Here is a paper I read Sunday morning at the Middle Atlantic
Conference in Ocean City, Maryland. Maybe this topic needs to be
discussed, so I am forwarding it to this list.
Genealogy as an auxiliary science of archæology
Prepared for Mid Atlantic Archæological Conference
March 2001
In 1955, my late friend Pinky Harrington published an important
article titled "Archæology as an auxiliary science of American
History" in American Anthropologist. Harrington then published a
leaflet from the opposite viewpoint, advising historical agencies how
to profitably use archæology.
Unfortunately, it would be many years before similar articles
appeared in the literature of the historical profession. In fact,
today it still is rare to find an historian who is comfortable using
archæological literature. The unfortunate exclusivity of academic
disciplines is alive, well, and artificially constricting the scope
of research in the social sciences. The one bright and shining light
in this darkness of contrived academic provincialism is the
cultural resource management industry, where all the recognized
disciplines are forced, sometimes reluctantly, to share a platform
and a research agenda.
My plagiarism of Pinky's title for this article was quite intentional.
The connection between genealogy and historical archæology is quite
as vital and intellectually important as the connection between
archæology and history. Unfortunately, this connection has not been
realized, either.
For those who question classifying genealogy among the social
sciences, I point out that professional genealogy is vastly more
sophisticated than your grandmother tracing the family tree. The
journal of the National Genealogical Society is a scholarly
publication that deals with many of the same subjects as traditional
social sciences journals, at a similar level of scholarship.
Professional genealogists work at defining groups of people, tracing
their activities in terms compatible with academic studies in
anthropology, sociology, or history. Techniques of genealogy can
explain relationships among community members, and they can also help
us put a human face on the material we find in the ground. We profess
an interest in understanding something called a community. In most
cases, a community is an organization, composed of families often
sharing kinship bonds that only a skilled genealogist can unravel.
Scholarly practice of genealogy transcends grandmother tracing her
family tree, just as archæology goes beyond mere artifact collection,
or history is more than a talk at the local heritage day celebration.
Over our eighteen years of cultural resource studies for the Delaware
Department of Transportation, we have become intimately involved in
the social science of genealogy. Moreover, we have noticed that
other CRM firms have incorporated more and more genealogical material
into their reports for DelDOT. In fact, the Department of
Transportation has become one of the major Delaware publishers of
genealogical literature. My own family's immigrant antecedents have
been subjects of two different DelDOT reports.
Beginning in 1983, we have completed and published six volumes, the
latest of which is now available on line.
By the time we prepared the second volume of the series, it became
obvious that our work was intimately connected with the history of a
local Native American community. That second report was titled Fork
Branch/duPont Station Community, and a later volume was titled A
Community on McKee Road. Clearly, a simple Phase I archæological
survey blossomed into a detailed, ongoing, community study involving
several closely interrelated families over three centuries. Genealogy
necessarily became an integral part of the project.
In the Fork Branch report, Louise Heite explored the question of
racial perception and identity. She traced the lineages of the people
whose sites we were studying, and showed that Native American people
in Central Delaware suffered a serious decline in status during the
first half of the nineteenth century. To avoid being officially
identified as black, they took refuge behind an enigmatic "Moorish"
identity. Even while they were called Moors or blacks by the
surrounding community, Native people in Kent County maintained their
own internal identity, together with knowledge of their actual
origins in the face of overt institutionalized racism. Toward the
end of the nineteenth century, an elderly member of the community
related his youthful experience visiting Lenape connections in the
west, and reasserted the claim that the community were indeed Native
Americans.
Over the years, our research has been used by members of the
community to trace their lineages, and we developed connections with
a core group of avocational researchers who are gradually assembling
the genealogical history of the community. Eventually a web site,
called Mitsawokett, was established, together with an internet
discussion list that now includes hundreds of descendants all over
the country. One of the most important results of this networking
has been our ability to trace the people who have left the community,
some of whom have subsequently identified with other Native American
communities, and many of whom have disappeared into the European
American community. A whole new aspect of community studies has
opened on the internet, as we traced the dispersal of the community
into Canada, Indiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Iowa, where branches of
the families live today.
Curiously, we have discovered that the families moved west in groups
and maintained their connections in their new homes, sometimes for
several generations. We also have identified other families who have
moved into Kent County from other Native American communities over
the centuries. The internet allows these various branches to
communicate and sometimes to come together during Delaware
Archaeology Month events, now held annually in Cheswold.
This body of genealogical research, in turn, enabled us, in the
latest report, to describe the eighteenth-century Native American
community in northern Kent County and link it historically with the
community that exists today. In other words, genealogical report
allowed them to document a major part of their heritage, thus
validating oral traditions.
When we found worked glass artifacts on the site, known to have been
occupied by identifiable ancestors, we provided a physical connection
to the ancestral material culture that never before had been
available to Native American descendants in Kent County.
One part of this research was published in the journal of Middle
Atlantic archæology, and the whole volume is available online in
downloadable .pdf format from the DelDOT web site.
In cultural resource management, we are required to consider the
social context, in which a site exists. Most fundamental of those
contexts is the family, which in turn is part of a larger kinship
group and the individuals who interact with that group. Issues of
status and connection are intimately intertwined with a person's
religious, social, political, and familial relationships, all of
which are found in the records most commonly used by genealogists.
While it is true that many genealogical researchers do not function
as social scientists, the vast majority of dedicated amateurs are
becoming sophisticated interpreters of evidence, who can provide a
framework, or at least a body of raw material, for community studies.
Archæology, in turn, can provide communities with tangible assets
that had never existed before. We can show them artifacts that their
ancestors used; we can help them find the birthplaces of their people.
Work on our DelDOT projects coincided with the Native American
awareness movement that is sweeping the eastern states. In Delaware,
as in most eastern states, the original Indian tribes had either
moved away or forgotten their identity. Isolated communities kept
alive the faint sparks of an Indian heritage, which they are now
rekindling. The Lenape people of Kent County have organized
themselves into a corporate body that uses the name of Lenape Indian
Tribe of Delaware, and are busily trying to reawaken public
awareness. I'm proud to report that cultural resource management has
had an important role in this effort.
--
Ned Heite ([log in to unmask])
*************************************************
* Today's compost wisdom: *
* Spring is here. Time to crank up the *
* grille and cremate large parts of *
* small animals and small parts of large *
* animals. While you're at it, do you know *
* where last fall's raked-up leaves are? *
* Composting traps carbon in the soil and *
* reduces greenhouse gases, which is more *
* than we can say for barbecue pits!
*************************************************
|
