Silliman 2010
Silliman 2010
Silliman 2010
ABSTRACT
This article reconsiders how archaeologists find Indigenous people,
particularly Native Americans, in past colonial communities. Signifi-
cant progress has been made in studying indigenous living areas
associated with colonial communities but not in recovering evidence
for (or even remembering) Native people laboring in distinctly
colonial spaces. I propose that the reason for the lag lies in an incom-
plete perspective on material culture and space that denies their poly-
valent and ambiguous, yet informative and manifestly real, nature. A
new perspective can be forged with greater use of social theory
pertaining to practice, space, and labor. Reconceptualizing material
culture and space in colonial contexts requires that archaeologists
acknowledge the role of labor relations in structuring material and
spatial practices and not conflate origins of artifacts and spaces with
other possible social meanings derived from practice. This article
examines these two dimensions with three North American cases
from New England, Florida, and California.
KEY WORDS
archaeology ● colonialism ● identity ● labor ● North America ●
practice theory
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■ INTRODUCTION
For more than three decades anthropologists have grappled explicitly with
a phenomenon at the very core of the discipline: colonialism. Archaeology
has a pivotal position in research on colonialism because two of its central
study subjects – space and objects – played a key role in constituting the
materiality in which past social agents negotiated their social, political,
economic, and cultural relations, and it plays a central role today in repre-
senting colonial encounters and heritages. Archaeology’s ability to study
space and objects permits intervention in the historiography of colonialism
by breaking silences. As Trouillot (1996) outlines, historiographic silences
begin at the moment a decision is made about whether or not to document
an event and continue well into the process of archiving and synthesis that
produces historical texts and analyses. When colonial-period documents on
Native people are few, authored by others, and frequently detailing only a
small fraction of lived experiences, the silences about Indigenous people
run deeply. Rubertone (2000: 434) exposed this problem for post-
Columbian North America when she observed that ‘privileging written
sources over archaeology in constructing histories of Native Americans in
culture contact situations is a highly problematic endeavor that binds
Native peoples to someone else’s history’. The appropriate response – treat
artifacts and texts critically and in conjunction – is well understood by
historical archaeologists and needs no further explication here.
Despite much progress in scholars’ abilities to pull Indigenous people
from the long shadows cast by these legacies, we still face an obstacle in the
archaeological study of colonialism. How do we recover Indigenous traces
from colonial spaces in a way that captures the diverse experiences of past
people, and, similarly, how do we represent those experiences in the
present? One might answer that such a process is quite simple: find objects
and spaces made, used, valued, or left behind by Native people in colonial
contexts. Archaeologists have fared well on these fronts when examining
Indigenous sites and spaces associated with colonial settlements or settler
colonies, but face great difficulties when trying to tease apart the entangled
or shared spaces and material cultures of Indigenous people, colonists, and
those who may have navigated the interstices. As Byrne (2003) has argued
for Australia, these difficulties of shared histories tend to translate perforce
into subtle erasures of Indigenous people in both empirical analyses and
historical representations (see also Harrison, 2004b; Murray, 1996).
My contention is that the translation happens in these shared and
entangled spaces due to two tendencies in archaeological analysis and
representation: an overemphasis on cultural relations at the expense of
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30 Journal of Social Archaeology 10(1)
■ ARCHAEOLOGIES OF COLONIALISM
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32 Journal of Social Archaeology 10(1)
between colonial and Indigenous artifacts at places such as the Dutch VOC
fort of Oudepost I in South Africa (Schrire and Deacon, 1989), the Russian
colony of Ross on the west coast of the United States (Lightfoot et al.,
1998), and the Van Diemen’s Land Company properties in Tasmania
(Williamson, 2004). Physical segregations of spaces, times, and materials
have provided the foundation for these insightful analyses and will continue
to do so.
