Ethnohistory

Chambri endgame: history and anthropology in New Guinea

by Rena Lederman

Historiografía de los Mayas de Guatemala: El Pensamiento de Manuel García Elgueta, and Título de los Nimak Achi de Totonicapan (1545)

by Oswaldo Chinchilla

Published in "Mesoamerica" vol. 38, pp. 55-75, and pp. 77-84 (1999).

A politician, writer and journalist, self-taught linguist and archeologist, Manuel García Elgueta is a little known... more A politician, writer and journalist, self-taught linguist and archeologist, Manuel García Elgueta is a little known figure in the history of Maya studies. From his archeaological endeavors in the Huehuetenango region of northwestern Guatemala he gathered an important collection of artifacts that were exhibited in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he made an effort to connect Classic Lowland Maya sites such as Tikal with the contemporary peoples of the Guatemalan highlands, particularly the K'iche', arguing that the former's glory could serve as an example for the improvement and progress of their descendants.

A documentary addendum to this paper includes the text and comment of a sixteenth century document, from Totonicapan that was originally published by García Elgueta in 1883.

“Removed from off the face of the island”: late pre-Colonial and early Colonial Amerindian society in the Windward and Leeward Islands

by Alistair Bright

Published in Communities in contact. Essays in archaeology, ethnohistory and ethnography of the Amerindian circum-Caribbean. Corinne L. Hofman and Anne v. Duijvenbode (eds):307-325. Leiden: Sidestone Press

Review of "From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation" by Robbie Ethridge

by Jeffrey M. Mitchem

Published in "Journal of Interdisciplinary History", Volume 43, Number 1, Summer 2012, pp. 115-116

Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in 17th Century New Mexico. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. 2012.

by Matthew Liebmann

Parameters of the Fur Trade in New Netherland: Eighteenth-Century Evidence? (2006)

by Kees-Jan Waterman

Paper delivered at first joint conference of the American Association for Netherlandic Studies (AANS) and the New Netherland Institute (NNI), Albany, N.Y., USA, June 2006.
Published in Margriet Bruijn Lacy, Charles Gehring, Jenneke Oosterhoff (eds.), From De Halve Maen to KLM: 400 Years of Dutch-American Exchange [Studies in Dutch Language and Culture, vol. 2, Margriet Bruijn Lacy,
(ed.)], pp. 135-148. Münster: Nodus Publikationen, 2008.

The objective of this article is to establish whether close examination of a Dutch account book for the fur trade with... more The objective of this article is to establish whether close examination of a Dutch account book for the fur trade with Indians in colonial Albany, 1695-1726, yields useful data to assist us in reconstructing some parameters of the fur trade in New Netherland. From the account book a number of broad characteristics can be distilled that characterize the trade between Indians and two members of a family with strong New Netherland ancestry. The approach of this article is inspired by ethnohistorical studies that deploy a technique called "upstreaming": the researcher identifies a given set of circumstances and consults sources from progressively earlier times (goes "upstream") to examine if and to what degree such circumstances were recognizable in previous periods. In doing so, one may gain insights into the persistence or adaptations of the practices developed and deployed in the intercultural trade between colonists and Indians in New Netherland.

Not Confined to the Village Clearings: Indian Women in the Fur Trade in Colonial New York, 1695-1732 (2008)

by Kees-Jan Waterman

Motivations and Practicalities in the New York Fur Trade, 1695-1732 (2011)

by Kees-Jan Waterman

The Need For Others: Why The West Wants the Maya

by Richard Wilk

This paper was prepared for the XV ICAES 2K3
Humankind/Nature Interaction: Past, Present and Future
Florence (ITALY) July 5th – 12th, 2003
It was never delivered - my mother was dying and I stayed in the USA.
But given the furor over 2012 - how timely the paper appears now!

