ANTH 3130 Archaeology & Society

Class notes 11 Oct 2007

Welcome back!

Plan for Class today...

Attendance sheet...

Announcements

Quiz 25 minutes

Rest of film of case study... Zimbabwe.  Lost Cities of the South. PBS. 50 minutes. 1999. York vid #5686 Series: Wonders of the African World. www.pbs.org/wonders/index.html

Discussion of issues from film and Skeates readings.

We'll end a little early today so I can chat with you about essay topics.... I'll be in my office (Vari 2036) and ready to talk at 2:45

Announcements

1) Remember, your paper outline/biblio is due Oct 25, in two weeks... so you need to be thinking about your topic.

My Extended Office Hours - for discussing your papers. (Vari 2036)

Thurs Oct 11, 2:45 - 4:30

Tues Oct 16, 3:15-4:25

Thurs Oct 18, 2:45-4:30

2) Reading and homework for Oct 18:  Holtorf Chapters 1,2,3,4 pp 1- 77.  Homework: Write a short (350-500 word) reflection comparing the attitudes towards the past in Skeates book with the first four chapters of the Holtorf book.  Considering their overall approach to the past: How are their views similar? How are they different? Explore any aspect. For specific points or quotations, cite your sources carefully, as you would for an essay. Use the Anthropology citation system (see handout on Using Sources Correctly). Worth 3% of your seminar grade.

Useful overview of the history of Africa: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/index.shtml

especially

Africa and Europe 1800-1914: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/index_section11.shtml  Independence timeline: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/14generic3.shtml

Suez canal:

http://www.navis.gr/canals/images/su_space.jpg

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal

South Africa

- original inhabitants were the Khoi San, then the Bantu speakers including the Xhosa

- first Europeans in the area were Portuguese 1400s, first major European settlements were Dutch, 1600s... series of wars with the local people... Britain took control in the early 1800s, but the Boers (Dutch descendants) remained, and there were wars between the British and the Boers... finally South Africa emerged as a nation with control in the hands of whites

Apartheid  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid

- racial segregation in South Africa, 1948-1994 - very harsh system of white minority rule... most South Africans (the nonwhite population, 80%) could not vote until 1994

- apartheid finally collapsed after a great deal of international pressure, and many internal anti-apartheid movements, including the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela...

- the economy is still in bad shape, the poverty is severe in places, and there is still a lot of political unrest, but things are changing

Back to... Lost Cities of the South

1 handout - click to get pdf if you missed class, and watch the video at the York SMIL library  Lost Cities of the South

Great Zimbabwe

N.B. The Palace of the Lost City is owned by Sun International -- a multinational South African-based company founded in 1983.  http://www.suninternational.com/

(http://sun-city-south-africa.go2africa.com/palace.asp )

Great Zimbabwe: Medieval site (15^th century CE), clearly African, located 200 miles south of Harare, built with dry stone masonry

n.b. Rhodesia was a British colony ruled by a small (5%) white minority in a system like South Africa’s apartheid (institutionalized racism). England refused to grant Rhodesia independence, but in 1965 under Ian Smith (white leader), the Rhodesian government unilaterally declared independence, with the intent of keeping the apartheid system. After a bloody civil war in 1979, in 1980 Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, with black majority rule. The next leader of Zimbabwe was (and is) Robert Mugabe.

Some general comments on nationalism in archaeology:

From Silberman, Neil Asher. 1995. “Promised lands and chosen peoples: the politics and poetics of archaeological narrative.” In Philip Kohl and Clare Fawcett, eds.  Nationalism, Politics and the  Practice of Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  pp 249-262.

249 “images and symbols from the past play conspicuous and powerful roles in the present…

-          archaeological finds become battle-banners of modern ethnic groups and nations;

-          how the dubious evidence of ancient ethnic migrations and diffusions can be used to legitimze modern territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing;

-          how patterns of archaeological funding and scholarly interest can place interest on certain politically useful sites and certain classes of evidence;

-          and how archaeological interpretation can often both reflect and reinforce the centralizing policies of emerging nation-states.”  (Silberman 1995:249, punctuation changed by me)

249 “nationalist bias in archaeological research and interpretation is neither a regional aberration nor merely a curable symptom of an identifiable scholarly disease.”

