Archaeology as Political Action

CALIFORNIA SERIES IN PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY

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Archaeology as
Political Action

Randall H. McGuire

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley . Los Angeles . London
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Chapter 3 appeared in an earlier form as “Class

Confrontations in Archaeology,” Historical
Archaeology 33, no. 1 (1999).

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2008 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McGuire, Randall H.
Archaeology as political action / Randall H. McGuire.
p. cm. — (California series in public anthro-
pology ; 17)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-520-25490-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-520-25491-6 (paper : alk. paper)
1. Archaeology—Political aspects. 2. Archaeology—
Political aspects — Case studies. 3. Archaeologists —
Political activity. 4. Archaeology — Social aspects.
5. Archaeology — Philosophy. 6. Marxian archaeology
I. Title.

CC175.M39 2008
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For Ruth
Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Preface xi

Introduction 1
1. Politics 12
2. Praxis 51
3. Class 98
With Mark Walker
4. México 140
5. Ludlow 188
With the Ludlow Collective
Conclusion 222

References 237

Index 281
Illustrations

Figures
1. Cerro de Trincheras 170
2. Archaeologists at Valle de Altar, Sonora, 2006 171
3. Norteño workmen at Cerro de Trincheras, 1996 179
4. Ludlow tent colony before the massacre 198
5. Ludlow after the massacre 201
6. Excavating a tent cellar at Ludlow, 2001 206
7. Dean Saitta addressing the 2005 Ludlow Memorial Service 213
8. Oberosler family and friends 215
9. Educators listening to a retired miner and his wife,
Ludlow Memorial 218

Maps
1. Archaeological traditions in northern Sonora and southern
Arizona 150
2. Trincheras Tradition Project areas in Sonora, México 169
3. Trinidad coalfields area 195

ix
Preface
Where does archaeology stand in relation to all this? Where
are its values? What is its purpose? In what direction should
the discipline develop? Is archaeology relevant or irrelevant to
the world? Is doing archaeology like playing the fiddle while
Rome burns? In short, why archaeology?
Christopher Tilley (1989)

Christopher Tilley (1989:105) challenged archaeologists to ask the ques-

tion, Why archaeology? He answered it, saying that archaeology is a
form of sociopolitical action in the present. Tilley accepted that archae-
ology cannot transform capitalism, or end war, or mitigate global
inequality. He argued, however, that because archaeology is part of mod-
ern culture, changes in archaeology can filter through to affect various
aspects of culture. Therefore, he contended that archaeology can be a
source of, and a medium for, critiques of capitalist ideology. By the turn
of the twenty-first century, many archaeologists had put down their fid-
dles and taken up Tilley’s challenge to confront the sociopolitics of
archaeology.
My reflections on these politics began with my book A Marxist
Archaeology (McGuire 1992b, 2002b). In that work, I outlined an
explicitly Marxist approach to archaeological praxis that sought to
know the world, to critique the world, and to take action in the world.
Since publishing that book I have worked to realize such praxis.
Archaeology as Political Action offers a sustained discussion of my
efforts to do so using three archaeological projects. First among these is
an analysis of archaeology as a class-based endeavor that I undertook
with Mark Walker. Second, is an exploration of the Trincheras Tradition
Project in Sonora, México that evaluates the “double colonialism” that
confronts U.S. archaeologists working on the international border.
Finally, I synthesize the Colorado Coal Field War project with a focus on

xi
xii Preface

building a working class archaeology and community collaboration. The

book discusses the dilemmas of praxis and critically appraises the out-
comes of that praxis in each case.
In this work, I reflect upon how a theoretically informed and politi-
cally grounded archaeology might make a difference in peoples’ lives
and might contribute to a more humane world. The book begins with the
premise that archaeology is always political. I argue that scholars should
not try to deny this fact or obscure it behind a veil of false objectivity.
Drawing on the history of archaeological theory and a Marxist dialecti-
cal theory I suggest that archaeologists may harness the sociopolitics of
our discipline for emancipatory goals in the context of modern “fast
capitalism.”
The key to doing this lies in the craft of archaeology. Archaeologists
can use their craft to evaluate interpretations of the real world, to con-
struct meaningful histories for communities, to strive for real collabora-
tion with communities and to challenge both the legacies of colonialism
and the omnipresent class struggles of the modern world. Archaeologists
can become more collaborative in their craft but this does not mean that
we should give up our authority as good crafts persons. Speaking truth to
power requires that we maintain the authority of our craft. For effective
collaboration, however, we do need to enter into a dialogue with the
communities that we work with and to surrender significant control over
our research agenda.
When archaeologists put down their fiddles to engage the sociopolitics
of our practice they enter into a dynamic, complex, and bewildering ter-
rain. Archaeology as Political Action reflects my attempts to navigate this
topography. My reflections do not result in a cookbook, or guidebook
with step-by-step instructions on how to engage the sociopolitics of
archaeology. Rather, I have written a journal of my travels that might aid
others in their engagement. My journal confronts many core issues that
face every archaeologist including the subjectivity/objectivity debate, her-
itage issues, working with communities, and the political, economic and
cultural issues of the everyday practice of archaeology in the United
States and abroad. I hope that my reflections will be of some use to all
archaeologists but this book is primarily intended for those archaeolo-
gists who no longer wish to fiddle while fast capitalism burns.
The journey that brought me to Archaeology as Political Action took
a decade and a half. I had many guides, compañeros (-as), helpers, and
mentors along the way. Some of these people assisted me in the formula-
Preface xiii

tion of my ideas and understandings. Others went beyond intellectual

stimulation to actually aid me in the writing, revision, editing, and pro-
duction of this book.
Binghamton University has provided a supportive and intellectual
stimulating environment for my efforts. Interactions with all of my col-
leagues in anthropology have influenced my thinking, and my exchanges
with Charles Cobb, Susan Pollock, Reinhard Bernbeck, Carmen
Ferradis, Douglas Holmes, Dawnie Steadman, Deborah Elliston, and
Thomas Wilson stand out. Very few of the Binghamton University fac-
ulty play the fiddle. I have benefited from discussions with scholars from
many departments including Richard Lee, Immanuel Wallerstein,
Kathryn Sklar, Thomas Dublin, Don Quataert, Jean Quataert, Herbert
Bix, Dale Tomlich, and William Martin. My students at Binghamton
University have been a constant source of inspiration and critique. I tried
out most of my ideas and much of this text on them in the classroom, in
the halls, and over beers. I would particularly like to thank Paul Reckner,
Mark Walker, Michael Jacobson, Sarah Chicone, Felix Acuto, John
McGregor, Amy Groleau, Robbie Mann, Genesis Snyder, Stacy
Tchorzynski, Bridget Zavala, Rodrigo Navarrete, Claire Horn, Alex
Button, Marie Hopwood and John Roby. One of the wonderful things
about students is that the best ones never really leave you. Two of my
first doctoral students, LouAnn Wurst and Maria O’Donovan, have
become my colleagues and a constant source of support, critique, inter-
action, and insight. Thank you, LouAnn and Maria!
My interactions and collaborations with Spanish-speaking colleagues
in Latin America and Spain have been critical and formative for my
thought. I have twice taught at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in
Spain. I learned much from all of the faculty and students there but most
especially Jordi Estévez, Assumpció Vila, Vicente Lull, María Encarna
Sanahuja, Roberto Risch, Rafael Micó, Ermengol Gassiot, Beatriz
Palomar, and Juan A. Barcelo. I have also benefited much from the coun-
sel of the senior scholars of the Arqueología Social: Mario Sanjoa, Iraida
Vargas-Arenas, Julio Montané, and Lucho Lumbreras. My own field-
work in Sonora, México, has always been in collaboration with the
Centro Sonora de INAH in Hermosillo and in cooperation with the
Escuela Nacional de Antropología y Historia in México City. My thanks
to Felipe Bate, Manuel Gándara, Ana María Alverez, Júpiter Martínez,
Adrián López, and César Villalobos. In particular I must thank Elisa
xiv Preface

Villalpando. We have worked together for twenty-five years, and she

more than anyone has helped me see beyond my gringo blinders.
For the last decade, I have had the pleasure of being the part of the
Ludlow Collective’s archaeological study of the Colorado Coalfield War
of 1913–1914. Dean Saitta, Phil Duke, and I began the project. The col-
lective grew to include Mark Walker, Margaret Wood, Karin Larkin,
Bonnie J. Clark, Amie Gray, Paul Reckner, Michael Jacobson, Sarah
Chicone, Summer Moore, Clare Horn, Donna Bryant, and Jason
Lapham. We did the project in collaboration with the United Mine
Workers of America. I learned much from the working people of south-
ern Colorado, especially from Michael and Yolando Romero and Carol
Blatnick-Barros.
I have benefited greatly from my professional relationships and friend-
ships among a group of archaeologists who collectively call themselves
the “Closet Chickens.” This group includes Native American and First
Nations archaeologists and supporters. My thanks to Dorothy Lippert,
Joe Watkins, Claire Smith, Sonya Atalay, George Nicolas, Julie Howell,
Martin Wobst, Desiree Martinez, Deborah Nichols, T. J. Ferguson, and
Larry Zimmerman.
Many of my colleagues gave me well-considered advice on earlier
papers and chapters of this book. The list includes Mark Leone, Thomas
Patterson, Julian Thomas, Adam Menzies, Ian Hodder, Becky Yamin,
Theresa Kintz, Brian West, Steve Silliman, Margaret Conkey, Bruce
Trigger, Robert Fitts, and Robert Paynter. In the end, I did not always
take their advice, but the book is better for the comments that they gave
me.
The birthing and production of a book requires much work and lots
of help. Robin Barron and Heidi Kenyon of the Department of
Anthropology at Binghamton University assisted me in too many ways to
list. Ann Hull drafted the three maps included herein. I must also thank
the Denver Public Library’s photo department for permission to publish
three of the figures in chapter 5.
It has been a pleasure to work with the University of California Press.
My editor, Blake Edgar, held my hand and guided me through the pro-
cess to make this a book. Robin Whitaker’s copyediting helped me to
improve my prose and the clarity of my arguments. I especially thank the
University of California Press for respecting my wish that the production
and manufacture of this book not be outsourced to India or Hong Kong.
BookMatters of Berkeley, California, typeset the book, and the Maple-Vail
Book Manufacturing Group of Binghamton, New York, printed and
Preface xv

bound the book. Thank you to my union brothers and sisters of Graphics
Communications International Union Local 898M of Binghamton, New
York, for the craft that they put into manufacturing Archaeology as
Political Action. Everyone involved in the writing, editing, and produc-
tion of this book was paid a living wage, labored in a safe work place,
worked reasonable hours, and is to be respected for their labor.
I wrote much of this book while a Research Associate at the Amerind
Foundation in Dragoon, Arizona. John Ware has made the Amerind
Foundation an intellectual oasis in the desert. I am never whole unless I
am in the desert, and I have found the Amerind Foundation a haven
where I can think, create, and thrive.
Most of all I must thank Ruth Van Dyke. Ruth has been with me
every step of the way, from my first tentative pages through the trials of
reviews to the final page proofs. She is my critic, my editor, and my col-
league. My thought is clearer, my grammar better, my punctuation
improved, my ideas sharper, my craft more masterful because of her.
Introduction
The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently;
the point is, to change it.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1947:199)

In July 1936, Fascist forces under the leadership of Francisco Franco

swept through Spain to put down the legally elected government of the
Second Republic. About half the country, including Andalusia, fell
quickly to the rebels. Asturias and Vizcaya surrendered in October of the
following year, while Madrid, Valencia, Murcia, and Catalunya contin-
ued the struggle until 1939. As the Fascists subjugated each area, they
attempted to systematically wipe out Republican officials, intellectuals,
officers, soldiers, and sympathizers. They also instituted a reign of terror,
for example, executing 10 percent of the male population of Andalusia.
What happened in the small Andalusian village of Santaella was typical.
In 1936, Fascist troops, members of the Guardia Civil, and Falangist vig-
ilantes entered the village on two occasions. Each time they rounded up
town officials, schoolteachers, and others, twenty-two men in total, and
took them on paseitoes (promenades) to the town cemetery, where they
were shot to death. In haphazard acts of violence, Republican forces also
executed civilians during the Civil War, but these atrocities did not match
the systematic terror that the Fascists mobilized to pacify the areas they
conquered.1
During Franco’s forty-year reign, the dictatorship built monuments
and put up markers to commemorate the victims of the Republic, but the
graves of the victims of Fascism remained unmarked and obscured.2 For
almost thirty years after the fall of the dictatorship, these dead were offi-
cially forgotten. Today archaeologists are working to recover the mem-
ory of the victims of Spanish fascism. This is an overtly political act.
Excavating mass graves uncovers the official amnesia about the Civil

1
2 Introduction

War that the government used to establish the contemporary Spanish

state following Franco’s death in 1975 (Elkin 2006).
In June 2004, archaeologists, biological anthropologists, historians,
and volunteers from the national organization Foro por la Recuperación
de la Memoria Histórica (Forum for the Recuperation of Historic Mem-
ory) located and exhumed the mass grave of seventeen of the twenty-two
individuals executed in Santaella. The excavations at Santaella revealed a
macabre scene. The Fascists had laid the bodies across the width of a
long trench. They made efficient use of the ditch, placing the bodies side
by side, alternating head to foot to use the smallest amount of space pos-
sible. The skeletons bore the marks of the killings, including pelvises and
vertebra shattered by bullets. Forensic analysis indicated that the victims
had been placed standing against a wall, facing their assassins, and shot
to death with submachine guns held at waist level. Uncovering the
remains and identifying them will allow their descendants to claim and
properly bury them. It also will recover the memory of Fascist atrocities
and confront the fascism that remains in contemporary Spanish society
and politics. In Spain, scholars have fashioned an emancipatory praxis of
archaeology to confront fascism.
This is a book about the praxis of archaeology. It is my reflection on
how to adapt the modern practice of archaeology to those who do
archaeology, who want archaeology, and who are affected by archaeol-
ogy. In A Marxist Archaeology (McGuire 1992b), I laid out a program
for a humanistic, dialectical Marxism in this discipline. This book self-
critically examines my attempts to make that program an archaeology of
political action.

Praxis
My reflection begins with considerations of the broad theoretical, philo-
sophical, and ethical issues that confront all modern Western archaeolo-
gists, including questions about social theory, the construction of archae-
ological knowledge, and the real-world consequences of our practice.
These considerations continue a theoretical dialogue about archaeology
that began in the mid-twentieth century (Trigger 2006). I enter this dia-
logue to elaborate a praxis that builds an archaeology of political action.
At places like Santaella, Spain, some archaeologists have already begun
such praxis.
Archaeologists have come to realize that people act as agents in social
contexts only partly of their own making, in a dialectic between structure
Introduction 3

and agency (Silliman 2001:194). Agency becomes praxis only when peo-
ple strive to alter that structure. Praxis refers to the distinctively human
capacity to consciously and creatively construct and change both the
world and ourselves. The minimal definition of praxis is “theoretically
informed action.” To engage in praxis, people must entertain concepts of
possibility and change. Praxis becomes emancipatory when it advances
the interests of the marginalized and the oppressed against the interests of
the dominant. Praxis implies a process of gaining knowledge of the
world, critiquing the world, and taking action to change the world. All
archaeologists contribute to praxis, although only a minority of archae-
ologists ever complete the process and take action to change the world.
Virtually all archaeologists seek to gain knowledge of the world. We
excavate sites, survey landscapes, count potsherds, reproduce lithic tools,
sort modern trash, and do many other things to learn about the human
condition. Within archaeology, scholars have extensively debated the best
ways for us to gain knowledge of the world. These discussions have cov-
ered archaeological techniques, methods, and epistemologies (Johnson
1999; Gamble 2001; Wylie 2002; Trigger 2006). Since the 1980s, advo-
cates of alternative archaeologies, including feminists, post-processualists,
indigenous peoples, and Marxists, have engaged in critique, developing an
extensive literature reflecting on archaeology and its place in the world
(Johnson 1999; Watkins 2000; Gamble 2001; Thomas 2004; Conkey
2005a; Trigger 2006; Fernández 2006). Their critique has demonstrated
that knowledge does not exist apart from its creation in a social context. It
has led many archaeologists to realize that archaeology is a social and
political practice and must be understood in those terms.
Most of the archaeologists who have criticized the discipline have
done so with the goal of transforming archaeology. Focusing on the
experience and practices of archaeology, they have sought to develop a
self-critical archaeology (Shanks 1992), build self-reflexive methods
(Hodder 1999), transform gender inequalities in the field and in our
interpretations of the past (Gilchrist 1999), remake archaeological exca-
vation (Lucas 2001), and rethink the language we use to do archaeology
and interpret the past (Joyce 2002). Archaeologists have given far less
attention to how our discipline has been and can be used as a means of
political action to challenge society (Meskell and Pels 2005; Hamilakis
and Duke 2007).
An emancipatory praxis is of no use to those archaeologists who wish
to defend the status quo or to provide mythic charters for social groups.
This is true whether that status quo is capitalist, communist, Hindu, fas-
4 Introduction

cist, or something else altogether. It is also of no use to those archaeolo-

gists who cannot see beyond their trench or their pile of potsherds. The
theory that I present here is not a universal theory for archaeology or yet
another theory to interpret the world differently. It is, rather, a theory for
those archaeologists who want to engage in archaeology as political
action.

A More Humane World

Advocating an archaeology of political action raises the question, Action
to what end? My answer to that question is, a more humane world in
which there is less alienation and more emancipation. Alienation refers to
the separation of aspects of the human condition that naturally belong
together or to antagonism between aspects that are properly in harmony
(Schmitt and Moody 1994; Schmitt 2002). For Marx (1959), capitalist
workers who have to sell their labor power are alienated from both their
labor and the products of their labor. They inevitably lose control of their
lives by losing control over their work. Workers thus cease to be
autonomous beings in any significant sense.
Marx dealt only with labor, but alienation may also spring from a
wide range of social relations, including race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity,
and religion (Schmitt and Moody 1994; Schmitt 2002). Alienated indi-
viduals may feel estranged from their milieu, other human beings, work,
the products of work, sexuality, society, or self. Alienation may take on
various aspects and dimensions, such as meaninglessness in the cultural
dimension, powerlessness in the political dimension, and social exclusion
in the social dimension. It is most often associated with minorities,
women, the poor, the unemployed, gays, and other groups who have lim-
ited power to bring about changes in society. Alienation is usually under-
stood as being incompatible with emancipation.
Emancipation frees people from alienation. Critical theories seek
human emancipation by “liberating human beings from all circum-
stances that enslave them” (Horkheimer 1982:244). These theories aim
to explain and transform all the circumstances that alienate human
beings. Activists and scholars have developed critical theories that focus
on each of these circumstances. The goal of transformation is a consen-
sual form of social life in which each person can realize his or her full
potential. Following Horkheimer, in such a society “all conditions of
social life that are controllable by human beings depend on real consen-
sus” (1982:249–250).
Introduction 5

The Marxist perspective presented here is but one of several critical

theories in archaeology; the others include feminism, post-processual
archaeology, queer theory, and indigenous archaeology. Scholars can
exploit the intersectionalities among these different approaches in pursuit
of common goals and yet maintain their independence. Marxists con-
front class oppression. Feminists challenge gender oppression. Queer the-
oriests contest the oppression of sexuality, and indigenous archaeology
questions colonial and racial oppression. Each theory uses its object
(class, gender, sexuality, race) as the starting point for the analysis of
alienation and the struggle for emancipation. These different forms of
oppression do not, however, exist independently of one another. They
intersect in the lives of individuals. Thus, scholars should move beyond
their own individual entry points to examine the intersectionalities of
oppression (Hammond 1993; Conkey 2005b). My entry point is class,
and the case studies in this book confront class and its intersectionalities
with gender, race, and colonialism.

Fast Capitalism
Fast capitalism dominates the world that an emancipatory praxis of
archaeology seeks to change (Agger 1989, 1997, 2004). We still live in a
capitalist world where economic processes are based in the ownership of
private property and wage labor. Modern capitalism, however, is an accel-
erated, hyped-up capitalism that holds a more profound sway over the
peoples of the earth than it ever has before. The world is, in fact, more
capitalist today than it was when Marx wrote in the middle of the nine-
teenth century. At that time, private property and wage labor dominated
only in Europe. For most of its existence, capitalism has expanded by
incorporating noncapitalist regions of the world. Today, virtually no cor-
ner of the world lies outside capitalism’s control. Capitalism now expands
by speeding up its processes and by penetrating all aspects of social life.
Many modern observers wish to believe that we live in a globalized,
postcapitalist world. This is not the case. The globalization of the mod-
ern world is neither new nor unique. Private property and wage labor
arose in early modern Europe as a result of a globalized economy
(Wallerstein 2000; Lee, in press). English workers wove the cloth of
Manchester from cotton grown in the southern United States and India.
Capitalists sold the woven cloth in a global market. Tea from India
sweetened with sugar raised by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean
enabled the workers to stand at their looms longer (Mintz 1986).
6 Introduction

We do not live in a postcapitalist world but rather in fast capitalism.

The rapid expansion of information technologies (including computers,
software, satellites, fiber optics, and the Internet) has transformed the
global economic landscape (Foster et al. 2001), accelerating capitalism in
terms of both its reach and its transactions. Advances in transportation,
such as container ships, allow goods to be produced wherever wage rates
are lowest in the world. The new information technologies allow techni-
cal, clerical, and even professional services also to seek the lowest wage.
To make a profit, firms must cut wages and overhead. Workers who do
not accept less lose their jobs when whole industries hop around the
globe. The pressures to deliver all goods and services at the least possible
cost create hypercompetitiveness. This process erodes workers’ rights
and benefits and proletarianizes professional occupations, including
archaeology.
Fast capitalism expands by oozing into every nook and cranny of
society to create new needs. Powerful capitalists in business, education,
and government embrace hypercompetition to make market principles
the dominant ethic for all social relations, evaluating all such relations in
terms of costs and benefits and the bottom line. Their success corrodes
socially derived moral frameworks and political programs (Holmes
2000). Fast capitalism attacks the values and social relations that have
created and sustained archaeology. Hypercompetition leaves slight place
for the life of the mind that does not produce profits (Siegel 2006). The
camaraderie and shared purpose of fieldwork do not generate earnings.
Fast capitalism undermines the relationships of apprenticeship and mas-
tery and grinds down the community of scholars that have drawn most
of us to the craft of archaeology. Capitalists’ search for profit transforms
archaeological knowledge and education into commodities to be pro-
duced at the lowest cost and to be sold in a competitive market (Tilley
1989:106–107). No wonder archaeologists feel confused and alienated.

Building Praxis
In archaeology, processualists, post-processualists, classical Marxists,
critical theorists, indigenous archaeologists, and feminists have sought to
build a more humane world (Fernández 2006). Their critical theories
provide a foundation and a dialogue that inform and enrich my efforts
here. These efforts also point to the dangers of programs based in a cat-
egorical choice between objectivity and subjectivity. An emphasis on
objectivity has too often led to a social engineering that assumes its
Introduction 7

designers can gain a true knowledge of the world that allows them to
direct change. Subjectivity, on the other hand, can lead to a relativistic
advocacy of multivocality that leaves scholars with no way to identify or
reject those voices that are silly, delusional, or pernicious. The real ques-
tion facing archaeological praxis is not whether archaeological knowl-
edge should be objective or subjective but, rather, how scholars can con-
nect the subjectivities of knowing and the realities of the world in our
construction of archaeological knowledge.
A relational approach to the evaluation of knowledge involves a mul-
tifaceted dialectic between what I have termed the four Cs: coherence,
correspondence, context, and consequences. Coherence refers to the log-
ical and theoretical harmony of our interpretations. Correspondence
considers how our interpretations fit the observations we can make of
the world. Context reflects on the social, political, and cultural milieux of
our interpretations. Finally, consequences involves a serious considera-
tion of what interests our interpretations serve for the communities we
work with. Thus, how we know the world is a complex mix of the world
itself, the methods we use to study the world, and our social context as
scholars in the world. Such complex knowledge provides a basis for
making change in the world, which alters the world and necessitates new
knowledge.
My theory of praxis begins with the idea of relational knowledge and
draws on the intersectionalities among dialectical Marxist, feminist, and
indigenous archaeologies (McGuire 1992b; Conkey 2005b; Lippert
2005). Feminism has been a significant source of praxis challenging the
discipline of archaeology. Feminists confront and provide alternatives to
the powerful andocentric bias in archaeology. The feminist idea of entry
point (Wylie 1991) provides an effective method for considering race,
ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class in compatible analyses that do not
reduce any of these phenomena to the other. Indigenous archaeologists
have built a successful archaeological praxis to challenge the colonialism
of archaeologies in which the descendants of the conquerors study the
ancestors of conquered native peoples (Watkins 2000; Lippert 2005).
Key to this success has been their collaboration with indigenous commu-
nities (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2004, 2006; Smith and
Wobst 2005; Zimmerman 2005). These efforts provide a model for
building praxis with all communities.
Collaboration is key for praxis. Michael Shanks and I have argued
that archaeology should be a craft that combats alienation by unifying
hearts, hands, and minds (Shanks and McGuire 1996). As a craft,
8 Introduction

archaeology entails a practice that can be used to advance the interests of

many communities through a range of endeavors from the technical to
the interpretative, from the practical to the creative. Archaeologists have
used four different, overlapping approaches to interact with communi-
ties: Opposition involves contesting and thwarting the interests of a
community. Education entails imparting and acquiring knowledge while
developing the powers of reasoning and acquiring self-awareness.
Consultation is an instrumentalist process that involves a discussion
between two or more parties to resolve a particular issue or question.
Collaboration requires cooperating social groups to assimilate their
goals, interests, and practices in a dialogue that advances the interests of
all groups involved in the collaboration. Each of these approaches has a
place in an emancipatory archaeology, but only collaboration will lead
to praxis.

Engaging in Praxis
Engaging in praxis is difficult. Social relations, political struggle, and
ethics are never so clearly and distinctly defined in reality as they are in
abstract discussions. They will always be complex, messy, ambiguous,
and precarious. The four Cs provide a guide for action, but they do not
resolve, remove, or reduce the intricacy and uncertainty of real life.
Praxis has no relevance or meaning in the abstract. It is significant only in
its application. The core of Archaeology as Political Action reflexively
discusses three attempts at praxis in the real world.
Communities and their relationships result from historical processes
of cooperation, struggle, and conflict. An emancipatory praxis serves the
marginalized and challenges the dominant. The multifaceted and contra-
dictory nature of social relations usually makes these two things hard to
do. Rarely does a single, unequivocal “oppressor” clearly dominate other
groups. When viewed from a universal perspective, power relations may
seem clear, but when scholars focus on real communities embedded in
larger sets of social relations, the seemingly straightforward relations of
dominance frequently become perplexing and puzzling. Even subordi-
nate groups may include oppressive internal relationships of power
between genders and among age grades, ethnicities, or other factions or
social parameters that subdivide them. An emancipatory scholarship can-
not simply ignore such oppressive internal relationships in the struggle to
advance the interests of the group in the larger society. Relations of
power can also shift when groups that are subordinate in one context
Introduction 9

become dominant in a different context. Archaeologists enter communi-

ties as fully formed social beings with preestablished ethnic, racial, gen-
der, sexual, and class identities. These identities usually have preexisting
connotations to the communities that we work with, connotations that
may be negative. Archaeologists can understand their relationship to the
community only by knowing the histories that created the community as
well as the community’s present context.
The praxis of archaeology should first be self-critical and seek to
transform social relationships within the discipline. Feminist scholars
have extensively criticized patriarchy in both the ideologies of archaeol-
ogy and the structure of our discipline. Indigenous archaeologists have
criticized the colonialism inherent in archaeology in the Americas and
other parts of the world, including Australia and New Zealand. In both
cases, these scholars have offered alternatives to current practices and
achieved some success in transforming the discipline, even though much
remains to be done. Less attention, however, has been given to issues of
class within archaeology.
Archaeology as a discipline serves class interests and, as a profession
or occupation, has its own class structure. Archaeology has traditionally
been a middle-class practice that has served middle-class needs. Reduced
public funding for education and hypercompetition among contract
firms undermines the craft of archaeology and replaces it with market
principles of flexibility, competition, and profit. The corrosion of fast
capitalism has reached into both the academy and cultural resource man-
agement. More and more, the discipline of archaeology depends on a
proletariat of teaching assistants, adjuncts, and field technicians whom
universities and contract firms increasingly exploit.
We practice archaeology in complex sociopolitical contexts. Elisa
Villalpando and I created the Trincheras Tradition Project as a bina-
tional research effort on the international border between Arizona and
Sonora, México. There we have threaded our way into the tangled skein
of imperialism and colonialism. Our praxis attempts to confront and
transform the relationships of imperialism and colonialism among four
communities—U.S. archaeologists, Mexican archaeologists, Norteños,
and the Tohono O’odham (the Papago). These communities have a long
history of relations with one another. U.S. archaeologists have tradition-
ally had an imperialistic relationship to both Mexican archaeology and
the Norteños who live along the border. Mexican archaeologists engage
in a nationalistic archaeology that, under fast capitalism, is being eroded
by cultural tourism. The Tohono O’odham now primarily live in the
10 Introduction

United States, but only because Mexican authorities drove most of those
who lived south of the border north. Both México and the United States
have subjugated and colonized the Tohono O’odham. Our praxis on the
border is difficult, and we have met with failure as well as success in the
pursuit of our goals.
In southern Colorado, the historical archaeology of the 1913–1914
Colorado Coalfield War offers a less complex stage for praxis, on which
we study class warfare to participate in modern-day class struggle. In
1914, Colorado National Guard troops laid machine gun fire into a tent
colony of striking coal miners at Ludlow, Colorado, killing twenty of the
camp’s inhabitants, including two women and twelve children. Enraged
by these events, the strikers launched a ten-day class war, torching com-
pany towns, dynamiting mines, and killing National Guard troops and
company men. On the basis of excavations at the site of the Ludlow
Massacre and at the contemporary company town of Berwind, our proj-
ect has built archaeological praxis in collaboration and solidarity with
the United Mine Workers of America. Our efforts address a variety of
communities that include archaeologists, educators, and the children and
grandchildren of the strikers. We address these audiences to engage in the
broader discourses and practices about labor and labor rights in the
United States, but primarily we serve the interests of the descendant com-
munity—unionized workers in southern Colorado. Our collaboration
has created a working-class archaeology that differs from the tradition of
archaeology as a middle-class practice. Our archaeology joins working
families in their struggle to hold back the erosion of their rights and dig-
nity under fast capitalism.
For over a decade, I have presented talks about our research on the
Colorado Coalfield War to both professional and popular audiences.
When I have spoken outside the United States, in countries such as Spain,
México, Brazil, England, Argentina, and Portugal, the audience has been
enthusiastic about our project as a form of political action. In the United
States and Canada, the reactions have been different. In the dozens of
presentations that I have given in North America, someone has always
asked me this question: “Why do you want to politicize archaeology?”
And I have always answered, “I cannot politicize archaeology. Archae-
ology is inherently political, and we best deal with that fact by explicitly
confronting the political nature of archaeology.” These experiences have
made it clear to me that many of my North American colleagues still
believe what archaeologists do is apolitical, or at best they wish to ignore
the troublesome fact that it is not. I argue that we ignore the political
Introduction 11

nature of archaeology at our own peril. For this reason, I begin this book
by discussing how archaeology is political and how a dialectical
Marxism provides one starting point for archaeology as political action.

Notes
1. Contemporary historians have estimated that the Fascists executed at least
a hundred thousand civilians and tens of thousands of prisoners of war, while the
Republicans executed fewer than fifty thousand people (Juliá 1999). These
approximations, based on government documents, almost certainly underesti-
mate the number of people killed by the Fascists, because many executions were
done in secret or were not documented. During and following the Civil War, the
Fascists extensively documented Republican atrocities and often adulterated doc-
uments to make deaths look like executions when they had not been. For these
reasons, the estimates of how many individuals the Republicans killed are, if any-
thing, exaggerated.
2. The dictatorship continued to execute its Civil War enemies up until the
1970s. Conservative estimates of the number of individuals executed by the
Fascists after the Civil War had ended run to around fifty thousand people (Juliá
1999).
Chapter 1

Politics
Although it may seem to be a neutral act to study eighth
or thirteenth century Maya, such activity carries profound
political effects and implications. Some of these effects stem
directly from the ideological assumptions that undergird the
research paradigm and interpretive models, whereas others
derive from secondary manipulations by persons other than
the researcher. Once the archaeologist produces an interpre-
tation of the past, that knowledge has a political life of its
own.
Quetzil E. Castañeda (1996:24)

Quetzil Castañeda’s studies of Chichén Itzá (1996, 2005) reveal a con-

tested space, a battleground for struggles over economic gain, heritage,
and identity. Under Mexican law, the ruins of Chichén Itzá are patrimo-
nio cultural (a federally owned heritage site) and are controlled by the
Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Historia (INAH). INAH employees
at the site include archaeologists and the staff members who manage and
maintain the park. The Mexican government created Chichén Itzá as a
national park to reinforce a nationalist heritage of the Mexican state.
Increasingly, in a transition seen at similar sites around the world, the
park has been transformed into a market center for heritage tourism.
The growth of Cancún as a resort destination for U.S. and European
tourists in the last decades of the twentieth century greatly increased the
number of visitors to the site and the money to be made from sale of sou-
venirs and craft items. The state has given the employees of INAH a
monopoly on such sales, but Mayan Indians from the nearby community
of Pisté have challenged that monopoly in order to sell their own handi-
crafts in the park. Three times, during 1983–1987, 1993–1996, and
2003, artisans from Pisté invaded the park to sell their wares. This is

12
Politics 13

obviously an economic struggle, but it is also a struggle about heritage

and identity. The state wishes to project a pleasing image of México and
of the Maya to tourists so that these visitors will return and recommend
their experience to others. The Mayan Indians contest this expropriation
of their culture, heritage, and identity by invading the park.
The local Maya and the state are, however, not the only groups claim-
ing the heritage of Chichén Itzá. The setting sun on the days of the vernal
and autumnal equinoxes projects a shadow on the main pyramid that
looks like a serpent. This phenomenon has attracted enormous interna-
tional attention and interest. The INAH puts on a big show, with dancers,
music, and theater to attract and entertain the tourists. In the spring of
1989, the equinox also attracted four other groups of people who laid
claim to the spirituality of the monument—and indeed to the identity of
the ancient Maya: a group of New Age neo-Aztecs, the Fraternidad
Blanca de Quetzalcótal (White Brotherhood of Quetzalcótal), made up
primarily of urban mestizos from México City; a tour group of North
American New Agers led by a Mayan spiritualist; a group of Mexican fol-
lowers of the Mexican American New Age prophet José Arguelles; and
the Rainbow Family, a loose group of North American spiritualists who
gather each year. When these spiritualists began celebrations and cere-
monies that interfered with the official program, INAH officials and the
police clashed with them. The real descendants of Chichén Itzá, the local
Mayan villagers, saw (and continue to see) the whole event as nonsense.
In the Chichén Itzá arena of economic, ideological, political, and iden-
tity struggle, archaeology has played numerous roles. Mexican archaeolo-
gists have definite economic and political interests in the control of the
monument and its interpretation through the INAH (see chapter 4). The
interest of the international tourists originates from popular knowledge of
the archaeological research done at the site, primarily by North American
archaeologists. The North American and Mexican New Agers built their
interpretations of spirituality in large part from the knowledge that
archaeologists and anthropologists have produced of the ancient Maya.
Throughout this tale, archaeologists have been intimately involved, polit-
ically interested, and broadly implicated in social relations and struggles.
Castañeda’s analysis of Chichén Itzá demonstrates the complexity of
the social contexts of archaeological practice. This complexity points to
the importance of self-reflexivity on the part of archaeologists, that is, a
self-critical examination of the political interests, ideology, and social
positioning of archaeology in social contexts. Over the last two decades,
substantial scholarship, public conflict, and legislation have made the
14 Politics

political, social, and ideological nature of archaeological practice clear

(Shanks and Tilley 1987; Tilley 1989; Conkey and Gero 1991; Hamilakis
1996; Castañeda 1996, 2005; Kehoe 1998; D. Thomas 2000; Meskell
2002a; Shanks 2004; Leone 2005; Meskell and Pels 2005; Hamilakis
and Duke 2007). Many authors are concerned that archaeological inter-
pretations take on a political life of their own. I seek to build a praxis of
archaeology to exercise more control over the knowledge that archaeol-
ogists create, a praxis that guides our knowledge toward human emanci-
pation rather than alienation. I find the theoretical basis for such a praxis
in a dialectical Marxism.

Archaeology as Politics by Other Means

In a political sense, the discipline of archaeology is at once trivial and sig-
nificant. Paradoxically, the significance of archaeology for political
action springs from its triviality. Archaeology by and large does not
directly engage in the key political struggles of the modern world.
Archaeologists do not in any noteworthy way direct armies, shape
economies, write laws, or imprison or free people from bondage. None-
theless, a handful of archaeologists have become individuals of signifi-
cant political importance. In 1917, the British government appointed the
archaeologist Gertrude Bell as Oriental secretary to the British High
Commission in Iraq. Bell helped draw the boundaries of Iraq, and she
chose the first king of the new country (Wallach 1999). From 1949 to
1952, the archaeologist Yigael Yadin served as the second chief of staff
for the Israeli Defense Forces (Silberman 1993). But, in no case has an
individual risen to political prominence through or because of their his or
her practice of archaeology.
Archaeology has been put to overt political use. In 1914, Leonard
Woolley and T. E. Lawrence provided “innocent” archaeological camou-
flage for a British military survey of the Turkish-controlled Sinai Penin-
sula (Wilson 1989:137). During World War I, Sylvanus Morley used his
investigations of Mayan sites in the Yucatán as a cover to negotiate with
rebel Mayan leaders for their support of U.S. interests (Casteñeda
1996:118). These examples warrant mention primarily because they are
exceptions in the history of our discipline. Even in these exceptional
cases, however, archaeology primarily served as a stalking horse for polit-
ical activities, rather than as a form of political action. It made an effec-
tive stalking horse because of its obvious triviality. Clearly archaeology is
a weak instrument for overt political action, and in a sense, that should
Politics 15

comfort archaeologists. We do not violate the civil rights of people if we

wrongly reconstruct social hierarchy in the British Bronze Age. No one
starves if we underestimate the productivity of Mayan-raised field agri-
culture. Nonetheless, the past is a locus of political struggle, and this
struggle can have significant costs and consequences (Meskell 2002a,
2005; Leone 2005). It has manifested itself at many famous archaeolog-
ical sites, such as Chichén Itzá and Stonehenge.
During the 1970s, the summer solstice ceremonies of the Ancient
Druid Order at Stonehenge began to take on a new significance (Chip-
pendale 1983:253–263). The ceremonies had for decades attracted
rowdy onlookers. In 1974, a pirate radio station called for a festival of
“love and awareness,” and the Stonehenge Free Festival was formed. The
festival grew over the next ten years and came to be a counterculture
gathering for hippies, travelers, and the curious.1 The conservative
regime of Margaret Thatcher saw the travelers as a threat to social order
(Chippendale 1986; Bender 1998). Eventually, government officials
claimed that the festival was damaging archaeological sites around
Stonehenge, and in 1985 they closed it on the solstice to all but the
druids. They fortified the site with barbwire and dug a trench across the
entrance road to stop travelers from driving into the site. In a conflict
called the Battle of the Bean Field, the police attacked a large party of
travelers trying to get to Stonehenge. In the struggle, the police destroyed
or seriously damaged numerous vans, trucks, buses, and cars. Scores of
people were injured. In the largest mass civil arrest in English history, the
police detained five hundred people (Hetherington 2000). Conflicts
between the police and travelers occurred again in 1988. All of this
unrest resulted in the British courts awarding damages of twenty-three
thousand (pounds) to twenty-four travelers in 1991 for assault and
damage to their vehicles during the Battle of the Bean Field (Bender
1998:115). In 1994, the Tory government passed a criminal justice act
that greatly restricted travelers’ mobility and rights. In 2001, British
Heritage reopened Stonehenge for solstice visitation under heavily con-
trolled conditions.
In the battle over Stonehenge, which focused on who has rights to the
past, British Heritage defeated the travelers’ claim to Stonehenge as a site
of counterheritage (Bender 1998). The struggle gave the Thatcher gov-
ernment a useful opportunity to regulate and disrupt the travelers, who
live outside the tax-paying mainstream of British society. The govern-
ment did not expel the Ancient Druid Order, whom they regarded as
quaint eccentrics good for tourism.
16 Politics

Stonehenge was a locus of ideological struggle. Political struggles over

the past are first and foremost ideological, especially when their political
nature is hidden or obscured. The obvious triviality of archaeology for
overt political action makes it a cloaked but significant weapon in strug-
gles over the past. Jordi Estévez, a colleague of mine in archaeology at the
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, once remarked to me that he works
in an ideology factory. His point was that archaeological practice pro-
duces ideology. Therefore, the question becomes, What ideology should
we manufacture? His metaphor is apt. We may direct our scholarship to
produce knowledge that either reinforces or challenges the dominant ide-
ologies of our times. As Christopher Tilley (1989) has pointed out, the
products of the archaeological ideology factory have most commonly
sustained, justified, and legitimated the dominant ideological values of
capitalism. Archaeologists have done this by venerating stability and dis-
paraging change, by equating social change with progress, by biologizing
the social, and by rationalizing the economic.
Much of the discussion of archaeology and politics has focused on the
ideological content of our interpretations of the past and archaeological
practice. Scholars have deconstructed Cambridge lectures (Tilley 1989),
living history museums (Leone 1981), communities (Potter 1994), gar-
dens (Leone et al. 1987), histories (Patterson 1995b; Kehoe 1998;
Estévez and Vila 1999, 2006), and cemeteries (McGuire 1988) to show
how they are laden with politically significant ideologies. Too often,
however, this process of deconstruction and critique provides no direc-
tions for alternative practices or, more important, no guide for a politi-
cally engaged praxis. We are left with the sure understanding that these
things are political and ideological but with no clear sense of what to do
about that fact. Many archaeologists, however, still wish to ignore or
deny that archaeology is politics by other means.

Political Doubts
Overt discussions of archaeology and politics make many Anglo archae-
ologists uneasy and uncomfortable, especially in the United States (Ford
1973; Clark 1996). I concur with Lynn Meskell that “archaeologists
have traditionally operated on the assumption that they are not impli-
cated in the representation and struggles of living peoples and that all
such political engagement is negatively charged” (2005:123). Alice
Kehoe notes, “Archaeologists chose to disengage from politics, money-
grubbing, socialite smoozing: out there in the desert or jungle or corn-
Politics 17

field, they could epitomize the dedicated selfless seeker after objective
knowledge” (1998:86). This unease and disengagement occur for both
good and bad reasons, but denying the political nature of archaeology is
not realistic. Furthermore, denying, ignoring, or discounting the political
nature of archaeology presents real dangers. It leaves archaeologists with
no say or role in the political life of the knowledge that we create.
In part, this disdain for politics in archaeology reflects a larger disdain
for politics in U.S. culture. North Americans tend to spurn politics as a
dirty business tainted by dishonesty, strong feelings, and self-interest. In
popular discourse, politics is contrasted with dispassionate, objective sci-
ence. The dominant ideology of the United States tends to view politics as
a phenomenon separable from other aspects of society, such as econom-
ics and culture. Americans in general resist “making things political.”
This attitude contrasts strongly with the ideologies of European, Latin
American, African, and Asian societies, which tend to see politics as an
integral aspect of all social life, including archaeology (Hodder 1991;
Schmidt and Patterson 1995; Politis and Alberti 1999; Fernández 2006).
Many archaeologists also resist any explicit discussions of politics,
because such discussions can be emotional and acrimonious. Political
positions necessarily involve moral and ethical attitudes about the world.
These attitudes invoke powerful zeal in people. We are taught as young
children to exclude politics from polite conversation, because politics
creates tension and hostility among individuals. To engage in political
discourse is to enter into an uneven and unstable terrain where you can
make more enemies than friends. In the aftermath of theoretical tensions
that occurred at the end of the twentieth century, many archaeologists
just want to proclaim, “Why can’t we all be friends?” and get back to
sorting potsherds. They want to paper over differences to avoid con-
fronting real political issues (McNiven and Russell 2005:223–231).
Politics is fundamentally about how groups advance their interests
within society. If we accept that archaeology is political, then we must
ask which interests we should support and which we should oppose. But
what tools do we have to make these decisions? Archaeologists fear that
others will use our knowledge or practice without our consent or coop-
eration to advance their interests. Even worse, we fear that we will be
caught between conflicting interests. Nowhere is this fear more of a real-
ity in the United States than in negotiations mandated by the Native
American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. In some con-
texts these negotiations have thrust archaeologists into the midst of con-
flicts among Indian nations. Fine-Dare (2002:131–132) discusses how
18 Politics

anthropologists negotiating repatriation at Fort Lewis College, in

Colorado, had to resist being drawn into disputes between the Navajo
Nation and the Hopi Nation.2 Even while Fort Lewis anthropologists
attempted to remain neutral, both Native groups interpreted their actions
as supporting or not supporting one or the other nation. In the United
States, discussions of repatriation have shown archaeologists that we,
too, have political interests, that our practice of science is not unsullied,
dispassionate (D. Thomas 2000). Archaeologists must accept that our
retreat to the desert, the jungle, or the cornfield has not removed us from
the taint of politics.
Politics necessarily involves passions and interests because political
practice has real consequences, and they are often pernicious. People lose
their land or their jobs; they starve, die, or are imprisoned. As Trigger
(1989a:381) points out, the political causes that archaeologists have will-
ingly supported have been harmful to humanity as often as helpful.
We have no better example of this than the use of archaeology in the
Nazi Third Reich (Arnold 1990, 2004). German prehistorians elabo-
rated Gustav Kossinna’s notion that archaeological cultures equate with
ethnic groups, and they turned this into a propaganda tool for German
ideas of racial superiority. German archaeologists spread across eastern
Europe looking for Germanic sites that would demonstrate Aryan racial
superiority and justify the expansion of the Third Reich to include all of
“ancient Germany.” This archaeological practice did not wage war,
bomb cities, or exterminate Jews, Gypsies, communists, homosexuals,
and the disabled. It did, however, contribute to the legitimation of a
genocidal regime. Unfortunately, we can call up many additional exam-
ples of the use of archaeology in the service of totalitarian dictatorships
(Galaty and Watkinson 2004).
In the discourse about archaeology, all totalitarian and racial con-
cerns get neatly packed into the accusation of “political bias.” A bias is a
prejudice in a general or specific sense that gives a person a predilection
to one particular point of view. A bias could lead a scholar to accept or
reject the truth of a claim, not because of the strength of the claim itself,
but because it does or does not correspond to the scholar’s own precon-
ceived ideas. When critics search Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union for exam-
ples of the dangers of such biases, they easily find them (Shnirelman
1995). In archaeology, Nikolay Marr advanced a theory that languages
change not as a result of historical processes but because of social evolu-
tionary changes in the societies of the speakers. From this premise he
argued that the prehistory of Europe was a history of a single people dif-
Politics 19

ferentiated by their stages of evolutionary development. Under Stalin,

Marr’s views became official dogma, because they could be used to sup-
port Stalin’s ideas of mechanistic unilineal evolution (Trigger 1989a:225;
Klejn 1993:22). Soviet archaeologists could not challenge Marr’s theory
until Stalin finally decided to reject it in 1950.
To many archaeologists, it seems safer to remain aloof from politics
and either ignore or deny the political nature of archaeology. Better yet,
they advocate removal of “political bias” from our practice, thinking
that this will make archaeology apolitical. They are mistaken about this
strategy, however, because attacking political bias in archaeology is itself
a political act. Just as the accusation of prejudice charges that the accused
lacks objectivity, it implicitly claims that the accuser has objectivity. For
the accuser to be unbiased, however, he or she would have to stand out-
side society and all its political interests and passions. This is not possi-
ble. Invocation of political bias silences the conversation that critique
makes possible in praxis, a critical discussion of how knowledge is polit-
ically situated and how that situatedness affects what we can and cannot
know about the social world. Unfortunately, ignoring or denying the
political nature of archaeology does not make politics go away, just as
accusing others of political bias does not make the accuser unbiased.
More important, such self-deception can lead to the very consequences
that the apolitical archaeologist fears.
A “politically unbiased” archaeology poses three dangers. These are
triviality, complicity, and unexamined prejudice.
First is the danger of triviality. The most obvious form of triviality is a
focus on the inconsequential details of the archaeological record. A good
example of this can be seen in the development of West German archae-
ology after World War II. Before the war, German archaeologists had
actively engaged in interpretations of prehistory, but after the war, in
reaction to the insidious Nazi manipulation of prehistory, German
archaeologists turned away from questions of theory and interpretation
(Arnold 1990), focusing instead on the description and classification of
archaeological minutiae. Entire dissertations were written on the classifi-
cation and description of a style of brooch. Detailed description and
classification of the archaeological record can be important and useful if
it is done with specific interpretive and theoretical goals. But as the cri-
tique of science in archaeology has shown, such goals necessarily imply a
political content. In the absence of such goals, archaeologists risk becom-
ing like Chattus Calvensis II in Herman Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead
Game (1969:65). His life’s work was a four-volume tome, The Pronun-
20 Politics

ciation of Latin in the Universities of Southern Italy toward the End of

the Twelfth Century.
Second is the danger of complicity. Apolitical archaeologists risk
involvement as accomplices in questionable acts or even crimes (Trigger
1989a:331). Archaeologists’ complicity may spring from their false beliefs
in objectivity combined with a failure to understand the political contexts
in which they create knowledge. Susan Pollock (2003), Reinhard
Bernbeck (2003b), and Yannis Hamilakis (2005) discuss how some
archaeologists have become complicit in support of the current U.S. war
in Iraq. Pollock (2003) notes that the April 2003 looting of the Iraq
Museum in Baghdad attracted widespread media attention in the West,
because Western news media has for over a hundred years treated finds in
Mesopotamian archaeology as foundational to Western civilization.
Archaeologists criticized the U.S. government and decried the destruction
of the museum as a loss to Western civilization. The burning of the
National Library, the National Archives, and the Koranic Library
attracted far less attention and little or no comment from archaeologists.
The books, manuscripts, and records in these collections pertain to the
modern history of Iraq and its people. Even though many archaeologists
were critical of the U.S. government, their comments reinforced popular
Western perceptions of the Iraqi people as “others” by focusing on the
destruction of ancient artifacts that the public associate with Western her-
itage and by ignoring the destruction of the libraries (not to mention the
widespread looting of hospitals) (Bernbeck 2003b:115–116; Hamilakis
2005). By making the Iraqi people others, these archaeologists became
complicit in the war, because the U.S. public will accept the destruction
and slaughter of others, but not people like themselves. Pollock, Bernbeck,
and Hamilakis suggest that archaeologists need to link their practice to
larger social contexts in order to take a more nuanced and ethically
responsible approach to the politics of the region and the media.
Third is the danger of unexamined prejudice in our knowledge cre-
ation. If archaeologists create knowledge without critically examining
the political nature of that knowledge, we will naively reproduce ideolo-
gies. These ideologies may or may not be ones we agree with, and we
may help or hinder human emancipation. Feminists have made this point
very forcibly (Enloe 2004). As long as gender was unmarked (not explic-
itly considered) in social science research, women were invisible, because
social agents were assumed to be male. Feminist scholars have shown
how a failure to consider gender led archaeologists to attribute all major
social transformations, from the origins of humanness to the rise of the
Politics 21

state, to the actions of men; women were little more than passive
bystanders (Gilchrist 1999; Sanahuja 2002). Feminists have gendered
the study of such transformations, leading to new understandings of how
women and men made the past (Nelson 2004). They achieved this
knowledge production not by removing “bias” but, rather, by explicitly
examining the gender politics of archaeological interpretation. They cre-
ated new knowledge by applying gendered assumptions about the social
world to the archaeological record.
Archaeologists have good reason to be wary of mixing politics with
their discipline. One can easily find examples of archaeological knowl-
edge that was fabricated to fulfill a political agenda or interpretations
that were predetermined by the prejudice of the researcher. The idea,
however, that we can straightforwardly eliminate political bias or just
ignore the political content of our knowledge production is facile.
Archaeologists make knowledge in social and political contexts, and our
knowledge will always be in some part a product of that context (Tilley
1989; Conkey and Gero 1991; McGuire 1992b; Watkins 2000; Shanks
2004; Leone 2005; Fernández 2006). Once scholars recognize that the
production of archaeological knowledge has political implications, some
archaeologists need to develop an explicit, comprehensive praxis of
knowledge creation, critique, and action to transform the world.
In an earlier book titled A Marxist Archaeology, I stated, “The notion
that archaeology can change the world, that it can alter capitalism, or in
any serious way challenge it is simply absurd” (McGuire 1992b:xv). I
still believe this. Individuals who primarily seek a life on the barricades
will not find it in archaeology. The vast majority of archaeological prac-
tice has been and should remain concerned with the acquisition and cri-
tique of archaeological knowledge. Archaeology is a weak weapon for
political action, because it cannot be wielded directly in the struggles over
land, life, liberty, and wealth that drive the political process. Archae-
ology, however, can be a powerful weapon in ideological struggles that
have real consequences for people.

