I work for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon. We use pre-contact/post-contact for a variety of reasons, several of which have been touched on and also one which has not.
I was trained as a historic sites archaeologist and that's part of why I was hired. The CTUIR is as interested in its "history" as it is in its "prehistory" (although it's all pretty much the same thing for tribal members).
We have a difficult time getting agencies and the public to understand that. People agree tribal people were here in the past. If we're lucky, they'll agree that tribal members are here today. But everyone behaves as if there simply were no tribal people in between, in what we generally think of as the "historic era."
Agencies agree to consult with tribes about Native American sites (which 99% of the time means pre-contact sites). We request to be consulted regarding all sites, as we believe we are the only ones who can decide whether it is a Native American site. Tribal members worked on railroads. Tribal members made homestead claims. Tribal members did lots of things during the "historic era" that members of the dominant culture did. In addition, tribal culture was dramatically impacted by what everyone in the historic area was doing in the tribes' traditional territories.
The fundamental assumption of the lack of tribal presence in "historic sites" is part of the ongoing effort to make tribal people invisible.
Catherine Dickson
________________________________
From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of David Raymond Carlson <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2018 2:46 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Protohistory on the Utah site form
Hi John,
I just wanted to drop in and comment on a few things you said. I agree with
you that there is an important methodological/epistemological difference
between conducting archaeology with written documentation and conducting it
without, and I can see, from a managerial standpoint, how classifying sites
in some basic way according to what kinds of procedures you will need to do
to investigate them can be helpful. I do not think, though, that the issue
here is one of ignoring the influence of European and Euro-American
contact. But I think there are a few important points to consider:
1. Chronological divisions need to serve our research interests, which go
beyond epistemological concerns. Case in point, part of the research goal
of many people interested in challenging the prehistoric/historic divide is
that they want to de-emphasize the significance of what you termed as the
"substantive ontological difference[s] between the pre-colonial and
colonial eras in North America." For those operating in the
persistence/resilience research program (or paradigm, if you will), the
goal is to investigate persistence across and during colonialism, as means
of challenging current archaeological historiographies (which emphasize
colonialism as a drastic change) and at the behest of descendant
communities who are more interested in their own agency then in seeing
themselves purely as creatures affected by European colonialism. The issue
is not so much that change did not happen, but of focusing on more than
just that change. While the methodological issues of written vs material
records are still present, the ontological concerns are not, and are in
fact precisely what these archaeologists are seeking to challenge.
Defending a challenge to an assumption with that very assumption is not
much of a defense.
2. I don't think anyone is calling for the contact/pre-contact distinction
to be ignored. No one has said that. It seems more that people want a
different way of classifying sites, chronologically, for managerial
purposes. Changing how we classify sites in such a context will not mean
the elimination of the contact/pre-contact distinction. If it's useful for
some set of research, it's useful for some set of research. But the terms
we use have to serve archaeological and non-archaeological communities as a
whole, which brings me to...
3. As several have made clear, this issue of chronological classification
has implications above and beyond the technical considerations of
archaeologists. In addition to the sensibilities of indigenous groups (some
of whom do not like referring to their past as "prehistory", especially
since they may have oral historical records of said past), these
classifications are marshalled in museums, written texts, and other
contexts in ways which render Native American post-European contact history
invisible. This invisiblity is both inaccurate and harmful, as it extends
well beyond our understanding of the past, encompassing all manner of
policy decisions. Challenging it is, in my opinion, as important as
challenging any other erroneous preconception about the past (e.g. the
Solutrean Hypothesis, the Lost Tribes of Israel and South America). If you
believe, as I do, that archaeologists bear some general responsiblity for
how we represent the past, then we must take into consideration how our
terms are interpreted beyond the domain of archaeology (or of our
particular corner of it). "It's just useful to [some of] us", then, isn't
enough of a defense.
My point, then, is that while the epistemological distinction you make is
important, it shouldn't be the sole justification for classifying sites as
we do. There's more to consider here than just historical archaeological
epistemology, and it seems to me that we don't lose much in being
accommodating (since nothing stops us from recognizing the importance of
the contact/pre-contact distinction, even if we don't use it as a universal
classification for basic site chronology).
