Archaeology, Heritage, and Civic Engagement
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Archaeology, Heritage, and Civic Engagement

Working toward the Public Good

Barbara J Little, Paul A Shackel

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eBook - ePub

Archaeology, Heritage, and Civic Engagement

Working toward the Public Good

Barbara J Little, Paul A Shackel

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About This Book

The definition of "public archaeology" has expanded in recent years to include archaeologists' collaborations with and within communities and activities in support of education, civic renewal, peacebuilding, and social justice. Barbara Little and Paul Shackel, long-term leaders in the growth of a civically-engaged, relevant archaeology, outline a future trajectory for the field in this concise, thoughtful volume. Drawing from the archaeological study of race and labor, among other examples, the authors explore this crucial opportunity and responsibility, then point the way for the discipline to contribute to the contemporary public good.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781315433592
Subtopic
Archaeology
Edition
1

PART ONE

Story of Self

Here we give a little personal background about our own work, we place ourselves in a tradition of anthropology that has shifted to take responsibility both for the consequences of its own past and for action in the world today, and finally, we offer some definitions that are relevant throughout the book.

Chapter 1

Images

Story of Self

Story of Self: Some Reflections from the Authors

We were trained as archaeologists to practice archaeology as a defined discipline with boundaries. The accompanying restrictions made less and less sense to us as we explored the potential of historical archaeology, which we believed required that those boundaries be crossed. We can each recall many times in our early careers when we were told that what we were doing might be interesting but it was not archaeology. This often insistent critique came from every direction. A “stay inside your box” message enforces the orderliness of academic divisions and departments and works against effective or sustained cross-disciplinary collaboration. On the practical side, however, two things must be acknowledged: it is difficult to get a job if one does not fit inside the boxes for which practitioners are being hired, and it is impossible to be well-versed and up-to-date in any reasonably broad field of knowledge. Yet, we persist.

Paul

Archaeology means different things to different people, but most people hope to make a connection to the past as a way to find meaning in their lives today. I was trained in the tradition of the New Archaeology—a mid-twentieth-century, science movement in the discipline away from description and historical context and toward explanation and generalizations about human behavior. I became aware of the political power of the past and the role of archaeology while discovering critical theory in the 1980s as I worked on the Archaeology in Annapolis project. In the 1990s, while employed at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park as an archaeologist, I participated in research that focused on examining the roots of industrial capitalism and the inequalities and discontent in a wage labor system. The important contribution of this research was to connect the past to the present and show that many of the inequalities in today’s society began with the Industrial Revolution. While we can boast of many modern conveniences, such as mass manufactured goods, they came at the price of alienation of labor in the factory system. Experiencing the way the National Park Service selectively interpreted this important episode of U.S. history, it became more apparent to me how the past is presented through a certain lens and that present-day actors influence the meaning of the past.
In the early 1990s, many professionals continued to argue adamantly that the goal of archaeology was to find a true and objective past. While there are still many today who hold to that position, the world of archaeology in the United States changed dramatically in the 1990s. Many different communities were obtaining a greater say in how their pasts were treated and interpreted. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and the incidents behind the creation of the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York City opened the door to a new type of public archaeology—civic engagement. Communities could control their past and their destinies. It became increasingly clear to me that archaeologists and their work could make a difference in the present by addressing and acting on many of the “isms” that exist today in our society, including racism, sexism, and ageism.
In the early 2000s I was invited by the New Philadelphia Association in western Illinois to rediscover the heritage of an African American community known as New Philadelphia. This large-scale project was a collaboration with the University of Illinois and the Illinois State Museum (see chapter 6), and it provided the opportunity to use portions of the civic engagement “toolkit” to make the community more aware of the deep roots of racism that existed in the region. I thought that our work might also lead to anti-racism activities in the community. However, most people were skeptical and did not initially participate in the project, and many challenged our findings. It was the Internet that became the key instrument in the democratization of knowledge. We used the project’s website to describe a clear path to how we collected our historical and archaeological data, and to demonstrate how the town had developed within a racist climate. As we describe in chapter 7, climbing the civic engagement pyramid was not easy, nor was it a natural ascent for community members. However, because of the democratization of the project findings, the New Philadelphia Association is taking responsibility for becoming a more inclusive organization, while promoting a more inclusive past. Archaeology served as a touchstone that connected the past with the present and enabled the community to act to change its social and political climate. It remains a work in progress.
In the 2010s, I turned once again to my interest in connecting past and present labor inequalities. Class, ethnicity, and racism all play a major role in the way people are identified and treated in the labor force. A team that includes several graduate students is working in the coal patch towns of northeastern Pennsylvania, collecting oral histories and performing archaeology. Examining the historical records reveals that in the late nineteenth century, embedded racism influenced the treatment of new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe who came to labor in the coal mines. Today, this region is receiving a new influx of Latino immigrants to work in minimum wage jobs because most youth of European descent have left for better opportunities in New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. These new immigrants are generally receiving the same hostile treatment the European immigrants received several generations earlier. The challenge for the project is to make the established community aware of the injustices of the past and its connection to the treatment of new immigrants today. Perhaps this work in the community will alleviate some of the racism still evident. It is also a work in progress.

