There are a couple of different things to wonder about: the questions to ask and the sources of data to consider. Two big questions to ask would be first of all: what were the gender relations or, even more generally, what were lives of men and lives of women like in different places just before contact with Europeans? And then the second question that grows out of that is: how did this organization of men's lives and women's lives affect the contact experience? Obviously it doesn't affect the contact experience by itself; it affects the contact experience in relationship to things like the different cultures and situations of the Europeans. Are they Russians, are they Spanish, are they English, are they agricultural settlers, are they militaristic adventurers, whatever? The environmental situation is going to have an impact. The other social issues such as hierarchical or not hierarchical societies is going to have an impact as well. And roles and status of men and women are simply another area to enrich our understanding of this process.

Sources of data are at least three and they all have strengths and they all have problems. (1) Archaeology, of course, including such things as paleodemography, paleopathology of skeletal remains, mortuary practices, evidence about production and so forth. (2) The ethnohistoric documents. They have a whole range of biases that we all know about. Sometimes you don't always know how to work around them. You don't want to throw those documents out but you do have to deal with the biases. (3) And then in some places as well, we have more recent ethnography as a third source of information or data. Again, cultures have changed more or less and in different ways, but again you don't want to throw these sources out even though they aren't perfect information. There is no perfect information. We have some nice contrasts today, because we have people who work in the southeast, someone who works in the upper midwest and with the Chumash in California.

For those of us who work in the southeast, one issue, (although a lot of people told me it wasn't as important as I thought it was) is that we know that many of these societies were matrilineal. We know the Spanish were not matrilineal, probably didn't understand it: what role does that have to play? One other thing that we got into was the issue of the impact of disease. We know it was there but how did it work? Did it have the impact we've all assumed or is it more variable and, then, what impact does that have on these men's lives and women's lives, both the actual disease process and introduced domination by an outside culture? Do women's lives, perhaps on a daily basis, change less than men's lives? Does that lead to, I don't know, better mental health and therefore they survived better? There are a whole bunch of possible questions there.

I want to recommend this book First Contact by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, Penguin Books, New York 1988, taken from the movie First Contact, a wonderful book about first contact in the highlands of New Guinea with EuroAustralians who had a movie camera, about 1930, and took movies of the people as they walked into the villages. These people were seeing white people for the first time. Amazing, amazing documentation of that contact experience. And for the tape I have to read this quote again. For the first days and weeks the local people of the New Guinea highlands kept thinking, these folks are gods or their ancestors or they're sky people until the inevitable happened and two women, as you might expect, get involved sexually; they say they are given by their brothers to two of the interlopers. And they say the first thing they thought was: "we thought, 'they are going to eat us'. But they didn't, in fact they were very kind to us" (Connolly and Anderson 1988:140). And then the next one says laughing, "we had sex together and then we knew they were men". They weren't sky people, they weren't ghosts, they weren't ancestors, they were just men. As I said earlier, a wonderful commentary on learning the truth about these new intruders. And who might have known first.

LS: I remember for the movie, didn't they say some of the men used to hide out and watch them. They said they wore trousers and that's why they thought they didn't have any genitals. And then they saw them, I think excrete was the word they used. Once they saw that, they walked over after they had left and they looked at it and they said, oh boy, okay, I know they're just like me. It's a great movie.

CC: At the Northeastern Archaeological conference in 1981, a woman who's name I don't now remember gave a paper about disease vectors in the northeast. In the extreme northeast, Ontario, you get epidemics about a hundred years later than you get epidemics in the southeast or in Mexico. Her solution for that difference in timing was the role of women in contact. In Mesoamerica you've got an army contacting a residential population and the rape that's associated. And so, because the contact was sexual, the disease vector was very quick and very thorough, preceding the Spanish. Whereas there was about a 125 year lag between European contact and the first epidemics in Newfoundland and Labrador. The contact situation was there fishermen who only came on land when they were getting ready to return to Europe, to take on water and salt fish. So the people they met with, the native population they met with, were parties usually that had been watching them or seeing them that had come specifically to meet them when they came on the land. It was all male contact and fairly short, maybe over the space of several days, probably without sexual contact. And the first epidemic then is when you actually are getting a colonizing situation in the northeast. You get again the sexual intercourse being the vector in the communities of people conglomerating.

AK: We've been keeping on that question of disease in the northeast. One explanation put forth was, one difference is that the Spanish ships had more people on them. There were usually about twice or three times as many men on those Spanish ships, compared to the fishing boats. And fishing boats were out of port long enough by the time they got over, particularly because they would stop to fish on the Grand Banks, that there was more time for diseases to run their course and no longer be contagious. In contrast, Spanish took the shortest route in a shorter time period so there would be more still contagious people. By the time they set up on the shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the 17th century for trade, women were coming down and there was already a sort of brothel business going. So there was opportunity for disease. But by that time they were already getting the diseases, the whole slew of smallpox and measles and all of that anyway.

For one of the problems a biological anthropologists in my department is trying to get a grant to go research Iceland and Scandinavia. The epidemic of tuberculosis in the upper midwest of the Mississippian period, starts quite sharply right around AD 1000, which is of course the time of L'Anse aux Meadows, the Norse contact. Buikstra, et al., have not really faced up to the explanation of where this disease came from. The lesions on the skeletons which Norman Sullivan, my colleague, has looked at on a great many Oneota skeletons, look like what is generally identified as tubercular lesions. He wants to go look at medieval Norse skeletons and see what tubercular lesions in those skeletons look like. He wants to answer the question of just how similar are these Oneota and medieval Norse, where the medieval Norse were in a population in which tuberculosis was indemic. He hasn't quite gotten the grant to do the one-to-one comparison but he's really confident that they are tubercular lesions. The medical literature says that for every one skeleton which has lived with the disease long enough and has taken the main attack that leaves lesions on the skeleton, there are about 300 persons who suffered the disease, either dying before it could ravage the skeleton or it took other attack forms in the body. So for every one Oneota skeleton with tubercular lesions, you have to assume 300 individuals who suffered from TB. And this is an epidemic. It's really striking. Now Buikstra et al. in 1981 rather lamely suggested that the intensity of Mississippian agriculture must have, for the first time, put people in contact with a pathogen in the soil. They hadn't been playing around with the soil long enough, getting their hands dirty before, so they hadn't gotten TB. The medical people that we've talked to say this is ridiculous: tuberculous bacillus is a particular organism, it's a species. It's not replicated elsewhere.

