"This Is The Ancestral": Black Women Archaeologists and Ethics of Care

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Africa’s Discovery of the World from Archaeological Perspectives: Revisiting Moments of First Contact, Colonialism, and Global Transformation", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Black women archaeologists care deeply for one another, the artifacts and sites they study, and the global Black community. An ethic of care and notion of obligation are important, undertheorized anti-racist practices that mediate Black women archaeologists' sociopolitical relationships to other Black fictive kin, both living and deceased, artifacts, and the discipline of archaeology. A Black feminist ethic of care informs the variety of unpaid, institutationally unaccounted, and deeply meaningful acts of care they undertake: advising students, shaping research around descendant community interests, and even staying in the field despite personal desires to leave academic arachaeology. These care acts circulate and support the community of Black women archaeologists. This paper animates interdisciplinary discussions of care through ethnographic interviews and participant observation with Black women archaeologists trained in the United States.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Africa’s Discovery of the World from Archaeological Perspectives: Revisiting Moments of First Contact, Colonialism, and Global Transformation

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Contact(s): Nicole Haddow