The Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology

Abstract

The primary purpose of this edited volume is to formalize as a theory the historical turn in southeastern archaeology (and American archaeology) and provide a number of case studies illustrating the use of the theory in the region. In previous decades, archaeologists and other scholars studying what is commonly termed “prehistoric” America emphasized long-term, evolutionary change and adaptation, and archaeologists conceptualized pre-colonial societies like living organisms adapting to environmental challenges rather than as collections of people responding to historical trends and forces. The history of archaeology and the reasons for this conceptual frame are complex and deeply rooted in misconceptions about indigenous people as unchanging, static “people without history” who disappeared soon after Europeans arrived in North America. Today, however, archaeologists are combining evolutionary processes with a new understanding that so-called prehistory was also historical, contingent, and local, and historians are looking to the ancient past to better understand Indian societies of the historic era. In other words, scholars now understand that the historic and “prehistoric” eras were not categorically different and that people across this divide were subject to similar historical forces. This historicizing of prehistory represents a profound shift in our way of thinking about precolonial and colonial history and begins to erase the false divide between ancient America and colonial and even contemporary America.