Ancient History in the New World: Integrating Oral Traditions and the Archaeological Record in Deep Time

Abstract

Oral traditions provide a viable source of information about historical settings dating back far in time—a fact that has gained increasing recognition in North America, although archaeologists and other scholars typically give minimal attention to this data. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) lists oral traditions as a source of evidence that must be considered by museum and federal agency officials in making findings of cultural affiliation between ancient and modern Native American communities. This paper sets forth the NAGPRA standards and presents an analytical framework under which scholars can proceed with evaluation of historicity in verbal records of the ancient past. The author focuses on an Arikara narrative and argues that it presents a summary of human history in the New World from initial settlement up to the founding of the Arikara homeland in North Dakota. Oral records and the archaeological record describe a shared past and should be viewed as natural partners in post-NAGPRA America. In conceptual terms, scholarship on the past should revisit the bibliocentric assumptions of “prehistory,” and pursue, instead, the study of “ancient American history”-an approach that treats oral documents as respectable siblings of written documents.

Coastal environments and their role in prehistoric migrations

“…(Minc andSmith 1989: 20 quoted in Rockman 2003: 6). While it has been argued that oral traditions can transmit information over timescales of several millennia, we must also recognise that the verbal durability of narratives relies on the principle of memorability (Echo-Hawk 2000). In essence, only the most memorable aspects of an event will be transmitted over multiple generations.…”

Native/American Digital Storytelling: Situating the Cherokee Oral Tradition within American Literary History

“…15 The very word "prehistoric," which continues to be widely used, embodies the kind of unresolved contradiction that impedes a fuller understanding of the temporal expanse of Native/American history. 16 "Prehistoric," of course, derives from the discredited, though still prevalent, notion that "history" commences when the first white man sets foot on the continents and begins recording his deeds in an alphabetic form of writing. Perhaps a new way to move beyond this very old problem is to study the map below -composed in 1544, two years after de Soto "discovered" the Cherokee's ancestral homeland -enhanced by Flash technology to illustrate how the epistemology of European colonization disfigures Native/America both in the Age of Discovery and in our own time.…”

Narrating landscape: The potential of oral history for landscape archaeology

“…Recent years have seen a number of somewhat disparate studies that have considered and linked oral history and archaeology (see, for example, Echo-Hawk, 2000;Mason, 2000;Whiteley, 2002;Hegmon, 2003;Scott, 2003). Such studies have largely been stimulated by the call for more ethnographic techniques in an 'applied archaeology' that is informed by post-processual (or processualplus) trends, which have called for closer consideration of issues of agency/practice, symbols and meaning, material culture, gender and native perspectives within archaeological enquiry (see Tilley, 1993;Downum and Price, 1999;Hegmon, 2003).…”