Historical and Anthropological Archaeology: Forging Alliances

P1: FPY Journal of Archaeological Research [jar] PL120-73 August 30, 1956 22:2 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999 Journal of Archaeological Research, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2000 Historical and Anthropological Archaeology: Forging Alliances Robert Paynter1 Historical and anthropological archaeology have had a somewhat disjointed rela- tionship. Differences in theoretical perspectives, methodological concerns, and material records have led to a lack of cross talk between these branches of Americanist archaeology. This paper presents recent issues in historical archaeology, points out areas of common concern, and argues that both archaeologies would benefit from informed discussions about the materiality and history of the pre- and post-Columbian world. KEY WORDS: landscape; epistemology; history. INTRODUCTION In 1493 Columbus set off for North America on a voyage that truly deserves to be part of our public memory, for it, rather than the voyage of 1492, was a harbinger of the world to come. His first voyage of 1492 was a low-budget, three-ship reconnaissance survey. The second voyage began in 1493 with at least 17 ships, 1200 to 1500 men, and explicit plans to establish enterprises to begin the real work of colonization. The goals of the second voyage were those for centuries throughout the Western Hemisphere—find converts and gold; and on Hispaniola, as throughout the Western Hemisphere, conversion took second place to accumulation. The gold, never plentiful, was rapidly depleted through despotic taxes and enforced mining. Seeking an alternative form of accumulation, Columbus enslaved 1500 of Hispaniola’s people. Five hundred were transported to Spain of whom only 300 survived the passage. The survivors died shortly after arrival. History shows that Columbus’s idea of an Atlantic slave trade in Native Americans was not realized, in part because of the colonizers’ practices of terrorizing the 1Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003. 1 1059-0161/00/0300-0001$18.00/0 C 2000 Plenum Publishing Corporation P1: FPY Journal of Archaeological Research [jar] PL120-73 August 30, 1956 22:2 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999 2 Paynter local population and savagely exploiting their labor in mines and fields, driving the native population of Hispaniola virtually extinct by 1550. However, and somewhat unwittingly, Columbus did bring the source of Caribbean profits on this second voyage—sugar plants. By 1516 the first capital-intensive sugar mill was established on Hispaniola and by the mid-1500s sugar exports from the island were a major source of Spanish wealth. The decimated indigenous population was not a large enough labor force for this commodity, and thus came to the Western Hemisphere, in chains, the people of Africa who tilled the fields, cut the cane, and worked the mills. The transport of enslaved Africans to Hispaniola was first sanctioned in 1501, and by 1517 a contract was let by the crown of Spain for 4000 Africans (Jane, 1988, pp. 20–188; Koning, 1976, pp. 70–94; Las Casas, 1992, pp. 14–25; Morison, 1991, pp. 389–399, 481–495; Williams, 1970, pp. 23–45). Columbus’s second voyage is a capsule of the practices and processes by which European culture moved from its position on the periphery of the medieval world (Abu-Lughod, 1989) to become part of the core of our post-Columbian world system. More generally, the late 15th century was the beginning of a historically unique conjunction of forces that resulted in dreams and practices of European global conquest. It began with European advances into Africa, followed shortly thereafter by the invasion of the Americas. Later the peoples of South, East, and Central Asia, and then Oceania, were caught up in what eventually became our world, a world of global scale struggles to extract surpluses, to exert political domi- nance, to build communities, and to foster senses of political and personal identities. It is these multiple and diverse processes and the variety of responses to them that constitute the subject matter of historical archaeology. That historical archaeology is about the archaeology of European expansion is a thesis with a solid history in the discipline. Initially (and it was only some 30 years ago that the journal Historical Archaeology was founded) there were those who based the discipline’s definition on methodology—historical archaeology being the study of a people’s material culture with the aid of their documents. Schuyler (1978) com- piles many of these early arguments; Historical Archaeology 27(1), introduced by Cleland (1993), also has a number of articles on the history of the society (see also Deagan, 1982; Little, 1994; Orser, 1996, pp. 1–28; South, 1994). However, many practitioners always saw historical