“El Grito de Caguana”

On July 25, 2005, a small group of “Taino” reclaimed the Caguana Ceremonial Center in Utuado, Puerto Rico, in the name of their ancestors. The protestors demanded, “End the destruction and desecration of our sanctuaries, sacred places, archeological sites, coaibays (cemeteries) and ceremonial centers now!” The Taino had utilized the site for years to celebrate traditional rituals, but due to changes in the center’s policies, were suddenly restricted from using the site during certain hours. For the Taino, this was the final straw in an ongoing and escalating conflict with the site managers, The Institute for Puerto Rican Culture, charged by the Puerto Rican Legislature in 1955 with the task of “conserving, promoting, enriching and disseminating the cultural values of Puerto Rico.” The result was a 17-day occupation and hunger strike that brought to the fore issues regarding Puerto Rican identity that had long lay dormant and unchallenged.

Agency and Renegotiated Identities in the North Atlantic Isles

Humans, as agents, played an active role in the creation and communication of new identities during the Viking period in the Orkney Islands and Iceland. The authors argue that environments are not merely passive backdrops to societal and identity formation but are dynamic contributors in the negotiations that take place when humans settle into new lands. The chapter will focus on the maneuvering and balancing of traditional burial rituals and beliefs within new political, economic, and cosmological landscapes. The comparison of interdisciplinary data from burials, ancient texts, archaeological excavations, and landscape surveys from both regions during the time period of the study will show how the environment aided in the creation and performance of the burial ritual and how the agents’ reshaping of the land helped to form their new identities

Cupid’s Bow

This chapter examines the formation of white Creole masculine identity in the context of a middling sugar plantation in 18th-century Montserrat, West Indies, and considers the role of climate and the emergence of racialized categories of personhood in the creation of this distinctly colonial form of social identity. Employing a close study of a fob seal, an external artifact of personal adornment excavated from a planter’s dwelling house, the chapter highlights the relational aspects of colonial identity found in the disjuncture between the white “Creole” planter’s self-fashioning as an English gentleman and his Creole social practice within the plantation landscape and as viewed by the English Metropole. The chapter emphasizes the importance of historically and geographically situating archaeological studies of embodied identity to mitigate the potential for misinterpretation of the cultural context in which white Creole personal material goods were deployed and identity negotiated.

Constructing Identity in Seneca Village

This chapter explores the issue of identity in Seneca Village, a nineteenth-century, middle-class, black community located in what is now Central Park in New York City. The city evicted the residents in 1857, and until recently this important village was forgotten. Using information from historical documents and material culture (including landscaping and both the form and decoration of dishes) excavated from the site in 2011, this study examines the intersection of class, race, and nationality. The evidence suggests that the identity of at least one family there was made of many strands: they may have identified themselves as members of the black middle class, as Americans, as African Americans, and perhaps even as Africans, depending on the situation and the audience. Skillful use of these strands may have been one way in which this and other village families attempted to ameliorate oppression and to make a place for themselves.

“The Little Stairway under the Bell”

The Lott House in Brooklyn, one of the few remaining Dutch colonial farmhouses in New York City, was a place of multiple and transforming identities in encounters between persons of Dutch, English, and African descent. At one time the family was among the largest slaveholders in Brooklyn, yet they may have become abolitionists and used their house as part of the Underground Railroad. This chapter looks at the Lott family in the first half of the nineteenth century and how they fashioned and adapted their identities within the changing environment of antebellum America, particularly in relation to the people of African descent whom they owned, employed, or otherwise encountered. Making use of the built environment and archival evidence, the author argues that identity formation for the Lotts was a troubled endeavor, made difficult by the contradictory and sometimes clashing facets of their ethnic, religious, and social identities.

Bodies under Scrutiny

After invading Algiers in 1830, French colonial administrators enacted policies intended to surveil and control local prostitutes. These regulations established sex worker registration logs, mandatory vaginal inspections, and forced treatments while redefining the primarily Muslim local women’s bodies as sites of disease. French medical workers used privileged technologies and clinical confinement to become the gatekeepers of women’s health. While French rhetoric stressed the benefits of new medical procedures and local acceptance of regulations, contemporary records suggest Algerian women resisted the new management policies. These women drew on pre-French social dynamics to evade surveillance and fashion new identities as sex workers within the shifted demographics of colonial Algiers, conceptualizing sex as a commodity to be drawn upon during economic crisis.

On Time and Identity

This chapter explores the relationship between time and identity through an excavation of three science fiction novels set in a futuristic London or London-esque city. The interplay of past, present, and future in the production of identity is seen in the excavation of the protagonists’ lives. Each faces a personal crisis of identity that can be resolved only by excavating the past in order to navigate the present and construct the future.

Where Are the Outsiders?

This chapter analyzes the historic narrative of Dogtown, Massachusetts, a New England outsider community. The shift from insider to outsider community in the early nineteenth century is examined by placing the documentary record side by side with the past and present landscape. The constructed nature of the historic narrative along with today’s physical space is unpacked, arguing that Dogtown’s communal identity is still an unknown and that the modern understanding of the community has been constructed in the one hundred years since site abandonment.

Two Houses Windows on the Identity of Chief Richardville

This chapter examines the life of Jean Baptiste de Richardville, the last civil chief of the Miami tribe, as he navigated the pluralistic frontier society of the nineteenth-century Great Lakes region. Richardville drew upon elements of his Métis (mixed French-Miami) ancestry as well as his class to produce and enact various identities. His skilled negotiation of the divergent worlds he inhabited served to secure his role within the Miami tribe, as well as within the dominant white culture. In particular, this chapter looks at identity formation through Richardville’s two houses, an ornate Greek revival building (the Chief Richardville House) that served as his residence and a place for lavish entertainment, and the more modest Richardville/Lafontaine House that he used for the fur trade and treaty negotiations. These buildings, and archival evidence of Richardville’s life, shed light on how he constructed and maintained a fluid social identity to thrive in a potentially contentious and continually evolving setting.

O Brave New World

This chapter introduces the concepts of identity and dissonance and the theoretical basis for their study within historical archaeology. The authors utilize previous work on practice and agency as a basis for understanding the ways that people and communities produce and reshape identities in contexts of disruption and chaos.