The Keam Sherds in the Museum

Figure 1:Four pottery sherds 1922.35.118 – 1922.35.121 (front)

To many museum visitors and researchers alike, ancient pottery sherds may not inspire any meaningful insight into contemporary Indigenous culture and communities. Historically, these sorts of archaeological specimens have been considered ‘common objects’ and are abundant in institutional collections across the globe. However, researching closely with this set of pottery sherds reveals a concealed cosmology of thought and identity from the desert region of the American Southwest. 

A set of four pottery sherds, described in the museum database simply as ‘4 sherds, possibly Mesa Verde grey ware of the Four Corners region’, Arizona, Southwestern USA. Whilst their age and broad location indicates they are fragments of clay pottery made by the ancestral Puebloans (AD 100 – 1600), their status as objects of cultural importance and institutional interest far exceeds their material property. The intention of this blog post is to consider the Keam sherds in the wider context of their biographical history, their diverse and often divisive affordances both within the museum and outside of it, and the potential for decolonial thinking in partnership with them. 

Figure 2: Four pottery sherds 1922.35.118 – 1922.35.121 (back)

The sherds arrived in the Pitt Rivers in 1922, sent by Walter Hough, the head curator of the Smithsonian Museum, to the Pitt Rivers’ first curator, Henry Balfour. Six other objects acquired in this same donation are currently on display in the Pottery – North America case (c.153.A) on the ground floor of the Pitt Rivers Museum. This includes an ‘ancient’ pottery ladle from Keams Canyon (1922.35.1), three small ‘ancient’ pottery bowls from an unspecified area of Arizona (1922.35.2), (1922.35.4), (1922.35.8). An ‘ancient’ ceramic jug from a similarly unspecified area of Arizona (1922.35.6), and a ‘modern’ pottery jar from either the Walpi or Owachomo Pueblo Village (1922.35.3). 

Inscribed prominently onto the sherds are the words ‘Keams Canyon’, giving some insight into their location of origin. Somewhat misleadingly, Keams Canyon refers not to a canyon itself, but an area of land settled and homesteaded by the Keam family on the modern-day Hopi Nation, in the North-East of Arizona. An array of notable archaeologists and ethnologists collected at Keams Canyon, including Cosmos and Victor Mindeleff in 1882 on behalf of the Bureau of Ethnology, as well as James and Matilda Coxe Stevenson who worked in the area beginning 1879. Thomas Keam himself also sold objects to the Smithsonian , the Peabody Museum, and many other museums within America.   

Figure 3: Smithsonian Accession records containing mention of ‘fragments of pottery (mixed)’ obtained from ’12 miles north of Keams Canyon’ by James Steveson in 1885. 

Whilst thousands of sherds are recorded as being collected by different archaeologists and ethnologists in the area, it is impossible to discern who is indeed responsible for the collection of the Keam sherds. There is also the possibility that the Keam sherds were not collected by Keam or any of the collectors visiting the site, but by the mostly unnamed Indigenous people who guided and aided ethnologists and archaeologists in the Americas. This history is complicated and tied to a frenzy of ethnographic collecting which occurred throughout the 17th and 18th Century, through which many objects found themselves in the Pitt Rivers Museum. 

Figure 4: Local Navajo men assisting Walter Hough’s team of archaeologists in an excavation at the Jettyo Valley.  

Source: Hough, W. (1903) Archaeological field work in northeastern Arizona. The Museum-Gates Expedition of 1901: Govt. print. off. p.252 

Whilst these collaborations in collecting may appear positive, it is important to remember that the unequal power relations which occur under colonialism require this history to be viewed critically. In a report on the 1901 Museum-Gates Expedition in the region of Keams Canyon, Walter Hough writes: 

‘Lack of water, however, has not prevented the Navaho tearing the Jettyto ruins to pieces in search of pottery for the trader [Thomas Keam]’. 

This image of the looting of an ancestral landscape by Indigenous people is difficult, but such histories are part of the very fabric of ethnographic collecting and its deep ties to colonial regimes. To this day, Indigenous people continue to have little control over how their material culture is displayed and talked about in museums. Beyond the many possibilities behind the collection of the Keam sherds, it is important to remember that the contemporary Indigenous people of the region may challenge the legitimacy of all collecting done under the unequal power relations of colonialism. 

Figure 5. A photograph of the inside of the Trading Post at Keams Canyon, taken late 19th Century and recovered from a box of mixed prints in the British Museum archive.  

Photograph provided by The Trustees of the British Museum, available at: https: ://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/EA_Am-B34-15 © The Trustees of the British Museum.  

