Abstract
How should archaeologists respond to descendant communities whose essentialism runs counter to constructivist notions of identity? For native communities in Virginia, the 17th-century landscape described by Jamestown’s colonists represents a powerful documentary basis for countering discourse that denies or ignores their existence. Strategic essentialism tied to the notion of tribes as transhistorical subjects offers a means of connecting contemporary native communities to accepted national narratives. While such strategies may be necessary in the short term, research at Werowocomoco, capital of the Powhatan chiefdom ca. 1607, highlights other modes of native social construction. Tidewater communities constructed pluralistic networks prior to contact and reconfigured social ties after 1607. They have done so by incorporating new practices while retaining connections to meaningful places and kinship ties stretching across communities. The expanding involvement of native consultants in research at Werowocomoco and elsewhere provides a point of departure for ‘decolonizing’ discussions of this past.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Atalay, Sonya 2006 Indigenous Archaeology as Decolonizing Practice. American Indian Quarterly 30(3&4):280–310.
Barth, Fredrik 1969 Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Little, Boston, MA.
Binford, Lewis R. 1991 Cultural Diversity Among Aboriginal Cultures of Coastal Virginia and North Carolina. Garland, New York, NY.
Brumfiel, Elizabeth M. 2003 It’s a Material World: History, Artifacts, and Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 32(1):205–223.
Olifford, James 1988 Identity in Mashpee. In The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, James Clifford, editor, pp. 277–348. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Olifford, James 2004 Looking Several Ways: Anthropology and Native Heritage inAlaska. CurrentAnthropology 45(26):5–30.
Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip, and T. J. Ferguson 2008 Collaboration in Archaeological Practice: Engaging Descendant Communities. AltaMira Press, Lanham, MD.
Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip, T. J. Ferguson, Dorothy Lippert, Randall H. McGuire, George P. Nicholas, and Joe Watkins 2010 The Premise and Promise of Indigenous Archaeology. American Antiquity 75(2):228–238.
Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff 1992 Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Westview Press, Boulder, CO.
Croes, Dale R. 2010 Courage and Thoughtful Scholarship = Indigenous Archaeology Partnerships. American Antiquity 75(2):211–216.
Dietler, Michael 1994 ‘Our Ancestors the Gauls’: Archaeology, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Manipulation of Celtic Identity in Modern Europe. American Anthropologist 96(3):584–605.
Dongoske, Kurt E., Mark S. Aldenderfer, and Karen Doehner (editors) 2000 Working Together: Native Americans and Archaeologists. Society for American Archaeology, Washington, DC.
Ferguson, T. J., and Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2006 History is in the Land: Multivocal Tribal Traditions in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
Field, Les W. 1999 CA Forum onAnthropology in Public: Complicities and Collaborations: Anthropologists and the ‘Unacknowledged Tribes’ of California. Current Anthropology 40(2):193–209.
Fischer, Edward F. 1999 Cultural Logic and Maya Identity: Rethinking Constructivism and Essentialism. Current Anthropology 40(4):473–499.
Gallivan, Martin D. 2007 Powhatan’s Werowocomoco: Constructing Place, Polity, and Personhood in the Chesapeake, C.E. 1200- C.E. 1609. American Anthropologist 109(1):85–100.
Gallivan, Martin D., and Danielle Moretti-Langholtz 2007 Civic Engagement at Werowocomoco: Reasserting Native Narratives from a Powhatan Place of Power. In Archaeology as a Tool of Civic Engagement, Barbara J. Little and Paul A. Shackel, editors, pp. 47–66. AltaMira Press, Lanham, MD.
Gallivan, Martin D., Thane Harpole, David A. Brown, Danielle Moretti-Langholtz, and E. Randolph Turner III 2005 The Werowocomoco Research Project: Background and 2003 Archaeological Field Season Results. Virginia Department of Historic Resources, Technical Report Series, 15. Richmond.
Gleach, Frederic Wright 2003 Pocahontas at the Fair: Crafting Identities at the 1907 Jamestown Exposition. Ethnohistory 50(3):419–445.
Hall, Stuart 1996 New Ethnicities. In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, editors, pp. 441–449. Routledge, London, UK.
Handler, Richard 1994 Is ‘Identity’ a Useful Cross-cultural Concept? In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, J. Gillis, editor, pp. 27–40. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Hantman, Jeffrey L., Karenne Wood, and Diane Shields 2000 Writing Collaborative History: How the Monacan Nation and Archaeologists Worked Together to Enrich our Understanding of Virginia’s Native Peoples. Archaeology 53(5):56–59.
Hantman, Jeffrey L. 2008 Jamestown’s 400th Anniversary: Old Themes, New Words, New Meanings for Virginia Indians. In Archaeologies of Placemaking: Monuments, Memories, and Engagement in Native North America, Patricia E. Rubertone, editor, pp. 217–241. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA.
