HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

  • Concern with societies for which written documentation exists
  • Does it include?
    • Vikings
    • Maya
    • Egyptology
    • Biblical archaeology
    • Classical studies
    • Medieval studies

Historical Archaeology

  • Origins in United States not Europe
  • to gather information on the restoration, reconstruction and interpretation of sites considered to be historically important

AMERICAN ORIGINS

  • Historical Archaeology focuses on the modern world system that emerged after 1492 as a consequence of European colonial expansion
  • Now also a focus in Australia and Africa

WHY
EXPANSIONISM?

  • Search for secure markets
  • Search for resources which were dwindling in Europe
  • Population growth
  • 1500 AD 80 million
  • 1800 AD 200 million
    • 1/4 world population
  • Famines
  • Europe needed food and new resources to support the dwindling economy
  • Resources
  • Mining - gold, diamonds, copper, lead
  • Products of the Wild -Ivory and skins
  • Agricultural goods-grains and spices

SLAVERY

  • European slavery differed considerable from African slavery
  • Work that no hired person would do- European
  • Social mobility possible and life of their own- Africa
  • Degrading and dangerous- European
  • African Resistance
  • 1543 King Nzinga Memba of Kongo
  • Queen Nzinga Mbande of Angola
  • Agaja Trudo of Dahomey
  • Abolishment of Slave Trade
  • Denmark 1792
  • Britain 1770-1807
  • USA 1808
  • Holland, France, Sweden 1813-1814
  • Spain 1820

THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA

  • Race for Colonies began in 1879
  • French explores for a trans-Saharan railway
  • French push to control Senegal
  • Belgium sent explorers into the Congo
  • Berlin Conference 1884-1885
  • Attended by every western Nation but USA and Switzerland and no African states represented
  • Formal sanctioning the partition of the continent among several European Powers- consolidates Europeans
  • Keep Congo and Niger open,
  • Germany lost its colonies to Britain, Portugal and France after WW I.
  • Ethiopia remained independent except for Italian control during 1936-1941

COLONIALISM

  • The political, social, economic, and cultural domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power for an extended time
  • Controlled have no formal say concerning overrule
  • Colonizers do not answer to the interests or the needs of the colonized
  • Adopt 3 C’s Policy
  • Commerce, Christianity, & Colonization

MISSIONS

  • Catholic missions began in the mid 16th century
  • Protestant missionary 1790s
  • Example: African Inland Mission (Protestant) in Kenya and the Kikuyu
  • took land without consent- 1925 Residence Native Ordinance
  • elimination of polygyny- -1902 government Marriage Law
  • Labor Department Ordinances- secular and religious education
  • elimination of rites of passage including circumcision ceremonies- required Loyalty Oath (1929)

COLONIES FOR EXTRACTION

  • No settlement except for a few Europeans primarily in West Africa
  • Crops for export - cocoa, cotton, groundnuts, coffee,
  • Entire profit in European hands
  • Rubber, oil palm, diamonds, gold, tin, copper, zinc…
  • Concessionaire companies- exploit one commodity using exploitative labor
  • European land management, Forced labor and taxation
  • Example: Leopold’s Congo for rubber, concentration camps, mutilation, destruction of villages, starvation - death of over 10 million people1/2 the population

SETTLEMENT COLONIES

  • Settlement Colonies-
  • East and Southern Africa
  • British in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Botswana; Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique, Italians- Eritrea, French in Madagascar, Belgians in Zaire
  • Europeans took the best lands physically forcing Africans off their lands, forced taxation, and forced labor         
    • administrators, traders, plantation owners/miners military officers
  • Example-
    • 1904-1913 Tanzania (Tanganyika) Kilmanjaro, Mt. Meru and Usambara were coffee plantations and by 1913 the Maasai were confined to their reserve (closed district), which had inadequate land and water and hunger and poverty set in and competition over scarce resources with immigrating Kikuyu.

Replace Existing Empires

  • Aztec (Europeans destroyed in 1532)
  • 6 million people
  • Epidemics smallpox and measles
  • F. Pizarro (Spanish) used the Inca’s elaborate road system to channel his troops into the Andean Mts. And conquer the Inca
  • Silver at Potosi- Europe’s main source for next three centuries

1) CONTRIBUTIONS OF HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

  • Process of Cultural Contact Questioned
  • Assimilation - minority culture is incorporated into a dominant culture and loses it original identity
  • Acculturation-both groups remain distinct but as a result of cultural contact either or both groups may be altered
  • Resistance was ignored and non western peoples viewed as passive
  • What aspects of culture are changed social, economic, political, is there an order to the change?

