Abstract During the early twentieth century the rise of professional archaeology pushed the study of deep-time oral tradition into the fringes of historiography. The development of evidence-based archaeological chronologies displaced oral tradition, relying on the assumption that transmission processes include short-term limits on durability. By the end of the century, sporadic innovative partnership experiments brought together archaeological chronology and oral tradition, suggesting the need for further research. This article advances the narrative merging of oral tradition, archaeology, and genomic analysis. After surveying research on archery technology, it explores how the integrative aligning of oral tradition and archaeology can expand meaningful insights into antiquity worldwide. Although twenty-first century inquiry into deep-time oral literature unfolds in the shadowy academic fringes, perhaps such research is on the verge of professionalizing into new scholarship and a mutual enrichment of knowledge systems. Academic scholarship may someday see “prehistory” replaced by ancient human history.
Roger Echo-Hawk (Mon,) studied this question.