Another #GloH2019 post is up! This is another unessay, this time by one of our TAs during the Institute for Field Research session. Nina is examining Gallina artistry on rock art, murals, and ceramics for her MA and wrote us an awesome folk song about her research and Gallina archaeology in general. Listen and share!
I know you’ve been waiting! Here’s another #GLoH2019 Institute for Field Research (IFR) student (Henry Zeiwert Kornfeld) blog post about the archaeology we’re working on.
“In the impressive terrain, there is a sense that the history of the place is almost palpably infused in the landscape. And it is hardly surprising to note that people have left a considerable mark. It is not obvious to the casual observer, but looking out at the landscape, it is possible to see these often-subtle impressions. A slight depression in the earth, a scatter of chipped stone, a change in soil color. The land is a witness, yet it is often difficult to obtain and to interpret this testimony of life in the past.”
https://glohre.wordpress.com/2019/08/01/gallina-the-culture-hidden-in-the-hills/
New photo blog by one of #GLoH2019 Institute for Field Research (IFR) students is up. This one about preparing indigenous (Dine and Zuni) foods. We all ate these and they turned out really well.
“To make the bread, I needed juniper ash. So, I collected branches of juniper to ash for the Navajo blue bread. I used a Coleman outdoor grill powered by propane and a metal bowl covered in foil to collect the ashes.”
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of grunge, it was the age of Robin Hood ballads; it was the epoch of flannel, it was the epoch of tight rolled jeans; it was the season of techno, it was the season of boy-band pop; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us . . .
Yep. It was the early ’90s. And I was in high school.
What this meant for me was a whole lot of awkwardness; some purposely bad hair (read: mullet) as a reaction to small-town high school snobbery; punk, grunge, and techno music; and some incredibly bad emotive poetry. Oh…and Latin. And Dungeons and Dragons. And cross-country running. And folk wrestling (i.e. collegiate). And Tae Kwon Do. And skateboarding. And street skating. And flannel. And Chuck Ts. And massively over-sized overalls. Really, just pure nerdery and hormones and more awkwardness.
And angst. Holy crow, the angst.
Oh, man. It was horrible.
The 1990s were actually a pretty incredible time, though. Music had diverged in two important ways that created somewhat overlapping, but dramatically different constituents. Grunge music was as a wake-up call to pop-radio consumers. Techno, trance, house, and drum and bass music flooded the warehouses, farm fields, and clubs in the Midwest along with what, at that time, was a very forward-thinking, optimistic social movement packaged within rave culture.
So, with my eyes opening to capitalism and social repression through grunge and punk and my heart opening to the promise of Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones that the rave community was enthralled by, I took my first high school career placement test on a fancy, dirty white computer that generally just ran Oregon Trail and Scorched Earth.
This test was exciting. I pictured a pat on my back by our counselor as the computer screen was flashing that I was a perfect fit as either an archaeologist or a writer. Needless to say, it was a total shock to me when the first career fit was proctologist.
Okay, so it didn’t actually say “you should be a proctologist,” but that was the first option in the program’s list of what I would be good at. Now, I don’t want to upset any proctologists. Honestly, you all are awesome and deserve far more credit than you can possibly ever receive, but as a 16-year-old romantic . . . well, let’s just say there was a cognitive disconnect.
Clearly, this test is faulty. I should take it again, right? Right. This second time will surely clear things up. Wait…what…bus driver? What the he–? This is about where my counselor walked over and patted me on the back. I got up and slouched out of the office, trying not to trip over my untied Chucks or the huge hem of my baggy overalls. I wrapped my flannel around me like a blanket and set about trying to understand how things could have gone so horribly wrong. Who was I supposed to be?
I still have no idea how those tests work. I’m guessing they were along the lines of an early Buzzfeed quiz. But there I was, apparently destined to be the first operator of a mobile proctology clinic. My solution to this was simple. Flee.
I promptly asked my mom if I could go to a high school archaeology field school. Note that I didn’t choose a writing camp. I can only imagine that, somewhere deep down, a part of me already recognized that lines like, “A tin puppet prepares his twin sorrows / he’ll force nature’s sign” were best forgotten with the other garbage in Al Capone’s vault.
So, off to archaeology camp I went, where I immediately learned far more about historic blue glass, rusted pieces of historic metal, and old pieces of wood than a high schooler who yearned for images of Western skies at dusk could handle. I was done. And not in any good way. Archaeology was horrible. And boring. Definitely. Not. The Bomb.
So, I trudged through the last bit of high school. Graduated and ended up chasing down the writing dream. I put together two mostly horrible novels that I still tell myself I might salvage one-day, a slew of trite and tripe short stories, and more bad poetry than an entire decade of an Introduction to Poetry class could possibly create. I wasn’t a total failure. I did have a couple of poems published and, for a while, there were some bites on my first novel—but I spent more time at the bar than the typewriter, and I never really had my heart in the effort of it. Writing was hard. Drinking was not.
