10.1 INTRODUCTION: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY AND NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY
In this chapter, I make a case for the need to continue to develop a historical anthropology in studies of the colonial-era Chesapeake region of North America. This historical anthropology must blur the boundary between history and prehistory, while acknowledging that the events of the colonial encounter are still felt in very tangible ways today by Native Americans. This historical anthropology is envisioned as one that encompasses and blends archaeology, ethnohistory, oral history, oral tradition, and contemporary indigenous perspectives. It is important to stress the last three forms of knowledge, as a century or more has passed since anthropologists virtually abandoned the collection of tribal oral histories and oral traditions in the belief that no such ‘accurate’ knowledge existed, and that learning about the past from a native perspective was to let the present speak for the past uncritically (see Lowie 1915). Native people also kept indigenous historical knowledge within the tribes, something that has also only recently begun to change in the region (Custalow and Daniel 2007; Vest 1992, 2003). In the Chesapeake region of the eastern United States, it has been my experience that considering each of those sources provides a richer long-term anthropological history, one that enlarges our understanding of cultural processes, political action, and cultural encounters in the region’s past and present.
These varied sources can be consistent with one another or they can be contradictory with one another. I take the position that both encourage critical engagement and enrich interpretative possibilities. It is the indigenous perspectives brought to archaeological interpretation by the ‘quiet revolution’ (Smith 2007: 35) that are the most challenging and exciting, if for no other reason than that they are often inconsistent with prior archaeological writing or colonial texts. Historical anthropology acknowledges that indigenous perspectives are not unchanging, deflating a common critique of any use of contemporary indigenous histories or perspectives (see also Gould, Mrozowski, this volume). But it is equally well understood that the goals and methods of a positivist historical anthropology are ever-changing as well. The well-debated concerns over methods and standards regarding the use of oral tradition provide a worthwhile caution, but the testing of such perspectives for their supposed accuracy should not be the principal goal of anthropological history (see also Kehoe, Schmidt, Walz, this volume). Whatever the changes in ‘traditions’ may have been over centuries, native people bring different questions and different ideas about space, landscape, and the cosmos that most non-native historians and archaeologists would otherwise not have thought to ask or think about. They add new paths towards knowing the past, rather than restricting it to Western scientific and traditional historiography protocols.
This type of historical anthropology, informed by oral history, tradition, and contemporary insights, functions at multiple levels of interpretation in time and space. Spatially, this perspective at its fullest allows a focus on one place or even the individual actor, and embeds those in broader socio-political constructs from the social sciences (e. g., the site and regional systems) as well as indigenous ideas of landscape and place (see also Aguilar and Preucel, this volume). Temporally, this perspective, at its fullest, forces archaeologists to look at historical processes and events to take into account how time is perceived and remembered differently—a not insignificant factor in understanding the meaning of events typically framed in linear, Western notions of time (see also Rizvi, this volume).
I will discuss here a historical anthropology of the Chesapeake region with an eye towards two dimensions of archaeological sites. One I call ‘sites in history’; the other is ‘history in sites’. The former states the obvious—archaeological sites are places in linear time, denoted by absolute dating methods or less rigorous and often non-replicable frameworks created by artefact typologies. But indigenous perspectives gleaned from archaeology, ethnohistoric texts, and contemporary collaboration have taught me that sites also embody and create history, bring history to life, and imbue past events and processes in a household, a town, a landscape. These places of the ancestors convey both power and authority because of historically constructed internal site landscapes (see Schmidt 2006, 2010d; Aguilar and Preucel, this volume). These are the places that I describe with the phrase history in sites. The phrasing intentionally evokes the influence of R. G. Collingwood and Marshall Sahlins in two classic but very different texts concerned with the writing of history (general) and histories (specific).
In The Idea of History, Collingwood (1972: 213) noted that the method of the historian makes a distinction between the outside and the inside of an event. The former refers to the context in which an action took place and the latter to the thoughts that drove the action. Collingwood emphasized that human action is found and understood only in the ‘unity of the outside and the inside of the event’, adding, ‘the historian must always remember that the event was an action, and that his main task is to think himself into this action, to discern the thought of its agent’ (1946: 213).
Anthropologists will see a parallel to the phrasing in Sahlins’s Islands of History (1985). There, and in other writings, anthropologists were encouraged to examine the structure of the conjuncture—the meeting of long-term histories and indigenous non-Western world-views with the exigencies of the events of European colonial expansion. Sahlins later referred to these as structures ‘of and in’ history. When narrated by the anthropological historian, they ‘not only feature individual and collective agency, respectively, they also contrast kinds of historical change. There are structures of and in history. It’s not all tricks the living play on the dead’ (Sahlins 2004: 127).
