Politics can only become representative, a truly public discourse, through a splitting in the signification of the subject of representation;  through an ambivalence at the point of the enunciation of a politics.
                                                                                                                                        Homi Bhabha (1994, 24)

    In 1999 the University of New Orleans produced a poster for a public program (Figure 1) to be held at the St. Augustine archaeological site in the predominantly African-American Tremé neighborhood.  Guided by archaeologists and public program professionals, the design of the poster offered graphic and textual illustrations of what the archaeology program was about.  This material was based on archaeological tests done at the site as well as the site history, the history of Tremé, and how these histories fit with some more well-known narratives of New Orleans.  The text of the poster included this statement: “A simple-looking urban lot in the historic Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans holds secrets which will help New Orleaneans understand their colonial and Creole past.”  The statement, in fact, draws its meaning from the principle stratigraphic associations identified in archaeological testing.  At the deepest levels were deposits associated with a colonial period (18th-century) plantation manor house.  The deposits above these were associated with the use of the same structure from 1838 to the 1890s for a convent and school for free girls of color.  In addition to the text, the poster graphics illustrated these stories by showing artifacts such as a ceramic chamber pot, a wine bottle, bricks, and historic toys layered below an image of the still-standing 1840s St. Augustine Church tower.

    These texts and images were used to highlight the two histories envisioned to be the major points of educational and cultural value presented in the public program.  While these stories were selected because of the archaeological evidence, they also fit well with other narratives that have wider significance in New Orleans.  The colonial beginnings of the city are particularly significant since they contrast with those of other parts of the United States as a result of being dominated by the French and Spanish before the Americans.  These cultural distinctions lie at the root of many characteristics that serve as markers of local identity including local language, architecture, cuisine, religion, and at times politics and morality that are deemed unique for an American city.  Also, at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, this non-Anglo heritage paired with an uneven sexual balance in its population supported the development of plaçage, the institutionalization in New Orleans of interracial sexual unions between white men and women of color.  Some of these women and their children were the first to settle and develop the Tremé neighborhood beginning in the 1790s, and living there and elsewhere created New Orleans’ historic class of free Creoles of color.  These Creoles are particularly relevant to the heritage of the St. Augustine site since their daughters were educated there in the 19th century.

    These articulations between the archaeological record at the St. Augustine site and existing popular currents of local social and historical significance are what the poster intended to relate.  This was, I thought, a good plan and one that was well-executed, but it turned out to have a significant problem: one of the readers was highly offended by the text.  This was revealed first to the grant manager from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH) who had funded the program and the poster.  When the posters were ready I distributed and hung them up to announce the program throughout Tremé.  That same day a local man active in the community, and someone who I had already met, tore down the first poster he saw and went straight to the LEH to complain.  He highlighted the phrase I extracted above, specifically the reference to the “colonial and Creole past.”  For him these words were nothing less than a slap in the face.  When he and I first met I told him that a public archaeology program in Tremé would promote an understanding of their community’s past, particularly as African Americans, since the site, as first a plantation and then school for free girls of color, had a good potential for recovering relevant African-American archaeological remains.  At the time he agreed this was a very valuable and desirable goal since the neighborhood was in the process of gaining recognition as a historic district, with its African-American history being spotlighted.  His interest, in fact, made this one of the better conversations I had before the program began, so I was especially surprised to hear about who it was that complained.

    Once I learned what he was angry about, however, I not only understood, but realized for the first time that this public archaeology was failing to reach, in a very important way, the shared goal I had in mind as I introduced myself to the Tremé community.  For this person, saying that the program was about understanding New Orleans’ colonial and Creole past was tantamount to saying we were doing the archaeology of white and light New Orleans.  For him, “colonial” New Orleans was the story of the white colonizers and how they struggled to survive on a frontier at the expense of the Indians and Africans they dispossessed and enslaved.  Similarly, “Creole” for him was not a story about African-Americans at all, but solely of the light-skinned, mixed-race Creoles of color he felt no kinship with and in fact cited as one of the problems in creating historic Tremé as a monument to African-American New Orleans.  The phrase for him neglected entirely the very essence of the African-American archaeology he thought I was planning to do.

