Nicole Mathwich, Ph.D.

Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona, Tuscon, AZ

ABSTRACT

Complex systems approaches to archaeological interpretation are well-established in the discipline and offer important ways for studying change over various scales. Large datasets and regional syntheses invite new applications of complex systems applications of complex systems to archaeological data. At the same time, indigenous and postcolonial perspectives have increasingly become foundational to project planning, data collection, and interpretation. Despite the importance of these two approaches to contemporary archaeology, researchers seldom interpret complex systems concepts and methods through indigenous ontological frameworks. The lack of substantial dialogue between these theoretical approaches results in uncritical applications of complexity theory which inadvertently reinforce scripts of settler colonialism. This paper uses legacy faunal data from southern Arizona to challenge the prehistoric/historic break often used in the interpretation of archaeological materials. This case study of data reinterpretation examines how careful data sharing and indigenous perspectives can inform interpretations of state shifts in complex systems and colonialism.

Legacy data are out there. They are online. They are owned by universities. They are being incorporated uncritically into many theses and dissertations. As managers and researchers, how do we re-use these data with an eye toward making them more accessible and more inclusive? Legacy data often have outdated ways of organizing time and space. If researchers simply continue to stick close to the original categories, there is a risk of carrying problematic assumptions forward uncritically. While this certainly touches on issues of data aggregation (Atici et al. 2013; Cooper and Green 2016), we know the issues with legacy data go deeper than methodological diversity.

The development of large databases offers the opportunity to both rethink the standards of data collection, and to engage with community stakeholders in new ways. Instead of tracking down data in reports, scholarly journals, and archives from multiple sites with paywalls and barriers, researchers can now access original data in large databases. One hopes that accessibility will lead to greater engagement and conversations about data sensitivity and incorporation of new collection methods. While this aggregation theoretically provides new opportunities for researchers from historically marginalized groups to collect and interpret data for projects guided by their own perspectives, legacy data pose a variety of challenges.

Decades of older data must continue to be brought into shared digital databases, simply for their own preservation. These legacy data were collected by researchers at various moments in archaeology’s history and the data bring with them all the assumptions from those periods. The data archaeologists collect remain its most powerful tool and are foundational to the culture of the discipline. As archaeology continues to wrestle with decolonizing archaeological practice, there continues to be a tendency to cleave to the original data organization used by the analyst. Practical possibilities for reinterpretation of legacy data must include re-evaluation of basic levels of organization.

For this presentation, I’ve chosen to focus on a methodological and conceptual approach which is becoming increasingly influential in archaeology, but also requires large quantities of digital data. Complex systems view human social and environmental interactions as a system. These are broad interdisciplinary approaches. These approaches simplify much of human interaction by creating models, but they also offer new ways of looking at social and environmental change. Of interest here are the opportunities to model Indigenous value systems and changing relationships to the environment and potential predictive abilities, which may benefit contemporary communities as they evaluate the long-terms effects of resource use. These models and concepts are tools but are ultimately limited by the data used. What a researcher puts in affects what they get out.

The problem here is that complex systems often require large quantities of data and may be used by researchers outside of archaeology with limited understanding of the ethical considerations and colonialist approaches of past archaeologists. Many of the papers in this session are coming from a database management and government archival perspective. I’m approaching this from a research and educational perspective. The questions I seek to answer are: How do I as researcher and educator maintain data accuracy? How do I also ensure what I produce and what my students produce from older data better reflects contemporary archaeological values?

As a case study to illustrate the issues legacy data can create, I present a small case study showing the impact legacy categories can have on something as basic but as profoundly important to archaeology: time.