Secret Writing and the Follies of

Unbiased Archaeology
The greatest danger of a politically unbiased archaeology lies in what Ben
Agger (2004:49 – 55) has called the “secret writing” of fast capitalism.
Secret writing flows from the pens of “objective” social scientists and cul-
ture industry pundits who produce texts, cultural artifacts, and meanings
22 Politics

that appear natural, given, and unalterable. These writings are secret in
the sense that their creators hide or obscure their authorship and agendas
and the politics with which they imbue the writings. By pretending objec-
tivity, science becomes even more partisan, because the scholar denies the
political nature of research. The culture industry commodifies culture,
and thus culture is shaped by the people who stand to reap profits from it
(Agger 2004:55). Yet the presentation of culture is designed to deny the
authorship of these entrepreneurs. People consume culture as leisure and
entertainment. To be marketable, culture must be made comfortable,
unthreatening, and entertaining. Commodified culture sells a natural,
given, and unalterable reality. In both nationalism and heritage tourism,
secret writing creates mythic histories. In these uses of heritage, “unbi-
ased” archaeology and “objective” science have, in fact, constituted polit-
ical actions often dominating, alienating, and otherwise harming people.

Archaeology as the Secret Writing of Nationalism

The critique of archaeology as a political tool has often focused on how

nationalist movements have used and manipulated it to create nation-
alisms. When Trigger (1989a, 2006) and others (Ford 1973; Meskell and
Preucel 2004) bemoan the pernicious consequences of archaeology as
political action, they usually have nationalism in mind. Sian Jones
(1997:11) goes further, claiming that nationalist discourse permeates
archaeology at all levels of practice. The literature on archaeology and
nationalism is massive (Díaz-Andreu and Champion 1996; Kohl and
Fawcett 1995; Meskell, ed. 1998; Kane 2003; Galaty and Watkinson
2004). In their brief review of politics and archaeology, Lynn Meskell
and Robert Preucel (2004:318–319) cite over seventy works by archae-
ologists that discuss nationalism. Virtually all of these works criticize the
use of archaeology in nationalism. Most Western archaeologists would
probably agree with Yannis Hamilakis’s observation that “a critical
archaeology should deconstruct and effectively oppose nationalist narra-
tives of the past and the present, as hegemonic discourses” (1996:977). I
will not attempt a comprehensive review of this literature, but I will use
observations and examples from it to point out the folly and danger of
nationalism as political action through archaeology.
Despite an immense literature critiquing nationalist archaeologies, I
know of no how-to book for doing a nationalist archaeology. Such a
work could not exist, because it would expose the secret of the writing.
The power of archaeology in nationalist struggles springs from the fic-
Politics 23

tion that archaeology is an objective science and from the obfuscation of

the political endeavor. Nationalists muster archaeology both to prove
their myths dispassionately and to reveal and reconstruct an “authentic”
objectified heritage.
Over the last hundred years, nationalism has been the source of great
human suffering (Anderson 1983; Harris 1990; Smith 1991; Poole 1999;
Grosby 2005; Kampschror 2007). Nationalism is a flawed project. The
notion that every nation should have its own state or that every state
should be a single nation does not have much value as either a normative
or a realistic goal (Dunn 1994:3). Nationalists’ projects use archaeology
to reinforce and validate mythic histories. In the struggle of nationalistic
movements, archaeology may be wielded to confront inequities, but with
the success of such movements nationalist archaeologies inevitably
become embedded in the status quo (Thomas 2004:108–116).
The ideology of the nation-state is grounded in an essentialist notion
of a people (a nation) who share a common language and culture, her-
itage, and territory, which define the nation (Hamilakis 1996:977;
Thomas 2004:109–110). Nationalism often rests on the idea of a golden
age of ethnic and linguistic uniformity and promotes a culture that is sup-
posedly still connected to that past. In reality, however, national identity
is created, contested, and unstable (Poole 1999:67–82). Sharing a com-
mon history does not mean that people have shared a common experi-
ence of that history (McNiven and Russell 2005:211–231). The struggle
over heritage among groups with different experiences of history both
flows from and contributes to the instability and conflict of national
identity (Kampschror 2007).
Nationalist movements pick and choose from the events of history to
create a heritage (Lowenthal 1985:37). Poole (1999:17) notes that every
nation has its own history of triumphs and tragedies, victories and defeats,
but these events are never the sum total of all that the people of the nation
have experienced. The chosen events are usually tied to the territory of the
nation. National heritages typically favor those events that relate to how
the people of the nation acquired their rightful territory or how they
defended it from usurpers. National heritages also tend to glorify the death
and suffering of the heroes of the nation; they favor martyrs rather than
conquerors. Those who have suffered and sacrificed their lives for the
nation demonstrate that the worth of the nation transcends other values.
In 1999, Catalán friends in Barcelona took me to the Gothic basilica
of Santa María del Mar. Adjacent to the church is a memorial to the mar-
tyrs of the siege of Barcelona in 1714. During the War of the Spanish
24 Politics

Succession (1701–1714), Barcelona sided with the Austrians and English

against the Spanish and French. Armies supporting the Bourbon Spanish
king Felipe V attacked Barcelona in 1713. The city fell eighteen months
later, after a horrific siege. Felipe ordered the construction of two
fortresses to dominate the city, stripped the Catalán people of sover-
eignty, and outlawed the Catalán language. The Spanish took the leaders
of the Catalán resistance to a plaza adjacent to the basilica and shot them
dead. Over two hundred years later, at the end of the Spanish Civil War,
Franco conquered Barcelona, executed his opponents against the walls of
the city, and suppressed Catalán sovereignty, language, and identity.
Barcelona regained partial sovereignty and cultural freedom following
Franco’s death in 1975. The Catalonian government then constructed the
monument and inscribed it in Catalán to honor the martyrs of 1714.
On our way to Santa María del Mar, we walked past the main cathedral
of the city. Here, on the west side of the cathedral, we passed a memorial
erected in the nineteenth century to a different martyrdom. On a wall
behind a fountain, tiles hand painted with Castilian text and drawings
told the story of two residents of Barcelona who opposed the French dur-
ing Napoleon’s invasion of Spain (1808–1813). The French garroted the
two, making them martyrs in the Spanish War of Independence. When I
asked one of my Catalán friends about this memorial, he avowed no
knowledge of the events, dismissing it with a wave of his hand as Spanish.
One problem that nationalist movements encounter in creating
national histories and heritages is that the past is already taken (Bernbeck
and Pollock 1996:140). One group’s defeat is another’s victory. As the
two memorials in Barcelona show, the same territory includes events sig-
nificant to different groups and nationalisms. In a discussion of U.S.
nationalism and archaeology, Frank McManaman (2000) distinguishes
between a civic nationalism available to all through citizenship and com-
peting ethnic nationalisms claimed by specific groups such as Native
Americans and African Americans but closed to others. In the end, he
dismisses Native Americans’ nationalist claims to an ancient U.S. past.
He concludes, “There is no inherent barrier to modern Americans, no
matter what their ethnic backgrounds, embracing ancient American his-
tory as their own” (McManaman 2000:133). Thus, a national heritage
can have only one past and one history that define the essence of the
nation. In picking and choosing between events, the silences, the events
not chosen, are as significant as the ones trumpeted in the national his-
tory. These pasts remain outside the national heritage both as a challenge
to it and as building blocks for conflicting ethnic nationalisms.
Politics 25

National heritages are built on mythical concepts of history in which

little or no separation exists between the past and the present (Bernbeck
and Pollock 1996:140). They move events, identities, and nation-states
forward and backward in time in order to serve the interests of groups in
the present. Only by ignoring this conflation of chronometric time with
mythic time can secret writing remain undisclosed.
In Israel, the secular Zionists of the early twentieth century embraced
the 74 C.E. Roman siege of Masada as a powerful symbol for their
nationalist movement (Yadin 1966; Silberman 1993:271–273). Yigael
Yadin (1966), archaeologist and retired chief of staff for the Israeli
Defense Forces, mounted a massive excavation at Masada in 1963 to
prove a nationalist myth of heroic resistance fighters choosing death
rather than surrender (Ben-Yehuda 2002). The Zionists used the defense
of Masada against ancient Romans to bolster the defense of the modern
nation-state of Israel against Arabs and projected their nation-state back
in time to connect it to the last semisovereign Jewish kingdom destroyed
by the Romans in 74 C.E.
In May 1921, Great Britain ended the Irish-Anglo War by partitioning
six of the nine counties of Ulster to form Northern Ireland. The rest of
the island would become the Irish Republic (Bardon 1992). The partition
boundary corresponded roughly to Black Pig’s Dyke (Delle 1994). Built
in the first century of the common era, Black Pig’s Dyke is a discontinu-
ous system of defensive linear earthworks and ditches that stretch from
County Armagh to Donegal Bay. Similar linear earthworks with accom-
panying ditches exist throughout Ireland and probably represent Iron
Age territorial boundaries. Unionists who wished for Northern Ireland to
remain part of the United Kingdom projected the partition boundary of
1921 back in time onto Black Pig’s Dyke. They claim that it was a
formable barrier that had separated northern Ireland from the rest of the
island and that, for this reason, the region had always been more closely
connected by sea to Scotland than by land to the Irish Republic (Bardon
1992; Delle 1994).
National heritage is objectified in historic objects, structures, and
places, such as Masada and Black Pig’s Dyke. These things give the sense
of reality to the past and become powerful, emotive symbols of national-
ism. Their materiality creates an appearance of a known given past, even
though their interpretation remains constantly malleable as secret writ-
ing. They offer the national history a tangible and material appearance of
authenticity, because the history becomes confused with the thing.
Archaeology’s power in nationalism springs from the materiality of the
26 Politics

historic objects, structures, and places that objectify nationalism. The

archaeologist’s ability to date events, reconstruct buildings, trade net-
works, production techniques, and activities seems to confirm an accu-
rate national history. Archaeology’s triviality in relation to practical polit-
ical action diverts suspicion from the secret political nature of such
findings. The pockmarked wall of the basilica Santa María del Mar ver-
ifies the execution of the Barcelona martyrs of 1714. The archaeologists’
excavation of the Roman camps and works at Masada confirm the real-
ity of the 74 C.E. siege. When archaeologists plot and map Black Pig’s
Dyke, its course parallel to the 1921 partition line becomes obvious.
Scholars’ ability to accurately locate these places and things adds cre-
dence to other aspects of the nationalist story and the struggle.
Struggles over heritage focus on the objects, structures, and places
that symbolize it (Golden 2004). During the American Revolution, bat-
talions of the Continental army invaded upstate New York to destroy the
Iroquois Confederacy. The soldiers burned fields and villages and
chopped down orchards to drive the Indians out. They also pulled down
the wooden markers in the cemeteries and obliterated petroglyphs at
Picture Rocks, Pennsylvania (Wilkinson 1992). Following the Greek War
of Independence (1821–1831), the new Greek state cleansed the
Athenian Acropolis of an Armenian cemetery, Muslim buildings, and
medieval structures, just as the revolution had cleansed the Greek coun-
tryside of Muslims (Hamilakis 2003:64–69). In 1993, Croat forces
shelled and destroyed the baroque Ottoman bridge in Mostar as part of
their attempt to cleanse Bosnia and Herzegovina of Muslims (Yarwood
1999). All of these examples of nationalist archaeologies show that the
symbolic is not something apart from real politics but, rather, is real pol-
itics expressed in powerful and consequential ways.
The most compelling example of such power lies in the conflicts over
the Babri Mosque in Ajodhya, India (Bernbeck and Pollock 1996;
Ratnagar 2004; Romey 2004). At the Babri Mosque, the ideological
struggle has generated archaeological debates over the authenticity of
materiality. Hindu nationalists have marshaled seemingly inconsequen-
tial debates over stratigraphy, column bases, and the context of artifacts
to raise passions and inflame nationalistic sentiments (Mandal 1993;
Romey 2004:50). Here the triviality of archaeology has become conse-
quential in horrifying ways.
This conflict over heritage has directly resulted in the deaths of thou-
sands of people. In December 1992, a mob led by members of a radical
Hindu nationalist political party tore down fences surrounding the Babri
Politics 27

Mosque and razed the structure. They claimed that when the first Mogul
emperor, Babur, built the mosque in 1528 he razed a temple marking the
birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. They destroyed the mosque to
rebuild the temple to Rama and to right a wrong done over four cen-
turies ago. Rioting in India and Bangladesh followed, and over three
thousand people died. In February 2002, Muslims in the city of Gujarat
attacked a trainload of pilgrims returning from erecting a Hindu altar in
the ruins of the mosque. Fifty-eight people died in the attack. In retalia-
tion, Hindu mobs attacked Muslim neighborhoods in that city, and over
nine hundred people died. On July 7, 2005, six armed Muslim men
attacked the Hindu altar in the ruins of the old mosque, but police killed
them in a gun battle. Violent reactions to these events continue to rage as
I write these words.
These violent events were preceded and followed by archaeology. In
1990, B. B. Lal, the former director of the Archaeological Survey of India
(ASI), published a report on his late 1970s excavations adjacent to the
Babri Mosque in a Hindu nationalist publication (Romey 2004:50). He
reported that he had found a series of brick pillar bases and that stone
pillars in the mosque may have originated from a temple to Rama.
Following the destruction of the mosque, D. Mandal (1993) published a
book disputing Lal’s claims. Mandal argued that the pillar bases were too
insubstantial to support large stone columns and that they occurred in
different stratigraphic layers and thus could not be from the same build-
ing. In 2002, in a civil suit over the mosque site, the Lucknow Bench of
the Allahabad High Court ordered a ground-penetrating radar survey to
look for remains of a Hindu temple. On the basis of the results of this
survey, the court ordered archaeological excavations at the site starting in
March 2003. The excavators worked under difficult and rushed condi-
tions, producing a final report by August of that year. The court ordered
the two-volume descriptive report of the excavations sealed, releasing
only a summary final report. This report indicated the discovery of a
large building under the mosque, and nationalists leaped on this finding
as evidence for the temple of Rama. Other critics found the results far
more ambiguous and argued that the large structure may be an earlier
mosque. They also called into question the objectivity of the ASI and
alleged that the organization had sold out to the nationalists.
Bernbeck and Pollock (1996) see the controversies over the Babri
Mosque as a cautionary tale for a politically active archaeology. They
warn that archaeologists cannot indiscriminately support the claims of
subordinate groups. Instead, archaeologists must be critical of all identi-
28 Politics

ties and histories and should demonstrate the fluidity and dynamism of
identities in the past. Bernbeck and Pollock want archaeologists to chal-
lenge the essentialism of nationalism and expose the secret writings.
Yet even as archaeologists are coming to grips with the discipline’s
involvement with nationalism, heritage and the uses of the past in a
global economy are changing. The terrain of nationalism has become
much more rugged. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugo-
slavia has resulted in a plethora of nationalist archaeological projects in
central Eurasia (Chernykh 1995; Kohl and Tsetskhladze 1995; Kamp-
schror 2007). The reinvention of Europe as a confederation of states
under the umbrella of the European Union has fanned the flames of sup-
pressed nationalisms, such as Catalán. To establish its own ancient prece-
dent, the European Union has allocated significant monies to the archae-
ological study of the Celts (Arnold 2004:208; Levy 2006:144–145).
Thus, in contemporary Europe, archaeology serves four overlapping and
often contradictory nationalist agendas: those of the existing nation-
states, those of emerging nation-states, those of suppressed ethnic nation-
alisms, and those of a unifying Europe. Perhaps more important, the
role of heritage and the past has shifted on the global stage. The com-
modification of the past in heritage tourism has converted patriotic
shrines into theme parks (Silberman 1995:258–261) and has involved
archaeologists in new secret writings.

Archaeology and the Secret Writing of the Culture Industry

Yorke Rowan and Uzi Baram argue that, “at the start of the twenty-first
century, nationalism is not the only political force impinging on archae-
ology, and it may not be the most significant” (2004:3). They identify
globalization and the marketing of the past for consumption as the new
political forces impinging on archaeology. Following Marcuse (1955),
Agger (2004:39) notes that because fast capitalism in core states has ful-
filled people’s basic needs, capitalists can increase profits only by creating
fresh needs through the culture industry. Fast production and the move-
ment of production overseas create leisure time, and leisure time creates
a need for entertainment. People must spend their leisure time consuming
(being entertained) to keep profits flowing. In this context, heritage
remains the mobilization of the past in service of the present, but it takes
on a new significance (Hall and Bombardella 2005:6). Globalized fast
capitalism transforms the unique heritage of nations into a universal
commodity for sale in heritage tourism (Rowan and Baram 2004:6).
Politics 29

Secret writing appears both in the marketing of this heritage and in the
ways capitalists make heritage accessible and entertaining for tourists.
This commodification is obvious in theme parks and destination
resorts. The quintessential theme park is Disneyland. The tourist comes
into Disneyland through a portal on the past, Main Street. Main Street
is an idealized reproduction of the heart of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-
century, small, midwestern American town (Wallace 1996). Walt Disney
had the street built at five-eighths of actual size. He “improved” the past
by decreeing that everything on the street would remain fresh and new
and that all its elements would function together in harmony and unison.
Tourists enter a safe, gated space and experience a hyperreal past that is
comfortable and unthreatening. The historian Mike Wallace (1996:136)
noted, “It is like playing in a walk-in doll’s house that is simultaneously
a shopper’s paradise, equipped with dozens of little old-time shops with
corporate logos tastefully affixed.”
The use of the past as nostalgia and exotica to lure the consumer to
spend is not limited to theme parks like Disneyland. In Las Vegas, the
gambling tourist can visit ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, medieval
England, and Renaissance Venice. In South Africa, destination resorts
with casinos have tried to enhance Africa as an exotic destination
through new architecture and design (Hall and Bombardella 2005:10).
The tourist can experience the grandeurs of the Dutch East India
Company in Johannesburg and a full-scale Tuscan town on the highveld,
all improved like Main Street (but without the dancing cartoon charac-
ters). These obviously commercial manipulations of heritage invoke
authenticity, but they do not claim to be authentic. “The visitor is a
knowing participant in the illusion” (Hall and Bombardella 2005:22).
The commercial commodification of the past is not new. Walt Disney
built Main Street in 1954. But as the twentieth century drew to a close,
objectified heritage became increasingly commodified, and patriotic parks
became theme parks. In the current triumph of the logic of commodifica-
tion, fast capitalist market forces apparently can convert almost every use
value to exchange value. Archaeologists see this process in the marketing
of heritage. Some, such as Mexican archaeologist José Luis Lorenzo
(1998:157), have declared tourism a menace to the preservation of
archaeological heritage. The use value of heritage is to define a group of
people or a nation that shares a history. The rise of the heritage industry
has converted that use value to an exchange value by transforming nos-
talgia for the past into a commodity to be sold (Shanks 2001). In
Manchester, England, yuppies buy lofts built in restored historic industrial
30 Politics

buildings, with a Starbucks on the first floor; thousands of miles away in

Denver, Colorado, yuppies buy lofts in restored historic industrial build-
ings with a Starbucks on the first floor (Rowan and Baram 2004).
In the 1980s, Great Britain suffered an extreme economic decline as its
industries collapsed under foreign competition, and ships carried South
African coal to Newcastle. This period of economic decline saw the
growth of a heritage industry in Great Britain (Hewison 1987). This
industry created a past in which the British could find a refuge from the
realities of economic decline and in which tourists, primarily from the
United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, could encounter a
heritage. Consumers purchased nostalgia and roots along with their
hotel rooms, meals, tours, and souvenir coffee mugs. The flagship of this
industry has been the Jorvik Viking Center, in York, a commercial enter-
prise that uses information from archaeological excavations to construct
a Disney-like ride under the city of York, into the Viking past (Merriman
1988). Here, authenticity matters, because tourists come to experience a
trip into the past, not an illusion. Nonetheless, this authenticity has had
to be packaged, refined, molded, and marketed in order to be consumed
as experience in the ride and to be sold as trinkets in the shop at the end
of the ride. It is not “improved” quite like Main Street, but the writing
that has created the cultural object for sale has remained secret.
Global fast capitalism has created heritage tourism as a major indus-
try of worldwide scope. The wealthy and even the well-off of North
America, Europe, Japan, and Australia, all core capitalist societies, can
travel to heritage sites anywhere in the world (Rowan and Baram
2004:6). They go to these places as themselves, demanding security, ease
of travel, and comforts when they arrive. They seek the exotic, but they
want a comfortable exotic that is not threatening or unpleasant. They
are, after all, on vacation. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2006 movie
Babel effectively captures the contradictions inherent in a comfortable
exotic. In the movie, Western tourists are enjoying a tour of Morocco.
After a boy accidentally shoots an American woman on the tour, their
bus is diverted from the tourist path into a local village, where the exotic
quickly turns threatening, and the comforts of the West disappear. The
tourists’ experience becomes one of alienation and fear.
Many countries in the Third World have found it profitable to turn
their patrimony, such as Chichén Itzá, into theme parks (Kohl 2004). To
do so, however, they have to create a social, infrastructural, and eco-
nomic bubble to protect the heritage tourists from the threatening and
unpleasant realities of poverty, exploitation, violence, and rebellion that
Politics 31

exist in and around the heritage sites. Such bubbles are expensive. Most
often their creators are multinational resort companies that reap massive
profits from the heritage industry (Meskell 2003:162). Most of these
profits leave the country and go into the pockets of investors in the cap-
italist core. The local people, who may be the descendants of the site
builders, reap little economic gain from their ancestors’ monuments.
Heritage sites thus become loci of political struggle that involves archae-
ologists and sometimes has pernicious consequences for the interest
groups involved (Casteñada 1996, 2005; Joyce 2003, 2005; Ardren
2004; Meskell 2005).
In 1988, the National Geographic Society proposed the creation of the
Ruta Maya (the Mayan Route) to a group of five Central American
nations in order to define a tourist itinerary linking the major Mayan
sites of the region (Joyce 2003:82). These five nations, México, Belize,
Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, formed a marketing confedera-
tion called the Mundo Maya (the Mayan World) to promote tourism
along this route. To create the Ruta Maya, the National Geographic
Society used an archaeological narrative, which treats the Maya as a
phenomenon that transcends the borders of the five nations (Joyce
2003:82–85). It thus defines the Maya as an international cultural her-
itage not owned by any of the participant states that make up the Mundo
Maya. These states apparently saw the increased income from tourism as
more important than the nationalist narratives that made Mayan sites
the objectified heritage of individual nations.
The secret writings of the Mundo Maya largely exclude the indige-
nous Maya of the region from the interpretation, management, and eco-
nomic benefits of the Ruta Maya (Ardren 2004:107). Advertising for the
route prominently displays indigenous Maya in native costume as time-
less inhabitants of the ruins. The marketing equates the Maya with
nature and includes images that highlight exotic, eroticized Mayan
women posed among equally exotic ruins (Joyce 2003; Ardren 2004), re-
creating the Mayan monuments to satisfy the heritage tourist’s desire for
escapism and entertainment. Although the marketing of the Ruta Maya
commodifies the indigenous Maya, these people receive little direct ben-
efit from the tourism. The occupation of the site of Chichén Itzá by
Mayan people is not an isolated example of contested space and indige-
nous struggles for economic gain, heritage, and identity along the Ruta
Maya (Castañeda 1996, 2005). In 1998, two thousand to three thousand
Chorti Maya occupied the archaeological park at Copán, in Honduras
(Joyce 2003:92–93; 2005:260). For two weeks they brought tourism to
32 Politics

a halt to advance their demands for land claims and indigenous rights. In
both these cases, Mayan Indians contested the expropriation of their cul-
ture, heritage, and identity by reclaiming that heritage to try to advance
their contemporary interests
Cultural heritage has been the focus of similar but even more violent
political confrontations in Egypt (Meskell 2003, 2005). Western scholars
in Egypt have a long history of seeing the Egyptian people as divorced
from their pharaonic past and as active impediments to archaeological
research (Meskell 2003). Since the eighteenth century, Egyptian villagers
have confronted archaeologists as foreign intruders who have treated
them as beasts of labor. Repeatedly, Western archaeologists or the
Egyptian state has expelled villagers from their homes in the precincts of
ancient ruins. The village of Gurna, in the ancient site of the Valley of the
Nobles, near Luxor, has been a locus of such evictions. The shantytown of
Gurna was unsightly and odorous and distracted the tourist’s gaze from
the splendors of ancient monuments. Attempts at forced relocation of the
villagers have had limited success. In one attempt, police killed four peo-
ple and injured twenty-five others (Meskell 2005:134). Tourist develop-
ment in the area has focused on separating the local people from the
tourists by using walls, aerial walkways, and gated tourist centers. The
tourism industry has also constructed themed restaurants and faux
Egyptian villages (Meskell 2003:163–164; 2005:140–144). Like the
theme casinos of Las Vegas and South Africa, an improved version of
Egypt allows tourists to visit without encountering the realities of poverty,
unsanitary conditions, and exploitation that are typical of the real rural
Egypt. In November 1997, Muslim extremists attacked tourists at the
Temple of Hatshepsut, near Gurna, killing fifty-eight foreigners and four
Egyptians (Meskell 2005:136–138). The terrorists identified heritage
tourism as an attack on Islamic culture. They struck out at the most visi-
ble evidence of Western domination, the opulent bubble of tourism juxta-
posed with the poverty and misery of communities like Gurna.
Some archaeologists have sought to subvert the culture industry and
to burst the tourist bubble. Many have critiqued the experience of her-
itage tourism (Castañeda 1996, 2005; Joyce 2003, 2005; Meskell 2003,
2005; Ardren 2004; Rowan and Baram 2004; Duke 2007). A few others
have sought to create cultural tourism that does not alienate local com-
munities from their own heritage, economic benefits, or the visitors. This
involves creating a heritage experience outside the tourist bubble. One of
the best examples of heritage tourism that confronts alienation is on the
Ruta Maya, at the site of El Pilar, in Belize.
Politics 33

Anabel Ford and her colleagues have sought to make El Pilar a place
that promotes archaeological conservation, sustainable agriculture, and
heritage tourism (BRASS El Pilar Project 2006). El Pilar project has
worked with the local inhabitants and the government of Belize to design
and manage El Pilar Archaeological Reserve for Maya Flora and Fauna.
Key to the program is a community organization called Los Amigos de El
Pilar. The project has worked with Los Amigos de El Pilar to develop gar-
dens in the forest and to stop clear-cutting of forests for cattle grazing.
The park has become a center for eco-tourism that links the tourist expe-
rience to the archaeology, the environment, and the local community.
Community members run the Masewal Forest Trail, which introduces
visitors to the gardens, local plants and Mayan lore. The community has
also set up a café for visitors in the Be Pukte Community Center. El Pilar
Archaeological Reserve for Maya Flora and Fauna bursts the tourist
bubble to serve multiple interests and produce local benefits.
In many places around the modern world, certain social groups have
used archaeology to advance their political interests, which has had real
and significant consequences for the people in those societies: loss of
land and jobs, starvation, death, and imprisonment. The seeming trivial-
ity of archaeology for political action has made it an effective pen for
secret writings about nationalism and commodified heritage. Building an
emancipatory archaeology is possible if we recognize the political nature
of archaeology and eschew secret writings.

Emancipatory Archaeology
Secret writing supports the powerful and the status quo. Positions that
confront power and challenge the status quo must read secret writings
aloud in order to question what they have made unalterable, given, and
natural. Emancipatory praxis in archaeology seeks to recover memory
and to confront the powerful with nonmythic histories of events placed
firmly in time and space. Such histories reveal injustice rather than
mythologizing or hiding it. The excavations of mass graves of the
Spanish Civil War by Foro por la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica
are one example of such efforts (Gassiot 2005). Forensic archaeologists
have also excavated mass graves to reveal the violation of human rights
in many other countries, including Argentina (EAAF 2005), Bosnia
(Stover 1998), and Mongolia (Frohlich and Hunt 2006). Archaeologists
have excavated fascism’s chambers of horrors to expose the secret writ-
ings of torture on human bodies at the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin,
34 Politics

Germany, and at the Clandestine Center of Detention and Torture (aka

Club Atlético) in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The Berlin Wall, built by the East Germans in 1961, ran through the
heart of the city, a few yards away from the headquarters of the Nazi
secret police, the Gestapo, at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8. The basement of
this building contained an infamous jail and torture center. During World
War II, the Allies bombed the building to ruins, and by the mid-1950s,
the City of West Berlin had leveled the remains. In 1985, a citizen’s group
called the Active Museum of Fascism and Resistance issued an appeal:
“Let’s dig. . . . Let no grass grow over it” (Meyer 1992:28). The group
began an archaeological excavation to draw attention to the Nazi past
and to recover the memory of the crimes of fascism in time for the cele-
bration of Berlin’s 750-year anniversary, in 1987. Many in Berlin and in
Germany opposed the excavations, because they did not want this past
memorialized or even revealed. Despite much opposition, the Active
Museum of Fascism and Resistance continued its illicit excavation. By
1987, the group had uncovered the basement of the building with its cells
and torture chambers. It then erected a temporary museum on the site,
called Topography of Terror (Rürup 2002). The museum in the exca-
vated basement consisted of interpretive panels that told the history of
Nazi atrocities at the site. The panels listed the names of people whom
the Nazis had tortured and killed there. In the museum’s first year, over
three hundred thousand people visited this impromptu exhibition.
When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the automaker Daimler-
Benz proposed expanding its headquarters building over the site. Public
support for the museum, however, grew. In 1992, the government of
Berlin incorporated the Foundation Topography of Terror to build and
administer a permanent museum at the site (Rürup 2002). This founda-
tion, which included a number of communities, schools and churches,
political parties, trade unions, citizens’ groups, and history workshops,
set up the Memorial Museum Department, which works with other
groups and institutions seeking to recover the memory of Nazi atrocities
throughout the German Republic. The foundation has conducted digs to
uncover, preserve, and interpret other key Nazi buildings adjacent the
Gestapo headquarters and the remains of bunkers and air defense
trenches. Today the open-air museum in the excavated basement of the
Gestapo headquarters is a popular tourist destination (Foundation
Topography of Terror 2002).
Archaeologists in Buenos Aires, have undertaken a project similar to
that in Berlin. A right-wing military dictatorship ruled Argentina from
Politics 35

1976 to 1983 (Weissel 2003:29–30; Acuto 2003). The dictatorship pur-

sued the “Dirty War” to wipe out any and all left-wing opposition.
Government agents took around thirty thousand people, known as desa-
parecidos (disappeared ones), to clandestine detention centers, where the
military questioned, tortured, and killed most of them. The government
released some individuals after torture, but its agents threw most from
planes far out over the Atlantic Ocean or buried them in secret graves.
The military opened the Clandestine Center of Detention and Torture,
euphemistically referred to as the Club Atlético, in 1977. The center con-
tinued in operation in the basement of an old warehouse until 1980,
when the building was leveled for freeway construction. The military
government imprisoned and tortured about eighteen hundred people at
the Club Atlético alone (Weissel 2003:29).
In the early 1990s, a survivor of the Club Atlético recognized the spot
under the elevated freeway where the torture center had stood, and sur-
vivors and human rights organizations began to agitate for the excava-
tion of the basement, to air the horrors that had occurred there. One of
the survivors stated the goal of the project: “to recover what could have
been forgotten, so memory is not lost and thus we can claim justice”
(Acuto 2003:3). In 2002, survivors, relatives of the desaparecidos,
human rights organizations, and the City of Buenos Aires began excava-
tions in the basement (Weissel 2003:30). These groups set the agenda of
the project and employed archaeologists as collaborators in the effort.
The archaeological research focused on recovering artifacts and inferring
the formation processes of the cellar so that the activities of the Club
Atlético could be reconstructed (Weissel 2003:30). The materiality of the
torture center, combined with the testimony of those who survived tor-
ment there, has made for a powerful public statement about the excesses
of the military government. Archaeologists have undertaken similar
excavations at other torture centers in the province of Buenos Aires, the
city of Rosario, and the state of Tucumán. In Argentina and the rest of
the world, the memory of the horrors of totalitarian dictatorship must be
sustained so that such atrocities can never happen again (Weissel
2003:30).
Clearly, when archaeologists seek to make political action part of their
practice, they step onto a very difficult topography. The history of
nationalist uses of archaeology is at best checkered and at worst mon-
strous. The archaeology done in the service of commodified heritage for
tourists has seldom been any better. Most Western archaeologists would
probably agree with Trigger’s stinging condemnation (2006:486) of indi-
36 Politics

viduals who deliberately invent or misrepresent archaeological knowl-

edge for political purposes and his insistence that they should be decerti-
fied by the profession and criminally prosecuted if their actions help to
bring harm to people. But political archaeologies have also been emanci-
patory. The excavation of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War, the
Bosnian War, and the Dirty War of Argentina and of torture rooms in the
Gestapo headquarters and the Club Atlético has recovered the memories
of injustices and violations of human rights. Such recovered memories
have helped bring justice and closure to those who suffered as well as to
their families.
Scholars cannot resolve the dilemma of politics and archaeology by
invoking a sterile vision of archaeology as either science or politics. Two
decades of debate have shown us that archaeology is both science and
politics. The productive question is not, How do we make archaeology
one or the other? but, instead, How do archaeologists link science and
politics in our practice?
An honest, emancipatory political archaeology challenges the secret
writings that hide and justify injustice. Such archaeology is truthful about
its political content and confronts power and oppression. Neil Faulkner
(2000) and Yvonne Marshall (2002, 2004) have proposed that intellec-
tuals can build an honest, emancipatory scholarship with a community
archaeology that is politically self-conscious and collaborative with local
groups of people. A candid, liberating archaeology has the potential to
develop a heritage tourism that benefits and advances the interests of
local peoples rather than the profits of multinational corporations
(Ardren 2004; Marshall 2002:214–215; Moser et al. 2002; Sen 2002;
Isaacson and Ford 2005:362). Such an archaeology disassembles secret
writing’s myth of a single, common, national heritage. It reveals the
pieces that are hidden in this story to create a reflexive heritage that rec-
ognizes how social groups have differentially experienced a shared past
and the consequences of that difference (Scham and Yahya 2003). It
reveals how racial groups have experienced oppression and exploitation
in shared pasts. It helps their descendants reclaim their dignity, legacy,
and rights (Deloria 1993; La Roche and Blakey 1997; D. Thomas 2000;
Watkins 2000; McDavid 2002; Blakey 2003; Leone 2005; McNiven and
Russell 2005; Wiseman 2005). It transcends bourgeois interests to
include working-class communities (Gero 1989; Patterson 1995b, 1997;
Saitta 2005, 2007). A liberating archaeology transcends androcentric
bias both in the interpretation of the past and in the practice of archae-
ology in the present (Gero 1983, 1985; Conkey and Williams 1991;
Politics 37

Gilchrist 1999; Dowson 2000; Joyce 2004; Nelson 2004). In response to

imperialism and global fast capitalism, emancipatory scholarship asks
how we can build an archaeology that includes the colonized (Schmidt
and Patterson 1995; Scham 2001; Lyons and Papadopoulos 2002; Given
2004; Schmidt 2005). The key to an honest, emancipatory political
archaeology is praxis.
Marxist archaeologists are not the only archaeologists who have advo-
cated a socially responsible scholarship that confronts inequality and
oppression in the world (Fernández 2006). Processualists, feminists, post-
processualists, indigenous archaeologists, and others have attempted to
build archaeologies of political action. The theory that I use here is not the
only starting point for a politically engaged archaeology. It is, however,
the starting point for the praxis of archaeology that I develop in this book.

A Marxist Theory of Praxis for Archaeology

Marxism differs from much other social theory because it has an explicit
political intent. Marxism is first and foremost a critical study of capital-
ism that seeks to transform the social world. Modern Western Marxists
recognize that exploitation, inequality, and oppression exist in capitalist
social relations of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. They use class as
their entry point into an analysis that examines the intersection of these
social relations, each with the others and with class (Sherman 1995:119;
Wurst 2006). The alternative that these Marxists offer for capitalism is
social democracy.
The relational dialectical method that I have adopted here is but one
contemporary Marxist approach in archaeology. Archaeologists have
also embraced classical Marxism and critical theory. These approaches
share the ultimate goal of transforming capitalism but differ in the
importance they give to knowing the world and taking action in the
world. In chapter 2, I will compare how these approaches and non-
Marxist approaches address praxis. Archaeologists who embrace classi-
cal Marxism also advocate a dialectical method, but it is a dialectics of
nature rather than a Hegelian, or relational, dialectic. My discussion of
the dialectic that follows in this chapter will elucidate the differences
between these two dialectics.
Frederic Jameson (1997:175) defines Marxism as the science of capi-
talism or, more properly, as the science of the inherent contradictions of
capitalism. This science begins with Karl Marx’s radicalization of
Enlightenment rationality into a critique of capitalism (Patterson
38 Politics

2003:7–32). Marx read history in class terms. That is, he looked at his-
tory in terms of social groups that have material interests. For Marx, the
key to understanding that history lies in the struggle of these groups to
create, maintain, or transform social relationships that advance those
material interests. Social groups can act to advance their interests only if
their members possess a shared consciousness—class consciousness—
that encompasses their identity and interests. The Marxist study of the
past seeks to reveal hidden social relations and to take up the perspective
of the oppressed and dominated. Patterson (2003:8) has compared this
process to peeling an onion: the scholar removes layer after layer to
reveal its innermost structure and then reassembles the whole.

Praxis

Conscious, knowing human actors may seek the transformation of capi-

talism though a radical praxis (McGuire et al. 2005). Praxis springs from
the realizations that people make the social world in their everyday lives
and that they can also subvert and transform that world. A Marxist rad-
ical praxis necessarily involves three goals: to know the world, to critique
the world, and to take action in the world. Without a praxis that inte-
grates these three goals, individuals cannot fully realize their place in
society or their capacity to transform society.
In order to change the world, people must have accurate knowledge of
it. Action based on false or flawed knowledge can only lead to failure
and error. Accurate knowledge does not, however, exist independently of
the social consciousness of the individual. Rather, people produce knowl-
edge in a complex dialectic between the reality that they observe and the
consciousness that they bring to their observations. Knowledge becomes
meaningful and important when the process of gaining it is intimately
interconnected with both social concerns and the position and interests
of people as social agents. Accurate knowledge, therefore, is possible
only from a critical stance. If people do not question the ethics, politics,
epistemology, and reality behind their knowledge, then their actions in
the world will be unsound and may result in unanticipated consequences
that can be counterproductive or even harmful. Marxist critiques chal-
lenge how people use the reality of the world, the social context they
exist in, and their own interests in creating knowledge. These critiques
involve a questioning of different visions or interpretations of knowledge
and a self-examination of one’s own perspectives. They must ultimately
rest in the reality of the observable world, however, because if they do
Politics 39

not, then they will only lead to self-delusion and fantasy. By the same
token, these critiques should be coupled with collective action. Just as
reality without critique equals self-delusion, critique without action pro-
duces only nihilism and despair.
Along these lines, Marxists argue that to take effective collective
action in the world, individuals need to reflect on their larger social con-
texts. The political, ideological, and ethnic confrontations of the last
three decades have led many social scientists to conclude that taking
action in the world without concrete knowledge of that world inevitably
leads to erroneous and pernicious results. In the same way, collective
action that springs from knowledge and converts it into a rich platform
for debate and critique avoids the tendency toward self-delusion and
totalitarianism that lurk in isolated and unexamined knowledge or in
absolute truths.
People realize praxis in the articulation of knowledge, critique, and
collective action, all based in the concrete world. Praxis enriched by
knowledge, critique, and action can exist only within real contexts of
social relations, social struggles, social interests, and social agents. Praxis
cannot exist in the abstract (McGuire et al. 2005).

A Dialectical Marxism

There is no simple or unambiguous way to define the dialectic, and dis-

agreements about the nature of the dialectic define differences within
Marxist thought (Ollman 1976:238–240; Sherman 1995:235–240). The
Hegelian dialectic is just one of many concepts of the dialectic that exist
in Marxism and in Western thought in general (Ollman 1976, 1992,
2003; Sayer 1987; Gottlieb 1989; Agger 1997; Roseberry 1997; Jacoby
2002). It is one of two concepts of the dialectic currently used in Western
archaeology.
At least five major elements of a dialectical Marxism have important
implications for a praxis of archaeology: a relational dialectical method;
a relational theory of society; the concept of collective agency; an empha-
sis on knowing the world through the lived experience of people (every-
day life) as opposed to the description of artifacts or a search for abstract
models, laws, or theories of cultural change; and a self-reflexive aware-
ness of archaeology’s place in the modern world.

The Dialectic Although two different dialectical approaches exist in

Western archaeology today, they share some basic concepts and defini-
40 Politics

tions of the dialectic. These shared concepts include a holistic, relational

view of society in which cultural change is an internal process driven by
relational contradictions, a focus on the dynamics of quantitative and
qualitative change, and the use of the dialectic as a method to study
change rather than as a theory that explains change. The two approaches
disagree over what is the proper object of a dialectical method. Classical
Marxists in archaeology have adopted a dialectics of nature that applies
the dialectic to nature and society. Dialectical Marxists use a Hegelian, or
relational, dialectic that can be applied to the study of society but not to
the study of nature.
The dialectic views society as a whole (Ollman 1976, 1992, 2003;
Sayer 1987), as a complex interconnected web, within which any given
entity is defined by its relationship to other entities, unable to exist in iso-
lation. As Bertell Ollman has noted: “Dialectics restructures our notions
about reality by replacing the common sense notion of ‘thing’ (as some-
thing that has history and external connections with other things) with
the notion of ‘process’ (which contains its history and potential futures)
and ‘relations’ (which contain as part of what it is its ties with other rela-
tions)” (2003:13). For example, you cannot have husbands without
wives; each social entity (thing) exists because of the existence of its
opposite. It is the underlying relationship of marriage that creates both
husbands and wives. If the interconnectedness is broken (divorce), the
opposites dissolve or, more properly, are transformed into something else
(ex-husband and ex-wife). The dialectical method seeks to penetrate the
observable reality of social entities such as husbands and wives to reveal
the underlying social relationships that create these entities. This is the
method that Patterson (2003:8) captures in his metaphor of peeling an
onion.
In the dialectic, the entities that make up the social whole are not
expected to fit comfortably together. They may fit, but the dynamics of
change lie not in these functional relations but in the relational dialectical
contradictions that spring from the fact that social categories are defined
by and require the existence of their opposite. Thus, in the antebellum
South of the United States, slavery defines both the master and the slave.
The existence of masters requires the existence of slaves, yet the two are
opposites and as such are potentially in conflict. Each participates in the
relationship of slavery, but each has a different lived experience of slav-
ery. For the master, it is an experience of wealth, freedom, comfort, and
privilege. The master’s experience depends on the slave’s experience of
poverty, want, and oppression. Thus, the slave and the master have dif-
Politics 41

ferent interests in the relationship that defines them both. Social change
results from the conflict and contradictions inherent in such relations.
Change in these relations is never simply quantitative (changes of
degree) or qualitative (transformative or revolutionary). Quantitative
changes lead to qualitative change, and qualitative change necessarily
implies a quantitative change. Conflicts that result from relational con-
tradictions may result in quantitative changes that build to a qualitative
change in those relations. Rebellion by slaves may lead the masters to
enforce stricter and stricter controls, thereby heightening slave resistance
until the relation of slavery is overthrown. The social relations that result
from such a qualitative change are a mix of the old and the new; the old
social form is remade, not replaced.
The dialectic does not explain or predict how change and interaction
occur (Ollman 2003:12). Rather, it is a method that leads the scholar to
understand change and interaction by providing appropriate questions.
The test of the dialectic as a method is its utility (Sherman 1995:218):
Does it help us choose important problems? Does it guide the researcher
to the empirical observations needed to consider those problems? Does it
provide a framework for evaluating those observations, a framework
that helps the scholar solve the problems, formulate new theory and
problems, and take action in the world?
Classical Marxists tend to accept Engels’s (1927) concept of the
dialectics of nature, applying the dialectic to the study of both the natu-
ral and the social world. Engels argued that Marxist concepts used in the
study of society can be used in the study of nature. This perspective sug-
gests that natural relationships such as that between cougar (predator)
and deer (prey) can be understood in the same way as social unities such
as the master and the slave. A dialectics of nature seeks the general laws
governing the development of nature, science, society, and thought
(Woods and Grant 1995:15). The role of the scholar is to gain knowl-
edge of the world, then from this knowledge derive the laws of motion
that drive social change and through this knowledge shape social change
(Woods and Grant 1995:140).
In contrast, humanistic dialectical Marxists see the dialectic as a
uniquely social phenomenon. A relational dialectic treats Marxism as a
theory of relations and treats society as a complex web of social rela-
tions, within which the nature of any entity is governed by its relation to
other entities. Dialectical Marxists argue that the dialectic between social
entities, such as master and slave, depends on the entities having an
underlying unity, which comes from their common humanity. Such a
42 Politics

unity cannot exist in the study of nature. A master may become a slave,
and a slave may become a master. The deer (prey), however, cannot
become a cougar (predator). The study of nature produces scientists, but
it does not produce nature; the study of geology creates geologists, but it
does not create rocks. By contrast, the scholar may be the subject and the
object of the study; it is the relationship inherent in study that creates
scholars (subjects) and informants (objects). For humanistic Marxists,
critique lies at the core of research. The scholar obtains knowledge of the
world through observation but must be constantly critical of how and
why that knowledge is accepted.
The unity of subject and object that characterizes the study of the
social world exists even when archaeologists study people who are long
dead. The dead cannot study the archaeologist, but it is their silence that
allows many archaeologists to define scientific goals as objective, univer-
sal, or even in the interest of the dead. We cannot alienate the dead, but
the assertion of an objective, universal, or true archaeology becomes a
way to alienate the living from their past and to advance, justify, and
maintain the inequities of today (McGuire 1992a; Watkins 2000; Fforde
et al. 2002; Fforde 2004; McNiven and Russell 2005).