On the other hand, archaeologists face a major challenge when trying to
recognize and represent experiences of Indigenous people in distinctly
colonial spaces – that is, those specific spaces where indigene and colonist,
Native and settler lived, worked, procreated, interacted, and negotiated a
daily existence. Such spaces do not regularly show physical segregation of
activity or artifacts by ethnic group since these practices and items may well
have been co-used, or what might be called ‘shared’ or ‘entangled’. Instead,
as discussed below, time rather than space frequently structured the uses of
material culture. Relations of inequality – labor, class, gender, race, sex –
influenced the visibility of those times, sometimes effecting silences at the
moment of the event such that no amount of analysis can ever access them
again, but at other times transmitting their silences in more subtle ways into
schemes of identification, attribution, and interpretation. Much of what
follows will take up the challenge of the latter.
The difficulty in recognizing Indigenous people in distinctly colonial
settings of the past lies in the fact that artifacts and spaces in colonial worlds
are fraught with ambiguity, alternate functions, and multiple users. Artifacts
typically recovered on colonial sites around the world include those manu-
factured in Europe, the USA, or Asia, those made by Indigenous people in
local settings, and those modified by resident groups to meet their own
particular needs and perceptions. Few would disagree that specific artifact
discoveries or material culture objects – such as stone projectile points, local
earthenware ceramics, shell beads, reshaped gun barrels, and implements
chipped from bottle glass – have been crucial for understanding the ways
that Indigenous people coped with imposed colonialism around the world.
In archaeology, the critical role of these material items has been recognized
primarily in spaces identifiable as ‘Indigenous’, but some have also
examined these in colonial spaces with a distinct Indigenous contribution,
such as Spanish colonial households in Florida with Native American
women residents (Deagan, 1996).
Yet, how well do these specific artifact categories, such as worked glass
or local ceramics, demarcate Indigenous versus non-Indigenous people and
their social practices in distinctly colonial spaces? Even with unequivocal
Native artifacts, archaeologists frequently interpret them in light of cultural,
rather than also labor, relations. In colonial North America, Australia, the
Pacific, or South Africa, the standard way to assign archaeological evidence
to the category of ‘Indigenous’ involves finding items made by Native
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Silliman Indigenous traces in colonial spaces 33
Labor relations sit at the heart of this discussion, forming as they did core
colonial experiences of Indigenous people the world over. Anthropologists
and historians have spent considerable effort investigating the role of labor
in colonialism, some addressing macroscale issues of world systems and
economies within global labor structures (Crowell, 1997; Wallerstein, 1974;
Wolf, 1982) and others emphasizing the microscale concerns of those
implementing and experiencing labor (Cassell, 2003; Knack and Littlefield,
1995; Paterson, 2008; Silliman, 2006; Voss, 2008b). Historical and anthro-
pological studies of plantation slavery have also paid attention to labor
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34 Journal of Social Archaeology 10(1)
(Berlin and Morgan, 1993; Delle, 1998; Orser, 1990; Young, 1997), as have
historical archaeologists studying industrial settings (Beaudry et al., 1991;
Beaudry and Mrozowski, 2001; Casella, 2005; McGuire and Reckner, 2002;
Mrozowski et al., 1996; Saitta, 2004; Shackel, 2000, 2004). In general, though,
archaeologists have lagged behind in this broad project by not developing
ways of handling the material side of these labor relations beyond the
laborers themselves.
I intentionally direct my attention here to Native Americans involved in
colonial labor relations, but the arguments relate equally well to the
archaeological recognition of African and African-American experiences
during enslavement, indentured servitude, and post-emancipation laboring
arrangements (see Silliman, 2005: 64–5). This does not imply that enslaved
Africans and Native American workers were in the same situations, but
rather that both groups can be silenced in the objects with and the spaces
in which they labored for the same reasons. My choice to focus on Native
Americans hinges on an attempt to bring to light the experiences of Native
Americans in colonial history, much as others have done for Australian
Aboriginal people involved in settler labor economies (Harrison, 2004a,
2004b; Paterson, 2008). Indigenous people tend to be a truly silenced
laboring class in American history as a result of the public myth of the
‘Vanished Indian’ and the research primacy of presumed earlier ‘contact-
period’, rather than colonial, sites in North America (Knack and Littlefield,
1995; Lightfoot, 2006; Silliman, 2006). That said, however, my ideas draw
upon the insights of African Diaspora archaeology (Delle, 1998; Orser,
1990; Paynter, 1992; Singleton and Bograd, 1999) and the ways that Native
Americans and Africans intersected with Europeans under colonial domi-
nation (Mouer et al., 1999; Perry and Paynter, 1999: 302–4).