Archaeology “has by its nature an unavoidable political dimension – and that nationalism is simply one of many possible manifestations of its character as both a scientific and a political enterprise.”

250 nationalism exerts influence “on professional standards of behaviour and research traditions within the discipline” but also the other way, i.e. through “forms of archaeological interpretation that gain currency among the general public, conveyed in such media as schoolbook texts, guided tours through national parks, museum displays, and popular literature”.

250 “Whether spoken, written, or visually depicted, these interpretations usually take the form of narratives: sequences of archetypal story elements, didactically arranged with clear beginnings, middles, and ends. And whether describing the archaeology of Jerusalem, Croatia, or Colonial Williamsburg, these archaeologically based stories often address politically evocative themes.”

He describes Bruce Trigger’s (1984) typology (and at the end of the article adds two of his own)

Silberman is emphasizing that (251) archaeologists are responsible both as scholars and as citizens, to science and to the public; to the evidence and for the story they choose to tell with it.

251 “a scholar’s responsibility to speak out…. willingness to criticize archaeological narratives as both scientific hypotheses and literary texts.”

252  These “hero” story forms are used to describe both the archaeologist’s process of discovery, but the past peoples themselves.

255 “As Trigger and other historians of science have  repeatedly stressed, archaeology and anthropology have long been fundamentally divided between the romantics – looking backward fondly to their favourite chosen peoples and the golden ages – and the evolutionists – often looking ahead.”  - but both can be written as very patriotic narratives.

 256 “whether dealing with the ancient cultures of a single country, nation, region, or all of humanity, the standard archaeological narrative requires that a certain ancient trait be identified, celebrated as noble and timeless, and linked to the present across a long period of ignorance or neglect.”

NAS was drawing from Bruce Trigger, 1984, “Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist,” Man, 19,355-370.

More key points relating to Skeates

Alison Wylie, a philosopher of archaeology, identifies two important presuppositions which underlie most archaeological practice in the West:

" 1. that archaeological practice can be clearly distinguished from nonscientific and, increasingly, nonprofessional, uses of the record;

 2.  that the scientific goals central to archaeological inquiry can be presumed to yield an understanding of the cultural past that is a common good, that serves humanity or society as a whole."   (Wylie 1996:166)

She goes on to observe that lately, “it is precisely these assumptions, and the priorities they establish among disciplinary goals, that are being challenged by critics both within and outside the discipline” (1996:166). Wylie describes the increasing difficulty of keeping professional and commercial interests separate, and the challenges of nonarchaeological interest groups (primarily First Nations), and concludes that archaeology’s disciplinary identity is being strained to the limit by such pressures.

Wylie, Alison. 1996. "Ethical Dilemmas in Archaeological Practice: Looting, Repatriation, Stewardship, and the (Trans)formation of Disciplinary Identity”

Perspectives on Science 4.2: 154-194.

"There are some things, however, that cannot change because they are the foundations of the relationship. Anthropology carries with is some incredibly heavy baggage. It is, and continues to be, a deeply colonial academic discipline, founded in the days when it was doctrine that the colored races of the world would be enslaved by Europeans, and the tribal peoples would vanish from the planet. When we stop and think about it, we live in a society so rich and so structured that we have the luxury of paying six-figure salaries to individuals who know a little bit about the pottery patterns of a small group of ancient people, who know something of the language of an Indian tribe, or who specialize in ledger-book drawings or plant knowledge of remote groups of desert-dwelling tribal peoples. We still seem to find it more valuable to have an Anglo know those things and be certified to teach them to other Anglos in an almost infinite chain of generations of scholars than to change the configuration of the academic enterprise and move on to more significant endeavours..." (1997:211)

 Deloria, Vine. 1997. "Anthros, Indians, and Planetary Reality." in Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Critique of Anthropology.