On Rehumanizing Pleistocene People of the Western Hemisphere

Abstract

Since the emergence of the niche in Folsom, New Mexico, in the late 1920s, peopling archaeology has sought to understand the earliest human occupants of the Western Hemisphere. Three generations of practitioners have made great strides in the techno-environmental arena. However, we have largely failed to tap into PaleoIndigenous intellectual, emotional, and social lives—the very domains that made Ice Age people as fully human as we are. As a result, our interpretations of those pioneering populations could often apply as readily to a colony of ants or a herd of wildebeest as they do to living, breathing, thinking, dreaming, loving, striving human ancestors. This article first explores the reasons for our failure to fully actualize First Peoples, identifying and implicating a feedback loop that includes practitioner homogeneity (we have always been and continue to be disproportionately white men of European descent); our predominantly positivist worldview; our language, training, and practice; and even the limited nature of the material record we study. This article also, however, highlights the ways that an important minority of peopling scholars have sought to access the humanity of PaleoIndigenous people. By more consistently mobilizing our own human capacity to creatively interrogate the deep past, we will produce scholarship that more consistently recognizes the capacity of the people who lived it and, just as importantly, respects those living today.

Heritage as liberation

“…She writes, “a black feminist approach in archaeology has the possibility of being transformative, not only in the composition and practices of academic archaeology to produce a more just climate, but also in fulfilling our obligations to past populations by presenting them as fully human ” (Sterling, 2015, 109; emphasis added) 5 . Bonnie Pitblado (2022) takes up a similar mantle as she tries to make sense of how archaeological work so often loses sight of the humanity of paleoindigenous First Americans. She argues that it will take fundamental changes to how we think about, speak about, and ultimately represent past peoples as “fully human as we are” (Pitblado, 2022, 217; see also Steeves, 2021).…”

“…Bonnie Pitblado (2022) takes up a similar mantle as she tries to make sense of how archaeological work so often loses sight of the humanity of paleoindigenous First Americans. She argues that it will take fundamental changes to how we think about, speak about, and ultimately represent past peoples as “fully human as we are” (Pitblado, 2022, 217; see also Steeves, 2021).…”