonial centers. In all contexts, training occurred in the framework of family-communities of practices. In Portugal, there is no direct evidence that women were involved in any stage of ceramic production, at least in the large production centers before the nineteenth century. Their role was more related to trade than to production (Fernandes 2012). It is possible that their participation in the production stage,

350

“Politics of regard” Table 22.1 Ceramic production contexts. Production context

Tupiniquim

PCW

Paulistaware

Prevailing gender Work environment Training

Women Family In-house Women lineage Community of practices

Women Family In-house Women lineage Community of practices

Labor organization and operating chain

Generalist Controls every step, possible assistance in raw-material extraction and transportation Local Deregulated

Male Family In-house Male lineage Community of practices Hierarchical Specialized tasks

Distribution Activity

Local\regional Regulated\state

Generalist Controls every step, possible assistance in raw-material extraction and transportation Local\regional Deregulated

especially decoration, occurred in smaller towns and villages, where the family was directly involved in production (Tânia Casimiro, pers. comm. 2020). In Portugal, the working environment was mainly residential, with hierarchic functions, managed by a more experienced potter who usually owned the means of production. Vessels were made at the potter’s wheel by the owner, with the assistance of people from his household and outsiders who performed different specialized tasks, from clay collection to decoration. In the cases of Tupiniquim and Paulistaware pottery, production was residential, and one single woman took care of the entire production chain. However, other people from her family could possibly locate the deposits and extract and carry the clay. PCW was made for family use and for trading, and its manufacture was regulated by the officials responsible for authorizing, inspecting, and taxing ceramic production in Portugal. Tupiniquim pottery was produced for family use and possibly also for household-gathering festivities. Its production was autonomous. Paulistaware followed the autonomous use pattern of the Tupiniquim until the eighteenth century, when it started being traded at emerging urban centers and plantations and taxed (Rabello 1977). As we have suggested elsewhere (Noelli and Sallum 2019), Paulistaware is the result of the relationship and articulation of practices between the Portuguese and Tupiniquim and, later, newcomers. In the community of practices, successive generations learned the techniques and used their individual creativity to make each item of their set of vessels combining a vast repertoire of technologies, meanings, and senses. The persistence of practices was variability, to such an extent that the difference made the vessels similar in the long duration, a form of “changes within continuities and continuities within changes” (Ferris 2009; Pezzarossi 2015 sensu Silliman 2020). Perhaps the appropriation and articulation of practices may be approached from another angle, the Indigenous perspective of “taming.” As Célia Xakriabá (2020) explains, we can understand this process as “taming that which was wild, which was fierce” instead of using western terms like appropriation and reappropriation.

Conclusion Colonial Portuguese politics were not the simple enforcement of a project upon the undifferentiated population of Brazil. They resulted from a variety of interactions between people and

351

Marianne Sallum and Francisco Silva Noelli

situations, generated by a constant dialogue of cultural values (Perrone-Moisés 1999). São Paulo is an example of how the Portuguese colonial project was transformed in some communities of agroforestry practices. This diversity of relations gradually formed two colonial groups: agroforestry communities in coexistence with urban centers and plantations. Until the eighteenth century, the policy of collaborating, the symmetrical relations of gender, and the paulista autonomy were pillars of the agroforestry practice communities of São Paulo. The women shaped the ceramic communities, created the Paulistaware, and dealt with colonialism and the advance of European rules. From the eighteenth century onwards, women began to supply growing urban centers with their ceramic wares and produce from their crops. Later, domestic ceramics were their only commercial product. With the arrival of industrialized goods and the enclosure of neighboring properties (restricting access to raw materials), production diminished, and there were few women ceramists left. From the eighteenth century onwards, all over the southeast of São Paulo and the northeast of Paraná, large swaths of the forested hinterland were inhabited by so-called old Paulistas who were not fluent in Portuguese and did not participate in market production. Since they did not generate quantifiable data at the time, such populations were generally not incorporated in the official statistics. A report from 1820 described a typical settlement and its agroforestry style, as seen in Figure 22.2, as “a miserable hovel made of poles erected side by side which gave way to wind and rain. A few pans and woven mats were all that there was inside, and their inhabitants were covered in rags” (Saint-Hilaire 1851, 214). They were stereotyped as a metonym for poverty and cultural loss; the nude appearance of their houses became a metaphor for indolence and misery. Just as for archaeologists and other academics, this traveler’s prejudice made him ignore the self-sustainable way of life of these people, who depended only on themselves, their knowledge, and their local collaborative networks. In fact, their residences were biodegradable and are thus hard to find as archaeological record; and their only material evidence was vegetation management, the remains of kilns and the accumulation of pot sherds. This epistemological erasure disregarded the written sources of the past and the memories of generations of communities of the present. It is a kind of epistemicide, a destruction of cultural knowledge (Santos 2014), or the “colonization, assassination and refusal of knowledge production of some people” (Nogueira 2011); and the “denial of the subjective condition of knowledge, through the devaluation, negation or concealment of its contributions” (Carneiro 2011). The major challenge will be to overcome the traditional version, especially in the reconstruction of contexts of sociability and women’s agency. To this end, it is necessary to develop a decolonial interdisciplinary approach that combines archaeological, historical, anthropological, linguistic data, and memories of present people. The notion of persistence allows us to track the agency and knowledge of Tupiniquim women that were transmitted to different women across the generations until today. They formed communities of practices that survived colonialism. These women walked different paths to contemporary times and make us think about future solutions able to balance social practices, ecological preservation, and cooperative life.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Lee M. Panich and Sara L. Gonzalez for the invitation and comments that improved this chapter, and to the careful review of Steve Silliman. To Carmelita Moraes and Gustavo Raulino, for the interest in disseminating the photographic record of Plácido de Campos Jr. and Aloysio Raulino, kept by the Museu da Imagem e do Som do Estado de São Paulo. To José Kelly and Marcos Matos for the ideas that inspired us. To friends for comments in these times of social isolation caused by 352

“Politics of regard”

COVID-19: Lúcio Menezes Ferreira, Ângela Buarque, Ana Suelly Cabral, Tânia Casimiro, Eric Kelly, Agda Sardinha, Astolfo Araujo, Marcos André de Souza, Amílcar D´Ávila de Mello, Carol Guedes, Mariano Bonomo, Alessandro Lima, Andrea Catropa, Mercedes Okumura, Carlos Fabião, and André Pereira. This work was partially financed by Brazilian funds through FAPESP–São Paulo Research Foundation (grants 2019/17868–0 and 2019/18664–9), Portuguese funds through FCT–Foundation for Science and Technology under the project UIDB/ 00698/2020 and grant 2020.05745.BD.

References cited Alencastro, Luíz Felipe. 1992. O Trato dos viventes. Formação do Brasil no Atlântico Sul. Séculos XVI e XVII. São Paulo: Cia das Letras. Anchieta, José. 1957. “Carta ao P. Inácio de Loyola, Roma. São Paulo de Piratininga, [1 de setembro de] 1554.” Monumenta Brasiliae 2: 83–118. Baniwa, Gersem. 2008. “Antropologia Indígena: O caminho da descolonização e da autonomia indígena.” In 26a Reunião Brasileira de Antropologia. Porto Seguro. Bluteau, Raphael. 1712. Vocabulario Portuguez & Latino: aulico, anatomico, architectonico. vol. 1. Coimbra: Collegio das Artes da Companhia de Jesus. Bluteau, Raphael. 1713. Vocabulario Portuguez & Latino: aulico, anatomico, architectonico. vol. 4. Coimbra: Collegio das Artes da Companhia de Jesus. Bluteau, Raphael. 1716. Vocabulario Portuguez & Latino: aulico, anatomico, architectonico. vol. 5. Lisboa : Officina de Pascoal da Sylva. Bragdon, Kathleen. 2010. “The Pragmatics of Language Learning: Graphic Pluralism on Martha’s Vineyard, 1660–1720.” Ethnohistory 57 (1): 35–50. Brochado, José. 1984. “An Ecological Model of the Spread of Pottery and Agriculture into Eastern South America.” PhD Dissertation, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Bugalhão, Jacinta, and Inês Coelho. 2017. “Cerâmica moderna de Lisboa: Proposta tipológica.” In I Encontro de Arqueologia de Lisboa: Uma Cidade Em Escavação, 106–146. Lisboa: Imprensa Municipal/Câmara Municipal. Candido, Antônio. 2010. Os parceiros do rio Bonito. Rio de Janeiro: Ouro Sobre Azul. Cardim, Fernão. 1937. Tratado da terra e gente do Brasil. São Paulo: Cia Editora Nacional. Carneiro, Suely. 2011. Racismo, sexismo e desigualdade no Brasil. Edited by Vera Lúcia Benedito. Câmara Brasileira do Livro/Selo Negro. Casimiro, Tânia, and Sarah Newstead. 2019. “400 Years of Water Consumption: Early Modern Pottery Cups from Portugal.” Ophiussa 3: 145–154. Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de. 2004. “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies.” Common Knowledge 10 (3): 463–484. Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de. 2018. “The Problem of Affinity in Amazonia.” Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8: 349–393. Conkey, Margaret. 2003. “Has Feminism Changed Archaeology?” Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 867–880. Corrêa, Ângelo. 2014. “Pindorama de Mboîa e Îakaré.” PhD Dissertation, Universidade de São Paulo. Cunha, Manuela Carneiro, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 1985. “Vingança e temporalidade: Os Tupinambá.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 71 (1): 191–208. Cusicanqui, Silvia. 2010. “Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa. Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores.” La Peste.Org. https://lapeste.org/2019/05/silvia-rivera-cusicanqui-chixinakax-utxiwa-una-reflexionsobre-practicas-y-discursos-descolonizadores/#prettyPhoto. Despret, Vinciane. 2013. “From Secret Agents to Interagency.” History and Theory 52 (4): 29–44. Dória, Carlos Alberto, and Marcelo Corrêa Bastos. 2018. A culinária Caipira da Paulistânia. São Paulo: Três Estrelas. Ennes, Ernesto. 1938. As Guerras nos Palmares: Subsídios para sua história. Domingos Jorge Velho e a “Tróia Negra” 1687–1700. São Paulo: Cia Editora Nacional. Fausto, Carlos. 1992. “Fragmentos de história e cultura Tupinambá.” In História Dos Índios No Brasil, edited by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha. São Paulo: Cia das Letras/SMC/Fapesp. Fernandes, Florestan. 1963. A Organização social dos Tupinambá. São Paulo: Difel. Fernandes, Florestan. 1975. Estudos de etnologia e outros ensaios. Petrópolis: Vozes. Fernandes, Isabel. 2012. “A loiça preta em Portugal: Estudo histórico, modos de fazer e de usar.” PhD Dissertation, Universidade do Minho.

353

Marianne Sallum and Francisco Silva Noelli Fernandes, João. 2016. De cunhã a mameluca: A mulher Tupinambá e o nascimento do Brasil. João Pessoa: Editora da EDUFPB. Ferraro, Alceu Ravanello. 2012. “Alfabetização rural no Brasil na perspectiva das relações campo-cidade e de gênero.” Educação & Realidade 37 (3): 946–967. Ferris, Neal. 2009. The Archaeology of Native-Lived Colonialism: Challenging History in the Great Lakes. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Goldman, Márcio. 2017. “Contradiscursos afroindígenas sobre mistura, sincretismo e mestiçagem ”. Revista de Antropologia da UFScar 9 (2): 11–20. Hamilakis, Yannis. 2013. Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holanda, Sérgio B. 1995. Raízes do Brasil. São Paulo: Cia das Letras. Hora, Juliana, Vagner Porto, Wagner Magalhães, and Elaine Alencastro. 2020. “Unveiling Regional Archaeological Heritage, Historical Archaeology at Vale Do Ribeira: The Case of Sobrado Dos Toledos, Iguape-São Paulo.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 24: 707–727. Kelly, José Antonio, and Marcos de Almeida Matos. 2020. “A Politics of Regard: Action and Influence in Lowland South America.” In Lowland South American World, edited by Luiz Costa and High Casey. London: Routledge, forthcoming. Krenak, Ailton. 2019. Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo. São Paulo: Cia das Letras. Lagrou, E. 2016. “No caminho da miçanga: um mundo que se faz de contas.” Catálogo Museu do Índio (Rio de Janeiro), 10–15. Magnani, Cláudia, Ana Maria Gomes, Suely Maxacali, and Maisa Maxakali. 2020. “Panela de barro, água de batata, linha de embaúba: práticas xamânicas das mulheres Tikmũ’ũn-Maxakali.” Cadernos de Campo 29 (1): 262–281. Magrini, Amanda. 2019. “Lá no alto, o barro é encantado: A cerâmica do alto vale do Ribeira—SP.” Masters Thesis, Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Mathieson, Louisa Campbell. 2018. “O recenseamento escolar de 1920 na imprensa Paulista: Uma campanha cívica de combate ao analfabetismo.” Educação e Pesquisa 44: 181751. Matos, Marcos. 2018. “Organização e história dos Manxineru do alto rio Iaco.” PhD Dissertation, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Matos, Beatriz A., Júlia O. Santos, and Luísa E. Belaunde. 2019. “Corpo, terra, perspectiva: o gênero e suas transformações na etnologia”. Amazônica: Revista de Antropologia 11 (2): 392–412. Melià, Bartomeu. 1989. “Potyró: La cuestión del trabajo indígena Guaraní.” In Anais do VIII Simpósio Nacional de Estudos Missioneiros, 295–326. Santa Rosa. Monteiro, John M., 2001. Tupis, Tapuias e historiadores: estudos de história indígena e do indigenismo. Campinas: Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Monteiro, John M. 2018. Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montero, Paula. 2012. Selvagens, civilizados, autênticos: A produção das diferenças nas etnografias salesianas (1920– 1970). São Paulo: EDUSP. Mrozowski, Stephen, Rae Gould, and Heather Law Pezzarossi. 2015. “Rethinking Colonialism: Indigenous Innovation and Colonial Inevitability.” In Rethinking Colonialism: Comparative Archaeological Approaches, edited by Craig N. Cipolla and Katherine Howlett Hayes, 121–142. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Nascimento, Haydée. 1986. “Cerâmica folclórica em Apiaí.” Revista do Arquivo Municipal 186: 45–121. Noelli, Francisco Silva. 1998. “The Tupi: Explaining Origin and Expansions in Terms of Archaeology and of Historical Linguistics.” Antiquity 72 (277): 648–663. Noelli, Francisco Silva, and Marianne Sallum. 2019. “A Cerâmica Paulista: cinco séculos de persistência de práticas Tupiniquim em São Paulo e Paraná, Brasil.” Mana: Estudos de Antropologia Social 25 (3): 702–742. Noelli, Francisco Silva, and Marianne Sallum. 2020a. “Comunidades de mulheres ceramistas e a longa trajetória de itinerância da cerâmica paulista.” Revista do Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia 34: 132–153. Noelli, Francisco Silva, and Marianne Sallum. 2020b. “Para cozinhar. . .: as panelas da Cerâmica Paulista.” Habitus 18 (2): 501–538. Noelli, Francisco Silva, Giovana Cadorin Votre, Marcos César Pereira Santos, Diego Dias Pavei, and Juliano Bitencourt Campos. 2021. “Ñande Reko: The Fundamentals of Guaraní Traditional Environmental Knowledge.” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, forthcoming. Nogueira, Renato. 2011. “Denegrindo a filosofia: o pensamento como coreografia de conceitos e afroperspectivas.” Griot—Revista de Filosofia 4 (2): 2–19.

354

“Politics of regard” Nunes, Leonardo. 1953. “Carta aos Padres e Irmãos de Coimbra. São Vicente, November, 1551.” Monumenta Brasiliae 1, 200–210. Roma: IHSJ. Panich, Lee M. 2013. “Archaeologies of Persistence: Reconsidering the Legacies of Colonialism in Native North America.” American Antiquity 78 (1): 105–122. Panich, Lee M., Rebecca Allen, and Andrew Galvan. 2018. “The Archaeology of Native American Persistence at Mission San José.” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 38 (1): 11–29. Pedroso Jr, Nelson, Cristina Adams, and Rui Murrieta. 2009. “Slash-and-Burn Agriculture: A System in Transformation.” Current Trends in Human Ecology 12 (34): 12–34. Pereira, José. 1957. A Cerâmica popular da Bahia. Salvador: Aguiar e Souza Ltda. Perrone-Moisés, Beatriz. 1999. “Aldeados, aliados, inimigos e escravos: lugares dos índios na legislação portuguesa para o Brasil.” In Anais do Congresso Luso-Brasileiro Portugal-Brasil: memórias e imaginários, Vol 1, 147–164. Lisboa: Fundação C.Gulbenkian. Perrone-Moisés, Beatriz. 2015. “Festa e guerra.” USP. Pezzarossi, Guido. 2015. “Tribute, Antimarkets, and Consumption: An Archaeology of Capitalist Effects in Colonial Guatemala.” In Archaeology of Culture Contact and Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America, edited by Pedro Paulo A. Funari and Maria Ximena Senatore, 79–102. Cham: Springer. Pita, Sebastião da Rocha. 1730. História da America Portugueza. Lisbon: Officina de Joseph Antonio da Sylva. Queiroz, Maria IPereira. 1973. Bairros rurais paulistas: dinâmica das relações bairro rural-cidade. São Paulo: Duas Cidades. Rabello, Elizabeth. 1977. “Os ofícios mecânicos e artesanatos em São Paulo na segunda metade do século XVIII.” Revista de História 112: 575–588. Rodrigues, Aryon, and Ana Suelly Cabral. 2012. “Tupían.” In The Indigenous Languages of South America, edited by L. Campbell and V. Grondona, 495–574. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Saint-Hilaire, A. 1851. Voyage dans les Provinces de Saint-Paul et de Sainte-Catherine, Vol. 2. Paris: Arthus Bertrand Libraire-Éditeur. Sallum, Marianne, and Francisco Silva Noelli. 2020. “An Archaeology of Colonialism and the Persistence of Women Potters’ Practices in Brazil: From Tupiniquim to Paulistaware.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 24 (3): 546–570. Sallum, Marianne, and Francisco Silva Noelli. 2021. “‘A pleasurable job’.  .  . Communities of women ceramicists and the long path of Paulistaware in São Paulo.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 61 (1): 1–12. Sande, Antônio. 1917. “Relatório do Governador António Paes de Sande (1692).” In Annaes da Bibliotheca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, 39: 197–200. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. London: Taylor & Francis. Scheuer, Herta L. 1976. Estudo da cerâmica popular do Estado de São Paulo. São Paulo: Conselho Estadual de Cultura. Silliman, Stephen W. 2009. “Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England.” American Antiquity 74 (2): 211–230. Silliman, Stephen W. 2020. “Colonialism in Historical Archaeology.” In Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology, edited by Charles E. Orser, Andrés Zarankin, Pedro Paulo A. Funari, Susan Lawrence, and James Symonds, 41–60. London: Routledge. Stahl, Ann B. 2010. “‘Route Work’ through Alternative Archives: Reflections on Cross Disciplinary Practice.” South African Historical Journal 62 (2): 252–267. Sztutman, Renato. 2005. “O profeta e o principal: a ação política Ameríndia e seus personagens.” PhD Dissertation, Universidade de São Paulo. Tiburtius, Guilherme. 1968. “Altere Hauskeramik Aus Der Umgebung von Curitiba, Paraná, Südbrasilien.” Anthropos 63/64 (1/2): 49–74. Toríbio-Medina, José. 1908. Los viajes de Diego Gárcia de Moguer. Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Elziviriana. Trigg, Heather. 2004. “Food Choice and Social Identity in Early Colonial New Mexico.” Journal of the Southwest 46 (2): 223–252. Vieira, Antonio. 1756. “Voto sobre as dúvidas dos moradores de São Paulo acerca da administração dos Índios. Salvador, 12 de Julho de 1694.” In Vozes Saudosas . . ., 141–166. Lisboa: Officina de Miguel Rodrigues. VLB. 1952. “Vocabulário na língua brasílica.” São Paulo: FFLCH/USP. Willems, Emilio. 1953. “The Structure of the Brazilian Family.” Social Forces 31 (4): 339–345.

355

Marianne Sallum and Francisco Silva Noelli Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. Xakriabá, Célia. 2020. “Amansar o giz.” Piseagrama, 14: 110–117. Zanettini, Paulo, and Camila M. Wichers. 2009. “A cerâmica de produção local/regional em São Paulo colonial.” In Cenários regionais em Arqueologia Brasileira, edited by Walter Morales and Flavia Moi, 311– 334. São Paulo: Annablume.

356

23 FROM HYBRIDITY TO RELATIONALITY Shifting perspectives on the archaeology of Métis emergence Kisha Supernant

Introduction Throughout the history of archaeology, different explanations have been offered for how and why cultural identities change and coalesce into new social, cultural, and ethnic forms (Barth 1969; Franklin and Fesler 1999; Hu 2013; Jenkins 1994; Jones 1997; Trigger 1994). Many social and cultural elements contribute to the emergence of a new people, although changes occur within cultural identities through time without leading to the emergence of distinct identities. A constellation of factors, including economic pressures, social dynamics, political tensions, kin relationships, and systems of power, contribute to cultural change and, at times, the creation of distinctive cultural identities (Devine 2004; Emberling 1997; Haley 2005; Hill 1996b; Mullins and Paynter 2000; Sattler 1996; Voss 2008). Some scholars have attributed new identities in the post-contact history of the Americas to racial mixing, where social and biological traits from two or more groups were combined to create new ethnic identities (Hickerson 1996; Hill 1996a; Sattler 1996). Postcolonial approaches emphasize the role of hybridity in colonial contexts as a form of resistance to reified colonial categories (Spivak 1988), noting times where certain identities emerge and become important is due to a variety of social, political, and economic factors, not merely concepts of mixing based on racialized categories (Hu 2013; Voss 2008). The Métis, a post-contact Indigenous people who emerged in the lands currently known as Canada, provide an important case study for broader questions around the emergence of new collective cultural identities and their visibility in the archaeological record. In this chapter, I will explore how concepts of mixedness and hybridity have influenced research on the Métis, with attention to how these concepts are tied up in western and settler colonial ways of defining identity and ethnicity. Archaeological research on the Métis, while limited, has also focused on the hybridity of material culture and architecture within Métis sites, as well as the ways in which Métis people attempted to be more like European settlers (Burley 1989b, 2000; McLeod 1985). Postcolonial theorizations of hybridity are a better fit for understanding the Métis than previous conceptions of creolization or mixedness, yet hybridity remains an externally imposed category, developed by non-Indigenous theorists. In this paper, I turn the lens around, emphasizing a Métis approach to understanding Métis history and archaeology, rejecting the use of colonial 357

Kisha Supernant

binaries and external theorizing to define our history. Defining a Métis approach to archaeological research that centers Métis ways of knowing and the important elements of Métis lifeways counters the dominant narratives on ethnicity, ethnogenesis, and creolization that give primacy to biological and cultural mixing rather than personhood and nationhood (Andersen 2014) and upholds the principles of Indigenous archaeology (Atalay 2006; Martinez 2014; Nicholas 2008). Using five threads of a Métis worldview—geography and place, mobility, kinship/family, economy, and daily life (Macdougall et al. 2012), I weave together the archaeological and historical record to provide insight into Métis identity in the past that moves away from how Métis came to be toward an understanding of a Métis way of being. I then reflect on the implications of this approach for broader questions of exploring the dynamic interplay between the persistence and emergence of Indigenous identities in colonial contexts.

Indigeneity, identity, and colonialism The ways in which people are situated within various identities has long been of interest in archaeology and anthropology more broadly. Different categories of identity, such as gender, ethnicity, and social status, have been debated and discussed in various cultural contexts through space and time (Gero and Conkey 1991; Fried 1967; Jones 1997), while others, such as age, queerness, and disability, have only more recently begun to be the focus of archaeological scholarship (Baxter 2008; Rutecki and Blackmore 2016; Southwell-Wright 2013; Voss 2000). Archaeology, with its disciplinary focus on material culture and change through time, is well situated to explore long-term relationships between materiality, place, and identity through a lens of change and stability. However, as others have argued (Gosden 2012), the past 500 years of imperial and colonial violence has occasioned change on a scope and scale unprecedented in other moments in human history. The dynamics of culture change and identities in colonial contexts has therefore been of significant interest in historical archaeology and related disciplines (Cipolla 2013; Jones 1999; Jordan 2009; Silliman 2010, 2005, 2009). Historical archaeologists have made sense of encounters between Indigenous Nations and colonizers through a variety of theoretical approaches, including ethnogenesis, entanglement, and hybridity. Ethnogenesis in colonial contexts is impacted by systems of power, domination, resistance, and social constructions of difference (Jordan 2009; Lightfoot et al. 1998; Silliman 2005). Research on the relationship between colonizers and colonized has been framed in a number of ways, including culture contact (Hill 1996b; Silliman 2001), colonialism (Silliman 2005), entanglement (Jordan 2009; Martindale 2009), mimesis (Howey 2011), hybridity (Liebmann 2008), and polyvalence (Robinson 2013). Some authors discuss ethnogenesis (e.g., Voss 2008 on Californios), but many of them focus on resistance, entanglement, and culture change within First Nations or Native American contexts rather than emergence of new identities. Indigenous responses to colonialism are increasingly considered in terms of agency and resistance rather than acculturation (Howey 2011; Jordan 2009; Robinson 2013; Rothschild 2006; Schurr 2010; Silliman 2005). The postcolonial conception of hybridity has been influential for examining Indigenous resilience and resistance to colonial powers (Card 2013; Silliman 2015). Drawing on the work of Said (1978), Bhabha (1994), and Spivak (1988; and see Liebmann and Rizvi 2008), hybridity refers to subaltern forms of cultural identification that defy colonial categories and binaries (colonizer/colonized, civilized/savage) and are inherently “subversive and intentional political act[s]” (Silliman 2015, 281). Much of the theorizing of hybridity in postcolonial archaeology has focused on the subaltern rather than colonizers, framing hybridity as a form of anticolonial resistance attentive to power relations and reflected in the material culture of the colonized. This 358

From hybridity to relationality

conception might seem an ideal model for the Métis, who epitomize a cultural identity that defies colonial binaries, creates space for resistance to colonial authority, and represents agency. However, to articulate Métis identity through the lens of postcolonial theory using hybridity still imposes externally defined ways of being onto our history and our present and is still based on some original state that becomes hybrid and integrates elements from other contexts. Hybridity does not provide adequate theoretical grounding for understanding when a subaltern identity goes from being hybrid to being distinct (Silliman 2015, 283). Material forms can change almost entirely, but people remain connected to a shared identity. Contemporary Indigenous peoples have different material cultures and lives than their ancestors, but they retain the identity of their Indigenous Nation(s). Colonial structures of law and government imposed upon Indigenous Nations have tended to emphasize the portion of blood or, more recently, DNA as the foundation for belonging to Indigenous Nations (TallBear 2013a). Indigenous identity, however, lies not exclusively in blood or in DNA; rather, it lies in ways of being (ontology) and ways of knowing (epistemology) embedded in webs of relations, past, present, and future (TallBear 2013b). Indigenous peoples have survived all attempts to remove them from those webs of relations and to disrupt their connections to language, cultural practices, land, and history. The resilience and persistence of many Indigenous identities in the face of genocide and dispossession makes the emergence of new distinct Indigenous identities even more important to understand. The study of Métis emergence is further complicated by the dynamics of cultural entanglement and settler colonialism. Colonialism is a framework that places Métis identities in a context that emphasizes individuals struggling with power, domination, and economic transformation: underscores long-term episodes of violence, oppression, and negotiation: admits individuals forging their way into new worlds and identities; and recognizes no bounded cultures while also recognizing the possibilities of ethnogenesis. (Silliman 2005, 69) The Métis bring a diferent perspective to studies of responses and consequences of colonialism. They are a legally recognized Aboriginal people in Canada, but they did not exist as a coherent identity prior to the arrival of Europeans to North America. The ways in which Métis people emerged from various social, political, sexual, and labor-based relationships between non-Métis colonists and First Nations has been highlighted as a form of hybridization or creolization, as the Métis were arguably not colonized until after their unsuccessful resistance against Canada ended in 1885 (Teillet 2019). As neither First Nations nor colonists, nor merely a mixture of the two, the Métis provide an example of how new identities emerge as distinct within colonial contexts and work against reified ideas of Indigenous authenticity and racialization that can be perpetuated in historical archaeology (Cipolla 2013).

Rejecting hybridity: Métis kinscapes Previous framings of the emergence of new identities in colonial contexts, as reviewed earlier, have one element in common: the theories are drawn from western ways of knowing. Even in the critiques of colonial binaries that emerge from postcolonial theorizing, the foundational scholars strongly engage with western thinkers (see Acheraïou 2011). Many previous researchers have centered mixedness and hybridity, but ethnogenesis is a complex, dynamic process that is not necessarily predicated on the mixing of two defined, binary categories. Métis people were a new people with a set of cultural practices, politics, economies, kinship networks, and language that were separate from First Nations or European kin. Being Métis in the past and in the present is 359

Kisha Supernant

not to have Indigenous and non-Indigenous ancestry; it is so much more. Emphasizing mixedness poses a threat to Métis sovereignty in the present, as there has been a significant growth in nonIndigenous peoples claiming to be Métis based on a real or imagined Indigenous ancestor from the distant past (Gaudry and Leroux 2017; Leroux 2019). This race-shifting is made possible through the reduction of the dynamics of the emergence of new identities to a simple process of descent or ancestry, no matter how distant. External theorizing of Métis through lenses of mixedness or hybridity, even when well-intentioned, remain entrenched in settler colonial ways of knowing. The rise of Indigenous archaeologies over the past 20 years presents a different set of theoretical possibilities. Indigenous archaeologies are most commonly defined as “archaeology done with, for, and by Indigenous peoples” (Nicholas and Andrews 1997, 3, emphasis added). Archaeology done by Indigenous peoples must include all elements of the archaeological process, from theory to method to analysis and interpretation. I argue that using external, western frameworks of hybridity, even postcolonial hybridity, perpetuates settler colonial misunderstandings of what it means to be Métis, past, present, and future. Drawing on a Métis epistemology and ontology, I provide a different way of understanding Métis lifeways in the past, centering threads of relations woven together, each of which connects to different forms of archaeological and historical evidence. Instead of centering the mixedness and hybridity of Métis history, I consider the interconnected webs of kinship between Métis people, other humans, and other-than-human beings, including lands, waters, plants, and animals. These connections are visible in the archaeological record when the theoretical framing is shifted, and the methodology emphasizes relations rather than categories or discrete entities so often found in archaeological analyses. Next, I briefly review the history of the Métis Nation before outlining an approach to archaeology that engages Métis ways of knowing.

Historicizing Métis identity Upon the arrival of the first fur traders from France, England, and Scotland to the lands now known as Canada, there were unions between European men and Indigenous women. Often called country wives, these Indigenous women were essential to the life of the fur trade (Van Kirk 1983). These marriages in the fashion of the country led to children, and these children tended to marry each other throughout subsequent generations. These subsequent generations forged strong kinship networks to similar families and to their First Nations kin, serving an important economic role in the fur trade (Sealey and Lussier 1975). Over time, these interconnected families formed a distinct identity, at the time known by several different names, depending in part upon their European ancestry, but sharing a similar lifestyle (Macdougall et al. 2012; Peterson and Brown 1985; St-Onge and Podruchny 2012; Teillet 2019). Earlier historical work tended to emphasize the emergence of the Métis as a people “inbetween” and of mixed ancestry, never fully fitting into European settler or First Nations communities (Foster 1978; Sealey and Lussier 1975). Historical research has also tended to focus on Métis political identity as a key to Métis emergence, in part because it was this political organizing in places such as Red River (Figure 23.1) that led to two episodes of resistance against Canadian control, one in 1869 and one in 1885. In both cases, Métis attempted to expel the Dominion of Canada from their homeland through establishing provisional governments, negotiating with Canada, and eventually engaging in armed resistances (Teillet 2019). Once the Métis were defeated at Batoche, Saskatchewan, in 1885, their leader, Louis Riel, was hanged as a traitor; this, along with changing government policies, served as a turning point for Métis communities (Innis 1999; Payne 2004; Ray 1998). The focus on the Métis in Red River has tended to underemphasize the extent of the Métis homeland, as Métis families forged a distinct cultural landscape 360

From hybridity to relationality

Figure 23.1 Map showing the sites discussed in the text. Source: Author’s creation.

stretching from the northern United States to the Northwest Territories (see Figure 23.1), with many places of significance to Métis families. As more Métis scholars have engaged in research, there has been a shift in the ways Métis have been understood, both in terms of ethnogenesis and nationhood. (Andersen 2008, 2011a, 2011b, 2014; Gaudry 2013). Métis scholars have argued that using mixed-blood as the primary defining factor of Métis identity imposes settler-colonial racial categories rather than recognizing personhood and nationhood. Andersen (2014, 20) argues that “history is . . . a crucial resource in Indigenous claims to peoplehood, as it is for all Indigenous claims, because it challenges dominant colonial national/historical narratives that marginalize or attempt to altogether erase our prior presence.” While the Métis originate from marriages between Europeans and First Nations in the early days of the fur trade, at what point did the Métis coalesce into an identity separate from their relatives? Many Indigenous Nations have members who have some non-Indigenous ancestry, but those individuals are still part of the nation. Many Indigenous Nations have undergone major changes, but their members remain connected to their Indigenous identity. Focusing on mixedness or hybridity also assumes there is some “pure” culture from which Métis are derived rather than understanding all cultures as dynamic rather than static, unchanging entities. Understanding Métis identities in the present matters for how the archaeological record of the Métis is studied, analyzed, and interpreted. Previous research on historical archaeology in Canada has tended to focus on the fur trade era (Doroszenko 2009), with most of the research done on forts and fur trading posts. Indigenous histories during the post-contact era have received less attention, while Métis-specific archaeologies have been extremely limited. In the 1970s and 1980s, several projects run by government organizations explored Métis overwintering or hivernant 361

Kisha Supernant

sites in Alberta and Saskatchewan dating from the 1850s–1880s. The focus on these sites allowed for an exploration of a Métis practice in which large groups of families would travel together to places of overwintering for bison herds, build log cabins, and spend the winter together. These were often away from larger settlements such as Red River and Fort Edmonton, but they did generally echo summertime bison hunting brigades, where large groups of up to 1,600 Métis people, often all related through extended kinship networks, would gather in structured communities to hunt bison (Macdougall and St-Onge 2013; Ross 1856). In the winter, groups of families would choose protected, treed areas near bison wintering herds and water sources. Cabins were expedient, one room constructions but were made snug through the use of mud or clay, with a thatched roof, a stone or clay fireplace, and a chimney (Burley et al. 1992; Carpenter 1977; Sealey and Lussier 1975). These distinctly Métis places are noted in the historic record and provide an archaeological signature of Métis lifeways that can be extrapolated to more complex locations, such as fur trade posts, where Métis were present with other people (Burley 1989a, 1989b, 2000; Burley et al. 1992; Doll et al. 1988; Elliott 1971; Weinbender 2003). The research conducted at Métis wintering sites in the 1970s and 1980s can be summarized as being of two general types (Supernant 2018). Since much of the research was driven by concerns about long-term impacts to sites (Doll et al. 1988), there was a focus on gathering as much information about the sites as possible, leading to reports on the historical and archaeological findings with limited interpretations (Doll et al. 1988; Elliott 1971). Research on overwintering sites in Saskatchewan conducted by David Burley and colleagues in the 1980s led to some interpretation about the material culture and architecture (Burley 1989a, 1989b, 2000; Burley et al. 1992). The main framework for analysis, however, was creolization and hybridity (e.g., in architecture) and attempts to explore how Métis people, especially women, sought social status through emulation of their European kin in material culture choices. Therefore, initial research on Métis archaeology was based on the foundational premise that mixedness and creolization defined Métis identity and could be found in the material record of Métis lifeways (Burley 1989a, 1989b; Burley and Horsfall 1989; Burley et al.1992). This early archaeology was also done by non-Métis people and had little to no involvement of contemporary Métis communities.

From hybridity to relationality The theoretical frameworks of creolization and hybridity applied to Métis archaeology (Burley 2000) echoed research in Métis history at the time. However, as more Métis scholars have begun to engage in research, new frameworks have emerged based in Métis ways of knowing and being. In 2012, I started the Exploring Métis Identity Through Archaeology (EMITA) project to test whether there were material correlates in the archaeological record for Métis identity and ethnogenesis and to explore where, when, and how Métis formed distinct communities. As the project has evolved, the focus shifted from finding Métis ethnogenesis to understanding the relationship between Métis ways of knowing, ways of being, and ways of life, as reflected in the archaeological and historical traces. It is out of this shift that I have created a theoretical and methodological framework for Métis archaeology, based on threads that weave together into Métis kinscapes, or the constellation of relations in which Métis are embedded (Macdougall 2017). Three of these threads—geography, mobility, and kinship—were identified as essential components to Métis ways of being by Macdougall and colleagues (2012). I add two additional strands that have direct correlates in the archaeological record—Métis economies and Métis daily life. These five threads each relate to the archaeological and historical record in specific ways, but it is in weaving them together that a full, relational understanding of a Métis way of being in the past is achieved (Figure 23.2). An important contemporary symbol in Métis communities 362

From hybridity to relationality

Figure 23.2 Representation of the various archaeological and historical threads in the sash framework. Source: Author’s creation.

is the voyager sash, where threads are woven together using finger weaving to create a long, versatile piece of fabric that would have been used in the past for a variety of purposes. There is a standard weave, shown graphically in Figure 23.2, although certain families have their own variations of color of thread and patterns of weaving (Farrell Racette 2004). Métis gatherings and cultural events often involve members of the Métis community wearing the sash to denote their connections to the past and present. I use the sash here as a metaphor, where the threads of history and archaeology are woven into a pattern that illuminates Métis ways of life in the nineteenth century.

Métis geographies and landscape First, taking a landscape approach to Métis archaeology means considering the traces of Métis activity across a diverse set of sites and places, not just at bounded archaeological sites or wellknown historical locations. Métis people did not just live in cabins during the winter; they engaged with a broad range of environments, places, and people on a seasonal, yearly, and lifetime basis. A Métis landscape encompasses a set of relations with lands, waters, and nonhuman beings, as well as other humans. The archaeological record encodes elements of the Métis cultural landscape, concentrated in certain places but expansive as well. Historically, the Métis homeland extends over a large portion of what is now known as Canada, stretching from the western side of the Great Lakes to the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, south to Montana and the Dakotas, and north to Great Slave Lake and the Mackenzie River in what is now the Northwest Territories (see Figure 23.1). The scope and scale of the homeland make tracing Métis families and communities in the archaeological record a daunting task, but geography is an essential thread in weaving together an understanding of Métis lifeways. The expansive and varied geographies contained within the Métis homeland impacted how different Métis families and communities lived, what they ate, and how they chose to move through different landscapes. An example illustrating the interplay between a broad Métis homeland and deep rootedness of families to place comes from an analysis of demographic records through time at Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta (see Figure 23.1). Lac Ste. Anne was and is a very significant Métis place of pilgrimage, where many Métis gather for the feast of Saint Anne every July and have been doing so since the 1800s. There were also many Métis families who settled there, some of whom still live on the original river lot land plots today. The histories of these families are closely connected 363

Kisha Supernant

to this specific place, but members of these families traveled throughout the homeland during their lifetimes, as demonstrated by mapping where these family members are recorded through time in demographic records. Birth, marriage, scrip,1 census, and death locations and years were collected for 71 Métis individuals from five Métis families born between 1813–1885 and who had connections to Lac Ste. Anne. The locations noted in the records for everyone were entered into a table and imported into ArcGIS Pro 2.5, and counts for each type of record (e.g., birth location) were generated and mapped using heatmap symbology (Supernant 2020). In general, the data demonstrate a consistent connection to Lac Ste. Anne and nearby St. Albert by the Métis families in the study. A large majority of the individuals mapped (n = 51, 72 percent) were born in Lac Ste. Anne, with the remaining individuals being born primarily in what is now the province of Alberta. Through the lifetime of the individuals, two trends emerge. Approximately half of the individuals in the study (n = 37, 52 percent) only ever appear in the records in the regions around Lac Ste. Anne, St. Albert, and Edmonton, including for census data, scrip address, and scrip location. A second group never are recorded further than 300 km from Lac Ste. Anne (n = 20, 28 percent); all these individuals are only recorded at locations in Alberta, ranging as far as Calgary. Therefore, 57 of the 71 individuals (80 percent) included in the study were never recorded outside of Alberta in the archival records consulted. The remaining individuals (n = 15, 21 percent) travelled widely throughout the Métis homeland, being recorded as far north as the Mackenzie River, as far east as St. Boniface (now in Winnipeg), Manitoba, and as far south as Montana. One other variable I considered was the number of places at which Métis individuals were recorded, to explore the relationship between distance traveled and places recorded. Most individuals were never recorded in more than three places (n = 56, 79 percent) and only six individuals (8 percent) were recorded in five places. One individual was only recorded at Lac Ste. Anne, and no individuals were recorded at more than five places (Table 23.1). The results, without about half of the individuals in the study being only recorded around the triangle of Lac Ste. Anne, St. Albert, and Edmonton throughout their lifetimes, shows the importance of specific places and regions to Métis families (Supernant 2020:14). The results also show great mobility for some Métis individuals and families connected to Lac Ste. Anne, with some traveling far to the north, east, and south throughout their lifetimes. Several of these individuals were recorded at far distant locations before returning to the Lac Ste. Anne region, while others spent most of their lives in other parts of the homeland. In the next section, I turn to some other forms of analysis to explore connections between Métis geographies, landscapes, and mobility.

Métis mobility One of the hallmarks of the Métis is mobility across expansive landscapes. Oral and written histories indicate some Métis families travelled well over 1,000 km (600 miles) in a season on a Table 23.1 Average distance and number of places traveled by Métis in their lifetimes. Number of individuals

Average distance

Number of places

1 29 26 9 6

0 km 105 km 194 km 474 km 606 km

1 place 2 places 3 places 4 places 5 places

364

From hybridity to relationality

regular basis (Carpenter 1977), where others had more stability, as discussed earlier. Because of the tensions between mobility and rootedness, the material traces of the Métis can be elusive. There has been a tendency to use mobility to argue that the Métis were ungrounded and untethered, never long enough in one place to call it home (St-Onge and Podruchny 2012). The Red River cart, a Métis creation used to address the challenges of moving goods and people across the prairies in variable conditions, is an iconic symbol of Métis identity. These carts, pulled by horses or oxen, marked the prairie landscape across huge swaths of land, making life on the trail an important part of Métis identity. One of the ways to explore Métis mobility is through connecting the historical record of the use of these trail systems by Métis through written accounts, early maps, and the physical remains of trail systems. Many of the historical trails used by the Métis became major roads and highways in the twentieth century, but some smaller trails are still detectable on the land today (McCormack 2017). Archaeological sites in Canada are typically defined through the presence of material culture such as artifacts or features, although there is precedent for cultural landscapes and historically important trails being protected. For Métis communities, trails are an important part of material and cultural heritage. They demonstrate where and how Métis families moved through the diverse landscapes of western Canada to connect important places of settlement, whether fur trade forts, river lots, wintering sites, bison hunting locations, or campsites. Some of these places would have had more extensive material traces, but all were important parts of Métis lifeways. In previous work (Supernant 2017), I tested GIS-based least cost path models against the heuristic of known historical trails, concluding that current analytical methods are unable to capture the complex and culturally specific landscape knowledge of the Métis across space and both short-term (e.g., seasons) and long-term temporal scales. Further work to refine and create GIS models attentive to Métis ways of knowing are currently underway. Another method of engaging with connection to place through mobility is tracing where families move through the seasons, years, and through lifetimes, as discussed in the above section on landscape. Historical data are limited because they capture moments in time (births, marriages, deaths, etc.), but demographic through time data can demonstrate longer-term movement scales. In the research related to Lac Ste. Anne, I explored the average distance traveled for individuals and families over their lifetimes. For the 71 individuals in the study, the longest distance traveled from the site of Lac Ste. Anne through their lifetimes as captured in the historical record ranged from 30 km–1,398 km. The individual who traveled most was recorded at locations traveled a minimum of 4,140 km in their lifetime. The places where Métis individuals are found throughout the historical documentation is also a valuable tool in locating archaeological sites that have a Métis component. However, what is lacking from these records are the seasonal and short-term movements due to various elements of Métis ways of life, including trading, bison hunting, trapping, and pilgrimages.

Métis economies Métis economies, including bison hunting, pemmican making, trading, farming, and other merchant-based activities, show up in the archaeological record and provide a way of capturing the diversity of Métis life during the nineteenth century. In the historical record, Métis are closely connected with the economies of the fur trade (Innis 1999; Ray 1978), moving goods between fur trade forts, providing food, and building and maintaining the forts themselves. After the merger of the Northwest Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1821, many Métis took to supplying pemmican, a high-density and long-lasting food made of dried meat, fat, and berries that was an important part of provisioning the forts (Clark 1983). The period between 365

Kisha Supernant

1821–1880 was one of increasing focus of Métis folks on bison hunting, both in the summer, from important settlements at Red River and Pembina, and, as bison populations dwindled, more and more bison hunting was undertaken in the winter. Most archaeological research on the Métis has focused on the bison hunting economy at overwintering sites (Burley 1989a, 1989b; Burley et al. 1992; Doll et al. 1988). At two wintering sites, Buffalo Lake in central Alberta and Chimney Coulee in southwestern Saskatchewan (see Figure 23.1), excavations revealed a faunal assemblage consisting of diverse fauna, with the largest category being fragmented generic mammal bone (Table 23.2). Based on the historical records connecting overwintering sites with winter bison hunting, we can infer that a majority of the ungulate long bones are likely from Bison bison. The predominance of Bison bison among identifiable specimens supports this interpretation, although there are smaller amounts of other ungulates (moose, elk, deer). Bison long bone would have been boiled for marrow to extract fat for pemmican production, both to feed families at the wintering site and to trade to the Hudson’s Bay Company (Colpitts 2014). Previous work on butchery patterns at the Buffalo Lake wintering site support the hypothesis that the fragmented long bone was purposefully broken. There is also a diversity of small mammals and fish, including muskrat, a known Métis delicacy (Doll et al. 1988). Future work on the faunal assemblage should explore how much bison was consumed by Métis winterers and how much was kept for trade. While the archaeological record does show strong evidence of bison hunting as an important activity, broader connections to the economic world can been seen through material traces of trading. Most of the items found at wintering sites would have been sourced from the Hudson’s Bay Company, although sites in southern Saskatchewan also show trading connections to Fort Benton, Montana (Elliott 1971). These items show how the Métis, while connected to local places, were also intertwined with an increasingly global economy in the nineteenth century. One of the characteristics of Métis wintering sites is the presence of transfer-printed ware ceramics, found in abundance at all sites that have been excavated (Burley 1989b; Burley et al. 1992; Doll et al. 1988; Elliott 1971). These ceramics, in the form of plates, bowls, and teacups, were primarily produced in factories in England and shipped across to fur trading forts (Burley 1989b; Jones 2019). Previous researchers such as Burley have questioned why Métis overwinterers brought delicate ceramics along with them out onto the prairie. His argument is that Métis women were emulating their European cousins and status signaling through the acquisition and use of these ceramics (Burley 1989b). Jones (2019) explored other possible explanations for Métis use of ceramics, including their easy availability, their aesthetic qualities, and the predominance of tea culture among Métis. Regardless of their internal meaning, these ceramics show how Métis were consumers of goods from far distant places and were embedded in larger economic patterns, both locally and globally,

Table 23.2 Counts and percentages of identifiable fauna from Chimney Coulee and Buffalo Lake wintering sites. Chimney Coulee

Buffalo Lake

 

Count

Percent

Count

Percent

Bison bison Generic mammal Small mammal Fish Total ID

78 428 40 70 616

12.7% 69.5% 6.5% 11.4% 100.0%

206 490 23 2 721

28.6% 68.0% 3.2% 0.3% 100.0%

366

From hybridity to relationality

providing an important perspective on Métis lifeways in the nineteenth century. These interconnections can also be seen in other elements of Métis daily life, as discussed in the next section.

Métis daily life One of archaeology’s greatest strengths is its ability to reveal the daily lives of individuals in the past through what they leave behind. Métis daily life can be seen through patterning within material culture and the belongings of Métis ancestors. Instead of examining the hybridity or mixedness of materials within Métis material culture, which has been the focus of other studies (Burley 1989b; Burley et al. 1992; McLeod 1985), I focus on how different important Métis cultural practices are evident in the archaeological record. These include dances, weddings, social gatherings, religious practice, and dress, which, while an important cultural marker (Farrell Racette 2004), may not be visible in the archaeological record using typical recovery methods. The belongings found at Métis wintering sites provide insight to elements of daily life of Métis families that do not often enter into the historical record. For example, one of the largest artifact categories found at Métis sites are drawn glass seed beads of various colors, purchased from the Hudson’s Bay Company posts and manufactured in eastern Europe (Farrell Racette 2004). Métis women were known for elaborate flower beadwork patterns on moccasins, vests, jackets, gauntlets, leggings, and fire bags. These flowery pieces were tyically worn by men and were distinctive enough that their neighbors called them the flower beadwork people (Farrell Racette 2004, 4). When collection methods are designed to find these beads by using very small mesh screens for water screening of sediments, they are by far the dominant category of belongings found at Métis wintering sites (Table 23.3). The practice of beading, along with other domestic activities, can been seen through the spatial patterning of belongings found in Métis cabins. At the Chimney Coulee site, where our excavations revealed the remnants of a Métis cabin with clearly delineated walls, the spatial patterns Table 23.3 Artifact counts and percentages from the Chimney Coulee and Buffalo Lake Métis wintering sites. Chimney Coulee 

Category

Count

Percent

 

Beads

1,832

71.1%

Metal Ceramic Glass Lithics

168 180 272 126

6.5% 7.0% 10.6% 4.9%

11,706

75.3%

1,802 392 562 498 302 17 125 152

11.6% 2.5% 3.6% 3.2% 1.9% 0.1% 0.8% 1.0%

Buffalo Lake Beads Other personal Architecture Commerce/industry Household Lithics Transportation Glass Metal

367

Kisha Supernant

help to indicate areas of the cabin used for different activities. Beads, while found throughout the excavation, are concentrated near the chimney and fireplace. In dark winter months with limited daylight hours, we can imagine the women making beadwork close to the warmth and light of the fire. Other patterns in the material culture, such as personal items, illustrate other elements of daily life of Métis families. Weaving this thread into an understanding of Métis history helps expand knowledge of Métis ways of being and connect the past to the present.

Métis relations A Métis framework for understanding history must center kinship and the interconnected webs of relations between Métis families, their First Nations and settler kin, and the other-than-human beings of the Métis homeland. Here I draw on the work of colleagues such as Brenda Macdougall (2010, 2014, 2017) who are exploring the historical record of Métis kinship and genealogy, looking not just at a typical family tree but rather looking at genealogy through webs of interconnected kin that center on Métis women. More broadly, relations sit at the heart of Métis ways of being and the framework applied here. As the pattern of the sash only emerges through the process of weaving the threads together, a Métis way of understanding history through the archaeological record sits in the relations between the places of the ancestors, the belongings left behind, and the lands and waters that hold these places and belongings today. The fundamental distinction between all the non-Métis ways of theorizing Métis identity and the Métis way of understanding ourselves lies in this interconnected and relational space. It is not possible to understand a Métis way of life by dividing up the material culture created by the ancestors into discrete categories based on form, function, and material to statistically compare against First Nations or settler patterns and arguing we are more or less like either of those groups (Burley 1989a, 1989b, 2000; McLeod 1985). This reductionist framework fails to understand that Métis ancestral places and belongings are interwoven into relations, in their material patterns but also in the relations between the ancestors, their belongings, and their descendants in the present. An example of how these externally imposed categories bely the constellation of relations across space and time in which Métis people are enmeshed is through a teaching I received from beadwork. In the summer of 2017, my graduate student Eric Tebby was excavating a Métis cabin at Chimney Coulee when he uncovered an extremely rare example of an intact beadwork pattern (Figure 23.3). I immediately rushed down to join him in the field so we could remove this pattern from the earth in as intact a form as possible. We successfully removed and conserved the pattern, applying various compounds to solidify the soil. The process of conservation required certain laboratory protocols, including use of a fume hood and protective materials. After conservation, the pattern was stored in the lab. Over time, however, I could not ignore a nagging feeling that the pattern should be somewhere else. When I finally retrieved it, I brought it back to my office and placed it with traditional medicines such as sage and tobacco. The deep sense of relief I felt in having the pattern nearby served to show me that this was not an artifact; rather, it was my relation, and I was meeting my relational responsibilities to the belonging and to the ancestors by honoring it with medicines and care. Now, when my Métis colleagues and relations come to see me, we visit with the pattern. Métis artist and beader Krista Leddy shared her teachings that patterns of beadwork, not the beads themselves, hold the spirit of those who created them and the spirit of the plant or animal being depicted. This beadwork has become a great teacher to me in terms of how to be a good relation to the belongings of my ancestors. It has power to connect the past and present, not because it is some hybrid between First Nations and European material culture but because it is Métis.

368

From hybridity to relationality

Figure 23.3 Beadwork from Chimney Coulee Métis wintering site with medicines. Source: Photo by the author.

Rearticulating Indigenous identities in colonial contexts Archaeological research on change and resilience of Indigenous identities in colonial contexts has drawn on a diverse set of theories to explore how the material and historical record demonstrates the persistent presence of Indigenous communities through time. The enduring identities of many Indigenous Nations in the face of attempted genocide and erasure is remarkable, but in some cases, new identities emerged, including the Métis Nation. Previous archaeological research on the Métis was reductionist, centering either our hybridity or our desire to be like our European relatives. In this chapter, I have argued that to frame the Métis as a mixed-blood people is problematic and remains entrenched in external, colonial structures of racialized categories. A Métis approach to archaeology instead centers geographies, mobility, economies, and daily life woven together in relation, reflective of a Métis ontology, a way of being marked in the land through the material traces of our peoplehood and nationhood. It is the emergence of this new way of being in relation with lands, waters, and human and other-than-human kin that makes the Métis a distinct people.

Note 1 Northwest Scrip was a Government of Canada program designed to address Métis land rights after the Métis were defeated in the 1885 resistance (http://albertametis.com/2018/08/rcmr-scrip-booklet/). Eligible Métis individuals could receive either land grants or cash payments in lieu of land. The program mostly served to dispossess and further marginalize Métis families, but scrip records provide important demographic and spatial data and form a part of how contemporary Métis families demonstrate connection to historical Métis communities.

369

Kisha Supernant

References cited Acheraïou, Amar. 2011. Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Andersen, Chris. 2008. “From Nation to Population: The Racialisation of ‘Métis’ in the Canadian Census.” Nations and Nationalism 14 (2): 347–368. Andersen, Chris. 2011a. “‘I’m Métis, What’s Your Excuse?’: On the Optics and the Ethics of the Misrecognition of Métis in Canada.” Aboriginal Policy Studies 1 (2): 161–165. Andersen, Chris. 2011b. “Moya ‘Tipimsook (‘The People Who Aren’t Their Own Bosses’): Racialization and the Misrecognition of ‘Métis’ in Upper Great Lakes Ethnohistory.” Ethnohistory 58 (1): 37–63. Andersen, Chris. 2014. “Métis”: Race, Recognition, and the Struggle for Indigenous Peoplehood. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Atalay, Sonya. 2006. “Indigenous Archaeology as Decolonizing Practice.” American Indian Quarterly 30 (3–4): 280–310. Barth, Fredrik. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Boston: Little Brown. Baxter, Jane Eva. 2008. “The Archaeology of Childhood.” Annual Review of Anthropology 37: 159–175. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Burley, David V. 1989a. “Flaked Stone Technology and the 1870s Hivernant Metis: A Question of Context.” Canadian Journal of Archaeology 13: 151–163. Burley, David V. 1989b. “Function, Meaning and Context: Ambiguities in Ceramic Use by the Hivernant.” Historical Archaeology 23 (1): 97–106. Burley, David V. 2000. “Creolization and Late Nineteenth Century Metis Vernacular Log Architecture on the South Saskatchewan River.” Historical Archaeology 34 (3): 27–35. Burley, David V., and Gayel A. Horsfall. 1989. “Vernacular Houses and Farmsteads of the Canadian Metis.” Journal of Cultural Geography 10 (1): 19–33. Burley, David V., Gayel A. Horsfall, and John Brandon. 1992. Structural Considerations of Métis Ethnicity: An Archaeological, Architectural, and Historical Study. Vermillion: University of South Dakota Press. Card, Jeb J., ed. 2013. The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture. Occasional Paper No. 39. Carbondale: Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University. Carpenter, Jock. 1977. Fifty Dollar Bride: Marie Rose Smith, A Chronicle of Métis Life in the 19th Century. Sidney, BC: Gray’s Publishing. Cipolla, Craig N. 2013. “Native American Historical Archaeology and the Trope of Authenticity.” Historical Archaeology 47 (3): 12–23. Clark, Leland W. 1983. “The Place of the Metis Within the Agricultural Economy of the Red River During the 1840’s and the 1850’s.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 3 (1): 69–84. Colpitts, George. 2014. Pemmican Empire: Food, Trade, and the Last Bison Hunts in the North American Plains, 1780–1882. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Devine, Heather. 2004. The People Who Own Themselves: Aboriginal Ethnogenesis in a Canadian Family, 1660–1900. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Doll, Maurice F. V., Robert S. Kidd, and J. P. Day. 1988. The Buffalo Lake Metis Site: A Late Nineteenth Century Settlement in the Parkland of Central Alberta. Edmonton: Historical Resources Division. Doroszenko, Dena. 2009. “Exploration, Exploitation, Expansion, and Settlement: Historical Archaeology in Canada.” In International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by David Gaimster and Teresita Majewski, 507–524. New York: Springer. Elliott, Jack. 1971. “Hivernant Archaeology in the Cypress Hills.” Master’s Thesis, University of Calgary. Emberling, Geoff. 1997. “Ethnicity in Complex Societies: Archaeological Perspectives.” Journal of Archaeological Research 5 (4): 295–344. Farrell Racette, Sherry. 2004. “Sewing Ourselves Together: Clothing, Decorative Arts and the Expression of Metis and Half Breed Identity.” PhD Dissertation, University of Manitoba. Foster, John E. 1978. “The Metis: The People and the Term.” Prairie Forum 3 (1): 79–90. Franklin, Maria, and Garrett Fesler, eds. 1999. Historical Archaeology, Identity Formation, and the Interpretation of Ethnicity. Williamsburg: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Research Publications. Fried, Morton. 1967. The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology. New York: Random House. Gaudry, Adam. 2013. “The Métis-ization of Canada: The Process of Claiming Louis Riel, Métissage, and the Métis People as Canada’s Mythical Origin.” Aboriginal Policy Studies 2 (2): 64–87.

370

From hybridity to relationality Gaudry, Adam, and Darryl Leroux. 2017. “White Settler Revisionism and Making Métis Everywhere: The Evocation of Métissage in Quebec and Nova Scotia.” Critical Ethnic Studies 3 (1): 116–142. Gero, Joan M., and Margaret W. Conkey, eds. 1991. Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Gosden, Chris. 2012. “Post-Colonial Archaeology.” In Archaeology Theory Today, edited by Ian Hodder, 251–266. Cambridge: Polity Press. Haley, Brian D. 2005. “How Spaniards Became Chumash and Other Tales of Ethnogenesis.” American Anthropologist 107 (3): 432–445. Hickerson, Nancy P. 1996. “Ethnogenesis in the South Plains: Jumano to Kiowa.” In History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492–1992, edited by Jonathan David Hill, 70–89. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Hill, Jonathan David, ed. 1996a. History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492–1992. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Hill, Jonathan David. 1996b. “Introduction: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492–1992.” In History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492–1992, edited by Jonathan David Hill, 1–19. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Howey, Meghan. 2011. “Colonial Encounters, European Kettles, and the Magic of Mimesis in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century Indigenous Northeast and Great Lakes.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 15 (3): 329–357. Hu, Di. 2013. “Approaches to the Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Past and Emergent Perspectives.” Journal of Archaeological Research 21 (4): 371–402. Innis, Harold Adams. 1999. The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jenkins, Richard. 1994. “Rethinking Ethnicity: Identity, Categorization and Power.” Ethnic & Racial Studies 17 (2): 197–223. Jones, Riley. 2019. “Hivernant Métis Consumption of Ceramics: Consideration in Archaeology, Abundance, and Aesthetics.” Undergraduate Honours Thesis, University of Alberta. Jones, Sian. 1997. The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present. New York: Routledge. Jones, Sian. 1999. “Historical Categories and the Praxis of Identity: The Interpretation of Ethnicity in Historical Archaeology.” In Historical Archaeology: Back from the Edge, edited by Pedro Paulo A. Funari, Martin Hall and Sian Jones, 219–232. London: Routledge. Jordan, Kurt A. 2009. “Colonies, Colonialism, and Cultural Entanglement: The Archaeology of Postcolumbian Intercultural Relations.” In International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by David Gaimster and Teresita Majewski, 31–49. New York: Springer. Leroux, Darryl. 2019. Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Liebmann, Matthew. 2008. “Postcolonial Cultural Affiliation: Essentialism, Hybridity, and NAGPRA.” In Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Umza Z. Rizvi, 73–90. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Liebmann, Matthew, and Uzma Rizvi. 2008. “Introduction: The Intersections of Archaeology and Postcolonial Studies.” In Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi, 1–20. Lanham, MD: AtlaMira Press. Lightfoot, Kent G., Antoinette Martinez, and Ann M. Schiff. 1998. “Daily Practice and Material Culture in Pluralistic Social Settings: An Archaeological Study of Culture Change and Persistence from Fort Ross, California.” American Antiquity 63 (2): 199–222. Macdougall, Brenda. 2010. One of the Family: Metis Culture in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Saskatchewan. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Macdougall, Brenda. 2014. “Speaking of Metis: Reading Family Life into Colonial Records.” Ethnohistory 61 (1): 27–56. Macdougall, Brenda. 2017. “Wahkootowin as Methodology: How Archival Records Reveal a Métis Kinscape.” Paper presented at the Daniels Conference: In and Beyond the Law, Rupertsland Centre for Métis Research, University of Alberta. Macdougall, Brenda, Carolyn Podruchny, and Nicole J. M. St-Onge. 2012. “Introduction: Cultural Mobility and the Contours of Difference.” In Contours of a People: Metis Family, Mobility, and History, edited by Nicole J. M. St-Onge, Carolyn Podruchny, and Brenda Macdougall, 1–21. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

371

Kisha Supernant Macdougall, Brenda, and Nicole J. M. St-Onge. 2013. “Rooted in Mobility: Metis Buffalo-Hunting Brigades.” Manitoba History 71: 21–32. Martindale, Andrew. 2009. “Entanglement and Tinkering: Structural History in the Archaeology of the Northern Tsimshian.” Journal of Social Archaeology 9 (1): 59–91. Martinez, Desireé Reneé. 2014. “Indigenous Archaeologies.” In Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, edited by Claire Smith, 3772–3777. New York: Springer. McCormack, Patricia A. 2017. “Walking the Land: Aboriginal Trails, Cultural Landscapes, and Archaeological Studies for Impact Assessment.” Archaeologies 13 (1): 110–135. McLeod, David K. 1985. “A Study of Metis Ethnicity in the Red River Settlement: Quantification and Pattern Recognition in Red River Archaeology.” Master’s Thesis, University of Manitoba. Mullins, Paul R., and Robert Paynter. 2000. “Representing Colonizers: An Archaeology of Creolization, Ethnogenesis, and Indigenous Material Culture among the Haida.” Historical Archaeology 34 (3): 73–84. Nicholas, George P. 2008. “Native Peoples and Archaeology.” In Encyclopedia of Archaeology, edited by D. Pearsall, 1660–1669. New York: Academic. Nicholas, George P., and Thomas D. Andrews. 1997. “Indigenous Archaeology in the Postmodern World.” In At a Crossroads: Archaeology and First Peoples in Canada, edited by George P. Nicholas and Thomas D. Andrews, 1–18. Burnaby, BC: Simon Fraser University Press. Payne, Michael. 2004. The Fur Trade in Canada: An Illustrated History. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company. Peterson, Jean, and Jennifer S. H. Brown, eds. 1985. The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Metis in North America. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Ray, Arthur J. 1978. “History and Archaeology of the Northern Fur Trade.” American Antiquity 43 (1): 26–34. Ray, Arthur J. 1998. Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role as Trappers, Hunters, and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay, 1660–1870, 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Robinson, David. 2013. “Polyvalent Metaphors in South-Central California Missionary Processes.” American Antiquity 78 (2): 302–321. Ross, Alexander. 1856. The Red River Settlement: Its Rise, Progress, and Present State. London: Smith, Elder and Company. Rothschild, Nan. 2006. “Colonialism, Material Culture, and Identity in the Rio Grande and Hudson River Valleys.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 10 (1): 72–107. Rutecki, Dawn M., and Chelsea Blackmore. 2016. “Towards an Inclusive Queer Archaeology.” The SAA Archaeological Record 16 (1): 9–11. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Sattler, Richard A. 1996. “Remnants, Renegades, and Runaways: Seminole Ethnogenesis Reconsidered.” In History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492–1992, edited by Jonathan David Hill, 36–69. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Schurr, Mark R. 2010. “Archaeological Indices of Resistance: Diversity in the Removal Period Potawatomi of the Western Great Lakes.” American Antiquity 75 (1): 44–60. Sealey, Bruce D., and Antoine S. Lussier. 1975. The Metis: Canada’s Forgotten People. Winnipeg: Manitoba Metis Federation Press. Silliman, Stephen W. 2001. “Agency, Practical Politics and the Archaeology of Culture Contact.” Journal of Social Archaeology 1 (2): 190–209. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005. “Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America.” American Antiquity 70 (1): 55–74. Silliman, Stephen W. 2009. “Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England.” American Antiquity 74 (2): 211–230. Silliman, Stephen W. 2010. “Indigenous Traces in Colonial Spaces: Archaeologies of Ambiguity, Origin, and Practice.” Journal of Social Archaeology 10: 28–58. Silliman, Stephen W. 2015. “A Requiem for Hybridity? The Problem with Frankensteins, Purées, and Mules.” Journal of Social Archaeology 15 (3): 277–298. Southwell-Wright, William. 2013. “Past Perspectives: What Can Archaeology Offer Disability Studies?” In Emerging Perspectives on Disability Studies, edited by Matthew Wappett and Katrina Arndt, 67–95. London: Springer. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, edited by Rosalind Morris, 21–78. New York: Columbia University Press. St-Onge, Nicole J. M., and Carolyn Podruchny. 2012. “Scuttling Along a Spider’s Web: Mobility and Kinship in Metis Ethnogenesis.” In Contours of a People: Metis Family, Mobility, and History, edited by Nicole J. M. St-Onge, Carolyn Podruchny, and Brenda Macdougall, 59–92. Norman: University of Oklahoma.

372

From hybridity to relationality Supernant, Kisha. 2017. “Modeling Métis Mobility? Evaluating Least Cost Paths and Indigenous Landscapes in the Canadian West.” Journal of Archaeological Science 84: 63–73. Supernant, Kisha. 2018. “Archaeology of the Métis.” In Historical Archaeology Oxford Handbook Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935413.013.70. Supernant, Kisha. 2020. Nodes, Networks, and Names: Narrative Report for Rupertsland Center for Métis Research Fellowship, 2017–2018. Report for Rupertsland Center for Métis Research. Edmonton: University of Alberta. TallBear, Kim. 2013a. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. TallBear, Kim. 2013b. “Genomic Articulations of Indigeneity.” Social Studies of Science 43 (4): 509–533. Teillet, Jean. 2019. The North-West is our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel’s People, the Metis Nation. Toronto: HarperCollins. Trigger, Bruce G. 1994. “Ethnicity: An Appropriate Concept for Archaeology?” Fennoscadanavia Archaeology 11: 100–103. Van Kirk, Sylvia. 1983. Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670–1870. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Voss, Barbara L. 2000. “Feminisms, Queer Theories, and the Archaeological Study of Past Sexualities.” World Archaeology 32 (2): 180–192. Voss, Barbara L. 2008. The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weinbender, Kimberley D. 2003. “Petite Ville: A Spatial Assessment of a Metis Hivernant Site.” Master’s Thesis, University of Saskatchewan.

373

24 BATTLING THE ALAMO Toward preservation and protection of Coahuiltecan legacies and camposantos Alston V. Thoms, Ramon Juan Vasquez, and Art Martinez de Vara

Mission San Antonio de Valero is located in downtown San Antonio and known globally as “The Alamo,” Texas’s 1836 Shrine of Liberty. Texas’s General Land Office owns and manages the popular site visited annually by more than a million tourists from around the world. Less-known attributes render the Alamo a physical and historical microcosm for the nature and consequences of mission-based colonialism and ensuing nationalism in settler countries. Those other attributes include 300 years of Spanish, Mexican, Texan, and American archives and written history, with multiple interpretations, reliable archaeological evidence of American Indian occupations within and near the mission extending back to the Late Pleistocene, and, importantly, diverse oral histories and heritage-preservation interests that continue to the present. Persistent among those are calls from and programs presented through self-organized, family-based, tribal communities whose members trace biological and cultural heritage to the region’s Indigenous people who underwent missionization in San Antonio and to the south during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the present case study, biological and heritage ties are to peoples collectively known as Coahuiltecans, hunter-gatherers who inhabited South Texas and northeast Mexico for millennia and at the dawn of the region’s written history, some 500 years ago (Thoms 2007a). Several tribal communities in San Antonio and the vicinity trace their collective ancestry to Coahuiltecans, but none is a federally recognized tribe (Kitchens 2016; Logan 2001; Maestas 2003). Some members of Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation (Tap Pilam) trace their biological ancestry directly to Coahuiltecan individuals who lived and died at Mission Valero. Tap Pilam is among the key players in an ongoing socioeconomic controversy about whether and how far Mission Valero’s colonial-era camposanto (i.e., cemetery) extends into Alamo Plaza. As per Texas’ Health and Safety Code, if a cemetery exists beneath Alamo Plaza, its presence legally affects improvements—extensive renovation and preservation work, including archaeological excavations—presently underway at the Alamo. There is no federal cultural-resource oversight or permit required for the multiyear project (2015–2020) undertaken in conjunction with San Antonio’s 300th anniversary. As per a memorandum of agreement between the city of San Antonio and the Texas General Land Office, Alamo Trust, Incorporated, manages the $450 million project (City of San Antonio 2019).

374

Battling the Alamo

This state and privately funded socioeconomic endeavor quickly developed into a virtual battle for the protection of Mission Valero’s camposanto, along with “culturally unidentifiable human remains” therein, as per the generic terminology in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990. This battle also takes place on an uneven field. Nonfederally recognized tribes, including Tap Pilam, represent NAGPRA’s lower rank of potential claimants regardless of whether historical circumstances indicate otherwise. Consequently, in some places and under a diversity of circumstances, “thousands of deceased individuals remain separated from their relatives, held captive, in part, by modern notions of association” (Bruchac 2010, 5). It is toward mitigation of such inherent inequality that America’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation suggests, “when historic properties of religious and cultural significance to them may be affected, federal agencies should remember that non-federally recognized tribes can and often should also be involved” (emphasis added; Advisory Council on Historic Preservation 2018). The Texas Historical Commission’s guidance for consultation follows suit, albeit in a more nuanced fashion: “these groups may have valuable insight that pertains to specific projects. Moreover, nonfederally recognized tribes have a legal right to comment on projects as “interested parties” (emphasis added; Texas Historical Commission 2020). Reminiscent of the ongoing Alamo battle is a sociopolitical controversy that surrounded archaeological excavations at New York City’s African Burial Ground in the 1990s (Ayala 2017). The federal General Services Administration funded archaeological investigations in advance of constructing a new headquarters in downtown New York City. The building site coincided with the location of a historically documented mid-eighteenth-century “Negro Burial Ground,” and archaeological excavations confirmed its presence. Rapid removal of burials followed to minimize construction delays, albeit without any meaningful consultations with the city’s African American community. Minimal consultation occurred, ostensibly, because African American citizens who averred that investigations feature “African” perspectives and interpretations did not live near the cemetery. In response to public protests and international headlines, however, the General Services Administration formed an advisory council to represent descendant communities. The property was set aside as a permanent memorial. People from around the world visit it today as a healing place, “a point of connection for Africans and Americans, white or black” (Kelly and Thomas 2017, 301).

Sociopolitical contexts The concluding chapter in Kelly and Thomas’s (2017) popular introduction-to-archaeology textbook includes a subsection—“Refighting the Battle of the Alamo”—that exemplifies difficulties faced by archaeologists as they endeavor to interpret the past and inform a culturally diverse audience. It reviews a long-standing controversy between “Texan” and “Mexican” populations and their generalized perspectives on the historic site. Citing Brear (2010), Kelly and Thomas call for greater emphasis on multicultural perspectives: More than half of San Antonio’s current population is Hispanic, and many challenge the traditional heroic image of the Alamo. . . . Some members of San Antonio’s Hispanic community believed that additional research should be conducted at the Alamo— archaeological research that emphasizes not the short-lived 1836 battle, but rather the eighteenth-century mission period . . . and public interpretation . . . to highlight the peaceful Hispanic origins within the state of Texas. (Kelly and Thomas 2017, 347–348)

375

Alston V. Thoms et al.

Toward resisting and reversing Coahuiltecan extinction We expand upon Kelly and Thomas’s contention about the need for greater stakeholder diversity by further battling limitations of the Alamo’s popular story. We review ethnographic lifeways, colonial-era history, and its aftermath to establish contexts for discussions of anthropological and archaeological underpinnings of twenty-first-century efforts toward meaningful representation of historically disenfranchised Indigenous voices. We contend that Native Texans who enabled and endured the mission process, along with their descendants, find themselves among the people without history, disenfranchised by government policy yet again (Thoms 1999; Wolf 1982). Tap Pilam members perceive the present state-sponsored Alamo renovation project as propelled, in part, by weaponizing NAGPRA via empowerment of federally recognized tribes with no or comparatively minimal links to Mission Valero and its camposantos. That empowerment minimizes well-documented roles of Indigenous, albeit non-federally recognized, populations who maintained Mission Valero and helped found, provision, and protect San Antonio during the eighteenth century. It further diminishes the contributions of their descendants who continue, as citizens, to provision and protect the city, its missions, and the surrounding region to the present day (American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions 2019). In battling “The Alamo” with written and oral histories, along with archaeological data and legal arguments, we illustrate continuing systemic inequality, born of colonialism and perpetuated by “Jim Crow-Feather.” The reference here is to Indigenous peoples’ experience of structural racism, similar to America’s infamous Jim Crow laws that enabled and enforced racial segregation in the period between the legal abolition of African American slavery to the civil rights movements of the mid-twentieth century. Anti-racism responses continue to the present day, as evidenced by widespread Black Lives Matter and Black-Indigenous-People of Color (BIPOC) movements that endeavor to level socioeconomic and political playing fields. Coahuiltecans were the target population for eighteenth-century missionization in San Antonio and the vicinity. Historical, anthropological, and archaeological studies commonly conclude that missionization, along with diseases, enslavement, and warfare, led to Coahuiltecan extinction, culturally if not biologically. Consequently, non-Indians end up owning the past and telling the stories about it. Best-known stories feature a settler perspective, with Indigenous people’s contributions minimized and, inevitably, their inconsequential disappearance into the historical mists of Manifest Destiny and ensuing white nationalism. Representatives of Tap Pilam (Figure 24.1) reject assertions that they exemplify American Indian extinction at the hand of mission-based colonialism and actively resist their official NAGPRA status as lower-ranked Indigenous people.

