History to Prehistory: an Archaeology
of Being Indian
Christopher N. Matthews, Department of Anthropology, Hofstra
University, Hempstead, NY 11549, USA
E-mail: anthczm@hofstra.edu
RESEARCH
Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress (Ó 2007)
DOI 10.1007/s11759-007-9024-x
ABSTRACT
This paper explores a conception of being Indian in New Orleans that
complicates and localizes Indian histories and identities. It poses that the
notion of ‘‘being Indian’’ may be approached not only through the history
and archaeology of persons but also as an identity such that being Indian
itself is an artifact produced by a wide range of people in the development
of New Orleans in the colonial and post-colonial periods. Employing a
critical reading of intercultural relations, I explore archaeological evidence
that suggests colonial New Orleans was created in both Indian and nonIndian terms through exchange. In this process archaeology shows that
being Indian was part of a widely-shared colonial strategy that places a
fluid Indian identity at the center of local history. The paper also considers
how the marginalization of Indian people in the early nineteenth century
was one way New Orleans and the greater southeast connected with
dominant American sensibilities. Developing with the idea of ‘‘prehistory,’’
nineteenth-century Native Americans were distanced as a cultural other and
pushed to margins of New Orleans society. The subsequent internal
tensions of assimilation and removal derailed Indian challenges to White
domination they had employed over the previous 100 years. As this action
coincides with the invention of American archaeology as the science of
prehistory, the paper concludes with a critical reflection on archaeological
terminology.
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Résumé: Cet article explore l’idée d’être Amérindien à la Nouvelle-Orléans
qui rend plus complexes et plus spécifiquement locales les histoires et
caractères identitaires amérindiens. Il suggère que la notion d’ « être
amérindien » peut être appréhendée non seulement à travers l’histoire et
l’archéologie des personnes, mais également par le biais d’une identité à
proprement parler, procédant de l’acceptation qu’être Amérindien est en
lui-même une construction empruntant à un large éventail de personnes de
la région de la Nouvelle-Orléans durant la période coloniale et postcoloniale. Utilisant une lecture critique des relations interculturelles, j’explore
Ó 2007 World Archaeological Congress
ARCHAEOLOGIES Volume 3 Number 3 December 2007
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271
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CHRISTOPHER N. MATTHEWS
les faits archéologiques qui suggèrent que la Nouvelle-Orléans coloniale fut
créée selon des principes à la foi amérindiens et non amérindiens par
l’entremise d’échanges. Dans ce processus, l’archéologie démontre qu’
« être amérindien » faisait partie d’une stratégie coloniale largement utilisée
et qui se servait d’une identité amérindienne polyvalente comme point
central de l’histoire locale. Cet article traite également de la façon dont la
marginalisation du peuple amérindien au début du 19ème siècle fut un
moyen par lequel la Nouvelle-Orléans et plus largement le sud-est sont
entrés en adéquation avec la sensibilité américaine dominante. En même
temps que se développait l’idée de « préhistoire », les amérindiens du
19ième siècle furent écartés en temps qu’« autre culture » et repoussés aux
marges de la société de la Nouvelle-Orléans. Les tensions internes qui ont
suivi, liées à leur assimilation et déplacement, ont entravées les efforts des
Amérindiens contre la domination des Blancs, efforts déployés au cours des
100 années précédentes. Ceci coı̈ncidant avec l’invention de l’archéologie
américaine comme la science de la préhistoire, cet article termine avec une
discussion critique de la terminologie archéologique.
________________________________________________________________
Resumen: Esta ponencia explora una concepción de ser Indio/a en New
Orleans que complica y localiza historias e identidades Indias. Propone que
se puede abordar la noción de ‘‘ser Indio/a’’ no sólo a través de la historia y
la arqueologı́a de las personas, sino también como una identidad que hace
que ser Indio/a sea en si mismo un artefacto producido por una amplia
porción de gente en el desarrollo de New Orleans en los perı́odos
coloniales y post-coloniales. Usando una lectura crı́tica de relaciones
interculturales, exploro la evidencia arqueológica que sugiere que el New
Orleans colonial fue creado en términos Indios y no-Indios por el
intercambio. En este proceso la arqueologı́a demuestra que ser Indio/a era
parte de una estrategia colonial extensamente compartida que ubica una
identidad India fluida en el centro de la historia local. La ponencia también
considera la manera como la marginalización del pueblo Indio al comienzo
del siglo XIX fue una forma a través de la cual New Orleans y el gran
sudeste se conectaban con las sensibilidades norteamericanas dominantes.