In an archaeological perspective, the conjuncture of the inside and the outside, the structure and the event, of history and in history, can be literally found by examining (traditionally) sites in history with the thoughts inferred from the history in sites. Both are necessary and will bring indigenous world-views into our understanding of events and processes while staying within a recognizable frame of Western time and space systematics. This model of site interpretation makes no distinction between ‘prehistoric’ or ‘historic’ eras. These arbitrary temporal units are examined in conjunction with other sources of insight, such as oral traditions or indigenous ideas of power and authority, affected in the same way by the linear flow of historical events but understood in multiple ideologies.
The inside of the event (thought), and the structure of the conjuncture (native actions), have been elusive in Chesapeake archaeology. Such concepts force open the tensions over scientific methods versus historical methods and ‘true’ history versus the Western empirical definition of myths, often encouraged by anthropologists, in which myths are presumed to be moral guideposts or vague historical metaphors, but with no necessary connection to historical events or processes. These debates are well known in the academic career of indigenous studies in North America and have been contentiously argued in fits and starts since the late nineteenth century. Most critically, the rejection of modern voices concerning historic action left the discussion of deep time to the archaeologist alone, working in the absence of indigenous knowledge. It also cemented the divide that would define twentieth-century anthropological approaches to studying the prehistoric and the contemporary. The history of polarized discussion regarding the inclusion of indigenous perspectives in anthropological interpretation of the archaeological past is reviewed in the section below. A middle ground has been hard to find. However, in reviewing this literature, I found perhaps the clearest resolution in a nearly century-old classic, Edward Sapir’s Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture (1916).
10.2 HISTORY/ORAL HISTORY DEBATES AND SAPIR’S MESSAGE: LISTEN TO THE TESTIMONY
Kehoe (1998), Whiteley (2002), and Mason (2008) have provided comprehensive summaries and contemporary reflections on the North American debate concerning the relationship of oral history to ‘scientific’ history, and the value of indigenous traditions and histories to archaeological interpretation. These authors by no means agree with one another. The roots of disagreement generally are found as far back as Edward Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871). In this foundational work for all anthropology, Tylor made clear that there is much to value in the myths and oral traditions of ‘primitive’ people, even though he draws a distinction between myth and history (Mason 2008: 245-6).
This distinction and the arguments over the veracity and accuracy of oral traditions are evoked today in North America more actively than they have been any time since the early twentieth century. This is clearly a product of the three-decade-old post-processual critique and, more specifically, the interest in and openness to multivocal histories (Ferguson and Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2006), the politics of indigenous rights and claims to ownership of tribal histories and material culture (Hantman 2008; McGhee 2008; Silliman 2010), and the greater interest in ritual and religious practice in archaeological interpretation of past native societies (Howey and O’Shea 2006). There is a hyper-critical and fearful tone to some involved in this debate, especially in McGhee (2008) and Mason (2000, 2008). These authors criticize indigenous archaeology in unveiled suggestions that listening to oral history, tradition, and myth as a path to new insights into the archaeological past is naively supporting a presentist political course of action, and thereby undoing the perceived objective historical science of anthropology. As others in this volume discuss here and elsewhere (see Schmidt and Walz 2007a), this is hardly unique to North America, as seen most recently in the point-counterpoint debate between Horsthemke (2008) and Green (2008) from the Universities of Witwatersrand and Cape Town, respectively.
North American archaeology was enmeshed in this debate almost anew in the first decade of the twenty-first century, following nearly a century of rejecting the tenet that indigenous history should be heard as history. It seems incredible that there hasn’t been an ongoing conversation since the birth of anthropology on the American continent, but there has not. Instead, archaeologists (and anthropologists) followed the lead of Robert Lowie (1915) when he famously dismissed Swanton and Dixon’s (1914) overview of American Indian history informed by tribal oral traditions with the phrase: ‘the primitive tribes I know have no historical sense’. This brief but powerful exchange took place in the pages of American Anthropologist, the lead journal of a still small and evolving discipline. Goldenweisser (1915) rebutted Lowie but to little obvious effect in the writing of archaeologists.
A half-century and more went by with little change—anthropologists and archaeologists were not listening critically to the oral traditions and histories of American Indians regarding their ancestors. It was argued that their lives had been transformed to too great an extent by European colonialism, that their ancestral landscapes had been transformed through relocation and the reservation system, and that missionaries and the federal government had taken away indigenous language, religion, and ritual practice. As such, little (if any) accurate history could be discerned from contemporary Indian people. Ethnographic analogy had its uses in the new archaeology, but the ethnographies and archaeological testing of those analogies were all created by anthropologists, not indigenous people. Ethnoarchaeologists listened to contemporary indigenous craftspeople and offered valuable critiques of certain assumptions of the ‘new archaeology’ (Stanislawski 1969), but little ethnoarchaeology was conducted in North America, and certainly not in the eastern United States where ‘authentic’ Indians were thought to have disappeared (see also Gould, this volume).
