Thursday, July 31, 2014

Digging Sites and Telling Stories: Narrative and The Culture concept in Historical Archaeology






    To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself.

    Hayden White
    The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.
    Critical Inquiry 7(1), 1980.

    Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story­--a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.

    Eric Hoffer
    The Passionate State of Mind, aph. 97; 1955


    Jamaica lost a national treasure in 1992, the year that the Society for Historical Archaeology met in Kingston, for that year Louise Jones died. She was affectionately and respectfully known as Ma Lou, and she was one of the last, and probably the most accomplished, of the traditional potters working in what Roderick Ebanks has named the Afro-Jamaican pottery tradition. Fortunately, Ma Lou, who once had given up the potting trade, had made it her life's ambition to keep the traditional craft alive. Not only did she revive her own skills later in life, she taught her daughter to make pots the way she had learned from her mother. Her daughter, and a handful of other women, continue to make a variety of vessel types using ancient techniques. So precisely did Ma Lou transmit the knowledge and skills of potting to her daughter that she and they claimed not to be able to distinguish their individual products.

    Ebanks has divided the historic pottery traditions of Jamaica into four groups: the Amerind tradition, typified by the so-called boat pots made by the Taino-speaking Indians who occupied Jamaica at the arrival of Columbus; the European tradition, with which all historical archaeologists are familiar; the Syncretic tradition, in which African and European and, occasionally, American Indian attributes are combined; and the Afro-Jamaican tradition which has clear precedents in and continuities with specific pottery-making customs of some Western African peoples. The figure, below, shows an example of a "yabbah" made by Ma Lou. The yabbah is a traditional African and Jamaican eating or serving vessel used with a calabash spoon. The culture history of the New World has left permanent marks in clay. Jamaica's national motto is virtually the same as that of the United States: Out of many, one people; E Pluribus Unum. The unity of our national cultures is found in a diversity of expressions: a diversity which bespeaks separate durable traditions existing alongside, and entangled with, syncretic, creolized creations.


    I first encountered Ma Lou's pottery in 1992, in Kingston and Port Royal, where it was sold in a number of souvenir shops labelled as reproductions of ÒArawakÓ Indian pottery. I purchased the pot in Figure 2.2 two years later from a tourist shop at Devon House in Kingston. This time there were no signs announcing the ÒArawakÓ origins or affinities of this vessel, and when I asked about it, I was told, without hesitation, that it was a piece made by Ma Lou Jones or her daughter, and an example of traditional Jamaican pottery.

    According to Roderick Ebanks (personal communication, 1995) the first potÑthe ÒArawakÓ potÑwas a new form created by Ma Lou specifically to pay homage to the Amerindian Òboat potsÓ found in archaeological sites of the Taino speakers on Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean. Despite Ma Lou's attempt to mimic the Taino shape, her vessels would never be mistaken for Amerindian vessels by a knowledgeable archaeologist. Ma Lou's ÒArawakÓ pots bespeak an African heritage. The methods of forming the pots, finishing their lips, tempering the clay body, finishing internal and external surfaces, and firing the greenware are all distinctly reflective of the Afro-Jamaican pottery-making techniques passed down mother to daughter over countless generations.

    Kingston was not the first place I had seen almost precisely the same creolized pottery form. The combination of this shapeÑperhaps more like a European tureen than an Arawak boat potÑcombined with African-derived building techniques almost precisely identical to those used by Ma Lou and her daughter was evident in a unique vessel my colleagues and I had excavated from contexts of the first or early second quarter of the 17th century, at the site of Jordan's Journey, on the James River in Virginia (Figures 2.3 and 2.4). Portions of this vessel were recovered from a small house we labelled Structure 17 (Figure 2.5). Sherds were recovered from postmolds of the house and from adjacent trash pits. I believe Structure 17, with its characteristic Òroot cellar,Ó and its next-door neighbor, Structure 18, to be the earliest houses of enslaved Africans yet excavated in the Chesapeake (Mouer 199*AF-AM Paper and Òthis volume, JPÓ). I was immediately aware that this pot was something quite different from either Protohistoric Virginia Indian pottery or the ubiquitous Colono-Indian wares of the colonial Chesapeake. I got my first hint as to the likely origin of this vessel in my first visit to Kingston. A great many technological and formal features of the Jordan's Journey vessel were repeated in Louise Jones's pottery, and one form, the ÒArawakÓ pot, was a dead ringer. I showed the vessel to Norman Barka and Barbara Heath, both of whom have had extensive experience with the historical pottery of the Caribbean, and both pronounced without hesitation that this was probably a West Indian pot.

    Ma Lou's act of personal creativity and her conception of an Indian vessel form led to the ÒArawakÓ pot shape produced with the technical knowledge of an African tradition. It is incredible to think that a nearly identical vesselÑand I mean identical in numerous technical details, not simply in a generally similar shapeÑhad been produced by an African or African-Caribbean slave in Virginia, 370 years earlier. I thought the Jordan's Journey pot was a unique find until Robin Ryder showed me some specimens of colonoware ceramics she had excavated from 19th-century slave quarters at the Monroe Farm Site, near Manassas, in the northern Piedmont of Virginia (*). Among the numerous sherds she showed me, most of which looked for all the world like typical Colono-Indian Ware, were some unusual specimens. Not all the characteristics were the same, but there were enough specific traits shared by some of the Monroe Site vessels, the Jordan's Journey vessel, and Ma Lou's pottery to suggest that a common West African tradition was apparent in all of these vessels. Katherine (*?) Parker and Jacqueline Hernigle (*) had suggested as much about some similar vessels found at late 18th- and 19th-century sites they had studied, also in the vicinity of Manassas.

    In an earlier project, Robin Ryder's crews had discovered a small root cellar at a farmstead owned and occupied between 1865 and 1917 by an unmarried African-American woman named Susan Gilliam. The cellar was filled shortly after her death in 1917, but among the finds in it was a nearly complete whiteware tureen (Figure 2.6). It was not possible to tell if the tureen was in primary or secondary context, but its completeness suggests the former (Ryder *Thesis, Equal portion). My colleagues and I had also excavated a small root cellar under a former slave house-cum-wood-shed at Magnolia Grange Plantation at Chesterfield Courthouse, Virginia (Figure 2.7) (Mouer *Magnolia, and see Chapter *, this volume). The house had been occupied in the 1910s and 20s by an elderly black woman named Rhodie Goode. Rhodie Goode was said to have been ÒallowedÓ to live in the cabin in exchange for keeping the work yard clean, and for ministering as a healer to my informant's mother, who suffered migraine headaches. Rhodie Goode's root cellar had held a wooden trunk that had mostly rotted away by the time we found it. Among the artifacts in trunk were the complete bowl and lid to a Staffordshire whiteware tureen. The coincidence of two English tureens in two 20th-century African-American women's root cellars was interesting. The finding of a good bit of a tureen-shaped pot made in an African or African-Caribbean creole pottery tradition in a very similar early 17th-century house with a very similar root cellar suggests something well beyond coincidence. Add to this that the 17th-century pot is a very close cousin to Ma Lou Jones's ÒArawakÓ pots, and we have most of the material for a very good story.

    ***

    In the past few moments I've taken you to Africa, Jamaica, and Virginia. I've introduced you to some interesting womenÑRhodie Goode, Susan Gilliam, and Ma Lou Jones. I've dragged you from the 17th century into the 20th, and I've plunked you down into one of the thornier thickets of recent discourse in historical archaeology. If you are at all interested in these ceramic objects, if you're at all knowledgeable about the Òcolonoware question,Ó and if you have any imagination, I suspect your mind is busily working away spinning stories to connect these fragments, trying to make sense of the isolated pieces that seem, somehow, to belong together in a meaningful context.iii

    If there are connections among these sherds of history, they are connections made of culture, and if you are able to construct a meaningful story out of these isolated observations, it is because you are a human being who, like all competent human beings, constructs meaning from ambiguous and disorderly observations by creating narratives. We all ÒdiscoverÓ in disjunct pieces a story that resonates with other, previously heard, stories, distinctive stories, mythical stories, meta-narratives which draw upon and in turn shape culture.iv Our understandings of colonowares and culture are constructed by narrative, a process that is fundamental to human cognition (***).

