On the edges of history: Reflections on historical archaeology

American Historical Review

Volumn 113, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 93-118

  Mayne, Alan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 40849116629     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.113.1.93     Document Type: Review

References (157)

1. Charles E. Orser, Jr., "History of Historical Archaeology," in Orser, ed., Encyclopedia of Historical Archaeology (London, 2002), 271.
2. See also Philip Levy, "Always a Handmaiden-Never a Bride: A Historical Archaeologist Explores the Divide between Archaeologists and Historians," Archaeology, February 23, 2000, http://www.archaeology. org/online/features/history/index.html (accessed November 28, 2007).
3. Martin Hall, Archaeology and the Modern World: Colonial Transcripts in South Africa and the Chesapeake (London, 2000), 71.
4. Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman, eds., Historical Archaeology (Malden, Mass., 2006);
5. Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology (Cambridge, 2006).
6. Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman, "Introduction: Archaeology of the Modern World," in Hall and Silliman, Historical Archaeology, 11;
7. Charles E. Orser, Jr., "Negotiating our 'Familiar Pasts,'" in Sarah Tarlow and Susie West, eds., The Familiar Past? Archaeologies of Later Historical Britain (London, 1999), 274;
8. Matthew D. Cochran and Mary C. Beaudry, "Material Culture Studies and Historical Archaeology," in Hicks and Beaudry, The Cambridge Companion, 193.
9. See Charles E. Orser, Jr., A Historical Archaeology ofthe Modem World (New York, 1996);
10. Charles E. Orser, Jr., and Brian M. Fagan, Historical Archaeology (New York, 1995);
11. Orser, "History of Historical Archaeology," 270.
12. Hall and Silliman, "Introduction: Archaeology of the Modern World," 2.
13. Henry Glassie, Material Culture (Bloomington, Ind., 1999), 41;
14. Dan Hicks, "Archaeology Unfolding: Diversity and the Loss of Isolation, "Oxford Journal of Archaeology 23, no. 1 (2003): 326;
15. Cochran and Beaudry, "Material Culture Studies and Historical Archaeology," 191.
16. Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, "Introduction: The Place of Historical Archaeology," in Hicks and Beaudry, The Cambridge Companion, 6;
17. Rhys Isaac, "Imagination and Material Culture: The Enlightenment on a Mid-18th-Century Virginia Plantation," in Anne E. Yentsch and Mary C. Beaudry, eds., The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology (Boca Raton, Fla., 1992), 401.
18. See Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982).
19. Leora Auslander, "Beyond Words," American Historical Review 110, no. 4 (October 2005): 2.
20. Hicks and Beaudry, The Cambridge Companion, 2-3.
21. Hall, Archaeology and the Modern World, 102. See Hall's discussion of "critical materialism" in chap. 4.
22. Charles E. Orser, Jr., "Historical Archaeology," in Brian M. Fagan, ed., The Oxford Companion to Archaeology (New York, 1996), 279.
23. See also Barbara J. Little, Text-Aided Archaeology (Boca Raton, Fla., 1992).
24. See especially James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New York, 1977).
25. See Adrian Praetzellis and Mary Praetzellis, "More Than 'Just a Place to Start From': Historical Archaeologies of West Oakland," in Praetzellis and Praetzellis, eds., Putting the "There" There: Historical Archaeologies of West Oakland (Sonoma, Calif., 2004), 305.
26. Orser, "Historical Archaeology," 279.
27. See Jim Symonds and Eleanor Casella, "Historical Archaeology and Industrialisation," in Hicks and Beaudry, The Cambridge Companion, 143-167.
28. Orser, "History of Historical Archaeology," 272.
29. See Tim Murray, "But That Was Long Ago: Theory in Australian Historical Archaeology," Australasian Historical Archaeology 20 (2002): 8-14.
30. Hall, Archaeology and the Modern World, 2, 3.
31. Stephen A. Mrozowski, Grace H. Ziesing, and Mary C. Beaudry, Living on the Boott: Historical Archaeology at the Boott Mills Boardinghouses, Lowell, Massachusetts (Amherst, Mass., 1996).
32. See Alan Mayne and Tim Murray, eds., The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland (Cambridge, 2001).
33. Christopher R. DeCorse, An Archaeology of Elmina: Africans and Europeans on the Gold Coast, 1400-1900 (Washington, D.C., 2001);
34. Patricia E. Rubertone, Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians (Washington, D.C., 2001), 189.
35. See also Tim Murray, ed., The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies (Cambridge, 2004).
36. Randall H. McGuire and Robert Paynter, eds., The Archaeology of Inequality (Oxford, 1991);
37. Randall H. McGuire, "Marxism and Capitalism in Historical Archaeology," in Hicks and Beaudry, The Cambridge Companion, 123.
