“Chicken Strips” McGuire and the Development of Indigenous Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Praxis Makes Perfect: Celebrating the Academic Life and Times of Randy McGuire" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Randy McGuire’s career in archaeology overlapped several major shifts in the discipline. This paper examines his contributions to Indigenous Archaeology, which developed organically from a discipline unsettled by global cultural processes related to indigenization. By the late 1970s Indigenous demands for decolonization of archaeology, especially repatriation of Ancestors, became a focus for debates within the discipline. By the mid-1980s archaeology also became embroiled in an epistemological shift. Post-processual archaeology emerged from a critique of processual archaeology and recognized and openly acknowledged the subjectivity of archaeological interpretations centered on meaning, cultural memory, politics, and ethical practice. Conflation of post-processual archaeology with an Indigenous critique appeared in the late 1980s as Indigenous Archaeology. Since then, McGuire has been a central figure in addressing Indigenous concerns by developing collaborative projects, by training Indigenous archaeologists, and by exploring necessary shifts in epistemology, ethical practice, activism, advocacy, and use of archaeology in social justice issues involving other marginalized people.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Praxis Makes Perfect: Celebrating the Academic Life and Times of Randy McGuire

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50318