    Twenty years ago, when I received my B.S. degree in anthropology, I thought I had become an initiate in an exclusive club. When anthropology colleagues talked about humanity with students of history, sociology, literature, or psychology we knew, quite simply, that they didn't ÒhaveÓ the culture concept. Culture is the central organizing principal of anthropology. It isn't a concept that comes easily. When I first began teaching I used to watch my students' faces as we struggled through those introductory lectures about how many words Inuits have for snow, or how Navahos don't experience time in the same linear fashion as do ÒAnglos,Ó and other overly-simplistic relativisms. Eventually I would see the light bulbs begin to blink on over the heads of students. A smile would creep across their faces, as if they had just experienced a beatific vision. When that happened, I knew, and they knew, they now possessed the culture concept, and were among the select few.

    These days it's a bit different. Culture, it seems, is everywhere. I read it daily in the newspapers and in memos from the Human Resources office. When our school recently absorbed some departments from another unit in the University, our dean cautioned us to be sensitive to the different ÒculturesÓ of our new faculty colleagues, meaning everything from their methods of awarding tenure to their customs for relating to secretaries. Now I speak freely with colleagues from other departments about our various efforts to enhance Òmulticultural understandingÓ in our classrooms. My students hold lively seminars debating the cultural differences of campus ÒethnicÓ groups they call by such names as Òjocks,Ó Òskateboarders,Ó and Òfrat-boys.Ó I receive by e-mail electronic journals on postmodern culture with articles by literature professors discussing rap music while citing Clifford Geertz's observations on Balinese cockfights.

    Rather than rejoicing at the extension of the culture concept beyond the discipline, I get a sense that some anthropologists feel that sacred ground has been appropriated by the uninitiated for profane causes. A certain smell of sour grapes has wafted through the anthropological media of late complaining that we've been left out of the great culture debate, that the culture wars are being fought by undeserving fools who wouldn't know culture if it bit them. We earned culture. We have studied it and talked about it for a century or more. They just use it as if there weren't a huge literature out there written by...why, by us!

    I teach courses in both historical archaeology and interdisciplinary culture studies. I am as likely to be caught reading articles by literary critics and philosophers as I am those written by archaeologists and anthropologists. And it worries me that many of my colleagues in anthropology and archaeology can only deride the ideas and intellectual products of culture studies. Yes, there is some facile thinking and even some charlatanism concerning culture out there beyond the anthro departments, but there's also some great wisdom, some wonderfully honed philosophy, and some really neat ideas. And, to be honest, many anthropologists, and certainly many anthropologically trained archaeologists, have abandoned the culture concept, or continue to work with unworkable, dualistically conflicted, uncritical notions of culture. We wear culture as a proprietary emblem; we don't wield it as a well-honed tool.

    What is this vaunted culture concept we guard so dearly? Culture is not only the object of anthropological study, it's the structuring paradigm that frames our inquiries. It's both a theory and a method; both the end and the means to the end. And yet it is so chimerical that one could argue it's not a thing at all. Anthropologists have argued ceaselessly over what it is, and no single perspective has ever held the field for long. We can't agree, for instance, whether it is, in Kroeber's term, Òsuperorganic,Ó or whether it is embedded in the fundamental structure of the brain. Is it beyond individual control, like Leslie White's famous ÒbÓ at the end of the word Òlamb,Ó or is it continually created in individual actions?

    A ÒtypicalÓ definition of culture in anthropology is a paraphrase or extension of Tylor's, and it goes something like this: ÒCulture is the sum of all the practices, beliefs, customs, ways of life, etc., which are shared by the members of a society and passed down from generation to generation.Ó Sound familiar? Let's examine that definition. First, it is inclusive, holistic: the sum of all practices...etc. That Òetc.Ó is crucial; anything and everything is included: arrowheads and fear of the dark, economic systems and hand stencils on a cave wall.

    We define culture as the property of a society, but then we use it as a descriptor; not a noun, but an adjective. It is both a consequence of and a precondition for membership in a group. Culture is not only shared by the members of a society, it is passed down from generation to generation. Culture is a state of being, but also a process of becoming; a system of structures, and the chaotic unfolding of history. Its study can be either synchronic or diachronic. It is both adaptive, changeable, evolving, and the fundamental, changeless, character of a people, transmitted, enduring, granting identity from heritage. It is information and energy and yet it's also a mechanism, like an elephant's trunk or leopard's spots, fine-tuning adaptations to the natural and social worlds, permitting change and simultaneously conserving the status quo. It is social organization, or ideas about social organization, and it's the lies that informants tell ethnographers about marriage partner preferences, or the role of angry spirits and their relationships to drums or batiks or sex or food. We conceive of culture as the personality of a group, and like personality, we cannot decide if it is process, behavior, belief, or chemistry; if it's learned in childhood or created anew in every act.

