Kendall Lovely, University of California, Santa Barbara
Coloniality is a key part of constituting classicism, as it defines civilization through its literal and conceptual border-making. I approach this border-making through the influence of the Classical Tradition in its in its simultaneous construction and perpetuation alongside the development of American archeology, where I center the interests of classically-trained early anthropologists in New Mexico and surrounding regions. Perhaps better known for his impact on the field of anthropology, and cultural evolution within it, through his studies of the Iroquois Confederacy, Lewis Henry Morgan also played a formative role in colonial exploratory interests in the American Southwest. Previous scholarship by Classicists has focused on the impact of Classics in his Ancient Society (1877), and more broad ranging comparative work, and already draw on the relationship between classicism and ideas of cultural evolution (Varto 2018, Kennedy 2018). I focus here on his later publications that interface Central America and the American Southwest that were juxtaposed with Greek and Roman archeology through the first report of the American Archeological Institute of America. In his 1878 “Journal of a Trip to Southwestern Colorado and New Mexico” and preceding “Seven Cities of Cibola” (1869), Morgan asserts considerations of New Mexico’s San Juan River Valley and the greater Chaco area as the origin site for corn and particular forms of building, and thus ancient American civilization, reading Aztlan and the mythological cities of Cibola with Spanish and Mexican presence, over the presence of the Apache, Diné, and Pueblo Indians of the region. These also figure into another level of mapping in line with the AIA’s goal to both “quicken the interest in classical and Biblical studies, [and] to promote an acquaintance with the antiquities of our own country” (1880, 8).
Where Morgan draws from the prevalent 19th-century language of “ancient” and “ruins” when discussing still-living sites and people, he participates in a co-constructed discourse between Classical Studies and American anthropology that maps civitas based on settler and imperial observations. Through consideration of civitas (perhaps after Cicero) and arts (with Horace’s conception of ars apparent), Morgan imposed his education in reading Classical authors over Indigenous knowledge and kinship. “Classical” refers to works that represent an ideal of a constructed European-derived civilization, stemming from this tradition, while the assertion of these categorical boundaries comprising Morgan’s stages of civilization persist in the preservation of the past globally. The imposition of these terms related to ruins and antiquity constitutes colonial dispossession, but the latter part of my paper will shift toward visions of Indigenous futurity that realign the ongoing presence of Indigenous people, deemed mere ancient but unknowing vestiges in the lead up to the inaugural AIA report, and their reassertions of relationships to their ancestors. Following scholarship that centers Indigenous feminist practices of (re)mapping and visiting (Goeman 2013; Tuck et. al. 2022), this paper overall asserts the importance of methodologies in ethical care against the colonial abandonment of Indigenous peoples to static stages of antiquity.