    It would have been easy to explain what I had in mind regarding the terms on the poster and likely this would have resolved the situation.  For me, as an archaeologist, these terms, while containing relevant social and historical meanings, were about the site and what it contained: deposits from its “colonial” and “Creole” eras.  I might have said that these were only words used to name archaeological data, and that what I had in archaeological remains was something categorically different and much more substantial.  However, I never had this conversation.  His critique taught me something simple but very important: he did not see the archaeological record the way I did.  To him, the words on the poster (the discourse of this archaeology) and the actual archaeological remains were essentially the same.  Words were in fact what he wanted regarding the archaeological record.  He was not interested in the record itself, what we might call its “material” form.  His goal, and what he expected to be to shared and produced with him, was a story.  While this is not uncommon as every archaeological interpretation is some sort of story, I wanted and felt professionally compelled to put that story in the terms of archaeology, and it was this that worked out so poorly.  I decided not to clear this up because this miscommunication clarified for me a fundamental problematic for public archaeology.  When working in public is it the point to train others to see and understand the archaeological record like we do, or to learn from them how to see it and how it is produced through their eyes?  And by asking this question are we challenging not only what the archaeological record can mean but what it actually is?  With this incident I chose instead to make understanding the precarious balance between social discourse and archaeological materiality in the creation of the archaeological record the key component of the program.  Shifting in this way I developed much more satisfactory research questions for both myself and the residents of Tremé.  And, in reflecting on this process, I came to discover what I think public archaeologists have long been struggling with in terms of how to make relevant and productive what and how the archaeological record can speak to the descendents of its creators.

    This process of discovery and its outcome are the subjects of this paper.  To manage the topic the work that was done on the site is put in the background so that what was done off of the site, that which is traditionally regarded as being “off” of the archaeological record, can be better systematized and articulated.  This “other” work is essentially a postcolonial ethnography of doing archaeology in Tremé.  To explain this approach I first review why I think this method is useful for archaeology now.  On one level it is a positive response to the post-processual reflexive critique that has challenged the legitimacy of positivist claims to archaeological knowledge.  What we are being asked to consider in this critique is the contingency of archaeological data.  It is perhaps useful to explain the factors that create this uncertainty in certain cases and use them directly in the creation of archaeological knowledge.  On another level the approach discussed draws from cultural resource management (CRM) archaeology in that it seeks its legitimacy not solely because of archaeological but also public value.  CRM archaeology is treated here as a public discourse with a potentially radical purpose.  A consideration of how CRM has changed archaeology shows that several redefinitions of the archaeological record have been proposed and for the most part accepted by archaeology.  A last step, however, has yet to be taken that would allow archaeology in essence to complete its public authorization.  This is the hardest step because it involves a loosening of foundational terminology and the creation of archaeologists and archaeological records as contingent discourses in the postcolonial world.

    To develop this approach I draw from postcolonial scholarship a new method for public archaeology that engages the problematic of discourse and cultural hybridity in reference to the way knowledge is produced and consumed for the public good.  What is at stake in this approach is not just the meanings of archaeological records, but their legitimacy and perhaps even existence.  To retreat to these disciplinary starting blocks more effectively opens archaeology to public critique and thus allows it to proceed on more publicly significant grounds.  This perspective makes it clear that to sustain ourselves and our resource requires much more than a conservation ethic. It requires a better understanding of and articulation with the cultural politics in which we are entangled as archaeologists working today.  At the end of the paper I return to the Tremé program to illustrate the method described by reviewing how I arrived at the research questions developed for the project.

NATURAL RESOURCE OR CULTURAL DISCOURSE
    CRM has changed archaeology in several important ways.  The heritage and environmental legislation invoking CRM archaeology created new jobs, practical concerns, and research designs that focus as much on preservation and recording as the interpretation of excavated materials.  CRM archaeology has also opened wider the window for public involvement and engagement, and public interests, especially as they come to be contradictory to professional archaeological interests, serve as a focus for discussion and debate over the future of all archaeology.  Several critical reviews (e.g., Layton 1989a, 1989b; Gathercole and Lowenthal 1990; Leone et al 1987; Leone and Preucel 1992; LaRoche and Blakey 1997; Meskell 1998; Thomas 2000; Watkins 2000; Watkins et al 2000; Zimmerman 1989) of the relations between archaeologists and local communities, descendent populations, indigenous peoples, and other publics have allowed a reflexive understanding of archaeological practice as political to emerge.  One common flaw to these encounters, however, is an enduring reliance by scholars and the public on the existence of something inherently instrumental to archaeology: the belief that the archaeological record is a “natural” resource to be discovered and recovered through an distinctly scientific archaeological research process.  This dominant idea in particular sees the archaeological record as something encountered “in the field” as an object of discovery (cf. Castañeda 1996).  Some recent writing in archaeology challenges this ontology by emphasizing the integral role of the archaeologist as the creator of archaeological records and thus highlighting the contingent factors that affect what the record is and can say (e.g., Leone et al 1995; Hodder 1999; Shanks and Tilley 1987).  Still, while approaches are being developed to account for the role of this archaeological agent, few of these criticisms have explicitly confronted the basic ontology of a “natural” archaeological record and most still assume to a great degree on a real separation of archaeologists from it.
This instrumental use of the archaeological record as something archaeologists engage with as an “other” may be overcome without dismantling the effectiveness of archaeology as a method for exploring the meaning of the past.  The focus, though, needs to be on expanding reflexivity from an awareness of the real and potential political complicity of archaeology in colonialist hegemony (e.g., Arnold 1990; Gero and Root 1996) and the more recent reflexive investigations of the influence and agency of the archaeologist in the production of archaeological records to the space created between these options where we can see and understand our own reflection in everyday archaeological incidents and encounters and more importantly the reflection of others in ourselves.