Al desarrollarse con la idea de ‘‘prehistoria’’, los Nativos norteamericanos
del siglo XIX fueron distanciados como un otro cultural y desplazados a
los márgenes de la sociedad de New Orleans. Las tensiones internas
subsiguientes de asimilación y extirpación torcieron el curso de los desafı́os
Indios al dominio blanco que habı́an estado usando en los últimos cien
años. Como esta acción coincide con la invención de la arqueologı́a
norteamericana como la ciencia de la prehistoria, la ponencia concluye con
una reflexión crı́tica de la terminologı́a arqueológica.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
History to Prehistory
273
KEY WORDS
Archaeology, Prehistory, Identity, New Orleans, Native American
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Here we recognize immediately the spiritual ancestry of the great historical
wisdom of the Germans, who when they run out of positive material and
when they serve up neither theological nor political nor literary rubbish
assert that this is not history at all, but the ‘‘prehistoric era.’’ They do not
however enlighten us as to how to proceed from this nonsensical ‘‘prehistory’’ to history proper; although, on the other hand, in their historical speculation they seize upon this ‘‘prehistory’’ with especial eagerness because they
imagine themselves safe there from interference on the part of ‘‘crude facts,’’
and, at the same time, because there they can give full rein to their speculative impulse and set up and knock down hypotheses by the thousand.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
The German Ideology
This essay outlines a new way to locate Indians in New Orleans by shifting
the attention from Indian persons, that is, particular bodies in particular
locations, to Indian performance: being Indian as a way of life that any
‘‘body’’ from any ‘‘where’’ could be or become (Bhabha 1994; Butler 1993;
Deloria 1998). The point is to escape a problematic foundation on which
many treatments in American history and archaeology rely to establish
Indians as research subjects. While we may indeed conceive of people as
Indian through evidence of language, belief, kinship, landscape, artifacts,
and other particular ritual and habitual actions, the most defining characteristic employed to set them in American history is to mark them as
native. Being native is essential because, in a word, it defines the relationship between Indians (as Native) and other Americans. In this sense being
Indian becomes in part a political issue in that native standing produces
an identity and, for many, a political economy within colonial and postcolonial history and practice. The use of this foundation to define Indians for
this purpose, however, does little more than isolate Indian people and culture and in an important way take Indians out of history (Dombrowski
2001; Sider 1987, 1994; Wolf 1982). It may be said, moreover, that this
problem applies to the history and archaeology of indigenous peoples
worldwide as they work to establish footholds within modernity through
scholarship and identity.
The construction of Indian-as-native—and thus primary, natural, and, as
such, substantially different—is an artifact of the dominant colonial culture
of which archaeology is part. In this sense I think we may consider Indian
performance as an archaeological problem in two related senses. First, we
must reflexively consider how the identification of Indian subject-persons as
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CHRISTOPHER N. MATTHEWS
Native Americans frames relations between archaeologists and their subject
communities that are highly politicized components of the living worlds of
researchers and descendents (see Zimmerman 1997, 2005; Castañeda n.d.,
Watkins et al. 2000). Second, we can conceive of the construction of the
Indian-as-native identity in archaeological terms by examining contexts
where relations between Indian and non-Indian people led persons to establish the practical meanings of cultural difference. In other words, there is a
need for an archaeology of how Indian persons and groups became Native
Americans through both historical and political-discursive processes. This
paper combines these efforts. I explore patterns in the archaeology and history of colonial and post-colonial New Orleans and the lower Mississippi
Valley to show that Indians were at first integral in everyday colonial life
but later removed as part of the programs of American state formation and
expansion. I interweave this story with the thematic described in the title.
By ‘history’ I mean that Indians, and especially Indian performance, was a
normal and important part of cultural life in early New Orleans as Indians,
settlers, and slaves counted on the Indian trade and the alliances and obligations it underwrote through gift-exchange for basic necessities and peace.
With ‘prehistory’ I am symbolizing the removal of Indians from a role in
making American history as the Indian trade collapsed and settlers focused
on connecting with the American market economy. At that moment Indian
people became survivals, an issue that was not without problems and significant consequences. A continuing Indian presence (especially their control
over vast amounts of land) was negotiated in political terms that made
Indians knowable only as anachronisms unsuited for the modern world. In
no small part Indian appeals to the traditions of gift-exchange and alliance
reinforced this assessment. Declared as being out of place, despite the
fact that they were living in their ancestral homelands, Indian people were
ineligible for consideration and by the 1830s were in large part forcibly
removed.
Following the opening extract it is important to acknowledge that the
Western idea of prehistory emerges in this same era with archaeology (also
see Kehoe 1998; Trigger 1989). This observation leads to additional reflection on how the terminology of archaeology and related disciplines has an
important history, and archaeology, of its own. With ‘prehistory’ Indian
identity was and is discursively disarticulated from the historical processes
of colonialism that were used to create it. I follow in particular anthropologist Gerald Sider (1987, 1994) taking the stance that there were no Indians at all until colonists ‘‘discovered’’ and defined them in the effort to
control them. Rather, there were hundreds of social formations with
unique histories and ways of life, which continue to make American history in the present despite the dominant sense that the Indian problem
has been solved. It is vital that archaeologists do not also generalize these
History to Prehistory
275
histories by resorting to the to the ‘‘safe’’ place, as Marx and Engels
describe it, of prehistory where natives are Indians just as they were before
the transformations and destructions caused by European colonialism and
American expansion. With prehistory, that is, Indian persons and performance are bound together so that the social and historical discourse of
identity is reduced to a pre-historical state of nature usually called race.1 I
do not think this is goal of most archaeologists, thus I caution that we be
more aware of how our work may promote the issues we think we are
working against.
The focus here is framed so that the symbolic and discursive implications of being Indian are kept distinct from the historic bodies involved in
the performance. I take a dialectical approach to Indian history that highlights the performance of persons with bodies in order to discover how
persons produced identities given their specific historic conditions and
despite the aspects we now recognize about their bodies. This approach
entails asking several questions that clarify the meanings applied to Indian
identity. How was being Indian performed, and by who? How was Indian
performance tolerated, and by who? Did the kinds of performances and/or
the arenas for them change through time or vary depending on the social
relations of production? What created and sustained the social space
required to make Indian identity claims? Did this space support or challenge the cultural formations where Indians are found, and, if so, how?
And, how did the claim vary between those who made it for themselves
and those who applied it to others? With these questions we may better
establish what we mean by declaring someone was being Indian, and we
become more capable of handling the real and potential diversity that such
a broad identity contains.
