Last updated: July 20, 2023
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Podcast 121: Practicing Engaged Archaeology
C. Cooper: My name is Catherine Cooper I am here with-
S. Herr: Sarah Herr, President of Desert Archaeology.
K. Hays-Gilpin: Kelley Hays-Gilpin, Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University and Curator of Anthropology at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, Arizona.
S. Herr: Sarah Herr, President of Desert Archaeology.
K. Hays-Gilpin: Kelley Hays-Gilpin, Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University and Curator of Anthropology at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Engagement with Archaeology
Photo courtesy of K. Hays-Gilpin
K. Hays-Gilpin: Well, this is part of a series that the University Press of Colorado has been doing for a long time. We have a conference about every other year called the Southwest Symposium and the organizers pick some themes and invite people to take part and then the expectation is that a volume will result.
C. Cooper: Could you talk a bit more about what engaged archaeology is as a practice and why it's so important?
S. Herr: There are multiple definitions of it for sure. Like archaeology is so fragmentary, when we're in the field, you know, we have such partial remains of the past and then we're asked to interpret whole life ways based on, you know, what we can hold in our hands and so that's not a very rich understanding of the past. If we're willing to kind of share authority and talk to other anthropologists, talk to people who work in the physical sciences and most importantly talk to other communities and have these, like, human conversations around what the materials of the past are, we think that's a way for enriching archaeology and our understanding, bringing the past into modern conversations. And with physical scientists who, you know, can help us describe the land and the resources that the people of the past were engaged with, because you know the land-people relationship is so important in the past. And with other ways of doing anthropology language, culture, kinship systems, all of that became part of our conversation too.
K. Hays-Gilpin: So I would say: Who are we engaging with? Not just other archaeologists, not just other anthropologists although they have a lot to offer. For example, historical linguistics is something that Indigenous people are interested in but archaeologists have not engaged with that very much. But we also want to engage and benefit by engaging with descendant communities, with physical scientists, chemists, geologists. And important for this group historically has been cross-border engagement, so working with our Mexican colleagues across the border, their heritage resources.
Networks and Collaboration
C. Cooper: How did you select or solicit papers to include in the publication?
K. Hays-Gilpin: We both have a pretty broad network. I work in museums and universities, and Sarah works with a private cultural resource management--heritage management--firm, and we both have colleagues in Mexico. Sarah also works with a lot of public archaeology, public education, private foundation advocacy kinds of work with Desert Archaeology, Inc. (desert.com). So we already had a broad network to draw on and we would get together with our third colleague, Patrick, and say who do we know who's doing the most exciting work and what's everybody talking about, what do we need to bring to the table?
S. Herr: We really wanted the people doing the hands-on work, and I think that's what shows in this book is that it's the people in the labs, for example, that did the work.
K. Hays-Gilpin: We both have a pretty broad network. I work in museums and universities, and Sarah works with a private cultural resource management--heritage management--firm, and we both have colleagues in Mexico. Sarah also works with a lot of public archaeology, public education, private foundation advocacy kinds of work with Desert Archaeology, Inc. (desert.com). So we already had a broad network to draw on and we would get together with our third colleague, Patrick, and say who do we know who's doing the most exciting work and what's everybody talking about, what do we need to bring to the table?
S. Herr: We really wanted the people doing the hands-on work, and I think that's what shows in this book is that it's the people in the labs, for example, that did the work.
The Importance of NAGPRA
C. Cooper: I noticed that many of the chapters talk about the importance of NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Could you expand on why NAGPRA is so important and has such an impact on engaged archaeology?
K. Hays-Gilpin: We've had several decades of working with repatriation and I think at first archaeologists were skeptical. At least the older… the older generation, including many that are no longer with us, would say “Oh but science is more important than anything” or “We need to have everything we excavate curated in perpetuity and it needs to be available for future scientific research.” And the response from Native American communities was pretty strong: “We don't understand why science is more important” and “We don't know what benefit our communities have had from bioarcheology, osteology, archaeology” and “How would you feel if we were digging up your grandparents in a Christian cemetery in Tucson, for example?” And the conversation got started.
So what the passage of this law did was open doors for communication among scientists, Native American descendants, Native American heritage managers, tribal museums, as well as museums that tend to be more science oriented or broader in their scope. And the law is very clear that it's human remains, funerary objects—even ones that are no longer associated with human remains. It is objects of cultural patrimony, which can't be owned by individuals or by outside institutions, and it's sacred and ceremonial objects that are necessary for the continuation of cultural practices. I think most archaeologists understood that this was necessary and important and that we wanted to do it. And now it's happening and what we wanted to do here was show some of the good that has come out of this process of working together to get repatriation done.
S. Herr: I think I would add a little bit about why NAGPRA is important in this book and I guess there's a couple of comments about that. One is that I think it's not the kind of work that really gets published and so in terms of showing models of how this works, it's such an essential part of the conversations that I think anthropologists and archaeologists are having with descendant communities right now but it's not in the kinds of spaces that, you know, other people can witness and see. But for people who are willing to put this into a book form, this provides like now a nice set of case studies that, you know, show the full range of work from bioarcheologists and how they balance what they record with tribal interests, to tribal voices that talk about the trust relationships that happen in these spaces and when things have gone well and when things haven't. That is particularly clear in the chapter on the San Carlos Apache work with the Smithsonian. And so having this published is important. The other piece that I think is important in terms of the impact of the NAGPRA that also shows up is that I think it's really changed bioarcheology careers a lot. I feel like now such interesting questions come in terms of asking people about identities and the more focus on the human body and the individual.