The influence of archaeology on anthropological thinking is highly visible within the Pitt Rivers Museum, an overlap of a historical field often described as ‘ethnoarchaeology’. The collection of Hough’s pottery which is displayed in the North America Pottery case is a product of much of this so called ethnoarchaeological thinking which combined anthropological ideas about societies with archaeological ideas about the deep past. When the potsherds are described in terms of ‘specimen’, these ideas are imposed onto them, and they come to represent ethnoarchaeological ideas about American antiquity and historic academic beliefs about the so-called ‘development’ of Native American society. 

Today, the Pitt Rivers acknowledges that the language of labels which appear in the collection may not appropriately or accurately reflect the knowledge that source communities themselves hold about these objects. Instead, what these labels often reflect is historic academic attitudes and academic ideas that harmfully, and occasionally intentionally, contradict with Indigenous understandings of self and history. 

The cultural significance of pottery within the landscape will be visible to anyone who has visited Tribal lands in the Southwest, where potsherds are intentionally and consciously left upon the ground; occasionally grouped together to be viewed, but firmly within the land. Indigenous voices in the American Southwest advocate strongly for the protection of this material, and the important role of ancestral material culture within the landscape. 

‘Those artifacts represent more than just remnants: so much labor mixed with the surroundings by the ancestors of the indigenous inhabitants’ Kimball Bighorse (Navajo/Cayuga). 

For many Indigenous people living in the region, knowledge and memory of their ancestors is preserved within the landscape and the artefacts left there by their ancestors, who are known as Histat’sinom (people of long ago), in the Hopi language. 

 

‘Protection of the landscape allows us to share with the outside world that we are more than historical footnotes, to show that our connections to the ancestral land traverse distance and time’ Lyle Balenquah (Hopi). 

To Indigenous societies of the region, ancestral objects are valued for the connection they can provide to the ancestors, and the removal of these objects presents a serious violation of that relationship. The removal of the Keam sherds and the lack of information recorded about their biographic history is therefore frustrating in many ways. The Keam sherds are a small representation of many objects within the Pitt Rivers Museum which are characterized institutionally by an absence of records, and they remind us that colonial violence presents itself in different forms. Within the Pitt Rivers Museum, the reminders of colonial violence can be seen in blatant ways, such as the burn marks on the rear of an Ivory Tusk from the Kingdom of Benin, but they can also reveal themselves in these vast absences and silences. 

The task of giving voice to the Keam sherds is an almost paradoxical one of applying restitution to an object that has become ‘lost’ whilst we are able to hold it in our hands. The locality of these ancestral objects is deeply important to Indigenous people for whom they afford an irreplaceable connection to the ancestors. The violation of this relationship through collecting is therefore a harm caused by the collectors.  

Perhaps a hopeful outlook is to consider how the Keam sherds can continue to be teaching objects as they were in their homeland by inviting us to look differently at the space of the museum. The Keam sherds expose how violence against Indigenous people is not always obvious physical violence and can instead take the form of the erasure of Indigenous knowledge and the removal of sacred objects. It is this sort of violence that remains the most sustained within institutions like the Pitt Rivers, making the Keam sherds not just evidence of a violent history but witness to an ongoing one.  

The Keam sherds also remind us that some wounds cannot be fully healed, and decolonisation is not a process of total reversal. Perhaps it is better to suggest that the Keam sherds encourage us to sit with discomfort and to take seriously the harm done by museum institutions. Afterall, to acknowledge and to frustrate over these impossibilities is to share- in small part- in the Indigenous experience itself. With this acknowledged, there is optimism that the Keam sherds may now inform people about the many different ways of knowing and being experienced by people in the world. With the Keam Sherds this should perhaps best begin with how Indigenous people of the Southwest show reverence to ancestral objects: in the presence of great forces of ancestors is the invitation to sit quietly and to think. 

By Olly DeHerrera

Graduate of Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology at the University of Oxford.

Further reading: 

 

Colwell, C. (John S. (2010) Living histories : Native American issues and Southwestern archaeology. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press. 

 

Hicks, D. & Stevenson, Alice. (2013) World archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum : a characterization. Oxford: Archaeopress. 

Keeler, J. (ed.) (2017) Edge of morning : native voices speak for the Bears Ears. First Torrey House Press edition. Salt Lake City, Utah: Torrey House Press. 

 

Peers, L. & Brown, A. K. (2015) Visiting with the ancestors: Blackfoot shirts in museum spaces. Edmonton, Alberta: Athabasca University Press.