Continuing the Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology

Two prominent archaeologists utilizing history in their archaeology offer thoughts on the essays and on the historical turn in Southeastern archaeology considering especially the themes of historical process, historical consciousness, and historical ontology

The Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology

Southeastern archaeologists increasingly use an historical approach to ask fresh questions and open up new ways of understanding the deep past of the Native South. Archaeologists now see that processes were certainly at play shaping the ancient past, but that it was also a product of long- and short-term events, people making choices, migration, coalescence, ethnogenesis, ideology, place making, memory constructs, contingency, and structures of the longue durée, among other things. In this introductory essay, the authors examine the historical turn in archaeology; explore how re-conceiving of the ancient past not as “prehistory” but “history” fundamentally reshapes our understanding of pre-colonial indigenous people; and iterate some of the fundamentals underlying this historical turn.

The Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology

The primary purpose of this edited volume is to formalize as a theory the historical turn in southeastern archaeology (and American archaeology) and provide a number of case studies illustrating the use of the theory in the region. In previous decades, archaeologists and other scholars studying what is commonly termed “prehistoric” America emphasized long-term, evolutionary change and adaptation, and archaeologists conceptualized pre-colonial societies like living organisms adapting to environmental challenges rather than as collections of people responding to historical trends and forces. The history of archaeology and the reasons for this conceptual frame are complex and deeply rooted in misconceptions about indigenous people as unchanging, static “people without history” who disappeared soon after Europeans arrived in North America. Today, however, archaeologists are combining evolutionary processes with a new understanding that so-called prehistory was also historical, contingent, and local, and historians are looking to the ancient past to better understand Indian societies of the historic era. In other words, scholars now understand that the historic and “prehistoric” eras were not categorically different and that people across this divide were subject to similar historical forces. This historicizing of prehistory represents a profound shift in our way of thinking about precolonial and colonial history and begins to erase the false divide between ancient America and colonial and even contemporary America.

An Unthinkable Loss

As climate change has become a global issue, it is important to assess its impacts on not only our modern day resources, but also our archaeological resources. An archaeological approach to climate change sheds light on themes of resilience, natural and cultural relationships, public outreach, social inequalities, and interdisciplinary perspectives (Hudson et al. 2012). In this paper, we organize fifteen archaeological and historical sites within the southeastern United States in a way that highlights their status regarding current climate change effects and their preservation needs. Tying these sites to these five themes, we show how consideration of southeastern archaeology can contribute to the global narrative on climate change.

The Context and Consequences of Sexual Harassment in Southeastern Archaeology

ABSTRACTIn 2014, the Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC) conducted a sexual harassment survey of its membership. The survey's goal was to investigate whether sexual harassment had occurred among its members, and if so, to document the rate and demographics of harassment. Our findings include a high (66%) level of harassment, primarily among women, with an additional 13% of respondents reporting sexual assault. This article provides an overview of the survey and responses. Additionally, we analyze survey data aimed at capturing change over time in harassment and assault, correlation between field and non-field tasks and harassment and assault, and correlation between gender of supervisor and harassment and assault. We also discuss the effects of harassment and assault on careers. We conclude with suggestions for decreasing the rate of harassment and assault and urge professional archaeological organizations to document sexual harassment and assault to mitigate the effects on their members and on the discipline as a whole.

The Everyday Archaeologist Matters

Archaeology has many goals, and those goals may differ depending on your theoretical paradigm. These aims vary from bringing order to an incomplete and imperfect record of people in the past, to distilling the actions of the past in order to understand not only cultural changes but also the reasons those change occurred, to synthesizing this information to predict human behavior through laws, and to using the past to better the future of humanity. Thinking about the everyday broadens perspectives, posits new questions, presents testable hypotheses, and, perhaps because it is measured on a shared scale, brings some level of consilience to southeastern archaeology. In this chapter, the authors discuss three opportunities for making archaeology relevant: writing palatably, scaling interactions, and engaging people with their past by bringing archaeology into their everyday lives.

Why the Archaeology of Everyday Matters?

This chapter functions as an introduction to the volume; it highlights previous, related work and argues why using the “everyday” as a guiding theme is useful. The idea of “everyday matters” has two meanings: either it can refer to daily concerns or events that are common and ordinary or it can demonstrate that actions which occur daily or “every day” are of significance, that such actions matter. Because, from an archaeological perspective, common concerns reveal something about the lives of the people we investigate, we propose that the archaeological record is formed on a daily basis. Thus, while fostering a degree of holism in archaeology, an everyday framework allows specialists to remain specialized. Used in a myriad of ways, this framework broadens perspectives; posits new questions; presents testable hypotheses; and, perhaps because it operates on a shared scale, brings some level of consilience to southeastern archaeology.