This is an important exercise for writing Indian histories and archaeologies because only through the existence of a plurality of meanings can
identities be created, changed, or remain strategically unfixed. In other
words, it is the diversity embedded within identities that creates the possibility for history and by extension truly historical archaeologies. This issue
is especially significant in the study of indigenous people worldwide for
few groups have been as characterized in reference to their supposed prehistory and thus identified with a set of highly restrictive and unyielding
ways of being (Wolf 1982). Working with the alternative idea of ‘‘identities
as history’’ (Sider 1994), we find that claims to be someone are windows
on the cultural tensions that constituted the production of the archaeological and documentary records, even if these are histories of the identification of persons and cultures as prehistoric.
In this essay I propose that being Indian in New Orleans may be associated with a variety of individuals and groups as they struggled to make a
way of life that supported their position in the regional political economy.
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CHRISTOPHER N. MATTHEWS
I consider that being Indian does not mean that we need to look for
Native American persons but also others who played Indian as they lived
and made history in the lower Mississippi Valley. I first examine the
eighteenth-century origins and maturation of New Orleans to argue that
the Indian trade and its support of Indian performance made New Orleans
possible. I then review how Indians were both excluded and maintained in
New Orleans through a process that resituated Indians from history to
prehistory: a process indicating a change in local culture that turned
Indians from coeval intercultural inhabitants to margin-dwelling relics of
another culture and time altogether. In the conclusion I explore more
about the reasons for this shift as I relate the association of Native America
with prehistory to the idea of archaeological cultures.
Indians and History
This discussion of Indian history in New Orleans is based on a pattern in
the ceramic assemblages from colonial-period archaeological sites in the
city. In almost every case, Indian ceramics are part of the colonial-period
assemblages from sites deemed European by virtue of the cultural affiliations of the heads of household (Figures 1 and 2). At first glance this
finding is not surprising since in many early colonial North American
settings the interaction between Indians and colonists is well-documented
and known to have produced clear archaeological correlates recognized by
the presence of each other’s material culture at each other’s sites (e.g.,
Avery 1995; Brain 1979, 1988; Brown 1980; Jordan 1998; King 1984;
Loren 2001; McEwan 1986, 1991; Neitzel 1983; Rogers 1990; Rothschild
2003; Sylvia 2002; Vernon 1988; Waselkov 1993). One of the foundations
Figure 1. Eighteenth-century Native American-manufactured ceramics, Tremé Plantation Site, New Orleans. Photograph by the author
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History to Prehistory
Figure 2. Eighteenth-century Native American-manufactured ceramics, Madame
John’s Legacy Site, New Orleans. Photograph by Shannon Lee Dawdy
for understanding this process of cultural interaction in archaeology is
found in the work of Kathleen Deagan (e.g., 1983, 1995) and her colleagues at colonial Spanish sites in Florida and the Caribbean. This
research shows that Spanish colonization was based on establishing military and missionary outposts within Indian territories to both dominate
and profit from American people and resources. While these settlements
pronounced an official European colonial culture, this authority was mediated by the everyday intercultural matrix epitomized by the growth of a
mestizo population resulting from the intermarriage of Spanish men and
Indian women. At these ‘‘mixed’’ households the archaeological record is
marked by a clear Indian presence represented by a large proportion of
Native American pottery (Table 1). The relatively equal numbers of Indian
and European ceramic sherds is taken to signify the impact of Indian
women’s domestic work made possible in part by the access of resident
women to Indian controlled and produced resources like ceramics as potters themselves or, through kin and similar relations, to Indian potters in
nearby settlements.
Table 1 Summary ceramic sherd counts for two major Spanish colonial sites
Site
Native
American
ceramics
St. Augustine, Florida
13,302
(Hoffman 1997: Table 2)
Puerto Real, Haiti
25,303
(Deagan 1995: Table 13.3)
European
ceramics
Total
Native American ceramics
as percentage of total
ceramics (%)
9,390
22,692
58.7
27,975
52,278
48.4
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CHRISTOPHER N. MATTHEWS
Table 2 Summary ceramic sherd counts for Colonial New Orleans sites
Site
Cabildo (Yakubik and Franks 1997:
Native
American
ceramics
European
ceramics
Total
Native American
ceramics as percentage
of total ceramics (%)
20
509
529
3.8
36
479
515
7.0
234
1,434
1,668
14.0
Appendix 1)
Madame John’s Legacy (Dawdy 1998:
Appendix C)
Tremé Plantation (Matthews 1999)
In contrast, colonial sites in New Orleans have a very different distribution in which Indian ceramics make up only a small percentage of the
overall ceramic assemblages (Table 2). To help explain the presence of
Indian pottery, colonial census records from New Orleans were consulted,
but no evidence was found of Indians living at the excavated sites. This
suggests that the pots were not directly associated—at least in terms of
their use and discard—with people from their culture(s) of origin. Lacking
resident Indians to connect with the pots, it is more likely they ended up
at the excavated sites through exchange. This helps explain the low sherd
counts since without Indians living at these sites there may have been less
motivation by colonial residents to acquire examples of traditional Indian
material culture. However, further investigation of the Indian trade in New
Orleans suggests a need to question the cause and nature of this exchange
in order to define a more satisfactory explanation for the presence of
Indian pottery at settler sites at all.
