Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chrislyn Laurie Laurore. Matthew C. Reilly. Craig T. Stevens.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Dozoa or Providence Island has long served as a meeting ground along the West African coast. Indigenous groups traded and potentially used the site for rites associated with secret societies. The site later served as a trading outpost, with European merchants eager to exchange goods, including human cargo. In this paper, we discuss recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Reilly.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The archaeological archive is a largely untapped resource related to the role that race and White supremacy played in the production of archaeological knowledge and methods. As I suggest in this paper, archaeological methods and thought were deeply, even if unconsciously, influenced by plantation logic. Specifically, race determined who...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nina M Schreiner.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Building on decolonizing and postcolonial frameworks that highlight white supremacist ideologies within the disciplinary formation of archaeology, this paper addresses informal collecting practices of middle-class white families in the nineteenth century. By tracing a family of civil engineers across the Eastern United States, I connect...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suzanne Spencer-Wood.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Most social reformers were Anglo-American middle-class whites, who found they could not impose their privileged racist and classist ideas of “proper” housekeeping, cooking and mothering etc. on poor whites, minorities and immigrants, because participation in reform programs was voluntary. Amazingly, reform women quoted negative as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry P. Brock. Matthew E. Reeves. Mary F. Minkoff. Christopher Pasch.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper will bring attention to possible avenues of inquiry at James Madison’s Montpelier to explore the ways that whiteness was a prevalent factor on the plantation. It will explore the plantation landscape, architecture, and material culture of the Madison family and their white employees who lived at the overseer’s house on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Horton.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Hatteras island, on North Carolina Outer Banks is well known as the likely destination of the 1587 English Colonists when they abandoned their settlement on Roanoke island. Our archaeological investigations at the Cape Creek site since 2012 have located a sequence from the 16th-early18th c. which maps the integration of the English...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy S. Maddock.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Depression-era company town and logging community of Apex, Arizona was staffed and occupied almost exclusively by White lumberjacks of Scandinavian descent. Archival research indicates that the community’s racial and ethnic makeup was by design, given the Saginaw and Manistee Lumber Company’s staunch refusal to hire African Americans...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charlotte MS Feakins.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In northern Australia, the buffalo hide industry was prevalent from the late 19th to mid-20th century. It involved Indigenous and non-Indigenous women and men working collectively for white male shooters to exploit feral water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) for their thick hides. Indigenous peoples dominated the workforce and often excelled in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew C. Greer.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeologists have studied race in Antebellum Virginia for decades. But these works have focused predominantly on Blackness, and to a lesser extent Indigeneity. Whiteness, however, has been largely ignored, and the few works that have addressed white racial identities have addressed notions of whiteness among local elites instead of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Audrey Horning.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Drawing upon my research into two groups commonly described as ‘racialized’: the Irish and southern white mountaineers, I take a Black whiteness approach placing ‘degrees of whiteness’ in conversation with anti-black racism. The normalization of whiteness as a monolithic category obscures oppression within white European-descendant...