To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” . . . It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger.  The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers.  The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes.
                                                                                                                                       Walter Benjamin (1968, 255)
 
 

Preface
Modern Western history essentially begins with differentiation between the present and the past.  In this way it is unlike tradition . . . though it never succeeds in being entirely dissociated from this archaeology, maintaining with it a relation of indebtedness and rejection.
                                                                                                                                        Michel de Certeau (1988, 2)

    An archaeology of history?  A title like this may lead readers to expect a metaphorical archaeology such as been produced by post-structuralist authors like Foucault and de Certeau, however, the archaeology of history here is one produced from the more basic archaeological engagement with the material remains of the past.  I do not mean to denigrate this archaeology by comparison, rather I seek to contrast it with the other for the purpose of seeing the useful differences and similarities.  Archaeologies from the ground vary from the archaeologies of post-structuralism because they seek to make sense of the archaeological record in its own terms.  This means asking questions like: With what can we relate a given artifact in order to support a plausible explanation for its existence where we found it?  The intellectual effort here is to bridge the past in terms of what happened with the present in terms of what was found.  Archaeological science has permutated over the course of its existence as to what is the best means for making these relations, but the basic pursuit has stayed the same.

    Post-structuralist archaeologies approach the past in a different way.  While aspects of this work take on the character of extant remains, the focus is on the process by which such artifacts as modern discipline (Foucault 1977) or dominant forms of knowledge (Foucault 1972) emerged.  This work is thus more genealogy than archaeology since rather than the attempt to place in the past what is discovered now, it seeks to discover or reveal threads of connection between artifacts of the present and their particular pasts.  This is genealogy because it explicitly recognizes the histories that determine the current condition of artifacts.  Archaeology does not actually lack this understanding of artifacts but has yet to make its conception of “formation processes” (e.g., Schiffer 1987) open to the sorts of social and cultural determinants that Foucault and others dwell on.  Instead, the production of the archaeological record is seen as an essentially natural process (even when cultural transforms are elucidated) by which artifacts enter and leave the ground.  I believe there is a space, and perhaps a real need, within the practice of archaeology for more exploration of the means of the production of the archaeological record.  This requires that we consider sites in more than objective, ahistorical terms and recognize that archaeological sites at some time became worthy of study and thus ‘archaeological’ in the first place.  As much as anything other characteristic, these conditions of discovery determine what sites are and thus play a real role in producing what the archaeological record really is.

    One effort that has followed these lines of inquiry has been the writing of critical histories of archaeology (e.g. Conkey and Spector 1984; Leone 1985; Trigger 1989; Patterson 1986, 1995; Kehoe 1999).  Exploring how archaeology has worked in the past, this work has challenged archaeologists to critically evaluate their position in society and the academy and their relationship to the contemporary process of cultural production.  Focusing on the power of authorship and the responsibility of writers to understand the perspectives they employ, this work has led to a greater awareness of gender, class, and racial bias in archaeological interpretation and a more intelligent understanding of how to see the existence of archaeology in today’s world.

    To build on this work I have sought in this book to explore in more detail one of the basic efforts of these critical histories.  Each of these studies has sought to contextualize archaeology by setting it amidst the processes of cultural production through which living people come to know who they are.  These stories, rituals, traditions, and ways of living allow people to share a way of knowing the world that provides common meanings of experience.  Archaeology and archaeological interpretation is shown in these critical histories to be one means for writing these shared meanings into existence and, further, applying them to the past thereby making them seem natural, taken for granted, and beyond critique.  Critical historians of archaeology urge archaeologists to see these influences and to write against them in their work.  The effort in this book is to extend this impulse to change archaeology by examining whether we can write in additions to histories of archaeology archaeologies of archaeology by focusing on how the critical approach may play a role in archaeological praxis. Thus, an archaeology of history is a way of applying the insights of the critical historical approach to the methods as much as the theories and interpretations of archaeology.  In other words, it is asking if there is a way to write a critical history of archaeology through archaeology?

    In most critical inquiries, the principle subjects are the normal ways of doing and producing that are accepted by those under study.  These critiques identify the strange among the normal in such a way as to expose the normal as something which permits practitioners to reproduce beliefs and assumptions without knowing it.  I believe this work parallels what Eric Hobsbawn (1983a) has called the study of the  invention of tradition.  Like Hobsbawm, critical historians of archaeology have sought to elucidate invented traditions in archaeological practice that have produced and reproduced certain ways of knowing detrimental to contemporary society and perhaps contrary to the interests of archaeology itself.  It is the goal here to further this exploration by using archaeological methods as a means to recognize the invention of traditions in the past.

