Glenn A. Black and the Lessons of Big Site/Big Science Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Sins of Our Ancestors (and of Ourselves): Confronting Archaeological Legacies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Large-scale excavations in the first half of the 20th century, like those conducted by Glenn Black at Angel Mounds, were a means to deliver archaeology from its antiquarian roots to legitimate scientific practice. Though this transformation led to innovative methods, amassed collections of unprecedented size and scale, and created foundational knowledge, the past and peoples who occupied it became increasingly objectified, sins we struggle with today in arenas of NAGPRA, curation, and archaeological practice. How does archaeology on such an expansive scale remove from history the very people whose past lives and places it interrogated and memorialized in a national historic landmark? Were other social inequities set in motion through labor relations and institutional politics by early large-scale archaeology projects and their legacies? Would discourse and archaeological practice today be different had this big site/big science approach been more inclusive and sensitive to tribal concerns? Through correspondence, institutional papers, and field records, this paper explores these questions in order to offer solutions to ways archaeologists and tribal groups can come to terms with the unintended consequences of past archaeologies and mediate present challenges.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Sins of Our Ancestors (and of Ourselves): Confronting Archaeological Legacies

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26329