In 1969, Fontana urged American ethnohistorians to follow Africanist historian Jan Vansina’s (1965) methodology articulated in Oral
Tradition, but this did not happen in ethnohistory or archaeology. Africanists moved forward and invested considerable effort in oral history, acting as harbingers who were not forced by law or outside critiques (Schmidt 2006). Attention to oral history and oral traditions in North America only began to be taken seriously by archaeologists as a guide to a native understanding of sites and landscapes when federal law and the empowering of preservation in tribal governments forced this long overdue development. Ferguson (e. g., 1996b), Echo Hawk (2000), and Watkins (2005) led the way, only to be strongly rebuked in the literature (McGhee 2008; Mason 2000) and in federal courtrooms, as in the debate over the historical claims to the Kennewick skeleton.
One can become dizzy studying this sporadic but long-term intellectual exchange. It was Robert Lowie who emphatically declared, ‘I cannot attach to oral traditions any historical value whatsoever, under any conditions whatsoever’ (1915: 598). The generation of Lowie, the students of Boas, took off in this direction throughout the middle of the twentieth century, including legendary four-field scholars such as Alfred Kroeber. In writing a past for North American Indians, oral histories were seen to be impossible to obtain or of little value (see Lightfoot 2005: 31-48 on Kroeber). Yet, in an interview published in Ethnohistory, when asked which American anthropologists had an impact on him, Vansina answered that Lowie and Kroeber specifically ‘had influenced my thought’ (Whitehead 1995: 306). There are no good guys and bad guys here—history versus anthropology, historical archaeology versus prehistorians—it has never been simple but it has been crippling, especially to those who sought the inclusion of indigenous perspectives.
One legendary figure of that first generation of Boas’s students may have provided a simple model of resolution, someone I turn to now in my own work. In 1916, Edward Sapir published Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture. Archaeologists at the prehistory/history divide, which we hope to erase in this volume, could still do well to follow his guidelines. In developing a protocol of methods in the production of time perspectives, Sapir (1916: 5-10) wrote:
(1) look critically at the documentary evidence, as they are a record of change;
(2) listen to native testimonies, and do not easily make light of them; and
(3) ‘listen’ to the ‘stratified archaeological testimony’.
At a time when Lowie and Swanton were at odds over the value of native testimony, Sapir charged us with an anthropological method in which ‘ethnologic and archaeological data should form a cultural continuum [that] few would now venture to deny’ (1916: 10). Such a continuum then and now encourages the merger of indigenous, ethnographic, and archaeological knowledge. It also forms the cultural continuum that erases the prehistory/history divide and the history/myth/oral tradition divide. Writing a historical anthropology of the Chesapeake world requires these protocols in putting sites in history and history in sites. Listening may be the hardest part for archaeologists. It is the urgent need of the moment in the Chesapeake if not throughout the eastern United States (see also Gould, this volume).
Listening to native testimony may be the hardest challenge for academic archaeologists in the Chesapeake for all too familiar reasons. First is the perception that Indians and their authentic oral traditions disappeared from the region long ago. Forced removal, Christian missionary churches and schools, intermarriage, racial identity policies, and racism all fostered the image of the disappearing Indian. It is hard to dismiss those factors or the perception of the disappearing Indian in the Chesapeake region, given how real and precipitous the impact of the population decline was, uniquely so in Virginia (see Wood 1989). It is hard to dismiss those factors except for the undeniable fact that Indian communities persisted and are now recognized by the State of Virginia. Frank Speck (1925, 1928) studied Virginia Indian people in search of the authentic, but until recently few other anthropologists in any generation have done the same.
Native people have begun to publish their own oral histories (Custalow and Daniel 2007; Vest 1992, 2003). It must be remembered, though, that oral history and oral traditions that relate directly to specific archaeological sites are uncommon or have not been shared. But this is not a reason to disconnect sites from the present-day descendants of those who created the sites (Mason 2008: 149). Such a negative argument echoes that which was made perniciously for centuries throughout the eastern United States invoking a culture of mound-builders who had no connection to the Indians who were then living nearby. This justified the perception of a terra nullius, empty land or land occupied by recent ‘barbarous’ invaders open for taking and civilizing (see also Kehoe, this volume). Examples of collaboration in archaeological studies in the eastern United States are certainly growing (Adkins 2009; Gallivan 2009; Kerber 2006; Rubertone 2000). But listening to contemporary historical testimony, testimony not necessarily concerned with specific archaeological sites but with a historical world-view and landscape, has been a path rarely taken in the Chesapeake region.