Toward judicial pathways to cultural survival The underlying legal contentiousness, itself a consequence of colonialism, is whether there exists a cemetery in the Alamo Plaza area and, if so, whether Tap Pilam should have a meaningful voice in addressing cemetery-protection issues and related human remains recovery protocols. The plaza is within the Mission’s designated “historic” cemetery area, as per the Texas Historical Commission, but that designation is honorific, bereft of legal standing (Wolfe 2019). Recognition of a “known,” “abandoned,” or “unverified” cemetery, however, would restrict elements of renovation plans, including significant modifications to the local landscape, new construction, and commercial developments. “Known” and “abandoned” are self-explanatory terms. “Unverified cemetery,” as defined in the Texas Health and Safety Code, is: a location having some evidence of interment but in which the presence of one or more unmarked graves has not been verified by the Texas Historical Commission or a 376

Battling the Alamo

Figure 24.1 Photo of Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan tribal members gathered in front of Mission San Antonio de Valero, the Alamo, in 2015. Source: Courtesy of Raymond Hernandez.

person described by Section 711.0106(a), a cemetery keeper, a licensed funeral director, a medical examiner, a coroner, or a professional archeologist. (Texas Health and Safety Code 2020, Section 711.0111) According to the Code’s General Provisions Relating to Cemeteries (Chapter 711.004(a)(5)), improvements cannot be undertaken at a recognized unverified cemetery prior to identification, removal, and reburial or, alternatively, protection in place of all graves and associated human remains and associated funerary objects. To that point, Tap Pilam elder Raymond Hernandez filed an application in January 2020 for ofcial recognition of an unverified cemetery in Alamo Plaza and the vicinity. In May, members of the Texas Historical Commission’s archaeology committee voted unanimously to forward a motion, subsequently approved, that the Texas Historical Commission formally reject Hernandez’s cemetery application due to insufcient evidence (Bruseth 2020). Whether or not a cemetery exists in the plaza area, state agency representatives argue that Tap Pilam lacks legal standing in the decision-making process about protocols for the treatment of human remains. The state afforded legal standing only to federally recognized tribes. The General Land Office’s and the Texas Historical Commission’s stance triggered an ongoing federal civil rights lawsuit brought under the First (freedom of religion) and Fourteenth (equal protection) Amendments to the US Constitution. The filing in San Antonio’s Federal Court and related issues have been in the news for several years, as illustrated by a 2019 story in the San Antonio Express News titled “Lawsuit over Alamo burial grounds reflects wider ferment” (Ayala 2019). State agencies and their representatives promptly filed for dismissal of the federal case based on arguments that the groups lack legal standing and the state’s sovereign immunity from such legal actions (Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation v. Alamo Trust, Inc., No. 5:19-cv-01084-OLG (W.D. Tex 2019)). With continuing delays in judicial processes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, legal debates about the presence of an expansive camposanto and tribal representation remain unresolved as of July 2020. 377

Alston V. Thoms et al.

Coahuiltecans: ethnographic and historical contexts Anthropologists typically use the term Coahuiltecan and similar-sounding words in reference to autonomous groups of band-organized hunter-gatherers who occupied much of South Texas and northeast Mexico, notably the states of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas (Figure 24.2). Their homelands included the lower Rio Grande (i.e., Rio Bravo) drainage basin, southward to today’s Monclova, Monterey, and Ciudad Victoria, and the coastal plain portions of the Nueces, San Antonio, and Guadalupe river basins. Although their languages were diverse, many of these people spoke Coahuilteco either as their first or second language (Campbell 1983). During the early part of the eighteenth century, they also occupied portions of the lower Colorado and Brazos river basins (Campbell 1983; Newcomb 1961; Thoms 2007b). Coahuiltecans inhabited this vast region when Europeans arrived in the early 1500s and until the late 1700s, when a majority of those who survived the conquest, introduced diseases, and enslavement were “reduced” to Spanish missions (Campbell 1983; Griffen 1969; Hindes 1995; Kenmotsu et al. 2006; Newcomb 1961; Thoms 2001a). Reliable wild food resources included deer, small game, prickly pear, agave, and a variety of bulbs, tubers, nuts, and fruits. The people lived in temporary encampments, ranging in size from

Figure 24.2 Map of South Texas and northeast Mexico showing missions, presidios, settlements, and rivers in Coahuiltecan homelands (after Figure 3 in Thoms 2001b, 25). Source: Authors’ creation.

378

Battling the Alamo

a few families to as many as 2,000 individuals attending regional trade fairs (Campbell 1983; Foster 2008). They moved many times a year, often more than once a week, to keep pace with seasonally available foods (Thoms 2007b). Each family lived in a mat-covered, dome-shaped, quickly built and dismantled shelter several meters in diameter (Newcomb 1961, 29–57). Larger communal structures accommodated a few dozen people (Foster 2008). Texas archaeologists aver that Coahuiltecan lifeways represented a culmination of more than 11,000 years of successful adaptation to south Texas (e.g., Hester 1980, 38). The stories of the Native peoples are all the more remarkable when we consider that many of the Native peoples of the South Texas Plains may well have been direct lineal descendants of the Paleoindian peoples who came to the region more than 13,000 years before, and whose descendants stayed on. That fascinating inference is based on the linguistic diversity of the Coahuiltecan groups, and the fact that several of the region’s languages are unique and not closely related to any languages elsewhere in the world. Said otherwise, places where language “isolates” are spoken are likely places where people lived continuously for thousands of years. (Kenmotsu et al. 2006) Decades of archaeological excavations in the Alamo Plaza area yielded projectile points and other tools representative of Paleoindian, Archaic, late pre-Hispanic (i.e., late prehistoric), and early historic era lifeways. Chipped-stone arrow points and pottery types characteristic of the late pre-Hispanic era are technologically identical to those made and used by Coahuiltecans who were recruited to Mission Valero in the 1700s (Eaton 1980; Fox et al. 1976; Fox 1983; Lohse 1999; Meissner 1996). Griffen (1969) documented the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history of huntergatherers known collectively as Coahuileños, or alternatively as Cuaguilos, Coahuilas, and Quahuilas. Spanish administrators and military personnel used these and related terms in reference to bands of linguistically diverse hunter-gatherers from the frontier province of Coahuila. Colonial officials grouped once-autonomous bands, culturally similar in the sense of sharing similar settlement, subsistence, and social patterns, under a geographic rubric for administrative and military purposes. Anthropologists and archaeologists followed suit (Schuetz 1980a; Thoms 2007b). During the 1600s and early 1700s, Coahuileños consisted of a series of collectives or confederacies led by powerful capitans when fighting other amalgamated bands in the region or Spanish military forces, as well as in suing for peace (Griffen 1969). In 1676, the Archbishop of Guadalajara wrote that the “Coahuiles” informed Spanish officials about large permanent villages occupied by “Texas” farmers (i.e., Caddo) that might be good places to establish missions. He added that with “the Coahuiles once pacified, the Spaniards can reach the land of the Texas without touching the country of enemies” (Bolton 1912, 16). As late as the 1740s, the Coahuileños, together with the Tobosos, constituted the principal Native groups in the region, and they had a long history of rebellion against Spanish authority (Griffen 1969).

Coahuiltecans and others at Mission Valero and its camposantos By the mid-1700s, “recruited” Coahuiltecan groups labored at numerous missions in northeast Mexico and south Texas, with new missions planned, while others stood abandoned. These missions relied on agriculture, and none could be maintained unless recruits arrived “to replace [their] declining Indian population, which constituted the mission’s labor force” (Campbell 1983, 346). Missions established for surviving Coahuiltecans operated from only a few years to 379

Alston V. Thoms et al.

almost 100 years before they closed due to a lack of recruits, mission consolidation, or, by the 1790s, via official secularization. Religious services, however, often continued, officiated by parish priests, a practice maintained to the present day at all but one of San Antonio’s remaining missions, Mission Valero (Campbell 1983; Schuetz 1980a). All Spanish Colonial missions had cemeteries (i.e., camposantos); burials commonly occurred beneath the chapel floor and elsewhere on mission grounds, typically the area in front of or near to the chapel (Cox 1994). A plan-view map of Mission San Antonio de Valero, based on Mexican Colonel Jose Sanchez-Navarro’s 1836 map and published in Excavations at the Alamo Shrine (Mission San Antonio de Valero) illustrated a “campo santo” in front of the church (Eaton 1980, 49, Figure 1) (Figure 24.3a). Results of cemetery-focused excavations at San Antonio’s Mission San Juan de Capistrano, located several miles south of Valero, illustrate the basic mission-cemetery pattern (Schuetz 1969, 1980b). Each of four chapels, built there between 1731 and 1790, had two burial places, the chapel floor and an area outside but near the chapel and within the established compound of the time (Thoms 2001b, 28). In addition to fully articulated (i.e., complete) burials, Schuetz reported numerous “empty” grave pits, some containing “loose scattered human bones, primarily foot and hand bones,” often with glass beads (1980b, 30, 42). She interpreted these as evidencing Churchsanctioned exhumation, during the Mission era, of a given burial within a to-be-abandoned cemetery and its reburial in the new chapel or camposanto (Schuetz 1974, 1980b). In 1999, after lengthy negotiations, most of the human remains (n = 100+ individuals) recovered from excavations at Mission San Juan and held by universities were returned to the Catholic Church. The church formally and publicly transferred the remains to Tap Pilam for reburial in a previously excavated portion of a colonial-era camposanto (Colton 2019; Thoms 2001b, 37–42). Other things being equal, there should be a positive correlation between the length of time a given Spanish colonial mission functioned, an indirect measure of its cumulative Indian population, and the size of its camposantos. Mission Valero, in/near its present location (1718– 1793), was active for a single lifetime, which encompassed several generations of recruits. Colonial-age standing structures represent the mission’s third and final location; construction began there in the aftermath of a hurricane in 1724 that destroyed the second nearby location (Schuetz 1966). Death rates at Mission Valero varied from year to year, the highest during epidemics. As of 1745, per an inspection report by Father Fray Francisco Xavier Ortiz, 981 Indians had been baptized and 685 given Christian burial; the mission hosted 311 Indians of both sexes and all ages (Schuetz 1966, 9). An inspection report in 1762 noted that 1,247 individuals, including infants, had received the Last Sacrament; the Indian population was 275, including 32 gentiles (i.e., unbaptized persons) (Schuetz 1966, 19–20). In all, approximately 1,480 Indians appear in the Mission Valero census, birth, marriage, and death records (Habig 1968; Leal 1978; Schuetz 1980a, 52–53). While Coahuiltecans represented a substantial majority of these people, some Coco (Karankawa) and Sana (Tonkawa) individuals and families arrived there in the 1750s following the closure of missions along the San Gabriel River well to the northeast. Lipan Apaches arrived there intermittently, primarily as captive women and children, and at least one Comanche lived at the mission (Schuetz 1980a; Thoms 2016). Two monographs, based on archival and archaeological data, attest to Spanish Colonial cemeteries at Mission Valero. A Historical Overview of Alamo Plaza and Camposanto concluded as follows: lines of evidence converge suggesting that the camposanto for San Antonio de Valero is located in front of the church: this is the traditional location for a cemetery, the 380

B A

HOUST ON ST REE

T

INDIA

N AP ARTM

WELL

QUADRANG LE PLAZA

MAIN GATE

GRANAR Y

ROOM

A

Plaza Alamo

CONVEN

LONG BARR

UI

S

STREET

WORK SHO PATIO P

TO PATI O

ALAMO

CHURCH

WELL

SACRIST

Y

CAMPO SANTO

TOWER

WEAV ING

EQ

ALAMO

ks) Barrac CO TWO-ST NVENTO (L ong ORY C LOIST ER

ONT

ACEQUI

A

ALONG FR

APARTM ENTS INDIAN

ARCADE

) ACEQUIA (WA TER DITCH

381

amo (Al

za) Pla

AC

CHURCH (UN

FINISHED)

(Alamo Chu rch)

0 0

100 FEET VARAS

50 CROCKE TT STRE ET

Figure 24.3 a. Plan-view map of the Mission Valero compound in the mid-1700s (after Eaton 1980, 49, Figure 1); note the labeled “campo santo” (i.e., cemetery) in front of the church, and b. map of the Alamo and Alamo Plaza redevelopment area (adapted from The Alamo 2020, visitor map); note that a cemetery is not depicted in this rendition. Source: Authors’ creation.

Battling the Alamo

APPROX IM ADDITION ATE LOCATION OF AL INDIAN HOUSING

ACK

ENTS

Alston V. Thoms et al.

Sanchez-Navarro map indicates this location, and burials have been found there. Given the small area between the church and the street, the cemetery most likely would have extended into Alamo Plaza East. (Hard 1994, 72; emphasis added) Iruegas and Iruegas (2019) also reviewed the nature and distribution of previously recovered human remains, both within and outside the chapel. They recommended that provisional cemetery boundaries extend beyond today’s Alamo Plaza, subject to modification based on completion of a comprehensive archival study and archaeological historic cemetery delineation investigation carried out by the General Land Office of Texas and the City of San Antonio “before breaking ground” in the Alamo Redevelopment Project area, in accordance with the Antiquities Code of Texas and the Health and Safety Code under Chapter 711.004(a)(5). (Iruegas and Iruegas 2019, 49) The ofcial website for the renovation project also attests to the presence of a cemetery or cemeteries in the Alamo Plaza area, suggesting that “nearly 1,000 Indigenous converts were buried in the mission’s campo santo” (Winders 2016). Church records indicate that a vast majority of the Indian recruits were from Coahuiltecan bands, and hence it is reasonable to assume that they also represented a corresponding percentage of those interred there (Schuetz 1980a; Thoms 2016). It is noteworthy, however, that a cemetery is not indicated on a recent map—2020—included in TheAlamo.org’s website that shows ongoing renovation work (Figure 24.3b). The Alamo: An Illustrated History (Nelson 1998), a popular book sold in local museums and elsewhere, attests to: (1) Native American activities at the site spanning more than 10,000 years; (2) incorporation of local Indians known collectively as Coahuiltecan into the mission beginning in 1718; (3) subsequent impacts of epidemics and missionization; and (4) secularization in 1793. It notes that 127 Indians lived there in 1727 and that an epidemic in 1739 killed 116 Indians. Detailed “birds-eye” color illustrations therein depict crosses, presumably indicative of a cemetery, in front and to the left of the church in 1745 and 1785 (Nelson 1998). A series of bronze plaques publicly displayed (2020) in the plaza area illustrate the mission compound at different times before secularization and clearly depict a cemetery in front and to the left of the church. None of these illustrations, however, depicts Mission Valero’s camposanto nearly large enough to contain the thousand-plus burials recorded in church archives. An overwhelming preponderance of archival and archaeological evidence indicates that a substantial cemetery exists in Alamo Plaza and its immediate vicinity. Current professional standard operating procedures for archaeologically investigating unmarked cemeteries remain to be undertaken: systematic remote sensing and test excavations to identify intact burials and “empty graves” representative of secondary burials during the colonial era and follow-up fieldwork to determine the nature and distribution of graves throughout Alamo Plaza. Results of substantial targeted fieldwork and related analyses aimed specifically at fully delimiting the camposanto(s) are foundational to and indispensable for the development of a preservation plan that adequately represents the Alamo’s multicultural heritage. Nonetheless, after years of state-funded and permitted archaeological investigations for the Alamo renovation project, there seems to be no formal plan for delineating Mission Valero’s historically known camposantos.

382

Battling the Alamo

Dueling anthropological/historical sagas about post-secularization Coahuiltecans With time, fewer mission Indians were identified in church records by specific Coahuiltecan band (e.g., Payaya, Pampopa, Mesquite, Yerbipiame) or other tribal affiliations (e.g., Coco [Karankawa], Sana [Tonkawa], Apache [mostly Lipan]) (Campbell 1983; Hindes 1995; Schuetz 1980a). Well before secularization, terms such as Indio, mestizo, mulatto, and occasionally Español routinely classified mission recruits (Schuetz 1980a; Thoms 2001b). The 1824 Mexican Constitution rejected the casta system; usage of Indio, mestizo, mulatto, coyote, lobo, and other racial-mixture designations became illegal in official documents. As a result, mission Indians became citizens but often “lost” their tribal/band affiliation in the process (Maestas 2003). For the US federal census, some mission Indian descendants likely self-identify as “Mexican American Indians” (U.S. Census Bureau 2010). An Anglo-American perspective on Texas history published in 1836 noted that Texas Indians were “but remnants of broken tribes” (Edwards [1836] 1980, 93), thereby minimizing their importance. The new nation of Texas’s Standing Committee on Indian Affairs declared on October 12, 1837, that “the people called Lipan, Karankawa and Tonkawa your committee considers as part of the Mexican nation and no longer to be considered as a different People from that nation” (Winfrey and Day 1966, 24). This Republic-era proclamation overtly disenfranchised many Texas Indians by grouping them as generic citizens of Mexico, the defeated nation that gave up their homelands. A popular narrative among white Texans in the late-nineteenth century was that Texas Indians were bloodthirsty, racially inferior savages who slaughtered white settler families and thwarted Manifest Destiny. Indian Depredations in Texas (Wilbarger [1889] 1985), based on interviews with white pioneer witnesses and news articles of the day, exemplified this mindset. The author’s preface states, “I felt impelled to prepare and publish for the benefit of another generation this volume, which shows something of the dangers and difficulties under which the peace that our people now enjoy has been secured” (Wilbarger [1889] 1985, iv). A New History of Texas for Schools, published in the same period, further contributed to systematic misconceptions regarding Native people: “It is a mistake to think there were large numbers of Indians here or in any other part of the United States when the Europeans came” (Pennybacker [1888] 1912, 16).

A case for cultural and biological extinction Such claims persisted into the mid-twentieth century. According to The Indians of Texas from Prehistoric to Modern Times, By 1800 most of the south Texas Coahuiltecans had disappeared, destroyed by disease or absorbed into the Mexican population. . . . By the time Anglo-Americans began to settle Texas, the far-flung Coahuiltecans had dwindled almost to nothingness. In northern Mexico, small acculturated groups persisted longer, but by the end of the nineteenth century, they also had disappeared. (Newcomb 1961, 37) This efective-extinction contention was repeated in the concluding chapter: “Coahuiltecans just seem to have faded away . . . by the beginning of the nineteenth century most Coahuiltecans either were already destroyed, had moved southward into Mexico, or had joined other Indian groups” (Newcomb 1961, 335).

383

Alston V. Thoms et al.

One of us (Thoms) first learned about Coahuiltecans and their ostensible extinction from reading Newcomb’s book in a late-1960s undergraduate anthropology class about Texas’s Native people. The extinction model—via conflicts with the Spanish, other tribes, and introduced European diseases—was offered as evidence for why none of the Coahuiltecan groups “survived culturally or biologically to be interviewed by early anthropologists” (Hester 1989, 195). A late-twentieth-century publication by the Texas Historical Commission, Texas Archaeology in the Classroom: A Unit for Teachers, systemically promulgated arguments made by contemporary historians, ethnographers, anthropologists, and archaeologists. None of the Texas Indian cultures that were present at the beginning of the Historic period now lives within the borders of Texas. By 1880 they had been forced out of the state or destroyed. A handful of Lipan Apaches live in New Mexico, a few Tonkawas in Oklahoma, and the Wichitas, Caddos, and Comanches are joined on the reservations in Oklahoma. The Karankawas, Coahuiltecans, Atakapans, Jumanos, and others have all disappeared—vanished forever. (Simons et al. 1998, B-24; emphasis added) Maps in twenty-first-century college textbooks about American Indians often illustrate Coahuiltecans as “culturally extinct” or their homelands as “poorly known,” and their culture is seldom discussed (e.g., Sutton 2017). Regrettably, 95 percent of the thousands of undergraduate students in Thoms’s Indians of Texas and Indians of North America classes over the last 30 years had no idea who built Mission Valero or about its role in Texas history beyond as an example of the failed Spanish mission system and it being the Shrine of Texas Liberty.

A case for biological and cultural survival Thomas N. Campbell was among those who kept an academic door open to the idea that Coahuiltecan extinction was a myth awaiting exposure. He noted that as of 1981, “descendants of some aboriginal groups still lived in various communities in Mexico and Texas, but few attempts have been made to discover individuals who can demonstrate this descent” (Campbell 1983, 347). Mardith Schuetz’s (1980a) dissertation, The Indians of the San Antonio Missions 1718–1821, included a chapter wherein she traced several of Mission Valero’s Indian families into post-secularization San Antonio, where they were Spanish citizens, integral to the city’s history and the surrounding environs. It was her archaeological excavations and historical research at these missions that led her to reject the extinction contention and follow archival and oral history pathways (Schuetz 1969, 1980b; Thoms 2001a). So, too, they fostered San Antonio’s Coahuiltecan-led American “Indian renaissance” (Colton 2019, 77–78). Also consistent with survival models is a notation in a visitor’s pamphlet about Mission San Juan Capistrano, where Coahuiltecans also lived and died during the 1700s. It reads, in part, “Native American and Spanish descendants of the original inhabitants still live near the Mission Grounds” (San Antonio Convention and Visitors Bureau 1998, front page). Several anthropological and historical studies identified living individuals who likely descended from individual Coahuiltecans who lived at Mission San Juan during the Spanish colonial era (e.g., De la Teja 2019; Thoms 2001a). Oral histories attest to a significant presence of mission-Indian descendants in the midtwentieth century and to a reverence for their ancestors buried at Mission Valero. Raymond Hernandez, a Tap Pilam elder, was among several dozen individuals interviewed 20 years ago by anthropologists working with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American 384

Battling the Alamo

Indian and its “Living Voices” project. He recounted how, in the 1950s and 1960s, he accompanied his grandparents, sometimes reluctantly, to Alamo Plaza each September, where they prayed for Coahuiltecan ancestors interred there (Hernandez 2001). A 2016 article published in Indian Country Today called attention to the century-long role of Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT) in promoting the Alamo as San Antonio’s major Anglo-American tourist site and their eventual recognition of mission-Indian descendants. It was not until 1994 that the DRT erected a marker recognizing that the Alamo site had once contained Indian burial grounds. This was partially in response to agitating by local people who had been able to prove their direct descent from Coahuiltecan mission Indians using Spanish colonial records of births and deaths and marriages. (Russell 2016, emphasis added) There is growing recognition among Texas archaeologists of organized descendant-groups of South Texas’ Coahuiltecan peoples, which further opens the cultural-survival door and, ideally, mitigates some of the adverse efects of learned ignorance. Following Cabeza de Vaca’s journey in the early 1500s, only a few hundred years passed before the Indigenous peoples of the South Texas Plains had lost almost all ethnic identity and were, effectively, culturally extinct. Although their languages were no longer spoken, those Native peoples who survived the Mission era were absorbed within the Mexican communities that formed around the abandoned missions. Some of their genes and memories were passed on and today there are several “resurgent” groups who trace their heritage to the Coahuiltecans of yesteryear, including the “American Indians in Texas at Spanish Colonial Missions” and the “Tap-Pilam-Coahuiltecan Nations.” (Kenmotsu et al. 2006, emphasis added) The mission statement on the American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Mission’s website is consistent with that assertion: to work for the preservation and protection of the culture and traditions of the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation and other Indigenous people of the Spanish Colonial Missions in South Texas and Northern Mexico through: education, research, community outreach, economic development projects and legislative initiatives at the federal, state and local levels. (American Indians in Texas-at Spanish Colonial Missions 2019) US census data for 2010 reveal that 170,972 Indians live in Texas, and of those, 14,475 reside in Bexar County. Of those, 11,800 live in San Antonio, making it the tenth-largest population of American Indians per capita in the US (U.S. Census Bureau 2010). Many of these people self-identify as direct descendants of the region’s Coahuiltecan people and routinely call public attention to their rich millennia-old cultural heritage and its contributions to American history (O’Hanlon 2017). Dissertations and thesis also reveal eforts through the decades by American Indian groups in San Antonio, including American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions and Tap Pilam, to call attention to their continuing existence and commitments to documenting their contributions to San Antonio’s missions (e.g., Kitchens 2016; Logan 2001; Maestas 2003). Said simply, available oral histories, archival records, and archaeological data are sufcient to counter the long-perpetuated myth regarding Coahuiltecan cultural and biological extinction. 385

Alston V. Thoms et al.

Genealogical evidence for direct lineal descendants of Coahuiltecans Tap Pilam is a tribal community of descendants from affiliated bands and clans that underwent missionization in Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, and south Texas. Its nonprofit organization, American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Mission, focuses on reversing extinction, through extensive genealogical and archival research. Community member families have been traced to Indian ancestors listed in the archives of all five of San Antonio’s missions— Concepcion, Espada, San Juan, San Jose, and Valero—as well as to other missions in northeast Mexico, including Missions San Bernardo, San Francisco Solano, and San Juan Bautista. Here we summarize results of relevant research conducted under the auspices of American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions, led by one of us (Vasquez). As noted earlier, many of today’s citizens were taught that American Indians associated with the missions of Texas and vicinity became extinct long ago. Much to the contrary and as detailed herein, there is ample evidence that Coahuiltecan families adapted to the mission system and survived. Many, known as Tejanos, worked and lived in the small communities and ranches of Bexar and surrounding counties, and well beyond (De la Teja 1995; Poyo and Hinojosa 1991; Schuetz 1980a). They were practicing Catholics. Church records preserved their postcolonial histories in the forms of baptisms, marriages, and burials at missions in Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, and San Antonio. The Archival Repository at the San Antonio office of American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions curates copies of secular and non-secular records related to Tap Pilam. Colonial-era documents for San Antonio’s missions, translated by John Ogden Leal (1978) several decades ago, were foundational to this research, but the translations were incomplete insofar as important details were omitted. Reexamination of original documents housed at the Bexar County Archives, the Archdiocese of San Antonio, and the Spanish Archives at Our Lady of the Lake University revealed critical details. The original burial entries for Mission San Antonio de Valero, for example, included additional baptism dates and additional family details about the deceased. Records for parishes in Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas held by the Church of the Latter-Day Saints allowed for a better understanding of movements of Indian families during postcolonial times. They enabled us to track mestizo families who arrived in the San Antonio area during the early 1700s. At that time, Monclova served as the capital of the Coahuila y Tejas. Some of San Antonio’s Indian families traveled there routinely as soldiers or servants. Other San Antonio Indian and mestizo families also had roots in the south, as shown by marriages, baptisms, and burial records. They reveal, for example, that many of the original 35 presidio soldiers and their families who arrived in San Antonio in 1718 (De la Teja 2019) were mestizos from Monclova and the vicinity. The earliest records for Bexar County also document inter- and intra-family interactions via service as witnesses for marriages or as godparents at baptisms. Those same inter-/ intra-family interactions continued through the 1800s, 1900s, and to the present day. Genealogies compiled by Vasquez for two individuals currently enrolled in Tap Pilam illustrate the number of generations followed using church records dating from the late 1600s. Records from Monclova, Coahuila, listed Raymond Hernandez’s (Table 24.1) and Jesus Reyes’s (Table 24.2) earliest known ancestors—Vincente Guerra and Maria Sepeda, respectively—as coyote and mestizo in their children’s baptismal records. Coyote, a casta term, usually referred to a person of mestizo (mixed Spanish + Indigenous) and Indio (Indigenous) parentage. Hernandez and Reyes’s ancestors exemplify the degree of intermarriage of mestizo, Indio, San Antonio’s Canary Islander setters, and others of Spanish descendent. They demonstrate the degree of kinship among mission families and sociocultural interactions after secularization. Autosomal DNA analysis completed for several Tap Pilam members reveals linkages as fifth to eighth cousins. 386

Battling the Alamo

Currently, two of us (Vasquez and Martinez de Vara) are collaborating to produce a new translation of original documents containing genealogical data, beginning with the Burial Records of Mission Antonio de Valero. American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions recently inaugurated the South Texas History Project in partnership with Northwest Vista College and Alamo Press. Their goals include acquiring historical family photographs for the Archival Repository and development of a digital repository readily accessible by families and researchers. Table 24.1 Genealogy of Raymond R. Hernandez, whose eighth-great-grandparents were interred at Mission Valero. Maria Sepeda, India (implied by records) (Mission San Antonio de Valero) Maria Sepeda (b.) ca. 1665 (d.) 1726 (m.) Vicente Guerra (b.) ca. 1655 (d.) 1725 (Both buried in Mission Valero’s camposanto)

(Daughter) Angela Guerra (b.) ca. 1689 (d.) 1751 (m.) Mateo Carvajal (b.) ca. 1680 (d.) 1748

(Son) Nicolas Carvajal (b.) ca. 1700 (d.) 1785 (m.) Catarina Martinez (b.) ca. 1710 (d.) 1766

(Daughter) Maria Concepcion Carvajal (b.) 1730 (d.) ca.1804 (m.) Domingo Perez (b.) ca.1740 (d.) ca. 1804

(Son) Juan Ignacio Perez (b.) 1761 (d.) 1823 (m.) Maria Clemencia Hernandez (b.) 1765 (d.) 1825

(Son) Ignacio Jose Perez (b.) ca. 1786 (d.) 1852 (m.) Maria Josefa Cortinas (b.) ca. 1786 (d.) 1861

(Son) Jose Jesus Perez (b.) 1812 (d.) 1876 (m.) Maria Jesusa Padilla (b.) 1820 (d.) 1885

(Daughter) Concepcion Francisca Perez (b.) 1871 (d.) 1933 (m.) Ramon Hernandez (b.) 1866

(Son) Raymond Hernandez (b.) 1891 (d.)1963 (m.) Feliz Maria Rendon (b.) 1898 (d.) 1983

(Son) Raymond Luciano Hernandez (b.) 1922 (d.) 2008 (m.) Alicia Felan (b.1933) (d.) 2017

(Son) Raymond Ralph Hernandez (b.) 1948—(enrolled, Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation)

387

Alston V. Thoms et al. Table 24.2 Genealogy of Jesus Jose Reyes Jr., whose tenth-great-grandparents (ca. 1655–1725 and ca. 1665–1726) were interred at Mission Valero. Vicente Guerra, Mestizo (Mission San Antonio de Valero) Vicente Guerra (b.) ca. 1655 (d.) 1725 (m.) Maria Sepeda (b.) ca. 1665 (d.) 1726 (Both buried in Mission Valero’s camposanto)

(Daughter) Josefa Guerra (b.) ca. 1680 (d.) 1747 (m.) Cristóbal Carvajal (b.) ca. 1679 (d.) 1734

(Daughter) Juana Antonia Carvajal (b.) ca. 1700 (d.) 1777 (m.) Jose Martinez (b.) 1713 (d.) 1760

(Son) Carlos Martinez (b.) 1734 (d.) 1803 (m.) Maria Gracia Leal (b.) 1740

(Son) Jose Antonio Martinez (b.) 1772 (m.) Feliciana Gamboa (b.) 1762

(Daughter) Maria Jesus Martinez (b.) ca. 1787 (d.) 1847 (m.) Jose Dolores Santos (b.) ca. 1779 (d.) 1818

(Daughter) Concepcion de los Santos (b.) 1806 (d.) 1873 (m.) Manuel Herrera (b.) 1801 (d.) 1869

(Son) Jose Maria Herrera (b.) 1833 (d.) 1869 (m.) Refugia Gallardo (b.) 1838 (d.) 1920

(Daughter) Maria Concepcion Herrera (b.) 1865 (d.) 1899 (m.) Celso Gil (b.) 1857 (d.) 1938

(Son) Jose Maria Gil (b.) 1891 (d.) 1953 (m.) Herminia Vasquez (b.1897)

(Daughter) Herminia Gil (b.) 1918 (d.) 2009 (m.) Miguel Reyes (b.) 1919 (d.) 2015

(Son) Jesus Jose Reyes (b.) 1945 (d.) 2007 (m.) Antonia Garcia (b.) 1947

(Son) Jesus Jose Reyes Jr., (b.) 1968—(enrolled, Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation)

388

Battling the Alamo

NAGPRA’s applicability to Coahuiltecans as non-federally recognized tribes NAGPRA affords legal voice, including veto power in some instances, to federally recognized tribes as primary stakeholders in decisions regarding the discovery and scientific study of culturally affiliated human remains and funerary objects. NAGPRA, however, does not apply as directly to individuals or groups who identify as or trace their ancestry to Coahuiltecans, by that or any other name, because they are not among the federally recognized tribes. NAGPRA regulations outline rights and responsibilities of lineal descendants, Indian tribes, Alaska Native villages, Native Hawaiian organizations, Federal agencies, and museums under the Act. They establish a process by which human remains and associated funerary objects are transferable to lineal descendants, federally recognized Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations. A lineal descendant is an individual tracing his or her ancestry directly and without interruption by means of: (a) the traditional kinship system of the appropriate Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization or; (b) common law system of descendance to a known Native American individual whose remains, funerary objects, or sacred objects are claimed under these regulations (Department of the Interior 2010, 43 CFR 10.2 [b][1]). NAGPRA’s lineal-descent component does not currently apply to human remains and associated funerary objects from Mission Valero because none of the previously discovered remains represent a known individual, per se (Iruegas and Iruegas 2019). DNA studies, however, may yet identify unknown individuals interred at Mission Valero as well as their direct lineal descendants among today’s population. Tap Pilam’s lawsuit includes a clause attesting to its support of DNA testing of recovered human remains. In marked contrast, representatives of six federally recognized tribes approved the “no-DNA studies” clause in the state’s human-remains protocols for the Alamo renovation project. NAGPRA’s 2010 amendment concerning Disposition of Culturally Unidentifiable Human Remains and Associated Funerary Objects (Department of the Interior 2010, 43 CFR § 10.11) applies directly to Tap Pilam. It instructs museums and federal agency officials to initiate consultation to address human remains previously determined to be Native American but for which there is no known lineal descendant or culturally affiliated Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization. Museums and federal agency officials holding culturally unidentifiable human remains and funerary objects must offer them first to recognized Indian tribes, Alaskan, and Native Hawaiian organizations from whose tribal land the remains originated at the time of the excavation and then to federally recognized groups with aboriginal territories encompassing the original burial place. If none of the identified Indian tribes or Native Hawaiian organizations agrees to accept control, a museum or federal agency may transfer control of culturally unidentifiable human remains to other recognized tribes or organizations. Lastly, and only upon recommendation from the Secretary of the Interior or an authorized representative, culturally unidentifiable human remains may be transferred to a non-federally recognized Indian group, which includes Tap Pilam, or the remains may be reinterred according to state or other law.

Legal case and civil rights background One of us (Martinez de Vara) prepared the civil rights lawsuit brought on behalf of the plaintiffs: Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation, San Antonio Missions Cemetery Association, and Raymond Hernandez, whose ancestors include at least one individual buried at Mission Valero. The record established in the lawsuit documents Vasquez’s previous committee and service roles on behalf of the plaintiffs and includes Thoms’s expert testimony about Coahuiltecans and mission 389

Alston V. Thoms et al.

cemeteries. It challenges the state’s (i.e., Defendants: Texas General Land Office its representatives, and the Texas Historical Commission) decision to restrict religious practices by excluding Tap Pilam from human remains protocols adopted by the state (Civil Action No. 5:19-cv01084-OLG). The primary contention is that plaintiffs are next of kin, direct lineal descendants, of known and unknown individuals buried at the “Alamo” Mission. The plaintiffs observe that Tap Pilam previously conducted reinterments of ancestral remains at the Alamo and other sites in Texas. Repatriation-related reburials became common practice after the passage of NAGPRA, given its consequential requirement for federally funded museums, universities, and other entities to return Native American human remains and funerary objects by transferring possession of them to culturally affiliated groups. Among core religious beliefs of the Tap Pilam surrounding reinterments is a requirement to perform a forgiveness ceremony, asking the deceased for forgiveness of their role in disturbing the intended final resting place. Alongside this ceremony, the conduct of reinterments follows funerary practices of the interred ancestor. In the case of Mission Valero, it would follow Roman Catholic practice. Reburial of non-baptized ancestors, however, would follow traditional interment practices. Tap Pilam’s elders take a solemn vow to perform a remembrance ceremony each year on the anniversary of a given reinterment. The ceremony stems from a religious belief that disturbance of a burial also disturbs the spiritual journey in the afterlife. Forgiveness, reinterment, and annual remembrance ceremonies allow the ancestor to return to their afterlife journey. Raymond Hernandez and other members of the Tap Pilam took such a vow when they reinterred ancestral remains inside the Valero Chapel in 1995. At that time, the Alamo was under the management of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, and they agreed to allow the performance of the annual remembrance ceremony (Bousman 2014). The lawsuit’s plaintiffs argue that it is particularly inappropriate that the General Land Office and its designated representative, Alamo Trust, Incorporated, decided to allow six federally recognized tribes to serve on the committee as monitors. Those tribes are the Mescalero Apache Tribe (representing Lipan Apache), Tonkawa Tribe of Oklahoma, Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas, Caddo Nation of Oklahoma, the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma (Alamo Trust Incorporated 2019). By overtly excluding Tap Pilam, this flawed policy assertion by the General Land Office seemingly adopts the belief that all Indians are the same. Nothing is further from the facts at hand. Invisibility is a modern form of racism against American Indians. Public discourse on racial discrimination focuses on groups of people seen as different, but racial discrimination also occurs when a group of people remains unseen. Lack of exposure to realistic, contemporary, and humanizing portrayals of Native people creates a deep and stubborn unconscious bias in many non-Native minds. Rooted in this unconscious bias is an idea that Native people are not real or even human. We know, however, that American Indian tribes had their own customs, religious beliefs, funerary practices, and often spoke vastly different languages. The plaintiffs argue further that participation of federally recognized Indian tribes in the Alamo redevelopment project does not justify the defendants’ exclusion of the Tap Pilam and that doing so is discriminatory. Federally recognized tribes that the state’s oversight agencies chose at the exclusion of the Tap Pilam are not native to the San Antonio area, but three of them have some historical links to Mission Valero. A few Tonkawa people from abandoned missions along the San Gabriel River, some 200 km to the northeast, relocated to Mission Valero in the mid-1700s. As per Valero’s records, there are numerous Tonkawa burials as well as those of Lipan Apache, mostly women and children (Leal 1978; Stiles 2020). Historically, the Lipan Apache were enemies of Coahuiltecans and were responsible for the deaths of numerous of those living 390

Battling the Alamo

at Mission Valero and nearby communities. It was in retaliation of those deaths that Spanish soldiers and Coahuiltecan militiamen targeted Lipan Apache encampments and incorporated captive women and children into the mission’s population. Several burials may be Caddo people who relocated to Mission Valero following closure of Spanish missions in their east Texas homelands (De la Teja 1995; Habig 1968; Poyo and Hinojosa 1991; Schuetz 1980a; Stiles 2020). According to the plaintiffs, the situation denies a culturally affiliated tribal community representation and engagement while simultaneously inviting unaffiliated tribes to participate, some from out of state. The federally recognized tribes have vastly different cultural and religious beliefs, differing funerary practices, and comparatively little or no historical connection to the mission. Nonetheless, they presently stand in Tap Pilam’s place and rely on the erroneous premise that the plaintiffs are not Indians because they are not federally recognized. The reason for this is obvious: a culturally affiliated tribe such as Tap Pilam is likely to have a greater degree of respect and thereby oversight, concern, and care for remains that are lineal ancestors than people who lack such attachment. The plaintiffs argue that the General Land Office seeks to skirt the oversight and protection of culturally affiliated communities that Congress and the Texas Legislature have determined is necessary and in the public interest for a project such as this. Their policy allows other federal recognized Indian tribes to participate and exclude the plaintiffs. Simply said, federal recognition does not dictate ethnicity or race. The arguably false premise is that somehow the plaintiffs should not participate because they are not in fact Indians based solely on the erroneous premise that they are not federally recognized. Federal courts have ruled that federal recognition is a political act of Congress and does not grant or remove aboriginal sovereignty (United States v. Holliday, 70 U.S. [3 Wall.] 407, 419 [1866]; see also Winnemem Wintu Tribe v. U.S. Dept. of Interior, 725 F.Supp.2d 1119, 1131–33 [E.D.Cal.2010]). Such backward antiquated logic is improper, hurtful, and seen here for what it is—discriminatory. It is yet another legacy of colonialism, a systemic product of “learned ignorance” through the centuries, which is to say it is a decidedly conqueror’s perspective systematically fostered in support of the status quo (Buck 2013, 19–24).

Summary and concluding comments In battling “The Alamo” myth, a manifest consequence of settler colonialism, we called upon an arsenal of archaeological, ethnographic, historic, genealogical, and Census data, along with legal arguments. We related the Alamo to an underlying and still-popular Coahuiltecan-extinction myth, another colonial legacy, and chronicled its promulgation for almost 200 years by historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and heritage-preservation specialists. We highlighted the systematic use of terms and phrases indicative of systemic racism that minimize, ignore, and deny Indigenous contributions and stakeholder voices. Engendered by learned ignorance, the extinction contention is that Coahuiltecans dwindled almost to nothingness, faded away, vanished forever, such that none survived to tell their own story, leaving that task to academics. An alternative cultural-survival contention rose from descendant communities of San Antonio’s mission Indians who averred, with some success, for recognition of their ancestors’ welldocumented presence at Mission Valero. The difficulties and setbacks they endured through the decades exemplify the proposition that Jim Crow-Feather is alive and well in Texas despite sufficient data to lay such short-sighted exclusionary polices to rest. In the misty midst of tricentennial celebrations in San Antonio and at its five standing Spanish colonial-era missions, Coahuiltecans and others who built and maintained them remain obscure and without meaningful history, their descendants’ voices all too faint as powers-that-be endeavor to sustain the popular Alamo story via a multi-hundred-million-dollar renovation project. 391

Alston V. Thoms et al.

Minimization of mission-Indian descendant voices effectively denies them a seat at the graves-protection table, thereby fostering a form of racism that renders them invisible despite their millennia-old and historical links to Mission Valero. Those battling for dominance of Euro-American heritage at the Alamo enlisted the “spirit” of NAGPRA as a weapon of exclusion, offering Indigenous voice only to federally recognized Native American tribes. Colonial governments and resulting settler-counties have centuries of practical experience in favoring one group of Indians over another, depending on circumstances at hand. Regardless, the governments’ working model is “divide-and-conquer,” ally with some and war upon others. There is an upside to this tale about archaeological explorations into colonialism and the consequences thereof. Public records attest to Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation and its nonprofit organization, American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions, having gained significant sociopolitical stature as a viable American Indian community with considerable stakeholder interests in San Antonio and vicinity. Such recognition stems from decades of sustained networking with representatives of the Catholic Church, mission communities, heritage-based organizations, and academic institutions, as well as with agencies of the city of San Antonio, the state of Texas, and the federal government (American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions 2019). Those efforts contributed substantially to greater public awareness of the historical contributions of the Indigenous inhabitants of south Texas and the vicinity, commonly known as Coahuiltecans. Such recognition, low on the horizon as it remains, promises to bring much more “added value” to the city’s multicultural developmental endeavors. The economic and heritagepreservation potential is especially high. Endeavors are underway to promote the 300-year history of its missions and ensure that those who built and maintained them are visible, readily so, to millions of visitors. Rising public recognition and positively oriented stakeholder stature generate an unprecedented sense of cultural pride among San Antonio’s mission Indian communities. This is especially evident for Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation, given their leadership in maintaining spiritual ties with their ancestors interred in the chapel floor and elsewhere at Mission Valero. Digging wider and deeper often illuminates pathways toward greater community solidarity and longterm commitments to American Indian concerns and their collective resistance to disenfranchisement policies grounded in sociocultural inequality. Deconstruction of Texas myths, underlain by systemic racism and promulgated by learned ignorance, illustrates difficulties faced by archaeologists as they interpret the past for a culturally diverse audience. Propensities to minimize Indigenous interests continue to characterize American hegemonies, especially in settler countries. The trials and tribulations of resisting and reversing Coahuiltecan extinction, preserving cultural legacies, protecting their cemeteries, and promoting values of multiculturalism exemplify inequality issues that dominate headlines worldwide, as illustrated by the “BIPOC” moniker: Black, Indigenous and People of Color. Elements of long-running culture wars rage in the Americas, as epitomized by the current Alamo battle. Those most toggled to inequality aim for multicultural resolutions that engender equality. There are increasing cries for truth and reconciliation. Oppositional actions, however, decry enhanced attention to unsavory elements of our collective past. As articles in the present handbook demonstrate, archaeology’s challenge to mitigate colonialism’s adverse effects remains frontline.

Acknowledgments This chapter reflects our response to manuscript review comments from editors Lee M. Panich and Sara L. Gonzalez as well as from our colleagues Stephen Black, Patricia Clabaugh, Raymond 392

Battling the Alamo

Hernandez, Kay Hindes, and Robert Mierendorf. Their suggestions improved the clarity of our arguments. So, too, we appreciate Lauren Jones’s assistance in drafting, formatting, and proofing tasks. While acknowledging their contributions, the responsibility for any errors in fact or otherwise that inadvertently remain are ours alone.

References cited Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. 2018. “Guide to Working with Non-Federally Recognized Tribes in the Section 106 Process.” www.achp.gov/sites/default/files/whitepapers/2018-06/Guideto WorkingwithNon-FederallyRecognizedTribesintheSection106Process.pdf. Accessed July 10, 2020. The Alamo. 2020. “The Alamo Master Plan.” www.thealamo.org/visit/grounds/visitor-map/index.html. Accessed July 10, 2020. Alamo Trust Incorporated. 2019. “Alamo Archaeological Investigations: Native American Representation and Engagement.” www.expressnews.com/file/502/0/5020-alamo%20human%20remains%20 guidelines.pdf. Accessed May 18, 2020. American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions. 2019. “Official Website: American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions.” https://aitscm.org/. Accessed September 15, 2019. Ayala, Elaine. 2017. “S.A. Should Heed the Lessons Learned from a Slave Cemetery Found in N.Y.” San Antonio Express-News, May 28, 2017. Ayala, Elaine. 2019. “Lawsuit over Alamo Burial grounds reflects wider ferment.” San Antonio ExpressNews, September 12, 2019. Bolton, Herbert E. 1912. “The Spanish Occupation of Texas, 1519–1690.” The Southwest Historical Quarterly 16 (1): 1–26. Bousman, Britt C. 2014. “Letter of June 20th to the Alamo Plaza Study Committee Confirming Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation’s Participation in Alamo Chapel. June 20, 2014.” Letter on file at American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions, San Antonio, Texas. Brear, Holly B. 2010. Inherit the Alamo: Myth and Ritual at an American Shrine, 2nd ed. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bruchac, Margaret M. 2010. “Constructing Indigenous Associations for NAGPRA Compliance.” Anthropology News 51 (3): 5–8. Bruseth, James. 2020. “Discussion and Possible Action on Alamo Unverified Cemetery Notice Submitted by Raymond Hernandez.” Item 3.c., Texas Historical Commission Quarterly Meeting, May 12, 2020. www.thc.texas.gov/public/upload/public/upload/Archeology%20PUBLIC%20Meeting%20 ePacket%205.12.2020.pdf. Accessed July 1, 2020. Buck, Pem Davis. 2013. In/Equality: An Alternative Anthropology, 3rd ed. Palo Cedro, CA: CAT Publishing, Inc. Campbell, Thomas N. 1983. “Coahuiltecans and Their Neighbors.” In Handbook of North American Indians Vol. 10: Southwest, edited by Alfonzo Ortiz, 343–358. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. City of San Antonio. 2019. “Community Information: Alamo Master Plan.” Save the Alamo. https:// savethealamo.com/community-information.html. Accessed July 6, 2020. Colton, Milo. 2019. “Texas Indian Holocaust and Survival: McAllen Grace Brethren Church v. Salazar.” The Scholar: St. Mary’s Law Review on Race and Justice 21 (1): 51–146. Cox, Wayne J. 1994. “Burials at the Alamo.” In A Historical Overview of Alamo Plaza and Camposanto, edited by Robert J. Hard, 36–51. Special Report No. 20. San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, University of Texas at San Antonio. De la Teja, J. F. 1995. San Antonio de Bexar: A Community of New Spain’s Northern Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. De la Teja, J. F. 2019. Faces of Bexar. College Station: Texas A&M Press. Department of Interior. 2010. “Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act RegulationsDisposition of Culturally Unidentifiable Human Remains.” Federal Register, March 15, 2010. Eaton, Jack D. 1980. Excavations at the Alamo Shrine (Mission San Antonio de Valero). Special Report No. 10. San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, University of Texas at San Antonio. Edwards, David B. (1836) 1980. The History of Texas: Or, the Emigrant’s, Farmer’s and Politicians’ Guide to the Character, Climate, Soil, and Productions of That Country: Arranged Geographically from Personal Observations and Experiences. Cincinnati: J.A. James. Reprint, Austin: Texas State Historical Association. Foster, William C. 2008. Historic Native Peoples of Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press.

393

Alston V. Thoms et al. Fox, Anne A., Feris A. Bass, and Thomas R. Hester. 1976. “The Archaeology and History of Alamo Plaza.” Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State 1: 9. Fox, Daniel E. 1983. Traces of Texas History: Archaeological Evidence of the Past 450 Years. San Antonio: Corona Publishing Company. Griffen, William B. 1969. Culture Change and Shifting Populations in Central Northern Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Habig, Marion A. 1968. The Alamo Chain of Missions: A History of San Antonio’s Five Old Missions. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press. Hard, Robert J. 1994. “Conclusions and Recommendations.” In A Historical Overview of Alamo Plaza and Camposanto, edited by Robert J. Hard, 71–73. Special Report No. 20. San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, University of Texas at San Antonio. Hernandez, Raymond. 2001. “Reaffirmation of Cultural Identity of Original Coahuiltecan People of Texas by Reclaiming the Alamo as Their Sacred Site.” Living Voices, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. Hester, Thomas R. 1980. Digging into South Texas Prehistory: A Guide for Amateur Archaeologists. San Antonio: Corona Publishing Company. Hester, Thomas R. 1989. “Texas and Northeastern Mexico: An Overview.” In Columbian Consequences, Volume 1, Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West, edited by David Hurst Thomas, 191–211. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Hindes, Kay V. 1995. “Native American and European Contact in the Lower Medina River Valley.” La Tierra 22 (2): 25–33. Iruegas, Sergio A., and Melinda Tate Iruegas. 2019. Overview Report: San Antonio de Valero Historic Texas Cemetery Designation Application Supporting Documentation, GTI, Environmental, LLC., San Antonio, Texas. Manuscript on File with American Indians of Texas-at Spanish Colonial Missions, San Antonio, Texas. Kelly, Robert L., and David H. Thomas. 2017. Archaeology, 7th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. Kenmotsu, Nancy, Susan Dial, and Steve Black. 2006. “South Texas Plains: Who Were the ‘Coahuiltecans’?” Texas Beyond History. https://texasbeyondhistory.net/st-plains/peoples/coahuiltecans.html. Last modified September 18, 2006. Kitchens, Joel Daniel. 2016. “San Antonio’s Spanish Missions and the Persistence of Memory, 1718–2015.” PhD Dissertation, Texas A&M University. Leal, John O. 1978. “Burials of San Francisco de Solano (Mission San Antonio de Valero—The Alamo): 1703–1782.” Burial Records. San Antonio: Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library. Logan, Jennifer Leigh. 2001. “A Tangled Web: The Role of Material and Ideational Definitions of Culture in Evaluating Coahuiltecan Cultural Change.” Master’s Thesis, Texas A&M University. Lohse, Jon C. 1999. “Lithics from the San Antonio de Valero Mission: Analysis of the Materials from the 1979 Excavations at the Alamo.” Bulletin of the Texas Archeological Society 70: 265–279. Maestas, Enrique Gilbert-Michael. 2003. “Culture and History of Native Peoples of South Texas.” PhD Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. Meissner, Barbara A. 1996. The Alamo Restoration and Conservation Project: Excavation at the South Transept. Archaeological Survey Report, No. 245. San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, University of Texas at San Antonio. Nelson, George. 1998. The Alamo: An Illustrated History. Dry Frio Canyon, TX: Aldine Press. Newcomb, W. W., Jr. 1961. The Indians of Texas from Prehistoric to Modern Times. Austin: University of Texas Press. O’Hanlon, Morgan. 2017. “Native Americans Seek Their Heritage within San Antonio’s Rich History.” Texas Standard: The National Daily News Show of Texas, April 7, 2017. www.texasstandard.org/stories/ Native-americans-seek-their-heritage-within-san-antonios-rich-history/. Pennybacker, Percy V., Mrs. (1888) 1912. A New History of Texas for Schools: Also for General Reading and for Teachers Preparing Themselves for Examination. Tyler, TX: printed by the author. Reprint, Austin: printed by the author. Poyo, G. E., and G. M. Hinojosa, eds. 1991. Tejano Origins in Eighteenth-Century San Antonio. Austin: University of Texas Press. Russell, Steve. 2016. “Remembering Before the Alamo.” Indian Country Today: Digital Indigenous News, September 5, 2016. https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/remembering-before-the-alamomZ6dgCOtN0qIOYmJ5VtKoQ/. San Antonio Convention, and Visitors Bureau. 1998. Guide to Historic San Antonio Mission Trails. San Antonio: Convention & Visitors Bureau.

394

Battling the Alamo Schuetz, Mardith K. 1966. “Historical Background of the Mission San Antonio de Valero.” Report No. 1, Texas State Building Commission Archeology Program. Austin: Texas State Building Commission. Schuetz, Mardith K. 1969. “Description of the Artifacts and Ethno-History of the Coahuiltecan Indians.” In Vol. II of The History and Archaeology of Mission San Juan Capistrano, San Antonio, Texas. Texas State Building Commission Archaeological Program Report No. 1. Austin: Texas State Building Commission. Schuetz, Mardith K. 1974. “The Dating of the Chapel at Mission San Juan Capistrano, San Antonio, Texas.” Special Reports No. 12. Austin: Texas Historical Commission. Schuetz, Mardith K. 1980a. “The Indians of the San Antonio Missions 1718–1821.” PhD Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. Schuetz, Mardith K. 1980b. “Excavation of the Convento.” In Vol. IV of The History and Archaeology of Mission San Juan Capistrano, San Antonio, Texas. Austin: Office of the State Archaeologist, Texas Historical Commission, Austin, Texas. Simons, Helen, Brett Cruz, and Kitty Henderson, comps. 1998. Texas Archaeology in the Classroom: A Unit for Teachers. Austin: Texas Historical Commission. Stiles, Shannon. 2020. “Burials at the Alamo.” Attachment in letter of April 24th from Douglass W. McDonald, Alamo Trust CEO to the Executive Committee of Texas Historical Commission Pertaining to Alamo Plan Regarding Human Remains. Copy on file at the Texas Historical Commission, Austin, Texas. Sutton, Mark Q. 2017. Introduction to Native North America, 5th ed. New York: Routledge. Texas Health and Safety Code, 2020. “General Provisions Relating to Cemeteries (Chapter 711.004(a) (5)).” https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/HS/htm/HS.711.htm. Accessed July 13, 2020. Texas Historical Commission. 2020. “Project Review: Tribal Contacts.” www.thc.texas.gov/projectreview/tribal-consultation-guidelines/tribal-contacts. Accessed July 14, 2020. Thoms, Alston V. 1999. “Beyond Texas’ Legacy: Searching for Cooperation without Submission.” Texas Forum on Civil Liberties and Civil Rights 4 (1): 41–52. Thoms, Alston V, ed. 2001a. Reassessing Cultural Extinction: Change and Survival at Mission San Juan Capistrano, Texas. College Station, TX: Center for Ecological Archaeology, Texas A&M University and San Antonio Missions National Historic Park. Thoms, Alston V. 2001b. “Historical Overview and Historical Context for Reassessing Coahuiltecans Extinction at Mission San Juan.” In Reassessing Cultural Extinction: Change and Survival at Mission San Juan Capistrano, Texas, edited by Alston V. Thoms, 21–44. College Station, TX: Center for Ecological Archaeology, Texas A&M University and San Antonio Missions National Historic Park. Thoms, Alston V. 2007a. “Archaeological and Paleoecological Records: Summary and Synthesis.” In Archaeological and Paleoecological Investigations at the Richard Beene Site, 41BX831, South-Central Texas, edited by Alston V. Thoms and Rolfe D. Mandel, 237–282. Reports of Investigation No. 8. College Station: Center for Ecological Archaeology, Texas A&M University. Thoms, Alston V. 2007b. “Learning from Cabeza de Vaca: Revelations about Hunter-Gatherer Foodways in South Texas at the Dawn of Written History.” Texas Beyond History. www.texasbeyondhistory.net/ cabeza-cooking/index.html. Accessed July 10, 2020. Thoms, Alson V. 2016. Timeline Table for Valero. San Antonio, TX: American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions and Philadelphia: Preservation Design Partnership, LLC. U.S. Census Bureau. 2010. Census Briefs: The American Indian and Alaska Native Population: 2010. www. census.gov/history/pdf/c2010br-10.pdf. W.D. Tex 2019. “Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation v. Alamo Trust, Inc., No. 5:19-cv-01084-OLG.” https:// www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/36895873/Tap_Pilam_Coahuiltecan_Nation,_et_al_v_Alamo_ Trust,_Inc,_et_al__;!!KwNVnqRv!QQx8KrS4xkSeVWIqs62ppre5Q1TpR4kmq3hU6_yHEyvcd fwshNGiqq1D3KgGxt7d$. Wilbarger, J. W. (1889) 1985. Indian Depredations in Texas. Austin: Hutchings Printing House. Reprint, Austin: Pemberton Press. Winders, Richard Bruce. 2016. “The Alamo’s Origins: Mission San Antonio de Valero.” The Alamo, November 30, 2016. https://medium.com/@OfficialAlamo/the-alamos-origins-mission-san-antoniode-valero-46bf1cb11bb. Winfrey, Dorman H., and James Day. 1966. The Indian Papers of Texas and the Southwest, 1825–1916, Vol. 1. Austin: Pemberton Press. Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wolfe, Mark. 2019. “Dedication Document for Historic Texas Cemetery for the Alamo, Alamo Plaza and Vicinity.” June 21, 2019. Texas Historical Commission. Austin, Texas.

395

25 LIVED HERITAGE OF COLONIALISM AT TAHCABO, YUCATÁN, MÉXICO Patricia A. McAnany, Maia Dedrick, and Adolfo Iván Batún Alpuche

Introduction In a small town on the eastern side of the state of Yucatán, México, the ruins of an early colonial church—dedicated to San Bartolomé—sit astride the hollowed-out, mounded remains of a pre-Columbian patron-deity shrine (Figure 25.1). Lacking a nearby cellphone tower until very recently, residents climbed to the top of the remnants of the pre-Columbian mound to catch a signal. The stone sanctuary and nave of the colonial mission once covered 600 m2. Today, a newer, smaller cinder-block church has been built that incorporates architectural features of the older mission structure (Figure 25.2). The chapel-sized structure houses a heavily restored statue of San Bartolomé. Homes built of concrete block as well as traditional pole-and-thatch line a gridded pattern of streets laid out in compliance with an Early Colonial Spanish decree. The heritage of colonialism—and of earlier times—is woven into the fabric of daily life in Tahcabo— it is a lived heritage. In this chapter, the past/present of this community is examined in terms of: (a) the history of Spanish colonial entanglements; (b) the slow, long-durational violence of colonialism, particularly in reference to agriculture and food security; (c) difficult discourses that reveal how archaeology can reinforce but also work against the violence of colonialism; and (d) two community initiatives—an archaeological investigation of the material imprint of colonialism in domestic contexts and a community museum. Both attempt to bend the arc toward a decolonized future. Lived heritage differs from many western concepts of heritage preservation that are enshrined in national laws and regulations. Anne Ross (2010) has written about the lived heritage of Australian Indigenous peoples and how cultural survival is linked to physical interaction with places rooted in the past. As such, practicing one’s heritage can run afoul of Australian preservation laws and archaeological precepts that trend toward fossilized preservation of cultural places perceived to hold “universal” value for humanity. Within the United States, Kurt Dongoske (2020) has written of the clash between Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (which prioritizes values such as the singularity and research potential of a site) and Zuni creation narratives about landscapes—such as the Grand Canyon—through which Zuni ethnogenesis emerged. As a result, considerable tension can exist between Indigenous communities striving for greater visibility, autonomy, and self-representation on the one hand and the regulatory/ historic preservation apparatus of nation-states on the other. Such tensions can be perceived as 396

Lived heritage of colonialism

Figure 25.1 Tahcabo, back of colonial church (right) and pre-Columbian pyramidal shrine (left). The shrine was robbed of stone to construct the mission church. Source: Photo by Patricia A. McAnany.

a form of neocolonialism (or double coloniality, see Chapter 3); archaeologists often are caught in the middle. The tension between relationality and heritage preservation also has been addressed by Laurajane Smith (2006), who has written persuasively about reorienting the UK heritage industry away from a preoccupation with spectacular objects or grand buildings and toward an approach that places higher value on the relation between people and place. From a philosophical perspective, this approach moves heritage (and archaeology) away from a concern with an epistemology of the past and toward a relational ontology of the past with the present. In Tahcabo, tension between lived heritage and historical preservation of the colonial church has crystallized around a bull-fighting ring constructed perilously close to the fragile ruins (and intact archway) of the church (see Figure 25.2). Despite the concerns of some community members, bulls are run across the footing of the churchyard wall during the feast day celebration of San Bartolomé to compete against locally trained bullfighters in the shadow of the 400-year old stone sanctuary. This spectacle affords a unique viewing experience, as the ruins of the mission rise just beyond the circular seating area constructed of lashed timber poles. The juxtaposition of two colonial institutions—bull fighting and Christianity—within a Yucatec Maya town exemplifies the complexities of lived heritage in the aftermath of empire.

Entangled with colonialism As Oland and Palka (2016) have noted, the Spanish colonial imprint in the Maya region was highly variable. Some areas—such as northern Yucatán—were intensively colonized, while 397

Patricia A. McAnany et al.

Figure 25.2 Tahcabo, showing the bull-fighting ring on the left, the archway of the colonial church in the background (center), and a wall of the current church on the right. Source: Photo by Maia Dedrick.

others (including Belize) witnessed extensive near-shore slave-capture expeditions but only aborted efforts to establish far-flung missions in the interior (Oland 2012). Indigenous peoples of the deep interior region of northern Guatemala rebuffed Spanish domination for over 150 years (Jones 1998), and those who inhabit parts of the upper Usumacinta River drainage today consider themselves to be “unconquered” (Palka 2005). Even in northern Yucatán, colonial attempts at “pacification” were measured in decades, with many reversals along the way. Juan de Grijalva landed on the coast of Yucatán in 1518, but it would take another 40 years before Spaniards occupied a partially conquered landform that came to be known as the Yucatán Peninsula. According to the Maya calendar kept during this time, the years of intensive Spanish incursions (1559–1579) were known as the k’atun of 9 Ahau (a k’atun is roughly a 20-year time span). During this time, Spaniards moved rapidly to allot the labor of Indigenous peoples to conquistadors (called encomenderos postconquest). Even earlier (in 1549), conquistador Juan de Contreras was awarded encomiendas for Tahcabo, Nabalam, and the Island of Cozumel (Roys et al. 1940, 11). Several years later, a priest wrote an eyewitness account of the encomienda communities on Cozumel Island: “Indians were being taxed more heavily by the encomendero than the law permitted. On the other hand, there appears to have been little interference with their mode of life and the worship of their pagan gods” (Roys et al. 1940, 8). Their “mode of life” included living in large, multifamily dwellings—a practice that Spaniards severely discouraged through a 1552 ordinance of Lopéz Medel (Roys et al. 1940, 14, Table 1). Each married head of household was ordered to live in a separate house so as to be counted individually for tribute collection. Lopéz Medel also ordered mission communities to be laid out in grid blocks or trazados (Hanson 1995, 20).

398

Lived heritage of colonialism

During the k’atun of 9 Ahau, scores of Franciscan missions were established (Hanson 1995, 17; Scholes et al. 1936, 55–62). Through local caciques (a Spanish term derived from a Caribbean Arawak word for leader), Franciscan friars drafted labor to build churches in forcibly congregated communities. One of those communities was Tahcabo—a place with a deep precolonial history dating back to at least 300 bce (Dedrick 2019). At Tahcabo and elsewhere, Catholic mission churches replaced shrines to ancestors, spirits, or deities and often were built close to such precolonial structures (e.g., Figure 25.1). There were both pragmatic and ideological reasons for such proximity. Propinquity facilitated the use of readily available and laboriously shaped stone for construction materials and also emphasized the replacement of the old religion with Catholicism. The violence associated with such replacement is well documented and included physical torture using methods perfected during the Spanish Inquisition (Tedlock 1993) as well as massive destruction of tangible cultural heritage. Destructive acts included dismantling shrines, burning codices, and destroying wooden icons along with any other material culture that Spaniards associated with non-Christian religious practices (Chuchiak 2009). Tahcabo became an established mission by the late sixteenth century, but compelling questions remain regarding when the massive colonial church was constructed. The timing of the imposition of a Spanish colonial street-grid plan likewise is unclear. Based on archival evidence, Andrews (1981, 9–10, 1991, 368) suggests that the church at Tahcabo was built by sixteenthcentury encomenderos, but neither Juan de Contreras nor his son Diego describe the construction of a church. Diego de Conteras did describe the tribute that he extracted from the encomienda of Tahcabo as including maize, turkeys, raw cotton, and cotton textiles (RHGY 1579, 50). Ethnohistorians such as Farriss (1984, 167) and Quezada (2014, 97) emphasize that labor demands on female weavers skyrocketed during the colonial period. The time required to plant, harvest and laboriously clean raw cotton bolls taxed the labor of all community members. Textiles were extremely valuable to encomenderos (and to repartidores by late colonial times; more on this later); quotas were enforced. Diego de Contreras justified tribute extraction by stating that prior to the coming of Spaniards, Native peoples gave similar tribute to Namon Cupul, ruler of Ek’ Balam—a Classic and Postclassic royal court located less than 30 km to the south (RHGY 1579, 50). Contreras also reported on his efforts to bring Christian doctrine to Tahcabo through payments of wine, oil, and other amenities requested by Franciscan friars who visited Tahcabo from a convento (residence for priests) at nearby Tizimín (RHGY 1579, 58). Spaniards brought the terror of the Inquisition to the Americas. Although Native peoples were exempted from the Inquisition (Silverblatt 2004, 91), they nonetheless were subjected to accusations of idolatry and to torture (Tedlock 1993, 144–146). Through the seventeenth century, as Spanish comprehension of Yucatec-Mayan language and religious practice deepened, accusations by overwrought priests and bishops increased. Between 1591 and 1608, Sanchez de Aguilar, vicario of Chancenote (only 36 km east of Tahcabo), confiscated seven hieroglyphic books—one of which may have been the Codex Madrid (Chuchiak 2004, 72; Sanchez de Aguilar 1639). As the veneer of Catholicism hardened on the surface of Yucatán, objects of traditional ritual practice—images carved in stone and wood or fashioned from clay—increasingly were hidden. Keeping an “idol” was dangerous business in this violent colonial world (Chuchiak 2009, 151). In 1612, the status of Tahcabo changed from a stop on the circuit of friars from Tizimín to a visita church linked to a newly built convento at Calotmul (López de Cogolludo 1688, 238). A direct road to Calotmul cut diagonally across the street grid and continued for 11 km to the southwest. At this time, the community of Tahcabo most likely built (or amplified) a ramada church, so called because only the sanctuary (or chancel) was made of stone (for comparable Maya-region examples, see Andrews 1981, 9, 1991, 360; Folan 1970; Fowler 2009, 440–442;

399

Patricia A. McAnany et al.

Gallareta Negrón et al. 1990; Graham 2011, 167–174; Hanson 1995; Miller and Farriss 1979). The church nave—where Indigenous parishioners sat/kneeled—was covered with a vast thatched roof; generally, the nave was open-sided. As mentioned earlier, the church was built immediately north of a pyramidal shrine, the latter mined for worked stone. The act of terminating the old shrine and building part of the churchyard over the much-diminished shrine marked an inflection point in the colonization process. The major shrine of this Postclassic town—likely dedicated to a patron deity specific to that place (Baron 2016)—was looted for stone to provide a house for a patron saint, San Bartolomé (López de Cogolludo 1688, 238). The new and old religions became intimately entangled down to the very building stones. Today, the colonial church of Tahcabo stands as a ruin behind the current chapel-sized church. An intact Roman-style arch frames the top of the chancel; above the arch is a sculpted panel upon which a dedicatory text was inscribed. The stone remains—a central chamber for the altar and two flanking side rooms likely used for a baptistery and a sacristy—have been remodeled and altered over the centuries. Areas of well-preserved plaster indicate that much is preserved under the talus of stone that has buried the church walls and floors. Construction projects in the nave and churchyard invariably yield human remains indicative of a colonial cemetery. As a place of reducción, Tahcabo experienced dramatic population fluctuations. Families living in smaller, nearby settlements were forced to move into reducciones and, if they did not oblige, were burned out and forcibly congregated (Hanks 2010, 32; Patch 1993, 26). The suddenly super-sized towns were serially beset by drought, plagues, and famine through the second half of the sixteenth century (Chuchiak 2006; Hoggarth et al. 2017; Quezada 2014, 116). These conditions engendered a high level of residential mobility throughout colonial Yucatán. For instance, at Tahcabo the surname Tun figures prominently in early colonial records (Quezada 2014, 161) but barely appears in a nineteenth-century census (AGEY 1841). Such mobility—engendered by the violence of colonialism—continued through Mexican Independence (1821) and the Caste War (1847–1901; see Patch 1993, 44, 63–66; Farriss 1984). Recent excavations on the edge of the Tahcabo colonial street grid corroborate that early colonial settlement could be fluid and short-lived (Dedrick et al. in press). In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Yucatán, a more commercial form of predation called repartimiento existed alongside extraction through encomienda. Repartimiento consisted of advancing a payment of coins or goods to Native inhabitants—ostensibly to cover taxes and other expenses for which coinage or specific trade items were necessary. In return, a set quota of goods was to be delivered to whomever extended the “credit.” Cotton textiles (patíes) and beeswax (cera) were the most common repartimiento goods of the Yucatán Peninsula. In 1664, Juan Manuel Gutierrez (carrying the title of juez repartidor) collected from the residents of Tahcabo a total of 50 patíes (~83 yards of cloth), 8 arrobas of wax (about 200 pounds), and 80 cargas of raw cotton (between 6,720 and 7,760 pounds) (García Bernal 2005, 245; Patch 1993, 77). This shift to more commercial forms of predation and debt accumulation presaged larger trends (i.e., the Bourbon Reforms) that took place in Spain and the colonies during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Archaeological investigations into Late Colonial deposits often yield low quantities of coinage (see Dedrick 2019; Morgan-Smith 2019; Pugh et al. 2016), providing evidence of the debt servitude ushered in by repartimiento and the Bourbon Reforms. In Yucatán, such predatory arrangements prevailed until the early 1800s, when a neocolonial system of appropriated land and labor called estates or haciendas emerged as the dominant economic arrangement in the countryside (Patch 1993, 130, 138). The hacienda horizon of Yucatán, which continued through the early twentieth century, is culturally salient to contemporary Yucatec Maya peoples, who refer to it as the time of enslavement of their grandparents and great-grandparents.

400

Lived heritage of colonialism

As a town located in el oriente, or the eastern portion of the peninsula, Tahcabo was close to the front lines of the violent turmoil that followed Mexican independence in 1821. A precursor to the nineteenth-century Caste, or Social, War of Yucatán was the 1839 Rebellion of Santiago Imán, which originated in Tizimín, just 13 km northwest of Tahcabo (Rugeley 1996). By the time the war officially began in 1847, the population of Tahcabo had grown to include more than 1,000 inhabitants (AGEY 1841). The upheaval of the war prompted people to leave the town; recorded municipal populations remained low to nearly nonexistent for decades after (Dumond and Dumond 1982). Repopulated during the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, Tahcabo now faces challenges similar to small towns across the globe—how to stay connected with family and one’s cultural identity while also securing a meaningful livelihood and good health/well-being.

