The Routledge Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology

Charles E. Orser, Jr., Andres Zarankin, Pedro Funari, Susan Lawrence, James Symonds, Charles E. Orser, Jr., Andres Zarankin, Pedro Funari, Susan Lawrence, James Symonds, Jr. Orser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138704053
• eBook ISBN: 9781351786249
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology is a multi-authored compendium of articles on specific topics of interest to today's historical archaeologists, offering perspectives on the current state of research and collectively outlining future directions for the field.

The broad range of topics covered in this volume allows for specificity within individual chapters, while building to a cumulative overview of the field of historical archaeology as it stands, and where it could go next. Archaeological research is discussed in the context of current sociological concerns, different approaches and techniques are assessed, and potential advances are posited. This is a comprehensive treatment of the sub-discipline, engaging key contemporary debates, and providing a series of specially-commissioned geographical overviews to complement the more theoretical explorations.

This book is designed to offer a starting point for students who may wish to pursue particular topics in more depth, as well as for non-archaeologists who have an interest in historical archaeology. Archaeologists, historians, preservationists, and all scholars interested in the role historical archaeology plays in illuminating daily life during the past five centuries will find this volume engaging and enlightening.

1

Introduction

Charles E. Orser, Andrés Zarankin, Pedro Paulo A. Funari, Susan Lawrence, and James Symonds

Introduction

Historical archaeology has already proved its potential for the study of global archaeologies and the processes that created the modern world (Orser, 2002). From different perspectives and in several geographical locations, historical archaeologists have been able to shed light on social, economic, ideological, and ecological aspects of global expansion and the transformations of the basic structures which constitute the contemporary world. Archaeological analyses have focused on a myriad of concepts and subjects including various approaches to artifact studies, bioarchaeology, studies of capitalism, colonialism, and critical archaeologies of race, class, and gender in urban, rural, and a wide range of national and transnational settings. By way of orientation, information on the state of historical archaeology in North America at the end of the 20th century may be found in two useful review articles by Robert Paynter (2000a, 2000b).

Contributions to historical archaeology over the last 20 years or so have had a unique impact in shaping a worldwide definition of global historical archaeology. Charles Orser’s classic A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World (1996), along with his International Journal of Historical Archaeology (founded in 1997), together with several handbooks and encyclopedias (e.g. Encyclopaedia of Historical Archaeology C. Orser, ed. 2002, and the International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, T. Majewski and D. Gaimster, eds, 2009) and the Plenum Kluwer/Springer book series Contributions to Global Historical Archaeology have all served to internationalize research in historical archaeology by drawing attention to the long-term processes that have shaped the modern world from a global and interconnected perspective. The two most recent textbooks dealing with historical archaeology have followed Charles Orser’s call for globalized historical archaeologies (Hall and Silliman, 2006; Hicks and Beaudry, 2006). A concise overview of developments in historical archaeology up to 2010, focusing on four areas of research: analytical scale, capitalism, social inequality, and heritage and memory, may be found in Orser (2010).

In this respect it is perhaps worth recalling that prior to the mid-1990s the sub-discipline had been geographically fragmented. In the United States it was narrowly defined as ‘historic sites archaeology,’ or post-prehistoric archaeology which studied ‘the material manifestations of the expansion of European culture into the non-European world starting in the 15th century and ending with industrialization or the present depending on conditions’ (Schuyler, 1970, 84).

James Deetz famously reworked this definition of historical archaeology in his still valuable book, In Small Things Forgotten, suggesting that historical archaeology should be concerned with ‘the archaeology of the spread of Europeans throughout the world since the 15th century and their impact on indigenous people’ (1977, 5). While Deetz’s new emphasis drew much needed attention to the deleterious impacts of European expansion on indigenous peoples his work nevertheless maintained a resolutely New World perspective. In essence, Deetz’s historical archaeologies were all about tracing shifts in identities and circumstances, and the process of becoming American. Indeed, in retrospect it could be argued that his well-intentioned narrative merely cast indigenous peoples as passive recipients of European oppression and harm.

Mark P. Leone took a different line, identifying the growth of global capitalism as the object of study for historical archaeology, exposing the hypocrisy of early American Republican merchants such as William Paca of Annapolis, whose wealth was founded on the transnational movement and labor of enslaved African men and women (Leone, 1995). Leone’s work built upon a proud tradition of American leftist anthropology incorporating European Marxist critical theory, and gave an active voice and agency to oppressed African Americans (Leone, 1995). Mark Leone’s many publications may be characterized by their concern for social justice and a desire to expose the way in which capitalism disguises its workings and makes use of racist constructions to fulfill its needs (Leone, 2005, 2010). In this respect Leone, like other post-WWII American scholars (Ferguson, 1992), was reflecting upon the persistence of private and publicly institutionalized forms of racism in the wake of the hard-won achievements of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, archaeologists in Australia and New Zealand were also beginning to investigate the material record of the recent past. Early work by Judy Birmingham (1976), Jim Allen (1973), and Ian Jack (1985) in Australia was all informed by the intersection of experience and/or training in Old World archaeology and in the disciplines of history and geography. The discovery of several 17th-century Dutch shipwrecks off the coast of Western Australia ensured that maritime perspectives also played a role (Green, 1989). In New Zealand, Peter Coutts (1972), Nigel Prickett (1981), and Neville Ritchie (1986) drew on the close relationship between archaeology and anthropology in that country. While Australians implicitly adopted a definition similar to that of Deetz, in New Zealand the study of settler colonialism was much more closely integrated with the long and continuing trajectory of Maori occupation (Lawrence, 2013). In 1992, the renaming of the Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology to explicitly include New Zealand formalized a relationship of increasing strength that has continued to foster a comparative international approach.

