Journal of Social Archaeology

Hybridity as an interpretive construct in the archaeology of colonialism has encountered many pitfalls, due largely to the way it has been set adrift from clear theoretical anchors and has been applied inconsistently to things, practices, processes, and even people. One of the telltale signs of its problematic nature is the ease with which archaeologists claim to identify the origin and existence of hybridity but the difficulty faced if asked when and how such hybridity actually ends, if it does. In that context, this paper offers a potential requiem for hybridity. If we need not go that far, archaeologists at least need to rein in the “Frankenstein” version of hybridity that permeates archaeology and occludes its variable and problematic origins, acknowledge the dangers of accentuating or even celebrating “purées,” and beware of the creation of cultural “mules” in analytical classifications and interpretations.

Hybrid colonial objects are potent. Simply stated, hybrid colonial objects in museum contexts are defined as those items that contain material characteristics of both colonizer and the colonized. These objects are constituted in complex colonial contexts, resulting from the adoption and fusing of elements of style, manufacture, material, and meaning from distinct intellectual and cultural legacies, which were themselves hybrids. While hybridized material culture was used alongside more familiar, perhaps non-hybrid objects, archaeologists encounter hybrid colonial objects differently. They seemingly encapsulate in material form a certain lived experience of colonialism, allowing validation that the concepts of hybridity we argue were real and tangible in the past. In this paper, I turn a critical mirror on collections of colonial material from eastern North America at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University to discuss not only how hybrid artifacts from the colonial world were documented, cataloged, and preserved, but also to interrogate the processes of longing and fetishization that impact the collection and interpretations of these objects.

Hybridity is a term used by anthropologists to characterize the amalgamation of influences from two (or more) different cultural groups. Hybridity has captivated archaeology in recent years, especially archaeologists investigating colonialism in Native American contexts. At the same time, a growing chorus of critics has begun to question anthropology’s devotion to hybridity and hybrid objects. These critics take issue with the term’s alleged Eurocentrism, implications of cultural purity, and evolutionary etymology. In this article, I address these critiques and advocate a more circumscribed use of hybridity in archaeology. I caution against the abandonment of the term entirely, because the archaeological identification of hybridity provides insights into both present-day (etic) and past (emic) perspectives on cultural amalgamation. Hybridity reveals the biases of contemporary researchers regarding the societies we study, as well as highlighting the ways in which power structures centered and marginalized colonial subjects in the past. To illustrate these points, I draw on case studies involving the Hopi Mickey Mouse kachina, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indigenous-colonial whips from the American Plains and southeast Australia, and seventeenth-century Pueblo ceramics from the American Southwest.

Sunken features backfilled with domestic refuse represent the prevailing depositional context-type in later prehistory worldwide. Despite being so, this evidence remains poorly understood and has only received sporadic attention, chiefly within Anglophone archaeologies. This paper focuses on ceramics from a suite of such intricate contexts (cut features, burials, settlements, barrows) from Iberia in a diachronic and comparative perspective, from the Early Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age (5500–1100 BC). A total of 10,800 potsherds were examined with a taphonomic and refitting protocol attentive to formation dynamics and tracking intentionality. Results suggest that most of the studied assemblages are unplanned by-products of social life. From the earliest pottery-using communities, habitual actions conditioned the eventual preservation of the extant archaeological record. Fragmentation and deposition were key social practices, ultimately representing enduring trans-cultural phenomena. This research challenges uncontested interpretive premises, namely the ‘reflectionist’ standpoint, and disproves consensual and undue concepts frequently used in mainstream accounts of later prehistory.

This article analyzes the origins of the 1994 Global Strategy for a Representative, Balanced and Credible World Heritage List as a lens through which to view the process of constructing and re-elaborating a global heritage discourse. Using untapped archival records, it shows that the Global Strategy crystallized after lengthy prior discussions reaching to the early 1980s. Most important, it demonstrates that the novel element in 1994 was the influence of new actors, although not from the Global South that was intended to be the beneficiary of change. The contributors to the Global Strategy were rather from regions (Australia) or disciplines (anthropology) that had hitherto failed to claim their share of influence in shaping international cultural heritage concepts despite being firmly situated within the North. By highlighting such influences, this article resonates with the efforts of anthropologists and other scholars to eschew a reductive center-periphery framework in conceptualizing global cultural flows.

In most parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, the traditional manner of pottery-making persists, with pottery production connected to a series of other daily activities. The Wallagga region of the southwestern Ethiopian highlands, in particular, sees traditional pottery widely practiced and exclusively in the domain of women. In this society, pottery-making and the use of pottery vessels are informed and constrained by deeply-rooted metaphoric meanings connected to the technological practices. Pots are metaphorically associated with persons and the stages they pass through: youth, adulthood, old age, and death. More specifically, a wet pot metaphorically represents a baby, pots in use are associated with adults and damaged pots are linked to a deceased person.

Michigan Central Station and Roosevelt Park were constructed between 1908 and 1918 as part of Detroit’s City Beautiful Movement. The construction process was a place-making effort designed to implant order on the urban landscape that involved the displacement of a community who represented everything that city planners sought to erase from Detroit’s city center: overcrowding, poverty, immigrants, and transient populations. Current historical archaeological research reveals how the existing ornamental landscape of Roosevelt Park masks the history of a forgotten working-class neighborhood. This synthesis of archival and material evidence details the conditions of life within the neighborhood and of a contentious, decade-long displacement struggle rooted in the inequalities of early-20th-century industrial capitalism. Positioned at the start of a century of controversial urban planning initiatives, the Roosevelt Park case study encourages understandings of displacement as a process that has diachronic and comparative dimensions, both in Detroit and in other urban settings.