It was first believed that Indian pots may have served a particular function unmet by European ceramics, creating in effect a market for Indian
wares. Since many of European vessels at colonial Spanish sites were serving and table wares while most Indian ceramics were storage and food
preparation vessels, it seems that Indian pots in these settings indeed
served an unmet function.2 However, the relationship of serving to storage
and preparation vessels given European or Indian manufacture at the
Tremé Plantation site in New Orleans (Table 3) shows native vessels, which
were almost entirely hollow vessels and open bowls, were redundant forms
since the European ceramics included both refined earthenware table vessels and large coarse earthenware storage and preparation bowls (Figure 3).
This leads us to consider why settler households acquired Indian vessels
they apparently did not necessarily need?
One answer I think is that the meaning of these Indian ceramics was
less a result of their functional value than their value in exchange. This
makes sense especially considering the significance of intercultural exchange
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History to Prehistory
Table 3 Minimum Vessel Count for the Tremé Plantation Site, New Orleans
Vessel Type
Native American
CEW
REW
Other
Plate/Flatware
0
1
26
3
Table bowl
0
3
37
0
0
1
18
4
14
23
14
13
4
7
3
7
Cup/Teacup
Prep/Storage bowl
Hollow vessel form unknown
CEW: Coarse Earthenware; REW: Refined Earthenware;
Other: Stoneware, Porcelain, and Slipware; Hollow vessel form unknown indicates
vessel is either large or small bowl or cup
Chart for Table 3
Minimum Vessel Count for Colonial Deposits,
Treme Plantation
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
Indian
CEW
REW
Hollow vessel
unknown
Prep/Storage
Bowl
Cup/Teacup
Table Bowl
Plate/Flatware
Other
Figure 3. French Saintonge and Aboriginal ceramic sherds indicating the same large
bowl vessel form in both types. The sherd on the left is approximately a 15 cm
section of a bowl rim. Recovered from the Tremé Plantation site, New Orleans.
Photograph by the author
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CHRISTOPHER N. MATTHEWS
in the greater colonial southeast (see Axtell 1997; Braund 1993; Crane
1981; Merrell 1989; Usner 1992; White 1983, 1991; Wright 1981). On this
topic the information from documentary sources is both abundant and
clear. In sum, intercultural exchange in the colonial southeast was an
important foundation of colonial social life for both its products such as
deer skins and the obligations and social ties trade inculcated between varied colonial-period groups. Seeing how exchange was part of the mediation
of cultural difference that defined regional politics and production is essential in any attempt to reconstruct past social action that relates Indians and
non-Indians in New Orleans or anywhere else in the lower Mississippi
valley. Still, the particular characteristics of these relations must be carefully conceived since intercultural exchange occurred during an era of
heightened political tension and frequent cultural misunderstanding and
conflict that created a diverse array of social factions and relations as well
as political economic opportunities across the historic landscape.
To situate being Indian in this history of exchange requires understanding two basic points about intercultural exchange and warfare in
the southeast. First, the meaning of exchange was not necessarily obvious, nor even the same, for the parties involved. Exactly what skins,
blankets, maize, meat, wax, oil, beads, trinkets, guns, ammunition, and
ceramic pots meant to each group as these items crossed politicized cultural borders was ambiguous at best and not consistent through time.
However, significant meaning was created in these exchanges as trading
partners recognized each other, if not formed the lasting obligations that
non-market exchange traditionally elicits. Still, an important source of
this misunderstanding stems from the poor fit of the European interest
in developing commercial exchange with the typically Indian emphasis
on gift exchange, a mismatch that sustained a highly politicized cultural
atmosphere that made trade goods sites of serious intercultural meaning
and negotiation. The discourse over the Indian trade, in fact, permitted
the exigencies of culture contact, most especially the positions of power
claimed by the participants, to be aired and materialized, especially as
circumstances changed. Through the exchange of goods, that is, Indians
and others defined not only their relations, but took advantage of the
attention that the exchange promoted to indicate intentions to change
positions within these relations as circumstances developed. In this
setting it is not a surprise that sites in colonial New Orleans produce
artifacts reflecting these colonial politics, nor that these artifacts are
relatively few in number. If these pots were signs of political relations their value may have been enhanced by their relatively limited
quantities.
A second important reason for emphasizing the politicized and tactical
aspects of gift-exchange is the common incidence of Indian conflict
History to Prehistory
281
originating at the very beginning of the historic period. As Patricia
Galloway (1994, 1995) and others (Merrell 1989; Sider 1994; White 1983;
Ramenofsky 1988) have shown, most historic Indian nations of the southeast encountered and defined by Europeans in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries were recently reorganized polities that developed after
a collapse of Mississippian chiefdoms brought on by the effects of introduced European diseases and population decline. New Indian polities
formed in the subsequent era as populations stabilized and groups
reclaimed productive horticultural and hunting territories that they in turn
regularly defended through feuding and war. Historian Richard White
(1983: 9–13) describes how the Choctaw landscape was marked by extensive borderland regions reserved for hunting, in part because these were
considered dangerous sites where ambush and raiding were common. For
the Choctaw, significantly, warfare meant the nation’s most fertile rivervalley land was left agriculturally unused. With even basic aspects of productive life controlled by a competitive atmosphere marked by disease,
conflict, raiding, and revenge, this process of ethnogenesis politicized virtually every aspect of daily life. In this environment the emphasis on tactical
gifting and alliance formation that Indians placed on intercultural exchange
with Europeans can be recognized not as an Indian tradition but a particular historical strategy crafted in a landscape of fear European settlers
encountered, exacerbated, and unavoidably were a part of.3
This landscape was not confined to the Indian world but of necessity
included every settlement in the region, including European ‘‘frontier’’ forts
and trading posts as well as settlements imagined as less peripheral like New
Orleans and Mobile. In fact, all European sites were considered by Indian
nations to be built on lands not purchased but temporarily granted in
exchange for trading rights. This belief was made exceptionally clear by
members of the Natchez nation in 1729 who attacked and killed the entire
white population of the White Apple settlement.4 This attack was an act of
revenge and an assertion of Natchez authority following a shift in official
French policy that drastically cut back the trade (McGowan 1976). Any and
every settlement—Indian or European—in this landscape at root signified a
social relationship mediated through the exchange of goods used to consistently negotiate political alliances. One meaning here is that without
exchange there was only war and theft. Another implication is that intercultural exchange could never be purely commercial, but was always in part
implicated in the political and tactical applications of the gift.
