This special issue gathers together a selection of short articles reflecting on the historical construction of inequality and race in the histories of archaeology. The articles also suggest ways in which the discipline might grapple with the—often obvious, sometimes subtle—consequences of that historical process. Solicited via an open call for papers in the summer of 2020 (one made with the aim of speedy publication), the breadth of the topics discussed in the articles reflect how inequality and race have become more prominent research themes within the histories of archaeology in the previous five-to-ten years. At the same time, the pieces show how research can—and should—be connected to attempts to promote social justice and an end to racial discrimination within archaeological practice, the archaeological profession, and the wider worlds with which the discipline interacts. Published at a time when a pandemic has not only swept the world, but also exposed such inequalities further, the special issue represents a positive intervention in what continues to be a contentious issue.

During the 1920s, a wave of U.S. scientists and journalists descended on Central America and the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico to unlock the riddles of the ancient Maya: their origins, their cultures, and their disappearance. These expeditions, widely publicized in US newspapers, taught the public about both the Maya and US past and present. In this article, I compare media representations of archaeological exploration in Yucatan published in The New York Times. I analyze Alma Reed’s reports from her 1923 visit to Yucatan against Gregory Mason’s dispatches from the later Mason-Spinden Expedition in 1926. Each journalist drew different conclusions about the nature and identity of the ancient Maya, yet sought to transform readers into vicarious stakeholders to maintain US dominance in Yucatan. They recreated cultural and scientific ties between Yucatan and the United States damaged by plummeting henequen prices and a series of radical socialist experiments designed to bring the ideals of the Mexican revolution to the region. I show how cultural representations of empire and assumptions about the indigenous bolstered informal US economic empire and strengthened both real and imaginary relationships between Yucatan and the United States.

In this paper I present the background and rationale for a new research project that aims to rediscover the first women who participated in the development of archaeology in the Pacific, from the 19^th to the mid-20^th century. I discuss how this research is inscribed in the history of women in science, responding to Rossiter’s plea to future scholars: to write a history and sociology of science that is more comprehensive by integrating ever more of the hidden women scientists, or ‘Matildas’. I consider how a history of these ‘Pacific Matildas’ can be connected to factors that have been identified as historically keeping women out of science (especially fieldwork-based sciences) as well as keeping them out of historical records about the making of science. After discussing the methodological and conceptual frameworks envisaged for such a project, I present some preliminary results of this research: a short overview of historical figures already identified and a brief examination of one early case-study in the history of the first women engaged in the discipline, that of Adèle de Dombasle in the mid-19th century. I conclude by highlighting what the first clues we can gather about such stories tell us both about the historical place of women in the field and the place of women in the history written about the field.

In the 1870s a dispute arose between supporters and opponents of the idea that a hiatus existed between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic, a period when Europe was uninhabited. Researchers invoked geological, paleontological, archaeological, and anthropological evidence to support their views. This paper discusses the development of this debate and how it was resolved, in large part due to the excavations of Edouard Piette.

The outcome of the 1948 war in Palestine resulted not only in the country’s partition between the state of Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan but also in the division of its archaeological research. The Jordanian Department of Antiquities, which was responsible for administering archaeological research in the West Bank until 1967, prioritized research in the East Bank over research in the West Bank as a function of broader Jordanian government policy. The bulk of the research in the West Bank during this period was conducted by foreign institutions and researchers, who were forced to choose between researching in Israel and researching in the Arab countries, including the West Bank. Those who chose to research in Israel were denied the ability to simultaneously research and excavate in the West Bank. In this way, the choice of the foreign researchers divided them, placing them on the two different sides of the ‘Green Line’. The excavations in the West Bank piqued the curiosity of the Israelis, who never ceased trying to acquire information about them and their findings. These efforts included secret meetings with foreign researchers, attempts to acquire the Qumran scrolls, and the secret transfer to Israel of a few findings for the sake of secret research. For many years, part of their story remained classified in archives. It is shared here for the first time.