JL: But could it not have existed in the Old World and the New World from some earlier stage?

AK: There are no tubercular lesions in New World skeletons before Oneota, except for a few on the south coast of Peru at 700 AD.

KB: Could the increase be possibly due to village life around 1000 AD? Isn't that about when that area increasingly became sedentary?

AK: Well, it's not sedentary. That's when that area, that's when Cahokia became a major state, sending out its daughter colonies, establishing major trading. That definitely contributed to its becoming epidemic. But we still have to know where an Old World bacillus entered into the Americas.

??: Aren't there varieties of tuberculosis in deer and raccoons and some other small mammals?

AK: Apparently from what my colleague has been hearing from medical people, they don't think that you can get it. There is bovine tuberculosis, but you can only get it from the milk of bovines. I have actually, believe it or not, heard a team of archaeologists working in Jamestown, North Dakota, in identifying tubercular lesions in some skeletons right at our target date of 1000 who said, well, they must have gotten bovine tuberculosis. I said, from what? And they said, well, bison are bovines you know. And I said, but you can only get bovine tuberculosis from milk. And they said, well, they must have been milking bison!

JL: Cheryl, let me go back. Clearly this is provocative, how much contact would it take?

AK: That's the question. And it's a very engendered thing because as you draw it out, if the Norse around the Gulf of St. Lawrence (and incidentally the Norse must have gotten down to or had direct contact with the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, because L'Anse aux Meadows are two butternut shells and they do not grow any farther north than the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, southwest across the Gulf of St. Lawrence from Newfoundland), did have contact, either personally or with people coming from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River quite a bit to the southwest, are these Norse sleeping with Indian women which would certainly transmit tuberculosis?

JL: My question is sort of to both of you. Obviously sexual contact is very intimate and all kinds of diseases, even though not sexually transmitted, can be transmitted. But you can transmit TB and smallpox and measles without sexual contact. It happens to kids all the time.

AK: An alternative would be, I was amazed: Helen Hornbeck Tanner who is a highly respected ethnohistorian on Great Lakes Indian history told me that in doing the atlas of Great Lakes Indian history, she ended up with a fairly thick file on Norse finds and Helen says that she would really urge us to look into the possibility that Norse actually went up the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes.

JL: But the stuff could move. If you say she finds Norse things, you know, iron axes...

AK: She's strictly an historian. She's collecting what everybody else discounts, except that, and I want to get into one paper which suggests that the Kensington runestone is a real historical document. But what Helen was suggesting...

JL: Alice where do you find these things?

AK: Because I write a book called North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account. If the Norse were actually moving up the St. Lawrence and into the Great Lakes in the medieval period, then the principle of actualism would suggest that these men were living in Indian cabins. Indian cabins, winter cabins, are very, very tightly insulated, they're stifling, also the southeastern Indian cabins.

JL: They all say that, it's very smokey.

AK: Not just smoky, but stifling cause they're so well insulated against the cold. But what better place to contract diseases than you've got this Norse guy snuffling and breathing right next to you in a stifling cabin.

CC: I took a course from Peter Wells. One thing that he did was work through five or six contact situations. But he also had us to work through contact situations too. We had to identify what subset of the stranger population was contacted, what subset of the native population was contacted, and then what the motivation was for the contact. We methodically had to go through and do this for all these different groups. There really is a lot of point in doing that sort of thing. The Spanish were time and time again a military situation, with largely lower class men doing the contacting. From the prisoners that are settling Australia, you can expect a certain behavioral conduct in contact situations and how that impacts women certainly has a lot to do with a lot of different questions, not just disease transfer. So I guess what we'd have to do if we want to stay on this topic is just who do we see in the Viking boats. Aren't we talking about an all male population?

JL: No, I think that's where they're quite different from the Spanish.

CC: Who's in the boats?

JL: I don't know about kids. They're men and women. They are families.

AK: The Gronlandic Saga and the Saga of Eric the Red, they're both the same family history, two versions of Routha family history, both describe Vinland colony, which is provisionally identified as L'Anse aux Meadows.

CC: But there was no contact before the colony was established?

AK: No. This was right at 1000 AD.

JL: It's families. It's like they picked up and went from Iceland right to Greenland. I mean times were tough in Iceland and there was a lot of fighting (and probably it has partially to do with climate) and they go off and they find Greenland during the only 200 years when they could have survived there probably.

CC: Well keeping this tied to gender then, that makes me think of another situation in the eastern US where you get pots, big round black bellied pots replacing ceramics, ceramic technology dropping out very quickly in the northeast and ceramic technology being one of the last things to drop out in the mid-Atlantic area and coastal North Carolina where we see the colono-ware, colono-Indian ware. And one of the explanations I've heard for that is that the iron pot is more transportable, has a longer use life, etc. You've got largely single men who are setting up households, if they're setting up households, they're setting up households with native women versus a colonizing situation in this part of the country --whole families cut off from their supply lines. You can't continually replace your household inventory creating a prolonged need for native ceramic technology in this area. So it was one of the last cultural traits to drop out.

