The Blind Spots of the Colonial Legacies of Archaeological Theory and Practice

The authors introduce their interesting and thoughtful piece with a personal anecdote that serves as an origin story to the argument within the paper itself and to the issues they have been wrestling with for some time. In 2018, they attended the 12^th International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHAGS), which was held in Penang, Malaysia. Located in a former British colony and in a part of the world that is often included in the Global South, the conference featured extensive engagements with the colonial legacies within hunting and gathering studies and political activism to initiate positive changes in future research. I am sure that many representatives of Indigenous groups and their research partners were able to attend this conference. Southeast Asia is home to a hugely diverse Indigenous cultural and social landscape, and this is not different for adjacent regions. At the same time, within the same region, many Indigenous groups suffer from oppression and their cultural and ethnic survival continues to be an ongoing struggle within different nation states. While I do not want to speculate further about the experiences of the authors on this occasion, it seems that the anecdote is reflective of a very common colonial/postcolonial situation. First, the authors mention that in Penang, they were in the minority as European researchers. This is an unusual experience for academics, who specialise in European subjects and can rarely engage with Indigenous communities from the Global South directly. Second, they experienced that their own field – hunter-gatherer studies – was seen and practiced in a very different way in a region that experienced European colonial occupation in the past and that was subjected to oppression by a foreign power. These processes were multidimensional and varied with historical circumstances; they were political, economic, social, and intellectual. In many countries in Southeast Asia, decolonisation after WWII was a violent process and in Malaysia it also involved a long and painful liberation conflict. These aspects are potentially known to Europe-based researchers, but it is a different story being exposed to the respective legacies directly and personally.

I was not able to attend the CHAGS conference in 2018, but I can relate very well to the experiences of the two authors and how we are entangled in colonial legacies wherever we are and work. After finishing my PhD in the UK, I worked for several years in museums in Germany before moving to Australia in 2008. After focussing on European Palaeolithic archaeology and Palaeolithic art studies, I have now been working with Aboriginal people in Northwest Australia for many years. This work has changed my perception of archaeology in profound ways, and I continue to wrestle with many issues that are raised by the authors in their paper. I view this situation as a reflection of an aspect that has been part of the postcolonial literature for many decades. Colonialism is not only a multi-dimensional phenomenon that takes place in the colonies and at the periphery. It also has profound effects on the centres of power. As outlined above, these effects are political, economic, and intellectual. They also operate at different scales from individuals to the global movements of goods, ideas, and people. These effects have outlasted the end of European political colonialism and survived the establishment of the current global economic system. Just as colonialism changed the centres of power, decolonisation changed the centres as well. The paper is very much a reflection of these dialectical processes.

After discussing two key aspects of colonial thinking in relation to Mesolithic archaeology, archaeological periodization and analogical reasoning, the authors present previous contributions in a decolonial spirit within their field, which are foremost inspired by the ontological turn in anthropology. They arrive at the insight that despite much discussion about ontological variability, the decolonial potentials of these debates are not always realised. This is not really a surprising conclusion. I think that this is a sentiment that is currently shared by many practitioners in the field, particularly in Europe and the United States. What now? What to do with all these theoretical insights into ontological difference and alterity? How should they affect archaeological theory and practice?

To find answers to these questions and some inspiration, I suggest that the authors might return to the beginning of their journey. It was the exposure to the ways in which hunter-gatherer studies are conducted together with representatives from Indigenous communities and considering the daily existential pressures that they encounter and need to navigate. As I said above, I was not able to attend the conference in Penang, but I am pretty sure that the ontological turn only played a very minor role in the sessions and the respective discussions. In my own work with Aboriginal communities in Australia, I have moved increasingly away from a focus on social theoretical considerations, and I am increasingly uneasy about the writing of academic books and papers. I am more and more interested in the ways in which archaeological or material evidence is transformed into contemporary heritage. I think that this is the area where archaeologists need to direct their attention much more.

This assessment does not mean that we should drop theoretical reflection. It means that our considerations need to be directed much more towards the underpinnings of our daily practices. How is the field of archaeology structured and how is knowledge produced and communicated? Who really profits from academic research? These questions go to the heart of a decolonising approach in academia because they are related to the political economy of scientific practice. We are seeing little sustainable change in our research practices because the political economy of archaeology has not changed much over the last decades. The imbalances of power persist and are growing because of the increasingly neoliberal structure of the global higher education and research system. In this context, epistemological and ontological dimensions become again very relevant, but they must be related to the real world in which archaeology operates. I recently found the notion of political ontology worth integrating in my work (Porr 2021). It is a term that is related to Latin American decolonial literature and has been foremost used to understand the conflicts about land rights and resource exploitation (Blaser 2009, 2013). There is no question that this framework can also fruitfully be applied to cultural heritage (see e.g. Harrison 2018 for a related argument).

Beyond these issues that are related to the destructive impacts of Western ontologies and the darker side of modernity (Mignolo 2011), my work with Australian Aboriginal Traditional Owners has also taught me that different knowledge systems do not have to be seen as exclusive. Indeed, a clear separation between different ontologies easily falls into the trap of essentialism (Ingold 2016). My Aboriginal research partners have a keen sense of the potentials and limitations in this respect and how science can be employed to achieve certain outcomes in different circumstances. These aspects must, of course, be seen again in relation to the power discourses around Indigenous cultural heritage in Australia and elsewhere. The lesson for me is, consequently, not so much about a rejection of Western modernity and philosophies, but rather how these have an impact on the real world and how they can be used and manipulated in productive and meaningful ways. This is an equally ontological, epistemological, and ethical challenge and recent decolonial contributions provide an extensive reservoir for engagements and explorations. However, it is also the case that in recent discussions within archaeology there appears to be very little substantial engagement with recent decolonial literature and propositions. For example, the authors quote Bhambra and Holmwood (2021), but they seemingly fail to engage with the key message of this book, which argues that crucial elements of social theoretical thought were themselves fundamentally shaped by the influence of European colonialism. These elements are not restricted to sociology, but they are fundamental to the dominant understanding of humanity, human agency, and social and human-environment relationships. The book, consequently, questions the foundations of the modern understanding of causalities of human behaviour, which also form the foundations of most of archaeological inference. They form the unacknowledged background to the analogical arguments that are critiqued by the authors in their paper. They point to some fundamental aspects in the archaeology of hunting and gathering societies that still have not been resolved and properly addressed. Indeed, the past continues to be populated by ‘people like us’, modern people, and becomes a reservoir for narratives that feel familiar and provide justifications for today’s conditions and power structures and existing conditions and understandings of humanity and nature. In a global academic system that allows fewer and fewer opportunities to break with these reflections of modernity/coloniality, continuing these narratives is often the only option for academics, who are themselves entangled in these dependencies that the colonial system once created.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.