Bonnie Clark wrote:>
> Just another anecdote on the difficulties of seeing ethnicity in the
> ground.  Working at a Dam construction camp in Arizona, the contracting
> archaeologists (Dames & Moore) recorded a short-term occupation for which
> detailed census data was available.  The residents included 40% Mexican
> or Mexican-Americans, 28% Apache, and a few immigrants.  Whites
> born in the U.S. made up only 32% of the population.  The only artifacts
> in the town dump that were "ethnically marked" were a Chines ceramic food
> jar, three chili cans, and two chili powder bottles.  Given the site's
> location in Arizona, the chili cans and chili powder are themselves
> questionable as "ethnic markers".
>
> That ethnicity is hard to see in the ground goes beyond a theoretical
> problem, especially for those of us doing cultural resources management.  In
> Colorado and any state that uses the IMACs (Utah, Wyoming, Nevada), all
> sites need to be assigned an ethnic affiliation.  (This is probably true
> elsewhere, but this is where I have worked.)  The assumption is
> made that without discrete and implicit ethnic markers, a site is the
> remains of Anglo-americans.  As historical archaeologists, we should know
> this to be a spurious assumption.  In the West, especially, it does a
> great disservice to the historic record to assume Anglo-american
> affiliation as the default.  In so doing we erase difference in the
> historic record just as historians of old.  For my part, I record
> cultural affiliation as "unknown" for sites lacking historic records or
> clearly marked material culture.
>
> Yet another cautionary tale...
>
> Bonnie Clark
> Historical Archaeologist
> SWCA, Inc.
> [log in to unmask]
>
 
Bonnie has touched on an important point: theintersection of
well-intentioned motives and profound ignorance!. What makes these
sites significant is the value of their information, and part of the
information they contain is what we need to help more clearly
understand what ethnicity is. To decide ahead of time that ethnicity
is a thing and one we understand, and that it has material "markers"
in the archaeological record is to be unaware of the culture theory
that has developed over the past 20 or 30 years. The desire to elevate
in iomportance "ethnic" sites which reveal certain "ethnic" traits is
not consistent with Criterion D (i.e., to contribute information or
knowledge), which in contemporary anthropology and archaeology
includes the attempt to more properly understand what ethnicity is and
how it works and how it evolves or develops historically. This is yet
another reason why we cannot allow people who have eschewed the
scholarly dimension of archaeology for the civil-service dimension to
dictate what makes a site significant. We cannot allow those who do
not attend scholarly conferences, engage in research and/or teaching,
or keep up with the literature to make decisions based on their
judgements of significance, ethnicity, or other such matters.
 
The soapbox is now free.
 
Dan M.