Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Between 23 and 25 October 2024, about 80 scholars from five continents gathered at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge in the UK for the 'Envisioning Decolonial Futures Through Archaeology' conference (Figure 1).The conference facilitated interaction between a great variety of perspectives on what it means to decolonise archaeology and how our discipline can help shape decolonial futures.Based on our experience organising this conference, in this Guest Editorial we discuss what we think decolonising archaeology entails, some of its many challenges and the necessity to create spaces for interaction to take place so that guidance on 'decolonial thinking' can emerge.Here, we reflect on the critical themes of disambiguation, interaction, indigeneity, memory, practice and imagination for envisioning decolonial futures through archaeology. DisambiguationArchaeology and other academic disciplines are constituent parts of coloniality, understood as a structure of global inequalities that began to place certain parts of the world in a position of subalternity when Europeans first arrived in the Americas (Quijano 2000).Our field-as with anthropology or related fields that constitute what we understand today as 'area studies' (e.g.Egyptology)-is deeply entrenched in colonial practice.For instance, Mickel recently discussed how early archaeological practice in West Asia that had been deemed 'rigorous and scientific' actually worked as a platform to promote colonial discourses using ancient societies as a basis for modern European colonial perspectives on 'civilisation' (Mickel 2023).Likewise, Flinders Petrie, who is considered the father of scientific methods in Egyptian archaeology and beyond, used his work in Egypt to support eugenics, including providing osteological remains for experimentations in this field (Moro-Abadía 2006: 9; Sheppard 2010: 17-18).Archaeology's history is one entangled with colonial discourses and practices aiming to reaffirm European superiority over colonised Indigenous communities around the world.The discipline's scientific stance has often created situations in which we face the rationality versus superstition dichotomy, both in theory and practice.For example, interpretations of prehistoric ritual are said to be essentially irrational, which disqualifies distinctive rationalities in the past (Brück 1999).Archaeology as science has also continuously undermined the
Source: Antiquity
DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2025.29
Institutions: University of Cambridge, University of East Anglia
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4409225182