Wounded Communities and Their Wounded Archaeologists: Ancestrality, Archaeological work, and the "Impossible Goal" of Healing

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Increasingly, Indigenous, Black, and other colonized people have turned to archaeological knowledge as a potential tool allowing us to reclaim ancestral worlds, and expose the ongoing structures of violence that keep affecting our communities. Yet, such undertaking does not necessarily attend to our needs, while also being at the root of deeper frustrations and pain as we face the inevitable contradictions present in occupying colonial epistemological spaces. The constant reiteration of structures of epistemic violence affects colonized communities and their archaeologists, making the transformation of archaeological knowledge into a tool for care or healing seem like an impossible goal. This paper seeks to offer reflections on the need to both acknowledge the trauma present in our participation in archaeological knowledge and remember/imagine otherwise ways of doing research for our communities. Much more expansive than a method, the connection with the Ancestors appears as a guiding force for such “impossible goal”.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow