ABSTRACT
Storytelling through the literary and performing arts can reveal or suggest aspects of the past otherwise unconsidered, or perhaps inaccessible through the conventional tools of science. For the literate past—with its offerings of characters, contested ideas and events documented through oral or written testimony—storytelling through playwriting has proven to be illuminating. Nonliterate pasts seem less well suited to this approach, posing ethical and practical challenges. In this chapter, I explore these challenges and offer a brief scene from an aboriginal setting in the Chesapeake Bay region of North America for the Terminal Archaic Period (2550–1250 bc), seeking to overcome apparent limitations in the data to suggest archaeologically testable patterns.
