Introduction : rethinking colonial pasts through the archaeologies of the colonized

Conceptually, ‘identity’ is entangled by a range of definitional senses of self and collectivities, a complexity of belonging and means of understanding others encompassing a multiplicity of personal, sexual, familial, gendered, social, residential, political, spatial, economic, labour, and belief conceptions and categories that are at once more complex and contested than any single dimension can provide for, and yet generally self-evident to those individuals who situate themselves within that web of identities. ¬The challenge for archaeology is to comprehend and explore meaningful dimensions of this concept from the ancient material record. Th¬e added challenge for archaeologists materially exploring the rise of global colonial patterns is that these categorizations of identity we define from the archaeological past constrain and are constrained by emergent contemporary identities, along with the heritage defined from those identities—contested, denied, or authorized by our archaeological sensibilities (e.g. de la Cadena and Starn 2007; Gnecco 2011; Habu and Fawcett 2008; Harrison 2013b; Leibmann and Murphy 2011; Lilley 2006; Lydon 2006; McNiven and Russell 2005; Merlan 2009; Schmidt and Patterson 1995; Sillar 2005; Smith 2006; Welch and Ferguson 2007; Zimmerman 2007). Intellectually, socially, and politically the archaeology of the recent past and the consequences of global colonialism are never solely about presenting archaeological narratives of the material past (e.g. Leone 2009).