**[WAC-5 Conference](http://www.american.edu/wac5/): Shining the Light:
The Illumination of History and Cultural Processes Through Archaeology -
The Differing Approaches and Foci of \'Historical Archaeology\'
Worldwide**

Sponsored by the Society for Historical Archaeology and

the Council for Northeast Historical Archaeology

*Organised by:*

*John H. Jameson, Jr.*

*Senior Archaeologist*

*Southeast Archeological Center*

*U.S. National Park Service*

*2035 E. Paul Dirac Drive*

*Johnson Building, Suite 120*

*Tallahassee, Florida 32310*

[*john_jameson@nps.gov*](mailto:john_jameson@nps.gov)

*Martin Henig (UK)*

[***martinhenig@hotmail.com***](mailto:martinhenig@hotmail.com)

*FORMAT:*

This session attempts to compare approaches to historical archaeology
worldwide. Constructing or defining internationally relevant comparisons
is problematic since the term \"historical archaeology\" has a number of
possible contextual meanings. This is a special challenge for North
American historical archaeologists since, although long accepted in
Europe to cover all periods in which historical sources exist, in the
Western Hemisphere, the term is largely limited to colonial and post
colonial periods on the North and South American continents. In this
session, we explore international and cross-cultural applications of
terms such as \"historic vs. prehistoric,\" \"the archaeology of ancient
and medieval Europe, \"post-medieval archaeology on both sides of the
Atlantic, \"onset of mercantile capitalism, \"colonial\" vs. \"pre- and
post-colonial.\" We examine the usefulness of more general assumptions,
definitions, and approaches that appear to have world-wide implications
such as \"the study of people with a written record, \"the onset and
study of the spread of European colonization world-wide, \"the study of
the development, expansion, and impact of Islamic civilization on the
course of world history,\" and \"the impacts of indigenous peoples on
the spread and expansion of western and Islamic civilizations.\" As some
have said, there are probably as many definitions of historical
archaeology as there are historical archaeologists. We also explore the
historical, cross-cultural, and developmental perspectives of
\"historical archaeology,\" how historical vs. archaeological evidences
are distinguished and linked, and whether in these settings a
disciplinary separatism exists between the disciplines of archaeology
and history that is detrimental to accurate interpretations of the past.

**Session schedule:**

9:00 Introduction to the Session - John H. Jameson, Jr. and Martin Henig

9:05 The Complexities of Modernity in the Middle East: Historical
Archaeology and Its Contributions - Uzi Baram

9:20 Emerging Ethnonyms: The "Finns" - A Case Study in Northern Europe
**-** Thomas Wallerström

9:35 Still colonial, post-colonial, post-medieval or just historical?:
Archaeology and contemporary identity in Northern Ireland - Audrey J.
Horning

9:50 Historical Archaeology as Anthropology: Artifacts, Identities, and
Interpretations in the Study of Dutch Colonial South Africa - Stacey C.
Jordon

10:05 A Re-examination of Creolization Theory in Historical
Archaeology - Meredith Hardy

10:20 Colonies of Colonies in Spanish America: The expansion of Creole
culture under the guise of a European nationality - Judy Bense

10:35 Questions & answers

**11:00-11:30 BREAK**

11:30 The development of trade in the Indian Ocean 4th - 16th c AD:
using archaeology to combat Euro-centric history - Rodney Harrison

11:45 Of dead and deposits: on the use of historical data for the
interpretation of European Late Prehistory - Marc Vander Linden

12:00 The Historical Archaeology of Indigenous Australia - Alistair
Paterson

12:15 From Neocolonial to Postcolonial Archaeologies of the British New
World: Considerations of Craft and Practice - Marley Brown III

12:30 Questions & answers

**1:00-2:00 LUNCH**

**2:00-3:30 Plenary (refer to WAC-5 Program)**

4:00 Workhouses in Ireland: the archaeological manifestations of
nineteenth century ideologies - Liz Thomas

4:15 Historical Archaeology and the British Archaeological Association -
Martin Henig

4:30-5:00 Pedro Funari - Discussant

5:00-6:00 Questions & answers, open discussion

## *Presentations*

**Introduction to session**

### John Jameson and Martin Henig

**The Complexities of Modernity in the Middle East: Historical
Archaeology and Its Contributions**

*Uzi Baram*

e-mail: <Baram@ncf.edu>

Akko (also known as Acre), in northern Israel, provides a useful entry
point to discuss Historical Archaeology in global perspective. Akko was
the center of imperial control over northern Palestine and the seat for
local potentates; the port felt the impact of foreign invaders,
travelers, and merchants; and trade allowed the city to grow to become
the third largest urban center in Ottoman Syria. The materiality of the
port-city offers the opportunity to consider completing visions for the
archaeology of the Ottoman period and to evaluate the North American
definition of Historical Archaeology for the Middle East. Even though
history has great depth in the region, this paper will argue that broad
definitions for Historical Archaeology will only facilitate the
avoidance of the Ottoman period within Middle Eastern archaeology. While
the concerns of Historical Archaeology are not the only issues for the
archaeology of the Ottoman period, the foci of North American Historical
Archaeology have been under-represented in the scholarship for the
Middle Eastern past. Using Ottoman period Palestine as the central
example, the contributions of Historical Archaeology will be illustrated
by several case studies.