    Revising what defines the archaeological record clearly calls for a reassessment of the foundations of archaeological inquiry.  As this effort may appear at the outset to be overly radical, I want to consider how CRM archaeology has in fact paved the path to this point.  I explain using a journalist’s approach.  CRM changed the who? of archaeology by creating standard, non-academic positions that exist alongside the academy and serve archaeological practice in their role as stewards of the archaeological record as well as those who enforce the laws that protect that record.  CRM changed the what? of archaeology by focusing on the discovery and interpretation of archaeological sites and, equally so, on their identification, preservation, and mitigation.  Archaeologists are now as much representatives of the archaeological record as they are those who excavate it.  CRM changed the why? of archaeology by inserting into its mode of operation a need to explain research relevance in terms other than just for archaeology’s sake.  Through CRM the public in general has a new means to access to their heritages, and archaeology now responds to these claims in order to sufficiently legitimize its legislatively authorized position.  Each of these issues has also changed the when? of archaeology by making it more clear than ever that archaeology is as much about now and what’s to come as any particular time in the past.  Still, there remains one stable basis to archaeology that has been left more so than the others free from redefinition and which may be regarded as the where? of archaeology.

    No matter is stripe (CRM, academic, agency, etc.) archaeology remains a field science and thus the discussions within and about CRM archaeology that are transforming archaeological practice remain focused on sites that exist somewhere “out there.”  Even as we consider archaeology at conferences; in books, journals and the popular press; in museums, classrooms, and government and tribal agencies; and the private laboratories and offices of archaeological professionals, we rely on our ability to imagine the “somewhere else” that we take to be essential to defining what the archaeological record is.  In this manner, archaeological sites have a real and independent existence discrete from ourselves in both space and time.  This perspective allows archaeological sites to be treated the same as precious natural resources like wetlands and endangered species or equally as commodities in the sense of objects to be discovered out there and reported on through a distinct process taught to all professionals in the academy.

    While this approach to an archaeological record out there is a useful heuristic, it is one that we need to see has in fact changed as a result of what created CRM.  The time is now at hand to redefine the location of archaeology and its record from a natural resource to a cultural discourse and in so doing to offer a way to know how to recognize and embrace a new understanding of where it is.  As this is ground similar to that well covered in the development of postcolonial theory, I turn now to review a basic postcolonial methodology that I think is of some use for redefining the location of archaeology so as to explain how to proceed as archaeologists in the postcolonial world.

HYBRID TEXTS AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL PRACTICE
    The premise of postcolonial research is that the legacy of global colonialism is more than the de-colonized, marginal nation-states of the third world, but a conflictive and in many ways destructive social perspective found there and elsewhere resulting from the fractured and poorly related histories of colonial, pre-colonial, and postcolonial social formations.  At the root of this critique are the issues of being and essentialism in the postcolonial state.  In the attempt to overcome a cultural and racial inferiority imposed by colonizing powers, postcolonial societies are often entangled in an identity struggle.  In conflict are tendencies either to return to an imagined pre-colonial way of being or to one based on the assumption and adoption of the presumed cultural superiority of the former colonizers.  In neither expression, however, has emancipation from the hegemony of colonialism been found.  In the former the postcolonial identity is reduced to a nationalist invention and the latter establishes a disparaging position setting postcolonial subjects against themselves as an inferiors.  The purpose of developing a postcolonial theory is to challenge the legitimacy of these possibilities by highlighting their essentialist colonial foundations (Appiah 1993; Bhabha 1994; Fanon 1967; Gilroy 1991; Moore-Gilbert 1997; Said 1979, 1994; Spivak 1987).  Each is similar in that they are static representations that deny their own historicity by being in broad strokes either ancient (non-western) or modern (western) and necessarily oppositional rather than in relation.  In place of these, Homi Bhabha, especially, has argued for a recognition of the hybrid: a state of being formed in the same sociological spaces used to construct the essentialized cultural alternatives but one more reflective of the mixtures of these and the unarticulated subaltern perspectives that actually create social positions.  Significantly, the hybrid is not less than the pure, for no pure cultures exist.  Rather, the hybrid culture is a location for (self-)reflection formed in the awareness of the multiple intersecting social dialogues that create the cultural possibilities for given selves.  Discovering this location is the struggle of all social action.