10.3 MONACAN ORAL TRADITIONS
A few examples may help explain how today we can listen and not take the testimonies lightly, even in the vastly transformed native landscape of the eastern United States. I have selected examples of contemporary indigenous knowledge about historical process and place that have had an impact on how I write Indian history. This knowledge is not about land ownership, tribal boundaries, contemporary politics, or claims on material culture and repatriation, all of which seem to be at the heart of much of the controversy still teeming in American archaeology over the value of native oral traditions. The points I describe here are instead ways of thinking that would not have occurred to me from the training I had in anthropological archaeology or my own cultural experience. They are recognizably non-Western ways of understanding and ways of thinking and ways of seeing that are indigenous even if not necessarily attributed to a single people, language group, or nation. And, of course, they are not presumed to be timeless and unchanging. The ideas were shared by my contemporaries in a modern world, a world we shared and yet one in which certain ways of knowing, of reckoning time, of seeing a landscape, were profoundly different. The ideas shared by Monacan people with me are pieces of the quiet revolution that is indigenous archaeology.
The first example concerns ideas of time, time that creates historical distance. In Western time, some events are marked as closer to the present than others on a linear scale, and all events (particularly in archaeological reconstructions) must first be placed ‘in time’. Western ideas of time as history also include the hope that lessons for the present and the future will be learned from the study of the past—in belief if not in practice. Isn’t that one sine qua non of the study of history and archaeology? In my first meeting with the Monacan Indian people of Virginia, I was dissuaded of both notions. I had been invited to share my early work on Monacan archaeology at the time of English colonization, a story in which I argued the Monacans deserved a bigger role than had been given them in history texts.
There was modest interest in the Jamestown-era story I was telling, but more interest was shown seeking an answer to ‘where did we go from there?’ That question, which I could not answer at the time, anticipated Silliman’s (2005) appropriate call for archaeologists to focus on archaeology beyond the contact era. I then talked about events of the 1920s eugenics era when deplorable racist state policies targeted the Monacan community. I expressed hope that archaeology and greater public awareness of the Monacans over a long term would help undo the effects of decades and centuries of scientific racism and ensure that they would never happen again. The mood in the room turned cold and I wrapped up my talk. I soon learned from my Monacan host and earliest mentor Phyllis Hicks that I had broken an unstated taboo by speaking the names of state bureaucrats from the 1920s who brought eugenics and its impacts to this small mountain community. Those people are gone now, but speaking their names brings them back to life. I asked if it didn’t matter that the events mentioned in my talk were so long ago. ‘No,’ several said, ‘neither 1607 nor 1924 seem long ago to us—we feel those events every day and they are neither recent nor ancient, they are history and they are in the present.’
I was struck by the very tangible anger over the events of the colonial era, although few details were discussed, and the distinctly non-Western reaction to the study of history in the twentieth century. I was in a community that I had been told had been assimilated, but on these matters of history the reactions I heard were non-Western. This is not shocking, as it illuminates the power of the ancestors, the generations, to pass down a world-view that was very different to the dominant European world-view that surrounded the community.
A second example conveys in a very specific way how the landscape of an archaeological site can be seen in very different ways. In 1999, I received word of a development that was planned in the floodplain of the Rivanna River, a part of the Monacan ancestral homeland and at a location just across the river from where most scholars agree a burial mound was excavated by Thomas Jefferson in 1784. The development would likely disturb the early colonial-era Monacan town called Mon-asukapanough but would stay on the north side of the river and not endanger the mound location (Pellerin 2001). In collaboration with the Monacan Tribal Council, plans were made to study the town site. The Monacan people wanted a ritual blessing of Monasukapanough prior to disturbance by excavation, a ceremony that was open to the public and covered by local media. Monacan ritual leaders spoke and I said a few words about our plans for limited excavation at the town site. I repeatedly stressed that I would limit study to the north side of the river—the town site. I would not, under any circumstances, disturb the other site, the mound site, on the south side of the river.
I hoped that respect had been shown to the Monacans and their ancestors and was pleased that a study of a colonial-era chief’s village was of interest to the tribe. But, at the end of the day, in private conversation, one of the Monacan ritual leaders took me aside. He said he didn’t want to embarrass me with the media around but now he could say: ‘Why do you keep talking about this side or that side of the river as two separate places? Don’t you realize that the river is the heart of the
Village? You want to see the river as dividing the town from the mound, but we don’t.’ Where I saw a recently deeply entrenched channel that today is not easy to cross, my Monacan collaborators knew it was not always that way and that the river had united the people of the town with their ancestors in the mound. It was one place, one sacred place, and needed to be understood that way. I had failed to see it. The river was the heart of the village, and I never forgot that lesson in landscape and sacred places where history is in the site, a lesson I apply later in this chapter to archaeological research.
