ANT-2100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: George Duckworth, Colonial Williamsburg, Historical Archaeology
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Historical Archaeology
•Distinction between prehistoric and historic depends heavily upon the amount of written texts
available from the civilizations
•Historical archaeology: archaeology of culture contact in the Americas when Europeans
entered and interacted with native peoples
•Ivor Noēl Hume
•Director of Colonial Williamsburg archaeology program,1957
•Director of Williamsburg Department of Archaeology until 1988 (retired)
•“a historian with a pen in one hand and a trowel in the other”
•handmaiden to history - historical archaeology was just a way to confirm information already
provided from historical texts
•Three distinct characteristics of historical archaeology
1. Post-processual - texts, ethnohistoric data, oral traditions
•Can learn about symbols, ethnicity, income, religion, family composition, economic
networks, politics
•Can get perspectives of the people who lived at that time
2. Shortened time periods
•Documentary sources give:
•Precise dates for use of a site
•Change in use over time
•Can focus on individuals and events that were part of larger processes
3. Closer to us temporally and emotionally
•Deals with last 500 years (or so) in the United States
•Story of immigration of different ethnic groups, many we can trace our ancestry to
•Major themes in historical archaeology
•Study of historical disenfranchised groups
•African Americans
•Asian Americans
•Native Americans int he historic period
•Hispanic Americans
•women
•Looks at questions of historical interest that are often answered unsatisfactorily by history
books
•written by victors/dominant paradigm, biased
•Nature of European colonialism and its effects on indigenous peoples
•critical analysis of our history
•Foodways, Economic Status, and the Antebellum Upland South in Central Kentucky
•4 sites in Central Kentucky
•19th century farmsteads
•Upland South cultural tradition
•Cowan farmstead (1830-1870)
•2002-2003 excavations
•Who lived there?
•Robert Cowan and his family
•middling farmers (owned their own land and farmed it; not wealthy but above meager
subsistence - had enough to live comfortably)
•isolated geographically from other farms and markets
•had to be self-sufficient
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