38. Mark P. Leone, The Archaeology of Liberty in an American Capital: Excavations in Annapolis (Berkeley, Calif., 2005).
39. See McGuire's assessment of Leone in McGuire, "Marxism and Capitalism in Historical Archaeology," 131-133.
40. See Dan Hicks, "'Places for Thinking' from Annapolis to Bristol: Situations and Symmetries in 'World Historical Archaeologies,'" World Archaeology 37, no. 3 (2005): 373-391.
41. Leone, The Archaeology of Liberty, 58-61.
42. Hicks, "Archaeology Unfolding," 325, 318. See also Mary C. Beaudry, "Introduction: Ethnography in Retrospect," in Mary Ellin D'Agostino, Elizabeth Prine, Eleanor Casella, and Margot Winer, eds., The Written and the Wrought: Complementary Sources in Historical Anthropology (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), 1-16.
43. Orser, "History of Historical Archaeology," 272.
44. DeCorse, An Archaeology of Elmina, 1, 2.
45. Kathleen Deagan and José María Cruxent, Columbus's Outpost among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493-1498 (New Haven, Conn., 2002), 4, 161.
46. Mark P. Leone, Paul R. Mullins, Marian C. Creveling, Laurence Hurst, Barbara Jackson-Nash, Lynn D. Jones, Hannah Jopling Kaiser, George C. Logan, and Mark S. Warner, "Can an African-American Historical Archaeology Be an Alternative Voice?" in Ian Hodder, Michael Shanks, Alexandra Alexandri, Victor Buchli, John Carman, Jonathan Last, and Gavin Lucas, eds., Interpreting Archaeology: Finding Meanings in the Past (London, 1995), 110;
47. Barry Cunliffe, "Afterword: Historical Archaeology in the Wider Discipline," in Hicks and Beaudry, The Cambridge Companion, 318.
48. Hall, Archaeology and the Modern World, 19.
49. See, for example, Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall, Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City (New Haven, Conn., 2001), 8.
50. Kathleen A. Deagan, "La Isabela: Europe's First Foothold in the New World," National Geographic 181, no. 1 (1992): 40-51.
51. Thomas N. Layton, Gifts from the Celestial Kingdom: A Shipwrecked. Cargo for Gold Rush California (Stanford, Calif, 2002).
52. Hall, Archaeology and the Modern World, 19.
53. Orser and Fagan, Historical Archaeology, 237, 238;
54. Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone (Bloomington, Ind., 1995), 11-12.
55. Michael Shanks and Ian Hodder, "Processual, Postprocessual and Interpretive Archaeologies," in Hodder et al., Interpreting Archaeology, 11-12.
56. Deagan and Cruxent, Columbus's Outpost, 4, 213.
57. Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures and Self (Melbourne, 2004), 12.
58. Susie West, "Introduction," in Tarlow and West, The Familiar Past?, 1; also Sarah Tarlow, "Strangely Familiar," ibid., 264. Compare with Hicks and Beaudry, "Introduction: The Place of Historical Archaeology," 4.
59. Hicks and Beaudry, "Introduction: The Place of Historical Archaeology," 2.
60. Mary C. Beaudry, Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing (New Haven, Conn., 2006), 7.
61. Laurie A. Wilkie, The Archaeology of Mothering: An African-American Midwife's Tale (New York, 2003), xxi.
62. Praetzellis and Praetzellis, "More Than 'Just a Place to Start From,' " 306, 307.
63. See Alan Mayne, "Big Notes from a Little Street: Historical Research at Melbourne's 'Little Lon,'" International Journal of Historical Archaeology 10, no. 4 (2006): 311-322.
64. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, 1983), 57.
65. Lu Ann De Cunzo and Julie H. Ernstein, "Landscapes, Ideology, and Experience in Historical Archaeology," in Hicks and Beaudry, The Cambridge Companion, 261;
66. Geertz, Local Knowledge, chap. 3.
67. Ian Hodder, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1991), 151;
68. Julia A. King, "Household Archaeology, Identities, and Biographies," in Hicks and Beaudry, The Cambridge Companion, 312.
