Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1017/S1380203820000112
Maryam Dezhamkhooy, Leila Papoli-Yazdi
Abstract This paper discusses the emergence of an archaeology of the contemporary era in a Middle Eastern country, Iran. Far from North America and Europe, where the subfield was introduced, appreciated and developed by academic archaeologists, this archaeology is now also becoming established in Iran in spite of academic reluctance and (indirect) political pressure. The most encouraged form of archaeology in Iran remains nationalist and conservative, supported by the current political structures. However, the archaeology of the contemporary past is increasingly practised on a limited scale and has gradually extended its scope and subjects. Highly dependent on context, it has enriched the ways and methods of archaeological practice under dictatorship. The archaeology of the contemporary past is still in its infancy in the Middle East, but the pioneers of the subfield try to take up the challenges of smoothing the way for the future of this interdisciplinary archaeology in Iran and the Middle East. Iranian contemporary archaeology not only aims to investigate conflict, tensions and political (and armed) opposition, but also studies everyday life and disastrous contexts.
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Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1017/S1380203820000021
M. Blakey
Abstract Biological determinism continues to rest on belief rather than evidence. The racial genetics of David Reich and his immediate predecessors exemplify science applied as racist ideology which obscures evidence for social criticism and moral accountability for inequity.
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Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1017/S1380203820000069
Whitney Battle-Baptiste
Blakey’s critique of Reich into a European context – which I would like to do because that is the field with which I am more familiar – it should be obvious that in the same way as race is an ideological construct, so too are other categorizations of humans used in European archaeology and in archaeogenetic studies. Here the most critical examples are the essentialization of social identities, like gender stereotypes and ethnicities modelled after modern nation states. The same could be argued for the recurring claims of violence, war and social inequality as inevitable characteristics of human societies, projecting them back into deep prehistory, on shaky empirical foundations. When the narratives connected to the newly found ancient-DNA data reproduce modern Western tropes about ethnic identities, gender relations and the role of war and violence in intergroup relations, we cannot really fall back on the defence that it is something that objectively follows from our neutral reading of the data. All the relevant categories, the populations, cultures, migrations and population replacements, really just reproduce the categories inserted by us and projected back into prehistory. This not only is intellectually lazy, but also prevents us from really gaining new knowledge about the past. This is even more unfortunate, as it is well-established wisdom that the concept of static cultures blatantly misrepresents both the archaeological record (Hofmann 2015; Vander Linden 2016; Furholt 2018; 2019b) and the anthropological knowledge of non-state social organization (e.g. Cameron 2013). Do we really have to, begrudgingly, succumb to acknowledging a prehistory that ‘we may not like’ – because it is filled with violent misogynist hordes from the East, forming biologically defined groups of young males, who bully their way through Europe, killing and raping themselves into our gene pool (perhaps a little unfairly challenging the well-argued piece by Kristiansen et al. 2017, but clearly expressed in its popular adaptation by Barras 2019)? Is it not our responsibility to counter such narratives, which reproduce the right-wing’s view of human history as a perpetual clash of cultures? Especially when we actually know that it was us who inserted these ideas into our models in the first place? So it is clearly necessary to rethink our categories if we want to avoid giving ideological ammunition to nefarious political forces, but more fundamentally it is a prerequisite for arriving at any new ideas about the past. Is it not actually an exciting challenge for the new archaeogenetic project to create models that consider other forms of group organization than the ones known for our own modern world? Would it not be an innovative take to explore the temporal and spatial dynamics of population histories in periods before state borders circumscribed and regulated peoples’ movements and biological admixtures? Blakey’s critique of biodeterminism and the notion of scientifi
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Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1017/s1380203820000136
Thomas J. Booth, Rachel J. Crellin
WhitneyBattle-Baptiste isProfessorofAnthropologyat theUniversity ofMassachusetts,Amherst andDirectorof the W.E.B. Du Bois Center. A historical archaeologist, her research centres on the intersection of race, gender, class and sexuality. She is theauthorofBlack feministarchaeology (2011),whichoutlines thebasic tenetsofblack feminist thought and research for archaeologists and shows how it can be used to improve contemporary archaeology as a whole.