Given this understanding of exchange I suggest that the Indian pottery
excavated in New Orleans is the materialization of this politicized and dangerous landscape of fear. New Orleans was less an outpost of Europe in an
Indian world, than a settlement made possible by, and thus coeval with,
networks of intercultural alliance that formed the contours of a cultural
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CHRISTOPHER N. MATTHEWS
landscape marked by hostility, distrust, and the opportunities these gave
for personal and cultural advantage. In this sense, there need not have been
a single Native American living in New Orleans for us to locate Indians
there. Rather, every Indian ceramic that archaeology brings to the surface
identifies that the early settlers who traded for, used, and discarded these
objects had adopted the key component of being Indian in the lower
Mississippi valley: using things to create intercultural alliances and peace as
well as opportunities for social gain.5
The organization and history of the powerful Choctaw nation whose
interests were very closely tied to the development of New Orleans illustrates this process and its effects. White (1983) shows that the Choctaw
crafted a ‘‘play-off system’’ to manage their relations with contending European colonial powers. By both shifting and threatening to shift their allegiance between at first the French and English and later the English,
Americans, and Spanish, the Choctaw sustained a position of relative
dominance in the southeast throughout the eighteenth century. However,
the Choctaw themselves were just as often ‘‘played’’ by these colonial
empires in ways that, among other tragedies, led to a Choctaw civil war in
the late 1740s. Still, even these tragedies did not challenge the seeming
validity of the gift tactic but reinforced it, since from the Choctaw
perspective it was the suspension or disruption of the trade that led to violence and war (McGowan 1976). Similarly, the Choctaw moiety and iksa
systems undermined attempts by European powers to subjugate entire
nations since these and other factions allowed the Choctaw to turn ‘‘internal
divisions ... to the nation’s advantage’’ (1983:65). The advantage was that
the Choctaw, through legitimate, recognized cultural means, resisted subordination that a complete alliance with a single imperial power would produce. Thus, it may be supposed that some cultural ‘‘traditions’’ like kinbased factions or gift-alliances were emphasized and employed in political
struggles as non-negotiable contours in the colonial definition of their
Indian identity. Through these means some of the power created by intercultural colonial contact remained in the hands of Indians.
These traditions not only challenged European domination, but also
established an important tactical ambiguity to Indian identity that was,
among other effects, how Indian people made history in the colonial
southeast. Ultimately, Indians were not essentially anything in this political
landscape: they were, and had to be, made into something through alliance
and exchange. This means that under the conditions created by the playoff system they operated from a position in which they crafted what being
Indian meant given what they were offered for playing along. As conditions
changed they were thus able to change with them by simply ‘‘playing’’ a
different sort of Indian (i.e., friend, foe, ally, unaligned, etc.). Still, the
play-off system only succeeded as long as there were contending powers
History to Prehistory
283
seeking to form alliances, or, in other words, only as long as there was a
landscape of fear that would allow identities to be as historically fluid as I
have described. It was in times without fear that the Choctaw and other
southeastern Indians were the most vulnerable to colonial power. In this
sense the Choctaw were not a nation or culture apart, but, like the settler
‘‘Indians’’ we find in the archaeology of New Orleans’ households, a nation
existing within the hybrid culture that colonization, exchange, disease,
warfare, deceit, and distrust created in the southeast. Thus, it was not only
the Indians who wrote this history nor, as we shall see, only Europeans
who relocated Indians to prehistory.
Being Prehistoric
The transformation of being Indian in the American southeast from history
to prehistory is obvious in the historical record, even in broad strokes. Following the American Revolution and especially after the Louisiana Purchase, southeastern Indians lost the ability to play off European empires
against one another. Beginning after 1800, a new social landscape emerged
as the territories claimed by the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee,
Seminole, and other powerful Indian nations were no longer part of competing European imperial visions best controlled through the instigation
and negotiation of Indian warfare and intercultural exchange, but lands
prized by Americans for their potential agricultural productivity.6 In the
first decades of the nineteenth century, therefore, what had been an international borderland around New Orleans became the territory of a single
new nation eager to establish its commercial prowess and hegemony. Eventually, this order ruled the day making Indian ways of life outmoded and
leading to the rejection of Indian land claims and the removal of most
Indian people from the southeast by the 1830s.
