Stephen W. Silliman

Culture Contact or Colonialism? Challenges in the Archaeology of Native North America

What has frequently been termed “contact-period“ archaeology has assumed a prominent role in North American archaeology in the last two decades. This article examines the conceptual foundation of archaeological “culture contact” studies by sharpening the terminological and interpretive distinction between “contact” and “colonialism.” The conflation of these two terms, and thereby realms of historical experience, has proven detrimental to archaeologists’ attempts to understand indigenous and colonial histories. In light of this predicament, the article tackles three problems with treating colonialism as culture contact: (1) emphasizing short-term encounters rather than long-term entanglements, which ignores the process and heterogeneous forms of colonialism and the multifaceted ways that indigenous people experienced them; (2) down-playing the severity of interaction and the radically different levels of political power, which does little to reveal how Native people negotiated complex social terrain but does much to distance “contact” studies from what should be a related research focus in the archaeology of African enslavement and diaspora; and (3) privileging predefined cultural traits over creative or creolized cultural products, which loses sight of the ways that social agents lived their daily lives and that material culture can reveal, as much as hide, the subtleties of cultural change and continuity.

Agency, Practical Politics and the Archaeology of Culture Contact

I use this paper to intersect the trajectory of the agency concept in archaeology. On a theoretical front, I summarize briefly the state of ‘agency’ in archaeology and its deployment in theories of practice. This opens a space to introduce the concepts of practical politics and doxa, and I illustrate their effectiveness in addressing issues of social relations, power, identity and daily practice. I then pinpoint their particular applicability to colonial and culture-contact studies. On an empirical front, I turn the lenses of doxa and practical politics to a case study in nineteenth-century northern California. My focus is on Native American involvement in the Rancho Petaluma and the continuity of lithic practices in this secular colonial setting. I conclude that although lithic practices display a material continuity in technology, they are in fact part of a social change surrounding the politics of practice.

Indigenous traces in colonial spaces Archaeologies of ambiguity, origin, and practice

This article reconsiders how archaeologists find Indigenous people, particularly Native Americans, in past colonial communities. Significant progress has been made in studying indigenous living areas associated with colonial communities but not in recovering evidence for (or even remembering) Native people laboring in distinctly colonial spaces. I propose that the reason for the lag lies in an incomplete perspective on material culture and space that denies their polyvalent and ambiguous, yet informative and manifestly real, nature. A new perspective can be forged with greater use of social theory pertaining to practice, space, and labor. Reconceptualizing material culture and space in colonial contexts requires that archaeologists acknowledge the role of labor relations in structuring material and spatial practices and not conflate origins of artifacts and spaces with other possible social meanings derived from practice. This article examines these two dimensions with three North American cases from New England, Florida, and California.

A requiem for hybridity? The problem with Frankensteins, purées, and mules

Hybridity as an interpretive construct in the archaeology of colonialism has encountered many pitfalls, due largely to the way it has been set adrift from clear theoretical anchors and has been applied inconsistently to things, practices, processes, and even people. One of the telltale signs of its problematic nature is the ease with which archaeologists claim to identify the origin and existence of hybridity but the difficulty faced if asked when and how such hybridity actually ends, if it does. In that context, this paper offers a potential requiem for hybridity. If we need not go that far, archaeologists at least need to rein in the “Frankenstein” version of hybridity that permeates archaeology and occludes its variable and problematic origins, acknowledge the dangers of accentuating or even celebrating “purées,” and beware of the creation of cultural “mules” in analytical classifications and interpretations.

The Complexities of Consumption: Eastern Pequot Cultural Economics in Eighteenth-Century New England

Colonialism shaped economic interactions between Native Americans and settlers, and placed considerable constraints on indigenous people, but Native Americans creatively negotiated these material, economic conditions in practical and cultural ways in their daily lives. By the mid-18th century, Native Americans in New England were deeply entrenched in colonial and market economies as farmhands, domestic workers, whalers, soldiers, craft producers, store customers, and consumers. The Eastern Pequot community of southeastern Connecticut serves as an example which is examined by combining data from three years of excavation of two 18th-century reservation households and the transcribed store ledgers of a local merchant from the middle of that century. Using these dual information sources that sometimes converge and other times relate to different scales or materialities, the study permits a look at the long-term processes and negotiations of colonial market economies through the lens of consumption and cultural economics.

Obsidian Studies and the Archaeology of 19th-Century California

Abstract Obsidian studies play an integral part in archaeology around the world, particularly in the Americas, but few archaeologists have employed obsidian studies to understand Native American life at historical archaeological sites. Yet, obsidian sourcing and hydration analysis can provide critical insights into site chronology and use, lithic recycling, and procurement and trade at contact and colonial sites. Obsidian geochemical sourcing and hydration analyses of a 19th-century rancho site in northern California have revealed new information on Native Americans who labored there in the second quarter of the 19th century. The obsidian data indicate a significant amount of lithic manufacture and use, a change in obsidian procurement in the 1800s, and an unprecedented number of obsidian sources represented on-site. The implications for general obsidian studies, as well as for regional archaeological issues, concern the problems with popular sourcing methods in northern California and the need to revisit current understandings of the first micron of hydration rim development.

The Value and Diversity of Indigenous Archaeology: A Response to McGhee

Robert McGhee (2008) recently argued against the validity and viability of Indigenous archaeology based on claims that untenable “Aboriginalism” supports the entire enterprise. However, he mischaracterizes and simplifies Indigenous archaeology, despite the wealth of literature suggesting that such community approaches have had and will continue to have great value for method, theory, rigorous interpretation, and political value in archaeology.

Households, Time, and Practice: A Reply to Vitelli

Giovanna Vitelli (this volume) offers interesting perspectives on the archaeological study of Indigenous people in colonial contexts. She does so through a commentary on my recently published (Silliman 2009) article in which I outlined a perspective on practice and memory that has helped me interpret the ways that Indigenous communities can persist between the dichotomies of change and continuity. I offer here some clarifications and engagements with her comments.

SHELLFISH COLLECTION AND COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NATIVE NEW ENGLAND

North America have diversified and intensified over the last two decades, ranging across numerous regions, periods, datasets, and theoretical perspectives. Central to many of these studies has been an attempt to understand the nature of culture change and continuity within indigenous groups when they encountered, resisted, persisted within, and suffered under various colonial fronts. Moving beyond the simplified and problematic frameworks of “acculturation” that structured many interpretations from the 1950s to the late 1980s has led to new questions about how indigenous people and communities negotiated colonial and settler worlds, and their identities and places therein (Ferris 2009; Jordan 2008, 2009; Liebmann 2012; Lightfoot et al. 1998; Loren 2008; Panich 2013; Silliman 2005, 2009, 2012). Many of these have shifted focus from things to the practices that incorporated those things. SHELLFISH COLLECTION AND COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NATIVE NEW ENGLAND

Archaeologies of colonialism and enslavement in Spanish, Portuguese and French America

Archaeologies of ‘modern world’ colonialism and enslavement are booming research topics. Although studies of the North American experience have tended to dominate the literature, the last decade has seen the proliferation of numerous archaeological studies of colonialism in Mesoamerica, the Caribbean, Central America and South America, which widen the scope. Similarly, the dominance of Anglophone writers has reduced, with more perspectives provided by Spanishand Portuguese-speaking archaeologists from across the diverse regions and national contexts south of the US border. The three books reviewed here are part of that trend. In addition, these volumes, with different levels of emphasis, engage with some of the hottest topics in current archaeologies of colonialism and