69. Deetz, In Small Tilings Forgotten, 259;
70. Anne E. Yentsch, A Chesapeake Family and Their Slaves: A Study in Historical Archaeology (Cambridge, 1994), xix, xxii;
71. Beaudry, Findings, chap. 1.
72. Beaudry, Findings, 137.
73. See Orser, "Negotiating Our 'Familiar Pasts,'" 280-281.
74. Laurie A. Wilkie, Creating Freedom: Material Culture and African American Identity at Oakley Plantation, Louisiana, 1840-1950 (Baton Rouge, La., 2000);
75. David H. Thomas, "A Retrospective Look at Columbian Consequences," American Antiquity 57, no. 4 (1992): 614;
76. and see David H. Thomas, Columbian Consequences, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1989, 1990, 1991).
77. Murray, The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies, 15.
78. Laurie A. Wilkie and Paul Farnsworth, Sampling Many Pots: An Archaeology of Memory and Tradition at a Bahamian Plantation (Gainesville, FIa., 2005).
79. Cunliffe, "Afterword: Historical Archaeology in the Wider Discipline," 318.
80. Rubertone, Grave Undertakings, 189.
81. Hall, Archaeology and the Modern World, 70, 193.
82. Matthew Johnson, "Rethinking Historical Archaeology," in Pedro P. A. Funari, Martin Hall, and Sian Jones, eds., Historical Archaeology: Back from the Edge (London, 1999), 34-35.
83. See Johnson, An Archaeology of Capitalism (Oxford, 1996).
84. See Adrian Praetzellis and Mary Praetzellis, "The Loma Prieta Earthquake and Its Aftermath," in Praetzellis and Praetzellis, Putting the "There" There, 4-5.
85. Hicks, "Archaeology Unfolding," 324.
86. Victor Turner, On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience (Tucson, Ariz., 1985), 152.
87. Deagan and Cruxent, Columbus's Outpost, 4.
88. Glassie, Passing the Time, 14.
89. Mary C. Beaudry, "Public Aesthetics versus Personal Experience: Worker Health and Weil-Being in 19th-century Lowell, Massachusetts," Historical Archaeology 27, no. 2 (1993): 91;
90. Diana DiPaolo Loren and Mary C. Beaudry, "Becoming American: Small Things Remembered," in Hall and Silliman, Historical Archaeology, 254.
91. Hall and Silliman, "Introduction: Archaeology of the Modern World," 9.
92. Hodder, Reading the Past, 7-8;
93. Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Oxford, 1994), 11.
94. Mayne and Murray, The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes.
95. See Grace Karskens, Inside the Rocks: The Archaeology of a Neighbourhood. (Alexandria, NSW, 1999);
96. Praetzellis and Praetzellis, Putting the "There" There;
97. Rebecca Yamin, ed., "Becoming New York: The Five Points Neighborhood," Historical Archaeology, Special Issue, 35 (2001): 1-135;
98. and the Little Lon special issue of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology 10, no. 4 (2006).
99. Leone, The Archaeology of Liberty, 61; see also chap. 7.
100. James Symonds, "Historical Archaeology and the Recent Past," International Journal of Heritage Studies 10, no. 1 (2004): 37.
101. Wilkie, The Archaeology of Mothering, 219.
102. Hall, Archaeology and the Modern World, 176.
103. Praetzellis and Praetzellis, "More Than 'Just a Place to Start From,'" 316.
104. See Tim Murray, "In the Footsteps of George Dutton: Developing a Contact Archaeology of Temperate Aboriginal Australia," in Murray, The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies, 200-225.
105. Orser, "Negotiating our 'Familiar Pasts,'" 281.
106. Carmel Schrire, Digging through Darkness: Chronicles of an Archaeologist (Charlottesville, Va., 1995), 111.
107. DeCorse, An Archaeology of Elmina, 16.
108. Patricia Galloway, "Material Culture and Text: Exploring the Spaces Within and Between," in Hall and Silliman, Historical Archaeology, 42.
109. Hodder, Reading the Past, 126.
110. Hicks, "Places for Thinking," 375;
111. Shanks and Hodder, "Processual, Postprocessual and Interpretive Archaeologies," 11.
112. James Deetz, "Foreword," in Yentsch, A Chesapeake Family and Their Slaves, xix;
113. Hicks, "Places for Thinking," 386;
114. Hall and Silliman, "Introduction: Archaeology of the Modern World," 4.
115. David Barker and Teresita Majewski, "Ceramic Studies in Historical Archaeology," in Hicks and Beaudry, The Cambridge Companion, 206;
116. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), 4.