My own attempts in this arena of Native Americans, colonialism, and
labor have previously involved accentuating labor – in this case, economic
– as something that individuals not only endured as part of an overarching
structure of colonial power but also ‘worked through’ as a social practice
in their everyday lives (Silliman, 2001b, 2004). My work employed a theor-
etical framework concerned with social agency to distinguish labor as both
economic phenomenon and social practice. Here I expand that discussion
to include how practices can be used to problematize origin-based classifi-
cations of material culture and space by reorienting to labor relations.
Labor relations obviously do not generate the archaeological record, but
they influence and structure the interactions of individuals and the ways
that they use material culture and space (McGuire, 2002: 103).
Although a practice perspective can be modeled after the ‘standard’
sources of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977, 1990) notions of ‘habitus’ and ‘doxa’,
I turn here to the work of De Certeau (1984) for more elaboration.
De Certeau’s version of practice theory encouraged an analytical shift away
from the product and producer and toward the consumer, or, to use his
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Silliman Indigenous traces in colonial spaces 35
example, from the sidewalk and city planner to the pedestrian, the user of
that space (see also Funari and Zarankin, 2002). As much as designers,
manufacturers, and colonial administrators wanted to shape meaning and
use associated with materials and spaces, they could not completely predict
or rein in the outcome. Individuals often perform what De Certeau (1984)
termed ‘tactics’, or ruses that cannot control space but can manipulate
some aspects of time and meaning-making within predefined spaces. To
De Certeau, such a practice ‘is devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself
everywhere, silently and almost invisibly, because it does not manifest itself
through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products
imposed by a dominant economic order’ (1984: xii–xiii). Even though he
did not talk about materiality in ways that are sufficient for archaeologists,
his tactics are often inherently material.
Studying labor relations and practices offers keen insights into the
silences and struggles of colonialism. Relying only on cultural relations –
assumed, pre-given identities such as Native American, African, British,
Spanish, or Russian – in the midst of intense colonial interactions tends to
lead archaeologists on a hunt for artifacts that can be unequivocally
attributed to one of these cultural aspects of the colonial mixture. That is,
archaeologists seek ‘British’ artifacts to talk about British colonists, ‘Native
American’ ceramics to talk about Native American people, and so on. This
process tends to implicitly assume essentialized identities of colonizer and
colonized and a relatively unwavering association of artifact meanings with
their presumed cultural origins. These assumptions fly in the face of critical
archaeological and historical analyses of identity formation and main-
tenance, particularly given the ways that individuals use material culture in
this process (Jones, 1997; Orser, 2001; Upton, 1996; Weisman, 2000), and
they neglect the role of labor relations. Emphasizing labor relations raises
the historical visibility of Native Americans who found themselves in a
variety of colonial laboring positions and who today often face claims of
inauthenticity as a result. Albers (1995: 248) pinpoints the problem: ‘when
Native Americans manufacture dream-catchers, even on an assembly line,
their ethnic identity is validated. When they rebuild an engine block . . . as
a wage laborer in a commercial garage, their ethnic identity is denied.’
