Sins of Our Ancestors (and of Ourselves): Confronting Archaeological Legacies

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Sins of Our Ancestors (and of Ourselves): Confronting Archaeological Legacies," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Today’s archaeological debates have historical and cultural roots. Only by knowing those who came before us, and how they generated our foundational knowledge, can we contextualize the present and build a better discipline. Current discussions, musings, successes, and failures, mirror those of Arthur Caswell Parker (a Seneca man, and the first president of the SAA) and his daughter Bertha "Birdie" Parker (a female indigenous archaeologist working in the early 1900s), Warren King Moorehead (a man with little academic training and curator of the Phillips Academy Department of Archaeology), Alanson Buck Skinner (an ethnologist and archaeologist for the Museum of the American Indian) and his regular collaborator Amos Oneroad (a Dakota man and Presbyterian minister). Many archaeologists espoused their support for Native peoples and cultures while undertaking large scale excavations without meaningful tribal involvement, without documenting their work so that others could learn from it, and without acknowledging the labor of those who made their work possible. The papers in this session focus on the legacies of these and other early archaeologists in order to examine our own shortcomings. Each author offers insights into today’s socio-political struggles while reflecting on our discipline’s history.