Activating Heritage: Encouraging Substantive Practices for a Just Future

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Activating Heritage: Encouraging Substantive Practices for a Just Future" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Heritage isn’t a static reflection of some real (or imagined) past. Heritage does things: it engenders community, teaches history, celebrates diversity; it can also exclude people, reproduce ideologies, and create silences. Heritage is not a thing in itself but rather a set of relations (to the past and each other) that act on and in the world. Nor is heritage beholden to the conventional disciplinary boundaries of archaeology. Instead, it puts archaeology to work in the world. Recognizing heritage’s role as a nexus of social action, this session asks how archaeologists can engage in more substantive heritage practices that aim to dismantle systems of oppression and actualize a more just future. Individual papers present Indigenous and descendant community collaborations, projects that help transcend histories of conflict, and work that brings to light oppressed and silenced narratives. Contributors also offer critiques on archaeology itself, the limitations of heritage work, and the importance of redressing its failures. Reflecting on how archaeologists can and should conduct their work, the papers in this session generally share a pragmatic view that emphasizes not only how heritage does act in the world but how it might act more readily toward consciously anti-oppressive and even liberatory aims.