archaeology as staking a claim to a slice of world history largely unexamined by anthropologists. For example, Deetz (1968) early on conceived of the task as the study of Late Man in North America and more recently advocates the study of “the spread of European societies worldwide, beginning in the 15th century, and their subsequent development and impact on native peoples in all parts of the world” (Deetz, 1991, p. 1). South (ed., 1977) stresses the importance of studying the British colonial system and not just particular sites, and more recently in studying the energetics of world cultural systems riven by class distinctions (South, 1988). Schuyler (1970, p. 83) succinctly describes historical archaeology as “the study of the material manifestation of the expansion P1: FPY Journal of Archaeological Research [jar] PL120-73 August 30, 1956 22:2 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999 Historical and Anthropological Archaeology 3 of European culture into the non-European world starting in the 15th century and ending with industrialization or the present” (see also Schuyler, 1991). Leone (1977, p. xvii), working with insights from Marx, argues that historical archaeology deals “with modern society or with its direct historical foundations ...people, places, and processes tied up with the Industrial Revolution, the founding of the modern English-speaking world, or directly with modern Americans.” For Leone, this problematic provides a place for historical archaeology within anthropology: “it has a special way of analyzing our society” (1977, p. xxi). Today, many practitioners trained in North America adhere to the position that historical archaeology is about the ways of life of post-Columbian peoples (e.g., Deagan, 1982, 1988; Falk, 1991; Leone, 1995; Orser, 1996). Less cer- tainty surrounds the key features and dynamics of this way of life. Deetz’s (1977) structuralist-idealist paradigm is a major research perspective. Approaches empha- sizing traditional and revised ecological models also have been advocated (e.g., Hardesty, 1985; Mrozowski, 1993, 1996). Although mainstream social science perspectives dominate the conception of politics and economy, others have argued for the relevancy of any of a number of marxian and other critical approaches (e.g., Leone, 1995; McGuire and Paynter, 1991; Orser, 1988). Theoretical approaches rarely dominate the discussion in historical archaeology as most of what historical archaeologists have done is the very familiar work of “archaeography” (Deetz, 1988b, p. 18), the detailing of aspects of the post-Columbian way of life. Thus, much of what is done in historical archaeology is what is done in any archaeology, teasing out the methodological issues about interpreting material remains with the added issue of the interplay of documentary and material sources of information [see Little (1994) and Orser (1996) for very useful overviews of the intellectual currents in historical archaeology]. What is the place of the post-Columbian world in the discipline of anthropological archaeology? It should represent an important subject matter for a discipline interested in a comparative perspective on such matters as faction process, state formation, world systems, and identity construction (e.g., Blanton et al., 1996; Brumfiel, 1992; Brumfiel and Fox, 1994; Chase-Dunn, 1992; Friedman, 1992; Patterson and Gailey, 1987; Rowlands et al., 1987; Yoffee, 1995). Nonetheless, the post-Columbian world constitutes an understudied subject in anthropological archaeology (cf. Patterson, 1993). It is understudied, perhaps, in much the same way the ethnography of Europe and of the United States are understudied due to anthropology’s aversion to the ways of life of the West (Cole, 1977; Wolf, 1982). It is also, perhaps, understudied by anthropological archaeologists because its use of documents seems somehow to circumvent the difficult task of material inter- pretation that is at the heart of “pre-historic” archaeology (Hodder, 1989, p. 141; Watson and Fotiadis, 1990, p. 615). All the same, historical archaeologists have been seeking a disciplinary understanding that bridges between the concerns of anthropology and history, that uses objects to study the mediation of actions and P1: FPY Journal of Archaeological Research [jar] PL120-73 August 30, 1956 22:2 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999 4 Paynter meanings. This can be accomplished only if its analysis of the past 500 years approaches the creation of a vast array of ways of life through the understanding that comes from the anthropological archaeological perspectives of comparison and material analysis. With its emphasis on studying the West, using documents and objects, historical archaeology inhabits a liminal space in the anthropological imagination (Orser, 1996,

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