That archaeology can be informed by nationalist ideologies is assumed. Specifying precisely how nationalism articulates with interpretations of the past, however, presents a formidable challenge to the historiographer. Archaeologists rarely make explicit, either in published form or in correspondence, their political, social, or psychological agendas. The historiographer is forced, therefore, to make associations from often meager documentation. Furthermore, many archaeological historiographers are archaeologists who have been trained to deal with long-extinct societies. When considering the individual, who may still be alive, they must employ a new scale of analysis and exercise a higher degree of political awareness and sensitivity. But, to pursue the issue of nationalism in archaeology, to understand the link between the mind of a political leader and the archaeological record, the historiographer must assume these responsibilities.

Archaeology's dependence upon political and economic circumstances is graphically illustrated by recent developments affecting its practice in the former Soviet Union. This brief postscript to Shnirelman's longer historical study first describes the breakdown of state-sponsored support for archaeology and then attempts to explain the recent outbreak of various nationalist archaeologies throughout the former USSR through a consideration of the disguised Russian nationalism of Soviet “Marxist” archaeology. Since the current situation is so volatile, it is worth recording that these remarks were prepared in winter 1994.

The current crisis

The whole centralized system of Soviet (now Russian) science quickly and inexorably began to unravel simultaneously with the advent of perestroika in 1985–6. This disastrous process occurred so suddenly that by 1993–4 only one important question was left for discussion: has the whole infrastructure of the former global Soviet scientific organization already collapsed or is the final dénouement still to come? Obviously, political and economic factors explain this ongoing tragedy. New realities, associated with the break-up of the Soviet empire, have erected severe and sometimes nearly insuperable political barriers among different parts of the huge state-sponsored Academy of Sciences, the organization which for decades provided the complex infrastructure for nearly all scientific research.

Economic factors, however, were far more important. State financing of scientific research, which had been in fact the main source of support for scientific organizations, was cut drastically and, in many cases, completely. Consequently, numerous large scientific projects were implemented slowly or were completely frozen.

This chapter examines the politics of archaeology in an area that can justly be viewed either as part of the northern frontier of the modern Middle East (and ancient Near East) or the southeastern boundary of Europe (Map 2). One of the fascinations of Caucasia – both Ciscaucasia and Transcaucasia – is that it is a region where European (Christian) and Oriental (here Islamic) traditions meet or, more appropriately today, collide. It is also characterized by exceptional, almost unparalleled ethnic and linguistic diversity, making it – depending upon one's temperament – either an ethnographer's dream or nightmare.

In addition to sectarian, linguistic, and ethnic diversity, the Caucasus is characterized by a very long and vivid historical consciousness, extending back with rich historical and then archaeological documentation for millennia. Archaeology and ancient history are exceptionally alive and meaningful for all the myriad peoples of the Caucasus. Today, given the collapse of the former Soviet Union, it is a very volatile region replete with numerous territorial disputes and several exceptionally bloody and explosive ethnic conflicts. Given all these conditions, it is an area where one would not expect the practice of archaeology to be an idle academic pursuit, unrelated to contemporary politics. One is not disappointed.

In Europe after World War II overt ethnic chauvinism became politically incorrect on both sides of the Iron Curtain, though for somewhat different reasons. More specifically, the discrediting of Nazi-style racist archaeology made ethnic archaeology (defined below) very subdued. Today, with progressive unification within the European Community, it may be more difficult for states to ignore or to minimize ethnic diversity within or across their borders, while for many in eastern Europe ethnicity has now become a fundamental principle of political identity. In either situation, archaeology may be used as an important aspect of cultural identity and to support moral claims to territory. Territorial claims are unlikely to be settled by archaeological debate, perhaps, but archaeologists and other scholars have provided much ammunition that might be used on the cultural identity front. This might seem odd, if overtly ethnic archaeology has been muted for several decades, and if – as is generally the case – scholars have not fostered ethnicity deliberately in their research or publications. Yet scholars, along with other Europeans, have deeply ingrained perceptions of ethnicity in the European past, perpetuated by traditional terminologies as much as by anything else. A hypothetical, yet characteristic, example may clarify this.

