THE HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY of NATIVE AMERICANS Patricia E

P1: FBH August 28, 2000 9:45 Annual Reviews AR111-16 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2000. 29:425–46 Copyright c 2000 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved THE HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY OF NATIVE AMERICANS Patricia E. Rubertone Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912; e-mail: Patricia [email protected] Key Words acculturation, direct-historical approaches, landscapes, multicultural communities, colonialism ■ Abstract Historical archaeologists have given relatively scant attention to the study of Native Americans. Despite the potential to contribute to new understandings about Native peoples during and after European contact, the research commitment has been ambivalent at best. In this review, I ground this relationship in early debates about the field’s subject matter and concurrent discussions in anthropology about direct- historical and acculturation models. In addition, I highlight currents in research that have refined these approaches as well as those that have charted new directions. The latter are notable for helping comprehend the role of place and tradition in Native peoples’ lives, but also for reminding us of the complexities of identity construction in America after European contact. I reason that historical archaeology’s use of multiple sources, if linked creatively, can be crucial in producing knowledge about the past that illuminates the rich diversity of experiences among Native Americans. “Did these occurrences have a paradigm ... that went back in time? Or are we working out the minor details of a strictly random pattern?” Erdrich (1998:240) “...all of us remembering what we have heard together—that creates the whole story the long story of the people.” Silko (1981:7) INTRODUCTION Today, definitions of what constitutes historical archaeology are more broadly conceived than ever before. Disciplinary boundaries are being crossed, geograph- ical specialties absorbed, and temporal divides dismantled at an exhilarating pace. In the wake of these intellectual encounters, perceptions of the field’s parochial- ism have eroded. American historical archaeology’s emphasis on the colonial and immigrant experience has been “ethnified.” Within this framework of greater in- clusivity, however, historical archaeology’s commitment to research on Native 0084-6570/00/1015-0425$14.00 425 P1: FBH August 28, 2000 9:45 Annual Reviews AR111-16 426 RUBERTONE Americans has remained tentative (Rubertone 1996). Although not entirely mute, historical archaeological research has not played a major role in contributing to the process of remembering and thus, in helping to open new understandings of Native Americans during and after European contact. In part, historical archaeology’s ability to study postcontact Native Americans in a concerted way has been hampered by the undefined role of archaeological findings in what has traditionally been the domain of the ethnohistorian (Trigger 1980, 1986). Equally, if not more, detrimental has been an unwillingness to break free of conceptual models that have marginalized Native peoples and have tethered them to written sources (and the histories informed by them). In this review, I reason that historical archaeology’s ability to produce more inclusive understandings of America’s past—rather than just a series of separate ones—rests on its access to multiple sources of evidence and the vision to use these more critically, more rigorously, and more imaginatively. I begin by situating historical archaeology’s ambivalence toward Native Americans within developments in the larger discipline of anthropology, which defined how historic-period Native peoples should be studied and, thus, influenced the field as it emerged as an arena of scholarly discourse. I then review a selec- tion of historical archaeological studies that build on traditional approaches to research on postcontact Native Americans by infusing them with theoretical in- sights from recent work in symbolism, materiality, and textual criticism. In the final sections, I examine current directions that are notable for radically revising historical archaeology’s engagement with Native Americans by opting for longitudinal, place-centered, and multicultural perspectives. Despite the enormous promise of these recent studies, they raise complex issues that pose hard challenges to historical archaeology as usual. By asking us to see the “invisible,” they encourage us to revisit bodies of evidence and categorical choices that have underwritten the marginalization of Native peoples in colonial North America. Moreover, they force us to reflect on the extent to which this research matters to contemporary Native Americans and encompasses concerns they may have about how their histories have been represented. HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY AND NATIVE AMERICANS: Questions of Definition, Matters of Inclusion Postcontact Native Americans have been a subject of inquiry in historical archaeology since the 1930s, when fieldwork opportunities lured archaeologists with training and experience in North American prehistory to sites ranging from Spanish missions to Plains Indian villages (for a review of historical archaeology from the 1930s to 1950s, see South 1994). For many who engaged in this research, “archaeology was archaeology and, with few exceptions, historical archaeology was the archaeology of post-contact Indian sites or sites of frontier forts and P1: FBH August 28, 2000 9:45 Annual Reviews AR111-16 HISTORICAL NATIVE AMERICANS 427 trading posts frequented by post-contact groups of Indians” (Quimby 1994: 117–18). These sites and the questions they posed appealed to researchers intrigued by discussions taking place within anthropology about the study of culture change, including the use of direct-historical and acculturation approaches (e.g. Boyd et al 1951, Montgomery et al 1949). In this section, I reason that an interest in these theoretical approaches created a nurturing environment for historical archaeology, but one that was not entirely unproblematic in defining its relationship to the study of Native Americans. The direct-historical approach, which assumed cultural continuity from the documented ethnographic (or historical) present to prehistoric times for Native American groups living in certain regions of continental North America (e.g. the Puebloan Southwest, the Great Plains), influenced the development of historical archaeology by focusing attention on historically known sites. Cyrus Thomas (1898), who headed the Bureau of Ethnology’s mound surveys, first proposed the idea of cultural continuity as the basis for refuting “the Moundbuilder myth” by reasoning that the archaeological record had been mostly produced by native peoples who had lived in the same locations into the historical period (Trigger 1989; but see also Meltzer 1983, Ramenofsky 1990). By stressing cultural stasis, Thomas and other anthropologists working for the Bureau (subsequently renamed the Bureau of American Ethnology) encouraged the subordination of archaeological to ethnological research by giving primacy to what could be learned about Native Americans from ethnohistorical and ethnographic accounts rather than archaeological remains (Trigger 1989:125). According to this reasoning, which was later embraced by Boasian anthropologists, archaeology was relegated to a minor role in the study of Native American lives in historic periods. Archaeologists who later adopted the direct-historical approach (e.g. Steward 1942; Strong 1935, 1940; Wedel 1938) employed a documented Native American site (or one containing artifacts that suggested contact with Europeans) to estab- lish a known baseline for tracing cultural sequences into the unknown prehistoric. Rather than assuming a kind of extreme cultural conservatism in which ethnographic data could be projected directly onto the past, they recognized that there were differences between the historically known present and the unknown past. Postcontact sites represented simpler, more decadent manifestations of Native American cultures (Strong 1935, Wedel 1938). Thus, the starting point in research informed by the direct-historical approach coincided with what was considered to be a terminal period in the culture history of the Native American groups being studied (Ramenofsky 1990:444). Consequently, archaeological research on historic period sites served more as a means of gaining a backward glance at ear- lier cultural periods and less as a critical source of evidence for illuminating the realities of Native peoples’ lives and struggles in colonial America. By diminishing archaeology’s relevance to contributing information that might lead to alternative understandings of Native Americans in the postcontact period, the direct-historical approach underscored the widely accepted opinion that European contact signaled the inevitable demise and eventual disappearance of native cultures. P1: FBH August 28, 2000 9:45 Annual Reviews AR111-16 428 RUBERTONE As a conceptual framework for the study of historic America, acculturation reit- erated ideas about the loss of traditional lifeways following contact with Europeans. The term’s origins can be traced to nineteenth-century debates about the place of “first Americans” and “Un-Americans” in US democracy in which it was argued that the extension of constitutional rights and citizenship to Native Americans (but also African Americans and immigrants), and their full integration into national life depended on the erasure of their distinctive cultures. Between the 1930s and

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