Archaeology and Native North American Oral Traditions

Abstract

Archaeologists today are being urged from within and outside their profession to incorporate aboriginal oral traditions in reconstructing culture histories. Such challenges usually ignore or at least drastically underestimate the difficulties in doing so. Not least among those difficulties is that of attempting to reconcile inherently and profoundly different ways of conceptualizing the past without violating the integrity of one or the other or both. The pro and con arguments are examined theoretically and as actually employed in discrete instances. These raise such problems of incommensurability as to severely limit the fruitfulness and even desirability of making the attempt.