    Perhaps the most successful of this work, and the most applicable for developing an archaeological methodology, is the postcolonial theory of the text.  Best elaborated in the work of Gayatri Spivak (1987), though also a root for Bhabha, Edward Said, and others (e.g., Amselle 1998; Appiah 1993; Chakrabarty 2000; Prakesh 1999; Werbner and Modood 1997), postcolonial textual analysis gives the project of postcolonial theory a method.  The approach treats the fabric of the text as something that can be unwoven not just to see how it was assembled but to see what was and, more importantly, had to be left out, buried, or silenced in the process of its production.  In this way a postcolonial reading works to define and break open the artificial, imposed orthodoxy (cf. Bourdieu 1977; Trouillot 1995) created or adopted by authors as they attempted to direct the reader towards meanings in their texts.  This is not to assert that texts necessarily have singular or even primary meanings, but, quite the opposite, in that from every meaning that can be taken from a text there is a way to see how that meaning was created by being refined.  In this way, postcolonial criticism has convincingly argued that the formation of colonial cultures was not a simple imposition of a (modern) western orthodoxy over (ancient) non-western subject populations, but the articulation of colonial authority through the refinement and weaving of distinct meanings developed and employed in the rationalization of the coevalness of colonized and colonizer even as the occupied radically different positions within the colonial cultural system (Appiah 1993; Chakrabarty 2000; Dirks 1992; Fabien 1983; Guha 1994; Sider 1994; Stolar 1995; Thomas 1994).  Colonialism is thus a process actualizing the hybridized agency stemming from all those involved whether they held power, were subject to it, or were merely observers of the process.

    This postcolonial definition of culture has been expanded beyond colonialism to serve as a method equally useful in the postcolonial world in which we necessarily see the victimization and complicity of both the dominated and dominating in any social formation.  No culture in this sense is ever pure or innocent, for the production of culture is a dialectical discursive winnowing of self from other that necessarily and nervously maintains multiple possibilities of being set in relation and held by each within (cf. Marcus 1999; Taussig 1991).  What we might then observe as culture is how individuals and groups sustain these possibilities through the application of social power.

    In many ways, postcolonial research has focused on explaining past social processes and thus has some clear relevance for traditional archaeology (see Gosden 2000).  Here, however, my attempt is to show that this process might equally serve a reflexive public archaeology by defining a needed extension of that program from theory to practice.  To do this sort of archaeology I draw on the postcolonial analysis of discourse.  Rather than being fixed, texts themselves are an active process of discourse production and use.  This is evident in the multiple ways that texts are assembled in a dialogue between authors and their subjects that leads to the selection or privileging of some ideas, perspectives, and facts over others.  This dialogue is the discourse of the text.  So, when any text enters the world, discussion about it is therefore not about something inert but something with a history and, as such, a distinct representational voice.  This expanded discussion deepens the discourse of the text, but inasmuch as the text can be severed from it (as much as there is a text that is the subject of discussion), an expanded discourse does not alter what was original to the presented text, though we must make every effort to know the difference between and the relationship of the original and its descendants.

    My point here is that I consider that every archaeology (not just the material culture it studies) is a text created by a socially constructed archaeological discourse.  Using postcolonial textual analysis we may read an archaeology as we would any other text to determine how it was produced by seeing how its meanings were refined and assembled.  This project has found initial expression in several critical histories of the discipline (e.g., Blakey 1987; Gero et al 1983; Kehoe 1999; Patterson 1995; Shanks 1996; Trigger 1989), but has yet to find a stable voice in the more forward looking considerations of archaeological practice.  Archaeology in the postcolonial world needs to be not only criticized for its colonialist complicity, but analyzed for how to get past this.  The question is: how can archaeology not only recognize itself as colonialist, but consider how it must be redesigned to exist at all in the postcolonial world?