AK: If I may introduce my own excavation of a contact period fur trading post published extremely obscurely in Sascatchewan in 1978 and never distributed. This was 1768 and it was the first successful fur trade post on the Saskatchewan River beyond Manitoba, beyond Lake Winnepeg. It was set up by two independent traders in known violation of the Hudson Bay Company monopoly. They set up this post at this major portage which had been a rendezvous for at least 2000 years because on the terrace above the post we just found 2000 years worth of goodies. They knew why they were setting up there, they knew this was a major trading spot. This was Nipawi, "gathering place". (Nipawin which it's called now actually means gathering place of the dead.) They built this post which had rectangle with a single palisade and then there were cabins inside. They were visited twice by Hudson Bay Company men who were trying to spy out these challengers. One was Matthew Caulking who paced it out very precisely and described it. Now we found both European and Indian ceramics and we were digging this site because we were looking for a contact period definition. We wanted both. Of European ceramics, there was a delicate little teacup. It just blew my mind, the prettiest little delicate porcelain teacup fragment and then there was a piece of plate, earthenware ceramic plate, a couple of very small sherds. And then there was a fair bit of Indian ceramic and the Indian ceramics were associated with stone knife blades, what some persons might call projectile points. But this was a very domestic site: the pot and the stone knives and a couple of expedient tools. If I were a woman living there and I was preparing a meal and it was a nice day like this, that's exactly where I would sit. It was shady, you've got the river breeze and it was flat, it must have been grassy. And I remember there is a description of one of the traders in his canoe with his wife and son and we knew that this trader, James Finley, had a son named Jackal Finley who grew up out in the west and who's mother was Indian. And so I felt confident in assuming there were at least two Indian women who were residing in the masters cabin. And there were very nice fireplaces in the masters cabin. So I engendered that fur trade post back in 1768 and the picture that we had drawn by the museum artist shows this Indian woman lounging like this against the door of the masters cabin.

KS: Alice, do you know how late, what we would call aboriginal pottery shows up in this area?

AK: It disappears quite quickly. It disappears early in the 19th century at the latest.

JL: Was this first contact?

AK: That's it. That is first contact. That was why we dug that spot.

RJ: My fieldwork is in Honduras and we have a particular difficulty in actually locating the 16th century sites although we know where they were because we have all the historical documentation and we know that there were lots of them. Even when we go and look for them it's very difficult to find them. One of the things obviously going on is that they don't look different from late pre-Columbian sites, all of which have the kinds of things we expected, 16th century, 15th century stuff. On one site that I found on survey the one piece of ceramic on the surface was a fancy, very diagnostic ceramic from the hierarchically organized sites from this time period. When it was excavated, the excavator for reasons that utterly escape me, quite at 45 cm. I think he was grumpy. But 45 cm. didn't yield any more of this fancy pottery. What they gave us was majolica and plainware which was not identical with what should have been there had it been a late 16th century site, and a mess of animal bones which the investigator described as being cattle and on that basis felt that it was a late 16th century or early 17th century site. The cattle, if they were cattle, were real short. And in fact in the same assemblage there were large numbers of crocodilian teeth so that I argued that the bones were. . .

CC: That's why their legs were so short.

RJ: They didn't get to grow very tall, those crocodiles were eating them. The problem with an assemblage like that is. . . and this is, I think, typical as far as I can tell for the time period from first contact (which in this area is somewhere between 1521 and 1536 based on historical documentation, all the way up to say 1780) you can expect assemblages that are ultimately indistinguishable. They keep using the local lithic materials. We keep getting obsidian, maybe a little less specialized but that's always a problem anyway. They keep making utilitarian ceramics. The lack of painted wares may be an indication of some specialization, some eliteness. If you don't have the added material which is Spanish in origin, you can have this this two century time period that doesn't, in the area that I'm working in, really look different.

JL: That's very interesting, the fact that it doesn't look different.

RJ: It has a lot to do with the way the Spanish used the area.

LS: [To David Moore] Wasn't that part of your problem looking for Spanish sites in North Carolina?

DM: No, I was trying to identify 16th Century sites. It's hard in the piedmont. I think we find them all the time but it's hard to recognize them. Part of the problem is the lack of historical material. You occasionally find small amounts. For the Cherokee we have lots more information. Interestingly enough, early 19th Century reservation house sites have both aboriginal and colonial wares.

JL: What I was thinking about was Kathy Deagan's work in St. Augustine. I was going to ask you [Ruth Trocolli] if you could remember how late this goes where you find really fancy Spanish stuff, the big platters for company, and then all the cooking stuff is aboriginal?

RT: The domestic assemblages, even the faunal material and the botanical remains that they get in the wells, it's very, very close to aboriginal foodways and that's primarily because of the native American women that were in the households, basically running them.

RJ: That was the point that I was going to get to. What that seems to me to imply, again getting back to gender, is that at least in the area that I'm familiar with in Mesoamerica where people really looked at this issue, if women are largely in charge of domestic production and especially in producing ceramics for certain and are responsible for the food preparation, then except for when we look at specifically Spanish administrative centers, we're not seeing a lot of this junction. We're not seeing a lot of change apparently in the way, in the productive activities that women are taking part in. That goes back again to your initial discrimination of the three different data bases we have. The archaeological data base doesn't seem to me to be at all comparable with the ethnohistorical data base which doesn't talk, or is frustratingly silent about women.

JL: In some ways it's frustratingly silent about production actually. And of course some of it is probably silent about women because women were able to escape better.

RJ: They weren't there being controlled and managed.

AK: The Hudson Bay Company is silent about women because it was against its rules for any of its factors or even the staff to cohabit with Indian women. Nor would they allow any but its highest officials to bring European wives over.

JL: This is calculated to make disaster.

AK: But Sylvia Van Kirk and Jennifer Brown have been working very hard, you know, in the tremendous variety of archival sources to pull these women out.

RJ: Well one way that that has been done in Yucatan by Nancy Ferris who is a historian is by looking at the tribute that was being extracted from the newly conquered Maya of Yucatan by the Spanish administration and using the consensus that most of this tribute was in the form of cotton textiles. The consensus was that cotton textile production was in women's hands and was taking place within the household. She's been able to talk about it in terms of gender even though the Spanish sources themselves don't talk about this in terms of gender. But in looking at some of that material too, there is this problem with the Spanish sources telling us how much they're supposed to be getting, how much tribute is supposed to be extracted; they don't have to tell us how much tribute is extracted. They tell us how much population they think they have, not necessarily how much population there really is. Still, it's not a 100%. It's really problematic.