**Emerging Ethnonyms: The "Finns" - A Case Study in Northern Europe**

*Thomas Wallerström*

e-mail: <Thomas.Wallerstrom@ark.lu.se>

Ethnonyms are often abstract analytical units that are often employed
"automatically" in historical and archaeological studies. This supposed
quality is challenged in this article. The ethnonym "Finne" or "Fin" and
the territorial designations "Finland", "Finnmark" and "Finnveden" are
analyzed. The ethnonym was used by Tacitus in 98 A.D. while the
geographical designations came in to use during the second part of the
first millennium A.D. The use of the prefix "Finn" signals that all of
these geographical terms have something in common with the ethnonym when
they appear in written sources. A comparative analysis is performed in
order to determine when and under what conditions the meaning of this
ethnonym changed. Originally it was a term that characterize "hunters,
collectors, wanderers", a meaning that appears in Anglo-Saxon England
term "Herefinnas." Changes in the meaning of these categories were
brought about by new economic and administrative systems, writing and
through the need to assert historical legitimacy by appropriating old
ethnonyms. Their meanings seem to change when new hegemonies appear. It
is also suggested that archaic ethnonyms, hidden in ancient territorial
names that came into use during Medieval times in Sweden, to some
extent, represent those people who were forced to relinquish their
independence to a growing royal and/or ecclesiastic centralism --
probably the emerging state. Ethnonyms are by no means static. They are
constructs that signify changing power relations. In historical
archaeology, these "natural analytical units" must be used with utmost
care.

**Still colonial, post-colonial, post-medieval or just historical?:
Archaeology and contemporary identity in Northern Ireland**

### Audrey J. Horning

e-mail: <ajhorn@wm.edu>

Contemporary identity in Northern Ireland is fragile, complicated, and
fragmented; colored by the tumultuous events of the past 500 years and
rooted in the often fraught interactions of native Irish, English, and
Scots during the 17^th^ -century Plantation period. The archaeology of
Plantation with its most visible monuments (castles and fortified
villages) has often been perceived by the public and professionals alike
as relevant only to a contemporary Protestant identity, rendering the
native Irish seemingly invisible while serving as a tangible reminder of
deep-seated cultural conflict. Yet Plantation-period sites contain a
wealth of material evidence underscoring the close, if undeniably
complex, nature of relations between natives and newcomers, a history
which has been used, abused, and in general vastly oversimplified to
support the modern division of society in Northern Ireland into two
so-called 'traditions': Roman Catholic, self-identifying heirs of the
"original" Gaelic population, and Protestant -- self-identifying heirs
of the Planters, victorious under King William at the Battle of the
Boyne in 1690. Archaeologists working on 'post-medieval' sites can and
are contributing to a long-overdue revision of this dichotomous view of
Irish history, but are doing so while operating in a world marked by
political uncertainties with Plantation-era roots. As such, the
relatively young discipline of Irish post-medieval or historical
archaeology has much to contribute to the more well established practice
of historical archaeology in the Western Hemisphere, where the
present-day implications of the colonial past are less immediately
resonant.

Historical Archaeology as Anthropology: Artifacts, Identities, and
Interpretations in the Study of Dutch Colonial South Africa

### Stacey C. Jordon

e-mail: <sjordan@bfma.com>

The disciplines of archaeology and history are two methodologies that
should serve a common purpose. Too often, however, historiographies
neglect material culture, and archaeological studies infrequently
excavate beyond a document's written words. Historical archaeology
should seek to employ both documents and material culture to enable us
to ask anthropologically driven questions. The extensive analysis of
archival records on which this paper is based addresses a variety of
issues, including the role of European potters in the creation of an
identifiably South African culture through the forms and functions of
their pottery as well as through their own lives and social interactions
at the Cape. It also serves more generally to indicate the social status
of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European artisans outside of the
their homelands, creating a broader picture of the new world into which
young and often impoverished men stepped when they boarded the creaking
East Indiamen in the ports of Europe. Artifacts, reflecting the
movements of goods and peoples around the globe, can be interpreted to
show how material items as well as ideas of self and community changed
within the new social, economic, and demographic contexts forged in
colonial situations.

