Engaged Anthropology: Research Essays on North American Archaeology, Ethnobotany, and Museology

292 Pages·20.323 MB·English

by  edited by Michelle Hegmon and B. Sunday Eiselt

Anthropological Papers
Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan
Number 94
Engaged Anthropology
Research Essays on North American
Archaeology, Ethnobotany, and Museology
edited by
Michelle Hegrnon
B. Sunday Eiselt
1.
PAPERS IN HONOR OF RICHARD FORD
Ann Arbor, Michigan
2005
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Contents
List of figures, v
List of tables, v
Foreword, vi
INTRODUCTION. Conversations with an Engaged Anthropologist: An Interview with
Richard I. Ford, xiii
B. Sunday Eiselt and Michelle Hegmon
CHAPTER 1. Ceramics for the Archaeologist: An Alternative Perspective, 1
F eUpe V. Ortega
CHAPTER 2. Collaborative Knowledge: Carrying Forward Richard Ford's Legacy
ofIntegrative Ethnoscience in the U.S. Southwest, 6
Michael Adler
CHAPTER 3. Our Father (Our Mother): Gender Ideology, Praxis, and Marginaliza
tion in Pueblo Religion, 27
Severin M. Fowles
CHAPTER 4. Landscapes As Memory: Archaeological History to Learn From and
Live By, 52
Kurt F Anschuetz
CHAPTER 5. Mestizaje and Migration: Modeling Population Dynamics in Seven
teenth-Century New Mexico's Spanish Society, 73
Heather Trigg and Debra L. Gold
CHAPTER 6. The Art of Ethnobotany: Depictions of Maize and Other Plants in
the Prehispanic Southwest, 89
Kelley Hays-Gilpin and Michelle Hegmon
CHAPTER 7. At the Other End of the Puebloan World: Feasting at Casas Grandes,
Chihuahua, Mexico, 114
Paul E. Minnis and Michael E. Whalen
CHAPTER 8. The Beginnings of Plains-Pueblo Interaction: An Archaeological
Perspective from Southeastern New Mexico, 129
John D. Speth
CHAPTER 9. Protohistoric Western Pueblo Exchange: Barter, Gift, and Violence
Revisited, 148
Stephen Plog
CHAPTER 10. Ritual, Politics, and the "Exotic" in North American Prehistory, 155
Katherine A. Spielmann and Patrick Livingood
CHAPTER 11. "Darkening the Sun in Their Flight": A Zooarchaeological Account
ing of Passenger Pigeons in the Prehistoric Southeast, 174
H. Edwin Jackson
CHAPTER 12. Why California? The Relevance of California Archaeology and
Ethnography to Eastern Woodlands Prehistory, 200
David G. Anderson
CHAPTER 13. The Value of Material Culture Collections to Great Basin
Ethnographic Research, 226
Catherine S. Fowler
CHAPTER 14. The Next Generation: Museum Techniques at Penn State's Matson
Museum of Anthropology, 238
Claire McHale Milner
CHAPTER 15. Dick Ford as Friend, Colleague, and Mentor: 1963-Present, 255
Jeffrey R. Parsons
iv
Figures
2.1. Location of Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo, Bernalillo County, New Mexico, 12
2.2. Aerial photo of Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo showing Main Mound and locations of
the north and east roomblocks, 14
2.3. Architectural details of the adobe rooms in the north and east roomblocks, 16
3.1. Map of T'aitOna highlighting the rooms and surrounding features, 33
3.2. Variation in ritual architecture at T'aitOna, 36
3.3. Examples of female figurines from the northern Rio Grande, 41
4.1. Northern Rio Grande region, 55
4.2. World Quarter shrine at K'uu?6wlnkeyi, 63
4.3. Boulder shrine with pecked and ground cupules, 64
5.1. Female population growth, 84
6.1. Mimbres Classic Black-on-white bowls, 92
6.2. Historic and late prehistoric petroglyphs depicting corn plants, 94
6.3. Maraw dance wands with corn ear, 95
6.4. Ears of corn and flowers on Antelope Mesa mural basebands, 97
6.5. Pottery Mound mural with women, baskets, and com, 99
6.6. Flower Mound with colored com and lightning, 100
6.7. Corn personified at Pottery Mound, 102
6.8. Potsherds with com and flowers from Awat'ovi, 103
6.9. Dot-in-square pattern on human figures, 105
7.1. Casas Grandes, 116
7.2. Unit 9 oven and associated platform mound, 118
7.3. Unit I ovens with associated mound, 120
7 A. Photograph of an excavated elaborate oven, 123
8.1. Location of Henderson Site and Bloom Mound, 132
10.1 Map of cultural areas and sites, 156
11.1. Pleistocene. Paleoindian, Archaic. and Early and Middle Woodland sites with passen-
ger pigeons, 184