In the two imaginary European countries of Paphlagonia and Crim-Tartary (see Thackeray 1854) the later part of the archaeological record represents documented societies of the historic Paphlagonian and Crim-Tartarian peoples, so the labels “Paphlagonian” and “Crim-Tartarian” are applied to archaeological units.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the importance which the appearance of nationalism as a political doctrine had in the formation of archaeology as a scientific discipline in Spain. This question cannot be understood without first taking into account the complexity of the phenomenon of nationalism and the specificity of its development in Spain. Here a number of different nationalisms existed, and archaeological data were, therefore, interpreted from a nationalist perspective in a number of different and, to a certain extent, contradictory ways.

This article argues that in Spain, as in most of Europe, archaeology developed as the result of the need to find data which would permit the reconstruction of the remotest periods of the national past. The crystallization of the study of history for nationalist aims occurred in the nineteenth century, leading to the dramatic growth of historical studies in the universities, the creation of archives and libraries, and, finally, the funding of historical research, including archaeological excavations. However, one should not exaggerate the role of archaeology in the construction of national histories. Historical studies were centered fundamentally on the modern and medieval periods. The Romantic movement drew on medieval times for inspiration. Nevertheless, to a lesser degree during the nineteenth century, and to a greater extent in the twentieth, the growth of historical studies affected ancient history and prehistory and led to a greater recourse to archaeological data. In this way archaeology became politically charged.

The archaeological study of agricultural systems

Archaeological gardens and field systems are notoriously difficult to study. They tend to be “artifact poor” contexts, and thus, extremely difficult to date with accuracy. Stratigraphy tends to be heavily reworked and eroded, the result of continual cultivation and mixing of soil structure by humans and nature, both during the time of use, and after abandonment. Due to the poor preservation of botanical remains, there is usually no direct evidence for the crops which were cultivated. Technological information on cultivation practices and tools is limited, and rarely is there direct evidence for labor and social organization, land tenure, and efficiency of the system.

Ethnographic analogy can be useful in many contexts, but it is usually difficult to determine direct historical ties between contemporary farmers and their previous counterparts. In many situations, ancient field and garden systems have been completely abandoned, breaking any continuity between past and present. Even in cases where ties can be demonstrated, the social, political, economic, and environmental situation has changed so much that the usefulness of direct analogy is limited. Historical records can sometimes be extrapolated back into the past, but agricultural practices are not often discussed in sufficient detail. Despite these limitations to research, certain archaeological field methods, combined with experimental archaeology, can provide the detailed information lacking in cases where historical and ethnographic analogy is inadequate and preservation is poor.

Archaeological research in the New World tropics has many different foci. Investigating the nature of subsistence practices in this diverse region, especially the transition to agriculture, figures prominently among these. However, recovering direct evidence of subsistence (for example, the remains of plants used by people), is a formidable challenge facing archaeologists who work in the neotropics. Preservation of macroremains (seeds, tubers, wood, corn cob fragments and the like) is limited to charred materials in all but the most arid settings. Even when charring occurs, macroremains may be highly fragmented due to expansion and contraction of soils, making their detection and recovery difficult during excavation. The problems of identifying such fragmented materials are rendered more complex by the high species diversity of the tropical flora. This necessitates a large botanical comparative collection and the occasional application of specialized identification techniques, such as scanning electron microscopy (Pearsall 1989).

Problems of preservation, recovery, and identification of botanical remains are not unique to paleoethnobotanists working in the neotropics, but the environments of the moist lowlands seem to “conspire” to create the worse possible conditions for recovering subsistence data. As Mangelsdorf remarked in his review of Agricultural Origins and Dispersals, in which Carl Sauer (1952) proposed the riverine zone of the moist tropical forest as a likely hearth of agricultural origins:

In this chapter I do not intend to plow new ground, but take a retrospective stance through explicating a particular methodology which has been applied to the classification of pottery in the South American tropical lowlands. I shall refer to this methodology as structural classification, since it is modeled after the methodology of descriptive linguistics. It is not to be confused with structuralism or structuralist analysis (Leone 1982) as those terms are currently used in a Lévi-Straussian sense in the archaeological literature. It is more akin to what has been called componential analysis, or ethnoscience in anthropological literature of the past four decades. Donald Lathrap was a strong advocate of this methodology, and his unpublished thesis (Lathrap 1962) is the earliest example of a thorough application of this methodology to an archaeological data set.

