Unsettling Sin and Seeding Healing: Developing the Conversation Around Coloniality in the European Mesolithic

We wish to thank all the respondents for their thoughts on the issues we have raised, and the constructive framing of their various points of critique. We found the responses positive and useful, which is somewhat surprising given the demonstrably divisive nature of our position! It should be immediately apparent to those following this discourse that we have neatly split our audience over the utility of a decolonial approach to Mesolithic archaeology. Glørstad and Nilsson Stutz posit that the lens of colonial critique is ill-suited to critical reflection on the European Mesolithic, whilst Porr, Pitcher and Tiwari argue to the contrary. Of course, the position adopted by the respective authors emerges from their different positions of knowledge and experience. This breadth of opinions speaks to an underlying dynamic that we have not, as yet, addressed directly, that of positionality. The diversity in the professional backgrounds of our respondents vastly enriches this debate, whilst also hinting at the source of the mixed response to our approach. Is it any wonder that sociologists of race, Mesolithic researchers with experience of engagement with postcolonial studies outwith Europe, specialists in Indian Prehistory, and the director of one of Europe’s major museums would have wildly different experiences of colonial legacies and engage differentially with the extensive academic literature and analysis which surround them?

We should also stress that positionality can be extended further than our professional lives. As authors, we will be open here. Beyond our academic qualifications, we are two British (at least by background), middle-aged, middle-class white men who in many, many respects have been disproportionately privileged by the hegemonies that we now seek to expose and deconstruct. As such, we wholeheartedly agree with Nilsson Stutz’s point, via Táíwò (2022), regarding the dangerous tendency of social justice discourse to be ultimately appropriated by those who lack direct experience of inequality or oppression. We are grateful to have been able to start this conversation within Mesolithic studies and are delighted to see others from different backgrounds push this discourse forwards, including in sessions at recent and forthcoming conferences. We would, however, stress that privilege within Mesolithic research is fundamentally relative and reiterate the need for robust demographic data on the make-up of our research community, before diving into a more expansive discussion over who should, and should not, be front and centre within this discourse, or even whether anyone should be positioned in this way. We also note that it is our positions of privilege that provided us with a platform to raise issues of justice and ethics and in the first instance shield us from some of the vulnerabilities that disadvantage others within power-laden academic structures.

Beyond the differences of perspective that might be linked to positionality within the professional field, there also appears to be a shared sense in Nilsson Stutz and Glørstad’s responses that a colonial framework of analysis is ill-suited to Mesolithic research because of its propensity to ascribe blame, or find fault, with researchers. This we would contest. We see the value in this approach lying in its role to foster critical reflection on the contexts in which we work today; to better understand why things are the way they are, why people think the way they do, and how people beyond the academy might be affected by the work we produce. We concur with Pitcher’s sentiment that ‘decolonisation is not about appropriating blame but about establishing ethical research practices’. For us then, untangling the legacies of colonialism is not an exercise in invoking the concept of original sin for the crimes of our antecedents, but an opportunity to recognise and mitigate previously unseen power imbalances to ensure an equitable and accessible field which produces robust knowledge. Acknowledging the problems caused by an over-focus on concepts of social progress and complexity in macro-scale narratives of the European Mesolithic is not a means to harshly imply that the researchers involved are consciously racist or imperialist in their outlook but to highlight the ways in which our field has, inadvertently, sustained colonial tropes and structures within the academy. Stenger (2018) argues that ‘reclaiming’ our practices ‘ … always begins by accepting that we are sick rather than guilty, and understanding how our environment makes us sick … ’; how our practices may be spreading an ‘infection’ (Stenger 2018, pp. 121, 131). Being sick is not a cause of guilt or blame. It is, however, an opportunity for healing.

The points we raise on ontology are conflated by several authors, which probably speaks to an error of expression on our part. We take this opportunity to clarify our position. We do not believe that relational ontological approaches hold the key that will unlock a decolonial Mesolithic. Our intention was to comment on the strength of decolonial sentiment in much of the anthropological literature that underlies this movement and query its absence within Mesolithic research.

These points, to our minds, stand somewhat distinct from the tension between Radical Indigenism and pan-indigeneity. Successfully negotiating this tension may well unlock the potential for Mesolithic archaeology to engage productively with the people we rely on for our analogical arguments, but this does not necessarily need to come in the form of relational ontologies. It will require a fundamental shift towards taking indigenous knowledge structures seriously as ways of understanding the world, not just data to be extracted. The danger here, as others have previously pointed out, lies in generalisation; the risk of conflating varied and context specific ideas and approaches from cultures across the globe, and homogenising them into a single monolithic ‘Indigenous Knowledge System’ to act as a foil for ‘Western Thought’ (Crellin et al. 2020). In any case, our challenge is to create modes of practice which allow for knowledge to be produced in a manner which does not delegitimise one or the other and draws from both.

