Archaeologies-Journal of the World Archaeological Congress最新文献

This introduction to the special issue on ‘The Public Archaeology of Working Class Communities’ situates the articles included in this issue within the broader context of identity-based public and community archaeology efforts. Despite being part of the gender-race-class classical triad of identity, class has been repeatedly overlooked as it’s own area of focus within community engagement and public archaeology. This introduction calls for public archaeologists to more thoroughly consider their engagement strategies with working class communities in order to ensure our projects capture the intersectionality of our stakeholder and descendant populations. Finally, the articles in this issue are examined as case studies that are already highlighting some thematic trends within working class public engagements.

Eckley Miners’ Village in Luzerne County, PA is a living history museum that holds significance for many residents of the surrounding area. Preserving and interpreting the homes and buildings that once made up an anthracite coal mining patch town, the site retains ties to many in the area who either lived in Eckley or are related to people who lived in Eckley. However, since 2000 the population demographics of Luzerne County have changed drastically. As the population changes, the ways the public perceives the relevance and value of local history stand to change as well. Utilizing archaeology for new interpretations of local history, and as an outreach method, the Anthracite Heritage Program provides a case study of local history sites adapting to shifting population bases and working to incorporate non-descendant groups into the preservation of local histories.

The working classes have been overlooked as a population that could benefit from social-justice-oriented critical public archaeology approaches. The Anthracite Heritage Program sought to address this gap by targeting educational attainment among students in the historically working class, chronically underserved northeastern Pennsylvania region. Public archaeology initiatives to promote interest and knowledge about undergraduate education revealed that the archaeologists’ greatest contribution was our own (class-based) knowledge of the intricacies of university admissions, funding, and life in the United States. In this way, the project ended up serving underserved communities in the ways that they needed help the most: securing the knowledge to attain class mobility.

This paper seeks to make a methodological contribution to archaeological praxis of working-class communities, by illuminating how archaeologists engaged in oral history-based research with working-class communities may encounter authenticity as a methodological challenge. Drawing on my PhD research on football as cultural heritage, I will outline the authenticity problem I encountered in the field: the enforcement of hierarchies of authenticity by working-class football supporters in response to their experiences of marginalisation in the sport. In turn, I will not only show how these hierarchies of authenticity present obstacles to researchers looking to build relationships of trust with their subjects, but also indicate some solutions to this authenticity problem. Specifically, I will show how it is often useful to “fall into the trap of authenticity” as a researcher and use the interview setting to discursively construct yourself as authentic on your subject communities’ own terms.

During the first half of the 20th century, the lumber industry played an instrumental role in the economic development of the Témiscouata valley in eastern Québec, Canada. Considering the strong working-class lumber heritage in Témiscouata, a public archaeology approach was used as a tool to engage community in the documentation of their own history. Based on the results of a public archaeology programme led at a 1940s lumber camp site, this study explores how the archaeological experience acts as a “memory trigger” leading individuals to share personal stories and local knowledge. Ultimately, this research illustrates the importance of public archaeology for accessing and shaping collective memory.

Few archaeological studies of Pre-Columbian Maya peoples mention enslaved individuals. While ethnohistoric texts attest to the likelihood of Indigenous Maya enslavement practices before the arrival of Spanish conquistadores and friars, archaeologists are reluctant to consider such practices and peoples into interpretative frameworks because of their tremendous ambiguity in the archaeological record. This paper embraces and probes the ambiguity of the archaeological record to interrogate the possibility of hidden histories of captive and enslaved Maya individuals in general and captive and enslaved Maya women in particular during the Classic and Postclassic periods. It argues that such women cannot be found in particular types of artifacts or hieroglyphic texts but at the intersection of names and landscapes.

While ethnoarchaeological studies on megalith-building traditions in a few communities in India’s northeastern region have enriched our knowledge, a knowledge gap remains regarding how traditional societies mobilized the workforce for transporting and erecting stone monuments. This paper aims to fill this research gap with an ethnographically documented case of building a monolith in 2020 in Willong Khullen, a village inhabited by the Maram Nagas (an indigenous Tibeto-Burman ethnic community) in the Indian state of Manipur. After participating in the undertaking, I argue that traditional networks of support among sub-clans and clans in the village, as well as among neighboring and distant villages, may have ensured the free mobilization of workforce. The survey also revealed that work feasts and a grand feast, where the host expends maximum resources, are crucial for accessing social support networks, including the mobilization of labor participants. These feasts serve as a means of reciprocating the labor participants for their voluntary labor and time. The survey results support the claim of the high cost of such undertakings and supplement that feasts may have served similar functions in the past among other Naga communities in the region.

This study reveals the early results of diverse community archaeology activities taking place in a contemporary archaeological site, a cardboard hospital built in 1912 in the Vall Fosca (Catalan Pyrenees). This isolated valley, formerly used to breed cattle, had three hydroelectric power facilities erected in the twentieth century. In 2019, the Torre Capdella Town Council and the National Museum of Science and Technology of Catalonia initiated a project involving local communities. The main scope of this work is to comprehend the materiality of the working class and to provide new narratives about the people who built them and subsequently occupied part of the valley.