Slow violence of colonialism and its impact on food security Nixon (2011) deploys the concept of slow violence in reference to contemporary poverty and the continued structural violence that is imposed upon populations that are vulnerable due to socioeconomic status. Over the longue durée, such violence becomes normalized and expected. Thus, those who are impoverished are subjected to environmental dangers such as high levels of toxins so that manufacturing or hog-processing plants can be situated a safe distance from affluent neighborhoods. The concept of slow violence—a type of terror that endures over decades if not centuries—is relevant to archaeological contexts for which change is measured in decades, centuries, and millennia. Amanda Logan (2016) has applied the concept to the deep history of food and farming in Ghana, Africa. Citing paleoethnobotanical evidence, she argues that contemporary food insecurity can be linked historically to factors of European colonialism that effected—through policy and globalized markets—shifts in cultivation practices that reduced access to preferred foods and increased vulnerability to drought. A narrative of slow violence that results in heightened food insecurity resonates in the Maya region and especially Yucatán, where thin surface soils limit the productivity of maize farming. Agriculture in the Maya region—while vested in maize farming prior to European invasion— also involved many other crops (including roots and tubers) as well as orchard species such as avocado, nance, and cacao (the last in wetter growing environments). Spanish overlords were not interested in a thriving polyculture, and among Maya peoples, high levels of mobility (whether forced or selected to escape violence or arduous taxes and tithes) meant that investment in generational or long-maturation species such as trees, shrubs, and some root crops was not a viable survival strategy (see Chapter 20). Maize, on the other hand, was much in demand by Spaniards (and so was a compulsory cultigen) and also was highly portable. Corn could be harvested in as few as seven weeks (i.e., nal t’eel maize; Tuxill et al. 2010, 469) and, once dried and shelled, was transported both as a comestible and as seed corn for planting during the next growing season—wherever that may be. Continued mobility throughout the colonial and early Republic periods meant that maize—as a primary cultigen—continued to dominate subsistence, with tree crops and other perennials taking a back seat. In fact, this pattern was so strong that the idea of “the timeless Maya” featured in the pages of National Geographic magazine invariably featured a farmer making milpa (a form of shifting cultivation) in order to plant maize and possibly also beans and squash. In a manner that is reminiscent of the colonial situation that Logan describes for Ghana, colonialism in Yucatán likewise resulted in changing cultivation practices, with an increased focus on maize, which is far less tolerant of variation in rainfall than the many drought-resistant plants that are documented foods

401

Patricia A. McAnany et al.

of pre-Columbian times (Fedick 2020). Evidence for dynamic and responsive agricultural practices amid population, climate, and political fluctuations helps to dismantle the notion that milpa agriculture has gone on unchanged for centuries (Dedrick et al. 2020). Despite the limitations of maize cultivation, the practice of “making milpa” (clearing a field and planting maize) has become a touchstone of Yucatec Maya identity and cultural expression (Re Cruz 2003). Many residents of small towns throughout Yucatán find it necessary to seek employment in the capital city or along the Maya Riviera in order to support their families; however, there are frequent trips to one’s hometown to cultivate a milpa or participate in other practices that support cultural identity. As mentioned previously, the thin soils of northern Yucatán are not auspicious for agriculture, although these soils have been farmed successfully for three millennia. The karstic limestone substrate upon which the Yucatán plateau is situated generates a mollisol that is rich in many nutrients but is not very thick in the northern portion of the plateau. Over several millennia, farmers of Yucatán devised many ingenious strategies to improve soil depth and dampen the heat effects of thin soils in a tropical latitude (see Kepecs and Boucher 1996; Fedick 1996; Fedick et al. 2008; Fedick and Morrison 2004; Flores-Delgadillo et al. 2011; Leonard et al. 2019). The pronounced karstic landscape of Yucatán—often compared to swiss cheese—contains two kinds of sinkholes: cenotes, perennial sources of water; and rejolladas, which do not penetrate to the water table and are large concavities that accumulate soil and generate more humid edaphic conditions. Tahcabo is situated within the zone of rejolladas (Fedick 2014) and contains eight rejolladas within its 52 hectare central zone of contemporary settlement. This high number of rejolladas means that conditions for the cultivation of trees and root crops (both prefer deep soils) are excellent—as long as one has access to these unique geomorphic features and political conditions permit continued attachment to a place over a multiyear planting and harvesting cycle. Today, most rejolladas of central Tahcabo are privately owned. Most are cultivated, but one rejollada (managed jointly by the municipality) currently lies fallow. Excavations directed by Maia Dedrick (2019) within rejolladas document the millennial-deep history of their usage and the ways in which these modified natural features provided important support for polycultural agricultural practices prior to the Spanish invasion. Ethnographic interviews with current owners of rejollada tracts (conducted by Maia Dedrick and José Miguel Kanxoc Kumul; see Dedrick et al. 2020 or Kanxoc Kumul and Dedrick 2016) deepen our understanding of how residents relate to these special growing environments and how the violence of colonialism—with its attendant high rates of mobility—actively worked to dissuade their usage.

Difficult discourses about colonial violence Valladolid—the largest city of eastern Yucatán—retains its colonial plan of gridded streets centered on a large central plaza bordered by a massive Catholic church built during early colonial times. The central statuary of the plaza fountain depicts a Yucatec Maya woman wearing a traditional embroidered huipil or long blouse. She is called La Mestiza, or the woman of mixed descent, despite the fact that her attire is closely associated with Yucatec Mayan language and culture. Indigenous identity in Yucatán is not a straightforward thing. Today, those who identify culturally as Maya may scorn the term Indigenous altogether because of an etymological root that is too close to “Indio”—a pejorative term long used against those who look or speak Mayan. During the nineteenth century, the Yucatec language was spoken widely across the Peninsula, and some describe it as the lingua franca of the time (Gabbert 2004, 95). Even today, Yucatec Mayan speakers number in the millions, printed Yucatec-Mayan materials are widely available, and a bilingual school system is operative within Yucatán. Still, great anxiety exists about the

402

Lived heritage of colonialism

survival of this language, particularly in regard to the large number of Spanish loan words that have been incorporated into spoken and written Yucatec (Armstrong-Fumero 2013, 153–154). Paradoxically, Yucatec-Maya identity is both culturally distinctive as well as a mixture of Spanish and Indigenous thoughts, words, practice, and dress—a kind of vernacular multiculturalism (Armstrong-Fumero 2011, 69). William Hanks (2010) maintains that Yucatec language and ritual practice (such as the Ch’a’ Cháak ceremony meant to encourage rain) have been so thoroughly transformed by colonialism and Christianity that they should not be considered Indigenous. Such multiculturalism, transformation, ethnogenesis—whatever term is applied by academics—creates distance between the past and the present. While the specter of the “timeless Maya” conjures a notion of a static people frozen in pre-Columbian time, the opposite projection of Yucatec peoples as mestizos living under the nation-state of México also falls far short of the reality of a culturally specific, lived experience. The latter formulation that emphasizes change has been embraced by many nation-states of Latin America, perhaps because it negates the validity of land claims, rights to archaeological/ancestral sites, and other forms of redistributive justice. In this sense, ethnic identity is another casualty of the violence of colonialism. In so far as archaeology in Latin America is conducted with the permission of the nation-state, it has benefitted from the construct that original inhabitants are extremely changed (and estranged from the past; McAnany and Parks 2012). In order to conduct archaeological research in Latin America, archaeologists need only to be permitted by the nation-state and receive permission from private landowners (if applicable). A reckoning with the coloniality of archaeology—specifically how Indigenous peoples were/are omitted from consultation regarding investigation of their ancestral places—has yet to take place formally and legally in Latin America (McAnany 2020). In the US and other Anglo-colonized spaces, steps toward reckoning and reconciliation are occurring (e.g., Bray and Killian 1994; McNiven and Russell 2005; Smith and Wobst 2005, among others). Compounding this situation is an emphasis on the conservation of Latin American colonial-era buildings and missions, with little concern for descendant populations who continue to live nearby and interact with such architectural landmarks. As mentioned earlier, Gnecco and Dias (Chapter 3) suggest that “double coloniality” is a suitable term for this approach to heritage conservation. In practice, however, archaeology can reinforce or work against the violence of colonialism. Archaeology that is collaborative with a community is one way that archaeologists work against the neocoloniality of our discipline (Marshall 2002). A community-collaborative approach to archaeological investigation departs from business-as-usual in several ways—one of the most notable being the longterm covenantal relationship that is forged between archaeologists and communities (McAnany and Brown 2016). Significantly, this approach requires the surrender of some control over research ideas and execution as well as interpretation of archaeological evidence (Atalay 2012). Deep time in the Maya region has been the source of continued fascination for archaeologists and lay persons alike. Some claim that the Classic Maya are a celebrity archaeological culture. Coeval with the time of Charlemagne in Europe, the Classic Maya world is very distant temporally from contemporary peoples (as is Charlemagne from current residents of Aachen, Germany). The archaeological project at Tahcabo—which is part of El Proyecto Arqueológico Colaborativo del Oriente de Yucatán (PACOY)—was conceived as a community-collaborative effort focused on the more recent colonial period (the rationale being that this more proximate time might prove more salient to community members than distant Classic-period times; Batún Alpuche et al. 2017). Since the town contained the remains of an early colonial ramada church, this feature could serve as a focal point for discussion of this time period. To some extent, the old church remains do serve as a nexus for dialogue, but townspeople also have expressed keen interest in the more recent hacienda era of the early Mexican Republic. Although this time

403

Patricia A. McAnany et al.

invariably is described by Yucatec-Maya as a time of enslavement, community members want to learn more about the experiences of their immediate ancestors.

Conducting community-collaborative archaeological research At this point in time, we can report on two community-collaborative initiatives—an archaeological investigation of the material imprint of colonialism in domestic contexts and the creation of a community museum. Initially, townspeople were inquisitive about archaeology but unsure of its methods and goals. After several seasons of survey, mapping, surface collection, and excavation (the last within domestic and rejollada contexts), archaeological knowledge of colonialism at Tahcabo is still a work in progress. Research is both aided and hindered by the continued occupation of the town. Current residents maintain vast knowledge about the past through stories told by elders and through their own experiences. This knowledge includes the environment and landscape in which they live. This important information has been shared through interviews and meetings with townspeople as well as through informal conversation that takes place as community members participate in excavations, visit the museum and sites, and otherwise engage with the archaeological team. On the other hand, the limestone bedrock in the area is shallow, and continued town occupation has led to mixed archaeological remains. Excavation at a handful of colonial houses and dry sinkhole features (critical for agricultural breadth, as discussed previously) has revealed how past inhabitants grappled with colonialism and altered many facets of their livelihood portfolios, which included agriculture, gathering of wild foods, hunting, bee-keeping practices, and house size. For the most part, excavations have taken place outside of the actively maintained space of the town center. Colonial-period dwellings located on the edges of town yielded relatively well-preserved contexts. Investigations were located on private tracts of land, with excavation only available to us through the good will and generosity of community inhabitants and due to their support of the project. Engagement with community members throughout the excavation and laboratory seasons included presentations, seminars, site tours, and other opportunities for bidirectional knowledge exchange that enhanced archaeological interpretations. During the colonial period, it was common for well-established and well-off town residents to live centrally in congregated communities, near the town square (Alexander 2012, 7). The residences we studied, located at some distance from the center of town, instead likely belonged to newly arrived, newly formed, or non-elite households. The excavated early colonial residence (occupied ca. 1580–1640 ce) provided evidence that members of a multi- or extended-family household engaged in hunting and fishing and participated in long-distance Indigenous trade networks (Dedrick 2019). Faunal remains found at the house include bones of animals that Tahcabo residents continue to hunt with traps in a nearby rejollada, according to community member accounts during fieldwork and interviews. Seeds identified from the early colonial house midden indicate that residents cultivated maize, beans, squash, and chili peppers—annual field crops that would allow them to meet tribute requirements and provide food for themselves on a relatively short-term basis without investing in long-term cultivation of orchard species to produce fruit (a point that came up in our interviews with town residents about past gardening practices). These early colonial residents living on the margins of the street grid supplemented their diets with nuts and berries from the forest. Overall, house residents maintained a diverse livelihood portfolio that would have provided flexibility to take advantage of new opportunities as they arose or flee deteriorating conditions (Dedrick et al. in press). This strategy is distinct from that pursued by contemporaneous 404

Lived heritage of colonialism

but more established households at the nearby early colonial settlement at Ek’ Balam (Hanson 2008). Residents of the dwelling on the outskirts of Tahcabo pursued activities and ways of life that Spanish officials sought unsuccessfully to restrict, including hunting and mobility (Ancona 1889, 538–558). Other evidence for ongoing forbidden activity consisted of a fragmented Chen Mul Modeled incense burner, in the form of a deity, which was placed at the foot of a retaining wall for the house platform. Such a belonging likely would have been interpreted as an idol by Spaniards—a dangerous item to possess at the time. Residents of one middle colonial period house appear to have worked to meet repartimiento demands through the production of beeswax, which was a much sought-after substance during Spanish colonialism due to the need for church candles (Wallace 2019). We found discs that likely were used to plug log hives within which native stingless bees (Melipona beechei) are housed (Dedrick 2019, Figure 6.21). Such discs often were made of stone or wood, but those found at Tahcabo were made of stucco with a ceramic-sherd lining—an innovative design to facilitate wax extraction. Plant seeds associated with the middle colonial dwelling suggest that residents maintained a garden beneficial for the bees and other domestic animals (Dedrick 2019, Table 6.12). Residents likely also collected wax from natural beehives located in forested areas. Current Tahcabo residents recall that native honeybees were commonly kept in town, though European honeybees have since replaced them. Tahcabo, a town with honey (cab in Yucatec Mayan) in its very name, has long been known as a place populated by beekeepers (Batún Alpuche et al. 2017). Residents of middle-to-late-colonial residential areas at Tahcabo likely lived in smaller, nuclear family arrangements, based on the small size of their dwellings. As mentioned earlier, as far back as the early colonial period friars demanded that extended families break into smaller households (Farriss 1984, 169), and eventually nuclear family arrangements prevailed (Dedrick 2019). This trend contributed to the narrowing of household livelihood portfolios. We infer that farmers living in middle-to-late-colonial Tahcabo exhibited greater dependence on maize based in part on an increase in the frequency of grinding stones (Dedrick 2019, Table 6.1). The presence of large cooking pots in house assemblages also suggests the preparation of maize-based stews and gruels. At a late colonial house, the ceramic vessels consisted almost entirely of jars, while individual serving vessels were nearly absent. By this time, local access to pottery may have diminished; consequently, the use of gourds as bowls increased. This would have contributed to the trend of larger vessel sizes—the presence of exceedingly large cooking pots with rim diameters larger than 40 cm suggest that nuclear families engaged regularly in large-scale food-sharing events (Dedrick 2019, Figure 6.38). Today, as well, Tahcabo residents gather together for events such as the annual feast day celebration of San Bartolomé, in which they prepare and share food with all community members and town visitors. During the weeklong festivities, those working far from home return to gather with friends and family and participate in activities associated with community heritage, resilience, and pride. When asked about cultural heritage, Tahcabo residents frequently identify the town fair as a beloved cornerstone of community life that is steeped in tradition and history. Some of the survival-enhancing tactics that colonial households implemented resonate with the challenges that current inhabitants face and the decisions they make today. The impact of slow violence on Tahcabo households became apparent through archaeological research, yet so too does evidence for the ingenuity, knowledge, and dedication of town residents, past and present. Archaeology is a step removed from contemporary livelihoods, yet deployment of mobility as a tactic of survival resonates with short-term migration to the Maya Riviera to labor in the tourism-fueled economy. Within Tahcabo, livelihood decisions (today and in the past) are/were influenced by local, regional, and global politics as well as visions for the future. As such, the archaeology of colonialism at Tahcabo provides opportunities for the community to reflect on the past and to use that information when choosing a path forward. 405

Patricia A. McAnany et al.

Displaying lived heritage in a community museum Although community members may have been quizzical about the archaeological process, there was much interest in a community museum from the start. Archaeologists reasoned that a museum might showcase the deep heritage of the town and provide a place to curate heritage objects. We heard repeatedly from Tahcabo residents that they just didn’t know much about the history of their town. A museum—no matter how small—seemed to be a way for townspeople to regain authority over their story and over heritage objects found or excavated on community land. Elsewhere in México—and particularly in Oaxaca—community museums have proven to be extremely popular (Hoobler 2006). With financial support from the Archaeological Institute of America and modest support from the municipal government for museum maintenance, plus the donation of space in the town hall (matched by the formation of a volunteer town heritage committee), a small museum opened in August 2015 during the annual feast-day celebration of San Bartolomé (Figure 25.3). At the time, only mapping and surface collection had been undertaken at Tahcabo, so our knowledge of its deep history was preliminary. However, considerable archival information about the town was available, and bilingual (Spanish and Yucatec Mayan) wall panels were designed. In presenting events of the colonial period, we were cognizant of the tension between glossing over the violence of this time and portraying Maya peoples as helpless victims of a Spanish juggernaut. The concept of persistent agency despite colonization—in other words, survivance (Atalay 2006; Vizenor 1998, 15)—proved helpful in setting the tone of the panels.

Figure 25.3 Interior of community museum at Tahcabo. Source: Photo by Maia Dedrick.

406

Lived heritage of colonialism

Apart from an overview of Tahcabo’s history, the exhibit covers the beauty and significance of landscape features such as cenotes, rejolladas, and caves, and also highlights important community traditions, such as the feast day celebration of San Bartolomé and the rain ceremony (Ch’a’ Cháak). All of the text went through a process of consultation with the heritage committee. Artifacts featured in the museum include facsimiles of historical documents as well as donations from community members, such as coin collections, a miniature replica of a traditional woven-vine door, and belongings that people had found in and near the community, such as grinding stones and a complete Late-Terminal Classic slateware vessel recovered from a cave. The museum exhibit provides community members with a secure place for the artifacts they had come across, which they had previously worked to keep safe at home. On the opening day, the museum was packed, and it remains a vital resource for the community, particularly for schoolchildren, who study the wall panels and holdings of the small library to learn about their town in preparation for writing class essays. International visitors add to the cachet of a small town with a big history. The museum, along with an enhanced web presence and publications focusing on the community, have increased knowledge of Tahcabo, improving its reputation regionally. This was an outcome desirable to community members and expressed to us as a goal early on in the project. A number of educational and performance programs associated with the museum have occurred, including language workshops, archaeological seminars, concerts, and field trips to archaeological sites such as nearby Ek’ Balam and the more distant Dzibilchaltun. Field trips enhanced knowledge of Yucatec Maya cultural heritage and pride in Maya ancestry. Most events feature Yucatec Maya language prominently, as town residents have expressed a desire for initiatives that will assist with language preservation. Events sponsored by the archaeological team complement those hosted by community schools and residents, including an annual Mother Languages Day event, the display of Janal Pixan (Day of the Dead) altars, presentations that highlight the diversity and appeal of local recipes and plant medicines, as well as concerts, dances, and the previously mentioned bullfights at the annual fair.

Bending the arc toward a decolonized future In a speech given at the US National Cathedral in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., stated that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This statement has been critiqued as too patient and too accepting of pressing injustice. But King was grappling with the reality that social change often occurs slowly, over generations, especially when that change involves ceding power and privilege. Nonetheless, bending a trajectory in the present—even if slightly—changes the direction of the future. In Yucatán, the establishment of a small museum and a communitycollaborative field project are attempts to bend the arc, to move toward what can be referred to as re-patrimonialization of Maya cultural heritage. These efforts work to decolonize the future by reconnecting people with the authority to investigate and manage their past. From another perspective, reckoning with the lived heritage of colonialism provides space to understand how the vernacular multiculturalism of current identities has been forged and away from thinking about the past (or the present) in terms of simple polarities (the latter exemplified by the “timeless Maya” trope previously discussed). A reckoning with coloniality can be accomplished more effectively when the trauma of colonial and more recent violence is explored alongside a celebration of cultural heritage and relationships to place and landscape (Lederach 2017, 598; Montgomery 2019, 743). Working toward what Arturo Escobar (2017) calls a pluriverse, we hope to redesign the practice of archaeology to be an endeavor that is ethically sound, ethnically diverse, and radically interdependent. 407

Patricia A. McAnany et al.

References cited Alexander, Rani T. 2012. “Prohibido Tocar Este Cenote: The Archaeological Basis for the Titles of Ebtun.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 16: 1–24. Ancona, Eligio. 1889. Historia de Yucatan desde la época más remota hasta nuestros días, Vol. 2. Barcelona: Jaime Jepús Roviralta. Andrews, Anthony P. 1981. “Historical Archaeology in Yucatan: A Preliminary Framework.” Historical Archaeology 15 (1): 1–18. Andrews, Anthony P. 1991. “Rural Chapels and Churches of Early Colonial Yucatán and Belize: An Archaeological Perspective.” In The Spanish Borderlands in Pan-American Perspective (Volume 3 of Columbian Consequences), edited by David Hurst Thomas, 355–374. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Archivo General del Estado de Yucatán (AGEY). 1841. Padrón general de habitantes del pueblo de Tahcabo. Poder Ejecutivo, Censos y Padrones, vol. 5. Exp. 55. Armstrong-Fumero, Fernando. 2011. “Words and Things in Yucatán: Postructuralism and the Everyday Life of Mayan Multiculturalism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17: 63–81. Armstrong-Fumero, Fernando. 2013. Elusive Unity: Factionalism and the Limits of Identity Politics in Yucatán, Mexico. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Atalay, Sonya. 2006. “No Sense of the Struggle: Creating a Context for Survivance at the NMAI.” American Indian Quarterly 30 (3–4): 597–618. Atalay, Sonya. 2012. Community-based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Baron, Joanne P. 2016. Patron Gods and Patron Lords: The Semiotics of Classic Maya Community Cults. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Batún Alpuche, Adolfo Iván, Patricia A. McAnany, and Maia Dedrick. 2017. “Tiempo y Paisaje en Tahcabo.” Arqueología Mexicana 25 (145): 66–71. Bray, Tamara L., and Thomas W. Killian, eds. 1994. Reckoning with the Dead: the Larsen Bay Repatriation and the Smithsonian Institution. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Chuchiak, John F. 2004. “Papal Bulls, Extirpators, and the Madrid Codex: The Content and Probable Provenience of the M. 56 Patch.” In The Madrid Codex: New Approaches to Understanding an Ancient Maya Manuscript, edited by Gabrielle Vail and Anthony Aveni, 57–88. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Chuchiak, John F. 2006. “Yaab Uih Yetel Maya Cimil: Colonial Plagues, Famines, Catastrophes and Their Impact on Changing Yucatec Maya Concepts of Death and Dying, 1570–1794.” In The Jaws of the Underworld: Life, Death and Rebirth among the Ancient Maya, edited by Pierre R. Colas, Genevieve LeFort and Bodil Liljefors Persson, 3–18. Markt Schwaben: Verlag Anton Saurwein. Chuchiak, John F. 2009. “De Descriptio Idolorum: An Ethnohistorical Examination of the Production, Imagery, and Functions of Colonial Yucatec Maya Idols and Effigy Censers, 1540–1700.” In Maya Worldviews at Conquest, edited by Leslie G. Cecil and Timothy W. Pugh, 135–158. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Dedrick, Maia. 2019. “The Archaeology of Colonial Maya Livelihoods at Tahcabo, Yucatán, Mexico.” PhD Dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Dedrick, Maia, Patricia A. McAnany, and Adolfo Iván Batún Alpuche. in press. “A Livelihoods Approach to Colonial Period Farming Strategies at Tahcabo, Yucatán.” In Coloniality in the Maya Lowlands: Archaeological Perspectives, edited by Kasey Diserens Morgan and Tiffany C. Fryer. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Dedrick, Maia, Elizabeth A. Webb, Patricia A. McAnany, José Miguel Kanxoc Kumul, John G. Jones, Adolfo Iván Batún Alpuche, Carly Pope, and Morgan Russell. 2020. “Influential Landscapes: Temporal Trends in the Agricultural Use of Rejolladas at Tahcabo, Yucatán, Mexico.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 59: 101175. Dongoske, Kurt E. 2020. “Making Mitigation Meaningful to Descendant Communities: An Example from Zuni.” Advances in Archaeological Practice 8 (3): 225–235. Dumond, Carol Steichen, and Don E. Dumond. 1982. “Demography and Parish Affairs in Yucatan 1797– 1897: Documents from the Archivo de la Mitra Emeritense Selected by Joaquín de Arrigunaga Peón.” University of Oregon Anthropological Papers, No. 27. Escobar, Arturo. 2017. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Farriss, Nancy M. 1984. Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

408

Lived heritage of colonialism Fedick, Scott L., ed. 1996. The Managed Mosaic: Ancient Maya Agriculture and Resource Use. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Fedick, Scott L. 2014. “A Reassessment of Water and Soil Resources in the Flatlands of the Northern Maya Lowlands.” Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 24: 72–83. Fedick, Scott L. 2020 “Maya Cornucopia: Indigenous Food Plants of the Maya Lowlands.” In The Real Business of Ancient Maya Economies: From Farmers’ Fields to Rulers’ Realms, edited by Marilyn A. Masson, David A. Freidel, and Arthur A. Demarest, 224–237. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Fedick, Scott L., Maria de Lourdes Flores Delgadillo, Sergey Sedov, Elizabeth Solleiro Rebolledo, and Sergio Palacios Mayorga. 2008. “Adaptation of Maya Homegardens by ‘Container Gardening’ in Limestone Bedrock Cavities.” Journal of Ethnobiology 28 (2): 290–304. Fedick, Scott L., and Bethany A. Morrison. 2004. “Ancient Use and Manipulation of Landscape in the Yalahau Region of the Northern Maya Lowlands.” Agriculture and Human Values 21: 207–219. Flores-Delgadillo, Lourdes, Scott L. Fedick, Elizabeth Solleiro-Rebolledo, Sergio Palacios-Mayorga, Pilar Ortega-Larrocea, Sergey Sedov, and Esteban Osuna-Ceja. 2011. “A Sustainable System of a Traditional Precision Agriculture in a Maya Homegarden: Soil Quality Aspects.” Soil & Tillage Research 113: 112–120. Folan, William J. 1970. The Open Chapel of Dzibilchaltún, Yucatán. Middle America Research Institute, Publication No. 26. New Orleans: Tulane University. Fowler, William R. 2009. “Historical Archaeology in Yucatan and Central America.” In International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by T. Majewski and D. Gaimster, 429–448. New York: Springer. Gabbert, Wolfgang. 2004. “Of Friends and Foes: The Caste War and Ethnicity in Yucatan.” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 9 (1): 90–118. Gallareta Negrón, Tomás, Anthony P. Andrews, and Peter R. Schmidt. 1990. “A 16th Century Church at Xlacah, Panabá, Yucatan.” Mexicon 12 (2): 33–36. García Bernal, Manuela Cristina. 2005. Economía, Política y Sociedad en el Yucatán Colonial. Mérida: Ediciones de la Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán. Graham, Elizabeth. 2011. Maya Christians and Their Churches in Sixteenth-Century Belize. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Hanks, William F. 2010. Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hanson, Craig A. 1995. “The Hispanic Horizon in Yucatan: A Model of Franciscan Missionization.” Ancient Mesoamerica 6: 15–28. Hanson, Craig A. 2008. “The Late Mesoamerican Village.” PhD Dissertation, Tulane University. Hoggarth, Julie A., Matthew Restall, James W. Wood, and Douglas J. Kennett. 2017. “Drought and Its Demographic Effects in the Maya Lowlands.” Current Anthropology 58 (1): 82–113. Hoobler, Ellen. 2006. “To Take Their Heritage in Their Hands: Indigenous Self-Representation and Decolonization in the Community Museums of Oaxaca, Mexico.” American Indian Quarterly 30 (3–4): 441–460. Jones, Grant D. 1998. The Conquest of the Last Maya Kingdom. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Kanxoc Kumul, José Miguel, and Maia Dedrick. 2016. “Interdisciplinary Views of Gardens Produced through Ethnographic Research in Tahcabo, Yucatán, Mexico, as Part of a Collaborative Archaeological Project.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Minneapolis, MN. Kepecs, Susan, and Sylviane Boucher. 1996. “The Pre-Hispanic Cultivation of Rejolladas and Stone-Lands: New Evidence from Northeast Yucatán.” In The Managed Mosaic: Ancient Maya Agriculture and Resource Use, edited by Scott L. Fedick, 69–91. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Lederach, Angela J. 2017. “‘The Campesino Was Born for the Campo’: A Multispecies Approach to Territorial Peace in Colombia.” American Anthropologist 119 (4): 589–602. Leonard, Daniel, Sergey Sedov, Elizabeth Solleiro-Rebolledo, Scott L. Fedick, and Jaime Diaz. 2019. “Ancient Maya Use of Hidden Soilscapes in the Yalahau Wetlands, Northern Quintana Roo, Mexico.” Boletín de la Sociedad Geológica Mexicana 71 (1): 93–119. Logan, Amanda L. 2016. “‘Why Can’t People Feed Themselves?’: Archaeology as Alternative Archive of Food Security in Banda, Ghana.” American Anthropologist 118 (3): 508–524. López de Cogolludo, Fray Diego. 1688. Historia de la Provincia de Yucathan. Madrid: Juan Garcia Infanzon. Marshall, Yvonne. 2002. “What is Community Archaeology?” World Archaeology 34 (2): 211–219. McAnany, Patricia A. 2020. “Imagining a Maya Archaeology that is Anthropological and Attuned to Indigenous Cultural Heritage.” Heritage 3 (2): 318–330. McAnany, Patricia A., and Linda A. Brown. 2016. “Perceptions of the Past within Tz’utujil Ontologies and Yucatec Hybridities.” Antiquity 90: 487–503.

409

Patricia A. McAnany et al. McAnany, Patricia A., and Shoshaunna Parks. 2012. “Casualties of Heritage Distancing: Children, Ch’orti’ Indigeneity, and the Copan Archaeoscape.” Current Anthropology 53 (1): 80–107. McNiven, Ian J., and Lynette Russell. 2005. Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Miller, Arthur G., and Nancy M. Farriss. 1979. “Religious Syncretism in Colonial Yucatan: The Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Evidence from Tancah, Quintana Roo.” In Maya Archaeology and Ethnohistory, edited by Norman Hammond and Gordon R. Willey, 223–240. Austin: University of Texas Press. Montgomery, Lindsay M. 2019. “Memories that Haunt: Layered Landscapes of Historical Trauma on the American Plains.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 25 (7): 736–749. Morgan-Smith, Mary M. 2019. “Caciques and Community: Historical Maya Archaeology at Rancho Kiuic, Yucatán, México.” PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Oland, Maxine. 2012. “Lost among the Colonial Maya: Engaging Indigenous Maya History at Progresso Lagoon, Belize.” In Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology, edited by Maxine Oland, Siobhan M. Hart and Liam Frink, 178–200. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Oland, Maxine, and Joel W. Palka. 2016. “The Perduring Maya: New Archaeology on Early Colonial Transitions.” Antiquity 90 (350): 472–486. Palka, Joel W. 2005. Unconquered Lacandon Maya: Ethnohistory and Archaeology of Indigenous Culture Change. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Patch, Robert W. 1993. Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1648–1812. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pugh, Timothy W., Katherine Miller Wolf, Carolyn Freiwald, and Prudence M. Rice. 2016. “Technologies of Domination at Mission San Bernabé, Petén, Guatemala.” Ancient Mesoamerica 27: 49–70. Quezada, Sergio. 2014. Maya Lords and Lordship: The Formation of Colonial Society in Yucatán, 1350–1600. Translated by T. Rugeley. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Re Cruz, Alicia. 2003. “Milpa as an Ideological Weapon: Tourism and Maya Migration to Cancún.” Ethnohistory 50 (3): 489–502. RHGY. 1579 [1900]. Relaciones Histórico-Geográficas de las Provincias de Yucatán [RHG]: Colección de documentos ineditos relativos al descubrimiento: Relaciones de Yucatán 13. Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia. Ross, Anne. 2010. “Defining Cultural Heritage at Gummingurru, Queensland, Australia.” In Bridging the Divide: Indigenous Communities and Archaeology in the 21st Century, edited by Caroline Phillips and Harry Allen, 107–128. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Roys, Ralph L., France V. Scholes, and Eleanor B. Adams. 1940. “Report and Census of the Indians of Cozumel, 1570.” In Contributions to American Anthropology and History, Vol. VI, No. 30, 1–30. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington. Rugeley, Terry. 1996. Yucatán’s Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sanchez de Aguilar, Pedro. 1639. Informe Contra Idolorum Cultures del Obispado de Yucatan. Madrid: Por la viuda de Juan Gonzalez. Scholes, France V., C. R. Menéndez, J. I. Rubio Mañé, and Eleanor B. Adams, eds. 1936. Documentos para la historia de Yucatán, Tomo II. Merida: Compañía Tipográfica Yucateca, S.A. Silverblatt, Irene. 2004. Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, Claire, and H. Martin Wobst, eds. 2005. Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge. Tedlock, Dennis. 1993. “Torture in the Archives: Mayans Meet Europeans.” American Anthropologist 95 (1): 139–152. Tuxill, John, Luis Arias Reyes, Luis Latournerie Moreno, Vidal Cob Uicab, and Devra I. Jarvis. 2010. “All Maize is Not Equal: Maize Variety Choices and Mayan Foodways in Rural Yucatan, Mexico.” In Pre-Columbian Foodways: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture, and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica, edited by John E. Staller and Michael D. Carrasco, 467–486. New York: Springer. Vizenor, Gerald. 1998. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Wallace, Geoffrey H. 2019. “The Geography and History of Beeswax Extraction in the Northern Maya Lowlands, 1540–1700.” PhD Dissertation, McGill University.

410

26 MONUMENTALIZING NIPMUC HERITAGE AND EMPLACING INDIGENOUS PRESENCE Heather Law Pezzarossi, Stephen A. Mrozowski, and D. Rae Gould

Several decades ago, a seasoned archaeologist began to develop a relationship with the Nipmuc tribe through the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, Rae Gould. Stephen A. Mrozowski had worked in southern New England for almost all of his career on “historical” (post-contact) projects but had only recently considered that on both sides of, and throughout, the colonial, industrial, and more contemporary layers he explored, a constant presence existed: the Native peoples connected to the land for thousands of years who were still actively involved in and with their homelands. This chapter outlines a project that has developed from the professional relationships and friendships that have grown between Steve, Rae, and a former student trained by Steve: Heather Law Pezzarossi, now a friend, colleague, and collaborator, as well (and primary author of this chapter). As a collaborative group of scholars, both Indigenous and allied, we have worked together for over 15 years designing research objectives that support the Nipmuc tribe in the present. Our next project will be an expansion of existing place-based and cultural landscape studies of Nipmuc homelands the authors have engaged in through archaeology, documentary research, and collaborative methodologies (Gould 2010, 2013; Gould et al. 2020; Law 2014; Law et al. 2008; Law Pezzarossi 2014, 2019; Mrozowski 2009; Mrozowski and Law Pezzarossi 2015; Mrozowski et al. 2009, 2015). Through critical heritage studies and a deep engagement with how we consider Indigenous presence on the landscape over time, the project will map, record, and remember significant historical places across Nipmuc homelands and explore aspects of tribal sovereignty in a new way: through monumentalizing Nipmuc heritage from Indigenous knowledge and perspectives about these places. The degree of public access to this knowledge will be determined by Nipmuc people, following the model of similar projects (e.g., https:// localcontexts.org/). The project’s overall goal will be to assist the tribe in documenting and preserving important sacred and historic Nipmuc sites and land features while creating an archive of tribal land histories for tribal members (and any others the tribe feels should have access). This project is one example of how Native people across North America are working to reIndigenize the land they have been connected to for millennia. Its anti-colonial lens provides an opportunity to see the landscape in a new—yet old—way based on knowledge reaching back to well before settler colonialism defined narratives of North America. We seek to write over, again, the landscape of southern New England with Indigenous narratives. Since the early seventeenth century, Nipmuc homelands, and the American continents in general, have incurred 411

Heather Law Pezzarossi et al.

a violent dispossession of land, people, knowledge, and heritage that requires redressing. The violence against non-settler colonial populations has been pervasive, as the very public Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement demonstrates. BLM has empowered a broad and monumental resurgence of the exhausting struggle to combat the systemic racism and structural violence that has shaped American society from its inception. As protests continue, we have seen and participated in the removal of monuments to Euro-American history that erase, justify, and otherwise glorify colonialism. These heritage objects and the once-celebrated historical narratives that they commemorate have reminded us that heritage is not neutral; rather, it is a selective process by which the past is made useful, meaningful, and valuable in the present (Smith 2006). The material fixity of monuments and their relative durability have allowed them to reinforce benign versions of colonialism and narratives of Indigenous decline into the present, just as they have glorified American heroes tied to enslavement of Black peoples. In this chapter, our critical heritage studies approach investigates existing heritage landscapes in Nipmuc homelands (modern-day southern New England) that include sites of interest, monuments, and roadside markers. We ask how the creation of knowledge connected to these landscapes is entangled with relations of social and political power and inequality and how they have shaped public understanding of Nipmuc people in their own homelands (Baird 2013, 328). As Patrick Wolfe (2006) notes, the condition of settler colonialism is not an event; that is, it is not something that happened in the past but is rather an ongoing structure that must be actively maintained in order to continually justify the exploitation and displacement of Indigenous peoples. Colonialism has not ended; it is not a thing of the past for Indigenous peoples of the Americas and remains an active reality (Byrd 2016; Cook-Lynn 2012). National heritage and the creation of heritage landscapes is one way that colonial regimes are upheld and Indigenous landscapes are replaced with colonial ones (see, for example, DeLucia 2018). The second purpose of this chapter is to identify landscapes of Nipmuc heritage to increase their tangible nature within Nipmuc homelands. While some Nipmuc heritage sites, like the Hassanamisco Reservation, Cisco Homestead, and Burnee/Boston Site (see later), are significant because they have substantial histories of Nipmuc occupation or ownership, other places and routes have rich histories illustrating the dynamic ways Nipmuc people have continued to inhabit their homelands despite colonial encroachment, land theft, the imposition of private property laws, strategic dispossession, and removal over the last 400 years. We plot and discuss the historical significance of places where Nipmuc people (past and present) labor, travel, raise families, congregate, and celebrate, regardless of land ownership. By mapping out and monumentalizing these Nipmuc histories, we hope to provide the contemporary Nipmuc community with a resource for tangible Nipmuc heritage sites in the present and create a model for identifying more diverse heritage landscapes in the future. The narrative we offer focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the formation of an overwhelmingly white American historical narrative attempted to systematically erase the continued presence of Nipmuc communities and deny them a place in the urban and industrial landscapes of their own homelands (O’Brien 2010).

Nipmuc heritage landscapes The concept of homeland is fundamental to Nipmuc identity. It provides a backdrop for Indigenous knowledge and wisdom; it emplaces generations on a landscape, creating networks of relations and stories. While the spaces of contemporary New England have been largely defined by the settler colonial state, Nipmuc spaces continued. Nipmuc homelands cut across state and town boundaries, overlapping with those of Narragansett, Massachusett, Wampanoag, Mohegan, 412

Monumentalizing Nipmuc heritage

Mohican, Wabanaki, and Pocumtuc. They exist despite the boundaries of private property, highway easements, railroad crossings, no-fly zones, and superfund sites. They exist despite Columbus statues and the overwhelming monumentality of Euro-American history in New England. They exist despite their absence on maps or their lack of visibility in history textbooks. Nipmuc homelands exist because they have been practiced, enacted, traveled, and occupied for millennia. Emplacing Nipmuc histories is the first step toward the realization of Nipmuc heritage landscapes that counter the overwhelmingly Euro-American heritage inscribed on Nipmuc homelands today. Storying the landscape in this way brings Indigenous heritage out of museums and history books and into the public eye, creating a physical space for the retelling of the Nipmuc past and present. It is an effort by Nipmuc people to manage the tangible heritage of their own homelands and, as such, is an exercise in Nipmuc sovereignty. Of course, there are many important places within Nipmuc homelands that are not suitable for serving in the role of monuments. Monuments make histories visible, carving out spaces for historical narratives and opening possibilities for opportunities of civic engagement. Some Nipmuc places are sacred, private, and shared only among tribal members. These places are actively maintained by the Nipmuc community and are not the intended focus of our work. Instead, we hope to focus on the heritage landscape of Nipmuc adjustment to the spread of industry and colonization across their homeland. This is the logical next step in our joint research, as it highlights the narrative of societal advancement built on evolving technologies that emerged during the nineteenth century. This narrative—written during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—was predicated on the idea that settler society had now eclipsed an Indigenous present relegated to the past, to history, a history that had no connection to the future (Gould et al. 2020). We see this project as allied with several other efforts, led by Indigenous collectives, to continue to memorialize Nipmuc histories and inhabit Indigenous homelands in New England. In the 1920s, the Indian Council of New England—which included James Lemuel Cisco, Sara Cisco-Sullivan, other Nipmuc people, and leaders of other Algonquin communities in New England—gathered as a pan-Indian council. They created initiatives for memorializing the Indigenous landscape with monuments to Indigenous leaders like Wawaloam and Miantonomi (Rubertone 2012, 239). Since 1996, Nipmuc people have participated in annual canoe journeys (or paddles) to Deer Island—a landscape dominated by Boston’s water treatment facility and low flying air traffic surrounding Boston’s Logan International Airport—to commemorate the dark heritage of Deer Island as a place of Indigenous internment, starvation, and genocide during King Philip’s War (1675–1676). As DeLucia has noted, Given this intensely painful context of ongoing dispossession, periodic gatherings and mobility across land and water, like regularly occurring powwows and the Deer Island commemorations, are ways of reaffirming places as Nipmuc, contrary to colonial attempts to diminish those spatialities. (2018, 109) The Deer Island paddles include itineraries that take participants from one meaningful location to the next, connecting nodes in a memorial network that enable participants to maintain and embody what DeLucia calls a “meaningful memorial geography” (DeLucia 2018, 109) (see Figure 26.1 to trace the path of the Charles River from Natick to Boston Harbor). The idea of focusing on a Nipmuc heritage project has taken shape over the past few decades, beginning with our work in Grafton, Massachusetts. We began there, in different capacities, as both part of and allies to the Nipmuc Nation. Rae Gould has led efforts to preserve the Cisco Homestead and used this cultural landscape as a vehicle for engaging Nipmuc history, past and 413

Heather Law Pezzarossi et al.

present (Gould 2010; Gould et al. 2020). Steve Mrozowski and Heather Law Pezzarossi worked in collaboration with the Nipmuc Nation to investigate Keith Hill as a place of Nipmuc heritage. While archival research identified the hillside as part of the site of the seventeenth-century praying village Hassanamesit, archaeological excavations yielded a different story. We located a Nipmuc homestead, occupied by four generations of one Nipmuc family spanning the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (Gould et al. 2020; Mrozowski and Law Pezzarossi 2015). That initial work has now expanded to include research on additional Nipmuc and Anglo-American households, most notably Deborah Newman’s. Like Sarah Boston and her mother Sarah Burnee, Deborah Newman was a basket maker. From servants to farmers to basket makers, the historical narratives that emerged from both of these projects are testaments to the strength and audacity of Nipmuc women as stewards of their homelands and leaders in their community. These sites now have an active presence on the Grafton landscape. Hassanamesit Woods is an educational walking trail for the public that makes a site of Nipmuc heritage visible on the contemporary landscape. The Cisco Homestead, with its restored exterior, remains the heart of an active and vibrant gathering place for Nipmuc people, as it has been for generations (Gould et al. 2020; Gould 2010; National Park Service 2011) (see Figure 26.1, point 1). We know that the places in Grafton are important spots of Nipmuc heritage because they provide rare examples of the retention of Nipmuc landholdings (the Burnee/Boston Farmstead is an example of property “owned” for over 100 years, following the 1728 allotment of Hassanamesit) or of continued occupation and use (in the example of the Cisco Homestead and Hassanamisco Reservation). But we also know that so many Nipmuc people who did not own land (or lost their lands through the aggressive tactics of dispossession implemented through cycles of indebtedness and financial paternalism maintained by Euro-American settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) continued to occupy their homelands in very dynamic and deliberate ways. This proved to be a major motivating force in extending our research and collaboration to the present. For example, we know that the land owned by the Burnee/Boston family in Grafton was sold in the mid-nineteenth century but were uncomfortable with implications of their story ending as their land was sold. Research done in 2018 revealed a much larger and dynamic homeland that this Nipmuc family occupied. Even while they lived on Keith Hill, places of repeated connection, labor, and travel extended the habitual use of their homelands far beyond the contracting boundaries on the surveyors’ maps. They included spaces where Nipmuc mothers and children labored in Providence, Rhode Island, in prominent politicians’ and merchants’ homes, and routes from Providence to Grafton that were maintained by generations of the Burnee/Boston family and others. And they included urban spaces in Worcester, Massachusetts, where subsequent generations of Nipmuc women purchased property in the mid-nineteenth century and became active members of a Nipmuc and African American community (Gould et al. 2020). These are just some of the places across Nipmuc homelands that define the heritage landscapes connected to this tribe; this chapter provides the beginning of our efforts to define others.

Settler colonial heritage landscapes in Nipmuc homelands The dominant historical narratives in New England remain written on the landscape. Many cities and towns in Nipmuc homelands bear the identities of English landscapes left behind by early colonists, creating something of a nostalgic memorial landscape of seventeenth-century Britain. Worcester, Leominster, Leicester, Oxford, and Shrewsbury are all towns scattered across central Massachusetts in a pattern not dissimilar to how they are scattered across the English Midlands. These colonial names stretch across an Indigenous landscape already rich in history, already crisscrossed with the rivers and well-worn trails that linked villages through complex 414

Monumentalizing Nipmuc heritage

networks of relations for millennia (see Brooks 2008). While many Nipmuc toponyms can be found within these homelands, these names are often not well understood. Lake Quinsigamond, Tatnuck, Lake Chaubunagungamaug, Quinebaug River, Quaddick Lake, and Wachusett Mountain are some examples. While hundreds of known Nipmuc place names can no longer be found on contemporary maps, these are some of the places known most commonly by their Nipmuc toponym, or an Anglicized version of it, at least. Still other toponyms hint at historical events, communities, settlements, and important features on the landscape with little historical context: Indian Lake in Worcester, Wigwam Hill, Nipmuc Forest, Nipmuc Trail, Nipmuc Pond and Nipmuc River. These naming practices provide examples of how Indigenous toponyms tend to be generalized, homogenized, and serve as relics of the past (and just not well understood) for the public, while at the same time reference a richer heritage landscape for Indigenous people. The monuments and memorials in Nipmuc homelands also provide a sense of the histories that have been sanctioned by townships and given credence in public spaces, across a landscape that has been occupied by Nipmuc people and their descendants for millennia yet occupied by settlers for only 400 years. The Christopher Columbus monument at Union Station in Worcester, which has lately drawn much attention as a symbol of the colonial past and/or a tribute to the Italian American community in Worcester, is a good example.1 We might also consider the many monuments to John Eliot, proclaimed “Apostle to the Indians,” who launched a campaign of conversion across Nipmuc, Massachusett, and Wampanoag homelands before King Philip’s War (Metacom’s Rebellion). While his efforts have been shown archivally and archaeologically to have met considerable resistance by Nipmuc people, as well as having been motivated by personal gain, sites tied to his campaign are celebrated throughout eastern Massachusetts and Northern Connecticut as part of a colonial heritage landscape. His legacy is celebrated by a stone obelisk in Natick and a mural at the Massachusetts State House, as well as many roadside historical markers (see below) (DeLucia 2018). Similar monuments carve space for narratives of the American Revolution, inscribing tales of American heroism and patriotism onto land actively dispossessed from Nipmuc peoples through acts of violence, theft, and coercion (O’Brien 1997). Israel Putnam is celebrated in Northeastern Connecticut as a Revolutionary War hero. In addition to the town that bears his name, he has a statue in neighboring Brooklyn and the site where he reportedly killed one of the last remaining wolves in Connecticut is memorialized as a state park. Other examples include Timothy Bigelow, who has a monument in Worcester, and Revolutionary War veteran, senator, and Hassanamisco Nipmuc Trustee Artemas Ward, who has a carefully preserved house and museum in Shrewsbury. Samuel Slater, the much-celebrated early industrialist who brought the first textile mill to the Blackstone Valley, has a National Historic Landmark and Memorial Park in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, plus a memorial obelisk and two memorial towers in Webster. Jerome Wheelock, an inventor of several mechanisms to improve the steam engine, is memorialized by a statue in Grafton. These are just some of the names inscribed in stone on municipal buildings or etched in brass on village greens across Nipmuc homelands. These men became the heroes of an American historical narrative that disguised the attempted genocide, land theft, and enslavement of Indigenous peoples and replaced it with a more palatable and benign narrative of Indigenous “disappearance” (O’Brien 2010). These are the men whose lives and achievements stood as examples of patriotism, valor, and freedom that fueled attitudes of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. These are the men whose innovation and entrepreneurial spirit embodied the capitalist model of success and progressive ideals of American modernity that defined itself against the perceived primitivism of the Native peoples of the region. Certainly, these landscapes also memorialize Indigenous people. King Philip (Metacom) is most prominently memorialized on the Nipmuc landscape. While he was a Wampanoag leader, 415

Heather Law Pezzarossi et al.

the narrative of his defeat is commemorated on Nipmuc homelands at locations such as Lookout Rock in Northbridge, Metacomet Path in Harvard, and King Philip’s Woods in Sudbury (all in Massachusetts). He has been canonized as brave, rebellious, and a formidable adversary, yet also as a doomed leader of a resistance destined to fall to the superior forces of democracy and western modernity (see Lapore 1998). The heritage landscapes built to memorialize King Philip uphold images of the “noble savage” who both inspired and enabled American greatness. Philip Deloria (1998) explains the important role that Indigenous peoples (and places) play in the creation of a unique American heritage landscape. Even prior to the American Revolution, settlers’ appropriation of “Indian” imagery (often an Indigenous woman) mobilized both a nobleness and wildness that enabled early America to envision itself as both morally superior to and yet unfettered by the “Old World.” Simultaneously, fully realized American subjectivity was dependent on a rejection of British colonialism but also a repression of their colonial relation to Native Americans and enslaved peoples. As such, Americans were (and remain) haunted by the fundamental paradox of the American Nation as both a colony and a colonizer (Bergland 2000, 13). As independence from Britain became a reality, Americans wrestled with their own complicity, using what Patrick Wolfe (2006) calls the “logic of elimination,” in which Indigenous society must be broken down and replaced with that of the settler colonial state. As Deloria explains, “there was, quite simply, no way to conceive an American identity without Indians. At the same time, there was no way to make a complete identity while they remained” (Deloria 1998, 37).2

Tercentenary memoryscapes In 1930, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts installed hundreds of cast-iron historical markers across the state in an effort to emplace Massachusetts’s colonial heritage as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Tercentenary celebration. The chairman of the commission, Herbert Parker, described the markers as places significant in a highly romanticized birth of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts: The travelers who shall pass by the many storied ways through the lands of the Puritan occupations in the ancient days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, may now read on tablets set by roadsides or in city streets the tales which the ocean shores, the hills, the fields, the churches, the garrison houses and the old hearthstones, have to tell of the heroism, of the romance and the tragedies, and of the unfaltering faith, of the ancestors of our Commonwealth. (Morison 1930, 12) Christine DeLucia (2018, 89) describes this campaign of signage throughout Massachusetts as “strategically situated on specific grounds to visually promulgate a memoryscape valorizing colonial settlements and Indigenous relinquishments.” While very few of these markers acknowledge the complex histories of Indigenous communities in the region, many promote messaging that DeLucia says “needed Indigenous people, but as historical touchstones, rather than contemporary actors or sovereign communities” (2018, 89). A systematic search for these Tercentenary markers located within Nipmuc homelands that mention Indigenous people revealed several recurring themes that support DeLucia’s point.3 One of the more common themes memorializes praying towns associated with John Eliot as sites of Christian and colonial heritage on the Massachusetts landscape. On the Grafton town green, for example, a marker reads, “John Eliot established here in 1651 a village of Christian 416

Monumentalizing Nipmuc heritage

Indians called Hassanamesit—‘at a place of small stones’ .  .  . It was the home of James the Printer who helped Eliot to print the Indian Bible.” A similar marker announces the location of “Pakachoag” in Worcester: “One-half mile up Malvern Road is the Indian spring and the site of the Indian village Pakachoag, clear spring, one of the three Indian villages on Worcester ground. John Eliot preached here in 1674.” Another marks the site of “Chabunagungamaug” in present-day Webster, and yet another marks the site of the “Eliot Church Meetinghouse” in Natick, Massachusetts: On this site John Eliot helped his Indian converts to build their first meetinghouse in 1651, with a “prophet’s chamber” where he lodged on his fortnightly visits to preach to them in their language. His disciple Daniel Takawambait succeeded to the pastoral office in 1698. Interestingly, these markers commemorating conversion are the only Tercentenary markers that mention Nipmuc people by name. Other Tercentenary markers emplace captivity narratives. Captivity narratives became extremely popular in New England after King Philip’s War and are often characterized as one of the first uniquely American literary genres. A Tercentenary marker stands near Billings Square in Worcester, relating Samuel Leonardson’s captivity narrative: “At the end of Hamilton Street is the site of the Leonardson house from which in 1695 Samuel, aged twelve, was taken captive.” Samuel Leonardson was an accomplice of Hannah Dustin, a captive made heroine in the nineteenth century for the massacre of her Indigenous captors and her subsequent escape from captivity. Many of the events (or “removes,” as she terms them) of Mary Rowlandson’s wellknown captivity narrative took place in Nipmuc homelands, and her route is also treated as a heritage landscape there. These sites include the location of her capture in Lancaster, her first night in captivity at “Rowlandson Rock” in Lancaster, and the site of her ransom negotiation at “Redemption Rock” in Princeton. In her book, Rowlandson remembers her Nipmuc captors as “wild beasts of the forest” and describes Nipmuc homelands as “a vast and howling wilderness” (Rowlandson in Salisbury 1997, 78–80). She presents her near constant movement through Nipmuc homelands as a struggle to find and keep hold of her spirituality through the hardships of her captivity and the demonic influence of her captors (Strong 1999, 98). Of course, captives were often taken by both the English and King Philip’s forces in wartime. Captives had strategic diplomatic value in negotiating the exchange of power and land. However, sites of captivity narratives in Nipmuc homelands are not remembered as places where Nipmuc people used captives to strategically gain wartime advantage but as places where Nipmuc people were positioned as both enemies of the state and enemies of Puritan faith and domesticity (Strong 1999). Still other roadside markers across Massachusetts towns emplace the history of Indigenous violence against settlers, largely surrounding the events of King Philip’s War. For example, “The Eames Massacre” is memorialized in Framingham with these words: “Here stood the home of Thomas Eames, burned by the Indians in King Philip’s War Feb. 1, 1676. His wife and five children were slain and four carried into captivity.” In Oxford a marker for the “Huguenot Settlement” reads: “Their prosperous settlement was interrupted by Indian attacks in 1696, and finally abandoned in 1704.” A half mile from that marker, also in Oxford, another indicates the site of the “Johnson Massacre,” where “John Johnson and three children were killed by Indians in his house on this spot August 25, 1696.” In Northborough, a signpost marks the grave of Mary Goodnow, who “was lame and unable to run to the garrison house for safety when the Indians attacked Northborough, August 18, 1707. A short path leads through the woods to her grave near the place where she fell.” In New Braintree, a Tercentenary marker commemorates “Wheeler’s Surprise,” in which “Edward 417

Heather Law Pezzarossi et al.

Hutchinson’s company seeking a parley with the Nipmucs was ambushed by Indians August 2, 1675, and more than half were slain.” Not only do these Tercentenary markers not mention the context (that these were wartime occurrences), but the sites seem chosen to memorialize what appears to be egregious Indigenous violence against women, children, and others deemed defenseless. These are remembered not as sites of war but as sites of particular cruelty and cowardice. Other Tercentenary signages in Massachusetts note the destruction of property by Indigenous people. A marker in Medfield locates “Peak House . . . built in 1651 . . . burned when King Philip’s Indians burnt the town of Medfield in 1676.” Another notes “The first Meetinghouse in Mendon, destroyed by Indians.” A marker for the “Williams Tavern” in Marlborough reads: “The first tavern was erected on this site by Lieutenant Abraham Williams in 1665. Destroyed by Indians in 1676, it was promptly rebuilt and managed by the Williams Family until 1829.” These signs provide additional examples of marking an absence or active destruction of a colonial heritage place by Indigenous aggression. Altogether, the landscape of Indigenous history across Nipmuc homelands sketched out by the Tercentenary Commission is one of religious salvation followed by acts of violence, destruction, and devastation, followed by, well, near total silence. The visibility of Nipmuc history in their own homelands shrinks exponentially after King Philip’s War. The exception to this trend is a single roadside marker by the Hassanamisco Reservation in Grafton that reads: “These four and one-half acres have never belonged to the white man, having been set aside in 1728 as an Indian Reservation by the forty proprietors who purchased the Praying Indian town of Hassanamesit.” This place stands out on a landscape otherwise marked by absence, as a solitary island of Indigenous survival. While the Cisco Homestead and Hassanamisco Reservation is indeed an anchoring place for the Nipmuc community (Gould 2010; National Park Service 2011), the isolation of this Nipmuc place is an illusion of selective history telling. It offers the impression that while the surrounding countryside was overtaken by colonial and industrial landscapes, this place alone remains Nipmuc. This is a vast underestimation of the continued residence of Nipmuc people in their homelands, as the continued presence of both Nipmuc people and the circulation of Nipmuc material goods within southern New England confirms.

Nipmuc industrial landscapes Native-made baskets provide one example of these material goods. Due in large part to the volume of baskets now housed in museums, the Nipmuc basket makers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have been explored rather extensively over the past few decades. Indigenous communities throughout the Northeast participated in the development of unique basketry styles and construction techniques to meet the needs of a growing demand for Native basketry in the years following the American Revolution (McMullen and Handsman 1987; Phillips 1998). As industrialism swept the river valleys of southern New England in the decades around 1800, basketmaking and mobile routes of basket selling became important components of livelihood, a means of socially linking scattered relations, and a critical way to occupy homelands without owning them (Law Pezzarossi 2014). Much less has been discussed, however, of the related profession of chair bottoming or chair caning. Because basket making and weaving natural fiber chair seats share a similar set of skills and materials, many Nipmuc people did both and were well known for their craftsmanship. Like basket makers, chair bottomers could gather their materials rather than grow them. For Nipmuc people who owned little or no land, this was an important way that they continued to occupy their homelands and exercise their rights to aboriginal title. Nan Wolverton (2003, 360) found ample evidence that the rights of Indigenous people to gather on ancestral lands were not only 418

Monumentalizing Nipmuc heritage

claimed by Indigenous residents but were also readily acknowledged by settlers in the nineteenth century. Most notably, a historian of Windsor, Connecticut, remarked in 1859 on the very prevalent opinion among the people of New England, that the Indians, of the present day, have still a claim or right to certain privileges within the domains once owned by their ancestors. Even the damage done to young wood-lands . . . by strolling bands of Indians, are often submitted to in silence, from a general undefined impression that they have a sort of hereditary right to make free with such property. (Stiles 1859, 130) While basketmaking has already been identified as an important Nipmuc livelihood in the transition away from farming in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the critical role that chair-caning had for the Nipmuc entrée into the Industrial Era has yet to be explored. In fact, this transition from agrarian to industrial New England is perhaps one of the most difficult for tracing Indigenous persistence in New England. In Jean O’Brien’s landmark book Firsting and Lasting (2010), she explains how New England’s enthusiasm to claim an industrial identity further framed Indigenous landscapes as relics of antiquity. In the nineteenth century, New England’s local historians began to write each town into an emerging American historical narrative. These towns were keen to establish any role they may have played in a colonial past but were equally eager to cast their localities in the industrial boom that swept southern New England shortly after the American Revolution. In binding their own histories with industrial beginnings, towns sought to secure not only a place in a sweeping American history but also insurance for local prosperity in an American future dependent on modernity. As part of this effort, local historians emplaced Native individuals and landmarks within this emerging industrial landscape, if only to show how the modern was overlaying and replacing the ancient. For example, the often-referenced local history of Harriet Merrifield Forbes4 (1889 history of Westborough, Massachusetts) described the whereabouts and condition of Simon Gigger’s home in relation and contrast to the recent railroad, an index of modernity in late-nineteenthcentury New England: The remains of his old shanty can still be found near the Arch Bridge and the Boston & Albany Railroad. It is on the north side of the railroad, about twenty rods east of the western intersection of the old and new road-beds, a half- dozen rods north of the new embankment. There is now left merely a collection of loosely piled-up stones, half hidden by the dense brush, but indicated as once having been a human habitation by the bright little faces of the ladies’ delights, which, in the struggle for existence, have outlasted the Indian family which planted them in the wilderness. (Forbes 1889, 173–174) Embedded in descriptions of Native historical ruins is the idea that the Native people that inhabited the New England landscape in the past were incompatible with the landscape of the future and of modernity (O’Brien 2010). In her history, Forbes gives no indication of the persistence of the Gigger family and their continued presence in Nipmuc homelands. But if we look more closely at the historical trajectory and itineraries of the Gigger family, we begin to see one example of Nipmuc heritage landscapes that serve as counter-monuments to the colonial heritage inscribed on the land today. There were, in fact, several members of the Gigger family who had ties to Hassanamesit but did not own property there. Simon Gigger was a Nipmuc basket maker with ties to the Natick 419

Heather Law Pezzarossi et al.

and Hassanamesit communities (Forbes 1889, 172–173). Born in 1783, Simon is remembered for his basketry and “often found work re-bottoming chairs.” While he did not own land, he lived most of his life in Westborough with his wife, Betsy,5 his brother Daniel, and his sister Sallie (Forbes 1889, 172). He also lived near his relative Josiah Gigger, his wife, Lucinda (Brown) Gigger, and their family. Josiah and Lucinda lived in Westborough as well, “on a cross-road between the Southborough and Flanders roads, on the farm now owned by Mr. George Harrington” (Forbes 1889, 172) (see Figure 26.1, point 5). In 1859, the Massachusetts Commissioner of Indian Affairs recounted the following recollections of Josiah and Lucinda Gigger: “they had no permanent dwelling place—usually lived in Westborough in a hut through the winter—and through the warm Season near a pond in Waltham where they encamped—and sold baskets in the [lower?] towns—she wore her hair long, wore a Red Blanket and a Hat, and had property in Real Estate” [Earle Papers (1652–1863), Box 2, Folder 5, S.H. Lyman, July 30, 1859]. Despite Lucinda Brown’s landholdings, she and Josiah chose to live a seasonably mobile lifestyle (O’Brien 1997, 203), and it seems that both Gigger families made their livelihoods using Nipmuc weaving knowledge, either in basketmaking or chair caning. According to Forbes, Simon and Betsy Gigger made at least two dwellings on either side of a wetlands area, referred to by Forbes as a “swamp toward Shrewsbury” that is now the George H. Nichols Reservoir:6 one on the “Old Mill Road on the right as you go from Main Street” and the other near the “Arch Bridge” (Forbes 1889, 173) (see Figure 26.1, points 2 and 3, respectively). Forbes and other local historians of her era are quite fond of pointing out Indigenous dwellings beside swamps, perhaps because swamps are not desirable landscapes for agriculture or dense settlement, and for this reason a swampy address tends to signal not only unproductive and unattractive real estate but social and economic marginality as well. However, living near a wetlands area was advantageous for Nipmuc basket makers. Black Ash (Fraxinus nigra) is the primary material used in the construction of Nipmuc wood splint baskets, and it grows best in wetland environments, often at the edges of swamps or streams (United States Department of Agriculture). For Nipmuc basket makers making their living in an increasingly crowded earlynineteenth-century landscape, easy access to raw materials on land that was of little consequence to settlers was a substantial benefit. For the Giggers, this particular wetland was doubly useful because it sat adjacent to the newly constructed Boston and Albany Railroad, a winding stretch of track that first connected Boston, Natick, Framingham, and Westborough by 1834 and Grafton and Worcester by 1835 (Karr 1995, 279–280) (see Figure 26.1, Inset B). Later subsidiary lines linked Nipmuc homelands north and south of Worcester as well. In addition to their previously mentioned dwellings in Westborough, Simon and Betsy later relocated about 7 miles further west, still along the Boston and Albany Railroad tracks, to the eastern shore of Lake Quinsigamond in Worcester (see Figure 26.1, point 4). Forbes (1889, 175) describes the location of this dwelling as adjacent to the E. L. Davis Tower, more commonly known as the “Indian Tower” for the captivity narrative of Samuel Leonardson that was memorialized there (mentioned earlier). The tower was taken down in 1969, but the same area near Quinsigamond State Park and Perkins Farm is still a heritage landscape devoted to the history of the first Euro-American settlers of Worcester. While Nipmuc people already had well established routes through their homelands, the increasingly crowded landscape, carved up by fences and stone walls, may have been more challenging to navigate in the early nineteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, the tacit agreements to safe passage and gathering rights on private property that existed between Indigenous people and settler landholders were eroding, or at least encountering substantial resistance. Stiles himself argues in 1859 in response to the tendencies of Indigenous people to “steal from the forest with perfect impunity the materials for the manufacture of their basket, willow, and 420

Monumentalizing Nipmuc heritage

Figure 26.1 A portion of Nipmuc homelands that includes heritage sites referenced within the text as well as a section of the Boston and Albany Railroad between Boston and Worcester, Massachusetts, and the Charles River between Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and Boston Harbor. Inset A is a detail of the town of Gardner, Massachusetts, and Inset B is a detail of a section of the Boston and Albany Railroad between Westborough and Worcester, Massachusetts, including the wetlands referenced in the text. Source: Map created by Guido Pezzarossi.

421

Heather Law Pezzarossi et al.

fancy wares” that “the Indian in the present day has no legal right to commit any trespass upon the now alienated land of his forefathers, nor can he have any claim except by the favor of the present owners” (Stiles 1859, 130–131). The residence patterns of the Gigger family in the 1830s and 1840s suggests that the Nipmuc community may have used the railroad (or its easement) to traverse their homelands more efficiently and safely at this time. In fact, based on the location of the Gigger homes, the railroad may also have facilitated further connection with and coalescence of the urban Nipmuc community. When Simon and Betsy arrived in Worcester in the 1840s, they would have already been aware of vibrant Nipmuc neighborhoods there. Nipmuc bakers Hepsibah and Hannah Hemenway’s wedding cakes were sought after by the Worcester elite, and their cake shop (operated from their home on Mechanic Street) was just a few blocks from the town green and less than one block from the railroad tracks (Izard 1999, 67) (see Figure 26.1, point 6). There were several Nipmuc/African American families living in the neighborhood around Union Street at that time, including Hepsibah’s son Ebenezer Hemenway, John Hector (who had relocated following the sale of Printer land in Grafton), and Sarah and Gilbert Walker, also members of the Hassanamisco community (see Figure 26.1, points 7 and 8). Worcester was a vibrant place for Nipmuc people in the 1850s; it was a place of opportunity, activism, and jobs. The next generation of the Gigger family in Westborough also adjusted to the increasingly urban and industrial horizon of their homelands in Massachusetts. Josiah and Lucinda Gigger had several children, two of whom (Eliza and Elbridge, Sr.) relocated from Westborough to Gardner, 50 miles northwest, in the late 1840s (see Figure 26.1, Inset A). While we can only speculate as to the reason for their move, it coincides with the development of the chair caning industry in Gardner. By 1850, this town—still known today as the “Chair City” and the “Furniture Capital of New England”—had dozens of chair manufacturers, many specializing in “cane-seat chairs.” While some chair factories began by hiring women to weave seats in the factory, many factories produced just the frame, leaving the caning as a post-production, in-home step. By 1865, 13 cane-seat chair factories existed in Gardner, employing 461 men. A further 1,300 women and children were employed caning chairs at home (Massachusetts Historical Commission, 8). In the 1850 Federal Census, Elbridge Gigger had recently arrived in Gardner with his partner, Livona, and their children Levi, Elbridge Jr., and Eliza. His profession is listed as “Laborer.” By the 1860 Federal Census, 22-year-old Levi, Elbridge’s eldest son, was listed as a “chair maker,” and by the 1865 State Census, his younger sister Eliza, age 15, was listed as a “chair seater.” Again in 1870, Eliza, now 20, was listed as a “chair seater” and Elbridge Jr. as a “Carver.” By 1900, the generation of Gigger children that grew up in Gardner working as seaters and chairmakers had children of their own, who also worked in local chair factories. Elbridge Gigger, Jr., was 47 years old and worked as a “Carver” at Nichols and Stone Chair Company (see Figure 26.1, point 9, and Figure 26.2). He, his wife, Margaret, and their children, Mildred and Emory, lived at 202 Union Street in South Gardner, with his widowed aunt, Eliza Gigger Hemenway (Gardner Directories 1900) (see Figure 26.1, point 10). Less than a mile away (across Broadway and down Summer Street) lived James Hemenway (Eliza and Henry’s son) who worked as a teamster for chairmaker L.A. Wright, and his son, Alfred Hemenway, who worked at Greenwood Bros. chair factory (Gardner Directories 1900) (see Figure 26.1, point 11). Levi Gigger (Elbridge and Eliza’s brother) was also a teamster for L.A. Wright and lived a further half-mile down Broadway at 12 Maynard Street (Gardner Directories 1900) (see Figure 26.1, point 12). Much like the traveling basket makers of the early nineteenth century, the Nipmuc teamsters of the early twentieth century again demonstrate a time-honored practice of routine mobility, grounded in precolonial patterns of movement and adapted to accommodate the shifting obstacles and livelihoods of the nineteenth and twentieth 422

Monumentalizing Nipmuc heritage

Figure 26.2 An 1895 reproduction of the Nichols and Stone Co. building at 82 Logan Street in Gardner, Massachusetts. Source: From the collection of the Gardner Museum, Gardner, Massachusetts.

centuries. Not only did teamsters continue to maintain a broad knowledge and awareness of their homelands in ways that only mobile livelihoods would allow, they would also have acted as important links in the Nipmuc social landscape, much like basket makers did, connecting the families of Gardner with those in Worcester and beyond. By 1910, Elbridge and Margaret Gigger had purchased a home a mere tenth of a mile from his brother Levi’s lodgings at 190 High Street (see Figure 26.1, point 13). They7 lived on High Street for at least 20 years, where their son Emory (age 48) was listed as a “stationary engineer” at a chair shop in the 1930 census. In 1942, Emory Gigger’s draft card noted that he worked for Heywood Wakefield and Co., as did his wife; he was 61 (The National Archives). From traveling weavers to an engineer in a chair factory, from Simon to Emory, the Giggers are just one Nipmuc family that continued to find innovative and relevant ways to reside on their homelands. In doing so, they created dynamic landscapes linking urban and rural economies and artisanal and industrial livelihoods; they claimed the railroads, factories, and cities within Nipmuc homelands as Nipmuc places as well, actively transforming them through their occupation. When Gardner became a center for furniture manufacturing in the mid-nineteenth century, Nipmuc basket makers and chair bottomers like the Giggers brought their craftsmanship and considerable knowledge of weaving to bear upon the industrialization of the furniture industry. The Gigger’s transition to Gardner is a critical piece of Nipmuc heritage. It represents both a respect for the knowledge and work of generations of Nipmuc basket makers and chair 423

Heather Law Pezzarossi et al.

bottomers that came before them and a willingness to adapt that knowledge for future generations. Their narrative bridges the intentional gap that local historians tried to create between the agrarian landscape of post-Revolutionary New England traversed by Nipmuc basket makers and the emerging industrial landscape of New England that bustled with trains, factories, and waves of European immigrants, but in which Nipmuc people and their landscapes were represented only as a series of ruins. This narrative of the transition from independent Nipmuc artisans to wage laborers who did similar work in chair bottoming highlights the value of the stewardship, conveyance, and adaptation of Indigenous knowledge as it transcends generations and inhabits Nipmuc homelands in new ways.

Conclusion and future work The Nipmuc landscape is monumental in many ways. This new project, focused on monumentalizing Nipmuc heritage and emplacing Indigenous presence across Nipmuc homelands, celebrates the dynamic occupation of this area and will support the continuing self-determination of the contemporary tribe for generations yet to come. The monuments and objects of heritage on the New England landscape are more than just symbols. They create a landscape in which a curated set of historical events are granted the privilege of relative spatial permanence through the public installation of a material object. While they are not the primary means by which we learn history, they are the anchors and amplifiers of history. Collectively, the monuments in Nipmuc homelands have anchored narratives of an idyllic colonial past, a dwindling Indigenous presence, and a modern and industrious future. In many ways, they function as diachronic artifacts, as they reveal just as much about the social and political moment of their installation as they do about the person or event being commemorated. Decolonizing the New England historical landscape is not a simple task. The removal of a monument does not result in the erasure of history but merely serves as a challenge to the kinds of histories we collectively want (and need) to make room for. In that same sense, the installation of a monument does not necessarily fix history, but it does combat erasure; it makes space for other, more diverse historical landscapes to exist in the present and anchors them for the foreseeable future. Making Nipmuc heritage more visible confronts a one-dimensional and truncated version of Indigenous history that has very few tangible bridges to the contemporary tribal people in southern New England today. In this way, defining landscapes of Nipmuc heritage both combats challenges to authenticity and serves as an exercise of Nipmuc sovereignty, in which Nipmuc people decide the stories and places that are given space in their homelands. In the 1930s, very near the time the Tercentenary Committee was instilling a clearly colonialist historical narrative on the New England landscape, Mohegan historian Gladys Tantaquidgeon was questioning the logic of creating memorials to the Indigenous past in New England. When the Indian Council of New England proposed the installation of dozens of monuments to important Indigenous leaders in colonial history, Tantaquidgeon had her doubts. She pointed out that the education and investment in contemporary Native lives was surely more important than building a commemorative landscape to the Indigenous past (Fawcett 2000, in Rubertone 2012, 239). But the events that surrounded the installations of these monuments served as gatherings and important social events for the New England Indigenous community and as political events, protesting public opinion, detribalization, and other contemporary issues (Rubertone 2012, 240). In initiating this project, we are cognizant of Tantaquidgeon’s concerns. We seek to enable more than just a “commemorative landscape” (Rubertone 2012). Instead, we hope that these efforts to commemorate Nipmuc heritage in Nipmuc homelands will draw on the vitality and creativity of the contemporary community to determine empowering ways of remembering the Nipmuc 424

Monumentalizing Nipmuc heritage

past that also celebrate the Nipmuc present and future. We recognize the potential for these heritage landscapes to become routes and sites of remembrance that have lives of their own, drawing Indigenous history out of the museum and bringing it into public consciousness, where it can be seen and engaged with. This work continues today in many forms: in the continued presence of the Hassanamisco Reservation and Cisco Homestead in Grafton, in the many projects the traditional government and tribal members take on to continue their cultural practices, and through projects such as this, combining academic examinations with tribal knowledge.

Notes 1 See www.wbur.org/news/2020/07/22/worcester-christopher-columbus-statue-remains 2 No one example illustrates this more clearly than the name of Massachusetts itself, an Algonquian word connected to the peoples who have occupied this area. 3 See www.hmdb.org/search.asp 4 Merrifield Forbes was a one of the most prolific historians in the Worcester, Massachusetts, area and critical to the memorialization of local Native peoples. She was also a suffragist, a mother of five children, and the wife of a successful Worcester County Judge and politician (Izard and Hofstetter 2004: 15). Among many other local historical texts, she wrote “The Hundredth Town, Glimpses of Life in Westborough 1717–1817,” which seems to be the earliest published source for most of the anecdotes about Nipmuc Sarah Boston and her contemporaries in Grafton and the surrounding area. Her maternal grandfather was Samuel Brigham, one of the final Trustees of the Hassanamisco Nipmuc, whose estate sat adjacent to the Hassanamisco Reservation on “Brigham Hill” in Grafton. Harriet was relaying stories told by her Aunt Cornelia Brigham, who grew up playing with Nipmuc children on the Hassanamisco Reservation. Her grandfather’s position as a trustee injects a significant paternalist dimension into the analysis of the creation of her historical narrative. 5 New England Historic Genealogical Society; Boston, Massachusetts; Massachusetts Vital Records, 1840–1911. Massachusetts Death Records for the year 1848 (pg. 229) list his profession as “basketmaker.” He and his wife Betsy both died on February 5 of unknown causes in Worcester. Betsy was 35 and Simon was 65. 6 Dammed in 1954. 7 The 1910 census lists Elbridge Gigger as a wood carver for a chair factory and Mildred Gigger as a piano player for theater companies.

