Test 1

preservation movement

Championed by John Muir in the late 1800s. Held that wilderness should be set aside from human use (other than visitation).

conservation movement

Championed by Gifford Pinchot. Promoted sustainable use of resources for the benefit of people.

Industry

Henry Ford: technological progress, manifest, destiny, human mastery over nature (extracting value from nature)

Manifest Destiny

A mandate to expand out and subdue nature for the sake of God and Country.

culture core

The technological articulation between humans and the environment among nonwestern people (ex: Shoshone culture could be explained as Core, because they devote most of their time, energy, and thought to the pursuit of food)

technological fetishism

The tendency to imbue technology with powers it does not actually have (ie.,the worship of technology)

Considering the North American past as prehistory…

…where “primitives,” thought to lack the capacity to overcome nature’s constraints, were nothing more than a Culture Core is racist logic. This view makes it hard for western observers to see anything progressive in the North American archaeological record.

post-humanism

Strives to remove humans from the top of the Great Chain of Being, suggesting they have no inherent right to destroy nature or set themselves above it.

antiquarianism

Seeking out particularly valuable objects, not necessarily for their monetary worth, but for their unique or rare form and, for the more progressively minded, their historical significance. Kept for rich people’s private collections.

Mound-builder Myth

The notion that the many earthen mounds of North America were built by people other than the ancestors of native North Americans.

Nineteenth-century thinkers were unable to accept that contemporary Indians could build monuments of earth. Thought maybe the Lost Tribes of Israel, giants, or the Welsh (???)

Dissociating Indians from their earthworks made it easier to expropriate land they believed to be unimproved by native people (terra nullius). They underestimated the depth of native history.

Bears significance for benchmarking changes in public perception about Indians.

Who is considered the Father of American Archaeology? Why?

Thomas Jefferson. In 1780, he excavated a mound to collect information on how the natives interacted with it and how it was meaningful to them. Busted myth, but landowners then didn’t care about them, so leveled mounds.

Louisiana Purchase

1803

Funding the Smithsonian Institution

In 1881. To investigate mounds for evidence of their origins.

the Indian Removal Act

May 28, 1830. President Andrew Jackson introduced to remove all Indians east of the Mississippi. The Trail of Tears.

Morrill Act

Abraham Lincoln signed in 1862 to establish land-grant colleges across states to teach agriculture, engineering, military training, classical studies, and natural sciences (def liberal arts). States received rural federal land, giving more people access to education.

The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (GI Bill)

In 1944, introduced benefits to returning veterans, including college funding, low-interest mortgages, and unemployment compensation. Created a massive wave of education, so lots became archaeologists.

Impact of the New Deal in 1930s

Use lots of people to make more infrastructure, esp in Deep South. Lots digging, so unearthed artifacts. Needed archaeologists to supervize.

Harriet Smith

African-American woman archaeologist who led the excavation of a mound. One of many African-American women who played a big part in laboring and supervising these projects.

National Historic Preservation Act

In 1966. It intended to give archaeologists the chance to evaluate the impact of development on historical resources.

It mandated when and how archaeology would be done on federal lands/projects, established archaeological review, and created criteria for measuring historical value.

Cultural resource management grew out of this.

Impact of finding a Folsom point embedded in ribs of Ice Age bison.

Before 1927, scholars thought that Indians had occupied North America for only about 4,000 years ("Short Chronology”). This find increased the span of native history to 10,000 years because of the species of bison (which went extinct at the end of the Ice Age)

Pecos Pueblo site

Alfred V. Kidder in 1915. Used stratigraphic excavation to reveal 2,000 years of occupation by the Ancestral Pueblo of New Mexico.

Preceded by Max Uhle in San Fransico Bay, Clarence B. Moore, and Jeffries Wyman.

At this point, stratigraphic sequences were underappreciated (until after the Folsom discovery).

Franz Boas

“Father of American Anthropology.” Was critical of cultural evolutionism.

Instead, championed cultural relativism.

cultural evolutionism

Euro-Americans speculated that societies passed through stages of increasing development/improvement, enabled by the application of rational thought and technology. Considered ethnocentric.

Cultural relativism

Franz Boa developed. Also known as historical particularism. Opposite of ethnocentrism.

Writing histories from the particulars of human experience and understood in their own terms. NOT presupposing a model that equates time with progress.

Manifested in an approach called culture history.

ethnocentric

A theory that proposes a progression of culture leading to a stage akin to modern Europe.

Culture history

Defining societies based on the basis of material traits alone, namely artifacts. Emphasizes the geographic variation in cultures ← attributed to migration, DIFFUSION, and related historical events.

Regarded as an inductive approach to the past, where the data was allowed to “speak for themselves,” without prejudice from extant models or political agendas.

Used stratigraphy and radiometric dating but LOVED seriation.

Issues with culture history:

Became preoccupied with artifact typology.

Nazis liked

Seriation

A relative dating method based on the assumption that change in material culture within a cultural tradition was slow and gradual.

Processual archaeology

Walter W. Taylor. Late 1960s. Applies the methods of scientific inquiry to the development of generalizable, law-like knowledge about human variation and change.

Cultural ecology

Julian Steward 1955. An approach emphasizing the relationships between humans and their environment. Well before archaeologists used evolution as a tool to analyze cultural change.

Neoevolution

Attributing cultural change to the ability of a society to harness increasingly greater amounts of energy.

Denouncing Boasian particularism, Leslie White resuscitated some of the tenets of cultural evolution.

Postprocessual

Since 1980s. The methods are deeply contextual, dependent on the details of actual human experience and its meaning (not always rejecting generalizations) but careful to not allow such knowledge claims outside of the bounds of experience.

Critical self reflection→loss of innocence about colonialist mentality.