Historical archaeology has presented a heterogeneous development in South America, especially after the end of military dictatorships and the consolidation of democratic governments. According to Pedro Funari (1994, 1996, 2002), Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay have traditionally stood out in this field of study. Professionals from these three countries have written most of South America’s modern literature on historical archaeology (Zarankin and Salerno, 2008, and Brooks and Torres de Souza in this book).

It was only in the closing years of the last century, however, that historical archaeology in the northern hemisphere truly broadened its scope to include a more open and international perspective. Notwithstanding the many artifact-oriented studies by the late Ivor Noël Hume, Matthew Johnson’s An Archaeology of Capitalism (1996) was arguably the first book to use historical archaeology to reconnect the Old and New Worlds. Inspired by his participation in Leone’s Archaeology in Annapolis field school, Johnson was able to demonstrate that the widely used ‘Georgian Order’ thesis which described the 18th-century American quest for order, symmetry, and individualism in daily life, as proposed by Henry Glassie in his study of folk housing in Virginia (1975) and subsequently developed and championed by Deetz (1977) and Leone (1988), had its roots in late medieval England. Martin Hall, formerly Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cape Town, developed a similar comparative perspective on the material conditions of everyday life with case studies from the colonial Chesapeake (Virginia and Maryland, USA) and the Cape region of South Africa (Hall, 2000). British imperialism likewise provided the framework for comparative studies of several former British colonies (e.g. Lawrence, 2003).

By the late-1990s the rise of the internet and the global reach of many Anglophone publishing houses had disseminated key texts by American historical archaeologists around the world and likewise made international work more visible to American scholars. Rather than focusing on the origins of American life and the circulation of people and commodities in the early modern Atlantic world in the recent past, the Swedish archaeologist Anders Andrén argued that historical archaeology should be regarded as a methodology that could be extended to include the archaeology of all historical societies (Andrén, 1998). At about the same time Pedro Funari, Martin Hall, and Siăn Jones led a movement to promote a broader scope for historical archaeology through the auspices of the Routledge One World Archaeology World Archaeological Congress book series (1999). Their innovative approach effectively shifted the emphasis of historical archaeology from the study of White Europeans in the Global North, to the study of other societies, with their own experiences and understandings of ‘modernity.’ In line with wider developments in the humanities, historical archaeology was extended to include multiple scales and voices (Gilchrist, 2005). Hand-in-hand with this re-orientation, prominent scholars such as Matthew Johnson called for new perspectives in a field that was still dominated by the narratives of American scholarship (Johnson, 2006).

In the early years of the new millennium the de-colonization of historical archaeology proceeded with vigor (Croucher and Weiss, 2011; Gosden, 2001; Leone, 2009; Lydon and Rizvi, 2016; McNiven and Russell, 2005). One important development here has been moves to create alternative narratives for the archaeology of African societies based on indigenous oral traditions (Reid and Lane, 2004) and to view the African diaspora as a transcontinental process ripe for multi-site and multi-scalar investigations (Ogundiran and Falola, 2007). Equally important has been the emergence of dynamic archaeologies that re-position First Peoples within the recent and contemporary pasts of modern post-colonial societies around the world (e.g. Beck and Somerville, 2005; Byrne, 2003; Ferris et al., 2014).

Other historical archaeologists have intensified research into archaeologies of gender and sexuality (Casella, 2000; Gilchrist, 2012; Voss, 2000; Voss and Casella, 2011; Wilkie and Hayes, 2006). The archaeology of urban neighborhoods and industrializing societies have also been examined and problematized by a new generation of scholars (Casella and Symonds, 2005; Mayne and Murray, 2001; McAtackney and Ryzewski, 2017; Mrozowski, 2006; Symonds, 2004; Symonds and Casella, 2006; Yamin, 2001). At the same time the close interest which historical archaeologists have always shown in material culture and artifact studies has continued and has moved beyond issues of chronology, dating, and provenance, with the publication of several nuanced microhistories of household material culture (Beaudry, 2007; Brookes, 2016; Loren and Beaudry, 2006; White, 2009; White and Beaudry, 2009).

In the 21st century historical archaeology has also moved closer to the heart of the study of modernity. For a long time, historians and social scientists recognized archaeology as a useful technique for the study of the remote past, particularly prehistoric or ancient societies, which might lack adequate written sources. Modernity created an explosion of written evidence, however. It therefore took a long time to acknowledge the unique opportunities offered by material evidence for the study of the last few centuries. In the last 20 years historical archaeology has proved to be a useful perspective for both historians and social scientists, not only in providing new forms of evidence, but also by providing new interpretive frameworks and insights, as demonstrated in this volume.

An understanding of modernity requires a consideration of the changes in relationships between individuals, as well as between individuals and things (Zarankin and Salerno, 2002). This theoretical perspective forces archaeologists to analyze singularities in local practices, deconstructing hegemonic discourses and stressing the multiple trajectories upon which different societies were built.

In the last 20 years a new and vibrant field of contemporary archaeology has emerged, with the development of archaeologies of the contemporary past (Buchli and Lucas, 2001). A new movement which began with the CHAT (Contemporary Historical Archaeology and Theory) conference organized by Angela Piccini and Dan Hicks at Bristol University in the UK in 2003 has matured to bec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1. Introduction
• Part 1: Historical development
• Part 2: Core issues and topics
• Part 3: Theoretical approaches
• Part 4: Subjects
• Part 5: Regional overviews
• Index