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Societies in Eclipse
Archaeology of the Eastern Woodlands Indians, A.D. 1400â"1700
By David S. Brose, C. Wesley Cowan, Robert C. Mainfort Jr. The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2001 David S. Brose, C. Wesley Cowan, and Robert C. Mainfort Jr
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8339-8
CHAPTER 1
Introduction to Eastern North America at the Dawn of European Colonization
DAVID S. BROSE
Curiosity about the aboriginal people of the New World is as great in the United States today as it was among Europeans five hundred years ago, when Native Americans met the first Europeans since the Norsemen to arrive on the Atlantic shore. The history of American Indian cultural traditions has always been part of North American collective history. Yet the collective image of American Indian societies exists largely in terms of European and Anglo-American ideas of science and history that prevailed in the past. The American public has little appreciation for the real depth of the aboriginal cultural traditions that mediated social interactions between Native Americans and the Europeans and white Americans who largely replaced them on the land. Nor have most Americans any effective understanding of how American Indians' ancient traditions mediated their interactions with one another in the face of nonaboriginal pressures. Indeed, most of the public's common misunderstandings about Native American social and ecological relationships can be attributed to the fact that until recently, United States history as a national tradition expropriated examples of Native American contact and resistance, along with isolated, emotionally affecting stories, ignoring nearly everything else. With an inadequate grasp of the depth and tempo of cultural phenomena, public perception of the American Indian collapses like a half-filled balloon. And this is because few thought it might matter.
Neither the seventeenth-century French and English colonists who penetrated the St. Lawrence and Mississippi waterways and crossed the Appalachians nor the eighteenth-century American settlers envisioned the persistence of the American Indian societies they encountered. Against generations of economic sanctions, psychological and biological warfare, and what we would today call ethnic cleansing, attempts at resistance by eastern American Indians proved heroic failures. Having been declared in the early eighteenth century to be people without a cultural future, American Indians discovered that they had also lost to the Old World the remote past, which might have given them a historic claim to the lands of which they were being swiftly dispossessed.
The colonizers' encounters with the New World coincided with western Europe's era of immense intellectual ferment—a movement from theodicy to the appreciation of newly discovered ancient authorities and on to the creation of critical historiography and the development of experimental science. In the years between the Renaissance and the Reformation, western Europeans explored not only the globe but also the roots of their own society. Poorly known societies encountered far away were compared to poorly known societies of long ago—lost Israelites, Teutons, Phoenicians, Babylonians. American Indian societies appeared so unlike current European ones that all but their languages and their most glaring cultural differences were obscured in learned debates over their theological qualifications and biblical lineage. Those who first encountered native tribes and bands along the coasts of eastern North America came fresh from the violent subjugation of the early states of Mexico and Peru. Narragansett and Powhatan, Creek and Cherokee became all but indistinguishable in travelers' pastiches of sixteenth- century North American Indians.
Within a generation of initial European contact along the Caribbean, Atlantic, Pacific, and even Arctic shores, aboriginal societies living so far inland that they had heard of oceans only in legends had been irrevocably changed by the distant European presence. And just as encounters with Africans and Asians had changed European cultures before 1492, contact with American Indians changed them afterward. By the mid-seventeenth century, the third or fourth generation of enlightened western European explorers, divided by sect and section, were reporting differences among the tribes and chiefdoms of the mid-South river valleys and the Great Lakes. And beyond the first Spanish, Dutch, French, and English colonies, the clashes of legendary explorers, missionaries, and settlers with native groups of the great midcontinental forests, lakes, rivers, and grasslands—with Huron and Seneca, Shawnee and Ojibwa, Choctaw and Creek—became the mythic American frontier experience. The midcontinent was, in our nation's founding and again in the revival of native-federal conflict, the place where intellectual empires were forced to confront each other's raison d'être.
Despite the fragmentary nature of the written record, history, philology, and even theology have been invoked to explain American Indians' kaleidoscopic cultural patterns and their centuries of varied reactions as wave after wave of newcomers swept from the coasts, across mountains, and into the heart of the continent. This book offers the perspective that a generation of anthropological archaeological work brings to the understanding of the societies those Europeans first encountered.
As we are learning from anthropological archaeologists working among native people, the bases for ethnic inclusion often have more to do with allegedly shared languages and the relationships and spatial attribution of myths than they have to do with documented, shared material culture or site locations (e.g., Dongoske et al. 1997). To see how these divergent approaches relate the material aspects of group identity to the sociological aspects in historical perspective, David Hurst Thomas (Chapter 16) briefly synthesizes the politically volatile reinterpretations of exactly whose history this was or is to be. The engagement of American Indians with European Americans in the midcontinent has not ended, although the nature of the confrontation has changed.
