Materiality and Memory Practice: Tools of Collaborative Decolonization
Session 2: Starting from Material Understandings
Sunday, May 2nd
2:00-5:30 pm
Session Organizers: Diana D. Loren (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University) and Christina J. Hodge (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University )
2:00: Diana D. Loren and Christina J. Hodge (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University): Introductory remarks
2:10: Siobahn M. Hart (Binghamton University): Materiality, Heritage, and Memory Practice of the “Pocumtuck Fort”
2:30: Cameron B. Wesson (University of Vermont): “Nice, Commodious Buildings and Hospitable Families”: Creek Domestic Life in the Colonial Era
2:50: Christopher N. Matthews (Hofstra University): Decolonization, Representation, and Reflexivity: What Archaeologists Still (and Always?) Do That Is Colonial
3:10: Martin Gallivan (College of William and Mary): Nonevents and Nonplaces in the Chesapeake: Toward an Archaeology of Tidewater Algonquian Historicity
3:30: Coffee break
4:00: Bryn Williams (Stanford University): Objects and Tokens of Memory
4:20: Neil L. Norman (College of William and Mary): Leaves of Change: Arboreal Archives of the Early Atlantic World in Coastal West Africa
4:40: Michael Nassaney (Western Michigan University): Decolonizing Archaeological Theory through Practice at Fort St. Joseph
5:00: Discussion
Session Abstract:
Colonialism is a material process—the establishment of new orders according to an imperial vision of “colony,” which concomitantly destabilizes preexisting relationships between people and their material worlds. As we know, there is often discordance regarding how the entanglement of persons and objects is represented in the archival record versus how it played out in the material record of lived experience. In these entanglements, objects are given new significance and meanings. There is a subtlety to these new meanings both in their unique cultural contexts and in the modern imagination and remembering of past peoples, a concept that Raymond Fogelson refers to as “events” and “nonevents.” The collaborative study of colonial contexts, involving archaeologists, historians, museums, descendant communities, and other stakeholders, becomes a decolonizing practice. It supports a redistribution of power/authority through the creative flow of knowledge among different partnering groups. The new meanings of colonialism exist not only in primary processes of creation and negotiation, but also in present-day recovery and remembrance. In this session, we consider how materiality, as a specific archaeological concept, supports decolonizing narratives of collaborative archaeological practice.
Effective projects can originate from different starting points. In the first session, authors present papers on projects driven by community needs and goals for archaeology of social action. In the second session, authors discuss those projects that begin with material findings. While the origin of the projects can differ, they share the goal of collaborative action towards decolonizing narratives.
"Abstracts and Participants:"
Materiality, Heritage, and Memory Practice of the “Pocumtuck Fort”
Siobahn M. Hart (Department of Anthropology, Binghamton University)
The process of defining what is valued as heritage is fraught with the inequalities of social and political power concomitant with colonialism. It shapes whether, or how, the tangible and intangible pasts of disenfranchised and marginalized groups are remembered in the public domain. Archaeologists are increasingly seeking to reorient and restructure these relations by engaging multiple stakeholder groups in heritage work. The collaborative study of colonial contexts has resulted in modern material entanglements as various stakeholders engage in heritage and memory work. In this paper, I discuss how dominant memories of Native peoples in the New England interior are being re-shaped by collaborative efforts to decolonize history and archaeology. I situate collaboration as a material practice central to both memory and heritage work. I ground my consideration in a case study focusing on the social relationships of multiple stakeholders (Native American descendant communities, heritage institutions, archaeologists, landowners, avocational archaeologists, local residents, and scholars) catalyzed by the archaeology of a seventeenth-century Native American site in Deerfield, Massachusetts. The site, believed to be a fortified place of Pocumtuck peoples, plays a critical role in the dominant English and early American colonial history commemorated in the town for a century. Today it is at the nexus of complex entanglements of persons, objects, significance, value, meaning, and memory.
“Nice, Commodious Buildings and Hospitable Families”: Creek Domestic Life in the Colonial Era
Cameron B. Wesson (Department of Anthropology, University of Vermont)
The nature of post-Columbian culture change among the Native peoples of Southeastern North America has been the subject of considerable historical and archaeological research, with much of this research centered on large-scale social, political, and economic transformations. Countering many of these trends, this paper examines evidence for culture change through an examination of the mundane, routinized daily behaviors enacted within Creek domestic structures. Through the examination of the spatial and social contexts within which the majority of practical action took place, a more nuanced, agent-centered understanding of local culture change is thought possible. Additionally, by reorienting the scale of archaeological inquiry it is possible to examine the practical realities of colonialism as experienced (dialectically and recursively) in the daily life of individual Creeks.