    This book interprets the artifacts of the archaeological record and the formation of the record itself as a component through which past traditions were made and replaced.  The focus of this book is thus how material objects became meaningful through the invention of traditions which sustained particular ways of knowing in the past that have accumulated in the present as a diversity of histories now known as the archaeological record.  In other words, this project explores through the examination of the archaeological record in one locale how the past existed and was culturally produced as ‘the past’ in the past.  I believe this is an essential stage for understanding archaeological production today and for the future because it sets current archaeological practice in terms of the identification of archaeological subjects in historical perspective, a perspective akin to post-structuralist archaeologies which “re-member” (Bhabha 1994) today’s work with that of the past in such a way as to elucidate the histories that produce archaeologies.
 

Another Archaeology in Annapolis
     To do this work I focus on multiple sequential examples of the cultural production of history in Annapolis, Maryland that exist now in the archaeological record.  This book draws from my dissertation research undertaken as a student in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, nevertheless, the clearest site of my education came from the tradition of scholarship and engagement that is Archaeology in Annapolis.  This long-term historical archaeological research project begun in 1981 by Dr. Mark Leone of the University of Maryland, College Park has picked over the contents of the archaeological record of the small city of Annapolis, Maryland in enormous detail.  Much of what is presented here is drawn from threads of previous work that I have been able to reweave into the fabric of my own research.

    Along the way, as I struggled to see what I was doing, I realized that from among the central foci of the project there was a key site of inquiry which remained to be thoroughly investigated.  One of the great successes of the project had been a reflexive understanding of the presence of Archaeology in Annapolis in Annapolis.  Leone with Parker Potter, Paul Shackel, and Barbara Little sought to make archaeology into something in Annapolis rather than just let it be construed by residents and visitors on their own terms.  Their goal was to make archaeology a critical voice which could challenge contemporary politics.  The focus of this work was the narratives of the past in Annapolis and how these narratives work in the present, specifically how they help to maintain inequality and forms of domination.

    This research took two primary angles.  First, Leone and Potter dove into an ethnography of the use of history in Annapolis.  Potter’s (1994) work in particular explores the contours of how history exists in Annapolis from walking tours to the official institutions of historic preservation and research.  He deduced that history-telling in Annapolis is based on three assumptions: that the historical value of Annapolis is inherent; that the focus of research should be on the Revolutionary War era, Annapolis’s Golden Age; and that the historical narrative consists of multiple distinct parts having their own histories including the colonial city, the Naval Academy, whites, blacks, residents, and visitors.  Potter used these assumptions to draw up research designs and site tours which would challenge these assumptions by laying them bare in the public explanation of the archaeological record.  The goal was to produce an archaeological presentation that not only spoke about the past but directly confronted perceptions of the past and lead visitors to question their own assumptions.  By showing that the past was not simply excavated whole but produced by living people, archaeological publics were invited to enter their perceptions into the archaeological process.

    Leone and Potter’s public archaeology in Annapolis has, along with other critiques (e.g., Shanks and Tilley 1987, Gero and Conkey 1991, Castenada 1996, Meskell 1998, Hodder 1999) made an positive impact on the practice of archaeology.  The purpose of doing archaeology at all has been brought into question.  Over the past decade, for example, the notion and role of the descendent community has blossomed, and the idea of a singular past has given way to an embrace of multiple perspectives of the archaeological record.  Such work is transforming the field by drawing archaeologists into public discourse and turning the archaeological record into a more responsible segment of public history.  To the extent that Archaeology in Annapolis contributed to an understanding of the theory and practice of this effort it has been a great success.

    A second research angle of the Archaeology in Annapolis program was to consider the archaeological record of Annapolis as a record of the development of modern culture.  Archaeological questions were framed with an understanding that the remains that would be recovered were not from another time or place, but fragments from the eras that gave birth to today’s culture.  This has meant that the archaeology has been especially concerned with the development of the culture of capitalism.  Drawing from the ideas formulated by James Deetz, Karl Marx, E .P. Thompson, Georg Lukacs, Michel Foucault, C. B. Macpherson, and Louis Althusser, Archeology in Annapolis has sought to explore how capitalism emerged in Annapolis especially in terms of the production of the modern individual.

