Skip S-A's post brings up what I think is a far more important
problem than the political squabbles, misunderstandings and
misrepresentations of "historical and prehistorical archaeologists
about and towards each other. If those studying the ancient
undocumented past mostly use a neo-evolutionist paradigm and those
working in the documented near past tend to use Marxist or
interpretivist or postmodernist approaches, then we create two
classes of people in the past: those who "adapt" and "evolve" versus
those who "create" or "construct" their social and cultural
worlds.[Or, in the Marxist approaches, at least, those who react to
ideological and political forces versus those who react to the
weather].
 
One group is passive or reactive, the other is active and
participatory. Since in the New World the line tends to be drawn
between pre-Contact and Contact, and (inexplicably) between Native
Americans on the one hand and everyone else on the other, our
habitual ways of working have dire consequences.
 
Indians become a fossil species, passive members of nature.
Arrowheads get stuck in natural history museum next to fossils. More
recently-arrived peoples become "historical," their materials are
exhibited in history musems. Creamware is categorized with the
American Declaration of Independence, while petroglyphs are classed
with Trilobytes. This creation of Native Americans as persons without
history is dangerous and dumb, and, I think, it is largely a
construction of intradisciplinary splits between "history" on the one
hand and "ethnohistory" and "prehistory" on the other. Eric Wolfe's
dictum that "there are no people without history" needs greater heed
among we New World archaeologists.
 
So, yes, I agree with Skip that documents (and verbal testimony,
artwork, photographs, etc.) give us more interpretive room, but the
burden then falls to those dealing with non-documented cultures to
write their "histories" as creatively as possible. Because we don't
have any written records from the Late Archaic, we have no reason to
represent Late Archaic people as if they were merely congeries of
adaptive units without politics, desires, and histories of their own.
 
Dan Mouer
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