References cited Baird, Melissa F. 2013. “‘The Breath of the Mountain Is My Heart’: Indigenous Cultural Landscapes and the Politics of Heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 19 (4): 327–340. Bergland, Renée L. 2000. The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England. Brooks, Lisa. 2008. The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Byrd, Jodi A. 2016. “Still Waiting for the ‘Post’ to Arrive: Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and the Imponderables of America Indian Postcoloniality.” Wicazo Sa Review 31 (1): 64–74. Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. 2012. A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press. Deloria, Philip J. 1998. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press. DeLucia, Christine M. 2018. Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast. New Haven: Yale University Press. Earle, John Milton. 1652–1863. “John Milton Earle Papers.” American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA. Fawcett, Melissa Jayne. 2000. Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Forbes, Harriet Merrifield. 1889. The Hundredth Town: Glimpses of Life in Westborough 1717–1817. Boston: Rockwell and Churchill. Gardner Directories, 1899–1900. A General Directory of the Citizens, Classified Business Directory, Map, Street Directory, Town Officers, Churches, Schools, Societies, Etc. New Haven: The Price and Lee Co.

425

Heather Law Pezzarossi et al. Gould, Rae D. 2010. “Contested Places: The History and Meaning of Hassanamisco.” PhD Dissertation, University of Connecticut. Gould, Rae D. 2013. “Cultural Practice and Authenticity: The Search for Real Indians in New England in the ‘Historical’ Period.” In The Death of Prehistory, edited by Peter Schmidt and Stephen Mrozowski, 241–266. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gould, Rae D., Holly Herbster, Heather Law Pezzarossi, and Stephen A. Mrozowski. 2020. Historical Archaeology and Indigenous Collaboration: Discovering Histories That Have Futures. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Izard, Holly V. 1999. “Hepsibeth Hemenway’s Portrait: A Native American Story.” Old-Time New England, Fall/Winter: 49–85. Izard, Holly V., and Vanessa J. Hofstetter. 2004. Merrifield at 23 Trowbridge Road 1856–2002. Worcester, MA: Worcester Historical Museum. Karr, Ronald Dale. 1995. The Rail Lines of Southern New England. Pepperell, MA: Branch Line Press. Lapore, Jill. 1998. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Vantage Press. Law, Heather B. 2014. “Traces of Residence: Indigenous Mobility and Materiality in 19th c. New England.” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Law, Heather B., Stephen Mrozowski, and Guido Pezzarossi. 2008. “Cultural Resource Management Study No. 26: Archaeological Intensive Excavation, Hassanamesit Woods Property, The Sarah Boston Farmstead, Grafton, Massachusetts. Part 2.” Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research, University of Massachusetts Boston. Law Pezzarossi, Heather. 2014. “Native Basketry and the Dynamics of Social Landscapes in Southern New England.” In Things in Motion: Object Histories, Biographies and Itineraries, edited by Rosemary Joyce and Susan Gillespie, 179–200. Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research Press. Law Pezzarossi, Heather. 2019. “Brewed Time: Considering Anachronisms in the Study of Indigenous Persistence in New England.” In Indigenous Persistence in the Colonized Americas, edited by Heather Law Pezzarossi and Russell Sheptak, 77–98. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Massachusetts Historical Commission. “Town Reconnaissance Survey, Gardner, Massachusetts.” www.sec. state.ma.us/mhc/mhcpdf/townreports/Cent-Mass/gar.pdf. Accessed September 27, 2020. McMullen, Ann, and Russell G. Handsman. 1987. A Key into the Language of Woodsplint Baskets. Washington, CT: American Indian Archaeological Institute. Morison, Samuel Eliot. 1930. Historical Markers Erected by Massachusetts Bay Colony Tercentenary Commission. Boston: The Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Mrozowski, Stephen A. 2009. “Christian Indian Communities in New England after King Philip’s War.” In Archaeology in America: An Encyclopedia, edited by Francis P. McManomon, 143–147. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing. Mrozowski, Stephen A., Holly Herbster, David Brown, and Katherine L. Priddy. 2009. “Magunkaquog Materiality, Federal Recognition, and the Search for a Deeper History.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology. 13 (4): 430–463. Mrozowski, Stephen A., Heather Law, and D. Rae Gould. 2015. “Rethinking Colonialism: Indigenous Innovation and Colonial Inevitability.” In Rethinking Colonialism: Comparative Archaeological Approaches, edited by Craig N. Cipolla and Katherine Howlett Hayes, 121–142. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Mrozowski, Stephen A., and Heather Law Pezzarossi. 2015. “The Archaeology of Hassanamesit Woods: The Sarah Burnee/Sarah Boston Farmstead, Cultural Resource Management Study No. 69.” Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA. The National Archives at St. Louis; St. Louis, Missouri; World War II Draft Cards (Fourth Registration) for the State of Massachusetts; Record Group Title: Records of the Selective Service System; Record Group Number: 147; Series Number: M2090. National Park Service. 2011. “National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form: Hassanamisco Reservation.” www.nps.gov/nr/feature/indian/2011/Hassanamisco.pdf and www.nps.gov/nr/feature/ indian/2011/Hassanamisco_Reservation.htm. Accessed September 28, 2020. New England Historic Genealogical Society. “Massachusetts Vital Records, 1840–1911.” Massachusetts Death Records for the year 1848. Boston, MA. O’Brien, Jean M. 1997. Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650– 1790. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. O’Brien, Jean M. 2010. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

426

Monumentalizing Nipmuc heritage Phillips, Ruth. 1998. Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700– 1900. Seattle and Montreal: University of Washington Press and McGill-Queen’s University Press. Rowlandson, Mary White, and Neal Salisbury. 1997. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed : Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson and Related Documents. Boston: Bedford Books. Rubertone, Patricia. 2012. “Monuments and Sexual Politics in New England Indian Country.” In The Archaeology of Colonialism: Intimate Encounters and Sexual Effects, edited by Barbara L. Voss and Eleanor C. Casella, 232–251. New York: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge. Stiles, Henry Reed. 1859. The History of Ancient Windsor, Connecticut, Including East Windsor, South Windsor, and Ellington, Prior to 1768. New York: C. B. Norton. Strong, Pauline Turner. 1999. Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics And Poetics Of Colonial American Captivity Narratives. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. United States Census. 1850. Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, Worcester County, Massachusetts. Washington, DC: National Archives of the United States. United States Census. 1860. Population Schedules of the Eighth Census of the United States, Worcester County, Massachusetts. Washington, DC: National Archives of the United States. United States Census. 1870. Population Schedules of the Ninth Census of the United States, Worcester County, Massachusetts. Washington, DC: National Archives of the United States. United States Census. 1910. Population Schedules of the 13th Census of the United States, Worcester County, Massachusetts. Washington, DC: National Archives of the United States. United States Census. 1930. Population Schedules of the 15th Census of the United States, Worcester County, Massachusetts. Washington, DC: National Archives of the United States. United States Department of Agriculture. “Natural Resources Conservation Service. Plant Profile: Fraxinus Nigra/Black Ash.” https://plants.usda.gov/core/profile?symbol=FRNI. Accessed July 10, 2020. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. Wolverton, Nan. 2003. “‘A Precarious Living’: Basket Making and Related Crafts Among New England Indians.” Colonial Society of Massachusetts 71: 341–362.

427

PART IV

Decolonial futures

27 IN SMALL ISLANDS FORGOTTEN Lessons from CHamoru lands Sandra Montón-Subías

Introduction, and a bit of history This chapter is rooted in my recent experience with community-oriented archaeology in Guam (Guåhan) (Figure 27.1) and in my commitment to exploring and practicing a depatriarchaldecolonial archaeology. I have been visiting Guam since 2013, mainly within the framework of an archaeological project originally devised to better understand the impact of Spanish colonialism on Native CHamoru. CHamoru/Chamorro is the name that present-day Indigenous inhabitants of the Mariana Islands use to refer to themselves. Among them, more than ever before in my expertise in the field, I have experienced archaeology not only as a discipline that excavates remains from the past but as an enterprise that takes place in a present inhabited by people for whom this past plays an important role. From a strictly geographic point of view, mine is the only chapter of this book that falls outside of the Americas. However, global perspectives that include the Americas—past and present—intermingle in Guam: they do so in the colonial processes that have been taking place since the sixteenth century and in the ways these acquire relevance in the present; in a shared and simultaneously unique resulting heritage; in the processes of surviving within colonial rule and domination, including Indigenous resilience; and in the ways that we archaeologists approach work in such locales. A small dot on world maps—even imperceptible when the scale is too small—Guam has nonetheless enjoyed prime importance in international geopolitics since the sixteenth century, when it became the only way station in the 14,339 km transpacific Manila galleon route. The route connected Acapulco and Manila and has been defined as the first global trade route of modern capitalism (Clossey 2006; Giráldez 2015). More recently, the 2017 North Korea–US missile crisis has once again shown the geostrategic nature of what, to many, remains a little-known corner of the world (Lujan Bevacqua 2010). In today’s allegedly postcolonial world, Guam is a US colony—with the status of an unincorporated territory—and one of the 17 territories listed as non-self-governing by the United Nations. Sadly, colonialism is no news to CHamoru people. Over the last five centuries, they have endured occupation by different imperial powers—Castile and Spain, the US, Japan, and the US again—since they were first colonized by the Hispanic Monarchy in 1668. And, even so, despite subsequent colonial hecatombs (sensu Rivera Cusicanqui 2010, 22), CHamorus are today an encouraging example of Indigenous withstanding. 431

Sandra Montón-Subías

Figure 27.1 Location of Guam and the Mariana Islands. Source: Courtesy of Mike T. Carson.

On the edge of both the Spanish empire and of present-day mainstream discourses on modern colonialism, Guam is nonetheless fundamental to framing colonialism in a global perspective. It illustrates well the engendering and racializing (bio)political, economic, social, and cultural integrated workings of the colonial machinery, and its influence in molding the world into its current shape. Indeed, the island intersects in a single, small territory many of the features that characterized modern Spanish colonialism around the world. In fact, colonialism might have affected CHamorus even before actual colonization. The first interactions with Europeans took place in March 1521, during the first world circumnavigation instigated by Carrera de Indias between the competing imperial crowns of Castile and Portugal, at a moment in history when international politics had an Iberian color. Unfortunately, this first encounter, which was also that between Oceania and Europe (Bayman and Peterson 2016, 231; Rogers 2011, 7), twisted into a serious mis-encounter when members of Magellan’s crew burned several Native houses and boats and killed seven islanders (Pigafetta 1525, 17). Some 150 years of colonial interactions followed, known in the scholarship of the island as the contact period. Although I have myself used this periodization before, I am now dropping it because of its Eurocentric and misleading character; as with other Pacific islands (Flexner 2014; Torrence and Clarke 2000) intercultural contacts with non-Europeans in Guam far preceded 1521. Post-1521 interactions, however, took place within an expansive colonial matrix of unequal relations of power that eventually disrupted, transformed—and in many cases swallowed—local lifeways and modes of being. I thus agree with reservations (Escribano-Ruiz 2019; Silliman 2005) in calling contact what could have been incipient colonialism, although of a colony-free type. The permanent colonization of Guam began relatively late in the chronology of the Spanish empire, in 1668, almost two centuries after the first Caribbean colonies had been established 432

In small islands forgotten

in the Americas. It finished even later, when Spain also lost sovereignty over the better-known Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American war in 1898. More than two centuries of permanent colonization saw changing colonial strategies and imperial logics and, already from the very outset, multiple contradictions and interests between and within the different sectors involved: Native CHamorus, Catholic missionaries, Habsburg and Bourbon dynasties, civil governors, the militia, and colonial settlers of different descent (mainly from New Spain, the Philippines, and Iberia). The colonization of Guam and the Marianas was first envisioned as a peaceful “civilizing” project by Jesuit missionaries, who nonetheless soon petitioned military support to fight increasing Native sectors refusing to accommodate the new lifeways promoted by them. Thirty years of conflict followed suit until Native CHamorus were forcibly uprooted from ancestral lands and nucleated in a reduced number of villages or towns during what is known as La Reducción (Hezel 2015). Reducciones were aimed at “civilizing” CHamorus through changing settled quotidian routines into new ones (Montón-Subías 2019). New corporeal disciplines (sensu Foucault 1975) related to food, health, care, dress, or sexuality and new labor regimes, kinship systems, or, amongst others, land-tenure patterns were imposed through the joint work of Jesuit churches and schools—which shared the same physical space in many cases (Montón-Subías 2019; MontónSubías and Moral de Eusebio 2021; Peña 2020). Local institutions were forbidden while new ones were instated. The substitution of the so-called guma’uritaos, or bachelor houses (Moral de Eusebio 2016), by formal schooling where indissoluble marriage and nuclear monogamous families were promoted are telling examples. Perhaps the most conspicuous physical correlate of such social unrest is to be found in a plummeting population that even endangered the very continuity of the colony (Hezel 2015, 80–81). What happened in Guam epitomizes how societies with distant—even contrasting—cultural logics were brought into coexistence within this modern global colonial matrix of domination. While precolonial CHamorus configured societies characterized by orality, high levels of social relationality, low levels of socioeconomic complexity, and possible matrilineal descent and heritage, Jesuit leaders came from seventeenth-century European states and were representatives of the highest levels of logocentrism, self-reflection (Molina 2013), and individualization at that moment. What colonization initially meant to each must have been radically different. Reducciones portray this well: if for colonial agents reducciones were mainly a politico-religious enterprise of Native surveillance on the confines of the empire, for CHamorus what was at stake was the very structure of their own world and the bonds that connected them to it: the human ordering they made of their surroundings in the course of everyday interactions, practices and experiences. What happened in Guam also shows how far this early modern colonial globalization was structured by coloniality (Lugones 2010; Quijano 2000; Segato 2011) and, as part of it, by racialization, class, and dichotomous gender of clearly unequal power relations between men and women. Coloniality has been considered a characteristic feature of modern colonialism. Worldsenses (sensu Oyěwùmí 1997, 3) and ways of being were deemed as vital as—if not more—than the colonization of new land (Comaroff and Comaroff 1986; Fanon 1952; Rivera Cusicanqui 1984). Laura Souder made it very clear when she wrote that the Spanish colonization affected the CHamoru psyche (Souder 1992, 233). At the same time, it is important to not forget that coloniality took place in a historical conjuncture of patriarchal reaffirmation in Europe (Federicci 2004; Kelly-Gadol 1977; Mies 1986) that propagated the male way of being that was dominant on the continent at that time (Montón-Subías and Hernando 2018, 2–3) and that concomitantly created and/or aggravated women’s subordination and disempowerment both in Europe and in many other places that came under its influence and domination (Allen 1992; Etienne and Leacock 1980; Gautier 2005; Lugones 2007; Oyěwùmí 1997; Segato 2015; Souder 433

Sandra Montón-Subías

1992). In Guam, Jesuits used all the means at their disposal to de-structure more equal relations between CHamoru men and women, so alien to and incompatible with their own mindsets. Guam is thus one of those clear examples where the colonization of new territories was envisaged as a “corporeal enterprise” (Boddy 2011, 119). Still, its territorial dimension cannot be discounted. Often considered a poor frontier colony on the confines of the Spanish empire, supported by a handful of Jesuits and soldiers, a reduced number of settlers from abroad, and resigned governors longing for more propitious destinies, Guam became a central “periphery” for transpacific trades as a stepping stone in the Manila Galleon route (Brunal-Perry 2009). As such, it was defended by the Spanish Crown against other imperial powers until the route collapsed in 1815, just a few years before Mexico gained independence from Spain. As a result of these processes, Guam and the Marianas share with the Americas—and with regions of Africa, Oceania, and Europe—an archaeological heritage whose study provides a privileged comparative vantage point (Bayman and Peterson 2016, 229) for a better understanding of both its global and particular traits. While it is true that the archaeology of modern Spanish colonialism is here much younger (McKinnon and Raupp 2011), it has nonetheless incorporated from the outset postcolonial and decolonial concerns that took longer to develop in the Americas. In this chapter, I will share my situated concerns in favor of a decolonial-depatriarchal archaeology, especially those that aim to redress misrepresentations of communities, territories, practices, values, cultural logics, and ways of being. I will use the 500-year anniversary of Magellan’s circumnavigation (1519–1522) and ABERIGUA’s excavations in Guam as backdrops to frame such concerns. Before this, however, I will present a brief overview of the archaeologies of modern Spanish colonialism on the archipelago.

Archaeologies of Spanish colonialism in Guam: a background Centuries of colonialism in the Marianas have resulted in both tangible and intangible heritage. Archaeologies of colonialism are recent in their study but have elicited increased interest in both the “Spanish” (Bayman and Peterson 2016; Dixon et al. 2017; McKinnon and Raupp 2011; Montón Subías et al. 2018; Peterson 2008) and the “Japanese” colonial period (Dixon 2004; Mushynsky 2019). Most archaeology has, however, focused on the preceding Latte period. Latte most probably comes from Latde, a term that nineteenth-century CHamorus used to refer to the stone remains thought to have survived from their ancestors’ houses (Russell 1998, 22, 55). And this is indeed what these remains are: the ancient foundations for rooms built atop them in perishable materials that were constructed from 900/1000 to 1700 ce (Carson 2012; Laguana et al. 2012; Russell 1998; Thompson 1940) (Figure 27.2a). Lattes were the main buildings in small to medium settlements spread all across Guam and neighboring islands and were forcibly abandoned after La Reducción resettled CHamorus mainly in the south of Guam. Today, Latte architecture has become a symbol of CHamoru indigeneity and a reference to vindications of cultural continuity and bonding with a non-colonial past (Carson 2012, 5, 11; Hunter-Anderson 2011; www.guampedia.com/latte/). A simple walk around the island confirms the ubiquitous character of the Latte: from everyday transactions at the supermarket to official documents, through its presence in public buildings, T-shirts, souvenirs, car plates, bus stops, and a long etcetera that is probably increasing as we speak (Montón Subías et al. 2018, 311) (Figure 27.2b). The archaeology of modern colonialism is thus less developed than the archaeology of the Latte period. However, or precisely because of that, it remains promising (McKinnon and Raupp 2011; Peterson 2008), despite the ordeals circumvented by many of its remains: typhoons, 434

In small islands forgotten

(a)

(b)

Figure 27.2 a. Latte set from Inapsan; b. McDonald’s with Latte pillar. Source: a. Photo by author; b. Photo by Enrique Moral de Eusebio.

435

Sandra Montón-Subías

earthquakes, World War II bombings (Delgadillo et al. 1979; Flores 2008), urban development, and even the “active” neglect of a US colonial power uninterested in preserving imprints of Spanish colonialism (Coello and Atienza 2016, 25). Although in varying degrees of preservation, these remains include forts, churches, Casas Reales (governor’s residences), possible living quarters in reducciones, roads, bridges, hotnos (dome-shaped ovens), houses, shipwrecks, material culture, and cultural landscapes—all of which renders the Marianas—Guam particularly—the place with the most Spanish-style built heritage in Oceania (Dixon et al. 2017; Galván Guijo 1999; Junco 2011; Mathers et al. 1990; Mathers and Shaw 1993; McKinnon and Raupp 2011; Moore and Steffy 2008; Skowronek 2009). For comfort’s sake, this heritage is conventionally called “Spanish,” but it actually integrates cultural aspects that developed both inside and outside Spain. We need to remember that Spanish colonialism in Guam brought into coexistence people from diverse cultural backgrounds—mainly from New Spain and the Philippines—in addition to CHamorus and Iberians. Equally important are post-1521 Latte sites (Bayman et al. 2012a, 2012b) and lånchos—ranch-farms possibly beyond the reach of colonial surveillance where precolonial traditions might have survived less altered than at reducción villages (Bayman et al. 2020; Dixon et al. 2020; Perez Hattori 2004, 16). As vindicated for the Americas (Rubertone 2000; Wylie 1992, 592), these ought to be integrated into the study and understanding of modern colonialism, of which they form an integral part. Otherwise, we would run into a colonialist archaeology that privileges consideration for certain sites—those that remind us more of Spanish-style architecture—over others. At the moment, contract archaeology has been fundamental in rescuing this heritage (Dixon et al. 2010; Moore 2007; Schuetz 2007), as have been joint efforts with the Guam Preservation Trust (GPT) (Inangokkon Inadahi Guåhan), a local nonprofit public corporation created to “preserve and protect Guam’s historic sites, culture, and perspectives” (http://guampreservationtrust. org/). The restoration of Fort Soledad, Plaza de España, or Talayfak Bridge, which are today some of the most popular visiting sites among locals and tourists from abroad, have been some of its projects. Research-driven archaeology has also begun to make its mark on the study of colonialism in Guam (Bayman et al. 2012a; Bayman et al. 2012b; Jalandoni 2011), and this is where our project, ABERIGUA, stands. ABERIGUA is aimed at better understanding the case-specific details of colonial strategies implemented during the colonization of Guam and the Marianas and subsequent CHamoru Native responses—including processes of cultural identity, change, and continuity. We are particularly interested in investigating how gender is constructed in situations of colonial interaction and dominance. The project is inspired by feminist and anti-, post-, and de-colonial critiques to modern colonialism and the practice of archaeology itself. At the moment, we have been excavating at the church and cemetery of San Dionisio, at Humåtak, as a first step in a broader effort to include different enclaves from the colonial period (Montón-Subías et al. 2020). Such excavations stem from a joint effort between GPT, University Pompeu Fabra (UPF), University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, and the Humåtak mayor’s office to develop fieldwork within the framework of community archaeology. Archaeological work has thus brought together different groups of people and interests, mainly academic archaeologists initially interested in studying processes associated with the colonization of the island—which is how I myself came to Guam, excavating at post-1521 Latte sites and Casa Real at Ritidian— and Humåtak residents interested in better knowing, managing, and disseminating their rich heritage and past. The active collaboration of the Humåtak Community Foundation (Fondasion Komunidåt Humåtak) has also been vital. Rather than establishing a social relationship where some create and others are the social recipients of knowledge, we all try to create and receive. The excavations have incorporated Humåtak residents (mainly schoolchildren and 436

In small islands forgotten

youth) who have chosen to call themselves “assistant archaeologists.” After three summers excavating together, we have become strategic partners and active collaborators both in deciding what to excavate and in the dissemination of results in similar and complementary fora (for instance, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbmx2vOmcJY). Excavations began at San Dionisio on the explicit request of GPT and the mayor’s office.

Attitudes to colonial-era heritage Years of research trips to Guam have made me aware of the complex and dynamic nature of local attitudes to heritage from the Spanish colonial period and responsive to the fact that our work as archaeologists becomes part of a social fabric that is more layered than initially meets the eye. Like in most areas of the world, local voices are multiple (Atalay 2006; González-Ruibal 2014; La Salle 2010; Supernant and Warrick 2014), and even cultural practicioners and CHamoru rights activists have different viewpoints regarding such heritage. CHamoru language is a telling example: while some seek to rid CHamoru of “Hispanic” influence, others prefer to keep it as a legacy from grandparents and recent ancestors and emphasize that semantic loans have been converted into CHamoru grammar rules (Limtiaco 2019). “Heritage Day”—renamed in 2014 from the original “Discovery Day”—is another example. Heritage Day is a public holiday and festival that takes place at Humåtak in March every year. Humåtak is currently a small and economically depresed village in Guam but also where local memory places Magellan’s 1521 landing and therefore the first encounter between Pacific Islanders and Europeans (for a discussion about Magellan’s actual landfall, see Rogers and Ballendorf 1989). Heritage Day annually reenacts this historical episode, which is also monumentalized by an obelisk standing by the beach with the inscription “Magellan landed here,” by the village’s farewell song composed by Francisco Q. Sanchez, or by some of the small businesses facing the main road (Figure 27.3). Besides, Humåtak is one of the places in Guam with the most Spanish-style constructed heritage—Fort Soledad, Fort Santo Angel, Fort San Jose, and one of the Governor’s Palaces in addition to San Dionisio’s church—since it was here that the Manila Galleon used to stop along its journey from Acapulco to Manila. Despite criticism by some sectors in Guam, CHamorun Humåtak are strongly determined to keep this festival, and for different reasons. In a recent interview to Kuam News (www.kuam. com/story/37644881/2018/03/Monday/can-govguam-really-afford-a-day-off-on-a-culturalholiday), Humåtak’s mayor, Johnny Quinata, proudly defended Heritage Day as a bottom-up cultural holiday and not one imposed by the American calendar of public holidays. This festival, he noted, was aimed at keeping the tradition, commemorating Guam’s history and culture, and raising cultural awareness; and he stressed that “all village residents, regardless of age, want to partake in showcasing all that the southern village has to offer” (italics are mine). This is in line with what Joe Quinata—GPT’s Chief Program Officer and Native of Humåtak—has always told me: that this holiday is not about celebrating Spanish colonialism but re-signifying a universally known historical event to promote CHamoru cultural awareness and historical knowledge. Heritage Day also includes such activities as storytelling, art exhibits, historic walking tours or dance performances to celebrate enduring CHamoru culture (for instance, https://youtu.be/WYRHjPZ7y-M or www.facebook.com/Guam-History-Chamorro-Heritage-Day-Festival-323599644416015/). In my own view as a person from abroad, Heritage Day has a much more complex grammar than its tempting but premature associations with coloniality of knowledge alone might suggest. In fact, the celebration is yet another example of the need for colonial contexts to be interpreted through more than a single lens or as one-sided stories. As mentioned previously, Humåtak is an economically depressed village in what, to many on the island, constitutes the “remote” south. 437

Sandra Montón-Subías

(a)

(b)

Figure 27.3 a. Magellan’s monument at Humåtak with the inscription “Ferdinand Magellan landed near this place March 6, 1521”; b. local business by Humåtak’s main road. Source: Photos by the author.

438

In small islands forgotten

Heritage Day has become an important political issue not only as a way of making a clear statement against US colonialism but also, more subtly, as a way of taking a stance as CHamorun Humåtak within Chamoru cultural activism and self-determination movements, represented on the island by different local groups, institutions, and organizations. These are also varied in their interests, goals, and viewpoints and crosscut with local power relationships that, as yet, I myself still find hard to grasp. And needless to say, not all CHamorun Humåtak share the same points of view on the festival. In any case, while a recent publication has stated that CHamoru identity has not shown any interest in recovering heritage from the Spanish colonial period (Coello and Atienza 2016, 29), my own experience in Guam would advise a more cautious position. Guampedia, an online encyclopedia community project, acknowledges both the social catastrophes associated to Spanish colonization and the fact that it “has become part of heritage and history of the CHamoru people and what they will pass on to their children” (www.guampedia.com/ manila-galleon-trade-route-la-nao-de-china-a-legacy-in-the-marianas/). At Humåtak, residents engage in actions to rescue and promote knowledge about the colonial period and its resulting heritage. Visitors from other villages come to the excavations and express the same interest. I want to emphasize that this by no means constitutes a celebration of Spanish colonialism. The heritage considered is, above all, CHamoru. Historian and storyteller Toni “Mallia” Ramirez made it very clear when he said that “we have made it our own” (www.guampedia.com/ manila-galleon-trade-route-la-nao-de-china-a-legacy-in-the-marianas/). Excavating colonialism and becoming closer to CHamorus has increased my own concerns for decoloniality and its possibilities. In the process, the works of feminist scholars like Chakrabarty Spivak (1988), María Galindo (2013), Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2010), Maria Lugones (2010), or, among others, Rita Segato (2015) have been particularly engaging by their insistence that no decolonization is possible without de-patriarchalizing. This joint and inseparable effort is to me one of the most important challenges facing those of us who, in global archaeology—and in the global world—strive to construct a less colonialist global future. Through ABERIGUA, within our limits, we aim at implementing actions to translate such decolonial and depatriarchal concerns both into discourses of the colonial past and the practice of archaeology in the present. One such action is connected, again, with Ferdinand Magellan.

Decolonial interactions in the Magellan quincentennial Historical anniversaries elicit public interest and are thus vital in constructing historical memory. Although with less public repercussion than that of 1492, 2019 has opened the gate to a new quincentennial: the first world 1519–1522 circumnavigation (led by Magellan until his death in the Philippines). Commemorations do not float in the vacuum; they are situated within particular sociopolitical contexts, and this is why the quincentennial is experienced in different ways in Spain and in Guam (and in other parts of the globe visited by the expedition). In Spain, it coincides with demands of independence by important sectors of the population in Catalonia (one of the 17 autonomous communities that today integrate the country) and by a mirroring rise of the extreme populist right. Vindications of Spain’s colonial past and grandeur are being promoted with renewed impetus, although imperialist nostalgia never totally abandoned the country after 1898. This wistful attitude is also behind some (or many) of the activities that parade under the official Spanish program for the quincentennial (www.vcentenario.es). Imperialist ideologies and imperialist practices were not separated in the past, and neither are they in the present, and as critical archaeologists, we need to take responsibility for this (see Wylie 1992, 593). Diluting divides between popular and decolonial academic understandings of colonialism should be part of such responsibilities (Silliman 2005, 65), and this is an incomparable 439

Sandra Montón-Subías

opportunity to put this in practice. If we cannot yet kill Goliath, we can at least try to turn him on his head by targeting audiences outside the profession through activities that promote decolonial understandings. Among the different public exhibitions opened at the moment, this is what the Spanish National Museum of Anthropology (MNA) is seeking. Rather than rejoice in masculinist grand narratives focused on the expedition’s anecdotes, machinations, and achievements, the museum has designed a critical approach through a cycle of exhibitions that will incorporate different places and peoples visited by the expedition and their own perspectives “without impositions, or necessarily in agreement with the hegemonic account construed from the West” (Saéz 2019). One of such exhibitions, to be displayed in 2021, will be about Guam. It is now scheduled as a joint effort between the MNA, members of the ABERIGUA project, and members of Guam’s Quincentenary Commission, created in October 2019. As members of the ABERIGUA project, we began conversations with MNA in 2017 and embraced the following concerns from the outset: collaboration with local/Indigenous representatives and institutions; recovering historical memory of the Spanish colonization of the Marianas in Spain; incorporating a long-term perspective of colonialism, including ontological plurality; and introducing twenty-first-century CHamoru culture and sociopolitical struggles. Most of these concerns are also shared by the CHamoru Commission and MNA. In 1819, Rose Marie Pinon de Freycinet wrote, “Very little information is available about these islands in Europe, and yet they deserve to be better known” (quoted in Rivière 1996, 75). Sadly, this quote is still valid. More that two centuries later, Guam still deserves to be better known. The insertion of the Marianas and several other Pacific islands into the colonial network of the Spanish empire constitutes quite a little-known historical episode outside Micronesia. The case is particularly unfortunate regarding Spanish society, which has not only lost memory of the Spanish colonization of Guam but could be safely said to ignore the island’s existence altogether. Through the MNA exhibition, we seek to revert historical amnesia and also to unmake asymmetries in the mutual knowledge of both countries. We would like to stress particularly the short-, mid-, and long-term consequences that the circumnavigation and ensuing colonization carried for Native CHamorus in order to portray the most profound implications (both shared and different) that colonial domination had for CHamoru men, women, boys, girls, and possible others. The inclusion of previous Latte societies will be a must, not only to depict the local impacts of colonization in its full breadth but to illustrate, through Guam, a global patriarchal turn that also fostered a racialized colonial underclass and endangered ontological diversity. This is of utmost importance to reflect about current hegemonic ontology and ways of being in the world (Haber 2016; Hernando 2002; Rivera Cusicanqui 2010; de Sousa Santos 2010) and, therefore, to tell the public that contemporary axes of inequality have nothing whatsoever to do with so-called human nature. Likewise, we would like to use this opportunity to illustrate continuities in precolonial cultural logics and values related to interdependency and group bonding. To me, it has been quite telling to see how core CHamoru values vindicated within today’s cultural activism and invigoration of tradition are described in Spanish documents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I am referring to concepts such as inafa´maloek, or restoration of harmony (Leon Guerrero 2019; Perez-Iyechad 2019), which includes respetu, manginge (given to elders and persons of authority), or påtgon, referring to child rearing as a socially shared responsibility (for instance Pobre de Zamora, in Martínez 1997, 444). I have also enjoyed learning—from conversations with Humåtak youngsters during excavations—that a form of matrilineal kinship continues to operate on the island alongside the patrilineal one enforced especially during US colonization. Historiographic silences (sensu Trouillot 1995) are produced by those who write history and/or excavate the past but are more easily noticed by those who experience them. Awareness 440

In small islands forgotten

of discrimination results in different understandings and writings of the past (Atalay 2006; Blakey 1987; Conkey 2005; Dowson 1998; Franklin 2001; Montón Subías and Lozano Rubio 2012; Spivak 1988; Wylie 2003) and in different exhibitions for the lay public. CHamorus involved in the quincentenary have oftentimes declared they want to offer their own perspectives, and the MNA exhibition will be one avenue for it. Although collaboration will take place in all spheres, representing present-day CHamoru culture and sociopolitical struggles will mainly be their responsibility. As Guam’s Commission President Robert Underwood declared some years ago, no one is in a better position than them to “reflect our current concerns and our selfimagery in ways which tell others who we are, where we have been and where we would like to go” (1999, 528).

Discussion Feminist decolonial concerns are situated in specific ways. In my case, I am a feminist Spanish woman and archaeologist working in Guam with CHamorun Humåtak for one to two months every year, and I am simultaneously part of a western academic structure, although one not entirely within the mainstream (I am based in the Mediterranean). I codirect fieldwork in a former Spanish colony through a Spanish funding program that allocates research grants to excavations abroad. Excavating with CHamorus has brought me face to face with core colonialism in a supposedly “post-colonial” world, but my drive toward a feminist and decolonial archaeology coexists with working at institutions and programs of power-knowledge guided by antagonistic inner logics (González-Ruibal 2010, 44–45; Montón Subías and Lozano Rubio 2012; Supernant and Warrick 2014, 565–566). I therefore inhabit the uncomfortable juncture implied in working within an increasingly neoliberal “fast academia” whose hegemonic research rationale is far from the ideal of a feminist decolonization of science. This confronts me with the old but vivid questions of how to make the most of my privileges as an academic to subvert androcentrist, eurocentric, and colonialist practices instead of exerting power. Coloniality of knowledge (Bidaseca and Vazquez Laba 2011; Lander 2000; Lugones 2010; Quijano 2000; Rivera Cusicanqui 2010; Segato 2011) constitutes us all in unconscious ways. I therefore regard my decolonial-depatriarchal commitment as a path of unremitting and continuous self-reflexive scrutiny to unmask and challenge everything that has become unconsciously embedded in our way of doing archaeology as a result of patriarchy and eurocentrism. Feminist and/or decolonial archaeologies have exposed reductionism in understanding the past through presently mainstream cultural values and logics. Experience and awareness of social discrimination and/or self-exposure to different ways of being has turned vital in recovering ontological plurality and realizing that allegedly universal hegemonic ways of being—and thus values and logics of mainstream historic and archaeological discourse—have a genealogy (see also Atalay 2006, 285; Haber 2016; Hernando 2002; Montón Subías and Hernando 2018; Preucel and Cipolla 2008, 130). Indeed, many people in the past we investigate would have constructed their personal identity in ways that differ considerably from our own as twenty-firstcentury archaeologists. They therefore would have configured societies guided by entirely different logics. The point is not only to practice a more representative and inclusive archaeology in the present but also to understand that the past was populated by different public rationalities. Present-day politics of representation are nonetheless also important. While the term Indigenous archaeologist is no longer an oxymoron (Two-Bears 2006), profound colonial imbalances remain at a global level (González-Ruibal 2010, 46). While non-Indigenous western scholars inhabit world archaeologies, Indigenous archaeologists—when they exist—usually remain focused on their local pasts. Unfortunately, they do not excavate the Bell-Beaker, the Mycenaean world, or 441

Sandra Montón-Subías

Argaric Bronze Age Iberia. Unsurprisingly, relationships between archaeologists in the North and the South of Europe echo such imbalances. In Guam, there are only a few CHamoru archaeologists. Scarcity of CHamoru archaeologists is something that some Indigenous leaders are seeking to address, and in fact, some of the schoolchildren excavating with us have stated their interest in becoming archaeologists, but this is not an easy task when coping with social vulnerability. One of them has, for instance, joined the US military as the only possible way to gain access to college education (to maybe study archaeology), something not rare in present colonial Guam (see also Camacho and Monnig 2010, 163). At the moment, community-based archaeology at San Dionisio may have acted as an empowering process, and some assistant archaeologists have found jobs on the island (Joe Quinata, personal communication, June 2019). ABERIGUA has also incorporated archaeologists from Puerto Rico and Colombia (both part of previous Spanish colonial overseas territories), but proportion and leadership still falls within the “metropolis” side.

Conclusion The title of this article pays homage to Deetz’s famous In Small Things Forgotten (Deetz 1996). Like his small things, the small island of Guam has been often forgotten in studies of both the past and the present: it has featured as marginal in narratives of Spanish colonialism, in analyses of modern colonialism in the Pacific, in today’s historical memory of Spaniards and Europeans, and even in current analyses of decolonial struggles (Lujan Bevacqua 2010). And yet, like Deetz’s small things, Guam is of relevance to fully understand colonialism past and present, and also plurality in today’s indigeneity and decolonizing movements (Camacho and Monnig 2010, 149–150). Manilla galleons gave Spanish colonialism a global dimension; they were fundamental in making up a global colonial matrix of domination that integrated territories and people in Europe, America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Guam was one of those territories, and CHamorus one among those people. This colossal colonial matrix can be better approached through dissecting its specific local configurations: these provide comparative perspectives to each other and help understand how globalization began breathing in their confluence. Guam is also particularly important to understand and compare missionization and reducciones worldwide and thus processes that endangered ontological diversity through coloniality of being and knowledge. Both acted as political engines to racialize and engender CHamorus into a new sex/gender system that promoted all types of social hierarchies through the colonial appropriation of CHamoru land and labor force, through the implantation of new patriarchal institutions—like the nuclear monogamous heterosexual family with clearly unequal roles for men and women—and through un-structuring and restructuring most basic daily routines. Guam thus helps understand how colonial globalization both articulated and was shaped by different lines of discrimination and inequality. And yet despite waves of coloniality, the CHamoru sense of belonging has reached our days in a particular process that has combined Oceanian, European, and American—including Latin American—cultural backgrounds (Atienza and Coello 2012; Bayman et al. 2020; Diaz 2010; Lujan Bevacqua 2020; Souder 1992). We have seen how an incipient line of archaeological research in Guam is aimed at investigating archaeological sites that might have remained beyond colonial surveillance. Here it might be easier to detect cultural continuities, so important to understanding the voids of coloniality and to practice a decolonial archaeology. Cultural continuities are reclaimed by Indigenous communities in the present (Hernández 2012; Lightfoot 2015; Panich 2013; Silliman 2009; Wright and Ricardi 2015), and CHamorus are no exception. 442

In small islands forgotten

A decolonial archaeology should both investigate sites—like lånchos—and geographies—like Guam—that have received less or no scholarly attention. While in terms of cultural activism the Latte period is undoubtedly attracting increasing interest, colonial-era heritage continues to play an important social, cultural, and political role. CHamorus of today live in a US colony, and political activism is therefore directed to US colonialism. Unlike in many countries in Latin America, Spain has not been made the metropolis against which to construct national identity or to define the process of self-determination. Although CHamoru attitudes toward “Spanish” heritage are in no way unitary, important sectors in Guam voice it as their own. GPT allocates programs to such heritage, and the community we work with is making efforts to investigate, restore, and present it to the public outside the profession. CHamoru people are well aware that they share parts of this heritage with many other countries around the globe, but they also contend that, on their island, it is situated in a uniquely CHamoru way. Attitudes to the past are situated in the present, and Guam faces a time where anti-colonial activism rises largely in response to increasing allocation of local land to US military build-up (Camacho and Monnig 2010, 150). As we approach the 500th anniversary of Magellan’s circumnavigation, attitudes to heritage from the Spanish colonial-era may also change. To cope with the anniversary, the Commission “I Estoria-ta” (“Our History”) was constituted in Guam in October 2019. President Robert Underwood declared recently that “we’re not actually celebrating it, we’re just acknowledging it, commemorating it in order to be able to present the Chamorro perspective . . . which I think for 500 years has been undervalued” (https://pncguam. com/chamorro-perspective-to-be-presented-during-magellan-anniversary/). Decolonizing the colonial politics of historical memory is necessary. Though the MNA exhibition we are trying, but the main exhibitions operating in Spain are inspired by somewhat different buzzwords. The titles Fuimos los Primeros (We Were the First) or El Viaje más largo (The Longest Journey) leave little to the imagination about what visitors will find and what many actually seek: an account of the expedition’s adventures and intrigues and the display of its glory and grandeur— which is no other than that of Spain and its history. Both feature Guam as a tiny showcase, uncritically reproducing chronicler Pigaffetta’s unpleasant depictions: that “they” were thieves, and that “we” were therefore forced to kill several of them. Such Eurocentric gestures have an impact in fostering a specific type of historical memory. This is precisely why I insist in bringing to the conscious fore what Eurocentrism has internalized. Anniversaries and their exhibitions can become avenues to disseminate such challenges to the western public, and we should therefore make the most of these chances as necessary steps in constructing a less colonialist global future.

Acknowledgments First of all, I would like to thank all the people who have been participating in the San Dionisio excavations since 2017. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Joe Quinata for sharing with me CHamoru culture and ways of being Indigenous, and for WhatsApp-answering different doubts while I was writing this chapter. Likewise, Boyd Dixon and Omaira Brunal-Perry have also answered my questions, as have Judith Amesbury and James Bayman. I also thank Pedro Pablo Fermín Maguire and Konrad Antzcak for improving my English, and Carmen A. Granell for sharing some bibliographic references. This work has been partly supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Grant HAR2016–77564-C2–1-P and by the Catalan Agency for the Management of University and Research Grants (FI-2017). The article has also benefited from the ABERIGUA grant (sponsored by the Palarq Foundation and the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sports). 443

Sandra Montón-Subías

References cited Allen, Paula Gunn. 1992. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press. Atalay, Sonya. 2006. “Indigenous Archaeology as Decolonizing Practice.” The American Indian Quarterly 30 (3–4): 280–310. Atienza, David, and Alexandre Coello de la Rosa. 2012. “Death Rituals and Identity in Contemporary Guam (Mariana Islands).” Journal of Pacific History 47 (4): 459–473. Bayman, James M., Boyd Dixon, Sandra Montón-Subías, and Natalia Moragas. 2020. “Colonial Surveillance, Låncho, and the Perpetuation of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Guam, Mariana Islands.” In The Global Spanish Empire: Five Hundred Years of Place Making and Pluralism, edited by Christine Beaule and John Douglass, 222–241. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Bayman, James M., Hiro Kurashina, Mike Carson, John Peterson, David Doig, and Jane Drengson. 2012a. “Household Economy and Gendered Labor in the 17th Century A.D. on Guam.” Journal of Field Archaeology 37 (4): 259–269. Bayman, James M., Hiro Kurashina, Mike Carson, John Peterson, David Doig, and Jane Drengson. 2012b. “Latte Household Economic Organization at Ritidian, Guam National Wildlife Refuge, Mariana Islands.” Micronesica 42 (1): 258–273. Bayman, James M., and John A. Peterson. 2016. “Spanish Colonial History and Archaeology in the Mariana Islands: Echoes from the Western Pacific.” In Archaeologies of Early Modern Spanish Colonialism, edited by Sandra Montón-Subías, María Cruz Berrocal, and Apen Ruiz, 229–252. Cham: Springer. Bidaseca, Karina, and Vanesa Vazquez Laba. 2011. Feminismo y Poscolonialidad. Descolonizando El Feminismo Desde y En América Latina. Buenos Aires: Godot. Blakey, Michael L. 1987. “Intrinsic Social and Political Bias in the History of American Physical Anthropology: With Special Reference to the Work of Aleš Hrdlička.” Critique of Anthropology 7 (2): 7–35. Boddy, Janice. 2011. “Colonialism. Bodies Under Colonialism.” In A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment, edited by Frances Mascia-Lees, 119–136. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Brunal-Perry, Omaira. 2009. “Early European Exploration and the Spanish Period in the Marianas 1521– 1898.” In Maritime History and Archaeology of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, edited by Toni Carrell, 95–142. Saipan: CNMI Division of Historic Preservation. Camacho, Keith L., and Laurel A. Monnig. 2010. “Uncomfortable Fatigues: Chamorro Soldiers, Gendered Identities, and the Question of Decolonization in Guam.” In Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, edited by Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, 147–179. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Carson, Mike T. 2012. “An Overview of Latte Period Archaeology.” Micronesica 42 (1): 1–79. Clossey, Luke. 2006. “Merchants, Migrants, Missionaries, and Globalization in the Early-Modern Pacific.” Journal of Global History 1: 41–58. Coello, Alexandre, and David Atienza. 2016. “Sobre Amnesias y Olvidos. Continuidades y Discontinuidades En La (Re)Construcción de La Memoria Colectiva En Guam (Islas Marianas).” Historia Social 86: 25–46. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 1986. “Christianity and Colonialism in South Africa.” American Ethnologist 13 (1): 1–22. Conkey, Margaret. 2005. “Dwelling at the Margins, Action at the Intersection? Feminist and Indigenous Archaeologies.” Archaeologies 1 (1): 9–80. Deetz, James. 1996. In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life. New York: Anchor Books. Delgadillo, Yolanda, Thomas McGrath, and Felicia Plaza. 1979. Spanish Forts of Guam. Agaña, Guam: Micronesian Area Research Center, University of Guam. Diaz, Vicente M. 2010. Repositioning the Missionary: Rewriting the Histories of Colonialism, Native Catholicism, and Indigeneity in Guam. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Dixon, Boyd. 2004. “The Archaeology of Rural Settlement and Class in a Pre-WWII Japanese Plantation on Tinian, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 8 (4): 281–299. Dixon, Boyd, Andrea Jalandoni, and Cacilie Craft. 2017. “The Archaeological Remains of Early Modern Spanish Colonialism on Guam and Their Implications.” In Historical Archaeology of Early Modern Colonialism in Asia-Pacific: The Asia-Pacific Region, edited by Maria Cruz Berrocal and Cheng-hwa Tsang, 195–218. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

444

In small islands forgotten Dixon, Boyd, Richard Schaefer, and Todd McCurdy. 2010. “Traditional Chamorro Farming Innovations during the Spanish and Philippine Contact Period on Northern Guam.” Philippine Quaterly of Culture and Society 38 (4): 291–322. Dixon, Boyd, Danny Welch, and Lon Bulgrin. 2020. “Archaeological Roots of Traditional Land Use and Resistance to Spanish Colonial Engagement on Guam.” Asian Perspectives 59 (1): 61–99. Dowson, T. A. 1998. “Homosexualitat, Teoria Queer i Arqueologia.” Cota Zero 14: 81–87. Escribano-Ruiz, Sergio. 2019. “Olor a Sangre. La Pesca Vasca Del Atlático Norte En Época Moderna Interpelada Desde Una Posición Colonial y Sensorial.” Arqueología Iberoamericana 41: 52–61. Etienne, Mona, and Eleanor Leacock. 1980. Women and Colonization. New York: Praeger Publishers. Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau Noire, Masques Blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Federicci, S. 2004. Caliban and The Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia. Flexner, James L. 2014. “Historical Archaeology, Contact, and Colonialism in Oceania.” Journal of Archaeological Research 22 (1): 43–87. Flores, Judith. 2008. “Spanish Heritage Resources in the Mariana Islands.” In Spanish Heritage in Micronesia, 8–14. Tumon, Guam: Spanish Program for Cultural Cooperation. Foucault, Michel. 1975. Surveiller et Punir. Paris: Gallimard. Franklin, Maria. 2001. “A Black Feminist-Inspired Archaeology?” Journal of Social Archaeology 1 (1): 108–125. Galindo, María. 2013. No se puede descolonizar sin despatriarcalizar. Teoría y propuesta de la despatriarcalización. La Paz: Mujeres Creando. Galván Guijo, Javier. 1999. “El Legado Arquitectónico de Origen Español En Micronesia.” Revista Española Del Pacifico 10: 9–26. Gautier, Arlette. 2005. “Mujeres y Colonialismo.” In El Libro Negro Del Colonialismo. Siglos XVI Al XXI: Del Exterminio Al Arrepentimiento, edited by Marc Ferro, 677–723. Madrid: La esfera de los libros. Giráldez, Arturo. 2015. The Age of Trade: Manila Galleons and the Dawn of the Global Economy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. González-Ruibal, Alfredo. 2010. “Colonialism and European Archaeology.” In Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology, edited by Jane Lydon and Uzma Rizvi, 39–50. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. González-Ruibal, Alfredo. 2014. “Malos Nativos: Una Crítica de Las Arqueologías Indígenas y Poscoloniales.” Revista de Arqueologia 27 (2): 47–63. Haber, Alejandro. 2016. “Decolonizing Archaeological Thought in South America.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45: 469–485. Hernández, Gilda. 2012. Ceramics and the Spanish Conquest: Response and Continuity of Indigenous Pottery Technology in Central Mexico. Leiden: Brill. Hernando, Almudena. 2002. Arqueología de La Identidad. Madrid: Akal. Hezel, Francis X. 2015. When Cultures Clash: Revisiting the “Spanish-Chamorro Wars”. Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands: The Northern Marianas Humanities Council. Hunter-Anderson, Rosalind L. 2011. “The Latte Period in Marianas Prehistory. Who Is Interpreting It, Why and How?” Terra Australis 35: 17–28. Jalandoni, Andrea. 2011. “The Casa Real Site in Ritidian, Northern Guam: An Historical Context.” Philippine Quaterly of Culture & Society 39 (1): 27–53. Junco, Roberto. 2011. “The Archaeology of Manila Galleons.” In Proceedings on the Asia-Pacific Regional Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage. www.themua.org/collections/items/show/1535. Kelly-Gadol, J. 1977. “Did Women Have a Reinassence?” In Becoming Visible: Women in European History, edited by Renate Bridenthai and Claudia Coonz, 175–201. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Laguana, Andrew, Hiro Kurashina, Mike T. Carson, John A. Peterson, James M. Bayman, Todd Ames, Rebecca A. Stephenson, John Aguon, and Ir. D. K. Harya Putra. 2012. “Estorian i Latte: A Story of Latte.” Micronesica 42 (1): 80–120. Lander, Edgardo. 2000. “Ciencias Sociales: Saberes Coloniales y Eurocéntricos.” In La Colonialidad Del Saber: Eurocentrismo y Ciencias Sociales. Perspectivas Latinoamericanas, edited by Edgardo Lander, 9–38. Buenos Aires: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales CLACSO. La Salle, Marina J. 2010. “Community Collaboration and Other Good Intentions.”Archaeologies 6: 401–422. Leon Guerrero, Victoria. 2019. “Crime and Punishment.” Governed by inafa’maolek. www.guampedia.com/ crime-and-punishment/. Lightfoot, Kent G. 2015. “Dynamics of Change in Multiethnic Societies: An Archaeological Perspective from Colonial North America.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112 (30): 9216–9223.

445

Sandra Montón-Subías Limtiaco, Clark. 2019. “Our Hispanic Heritage The Key to Broadening Chamorro Cultural Awareness.” In 4th Marianas History Conference: One Archipelago, Many Stories: Commemorating Our Histories, 187–196. Manguilao: Guampedia. Lugones, María. 2007. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22 (1): 186–209. Lugones, María. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25 (4): 742–759. Lujan Bevacqua, Michael. 2010. “The Exceptional Life and Death of a Chamorro Soldier. Tracing the Militarization of Desire in Guam, USA.” In Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, edited by Setsu Shigematsu, and Keith Camacho, 33–61. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Lujan Bevacqua, Michael. 2020. “The Transmission of Christianity into Chamorro Culture.” www. guampedia.com/transmission-of-christianity-into-chamorro-culture/. Accessed January 15, 2020. Martínez, Jesús, ed. 1997. Fray Juan Pobre de Zamora. Historia de la pérdida y descubrimiento del galeón “San Felipe”. Ávila: Institución “Gran Duque de Alba” de la Diputación Provincial de Ávila. Mathers, William M., Henry S. Parker, and Kathleen A. Copus. 1990. Archaeological Report. The Recovery of the Manila Galleon Nuestra Señora de La Concepción. Sutton, VT: Pacific Sea resources. Mathers, William M., and Nancy Shaw. 1993. Treasure of the Concepción: The Archaeological Recovery of a Spanish Galleon. Hong Kong: APA Publications (HK) Ltd. McKinnon, Jennifer F., and Jason T. Raupp. 2011. “Potential for Spanish Colonial Archaeology in the Northern Mariana Islands.” In Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Regional Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage. www.themua.org/collections/items/show/1198. Mies, M. 1986. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. London: Zed Books. Molina, Michelle. 2013. To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and Spirit of Global Expansion, 1520–1767. Berkeley: University of California Press. Montón-Subías, Sandra. 2019. “Gender, Missions, and Maintenance Activities in the Early Modern Globalization: Guam 1668–98.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 23 (2): 404–429. Montón Subías, Sandra, James Bayman, and Natalia Moragas Segura. 2018. “Arqueología del colonialismo español en la Micronesia: Guam y las poblaciones Chamorras.” In Repensar el colonialismo: Iberia, de colonia a potencia colonial, edited by Beatriz Marín Aguilera, 305–335. Madrid: JAS Arqueología. Montón Subías, Sandra, James Bayman, and Natalia Moragas Segura. 2020. “The First Missions in Oceania. Excavations at the Colonial Church and Cemetery of San Dionisio at Humåtak (Guam, Mariana Islands).” Journal of Pacific Archaeology 11 (2): 62–73. Montón-Subías, Sandra, and E. Moral de Eusebio. 2021. “A Body Is Worth a Thousand Words: Early Colonial Dresscapes in Guam.” Historical Archaeology 55 (1), in press. Montón-Subías, Sandra, and Almudena Hernando. 2018. “Modern Colonialism, Eurocentrism and Historical Archaeology: Some Engendered Thoughts.” European Journal of Archaeology 21 (3): 455–471. Montón Subías, Sandra, and Sandra Lozano Rubio. 2012. “La Arqueología Feminista En La Normatividad Académica.” Complutum 23 (2): 163–176. Moore, Darlene. 2007. Latte Period and Spanish Period Archaeology at Old Pago, Guam. Mangilao: Micronesian Archaeological Research Services. Moore, Darlene, and R. Steffy. 2008. Hotnun Sanhiyong: Guam’s Outside Ovens. Mangilao: Micronesian Archaeological Research Services. Moral de Eusebio, E. 2016. “Heterotopías En Conflicto. Sexualidad, Colonialismo y Cultura Material En Las Islas Marianas Durante El Siglo XVII Interdisciplinaridade.” In Entre Ciência e Cultura: Da Interdisciplinaridade à Transversalidade Da Arqueología (Actas Das VIII Jornadas de Jovens Em Investigação Arqueológica), edited by ines Pinto Coelho, Joana Bento Torres, Luis Serrão Gil, and Tiago Ramos, 229–232. Lisboa: CHAM, IEM. Mushynsky, Julie. 2019. “Defining Karst Defenses: Construction and Features.” Historical Archaeology 53 (1): 193–204. Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnestoa Press. Panich, Lee M. 2013. “Archaeologies of Persistence: Reconsidering the Legacies of Colonialism in Native North America.” American Antiquity 78 (1): 105–122. Peña Filiu, Verónica. 2020. “Alimentación y Colonialismo En Las Islas Marianas (Pacífico Occidental). Introducciones, Adaptaciones y Transformaciones Alimentarias Durante La Misión Jesuita (1668– 1769).” PhD Dissertation, Pompeu Fabra University.

446

In small islands forgotten Perez Hattori, Anne. 2004. Colonial Dis-Ease: U.S. Navy Health Policies and the Chamorros of Guam, 1898– 1941. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Perez-Iyechad, Lilli. 2019. “Inafa’maolek: Striving for Harmony.” www.guampedia.com/inafamaolek/. Peterson, John A. 2008. “The Archaeology of Spanish Period, Guam.” In Spanish Heritage in Micronesia, 15–50. Tumon, Guam: Spanish Program for Cultural Cooperation. Pigafetta, Antonio. 1525. Primo Viaggio in Torno Al Globo Terracqueo. Español-Italiano Vol. 2: Reprod. Facs. Del Ms. L 103 Sup. de La Biblioteca Ambrosiana. Valencia: Grial. Preucel, Robert W, and Craig N Cipolla. 2008. “Indigenous and Postcolonial Archaeologies.” In Archaeology and the Poscolonial Critique, edited by Uzma Rizvi and Matthew Liebmann. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press. Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. “Colonialidd Del Poder, Eurocentrismo y América Latina.” In La Colonialidad Del Saber: Eurocentrismo y Ciencias Sociales. Perspectivas Latinoamericanas, edited by Edgardo Lander, 193–238. Buenos Aires: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales CLACSO. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 1984. Oprimidos Pero No Vencidos. Luchas Del Campesinado Aymara y Qhechwa 1900–1980. La Paz: Hisbol-CSUTCB. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 2010. Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa. Una Reflexión Sobre Prácticas y Discursos Colonizadores. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón. Rivière, Marc Serge. 1996. A Woman of Courage: The Journal of Rose de Freycinet on Her Voyage around the World, 1817–1820. Canberra: National Library of Australia. Rogers, Robert F. 2011. Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Rogers, Robert F., and Dirk Anthony Ballendorf. 1989. “Magellan’s Landfall in the Mariana Islands.” The Journal of Pacific History 24 (2): 193–208. Rubertone, Patricia E. 2000. “The Historical Archaeology of Native Americans.” Annual Review of Anthropology 29 (1): 425–446. Russell, Scott. 1998. Tiempon I Manmofo’na: Ancient Chamorro Culture and History of the Northern Mariana Islands. Saipan: Micronesian Archaeological Survey Report No. 32. Division of Historic Preservation. Saéz, Fernando. 2019. “Démosle La Vuelta Al Mundo. V Centenario de La Primera Circunnavegación Del Globo 2019–2022.” Madrid. Santos, Boaventura De Sousa. 2010. Descolonizar El Saber, Reinventar El Poder. Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce. Schuetz, Mardith. 2007. The Archaeology of the Governor’s Palace: Plaza de España, Agaña, Guam. MARC Monograph Series. University of Guam. Segato, Rita Laura. 2011. “Género y Colonialidad: En Busca de Claves de Lectura y de Un Vocabulario Estratégico Descolonial.” In Feminismos y Poscolonialidad. Descolonizando El Feminismo Desde y En América Latina, edited by Karina Bidaseca and Vanessa Vázquez Laba, 17–48. Buenos Aires: Godot. Segato, Rita Laura. 2015. “Género y Colonialidad: Del Patriarcado Comunitario de Baja Intensidad Al Patriarcado Colonial Moderno de Alta Intensidad.” In La Crítica de La Colonialidad En Ocho Ensayos. Y Una Antropología Por Demanda, edited by Rita Segato, 69–99. Buenos Aires: Prometeo. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005. “Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America.” American Antiquity 70 (1): 55–74. Silliman, Stephen W. 2009. “Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory : Native American Persistence in Colonial New England.” American Antiquity 74 (2): 211–230. Skowronek, Russell K. 2009. “On the Fringes of New Spain: The Northern Borderlands and the Pacific.” In International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, edited by Teresita Majewski and David Gaimster, 471–505. New York: Springer. Souder, Laura Marie Torres. 1992. Daughters of the Island: Contemporary Chamorro Women Organizers of Guam. Mangilao: Micronesian Area Research Center, University of Guam. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Supernant, Kisha, and Gary Warrick. 2014. “Challenges to Critical Community-Based Archaeological Practice in Canada.” Canadian Journal of Archaeology 38: 563–591. Thompson, Laura. 1940. “The Function of Latte in the Marianas.” The Journal of the Polynesian Society 49 (195): 449–465. Torrence, Robin, and Anne Clarke, eds. 2000. The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross-Cultural Engagements in Oceania. London: Routledge. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.

447

Sandra Montón-Subías Two-Bears, Davina. 2006. “Navajo Archaeologist Is Not an Oxymoron: A Tribal Archaeologist’s Experience.” The American Indian Quarterly 30 (3–4): 381–387. Underwood, Robert. 1999. “The Practice of Identity for the Chamorro People.” In 1898, España y el Pacífico. Interpretación del pasado, realidad del presente, edited by Miguel Luque Talaván, Juan José Pacheco Onrubia and Fernando Palanco, 527–534. Madrid: Asociación Española de Estudios del Pacífico. Wright, Duncan, and Pamela Ricardi. 2015. “Both Sides of the Frontier: The ‘contact’ Archaeology of Villages on Mabuyag, Western Torres Strait.” Quaternary International 385: 102–111. Wylie, Alison. 1992. “Rethinking the Quincentennial: Consequences for Past and Present.” American Antiquity 54 (4): 591–594. Wylie, Alison. 2003. “Why Standpoint Matters.” In Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophies of Science and Technology, edited by Robert Figueroa and Sandra G. Harding, 26–48. London: Routledge.

448

28 UNSETTLING THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF RESERVATIONS A view from Grand Ronde, Oregon Ian Kretzler and Sara L. Gonzalez

Introduction Archaeological studies of colonialism in the United States increasingly proceed from the position that, following Wolfe (1999, 2), colonialism is a structure, not an event (see Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018; Liebmann 2008; Silliman 2005). This framing trains scholarly attention on the long-term, multiscalar political, environmental, and social processes that shape the actions and experiences of both colonizers and colonized (Harrison 2014; Rogers 2005; Silliman 2010; Sunseri 2017). In view of the growing record of settler colonial studies in archaeology, we believe it is both possible and advantageous to articulate research programs that target one of the specific elements of the structure of US settler colonialism: Native American reservations. As perhaps the most conspicuous and enduring manifestation of US settler colonial policies, reservations are geographically and politically bounded spatial units designed to ensure unfettered settler access to Native lands, extinguish Native lifeways via assimilationist policies, and terminate Tribal Nations, whether politically, physically, or culturally. While reservations have garnered substantial historical and anthropological interest (e.g., Biolsi 2018; Harjo 2014; Raibmon 2008; Ruppell 2008; Wilkinson 2010), they, along with nineteenth and twentieth century settler colonial entanglements, have been the subject of little archaeological investigation (though see Beaudoin 2017; Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018; Panich et al. 2021; Surface-Evans 2016). The failure to bridge studies of early colonial encounters with more recent elements of US settler colonial structures limits archaeology’s ability to develop long-term views of settler colonialism as a sustained, enduring process (Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018). In this chapter, we argue that “reservation archaeology” is uniquely positioned to address these temporal, spatial, and structural gaps within archaeology and contribute necessary material depth to the broader field of colonial studies. In using the designation “reservation archaeology,” we do not refer simply to research on reservation-era Native histories, nor do we describe research taking place on reservations but focused on pre-reservation histories. Rather, using examples drawn from our community-based research with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon (Figure 28.1), we demonstrate how reservation archaeology pairs an examination of the material expressions of US settler colonialism 449

Ian Kretzler and Sara L. Gonzalez

Figure 28.1 Map of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon’s ceded lands and the original boundaries of the Grand Ronde Reservation. Source: Authors’ creation.

450

Unsettling the archaeology of reservations

with a commitment to addressing the legacies of colonialism through collaborative research with Tribal Nations. In this chapter, we use this two-pronged approach to answer three questions. First, how do reservation-specific histories enhance our understanding of US settler colonialism? Second, how can archaeological research contribute to remembering Native histories that have been suppressed, erased, or marginalized as a direct outcome of federal removal and assimilation policies? Third, in what ways does community-based research enhance the capacity of Tribal Nations to implement self-determined and sovereignty-based expressions of heritage protection? Before discussing these questions at length, we consider some of the opportunities and potential pitfalls of “reservation archaeology” as a specific research program. We also contextualize reservations within recent US history, highlighting the role they played in the expansion of the settler colonial project beginning in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

On reservation archaeology Reservation archaeology, by definition, focuses on the relationship between Native peoples and US settler colonialism. We believe this framing is advantageous to archaeologies of colonialism for reasons we outline here. We acknowledge, however, that it is not without tension. In using “reservation archaeology” to describe our research agenda, we risk prescribing the totality of Native peoples’ long-term entanglements with settler colonialism to reservations. This is a common issue within popular historical narratives, which deploy reservations as markers of Native disappearance, signifying the transition of Indigenous homelands to settler state and colonial territory (e.g., Lewis 2014). We offer “reservation archaeology” as a starting point for dialogue about how archaeology might use the spatial unit of the reservation to begin to unsettle one of the structures of settler colonialism. Reservations were (and are) at once loci of state control over Native bodies and also sites of transgression and boundary crossing. For many Native communities, reservation boundaries were very real. Individuals faced imprisonment or worse for attempting to return to their homelands. Though ostensibly designed for the mutual protection of settlers and Natives, the state’s enforcement of reservation boundaries fell overwhelmingly on Native people. Reservations were designed to keep residents confined. Even amidst such confinement, reservations proved spatially and culturally permeable. Native people traversed reservation boundaries—with permission or not—to secure economic opportunities, maintain and reconnect with ancestral places and landscapes, harvest First Foods, and visit kin living in a variety of urban and rural contexts. Such travel, exchange, and cultural production can be viewed as a politics of refusal (Simpson 2017) that undermine settler colonialism’s seemingly unshakeable structure. The challenge inherent to reservation archaeology is engaging with the interplay of competing federal policies, local settler relations, and Native politics and logics that structured reservation daily life. The federal government’s pursuit of assimilation deeply affected individual communities’ ability to practice and pass down linguistic, historical, and cultural knowledge. While the historical impacts and contemporary legacies of these government regulations cannot be overlooked, it would be misguided to focus archaeological research solely on examples of tragedy or decline, what Wilcox (2009) refers to as “terminal narratives.” Reservation archaeology must not lose sight of what Atalay (2006, 608) calls a “sense of the struggle.” That is, there is a need to understand histories of Native survival and colonial violence within the broader context of Native creativity and success. This enduring presence is encapsulated in Vizenor’s (1994, 2009) concept of survivance (see Chapter 29 for a fuller discussion of survivance and its archaeological applications). 451

Ian Kretzler and Sara L. Gonzalez

Reservations, as much as they are products of US settler colonialism past and present, are also distinctly Native spaces that endure as political, demographic, and cultural centers for hundreds of Tribal Nations. There is the tease of irony here: spaces designed to eradicate Native peoples also serve as platforms upon which these nations assert sovereignty and self-determination. Reservations serve as potent reminders that settler colonialism failed (and continues to fail) to erase Native peoples. Viewed in this way, reservations provide opportunities to simultaneously examine the materiality of settler colonialism and Native survivance. Reservation archaeology directly speaks to these entangled, ironic histories. Reservation archaeology stands to advance the spatial and temporal dimensions of archaeologies of colonialism, but this research cannot be absent of the Native communities who continue to engage with, contest, and build on the legacies and contemporary realities of reservations. Citing Vizenor and Atalay’s work on survivance in lieu of related but non-Indigenous concepts like persistence (Panich 2013) is an explicit attempt to ground reservation archaeology in Indigenous ways of thinking and knowing. Yet drawing on the conceptual tools of Indigenous scholars is only a starting point. The doing of a reservation archaeology depends on the consent of the Tribal Nation whose heritage is being investigated and, importantly, the integration of that community’s knowledge into all aspects of research design. Indigenous, collaborative approaches to archaeology offer specific examples for how archaeologists might begin to bridge archaeological practice with Indigenous protocols for working with heritage (Atalay 2012; Colwell 2016; Silliman 2008). In our own work with the Grand Ronde Historic Preservation Office (HPO), community-based participatory research frameworks have been a particularly valuable tool in this regard (Gonzalez and Edwards 2020; Gonzalez et al. 2018; Kretzler 2017). While it is outside the scope of this chapter to discuss this framework in depth, we note that the form and structure of a collaborative research protocol will vary according to a community’s specific needs, goals, and interests as well as to the local context in which that work will occur (Atalay 2012; Colwell-Chanthaphonh et al. 2010; Silliman 2008, 2). Context here refers to the unique social, political, historical and other relations that may shape collaborative research protocols and/or practices within and beyond the community. In the United States, the sovereign status of Tribal Nations intersects with heritage regulation in that federally recognized tribes may apply for status as a Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO). Established under 1992 amendments to the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), the THPO program enables tribes to assume some or all of the duties of State Historic Preservation Offices (SHPOs) on reservation and other tribally owned lands. Under the NHPA and through other related federal and state heritage laws, federally recognized Tribal Nations also exercise authority to engage in government-to-government consultation with state and federal agencies regarding tribal cultural resources within their ancestral homelands. These statutes create a unique context for working with tribal heritage, one in which archaeologists must satisfy specific consulting and permitting requirements prior to and while undertaking their research. In crucial ways, the United States’ 191 Tribal Historic Preservation Offices already conduct reservation archaeology as a matter of course. Some of the longest standing programs, such as the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department and Colville History & Archaeology Program, for example, feature robust, sovereignty-based archaeologies that employ communityspecific values and cultural protocols for caring for tribal cultural resources (Marek-Martinez 2016; Gonzalez 2016). These Indigenous approaches to archaeology and historic preservation are mirrored by a number of other THPO programs, in addition to cultural resource programs operated by tribes who either are not eligible for or who have not applied for THPO status (non-federally recognized tribes are ineligible under NHPA to operate as a THPO) (Backhouse et al. 2017; Hunn et al. 2015; Martinez and Teeter 2015; Stapp and Burney 2002). 452

Unsettling the archaeology of reservations

The work of tribes’ historic preservation programs is relevant to reservation archaeology in three ways. First, the political status and governing structures of federally recognized tribes, particularly those with THPOs, are a foundation for developing collaborative research protocols. For non-community researchers, they provide a framework not only for obtaining consent to conduct collaborative research, but also for identifying community partners to codirect that research. Critiques of community archaeologies highlight the problematic assumptions archaeologists often make in viewing Indigenous, descendant, or local communities as monolithic entities (McClanahan 2007; Pyburn 2011). Similarly, Cipolla and Quinn (2016) argue that uncritical analyses of collaborative practice gloss over power dynamics between communities and researchers. Developing collaborative research programs according to established tribal governing protocols does not absolve researchers of addressing power disparities between researchers, individual community members, and institutional collaborators. It does, however, help resolve obstacles archaeologists commonly face in establishing collaborative partnerships with Tribal Nations. Second, tribes face significant hurdles in implementing sovereignty-based approaches to historic preservation. Tribes’ historic preservation programs are situated within a regulatory environment that was not developed to address the needs, goals, or approaches of Tribal Nations (King 2003), and they often face capacity-related challenges—such as lack of personnel, budgetary shortfalls, or equipment needs—in undertaking cultural protection work. Tribes, including the Grand Ronde HPO, have addressed these challenges by developing collaborative or contractual relationships with outside researchers, who then carry out tribally defined projects that would otherwise not be possible. Tribes have also relied on these relationships to develop historic preservation plans, which direct how and in what ways cultural resources on reservations will be managed. Finally, the majority of archaeological projects that THPOs are asked to consult on or contribute to focus on ancient ancestral places located beyond reservation and other tribally owned lands. These places are important, but their disproportionate representation within tribal consultation may suggest to state and federal agency staff that tribes are not interested in or have no connection to places associated with the recent past. The Grand Ronde HPO frequently reminds its consulting partners that tribal history did not end with the arrival of Euro-American settlers (Edwards and Thorsgard 2012). This position is evidenced in the HPO’s nomination of the Grand Ronde Rail Depot to the National Register of Historic Places (Harrelson and Edwards 2012). The nomination could have relied solely on the architectural significance of the depot—the 1922 building was designed by John Albert Schuerch and has experienced few changes to design or setting—or the role the depot played as a local hub during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Instead, the HPO added a third layer of significance. Following Grand Ronde’s restoration in 1983, which overturned the tribe’s termination nearly three decades prior, the depot housed tribal government offices and programs. Grand Ronde’s emphasis on protecting historic properties related to nineteenth- and twentieth-century tribal history speaks to the larger tribal community’s interest in its recent past and enduring connections to places, such as local lumber mills and hop-picking camps, that are often thought of as non-Native places. The enduring presumption that US history is characterized by Native disappearance, even among agency staff conducting consultation with Tribal Nations, is partly responsible for the relative lack of interest among non-tribal archaeologists in investigating recent Native historical places such as reservations (see Kretzler forthcoming). We thus view reservation archaeology as well-suited both to address the persistent bias within archaeology that limits Native experiences to ancient periods and to enhance the capacity of Tribal Nations to undertake research that is of direct interest to their communities. 453

Ian Kretzler and Sara L. Gonzalez

Today, reservations are critical to Tribal Nations’ pursuit of sovereignty, within the historic preservation industry and beyond. This is a relatively recent development, however, one born from the tireless activism of Native people. In the next section, we situate reservations within a broader historical context. Reservation archaeology, if it is to contribute new insight into the study of US settler colonialism, should begin with a robust understanding of the role reservations played in advancing the state’s attempted eradication of Native peoples.