A third example is one I have discussed in a prior publication (Hantman 2004). I mention it here because the ideas that were shared with me by Monacan people—Tribal Council members in this case— challenge some assumptions about inherent antagonisms between Indians and archaeologists and turn them upside down. In a meeting concerned with repatriation of human remains excavated in the early twentieth century by a private museum, my role was to facilitate reburial. But, having worked with the Monacan Tribal Council on several occasions concerning repatriation of human remains and artefact collections where some study was desired, I asked if the Council was open to respectful, short-term bioarchaeological study to provide comparative data for prior studies we had done collaboratively (Gold 2004). That idea was rejected, and I pushed no further. Just as my time at the podium was ending, one of the Council members asked if I knew about the practice of facial reconstruction. He had seen images of a colonist recovered at Jamestown whose face had been reconstructed, a face very much in the media at that time. With all the paintings, portraits, and drawings of seventeenth-century English men, why was this happening, he asked. Why do we not see the faces of Indian people?
I answered by questioning the accuracy of such reconstructions and suggested that they were really more an art than a science. I quickly saw that this was a distinction rejected by my hosts. I learned that night that no Monacan had seen an image of their ancestors that was older than a 1914 wedding photographic portrait. While colonist and naturalist John White painted detailed watercolours of coastal Algonquian people living near the Roanoke Colony in 1585, such images were not made of the people living in the interior. My reply concerned the scientific issues surrounding the veracity of facial reconstructions. I was cut short with a rhetorical question: ‘Do you know what it’s like to have no pictures, no paintings, no images of your people, of your ancestors? If it is possible we would like to do that with facial reconstruction.’ A year or so later, the faces of a Monacan man and woman who had lived in the Virginia interior during the fifteenth century were featured in the Monacan
Ancestral Museum as well as in Archaeology magazine (Hantman et al. 2000).
The Tribal Council had made both a political point about not being marginalized from the power of such images, and a humanistic point, wanting to look into the faces of the ancestors to whom they felt a connection. Where I had been interested in possibly obtaining samples for DNA and stable isotope studies among other bioarchaeological interests, the Monacans saw the remains as an opportunity to make a unique human connection with the past, appropriating a method developed at the boundary of art and science, and interpreting it on their own terms. By listening, I learned how much a humanistic approach can influence the archaeology we practise.
In each of these instances, a sample among many, I did not ask, then or now, if these were uniquely Monacan perspectives or if this was somehow verifiable ancient knowledge. I did not ask if the insights were true and distinctive to the cultural traditions of the people whose history I was studying. My research was not intended to test such insights in that way. The insights, the lessons learned, were not prompted. They were freely offered as lessons and had a weight to them that I could not deny. I only know that I learned a new way of thinking from my Monacan teachers that led me to question profound concepts that had always rested at the heart of my own archaeological research.
While the stories may read as small vignettes here, these are large concepts that include ways of thinking about time, landscape, humanistic approaches to archaeology, the relevance of the past to the present, and the place of contemporary politics in affecting both the continuation and the invention or reinvention of traditions (making them no less valid a concern). As archaeologists work or struggle to blur the analytical boundary between prehistoric archaeology and historic archaeology, one cannot help but see that the boundary between history and prehistory was not a Monacan temporal marker; no differential weight was given to either side of the supposed divide based on the nature of the historiographic sources used. In the Monacan museum, the faces of two individuals from the fifteenth century sit alongside a wedding portrait from 1914, and the colonial assault against the Monacans in 1607 is as real and felt as those of the 1920s eugenics era. Even if not stated, the Monacan narrative is one of continuity through this time, a continuity of structures in the context of changing events. The landscape of the village, the unity of town and mound and the river, and the people and their ancestors were felt and as pertinent today as in the past. Such perspectives were not and are still not learned in Virginia public schools, and they were not learned in the century-old local mission church and school. In history-obsessed Virginia, there was an alternative Native American world-view to be heard. These perspectives were learned and now shared, following Sapir (1916), by listening to native testimony and giving it the weight it deserved. I next turn to how these perspectives inform how archaeological testimonies might be re-represented.
Few regions in North America have seen as great a focus on the historical archaeology of the earliest era of European colonization as has the Chesapeake Bay watershed of the eastern United States. Some of this work defines the discipline of historical archaeology itself in its long development in North America. From Jamestown (Kelso 2006) to Flow-erdew Hundred (Deetz 1993, 1998) to St. Mary’s City (King and Chaney 2004), the seventeenth-century world and world-view of European colonists has been revealed by an anthropologically influenced generation of historical archaeologists (Deetz 1998; Kelso 2006). Historical archaeologists examined the far ends of an economic spectrum—from the development of local industries for largely local consumption (Cotter and Jelks 1957) to the participation of early European colonists in global markets (Kelso 2006). And historical archaeologists studied the changing lives of the first generations of Africans and African Americans in the changing landscape of the plantation (Kelso 1984; Singleton 2005; Yentsch 1994).