This paper is about the role of global power relationships in the writing of the past. In the name of science,... more
This paper is about the role of global power relationships in the writing of the past. In the name of science, European culture has long aspired to write 'world history' from a particular viewpoint. Mayan peoples were caught up in this system as representatives of a particular romantic project that criticizes the inauthentic nature of modernity. The writings of Mahler, Thompson, and Gann about modern and ancient Maya people are full of morally-laden arguments about the virtues and pitfalls of civilization. Over time, this romantic project has been transformed and transmuted in fascinating ways. All of these processes of manipulation and interpretation can be understood within a framework I have called "common difference." This is a process that narrows down the discussion of how 'we' are different from 'them' to a few crucial dimensions of contrast. "Otherness" is thereby perceived only along the scales developed by social scientists. In the case of the Maya these scales pertain exclusively to religion, technology, and the arts. In the process, all the other degrees of difference (including things like quality of life and poverty) fall into the background or disappear. In consequence, even when modern Mayan peoples argue for the equality or superiority of their culture, they must do so along avenues already mapped and paved by social science. 

Embedded: 4,000 Years of Shell Symbolism in the southeast

by Tanya Peres

Co-authored with Aaron Deter-Wolf. Paper presented at the Society for American Archaeology Annual Meeting, Apirl 20, 2012, Memphis, Tennessee.

Constancy in Continuity: Native Oral history, Iconography and the Earthworks of the Upper Purus.

by pirjo kristiina virtanen

In Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia: Reconstructing past identities from archaeology, linguistics, and ethnohistory. Alf Hornborg & Jonathan D. Hill (eds.). Pp. 279-298. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2011.

TartariaMag_issue1-2012

by Nikolay Tsyrempilov

Review of 'Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South'.

by Anthony Krus

published in 'American Antiquity', 2010

Bridging History and Prehistory: The Possible Antiquity of a Native American Ballgame

by Anthony Krus

published in 'Native South', 2011

PROJEKTI ETNOARKEOLOGJIK I LUGINËS SË DEVOLLIT: Raporti paraprak për KOBAS 2007

by Douglas Park 

2007. Written with Keti Zotaj and Anisa Tanaka
Report in Albanian on ethnoarchaeological survey of Korca Basin, Albania

Jesuit Missionaries, Environmental Transformation, and Indian Ethnogenesis in the Lagoon March of Northeastern New Spain

by J. Gabriel Martinez-Serna

To be presented at the 2012 Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies Conference on Park City, Utah, March 28-April1, 2012

In the northeast corner of New Spain, the frontier province of Nueva Vizcaya included the region between the present... more In the northeast corner of New Spain, the frontier province of Nueva Vizcaya included the region between the present day city of Torreon and the old provincial capital of Saltillo. It is a region of sandy soil with little precipitation, covered mostly by desert scrub dotted with occasional watering holes and surrounded in three sides by the Sierra Madre and Sierra de Coahuila. Two rivers, the Nazas and the Aguanaval, reach their end in the area, and their flow helps sustain livestock and intensive agriculture, even though their affluent is not yearlong. The area is commonly referred to, rather incongruously, as the Comarca Lagunera (Lagoon March), though the aridity of the surrounding area makes for a jarring comparison between the name and physical reality.
The origins of the term come from colonial times: it was the nucleus of the immense Marquisate of San Miguel de Aguayo, the largest entailed estate in the borderlands (hence the term Comarca, the landed property of a Marquis); secondly, at the time of contact between Spaniards and Indians of the region in the second half of the sixteenth century, the area was a lush lacustrine environment sustaining the largest population of Indians in Mexico’s colonial north, the Lagunero Indians.
This unique lacustrine environment teeming with heathen Indians seemed like a promising area for establishing a mission, but its economic potential also attracted secular Spanish settlement. Within a couple of generations it would be transformed by European agriculture accompanied by an even more dramatic change in the demographic profile of the region. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Parras mission had been secularized into a frontier parish, the Jesuits had changed their mission into a colegio, and the local economy was providing wine to a frontier market that stretched for hundreds of square kilometers. The Jesuits were not the only actors who brought about these changes, but they were the most consequential.
The introduction of European agriculture and livestock transformed the natural and human landscape of the Americas profoundly. In the borderlands of the continent, it was often missionaries who introduced these practices to areas where mobile Indians groups had adapted their cultures to an environment that was irrevocably changed. Transforming a landscape usually doomed a mobile ethnic group to forced adaptation, migration or extinction, but could also prove a catalyst to an ethnogenesis that could not have occurred without the effects the Columbian exchange brought about by the missionaries. The so-called Lagoon March (Comarca Lagunera) of the northeastern borderlands of New Spain experienced perhaps the most dramatic of these episodes in the story of Colonial North America. This region was home to the Lagunero Indians, the most populous pre-contact group in the borderlands, and as late as the last decade of the sixteenth century it was a lush lagoon environment surrounded by wooded mountains. The Jesuits founded the Parras mission there in 1598, and within two generations, the Laguneros had largely disappeared, and the area was transformed into a highly productive oasis surrounded by scrub barely suitable for livestock. Viticulture made the area the richest non-mining region of the entire frontier, and a magnet for population. Tlaxcalan (Nahua) colonist that had lived in the mission and survived the Lagunero extinction became a borderlands community intrinsically attached to viticulture and communal rights to water from the region’s only major spring, giving them a legal status that distinguished them from other Indian groups (including other Tlaxcalans) and underlined a social cohesion that lasted until the Independence period. Thus, the unintended effects of the Jesuit presence transformed the Parras environment and the way Indian identity related to it.

