Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association最新文献

The Dr. James Still Historic Office and Homestead—home to a nineteenth century, self-educated, African American doctor, born to formerly captive parents, who would go on to become the third largest landowner in a predominantly White rural community in Southern New Jersey—has been the focus of the Dr. James Still Community Archaeology Project (DJSCAP) since 2013. This paper, however, shifts the target of archaeological exploration and asks what we can glean from the actors in and around the site. Using data collected by DJSCAP, this chapter critically examines how a community comes to understand and commemorate their efforts to protect and preserve Dr. Still's meritocratic narrative via a material engagement with the site. Reflecting on the simultaneous navigation of the past, present, and future via objects, the chapter explores how “things” such as donations and donor plaques do the social work of volunteering, informing perceptions of effort, talent, memory, and entitlement around the site. Using materiality theory and an archaeological lens attuned to nowness, this chapter identifies key instances in which the articulation of bodies, ideas, objects, and labor generate fascinating insights into the theorization of meritocracy as a moral economy that underpins volunteering. This contemporary archaeological approach uncovers the materiality of austerity, informing how communities navigate systemic failures in heritage site management through individual and collective efforts that I call meritocratic stewardship.

The Millars Plantation on Eleuthera, Bahamas was first established in 1803 as a cotton plantation and remained in operation through the 1830s. After emancipation, the formerly enslaved community continued to live on and work the plantation acreage and surrounding areas, until 1871 when Ann Millar formally left the 2000 acre-property to the descendants of her former slaves and servants. That descendant community still upholds their right to this land today, despite a series of legal challenges by Bahamian and foreign investors who seek to develop new tourism-based economies in the area. In the process of documenting the historical landscape of the Millars Plantation through oral histories, ethnographic interviews, and landscape survey, the research revealed ways that residents today have materialized memory—piecing together object, story, and space—on a living landscape that has too often been framed as empty or relegated to the past. This chapter investigates the ways in which memory becomes rooted in the materiality of the South Eleuthera landscape. When read side-by-side, the archaeological and contemporary social stratigraphy of South Eleuthera illustrate this historical landscape's ongoing site formation and the ways in which community members use the memoryscape as a tool for community building and local advocacy.

This chapter provides a review of the papers focused on developing the ways that Contemporary Archaeologies in Old Places provides a framework for understanding ongoing processes of dispossession, displacement, and disenfranchisement historically experienced by marginalized and economically vulnerable populations. At the same time, through community-engaged praxis, the authors also demonstrate the ways that contemporary archaeological research can contribute to issues of sustainability and social justice, particularly through the use of methodologies that are easily reproduceable by non-experts. The author tests this assertion by, in the context of recent protests against Anti-Black police violence, taking a contemporary archaeological perspective to the old place in which she lives, Bushrod, Oakland, where the Black Panther Self-Defense party was founded and engaged in its early social justice work.

This chapter opens an analytic space to consider the resonance of “old places” in the contemporary moment through the lens of archaeology. Borrowing the term used by some of our interlocutors, old places are places that bear memory, that have accrued emotional attachment, and that intervene in the present as reminders of things that have happened before. Through these qualities, old places sustain life and relations. We adopt an expansive view of site formation processes that extends into the present and future and argue that studying contemporary site formation can unleash insights into the multi-temporal constitution of the world we inhabit. We do not insist on a single approach to studying these processes, but rather suggest that the methodological and theoretical diversity that archaeologists and local communities bring together is key to studying and knowing old places in the present. We draw connections between a contemporary archaeology of old places and the emergent fields of contemporary archaeology and critical heritage studies, but also argue for retaining and fully incorporating the political and activist orientations of historical, feminist, African Diaspora, and Indigenous archaeologies—fields that have long centered the knowledge and concerns of contemporary communities—into this work.

The Old Leupp Boarding School (OLBS) was a Federal Indian Boarding School in operation from 1909–1942 on the southwest Navajo Reservation. It currently exists as a historical archaeology site, and it is an important place to the local Navajos of Leupp and Birdsprings, Arizona. Due to the nature of cultural resource management projects on the Navajo Reservation, which occur prior to development, in-depth research of Navajo archaeological sites and collaboration with the Navajo public does not usually occur. With the support of local Navajo communities, my decolonizing research documents the history of the OLBS from a Diné (Navajo) perspective, as I explore Diné survivance and resistance within the context of this school. I argue that children utilized their Diné traditional cultural foundations to survive and resist assimilation imposed upon them by the U.S. government at Leupp. In keeping with Navajo cultural norms, I incorporate non-destructive research methods including oral history interviews with Navajo elders, who attended the OLBS in the early twentieth century, and archival research to investigate the history of the OLBS. My research contributes to decolonizing and post-colonial anthropological/archaeological research, Navajo Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies.

The Old City of Acre (‘Akka) is home to a predominantly Palestinian community within the larger Israeli municipality of Acre. Bounded by late eighteenth and early nineteenth century land and sea walls, the Old City's dense mix of Ottoman and Crusader-era architecture sits on a peninsula less than one square kilometer in area on the Mediterranean coast. In 2001, the World Heritage Committee designated the Old City as a UNESCO World Heritage site, intensifying the Israeli state project of developing the city as an international tourist attraction. This chapter examines contemporary interventions on the surfaces of the Old City by way of photographic surface survey. Documented surface interventions include residents’ deposition of bread for animals to eat and fishermen to use as bait and surface adornments that reflect local aesthetic values. An archaeological analysis draws attention to an expansive repertoire of local care practices. Residents selectively appropriate the language and work of “heritage” to represent their own histories and serve their own aspirations against the grain of the state project, offering an alternative theorization of heritage that insists on maintaining ‘Akka as at once a historic and livable space.

Oklahoma's history books make little mention of the sociocultural significance and impact of all-Black towns within the state. There is scant information in Oklahoma's historical and archaeological records that discuss the roles of women in all-Black communities. The town of Dorason was an all-Black town settlement in Western Oklahoma. It was nestled between two all-Black towns within an American Indian tribal district. Miles away, the bustling railroad town of Elwat would later become home to many descendants from the all-Black towns we discuss in this chapter. Very little remains in these mostly forgotten spaces and places. Through a process of ethnohistorical investigation and several trips to field sites, our research places descendant community narratives within Black Feminist archaeological scholarship. Our purpose in privileging narratives is two-fold: 1) to fill in the gaps between the archaeology of storytelling and space and place literature; and 2) to illustrate the ways in which storytelling situated within archaeological frameworks is empowering. The inclusion of these narratives creates an understanding of empowerment through all-Black town space and placemaking. We argue that intimate space, storytelling within spaces, and strong social networks are and were critical elements of self-empowerment and emancipatory practices in contentious spaces.

The post-depositional afterlife of an archaeological site is often viewed as the least important aspect of its history and outside of traditional archaeological interest. In the case of industrial sites, this elision ignores one of the most important aspects of industrial history, namely the long-term effects of toxic waste. In an era where industrial pollution and anthropogenic climate change are rapidly changing the future of life on this planet, the stakes of understanding the effects of industrial waste are vital. This article outlines a reflexive, ecologically focused archaeology that interrogates the afterlives of industrial waste, not as a method to get back to the history of production, but as a means for taking seriously these afterlives as a defining characteristic of life in the Anthropocene.  Using the concept of the ecological lives of industrial waste to explore the (post)industrial history of Mill Creek Ravine—a historically important industrial area in Edmonton, Alberta— this article argues that the decomposition of industrial waste serves as both a medium for long-term harms, as well as the locus for emergent relations and critical investigation.