The years blew by. Weird experiences and amazing people (and vice versa) racked up like points in a particularly great pinball game. And before I knew it, I’d put the fiction writing on hold, packed up my heart, said good bye to those amazing people, and moved out to the great American desert. In Albuquerque, after a year of racking up some more points on that odd pinball machine, I landed at the University of New Mexico. There, I started taking anthropology classes and eventually took an Introduction to Archaeology class taught by Dr. Patricia Crown.
School was always pretty easy for me. Minimal effort, maximum return. Then I took Patty’s class. The first test in that 100-level class was a brick to the face. Somehow, I rallied, buckled down, and poured myself into my studies in a way I never really had before. I had to fight against a lifetime of education that had taught me that “smart” should mean “gets it right away” and not “worked at it till it was learned.” But, somehow, I did it, and came out of that class with the first A I’d ever really been proud of. There would be many more that I would fully earn, but that was the first. During that semester, I finally put my hand to the plow, and I’ve been tilling ever since.
Now, there are some other things we could talk about, but I’m getting short on time and am way over the word limit (as always). So, for now, we’ll summarize and discuss.
Life handed me a bus-driving proctologist. I said no way to archaeology. I tried to shoot the moon for writing, but eventually found my way back to archaeology. There, I fell in love with humanity’s detritus. And even more importantly, I fell in love with the sense of humanity you can get from studying the things we love.
Now I get tears in my eyes when I see my daughter’s favorite teddy bear slowly getting older from 6 years of intense love. I choke up when I hear my youngest tell me she’s worried about how damaged her favorite stuffed toy is and that she doesn’t want her friends to see it, but then she still finds her and snuggles with her at night. I do this because I know that as inanimate as these things are, they’re defining my daughters as much as my wife and I are. These things form the spaces within which my children grow, and learn, and become amazing. These things create the shape of who they are and will be as young women and will continue to create the spaces that shape them until they die. And I know that long after I’m gone, things of mine will remain that will preserve a portion of the shape of who I was. Our things are our stories and they are us. And this is exciting and comforting to me.
So…how I became an archaeologist is maybe not the most interesting tale, and it’s definitely not the culmination of a single-minded lifelong quest. Instead, I think it is more the chronicle of this long process of moving from making up stories to realizing that there was already a world littered with stories.
After writing this out, it now seems clear that how I became an archaeologist is also why I became an archaeologist: because I realized that archaeology is an honest way to uncover the story of the people I love. Archaeology holds the story of all of the people I’ve learned so much from. It holds the story of my wife and my children, my family and my friends. All of the incredible, and horrible, people I’ve met, along with millennia of incredible people I could not meet. Because archaeology, once we get past the dictionary definition, is not the study of things, it’s the study of the human narrative and of our humanity. It’s the study of our stories that form in and around our things.
Basically, dear reader, I became an archaeologist because I think you are pretty darn awesome. You and all of your things that make you, you. And I would really like to read that story.
A version of this essay originally appeared on Archaeology Southwest’s blog as one of many blogs about how archaeologists ended up working in our discipline: https://www.archaeologysouthwest.org/2015/10/12/how-bad-poetry-can-lead-to-a-career-in-archaeology/
This blog originally appeared on October 13th, 2016 on the ever excellent Archaeology Southwest blog. It was written within a series of blog posts about what the day to day work life of an archaeologist looks like.
In a recent Tea and Archaeology talk, I broke ranks with the typical “this is what I am going to talk about” intro and started with “this is how I got interested in the topics I am going to talk about.” I did this because I think how archaeologists and researchers first think of things is important—fundamentally important.
There are examples all over our field of people starting to research children in the archaeological record after they’ve had their own kids. Or, researchers become incredibly engaged with using the archaeological record to examine gender fluidity and queer histories. Frequently, although not necessarily, it is because their lives have been marked in some way by these topics. The main point: an archaeologist’s personal life intruding into their work is not bad.
Though some might consider this bias (and there are ways to minimize bias, including the rigorous peer review we always go through), these types of crosscutting interests actually make our work relevant in the present. They are also one of the things that keep us interested in our job. Most archaeologists love things, but as David Hurst Thomas famously said (now tattooed on my arm), “It’s not what you find, it’s what you find out.” Our interests help us move past the former and into the latter.
And so, in many ways, we drag the present into the past, just as often as we drag the past into the present. In its worst incarnation, the former can introduce bias into our research; in its best form, it helps create a research method (either scientific, historic, or humanistic) that is creative, exciting, and topical. Our concerns in the contemporary world are tested in some ways against the past, just as we use the past to critically examine the present. This is the regular dialogue of research that archaeologists have with themselves. Yet, other archaeologists, researchers, and the public only see half of it. The part that is published, the part that is scientifically or historically tested and examined. What is published is in some ways analogous to Plato’s cave. Our research can seem irrelevant to many people because it kind of seems as though we’re analyzing shadows on a wall.
