Re: Early Amerind assimilation (Was: Re: Romans in the New World?)
Matt Silberstein (matts2@ix.netcom.com)
Tue, 30 Jul 1996 06:15:04 GMT
mbwillia@ix.netcom.com(Mary Beth Williams) wrote:
>First of all, the term *Amerind* is highly offensive to most Indians,
>myself included, so if I'm going to continue to participate in this
>thread, a more appropriate term must be used.
I don't particularly like the term Native American, but that is the
prefered term, correct? (No, I don't have a term I like better. What I
would like to refer to tribes by name, but that does not make sense
either.)
Anyway,
[snip]
>Europeans, particularly the English, had very strict constructs of
>*racial identity*, and so most *racial mingling* was most likely to
>occur among the *outlivers*, Europeans who lived on the fringes of
>Euro-American society. Most Early Colonial archaeologists that I've
>run across are more interested in *traditional* Euro-American culture,
>and thus, until the lifeways of *outlivers* are more fully understood,
>exploring how such lifeways were altered by contact with Indians cannot
>be properly conducted.
I suspect that, if we could get the information, the study of the
*outlivers* would be rewarding. The lives of those on the edge of a
society tell very much about the society as it is, rather than how it
views itself.
>>Hyperdiffusion is very bad, of course. But two-way diffusion
>>at a real social frontier is to be expected.
>Why? (And was the American East Coast a *social frontier*, or a point
>of aggressive invasion?)
I would expect diffusion across a frontier because there would be actual
contact between groups. And why the "or". It was both a frontier and a
line of invasion.
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