**A Re-examination of Creolization Theory in Historical Archaeology**

### Meredith Hardy

e-mail: merhardy@juno.com, <meredith_hardy@nps.gov>

Historical archaeology is self-defined as the archaeology of people with
a written, documented past. Over the past thirty years in the United
States there has been much effort directed towards the investigation of
"people with no history," including post-European contact Native
American groups, African slaves, and free people of color. Within the
last decade, cultural exchange and interaction between Native Americans,
African or African-descendant slaves, and European colonists and
settlers in the southeastern United States and the Caribbean have been
conceptualized as a process of "creolization," or "multicultural
interaction and exchange that produces new cultural forms" (Singleton
1999: 5). Creole forms of cultural interaction are evident in many
aspects of daily life, including language, music, food, architecture,
religion, economy, and material culture. In each of these aspects can be
found definitions of identity, of "self" vs. "other." In this paper I
propose that creolization should not be confined to the Caribbean and
the southeastern United States, but is applicable around the world.
Implicit in this paper is the recognition that material culture is not
an aspect that can be analyzed separate from context. Material culture
is indicative of cultural preservation and loss, social interaction,
economic and cultural exchange, power relations and assertions of
status.

**Colonies of Colonies in Spanish America: The expansion of Creole
culture under the guise of a European nationality**

### Judy Bense

e-mail: jbense@uwf.edu

There is a strong perception that "Spanish" culture swept across what is
now the lower southeastern United States, northern Mexico, and
California after the 17^th^ century. However, a close examination of the
archaeology and history of the colonial settlements in Spanish Florida
and northern New Spain, especially those initiated after the 17^th^
century, reveals that the residents and their culture were not Spanish,
but *creoles* (Spanish ancestry born in the New World) and mestizos
(mixed indigenous and European ancestry). The colonies in Spanish
Florida and northern New Spain were in fact colonies of New Spain. These
colonial settlements, usually presidios, were planned, funded,
administered, and populated from New Spain primarily to prevent
intrusion into New Spain by other European nations, especially France
and England. The material culture, food, social organization, and
religion were from Nueva España, not Spain. Recent integration of
archaeological and historical research at presidios in Spanish West and
East Florida, northern New Spain, and Alta California has revealed
unexpected close cultural ties with New Spain and provides a different
base for interpretation of this long occupation of the Spanish
Borderlands.

**Sharing the archaeology of post-1788 Australia: historical archaeology
as shared history and the archaeology of becoming *us***

### Rodney Harrison

e-mail: <Rodney.Harrison@npws.nsw.gov.au>

The discipline of archaeology in Australia has largely been divided
along the lines of 'prehistoric archaeology', focussing on the
precontact archaeology of Aboriginal Australia, and 'historical
archaeology', with a focus on the settler experience of colonialism in
Australia. Recent revisionist approaches have foregrounded the
historical archaeology of Aboriginal Australia, so called 'contact
archaeology', as a new and largely distinct stream of academic
investigation. The NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service have recently
embarked on a number of research projects that aim to reveal the mutual,
*shared histories* of Aboriginal and settler Australians. This approach
informs integrated archaeological, documentary and oral history research
undertaken as part of the *Shared histories of the pastoral industry in
NSW* project. This paper outlines the research project and considers the
implications of this approach for historical archaeology in other
settler-colonial contexts.

**Of dead and deposits: on the use of historical data for the
interpretation of European Late Prehisto**ry

*Marc Vander Linden*

e-mail: <mavdlind@ulb.ac.be>

Despite their insistence on local sequences, many European
archaeologists seldom rely to historical data to interpret more or less
ancient prehistoric situations, and generally invoke the risk of
circular reasoning. Yet, the use of historical data remains possible if
one does not merely focus on continuities or synchronisms, but
acknowledges the value of historical sources as a privileged and
specific type of analogies. For instance, "ritual" deposits of weapons,
tools or ornaments represent a well-known category of finds, from the
Bronze Age onwards, up to early historical periods. These are generally
interpreted as gifts for the gods, by opposition to grave goods which,
evidently, are dedicated to the dead. Yet, this interpretation rests
more on informed guessing than on any real argumentation. On basis of
comparative and Scandinavian historical material, one can set forth an
alternative reading and suggest that, in many instances, such deposits
are best to be interpreted within the framework of mortuary practices.

**The Historical Archaeology of Indigenous Australia**

*Alistair Paterson*

e-mail: [paterson@cyllene.uwa.edu.au]{.underline}

Interactions between Australia Aboriginal hunter-gatherers and
non-indigenous people occurred during seasonal Macassan visits over the
last several hundred years, and following permanent European
colonisation in 1788. In this paper I provide a historical overview of
previous research to explore how the archaeology of hunter-gatherers in
historic periods requires archaeological expertise common to indigenous
and historic archaeologies, and how historical archaeology contributes
to broader research into colonialism and culture contact in Australia.