US settler colonialism and the role of reservations Reservation archaeology, like archaeologies of colonialism generally, is rooted in scholarship on the structure, ideologies, and practices of colonial projects. Of particular relevance is the growing corpus on the study of settler colonialism (e.g., Cavanagh and Veracini 2017; Tuck et al. 2016; Veracini 2011). One key insight forwarded by this research is that settler colonialism and external colonialism—which describes most nineteenth-century European colonial projects in Africa and South Asia—pursue opposing goals. External colonialism aims to fix asymmetrical relations between colonizer and colonized. Perpetuating the subordination of Indigenous populations preserves the flow of wealth and resources to the metropole. Settler colonialism takes the opposite tack. Settler states wield a variety of narrative and ideological tools that seek to naturalize the contingent nature of settler domination as progress, cultural evolution, or even Manifest Destiny. These tools help realize the creation of a “settled” colony, one in which access to Indigenous lands is not only uncontested but, following national narratives, has always been uncontested. The primary obstacle in the pursuit of the settled colony, of course, is Indigenous peoples themselves. Indigenous peoples’ lifeways, relationships with nonhuman relations, and millennia-old connections to land pose existential threats to the settler colony. Thus, for over two centuries the United States has attempted to solve its “Indian Problem” with treaties, military and settler violence, and assimilationist policies designed to achieve the physical or cultural disappearance of Native peoples (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014; Estes 2018; Whaley 2016). Federal action toward Native peoples both arises from and seeks to advance the settler colonial project. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the reservation system emerged as a lynchpin within the United States’ settler colonial structure. To that point, the federal government had relied on removal policies set in place by British authorities. Removal assumed multiple forms between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries but generally followed the same formula. The federal government acquired (or seized) Native land and incentivized (or outright forced) its inhabitants to relocate to “unclaimed” lands far from and generally west of settlers. Newly acquired territory was then made available, via purchase or donation, to settlers, state governments, and land companies. The infamous, lethal removal events of the 1820s and 1830s such as the Trail of Tears garnered unique national attention, but they were mostly expansions of existing policies (Black 2015; Bowes 2016; Littlefield and Parins 2011). The dividing line between Native and settler societies proved anything but permanent, however, as settlers continually pushed west into Native lands. By 1850, waves of settler migration to California, Oregon Territory, and other western territories rendered existing removal strategies untenable. The federal government could no longer maintain even nominal separation between Native peoples and settlers. This prompted a rethinking of federal Indian policy. The eradication of Native peoples from the settler state shifted from a question of international relations and physical expulsion to one of domestic containment—that is, eliminating the qualities that distinguished Native peoples as Native peoples (Wolfe 2011). 454

Unsettling the archaeology of reservations

Reservations were a stage upon which to enact this new approach. Instead of forcing Native peoples west of national boundaries or to a dedicated Indian Territory, they would be confined to comparatively local enclosures. Reservations combined the primary goals of removal—land appropriation and Native displacement—with a politically expedient, ostensibly philanthropic project of cultural uplift. The ultimate goal, however, was the same: the achievement of a settled colony. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Luke Lea (1852, 3) bluntly summarized this dynamic: “civilization and barbarism . . . cannot coexist together.” Furthermore, unlike removal, reservations were conceived as a short-term project. Lea (1850, 2) explained that Native peoples would be confined on reservations only until “their general improvement and good conduct may supersede the necessity of such restrictions.” The idea of “general improvement” guided much of subsequent reservation policy. In the decades that followed, federal officials implemented programs and policies designed to alter or erase Native foodways, spiritual practices, settlement patterns, languages, gender roles, and family structures. Lea’s successor, Charles Mix (1858, 9), claimed that by adhering to this plan of cultural reinstruction, Native peoples would be “induced to make the necessary exertions to support themselves.” His use of “support themselves” is telling. Mix did not refer to basic subsistence but to lifeways that aligned, both ideologically and practically, with those of settlers. To “support themselves,” Native peoples would not only participate in market economies, practice Christianity, and speak English, they would do so as assimilated colonial subjects devoid of indigeneity. They would thus be of little threat to the creation of a settled colony. The goal was disappearance. In the eyes of the settler state, “assimilated Natives do not even exist” (Wolfe 2011, 34). The establishment of the reservation system highlights the flexibility of the settler colonial project. Yet it is important not to conflate adaptability with achievement. For while the legacies of reservations and the assimilationist policies they supported continue to reverberate within contemporary Tribal Nations, it is also true that reservations were from their inception sites of Native contestation, resistance, and refusal. The nature of Native peoples’ responses to reservations has been shaped by intersecting environmental, cultural, and political forces operating at multiple scales. Native communities were never monolithic in their views and engagements with settler colonialism, nor did the strategies they employ remain static.

Reservation-specific histories, or identifying the forms and failings of settler colonialism With this diversity in mind, we turn to the first of the three questions we posed above: how do reservation-specific histories enhance our understanding of the US settler colonial project? We answer this question by examining the implementation and aftermath of one of the federal government’s most notorious reservation policies—the General Allotment (Dawes) Act of 1887—at Grand Ronde. Conceived as an “Indian Magna Carta” (Hoxie 1984, 70), the allotment program segmented reservation land into individually owned plots. To its backers, allotment promised the destruction of Native lifeways and the transformation of Native people into individualistic, yeoman farmers. Like reservations themselves, however, the federal government’s pursuit of Native disappearance was inextricably linked to settler control over Native land (Greenwald 2002). The allotment program included numerous mechanisms for transferring Native land into the hands of settlers (see Hoxie 1984; Kretzler 2017; Ruppell 2008). Between 1887 and 1938, allotment was implemented at 118 reservations. During this period, over 80 million acres, or 60 percent of all Native land, passed out of Native ownership (Carlson 1981, 185, 204; Limerick 1987, 198–199). 455

Ian Kretzler and Sara L. Gonzalez

Historic analyses of allotment tend to highlight the program’s long-term, national effects. Dispossession fragmented reservation land, strained community cohesion, and subverted tribes’ economic development. These legacies cannot be overlooked. Yet to focus exclusively on them overlooks the on-the-ground implementation of the policy and the unique ways reservation communities responded. Allotment’s negative outcomes did not occur instantaneously, nor were they evenly experienced across reservations. Shifting the scale of analysis to individual reservations sheds light on stories of survivance whereby Native people drew on deeply rooted connections to practice, place, and each other to creatively resist and refuse state intrusion, often with undeniable success. The history of the Grand Ronde Reservation is a fitting example. The reservation, which originally encompassed roughly 61,000 acres, is situated on the border between the Coast Range and the Willamette Valley in northwestern Oregon (see Figure 28.1). In the mid-1850s, the federal government forcibly relocated 2,000 people to the reservation. The founding community was linguistically and culturally diverse, consisting of dozens of groups from across western Oregon. Over the next three decades, reservation agents repeatedly called for the reservation to be allotted. In the absence of private property, they reasoned, the Grand Ronde community had little incentive to abandon traditional lifeways. Tethering each (nuclear) family to an allotment would foster sedentism, agricultural production, and eventually the end of government “supervision.” At the same time, agents repeatedly emphasized that their requests came from the Grand Ronde community. The early Grand Ronde community likely associated allotment with selfdetermination. As early as 1862, Agent Rector (1862, 55) reported that the community members “manifested a desire to make the allotment themselves—to say how it should be divided, and to whom certain parcels should be assigned.” Situating land tenure with individual community members promised an end to federal oversight and an opportunity for Grand Ronde to chart its own course. Rector (1862, 55), perhaps aware of these implications, quickly dismissed the idea of community-driven allotment, claiming “this would lead to insurmountable difficulty” and that “they would not be able to agree among themselves.” Agents awarded “long-prayed-for” (Reinhart 1871, 303) allotments to Grand Ronde families in the early 1870s. A decade later, Agent Sinnott (1881, 143) celebrated the policy, claiming that “all, or nearly all, [are] living upon their individual lands . . . and are industriously working their small farms.” The problem, which was not lost on the Grand Ronde community, was that these allotments were informal, agent-awarded parcels and did not confer title. Agent McClane (1888, 204) admitted as much: “They know the title is not good.” Following the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887, Grand Ronde was among the first group of reservations to be selected for the program. Allotting agents arrived on the reservation in June 1889. By year’s end, the reservation had been divided into 269 allotments totaling 33,000 acres. Whether these allotments aligned with those awarded in the 1870s is unknown. However, it is clear the Grand Ronde community played a key role in determining the location and extent of each parcel. Pursuant to guidelines outlined by the Secretary of the Interior, “selections of allotments shall be made by Indians . . . [and] shall embrace the improvements made thereon by the respective Indians” (Atkins 1887, iv). This effectively allowed the Grand Ronde community to merge existing settlement and economic systems with a settler-recognized form of land tenure. Grand Ronde was not alone in using this provision for their benefit (see Lewis 1994; Moore 1980; Tonkovich 2012). As part of our work with historic preservation staff on the Grand Ronde Land Tenure Project (Kretzler 2017), analysis of allotment cards and associated land records revealed a dedicated effort by the community to maintain relationships between different western Oregon groups. In the 456

Unsettling the archaeology of reservations

reservation’s early years, the distribution of early settlements, which were likely composed of groups of extended families, mirrored that of pre-reservation Oregon. Families with ancestral ties to northwestern Oregon lived north of those with ties to southwestern Oregon and west of those with ties to the eastern Willamette Valley and foothills of the Cascades. This settlement pattern made manifest the networks of trade, cultural exchange, marriage, and politics that had shaped western Oregon lifeways for millennia. Removal strained but did not sever these bonds. Allotment strengthened rather than undermined this settlement pattern. Drawing on cultural logics about where and near whom it was appropriate to live, allottees selected parcels near extended family members and historical neighbors, creating a patchwork of culturally salient allotment clusters. The microcosm of western Oregon established by the early reservation community remained. Even as agents celebrated the coming of the federal government’s latest assimilationist policy, the allotment of the reservation can be read as the culmination of a decades-long lobbying effort to supplant federal paternalism with community self-determination. The Grand Ronde community could not have foreseen that allotment would lead to widespread dispossession. During the first half of the twentieth century, a combination of legal machinations conspired to wrest land from individual allottees. In 1901, 40 percent of the reservation, roughly 26,000 acres, was declared “surplus” and sold to settlers. Much of it was prime timberland that, while not suitable for small-scale farming, would have been a valuable source of economic development for the Grand Ronde community. Allotments were increasingly exposed to market forces as a result of forced fee patenting and federal competency commissions whereby allottees received fee simple title without their knowledge or despite their protests. Given the lack of economic opportunity at Grand Ronde, once allottees received fee simple title, they were often left with little choice but to sell their land. By the 1950s, less than 1 percent of the reservation remained held in trust by individual allottees (Kretzler 2017). The story of allotment at Grand Ronde reminds us that reservations were (and are) spaces of cultural contestation. The actions taken by the Grand Ronde community to establish a culturally salient settlement system were among its first declarations that the reservation, despite its assimilationist underpinnings and the challenges allotment would later bring, was to be a distinctly Native space. This act of survivance remains foundational to the contemporary Tribal Nation, for which the reservation continues to be a place of cultural support, education, and creativity. Research on the history of allotment at Grand Ronde speaks to the disjunctures between the federal government’s assimilationist aspirations and Native peoples’ culturally informed forms of resistance and refusal. In our work with the Grand Ronde HPO, this work also served as a precursor to archaeological investigation. We worked with HPO staff to identify locations at which archaeological investigation could contribute to remembering community histories related to allotment and the period of dispossession that followed. As we discuss in the next section, these conversations focused on two locations: the Grand Ronde Agency School and the Uyxat Powwow Grounds.

Remembering reservation survivance through archaeology Vizenor (2008, 1) presents acts of survivance as continuations of Native stories, as channels through which Native presence is brought into the world. We understand the archaeological record as temporally durable aspects of these stories. At Grand Ronde, we have approached reservation archaeology as a process for reawakening stories of survivance so that they may be remembered, retold, and reexperienced by community members. As archaeologists who are not tribally enrolled nor affiliated with the Grand Ronde community, our role in this process 457

Ian Kretzler and Sara L. Gonzalez

is not to narrative these stories, but to use archaeology as a form of active listening: to hear and reflect on the stories that have already been told by the Grand Ronde community (Archibald 2008; Martínez-Falquina 2009; Wilson 2008). In positioning ourselves as listeners, we recognize that stories of survivance, at Grand Ronde and among other Indigenous communities, exist independently of archaeologists. Framed in this way, the practice of reservation archaeology may enable Tribal Nations to enhance existing bodies of historical knowledge and, by engaging directly with the material manifestations of past survivance stories, access memories that may have lain dormant or been intentionally silenced as a result of settler colonial violence (Smith 2012, 147). With these considerations in mind, we have worked with the Grand Ronde HPO to define an approach to remembering Grand Ronde survivance that is rooted in community storytelling and reinscribes the sovereignty of the Tribal Nation over its heritage. Rather than seeing this shift in power dynamics as stripping archaeologists of their authority to interpret the archaeological record, we maintain that such transfers of authority reframe the relations of archaeology to acknowledge the sovereign status of US Tribal Nations and Canadian First Nations (Colwell 2016, 116–117; ColwellChanthaphonh et al. 2010, 232). Furthermore, the value of such Indigenous and community-based approaches to reservation archaeology and the study of survivance is that they create an epistemically diverse and holistic understanding of settler colonialism as lived and experienced by communities such as Grand Ronde. In this section, we review how we have integrated archaeological knowledge with tribal histories and knowledge to remember Grand Ronde survivance. At Grand Ronde, remembering survivance through archaeology involves identifying material details relating to how the nation’s multiple communities—Umpqua, Molalla, Rogue River, Kalapuya, and Shasta people—formed a distinctly Grand Ronde sense of place and identity following their forced removal to the Grand Ronde Reservation. In partnership with the Grand Ronde HPO, we undertook archaeological research at the Grand Ronde Agency School and Uyxat Powwow Grounds through Field Methods in Indigenous Archaeology (FMIA), which we developed with HPO staff to provide training for undergraduate and graduate students in community-based research methods and tribal historic preservation. Research conducted through FMIA is designed to build the capacity of the tribe to care for and protect historic places on the reservation. This includes ensuring that tribal and non-tribal students understand what it means to work with and for a Tribal Nation, as well as to carry out research that the HPO deems critical to its mission.

The Grand Ronde Agency School The Grand Ronde Agency School—one of at least five that operated on the reservation—was operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs from approximately the 1890s until Grand Ronde’s termination in 1954 (see Dewan 2021 for a broader discussion of identifying history of schools on the reservation). The school functioned as a day and boarding school. Children were instructed in a variety of occupations including blacksmithing, sewing, farming, and housekeeping, which reflected the school’s underlying mission to civilize Native students. Even so, the Agency School is remembered fondly by community members. At various points in its history, including its later years, tribal members served as educators and administrators. This experience stands in contrast to those associated with other reservation schools and Chemawa Indian School, the regional boarding school in Salem, which Grand Ronde children also attended (Adams 1995; Lomawaima and McCarty 2006; Lomawaima et al. 2000; Parkhurst 2014; Trafzer et al. 2006). For the Grand Ronde community, archaeological research at the Agency School was an opportunity to remember what it meant to grow up in Grand Ronde. In choosing to begin 458

Unsettling the archaeology of reservations

FMIA’s work at the Agency School, we and the HPO sought to tell a counter-story offering a different understanding of schooling and education, one that acknowledges the continuing importance of education in community today as well as in the past. Considering that FMIA was planned as a long-term partnership, we also felt that it was important that our work to remember Grand Ronde survivance begin in a “good way” by remembering stories of pride and belonging rather than perpetuating the tendency for outsiders to encourage Indigenous peoples to “only speak their pain” (hooks 2015, 152). To date, FMIA has completed four seasons of fieldwork at the Agency School. Investigations identified the historic footprint of the schoolhouse, a well, and a privy. Analysis of belongings (the HPO’s preferred term for artifacts; see Kretzler forthcoming) and privy soils recovered through archaeological investigations is still ongoing. However, FMIA regularly presents preliminary results to community. This reporting takes the form of one-on-one discussions with tribal elders as well as formal workshops and symposia during Grand Ronde’s annual History and Culture Summit where we (Ian and Sara) share our ongoing work alongside our graduate and undergraduate project collaborators. In these spaces, belongings from the privy such as still-sharp chalk and pencils, ruby-red metal hair barrettes designed to resemble clusters of rhinestones, canning jars, wads and wrappers of Beemans chewing gum, and the seeds from ɫiʔil-ulali1 (blackberries; Rubus sp.), shat-ulali (huckleberries; Vaccinium sp.), and amut (strawberries; Fragaria sp.) have prompted remembering by elders and community members about their childhoods at Grand Ronde (Figure 28.2). We have been struck by the willingness of tribal members to work with FMIA, from sharing their stories, to visiting the project on-site, to directly participating in the training

Figure 28.2 Grand Ronde Agency School material belongings. From left to right: faceted metal hair barrette, Beemans chewing gum wrapper, still-sharp pencils. Bottom: child-sized scissors. Source: Photos from the authors.

459

Ian Kretzler and Sara L. Gonzalez

program. That these engagements have occurred at such an early stage in FMIA’s partnership with Grand Ronde suggests that the relationships we have cultivated through our work in community has made a positive impact. While this may be true, we believe it is ultimately the fact that FMIA does archaeology in a Grand Ronde way that facilitates the participation and involvement of community members. FMIA incorporates tribal protocols for coming to know the sacred into all work and employs a low-impact archaeological methodology that is designed to minimize physical disturbance to ancestral sites and belongings and, therefore, minimize the harm done to community in practicing archaeology (see Gonzalez et al. 2018). This methodology creates a culturally appropriate, respectful process for remembering Grand Ronde history that directly addresses concerns held in community about the cultural appropriateness of conducting archaeology. More so than the belongings themselves eliciting memories, it is this community-based and Grand Ronde approach to archaeology that has generated a desire to collectively remember what living in community at Grand Ronde has meant, in the past, present, and future. It is important to note that remembering is often difficult. Even though research at the Agency School allowed us to tell a story that is not rooted exclusively in trauma or pain, the stories that are being reawakened in community are not separate from more difficult experiences. The current generation of elders were children when Grand Ronde was terminated, and many of their families resettled onto other reservations or in nearby cities until the Tribal Nation was restored in 1983. If reservation archaeology is to be successful, the approaches archaeologists employ must be aware of the wider impacts such storytelling has in community.

The Uyxat Powwow Grounds Archaeological research at the Uyxat Powwow Grounds entailed remembering more difficult stories for the Grand Ronde community involving their removal to the reservation and postallotment dispossession. It was also an opportunity to lend new detail to a place that, in recent years, has been a site of community celebration, ceremony, and connection. The Chinuk Wawa word “uyxat” translates as trail or path, and to spend time at the powwow grounds is to walk through nearly 170 years of tribal history. The 25-acre powwow grounds are situated between Cosper Creek and the eastern boundary of the original reservation. In 1856, the federal government established Fort Yamhill a quarter mile to the southeast. Over the next ten years, the fort guarded the reservation’s border, and military personnel imprisoned those who attempted to leave Grand Ronde without permission. Molalla, Umpqua, and other groups established settlements and early farming operations below the fort on both sides of the creek. These lands were later selected by Chinook and Molalla individuals during the allotment of the reservation as part of the community’s effort to create clusters owned by extended families and historical neighbors. Over the next three decades, however, the powwow grounds, like nearly all of the reservation, passed out of tribal ownership. Dispossession is not necessarily evidence of absence, however, as many Grand Ronde families continued to live on their allotments under various formal and informal arrangements with settler landowners. The tribe reacquired parcels along Cosper Creek in the early 2000s. In the years since, the grounds have become an epicenter of community life. Today, they feature the Grand Ronde plank house Achaf-Hammi, a dance arbor for powwows and other events, and ample space for camping and outdoor activities. On this landscape, the Grand Ronde community has weathered removal, military surveillance, and participation in assimilationist programs; they have also established settlements and land-use strategies that privileged familial and cultural ties and transformed a landscape of dispossession into one of belonging. 460

Unsettling the archaeology of reservations

Archaeological research conducted by FMIA sought to deepen the rich story of survivance associated with the powwow grounds (Kretzler 2019). Field investigation focused on identifying material traces of Grand Ronde presence dating to the reservation’s initial decades and/or the post-allotment period. This work sought to help address conspicuous absences in the reservation’s archival record. In their annual reports, agents offered detailed assessments about various aspects of Grand Ronde daily life. Yet they wrote primarily about highly visible spaces such as classrooms, farms, and agency offices. Grand Ronde families would have been cognizant of the public nature of these activities and may have acted, intentionally or not, in ways agents would have approved. These reports may thus be doubly filtered, first by agents’ attempts to present the reservation as a model for assimilation and second by the strategic actions of community members. Through archaeological investigation, FMIA sought to remember stories of Grand Ronde’s “hidden transcript” (Scott 1990) enacted within reservation homes and away from the prying eyes of federal overseers. Relying on the same low-impact methodology employed at the Grand Ronde Agency School, FMIA unearthed a variety of everyday belongings, including ironstone flatware, wire nails, glass beads, obsidian and chert debitage, vessel glass (including two pieces with obvious retouch), and structural remains (Figure 28.3). Most date to the post-allotment period, roughly 1890 through 1920. The macrobotanical assemblage contained charred remains of limulo-saplil (tarweed; Madia sativa), k’anawi (oak acorns; Quercus garryana), hayash-təmtəm stik (blue elderberry; Sambucus caerulea), and other important dietary and medicinal plants. Many of these plants, as well as lithic raw material and mass-produced ceramics and metal implements, were likely acquired via journeys off-reservation. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

Figure 28.3 Belongings from the Uyxat Powwow Grounds. From left: plastic friendship bracelet, historic glass beads, modern plastic and glass beads, retouched solarized amethyst glass. Bottom: The Uxyat Powwow Grounds. Source: Photos from the authors.

461

Ian Kretzler and Sara L. Gonzalez

Grand Ronde families left the reservation during the summer months to secure employment, strengthen relationships with ancestral places and landscapes, and visit other Native communities (Schrock and Zenk 2017, 86–98, 136–140). As western Oregon Native peoples had done for millennia, summer was a time of travel, harvest, and connection. The imposition of settler colonialism had altered but not terminated this millennia-old seasonal round (Lewis 2009, 124). Of course, the story of enduring connection represented by the belongings along Cosper Creek does not end in the 1920s. During archaeological investigation, FMIA also identified belongings that speak to the Grand Ronde community’s contemporary and ongoing relationship with the powwow grounds. Finds such as tent stakes, a plastic friendship bracelet, and modern glass and plastic beads possibly associated with powwow regalia represent a new chapter in Grand Ronde’s story of survivance at the powwow grounds (see Figure 28.3). This story remains highly visible within community. In their opening remarks at powwows and other community gatherings, cultural and political leaders often remark that the grounds are a place for looking back and looking forward. The landscape is a testament to the tribe’s refusal of the federal government’s pursuit of a settled colony. The actions of the historical Grand Ronde community laid the foundation for the creation of the Uyxat Powwow Grounds, just as today’s community lays the foundation for tribal futures characterized by pride, belonging, and innovation.

Capacity building To this point, our discussion has focused on the potential of reservation archaeology for advancing scholars’ and Native peoples’ understanding of settler colonialism and historical reservation communities. Yet, as we have learned from our colleagues at Grand Ronde, the implementation and results of archaeological research extend far beyond simple historical curiosity. They link contemporary Native communities with stories—of struggle, perseverance, and success—that shaped the lives and experiences of past generations. Archaeological research situates communities, scholars, and students within new webs of relationship between the places, belongings, and practices of history (Wilson 2008). This expands the well of available knowledge with which to address contemporary challenges and fosters vibrant tribal futures. We have presented this process of relationship formation as a form of capacity building and advocated that it be a pillar of reservation archaeology (Gonzalez and Edwards 2020; Gonzalez et al. 2018). Many Native communities, Grand Ronde included, associate archaeology with extraction: the export of Native bodies, belongings, and knowledge from their ancestral homelands. Orienting archaeological research goals around community-identified capacity building goals, however, transforms the relations of research and ensures that such work expressly meets the specific needs of Indigenous communities and nations (see also Atalay 2012). Capacity building transcends “broader impacts” or other forms of scholarly engagement with interested stakeholders. Rather, it is an effort to fulfill Article 11 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which includes the “right to maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestations of their cultures, such as archaeological and historical sites” (United Nations 2007, 11). Native peoples have always maintained relationships with historically meaningful places and practices. The goal of capacity building in relation to archaeology is not to transform Native peoples into archaeologists but instead to create pathways for directing alternative ways of knowing and protecting the past within archaeology and historic preservation. If Tribal Nations possess a right to guide and/ or oversee archaeological research on their ancestral lands and belongings, we believe capacity building represents one way in which non-Indigenous archaeologists may integrate this right into their research. 462

Unsettling the archaeology of reservations

As with other aspects of Indigenous and collaborative archaeologies, what constitutes capacity building will vary by project and Tribal Nation and may range from the individual to the institutional. In the case of our work with Grand Ronde and through FMIA, all of our primary research goals were designed in response to specific capacity building challenges outlined by the tribe. These included: development of a low-impact archaeological methodology that integrated tribal values and cultural protocols; use of archaeological research to remember stories of survivance on the reservation; and creation of a training program for undergraduate and graduate students in Indigenous archaeology and tribal historic preservation. Though our emphasis in this chapter centers on the potential of archaeology to contribute to Indigenous communities, we also note that capacity building is a two-way street. Too often archaeologists view Tribal Nations as working at a deficit, without also considering archaeology’s own lack of capacity in caring for and protecting Indigenous heritage. For example, few undergraduate or graduate archaeology programs offer opportunities for archaeologists-in-training to work with and for an Indigenous community, even though consultation and collaboration with Tribal and First Nations constitutes a significant aspect of heritage management in the United States and Canada. FMIA’s field school is explicitly designed to ensure that the next generation of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous archaeologists hold the necessary experience to both engage with and be attentive to the specific heritage- and archaeology-related needs of Indigenous communities. Similarly, in devising alternative strategies for coming to work with Grand Ronde belongings that acknowledge the need to limit disturbance to them and, importantly, the tribal community, we have witnessed how collaborative thinking with the HPO has improved our collective ability to preserve these resources for future generations (Gonzalez et al. 2018). These lessons highlight what is to be gained by transforming the relations of practice within archaeology to be inclusive of Indigenous perspectives and respectful of Indigenous sovereignty.

Conclusion Reservation archaeology is an example of what Smith (2012, 146–147) calls an Indigenous project of remembering and celebration. Oral and documentary Indigenous histories, particularly those surrounding traumatic events such as removal and schooling, often contain silences born out of state indifference and community attempts to place these experiences in the past. Yet, as Smith (2012, 147) reminds us, remembering can be a first step in a process of healing and transformation. Archaeology, we believe, has a role to play in addressing the silences in reservation histories when such work is directed by Tribal Nations. Remembering may also reawaken stories of celebration. The history of the Grand Ronde Reservation, as we have discussed, is a story not only of community resistance and survival but of community success in fashioning a new sense of belonging, home, and connection in a place designed to advance the settler colonial project. The reawakening of reservation survivance stories reconfigures the position of archaeologists within the research process. Rather than assuming the role of storytellers, we approach reservation archaeology as active listeners who recognize that Native communities’ stories exist without our intervention. Doing so works to challenge the relations of knowledge production in archaeology, which have traditionally excluded Indigenous people from telling their histories. As Borck (2018, 230) contends, “how researchers construct history serves to create the world in which contemporary people live.” This is a salient lesson for archaeologists studying settler colonialism: our work is not divorceable from settler colonial relations. The historical and in some cases ongoing uses of archaeology to reproduce terminal narratives of Native disappearance call us to be mindful of the political and ethical dimensions of archaeological approaches 463

Ian Kretzler and Sara L. Gonzalez

to colonialism. We join Borck (2018) in calling for the creation of future histories that speak to the political dimensions of our research and contest archaeologies that would reproduce settler colonial relations in our practice. In our attempt to broaden what it means to undertake an archaeology of colonialism by extending our focus into nineteenth and twentieth century reservation lifeways, we must be cautious of establishing new temporal divisions that, intentionally or not, deem certain Native experiences as worthy of scholarly import. As we conceptualize it, reservation archaeology is not simply a temporal or spatial project. Rather, it involves using community-based research with Tribal Nations to unsettle settler colonialism. This includes tracing Native communities’ local, on-the-ground engagements with settler policies across time and space, as well as interrogating the processes through which archaeology produces Native histories. Such research has the potential to transform historical understandings of settler colonialism and, more importantly, address the ongoing legacies of colonialism and current needs of Tribal Nations.

Note 1 Chinuk Wawa translations from Chinuk Wawa Dictionary Project 2012.

References cited Adams, David Wallace. 1995. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Archibald, Jo-ann. 2008. Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit. Vancouver: UBC Press. Atalay, Sonya. 2006. “No Sense of the Struggle: Creating a Context for Survivance at the NMAI.” American Indian Quarterly 30 (3–4): 597–618. Atalay, Sonya. 2012. Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Atkins, J. D. C. 1887. “Department of the Interior, Office of Indian Affairs, Washington, September 21, 1887.” In Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1887, III–LXXXIII. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Backhouse, Paul N., Brent R. Weisman, and Mary B. Rosebrough, eds. 2017. We Come for Good: Archaeology and Tribal Historic Preservation at the Seminole Tribe of Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Beaudoin, Matthew A. 2017. “A Tale of Two Settlements: Consumption and the Historical Archaeology of Natives and Newcomers in the 19th-Century Great Lakes Region.” In Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology, edited by Craig N. Cipolla, 44–58. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Biolsi, Thomas. 2018. Power and Progress on the Prairie: Governing People on Rosebud Reservation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Black, Jason Edward. 2015. American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Borck, Lewis. 2018. “Constructing the Future History: Prefiguration as Historical Epistemology and the Chronopolitics of Archaeology.” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5 (2): 213–302. Bowes, John P. 2016. Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Carlson, Leonard A. 1981. Indians, Bureaucrats, and Land: The Dawes Act and the Decline of Indian Farming. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Cavanagh, Edward, and Lorenzo Veracini, eds. 2017. The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism. New York: Routledge. Chinuk Wawa Dictionary Project. 2012. Chinuk Wawa: Kakwa Nsayka Ulman-tilixam ɬaska Munk-kəmtəks Nsayka/As Our Elders Teach Us to Speak It. Grand Ronde, OR: The Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon.

464

Unsettling the archaeology of reservations Cipolla, Craig N., and James Quinn. 2016. “Field School Archaeology the Mohegan Way: Reflections on Twenty Years of Community-Based Research and Teaching.” Journal of Community Archaeology & Heritage 3 (2): 118–134. Colwell, Chip. 2016. “Collaborative Archaeologies and Descendant Communities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45: 113–127. Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip, T. J. Ferguson, Dorothy Lippert, Randall H. McGuire, George P. Nicholas, Joe E. Watkins, and Larry J. Zimmerman. 2010. “The Premise and Promise of Indigenous Archaeology.” American Antiquity 75 (2): 228–238. Dewan, Eve. 2021. “Frontier Lessons: An Archaeology of Living and Learning in the Grand Ronde Tribal Community.” PhD Dissertation, Brown University. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. 2014. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press. Edwards, Briece, and Eirik Thorsgard. 2012. “‘Tell Me What It Isn’t’: A Position Paper on Cultural Connection to Place.” Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Tribal Historic Preservation Office. Copies available upon request. Estes, Nick. 2018. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. London: Verso. Gonzalez, Sara L. 2016. “Indigenous Values and Methods in Archaeological Practice: Low-Impact Archaeology through the Kashaya Pomo Interpretive Trail Project.” American Antiquity 81 (3): 533–549. Gonzalez, Sara L., and Briece Edwards. 2020. “The Intersection of Indigenous Thought and Archaeological Practice: The Field Methods in Indigenous Archaeology Field School.” Journal of Community Archaeology & Heritage 7 (3): 1–16. Gonzalez, Sara L., Ian Kretzler, and Briece Edwards. 2018. “Imagining Indigenous & Archaeological Futures: Building Capacity with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.” Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 14 (1): 85–114. Greenwald, Emily. 2002. Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, Jicarilla Apaches, and the Dawes Act. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Harjo, Suzan Shown, ed. 2014. Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Harrelson, David, and Briece Edwards. 2012. “National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Grand Ronde Rail Depot.” www.nps.gov/nr/feature/weekly_features/2012/OR_12001092.pdf. Accessed December 9, 2020. Harrison, Rodney. 2014. “Shared Histories: Rethinking ‘Colonized’ and ‘Colonizer’ in the Archaeology of Colonialism.” In Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology, edited by Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael V. Wilcox, 37–56. Oxford: Oxford University Press. hooks, bell. 2015[1990]. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge. Hoxie, Frederick E. 1984. A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hunn, Eugene S., E. Thomas Morning Owl, Phillip E. Cash Cash, and Jennifer Karson Engum, eds. 2015. Čáw Pawá Láakni—They Are Not Forgotten: Sahaptian Place Names Atlas of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla. Pendleton, OR: Tamástslike Cultural Institute. King, Thomas F. 2003. Places that Count: Traditional Cultural Properties in Cultural Resource Management. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Kretzler, Ian. 2017. “Archives of Native Presence: Land Tenure Research on the Grand Ronde Reservation.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 41 (4): 45–70. Kretzler, Ian. 2019. “An Archaeology of Survivance on the Grand Ronde Reservation: Telling Stories of Enduring Native Presence.” PhD Dissertation, University of Washington. Kretzler, Ian. Forthcoming. “‘I Can Tell It Always’: Confronting Expectations of Native Disappearance Through Collaborative Research.” In Archaeologies of Indigenous Presence, edited by Tsim D. Schneider and Lee M. Panich. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Lea, Luke. 1850. “Department of the Interior, Office of Indian Affairs, November 27, 1850.” In Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs Transmitted with the Message of the President at the Opening of the Second Session of the Thirty-Second Congress, 1850, 3–14. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Lea, Luke. 1852. “Department of the Interior, Office of Indian Affairs, November 30, 1852.” In Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs at the Opening of the Second Session of the Thirty-Second Congress, 1852, 3–12. Washington, DC: Robert Armstrong, Printer. Lewis, David G. 2009. “Termination of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon: Politics, Community, Identity.” PhD Dissertation, University of Oregon.

465

Ian Kretzler and Sara L. Gonzalez Lewis, David G. 2014. “Four Deaths: The Near Destruction of Western Oregon Tribes and Native Lifeways, Removal to the Reservation, and Erasure from History.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 115 (3): 414–437. Lewis, David R. 1994. Neither Wolf nor Dog: American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liebmann, Matthew J. 2008. “Introduction: The Intersections of Archaeology and Postcolonial Studies.” In Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, edited by Matthew Liebmann and Uzma Z. Rizvi, 1–20. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Lightfoot, Kent G., and Sara L. Gonzalez. 2018. “The Study of Sustained Colonialism: An Example from the Kashaya Pomo Homeland in Northern California.” American Antiquity 83 (3): 427–443. Limerick, Patricia Nelson. 1987. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Littlefield, Daniel F., and James W. Parins, eds. 2011. Encyclopedia of American Indian Removal, Vol 1. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood. Lomawaima, Tsianina K., Brenda Child, and Margaret Archuleta. 2000. Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1879–2000. Phoenix: Heard Museum. Lomawaima, Tsianina K., and Teresa L. McCarty. 2006. “To Remain an Indian”: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University. Marek-Martinez, Ora. 2016. “Archaeology for, by, and with the Navajo People: The Nihookaa Dine’e Bila’ Ashdla’ii Way.” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Martinez, Desireé, and Wendy Teeter. 2015. “Ho’eexokre ‘eyookuuka’ro ‘We’re Working with Each Other’: The Pimu Catalina Island Project.” SAA Archaeological Record 15 (1): 25–29. Martínez-Falquina, Silvia. 2009. “The(st)ories of Ceremonial Relation: Native Narratives and the Ethics of Reading.” In Stories through Theories/Theories through Stories: North American Indian Writing, Storytelling, and Critique, edited by Gordon D. Henry Jr., Nieves Pascual Soler, and Silivia Martínez-Falquina, 191–208. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. McClanahan, Angela. 2007. “The Cult of Community: Defining the ‘Local’ in Public Archaeology and Heritage Discourse.” In Whose Past, Which Future? Treatments of the Past at the Start of the 21st Century, edited by Sven Grabow, Daniel Hull, and Emma Waterton, 51–57. London: Archaeo Press. McClane, J. B. 1888. “Grand Ronde Agency, Oregon, August 17, 1888.” In Fifty-Seventh Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior, 1888, 203–206. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Mix, Charles E. 1858. “Department of the Interior, Office of Indian Affairs, November 6, 1858.” In Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs Accompanying the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1858, 5–16. Washington, DC: Wm. A. Harris, Printer. Moore, John H. 1980. “Aboriginal Indian Residence Patterns in Census and Allotments.” Science 207 (4427): 201–202. Panich, Lee M. 2013. “Archaeologies of Persistence: Reconsidering the Legacies of Colonialism in Native North America.” American Antiquity 78 (1): 105–122. Panich, Lee M., GeorgeAnn DeAntoni, and Tsim D. Schneider. 2021. “‘By the Aid of His Indians’: Native Negotiations of Settler Colonialism in Marin County, California, 1840–70.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 25: 92–115. Parkhurst, Melissa. 2014. To Win the Indian Heart: Music at Chemawa Indian School. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press. Pyburn, Anne K. 2011. “Engaged Archaeology: Whose Community? Which Public?” In New Perspectives in Global Public Archaeology, edited by K. Okamura and Akira Matsuda, 29–41. New York: Springer. Raibmon, Paige. 2008. “Unmaking Native Space: A Genealogy of Indian Policy, Settler Practice, and the Microtechniques of Dispossession.” In The Power of Promises: Rethinking Indian Treaties in the Pacific Northwest, edited by Alexandra Harmon, 56–86. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Rector, William H. 1862. “Office Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Salem, Oregon, September 2, 1862.” In Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1862, 253–264. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Reinhart, S. D. 1871. “Office Superintendent Indian Affairs, Salem, Oregon, October 25, 1871.” In Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1871, 297–309. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Rogers, Daniel J. 2005. “Archaeology and the Interpretation of Colonial Encounters.” In The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Gil J. Stein, 331–354. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

466

Unsettling the archaeology of reservations Ruppell, Kristin T. 2008. Unearthing Indian Land: Living with the Legacies of Allotment. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Schrock, Jedd, and Henry Zenk, eds. 2017. My Life, by Louis Kenoyer: Reminiscences of a Grand Ronde Reservation Childhood. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Silliman, Stephen W. 2005. “Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America.” American Antiquity 70 (1): 55–74. Silliman, Stephen W. 2008. “Collaborative Indigenous Archaeology: Troweling at the Edge, Eyeing the Center.” In Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge: Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology, edited by Stephen W. Silliman, 1–21. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Silliman, Stephen W. 2010. “Indigenous Traces in Colonial Spaces: Archaeologies of Ambiguity, Origin, and Practice.” Journal of Social Archaeology 10 (1): 28–58. Simpson, Audra. 2017. “The Ruse of Consent and the Anatomy of ‘Refusal’: Cases from Indigenous North America and Australia.” Postcolonial Studies 20 (1): 18–33. Sinnott, P. B. 1881. “Grand Ronde Agency, Oregon, August 15, 1881.” In Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1881, 142–143. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. London: Zed Books. Stapp, Darby C., and Michael S. Burney. 2002. Tribal Cultural Resource Management: The Full Circle to Stewardship. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Sunseri, Jun U. 2017. Situational Identities Along the Raiding Frontier of Colonial New Mexico. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Surface-Evans, Sarah L. 2016. “A Landscape of Assimilation and Resistance: The Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 20 (3): 574–588. Tonkovich, Nicole. 2012. The Allotment Plot: Alice C. Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Trafzer, Clifford E., Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc. 2006. Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Tuck, Eve, Marcian McKenzie, and Kate McCoy. 2016. “Land Education: Indigenous, Post-Colonial, and Decolonizing Perspectives on Place and Environmental Education Research.” Environmental Education Research 20 (1): 1–23. United Nations. 2007. “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” www.un.org/development/ desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_E_web.pdf. Accessed December 13, 2020. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2011. “Introducing Settler Colonial Studies.” Settler Colonial Studies 1 (1): 1–12. Vizenor, Gerald. 1994. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Vizenor, Gerald. 2008. “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice.” In Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor, 1–24. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Vizenor, Gerald. 2009. Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Whaley, Gray H. 2016. “American Folk Imperialism and Native Genocide in Southwest Oregon, 1851– 1859.” In Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, edited by Andrew Wolloford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton, 131–148. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wilcox, Michael V. 2009. The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wilkinson, Charles. 2010. The People Are Dancing Again: The History of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Wilson, Shawn. 2008. Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing. Wolfe, Patrick. 1999. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. New York: Cassell. Wolfe, Patrick. 2011. “After the Frontier: Separation and Absorption in US Indian Policy.” Settler Colonial Studies 1 (1): 13–51.

467

29 SURVIVANCE STORYTELLING IN ARCHAEOLOGY Nathan P. Acebo

Introduction Indigenous archaeology engages with contemporary Indigenous communities as active collaborators across most, if not all, phases of research and, more recently, incorporates Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and other cultural values outside the immediate community of collaborators (Atalay 2006a, 2012; Bruchac et al. 2016; Colwell 2016; Nicholas 2008). These “imported” Indigenous forms of knowledge are drawn from the work of Indigenous activists, artists, journalists, and scholars from critical ethnic studies on topics like Indigenous futurity (e.g., Dillon 2012; Rifkin 2017) or refusal (McAnany 2020; Nelson 2019, 2020; Simpson 2010, 2017). Among these, Gerald Vizenor’s (White Earth Nation) concept of Indigenous survivance has become increasingly popular as an interpretive perspective for the material culture of Indigenous-colonial interactions and a thematic direction for Indigenous heritage management programs. The growing use of survivance in archaeology should be applauded given the concept’s capacity to engender emancipatory histories and thus new imaginings of Indigenous futures through stories of the ancestors (i.e., a production of futurity). Even so, archaeologists take some interpretive liberties with Vizenor’s concept separate from its literary roots, which problematically flattens survivance’s contextual specificity and, in the worst scenarios, potentially threatens an appropriation of an Indigenous epistemology. In this chapter, I provide a brief summary of Vizenor’s definition of survivance and a brief overview of how archaeology and related fields apply said concept, after which, I present a case study of archaeological survivance storytelling—the creative production of survivance through survivance-centered narratives—that was indebted to the epistemic influence and imagination of collaborators during my research partnership with Tongva, Acjachemen, and Payómkawichum peoples of the Los Angeles (LA) Basin in California. Through this example and my synopsis of Vizenor’s work, I demonstrate how archaeology can work in service of Indigenous storytelling and resist appropriating of Indigenous epistemologies.

Thinking through Vizenor: socio-acupuncture, simulations, and survivance Before surveying archaeological intersections with survivance storytelling, it is necessary to define survivance within its generative theoretical milieu. This is an immensely challenging task, 468

Survivance storytelling in archaeology

given the complexity, depth, and breadth of Vizenor’s work, and in my opinion has been accomplished successfully and succinctly elsewhere by scholars beyond anthropology (e.g., Däwes and Hauke 2017, 2017; Madsen 2009; Madsen and Lee 2010; Lee 2000; Vizenor 1994b; in archaeology, see Kretzler 2019). Still, it is crucial to provide an overview here to properly foreground survivance’s origins in the experiences of North American Indigenous peoples and to avoid a casual reduction to the notion that “survival + resistance = survivance.” This portmanteau definition of survivance is fitting in some respects and popular in archaeological studies concerned with survivance. Yet beyond the term’s eighteenth-century francophone definition or Derrida’s (see 2009, 130–130) concept, a deeper meditation on Vizenor’s writings clarifies that survivance is a healing condition that (1) reveals real conditions of Indigenous existence and (2) enables decolonizing Indigenous storytelling. Different conditions of survivance appear and evolve throughout Vizenor’s career as a journalist, historian, poet, and cultural critic, but the concept is fundamentally rooted in the contexts of his early scholarship (Madsen 2009, 20–45; Vizenor and Lee 2000). Vizenor’s early works are associated with the body of literature popularly termed the “Native American Renaissance” (Lincoln 1982), which reconsidered the work of early Indigenous writers while emphasizing the repossession and renewed creation of Indigenous heritage across different mediums (Lundquist 2004, 46–48; Velie 1995). Vizenor’s writings on indigeneity and western-colonial society have been categorized as works of postmodernism, given his appreciation of continental critical theorists like Lyotard (e.g., postmodernism as an experiential condition), Baudrillard (e.g., simulation and simulacrum), Barthes (e.g., the striptease), and Derrida (e.g., the trace) among others (Jahner 1985; Velie 1982). However, Vizenor is accurately understood as trickily reshaping continental social theory through Indigenous epistemologies to foster what he calls “socio-acupuncture,” a healing/liberating process that disrupts harmful, artificial representations/stereotypes of Indigenous peoples propagated by the policies and everyday practices of colonial-western society termed “manifest manners” (Vizenor and Lee 2000, 82, 83). The false colonial representation, or more accurately, hegemonic simulation of indigeneity emerging from and partially sustaining colonial manifest manners is the racialized identifier of the “indian” (always lower case in Vizenor’s writing; e.g., Vizenor 1994a, 15–17). Vizenor’s articulation of the indian is a correction and expansion on Baudrillard’s (1994) writings on postmodern representational discourses. For Baudrillard, the simulation is a form of representation generated by modeling/mapping practices of different representational discourses like ethnology, cinematography, or judiciary systems that partially or completely replaces a “real” entity (e.g., actual Indigenous individuals, traditions, or communities) with the creation of a “hyper-real” object (i.e., the pan-ethnic, racial category of the indian). During the postindustrial era, Baudrillard (1994, 7) saw the boundaries between reality and representation as fully collapsed and occupied by new hyper-real representations like the indian, whose specific emergence was tied to representational discourses of ethnology and anthropology. For Vizenor, the indian is a racial identifier separated from autochthonous languages and traditions with its genesis in colonization (i.e., 1492 ce in Columbus’s letters of India and “Indians” to Spain; see Vizenor 1992), not postindustrial modernity (Velie and Vizenor 1995, 1–5). Vizenor (1992, 1994a, 1998, 2008) not only accurately identifies the genesis of the indian simulation at the site of colonization but then traces and challenges mutations of the simulation across contemporary society. The modern indian simulation supplants the Indigenous real and links a false ontology of indigeneity to “terminal creeds,” defined by Vizenor as totalizing essentialized beliefs in noble or wild savages, racial authenticity, pseudo-evolutionary trajectories of cultural extinction, and conditions of Indigenous “victimry” or victimhood (Blaeser 1996, 48–51; Vizenor 1999). Vizenor’s imaginative challenge beyond identifying dangerous representations lies in his reimagination of 469

Nathan P. Acebo

Derrida’s (1967, 1978) notion of contradictory simultaneity within the sign, termed the trace. Vizenor explicitly argues that colonial simulations of Indigenous peoples can be countered by the presence and creation of what he terms “postindians”(Vizenor 1994a, 11, 164, 1998, 15). Whereas the hyperreal indians are the sign for the absence of the real in the colonial Other (i.e., Indigenous peoples), postindians are countersimulations created by and for Indigenous peoples that simultaneously express real dimensions of indigeneity and, accordingly, expose the absence of indigeneity within the indian (Ganzer 2017, 23). These dimensions of an Indigenous real manifest in displays or performances of cultural vibrancy, moments of chance, Native motion, comedy, prosperity, ironic survival, radical resistance, imaginative agency by the individual, and/or communal autonomy to convey a sense of Indigenous “active presence” over colonial circumstances. The sense of active presence embodied by the postindian creates survivance: a liberating condition/experience that is an “active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” that exceeds bare endurance or reactive responses to colonial oppression and contradicts the basis of false simulations enabling specific terminal creeds (Vizenor 1998, 15). Processes of contextually creating survivance emerges from select actions of postindians (i.e., their practices) and the polysemic interpretive process that engages with simulations of Indigenous peoples by the storyteller (again, survivance storytelling). The latter was classified by Vizenor (1994a, 15) as “trickster hermeneutics,” which emphasizes the contradictory, nonbinary nature of Indigenous representation, and when practiced as a form of deconstructive storytelling, simultaneously highlights the absence of indigeneity within the narrative and discourse of representation (Carlson 2011; Helmbrecht 2008). Vizenor makes clear that trickster hermeneutics are performed in Indigenous storytelling practices across any medium—oral, textual, or material—and establishes survivance on two levels: through the postindian actors in the narrative and at the level of the narrative itself (Vizenor and Lee 2000, 83). All postindians tease dimensions of an Indigenous real by accentuating how said actors creatively or ironically subverted, prospered, or asserted authority within or over colonial conditions. Vizenor’s postindian warriors often include fictional simulations (Vizenor 1990, 1991, 2012) and factual (e.g., John Squirrel) or often semi-fictionalized versions of actual Indigenous peoples, such as Russell Means, Ohiyesa (Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman), and Ishi (Vizenor 1992, 1994b, 2003). The expression of the postindian narratives invokes survivance in the present by allowing the reader or listener renewed connections to ancestral places, new modes of Indigenous historical consciousness, and access to alternative Indigenous identities, all of which serve as epistemic tools to engender consciousnesses of Indigenous futurity and rejections of racial stereotypes. The creation of survivance on these two levels then enables socioacupuncture by relieving some of the damaging effects of manifest manners. For example, Vizenor dismantles the tragic simulation of “Ishi the last indian” (my emphasis) traditionally propagated by anthropologists by semi-fictionally recasting him as a tricksterstoryteller prospering in exile (Vizenor 1992, 2003). Ishi is committed to mischievously upsetting anthropologists by selectively mobilizing dimensions of his Yahi culture without ever disclosing his sacred identity (sensu refusal). In selectively sharing dimensions of his culture inclusive of telling stories or speaking Yahi, Ishi denies alienation by recurrently creating a connection to his ancestors while affecting and at times manipulating positive relationships with people in and beyond the University of California Museum of Anthropology. Again, postindians are never complete articulations of the Indigenous subject but a simulation that references parts of what is/was real. Recasting Ishi as a postindian warrior of survivance draws attention to the diversity, prosperity, and complexities within the actual Ishi’s twentieth-century San Francisco experience. This move ruptures anthropologists’ abstraction of Ishi as a symbol of suffering and Indigenous victimhood (Kroeber 2008). 470

Survivance storytelling in archaeology

Two fundamental characteristics of Vizenor’s survivance need to be reinforced before addressing how the concept is applied in archaeology and heritage management programs. First, Vizenor does not conceive of survivance as a combination of “survival + resistance” nor reducible to an object (Gerald Vizenor, personal communication; see Madsen 2009, 33). Again, survivance is a condition tied to the actions of postindians that emerge from a baseline of survival/endurance, resilience, or resistance but which is given full expression through imaginative, ironic expressions of Indigenous active presence like disruptive acts of agency or radical autonomy over colonial authority. Second, while survivance disrupts false colonial representations, the condition’s production is always contingent on the specific circumstances facing Indigenous peoples. For example, “Ishi, the last of his kind” is a harmful simulation embedded in the field of anthropology that exists differently from other simulacra such as indian sport mascots. There are stereotypical similarities and related falsehoods in each, but there are also fundamentally different colonial practices creating and relying upon each false simulation. Situationally specific senses of active “presencing” are then required to disrupt the epistemic grounds of each false representation. Simply put, there is no universal condition of survivance but contextually specific ways of acting, imagining, or storytelling by postindians (i.e., countersimulations and actual people) that promote socio-acupuncture.

Applications of survivance in archaeology Survivance is utilized as an interpretive direction in museum exhibitions (Atalay 2006b; Kasper and Handsman 2015; and see Dion and Salamanca 2014; Vizenor 2010), conventional archaeological research (Allard 2018; Beaudoin 2017; Handsman 2018; Hosken and Tiede 2018; McGovern 2015; Nassaney 2018; Silliman 2014), and Indigenous archaeology research/heritage management programs (Acebo 2020; Dring et al. 2019; Gonzalez and Edwards 2020; Gonzalez et al. 2018; Kretzler 2019; Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018; Montgomery and Colwell 2019; Wilcox 2018). Most archaeological uses of survivance concentrate on Indigenous experiences and the materiality of places within settler colonial societies, including reservations, boarding schools, frontier settlements, or urban towns. Some archaeologists are beginning to focus on narratives of Indigenous active presence in non-colonized spaces such as the distant frontier hinterlands (e.g., Acebo 2020; Allard 2018; Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018), while other scholars utilize survivance in the study of non-Indigenous communities (e.g., Hosken and Tiede 2018). Archaeologists also hold different positions on the relationship between materiality and survivance. Some scholars view material culture as infused or “injected” with survivance (e.g., Hosken and Tiede 2018; Nassaney 2018; Silliman 2014), and others see nonhuman actors (artifacts, animals, plants, etc.) as enabling or resulting from practices or strategies of survivance in the past while serving as material referents for survivance storytelling in the present (Acebo 2020; Gonzalez et al. 2018; Kretzler 2019; Montgomery and Colwell 2019). With few exceptions (see Acebo and Martinez 2018; Gonzalez et al. 2018; Kretzler 2019; Wilcox 2018; see Chapter 28), archaeologists do not explicitly engage with other concepts within the Vizenor literary canon like socio-acupuncture, simulations, or trickster hermeneutics. Regardless of these differences, false colonial and specifically anthropological simulations associated with Indigenous victimhood are disrupted in each application. Atalay’s (2006b) attention to survivance in her critique of the National Museum of the American Indian’s (NMAI) “Our Peoples” exhibition is a foundational contribution in this regard (see also Lonetree 2012). The NMAI portrayed colonial artifacts, specifically weapons and objects of Christian proselytization, as mediums through which Indigenous agency (in this case, the creative adoption of technology and religion) was positively exercised as an active presence. 471

Nathan P. Acebo

However, curators failed to articulate how these objects inflicted genocidal trauma (corporeal, economic, and spiritual) onto Indigenous peoples while neglecting the ongoing battles and triumphs of contemporary Indigenous communities. Atalay is mindful that a condition of survivance necessitates a simulation of colonial representation to intervene upon, and the failure to acknowledge the reality of colonial brutality in explorations of Indigenous agency undermines the liberating utility of survivance. That is, as a public theater of Indigenous representation, the absence of struggle in the NMAI exhibitions only creates another false simulation of indigeneity that obfuscates the “context for understanding and appreciating the creative methods of resistance and survival in the face of such unimaginable turmoil” (2006b, 609). Atalay sees a more productive application of survivance in forms of creative cultural vitality (e.g., Colleen Lloyd’s [Tsa-la-gi/Tuscarora] ironic Geronimo homeland security T-shirts) framed within the contexts of colonial devastation where Indigenous peoples past and present take a central role in the storytelling process. Other survivance-oriented museum exhibitions and conventional forms of archaeological research heed the tenants of Atalay’s critique in retaining a sense of struggle when foregrounding Indigenous agency at sites of colonial trauma. For example, survivance stories in the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center’s focus on “histories of how Native people lived and worked in a world of always-changing political economies while maintaining their cultural identities and communities” on the reservation (Kasper and Handsman 2015, 199). The exhibit paired oral histories with multimedia displays of Pequot homes filled with mixed materialities (e.g., precontact house styles furnished with European goods) to reveal the reality of how some precolonial domestic traditions like foraging and housing architecture endured and evolved through participation in colonial markets. Subsequent research on the reservation life portrays the same practices and the presence of domestic surplus, for example expensive porcelains, as material result of “survivance strategies.” Within the exhibit, curators use these objects to complicate visitors’ beliefs about Pequot peoples as disconnected from their ancestral homelands, impoverished, uncivilized, or resistant to cultural change (Handsman 2018). Montgomery and Colwell (2019) similarly reframe ethnographic collections from twentieth-century reservation and boarding school contexts in a powerful textual exhibit of oral histories, photos (e.g., posed portraitures), and symbolically hybridized objects (e.g., Christian prayer books and other European goods covered in traditional beads). They use these material traces to convey different mixed expressions of cultural persistence and resiliency as expressions of survivance. Similar to Atalay’s position, both exhibitions view survivance as existing within a combination of survival and small-scale resistance; however, unlike Atalay, both highlight agency in the creative endurance of Indigenous identities as a sense of active presence. This specific storytelling commitment is shared by archaeological studies that present survivance as a generalized challenge to culture-contact dichotomies of change and continuity (see Walder and Yann 2018) and specifically, social identity transformation processes inclusive of assimilation, reactive resistance, or cultural hybridity. Silliman’s (2014) “Archaeologies of Survivance and Residence” exemplifies this interpretive direction by equating the capacity of Eastern Pequot people’s agentive residence (i.e., heterodoxic Indigenous social reproduction in colonial contexts) to engender ethnogenic persistence (i.e., continuity with Indigenous traditions while accommodating new practices within said traditions; and see Panich 2013) as expressions of survivance. The “practical politics” of residence creates communal belonging in the subtle ways Indigenous peoples creatively made colonial goods and places their own while reproducing some autochthonous practices. This heterodoxic reproduction or “negotiation” of colonial circumstances connects (or apolitically blurs) practices of cultural accommodation and micropolitical resistance as a broad subversion of colonial doxa. 472

Survivance storytelling in archaeology

Silliman’s pairing of social identity transformation models with survivance remains influential for recent archaeologies of survivance. Several archaeologists highlight other scales of agentive residence in landscape-scale Indigenous placemaking (e.g., Allard 2018; Kretzler 2019; McGovern 2015; Nassaney 2018). For instance, McGovern (2015) draws attention to Montaukett men’s participation in mobile labor industries like whaling as a way to financially sustain new multiethnic communities in New York in the wake of racialized settlement programs, whereas Allard (2018) identifies the roles Anishinaabeg and Dakota storytelling practices played in shaping the mobility and success of fur trapping companies. Other scholars (e.g., Beaudoin 2017; Handsman 2018; Nassaney 2018) focus on domestic and intra-communal scale practices of selective consumerism, symbolic repurposing, or the selective maintenance of traditional foodways as practices of agentive residence within colonial settlements. Each study positions new and old traditions sustained through acts of survival and micropolitical resistance as analogs for Indigenous identity maintenance and thus a challenge to historiographic simulations of racialized authenticity and tragic cultural extinction. Hosken and Tiede’s (2018) study of Japanese citizens at the World War II Kooskia Internment Camp also draws upon Silliman’s framework of residence and survivance. Hosken and Tiede argue that prisoners’ petitions for improved health care, recreational activities, and use of American and Japanese dental hygienic goods, including toothpaste and mouthwash, denotes agentive residence and a broad resistance to camp authority. The authors frame Japanese-American survivance as a “creative response to difficult circumstances” (2018, 595) and a refusal of American assimilation. Although the authors deny the portrayal of Kooskia prisoners solely as victims, the authors’ use of survivance disregards the concept’s Indigenous epistemic roots while reducing survivance to a generic subaltern coping mechanism akin to resiliency (similarly, see Nassaney 2018; Walder and Yann 2018). Given Vizenor’s (1987) imaginative exploration of trickster figures in foreign contexts, archaeological socio-acupuncture for non-Indigenous communities may certainly be worth imagining. For example, systemic class hegemony, systems of bondage, and exploitive forms of neoliberal transnationalism are social phenomena (within and beyond colonization [see Mbembe 2019, 76]) that enable and rely upon hyperreal simulations for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Hosken and Tiede’s approach thus raises importance questions about whether survivance is exportable beyond Indigenous contexts. Other scholars utilize survivance storytelling to explicitly contest setter colonial historiographies of violence and displacement by exploring Indigenous survival and communal prosperity (e.g., Acebo 2020; Kretzler 2019; Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018). Agentive residency remains key, but selective forms of Indigenous sovereignty and communal autonomy are given primacy in storytelling and performed in the present through survivance oriented tribal archaeologicalheritage programs (e.g., Gonzalez et al. 2018; Gonzalez and Edwards 2020). Regarding the former, Lightfoot and Gonzalez (2018) provide a diachronic study of how the Kashaya Pomo transformed core cultural practices, inclusive of foodways, residential networks, and band level organization into tribal scale governance, to navigate new waves of settler colonists in Northern California (1840–1860 ce). The emergence of the latter, manifest in the communal-style architecture of the Metini Village dance house, provided a material stage for the performance of a radical Kashaya survivance by physically enabling a new gathering point for revitalization ceremonies and new practices of consolidated tribal governance. Said governance was enacted at a scale that further fostered Kashaya unity and communal perseverance through a new era of colonial hyper-violence related to mass settlement and California’s Native American genocide. Kretzler’s (2019) collaborative research with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde also reveals how assimilationist and land termination policies were recurrently negotiated and opposed through communal scale settlement strategies and foodways. Among other contributions is 473

Nathan P. Acebo

Kretzler’s (2019, 41–47, 325, 326) middle range theorization of archaeological foodways with Vizenor’s concept of transmotion (i.e., visionary practices of storiers [humans and totemic nonhuman entities] enabling a freedom of Indigenous motion/movement across colonial boundaries as pure autonomy). Instead of viewing food detritus as pure indexes of subsistence practices, plants and animals are imaginatively recast as actors whose interactions with and acquisition of through hunting, gathering, and storytelling creates dynamic movements (in the past and present) for Grand Ronde peoples in and beyond the reservation. Dimensions of mobility in foodways foster renewed connections to the land as a unique modality of Grand Ronde sovereignty (sovereignty sui generis in Vizenor’s linguistics), which often figuratively subverted the physical boundaries imposed by setter colonial society during eras where Grand Ronde peoples were supposed to be restricted to the reservation.

Case study: thrivance and survivance in coastal southern Alta California Archaeological survivance storytelling or survivance in service of archaeology? My commitment to Vizenor’s work is concerned with practicing archaeology in service of Indigenous cultural values and knowledge (sensu Atalay 2006a, 2012; Gonzalez et al. 2018; Kretzler 2019) and not the other way around. I say this because I am not fully convinced that some archaeologists’ applications of survivance accomplishes much more than confronting generalized simulations of Indigenous peoples (as physically or culturally extinct) with interpretive tools already available within archaeological theory (e.g., clever consumerism, hybridity, residency, and ethnogenic persistence) (see also Kretzler 2019, 334). Although some researchers provide imaginative and, at times, ironic postindian stories through material analysis or historical vignettes (Montgomery and Colwell 2019, 146–148, 194; Gonzalez et al. 2018, 100, 101; Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018, 438), most portray any heterodoxic or orthodoxic negotiation of Indigenous culture (as agentive residence) as survivance during an era of colonialism as the generalized condition of struggle. The recurrent thematic positioning of survivance as a remedy for politically ambiguous areas of cultural identity models, a reduction of survivance to objects, object provenance, or a state of “survival + resistance,” often made without citation to Vizenor (e.g., Hosken and Tiede 2018), attests to a potential theoretical flattening and/or appropriation. Applying survivance in stories related to cultural identity change and/or continuity is appropriate when Indigenous non-presence related to inauthenticity or assimilation is established as the basis for hyperreal indians at the site of colonial trauma, but as Atalay noted, there are other specters of false representation at play. Across Vizenor’s (e.g., 1978, 1990, 2012) writing, senses of active presence are always tailored to the postindian’s circumstances, which often requires assertions of radical authority and alternative forms of autonomy such as transmotion rather than underscoring how Indigenous peoples remained Indigenous. The condition of survivance embodied and practiced by different Indigenous individuals like Ishi (i.e., playful refusal against ethnological objectification) or the Anishinaabe elder Charles Aubib (i.e., fourth-person oral evocation as court testimony [Vizenor 1998, 167–169]) are deeply connected to the postindian actor’s traditions. However, the actor’s subjectivity, inclusive of their ethnic identity, is not exclusively portrayed as a form of active presence but an element in the narrative to be instrumentalized to expose the non-presence of indigeneity. There also tends to be a unidirectional application of survivance in which Indigenous epistemologies are imported from outside of the immediate community of Indigenous stakeholders without a clear articulation of how local Indigenous collaborators’ knowledge enhances/informs 474

Survivance storytelling in archaeology

the condition of survivance, as all of Vizenor’s literary postindians do. A generalized incorporation of survivance is not wrong by any means if it fits stakeholders’ needs, but a deeper incorporation of an imported Indigenous epistemology-ontology might be found through an explicit collaborative rethinking (as is the case for any archaeological methodology) to create ownership over and craft relevant senses of active presence through archaeological historiography. Applications of context-driven survivance in psychiatry and cinematography (Chisholm 2016; Kirmayer et al. 2014; Ramirez and Hammack 2014) and other archaeological adaptations of other Indigenous epistemologies like refusal (Nelson 2019) have proven successful in this regard. I now offer another case study of how archaeology can facilitate survivance storytelling that disrupts colonial simulations of Indigenous peoples on the two levels emphasized in Vizenor’s trickster hermeneutics: (1) attention to radical postindians (i.e., ancestors) within the narrative and (2) the meta-production of the narrative itself as a means to create survivance in the present. Many of the archaeological studies mentioned earlier accomplish this in some form, but a critical distinction in the application of trickster hermeneutics here is that collaborators specifically rearticulated survivance to frame a condition of radical active presence in the past beyond a narrative of cultural identity change. Collaborators’ concept of active presence in the historical narrative was envisioned as a specific condition of “thrivance.” In developing and then positioning local Indigenous collaborators’ concept as the interpretive focus for the past, the research program was able to disrupt negative colonial historiography specific to the study and re-tease Vizenor’s survivance on their terms. Archaeological survivance storytelling was performed during the Black Star Canyon Archaeological Project (BSCAP; 2013−2019). The BSCAP was a community-based participatory research program I led in partnership with Tongva, Acjachemen (Blas Adobe Aguliar Museum; Juaneño—Acjachemen Culture Center), and Payómkawichum (Pechanga Band of Luiseno Mission Indians Cultural Center) community members in the Santa Ana Mountains of Orange County, California. Among other heritage management services, the BSCAP examined the history of the California Historic Landmark (CHL#217; CA-ORA-132 and CA-ORA-317) Black Star Canyon Puhú Village before and through Spanish (1542–1821 ce) and Mexican (1821–1848 ce) colonization and documented contemporary heritage practices specific to the landmark. Positioned at the intersection of the Tongva, Acjachemen, and Payómkawichum peoples’ individual ancestral homelands (Figure 29.1), the landmark encompasses one mounded habitation midden (ca. 4,500 m2) and 16 bedrock milling features with rock art panels. The visible archaeological features alone attest to a complex state of Indigenous residency, but the “official” historical significance of the landmark is derived from the 1832 ce “Battle in Cañón de los Indios” (Canyon of the Indians, now Black Star Canyon) (see Stephenson 1931). The battle, more accurately defined as a massacre, was perpetrated by a band of American and Mexican fur trappers hired by Franciscan mission officials and ranch owners at Mission San Gabriel Arcángel (Torres 2015). The trappers were tasked with locating horses stolen from outlying settlements and punishing the responsible Indigenous peoples (Stephenson 1931, 108). The stolen horses were tracked to Puhú, where a small group of starving “Shoshonean” horse thieves were allegedly eating some of the horses. The fur trappers ambushed the village, and after an intense skirmish, the residents were slaughtered and the trappers victoriously returned the horses (Stephenson 1931, 109–111). By the end of the nineteenth century, the massacre was a popular Orange County folktale and became a part of textual history after the publication of the narrative in 1931, which was then followed by the establishment of the landmark status in 1935 (Gould 1989). Inspired by the folklore of the massacre and rumors of sensational artifacts at the village, a series of excavations were performed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1936–1937, followed 475

Nathan P. Acebo

Figure 29.1 Map of Indigenous ancestral homelands and missions in southern Alta California and the location of California Historic Landmark (CHL#217; CA-ORA-132 and CA-ORA-317) Black Star Canyon Puhú Village (after Acebo 2020, 4). Source: Author’s creation.

by excavation projects by different avocational archaeological societies. Approximately 200 kg of artifacts were collected and haphazardly curated in different museums but never cataloged or analyzed. Some local archaeologists cast off the village’s orphaned collections as too fragmented to study, while others (e.g., Cameron [1999]) accepted the cursory interpretation offered by the WPA. The latter characterized the site as a precolonial, small-scale (single lineage), ephemeral (one- to two-month) hunting and acorn-processing camp lacking evidence of intercommunal residential traditions inclusive of interregional trade, wealth surplus, and ritual features associated with politically and economically powerful villages of the coast (Winterbourne 1937). Orange County historians and folklorists embraced two interpretations of the village. Some historians viewed the massacre as a colonial myth because they doubted the presence of Indigenous people in the mountain hinterlands given the impacts of Spanish relocation programs (Arellano 2013). Other scholars accepted the massacre account and the narrative’s depiction of Puhú residents as a desperate but devious few awaiting inevitable retribution and colonial annihilation (Stephenson 1931; Sleeper 1973, 1976). The veneration of the Puhú community’s obliteration at the hands of early American pioneers was also viewed as an event of European/ Anglo-American triumphalism within the early canon of Orange County and Californian historiography. Several historians/folklorists in the latter group would play a critical role in publicly propagating the massacre narrative by republishing sensationalized versions of the 1832 ce events in Orange County newspapers and popular almanacs in addition to official historical chronicles (e.g., Sleeper 1968, 1982). 476

Survivance storytelling in archaeology

Although Puhú possesses a historical landmark status equal to the Franciscan missions, the village lacks commemorative plaques or informational signs. Instead, abstract references to Indigenous people through the enduring folklore of the massacre and land management advertisements are available to the public. Black Star Canyon is primarily marketed as a pristine wilderness reserve, but Orange County land management agencies and heritage organizations (e.g., Orange County Parks and Haunted OC) also utilized embellished narratives of the massacre to promote public use. Monthly guided thematic group hikes are carried out during which the historical significance of the landmark along with other morbid aspects of the village’s folklore are told. The latter part of the guided hiking experience caters to visitors interested in paranormal experiences, many of which regard the canyon and village as one of the most haunted sites in Orange County (see Brazil 2017; e.g., Horjus 2017). The ghosts of massacre victims are believed to occupy the unhallowed landmark at night, and for some members of the public, this notion recasts the village’s archaeological features as a haunted Indian burial ground (Acebo 2020). The association of the paranormal within the narrative of the canyon landscape as “nature untainted by civilization” contextually pairs the vacancy of Indigenous people in wilderness romanticism with essentialized tropes of spectral victimized Indigenous peoples (see Boyd and Thrush 2011). Judith Richardson (2003) convincingly argued that across the United States and Canada, the pop cultural phenomenon of haunted Indigenous burial grounds impedes the visitors’ capacity to empathize with the lives of the real Indigenous people who produced the space. This is a fitting interpretation for the public representational discourses on Puhú, but I prefer to rearticulate Richardson’s position on folklore through the trickster linguistics of Vizenor in which the fictitious, vengeful Indigenous ghosts and the non-presence of Indigenous peoples in nature parks are simply different manifestations of indian simulations (i.e., false representations of indigeneity that have replaced the real). In a hyperreal sense, the victimized indian ghosts of the “haunted” landmark figuratively occupy the village because they inhabit conceptual space in the public Orange County ethos. Borrowing Vizenor’s terms again here, the historiography and heritage practices surrounding Puhú necessitated socio-acupuncture, given the dark colonial simulations of indians literally and figuratively haunting the village. “Official” representational discourses of historiography in the disciplines of history and archaeology are equally guilty of producing indians at the landmark. Historians’ and folklorists’ fetishization of the massacre as a colonial moment/achievement envisions gentile indians as deviant relics but ultimately powerless victims against colonization. Denials of the massacre are based upon beliefs in the terminal effects of Franciscan missionization, which supposedly depopulated the Santa Ana mountains prior to 1832 ce. This specific position relies upon and affirms a broader terminal narrative of absolute Indigenous disappearance (Wilcox 2009) but also downplays the possibility of ultraviolence against Indigenous peoples in the hinterlands before the era of mass settler colonization. Alternatively, archaeologists’ (e.g., Winterbourne 1937; Cameron 1999) interpretations portray Puhú as a place of pure yet minimal subsistence without forms of affectual communal governance before and after colonization, given the site’s exclusive dating to the late prehistoric period (900−1542 ce).

