Indigenous Traces in Colonial Spaces: Archaeologies of Ambiguity, Origins, and Practices

This article reconsiders how archaeologists find Indigenous people, particularly Native Americans, in past colonial communities. Significant progress has been made in studying indigenous living areas associated with colonial communities but not in recovering evidence for (or even remembering) Native people laboring in distinctly colonial spaces. I propose that the reason for the lag lies in an incomplete perspective on material culture and space that denies their polyvalent and ambiguous, yet informative and manifestly real, nature. A new perspective can be forged with greater use of social theory pertaining to practice, space, and labor. Reconceptualizing material culture and space in colonial contexts requires that archaeologists acknowledge the role of labor relations in structuring material and spatial practices and not conflate origins of artifacts and spaces with other possible social meanings derived from practice. This article examines these two dimensions with three North American cases from New England, Florida, and California

Oiling accelerates loss of salt marshes, southeastern Louisiana

The 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill damaged thousands of km2 of intertidal marsh along shorelines that had been experiencing elevated rates of erosion for decades. Yet, the contribution of marsh oiling to landscape-scale degradation and subsequent land loss has been difficult to quantify. Here, we applied advanced remote sensing techniques to map changes in marsh land cover and open water before and after oiling. We segmented the marsh shorelines into non-oiled and oiled reaches and calculated the land loss rates for each 10% increase in oil cover (e.g. 0% to >70%), to determine if land loss rates for each reach oiling category were significantly different before and after oiling. Finally, we calculated background land-loss rates to separate natural and oil-related erosion and land loss. Oiling caused significant increases in land losses, particularly along reaches of heavy oiling (>20% oil cover). For reaches with ≥20% oiling, land loss rates increased abruptly during the 2010-2013 period, and the loss rates during this period are significantly different from both the pre-oiling (p < 0.0001) and 2013-2016 post-oiling periods (p < 0.0001). The pre-oiling and 2013-2016 post-oiling periods exhibit no significant differences in land loss rates across oiled and non-oiled reaches (p = 0.557). We conclude that oiling increased land loss by more than 50%, but that land loss rates returned to background levels within 3-6 years after oiling, suggesting that oiling results in a large but temporary increase in land loss rates along the shoreline