The Joan Gero Book Award

Wedded to Privilege? Archaeology, Academic Capital, and Critical Public Engagement Abstract Public and collaborative archaeological projects—many of them inspirational—have made headway in different parts of the world. But, as far as I can tell, they do not garner the same level of academic capital, or provide their practitioners with the same rewards, as other kinds of scientific or industrial collaboration. Moreover, in countries such as mine (Israel), where archaeology is imbricated in contestations of identity, historical narrative, and territorial claims, public archaeology projects are carefully co-opted by local or governmental institutions, so that any potentially disruptive impact may be contained, if not completely subverted. In what follows, I describe the current academic and extra-academic landscape and its implications for public engagement, commenting briefly on the possible ways forward, which require, I suggest, a patient commitment to a critical stance and a shift in the locus of archaeological desire—the driving passion of our discipline.

Collaborating on the Federal Level: Moving Beyond Mandated Consultation in the Section 106 Process Abstract Collaboration and consultation are terms involving working with stakeholders; consultation implies a formulaic, reactionary product, while collaboration suggests a voluntary, shared method and a mutual goal. Within this decolonial approach to conducting archaeology, little discussion surrounds what this looks like within the public sector in the USA. Since consultation as mandate is based in a colonial process and has definitive bureaucratic boundaries, the question arises can public sector archaeologies take a postcolonial approach to required consultation? If so, how? This paper looks at areas of constraint and potential spaces for moving beyond the mandate of consultation within a federal agency.

Authoring and Authority in Eastern Pequot Community Heritage and Archaeology Abstract As collaborative indigenous archaeology continues to mature in North America, more attention is needed on the role of authoring and authority by descendent community members in the heritage practices of archaeology. We discuss the role of contemporary collaborative practice and address the ways these have materialized in the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation context in south-eastern Connecticut (USA). As a way to accentuate Eastern Pequot authoring and authority, we use examples of a commemorative volume published as a community rather than an academic product, the return of all archaeological collections to Pequot homelands from their curatorial storage at a university, and the actual content of this article itself with 80% Eastern Pequot authorship.

Collaborative Archaeology as Heritage Process Abstract The archaeology of Amache, the site of a WWII-era Japanese American incarceration camp, has been performed collaboratively with survivors, their families, and local residents for over a decade. This makes it an exemplary test case for how research intertwined with multiple communities can recast our discipline’s relationship to heritage. Project success has been greatly enhanced though creating opportunities for intergenerational and intercommunity engagement with the site and others who care about it. Paying equal attention to process and product allows archaeology to be positively integrated into heritage building and brings epistemological resources to the study of the past.

Pursuing Social Justice Through Collaborative Archaeologies in Aboriginal Australia Abstract This paper identifies the emergence of the pursuit of social justice as a core focus of collaborative archaeologies in Aboriginal Australia. A wide range of case studies are examined, especially in relation to efforts to redress a ‘deep colonisation’ that silences Indigenous histories and fails to engage with Indigenous voices or experiences. This research is part of a wider global movement of community-based, activist and engaged archaeology that encompasses two principle approaches to social justice: the redistribution of resources and goods and the politics of recognition. It is informed by a more general concern with human rights, structural violence and ethical globalisation. In Australia, social justice archaeologies are both confronting, in terms of frontier violence, intentional structural violence and racism, but also inspirational/aspirational, in terms of Aboriginal nation building and the cultural facilitation of Aboriginal research ethics. The development of collaborative projects between Indigenous peoples and (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) archaeologists can be challenging. Indigenous archaeologists face particular challenges, including balancing sometimes conflicting expectations from communities with the demands of the profession. For non-Indigenous archaeologists, the challenge lies in the shift from working with Indigenous peoples to working for Indigenous peoples as part of a process in which social justice outcomes are a product, rather than a by-product, of archaeological research.

Collaboration, Collaborators, and Conflict: Archaeology and Peacebuilding in Northern Ireland Abstract Collaboration in contemporary archaeological parlance principally refers to active engagement with one or more selected groups of stakeholders and co-producers of knowledge. Yet to be a “collaborator” in conflict settings implies an allegiance, often deceitful, to one cause or another. When embedding archaeology in conflict transformation activities, being seen as a “collaborator”, or partisan, can therefore actively work against the aims of peacebuilding. Drawing upon experience in conflict transformation within post-Troubles Northern Ireland, issues of ethics and positionality are considered, and an alternative terminology for embedding archaeology in peacebuilding activity is posited.

Crossing a Threshold: Collaborative Archaeology in Global Dialogue Abstract If collaborative archaeology is crossing a threshold, as several contributors to this special issue attest, nowhere is this more clearly evident than in the kinds of critical scrutiny it is attracting from those who are sceptical about its aims, its ethical/political integrity and its practical efficacy. There is a striking difference between the overtly hostile critiques that early advocates of collaborative practice faced and the kinds of challenges they now address. Rather than anxiety that community-based collaborations pose an existential threat to archaeology as a discipline, current critics object that they have failed to make any significant break with a conservative status quo and the extractive modes of inquiry it perpetuates. I trace the trajectory of critical responses to collaborative archaeology since the early 1990s and use this as a frame for thinking with contributors about the nature of the threshold marked by this special issue.

Introduction to a Global Dialogue on Collaborative Archaeology Abstract Active collaboration with a wide variety of stakeholders forces practitioners to rethink how and why we do archaeology, indeed even to question what archaeology is and can be. Drawing from a wide range of practitioners with different temporal and regional foci, this publication takes an international view of collaboration in archaeology. It presents global collaborative archaeology, both as a challenge to current practice and theory, and an impetus for the future. This piece by the editors of the volume provides some background on how this dialogue on collaborative archaeology came about and the questions that guided it.

Different Roles, Diverse Goals: Understanding Stakeholder and Archaeologists Positions in Community-Based Projects Abstract Scholars have discussed the diverse and heterogeneous nature of people that comprise communities in community-based research (McManamon in Am Antiq 56(1):121–130, 1991; Marshall in World Archaeol 34(2):211–219, 2002; Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson, in Scarre, Scarre, (eds) The ethics of archaeology: philosophical perspectives on archaeological practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 115–130, 2006; Pyburn, in Okamura, Matuda, (eds) New perspectives in global public archaeology, Springer, New York, pp 29–41, 2011: 31). The divisions within stakeholder groups are highly complex and merit more discussions. By considering community interests and needs, as well as that of different stakeholders, on a case-by-case basis we break down the term community to demonstrate a need for localized approaches to community-based research. Further we discuss some of the differential relationships within community archaeology and roles dictated by legislative requirements and other necessities. Through a community-based research project case study on Inishark and Inishbofin, County Galway Ireland, islands about five miles into the Atlantic Ocean, we explore the different stakeholder groups that comprise island community and the important role archaeologists play in the community-based research.