In 1851, says the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘prehistory’ entered the English language. Its carrier was The Archaeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, by Edinburgh resident Daniel Wilson. Developed from a radical revision of the exhibits of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the book meant to establish the deep history of Wilson’s people. A decade later, in 1862, Wilson expanded his view globally with Prehistoric Man, bringing the native civilizations of the Americas into conjunction with Europe's past, all grounded (literally) in material cultures.
Wilson and his patron, Robert Chambers, were Scots patriots struggling against the Society of Antiquaries’ sentiment that civilization began in Britain with the Roman invasion. Scottish antiquaries endeavoured to find remnants of Agricola’s advance (ad 78-84) beyond Hadrian’s Wall across northern England. Beyond that line, they believed, were blue-painted Pictish barbarians. Chambers was an avocational geologist for whom archaeological objects were the most recent in his country's millions of years of existence. Pioneering conceptualizations, surveys, and excavations by the Danes Christian Thomsen and his protege Jens Worsaae were Chambers's model for pursuing and ordering his own nation's true history. Scandinavians and Scots alike chafed under defeats by more powerful nations, and many educated persons in both regions perceived scientific methodology to be capable of establishing a prouder picture of the ancient past. Theirs were subaltern views in the Napoleonic era.
Introducing the term ‘prehistory' was not meant to disparage Britons and Scots, or subsequently in Wilson's writings, non-Western peoples. Quite the opposite, it recognized that ‘peoples without history’ did leave
Data that can be employed to construct ‘annals’ (chronicles), as Wilson termed his constructions. Thomsen’s Three-Age system ordered archaeological data chronologically according to whether only stone, or stone and copper-based metals, or these plus iron had been encountered in sites. This use of the Three-Age system was scientific in that it placed observed data into a demonstrable model validated by replication in the field. Scandinavians called their textless past forhistorisk, of which prehistory is a transliteration. Rowley-Conwy (2006) thinks Peter Andreas Munch, a Norwegian, suggested the English term to Daniel Wilson in 1849 (Lane, this volume), although Worsaae had left a copy of his Danmarks Oldtid with the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland when he visited, at Chambers’s invitation, in 1846 (Kehoe 1998: 16; Trigger 2006: 132). Wilson and Chambers struggled to be heard by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Kehoe 1998: 61). Wilson said:
[They had a] theory, set forth before the end of [1851] in one of the sections of the British Association as an ‘Inquiry into the evidence of the existence of Primitive Races in Scotland prior to the Celtae’. It is amusing now [in 1878] to recall the undisguised incredulity with which a theory was then received which has since met with universal acceptance. (Wilson 1878: 140)
In one generation, the concept of a prehistory discovered by scientific archaeology had enormously enriched British history.
2.1 COLONIALISM REARS ITS UGLY HEAD
Enter Sir John Lubbock, baronet. After Eton, Lubbock commenced employment at the family business, a London bank and, similarly a family tradition, became a Fellow of the Royal Society. Lubbock lived on a large estate bordering Charles Darwin’s home in the village of Down. Twenty-five years younger than Darwin, Lubbock greatly valued the man of science, assisting Darwin with natural history observations—particularly entomology—and promoting his reputation through the X-Club, a group of younger men determined to take leadership of the Royal Society (Barton 1990). Lubbock enjoyed travelling to visit archaeological sites in Europe, publishing accounts in the Natural History Review between 1861 and 1864. When Macmillan’s printing of Daniel Wilson’s 1862 Prehistoric Man sold out, rival publishers Williams and Norgate suggested to Sir John that he cash in on popular interest by preparing a collection of those essays under the title Pre-Historic Times. To round out the book,
Lubbock added passages from Wilson’s book and from Charles Lyell’s Antiquity of Man, which he saw in manuscript (Kehoe 1998: 57), and chapters on primitive races, drawn from travelogues.
