Engaged Archaeology: Working With Communities to Understand the Southwest’s Past

Engaged archaeology is a collaborative way of doing research that actively involves the people connected to a place — above all the descendant communities — along with experts from other fields. In an episode of the Preservation Technology Podcast from the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, Catherine Cooper talked about it with two editors of the book Engaged Archaeology in the Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico: Sarah Herr, then president of the cultural resource management firm Desert Archaeology, and Kelley Hays-Gilpin, a professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University and curator of anthropology at the Museum of Northern Arizona.

Why share authority

The book grew from the Southwest Symposium, a conference held about every other year whose themes lead to published volumes. The editors describe archaeology as fragmentary: researchers hold partial remains and are asked to reconstruct whole ways of life from them. Sharing authority — talking with other anthropologists, with physical scientists who can describe the land and resources past peoples relied on, and above all with communities — makes that understanding richer and brings the past into present-day conversations.

The episode: "Practicing Engaged Archaeology", from the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast.

That means engaging far beyond archaeology: descendant communities; chemists and geologists; scholars of language, culture and kinship, including historical linguistics, which interests many Indigenous people but has drawn little from archaeologists; and colleagues across the border in Mexico, whose heritage resources are part of the same story. The editors sought out the people doing hands-on work, including in the laboratories.

How NAGPRA changed the field

Many chapters discuss the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Hays-Gilpin recalls that older archaeologists were skeptical of repatriation at first, arguing that science should come first and that excavated material should be kept forever for future research. Native American communities pushed back hard, asking why science outranked their ancestors, what their communities had ever gained from archaeology, and how archaeologists would feel if their own grandparents were dug up.

The law opened doors for communication among scientists, descendants, tribal heritage managers and tribal and other museums. It covers human remains, funerary objects (even those no longer with remains), objects of cultural patrimony that cannot be owned by individuals or outside institutions, and sacred objects needed for continuing ceremonies. Most archaeologists, the guests say, came to see this work as necessary, and the book shows some of the good that has come of it.

Such collaboration rarely gets published, Herr notes, so the book offers case studies of how it works — from bioarchaeologists balancing what they record against tribal interests, to tribal voices on the trust built, or broken, along the way, as in a chapter on the San Carlos Apache and the Smithsonian. NAGPRA has also reshaped bioarchaeology careers. Researchers now ask tribal representatives what, if anything, they would like learned before remains are returned. Some answer that the ancestors have been handled enough and should go back to the earth; others want to know about migration and dental traits that trace ancestry, to compare with their oral histories.

A field still changing

Since the conference in 2016, Hays-Gilpin sees graduate students arriving eager to work with communities — their own or tribal ones — to study the daily lives of people in the more recent past, or the effects of colonialism and Spanish missions and the new identities they produced, much of which was never written down. Interest in public archaeology and museum education is growing, and jobs in heritage management are plentiful, many open to people with a master’s or even a bachelor’s degree. In cultural resource management, projects now more often include tribes from the start — for example, cultural-competency training by tribal members for field technicians new to the region — and communities sometimes ask firms to run workshops for their students.

The guests’ message: the paths into archaeology are more diverse than ever, and whatever your background, there is a place in it to help tell the stories of the Southwest’s peoples and landscapes.

Sources

Based on "Podcast 121: Practicing Engaged Archaeology," Preservation Technology Podcast, National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, National Park Service; the guests’ remarks are rewritten in hubnx’s own words.

• The episode's audio is the National Park Service's own file, from the podcast's feed.