--David
=====================================================
David Carlson, M.A.
Co-Principle Investigator, *Issei* at Barneston Project
Project Website: http://blogs.uw.edu/davidrcn
Email: davidrcn[at]uw.edu
PhD. Candidate, Archaeology Program
Department of Anthropology
University of Washington
Personal Website: http://davidrcarlson.net
<http://uw.edu>
On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 1:55 PM, John Worth <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I’m very much in agreement with Bob on this. In terms of research
> methodology and datasets, and what cultural phenomena we do and don’t have
> direct access to, the concepts of prehistoric and historic periods are
> abundantly useful and fully descriptive. In the complete absence of
> documentary/textual data that we can read, our direct archaeological
> interpretations are based on material traces of past behaviors, from which
> we then build inferences that reach beyond the material and behavioral and
> into the mental realm. When that material evidence is supplemented by
> documentary data, our interpretations can also draw upon textual data that
> allows us direct glimpses into the mental realm of those past cultures,
> though only indirectly into the behavioral and material realm that such
> texts may describe. Combining the two sources of evidence, archaeological
> and documentary data provide direct and simultaneous access to both the
> behaviors and thoughts of members of past cultures, offering us an
> opportunity for a much richer and mutually comparable interpretive
> framework that is not solely reliant on material evidence.
>
>
>
> And the concept of protohistory, as I’ve always understood it, bridges the
> gap between the two, particularly in colonial situations when literate
> groups interacted with non-literate groups, providing at least some textual
> evidence, though typically through the lens of one alien culture writing
> about another with whom they have only limited interaction and
> understanding (e.g. when American Indians were not personally generating
> their own texts and historical accounts, but were nonetheless being
> described by European observers, which is a major emphasis of
> ethnohistory).
> That being said, however, even in “literate” historic-period societies, a
> large swath of the population either did not or could not write, or wrote
> very little, which somewhat blurs the distinction between “protohistory”
> and “history” as described above, since the amount and quality of
> documentary evidence varies by group and region even within these
> “historic” societies.
>
>
>
> In Utah and much of North America, these periods roughly correspond to the
> pre-colonial and colonial/post-colonial eras, and thus encapsulate not just
> methodological and evidentiary differences, but also a number of
> fundamental differences in the actual social landscape, particularly as
> regards the presence and expansion of non-indigenous groups into a
> previously indigenous landscape, and the concurrent transformation of the
> political and economic circumstances affecting all groups. But as Bob
> points out, the Maya had been generating their own documentary texts long
> before Europeans arrived, and thus their “historic” period now (since
> decipherment) encompasses both the late pre-colonial and the
> colonial/postcolonial eras (and I consciously am avoiding conflating the
> generic term “contact” with “colonialism,” since the first occurs regularly
> without the latter, and the latter necessarily incorporates the former).
>
>
> For the Utah situation, I’d think that both
> prehistoric/protohistoric/historic and pre-colonial and
> colonial/post-colonial would work, since they are rough functional
> equivalents of each other. All human cultures were prehistoric at one time
> or another, and all indigenous cultures were ultimately affected by
> colonialism authored by Europeans or others at some point in their history,
> so to single out either of these terms (history or colonial) as if they are
> somehow specifically perjorative or biased against Native Americans in this
> context seems very myopic in my opinion. There really is an important
> methodological distinction to be made between archaeology conducted with
> and without contemporaneous documentary evidence, and there really was a
> substantive ontological difference between the pre-colonial and colonial
> eras in North America, so we blur these lines at our own intellectual
> peril.
>
> John Worth
>
>
> --
> John E. Worth, Ph.D.
> Professor, Department of Anthropology
> University of West Florida, 11000 University Parkway, Pensacola, FL 32514
> Phone: (850) 857-6204 Fax: (850) 857-6278 Email: [log in to unmask]
> Home Page: *http://pages.uwf.edu/jworth/ <http://pages.uwf.edu/jworth/>*
> Luna Settlement Project: http://lunasettlement.blogspot.com/
> https://www.facebook.com/lunasettlementproject/
>
>
>
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