Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness," at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Historical archaeologists have long studied race, but most of this work has focused on people of color while omitting people racialized as white. This treatment inadvertently normalizes whiteness by positioning it outside of discussions of racial identities instead of approaching white people as racialized individuals who actively participated in perpetuating racist hierarchies that benefited them in a myriad of ways. This session provides case studies that critically explore whiteness in the past and, ideally, how archaeology can be used to subvert understandings of whiteness in the present.