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The ‘signs’ are the material and architectural arrangements of space and
activity that archaeologists regularly find, and they do literally stare us in
the face. However, to look at (or rather, see) only the ‘conceived’ or
‘perceived’ space, rather than the ‘lived’ space, is always a view from
dominance. It is space as designed and as controlled. Lefebvre isolates the
problem with how scholars under- or mis-conceptualize those who do not
make, produce, or control space. Our theoretical frameworks and termin-
ology downgrade their experiences as secondary to the origins of space (and
material culture) production (but see Senatore, 2005).
Without a focus on labor relations and the complexity of shared places
and things, the material contributions to history made by Indigenous people
in colonial worlds are frequently closed off in academic and public
discourse because these individuals had little power to make, use, or direct
material culture in colonial spaces where they labored (see Orser, 1996:
172). Closing off these topics runs counter to the otherwise ‘growing recog-
nition that the classic “European” colonial settlements where historical
archaeologists cut their teeth were actually comprised of many peoples of
“color”’ (Lightfoot, 1995: 202). These ‘many peoples of “color”’ often found
their way in and out of colonial communities through relations of labor, not
just relations of culture. Historical documents place Indigenous laborers in
these colonial spaces, but such individuals may leave few unequivocal
material traces in the sense traditionally expected by archaeologists.
These are the people who did not even leave Deetz’s ‘small things
forgotten’ in the archaeological record. They are Spivak’s subalterns: the
women, slaves and servants who were the engines of colonial society but
who can only be seen partially – or not at all – in the material culture and
documents that are the historical record (Hall, 2000a: 97).
However, I would argue that the subaltern just as likely left the ‘small
things forgotten’ that we so readily attribute to someone else who may have
purchased or controlled the objects. The subaltern may have even been the
individuals who discarded them – the key vehicle for introducing artifacts
into the archaeological record. Unlike texts written and kept by the literate
and elite, the material record of everyday life passes through the hands of
many participants in a colonial setting. To address colonial labor relations,
we do not need only to find deposits segregated spatially by their ethnic or
colonial identities, although these are beneficial discoveries. Instead, we
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Social space contains a great diversity of objects, both natural and social,
including the networks and pathways which facilitate the exchange of
material things and information. Such ‘objects’ are thus not only things but
also relations. As objects, they possess discernible peculiarities, contour and
form. Social labour transforms them, rearranging their positions within
spatio-temporal configurations without necessarily affecting their
materiality. (1991: 77)
These ‘spatio-temporal’ changes are the fuel for ambiguity and for action
in social spaces, particularly when the ‘social labour’ draws on colonial
power. As Lefebvre captured, the materiality of objects and even space is
not affected in the context of these multiple intersections; a point worthy
of careful consideration by archaeologists since we tend to presume,
wrongly, a fixed materiality (Buchli, 2003; Holtorf, 2002).
■ THREE EXAMPLES
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42 Journal of Social Archaeology 10(1)
family members used the same kind of dishes in their own homes and felt
some affinity for them. Either way, these creamware sherds still represent
Native actions, perceptions, and experiences alongside and just as much as
they do British/EuroAmerican colonial ones. They may not represent
special meanings or cultural symbols – this must be determined in specific
archaeological contexts, vis-a-vis other objects, spaces, oral histories, and
texts – but their role in daily practice by Native (and other) laborers should
not be foreclosed from interpretation, even when we struggle archae-
ologically to see any alternate uses of objects or spaces. Prioritizing the
wealthy and white is certainly the way that many colonial homeowners
would have wanted others to perceive their material culture, but archae-
ologists should not comply by fixing artifact meaning to only some of its
handlers and some of its uses. These are more silences to resist.
Why is the role of server or position of subservience ignored analytically
in place of a focus on ownership, wealth, and dominance? The answer lies
benignly, in part, in misrecognition of the complexities of material culture
and space. Yet the answer also lies in the silencing of class and labor in
present-day interpretations and the glorification of wealth and power in
colonial histories. ‘All too often they [objects] are given the interpretation
used by the dominant culture’ (Perry and Paynter, 1999: 302). This process
relates in large part to that aptly captured by Lefebvre when talking about
the nature of production in capitalist contexts: ‘from products, be they
objects or spaces, all traces of productive activity are so far as possible
erased. What of the mark of the worker or workers who did the produc-
ing?’ (1991: 212). In colonial and capitalist contexts, archaeology confronts
not only the erasure of worker production in commodity exchange and
market economies, but also the silencing of laborers’ uses of already
produced objects and spaces.