Sir John Lubbock maybe the Jared Diamond of his generation. While he did some solid work in zoology (entomology), his fame comes from collating others’ work into airport bookstore-style reads saying just what the moderately educated middle class wants to know (Stocking 1987: 152). In the 1860s, and up to the First World War, that was how the ‘vital force of progress’ led to the English-speaking bourgeoisie leaving behind the less-evolved primitive races in the colonies. Lubbock, a fellow member of the X-Club, was a friend of Herbert Spencer whose massive volumes of synthetic philosophy expounded that vital force. Like Spencer, and unlike Daniel Wilson who spent weeks with Anishinaabeg on the Great Lakes, Lubbock saw no need to personally observe lower races in foreign habitats. Another friend, Edward Tylor, had pointed out that one can observe survivals from barbarism right there in England (Tylor 1871: 16, 1906 [1881]: 15-18). ‘Archaeology,’ said Lubbock, ‘forms, in fact, the link between geology and history’ (Lubbock 1912 [1865]: 2). That said, and with ‘pre-historic archaeology’ divided into four epochs (Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron), Lubbock launched into twenty-nine pages on metallurgy and the swords and daggers it produced (Guns, Germs and Steel is Diamond’s bestselling title). The chapters originally in the Natural History Review, on Swiss Lake Dwellings, Danish Kitchen Middens, Tumuli, and Palaeolithic sites and artefacts, are argued to describe prehistoric humans on the basis of geological occurrence or lack of text association. Lubbock then painted a rambling picture of prehistoric people by quoting descriptions of behaviour and artefacts among contemporary ‘savages’, that is, presumed survivals from mankind’s earlier epochs. He concludes that, having shown the rude beginnings of our species and its eventual invention of beautiful swords in a few favoured places, we may confidently look forward to ‘Utopia... which turns out. . . to be the necessary consequence of natural laws. . . [and] the simple truth’ (Lubbock 1912 [1865]: 577).
Geological data and models could not support such a conviction. Like Tylor, Lubbock turned to ethnographies to chart progress from the savage prehistoric epoch. For this, Lubbock produced a second tome, The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man: Mental and Social Condition of Savages (1875 [1870]). Prefacing a 1978 reprinting of that classic book, Peter Riviere suggests ‘the acknowledged popularity and readability of his books with their tone of great authority mark Lubbock as one of the creators of the representation of the “savage” that is not uncommon in the Western world today’ (Riviere 1978: lxiii).
Readers were warned, ‘I shall have to record many actions and ideas very abhorrent to us; so many, in fact, that if I pass them without comment or condemnation, it is because I am reluctant to fatigue the reader by a wearisome iteration of disapproval’ (Lubbock 1875 [1870]: v-vi). Abhorrent as savages may be, he concludes his preface noting that the ‘science’ of cultural evolution (Lubbock 1875 [1870]: 3) ‘has a peculiar importance to an Empire such as ours, comprising races in every stage’ (Lubbock 1875 [1870]: viii).
Pre-Historic Times’s success in 1865 did not extend to giving Lubbock enough votes to win the seat in Parliament for which he ran that year, but five years later, in 1870, he did become a member. His political career had little distinction as he introduced or supported mildly liberal laws such as reduced hours of work and introducing science into government-supported schools’ curricula (Stocking 1987: 151)—small steps towards Utopia. Lubbock lived through the flowering of Victoria’s Empire on which the sun never set; he was a contemporary of Rudyard Kipling, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, General Gordon and the Siege of Khartoum, and in America, the Indian Wars, Grant's Peace Policy (conquer them, then make peace), and the two Riel Rebellions of the Metis in Canada. Travelling only through Europe and with plenty of money, residing in a prosperous farming district, Lubbock had no experiences that would challenge the imperialist cant of conquest. Thus, he built his picture of nasty, brutish, and short primitive lives to contrast with the happy condition of the Victorian bourgeoisie, proving scientifically, he asserted, that progress really happened and might be extended to the suffering benighted races.
Contemporary with Lubbock and Wilson, Lewis Henry Morgan constructed his Ancient Society (1877) out of detailed descriptions of Greek and especially Roman kinship laws compared with an equally detailed description of the Iroquois taken from his own researches with Ely Parker and other Seneca. He created a nine-fold structure of progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization (Morgan 1877: 12), based primarily on logical premises rather than on archaeology. Like Wilson and unlike Lubbock, Morgan had first-hand experience with North American First Nations, those whom he placed in the stage of barbarism. Morgan is not usually included in studies of the history of archaeology—Trigger (2006: 179) remarks how he wrote ‘doggedly ignoring archaeological evidence'—yet his concordance with Lubbock in insisting on the primitiveness of First Nations played a real role in legitimating Anglo imperialism, American as well as British.
