Taking and Giving: Finding the Balance in Community Archaeology

Summary

One of archaeology’s seemingly inescapable practices is the act of taking, and it remains one of the hardest aspects to manage for communities that work with archaeologists because of its appropriative nature and colonial legacies. A way to balance this "taking" is to emphasize at least as much "giving" in the process, which requires a level of sharing and dialogue that are only now becoming part of archaeologists’ conceptual and methodological toolkits. This paper considers these issues in the context of the Eastern Pequot Archaeological Field School, a project underway since 2003 between the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation in southeastern Connecticut and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. More than ten years of ongoing dialogue, pedagogical enhancements, flexibility, and mutual respect – plus the tribe’s continuing battle with the federal acknowledgement process – have generated community and scholarly products and opportunities that try to embody that tenuous and ever-shifting balance between giving and taking.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Archaeologies by Community Mandate: Practicing Collaborative and Community-Engaged Research

Keywords

Spatial Coverage