The prehistoric transformation of Indians around New Orleans is also
obvious archaeologically. While the colonial-period deposits of the city consistently produce Indian ceramics, the assemblages of the nineteenth century
are characterized by their absence. At the Tremé Plantation site, for example, the most recent deposits containing Native American pottery date no
later than 1820. Given the possibility for reuse and curation of Indian pots,
this finding suggests that Indian exchange was still common up to about
1800, even as this particular site was occupied by new owners and incorporated into the city which started developing around it in the 1790s (Matthews 1999). After 1820, however, the presence of Indian pottery disappears
at this site as well as the others, and it has never been found at sites that
date only to the nineteenth century. This pattern suggests that during the
first years of the 1800s the Indian trade ended in New Orleans.
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CHRISTOPHER N. MATTHEWS
Given the widespread removal of southeastern Indians in the 1830s, this
absence of Indian ceramics is not surprising. However, the pottery disappears before Indians were officially removed, and, more significantly, while
the removal of Indian nations was official, the process did not carry every
Indian person away. In fact, in the very era when Indian ceramics stopped
being a part of New Orleans households, many Indians adopted a new way
of life in direct relation to the city. Historian Daniel Usner (1998:114)
describes that ‘‘New Orleans actually became more important than ever
before to Indians who were ... devising new means of coping with the loss
of political autonomy and ... socioeconomic displacement. ... Peddling and
casual labor by Indians in the burgeoning commercial center became part
of a wider seasonal round of itinerant economic activities.’’ This conclusion
is in part drawn from multiple first hand observations of Indians in Louisiana in the nineteenth century that associate Indians with exchange and peddling, the most evocative of which are drawings and photographs of Indian
peddlers at New Orleans market houses (Figure 4). Notably, the focus of
the trade here has shifted from gift to commercial exchange. The point is
that Indians never left New Orleans and may actually have been present in
the city in new and more significant ways than before, but the moment they
lost the ability to operate outside, and thus challenge, American commercial
hegemony they also disappear from the archaeological record. This is how,
as a result of the loss of self-determination, Indians were able to be placed
at the margins of New Orleans society and essentialized as persons of different culture whose principle attribute was their anachronistic ‘‘other’’ way of
life. This is what I mean by ‘‘being prehistoric’’.
Figure 4. Native American selling sassafras at the French Market in New Orleans.
Paul Hammersmith, French Market, N.O. Feb. 1891. Detail. The Historic New Orleans,
Collection, acc. No. 1977.79.13
History to Prehistory
285
To elaborate I return to White’s discussion of the historic Choctaw.7
In the late eightteenth century as the order of exchange tilted in favor of
European commerce, particular historical conditions came about that led
the Choctaw into internal conflict and external dependence both of which
left them incapable of resisting land grabs and then removal. It is notable
that this process occurred through a dialectical social factioning in direct
relation to exchange. To explain, historians highlight the significant role
of market debt. In the words of then President Thomas Jefferson: Americans should encourage ‘‘especially ... leading [Indian] men to run in debt
... beyond their individual means of paying; and whenever in that situation, they will always cede lands’’ (cited in Usner 1998:77). Clearly, while
Indians previously had strategically employed the gift to guide intercultural relations in their favor, Americans, once empowered to do so, did
not just adopt or mildly introduce their ‘‘natural’’ mode of commercial
exchange but employed the gift-based tactics of credit and debt as a
strategy of cultural domination for the stated purpose of eliminating
Indians, both politically and culturally, from the landscape. The implication here is that it was not just raw commercial and military power, but
the subtleties of exchange and cultural characteristics like gift obligations
reflexively being used by and against Indian people that allowed market debt to eliminate Indians from the land and as powerfully from
American history.
After the creation of the American Mississippi Territory in 1798, some
Choctaw turned to livestock herding as excessive hunting for the deerskin
trade depleted wild game throughout the nation’s lands. One impact of the
shift to herding is the role cattle ownership played in defining a new basis
for Choctaw factions. Choctaw herders, for example regularly complained
to American Indian agents that Choctaw hunters were killing their cattle.
Even though the cattle were grazing on the nation’s traditional hunting
grounds, herders convincingly argued that cattle were not the same as wild
game specifically because the cattle (though not the land they were grazing
on) were private property (White 1983:107–110). Interestingly, even
though they were more engaged with the commercial economy, the herders
did not struggle with the problem of debt. Rather, this was the problem of
the traditionalist hunters who had been co-opted into Jefferson’s prophesized cycle of debt in which they owed traders for goods they purchased
with skins they had yet to even hunt and given the depleted supply would
likely never produce.8 Yet, because these two groups, despite their divergent relations with the market, were identified as Choctaw, they were
forced to act as one in their dealings with American merchants and
authorities. This unified public cultural identity reversed the anti-essentialist Indian identity their ancestors had employed to subvert European
power in the colonial period. The tensions that resulted from this imposed
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singular Indian identity on what were quite distinct ways of life ultimately
led the Choctaw as a whole to succumb to being prehistoric.
An example explains. In 1818, a mixblood herder, David Folsom,
declared that the old hunt was dead (White 1983:118). From his perspective, the survival of the Choctaw required their self-sufficiency within the
market. The traditional hunt had long before stopped being for subsistence
purposes. Most hunting was for the trade and thus underwrote in Folsom’s
opinion that debt and dependence was destroying the Choctaw nation. In
the world he envisioned, notably with the help of Protestant missionaries,
Folsom saw the Choctaw becoming modern through education, thrift,
property-ownership, and sobriety. To do so, the cattle herders, who by
virtue of their commercial success were the new Choctaw elite, declared
that being Indian now meant getting over gift-exchange and staying out of
debt. To do otherwise he and his peers argued was to drag the whole
nation down to the discursive status where Americans already thought they
were: ‘‘pitiful remnants’’ or ‘‘fragments of an erratic race’’ (cited in Usner
1998:118–119).9 Thus, itinerant Indians at New Orleans market houses,
those who still lived by trading rather than settling and working the land,
were the real problem for the Choctaw herding elite because they seemed
to be living up to the stereotypical associations of the Indian race as indolent, indigent, and essentially prehistoric.
