I recently returned from a trip to Italy, France and Spain. On this trip, as on other visits to Europe, I found myself charmed and intrigued by the antiquity of the places we visited. However, while I appreciate that antiquity, I struggle a bit when I try to figure out how to think about it and write about it.
What I respond to so strongly are the narrow streets and old buildings, buildings that were ancient when our country was founded 250 years ago. In the face of that, I often find myself thinking about the contrast between the so-called old and new worlds, the oldness of Europe and the newness of the United States.
It is an easy contrast to draw, especially when I am standing in front of a building such as the cathedral in Pisa, Italy, which was completed before 1100. My first impulse is to regard such a building as unfathomably old and totally unlike anything to be found over here.
But there were people in New Hampshire before 1100. There were people in New Hampshire 5,000 years ago. There were people in New Hampshire more than 10,000 years ago. Human history goes way back in Europe, but it goes way back here, too, and that’s important for me to bear in mind when I walk around Europe and marvel at all the history there.
Simply stated, I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking of Europe as the old world and the Americas as the new world. The Americas may have been new to Europeans in the 1490s, or the 990s, but this land was not new to the people who had lived here for 30,000 years or more when Christopher Columbus, or Leif Erikson, first landed. According to archaeologists, people lived in Europe long before people arrived in the Americas, but still, from the standpoint of human history, North America was an old world in 1492, not a new one.
So, I am no big fan of the idea that America is the new world. It’s misleading, and it helps hide the fact that people lived here for tens of thousands of years before Europeans “discovered” America. But is there more to it than that? I think so.
Shortly after they arrived, the first European visitors to America discovered that America had native inhabitants. And by the nineteenth century, if not a bit earlier, it became apparent, through archaeology, that the native presence here wasn’t all that new. So, what to do with the archaeological evidence of pre-contact human history in America? Here’s where things get interesting.
As every archaeologist knows, once you dig things up, you have to put them somewhere. For many decades, the school solution to the storage, study, and exhibition of the artifacts of Native American history was to put those artifacts, and human remains, in natural history museums, along with butterfly collections and mastodon skeletons.
That practice, in turn, supported the false narrative that history in the Americas only began when “we,” that is to say Europeans, got here, a narrative that at the same time treats native inhabitants as “them,” and as standing outside of history and apart from humanity. This is, of course, very much in keeping with the scientific thinking of the nineteenth century, which placed all human societies on a ladder with Europeans on the top rung and people of color on various lower rungs.
The difference between Europe and the United States is not that Europe is the old world and the United States is a new one. Rather, the difference is that many Europeans feel a connection between themselves and thousands of years of history in their own back yards, while most Americans feel a connection to local history that goes back only a couple of hundred years, with the time before that being the story of “them,” native people who just vanished and whose cultures have become fair game for insensitive caricature and stereotypes.
But there are some hopeful signs of change. Among those signs is the ever-increasing appearance of land acknowledgments, such as the one that has opened the last several Hopkinton town meetings. Acknowledging the Abenaki presence on the land we now call Hopkinton does two things.
First, it helps erase the myth that Europeans arrived in North America and settled land that was uninhabited.
Second, acknowledging Abenaki history at least implies a contemporary Abenaki presence in New Hampshire, which opens the door for conversations between descendants of New Hampshire’s first inhabitants — some of whom are my neighbors — and descendants of people who came later. Such conversations have the potential to help remind native people and non-native people of their shared humanity, which is a step toward creating a “we” that includes both native people and non-native people.
Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dogwalker who lives and works in Contoocook.