A Relational Concept of Society The Hegelian dialectic makes social

relations rather than social entities the key to studying society. The exis-
tence of individual humans necessarily implies the existence of society, and
the existence of society necessarily implies the existence of individuals. A
relational dialectic does not view the social world as made up of individ-
uals (things) but instead sees the social world and individuals as products
of underlying social relationships and processes. From the standpoint of a
dialectical praxis, humans make history as members of collective groups.
A relational dialectic defines society as a network of interrelated dif-
ferences. Difference is inherent in society, because underlying social rela-
tionships create social categories that are the opposite of each other, such
as master and slave. Conflict is intrinsic in these social oppositions.
Individuals negotiate identities, social characteristics, and consciousness
through their relationship to others in these social networks. They do so
within the social structures that these relationships create, but in doing so
they also have the potential to transform the social structures. These
individuals do not exist alone or outside the network of difference that is
society, nor can they act alone in a transformative way. Thus, the impor-
tant question for praxis is, How do individuals create a shared con-
sciousness of group identity and interest that allows them to act as a
Politics 43

group in a transformative way? In a relational view, the dynamics of

social change cannot be reduced to the economy, human psychology, or
action of individuals. A relational concept of collective agency allows us
to understand how people make history.

Collective Agency Society changes because of human action, but all

human action is dependent on the existence of society. As Marx wrote:
“People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but
under given circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the
past” (1978:9).3 Social structures, ideologies, and material conditions
inherited from the past both enable and limit this agency, yet these same
structures, ideologies, and conditions are products of conscious human
action. People inherit the material conditions created in the past, and peo-
ple will create the material conditions of the future. This dialectic between
the past and the present creates a future through the dialectic of agency
and structure. Understanding collective agency allows us to participate in
the struggles of contemporary constituencies and creates the possibility of
making the archaeological project part of transformational social projects.
Archaeologists have recognized that human agency is always social;
thus, people never act simply as individuals (Silliman 2001). Even the act
of being a hermit is social. Individuals can exist only in a web of social
relations, and agency is realized through these relations. When individu-
als join together in collective action, their agency may transform these
relations. Put another way, agency presupposes a web of social relation-
ships and meanings, yet these social relations and meanings are them-
selves products of conscious human action.
Even the unintentional changes that fascinate practice theorists in
archaeology entail goal-oriented social agency (Barrett 2000; Pauketat
2000; for a critique see Bernbeck 2003a). This is well illustrated by the
classic case of unintended consequences, the tragedy of the commons
(Hardin 1968; Pauketat 2000). In William Forster Lloyd’s (1833) para-
ble of the English commons, cattle herders personally gain greater
income by grazing more cattle on the village commons, and each cattle
herder makes an individual decision to maximize his or her income
through this increased grazing. The unintended consequences of these
individual actions is the overgrazing of the commons, resulting in the
loss of all income by all herders and the loss of the right to the com-
mons. This parable might appear to be an example of individual agency
and unintended consequences, but it actually assumes individuals
44 Politics

embedded in social relations acting as social agents. The right to the

commons is a social relationship. Also, the only way that the herders
could benefit from herding more cattle than the number for which they
had use value was through the existence of a market in which to sell the
cattle. That is, these herders had to engage in the social relations of the
market in order to reach the decision to graze more cattle. Thus, social
relations enabled and limited the decisions these herders could make,
and the consequences of these decisions transformed these relations.
The unintended consequences of individual agency may cause change,
but this is not what brought about the demise of the English commons
in reality.
Archaeologists, like many other scholars, have assumed that the
tragedy of the commons was a frequent event in medieval and
postmedieval England, but this belief is incorrect (Cox 1985; Neeson
2004). English law granted the right to commons only to members of the
community or to individuals who provided services to a lord. Law and
custom regulated who could use the commons and how many animals
they could graze there, all in recognition of the carrying capacity of the
land (Cox 1985:55). The social relations of the commons worked for
hundreds of years in England and came to an end only through the
praxis of the landed classes. Landlords enclosed or took possession of the
commons. They increased their profits by applying improved agricultural
techniques and selling wool to supply the mills driving the industrial rev-
olution. Enclosure was a conscious and calculated movement by the
landed classes (Neeson 2004). As part of this movement, they had to
“reform” agricultural laws and discredit existing customs. Lloyd (1833)
wrote his parable during the debates over the 1832 Enclosure Acts. The
tragedy of the commons originated not as history but rather as an ideo-
logical myth to advance enclosure. It survives today as a right-wing fable
that denies the efficacy of communalism.
Praxis implies something more than embodied practice, something
more than practical consciousness, and something more than individuals
simply making self-interested decisions. Agency becomes praxis only
when social groups collectively seek transformational change to advance
their interests (Gramsci 1971; Crehan 2002). Transformative praxis
springs from communal action. One hand did not tear down the Berlin
Wall, Martin Luther King did not march on Washington alone, the
Stonewall riot did not involve a single rowdy homosexual, and Hitler did
not by his own hand kill six million Jews.
People make history as members of social groups whose common
Politics 45

consciousness derives from shared social relations and lived experiences

and from common interests, cultures, and ideologies that link them to
one another and oppose them to other social groups. They create this
consciousness through their shared experience of day-to-day life. A
shared consciousness exists when members of the group identify with
other members of the group and develop an awareness of the relation-
ship of their group to other social groups. The solidarity of lived experi-
ence may be based in class, gender, ethnicity, or race, or more commonly
in some combination of these identities.
Antonio Gramsci (1971; Crehan 2002) argued that shared conscious-
ness originates in common experience but that this experience does not
automatically give rise to solidarity. Consciousness raising usually
requires individuals acting as intellectuals, activists, organizers, and
provocateurs to first mold the raw material of experience into con-
sciousness. If group members recognize this consciousness as their own
individual situation and if they are moved to act in solidarity, then col-
lective agency will occur. The task of scholars is to produce knowledge
and critique. For those scholars who seek to engage in praxis, that
knowledge and critique should be based in a genuine understanding of
the experience of the social group whose interest their scholarship serves.
Praxis, therefore, flows from a dialogue or dialectic between intellectuals
and the communities they serve.
The relationship of individuals to one another and to social groups is
complex. Individuals participate in multiple relations within social
groups, and they may participate in multiple groups. The inequality and
exploitation that usually exist within social groups further complicate the
relationship. Also, individuals may participate in various groups that
have different or even contradictory social interests. People do not expe-
rience these relations and their multiple identities in isolation; rather,
their experience flows from the interrelationships among social groups
and identities in the social reality in which they participate. Furthermore,
just because individuals participate in the same social reality does not
mean that they will have the same experience. The lived experience in the
coalfields of southern Colorado in the first decades of the twentieth cen-
tury differed between husbands and wives, between company managers
and miners. Thus, the axis of solidarity and experience that will be used
to create a social consciousness will depend on the specific historical
context of its creation.
Transformative collective agency will not always succeed. People may
know what change they want, but almost inevitably their efforts to effect
46 Politics

it will result in unintended consequences. Powerful groups within society

will also actively seek to prevent such consciousness from rising in order
to preserve their own interests. Social groups may also try but fail to
form a collective consciousness and thus be ineffective agents. Competing
identities and differences in experience may hinder the forming of group
consciousness. Consciousness raising may succeed when struggle against
a greater oppression transcends these differences or when groups with
different interests can define mutual goals. Collective agency creates a
very complex arena in which we as archaeologists seek to understand
change and to build a radical archaeological praxis.

Knowing the World Collective agency is both contingent and unpre-

dictable. The prior conditions of a historical sequence, material rela-
tions, social structures, culture, and ideology define a range of possibil-
ities for collective action. Which actions people will undertake, however,
are not determined but contingent on both prior conditions and the
subjective evaluations that people make of them (Roseberry 1997). The
conditions that structure human action leave broad channels and lots of
room for actions and consequences that cannot be known in advance.
Small changes in events or circumstances, actions taken or not taken,
can, over time, have dramatic and unforeseeable consequences for the
course of history. Praxis occurs when people consciously try to chart
their way through these channels. The starting point for praxis, there-
fore, is a historical understanding of society and prior agency to identify
what the channels are, how they are bounded, and where they might
lead.
The substantive analyses in this book begin with historical considera-
tions of the prior conditions that channel praxis. The class structure of
archaeology today is legitimated by a guild ideology of the discipline that
reflects the history of the field rather than the modern realities. When we
began archaeological research in Sonora, México, along the U.S.
Mexican border, we stepped into preexisting social relations, social struc-
tures, economies, politics, and ideologies. The Ludlow Collective’s study
of the Colorado Coalfield War analyzes the collective agency and praxis
of early twentieth-century miners to demonstrate why such praxis must
be continued in the present to maintain the rights and dignity of working
families. Following Marx, our analyses focus on the everyday lived expe-
rience of people in these cases.
Marx’s method opens the way to the recovery of history, but it does
not predict the course of that history (Sayer 1979:199). It provides a
Politics 47

guide for how scholars can understand and analyze concrete cases of
social change in order to make social change in the future. The key to this
method is the study of real lived experience. In his own historical studies
of transformational change, Marx (1978) started with real individuals,
their actions, and the material (economic) conditions under which they
lived, both those that they inherited from the past and those that they
created through their actions. He examined how people acted within
and on social, political, and cultural relationships, institutions, and struc-
tures, reproducing some and changing others (Roseberry 1997:30). In
order to do this, these individuals had to have certain understandings,
images, and beliefs about who they were and what they were doing.
Marx undertook historical studies of transformative change because he
rejected the idea that such changes are predetermined, inevitable, or pre-
dictable. He studied history to build praxis. His historical studies were
commentaries on movements and attempts to shape them to change the
world (Roseberry 1997:39).
A Marxist analysis starts with an analysis of economic relationships,
focusing on the relations between classes and class factions (Wurst
2006). The method of Marxist class analysis can, however, be applied to
any social groups that have common interests and consciousness (Bloch
1985:162–163). Any group of individuals who share an identity and
interests and can form a group consciousness may engage in collective
agency. This realization opens the door for complex analyses from mul-
tiple vantage points (Patterson 2003:12), including gender, race, ethnic-
ity, sexuality, and age, in addition to classes and class factions. Regardless
of these other vantage points, Marxist analyses always examine the lived
experience of the oppressed, the marginalized, and the forgotten. The
economic vantage point is essential to reveal secret writings. Marxism
shares this vantage point with other approaches to emancipatory archae-
ology. We see it in the Argentinean studies of the Club Atlético (Weissel
2003:29–30; Acuto 2003), in Lynn Meskell’s analyses of archaeology
and violence in Egypt (2003, 2005), and in Rosemary Joyce’s critiques of
cultural tourism and the Ruta Maya (2003, 2005).
My substantive analyses in this book focus on communities and class
factions that have not traditionally been included in archaeology. I
read the secret writings aloud in order to build praxis. To include the
oppressed, the marginal, and the forgotten in our analyses, archaeolo-
gists need to first be self-reflexive about the social and political position-
ing of archaeology in order to understand the power relations we exist in
and contribute to.
48 Politics

Critiquing the World Just as it is people who make history, it is also

people who write history and do archaeology. As scholars, we are also
social beings who live and work in a social context. Our social, cultural,
and political point of view affects how we see the world, what questions
we ask, what assumptions we make, what observations we value, and
what answers we accept. Our understandings of the past must always fit
the knowledge we have of its events and practices, but many explana-
tions of these will always fit. A dialectical point of view urges us to
accept that even though the past is real, our knowledge of it is always
made in the present, and this knowledge is never a simple product of
either past or present but a complex mix of both. Our assessments can-
not be complete unless we also ask why we, as socially situated scholars,
choose to raise the particular questions that we ask and why we might
favor one possible explanation over another.
To answer these questions, we can study archaeology’s history as a
material social process (Trigger 1989a, 2006; Patterson 1986, 2003;
Kehoe 1998). Our own history bequeaths beliefs and social relations to
us as social beings and scholars. This inheritance conditions our scholar-
ship, setting up paths of least resistance that we may travel without real-
izing why we took them or what the repercussions of our journey may
be, for ourselves or others. A self-critical historical analysis reveals alter-
native paths and asks why the paths we are following appeared to us,
why we should follow them, to what ends they can take us, and whose
interests they serve? With such knowledge we can, hopefully, more wisely
navigate our journey.
Recognizing that archaeology is a social product and process and that
multiple stories, addressing different interests in the present, may always
exist raises questions of what interests archaeology should serve and how
these interests are best served. North American archaeology legitimately
serves the academy, the people who pay for our work, the museum going
public, indigenous nations, and many other communities. The interests of
these various communities may be in harmony or in conflict or irrelevant
to one another. Archaeologists have not given enough attention to identi-
fying these interests or to building dialogues between those interests and
us (Shanks and McGuire 1996; Faulkner 2000; Moser et al. 2002).
As socially engaged scholars, Marxists and other emancipatory
archaeologists should remember that we cannot trust in “correct” theory
or “true” knowledge of the world to direct our praxis. Critique must
remain a constant and central part of what we do. We also need to avoid
totalitarian theories. Social theories become totalitarian when they claim
Politics 49

that their perspective identifies the determinants of social forms and thus
serves as a way to engineer change in those forms. The feminist idea of
entry point gives us a way to break this linkage by treating social theories
as entry points to study social relations, with the recognition that, in any
given case, multiple entry points will be possible and may give compati-
ble interpretations that reinforce one another (Wylie 1991). A pluralistic
praxis of alliance and common struggle can be built from these intersec-
tionalities (Conkey 2005b).
Commentators have appropriately criticized Marxism for not ade-
quately considering social factors such as gender, sexuality, race, and
ethnicity (Hartman 1981; Sargent 1981; Taylor 1990). If scholars accept
a totalitarian notion of Marxism (class is the root of all exploitation), or
a totalitarian notion of feminism (gender is the root of all exploitation),
or a totalitarian notion of queer theory (sexuality is the root of all
exploitation), or a totalitarian notion of race theory (race is the root of
all exploitation), then Marxism must be at odds with all of these other
approaches. The feminist perspective of entry point, however, offers an
alternative (Wylie 1991). If we are to take the diversity and complexity of
oppression seriously, we must recognize that it derives from many rela-
tionships, including those of gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity.
Each of these provides an entry point to the study of social relations and
oppression. Marxists enter the study of the social world with the analy-
sis of class, and from this entry point we should examine its complex
relationships with gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity in the construc-
tion of oppression. Other socially engaged scholars use other entry
points. For example, feminists begin their analysis with gender. As long
as feminists seek a radical transformation of gender relations that must
also address class, sexuality, race, and ethnicity (hooks 2000; Sanahuja
2002), and Marxists recognize that relations of class also involve rela-
tions of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, then the intersection of
multiple approaches can produce compatible and complementary praxis
(Wurst 2006).4
Following from Antonio Gramsci (1971), the emphasis in this book is
on how class is lived by people. That is, on how people experience class
in their everyday existence (Wurst 1999, 2006). People live class as gen-
dered, ethnic, sexual, and racial social beings (Crehan 2002:195).
Addressing class as a social lived phenomenon means that all aspects of
the social condition ought to be considered in the analysis and interpre-
tation of history and the building of praxis.
The Marxist theory of relational dialectics that I have advocated here
50 Politics

leads me to an emancipatory praxis of archaeology. This is not the only

theory that may lead to political action. Indeed, archaeologists using
other theories have sought to build praxis, sometimes with different goals
and usually with alternative entry points. Multiple theories produce the
debate and dialogue that help archaeologists better know the world, cri-
tique the world, and take action in the world. In chapter 2, I will com-
pare processualist, post-processualist, Marxist, feminist, and indigenous
efforts to build archaeological praxis. My theory of praxis builds on a
foundation of these efforts and draws on the intersectionalities among
Marxist, feminist, and indigenous archaeologies (Conkey 2005b).

Notes
1. In Great Britain the term traveler refers to a variety of social groups who
generally move around the country and have no permanent abode. This includes
ethnic Gypsies, Irish tinkers, and, starting in the 1960s, a group of New Age trav-
elers who formed around a free festival circuit that came to include Stonehenge.
2. The Navajo and Hopi nations have been engaged in a long-running dis-
pute concerning control of land in northeastern Arizona. The dispute originated
in 1882, when the president of the United States established the Hopi reservation
and then later settled Navajo people on land originally assigned to the Hopi. The
conflict continues today on the ground, in the courts, and in Congress. It has
involved and deeply divided anthropologists and archaeologists who work with
or for each nation (Benedek 1999).
3. The usual English translation of this quote begins “[Men] make history,”
but this translation is inaccurate. In the original German, Marx used the noun
Menschen, which translates as “people,” not as “men.” The German word
for“men” is Mannschaft.
4. I should note that all contemporary Western Marxists in archaeology do
not agree with my advocacy of Marxism as a method for understanding social life
as opposed to Marxism as an explanation of the social world or my advocacy of
class as an entry point to study society as opposed to class as a determinant of the
social world. Many times Marxist colleagues have told me that an approach that
grants importance to social factors other than class is not really Marxist (Gilman
1993). Ultimately, the issue is changing the world, not defining what “Marxism
really is.” My reply to these critics can be found in the prologue of the reprinting
of A Marxist Archaeology (McGuire 2002b) and in the totality of this book.
Chapter 2

Praxis
True knowledge is the reformer’s most important weapon and
we should never surrender it.
Bruce Trigger (1995b:331)

This book is not the first attempt to develop an explicit praxis of archae-
ology that contributes to the transformation of society and, hopefully, to
a more humane world. The theory of praxis presented here builds on a
foundation of earlier efforts and from an ongoing engagement with cur-
rent perspectives. My theory originates from a critical examination of
these processes. It starts from the dialectical theory of Marxism that I
presented in chapter 1 and draws on the intersectionalities between fem-
inist and indigenous archaeologies (Conkey 2005b).
Praxis is a process of gaining knowledge of the world, critiquing the
world, and taking action in the world (McGuire et al. 2005). Bruce
Trigger charges us to base our praxis in “true knowledge” and to use cri-
tique to expose false consciousness and flawed knowledge. Yet, if our
knowledge is always situated in social and political contexts, how can we
talk of “truth”? The situated nature of knowledge means that truth will
be overdetermined, not objectively discernable or separate from its con-
text. If archaeologists accept this position, then critique is in and of itself
praxis, because critique will evaluate the situatedness of knowledge.
However, this leaves us no basis for alternative action, since it entails the
nihilistic revelation that the world is not knowable. The nature of knowl-
edge claims, therefore, is key to any theory of praxis in archaeology. A
dialectical approach attempts both to know the world and to critique it,
evaluating knowledge claims through a four-way dialectic among the
four Cs: coherence, correspondence, context, and consequences.

51
52 Praxis

Archaeologists laid the first stones of a foundation for praxis by the

middle of the twentieth century. Those doing culture history assumed
that knowledge lay in the ground, to be collected like so many potsherds.
Although culture history remains a major effort in world archaeology
today, current theoretical discussions recognize as naive the notion that
data can exist independent of some kind of larger theoretical or social
practice or both. One of the first archaeologists to acknowledge this was
V. Gordon Childe, who adopted a modernist philosophy from classical
Marxism that emphasized “true” knowledge. His discussion of the
nature of knowledge presaged current debates by a generation. The range
of positions that exist within contemporary archaeology run the gamut
from those that seek true, or objective, knowledge to those that are over-
whelmed by the situatedness of what we think we know (Wylie 1994;
Bate 1998; Hodder 1999; Trigger 2003b; Meskell and Pels 2005;
Fernández 2006).
The simplistic opposition between objective and relativist knowledge
of the world lies at the heart of the debate between the two dominant
theoretical threads of Anglo-American archaeology—processual archae-
ology and post-processual archaeology. Processual archaeologists have
reduced the dialectic of knowledge, critique, and action to simply knowl-
edge. They argue that critique must be tested against knowledge and
that correct knowledge dictates action. In reaction to this positivist
approach, the late twentieth-century postmodernist, post-processualist
theorists of archaeology have emphasized critique as the purpose of
archaeology. They attempt to critically demonstrate how social and polit-
ical interests construct knowledge. Thus, in a post-processual archaeol-
ogy, knowledge may become simply legitimation for action. The debate
between knowledge and critique implies that we either know a real
world or we make it up in our heads.
Different alternative archaeologies, Marxist, feminist, and indigenous,
have wrestled with the relationships of reality, critique, and knowledge
(Fernández 2006). Childe’s modernist Marxist work inspired American
archaeologists such as Bruce Trigger, Thomas Patterson, and Philip Kohl,
as well as la arqueología social of the Spanish-speaking world. In the
1980s, some archaeologists followed Western Marxism and stressed cri-
tique and the construction of knowledge. This gave rise to a critical
archaeology that developed in harmony with the post-processual cri-
tique. In some ways, these two Marxist emphases mirror the differences
between processual and post-processual archaeologies. Marxist, femi-
nist, and indigenous archaeologies differ from mainstream approaches,
Praxis 53

because, in all of them, critique, knowledge, and action remain interde-

pendent in one form or another with praxis. Feminist archaeology began
with a program of praxis that critiqued and sought to remake the field of
archaeology. Indigenous archaeology emerged from the struggles over
repatriation, and indigenous archaeologists have developed praxis to
decolonize the discipline.
A dialectical theory of praxis critically engages and builds on all of
these approaches. It springs from a view of Marxism as a theory of social
relations. It intersects with feminist thought on how we know the world
and with indigenous perspectives on how we collaborate with communi-
ties. Dialectical knowledge rejects both the optimism that we can objec-
tively know the world and the trepidation that the world is ultimately
unknowable. In place of this opposition, it proposes that scholars create
knowledge in a complex dialectic between their observations of the real
world and their own situatedness within that world. Knowing and cri-
tiquing the world come together in a four-way dialectic that evaluates the
coherence, correspondence, context, and consequences of knowledge
claims. Action comes from both knowledge and critique, and human
action transforms the real world and the context of the scholar, thus per-
petuating a dialectic of praxis.

V. Gordon Childe
V. Gordon Childe was undoubtedly the most prolific of the early mod-
ernist archaeologists and probably the most cited archaeologist of the
twentieth century (Trigger 1980b). Childe had a great deal to say about
the role and importance of knowledge both in the past and in the present.
For Childe, praxis springs from knowledge and a correct understanding
of how societies change.
Childe turned his attention to the nature of knowledge claims after
World War II when the failings of the Bolshevism of the Soviet state
became apparent to scholars in the West (McGuire 1992b:25–32).
Bolshevists had argued that scholars using a scientific Marxist theory
could come to a truer understanding of the world than intellectuals could
reach using bourgeois theory. Marxists could ascertain the laws of
motion that drive social change. Armed with this knowledge, intellectu-
als would become the vanguard party that would lead Russia to true
communism. Faith in the vanguard party and the assumed prescience of
its leadership justified horrible acts that led to the suffering of millions of
people. The leaders argued such suffering was in the interest of the com-
54 Praxis

mon good and was necessary for the attainment of the ultimate goal of a
humane socialism. Bit by bit the vanguard party became a new ruling,
bureaucratic class. When Stalin came to power in the Soviet Union, this
class transformed Marxism into a repressive state ideology that alien-
ated, dominated, and exploited the people and was antithetical to science
(Klejn 1993; Sherman 1995:200–205; Trigger 1995a:326; Buchli
1999:77–98).
Childe (1989:15–17) would later call Stalinism “the Marxist perver-
sion of Marxism” (Trigger 1989a:259–263). With this critique Childe
became very concerned about the nature of knowledge and how we as
scholars create it. He rejected notions of laws that determine social
change. He saw “true” knowledge as complexly created and always sub-
ject to revision.
In “The Sociology of Knowledge,” Childe (1949) argued that the
function, structure, and content of knowledge is social and relates to
action. The function of knowledge is social, since it provides rules for
cooperative social action. The content of knowledge is social, since it
provides a working model of the “real world” that must be accurate
enough for a society to act. For Childe, the success of these actions
proves the “truth” of these rules, and the test of this truth is practice. But
a society’s knowledge is not always progressive, and critique is necessary
to reveal this. For Childe, the convergence between knowledge as a
model of the “real world” and a society’s means of production provides
the measure of that society’s fitness to survive.
Individual delusions or social illusions can hamper a society’s knowl-
edge or ability to act and progress (Childe 1956:115). In this sense,
Childe distinguished between true consciousness as the operational and
external correspondence of reality and false consciousness as the absence
of this correspondence (Trigger 1980b:139). False consciousness may
serve the particular interests of classes or specific groups and at the same
time be a buttress to the authority of the ruling class (Childe 1949:308).
Thus, individuals and social groups may transform knowledge and sci-
ence into ideology, and this ideology becomes a brake on the progress of
knowledge (Childe 1949:309). Childe saw the development of knowl-
edge as a dialectic in which people achieve true knowledge through the
negation of error (Trigger 1980b:141). Childe argued that all scientific
knowledge is practical and must furnish rules for action (1979:93).
Intellectual pursuits divorced from practical action are the primary
impediment to progress and thus are not true knowledge (Trigger
1980b:141).
Praxis 55

According to Childe, “The sociological limits of knowledge can be

transcended if only so far as to guide the next step in practice. We need
not predict what will happen thereafter when ideological distortions have
been eliminated by the abolition of classes with class interests”
(1949:309). For him, the ultimate goal of scientific history, or the accu-
mulation of practical knowledge of the past, is to “enable the sober citi-
zen to discern the pattern the process has been weaving in the past and
from there to estimate how it may be continued in the immediate future”
(1947:83).
Childe’s ideas influenced archaeology during the second half of the
twentieth century, but this influence took very different forms. The archi-
tects of the New Archaeology cited Childe as a forebear of their cultural
evolutionary approach but did not read his works on history and knowl-
edge. The authors of the manifesto of post-processual archaeology,
Symbolic and Structural Archaeology (Hodder 1982), explicitly invoked
the humanism of Childe as their precedent. For others in England, North
America, Latin America, and Spain, Childe’s work became the starting
point for integrating Marxist ideas into archaeology.

Praxis in the Dominant Debate in

Anglo-American Archaeology
At the turn of the twentieth to the twenty-first century, the principal the-
oretical debate in Anglo-American archaeology is between the processual
and post-processual archaeologies. For the last few decades of the
twentieth century, a processual approach dominated the archaeology of
the United States. The post-processual critique began in England, where
Ian Hodder and his students at Cambridge University designed a post-
modernist program of archaeology that they called post-processual
archaeology.

Processual Archaeology

Processual archaeology developed in the United States and in England

from the New Archaeology of the 1960s. Those who practice it embrace
a positivistic epistemology science à la Hempel, and they advocate an
approach to knowledge of the past based on objective science and nomo-
thetic (lawmaking) deductive reasoning (Redman 1973; Plog 1974). New
Archaeologists saw the past as a laboratory to test hypotheses that would
produce generalizations governing human behavior. Their science had an
56 Praxis

antiauthoritarian edge; that is, hypothesis testing, not the prominence of

the scientist, is what validated or negated a claim. The hypothetical
method made it possible for students to disprove the ideas of their pro-
fessors or other superiors. The goal of a positivistic science was objective,
value-free knowledge of the past. Most New Archaeologists simply
wished to generalize about the past; however, some embraced the poten-
tial of this science to provide insights that could aid the contemporary
world and make it more humane. Such a political program never became
a major part of contemporary processual archaeology. The tension
between the somewhat naive understandings of science as apolitical and
the reality of some New Archaeologists’ commitment to causes with
explicit political agendas soon became apparent (Wobst 1989).
Some New Archaeologists took up the 1960s search for “relevance.”
They argued that archaeology, often viewed as an arcane practice, must
produce knowledge and insights that can be used by everyone, from aca-
demicians in various disciplines to “the common man” (Fritz 1973;
Redman 1973). They embraced the positivist science of archaeology to
strip away the major barriers to knowledge of the past. They claimed
that if archaeology were freed from narrow, subjective interests, the great
time depth that it entails could provide valuable insights into the present
and be a positive force for change toward a better world (Fritz 1973;
Plog 1974; Wobst 1989). They hoped that a scientific archaeology would
be able to provide tried and true solutions to the world’s problems and
guides for future action.
The key to these solutions lay in the ability of archaeologists to dis-
cover the underlying laws of social process and cultural change.
Knowledge of these laws would allow scholars to predict cultural change
(Renfrew 1982:13; Watson et al. 1984:25–26). Armed with this knowl-
edge archaeologists could become social engineers and alter the path of
cultural change to solve social problems (Minnis 1985:2, 14–15).
Despite much initial optimism, these attempts all failed to solve social
problems. Even processual archaeologists came to recognize the failure of
this program to generate general laws of cultural change (Renfrew
1982:8, Salmon 1982:140, McGuire 1992b:121).
New Archaeologists recognized that scholars are situated in a social
context and that individual archaeologists have a psychological desire to
be right. Processualists’ anxiety about these biases tended to focus on the
psychological. They argued that the positivist method of hypothesis test-
ing provides a way to control for or eliminate such biases (Hill 1970).
Merrilee Salmon (1982) recognized that social factors affect which
Praxis 57

research questions scholars choose and that these social factors have an
important effect on the direction and conclusions of research. But
Salmon remained confident that the positivist method could provide an
objective evaluation of hypotheses so chosen.
Archaeology at the service of humanity’s problems requires an active
engagement with the world that can hardly be devoid of political con-
tent. In order to control for this political bias, the New Archaeologists
essentially separated knowledge and critique. Politically inspired cri-
tiques of the world led them to seek knowledge; however, given their pos-
itivist philosophy, that knowledge had to be independent of critique. The
content of archaeological practice during this period remained in a very
real sense politically neutral or at best reformist. These archaeologists
identified problems, such as regional food shortages and urban over-
crowding, that could be “solved” by understanding human behavior or
environmental interaction or the two together. This focus ignored larger
relations of oppression within a capitalist global system.
Martin and Plog’s overview of Arizona archaeology (1973) contains
one of the most extensive treatments of archaeology in the service of a
better world. In an appendix, Martin and Gregory (1973) apply insights
from Puebloan archaeology to the problems of poverty and violence in
urban ghettos. After an impassioned discussion of these contemporary
problems, the authors suggest that ghetto populations should disperse in
the face of resource stress, as aboriginal peoples in the southwest United
States did. While they recognize the modern limitations imposed by
social prejudice and economic factors on contemporary conditions and
future dispersal, they seem naively optimistic that the mere act of disper-
sal will help to resolve this oppression and the racism that feeds it.
Paul Minnis’s archaeological study of food stress (1985) also focuses
on practical universal solutions for a significant problem of contempo-
rary global society. In that study, Minnis developed a theory of food
stress and cultural change based on the prehistoric Mimbris culture of
southwestern New Mexico. He presents this theory in the hope that it
will have a practical application to all human groups. The theory suc-
cessfully integrates ecological and social factors, but its stress on adapta-
tion provides little insight into the global political factors that create
food stress.
Although these two examples of praxis in processual archaeology
probably do not exhaust such cases, a long list of similar examples is dif-
ficult to compose. It is also difficult to identify any specific instance in
which policy makers actually applied archaeologically generated laws of
58 Praxis

cultural change to contemporary social problems. This is probably for

the best. These interpretations of cultural processes are too tentative,
insecure, and incomplete to use as a basis for decisions that directly affect
the real welfare of people.
Some processualist attempts at relevance have had an impact on the
world. Bill Rathje’s garbage project used archaeological methods to study
modern trash (Rathje and Murphy 1992). The project produced a wealth
of practical insights about the composition of trash, household consump-
tion practices, and the lack of decomposition of materials in landfills.
These insights have helped to shape public policies about consumption,
nutrition, and waste disposal. In Bolivia archaeologists excavated and
reconstructed raised field systems in the 1980s and then cooperated with
development workers to reintroduce this agricultural technique to a local
indigenous peasantry (Swartley 2002). The use of archaeological methods
to address practical issues in the Garbage Project and in Bolivia does
have “relevance” and did create useful knowledge. But these projects did
not produce the laws of social process and cultural change that processual
archaeology sought. In the Bolivian example, farmers abandoned the
raised fields within a decade, because the practice and social organization
of the modern fields reflected preconceived notions of Latin American
indigenous peoples (Swartley 2002:6). In the end, both projects’ empha-
sis on practical knowledge was not transformative and, thus, not praxis.
Processual archaeologists’ excursions into praxis had little or no real
impact on the world. Probably for this reason, contemporary archaeolo-
gists have largely forgotten those excursions. Processualists did, however,
establish a precedent for a politically engaged archaeology that seeks to
effect a more humane world. But in following their precedent, we need to
recognize the dangers inherent in the instrumentalist nature of their
approach, when isolated problems amenable to modifications of human
behavior require no major transformation in political and economic rela-
tions, just tinkering. The processualists did not build a critique that was
informed by knowledge and united with action but, instead, sought
instrumental solutions. Scientists use instrumentalist theory to gain
power over what they study (Meskell and Pels 2005:4–10). Such theory
gives those in power control of nature and people. Positivist social engi-
neering presents the same dangers as those in the notion of the vanguard
party. These dangers begin in the hubris that we can objectively know the
world apart from our own position and interests in that world. Such
hubris risks self-deception and has been used to justify actions that are
destructive of people and society.
Praxis 59

At the same time that the processual archaeologists were attempting

to build a positivist praxis of archaeology, many scientists, international
agencies, and nations had embarked on one of the most massive social
engineering projects of the twentieth century. The “Green Revolution”
sought to transform the Third World by exporting a scientific agriculture
of irrigation, mechanization, and hybrid crops. In countries like India
and Pakistan, these efforts were dismal failures that increased poverty,
landlessness, and social inequality. Cultural anthropologists and others
have criticized the Green Revolution for failing to take into account both
the larger colonial context of the project and the specific cultures of the
places it was implemented (Bodley 1983:141–144; Perkins 1998). As
these criticisms grew, they became a more fundamental questioning of
social engineering as at best paternalistic and at worst malicious (Poggie
and Lynch 1974; Hobart 1993).

Post-processual Archaeology and Praxis

Post-processual archaeology developed in England during the 1980s.

Like the larger current of postmodernism of which it is a part, it rejected
any totalizing “metanarrative” and drew from an eclectic range of theo-
ries to arrive at a mélange of ideas (Fernández 2006:21–53). Post-
processual archaeologists advocate a praxis of radical relativism. Their
relativism is radical in two senses: it rejects the illusion of objectivity, or
“true” knowledge, as the source of domination and oppression in the
world, and these archaeologists hope it can transform the social relations
of domination and oppression that exist in the world.
Post-processualist archaeology primarily focuses on critique. Chris-
topher Tilley argued that “archaeology should not primarily be con-
cerned with the past for its own sake and as a means of escape from the
socio-political reality of the present, but with using the past as a basis for
strategic intervention in the present” (1989:105). Post-processualist cri-
tique attempts to expose the situated nature of knowledge. Because
knowledge is socially situated, multiple interpretations of the past exist
and reflect the contemporary sociopolitical situation of each interpreter
(Shanks and Tilley 1992). Thus, the interpretive process does not pro-
duce “true” knowledge but, rather, a revelation of the subjectivities of
knowing.
Post-processualists reject the search for objective knowledge of the
past and instead highlight the Western capitalist biases that pervaded the
processual perspective (Shanks and Tilley 1992; Tilley 1989). They claim
60 Praxis

that archaeologists come to the data with a set of “prejudgments” that

include things such as the definitions of terms, goals, assumptions,
expected answers, tools, standards of measurement, methods, skills, and
the social and political context of our research (Hodder 1999:32–33).
These prejudgments matter and have a lasting effect on conclusions.
Post-processualists reject the positivist notion that the method of testing
hypotheses can create a moment in the research process that holds these
prejudgments in abeyance (Hodder 1999:62–63). Archaeologists’ start-
ing points will always influence their conclusions and the directions of
future research.
Processual archaeologists and classical Marxists have frequently
accused post-processualists of an extreme relativism, in which political
partisanship dominates the research process and no “true” knowledge is
possible (Kohl 1985; Schiffer 1988; Renfrew 1989; Thomas 1990;
Trigger 1995a, 1995b). To make such accusations is to kick a straw dog.
The post-processualist movement began with critiques of objectivity that
overstressed the relative nature of knowledge (Hodder 1984; Tilley
1989). More recently, however, post-processualists have turned to
considerations of the role of reality in knowledge claims. Most post-
processualists would acknowledge that archaeological data place limits
on all interpretations, and Hodder has argued that interpretations should
be “theory led” (1999:62–63). Post-processual archaeologists fit theory
and data together in a hermeneutic circle, linking knowledge, theory,
and ethical or moral standpoints to arrive at interpretations (Hodder
1999:62–65). The claim that contemporary post-processualists espouse
an extreme relativism that makes all interpretations of the past accept-
able is, therefore, incorrect. However, even though their hermeneutic cir-
cle is more data led than many critics allow, the role of data remains
weak. The weak role that the post-processualists give data in interpreta-
tion may not allow for the most effective praxis of archaeology.
Post-processualists advocate multivocality as the key to praxis
(Hodder 1999). They argue that many different ways of knowing the
past exist and that power relations play a greater role than data in which
of those interpretations are heard. Thus, praxis lies in giving voice to the
voiceless or in letting all voices be heard. Praxis becomes radical if the
voices that are heard are the suppressed voices of the disenfranchised.
Multivocality requires that archaeologists surrender their authority and
claims of privileged knowledge. With this surrender of authority and
privilege, no social engineering or vanguard party can occur, and there-
fore, our efforts will not have pernicious consequences.
Praxis 61

A post-processual praxis can be divided into two parts (Hodder

1999). First comes the critique that breaks down the authority of the
archaeologist as a knower of the past and that eliminates the scholar’s
hegemonic control of the archaeological process. This creates a stage
and an opportunity for other voices. Second comes the archaeologist’s
provision of multiple representations of the archaeological record that
can be read in various ways. This provisioning of representations
involves more than just a compendium of data, because for the post-
processualists data do not exist separately from interpretation. Interpre-
tation begins at the trowel’s edge. Thus, the only way to let multiple
voices speak is to involve them from the very beginning and at every
stage of the research process.
The post-processual notion of praxis has much of value, but in the end
it does not work as an emancipatory praxis of archaeology. The post-
processualists’ goals of empowerment and transformative practice share
much with the goals of this book. The dialectical knowledge that I
espouse builds on the critiques that the post-processualists have made of
the subjectivities of knowledge. Dialectical knowledge also parallels the
process of “fitting” that Hodder advocates to evaluate correspondence in
knowledge claims (1999:30–66). But, the post-processualists underesti-
mate the complexity of the craft of archaeology and overestimate the
ability of individuals not trained in that craft to make sense of the repre-
sentations that archaeologists produce. Their theoretical focus on the
individual does not lead to effective action, and it unwittingly reinforces
the dominant ideology of twenty-first-century capitalism (Fantasia and
Voss 2004:9). Radical relativism and multivocality give little guidance on
how to decide between competing voices. Different voices exist in rela-
tionship to one another and to social contexts. Some voices seek to
silence others and maintain the powerful, while other voices challenge
inequities. In the absence of relational criteria to distinguish one voice
from another, multivocality may be harmful, because it leaves the stage
open for oppressive voices.
Perhaps the best example of an attempt at multivocality and of the
problems that it can create is Ian Hodder’s project at Çatalhöyük.
Hodder (1998, 2000, 2006) has made the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in
Turkey the high-tech showplace of excavation for post-processual
archaeology. This site is well known in Europe as one of the earliest
towns in the world. Eco-feminists and goddess worshipers regard it as an
ancient center of the cult of the goddess. The project seeks to produce a
multivocal archaeology that includes the perspectives of various archae-
62 Praxis

ologists and of a global general public. It attempts to do this by making

available all possible data and interpretations so that each individual can
derive his or her own conclusions about the site. The Çatalhöyük Web
site (http://catal.arch.cam.ac.uk/catal/catal.html) contains reams of
archaeological data that even a professional would be hard-pressed to
make sense of. This would seem to inhibit rather than enhance the abil-
ity of individuals and groups to use these data to create empowering
interpretations. Moreover, even if nonprofessional individuals and
groups could read and interpret archaeological texts, again, how do they
choose between the competing texts?
Several aspects of the post-processualists’ theory seem to inhibit or
limit their goal of empowerment. Most post-processualists have
embraced a mixed bag of postmodernist theory that has led them to
focus on questions of individual agency and identity. This spotlight on
the individual has led to a literature littered with statements about why
the individual matters (Meskell 1999, 2002b; Hodder 2000; Shanks and
Tilley 1987; Johnson 1989). This literature often identifies the active
individual as the only force capable of creating cultural change. Although
the goal of post-processualist archaeology is to empower people in the
present through critique and the provision of space for multiple interpre-
tations, post-processualists’ focus on individuals seems to deny these
abilities. Individuals are truly empowered only through solidarity and
collective agency. Postmodernist and post-processual theorists would
have us believe that their positions are radical and transformative of cap-
italism (Shanks and Tilley 1987). However, since postmodern theorists
have accepted one of the most important foundational myths of capital-
ism, the autonomous individual, this approach cannot be radical or
transformative (J. Thomas 2000, 2004:122). Some authors have argued
that the postmodernist focus on the individual fits rather nicely as a com-
ponent of the dominant ideology of globalization and fast capitalism
(Eagleton 1996; Harvey 2000; Larrain 1995; Zavarzadeh 1995; Wurst
and McGuire 1999; J. Thomas 2000; McGuire and Wurst 2002; Agger
2004; Fantasia and Voss 2004:9). Others have been more outspoken,
claiming that the postmodern foundation of post-processualism is the
dominant ideology of twenty-first-century fast capitalism and globaliza-
tion (Jameson 1992; Hawkes 2003:10; Hardt and Negri 2000; Zizek
1994:17).
Archaeologists often find themselves confronted by conflicting voices
about the past. The post-processualists provide us with little guidance in
how to choose among these voices (Wylie 2002:190–191). Barbara
Praxis 63

Bender’s dialogues with Hodder about her involvement in the travelers’

protests against their exclusion from Stonehenge illustrate this quandary
(Bender 1998). Hodder essentially questions whether this is really impor-
tant political action. Bender’s response, that we have to start somewhere,
is somewhat unsatisfying. Hodder has also questioned the use of archae-
ology in relation to goddess worship and the men’s and eco-feminist
movements, which frequently only seem to reaffirm contemporary middle-
class searches for identity and self-fulfillment (Hodder 1999; see also
Bender 1998; Meskell 1998). Here we meet the central irony of post-
processualist archaeology: the tension between its goals of interpreting
individual agency and identity in the past, and its focus on critique and
multiple interpretations, which question the authority of the archaeolo-
gist as interpreter. Divorced from any theoretical metanarrative that
would provide insight into the relevance of competing knowledge claims,
post-processualist archaeology is devoid of the power to contest inter-
pretations that uphold existing conditions.
Archaeologists should not wish to let every voice speak (Kohl
2004:297–298). Some voices are pernicious, such as those that spoke in
the Nazi Gestapo headquarters and in the torture rooms of the Club
Atlético, in Buenos Aires. Multivocality has the danger of denying or
masking the power of the powerful. We must be able to judge some
voices as pernicious, because the real human cost of not doing so is too
great. A relational multivocality that critically examines the power rela-
tions among voices and the consequences of each voice speaking offers a
means to decide which voices are pernicious. In a relational multivocal-
ity, archaeologists will retain some authority to say when interpretations
are in error or immoral. Yet in making these judgments, we must also
avoid the dangers of social engineering and the vanguard party.

Alternative Archaeologies and Praxis

The dominant debate in Anglo-American archaeology does not encom-
pass the full range of theoretical positions that exist on praxis in archae-
ology. Marxist, feminist, and indigenous alternative archaeologies have
also engaged this issue. In the dominant debates, participants may simply
lump these alternatives under the mantle of post-processual archaeology
(Redman 1991; Hegmon 2003). This lumping obscures the variation
that exists in these positions and ignores the contributions they can make
to the debate. These alternative archaeologies provide some of our best
examples of praxis and starting points for resolving the opposition
64 Praxis

between relativism and objectivity that so befuddles the processualists

and post-processualists (Fernández 2006). Classical Marxists in the
Hispanic and Anglophone worlds take a modernist position that empha-
sizes objective knowledge of the world but also address the subjectivities
of knowing that affect the creation of knowledge. Critical archaeologists
engage in a critique of knowledge creation but also test their critique by
evaluating how effectively it influences human action. Feminist archaeol-
ogists engage in a gendered praxis that struggles to transform the disci-
pline of archaeology and society. Indigenous archaeologists confront
colonialism and seek to decolonize archaeology.