K. Hays-Gilpin: We have several examples in there of the bioarcheologists asking the representatives of tribal nations “if we do this documentation before repatriation, what are the questions that that you'd be interested in?” and sometimes people say “no, they've been handled enough. Let's just put them back in the earth so they can continue their intended life cycle, life journey.” But in a number of cases tribes said “well, we're interested in migration and we're interested in these dental markers that are markers of genetic populations and gene flow and we want to know who moved from here to there because we have oral histories that describe that.”
K. Hays-Gilpin: We've had several decades of working with repatriation and I think at first archaeologists were skeptical. At least the older… the older generation, including many that are no longer with us, would say “Oh but science is more important than anything” or “We need to have everything we excavate curated in perpetuity and it needs to be available for future scientific research.” And the response from Native American communities was pretty strong: “We don't understand why science is more important” and “We don't know what benefit our communities have had from bioarcheology, osteology, archaeology” and “How would you feel if we were digging up your grandparents in a Christian cemetery in Tucson, for example?” And the conversation got started.
So what the passage of this law did was open doors for communication among scientists, Native American descendants, Native American heritage managers, tribal museums, as well as museums that tend to be more science oriented or broader in their scope. And the law is very clear that it's human remains, funerary objects—even ones that are no longer associated with human remains. It is objects of cultural patrimony, which can't be owned by individuals or by outside institutions, and it's sacred and ceremonial objects that are necessary for the continuation of cultural practices. I think most archaeologists understood that this was necessary and important and that we wanted to do it. And now it's happening and what we wanted to do here was show some of the good that has come out of this process of working together to get repatriation done.
S. Herr: I think I would add a little bit about why NAGPRA is important in this book and I guess there's a couple of comments about that. One is that I think it's not the kind of work that really gets published and so in terms of showing models of how this works, it's such an essential part of the conversations that I think anthropologists and archaeologists are having with descendant communities right now but it's not in the kinds of spaces that, you know, other people can witness and see. But for people who are willing to put this into a book form, this provides like now a nice set of case studies that, you know, show the full range of work from bioarcheologists and how they balance what they record with tribal interests, to tribal voices that talk about the trust relationships that happen in these spaces and when things have gone well and when things haven't. That is particularly clear in the chapter on the San Carlos Apache work with the Smithsonian. And so having this published is important. The other piece that I think is important in terms of the impact of the NAGPRA that also shows up is that I think it's really changed bioarcheology careers a lot. I feel like now such interesting questions come in terms of asking people about identities and the more focus on the human body and the individual.
K. Hays-Gilpin: We have several examples in there of the bioarcheologists asking the representatives of tribal nations “if we do this documentation before repatriation, what are the questions that that you'd be interested in?” and sometimes people say “no, they've been handled enough. Let's just put them back in the earth so they can continue their intended life cycle, life journey.” But in a number of cases tribes said “well, we're interested in migration and we're interested in these dental markers that are markers of genetic populations and gene flow and we want to know who moved from here to there because we have oral histories that describe that.”
A Continually Growing Field
Photo courtesy of S. Herr.
K. Hays-Gilpin: Well, I definitely have in terms of what our master’s students are interested in; they're coming right in talking about “I want to work with communities,” and maybe it's their own community or maybe it's tribal communities in the region or “I want to know more about the daily lives of people who lived here that were here in our area in the late 1800s,” for example. What was the effect of colonialism and in some cases even Spanish missionization? You have the formation of new ethnic identities and new kinds of communities and some of that history did not get written down, so archaeology is part of that. So, we have more archaeologists I think wanting to do ethnohistory. We certainly have an interest in public archaeology with education; I get a lot of people who want to do museum education in the area of archaeology. And then the job market is really good right now in heritage management and so they're looking for “what's my career going to be?” It's not just “I want to be a professor,” and it's so refreshing to see people recognizing there are so many more careers than that, most of which you can do with a master's degree or even a bachelor's. Sarah, if you want to add about how the practice of CRM is changing?
S. Herr: I mean one thing that we're seeing changing, I think, is the way that we work together with tribes and so I think a piece that we're seeing right now is that everybody's more open to conversations and hearing how to be inclusive in a project.
K. Hays-Gilpin: So, it seems like you can build more activities into some of these large projects than we used to be able to do. Now you can build in cultural competency trainings where tribal members instruct your field techs who may be coming from anywhere and they're coming into this new cultural environment and they don't know what's respectful and what isn't. And they're curious and so let's answer questions, let's have a discussion, and let's lay a foundation for working together. And then on the other end, or really at any point, some communities might ask Sarah’s company “you know, could you do a workshop for our high school students?”
C. Cooper: What do you hope people will take away from reading the book or listening to our conversation?
S. Herr: I think one thing we want the people listening to take away from the conversation is to realize that the paths into archaeology now are a lot more diverse. You know Kelley’s speaking as a professor and sees the future of our profession. But I think we want people to see that regardless of their background, there's a place in archaeology for them. There’s a lot of ways to be involved in the heritage management and the cultural resource management and to help tell the stories of the people and landscapes of the Southwest. We want people to see that there's jobs there. And so there might be a traditional path that you go through grad school, you need to get your MA often, BA sometimes, but it's not it's not just a course to a professorship. We value the very good professors who can teach this, but there's far more jobs than that.
C. Cooper: Thank you both so much.
S. Herr: Thank you for inviting us.
K. Hays-Gilpin: You’re very welcome, our pleasure.
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