Thrivance: challenging the indians of Cañón de los Indios Puhú’s indians supplant any sense of Indigenous heritage at the landmark, given that the activities of past Indigenous peoples, in descendants’ oral histories or the archaeological record, were ignored and replaced by false representations. The way the indians of Cañón de los Indios create this separation is by propagating a state of victimry devoid of affective communal autonomy through the massacre narrative. Creative residency or refuge placemaking could have been deployed to clarify the 477

Nathan P. Acebo

“changing continuities” in the daily practices of Puhú’s occupants as narratives of persistent Indigenous identities and thus a condition of agency as survivance. However, none of these interpretive directions would have disrupted the indians at Puhú in a manner desired by BSCAP collaborators. First, BSCAP collaborators were simply not interested in crafting another history of nonlinear, ethnogenic culture change processes at Puhú in which domestic activities or other intercommunal scale traditions were viewed as referents for their ancestors’ identities. A second point of dissatisfaction with survivance paired with social identity models stemmed from their inability to disrupt the underlying condition of Indigenous non-presence within the massacre narrative itself. That is, simulations of acculturated indians do not haunt Puhú. In the narrative, the occupants of Puhú clearly retained aspects of their traditions (e.g., residency in the mountains) and thus their identities but are framed as colonial pawns made victims on the basis of being deviant gentiles (non-missionized peoples) whose exertion of agency was never truly affective relative to colonial authority. The occupants of Puhú were selected for annihilation because they exercised a micropolitical mode of agency (i.e., horse theft and small-scale refuge placemaking) to minimally persist beyond colonial settlements and therefore exhibited a condition of “survival with attitude” so often claimed in archaeologies of survivance as affective active presence. Instead, collaborators wanted to explore the affective properties of communal power of Puhú, where their ancestors could be envisioned as prosperous under colonization rather than crafty survivors who then became victims. The invisibility of the Puhú residents’ affective power in communal autonomy (relative to colonial society) was remedied by telling a story of thrivance: an Indigenous condition of existence that radically exceeds the boundaries of bare survival and resistance in embodying disruptive economic and political dimensions of communal prosperity (Acebo 2020; similarly Castro 2020). The formulation of thrivance was indebted to a set of conversations with Gregg Castro (t’rowt’raahl Salinan-Rumsien Ohlone) and Desireé Reneé Martinez (Tongva) leading up to the 2018 Society for California Archaeology conference, subsequent dialogues with other BSCAP collaborators, and discussions with Gerald Vizenor on imagining a condition of survivance specific to the colonial historiography of Puhú (Acebo 2020, 10–16; Acebo and Martinez 2018). Collaborators appreciated the tenants of Vizenor’s survivance, but they also believed that the literal term creates a conceptual slippage seen in some applications in archaeology where “(bare) survival + (micropolitical) resistance” is cast as an imaginative form of active presence. BSCAP collaborators already know that they and their ancestors performed and embodied these phenomena but desired stories of power and authority tied to the village as a challenge to the figurative and epistemic trauma of the massacre. Signified in the identifier “thrive,” thrivance urges a fundamental interpretive commitment to contradictory and often radical forms of Indigenous prosperity asserted in the face of or over colonization. A state of survival or acts of resistance are imaginatively surpassed by the potency of communal autonomy itself. Highlighting a condition of thrivance at Puhú was enabled by BSCAP collaborators’ knowledge of the Santa Ana Mountains and complementary interpretive perspectives on systematic economic prosperity and political governance. Collaborators recognize the traumatic massacre but also know that Black Star Canyon and the northern Santa Anas were major trade corridors and places tied to important religious ceremonies. The rediscovery of the village’s placename, Puhú, “his/her arrow place,” as well as associated stories shared by Tongva and Acjachemen ancestors in the John Peabody Harrington field notes clarified that Puhú was a major residential village inhabited by Tongva, Acjachemen, Payómkawichum, and Serrano peoples that accommodated gentiles and cimarrones (runaways from the missions) (Acebo 2020). To frame communal-scale forms of governance clearly signaled, in the multiethnic, 478

Survivance storytelling in archaeology

religious, and economic contexts of the village, approaches to group-level Indigenous autonomy and subaltern macropolitical resistance (Jordan 2013; Clausewitz 1832) were paired with the interpretive principles from assemblage theory (DeLanda 2016). These frameworks provided several appealing interpretive perspectives for collaborators such as dynamic material agency, systemic potentiality as real, and politically affective autonomy beyond mass resistance, but none more so than an interpretive commitment to macropolitical properties of their ancestors’ political economies. Material analyses further clarified Puhú’s enduring status as a major multiethnic residential village that orchestrated trade and forms of ritualized political-economic exchange within and beyond the LA Basin. The reassembly of orphaned collections with artifacts recovered during BSCAP excavations of the village midden provided a robust aggregate collection of cultural constituents for analysis. The collection included hundreds of locally produced and traded arrow points (MNI > 800), stone tools, milling implements, baskets, leather goods, awls, ceramic and stone storage-cooking vessels, ornaments, ritual paraphernalia, faunal remains, and trace amounts of colonial goods including nails, gun flints, unspent musket rounds, and iron weapons. Many of these objects enabled communal residency and connections to intra- and interregional trade networks. For example, Puhú residents processed and stored botanical foodstuffs and crafted highly valued “commodities” in mass quantities including baskets, leathers, shell pendants, and beads. Stylistic, petrographic, and geochemical provenance analysis of imported arrows, ceramics, and nonlocal stones revealed trading connections across the LA Basin and to the Southern Channel Islands, Salton Trough, northwestern Great Basin, San Joaquin Valley, and Colorado River regions. Seriation of arrows, shell beads, colonial goods, and obsidian hydration and radiocarbon (AMS 14C) dating analyses identified that Puhú was continuously occupied since the late prehistoric period and continuing after the massacre (1000–1860 ce). Zooarchaeological analyses revealed that, through this period, residents communally hunted and consumed large volumes of endemic large-bodied ungulates (e.g., deer and antelope). Although Puhú is over 30 kilometers from the coast, residents also retained steady access by trade and by politically sanctioned foraging access to shellfish foodstuffs while also procuring non-dietary marine and terrestrial species (e.g., mountain lion, Olivella, and chestnut cowry) to produce specialized craft goods associated with clan signification practices and shaman rituals. There was no evidence of European domesticates in foodways nor in crafting debris, whereas the range of present colonial goods were merely tertiary components of enduring residential traditions exemplified by the use of nails as crafting tools and firearms as minority components of hunting/defensive assemblages at “his/her arrow place.” Given collaborators’ extensive knowledge of the Santa Ana Mountains, the duration of occupancy at Puhú was predicted. However, the village’s intensifying economic eminence during the Spanish and Mexican colonial eras (1550−1830s), which is evidenced by increases in largescale specialized craft production, communal subsistence surplus, ritual activities, and range of exchange connections, was unexpected. The multiregional flow of surplus would have sustained or created new political and economic ties to Puhú while also provisioning resources beyond the village’s base subsistence economy, all of which were governed by residing elites (i.e., chief, council of elders, and shamans) who could call upon political obligations forged through trade or ritual gatherings in service of other modes of macropolitical action (e.g., multi-village warfare or communal feasts) (Bean and Shipek 1978; McCawley 1996). After colonization, consistently exceeding bare subsistence in this manner would have enabled the resources to not only accommodate mission runaways but continue traditional long-distance exchange ties with Yokuts (San Joaquin Valley), Mojaves (Colorado River), Ute (Great Basin), and eastern Kumeyaay (Salton 479

Nathan P. Acebo

Trough) peoples. After colonization, these nonlocal groups traded for baskets and other precolonial goods but were also engaged in massive horse raids at a scale that threatened the integrity of the Alta California ranching economy (Zappia 2012).

Empirical and imagined thrivance to teased survivance Rather than a desperate devious few “Shoshoneans” eating stolen horses to survive, the inhabitants of Puhú constructed an ethnically diverse, politically and economically vibrant community that flourished after colonization. This state of mass prosperity enabled empirical and imaginative narratives of postindian thrivance at Puhú, and here is one such story. Missionaries and ranchers around San Gabriel and San Juan Capistrano were explicitly concerned about gentile livestock trading networks in the northern Santa Anas post-1810 ce (Haas 2014, 44, 45). By maintaining a place for gentiles, cimarrones, and Indigenous traders-raiders adjacent to major colonial settlements (< 5 km), Puhú recurrently denied forced relocation programs and increasing demands for Indigenous labor by the missions and private ranches during the most intense era of colonial territorial expansion (1823−1845 ce) prior to annexation by the United States (Phillips 2010; Zappia 2014, 80–83). The village’s connections to nonlocal Indigenous traders-raiders likely led to massive horse raids, but given the stable surplus of resources and lack of domesticates within village foodways, the act was never committed to secure some liminal existence. Instead, we could speculate that Puhú residents were savvy horse traders in their own right, subverting ranchers’ wealth with their own commodities only to “feed” their own multiscalar Indigenous economies. Beyond horse theft, the politically eminent multiethnic nexus at Puhú would have also provoked a deeper political anxiety for colonists in the years preceding the massacre. Military and Franciscan leadership at Missions San Gabriel and San Juan Capistrano believed a combined assault by neophytes, gentile villages, and Mojave traders-raiders was the greatest threat to the LA Basin missions (Cook 1962, 161; Haas 2014, 46). Elsewhere, Yokut villages in the distant San Joaquin Valley hinterlands posed such a threat and were targeted by colonial expeditions to retrieve horses, capture cimarrones, and raze dangerous villages (see Phillips 1993; Payeras 1995). Fray José Bernardo Sánchez-a staunch opponent of Indigenous emancipation from the missions, participant in military expeditions into the San Joaquin Valley, and the head priest at San Gabriel at the time of the Puhú massacre-specifically saw the reincorporation of neophytes as fundamental to the survival of the declining mission project at the expense of any return to precolonial life, let alone a “heathen” residence in a politically radical Indigenous community (Herbermann et al. 1934). Although there is no indication that the people of Puhú would have enacted total rebellion, the multiethnic and economic structures of Puhú retained a macropolitical potential to draw together LA Basin and nonlocal Indigenous peoples as a real threat to the colonial project through a direct assault or a prolonged denial of mission paternalism. It was in these administrative contexts that the fur trappers were commissioned to exact total violence onto Puhú. A condition of thrivance lies in the Puhú occupants’ capacities to maintain the village’s political economy as a forceful source of active presence rather than agentive residence as an abstract connection to an autochthonous identity state. The latter is a given but simply not explored during the BSCAP, while the former’s radical properties shatters the false representation of indigeneity in the massacre narrative. That is, simulations of starving, thieving indians existing at the bare threshold of survival as espoused in colonial historiography are discarded for real dimensions of Indigenous prosperity capable of truly unsettling colonial economies, governance, and, consequently, settler colonial designs. In tracing the foundations of systemic prosperity at Puhú, the 480

Survivance storytelling in archaeology

interpretations of archaeologists who framed Puhú as a peripheral camp only occupied during the late prehistoric period are also rejected. Given the diachronic presence of Puhú’s material resources, accommodation of runaways, potentials of actualizing Indigenous governance over colonists, and enduring use of the canyon by Indigenous descendants, the Indigenous peoples of Puhú were never victims before or after the massacre but disruptive postindian visionaries economically crafting radical futures during colonization.

Conclusion Unlike other applications of the term thrivance in ethnic studies (e.g., Baumann 2019; Schneider 2016), the context specific historiography of Puhú’s thrivance is not a replacement for survivance but a teasing of survivance’s principles on BSCAP collaborator’s terms. Postindians (collaborators) tease specific stories of postindians’ (the ancestors’) clever power through archaeology to intervene upon a specific site of fetishized colonial trauma. The condition of active presence as a healing force is informed by and thus tailored to descendants’ beliefs, provoking a dual synthesis of local and imported Indigenous epistemologies that is often unaccounted for in other archaeologies of survivance. The sense of struggle inherent in the massacre event or Alta California’s colonization is not denied. Instead, the struggle is explicated in light of postindians and their traditions that destabilize the production of settler authority and futurity while highlighting colonialism’s villainous capacities in the past and present (e.g., heritage practices). Regarding the latter, creating and sharing thrivance stories of Puhú with museums and land management organizations has created new institutional partnerships and heritage management programs sensitive to the needs of Indigenous stakeholders (e.g., new museum management protocols and traditional gathering access). BSCAP collaborators now assume their own new active presence in representational discourses they were once excluded from by fostering new pathways for the public to connect with real aspects of their Indigenous heritage at the landmark centered on long-term forms of collective Indigenous power rather than complete annihilation and pure victimhood. To borrow from Vizenor again, contextual survivance storytelling enables a challenge to the manifest manners propagating terminal creeds of indigeneity at Puhú and, consequently, satisfies the second dimension of trickster hermeneutics by presence-ing postindians (radical ancestors and their descendants) in historiographic representation as a process of socio-acupuncture.

References cited Acebo, Nathan P. 2020. “Re-Assembling Radical Indigenous Autonomy in the Alta California Hinterlands: Survivance at Puhú.” PhD Dissertation, Stanford University. Acebo, Nathan P., and Desireé Reneé Martinez. 2018. “Towards An Analytic Of Survivance In California Archaeology.” Proceedings of the Society for California Archaeology 32: 144–152. Allard, Amélie. 2018. “Communities, Survivance, and Acts of ‘Residence’ in the Late Eighteenth-Century Fur Trade in Minnesota.” Midwest Archaeological Conference Occasional Papers 2: 55–56. Arellano, Gustavo. 2013. “Black Star Canyon’s Indian Massacre.” OC Weekly, November 11, 19 edition, sec. 14. Atalay, Sonya. 2006a. “Indigenous Archaeology as Decolonizing Practice.” American Indian Quarterly 30 (3–4): 280–310. Atalay, Sonya. 2006b. “No Sense of the Struggle: Creating a Context for Survivance at the NMAI.” American Indian Quarterly 30 (3–4): 597–618. Atalay, Sonya. 2012. Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

481

Nathan P. Acebo Baumann, Dianne Fay. 2019. “Blackfeet Men, ‘Toxic Masculinity’, and Gender Entanglement.” Thesis, Seattle, WA: University of Washington. Bean, Lowell J., and Florence C. Shipek. 1978. “Luiseño.” In Handbook of North American Indians, edited by Robert Heizer, 8:550–563. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Beaudoin, Matthew A. 2017. “A Tale Of Two Settlements: Consumption and the Historical Archaeology of Natives and Newcomers in the 19th-Century Great Lakes Region.” In Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology, edited by Craig N. Cipolla, 44–56. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Blaeser, Kimberly M. 1996. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Boyd, Colleen, and Coll-Peter Thrush, eds. 2011. Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Brazil, Ben. 2017. “A Hike into the Eerie Shadows of Black Star Canyon with Haunted OC.” Los Angeles Times, October 27, sec. Daily Pilot. Bruchac, Margaret, Siobhan Hart, and H. Martin Wobst, eds. 2016. Indigenous Archaeologies: A Reader on Decolonization, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Cameron, Constance. 1999. “Determining Tribal Boundaries Through Potsherds and Archaeological Perpsective.” Pacific Coast Archaeological Society Quarterly 35 (2–3): 96–123. Carlson, David J. 2011. “Trickster Hermeneutics and the Postindian Reader: Gerald Vizenor’s Constitutional Praxis.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 23 (4): 13–47. Castro, Gregg. 2020. “Native American ‘Thrivance’—More Than Surviving in Modern Colonial America.” Presentation to the Menlo Park Library (virtual), September 30. Chisholm, Dianne. 2016. “The Enduring Afterlife of ‘Before Tomorrow’: Inuit Survivance and the Spectral Cinema of Arnait Video Productions.” Études/Inuit/Studies 40 (1): 211–227. Clausewitz, Carl von. 1832. On War. Translated by J. J Graham. Auckland: Floating Press. Colwell, Chip. 2016. “Collaborative Archaeologies and Descendant Communities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45 (1): 113–127. Cook, Sherburne F. 1962. “Expeditions to the Interior of California Central Valley, 1820–1840.” University of California Anthropological Records 20: 151–213. Däwes, Birgit, and Alexandra Hauke, eds. 2017. Native American Survivance, Memory, and Futurity: The Gerald Vizenor Continuum. New York: Routledge. DeLanda, Manuel. 2016. Assemblage Theory: Speculative Realism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1967. On Grammatology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2009. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dillon, Grace L., ed. 2012. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Dion, Susan D., and Angela Salamanca. 2014. “Indigenous Artists, Indigenous Youth and the Project of Survivance.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3 (1): 159–188. Dring, Katherine, Stephen W. Silliman, Natasha Gambrell, Shianne Sebastian, and Ralph Sebastian Sidberry. 2019. “Authoring and Authority in Eastern Pequot Community Heritage and Archaeology.” Archaeologies 15 (3): 352–370. Ganzer, Alexandra. 2017. “Gerald Vizenor Transnational Trickster of Theory.” In Native American Survivance, Memory, and Futurity: The Gerald Vizenor Continuum, edited by Birgit Däwes and Alexandra Hauke, 19–33. New York: Routledge. Gonzalez, Sara L., and Briece Edwards. 2020. “The Intersection of Indigenous Thought and Archaeological Practice: The Field Methods in Indigenous Archaeology Field School.” Journal of Community Archaeology & Heritage 7 (2): 1–16. Gonzalez, Sara L., Ian Kretzler, and Briece Edwards. 2018. “Imagining Indigenous and Archaeological Futures: Building Capacity with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.” Archaeologies 14 (1): 85–114. Gould, Steven. 1989. Orange County: A Bibliography of Historical, Geographic, Political, Economic, Agricultural, Archaeological, Ethnic, and Othe County Sources. Anaheim, CA: Shumway Family History Services. Haas, Lisbeth. 2014. Saints and Citizens: Indigenous Histories of Colonial Missions and Mexican California, 1750–1850. Berkeley: University of California Press. Handsman, Russell G. 2018. “Survivance Strategies and the Materialities of Mashantucket Pequot Labor in the Later Eighteenth Century.” Historical Archaeology 52 (1): 51–69.

482

Survivance storytelling in archaeology Helmbrecht, Breinig. 2008. “Native Survivance in the Americas: Resistance and Remembrance in Narratives by Asturias, Tapahonso, and Vizenor.” In Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor, 39–59. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Herbermann, Charles George, Edward A. Pace, Condé Bénoist Pallen, Thomas J. Shahan, and John J. Wynne, eds. 1934. The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church. New York: The Catholic Encyclopedia Inc. Horjus, Maren. 2017. Haunted Hikes: Real Life Stories of Paranormal Activity in the Woods. Lanham, MD: Falcon Guides. Hosken, Kaitlyn, and Kristen Tiede. 2018. “‘Caring for Their Prisoner Compatriots’: Health and Dental Hygiene at the Kooskia Internment Camp.” Historical Archaeology 52 (3): 585–599. Jahner, Elaine. 1985. “Allies in the Word Wars: Vizenor’s Uses of Contemporary Critical Theory.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9 (2): 64–69. Jordan, Kurt. 2013. “Incorporation and Colonization: Postcolumbian Iroquois Satellite Communities and Processes of Indigenous Autonomy.” American Anthropologist 115 (1): 29–43. Kasper, Kimberly, and Russell G. Handsman. 2015. “Survivance Stories, Co-Creation, and a Participatory Model at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center.” Advances in Archaeological Practice 3 (3): 198–207. Kirmayer, Laurence J., Joseph P. Gone, and Joshua Moses. 2014. “Rethinking Historical Trauma.” Transcultural Psychiatry 51 (3): 299–319. Kretzler, Ian Edward. 2019. “An Archaeology of Survivance on the Grand Ronde Reservation.” PhD Dissertation, University of Washington. Kroeber, Karl. 2008. “Why It’s a Good Thing Gerald Vizenor Is Not an Indian.” In Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor, 25–38. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Lee, Robert A., ed. 2000. Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Lightfoot, Kent G., and Sara L. Gonzalez. 2018. “The Study of Sustained Colonialism: An Example from the Kashaya Pomo Homeland in Northern California.” American Antiquity 83 (3): 427–443. Lincoln, Kenneth. 1982. Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lonetree, Amy, ed. 2012. Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Lundquist, Suzanne Evertsen. 2004. Native American Literatures: An Introduction. New York: Continuum. Madsen, Deborah L. 2009. Understanding Gerald Vizenor. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Madsen, Deborah L., and A. Robert Lee, eds. 2010. Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McAnany, Patricia. 2020. “Imagining a Maya Archaeology that is Anthropological and Attuned to Indigenous Cultural Heritage.” Heritage 3 (2): 318–330. McCawley, William. 1996. The First Angelinos: The Gabrielino Indians of Los Angeles. Menlo Park, CA: Bellana Press. McGovern, Allison Manfra. 2015. “Facing ‘The End’ Termination and Survivance among the Montaukett of Eastern Long Island, New York.” In The Archaeology of Race in the Northeast, edited by Christopher N. Matthews and Allison Manfra McGovern, 215–231. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Montgomery, Lindsay M., and Chip Colwell. 2019. Objects of Survivance A Material History of the American Indian School Experience. Denver: Denver Museum of Nature & Science and University Press of Colorado. Nassaney, Michael S. 2018. “Embracing Anomalies to Decolonize Archaeology.” Midwest Archaeological Conference Occasional Papers 2: 33–54. Nelson, Peter. 2019. “Indigenous Refusal of Settler Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century Central California.” In Indigenous Persistence in the Colonized Americas: Material and Documentary Perspectives on Entanglement, edited by Heather Law Pezzarossi and Russell N. Sheptak, 169–186. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Nelson, Peter. 2020. “Refusing Settler Epistemologies and Maintaining an Indigenous Future for Tolay Lake, Sonoma County, California.” American Indian Quarterly 44 (2): 221–242. Nicholas, George P. 2008. “Native Peoples and Archaeology.” In Encyclopedia of Archaeology, edited by Deborah M. Pearsall, 1660–1669. San Diego: Elsevier/Academic Press.

483

Nathan P. Acebo Panich, Lee. 2013. “Archaeologies of Persistence: Reconsidering the Legacies of Colonialism in Native North America.” American Antiquity 78 (1): 105–122. Payeras, Mariano. 1995. Writings of Mariano Payeras. Translated by Donald Cutter. Santa Barbara, CA: Bellerophon Books. Phillips, George Harwood. 1993. Indian and Intruders in Central California 1769–1849. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Phillips, George Harwood. 2010. Vineyards and Vaqueros: Indian Labor and the Economic Expansion of Southern California, 1771–1877. Norman, OK: The Arthur H. Clark Company. Ramirez, Lucio Cloud, and Phillip L. Hammack. 2014. “Surviving Colonization and the Quest for Healing: Narrative and Resilience among California Indian Tribal Leaders.” Transcultural Psychiatry 51 (1): 112–133. Richardson, Judith. 2003. Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rifkin, Mark. 2017. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Schneider, Lindsey. 2016. “Dammed by the State: Indian Fishing and the Geographies of Settler Colonialism in the Columbia River Basin.” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Riverside. Silliman, Stephen W. 2014. “Archaeologies of Survivance and Residence: Reflections on the Historical Archaeology of Indigenous People.” In Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology, edited by Neal Ferris, Rodney Harrison, and Michael Wilcox, 57–77. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simpson, Audra. 2010. “Under the Sign of Sovereignty: Certainty, Ambivalence, and Law in Native North America and Indigenous Australia.” Edited by Kevin Bruyneel, Deborah A. Rosen, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Wicazo Sa Review 25 (2): 107–124. Simpson, Audra. 2017. “The Ruse of Consent and the Anatomy of ‘Refusal’: Cases from Indigenous North America and Australia.” Postcolonial Studies 20 (1): 18–33. Sleeper, Jim. 1968. “The Rancho San Joaquin Gazette Vol. II, No. 2, January, 1846.” The Irvine Company. MS-R173. Jim Sleeper Papers; Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California. Sleeper, Jim. 1973. Turn the Rascals out: The Life and Times of Orange County’s Fighting Editor Dan M. Baker. Trabuco Canyon, CA: California Classics. Sleeper, Jim. 1976. A Grizzly Introduction to the Santa Ana Mountains: A Boys’ Book of Bear Stories (Not for Boys). Trabuco Canyon, CA: California Classics. Sleeper, Jim. 1982. Jim Sleeper’s Orange County Almanac of Historical Oddities. Trabuco Canyon, CA: Ocusa Press. Stephenson, Terry E. 1931. Shadows of Old Saddleback. Santa Ana, CA: Santa Ana High School and Junior College. Torres, Craig. 2015. “BlackStar 1 Interview by Mishuana Goeman. MPGEG-4.” www.youtube.com/ watch?time_continue=20&v=mwven5hyams&feature=emb_title. Velie, Alan R. 1982. Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Velie, Alan R., ed. 1995. Native American Perspectives on Literature and History. American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series, v. 19. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Velie, Alan R., and Gerald Vizenor. 1995. “Introduction.” In Native American Perspectives on Literature and History, edited by Alan R. Velie, 1–7. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Vizenor, Gerald. 1978. Bearheart: Darkness in Saint Louis. Saint Paul, MN: Bookslinger. Vizenor, Gerald. 1987. Griever, An American Monkey King in China: A Novel. New York: Fiction Collective. Vizenor, Gerald. 1990. Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vizenor, Gerald. 1991. The Heirs of Columbus. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Vizenor, Gerald. 1992. “Manifest Manners: The Long Gaze of Christopher Columbus.” Boundary 2 19 (3): 223–235. Vizenor, Gerald. 1994a. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Vizenor, Gerald. 1994b. Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Vizenor, Gerald. 1998. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Vizenor, Gerald. 1999. Postindian Conversations. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

484

Survivance storytelling in archaeology Vizenor, Gerald. 2003. “Mister Ishi: Analogies of Exile, Deliverance, and Liberty.” In Ishi in Three Centuries, edited by Karl Kroeber and Clifton B. Kroeber, 363–372. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Vizenor, Gerald, ed. 2008. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Vizenor, Gerald. 2010. “American Indian Art and Literature Today: Survivance and Tragic Wisdom.” Museum International 62 (3): 41–51. Vizenor, Gerald. 2012. Chair of Tears. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Vizenor, Gerald, and A. Robert Lee, eds. 2000. Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Walder, Heather, and Jessica Yann. 2018. “Resilience and Survivance: Frameworks for Discussing Intercultural Interactions.” Midwest Archaeological Conference Occasional Papers 2: 1–18. Wilcox, Michael. 2009. The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest: An Indigenous Archaeology of Contact. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wilcox, Timothy. 2018. “Gobernador Polychrome as a Material Expression of Survivance.” Paper presented at the 82nd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Washington, DC. Winterbourne, J. W. 1937. “Preliminary Survey of Indian Camp Sites on Irvine Property 1935 Black Star Canyon 1937.” 970.657 UN (1935 & 1937). Santa Ana, CA: The Bowers Museum. Zappia, Natale A. 2012. “Indigenous Borderlands: Livestock, Captivity, and Power in the Far West.” Pacific Historical Review 81 (2): 193–220. Zappia, Natale A. 2014. Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin, 1540–1859. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

485

30 THE HOOFED CLAN STORY AND STORYWORK Red Lake Ojibwe foodways and Indigenous food sovereignty Ashleigh BigWolf Thompson and Tristan Reader

Introduction: Ojibwe Hoofed Clan story as Indigenous food sovereignty narrative A long time ago, the hoofed kin disappeared from Anishinaabe aki [land]. Because the hoofed animals’ absence made them hungry and sick, the Ojibwe sent runners to the four directions in order to find the moose, caribou, and deer that had disappeared. They finally found them to the north where they were being protected by crows. When the Ojibwe asked them why they had left, the hoofed animals told the Ojibwe that they were happy in the far north and did not wish to return. The Ojibwe were confused and asked why they had become unhappy and did not want to come back. The hoofed clan told them they felt disrespected by the Ojibwe in Anishinaabe aki. They were upset because the Ojibwe wasted their bodies, did not share their food with all members of their community, and killed more hoofed creatures than what the Ojibwe needed. After intently listening to their hoofed brothers, the Ojibwe agreed to not waste their flesh, to share food with their community, and to take care of the land that they all lived on, performing special ceremonies when they took an animal. Thus, the hoofed animals agreed to return to Anishinaabe aki so that the Ojibwe would not starve, but only on the condition the Ojibwe would continue to honor their promises to the hoofed clan.1

This story of the Hoofed Clan provides multiple insights into how Indigenous communities both understand and enact food sovereignty as a powerful tool of community revitalization in the twenty-first century. As we shall see, Indigenous food sovereignty (IFS) has become a central focus for re-indigenization efforts across the United States and beyond. Although it parallels the global food sovereignty (FS) project, the ways in which IFS is conceived of and practiced is distinctive in four important ways: •

IFS centers story and “storywork” as the key epistemological and pedagogical tools to articulate the ontologies, axiologies, and methodologies that serve as the foundations of efforts to revitalize foodways and food systems within contemporary Indigenous communities in the United States. 486

The Hoofed Clan story and storywork

•

• •

IFS is rooted in a relational understanding of food sovereignty based upon Indigenous values and ontologies of kinship, relationship, reciprocity, and responsibility that stands in contrast with the rights-based understandings of the broader FS movement. IFS addresses health and wellness in a more intensive and integrated manner than that of the broader FS movement. IFS serves as an integrated tool within the effort to revitalize the place-based cultures of Indigenous peoples, in contrast to the broader FS movement, in which land access and tenure are more broadly conceived of as connected to economic justice.

The specific ways in which these distinguishing traits of IFS are expressed vary from place to place and people to people. As we shall see, however, they represent common themes that are reflected in the broader IFS project as conceived of and practiced in many Indigenous communities across North America, as well as within Ojibwe foodways specifically. Furthermore, archaeologists argue for multiple Indigenous archaeologies rather than a single archaeology because the plurality recognizes the diferent needs, desires, and cultural protocols between Indigenous peoples throughout space and time (Nicholas 2008; Wobst 2010). As such, this project demonstrates how Indigenous archaeology can be adjusted to fit the needs of specific Indigenous communities. As part of the wider conversation in the archaeology of colonialism, this research seeks to assist the Red Lake Ojibwe community in better understanding how their food systems are impacted by colonialism and the ways in which the community can address food sovereignty challenges related to the historic and ongoing processes of colonization (Thompson 2019).

Distinctive themes of Indigenous food sovereignty Before examining the ways in which Ojibwe food sovereignty is being documented, expressed, and practiced, it is essential first to understand its context within the global FS project and second to briefly examine some of the ways in which Indigenous conceptions are challenging, expanding, and deepening the understanding and practice of food sovereignty. Growing out of and reflecting decades of grassroots efforts in communities throughout the world, the concept of “food sovereignty” was articulated in the first decade of the twenty-first century, primarily through the work of La Via Campesina, a self-described “International Peasants’ Movement” (Via Campesina 2019). Over 500 delegates from 80 countries met in Sélingué, Mali, in 2007, issuing the Declaration of Nyéléni, which articulated a vision that—although evolving—continues to frame understandings of FS. At its most basic level, it conceives of food sovereignty as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems” (Via Campesina 2007).2 Less than a year later, Indigenous activists from more than a dozen Native American tribes gathered in Taos, New Mexico, where they drafted a document that—while endorsing the Declaration of Nyéléni—began to articulate some distinguishing “principles of native food sovereignty” (Principles of Food Sovereignty Forum 2008, emphasis added). While recognizing the power of the broader conceptions of FS, this document—based upon the grassroots work to revitalize tribal food systems in a scores of Native communities across the United States—also began to articulate some of the themes that would begin to distinguish IFS from the broader FS project: Native Food Sovereignty is a means to protect our peoples and communities and to provide a foundation from which to build and/or rebuild. . . . Native foods are 487

Ashleigh BigWolf Thompson and Tristan Reader

essential to cultural revitalization, health and wellness, language, spirituality, community, family, the environment and all aspects of life. . . . We must plan for future generations in a changing world while drawing upon and respecting the wisdom passed on to us from previous generations. (Native Food Sovereignty Forum 2008) Thus, IFS is not an end in itself but a part of a larger efort to revitalize healthy, culturally vital, and sustainable Indigenous communities. In the decade since these two foundational statements were created, understandings of both FS and IFS have continued to develop and evolve. However, as Gupta (2014) notes, strategies and outcomes oriented toward FS and IFS will look different across communities and environments. It is therefore important to examine the diversity of place-based approaches to food sovereignty that vary across social groups. Yet (Kerr 2013, 869) notes that only “a few studies have examined the relevance of the concept of food sovereignty within a specific context.”3 The need for such contextual examinations is, perhaps, even more essential within the diverse cultures of Indigenous North America where IFS projects large and small have been developed in over 100 communities within the United States alone (Hoover 2017; Reader 2018). There is, however, a small but growing literature that does, indeed, delve more deeply into IFS within particular communities, including Kamal et al. 2015; Buseck 2003; Cohen 2012; Gupta 2014; and Reader 2018. This current examination of Ojibwe food sovereignty seeks not only to examine food sovereignty within a particular Indigenous community, but also to look at what it reveals about larger trends within IFS. As we shall see, the exploration of Ojibwe foodways provides a contextual example of four key elements of IFS. First, IFS utilizes story and other traditional epistemological and pedagogical tools to articulate the ontologies, axiologies, and methodologies that serve as the foundations of efforts to revitalize foodways and food systems within contemporary Indigenous communities in the United States. There is a large literature about the importance of story in Indigenous knowledge systems (e.g., Atalay 2006; Iseke 2013; Thomas 2005; Lambert 2014; Basso 1996; Vansina 1985) and Indigenous methodologies (Windchief and San Pedro 2019; Archibald et al. 2019; Wilson 2008; Smith 2012). Thus, it is no surprise that story remains a critical tool for describing and understanding food sovereignty within Indigenous communities. The incorporation of storywork remains at the heart of the IFS literature and practice. This stands in sharp contrast to the broader IFS project, wherein both the academy and advocacy organizations like La Via Campesina focus primarily on declarations, critique, analysis, policy recommendations, and/or socioeconomic theory (Wittman et al. 2010, 12). Within IFS, story is both form and content, serving as pedagogy and methodology, thereby reflecting the ontologies and axiologies of Indigenous peoples in which the universe is one of relationality and accountability. Second, IFS applies a relational understanding of food sovereignty based upon Indigenous values and ontologies of kinship, relationship, reciprocity, and responsibility. The “kincentric” universe (Salmón 2012) places “relational accountability” (Wilson 2008) at the center of Indigenous identity, community, culture, and lifeways. Wilson (2008, 80) argues that “rather than viewing ourselves as being in relationship with other people or things, we are the relationships that we hold and are a part of.” In focusing on relationship—with other people, with the environment, with land and place, with the cosmos, and with ideas—Indigenous ontologies call for accountability, responsibility, and reciprocity. This focus on kinship is echoed throughout the literature of IFS, including Arquette and Cole Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment 2004; Grey and Patel 2015; Whyte 2016; Gupta 2014; Salmón 2012; Hoover 2017; and Reader 2018. This focus on the responsibilities demanded by kinship relationships stands in sharp contrast to 488

The Hoofed Clan story and storywork

the western focus on autonomy, in which rights stand as paramount (Coté 2016; Reader 2018).4 Focusing on relational accountability rather than rights has profound implications for how food sovereignty is understood and practiced. This is more than a semantic distinction. Rather, it reflects a completely different set of assumptions, values, epistemologies, and even ontologies. These are then reflected in differences in how food sovereignty is understood and practiced at the community level. One of the most interesting examples of the way in which obligation stands at the heart of Indigenous conceptions of FS is the 2012 legal case of 23 Yup’ik (Native Alaskan) fishermen on trial for violating a state of Alaska ban on salmon fishing on the Kuskokwim River. In court, the fishermen did not assert that they had a right to fish for salmon; they did not rely on legal precedence, treaty rights, or even a clear assertion of their right to practice their religion. Rather, they told the judge that it was their obligation to fish for salmon: If Yup’ik people do not fish for King Salmon, the King Salmon spirit will be offended and it will not return to the river. . . . A Yup’ik fisherman who is a sincere believer in his religious role as a steward of nature, believes that he must fulfill his prescribed role to maintain this “collaborative reciprocity” between hunter and game. . . . Under Yup’ik religious belief, this cycle of interplay between humans and animals helped perpetuate the seasons; without the maintaining of that balance, a new year will not follow the old one. (Weymouth 2014) Although in legal terms, this defense might be viewed as a “rights claim” (i.e., the right of religious liberty), the internal logic of the fishermen and their community was not that they had the right to fish but that they had the obligation to do so based upon “relational accountability.” Similarly, the Hoofed Clan story introduces Ojibwe understandings of the relational universe in which responsibility and reciprocity sit at the heart of foodways. As we shall see, the bulk of this current research reinforces this view. Third, IFS centers health and wellness in a more intensive and integrated manner than that of the broader FS movement, where it has been addressed only peripherally (Reader 2018). Indigenous communities across the United States face epidemic levels of nutrition-related disease. Indian Health Service (2012) demonstrates that rates of Type 2 diabetes for American Indian/ Native Alaskans are 2.3 times those of non-Hispanic whites. This disparity is even greater among Native youth (aged 10–19), who are nine times as likely to suffer from the disease as their nonHispanic white age-mates (Indian Health Service 2012). Although the contributors to these health disparities are a complex mix of biomedical and socially determined factors (Reader 2018), the loss of and damage to the food systems that supported Native people for countless generations and the resulting dietary changes are certainly major contributing factors. Mailer and Hale (2018, 2) compellingly argue that the key determinant in the impacts of disease among Indigenous peoples of the Americas from the time of first contact until today “can be found when their ability to hunt, gather, and farm nutritionally dense plants and animals is diminished by war, colonization and cultural destruction.” Indeed, the destruction of Indigenous food systems was—and still is—a key tool of settler colonialism. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that for Indigenous peoples, the revitalizing of tribal food systems and assertion of tribal food sovereignty are intimately linked to promotion of public health and wellness (Reader 2018; Whyte 2016; Hoover 2017). As we shall see, this understanding of the link between food and health is a common theme within the examination of Ojibwe food sovereignty, reflected in the fact that the loss of the Hoofed Clan led to hunger and disease, as well as the concerns of contemporary community members who have been a part of this current research. 489

Ashleigh BigWolf Thompson and Tristan Reader

Fourth, IFS serves as part of an integrated effort to revitalize the place-based cultures of Indigenous peoples. Indeed, in many ways, IFS is not an end in and of itself but a tool for recontextualizing and revitalizing the broader cultural practices of Indigenous peoples. In Native communities across the United States, the decline of food sovereignty and foodways contributed to and accelerated the loss of cultural vitality (Reader 2018). Therefore, in contrast to many of the socioeconomic ways of framing the FS discourse globally, IFS and cultural revitalization are understood to be inseparable. Indigenous cultural practices are fundamentally connected to the making of a livelihood in relationship to the particular places and the animals, plants, waterways, geographies, and spirits that inhabit those places. The Ojibwe Hoofed Clan story is but one of countless examples of the close connection between the material culture of foodways and the symbolic cultural practices (i.e., songs, ceremonies, dances, stories, languages, etc.) of various Indigenous communities. IFS is—at least in part—a process of recontextualizing culture, once again connecting cultural practices to the material practices in which they were originally rooted. The revitalization of foodways and Indigenous food systems is essential to the recontexualization and re-sacralization of cultural practices that have had their original reason for being destroyed. After all, if you no longer need moose, caribou, and deer for sustenance, it is no longer necessary to meet the demands of the Hoofed Clan “to share food with their community . . . performing special ceremonies when they took an animal.” However, as cultural practices are reconnected with their material foundation—the food systems of a people—they once again take on their central role in the community. Putting ceremonies, songs, stories, and other cultural traditions back into their original context strengthens them. Recognizing this fact, the late Christine Johnsonbaḍ, a tribal elder within the Tohono O’odham tribe of southern Arizona, articulated the impact that the rejuvenation of even a small part of foodways can have on cultural preservation efforts: Every year, I sang the songs that called down the summer rains. But this year, for the first time in many years, I had a garden filled with devil’s claw and corn, melons and squash. This year, I sang for them. This year, I sang like I really meant it. (Reader 1997) In rebuilding Indigenous food systems and foodways, whether in the Sonoran Desert home of the Tohono O’odham or in the northern woodlands of the Ojibwe, IFS is being utilized as a powerful tool for the revitalization of the cultural practices and identities of Native peoples across the United States and beyond. These four distinguishing themes within IFS appear throughout the broad effort to revitalize traditional foodways and tribal food systems across the United States. The ways in which they manifest themselves, however, vary from community to community. We shall now proceed to examine the ways in which they operate within one community: Red Lake Ojibwe.

Red Lake Ojibwe foodways research project: an overview5 Project introduction As an Ojibwe researcher working within the discipline of archaeology, it is essential that I maintain relational accountability not only to the academy but also to my community (Wilson 2008). In designing my ongoing research, therefore, I wanted to conduct research that would not only benefit me and my academic community but be beneficial to my tribal community 490

The Hoofed Clan story and storywork

as well. Working in collaboration with the Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO) of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians (referred to from now on as the Red Lake Ojibwe), we designed a traditional foodways and food sovereignty research project. This research would be timely because the tribe has recently implemented a few programs to help the community eat more local, traditional, and nutrient-rich foods with the intention of improving the health of tribal members. Thus, we hoped that the project could inform the current work being done that promotes traditional Ojibwe foodways and wellness. In addition, a comprehensive traditional foodways project that documents historical and contemporary foodways has never been done before for the Red Lake Ojibwe and provides a resource for the THPO and tribe at large. Our approach to this project falls within Indigenous archaeology. This type of archaeology is done for, with, and by Indigenous peoples (Atalay 2006; Murray 2011). As defined by Nicholas, Indigenous archaeology intersects with Indigenous values, knowledge, practices, ethics, and sensibilities, and through collaborative and community-originated or directed projects, and related critical perspectives. It seeks to make archaeology more representative of, responsible to, and relevant for Indigenous communities . . . and broaden the understanding and interpretation of the archaeological record through the incorporation of Aboriginal worldviews, histories, and science. (Nicholas 2008) Therefore, Indigenous archaeology combines ontological, epistemological, and moral dynamics of both Indigenous and western scientists to create a field that helps Native people accomplish their own research agendas. Methods such as intergenerational knowledge transfer, oral tradition, and noninvasive archaeological methods are just some of the methods this field utilizes (Nicholas 2008; Watkins 2003). One aspect of this project was using storywork as method. By using oral histories and the written historical record, the Red Lake THPO and I wanted to address questions such as what traditional foods are important to the community? How are these foods produced? And why are these foods significant to Red Lake Ojibwe culture and lifeways? Answering these questions helps create a framework to address several common Indigenous food sovereignty goals, such as improving the health and wellness of our people and the earth, implementing cultural revitalization, creating good relationships within our food system, and passing food knowledge on to future generations. By documenting our traditional foodways, we hoped that we could help those working directly or indirectly within Red Lake food sovereignty by providing a general overview of what are our traditional foodways are, how are these produced, and why they are important. For the project, interviews conducted with tribal members identified seven major Ojibwe foodways, including gardening; maple sugar harvesting; hunting, snaring, and collecting eggs; fishing; berry picking; wild rice harvesting; and other wild foods gathering. Interviewees identified four major explanations for why these traditional foodways are important to the Red Lake Ojibwe, which include physical health and lifespan; medicinal and ceremonial importance; respect of the land and waters; and the health and wellness of the future generations. This chapter does not include all of the findings of this ongoing research project, which are available in (Thompson 2019). Rather, we use the project as a case study to illustrate key themes of the wider Indigenous food sovereignty research. Here we share context for the project, including who the Red Lake Ojibwe are, the project’s methods and theory, and some of the results of the project that exemplify wider Indigenous food sovereignty themes. 491

Ashleigh BigWolf Thompson and Tristan Reader

A brief history of the Red Lake Ojibwe The Red Lake Ojibwe are part of a larger Ojibwe group also known as the Chippewa or Anishinaabe. Until approximately 1,500 years ago, the Ojibwe occupied territory is what is now the Northeast United States. However, food shortages and high population density resulted in land conflict between the Ojibwe and other Indigenous peoples of the Atlantic coast (Treuer 2010, 4). In response, Ojibwe prophets told the people to move west to where “the food grows on water,” which refers to wild rice. As a result of this prophecy, the Ojibwe migrated west, a process that was accelerated by pressure from European settler expansion. The move westward took place over a 1,500-year period, during which the Ojibwe traversed from the Atlantic coast to present-day Minnesota by the mid-1600s and to Red Lake by the mid-1700s. By 1770, the shores of Red Lake were considered Ojibwe territory, with the tribe having settled lands previously occupied by the Dakota Sioux (Treuer 2015, 9). At Red Lake, the Ojibwe lived in the place their prophets told them about—the “place with food that grows on water”—making a home in the land of wild rice, a sacred food of the Ojibwe. Historically, the villages of Red Lake were not unified into one cohesive political unit or under one leader, although US officials considered all of the villages to be a single political entity (Treuer 2015, 22). A series of nineteenth-century treaties made between this newly unified tribe diminished Red Lake Ojibwe land holdings. Later, when the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 and the Nelson Act of 1889 sought to break up remaining collectively held reservation lands into private allotments, Red Lake leaders successfully resisted. As a result, the Red Lake Ojibwe lost much of their traditional land holdings, and the reservation was and remains “closed,” meaning all land within reservation boundaries is held in common by tribal members, with no private land ownership. The rejection of private land ownership illustrates the Ojibwe belief that land cannot be privately “owned” by an individual because of its importance to other humans and nonhuman relatives. Furthermore, unlike reservations that were broken up by private land holdings, Red Lake’s land base has been kept intact, thereby contributing to the tribe’s ability to keep Ojibwe language, traditions, and culture alive. Today, the Red Lake Reservation is one of several Ojibwe communities across the Great Lakes region and one of seven Ojibwe reservations within Minnesota (Figure 30.1). The tribe currently has 12,000 enrolled members, about 6,000 of which live on the reservation. All members have the right to collect food on the reservation, so the Red Lake Ojibwe food sovereignty project serves as a source of knowledge to them or Ojibwe more broadly who want to learn about traditional foodways.

Red Lake Ojibwe food sovereignty and traditional foodways Because the Ojibwe have moved across the continent over centuries, their foodways varied depending on seasonal availability. What is compelling, especially within this traditional foodways project, is that the Ojibwe were told by their spiritual leaders to move to where food grows on water, or where manoomin (wild rice) grows. Thus, food is not only a means of subsistence, it plays an important role in the reason why the Ojibwe came to the Great Lakes area and is a significant part of their cultural identity. Migration is a fundamental part of Ojibwe understandings of what it means to be a people. Traditionally, the Ojibwe were semi-nomadic, following animals and plants throughout the seasons as part of a well-adapted strategy of not only subsisting on the land but thriving upon it. Although they lived part of the year at Red Lake—where manoomin (wild rice) does not readily grow—they still harvested it in other parts of traditional Ojibwe territories during late summer and early fall. 492

The Hoofed Clan story and storywork

Area of Detail

Legend Red Lake Reservation Water

Ponemah

Little Rock

Redby

Red Lake

Figure 30.1 Map showing major holdings of Red Lake Reservation Map in Minnesota, USA. Source: Background map courtesy of FreeVectorMaps.com.

From their first occupations of Red Lake into the 1800s, Red Lake Ojibwe used the abundant resources of the area. They hunted buffalo, elk, deer, and woodland caribou (Treuer 2015, 36). They also fished, gathered wild foods, and harvested wild rice. Prior to European influence, farming was practiced, but not at a large scale (Kugel 1998, 35). Ojibwe women planted their family’s gardens in the spring after they arrived at their summer homes, and they grew corn, beans, and squash (Densmore 1929). Potatoes and turnips were later introduced by traders (Kugel 1998, 35). If not eaten fresh, dried vegetables were placed in makuks or birch bark containers and stored for later use in caches 6 feet deep (David Manuel, personal communication, 2019). Food was shared through family networks, as reflected in the Hoofed Clan story and, by the early 1700s, was also used as a commodity in trade with settlers (Raster and Hill 2017). Beginning in the early nineteenth century, farming was practiced at a larger scale, meaning larger than family garden plots, after Anglo settlers moved into and colonized the area, forcing the Red Lake Ojibwe to become more sedentary (Treuer 2015, 37). The soil on the western part of the Red Lake reservation is rich with nitrates, making it a favorable environment for agriculture, especially cereal grains (Treuer 2015, 37). Agricultural surpluses were such that, during the winter of 1842, the community was able to feed 50 Ojibwe families from other Ojibwe communities who came to Red Lake over the winter (Treuer 2015, 38). Today, some Red Lake families continue to practice commercial farming.

Project theory and method The theory and method of Indigenous archaeology are emergent and have yet to be completely defined (Atalay 2006; Nicholas 2008). In part, this is due to Indigenous archaeology being “contextualized by the needs, values, and critiques of Indigenous peoples,” which exhibit great diversity around the globe (Nicholas 2008). As a result, some archaeologists argue for multiple Indigenous archaeologies rather than a single archaeology because the plurality recognizes the differences between Indigenous cultures throughout space and time (Nicholas 2008; Wobst 2010). Such interpretations of Indigenous archaeology require that each project should have its own contextualized method and theory in which the appropriate Indigenous worldview is 493

Ashleigh BigWolf Thompson and Tristan Reader

centered. Taking up this approach, I built upon previous work by Anishinaabe scholars to create an Ojibwe theoretical framework with which to interpret the research I conducted for the Red Lake traditional foods project (Atalay 2006; Simpson 2017; Vizenor 1999). Indigenous archaeology often involves decentering western ways of knowing and instead centering Indigenous ways of knowing (Atalay 2006; Nicholas 2008; Smith 2012). Western thought contains differing values, epistemologies, and ontologies than Indigenous thought, and therefore western theories are not adequate for Indigenous projects that seek to study Indigenous understandings of the world (Harris 2005; Smith 2012). In other words, western approaches to and conceptions of food are inadequate for explaining Ojibwe connections to food. So what is Ojibwe theory? And what parts of Ojibwe theory should be used for this research? Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, one of the leading Ojibwe theorists of our time, adopts Nishnaabewin (Ojibwe intelligence) as her theory of choice (Simpson 2017). She states that Nishnaabewin is “all of the associated practices, knowledge, and ethics that make us Nishinaabeg and construct the Nishinaabeg world” (2017, 23). Thus, Nishnaabewin is a theoretical framework that makes the Ojibwe a coherent cultural entity and that creates the Ojibwe worldview. Nishnaabewin is Ojibwe ontology, epistemology, and axiology. Furthermore, Simpson writes that “[Ojibwe] ethical intelligence is ongoing; it is not a series of teachings or laws or protocols; it is a series of practices that are adaptable and to some degree fluid” (Simpson 2017, 24). Importantly, Nishnaabewin is adaptable, meaning that it is useful to use on a project-to-project basis and throughout changing times. During a time when Ojibwe foodways have been severely impacted by settler colonialism, Nishnaabewin is adaptable and capable of recognizing traditional Ojibwe foods as Ojibwe foods. Like western iterations of practice and performance theory (Bourdieu 1977, 18; Giddens 1984, 189), the framework of Nishinaabeg highlights the importance of bodily acts of doing. Thus, this project utilizes Nishnaabewin as a theory for using lived experience as a framework for interpreting the interviews I conducted with Ojibwe people. Accordingly, my analysis focuses on the hunting, gathering, fishing, and planting practices of these individuals, as well as the ways in which these foods are prepared and consumed. Further, the importance of traditional foodways to the community can be determined from asking those who participate in these ways why they are significant to the Red Lake community. In applying this theoretical approach and developing this research project, the Red Lake THPO was particularly enthusiastic about the interview portion of the project. They envisioned a collection of interviews from tribal members, especially elders, as one of the project’s deliverables to the tribe. Interviews with tribal members are important to Red Lake Nation for two primary reasons. First, over the last few decades, many of our elders have walked on. Thus, there is a sense of urgency in preserving elders’ knowledge for generations of future Red Lake community members to come. Second, like many Indigenous cultures across the world, the Ojibwe utilize oral tradition to pass on knowledge (Peacock and Wisuri 2009, 28; Thomas 2005, 183). Therefore, a significant and culturally appropriate method for this project that fits within a Nishnaabewin theoretical framework is to talk with elders and other knowledgeable community members who are willing to share what they know about traditional foods. Indigenous peoples across the world use oral tradition as a way to transmit knowledge, so within an Indigenous research paradigm, storywork is a crucial method for gathering and transmitting information (Kovach 2009; Thomas 2005; Wilson 2008; Archibald and De Santolo 2019). “The story is both method and meaning, and is the central feature of Indigenous research and knowledge methodologies” (Smith 2012, 146). For Ojibwe, it is no different: 494

The Hoofed Clan story and storywork

In Ojibwe culture, while certain people have greater access to some forms of knowledge than others, there remains a sense that knowledge, particularly that related to our history, is shared by the community. . . . It is passed from elders to youth, via the oral tradition through face-to-face interactions and in daily life practice. (Atalay 2006, 296–297) Within Ojibwe epistemology, knowledge is intergenerational and collective. Moreover, it is enacted through practice. This fits well within the broader conceptions of what Deborah McGregor calls verb-based Indigenous Knowledge (IK). IK is not just “knowledge” per se. It is the lives lived by people and their particular relationship with Creation. . . . Indigenous Knowledge cannot be separated from the people who hold and practice it, nor can it be separated from the land/environment/ Creation. (McGregor 2004, 390) Thus, for this project that falls within Nishnaabewin, storywork and the oral tradition is the most culturally appropriate method aligned with Ojibwe axiology and methodology with the goal of creating resources that support the practices—the verbs—of Ojibwe food sovereignty. Although interviews may contain stories, interviewing is not synonymous with storytelling. In fact, the interview process is much different than if I were to listen to an elder tell a story in a traditional Ojibwe setting. For example, within a traditional setting, I would not approach an honored elder with a typed list of questions, recorders in hand, expecting them to answer all of my questions in one interview that was directed by me. Traditionally, when I talk to my elders, I have no authority over what information they choose to share or how they choose to share it with me. Additionally, as far as recording or writing things down, I have been told by an elder to stop writing notes and pay attention. Thus, the research process I use for this project is not “traditional” in the strictest sense. Indeed, it shifts some of the power to decide what information is deemed “important” from the elders to me as “researcher” in ways that are complex and fraught. Coast Salish scholar Robina Anne Thomas addresses some of these complexities: When I began to transcribe the tapes, I even wondered if the oral and written were contradictory. But, as with everything, times change, and in order for Indigenous people to have their stories and voices validated, they have had to adapt and write down their experiences, while at the same time maintaining the integrity of the stories. (Thomas 2005, 184) As she notes, times change and Indigenous people, including Indigenous scholars like myself, must adapt. Therefore, in the interviews used for this project, I asked guiding questions in order to collect knowledge about traditional foods. I also recorded the interviews for the purpose of using the interviewee’s own words, rather than my own, in this project. Within Indigenous food sovereignty, story is a significant aspect of knowledge transfer. Thus, by utilizing Ojibwe theory that comes from teachings from the Hoof Clan story, as well as using oral tradition to document traditional foodways as a method, this project is one example of how IFS research can and is done. In other words, storytelling is a fundamental part of IFS because it is a fundamental aspect of Indigenous culture and knowledge. For this chapter, I synthesized interviews with tribal members to demonstrate three additional key themes that are within the larger Indigenous food sovereignty discussion. 495

Ashleigh BigWolf Thompson and Tristan Reader

Red Lake Ojibwe food sovereignty and the broad themes of Indigenous food sovereignty Good relations with all of our relatives The Ojibwe believe that everything—humans, animals, plants, landforms, water, celestial bodies, everything—is alive with a spirit, equal with all other creations, and related (L. D. Harris and Wasilewski 2004; H. Harris 2005). In the broadest and most traditional sense, the word Anishinaabe means “The People” and refers to human, animals, and plant persons (Peacock and Wisuri 2009). In fact, many Ojibwe refer to animals as our elder siblings. This understanding of animals as kin is first laid out in the Ojibwe creation story. Because animals were created before humans, they are considered our direct ancestors from whom we learn important lessons about the world (Broker 1983; Dumont 1999; Peacock and Wisuri 2009). Furthermore, our animal kin gave us their names and powers. These names and abilities were given to particular groups of people, who are the ancestors of our contemporary clans or dodems (Broker 1983). The interrelationships and kinship between all living things guide how Ojibwe treat their relations throughout the world. Ojibwe Elder James Dumont states that The relationship Anishinaabe people feel toward the world around them is one that is personal and is expressed as kinship. Kinship extends far beyond the human family and makes for an appreciation of the world that is cooperative, caring, and interconnected. All things in creation are related. (1999) It is because we are related to plants and animal life that we are taught to treat them with care, kindness, and equality (Dumont 1999). Because we consider everything family, we treat everything as such. Animals and plants are simultaneously family and food and are treated with kindness and care. This ethic reflects a key theme of IFS more broadly—within kinship relations, principles and practices of reciprocity, obligation, and responsibility are central. This stands in contrast to the broader FS movement, in which the assertion of rights stands as much more central than the embracing of our kinship obligations. Respecting the land and everything on it is an important component of traditional Ojibwe foodways and was discussed during interviews for the project. One of the staff members of the Red Lake local foods program, David Manuel, stated that as a leader and decision maker of the tribal gardens, he intentionally chooses organically certified, non-GMO seeds because he believes that utilizing organic plants is one way to be a good steward of the earth. If he did not use such seeds, he fears that he would potentially harm humans, animals, and the water. Thus, not only is he looking out for human health but the health of the water and our animal relatives. Another example of having good relations with our animal relatives is that of the walleye population collapse in Red Lake during the mid-1990s. In his interview, David Manuel said that the reason the walleye population collapsed was because tribal members took advantage of the gift of walleye and were not respectful of those gifts, as evidenced by overfishing. In another interview, Vicky Fineday spoke about the walleye population collapse similarly to David Manuel and blamed the collapse on the greed of tribal members who overharvested walleye to make a profit. Whereas western approaches advocate for natural resource management based upon an ethic in which humans seek to control the natural world, Ojibwe conceptions focus on rebuilding an intimate kinship relationship in which the walleye—as well as the waterways, plants, insects, and 496

The Hoofed Clan story and storywork

landscapes—are partners in the process of seeking wholeness. Like the Ojibwe in the Hoof Clan story, the Red Lake Ojibwe were greedy with the walleye and took more than they needed. As a result, the walleye population collapsed, and tribal members, as well as the tribal fishery business, suffered as a result. This relational understanding of food sovereignty in which the Ojibwe must maintain good relations with our relatives is also a broader theme of IFS. Rather than considering food as a right, food is based on reciprocity and respect. When we do not respect our relatives, dire consequences occur to everyone in the circle of life. Another way in which Red Lake Ojibwe engage in respectful relations with the land and its floral and faunal inhabitants is by giving thanks. Shirley Lussier said that she puts out tobacco before going into the woods to harvest wild animals or plants in order to give thanks for the medicine and food that plants and animals provide, which is common practice among Ojibwe from many different communities. Vicky Fineday stated that she wants to teach her children to give thanks and to only take as much food as they need. Further, she wants to teach the future generations that they should not take animals as trophies and to never waste what they take. This concept of “enoughness,” of only taking what you need without greed or pride, is a traditional teaching she wants passed on. These values and practices articulated by community members are vital to traditional Ojibwe foodways, and interviewees expressed the hope that Red Lake children are taught these ways. Within the broader IFS movement, placing the values of relationality at the forefront of traditional foodways work is a key element of implementing food sovereignty.

Wellness and community health When asked why traditional foods are important to Red Lake Ojibwe, poor health of the contemporary Red Lake reservation community emerged as a common theme. For example, David Manuel attributed poor health on the reservation directly to processes of colonization. As Ojibwe lands were taken and our foodways were negatively impacted, he noted, the federal government gave the Red Lake Ojibwe commodity foods through programs like the USDA’s Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). The foods for these programs were selected from commodities purchased by the USDA as a part of price-support programs for large-scale producers. As such, the foods distributed to tribes were not selected for their nutrition quality or cultural appropriateness. David Manuel and many others believe that, as a result, these foods have contributed to poor health—including diabetes, obesity, and heart disease—throughout Native American tribes. Indeed, he believes that commodity foods were a major contributor to poor health of the Red Lake community, along with the loss of our land and, thus, the loss of our ability to practice traditional foodways. Two other interviewees also mentioned that they see many health problems in the community that are related to diet. Both Shirley Lussier and Vicky Fineday mentioned processed foods, which they say are unhealthy. They said that these foods have chemicals, additives, preservatives, pesticides, and herbicides. Therefore, part of what makes traditional food healthy is what is not in them compared to the things that are in nontraditional, processed foods. Delving deeper, Vicky mentioned that it is easy to buy processed foods, whereas when she was younger, they went outside and worked to harvest their food. Thus, a key element that is missing from store-bought food is the absence of relationship. By not partaking in the act of harvesting and producing food, humans are disconnected and not in relationship with their food. Indigenous food sovereignty looks at food in terms of relationship rather than under the lens of capitalism that global food sovereignty uses. Thus, the loss of the relationship between the people and the sources of food is thought to contribute to a loss of health. 497

Ashleigh BigWolf Thompson and Tristan Reader

According to Shirley, not only does consuming traditional foods make people physically healthy, the act of participating in gathering traditional foods also contributes to wellness more broadly. She points out that harvesting gives people exercise, joy, and fresh air. Thus, traditional foodways impact more than just physical health; it impacts our mental and emotional health as well. This holistic view of wellness is a crucial aspect of IFS across communities. The ongoing processes of colonization have taken away the ability of Red Lake Ojibwe to practice traditional foodways and have introduced new foods that are unhealthy. These unhealthy foods have resulted in diet-related diseases that are killing community members at higher rates than ever before. However, the process of reclaiming and rebuilding Ojibwe food systems—of asserting Ojibwe food sovereignty—is seen as an opportunity to address health disparities. Interviewees believe the community needs to consume less store-bought, processed foods and return to traditional foodways. This, in turn, requires the revitalization of Ojibwe foodways in order to benefit tribal members’ physical health, as well as improve our emotional and mental health by creating happiness when we harvest, demonstrating an ethic of care based upon our kinship relationship with the land, water, animals, and plants of Ojibwe aki. Centering the health and wellness of humans and nonhuman relatives is an important component of Ojibwe food sovereignty and IFS more broadly. Indigenous people recognize that the way food is harvested and produced not only impacts human life span and physical health but affects all elements of our wellness, including the mental, emotional, and spiritual. Furthermore, the way food is harvested and produced impacts not only humans but impacts the land and every being on it, which is a more interconnected view of how foodways touch all aspects of life on earth, not just humanlife. This interconnected framework of looking at how people and our relationship with food goes beyond humans differs from global sovereignty, which takes into consideration only humans.

Cultural importance and cultural survivance Survivance is a term introduced by Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor. “Survivance is an active sense of presence, the continuation of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (Vizenor 1999, viii). In Red Lake traditional foodways practiced by the community, survivance is a main theme and a way of resistance to colonization. Colonization introduced many hardships to the Red Lake Ojibwe, which all of the interviewees discuss. These adversities include health problems related to diet, materialistic and selfish values, and loss of culture. Yet by participating in our traditional foodways and passing this knowledge on to the future generations, Red Lake Ojibwe are able to fight for our health, our values, and our culture. We practice survivance when we practice our traditional foodways. Our traditional foodways are inextricably linked to our value system and our culture. The Hoof Clan story shows us the consequences of what happens when the Ojibwe do not incorporate values of enoughness, respect, or ceremony into our food practices. Moreover, our migration prophesy and history reflect the need to find manoomin. If we forget or disregard our cultural values, practices, and duties, then humans and nonhumans become hungry and sick. Food is a gift given to us by our animal and plant relations. As the recipient of these gifts, we are responsible for keeping harmony and balance in the world that we all live in because what we do to the land inevitably impacts humans and all our other relations. Food is the reason we came to inhabit the lands we live in today. Ojibwe prophets told us to go to the place where food grows on water, and we did. In addition to traditional teachings, food plays a significant role in our ceremonies and prayers. We use our traditional foods for feasts during ceremonies, and we offer spirit plates 498

The Hoofed Clan story and storywork

as prayer and thanksgiving, acknowledging the gift of food we receive from our relations and giving back some of it to the land as thanks. In this way, traditional foods help us continue our spiritual way of life. Ojibwe food sovereignty efforts do not merely contribute to the strengthening of cultural identity and practices. Rather, they are—in part—the result of the desire and concerted effort of the community to rebuild and revitalize key elements of Ojibwe culture. In a reciprocal relationship, cultural revitalization serves as both a driver and result of Ojibwe food sovereignty efforts. This stands in contrast to the broader FS movement in which culture and identity have often been and continue to be more peripheral. For example, the Declaration of Nyeléni only uses the word “culture” once: “we value, recognize and respect our diversity of traditional knowledge, food, language and culture, and the way we organise and express ourselves” (Via Campesina 2007). Although culture and identity have taken on somewhat increased importance within the broader FS movement since 2007, it remains largely tangential to what are often articulated as more central concerns such as the critique of neoliberalism and the global food systems, the assertion of the rights of producers, and the democratization of decision making. Moreover, the efforts to increase emphasis on culture have come from Indigenous organizations, demonstrating the way in which the themes explored in this examination of Red Lake Ojibwe food sovereignty may reflect similar concerns within Indigenous communities more generally. For the Red Lake Ojibwe—as well as many Indigenous peoples—culture is not a part of food sovereignty. Rather, food sovereignty is a part of the larger effort to revitalize their place-based cultures.

Conclusion Interviews with tribal members, as well as the Hoofed Clan story itself, illustrate several elements of Ojibwe FS and the broader IFS movement. For one, stories and other traditional epistemological tools articulate Indigenous ontologies, values, and methodologies that constitute the foundation of IFS practice. For example, traditional Ojibwe values within the Hoofed Clan story such as sharing with the community, taking only as much as one needs, and engaging in ceremony are some ways in which Ojibwe FS is enacted. The oral tradition, utilized in this project and modified as interviews, is one way in which the Ojibwe—and other Indigenous communities—pass on cultural knowledge. Secondly, the relational understanding of how the Ojibwe and other Indigenous communities are in relationship with their foodways guides the way in which Indigenous people must engage with their nonhuman relatives (i.e., in respectful, reciprocal relationship). It is the obligation of Indigenous people to practice good relationships with their kin. If they do not, they, as well as their nonhuman relatives, suffer negative consequences, as seen in the collapse of the walleye population or disappearance of the hoofed kin. Thirdly, the wellness and health of humans and their relatives is a fundamental aspect of Ojibwe FS and IFS at large. When traditional foodways are not practiced according to traditional custom, all life on earth is threatened. With the health of Indigenous people and the earth in danger, practicing IFS is one way to heal our communities, relatives, lands, and waters from the impacts of colonialism. Lastly, practicing Ojibwe FS and IFS is one way in which Indigenous people revive their respective cultures. As Indigenous communities reconnect with traditional foodways, they reconnect with their nonhuman relatives, responsibilities, and traditions. By honoring their foodways, relatives, and the earth, they strengthen and restore their relationships, wellness, and livelihoods: “Thus, the hoofed animals agreed to return to Anishinaabe aki so that the Ojibwe would not starve, but only on the condition the Ojibwe would continue to honor their promises to the hoofed clan.” 499

Ashleigh BigWolf Thompson and Tristan Reader

Notes 1 This is a summary of a longer text of the Hoofed Clan story. A version of this story can be found in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s book The Gift Is In the Making (Simpson 2013), a collection of traditional Anishinaabe stories as retold by Simpson. 2 A complete examination of the vast literature FS is beyond the scope of this current chapter. For an overview of the broad FS literature, refer to Reader (2018, pp. 27–46). 3 Examples include Ávila Lozano et al. 2011; Kerssen 2015; Martiniello 2015; Kerr 2013. 4 The Declaration of Nyéléni (Via Campesina 2007), for example, uses the word “rights” 12 times while referring to relationships (solely between people) only once, and never referring to responsibilities, obligations nor accountability. 5 The Red Lake Traditional Foodways Project was conducted by co-author Ashleigh Thompson, who uses a first-person narrative to describe her research.

References cited Archibald, Jo-Ann, Jenny Lee-Morgan, and Jason De Santolo. 2019. Decolonizing Research : Indigenous Storywork as Methodology. London: Zed Books. Arquette, Mary, and Maxine Cole Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment. 2004. “Restoring Our Relationship for the Future.” In In the Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects, and Globalization, edited by Mario Blaser, Harvey A Feit, and Glenn McRae, 332–350. London: Zed Books. Atalay, Sonya. 2006. “Indigenous Archaeology as Decolonizing Practice.” The American Indian Quarterly 30 (3): 280–310. Ávila Lozano, Dana Rocío, Peter Michael Rosset, Braulio Machín Sosa, and Adilén María Roque Jaime. 2011. “The Campesino-to-Campesino Agroecology Movement of ANAP in Cuba: Social Process Methodology in the Construction of Sustainable Peasant Agriculture and Food Sovereignty.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (1): 161. Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Broker, Ignatia. 1983. Night Flying Woman. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Buseck, Paul Michael. 2003. “Tohono O’odham Agriculture and Traditional Foods: Revitalizing a Community Food System to Help Prevent and Treat Diabetes.” Masters Thesis, University of California, Davis. Cohen, Rebecca Jane Caro. 2012. “Rebuilding the Himdag: The Fall and Rise of Tohono O’odham Agriculture and Foodways, 1936–2012.” Honors Thesis, Harvard College. Coté, Charlotte. 2016. “‘Indigenizing’ Food Sovereignty. Revitalizing Indigenous Food Practices and Ecological Knowledges in Canada and the United States.” Humanities 5 (3): 57. Densmore, Frances. 1929. Chippewa Customs. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Dumont, James. 1999. “Anishinaabe Izhichigaywin.” In Sacred Water: Water for Life. Lake Elmo: North American Water Office. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grey, Sam, and Raj Patel. 2015. “Food Sovereignty as Decolonization: Some Contributions from Indigenous Movements to Food System and Development Politics.” Agriculture and Human Values 32: 431–444. Gupta, Clare. 2014. “Return to Freedom: Anti-GMO Aloha ‘Āina Activism on Molokai as an Expression of Place-Based Food Sovereignty.” Globalizations 12 (4): 529–544. Harris, Heather. 2005. “Indigenous Worldviews and Ways of Knowing as Theoretical and Methodological Foundations Behind Archaeological Theory and Method.” In Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice, edited by Margaret M. Bruchac, Siobhan M. Hart, and Martin H. Wobst, 33–41. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Harris, La Donna, and Jacqueline Wasilewski. 2004. “Indigeneity, an Alternative Worldview: Four R’s (Relationship, Responsibility, Reciprocity, Redistribution).” Behavioral Science 21 (5): 489–503. Hoover, Elizabeth. 2017. “‘You Can’t Say You’re Sovereign If You Can’t Feed Yourself ’: Defining and Enacting Food Sovereignty in American Indian Community Gardening.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 41 (3): 31–70. Indian Health Service. 2012. “Diabetes in American Indians and Alaska Natives: Facts At-a-Glance.” www. ihs.gov/MedicalPrograms/Diabetes/HomeDocs/Resources/FactSheets/Fact_sheet_AIAN_508c.pdf.

500

The Hoofed Clan story and storywork Iseke, Judy. 2013. “Indigenous Storytelling as Research.” International Review of Qualitative Research 6 (4): 559–577. Kamal, Asfia Gulrukh, Rene Linklater, Shirley Thompson, and Joseph Dipple. 2015. “A Recipe for Change: Reclamation of Indigenous Food Sovereignty in O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation for Decolonization, Resource Sharing, and Cultural Restoration.” Globalizations 12 (4): 559–575. Kerr, Rachel Bezner. 2013. “Seed Struggles and Food Sovereignty in Northern Malawi.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 40 (5): 867–897. Kerssen, Tanya M. 2015. “Food Sovereignty and the Quinoa Boom: Challenges to Sustainable RePeasantisation in the Southern Altiplano of Bolivia.” Third World Quarterly 36 (3): 489–507. Kovach, Margaret. 2009. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kugel, Rebecca. 1998. To Be the Main Leaders of Our People: A History of Minnesota Ojibwe Politics, 1825– 1898. Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Lambert, Lorelei. 2014. Research for Indigenous Survival: Indigenous Research Methodologies in the Behavioral Sciences. Pablo: Salish Kootenai College Press. Mailer, Gideon A., and Nicola E. Hale. 2018. Decolonizing the Diet. Decolonizing the Diet. London: Anthem Press. Martiniello, Giuliano. 2015. “Food Sovereignty as Praxis: Rethinking the Food Question in Uganda.” Third World Quarterly 36 (3): 508–525. McGregor, Deborah. 2004. “Coming Full Circle: Indigenous Knowledge, Environment, and Our Future.” American Indian Quarterly 28 (3–4): 385–410. Murray, Tim. 2011. “Archaeologists and Indigenous People: A Maturing Relationship?” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (1): 363–378. Native Food Sovereignty Forum. 2008. “Some Principles of Native Food Sovereignty.” In Principle of Native Food Sovereignty Forum. Taos, NM. Nicholas, G P. 2008. “Native Peoples and Archaeology (Indigenous Archaeology).” In Encyclopedia of Archaeology, edited by Deborah Pearsall, 1660–1669. New York: Academic Press. Peacock, Thomas, and Marlene W isuri. 2009. Ojibwe Waasa Inaabidaa: We Look in All Directions. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Raster, Amanda, and Christina Gish Hill. 2017. “The Dispute over Wild Rice: An Investigation of Treaty Agreements and Ojibwe Food Sovereignty.” Agriculture and Human Values 34 (2): 267–281. Reader, Tristan. 1997. Recontextualizing Culture: Some Reflections on the Material Roots of Language and Culture. Sells, AZ: Tohono O’odham Community Action (TOCA). Reader, Tristan. 2018. “‘Thereby We Shall Live’: Tohono O’odham Food Sovereignty and the Confluence of Quantum Leadership, Cultural Vitality, Public Health, and Economic Hybridity.” PhD Dissertation, Coventry University (UK). Salmón, Enrique. 2012. Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2013. The Gift Is in the Making: Anishnaabeg Stories. Winnipeg: HighWater Press. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Thomas, Robina Anne. 2005. “Honoring the Oral Traditions of My Ancestors through Storytelling.” In Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous and Anti-Oppressive Approaches, edited by Leslie Brown and Susan Strega, 237–254. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Thompson, Ashleigh. 2019. “Red Lake Ojibwe Traditional Foodways and Food Sovereignty: An Analysis.” Masters Thesis, University of Arizona. Treuer, Anton. 2010. The People of Minnesota: Ojibwe in Minnesota. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Treuer, Anton. 2015. Warrior Nation: A History of the Red Lake Ojibwe. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Vansina, Jan. 1985. Oral Tradition As History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Via Campesina. 2007. “Declaration of Nyéléni.” www.nyeleni.org/spip.php?article290. Via Campesina. 2019. “Home Page.” https://viacampesina.org/. Vizenor, Gerald. 1999. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

501

Ashleigh BigWolf Thompson and Tristan Reader Watkins, Joe E. 2003. “Beyond the Margin: American Indians, First Nations, and Archaeology in North America.” American Antiquity 68 (2): 273–285. Weymouth, Adam. 2014. “When Global Warming Kills Your God.” The Atlantic, June 3, 2014. Whyte, Kyle Powys. 2016. “Indigenous Food Sovereignty, Renewal, and US Settler Colonialism.” In The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics, edited by Mary Rawlinson and Caleb Ward, 354–365. London: Routledge. Wilson, Shawn. 2008. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Windchief, Sweeney, and Timothy San Pedro, eds. 2019. Applying Indigenous Research Methods : Storying with Peoples and Communities. Milton: Routledge. Wittman, Hannah, Annette Aurelie Desmarais, and Nettie Wiebe. 2010. “The Origins & Potential of Food Sovereignty.” In Food Sovereignty: Reconnecting Food, Nature and Community, edited by Hannah Wittman, Annette Aurelie Desmarais, and Nettie Wiebe, 1–12. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Wobst, Martin H. 2010. “Indigenous Archaeologies: A Worldwide Perspective on Human Materialities and Human Rights.” In Indigenous Archaeologies: A Reader on Decolonization, edited by Margaret M. Bruchac, Siobhan M. Hart, and Martin H. Wobst, 17–28. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.

