Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archeology ed. by Maxine Oland, Siobhan M. Hart, and Liam Frink (review)

While Decolonizing Indigenous Histories is geared toward archeologists, this collection of essays shares concerns current in literary studies of colonialism and postcolonialism and offers methodological insight that readers of Western American Literature may find useful. The theoretical exploration offers a fine-grained view of history that moves beyond written texts for understanding and complicates our view of Native cultures’ responses to colonial incursions.

The authors build on the work of North American archeologists Kent G. Lightfoot and Patricia Rubertone, who pioneered global archeological studies of colonialism in the mid-1990s. Both offer their own reflections at the end of the volume. The contributors call into question the colonialist tendency both to emphasize the moment of contact, which divides the past into “precontact” and “historical” archeology, and to focus on written accounts rather than archeological remains and Indigenous tradition to define the contact period. The editors point out that “precolonial archaeology studies the long-term history and deep pasts of Indigenous peoples, while colonial period archaeology tends to focus either exclusively on Europeans and their descendants or on the effects of European colonization upon Indigenous peoples” (3). Such studies tend to ignore what material culture reveals about the various ways in which colonized people responded to cultural contact, ways determined by their own experiences, traditions, political orientations, and locale. Viewing contact as an “event horizon” or period of transition allows archeologists to understand the period from first contact to “intense interaction” in a more nuanced way (3). Indigenous peoples emerge less as passive victims of colonialism than as agents who respond to the forces around them in productive ways. In addition to producing a more accurate view of the past, decolonization works to recognize and ameliorate the ways in which archeological studies continue to affect the lives of Indigenous peoples.

The contributing authors examine the archeological record on a range of temporal and spatial scales in order to demarcate both cultural shifts and continuities. They also seek to discover what “a focus on transition(s) can contribute to the movement to decolonize archaeology, which seeks to confront the Eurocentric foundation of archaeological approaches and to offer alternatives that address Indigenous concerns, are shaped by Indigenous values, and engage with Indigenous peoples in the present” (2). For example, in her study of Oaxaca, Mexico, Stacy King observes that a stable “essentialized” precolonial baseline is nonexistent, given the region’s long history of colonial incursions by the Inka and Aztec empires. While noting the devastating impact of the Entrada, King concludes that “the arrival of the Spanish would not have been completely outside the understanding and experience of local Indigenous communities, and, indeed, by comparison may have had less of an immediate impact than earlier invasions” (231).

In this and other cases, studying both the longue durée and what William S. Silliman in his contribution calls the “short purée” (114) of history enables archaeologists to more precisely assess what constitutes change and what indicates continuity in the archaeological record. Examined in this way, material objects such as the Spanish majolica used across Xaltocan may reveal a more complex set of power relations than are initially apparent; Enrique Rodríquez-Alegría concludes that “the adoption of Spanish serving vessels was not a process of Indigenous people trying to be more like Spaniards, but rather a process of competition among Indigenous people through the use of exotic material culture. Rather than merely a process of identity change, this was a process of political alliance building within the Indigenous population” (47).

In addition to the editors’ introduction and the book’s concluding essays, the case studies in part 1 will be most directly relevant to scholars of western American literature, including chapters on Puebloan and Mexican cultural transitions; rock art in South Africa, Australia, and the North American Great Plains; and the survivance of Indigenous peoples in the...