So what are my bridges? My life outside of work involves a lot of long-distance running, and eventually I’ll start working on that archaeologically. My personal investment and interest in tattoos extends to the archaeological record as well. My dog Sancho—aging, deaf, going blind, and suddenly barking to no end at a blank spot on our fence—has led to an interest in canines in archaeology.
My wife Melissa has also fed my intellectual curiosity. She’s maintained a lifelong interest in animal welfare, held a career in that field, and spent many years engaged in animal behavioral analysis and positive reinforcement training. She spent time working for Dr. Patricia McConnell’s former company Dog’s Best Friend. She even beat me to the primary author research publication punch (see article here). She has since moved into a new focus on facilitating the reuse of material culture. This in many ways grew out of our mutual interest in the problems of consumption in contemporary life—upon which archaeology has heavily influenced my views.
We have two daughters who are incredibly inquisitive and raucous and rowdy and just smart. Watching them tackle the world around them and derive incredibly logical but factually ridiculous conclusions from their observations has instilled in me a fundamental interest in how we construct knowledge. I’m applying this in my other job with Leiden University. There I’m beginning a project that will deeply query how archaeological knowledge is constructed and what that means for our data—and by extension, for our understandings of how people purposely and accidentally express group membership, or cultural belonging.
As noted, I’ve talked before about how I gained some of my research interests. This history led to a scenic desert trip with a number of dead ends and an eventual arrival at a dissertation titled, Lost Voices Found: An Archaeology of Contentious Politics in the Greater Southwest, A.D. 1100–1450. The linked talk is mostly about that, but at an hour long, I understand if you aren’t able to watch it.
My elevator-speech version is that there are many hinge points, or transitional periods, in the historical and archaeological record. In archaeology, we’ve often talked about them as either products of environmental change, or inevitable products of social scaling (i.e., increases in population), and sometimes as social reactions to what has been termed “breakdowns of society.” I reanalyzed two case studies in the Greater Southwest, asking not how this happened or why this happened, but why the end result looked the way it did when so many other options were available. That, I think, is an important question that has been missed. And it led me to argue that the history of the Greater Southwest is filled with constant slides into hierarchy as social mechanisms restricting increases in inequality broke down, followed by sudden reactions as groups tore apart those hierarchical institutions and built new limiting mechanisms.
A lot of these interests also came out of an early passion for skateboarding on the street. Although you might see this as an innocent or—depending on your view of the ownership/tragedy of the commons—a criminal pastime, one of the underlying acts of skateboarding is a constant and physical performance aimed at reclaiming public space for the public. In fact, since its inception back in the early 1950s, skateboarding has been a political act. Fun, yes. Amazing to watch, yes. But political all the same. And it is an intensely, material political act. It uses human material culture to impact an environment we’ve built in order to contest restrictive control of space.
So, the theme of subversive actions aimed at questioning who is allowed privileges and rights in society has been with me for a very long time. Looking back, it seems pretty natural that I’d be addressing many of those issues by examining what many people have called transitional periods in the precolonial U.S Southwest from a perspective of understanding who controls space and understanding how that control of space (in this case religious architecture) was contested.
And now I need to get back to teaching my daughters how to skateboard.
Following the conclusion of excavation fieldwork for the Edge of Salado project that I ran in conjunction with Jeff Clark and Bill Doelle at Archaeology Southwest (and for which I am finalizing reports and some articles still), the tireless Mike Brack (from Desert Archaeology) and I went out and finished up some mapping odds and ends. This was back in October 2014. Mostly we were shooting in a few remnant features and then trying to get a UAV up on a site we had worked on but been unable to fly before because of the continuous high speed drafts coming out of the mountains. The second picture below is from us working on an Animas phase (A.D. 1150-1450) site in the Sulphur Springs valley. *Sidenote, when you see that AD 1450 date for sites in southern Arizona, read it as “probably at least to this period, but possibly later. Our end dates in that area aren’t that awesome and are built on relatively few absolute dates.*
This particular site, and many from this period, have large amounts of Roosevelt Red Ware (some have few RRW and lots of Chihuahuan Polychromes which indicates some important social processes of incorporation into a couple of different styles of leadership movements. You can read the third case study in my dissertation or wait for the upcoming articles if you want to know more), adobe walls (mostly eroded/melted) with cimiento (rocks embedded into the earth) footings, and often obsidian artifacts (although not always). Anyways, Mike and I were out visiting 5 sites and then stopping by an excavation at Desolation Ranch that was being conducted by the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society (AAHS). Mike was there to map and then I was going to help date a Classic period/Animas phase component at the site (FYI, Archaeology Southwest now owns and preserves most of this site thanks to a wonderful grant from the Smith family).
