Community-Based and Collaborative Archaeology in South Greenland: Past, Present, Future

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Anna Kerttula's Contributions to Northern Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists are increasingly engaging in community-based and collaborative approaches to develop frameworks for co-production of knowledge and its dissemination. Encouraging collaborative frameworks and community engagement has been a key element of the NSF Arctic Social Sciences Program under Anna Kerttula's leadership. These efforts offer correctives to disenfranchising research praxes, make archaeologists accountable to their subjects, and reposition those subjects as active producers of their narratives. Destabilizing the privileged position of Western academics results in a more ethical, nuanced, and, arguably, more relevant archaeology. In 2017, the Greenland National Museum and Archives issued an open letter to foreign researchers exhorting them to consider designing community-based, collaborative projects. In 2018, the Arctic Horizons Final Report specifically recommended expanded community engagement and financial support for promoting Indigenous scholarship. North Atlantic Biocultural Organisation archaeologists and their research partners have taken these recommendations seriously for over a decade. In this paper, authors Turley, City University of New York, and Bendtsen, Ilisimatusarfik (University of Greenland), first discuss the general impact of these projects. Then, they present the experience and preliminary results from the first phase of their community-based, collaborative PhD and MA projects at Alluitsoq, a former Moravian mission site in South Greenland.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Celebrating Anna Kerttula's Contributions to Northern Research

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23135