Against the Alienability of Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Congress: Multivocal Conversations Furthering the World Archaeological Congress Agenda" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Working with marginalized Black and Indigenous communities shines a light on the use of archaeological research to support struggles for heritage, recognition, and well-being in settler colonial states. We highlight archaeology’s potential to alienate, whether alienating heritage as “data,” land as open to commodification, or meaning as apolitical. Our experience is that archaeology might also work against forces of alienation if used deliberately as part of a community’s active process of politics, living, and meaning-making rather than a passive or scientific reflection of their past. In this way, sites and artifacts are constructed through the dialogues that also define communities, both in terms of identity and ongoing politics of land, health, and livelihood. This approach resists the alienability of archaeology to ensure that materials are not distinct from those who define them as significant to their presence today. This is a theoretical and political process in which archaeological meaning-making is tied to pragmatic political ends. We discuss these ideas in a conversation with cultural heritage experts of the Ramapough Lenape Nation Turtle Clan in northern New Jersey about Ramapough heritage, especially in reference to the land and its role in Indigenous sovereignty and nation building.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeological Congress: Multivocal Conversations Furthering the World Archaeological Congress Agenda   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37316.0