Again, this was the fall. Usually, in the southern American Southwest, you have little ground cover at this period. But there had been almost continuous rain for the previous month and the weeds were sort of shocked into a false spring. Blooming plants were everywhere, but because of the nature of what is attracted to disturbed soil in the southern American Southwest Mike and I were walking through fields of 4 to 7 foot tall Amaranth and Russian Thistle (tumbleweed). It was the tallest I’d seen weeds in this part of the SW. And it led to what would eventually be a long term allergic issue that had some unpleasant physical side effects for me. Anyways, long story short, I’ve been around Russian Thistle a lot, but usually only in concentrations were the plant is dead, blowing all over and piling up. Rarely when it is blooming in concentrated like this. My body kind of broke. When I got back to Tucson, I visited my primary care provider and they ran an allergy test and started to freak out about how high my counts were for Russian Thistle. I was apparently very close to going into anaphylactic shock from it. A week later. My buddy Will Russell, however, was lucky enough to actually go into anaphylaxis from plants while in the field. Ahh the joys of life.
Anyways, beyond that unpleasantness, the trip was pretty wonderful and included a desert box turtle that I saved from getting squished.
A Gila monster that Mike and I noticed.
A bear cub hanging out in a tree at night over where we were all camping with AAHS that Jesse Ballenger and a few others noticed. I subsequently moved inside. Mostly because I was offered a bed because I couldn’t breathe. And because I didn’t want to be on the ground when trash eating bears are nearby. The problem we have with bears eating trash in the US SW has always made me wonder if those stockades we see around Pueblo I sites in the northern Southwest aren’t actually an attempt to deal with the problems (i.e. bear attacks) of bear/human interactions in trash rich environments.
Some nice deer that didn’t want to drop on my head during the cold embrace of night.
And some excellent overgrowth, because of the late rains, of native squashes and Devil’s Claw (which the O’odham use for basket weaving).
All around a good work trip with some nice photos that I thought you all might enjoy.
Hey folks! Shane and I wrote something for the Conversation a couple of weeks ago for Indigenous People’s Day.
This was a difficult kid to give birth too. We originally had a ~6,000 word essay looking at how there is a massive split in the American Dream as an Ideal and the American Dream as Practice, with one oriented towards things like justice, equality, freedom and the other generally deploying things like murder, rape, theft, and general lies and self-ish behavior to allow one group of people to acquire the ideals of the Dream at the expense of another group of people. Over the course of edits with the editors at the Conversation (which was a great experience for the most part) and massive cuts and reorganizations aimed at getting this down to 1200 words a lot of these important discussions were lost. Or minimized. Which was unavoidable since this is really about 5 books worth of writing needed to cover the 5,000 years we focus on.
Some of the goals for the piece that we had that we believed were important, included indicating that Indigenous history can be fundamentally important for changing contemporary political conversations and another of which is that there is a group of Americans with an incredible history who are routinely ignored, treated as non-existent, or worse threatened when they dare to express outrage at their historic and contemporary treatment.
Some small things were changed during edits (The Conversation doesn’t use a track changes style of editing software) that I missed, as well, and didn’t notice until a 50th read through after publication. Small things with huge impacts, like the sentence “archaeologists have long known…” that used to read “Indigenous knowledge-holders and scholars as well as historians and archaeologists have long known . . . ” As a comrade, I thought the second was necessary, but there is some clear academic privilege of my own that allowed the edits to slip through unnoticed. Anyways, this isn’t totally what Shane and I were hoping for. I’m going to write a blog post about the whole process, I think, but I’m also not horrified by the outcome. We geared it towards non-academics outside of Indigenous communities to try and get them to think more deeply on what the American Dream is, how they were able to get to where they are at socially and economically through their own and their ancestor’s actions, and whether there are alternative ways of being and organizing that might help to deal with some of the rampant issues of cultural and economic inequality we are dealing with in our lives. I think that middle goal was lost during our many rewrites. Anyways, clearly I’m conflicted about this. I’ll post the Conversation piece below (which made the front page of the Global edition!). Underneath that, I’ll put our response to many of the critiques, or at least the ones posted as of this writing. If anyone wants to see an early version, let me know and I can post that also.
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When President Barack Obama created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the 2012 program that offered undocumented young people brought to the U.S. as children a path into society, for a moment the ideals of the American Dream seemed, at least for this group, real.
We call these kids (many of whom are now adults) “Dreamers,” because they are chasing the American Dream – a national aspiration for upward economic mobility built on physical mobility. Fulfilling your dreams often means following them wherever they may lead – even into another country.
The Trump administration’s decision to cancel DACA and build a U.S.-Mexico border wallhas endangered those dreams by subjecting 800,000 young people to deportation.