**From Neocolonial to Postcolonial Archaeologies of the British New
World: Considerations of Craft and Practice**

### Marley Brown III

e-mail: <MBrown2@CWF.org>

Field research on the early English expansion into the New World outside
of North America proper is a rapidly growing area of historical
archaeology, participated in now by two groups of scholars. American
historical archaeologists have a long-standing interest in the
plantations, towns, and other settlements of the English-speaking
Caribbean and the Atlantic Islands. In recent years they have been
joined by an increasing number of British archaeologists, who can be
seen to represent both the traditional and the new of that nation's
post-medieval archaeology. The export of the latter to New World field
situations brings into sharp relief some of the very important
differences between American historical archaeology and British
post-medieval archaeology and draws attention to the importance of
creating basic standards for excavation techniques employed on sites
dating to the last few hundred years. But even with such standards in
place, the bulk of this research is now pursued in places where coherent
approaches to historic preservation are mostly lacking and where local
participation in archaeology is largely or altogether absent. It is now
time to develop effective ways for archaeologists to make an enduring
contribution to the preservation of archaeological resources in the
independent countries and colonial departments where they work. It is
also well past time for both American historical archaeologists and
British post-medieval archaeologists to accelerate indigenous control
over archaeological fieldwork, thereby replacing the expanding
neocolonial archaeology of the colonial Atlantic world with a vibrant
postcolonial practice.

**Workhouses in Ireland: the archaeological manifestations of nineteenth
century ideologies**

### Liz Thomas

e-mail: <L.Thomas@Queens-Belfast.AC.UK>

The nineteenth century was a radical period in poor law reform. The 1834
Poor Law (Amended) Act was quickly assembled and put through parliament,
leaving little time for objection. It revolutionized poor relief. From
1815 there was a fear of 'social disintegration'. As England made the
shift from an agrarian to industrial society, there was great uneasiness
as both the poor rates and the discontent of laborers had risen
alarmingly, threatening the existence of the political, economic and
social order. The new act was fundamentally based on the key ideologues
of the nineteenth century. Every political ideology develops from
philosophical thought. Adam Smith and David Hume, stoics and materialist
philosophers, influenced nineteenth century political ideologies, by
rejecting religious superstitions and re-introducing the concepts of
order, regularity of form between the personal and political state, and
the idea that God's Providence provided for the well-being of society as
a whole, and not every individual Hence, fundamentally the same law,
despite objections, was conferred on Ireland; since 1801, the country
was an integral part of the British Empire. The new Poor Laws were
instrumental in establishing utilitarian control, harnessing a hold on
political power, social insurrection and poverty relief. In 1838 a Poor
Law Act was conferred on Ireland. There was one fundamental difference
in the implementation, as reflected in the workhouse designs. In
England, although model plans existed, there was considerable diversity
in the forms of the workhouses. In contrast, rigid uniformity was
imposed from on high in Ireland through the appointment of a single
architect. Furthermore, this single architect chose to use essentially
the same plan throughout the country although he had previously authored
a diversity of plans for use in England. The main objective of the Irish
Poor Law was to introduce a centralized power. Essentially,
centralization was the institutionalization of poverty relief in Ireland
and England. The utilitarian elements of control was seen at microcosmic
level in the workhouse design, where there was also centralized control.
Workhouses had the physical capability to enforce the principle policies
of the new Poor Laws: centralization, classification, discipline and
deterrence. This paper will address how the ideologies of the period are
reflected in the workhouse plan and architecture.

**Historical Archaeology and the British Archaeological Association**

### Martin Henig

e-mail: <martinhenig@hotmail.com>

The concept of Pre-history originated in the second half of the
Nineteenth Century. Until then the age of the earth was still not fully
appreciated, still less evolution, and all prehistoric antiquities in
north-west Europe were lumped together and explained through what
Classical authors wrote about the Gauls, \'Ancient Britons\' and the
mysterious priesthood called the Druids. Subsequently the study of the
most distant past has fallen into the hands of scientists, both physical
and social, who have created their own language to describe what they
found to each other and to mystify the rest of us. But the true concern
of the Archaeologist who keeps faith with the vision of Roach Smith and
Wright is always with history and this is true whether we have a list of
dates or events or have to reconstruct the lives of women and men who
lived before us from bones and potsherds.

**Discussant**

##### Pedro Funari

e-mail: [**pedrofunari@sti.com.br**](mailto:pedrofunari@sti.com.br)