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Not Just “One Site Against the World” Seneca Iroquois Intercommunity Connections and Autonomy, 1550–1779 Kurt A. Jordan Archaeologists studying American Indian peoples impacted by the post-1500 European expansion have been slow to acknowledge that in many situations, the political-economic power of Indian groups was equal to or even greater than that of European colonizers. Although such settings can be readily recognized in both the historical and archaeological records (e.g., DuVal 2006; Preucel 2002), archaeologists have few theoretical tools or even a basic terminology for investigating these contexts. This chapter takes steps toward remedying this situation by surveying the long-term history of Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) political-economic autonomy. I begin by identifying several factors responsible for scholars’ lack of consideration of political-economic equality, and then propose that supralocal processes linking indigenous communities—particularly alliance, trade, mobility, and conflict—were crucial to the maintenance of native autonomy. Methodologically, assessment of intercommunity connection requires that archaeologists supplement excavation data with concentrated attention to scales well beyond those researchers typically consider. I illustrate these points with a case study examining continuity and change in Seneca Iroquois intercommunity interaction from 1550 to 1779, which also reviews the pre-1550 roots of these processes . If archaeologists engage in systematic examinations along these lines, in many settings they will determine that indigenous groups were entangled with European colonists rather than dominated by them, and at the same time they will discover some of the factors responsible for the persistence of native autonomy. The products of such examinations will be objectively more accurate than conventional approaches that 5 80 Kurt A. Jordan center on European colonialism, as well as potentially more relevant to present-day American Indian groups. Factors Contributing to the Lack of Consideration of Indigenous Autonomy Several aspects of the history of scholarship on post-1500 Indian groups contribute to present-day archaeologists’ inadequate consideration of indigenous autonomy. Tropes of indigenous decline and disappearance were prevalent in early analyses of post-1500 sites, and they continue to shadow current scholarship (Jordan 2008:6–18; Mitchell and Scheiber, this volume). As exemplified by the uses of acculturation and modernization theory in the mid-twentieth century (Cusick 1998; Orser 1996; Rubertone 2000), decline models tend to position indigenous societies along a continuum sliding from tradition to irrelevance, and they interpret the dynamics of the past from the vantage of the present. Past eras are mined for evidence of decline in what Ferris (2006:102) terms an “archaeology of anticipation,” rather than being seen as open-ended settings with the potential to reveal novel types of processes and relationships . Analyses undertaken within decline frameworks typically validate their presupposition that change represents the loss of tradition, and they rarely detect indigenous innovation, autonomy, or selectivity. Furthermore, archaeologists examining the world after 1500 have an incomplete conceptual tool-kit for the study of intercultural politicaleconomic relations. In the 1980s and 1990s, archaeologists concentrated on refuting the assumption that European and American cultural and economic forms would inevitably be adopted by indigenous groups (e.g., Rogers 1990). More recently, scholars have sought out new models to better capture the complexity of post-1500 intercultural relations, frequently by invoking the concept of colonialism (e.g., Gosden 2004; Silliman 2005a). Although colonialism certainly is essential to the study of the world after 1500, archaeologists may be diminishing the utility of this concept through overly broad application. For example, Gosden (2004) labels as colonialism everything from genocide and displacement to what archaeologists formerly called a horizon style. Designating such disparate processes as colonialism dilutes the violence, domination, suffering, and Seneca Iroquois Connections and Autonomy 81 resistance that should be at the center of its application. Furthermore, the concept of colonialism is Eurocentric at root, since it carries with it the connotation of realized or imminent European domination (cf. Silliman 2005a:59). Overemphasis on colonialism may in fact be a “fragment of colonial discourse” (Mitchell and Scheiber, this volume) that remains embedded in current thinking about indigenous-settler dynamics. These theoretical problems with broad-strokes applications of colonialism suggest that a complementary concept is needed to better characterize contexts involving conspicuous indigenous autonomy. Following the work of earlier scholars (e.g., Alexander 1998), I propose that the phrase cultural entanglement be used solely to describe settings of relative intercultural parity. I define cultural entanglement as “a long-term, gradual, and nondirected process of interaction” (Alexander 1998:485), where no party has the ability to dominate another politically or economically. I use...

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