Making Archaeology Available to the Subaltern: Towards an Engaged, Militant Archaeology

Abstract

It is not a secret that archaeology is not a politically innocuous enterprise. Throughout its history, and in the name of science, modernity, and the state, the discipline has appropriated minorities’ heritage, generating representations that have contributed with their subordination and denial. For some decades now, scholars have critically reflected about archaeology’s social role, its contribution to sustain Western, capitalist hegemony, and the negative impact that archaeological narratives have had on different collectives. In this light, the decolonisation of the discipline and the construction of a more reflexive, open, tolerant, and democratic archaeology have become valuable goals. Although some believe that archaeology is no longer what it used to be, in actuality only a small group of scholars have developed an engaged, activist archaeology. Just by attending any archaeology congress in the First World or in Latin America, we can easily realize that the great majority of our colleagues still maintain a bourgeois fascination about the exotic, conducting an uncommitted, apolitical, and increasingly hyper specialized archaeology. Archaeologists keep discussing topics that, in the great majority of the cases, only interest other archaeologists.