“The Future of Archaeology Is Antiracist”: Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter

Abstract

This forum builds on the discussion stimulated during an online salon in which the authors participated on June 25, 2020, entitled “Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter,” and which was cosponsored by the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA), the North American Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG), and the Columbia Center for Archaeology. The online salon reflected on the social unrest that gripped the United States in the spring of 2020, gauged the history and conditions leading up to it, and considered its rippling throughout the disciplines of archaeology and heritage preservation. Within the forum, the authors go beyond reporting the generative conversation that took place in June by presenting a road map for an antiracist archaeology in which antiblackness is dismantled.

Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Women and Early Career Archaeologists

“…Other recommended strategies for offsetting negative impacts on historically underrepresented groups include recognizing the emotional and psychological impacts of systemic racism, recently highlighted in the impacts of the Black Lives Matter campaign [33,34] and violence against Asian-Americans. The emotional taxation on BIPOC scholars should be recognized [35] and the structural inequalities that these groups face should be officially recognized by employers and professional organizations.…”

“…Structural inequities have been noted across several vulnerable populations in academia since before the pandemic began [33,34,[36][37][38][39][40]. BIPOC faculty are majorly under-represented in tenure-stream positions [31,38].…”

Contemporary Archaeology and Anti-Racism: A Manifesto from the European Society of Black and Allied Archaeologists

“…Members work across all parts of the discipline and include academics, students, museum professionals, historic environment officers and commercial archaeologists. We have close links with other sector support groups including Museum Detox and the Society of Black Archaeologists (2020, 2021; Franklin et al, 2020; Flewellen et al, 2021).…”

Resistance and Care in the Time of COVID‐19: Archaeology in 2020

“…Despite attempts to pass the African American Burial Ground Network Act, there remain little to no protections of African American graves or cemeteries and no legal avenue for Black communities to pursue repatriation of their ancestors held by museums and other scientific institutions. That Black and Indigenous bodies and heritage constitute a significant area of study for North American archaeology while few Black or Indigenous peoples are represented within the field of archaeology signals a persisting inequity in our field (Flewellen et al 2021).…”

“…In response, white nationalists at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville held a "Unite the Right" rally protesting the removal of a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee. White nationalists portrayed the removal of statues as "erasure of history", but archaeologists took the opportunity to point out that statues being toppled has always been a part of history and that these statues should now be our archaeology (e.g., Baxter 2020; Gopnik and Birkett-Rees 2020; Flewellen et al 2021), even providing guides on how to safely remove them (Parcak 2020;Thompson 2020).…”