Reclaiming Their Voice
Navajo archaeology and anthropology professor Wade Campbell examines his tribe’s history of sheepherding
The Navajo, who call themselves the Diné, have tended to flocks of churro sheep since the 17th century, when they were introduced to domesticated livestock after contact with the Spanish. Today, the hardy, adaptable breed are “beacons of traditional life,” says Wade Campbell, an assistant professor of archaeology and anthropology, who joined the CAS faculty in January 2022. Campbell himself is Diné and says that despite the importance of sheepherding to Navajo society, not much research has focused on the beginnings of the Diné pastoral tradition during the Spanish colonial period.
Campbell is the principal investigator of the Early Navajo Pastoral Landscape Project, which he started as his dissertation program at Harvard (he graduated with his PhD in May 2022). The project seeks to examine how pastoralism impacted the social organization, culture, and settlement patterns of early Navajo communities in the American Southwest in the early 18th century and how the practice continues today, as herding is seen as an important piece of preserving and sustaining traditional Navajo culture. In his research, he also applies theories of ethnoarchaeology—working with contemporary communities to learn about their traditional practices and history, an approach that is especially valuable when dealing with those groups who lack extensive written records, like the Navajo.
“Growing up, I was always very curious about the position of Navajo folks within this world when the Spanish arrived in 1598. Where’s the Navajo component in that story?” says Campbell, whose Twitter handle is, fittingly, @looking4mutton. “Sheep are huge in Navajo culture and society, historically and even now. I was helping shear my family’s sheep the other day at home on the Navajo reservation. It’s one of the ways in which some of these traditional Navajo values are expressed and brought into daily life.”
A Rich Regional History
Campbell, who was raised on the Navajo reservation in the Four Corners region of Arizona and New Mexico, grew up near archaeologically significant sites such as Chaco Canyon, Navajo National Monument, and Canyon de Chelly. As a Yale undergrad studying archaeology, he worked on digs in Peru, Mali, and South Africa. It was on these trips that he realized his research interests—how humans engage with the environment, how multiethnic communities interact, and how the onset of Western colonialism impacted Indigenous communities—could be applied back home on the Navajo Nation.
Campbell says the Navajo people have historically fallen outside the traditional narrative of Southwestern history and archaeology. Native people weren’t writing about themselves, he says. “It was white clerks, soldiers, priests, and missionaries writing about us, until about the late 19th century. Oral history is an important resource, but it isn’t great on the details; it tells big sweeping lessons. I think archaeology provides direct evidence of what people were doing in specific places at specific times. There is a historical reason to help Native people reclaim their voice for these earlier periods through archaeological research.”
Archaeology provides direct evidence of what people were doing in specific places at specific times. There is a historical reason to help Native people reclaim their voice for these earlier periods through archaeological research.
Mapping History
Typically when people think of archaeology, they imagine trowel-wielding researchers unearthing sherds of pottery or old building foundations. But a key part of Campbell’s Early Navajo Pastoral Landscape Project is to avoid excavation. That’s in part because the Navajo traditionally have what early anthropologists described as a strong “death taboo,” or more accurately, “a deep respect for past people such that you weren’t supposed to talk about individuals who died or disturb those places where they had once lived,” he says. “Death is not seen as something to casually interact with. If the goal of Navajo life is to achieve a long, harmonious life, a natural death is a fitting natural end, and disturbing this final rest through excavation is not something to be glorified.”
As a result, engaging with sites where past people lived is fraught with tensions that were exacerbated when archaeologists began excavating Native American sites in the late 1800s. Today, this juxtaposition between “traditional” Western scientific values and the desires of sovereign Native American tribal communities presents an ethical dilemma for modern archaeologists.
“Early researchers in the Southwest dug into sites and took out bodies, took out pottery sherds, and transported them to faraway museums. These actions flew in the face of traditional Navajo conceptions of what is acceptable; it really [was] a sign of a lack of respect,” Campbell says. “But excavation doesn’t need to happen for archaeological research to occur, or if it does, it should truly be a last resort.”
At early Navajo sites where Campbell believes there may have been pastoral infrastructure such as corrals or watering holes for the animals, he combines methods such as GIS-based geospatial analyses—a software-based technique that combines archaeological data sets with geographic information—with a site survey and the analysis of soil samples to confirm the former presence of a herding site. He hopes that by identifying sites where animals were once kept, he can help reveal how early Navajo groups successfully herded and used the land, while remaining unconquered and free from Spanish rule—lessons he says are relevant for future studies of pastoralism. Thus far, these noninvasive methods have identified three likely corral sites, establishing where he should focus his future efforts. He says he would like to bring BU students to the reservation next summer to study further.
When starting this work, Campbell’s family had a stipulation: be reverent, and do your work with a respect for those past peoples whose lives you are studying. “One way Navajo archaeological work helps the Diné community today is to put the power to create history back into the hands of Navajo folks,” he says. “Indigenous communities across the country wrestle with the fact that the pervasive influence of Western culture has led to a deterioration of our traditional languages and cultures. By reclaiming the ability to tell our own histories through a variety of means, including an Indigenous approach to archaeological research, we can help to ensure the continuation of our traditional societies and cultures into the 21st century.”