Deepening Archaeology's Engagement with Black Studies

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Deepening Archaeology's Engagement with Black Studies" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Cultural anthropologist Savannah Shange (2019:7, 10) writes that because Black Studies scholars “work largely in the fields of English, history, and film studies, we don’t know much about how their interventions map onto blackness as lived and loved on a daily basis.” This, she argues, creates a space for anthropology to serve as a critical branch of Black Studies, as our work can often account for “the daily practices that facilitate Black” lives in ways that other disciplines cannot. Following Shange’s lead, this session explores the intersection of archaeology and Black Studies in three areas: (1) what archaeological case studies on the materially of everyday lives can contribute to Black Studies; (2) how can archaeologists apply Black Studies theories (such as Black feminist theory or the work of Saidiya Hartman) to our work on the Black diaspora and beyond; and (3) what a deeper engagement with Black Studies would mean for archaeological methods and theories.