Books by Kat Hayes
Now available in paperback
Overview:
Historical archeology studies once relied upon a bina... more Now available in paperback
Overview:
Historical archeology studies once relied upon a binary view of colonialism: colonizers and colonized, the colonial period and the postcolonial period. The international contributors to this volume scrutinize imperialism and expansionism through an alternative lens that looks beyond simple dualities to explore the variously gendered, racialized, and occupied peoples of a multitude of faiths, desires, associations, and constraints. Colonialism is not a phase in the chronology of a people but a continuous phenomenon that spans the Old and New Worlds. Most important, the contributors argue that its impacts--and, in some instances, even the same processes set in place by the likes of Columbus--are ongoing.
Inciting a critical study of the lasting consequences of ancient and modern colonialism on descendant communities, this wide-ranging volume includes essays on Roman Britain, slavery in Brazil, and contemporary Native Americans. In its efforts to define the scope of colonialism and the comparability of its features, this collection challenges the field to go beyond familiar geographical and historical boundaries and draws attention to unfolding colonial futures.
Slavery Before Race: Europeans, Africans and Indians at Long Island's Sylvester Manor Plantation, 1651-1884
Chapters by Kat Hayes
The Sound of Silence: Indigenous Perspectives on Historical Archaeology of Colonialism (editors Tiina Äikäs and Anna-Kaisa Salmi), 2019
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and... more All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.
Small Beginnings: Experimental Technologies and Implications for Hybridity
In The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture, Jeb J. Card (ed.), Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper No. 39, pp. 425-448. Southern Illinois University., 2013
Indigeneity and Diaspora – Colonialism and the Classification of Displacement. (In Rethinking Colonialism, Cipolla and Hayes (eds), University Press of Florida, 2015)
The terms of indigeneity and diaspora are fixtures in scholarly discussion of colonialism, referr... more The terms of indigeneity and diaspora are fixtures in scholarly discussion of colonialism, referring to different sets of relations between “homeland” and identity challenged by colonization. The two sets of concepts might also be thought of as maintaining incommensurate statuses for American Indians and African Americans, implying radically different historical experiences. This distinction unfortunately contributes to unhelpful disciplinary and racial distinctions. In this chapter I explore the potentials and problems in extending the concept of diaspora to understanding the experience of indigenous people, and vice versa, including the contemporary political consequences of these terms. I draw upon examples from Native North American communities of mixed and/or displaced ancestry, responding to the processes of European colonization. How do comparative cases broaden our conceptual framework for these classifications? And what are the implications for archaeological practice and interpretations when confronted with communities which do not neatly fit these categories?
Twenty years ago, the Columbian quincentenary inspired archaeologists to initiate conversations a... more Twenty years ago, the Columbian quincentenary inspired archaeologists to initiate conversations and debates about colonialism that extended well beyond Columbus specifically and modern European expansion in general. These conversations were particularly poignant and fraught among archaeologists in the Americas. Not only did they touch upon the raw nerve of the newly passed Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), they also brought attention to the gaping ontological and epistemological divides in our discipline over temporality and subjectivity. In the years that followed, we turned more attention to the question of colonialism and have found not one but many processes and historical outcomes and found not two categories of people involved (colonizer and colonized) but a vast plurality of variously gendered, racialized, aged, and occupied peoples of a multitude of faiths, desires, associations, and constraints. Perhaps one of the most important lessons learned in these investigations is that colonialism is not a phenomenon of limited historical duration, a phase or era in our chronology, but is ongoing. This we learn when we try to identify a finite end point of the process and do not find it and especially so when we learn from contemporary descendant communities. The impacts of colonialism, if not in some instances the same processes set in place by the likes of Columbus, are ongoing.
Journal Articles by Kat Hayes
The Carceral Side of Freedom
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2019
When nationalistic narratives implore citizens to recall progressive values in their history, as ... more When nationalistic narratives implore citizens to recall progressive values in their history, as some American politicians have in the recent past, do we also remember the cost, and those at whose expense those values are gained? The historic site of Fort Snelling in Minnesota (USA) has been reconstructed and interpreted as a frontier fort, opening the west to settlers. Yet the site also has witnessed the failed promises to Native peoples, the ambivalent status of enslaved African Americans in non-slavery territories, and the struggles to belong by Japanese American soldiers whose rights as citizens had been abrogated. In this article I outline the challenges in remembering and acknowledging difficult aspects of history at this public heritage site which are often grounded in structures of whiteness. But I also consider the potentials
for recognition, and perhaps healing and coalition-building, by shifting
focus to the landscape and materiality of a carceral state.
