Community-based Archaeology Research Articles

Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by and for Indigenous and Local Communities by Sonya Atalay (review)

Reviewed by: Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by and for Indigenous and Local Communities by Sonya Atalay Eldon Yellowhorn (bio) Sonya Atalay. Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by and for Indigenous and Local Communities. Berkley: University of California Press, 2012. 312 pp. $29.95. Reading this volume is like having a long, engaging conversation with the author. Its accessible vocabulary, interspersed with instructive illustrations, chronicle the ideas fomenting dialogue between archaeology and the public in general but more specifically Indigenous people. Being Anishnabek encourages the author to imbue her words with a special sensitivity to the struggle of her community to tell their history in their own words. Archaeology, thus, is tailor-made for her inquiries because [End Page 450] her training allows her to extract history from unwritten sources. She triangulates data retrieved from material culture studies, archival documents, and oral history interviews to construct a narrative that emanates from her people’s internal dialogue on the nature of antiquity. Her reflections on an uneasy history with her self-selected career, due to its disrespectful practices and its complicity in marginalizing her community, point to the challenges she overcame to pursue this calling. However, the profession and her community are better off because she did. Beginning with her sample from Anishnabe artist Daphne Odjig’s Spiritual Renewal, the preface relating her inspiration and the people she acknowledges, the author commits herself to articulating her perspective of the good that archaeology can do for Indigenous people. Within the eight chapters in this volume she synthesizes her involvement in the long- and short-term research projects that keep her busy. She begins by introducing her protagonist, which in this case is the subject of community-based participatory research (cbpr) and its implications for promoting a sustainable archaeology. She then turns her attention to examining the historical roots of this trend by recounting the early days of reactionary protest led by the red power movement. Direct action in those days meant invading archaeological excavations and disrupting the work at those sites. It meant protesting the desecration of Indian graves and sacred places. Their efforts started a friendless vigil, but eventually they found allies within the discipline and, more important, among legislators. However, I do think she overlooked the influence of early feminist discourse on the mental template and vocabulary that would inspire aboriginal scholars taking control of their research agenda. The phrase “research for, by and with Indigenous communities” (40) restates a motive, using the same prepositions, employed by journalists such as Gloria Steinem in the 1960s when she was launching a magazine that would include articles written for, by and with women. Apart from this oversight, the point that becomes clear is that this practice has shallow time depth in the repertoire of American archaeology. Chapter 3 is a practical guide for studying the past, how it intrudes on the present, and how cbpr contributes to bridging the distance between a profession just learning to communicate with multiple audiences and communities who feel excluded from participating in the recovery of their own history. It serves mainly to contextualize the succeeding [End Page 451] chapters that describe her personal journey of learning how to engage nonprofessionals in a jargon-laden profession. Chapter 4 is by far the most intriguing. Here she discovers the perspective of the outsider. Her work in Çhatahöyük, Turkey, is about confronting herself as the other. Working in a foreign land, speaking an alien language, and excavating strangers’ history situate her in a role familiar to many American archaeologists. Rather than estrange herself further, she embraces the opportunity to find common cause with the good folk of Küçükköy. As a consequence she gains an enhanced understanding of community concerns about being shut out of a project that would not exist had their ancestors not invested their labors in the objects, features, and architectural remains unearthed by foreigners. She learns her lessons and applies them to subsequent projects with her own people, but the experience was a prominent interlude in her usual practice. Of course the friendships she made while traveling in another country she simply took to heart. Chapter 5 is a step-by-step...

Collaborative Archaeology, Oral History, and Social Memory at Timbuctoo, New Jersey

This article discusses ongoing research concerning the African-American community of Timbuctoo in Burlington County, New Jersey. Through the course of this work, a group of community descendants, Temple University archaeologists and vested community members utilize a collaborative approach to the history and archaeology of the town. Along with analysis of archaeological and written sources, researchers interviewed former residents and community descendants in an effort to better contextualize the past. Joining a growing movement of community-based archaeology projects, this work seeks through collaboration to complicate histories and interpretations of Timbuctoo. This collaborative approach seeks to better understand the past of Timbuctoo and to facilitate discourse on the constructions of race, class, and power in the present.

When is “Gone” Gone? Archaeology, Gentrification, and Competing Narratives about Freedmen’s Town, Houston

This paper examines the interplay between historic preservation, archaeology, mass media, and competing historical narratives, focusing on one urban community in Texas. After its founding by emancipated African Americans, Freedmen’s Town became the “Mother Ward” for Houston’s growing black professional class. By the late 20th century, due to demographic shifts, a lack of zoning, and weak historic preservation ordinances, it had become one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city (despite being listed on the National Register of Historic Places). The remaining historical structures are now being drowned in a gentrification-driven sea of townhomes and lofts. Some new residents embrace the neighborhood’s history, but others use media and politics to reject it actively, as they enact traditional stereotypes about race, poverty, and class. Within this context, those of us involved with the Community Archaeology Research Institute, Inc., have been attempting to do community-based (not “placed”) archaeology and encourage local-history and public-policy communities to avoid “writing off” the neighborhood as “lost.”

