Rethinking Indigenous And Collaborative Archaeologies

Abstract

In this essay I will try to respond to Gnecco’s thoughtful criticism of Indigenous archaeology by reflecting on the ways in which the incorporation of indigenous peoples to the archaeological process might change our perceptions, and the production, of time – both the one produced by the discipline’s discourse and practices and the one that is experienced by human beings during the archaeological process itself, from the elaboration of the project to the publication of a paper. But before that, I propose a propaedeutic step: to question an assumption shared by both historiography and archaeology, namely, the capacity of those disciplines to reconstruct, from a series of fragments of the past, the totality of a bygone world. This intellectual operation may help both collaborative and indigenous archaeology to develop their full potential for the study of the indigenous pasts, while avoiding some of the traps that characterize the history and current practice of the discipline. Only after that will one be prepared to propose a phenomenological version of archaeology as a mode of knowledge production that could yield a different notion of time that does not go against the needs and agendas of indigenous peoples of the present. Finally, I will discuss the ethical and political implications of research production about indigenous pasts and the responsibility of disciplines and scholars before the indigenous peoples of the present, in order to help disciplinary practices to be more sensitive and friendly to their struggles.