Tierras Concejiles Y Propiedad Indigena. Una Hipotesis De La Evolucion Del Pueblo Mexicano (1520-1920)

by Rik Hoekstra

A Different Way of Thinking: Contrasting Spanish and Indian Social and Economic Views In Central Mexico

by Rik Hoekstra

The society of our “out of Africa” ancestors (I): The migrant warriors that colonized the world

by Eduardo Moreno Lampaya

The “out of Africa” hypothesis proposes that a small group of Homo sapiens left Africa 80,000 years ago, spreading the... more The “out of Africa” hypothesis proposes that a small group of Homo sapiens left Africa 80,000 years ago, spreading the mitochondrial haplotype L3 throughout the Earth.1-10 Little effort has been made to try to reconstruct the society and culture of the tribe that left Africa to populate the rest of the world.1 Here, I find that hunter-gatherers that belong to mitochondrial haplotypes L0, L1 and L2 do not have a culture of ritualized fights. In contrast to this, almost all L3 derived hunter-gatherers have a more belligerent culture that includes ritualized fights such as wrestling, stick fights or headhunting expeditions. This appears to be independent of their environment because ritualized fights occur in all climates, from the tropics to the arctic. There is also a correlation between mitochondrial haplotypes and warfare propensity or the use of murder and suicide to resolve conflicts. The data implicate that the original human population outside Africa is descended from only two closely related sub-branches that practiced ritual fighting and had a higher propensity towards warfare and the use of murder for conflict resolution. This warfare culture may have given the out of Africa migrants a competitive advantage to colonize the world. But it could also have crucially influenced the subsequent history of The Earth. In the future, it would be interesting to see how we could further reconstruct the society and culture of the “Out of Africa Tribe.”

Written oral history: Dimensions of identity of Chukotka’s indigenous people in the works of Rytkheu

by Ivan Sablin

published in AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, vol. 8, no. 1, 2012, pp. 27–41.

Through the examination of two autobiographic works of Chukchi writer, Rytkheu, this study demonstrates the research... more Through the examination of two autobiographic works of Chukchi writer, Rytkheu, this study demonstrates the research potential of indigenous literatures, offering a new perspective on the past and present of indigenous peoples. The study seeks to provide new interpretations of identity in Chukotka, the northeastern extremity of Asia, of the 1930s and 1940s and to contribute to the identity debate in indigenous studies. In the article identity is understood as a multidimensional whole, with the discussed dimensions being based on ethnicity, nationality, occupation and place of residence. The article pre-eminently addresses the identity of the coastal sea-mammal hunters of Chukotka.