JL: Well, all data about the past is problematic. I think you work with it for what you can get.

AK: How about bringing up the slave trade. It's in gender context when you talk about the slave trade because women and children were particularly often traded because they were seen to be more docile.

JL: Also, you get a better bargain if you get a female because you might get more slaves. David, do you know, I know there's slave trade with the Indians out of Charleston starting right when they get there in 1670 and in fact the central government's sort of pissed off about it but it keeps going. Do you have any idea though whether they are searching out men or women more preferentially?

AK: Marvin Smith has some of that.

CC: I know hunters, and fishers, and guides are sought--men, of course.

DM: I don't know.

JL: I don't either. I just know that it happened, that it wasn't supposed to happen and it did. In the southeast though I wonder if it wasn't rather rapidly displaced by Africans.

AK: The slave trade, not the use of slaves. The slave trade in Indians continued while Africans were being imported.

JL: I realize that. But I wonder if in the southeast it became not as worthwhile to go off into the back country and try to find Indians when you could just bring in big shiploads of African people.

CC: We've also talked about how the natives would just die rather than work, or they would get despondent or homesick or whatever and they would just die.

JL: We hear a lot about that in the Caribbean and Honduras. Do you think it's true?

RJ: It's universal in the early Spanish documents from Honduras and Nicaragua. There's actually a wonderful book about it from the 16th century. Initially, the big Spanish failure in Central America of course was that there wasn't enough material wealth to make it worth their while. And in Honduras and Nicaragua they thought they had hit it because there was gold and silver. So they started putting the Indians to the mines and in fact very early on realized that they just couldn't do it. They weren't getting enough labor, these people were dying. They started important black African slaves very early in the 16th century.

JL: Let me bring up another topic. One thing about missions is that there are all these celibate men in charge. It's not clear in my mind: do we want to see the priesthood and the missions as total supporters of a colonial hegemony, or were they actually, in fact, a force for humanity or some amelioration; probably it's something of both. I mean all these things are always more complicated than our original assumptions. But what is the impact that it's Catholics that set up missions with their own little peculiar institution so to speak and also that are reporting to us?

AK: Don't all the successful missions have soldier groups? The ones who went out to the Chesapeake in 1570 or something like that, they got wiped out.

RT: The Florida mission system was very, very successful after its first 100 years of trial and error and the Western missions probably would have gone on and continued if it weren't for the American Revolution and the changing hands of Florida. The missions were usually only occupied by one or two or three Catholic priests. There really weren't very many Catholics but Catholicism itself, I think, had drastic impacts on the native culture. When they were writing confession manuals to sort of ask the right kinds of questions in the native languages, there's actually one from 1613 in the Timucuan language that has a translation in Spanish. And the questions shed a lot of light on the cultural institutions, you know: eating dirt, the women were told not to eat dirt; they were asked if they were having sex with more than just their husband, like their husband's brother or their uncles; all of these kinds of things that are hallmarks of matrimonial society. And one of the things that comes out of all that is that they were changing the culture to the Spanish ideal through the missions.

SH: Throughout California, in general, the questions that the priests were supposed to ask during confession contained some interesting information about native sex practices. They asked all these questions: have you masturbated, have you watched other people masturbate, did you have sex with animals, do you have sex with other men if you're a man or other women if you're a woman?

JL: Are we finding out about native sexual practices or priests' fantasies?

??: They're very specific how they ask the questions aren't they?

SH: I think it does say something about priests' fantasies and that they somewhat live vicariously through other people's confessions but I also think that it sheds light on some native practices that they didn't think there was anything wrong with. They had to be extremely specific about what kind of sexual activity is going on, to let them know that it was a sin. A friend of mine has been doing research with baptismal and death records at Mission Santa Barbara. And they actually would enter next to a person's name the word joya which the Spanish had applied to the berdaches among the Chumash so that they were specifically making note.

JL: So they knew what it was and understood it as being something different. My very first archaeology professor in the world was Jim Deetz shortly after he published about the Arikara. Do you think that he is right about looking in the material culture (and I think in particular it is design motifs on pottery and how the patterns change) which he says is because they were, through contact, going from matrilineal to patrilineal. How would you evaluate that work?

SH: I think there's been some recent discussion about some major flaws.

CC: The paper by Christi Mitchel tomorrow addresses your question, Janet.

SH: But a lot of people think that the notion has some validity, that in a general sort of way you would be able to trace something about breakdown of social structures in some aspect of material culture. I can say with some certainty, based on work that others have done and what I've recently completed myself, that everything just does to hell fast and I don't know whether certain kinds or classes of material culture are going to be sensitive enough to pick that up. But if you lost half your population in a generation...

RJ: One of the problems with trying to argue for a particular relationship between matrilineality or patrilineality and the production of design motifs, is really you have to have an implicit theory. I teach ceramics, so an implicit theory of the production of ceramic design and matrilocality or patrilocality may be important to produce the diversity versus non-diversity which was the index that he was using. If you look at ethnographic or ethnoarchaeological accounts of living ceramic producers in traditional societies, a lot of the work that Warren DeBoer and Donald Lathrap among others have done in South America, as you might expect, people change their styles through their lives. If you move into a village that has a different style-- this has also been documented with Maya textiles in the highlands of Guatemala, (and it's rare for this to happen, for a woman to marry outside of her home village into a village that has a different traditional costume) she doesn't necessarily keep wearing the old costume. She learns to produce the new costume, the costume of the village she'd moved into.

JL: But if it's rare, let's say it is rare. . .

RJ: It's rare today.

JL: You could conceivably still see a pattern; a pattern doesn't have to be 100%.

RJ: If you open it up to theory of learning-- the idea that people, in fact, practice designs that they learn from the people who teach them and then try to talk about who's more likely to teach whom in what kind of society-- I think it still works.

KB: I was just going to say that as a point of information that Deetz rethought his argument this past year and he totally defends it. He came in and talked to one of our classes about it and then he kind of sat down and rethought it and decided to do it as a paper.

