Archaeology: A Prisoner to Its Past
Nothing pisses off archaeologists more than being equated with pothunters. Last year, this piece by Craig Childs upset many SW specialists. (Childs is giving a talk at the annual Pecos conference later this week; somebody please record this. Or blog on it. How about you, Gambler’s House, if you’re attending?)
As this recent column in Indian Country Today makes clear, archaeology continues to be haunted by its own past:
The acquisition and holding of human remains by a museum or academic institution is said to be different from grave robbing. Institutional grave robbing is described as scientific research. This argument goes back a long way. As David Hurst Thomas, author of “Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity,” writes, “Thomas Jefferson, America’s first scientific archaeologist, argued that Indians could ““ and really should ““ be studied as part of the rest of nature. Jefferson defined American Indians as specimens. “¦”
Repatriation is the specific issue the author discusses. It’s something we’ll be hearing a lot more about as we approach the 20th anniversary of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatration Act (NAGPRA).
Rest assured that I will be there to see Childs, and will blog it.
Excellent.
Interesting, though nearly a non-sequitur given the context, is the broad theme that kept coming up at this week’s ESA meeting in Albuquerque regarding the necessity of considering humans as parts of ecosystems, rather than seeing ecosystems as something apart. In other words, the importance that humans be studied as part of nature.
Not much of a non-sequitur, I’d say. That has all kinds of interesting implications for archaeology that I’ll have to give some thought to.
John,
Ecologists have been struggling with that dichotomy for many, many years. Old paradigms die hard, though.
As for archaeologists, some are just coming to grips with how drastically humans have changed ecosystems throughout history. See, for example, the piece I wrote a few years ago about ASU’s novel research at Agua Fria National Monument. It’s on the Articles page of this blog, entitled Lost World.
But that’s a unique case, because one of the main researchers (Hoski) has both an archaeology and ecology background. He can read the landscape in ways that most traditional archaeologists can’t.