In the Americas the purview of historical archaeology is the material record dating after the AD 1492 beginnings of the colonial period, and continuing to the present, through the period of independence of the New World colonies. From its beginnings in the first half of the twentieth-century historical archaeologists in North America have made frequent claims that they speak for the ‘wretched of the earth;’ the colonized rather than the colonizers. These claims are easily justified. Whether they claim explicitly Marxist theoretical ties or not, historical archaeologists can often agree that their study of material culture gives voice to a silent majority of people who are not well-represented in the written historical record, and who can be understood through the material remains they have left us in the ground (see Historical Archaeology: As a Discipline).
This led historical archaeologists into the anthropological literature on ethnicity and acculturation, and more recently into more explicitly Marxist ideas such as James Scott’s work on subtle forms of resistance. The issue of individual agency has come to the forefront in such discussions.
The foregrounding of the concept of human agency in archaeology in the last 10 years is partly a reaction to the New Archaeology of the 1960s, and its emphasis on systems. Archaeologists working from an agency approach have now taken this in the opposite direction, emphasizing the role of individual choice in the archaeological record. Several archaeological examples can be used to illustrate recent attempts to explore the relationship of people as agents to wider social structures through the daily activities of people in colonial situations.
World History