Until very recently, this archaeology has been reported in a cultural geography nearly devoid of Native Americans before and after the years ofinitial contact. Ethnohistoric documents dating to the immediate years of contact have been studied critically by archaeologists, but an ethno-history or published indigenous history of Native Americans in the Chesapeake is relatively silent after the departure of John Smith from the region in 1610 (Rountree 1990 is one key exception). A long-term history, one that transcended prehistory and history boundaries, was absent. Archaeologists in the region were assigned to one or another ‘camp’—prehistorian (meaning Native American archaeology, sites, and material culture)—or historical archaeologist (meaning Euro-American archaeology, sites, and material culture). Situating native polities and politics in time and space in a world beyond the Jamestown event was rarely attempted. Yet, that long-term view provides a necessary context for the actions of all the actors who were in the Chesapeake in 1607 and beyond. Sapir instructed us to look to the documentary history, look to the native testimony, and listen to the stratified archaeological testimony. Historic and prehistoric archaeologists (by traditional labels) have overrelied on the first, ignored the possibility of the second, and only recently approached the third in the context of an Indian-centric historical archaeology.
I now want to emphasize developments in the field that break down the boundary between prehistory and history and open up to the importance of the long term and the regional. First, I discuss briefly changes in the way we understand sites in history, the supposedly objective chronological placement of sites and people that could blur the temporal boundary, but instead build a wall between precolonial and colonial eras. Second, I will discuss history in sites, or what I consider attempts to write an indigenous archaeology of the Chesapeake. While discussing history in sites, I will explore indigenous ideas of time, history, power, and materiality, noting how archaeological sites can, indeed, provide a native testimony in their stratigraphy. Typologies and date assignments to known types have been crippling to the hope that the boundary between prehistory and history in the Chesapeake would fall.
The temporal and cultural boundaries we place on artefacts create a very real silent period, seven years in length. That sounds absurd in archaeological terms, but seven years is an impenetrable wall. It works like this: archaeological types for temporally sensitive Native American projectile points and pottery have an end date of 1600 ad (see also Gould, this volume). One frequently finds references in the literature to a particular artefact type with an end production date of 1600 ad, even when it is reported in contexts that were constructed at least seven years later. Accepting these silent or empty seven years, the end of Native American artefact production and the dated 1607 settlement of Jamestown creates a theoretical empty space that the colonists inhabited as well as the capacity to largely ignore Indians in the study of early European colonists. Colonial settlements were frequently placed in areas just recently cleared by indigenous people (Potter and Waselkov 1994), so it is logical to ask where those displaced people went. But few have done so. So, even as Indian trade goods are recognized and acknowledged in early colonial sites, the people—those making stone arrow points, shooting those arrow points, and creating the objects that were part of the trade—are not kept alive by historical archaeology. They are ethereal, they are displaced, and then they very easily disappear from the story, from the history. Our most basic methodological tools, artefact typologies, and the date ranges we placed on them make this possible.
Unlike the category above, history in sites is found in places that immerse an individual or a collective in the sacred, mythical, and political past and merge it with the present (see also Aguilar and Preucel, Lane, Schmidt, this volume). The place has and confers knowledge and power, and transforms those who occupy it. In this context, I look at two places in the greater Chesapeake world: Monasukapanough, a Monacan town on the Rivanna River in the central Virginia Piedmont (Hantman
Fig. 10.1. Location of Monacan and Powhatan territories in the Virginia/Chesa-peake region. Arrows point to Monasukapanough (Monacan) Werowocomoco (Powhatan) ‘king’s howses’ discussed in text
2001) and Werowocomoco, a Powhatan town on the York River in Eastern Virginia (Gallivan 2007) (Fig. 10.1).
A few insights drawn from the ethnohistoric record denote these places for archaeologists and for indigenous people interested in writing the histories of the Powhatan and Monacan peoples. Both places were marked as ‘King’s Howses’ on Jamestown colonist John Smith’s 1612 Map of Virginia (Barbour 1986). Archaeologists and ethnohistorians generally agree that the King’s Howse reference denotes a chiefly residence. There are nine identified king’s howses in the Monacan territory of the Virginia interior—a low number compared to the coastal plain but a large number when it is remembered that John Smith never travelled into the interior. These were places he was told about.
One hundred and twenty miles to the west of the Jamestown colony, the Monacan town of Monasukapanough was marked with a king’s howse icon on John Smith’s map. Colonial texts supplement and enhance our understanding of the early colonial map. It is here that Jefferson’s (1982 [1787]) study of a large burial mound located on the Rivanna River took place. It is this mound that was part of the same sacred place as the king’s howse of Monasukapanough—even though a river flows between them. As mentioned before, the mound and the town are one sacred place, and while excavations focused on the town, I accept that one must understand the ancestral mounds to understand the king’s howse. Jefferson noted that the mound sat ‘opposite to some hills on which had been an Indian town’ (1982 [1787]: 98), and this reference to a town suggests there were visible ruins of this place as recently as the early eighteenth century. He did not note ‘Indian towns’ in any of his other writing or surveying.