Praxis in Hispanic Archaeology: La arqueología social

Hispanic archaeologists created la arqueología social as a reaction to

both the descriptive cultural historical approach that dominated Latin
American and Spanish archaeology in the late 1960s and Anglo-
American processual archaeology (McGuire and Navarrete 1999, 2004;
Benavidas 2001; Politas 2003). They argue for a scientific approach and
increased rigor both in method and in the formulation and testing of
research questions. Their science, however, has been based in a Marxist
materialist dialectic and not in positivism (Bate 1998; Lull 2000;
Lumbreras 2005). They criticize the New Archaeology for its functional-
ism, its unilineal evolutionary theory, and its lack of political conscious-
ness (Gándara 1980; Castro et al. 1992).
In Latin America, la arqueología social began with the question,
Archaeology for whom? (Arqueología para quien?) (Panameno and
Nalda 1978). This group of archaeologists expresses a profound concern
for the social and political roles of archaeology, and they seek to build a
Marxist praxis in archaeology. They stress the development of methods,
categories, and concepts to gain a scientific understanding of the past
from the archaeological record. Like the North American processualists,
they began with the scientific conviction that the transformation of social
relations in the present depends on a true knowledge of the past and of
general historical processes.
Practitioners of la arqueología social found their inspiration for
archaeology as a social science in the work of Marx and V. Gordon
Childe, but they realized that these works could not be applied directly to
the aboriginal history of Latin America (Lorenzo et al., 1976:6; Vargas
and Sanoja 1999:60; Lumbreras 2005:28). Marx had formulated his
concepts in the study of European capitalism, and Childe had developed
Praxis 65

theories to account for European prehistory and the development of the

classical world. The culture history of Latin America varies from these
examples in levels of development, in modes of production, and in his-
torical specifics. Because of this, the Latin Americans have developed an
elaborate scheme for categorizing cultural differences and social change
in order to apply Marxism to the aboriginal history of Latin America.
The purpose of this scheme is to gain a “true” knowledge of the past.
Arqueólogos sociales value knowledge of the past as the base for a criti-
cally informed effort to transform the present. As Vargas and Sanoja
state, “The fundamental aim of social archaeology is the critical study of
history as a dialectical process, considering the past as that which deter-
mines the present and, conversely, the present as the source of the manip-
ulation of the past” (1999:70).
A pragmatic and programmatic emphasis on praxis springs from the
substantive theory of Latin American social archaeology built on a clas-
sic vision of historical materialism. This view gives primacy to the mate-
rial conditions of life over social consciousness. It emphasizes social and
technical relations of production as determining the form of society and
how it changes. From this perspective, the ability of humans to transform
nature is the basis for change in all social processes and in all historical
moments. By linking the theory of the past with a critique of the present,
these scholars seek to demonstrate that contemporary class inequality
and imperialism are connected to that past. More important, they argue
that just as people changed their social conditions in the past, so too can
people change these conditions in the present (Vargas 1990).
Between 1984 and 1987, Mario Sanoja and Iraida Vargas developed
the Museo del Hombre Venezolano within the Universidad Central de
Venezuela, in Caracas, as a form of praxis (McGuire and Navarrete
1999, 2004). The museum proposed an alternative history of Venezuela
that stressed social processes more than events, social groups more than
heroes, struggles and contradictions more than accomplishments, and
progress and the construction of national identity more than legendary
anecdotes. The first and only exhibition, “Three Cultures, One Nation,”
sought to challenge the official state history. The exhibit emphasized the
continuity of processes over an immense span of time, and it represented
a clear break with elitist, Eurocentric, official, hegemonic history.
In the end, however, the museum was not a success, because it failed
to capture the interest of the public. The exhibit also suffered from insuf-
ficient critique. Even though the exhibit explicitly confronted the hege-
monic national history of Venezuela, some of the concepts embedded in
66 Praxis

the exhibit and in its title, “Three Cultures, One Nation,” ran the danger
of reinforcing nationalist notions of creolization (McGuire and
Navarrete 1999:101–102). European elites of Latin American countries
have used the ideology of creolization to co-opt and diminish the politi-
cal potential of racial groups (Badillo 1995; Sorensen 1997; Alonso
1995). Although the exhibit presented an explicit critique of creolization,
implicitly it continued to spread the same ideology of cultural and racial
equivalence by asserting that Indian, European, and African cultures
formed a single nation.
La arqueología social has profoundly affected Latin American archae-
ology but has had less success in its goal of praxis (McGuire and
Navarrete 1999, 2004). La arqueología social has had a substantial
impact on academic archaeology in the autonomous universities of Latin
America (with the exception of those in Chile and Argentina) and some
limited influence in North America (McGuire 1992b; Patterson 1994;
Ensor 2000). In the autonomous universities, la arqueología social has
trained several generations of students who today dominate Latin
American archaeology and intellectual circles. Outside the university,
however, Latin American states control the presentation of archaeology
as part of a national heritage and as a tool of nationalist ideology
(Patterson 1995a). Critiques of this nationalist archaeology by arqueólo-
gos sociales have not resulted in its transformation (Gándara 1992).
In Spain, the death of the dictator Franco in 1975 and the subsequent
collapse of the Fascist Party allowed for the development of Marxist
approaches in archaeology. As in Latin America, Marxist archaeologists
formulated their theory in reaction both to an entrenched cultural his-
torical approach in their country and to the Anglo-American New
Archaeology (Vázquez and Risch 1991). Marxism became a major theo-
retical movement in Spanish archaeology, with research groups in three
Spanish universities (Gassiot et al. 1999; Gassiot and Palomar 2000).
One of the most creative and internationally influential of these groups
has been at the Catalán Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
The research group in Barcelona adopted an explicitly scientific
archaeology that focused on the history and evolution of socioeconomic
formations, the levels of development of productive forces, and the com-
plexity of relations of production (Vázquez and Risch 1991:37). In this
work, they have integrated Marxist and feminist approaches into a the-
ory of the production of social life (Castro et al. 1998; Sanahuja 2002).
This theory begins with the assumption that social life requires the exis-
tence of three objective conditions: men, women, and material objects.
Praxis 67

They use an all-inclusive notion of production that views men and

women as both the products and the producers of society. Their theoret-
ical framework is highly structured with a typology of production that
includes basic production of human beings, object production of food
and other products intended for consumption, and maintenance produc-
tion that increases the social value of things without altering their use
value. The Cataláns posit a dialectical relationship between production
and property, a relationship that forms the internal dynamic that drives
social transformation.
Like la arqueología social of Latin America, the Spanish Marxists
regard a correct knowledge of the past as the necessary basis for praxis.
The first generation of Spanish Marxists struggled to transform Spanish
universities from ideology factories of the Fascist state into centers for the
critical study of the social world. They confronted right-wing ideology in
the traditional intellectual settings of the university classroom and the
museum and in the published word. They proposed alternative interpre-
tations of the ancient past that reveal the errors in the established dis-
course and in the written critiques of the social and political context of its
production (Estévez and Vila 1999, 2006).
The contemporary generation of Marxist Catalán archaeologists have
taken their archaeology to the masses in a popular praxis of archaeology.
This praxis parallels the approach advocated in this book, as the
Cataláns seek to undertake archaeological research that serves the inter-
ests of specific communities. For example, in the late 1990s, university
students worked with Barcelona citizens to identify, map, and record
Spanish Civil War bomb shelters in order to sustain the communal mem-
ory of the resistance to fascism. Currently archaeologists from the
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona are launching a program of forensic
excavation in mass graves from the Spanish Civil War to document the
atrocities of that war and to return the bodies of the victims to their fam-
ilies (Gassiot 2005; Gassiot et al. 2005).
In Nicaragua, Catalán archaeologists have worked with the Unión
Cooperativas Agropecuarias de Miraflor and the Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de Nicaragua, in Managua, to develop an academic research
program that is integrated with the interests of the agricultural coopera-
tive at Miraflor (Gassiot and Palomar 2000). The project has involved
collaboration with the cooperative members in the design, execution,
and interpretation of archaeological research. The Miraflor project
builds a popular heritage for Nicaragua. It uses archaeology to integrate
the interests of Nicaraguan intellectuals and camposinos, to reinforce
68 Praxis

and support the Nicaraguan cooperative movement that is under assault

by conservative forces.

Classical Marxism and Praxis in North America

Childe influenced a generation of archaeologists who have continued his

focus on Marxist theory in North America (Trigger 1984b, 1985, 1993b;
Muller 1997; Patterson 2003). From Childe they have taken the idea that
praxis should follow from correct knowledge of the world, as well as the
realization that such knowledge is always tentative. They have critiqued
both the processual and the post-processual archaeologies.
North American Marxist archaeologists reject the basic tenets of the
New Archaeology. In the works of V. Gordon Childe, the late Bruce
Trigger (1978) found the critical dialectic between history and evolution,
theory and data, and mentalism and materialism that he thought lacking
in the New Archaeology. In the early 1960s, Thomas Patterson (1973,
1989) came in contact with Marxist political thought in Peru. He
increasingly saw it as a useful theoretical perspective for archaeology. By
the 1970s, Marxism had attracted the interest of only a handful U.S.
archaeologists (Gilman 1989:63). Among these was Phil Kohl, who, in
the 1970s, turned to Marx as an alternative to processual archaeological
approaches to exchange and production (Kohl 1975).
These North American Marxists reject the New Archaeology’s sepa-
ration of critique, knowledge, and action, recognizing the subjective
nature of knowledge and the political role knowledge plays in human
affairs (Trigger 1995a:328–329). They have written numerous critical
historical analyses of archaeology that discuss how archaeological
thought developed in social and political contexts and served specific
interest (Patterson 1986, 1989, 1994, 1995b, 2003; Trigger 1980b,
1984a, 1989a, 2006). They see Marxism as a theory that can explain
human behavior and provide guidance for a revolutionary praxis to
transform the world. Kohl (1985:115) argues that archaeology can cap-
ture a real past, but only through an active dialogue that involves a cri-
tique of our research and of the social and political context of that
research. This process arrives at knowledge through a never-ending series
of approximations. Praxis then follows from this knowledge.
Among these scholars, Bruce Trigger most explicitly considered the
linkages among epistemology, critique, and praxis. Trigger described
himself as a moderate realist (Trigger 1989b, 1995a, 2003b). He recog-
nized the subjectivities of knowledge that arise from the situatedness of
Praxis 69

knowing in social and political contexts. He rejected the positivist notion

that social scientists can use method to control and moderate these sub-
jectivities. For Trigger, scholars can attain “true” knowledge only if they
overtly challenge these subjectivities as part of the research process.
Trigger wrote much on the subjectivities of archaeological research
and knowledge. He critically examined how North American archaeolo-
gists’ assumptions of unchanging Indian people mislead them in their
interpretations of the aboriginal past (Trigger 1980a). He identified three
global approaches to archaeology that are determined by a country’s
position in the capitalist world system: nationalist, colonialist, and impe-
rialist (Trigger 1984a). In each approach he demonstrated how archaeol-
ogy incorporated the aspirations, fears, and goals of the dominant classes
of the society. In both editions of his historical opus, A History of
Archaeological Thought (Trigger 1989a, 2006), he linked the develop-
ment of archaeology to the rise of the bourgeois classes in the West. The
bourgeoisie embraced archaeology as a means to create mythic charters
that legitimate both the nation-states they have created and the notion of
a Western civilization superior to other civilizations (see also Patterson
1997). In these critiques, Trigger sought to reveal the false ideology that
has shaped archaeological thought and knowledge, so that scholars can
strip it away and find “true” knowledge.
Trigger’s historical analysis shows scholars that archaeology reflects
the interests of specific classes or communities. This revelation debunks
the processualists’ definition of archaeology as a method to obtain objec-
tive (that is, context-free) understandings of the processes of cultural
change. Some archaeologists have used this revelation to create archae-
ologies that serve the interest of communities other than the bourgeois
classes and thus weld archaeology as an instrument to challenge the pow-
erful rather than legitimate them (Shanks and McGuire 1996). Archae-
ologists have developed feminist (Hays-Gilpin and Whitley 1998;
Franklin 2002; Conkey 2005a), indigenous (Watkins 2000; Smith and
Wobst 2005), and working-class (McGuire and Reckner 2003; Shackel
and Palus 2006; Saitta 2007) archaeologies, among others. Trigger ulti-
mately sought to transform the social world through his scholarship
(1993a, 1998:192–193, 2003a, 2003c). He urged scholars to struggle
for a society that is technologically advanced, culturally diverse, egalitar-
ian in both its economy and its politics, and in which all people share in
both the rewards and the responsibilities of living on this earth.
Trigger (1989b:790) had confidence that as long as social scientists do
not ignore it, “true” knowledge will prevail over ideology. His confi-
70 Praxis

dence comes from the belief that the weight of true knowledge works
against ideology: true knowledge resists the subjectivities of knowing.
For Trigger, scholars attain true knowledge in a two-part process: they
critically identify the subjectivities of knowing, and they accumulate data
that will challenge the pernicious uses of history that come from those
subjectivities. Like Childe, Trigger realizes that the material world of
archaeology and the data we generate do not exist independent of
thought. Only by struggling to find a fit between our views of reality and
the material world can we generate data and true understanding. Trigger
recognizes that this is an inexact and imperfect process. The social, polit-
ical, and ideological subjectivities of knowing heavily affect the process,
but the process remains capable of generating, and being shaped by, our
cumulative knowledge of the past.
Trigger’s last ten years of scholarship culminated in his book
Understanding Early Civilizations (Trigger 2003c). He argued that
humans in small-scale societies are not inherently altruistic but rather
that they maintain egalitarian relations through ridicule, gossip, and fear
of witchcraft. Thus, hunter-gatherer societies demonstrate that social and
political egalitarianism is possible in human societies, but they do not
provide a blueprint for the future. Trigger’s historically comparative
cross-cultural study of early civilizations indicates that these small-scale
mechanisms fail with a scalar increase in social complexity. He argued
that institutionalized political, social, and economic inequality inevitably
results from social evolutionary changes that necessitate high-level deci-
sion making. Trigger maintained that this necessity, however, does not
explain why managerial elites appropriate heavy surpluses for their own
use. He concluded that people cannot create more just societies by simply
removing the corrupting influences of a mode of production such as cap-
italism. Rather, social scientists have to imagine and design control mech-
anisms that will work in technologically advanced large-scale societies in
a manner analogous to the role of ridicule, gossip, and fear of witchcraft
in small-scale societies.

Critical Archaeology and Praxis

Independent of the classical Marxists’ reading of Childe, a new genera-

tion of North American archaeologists read Western Marxism in the
1970s and 1980s. These archaeologists differ from the classical Marxists
in their wish to build praxis through critique and consciousness raising
rather than from a “true” knowledge of the world. The critical archaeol-
Praxis 71

ogy developed at the same time as and with much fruitful interaction
with post-processual archaeology. Mark Leone’s critical archaeology
derived from an understanding of French structural Marxism and the
Frankfurt School (Palus et al. 2006).
Leone began his critical archaeology with the problem of ideology.
Following Althusser, he wondered why our taken-for-granted assump-
tions about the world permeate every aspect of daily life and why they
work so effectively to uphold dominant interests while making true
knowledge of class interests difficult. Leone sought to expose the work-
ings of ideology in modern capitalist society: “to understand the past in
order to create a consciousness of modern society” (Leone 1986:431).
He hoped to raise the consciousness of people about the ideological
nature of capitalist society so that they would struggle to change it: cri-
tique and knowledge lead to action. As Leone and Little state, we need to
understand “things historically to be able to know consciously or criti-
cize the society we live in now” (1993:162). Leone and Potter (1999)
continued this mission in Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism, which
expresses one of the clearest and strongest statements about American
historical archaeology as political action. In that same volume, Wylie
(1999) passionately argues that we have to study capitalism in order to
comprehend a present that is based on exploitative social relations and to
provide alternatives to those relations.
To move from theory to praxis, Leone (2005) used the Annapolis
project, which, in 1981, began questioning the ideological construction
of Annapolis, Maryland. Protestant English colonists established Annap-
olis in 1650 C.E., and throughout the eighteenth century it was an impor-
tant sociopolitical and cultural center of the North American colonies. It
has been the capital of Maryland since 1695, and numerous important
figures of the U.S. Revolution lived in or visited the city. Today the city
uses this history to attract tourists, making heritage tourism its major
industry. The Annapolis project sought to reveal the contradictions and
social inequalities that the hegemonic history of the city obscured on
paper, in reconstructed and restored buildings, and in the ground (Leone
et al. 1987; Leone 1995). The project organizers sought to create a par-
ticipatory experience that would engage tourists in a critical reflection of
the colonial history of the United States.
Reading the popular history of Annapolis, project scholars concluded
that this history is fragmented and that it reflects a nationalist ideology
(Palus et al. 2006). The popular history sunders the temporal and cul-
tural continua of the city from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
72 Praxis

and obscures the relationship between Euro-Americans and African

Americans. This dismembering reinforces a static and harmonious vision
of the U.S. past and justifies the inequalities of the modern community.
These archaeologists took up Althusser’s (1969) notion of a dominant
ideology that creates a false consciousness for all members of society.
They sought to challenge this ideology by demonstrating to the tourists
that the history and the “historic” Annapolis that they encounter has
been “falsely” constructed. The project used guided tours of the historic
center of the city and of project excavations to demonstrate how the
hegemonic history has been constructed and to reveal the inequalities
and exploitation of the past (Leone and Potter 1984). The archaeologists
stressed how industrialization led to the increased consumption of goods
and created the division between those who could acquire such goods
and others who were marginalized in this consumption. They also
emphasized how common goods used in daily life served to establish and
enforce social divisions in the formation of the United States.
In the end, the Annapolis project’s challenge to the hegemonic history
of the city failed to sweep away the official history and the cultural and
social relations that produce it (Potter 1994; Leone 1995). The tourists
generally responded to the alternative vision that the project offered by
reinterpreting this vision in terms of their preconceptions derived directly
from the ideology under critique. The archaeologists wanted to demon-
strate the relationship between past inequalities and contemporary rela-
tions of discrimination. The visitors, however, were fascinated by the
exotic and odd features of the past. Their responses focused on the
unusual, the monumental, and the extraordinary and expressed assump-
tions directly derived from a capitalist ideology. Tour participants were
preoccupied with the value of objects, the time necessary to produce
goods, and their availability in the market.
This range of responses should not have been surprising, given the
background of the tourists who visit Annapolis and the types of histori-
cal interpretations that they have already internalized. In general, people
engaged in heritage tourism are members of the professional middle
classes of U.S. society (McGuire 1992b). The fact that Annapolis is a
high-end tourist destination only amplifies this trend. This example
demonstrates that relationships of power affect the distribution of
knowledge within society. Leone, following Lukács (1971), noted that a
hegemonic ideology reifies and distorts the history produced for the mass
of people. This history naturalizes and makes universal the inequalities
and forms of exploitation that exist in the past and the present. Clearly,
Praxis 73

in Annapolis, the privileged classes of U.S. society did not question hege-
monic history even when presented with alternatives.
As a result of this experience, Leone (1995, 2005) adopted Haber-
mas’s (1984) notion of communicative action. He recognized that the
people who were alienated by the contradictions, inequalities, and
exploitation in society would be the most open to alternative histories.
He therefore shifted the focus of the research in Annapolis to an African
American community within the city and to a project that actively incor-
porates members of that community (Leone 2005). Archaeologists did
not assume that they knew the interests of the community. Instead, the
archaeologists actively worked with its members to develop an alterna-
tive historical discourse that meets the interests of both parties. This pro-
cess of cooperation revealed to the archaeologists how African Amer-
icans also assume the symbols and beliefs of the hegemonic ideology but
on their own terms and only after giving these symbols and beliefs their
own meaning (Mullins 1999).

Feminism and Praxis

Feminism has the capability to transform society (Mohanty 2003). As

Maria Franklin has stated, “The point of employing feminist theorizing
in general is to produce scholarship that leads to social change”
(2001:114). Like Marxists, feminists evaluate the structures of power
and ideology that exist in society (Conkey 2005a). Feminists, however,
ask, “How much of what is going on here is caused by the workings of
patriarchy?” (Enloe 2004:7). Through this question, they critically seek
to understand how male privilege springs from controlling women or
mobilizing their complicity or both (Enloe 2004:7). This understanding
then becomes a starting point for a praxis to challenge and eliminate the
control and complicity of patriarchy and thus transform society.
Feminism has been a significant locus of praxis within the discipline of
archaeology (Conkey 2005a). For a feminist archaeology to exist, it had
to first confront a powerful androcentric bias in archaeology and provide
alternatives to it. Today we might ask why archaeologists did not seri-
ously take up the study of gender until the 1980s (Conkey and Spector
1984), long after such research had become commonplace in cultural
anthropology, history, and sociology. Throughout human history, social
relations have always been gendered, because human societies must
include both men and women. How could archaeology, with its studies
of long-term change in human societies and its comparative methods,
74 Praxis

ignore gender? There is really only one answer to this question, and it has
to do with the powerful androcentric bias of the field (Gero 1983; Wylie
1991; Gilchrist 1994:1–4; Gamble 2001:30–31).
Androcentric bias has pervaded both the interpretation of the past and
the practice of archaeology (Sanahuja 2002; Voss 2006). Archaeological
interpretation has largely focused on the image of active male hunters,
chiefs, kings, builders, and farmers in opposition to the image of passive
female gatherers, child bearers, food processors, and homemakers (Gero
1983; Conkey and Spector 1984). Archaeologists have created and rein-
forced these images of active men and passive women, which have in
turn reinforced broader gender stereotypes in U.S. society. Before the
mid-1970s, many male professors actively and explicitly discouraged
women from entering the field of archaeology, because they saw women
as unprepared for the rigors and physical demands of fieldwork (Kehoe
1998:ix). Instead, they encouraged women to become cultural anthro-
pologists or to stay in the laboratory (read kitchen) (Gero 1985). Ivor
Noel-Hume, in a rare published example of these attitudes, wrote:
“Digging is, after all a masculine occupation, and while more women
than men are likely to do well in the pot washing shed or in the labora-
tory, shovel wielding women are not everyday sights in Western society”
(1969:60). This bias directly affected the ability of women to advance in
the field (Gero 1985).
Conkey and Gero (1991:5) have identified three goals for a feminist
archaeology: to expose gender bias in archaeological inquiry; to find
women in the archaeological record and to identify their participation in
gender relations, gender ideologies, and gender roles; and to challenge
underlying assumptions in Western culture about gender and difference.
This is a program of praxis that calls for a radical transformation of
archaeology.
Processual archaeologists ignored gender in the past by assuming that
gender relations are given in nature, that is, that male and female roles
originated with the biological evolution of the human species and that
they have been unchanged from that point on (Conkey and Williams
1991). The processualists assumed that men would always hunt (engage
in productive activities) and women would always gather (engage in
reproductive activities) (Gero 1985). They also assumed that changes in
men’s productive activities (hunting, farming, building, etc.) drove cul-
tural change and evolution, while the tasks of reproduction (cooking,
caring for children, and cleaning) remained basically unchanged. The
neo-evolutionary theory that they embraced made gender inequality a
Praxis 75

given and unchanging facet of human existence. One of the most popu-
lar evolutionary sequences in processual archaeology is Morton Fried’s
(1967) sequence of egalitarian, ranked, and stratified societies. Fried
defines an egalitarian society as one in which the only inequalities that
exist are those of sex and age. That which does not change (in this case
universal gender inequality) does not require study and becomes the
unexamined category (women) in research.
Feminist archaeologists challenged the assumption that gender is given
in nature through critique and by seeking knowledge based on that cri-
tique (Gilchrist 1994, 1999; Sanahuja 2002). Much of their first volley of
work pointed out the strong androcentric bias in archaeology (Gero
1983, 1985; Conkey and Spector 1984; Conkey and Williams 1991). At
the same time, feminist scholars undertook many case studies to reveal
variation in gender roles in the past and the active participation of
women in the course of cultural change (Sanahuja 2002). Brumfiel’s
(1991) demonstration that women’s work of tortilla making and weav-
ing was central to the formation and maintenance of the Aztec state is a
classic example.
Recently some archaeologists have enlisted queer theory to study sex-
uality as a shaping essential of social life (Schmidt and Voss 2000; Joyce
2004; Voss 2006:121–122). Like gender, sexuality is an omnipresent
aspect of social life that archaeologists have largely ignored (Dowson
2000). The first step to an archaeology of sexuality has been to propose
our common knowledge of sexuality as a topic of research. Scholars
enlisting queer theory argue that archaeologists need to consider sexual-
ity in all of its variations and to challenge the assumption of heterosexu-
ality as the given or natural variant (Meskell 2002a:283).
Feminist critiques of science and the subjectivities of knowing con-
tributed to the critiques of positivism. Feminist archaeologists asked, If
the positivist method is value free and self-correcting of error, how is it
that the processual archaeology was so riddled with gender stereotypes
and androcentric biases (Wylie 1991, 2002:185–199)? Like the post-
processualists and Marxists, feminists recognized that scholars with dif-
ferent standpoints as a result of their gender, race, or class position in
society will draw different conclusions to produce knowledge (Wylie
1991; Gilchrist 1999:17–30). Some feminists have argued that a female
standpoint privileges the study of gender (Harding 1986; Taylor
1990:35; Mohanty 2003:231–232).
Wylie (1991) has questioned this privileging of standpoints, because it
assumes a universal standpoint (i.e., a universal womanhood) that can-
76 Praxis

not really exist. Each person exists in a social space defined by multiple
social relations and contradictions. No specific standpoint can encom-
pass the social whole or even the social position of an individual scholar.
She argues that instead of privileging specific standpoints, scholars need
to embrace a diversity of points of view. With this diversity some stand-
points may give a clearer understanding of a specific issue than others,
but no one standpoint will give a complete or “true” picture of the
world. We thus gain by including multiple standpoints in our construc-
tion of knowledge. She also asks us to consider entry points, which deter-
mine the social questions addressed by different approaches and theories
and may also lead to different answers to those questions. But if in their
questioning, Marxists’ consideration of class includes its relationship
with gender and sexuality, feminists’ reflection on gender includes its
relationship with sexuality and class, and queer theorists bear in mind
the relationship of gender and class in their focus on sexuality, then their
answers should be complementary and not necessarily at odds with one
another.
The feminist demonstration that nature does not determine gender
relations calls into question the gender inequalities within archaeology.
Feminist archaeologists have identified the power structure of archaeol-
ogy as part of the problem. They have actively sought to critique and
transform our discipline into a more equitable practice. Kramer and
Stark (1994) began addressing issues of gender inequality by collecting
and analyzing data on the effects of gender on professional careers. Leslie
Wildesen (1994) did the first such study and published it in the
Anthropology Newsletter. In the 1990s a plethora of further studies col-
lected and examined more data (Chester et al. 1994; Spencer-Wood
1994; Beaudry 1994). Nelson, Nelson, and Wylie (1994) drew many of
these together in the Archaeological Papers no. 5 of the American An-
thropological Association. These studies consistently show that women
have lower status in the profession than men. Women hold fewer posi-
tions of leadership, publish fewer books, advance more slowly up the aca-
demic ladder or not at all, receive fewer research grants, hold fewer
positions at prestigious universities, earn less money than men, and are
subjected to other more subtle forms of gender discrimination (Nelson and
Nelson 1994; Association Research, Inc. 2005:C1–C5; Baxter 2005).
Women and men have organized to address these inequities, for
instance, forming the Committee on the Status of Women in the Society
for American Archaeology (SAA) and the Committee on Gender Issues in
the Society for Historical Archaeology. Less formal networks have
Praxis 77

included the Historical Archaeology Women’s Caucus, the Women in

Archaeology Interest Group in the SAA, and a host of even less formal
and often unnamed groups. At regional, national, and international
meetings, archaeologists have organized workshops and roundtables to
discuss issues of gender inequality in the field and ways to change it.
In many ways feminist archaeology has been the most productive
praxis of archaeology, although much remains to be done to eliminate
gender inequalities in our discipline. With feminism we see the integra-
tion of critiquing the world, knowing the world, and taking action in the
world with a well-defined political agenda: the elimination of gender
bias in archaeology. The gross and explicit inequities that characterized
archaeology before the 1970s have become less common. Archaeologists
rarely, publicly, express overtly sexist attitudes like those of Ivor Noel-
Hume. But in some ways, contemporary sexism is more subtle and cir-
cumspect and thus harder to confront than the overt pronouncements of
a generation ago (Baxter 2005). Women now receive slightly more than
half the Ph.D.s awarded in archaeology (Zeder 1997:205). Quantitative
increases in the status of women have also occurred within archaeology,
but those increases have not been adequate to eliminate gender bias
(Zeder 1997:203–207). Despite improvements over the last three
decades, women continue to be paid less, have less success at receiving
both grant and CRM funding, hold a lower number of CEO positions in
private firms than men, and make up a smaller percentage of the tenured
professoriat (especially at research universities). Women in archaeology
continue to face a plethora of challenges surrounding life roles and deci-
sions that are quite different from those faced by their male colleagues.
These challenges spring from continuing gender inequalities in society as
a whole. Clearly, a feminist praxis needs to continue to confront the
more subtle biases, social patterns, and domestic issues that perpetuate
gender bias in twenty-first-century archaeology.

Indigenous Archaeology and Praxis

The struggle of indigenous peoples for the repatriation of the remains of

their ancestors gave birth to indigenous archaeology (Lippert 2005:63).
In settler states of the world, including North America (McGuire 1992a;
Nichols and Andrews 1997), the southern cone of South America
(Endere 2002; Barbosa 2002), New Zealand (Tapsell 2002), Australia
(McNiven and Russell 2005), Scandinavia (Levy 2006), and southern
Africa (Parsons and Segobye 2002; Nemaheni 2002; Ouzman 2005),
78 Praxis

archaeology has been a fundamentally colonialist enterprise, the study of

the ancestors of the conquered by the descendants of the conquerors.
Indigenous archaeology sprang from the attempts by archaeologists,
both native and nonnative, to decolonize archaeology (Atalay 2006).
In the 1970s and 1980s, indigenous peoples informed archaeologists
that the pasts we study are the heritages of living peoples and that
archaeological practice forms part of their oppression (Deloria 1993; D.
Thomas 2000; Watkins 2000; Fforde 2004; Wiseman 2005). An example
illustrating these confrontations occurred in Fort Collins, Colorado, in
the fall of 1971, when members of the American Indian movement
(AIM) took over the Colorado State University physical anthropology
laboratory. They handed out “citizens arrest warrants” to field school
students who had excavated Native American burials the summer before.
I was one of the students they issued a warrant. The AIM members then
gathered up human bones that the Department of Anthropology had
purchased from scientific supply houses for the university’s teaching col-
lection. They later exchanged the teaching collection in return for the
field school burials. Another example occurred in Australia in 1982,
when Ros Langford (1983) delivered a broadside attack on archaeology
at the meetings of the Australian Archaeological Association. She spoke
as a representative of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. Langford
asserted that Aboriginal pasts belonged to Aboriginal Australians and
that they alone had the right to control these pasts. In reaction to her
comments, the meeting passed a motion that recognized Aboriginal own-
ership of their heritage and called on archaeologists to seek permission
from Aboriginal owners to do their research (McNiven and Russell
2005:189). Indigenous people see archaeology in the historical context of
colonialism. In this context, the archaeologists’ control of native pasts is
simply one more facet of native life that has been taken from them. Most
archaeologists have been honestly troubled by the dark images reflected
at them from the mirrors that indigenous people held up. They see their
actions in terms of their own intentions, debates over national heritage, a
scientific search for knowledge, and the particular history of archaeology.
Eventually, it took legislation to force settler state archaeologists to
confront and change the colonialism of our discipline (Watkins
2000:176). In the United States, the Native American Graves Protection
and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA) legislated that Native Amer-
icans would have a voice in the disposition of their ancestors’ remains. In
Australia, the Mabo decision of the High Court of Australia in 1992 rec-
ognized native title to lands in Australia. This decision and subsequent
Praxis 79

legislation greatly expanded the ability of Aboriginal Australians to con-

trol their lives, lands, and heritage (McNiven and Russell 2005:197). A
patchwork of laws regulate repatriation in Australia, but their impact on
archaeology is similar to NAGPRA in the United States (McGiven and
Russell 2005:189). In New Zealand, the Resource Management Act of
1991 and the Te Ture Whenua Maori Act of 1993 have enabled Maori to
become increasingly active in repatriation and control of their heritage
(Watkins 2000:163). Also in 1993, apartheid ended in South Africa.
In all of the settler states, the struggle over repatriation was part of
larger movements to grant indigenous peoples greater independence and
control over their lives, lands, culture, education, and heritage. In the
United States, the federal policy of self-determination has allowed Native
American nations to take over functions that were performed by the
Bureau of Indian Affairs. Many Native Americans have taken control of
the management of heritage on their reservations. The first two Indian
nations to do this were the Navajo, who set up the Navajo Nation
Cultural Resource Management Program in 1978, and the Zuni, who
established the Zuni Archaeological Program in 1978. In 1996, twelve
Native American nations established Tribal Historic Preservation Offices
(THPOs), thus taking control of the implementation of federal historic
preservation legislation on their lands. In 2006, fifty-eight Native
American nations had THPOs (NATHPO 2006). As a result of these
changes, Indian nations now employ archaeologists who work for the
best interests of the nations (Two Bears 2006). This has also created a
pool of jobs for Indian people who wish to become archaeologists.
At the end of the twentieth century, more indigenous peoples in settler
states had the opportunity and preparation to attend universities (Deloria
1997:216), which has resulted in a small but increasing number of
college-educated indigenous professionals. Some of these professionals
are archaeologists. Indigenous archaeologists find themselves in an awk-
ward and often conflicted position (Lippert 1997, 2005; Watkins 2000;
Russell 2001; Isaacson and Ford 2005; Two Bears 2006). On the one
hand their “objectivity” may be questioned by other archaeologists, and
on the other hand their motive may be distrusted by indigenous people.
This position makes them highly aware of the social and political context
of archaeology.
Although native peoples have been at the heart of the creation of an
indigenous archaeology, this archaeology is not defined or limited by
race or ethnicity. “Indigenous archaeology is a methodology or a theo-
retical approach, rather than a culturally or biologically based activity”
80 Praxis

(Lippert 2005:63). Key to this approach is the desire to behave respect-

fully with regard to the cultural sensibilities of native peoples. Indigenous
archaeology is archaeology informed by native values and agendas. It is
archaeology conducted by and for indigenous peoples (Smith and Wobst
2005). Ultimately indigenous archaeologists strive to help native peoples
build vibrant communities in full control of their pasts, presents, and
futures.
Four facets are key to the praxis of indigenous archaeology. First, it
serves the interests of native communities. Second, the method of work-
ing with these communities is collaboration. Third, collaboration
requires that many voices be heard. And finally, this kind of archaeology
should be of use to indigenous peoples. An indigenous approach to
working with communities goes beyond the tenets of community archae-
ology (Marshall 2002) to become partnership archaeology (McNiven
and Russell 2005:232–242), emphasizing that the native community is a
full partner in the archaeological process. Indigenous archaeologists view
members of a native community not as simply another voice but rather
as the owners and regulators of their own heritage. For example, in
Australia, archaeologists need permission from the Aboriginal, tradi-
tional owner of an area before they can work there (Wiynjorroc et al.
2005). In the fullest application of this approach, scholars do archaeol-
ogy as guests of the community.
Collaboration requires working jointly with the community to benefit
all participants in the process (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson
2004:6; Atalay 2006:293–294; Martinez 2006). The colonialist history
of archaeology makes establishing collaboration between archaeologists
and indigenous communities a process fraught with problems. Scholars
must overcome long-standing prejudices against archaeologists. For the
archaeologist, the first step to doing this is to be humble (Zimmerman
2005), and the second step is to respect the community that he or she
works with (Lippert 2005). Indigenous archaeologists reject mechanical,
bureaucratic processes of consultation that focus on single events and
acts. Collaboration implies sustained action and springs from a long-
term commitment to the community (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and
Ferguson 2004:23; Isaacson and Ford 2005:361). This commitment, by
its very nature, bridges private and professional lives. The archaeologist’s
commitment to an indigenous community must go beyond issues of
archaeology and the archaeologist’s needs.
Collaboration leads archaeologists to include multiple voices and per-
spectives in their research. Indigenous knowledge and tradition are most
Praxis 81

commonly contained in oral traditions. A partnership archaeology

respects oral tradition and includes it in research. Virtually every indige-
nous community has suffered oppression and exploitation. For this rea-
son, an indigenous archaeology rejects a hyperrelativistic multivocality
that lets all voices speak, because its practitioners know that some voices
are pernicious. Indigenous archaeologists simultaneously embrace multi-
vocality and seek objective understandings (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and
Ferguson 2006:159). They produce multilayered narratives of the past
that mediate between the physical and social world and recognize the
connection between these worlds and meaning and belief.
Native communities have little reason to collaborate with scholars
unless the community has some use for the archaeology. Indigenous
archaeologists seek to be allies with communities (Wobst 2005:25). Our
praxis can address real issues for communities, including land claims,
tourism, and education, and can help to facilitate cross-cultural commu-
nication (Isaacson and Ford 2005). A long-term commitment to be of use
to communities also leads the scholar to assist in community interests
beyond the craft of archaeology.
Indigenous archaeology has grown rapidly in the first decade of the
twenty-first century. Myriad examples of collaboration between archae-
ologists and indigenous communities exist, far too many to cite here
(Nichols and Andrews 1997; Watkins 2000; McNiven and Russell 2005;
Smith and Wobst 2005; Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2006).
These collaborations represent some of the strongest examples of praxis
in modern archaeology, a praxis that is transforming the field and sup-
porting native interests.

Dialectical Knowledge and Praxis

Earlier archaeological attempts to contribute to the transformation of
society and, hopefully, to the creation of a more humane world provide a
foundation for building a praxis of archaeology. My dialectical, rela-
tional theory of praxis eschews the polar opposition between objectivism
and relativism that has characterized contemporary theoretical debate in
archaeology. It rejects an instrumentalist approach that seeks to engineer
society. It also rejects critical and relativist approaches that strip the
scholar of any authority to take and support transformative action. A
dialectical praxis of archaeology begins with a relational theory of
knowledge that offers an alternative to the objectivist and relativist epis-
temologies that create these poles.
82 Praxis

The real question facing a praxis of archaeology is not whether

archaeological knowledge should be objective or subjective but, rather,
how we relate the subjectivities of knowing and the realities of the world
in our construction of archaeological knowledge. Such knowledge is a
very complicated thing. Prior knowledge, conventions, methods, and cul-
tural understandings both enable and restrict empirical observations, and
the whole process of constructing archaeological knowledge is situated in
social and political processes. It is little wonder that relativists avoid
these complexities by letting all voices speak or that positivists put their
faith in empirical observations and try to control or ignore the rest. In a
dialectical approach, the evaluation of knowledge involves a comprehen-
sive dialectic among what I have called the four Cs: coherence, corre-
spondence, context, and consequences.
The alternative that I present here attempts to chart a route down the
middle of the opposition between subjective and objective knowledge.
This perspective gives equal weight to the subjectivities of knowing and
the realities of the world but does not reduce knowledge to either. This is
not a particularly easy or comfortable route, because it disallows the
security of true knowledge as well as the complacency of hyperrelativism.
I argue, however, that this discomfort and tension provide the means to
avoid the dangers of either extreme.
Hodder (1999:24) has noted that the debate over how to plot such a
path quickly becomes a matter of emphasis and language and that schol-
ars resolve the tension between the subjective and the objective only in
practice. My emphasis and language follow here, but the true measure of
my alternative lies in the praxis discussed in chapters 3, 4, and 5.
The idea of dialectical knowledge springs from a realist philosophy of
science (Keat and Urry 1983; McGuire 1992b:106–115; Wylie 2002).
Realism accepts that a real world exists independent of our senses and
that scholars can gain empirical knowledge of that world. Our knowl-
edge of the world, however, remains imprecise, faulty, and diverse,
because we can know the world only through human minds. Knowledge
is, therefore, constructed in the dialectic between our consciousness and
the reality of the world. Neither is it an honest reflection of that reality,
nor is it simply fabricated.
To understand and evaluate knowledge, archaeologists have to look at
its coherence with theory and logic, its correspondence with our obser-
vations, the context in which we have created it, and the consequences
that it has for humanity. Our research occurs in social and political con-
texts that shape what questions we will ask, how we will ask them, and
Praxis 83

what meaning we will give the answers. Our knowledge of the world
should be coherent in a logical sense and consistent with the theory that
guides our research. But coherence does not guarantee that knowledge
will correspond to the empirical observations we can make of the world
or that it will not have harmful consequences. We can construct coherent
knowledge that lacks an empirical fit with reality, and we can produce
coherent rationalizations for malicious actions. By the same token, cor-
respondence with empirical observations is not, as the processualists
would suggest, an adequate measure of knowledge.
Usually multiple interpretations fit a set of empirical observations,
and when an interpretation does not correspond to empirical observa-
tions, scholars habitually modify the interpretation to fit. In the end, an
interpretation may buckle, groan, or even collapse under the weight of
empirical observations, but multiple alternatives virtually always remain.
Since we may practically never be able to come up with one “empirically
correct” interpretation, we cannot justify accepting one interpretation
simply because it fits. As socially responsible intellectuals, we should
critically consider the consequences of the different interpretations that
do fit our empirical observations. This critique should include both
assessment of the subjectivities of knowing that lie behind that knowl-
edge and the social, political, and ideological consequences of that
knowledge.
A four-part dialectic between coherence, correspondence, context, and
consequences makes the evaluation of knowledge claims quite complex,
contentious, and changeable. In a dialectical relationship, no one of these
criteria is adequate or privileged. Moreover, the critique does not reduce
to a simple sequential comparison of one to another but instead requires
a dynamic, recursive consideration of how each informs and creates the
others.

Coherence

It perhaps goes without saying that our interpretations of the past must
be coherent. They should be rational; they should not be tautological or
filled with logical contradictions. But coherence implies more than just
logical consistency. It also implies theoretical coherence.
Interpretations should be consistent with our social theory. Social the-
ories entail assumptions about the world, entry points for studying the
world, objectives, critiques, terminologies, conventions, and styles of dis-
course. They not only define what is important to study in the world;
84 Praxis

they also circumscribe the questions we can ask and the observations we
can make. They enable us to make sense out of the enormous variability
that exists in the social world, but they also restrict what aspects of that
variability we can study. The melding of different theoretical stances and
concepts through an in-depth process of synthesis can produce a coher-
ent interpretation. Synthesis requires that we consider the compatibility
and incompatibility of various entry points, objectives, and assumptions.
Failing to do the hard work of synthesis results in muddled interpreta-
tions. The willy-nilly use of theoretical concepts, terms, or goals to con-
struct knowledge results in confusion, blind alleys, and both conceptual
and substantive contradictions in interpretation.
One of the main purposes of theory is to define the questions we ask
about the social world. These questions define the phenomena that we
study and simultaneously enable and limit what we can understand of
the social world. Our interpretations should also be theoretically coher-
ent and comprehensive in terms of the questions we ask. Better interpre-
tations take into account more aspects of the phenomena we wish to
understand (Sayer 1979:117).

Correspondence

Archaeologists can make empirical observations of the world, and these

observations may be regarded as evidence or data. Examples of such
observations include the following: the Native peoples of the Mesa Verde
region of southwestern Colorado grew corn in 1100 C.E.; the climate of
Europe was considerably colder in the Pleistocene than it is today; the
Great Pyramid at Giza was built in the third millennium before the com-
mon era. Such observations are not reality, nor do they exist prior to or
outside dialectical knowledge. As observations, they are the products of
conscious human action. They necessarily entail the prior knowledge,
conventions, methods, categorizations, and cultural understandings that
people must bring into play to observe the world in a coherent way.
Empirical observations take on meaning, become knowledge, only
within a socially constructed discourse about the world. In the absence of
such meaning, observations such as the examples listed above are trivial.
We must give meaning to observations; they cannot simply speak for
themselves (Leone 1981:312). These meanings are made in the present
and reflect social and political interests. Thus, all knowledge must be
social and political. But, as Agger observes, “Just because we recognize
that truth is a matter of perspective doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t pur-
Praxis 85

sue it, especially where the alternative is to accept the present (‘facts’) as
eternity” (2004:47).
I have carefully chosen the word observations here as opposed to
facts, data, or truths. As Hodder (1999:84) has pointed out, empirical
observations are dialectical from the start. He would argue that we can
have no knowledge of the world independent of the “prejudgments” we
must have to be able to observe the world. Accepting this point, however,
does not mean that observations necessarily correspond or fail to corre-
spond to reality (Eagleton 2002:103–109). For example, consider empir-
ical observations comparing the length of two projectile points, one four
centimeters long and the other six centimeters long. Many aspects of
these observations, such as why we make them in the first place and our
choice of systems of measurement (metric or English), are cultural under-
standings. However, the reality remains that one point is longer than the
other. Empirical observations entail a culturally constructed awareness of
how to make sense of the world, but the fact that they do or do not cor-
respond to the reality of the world means that even these cultural under-
standings can be considered empirically (Eagleton 2002:103–109).
Evaluating correspondence requires that archaeologists retain some
authority over the production of knowledge (Colwell-Chanthaphonh
2006:23). Archaeology is a craft that entails heart, hands, and minds
(Shanks and McGuire 1996). The archaeologist’s craft is the skill to use
material remains to interpret past experiences and situations. As a craft,
archaeology is more than just a set of theories, methods, and techniques.
It is, instead, a practice with a range of endeavors from the technical to
the interpretative, from the practical to the creative. Our authority lies in
our craft. Mastering the craft of archaeology requires special training and
skills. Not all people can think archaeologically, have acquired the back-
ground knowledge necessary for archaeology, or have mastered the
motor skills to do archaeology. These things are learned. The craft of
archaeology is a process of interpretation at all levels, from the first
spade in the ground to the last period of the final report (Hodder 1999).
But to say that archaeology is interpretation does not mean that it is
merely subjective or that just anyone can do it.
Estimating a radiocarbon date provides an example of this. The col-
lector must have prior knowledge that includes how the process of radio-
carbon dating works, how samples may be contaminated, what the
advantages and problems are of dating different materials, and how to
identify these materials in the field. He or she will also need to have the
background knowledge necessary to interpret archaeological contexts,
86 Praxis

both the stratigraphic and the horizontal. The collector must make judg-
ments as to what materials to take and where to take them. Collectors
often disagree on the type of material to take, the identification of types
of material, and, more likely, the nature of the context to take the sample
from. Exposing the sample and removing it involve knowledge of proce-
dures and specific motor skills. When results come back from the lab, the
archaeologist needs to understand issues such as the correction of radio-
metric dates and the conventions of how dates are reported. Once a
chronometric date is derived from lab results, its relevance to the
chronology of the phenomenon being dated must be interpreted in terms
of the stratigraphic and horizontal relationships between a host of
archaeological objects (layers, artifacts, and features). In this process,
multiple interpretations will exist at every step, but not all interpretations
will be correct and not all individuals are equally capable of making
such interpretations.
Our interpretations need to fit the empirical observations that we
make of reality. They should correspond to the artifact distributions,
dates, events, and practices that we can interpret from the archaeological
record using empirical methods. In looking for this correspondence, we
must remember that these observations are not reality. They are the
results of both a reality that existed before our research and the concep-
tual schemes, methods, and prior knowledge that governed the inquiry
that found them. As such, they are in the same moment both real and
social.

Context

Archaeologists practice their craft in social and political contexts. Post-

processual, feminist, indigenous, and Marxist critiques of the last twenty
years have emphasized the importance of understanding the impact of
these contexts on knowledge production. Once archaeologists abandon
the illusion that our discipline is an objective science, we have to seri-
ously consider these contexts, the interests that our craft serves in them,
and how these interests influence the knowledge that we produce. My
consideration focuses on the relationship of our craft to the “public,” to
actual human communities, and to archaeology itself.
Much discussion has occurred in archaeology about the need for our
discipline to serve the interests of a “general public.” This discussion has
frequently proceeded without asking key questions: Who is this public?
Do they need or want to listen to us? The first step in answering these
Praxis 87

questions is to recognize that there is no such thing as the general public.