But the notion underlying both the DACA repeal and the wall – which is that “illegal” immigrants, most of them from Mexico, are stealing U.S. jobs and hurting society – reflects a profound misunderstanding of American history.
On Indigenous Peoples Day, it’s worth underscoring something that many archaeologists know: many of the values that inspire the American Dream – liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness – date back to well before the creation of the U.S.-Mexico border and before freedom-seeking Pilgrim immigrants arrived at Plymouth Rock in 1620. They originate with native North Americans.
The modern rendition of the American Dream can be traced back to 1774, when Virginia’s governor, John Murray, the fourth earl of Dunmore, wrote that even if Americans “attained Paradise, they would move on if they heard of a better place farther west.”
The actual term “American Dream” was popularized in 1931 by the businessman and historian James Truslow Adams. For him, its realization depended on not just being able to better oneself but also, through movement and human interaction, seeing your neighbors bettered as well.
The first peoples to come to the Americas also came in search of a better life. That happened 14,000 years ago in the last Ice Age when nomadic pioneers, ancestors to modern Native Americans and First Nations, arrived from the Asian continent and roamed freely throughout what now comprises Canada, the United States and Mexico. Chasing mammoth, ancient bison and the elephant-like Gomphothere, they moved constantly to secure the health of their communities.
A more recent example of the power of migration reappears about 5,000 years ago, when a large group of people from what is today central Mexico spread into the American Southwest and farther north, settling as far up as western North America. With them they brought corn, which now drives a significant part of the American economy, and a way of speaking that birthed over 30 of the 169 contemporary indigenous languages still spoken in the United States today.
This globalist world view was alive and well 700 years ago as well when people from what is now northern Arizona fled a decades-long drought and rising authoritarianism under religious leaders. Many migrated hundreds of miles south to southern Arizona, joining the Hohokam (ancestors to modern O’odham nations) who had long thrived in the harsh Sonoran desert by irrigating vast fields of agave, corn, squash, beans and cotton.
When the northern migrants arrived to this hot stretch of land around the then-nonexistent U.S.-Mexico frontier, Hohokam religious and political life was controlled by a handful of elites. Social mechanisms restricting the accumulation of power by individuals had slowly broken down.
For decades after their arrival, migrants and locals interacted. From that exchange, a Hohokam cultural revolution grew. Together, the two communities created a commoners’ religious social movement that archaeologists call Salado, which featured a feasting practice that invited all village members to participate.
As ever more communities adopted this equitable tradition, political power – which at the time was embedded in religious power – became more equally spread through society. Elites lost their control and, eventually, abandoned their temples.
The Hohokam tale unearths another vaunted American ideal that originates in indigenous history: equality. Long before it was codified in the Declaration of Independence, equality was enacted through the building of large mounds.
Massive earthen structures like these are often acts of highly hierarchical societies – think of the pyramids of the ancient Egyptians, constructed by masses of laborers as the final resting place of powerful pharaohs, or those of the rigid, empire-building Aztecs.
But great power isn’t always top-down. Poverty Point, in the lower Mississippi River Valley of what’s now Louisiana, is a good example. This massive site, which consists of five mounds, six concentric semi-elliptical ridges and a central plaza, was built some 4,000 years ago by hunter-fisher-gatherers with little entrenched hierarchy.
Originally, archaeologists believed that such societies without the inequality and authoritarianism that defined the ancient Egyptian, Roman, and Aztec empires could not have constructed something so significant – and, if so, only over decades or centuries.
But excavations in the last 20 years have revealed that large sections of Poverty Point were actually constructed in only a few months. These Native Americans organized in groups to undertake massive projects as a communal cooperative, leaving a built legacy of equality across America’s landscape.
The Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, offer a more modern example of such consensus-based decision-making practices.
These peoples – who’ve lived on both sides of the St. Lawrence river in modern-day Ontario and the U.S. Great Lakes states for hundreds, if not thousands, of years – built their society on collective labor arrangements.
They ostracized people who exhibited “selfish” behavior, and women and men often worked together in large groups. Everyone lived together in communal longhouses. Power was also shifted constantly to prevent hierarchy from forming, and decisions were made by coalitions of kin groups and communities. Many of these participatory political practices continue to this day.
The Haudenosaunee sided with the British during the 1776 American Revolution and were largely driven off their land after the war. Like many native populations, the Haudenosaunee Dream turned into a nightmare of invasion, plague and genocide as European migrants pursued their American Dream that excluded others.
The long indigenous history of rejecting authoritarianism continues today, including the 2016 battle for environmental justice at Standing Rock, South Dakota.
There, a resistance movement coalesced around a horizontally organized youth group that rejected the planned Dakota Access oil pipeline.
The movement centered on an environmental cause in part because nature is sacred to the Lakota (and many other indigenous communities), but also because communities of color often bear the brunt of economic and urban development decisions. This was the indigenous fight against repression and for the American Dream, gone 21st century.