The Character of Contact between Europeans and American Indians
From A.D. 1420 to 1760, a distinctive western European culture developed and expanded to every corner of the inhabited world. Those years also bracket the sweep of that culture across the last generations of American Indians to have lived life as their ancestors had, free of Europeans. Although Norse people from Iceland had spent several years around A.D. 1000 in feuds with "Skraelings," the aboriginal neighbors of their ill-fated Newfoundland settlement (Ingstad 1964), no evidence has yet been found for any real Norse impact on other American Indians' cultures.
But the next exotic influences were to change every American Indian culture, and they arrived in eastern North America only a few years after Spaniards first explored the Caribbean. Spain's presence was felt across the interior of the territory it termed La Florida, with Juan Ponce de León's brief exploration of 1513, the 1527–1569 treks by Narváez, de Soto, de Luna, and Pardo, and settlement of St. Augustine in 1565. English impact began with a colony at Roanoke in 1583, and Jamestown was founded in 1603. By the last third of the sixteenth century, Portuguese, Basque, and French whalers and fishermen were frequenting the Gulf of St. Lawrence. French exploration up the St. Lawrence began in 1585 with settlement of what would become Canada, dating from 1611. The Dutch established Fort Nassau in 1614, New England's northern colonies took root in 1620, and Swedish settlements along the mid-Atlantic coast began in the 1630s.
Some have imagined that the first decades were marked by pacific curiosity on both sides, tempered by the brief exchange of European goods for American Indian food or furs, after which Europeans reboarded their vessels and sailed away. But certainly, as contact became more frequent—as Europeans moved farther inland and stayed longer—curiosity and courtesy gave way to despair and violence. The story must have been more complicated than the historical documents tell us directly, for the European royal chronicles that followed Columbus's landfall by less than a decade are filled with references to American Indian men, women, and children who had been plucked off coasts from Baffin island to Yucatán. No doubt the flights and evasions described in early European accounts of encounters with American Indians reflect the wary natives' understandable reaction.
Some scholars have wondered what might have happened to American Indian societies if Europeans had not arrived, or if they had arrived at different times or places. Fischer (1970: 15–21) called this the "fallacy of fictional questions," noting that such fantasies can be useful for the ideas they raise and the inferences they help suggest, but that they can never be logically evaluated, much less "proven" in any meaningful way. Though we are resigned to the fact that we can never know what might have been, it is harder to live with the fact that we are none too certain about what actually did happen. Permanent European settlement resulted in substantial acculturation, and recognition of the mutuality of that acculturation and reactions to it differed dramatically among the various participants: American Indian and European, visitor and immigrant, hunter and farmer, Catholic and Protestant, soldier and priest. Differing, too, were their descriptions.
The History of the Written Record
Huddleston's (1967) valuable study of European concepts of American Indian origins began with the observation that Columbus never questioned the existence of people in the New World because he did not believe it to be a new world. But Europe's intellectual confusion about American Indians has origins in its earliest propaganda. On his second voyage, Columbus forced his own crew to swear that Cuba was not an island but a mainland in which they would find civilized inhabitants (Todorov 1984: 4–7). Because he perceived the Indians of the Caribbean as too savage to know the truth (Todorov 1984: 24–27), Columbus felt obliged to give places, people, and things in the New World their true and rightful names, much as God did for Adam. Todorov noted that Columbus's journal descriptions of clothing, language, and so forth reveal a belief that because American Indians lacked proper material culture, they were without real spiritual or social culture as well (1984: 34). Equally lacking writing, North American Indians held a very non-European view of the importance of the speech of the ancients—making for past-oriented societies in which cyclicity prevailed over linearity and change (Todorov 1984: 80–84). The Christian Europeans saw the ease of their conquest as divine approbation, whereas American Indians initially sought to placate the spirits while awaiting the natural revolution that would rid the world of its newest pollution (Todorov 1984: 87).
Because Europeans had never been altogether ignorant of the existence of Africa, India, or China, Todorov (1984: 4) considered the European conquest of the Americas to be the perfect example of his thesis that the discovery of others is the key to the discovery of oneself. He argued that the conquest of the Americas heralded and established modern European intellectual identity. No date could be more suitable to mark the beginning of the modern era, Todorov argued, than the year 1492. As Columbus declared in 1503, "men have now discovered the totality of which they are a part whereas hitherto they formed a part without a whole" (Todorov 1984: 5).
