Why we need to jettison ‘prehistory’

‘Protohistory’ doesn’t quite make it either

    As I’ve said before, ‘prehistory’ doesn’t exist because as soon as you find it you’ve extended the bounds of history to exactly that place. But there is history which is our tempocentric reckoning based on EuroAmericans as being the arbiters of when history begins. And there is something called ‘protohistory.’

    Someone, I’m going to say a scientist but definitely not an English major, decided ‘protohistory’ is different from ‘prehistory.’

    According to an Indiana government publication on ancient people of Indiana, “Protohistoric cultures are those thought to be ancestral to–or developing into–those cultural groups beginning to be recorded in early historic times. Protohistoric cultures can be defined as those prehistoric groups developing or continuing directly into early recorded history, some associated with early historic artifacts.”

    If you noticed some redundancy here, thank me for not showing you the rest of the paragraph where they ‘redund’ themselves two or three more times.

    Would you believe, prehistory and protohistory are two distinct things? It seems so. Meaning, when we look at a timeline from this moment backward we have, history, protohistory and prehistory, in that order.

    My dictionary has no listing for ‘protohistory,’ but it does for the noun ‘prehistory,’ “the period of time before written records.” Since the written word came to the Great Lakes with the French explorers and missionaries beginning with Cartier in 1534 or so, protohistory sort of bleeds over into history here.

    By strict definition prehistory ends when the white man writes about what he finds here in the New World. That’s racist. It’s also tempocentric to an insulting degree. It says all you people who came before are not part of our history. You are prehistory, someplace before history begins.

    It also doesn't recognize the written word as exemplified by ‘talking sticks’ like Walam Olum. Schoolcraft verified the Ojibway in the Upper Peninsula conveyed important knowledge to future generations with these talking sticks.    

    Do we dare say that is not history? Of course it is and other tribes had other forms of ‘written’ communication. The pictographs of the Chumash near Santa Barbara, California, the petroglyphs you find at Reef Bay on the island of St.John, the Sanilac Petroglyphs and the Burnt Bluff Rock Paintings in Michigan, all are markers of history even if no one knows what they mean.

    I call that insulting. Not that the glyph-makers care. It is we who carry the scars of our false pride, to think we are so effen important that the ancient ones don’t matter to our timeline. Thinking like that leaves scars because it draws a line between us and them. It builds an artificial border and we are intellectually confined within it.

    I say we break out of this prison of self consciousness by shitcanning the term ‘prehistory.’ But we need something to take its place.

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Dear Anthropologist,

    After sending you that nice poem which you have my permission to chortle at your next cocktail calling, I ask you in return to send me your thoughts on this ‘prehistory’, ‘protohistory’, ‘ahistory’, ‘ancient history’, ‘precontact history’ controversy. And yes, if as Warrick says, the Indians consider ‘prehistory’ an insult, then it is an insult and its continued use is controversial.

    Come, join the controversy!

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