Engaging Archaeology: 25 Case Studies in Research Practice by Stephen W. Silliman

Author:Stephen W. Silliman [Silliman, Stephen W.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9781119240532
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-01-25T16:00:00+00:00

My Current Research

After my dissertation, I began investigating plant‐human relationships at historical sites in New England, the mid‐Atlantic, and Iceland. I began seeing commonalities and differences in the colonialism of different regions. More recently I have returned to these issues for seventeenth‐century New Mexico. Snow and Stoller had done a great deal of archaeology at LA 20,000, but they had never written it up. Snow knew that ethics required someone to publish the work, and when I told him that I was interested in continuing research on Spanish colonialism during the early colonial period, he asked me to take up the work on LA 20,000. I knew I did not want to simply write up what he had done; I wanted to conduct my own research.

I have gone back with the freedom to develop my own questions. I have thought a lot about theories of creolization and hybridity and have published on foodways (Trigg 2004), regional economic transactions, and demography and plant‐human interactions in other regions. These experiences afforded the opportunity to hone questions and theoretical perspectives that interested me most. I was particularly interested in the way people within pluralistic colonial households interacted. My current project investigates the social and environmental consequences of Spanish colonization. The specific goals are to reconstruct environmental changes, understand the foodways as evidence of the incorporation of indigenous knowledge, trace relationships with Pueblo villages, and understand specific spatial relationships within the site. The project relies on excavation, ceramic and faunal analysis, reconstruction of architecture and GIS, as well as paleoethnobotany.

The work I wanted to do required external funding, so I obtained a National Science Foundation grant. That grant allowed me to make the most of the existing work. I reviewed the previous excavation notes, which included over 100 student notebooks. None of the maps had all the excavation units, so with the assistance of colleagues and the notebooks, we created a single comprehensive site map. My colleagues conducted a shallow geophysical survey. We also developed a database of material culture and samples that had already been collected. Upon completing these activities, I was able to develop sampling strategies that combined existing data with new, targeted excavations. A second grant is allowing me to excavate, collect botanical and faunal samples, and material culture.

I use a combination of theories to guide my work. Investigations of practices in colonial contexts often focus on the differences between colonizers and colonized, playing off introduced practices (presumably reflecting the activities of colonizers) and local, indigenous practices (presumably reflecting the activities of the colonized). This approach does have a place, but it cannot be the end point of the research. Most archaeological models of pluralistic households have built upon the premise that the male and female heads of the household were the major determinants of daily practice. In seventeenth‐century New Mexico, others may have had an impact as households were typically composed of extended families along with adult relatives, adoptive children, servants, or slaves. Individuals who were not permanent residents of the household, such as day laborers, may have contributed to the nature of a household’s practice.

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