The Historical Archaeology of Sylvester Manor (Hayes and Mrozowski, eds.)
Northeast Historical Archaeology, vol. 36(1), 2007
In this paper I argue that we should attend to why and how forgetting happens in concert with the... more In this paper I argue that we should attend to why and how forgetting happens in concert with the construction of social memory, history, identity and heritage. Through a focus on processes of forgetting, this discussion offers a new set of interpretations of early colonial Sylvester Manor, a 17th-century plantation site in coastal New York. More specifically, the construction of racial categories over several centuries implicates social memory and forgetting, and introduces issues to the manner in which we remember the site where people of European, African and Native American ancestry met. This analysis views memory and forgetting not only as historical vectors in racialization, but also as factors in current identity politics.
Parameters in the Use of pXRF for Archaeological Site Prospection: A Case Study at the Reaume Fort Site, Central Minnesota
Journal of Archaeological Science 40: 3193-3211, Aug 2013
Papers by Kat Hayes
Small beginnings: Experimental technologies and implications for hybridity
Indigeneity and Diaspora: Colonialism and the Classification of Displacement
Society for Historical Archaeology, 2013
Epistemic Colonialism: Is it Possible to Decolonize Archaeology?
American Indian Quarterly, 2020
In the fourteen years since the publication of Sonya Atalay’s groundbreaking special issue of Ame... more In the fourteen years since the publication of Sonya Atalay’s groundbreaking special issue of American Indian Quarterly, “Decolonizing Archaeology” (2006)— and the call for a more equitable and ethical, or decolonized, archaeology— we raise the question: Is it possible to decolonize archaeology? Of late, archaeologies of colonialism seek to counteract Western views of the plight of Indigenous populations and the systematic erasure of peoples, sites, and cultures from the land, from public memory, and the conventional writing of history. For archaeologists, countering narratives of Indigenous loss or absence requires gathering evidence—excavation in the soil and archives— to demonstrate resiliency, even as many present- day Indigenous communities doubt the very premise of that loss and the idea that their histories and cultures are missing or obscured. In this article, we acknowledge the colonial nature of evidence (epistemology) in archaeology. Introducing this special issue, we consider how archaeology has performed as a structure of settler colonialism, and how a close engagement with critical Indigenous theory can reorient us. We argue that a more equitable form of practice is evolving, but that decolonizing archaeology will require a kind of “undisciplining,” changing larger institutional structures in universities and heritage protection law. We thus consider the potentials or impossibilities for decolonizing archaeology by centering our questions in the scholarship on settler colonial studies and critical Indigenous theory.