My own interest in Daniel Wilson began with wondering why his Prehistoric Man, so much better written than Lubbock’s rival book, is little discussed. Each of its three editions of 2,000 copies sold out, and, from the locations of copies listed in bibliographic searches, it seems to have been widely read, probably by those with avocational interests in archaeology. Wilson took unpopular positions, not only celebrating the many great achievements of American nations (for example, the magnificent art of Palenque [Wilson 1876 [1865], v. 2: 3-5]), but also stating that ‘half-breeds’ (Metis) are tall, strong, vigorous, and intelligent (Wilson 1876 [1865], v. 2: 261-6), proof that intermarriage with settlers benefits Canada. His own university, Toronto, put him down by calling him a dilettante (Trigger 1999: 98). Bruce Trigger believed that Wilson carried an obsolete Scottish Enlightenment view (Trigger 1999: 95) that put him out of step. Of course, there is a thread of Scottish Enlightenment in the liberal Edinburghers of Wilson’s generation, but Wilson, his patron Robert Chambers, and their friend George Combe were political reformers dedicated to creating a meritocratic society (Kehoe 1998: 22-31). I want to put it bluntly: Lubbock and Morgan have been consistently cited as founding fathers because they fed the ideology of imperial colonialism—Manifest Destiny—and Wilson’s Prehistoric Man has been practically ignored because it went against the grain.
2.2 THE COLONIALIST STRUCTURE OF PREHISTORY
Anglo culture is the air we in North America breathe. Lubbock constructed his prehistory on a foundation built by John Locke, and American archaeology combined Locke with Jefferson. Both Locke and Jefferson were master spinmeisters, smooth rhetoricians pushing political agendas. Locke was employed by the Earl of Shaftesbury to legitimate his policies for Carolina Colony and the British Board of Trade. A major issue at the time in late seventeenth-century Britain was enclosure of peasant lands by aristocrats. Locke created an elaborate argument that private property in land, secured by written title that could be exchanged for money, is the basis for civilized society. Accept that dictum and neither British peasants nor American Indians qualified as owners of their lands. Around the basic dictum, Locke argued for the necessity of ‘improving’ (developing) land, claiming it was God’s commission to mankind to labour to improve the wilderness. He took care to specify that a man could hire labour to do the physical work, but mere labour without title would not gain property. Although Locke must have had some direct knowledge of the colony’s First Nations, since he was executive director of Carolina Colony in the 1670s, he chose to use only a few travel books as sources for his statements about Indians being savages (Kehoe 2009: 127). Locke’s position was directly counter to the international doctrine of title by right of first discovery; he could negate First Nations’ clear right of first discovery only by denigrating their humanity. Describing Indians as subsisting on the bounty of nature, without labouring to cultivate or amassing property, Locke contrasted the perishable residue of their activities with metal artefacts accumulated by civilized Christians (Locke 2003: ch. 5). Savages not only had no history, they left no imperishable traces.
Jefferson, in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, justified rebellion against King George by listing twenty-seven ‘Facts’ (his word) of which the last states, ‘He [King of Great Britain] . . . has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction, of all ages, sexes and conditions.’ Jefferson was a Virginian whose Indian neighbours were the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole). He was keenly aware, as he showed in his moving account of Logan’s Lament (Wallace 1999: 2), that those who destroyed so indiscriminately were more likely the colonists than the Indians they drove out. No matter, unvarnished truths were too plain to interest the Sage of Monticello. Anthony Wallace said in his assessment that he ‘tried to be fair’ towards Jefferson, but ‘some of his actions appear to be hypocritical, arbitrary, duplicitous, even harsh’ (Wallace 1999: viii). Historian Peter Onuf characterized Jefferson as ‘uncompromising, self-righteous, and dangerously doctrinaire’ (Onuf 1997: 141). When he became president, Jefferson established US policy towards its First Nations, telling the governor of Indiana Territory, that our settlers
Will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time
Either incorporate with us...or remove beyond the Mississippi____our
Strength and their weakness is now [1803] so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them. . . . The preceding views are such as should not be formally declared. (quoted in Kukla 2003: 302)
Supreme Court Justice John Marshall famously carried on Jefferson’s
Duplicitous policy when he ruled, in Johnson v. McIntosh, 1823, that
The tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest. To leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness; to govern them as a distinct people, was impossible. (quoted in Williams 1990: 323, n. 133)
Clearly, Anglo imperialism required picturing the colonies (literally) as God-forsaken wilderness and their First Nations as brutish savages leaving no ruins, no artefacts. This dichotomy between Christian civilizers and those they dispossessed under Jeffersonian policy effectively curtailed America’s patrimony, restricting it to the colonial era and setting all evidence of earlier inhabitants to the realm of pre-history. Here is the contrast between Lubbock’s empire-serving collation of archaeological data with brutish-looking savages, and Wilson’s treatment of American First Nations as he did his own ancestors in Scotland, builders of civilizations. It bears emphasizing that Lubbock worked second-hand, travelling only in Europe, visiting other gentlemen’s archaeological excavations and collections, and using travelogues for his pictures of savages. It was much easier to construct a dichotomy between history and pre-history from Lubbock’s distance. Daniel Wilson had felt the cold rain on Lake Superior’s shore and the warmth of the fire built by his Anishinaabe companion’s skill, a primary experience slanting his view of First Nations’ pasts toward respect. Daniel Wilson’s concept of prehistory was basically postcolonial, coming as he did from Scotland chafing under English domination. A century and a half after Wilson’s and Lubbock’s texts outlined ‘pre-history’/prehistory for English-speaking readers, understanding non-Western lives as Wilson did, remains less common in American archaeology than treating their residues as if they were little more than savages—aka foragers—in the wilderness.
