Writing as we do from two settler colonies—Australia and the United States—that continue to struggle with their pasts, we are confronted every day by the legacies of colonialism in the form of persistent structural inequalities within our societies, which determine differing life expectancies, health care, education, and other basic rights for more or less privileged groups. As archaeologists, our professional and intellectual concern with the past makes very clear to us that these inequalities originate from the colonial experiences of our countries. This volume explores the relationship between the postcolonial critique and archaeology, two fields of intellectual endeavor that intersect in a growing body of research concerned with the concrete and pervasive heritage of colonialism and imperialism.
In a research handbook in a series sponsored by the World Archaeological Congress (WAC), it is appropriate to reflect that such a synthesis owes its existence and form to the organization’s central goal of addressing present social inequality through a concern with the past. WAC was founded in Southampton in 1986 in response to the call by the Anti-Apartheid Movement to impose sanctions against the South African regime in accordance with United Nations resolutions (Stone 2006; Ucko 1987). Among its objectives, WAC is “committed to diversity and to redressing global inequities in archaeology through conferences, publications, and scholarly programs. It has a special interest in protecting the cultural heritage of Indigenous peoples, minorities and economically disadvantaged countries, and encourages the participation of Indigenous peoples, researchers from economically disadvan-taged countries and members of the public.”1 Hence, many of WAC’s aims and programs reflect broad global processes of scholarly and political acknowledgment of the inequalities created by colonialism, Indigenous and minority demands for restitution, and the ethical necessity for us all to engage with strategies of decolonization.
This handbook to archaeology’s engagement with postcolonialism specifies strategies for decolonizing archaeological research that still bears the marks of the colonial enterprise. Summary articles review the emergence of the discipline of archaeology in step with the colonialist enterprise, critique the colonial legacy evident in continuing archaeological practice around the world, identify current trends, and chart future directions in postcolonial archaeological research. Contributors provide a synthesis of research, thought, and practice on their respective topics. Many of the articles take a regional approach, a perspective that emphasizes the diverse forms of colonial culture that emerged around the globe. There is no one colonialist experience, nor its concrete ramifications in the present; such local perspectives foreground the need to counter totalizing narratives of historical and cultural process. These diverse perspectives regarding colonialism reflect historical loyalties and experiences as well as contemporary geopolitics.
In addition to the review-based chapters, each section includes commentary chapters, which provide short, specialized narratives related to the larger theme. Unusual in such handbooks, these shorter chapters offer space for new ways of thinking and formally challenge the structure of a traditional handbook. In its entirety, this collection provides a companion to archaeologists grappling with postcoloniality through a global survey of key concepts, developments, and directions, contributed by leading practitioners and particularly scholars from traditionally disenfranchised communities such as Indigenous peoples, minorities, or other historically and politically marginalized populations. Archaeological interpretation is widely perceived to play an important role within contemporary articulations of identity in providing a deep foundation for modern assertions of authority, and contributors explore this process. Overall, the handbook provides guidelines to enable practitioners around the globe to understand how these issues are integral to archaeological fieldwork, and to assist archaeologists to better understand and to implement the approaches reviewed.

Definitions: Colonial, Postcolonial

Postcolonial scholarship developed in relation to the expansion of the empires of Western Europe that occupied most of the world from 1492 to 1945. As a body of ideas and methods, it originates in the political activism of post-World War II anti-colonial liberation movements, allied to the intellectual critique of the structures of colonialism—a project often said to have been initiated in 1961 by the publication of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1968 [1961]). Such a critique aims to show that colonialism and European culture are deeply implicated within each other, and to demonstrate the reliance of Western systems of thought upon the colonial “other.” Postcolonial scholarship has also revealed the disjunction between the apparent progressivism and benevolence of the universals of the European Enlightenment tradition—concepts such as historicism, reason, and humanism—and their restricted deployment in colonial practice, where they were reduced to the figure of the “White settler male.” As historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000: 4–5) points out, universal categories such as a “conception of a universal and secular humanism” continue to underpin the human sciences, and they are indispensable because “without them there would be no social science that addresses issues of modern social justice,” including the critique of colonialism itself. Hence, Western concepts such as “historicism” and “political modernity” are both necessary to non-Western histories yet are simultaneously inadequate to explain them.
In temporal terms, “post-colonial” therefore pertains to a distinct period in world history—namely, the aftermath of European imperialism post-World War II. The colonialism of this era is distinguished from earlier forms by its global scale, integration, and overlap with the emergence of modernity and capitalism. However, the term does not imply the triumphant transcendence of colonialism: while these great world systems have been dismantled, various disguised forms of colonialism and neocolonialism continue to flourish. In what follows, we use the term primarily to refer to a specific theoretical approach rather than denoting a temporal period; we remain wary of defining our own time as somehow having left colonialism behind (see also PagĂĄn-JimĂ©nez 2004).
It follows that postcolonial scholarship may be distinguished from earlier approaches toward the study of colonialism by its integrally self-reflexive, political dimension: it has been termed a kind of “activist writing,” committed to understanding the relations of power that frame colonial interactions and identities, and to resisting imperialism and its legacies. The postcolonial critique, unlike those of poststructuralism and postmodernism with which it intersects, has a fundamental ethical basis in examining oppression and inequality in the present, including those grounded in neocolonialism, race, gender, nationalism, class, and/or ethnicities. Postcolonialism’s concern with the past is guided by that past’s relationship with the present, foregrounding the links between cultural forms and geopolitics. It is intellectually committed to contributing to political and social transformation, with the goal of countering neocolonialism and facilitating the assertion of diverse forms of identity.
Postcolonial scholarship has therefore reconsidered colonialism from the perspective of colonized peoples and their cultures, as well as revealing its continuing ramifications in the present. Interdisciplinary and transcultural in its theory and effects, post-colonialism has followed diverse historical trajectories, making it difficult to generalize or to satisfactorily theorize the process of colonialism as a coherent project. As Ania Loomba (1998: xvi) warns, colonialism’s historical and geographical heterogeneity means that “we must build our theories with an awareness that such diversity exists, and not expand the local to the status of the universal.” While colonialism has often been evoked as a “global and transhistorical logic of denigration,” a “coherent imposition” rather than a practically mediated relation (Thomas 1994: 3), here we seek to place these diverse processes in historical and global contexts.
Colonialism centers on the conquest and control of other peoples’ lands and goods. In its inescapably material character, it is particularly amenable to archaeological investigation, raising a range of questions that have long been central to the discipline, such as the role of material culture in constituting identities and mediating between cultures. Like Michael Rowlands, we use the term “colonialism” to refer to the modern phenomenon in which the colonizers’ relations of domination over the colonized are of primary salience. By contrast, the more specific term “colonization” is restricted to describing the movements and settlements of people with no implication of power relations (Rowlands 1998a).

Colonialism, Culture, and Representation

Crucially, postcolonial scholarship has revealed the importance of representation in securing the West’s dominance over the colonized. Drawing on Foucault’s arguments for the mutual constitution of knowledge and power through discourse, an...