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Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology (Archaeology In Society)

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McNiven, Ian J. and Lynette Russell
2005 Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology. Archaeology in Society. Altamira Press, New York.

McNiven and Russell's Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology is in some ways a by-now familiar review of the colonial origins of archaeological study and the social sciences in general (see also Chakrabarty 2000; Said 1978; Trigger 1989). What these authors provide that has perhaps been less explicit elsewhere is a chronological recounting of the colonialist "tropes" regarding indigenous inferiority stemming from the graduated "progressivism" of the classical period and leading to the subtle "appropriation" of modern, seemingly politically correct, academic thought (McNiven and Russell 2005:7-9). In arguing that indigenous history is "world history," for example, academics may, perhaps unwittingly, alienate native groups from their own heritage and perpetuate the colonial tradition of western expansionism (McNiven and Russell 2005:211-231). While these authors draw most heavily on their own experience with relations between archaeologists and native groups in Australia, the lessons they seek to convey are equally important for other "settler colonies" such as the United States and Canada (McNiven and Russell 2005:2-3).

One area in which these authors break new ground is in their insistence that this colonialism lives on in the often subtle but nonetheless negative connotations that nonwestern ontologies suffer at the hands of western academic thought. While many authors have moved toward the conclusion that a modern archaeology requires embracing indigenous perspectives as part of the process of producing a sound research design (e.g., Ferguson 1996 [cited in McNiven and Russell 2005:233]), McNiven and Russell take this argument further than many, and it is in so doing that they most threaten the archaeological and academic establishment. Rather than adopt indigenous counselors as "partners" in the academic process, McNiven and Russell insist that only by relinquishing the right over determination of research design to descendant populations can archaeologists hope to correct some of the errors of the field's past and forge a truly postcolonial archaeology.

In Appropriated Pasts, McNiven and Russell tread a very fine line between tolling a death knell for archaeology as we know it and promising a bright future for a postcolonial social science in which native groups are given more than passing lip service in the footnotes of reported research. These authors argue that it is the native groups that must drive our research to satisfy more than just western positivist tastes, and as archaeologists we must relinquish to them the means of doing so. In retelling the story of the digital enhancement of rock art at Mua Island that corroborated oral traditions about the death of Goba's father, these authors seek to provide an example of a success story regarding archaeology designed to satisfy indigenous research objectives (McNiven and Russell 2005:255). What archaeologists and others in the western academic tradition must ask themselves, perhaps wide awake very late at night, is whether we would appreciate the story of Goba and his father any less if the enhancement of the rock art had revealed another image.

Works Cited
Chakrabarty, Dipesh
2000 Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Ferguson, T. J.
1996 Native Americans and the Practice of Archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 25:63-79.

McNiven, Ian J. and Lynette Russell
2005 Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology. Archaeology in Society. Altamira Press, New York.

Said, Edward
1978 Orientalism. Pantheon Books, New York.

Trigger, Bruce G.
1989 A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge University Press, New York.