The archaeology of Indigenous-colonial interaction in the Americas is emerging from a decades-long shift in orientation, one that has moved the field to the forefront of theoretical and methodological debates in archaeology. Whereas many foundational works focused on the lasting legacies of European and American colonialism for the Native peoples of the Americas, such as demographic losses and acculturation, more recent approaches acknowledge the hardships of colonialism but also work from the premise that Indigenous societies persisted in various ways (Atalay 2006b). Indeed, largely as an outgrowth of Indigenous concerns, repatriation debates, and archaeologyâs engagement with the postcolonial critiques of the 1980s and 1990s, the field today acknowledges the varied trajectories and outcomes of Indigenous entanglements with European and American governments and colonists. Contemporary approaches thus balance studies of local, micro-scale histories of intercultural encounters with an awareness of the global aspects of imperial and colonial projects in the Americas (Cobb 2019). There is also a widespread and growing acknowledgment of the active presence of Indigenous peoples, today and in the past, who negotiated, contested, and articulated their interests and needs in relation to the colonial projects and successive waves of colonists they encountered (Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018; Panich 2020). Taken together, these current approaches address the colonial period not as a rupture with the past but as part of long-term Indigenous histories and ongoing colonial processes and struggles for sovereignty that continue into the present.
This volume seeks to establish common ground about the archaeological study of colonial entanglements in the Americas and to chart more equitable and decolonial ways for such research to proceed. The bookâs focus is primarily on the ways in which Indigenous peoples have long dealt with the imposition of colonialism rather than those colonial institutions themselves. Still, it is worth noting here that the Americas were the site of intense colonial activity by several European countries, including Spain, Portugal, England, France, the Netherlands, and Russia. From the perspective of Indigenous people, colonialism has continued unabated despite the independence of former colonies that today constitute settler states like Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Brazil. From the fifteenth century through the twenty-first, these settler entities have each developed their own unique strategies to implement their colonial agenda, confronting Indigenous peoples with a variety of demographic, ecological, geographic, and temporal challenges. The chapters of this book, therefore, range in scope from Native peoplesâ earliest encounters with Europeans all the way through to the continuing colonial relations between the contemporary field of archaeology and Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Emerging trends
In many areas, the past three decades have seen a major transformation of how scholars examine the archaeology of colonial entanglements in the Americas, shifting from a focus on colonialism itself to an examination of how Indigenous people met the challenges of the times. Early historical archaeologistsâparticularly in North Americaâlargely focused their efforts on defining site types, classifying European-introduced material culture, and determining the extent of architectural and economic features at sites founded by European colonists (e.g., Fontana 1965 and see Zarankin and Salerno 2008 for a discussion of similar developments in South America). As Americanist historical archaeology matured, it added the study of European colonialismâs âimpact on Indigenous peopleâ to its charge (Deetz 1977, 5). This shift reached its zenith with the quincentenary of Columbusâ first voyage, as archaeologists throughout the hemisphere broadened their perspective to examine not just the experiences of the colonizers but also what European colonialism wrought for the Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas (Rubertone 2000). The emerging paradigm was perhaps best represented by the landmark three-volume Columbian Consequences series, edited by David Hurst Thomas (1989, 1990, 1991), who explicitly advocated for a âcubistâ perspective that considered a range of vantage points on hemispheric colonialism.
A full generation later, archaeology is experiencing yet another paradigm shift with regard to the investigation of Indigenous-colonial interactions in the Americas. Instead of scholarship that simply examines the impact of colonialism on Native peopleâsetting up a false dichotomy between Euro-American actors and Indigenous victimsâarchaeologists are today using a variety of means to center Indigenous voices and experiences in the archaeological study of colonial entanglements in the Americas (Jordan 2016; Silliman 2020). Importantly, much of this research is led by or is in collaboration with Native scholars and their communities (e.g., Cowie et al. 2019; Gonzalez et al. 2018; Ferris 2009; Gould et al. 2020; Oland et al. 2012; Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018; Panich et al. 2021; Schneider 2020; Sunseri 2017). Such Indigenous archaeologies are critical for addressing the colonial legacies of the study of the precolonial past (Gnecco and Ayala Rocabado 2010; Silva 2012), but they are equally important for the archaeological approaches to post-1492 Indigenous histories given that settler society has long mobilized archaeology to erase the continued presence of Native people (OâBrien 2010; Wilcox 2009). While these developments are manifested differently in the various archaeological traditions of the Americas, as well as in academic, governmental, and private-sector archaeology, we see the foregrounding of Indigenous histories and experiences as a unifying theme that cuts across several interrelated shifts since the Columbian quincentenary. These emerging research foci, moreover, have invited critical reflection about how archaeologists and heritage professionals disseminate Indigenous histories to the broader public, and indeed, about the coloniality of archaeology itself. Below, we briefly highlight these issues with reference to the chapters included in this volume.
Conceptual advances
To better account for how Indigenous people experiencedâand continue to experienceâcolonialism in the Americas, archaeologists have revisited a host of core concepts. First to fall was the notion of acculturation, which served as the underlying framework for many early studies (Cusick 1998, and see Chapter 8), along with the related focus on âculture contactâ that frequently served to downplay issues of power and sustained colonialism (Silliman 2005). Similarly, the pre-history concept has suffered a long, and perhaps fatal, critique in the literature for its ethnocentric nature and the attendant limitations for understanding the role of colonialism in long-term Indigenous histories (Lightfoot 1995; Schmidt and Mrozowski 2013). As explored by Gallivan (Chapter 2), different time scales focus our attention on different phenomena, and processes in play prior to the arrival of Europeans to the Americas often established critical antecedents to the upheavals of colonialism. For example, local Native groups in some regions had long experience with various Indigenous empires (Chapter 16; see also King 2020; VanValkenburgh 2019). In others, hunter-gatherer peoples interacted with each other and their environments in ways that made the disruptions of missionary and settler colonialism particularly devastating (Lightfoot et al. 2013).