2.3 HARMONY OF ILLUSION
The geographer William Speth discussed what he considers antitheses: historicism and positivism. The former is founded on the understanding that change is intrinsic to human phenomena, and the latter on the premise that objective observations and rational analyses of phenomena will reveal universal laws. Speth continues, ‘Whether they know it or not, scientists practice their disciplines in a way that presupposes a “system of opinion”, or disciplinary world view. Such features as theory, methodology, and synthesizing philosophy together exhibit a kind of “harmony of illusion”’ (Speth 1987: 12).
‘Harmony of illusion’ is exactly the constitution of orthodox interpretations of prehistory. In European nation-states, archaeological data were collected and organized to demonstrate ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983), while in colonized nations, archaeological and ethnographic data were collected and collated under the supposition that the conquered peoples were lower in the evolutionary scale than their European conquerors. European nations have patrimonies; colonized First Nations do not. This is recognized in law, in that European nations claim antiquities as national patrimony, while the United States holds the Lockean position that antiquities in private property belong to the property title-holder. For Europe, historicism prevailed; for colonies, positivism.
Roger Kennedy, former director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, asks, ‘What did the first European explorers and settlers know about ancient America? Why was that knowledge not passed on, expanded, revised, and made a necessary prelude to American history?’ (Kennedy 1994: 2). Kennedy, whose scholarly work focuses on architectural history, was particularly impressed with the great earth architecture of eastern United States and appalled that these thousands of monuments to Indian labour—pace Locke—are not celebrated in schoolchildren’s textbooks. He found that the US’s expansionist fervour and its conviction that it embodies Manifest Destiny (a label coined in 1845 by jingoistic demands for a Mexican War) demanded dispossession of First Nations, actions excused by the trope of savagery. Mounds do not fit the ideology; as Richard Pryor, speaking as a black man, put it, ‘Who are you going to believe—me, or your lying eyes?’ (quoted by Gates 1995: 64).
American history taught in American schools is a Whig history of English colonization (as British prehistory serves the Whig histories of progress still taught in British schools [Planel 1990: 275]). Whig histories select events to make it appear that the happy state enjoyed by enlightened citizens today was the inevitable outcome of our predecessors’ brave or wise choices. As textbooks, such histories are designed to inculcate patriotic allegiance to the regime in power.