    It is my contention that the field faces this problem everyday in its expression as CRM or “public” archaeology, but because of the discipline’s colonialist mores has not recognized that public interest is not a call for more or better archaeology but for access to what makes archaeology, or more specifically archaeological knowledge claims (its stories), legitimate in their world.  To provide this access we must conceive for the public a position within the production of our archaeological discourse.  They must be with us as we write archaeological texts, and we must all be conscious of this.   This mode of practice is fortunately a regular part of public archaeology.  In the most basic sense it is evident in the way the public is regarded as an audience for archaeological research.  In the postcolonial approach, however, such an audience is given significantly more authority: as we imagine public interests, we infuse them into and thus hybridize our work.  It is the unfortunate result, however, that this authority is one which the public is rarely made aware that they have.  More often it is appropriated (by both archaeologists and their publics) as part of the social discourse used to legitimize archeological work.  The postcolonial approach conversely treats public interest in the same way archaeologists already treat the voices of our fellow professionals: as advisors, peers, and colleagues.  This is to say that the archaeological discourse is “always already” a hybrid, but that the protective politics of its dominant authors have suppressed this hybridized consciousness in favor of expressing a legitimate, seemingly uniform, professional archaeological authority.  To survive in public we will have to do better in our effort to create relevant dialogic spaces where what the record is as much as what it means is debated.  With this postcolonial approach I believe we can initiate this process by seeing how we, as archaeologists, are produced in public and work to understand the connections that public interests make between what we do and what we can learn.

    To summarize, a postcolonial approach in archaeology is one that focuses on the social production of the archaeological record as a discourse.  This means that archaeological methods and practice are examined as discrete sets of contingent social maneuvers with specific histories that lead to and from specific agendas.  The point is to recognize these contingencies and understand their influence on the research process, especially how they produce the archaeological record both for and through archaeologists.  In this way the construction of specific archaeological discourses acts with an awareness of their social production  and shares this consciousness and authority with the publics who do, or may find, once they are allowed inside the discourse, that they have a stake in the work.

    To illustrate this approach I review in the following how I revised the public archaeology program in Tremé following the incident of the poster.  The focus of the discussion is a description of how learning from the constituencies I knew, discovered, and created helped me to recognize my project.  My goal was to understand the social existence of my agenda and work to develop ways that it would not be the sole motor for the questions being asked, but just one among the many hybridized interests in archaeology I determined by being an archaeologist in public in Tremé.

ARCHAEOLOGY IN TREMÉ
    The mode of discovery I used in New Orleans draws from the archaeological politics of race widely debated in American historical archaeology.  In the last decade, and most specifically due to the impact of NAGPRA and the excavation of the African Burial Ground site in New York, the issue of race has become a dominant concern and research focus in the field (Orser 1998).  Questions have been posed about why historical archaeologists are so overwhelmingly white and whether such a racial imbalance undermines it capacity to act in one of its most successful arenas of work: African-American archaeology (Franklin 1997, 2001; LaRoche and Blakey 1997).  While many archaeologists have discovered a real interest in archaeology among African-American descendent communities (see Leone et al 1995; McDavid and Babson 1997), few have engaged with the postcolonial and anti-racist questions that this particular public interest creates.  Does this public interest force a radical revision of the way we appropriate the archaeological record to speak about the past?  Can we simply dig “African-American” sites and add to our existing knowledge, or do we need to wonder why this archaeology has been absent until now and whether the very tools we have used to define the archaeological record so far are exclusionary, if not white supremacist, as well?  Rather, because the archaeological record is regarded as something distinct from the archaeologists who define it, most, including many descendent communities, are satisfied with the discovery of discrete archaeological records of African-Americans as an interesting and good way to explore the/their past.  My work in New Orleans, as an attempt to be engaged with a set of living communities with both articulated and unarticulated interests in the local archaeological past, nevertheless, showed me that this mode of production does not work.  At root is the problematic of race in the postcolonia era and the dangerous possibility of reproducing the colonialist foundations of racism in the expectations of how race matters in archaeology and to those with an interest in it.

    It was this set of issues that guided the revision of the program at the St. Augustine site which became known as Archaeology in Tremé.  As I described, I had defined the site in archaeological testing and used my discoveries to articulate in public what I was hoping to find and why it might be relevant to those who came by to find out more about the work.  While I had learned of the many problems of using the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘Creole’, I maintained these referents as I told people the story of the site, and, to these I added the story of the site in the present: a churchyard that since the removal of the manor house in the 1920s has acted as a central community space.  For the purposes of the excavation and public program these referents were set in relation to each following the way I was taught how to see how they mattered to the project.  In other words, in order to avoid presenting them as independent or in some way only layered archaeological interests, I did an ethnography (both on and off the site) of their position in the discourses that produced the site.  In place of one multi-component site I came to see the site as a diversity of competitive sites, a process that turned a singular piece of the earth—at least for the term of its archaeological evaluation—into a historical and archaeological hybrid.