I write this with a slight feeling of apprehension, knowing that classification, particularly as it applies to ceramics, has historically been a hotly debated subject among archaeologists. As Spaulding (1982: 1) astutely observed, “Basic concepts and their implications are often controversial simply because they are basic.” If I touch some raw nerves, it is not by intention. My objective is to elucidate a particular methodology which has been used and developed by archaeologists working in the South American tropics over the past three decades.

This chapter explores two interfaces: one between human culture and the natural environment; the other between highland and lowland regions of Colombia. The starting point is a series of archaeological—environmental studies in the Caribbean lowlands and in certain highland areas of the country. These investigations are chosen because they draw attention to a number of methodological issues, the first of which is that (contra much romantic mythology) there is no essential difference between tropical lowland archaeology and archaeology as practiced elsewhere. The work of Roosevelt (1991) on Marajó Island, of Mora et al. (1991) in Colombian Amazonia, and of several contributors to the present volume, demonstrates that most techniques of field investigation are practicable in the American tropics, and that information about subsistence patterns and environmental conditions can be recovered from rainforest excavations. Conceptually, too, there is little that is unique to lowland archaeology. The comprehension gap that exists between “lowland” and “highland” specialists seems (to an outsider, at least) to have more to do with personal psychologies that with philosophical incompatibility.

If these assertions are true, it follows that most of the central questions of archaeology are potentially testable against lowland data.

While the preceding statement is true of numerous areas in New World archaeology, the dual problems of low surface visibility and limited accessibility are probably nowhere greater than in the tropical lowlands of South America, particularly Amazonia. These problems, combined with the sheer immensity of the area and small number of archaeologists working there, have led to widely conflicting interpretations of the archaeological record, not to mention opposing reconstructions of macro-regional prehistories (Gibbons 1990; Roosevelt 1991). In spite of these differences, all archaeologists working in this area have had to confront the severe logistical constraints and preservation biases imposed by the humid tropical environment, and in so doing, have been forced to employ “methodologically unlovely techniques” of one kind or another.

My purpose in this chapter is not to enter into this protracted debate on Amazonian prehistory. Instead, I explore certain methodological themes relating to archaeological survey and site discovery in the forested tropics of lowland South America, using as my point of departure Donald Lathrap's seminal article entitled “Aboriginal Occupation and Changes in River Channel on the Central Ucayali, Peru” (1968a).

Prologue

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the 1987 Bennington Conference on Lowland South America, an event that Ken Kensinger has been hosting for a number of years. Don Lathrap was not attending the conference, so I sent him a copy of the paper. A few weeks later, Don mailed the manuscript back, his only comment scrawled across the title page: “I hope you get to Pueblo Viejo, for I have been there.” I never found out what Don meant by this comment. As far as I know, he was never physically present in the Santiago-Cayapas region of northern Esmeraldas Province (Ecuador), much less at Pueblo Viejo, the legendary home of the Chachi. Perhaps Don's message was just one of those simultaneously reprimanding and encouraging prods. Or perhaps Don was speaking in a shamanic voice: “I have taken flight-medicine to Pueblo Viejo.” Maybe it was just some lingering fight with Berkeley where, contra Roosevelt (1989: 58), I completed my graduate training. Who knows?

Anyway, Don, I'm still trying to get to Pueblo Viejo. The following paper falls under the rubric of “ethnohistory,” one of those hybrid terms in which anthropology asserts a cross-disciplinary status. A main issue is the origin of the 3,000 or so Chachi who currently occupy the tropical forest lowlands centering on the Cayapas Basin of the Esmeraldas coast.