Admittedly, this case study, perhaps better called a vignette, does not
detail specific ways to interpret creamware from particular contexts, which
would be needed to develop local interpretations, but rather serves to
recommend that the interpretive nuances of shared material objects and
spaces be acknowledged, especially when historical documents help to
identify individuals, collectivities, and practices that are needed to better
understand archaeological cases. Although generalized beyond any specific
site to illustrate a point, this example differs little from situations faced by
many archaeologists of colonialism, whether in North America, South
Africa, Mexico, or Australia. For instance, the South African case of the
Dutch East India Company (VOC) has revealed the complex ways that a
single class of artifact – local, European-style earthenware ceramics – can
reveal the ambiguities of social life for a multi-ethnic, labor-infused, colonial
society (Jordan and Schrire, 2002). A similar observation has been offered
about the representation of enslaved Africans in living history displays at
Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.
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44 Journal of Social Archaeology 10(1)
preparation’ (Deagan, 1990a: 308). For the Spanish site of Mission San Luis
Talimali, McEwan offered a similar perspective: ‘Traditional pottery,
colono-wares, clay mines, and perhaps objects of adornment suggest ways
by which the local population was integrated into the lives of resident
Spaniards as wives, domestics, laborers, and political allies’ (1993: 317; see
also McEwan, 1995: 223). If taken to the next logical step, these multiple
positions in households should dissolve any singular notion of a nuclear
family household and move archaeologists toward a more enriched view of
colonial spaces and social power (Jamieson, 1999; Voss, 2008b).
Simultaneously, these observations indicate that the shared material
items and spaces can tell us even more, or perhaps something else, than
once believed. Deagan has expressed concern about the lack of evidence
for colonial interactions that did not involve intermarriage: ‘It appears that
the documented interaction between Spanish and Indian men, which was
based on military service and labor enslavement, left far fewer material
traces than did the domestic accommodations documented between
Spanish men and Indian women’ (1996: 149). Yet, how much accommo-
dation exists in colonial households if Native women served as domestics
instead of lived as spouses? The framework thus far described suggests that
material traces of laborers do exist or, more accurately, that the relations
of labor that Deagan identifies as important appear just as visibly in the
archaeological record as the cultural ones of intermarriage. The key to
imagining that possibility lies in giving labor relations as much weight as
cultural relations and realizing that Native women often worked in colonial
households not of their own choosing. The ceramics may give insight into
the nature of labor relations between colonial homeowners and Native
workers in the same household (Voss, 2008b).
In addition, indigenous-made ceramics in colonial Florida may well
indicate a labor aspect if they are low-cost, local wares that colonists
obtained through exchange or extracted as part of tribute, as suggested by
some archaeologists (Deagan, 1990a; McEwan, 1991; Saunders, 2001: 86;
Voss, 2008b). Such a labor-based interpretation receives support at St
Augustine where almost all contexts contained aboriginal ceramics regard-
less of their documented ethnic occupants (Deagan, 1983: 117) and where
quantities of Indigenous ceramics were inversely proportional to house-
hold income (1983: 240). This alternate view balances the question of who
made aboriginal and colonoware ceramics in colonial Hispanic households
(their cultural origins) with the question of who used them (their role as
tools and symbols in labor relations). In fact, the ‘who made them?’
question still requires a labor answer since it is not solely about cultural
relations.
This illustrates the theoretical points made earlier regarding labor and
origins as examined with creamware. Rather than a Spanish object being
used by Native American people in otherwise European colonial spaces, an
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46 Journal of Social Archaeology 10(1)
Miwok Native community that it would help to fill those gaps by excavat-
ing in a historic Native American living area near the main adobe house.