‘You have the ability to shape the next generation on the beliefs about the government and the role of personal responsibility but also understanding our history and the principles that we want to pass down to our children’, said Brooke Terry of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. ‘With many of the suggested changes [recommended by academic consultants], I think we would be backtracking on many of the important things that people fight for in defense of our country.’ (quoted in Scharrer 2009)
Notoriously, evolutionary biology is excluded from American textbooks to win purchase by the State of Texas.1 Both Pew Research Center and
Gallup surveys consistently show that nearly half of the Americans polled believe that humans did not evolve, and many of these also accept that God created the world and its creatures in six days (Keeter 2009). Pandering to such numbers of voters, Texas and other school boards would proscribe teaching human biological evolution and also archaeological evidence of pre-sapien hominids. Texas similarly dictates what will be available in social studies and history textbooks. Its patriots follow Jefferson and Marshall in looking on First Nations fighting in defence of their countries as ‘merciless savages’ in a wilderness, whose prehistoric artefacts are worth at best a couple of pages in the first chapter of history textbooks. Archaeologist Peter Ucko noted, in his Foreword to The Excluded Past,
The fundamental problem [is]... that educational publishing is often in the hands of private (and often foreign) commercial publishing companies, whose primary aim is to produce only what will sell, and sell at a significant
Profit but government-subsidized printing is also unacceptable, being a
Recipe for imposed orthodoxy of view. (Ucko 1990: xxii)
Whatever came before Whiggish nationalist histories is labelled ‘prehistory’. Lubbock inserted the hyphen between ‘pre’ and ‘history’, emphasizing the distinction—(an ignoramus’s error in Latin, Daniel Wilson pedantically noted to Charles Lyell [Kehoe 1998: 20]). Although Lubbock, as neighbour, friend, and patron of Charles Darwin, accepted the idea that men descended from apes, he could not stomach the correlate that the savages he abhorred evolved as fully as his English peers. Anglo imperialism was cloaked in pious missions to ‘elevate’ the benighted heathens in the colonies. Both Canada and the United States forced First Nations’ children into boarding schools, teaching them that their languages, religious beliefs and ceremonies, and economies were contemptible. Relegating First Nations’ long histories—orally transmitted and extended through archaeology—to a few pages of Lockean stereotypes teaches the patriotism that fuels the imperialist wars of Manifest Destiny.
Power, since other large states spend an equal amount. The reason Texas is so important in this battle is because Texas is the largest “adoption state”, a state in which the textbooks are adopted by a central authority (the State Board of Education), paid for by the state with the annual earnings ofa multi-billion dollar permanent trust fund, and then distributed for free
To the state’s school districts____publishers would write their books for the Texas school
Market as determined by the ideological, political, and religious biases and prejudices of the Texas SBOE [State Board of Education], the country’s lowest common denominator, because separate textbook editions could not be produced in a cost-effective manner. Thus, textbooks written for the Texas market were used throughout the United States, giving the Board gate-keepers enormous power to control textbook content’ (Schafersman 2003).
2.4 ILLUSION VERSUS PARTICULARISM
America’s home-grown proponents of racist ‘cultural evolution’ were challenged late in the nineteenth century by German-trained immigrant Franz Boas. Boas worked from historical particularism, aiming to gather as many data as possible from oral histories and literatures, ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and biological researches, to write the histories of societies outside the Western canon. He eschewed postulating universal laws on the grounds that we do not have sufficient data to generalize, a condition recognizing the difficulties of observing one’s own species. Boas’s true scientific caution was shared by the influential geographer Carl Sauer, a generation younger, who, like him, demanded empirical data to ‘build a retrospective science’ (quoted in Mathewson 1987: 106; see also Hornbeck etal. 1996). If the aim of these politically liberal scholars were realized, respect for cultural diversity would overwhelm the scientism trumpeted by positivists.
Glyn Daniel, a mid-twentieth-century doyen of British archaeology, thought about what is scientific about archaeology of prehistory. ‘Prehistory should not merely be written from archaeological sources,’ he stated, ‘it should be based on archaeological information which is accurate, detailed, and complete [i. e., all observed archaeological data recorded, not, for example, only whole painted pots])’ (Daniel 1988 [1962]: 68). Early in the twentieth century, Daniel writes, l’Abbe Breuil and Hugo Obermaier discovered that ‘index fossils’ for two ‘epochs’ in the unilinear evolution schema posited for northern Spain lay mixed in the same stratum. It was then, Daniel remarked, that ‘prehistoric archaeology broke away from... inherited conceptions of geology’, turning to ‘human geographers and anthropologists’ for the concept of cultures (1988 [1962]: 74): ‘This new idea took a long time to penetrate into the views of teachers and workers who were imbued with the nineteenth-century ideas of unilateral sequences to such an extent as almost to have given it a religious
Significance____this [unilateral] sequence had attained something of the
Status of an archaeological fundamentalist doctrine’ (1988 [1962]: 75).
