Being the Only One: An Ethnographic Study of Black Women Archaeologists

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The application of a Black feminist theoretical lens to the field of archaeology has produced a site to discuss how race, gender, and other identities impact how archaeological research is done. This paper is concerned with the experiences of three Black women archaeologists in the United States. Through ethnographic interviews, this paper explores how Black women confront race and gender in the field of archaeology and their strategies to support themselves and other Black women in the discipline.

Further, this paper draws deeply on the autoethnographic, particularly the author’s experiences as a young, Black woman attending a predominately white research university in the American Northwest. Autoethnography, woven into the narratives of the research participants, explores the central questions of the paper: How do Black women arrive in archaeological spaces and what structural and social challenges do they face within the field?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 309