The prehistoric-historical archaeology divide in North American has been issue of ongoing debate and methodological review (Scheiber and Mitchell 2010). The historical period marks the appearance of European plants, animals, objects, and pathogens, but these are materialist definitions of the period concerned with the interpretative potential of these artifacts. The historical period is a moving target because contact between Europeans and Indigenous groups occurred earlier than some of these signature materials appeared at sites. In other cases, introduced materials and animals appeared before direct contact, traveling through Indigenous trade networks before face-to-face contact with Europeans (Mitchell 2015). Indigenous groups across North America have extensive oral traditions, many of which do not mark a break between the “prehistoric” and “historic.” Lightfoot and Martinez (1995) noted over two decades ago that the divide between historical and prehistoric periods was artificial at best (Lightfoot and Martinez 1995; Silliman 2012). At worst, the division of the periods as two separate fields of study disconnects contemporary Indigenous peoples from their precontact ancestors. Alienation from the past has political ramifications for descendants’ legal claims to land and cultural objects (Panich and Schneider 2014). For the most part, archaeologists recognize the artificiality of the boundary, and the limitations of binaries inherent in terms such as “precontact” and “postcontact” (Schneider 2015b; Silliman 2005). When it comes to large databases, structuring in continuity instead of cultural periods whenever possible helps eliminate the tendency to divide the historical from prehistoric. In this presentation, I seek to show what might be gained through intentional combination of historical and prehistoric legacy data in the Pimería Alta.

My research seeks to understand the ecological and economic contexts that influenced native actors’ decisions at Pimería Alta missions by understanding how livestock began to fit into previous subsistence practices. The Pimería Alta, today southern Arizona and northern Sonora was the northern borderland of New Spain and the heart of the O’odham and Apache ancestral homelands. I focus here on subsistence at colonial sites because livestock have the potential to drastically alter the landscape through grazing. From the human perspective, livestock required water, labor, range, and fodder from resources previously used by local O’odham. The main sites for native interactions with introduced livestock were the Spanish missions. From A.D. 1690 and 1850, O’odham adjusted quickly to the new livestock resource, and cattle ranching remains an important economic activity for the Tohono O’odham today. Various O’odham oral histories mark the arrival of the Spanish but view the events of the colonial period within their longer history (Bahr 1994; Loendorf and Lewis 2017). The O’odham continuity an important perspective to consider, and I used it as my primary way of organizing the data.

The data presented here were a component of my dissertation research and compared the use of rabbits and ungulates and overall species diversity at 31 archaeological sites in the Santa Cruz River Basin, located in southern Arizona.

Analysts in the southern Southwest tend to separate historical from prehistoric automatically. The data came from legacy reports which analyzed and reported prehistoric and historic components separately, often in different chapters. For the full list of sites and authors’ work used in this study please check out Chapter 5 of my dissertation. Thus the prehistoric/historic division is consistently maintained over generations of researchers. It is reified every time a report is published. To put the data together in this way was the opposite of how these legacy data were originally presented, yet it most accurately reflects contemporary O’odham perspectives of their time in the Santa Cruz River Valley.

Recent efforts to revitalize the use of native Sonoran foods focused primarily on plants, not native animals (Native Seed Search, San Xavier Co-op Farm). Today, beef, rabbit, chicken, and deer, are often considered traditional foods in the Tohono O’odham Nation (Fazzino 2008). I was curious as to why these efforts to revitalized native foods excluded native animals? My research suggests that the stability of this new regime and the subsequent ethnographic role livestock play in modern Tohono O’odham life suggest that this reliance on livestock is not likely to change readily (nor does it need to).

This case study illustrates the challenges legacy data present to digital data managers and researchers. These data were already online in various ways, but they weren’t systemically brought together, nor would they likely be because of the prehistoric/historic divide. Digital data managers should consider increasing their awareness of the needs and possibilities of complex systems and help structure databases toward those needs, particularly regarding time continuity. Traditional archaeological categories, such as time, can uphold settler-colonial values far beyond their publication dates to the exclusion of Indigenous perspectives. Can legacy data be purged of their biases? No, and nor would it be appropriate to alter the data so substantially from its original form. However, there needs to be a more active role by researchers and data managers as well as more end-user guidance and training of new researchers into how legacy archaeological ontologies perpetuate settler-colonial perspectives. Are we maintaining a prehistoric/historic division when we upload data, and what can we do differently? This could take a variety of forms, ranging from reporting requirements to short tutorials required by new users before they are allowed to access data. As digital data managers and researchers, I invite us to think of ways to help legacy data incorporate Indigenous ontologies, make them more meaningful to non-experts, and use digital data to encourage future researchers of complex systems to engage with Indigenous ontologies.