AK: It's been 10 years since it's been refuted in a dissertation.

KB: He responded to a lot of the criticism and he did bring in someone's work, on teeth maybe, some kind of real technical thing that he used to support what he was saying that had just been done a lot more recently.

JL: It must be some sort of non-metric traits. You know when you bring up DeBoer and Lathrap, the one that I've always found to be a really striking reference relevant to that subject is Peter Roe about the Shipibo only they paint bark cloth. In that case, he claims to have found female to female generational transmission of a style and tied it in that particular case to not only matrilocality but I think matrilineality as well.

RJ: [to Sandra Holliman] But if your argument is that the Arikara material culture and biological indicators are going downhill rapidly, that wouldn't tend to suggest to me that people should start making a diversity of ceramic designs which is in fact the argument that Deetz is making. That's not just degradation.

SH: It's interesting that in 1963 Deetz did an excavation of a Chumash mission and he concluded that there was a gender difference in adoption of Spanish forms of material culture and that, if I remember correctly, the women were more conservative.

JL: They hold on to their ethnic identity he claims.

SH: Yeah, more strongly than the males.

JL: Which potentially makes sense in reference to the fur/deer skin trade that we were mentioning a little bit earlier. If men's daily life activities have now become so linked into the commercial world system (if you want to use that term) whereas women's daily life activities have not changed so much, perhaps they don't even need as many Europeans and so forth. They can really become as we see in a lot of ethnic minorities even to this day, that home and hearth is the place where ethnic identity is forged. It's food. I mean, what makes you Italian, what makes you Jewish? It's what you eat.

SH: What's interesting though is one of the few pieces of Chumash cooking equipment that was found were soapstone grills. They had had grinding implements before for plant processing but the Spanish co-opted this piece of material culture for a food they wanted. The Chumash began to make these sort of griddles and tortillas.

JL: That's fascinating.

SH: But I think that overall, the take home message about Chumash conditions is that there was a gender difference in adoption of certain aspects of Spanish culture, women suffered more than men. Despondency resulted in a lot of suicide and intentional abortion. They could not bare the thought of bringing children into that disintegrating world and they didn't want to live themselves. Disease did not seem to proceed contact in the Santa Barbara area. Once they moved into the missions then began their demise.

CC: But again we're talking fishermen doing the initial contacting aren't we?

JL: She's talking about the establishment of missions.

CC: Well who was colonizing?

SH: The military preceded the Franciscans.

CC: So it was military contact without disease?

SH: And although sexual exploitation of women seems to be a problem, I attribute a relative lack of comments about what women are doing based on the fact that they were hidden. Writers say they didn't see any women, "they were hiding from us". There are some really gruesome reports about rape and that compounds the invisibility of women in the documentary sources. Most of the interaction would have been between native and Spanish males along that part of the California coast.

JL: Of course engendering the contact period means talking about men too.

AK: In the northern plains, there are stories throughout the 19th century of the blue-eyed Mandan. And Marshall Newman back in 1958 (or something like that when Southwestern Journal of Anthropology was called that) had an article in which he tried to trace the story of the blue-eyed Mandan and he linked it in with ethnographic data which is that the Mandan (and those nomadic nations that traded with them, including the Cheyenne and the Blackfoot) shared in the belief that one way in which spiritual power could be transmitted from one man to another man would be literally by a woman. The spiritually more powerful man would have intercourse with a woman, usually his wife, who would then immediately sleep with the man to be gifted with this power. And this is very integral in Mandan ritual.

The big Okipa ceremony (this is their Sun Dance) has a major ritual in which the women go up to the more important men, the so-called elders and the women draw this spiritual power into them. Or the grandfather goes out of the lodge into the darkness with the wife of the grandson, and the grandfather has the option of either actually having intercourse with the woman who is naked under a bison robe or the grandfather may merely lie upon her and pass a piece of prairie turnip from his mouth to her mouth without doing anything more and then they can get up and go back to the lodge. And it's supposed to be strictly between grandfather and woman just how the power was passed. And we have no statistics on the choices made. But this was the way for younger men to get more spiritual power. The women didn't need more spiritual power from older men because the women, first of all, had more spiritual power; secondly, had their own set of ceremonies where they gained power from their contact with "grandmother who never dies" and the corn maidens that she nurtures and all this women's stuff.

The first fur traders, specifically like the la Verendryes came into the northern plains and naturally went to the Mandan towns which had some major trading centers. By the time these men got there from Montreal it was usually late in the summer and winter would be coming on. They couldn't get back to Montreal so they planned to winter over and they'd winter over in these towns which were already producing large surpluses of food to sell to people who came in to trade. And as these Verendryes were living in the town over the winter, some of the younger men would come up with their wives and, from the Verendryes accounts, press their wives upon them, begging them to take their wives for a night. No gift was required.

And the Verendryes and their staff were delighted to indulge these husbands in their desire to have their wives slept with. And of course in the context of Mandan beliefs, they were passing on spiritual power to the husbands of these women.

JL: Linda [Stine], that fits in almost perfectly with what you were saying about John Lawson and the Virginia traders. When they come down they are always given a house and a woman for the winter and then they go away again.

SH: This happened among the Arikara as well. Dan Rogers interpreted this in terms of class differences, as well; probably most of the sexual liaisons were instigated by male relatives of these women who were lower class and they wanted more Eurogoods. So not all husbands were extending their wives.

AK: The chiefs, the leaders would not do this because they considered themselves the equivalent or above even the Verendryes. It would be the youngest and the poorer men who would do this. The Verendryes thought these men were prostituting their wives and were so surprised that they didn't want material items in return. They saw it as straight prostitution. And in a way you can almost say it was in that the men were giving their wives to get something from the traders but it was not the meaning to the women. If I were a Mandan lower class woman, it would make a big difference to me whether I was being seen as a whore or seen as a normal wife.

