How Long Does It Take To Be Local?: the Foreigner-Local Threshold
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-03-18

Prehistoric archaeology often identifies cultural groups based on association with different types of material culture. However, in situations of culture contact, particularly prolonged contact such as in instances of colonization or migration, differentiating between groups can be particularly difficult. Exchange of ideas and goods between people in close geographical proximity can blur or eliminate cultural boundaries in the archaeological record. Furthermore, over time the colonizer and the colonized can create new hybridized material culture. What is the temporal boundary, therefore, between foreigner and native? This paper explores this question by comparing case studies from the New World, Ancient Greece, and Rome. Insights from cultural anthropology, and particularly ethnography, are essential to this discussion. While in pre- or proto-history, it is not possible to ask an individual how they identify themselves, it is in modern contexts. This reveals that identity is a multi-faceted concept and that the field of archaeology still lags behind anthropology in the application of this idea. In many cases, it may not be useful, therefore, to continue to discuss whether an archaeological individual or group is colonizer or colonized, but to acknowledge that they may be both and/or neither simultaneously. 

Ivy Faulkner-Gentry (University of Minnesota)