11.2. Late Woodland/Emergent Mississippian sites with passenger pigeons, 185
11.3. Mississippian sites with passenger pigeons. 185
I1A. Mississippian si tes lacking passenger pigeon, 188
11.5. Protohistoric and historic Native American sites with passenger pigeons, 188
Tables
5.1. Colonists arriving in New Mexico before 1605, 79
5.2. Life table for eighteenth-century espafioles, 80
5.3. Fertility and mortality rates for the eighteenth-century Spanish New Mexicans, 81
SA. Fertility and survivorship data for five-year intervals used in the simulation, 82
11.1. Sites with passenger pigeon identified in faunal assemblages, 179
11.2. Sites examined that lacked passenger pigeon, 182
v
Foreword
B. Sunday Eiselt and Michelle Hegmon
Richard 1. (Dick) Ford's career defies easy labels. He is a professor of both an
thropology and botany. He speaks fondly and favorably of his college days in a truly
interdisciplinary department of anthropology and sociology at Oberlin College. His
work in museum studies reaches well outside the traditionally defined field of anthro
pology. He trained as an archaeologist, he has done and is continuing to do extensive
and important archaeological research, and most of his students have been archaeolo
gists. But his dissertation was based primarily on ethnographic research, and many
of his greatest contributions have been in the field of ethnobotany. At the University
of Michigan Museum of Anthropology (which is focused on archaeology) he was the
curator of the Ethnology collections and the director of the Ethnobotany Laboratory.
Ever since his first field experience in the U.S. Southwest, he has been deeply involved
with the native communities whose ancestors created much of the archaeological
record. He maintains long-standing ties with these communities and has often helped
them with land claims and other legal matters. One of the greatest lessons he teaches
his students is the importance of maintaining these relationships, not because they
enhance careers, but because they become true friendships and sources of joy.
The best single word we can find to describe Dick's approach is "engaged." Talk
with him for five minutes and you will see that he is deeply engaged with his work; he
loves it. He is engaged with the people whose ancestors he is studying and the people
who live in the area where he works. He cares about them and has made life-long
commitments to reciprocate some of what they have shared with him. He is engaged
with his administrative work, and he undertakes difficult and potentially onerous tasks
because he believes he has the responsibility to try to make things better. He is engaged
with his teaching; he clearly loves it, and he also views it as a serious responsibility.
He is engaged with his students; he cares about their work and lives, and even sup
ports them when they strike out in new directions.
"Engaged" has many positive connotations in normal English usage, including
to pledge or bind through promise, to interlock, or to be active. It also has a specific
meaning in anthropology. Dick's friend and colleague Roy A. (Skip) Rappaport used
the word in his 1993 Distinguished Lecture to the American Anthropological As
sociation (Rappaport 1994) in which he urged anthropologists to become engaged
vi
Foreword vii
in the larger world and to intervene in the field of public policy and decision making (see
also Messer and Lambek 2001). This call for an engaged anthropology fits well with what
Dick has done throughout his career, not so much in programmatic policy statements, but
in his practice, especially his work with and for Native People. Dick Ford is an engaged
anthropologist. He is informed by and involved with the lives and cultures of people, both
past and present.
In the interview that constitutes the Introduction of this volume, Dick's own words ex
press his engagement with his work, his passion for research, and the strong bonds he has
forged with students, colleagues, and friends. In order to complement this personal perspec
tive, we briefly outline several more academic ways in which Dick's research subjects and
publications constitute engaged anthropology, both in the sense intended by Rappaport and
more broadly.
