Robert Paynter

Historical Archaeology and the Post-Columbian World of North America

Historical archaeology, with its interest in material culture and its use of the broader perspectives of anthropology and anthropological archaeology, has contributed to a distinctive understanding of the North American experience. Historical archaeologists have, to varying degrees, investigated the material traces of class, race, gender, and state formation. These studies provide an understanding of the origin of many of the social practices that undergird modern culture, a necessary, though neglected, case in a unified anthropological archaeologys goal of writing innovative world histories.

Historical and Anthropological Archaeology: Forging Alliances

Historical and anthropological archaeology have had a somewhat disjointed relationship. 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.

Representing colonizers: An archaeology of creolization, ethnogenesis, and indigenous material culture among the Haida

Rather than reduce colonial encounters to a universal creolization process, creolization is examined as conflict between various colonial powers and indigenous groups with distinct social and resource organizations. The concept of ethnogenesis focuses analysis of creolization by probing colonial power relations and approaching material culture as the active negotiation of colonization and colonial inequality. The subject of analysis is indigenous objects that depict European colonizers; such material culture should provide a sensitive insight into indigenous perceptions of colonization and illuminate the relations between various colonizers and indigenous peoples throughout the world. This examination of material culture from the Haida of the Pacific Northwest demonstrates how one indigenous group developed distinctive strategies to negotiate colonial power relations.

Surplus Flow between Frontiers and Homelands

Publisher Summary Frontiers are best understood as sets of relations. This chapter highlights the frontier–homeland relations in stratified societies. It presents descriptive and analytic models along with a case study demonstrating the usefulness of these perspectives. The models are designed to elucidate three characteristics of frontiers in stratified societies, namely, their large spatial scale, the systemic quality of interactions, and the role of the production and distribution of social surplus. The case study is drawn from historical-period New England. In addition to adaptations to local ecological situations, cultural variability is also a function of interactions over large areas. Though diffusion is almost synonymous with large-scale interactions in the anthropological literature, recent work makes it clear that a number of other relations have significant spatial dimensions. Frontiers involve large-scale spatial relations and the behavior on frontiers has been addressed from different theoretical positions. A frontier implies at least three cultural forms: (1) the frontier, (2) the homeland, and (3) the aboriginal culture impacted by the expanding homeland culture. Different approaches to spatial process account for these differences in a number of ways.

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Material World of African-Americans in Great Barrington, Massachusetts

Objects are related to social relations, ideologies and human beings in intricate and often contradictory ways. Teasing out these interconnections in the past and the present should be the task of archaeology. However, while focusing on the past, archaeologists often forget that objects are also signs within symbolic systems today. Historical archaeology’s focus on African-American related objects has variously misidentified them, ignored them, identified them as products of an exotic culture, as markers of social distinctiveness, and as components in anti-racist arguments. These tacks are products of contemporary political and ideological struggles, and the objects and histories provide groundings for the next round of these debates.

Epilogue: Class analysis and historical archaeology

Class analysis draws on the theoretical traditions of Marx and Weber to understand the densely structured, dynamic social relations of the post-Columbian world. Class analyses involves theoretical and empirical studies of class process, class structure, and class formation. The papers in this volume consider these various aspects of class analysis, particularly illuminating the intersections of race, class and gender, and the ongoing formation of the United States middle class.