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1 Crossing Divides Archaeology as Long-Term History Mark D. Mitchell and Laura L. Scheiber Few cultural and political events have stimulated as much debate among social scientists as the Columbian Quincentennial. For archaeologists especially, the 1992 commemoration of Columbus’s landfall in the New World provoked a wide-ranging and critical debate. At first, the discussion was largely reflexive and focused on the political context of archaeological practice, on the responsibilities of archaeologists to descendant communities, and on the disciplinary divide separating history from anthropology (Lightfoot 1995; Rogers and Wilson 1993; Thomas 1989; Wylie 1992). More recently, attention has turned to the development of new theoretical approaches for studying colonial interaction, inspired especially by political economy and poststructural social theory (Cobb 2003; Lightfoot, Martinez, and Schiff 1998; Gosden 2004; Silliman 2001; Stein 2005). The result has been a surge of interest in post-1500 indigenous communities and a rapidly growing body of archaeological knowledge about the ways in which the processes of European colonialism were integrated, accommodated, resisted, and transformed by native peoples. But even as research on colonial interaction has become more prominent and methodologically sophisticated, many scholars have continued to rely on untested conceptual frameworks for understanding how and why native societies changed after the advent of Europeans (McNiven and Russell 2005). Despite evidence of their inadequacy (Cobb 2003; Rodríguez-Alegría 2008; Rogers and Wilson 1993), the same conventional explanations for the course of post-1500 culture change continue to be given. American Indians and First Nations peoples continue to be portrayed as primitive environmentalists, living lightly on the land in a homeostatic state of nature, even as evidence  Mitchell and Scheiber mounts that they were responsible for shaping the ecosystems encountered by the first European settlers. Archaeologists continue to assume that European technologies rapidly and decisively replaced indigenous technologies, despite evidence for the persistent use of stone and bone tools. Historians acknowledge the impact of native actions on colonial society, but the dominance of the colonists, with their more powerful weapons, their superior disease resistance, and their outsized avarice, is seldom questioned. And although the triumphal story of European progress has lost some of its luster, the teleology at its heart can still be found in the assumption of inevitable cultural collapse that infuses research on recent native peoples. In part, the ongoing reliance on conventional narratives of change reflects the asymmetrical outcome of colonial interaction. In the end, the result was decisive: millions of native people dead, the survivors driven from their homes, forced to assimilate, forced to deny their heritage and their identity. Many of their descendants now live in crushing poverty. The consequences for native peoples have been so overwhelming that many scholars have believed they also were inevitable, and this has discouraged critical research on the course of colonial interaction. But the assumption of inevitability merely poses questions: On what evidence are conventional narratives based? Who produced them and when? In this chapter, we explore the origins of these narratives, consider why they have endured, and introduce the approaches the contributors to this book use to challenge them. Colonial Discourse The current conceptual framework for understanding post-1500 native culture change remains deeply rooted in what Edward Said (1978) and others influenced by the philosopher and critic Michel Foucault have termed “colonial discourse.” Over the last three decades, these postcolonial theorists have shown that European colonial power was intimately intertwined with European knowledge about colonized peoples (Bhabha 1994). On the one hand, European military and economic expansion made colonial knowledge possible by bringing large numbers of Europeans into contact with indigenous peoples around the world. On the other, such knowledge provided the moral and legal bases of conquest and control. Crossing Divides  Thus, colonialism both enabled and necessitated an array of “cultural technologies” by which Europeans segregated, classified, and ranked the peoples they conquered (Dirks 1992:3). Central to these techniques of control were European descriptions or representations of native societies and native lifeways. Everywhere they went, Europeans produced travelogues, allegorical images, novels, maps, scientific treatises, promotional pamphlets, and administrative reports containing representations of indigenous peoples (Jaffe, Viola, and Rovigatti 1991). Some of the earliest accounts reflect long-standing European expectations of the exotic: in announcing his discovery, Columbus reported that one of the islands he visited was populated solely by women and that on another, “everyone is born with a tail” (Zamora 1993:8). Others say at least as much about European society and European politics as they do...

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