Daniel comes down unequivocally on the side of cultural diversity: ‘Prehistory deals with man and not with nature and is not part of the natural sciences: it is part of human not natural history’ (1988 [1962]: 118). This view prevails today in the guise of cultural resource management (CRM), the business of rescuing and evaluating remains of human activities. Its primary purpose is to manage monies available, through a number of legislative acts and mandates, to mitigate destruction of evidence of past human activities (Mathers etal. 2005). Other acts and mandates protect flora, fauna, and natural landscape features.
Opposite CRM’s principle that everything touched by humans constitutes heritage, the ‘explicitly scientific’ new archaeology school did (perhaps wishfully, I use the past tense) not concern itself with linking local pasts to the present. Prehistory was a laboratory for these scientists deductively testing hypothesized universal regularities or relationships by means of selected data. Time and place were circumscribed by the hypothesis. The hypothetico-deductive (H-D) ‘scientific method’ was excoriated by historian William Dray and palaeontologist George Gaylord Simpson (Kehoe 1998: 138), neither of whose critiques were noticed by the new archaeologists. The fatal flaw in H-D archaeology is failure to explicate sources of the hypotheses. New archaeology’s illusion was unilinear cultural evolutionism, reinforced in the 1960s by Leslie White’s American version of Marxism, wherein harnessing of energy is the force of cultural development (demonstrating with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the United States, possessing nuclear energy, was the most evolved). White championed Lewis Henry Morgan. New archaeology thus was embedded in Lubbock’s and Morgan’s equation of prehistory with savagery, and because until very recently, nearly all American archaeology dealt with prehistory, ipso facto, archaeologists’ hypotheses came from that stock of pronouncements about savagery. Indeed, because American Indians in the American wilderness were like animals, said Locke and Lubbock, hypotheses could come from zoologists’ studies of animals (e. g., the foraging pattern of deer). H-D scientific archaeology preserved the harmony of Manifest Destiny’s imperialist illusion.
2.5 DELGAMUUKW
Chief Justice Allan McEachern of the British Columbia Supreme Court stated, in Delgamuukw v. Regina:
It is common, when one thinks of Indian land claims, to think of Indians
Living off the land in pristine wilderness____Similarly, it would not be
Accurate to assume that even pre-contact existence in the territory was in the least bit idyllic... there is no doubt, to quote Hobbs [sic], that aboriginal
Life in the territory was, at best, ‘nasty, brutish and short’ (p. 236)____It is
Asked whether a nation may lawfully take possession of some part of a vast country in which there are none but erratic nations, whose scanty population is incapable of occupying the whole?... Their unsettled habitation... cannot be accounted a true and legal possession, and the people of Europe. . . finding land of which the Savage stood in no particular need, and of which they made no actual and constant use, were lawfully entitled to take possession (p. 239) Some tribes are so low in the scale of social organization that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or the legal ideas of civilized society
(p. 246)____I do not accept the ancestors ‘on the ground’ behaved as they
Did because of ‘institutions’. Rather I find they more likely acted as they did
Because of survival instincts (p. 248) the Indians of the territory were, by
Historical standards, a primitive people without any form of writing, horses,
Or wheeled wagons (p. 247)____Aboriginal life, in my view, was far from
Stable____It is my conclusion that Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en laws and
Customs are not sufficiently certain to permit a finding they or their ancestors governed the territory. (McEachern 1991, Reasons for Judgment, quoted in Culhane 1998: 249 and other pages as cited)
The case had been brought by two British Columbia First Nations, Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en, seeking rights, including timber, to the territory surrounding their villages. McEachern ruled against their claims on the grounds he declared. When did he speak thus? 1991!
Earl Muldoe, the Delgam Uukw House hereditary chief, and the heads of fifty other houses within the two nations on the upper Skeena River in interior British Columbia, filed their case in 1984. Receiving the adverse judgement in 1991, they appealed to the provincial Court of Appeals and to Canada’s Supreme Court, the latter ordering, in 1997, a new trial on procedural error, McEachern’s refusal to entertain oral histories from the nations’ appointed traditional historians. McEachern disdaining Gitxsan adaawk and Wet’suwet’en sung kungax follows from his astonishing reliance on nineteenth-century cant of conquest. John Lubbock might have written the brief.
