Archaeology of Activism

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology, Activism, and Protest", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Micah White, one of the organizers of the 2011-2012 Occupy Movement, and its associated protests, emerged from Occupy so disillusioned that he published a book titled The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution. In it, White argues that activists tend to overestimate the effects of protest in the short term and underestimate them in the long term. For that reason, future social movements will need to “re-conceive activism in time scales of centuries, not seconds.” Archaeology can speak to this issue of time scale by reminding all of the sustained efforts necessary to create social change. By documenting the sites of protest and curating the materiality used by protestors to convey their messages, archaeology can counter narratives of success or failure for individual protest actions and reveal the larger and lengthier trajectories of their underlying social movements.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Archaeology, Activism, and Protest

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Contact(s): Nicole Haddow