Current Archaeologies in the American Southeast

The past few decades have witnessed a proliferation of studies concerning the historical development of American archaeology.¹ These efforts represent a significant stage in the development of the discipline, as scholars turn to the examination of not only the archaeological record but also, and perhaps more importantly, the historical development of their own field. As Collingwood contends, "no historical problem should be studied without studying … the history of historical thought about it."² This increased critical scrutiny reveals that rather than a single, unified narrative the history of American archaeology is a composite of distinct regional archaeologies. Although the consequence of many disparate factors, this regionalism primarily developed as a result of initial research efforts grounded in the view that the principal goal of archaeology was reconstructing local culture histories.³

While each regional archaeological tradition has played a role in the advancement of the field as a whole, the contributions of each region have been decidedly uneven.⁴ In both methodological and theoretical matters, the Southwest has been the dominant region in North American archaeology. In contrast, Southeastern archaeology, with most of its advancements viewed primarily as culture historical or methodological and lacking a tradition of studies employing overt anthropological theory, is commonly thought to have added little to the "big issues" of American archaeology.⁵

Despite these perceived shortcomings, the past twenty years have witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of theoretically informed archaeological studies in the Southeast. These efforts represent more than the mere replacement of the dominant culture history perspective by another theory but instead bear witness to the presence of an astounding diversity of theoretical views in recent archaeological research in the Southeast. This theoretical eclecticism is, in part, both a self-conscious response to prior claims of regional theoretical irrelevancy and a reflection of the growing importance of historicism in archaeological theory.⁶ The increasingly sophisticated use of theory, coupled with the scale of archaeological data generated by earlier culture historical research, provides the Southeast with an unparalleled foundation on which to construct a new regional archaeological tradition.

A survey of recent research in Southeastern archaeology indicates the diversity of approaches found in the discipline today: representation, embodiment, identity, materiality, political economy, gender, hybridity, creolization, and collaborative archaeologies are just some of the topics currently being explored.⁷ Of these, one of the more exciting developments has been the extent to which collaborative archaeologies have grown, both theoretically and methodologically, among archaeologists, historians, museums, descendant communities, and other stakeholders. Many of these collaborations were initiated as a result of legal mandates such as the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and the 1992 amendments to the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). Consultation has paved the way for collaboration; legal mandates have provided an arena in which the major stakeholders can work together to put forth multivocal histories. While the design, goals, involved communities, and methods in collaborative archaeology projects vary greatly, the practice of collaboration as a whole offers numerous opportunities for critically exploring the possibilities and challenges for the future of anthropological theory and practice in the Southeast.

In this paper we examine current approaches in Southeastern historical archaeology. Although a wealth of archaeological gray literature of archaeological site reports also attests to these changing research strategies, we emphasize published materials due to their greater circulation and measurable impacts on the discipline. Additionally, despite a diversity of new research directions employed by Southeastern archaeologists in these studies, we focus our efforts on what we consider to be the primary research trends shaping the field. Among the issues we see as critical to contemporary Southeastern historical archaeology are explorations of colonialism, identity, and history and collaborative archaeologies. In this discussion we provide just a few examples of new collaborative archaeologies that more adequately represent the work that is taking place in the Southeast and foretell the goals and methodologies of the archaeological future. We outline the ways in which Native American and other stakeholder communities have worked together to excavate, explore, and conserve identity and history in the...