Archaeologies of Indigenous Presence

Highlighting collaborative archaeological research that centers the enduring histories of Native peoples in North America
 
“A perfect embodiment of the major transformations occurring in North American archaeology today. The wide representation of Native American voices in this volume may be unequaled anywhere in the archaeological literature. The authors advocate methods, concepts, and terminologies to unerase practices of erasure.”—Charles R. Cobb, author of The Archaeology of Southeastern Native American Landscapes of the Colonial Era  
 
“As a Native academic with over 20 years of experience engaging with archaeology, I found that these chapters offer new approaches and useful examples I would integrate into my courses and that helped me think that archaeology in North America is moving in the right direction with each new generation of practitioners. By incorporating Indigenous scholars, the book models through practice how to integrate Indigenous knowledge—in its many forms—into archaeology.”—D. Rae Gould, coauthor of Historical Archaeology and Indigenous Collaboration: Discovering Histories That Have Futures  
 
Challenging narratives of Indigenous cultural loss and disappearance that are still prevalent in the archaeological study of colonization, this book highlights collaborative research and efforts to center the enduring histories of Native peoples in North America through case studies from several regions across the continent.
 
The contributors to this volume, including Indigenous scholars and Tribal resource managers, examine different ways that archaeologists can center long-term Indigenous presence in the practices of fieldwork, laboratory analysis, scholarly communication, and public interpretation. These conversations range from ways to reframe colonial encounters in light of Indigenous persistence to the practicalities of identifying poorly documented sites dating to the late nineteenth century.
 
In recognizing Indigenous presence in the centuries after 1492, this volume counters continued patterns of unknowing in archaeology and offers new perspectives on decolonizing the field. These essays show how this approach can help expose silenced histories, modeling research practices that acknowledge Tribes as living entities with their own rights, interests, and epistemologies.  
 
Tsim D. Schneider, a citizen of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse: Coast Miwok Resilience and Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California. Lee M. Panich, associate professor of anthropology at Santa Clara University, is the author of Narratives of Persistence: Indigenous Negotiations of Colonialism in Alta and Baja California.
 
Contributors: Heather Walder | Sarah E. Cowie | Peter A Nelson | Shawn Steinmetz | Nick Tipon | Lee M Panich | Tsim D Schneider | Maureen Mahoney | Matthew A. Beaudoin | Nicholas Laluk | Kurt A. Jordan | Kathleen L. Hull | Laura L. Scheiber | Sarah Trabert | Paul N. Backhouse | Diane L. Teeman | Dave Scheidecker | Catherine Dickson | Hannah Russell | Ian Kretzler