Module 27: Narrative in the Archaeology
of Native North America

Reading: Keene and Chilton, “Toward an Archaeology of the Pocumtuck”

The job of museum curators and archaeologists dealing with the public is to develop narratives or stories through museum displays. Narratives involve:

(1) Selection (and this implies that there is no unbiased history, although we can still worry about if history is fair or unfair, if it portrays issues and understandings from both sides).

(2) Creating order.

(3) Commentary on events—moral, parable, make history meaningful to viewer/reader (Wallace 1986:158).

Narratives give our observations coherence, meaning, order—e.g., Keene & Chilton? Narratives involve transformation, change—e.g., Keene & Chilton?
Narratives should enable us to see our own world differently, with new ideas about cause and effect.

I developed this narrative for grade school teachers (5th grade) who wanted to do an Indian unit with their classes. In grade school, Native American culture is discussed only for the time of European contact. Kids get no concept of native cultures having changed, so again, Indians look very static and uncreative. This ethnographic rendering of Indians establishes one set of expectations created for Indians today: if you don’t conform, you’re not authentic, a “real” Indian. So I'll present this narrative to you, and you can use it if you teach or do a museum display, or you can critique it—because I think it’s a problematic narrative in some ways.

Inhabitation is a process defined by hippie/New Age/eco-poet Gary Snyder as developing
an intimate familiarity with habitat, a sense of interdependence with habitat. It is a process by which a foreign, strange habitat becomes familiar, comprehensible, brought into understanding, and becomes meaningful.

Inhabitation didn't happen all at once. Indians arrived in the Great Lakes area immediately after the retreat of glaciers around 8000 B.C.E., and there is no indication that Indians arrived already endowed with some mystical respect for the land. In fact, there is some evidence to the contrary. As we discussed, newly arrived human hunters may have caused the extinction of many large mammals: mammoth, mastodon, horse, camel, and giant sloth.

From a kind of uniform, pioneer Paleoindian culture, inhabitation had both technical and spiritual aspects. Today, we will first deal with technology. In 10,000 years of living in the Great Lakes region, Native Americans made numerous technological breakthroughs:

1) Paleoindian, 7000 B.C.E.: heat treatment for stone, making stone more resistant—easier to flake into points; scrapers are important for making use of not very good quality, locally available stone.

2) Early Archaic 7000-5000 B.C.E.: water transportation—earliest occupation of Manitoulin Island. Canoes were important for transport to local resources and back to camp, for fishing, wild rice, trade, warfare, stone.

3) 6500 B.C.E.: First fish; over the next 3,000 years developed fishing gear:
hooks, gorges, leisters, harpoons, and netsinkers.

4) 6500 B.C.E.: Ground stone technology: hard igneous stone turned into axes, alts, and adzes for woodworking. This permitted the manufacture of dugout canoes and promoted bark technology: canoes, housing, birch and elm containers.

5) 5500 B.C.E.: Ground stone technology was also used to process plant foods. Grinding stones made more food available to digest, increase caloric and nutritive value. Nutting stones for acorns, walnuts, hickory nuts, butter nuts, pecans and hazelnuts in the South. Next to large game, nuts became a preferred food because they offered a complete protein, oil source, and high caloric content and were relatively easy to gather and process. In 3000 B.C.E., smaller seeds were growing in disturbed areas (river floodplains camp sites, forest fire clearings): smartweed, marsh elder, goosefoot, chenopodium wild, then domesticated sumpweed and sunflower. By 1700, 373 native plants had economic uses: 39 specially for food, 70 specially for medicine (see Densmore 1974). Many of the medicinal plants were of proven biochemical efficacy (see de Montellano 1975). Other plants were used for rope, twine, dishes, houses, dyes, etc.

6) 6000-5000 B.C.E. : Fiber technology (black willow) for nets, bark technology (larch roots) and game snares (palmetto-fiber woven textiles: blankets, bags, matting associated with burial at Windover site, Florida).

7) 3000 B.C.E.: Copper—sharp-edged points, knives, needles; never developed metal smelting—too pure naturally for hard alloys to be discovered; however, annealing was known and used.

8) Boiling technology: fire-cracked rock, 7000-5000 B.C.E.; pottery 500 B.C.E. Decreased toxins, extracted fats and oil, decreased calorie loss for charring, break down complex carbohydrates in plants, convert maple sap to concentrated storable sugar.

9) Bow and arrow beginning 700 C.E.; more for warfare than hunting?

10) Agriculture: first gourds in the Great Lakes around 500 B.C.E.; used as containers, and possibly the seeds were eaten. Corn present in Middle Woodland 100 B.C.E.–500 C.E., but corn was not a dietary staple until after 1000 C.E. Why the reluctance? Natural foods abundant and reliable are sign of success of adaptation, though often read as a sign of lack of cultural advancement. Another possibility: northward spread of corn required selective breeding since corn was a tropical grass—in which case ought to acknowledge it as a major achievement of Native American (women).

11) Agricultural clearing led to systematic forest management: intentional burning to clear underbrush, decreasing dangerous forest fires; encouraging the growth of browse for game animals, which were then harvested in drives. As a result, semi-domesticated deer, turkey, and passenger pigeon were most important. At the time of European contact, the Eastern Woodlands were an open parkland maintained by Indian land management practices. With epidemic diseases and population decrease the deep forest grew back and had to be cleared by pioneers (Cronon 1983.).

Ironically, the technological inhabitation of North America by Native Americans facilitated the rapid spread of Europeans across the continent. Ten thousand years of Native American R&D (Research and Development) provided Europeans with much of the knowledge they needed to flourish in the New World.

I'm not so happy with this narrative now because I feel that it provides a positive view of Native Americans, but using Anglo (technological) criteria and sustaining a narrative of Progress, a narrative used to disenfranchise Native Americans. A more native view might be one based on spiritual inhabitation, which we will examine next period.