Archaeologists speak to many publics, including the educated middle
class, school children, Native Americans, college students, and scholars.
At the most general level, a discourse on how we interact with these
publics is useful (Pyburn 2005; Schmidt 2005). The praxis of archaeol-
ogy, however, will most fruitfully occur on a much more local level in a
dialogue with actual human communities. Archaeologists should ponder
how our praxis relates to global issues and broadly defined publics, but
the realization of that praxis will be local.
I use the term communities here to refer to groups of people who
share a common lived experience and who, because of this experience,
have common interests and the potential to engage in collective agency.
This shared experience may be based in a variety of social factors—class,
gender, age, sexuality, residence, race, and ethnicity—and most com-
monly in complex combinations of them. In the modern world, such
communities may or may not share a common geographic space, but
shared experience does imply individuals who interact with one another.
Communities in the sense that I have defined them here are not hard-
bounded objects. Individuals are normally members of multiple commu-
nities, and they form, manipulate, and perform identities within and
among them. These processes also transform the community, making
community boundaries and membership dynamic and fluid. People are
also members of communities that exist at different scales. For example,
unionized workers in southern Colorado form a definable and self-
conscious community that acts in solidarity. Most of these workers are
members of the United Mine Workers of America, which forms a larger
community, which in turn is a subset of the labor movement in the
United States. Finally, each community exists in relationship to other
communities with their own interests and different abilities to realize
those interests. The conflicts, collaboration, and clashes among these
communities transform them all.
By my definition, members of a human community share a lived expe-
rience and share common interests as a result of that experience. But this
does not mean that a community is a homogeneous mass. Because indi-
viduals participate in multiple communities and communities almost
always encompass multiple social factors, all members of a particular
community do not participate the same in that lived experience or share
interests equally. Power relations exist among communities and within
communities. Inequalities, discrimination, and oppression usually exist
within communities; therefore, alienation may exist both among com-
88 Praxis

munities and within communities. An emancipation that confronts

oppressive relations among communities cannot be fully successful if it
ignores alienations of class, gender, sexuality, or what ever else exists
within communities.
Zimmerman (2005) discusses the complex politics he encountered in
defining indigenous communities during his direction of the Crow Creek
Massacre Project in 1978. He had thought he would have to deal with
two distinct communities: the Lakota of the Crow Creek Reservation,
where the archaeological site was located, and the Arikara community
that was descendant from the occupants of the site. Instead, he found
that multiple social groups, varied interests, and internal hierarchies
existed within these two communities. More important, it became appar-
ent that serving some interests compromised others. In the end, the proj-
ect was able to negotiate among these interests.
Human communities do not exist in the abstract. Archaeologists in a
given social context cannot assume a priori what the nature or composi-
tion of the communities will be, how they will be delimited, or what their
internal inequities or interests will be. General or global understandings
of social factors such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality aid us
in understanding the local context. But answering the questions of who
the communities are and whether they want or need to listen to us
requires archaeologists to examine actual lived experience and our rela-
tionship to it within that context.
I would argue that our consideration of contexts should begin by
identifying the communities involved, their interests, their internal rela-
tions, and their relationships with other communities, especially the com-
munity of archaeology. In many cases, such as with Native Americans
and Egyptians, the archaeologist enters a context in which the commu-
nity already has an established relationship with archaeology and well-
formed opinions on the need to listen to us or not (Pullar 1994; Moser et
al. 2002; Meskell 2003, 2005; Zimmerman 2005). In other cases archae-
ology may be something new to a community. These relationships affect
where archaeologists can do research, what methods they can use, what
questions they ask, and what answers they consider.
Archaeology as craft can be put to the service of multiple communi-
ties. Archaeology is part of the social capital that defines the middle class
and has historically served the needs of that class, as well as traditionally
serving the needs of a community of archaeologists that is by and large a
subset of the middle class. However, some archaeologists have entered
into active dialogues with feminist (Hays-Gilpin and Whitley 1998),
Praxis 89

indigenous (Watkins 2000; Smith and Wobst 2005), Third World

(Schmidt 2005), and working-class communities (McGuire and Reckner
2003; Shackel and Palus 2006), among others. I advocate that archaeol-
ogists actively dialogue with different communities to forge common
interests and acknowledge different interests with mutual goals (Marshall
2002). Successful dialogues entail a give and take that can transform
both archaeology and the community involved.
Archaeologists must, however, always be in dialogue with the com-
munity of archaeology itself. It is here that our craft lives and where it is
developed, modified, assessed critically, and enhanced. The community
of archaeology possesses the prior knowledge, conventions, methods,
categorizations, and cultural understandings that allow us to practice our
craft and to make interpretations of the world. It is also this community
that reviews, validates, and critiques our specific practice of the craft of
archaeology. In the absence of this review and critique, our individual
practice of archaeology can have no authority.
Most archaeological work serves the community of archaeologists.
The majority of archaeologists seek to increase archaeological knowledge
for this community and to assess and improve the craft of archaeology
(Hodder 1999). This is good and essential, but it is not all that archaeol-
ogy should be. Marxists, critical archaeologists, feminists, indigenous
archaeologists, and post-processualists have all critiqued the ideological
aspects of the knowledge we produce. These critiques make archaeolo-
gists more aware of the political role of archaeology in society as an ide-
ology factory and of archaeology’s potential use as a tool of oppression.
The knowledge that we create also serves the social and political interests
of other communities, and some of us need to engage this process as
praxis.
The community of archaeology forms a social context that is embed-
ded in larger contexts. As the feminists have demonstrated, our praxis of
archaeology must critically evaluate and attempt to transform archaeol-
ogy when inequities and abuses exist within our community. The social
and power relations of archaeology have real consequences for archae-
ologists. Again, as in the gendered praxis of archaeology, these social and
power relations usually replicate and participate in broader societal rela-
tions. Thus, a praxis that transforms archaeology both necessitates and
participates in praxis to transform society. By the same logic, our praxis
with other communities should encourage a critique of archaeology and
affect our practice as archaeologists.
Communities, in the sense that I define them here, are made. A
90 Praxis

shared consciousness of community is essential to transformative

change, because only with this consciousness can collective agency be
realized. Powerful groups within a society actively seek to prevent such
consciousness from rising in order to preserve their own interests. But
through struggle and negotiation, individuals can establish a shared
consciousness of community and engage in collective agency. Com-
munities that fail to form a collective consciousness become ineffective
agents. Archaeology has taken an active role in the dialogue to create
this consciousness.
Archaeologists who enter into such a dialogue must give up some of
their privilege (Marshall 2002). The privilege that we surrender should
not be the authority that comes from our craft. The craft of archaeology
gives us the ability to make observations, interpretations, and knowledge
of the world that cannot be made by those who are not archaeologists.
Without such authority, we speak only as the propagandists for political
interests. Without this authority, why should anyone believe us? More
important, why should we believe ourselves? Rather, we should give up
the programmatic privilege to exclusively define the questions, the sub-
stance, and those aspects of the archaeological record that we apply our
craft to. These things should be established through a dialogue with the
community we work with. Only then can we make a meaningful contri-
bution to praxis.
Dialogue and humility are the tonic against the hubris of social engi-
neering and the vanguard party (Zimmerman 2005). By allowing the
community that we serve to help define our research questions and goals,
we can do research that is relevant to that community. This process of
negotiation ought to continue throughout the research process. We
should not impose our goals, conclusions, or solutions on the commu-
nity; we must negotiate them. Because archaeologists and the communi-
ties we work with bring different skills, interests, knowledge, and expe-
rience to the discussion, the dialogue may often be conflictual. It should
also be transformative of archaeology, the community, and knowledge.

Consequences

By and large all the approaches to knowledge in archaeology have

avoided making the consequences of knowledge criteria for evaluating it.
This issue is a political hot button. Those approaches that stress objec-
tivity want to fall back on “data” as the arbiter of knowledge. For
archaeologists that promote such approaches, weighing the consequences
Praxis 91

of knowledge gives the political agenda too much power to subsume

“true” knowledge (Trigger 1995b:331). The approaches that stress rela-
tivism lack any metatheory to critically evaluate the consequences of
knowing. Thus, Hodder (1999:155–156) finds it difficult to distinguish
between the archaeological curiosity of New Age goddess worshipers
and the heritage claims of indigenous peoples. The key to evaluating
consequences lies in the critical appraisal of the social interests and the
communities that archaeology serves.
If we accept that archaeology has always served the interests of com-
munities and that it is desirable to expand beyond the traditional com-
munity of the middle class, then we must consider the issue of how we
decide what interests to serve. I propose that archaeologists need to
answer three questions when evaluating potential interests that they
might serve: Whose interests are served and how? How do those interests
and their consequences relate to other communities and to the internal
relations of the communities we serve? How do those interests corre-
spond to our knowledge of the world?
I will examine each of these questions in turn. They raise issues that
archaeologists have been reluctant to discuss explicitly but have always
been implicit in our research. Answering these questions is the hardest
and most fraught step in a dialectical praxis.

The Chosen Interests and How They Are Served It is always difficult to
know what the costs, benefits, and unintended consequences of human
action will be. We should not, however, use uncertainty as an excuse to
ignore the potential consequences of our research and the interests to
which it might be put. By the same token, we ought not embrace a mul-
tivocality that lets all voices speak regardless of the consequences of that
speech. Rather, we need a relational multivocality that examines whose
interests will be served and whose voices we will support, ignore, or
challenge (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2006). Part of the pro-
cess of examining interests involves looking beyond the specific issues of
archaeology to a broader political picture.
Considering the consequence of our research demands that we have a
good understanding of the political stage on which we perform (Deloria
1997; Lilley 2006). Archaeologists frequently confront the politics of
heritage, but we rarely consider the full canopy of political issues in
which our work is embedded. This canopy includes powerful historical
relations of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and class that our craft and
we are part of. For example, several archaeologists have advocated inter-
92 Praxis

pretations of the aboriginal history of ancestral Pueblo peoples that stress

the importance of violence, warfare, and even cannibalism (LeBlanc
1999; Turner and Turner 1999). They propose these ideas as an antidote
to the stereotype of Pueblo peoples as peaceful, noble savages. These
archaeologists have failed, however, to examine how their arguments
reinforce simplistic oppositions between good and bad Indians and how
their stance participates in and reinforces a current political backlash
against Native American rights (McGuire 2002c; McGuire and Van
Dyke, forthcoming).
We need to evaluate interests primarily by social rather than psycho-
logical and emotional criteria. In other words, we should prioritize the
social, political, and material consequences of community interests as
opposed to simply asking how well these interests fulfill the emotional
and psychological needs of community members. People may derive
emotional and psychological satisfaction from the pursuit and realization
of interests that alienate others and, thus, are contrary to emancipation.
For example, many Germans were emotionally moved by the Nazi
Party’s Nuremberg rally of 1934. They left the rally feeling that the expe-
rience had given them a stronger sense of what it meant to be German.
Indeed, a movie of the rally, Triumph of the Will, remains an emotionally
stirring experience, perhaps even more than the actual rally because of
our knowledge of the events that followed it (Kershaw 1987). The Nazis
used rallies, films, and other ideological devices to give people a redefined
and emotionally satisfying sense of what it meant to be German at that
time. This fascist sense of German-ness alienated and dehumanized mil-
lions of Jews, Gypsies, gays, disabled people, and dissidents, thus justify-
ing and making possible their murder (Gellately 2002).
In a post-processual radical relativism, archaeologists often invoke
emotional and psychological criteria to justify multivocality. Hodder
(1999:155) questions archaeologists’ right to challenge the beliefs of god-
dess worshipers. These largely bourgeois, European cultists embrace the
nineteenth-century evolutionist notion that the first religions were all
based in a belief in the goddess. They cite female figurines at Çatalhöyük
as evidence that this town was a center for the worship of the goddess
(Meskell 1995, 1998). Hodder notes that he has seen people emotionally
moved by visiting goddess sites and in a side bar states, “Many of these
people are women. Who are you to say that discovering the goddess
does not help them gain a stronger sense of what it means to be a women
after millennia of subjugation?” (Hodder 1999:155). Goddess worship
does not have the harmful consequences of nazism. Emotional consider-
Praxis 93

ations may justify archaeologists simply ignoring this bourgeois play. I

am not, however, sure that goddess worship at Çatalhöyük is without
problems. When goddess worshipers arrive at Çatalhöyük, they arrive as
privileged members of a dominant, secular Western culture. They enter a
social context torn by struggles between a secularized, urban, Turkish
elite and a devout, Islamic, rural peasantry (Hodder 2000). Much of this
struggle focuses on gender, and the European feminist view of gender
that the goddess worshipers bring conflicts with the views of the devout
Muslim inhabitants of the area (Hodder 1998). The consequences of
these actions must be carefully considered.

The Relationship between Different Communities Marxist theory

charges us to examine how the gain for some will come at a cost to others.
We cannot evaluate consequences without looking at the relationships
between communities and interests, which exist in social contexts that are
the historical products of cooperation and struggle. In order to look at
these relationships, scholars need to understand the histories that created
them, as well as their present situations and contexts (Mohanty 2003).
People form communities for various reasons, including the advance-
ment of different kinds of interests. My focus here is on communities that
share social, political, and material goals, rather than those that exist pri-
marily or solely to serve individual psychological and emotional needs.
Individuals may form communities principally to fulfill these needs by
creating identities for themselves, such as the U.S. organization known as
the Society for Creative Anachronism, whose members gather to take on
medieval personae. In capitalism, these individuals tend to be from the
bourgeois and middle classes, who have sufficient resources and free time
to engage in such play.1 The vast majority of the people in the world,
however, do not have the liberty for such amusement. They are too
intently engaged in the struggle to survive. Communities may arise from
such recreation, but they rarely engage in transformative change, because
their focus is on individual self-realization.
Identity creation that may be harmless bourgeois play in one context
may be domination in another. The mainly white, middle-class members
of the Society for Creative Anachronism take on medieval personae,
engage in mock combat, feast, and create an imagined society in which
they spend a significant portion of their lives (Price 2002). The Society
for Creative Anachronism represents unabashed romanticism, but their
activities do not appear to enter into power relations with other commu-
nities or compromise the interests of other communities.
94 Praxis

However, the same cannot be said for all bourgeois play. The New
Age movement has many devotees in the southwestern United States and
elsewhere. These people seek spirituality through a pastiche of “primi-
tive” beliefs and rituals drawn from various sources, including Native
America. The government, missionaries, schools, and private interests in
the United States have a long history of suppressing Native American cul-
ture and denigrating Native religion. New Age devotees thus operate,
often unwittingly, in a powerful arena of social struggle. These members
of the dominant society express white dominance and subordinate Indian
peoples by appropriating aspects of Native religion and desecrating
Native sacred sites with trinkets and made-up rituals (Finn 1997).
Navigating the complex maze of interests among and within different
groups is one of the thorniest tasks of a self-conscious praxis of archae-
ology (Zimmerman 2005). Social groups constantly negotiate and strug-
gle to advance their interests vis-à-vis other groups. Archaeologists who
engage in praxis that is radical and transformative should address inter-
ests that serve the needs of the subordinate and challenge the privilege of
the dominant. Relations of power and oppression, however, are usually
multifaceted, cross-cutting, and contradictory. A single “oppressor” with
a clear relationship of dominance to other groups almost never exists.
Relations of power may seem clear when scholars compare only two
communities or only look at them from a global perspective. When
viewed as part of a larger set of social relations and in detail, however,
these power relations rapidly become confusing and confounding.
Subordinate groups may have oppressive internal hierarchies of power. A
group that is subordinate in one context or relationship may be domi-
nant in another.
Archaeologists also need to keep in mind that, in much of the world,
archaeology has been a colonialist or imperialist enterprise (Trigger
1984a), which is most assuredly the case in North America and Australia
(McGuire 1992a; Watkins 2000; McNiven and Russell 2005). In most of
the rest of the world, it has been a tool of nationalism (Trigger 1989a;
Kohl and Fawcett 1995; Meskell, ed. 1998; Kane 2003; Galaty and
Watkinson 2004). Archaeology may be part of the problem in any of
these cases.

Knowledge of the World Sometimes the interests of social groups may

be based on a conception of the world that lacks correspondence to our
empirical observations or conflicts with our existing knowledge. This is
where archaeologists must retain the authority of our craft. We cannot
Praxis 95

support alternative group interests if they do not correspond to our

empirical observations and knowledge of the world. We need to retain
the authority of our craft to reject such interests. That said, archaeolo-
gists must also be critical of our own observations and knowledge when
challenged by alternative conceptions.
Within cultural anthropology, many scholars have adopted an advo-
cacy position that challenges anthropology to “speak truth to power.”
One quandary in such a position is what to do when fictions support the
subordinate and challenge the dominant. Can we ignore a lack of corre-
spondence with knowledge and wield convenient falsehoods in our strug-
gle? I would join others to argue that we must not (Conklin 2003)! If
archaeologists advocate ideas or perceptions that do not correspond to
our knowledge of the world, then archaeology loses any authority to
speak truth, and we abandon the dialectic between the empirical and the
political. With this abandonment comes self-deception and the rational-
ization of harmful acts. More important, we lose the ability for self-
reflection and the capability to critically evaluate power relations within
the groups we work with.
This is all to suggest that in our knowledge claims, archaeologists
need to have some independence from the social groups and interests that
we serve. The basis for this independence resides in our craft and in our
obligations to the community of archaeologists. It is, therefore, almost
inevitable that our knowledge claims will come into conflict with the
claims of the communities we work with. I view this situation as good.
Such contradictions create tensions that force each community to criti-
cally examine its own dialogue as well as the other’s. This critique may
have many consequences, such as modifying the perceptions and interests
of the archeologists or the community or both and revealing social rela-
tions and ideologies that were previously unknown to one or the other or
both. Of course, these contradictions also carry the real danger of rup-
turing the relationship.
Different ways of knowing the world and different kinds of knowl-
edge can be gained from these epistemologies (Colwell-Chanthaphonh
and Ferguson 2006). When archaeologists work with communities that
do not share a Western secular way of knowing, tensions are inevitable
(Watkins 2000; Smith and Wobst 2005). Any U.S. archaeologist who has
worked closely with Native Americans appreciates this. I have numerous
experiences of visiting an archaeological site with Indian people and
being struck by how differently we see things. Archaeologists and Native
Americans often give importance to dissimilar types of empirical obser-
96 Praxis

vations. Native American ways of knowing involve different notions of

time, evidence, and proof (D. Thomas 2000; Deloria 1997, 2002;
Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2006). Indigenous epistemologies
are not archaeological. At this point, positivists would dismiss the Native
voice as metaphysical. At this point, relativists would claim that letting
each voice speak is a radical praxis. In a dialectical praxis, however, we
should ask how these voices have been historically created in relations of
power and how we may use an archeological way of knowing to con-
front this inequality.

Conclusion
Trigger worried, like many others, that doing archaeology in the service
of politicized interests is dangerous. They worry that archaeology will
only produce mythic charters to validate these interests unless the disci-
pline makes “true” knowledge the ultimate arbiter. But archaeology must
be more than a bourgeois practice in order for true knowledge to have a
transformative impact on the world. Put more simply, an archaeology
that speaks to and for the bourgeoisie will not be transformative, because
the bourgeoisie have no interests in transformation; witness the failure of
Leone’s critical archaeology in Annapolis. Trigger worried that political
partisanship will dominate our efforts and that, with a loss of objectivity,
archaeology will become simply a prop for preconceived ideologies, as it
did in the Soviet Union. He feared that such an archaeology risks self-
deception. He wanted us to stand aside from the game and serve more as
referees than as players. Yet, it was Trigger who laid out the process by
which this anxiety may be alleviated.
Trigger (1989a; 2006) made the convincing case that modern archae-
ology has resulted from the development of the capitalist middle classes
and that archaeology has served the interests of that class. He also
argued, however, that the accumulation of knowledge by archaeology
has resisted bourgeois ideologies despite the class basis of archaeological
practice. He identified the key to this process as a focus on empirical real-
ity and a reluctance to dismiss lightly any evidence that does not support
current political beliefs. Thus, he argued that to consider the political
nature of archaeology is to arrive at a more objective understanding of
the world.
I agree and support these efforts within the community of archaeol-
ogy, but I argue that there is more to be done. As Trigger recognized,
what knowledge archaeologists accumulate depends in large part on
Praxis 97

what questions and interests we bring to our research. I wish to allow

communities other than the middle classes to define the interests and
questions of archaeology. In doing so, I resist simply providing other
communities with mythical charters that justify their existence, interests,
aspirations, and authority. Instead, I wish to examine these questions
critically and empirically, to arrive at knowledge that will transform the
political struggles of our world, in terms of both advancing nonbourgeois
interests and critically assessing the interests and beliefs of the communi-
ties that archeologists work with. Such a praxis of archaeology stands to
be the best hope of contributing to a change in society for the collective
good of a majority of human beings.
The praxis of archaeology involves a dialectic among knowing the
world, critiquing it, and taking action in it. Effective praxis is possible
only if archaeologists abandon the opposition between objectivity and
subjectivity and give equal weight to knowing the world and to critiquing
it. When critique, such as that of feminists or the indigenous, reveals that
archaeology is part of the problem, we need to take action to transform
archaeology. By critically examining what interests our craft serves in the
world, we can put that craft to the advancement of interests that have the
potential to make the world a more humane place.

Note
1. In this book, I am using a Marxist relational concept of class that differs
from the common popular usage of class in the United States. In common usage,
class position is equated to income (lower, middle, and upper class) or to the type
of work done (blue collar, white collar, pink collar). In a relational concept of
class, a person’s class position is defined by his or her relationship to the means of
production and to other class positions. In capitalism, there are minimally three
class positions: the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production; the workers
or proletariat, who actually produce goods and services; and the middle class of
managers, professionals, and administrators, who mitigate between the bour-
geois and the workers.
Chapter 3

Class
With Mark Walker

In Marxist terms, one doesn’t advocate class struggle or

choose to participate in it (common bourgeois misconcep-
tions). The class struggle, representing the sum of the con-
tradictions between workers, broadly defined, and capitalists,
simply is, and in one way or another we are all already
involved, often—as we come to discover—on the wrong
side. On learning about it and where we fit into it, we can
now decide to stop acting as we have been (the first decision
to make) and what more or else we can do to better serve our
own interests. What can be chosen is what side to take in this
struggle and how to conduct it.
Bertell Ollman (2003:20)

Class and class relations permeate all aspects of capitalist society, and as
a part of that society archaeology embodies these relations. Archaeolo-
gists approach the study of the past from a discipline that has tradition-
ally served middle-class interests. This discipline also has its own
dynamic class structure, and this structure is becoming increasingly
exploitative both in the academy and in cultural resource management
(CRM). Bertell Ollman (2003:20) reminds us that we are all already part
of the class struggle. By learning about the struggle and where we fit in it,
we can decide which side we are on. Too often we learn that we are on
the wrong side of the struggle. This knowledge gives us the ability to
change our conduct to support the other side.
The authors’ lived experience of class affects our understanding of
class struggle in archaeology. Randall McGuire is a tenured full professor
of anthropology at Binghamton University. He worked in contract
archaeology during the halcyon days of CRM in the 1970s, starting as a

98
Class 99

field technician and eventually becoming a project director. He came to

Binghamton University as a visiting assistant professor in 1982. His stint
as a gypsy scholar was brief, because he acquired a tenure-track position
the next year. Since then he has lived the guild model, rising to the rank
of full professor. He is a member of the United University Professionals,
a faculty union affiliated with the AFL-CIO. Mark Walker’s professional
career has been almost entirely within CRM, with a stint in graduate
school. He worked as a transient field tech in the early 1980s and, after
obtaining a master’s degree, achieved a steady position as a project direc-
tor. Returning to graduate school at Binghamton University, he worked
on the research-oriented Colorado Coalfield War Project. He is currently
a project director at the Anthropological Studies Center of Sonoma State
University, a university-based CRM group. Mark is a member of the
California State Employees Association, which is affiliated with the AFL-
CIO. We published an earlier version of this chapter as an article in
Historical Archaeology (McGuire and Walker 1999).
Attempts by archaeologists to transform the social context of our dis-
cipline are not new. In the last decade archaeologists have published
explicit comments on the gender foundations (Chester et al. 1994;
Nelson and Nelson 1994; Spencer-Wood 1994; Beaudry 1994; Zeder
1997; Association Research, Inc. 2005: C1–C5; Baxter 2005) and racial
foundations of our practice (Barbour 1994; Leone 1995; Blakey 2003;
Watkins 2000). Concerns with gender and race are essential to an eman-
cipatory archaeology, and feminist and indigenous critiques of archaeol-
ogy have contributed much to freeing archaeology of sexism and racism.
Even with these contributions, however, much remains to be done, and
we would argue that an explicit concern with class must be added to
these efforts.
The class structure of archaeology has remained largely a hidden
issue, which should not surprise us, because the denial of class and
class differences has long been a fundamental aspect of American ide-
ology (Domhoff 1983:3–6; Fantasia and Voss 2004:167; Durrenberger
2006). Despite this denial, class remains one of the inherent relation-
ships that structure modern capitalist America. By denying or over-
looking its existence, we ignore an important factor that affects the his-
tories that we write and structures the audiences whom we write for.
Finally, by denying class, we conceal the class struggles that exist
within our own discipline.
Archaeology is a locus of contemporary class struggle. In the universi-
ties, downsizing, declining employment opportunities, restructuring, and
100 Class

decreasing funding levels have proletarianized the life of the mind

(Aronowitz 1997; Nelson 1997a; Yates 2000; Nelson and Watt 2004). A
reserve army of part-time professors and gypsy scholars now performs
more than 40 percent of the teaching. Class struggles have erupted
among teaching assistants, professors, and administrators (Nelson
1997b). In cultural resource management, a group of managers formed a
trade association, the American Cultural Resource Association (ACRA),
and numerous field technicians banded together in the United Archae-
ological Field Technicians (UAFT), a union affiliated with the AFL-CIO.
These struggles involve all archaeologists in one way or another, and they
are profound forces shaping our discipline.
Archaeology exists in a tangled web of class relations. In our effort to
untangle the strands, we have found it useful to distinguish between
archaeology as a discipline and the various occupational structures that
archaeologists labor in. The discipline of archaeology is a branch of
learning grounded in a distinctive craft that can be used to study the
world (Shanks and McGuire 1996). Individuals who master this craft
and who apply it to research in the world are archaeologists. Archaeolo-
gists have different professions or careers, and they labor within various
occupational structures. For most of the twentieth century, professional
archaeologists primarily practiced their trade in the academy (museums,
colleges and universities), and amateur archaeologists did archaeology as
a hobby or as an avocation. Today, archaeologists still ply their craft in
these two contexts, but the vast majority of professional archaeologists
labor in CRM, where most are employed in either the governmental or
the private sector (Patterson 1995b; Zeder 1997; Fagan 2006).
Archaeology as a discipline has a class position and class interests. As a
profession or occupation it has a class structure in which class struggle
occurs.
Archaeology is part of the intellectual apparatus (composed of things
such as schools, books, magazines, organizations, and arts) that pro-
duces the symbolic capital (including things such as esoteric knowledge,
shared experience, certification, and social skills) that individuals need to
be part of the middle class (Ball 2003). This apparatus, archaeology
included, developed as part of the historical struggles that created the
capitalist middle class (Trigger 1989a, 2006; Patterson 1995b). Because
archaeology is set in the middle class, it attracts primarily a middle-class
following and often does not appeal to working-class audiences.
Archaeology also uses the intellectual apparatus of the middle class to
reproduce itself. Ideally this reproduction follows the guild model of
Class 101

apprenticeship and mastery. In the idealized guild model all archaeolo-

gists are either middle-class or apprentices moving toward that status.
In our current era of fast capitalism, all archaeologists are not simply
either middle-class or apprentices with a reasonable hope of becoming
masters. Hypercompetition among capitalist firms erodes workers’
rights, reduces workers’ security, and corrodes working conditions
(Agger 2004; Fantasia and Voss 2004). Archaeology is no exception; fast
capitalism has transformed its class structures. The guild of apprentices,
journeymen, and masters does not exist in the academy or in CRM.
These occupations entail permanent class divisions that exploit subordi-
nates and do not provide them with a living wage. In the academy, class
divisions have arisen as a result of changes in the function of the univer-
sity in reproducing the middle class. In CRM they arise from the com-
petitive, profit-driven nature of contracting and have led to the practice
of employers paying skilled archaeologists at lower wage rates than those
applied to unionized unskilled laborers. In both cases the ideology of the
guild model obscures the realities of exploitation.
What, then, is to be done? The first step to class praxis in archaeology
is to learn how archaeologists live class and how class interests limit the
audience of the discipline and exploit individuals within it. With this
knowledge, archaeologists can see where they fit in the struggle and
decide whose side they are on. Those of us who are in a privileged posi-
tion, whether we be tenured faculty or project directors, can question
that privilege. This questioning could include how we remake our prac-
tice to mitigate the exploitation we find. Finally, those in subordinate
positions, whether they are field technicians or adjuncts, need to organ-
ize to represent their own interests and struggle on their behalf. Our
focus in this chapter is on archaeology in the United States, but similar
processes and struggles are occurring in archaeology throughout the core
capitalist states of the world.

The Discipline of Archaeology and Class Interests

The prevailing middle-class nature of archaeology manifests itself in the
history of our discipline and in the audience for archaeology (Trigger
1989a, 2006; McGuire 1992b; Potter 1994; Patterson 1995b). The dom-
inance of middle-class interests and ideologies in archaeology encourages
archaeologists to see middle-class perspectives as universal and to disdain
other class interests and perceptions of the past. The discipline of archae-
ology reproduces itself in the middle-class setting of the academy.
102 Class

The Middle Classes

In the United States, the popular usage of the term middle class equates
this class either with middle income or with white-collar occupations
(Keller 2005). In contrast to this common usage, we speak of class as a
structural phenomenon defined by the relationship of a social group to
the means of production (Foster 2006; Wurst 2006). In modern capital-
ism, the middle classes . . . are composed of those individuals who stand
between the owners (or controllers) of the means of production and the
workers who do the labor of production (Braverman 1974:403–409,
1989:42; Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1979; Ball 2003). On average this
group (e.g., managers, administrators, and professionals) earns consid-
erably more than mean or median income and makes up no more than
about 20 percent of the population of the United States (Ehrenreich
1989:12). Most of these individuals have white-collar occupations, but
many other white-collar occupations (e.g., clerks, secretaries, and bank
tellers) are not considered middle-class in terms of class structure. The
middle class is not a uniform mass, and some authors even write about
it in the plural, that is, the middle classes (Patterson 1995b; Ball 2003).
For instance, individuals who make their living primarily through their
command of a specialized body of knowledge form the professional
middle class, as opposed to the managerial middle class, which is com-
posed of individuals who make their living primarily by managing the
labor of others (Ehrenreich 1989; Ball 2003). We can also define class
factions on the basis of regional, racial, and cultural differences (Patter-
son 1995b).
Classes reproduce themselves over time. Self-reproduction is an essen-
tial characteristic of classes that distinguishes them from strata (Foster
2006). Indeed, many sociologists have argued that scholars should speak
of classes as being made up of families rather than individuals (Sennett
and Cobb 1972; Domhoff 1983, 1996). The process of reproduction
entails both maintaining the structural position (the occupations and
relations among them) and socializing the next generation to take up
roles within that class position.
In modern capitalism, the reproduction of the middle class is the most
insecure of the class positions (Frykman 1987; Ehrenreich 1989:12;
Sullivan et al. 2001; Ball 2003; Lareau 2003). Working-class occupations
minimally require the ability to do physical labor or, in many cases, sets
of skills that can be acquired from a parent or with modest education.
Bourgeois families (the owners of the means of production) usually have
Class 103

capital resources (wealth, stocks, property, etc.) that allow them to

ensure that their children will be able to maintain the class position of
their parents (Mills 1956; Domhoff 1996). Middle-class families, how-
ever, typically lack the capital resources to guarantee their children’s class
position and instead seek to provide them with a formal education to
equip them with a body of esoteric knowledge, social skills, shared expe-
rience, and certification that will allow them to become middle-class
adults in the future. Formal education gives middle-class children the
technical skills necessary for middle-class occupations, but of equal
importance it entrusts to them the social skills and symbolic capital of the
middle classes (Ball 2003; Lareau 2003). Middle-class status derives pri-
marily from the control of this symbolic capital.
For most of the twentieth century and now in the twenty-first, entry to
the middle class has typically necessitated a college education, and this
need has been a major barrier to working-class individuals who sought to
enter the middle class (Wolff 1969:151; Ryan and Sackrey 1996:101–
109; Aronowitz 1997:190; Jancius 2006). Higher education commonly
separates learning from doing (Potter 1994:148–149; Leonhardt 2005),
which creates a hurdle for working-class individuals, who must sustain
work to maintain themselves and their own families. These people are
limited to learning as part of their work or in their time off from work or
to rapidly learning technical skills that they can directly apply to work.
The separation of leaning and doing also permeates the relations of
labor between the middle and working classes. The work of the middle
class is by and large intellectual labor, the application of formal knowl-
edge or principles commonly to tasks that working-class individuals exe-
cute. Middle-class ideology puts a high value on the intellectual appara-
tus of capitalism, especially educational institutions, because the class
reproduces itself through this apparatus and because much of the class
finds employment in it. Working-class ideology tends to resent this appa-
ratus as elitist, because it hinders their own class mobility and because in
the work place their experience and skill are usually subservient to for-
mal knowledge (Ryan and Sackrey 1996:106–109). Thus, middle-class
individuals tend to value book learning in contrast with the working-
class appreciation for knowledge based on experience (Sennett and Cobb
1972; Frykman 1990; Ball 2003).
The segmentation of learning from doing, of intellectual labor from
physical labor, and of knowledge workers from manual workers lies at
the heart of modern capitalism (Braverman 1974). This segmentation is
the culmination of over a century of class struggle. The discipline of
104 Class

archaeology was both a tool in and a product of this struggle (Trigger

1989a, 2006; Patterson 1995b).

Class and the History of Archaeology

Archaeology is a distinctive product of Western civilization that emerged

in the mid-nineteenth century (Daniel 1981:212). Trigger (1989a:14;
2006) links the appearance of archaeology with the rise to power of the
middle class in Europe and argues that archaeology broadly expresses the
ideology of that class. The middle class found in archaeology a tool to
build a common identity, to legitimate their power and privilege, to cre-
ate mythic charters, and to justify historical events that served their inter-
ests. This process involved an alliance with the bourgeois classes that
defined the broader interests of capitalist society and initially funded
most of the work. Archaeology has also been a weapon wielded in those
struggles among class factions within the middle and bourgeois classes
(Patterson 1995b).
The rise of the middle class took place in a context of nation-state for-
mation (Anderson 1983). The new middle class manipulated the process
of nation creation by inventing traditions that define and reenforce the
culture, language, and heritage of the nation (Hobsbawm 1983; Harris
1990). They also established national institutions of education and learn-
ing (such as museums) to manipulate these traditions and to educate
their youth. Archaeology fit into these new institutions as a way to con-
firm middle-class notions about history and human nature (Trigger
1989a:14; Wallace 1996:4–32, 178–186). In the middle of the nine-
teenth century, the first professional, middle-class archaeologist, Jens
J. A. Worsaae, received his training and employment in one of these
nationalist institutions, the Museum of Northern Antiquities, in Den-
mark (Trigger 1989a:81).
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the new nation of the
United States faced a fundamental contradiction in the ideology that jus-
tified its existence as a nation. The people of the nation-state were not the
indigenous people of the continent, but rather the interlopers who had
forcibly taken the territory from those who were already here, the Native
Americans. Competing class factions of bourgeois and middle-class inter-
ests developed rival ideologies to reconcile this contradiction (McGuire
1992a). An urbane East Coast elite steeped in Enlightenment thought
argued that Native Americans were the first Americans, a race of noble
savages who could not withstand the vices of civilization and who, as
Class 105

they vanished, had passed legitimate ownership of the continent to the

new Americans from Europe. Bourgeois individuals such as Thomas
Jefferson and George Washington asserted that the great mounds of the
Midwest and South demonstrated the accomplishments of the first
Americans. Through the nineteenth century, middle-class professionals in
eastern institutions, including Henry Schoolcraft, Samuel G. Morton,
and John Wesley Powell, conducted research to support the first
American point of view (Kennedy 1996:238). A rural midwestern and
southern elite, including presidents Andrew Jackson and William Henry
Harrison, embraced a more fundamentalist notion that Americans were
God’s chosen people and that Native Americans were not part of the
nation. Midwestern middle-class individuals such as Ephraim G. Squire,
Edwin H. Davis, and J. W. Foster did the leg work to support the idea
that a race of civilized Mound Builders had built the mounds only to be
overwhelmed by red savages who destroyed them (Patterson 1995b:28;
Kennedy 1996:238). Cyrus Thomas disproved the Mound Builder myth
in 1894, four years after the last official battle of the Indian Wars at
Wounded Knee made moot the legitimacy of a European nation on the
American continent. The ideological battles of the class factions had
shifted to other terrain.
By the turn of the century, the bourgeois class of the United States had
created a complex intellectual apparatus that included colleges, universi-
ties, and museums (Patterson 1995b:46–47). They staffed these institu-
tions with technicians, scientists, and other professionals, including
archaeologists. These intellectual fractions of the middle class mastered
the techniques and know-how that created and maintained capitalist cul-
ture, and they argued that this mastery justified their control of that
culture and of knowledge production. By the second decade of the twen-
tieth century, these institutions were becoming the defining locus of class
reproduction for the middle class (Patterson 1995b:58; Aronowitz
1997:190). The intellectual middle class manufactured the symbolic cap-
ital necessary to join the middle class and controlled who gained access
to it. Archaeology formed part of this symbolic capital that a well-
educated, that is, middle-class, person had to possess.
In the universities and colleges, archaeologists taught bourgeois- and
middle-class students an official history that primary and secondary
teachers distilled and simplified for schoolchildren. Until the 1960s this
history tended to deny cultural change in Native American pasts and thus
reinforced the idea that static Native American cultures had to fade away
in the face of dynamic, inventive Europeans (Trigger 1989a:128–129).
106 Class

After 1960, archaeologists spoke of culture change in Native American

history in theories that made a managerial elite (a primitive middle
class?) the prime movers or, in terms of environmental cautionary tales,
that reinforced then-current middle-class concerns with ecology (Trigger
1989a:314–315). In the 1980s, Native Americans confronted archaeol-
ogists, challenging this control of their pasts and asserting their own his-
tories, which they had not forgotten (Patterson 1995b:115). This chal-
lenge shattered the complacency of archaeology and confronted us with
the fact that we do not simply produce objective knowledge for a wide-
spread audience.

The Audience for Archaeology

Most archaeologists see their audience as broad and diverse (DeCicco

1988; Lynott 1990; J. Jameson 1997). The limited studies that have been
done of the constituency for archaeology suggest that this is not the case
and that, in fact, the middle class forms the primary audience for archae-
ology. In general, visitors to all types of museums, other than school
groups, strongly tend to be middle-class, with open-air museums draw-
ing a slightly broader audience (Falk and Dierking 1992:20–24; Hooper-
Greenhill 1994:65–66; Wallace 1996:25). Trotter’s study of visitors to
Wupaki National Monument in Arizona (1989:2) found that most of
them have been well-educated, middle-class Anglos. Likewise, Merri-
man’s study of visitors to archaeology museums in England (1987, 1991)
found that they too have been predominantly well-educated and middle-
class. The vast majority of the readers of the popular magazine
Archaeology come from the middle and bourgeois classes, with over 60
percent having college degrees and over 80 percent being professionals,
administrators, or managers (Archaeology 1996). National Geographic
has a broader audience with a higher proportion of working-class read-
ers, but still the magazine’s readers are primarily middle-class individuals
(Lutz and Collins 1993:222).
People who participate in professionally led field programs in archae-
ology also seem to be predominantly middle-class. Few high schools in
the United States include archaeology in their curricula, and those that
do are usually suburban, predominantly middle-class schools. Conse-
quently most people who obtain formal training in archaeology do so
only in college. Archaeology is always well represented in Earth Watch’s
expeditionary programs that allow individuals to participate in scien-
tific field projects. More than 94 percent of Earth Watch participants
Class 107

are in, or retired from, middle-class occupations (college students, pro-

fessionals, managers, and administrators). Merriman’s study of volun-
teers in archaeological field projects in Great Britain (1987) suggests the
same.
Segments of the middle class make up the primary audience of
archaeology for many possible reasons. Members of this class generally
have leisure time and money that can be used for such pursuits. Many
working-class jobs do not provide sufficient quantities of either of these
resources to allow the pursuit of archaeology. The middle-class interest
in archaeology clearly flows from the emphasis on education and for-
malized learning that characterize the class. Middle-class individuals
are socialized to respect, value, and appreciate expert knowledge, while
the life experience of working-class people encourages them to distrust,
spurn, and disparage such knowledge (Ryan and Sackrey 1996:105–
107). Archaeology also resides in the institutions of the middle class, so
its children gain familiarity with archaeology from an early age. Finally,
the themes and interests of archaeology have paralleled those of the
middle class throughout this century (Trigger 1989a; Patterson 1995b).
For example, Trigger (1989a:313, 319–320, 355) has argued that the
scientific evolutionism of 1960s archaeology, with its emphasis on
progress and the humanities’ ability to solve problems and make life bet-
ter, reflected the self-confidence and faith in technology of a prospering
U.S. middle class. This prosperity began to wane in the early 1970s,
leading to greater insecurity and pessimism in the middle class (see also
Ehrenreich 1989; Patterson 1995b:104), and archaeologists began
advocating a “cataclysmic evolutionism” that stresses how technologi-
cal change forces people to work harder and how technology degrades
the environment.

Archaeology and Working-Class Interests

Archaeology’s tendency to represent middle-class interests as universal

fits easily into a larger American ideology that says we are all middle-
class, except for a very small number of wealthy and poor individuals
(Sennett and Cobb 1972; Domhoff 1996; Fantasia and Voss 2004:167;
Keller 2005; Durrenberger 2006). Thus, archaeologists often represent
those individuals who hold different interests in the past or use the past
in different ideological ways as being ignorant, pernicious, or motivated
solely by greed (Lynott 1990). They have rarely considered that these dif-
ferences in attitudes may be class based. Nowhere is this more evident
108 Class

than in the archaeologist’s abhorrence for pothunters, or looters (not to

be confused with amateur archaeologists who are part of the discipline).
Archaeologists approach their database with a reverence uncommon
in other disciplines. From the first introductory course to the conclusion
of the Festschrift, we sanctify the archaeological record. We justify it as a
source of knowledge and, more important, as our heritage. We stand in a
unique relationship to our data; unlike the investigations of most other
disciplines, ours destroy that which we wish to study. Furthermore, the
archaeological record is given and finite; what we destroy cannot be
replaced. Thus, in the ideology of our discipline, the archaeologist exists
to serve a higher goal, the search for knowledge, but archaeologists must
also serve the archaeological record. This ideology includes a strong
notion of self-sacrifice, of economic gain and even well-being, to achieve
knowledge and to protect the archaeological record. Such self-sacrifice
embodies middle-class ideals of the sanctity of learning.
. . .
Looter: An individual who plunders archaeological sites
to find artifacts of commercial value, at the same time
destroying the evidence that archaeologists rely upon to
understand the past.
Wendy Ashmore and Robert J. Sharer (1993:616)

A strong animosity to pothunters, or looters, runs through archaeology.

Archaeologists argue that looters destroy the archaeological record in
order to recover objects that can be bought and sold. This process both
denies the archaeologist the material necessary to the production of for-
mal knowledge and violates the archaeologist’s sense of reverence for the
archaeological record. Archaeologists portray looters as being needy or
greedy, as lacking an appreciation of the past and any understanding of
the intellectual value of the materials that they seek. Most archaeologists
seem to agree that we need to educate looters to appreciate the record, to
see things our way (Lynott 1990).
Our data on who loots archaeological sites and why they do it are
every bit as meager as our information on who appreciates archaeology.
Even limited knowledge does suggest, however, that the looters come
predominately from working-class backgrounds. The distinction
between middle-class archaeologists and working-class pothunters goes
back at least to the 1930s (Duke and Matlock, n.d.; Patterson 1995b:59).
Hodder (1984:29–30) noted that the antagonism between treasure
Class 109

hunters and archaeologists in Britain has been rooted in broader class

differences. Merriman (1987) surveyed metal detector users who looted
archaeological sites in Great Britain and found that the majority of them
were working-class individuals with slightly above average incomes.
Potter (1994) has argued that we need to recognize the cultural differ-
ences between looters and ourselves and ask why these individuals
engage in these activities and what needs of theirs they fulfill. Only then
can we engage in a dialogue with these people that might change both
their and our behavior.
Clearly those people who loot archaeological sites and advocate cult
archaeologies have a concept of the value of the past that differs from
ours as archaeologists. We would argue that these differences are not the
manifestations of simply greed or ignorance. If a class difference sepa-
rates archaeologists from looters, then each group approaches the past
with very different beliefs about formal knowledge and intellectual labor.
The programs that archaeologists have developed to educate the
public—exhibits, site tours, magazines, classes, tours, and pamphlets—
appeal more to middle-class individuals, who look to books and author-
ities for knowledge, and less to working-class people, who stress practi-
cal know-how. Hodder’s (1984) and Merriman’s (1987) studies suggest
that many working-class people have a deep interest in the past, but they
feel alienated from an archaeology that they identify as elitist. The charge
of elitism is not unwarranted, since the traditional process of reproducing
archaeology seeks to remove archaeologists from the day-to-day world
of work and to imbue them with a sense of membership in an exclusive
group. Chapter 5 discusses an attempt to link archaeology to working-
class interests through the study of the 1913–1914 Colorado Coalfield
War and the Ludlow Massacre.

Reproducing Archaeology

The discipline of archaeology traditionally reproduced itself in the uni-

versity through a guild model. This process involved a long apprentice-
ship (graduate school), journeyman status (untenured faculty), and
finally the security of master status (tenure). In theory at least, these
stages related to age, maturity, and proficiency. Apprentice, journeyman,
and master formed a class structure, but, again in theory, it was a struc-
ture of mobility. Not all apprentices became masters, and exploitation
did occur, but all apprentices had the opportunity to become masters,
and all masters were once apprentices.
110 Class

In this idealized model, teams of scholars conducted archaeological

fieldwork. Senior members of the teams were established researchers
with publications and recognition. Junior members were apprentices,
there to learn and to acquire the skills and eventually the status of their
mentors. The participants in this process saw it as a noneconomic one in
which they received only as much money as was needed to support the
higher goals of the research. They eschewed the ethos of the market and
instead stressed archaeology’s goal as honest, disinterested, and compe-
tent research (Moore 2006:30). They saw their rewards in the process as
advancement through the guild.
Until the late 1970s, the vast majority of archaeologists labored in the
academy. Today a person must still pass through the academy to become
an archaeologist. The B.A. is usually a minimum requirement for regular
employment, and supervisory or managerial positions virtually always
require at least an M.A., if not a Ph.D. (Fagan 2006). The academy
remains the locus of socialization for archaeologists. In this context, they
are taught a reverence for the resource base, to sacrifice economic well-
being for research, the guild model of hierarchy, and the mental and
practical skills of the discipline.
Unlike fields such as business, engineering, and nursing, archaeology
traditionally did not train undergraduate students to take up professions.
Rather, archaeology as part of a liberal arts education, served to repro-
duce the middle class through undergraduate programs and to reproduce
itself through apprenticeship by a small number of individuals in gradu-
ate programs. Archaeology was part of the socialization process of the
middle class in undergraduate programs, giving them shared experience
and knowledge (symbolic capital) that were not easily obtained outside
the university by working-class individuals. Individuals who were drawn
to master archaeology (to become university professors) traditionally
were people who searched for a life of the mind and who wished to
escape the day-to-day world of capitalism (Kehoe 1998:86). The growth
of contract archaeology has greatly changed this situation, creating a
professional arena that employs the vast majority of archaeologists in the
day-to-day world of capitalism. However, it is very much our impression
that the majority of students who pursue apprenticeship in the academy
have the traditional longing for a life of the mind and seek to emulate
their professors of archaeology (Zeder 1997:16–17).
Archaeologists, like most middle-class Americans, have had little
awareness of the class structures within which they work and live. The
vast majority of archaeologists come from middle to bourgeois socio-
Class 111

economic backgrounds, and a Society for American Archaeology survey

of the discipline by Zeder (1997:13) suggests that the imbalance may be
increasing. Archaeologists have also been, by and large, white Anglos;
more than 98 percent come from this demographic, according to the
SAA survey (Zeder 1997:13). Few African American, Asian American,
Latino, and Native American individuals have entered the discipline.
The racial imbalance in part reflects the white predominance in the
American middle class. It is also the case that the class position of mid-
dle-class people of color is more precarious than that of the white
middle class, because people of color must also deal with racism and
discrimination. Middle-class people of color tend to direct their children
to more practical, stable, and financially secure professions (Barbour
1994:12; Franklin 1997:800; Lippert 1997). They also direct their chil-
dren away from archaeology, because they often identify it with the
racism and discrimination that they experience in modern American
society (Hill 1994; Pullar 1994). Thus, most archaeologists share a com-
mon social background, and they see one another as the same. The
common experience of the university reinforces this sense of sameness,
and the guild model tends to obscure from archaeologists the class
nature of archaeological interests and also the class structure within the
profession.
Traditionally, therefore, archaeology reproduced itself as a discipline
by training individuals to take up a very specialized niche, the university
professor, in the reproduction of the middle class. This traditional train-
ing, however, does not meet the realities of archaeology as an occupation
in our present era (Bender and Smith 2000; Whitley 2004; Fagan 2006).
Fast capitalism shapes archaeology, both in the academy and in CRM, to
an ethos of market exchange and corrodes the guild model of the univer-
sity. More important, in both the academy and in CRM the guild model
has become an ideology that is used to mask or hide class relations and
exploitation within the occupational structures of archaeology.

Fast Capitalism
The current state of the class struggle in archaeology today springs from
and is embedded in the fast capitalism that has shaped the turn of the
twenty-first century (Agger 2004:9). The consequences and driving
forces behind fast capitalism have been the erosion of worker’s rights, the
reduction in worker’s security, and the deterioration of working condi-
tions (Agger 2004; Fantasia and Voss 2004). The middle class has not
112 Class

escaped these consequences, because fast capitalism has increasingly pro-

letarianized professions such as archaeology.
After World War II, the worldwide capitalist economy soared, espe-
cially in the United States. By 1970, this growth began to slow down and
even stall, leading to hyperinflation and declining profits by the end of
that decade (Foster et al. 2002). The election of Margaret Thatcher in
Great Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States and the growth of
the so-called New Economy in the 1980s did not reinvigorate capitalist
economic growth, but they did usher in fast capitalism. In government
policy, liberal ideas of social contract and social welfare lost sway to
right-wing ideas of free trade, individual responsibility, and noninterfer-
ence by governments in economic affairs. The end of the twentieth cen-
tury witnessed shifts in the class structure of the core capitalist countries,
with declining working-class wages, more wealth concentration in the
bourgeois classes, and a squeezing of the middle class (Domhoff 1996).
What has emerged in the United States since the 1980s is a split economy
with relatively fewer secure well-paying jobs than before and more inse-
cure low-paying jobs (Patterson 1995b:104). The production of durable
consumer goods that drove capitalism since World War II has declined
and much manufacturing has shifted from core states to the peripheries.
The essence of the New Economy engaged economic sectors most closely
associated with the revolution in digital technology and the growth of the
Internet. The rapid convergence of information technologies (including
computers, software, satellites, fiber optics, and the Internet) has altered
the economic landscape (Foster et al. 2001). These trends have produced
an accelerated fast capitalism.
In chapter 2, I discussed how multinational firms have commodified
heritage through cultural tourism. The same processes have worked to
transform education and archaeological knowledge into profit genera-
tors. Education has many social goals, including social development,
democratic empowerment, advancing the general well-being of societies,
increasing economic competitiveness, and sharing knowledge and per-
sonal growth (Noble 2003). The commodification of education ignores
the social and transforms education into a private (individual) good that
can be bought and sold. Commodified education focuses on certification
rather than learning. The measure of education becomes the cost of the
degree relative to the market value that it has. Governments have used
the idea of education as a private good as a justification to cut funding
for public education, bringing the pressures of fast capitalism to the
academy. In a somewhat different way, cultural resource management
Class 113

has commodified archaeological knowledge (Tilley 1989:106–107).