Nevertheless, the tragedy of removal in part was brought about by this rift
within Indian communities and identities. While itinerant Indian traders
faced prejudice and harassment from not only whites but also members of
their own culture, their role in the removal was largely symbolic. As itinerant
traders at markets in New Orleans and other towns, they were in fact the
ones most likely to remain in their homeland region after removal (Usner
1998). Rather, removal was focused on those who pretended they could be
like whites by settling down, owning property, becoming literate, and adopting Christianity. These Indians were the real threat to American expansion
because they illustrated that being Indian did not also mean being inferior,
archaic, and vanishing, but, instead, that it solely meant being in control of
desirable and profitable resources. The problem of the herding elite was that
their way of life challenged the idea that being American or white was necessarily superior. The persistence and success of Indians within the commercial
economy undermined the colonial discourse that Americans relied on to
steal the southeast. In order for Americans to legitimize their cultural and
economic assault, they required the sense that ‘‘prehistory’’ provided that
they were improving the territory just by being there because they were a
superior race employing a better economic practice. Otherwise, all they
could do was beat down through force and relocation Indians whose successful adoption of a commercial way of life established Americans were in
actuality just well-armed and organized thugs. Ultimately, Indian removal
History to Prehistory
287
created a safe southeast, but only after Indians were redefined as prehistoric,
or unfit for, and thus dangerous in, the modern world.
Being Safe
This paper has explored the archaeology of ‘being Indian’ in New Orleans
by examining the shift from a fluid to a rigid Indian identity in association
with the events of American state formation and expansion. A sense of a
‘safe’ place taken from the opening extract focuses the discussion on the
symbolic discourse of identity made material in social practice and materialized in everyday cultural artifacts such as the presence and absence of
Indian pottery at European and American sites. To conclude, I would like
to offer some thoughts on how this approach also speaks to the notion of
being safe in archaeological practice in general.
John Welch (2001) has written that archaeology should strive to bring
an end to prehistory as it fills in gaps in the knowledge of human history
from its beginnings to the present. I have articulated a similar goal by
focusing on how we ever came to see any time or people as prehistoric in
the first place, and how there is an archaeology of this process. I join
with Welch here and urge archaeologists to reflect on prehistoricizing as a
problematic part of archaeological practice.
In one sense, archaeologists are purveyors of the notion of prehistory.
Even in historical archaeology, our job is to recover for present consumption what has been lost or buried—i.e., made prehistoric—about past
human lives. It is important to remind ourselves that we do this work now
and to know that these acts of reconstruction define the social contexts
and meanings of archaeology more than the other times and places archaeologists typically write about. This understanding has important ramifications for archaeological practice. First, it calls for more reflection on
whether we serve those with an interest in the archaeological past as well
as we might like when we refer to ‘‘prehistory’’ (see Holtorf 2005). We
should know more about how this terminology effects our own perceptions, and, further, how living people, especially descendent communities
and other interested publics, relate to prehistoric persons and cultures. Second, we can only approach a truly ethical form of public service by examining how archaeology’s discursive positions (such as purveying the notion
of prehistory) enable us to be relatively safe in our work. Though it is less
often the case, safe places are best constructed as a result of dialogue and
an awareness of history. In fact, dialogue produces history because social
encounters are moments when meanings and perspectives emerge and are
reproduced or not. The coalescence of these meanings as ways of life produces identities. This is how identities are histories for they authenticate in
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CHRISTOPHER N. MATTHEWS
a socio-historical sense everyday experience in complex social settings. My
description of the social processes of colonial New Orleans related to the
Indian trade illustrates how being Indian was necessary to making history
there through the social dialogue of the Indian trade such that the trade
formed the contours of safety and peace in the region.
More often, unfortunately, contemporary identities are taken to be prehistoric such that they are seen as unchanging and unconnected to historical conditions. Prehistory in this way constructs safe places very differently
than dialogue and history. One widely-accepted benefit of archaeology is
that it produces history by recovering and re-articulating lost, forgotten, or
marginalized traces of common and vital past human activity. A prominent
archaeological perspective in fact is based on the idea that pottery sherds,
households, and cultural landscapes are the details that constitute the roots
of cultural life for these are the primary materials that allow persons to
establish the parameters of their intersubjective negotiations of meaning
(e.g., Hodder 1991; Tringham 1991; Joyce 2002). Archaeological artifacts,
in other words, enable and produce identities. I have employed this perspective to explore how we might read the disappearance of Indian pottery
from sites in New Orleans as evidence of the disappearance of Indian identities despite the continuing presence of Indian persons in the city after the
forced removals of the 1830s. More than removing Indian persons, it was
the role of Indian identities in making American history that was taken
away. As early as 1800, American history, especially the history of expansion, was to be made by white Americans who approached land and labor
as private property (Drinnon 1980). The Indian alternatives of itinerancy
and traditional land claims were regarded as irrational and dangerous alternatives to market imperatives. To bring about order and safety required
these Indian ways of life be marginalized, a program that involved the
transformation of historic Indian persons and nations into remnants of a
prehistoric native race incapable of participation.
