Mark Warner - Historical Archaeology Through a Western Lens

Margaret Purser and Mark Warner

They are the kind of taglines that flash sporadically across any evening network newsfeed: fracking boomtowns in North Dakota scramble to meet the basic infrastructure needs of a massive, transient, and economically unstable labor force. Arizona politicians vote to remove all references to Mexican American history from the state school curriculum. Massive wildfires ravage expanding suburban settlement areas in Colorado. A Seattle-based corporate CEO with a background in oil exploration and a track record in protecting public lands close to urban space becomes secretary of the interior.

These things could be happening anywhere in the country. Yet as these stories and their images grab the momentary spotlight, the evocation of place imbedded in the very names themselves is inescapable. Somehow these become western stories. The imagined and iconic American West is still very much a part of the American scene and the American psyche. Three decades ago now, we learned from New Western historians like Patricia Nelson Limerick, Richard White, and William Robbins about the futility of trying to parse myth from truth in any finite sense where the West is concerned. This perception of the West and its storied past, especially by those outside the region, has itself become a prime mover, persistently shaping peoples actions both in the region and toward the region. But as these same historians have also pointed out, the very real power of this ultimately false perception only sharpens the need for nuanced, articulate narratives about the region and, most especially, for clearly drawn analyses that connect its many diverse pasts to the present moment.

Historical archaeologists working in the American West work at exactly these paired nexus points between past and present, and between myth and reality. We also increasingly work with both descendant communities and a general public holding very definite expectations regarding what stories will be told about any particular western past and how those stories should be used in the present. In many ways we share this research environment with colleagues elsewhere in the United States and the rest of the world: certainly no archaeologist working in colonial New England or the plantation South would fail to recognize this scenario. The origins of American regionalism, and how it has played out in evolving American identities, is an intellectual thread woven into the basic fabric of our discipline, beginning with the works of people like James Deetz, Charles Fairbanks, John Cotter, and Bernard Fontana.