Anthropologists and historians haven’t always recognized the quintessentially Native American ideals present in the American Dream.
In the early 19th century, the prominent social philosopher Lewis Henry Morgan called the Native Americans he studied “savages.” And for centuries, America’s native peoples have seen their cultural heritage attributed to seemingly everyone but their ancestors – even to an invented “lost” white race.
America’s indigenous past was not romantic. There were petty disputes, bloody intergroup conflicts and slavery (namely along the Northwest Coast and American Southeast).
But the ideals of freedom and equality – and the right that Americans can move across this vast continent to seek it out – survive through the millennia. Societies based on those values have prospered here.
So the next time a politician invokes American values to promote a policy of closed bordersor selfish individualism, remember who originally espoused the American Dream – and first sought to live it, too.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here.
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Shane and my comments to critiques:
First off, we want to thank everyone for their comments and we’re happy this has started a conversation. We, of course, appreciate those who understood and agreed with our argument, but we also value the discourse that has arisen from those who do not agree with us. There are a number of different critiques, so we’ll sort of break each down briefly. Some, we realize, are supposed to be insults, but are actual high praise when you deconstruct what they mean. For instance, one of the commenters clearly meant to insult us by calling this a typical academic argument (many academics would disagree with our statements, by the way). But since most academic arguments are built on rigorous empirical and historical analysis, we appreciate the complement. #backhandedcomplimentsarecomplimentstoo
Response: The point of the article is to demonstrate that liberal globalism (ie freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and equality regardless of where you are from) is not uniquely an invention of the US, nor of “Western” society, but that similar ideas existed in the Americas prior to arrival of Europeans. On top of that, the American Dream that emerged out of the “Western” tradition of liberalism (and in the US, liberalism is fundamentally embedded within both the Democratic and Republican parties) was more likely to be put in to practice at the expense of another group of people (i.e. freedom, liberty, and equality for some).
Response: This, of course, has nothing to do with the point of the article and doesn’t change the fact that the Dakota Access Pipeline emerged from the actions of a horizontally organized youth group. But, yes, many people were donating supplies to the protestors. There is no evidence of a conspiracy to fund protestors if that is what is being implied.
Response: This, of course, has nothing to do with the discussion in the article. However, this is a particularly common response that is problematic because it is frequently used to justify non-Indigenous decisions that negatively impact Indigenous groups. Folks who argue this also often argue that history is apolitical, etc. It is also purposely obtuse and pedantic to say that the only Indigenous people in the world have to be from where homo sapiens first evolved. This type of comment is also often used to justify social violence on Indigenous communities by governments, and sadly, academic researchers. So yes, there are many Indigenous groups in the Americas.
Response: This is neither true within contemporary tribal communities, nor is it correct in archaeological or historic data. One significant component that should be addressed is that, as with many groups, identity is a shifting, intersecting, scalar issue. For many Indigenous members of the US and Canada, identity is not often thought of as tribe first, for instance, if you talk to a Hopi and ask them who they are, they will likely first say clan. If pressed further, or in different social and spatial contexts, they may then say their village, then their mesa, then Hopi. If you ask them who they are while at a meeting together in Chicago, they’ll likely just say Hopi. It’s the same in non-Indigenous cultures. Lewis is originally from Wisconsin, lived in the SW for 15 years, and is now in the Netherlands. When people in Europe ask him who he is, he usually says he’s from the US. When someone from the US asks him who he is, he usually says he’s from the American Southwest. When another archaeologist asks him who he is, he says he’s a Southwestern archaeologist. When his daughters ask him who he is, he says, “Dadda.” There is always, and has always been, group membership. But how we define that shifts within cultural contexts.
Response: We definitely are. And thank you for pointing that out. Sadly, there was not enough space to incorporate all of the relevant groups within this discussion. But those groups, coastal California groups, groups in the Arctic, and Caribbean groups would definitely fit well within this discussion.
Response: First, there is no human prehistory, at least not as long as we have archaeological evidence for human activity. As for sanitizing history, if what you mean is oversimplified, then yes, it was hard to incorporate the infinite levels of detail necessary to do justice to multiple different regions and 14,000 years of history. If you do mean sanitized, I’m not sure how discussing revolutions, violence, conflict, and slavery amongst Indigenous groups in the Americas is sanitized. Could we have focused on the rise of inequality and the violence surrounding that instead of on ways that groups enacted equitable practices? Yes, but that would be a different article. One that has been frequently written. Do we think our argument is damaged by incorporating the “dirtiness” of history? No. Not at all. Again, this was a simplification to get 14,000 years of history into 1200 words.
