Equity in the Archaeology of Disaster, Past, Present, and Future

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Equity in the Archaeology of Disaster, Past, Present, and Future" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ongoing experiences with severe weather events, global environmental change, war, and epidemic disease demonstrate that impacts of disasters are rarely distributed equitably. Marginalized communities tend to be the most vulnerable and may have limited capacities to recover. Similarly, cultural heritage, tangible and intangible, is subject to damage and destruction during disasters and disaster response. But is everyone’s heritage at equal risk, and who defines what heritage is? This forum explores intersections of disaster and equity in archaeology. What have we learned about relationships among inequality, vulnerability, and resilience in past societies? How have disasters, and responses to them, affected social inequality? Under the rapid pace of modern disaster response and recovery, whose heritage is preserved and whose is sacrificed? Whose voices are considered during disaster planning when it comes to the protection of archaeological sites, collections, and cultural landscapes? And finally, what lessons from past disasters would improve the equity of disaster preparedness and recovery today? Although these issues and interests have global significance in archaeology, they have particular salience in New Orleans and the Gulf South, where disasters, preparedness, recovery, and aftermath have been recurrent and will continue to affect future generations.