Despite successes in recovering and interpreting evidence for Native
people on this nineteenth-century colonial rancho, I remained conscious of
the difficulty in reclaiming Native experiences of the Petaluma Adobe space
itself, the heart of the colonial enterprise. Historical documents placed
many Indigenous people in the rooms, along the verandas, and in the plaza
of that enormous mud-brick building (see Silliman, 2004), but they are no
longer so visible. State Park reconstructions of activity and living areas at
the Petaluma Adobe help to rectify that invisibility with rooms full of work
tools for weaving, butchering, woodwork, and cooking (Figure 3). In this
way, the nature of labor relations and tasks materialized, even though the
actual people remained missing from the picture. However, only a fairly
informed visitor would recognize that these rooms represented, if
somewhat obliquely, California Indian workers. Otherwise, the materials
conveyed a romanticized, industrious pastoral setting, one that was bought,
sold, and made by Mexican-Californian settlers.
Yet what about the refined earthenware plates, dark green wine bottles,
and silverware displayed in various rooms and undoubtedly used in the
Vallejo family dining room (Figure 4)? Visitors rather immediately imagine
that these material items must reflect non-Native, non-laborer activities;
they were acquired by, belonged to, and used by Vallejo and his family
members in their domestic spaces. They marked colonial wealth and
gentility. But archival sources pinpoint the role of Native American people
as cooks and food servers in the Petaluma Adobe (Silliman, 2004: 66–72),
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48 Journal of Social Archaeology 10(1)
ground plan. For instance, the original ground surface had been shaved off
to flatten the promontory, and workers had placed the removed fill against
sturdy cobble retaining walls, which served as foundations, to raise the
adjoining slopes of the now-flattened hill to increase the surface area to
raise the building (Silliman, 1999: 111–17). Sitting on top of that ground
surface, below the accumulation of fill to raise the surface to grade level,
was one red-on-white glass bead. Although only a single example, the bead
drew a sharp parallel to the more than 1300 glass beads – many of them
red-on-white – recovered from the nearby Native living area (Silliman,
2004: 143–8). This single bead served as a fleeting material reminder of
Native American laborers and their toils, but its message was made possible
by connections outside of the shared space inside the adobe walls, where
such items had been found in worker residential areas.
On the other hand, the entire Petaluma Adobe, sitting on a flattened
hill with voluminous earthen fill and heavy foundations, built of many
thousands of sun-dried adobe bricks, covering 3600 square meters and
standing two stories high with redwood beam supports, demonstrated one
of the clearest indications of Native labor.3 As Bakken (1997: 208) argued
for a rancho in southern California: ‘Indian voices largely are silent, but the
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artifacts crafted by the natives are obvious and extant. Their hands made
the bricks that formed the adobe. Their arms lifted the whitewash brushes
to the walls and brought the wood.’ The Petaluma Adobe building cannot
and should not be seen only in its colonial origins and ownership, but also
in the fact that it took form only through colonial labor relations and the
work burden of numerous Indigenous people. The monopolizing of
meaning as a Californio space can happen only when labor relations are
ignored, ownership and control are privileged, and multi-ethnic occupants
and builders are silenced. The adobe building is not just an architectural
outgrowth of cultural identity, but rather a product of complex labor
relations and colonial negotiations. Even its presumed origin as a Mexican-
Californian building can be questioned since only in design and manage-
ment is it Vallejo’s as a prominent Californio; otherwise its origins lie,
proximately, in the labor of hundreds of California Indian people and,
ultimately, in the interplay between intermingling of Spanish, Mexican, and
Indigenous building practices that involved adobe bricks and plaza design
in the New World.