The early years of the British administration in Cyprus, which began in 1878, were characterised by an approach of casual acquisition towards the island’s ancient material culture. Civilian administrators and military personnel stationed in Cyprus, prompted by the island’s reputation as a rich source of antiquities, took the opportunity to explore ancient tombs and acquire objects to keep as personal souvenirs or to sell, despite official restrictions on excavation. The nascent Cyprus Museum, responsible for the island’s cultural heritage, lacked resources to restrict or closely monitor this activity. Many objects were removed from their context of excavation without proper recording, resulting in the formation of numerous disparate collections across the UK which lack provenance and documentation. This paper seeks to restore contextual information to some objects dispersed in this way through a re-examination of archives and published sources. While this cannot reconstruct a full archaeological provenance, it can add to the knowledge of individual objects and their collection history, and more broadly the ways in which private and public collections of ancient Cypriot objects were formed through social and intellectual networks. It focuses on the archaeological activities of two British residents, Andrew and Esmé Scott-Stevenson, in Cyprus between 1878 and 1883, demonstrating how such research can contribute both to the archaeological record, and to the social history of archaeology in Cyprus, in particular the recovery of seldom-heard women’s voices.

Archaeology has been an “international” discipline since it emerged as a separate field of intellectual endeavor by the mid-eighteenth century. During the nineteenth century and into the twentieth it gradually became more institutional, as museums increasingly sponsored detailed work and universities began to teach archaeology. However, for its entire existence, the flow of “archaeological capital” has been unidirectional, from “North” to “South”, and archaeology has sometimes served as a cover for less respectable activities. Additionally, during the twentieth century, archaeology, as practiced in major industrial nations and in developing regions, diverged, both in intent and in execution. Furthermore, the practice of archaeology in the Old World and the New World, and in developed and developing nations, has grown in different ways, with foreign actors being at various times eagerly solicited, welcomed, tolerated, denied entry, or expelled. This paper examines these processes, and suggests possible reasons for why archaeology as a discipline has evolved as it has in different parts of the world during the past decades.

Recent work at Serpents Glen (Karnatukul) in the Carnarvon Ranges (Katjarra) of the Western Desert has changed our archaeological understanding of both deep time occupation and more recent arid-zone social geography. Mobilising rock art evidence into earlier models for how arid zone peoples have entered, settled and known Country has allowed us to project people into cycles of human mobility. Our understanding of the deep time and more recent engagements with Country (ngurra) has changed significantly since Richard Gould wrote Yiwara and Living Archaeology in the late 1960s. Early ethno-archaeological studies portrayed the desert as harsh and precarious, and the lifeways of arid zone peoples as marginal and conservative. Fifty years of archaeological endeavour working with traditional custodians in the Western Desert, has changed this view of the ‘dangerous desert’. ‘Risk-minimisation’ and the ‘dietary stress hypothesis’ have been replaced with models that consider human mobility, social geography and information exchange theory as ways of understanding how arid-zone peoples have been successfully on country since the earliest human occupation of this continent. Karnatukul’s record rewrites the deep history of the arid zone, as well as refining our understanding of social complexity by combining late Holocene arid zone art and occupation evidence.

From the 1880s onwards, the Anthropological Institute played a key role in arguments surrounding eoliths, both as a venue for significant events and through the pages of its journals. Eoliths, stone objects claimed to be man-made and regarded by ‘eolithophiles’ as the precursors of handaxes, had become an issue almost as soon as the first chipped flints had been accepted as artifacts in the mid-nineteenth century. The ensuing debate, that drew in many luminaries of the age – such as Edward Tylor, John Evans, Alfred Russel Wallace and Joseph Prestwich – in many ways exemplified the changing relationship between amateurs and professionals in the affairs of the Institute, and between the different branches of evolutionist anthropology, addressing questions of scientific method, the use of ethnographic analogies, and contributing to the splits between the branches, and the eventual supremacy of the professionals by the eve of the Second World War.