Post-Contact/Historic Archaeology

1. Post-Contact/Historic Archaeology

2. Historical Archaeology • Historical Archaeology: • In conjunction with analysis of written records. • Information on societies is also available in the form of documents that may or may not be retrieved archaeologically • Thus in one sense all archaeology of the civilizations—complex states—involves Historical Archaeology to some extent.

3. Contact and Historical Archaeology • The archaeology of European contact and the historical archaeology of North America in general were largely neglected until CRM laws mandated their development. • Historical archaeology, or text-aided archaeology, provides insights into North American Indian societies not available, or at least not easily available, through traditional (prehistoric) archaeological approaches. • An example is good descriptions of the hierarchical social organization of chiefdoms in the Southeast.

4. Disadvantages • Major disadvantages of historical archaeology in North America until recently have been its Eurocentric perspective and focus in general on Euro-American historic sites. • Text-aided archaeology has its own problems. • An example is that information in a text can be a distortion (or even a lie) about real events for some political, economic, or ideological reason. • In addition, explorers and early fur traders usually did not comprehend what they saw and heard (i.e., they understood it through their own cultural perspective).

5. Disadvantages • Traditionally, who write documents? • In most of history the average person was illiterate—even in literate societies! • Thus people who wrote were usually • Professionals (e.g., scribes or some other bureaucrats) and/or • Elites (kings and other royalty, priests, etc.—privileged people) • Traditionally, why were documents usually written? • Writing appears initially to have served an inventory function • Early writing also documents ritual and supernatural symbolism, for example: Passage of time, Sacred signs, Auguries. • Thus, for most of human history, writing was a scarce resource and one that was often employed for what we would today consider political considerations or elite agendas.

6. Concerns • Therefore, one immediate concern involves the inherent built-in bias of history. • This does not mean that we should throw out history, but that we should consider documents from the perspectives of: • Their source—who wrote them? • Their audience—who (or what?) was the target "reader"? • Culturally, how was writing used in the society? • Can we expect to find documentation that will inform us about things such as: • all levels of society? • the workings of the economy? (Beyond the concerns of elites for their prestige accumulation) • non-elite domestic life? • village life? • Usually, the answer is "No." • Significant questions to ask are, • "What kinds of observations have not been made?" • "What kinds of things have not been accounted for?"

7. Historic Archaeology • Issues, problems, research areas, etc., in historical archaeology. • Definition: • study of the development and spread of European culture globally since the 15th century to the present. • how this expansion influenced the lives of people not typically included in written records (Indians, slaves, farmers, factory workers, and women). • understand how the culture of these groups changed in new setting among different people.

8. Goals and Methods • Goals: • reconstructing past lifeways and explaining how and why societies changed through time. • i.e. How did groups organize socially? What kinds of food did they eat? What types of technologies did they use? • Methods: • broader range of available information, such as written records. • uses archaeology, history, folk life, cultural geography, psychology, sociology, and political science.

9. Studies • Studies: • African American and Native American studies explore the impact of European expansion upon these groups and issues related to inequality and the maintenance of traditional culture. • Gender studies are concerned with the way the division of labor between men and women within New World households changed as a result of modernization. • Farmstead studies focus upon the changes that occurred within rural households as they became increasingly involved in commercial farming. • Urban studies examine the development of cities, industries, and technology. • Maritime or underwater studies explore the technological history of ships and ocean transportation.

10. African American Studies • Since the early 1970s historical archaeologists in the South have excavated sites inhabited by enslaved African Americans. • African American studies have been guided by two main questions: How did African American culture develop from West African origins and what was everyday life like for enslaved blacks? • The persistence of West African traditions in material culture have been identified by archaeologists in the areas of architecture and pottery. • In South Carolina during the early 18th century slaves constructed West African-style, wattle and daub, thatched houses.

11. Colono Ware • They also made pottery, called Colono Ware, derived from West African traditions. • During the late 18th and 19th centuries elements of European material culture, such as European-style houses and imported household goods, were increasingly imposed upon African Americans. • However, West African derived cultural elements, particularly along coastal South Carolina and Georgia, persist to the present in areas such as language, foodways, music, funeral customs, and decorative crafts.

