Wringing Hands and Anxious Authority: Archaeological Heritage Management Beyond an Archaeologist’s Ontology

Abstract

In Canada archaeology sits between colonial and contemporary reconciled notions of heritage, and relationships between the descendant colonial State and Indigenous sovereigns. State-regulated Archaeological Resource Management (ARM) has slowly begun to shift away from archaeologist-centric values, as that management becomes less about preserving the material past, and more about fiduciary State obligations towards Indigenous sovereign rights over this heritage. These changes are also slowly destabilizing the role and authority of archaeologists in ARM: from experts and value makers of archaeological stuff to servicing other societal values within this contested material heritage. These changes have significant implications for how archaeology is understood by Canadian society to “make meaning” of human–material experiences in the past and present. Feeding into both old angsts and new anxieties over archaeological authority and the “rightness” of an archaeological ontology, current discourse invites the question: Is there a place for an informed, reflexive archaeological meaning-making within a resituated heritage conservation regime, and can it contribute to a State/Indigenous Sovereign-based archaeological management? This paper considers archaeology at a time when that practice appears to be moving beyond archaeological sensibilities, and the limits of archaeological ways of knowing are being expanded by other ways of knowing.