Community Engaged Bioarchaeology: Centering Descendants

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Community Engaged Bioarchaeology: Centering Descendants" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

An engaged bioarchaeological project includes Indigenous or descendant communities from the start of the project, centering their questions and bringing forward their knowledge of the past with that of the anthropologists. This model creates deeper, more nuanced conversations about their ancestors. The engaged bioarchaeological projects presented here all center Indigenous and descendant questions in different contexts (landscapes, geographies, cultures), intertwining their voices and stories with the gathering of information from ancestral and cultural remains resulting in broader understandings of the past. Each paper offers a glimpse into the different ways descendant communities can and do engage with bioarchaeological research projects. In some cases, the research is initiated by the community, and in others the bioarchaeologists seek out the descendant community for their input and questions, to guide the research. No matter the origin of the initiation, what is revealed here is the ways in which we can reframe our work to be inclusive of the knowledge of the descendant community. Further, many of these projects also reveal how community engaged bioarchaeological projects are decolonizing practices and working toward restorative justice by recalibrating how knowledge is produced and who benefits from the work.