CRM treats archaeological sites as units that must be managed. “Each
has a price-tag and, when the demands of business efficiency raise ques-
tions about who can do the requisite work for the least money the past
may be tagged with competing prices” (Tilley 1989:107).
The watchwords of fast capitalism are speed and flexibility (Holmes
2000; Agger 2004). The technology of computers, software, satellites,
fiber optics, the Internet, and the container ship make fast capitalism pos-
sible. Fast capitalism is a fully global capitalism in which any task can be
broken down into its component parts and deskilled. The least skilled
components can be outsourced to the other side of the world, so com-
puter programmers in Boston lose their jobs to workers in Bangalore.
Manufacturers need not own factories but instead can contract with
agents from around the world for delivery of goods on demand.
Fast capitalism creates a hypercompetitiveness that rewards an enter-
prise’s adaptability, dynamism, and continual reskilling/learning. The
first victims of fast capitalism were high-wage core-state manufacturing
workers who lost their jobs to low-wage countries on the peripheries of
the capitalist system. But the processes of fast capitalism penetrate all lev-
els of the economy, from manufacturing to service to management to
education. In this way, fast capitalism proletarianizes traditionally
middle-class professions. In order to maintain their competitive edge,
employers demand total commitment from their workers. Economic
acceleration and increasing demands on employees drive down the qual-
ity of life. People suffer increased levels of stress, reduced time spent with
friends and families, and overall dissatisfaction with their lives (Agger
2004; Fantasia and Voss 2004). Fast capitalism celebrates temporary
and fast-changing networks, including those of coworkers, businesses,
friends, and families (Holmes 2000). People come together for a given
project and then disperse when products, projects, and services change in
the hypercompetitive and fast-paced environment of fast capitalism.
These ephemeral networks erode stable communities of people with
shared histories and long-term commitments (Agger 2004).
The bourgeois classes have fared well under fast capitalism. This is
very clear in the United States. In 1980, the compensation for CEOs was
42 times that of the average worker in the corporation. By 2003, the
compensation for CEOs had risen to 245 times that of the average
worker (Fantasia and Voss 2004:15). Between 1983 and 2001, the top 1
percent of wealth holders in the United States received 28 percent of the
increase in national income, 33 percent of the total gain in net worth,
114 Class

and 52 percent of the rise in financial worth (Foster 2006). The accep-
tance of great disparities in compensation has permeated society, justify-
ing a star system of disproportionately high compensation in business,
entertainment, sports, and the university.
Fast capitalism’s mantras of speed and flexibility have meant greater
insecurity for people who work for a living, so the working and middle
classes have not fared so well in the New Economy. Real wages, con-
trolled for inflation, peaked in 1973, declined until the Clinton adminis-
tration, recovered slightly then, and are now falling again (Fantasia and
Voss 2004:12; Magdoff and Magdoff 2004). The reserve army of the
unemployed has increased under fast capitalism through underemploy-
ment, illegal immigration, and decreases in welfare support (Magdoff
and Magdoff 2004). A large reserve army of the unemployed drives
down wages at the bottom of the scale. Finally, workers are laboring
more hours, often at multiple part-time jobs. The bifurcating effects of
fast capitalism have created a split wage scale, with the rich getting very
much richer and the working and middle classes getting relatively and
absolutely poorer (Fantasia and Voss 2004; Magdoff and Magdoff
2004).
Fast capitalism has been hard on unions. In the boom years from the
1940s to the 1970s, “business unionism” dominated organized labor in
the United States (Fantasia and Voss 2004:57). Under this model unions
abandoned the social change agendas of organized labor in the first half
of the twentieth century to focus on winning higher wages and benefits
for their members. Union members, principally white and male, worked
primarily in manufacturing, construction, and transportation. Business
unionism won its workers the highest wages and benefits in the history of
the United States. In 1955, union membership peaked at 35 percent of
the labor force (Fantasia and Voss 2004:54). The focus of most unions
on gaining compensation for their primarily white male members often
put unions at odds with social movements to improve the conditions of
African Americans, women, and immigrants. Business unions were
highly hierarchical, with top-down control and widespread graft and
corruption (Fantasia and Voss 2004:78–119). Starting in 1980, business
began a concerted effort to break unions. Fast capitalism undermined
union occupations with its emphasis on flexibility, outsourcing, and
hypercompetitiveness. An industry of consultants, attorneys, and
accountants developed to aid corporations in union busting. Finally, con-
servative legislation eroded workers’ rights and the ability of unions to
Class 115

organize workers. By 2002, only 14 percent of the U.S. workforce

belonged to a union (Fantasia and Voss 2004:19–20).
In the 1980s, many of the rank and file in the AFL-CIO called for
reform and organized to democratize their unions (Fantasia and Voss
2004:98–119). At the AFL-CIO national convention in 1995, this
reform movement took control with the election of John Sweeney as
president of the organization, ushering in the current era of “social
movement unionism.” This new model of unionism emphasizes the orga-
nization of service, public, and information workers. These organizing
efforts and the continued decline of manufacturing in the United States
have increased the percentage of people of color in the union movement.
The movement has embraced a progressive social program of social jus-
tice and social change. In addition to stressing the organization of service
workers, the AFL-CIO moved to organize more middle-class profession-
als, such as teachers, college professors, and doctors. Despite these wel-
come reforms, union membership and power have continued to decline.
At the 2006 AFL-CIO convention, a group of four large unions broke
from the organization. The implications of this split for the future of
labor in the United States are not clear yet.

Working as an Archaeologist in
an Era of Fast Capitalism
Fast capitalism has transformed archaeology as a discipline and as an
occupation. Today bifurcated working conditions and compensation exist
in both the academy and in cultural resource management. Increasing
numbers of archaeologists are trapped in class positions that do not pay
them a living wage or grant them the respect that their mastery of the craft
of archaeology deserves. In both of these professional situations, this den-
igration of archaeological labor threatens a deterioration of standards
and quality in the archaeological product.
Even though the occupational structures of the academy and cultural
resource management are distinct, the two spheres remain interconnected
and will always be so. Archaeology still reproduces itself in the academy,
and almost all archaeologists share the experience of the academy. Also,
even though a core of higher-level, established professionals (professors,
managers, project directors) exists in each sphere, the two share a com-
mon pool of aspiring archaeologists. These aspirants move back and
forth between the two spheres until they land a permanent professional
116 Class

position in one or the other, resign themselves to a life in the new archae-
ological proletariat, or drop out of the discipline altogether.

The Changing Relationship of Class and the Academy

Fast capitalism has proletarianized the academy both in its role in the
reproduction of the class structure and in its occupational structure. The
democratization of the university in the postwar United States trans-
formed it from an exclusive portal to the white middle class into the
training ground for the middle class and a technically skilled working
class. This has eroded the symbolic capital of the middle class, because,
although middle-class status still virtually requires a university degree, a
degree no longer ensures that status. Concurrently, the occupational
structure of the academy has been transformed from a guild of masters
and apprentices to a knowledge factory dependent on a reserve army of
underemployed teaching assistants and lecturers (Yates 2000).
In the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, a massive expansion of
colleges and universities occurred because of the demographic bulge of
the baby boom and the ever-increasing percentage of young people enter-
ing college. In 1947, eighteen hundred colleges and universities existed in
the United States with 2.3 million students. By 1990, the number of insti-
tutions had risen to thirty-two hundred and the number of students to
12.5 million (Aronowitz 1997:190–191). This expansion fueled a mas-
sive increase in the number of anthropology departments in the country
and provided jobs for an unprecedented number of archaeologists in the
academy (Patterson 1995b:81; Roseberry 1996:9).
Thousands of people from working-class backgrounds flocked to the
more open universities, seeking a stepping-stone to the middle class
(Aronowitz 1997; Menand 1997). The university ceased to be the sole
preserve of the middle and bourgeois classes. In 1947, 10 percent of high
school graduates went on to higher education. This number increased to
40 percent in 1960, to 50 percent in 1980, and to 62 percent in 1994. At
the end of the twentieth century, most of this increase was fueled by the
entry of students of color (African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos,
and Native Americans) into higher education (Menand 1997:48). During
the period in which the economy was still expanding, a significant por-
tion of new graduates could gain access to the middle class. The eco-
nomic downturn that started in the 1970s and the resulting New
Economy changed this situation. The economic decline halted expansion
in the number of academic positions, and by 1975 new Ph.D.s in anthro-
Class 117

pology hit a solid wall of fully employed departments (Patterson

1995b:17–108; Roseberry 1996). Individuals graduating with bachelor’s
degrees hit similar walls, and since the 1980s a university degree has not
guaranteed entry into the middle class, although it remains a requirement
(Jancius 2006). Fifty percent of the workforce today enters college, but
only about 20 percent of the jobs available are middle class (Menand
1997:48). In the 1980s, social science enrollments, including anthropol-
ogy, plunged as students sought more practical training in business and
professional colleges (Givens and Jablonski 1996:5). At the same time,
real working-class wages declined, so we have witnessed an ever-widen-
ing gap between working-class and middle-class lifestyles. The insecurity
of the middle class has increased as the material costs of failure in repro-
duction—that is, of their children slipping into the working class—have
escalated (Ehrenreich 1989; Ball 2003; Lareau 2003).
Starting in the 1980s, the academy came under a concerted and sus-
tained attack by the political right (Roseberry 1996:17). Members of the
right saw the academy as one of the few areas of modern society that had
not succumbed to a fast capitalist ethos of market principles. The right
sought to “defund” the left by actively interfering with governmental
endowment and funding agencies and by attacking the privilege of the
professoriat (Bloom 1987; Sykes 1988). These attacks found widespread
support within the middle class, in part because of the changing rela-
tionship of that class to the university. As the university student body has
increasingly become more proletariat and less white, the support of the
white middle class for the university has declined (Aronowitz 1997;
Nelson 1997b; Nelson and Watt 2004). In a climate of increased middle-
class insecurity, rising university costs, and a decreasing efficacy of uni-
versity credentials in the reproduction of the class, middle-class individu-
als have wanted universities to be more practical and cost effective
(Ehrenreich 1989; Ball 2003; Lareau 2003). Working-class families fac-
ing declining real wages and increasing university costs, which have lim-
ited their children’s access to the essential credentials for class mobility,
have responded warmly to right-wing attacks on latte-drinking, brie-
eating, Volvo-driving intellectual elites, especially university professors.
Two consequences of these shifts have been an effort to restructure the
university and a crisis of employment in the academy (Roseberry
1996:17; Yates 2000). Fast capitalism has turned schools into work-
places (Agger 2004:83). For students at all levels, the emphasis has
switched from learning to earning credentials, grades, and test scores
(Agger 2004:98). The guild image of the university as a community of
118 Class

scholars in pursuit of knowledge does not fit well with a fast capitalism
that demands constant flexibility and constant reskilling of employees
(Siegel 2006). Many aspects of the traditional university, such as a liberal
arts education, tenure, theory, philosophy, personal fulfillment, and
humanism, do not fit well with fast capitalism’s emphasis on rote learn-
ing, skill acquisition, and value-added accountability (Agger 2004:98;
Siegel 2006).
Colleges and universities have become degree factories that employ a
significant portion of the U.S. workforce (Aronowitz 1997:188; Noble
2003). In 1991, colleges and universities in the United States employed
2,662,085 workers (Kelley 1997:146). In many communities, colleges
and universities are the largest employers and landlords in the area
(Kelley 1997). A hierarchical system of higher education has developed
in which the class and racial exclusivity of the traditional academy exists
only at the highest tiers, in private schools, and in state flagship universi-
ties, while the lower tiers train proletariat workers (Leonhardt 2005).
Elite private schools have become the new guarantor for middle-class sta-
tus, and the competition to enter such schools has soared. One of the
reasons for the establishment of community colleges was to provide a
stepping-stone to four-year schools, but increasingly a community college
degree is a terminal degree that gives access to a working-class occupa-
tion (Aronowitz 1997:189).
In the academic factory, the autonomy and the privilege of college and
university teachers have declined, except among an elite stratum of stars
(Yates 2000). University workers at all levels increasingly find themselves
facing the same challenges and difficulties (Nelson 1997b:6). One of the
few growth areas for unions in the 1980s was in colleges and universities.
As of 1997, 25 percent of full-time faculty at colleges and universities in
the Unites States were unionized, as opposed to 14 percent of all workers
in the economy (Aronowitz 1997:188, 204).
In the 1990s, the federal and state governments cut funding to the
academy, and administrators began actively downsizing the professorial
staffs of colleges and universities. As a result, the number of full-time
tenured and tenure-track positions in the academy has declined. Univer-
sities have responded to these cuts by replacing tenured faculty with
graduate assistants and adjuncts to teach more and more classes. In the
1970s, about 25 percent of faculty were part-timers. This figure rose to
about 45 percent during the late 1990s (Pratt 1997:265) and fell slightly
to 43 percent in 2003 (Jacobe 2006:46). Even among full-timers, the per-
centage of non-tenure-track faculty went up from 12 percent in 1984 to
Class 119

20 percent in 1996, then dropping a bit by 2003, to 17 percent (Jacobe

2006:46). Including full- and part-time faculty (but not graduate student
teaching assistants), over 50 percent of the faculty teaching in U.S. higher
education are nontenured today (McKenna 1997:6–7; Yates 2000;
Jacobe 2006:43); only 28 percent of university teachers in the United
States have tenure, and another 12 percent are on the tenure track
(Jacobe 2006:46).
Academic standards and quality have suffered in this process.
Declining numbers of faculty have meant increasing class sizes and
notions that equate academic productivity with higher and higher stu-
dent-faculty ratios. At Binghamton University in the last decade of the
twentieth century, the student-faculty ratio in the department of anthro-
pology went from 14:1 to 25:1 and has not declined since. Such ratios
are much higher in teaching colleges around the country. We have also
been pressured by administrators to lower entrance standards for gradu-
ate students and the requirements for a master’s degree in anthropology
to increase the number of graduate students that we enroll. Students are
not necessarily well served when overworked, underexperienced gradu-
ate students or transitory adjuncts teach many of their classes.

The Ideology of Apprenticeship as Exploitation in the Academy

Archaeologists who labor in the academy are battered by fast capitalism’s

erosion of the benefits of university employment. This erosion has trans-
formed teaching assistants and adjuncts into an academic proletariat.
Anthropology departments, where most archaeology programs reside,
have not been as hard hit as departments in the humanities, especially
English (Nelson 1997a). Even so, anthropology departments have mar-
shaled the ideology of apprenticeship to justify and obscure the existence
and exploitation of the academic proletariat. Departments have
increased the duties and responsibilities of graduate students and ad-
juncts even as the support and rewards for these individuals have
declined.
The apprenticeship of graduate studies has grown longer and longer,
because the university increasingly asks apprentices to do more and more
work not necessarily directly related to their own preparation for mas-
tery (Kennedy 1997; Pratt 1997). They also have no guarantee that they
will be able to move to mastery (a tenured professorship) or even to
journeyman status (a tenure-track position) after graduation. Without
the availability of jobs, the whole logic of apprenticeship collapses, and
120 Class

graduate students simply become exploited labor (Nelson 1997a:169).

As a result graduate students have come to see their status as that of
employees, not as that of students. One consequence of this shift has
been increasing struggles by graduate student teaching assistants to
unionize (Joseph and Curtiss 1997; Nelson 1997b; Kennedy 1997;
Kelley 1997; Kadir 2006).
Presently, only a minority of graduate students can hope to land
tenure-track jobs (Jacobe 2006). For example, of Harvard’s 1995 Ph.D.
class, only 27 percent had found teaching positions by 1997 (Menand
1997:49). National statistics are comparable. Since 1971, only about 33
percent of new Ph.D.s have obtained tenure-track jobs, and the chance
of a new Ph.D. earning tenure and staying in the profession has been less
than one in ten (Nelson and Watt 2004:23). This is also true in the spe-
cific case of anthropology and archaeology (Fagan 2006). The number
of Ph.D.s granted in anthropology has been about four hundred a year
since 1974; yet, in the last decade of the twentieth century, the number
of tenure-track academic positions open in the field never reached one
hundred per year (Evens et al. 1997). In response to legions of appli-
cants, those few departments with tenure-track positions have increased
their expectations of applicants, excessively raising requirements for
obtaining such a position. Job ads in the Anthropology News for assis-
tant professors seek candidates who are established scholars with
proven records of research, publication, and teaching. It was not so
long ago that these were the requirements for tenure, not employment.
This inflation of requirements is common throughout the academy
(Nelson and Watt 2004:50). Tenured faculty tell graduate students that
they must complete the requirements for their degrees, teach for their
departments, and publish meaningful research if they hope to get the
tenure-track job. With so few such prizes available, the student is like a
jogger on a treadmill, running faster and faster to go nowhere. Such is
fast capitalism.
Most graduate students who seek an academic position end up in a
continuing series of temporary and adjunct positions (Joseph and Curtiss
1997; McKenna 1997). Traditionally, the academy used temporary and
adjunct positions to fill in for absent faculty, to offer exotic courses, and
to host visiting faculty. Individuals accepted these positions as a step in
their movement to mastery, to supplement employment outside the acad-
emy, or because they were married to a full-time faculty member.
Adjuncts were the auxiliaries of the academy, but as positions have been
cut and demands on faculty time increased, administrators have increas-
Class 121

ingly used adjuncts to perform core teaching functions in the university.

Tenured faculty have acquiesced to or even supported this shift in order
to maintain their own privilege and position (Nelson 1997a:1–3; Nelson
and Watt 2004:24–26).
Today, individuals often cannot escape this adjunct status, and it has
become a career track. One or two adjunct positions convey experi-
ence, but at some point the candidate becomes damaged goods, unde-
sirable, because departments wonder what personal failing has kept
him or her from a tenure-track position (Nelson 1997a:159–161; Nel-
son and Watt 2004:25 Jacobe 2006). Moving from town to town each
year or semester, adapting to a new campus, and teaching four or five
courses on multiple campuses to make ends meet do not leave adjuncts
the time to nurture their own intellectual life or produce the kind of
research that will lead them to a tenure-track job (DiGiacomo 1996).
As graduate students, they ran fast to stay in one place. As adjuncts,
they run faster to fall further behind. These “gypsy scholars” receive
lower pay (25 to 35 percent of regular faculty pay) (DiGiacomo
1996:5) and fewer benefits than regular faculty if they receive any ben-
efits at all. They satisfy fast capitalism’s demand for lowered labor
costs and leaner, more competitive enterprises. They arguably form a
lesser class within the professoriat and are often regarded and treated
as such by the tenured faculty (DiGiacomo 1996; McKenna 1997).
Gender also plays an important role here; this new class or reserve
army of labor is disproportionately female, both in general (Thompson
1997:278; Sullivan 1997; Jacobe 2006) and in archaeology (Zeder
1997:16). These people are arguably middle-class but in a fractional
position quite distinct from and disadvantaged in relation to that of the
tenured or tenure-track professor.
Fast capitalism demands flexibility, and the gypsy scholars provide
this in higher education. They allow the college or university to shift its
course offerings more quickly than it can with tenured or tenure-track
faculty. The university can meet an increase in student demand for
Introduction to Microeconomics by not rehiring the adjunct that taught
Introduction to Archaeology last semester and instead hiring an eco-
nomics adjunct to teach microeconomics. The easy dispensability of the
gypsy scholars gives the college or university flexibility in other situations
as well (Nelson and Watt 2004:49). The administrators of the State
University of New York system dramatically demonstrated this following
the tragedy of 9/11. In 2002, the State of New York drastically cut fund-
ing for the university system, claiming financial exigency as a result of the
122 Class

attack on New York City. The system absorbed the cut in budget by
increasing class sizes and not rehiring the vast majority of adjuncts who
had taught the year before.
As Roseberry (1996) points out, within anthropology this shift has
greatly increased the differential between “elite” Ph.D. programs that
place a higher percentage of their students in tenure-track positions and
“commoner” programs that supply the individuals for the adjunct and
temporary appointments. Within the academy, tenured faculty often jus-
tify the position of the gypsy scholars by claiming that they are inferior
researchers (DiGiacomo 1996). These ideologies of achievement and
prestige from a past when each apprentice had a chance to become a
master obscure the fundamental structural change in how the academy
now reproduces itself as a class-stratified community. Our view of the
current situation for archaeologists in the academy is grim. We fear, as
Nelson (1997a:5) points out for the discipline of English, that the pres-
ent situation is not temporary and that it represents a structural change
in academic labor. We can only echo his warning: “Again, I write on
behalf of every job candidate to tell you the academic profession is sick
and broken and in need of change. In the meantime, take Mao’s advice:
dig tunnels deep, store grain everywhere” (Nelson 1997a:170).
Archaeology has weathered the storms of fast capitalism better than
many of the other social sciences because of the coincidental develop-
ment of contract archaeology or cultural resource management (CRM).
In the 1970s, as academic employment hit the wall and then shrank,
employment in the contract sector grew enormously. This growth
slowed or stopped in the 1980s when the creation of new positions lost
speed and petered out (Moore 2006). But even today archaeologists
have an option for employment in their field that is not open to many
other social scientists, such as historians and sociologists. However, con-
tract archaeology has matured in fast capitalism, and it has opened up
new dimensions of class struggle that were not traditionally part of our
profession.

The Class Structure of Cultural Resource Management

CRM archaeology evolved along with fast capitalism. Initially in the

1970s, universities and museums provided contract archaeology, usually
using an academic approach to research that stressed archaeological goals
(Moore 2006:31). These institutions were not-for-profit entities. They
often grafted the CRM onto exiting programs of apprenticeship training.
Class 123

The academic guild model did not fit well with the increasingly market-
driven requirements of CRM. Training apprentices interfered with the
accelerated requirements for on-time completion of projects and effi-
ciency. Academics accustomed to working with little money but unlimited
time often failed to meet compliance requirements and deadlines.
Today, private companies devoted exclusively to contract-based
archaeology have largely replaced universities and museums as the
providers of services, a shift that was evident by the close of the 1970s
(e.g., Fitting and Goodyear 1979). A market model, in which the results
of archaeological research are commodified as a “deliverable” produced
for a client and priced within competitive market conditions, replaced the
disciplinary ideal of “pure research” (Shott 1992:9–11; Fitting and
Goodyear 1979). In this model, profit derives from the difference in the
price paid for the product and the labor and material costs to the
contractor.
Economic efficiency has become a necessity as more and more com-
panies compete for scarce contracts. Like all other enterprises in fast
capitalism, increasing competition has made CRM purportedly more
efficient and flexible. Many companies survive by doing archaeological
work as quickly and cheaply as possible. In general, the purchasers of
required archaeological services are unconcerned with the quality of the
work, except insofar as it gets them through various permitting “hoops.”
The overall result of this is a pressure to relax the quality of archaeolog-
ical work. Standards and guidelines of state historic preservation offices
and regulatory agencies have become not the minimum standards but,
for many contractors, the only standards. The implications for the qual-
ity of CRM research as a whole have been addressed elsewhere (Lacey
and Hasenstab 1983; Shanks and McGuire 1996). The need to be com-
petitive prods CRM companies toward minimum effort, standardized
research, greater flexibility, and increased production (more contracts
executed in less time for less money). These same pressures depress wages
and erode working conditions.
CRM companies, and the archaeologists within them, must work
within a set of tensions between the demands of the disciplinary ideals of
archaeological research and the often-incompatible economic demands
of fast capitalism. How CRM companies and archaeologists work within
these structural tensions varies tremendously, depending on the policies
and “cultures” of the individual companies, the size of their contracts,
and the commitment of the employees. Some companies choose to com-
promise the discipline for the sake of business efficiency, while others sac-
124 Class

rifice profitability to do interesting research. The people within the com-

panies may likewise respond in different ways. Principal investigators
may produce a report with the minimum effort necessary for it to meet
standards or, as is more often the case, exploit themselves, working long
hours in order to do research that makes a contribution to the discipline.
An enormous amount of important work in archaeology has been done
within the context of CRM. More often than not though, individual
investigators have accomplished this work through self-sacrifice, in spite
of the economic realities of CRM. In this way, the general trend of fast
capitalism to make work omnipresent by blurring the boundaries
between work and home, leisure and productivity, is realized in archae-
ology (Agger 2004:60–82).
The escalating competitive pressure on CRM companies has also
resulted in increasing discordance between the disciplinary ideals of
research and the lived experience of the CRM labor force, the workers in
the field projects and laboratories (de Boer 2004). The maximization of
profit and the minimization of cost have propelled CRM on a trajectory
typical of most capitalist industries, and, like most other industries, it
finds itself confronted with labor problems. Sporadic attempts to orga-
nize field technicians in response to the proletarianization of fieldwork
have failed.
Almost all archaeologists in CRM are trained in the academy and are
often ill prepared for the realities of research within a profit-driven busi-
ness (Blanton 1995; Schuldenrein 1992, 1995; Bender and Smith 2000).
Many archaeologists working in CRM have expressed dissatisfaction
with their university training, claiming it did not give them realistic
expectations as to the careers available to them or adequately train them
for the jobs that they now have (Zeder 1997:13, 17; Whitley 2004). But
even as these archaeologists adjust to a market and profit-driven archae-
ology, they still retain assumptions and expectations that derive from
their disciplinary backgrounds. These assumptions and expectations
enter CRM labor relations as an ideology that emphasizes the academy-
derived guild-based, or “apprenticeship,” ideal of career advancement. In
this ideal, the position of field worker is temporary, an interlude of
acquiring skills and putting them into practice for a couple of years after
graduation. After a period of time, the field worker, by now probably a
crew chief, is expected to leave the field and enter graduate school, where
he or she will acquire the necessary accreditation to become a director
and eventually a principal investigator, leaving the working class of CRM
and joining its middle class. In this ideology, long-term or permanent
Class 125

field workers are an aberration, trapped only because of their own fail-
ings or lack of ambition in a position that should be temporary. Like
adjuncts in the academy, the discipline blames them for their lack of
advancement.
We should note that this ideal of career advancement is not a lie prom-
ulgated by managers to deceive their workers. It does, in fact, reflect the
lived experience of many managers, most of whom entered CRM in the
boom years of the 1970s. Reminiscences of this experience are a com-
mon trope in communications from managers to field staff. However, the
vast majority of individuals entering CRM since the end of the 1970s
have not shared the experience of advancement. Staffing in CRM
reached a plateau by the 1980s, and the individuals who gained positions
during this rapid growth phase by and large have yet to retire (Moore
2006). A constant turnover of entry-level individuals means that field
technicians’ positions continue to open up, but, without the requisite
degrees, field technicians are unable to advance to supervisory positions.
This ideology also ignores the skyrocketing costs of education
(Schuldenrein 1995) and the insufficient salaries in CRM for paying off
extensive student loans (McGuire 1984).
The guild ideal also emphasizes a vertical corporate identity rather
than a class-based solidarity. In this way, CRM participates in fast capi-
talism’s disruption of social distinctions, particularly those based on
class. The ideal proposes that we are all archaeologists, bonded through
our mutual concern for the preservation of the archaeological record.
Archaeologists should pursue economic well-being and quality of life as
secondary considerations to the preservation of this record and the
knowledge that we gain from it. Managers portray economic demands
by, in this case, field technicians as endangering the discipline, because
they “are rocking the Section 106 boat” (Kintz 1996).
Managers fear that increased wages will drive up the costs of proj-
ects, ultimately increasing corporate opposition to cultural resource
legislation, an alarming prospect in the current political environment.
The values enshrined in cultural resource legislation are not market val-
ues. They run afoul of the ethos of fast capitalism that has encroached
on all aspects of social life. Thus, CRM faces an explosive contradic-
tion. As an enterprise within fast capitalism, it must adapt to demands
for flexibility, hypercompetition, and accelerated production. Yet, fast
capitalism seeks to corrode the values that justify CRM and to erode
and eliminate the legal structure that generated CRM as an economic
enterprise.
126 Class

The CRM Labor Force

Field workers in CRM daily confront the contradiction between the ide-
ology of the discipline of archaeology and the economic realities of the
industry (de Boer 2004). In both the academy and CRM, archaeologist
workers are usually taught that the discipline of archaeology requires
skill, professionalism, and detailed, meticulous work. Teachers and
supervisors expect them to comport themselves as skilled professionals,
achieving mastery for their advancement in the discipline. As apprentices,
they are expected to sacrifice their livelihood willingly for the sake of the
discipline. Yet, field technicians hear many managers arguing that field-
work (i.e., the excavation of the archaeological record) is a job for
unskilled or, at best, semiskilled labor (Wilson 2001a, 2001b).
Compiling a picture of the CRM labor force is not easy. We have a
general impression from the people who have worked on our projects.
Trent de Boer’s zine Shovel Bum (2004) augments this impression. We
use these subjective impressions without apology, since few quantifiable
data are available. We would certainly encourage a full-scale survey of
archaeological field workers as a valuable project. We have drawn
mainly on three surveys of field workers from the mid- to late 1990s: one
compiled by the editors of the Underground newsletter in 1995 (Kintz
1995), another published by the United Archaeological Field Technicians
(UAFT 1996), and a third done by Michele Wilson (2001a, 2001b) in
1997. The Underground editors made the raw data from their survey
available to us. For wage information, we have used a survey of CRM
companies done by the Grapevine newsletter and posted on the Web by
ACRA (1996). Wilson’s survey (2001a, 2001b) is the largest (thirty-six
field technicians and nineteen managers) and most systematic of the
three. None of these surveys is ideal. They all suffer from small sample
sizes, regional biases, and self-selected samples. However, at the time of
writing, these decades-old surveys are the only data available. Although
wage rates have gone up since the 1990s, we have no reason to believe
that other characteristics of the labor force have changed significantly.
In general, the field workforce consists primarily of relatively young
(age twenty-seven to thirty-three), middle-class college graduates. In the
UAFT survey 70 percent of field technicians had college degrees, and 87
percent of Wilson’s (2001b:37) respondents were college graduates. Of
the twenty-one Underground survey respondents who classified them-
selves as technicians or crew chiefs and who listed their education, twenty
were college graduates. The UAFT survey indicates that 75 percent of
Class 127

technicians leave archaeology after an average of three years. The

Underground data do not disagree with this, although the sample size is
too small to be definitive. Over 61 percent of Wilson’s respondents
(2001b:37) had worked in CRM three years or less. The pattern sug-
gested by these data is that the average field technician has been in archae-
ology 2.8 years. Those who have been in the field longer tend to be crew
chiefs, which increase the mean to five years in archaeology. Seventy per-
cent of technicians and crew chiefs that responded to the Underground
survey had been in the field for less than five years. These surveys confirm
common knowledge that the CRM labor force turns over continually.
The job of field technician is still temporary, but it is no longer an ap-
prenticeship position, traditionally a step on the way to master/principal
investigator status. But instead of adhering to the tradition, technicians
appear to be leaving the field of archaeology altogether. The CRM indus-
try consumes workers, drawing on a pool of fresh college graduates,
essentially a reserve army of labor. This reserve army of labor gives CRM
the flexibility so crucial in fast capitalism. These workers toil in the
trenches for three to five years, until, disgruntled and probably in debt,
they leave the field altogether. Toward the end of their careers, they are
expected to train the incoming replacement workers, workers who earn
the same wage as the more experienced people training them.
In the late 1990s, field technician wages averaged from $8.00 per
hour (UAFT 1996) to $9.10 (ACRA 1996) with a range of $7.00 to over
$10.00 (Wilson 2001b:37). The mean annual income for field techni-
cians ranged from $11,200 in the UAFT survey to $12,000 in the Under-
ground survey. Assuming year-round employment, the annual income at
even $8.00 per hour should be higher, $16,640. But we must also take
into account their unreimbursed job expenses, which Wilson (2001b:37)
reported as averaging $817 per year in 1997, and also the common
knowledge that many field technicians have substantial periods during
the year with no work. Field workers can serve as crew chiefs, who are
paid on average $2.00 per hour more, but otherwise experience- and
seniority-related pay raises do not become an option until one has a per-
manent staff position, generally director or principal investigator.
In addition to experiencing little job security, few field workers receive
benefits, such as health insurance, but supervisory personnel usually do
(Wilson 2001b:38). In general, the wage structure of CRM is bifurcated.
The Grapevine survey suggests an incremental progression in wages from
“crew member” (archaeological technician) through “archaeologist I”
(equivalent to director) in roughly $2.00-per-hour “hops” and then a
128 Class

leap of $7.00 to $10.00 per hour when principal investigator status is

achieved (ACRA 1996). The disparity in wages between field workers
and management (directors and principal investigators) is, in fact, even
greater than these figures suggest. Managers have staff positions and
benefits and also do not pay hidden costs, such as travel time or depreci-
ation of personal equipment, such as vehicles. Unsurprisingly, most field
workers find the pay insufficient. Wilson (2001b:38) indicated that her
respondents worked in CRM only half the year. They managed to survive
by taking other jobs, by going on unemployment, by relying on per diem
for housing, or by taking loans from parents, or any combination of
these (UAFT 1996).
Another less quantifiable, but equally important, issue that field work-
ers face is the alienation that comes from the devaluation of their labor
(Wilson 2001b). In modern capitalism, mental or intellectual labor is sep-
arated from and valued over physical labor (Braverman 1989). Fast cap-
italism has only intensified this distinction as technical skills and wages
have been progressively devalued (Agger 2004). Although this separation
is less pervasive in archaeology than in other disciplines, the blue-collar
workers of CRM, the field technicians, are still often made aware of
their inferior or junior status. The appeal that we are all archaeologists
and scholars stands in contradiction to the common representation of
field technicians in stereotypical proletarian terms as alcoholic, childlike,
and in need of firm discipline, the “field animal” (Kintz 1995). We have
all heard the slang terms for field workers—shovel bums, grunts, and, in
a revealing overlap with racial discourses, digroes (UAFT 1996; Brandon
2003; de Boer 2004; Hirst 2005). Indeed, one of the largest sources of
dissatisfaction among field technicians is the alienation of their intellect
and interpretive abilities (Wilson 2001b).
Deskilling also devalues archaeological fieldwork and leads to inferior
archaeology (Paynter 1983; Berggren and Hodder 2003). In a pattern
that has occurred repeatedly in the past two hundred years for many
kinds of capitalist workers, the workers of archaeology, once considered
skilled craftsmen, are now being redefined as unskilled laborers, essen-
tially relegated to an “archaeological proletariat” (Paynter 1983). In fast
capitalism, this deskilling has penetrated the professions, including
archaeology. Deskilling flows from the economic pressure to routinize
archaeological research, the pressure to produce more for less. Just as
cookie-cutter research designs and reports increase production for princi-
pal investigators, cookie-cutter excavation methods, data recovery, and
recording increase production for field technicians. The devaluing of
Class 129

archaeological field workers goes hand in hand with a devaluing of

archaeological fieldwork (Lucas 2001:12; Berggren and Hodder 2003).
Routinizing some aspects of recording and excavation to the point that
anyone can do them may be possible, but we all know that good excava-
tion requires experience and mastery of the craft of archaeology. Field
techs must have knowledge of archaeological principles, such as stratigra-
phy, an understanding of what kinds of material can be sampled for what
kinds of analysis, artifact identification, manual skills in the use of trow-
els and other tools to expose delicate features, and an awareness of how to
use photographic and drawing to record what is found (Berggren and
Hodder 2003). For all archaeologists a tension exists between standardi-
zation and creativity, but the alternative to deskilling is not chaos. We can-
not do good archaeology without standards or tested techniques, but nei-
ther can we reduce good archaeology to a series of repetitive motions.
Whether archaeological fieldwork is skilled or unskilled labor is not
an abstract issue or a distinction that is important only in regard to the
quality of archaeological research. This issue is the terrain on which the
struggle over wages has taken place. In the late 1990s, this debate
erupted over the United States Department of Labor’s (DOL) definition
of archaeological technicians. Within archaeology, the main voices in
this debate and those that had the greatest potential for effecting change
were the UAFT on one side and ACRA on the other.
The UAFT arose from field technicians laboring beside organized
workers on pipelines in the early 1990s. “Working alongside Union
Pipefitters on countless jobs in countless states and watching them make
six times our annual wage with no one to blame but ourselves for failing
to stand together, we decided to do something” (UAFT 1997:1). The
UAFT was a local (no. 141) of the Union of Operating Engineers. This
affiliation with the pipeline workers union logically followed from the
kind of work field technicians do. It allowed the UAFT to draw on the
legal and organizational expertise of the AFL-CIO (UAFT 1997; West
1994). Even though the UAFT was the strongest effort to date to organ-
ize archaeological workers, it did not speak for all field technicians,
although all field techs shared in the benefits the union achieved. Field
technicians may be more resistant to organizing than workers in many
other industries because of the middle-class background of most techni-
cians and the dispersed and mobile nature of the workforce. In the end,
the UAFT largely failed in its attempt to organize the CRM proletariat.
As of this writing, the union has disappeared from the scene. Fast capi-
talism is hard on unions.
130 Class

Founded in March 1995, ACRA functions as a trade association to

advance the interests of the cultural resources industry in the national
arena. As such it is comparable to other trade associations, including the
American Egg Board, the Contact Lens Manufacturers Association, the
Lead Industry Association, and the Valve Manufacturers Association. In
2005, ACRA represented 142 firms of the more than 500 it estimated in
existence in the United States at that time. ACRA seeks to promote
the business needs of cultural resource practitioners, professionalism in
the industry, education, and public awareness of cultural resources
(ACRA 2005). Although all CRM companies may share in the benefits
of ACRA’s work, not all CRM companies belong to ACRA or support its
goals. A considerable diversity of opinion exists within ACRA (ACRA
1997).
Individual CRM companies reacted in different ways to the UAFT,
engaging in various activities to stem unionization of archaeological field
technicians. Some firms were scrupulously legal but proactive in their
stance against unionization, contracting with firms from the union-bust-
ing industry of fast capitalism to instruct their middle management and
supervisory personnel on how to act, and not act, if union organizers
appeared at the workplace. The Labor Relations Committee of ACRA
disseminated information to its members to assist them in dealing legally
with union organizing efforts (Pape 1996b). Other firms engaged in
actions that have been patently illegal under U.S. labor law, such as
rejecting individuals for employment because of their union association
(i.e., blackballing them).
Both the UAFT and ACRA participated in the legal debate over
whether archaeological workers are skilled or unskilled labor. The UAFT
justified a higher wage for field technicians on the basis that they are
skilled workers who are entitled to a living wage comparable to that of
skilled workers in other fields (UAFT 1996, 1997). As it stands, field
technicians receive less than many unskilled workers in other fields. For
example, in upstate New York, the 2005 prevailing federal wage for
unskilled labor on highway projects was $18.64 an hour. Archaeologists
on the same projects routinely received around $10.50 an hour. Unskilled
labor is cheap labor, and unorganized labor, regardless of skill, is cheaper
still.
In the mid-1990s the UAFT had considerable success using the exist-
ing U.S. Department of Labor classification of an archaeological techni-
cian to enforce prevailing wage laws on federal jobs. The prevailing wage
of an archaeological technician (29020) in 1994 ranged from a low of
Class 131

$8.49 for Fayetteville, North Carolina, to a high of $21.75 for Houston,

Texas (Pape 1996a). If companies had paid all archaeological field techs
the prevailing wage, the mid-1990s average wage would probably have
doubled. An increase of this scale for field workers would have had
severe ramifications for the CRM industry, by increasing labor costs, not
just for crews, but at all levels of employment.
ACRA sought to maintain a field tech wage of around $8.00 to
$10.00 an hour in the late 1990s. They established a special fund and
hired a labor lawyer for an appeal to the Department of Labor (Pape
1996a, 1996c, 1997a). ACRA also met with several federal agencies (the
U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land
Management, and the U.S. Corps of Engineers), the objective being to
“develop a unified strategy for presenting modified (Archaeological
Technician) descriptions to the DOL” (Pape 1996c:6). With input and
assistance from ACRA, the U.S. Forest Service led the effort to convince
the DOL to revise the job descriptions (Pape 1997a). The DOL accepted
the three-tiered classification proposed by the U.S. Forest Service in
1997, and it remains in effect at the time of this writing (DOL 2005).
This classification made explicit the trend toward deskilling archaeolog-
ical fieldwork (Paynter 1983). The archaeological technician I, the bot-
tom tier of the classification, works under “the direct supervision of
archaeological crew chiefs and under the general supervision of field
director/project archaeologist performs unskilled and semi-skilled tasks
at archaeological field sites” (Pape 1997b; see also UAFT 1997).
Although it is not stated in the DOL classification, the stance taken by
ACRA appears to be that the tier-I position is a crew member, and the
other two positions (tiers II and III) are crew chief and field supervisor
(Pape 1996c:6, 1997b). In contrast with this, UAFT argued that the
archaeological technician I cannot be a field technician position (West,
pers. comm.) but instead can be filled only by untrained laborers.
Many CRM managers express a pervasive fear that the UAFT, by
seeking to increase labor costs, has threatened the existence of CRM.
CRM companies are caught in the unfortunate contradiction of selling a
product that is mandated by laws embodying nonmarket values to cor-
porations embracing the market ethos of fast capitalism. Given fast cap-
italism’s impetus to free business from the “burdens” of such laws, CRM
companies worry that an increase in the expense of doing CRM could
turn the tide against CRM legislation in the federal government (Duke
1991:11). Many apparently feel that the preservation of the archaeolog-
ical record requires that field technicians work for low wages. In order to
132 Class

hold wages low, some managers, arguing that the archaeological record
can be excavated by unskilled labor, would sacrifice the quality of the
data and the archaeological record in order to avoid paying their work-
ers a living wage.
CRM archaeology has come of age as a business, and it is caught up in
the hypercompetitiveness and processes of fast capitalism. It has labor
problems. Realistically, we can see that these labor problems are not
going to go away. CRM companies are not going to be able to maintain
a skilled, highly motivated, but low-paid workforce. The alternatives
appear to be either dealing with a unionized workforce or resorting to
assigning the most publicly visible aspect of archaeology largely to
unskilled laborers. Neither of these alternatives is without consequences
for the practice of CRM and for the preservation of the archaeological
heritage of the United States.
The extreme bifurcation of the labor force that characterizes fast cap-
italism in the United States has had a profound effect on the profession of
archaeology. In both the academy and CRM, we now have a growing
archaeological proletariat that lacks a living wage, job security, benefits,
and respect. Its members are exploited. The question before us, then, is,
What is to be done?

Class Praxis in Archaeology

Much of the evidence of class relations in archaeology is buried and
often fragmentary, leaving our analysis incomplete in many ways. In
addition to more conventional sources, we have found our data largely
in photocopied newsletters that go out to select mailing lists, Internet
Listservs, Web pages, and informal conversations at conferences and in
our places of work. In formulating an abstract picture of class in archae-
ology, we speak in generalizations: “the middle-class is . . . ,” “archaeol-
ogists are . . . ,” “managers in CRM believe . . . ,” “field techs are . . . ,”
and so forth. The complex and concrete ways class is experienced by
individuals in different circumstances require finer scales of analysis. Our
understanding of class in archaeology remains incomplete in large part
because few researchers have studied archaeology in class terms.
Numerous studies have been done of the gender composition of our field
(Chester et al. 1994; Beaudry 1994; Association Research, Inc. 2005;
Baxter 2005), and they have been very valuable in identifying inequities
and the reasons for them. We know of no comparable studies of the class
Class 133

experience of archaeologists and the relationship of that experience to

their success in the field.
Our analysis does, however, demonstrate that a complex web of class
relations confronts archaeology and that class distinctions exist within
archaeology. The discipline of archaeology retains a middle-class orien-
tation and produces a product primarily for a middle-class audience.
The class relationships involved in this production are complex.
Producing archaeology requires the labor of working-class individuals,
and not all middle-class consumers desire the product that we generate
(e.g., Yamin 1997). The awareness of this, linked with a consciousness of
race and gender, has implications for the praxis of archaeology.
Building class praxis that addresses the existing class struggle in
archaeology is difficult. Before archaeologists can address the inequities
that exist within the practice of archaeology, they must first recognize
that many of these inequities rest in class structures. The increased
employment of adjuncts in the universities and the legions of archaeo-
logical field technicians in the country represent class positions that exist
outside the traditional guild model of archaeological training. In both
cases, the ideology behind these employment practices has been used to
marginalize, underpay, and withhold benefits from the individuals
involved. The resulting class relations are not simply foibles of the disci-
pline of archaeology or of its practice. They are, rather, manifestations of
the restructuring of class relations in fast capitalism. We cannot simply
wish away this restructuring or change it on a case-by-case basis. The
academic department that refuses to use adjuncts will find its budget cut
when enrollments drop relative to departments that do use adjuncts. Less
scrupulous companies will underbid the contract firm that pays its work-
ers a living wage and benefits. We must confront class exploitation in
archaeology on both the global scale and local scales.
We can join our scholarly and political efforts with those forces that
seek to transform the larger structures. Archaeologists might do well to
enter into the developing dialogue between organized labor and histori-
ans. The election of John Sweeney as president of the AFL-CIO in 1995
led to a revitalization of the organization as a broad-based social interest
movement. As part of this movement a joint labor-academic teach-in
was held at Columbia University on October 3–4, 1996, with over
twenty-five hundred people in attendance (Murolo 1996; Sugrue 1996;
Tomasky 1997). At least ten other teach-ins followed on campuses across
the country (Tomasky 1997). Our discussion of the Colorado Coalfield
134 Class

War Project, in chapter 5, represents our effort to participate in this

larger struggle. These efforts are important in the long term, but they do
not necessarily address the immediate needs of archaeologists.
Ben Agger (2004:131–168) concludes his analysis of fast capitalism
by arguing that social change must begin with changes in people. He con-
tends that changing fast capitalism first requires the realization that peo-
ple can do more than just struggle to keep up with it. They can change it.
Changing fast capitalism requires distance and critique. Distance comes
from stepping back from our own position to look at how we individu-
ally fit in the larger processes of fast capitalism. This allows critique, or
the critical awareness of what needs to be changed. Distance and critique
may not be possible for the poor, the desperate, and the marginalized,
who must struggle just to survive, but they are possible for college-edu-
cated, middle-class archaeologists (Agger 2004:134). We experience fast
capitalism as individuals, but our individual selves are fundamentally
social. From distance and critique should come action that changes the
social self and, through this change, the structure of fast capitalism.
On the local scale of archaeology we would propose a six-step pro-
gram to a praxis that confront the inequities that exist in the field. The
first step is to gain a better understanding of class in archaeology (dis-
tance) and to engage in a critique that raises the consciousness of archae-
ologists about the class position of the discipline and about the exploita-
tive class relations that exist in the profession of archaeology. This
chapter is our contribution to that first step. Second, those of us who
have privilege in the existing class structure should question that privilege
and the false consciousness that sustains it. Third, we need to recognize
graduate teaching assistants, adjuncts, and field technicians as profes-
sionals and formulate standards for their employment. Fourth, all
archaeologists deserve a day’s pay for a day’s work. Fifth, we need to
change the priorities of both the academy and CRM. Sixth, members of
the archaeological proletariat must recognize that they will never simply
be given respect, living wages, benefits, and decent working conditions
because it is right to do so. They must organize to win these rights.

Question Privilege and Fight False Consciousness

The class structures of our profession have changed. The guild model of
apprenticeship no longer functions, if it ever did. It has become, instead,
a false consciousness, a secret writing that allows those of us who occupy
privileged positions in the class structure, such as tenured professors and
Class 135

project directors, to ignore the exploitation of others. The time has come
to question our privilege and the ideology that justifies it (Nelson and
Watt 2004:24–26; Jancius 2006).
It is difficult to get individuals who have achieved success in a social
hierarchy to question that hierarchy, because success there validates the
self-worth of the privileged. For these individuals to gain distance and
critique, they must question their own achievement and self-worth. Part
of the false consciousness involves the denigration of the new archaeo-
logical proletariat of adjuncts and field technicians. The privileged reflect
on the experience of their own rise to mastery and conclude that those
who have failed in this process are somehow inferior. They presume that
the members of the proletariat have failed to achieve privileged positions
because of personal faults such as laziness or want of intellect or ability.
But fast capitalism does not respect even the privilege of the successful.
It corrodes all distinction and reduces all relations to the principles of the
market place. It hounds even the masters of the guild. Using information
technology, universities can outsource and deskill the teaching of the pro-
fessor (Noble 2003; Nelson and Watt 2004:156–163). A faculty member
can design a Web-based distance-learning course, and graduate students
or adjuncts can deliver it. In such a system, the university needs far fewer
tenured faculty members. Universities are increasingly profit driven and
favor academic disciplines that pay their way (Nelson and Watt 2004).
Archaeology can pay its way only through CRM. But CRM faces an
explosive contradiction. The market principles that structure the enter-
prise of CRM corrode the values of the legal structure that makes CRM
a profitable enterprise. All archaeologists, privileged or not, need to chal-
lenge fast capitalism’s corrosion of our discipline.
All archaeologists deserve respect as professionals and members of our
profession. We all suffer from the disrespect that those of us in positions
of power give the archaeological proletariat and from the economic
exploitation of these archaeologists. Those processes that lower the
wages and degrade the labor of temporary and part-time workers also
erode the prestige and earning potential of fully employed project direc-
tors and tenured professors (Nelson 1997b:6).

