Indigenous People have been here forever Why won't archelogists belive it?
Crawford Kilian is one of the best journalists in Canada, in some ways in a league by himself, so whenever he writes something, it is a worthwhile read. And as usual he doesn't disappoint.
I have always been disappointed with the academic focus on migration explanations in their archeology studies and to me, there seems some subconscious racist imperative to prove that no people were ever originally the occupants of any lands that the colonizers took over and settled with their own people. This migration/nomadic life of Indigenous peoples playbook was hugely popular in supporting Apartheid South Africa. The Dutch and English had every right to place a stake there since there were only transient, roaming tribes of people who had never settled in one place or another. Knowing how horribly wrong that perspective is doesn't erase that subconsious bias.
I've come to attribute this to an intersection of colonialist racism and intellectual laziness. I think archeologists just looked at a map, deduced that the Bering straight was likely passable, and figured well ok, that's that, now lets get back to ancient Mediterranian / mid east cultures where all the archeological fun is at. As a youth I wanted to be an archeologist, and the focus was definitely the romanticised world of Pharoes and the ancients of classical antiquity. Perhaps except for a few outliers, pre Columbian archeology wasn't a popular field because no one gave a damn enough to look at all the inconsistencies in the Bering straight theory orthodoxy.
Can't genetics be used to help figure these things out?
Can't genetics be used to help figure these things out?
There are those here who can speak to this with more authority than I. but I understand this to be a bit of a loaded issue with a lot of historical baggage.
And why would you go that route, JKR? That is another attempt to dismiss peoples' histories.
I thought human and biological migration patterns are also an archeological and scientific question? I think many archeologists are Indigenous and they support archeological science. I think it's an insult to say Indigenous history is not evidence based and is opposed to the scientific method. History is also a science based field.
First of all, I am not dismissing any Indigenous archeologists or any other Indigenous scientists but from what I have read or heard on interviews ("Quirks and Quarks", "Sparks", "Unreserved", etc), they certainly have a more respectful approach to dealing with the history and knowledge of their peoples. As for history being a science-based field, I would say it falls in the same realm as philosophy and is heavily prone to bias.
Even though humans are prone to being biased, can humans exist without fields of study like archeology, history and philosophy? I think dealing with bias and mitigating against it is part of our pursuit for "knowledge" and "truth." I think differentiating between different fields like archeology, history, philosophy, psychology, and even physics, and math are ultimately artificial divisions and constructs.
I'm trying to understand what this article is really arguing.
Both they and their lands transformed one another thousands of years before the Europeans belatedly stumbled in. In that sense, they have indeed been here “forever.”
That's just incorrect. The author tries to redefine the definition of forever.
The rest of the article, are they just arguing about how long ago people initially inhabited the Americas? It seems like there is some kind of white-people/racist undertone but the debate on when humans first came to the Americas has been debated for a very long time.