CASTLE SAO JORGE DA MINA, ELMINA, GHANA

  • 1482-Portuguese
  • 1637-Dutch
  • 1872-British
  • First sub-Saharan European outpost
  • Built to encourage slave and gold trade in the region
  • Christopher DeCorse

ELMINA & HISTORIANS

  • Documentary sources
  • Akan King Kwame Ansa
  • The sea and the land are always at variance- sea attempting to subdue the land and the Land with equal obstinacy resolving to oppose the sea
  • Stress discontinuity between European arrival and African culture
  • Segmented political systems
  • New cultigens
  • Changes in settlement patterns
  • Changes in pottery forms

ELMINA POPULATION

  • Who was living there?
  • Indigenous populations-Asante state founded in 1680 (5,000 sq miles)
  • Assimilation of Dyula, Mande, Ewe
  • Elmina- 20,000 pop
  • Marriage between Portuguese and local women
  • Slaves from the interior
  • Northern Ghana
  • 900 masons and carpenters

ELMINA CHANGES

  • Changes in households include presence of stone mason multi-storied buildings
  • Ritual vessels made of European sheet brass
  • Buttons, buckles indicate new patterns of dress

ELMINA CONTINUITY

  • Burials interred under house floor
  • Household organized around a courtyard
  • Continuity in foodways-shellfish and wild game though domesticates sheep and cow introduced
  • Ceramic designs change but form remains similar- communal bowls

2. CONTRIBUTIONS OF HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

  • Illegal/Illicit Activities
  • Events which are Disputed
  • Balance Bias in Historical Record

THE GREAT DISTORTION & THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

  • Slave Trade or Seizure?
  • 1441- Portuguese 1st consignment of slaves from Senegal
  • Abolishment of Slave Trade
  • Denmark 1792
  • Britain 1770-1807
  • USA 1808
  • Holland, France, Sweden 1813-1814
  • Spain 1820
  • Slave Trade Statistic
    • Total 40 million
    • by 1850 1/3 Africans lived outside Africa
  • African Resistance 1543 King Nzinga Memba of Kongo

WRECK OF HENRIETTA MARIE

  • 1972- Mel Fisher
  • treasure hunter
  • Only known slave ship
  • New Ground Reef, Marquesa Keys, Florida
  • 36 miles from Key West
  • 1699-1700
  • 1982-David Moore- archaeologist
  • Ethical Problems
  • Society for Historical Archaeology-
  • " The collecting, exchanging, buying or selling of archaeological artifacts and research data, for the purpose of personal satisfaction of financial gain or the indiscriminate excavation of archaeological sites, including underwater wrecks is contrary to the purpose of the society"/
  • 1999 with UNESCO- stronger protection laws for underwater cultural heritage (UCH)- 200 nautical miles, sale of UCH objects...

HISTORY

  • Ivory tusk and bell
  • French built and captured in late 1600s by Britain's King Williams
  • Captain- Thomas Chamberlaine
  • Voyages
  • 1696- 250 slaves Barbados
  • 1699-200 slaves Port Royal Jamaica
  • 1700- storm hit and sank cargo-cotton, sugar, indigo
  • Killed 12 men of the crew

WRECK OF HENRIETTA MARIE

  • Conditions
  • 10 feet deep 23 feet wide
  • 3 month trip
  • Dehydration, typhoid, yellowfever, small pox
  • Each time lost half of the African population on board
  • branding
  • Rebellion
  • Today symbol of the African holocaust- 1992

3. CONTRIBUTIONS OF HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

  • Documenting the lifeways of ordinary people including
  • Occupations, health, and subsistence

MYTH OF THE CULTURELESS

  • USA points of origin
  • Slavers had preferences and knowledge of origins indicates the diversity in African peoples not previously recognized
  • Occupations
  • Rice cultivators- Sene-gambia peoples
  • Domestic servants- Mande, Yorbu
  • Artisans- Akan (iron working)
  • Field Workers- Bantu

LIFE OF SLAVERY

  • Kingsmill, Virginia
  • Separate living quarters after 1660s
  • James Bray I, II, III 1657-1744
  • Tobacco plantation
  • Corn, cattle, mill, leather tanning, cider production
  • 30 to 80 slaves

HOUSES

  • Earthfast house- rectangular with post and beam construction
  • Porches
  • Cellars

CELLARS

  • Halfpennies
  • Agricultural tools
  • Buttons
  • Animal bones
  • Supplement diet with hunting and fishing

COLONO-WARE

  • Unglazed earthernware
  • Ceramic vessels and pipes
  • Original ascribed to Native Americans
  • West African motifs
  • Denticulate lines, combstamping, and dot impressions

4) CONTRIBUTIONS OF HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

  • Record the lives of those not recorded
  • The Disenfranchised
  • History records African slaves in the Americas as a passive population striped of their own culture

FORT MOSE, ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA

  • 1738-America’s first free black settlement
  • Island 2 miles north of St. Augustine
  • outpost of Spanish Florida
  • Spain- slaves were able to earn money, purchase their freedom, sue, owners not allowed to break up families
  • Kathleen Deagan

FORT MOSE HISTORY

  • 1693-Encouraged Africans to flee south and gave them sanctuary if they converted to Catholicism
  • Strengthen Spanish colonies and added skilled workers and Catholic converts
  • British destroyed the first Fort 1740 (underwater) and new one established in 1752

FORT MOSE MULTI-ETHNIC COMMUNITY

  • Peoples from Africa, Spain, and Native Americans
  • Captain- Franciso Menendez a West African Mandingo
  • Escaped from Carolinas aid of Yamasse Native Americans
  • Mixture of traditions

FORT MOSE ARTIFACTS

  • Artifacts
  • Government food supplies of corn, beef, pork and rice
  • Mostly deer, turtles, rabbits, fish, and oysters
  • Native American and English cook and tableware
  • Rum bottles, clay pipes
  • Animal bone buttons metal buckles
  • Musket and gunflints
  • Abandoned in 1763- Florida became an English colony