A Bill of Rights

The guild model of apprenticeship justifies the exploitation of graduate

students, adjuncts, and field technicians by portraying these positions as
temporary rites of passage that must be endured to achieve mastery. In
136 Class

reality they have become permanent career tracks that most individuals
can escape only by leaving the discipline. Those who occupy these posi-
tions are professional archaeologists, and within our discipline we need
to formulate standards for their treatment as professional employees,
not as apprentices.
What we are calling for is a bill of rights for the existing archaeologi-
cal proletariat that will recognize its members as professionals deserving
of respect, living wages, benefits, and decent working conditions. In the
academy, such rights should include provisions for teaching load, class
size, professional benefits such as departmental support of travel and
research activities, and professional respect for graduate students and
adjuncts. In CRM, these rights should include decent living conditions in
the field, working conditions that allow field technicians to build and
refine their skills, and respect for their professionalism and craft.
Our call for a bill of rights for archaeological workers participates in a
larger movement to confront fast capitalism in the academy. In June 2000,
the American Association of University Professors adopted the Statement
on Graduate Students, which addresses the rights of graduate students as
professionals, workers, and teachers (AAUP 2000). In February 2001, a
conference at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, proposed the
Charter of University Workers’ Rights (Nelson and Watt 2004:51), based
on a charter adopted by Northeastern University, in Boston (Northeastern
University 2001). This charter extends rights to all members of the uni-
versity community including student workers, service workers, faculty
(part- and full-time, tenured and untenured), library workers, research
workers, administrative workers, and administrators. And it entitles con-
tracted workers to the same rights as permanent workers.

A Day’s Pay for a Day’s Work

The most basic right of every worker is to make a living. At the very least,
all archaeologists should receive a living wage, that is, a wage at least com-
mensurate with the actual cost of living. In both the academy and CRM,
the archaeological proletariat is routinely paid less than a living wage.
Currently in the academy, graduate students and adjuncts are paid far less
per course or per student than regular faculty. Per class payments for tem-
porary teachers should be comparable to those paid to regular faculty, and
temporary teachers, like regular faculty, should be rewarded commensu-
rately with their experience and skill. Archaeological field technicians
work for substantially lower wages than those paid to unskilled laborers
Class 137

working on the very same construction projects. In recognition of the

skills that field techs must have to do archaeology, their compensation
should be comparable to that of not just the unskilled workers but the
other skilled workers on these projects. Finally, all temporary workers
should receive benefits, such as health and retirement, comparable to
those that permanent workers in our society rightfully receive.

Changing Priorities

The respect and compensation that the archaeological proletariat

deserves cannot be achieved without changing priorities. This is equally
true in the academy and CRM. Most graduate programs in the United
States still train and treat students as apprentices working to become uni-
versity professors. This practice is doubly pernicious in archaeology,
because the vast majority of jobs in the discipline are outside the acad-
emy and the number of tenured university slots for archaeologists is
shrinking (Fagan 2006). Every archaeology department has an obligation
to educate students at the beginning of graduate training about the real-
ities of the job market and then to provide these students with the skills
they need for that market. By producing a large number of graduates at
all levels, university archaeology departments also produce and replenish
the reserve armies of labor that both the academy and CRM consume.
Having this large number of students often serves the department’s inter-
ests and those of the tenured faculty; furthermore, a seemingly unlimited
supply of new fodder allows universities and CRM companies to use up
people rather than reform exploitative practices. Larger student-to-
teacher ratios also erode academic standards and worsen the training of
graduates. The professoriat should resist this erosion. It may be time for
fewer departments to produce fewer, but better trained, graduates.
CRM has been driven by two major goals, profit and research. Some
firms have funneled profits into not-for-profit branches to support
research, but in most cases the welfare of both managers and field tech-
nicians has been sacrificed to do research. We would argue that CRM
companies should respect three goals: profit, research, and the welfare of
their employees.

Organize

Archaeologists are largely paid less in comparison to those in other middle-

class professions and those in working-class trades. In the middle class,
138 Class

doctors, lawyers, dentists, engineers, and many others generally earn more
than archaeologists. In the field, archaeological field techs and even crew
chiefs and supervisors routinely make less than the heavy equipment oper-
ators, welders, carpenters, and even laborers working on the same proj-
ects. What do these people have that we don’t? In a word, organization.
Doctors and lawyers earn more than archaeologists chiefly because of
the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association.
Professional associations such as these license individuals as members of
the profession, establish professional standards, and grant accreditation
to the institutions that train these individuals. Archaeologists have
formed the Register of Professional Archaeologists (RPA) to promote
professionalism among archaeologists and to maintain a code of conduct
and a standard of research performance (Altschul 2006). The RPA is a
registry of archaeologists who meet certain standards, such as holding an
advanced degree, and who agree to conform to the code of conduct and
standards of the organization. The RPA does not, however, address the
needs or interests of field techs, adjuncts, and graduate students.
Given the larger structures of fast capitalism, the archaeological pro-
letariat of field techs, adjuncts, and graduate students would be naive to
believe that they will receive respect, living wages, benefits, and decent
working conditions simply because it is humane or right. They would be
equally naive to think that they can achieve these rights and benefits
though individual action. They must engage in collective agency. Labor
in the United States has won these things only through organization and
struggle. The reason that the people flagging traffic on a road project are
paid higher wages than archaeologists is that they have engaged in col-
lective bargaining and must be paid prevailing wages on federal con-
tracts. Archaeologists have no reason to believe they can win equitable
working conditions by any other means. At twenty-three universities in
the United States and twenty universities in Canada, graduate student
employees (including archaeologists) have unionized (CGEU 2006). At
three U.S. campuses, adjuncts have gained union recognition. These
unions have won their members higher compensation, benefits, grievance
procedures, and respect. The failure of the UAFT shows that it is very
difficult to organize the archaeological proletariat of field techs. Those of
us who have stable employment need to assist the archaeological prole-
tariat to organize and fight for respect, fair treatment, and security.
We offer our six steps not as a panacea but instead as a starting point
to a dialogue to stop the deterioration of archaeological labor in fast cap-
italism. We feel archaeologists should give this dialogue a high promi-
Class 139

nence in our scholarly and professional associations, a prominence com-

parable to that given reburial and repatriation in the last decade and a
half. This dialogue must start with the realization that archaeologists live
class. We live it every day, and it structures the whole of our professional
lives. It confronts us in our classrooms, on our excavations, in our
offices, and in our audience. As Ollman points out, “One doesn’t advo-
cate class struggle or choose to participate in it” (2003:20); we are all
part of it. Our only choice is which side we will be on.
Chapter 4

México
It seems to me that it is not difficult to find splendid formulas
for life, but it is difficult to live.
Antonio Gramsci (1994:13)

In the mid-1980s I initiated archaeological research in northern Sonora,

México, and threaded my way into the tangled skein of double colonial-
ism along the border. I did so with a keen awareness of the imperialist
archaeology that U.S. scholars traditionally practiced in México. I also
had a developing sense of the colonialist nature of prehistoric archaeol-
ogy in the United States. Since beginning this project, my Mexican col-
laborator Elisa Villalpando and I have tried to create a praxis of archae-
ology that challenges both the imperialism and the colonialism that we
encountered on the border. Creating emancipatory praxis will never be
an easy thing to do. The realities of social relations and ethics are never
so clear and distinctly defined as they are in abstract discussions.
Splendid formulas for life simplify the real politics, conflicting interests,
ambiguities, and contradictions of working with multiple communities.
In this chapter I will discuss a process for building emancipatory
praxis in archaeology. This process begins with a consideration of the dif-
ferent approaches that archaeologists may use to interact with commu-
nities. In order to interact with communities productively, archaeologists
need to be knowledgeable about those communities and their interrela-
tionships. From this knowledge archaeologists may engage in critique to
decide which approach will guide our action. Our action should create
more knowledge and be subject to constant critique. There is no cook-
book for praxis. Rather, it is a relational dialectical method that flows
from the questions we ask and the contexts that we ask them in.

140
México 141

The archaeology of the Trincheras Tradition Project shows how praxis

has worked out, albeit imperfectly, in one case. The project has involved
four communities from both sides of the international border: U.S.
archaeologists, Mexican archaeologists, Norteños, and the Tohono
O’odham (the Papago). The relationship between U.S. archaeology and
both Mexican archaeology and the descendants of Spanish settlers in
Sonora, the Norteños, has traditionally been an imperialist one. Archae-
ology has played a role in the United States’ economic, political, and cul-
tural domination of México. The relationship of all three of these com-
munities to the Tohono O’odham has been colonialist. The traditional
lands of the Tohono O’odham straddle the international frontier, and
O’odham live on both sides. México and the United States have subju-
gated the Tohono O’odham, and in both Sonora and Arizona the descen-
dants of the conquerors study the ancestors of the conquered.
Double colonialism exists in two senses here. In the simplest sense it
lies in the colonial relationship of both the United States and México
with the Tohono O’odham. U.S. archaeologists crossing the border into
Sonora also enter into an additional colonial relationship. Here they
encounter a tradition of U.S. imperialist archaeology in México and they
study the ancestors of a people their ancestors subjugated. An emancipa-
tory praxis should seek to confront and transform these unequal rela-
tionships in both of these colonial relationships. Our efforts to do this
in the Trincheras Tradition Project have met with uneven success. We
have built a collaborative approach between the two communities of
Mexican and U.S. archaeologists that mitigates the traditional imperial-
ist U.S. archaeology in México. We have also entered into an educa-
tional dialogue with the Norteños of Sonora. But our consultations with
the Tohono O’odham remain problematic.
The border creates a distinctive context for our research. The frontier
between the United States and México west of the Río Grande is an
unnatural line defined only by the artificial grid of longitude and latitude.
For the people who live and work along this line, including archaeolo-
gists, the international frontier is in one sense very artificial but at the
same time a very compelling reality (Alonso 1995). A mix of Español and
English, tortillas and white bread, Norteño and country-western tunes,
and El Pollo Feliz and Kentucky Fried Chicken defines a zone that is cul-
turally neither U.S. nor Mexican but simultaneously both. Yet, there is
nothing fuzzy about the line slashed through aboriginal territories, divid-
ing native nations and leaving the archaeological record of ancient pasts
unnaturally sundered. This line is a rigid social institution made up of
142 México

walls, fences, and checkpoints and patrolled by agents of the state with
guns, dogs, jeeps, and planes.
This line both impacts and structures the social relationships that gen-
erate the four communities of the Trincheras Tradition Project. Euro-
peans created the United States and México by conquering and subju-
gating aboriginal peoples. The elite of each nation developed a national
ideology that legitimated this conquest and defined the place of Indian
peoples in the heritage of the state. Archaeologists participated in the
development of the national ideology in both countries, and archaeology
was also defined by these ideologies. The respective ideologies delineate
very different relationships among archaeology, Indian peoples, and the
state. Furthermore, the two nations are not equal. The Treaty of Gua-
dalupe del Hidalgo ended the U.S. war of conquest that took approxi-
mately half of the territory of México (Griswold del Castillo 1990).
Within México a distinctive subculture known as Norteño arose along
the frontier. The unnatural line defined the limits of two nations but split
a third, that of the Tohono O’odham, in two. Even though both the
Norteño and the Tohono O’odham communities share the common his-
tory and reality of the border, they experience that heritage and reality in
different ways. From those experiences spring different relationships to
and interests in the past of the region.

Process and Praxis

An emancipatory praxis based in the interrelationship of knowledge, cri-
tique, and action can exist only within real contexts of social relations,
struggles, interests, institutions, and agents. The four border communi-
ties (U.S. archaeologists, Mexican archaeologists, Norteños, and Tohono
O’odham) are an example of such a context. Each of these communities
exists in relation to the others. Each has its own interests in past and
present borderland issues. Each is a product of a shared history, but each
also experienced that history differently. How can archaeologists undo
this tangled skein to ethically establish useful relationships among these
communities that lead to an emancipatory praxis? How do we decide
which communities we will oppose, which we will educate about archae-
ology, which we will consult with, and which we will collaborate with?
A relational dialectical process is necessarily historical. As we decide
how and why we interact with communities and what modes that inter-
action should take, archaeologists need to gain knowledge of the world
and engage in a critique of it. The questions we need to ask are necessar-
México 143

ily historical questions, seeking to learn about the historical processes

that produced the relationships that created the communities we study.
The relationships that create communities flow from historical processes.
At the same time archaeologists should critically analyze those relation-
ships to understand the power relations they entail. Finally, archaeolo-
gists need to take action in the world. This action may entail different
modes of interaction with different communities. Action may require
taking sides, since the interests of the communities involved may be in
conflict.
Wherever archaeologists do research, we step into a historically cre-
ated social context. Once we make that step, we are part of that context
and the relationships that it entails. Each community has its own histor-
ical experience, culture, interests, relations to other communities, and
ideologies. Archaeologists enter into social relationships as fully consti-
tuted social beings, with identities that include class, race, gender, pro-
fession, sexuality, and nationality. The communities that we encounter
will initially evaluate and interact with us based on their perceptions of
those identities, their historical experience with the communities the
archaeologist represents, and their evaluation of the power relationships
between themselves and the archaeologist. Archaeologists cannot assume
that we will be judged by our intentions or personalities. We will be
stereotyped. We need a historical understanding of the social contexts in
order to counter stereotypes as we interact with the communities affected
by our research.

Strategies for Interacting with Communities

Archaeologists may interact with diverse communities in different ways.

Four approaches to interaction in archaeological research are opposition,
education, consultation, and collaboration. Each of them implies a dif-
ferent level of investment by archaeologists in a community and a differ-
ent power relationship between the archaeologists and the community.
The four approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive and may be
fruitfully integrated. Each of them has an appropriate use in an emanci-
patory praxis of archaeology.
Arguing that archaeologists can engage communities in different ways
takes as given that we need to form relationships with the communities
that have interests in our work (Shanks and McGuire 1996). The alter-
native is to ignore them. Social engineers and members of the vanguard
party may choose to ignore the interests of communities, because they
144 México

believe that scientists possess “true” knowledge. As I have argued in pre-

vious chapters, ignoring the interests of others can lead to totalitarian-
ism. An emancipatory praxis of archaeology can ignore only those com-
munities that do not have interests in our research.

Opposition Opposition entails confronting, hindering, obstructing,

and resisting the interests of a community. Archaeologists should not
simply let every community’s interests go unchallenged; we need to
oppose some voices on the past and make ethical judgments based in an
explicit discussion of the morality of archaeology (Meskell and Pels
2005; Hamilakis and Duke 2006). Archaeologists have traditionally
opposed those social groups and communities that would commodify the
archaeological record for personal profit, such as looters, metal detector
clubs, and collectors of antiquities. These groups interfere with the inter-
ests of the archeological community by destroying the archaeological
record. Some social groups wish to use the past in ways that are contrary
to human emancipation. The nazi archaeology in Europe (Arnold 1990)
and the Hindu nationalist archaeology at the Babri Mosque in Ajodhya,
India (Romey 2004), provide examples of such malicious voices. Archae-
ologists who accept an ethic of human emancipation must oppose these
malicious voices.

Education Education is the act of imparting or acquiring knowledge,

developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and acquiring self-
awareness. Education has received much attention in archaeology at the
turn of the twenty-first century (Bender and Smith 2000; Smardz and
Smith 2000). Often scholars have argued that through education we can
reach the looters and collectors and convince them not to destroy archae-
ological sites (Judge 1989). I have expressed two reservations with the
general tone of these discussions (McGuire 1992b:257–261). The first is
that archaeologists have tended to use a consumerist model for educa-
tion. The second is that the audience or community to be educated is usu-
ally identified as “the general public.”
In a consumerist model, archaeologists produce a watered-down ver-
sion of our scholarly research, which we then package and sell to the
public. This model assumes that the archaeological community has the
knowledge, the skill, the authority, and the right to determine what the
correct knowledge or interpretation of the past should be. The issue be-
comes how our interpretation of the past can be communicated or made
relevant to the public (J. Jameson 1997; McManamon 2000; Smardz and
México 145

Smith 2000). Or, put another way, how do we educate the public to see
the world our way and to protect our interests in the past (Lynott 1990)?
The implicit assumption in the consumerist model is that those com-
munities who do not share our interests in the past lack that interest
because of ignorance, which education can eliminate. What is not con-
sidered in this view is that other communities or social groups my simply
have different interests in and ways of knowing the past. As I argued in
the last chapter, archaeology is primarily a middle-class pursuit driven by
middle-class interests. Other social groups, classes, and communities
have interests in the past different from ours. Parker Potter (1994)
argued over a decade ago that archaeologists should seek an ethno-
graphic understanding of other communities’ interests in the past.
This book’s relational approach to education views this ethnographic
understanding as a dialogue. Archaeologists possess authority invested in
our craft. We can make observations about the past that people who have
not mastered that craft cannot make. Such observations transmit as
knowledge only within a social discourse. In approaching education,
archaeologists must first recognize that societies are made up of varied
social groups with distinct and even conflicting interests. An undifferenti-
ated “general public” is an illusion, as Potter has demonstrated. In the
United States, Native Americans have made this clear by challenging us
with a very different concept of the North American past (Deloria 2002).
Recognizing this diversity among communities means that education must
become a process of discourse with them. Such a discourse considers our
craft, the interests of both communities, and the ethics of emancipation.
Such a discourse educates both the community and the archaeologists.

Consultation Consultation involves a discussion between two or more

parties to address a particular issue or question. It is an instrumentalist
process that seeks a decision or resolution. It seeks to avoid or resolve
conflicts related to particular goals by providing a structured way for
groups or individuals with differing interests to compromise and come to
an agreement. For this reason, consultation may be a very formalized or
bureaucratized process. Consultation also implies a meeting of groups
and individuals that have differential rights, authority, or power, or any
combination of these. To consult with someone (or some group) is to rec-
ognize his or her (or their) rights, authority, or power.
Consultation as a mode of interaction in archaeology usually ad-
dresses issues of rights and responsibilities to artifacts, knowledge, money,
and sites. Archaeologists consult with others who have rights or authority
146 México

in relationship to those things in order to be able to do archaeological

research. Examples of such others include landowners, funding sources,
local communities, Native American nations, and governmental units.
Usually the archaeologist has a predetermined goal, and the process of
consultation relates to how the archaeologist may meet that goal.
Establishing long-term relationships and conversations with individuals
and groups promotes effective consultation. Such relationships may lead
to greater understanding and transform the interests and practices of the
individuals or social groups that consult with each other. If such relation-
ships move beyond an instrumentalist concern, then they can be trans-
formed into collaboration.

Collaboration Collaboration implies the integration of goals, inter-

ests, and practices among the individuals or social groups that work
together. It entails a dialogue that goes beyond an instrumentalist con-
cern with resolving a conflict or respecting rights and responsibilities.
It requires humility, patience, listening, careful consultation, equality,
and respect (Clifford 2004:22; Zimmerman 2005). Collaboration
should be transformative of the parties involved. Each party brings dif-
ferent resources, skills, knowledge, authority, and interests to a collabo-
rative labor. Collaboration involves the melding of these unique quali-
ties into common goals and practices. Effective collaboration begins
before the definition of an objective or problem so that all parties can
contribute to this definition. Collaboration becomes praxis when it gives
subordinate groups a greater voice in the actions of dominant groups. In
true collaboration, local communities need to be able to say no (Clifford
2004:6).
Archaeologists have most often discussed collaboration in terms of
joint efforts among scientists from different disciplines. More recently,
many archaeologists have turned their attention to collaboration with
descendant communities, such as African American and Native
American communities (e.g., Watkins 2000; Stapp and Burney 2002;
Singleton and Orser 2003). Collaboration is the keystone of indigenous
archaeology, and the most insightful discussions of collaboration are
found there (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2004, 2006; Smith
and Wobst 2005). In all such cases, the archaeologists have entered into
collaboration with an intention of giving subordinate communities a
greater role in the archaeology of their ancestors. In each case, collabo-
ration has involved knowledge, critique, and action and has been trans-
formative of the archaeologists’ practice. This is praxis.
México 147

Knowledge and Critique

The communities in a social context share a common history, but their

experience of that history is different. The same history creates many
pasts. For example, the Mexican, Anglo, and Tohono O’odham peoples
who lived along the international frontier experienced the history of the
border very differently. A historical understanding should ask, How were
these experiences both different and similar? How did the interrelation-
ships among the communities both shape and result from these experi-
ences? How did this history of varied experiences mold the culture, inter-
ests, and ideologies of the communities involved?
Just as disparate communities have experienced a common history dif-
ferently, so too do disparate communities experience modern realities dif-
ferently. Although the international border is a modern reality shared by
U.S. archaeologists, Mexican archaeologists, Norteños, and Tohono
O’odham, the experience of crossing La Línea is very different for mem-
bers of each group (McGuire 1997). U.S. archaeologists usually cross the
line in comfort, with a minimum of hassle or delay on both sides.
Mexican archaeologists, like most middle-class Mexican people, can
cross the border in comfort. Before they can do so, however, they must
first apply for and receive a visa from a U.S. consulate. This process is
long, bureaucratic, and in many ways degrading. At the border, they are
far more likely to be delayed and hassled than Anglos are. U.S. immigra-
tion officials require more paperwork of them and can arbitrarily decide
not to admit them. Mexican customs agents are far more likely to press
them, rather than U.S. citizens, for bribes. Working-class Norteños who
enter the U.S. illegally do so in great discomfort and at risk of arrest,
injury, or death. Even though Tohono O’odham do not recognize the
border that splits their people as legitimate, their ambiguous physical
appearance and status cause them problems on both sides when they
attempt to cross. A relational historical analysis is necessary to under-
stand why these differences exist, especially if the goal of the scholar is to
eliminate such inequalities.
A critique of border history and modern reality must ask about power
(Alonso 1995). What are the relationships of power? How are they justi-
fied, hidden, or challenged by different ideologies? How do inequities
structure experience? More important, such critique should involve self-
reflection. How does the community of archaeologists enter into power
relationships? Can the goals of emancipation be better served by archae-
ologists giving up power and authority, or by wielding power and author-
148 México

ity to confront inequalities? These questions have answers only in real

social contexts.
The international border separating Sonora and Arizona is a very dif-
ficult social context in which to address these questions. This context
involves two nation-states, three different languages, three distinct cul-
tures, and four communities. The context is further complicated by the
double colonialism that defines the relationship among these communi-
ties. Praxis in this context consists of confronting the power relations and
inequalities of double colonialism. But the double colonialism creates
contradictions that may require buttressing some inequalities to diminish
others.
Archaeologists working on the U.S.–Mexican border enter a complex
space where various histories converge to create ambiguous, paradoxical,
and contradictory social, cultural, political, and economic relations
(McGuire 1997). Each individual has multifaceted identities and rela-
tionships, and effective praxis is possible only if the archaeologist has
knowledge of the tangled social and political skein of which he or she
will become a thread. The double colonialism of the border springs from
the national histories of the United States and México and the ambiguous
histories that the meeting of these two chronicles creates for native peo-
ples on the frontier.
Since 1985, in a joint project sponsored by Binghamton University
and the Centro INAH de Sonora, Elisa Villalpando, of the latter institu-
tion, and I have been conducting archaeological field research on the
Trincheras Tradition of northern Sonora, México (map 1). Before the
1980s it was rare for either Mexican or North American archaeologists
to work in northwest México. It is only with the establishment of ongo-
ing archaeological projects in the region, such as our project, that the
challenge of double colonialism among the four communities has arisen.
I begin my relational historical analysis with a consideration of the two
different communities of archaeologists—the U.S. and the Mexican—
that meet at the border. I go on to consider how each of these archaeolo-
gies relates to the indigenous peoples of the nations involved and to the
Norteños. Finally, I examine the implications of these relationships for the
Norteño and Tohono O’odham communities on the border.

U.S. and Mexican Archaeology

The double colonialism that characterizes the Trincheras Tradition
Project is a complex product. U.S. archaeologists participate in an impe-
México 149

rialist archaeology throughout Latin America; this is the first colonial-

ism. Both U.S. and Mexican archaeologies entail members of the edu-
cated middle class studying indigenous peoples who are politically and
culturally marginalized in the nation; this is the second colonialism. Both
archaeologies developed in the process of their respective states, seeking
to legitimate the establishment of a European nation on indigenous
lands. Yet each nation and archaeology came to a very different ideology
to legitimate themselves (Lorenzo 1998:99–101). These ideologies come
into conflict on the border.

Imperialist Archaeology in México

By the end of the twentieth century, U.S. and Canadian archaeologists

had worked in every part of México, with hundreds of projects on arche-
ological sites, ranging from the impressive to the mundane. U.S. institu-
tions have a long and well-established tradition of doing archaeology in
México, with U.S. archaeologists first entering the country over a century
ago. In stark contrast, I cannot identify a single archaeology project car-
ried out solely by a Mexican institution in the United States or Canada
during the last century.1
In general, U.S. archaeology in México differs in significant ways from
México’s own archaeology (McGuire 1997; Lorenzo 1998). Anglo
researchers enter México with more money than their Mexican col-
leagues possess and material resources superior to theirs. Often, the U.S.
projects do nothing to share these resources with the national archaeo-
logical community. Also, North Americans tend to ask different ques-
tions about the past. They focus more on theoretical issues and broad
questions about the process of culture change on a global scale. Mexican
archaeologists tend to emphasize the understanding of local develop-
ments within their nation-state. North American projects may include a
few token Mexican students or archaeologists. By contrast, individuals
associated with U.S. institutions rarely work on Mexican projects.2 Even
when North American projects include Mexicans, the language of the
project tends to be English. In México, two overlapping but separate
archaeologies exist. One is a local nationalist archaeology, and the other
is a U.S. imperialist archaeology.
U.S. archaeologists began working in México in the late nineteenth
century. From then to the middle of the twentieth century, U.S. scholars
largely focused on the archaeology of the Maya lowlands, while Mexican
archaeologists focused on the cultures of the highlands, especially the
Map 1. Archaeological traditions in northern Sonora and southern Arizona.
México 151

Mesa Central (Patterson 1986:12). North Americans downplayed the

achievements of the highland cultures, such as Teotihuacán and the
Aztecs. Instead, they championed the ancient lowland Mayan civilization
as the high point of cultural development in the Americas. In contrast,
Mexican archaeologists focused on the highland civilizations as the most
advanced and as the base for a national heritage in México (Bernal
1980:173–176; Lorenzo 1998:159). Following World War II, this
regional distinction began to break down. In 1960, the Valley of México
Project integrated cultural anthropologists, biological anthropologists,
and archaeologists from México and the United States in a notable col-
laborative effort that transcended the divide between the two communi-
ties (Wolf 1976). More North Americans began working in the high-
lands, and more Mexican archaeologists began working in the lowlands,
but two distinct practices of archaeology remain to this day.
In some exceptional instances, U.S. archaeologists in Latin America
undertook an even more sinister imperialism when they worked as spies
for the U.S. government (Price 2003). In 1917, the Mayanist Sylvanus
Morley used his archaeological activities as a cloak for espionage in Cen-
tral America. During World War II, Samuel Lathrop worked as a U.S. spy
in Peru. In El Salvador during the 1980s, guerillas killed two CIA agents
posing as archaeologists. In the mid-1960s, the U.S. Camelot Project
became public knowledge. This project enlisted cultural anthropologists
to gather information to assist, both knowingly and unknowingly, in
CIA-backed counterinsurgency efforts in Latin America and Asia. Even
though the project included no archaeologists, the scandal cast doubts in
México on the actions of all North American anthropologists, archaeol-
ogists, and ethnographers, doubts that linger today (Palerm 1980:27).
North American archaeologists are by and large unfamiliar with this his-
tory of active cooperation by anthropologists with U.S. political and mil-
itary actions in Latin America. It is, however, a well-known history in
México, where many scholars see it as one small aspect of a larger pat-
tern of U.S. imperialism (Lorenzo 1976, 1982; Lorenzo et al. 1976).

Archaeology and Nationalism in the Americas

Throughout the modern era, “national movements” led by “national”

intelligentsia have created, or failed to create, nation-states, as discussed
in chapter 1 (Anderson 1983; Thomas 2004:97). National movements
take cultural variation and history and construct a sense of nationalism,
which they then use to justify possession of a territory. Sometimes this
152 México

construction precedes the possession of the territory, and other times it

follows. Archaeology participates in these national movements as a way
to create heritage or mythic charters that legitimate the state (Trigger
1989a, 2006).
In the United States and México at the turn of the eighteenth to the
nineteenth century, mostly native-born individuals of European descent
established and led the national movements.3 The struggle to define
nation-states continued throughout the United States and México for a
hundred years or more.4 Both of these national movements faced the
same two contradictions. First, they sought to establish their nations on
lands that clearly had been taken from other peoples. Second, each state
contained Indians, Africans, and mestizos, peoples different from the
Euro-Americans who founded and led the movements.
The nationalist programs of the United State and México had differ-
ent ways of ideologically resolving the contradictions that native peoples
presented to their nationalisms (Lorenzo 1998:99–101). In the United
States a debate raged throughout the nineteenth century about the coun-
try’s ideological approaches to the resolution. The first ideology claimed
that Indians were the “First Americans” and had passed on their legiti-
macy to the Europeans who followed. The second ideology, the Mound
Builder myth, denied a significant Indian presence in the territory of the
state. Scholars claimed the Indians had been few in number, recent, and
had built little of consequence. The First American ideology triumphed
by the turn of the twentieth century. In México, the twentieth-century
nationalist ideology used the concept of indigenismo to deny the Euro-
pean origin of the nation and to identify the population of the state as
indigenous.5 Indigenismo glorifies mestizos (people of mixed Indian and
European ancestry) as the people of the nation. In this ideology the mes-
tizos inherited the heritage of both the Europeans and the native peoples
of the state to form a new nation.
Archaeology has played a key role in the national struggles over her-
itage and in determining which resolution would dominate in a nation.
The ideological resolution that triumphed in each country has also had
a profound impact on the nature of the archaeology in each. Even
though archaeology is largely a colonialist enterprise throughout the
Americas (again, the study of the ancestors of the conquered by the
descendants of the conquerors), the exact form this enterprise takes and
its relationship to the state and nationalism vary greatly. Both U.S.
archaeology and Mexican archaeology were born in these national
struggles. Each took a very different form as a result of the different
México 153

roles assigned to native peoples in nationalist programs. Each partici-

pates in a different set of ideological, institutional, and political relation-
ships with Indian people.

U.S. Archaeology and Native Americans

Throughout the twentieth century, two types of histories existed for
Native America. One was the official, public history of the First Ameri-
cans taught in schools and universities, integral to the laws of the land,
embodied in the interpretation at national parks, and presented in the
halls of museums. The other was a history taught by native elders to the
children in the home, in the kiva, and in the sweat lodge. The official his-
tory empowered ethnographers, archaeologists, and historians as the
keepers of the history of the First Americans (McGuire 1992b:240;
Watkins 2000). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, however,
Native American people questioned the privilege of archaeology and
sought to regain control of their ancestor’s remains, their sacred objects,
and their past. This questioning resulted in a radically changed relation-
ship between U.S. archaeologists and Native Americans at the end of the
twentieth century. The Trincheras Tradition Project entered into consul-
tation with the Tohono O’odham in the midst of this change.

The First Americans

The First American ideology originated at the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury and dominated the official history by the beginning of the twentieth
century. Thomas Jefferson excavated Indian mounds near his home to
demonstrate that North America had previously produced a noble race;
therefore, it could sustain the growth of a great European nation (Wal-
lace 1999). He defined Indians as the First Americans. By calling Indians
the First Americans, Jefferson gave Indian people a transient role in the
U.S. national heritage, and he appropriated their ancient past for Euro-
American scholars. Not everyone in the new nation wished to embrace
Indians as part of the national heritage. They proposed that a lost race of
Mound Builders had constructed the great earthworks that dot the
Midwest. They argued that savage Indians had descended on this civi-
lized race and destroyed it only decades before the European settlement
of the continent (Silverberg 1968). In 1894 Cyrus Thomas published the
results of the Bureau of American Ethnology’s mound explorations,
which proved Indians had built the mounds (Willey and Sabloff
154 México

1993:47). With this, the First American ideology came to dominate

scholarly and government versions of the national heritage.
As the controversy over the mounds raged, archaeology established
itself as part of four-field anthropology in the United States. Anthropol-
ogy was institutionalized in the great museums of natural history, such as
the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Field
Museum of Chicago, and the National Museum of Natural History in
the Smithsonian Institution. The new discipline included Indians in nat-
ural history, their remains to be collected like so many fossils, insects, or
rock specimens. By the end of the century, archaeology had become a
professional career. Archaeologists began to argue that they should con-
trol Indian sites, ruins, and remains, because only they had the special-
ized skills and knowledge to study them (Willey and Sabloff 1993:34).
The Antiquities Act of 1906 legalized the archaeological control of
ancient Native pasts.
By the second half of the twentieth century, the general public took the
archaeological control of Native American pasts for granted. In 1946 the
U.S. Congress established the Indian Claims Commission, which met
until 1978. This commission existed to legally resolve any outstanding
claims by Native American tribes against the federal government in order
to pave the way to the termination of those tribes (Indian Claims
Commission 1978). Many ethnographers and archaeologists engaged in
praxis by giving testimony in support of Indian claims (Ford 1973).
Other anthropologists, including prominent figures such as Julian
Steward, served as expert witnesses for the government to challenge these
claims (Pinkoski and Asch 2004). The commission based its findings pri-
marily on the testimony of Euro-American experts, historians, ethnogra-
phers, and archaeologists. The final report of the commission makes no
mention of testimony by tribal elders (Indian Claims Commission 1978).
Most archaeologists seem unaware that Native Americans commonly
hold ambiguous feelings about the role of anthropologists in this process,
seeing it not as justice but as proceedings to facilitate the theft of their
reservations and sovereignty (Deloria and Lytle 1984:191).

Native Rights and Archaeology

In 1971, American Indian movement (AIM) activists made the native

voice heard by disrupting an archaeological excavation near Minneap-
olis, Minnesota (Deloria 1993; Watkins 2000:4). The archaeologists
involved were honestly surprised and shocked by the interference. As was
México 155

already discussed in chapter 2, the group protested again that year by

interrupting a physical anthropology class at Colorado State University
and confiscating human bones from the teaching collection to negotiate
their exchange for Indian remains the university’s field school had exca-
vated. Native peoples spoke loudly in the 1970s, and they proclaimed
that archaeology was a tool of oppression.
By the 1980s, Indian activists had turned from the confrontational
tactics of the previous decade to seek legal and institutional resolutions
for their interests. A series of federal laws, beginning with the Indian Self-
Determination Act of 1973, gave tribal governments greater authority
and power (Deloria and Lytle 1984). Native activists came to archaeol-
ogy meetings, including the Society for American Archaeology and the
first World Archaeology Conference, to discuss reburial and repatriation
of Indian remains with archaeologists. O’odham people, including Cecil
Antone of the Gila River Indian Community, and Robert Cruz, a Tohono
O’odham, were among the activists meeting archaeologists. By this point
in time, the path of an emancipatory praxis of archaeology seemed clear.
Feminist archaeology provided the model, and some feminist scholars
took the lead (Spector 1993). If archaeology was part of the problem,
then progressive scholars needed to transform archaeology (Sprague
1974; Trigger 1980a; Zimmerman 1989; McGuire 1992a). In 1990, the
federal government passed the Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which has transformed the practice of
archaeology in the United States.
During the debates leading up to NAGPRA, the issues of reburial and
repatriation became concrete in the San Xavier District of the Tohono
O’odham Nation. In October 1983, a Santa Cruz River flood washed
away the San Xavier Mission Bridge and exposed an ancient cemetery
(Ravesloot 1990; Sheridan and Parezo 1996:129–133). The Arizona
Department of Transportation contracted with the Arizona State Mu-
seum (ASM) to do archaeological work on the site before construction of
a new bridge. The O’odham wanted a new bridge, but they were also
very concerned about the well-being of their dead. The archaeologists
from the ASM consulted with the San Xavier District Council and agreed
to active supervision of their research by O’odham political leaders and
an O’odham medicine woman. In response to O’odham requests, the
archaeologists modified both their excavation methods and their analy-
ses. In 1986, the ASM turned the human remains and mortuary artifacts
over to the Tohono O’odham for reburial. This experience established a
model for consultation and cooperation between archaeologists and
156 México

Indian people that would become a standard practice in Arizona after the
passage of NAGPRA. The San Xavier Mission Bridge project also in-
creased awareness of the reburial issue among Tohono O’odham people.

The Practice and Praxis of U.S. Archaeology after NAGPRA

NAGPRA transformed the practice of U.S. archaeology and redefined an

emancipatory praxis of archaeology vis-à-vis Indian peoples. Interactions
between non-Native archaeologists and Native Americans have increased
dramatically, with consultation now a standard aspect of archaeological
research in the United States. Collaboration between archaeologists and
Indian communities is now common. Both archaeologists and Indian
nations have put bureaucratic and institutional mechanisms in place to
facilitate negotiation and compliance with the law. Thousands of human
remains and sacred artifacts have been repatriated. Nonetheless, the
struggle over who will control native pasts and the things from those
pasts still continues, but with Indian people increasingly taking more
control of the official and public histories of Native America.
The involvement of tribal governments in archaeology has dramati-
cally increased in the twenty-first century. NAGPRA requires all muse-
ums receiving federal money to inventory their collections and provide
these inventories to Indian nations. Indian nations have set up cultural
affairs committees to deal with these inventories and with repatriation
and reburial issues that arise as a result of contract archaeology. All five
of the O’odham nations in southern Arizona set up such committees in
the 1990s. Today, dozens of Indian nations have their own archaeology
programs that employ both Native and non-Native archaeologists and
have there own tribal historic preservation officers (Stapp and Burney
2002; NATHPO 2006).
Indian people are also gaining more direct control over how their his-
tories are presented to the public and to their own people. This control
flows from the development of an indigenous archaeology and the
expansion of tribal museums. In virtually all cases, tribal museums have
worked with non-Native archaeologists and ethnographers. In the early
1970s, the Gila River Indian Community opened a craft center, museum,
and heritage park both for tourists on the interstate and for their own
people. The most noteworthy of these efforts is the National Museum of
the American Indian, which opened as part of the Smithsonian Institu-
tion in September 2004. This museum moved Native American exhibits
out from behind the stuffed elephant in the National Museum of Natural
México 157

History and placed them under the control of a predominately Native

American board of directors. In June 2007, the Tohono O’odham Nation
opened a new museum and cultural center near Sells, Arizona.
Aboriginal archaeology in North America today presents a very com-
plex field of praxis in contrast to the obvious path of the 1980s.
Collaborations between archaeologists and Indian people in tribal archae-
ology programs, museums, research, and field schools introduce a very
constructive transformative praxis. The development of an indigenous
archaeology presents the opportunity to establish a permanent and effec-
tive rapport between archaeology and Native peoples. This situation is in
marked contrast to México, where nationalist movements resolved the
contradictions of heritage and indigenous peoples in a very different way.

Archaeology and Indigenismo in México

México possesses a very well-developed tradition of academic archaeol-
ogy with a long history of scholarship (Bernal 1980; Lorenzo 1998:45–
64). This tradition developed with a usually ambiguous relationship with
North American imperialist archaeology in the country. One of the first
university-trained archaeologists in México was Manuel Gamio, who
studied with Franz Boas at Columbia University in the first decade of the
twentieth century (Bernal 1980:161, 164). Early in its history, Mexican
archaeology became an instrument of the nationalist ideology of indi-
genismo, connecting itself to the ancient past of Mesoamerica through a
national mestizo identity (Lorenzo 1982, 1998; Gandara 1992). Accord-
ing to this ideology, the mestizo sprang from the interbreeding of Euro-
pean and Indian peoples and thus can claim both heritages. Mexican
archaeologists believe that they study their own ancestors, in contrast to
the North Americans, who come to study the exotic. In part because
Mexican archaeology exists in service to the Mexican state, it also devel-
oped in a far more consistent and centralized way than North American
archaeology. In the twenty-first century, however, the role of archaeology
in México and the ideology of indigenismo have been challenged by the
global reach of fast capitalism. In México, market principles are cur-
rently contesting established ideals of heritage.

Indigenismo and La Raza

The Mexican Revolution, which raged from 1911 to 1918, devastated

the country (Gonzales 2002). Violence and unrest continued into the
158 México

1920s, with political factions vying for supremacy until the Partido
Revolutionario Institucional (PRI) consolidated its power in 1929. The
PRI subsequently ruled México for more than seventy years.6 The
destruction wrought by the revolution was so great that a new national-
ist movement was needed to unify the country under the political control
of the PRI. The new nationalism was based in the concept of the mestizo,
or La Raza (the race), melding indigenous and European heritage to cre-
ate a new Mexican heritage of indigenismo.
A national intelligentsia, including historians, artists, ethnographers,
and archaeologists, created indigenismo (Patterson 1995a). Gamio began
excavations in Teotihuacán in 1917 to glorify the heritage of indi-
genismo, directing the reconstruction of Teotihuacán as a Mexican Wil-
liamsburg that embodied the identity of the Mexican people (Lorenzo
1982:199–200). In 1934, the left wing of the PRI triumphed, and Lázaro
Cárdenas became the president of the Mexican Republic. Cárdenas
invited the return of intellectuals and artists who had fled México during
the revolution. They enshrined indigenismo as the nationalist ideology.
The great Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and
David Alfaro Siqueiros emblazoned the walls of México with glorifica-
tions of La Raza, often using themes derived from archaeology.
Archaeology played a major role in the construction and maintenance
of indigenismo. In 1939, the Cárdenas government created the Instituto
Nacional de Antropología y Historia (INAH, the National Institute of
Anthropology and History), with the archaeologist Alfonso Caso as its
first director (Bernal 1980:186). The Mexican state granted the INAH
sole responsibility for the direction of archaeological research and con-
trol of all national cultural heritage, including archaeological monuments
and zones, historic sites, and museums in the nation (Lorenzo 1998). At
the same time the Escuela Nacional de Antropología y Historia (ENAH,
the National School of Anthropology and History) was created to train
students to staff the INAH. In México, archaeology did not fall into the
realm of natural history, as it had in the United States (Lorenzo
1998:173–185); rather, it was key to national heritage and identity. In
INAH and ENAH, Gamio, Caso, and Ignacio Bernal developed a histor-
ical approach to archaeology that embodied anti-imperialist, socialist,
and anarchist ideals. These trends differed from the intellectual develop-
ments in the Anglophone archaeology that guided North American
archaeologists working in México and in the southwestern United States
(Fowler 1987:234).
The ideology of indigenismo did not equally glorify all the indigenous
México 159

pasts of México (Gandara 1992). Nationalist constructions of heritage

tend to pick and choose from the history of a nation, and indigenismo is
no exception, with its focus on the cultures and civilizations of the high-
lands. Although the scope of INAH’s interests expanded gradually dur-
ing the post–World War II era, INAH continued to expend the majority
of its attention and funds on the central highlands of the country. Areas
such as the West and North of México received only occasional and
peripheral attention. This focus culminated in the late 1970s and the
early 1980s with the excavation of the Aztec Templo Mayor in center of
México City (Matos 1988). This nationalist Mexican archaeology
developed alongside the imperialist foreign archaeology, which origi-
nated principally in the United States but also included German and
French researchers. In the 1970s, advocates of la archaeología social
confronted this imperialism.

La Arqueología Social

México became the center for a Latin American radical archaeology that
opposed the hegemonic power of U.S. ideologies (Lorenzo et al. 1976;
Patterson 1994; Bate 1998). In this radical climate, the INAH instituted
structural changes in permitting archaeological research in the country,
directly affecting U.S. scholars’ access to Mexican archaeological sites.
In 1975 archaeologists from México, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, and
Argentina came together at the Reunion de Teotihuacán in México to
forge a common struggle (Lorenzo et al. 1976). During the 1970s, reac-
tionary forces in Chile and Argentina violently established military
dictatorships that sought to crush all leftist ideas and actions. This
repression drove many intellectuals, including archaeologists, to more
democratic countries, including México. In México these archaeologists
came into contact with an already established progressive tradition of
nationalism and indigenismo (Caso 1958; Bernal 1980). As a result of
this process, México, especially the ENAH, became a hothouse for the
intellectual development of la arqueología social in the 1970s and 1980s
(McGuire and Navarrete 1999, 2004).
The political debates of the 1970s led the INAH to reevaluate the rela-
tionship between U.S. and Mexican archaeologists (Lorenzo et al. 1976).
Many Mexican archaeologists felt that those from North American had
exploited the national heritage of México and alienated it from Mexicans
(Lorenzo 1982:201–202; 1998). They questioned the quality of work
done by North American archaeologists and the use of Mexican sites to
160 México

train U.S. students. They noted abuses, such as archaeologists leaving

students at excavations without qualified supervisors and failing to pub-
lish the results of their research. U.S. excavations at sites with monu-
mental architecture often left INAH with expensive problems of stabi-
lization and restoration of the exposed architecture. More important,
Mexican archaeologists were concerned that North American archaeol-
ogists came to México to address academic debates that had no relevance
to Mexican concerns (Lorenzo 1982:202).
In 1972, INAH sought to redefine the practice of archaeology in
México by establishing a new set of rules for permitting archaeological
research in the country (McClung 1999). With some modifications, this
permitting process is still in force today, and it applies to both Mexican
and foreign projects (INAH 1994). These rules include strict guidelines
for the supervision of archaeological excavations, a mandate to submit
a final report in Spanish, and a provision that 15 percent of the project
budget must be transferred to INAH for the purposes of stabilization,
restoration, and curation of materials exposed by the project. Many
North American archaeologists worried that the changes meant the end
of U.S. fieldwork in México. This did not happen, but foreign archaeol-
ogists now had to enter into consultations with INAH to work in
México. More recently the conservative, neoliberal trends of fast capital-
ism have begun to transform Mexican nationalism and the role of archae-
ology in the Mexican state yet again.

