Kathleen Deagan

Neither history nor prehistory: the Questions that count in historical archaeology

Historical archaeology’s singular and unique strength among the social sciences is its simultaneous access to multiple categories of evidence bearing upon the same processes or events in past human behavior (either immediately or remotely in the past). Although this has been obvious for nearly two decades, historical archaeology has not produced the original and unparalleled insights into human cultural behavior or evolution that we might expect to result from the unique perspective and data base of the field. We have instead tended to weakly reproduce or “test” insights and principles resulting from history or prehistoric archaeology. Both the questions we have asked and the methods we have used to answer them have been grounded in fields other than historical archaeology and have generally ignored its special perspective.It is the premise of this paper that there are potential contributions of historical archaeology not duplicatable by any other field. Our present operational and methodological procedures, however, (grounded in prehistory and history) are neither appropriate nor adequate to deal with them. This will be explored through the issues of defining the right questions for historical archaeology, and identifying the appropriate approaches to employ in answering them.

Avenues of Inquiry in Historical Archaeology

Publisher Summary This chapter presents avenues of inquiry in historical archaeology. Historical archaeology at present is actively contributing to a variety of problems and disciplines. From its emergence as a recognized area of research in the 1930s, the field has advanced from being essentially a set of techniques providing supplemental data for other disciplines, through being an anthropological tool for the reconstruction of past lifeways and the study of cultural process, to being a means of discovering predictable relationships between human adaptive strategies, ideology, and patterned variability in the archaeological record. Certain aspects of historical archaeology should be particularly noted as having the potential for making contributions not possible through any other discipline. The simultaneous access to varied sources of information about the past allows the historical archaeologist to match the archaeological patterning of a given unit against the documented social, economic, and ideological attributes of the same unit in order to arrive at a better understanding of how the archaeological record reflects human behavior. The unique potential of historical archaeology lies not only in its ability to answer questions of archaeological and anthropological interest, but also in its ability to provide historical data not available through documentation or any other source. The inadequate treatment of the disenfranchised groups in Americas past, excluded from historical sources because of race, religion, isolation, or poverty is an important function of contemporary historical archaeology and one that cannot be ignored.

Colonial Origins and Colonial Transformations in Spanish America

Archaeological data have been critical in articulating the manner by which system-wide structuring elements of Europe’s colonial projects in America were adjusted or transformed in local settings. This paper explores the ways in which certain of these structuring elements in Spanish colonial America were played out in a variety of households and communities, with the ultimate goal of approaching an archaeologically informed, comparative study of American colonialism. Several parameters are offered as examples of potentially fruitful points of comparison among colonial systems through which researchers might assess local agency at both intra- and inter-colonial scales. These include varieties of economic and governmental centrality, forms of labor organization, varieties of religious experience, gender relations, idealized social identities, and frontier-urban dichotomies.

The archaeology of the Spanish contact period in the Caribbean

The arrival of Spanish conquistadors and colonists to the Caribbean in the late fifteenth century set in motion the processes that produced the post-1500 “New World.” The sixteenth-century cultural and ecological exchanges among Europe, Africa, and the Americas that took place during the early contact period greatly affected the social and economic patterns of life in both the Old and the New Worlds. Nowhere was this change manifest as profoundly and dramatically as in the sixteenth-century Caribbean. This essay explores the archaeological insights into the processes of encounter between the Amerindian peoples of the Caribbean region and the first permanent Europeans in the Americas and the responses of each to contact with the other. Archaeological research has informed our understanding of this seminal era in New World cultural development in important ways. It had also allowed the documentation of both the cultural and demographic disintegration of the Caribbean Indians and the formation of Euro-American culture.

Eliciting Contraband through Archaeology: Illicit Trade in Eighteenth-Century St. Augustine

The study of contraband (illicit trade) should offer a uniquely appropriate focus for the multi-evidentiary strengths of historical archaeology, in that it demands the articulation of largely undocumented economic activity (reflected materially in archaeological remains) with legal mandates and formal regulations about commerce. Problematic issues in realizing this are presented by the recognition of contraband goods and activities in the archaeological record and by the difficulties in articulating archaeologically derived periodicity with text-based periodicity of contraband in a given community. With those concerns in mind, the analysis of excavated data from six 18th-century households of St. Augustine is described here with extensive historical documentation of contraband activity in Spanish Florida and the Spanish Americas in general to explore the notion that historical archaeological integration of data about contraband can reveal useful information not knowable from either source alone. Results suggest that at a community-wide scale of analysis, the archaeological data essentially reify and add detail to the already existing documentary accounts of contraband trade. A household scale of analysis and comparison reveals how people with specific economic, occupational, religious, ethnic, and social identities engaged in contraband as a strategy in ways that were not previously known. This helps define the contours of economic possibility and creates a more nuanced understanding of the structure, opportunity, and dynamics of economic choice and agency within a community.