Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology
Ian J. McNiven and Lynette Russell.
(2005) Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture
of Archaeology
AltaMira Press - Archaeology in Society
Series
Series Editors' Foreword by Robert Preucel
& Ian Hodder
It is now widely accepted that archaeology and anthropology are products of the colonialist enterprise. Yet, few scholars have examined in any detail how Western portrayals of Indigenous peoples have furthered colonialist agendas in settler countries such as Australia, Africa, Canada, India, and the Americas. Because of this lacuna, many people remain unaware of how archaeology was complicit in the dispossession and disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples. This acknowledgment is a crucial starting place if archaeology is to become a more democratic practice.
In their book, Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology, Ian J. McNiven and Lynette Russell offer an incisive critique of Australian archaeology and a provocative agenda for its future. Drawing on comparative examples from Canada, Southern Africa, and the United States, they identify a series of negative tropes with deep historical roots in Western thought that have disassociated Aboriginal people from their traditional lands and ancestral places. These tropes include the claims that Aboriginal people are "living fossils", that they are not the "original inhabitants" of Australia, that they have no history, that other "races" constructed the Australian archaeological record, and that Western archaeology and site management concepts are the only ways of knowing and preserving the past. These tropes were embodied in textbooks, codified in law, and reproduced in popular discourse.
One of the key challenges for contemporary archaeology is to establish the social and political conditions for productive collaboration between archaeologists and Indigenous people. McNiven and Russell advocate a partnership approach where the research process and results are co-owned. This differs from the popular stakeholder model since Indigenous peoples are not just another interest group whose rights are equivalent to those of other stakeholders. Rather, Indigenous people, like all peoples everywhere, have the inalienable right to control and represent their own heritage. This kind of research holds considerable potential for the development of a truly postcolonial archaeology.
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