Excavating Nauvoo: The Mormons and the Rise of Historical Archaeology in America

Foreword

Foreword robert l. schuyler Historical archaeology is the archaeology of the modern world, the last five or six centuries of global cultural development. In light of its subject matter, it is not surprising that it emerged as an organized discipline last in the sequence of appearance of the various specialized archaeologies. Classical antiquarianism emerged as early as the Italian Renaissance, prehistoric archaeology with the mid-nineteenth-century geological revolution, and the study of various ancient civilizations in the later nineteenth or early twentieth century. Historical archaeology’s roots in North America go back to the Great Depression. By 1960 it was a fully recognized if small topic of research among fieldworkers in both the United States and Canada. The following decade saw the successful establishment and professionalization of this new field, which today is equal in importance to North American prehistory and, unlike x foreword that older specialization, is rapidly expanding as a discipline around the world. Historians of science and archaeologists themselves have only recently begun a full investigation of the discipline’s origins and development. The pioneers in the field fortunately preserved at least an outline of their own oral histories, as exemplified by Stanley South’s fine edited collection, Pioneers in Historical Archaeology: Breaking New Ground (Plenum Press, 1994), a collection of oral histories compiled in 1977. A few brief historical syntheses have also appeared. It was not until 2005, however, that the first book-length study of the subject, based on primary sources and using standard historical and contextual analysis, was produced. Donald W. Linebaugh’s The Man Who Found Thoreau: Roland W. Robbins and the Rise of Historical Archaeology in America (New Hampshire, 2004) is an excellent first such study because it outlines in detail the career of a famous avocational fieldworker who helped build the field but who was in turn eventually marginalized by the discipline’s growing professionalism. Benjamin Pykles’s book, the second serious, extended study, affords a fascinating exploration of a key episode in the developmentofhistoricalarchaeologyinAmerica . ExcavatingNauvoo: The Mormons and the Rise of Historical Archaeology in America not only convincingly adds a chapter to the discipline’s history, it also has implications for the history of general archaeology and, more broadly, for the history of all the human sciences. Human history, and the histories of individual professions and specializations, follow broad developmental patterns, but the history of any individual society or any discipline is also highly controlled by specific elements in its cultural setting. xi foreword As we look at the record of the human past we see both the determined patterns of cultural evolution and the much more chaotic and unpredictable factors that are to be found in any given historical sequence. Pykles recounts the chance coming together, late in his career, of the ultimate pioneer in American historical archaeology , Jean Carl Harrington, and a singular institutional setting for the growth of the discipline in the 1960s. The normal pattern during the decade of the 1960s, the period during which the events in this book took place, was characterized by a series of predictable steps: (1) the recognition of the recent past as a legitimate subject of archaeological research, (2) a successful demonstration of the field’s contributions, with case studies, and (3) the acceptance of this new discipline by various institutions, with expanding support for the future. In North America the earliest institutions involved with historical archaeology typically were national governmental agencies , especially the National Park Service (nps) in the United States and Parks Canada north of the border, or their state or provincial equivalents. Slightly later academia (especially departments of anthropology) provided major support. Finally, inthe1970s privatefirms engagedincultural resourcemanagement (crm) emerged as even more powerful and financially solid allies of the field. The Nauvoo project (1961–84) stood out from other projects under way at the time because its support came from an ecclesiastical institution, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (lds), and its counterpart, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now called the Community of Christ). Because of the senior standing of J. C. Harrington xii foreword within historical archaeology—with three decades of work in the nps on some of the most famous historic sites in the United States—and the very strong initial support from the First Presidency of the lds Church, a normal sequence of steps would have been predicted for this project at its...