Archaeologists have also expanded their temporal and spatial focus to better account for more recent Indigenous histories. Though initial encounters remain an important area of study (Chapter 15), current approaches have moved forward in time to include various examples of âsustained colonialismâ (Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018; Chapter 9). Chapters in this volume consider these issues from the perspective of Indigenous peoples who negotiated various types of enduring colonial impositions, including the reservation system in the United States (Chapter 28), the emerging national borders of Central America (Chapter 20), and long-term intercultural exchanges in Brazil (Chapter 22). This growing temporal range also invites reflection on public memory and other heritage practices, in which Native histories have too often been downplayed or distorted (Chapters 25 and 26; and see Schneider et al. 2020). As other chapters in the volume attest, museums and the very practice of archaeology continue to be additional sites of colonial contestation (Chapters 31â33).
Archaeologists are also reconsidering the geographic extent of colonial encounters. Colonial outposts such as religious missions remain important, if contested, foci for archaeological research (Chapters 3 and 11). However, in recent years, archaeologists have moved well beyond the traditional historical archaeological focus on forts, missions, and other European outposts to examine the broader landscape of Native-lived colonialism (Cobb 2019; Ferris 2009; Panich and Schneider 2015; Schneider 2015). As exemplified by several chapters in this handbook, Indigenous homelands were critical hubs of economic, spiritual, and political autonomy throughout the colonial period. In some cases, settlers moved to violently eliminate these centers of Native power, but in others colonists had to contend with their own tenuous position within broader Indigenous landscapes (Chapters 17â19 and 29). Conversely, archaeologists are looking for new ways to acknowledge the presence of Indigenous people in colonial spaces (Silliman 2010). Chapters in this volume by Fournier Garcia, Therrien, and Law Pezzarossi and colleagues all examine how Native people lived in and among colonists in the urban spaces that grew up in different locales across the Americas.
These advances serve to break down dichotomous thinking between European and Indigenous, between colonizer and colonized. As several chapters demonstrate, the Americas today reflect centuries-long processes of cultural entanglement (Chapter 15). Chapters explore these processes through the lenses of the documentary record (Chapter 7), material culture (Chapters 13 and 22), religion (Chapter 11) and environmental management (Chapter 6), among others. Several chapters also point out the importance of Africansâboth free and enslavedâin myriad pluralistic contexts throughout North and South America, a topic that is treated thematically by Weik (Chapter 10). Here again, a common thread is that colonial processes reverberate into the present in ways that undermine detached scholarly treatments of colonialism as something that existed only in the past (Chapters 25, 27, 28, 31, and 32).
Methodological advances
Other advances are methodological in nature, including the use of sophisticated analytical tools to ask important questions about colonial entanglements. For instance, archaeologists are using various forms of trace-element analysis (e.g., XRF, INAA, LA-ICP-MS) and isotopic analysis to illuminate persistent Indigenous exchange networks and landscape management practices (Andrews 2019, 211; Chapters 6 and 13). In many cases, methodological advances are providing archaeologists and community partners with the fine-grained data needed to contextualize the roles that external factors like disease, environmental fluctuations, and introduced animals played in colonial contexts (Chapters 4â6). Importantly, archaeological methods are well suited to recentering the social aspects of colonialism, which often exacerbated the effects of disease and environmental degradation for Indigenous societies (Chapter 4; and see Jones 2015).
In thinking about how archaeological data are generated, a growing consensus is that archaeological investigations of colonial entanglements can and must move beyond dirt archaeology. Part of this shift is simply the recognition that the material record can be complemented by an array of other datasets including the innovative use of archival documents, ethnohistorical information, and, where appropriate, Indigenous oral histories (Frink 2016; Chapters 7, 12, and 28). But, as discussed later, Indigenous scholars and their communities have also pointed out crucial weaknesses in the ability of archaeological epistemologies to fully account for post-contact Indigenous histories (Schneider 2020). Indigenous and collaborative archaeologies offer potential solutions, as communities are empowered to take a primary role in defining research questions, though scholars must also be attentive to the real harms and risks associated with the archaeology of colonial places (Cowie et al. 2019; Chapter 28). In such cases, low-impact field methods may offer ways to minimize community harms and/or impacts to sacred sites (Gonzalez et al. 2006; Gonzalez 2016).
Comparative approaches to the archaeology of colonialism
Given the diversity of temporal, geographic, and social contexts of Indigenous-colonial interaction in the Americas, comparative studies are one way to highlight common themes or disjunctures, as well as to disrupt the âgrand narrativesâ of colonial success and Euro-American cultural superiority (Funari and Senatore 2015). Enriching this perspective is the recognition that colonialism itself was and is not monolithic and instead is often suffused with diverse and contradictory objectives. As Deagan (2003, 3) noted of Spanish colonialism, it was âsimultaneously an invasion, a colonization effort, a social experiment, a religious crusade, and a highly structured economic enterprise.â To these observations, we would add that the Indigenous societies of the Americas encompassed the full scope of social organizationâfrom small-scale hunter-gatherers to Indigenous empiresâand occupied homelands that ranged from tundra to desert to tropical forest to high plains.
Given that a full acco...