JL: That sort of brings up this question I don't know how we could even answer archaeologically or otherwise. But, in general, women would have experienced European intruders sexually and men wouldn't have. I suppose there would have been exceptions to that statement. But I think, in general, that's probably true. What did that, how did the difference in that experience affect how you thought about these sky people or these ancestors or whoever these people were? You know, going back to this quote, "we had sex and slept together and then we knew they were men".

KS: [to Joan Gero] What's the paper we read in your class, the Tonga, was it Tonga women, using sexual contacts with traders as means of improving their status and their opportunities for getting access to resources they needed to have their own exchanges with higher ups, a positive experience for them. But it was one that was subsequently taken away from them by mission folks.

JG: The Europeans thought they were whores and were afraid of diseases and didn't understand that these were very high ranking women.

KS: If I remember, these were unmarried women, the youngest unmarried women, I think I remember that. It was a positive thing from their point of view, something that they could use to their advantage.

AK: In Puget Sound area the beginning of the 19th century, upper class women owned slave women whom they prostituted to sailors and traders and one upper class Salish woman was very upset when she could not kill a slave or slave women, actually planned to kill more than one slave woman, to accompany the aristocratic woman's dead daughter into the grave. She was prevented. And the grieving mother sobbed that her daughter had never done a thing for herself, everything had been done for her, she always had so many slaves and the same particular group, another aristocratic woman was said to have owned 20 women slaves expressly for the purpose of selling their services to the colonizers coming into the Puget Sound area. So we have to think in terms of, again, class differences within these Indian nations at the time of contact and how that would have affected the experience.

JL: That inspires m--now that Joan is here, working in South America where we have the Incan authoritarian centralized state which is rather unlike anything we're familiar with here in North America. What was the contact experience for high class Inca women, do we have any information about that?

JG: Irene Silverblatt reports extraordinarily abusive behavior. The high ranking persons of the Inca were disempowered almost immediately. Females had large land holdings, were very powerful, and had areas of autonomous decision making and it was all taken away. The Spanish would only recognize male rule. There are scenes of brutal treatment--none of this genteel social interaction [we have been describing in North America].

RJ: For Mesoamerica, actually for the Aztecs, Susan Kellogg has demonstrated that some of the same things happened. Normally Mesoamerica is represented as being dominated by patrilineal systems although I'm agnostic about that. But the Spanish certainly didn't approve of or allow inheritance through the female line and there are a whole series of 16th century documents in which you can see this system, the native land claims, being asserted through female links and they learn the system. By about 1600 they learned that there's no point to that and they stop doing it. And from that point on, clearly, to be female... It no longer does you much good. Yucatan, it goes on a little bit longer. Philip Thompson did a dissertation on wills in Yucatan and found that the women were writing wills and they were leaving property differentially from their husbands and from their fathers and from their brothers and leaving them in proportions that tend to suggest strict patrilineality doesn't work quite right there. But there is nothing I can think of that compares to what Joan describes in terms of the mistreatment of women. There's always been this difference between the Spanish Mexican and Peruvian conquests that someone really needs to take a look at. Cortés, obviously was aided very much by Doña Marina, and it doesn't seem as if there was the same kind of real, immediate degradation.

SH: Gender difference in the contact period might be seen in terms of a conflation surrounding sexual activity. In some cases it may have been consensual on the part of the woman, perhaps with prodding by a male relative, and sometimes, rape. Humiliation, degradation--in the most graphic way possible. Men would not have had this experience perhaps.

AK: Once the colony was set up and you had whipping, chaining, enslaving of men too. So it's two stage.

JG: It would be interesting if an indigenous voice in Mesoamerica could be identified. Guaman Poma was very atuned to the rights and powers women had. He was deeply offended by Spanish violation of that. You wonder how far standpoint is responsible for the difference in perception, Rosemary, between Mesoamerican descriptions and Incan.

RJ: It's quite comparable to the Aztec. I don't know if you've seen Susan Gillespie's Aztec Kings which was a dissertation called Aztec Queens but her publisher wouldn't let her publish it as Aztec Queens.

JL: One can sort of see their point.

RJ: One of the things she does in it is look at the native descriptions of the Aztec dynasty and really compares what's going on there quite strongly to what we know of the Inca, especially Zuidema's version of it, including an emphasis on bilaterality, including the crucial importance of women in the transmission of power and the authentication of power. The big difference may be that there was no one like Guaman Poma who's going to stand outside and say this; the closest we get is Ixtlilxochitl, who is non-Aztec, not Mexica, he's arguing for this own family. And he also makes use of female links. I don't think it's quite as centralized as sometimes it gets represented, quite as unfragile and quite as incomparable as it sometimes gets represented. But I think you've got a really great point, there's no observer like Guaman Poma to write for Central Mexico.

AK: It's not a contact situation because it was just two years ago but here's some Bolivian data I have collected. I heard this again and again and again in the Aymara villages where I was staying, the difference before and after the Bolivian Revolution of '53. The anthropologists, including Harry Chopik, invariably described the Aymara as sullen, hostile, impossible to work with, dirty, shiftless. But after 1954 when the haciendas were broken up and the land returned to the communities, all of a sudden, the anthropologists, all of them with one voice, described the warm, sharing, cooperative, wonderful Aymara that I met too. The political, economic situation changed dramatically and so did, God help me, the anthropologists' perception.

The other thing was, as I tried to figure out the difference which was basically my interest in the village between the men's work group that was rehabilitating raised fields and the women's work group. The men's work group had been solicited by the project's extension agent, a literate urban man, who had gone out to the village. It came out as a cluster of men trailed by some women. They went out to the area where they were to work and the men worked in a long line, side by side with the women kind of assisting them a little from behind and they dug up and built these raised fields. The next year a young woman from the village walked up to Alan Kolata and asked him whether there was a place for a women's group to rebuild raised fields. And Alan was very surprised and he said, "Well, sure. There are lots and lots of raised fields out there." So she formed a women's group which she called the Centre de Madres. (Although it's not mostly mothers, it's mostly unmarried women like herself or widowed mothers.) Most of the active madres are actually with the first, so-called men's work group which I am calling the official work group.