Hobsbawm, Eric J., and Terence O. Ranger (editors) 1992 The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Horning, Audrey 2006 Archaeology and the Construction of America’s Jamestown. Post-Medieval Archaeology 40(1):1–27.
Jones, Sian 1997 The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present. Routledge, London, UK.
Kerber, Jordan E. (editor) 2006 Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
Kohl, Philip L. 1998 Nationalism and Archaeology: On the Constructions of Nations and the Reconstructions of the Remote Past. Annual Review of Anthropology 27:223–246.
Lightfoot, Kent G. 2005 Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Little, Barbara J., and Paul A. Shackel (editors) 2007 Archaeology as a Tool of Civic Engagement. AltaMira Press, Lanham, MD.
McGhee, Robert M. 2008 Aboriginalism and the Problem of Indigenous Archaeology. American Antiquity 73(4):579–597.
McGhee, Robert M. 2010 Of Strawmen, Herrings, and Frustrated Expectations. American Antiquity 75(2):239–243.
Meskell, Lynn 2002 The Intersections of Identity and Politics in Archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 31:279–301.
Mooney, James 1907 The Powhatan Confederacy, Past and Present. American Anthropologist 9(1):129–152.
Moretti-Langholtz, Danielle 1998 Other Names I Have Been Called: Political Resurgence Among Virginia Indians in the Twentieth Century. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Oklahoma. University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI.
Moretti-Langholtz, Danielle 2003 The Rise of Christianity Among Virginia Indians. Paper presented at the Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference, Ocean City, MD.
Potter, Stephen R. 1993 Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs: The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley. University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville.
Rountree, Helen C. 1990 Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians ofVirginia through Four Centuries. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
Rountree, Helen C., and E. Randolph Turner 2002 Before and After Jamestown: Virginia’s Powhatans and Their Predecessors. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.
Rubertone, Patricia E. 2001 Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.
Rudes, Blair 2005 The Evidence for Dialects of Virginia Algonquian. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas, Oakland, CA.
Sahlins, Marshall 1999 Two or Three Things that I Know about Culture. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5(3):399–421.
Shackel, Paul A. 2001 Public Memory and the Search for Power in American Historical Archaeology. American Anthropologist 103(3):655–670.
Sider, Gerald M. 2003 Living Indian Histories: Lumbee and Tuscarora People in North Carolina. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
Silliman, Stephen W. (editor) 2010 The Value and Diversity of Indigenous Archaeology: A Response to McGhee. American Antiquity 75(2):217–220.
Silliman, Stephen W. (editor) 2008 Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge: Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Archaeology. University of Arizona Press and the Amerind Foundation, Tucson.
Smith, Adam T. 2004 The End of the Essential Archaeological Subject. Archaeological Dialogues 11(1):1–20.
Smith, John 1986 A Map of Virginia. In The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580–1631), Vol. 1, P. L. Barbour, editor, pp. 119–189. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
Smith, Claire, and H. Martin Wobst (editors) 2007 Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonising Theory and Practice. Routledge, New York, NY.
Speck, Frank G. 1928 Chapters on the Ethnology of the Powhatan Tribes of Virginia. Indian Notes andMonographs 1(5). Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, New York, NY.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 1996 The Spiva kReader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Routledge, New York, NY.
Strachey, William 1953 The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania. Hakluyt Society, London, UK.
Swidler, Nina, Kurt E. Dongoske, Roger Anyon, and Alan S. Downer (editors) 1997 Native Americans and Archaeologists: Stepping Stones to Common Ground. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, CA.
Tilly, Charles 2003 Political Identities in Changing Polities. Social Research 70(2):605–620.
Turner, E. Randolph, III 1976 An Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Study on the Evolution of Rank Societies in the Virginia Coastal Plain. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University. University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI.
Turner, E. Randolph, III 2003 Werowocomoco: Ye Seate of Powhatan. Notes on Virginia 47:40–45.
Watkins, Joe 2000 Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, CA.
Williamson, Margaret Holmes 2003 Powhatan Lords of Life and Death: Command and Consent in Seventeenth-Century Virginia. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
Wilcox, Michael 2010 Saving Indigenous Peoples from Ourselves; Separate but Equal Archaeology Is Not Scientific Archaeology. American Antiquity 75(2):221–227.
Woodard, Buck 2007 Powhatan Essentialism. Paper presented at the 40th Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, Williamsburg, VA.
Woodard, Buck 2008 Degrees of Relatedness: The Social Politics of Algonquian Kinship in the Contact Era Chesapeake. Master’s thesis, Department of Anthropology, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA.
Zimmerman, Larry J. 1996 Epilogue: A New and Different Archaeology? American Indian Quarterly 20(2):297–307.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gallivan, M., Moretti-Langholtz, D. & Woodard, B. Collaborative Archaeology and Strategic Essentialism: Native Empowerment in Tidewater Virginia. Hist Arch 45, 10–23 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376817
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376817