Heritage, Neighborhoods and Cosmopolitan Sensibilities: Poly-Communal Archaeology in Deerfield, Massachusetts

Cosmopolitan sensibilities acknowledging mutual obligations and human interconnectedness can orient people navigating the complexities of neighborhood and other forms of community-based archaeology. I suggest that practice aimed at engaging in ethical heritage work in neighborhoods can benefit from fostering cosmopolitan values among participants and stakeholders. I outline a model for “poly-communal archaeology,” an approach that takes a cosmopolitan stance and engages multiple stakeholders in neighborhood archaeology and heritage work. I then reflect on a case study of heritage work that employs such an approach in the neighborhood of “Old Deerfield” in western Massachusetts, U.S.A. In this case, a cosmopolitan sensibility is deployed to restructure the social relations that underpin heritage work.

The Premise and Promise of Indigenous Archaeology

Researchers have increasingly promoted an emerging paradigm of Indigenous archaeology, which includes an array of practices conducted by, for, and with Indigenous communities to challenge the discipline's intellectual breadth and political economy. McGhee (2008) argues that Indigenous archaeology is not viable because it depends upon the essentialist concept of “Aboriginalism.” In this reply, we correct McGhee's description of Indigenous Archaeology and demonstrate why Indigenous rights are not founded on essentialist imaginings. Rather, the legacies of colonialism, sociopolitical context of scientific inquiry, and insights of traditional knowledge provide a strong foundation for collaborative and community-based archaeology projects that include Indigenous peoples.

Voices of New Philadelphia: Memories and Stories of the People and Place

A project of collecting and recording oral histories related to New Philadelphia provided a valuable avenue for understanding facets of racism, and played an integral role in establishing a community-based archaeology program that emphasizes civic engagement. These oral histories also provided details of the historical context of the town, and revealed information that aided archaeological investigations. Several interviews supplied valuable data concerning the likely locations of structures, residences, and businesses that once existed within the town site. Oral histories further contributed data for meeting the challenges of analyzing cultural, ethnic, and class differences in artifact assemblages recovered from each house lot.

Community-Based Archaeology in Central New York: Workshops Involving Native American Youth

Beginning in 1995, Colgate University has offered seven two-week summer workshops in archaeology to members of the Oneida (Iroquois) Indian Nation of New York Youth Work/Learn Program. These workshops, directed by Jordan Kerber and funded by the Oneida Indian Nation, Colgate University, and the John Ben Snow Foundation, have provided more than one hundred Oneida teenagers with hands-on experiences in the limited excavation and laboratory processing of prehistoric and historic Native American remains in central New York State. This article also discusses the various challenges and benefits of involving a Native American descendant community in archaeological research.

Community-Based Archaeology in Central New York: Workshops Involving Native American Youth

Beginning in 1995, Colgate University has offered seven two-week summer workshops in archaeology to members of the Oneida (Iroquois) Indian Nation of New York Youth Work/Learn Program. These workshops, directed by Jordan Kerber and funded by the Oneida Indian Nation, Colgate University, and the John Ben Snow Foundation, have provided more than one hundred Oneida teenagers with hands-on experiences in the limited excavation and laboratory processing of prehistoric and historic Native American remains in central New York State. This article also discusses the various challenges and benefits of involving a Native American descendant community in archaeological research.

Community-based archaeology in Australia

Outside the Antipodes, Australian archaeology is best known as an archaeology of the distant Palaeolithic past. However, where communities have been closely involved in developing and undertaking archaeological research programs, the focus of archaeological research has been radically different, often dealing with the archaeology of the recent, remembered past and crossing disciplinary boundaries between Aboriginal and historical archaeology. Distinguishing between 'community-based archaeology' and reactive or 'consent-based' community involvement in archaeology,this paper reviews the state of archaeology and its engagement with communities in Australia. Through several case studies in both indigenous and post-contact archaeology, it demonstrates the way in which community-based research and practise is changing what it is we think of as 'archaeology' in Australia.

The ideal and the real: Cultural and personal transformations of archaeological research on Groote Eylandt, northern Australia

Since the early 1970s indigenous people have provided a challenging and often confronting cultural and political critique of some of the long-held givens of archaeological research. Archaeologists engaged in research about Australia's indigenous archaeological record, whether it is the distant past of the Pleistocene or the more immediate past of colonial conquest, have had to rethink some of the fundamental aspects of their practice. In the last ten years one important initiative has been the development of community-based approaches to archaeology. The paper is presented in two parts. The first part provides a brief background to the development of community archaeology in Australia, setting out the main elements of this approach. The second part presents three contexts from Groote Eylandt in northern Australia where I am able to identify the experiences that were pivotal in my shift in practice to a community-based archaeology.

Conducting Community‐Based Archaeology in Central New York: Recent Examples Involving Iroquois Youth in Educational Workshops

Conducting Community‐Based Archaeology in Central New York: Recent Examples Involving Iroquois Youth in Educational Workshops