When the women went out there, they worked in a slightly dispersed pattern, each one doing work cooperatively. There's no leadership apparent. They got the same amount of work done in the same amount of time. The women are assisted by their husbands and sons; the heaviest labor takes real upper body strength. When a decision had to be made about what the work group was to do, the men's work group clustered very tightly around the man who kind of orated what had to be done and orated what they were going to do and there was almost no dialogue whatsoever. When the women's group had to decide what was to be done, they sprawled out on one of the ridges not yet rebuilt and they talked about it. The woman who had first approached Kolata would very quickly and in a soft voice lay out what the problem was and then the women would discuss and after a while she or her cousin who was also quite a leader would ask if there was an agreement or a resolution. And the women would then either nod and raise their hands for a vote or they'd say they wanted to talk some more. And it was really totally informal. Well, Alan Kolata said, "Oh, that's the difference between men's style and women's style."

But the more weeks I spent in the village, the more I felt that that was not the explanation. I've since talked this out both with a couple of Aymara ethnographers and with a whole bunch of Andeanists. My interpretation is that the official group, men's group ,solicited by an outside agent who looked like an agent of the Bolivian government was formed on the 400 year old Hispanic pattern. The women's group was formed on the Aymara pattern.

And the longer I was in the village, the more I saw complementary equality between the men and women. And these men, they don't do a macho, dominating act. It was out of character for the men to work on this outside solicited group. But that was a standard Hispanic group, almost like a chain gang. And also the way in which decisions were made, somebody telling them in this loud kind of voice what the decision has to be and the men just nodding. In contrast to the Aymara way where people talk and they relax and they talk and they come to either an agreement or an agreement to keep on talking. I felt that I was not seeing any contrast between men's and women's styles among the Aymara but between the Hispanic pattern and the true Aymara pattern. And having reached that conclusion, which all these Andeanists supported, then again I really wonder about what we learn in the ethnographies that aren't concerned with that possible difference. These are peasants, we think they have to be patrilineal, they have to be kinship oriented and so on and so on.

LS: One thing we haven't mentioned today is what were the Spanish institutions relating to gender? Are we just assuming that all the Spanish have the same feelings about gender? And did those change at contact? Contact is a two way street. I don't know that much about it. I didn't know if anyone knew what sorts of gender categories the Spanish had at contact or at different times or did it change? I guess maybe its a class thing as well, religious thing.

KB: The thing I was going to ask is: how historic archaeologists deal with the differences between the ideology? You can say, well, Spanish are like this but how do you deal with all the differences in terms of what does European contact or Russian contact, whoever it is that's contacting, what they're like and how that's played out and how they change and whether it's just affects native people or how it's affecting the colonizing groups?

SH: An analogy of the founder effect. What subset of the population is being sampled? What are they bringing with them?

CC: You would think that the soldiers, being basically from lower class families, would have a very different attitude about women than I imagine Catholic priests of the 1600s to have about women.

RT: Except that the Catholic religion itself tended to reinforce that same gender policy, so to speak. It's really a policy. With the Spanish soldiers, they tended to incorporate the native American women into their households very quickly because they couldn't survive otherwise, at least in the Florida example. It's very different from Inca and from the Aztec. It doesn't seem to be as violent and the Spaniards just couldn't survive in Florida without learning the subsistence and taking on the domestic patterns of the native women; it became very much a two-way street. As you say, acculturation of both. The Spaniards that brought over their own wives tend to try to keep a Spanish style household and Spanish subsistence practices. So there are two different things going on at two different levels.

JL: What about Spanish women, were there any Spanish women...

RT: Very few.

JL: Do we know anything about them?

??: Did they even intermarry with native Americans?

JG: There were three women with Juan Pardo.

MM: And there were nuns, too of course.

RJ: No, at least not in Mexico, not early on. The Mexican situation was such that native women were very quickly adopted. Cortés' woman Doña Marina bore his son who actually got a Spanish title and had all of Oaxaca for a while as his fief. Then very quickly in the 1530s, a second wave of Spanish administrators came over and they brought their wives. And there was a tension between them and the first-in about the degree to which the first-in were tainted really by their participation in native cultures. This gets reflected in laws about castes that create these different mixtures: Spanish/native cross, Spanish/black cross, black/native cross; all of these different categories of people. There are extremely complex rules for who can live in towns together, who can socialize in different ways with each other and what kinds of civil and legal status you can have. At the very top, those people who came from Iberia, they were clearly, in their own minds and in the minds of the Spanish government, the only pure Spanish administration in Central Mexico. And Cortés's son loses out as a result of it very quickly. Especially when the rules say things like: Indians and Spanish can't live in the same town and then they go on to explain that if there are offspring from these prohibited marriages, that you'll treat them this way.

JL: We know this about apartheid where the military technology is significantly more intense and you can't stop people from doing this.

RJ: Well, in the Mesoamerican case again, the first two Spanish people in Yucatan were castaways. One of them was a priest who stayed a slave until Cortés arrived, the other one was a soldier who was a slave but worked his way out of slavery and ended up marrying in; he had a whole family and died fighting against the Spanish in Honduras.

They Spanish, did of course, want to establish themselves as nobility back in Spain, by taking these new lands. Pedro Alvarado who was crucial in the conquest of Guatemala didn't marry a local woman, he brought his legitimate wife from Spain very quickly. It looks as if Alvarado understood a little bit of the code, what he could do to bolster himself back into Spain and the Spanish system, what would look good there. And she outlived him. She didn't outlive him long, however, she was caught in an avalanche caused by a volcanic eruption.

AK: I think we should be sure to put on the tape to remind somebody to think about the Indian captive narratives that were the titillating Harlequin stories of the early 19th century. But, in fact, there were a number of both men and women of European origin who went to live in Indian towns, married Indians. Mary Jemison, of course is the most famous, she became one of the wives as I recall, she wasn't the only wife, of one of the Seneca and she was forced to leave him by her white relatives. She was very upset. Some people in colonial history, I can't give you any references, have been trying to total up the number of Euroamerican men and Euroamerican women who stayed with Indians or who were brought back forcefully and gave glowing accounts of how happy they were living with the Indians and so on. It would be worth somebody's effort.