Delgamuukw is a wake-up call. After the Supreme Court ruled against his judgement, Allan McEachern (1926-2008) was honoured by an appointment as chancellor of the University of British Columbia.2 Delgamuukw blatantly reveals an abysmal ignorance of non-Western histories among even highly educated Anglo Americans. Equally disturbing is the similar ignorance of contemporary understanding of Northwest First
Nations to be found in a college textbook co-authored by a leading American archaeologist, Timothy Earle. In my 1998 book The Land of Prehistory, I devoted a chapter to Earle and his co-author’s mistaken scholarship in their use of Northwest Coast nations to exemplify their ‘family-level forager’ level of human societies. A revised edition of their textbook added a few references without changing their nineteenth-century model of cultural evolution. Aside from the inappropriate label ‘forager’ (foragers are animals, or their human caretakers, seeking grasses and similar herbivore feed [Kehoe 1993]), Northwest Coast First Nations were far from family level. They were quite comparable to medieval European baronies, as Claude Levi-Strauss brilliantly explained in his 1982 The Way of the Masks (not cited in their book). Archaeology substantiates key aspects of their oral histories, providing time depth of millennia to their technologically sophisticated economies based on industrial-scale fishing and cultivation of indigenous tubers, extensive maritime and overland-portered trade, and slavery. Earle and Johnson’s racism ironically hits on the very nations upon which Franz Boas focused his historical particularism. Thousands of pages of minute detailed records of Northwest cultures, records that indelibly impressed the great French anthropologist with their picture of proud aristocrats ruling competing fiefs, could not penetrate Earle and Johnson’s harmony of illusion.
2.6 WHEN DID INDIANS BECOME INDIANS?
Roger Echo-Hawk, a historian who is a member of the Pawnee Nation, traces the evolution of the Pawnee from four allied small nations, the Skiri, Chawi, Kitkahahki, and Pitahawirata in central Nebraska. Not until they faced unrelenting invasions from Americans in the mid-nineteenth century did they see themselves as the Pawnee Nation. Echo-Hawk declared, ‘It wasn’t always this way. We weren’t always Pawnee Indians. Our ancestors didn’t have race. They weren’t Indians’ (Echo-Hawk 2007: 5).
Echo-Hawk recounts his gradual realization that if science claims that ‘race’, as understood in America, is a social, not biological, term, then he, as a Pawnee, should be able to reject the label ‘Indian’: ‘When race appeared in Pawneeland, it gradually usurped Pawnee discourse about what it meant to be human. Race took hold of the Pawnees during the 19th century. And during the 20th century it succeeded in obliterating traditional Pawnee notions of self and social identity’ (Echo-Hawk 2007: 116).
We could add that ‘race’, as Echo-Hawk uses the word, also turned Pawnee histories into ‘prehistory’. The process is particularly relevant to Pawnee, because it was in their territory that Waldo Wedel (1936) and W. Duncan Strong (1940) carried out archaeological studies that they interpreted as ancestral Pawnee. Their ‘direct historical approach’ located Pawnee village sites prior to their 1875 removal to Oklahoma Territory, researched archives of European explorers’, missionaries’, and traders’ documents to identify preceding locations. They surface-collected and excavated targeted sites and classified recovered artefacts. Strong premised that stratigraphic sequences of continuous series of closely similar artefacts, or series showing modification within a recognizable style, are proxy for historical chronicles. The method seemed to work reasonably well for dubbing occupations Pawnee on the basis of imperishable material culture, as far back as about the fourteenth century.
Discontinuities appeared in the stratigraphies at about that time. Earlier sites received straight ‘archaeological culture’ labels, such as Central Plains Tradition-Initial Coalescent (Johnson 1998; see also Krause 1998: 72-3). Neither Strong nor Wedel spoke Pawnee or lived among contemporary Pawnee people. In effect, they essentialized Pawnee to be a discrete multi-village tribe (US official term) evolved out of a widespread cultural adaptation by Late Woodland Indians to the agricultural and hunting resources of central plains river valleys. Strong also sought a historical parallel for the Pawnees with their linguistic relatives the Arikara, the northernmost Caddoan speakers on the plains. Such tribalization is, like race, a European social construction and projection. It incorporates the concept of a ‘chief’ entitled to make treaties with nation-states like Great Britain and the United States. Tribes are presumed to have histories just as European nations have histories. Ergo, they have pre-histories, as do European nations, with a critical difference that the mists of antiquity close in on American Indians’ pasts much more recently than on Europeans’ pasts.