    In preparing this chapter, I queried on two different occasions the approximately 300 subscribers to Anita Cohen-Williams's HISTARCH list on the Internet. I asked historical archaeologists if they consciously use the culture concept in framing or interpreting their research and, if so, I asked them to give me a short working definition of culture. The first telling revelation is that I received just nine responses, only six of which were from historical archaeologists, suggesting either than the concept is so fundamental as to be beyond discussion, or, conversely, that it is of little importance to historical archaeologists; or maybe just that no one wants to answer polls on the Internet. I really didn't have to conduct a survey to determine the vitality of the culture concept in historical archaeology today. Many of us have either discarded it, or buried it in unspoken and unexamined assumptions. Meanwhile, many other students of social studies and humanities have over the past couple of decades re-invested the grand idea as a subject of study, and this is in response to a broad public conversation about culture which has, in the past few years, reached a frenzied pitch.

    Culture has come under immense critical scrutiny that has been enlivened by inter-disciplinary perspectives. For instance, the idea of culture-as-heritage; that is, the abiding transcendent aspect of culture, was recently investigated through a fascinating essay by Walter Benn Michaels (*), a literary critic. Through his readings of late 19th- and 20th-century American literature, Michaels spins a chaotic web, dangling disorienting threads, until the reader is ensnared in a forced realization that we, anthropologists and others, have deconstructed race and have supplanted it with culture. The only problem is, that culture, heritage, roots, and similar notions have assumed most or all of the same old properties as that discredited idea of race. We have re-created the underlying means of defending and constructing racism by giving culture enduring qualities, by viewing it as a property belonging to a people, transmitted from generation to generation. I cannot reconstruct in a paragraph the power of Michael's insight, and that's not my intention at any rate. What I'm driving at is that some important thinking about culture is going on right now, often without anthropologistsÑor, rather, with only a few of themÑand some common threads have emerged. Let me take a few pages to explore just one of these: the idea that culture might be understood in terms of narrative.

    ***

    The events, or observations, which I used to open this essay could be conceived as a sort of content-less chronicle of observations about the recent and distant past. What makes them potentially meaningful is the quality of connexity which is provided by contextÑcontexts of the pots, the potters, and the users of the pots, as well as contexts of the archaeologist, his discoveries, his relation of his discoveries to you in this forum, your interpretations of his relation, etc. But the glue that connects chronicled events with context to make meaning is the process of narrative. Chronicle becomes story. Actors count for something; their individuality consists in their selection among a finite field of culturally known options. Their acts are plot elements in stories with unpredictable, but nonetheless familiar courses and outcomes. The universal capacity of competent humans to produce meaning through narrative has been investigated and discussed by a large and disparate group of philosophers, critics, anthropologists, and psychologists. This discussion has revealed or manifested some important properties about human narrative and its relationship to culture (***lots o refs).

    In terms of narratology, there is little conflict between chronicles of events past and their evocation of meaning in the present. Narrative theory provides specifically for pluralities of interpretation, for an understanding that stories exist in time and in specific contexts in which time is suspendedÑpart of the background, so to speak. Narrative assumes that there is difference between the story once told and the story retold, between the story told and the story heard. Anthropology has often found consonance between linguistic theories relating to sounds, words, and sentences, on the one hand, and more general extra-linguistic cultural structures and semiotic practices on the other. A narrative understanding makes it possible to view a largely consistent body of theory which goes beyond mere utterances, and views speech acts and social acts alike as the nexus of meaning creation. This body of theory has been constructed out of the stuff of many disciplines and it is the privileged property of none.