    To develop this meaning I began with the arguments made by Shanks and Tilley (1987) and Leone and Potter (1992) that show at some level this hybridization process is true for every archaeology.  At the very least each site is a produced by both an archaeological past which resides in that location and a present as  the world in which the site exists now and which recognizes its potential or actual archaeological significance.  What makes this story a particularly useful illustration is that I saw this process occur in a segment of contemporary reality immersed in an historically conscious, forward-looking racial identity dialogue complicated in New Orleans is by a history of the mixed-race Creole cultural group.  To put this another way, the site I was seeking to know and publicly represent existed in both its past and present in a social condition of racial and temporal hybridity.  These circumstances simultaneously allowed an observation and engagement with multiple and competing presents and pasts as I sought through both ethnographic and archaeological research to see which pasts and presents would emerge from the ground, from conversations with people who claimed or just came around to see the work, and from the spaces created in between the site and these contemporary social and historical interests and realities.  From this perspective, Archaeology in Tremé was less about the remains below the surface of the churchyard than the discourse which turned those remains into an archaeological record.

Learning where I was
    In the time that I was organizing the archaeology program, neighborhood activists and others were attempting to have Tremé recognized as a historic district by the city of New Orleans.  Among its historic characteristics, Tremé makes a claim to be the oldest African-American neighborhood in the United States.  This claim rests in part on the fact that Tremé is one of the few older neighborhoods in New Orleans yet to be recognized as historic, a fact highlighted in the racially charged context that saw its nomination.  Many argued specifically that New Orleans history needed a more prominent African-American presence in its public representation, and that the recognition of “historic Tremé” was a good way to do this.  In order to perform excavations at St. Augustine’s in the time the neighborhood was discussing being designated as historic, it was necessary to establish an understanding that the St. Augustine site was not just in Tremé but was a medium by which Tremé could and likely would realize itself as a historic African-American place.  As I learned, this did not mean making the site African-American or even Creole, as much as it meant making the excavation event a space where people could talk about the African-American histories that underwrite the meaning of historic Tremé today.  The site was thus created as a space where history and the politics that create historical consciousness could be engaged, considered, and discussed.

    This relied first on getting people to the site, and the best way to spread the news was by getting it in the established social networks in Tremé.  I visited with people in the community before the project began to talk with them about the excavation and the program I hoped to produce.  While this did get the word out, the principle impact was to teach me that I was an outsider.   I realized this when I understood that the subject of these conversations was less often about the site and its archaeology than who I was and where I came from.  This social construction made it obvious that any success for the project would have to be based in my ability to be someone they could recognize.  Importantly, this varied from person to person as they constructed with me what they imagined an archaeologist was.  In the end to gain an appropriate sense of Tremé and of those who were interested in its history, I have had to do multiple archaeologies of the same site, each reflecting the different archaeologist that I had to be in order to fit the expectations that people had about what I was doing there.  I relate here the three stories about the St. Augustine site that drove the development of my revised research questions and this hybridization of my archaeological self.
The site was first identified to me by an avocational advocate archaeology in New Orleans who represented the established historic preservation interest.  When I asked her about doing work in Tremé she immediately made arrangements with Father LeDoux of St. Augustine’s Church for the three of us to talk about doing archaeology in the churchyard.  The reason she was so excited about the site is that it had long been recognized by historians and preservationists as the location of a French colonial plantation house.  Because of urban development and two late 18th-century fires, very little was known about this sort of building in New Orleans.  And, since the site was under no threat and situated away from the focus of development, it had never been considered by archaeologists who have worked in the city.  For preservationists this was a very important and rare site.  Certainly, this was a perspective worth considering in the research design.

    In fact, I used this “rare plantation building” story when I talked to people who lived in Tremé, but found the story was largely unknown.  Most everyone knew the churchyard the remains of the house lay under as a playground they or their children had played in or been to as the site of community and church festivals. That the lot was once the site of one of the city’s first plantations came as a great surprise.  This variation in knowledge about the site’s existence and history between preservationists and the people who actually lived around it was also something to think about.
Finally, talking with people in Tremé about the site I learned how the Creoles of color were important to understanding the neighborhood’s history.  Typically after hearing the site was a school for free girls of color, people told me stories about the free Creoles who lived in New Orleans.  I heard about the immigration from St. Domingue/Haiti after the slave revolution.  I learned that free people of color were some of the first residents and property owners in Tremé.  And I learned about the Creole families in Tremé who produced well-known individuals such as Homeré Plessy, plaintiff in the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson segregation case, and Sidney Bechet, a founding father of New Orleans Classic Jazz.  But the most powerful stories I heard were those about the racial distinctions made between the generally lighter-skinned Creoles of color and the generally darker-skinned slaves and freedwomen and men. This distinction survives in many forms today and is based on the elaboration of a three-tiered racial hierarchy in southern Louisiana in which free, generally mixed-race and lighter-skinned Creoles lived within a circumscribed social caste separate from and not accepted by either the white or black cultural groups (see Bell 1997, Hanger 1997, Kein 2000).