    This research has focused to a great extent on the idea of discipline.  To be successful, capitalism requires that those who work do so in a orderly and predictable manner which is ideally self-controlled.  The modern individual cannot be overly encumbered by a dependence on others but must recognize himself as a distinct individual.  This becomes possible when the individual polices himself rather than relying on the state or other source of authority, and when he believes his own welfare is not reliant on that of others.  In the long run this production of individuals is a cultural process which dismembers the modern from the ancient by creating the modern in the mold of an object which can be severed from its surroundings.

    Archaeological research in Annapolis has focused on the production of these individuals through material culture.  Using both the archeological record and probate inventories, Leone, Shackel, and Little (e.g., Leone and Shackel 1987, Shackel 1993, Little 1994) have shown the rise of individualizing artifacts such as town plans, rational scientific and musical instruments, individual place settings, and artifacts of personal hygiene beginning in the early 18th century.  They have also pointed out that this rise developed with the shift towards a dramatic wealth distinctions in Annapolis society.  They argue therefore that these individuating tools were used to downplay social difference in favor of individual similarity.  Along the same lines Leone and Potter (1988) and Leone (1995) have employed the notion of recursivity in material culture to argue that these artifacts were not just reflections but media for the production of modern individuals.  By setting individual places, for example, people came to see themselves as individuals, the key process necessary for the development of modern culture.

    For this study I proposed that these two threads from Archaeology in Annapolis presented a logical opportunity for further study in their combination.  Could there be an archaeology of Annapolis that showed that history telling and the invention of the ‘historic artifact’ played a key role in the production of the modern individual?  In other words, is there an archaeology of history in Annapolis?  This work is thus an attempt to bring the critical perspective that Leone and his students applied to contemporary Annapolis to the moments from the history of Annapolis that bear on what historic Annapolis currently is.  The effort here is to show that the histories of the histories in Annapolis today are as contingent and particular as those that Potter ethnographically defined.  Their reconstruction through the documentary and archaeological record is used to construct the landscapes of past and present in Annapolis as media which served distinct purposes in the past, the resonance of which continue to be felt today.

    This project would have been unwieldy and likely impossible were it not for the perspectives I have just reviewed.  These ideas were foundations in this research and their insights allowed me to see in the archaeological record fragments of history and culture acting as objects of meaning both today and in the multiple pasts that are the subject of this book.  Therefore, I offer my gratitude to my predecessors at Archaeology in Annapolis both those who were long gone by the time I showed up as well as those who suffered through my presence in the 1990s.  I especially want to thank Mark Leone, Paul Mullins, Mark Warner, Liz Kryder-Reid, Hannah Jopling, Mike Lucas, Eric Larsen, Lynn Jones, Laura Galke, and the 1990-96 field schools for providing me the means and opportunity to work what is now a book into shape.  I also thank Susan and Philip Dodds for making their property, known archaeologically as the Bordley-Randall site, available to the 1993 through 1996 Archaeology in Annapolis field schools.

    This book has benefited equally from the support of more than just those who played direct roles in the production of me and my archaeology in Annapolis.  The preparation of this manuscript was supported by a Richard Carley Hunt Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.  I thank Chuck Orser for including this study with the excellent works already in his book series, and Eliot Werner at Kluwer/Plenum for aiding me in the publication process.   I graciously thank Nan Rothschild and  Terry D’Altroy at Columbia for maintaining their support as I wove my through this work.  They had the pleasure (perhaps?) of seeing it completed as a dissertation, and deserve my fondest thanks for their patience as it was slowly assembled.  Kurt Jordan was my confidant at Columbia and made his couch and his friendship available while I faced up to my responsibilities in New York.  My family has also been an accommodating and encouraging bunch.   My sister Michelle Matthews knows perhaps too well the struggles involved with producing this work as her home became mine more than a few times during my research in Maryland.  My wife Zoë Burkholder found herself cohabitating with this project in the guise of a boyfriend and husband for several years.  Her faith in my abilities, respect for my goals, and at times painfully honest critiques provided the necessary wherewithal required for this effort.  Finally, my mother Marjorie Platou, made sure that my head was in the right place which in her case was museums, historic houses, and other historic and archaeological travels.  This grounding and experience made my path clear and with any luck she will see, as I do, in this study the culmination of her influence and labor as a mother as much as any effort of mine.  I dedicate this book to her in an attempt to repay the opportunities she gave me as we sought and continue to seek together an understanding of the past.