Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

If community archaeology is to be truly participatory, then approaches to integrating local understandings and interests in cultural heritage with archaeological ways of knowing need to be further developed. Such methodological innovation requires an expansion of explanatory spaces to accommodate epistemologies that can be radically different. We draw upon the concept of "braided knowledge", a Native American Anishinabe concept introduced to community archaeology by Sonya Atalay. As archaeologists seek to construct partnerships with Indigenous and local communities, braiding together different knowledge systems, arguably, presents the most profound opportunity for meaningful collaboration and also the greatest challenge. Cross-threading different ways of knowing and doing is not easy, however, and sometimes there are significant barriers to reaching rapprochement. Examples of successful and not-so-successful synergies in the areas of community and collaborative archaeology, archaeological field methods and practices, research design, interpretive frameworks, and rationales for conservation are presented from across the Western Hemisphere in the spirit of fomenting discussion and refining braided-knowledge approaches.