The mound on the Rivanna River, a part of the Monacan chiefly town, contained over 1,000 individuals (Gold 2004; Jefferson 1982 [1787]). The mound had been built up accretionally over centuries, with multiple episodes of secondary bundle burial such that the mound became visible over time as a monument on the landscape. This mound is part of a complex of thirteen accretional burial mounds located in a restricted area of the Piedmont and Mountain regions of Virginia (Gold 2004). The Virginia Piedmont mounds are distinct from Mississippian platform and burial mounds, which can be found in southwest Virginia, western North Carolina, and eastern Tennessee. In the mound, burial features each contained between twenty and thirty-two persons. At the mound studied by Jefferson and the nearby Rapidan Mound, as many as 1,000-2,000 individuals (respectively) were interred (Gold 2004), an unusually high figure for any burial site in the eastern United States. The mounds generally have few artefacts associated with them.
Surprisingly for this location, several years of limited test excavations conducted by myself and graduate students from the University of Virginia revealed an occupation area with a remarkably low artefact density, just under seventy-five artefacts per cubic metre. Figure 10.2 depicts comparative artefact densities at other Late Woodland and Early contact period sites in the Chesapeake region that are not understood to be king’s howses. Monasukapanough is a town containing or associated with one of the largest burial mounds in the greater Chesapeake and Middle Atlantic region, but the density of material remains is strikingly small. Many geoarchaeological and cultural factors must be considered to make sense of this, not the least being the deposition of sterile flood deposits where this site is located thus reducing the raw measure of artefact density. Having acknowledged these conditions, there is very low materiality; at times, it is almost sterile.
In the Powhatan world there is a king’s howse noted for every polity that was integrated into the paramount chiefdom (Gallivan 2007; Rountree 1990). Werowocomoco was further distinguished among these in Smith’s extensive narratives of Powhatan life in the early seventeenth century as the home of the Mamanatowick (paramount chief) of
Artefact Densities at Towns
A. Potomac Creek town (within features/site total)
B. Werowocomoco residential town area (within features/site total)
C. Werowocomoco King’s House area (site total)
D. Partridge Creek town area (within features/site total)
E. Monasukapanough King’s House area (site total)
Fig. 10.2. Artefact densities at towns and ‘King’s Howses’ in the Virginia/Che-sapeake region. Potomac = Potomac Creek Site; Wero Res = Werowocomoco Residential town; Wero King = Werowocomoco King’s Howse area; Partridge = Partridge Creek (Monacan) town; Mona K. = Monasukapanough King’s Howse area. Densities are projected total artefacts per cubic metre from excavated features
Tsenacommacah (Powhatan’s world) (Gallivan 2007). At the time of English colonization, the Mamanatowick was Wahunsanacawh, also known as Powhatan. Feinman and Neitzel’s (1984) comparative study of leadership roles in non-state sedentary societies in the Americas identified Powhatan as the individual with the single greatest degree of centralized authority of any native leader in early colonial-era North America. What was the source of such authority? I draw on Martin Gallivan’s and Ashley Atkins’s interpretations of the site in answering this question, especially Gallivan (2007) and interpretations I collaborated on with them in a previous paper (Hantman et al. 2009).
Werowocomoco was occupied from at least the twelfth century to the early seventeenth century. Colonial texts have long been interpreted to suggest that tribute flowed from ‘ordinary howses’ to werowances (petty chiefs), to the Mamanatowick (paramount chief), and that ‘wealth finance’ constituted the primary basis of chiefly authority (Gallivan 2003, 2007; Rountree 1989; Turner 1985). Yet, indigenous history and oral tradition tell us that there is more to understanding the home of the Mamanatowick than can be captured in the movement of prestige or surplus wealth. Gallivan’s (2007) study of the chiefly town identified two parts to Werowocomoco. One was an area of high artefact density, close to the adjacent York River, the other a landscape of low artefact density enclosed by a series of shallow, concentric ditches that extended in two cases over 200 m. This area contained a large house, constructed early in the seventeenth century and presumably occupied by Powhatan. It is the ditches that draw our attention as they can be placed in history by radiocarbon dating to the thirteenth century. The history in and of that place can be inferred from the space marked off for centuries by the ditches. Landscape features set the king’s howse apart, and it is there that Chief Powhatan became one with a sacred history. We know that the man Powhatan was born in a different polity several decades before the English colonists arrived. It was in the first decade of the seventeenth century that Powhatan moved to Werowocomoco and assumed the power of the place as the Mamanatowick, or paramount chief.