    Though I heard other stories, these were the most common and profound of the public interests I encountered.  So, from these conversations and observations I developed three research questions to explore with a public archaeology: (1) what does the site tell us about French colonial plantations in New Orleans? (2) how did the site become archaeological? and (3) what does the site tell us about race in society at-large and among people of color in New Orleans in particular?  Certainly the first question about the architecture and daily life of colonial plantations represented the interests of the preservation community.  And the last question about race resulted from my introduction to the racial tensions between light and dark-skinned people of color.  The second question, though, resulted from a combination of these along with the lack of knowledge within Tremé of the site’s existence.  In particular, I suggest that many people in Tremé did not know about the site and its colonial significance because of two factors.  First, the building is gone.  In previous research (Matthews 1998, 2002a) I have explored the symbolic meanings of historic building preservation and observed that it requires both the symbolism and materiality of the buildings to make heritage tourism sites like Williamsburg and the New Orleans French Quarter successful.  Lacking the material symbol of its building, the St. Augustine site’s history was obscured, except, that is, to the preservation faction who had made knowing about these missing buildings a basis to their way of life.  A second issue affecting the disparity in historical knowledge was the site’s association with racism.  A plantation, the colonial site epitomized the racial inequalities of slavery.  A school for free children of color, the 19th-century site played into a discourse that led to a racialized segregation among people of color.  Finally, being in Tremé, where the contemporary race discourse in part fuels the recognition of the neighborhood’s historic identity, the site—as something historic in Tremé—is tied by many to a history of race in the neighborhood.  The lack of common knowledge about the site, I suggest, results from the fact that these histories and contemporary realities of race and racism are the sort of processes that lead to cultural silences and the loss of history in and about the contemporary world (see Appiah 1993; Chakrabarty 2000; Sider 1994; Sider and Smith 1997; Trouillot 1995; Wolf 1982).  With race, that is, a social history is reduced to a essentialized biological phenomenon; and with racism, the social power to sustain this alternative consciousness (race as history) is undermined and suppressed.  These are the very sorts of silences that were created in the production of colonial texts and which await postcolonial analysis even by archaeologists for how to surpass their limitations.

    This process of silencing challenges the possibility of simply finding new sites and discoveries to add to the archaeological corpus as a way of doing African-American archaeology.  Inasmuch as the very knowledge of site significance is related to the racism of the social and historical structures in which all New Orleaneans live, then the legitimacy of an archaeological site and its record is suspect.  As an archaeologist I can certainly bring the lost building back by defining what is still there and producing a way of seeing that allows what is missing to be imagined.  But I cannot, by simply excavating and interpreting sites, revive, replace, or make up for the silencing of history that race and racism have caused.  To do this archaeologists must focus on how doing archaeology and being an archaeologist, that is, acting specifically in a manner that is coeval with those whose history is lost, can allow them to participate in defining what the archaeological record is and to direct us to see it rather than the reverse.  An archaeological site is thus a not a neutral ground where race is studied but does not exist (like the buildings archaeology studies but which do not exist), but a site that gives issues such as race a place to be discussed and potentially where it can locate a history that gives the discussion meaning in contemporary society.  Asking how the site became archaeological, that is to say, a site with much of its meaning below the discursive and material surface of the contemporary world, was a way of allowing it to become a sign for Tremé as not a history of one or another race but as an archaeology of race as a text.  Furthermore, with questions created through the identification of the multiple perspectives that define the contours and boundaries of the race discourse, we can do archaeology to find what was buried and lost in its writing.  The point of Archaeology in Tremé became a way of understanding the processes of refinement that made race into what it is now.