502

31 INDIGENOUS ARCHAEOLOGICAL APPROACHES AND THE REFUSAL OF COLONIALISM IN ARCHAEOLOGY Ora V. Marek-Martinez

Archaeology has been and is a tool of colonialism. The enactment of archaeological research to claim and create nationalistic heritage has been used as justificatory action to displace Indigenous perspectives and interpretations of the past. Although in the past 20 years archaeologists have attempted to decolonize archaeology, it may be a feat that is never fully actualized (Schneider and Hayes 2020). However, the premise of Indigenous archaeology—the integration of Indigenous knowledge into archaeological research—has been integral to rebuilding trust and relationships between Indigenous groups and archaeologists and has resulted in new perspectives of the past (e.g., Gonzalez 2016; Gonzalez et al. 2018; Montgomery and Fowles 2020; Nelson 2020; Schneider and Hayes 2020). Sonya Atalay (2012) discusses the analogy of “braiding” these knowledges together to create frameworks to dismantle colonially constructed histories, which has been a very effective approach to investigating the past with Indigenous peoples and communities. Indigenous archaeology disrupts these narratives and creates the space to center particular tribal lifeways that enable Tribal Nations to engage in culturally appropriate ways of investigating the past, an act of reclaiming the “cultural archive” (Smith 2012) and the archaeological record. Through such liberatory acts, archaeologists then have the ability to create critical sites of pedagogy within archaeology in order to transform it into a healing and regenerative process through the articulation of Indigenous archaeology in the twenty-first century with, by, and for Indigenous people. By enacting an Indigenous archaeology research paradigm, Indigenous communities are using archaeology in ways that benefit not only them but also archaeologists, which begins to transform the praxis of archaeology. Western research has relied on the mechanisms of colonialism to support, uphold, and justify notions about Indigenous peoples and their pasts that result in the displacement of Indigenous voices and perspectives in the past. This has perpetuated harmful ideologies that continue to pervade the research and investigation of and about Indigenous peoples in archaeological research (e.g., Schneider and Hayes 2020). Here, I will discuss four ideological concepts based in colonialism that have infiltrated the archaeology of Indigenous peoples and that contribute to displacing Indigenous voices and participation in archaeological research. Indigenous archaeology can be and has been invoked as a way to address these issues and to overcome the colonizing tendencies of archaeology to create the space needed for an Indigenous research 503

Ora V. Marek-Martinez

paradigm that includes the added dimensions of “survivance” and “futurisms” to create pathways to the future. The inclusion of Indigenous cultural knowledge into archaeological methods and interpretations and into heritage management practices has the potential to overcome the colonialist roots of archaeology and to engage archaeology in a way that both involves Indigenous peoples directly and provides a way for Indigenous culture and values to be used in piecing together the past. So how does/can Indigenous archaeology actually address these issues? Based on my own personal experience, I contend that there are four approaches that can be applied to archaeological research that can assist with decolonizing and Indigenizing the archaeological process. These include (1) archaeology from the tamina (Nez Perce word for “heart” that refers to the creation of the Nez Perce People through the blood of the heart of the Monster) traditions that have formed the foundation of how I approach research and community work, which is almost the opposite of an objective approach; (2) creating an Indigenous research paradigm that centers Indigenous cultural beliefs and traditions that can be applied to specific groups and communities; (3) adding humanistic value into hard science, specifically humanizing archaeological interpretations from processually based research that has displaced Indigenous agency and participation in archaeology; and (4) shifting from the focus on questions and research that centers colonial concerns, such as the origins of Indigenous peoples—who got here first, who owns the past—and the ability to create new cultures that are separate from the existence and history of Tribal Nations (e.g. Anasazi, Paleoindian, Basketmaker, etc.). The work that I completed while working as an archaeologist for the Navajo Nation has provided me with the experience and awareness of the possibilities of Indigenous archaeology, particularly in envisioning the possibility of a Nihook’aa Dine’e’ Bila’ Ashdlaa’ii archaeology, or an archaeology of the Navajo People. The experiences and work completed at the Navajo Nation will guide the discussion of these ideologies and the approaches taken in creating a Nihook’aa Dine’e’ Bila’ Ashdlaa’ii archaeology. Imagining and envisioning the possibilities of archaeological futurisms in research with Indigenous communities offers archaeologists the opportunity to change the praxis of archaeology in a way that promises a new and collaborative future for archaeology, one that is inclusive of other perspectives and one that breaks from its roots in colonialism.

The colonialism of archaeology Archaeology has played a key role in the technologies of colonialism in the United States and across the globe, and in particular against Indigenous peoples. The development of archaeology as a discipline in the United States has been upon the bodies, bones, and material culture of Indigenous peoples. The development of theories and methodologies that were used in the field and in the interpretations of archaeological research have since been used to justify the alienation and displacement of Indigenous peoples, both in the past and in recreating the past. Numerous archaeologists have discussed the implications of colonial agendas in the archaeology of Indigenous peoples and the resulting implications of this work on contemporary Indigenous peoples (see Ferguson 1996; Trigger 1980; McGuire 1992). Contemporary forms of colonialism within archaeology are nuanced and take shape in the form of exclusionary and isolationist practices in research, writing, and publication, in hiring practices, and in the acceptance of Indigenous archaeology. These forms of colonialism are a part of those identified by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) and are personal observations based on my own experiences as an Indigenous archaeologist and as an Indigenous woman. These are not the only forms of colonialism that have infiltrated 504

The refusal of colonialism in archaeology

archaeological research. I posit that there are four concepts steeped in colonialism that have prevented the participation of Indigenous peoples in archaeological research and that deny a place in archaeological practice for Indigenous peoples. These concepts are: the use of “hard science” equates to valid archaeological interpretations and practices; there is a need to separate cultural beliefs from science and, more specifically, archaeology; objectivity is critical in archaeological practice and interpretations, and therefore, cultural knowledge should not be used in the research process; and finally, archaeology can create or rather trumps Indigenous knowledge about the past, and archaeological research can be undertaken without Indigenous participation. These ideologies have upheld and perpetuated archaeological praxis that continues to justify colonialism in all of its forms within and throughout the discipline. Western-based science has created a cultural archive or a sort of system of best practices of science and research rules that are upheld as the standard by which all research is measured; it is also seen as the only valid way of learning and understanding phenomena (Smith 2012; Wilson 2008). These theories and methods are taught to each new generation of scientists entering western institutions of higher education, and in fact, students must demonstrate that they are proficient in knowing and practicing these theories and methods in order to graduate and become practitioners. Some of the main principles of this training is that hard science is the only approach that will produce valid knowledge; and without the application of western based scientific methods, the resulting knowledge is unreliable and therefore questionable. Within this framework, Indigenous-based methodologies and theories are seen as less valid and lacking the rigor and structure of western-based theories and methods. Using this justification, archaeologists have prevented the use of Indigenous-based knowledge from being used in the archaeological process, which has resulted in the lack of Indigenous participation in archaeology. Within the United States, the number of Indigenous peoples with a PhD in archaeology is approximately 33 people (Gonzalez and Marek-Martinez 2019). These figures demonstrate that Indigenous people in the United States—and elsewhere—are interested in archaeology but continue to be under-represented in the upper levels of the profession, such as tenure-stream professors, CRM principal investigators, and museum curators. This pattern creates a paradox in which Indigenous archaeologists are forced to participate in a system in which non-Indigenous scholars continue to set the agenda. Indigenous knowledge about the deep past is often questioned, including the transmission of cultural knowledge from one generation to the next, which creates a need for validation of this knowledge through the application of hard science to investigate. The continuing colonization of archaeological knowledge further replicates these systems of denial and displacement and Indigenous peoples’ participation and voices in the archaeological record. The second colonialist ideology that displaces Indigenous participation and voices is the need to separate cultural beliefs from science, more specifically archaeology. Based on the rules of the western cultural archive, knowledge and practices that fall outside of the accepted norms of western research are by default unstable and in need of verification and validation, including Indigenous knowledge systems. This tends to be an oft-cited response to the denial of Indigenous archaeology as a valid part of archaeology (see, for example, McGhee 2008, 2010) and has become a staunch point of contention among archaeologists and Indigenous peoples. This also relates to the standard of maintaining an objective perspective when conducting archaeological research and in western-based research in general. According to the systems of western-based research, maintaining an objective perspective in research is essential to achieving valid research results; however, this is often at the expense of what is known as “other” or “alternative” knowledge systems (Deloria 1995). Within Indigenous communities, cultural knowledge systems and cultural practices are the foundation of their daily lives and in many communities are integrated into programs, 505

Ora V. Marek-Martinez

departments, and daily work. These practices are a critical part of systems enacted within their daily lives and help communities heal and plan; it also creates ways of being and ways of knowing that are then replicated each generation. The thought of separating cultural knowledge and practices from everyday life, including from land management and stewardship, is egregious. Therefore, asking Indigenous peoples to leave culture from research about and on the cultural landscape and about the deep past is nonnegotiable for Indigenous peoples. In my work as the Navajo Nation Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, there were several times that negotiations with federal agency personnel included asking us to remove our cultural teachings and beliefs and to be objective in our work together, to see it as “just land.” These dismissals and requests contributed to a divisive environment, and one that ended many times with people walking away. It became clear after many of these same types of meeting that nothing would change for the Navajo people if they could not get past this simple fact: that our culture was and is the cultural landscape. Cultural knowledge and cultural practices are embedded in everything; they create the protocols that guide the work that is completed with, by, and for the community. The third colonial-based ideology is the idea that objectivity is critical in archaeological practice and interpretations; therefore, cultural knowledge should not be used in the research process. Similar to the second ideology, this one is also steeped in the belief that objectivity is achievable and all-important in archaeological research. This idea has created disciplinary standards that deny these “other” and “alternative” knowledges, therefore making them unusable or, in worst cases, seeing them as myth and superstition. This idea has been replicated in western educational institutions and in the training of archaeologists and other scholars, who have normalized the exclusion of Indigenous peoples and knowledge systems from research. The application of Indigenous archaeology within the larger discipline has been more methodologically based and focused more on the where, how, and why of collaborative research (e.g. Colwell 2016; Colwell-Chanthaponh et al. 2009; Colwell and Ferguson 2007; McNiven 2016; Watkins and Nicholas 2014). There has, however, been a hesitancy to consider or investigate the impacts of avoiding Indigenous cultural beliefs and practices in archaeological research. Is it truly Indigenous archaeology when Indigenous knowledge systems are excluded from research? If not, then can archaeology ever be decolonized or Indigenized? How can archaeologists really engage in an archaeology with, by, and for Indigenous communities without engaging with Indigenous knowledge systems in their research? Indigenous peoples have discussed and published about the importance of their cultural knowledge being used in their research, not only in field research (e.g., Gonzalez et al. 2018; Gonzalez 2016; Gonzalez et al. 2006) but also in guiding and shaping research design (e.g., Smith 2012; Wilson 2008; Kovach 2010) and with dissemination of information to communities (e.g., Atalay 2007, 2012; Atalay and Swogger 2017). The distancing and exclusion of Indigenous knowledge systems in western research and within academic institutions reinforces the idea that these systems are inferior or should be used in a supplemental fashion rather than leading research. These attitudes toward other or alternative knowledge systems are replicated in each generation of researchers and practitioners, furthering the divide between Indigenous peoples and archaeologists. The fourth and final colonialist ideology is that archaeology and archaeologists can create knowledge about the Indigenous past, and this can be undertaken without Indigenous participation. Since the inception of archaeology in the United States, there has been an acknowledgement that archaeologists can and should create knowledge about Indigenous pasts that is considered fact. Although Indigenous peoples have historically been involved in the archaeological process, their contributions have remained more anecdotal in nature, they are a part of the labor needed on site, or they have been employed as cultural or site monitors. The reluctance to integrate Indigenous knowledge systems into archaeological praxis has been a contentious point 506

The refusal of colonialism in archaeology

amongst archaeologists and Indigenous communities and presents a host of problems for those participating in community-based projects (see Jackson and Smith 2005; Smith and Jackson 2006). The unwillingness of archaeologists to participate in or to utilize Indigenous knowledge has had the ability to stop research and work with Indigenous communities. During my time working for the Navajo Nation, for example, our offers to assist in Indigenizing archaeological work or provide our own Diné archaeologists were met with refusals and admonishment that Indigenous archaeology was not an option for this project due to budgetary, time, or personnel restrictions. This resulted in archaeological research that ignores Diné concerns and knowledge about the deep past and ultimately leads to the displacement of Diné people in the archaeological narrative of the Southwest (Marek-Martinez 2016). In many Indigenous communities, the legacy of archaeological research is negative and has created many stereotypes about what archaeology is and how it is carried out with Indigenous communities, one of the main issues usually being that oral histories and knowledge are ignored or seen as lacking authority or validity by archaeologists (Lowie 1915; Mason 2000; for discussion of the tensions, see Deloria 1995; Whiteley 2002). This attitude has been prevalent in archaeology based in colonial nations and within the wider academic community. The use of certain types of archaeological theory and methodologies in the investigation of the deep past in the United States can serve to displace the humanistic aspect of archaeological research and further remove Indigenous peoples from the past. In processually based research, for example, the theories and methodologies are divorced from personal agency and are ill equipped to explain or to tell the story of Indigenous pasts. The ideology that science alone can tell the story of Indigenous peoples in the deep past stems from colonialist ideologies that position western knowledge as superior and therefore true above all other forms of knowledge or of talking about the deep past (Deloria 1995; Marek-Martinez 2016). The continued use and implementation of these ideologies in research and in training has worked to create a divisive environment for Indigenous archaeologists. These ideologies have been justified and replicated throughout the academy and upheld in research about Indigenous pasts, which has then served to displace Indigenous peoples’ knowledge and participation in the investigation of the past. Indigenous archaeologists have provided multiple sources discussing this relationship and legacy and are pushing for a place within the discipline for Indigenous archaeology. However, with the continued use of these colonial-based ideologies in archaeological research, it seems that there may not actually be a space for Indigenous archaeology unless other ideologies are integrated in archaeology that center Indigenous ways of knowing and being, especially when it relates to land stewardship and heritage management.

Indigenous archaeology and refusing colonialism in archaeology Integration of Indigenous cultures and knowledge into archaeology and heritage management addresses these ideologies and provides a way for Indigenous knowledge systems to be used in piecing together the past. The implementation of Indigenous-based praxis in archaeology has created opportunities for research that are beneficial to both Indigenous communities and archaeologists, such as the use of cultural protocols in archaeological research, creating and using an Indigenous research paradigm to guide research, humanizing archaeology, and a conscious shift to centering Indigenous concerns and questions and away from colonially based research questions. Utilizing such approaches in archaeological research will change the praxis of archaeology to praxis that is inclusive, innovative, and meaningful to all who are involved in the archaeological process. There is much to be gained in strengthening Indigenous participation 507

Ora V. Marek-Martinez

and voices when investigating the past; the loss of colonial-centered research and training is really what is at stake for archaeology, and archaeologists must make very conscious decisions about how and why they are interested in investigating Indigenous pasts if we are to change the way that archaeology is completed. In taking a deeper look at the ways that Indigenous archaeology can address these issues, I have used my own cultural teachings and knowledge systems to provide a framework that assists me when investigating Indigenous pasts. I have applied these approaches in the work that I completed while working for the Navajo Nation between the years 1999 and 2016 and in other Indigenous archaeological research that I have been engaged in throughout my career. One of these approaches is taken from my teachings by my elders and communities and is an archaeology from the tamina (Nez Perce word for “heart”) traditions. This approach is more aptly described as using the foundation of cultural knowledge and other knowledge systems that have assisted you throughout your life and have guided you to a particular place and time to complete the work that is necessary. This approach requires thoughtful planning, establishing and maintaining respectful and reciprocal relationships, and speaking from the heart—or being open and honest when speaking and remembering that your words hold power. When working with Indigenous communities, I engaged with elders and cultural knowledge holders in this way and participated in protocols as a sign of respect and collaboration. The relationships that I established with Diné communities were the foundation of later work and trust and were something that has shaped community participation in archaeological research. This approach is quite different from a western-based archaeology that focuses on the need for objectivity on the part of the investigator and within the research process. Archaeology from the tamina is similar to the heart-centered approach described in Kisha Supernant, Jane Eva Baxter, Natasha Lyons, and Sonya Atalay’s recent volume Archaeologies of the Heart (2020). The approaches described in the book, an integrated and responsive approach to archaeology, acknowledge the need to build and nurture relationships with communities and build on current iterations of Indigenous archaeological approaches, in particular the need for additional rigor in research. Archaeology from the tamina is a culturally centered and embedded approach that can be tailored to Indigenous communities and invokes cultural practices and an Indigenous research paradigm specifically designed to fit the histories and practices of a specific community. When these approaches are implemented in research, it moves away from being a solely scientific process and becomes an engaged, responsible, and reciprocal approach to investigating and learning about the past. This also involves a movement toward decolonizing research and becoming an Indigenized approach that invokes a relational and experiential approach to working and learning about the past with Indigenous communities. Creating an Indigenous research paradigm that centers Indigenous cultural beliefs and traditions is an integral part of this approach. Indigenous research paradigms have been described in depth by Indigenous scholars as a way to overcome the colonialist roots of research that have been taught to Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars in the past 20 years (see Atalay 2006, 2012; Harris 2005; Kovach 2010; Smith 2012; Wilson 2008). These paradigms have integrated aspects of Indigenous knowledge systems and activities that help initiate healing, transformation, and innovation for, with, and by Indigenous peoples in the research that is undertaken with Indigenous peoples. These research paradigms have created space within western disciplines for the integration of ways of being and knowing that are a part of the everyday lives of Indigenous peoples, such as the enactment of protocols and ceremony in research. Within an archaeology of the tamina, this adds a dimension of sacredness to approaching research that can be likened to a form of objectivity. There also exists a cultural archive (Smith 2012) for Indigenous knowledge, and the rules associated with ceremonial knowledge are applied to research, so that there are 508

The refusal of colonialism in archaeology

observances made within the research process to comply with these rules. Although to many western-trained scholars this may seem like the end of science as we know it, there are systematic approaches built into Indigenous knowledge systems that have recently begun to inform research, such as the use of “Traditional Ecological Knowledge” or TEK in the environmental and natural sciences (Menzies 2006; Nelson and Shilling 2018). These types of knowledge systems can change the way that humanity understands the world around them and adds value to other fields as well (Wyte 2020; Whyte et al. 2016). Adding humanistic value into science strikes at the colonial foundation of archaeology and opens the discipline to considering other forms of knowledge and ways of learning about phenomena. Humanizing archaeology from its tendencies toward ignoring other knowledge systems and moving away from research that has displaced Indigenous participation in archaeology is a critical part of Indigenous archaeology. Research about the human past should create a space for the multiple stories held by different communities; the belief that there is one version of the past is ignoring the diverse complexity and nuanced nature of the deep past. Adding the dimensions of human agency and Indigenous knowledge to archaeological research can change the way the past is written about, cared for, and shared. Enriching the archaeological record is a foundational aspect of Indigenous archaeological approaches, and the inclusion of multiple stories enriches our understanding of the past. In working with Indigenous knowledge holders, elders, and cultural practitioners on creating a Nihook’aa Dine’e’ Bila’ Ashdlaa’ii archaeology for the Navajo Nation, we were able to learn ceremonial histories and sacred knowledge about the cultural landscape. This knowledge informed the development of the Navajo Nation cultural affiliation statement that has been used in NAGPRA repatriation claims and in other legal issues by the Navajo Nation government. This statement contains knowledge about the deep past and incorporates Diné oral and ceremonial histories that discuss the relationships that Diné people maintain with the landscape and the environment known as Diné Bikéyah or Navajo lands. This knowledge also informed decisions made about undertakings and research undertaken on the Navajo Nation. There were situations where invoking this information was contested both by federal agencies and Tribal Nations, but it was grounded in Navajo knowledge systems and was a part of their way of life and of being—a right of every Indigenous group. Enacting this knowledge ensured that Navajo perspectives and voices were included in consultation about the landscapes that have had direct and indirect impacts upon Navajo people. Finally, there needs to be a shift in archaeological research from focusing on research that centers colonial agendas and that instead forefront Indigenous peoples’ agency in the past. This focus has stemmed from the colonial foundations of archaeology and the rules of the western cultural archive that train researchers how to write and interpret the material culture they encounter, even without the input and interpretation of Indigenous peoples who are connected to the cultural landscape. Although there may be places where there are contested claims (Supernant and Warrick 2014), a shift to an Indigenous-based approach, such as an archaeology of the tamina, can help focus on the connections to land and places rather than whose connection is the most legitimate or valid, as is the focus of much current archaeological research (see for example the displacement of the Navajo peoples from the archaeological narrative of the Southwest through a focus on a Puebloan history in Marek-Martinez 2016). Indigenous peoples understand the nuanced nature of shared histories and places, as can be seen in the oral histories of Tribal Nations. In Navajo culture there are several stories that are affiliated with archaeological sites in the Southwest describing the relationship between their people and other tribes in the area. These are held in a sacred place, and protocols are enacted when working with other Tribal Nations, as signs of respect, reciprocity, and the importance of relationships that transcend colonial boundaries and notions about the past. 509

Ora V. Marek-Martinez

The approaches suggested have been an integral part of my approach in working with Indigenous archaeology throughout the years and with various communities. Based on the Indigenous knowledge systems that I have been taught and learned, I have found these approaches to be applicable to diverse Indigenous communities and accessible to non-Indigenous and other Indigenous researchers. However, there must be Indigenous community participation when enacting these approaches, as they are based in Indigenous knowledge systems. Applying these approaches does change the nature of the research, and it begs the question, is this still archaeology? Is it possible to make these changes within western academic institutions, to decolonize archaeological education and training in order to create a space for Indigenous archaeology as described here? Or does the application of these approaches to Indigenous archaeology change it into something else that is not necessarily archaeology, and is this the change that needs to occur to bring archaeology into the future?

Changing the praxis of archaeology—future directions The previous examples are approaches that can change the praxis of archaeology in a way that enriches the archaeological narrative and that promotes a shared history that represents the complex and nuanced story of our humanity. There are some promising avenues for archaeological research that offer a way to understand the past through present knowledge systems that also promise archaeological futurities. Borrowing from Indigenous studies and literary studies, the concept of futurisms is one that offers the “othered” a way to envision and enact futures that are representative of who they were, who they are, and who they will become. Indigenous futurisms allow for Indigenous communities to use cultural knowledge to guide communities in their own research and to use these knowledge systems to create their futures, an option that was not previously allowed in research. Creating futurisms is a liberatory act, an act of survivance for Indigenous peoples both academically and within communities; envisioning futures without intervention and the everpresent victimizing narrative that captures Indigenous research is a powerful tool for these communities (Higgins 2016; Dillon and Lewis 2013). Following the lead of the Afro-futurisms movement, Indigenous authors, researchers, and protectors have begun to explore futurisms in various mediums and expressing their futurities in ways that are meaningful and culturally based (Dillion 2016). These liberatory acts of survivance can also be seen as assertions of Indigenous sovereignty, a sovereignty that is not derived from settler-colonial political systems but which predates these systems, thereby establishing a future without settler-colonial systems governing their pasts, present, and futures. Applying these approaches to archaeology reveals entirely new areas of research and collaboration with Indigenous communities, much-needed research that will change the way that archaeologists engage with the public and the way that archaeology is practiced. There are several ways in which archaeologists have engaged with futurisms, mostly in indirect ways that have not borrowed directly from the concept of “futurisms” as derived within ethnic studies, Indigenous studies, or literary studies but in ways that have created a space for futurisms in their research and work with Indigenous or descendant communities. Indigenous archaeology and Indigenous research paradigms have embedded cultural knowledge and ways of being into their approaches, as well as ways to transform, heal, and to innovate, all a part of envisioning futures (see for example Gonzalez et al. 2018; Nelson 2020). However, applying “futurisms” to archaeological research is a recent development, one that promises exciting and innovative ways of learning and teaching about the past. Gerald Vizenor describes survivance and the continuance of Native stories that deny dominance, victimization, and tragedy (Dillon 510

The refusal of colonialism in archaeology

and Lewis 2013, 92), as a way to fight against notions that Indigenous peoples are extinct and reinforces Indigenous presence in contemporary societies. Utilizing the notion of survivance in Indigenous archaeology creates pathways to Indigenous archaeological futures that integrate Indigenous knowledge and lifeways into telling Indigenous stories about the past and telling new stories that create viable futures for future generations (for broader discussion of survivance in archaeology, see Chapter 29). These concepts—futurisms and survivance—must be a part of the framework of Indigenous archaeology, as they are a critical aspect to understanding the past, present, and future of Indigenous peoples and recognize the importance of community sovereignty in telling and maintaining the stories and lifeways of their people. As an example of applying Indigenous futurisms in archaeology, I would like to discuss an approach that many Indigenous communities have already implemented to enact Indigenous archaeological futures: community-based Indigenous heritage management and archaeology training and education programs. The Navajo Nation had a Student Training Program for over 40 years (1978–2019) that provided Navajo and other Native American students training and education in archaeology, Navajo culture, and historic preservation, with on-the-job training that resulted in building and maintaining much-needed infrastructure for the Navajo people. This program has trained over 100 Navajo and Native American students who have completed bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs or who are actively involved in archaeology, heritage management, or cultural resources management. The program was established with the vision to increase the number of Navajo and Native American archaeologists and to train the next generation of archaeologists caring for cultural heritage on the Navajo Nation. This program provided us as trainees with cultural education and technical training in learning archaeological field methods; we learned how to engage in Navajo protocols when conducting fieldwork and working with the local community, as well as how to conduct public outreach using a Navajo approach. One of the aspects that was lacking in this program was the ability to conduct original research that centered Navajo perspectives and philosophies, which resulted in a lack of Navajo perspectives and knowledge in the final reports. This indirectly impacted the Navajo people, as the interpretations were a part of the knowledge that considered Navajo people to be squatters in their own homelands that ultimately excluded Navajo voices and participation in the archaeological narrative of the Southwest. As a graduate of this program, this was a gap I sought to address through my doctoral research. In looking at future directions, the Navajo Nation Student Training Program could have been revised to include the application of Indigenous archaeological knowledge and methods to research that would have been interpreted differently through a focus on Navajo oral histories and knowledge about the past as a way to provide trainees with the ability to create and conduct research that is culturally relevant and that contributes to reclaiming archaeological narratives about Indigenous pasts. The enactment of survivance would be an excellent training tool, as it can be integrated in community outreach and training in ethnographic methods. Adding the dimension of survivance to training programs teaches students that Indigenous lifeways and knowledge systems can be used to guide and support research with Indigenous communities, and the stories of their people are a critical part of their survivance and futurities. These enactments are also a part of responsibilities to train and teach the next generation of Indigenous archaeologists. The machinations of colonialism have ensured that settler societies create fact and truth, and this ability has stayed with western-trained researchers and scholars. Within archaeological contexts, this is the expertise and authority bestowed upon archaeologists to tell the stories of places and peoples in ways that ignore the humanistic aspects of history, as well as other knowledge systems that may change the course of history as we understand it. Therefore, writing, theorizing, and creating knowledge are activities that Indigenous peoples and 511

Ora V. Marek-Martinez

communities should undertake as a way to share their stories of the deep past and to deny myths that claim they are extinct. Changing the praxis of archaeology will entail internal and external reflection and eventually revisions to approaches, especially in understanding and implementing decolonization efforts and the need for creating critical sites of pedagogy for our students that will ensure long-term change to repair the colonial foundations of archaeology. It is also an opportunity for archaeological research to embrace intersectionalities and the knowledge gained by other disciplines, such as applied Indigenous studies, ethnic studies, and critical race studies, for example. Archaeologists of color are working together to educate and create spaces within the discipline to teach and support the next generation of archaeologists. The ability to work with a community in a way that is culturally relevant and appropriate is needed in our discipline, as is the ability to implement and support transformative and healing approaches to research that are a part of Indigenous archaeological futurities.

Concluding remarks In recent years, we have seen an increase in Indigenous participation and perspectives in archaeological research and the application of Indigenous archaeologies that have worked with, by, and for Indigenous communities. This work has laid the foundation for new frameworks to research about the past with Indigenous communities that utilize such approaches based in Indigenous knowledge systems, lifeways, and protocols. This work is amplified through the implementation of concepts like survivance and futurisms that embrace the use of these approaches and that support the sovereignty of Indigenous communities to tell their stories and to imagine futures that also fight against false notions of Indigenous extinction and a constant state of victimization and instead focus on the cultural lifeways and stories of survivance that Indigenous people create and retell. The implementation of an Indigenous archaeological approach as described here also supports the innovativeness, adaptability, and survivance of Indigenous stories and connections to the past. Indigenous participation in the archaeological process has been an attempt to overcome colonial ideologies that are embedded in archaeological theory and methodology that is characterized by the exclusion of Indigenous peoples. The four ideologies I described in this chapter contribute to misinterpretations of Indigenous pasts, lifeways, and cultures. Indigenous archaeology, however, offers approaches and strategies that question and critique these colonized ideologies and that transform the resulting praxis of archaeology. I have offered four approaches to counter colonialist narratives that attempt to move archaeological research forward using strategies that support survivance of Indigenous communities and that envision Indigenous futurities for a sustainable future for the coming generations. Research that is based at the heart of Indigenous communities and their lifeways also supports the ability of communities to tell their own stories about the deep past alongside archaeological stories and strengthens the archaeological record. It is time for a change in the praxis of archaeology and moving archaeology beyond its colonial foundations to forefront other stories about the past that involve Indigenous (and other Brown Black Indigenous People of Color [BBIPOC]) voices, perspectives, and lifeways is a part of Indigenous archaeological futures. Sharing stories of survivance and changing the archaeological record to include these other stories can provide archaeologists and Indigenous researchers with opportunities for research, collaboration, and relationality that has not been realized in previous work. The real implications of ignoring and excluding Indigenous participation in the archaeological research process has resulted in impacts to culture and lifeways, political, social, and economic impacts, and impacts to Indigenous youth. The restoration of these lifeways and 512

The refusal of colonialism in archaeology

knowledge systems into research and community work will provide strategies for survivance and building futures that invoke stories and ways of being and knowing that will sustain future generations of Indigenous communities. It is my hope that other archaeologists and Indigenous communities will engage in an archaeology of the tamina that denies colonial constructions but that uplifts Indigenous lifeways, knowledge, and stories that invoke survivance in creating Indigenous liberatory futures. I have been taught by my family and communities the importance of including our lifeways and knowledge in all that we do, in who we are, and in our relationships with others and the environment. This knowledge provides me with the ability to adapt and to respond to various situations and contexts in ways that are respectful, are teachable/learnable, and that are sustainable for future generations. Research that is based at the heart of Indigenous communities and their lifeways supports the ability of communities to tell their own stories about the deep past alongside archaeological stories, which strengthens the archaeological record and relationships between archaeologists and Indigenous peoples. Envisioning Indigenous archaeological futurisms can create paths forward and away from the ever-present grip of colonialism in archaeological research and western-based research in general. The enactment of science (or research) that is an archaeology from the tamina, or one that decenters colonial concerns and refocuses and centers Indigenous concerns and systems in research, will change the face and praxis of archaeology. These changes in the way that we think about archaeology and the way that we practice archaeological research are the liberatory acts that are necessary to create archaeological futurisms. The work of other archaeologists such as Sonya Atalay, Sara L. Gonzalez, Kisha Supernant, Peter Nelson, Lee M. Panich, Tsim Schneider, Kat Hayes, and others all point toward such a future for archaeology; whether that future is solely an archaeological approach or a transdisciplinary approach, the future of archaeology is actively being created with, by, and for Indigenous and BBIPOC communities.

References cited Atalay, Sonya. 2006. “Indigenous Archaeology as Decolonizing Practice.” American Indian Quarterly 30 (3/4): 280–312. Atalay, Sonya. 2007. “Global Application of Indigenous Archaeology: Community Based Participatory Research in Turkey.” Archaeologies 3: 249–270. Atalay, Sonya. 2012. Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Atalay, Sonya, Jen Shannon, and John G. Swogger. 2017. “Journeys to Complete the Work: Stories about Repatriations and Changing the Way We Bring Native American Ancestors Home.” https:// nagpracomics.weebly.com/. Colwell, Chip. 2016. “Collaborative Archaeologies and Descendant Communities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45: 113–127. Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip. 2009. “Reconciling American Archaeology & Native America.” Daedalus 138 (2): 94–104. Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip, and T. J. Ferguson, eds. 2007. Collaboration in Archaeological Practice: Engaging Descendant Communities. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Deloria, Vine Jr. 1995. Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact. New York: Scribner. Dillion, Grace. 2016. “Introduction: Indigenous Futurisms, Bimaashi Niidas Mose, Flying and Walking towards You.” Extrapolation 57 (1–2): 1–6. Dillon, Beth Aileen, and Jason Edward Lewis. 2013. “Call it a Vision Quest: Machinima in a First Nations Context.” In Understanding Machinima: Essays of Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds, edited by Jenna Ng, 187– 206. London: Bloomsbury. Ferguson, T. J. 1996. “Native Americans and the Practice of Archaeology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 63–79.

513

Ora V. Marek-Martinez Gonzalez, Sara L. 2016. “Indigenous Values and Methods in Archaeological Practice: Low-Impact Archaeology through the Kashaya Pomo Interpretive Trail Project.” American Antiquity 81 (3): 533–549. Gonzalez, Sara L., Ian Kretzler, and Briece Edwards. 2018. “Imagining Indigenous and Archaeological Futures: Building Capacity with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.” Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 14 (1): 85–114. Gonzalez, Sara L., and Ora Marek-Martinez. 2019. NSF Senior Archaeology Grant, SAA Native American Scholarships Program. Co-PIs: Sara Gonzalez and Ora Marek-Martinez. Available upon request from authors. Gonzalez, Sara L., Darren Modzelewski, Lee M. Panich, and Tsim D. Schneider. 2006. “Archaeology for the Seventh Generation.” American Indian Quarterly 30 (3): 388–415. Harris, Heather. 2005. “Indigenous Worldviews and Ways of Knowing as Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Archaeological Research.” In Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice, edited by Claire Smith and H. Martin Wobst, 30–37. New York: Routledge. Higgins, David M. 2016. “Survivance in Indigenous Science Fictions: Vizenor, Silko, Glancy, and the Rejection of Imperial Victimry.” Extrapolation 57 (1–2): 51–72. Jackson, Gary, and Claire Smith. 2005. “Living and Learning on Aboriginal Lands: Decolonizing Archaeology in Practice.” In Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice, edited by Claire Smith and Martin Wobst, 328–351. New York: Routledge. Kovach, Margaret. 2010. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lowie, Robert. 1915. “Oral Tradition and History.” American Anthropologist 17: 597–599. Marek-Martinez, Ora V. 2016. “Archaeology For, By, and With the Navajo People: The Nihook’aa Dine’e’ Bila’ Ashdlaa’ii Way.” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Mason. 2000. “Archaeology and Native North American Oral Traditions.” American Antiquity 65: 239–266. McGhee, Robert. 2008. “Aboriginalism and the Problems of Indigenous Archaeology.” American Antiquity 73 (4): 579–597. McGhee. Robert. 2010. “Of Strawmen, Herrings, And Frustrated Expectations.” American Antiquity 75 (2): 239–243. McGuire, Randall H. 1992. “Archeology and the First Americans.” American Anthropologist 94 (4): 816–836. McNiven, Ian J. 2016. “Theoretical Challenges of Indigenous Archaeology: Setting an Agenda.” American Antiquity 81 (1): 27–41. Menzies, Charles. 2006. Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Natural Resource Management. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Montgomery, Lindsay M., and Severin Fowles. 2020. “An Indigenous Archive: Documenting Comanche History through Rock Art.” The American Indian Quarterly 44 (2): 196–220. Nelson, Melissa K., and Dan Shilling. 2018. Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, Peter A. 2020. “Refusing Settler Epistemologies and Maintaining an Indigenous Future for Tolay Lake, Sonoma County, California.” The American Indian Quarterly 44 (2): 221–242. Schneider, Tsim D., and Katherine Hayes. 2020. “Epistemic Colonialism: Is it Possible to Decolonize Archaeology?” The American Indian Quarterly 44 (2): 127–148. Smith, Claire, and Gary Jackson. 2006. “Decolonizing Indigenous Archaeology: Developments from Down Under.” American Indian Quarterly 30 (3): 311–349. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. New York: Zed Books. Supernant, Kisha, Jane Eva Baxter, Natasha Lyons, Sonya Atalay, eds. 2020. Archaeologies of the Heart. New York: Springer International Publishing. Supernant, Kisha, and Gary Warrick. 2014. “Challenges to Critical Community-based Archaeological Practices in Canada.” Canadian Journal of Archaeology 38 (2): 563–591. Trigger, Bruce Graham. 1980. “Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian.” American Antiquity 45 (4): 662–676. Watkins, Joe, and George Nicholas. 2014. “Why Indigenous Archaeology is Important as a Means of Changing Relationships between Archaeologists and Indigenous Communities.” In Indigenous Heritage and Tourism: Theories and Practices on Utilizing the Ainu Heritage, edited by Mayumi Okada and Hirofumi Kato, 141–151. Hokkaido: University Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies.

514

The refusal of colonialism in archaeology Whiteley, Peter M. 2002. “Archaeology and Oral Tradition: The Scientific Importance of Dialogue.” American Antiquity 67 (3): 405–415. Whyte, Kyle Powys. 2020. “Indigenous Environmental Justice: Anti-colonial Action through Kinship.” In Environmental Justice: Key Issues, edited by Brendan Coolsaet, 266–278. New York: Routledge. Whyte, Kyle Powys, Joseph P. Brewer, and Jay T. Johnson. 2016. “Weaving Indigenous Science, Protocols, and Sustainability Science.” Sustainability Science 11: 25–32. Wilson, Shawn. 2008. Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing.

515

32 THE LIMITS OF REPATRIATION’S DECOLONIZING ABILITIES Dorothy Lippert

You would think that repatriation would be a decolonizing force in anthropology, wouldn’t you? The mere fact that it disorders the standard archaeological practice of digging up Indigenous bodies and keeping them at locations that are sometimes far from their homelands seems to be enough to place repatriation squarely in the category of a decolonizing practice. However, what I have seen in nearly 20 years of working in repatriation leads me to understand that while the effects of repatriation can be disruptive to traditional archaeology and restorative for tribal communities, repatriation work is not structured to be decolonizing. In this chapter, I would like to comment on the practices that might even be considered re-colonizing, or at least those that underscore and emphasize colonization. I do not mean to deny the very real benefits of repatriation; after 20 years, I still experience a profound sense of relief when human beings and their possessions return to the care of their descendants. But maybe these 20 years have taken their toll, and I am now able to clearly voice my discontent with having to work within a system that is constricted by definitional violence, state-sponsored racism, and historical museological and archaeological praxis. Repatriation is, I hope, a rare entity: decolonizing, yet stuck fast in a colonized world. Like all of American archaeology, repatriation would not exist but for settler colonialism (Schneider and Hayes 2020). The history of repatriation is sufficiently described elsewhere (Fine-Dare 2002; Mihesuah 2000), but I will provide a brief discussion so that readers understand how I am framing the situation. Repatriation is the practice of returning human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony from museums and institutions to the Indigenous home communities. In the United States, two federal laws, the 1989 National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Act and the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), mandate this action. I have worked, since 2001, at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) on various aspects of repatriation. I have written elsewhere about my experiences with the daily aspects of this work and the challenges I have faced as a Choctaw woman (Lippert 2006, 2008). My presence as one of a very few living Native Americans at the NMNH reinforces the sense of the museum as a colonized space. I am also aware of the racial and social composition of the bodies who are grouped together in the museum. In addition to the 19,000 Native American ancestors that the museum had in 1989, it continues to hold the remains of people who are of Black ancestry and the remains of people who may be described as “impoverished white immigrants.” Remains of people in both categories are included in the Robert J. Terry collection 516

The limits of repatriation

and the George S. Huntington Anatomical Skeletal Collection at the NMNH (Billeck 2003; Hunt and Albanese 2005; Pearlstein 2015). In addition, the museum has a few remains of people who knowingly and proudly donated their bodies (Carlson 2006). The difference between how these people came to the museum is striking. It can be distilled into the categories of those who chose to become part of a museum collection and those who did not know this would happen after their death. Repatriation is only applied to the Native American remains, thus ignoring the universal injustice done to those who would have preferred to be buried by their loved ones and remain where they had been placed. By dealing with only one group of disrupted persons, the repatriation laws fail to acknowledge the role of settler colonialism in producing the problem.

Naming “things” “Freedom begins with naming things. Humanity is preserved by it” (Ensler 2006, 64). Ensler may as well have been talking about repatriation. When the concept of repatriation was finally formalized in law and regulation in 1989–1990, the categories of material that could be returned included Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. These were given specific definitions, the result of long hours of negotiation (Preucel 2011). And in the end, the names and the definitions are a kind of best-possible academic and legal blend of concepts that are applied to nonacademic, nonlegal “items.”1 For repatriation, the phrase human remains is fairly descriptive. If the phrase “skeletons,” or “bones” were used, these might be equally valid, but nonskeletal material can also be repatriated. However, if someone is not at all related to the human remains under consideration, then it is not obvious that these remains could also be described as “relatives” or “ancestors.” A nonNative archaeologist might refer to the remains as “ancestors”; logically, they are somebody’s ancestors, even if they are not hers, specifically. But this is not the term enshrined in law. The remains are not considered ancestors by NAGPRA or the NMAI Act. A non-Native archaeologist using the legal terminology is not required to notice that this phrase distances the bones from their relatives. This difference in identity, where human beings are either collections of skeletons or members of a community, can depend on whether one is seeking to relate to the human remains as a professional archaeologist or as a descendant community member. Engagement with the material remains of human beings need not be seen as completely divorced from the personhood of the individual. Lans (2018) describes the intimacy that accompanied the reduction of an unclaimed body into the Huntington collection,2 noting the role of touch. She describes her own interaction with the remains of a woman whose name she records as Lizzie:3 I struggle with how to recreate the life of a woman like Lizzie. While dissection and curation at the College of Physicians and Surgeons brought all of these individuals into a collective, I feel the need to remember that each of these people had individual lives and diverse life courses that led to this gathering place. I wonder what sort of “ethical person” I am in my intimate relations with the bodies of individuals who never asked or gave me permission to touch them. (Lans 2018, 22) Human remains in museum collections are mostly those of people who did not intend this to be their final resting place. Approaching them as individual people raises the question of what this person would have wanted. Identifying them as a “collection” obscures their individuality. 517

Dorothy Lippert

The community of the collected is largely made up of individuals whose relatives lacked the political, economic, or social capital to ensure that their remains stayed where they were placed. I once asked the question in this way: “Who gets taken into the museum?” Largely, it is the voiceless, the disempowered, or the impoverished. A distinct exception is the anthropologist Grover Kranz, who designated his skeletal remains and those of his dogs as museum collections prior to his death. Carlson (2006) provides a fascinating account of the interactions museum staff have with Kranz’s remains. He was known to many, and because of this, his remains retain his personhood. They are both part of a collection and individual. Unlike the remains of the woman described by Lans (2018), Kranz made the decision to become part of the museum collections, and it is likely that the interactions his peers have with his remains are a form of honoring his wishes to continue work as an educator: “I’ve been a teacher all my life and I think I might as well be a teacher after I’m dead, so why don’t I just give you my body” (Carlson 2006). His case stands in stark contrast to the thousands of individuals whose names and wishes are unknown. The terminology used in repatriation reveals how Native people have long been subject to “definitional violence (Zimmer 2018, 64).” Native Americans who are asking for human remains and funerary objects to be returned from the museum do not relate to these in the same way as non-Native museum staff. The human remains and objects are not simply bone and clay; rather, they are closer to what they were when they went into the ground—individuals and personal property. Recasting them as museum collections defines them into another category that may or may not allow them to return to their original identity. Author China Miéville (2010) described this situation brilliantly in his book Kraken. The book involves a battle between humans, would-be gods, wizards, and supervillains, and a pivotal moment is when all are in the presence of a giant squid that had been stolen from London’s Natural History Museum’s collections and was revered by the Church of Kraken Almighty. Just as the villain is about to bring about the end of the world by accessing the Kraken’s ink, the curator of the museum stops him, saying, “It’s not an animal or a god. . . . It didn’t exist until I created it. That’s my specimen” (Miéville 2010, 488). In a similar way, human beings whose remains were collected and placed in a museum have undergone an attempt by scientists to transform them into a different category, that of a collection, rather than members of a living community. Mieville goes on to describe the reality of this situation: “Architeuthis [the giant squid], Billy understood for the first time, was not that undefined thing in deep water, which was only ever itself. Architeuthis was a human term. It’s ours, he said” (Miéville 2010, 487). In a similar way, the human remains and objects in the museum collections are cataloged, labeled, placed in acid-free boxes, and stored, all activities that are appropriate for material meant to be preserved for as long as possible. But originally they were not meant to be treated this way. In the case of sacred objects, they were meant to be used, giving their lives for the spiritual benefit of their people. In the case of human remains, they were meant to continue on their journey through the mitigation of Mother Earth. Museum work entails classification, beginning with the initial decision that something or someone is appropriate for entry into the collections. Further categories ensue, including deciding on a division: archaeology, ethnology, biological anthropology; assignment of a general name: ceramic vessel, human remains, and, eventually, possible analysis to provide an anthropological identity: Chickachae combed vessel, or adult female. All of this categorization is outside and parallel to the categorization of the Indigenous community to which these people and objects belong. They may be more properly identified as family heirloom and grandmother. Like the giant squid, they were only ever themselves. The Santee Dakota poet, songwriter, and activist John Trudell (2009) voiced this clearly when he said, “We’re not Indians and we’re not Native Americans. 518

The limits of repatriation

We’re older than both concepts. We’re the people, we’re the human beings.” But when it comes to repatriation, we must become human remains before we return to being people.

Fighting back against the “hit list” NAGPRA and NMAI did not describe an end point to the process of repatriation, but it is useful to consider what this would look like. When repatriation is done, will there be no Native American human remains in any museum collection? (Spoiler alert: the answer is no! Some tribes have stated that they cannot bring human remains back into contact with descendant communities without risking harm to the spiritual health of tribal members.) When repatriation is done, will all federally recognized tribes have participated in this process? Well, this is an unanswerable question, given the nature of tribal federal recognition. When I began working at the NMNH in 2001, there were zero federally recognized tribes in Virginia. Currently, there are seven. There may someday be more. Tribes that survived the initial invasion have come to be recognized by the United States as dependent sovereigns, operating on a government-to-government relationship (Marshall and U.S. Supreme Court 1823). The repatriation laws initially assigned the rights to repatriate only to tribes that have federal recognition. The laws also assigned the rights to be repatriated only to individuals whose remains were found by the museums and institutions to be culturally affiliated. When museums and institutions did not decide on a cultural identity for Indigenous ancestors, they assigned them the category of “culturally unidentifiable.” This term initially placed these bodies outside of the community of “repatriatables” (Kakaliourias 2012). Subsequent regulations to the law provided pathways for these individuals to be returned, but the process has been challenging. Discussion of this practice of assigning the category of culturally unidentifiable and its pitfalls are explored by Gould (2017). She notes: “While some valid reasons remain for classifying Native American ancestors as CUI . . . this is a designation that should be used only in certain circumstances and in consultation with tribes. . . . Non-Native control of the process, though, often obfuscates both the process and intent of the law” (Gould 2017, emphasis in the original). A large part of this discussion was drafted prior to the passage of a policy for the NMNH that addresses the repatriation of culturally unaffiliated human remains and associated funerary objects (NMNH 2020). But I include it here to demonstrate how historical events shape the ability of tribal people to repatriate ancestors. Prior to this policy, the NMNH was only able to repatriate to tribes that did not have federal recognition through the intervention of a recognized tribe. There are two main ways that a tribe can receive federal recognition, either through a finding by the Bureau of Indian Affairs or via congressional action. The BIA criteria include different ways that a tribal community has been identified since 1900 ce, such as being identified as Indian, having a distinct community, maintaining governance over itself, and others. But the journey to federal recognition is not an equal one. In the state of Virginia, for example, tribes have been stymied by economic interests, as when casino operators opposed granting recognition to the Pamunkey Tribe out of fear that the tribe would initiate gaming facilities (Vergakis 2015). Tribes have also been unable to meet requirements for recognition because of the actions of a white supremacist registrar of vital records, Walter Plecker, who between 1912 and 1946 refused to allow members of Virginia tribes to identify as anything other than white or Black, thus negating the possibility for a tribe to have been continually identified as such since 1900 (Cook 2003). Plecker believed that Virginia tribes had intermarried with descendants of African peoples and produced a list of surnames belonging to “colored people.” This “hit list,” as it was known, was sent to county clerks and registrars, and anyone registering a birth or marriage was subject to jail time if they did not identify themselves as “Negro” (Cook 2003, 193). Plecker’s efforts in 519

Dorothy Lippert

the past mirror the practice of labeling remains as culturally unaffiliated; he erased the identity of Virginia Indian people through alterations of their birth records. Although some Virginia Indians had intermarried with people of African descent, they retained tribal cultural practices. Yet Plecker’s work meant that their descendants are unable to reestablish themselves to the satisfaction of the federal government. The lack of cultural affiliation for individuals in museum collections often turns on a similar lack of paperwork. Lack of provenience information is one of the reasons listed by Rae Gould (2017, 149) as a valid reason for CUI designation. But this does not mean that this is a neutral action. In essence, the CUI designation sometimes states “we do not know who you are because we did not record who you are.” These are among the most frustrating repatriation cases on which to work. Although a relationship of shared group identity can be established between some of the Virginia tribes and human remains in the NMNH collections, the lack of federal recognition had prevented repatriation according to museum guidelines and procedures (Mudar et al. 1994). A policy enacted in 2020 now allows for consideration of repatriation to tribes that lack federal recognition (NMNH 2020). Additionally, a return can be achieved with the assistance of a federally recognized tribe, given that once repatriation occurs, the museum has no ability to direct where that tribes chooses to place the remains or objects. I remain hopeful for the fate of the people who were buried at sites in Virginia and whose remains are now in the NMNH collections (Mudar et al. 1994). But this example shows that tribes have remained at the mercy of the federal government in order to be identified as legitimate relatives of the people whose remains are in museum collections. Repatriation is simply what the word itself means: returning someone to their own nation. But what we who work in repatriation actually do is define who they are and identify who we think their nation is, and both of these identifications rest on colonialist history. As archaeologists, we maintain the authority to name these past communities and to define what is constitutive of them. We might acknowledge the historical events that shape the existence of these groups, but we cannot undo the past. Some 36 years passed between the time that the people who were buried at the Hand Site were addressed in a repatriation report and the time that they had the potential to be returned (Mudar et al. 1994). The one thing that changed for them was an update to museum policy, in essence, a shift in institutional will (Rae Gould 2017). Many of the Virginia tribes who were subject to the effects of Walter Plecker’s racism continue to be unrecognized by the federal government, but the shift on the part of the NMNH may allow them to finally take their ancestors home.

Protection of the sacred Sacred material collected by anthropologists is subject to repatriation by tribes under the category of “sacred objects.” NAGPRA provides a definition as “specific ceremonial objects which are needed by traditional Native American religious leaders for the practice of traditional Native American religions by their present-day adherents.” To define sacred material as “objects” is similar to defining human remains as “specimens.” In fact, many tribal people interact with sacred objects as if they are living beings, “powerful living beings” (Conaty 2015, 82). Jerry Potts (2015, 147) describes speaking to a pipe in the Canadian Museum of Civilization: “I told that pipe ‘I’m going to do everything I can to get you out of here.’ I just felt so, so sad with it being there.” Potts later was able to repatriate the pipe and continue to contribute to revitalization of Blackfoot cultural practices. This animus present in sacred objects reflects its nature as more than a material being. Erdrich (2008) notes the agency that sacred objects have in “Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects,” playfully clarifying that anthropologists may be missing aspects of their identity. 520

The limits of repatriation

If an object calls for its mother, boil water and immediately swaddle it. If an object calls for other family members, or calls collect after midnight, refer to tribally specific guidelines. Reverse charges. The poem describes ways of interacting with objects that are far outside standard museological practice in order to disconcert the reader and allow them to imagine objects as needing a diferent sort of care than simply being protected through curation. In fact, traditional care can be provided for objects while they remain away from their homeland, with benefits both to the objects and to the museum (Flynn and Hull-Walski 2008, Shannon 2018). This process pushes curation closer to a decolonized activity, but it remains bounded by museum standards. While objects are in museum custody, they do not often get treated solely as sacred objects, mainly because visits from those with authority to treat them as such are all too rare. Conaty (2015, 82) raises an important point about identification of sacred objects as museum collections. He views this as a form of commodification that permits outsiders to view sacred material as something less than it is: “Considering sacred materials only, or even primarily, as objects facilitates an analysis that can ensure their redefinition outside of the sacred Blackfoot context and within the realm of global capitalism” (Conaty 2015, 82). Furthermore, the identification of a sacred object as primarily an object restricts the museum’s imagination to what one can do with an object and what an object can do for a museum. Conaty (2015, 82) is correct in theorizing about sacred objects becoming museum capital. The presence of collections largely identifies a museum. Repatriation causes a museum to remove objects from the collections, lessening its scholarly and economic capital. This capital is transferred back to the original owners, who do not accept it as such. Sacred objects, by their nature, are not meant to have monetary or academic value attached. The item being transferred from a museum is not the same thing received by the tribe. In essence, all the capital is imagined, part of the interaction between non-Natives who temporarily hold Native items. Potts (2015) might as well have said to the CMC, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”

Disrupting the colony Decolonization, in a medical sense, is the process of removing enough pathogen so that the body can return itself to health. It does not necessitate removal of every last bit of infectious material, but there is a point below which a colony cannot survive the efforts of the body to resist it. Repatriation identifies aspects of anthropology, archaeology, and museum spaces that are unhealthy for colonized peoples. Acknowledging that people have the human right to care for their dead is actually the acknowledgment that Indigenous people in the past and present are full human beings. The practice of repatriation can restore physical, spiritual, and emotional health to a community (Wooley and Thomas 2011). In this, it is decolonizing. But there are many aspects of repatriation, such as the ability to name and identify and the reliance on federal decisions regarding tribes, that are stuck fast in settler colonialism. I’ve found myself looking to the earliest repatriations for examples of decolonized practices. These are ones that took place in the absence of federal law. The reburial of remains from the Crow Creek site (Zimmerman et al. 1981) was anticipated from the beginning of work on the project, and the tribal council was provided with details about the project so they could give input about the excavation and the proposed reinterment. The preliminary archaeological report clearly identified repatriation and reburial as the outcome and emphasized tribal authority over the process: 521

Dorothy Lippert

While keeping the bones out of the ground may have provided more information, and the scientists involved would certainly have preferred to have had a longer time for study, reburial was one of the prerequisites to have any access to the bones. As noted in the Summary, the wishes of scientists can now no longer be considered most important; there are spiritual and ethical obligations to those peoples studied. (Zimmerman et al. 1981, B-5, emphasis added.) This statement is remarkable for its date. No federal repatriation laws were extant, yet the final sentence articulates what a decolonized repatriation practice looks like. What does the future of a decolonized archaeology look like? So very weirdly, I think it looks a lot like the past. Like 1981 in particular. Archaeology should be conducted with prior consultation with those affected, and their wishes regarding repatriation should also be woven into the excavation plans. To be truly honest, though, I’m not sure it is possible for repatriation’s decolonizing effects to disrupt archaeology enough so that the discipline becomes decolonized. Maybe a decolonized archaeology looks more like 1491. With the removal of the colonizers comes only the removal of archaeology, not the relationship that Indigenous people have with our ancestors. My time spent working repatriation has allowed me to do a lot of good on behalf of tribal people, but I am cognizant that the laws have limited the extent to which this work can said to be decolonized. The laws reveal that the process of repatriation is a colonized one. Like much of colonized territory, it renames and reconfigures aspects of tribal life. Loved ones become human remains; items that protect and inspire tribal members become sacred objects. Even further, human remains become crania and postcrania and sacred objects become wooden figures. The further they get categorized, the more removed their identity appears from what they really are. The legal renaming and the museum categorization reinforce outside authority to identify Indigenous people and our belongings. But Native people are survivors, if nothing else. We continue to walk toward a future in which we remedy many of the effects of colonization. We know that we are more than our human remains; we are ourselves.

Notes 1 The word “item” is used in NAGPRA, even though it includes human remains in the definition. Should the law have used the phrase “human remains and items” instead? 2 The George S. Huntington Anatomical Skeletal Collection consists of over 3,000 partial skeletons of European immigrants and US citizens of European descent who died between 1892 and 1921 in New York City. The collection is housed at the National Museum of Natural History. 3 Lans provided a catalog number for this individual, and a check of the NMNH catalog records indicates that the name of the person whose remains were given this number is Jennie.

References cited Billeck, William T. 2003. “Repatriation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.” AnthroNotes 24 (1): 15–19. Carlson, Peter. 2006. “Using His Cranium Grover Krantz’s Last Wish Was to Remain With His Friends. And He Has.” The Washington Post, July 5, 2006. Conaty, Gerald T. 2015. “Niitsitapiisinni: Our Way of Life.” In We are Coming Home: Repatriation and the Restoration of Blackfoot Cultural Confidence, edited by Gerald T. Conaty, 71–118. Edmonton: Athabasca University Press. Cook, Samuel R. 2003 “Anthropological Advocacy in Historical Perspective: The Case of Anthropologists and Virginia Indians.” Human Organization 62 (2): 191–201. Ensler, Eve. 2006. “The Power of Naming Things.” In This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women, edited by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman, 62–64. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

522

The limits of repatriation Erdrich, Heidi F. 2008. National Monuments. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Fine-Dare, Kathleen S. 2002 Grave Injustice; The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Flynn, Gillian, and Deborah Hull-Walski. 2008. “Merging Traditional Indigenous Curation Methods with Modern Museum Standards of Care.” Museum Anthropology 25 (1): 35–40. Gould, D. Rae 2017. “NAGPRA, CUI, and Institutional Will.” In The Routledge Companion to Cultural Property, edited by Jane Anderson and Haidy Geismar, 134–151. London: Routledge. Hunt, David R., and John Albanese. 2005. “History and Demographic Composition of the Robert J. Terry Anatomical Collection.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 127: 406–417. Kakaliourias, Ann. 2012. “An Anthropology of Repatriation. Contemporary Physical Anthropological and Native. American Ontologies of Practice.” Current Anthropology 53 (S5): S210–221. Lans, Aja. 2018. “‘Whatever Was Once Associated with Him, Continues to Bear His Stamp’: Articulating and Dissecting George S. Huntington and His Anatomical Collection.” In Bioarchaeological Analyses and Bodies: New Ways of Knowing Anatomical and Archaeological Skeletal Collections, edited by Pamela K. Stone, 11–26. New York: Springer. Lippert, Dorothy. 2006. “Building a Bridge to Cross a Thousand Years.” American Indian Quarterly 30 (3): 431–440. Lippert, Dorothy. 2008. “Not the End, Not the Middle, But the Beginning: Repatriation as a Transformative Mechanism for Archaeologists and Indigenous Peoples.” In Collaboration in Archaeological Practice: Engaging Descendant Communities, edited by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and T. J. Ferguson, 119–130. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Marshall, John, and Supreme Court of The United States. 1823. “U.S. Reports: Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. 8 Wheat. 543. 1823. Periodical.” www.loc.gov/item/usrep021543/. Miéville, China. 2010. Kraken. New York: Del Rey. Mihesuah, Devon A. 2000. Repatriation Reader: Who Owns American Indian Remains? Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Mudar, Karen, Erica B. Jones, and John W. Verano. 1994. Inventory and Assessment of Human Remains from the Hand Site (44SN22), Southampton County, Virginia, in the National Museum of Natural History. Washington, DC: National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. National Museum of Natural History. 2020. NMNH Policy for Culturally Unaffiliated Human Remains and Associated Funerary Objects Approved by NMNH—October 5, 2020. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Pearlstein, Kristen A. 2015. “Health and the Huddled Masses: An Analysis of Immigrant and EuroAmerican Skeletal Health in 19th Century New York City.” PhD Dissertation, American University. Potts, Jerry. 2015. “Reviving Traditions.” In We Are Coming Home: Repatriation and the Restoration of Blackfoot Cultural Confidence, edited by Gerald T. Conaty, 135–150. Edmonton: Athabasca University Press. Preucel, Robert W. 2011. “An Archaeology of NAGPRA: Conversations with Suzan Shown Harjo.” Journal of Social Archaeology 11 (2): 130–143. Schneider, Tsim D., and Katherine Hayes. 2020. “Epistemic Colonialism: Is it Possible to Decolonize Archaeology?” American Indian Quarterly 44 (2): 127–148. Shannon, Jennifer. 2018. “Collections Care Informed by Native American Perspectives: Teaching the Next Generation.” Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals 13 (1): 205–224. Trudell, John. 2009. Reel Injun. (Film). National Film Board of Canada. Vergakis, Brock. 2015. “Virginia’s Pamunkey Indian Tribe Granted Federal Recognition.” Associated Press. July 2, 2015. Wooley, Chris, and Evelyn Thomas. 2011. “Return with a Sharing: Coming Home to the Kuskokwim.” Alaska Journal of Anthropology 9 (2): 73–39. Zimmer, Adam N. 2018. “More Than the Sum Total of Their Parts: Restoring Identity by Recombining a Skeletal Collection with Its Texts.” In Bioarchaeological Analyses and Bodies: New Ways of Knowing Anatomical and Archaeological Skeletal Collections, edited by Pamela K. Stone, 49–69. New York: Springer. Zimmerman, Larry J., Thomas Emmerson, P. Willey, Mark Swegle, John B. Gregg, Pauline Gregg, Everett White, Carlyle Smith, Thomas Haberman, and M. Pamela Bumsted. 1981. The Crow Creek Site (39OF11) Massacre; a Preliminary Report. Vermillion: The University of South Dakota Archaeology Laboratory.

523

33 CHANGING MUSEUM NARRATIVES A conversation with culture curators at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture Sven Haakanson Jr., Holly Barker, and Sara L. Gonzalez

Introduction In 2013, the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture on the University of Washington (UW) campus hired two curators with joint academic appointments in the Anthropology Department, Sven Haakanson Jr. (Sugpiaq, Curator for North American Anthropology) and Holly Barker (Curator for Oceanic and Asian Culture). Shortly after the curators arrived, the Burke Museum packed its collections and moved into a brand new building (aka the “New Burke”) designed with an “inside-out” concept where visitors could see into and understand the inner workings of a museum. Curators in every department of the museum worked in teams to design new exhibits and engagement opportunities for communities and visitors. In the previous building, the museum adapted to the confines of the space that held the collections. In the new building, architects designed the surroundings to care for and share the collections with visitors, who can now see into collections and research spaces on each of the three floors. The Culture is Living exhibit is the first gallery visitors see when they enter the building along with the Northwest Coast Art Gallery. The second floor of the Burke highlights the strengths of the Burke’s biology collections, including fish, birds, mammals, and reptiles, and the third floor showcases the collections and research of archaeology and paleontology. While the natural history half of the museum features the Paleontology and Biology Departments, the Culture Department consists of the Archaeology and Contemporary Cultures collections, whose curators include: Sara L. Gonzalez (Archaeology), Peter Lape (Archaeology), Sven Haakanson Jr. (Contemporary Culture), Holly Barker (Contemporary Culture), and Katie Bunn-Marcuse (Contemporary Culture, Bill Holm Center for the Study of Northwest Native Art). Sara L. Gonzalez spoke with Sven and Holly about the ways the Burke Museum links their journeys to becoming curators, as well as their priorities and approaches to community and collections work. What was your journey that brought you to the Burke Museum as a curator in Contemporary Culture? SVEN HAAKANSON JR. (SUGPIAQ): For me, after managing the Alutiiq museum for 13 years, I wanted to roll up my sleeves and work with my community to change the trajectory for SARA L GONZALEZ:

524

Changing museum narratives

every one of our kids locally. I spent 13 years raising money for other people to do work I wanted to do myself but understood my role and how important it was for my staff to do this work, too. I was able to participate with the culture weeks held annually in each community on Kodiak Island. I would spend nine months researching, learning, and creating a cultural piece that the students would then create themselves during this week. I felt that working with the next generation, sharing cultural knowledge that had been stripped away from us—out of the communities and our region—and putting it back into a living context, they know the value it carries, and you completely shift the way young people see themselves as Indigenous people. They start to respect themselves as human beings, not as “primitive savages,” not as we have been told and treated as such by the dominant society. You change their minds and hearts to create a healthier human being from the foundation up. That is at the core of what I love doing: bringing this knowledge and sharing it, making sure that the community owns it, not me, and especially not an institution. The community should always have full control over how the knowledge is used and shared, and that’s one of the driving factors for why I feel so privileged to have my job as a curator at the Burke Museum. I can also use this position to begin to change this institutional practice of extraction, so we can see and realize we have to stop this practice and focus on giving back—giving back in a way that respects and honors the people connected to the material objects that museums are caring for now. When I came in seven years ago, I said, “Hey, here’s what I love doing. I am going to show you what I do, and if you want to work with and engage with me, please let me know.” By showing how we respect and honor the communities we work with, we can build new relationships. The relationships take time, and they become a lifetime of work but also a lifetime of change, giving communities access to collection, and opportunities to share their knowledge with us if they want to. Honoring that process completely changes the narrative of museums and what we’re able to do today. The trajectory that I took from Kodiak, Alaska, to Harvard, to becoming the Director of the Alutiiq Museum and eventually to the Burke Museum started with a researcher, Rick Knecht, inviting me to “Come and look at this site near your village!” where they were doing excavations. I couldn’t believe they got paid to do that. It was after this experience that I realized I wanted to learn about my own cultural history and ancestors, and the only way I saw doing this at this point was through archaeology. Rick Knecht and Gordon Puller invited me to go to the 6th Inuit Studies Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Attending this conference completely changed my life and trajectory. I was sitting on the other side of the world listening to people talk about my culture. I thought, “Why am I on the other side of the world when I could be talking to my Mom and elders about who we are?” I immediately switched into doing a double major at the University of Fairbanks in English and anthropology. That following summer, I decided to go into archaeology and gave up fishing. I went from making $60,000 in a summer to $2,000, and I was happier than I could ever be. The knowledge was worth more than the money. Because of my experience living in Russia and teaching English in the Soviet Union in 1990 and 1991, knowing Russian allowed me to apply to Harvard. I didn’t think I would get in. I was ready to go back home and be a teacher and salmon fish, but I became number 5 in terms of Indigenous scholars with a PhD in archaeology in 2000.1 While I was managing the Dig Afognak Camp on Afognak Island next to Kodiak, I was approached by the Alutiiq Museums hiring committee to apply for the executive director position. I was planning on taking a bit longer to write my PhD, but they encouraged me to finish within a year so I could be hired as the director. I hunkered down and wrote my 525

Sven Haakanson Jr. et al.

dissertation. When I finally took the job, they let me know they had funding to keep the doors open for one month and they needed me to raise $8 million. Nobody explained to me about fundraising or that that was a major role! Learning the nuances of financial management and statements is something I encourage every Native person getting involved with nonprofits to learn about. How to talk to people and how to talk to funders are important skills. I never saw myself in a faculty role. In fact, one of the first papers I got published (Haakanson 2001), I pointed out how we as Natives are never seen as scientists. The catalogue had Natives on one side and scientists on the other, with no crossover. Based on this, the answer was, “No, we can’t be because there is too much bias.” I never felt I would be in an academic position. I have always considered myself more of a worker, as I love to roll up my sleeves and work with people, and that’s what fills my soul. As a curator, I can work with the communities I want to and support them in how they want to bring their knowledge back home. It’s up to each of us to move our institutions in a direction that’s healthier for all people. I feel so grateful to have Holly as a colleague, as I didn’t know her until I got to the Burke. I didn’t know anything about how her work engages and empowers communities to make their own decisions about long-term health and well-being. To have someone like Holly to talk with, bounce ideas off of, and consider how to change things further has been so beneficial. Our current institutions are based on the “I,” not the “we.” When you collaborate with communities, as Holly and I do, we understand how important it is to start changing the institution from the inside out—and that’s what we’ve been able to do in the New Burke, with the new exhibits and how they are displayed: engaging with communities so their voices are first, not ours. And that’s our practice now. SARA: Moving to the “we” is so transformative. Listening to you made me reflect on all the relationships that made it possible for me to be in this spot. I didn’t have a mentor as an undergraduate. The only reason I went to graduate school is because I was already set on it—no one reached out a helping hand. It was my unwillingness to take “no” from anyone that kept propelling me across this trajectory. I was told I couldn’t do an internship and an honors thesis my senior year, but I said, “Watch me!” I cold-contacted the Smithsonian and arranged my internship. Holly, what was your trajectory to becoming a curator and working closely with Pacific Islanders? HOLLY BARKER: After graduating from college, I joined the Peace Corps, where I had to “unlearn” everything that I thought I knew about the world. I lived in the Marshall Islands for two years, and I came to terms with the crippling and devastating impacts of US activities, namely the testing of nuclear weapons in the islands. The Peace Corps had a profound impact on me and my sense of responsibility. As an American, there is no walking away from ongoing obligations to the Marshallese, particularly when it involves people I now love. After the Peace Corps, I went to Washington, DC, because I thought addressing policy was the central feature of advocacy work. I had a brief stint at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before the Marshall Islands Embassy hired me away. Before I came to academia, I worked for the embassy for 17 years supporting Marshallese leaders in their efforts to get the US Congress and the executive branch to address the impacts of US colonialism in the islands, including the nuclear legacy. At the embassy, Marshallese leaders asked me to document the impacts of US nuclear weapons testing from a Marshallese perspective. The Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, Tony deBrum, told me what to do and how to do it. I went to graduate school at night, but I didn’t realize that Tony was training me in Indigenous approaches to research, as there 526

Changing museum narratives

were no Indigenous studies, research methods, or Pacific Islander faculty when I received my PhD in 2000. Applied anthropology was the most closely aligned with the capacity building and community-led advocacy I care about, but applied approaches were often looked down upon in academia as less theoretical, rigorous, and “scientific.” I definitely did not see my place in academia and did not prepare for a career in it, but along the way I realized that I love teaching and community work. It turns out that a university-based museum is a great place for those activities. Thank goodness for Sven, as I learn from him every day, just as I did at the embassy. He leads by example. I had zero experience in museums when I came to the Burke, but Sven helps me realize the potential of collections to support the capacity building of students and to amplify the strengths of communities. I can only do this collaborative work because it is in partnership with Sven, communities, students, staff, and supportive colleagues. SARA: How are the missions and goals of your curatorial work linked to the Contemporary Culture department? SVEN: A museum, for me, is basically a warehouse of collected materials and objects that people keep for memory’s sake and sharing with others. Many people don’t have the space nor know what else to do with their collections, so they give them to museums to care for. This is where our work begins—in caring for these collections and learning about their histories, both good and bad. For me, Contemporary Culture within the Burke is creating a place for us to take back what was taken from us as Indigenous peoples. It is a place where we can put our history and knowledge, which has been stripped from us systematically over the last several centuries, back into a living context. Because of what we have in the Burke—the materiality of it, the tangibleness of it—no one can argue against what these pieces symbolize and mean, as it can be done against oral histories. When you bring physical objects and show “the story behind them,” no one can dismiss this. In that sense, Contemporary Culture is about who we are—a part of history that is living and can’t be forgotten. HOLLY: Sven and I started at the same time, and when we first got to the Burke, our department was called “Ethnology.” We certainly knew that the term was outdated and hurtful, as it focuses on the interests of the institution. Using “Ethnology” to describe our department also signaled the academic tradition of extracting and gathering knowledge for comparisons; this work isn’t focused on communities or their well-being. But figuring out what to call ourselves that is clear to the public, yet doesn’t bring the baggage of the past, isn’t an easy task. It took a long time internally to educate the museum about why the long-held departmental name of “Ethnology” was so hurtful. Our first mission was an important symbolic act that reflected the work we are doing in shifting the colonial-Indigenous relationship through naming. I feel that the work we do as curators reflects our priorities as anthropologists. I love working with Sven because we see the Burke as a place of unending opportunities for connection, engagement, learning, and pride. Our appointments at the Burke are split half-time with our academic unit at the University of Washington, anthropology, so we prioritize communities with direct ties to the collections, including students who can take leadership roles in the research that keeps knowledge in its living context. Everyone, and particularly communities that have been abused by the ongoing colonial practices of museums, should have an opportunity to connect with the inspiration and possibilities carried in the cultural collections. SVEN: Our goal is to keep Contemporary Culture and Archaeology departments at the Burke connected, as both of our departments focus on people and work closely with communities, 527

Sven Haakanson Jr. et al.

but finding a name or title that neatly explains our differences is difficult. People are internally learning to stop calling us Ethnology, but it takes a long time, and we need to stop the antiquated system of exploitation and extraction that is implied in this word. With our name change, we are now shifting the discussion to “talk with communities” about their history, lives, and knowledges, as opposed to “we are studying them.” How we word something and phrase something really does feed the narrative. By us saying, “Hey, this is going to change,” we’ve started the harder conversations such as rethinking how we actively engage with communities. We are not the experts; the communities are the experts. The name change is linked to respecting communities. SARA: What does the “New Burke” represent? SVEN: What was really wonderful was the move to the New Burke made it easier to make changes. We have a new space and a new dialogue that engages communities. For us, we got to bring into practice, not just listening to communities, but engaging with them from their perspectives, from their voices. Not everyone gets what we’re trying to do, but our goal is to change how we as an institution engage with communities moving forward. HOLLY: Change takes place so slowly in institutions. When we want to advocate for a change, it takes us so long. Moving to a new museum catapulted our reforms forward. SVEN: We changed our approach to collections management and exhibition with the move into the New Burke. That change allowed us to create a space that now uses collections to show how important it is to respect and see other cultures and their world views. For us, each cultural piece embodies a deep and rich history; we make sure it is the communities who share this knowledge on their terms and decide if they want this knowledge shared with the public. HOLLY: In the old Burke, people didn’t even know where to find those of us who work there or understand what we did; what they saw were the exhibits. Now visitors can see the work happening inside our department. They can see Sven in the work areas with the collections, or carving, or bringing community members in. They can see our students feeling that they have a sense of ownership in the Burke and leading the research. The communities are the voices of the museum. When someone sees another community member working with the collections in our department, it leads others to ask, “How do I do that?” It’s been wonderful to see how much more quickly relationships with new communities are being built in the New Burke. SARA: You’ve talked a bit about how the New Burke has allowed you to rethink not just how your department is defined but exhibits featuring the Contemporary Cultures collections. What is the role of museums in changing narratives about Indigenous-colonial relations? And how have you designed the Culture is Living exhibit in reference to your understanding about how natural history museums have typically represented Indigenous peoples and their histories? SVEN: The Culture is Living exhibit centers the voices of our community members, such as Lummi Chief Tsi;li’xw (Bill) James, whose quote guides the work of the exhibit (Figure 33.1). He says, “Xechit-en schaleche I’ en-tengexw. Know your relatives and where you are from,” and: we have to teach our young people their values and their culture, their language and history of who they are and where they come from. We are still alive as a Native people, as an Indigenous people. We are still alive here even though the government tried to suppress and do away with us. Doing away with our culture 528

Changing museum narratives

Figure 33.1 Tsi;li’xw (far left) visiting the New Burke for the first time seeing his welcoming robe and quote. Source: Photo by Sven Haakanson Jr.

and our people because that’s one of the major fights that we fight is teaching the young people about what happened and then boarding schools because where our language and our culture was beaten out of us. These things aren’t usually talked about. (Tsi;li’xw James, July 2018) 529

Sven Haakanson Jr. et al.

