Making Historical Archaeology Postcolonial

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Making Historical Archaeology Postcolonial
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Historical Archaeology and the Study of
Colonialism

• What can archaeology contribute to historical
  knowledge?
• How can we study the past while keeping in mind
  that we cannot judge the actions of historical
  peoples based on our own values and technology?

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Back to definitions of historical archaeology

• Evidence of encounters a study of the spread of
  European societies worldwide beginning in the
  15th century impacts on native peoples.
• Notion of product of European expansion changes
  brought about through the Columbian exchange

James Deetz
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• Deetz
• Advocated comparative, international perspective,
  e.g., English in Chesapeake vs. English in South
  Africa
• Notion of rehearsals
• Distinction between impact contact
• Historical archaeology deals with the unintended,
  subconscious, the world-view or mindset
• Documents material culture are unintentionally
  informative
• Interested in issues of scale

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General Themes

• Impetus for global expansion/reason for
  colonization
• Types or styles of colonialism
• Notion of rehearsals
• Characteristics of early colonies/sites
• housing
• fortification defense
• material culture
• diet
• Impact on indigenous populations two-way
  process of transculturation

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Kathleen Deagan University of Florida

• Identified food as something archaeologists can
  learn about (with help from biological sciences)
• Claims that archaeology is democratic,
  eliminating the bias of written records,
  (although the archaeological record, too, is
  biased)
• - Unique contribution of historical archaeology
• understanding colonization, impacts, results
• understanding the physical world of the past
• understanding of health nutrition
• documentation of disenfranchised groups illegal
  or illicit behaviour (domination resistance,
  smuggling, etc.)

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How should we interpret evidence of colonialism?
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Colonial Encounters?

• Gil Stein argues that we should jettison the
  terms colonialism and colonial studies as they
  carry too many implied meanings about specific
  power relations among interacting groups.
• He suggests we should instead use the less
  loaded term colonial encounters
• The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters (1995)

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An archaeology of comparative colonialism?

• We need to think of the early modern world as a
  vast scene of interaction, not merely a stage for
  the transference of Old World cultures to a New
  World
• We need to realize that what occurred was a
  sudden harsh encounter between several Old
  Worlds that transformed integrated them into a
  single New World

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Models of Colonialism

• Based on a general sequence of seafaring,
  conquering, planting
• Cultural geographers and others propose that
  there are stages as well as styles of colonialism

Martin Frobishers first voyage, 1576
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Stages of Colonization (1-3)

• Exploration
• reconnaissance, search for basic information,
  discovery of possibilities
• Gathering
• Exploitation of obvious coastal resources, such
  as fish, ship timbers, salt, by extension of
  routine activities
• Barter
• Commercial opportunism, trade with local
  populations for exotic goods, testing for further
  development

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Stages of Colonization (4-6)

• Plunder
• Brigandage, military opportunism, forays into the
  interior, seizing whatever may have value to
  European markets
• Outpost
• Fixing of a point of commercial exchange
  commitment to oversears investment assignment
  of personnel to overseas residence
• Imperial imposition
• Assertion of formal claim power over
  territories assignment of a governor, soldiers,
  missionaries, and other agents of European state
  society

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Stages of Colonization (5-6)

• Implantation
• Transfer of Europeans as permanent settlers and
  initiation of self-sustaining economy
• Imperial colony
• Logical development from imperial imposition and
  implantation involves the transfer of the full
  complex of institutions, a selected transplant of
  European culture tending toward expansion and
  divergence from the home county

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Postcolonial studies

• Edward Said 1978 Orientalism
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 1985 Subaltern
  Studies
• Homi Bhahba 1994 The Location of Culture
• Dipesh Chakrabarty 1992 Postcoloniality and the
  Artifice of History

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Colonialism Peter Pels Leiden University
Think of colonialism in three ways as the
universal, evolutionary process of modernization
as a particular strategy or experiment in
domination and exploitation and as the
unfinished business of struggle and
negation (Pels 1997164) Annual Review of
Anthropology 26
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Colonialism Chris Gosden University of Oxford
Colonialism is a particular grip that material
culture gets on the bodies and minds of people,
moving them across space and attracting them to
new values... (Gosden 2004 3) Archaeology and
Colonialism
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Colonialism Stephen Silliman University of
Massachusetts, Boston
Colonialism in the modern world, although
sharing elements with other colonial times,
operated on fixed orders of racial and cultural
difference and resulted from the trajectories of
geographic expansion, mercantilism, and
capitalism (Silliman 200558) American
Antiquity 70
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Sarah "Saartjie" Baartman (?1790 1815)
Sarah Baartman was a slave of Dutch farmers near
Cape Town. The Governor General of the Cape, Lord
Caledon, gave permission for her to be
transported to England for exhibition. She left
for London in 1810, and died in Paris in 1815.
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Mixed marriages in colonial Mexico
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The Roman Catholic Church went to great lengths
to categorize intermixed races for marital and
baptism purposes
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People Show 1928
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Re-Thinking Colonial Relations
Silliman stresses the need to explore labour
relations between coloniser and colonised in
Spanish and Mexican California Labour practices
were used to exploit natives on the ranchos
large tracts of land used for cattle
raising Native Californians integrated into the
ranches through five procedures legislation,
indebtedness capture by force, military alliance,
and social incorporation (Silliman
200835)
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Old Lamboo Cattle Station, Kimberley, Australia

• In 19th century Aboriginals moves there for a
  variety of reasons
• Preference for European goods
• A desire to live in proximity to Europeans for
  protection from other Europeans
• To live near kinsmen
• For the economic ability to trade European goods
  with peoples in the Bush
• BUT they kept the station at the station and
  the bush in the bush separating colonial
  landscape from their native landscape.
• While working at station they wore European style
  clothing but when they left for the bush they
  turned in their uniforms and embraced a bush
  identity
• Rodney Harrison 2004

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The archaeology of colonial encounters some
emerging themes

• The problematic nature of the term colonization
  and its intellectual baggage
• we need more non-Western and pre-capitalist
  examplesand need to look at colonies, indigenous
  host communities, and homelands
• The myth of the colonizer-colonized dichotomy
• complex interactions are usually oversimplified
  giving colonisers power
• Comparisons with the Classical World and
  European expansion post 1500 are problematic
• other types of interactions existed

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The archaeology of colonial encounters some
emerging themes

• Colonial Encounters engender the development of
  new forms of cultural identity
• hydridization is a dynamic process through which
  new identities are created
• Variation in the colonial programmes of
  colonizing polities
• depends on homeland ideologies, but also on what
  results from negotiated outcome of interactions
  with indigenous peoples
• The need to focus on variation in modes of
  interaction, rather than on colonial types
• not just a matter of pigeon-holing which
  flattens out interpretation

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The archaeology of colonial encounters some
emerging themes

• The non-universality of world-systems theory.
• it can be mechanistic, reductionist, and deny
  local agency
• Colonial interactions change over time
• life is never static
• The importance of local agency
• rejecting the determining role of colonisers and
  colonialism allows indigenous peoples to come
  into view