Response: We have a number of responses to this (in fact, we could write a book on it and it’s possible one of us is). We’ll break them apart briefly here:
This isn’t something we discuss in the article, and if non-state groups in the Americas were as violent as state groups in the contemporary world (or that invaded the Americas), this wouldn’t change the nature of our argument, either. People are incredibly complicated and can exhibit dualities. As we note in the article, violence existed prior to the arrival of Europeans, but that doesn’t change general trends in society (i.e. more concerned with limiting the ability of individuals to control other people versus celebrating it).
This is also an old critique and first was popularized in “Western” thought with a guy named Hobbes. Hobbes later had a cartoon stuffed tiger named after him, but that doesn’t change the fact that his argument, in his book Leviathan, was that people in non-state societies lived in “continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, [was] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” His argument is fundamentally situated within the Enlightenment’s views of “the state” as the supreme apex of civilization. It is also wrong. In archaeology we often study how people respond in contexts of perpetual fear of violence. It leaves very distinct signatures in how people build, in where they build, it what artifacts they make. Anyways, it’s categorically not true (neither is the extreme inverse). Hobbes argument is problematic on a number of levels, though.
1) Violence is often used to limit the ability of individuals and/or groups to control others. So, if freedom and equity are some of the founding principles of your society, then sometimes violence occurs to limit those trying to take it away. We see this regularly in the Americas prior to the arrival of Columbus. This sort of violence decreases dramatically within states, because violence becomes regulated. Only state sponsored acts can occur (i.e. police, military, etc.). Anything happening outside of those regulations will be punished.
2) There are mixed results from studies looking at the level of the advent of states. The first critiques of the myth of the Noble Savage (which was popularized in French literature and philosophy in the 1600s and 1700s) that were rolled out empirically in archaeology in the 1990s successfully demonstrated that American Indigenous individuals and groups can be as violent as state level societies on a per capita level, often more so. Again this is per capita, not total numbers. The most popular book to come out of the champions of this view was written by Larry Keeley (although there are many others). And he was right. He was also wrong on a lot of things. I’m not sure that 1 out of 10 (1 person = 10% per capita) dying in a raid is more violent than 3 to 3.7% of the worldwide population that died during World War 2 (70-85 million), but that is the gist of their argument. Fundamentally, it was pushed to stop dehumanizing past peoples and reducing horrible instances of fear and brutality to “ritual” or “ineffective” combat/warfare. That’s besides the point, though, what is the point is that many of these researchers who push the idea that past warfare was more damaging, per capita, than modern warfare focus on warfare instead of more commonly on violence. While Keeley’s actual results are still contested (there is a new paper out in Current Anthropology that reiterates some of my points here and has been written up for the public in Science News on October 20th), it is clear that the total per capita fatalies decreased with the advent of states (this may have happened anyways without states and may be a natural expression of numeric chances). But, again, this argument is built specifically on warfare and doesn’t include dramatic increases in other types of person on person violence. Things like domestic violence (which we know increased under state political organizations), state sanctioned violence like executions, prison sentences. Long story longer, life in the contemporary U.S., Canada, and Mexico, for many marginalized communities, is nasty, brutish, short and full of the perpetual fear of violent death. To be clear on who we are critiquing with that last sentence, it isn’t the marginalized communities.
o Critique: Communalism and Communism are the same.
Response: They aren’t.
o Critique: Tribes were homogenous before the arrival of the Europeans
Response: This is demonstrably false, both empirically and historically. Since we’ve used Hopi already, we’ll draw on their history as an example again. Each Hopi clan has a separate migration story that incorporates centuries, if not millennia, of movement throughout the Southwest, and sometimes farther afield. This has been demonstrated through Hopi historical practices (i.e. oral traditions and tribal knowledge) and archaeological research. In fact, many Indigenous groups in North America, even though identity has become politicized with firm cultural boundaries drawn in recent centuries by the Canadian, Mexican, and US governments, were very heterogeneous with individuals and households having diverse histories (if not in the immediate past, then definitely in the deep past).
o Critique: No mention of Solutreans in the Americas.
Response: It’s true. We don’t. The archaeological data, at this time, does not support that hypothesis. Neither does the genetic data. It also isn’t relevant to this article.
o Critique: 90% of Indigenous groups in the Americas were wiped out by European disease.
Response: While we do mention the impact of plague and genocide on the one period and region we discuss that overlaps with the arrival of Europeans to the Americas, the presence of European diseases doesn’t really impact our argument that liberal globalism was much more effectively deployed (in general) through many Indigenous societies than it was, and is, within the Western state. That being said, we’re already here so . . . since the actual numbers of Indigenous groups present in the Americas varies widely between researchers who attempt to reconstruct what North American demography looked like just prior to the arrival of Europeans, it is difficult to come up with an actual percentage of Native Americans that were killed by European diseases. It is also very important to recognize that Europeans weren’t only accidentally complicit in these genocidal activities and that many times they choose to commit genocide, both through acts of physical violence (i.e. with weapons) and by purposely infecting populations with diseases they knew would wipe them out. The fact that many Indigenous groups still exist with incredibly vibrant cultures and societies in the face of these atrocities speaks to strong underlying community and intra-group, sometimes even inter-group, equitable practices common in many Indigenous cultural practices in North America. Our argument as drawn out in the case studies is that this may not be true always at specific points in time, but through time, periods of inequality, particularly in what would become the U.S. and Canada, were frequently contested and overcome.
