Module 29: Narrative in the Archaeology of Native North America: Contact and Resistance

Readings: Rubertone, "Archaeology, Colonialism and 17th-Century Native America"; McDonald, et al., "The Northern Cheyenne Outbreak of 1879"

What two kinds of narratives does Rubertone describe for the archaeology of seventeenth-century North America?

(1) Colonial archaeology: focused on the reconstruction of the lives of early Euro-Americans. Indians are ignored or regarded as savages, one source of adversity to be overcome, a part of the wilderness. Europeans struggle to bring Western civilization to the North American wilderness.

(2) Archaeological studies of acculturation: focused on the presence of European trade goods in Indian settlements to measure progression from Indian culture to assimilation into European culture. This narrative assumes European culture’s superiority.

How do these narratives serve as a basis for subverting the status or rights of Indian people today? For colonial archaeology, Indians’ prior occupation of North America and their ownership of resources are ignored, the importance of their interactions with colonists is dismissed, or it supplies the justification for European conquest. For acculturation studies, the emphasis is on Indian assimilation to Euro-American society rather than their struggles against it. It portrays Indians as willing subjects of European colonialism.

Which kind of narrative is the traditional Deerfield narrative described by Keene and Chilton (1995)? Narrative of colonial archaeology (though based on history, not archaeology)?

Since this article, Rubertone has gone on to publish a book reporting her excavations of the Narragansett cemetery (Grave Undertakings, 2001). Rubertone uses archaeological data from the cemetery (excavated with the consent of the Narragansett people because it was threatened by development) to question and critique Euro-American views of Indian culture during colonial times. For example, the dead were buried in cemetery plots, which was a departure from pre-European Narragansett practices. Rubertone suggests that the Narragansett used these visible cemeteries to assert a more emphatic claim for indigenous rights over land and resources. The Narragansett might also have intended these cemeteries to provide protection against grave robbing, a Puritan practice which, according to historical records, enraged the Narragansett. The creation of cemeteries suggests pressures generated by the colonial encounter that are suppressed by the Eurocentric narratives of colonial archaeology. The cemeteries demonstrate previously unrecognized inventiveness by the Narragansett in responding to the colonial encounter.

The Narragansett cemetery also subverts the American “master narrative” that the indigenous cultures disintegrated and eventually became extinct under the impact of European contact. In the 47 graves examined by Rubertone, the dead were buried in a highly standardized fashion: on their right sides, in flexed positions, with their heads pointing southwest, and with indigenous cloths or mats spread below and over their bodies. Grave goods included items of both Native and European manufacture, and they varied among individuals. But some grave goods were restricted to individuals of a particular age and sex. The uniform burial program suggests deliberate adherence to a culturally ordered set of rules for disposing of the dead, not cultural disintegration or social disorder. Continuity in Narragansett culture is also evident in continuing efforts to honor the dead, some visible archaeologically (offerings placed in intrusive pits dug some time after the original burial, a burial placed in the cemetery a century after its common use had ended) and some evident in written documents (a nineteenth-century suit by the Narragansett against European Americans who were digging up Narragansett graves, a series of reports of encounters between living Narragansett and their long-dead ancestors appearing in Narragansett Dawn, a twentieth-century magazine of Narragansett language and culture).

Narratives such as Rubertone’s, based on archaeological and documentary data combined, can establish continuities of practice that link descendant communities to their ancestral pasts and that permit both cultural change and credible claims of legitimate descent.