Barbara

Archaeology is an extraordinarily diversified practice. I find it useful (albeit impractical) to be curious about a broad range of its theoretical stances, methods, and practical applications. I am fascinated that archaeology belongs to both the sciences and the humanities and that, in spite of the synthesizing power available to our discipline, the fragments of the practice fight and claw against each other. I want the insights that archaeology reveals about the ways in which material and ideological realities complicate each other. Archaeological heritage is similar to every other category of tangible heritage in reflecting that complication.
My initial training in archaeology, like Paul’s, was very much embedded in the New Archaeology. I was drawn to the field partly because I was looking for explanations about how we got to be where we are as a society. Eventually such questions led me to become far more interested in historical archaeology than in the exoticized and far-removed past being offered to me as an undergraduate. However, the lens of the New Archaeology’s brand of “science” and the objective distance it appeared to require were initially appealing because they seemed powerful. Power was important in the 1970s, particularly for a young woman mystified and irritated that there were few welcoming places for a woman in the academic world. I followed that science path briefly, delving into mathematical modeling and such because I was interested in complex problems. I was, and still am, excited about the possibilities of anthropological archaeology. I see no boundaries to anthropology, and thus no boundaries to its archaeological branch. I am an anthropologist first, an intellectual identity that prompts me to keep looking for intersections and connections.
I remain interested in complex problems and cultivate a high tolerance for ambiguity. Feminist theory introduced me to the deep questioning of shared narratives that I carry with me. That interest was not rooted in academic training but in curiosity stimulated by my daily experience. It is lived experience that has inspired the direction of my work. My central research questions are: “What heritage matters and why?” and “How do we use it?” As a member of the Archaeology in Annapolis project lead by Mark Leone, I learned about critical theory and the aspiration to use archaeology as a tool to free people from the ways in which historical narrative can entrap us in the present. I have remained interested in public outreach and involvement and in the broader relevance of heritage. Through my work as an employee of the National Park Service (NPS), I became interested in official designations and public memory. While I do not speak for the NPS in this book or in many of my other publications, one important exception is the book Public Benefits of Archaeology (Little 2002), which was an outgrowth of a conference sponsored by the NPS and partners in 1995. It was difficult to find a publisher for that book because the conventional wisdom in the field was that archaeologists were not particularly interested in the public and the book would be of no interest in the discipline. Instead, as we have witnessed, public archaeology has expanded and thrived in remarkable ways. Continuing in the vein of public benefits, I have been interested in the relevance and usefulness of archaeology (Little 2007, 2010, 2012) and have wondered how archaeologists, in collaboration with others, can contribute to the work of peace and justice (Little 2009, 2011, 2013).
How we, as a society, acknowledge and use the tangible parts of our heritage becomes a powerful force in social, cultural, and political life. Heritage constitutes a complex public sphere that provides opportunities to employ heritage work for the common good, and that is why we offer so many possible connections in this book.
Paul and I have been exploring our joint interest in social justice and continue to strive to move up the civic engagement ladder ourselves so we can use our strengths and our privilege to contribute to peace and justice. We have been inspired by antiracism work and the aspirations of restorative justice across the globe. We are on a journey to become more active citizens in addition to more effectively using our skills as commentators and observers.
A handful of years ago, our goal for Archaeology as a Tool of Civic Engagement (Little and Shackel 2007) was to encourage archaeologists to think about effective ways to participate in the civic renewal movement, including community building, the creation of social capital, and active citizen engagement in community and civic life. The contributors to that volume were committed to making stories about heritage fully inclusive and to creating a useable and interconnected heritage that is civically engaging in that it calls a citizenry to appreciate the worthiness of all people’s histories and to become aware of historical roots and present-day manifestations of contemporary social justice issues. One connecting thread is raising consciousness about the past and connecting it to the present, particularly with the intention of using archaeological histories as pathways toward restorative justice. A socially useful heritage can stimulate and empower both local community members and visitors to make historically informed judgments about heritage and the ways that we use it in the present. This is an important and growing commitment in archaeology. This book is our next step.