Final Comments:
One of our goals was to demonstrate that there is a creative persistence in the humanism underlying many Indigenous societies in North America that existed prior to the arrival of Europeans and continues to exist. Of course humans are humans, but human societies work within cultural rules and beliefs that can be written, unwritten, or both. Our main argument, that one of the reasons so many groups practiced forms of equitable rule and that so many instances of transitions into inequality and hierarchy were violently torn down or walked away from, is because the view of individuals as members of a social compact was (and is) often sacrosanct and much more strongly embedded in many North American Indigenous societies than it is in many other societies that allowed states to flourish at the expense of liberty and happiness for all members of society. Migration, which created these heterogeneous and cosmopolitan Indigenous societies prior to the arrival of Europeans, was a huge driver of this success and a recognizable indicator of this globalist impulse through time.
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Okay. That is a lot of words for one blog post, but I thought this would be informative for anyone interested in the topic we wrote about as well as any scholars (Indigenous or non-Indigenous) interested in taking their research out to a broader, diverse audience that doesn’t share your views and can be a bit caustic and dismissive in their disagreement. Not that researchers should be surprised by that. It’s just Reviewer 3, multiplied by a few hundred voices.
Hi! I’m properly citing this borrowed idea (Brughmans 2016) of taking hang-out photos with something I wrote that was just published.
The book is called Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology. It’s edited by Craig Cipolla. It’s full of a lot of great work by archaeologists using and expanding consumption theory.
The chapter I wrote with Barbara Mills is about using consumption theory to analyze the archaeological record as a record of human choices. As we say in the chapter, pots are not people, but they are choices.
“An archaeology of choice revealed through consumption patterns recognizes that decisions are involved at every step along the consumption continuum. In an archaeology of choice, ceramics, for example, are liminal objects that transition the archaeological record from one of things to one of acts, decisions, and experiences. Ceramics are evidence of historical choices. Each pot moves beyond the corporeal field of the material and into the incorporeal field of human history” (Borck and Mills 2017:30).
Anyways, the book is available through the University of Arizona Press and you can read our chapter here.
Session 150
Island Networks: Analytical and Conceptual Advances in the Archaeological Study of Intra- and Inter-Island Relationships
Dr. Jason E. Laffoon, Leiden University/Free University Amsterdam—The Netherlands: j.e.laffoon@arch.leidenuniv.nl
Dr. Lewis Borck, Archaeology Southwest/Leiden University—USA/The Netherlands: lsborck@gmail.com
This is a call for papers for archaeological researchers working on inter- and intra-island networks and relationships to submit an abstract for the upcoming conference of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA). The conference will be held in Maastricht (The Netherlands) from August 30th to September 2nd, 2017.
Many island settings throughout the world represent archaeologically understudied spaces with turbulent histories. These regions often offer complex interconnections of settler and indigenous dynamics further complicated by restricted terrestrial environments. These colonial/indigenous relationships are also frequently built on existing inter-community indigenous relationships that can be difficult to uncover. Archaeologists have used a wide variety of analytical and conceptual tools to understand and highlight the existence of these pre- and post-colonial interactions, and to explore how these relationships were built, maintained, modified, and abandoned. These include network analysis (both quantitative and conceptual), châine opératoire, consumption frameworks, artifact biographies, communities of practice and enculturative learning paradigms, and actor network theory. While surficially different, these forms have underlying similarities in that they all focus to varying levels on relational qualities found in various forms of data, including between individuals, archaeological settlements, groups, material culture, and steps in the production process. Relational analyses like these allow researchers to build bridges between multiple temporal periods and between the islands (and often the mainland). In this session, to represent the truly heterogeneous nature of data and relational methodology, presenters will use a varying mix of historical documents, oral traditions, and a multitude of analytical techniques applied to the material record to examine historical inter- and intra-community social relationships present within and between islands.
If you feel you have research that would fit within these themes, you have until March 15th, 2017 to submit your paper title and abstract directly at http://www.eaa2017maastricht.nl/deadlines by scrolling down to the submission section. For questions, email either Lewis Borck or Jason Laffoon.
More information on the conference is available at: http://www.eaa2017maastricht.nl/
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Dr. Zoe Todd | Academic | Writer | Artist | Fish Philosopher
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ΕΥΔΟΞΑ ΑΓΝΩΣΤΑ ΚΑΤΑΓΕΛΑΣΤΑ
An Indigenous Woman's Experience in Anthropology
LEWIS BORCK 