    Now one thing which will drive many archaeologists away from an acquaintance with this field of thought, which I will reluctantly dub cultural narratology, is its intransigent postmodernism. It is generally more concerned with enhancing discourse than with seeking answers. It raises questions and abstains from offering authoritative conclusions. It resists categories and eschews foundational assumptions. It has a widely accepted terminology, which is continually mutable, and accepted to be such. It is equally suitable to be applied to modern poetry, 18th-century portraiture, Madonna videos, or Ndembu origin tales. As a body of theory it contains few propositions, and nobody is spending much effort defending these. Its sense of method is pretty firm, or as firm as hermeneutics ever gets which, for neo-Darwinists and hard-core Structuralists often seems pretty mushy. This mushiness, this postmodern plasticity reveals the acceptance of the very notion that theory can be non-dualistic, uncertain, conditional and pragmatic. Conflicts and ambiguities are normal in human discourse, and narrative assumes them to be so; otherwise, the stories get boring.

    I don't mean to imply that there is a single unified narratology, for many theories of narrative exist, and many of these remain Òtied to dualistic models of language and confined to the examination of decontextualized structures,” in the words of Barabara Herrnstein Smith (*) The cultural narratology of which I speak is summoned by Smith who argues against dualizing ÒstoryÓ against Òdiscourse.Ó Similarly, in archaeology arguments can be made against evocations of transcendent or ÒdeepÓ structuresÑwhether they be Marxian class models or a Deetzian ÒGeorgian mind-setÑ which stipulate an essentialized culture distinct from the actions in which it is instantiated. I am Ònot defending traditional historical narrative...which denies difference and ambiguity, fills an empty time of the past with coherent, consoling narrative...Ó (Shanks and Tilley *). Quite the contrary.

    But what about colonoware pots and ÒArawakÓ pots and Staffordshire tureens and root cellars? What is the truth? What do they mean? What do they say about culture and its use by historical archaeologists?

    Ma Lou taught her daughters well. Dare we ask what stories did she tell?
    What stories do we tell?
    We, the keepers of the ancient relics, guarders and inventors of cultural traditions?
    Do we tell trivial, cryptic, arcane stories to ourselves,
    or bloody and beautiful ones to all who will listen?

    And many will listen.

    In a well-known reading by author and poet Ursula K. LeGuin, given to an interdisciplinary symposium on narrative held at the University of Chicago in 1979, the reader told a story of a man and a woman who killed the woman's husband and how he, the dead husband, reaped his revenge. In concluding, she had this to say:

    There may be some truth in that story, that tale, that discourse, that narrative, but there is no reliability in the telling of it. It was told you forty years later by a ten-year-old who heard it, along with her great-aunt, by the campfire, on a dark and starry night in California; and though it is, I believe, a Plains Indian story, she heard it told in English by an anthropologist of German antecedents. But by remembering it he had made the story his; and insofar as I have remembered it, it is mine; and now, if you like, it's yours.

    ***

    When I thought the idea of culture was the privileged space of anthropology and I was among those who were privy to its secrets, I told those who asked that archaeologists discovered the cultures of the past. Over the years I have become doubtful of claims such as this. More recently I have taken to telling those who ask that my job entails digging sites and telling stories about them. A respected colleague heard me say that once too often and, somewhat impatiently, remarked, ÒWe can't just dig sites and tell stories!Ó

    I suggest we can't do anything else.

    The question is: do we tell good stories? And do we tell them well?
    i. This chapter was expanded from an oral presentation given in the plenary session, ÒThe Culture Concept in Historical Archaeology,Ó at the 1994 Society for Historical Archaeology Conference in Washington, D.C.
    ii . Retrieved from Microsoft Bookshelf 1994, Quotations
    iii . For more about the Òcolonoware question,Ó see my article on Chesapeake Creoles elsewhere in this volume. For an extensive review of the scholarship on colonowares in the Chesapeake, I refer you to ***.
    iv . I have used the word “myth” (along with its numerous derivatives) very frequently throughout the pages of this book. In popular usage the word often implies a false belief. In anthropological usage, however, a myth is a story that is widely--or universally--shared by a society’s members. The story may exist in various forms, and it may be a careful recounting of an actual event, or a “purely” allegorical or metaphorical tale. It generally describes or embodies some cultural norms or ideals, or distills some set of shared beliefs. Members of the society may “believe” the story or not, think its lessons good, bad or indifferent. The key point is that they cannot plead ignorance about it. It is probably fair to say that the view presented here is that all history which is told as such is at least potentially mythical.