{"title":"List of Contributors","authors":"Thomas J. Booth, Rachel J. Crellin","doi":"10.1017/s1380203820000136","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1380203820000136","url":null,"abstract":"WhitneyBattle-Baptiste isProfessorofAnthropologyat theUniversity ofMassachusetts,Amherst andDirectorof the W.E.B. Du Bois Center. A historical archaeologist, her research centres on the intersection of race, gender, class and sexuality. She is theauthorofBlack feministarchaeology (2011),whichoutlines thebasic tenetsofblack feminist thought and research for archaeologists and shows how it can be used to improve contemporary archaeology as a whole.","PeriodicalId":45009,"journal":{"name":"Archaeological Dialogues","volume":"27 1","pages":"111 - 112"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/s1380203820000136","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42858169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1017/S1380203820000057
Martin Furholt
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Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1017/S1380203820000070
M. Blakey
Ripan Malhi and Agustin Fuentes point out that, ‘No matter how well-intended the practitioners, social and political ignorance can lead to “cultural harm” in scientific research, resulting in mistrust, stigmatization, or weakened political authority for communities whose members participate in these studies’ (Anton, Malhi and Fuentes 2018, 159). The chance for mitigating these harmful effects in social sciences comes from not allowing biases to be hidden by a false sense of what science should be. The mission of biodeterministic imagination is thick and purposeful. It is dangerous because it codifies the inequities of race and class within a ‘capitalist democracy’ such as the one we have in the United States. As an archaeologist, it is through the interpretation of black biological and physical anthropologists that I have been helped to shape and inform the methods I use to interpret material remains from peoples of the past. For generations, black archaeologists and anthropologists have also felt the impact of being seen through the eyes of others and have felt the sting of a world that casts the shadow of anti-blackness upon us without any cause for concern. If these biases are allowed to be hidden under the cloak of science, then the field is fertile for agendas that are detrimental to social justice and perhaps to the social sciences writ large. The biodeteministic imagination can be discredited over and over again. Some of the works that I have studied towards that end include biological anthropologists such as Michael Blakey, Fatimah Jackson, Teresa Leslie, Rachel Watkins and Joseph Jones. My earliest influence was the work of W. Montague Cobb. He helped me to see how the very tools used to prove my racial and social inferiority could be used as tools in disassembling the ‘race’ work of turn-of-thecentury eugenics. Cobb actively and purposefully used the same methods and data as his white counterparts. Cobb disproved race as the defining factor in high-performance or advanced athletic skills. And now, in 2020, Michael Blakey has once again brought to our attention the direct connection to the consistent use of biological determinism which translates into a means to justify the status quo of social and political inequalities. It has finally come to the point where we must abandon the practice forever.
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Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1017/S1380203820000033
Thomas J. Booth
moral cover with neutral-sounding nature narratives. As archaeologists, or as scientists and humanists more generally, we must think out of the box of the Enlightenment’s colonial assumptions (Blakey 1998), requiring careful study of the political histories of our fields and the theories we borrow and use. Rarely part of standard curricula, for what may be obvious reasons, I have found the problem of white supremacy to be pervasive in the arts and sciences. Only with a sophisticated understanding can one rationally challenge racist colleagues and replace their imaginations with self-critical and progressive inquiry on the field of evidence.
{"title":"Imagined biodeterminism?","authors":"Thomas J. Booth","doi":"10.1017/S1380203820000033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203820000033","url":null,"abstract":"moral cover with neutral-sounding nature narratives. As archaeologists, or as scientists and humanists more generally, we must think out of the box of the Enlightenment’s colonial assumptions (Blakey 1998), requiring careful study of the political histories of our fields and the theories we borrow and use. Rarely part of standard curricula, for what may be obvious reasons, I have found the problem of white supremacy to be pervasive in the arts and sciences. Only with a sophisticated understanding can one rationally challenge racist colleagues and replace their imaginations with self-critical and progressive inquiry on the field of evidence.","PeriodicalId":45009,"journal":{"name":"Archaeological Dialogues","volume":"27 1","pages":"16 - 19"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1380203820000033","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46828863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1017/S1380203820000094
Haeden E. Stewart, Kendra Jungkind, R. Losey
Abstract Despite widespread attention to the recent past as an archaeological topic, few archaeologists have attended to the particular social and ecological stakes of one of the most defining material features of contemporary life: the long-term effects of toxic industrial waste. Identifying the present era as the high Capitalocene, this article highlights the contemporary as a period caught between the boom-and-bust cycles of capitalist production and the persistence of industrial waste. Drawing on an archaeological case study from Edmonton, Alberta, we outline how the working-class shanty town community of Ross Acreage (occupied 1900–1950) was formed in relation to the industrial waste that suffused its landscape. Drawing on data from both archaeological excavation and environmental testing, this article argues that the community of Ross Acreage was defined materially by its long-term relationship with industrial waste, what we term a ‘fence-line community’.
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