Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear

ARCHAEOLOGICAL FICTION:
TRIPPING THROUGH THE MINEFIELD

If we consider the archaeological record—fragmentary, eroded, and easily misinterpreted—as the baseline, the truly sane would immediately run, if not flee in outright terror from the notion of writing a fictional story set in prehistory. So, why make the figurative charge into the minefield of anthropological fiction when you already know you are destined to make a misstep? Because doing so provides a vehicle through which the public can experience the past in both a meaningful and powerful way. Fiction allows you to bring the distant past alive by placing people in that time, culture, and place. For the reader, the past is metamorphosed from an abstract concept to a reality.

Our book tours have taken us around the world, and whether we're in Cleveland, London, Cape Town, or Perth, we encounter a ravenous appetite for information about North American archaeology, as well as a great deal of confusion about what archaeology is. People still ask us about dinosaurs.

But what can fiction do for anthropology, or even the sub-discipline of archaeology, that popular articles in periodicals like National Geographic can't?

People read fiction in droves. As of this writing our novel People of the Wolf is on its twenty-third printing with somewhere around two million copies in print in eighteen languages. The readers who continue to buy People of the Wolf are looking for the same thing most of us were when we first got into anthropology: They want to learn something about human beings who lived in the past, and thereby discover something about themselves.

With each new novel we seek to fulfill that desire by placing characters—people beset by human frailties with whom the reader can identify—inside the archaeological context provided by the data. The problems of plot, character motivation, conflict, theme, and other literary concerns lie beyond the scope of this paper, but the framework for that creative process is provided by the physical realities of the sites, paleoenvironmental reconstruction, artifacts, art work, floral and faunal remains, burial practices, paleopathology, ancient DNA, features, structures, petroglyphs, and so forth.

In soliciting this article, John Kantner asked us to address how we go about reconciling the incomplete nature of the archaeological record. To do so, we fall back on Maitland's dictum: "American archaeology is either anthropology or it is nothing" (see Willey and Phillips 1958). By that, we mean that our novels are more anthropological in nature than archaeological.

Archaeological monographs, articles, and field reports provide but a glimpse of a discrete time, place, and culture. A novel must reflect a vibrant and dynamic culture functioning in a fully-fleshed paleoenvironment.

By way of illustration we were writing about the post-Chacoan Southwest in The Visitant, The Summoning God, and Bone Walker. We know that the break up of the Chacoan system coincided with increased violence, population shifts, and social, religious, and political upheaval. We know that nativistic movements (Linton 1940), revitalization movements (Wallace 1956), messianic movements (Lowie 1948; Mooney 1991), and relative deprivation (Aberle 1962) arise during periods of socio-cultural dysfunction. Violence (Haas 1990; LeBlanc 1999) and cannibalism (White 1992; Turner and Turner 1999) provide further interpretation of the social and individual stresses the fictional characters are subjected to. Oral tradition such as the stories of Sityatki and Awatovi (Lomatuway'ma 1993), and mythology (Malotki 1987) also help to fill in the blanks. Put all that together and you have a potent brew for a story.

Which brings us to enthnoarchaeology and ethnographic analogy—both being methodological approaches bristling with pitfalls and caveats. Of necessity we must make assumptions concerning prehistoric culture based on behaviors reported in ethnographic accounts. Some are safe. For instance, while writing People of the River, we assumed that in Cahokia chunky stones were used in a very similar manner as was reported by Culin (1907) for extant Southeastern peoples. Mississippian statues of chunky players not only reflect the game, but give us clues about dress and hair styles.

At other times, we work on shaky assumptions at best, as we did in writing People of the Lightning. Did the Windover Pond people believe in a three souls (Hann 1991) the way the contact period Calusa did? We can never know for sure, but reflecting that belief allowed us to portray a spiritual concept entirely foreign to most Americans.

In our last novel, People of the Owl, we utilized a three-world creation cosmology at Poverty Point 3,500 years ago. The decision to do so was based on a canvassing of Southeastern creation stories, mythology, folk tales, and oral tradition. In essence we had to look for cross cultural similarities that couldn't be explained by subsequent Woodland and Mississippian influences. Can we prove conclusively that the people who built Poverty Point actually ordered their universe this way? No, but we can argue that such a cosmology is at least suggested by the physical dimensions of the site, the artistic motifs, and the subsequent diffusion of the concept across the Southeast.

This is why brassy nerves and humility are required in the fiction minefield. The author isn't allowed the luxury of stopping after Chapter Seven to await further research before concluding just what his characters are going to roast in their earth oven.

For the most part our work has a positive impact on the public. Feedback comes by means of fan letters, people at signings, and communications to our website. One woman in Tennessee organized a community to save a mound that was about to be bulldozed for a mall parking lot. Others write asking us to identify artifacts. A surprising number of people want to know where they can go to volunteer on an excavation. Children always want help with a school project.
Native American attitudes run about ninety percent in favor. Most Native Americans read the novels to gain an appreciation for the sort of lives their ancestors might have lived. We need not belabor the point—it has been made in these pages many times before—but as archaeologists we do a lousy of job of communicating to the public. If our novels induce Native American readers to use the bibliographies at the back of the book then we have succeeded in helping to bridge the gap. The few negative comments generally focus on prehistoric violence and stem from the myth of a pre-contact Eden.

