Ethnohistory

Historical development

Scholars studying the history of Mexico's indigenous peoples have a long tradition dating back to the colonial era, using alphabetic texts and other sources. The Handbook of Middle American Indians, edited by archaeologist Robert Wauchope, produced multiple volumes on Mesoamerican ethnohistory published as Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources in 1973. At that time, both the term and its concepts had entered the literature rather recently and were not fully agreed upon.

The volumes were intended as an inventory of sources for producing professionally acceptable ethnohistory. In the mid to late 20th century, ethnohistorians of Mexico began systematically publishing colonial alphabetic texts in indigenous Mexican languages, a branch known as the New Philology, building on an earlier tradition integrating indigenous history. In the United States, the field arose from studying American Indian communities required by the Indian Claims Commission, gaining a pragmatic rather than theoretical orientation.

Practitioners testified for and against Indian claims, using documentary historical sources and ethnographic methods. Scholars included Latin Americanist Howard F. Cline, who worked on Florida Indians and Jicarilla Apache, and Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin, Director of the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Research Project and founder of the American Society for Ethnohistory. The field has reached into Melanesia, where recent European contact allowed direct observation of the early postcontact period and addressed important theoretical questions.

Michael Harkin argues that ethnohistory was part of the general rapprochement between history and anthropology in the late 20th century.