12. Colono Ware

13. African American Cemeteries • There are a lot of differences between traditional African-American and traditional Euro-American cemeteries. • African-American graveyards are usually located in marginal areas, for example, and was probably the result of blacks being enslaved. Not only did owners not want to lose valuable land to slaves, but controlling even where the dead might be buried was yet another example of the power plantation owners had over their slaves. • The use of plants to mark graves is likely related to African antecedents. • Marking the graves was important, regardless of what was used, at least for the current generation. The predominance of temporary items – plants and wood planks, for example – suggests that it wasn't particularly important for future generations to know the location of any specific grave. • The use of temporary markers helps to ensure that the cemetery is always available to those who want to be buried with their kin. • As one modern black man explained, "there is always room for one more person." This, of course, sounds impossible to many whites, who see cemeteries in terms of a finite number of square feet. But this is simply not how African-Americans have traditionally viewed graveyards. http://www.sciway.net/hist/chicora/gravematters-3.html

14. African American Cemetery Preservation http://www.sciway.net/hist/chicora/gravematters-2.html

15. Palmetto Grove Cemetery http://www.sciway.net/hist/chicora/gravematters-2.html

16. African American Cemetery in NYC • The African Burial Ground is a cemetery that was used between the late 1600s and 1796. • Ten to twenty percent of the city's inhabitants during this period were African. • The remains of 419 individuals excavated from the site were eventually reinterred.

17. Remains • Michael Blakey’s analysis of human skeletal remains revealed that these men and women faced brutal working conditions, premature rates of mortality, and excessive workloads, while nutritional deficiencies were common among young children. • This reveals how much local merchants relied on slave laborers to operate the bustling port and to work in trades such as shipbuilding, construction, domestic labor, and farming. http://www.npca.org/magazine/2006/summer/news2.html

18. Excavations http://www.africanburialground.gov/ABG_FinalReports.htm

19. 1755 Map http://www.africanburialground.gov/ABG_FinalReports.htm

20. Coffin lid with Sankofa symbol (from W. Africa-take the good from the past and bring it to the present). http://www.africanburialground.gov/Report/Chapter2.pdf

21. Coffin excavation http://www.africanburialground.gov/Report/Chapter4.pdf

22. Artifacts http://www.africanburialground.gov/Report/Chapter4.pdf

23. http://www.npca.org/magazine/2006/summer/news2.html

24. Native American and Gender Studies • The impact of European colonization upon native groups and the way the sexual division of labor changed in the historic past are central topics in historical archaeology. • These issues are illustrated by historical archaeology conducted in Labrador, Canada. • During the late 18th century Moravian missionaries from Germany established mission towns along the Labrador coast. • This region was inhabited by the Inuit (Eskimo). The Moravians sought to convert the Inuit to Christianity and persuade them to live in mission towns. • The Inuit were nomadic hunter-gatherers and depended upon arctic animals such as seals, whales, and caribous.

25. Archaeological excavation of an Inuit house midden in Nain, a mission town • Illustrates the impact of European culture upon the Inuit and the way it restructured traditional divisions of labor between men and women. • European style houses and household items largely replaced Inuit material culture. However, artifacts from excavation illustrate European goods were used in distinctively Inuit ways.

26. Changing Times • For example, numerous European ceramics such as tablewares possessed oil discoloration from being used as lamps. • Previously, the Inuit had made lamps from soapstone. • Also, bowls made in Europe comprised the bulk of the imported tablewares, indicating that stews, previously consumed from soapstone bowls, continued to be the main fare of the Inuit. • The Inuit also mended European ceramic vessels by drilling and tying the pieces together with sinew, a practice previously conducted with soapstone vessels. • Concerning changes in the division of household labor, European goods such as metal and firearms increased the efficiency of hunting and reinforced male activities. • Conversely, the incorporation of European household goods by Inuit women increased the time and labor needed to maintain the household and in turn encouraged sedentism.

27. Exchange items

28. The Five Points Site • Archaeologists and historians rediscover a famous nineteenth-century New York neighborhood. • Named for the points created by the intersection of Park, Worth, and Baxter streets, the neighborhood was known as a center of vice and debauchery throughout the nineteenth century. • The archaeological excavation of the Foley Square courthouse block provided the opportunity to examine the physical remains of life in this infamous place.

29. Early Accounts • Outsiders found Five Points threatening and fodder for lurid prose. • Describing a visit in 1842, Charles Dickens wrote: "This is the place: these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking every where with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here, bear the same fruit here as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home and all the wide world over. Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of these pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours? and why they talk instead of grunting?"

30. Five Points Excavation

31. Five Points in 1827 as depicted in Valentine's Manual, 1855

32. The Pearl Street Tanneries • A 1785 map shows the courthouse block divided into eight lots that belonged to George and Jacob Shaw, tanners. • Taking advantage of the moving water of the eastern outlet of the Collect Pond and standing water in the surrounding swamps, the tanners sited their operations along the sill of land that eventually became Pearl Street.