Dick's engagement with the whole of his profession, including the seriousness with which
he takes his teaching and administrative responsibilities, is manifested in both his biography
and his publications. Of the thirty-six years he spent as a faculty member at the University
of Michigan, he was an administrator for twenty-seven of them. Specifically, he was (twice)
the director of the Museum of Anthropology, and he served as chair of the Department of
Anthropology and as associate dean for research of the College of Literature, Science, and
the Arts. He has also been active in numerous national and international organizations includ
ing the American Association for the Advancement of Science (chair of Section H), Society
for American Archaeology (executive committee), Archaeology Division of the American
Anthropological Association (including a term as chair), the Society for Economic Botany
(including a term as president), and the Council for Museum Anthropology (including a term
as president and founding newsletter editor). In all of these positions, Dick has helped to
shape the dialogs, debates, and public opinions surrounding anthropology. Furthermore, he
devoted part of his writing to issues of education and administration, including undergraduate
and graduate training, collections management, and research ethics (see for example Ford
1977a, 1977b, 1984, 1999a). These are just a few of Dick's administrative accomplishments
that speak to an engaged anthropology.
This service also demonstrates Dick's dedication to transdisciplinary research. His earli
est field experiences at San Juan Pueblo in the 1960s showed him how important it is for
archaeologists and other anthropologists to become knowledgeable about plants, which in
cluded learning from the indigenous groups who use them and the botanists who study them
academically. He also saw the importance of adding the perspectives of social anthropology
to the archaeological studies of plants. As a result, Dick engaged archaeology with these
other disciplines and hdped develop the transdisciplinary field of paleoethnobotany.
Not all of Dick's achievements or contributions have been confined to the realm of aca
demia. He is also clearly engaged in the work he has done with and for native communities,
and he has written extensively about the implications of this work. Anthropology involves
what he calls "transferable knowledge" (Ford 2001 :6) such as information about plant and
animal use, traditional agricultural practices, and resource management practices. For many
years now, this kind of knowledge has been critical to Native American communities seek
ing to gain control over their resources, land claims, and other legal matters (Ford 2001 :6,
viii Engaged Anthropology
1999b). Many archaeologists, historians, museum specialists, and ethnobotanists now as
sist these communities by providing documentation and giving expert testimony to support
these claims (for examples see Dogngoske et al. 2000; Ferguson 1984; Fowler et al. 1994;
McManamon and Hatton 2000). Dick began his own "expert witness" career as a consultant
for Zuni and Hopi land and water rights claims during the 1980s (Ford 1984). In doing this
work, Dick and other researchers like him are returning something to the communities who
have shared their knowledge (see for example Adler in Chapter 2, Anschuetz in Chapter 4,
and Fowler in Chapter 13 of this volume). Dick refers to this process of engaging native
communities as "reciprocity anthropology."
Reciprocity anthropology, especially when it involves legal cases, often creates a new
kind of relationship between anthropologists or other researchers and Indian communities.
In these cases, the parameters of research are defined by a subject group in order to achieve
a specific goal. The anthropologist's boundaries are made clear and their temporary position
within the society is situated and sanctified by an internal governing body. The resulting
research is topically-based and service-oriented. Some might argue that this process limits
or restricts open-ended research (see Asad 1973; Erve 1987; Purcell 1998 and references
therein for examples), but Dick has shown how it actually opens up new realms of knowl
edge and collaboration. Reciprocal work, done in the context of well-defined and long-term
professional and personal partnerships, yields new and sometimes surprising information
that extends well beyond the legal case. The resulting political uses of the information are
defined by the community and not the researcher. Researchers thus do not become political
advocates for the group, but rather, their information is used by the group as an advocacy
tool. This is the essential form of an engaged anthropology.