Rethinking Colonialism, 2015
Colonialism involves the acquisition of full or partial control over another country, occupying i... more Colonialism involves the acquisition of full or partial control over another country, occupying it with settlers and exploiting it financially. The edited volume Rethinking Colonialism: Comparative Archaeological Approaches provides a series of essays that bring together spatially and temporally disparate narratives to examine colonialism and its impacts on communities in the past and present. The editors repeatedly emphasize two key components of colonialism: it is both highly variable and also an ongoing phenomenon. The latter of these points is at odds with the opinion of many, who view colonialism as a historical concept that plays no role in modern life. This narrow perspective fails to recognize that many of the colonized and their descendants still live with the effects of colonialism. Craig N. Cipolla and Katherine Howlett Hayes have brought together an edited volume that uses the lens of comparative colonialism to examine both its historical and modern responses. A comparative approach is useful for drawing together generalizable concepts including the imposition or resistance to colonial power, and also assessing if there are common outcomes. The crosscutting perspective allows for critical consideration of ideas and concepts associated with colonialism. It creates a space that indicates that there is much variety in the experiences of people on both sides of colonialism and these people and experiences are "variously gendered, racialized, aged, and occupied peoples of a multitude of faiths, desires, associations, and constraints" (Hayes and Cipolla 2015:1). In this review, several of the chapters are highlighted to indicate key ideas. The stated goals of the volume are to make use of critical comparative perspectives related to the processes of colonialism, and to examine the impact of those processes on contemporary communities. Hayes and Cipolla note the importance of considering that scalar tensions, such as "the specific versus the general, the historical versus the anthropological, and the broadly drawn perspective on human history versus the local and individual experiences, help identify common concepts and categories of colonialism, and that these tensions can also be used to deconstruct those" (Hayes and Cipolla:3). The editors call for and achieve a balanced approach that recognizes the variation amongst the experiences of both the colonizers and the colonized. Most of the works within the volume meet or make a serious effort to meet the goals put forth. Cipolla (Ch. 2), in his stand-alone chapter describes work related to the Brothertown Indians of New York and Wisconsin and the Eastern Pequot of Connecticut and the shift in architectural, material, and commemorative practices of these groups in response to
Slavery Before Race: Europeans, Africans, and Indians at Long Island’s Sylvester Manor Plantation, 1651–1884 by Katherine Howlett Hayes
Journal of the Early Republic, 2014
Slavery Before Race: Europeans, Africans, and Indians at Long Island's Sylvester Manor Planta... more Slavery Before Race: Europeans, Africans, and Indians at Long Island's Sylvester Manor Plantation, 1651-1884. By Katherine Howlett Hayes. (New York: New York University Press, 2013. Pp. 240. Cloth, $30.00.)Reviewed by Gloria McCahon WhitingIn 1652, Nathaniel Sylvester left England for Shelter Island, an 8,000acre land mass on the eastern end of Long Island. The merchant soon presided over a bustling plantation. Built to provision sugar plantations in Barbados, Sylvester Manor became New York's largest slaveholding and perhaps its most diverse: Nearly two dozen bound Africans labored alongside local Algonquians and indentured Europeans on the property. Together they tended crops, pressed apples into cider, and slaughtered livestock to ship into the Atlantic. The heterogeneity of the manor's early labor force would have been unmistakable to seventeenth-century observers, but Sylvester's descendants would later misremember the plantation's past, flattening the island's complex history of slavery and race into a story of liberty that separated the Manor's Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans both temporally and spatially. In this compelling work of historical archaeology, Katherine Howlett Hayes takes a twofold approach to understanding the Manor's past: First she reconstructs the early plantation community through extensive use of archaeological evidence, and then she traces the process of remembering (and forgetting) that so distorted the plantation's history in the nineteenth century.Hayes begins by navigating the historical processes that brought the Manor's sundry inhabitants to Shelter Island. She discusses Algonquian life prior to European settlement, Dutch and British colonialism in New York, and the consequences of disease and war on the region's inhabitants. The book's most valuable findings surface in the third and fourth chapters, which focus on the early plantation community. Here Hayes makes meaning of all manner of material evidence: fragments of maize kernels; bits of plaster; waste from fish processing; shards of ceramic; deposits of crushed shell; patterns of micro-flaking on flint cores. These remains reveal what written records do not: that the local Algonquians (known as the Manhanset) stayed on Shelter Island after Sylvester's arrival and participated extensively in plantation labor. Evidence of Manhanset expertise at Sylvester Manor is ubiquitous. Early buildings were assembled using Native construction practices rather than common colonial ones; pottery was produced by hand and decorated with emblematic Algonquian motifs; stones were knapped into usable flakes. Hayes's discussions of local ceramic and lithic production are particularly noteworthy, as they link Native technologies to African practice. Assembling evidence related to the composition and firing methods of ceramic shards as well as the heat treatment and micro-flaking of flint cores, Hayes argues that Africans did not simply reproduce Algonquian production processes. Instead they innovated, contributing their skill and experience to local ceramic and tool manufacture.Africans and the Manhanset labored side by side in very close proximity to the manor's Europeans. Archaeological evidence locates the work yard immediately adjacent to what seems to have been the original Sylvester residence. However, the intimacy with which Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans interacted did not linger long in historical memory. By the late nineteenth century, Sylvester's descendants-who still lived on the estate-had fashioned their own version of the manor's history by erecting monuments that memorialized Africans, Algonquians, and Europeans separately, as if to suggest that each group had "minimal to no interaction with [the others], by reason of time, race, and social standing" (161). …