2.7 CONCLUSION
While during the 1840s the term prehistoire was applied in France by Boucher de Perthes to crude stone hand-axes deep in the gravels of the Somme Valley, Daniel Wilson transliterated the word, applying it to a Scots nationalist ideology. His critical reordering of the collections of the
Society of Antiquaries of Scotland was titled The Archaeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland. Unlike the antediluvian artefacts of Boucher de Perthes’s stone hand-axes from an ancient race, Wilson’s were to be seen as early documents in the chronicles of Scotland’s history. The context was assertion of Scotland’s nationhood against England’s domination since 1707. At the same time that Wilson and his patron Robert Chambers brought their country’s antiquities into the service of their nationalism, Wilson’s brother George and Robert and his brother William led the building of the National Museum of Scotland, making it scientifically superior to the British Museum in London (Kehoe 1998: 30). Archaeology demonstrated annals of Scots history independent of Roman invasions, a chronicle of a strong hardy race surviving in the cold north.
Wilson’s emigration to Canada gave him opportunity to observe a parallel race in America’s north. Contrary to ‘southerners’ Lubbock, Morgan, and the Smithsonian’s J. W. Powell, Wilson did not accept unilinear human cultural evolution. Instead, he (like Chambers) saw multilinear evolution with many geographic races achieving civilizations. Canoeing with Anishinaabeg in western Ontario, Wilson respected their knowledge and skills. Prehistory for English speakers in the 1860s could be conceptualized, as Wilson did, as the earlier annals of contemporary nations or races (the terms were more or less synonymous then), or as Lubbock did, dichotomizing the colonized against civilization.
Liberal as Wilson was, contrasted with Lubbock, Morgan, and Powell, they all accepted the concept that human populations are races, analogous to subspecies in biological taxonomy. Species and races were described from type specimens; variations from type were considered either insignificant or likely deleterious (Mayr 1982: 263-4). A subsequent paradigm revolution quoted Stephen Jay Gould: ‘If variability isn’t clearly a character of a species, then I don’t know what is’ (Gould 2002: 665). After the end of Anglo wars against American First Nations, governmental bureaucracies reorganized them as tribes (bands in Canada). Censuses counted and listed the Indian persons on a particular reservation during census week and created the roll of members of the tribe assigned to that reservation. Through this process, ‘Pawnee’ officially became a Tribe of Indians. Nebraska businessman Asa T. Hill (1871-1953) recognized ‘the’ Pawnee as Nebraska’s original residents, determined the location of a major Pawnee village documented in 1806, excavated earth lodges in the site, and had graduate student Waldo Wedel write up the work, published as Introduction to Pawnee Archeology (1936). Most of the sites are identified from nineteenth-century documents, with two considered protohistoric but not prehistoric. Prehistoric sites, lacking any European or settler artefacts or features, are described in other publications (Wedel 1936: 24). The direct historic approach applied by careful scientists Wedel and Strong thus heavily weighed Pawnee history towards early nineteenth-century documented villages, letting the tribe’s prehistory fade within a few centuries and its oral histories be categorized as legends and myths.
What is implicit and unexamined in discourse will lie within the realm of hegemony. Thomsen in Denmark and Chambers and Wilson in Scotland constructed nationalist arguments challenging the hegemony of more powerful imperialists—Napoleon and England—that located their Whig histories within the Roman domain. (Both Denmark and Scotland were north of the Roman limes.) Sir John Lubbock upheld English imperial domination by dichotomizing pre-history from British Whig history, equating pre-history with savages. Anglo hegemony in North America incorporated Lubbock’s version of pre-history, making American archaeology an exercise in uncovering evidence of a savage way of life, ‘foraging’ in Binfordian discourse. Postcolonial archaeologies fight this nineteenth-century racism.
Archaeology is, rhetorically, metonymy (Graves 2005: 195-6, 237-8; see Schmidt 2010b). The residue of human behaviour that we excavate stands for the whole of human lives at the site. Lubbock’s paradigm of pre-history reduces it further, making the singular trope savage stand for the vast panorama of past lives, for example, when Johnson and Earle reduce Northwest Coast noble houses and their fiefdoms to ‘family-level foragers’ (Johnson and Earle 2000). Daniel Wilson’s paradigm of prehistory as annals better fits today’s interest in agency and other individualizing points of view. It could open Pawnee archaeology to reflect Skiri, Chawi, Kitkahahki, and Pitahawirata, their several histories and transient, permeable boundaries. It could help archaeologists understand why Roger Echo-Hawk will not be an Indian anymore.
World History
