Caring Forthe Future With Archaeology

Summary

Historical archaeology is a useful method for discovering silenced and hidden pasts that force reconsideration of how the present came to be and at what and who’s expense. This impulse regularly generates deeper appreciations for the power of the past in and over the present. Yet, archaeologists less often move their results forward to engage with the futures that contemporary people, such as descendant and local communities, can make with new archaeological knowledge. This is surprising since a critical study of the past that provides ownership of it to marginal people and groups inherently and simultaneously calls for consideration of who the owns the futures that will be built on such new pasts. Drawing from my research with a descendent nonwhite community in Setauket, New York, I explore the intersection of past and future in the way historical archaeological research has been imagined and practiced.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2017   •
• Archaeologies Of Care: Rethinking Priorities In Archaeological Engagements

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 294