Decolonizing the past, empowering the future: Community-led heritage conservation in Ifugao, Philippines

Building from the Ground Up: The Archaeology of Residential Spaces and Communities in Southeast Asia

“…Recent studies elsewhere in the world have used residential data to highlight issues of interest to contemporary people, such as sustainable food practices and food security (Isendahl and Smith 2013;Logan et al 2019;Spielmann and Aggarwal 2017). A recent community archaeology project in the Philippines demonstrates how a focus on the archaeology of settlement spaces of minority groups can help subvert nationalist and colonialist narratives that foreground the heritage of the dominant cultural group (Acabado and Martin 2020). The archaeology of residential spaces and household archaeology also can facilitate community archaeology and engagement with local stakeholders (Acabado 2020).…”

Introduction

“…Of late, Indigenous, African diasporic, and community‐centric approaches in archaeology have led the charge in attempts to right the abuses archaeologically oriented heritage practices have long perpetuated (see, for example Smith, 2006). The growing number of projects taking these approaches as their central ethos (Colwell, 2016; Wylie, 2014, 2019) is causing what might be the most significant paradigm shift in the field since the postprocessual movement (e.g., Acabado and Martin, 2020; Cipolla and Quinn, 2016; Cowie, Teeman, and LeBlanc, 2019; Diserens Morgan and Leventhal, 2020; Flewellen et al., 2022; Fryer and Raczek, 2020; Gonzalez, 2016; Lyons, 2013; McAnany and Rowe, 2015; Schmidt and Pikirayi, 2016; Sesma, 2022; Surface‐Evans and Jones, 2020). There's ample overlap between those projects utilizing community collaborative methodologies and those projects whose aims center on repairing injustices and combating the epistemic violence permeating our field—a result often of our tendencies to prioritize archaeological understandings of the past while excluding other voices and perspectives (Gnecco, 2009; Schneider and Hayes, 2020).…”

Culture Contacts in Ancient Worlds: A Review of Theoretical Debates and Practical Applications

“…137 Indeed, on the conceptual level issues of Globalization and Colonialism in particular continue being much discussed, the latter still mostly in connection with the Americas but recently also areas not discussed from that point of view before such as Roman Britain or China. 138 Particularly remarkable are recent publications that practice or at least call for giving indigenous communities a voice in the exploration of their (pre-)histories 139 and/or returning material culture forcibly removed by colonial powers. 140 They draw attention to power asymmetries in the present (some of them with long histories) that determine who tells (pre-)histories, and try and find ways to provide new and more balanced views of colonial encounters.…”