33. Tannery Artifacts Iron hook for moving hides around Cattle bones

34. The Hoffman House • While the Hoffmans ate on fancy Chinese porcelain dishes, other citizens complained loudly about the industries that were polluting the nearby Collect Pond. • In addition to the tanneries, slaughterhouses, breweries, ropewalks, and potteries contributed to making the neighborhood less than desirable. • Despite these conditions, artisans continued to live here in order to be near their businesses. • The Hoffman bakery (managed by a sequence of tenants) remained in business on Pearl Street well into the 1850s; the widow Hoffman lived on the property until circa 1830 when the Five Points had already achieved its notorious reputation.

35. The Hoffman Assemblage

36. Irish Tenement and Saloon • Newly arrived immigrants worked in a variety of skilled and unskilled jobs, including construction, carpentry, masonry, dressmaking, printing, housekeeping, and hat making. • Men, women, and even children contributed to the family income which hovered around $600 a year, enough to put meat on the table at most meals and buy fashionable household goods and clothing. • For working-class men, life included membership in fraternal orders, trade unions, and fire companies as well as the camaraderie of the many local grog shops. • Women formed strong support networks in the tenements, sharing the burden of child care and domestic responsibilities.

37. Irish Tenement Artifacts Kids toys Soda Bottles Medicine Bottles

38. Biases • We have to be careful not to let the biases of nineteenth-century observers, men like George Foster who were outsiders to the neighborhood, prevent us from hearing the voices of the actual residents who lived there. • The Five Points artifacts speak for those whom Walt Whitman described in 1842 as "...not paupers and criminals, but the Republic's most needed asset, the wealth of stout poor men [and we will add women] who will work" (the Aurora).

40. Theory Refinement in Historical Archaeology • Acculturation • Syncretic

41. Acculturation • Explains the way non-European groups react to interaction with Europeans. • Stresses that non-European groups, such as blacks and Indians, quickly abandon their traditional culture and eventually entirely adopt the material and non-material culture of the principal colonizers, such as Europeans. • Problems with this theory are: • it is Eurocentric (what does this mean?), biased toward European or Western perspective. • it ignores the well documented fact that cultural exchange is multidirectional rather than unidirectional. • it de-emphasizes that traditional cultures persist beyond the impact of European ideas.

42. Syncretic • Emphasizes the way in which cultural elements become fused and transformed. • Acknowledges that through time the differences between cultural groups diminish. • it is a selective and progressive process, with some cultural practices changing and others remaining unchanged. • it emphasizes that elements of culture that do not change typically are used to reinforce and maintain identity among people.

43. Syncretic Examples • Southern foods represent a fusion of Native American, West African, and European food ways. • Religion, political opinion, and regional dialects are usually resistant to culture change.

44. The Issue of Disease and Depopulation • This is a pivotal problem in the archaeology of European contact for a variety of reasons: • If there was great depopulation and social readjustment among Indians at contact (and in some areas before direct contact), then does this mean that the 'ethnographic present' that anthropologists and historians use as a baseline to understand various Indian societies is of limited value for understanding what these societies were like before disruption?

45. Native American Responses to Contact • A main focus of early contact historical archaeology is the nature of Indian-White material interaction. • How were metal pots, guns, and axes (etc.) incorporated into Indian culture? • As superior materials? • Power items? Prestige items? Utilitarian goods? • Who had access to them and what were their life-histories? • What kinds of materials were exchanged and why? • Is there a pattern to changes in the availability and use of European material items? How did these changes affect Indian cultures?

46. Historical Archaeology as a Tool • Historical Archaeology as a Tool for Understanding Culture Change in Specific Regions. • I.e. the archaeology of De Soto. • To what extent do the archaeological record and written texts about De Soto's 'foray' through the Southeast in 1539-1543 agree or disagree? • What kinds of questions cannot be answered by archaeology? • What dangers exist in depending on the texts alone?

47. Other Kinds of Historical Archaeology: • The Black experience and archaeology. • Examples of 'unconscious' resistance to slavery and the plantation system. • Excavations at Monticello(http://www.daacs.org/). • Ships and Shipwrecks. • The U.S.S. Monitor (http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/monitor01/history/history.html).

48. What the History Books Forgot to Mention • History is written by those who have the means and ability to write. • Not all people during "recorded history" recorded their own history! • Historical archaeology is a relatively new, but rapidly growing, branch of archaeology in the New World.

49. Archaeology and History • The bottom line here is that archaeology can provide us with a glimpse into what actually occurred in the past. • Historical accounts written by well-fed, educated members of a priestly order or of the elite class will probably tell us little about the material conditions, preoccupations, and mealtime conversations of rural farmers. • Such accounts, if they exist, most probably will be either ethnocentric, "sociocentric," or, on the other hand, idealistic. • Such accounts may be perceived as sorts of hypotheses to be archaeologically tested. • When such accounts do not exist, we can use archaeological techniques to help us make such large gaps in our understanding "windows of opportunity."