Parameters in the use of pXRF for archaeological site prospection: a case study at the Reaume Fort Site, Central Minnesota
Journal of Archaeological Science, 2013
Abstract Field portable/hand-held x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) analyzers have been characterized as ... more Abstract Field portable/hand-held x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) analyzers have been characterized as potentially useful for archaeological site prospection, but little has been published on the parameters of their use in this manner. The purpose of this study is to explore whether the variability of surface geochemistry as characterized with a pXRF analyzer corresponds with subsurface archaeological features at a site subsequently excavated, and what conditions influence the success of this endeavor, including feature depths, soil moisture, and sample processing. A 520 m 2 within-site area was systematically surveyed on a 2 m interval, within which several types of archaeological features were excavated (chimney bases, wall trenches, and a bonebed of faunal waste), taking readings in situ and collecting samples for ex situ testing (undried, dried but not powdered, and dried/powdered). The four different tests of each grid location, analyzed through univariate and multivariate tests, showed that the pXRF surface data does correspond with some types of subsurface features when those features are very shallow (within 5 cm of surface level) and are associated with clayey fills. Further, the data from the subsurface samples provides excellent distinction of feature fills from other sediments, regardless of sample preparation. In situ surface survey with pXRF analyzers may however be adequate for sites with a thorough baseline geochemical database.
Archaeological Dialogues, 2011
In this paper I argue that we should attend to why and how forgetting happens in concert with the... more In this paper I argue that we should attend to why and how forgetting happens in concert with the construction of social memory, history, identity and heritage. Through a focus on processes of forgetting, this discussion offers a new set of interpretations of early colonial Sylvester Manor, a 17th-century plantation site in coastal New York. More specifically, the construction of racial categories over several centuries implicates social memory and forgetting, and introduces issues to the manner in which we remember the site where people of European, African and Native American ancestry met. This analysis views memory and forgetting not only as historical vectors in racialization, but also as factors in current identity politics.
The carceral side of freedom
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2018
ABSTRACT When nationalistic narratives implore citizens to recall progressive values in their his... more ABSTRACT When nationalistic narratives implore citizens to recall progressive values in their history, as some American politicians have in the recent past, do we also remember the cost, and those at whose expense those values are gained? The historic site of Fort Snelling in Minnesota (USA) has been reconstructed and interpreted as a frontier fort, opening the west to settlers. Yet the site also has witnessed the failed promises to Native peoples, the ambivalent status of enslaved African Americans in non-slavery territories, and the struggles to belong by Japanese American soldiers whose rights as citizens had been abrogated. In this article I outline the challenges in remembering and acknowledging difficult aspects of history at this public heritage site which are often grounded in structures of whiteness. But I also consider the potentials for recognition, and perhaps healing and coalition-building, by shifting focus to the landscape and materiality of a carceral state.
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Books by Kat Hayes
Overview:
Historical archeology studies once relied upon a binary view of colonialism: colonizers and colonized, the colonial period and the postcolonial period. The international contributors to this volume scrutinize imperialism and expansionism through an alternative lens that looks beyond simple dualities to explore the variously gendered, racialized, and occupied peoples of a multitude of faiths, desires, associations, and constraints. Colonialism is not a phase in the chronology of a people but a continuous phenomenon that spans the Old and New Worlds. Most important, the contributors argue that its impacts--and, in some instances, even the same processes set in place by the likes of Columbus--are ongoing.
Inciting a critical study of the lasting consequences of ancient and modern colonialism on descendant communities, this wide-ranging volume includes essays on Roman Britain, slavery in Brazil, and contemporary Native Americans. In its efforts to define the scope of colonialism and the comparability of its features, this collection challenges the field to go beyond familiar geographical and historical boundaries and draws attention to unfolding colonial futures.
Chapters by Kat Hayes
Journal Articles by Kat Hayes
for recognition, and perhaps healing and coalition-building, by shifting
focus to the landscape and materiality of a carceral state.
Papers by Kat Hayes