Historical Archaeology

371 Pages·2003·9.47 MB·English

HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY
Historical Archaeology is unique in defining its subject matter within an
international context which is not confined to the age of European colonialism.
The contributors advocate the study of all past societies with documentary
evidence, and challenge the entrenched oppositions between prehistory and
history, pre-literate and literate societies.
Focusing on methodological and theoretical issues, as well as a wealth of case
studies ranging from Roman Britain and classical Greece, to colonial Africa,
Brazil and the USA, the chapters in this book ‘answer back from the edge’. They
argue that recent work focusing on the mechanisms of European colonialism
and the emergence of a capitalist world system tends to produce a one-sided
history excluding the diverse traditions and practices that once shaped people’s
lives. To counteract this tendency they suggest that the pre-colonial antecedents
of modern capitalism and European colonialism should be explored, and that
oral and ethnographic evidence should be used in conjunction with written and
material sources.
A number of common themes run through the volume, including the relationships
between material culture, power and identity, between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’,
and between the past and the present. However, universalizing definitions of
concepts such as colonialism or power and identity have been avoided in favour
of research into the local manifestation of these phenomena in diverse social
and historical contexts.
Historical Archaeology will be of interest to students and scholars of archaeology,
history and anthropology, as well as professionals in the spheres of heritage and
cultural resource management.
Pedro Paulo A.Funari is Professor of Historical Archaeology, University of
Campinas, Brazil. Martin Hall is Professor of Historical Archaeology, University
of Cape Town, South Africa. Siân Jones is Lecturer in Archaeology, University
of Manchester, United Kingdom.
ONE WORLD ARCHAEOLOGY
Series Editor: P.J.Ucko
Animals into Art The Origins of Human Behaviour
H.Morphy (ed.), vol. 7 R.A.Foley (ed.), vol. 19
Archaeological Approaches to Cultural Identity The Politics of the Past
S.J.Shennan (ed.), vol. 10 P.Gathercole & D.Lowenthal (eds), vol. 12
Archaeological Heritage Management in the The Prehistory of Food: appetites for change
Modern World C.Gosden & J.Hather (eds), vol. 32
H.F.Cleere (ed.), vol. 9 The Presented Past: heritage, museums and
Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape education
P.Ucko & R.Layton (eds), vol. 30 G.Stone & B.L.Molyneaux (eds), vol. 25
Archaeology and Language I: theoretical and Sacred Sites, Sacred Places
methodological orientations D.L.Carmichael, J.Hubert, B.Reeves &
R.Blench & M.Spriggs (eds), vol. 27 A.Schanche (eds), vol. 23
Archaeology and Language II: archaeological data Signifying Animals: human meaning in the
and linguistic hypotheses natural world
R.Blench & M.Spriggs (eds), vol. 29 R.G.Willis (ed.), vol. 16
Archaeology and the Information Age: a global Social Construction of the Past: representation
perspective as power
P.Reilly & S.Rahtz (eds), vol. 21 G.C.Bond & A.Gilliam (eds), vol. 24
The Archaeology of Africa: food, metals and State and Society: the emergence and
towns development of social hierarchy and political
T.Shaw, P.Sinclair, B.Andah & A.Okpoko (eds), centralization
vol. 20 J.Gledhill, B.Bender & M.T.Larsen (eds),
vol. 4
Centre and Periphery: comparative studies in
archaeology Time, Process and Structured Transformation
T.C.Champion (ed.), vol. 11 in Archaeology
S.E.van der Leeuw & J.McGlade (eds), vol. 26
Conflict in the Archaeology of Living Traditions
R.Layton (ed.), vol. 8 Tropical Archaeobotany: applications and
developments
Domination and Resistance
J.G.Hather (ed.), vol. 22
D.Miller, M.J.Rowlands & C.Tilley (eds), vol. 3
The Walking Larder: patterns of
Early Human Behaviour in the Global Context
domestication, pastoralism, and predation
M.Petraglia & R.Korisettar (eds), vol. 28
J.Clutton-Brock (ed.), vol. 2
The Excluded Past: archaeology in education
What is an Animal?
P.Stone & R.MacKenzie (eds), vol. 17
T.Ingold (ed.), vol. 1
Foraging and Farming: the evolution of plant
What’s New? A closer look at the process of
exploitation
innovation
D.R.Harris & G.C.Hillman (eds), vol. 13
S.E.van der Leeuw & R.Torrence (eds),
From the Baltic to the Black Sea: studies in vol. 14
medieval archaeology
Who Needs the Past? Indigenous values and
D.Austin & L.Alcock (eds), vol. 18
archaeology
Hunters of the Recent Past R.Layton (ed.), vol. 5
L.B.Davis & B.O.K.Reeves (eds), vol. 15
The Meanings of Things: material culture and
symbolic expression
I.Hodder (ed.), vol. 6
HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY
Back from the edge
Edited by
Pedro Paulo A.Funari, Martin Hall
and Siân Jones
London and New York
First published 1999
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

© 1999 selection and editorial matter,
Pedro Paulo A.Funari, Martin Hall and Siân Jones;
individual chapters © 1999 the contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Historical archaeology: back from the edge/edited by
Pedro Paulo A.Funari, Martin Hall and Siân Jones.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Archaeology and history—Congresses. I. Funari,
Pedro Paulo A.
II. Hall, Martin, 1952– . III. Jones, S. (Siân), 1968– .
CC77.H5H574 1999 98–22313
930.1–dc21 CIP