Dick's true engagement with native communities has given him a perspective on their
social and economic situations, insights that have shaped his theoretical approach and topi
cal interests in archaeology. He has long argued that archaeologists should study issues of
race, gender (including multiple genders), class, ethnicity, and how these categories structure
society and thus affect people's lives (Ford 1973). In considering how native people are
popularly portrayed, he has asked "which western mission depicts the harsh surroundings
of the Indian neophytes, or which frontier outpost, now a national monument, shows the
economic parasitism it exerted nationally?" (1973:87). He also noted that museum "diOl·a
mas and displays often omit the presence (no less the contribution) of other ethnic groups"
(1973:87). These sentiments preceded by nearly a decade the critical and Marxist theory that
became popular in the Postprocessualism of the 1980s, and they speak clearly to a vision of
the past that redresses colonial agendas, power relations, and the production of contempo
rary social values. This perspective infuses Dick's anthropological practice, a practice that
emphasizes cultural pluralism, the contingency of human action, and the historical nature
of our preconceived categories.
Probably as a result of his involvement with native communities as well as his personal
perspective, Dick has always been aware that he is studying people and not just their materi
als and biology. Archaeologists' recent interest in issues of agency and practice came as no
surprise to him. It simply assigned theoretical labels to issues he long considered important.
Furthermore, initial archaeological interest in these theories focused primarily on social and
Foreword ix
ideational issues (e.g., Hodder 1982; Miller and Tilley 1984). Only very recently have many
archaeologists begun applying these theoretical perspectives to environmental and ecologi
cal issues (e.g., Carmichael et a1. 1994; Darling et a1. 2004; Fisher et al. 2003; McGlade
1995; van der Leeuw and Redman 2002). But this is where Dick began; starting with his
earliest work at San Juan Pueblo, he realized that humans play an active role in creating
their natural, social and cultural worlds. His view has always been one of an ecology that
includes humans, an approach with links to some of Rappaport's work (see especially 1968,
1971,1990). As Parsons (Chapter 15) notes, Ford's work anticipated what is today called
"landscape archaeology." It also helped to transform archaeobotany into paleoethnoecology,
thus making it an important avenue of theoretical inquiry, one that includes the engagement
of people with their environments over time.
Dick's ethnographic approach led him to emphasize native perspectives and their rules
about adapting to the environment (see Ford 1994: xxii). The oft-cited article, "The Color of
Survival" (1980), is just one example. In it, he considered how the Puebloan ritual require
ment for ears of corn of different and pure colors is related to Puebloan cosmology, and how
it also has important ecological implications. Pure color strains could only be maintained
by planting separate fields in distant and ecologically diverse locations. Ritual and ecology
are one and the same within this encompassing system. In another example from the Tewa
Pueblos (Ford 1976), he showed how cultural classifications relate to rules about illness
and healing, including the circumvention and eventual change of those rules. His most
recent work considers expressions of nature and metaphor in prehistoric and historic rock
art at Mesa Prieta in northern New Mexico. This project not only involves minority youth
and local schools but also brings together the Bureau of Land Management, private land
owners, and the Vecinos del Rio, a community action group made up of Anglos, Pueblos,
and Hispanics.
In sum, reading what Dick has written regarding the field of ethnobotany gives us some
insight into his general approach to material studies and his hopes for the future of American
Archaeology. He states,
Despite efforts to the contrary ... the scope of ethnobotany remains hard to define. It is articulated
by a semi-distinctive collection of epistemologies, varied theories, and accepted methodologies.
If anything, ethnobotany is best distinguished by its paradigmatic pluralism. Its vagueness, like
a world view, leaves it open to diverse influences that are equally frustrating to comprehend
but keep it intellectually challenging; that is its nature. [Ford 1994: xxii)
As postprocessual approaches have become integrated into traditional archaeological
practice, and as the ramifications of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatria
tion Act of 1990 have spread through the museum world, American archeology has become
more like its sister field of ethnobotany. What promises to unify the discipline, as Dick
points out, is precisely the native perspective as well as the ongoing relevance of heritage
research to local communities. The uniting factor for Dick, once again, is engagement, an
engagement with anthropological subjects as well as the lives of people, their concerns, and
their perspectives as an ongoing source of inspiration for the discipline.