As to criticisms from our professional colleagues? If they don't like our interpretations of prehistoric culture, they can do it differently when they write their own novels.

In Dark Inheritance and Raising Abel as well as in our prehistory novels we try to communicate the fascination we have with anthropology in general. This is a discipline based on discovery and wonder, but departmental politics, tenure track, the rigors of the classroom, Section 106 compliance, Cultural Resource Management, and statistical analyses that become the end rather than the means can deaden the hardiest of souls. Sometimes we get the feeling that many of our professional colleagues have lost the magic.

For us, the very act of researching, brainstorming, writing, and revising, a prehistory novel keeps the senses sharp. The People series has given us a grasp of the length and breadth of North America's cultural legacy that we would never have attained had we remained focused solely on field research in the Rocky Mountains and Great Basin. Fiction, by its very nature, takes you in directions you never would have considered and poses problems that the archaeologist must solve in order to continue the story.

For example we know that during the post-Chacoan period in the Southwest people were banding together in large and crowded defensive villages. From paleopathological studies of bone lesions we can calculate the attack rates for tuberculosis in those villages; it was epidemic. What impact did that epidemic have on people already under severe psychological and physical stress, and how does that relate to the origin of modern Puebloan witchcraft stories? Can this be part of the reason for abandonment? Did it influence the rise of the katchinas in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth centuries?

Fictional situations have also made us rethink some of our old and comfortable assumptions. While writing The Morning River our characters began burning dried bison dung after they'd scrounged all the locally available wood. Which in turn left us wondering what using dung for fuel did to the floatation samples. We know bison pass grass and yucca seeds, so how will a paleobotanist interpret charred seeds recovered from such a dung fire?

Writing fiction definitely isn't for everyone, but if you're one of those archaeologists who tend to imagine the people as they must have been, try it. Academicians tend to make several mistakes when they write fiction—grant proposals not included. The first problem to overcome is the tendency to include every scrap of data in long didactic passages. For any piece of fiction the rule of thumb is that you will only use about twenty percent of your research. If you find yourself writing about Chaco Canyon, you are not going to be able to air competing theories by Lekson, Vivian, Cordell, and LeBlanc. Your only option is to pick the theory you like the best and run with it.

Most scholars have been trained to write in passive voice. We like that sense of aloof detachment in professional publications, but it just kills a reader's ability to empathize with characters. Fiction requires active voice without jargon.

Do not assume too much of your reader. You may be the world's leading authority on Omaha kinship systems, but if you use different terms to describe mother's brother's eldest and second eldest sons, you are going to lose your readership. Ninety-eight percent of the American people have no idea that other cultures define kinship differently. In dealing with problems like
this, you may have to simplify the data in the interest of universal comprehension.

We can all diagram how a matrilineage works, at least on paper. It is quite different to actually write from within that cultural framework. Developing that ability takes time, critique, and practice. Obviously when writing a story set in Moundville, the war chief isn't going to report to his chief: "We wasted their asses when they tried to cross the river." Nor would a prehistoric person utter, "I could feel my phalanges under the loose skin of my fingers." The art comes from balancing story, background, character, and the use of language.

Like crossing a minefield, writing fiction based on prehistory is fraught with challenges. You will find out just how little you actually know about that time and place. The process will sharpen your wits and skills. And finally, by making the past come alive for your readers, you will be communicating some of the wonder of our vocation.

Bibliography:

Aberle, David
1962 "A Note on Relative Deprivation Theory as Applied to
Millenarian and other Cult Movements", in Sylvia L.
Thrupp, (ed.), Millenial Dreams in Action. ("Comparative
Studies in Society and History," Supplement 2.) The Hague.

Culin, Stewart
1975 Games of the North American Indians. Dover Edition of
the Twenty-Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of American
Ethnography to the Smithsonian Institution, 1902-1903.
Dover Publications Inc., New York.

Haas, Johnathan (editor)
1990 The Anthropology of War. Cambridge University Press.

Hann, John H.
1991 Missions to the Calusa. The Ripley P. Bullen Series.
University of Florida Press, Gainsville.

LeBlanc, Steven A.
1999 Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest. The
niversity of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.

Linton, Ralph
1943 Nativistic Movements. In American Anthropologist XLV,
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Lomatuway'ma, Michael, Lorena Lomatuway'ma, and Sidney Namingha.
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Lowie, Robert H.
1948 Primitive Religion. Liveright Publishing Corp.
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Malotki, Ekkehart and Michael Lomatuway'ma
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Mooney, James
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Turner, Christy G. and Jaqueline A. Turner
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Wallace, Anthony F. C.
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White, Tim D.
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University Press, Pinceton, New Jersey.

Willey, Gordon R. and Philip Phillips
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