The Iron Age Revival of the State XXVIII: some Road Trip Thoughts

 

Two things seem safe to say here:

i) The Siege of Troy is the most significant historical event of the Mediterranean Iron Age, whenever it occurred, and there is every reason, archaeologically speaking, to think that it happened, to the extent that it happened at all, around 750BC, and that the textual evidence for the traditional "Late Bronze Age Collapse" dating is weaker than is often assumed.

ii) The revitalisation of the downtowns of the small towns of the interior of southern British Columbia is a work in progress closely tied to the problem of the province's indigenous racialised minority, aka "the Indians."

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 (Lots of ruins at the west end of Hope still, very appropriate on an apocalyptic day. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of the "character" Coldwater Hotel in downtown Merritt that Booking.com directed me to.)

That these two things that I have had occasion to think about during a road trip that ended with me walking through my front door just an hour ago, is not obvious, but my aunt brought it home to me yesterday. She really likes to talk about James Alexander Teit (1864--1922),a local informant to Franz Boas, whose role in shaping the data upon which Boas built his theoretical superstructure was revealed by Dr. Wendy Wickwire, of the UBC Department of History. 

But questions about whether there was sufficient attribution to Tait are only the start of it. Teit was a major figure in the Nicola Valley from the 1880s to 1922. Apart from any children he might have had by his first, Lillooet, wife, he had six by his second. It seems very strange that this prolific family could find only the portrait above of their paterfamilias. And this inability to spell one's own name, seems to be a bit pre-Victorian. Not unheard of in the greater Nineteenth Century, but perhaps his editors might have raised the issue? 

The problem of Troy, which led to so many arguments about its location rather than its dating, is that the site now so identified was so very important from 3100BC to 750BC, and then ceased to be important as anything but "Illiad Land" thereafter. How could such an inconsequential place have been such a magnificently fortified city, the Ancient controversialists asked? The problem of Boas is more-or-less one of detecting social change, and perhaps one of over-reaching in claims about what can be discovered about the prehistoric past by  relatively short periods of field work. How plastic are people's self-understandings over long period of rapid technological, hence economic and social change. Did Tait invent his Scottish identity? How useful is it to speak of the Lillooet nation as "Salish people?" If it is about language and folklore authentically handed down in an oral tradition, what do we make of Teit being our authority?