Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology

by Ferris, Neal; Harrison, Rodney; Wilcox, Michael V.

• ISBN13: 9780199696697
• ISBN10: 0199696691
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-01-27
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology explores the archaeologies of daily living left by the indigenous and other displaced peoples impacted by European colonial expansion over the last 600 years. This new, comparative focus on the archaeology of indigenous and colonized life has emerged from the gap in conceptual frames of reference between the archaeologies of pre-contact indigenous peoples, and the post-contact archaeologies of the global European experience. Case studies from North America, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Ireland significantly revise conventional historical narratives of those interactions, their presumed impacts, and their ongoing relevance for the material, social, economic, and political lives and identities of contemporary indigenous and other peoples (e.g. metis or mixed ancestry families, and other displaced or colonized communities).

The volume provides a synthetic overview of the trends emerging from this research, contextualizing regional studies in relation to the broader theoretical contributions they reveal, demonstrating how this area of study is contributing to an archaeology practiced and interpreted beyond conceptual constraints such as pre versus post contact, indigenous versus European, history versus archaeology, and archaeologist versus descendant. In addition, the work featured here underscores how this revisionist archaeological perspective challenges dominant tropes that persist in the conventional colonial histories of descendant colonial nation states, and contributes to a de-colonizing of that past in the present. The implications this has for archaeological practice, and for the contemporary descendants of colonized peoples, brings a relevance and immediacy to these archaeological studies that resonates with, and problemetizes, contested claims to a global archaeological heritage.

Author Biography

Neal Ferris is Lawson Chair of Canadian Archaeology and an Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario.

Rodney Harrison is a Reader in Archaeology, Heritage, and Museum Studies at University College London, and an Adjunct Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of West Sydney.

Michael V. Wilcox is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors
Part 1: Ambiguous Definitions and Discordances
1. Shared Histories: Rethinking 'Colonized' and 'Colonizer' in the Archaeology of Colonialism, Rodney Harrison
2. Archaeologies of Indigenous Survivance and Residence: Navigating Colonial and Scholarly Dualities, Stephen W. Silliman
3. Native-Lived Colonialism and the Agency of Life Projects: A View from the Northwest Coast, Jeff Oliver
4. Pruning Colonialism: Vantage Point, Local Political Economy, and Cultural Entanglement in the Archaeology of Post-1415 Indigenous Peoples, Kurt A. Jordan
Part 2: Colonizing and Decolonizing Spaces, Places, Things, and Identities
5. The Nature of Culture: Sites, Ancestors and Trees in the Archaeology of Southern Mozambique, M. Dores Cruz
6. Indigenous Archaeology and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Social Mobility and Boundary Maintenance in Colonial Contexts, Michael V. Cox
7. Hiding in Plain Sight: Engineered colonial landscapes and indigenous reinvention on the New Mexican frontier, Jun Sunseri
8. Frontier Forts, Ambiguity, and Manifest Destiny: The Changing Role of Fort Lane in the Cultural Landscape of the Oregon Territory, 1853-1929, Mark Tveskov and Amie Cohen
9. Imperial Anxiety and the Dissolution of Colonial Space and Practice at Fort Moore, South Carolina, Charles R. Cobb and Stephanie Sapp
10. Intimacy and Distance: Life on the Australian Aboriginal Mission, Jane Lydon
11. Casting Identity: Sumptuous Action and Colonized Bodies in Seventeenth Century New England, Diana DiPaolo Loren
12. Persistent Pots, Durable Kettles, and Colonialist Discourse: Aboriginal Pottery Production in French Colonial Basse, Rob Mann
Part 3: Displacement, Hybridity, and Colonizing the Colonial
13. Challenging Colonial Equations? The Gaelic Experience in Early Modern Ireland, Audrey Horning
14. The Process of Hybridization among the Labrador Metis, Matthew A. Beaudoin
15. Archaeology and the "Tensions of Empire", James A. Delle
16. Material Practices and Colonial Chronologies in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean, Mark W. Hauser and Stephan Lenik
Part 4: Contested Pasts and Contemporary Implications
17. Being Iroquoian, Being Iroquois: A Thousand Year Heritage of Becoming, Neal Ferris
18. Archaeology Taken to Court: Unravelling the Epistemology of Cultural Tradition in the Context of Aboriginal Title Cases, Andrew Martindale
19. Being 'Indigenous' and Being 'Colonized' in Africa: Contrasting Experiences and Their Implications for a Post-Colonial Archaeology, Paul J. Lane
20. Deconstructing Archaeologies of African Colonialism: Making and Unmaking the Subaltern, Peter R. Schmidt
Commentary and Afterword
21. Commentary: Subaltern Archaeologies, Peter van Dommelen
22. Commentary: The Archaeology of the Colonized and Global Archaeological Theory, Chris Gosden
23. Afterword: Vantage Points in an Archaeology of Colonialism, Ann B. Stahl