Introduction

Archaeological facts have a perplexing character. They are often seen as tangible, less likely to “lie” and more likely to bear impartial witness to actual actions, events, and conditions of life than do, for example, the memories reported by witnesses or participants. At the same time, however, they are notoriously enigmatic and incomplete; they are sometimes described by critical archaeologists as inherently multivocal and malleable (Habu, Fawcett, and Matsunaga 2008). The anxiety that haunts archaeological interpretation, surfacing at regular intervals in sharply skeptical internal critique, is that the tangible, surviving facts of the record so radically underdetermine any interesting claims archaeologists might want to make that archaeologically based “facts of the past” are inescapably entangled with fictional narratives of contemporary sense-making. And yet, these same internal critics make effective use of the recalcitrance of archaeological facts (of the record) to unsettle entrenched convictions that have given presumptive facts of the past purchase, that have allowed them to travel unchallenged.

This jointly solid and uncertain character of archaeological facts is the source of epistemic hopes and anxieties that are by no means unique to archaeology and that have everything to do with the ways in which archaeological facts travel. I consider here a set of cases, drawn from longstanding traditions of archaeological investigation of the earthen mound sites of the central river systems in North America, that illustrate strategies by which contemporary archaeologists appraise the integrity of archaeological facts in terms of what can usefully be described as their trajectories of travel. In the process I disentangle several different senses of “fact” that figure in these appraisals.