Making Historical Archaeology Postcolonial

• 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?

Historical Archaeology and the Study of Colonialism

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

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

General Themes

Impetus for global expansion/reason for colonizationTypes or styles of colonialismNotion of rehearsalsCharacteristics of early colonies/sites

housingfortification & defensematerial culturediet

Impact on indigenous populations & two-way process of transculturation

- IIdentified 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.)

Kathleen DeaganUniversity of Florida

How should we interpret evidence of colonialism?

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)

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

Models of ColonialismModels 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 Frobisher’sfirst voyage, 1576

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

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

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

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

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 1997:164) Annual Review of Anthropology 26

‘ 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

Colonialism

Chris Gosden University of Oxford

‘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 2005:58) American Antiquity 70

Colonialism

Stephen Silliman University of Massachusetts, Boston

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.

Mixed marriages in colonial Mexico

The Roman Catholic Church went to great lengths to categorize intermixed races for marital and baptism purposes

‘People Show’ 1928

Re-Thinking Colonial Relations

Silliman stresses the need to explore labour relations between coloniser and colonised in Spanish and Mexican CaliforniaLabour 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 2008:35)

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

The archaeology of colonial encounters: The archaeology of colonial encounters: some emerging themes some emerging themes

• The problematic nature of the term “colonization” and its intellectual baggage we need more non-Western and pre-capitalist examples…and need to look at colonies, indigenous host communities, and homelands

• The myth of the colonizer-colonized dichotomycomplex interactions are usually oversimplified giving colonisers power

• Comparisons with the Classical World and European expansion post 1500 are problematicother types of interactions existed

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 politiesdepends 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

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 agencyrejecting the determining role of colonisers and colonialism allows indigenous peoples to come into view