I have been criticized in one published native oral history for suggesting that material goods, particularly non-local copper, were a source of Powhatan’s authority rather than his spirituality (Custalow and Daniel 2007: 51; Hantman 1990). Gallivan (2007: 93) found little evidence to suggest that Wahunsenacawh (Powhatan) ‘built his authority on a foundation of staple finance’ or the control there of prestige goods. Both ideas can be correct, but the native oral history allows us to escape the prehistory/history divide and a materialist reading of the ethnohistoric record. Power was in the place—the area within the ditches—marked before discernible prestige goods were brought there. A team of archaeologists from the College of William and Mary, state archaeologists, tribal archaeologists, and advisers from six coastal tribes interpreted Werowocomoco in terms of a biography of the place (i. e., history was in the place). Based on the native testimony and the testimony of the horizontal stratigraphy, we could re-ask the question posed earlier: What was the source of Powhatan’s authority? It seems clear that the best answer is that the history in the place known as Werowocomoco was that source.
These towns were, and still are, historically and politically important, even as the dimensions of how that importance is defined has changed or expanded. These two towns remain sacred places. Both towns are marked by a local landscape of internal differentiation: One town is most dramatically marked by the presence of ditches and the other by the presence of a burial mound. Classically, power has its ‘trappings’, its symbols of wealth and status and authority. At these two places unambiguously marked by colonial observers and indigenous histories as centres of power and authority, both individual and collective, we might have expected high densities of occupation debris and higher than average densities of prestige and wealth items. Just the opposite was found.
Handsman and Lamb Richmond (1995) discussed their efforts to document the presence of the Weantinock homeland in Connecticut, a landscape marked by the presence of many small dwellings, which, taken together, defined the homeland, but individually were almost invisible archaeologically. The materiality of these small towns was low. Parallels to the archaeology of the two king’s howses investigated in the homeland of the Monacan and Powhatan ancestors may be noted. A further parallel is seen in Kidder et al.’s (2008: 11) discussion of Mound A at Poverty Point: ‘There is no occupation debris associated with mound-top activities. . . [and] if we take the evidence literally, the function of the mound was to bury a natural wetland.’ Materiality, as written in artefact density, is not always the measure of the significance of a place. Blending indigenous oral history, critically reading ethnohistoric documents, and listening anew to the archaeological testimony offer vastly new perspectives on power and history in native places.
The immaterial power in these places is found in the landscape, in the ditches, and in the mound. The ditches do not create a physical barrier. They are not the repository for objects nor the physical evidence of extraordinary labour performed for the elites. Rather, they mark the space of the Mamanatowick, and they mark it as sacred and powerful. Most critically, that power is rooted in history and the ancestors. Ashley Atkins, a Pamunkey anthropologist who has worked on interpreting Werowocomoco, wrote that ‘power was not imbued in objects or necessarily even the person but in the relations between the leader and the place of power that was spiritually defined’ (Atkins in Hantman et al. 2009). Indigenous perspectives teach us a lesson about power being rooted in the society, in a place, and in a landscape, and not in the individual alone. The archaeological models of material things that stress trade, warfare, and political alliance building with the English are not therefore wrong. But the quiet evidence of the landscape features reverses the historical order of causality in the development of the colonial-era paramount chiefdoms.
The Monacan mound that is a part of Monasukapanough conveys a similar story. The immaterial power of the place is rooted in the centuries during which the ancestors were buried at that one place, even as the towns are small and hardly recognizable from artefact counts. Unlike most mounds elsewhere in the United States, this mound also had no artefacts associated with it. The materiality of the mound objectifies the power of place and the power of the ancestors. It would be an empty space eventually as the bones decayed. The materiality of the mound shrouds the power of the symbolic landscape created there, next to a king’s howse. In our collaborative paper with Atkins and Gallivan, Monacan anthropologist Karenne Wood wrote that ‘Indian people see the function of material objects in practical, aesthetic and spiritual terms. Objects of power, things and bones, are usually designed to “go back to the ground”, not to be preserved for generations. The absence of materiality in objects can be indicative of spiritual presence’ (quoted in Hantman et al. 2009). The mound on the river terrace and the ditches at Werowocomoco may be how the power of history, the immaterial, and the spiritual are seen on the indigenous landscape.
Sapir’s (1916) goal of almost a century ago was to construct a cultural continuum drawn from ethnologic and archaeological data by, again, critically reading documents, listening openly to native testimony, and studying the archaeological record. This strategy blurs any false distinction between prehistory and history. Most critically, as indigenous archaeology becomes a more common element of the native testimony and interpretation of archaeological sites, new insights into the past and present will continue to develop.40
World History
