I am so pleased by the discussion this thread has caused.  Very certainly I
have opened up this can of worms with myself when thinking about the term
protohistory and the greater language used in archaeology.  I will address
this discussion in more detail in a couple of days-- I'm in the field at
present.

Thank you all so much!
-Hannah

On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 9:47 PM, John Foster <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I quite agree Catherine.  Convincing agencies as well as the tribes that
> they have a say in "historical" sites is a real challenge.  As always it's
> outreach and education.  John Foster, RPA
> Greenwood-Associates.com
> Greenwood and Associates
> 310.717.5048
>
>       From: Catherine Dickson <[log in to unmask]>
>  To: [log in to unmask]
>  Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2018 8:36 PM
>  Subject: Re: Protohistory on the Utah site form
>
> 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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-- 
Hannah Russell, RPA
Cottonwood Archaeology, LLC
[log in to unmask]
(435) 210-0414

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