Yet to imagine that both sides of the cultural coin might be so minted comes close to committing what Fischer (1970: 144–149) described as the "fallacy of false periodization"—assigning inappropriate temporal limits to a historical problem, chopping the spans of historical events into segments in ways that are irrelevant to the logic of what is to be studied. Although European intellectual horizons were changed almost immediately by the Columbian contact, describing eastern North American Indian societies as being pre- or post-1492 is not merely unhelpful but also misleading. As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, any single European object or action would fail as a conceptual fulcrum or hinge for discussing American Indian societies. The first scrap of brass kettle, the earliest extant written description, even the establishment of Jamestown—all have profound consequences for our current ability to study aspects of culture change, but they are likely to have had very different consequences and significance for the cultures that are the objects of our study.
By 1503 Amerigo Vespucci had seen enough of the coastline to call it Mundus Novus, and by 1530 the question of American Indian origins was current in European scholarly debate (Huddleston 1967: 3–14). Because sixteenth-century European theologies all espoused a restricted time scale for antiquity, the question of human origins and the question of American Indian origins became one and the same. The explanatory paradigm called for discovery of the Old World locations from which Indians had emigrated, so Classical authors and biblical passages were commonly studied for clues of missing or wandering peoples from whom American Indians might have descended—an ethnohistoric method exhalted to religion by Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon.
Although Hakluyt's story of the mythical Welsh prince Madoc did add local British flavor (Huddleston 1967: 53–93), by the seventeenth century Garcia's synthesis had redirected scholarly debate on American Indian origins from ancient writings to comparisons of Indian "names and words, arms, idols, insignias of the people and hair styles" with those of known Old World societies, many of more modern vintage (Huddleston 1967: 106–108).
We might suppose that, in a kind of ahistoric equity, few Europeans distinguished among the American Indian societies they encountered, and that Indians saw the Europeans as undifferentiated invaders, intruders, and usurpers—but the two suppositions would be equally incorrect. Among just the more structured native societies that first met Spaniards, the Inca believed them to be gods; the Aztec believed them such only for the first few weeks or months; and the Maya speakers of Yucatán thought them simply bearded strangers who did not know which fruits were good to eat. Of the three groups, only the last had experienced previous invasion by real foreigners—the Toltec in A.D. 1000 (Todorov 1984: 80–81).
How could the Spaniards have destroyed a civilization that their letters show them to have admired? Their letters show that they admired its objects and actions but never considered its actors to be on the same level as themselves (Todorov 1984: 129). Indeed, the possession of true culture by true savages would have been considered monstrous (H. White 1985a). The nobility esteemed by Rousseau was the American Indian's "simple and honest" life in the transcendent world of nature, not in the courts of Europe. Less intellectual but more personally involved, the French and British settlers continued the "deculturalization" of American Indians with whom they dealt—that is, perceiving them as having no real culture—often before they even arrived in North America (Forbes 1964: 10–16, 38–43). From Powhatan to Tecumseh, North American Indian leaders had their own interpretations of what was happening to them, often at considerable variance with the understandings of the European colonists who were involved in making it happen (Brown and Vibert 1996; Forbes 1964: 54–61). They learned late that the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had taught Europeans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the existence of heterodoxy and the value of deception. To Europeans, a world without hierarchy was unimaginable, and a world without racial and religious polarities was unknown. Their narratives of American Indians did not neglect to imply the presence of these things.
Such scholarly European lenses, through which we must look at the anthropological and historical data on American Indians, colored not only the Spanish sources dealing with Latin America but also the earliest literary sources for the Eastern Woodlands: Marc Lescarbot's 1609 History of New France, Samuel Purchas's 1613–1617 Pilgrimages, and John Smith's General History of Virginia (Barbour 1986). Throughout the period that Huddleston (1967) saw lasting from 1492 until 1729, Euroamericans saw the broad comparison of cultural fragments from Indian societies with equally isolated fragments gleaned from the ancient writings of Old World peoples as the key to identifying the biological and thus cultural origins of the American Indian, granted some unknowable degree of antiquity.
In those early descriptions, from which we today would reconstruct the living biosocial systems of American Indians in the era of European contact, the cultural features discussed were those thought most likely to have been randomly concatenated from the detritus of some ancestral prototype. Controlled comparison of similarities and differences among groups' integrated cultural behaviors was irrelevant to the intellectual issues for which such data were collected.
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Excerpted from Societies in Eclipse by David S. Brose, C. Wesley Cowan, Robert C. Mainfort Jr.. Copyright © 2001 David S. Brose, C. Wesley Cowan, and Robert C. Mainfort Jr. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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