117. When I put this proposition to a symposium of historical archaeologists, I was accused of relativist paralysis. See Tim Murray, ed., Exploring the Modern City: Recent Approaches to Urban History and Archaeology (Sydney, 2003).
118. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, 4.
119. See also Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten, 253-254.
120. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, 262, 4-5.
121. Cochran and Beaudry, "Material Culture Studies and Historical Archaeology," 203;
122. Shanks and Hodder, "Processual, Postprocessual and Interpretive Archaeologies," 9;
123. Clifford Geertz, "Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination," in Geertz, Local Knowledge, 36-54.
124. Note, however, Barbara Little's caveat that the implied "superiority of the translation (words) over the original source (objects)" subordinates artifacts to texts. Little, Text-Aided Archaeology, 217.
125. Rubertone, Grave Undertakings, xi.
126. Leone, The Archaeology of Liberty, 200.
127. Alan Mayne, "Tall Tales but True? New York's 'Five Points' Slum," Journal of Urban History 33, no. 2 (2007): 321.
128. Wilkie and Farnsworth, Sampling Many Pots, 102.
129. Deagan and Cruxent, Columbus's Outpost, ix.
130. See Cantwell and Wall, Unearthing Gotham.
131. Layton, Gifts from the Celestial Kingdom, 4.
132. Ibid., 8; Wilkie, The Archaeology of Mothering, xxiv.
133. See Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten;
134. James Deetz, Flowerdew Hundred: The Archaeology of a Virginia Plantation, 1619-1864 (Charlottesville, Va., 1993).
135. Shanks and Hodder, "Processual, Postprocessual and Interpretive Archaeologies," 24, 27.
136. See the discussion of performance in Turner, On the Edge of the Bush, pt. 2: "Performance and Experience." A particularly effective historical archaeology museum is Montreal's Pointe-à- Callière;
137. see Pauline Desjardins and Geneviève Duguay, Pointe-à- Callière: From Ville-Marie to Montreal (Québec, 1992).
138. The West Oakland archaeological project has delivered a wide range of narrative forms. See Mary Praetzellis, ed., West Oakland: A Place to Start From (Sonoma, Calif, 1994);
139. Suzanne Stewart and Mary Praetzellis, eds., Sights and Sounds: Essays in Celebration of West Oakland (Sonoma, Calif, 1997);
140. Privy to the Past, video recording (Sonoma, Calif., 1999). The Little Lon project in Melbourne has produced a permanent exhibition in the Melbourne Museum campus of Museum Victoria, a documentary film, and a CD-ROM. See Russell Porter, Jo Lane, Jo Bell, and Ann Darrouzett, Life at Little Lon, video recording (Melbourne, 1992): Tim Murray and Alan Mayne, Vanished Communities: Investigating History at "Little Lon, " CD-ROM (Melbourne, 2002).
141. Yentsch, A Chesapeake Family and Their Slaves, 330;
142. Schrire, Digging through Darkness, 5.
143. Rebecca Yamin, ed., Tales of Five Points: Working-Class Life in Nineteenth-Century New York, 7 vols. (Washington, D.C., 2002), 1: 91.
144. See Yamin, "Alternative Narratives: Respectability at New York's Five Points," in Mayne and Murray, The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes, 163-165.
145. See also Yamin, "Lurid Tales and Homely Stories of New York's Notorious Five Points," Historical Archaeology 32 (1998): 74-85.
146. Yamin, "Alternative Narratives," 167; Yamin, Tales of Five Points, 1: 13;
147. Rebecca Yamin, "The Tangible Past: Historical Archaeology in Cities," Journal of Urban History 33, no. 4 (2007): 641.
148. Matthew Johnson, "The Tide Reversed: Prospects and Potentials for a Postcolonial Archaeology of Europe," in Hall and Silliman, Historical Archaeology, 326.
149. Dening, Beach Crossings, 346.
150. Wilkie, The Archaeology of Mothering, 219.
151. Clifford Geertz, "Making Experiences, Authoring Selves," in Victor Turner and E. M. Bruner, eds., The Anthropology of Experience (Urbana, Ill., 1986), 373.
152. Yamin, Tales of Five Points, 1: 11.
153. Auslander, "Beyond Words," 52.
154. Hall, Archaeology and the Modern World, 1.
155. Glassie, Material Culture, 41. Isaac is quoted above, pp. 95-96.
156. Hall, Archaeology and the Modern World, 16;
157. D'Agostino, Prine, Casella, and Winer, The Written and the Wrought, v.