Tracing Theoretical Approaches to Constructing and Contesting Whiteness in Southeastern Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Whiteness has been an especially salient phenomenon in shaping the histories, identities, and landscapes of the US Southeast, even as social and political rhetoric have long worked to render Whiteness invisible and implicit. However, explicit archaeological examinations of Whiteness have been comparatively limited within the theoretical terrain of critical race studies, especially as our discipline grapples with the legacy of colonialism and White supremacy on those we study in the past and ourselves. In this paper, I highlight the dialectical relationship between archaeology and White social constructs, which informs the way that land managers, heritage tourism, and popular media subsequently maintain “useable pasts.” I trace the influence of dominant theoretical frameworks that Southeastern archaeologists have favored on the ways that we have engaged Whiteness as a racial construct and a process. Though Southeast archaeology has long been presumed to lack meaningful contributions to broader archaeological theory, I argue that both archaeological sites and practitioners in the Southeast are especially well positioned to direct the trajectory of meaningful developments in critical Whiteness studies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• *SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41709.0