ISBN 0-203-20881-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-26713-3 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-11787-9 (hbk)
Contents
List of figures xi
List of tables xv
List of contributors xvii
Preface xix
1 Introduction: archaeology in history 1
Pedro Paulo A.Funari, Siân Jones and Martin Hall
Archaeology in history: problems of definition and subject matter 1
Dislocation and continuity: historical archaeology and the construction
of identity 3
Theoretical and methodological problems 5
‘Back from the edge’: towards a world-wide historical archaeology 7
Power and identity: common themes—diverse contexts 11
Fragmentation 16
Archaeology and history: an ambivalent relationship 21
2 Rethinking historical archaeology 23
Matthew H.Johnson
The fragmentation of theory 25
The fragmentation of disciplinarity 27
The fragmentation of master narratives 28
The fragmentation of method 29
One way forward 31
Conclusion 34
3 Historical archaeology from a world perspective 37
Pedro Paulo A.Funari
Historical archaeology, an American discipline 37
The European outlook 39
v
vi CONTENTS
Are there peripheral outlooks? 42
The revolutionary role of capitalism and a possible international
outlook 43
Non-capitalist features of the modern world: Latin America, a case
in point 45
Towards a world perspective 47
4 Research trends in the historical archaeology of
Zimbabwe 67
Innocent Pikirayi
Introduction 67
Definitions and theoretical approaches 70
Historical archaeology in Zimbabwe 72
Archaeology, environment and the written sources: the archaeological
sites connected with the Torwa/Changamire states 74
Addressing the problem of Ndebele—British interaction: the archaeology
of the Ndebele state and the early colonial period 75
Merchant capital, trade and states in northern Zimbabwe: the
archaeology of the Mutapa state 77
Conclusions 80
5 The séance of 27 August 1889 and the problem of
historical consciousness 85
Malcolm Quinn
Archaeologies of domination and resistance 97
6 Gender, symbolism and power in Iberian societies 99
Margarita Díaz-Andreu and Trinidad Tortosa
Introduction 99
Iberians, art and gender 101
Discussion 116
7 The tyranny of the text: lost social strategies in current
historical period archaeology in the classical
Mediterranean 122
David B.Small
Introduction 122
Texts and archaeology in classical studies 122
The issue 123
A social historian/archaeologist’s reconstruction 124
The mortuary record 125
The context of the cemetery and social historians/archaeologists’
models 133
CONTENTS vii
Discussion 134
Conclusion 135
8 The imperial context of Romano-British studies and
proposals for a new understanding of social change 137
Richard Hingley
The imperial context of the theory of Romanization 137
Proposals for a new understanding of social change 142
A case study: the roundhouse 145
Conclusions 146
9 Class and rubbish 151
Duncan H.Brown
Class 151
Medieval rubbish in Southampton 152
Medieval Southampton 154
Distribution of pottery types 156
The value of imported pottery 158
Conclusion 162
10 Proto-colonial archaeology: the case of Elizabethan
Ireland 164
Eric Klingelhofer
Earlier Tudor colonization 164
Elizabethan colonization 166
Jacobean colonization 173
Proto-colonial archaeology in Northern Ireland 175
Conclusions 176
11 West India: iconographie documents from the
seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in Brazil 180
Maria L.Quartim de Moraes
Introduction 180
Seventeenth-century travellers: Dutch Brazil 181
Nineteenth-century travellers: the Enlightenment vision 184
A way of life: slavery as a relational pattern 187
Concluding: Brazil as it is 191
12 Subaltern voices? Finding the spaces between things
and words 193
Martin Hall
viii CONTENTS
13 On rejecting the concept of socio-economic status in
historical archaeology 204
Gregory G.Monks
Introduction 204
Analytic tools: archaeological 205
Analytic tools: documentary 210
A question of aims 213
Discussion 214
Issues of identity, nationalism and ethnicity 217
14 Historical categories and the praxis of identity: the
interpretation of ethnicity in historical archaeology 219
Siân Jones
The problem: the interplay of text and material culture in the
interpretation of ethnic groups 219
Historical archaeology: ‘handservant’ of history or objective
science? 222
A theoretical approach to ethnicity 224
Practice and representation 228
Conclusions 229
15 Lost kingdoms: oral histories, travellers’ tales and
archaeology in southern Madagascar 233
Mike Parker Pearson, Karen Godden, Ramilisonina,
Retsihisatse, Jean-Luc Schwenninger and Helen Smith
Methods and sources 234
European written sources: Flacourt and Drury 236
Oral histories 241
Archaeological survey and excavation 242
The origins of Tandroy ethnicity 247
Conclusion 249
16 Pidgin English: historical archaeology, cultural
exchange and the Chinese in the Rocks, 1890–1930 255
Jane Lydon
The Rocks 257
Conclusion 279
17 The formation of ethnic-American identities:
Jewish communities in Boston 284
Suzanne M.Spencer-Wood
Introduction 284
European origins of Jewish-American identities 286
CONTENTS ix
Outline of the development of Jewish-American identities 287
A historical archaeology survey of the development of Boston’s
Jewish-American community identities 1840–1920 289
Conclusion 303
18 Maroon, race and gender: Palmares material culture
and social relations in a runaway settlement 308
Pedro Paulo A.Funari
Introduction: slaveholding societies, runaway settlements and
Palmares 308
Historical archaeology, its objectives and the Palmares archaeological
project 316
Ethnicity, material culture and Palmares 319
19 Black identity and sense of past in Brazilian national
culture 328
Michael Rowlands
Introduction 328
An archaeology of resistance? 328
A short history of Palmares 332
The archaeology of Palmares 334
An African-American culture at Palmares? 340
Conclusion 341
Index 345