LS: The Jamestown area, the same thing, they had to make laws to prevent that. People preferred it to working in the forts.

AK: And the contact archeology would be that these people are still prehistoric or just making contact. You would not see the European immigrant person in the community because that person had adopted the material culture of the Indians.

JL: In the Jamestown case, who are these people?

LS: Just people that were brought over as early colonists and who got to know native Americans and were walking through the landscape and fell in love with the land. It was so beautiful; they felt so free (they write about it); and winding up with this military bunch building this fort and depending on the native Americans to bring food and then trying to build your own fields and everything, when you could just be off in the woods hunting and fishing and playing.

JL: Are these men and women?

LS: Men and women.

AK: You've got to remember, many of these Jamestown men were coming from thatch, waddle and daub houses, little plots that they tilled almost by hand. If you take the livestock out, they're living like Indians. They wore a little more clothing because it was colder in England.

JG: Melanie Cabak, a graduate student at University of South Carolina, is writing a thesis on Inuit women which is turning out to be very interesting. The North Atlantic was colonized by Moravians. The accounts tell us women were attracted to the missions quickly and the men resisted missionizing fervently. Remember, this is all written by German. . .

AK: Brethren .

JG: So the 18th Century mindset. The women were complaining about the brutality of their husbands and the hardships of living off the land. They are eager to join the mission community. Especially the elderly women who are depicted as having a very rough time living off the land in certain seasons. And they see their lives extending by a decade or two by settling in the missions. Melanie has a nice archaeological midden to go through around the mission where the first Inuit houses were put and she's looking at the changing women's material culture. What the mission could offer women were tea cups, and lots of material advantages related to domesticity, whereas they had little to offer men-gunflints. Pipes were for everybody. So women are being bought off and benefitting early. They are the ones converting.

KS: Is there a trading operation set up with the Inuit there at the mission?

JG: Very quickly.

KS: So it's the exact opposite of what Eleanor Leacock found. She said Montagnais men were jumping at opportunities--to trade.

JG: Well, the Inuit men want to trade.

KS: And be missionized because it was going to facilitate their trading with these folks.

JL: Joan, are the Moravians living in these big separate communal houses as they are in Bathabara, North Carolina?

JG: Yes.

MM: And they do send women as well, as a part of the mission.

JG: Yes. They sent the children back to Germany.

CC: Lauristan Sharp's, Steel Axes for Stone Age Australians article. Were those trading posts or were those missions?

SH: Missions.

CC: Why were the women coming to those missions, the same reason, domestic inventory? Why were they going up to begin with? What was the draw?

JL: To find out because human beings are curious.

CC: But the missionaries would have given the men the axes too. The men weren't coming there. What attracted the women to them?

LS: If I was a woman who had to go ask a man all the time to borrow his stone axe and I heard through the grapevine...

CC: So you're saying the only attraction to the missions was its goods?

LS: No, but that would be a good one, to go and get your own, get control of this material culture.

JL: It does beg the question of why men weren't interested, fascinated too for some reason.

CC: But I would think that the women are probably there for some other reason and that was a reward for being there.

AK: They were being rewarded for placing themselves in a position to be converted.

CC: But I'm wondering if there are also other goods, like the domestic goods, that they could get.

JG: Cloth?

JL: And actually if you think about it, all the Spanish accounts say for example in the southeast, talk about passing out a lot of cloth which we never find. We're always looking at the glass beads and iron axes and stuff. Manufactured cloth would have been an incredible advantage or luxury. That's harder to find archaeologically.

AK: The cloth is on the pottery in our region. The pottery, however, is teeny little horrible sherds and you go totally crazy trying to find, make out the cloth and I finally concluded that most of the cloth that was used when they made the pottery was in rags to begin with. I was able to get a woman to look at it (an expert on weaving): we made a positive impression and magnified it and she said that there was no way this could be anything but woven and the weave was definitely European weave. So at one point, literally at contact, the women who ethnographically are identified as making the pottery at that time were getting the cloth and were presumably using it till it got ragged. And using it to line whatever it is that they used to mold their pots. The very latest pottery in the northwestern plains is very early reservation period and it's made by men. It's extremely crude. It's not fired, it's sun dried and it's used for holding tobacco. That's the last gasp of northwestern plains pottery.

CC: It would be interesting to take Lauristan Sharp's article, which is one of the more gendered contact period pieces, and try to finish out the story. He sort of quickly slides on off to what it means for men.

??: That goes on in Florida too. Women are showing up at the missions.

RT: Men as well. One of the problems with Florida missions that isn't addressed in some of the other places, is warfare. Missions often had a fortified church building and the encroachment of Indians from South Carolina and Georgia on the Florida missions spurned on by the English settlers, tended to create warfare and population movements; it was a very unstable situation. And I think that that could be another example of why women and people in general are sticking at the missions: for protection. But one of the offshoots of this is that in the Guale missions on the coastal islands of Georgia, they actually have large skeletal populations and they're looking at the differences in men and women through skeletal biological approach. They're finding that there are skeletal changes associated with the missionized populations. They're forced to work a lot and their skeletons reflect this: increased robusticity, large musculature attachments, across the board, men and women. So there is another way to look at these changes going on.

SH: For the Arikara there are writings that indicate the women would marry guys at the trading posts to lighten their work load. Aboriginally they were such menial slave laborers.

LS: They do work hard. The women wanted those steel hoes instead of bison scapulas. You know, a bison scapula hoe couldn't possibly have worked as well in the Missouri bottoms as a steel hoe and they wanted those implements to lighten their work.

CC: That's the story Sharp hasn't written. A really detailed look at what women are doing with the axes and other goods gotten through the missions and the impact on labor allocation and etc., etc.