Creating safe spaces by de-legitimizing alternatives and eliminating resistance is standard for expansionist states (Patterson 1992). What matters
here is that archaeology is complicit in this process in our own time by creating for public use safe spaces where ‘others’, whether Neanderthals or
Native Americans, may be experienced but not engaged. This safety comes
from the abstractions archaeologists employ to construct subject persons,
paramount of which is the sense of prehistory as an isolated and distant
place where cultures that failed to survive may be found. Those who are
placed in prehistory, including debatable examples like the early nineteenthcentury Choctaw or indigenous and other descendent communities living
now, suffer the insult of having to prove their existence in our external
terms. Prehistory, that is, enables encounters with living people to be
made safe for archaeologists and their wider public because it forces the
History to Prehistory
289
abstraction from real persons and histories to a set of genealogical facts,
traditional practices, or racial affiliations. Simply put, the horrors and histories of colonialism, enslavement, and genocide that created the modern
world—and modern archaeology along with it—are made less relevant to
understanding and acting in the present with prehistory.
Archaeology does need to be about prehistory, this is a choice professionals and the public first made in the early nineteenth century and in large part
still make today. Perhaps studies that examine—with archaeology—the
history of archaeology’s ties to colonialism and its promotion of the idea of
prehistoric times and peoples may help craft a new kind of archaeology for
the future. I suggest we examine in particular the components of the discipline that allow us to feel safe and imagine how me we might operate in
other ways. Losing safety, we will gain by being forced to realize and understand the coeval nature of prehistory with the present and the diverse and
competing relationships with living persons that prehistory and similar
markers of archaeology establish so that we may legitimize our work.
Acknowledgements
This paper was originally prepared as part of a session entitled ‘‘Bridging
the Great Divide’’ organized by Rob Mann and Diana Loren for the 2002
annual meetings of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Mobile, AL. I
wish to thank the organizers for their invitation and Patricia Galloway and
Timothy Pauketat for their comments on the paper at the conference. Other
drafts were read by Kurt Jordan, Zoë Burkholder, K. Anne Pyburn, and two
anonymous readers who helped improve the argumentation and suggested
additional literature. While I hope these colleagues will see evidence of their
suggestions, any errors in fact or reasoning are my own responsibility.
Notes
1. I draw here on Judith Butler’s (1993) theories of gendered performance as they apply
to the performance of Indian identity. In this case, however, my point is that historians
and archaeologists too often assume that Indian-as-native performance is somehow
more substantial because is it based in specifically Indian cultural and historical attributes. Akin to Butler’s critique of the gendered body, we have to develop, not assume,
how Indian performances create subjects in history and critically assess what we judge
to be the Indian practices that matter as we reconstruct these subjects in the research
and writing of the Indian past. It is the goal of this paper to explore the way that being
Indian was such a discourse, and that it was not something cultural and historical until
Indian traditions and histories mattered during the political struggles of colonization.
2. This is includes the ‘function’ of high status that has been ascribed to these European
vessels by archaeologists (see Deagan 1983).
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CHRISTOPHER N. MATTHEWS
3. I am indebted to Kurt Jordan (1998) for this particular sense of a landscape of fear.
4. This is not to imply that any other Indians lands were actually ‘‘owned’’ and could be
bought or sold. Native land was inalienable, thus the use of land by Europeans was
never possible in the European sense of private property. Rather, it was allowed that
Europeans could use the land they occupied as long as they recognized their alliance
with Indians through the media of peaceful exchange. The White Apple massacre also
known as the Natchez Revolt involved the killing of the entire white population of this
village by Natchez Indians in cooperation with the settlement’s African slaves. While
the retaliation of this event by the French essentially destroyed the Natchez culture
through murder or export of Indians as slaves, the event also clearly implicated the
Louisiana colonial settlements in the landscape of fear that southeastern Indians had
been living in since the passage of De Soto through their territories in the mid-sixteenth
century (see McGowan 1976; Usner 1992; Galloway 2005).
5. To reiterate, I am not promoting gift-exchange as a Native essential. Rather, the emphasis placed on the exchange of gifts sustained a Native position, and in part an authority,
within a clearly unequal intercultural relationship that situated them with the weaker
hand. In the same way, Europeans may not be solely associated with commercial or
commodity exchange essentially. The exchange of gifts was far from foreign to their
way of life including their intercultural relations. However, their intercultural relations
were less served by gift-exchange. And, as the French retraction that resulted in the
White Apple massacre illustrates, they made efforts to replace alliance and gift exchange
with commercial domination as often as they could.
6. It was this desire that led the United States to join their former European overlords in
colonial expansion by seeking to gain control of New Orleans, an effort through which
they then almost by accident obtained the enormous territory of the Louisiana purchase
(Kukla 2003).
7. This example is especially relevant since the Indians described at New Orleans market
houses were most often identified as Choctaw. Whether, they were actual Choctaw or
only assigned as such is debatable, but the appellation certainly identifies the Choctaw
as a type-Indian for the region at the time.
8. This, notwithstanding the fact that many of these hunters were the most adept Indians at
employing tactical gift exchange: a process that allowed them to either get out of their debts
or to extend them by arguing that their skins were not payments for liquor and other store
goods but gifts offered in return for what they had been given (White 1983:110).
9. These and other similar descriptions come from travel writers commenting on the market Indians as among the unusual characteristics of early nineteenth century New
Orleans. One does not even have to wonder whether they would say the same today if
Indians occupied the same places given New Orleans almost complete dependence on
tourism and the subsequent objectification of the defining aspects local culture (see
Evans-Pritchard 1989).
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