References Cited

Atici, Levent, Sarah Whitcher Kansa, Justin Lev-Tov, and Eric C. Kansa
2013 Other People’s Data: A Demonstration of the Imperative of Publishing Primary Data. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 20(4):663–681. DOI:10.1007/s10816-012-9132-9.

Cooper, Anwen, and Chris Green
2016 Embracing the Complexities of ‘Big Data’ in Archaeology: the Case of the English Landscape and Identities Project. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 23(1):271–304. DOI:10.1007/s10816-015-9240-4.

Curry, Benjamin A.
2017 Cattle in the Garden: An Environmental and Archaeological History of Ranching at Rancho Refugio - Wilder Ranch. Unpublished Dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona.

Fazzino, David
2008 Continuity and Change in Tohono O’odham Food Systems: Implications for Dietary Interventions. Culture & Agriculture 30(1–2):38–46. DOI:10.1111/j.1556-486X.2008.00006.x.

Garlinghouse, Thomas S., and Benjamin Curry
2009 Appendix F: Analysis of Faunal Remains from Mission Period Features at Santa Clara. Uncovering and Interpreting History and Archaeology at Mission Santa Clara: Reporting on Archaeological Data Recovery at the Leavey School of Business, Murguia Parking Lot, and Jesuit Community Project Areas. Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California.

Gifford-Gonzalez, Diane, and K Ueno Sunseri
2007 Foodways on the frontier: animal use and identity in early colonial New Mexico. We are what we eat: archaeology, food, and identity:260–287.

Jones, Emily Lena
2015 The ‘Columbian Exchange’ and landscapes of the Middle Rio Grande Valley, AD 1300–1900. The Holocene:0959683615588375. DOI:10.¹¹⁷⁷⁄_{0959683615588375}.

Mathwich, Nicole
2016 Prehistoric and Historic Vertebrate Faunal Remains from Mission Los Santos Angeles de Guevavi, AZ EE:9:1(ASM), Santa Cruz County, Arizona. In Archaeology at the Mission of Sorrows: Archaeological Test Excavations at the Guevavi Mission, AZ EE:9:1(ASM), Santa Cruz County, Arizona, pp. 103–125. Technical Report 2015–12. Desert Archaeology, Inc., Tucson, Arizona.

Mathwich, Nicole, and Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman
2018 Bureaucratic reforms on the frontier: Zooarchaeological and historical perspectives on the 1767 Jesuit Expulsion in the Pimería Alta. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. DOI:10.1016/j.jaa.2018.07.002.

Müller, Daniel, Zhanli Sun, Thoumthone Vongvisouk, Dirk Pflugmacher, Jianchu Xu, and Ole Mertz
2014 Regime shifts limit the predictability of land-system change. Global Environmental Change 28:75–83. DOI:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.06.003.

Scheffer, M., S. R. Carpenter, T. M. Lenton, J. Bascompte, W. Brock, V. Dakos, J. van de Koppel, I. A. van de Leemput, S. A. Levin, E. H. van Nes, M. Pascual, and J. Vandermeer
2012 Anticipating Critical Transitions. Science 338(6105):344–348. DOI:10.1126/science.1225244.

Sunseri, Jun U.
2017 Grazing to Gravy: Faunal Remains and Indications of Genízaro Foodways on the Spanish Colonial Frontier of New Mexico. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 21(3):577–597. DOI:10.1007/s10761-016-0388-8.

• Presentations