Decolonization, Representation, and Reflexivity: What Archaeologists Still (and Always?) Do That Is Colonial
Christopher N. Matthews (Department of Anthropology, Hofstra University)
Much of archaeology’s current decolonization effort rests on conservative assumptions about professional archaeology and its political economy. Most evident are assumptions that weave value and identity into artifacts as representational of social bodies and thus properly “owned” things related to the determination of cultural affiliation. This process describes a way of doing archaeology that is increasingly untenable and out of date given a sense of objects as active in the making of cultures past and present. Perhaps, though, there is something to gain by looking more closely at what an approach that sees artifacts as representational actually does in the realm of modern politics and the validation of contemporary experience to understand its persistence. I argue that the positioning of artifacts to stand in for people engages essentialist and colonialist practices that create persons, social formations and cultures more so than they reveal how these bodies occur. Moreover, we also close off debate, ignore process, elide histories and complicities, and most problematic affirm our own categorical sense of the world and its temporalities rather than challenge it. The question is how much the lines between archaeologists and others have been thus far reinforced rather than destabilized in the discipline's decolonization effort.
Nonevents and Nonplaces in the Chesapeake: Toward an Archaeology of Tidewater Algonquian Historicity
Martin Gallivan (Department of Anthropology, College of William and Mary)
Ray Fogelson has advocated an “ethno-ethnohistorical” approach to American Indian history reliant upon Native theories of the past as embedded in cosmology, in narratives, and in ceremonies. Within this approach, events are recognized, defined, and valued locally and differentially. Starting from the slightly audacious premise that archaeology can be a source for such an ethno-ethnohistory, this paper considers evidence bearing on the ways Tidewater Algonquian societies reckoned and represented the relationship between the present and the past during the late precontact and early colonial eras. The effort to recover elements of Tidewater Algonquian historicity focuses on archaeological evidence of the creation of new places with prominent landscape features. Such locations served as nodes of social construction circa AD 1300 and points of social engagement for Algonquian communities for the next three centuries. During the early colonial era, Native groups returned to these places to bury ancestors, sacrifice animals, and inter objects with social power, sometimes after the residential population had departed. Within positivist historical traditions these depositions may be construed as “nonevents”, particularly when they occurred within “non-places” that had long-since been “abandoned”, yet such practices also involved performances that represented elements of memory, materiality, and landscape fundamental to Algonquian historicity.
Objects and Tokens of Memory
Bryn Williams (Department of Anthropology, Stanford University)
Colonialism works through destabilization. Landscapes and their affective connections to identities are challenged in the meaningful stories that accompany the colonial process. In both colonial and post-colonial contexts, objects can become tokens that work against this destabilizing tendency. These tokens, though positioned against destablization, are not simple reminders of a pre-colonial time. Instead, they are a powerful medium through which landscapes become reconstituted. Indeed, the reconstitution can serve many ends – from the struggles of indigenous groups for self-determination to the homogenizing stability promised by the expansion of global capital. This paper explores how some of these object-tokens have been used by archaeologists and activists to strategically re-imagine colonial places.
Leaves of Change: Arboreal Archives of the Early Atlantic World in Coastal West Africa
Neil L. Norman (Department of Anthropology, College of William and Mary)
In Atlantic Africa, sacred trees serve as points of reflection and recollection on the landscape. In the historiography of coastal West Africa, these living monuments occupy—and denote—liminal spaces. In pre-colonial and colonial accounts by western chroniclers, they are illustrations of narratives highlighting the primeval connections between ancient trees and static cultures. In recent ethnographic and archaeological accounts, researchers describe them as abodes for transitory deities, settings for theatres of political action, and backdrops for transformative ritual. This paper builds on the latter project of decolonizing the narrative history of sacred trees as well as the archaeological material often located nearby. In it, I argue that sacred forests in southern Benin serve as mnemonic anchor points for spoken histories and longstanding locales where Gbe-speaking people memorialize and mitigate loss and dislocation associated with the early Atlantic world and trans-Atlantic slave trade. It draws from collaborative archaeological efforts aimed at exploring the recursive relationship between landscape, material culture, and the politicized West African past.
Decolonizing Archaeological Theory Through Practice at Fort St. Joseph
Michael Nassaney (Department of Anthropology, Western Michigan University)
Archaeologies of colonialism have challenged and significantly revised contemporary imaginings of indigenous peoples’ engagement with Europeans and the impacts of these entanglements on material and social realities. Changes in socio-political climate beginning in the 1970s instigated reconceptualizations that accompanied increasingly audible sounds of Native voices and concerns. Political action within and outside the discipline engendered new theoretical frameworks such as the shift from acculturation to agency models and the trend away from essentialized categories towards hybridized forms. In this paper I suggest that decolonized archaeological theory is grounded in socio-political experiences and contestation. I show how new theoretical frameworks that are sensitive to collaboration and consider the perspectives of the subaltern have influenced the archaeological interpretations of an 18th-century colonial site in southwest Michigan. Finally, I challenge a recent reactionary critique of aboriginalism in an effort to enter the ongoing debate on the side of indigenous archaeology and highlight some relationships between materiality, colonialism/decolonialism, and archaeological theory.