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| Dr. James Deetz, Master of the Parenthetical Comment |
One of the chief reasons I am here (and thus you are here) is my academic background. Way back yonder, I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in
Anthropology, Magna Cum Laude, from the
University of California, Berkeley. I learned about the (pre-)history of California, the great era of the
Maya, and even "
circumpolar" peoples like the
Inuit and the
Sami. But the class that set my course was
James Deetz' "Introduction to Historical Archaeology." This made sense, really, as I grew up on back roads and trails to
ghost towns of the
American West, from California's
49'er country to the high and lost in the
Colorado Rockies. Being in California, I could have focused on the
mission chain, all of which I have visited and which I studied a little while apprenticing at what was then still called the
Lowie Museum. Instead, my major adviser was
Kent Lighfoot, who was doing the archaeology of the oft-ignored
Russian impact on U.S. history and digging at its southernmost reach,
Fort Ross. He, in turn, had a grad student named
Aron Crowell, now director of the
Arctic Studies Center's Alaska office in Anchorage (Pauline, if ye ever by some truly odd chance run into Aron, say Lou from Berkeley remembers him fondly). And so I spent two adventurous, soggy, and life changing summers digging at
Three Saints Bay,
Kodiak Island, the first Russian American colony in North America. I then wrote my Honors Thesis, "Elderberry Wine and Other Necessities," which argued, based on a combination of
archaeobotanical evidence and local
ethnography, that, in the absence of
vodka, the Russians were distilling the local plants. I then endured a year of
grad school at the
University of Alaska, Fairbanks, before realizing that the discipline was veering down a road I didn't want to be on...more on this in a moment. All of this has, in a way, circled back with my interest in maritime culture and pirates, whether it be
shipwrecks or
Port Royal. So, after all that preamble/CV, I want to take a few minutes to discuss the field I love, which I may have left officially but still have dalliances with.
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| Fort Ross in 1828. Outside the wall were the homes of seal hunters brought all the way from the Aleutians, and where the archaeology has been focused. |
Naturally,
historical archaeology is defined in contrast to
prehistoric archaeology. Unfortunately, this distinction is troublesome. It might seem simple to say that the former implies the archaeology of
historical time, while the latter is the archaeology of people and places
before there was a historical record. The problem is that "history" as it is commonly perceived prioritizes
written history, but culture always has memory. Every culture has at least oral history. Many cultures will have some representational history--
Mayan glyphs, southwestern
pictograms, Plains
hide paintings--yet these are not, by most classifications, within the purview of historical archaeology. This also means that creating a numeric break from prehistory to history will vary from society to society and even from site to site. Thus, another distinction is often made between "pre-contact" and "post-contact"--that is, before and after the coming of European colonizers; the term "
Pre-Columbian," referring of course to Columbus, is often used to generalize pre-contact. "Contact" was in most cases a huge, and often catastrophic event for indigenous cultures. However, this distinction gives that moment premier priority, a distinction that might not be shared
by that culture. Do
Arawaks consider the coming of
Columbus the single most important event in their culture, the
Hawaiians the arrival of
Captain Cook, the
Powhatans the coming of
John Smith?