Intersections

In our introduction, we offered a quote from anthropologist Terrance Weik in which he refers to the postcolonial present and our social aspiration to emerge from global colonial relationships. The academic literature currently favors the antecedent “post,” which seems to us an optimistic label, and a potentially misleading one. For example, when politicians speak of postconflict, we presume that they do not really mean that once the shooting stops the problems disappear. A post period can last a surprisingly long time. In his work on conflict resolution and peace building, Kevin Avruch (2012) draws on Harold Isaac’s characterization of the post-World War II disintegration of power systems. Isaacs (1975) identified these as postcolonial, postimperial, postrevolutionary (referring to the fragility of the USSR and China), and postillusionary (referring to the illusion of white supremacy).
We are especially interested in the last, because we believe that it remains foundational to many social and economic inequalities. If the structural foundations of inequality are interconnected and the rhetorical devices used to sustain them are similar, then truly disrupting and dismantling the illusions of white supremacy will also disrupt and destabilize the illusory justification for interlocking oppressions. We are not under the illusion that there is some sort of ideal natural order that will reappear in some way, but we do believe that we have the power to intentionally change our stories and our democracy.
Isaacs (1975, 19) wrote of the postillusionary society:
In the United States, the breakdown of the worldwide white supremacy system after 1945 brought down like pricked balloons a whole cluster of illusions about the nature of the American society and raised in new ways and on a new scale the question of the character of the “American” identity. It opened up a time of wrenching change in all group relations within the society and within every group the beginning of an equally wrenching re-examination of itself.
Heritage holds, and upholds, illusions and aspirations; it also encompasses imagined and invented traditions and intentionality. We advocate for intentionally working toward peace; economic, social, and cultural justice; and environmental justice. We appreciate that such justice is a moving target, and that points on the horizon toward which we want to move may become blurred and indistinct. And yet, there is still a horizon that we might truly call a postillusionary society.

Shifts in Our Profession

As much as anthropological archaeology has changed over the past several decades, it continues to change, broadening its scope as both a science and a humanity, expanding its knowledge-focused questions and its social and cultural meanings. Archaeological scholarship and practice continue to explore the roles of practitioners as participants and collaborators in work that is far larger than archaeology done for the sake of archaeological science alone. The meanings of our terms have changed. “Public archaeology,” for example, today means something far broader than archaeology that is completed to comply with legal and regulatory requirements or paid for by public funds. It is broader than archaeologists going public to share research results. Public archaeology also includes archaeologists’ collaborations with and within communities, and activities in support of education, civic renewal, peace, and justice. This change has come about as archaeologists as heritage practitioners have become increasingly aware of their social and political context. Our grand ambitions speak to a vision of integrating our practice with our common problems. Barbara Little and Larry Zimmerman (2010) have proposed that this trend reflects a quest for wisdom. At least some archaeologists have been helped to see the value of such a quest through work with Native peoples and the cultural values maintained by many indigenous societies.
An increasing number of our colleagues call for creating a civically engaged archaeology that serves the public interest, however difficult that interest is to define. Various subfields of archaeology seek to change mainstream practice. Feminist, Indigenous, antiracist, vindicationist, and Marxist archaeologists offer powerful models that share some goals and methods for rehabilitating archaeology from its colonial and androcentric roots. Sonya Atalay (2006, 284) describes a shared goal this way:
If our goal is to decolonize archaeology, we must then continue to explore ways to create an ethical and socially just practice of archaeological research—one that is in synch with and contributes to the goals, aims, hopes, and curiosities of the communities whose past and heritage are under study, using methods and practices that are harmonious with their own worldviews, traditional knowledges, and lifeways.
In her book Black Feminist Archaeology, Whitney Battle-Baptiste (2011, 31) asks how archaeology can overcome the distrust frequently felt by descendant communities and become trustworthy. Her ambition is to “begin to tell a story that is not just about archaeology or artifacts, but about people and places, women and men, leisure and labor, with details that can be relevant to contemporary struggles for social justice and liberation.”
Anthropology has a mixed history of supporting and confronting injustice. Although rooted in colonialism, anthropologists have spent considerable energy undoing the racial typologies created by their predecessors. Anthropology is rooted in, but not wholly defined by, the western natural history tradition that encouraged social observers to classify and compare human populations. By the 1830s, Samuel Morton became the authority on explaining raci...

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