It is at this point that we must address perhaps the most substantial disagreement within the responses to our argument, Glørstad’s advocacy for the primacy of Western Science. We would reject this contention, although as we shall see, the discussion it sparks does raise valuable points. The vast body of postcolonial theory, and more specifically the arguments underpinning the development and application of Indigenous Archaeology globally stress that best practice emerges from the engagement of science-based approaches and indigenous knowledge systems. We would echo Nilsson Stutz’s position that our methods ‘should not do harm’ and note that this sits in direct opposition to Glørstad’s concession that a sole adherence to Western Science may be ‘violent’ and ‘offensive’ to some. The crux of the ethical issue here is illustrated neatly in Glørstad’s terms when rejecting the suggestion of consensual ethnographic analogy; ‘What we should abstain from though, is to let others decide how and what to examine.’

Critically breaking down this statement illuminates some of the dangers of this position, and the role that colonial critique might play in its deconstruction. We ask; who are the ‘we’ and who are the ‘others’ within this statement? Should archaeological research be critically mindful of who is defined as Other and is this not particularly relevant within the context of colonial critique? As stressed above, a lack of demographic data means that it is difficult to say with certainty who exactly ‘we’ are and who we are not, but at the very least sentiments such as this appear to create a clear dividing line between those conducting research on the European Mesolithic and those not. All of our other respondents seek to challenge this division.

The questions of who ‘we’ are and how we relate to others within our research as it is practiced in Europe also begin to distance the challenge of understanding colonial influences in European Prehistory from those faced elsewhere. As Pitcher notes, the concept of indigeneity crops us repeatedly throughout our argument yet is far from clear cut within a European context. In lieu of classically defined indigenous groups (barring the Sami, who should not be expected to stand in as the sole indigenous representative of an entire continent) what role should the Modern Project play in structuring our understanding of the Mesolithic? Put bluntly (and somewhat provocatively), if there is one place on the planet where Western Science could be argued to be deeply historically rooted and therefore an appropriate lens through which to study the past, would this not be Western Europe?

Nilsson Stutz’s point concerning the importance of contemporary, local, European voices from beyond academia within our understanding of the European Mesolithic raises another parallel. Here, we see a significant divergence from the challenges faced within Europe to those faced elsewhere, and whilst the broader postcolonial discourse forms a vital context for tackling these issues, we cannot expect to use the innovative approaches taken from other regions of the world as a crutch for addressing the questions that European Prehistory poses. Our definition of the word indigenous has, up to this point, remained cautious for numerous reasons. In fact, we now find ourselves rapidly encountering fundamental problems with the core terminology of postcolonial discourse as they might be applied within Europe. These feel ill-suited to unpick power dynamics, the movement of people and historicised knowledge systems that result from Europe’s experience of all aspects of colonialism. We would stress these are our problems to solve, and their solutions need not find parallels in other parts of the world subject to colonial settlement and oppression.

We also note that the comments of Pitcher and Porr that any de- or anti-colonising stance requires careful attention to the contexts in which our research is practiced and consumed. This includes the power structures and reward systems of the institutions within which we work, but also how prehistory is mobilised as a metaphor in contemporary society. Pitcher has shown the significant gap that exists between what researchers might say or do and these broader usages, which are often overtly racist and/or colonialist in their trope and tone. The deep-time European past, and especially hunter-gatherers, form key parts of this narrative and as a research community, we could, and should, take more responsibility for engaging with it.

In closing our response, we return to the question of guilt and sin and reiterate that we distance ourselves from this understanding of the relationship between our discipline and its colonial rootings. It is our central contention that a consideration of the relationship between Mesolithic archaeology and colonialism highlights how we have been ‘sick’, and that encouraging honest, open and unsettling debate about all aspects of our practice will enable more ethical, equitable and robust practice to develop. We thank our colleagues for their positive engagement with these questions, and for their disagreements, all of which have helped refine our thinking. We close with Max Liboiron’s statement about how to practice an ethical science:

Every morning when I put on my lab coat, I have decisions to make. How will we do science today? … These are not theoretical questions - they are practical questions, questions of method-and-ethics (hyphenated because they are the same thing). (Liboiron 2021, p. 113).

We can make the same kind of decisions every day when we go to work: how will we do archaeology today? We hope that this discussion has provided a useful context from which we might, as individuals, make these decisions. We look forwards to further conversations on this subject, and hope to eventually see, through a combination of debate and individual decision-making, the emergence of a collective consensus.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).