Archaeologists are hindered by the self-imposed boundary between historic and prehistoric archaeology, and assumptions about different rates and kinds of cultural continuity and change before and after the arrival of Europeans. The central objective of this edited volume is to call critical attention to two particular intra-disciplinary boundaries, and their dampening effect on fruitful cross-cultural and cross-temporal comparison. Contributors collectively challenge archaeologists’ self-imposed theoretical frontiers between European/non-European and prehistoric/historic case studies of coloni ... More

Archaeologists are hindered by the self-imposed boundary between historic and prehistoric archaeology, and assumptions about different rates and kinds of cultural continuity and change before and after the arrival of Europeans. The central objective of this edited volume is to call critical attention to two particular intra-disciplinary boundaries, and their dampening effect on fruitful cross-cultural and cross-temporal comparison. Contributors collectively challenge archaeologists’ self-imposed theoretical frontiers between European/non-European and prehistoric/historic case studies of colonialism. One way to begin to explore, and eventually explain, variability in colonial administrative strategies, local forms of resistance to cultural assimilation, native‐native interactions, hybridized cultural traditions, and other impacts of cross‐cultural interaction, is to bring together archaeologists working in very different regions and time periods. Case studies of colonialism drawn from around the globe also reveal that many of the features we associate with colonialism may not be present at all, or may only appear in very different forms than we expect. The effects of colonialism and colonization in local contexts are highly variable. By including several regions (e.g., the Philippines, Pacific, China, and Egypt) alongside better known cases of colonialism (e.g., Mesoamerica, the Andes, North America, and Britain), that heterogeneity may take surprising directions. This unusual set of case studies extends existing scholarship on colonialism by encouraging archaeologists to seek comparative parallels in untapped scholarship on other regions and time periods.