    This multifaceted research program thus allowed me to act simultaneously on the several archaeologies I was engaged with as I worked in Tremé.  As I mentioned, I strove to develop different perspectives from a reflection on my existence as one or another archaeologist given who I was talking with.  This process of being a multiplicity of archaeologists was not something that I chose to do in advance but was the way to operate given the circumstances of the project.  I extend this now to argue that this is what being a public archaeologist, which in the postcolonial era I think is being any archaeologist at all, is necessarily about.  More substantially I have also come to realize that this multiplicity of beings reproduced the creolization process that drove the cultural history of New Orleans in the first place.  Thus, in the development of a public archaeology that I believed was worthwhile and useful, I came to see that being or becoming Creole in New Orleans was still very much the way things are done. The effort to work in the archaeological present thus produced an insight essential to any understanding of the New Orleans past and one that fuels my on going analysis of the archaeological materials recovered from the St. Augustine site (see, e.g. Matthews 2001, 2002b).

CONCLUSION: A SATURATED SELF
    So where is archaeology in the postcolonial world?  By removing the focus in archaeology from the objects of an archaeological site to the persons whose interests defines for us how to see those objects, I have presented the kind of response to make to this question: the postcolonial archaeological record is no longer the location of data as much as the discursive fields that turn artifacts lost to the present into meaningful objects about the present’s past.  The site of archaeology here is found in what postcolonial writers have characterized as a space between discourse and text where the subject-object relation exemplified by archaeologists and their archaeological records is collapsed and reassembled in each instance of practice.  Archaeology and archaeological sites may now be located in the process of discovery through, and reflection on, the way people socially use archaeologists and their records as media to the past.  It is not just in New Orleans that an archaeologist may become a hybrid, Creole, or, in Gergen’s (1991) terms, “saturated self” by the identities and agendas encountered in an archaeological engagement.  All postcolonial archaeologies done in the public interest should be so defined.  Through a critical engagement at every level with the persons driving the work, archaeologists can see how we are being produced and thus how we are going to see what remains silenced below the surface from the past.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like recognize those in New Orleans whose interests and words gave this paper its inspiration: Rev. Jerome LeDoux, Bettie Pendley, Randy Mitchell, Lynn LeBaud, Al Jackson, Stephanie Jordan, Vera Warren-Williams, Cheryl Austin, Scott McGraw, Martha Irwin, Ian Branyon, Scott Simmons, Gerri Hobdy, Joan Exnicios, Ed Lyon, Tom Eubanks, Shannon Dawdy, Jill Yakubik, Nick Spitzer, as well as the many site visitors and volunteers at the Archaeology in Tremé project who shared their impressions of our attempt to tell a New Orleans Creole story.  Tim Joder and Fritz Wagner of the College of Urban and Public Affairs of the University of New Orleans deserve special mention for sustaining their support of the Greater New Orleans Archaeology Program position to this date.  The Archaeology in Tremé project was funded by grants from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation.  I want especially to thank Steve Duplantier for organizing the site exhibit and helping to get some of these ideas about the Tremé past articulated.  An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2001 SAA Annual Meetings in New Orleans.  I wish to thank Ian Hodder, Monika Bolino, and Rebecca Yamin for their invitation to participate and their comments the earlier draft. Finally, this writing has benefited from the advice of Zoë Burkholder, Dan Varisco, and Martha Irwin, though any errors or shortcomings are my own responsibility.
 

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NOTES
1. This does not mean that these expanded versions do not have meaning in the social world.  In fact, the original and any expansions are equally capable of having significant social meaning.  Rather, in order to appreciate the effectiveness of any expanded versions we must peel back, so as to recognize the independent discourses that give particular meaning to texts.  This will allow us to see why some expanded meanings work better than others by seeing how root meanings cultivate expanded ones.   It is also the case that the exploration of original meanings has a better chance of undoing the possibility for some expanded meanings, and therefore clarifying the arbitrary authority of texts in social life.

2.  It could be said that this was the intended effect of NAGPRA and perhaps of NEPA and NHPA.  However, archaeologists to often employ “archaeology” (as the discourse that establishes the significance of the archaeological record) to detour these public claims from being a means for public access to positions within the discourse to the creation of a public audience external to our work.  I believe this is evidence of a fear that the archaeological record will be somehow undermined (i.e., discursively, if not materially, looted) as a truth-bearing resource if the public is let in.  The only basis for this belief is one in which archaeologist imagine themselves as separate from their record and the public interests that relate them to it.

3.  By asking ourselves easy questions like: why am I working on this research problem? why do I think this is a legitimate way to answer them? as well as harder ones such as: in what way is my claim to be an archaeologist legitimized or challenged when I act in public?

4.  An “awayvian” as I have learned that some New Orleaneans call it.  This neologism is clearly an attempt to establish meaning in and for local discourse and who may represent it if there ever was one.  Thanks to Martha Irwin for pointing this out.

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