“Don’t read what we
have written; look at what we have done” (Deetz 260).
Anthropologist James Deetz advises
his readers to approach the past from a different kind of historical record.
Deetz’s In Small Things Forgotten: An
Archaeology of Early American Life (1977) reconstructs what we think we know
about early American settlements in New England and Virginia by using
archaeology to show the relationship between objects and the culture to which
they belonged. He looks at several different objects including ceramics to tap
into changes in dietary habits in early America; New England gravestones
that tell us about the shift from communal Puritan ideology to an emphasis on
the individual as a result of the Age of Reason and; housing structures and how
they conveyed changes in social structure over time. As Deetz substantiates how
objects can tell us about larger cultural functions, he takes great care to
make several important points. Most importantly, Deetz addresses his
contemporaries by reinforcing the definition of historical archaeology. A
relatively new field for his time, Deetz makes his case for its usefulness by going
to great lengths to distinguish it from prehistoric archaeology so as to make it
its own subfield. He explains that historical archaeology helps to uncover “stuff”
that textual evidence is silent on, especially historically marginalized groups.
We’ve talked about this quite a bit in class, but Deetz shows us how objects
help to uncover some of those silences created in the historical record, but also perpetuated by historians.
This is best exemplified in his
chapters on excavating information about the African-American past. He traces
the history of Cato Howe, who was freed from slavery after his military service
in the Revolutionary War. The excavation of the community of Parting Ways
helped to shed light on Cato’s life and others. Deetz concludes this chapter by
explaining that a culturally relativistic approach is necessary to understanding
Parting Ways because an Anglo-American cultural context does not explain Cato
and the African-Americans who lived outside of that context.
This important tenet of
anthropological study is explored in Grey Gundaker’s “Tradition and Innovation
in African-American Yards.” Gundaker employs an anthropological perspective as
he asks questions about the types of meanings that African-American yards convey.
Gundaker explores spatial relationships, organizing principles, and variations
in themes as a way to make sense of these types of meanings of the objects
displayed in the yards he studies. He writes about the objects in yards as having
a “vernacular language” and a “flexible visual vocabulary” (Gundaker 59). Deetz
likewise explains the idea that objects all have a grammar that governs them, “a
set of rules for the creation of artifacts mutually accepted by the members of
the culture producing them” (Deetz 154).
An anthropological approach to
understanding my own object is helpful, though challenging when I have rarely
applied it in my own approach to history. However, archaeology helps me to
think about provenance. Where, how, and why was the license plate found? Anthropology
serves as a tool to listen to the language and vocabulary that the license
plate communicates. Maybe this is in the structure, or the function, or
understanding how it communicates with other license plates or even
complementary objects of identification. Employing these methods is a gateway to
reaching Deetz’s point that objects speak, too.
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