That quote from the late Tsi;li’xw James during an interview conducted for the new Culture is Living exhibit underscores the priority we give for community leadership and voice to interpret the collections and to share stories of interest to communities. The process of creating the exhibit reaffirmed our commitment to letting community members represent the Burke Museum’s Contemporary Culture collections to the public. We need to build trusting relationships, and that takes time. There are no shortcuts, and the timeframe of exhibit designers often conflicts with the need to slow down and ensure that a strong foundation is built for both current and future collaboration. Communities first needed to understand they can build with the Burke before community members could give input into the process. The vast number of communities with heritage connections to the collections at the Burke are Indigenous communities who are well-versed about the exploitive and colonial practices of museums, including our own. HOLLY: We have to make changes to the ways that museums prioritize their own needs and timelines. The approach to building exhibits for the culture parts of the museum required extensive community participation that was not built into the showcasing of natural history collections. As curators for the Contemporary Cultures collections, we could not commit to or move forward with any dimensions of exhibit design without extensive input from the heritage communities connected to these collections. What themes for the entire exhibit would they like to see? For their specific communities, did they want to share pieces in our collections with the public? How much information, and what stories did they want to share? Who should share those stories? The vital input from communities added a substantial layer of time and complexity to the exhibit design process, as well as additional costs so we could honor the professional participation of community members. At each step of the exhibit design process, we had to explain internally about the importance of ethical engagement with communities. SVEN: A challenge we faced in creating a new exhibit was to acknowledge the contributions of our museum to colonial violence, but also to create new relationships and trust going forward. Rooting colonial violence out of museums is a process; it is not an outcome we could achieve through the exhibit or any other actions. Slowly, and community-by-community, we are working collaboratively to demonstrate by our actions that we strive every day to disrupt colonial practices and to build respectful partnerships going forward. The opening of the new museum and the Culture is Living exhibit created an opportunity to reconsider what it means to curate Indigenous culture collections amassed during a time when colonial practices in museums were not questioned and a period where museums established institutional practices regarding the exhibit and representation of these collections. It is not and has not been an easy or comfortable process internally for us to question existing practices, much less transform or disrupt the colonial patterns of museum operations. HOLLY: One of the most exciting practices to emerge from the new approach to our exhibits was the redesigning of labels. We asked our research team, Maia Sugiyama and Randizia Crisotomo, to find the original names of every cultural piece being shared in our exhibit. While we were not able to get the original name for every piece, we designed our exhibit labels so we can change them as we learn more from our community members. We also felt that the order of how our labels were set up is important. We start with the original name in the language from where it was from, then English, and finally a quote and or a short description of the piece from a community member, not us as the caretakers. If we had none of these, we left this space blank until we can add the right information to the label. This allowed us to put the pieces into a context and meaning that we cannot do in English. 530

Changing museum narratives

We show the importance of using and knowing the original languages of the piece, especially when we care for so many cultural pieces that carry a deep and rich history. Changing the narratives within our labels was just the start. SARA: In addition to exhibits, how else might we begin to grapple with the colonial legacies of museums? I’m thinking here of the wider work you, Sven, have done to reconnect angyaaq knowledge and you, Holly, to create research experience for Pacific Islander students at UW. SVEN: It starts with putting the pieces into students’ hands and the knowledge into the communities hearts and minds. Whether it’s the object itself, a photograph or a drawing— taking and giving it back to communities personally means a lot. That starts that process of empowering them with knowledge, knowledge that no matter what I or anyone else says can never be taken back. Once they know and once they see it, they will ask more and more questions about not only the pieces we have but the history of that piece. The model Angyaaqs that we made in 2014 was what inspired us to construct two fullsized ones from 2015–2016. This experience has inspired our community and especially our youth to see how their ancestors were truly engineers and not just primitive savages. Learning about how our ancestors designed these open boats out of driftwood and sea lion skins to make them safe and efficient to travel around Kodiak and across to the mainland is amazing. The only reason we discovered this knowledge is because of a model that is in our collection. When we started relearning about the angyaaq, I studied and used the model from the Burke’s collection to create another model and 20 model kits for the students to make at the Akhiok kids culture camp. I didn’t take the original piece back. What I did was make a model of the model to bring back with me to use as an example to teach others to do the same (Figure 33.2). This knowledge now belongs to the community and doesn’t belong to

Figure 33.2 Photo of Sugpiaq students—the next generation—paddling the angyaaq at the Akhiok Kids Camp, Cape Alitak, Alaska. Source: Photo by Sven Haakanson Jr.

531

Sven Haakanson Jr. et al.

the museum. Or to me. It belongs to them. That’s part of the excavation and relearning of the knowledge, of bringing it out, sharing it, and allowing the community to take and use this information in any directions they want. HOLLY: Research Family started at the “old” Burke with that same approach we’ve discussed— of inviting people in, showing them our resources and letting them lead. It started with the Pacific Islander students who wanted a space to do research connected to their families and to their communities; to ask questions about the collections from Oceania and be able to turn to their family members to look for answers; to see the living knowledge of their own families and communities as having critical knowledge for their university-based research. Its focus and emphasis is on family. Their families have nurtured their own growth and support of the students, and they have continued and ongoing roles in their university education. The research part of it has been a way to address the still low numbers of Pacific Islanders in research and higher education, and particularly in grad school, and to provide research and training opportunities for them. The idea is to create cohorts of researchers that function as family connected to their own families—but also function as family on the University of Washington campus, where they tend to each other as sisters (they’re mostly women) and as family members. They invest in one another and share with one another the ups and downs and challenges of higher education. They insist on research that’s done together as a group, too, rather than individual and extractive. They look at Indigenous research methods, and they look for the need for methods and ethics that are from their own community that still have to be developed. And they teach each other about their own cultures and create cohorts of support. It’s a space that they have carved out for themselves and taken ownership at the university. This year we have the first Research Family cohort for graduate students, and it’s all Pacific Islander graduate students. We take it in the direction that they want. A central feature is that it’s museum-based—it’s research and collections-based. The notion of Research Family is more than just mentoring or pulling together a group of students who are underrepresented in education. SARA: It’s also a radically different framing of how knowledge is produced. With westernscience frameworks and the institution of the university, we are posed as atomistic individuals who pursue our ideas in silos. We protect our data; we have a hard time sharing. To use the structure of and metaphor of the family is a decolonial act—you are reimagining what it is to produce knowledge. Instead of having an individualistic approach, you have a fundamentally different way that speaks to how knowledge is created at home. SVEN: And that is how we work at home. We work as a community. We work as a family. And that knowledge is so important, but we support each other through that whole process. That is what we do in Indigenous communities. This is one of the issues we’ve run into with the western education system, where we want everyone to be individualistic, but we (Indigenous people) know that we cannot thrive in that way. HOLLY: Yes, knowledge never belongs to a person, it belongs to a community. We don’t have to train people to be self-promoters! This approach brings joy to the teaching. We all feel the illness of academia, we all internalize the stresses of it and feel that all the time. Research Family is such my happy place. I love that our academic realm can be so full of love and peoples’ grandparents and aunties. The students bring parents into the Burke. When the parents see we are invested in their children, then the parents engage with us in a whole different way because they understand we share the same goal. Also the parents are the community leaders who open up all these relationships 532

Changing museum narratives

to us afterwards, too. So there’s this long-term benefit that comes from working with the students and not taking them away from their families but engaging with them in a familial context. Training students to work in their own communities gives students a leadership role in research as they are going to make sure that our methodologies are not extractive or hurtful. For the Pacific Islander students, there is a growing realization that western education bemoans what is characterized as a lack of participation of Pacific Islanders in the STEM fields. By engaging directly with the ongoing and living STEM practices, and seeing how STEM innovations are both ancient and ongoing, Pacific Islanders are reversing the narrative; they are not underrepresented in STEM fields, only in western approaches to STEM that fail to see or understand Oceanic knowledge in these areas. There are STEM disciplines being developed in Oceania that don’t exist in our research institutions, such as sophisticated studies of wind and wave movements used in navigation. Students need to see that there are deep STEM legacies in their communities that they can continue, that are integrated and inseparable from culture. Rather than discussion of STEM deficits, our collections can guide institutions to talk about STEM strengths and assets. Because STEM and culture are intertwined, STEM research has to connect to who students are—their families, communities, places, and identities. Students have to first understand the innovations that they can make for their communities so they can understand its potential in the lives of the people they love (Figure 33.3). SARA: There is an important shift that happens when students see themselves as researchers and part of a research community. I think that’s such an important thing that we lose sight of when we think about inclusion for Black, Indigenous and other historically excluded

Figure 33.3 Four Research Family sisters celebrate the arrival at the Burke of a Yapese sail woven by the family and community of Rachael Tamngin (foreground) and consider the interconnectivity of knowledge and relationships. Source: Photo by Sven Haakanson Jr.

533

Sven Haakanson Jr. et al.

students and individuals in science as the focus in often, “Why aren’t they interested? Why aren’t they taking our classes? How can we get them excited about STEM?” The problem isn’t that they aren’t excited about STEM, but STEM is not as open and representative of their understandings of the world as it needs to be for them to be full participants. It’s not that the students are lacking something; the onus is on us. Nobody wants to be a part of a system that tells you your way of thinking and knowing is incredibly wrong and has to be erased so you can be made into a real scientist. SVEN: You have to forget everything about who you are—socially, culturally, physically—in order to fit into STEM expectations. Students talk about these experiences of living in two worlds, but I don’t live in two worlds, I live in the world I am in, and I’ve incorporated the way I see the world and how I was raised into all that I do. This comes back to our efforts to change the narrative, not just within our institution, but with our colleagues. If you’re going to go in and work with communities, please coauthor the work because it is their knowledge, not yours. It’s their way of living and seeing the world that we’re writing about. Write together so you can see how western science connects to cultural knowledge. Find a way to combine it that is respectful and honors people who have been erased. SARA: Western science is based on this divide between subjects and objects. As scientists we are trained to isolate variables so we can test them apart from the whole, apart from their broader relations. With Indigenous ways of knowing, you are not creating that distance between subjects, objects, and the relations that connect them. For me, that is a key part of what you two are doing and what Indigenous approaches, more broadly, are doing: reinserting relations back into the science. The goal here is not to treat the objects we study as disparate or discrete entities but as a web of relations that are connected with each other, with community, and with ourselves. SVEN: We look at the world holistically, and how everything works together. Keep the Indigenous ways so we don’t become so myopic. I would really like to collaborate with Biology and look at all the species connected to Culture. Collaboration is still hard because we have so much work to do within our departments at the Burke; however, I would like to work with Biology to figure out how to show how our Indigenous practices of the past help sustain species over thousands of years, so that we can teach others. If we can build these bridges together, we can show how important our collections are to each other, in terms of not only understanding our environment but our place and our role in this world. When you think about Indigenous communities, we have the utmost respect for the foods that sustain us. Yes, we’ve adopted some outside practices, but we continue to give respect and honor to everything that we harvest. This makes us care for what we have right in front of us. By looking at Biology collections, we can learn lessons from Indigenous communities about how to care for other species besides ourselves. HOLLY: Yes, the goal is to connect knowledges, not keep them separate and categorized. Every aspect of museum practices, such as separating our distinct fields or even imposed categories of shelving and entering pieces into databases, separates pieces from context and connections. Our challenge is to build back the connections. Certainly when we’re doing our community work, there are not neat boundaries between culture and natural sciences the way there are in a museum, so much of the decolonizing work that needs to be done centers on integrating knowledge forms, reestablishing context, and relationships. SARA: I feel like our colleagues in Paleontology and Biology at the Burke are starting to ask questions. Getting people to that point of asking questions is itself an aspect of institutional change. The advocacy work on behalf of communities that the Culture half of the museum is doing is starting to create collaborations across disciplines. For people who dig 534

Changing museum narratives

up dinosaurs to now think about what it means to be in relationship with communities is really unique. HOLLY: I think one of the biggest shifts I’ve seen has been in teaching. Many of our science colleagues are really looking into ways to build research opportunities for all students and, specifically, students of color, given how much work needs to be done in the sciences to alter power and knowledge. Luke Tornabene, the curator for the fish collections, took the lead in writing an National Science Foundation grant for the two of us to train Pacific Islander students in research connecting the fish and contemporary culture collections. We have funding for three years of summer field work and did our first year in American Samoa last summer. I appreciate greatly how Luke asks questions about Indigenous science and wants to know how Indigenous biology is carried in culture. He wants to understand what knowledge about the fish is in the songs, and in the dance, and in the carvings, and in other areas of culture he had never accessed before. By having our students work across the disciplines of biology and anthropology, we all collectively see how the conversations are so much broader when you can draw on multiple knowledge forms and center Indigenous science and community relationships. From our grant, I think we see that by working together we can shift the narratives in our home institutions after our fieldwork, too. Just because scientists can figure out how to access or extract data, doesn’t mean that they should. By working together with our colleagues, the Culture side of the museum emphasizes the importance of respecting Indigenous protocols and building relationships, so the goal of our fieldwork inquiry is not strengthening our own institution but considering how we can be guided by communities to train their young people in research that supports their own questions and interests. I think of myself not as a researcher but as a capacity builder. SARA: Reflecting on Tuck and Yang’s (2012) piece, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” do you believe decolonizing a museum is possible, and if so, what aspects do you find most productive? What spaces do you find the most tension? SVEN: We started with showing what it has meant for us to decolonize our space through what we exhibited to the public in our new exhibit Culture is Living. Even before this, we started our conversations by listening to the communities and finding out what they wanted to share with the public first—before we made any decisions about what our focus is. Through these discussions, we were able to move into a deeper understanding and meaning of what it is for us to decolonize. We actively started this process in 2016 when we knew we were constructing a new museum and acknowledged the colonial legacies we were working with and within. This guided us throughout the entire process of design, development, context, and layout of the final exhibit space. We were practicing what is now being called “decolonization.” What we were doing was what we felt and thought was the right thing to do. Yes, we need to have a conversation with the general public on how to engage with each other about what it means to decolonize our practices and how to engage with communities by listening to them. Being in a position of power means we control the conversation and what is shared. For example, archaeologists interpret for us what they have excavated, and much of this is based on their life experiences, and this in turn influences the interpretations of what is written and becomes part of history. Just to say we need to stop and change this practice of “we know everything and therefore we’re going to tell you how to think” challenges everything that has been written and done in the past. It means questioning how and what we are doing in a way that is uncomfortable, because it points out the power of how the past was written down and became history in the first place. We can use this as a starting point to consider what it means to decolonize how and what we are doing 535

Sven Haakanson Jr. et al.

now, writing about the past and what it means to the people we are creating this past for in the present. We need to show and share with our public about other ways of interpreting, writing about, and sharing their history. What does this look like in practice so that we can respectfully share this knowledge to change our ways of engaging with other views and histories? HOLLY: It seems like the task at hand is to first see and understand the colonialism that is woven into all museum practices before it can be rooted out. Bringing awareness about the ongoing and everyday violence of museums is vital. I think still internally in museums there’s still not an understanding of what decolonization means. For some people it might be about shifting power or authority, which are certainly elements of decolonization, but it’s a lot more nuanced. I think internally within museums there is resistance to serving communities first when it means less revenue or power. I love partnering with Sven because we get to have conversations about how to make change. It can be frustrating to feel the urgency of decolonization and to have the commitment to do it and having the communities critiquing the normal ways of business within museums and academia and pushing for it, and then having our internal structure slow us down. Our internal mechanisms are way behind communities and curators and those working with the collections. The people closest to the collections feel most the ethical urgency of this work. Those who institutionally are protecting the maintenance of the university and the institutions—including drawing on visitor fees coming through the front door— have different priorities. SVEN: Because of this process, museums continue to exploit and commodify Indigenous people’s pasts and knowledge through what they share with the visitors. The knowledge that is embodied within every cultural piece in museums is used to attract visitors to show how people lived in the “past.” The other part, as a Native myself, that creates tension is that we are opening up a festering wound that goes back centuries. The travesties of the past continue to create tension between the museums and communities because of the collections. We have to open up a dialogue, to find ways to heal that process and to heal that wound so we can move forward in a healthy way, and this takes time. It takes us collaborating with communities to rebuild trust that has been lost. I am optimistic in that we can change this by having conversations in a way that allows the communities a voice that we listen to. That ability to listen then allows for the community and conversation to direct us. With Holly, we sat back and they told us and directed us on ways that we could move forward and help them; not us in our academic careers, but the community to reengage with collections, with the cultural pieces that were taken out, and using this as a dialogue to move forward. HOLLY: I like how you zeroed in on trust and relationships—both of those elements—these are the core of what we build and try to do. It starts with the two of us—I have such deep trust in you and I have a relationship with you where I feel accountable and responsible and want to do well by you because I love and respect you so much. That flows into the work we do. We are honest and transparent with students and community members about the awful things that happen in museums and collections. The work of decolonization is massive and overwhelming, and we invite everyone to come in and take on any parts of that work that feel doable. SARA: How do you reconcile this tension around museums being seen as owning belongings and ancestors? HOLLY: I feel ill often when I walk into the institution, but I also hold this understanding of its potential. If there wasn’t the potential to do better, I don’t think I could continue to enter this space because there are so many harms of museums that are ongoing. Connected to the last point, too, you can’t get rid of the colonialism. The idea that decolonization is achievable—the 536

Changing museum narratives

colonialism, the hundreds of years of institution building with colonialism woven into every fabric of life—is not achievable. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, however. How do we do better going forward? What can we do better to change narratives and power? SVEN: For me, I don’t feel the angst, but I think about the potential of what we can do through the museum collections to change the colonial narrative. Early on, as I was doing archaeology, I realized that if I can show you a site and the artifacts that my ancestors created from Kodiak 7,500 years ago, you can’t argue against these tangible facts and say they weren’t there. By showing you a physical embodiment of my ancestors, this becomes part of an unwritten written record, whether there are words on it or not. I look at every cultural piece as a history and as knowledge that is becoming—as we unfold and learn more about it and the community reengages with it. That is what is embodied within each of these cultural pieces—in fact I feel every cultural piece in this institution. I look at this and keep it at the forefront so I don’t get dissuaded or discouraged at how daunting it is to change the narrative within our system so that it is equitable to every voice and every type of knowledge and other ways of knowing. I think of it as a tool to allow those voices and knowledges to be heard, seen, shared, and learned about from within the system we have. HOLLY: That joy, that spark when you put a piece into the hands of a student and they feel a connection to ancestors, to knowledge, to community, to values, to place—it’s transformative. When we think of the potential of museums, it’s still untapped in terms of teaching, of reengagement, of reconnecting, and of healing. When I feel that angst, it’s more in the sense of looking at the sheer number of communities where that engagement needs to happen. Every community deserves to have an opportunity with our collections where they can have that powerful, visceral, emotional, intellectual engagement with those pieces. There’s so much work to do in having the students think about the types of narratives that museums initially created about their communities using these collections, looking at the taxonomies of people that were created through examples of “primitive communities” brought in with the collections. Giving students the tool to do this disrupting work, in the same way as you give that knowledge to them and they own it, but supporting their leadership so they can disrupt the false narratives put in place with these collections and put in place their new narratives. SVEN: It’s at the foundation of what we do—that trust and those relationships . . . the communities feel not only that they can trust us, and not only learn from the cultural pieces but know that the relationships we have won’t be used to further our careers or further the institution. Our relationships with the students, the Research Families, the artisans—it’s all important. We are trying to keep a healthy, trusting relationship but move forward in ways to have community voices carried forward, unlike in the past, where the approach was, “I’m the expert, I’m going to talk for Natives.” No! Holly and I will both tell you, we are not the experts. We don’t speak for the pieces. We can work with you to bring in community members to have them share their knowledge, but we need to shift that whole idea of who the experts are. SARA: Where do you hope the dialogue will be carried further? SVEN: When we finished the exhibit, someone asked us what we were going to do next. What do you mean? We’re just starting! This is the beginning of a long-term process in which we are using this exhibit and this layout to have these ongoing dialogues and relationships with communities as they feel that they can trust us, to come in and share (Figure 33.4). The work is only beginning for what we are sharing. We’re shifting from a place of cultural dominance to a place of sharing cultural knowledge with their own community, and with the community at large. It’s an ongoing process that’ll probably be the rest of my career 537

Sven Haakanson Jr. et al.

Figure 33.4 Peter Lape (far left) and Sven Haakanson Jr. (far right) holding up the Kayak Alfred Naumoff (middle) made for the New Burke Exhibit Culture is Living. Source: Photo by Justin McCarthy.

here. I am hoping it can be carried forward and go further so that eventually communities are narrating everything. HOLLY: We hope to create the spaces where we are facilitators for family members to teach their own kids or the next generation using the Burke’s collections. We don’t have to enter the conversations; we can just create the access. Back to that earlier point, teaching IS research. It is collective knowledge making. Teaching is not separate from research even if the university puts these aspects of our work into different compartments. Sven and I are not writing articles about our collections. It would be wholly unethical for me to write about them. Coming to the museum underscores that I don’t know anything. There will never be a time where I will write an academic article about the collections. It’s not going to happen, and it shouldn’t. As Sven was saying, it’s not our knowledge to share. They’re not our stories to share. If I can facilitate a community member doing that, fine. SARA: When you think about the legacies of colonialism, they go far and wide and structure everything we do in the academy and what is given importance or primacy here. For example, the emphasis placed on publishing in academia versus teaching. These value systems point to the same illness, the same problem. What can one do to disrupt this? I think it involves being fundamentally different and doing our work in a different way. There is a reason why so many communities have been involved in a lot of decolonial efforts in anthropology and archaeology, and it always coincides with educational 538

Changing museum narratives

opportunities for the next generation. For example, I don’t know of an example of a collaborative and community-based Indigenous archaeology that doesn’t have a field school or educational component to it, and often it’s this aspect of the project that is at the heart of why a Tribal Nation or community has partnered on the research. For example, in my work with both the Kashia Pomo Interpretive Field School with the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians and now with Field Methods in Indigenous Archaeology with the Confederated Tribes of Grande Ronde, training the next generation is the central goal of these projects. Doing archaeological research within the context of a field school ensures that archaeologists-intraining learn from tribal members directly their histories and the importance of the places and belongings that archaeologists work with. HOLLY: We joke around sometimes that we have to have elder status now—our job is just capacity building of the young people 100 percent of the time. It’s not about our careers, it’s not about our publications. Our fundamental job at the university is to make sure the next generation is set for whatever it’s going to inherit or whatever leadership they want to take. That’s full-time work. SARA: I’m interested in having you think about how the decolonizing work you do shifts in relation to the contexts in which you personally work? How different does the work look like at the Burke versus when you work in other contexts? SVEN: For me they go hand-in-hand. Being Native, Indigenous, and from Alaska and Kodiak, they go hand-in-hand. I’ve been using collections for 30 years now. I’ve been using collections to take knowledge back and to find ways to put it back into a living context within my own community. The exhibits are just one part of those lessons I have learned working for my community of how powerful and important it is to continue not just at a local scale, but a larger scale so others can use it as an example and a model for, “Hey, we can do this in my community.” They take it and they create their own way of doing it, but they’re still taking that knowledge back and to empower the community to have that knowledge, to ask questions, to go into other institutions and to start to take this information back and piece together this history that has been systematically erased for us. And that has a deeper role that then starts to change the attitudes of who they are as people, how they see themselves and how they live their lives. I say that just from my own personal experience seeing how powerful and moving it is for me to learn about the angyaaq, as I mentioned, and all of the other technologies that we were once told were primitive, that aren’t. They are pretty advanced. Gut-skin parkas that precedes Gore-Tex. Angyaaqs with their bulbous bows. SARA: The parkas are better than Gore-Tex! SVEN: And they’re green, unlike Gore-Tex! SARA: It’s not polluting the environment! SVEN: Exactly! Seeing all of these things and having that fundamental change within my own way of seeing the world, to saying, “Hey communities, you can do this!” To me, the museum’s exhibit is an extension of the idea to empower our communities to take this knowledge back to use it for themselves so that the next generation growing up isn’t unaware. They know their history. They know their cultural pieces. And they understand how they fit into their lives. SARA: Reflecting on Holly’s work on denuclearization in the Marshall Islands calls our attention to the ongoing structures of colonialism and imperialism that Indigenous communities continue to contend with. How does this influence the work you do as researchers and curators? How does this knowledge impact the kind of work that you do in the museum or as a researcher? HOLLY: Similar to what Sven was saying, that there aren’t distinctions between our work at the Burke, our community work, our teaching, and our research. We very much want to blur 539

Sven Haakanson Jr. et al.

those boundaries because our teaching and research is in service to communities at all times. It also foregrounds the priorities of communities. In order to work as a curator or to teach, it is critical to have priorities of the community foremost in our thinking. In the case of the Marshall Islands, I could not do anything in the museum if I wasn’t actively involved in the community’s nuclear justice efforts, because that is where people have asked me to focus. The Marshallese community enjoys engaging with the Burke—they feel welcome, it’s brought healing, it’s brought understanding, it’s brought connection. Explaining to universities the importance of this work as scholars is challenging. Community work is not separate, and we’re not doing it right if it can be separated. I can’t ignore the most pressing issues of the community in order to have them engage with the priorities of the university or the museum. Community priorities take priority over ours and that links to decolonization; we humble ourselves in service to others rather than pushing our own agenda first. I also think blurring these lines for the students is important, too. They need to be active in community work. They need to understand how their education bolsters their own communities. We have to be present in the community to understand where students’ knowledge that we co-construct in the university has applicability and relevance in their own lives so we can foster that at all times. SVEN: It’s just about taking the knowledge back and having these conversations. When we created the models of the angyaaq in Akhiok, Mitch Simeonoff, an elder said, “Let’s make a big one!” I had never seen a full-sized angyaaq from my community, but my response was, “OK!” This is what you want, we’ll make it happen. And we did. We figured it out as a community—not only as a community there but as a community here at the Burke. It was a relationship with museum staff and colleagues all coming together to say this is something that is bigger than us, something that will have a larger impact than just a “fun” project. It became a community relationship both here and in Kodiak facilitated by this simple vessel. That question you asked about colonialisms is not looking at them as colonialisms, but how do we change it by doing what we do? How do we flip this process from take-away to take-back, from being extractive to being proactive and giving back and sharing that knowledge again; trying to find a positive way to change something that is so negative? The rest of my life I will be part of this work and these relationships because I am part of this family now. I have an obligation to continue these relationships so that as we learn we build on the knowledge that we have—from not only how to use the angyaaq, to the tools and materials that went with it, to understand the greater environment of how to handle it in the weather—we are continuing something that started off as a model to building and rebuilding knowledge that goes beyond what a physical object is. You can call this healing, but it’s empowering the next generation with knowledge from one small piece of who they are culturally, who they are humans, who they are as individuals and who we are as a community. And that brings in this larger healing process that we start to grow stronger, healthier humans every generation moving forward. SARA: What we all do in the culture half of the museum—Archaeology, Contemporary Culture, and the Bill Holm Center—what we all do together is support communities in various aspects of their culture. We’re all doing the same work with culture, but we’re just doing it with different collections. In Archaeology, we see ourselves as very connected to communities today, and what we do mirrors the work that your department is doing. We don’t have references because we are working with living cultures and they are dynamic and fluid in how we engage with them. When you put something in writing, it becomes set and can’t change, unlike living cultures that continue to adapt to the world around them. We 540

Changing museum narratives

may have separate teams that carry out this work, but we share a similar mission. It is always about peoples’ sovereignty in this moment. As we come to the close of our discussion, I’m interested to hear what your vision of a decolonial future looks like going forward? SVEN: It’s so important to not just listen and collaborate with communities but also to change the way we go about our working by showing that research is not extractive. We need new research relationships where we think about coauthoring papers so knowledge is mutually shared. We have to be mindful always of how our work can benefit communities. HOLLY: For me, there is such a focus on collections as generating research and knowledge. I think it’s imperative to recognize that teaching IS research. If you want to decolonize, the emphasis is on education and building the capacity of future leaders with ties to our collections. SVEN: We can change the narrative of power by humbly stepping back as curators and exhibit designers to empower the communities to speak, to share and tell their stories from their voice, from their community and history. It is not an easy task because you are opening yourself, your institution and space, to very painful and ongoing histories that are carried forward within the living communities’ minds, unconsciously and consciously. It is important that the communities are able to share their histories from their views and voices.

Note 1 Twenty, years later there are only 33 Indigenous archaeologists with a PhD in the United States (Marek-Martinez, this volume, Chapter 31).

References cited Haakanson, Sven. 2001. “Can There Be Such a Thing as an Alutiiq Anthropologist?” In Looking Both Ways: Heritage and Identity of the Alutiiq People, edited by Aron L. Crowell, Amy F. Steffian, and Gordon L. Pullar, 79–80. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1): 1–40.

541

INDEX

ABERIGUA 436, 439 accommodation 8 acculturation 3, 5, 7, 17, 67, 95, 110–111, 150, 196, 228, 247, 248, 292; Guaranís 32; ladinos 96 Acebo, N. 8 adaptation 19, 69–70, 72, 228; of the Coahuiltecans 379; see also acculturation adornment 330; earrings 333, 334; piercings 330–332, 333, 335; shell 331, 332, 333, 334, 335; tattoos 331; see also dress African Burial Ground Project 8, 375 Africans 5, 146; Colonowares 150–151; enslavement 152, 153; Indigenous interactions 147, 148–149, 150, 152; multiethnic communities 156–157; in Native American territories 153–155, 156–157; quilombo 95, 155, 157; self-liberated 155–156 agency 16, 18, 20, 38, 65, 87, 102, 114, 117, 146–147, 149, 150, 169, 195, 203, 212, 238, 292, 295, 303, 338, 352, 358, 473; of Indigenous people 112, 228; of livestock 88; object 115 agriculture: milpa 308, 308–309, 401–402; and mobility 308, 309, 311, 313, 320; swidden 308–309, 313 Aguilar, J. B. 308 Ajacán 24 Alamo, The 374, 375, 376 Alamo Plaza 376, 377, 379 Alberti, B. 118 Alchon, S., A Pest in the Land 48 Alexander, R. 184, 315, 317 Allard, A. 116–117, 473 alms-giving 294–295 American Indian Movement (AIM) 109 Anderson, D. 67 Andrews, A. P. 8, 399

animals 6, 79, 138, 139; as agents of change 82–83; Columbian Exchange 81; overkill explanation for Pleistocene megafauna 80; stable isotope analysis of domesticates 84, 86 Anthony, D., on mobility 309–310 anthropology 14, 17, 80, 82; and deep history 20; ontological turns 117, 118, 119; see also historical ecology Aónikenk 292 Apache: logistical camps 281–282, 284; nuclear centers 282; tipi camps 280–281, 284 Appadurai, A., The Social Life of Things 114 archaeology 3, 4, 8, 14, 32, 40, 65, 110, 129, 146, 358; acculturation 110–111; applications of survivance in 471–474; applying futurisms 510–511; artifacts 111, 112, 115, 149, 150, 297–298; classification schemes 16–17; Classificatory-Historical Period 16; collaborative/community approaches 6, 7, 8, 14, 18, 39, 110, 113, 118, 120, 130, 150, 403, 404–405, 431, 436–437, 451, 452, 453, 463, 475; colonial nature of 504–507; comparative approaches 6–7; contact spaces 96; critiques of 7; and cultural knowledge systems 505–507; data sources 83, 84; decolonized 443, 522; and deep history 15; descriptions 33, 34, 35; direct-historical approach 17; documentary sources 14, 15, 16, 65, 97; downstream 14, 17, 19, 20, 26; feminist approaches 118–119, 439, 441; hard science approach 505; isotopic analysis 6; Jesuit-Guaraní missions 30; as longterm history 16–19; material culture 34–35; materiality 14, 16–17, 33, 95, 98, 112, 115, 116; methodological advances 6; Midwestern Taxonomic Method 17; mission 36; multiethnic communities 156–157; multi-linear evolution 17; New Indian History 17; and objectification

542

Index 34; and objectivity 506, 507; ontological turns 117, 118, 119; Pecos Classification 16–17; postcolonial theory 113; practice theory 112; pragmatism 114; and the prehistory concept 83; processual 17, 18; public 30, 38; of social identity 112; stereotypes 507; symmetrical 110; from the tamina traditions 507, 509; Tatham Mound 49–50; theories 110, 120, 147, 150; trace-element analysis 6; training and education programs 511–512; in the United States 504; upstreaming 45; see also historical archaeology; mission archaeology; plantation archaeology; reservation archaeology; theories archives 15, 16 Argentina 38 artifacts 149; categorizations 150; enchantment 115 assemblage theory 116, 117 Atalay, S. 8, 119, 451, 452, 471, 472, 474, 503 avoidance 19, 129 Aztecs 211, 221; food and diet 218 Balée, W. 80 barbarism 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 289 Barker, H. 524, 534, 538, 539, 541; on community work 540; on curatorial work 527; on decolonization 536, 537; on the exhibit design process 530, 531; on “New Burke” 528; on Research Family 532, 533; on working with Pacific Islanders 526–527, 533 Barthes, R., “The Death of the Author” 111 Batz, A., Sauvages Tchaktas Matachez en Guerriers 328 Baudrillard, J. 469 Baugh, T. 267 Beardsell, P. 176 Belgrano, M. 252 Benevides, F. A. de 56 Bhabha, H. 113, 358 Big History 15, 16 Bigelow, T. 415 Binford, L. 17 bioarchaeology 50–51 bio-determinism 47–48 biological imperialism 80–81 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement 412 Black Star Canyon Archaeological Project (BSCAP) 478 Blanton, D. 131 Bluteau, R. 344 Boddy, J. 334 bodily objects 330 Borah, W. 46 Borck, L. 463, 464 Brain, J. P. 332; Tunica Archaeology 326; Tunica Treasure 326 Braudel, F. 16, 18, 21, 182, 184

Bravo, A. G. 214 Brazil 5, 32, 36; Jesuit-Guaraní missions 38 Brenneman, D. 81 built places: for conversion practices 169; lattes 434; in Santafé de Bogotá 104, 105; see also churches; houses Bunn-Marcuse, K. 524 burial grounds: camposantos 374–375; and Maya mobility 317; “unverified cemetery” 376, 377 Burke Museum 524, 527 Burley, D. 362, 366 Camelo, J. 295, 296, 297, 299, 301, 303 Campbell, T. N. 384 camposantos, Mission Valero 374, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379–380, 381, 382 capitalism 64, 70, 184; antimarkets 182; corporate social responsibility 39 captive labor systems 147 Cardim, F. 350 Caribbean 221; encomienda system 231; slave trade 230, 231; social networks 228, 229–230; see also Cuba; Hispaniola Carlson, P. 518 Cartagena de Indias 97 case studies 8 cases, Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation v. Alamo Trust, Inc. 377, 389–401 Caste War 312, 401; see also Maya Social War Castro, V. 118 Catholicism 175; Council of Trent 168; missionizing and conversion 167–169, 170, 171, 172; see also conversion; Jesuit missionaries; mission archaeology cemeteries: “epidemic” 49–50; Mission Valero camposantos 374, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379–380, 381, 382; see also burial grounds; camposantos; funerary practices Central America 5, 8 ceramics 197, 213, 218–219, 233, 251, 256, 297, 319, 344; and language 348–349, 350; Paulistaware 348, 350, 351, 352; transferprinted 366; Tupiniquim 347–348; see also pottery; technology Chalco, P. 253 CHamoru people 431, 432, 433, 434, 440, 441, 442, 443; attitudes toward Spanish colonialism 437, 439; identity 439 Charmaz, K. 102 Chateaubriand, F., Atala 278 Cheqoq 249, 251 chert 199; see also stone tools Chesapeake region 25, 26, 69; drought conditions 70; see also Jamestown; Roanoke; Werewocomoco Christianity 163, 277, 278, 397; baptism 166; see also conversion

543

Index churches 399; mobility strategies 316–317; ramada 399–400; visita 399 Cipolla, C. 7, 8, 140, 453 Cisco, J. L. 413 Cisco-Sullivan, S. 413 civilization 36–37, 40; and savagery 278 civitas 97 climate 64, 67; change 79; and cultural systems 74; droughts 67, 68, 70, 71, 81; El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) 65; environmental determinism 72, 74; historical reconstruction 65, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72–73; Little Ice Age (LIA) 72–73 clothing 327; see also dress Coahuileños 379 Coahuiltecans 374, 376, 378, 379, 392; evidence for direct lineal descendants of 386–387; extinction of 383–384; and Mission Valero camposantos 379–380, 381, 382; myth of extinction 384–385; NAGPRA’s applicability to 389; see also cases Cobb, C. 20, 202 Colbert, G. 153 Colbert, L. 148, 153, 154 colonial regimes: managerial colonies 132, 133–134; missionary colonies 134; settler colonies 134–135; variation in the implementation of 135–136 colonialism 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 25, 30, 34, 48, 50, 65, 79, 88, 94, 129, 130, 164, 196, 292, 359, 396, 412, 432, 449, 464; Alamo, The 374; animals and plants as agents of change 82–83; of archaeology 504–507; under the Bourbon monarchy 400; congregación 165; contact spaces 96; and conversion 164, 166; cultural tropes 80–81; and culture contact 19; external 454; historical ecology 80–81; historiography 95, 96, 98; impact on food security 401; and overconsumption 81; peri268, 269–270; slow violence of 401; social categories 95, 96; Spanish 6–7; “sustained” 5; sustained 136–137, 138, 139–140, 141; taking the long view of 83–84; taxation 135, 136; and violence 402–404; see also settler colonialism; Spanish colonialism coloniality 30 Colonowares 150–151, 152 Columbian Exchange 81 Columbus, C. 231–232, 236 Columbian Consequences 4 Comanches 279, 280; Ute alliance 265–266; see also equestrian nomads communication: intercultural 95, 96; nonverbal 95 comparative studies 6–7 Conaty, G. 521 congregación 165, 311 conjonctures 16, 19, 21; Werewocomoco 24–25

conquistadors 398; Cortés, H. 211–212 consumption 196, 197, 212 contact spaces 96, 98; middle grounds 268, 269; in Santafé de Bogotá 98–99, 102 continuity 19, 20, 38, 83, 111, 271, 272; in Indigenous subsistence practices 81–82; of water management 87, 88 Contreras, D. 399 conversion 163, 164, 202, 212, 277, 278, 327; built environment 169; Catholic 167–169, 170, 171, 172, 175; congregación 165; and destruction of religious traditions 168; embodied spirituality 170–171; hybrid religious practices 165–166; Moravians 174; paseos 165; praying towns 172; Protestant 172–173, 174–175, 175; reducción 165, 168, 400; Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) 166–167, 173, 174; in Spanish Florida 171, 172; US Civilization Fund Act of 1819 174–175 Cook, N. D. 50 Coronado, F. 54 corporate social responsibility 39 Cortés, H. 211, 213, 214 cosmopolitanism 325, 327–328, 330 Covarrubias, S. 96 coyote 386 creolization 19, 150, 152, 166, 248 critical heritage studies 411, 412; see also heritage Crosby, A. 46, 47, 80–81 Cuba 233; ceramics 235; encomienda system 235; material culture 235; social networks 233, 234, 236–237 Cubagua 236, 237 Cuiza, C. 186, 189 cultural area 227 cultural entanglement 5 culture 148, 150; American Indian 148–149; change 65; and climate 64; contact 5, 14, 19, 111; material 35; see also acculturation; intercultural interaction; persistence; resistance culture contact 196, 358 Cusicanqui, S. 439 Deagan, K. 6–7, 152 decolonization 20, 109, 110, 119–120, 151, 407, 424, 521; Barker on 536; Haakanson on 535– 536; and repatriation 516 deep history 14–15, 16, 17, 20, 26; and anthropology 20; conjonctures 16, 19, 21, 24, 25; landscapes 20–21; Werewocomoco 24 Deetz, J. 117, 174; In Small Things Forgotten 442 Delaware tribe 19 Deleuze, G. 116, 119 Deloria, P. 416 Deloria, V. 19, 39, 109, 110; The Metaphysics of Modern Existence 119 DeLucia, C. 413, 416

544

Index depopulation of pre-Columbian societies 57; bioarchaeology 50–51; genetic evidence 51; High Counter/Low Counter dispute 46–47, 58; mortuary data 49–50; Pueblo people 56–57; settlement pattern studies 51–53; spatial analysis 52–53; Vacant Quarter hypothesis 52 Derrida, J. 469, 470 Diamond, J. 46, 48, 58; Guns, Germs, and Steel 46 Díaz del Castillo, B. 216 diseases 6, 25, 51, 52, 58, 94; bioarchaeology 50–51; bio-determinism 47–48; cocoliztli 51, 56; and the Columbian Exchange 81; and the decline of Indigenous populations 45–46, 47; and destruction of Indigenous food systems 489; and diet 497; Kliwa 57; in Pueblo villages 53–54; Werewocomoco 24; in Wichita communities 267–268; see also depopulation of pre-Columbian societies Dismal Swamp 148 displacement 20; Werewocomoco 24 DNA analysis 51 Dobyns, H. 45, 46, 47, 50 Dongoske, K. 396 “double coloniality” 30–41, 403 dress 324; colonial 325, 327–328, 330, 334; cosmopolitanism 325, 330; hybridity 325; Indigenous 327; of Indigenous people 328, 330; sumptuary laws 324, 325, 327 Du Tisne, C. 264, 265 Dustin, H. 417

assessment of encampments 286, 287–289; mobility 289; Tehuelches 294, 303; tipi sites 280, 281, 285 Erdrich, H., “Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects” 520–521 Escobar, A. 407 Espejo, A. 54 Estevanico the Moor 54, 148 ethnogenesis 358 Eurocentrism 151, 443 evolution, multi-linear 17 excavations 249; Calle Real 102–103; Cheqoq 251; Fuerte San José 302; Guam 436–437; Lower Mississippi Survey 332; Mexico CityTenochtitlan 216; Mission San Juan 380; Nipmuc 414; Pomacocha 255, 256; Puhú 479; San Pedro Siris 310, 311; Tahcabo 400, 404–405; Tenochtitlan 213; Tlatelolco 213; Wichita villages 266, 267; see also materiality exchange networks 295, 300; Maya 319 exploitation 473; and resource extraction 180; see also encomienda system; enslavement Exploring Métis Identity Through Archaeology (EMITA) project 362

Earle, C. 70 earthworks, Werewocomoco 22, 24 Eastern Pequot tribe 19, 150, 472 Edwards, K. 82 Eiselt, S. 284 El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) 65 Eliot, J. 415, 416, 417 embodiment 327; see also adornment; dress emplacement 20; Werewocomoco 24 En los orígenes de Bogotá: la construcción de su corpus documental, 1539–1633 97; archival sources 99, 100; coding 102, 103; conceptual framework 97–98; contact spaces 98, 99, 102; document analysis 101, 102, 106; document categories 97–98; see also Santafé de Bogotá encomienda system 55, 66, 94, 182, 228, 231, 232, 398, 400; in Cuba 235 enslavement 147, 164, 228, 345–346; African 146, 152, 183; Indigenous 151; and resource extraction 180; see also captive labor systems; slave trade entanglement theory 196, 197, 248, 268, 270–272, 358 equestrian nomads 276, 278; Apache logistical camps 282, 284; Apache nuclear centers 281–282; cold camps 286; comparative

families 405; Métis kinship networks 359–360, 362, 365, 368; and mobility 386; Paulista 347; Tupí 344 farming 321; and mobility 308, 309; see also agriculture; plantations Farriss, N. 308, 309, 310, 399 Feinman, G. 131 feminisms 110, 118 Ferris, N. 19, 20 Fineday, V. 496, 497 flintknapping 199–200, 202 Floridablanca 292, 299; interethnic relations 295–298; materiality 297–298; see also Patagonia Focking, G. 39 food sovereignty 8, 296, 341, 488, 491, 498; Declaration of Nyéléni 487; Hoofed Clan story 486–487; Red Lake Ojibwe 492, 493; and relational accountability 489, 496 Forbes, H. M. 419, 425n4 forestry practices: Tupiniquim 341, 343–344; see also agriculture Fortes, M. 111 Foster, G. M. 111 Foucault, M. 112 Fournier, P. 32 Franciscan missionaries 165, 167, 168, 170, 199 Freiwald, C. 317–318 Frink, L. 166 Fuerte San José: interethnic relations in 300–302; materiality 301, 302 Funari, P. 32

545

Index funerary practices 229; mass burials 49–50; Maya 317; Tap Pilam 390; Tunica 332 fur trade 261, 365–366; outposts 135; Wichita people 261–262, 265 futurisms 510 Galindo, F. 252 Galindo, M. 439 Gallivan, M. D. 5 Gann, T. 314, 315 Gasco, J. 182, 314, 316 Gell, A., Art and Agency 115 gender 436 Gigger, S. 419–420, 422 Glass, A. 265 glass tools 199 Gnecco, C. 7, 403 Gonzalez, S. L. 8, 473, 524 Goodnow, M. 417 Gordo, J. 295 Gould, R. 411, 413, 519, 520 Graham, E. 315 Green, J. 119 Greene, L. 155 Grijalva, J. de 398 Grimstead, D. 84 ground stone tools 200 Guam 431, 432, 434, 440, 441, 442; ABERIGUA 436, 439; archaeologies of Spanish colonialism in 434, 436–437; contact period 432; excavations 436–437; Heritage Day 437, 439; lånchos 436; Latte period 434, 436, 443; local attitudes to colonial-era heritage 437, 438; Magellan quintcentennial 439–441; reducciónes 433, 436, 442; Spanish heritage 436; see also CHamoru people Guaraní Indians 30–31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 41, 48; Tava Miri 40–41; see also Jesuit-Guaraní missions Guattari, F. 116, 119 Gupta, C. 488 Gutierrez, J. M. 400 Haakanson, S. Jr. 8, 532; on colonial legacies of museums 531, 532; on community and collections work 524–526; on community work 540, 541; on the Culture is Living exhibit 528, 529, 530; on curatorial work 527; on decolonization 535–536; on the exhibit design process 530; on “New Burke” 528; on STEM 534; on working relationships 537 Hall, E., The Silent Language 95 Hämäläinen, P. 46, 138, 139, 265, 272 Hamilakis, Y. 348 Handbook of North American Indians 131 Hanks, W. 403 Haraway, D. 119 Harrison, R. 115

Hart, S. 20 Hemenway, J. 422 Henige, D. 44, 47, 49 heritage 5, 8, 32, 33, 36, 40, 41, 151, 397, 416; and civilization 36–37; and “double coloniality” 403; education programs 38–39; lived 396, 397, 406, 407; Maya 407; Nipmuc 411, 413, 414, 424; Spanish 436 Hernandez, R. 377, 384–385 Hernández Álvarez, H. 184 Hernando, A. 197 High Counters 46 Hispaniola: ceramics 233; gold mining 233; material culture 232; slave trade in 232–233; social networks 231, 232 historical archaeology 96, 97 historical ecology 79; animals and plants as agents 82–83; of colonialism 80–81; data sources 80; seasonality 81–82; seasonality in livestock teeth 87; stable isotope analysis 84, 86, 87, 88, 89; see also Pimería Alta; weather historical reconstruction, dendroclimatological 67, 70, 71 history 16; and agency 16, 18; Annaliste 18, 21; Big 15, 16; conjectural 18; conjonctures 16, 19, 21; deep 14–15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 26; long-term 18; longue durée perspective 80; manifold 18; moyenne durée 18–19, 21, 26; and Processual archaeology 17; and time 16; see also deep history Hodder, I. 197; Archaeology as Long-term History 18; Reading the Past 18 homelands 412–413; Nipmuc 414–416, 417 horses 82; in Wichita society 267–268; see also equestrian nomads Hosken, K. 473 houses: of colonial Tahcabo 404–405; residential mobility 309, 315, 316; Tupiniquim 341 hunter-gatherers 5, 136, 277; Coahuiltecans 378 Hutchinson, D. 50 hybridity 113, 119, 164, 168, 196, 357, 358–359, 360, 369; of dress 325; religious 165, 166, 172–173 identity 196, 246, 248, 334, 345, 346; CHamoru 439; cultural 357; and difference 340; Exploring Métis Identity Through Archaeology (EMITA) project 362; Indigenous 359, 369; Métis 358, 359, 360, 361–362, 365; Paulista 340–341; politics 148; and skin 330–331; Yucatec-Maya 403 indian, Vizenor’s concept 469, 477–478 Indian Council of New England 413 Indigenous archaeology(ies) 3, 4, 6, 8, 441–442, 468, 487, 491, 493–494, 503–504, 507, 512; approaches 504, 509–510; futurisms 510–511, 513; research paradigms 508–509

546

Index Indigenous food sovereignty (IFS) 486–487, 487, 488, 491, 495, 499; focus on kinship 488–489, 496–497; revitalization of foodways 489; and storywork 488; wellness and community health 497–498; see also food sovereignty Indigenous Knowledge (IK) 495, 509 Indigenous peoples: agency 112; bio-determinism 47–48; cultural knowledge systems 505–507; decline of 44–45; dress 327, 328, 330; enslavement 151; epistemologies 474–475; High Counter/Low Counter dispute 46–47; identity 369; interactions with Africans 146–147, 147, 148–149, 150–151, 152; labels 155–156; Métis 357; nomads 276; persistence 247; piercings 333, 334; power attributed to 112; segregation 376; social networks 228, 229–230, 238; Tunica 326; see also Native societies; Tribal Nations indios 103, 104, 105, 186, 276, 280, 289, 310, 312, 386 Ingold, T. 116 Inkas 246; mitmaqkuna 246; silver production 190; urpu 249, 251; yanakuna 246 intercultural interaction 95, 104, 105, 152, 344; in Floridablanca 295–298; at Fuerta San José and Puesto de la Fuente 300–302; Indigenous/ African 146, 147, 148, 149, 150–152; Indigenous/Spanish 212; Métis 368; Native America/French 262, 264; Native American/ African 153–155, 156–157; politics of regard 338; at Real Compañía Marítima 298–300; and sustained colonialism 137–138; Tupí/ Portuguese 338, 339, 345–347; see also conversion Ishi 199, 470 Iverson, S. 169 Izquierdo, L. 55 Jamestown 21, 22, 24, 26, 74; drought conditions 71; food shortages 72; sources of fresh water 70 Jesuit missionaries 35, 36, 71, 163, 166–167, 169, 183, 433, 434; Ajacán mission 69; Guaraní missions 30, 31, 32, 38, 39–41; missionizing and conversion 167–168 Johnson, M. 110 Jones, D. 48 Jones, E. 53, 57 Jones, G. 316 Kelly, J. A. 375, 376; on politics of regard 338 Kepecs, S. 182 Kern, A. 35, 36, 40 Kidder, A. V. 16 Kipling, R. 57 Knecht, R. 525 Kranz, G. 518 Kray, C. 309, 314 Krenak, A., on politics of regard 341

Kretzler, I. 8, 473 Kroeber, A. 45, 185 Kunitz, S. 48 La Florida 66, 67; conversion 171, 172; droughts 68; tropical storms 69 La Harpe, B. 264 La Isabela 151, 152 labor 8, 182, 185, 191, 311, 312, 341, 347; antimarkets 182; cooperatives 188; debt peonage 183, 184; encomienda system 182, 231, 235, 398, 400; forced 182–183; haciendas 184, 254, 400; henequen industry 184; in Marxian theory 181; metal production 185, 186–187; mining 188, 189, 190; mitmaqkuna 246, 249, 251, 254; obraje 254, 256; repartimiento 288; and resource extraction 180–181; salt production 182–183; slavery 183; yanakuna 246 ladinos 96 landscape management practices 6, 131–132 landscapes 16, 20, 26, 412, 418, 425; Métis 363–364; of Nipmuc heritage 412–414, 424; settler colonial 414–416; and time 21; Werewocomoco 24 language: and ceramics 348–349, 350; Yucatec 402–403 Lans, A. 517 Lape, P. 524 Lapeyre, M., Les Moeurs de Paris 331 Las Casas, B. de 151 Latin America 8, 32, 403; Indigenous politics 186 Latour, B. 116, 119 Law Pezzarossi, H. 5, 8, 411 Lea, L. 455 Leal, J. O. 386 Lelievre, M. 20 Lenik, S. 169 Leonardson, S. 417 Liebmann, M. 166, 201 Lightfoot, K. G. 14, 15, 19, 25, 473 Lima, T. 32 Lippert, D. 8 lithic technology 195–196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203, 297–298, 379; exchange networks 200–201; recycling 201; see also stone tools lived heritage 396, 397, 406, 407 livestock 82–83; agency 87, 88; grazing 88; stable isotope analysis 84; see also animals Livi-Bacci, M. 45, 48 Logan, A. 401 Loren, D. 169 Los Comanches 279 Louisiana 325; sumptuary laws 327; Trudeau site 326; see also Tunica Low Counters 46–47 Lugones, M. 439 Lussier, S. 497

547

Index Macdougall, B. 362, 368 Magellan, F. 439 Magrini, A. 341 Mailer, G. 489 managerial colonies: characteristics 133–134; fisheries 133; mercantile outposts 133; plantations 132 manifold 18 Mann, C. 46, 58 Manuel, D. 496, 497 Marek-Martinez, O. 8 Marshall, Y. 118 Martindale, A. 203 Marxian theory 18; labor 181 mass burials, Tatham Mound 49–50 Massachusetts, Tercentenary markers 416–418 Massanet, D. 284 material culture 34–35, 184, 195, 196, 197, 204, 211–212, 248, 271, 327, 359, 468; bodily objects 330; Cuba 235; Grand Ronde Agency School 459; Hispaniola 232; incorporation of introduced materials 202–203; Métis 367–368; and persistence 247; of rebellion 252–254; San Pedro Siris 310, 311; Tahcabo 404–405; Tunica 332, 333; Tupiniquim 339; Uyxat Powwow Grounds 461, 462; Wichita people 266, 267; see also excavations; technology materiality 14, 16–17, 33, 95, 98, 114, 115, 116, 164, 295, 297, 303; and survivance 471 Mathwich, N. 84 Matos, M., on politics of regard 338 Maya culture 308, 312; burials 317; Caste War 310, 312; churches 316–317; foodways 317–318; hunting 317–318; k’atun of 9 Ahau 398–399; milpa agriculture 308–309, 314; mobility strategies 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 319–320, 321; pacíficos 310; residential mobility 315, 316; San Pedro 310; Santa Cruz 310; trade networks 318–319; Yucatec 402–403 Maya Social War 310, 315, 321 Mbyá 38, 40 McAnany, P. A. 8, 317 McGovern, A. 473 McGregor, D. 495 memory 343–344; “social” 36, 39 Merás, S. de 69 Meskell, L. 115 Mesoamerica 212, 218 mestizos 386, 403 Métis 357, 358, 359; bison hunting 366; daily life 367–368; economies 365–366; geographies and landscape 363–364; hivernant sites 361–362; identity 361–362; kinscapes 359–360, 362, 363, 368; material culture 367–368; mobility 364, 365; Red River cart 365; voyager sash 363, 368 Mexico 211, 212

Mexico City-Tenochtitlan 212, 214, 215, 216; diet of Indigenous inhabitants 218; evidence of hybrid technologies found in 218–219; imported goods 218, 219–220 Meyers, A. 184 Mezieres, A. de 267 middle grounds 268, 269, 273 Miéville, C., Kraken 518 migration 309–310, 312; see also mobility Mi’kmaw tribe 20 Miller, D. 115 Milner, G. 47 milpa agriculture 308–309, 313, 314, 317–318, 401–402; mobility 309; swidden 308–309; see also agency; farming; Maya mining 187; cooperatives 187; gold 233; silver 189, 190 mission archaeology 30, 32, 33, 36, 40; Charity Hall 154; descriptions 33, 34, 35; Guaraní 33, 37; and heritage 36, 37, 41; heritage education 38–39; Pimería Alta 84, 86; seasonality in livestock teeth 87; stable isotope analysis of domesticates 84, 86; see also conversion Mission Valero camposantos 374, 375, 376, 377, 378, 392; as Coahuiltecan burial site 379–380, 381 missionary colonialism 5; congregación 56; Pueblo people 54–55 missions 278; cemeteries 380; Indian recruits 383, 384–385; Jesuit 30–31, 32; Tahcabo 399 mitmaqkuna 249, 251, 254 Mix, C. 455 mobility 20, 164, 247, 362; agricultural 308, 309, 311, 313, 320, 401–402; Anthony on 309–310; and architecture 315, 316; of equestrian nomads 289; flight 310; in foodways 474; Maya churches and communal buildings 316–317; Maya strategies 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 317, 319–320, 321; of mestizo families 386; Métis 363–364, 365; “refugees” 312; residential 309, 315, 316; slave trade 230–231 Montón-Subías, S. 197 monuments 424; in Nipmuc homelands 415 Mooney, J. 45 Moraes, C. de 39 Moravians 174 Mrozowski, S. A. 411, 414 multi-linear evolution 17 museums 5, 516–517, 524, 527; collections 517–518, 520; exhibits 529, 530, 531; and repatriation 518–519, 520; survivance storytelling 471–472; see also Barker, H.; Haakanson, S. Jr.; repatriation Nagaoka, L. 80 narratives 15, 16, 20, 22, 471; creation 396; haunted landmarks 477; massacre 475–477,

548

Index 478; postindian 470; Processual archaeology 17; survivance storytelling 468; terminal 186, 451 National Museum of Anthropology (MNA) 440, 443 National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) 516–517, 519, 520 National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) 471–472 Native American Graves Protection & Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) 8, 113, 375, 392, 509, 516, 519, 520; applicability to Coahuiltecans 389; see also repatriation Native American Renaissance 469 Native societies 14; allotment 455–457; creolization 19; deep history 14–15, 16, 16–17, 17, 20; displacement 20; Eastern Pequot 19; emplacement 20; interactions with Africans 147, 148–149, 150, 153–155, 156–157; landscape management practices 131–132; political structure 131; polity size 131; Powhatan 16, 21; regional sociopolitical relationships 132; and sustained colonialism 138, 139–140; see also Indigenous peoples; Tribal Nations Navajo People 504 Neal, F. 65 Nelson, G., Alamo, The: An Illustrated History 382 Nelson, N. 16 New England, industrial landscapes 418–420, 422, 423–424 New Mexico 278, 286; tipi sites 280–281 New Spain 213, 214, 216; see also Mexico CityTenochtitlan; Tlatelolco Newcomb, W. W. Jr., The Indians of Texas from Prehistoric to Modern Times 383 Newman, D. 414 Newson, L. 48 Nicholas, G. 8, 491 Nipmuc tribe 411, 425; basketmaking 418–419, 420; heritage landscapes 412–414; homelands 412–413, 414–416, 417; industrial landscapes 418–420, 422, 423–424; and Massachusetts Tercentenary markers 416–418 nomadism 276, 294; see also equestrian nomads North America 8, 16 object agency 115 object biography 114–115 objectification 34 O’Brien, J., Firsting and Lasting 419 obsidian: exchange networks 200–201; symbolic value of 202; tools 198, 199 O’Higgins, B. 253 Ojibwe 19, 486; food sovereignty 488, 489; foodways 498; Hoofed Clan story 486–487, 489, 493, 495, 498, 499; Nishnaabewin 494,

495; Red Lake 487; survivance 498–499; theory 494–495; see also Red Lake Ojibwe Oland, M. 397 Ollman, B. 180, 186 Olsen, B. 110, 116 Oñate, J. de 54 ontology 117 oral history 6, 14, 491; Ojibwe 495 Ortlieb, L. 65 Osage tribe 264–266, 268 Otherness 33, 36, 37, 277, 279, 289, 338, 510; and politics of regard 340 Palka, J. 319, 397 Panich, L. 184 Paraguay 38, 48 Parker, H. 416 Patagonia 292, 293; interethnic relations at Fuerta San José and Puesto de la Fuente 300–302; interethnic relations at Real Compañía Marítima 298–300; interethnic relations in Floridablanca 295–298; Native inhabitants 293–294; Spanish colonization 294–295 Paulistaware 339 Pavao-Zuckerman, B. 84 Peers, L. 114–115 Pénicaut, A., Annals of Louisiana 327 Pennybacker, P., A New History of Texas for Schools 383 pericolonialism 268, 269–270 persistence 96, 247, 248, 249, 261, 352, 358, 359; and survivance 248; see also continuity and survivance Peru, material culture of rebellions in 252–254 Pezzarossi, H. L. 182, 411, 414 piercings 330; earrings 333, 334, 335; female 331–332, 335; male warriors 328, 333, 334, 335 Pimería Alta: livestock agency 88; long-term continuity 86, 87; seasonality in livestock teeth 87; stable isotope analysis of domesticates 84, 86 Pizarro, F. 221 placemaking 20, 25, 477–478 Plains nomads 285, 286, 287, 288, 289; see also Comanches; equestrian nomads; Ute plantation archaeology 155, 346; African and Native American interactions 150 Plecker, W. 519–520 Pocahontas 21 politics of regard 338, 348; Kelly and Matos on 338; Krenak on 341; see also intercultural interaction Pomacocha 254; excavations 255, 256 Porco 180, 186; silver production in 187, 188–190, 190; small-scale metal production in 185, 186, 187 Portugal, pottery production in 350, 351 positivism 17, 38

549

Index postcolonial theory 113 posthumanism 116 postindians 470, 471, 474 pottery 146, 149, 150, 152, 156, 169, 175, 197, 213; Brushed 153; Colonowares 150–151, 152; comparison of production methods 350, 351; majolica 220; Paulistaware 339, 350, 351, 352; red wares 219, 220; urpu 249, 251; “white ware” 220 Potts, J. 520 power 5, 94, 95, 96, 98, 100, 112, 183, 196, 247, 303; and trade networks 272–273; see also agency Powhatan tribe 16; Werewocomoco 21, 22, 24, 25, 26; see also Jamestown pragmatism 114 pre-Columbian societies 18; decline of 44–45; population estimates 45–46; see also depopulation of pre-Columbian societies prehistory concept 5, 14, 15, 16, 83 processual archaeology 18 proselytization see conversion Protestantism 175; missionizing and conversion 172–173, 174–175; praying towns 172; see also Catholicism; conversion; mission archaeology public archaeology 30, 38 Pueblo people 53, 54, 83, 148, 284; colonization of 54–55; population decline 56–57; Revolt of 1680 57, 278, 284 Puhú 475, 478–480 Puller, G. 525 Puritans 172 Putnam, I. 415 Quezada, S. 399 Quimby, G., “Acculturation and Material Culture” 111 Quinn, J. 65, 453 racial discrimination 390, 519–520 Ramirez, T. 439 Reader, T. 8 Real Compañía Marítima 292; interethnic relations 298–300; see also Patagonia Rebellion of Santiago Imán 401 reconciliation 403 Red Lake Ojibwe 491; food sovereignty 492, 493; foodways 491, 492, 493; history 492; Nishnaabewin 494, 495; survivance 498–499 Redfield, R. 309; “Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation” 111 reducción 66, 165, 168, 311, 400, 433, 442 “refugees” 312 Reil, L. 360 relationality 116, 118, 433, 497, 512; and heritage preservation 397 religious conversion see conversion

repartimiento 55, 288, 400 repatriation 3, 8, 516, 522; “culturally unidentifiable” designation 520; legal terminology 517, 518, 519; protection of the sacred 520–521 reservation archaeology 449, 451, 454, 457, 458, 464; capacity building 462–463; collaborative/ community approaches 453; Field Methods in Indigenous Archaeology (FMIA) 458, 459, 460, 461, 463; Grand Ronde Agency School 458–459, 460; remembering survivance through 457–458; Tribal Historic Preservation Offices (THPOs) 452–453; Uyxat Powwow Grounds 460–461, 462 reservations: allotment 455–457, 460; Grand Ronde 456, 457, 458, 460, 461, 473; role in US settler colonialism 454–455 residential mobility 309 resilience 98, 228, 247, 359, 369 resistance 19, 32, 39, 66, 71, 73–74, 96, 98, 113, 129, 151, 164, 246, 247, 248, 249, 358, 457, 472; see also persistence; survivance resource extraction 180, 184–185, 318; in Hispaniola 233; and labor 180–181; mining 185, 186–187, 188, 189, 190; pearls 236–237; see also technology Restall, M. 313 revitalization movements 25 Rice, D. 314 Rice, P. 318 Richardson, A. 22 Richardson, J. 477 Riggs, B. 175 ritual practices 155, 168, 202, 246, 247, 249, 253, 403; Inka 251, 252 Rivet, P. 45, 46 Roanoke 24, 69–70, 71 Rocchietti, A. M. 34–35 Rodríguez-Alegría, E. 203 Rojas A. 309 Ross, A. 396 Rothschild, N. 136–137 Rowlandson, M. 417 Rubertone, P. 14, 15, 19, 20, 25 Ruggiero, D. 202 Russell, L. 293 S BLACK bag 114–115 Sabloff, J. A. 16 Said, E. 358 Sande, A. 344 Santafé de Bogotá 97; built places 103, 104; commercial transactions 104–105; contact spaces 98–99, 100; excavations 102–103; houses 100; Indigenous peoples in 103; intercultural interactions 104; lawsuits 103–104 Scheuer, H. 341

550

Index Scheurch, J. A. 453 Schneider, L. 82 Schuetz, M., The Indians of the San Antonio Missions 1718–1821 384 Segato, R. 33, 439 settlements 155–156, 294; “abandonment” 313; fortifications 135–136; Fuerte San José 300–301; in La Florida 67; mapping 52–53; Mexican 212; milpa-based 309; Pilaklikaha 153; Pueblo 53, 54–55; San Pedro Maya 310, 311; tekaova 341; Wichita 272; see also Jamestown; La Florida; Pimería Alta; Pueblo people settler colonialism 5, 7, 134–135, 359, 391, 411, 412, 449, 451, 521; congregación 56; and decline of Indigenous populations 45–48; heritage landscapes in Nipmuc homelands 414–416; and repatriation 516, 517; and the role of reservations 454–455; see also reservation archaeology Silliman, S. 19, 113, 146, 150, 181; “Archaeologies of Survivance and Resistance” 472–473 silver production in Porco: colonial era 189–190; under the Inka 190; nineteenth to twenty-first centuries 187, 188–189 Simpson, L. B. 494 Singleton, T. A. 183 skin: and identity 330–331; piercings 331, 332; tattoos 331 Slater, S. 415 slave trade 230, 231, 288; in Hispaniola 232–233 Smail, D. 15 Smith, J. 21, 25 Smith, L. T. 110, 113, 397, 463, 504–505; Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples 109 Snow, D. 53 “social memory” 36, 39 social networks 227, 228, 229–230; and agency 238; in Cuba 233, 234; Cubagua 237; in Hispaniola 231–232, 232 Society for American Archaeology, 1992 plenary session 19 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) 166–167, 173; Brafferton Indian School 173, 174 socio-acupuncture 469, 473, 481 Soto, H. de 50, 52, 67 Souder, L. 433 South America 8, 30, 32; see also Jesuit-Guaraní missions sovereignty 451, 510; food 8; tribal 8, 411; of Tribal Nations 452; see also food sovereignty Spanish colonialism: Ajacán 24; archaeologies of 434, 436–437; attitudes of CHamoru people toward 437, 439; under the Bourbon monarchy 183, 280, 294, 296; La Florida 66, 67; New Mexico 278, 279; New Spain 213, 214; reducción

66, 165, 168, 311, 400, 433, 436; see also CHamoru people; Guam; La Florida; Mexico; mission archaeology; Patagonia; Pimería Alta; Santafé de Bogotá Spicer, E. 111 Spielmann, K. 55 Spivak, C. 113, 358, 439 Spoehr, A., “Acculturation and Material Culture” 111 stable isotope analysis 88–89; continuity of water management 86, 87; of livestock 84; seasonality in livestock teeth 87 Stahle, D. 67 stereotypes 469; of archaeology 507; Indian 18 Steward, J. 17 stone tools 195–196, 198, 285, 286, 297; Apache 284; chert 199; Coahuiltecan 379; exchange networks 200–201; flintknapping 199–200; and glass 199; grinding implements 200; lithic materials 199–200; obsidian 198, 199, 200; quartz 199; steatite 200; see also technology storytelling 458, 460, 472, 473; and Indigenous food sovereignty (IFS) 488; Indigenous Knowledge (IK) 495; massacre narrative 475–477, 478; survivance 468; trickster hermeneutics 470, 471, 475, 477; see also survivance storytelling Sunseri, J. U. 82–83 Supernant, K. 8 survivance 7, 8, 19, 113, 248, 406, 452, 457, 461, 468, 469, 470, 471, 472, 474, 475, 478, 510, 511, 512, 513; applications in archaeology 471–474; Grand Ronde 458, 459; JapaneseAmerican 473; Ojibwe 498–499; transmotion 447 survivance storytelling 468, 473; Black Star Canyon Archaeological Project (BSCAP) 475; massacre narrative 475–477, 478; in museum exhibitions 471–472; trickster hermeneutics 475, 477 sustainability 66, 72 sustained colonialism 136–137, 141; methods used to mitigate negative impacts of 138, 139–140 Sweitz, S. 184 symmetrical archaeology 110 syncretism 165, 166 Tahcabo 396, 397, 399, 401; colonial church of 399–400; community museum 406, 407; excavations 404–405; food security 402; material culture 404–405; rejolladas 402 Tallbear, K. 119 Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation 374, 376, 386, 389, 392; funerary practices 390; see also cases; Coahuiltecans Tatham Mound 49–50 Tava Miri 40–41

551

Index taxation 309, 311, 320; repartimiento 400; tributes 182 technology 17, 195, 196, 197; basketmaking 418–419, 420; beadwork 368; ceramic 197, 213, 218–219, 233, 251, 256, 297, 319, 344, 347–348, 366; and change 203; cultural innovations 246, 256; huayrachinas 186–187, 188, 190; hybrid 196, 218–219; incorporation of introduced materials 202–203; lithic 195–196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203, 297–298; silver production 188–190; stone tools 379; weaving 363, 368; see also agriculture; ceramics; mining; pottery; stone tools Tehuelches 294, 295, 303; interaction with Spanish colonists 295–298, 301–302 Tejanos 386 Tenochtitlan 212; excavations 213 terra nullius (“nobody’s land”) 44–45 Texas Archaeology in the Classroom: A Unit for Teachers 384 theory(ies) 110, 120, 147, 507; acculturation 3, 5, 7, 17, 32, 67, 95, 96, 110–111, 112, 150, 196, 228, 247, 248; assemblage 116, 117; creolization 150, 248; entanglement 196, 197, 248, 268, 270–272, 358; feminist 118–120; flat ontology 116; hybridity 357, 358–359, 362; and identity politics 148; and labels 155–156; Marxian 181; middle grounds 268, 269, 273; Nishnaabewin 494, 495; object biography 114–115; Ojibwe 494–495; ontological turns 117–118, 119; pericolonialism 268, 269–270; postcolonial 113; posthumanism 116; practice 112; pragmatism 114; relational approaches 116–117; on technology 196 Therrien, M. 5 Thomas, D. H. 4, 375, 376 Thomas, R. A. 495 Thompson, J. E. 8, 316, 318, 320 Thoms, A. V. 8, 384, 389 thrivance 475, 477–480, 481; see also survivance Tiede, K. 473 tipi sites 280–281, 282, 284–286, 289 Tlatelolco 212, 216, 219, 221; excavations 213 Todd, Z. 120; “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ is Just Another Word for Colonialism” 118–119 Toledo, F. de 168 toponyms 415 trade networks 285–286, 480; and entanglement theory 271–272; French 326; Maya 318–319; and the middle grounds 269; Pueblo-Apache 284; Wichita 264, 265, 266, 267, 268 transitions 20, 21 transmotion 474 Tribal Nations 8, 451, 503; Cherokee 154–155; Chickasaw 153–154, 175; Choctaw 328; Comanche 265–266, 279, 280; Delaware 19;

Eastern Pequot 19, 150; Grand Ronde HPO 453; historic preservation programs 453; Mi’kmaw 20; Ojibwe 19, 486, 489, 490, 491, 492, 493, 494, 495, 496, 497, 498, 499; Osage 264–266, 268; Powhatan 16, 21; sovereignty of 452; Tap Pilam 374, 376, 386; Tribal Historic Preservation Offices (THPOs) 491; Ute 276, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 286, 287; Wichita 261, 262, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268; see also reservation archaeology tributes 213, 228, 399; repartimiento 400 trickster hermeneutics 470, 475, 477 Trigg, H. 82 Trigger, B. 19, 25; “Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian” 17–18 Trouillot, M.-R. 40 Trudell, J. 518 Tuck, E. 119 Tunica 326, 331; food security 341; funerary practices 326, 332; materiality 332, 333; piercings and bodily adornment 330–332, 333, 334 Tupiniquim 352; agroforestry practices 341, 343–344; ceramic practices 344, 347–348, 348–349, 350, 351; family relationships 344; politics of regard 341, 348; relationships with Portuguese 345–347; tekaova 341 Turner-Pearson, K. 267 Underwood, R. 441, 443 UNESCO heritage sites 32, 37 United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), Article 11 462 United States 8, 150; Advisory Council on Historic Preservation 375; archaeological practice in 504; Civilization Fund Act (1819) 174–175; cultural hegemony 7; General Allotment (Dawes) Act (1887) 455–457, 492; Indian Removal Act (1830) 175; National Historic Preservation Act 396, 452; National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Act 8, 516, 517, 519; Native American Graves Protection & Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) 516, 517, 519, 520; Nelson Act (1889) 492; removal policies 454; reservation system 5; Tribal Historic Preservation Offices (THPOs) 452–453 upstreaming 45 urpu 251 Ute people 276, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 286, 287; see also Apache; equestrian nomads; Tribal Nations Vacant Quarter hypothesis 52 vacuum domicilium (“empty domicile”) 44–45 Valladolid 402 Valley of Mexico 212 Villarino, B. 298

552

Index violence 7, 19, 32, 37, 44, 50, 51, 53, 54; of colonialism 95, 118, 152, 358, 396, 402–404; slow 401, 405; structural 412 Vizenor, G. 113, 452, 457, 468, 469, 471, 473, 474, 475, 478, 481 Voss, B. 152, 181 Wainwright, J. 313 Wallace, A. 25 water management 86, 402; in Pimería Alta 86, 87 Watkins, J. 8 weather 64, 65; droughts 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 81; tropical storms 69; see also climate Weaver, B. 183 Weik, T. M. 5 Werewocomoco 21, 22, 25, 26; deep history 24; earthworks 22, 24 Wernke, S. 168 Wheelock, J. 415 White, C. 324 White, L. 17, 71 White, R. 268 Wichita people 261, 267–268; alliance building 265; conflicts with the Osage 265–266; and

entanglement theory 270–272; fur trading 261–262; interactions with Europeans 262; and the middle grounds 269; and pericolonialism 269–270; strategic movement 266; trade networks 264, 265, 266, 267, 268; trade with French colonists 262, 264 Wilbarger, J. W., Indian Depredations in Texas 383 Wilcox, M. 451 Willey, G. R. 16 Williams, J. 280 Williams, S. 52 Wilson, S. 488 Wolf, E., Europe and People without History 18 Wolfe, P. 412, 416 Wolverton, N. 418–419 women 339; ceramic production 350; colonial dress 327, 328; country wives 360; ear piercings 331–332; role in Tupiniquim settlements 344; Tupiniquim 338, 339, 341 Xakriabá, C. 351 Yaeger, J. 319 Yang, K. W. 119

553