■ CONCLUSIONS
The ambiguity of material culture and space plays a crucial role in the study
of colonialism. On the one hand, the ambiguity poses interpretive diffi-
culties as archaeologists struggle over who made what, how and when they
used it, and why. Such identifications are challenging enough in archae-
ological contexts readily assignable to one group, class, or identity of people,
but colonial cases exacerbate them when many kinds of people interacted,
shared space and objects, and participated – willingly or not – in social
relations buttressed by inequality and labor. This does not undermine
archaeologists’ abilities to interpret them, but it does require stepping
away from pre-given meanings and instead exploring the practices and
social relations that take form in and challenge those spatialities and
materialities. It also requires paying attention to the documents that help
to people those material and spatial worlds that sometimes prove
intractable in archaeological analysis.
A similar issue involves the debate surrounding colonoware in North
American historical archaeology, one that hinges on trying to decipher who
– African, Native American, both, or others – made it (e.g. Ferguson, 1980;
Mouer et al., 1999; Noël Hume, 1962; Orser, 1996: 117–23). As historical
archaeologists have learned from that debate, the origins of space and
material have profound significance, but they cannot be prioritized over the
interpretation of uses, lived experiences, and social relations. Too much
‘preoccupation with who made colonoware rather than who used it and
thus transformed its meaning’ has left many realms of African-American
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Acknowledgements
This work has benefited tremendously from the sharp and thoughtful insights of
Rodney Harrison, Chuck Orser, Bob Paynter, Barb Voss, and several anonymous
reviewers. I thank them for their time, effort, and assistance in clarifying my
thoughts, words, and references across its various versions. I appreciate the support
of the California Department of Parks and Recreation and the Federated Indians
of Graton Rancheria in my previous research at the Petaluma Adobe State Historic
Park, and I thank the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation for permitting me to work on
their reservation in southeastern Connecticut where I have been able to continue
reframing these issues. I alone retain all responsibility for the content, direction,
inclusions, and omissions.
Notes
1 I take slight liberty with Lefebvre’s quotation in the epigraph. Of course, he
referred to the ways that space is produced and constructed and the ways that
these spatial practices and structures influence subsequent spatial and social
relations (Lefebvre, 1991). That is, produced space does not disappear; it
undergoes translations and substitutions as succeeding spatial and social
relations take place, often in the form of domination and appropriation (1991:
164–8). However, I use his insights here not to access the ‘origins’ or even
‘production’ of colonial space, although this would be a valid pursuit. Instead, I
use his perspective to illuminate how we might think about interpreting space,
once produced and used, that has since lost its inhabitants.
2 Although Sainsbury illustrates the importance of labor roles, I have to register
dissatisfaction with the overall thrust of his argument. Rather than studying
labor relations as a way that Native American groups, primarily Narragansett
people in his case, found a way to survive in harsh economic and colonial times,
Sainsbury instead characterizes the labor as a sign of their demise. ‘With some
exceptions, Indian employment by white colonists in Rhode Island was the
result, not of economic conditions providing a general market exclusively for
such labor, nor of an enthusiastic Indian adjustment to white society, but rather
of Indian social disintegration, both inside and outside the colony, which
provided cheap labor at a degraded status and characterized an interim phase
between tribal coherence and ethnic extinction’ (Sainsbury, 1975: 392). This
perspective serves to recolonize Native history in New England, not only by
disregarding the ways that labor works as a colonizing force (rather than just as
a signal of its ultimate ‘success’), but also by subtly adding to the pernicious
narrative that contemporary Native American groups must be illegitimate since
they have already gone through ‘ethnic extinction’.
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52 Journal of Social Archaeology 10(1)
3 This does not newly recognize unsung labor, but it is an element often
overlooked in historical archaeology. Paynter (1992: 285) noted it for W.E.B.
du Bois’ home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, as a key feature of African-
American material production in New England. The historical archaeology of
Native Americans lags behind, although Voss (2008a) acknowledges and
theorizes the role of Native American laborers in the construction of the late
eighteenth-century Spanish Presidio de San Francisco, located fewer than 35 km
south of the Petaluma Adobe in northern California.
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