Labor and Plurality: Excavating the Political Economy of Identity

Historical archaeology is celebrated as a means to recover history’s under-represented people, and many base their contributions on our ability to give voice to the poor and the marginal. This worthy endeavor nevertheless rests on a soft foundation. To speak about the unspoken, archaeologists rely on an ability to work from spaces and sites that isolate marginal communities, so that the recovered archaeological remains can be confidently attributed to them. In exchange for this clarity, archaeologists tend to ignore other spaces and sites, and thus leave the diverse record of marginal people incomplete. We also lose an ability to observe direct interactions across the lines of race, class, and gender at the very intimate scales of site and home. Papers in this session employ labor relations as a means to construct alternative approaches to understanding the way identities emerge and develop through the productive processes of work, exchange, and debt.