Fast Capitalism, Neoliberalism, and Archaeology in México

The last decades of the twentieth century found México in economic cri-
sis and the established political and nationalist program of the century in
question. In 1982, México was plunged into a massive economic depres-
sion, followed by a brief recovery and then another crash in late 1994
(Middlebrook and Zepeda 2003). The PRI reacted by moving away from
a governmentally controlled economy with high tariffs on foreign goods.
Instead, factions within the PRI turned to a fast capitalist neoliberal pol-
icy of open trade, privatization of industries and services, and decentral-
ization of the government. In 1994, the government signed the North
American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada.
These trends have generally opened México up to foreign interests and to
the domination of market principles in all aspects of society, including
heritage and archaeology. The strong nationalist ideology of indigenismo
has been eroded, because it does not fit well with the globalization of fast
México 161

capitalism. The decentralization of politics and the economy has also

threatened the role of INAH in heritage management and archaeology
within México.
These changes were met with resistance within México, both from
within the PRI and among the populace. A group of PRI leaders, includ-
ing the son of Lázaro Cárdenas, split from the party and formed the
Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD, the Revolutionary Demo-
cratic Party). The 1994 election was fraudulent, and accusations of vote
tampering left many in the country believing that the PDR really won
the presidency, rather than the PRI.7 Then, in the 2000 elections, the
conservative Partido Acción Nacional (PAN, National Action Party)
won the presidency of México, ending seventy years of PRI rule. These
political shifts have left all Mexican federal agencies, such as the INAH,
in peril.
The fast capitalist neoliberal trend toward decentralization has had a
direct impact on INAH, eroding its domination of archaeology in the
country. In the 1970s, INAH began a program to expand the number of
regional centers throughout the country. By the early 1990s, virtually
every Mexican state had a Centro de INAH. Also in the 1970s, programs
of study leading to the licenciatura in anthropology were established in
state universities in Veracruz and the Yucatán.8 In 1983, an additional
program began in Guadalajara, and in the 1990s such programs sprang
up in many states across the country. In the last decades of the twentieth
century, students no longer had to attend the ENAH to obtain certifica-
tion to be an archaeologist. The state programs, along with the Univer-
sidad Autónoma de México’s Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológi-
cas, are research centers doing archaeology independent of the INAH. In
the last decade of the twentieth century, private companies also began to
appear to do contract archaeology.
In 1999, PAN legislators began introducing legislation to the Mexican
Congress that would transform INAH, and the efforts to pass it have
continued and gained strength since PAN won the presidency in 2000
and 2006. If passed, the legislation will result in the virtual abolition of
the INAH and the ENAH. It will commodify and privatize archaeology
and heritage in the country, replace research and education with market
principles as the philosophy of heritage management, and transfer con-
trol of most heritage issues from the federal government to state-level
governments (McClung 1999). The legislation also seeks to privatize the
national monuments and museums of México by granting concessions in
them to for-profit corporations. This law fits with the general PAN desire
162 México

to renegotiate nationalist ideology in México away from the ideal of

indigenismo, associated with the PRI. These efforts also reflect a larger
worldwide trend to create heritage industries that serve not to advance
nationalist ideologies but rather to generate profits (Rowan and Baram
2004).
In January 1994, Mayan Indians in the state of Chiapas, calling
themselves the Zapatistas, rose up in revolution (Collier 1994). In a few
days, they seized control of a portion of the state, which they still hold in
their power today. The Zapatistas timed their revolution to correspond
to the date for the implementation of NAFTA. Their revolution is a clear
rejection of the conservative neoliberal agenda of turn-of-the-century
México. Perhaps less obviously, the Zapatista revolution’s indigenista
ideology challenges the nationalist ideal of indigenismo. Contemporary
indigenista movements in Latin America, such as the Zapatistas, seek
greater economic, cultural, and political autonomy for indigenous peo-
ples (Joyce 2003, 2005; Ren 2006). The Zapatistas have rejected the
ideology that identifies all Mexicans with La Raza. They have instead
argued for the recognition of the highland Maya as a distinct people
with their own heritage.
The archaeological community of México stands in an ambiguous
relationship to the goals of the Zapatista movement. On the one hand,
most archaeologists in México today favor leftist political movements
and goals. In the spring of 2002, when the leaders of the Zapatista
movement arrived in México City for two weeks, the faculty and stu-
dents of the ENAH opened the doors of the school to house and feed
them. On the other hand, indigenistas claim that the ancient past of
México is the heritage of specific indigenous peoples, such as the Maya,
rather than the heritage of a mestizo Mexican nation. The INAH fears it
will lose control of monuments, museums, and collections to native
groups.
The archaeologists, U.S. and Mexican, of the Trincheras Tradition
Project share a craft of archaeology. But this craft developed and was put
to the service of very different nationalist programs in each country. Even
though both U.S. and Mexican archaeologists work on the same sites,
they are the products and keepers of different cultural traditions of
archaeology. Building a praxis of archaeology that challenges both the
imperialism and the colonialism of the frontier requires that both com-
munities understand critically the history that created them. In northern
Sonora, they also need to understand the history that created the resident
communities of the border, Norteños and Tohono O’odham.
México 163

Norteños and Tohono O’odham on the Border

The United States and México developed different ideologies to resolve
the inherent contradiction in the justification of their existence as nations,
since both were established through the conquest of indigenous peoples.
So too were the archaeological communities of each country created dif-
ferently, and they face different challenges today. The culturally ambigu-
ous nature of an international frontier means that the ideologies,
processes, and social relationships that characterize a nation’s core will
not be the same on the perimeter. The nationalist ideologies of the First
Americans and of indigenismo do not work well along the U.S.–Mexican
boundary. This line also has created unique relationships among the
archaeological communities of both countries, the regional population of
northern México, the Norteños, and the Indian nations, such as the
Tohono O’odham.

Norteños

The Northwest of México stands apart from the country’s other regions
(León-Portilla 1972; Alonso 1995). Elsewhere in México, the Spanish
conquerors encountered large aboriginal populations and existing insti-
tutions and relationships of control and governance. The conquistadores
and their native allies quickly defeated the indigenous armies and then
placed themselves at the top of the state structure. Epidemic diseases dec-
imated the native populations but left enough people that the Spanish
could enlist their labor to build haciendas, mines, and workshops. In
northwest México, by contrast, the Spanish encountered fewer people,
and they lived in smaller settlements without overarching state structures.
Each village had to be individually subjugated. After the conquest and the
ravages of epidemic diseases, the remaining populations in this area were
even smaller and more isolated. The new form of subjugation was slow,
with missions reducing the Indians to smaller areas of land and Spanish
settlers moving in to establish mines, farms, and ranches, much as settlers
did in North America. It was a violent process with nearly three hundred
years of near constant warfare between Indians and Norteños (Alonso
1995). As in the United States, much less intermarriage occurred between
European and Indian populations in this area of México; both remained
biologically more distinct than in the rest of the country.
The result of this process was a distinctive cultural identity in the
north, the Norteño (León-Portilla 1972; Nabhan 1998; Sheridan 1998).9
164 México

Norteños by and large do not accept the nationalist ideology of indi-

genismo, because it does not speak to their experience of history. The
things that distinguish Norteños from other regional populations of
México include obvious differences in food (flour tortillas and carne
asada), music (with accordions and a polka beat), and dress (jeans, cow-
boy boots, and cowboy hats). The Norteños’ “membership in the nation
has always been contradictory and ambiguous” (Alonso 1988:55). This
is most strongly seen in their relationship to two other communities on
the border, Indians and gringos.
Norteños are taller, lighter, and more European in appearance than the
mestizo populations to the south. They draw a strong distinction between
themselves and the Indian cultures that survive in the region, speaking of
Indian people in pejorative terms or referring to them in the diminutive,
los Oaxaquitas or los Mayitos. The Indian cultures that survived in the
Northwest did so in part by isolating themselves either socially or geo-
graphically from Spanish and later Mexican society. Today, much like
Euro-Americans in the United States, Norteños speak of local Indians as
people who once were on the land but now have vanished from it. They
tend to regard Tohono O’odham people from the United States as gringos,
with more wealth, power, and privilege than the Norteños have.
The reality of the international frontier is that, for the past 150 years,
contact with the United States and Gringos has shaped Norteño culture.
Virtually all Norteños have relatives who live in the United States, and
many, if not most, have crossed the border legally or illegally. The power
of the United States and the contrast between lives on either side of the
border are an ever-present backdrop to Norteño life. Although Norteño
attitudes about North Americans are at best ambiguous, these people are
usually welcoming and friendly to North Americans. Those of us
involved in the Trincheras Tradition Project have mainly encountered
graciousness and hospitality in the villages of Atil, Oquitoa, and
Trincheras, Sonora, where we have worked. But negative feelings also
exist. Joaquín Murrieta, a mythologized Norteño “Robin Hood,” who
robbed his way through California during the gold rush era, is a cultural
icon and hero throughout Sonora (Ridge 1955; Nabhan 1998:9–10).
The town of Trincheras claims him as a native son.

Tohono O’odham

The O’odham populations of the international frontier area are com-

posed of two peoples, the Akimel of the Phoenix Basin and the Tohono
México 165

O’odham of southern Arizona and northern Sonora; they are commonly

known in English as the Pima and the Papago, respectively (Fontana
1981; Erikson 1994). They speak a common language, O’odham (Pima).
Before the late seventeenth-century Spanish conquest of northern Sonora
and what is now southern Arizona, these peoples occupied the area of
the rivers of the Sonoran Desert, bordered by the Gila in the north and
the Río San Miguel in the south and centering on the Río Magdalena,
south of the modern international frontier, with concentrations of people
in the Tucson Basin and along the San Pedro River in southern Arizona.
The Tohono O’odham (the desert people, or the Papago) lived to the
west of the Tucson Basin and between the Río Magdalena and the Gila
River in an area that lacked flowing streams. The Akimel (the river peo-
ple, or the Pima) lived along the Gila, San Pedro, and Santa Cruz rivers.
The Spanish established the first missions among the O’odham at the
end of the seventeenth century, but the O’odham population declined
there because of diseases and low fertility (Fontana 1981:48). At about
this same time, the Apache of southern Arizona acquired horses and
started raiding both the O’odham and the Spanish. As a result of these
two pressures—Spanish from the south and Apache from the east—
O’odham populations shifted north and west.
By the time of the Gadsden Purchase, in 1854, the O’odham had been
greatly reduced in population and geographic extent (Fontana 1981:60).
The international border split the O’odham territory in two and left
about half of the O’odham living between the international border and
the north side of the Río Magdalena in México. The Tohono O’odham
still lived to the north of the Río Magdalena, in the Tucson Basin, and to
the west of the Tucson Basin. The Spanish had labeled this area the Papa-
guería, or the land of the Papago. To the north, the Akimel O’odham (the
river people) lived near modern Phoenix (Fontana 1981:60).
The O’odham allied themselves with the United States against the
Apache. In the 1870s and 1880s the federal government established five
reservations for these allies (Fontana 1981:64). In 1916, the president of
the United States issued an executive order creating the Papago Indian
Reservation, now known as the Tohono O’odham Nation. This reserva-
tion stretches from Tucson in the east, to Ajo, Arizona, in the west, and
almost to the Gila Bend Reservation in the north. Sixty-four miles of the
international border define the southernmost edge of the Tohono
O’odham Nation.
Following the Gadsden Purchase, the Tohono O’odham in Sonora
lacked any special status; they were simply Mexican citizens (Fontana
166 México

1981:68–83). México did not establish reservations for them, as was

done in the United States, so they lived in isolated communities and
along the edges of Mexican towns and villages. For nearly a century, the
border was a line on the map with little meaning. It was not until the
hoof-and-mouth epidemic of the 1940s that the U.S. government built a
barbwire fence along the sixty-four miles of the reservation to prevent
livestock from wandering between the two countries (Erikson 1994).
Throughout this period before the fence was erected, the Tohono
O’odham moved freely back and forth, but forces pushed them to leave
Sonora, and other forces pulled them north.
The Tohono O’odham in Sonora have experienced continued and
extensive encroachments by Mexican ranchers. The most dramatic inci-
dent occurred in 1898 in the small mining town of El Plomo (Fontana
1981:73–74). A party of about forty Sonoran and Arizona O’odham
attacked the town to free a jailed headman, but the Mexicans drove them
away in a bloody fight. For over a decade after this, Mexican rurales
(rural police) attacked Tohono O’odham throughout northern Sonora.
Hundreds of O’odham left Sonora to settle in what would become the
southern district of the Tohono O’odham Nation. They continued to
intermarry and regularly interact with their relatives who remained in
Sonora. Throughout the twentieth century, residence in the United States
generally offered Tohono O’odham better economic conditions and better
access to social services than residence in México, so informal immigra-
tion has continued.
The status of the Tohono O’odham in Sonora today is ambiguous. On
the one hand, the Mexican federal government has taken actions to rec-
ognize and protect O’odham property and rights, but, in general, state
and local officials regard the O’odham as U.S., not Mexican, Indians. In
1928, the Mexican government chartered an ejido for the O’odham com-
munity of Pozo Verde in Sonora.10 The Mexican Instituto Nacional
Indigenista (INI, National Indian Institute, the Mexican equivalent of the
U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs) recognizes the Tohono O’odham as
Mexican Indians (Fontana 1981:75), but despite these recognitions, the
general opinion in Sonora, both of the populace and of local government
officials, is that the El Plomo hostilities drove all of the O’odham to Ari-
zona and that they are really U.S. Indians or just a different kind of
gringo.
The sixty-four miles of the international border in the Tohono
O’odham Nation is no longer simply a line on a map or a four-wire live-
stock fence. At the end of the twentieth century, in response to drug
México 167

smuggling and illegal immigration, the U.S. government instituted exten-

sive surveillance and frequent patrol of the line. The Tohono O’odham
can no longer casually cross from one country to another but must pass
through U.S. and Mexican customs and immigration checks. The official
position of the Tohono O’odham Nation is that all Tohono O’odham are
members of that nation and have the right to move freely across the
sixty-four-mile line. Yet, the Mexican border agents treat the Tohono
O’odham from the United States as U.S. citizens, and the U.S. Immigra-
tion Service regards Mexican Tohono O’odham as Mexican citizens.
Northern Sonora remains a sacred and important place for the
Tohono O’odham. To the northwest of Caborca lies the desert oasis of
Quitovac, where a spring-fed earthen tank provides a year-round water
supply in the desert. Here, according to Tohono O’odham belief, a cul-
tural hero known as either I’itoi or Montezuma killed a great water mon-
ster that had been slaughtering people in the region (Fontana 1981:79).
Every summer, Tohono O’odham from Sonora and Arizona gather at
Quitovac for the Wi:gita ceremony to pray for rain, good crops, lush
desert growth, health, and long life.

The Trincheras Tradition Project — Building Praxis

The international border arbitrarily cuts the Southwestern-Northwestern
culture area in half.11 It had no meaning for the aboriginal history of the
culture area, but it has had a profound effect on the archaeology of the
region (McGuire 2002a). The amount of archaeological research done
north of the border greatly exceeds that undertaken in northwest Méxi-
co. Today the southwestern United States could be the most intensively
researched archaeological region in the world. To the south of the culture
area, Mesoamerica is also an intensively researched archaeological region.
Sandwiched between these two areas, northern México may be, archaeo-
logically, the least well-known region in North and Central America.
The paucity of archaeological research in Sonora provided an oppor-
tunity for our goals of creating a praxis of archaeology that challenged
the traditionally imperialistic practice of archaeology by North Ameri-
cans in Mesoamerica. When we began the Trincheras Tradition Project,
there was no established imperialist tradition of North American archae-
ologists working in northwest México. Previous U.S. projects had been
expeditions that entered and then left the region. The same was true of
most Mexican projects before the founding of the INAH center in
Hermosillo in 1973 (Braniff and Felger 1976). We had an opportunity to
168 México

build a new praxis of archaeology without having to confront an existing

local practice and well-established prejudice on either side.

The Project

I received my graduate education at the University of Arizona and

worked in southern Arizona during the mid- to late 1970s. I found the
cerros de trincheras there intriguing. The possible relationships in pre-
Hispanic developments between the Hohokam Tradition of Arizona and
the Trincheras Tradition of Sonora were an open question. At that time
very little archaeological research had been done in northern Sonora. The
Trincheras Tradition in Sonora was known only from travelers’ reports,
a few surface surveys, and a handful of test excavations at a few sites. In
1982, I went to my current academic job at Binghamton University with
the goal of establishing a field project in Sonora. In the summer of 1985,
I met with Elisa Villalpando at the INAH center in Hermosillo to plan
the project, and we agreed to codirect it.
The Trincheras Tradition Project has been from its start a joint project
of Binghamton University and the Centro INAH de Sonora. The project
has gone through several stages and five seasons of fieldwork. The
National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and
Binghamton University have funded the project.12 As is customary for
both foreign and national projects in México, our project employed local
people as cooks, laborers, and artifact washers.
The Trincheras Tradition of northern Sonora stretched from approxi-
mately the international border on the north to Desemboque on the
south and from the Río San Miguel on the east to the Gulf of California
on the west (map 1). A distinctive purple-on-red pottery and the site
type cerros de trincheras characterize this archaeological tradition.
Cerros de trincheras sites consist of rock walls, terraces, and structures
built on the isolated volcanic hills that dot the Sonoran Desert. Such
sites occur in other archaeological traditions in southern Arizona, in
northeastern Sonora, and in Chihuahua, but they appear the most com-
mon and elaborated in the Trincheras Tradition. The largest of these
sites is Cerro de Trincheras itself, overlooking the town of Trincheras,
Sonora. This site was a pre-Hispanic town on a hill with over nine hun-
dred terraces and a population of one thousand or more (O’Donovan
2002). The beginning date for the Trincheras Tradition is not well estab-
lished but probably falls between 300 and 500 C.E. The site of Cerro de
Trincheras was abandoned by 1450 C.E. The first Spanish missionaries
Map 2. Trincheras Tradition Project areas in Sonora, México.
170 México

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 1. Cerro de Trincheras. Photo by Randall McGuire.

found this area occupied by the O’odham in the late seventeenth century,
and the Tohono O’odham claim the archaeological sites of the region as
the handiwork of their ancestors.
Elisa Villalpando and I initially selected the Río Altar valley from the
Cuauhtémoc Dam to the town of Altar for an intensive pedestrian survey
(map 2), executing a systematic total area survey of this region in 1988
(McGuire and Villalpando 1993).13 We rented two field houses in the
town of Atil, Sonora, and lived there for four months. We hired a local
woman to cook for us. An archaeological team of six Binghamton Uni-
versity archaeologists and four archaeologists from the Escuela Nacional
de Antropología y Historia in México City did the fieldwork. m[ap2]
In 1991, we shifted our research to the site of Cerro de Trincheras, at
Trincheras, Sonora (figure 1). In that year we made a map of the site and
surface collected it (O’Donovan 2002).14 The crew then consisted of Elisa
Villalpando, three Binghamton University archaeologists, one archaeolo-
gist from the Escuela Nacional de Antropología y Historia, and myself.
We rented a house in Trincheras and spent two months there. We hired a
local woman to cook for us and a teenager to wash artifacts. In 1995 and
México 171

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 2. Archaeologists at Valle de Altar, Sonora, 2006. From left to right:

Elisa Villalpando, Adrián López, Stephanie Bowers, Randall McGuire, Alex
Button, and César Villalobos. Photo by Génesis Ruiz.

1996 we returned to Cerro de Trincheras to excavate (McGuire and

Villalpando, forthcoming). This was a large project with over fifty people
employed at its peak. We rented two houses in Trincheras each year, and
we lived in the community for four months during each field season. The
archaeology team consisted of Elisa and me with five or six U.S. archae-
ologists and four or five Mexican archaeologists. We employed up to
forty local people as laborers, cooks, and artifact washers. gif[ure1]
In 2006, we returned to the Altar Valley to map and make systematic
surface collections of two cerros de trincheras, Tío Benino and La Hor-
miga. Our field crew included two Binghamton University archaeologists
and two archaeologists from the Centro INAH de Sonora (figure 2). We
rented two houses in Oquitoa and hired a local woman as a cook. gif[ure2]
One of our goals from the beginning of the Trincheras Tradition
Project has been to build an archaeology that recognizes, confronts, and
attempts to alter the power relations of double colonialism on the border.
To do so we have used different modes of interaction in attempts to
engage Mexican archaeologists, U.S. archaeologists, Norteños, and
Tohono O’odham communities. We have tried to transform the imperi-
172 México

alist relationship that normally characterizes North American archaeol-

ogy in México by creating a binational and collaborative archaeology.
Also, we have tried to involve the local Norteño community in our
research through a program of education that began with an ethno-
graphic understanding of their interests in the past. Finally, we have tried
to address the colonialist relationship between Mexican and U.S. archae-
ology and the Tohono O’odham through a process of consultation.

Building a Binational and Collaborative Archaeology

We see binational collaboration as the alternative to the traditional impe-

rialism of North American archaeology in México. This collaboration
recognizes the power relations and inequalities between the two archae-
ological communities, eliminating the inequalities whenever possible and
mitigating them when not. Collaboration requires the establishment of
long-term personal, social, and professional relationships that allow the
parties involved to identify, create, and build on common interests. Such
a process best precedes and transcends a specific project or set of goals.
I began planning my research in Sonora at a time when la arqueología
social was flourishing, anti-imperialist sentiments were strong, and the
INAH had recently revised the permitting process for archaeological
research in México. Many of my colleagues and even some of my pro-
fessors questioned my interest in Sonora. They expressed the fear that it
would not be possible for U.S. researchers to work in México. As it
turned out, however, this was a very opportune time to initiate archaeo-
logical research in Sonora.
The new INAH center in Hermosillo established for the first time a
community of Mexican professional archaeologists, including Beatriz
Braniff, Arturo Oliveros, and later Julio Montané, whose primary inter-
ests were the archaeology of northwest México (Villalobos 2004:64–
66). Montané (1980) had been one of the founders of la arqueología
social in South America. He had fled Chile to avoid persecution by the
military dictatorship that overthrew the government of Salvadore Allen-
de in 1971. Braniff sponsored students from the ENAH to do their theses
on the archaeology of Sonora. She brought them to southern Arizona to
visit collections and to meet with archaeologists there. In 1979, I met
Braniff and two of her students, Elisa Villalpando and Ana María
Álvarez, in southern Arizona. Because they were trained in la arque-
ología social and because of my own interest in Marx, we had much in
common to discuss beyond the archaeology of the Northwest-Southwest.
México 173

I began traveling to Sonora to visit the center, to assist on INAH projects,

and to build social and professional relationships. Braniff left Hermosillo
in 1984, but Villalpando stayed at the center as a research archaeologist,
and Álvarez joined the faculty of the ENAH in 1985. Throughout this
period I studied and practiced Spanish to attain a level of competency
that would allow me to use the language in Sonora.
In 1985, Ben Brown and I did a windshield survey of the Río Mag-
dalena and met with Elisa Villalpando at the INAH center in Hermosillo.
We began discussing the collaborative approach to research that we
would develop in our subsequent projects together. Key to this was
shared responsibility for the direction of the project. Binghamton
University and the Centro INAH de Sonora have jointly sponsored each
stage of the project, with Elisa and myself as codirectors. We have iden-
tified five issues that we needed to address to build a collaborative, bina-
tional archaeology: research goals, resources, participation, language,
and publication.

Research Goals One of the things that most clearly define the two dis-
tinct archaeologies of North Americans and of Mexicans in Meso-
america is the difference in their research goals. In part this reflects the
difference between the global, imperialist interests of North American
archaeology and the local, nationalistic interest of Mexican archaeology.
In the 1980s and 1990s, these distinctions also sprang from the profound
theoretical differences between the processual archaeology of North
America and la arqueología social of Latin America. Mexican research-
ers from the regional centers in Sonora and Chihuahua have tended to
focus on issues of culture history in order to establish basic understand-
ings of time-space dynamics in the regions. They have also tended to
interpret northwestern archaeological sequences in terms of local events
and processes rather than in terms of those in the southwestern United
States or Mesoamerica. Along these lines, in 1981 the Centro INAH de
Sonora established the Management Plan for the Cultural Heritage of the
State of Sonora.15 This plan called for all archaeological projects in the
state of Sonora to contribute in some way to the priorities that the plan
lays out for researching the archaeology of the state at the local, regional,
and global levels. The plan formed a baseline for defining our collabora-
tive research efforts.

Resources One basic problem facing a collaborative North American

and Mexican project is the striking difference in the economies of the two
174 México

countries. Archaeologists can address power relations on projects, but we

cannot change the basic economic relationship between the United States
and México. North American projects in México generally have access to
greater resources than Mexican projects. These resources include both
equipment and money. We have not been able to transform the economic
inequity that separates the United States and México through archaeol-
ogy, so we have had to consider how to mitigate it.
We have used part of our grants to try to mitigate this economic
inequity by balancing the logistical support of the Centro INAH de
Sonora with long-term infrastructural benefits to it. The center has pro-
vided logistical support for the project through the use of its facilities,
computers, tools, support staff, curatorial services, and vehicles. It has
also facilitated the project by helping us to obtain INAH permits for our
work. The 15 percent charge that the INAH collects on all foreign
research grants in México was designed to fund the stabilization and
preservation of exposed monumental architecture. The local center has
been able to convince the INAH that since no such architecture exists in
Sonora, the funds should be used in Hermosillo to maintain the infra-
structure of the center.
Archaeologists are paid more in the United States than in México. In
such a situation, fairness in the compensation of archaeologists from
both countries is difficult to achieve. In the field, we have always paid
Mexican and American archaeologists on the same scale, slightly higher
than INAH has defined pay rates. For the Mexican students, this is a
good rate of pay, but for the North Americans it is a token amount that
allows them to break even on their participation in the project. The
North Americans have accepted this situation, in part because of the ide-
ologies of archaeological work discussed in chapter 3. For them the proj-
ect work was an opportunity to gain data for their theses and disserta-
tions and to do archaeology in a foreign locale. When we employ
Mexican archaeologists in the laboratory in Hermosillo, we again pay
slightly higher than INAH scale. Graduate students employed at Bing-
hamton are paid as university research assistants at the going rate for the
university.

Participation At each stage of the project we have endeavored, usually

successfully, to employ archaeologists in equal shares from each side of
the border. We have drawn North American archaeologists from Bing-
hamton University, the University of Arizona, Arizona State University,
and the University of New Mexico, and Mexican archaeologists have
México 175

come from the ENAH. Generally, these archaeologists have worked in

binational teams of two, either as surveyors or as supervisors of local
laborers in excavation. This organization has provided useful training for
the students in working together across cultural differences and has been
very successful. When we have employed archaeologists to do laboratory
work outside the field season, we have always employed one archaeolo-
gist at Binghamton and one in Hermosillo.
Transcending cultural differences and differences in training in the
binational teams of archaeologists has presented us with numerous
challenges and opportunities in our research. The most obvious chal-
lenge has involved North Americans’ adaptation to living in the isolated
Norteño villages where we base our projects. Less obvious has been the
issue of the Mexican archaeologists adapting to these villages. Most of
the Mexican archaeologists who have worked with us have been from
the central and southern parts of the country, steeped in the mestizo cul-
ture of México. The Norteño culture of Sonora is almost as different for
these students as it is for the gringos. We hire local women to cook for
us, and this entails a cuisine that does not fit either group’s conceptions
of Mexican food.16 A few times cultural frictions have arisen in the
project, both within the crew and between the crew and the local pop-
ulation, but they have always been resolvable through discussion and
compromise.
We have found that the Mexican archaeologists come to the field with
training and sets of skills different from those of the U.S. students, reflect-
ing in large part the differences in how archaeologists are trained in the
two countries (Newell 1999).17 In the United States, students generally
receive a broad undergraduate education that is intended to teach them
basic analytical skills, raise their awareness of world issues, and prepare
them to enter the world as educated individuals. At the ENAH, the stu-
dents receive a rigorous training in archaeological theory and practice to
prepare them to take professional positions in the INAH. As a result of
this particular training and its domination by a single school of archae-
ology in México, the Mexican ENAH students have invariably been
more proficient at the practice of archaeology, arriving on the project
with a much more consistent set of methods, conventions, and skills as
well as a wider range of technical skills than the U.S. archaeologists pos-
sess. These conventions and methods, which distinctively reflect the prac-
tice of Mesoamerican archaeology, often vary from the conventions and
methods of the southwestern United States. Working out these varia-
tions has involved a long erratic process.
176 México

Language The most basic problem we have faced in building a collab-

orative archaeology is language. North American projects in México
usually use English. All archaeologists trained in México are expected to
read English. The actual competence of individual archaeologists in
English varies greatly, but almost all of the Mexican archaeologists and
all of the students with whom we have worked can read articles and
books in English. Although most U.S. graduate programs in anthropol-
ogy require that their students read a second language, these require-
ments are rarely rigorously enforced. Archaeology professors in the
United States do not routinely assign readings in Spanish to classes and
seminars. Most of our U.S. archaeologists do not speak Spanish.

Publication The commitment to a bilingual project extends to publica-

tion. A number of article-length reports on the project have been pub-
lished in both Spanish and English. We have published project results in
both the United States and México. Although we have not attempted to
publish every page we write in both languages, which would simply cost
too much in money and effort, we have consciously sought to publish
comparable summaries and reviews of the project’s findings and results
in both English and Spanish, so that they are accessible to speakers of
either language. Technical analyses and reports have been done in the
principal language of the individuals doing the work. At each stage of the
project, a detailed descriptive report in Spanish has been submitted to the
INAH. Project personnel have also presented multiple papers at profes-
sional meetings in both México and the United States. The project has
resulted in one tesis de licenciatura at the ENAH written in Spanish, and
students at Binghamton University have produced undergraduate honors
theses, master’s theses, and a dissertation, all written in English. A full
report of the 1995–1996 excavation project has been prepared in Span-
ish, and an English version is currently in progress.

In many ways, our attempt to build a collaborative, binational archaeol-

ogy in Sonora has been successful. The project has trained a group of
archaeologists—Mexican and North American—who continue to work
in Sonora using collaborative approaches. Indeed, in Sonora today, all
projects that involve North Americans are collaborative and binational.
In October 2003, the Centro INAH de Sonora celebrated its thirtieth
anniversary with scholarly and public events in Hermosillo. These events
included U.S. and Mexican researchers, and behind them was a history
of collaborative research under the leadership of the center. We did not
México 177

achieve our success by ignoring or erasing the differences in wealth, pur-

pose, and training that characterize Mexican and U.S. archaeology.
Rather, we attempted to confront these differences and build a praxis of
archaeology that would benefit from the dissimilarities and in turn ben-
efit both archaeologies. This praxis does not eliminate the basic imperi-
alist nature of U.S. archaeology in México. It does, however, mitigate this
imperialism to create something new.
Our research results have reflected the international collaboration of
the project. Previous research focused on the Trincheras Tradition as an
extension or a by-product of processes in other regions. Mexican arche-
ologists had interpreted it as the far northern reaches of developments
emanating from the Valley of México and as a pale reflection of Meso-
american cultures. U.S. archaeologists had interpreted the tradition as the
southern extension of the Hohokam Tradition in southern Arizona,
altered as a result of the ebb and flow of changes north of the border.
Our research has shown that the tradition had its own history, develop-
mental trajectory, and processes of change. The major site of Cerro de
Trincheras was a town and regional center in its own right. Our research
has helped to transform the archaeology of the Southwest-Northwest
into an international field of study that seriously considers processes
occurring in northern México as important to understanding the whole
cultural area. In Sonora, our research has addressed issues laid out in the
Management Plan for the Cultural Heritage of the State of Sonora. Our
demonstration that the Trincheras Tradition was a development in its
own right, not simply the extension of processes from the north or south,
calls into question the nationalistic programs of both the United States
and México. The Trincheras Tradition is not understandable as the
ancient history of La Raza, because it was not simply an extension of
Mesoamerica. Neither was it the prehistory of the First Americans,
because it shows the irrelevance of the border to aboriginal history. The
limitations of these nationalist traditions were also made apparent in
our interactions with the Norteño and Tohono O’odham communities
that live in the region.

Norteños and Heritage

Our research affects the Norteño people of rural northern Sonora in two
ways (Villalobos 2004:124–128). We have an economic impact on the
communities in which we work, because we rent houses, employ people,
and purchase local goods and services. We also seek to educate the peo-
178 México

ple in these communities and build their appreciation for the aboriginal
heritage of the region. In both of these endeavors we enter into social
relations with the community inhabitants and become objects of their
curiosity. All of this occurs in the preestablished social and historical
context of the border.
Rural Sonoran communities like Atil, Oquitoa, and Trincheras are
filled with old people and children. These villages offer few employment
opportunities. The majority of the younger people leave for cities such as
Hermosillo, the maquiladora (export assembly) factories along the bor-
der, or the United States to find work, or they burrean (that is, backpack
marijuana illegally through the desert and across the border into the
United States). They often leave their children with relatives and send
remittances to help support them until they return. Many individuals,
however, do not return to the village but, instead, become permanent res-
idents of Hermosillo, Tucson, or Southern California. A few families
support themselves with privately owned farms, but most people in the
communities seek irregular day work to live.
Our projects have fitted into this economic situation as other sources
of day work. Over the last decade we have employed members of numer-
ous families on a regular basis as cooks and day laborers (figure 3).
These opportunities have allowed those families a few more comforts,
but they have not appreciably changed their economic position in the vil-
lage. In 1995 and 1996, when we employed up to forty local people, we
were the largest private employer in the village. Some individuals came
home to work for us during each of these seasons, then returned to itin-
erant labor. We have had a real, but not profound or transformative,
impact on the local economy. gif[ure3]
While in the field our workers and friends have often asked us to take
on the role of padrinos—that is, to serve as supporters and sponsors for
important social celebrations and events. Routinely in México aspects of
a celebration, such as food, beverage, music, and photography, will be
parceled out to different padrinos. For example, we have supplied pho-
tography and transportation for wedding celebrations.
The Norteño people of Sonora tend to view the pre-Hispanic archae-
ology of the region as something left over from vanished Indians. They
do not necessarily see it as their own heritage. Individuals routinely loot
pots from the cremation cemetery of Cerro de Trincheras and collect
skulls from burials eroding in the nearby archaeological site of La Playa.
Nevertheless, they do have some pride in the aboriginal site of Cerro de
Trincheras, which looms over them, recognizing that it gives the town
México 179

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 3. Norteño workmen at Cerro de Trincheras, 1996.

From left to right: Eugenio Bejarano, Ramón Alejandro
Yescas, Raúl Murrieta, and Medardo Salazar. Photo by
Júpiter Martínez.

distinction. During the 1940s, those who built the current railroad line to
Tijuana stripped many volcanic hills along the line of stone to construct
bridges. Locals told us that the mayor of Trincheras at the time stopped
the builders when they started to bulldoze Cerro de Trincheras for stone.
Our excavations uncovered tracks of the bulldozer in one of the most
important features in the site, La Cancha.
This ambiguous interest in the archaeological site does not mean,
however, that the people of Trincheras have no interest in heritage. The
town claims to be the birthplace of the California “Robin Hood”
180 México

Joaquín Murrieta. For most local residents, this is the most important
aspect of the community’s heritage. A small statue erected to the bandit
sits at the entrance to the town.
The INAH is an institution that serves the Mexican nation, the people
of México, and the discipline of anthropology. Consistent with this ser-
vice, our project has included an effort toward public education, which
Elisa Villalpando has led. All members of the project have participated in
public presentations, site tours, and television programming of the
archaeological work. Much of our public education has been directed
toward building local awareness of this archaeology and of the continued
presence of the Indians, whom many presume to have vanished. We have
also aided local efforts to build a small museum in an attempt to use the
site of Cerro de Trincheras to draw U.S. tourists to the community.
Recently three students in the architecture program at the Universidad de
Sonora developed plans for a restaurant, the museum along with visitor’s
center, and a hotel in Trincheras, which they presented to the director of
the state tourism office, where they were received with great interest.

Indians and Archaeology on the Border

The Indians who lived along the Río Magdalena have not vanished. A
handful of the Tohono O’odham still live in Sonora, and many thousands
live in Arizona. They form the other half of the double colonialism that
confronts the archaeologist on this frontier. We tried to confront colo-
nialism through consultation with Tohono O’odham people. These
efforts occurred in a context of shifting political interests.
When we started our work in Sonora, a French archaeological project
was already ensnarled in a double colonialism. From 1984 till 1987, the
French Center for Studies of Mexico and Central America conducted an
ethno-archaeological project at Quitovac, Sonora (Villalobos 2004:77–
109). The French researchers obtained permits from INAH’s Consejo de
Arqueología in México City, but they did not contact the traditional
authorities of the local native communities in Sonora or Arizona. The
project ultimately ended in bitter conflict with the Tohono O’odham.
Tohono O’odham from Sonora and Arizona gather at Quitovac each
year to celebrate the Wi:gita ceremony, but in the late 1980s, the only
O’odham actually living there were one elderly couple. With no Indians
nearby who could witness their work and object to it, the French
researchers excavated graves from the cemetery, and they collected mate-
rials from the blessed cave where the Tohono O’odham keep the sacred
México 181

eagle feathers for the Wi:gita ceremony (Villalobos 2004:80–85). In

1987, the French also found a skeleton of a mammoth, which they
uncovered and removed to Hermosillo for stabilization (Villalobos 2004:
85–87). The skeleton was eventually returned to the community, but
then the local Norteños took charge of it, constructing a case to display
it. Also in 1987, after the Wi:gita ceremony, the French systematically
mapped and collected the ceremonial ground without permission of the
Tohono O’odham.
In 1988, we began our first field project in Sonora. The institutional
and bureaucratic mechanisms that NAGPRA would inspire to facilitate
cooperation between Native Americans and archaeologists did not yet
exist. Confrontation was still the norm for such relationships. Neverthe-
less, Elisa and I felt that a radical praxis of archaeology in the region
required that we involve Indian communities, so we sent copies of our
grant proposals to the O’odham communities of southern Arizona (the
Tohono O’odham Nation, the Gila River Indian Community, the Salt
River Indian Community, and the Ak Chin Indian Community). We
asked for comments and offered to host representatives of these commu-
nities if they wished to visit our project in the field. Only one community
replied. I visited and talked to the leadership of the San Xavier District, of
the Tohono O’odham Nation, before we went to the field. These individ-
uals were sensitive to the archaeological issues because of their involve-
ment with the Arizona State Museum during the San Xavier Bridge
Project (Ravesloot 1990). Later, a delegation from San Xavier visited our
survey project in the Altar Valley of Sonora. After all was done, we sent
each of the communities copies of our reports.
In 1991, when we began our mapping and surface collection of Cerro
de Trincheras, we followed the same procedure. This time, none of the
communities responded. During this field season, all our research
involved survey and surface collection. We had little chance of encoun-
tering human remains or sacred objects, and we did not. Following the
1991 field season, as we planned our excavations at Cerro de Trincheras,
we realized that the situation had changed, both in the United States and
in México. We did not plan to excavate in the cremation cemetery we
had found at the site. We knew, however, that we might nevertheless
encounter human remains.
After the passing of NAGPRA, archaeologists and Native Americans
in southern Arizona developed institutionalized means and procedures
for consultation on archaeological research. All of the Native American
nations and communities of southern Arizona established either a com-
182 México

mittee or a designated individual within their governmental structure to

handle this consultation. At this time, relations between archaeologists
and Tohono O’odham people in southern Arizona ranged from bitter
conflict to cordial cooperation. The Tohono O’odham had generally
allowed the nondestructive analysis of skeletons and mortuary goods
before their return and reburial (Ravesloot 1990).
In México, all archaeological materials are legally the heritage of the
Mexican people. The national government owns all archaeological sites
and artifacts, regardless of the ownership of the land they are found on.
Any negotiations concerning the disposition of burials and sacred goods
must be made with INAH, and only INAH has the authority to repatri-
ate these things to Native American nations or communities. INAH had
never done such a thing before the French project at Quitovac.
In designing the excavation project for the spring of 1995, we felt that
we had to make a greater effort at consultation with the O’odham than
we had in the past. We came to this position both because we would be
excavating and because of the changing relations between archaeologists
and Native Americans in the region. We thought that the repatriation
and reburial at Quitovac gave us precedent for future repatriation and
reburial in Sonora.
We were optimistic. The experience of the French was foremost in our
minds, because we wanted to avoid the misunderstandings and abuses
that had happened at Quitovac (Villalobos 2004). The Centro INAH de
Sonora had played a leading role in returning the burials and sacred
objects to the Tohono O’odham. The center was also involved in negoti-
ations with the Tohono O’odham Cultural Affairs Committee about
plans to develop the Sierra Pinacate as a Mexican national park. Because
of the changes wrought by NAGPRA, we felt that it might be easier than
in the past to initiate and maintain a process of consultation. The cultural
affairs committees and offices of the Native American nations and com-
munities of southern Arizona made it more convenient for us to contact
key individuals in those communities. Once initiated, we also thought
less effort would be required to maintain the process with standing com-
mittees or offices that would survive changes in tribal governments.
We made initial contact with the Tohono O’odham Cultural Affairs
Committee by sending them a copy of our grant proposal for the project.
We then arranged to meet with representative of the committee in Trin-
cheras during September 1994. One member of the committee and an
Anglo lawyer who represented the committee came to this meeting, along
with representatives of the Comunidad de Trincheras and INAH. The
México 183

meeting was very cordial, and the Tohono O’odham were quite appre-
ciative that we had sought to consult them about a project in México. We
agreed at the meeting that if we encountered any burials in our excava-
tions, we would excavate them so they would not be looted and then
contact the Cultural Affairs Committee.
The Tohono O’odham recommended that we should contact other
indigenous nations and communities in Arizona in addition to the
O’odham governments we had contacted in the past. They suggested we
also inform the Pasqua Yaqui Indian Community and the Hopi Nation of
our project. We subsequently sent all of the O’odham groups, the Yaqui,
and the Hopi copies of our proposal. Only the Ak Chin community and
the Hopi Nation responded to our query. Both indicated that we should
deal directly with the Tohono O’odham Nation.
We started fieldwork at the beginning of February 1995. Within the
first few weeks we had located several possible cremations, one definite
cremation, and two inhumations. We left the cremations in place. They
did not contain ceramic vessels, and we thought they were not obvious
enough to attract looters. Our workers, however, immediately recog-
nized the bones in the inhumations as human. Even though none of the
inhumations contained extensive grave offerings, we excavated them on
discovery to prevent them from being looted.
We notified the Tohono O’odham about our finds, then met with two
members of the Cultural Affairs Committee and their attorney in
Caborca, Sonora, on March 4. There, they agreed that we would be
allowed to do nondestructive analysis of the inhumations and that after-
ward they would be reburied. The only point of contention was how
long we would keep the bones before reburial. Since we had not yet
talked to a physical anthropologist about doing the analysis, we wanted
a year to get the work done. The Tohono O’odham wanted the work
done more quickly.
On March 13, 1995, a delegation of four from the Cultural Affairs
Committee and their attorney visited us in the field. The visit was quite
cordial, except for one of the Tohono O’odham, who adopted a con-
frontational attitude. The Mexican archaeologists on the project had no
experience with Indian criticism of archaeology, and the confrontational
Tohono O’odham offended them greatly. They were, however, pleased
with the cordiality and obvious sincerity of the other Tohono O’odham
people who visited the site. Conversations at this meeting led to the deci-
sion to backfill the known cremations without excavating them.
After our 1996 field season, we had excavated a total of ten burials
184 México

containing twelve inhumations from scattered locations in the site. We

had made arrangements with biological anthropologists to analyze the
remains. We anticipated that with the completion of this analysis, the
remains and the few artifacts we had found with them would be repatri-
ated to the Tohono O’odham and reburied at Quitovac.
In 1997, the Centro INAH de Sonora sought permission from the
governing council of INAH, the Consejo de Arqueología, to repatriate
and rebury the inhumations from Cerro de Trincheras (Villalobos
2004:112–121). To our surprise, the consejo refused this permission.
Despite a formal request from the Tohono O’odham Nation and further
pleadings on the part of the center, the consejo would not change its posi-
tion, expressing two basic reservations about the repatriation. Officials
there felt that the requests represented an attempt to import U.S. prob-
lems into México, and they feared losing control over Mexican heritage.
The coordinador nacional de arqueología also raised legal issues. Under
national law the skeletons and artifacts from Trincheras were part of the
national heritage of México. The law vested responsibility for the analy-
sis, interpretation, display, and curation of this heritage in INAH, and a
local community could not co-opt this responsibility. The regulations of
INAH also required that such materials be kept in a recognized museum.
The consejo did not want a U.S. dilemma in México, and it took an
anti-imperialist stance, withholding recognition of the Tohono O’odham
Nation as having the legal or moral standing to request repatriation.
INAH regarded the nation as U.S. Indians and U.S. citizens. Needless to
say, this infuriated the O’odham, who see both México and the United
States as invaders. The consejo accused the archaeologists at the Centro
INAH de Sonora of being unduly influenced by North American archae-
ologists and of not representing the interests of the Mexican people and
nation. They expressed concern that the North American archaeologists
on the projects wanted to dictate policy to the INAH. Archaeologists
from the Sonora center tried to explain that things were different on the
border. Issues of heritage and legitimacy were much more complicated
than they seemed in México City. But, for the consejo, issues of heritage
and legitimacy were much broader than a few inhumations from the far
end of the nation.
The national politics of heritage and legitimacy had shifted in México.
Much had changed since the reburials at Quitovac in 1993. On the right,
the Partido Acción Nacional agitated for the decentralization and priva-
tization of heritage. This included the INAH, the ENAH, the museums,
and the national monuments of the country. The right wanted a profit-
México 185

making heritage industry, not nationalist lessons and scientific study. On

the left stood the Zapatista revolution in Chiapas. The Zapatista pro-
gram included an indigenista plank that refuted a pan-Mexican identity
of La Raza. Zapatistas called for greater autonomy for indigenous
groups. INAH feared that this call could come to include control of
national monuments, such as Palenque, Bonampak, and Yaxchilán, in
Chiapas. These fears raised the specter of other indigenous groups in the
country demanding return of their heritage, the most important archae-
ological sites in the nation. Too much was at stake to risk any of it for a
few inhumations in far-off Sonora. The situation remains much the same
today.
In the end, our attempts to repatriate the inhumations from Cerro de
Trincheras failed. Not surprisingly, the Tohono O’odham felt betrayed by
the turn of events. In retrospect, we should have included the Consejo de
Arqueología in our consultations with the Tohono O’odham from the
beginning. The incident strained relations between archaeologists in
northern Sonora (both Mexican and North American) and the O’odham,
although dialogue continues. In addition to creating a situation in which
we could not repatriate inhumations, the history, paradoxes, and ambi-
guities of three nations on the border also created a loss of trust.
Three causes lie at the heart of this lack of success. The first was our
failure to establish a long-term and involved collaborative relationship
with the Tohono O’odham as a community. Consultation was just not
enough. The consultation model that we followed is typical of contem-
porary relations between archaeologists and native communities. Such a
model may permit compliance with NAGPRA, but it does not build the
trust and dialogue with native peoples that lead to true collaboration.
The second was our failure to understand the shifting context of Mexi-
can nationalism and the place of archaeology in it. Finally, the com-
pelling realities of the border worked against us. In the absence of true
collaboration and trust, there was no way to escape the snare of double
colonialism.
Building an emancipatory praxis of archaeology requires more than
splendid formulas for life; it requires that archaeologists confront the
political, cultural, and economic difficulties of living communities. We
have struggled to do this on the border with the Trincheras Tradition
Project. We continue to build on the foundation of a collaborative bina-
tional praxis of archaeology involving U.S. and Mexican archaeologists.
We persist in our dialogue with the Norteño people of northern Sonora
and our programs of education. And we struggle to move beyond con-
186 México

sultation to a true collaboration with the Tohono O’odham. Not all con-
texts, however, are as difficult and complex as the border. In southern
Colorado, the historical archaeology of the 1913–1914 Colorado
Coalfield War offers a less conflicted stage for an emancipatory praxis of
archaeology.

Notes
1. I do not consider field projects carried out by Latin American students or
faculty in U.S. or Canadian universities as Latin American projects.
2. In México and to a lesser extent other Latin American countries, U.S.,
Canadian, and other foreign nationals are employed by local institutions. I would
consider these individuals to be local, not North American, archaeologists.
3. The major exception to this was in Haiti, where enslaved Africans over-
threw their French masters and established the second American nation-state
after the United States.
4. This is obvious for the countries of Latin America, most of which did not
take their modern form until very late in the nineteenth century. It is, however,
also the case for the United States, as evidenced by the Civil War and the con-
quest of the West.
5. Indigenismo should not be confused with the contemporary indigenista
movements of Latin America (Sieder 2002). These are nationalist movements
that seek to empower native groups with a sovereign status within or indepen-
dent of the nation-state.
6. Originally the party was called the Partido Nacional Revolucionario
(National Revolutionary Party). In 1938 it changed its name to the Partido de la
Revolución Mexicana (Party of the Mexican Revolution), and finally in 1949 it
took its modern name, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional
Revolutionary Party). The reader should note that the final name of this party is
an oxymoron.
7. My Mexican friends like to compare the 1994 Mexican election to the
2000 presidential election in the United States. I, too, find it an apt comparison.
8. The licenciatura is the initial university degree in the Mexican education
system (Newell 1999:29–30). It requires a thesis and more course work than a
U.S. bachelor’s degree, but it is not a master’s degree. It is a specialized profes-
sional degree that prepares the archaeology student, for example, to practice in
his or her field.
9. Indigenismo is a nationalist ideological concept that is institutionalized in
Mexican society. “Norteño” is a popular cultural category that has not been
institutionalized.
10. Under the Mexican constitution adopted in 1917, ejidos grant peasant
communities inalienable rights to land.
11. By traditional definition, the Southwestern cultural area includes the
American states of Arizona and New Mexico with small portions of Utah,
Colorado, and Texas and the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora. This is
the Southwest of the United States but the Northwest of Mexico. The hybrid
México 187

term Southwest-Northwest reflects the accurate geopolitical position of the

region.
12. The project is ongoing. In 2004 we received National Science Foundation
money (NSF no. BCS 0419353) to map and surface collect several cerros de
trincheras in the Río Altar and the Río Magdalena valleys. Subsequently we
received an additional grant from the National Geographic Society (no. 7845 –
05) in support of this research. Fieldwork for this project occurred in the winter
of 2006.
13. The National Science Foundation funded this survey with grant no. BNS-
8703515. Our 1995 – 1996 excavation project was funded by NSF grant no.
SBR9320224.
14. The National Geographic Society funded this mapping with grant no.
4454 – 91.
15. Plan de Manejo del Patrimonio Cultural del Estado de Sonora.
16. The North Americans come expecting to find the type of Mexican restau-
rant food that is served in the United States. The Mexican students encounter few
of the fruits and vegetables they are accustomed to and a cuisine based in beef
and flour tortillas instead of corn.
17. Both sets of students usually join the project after taking a course in the
archaeology of the Southwest-Northwest, so they all share a basic understanding
of the cultural developments of the region. The differences lie in their theoretical
and practical training.
Chapter 5

Ludlow
With the Ludlow Collective

The man who possesses no other property than his labour

power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the
slave of other men who have made themselves the owners
of the material conditions of labour. He can only work with
their permission, and hence only live with their permission.
Karl Marx (1938:3)

Then came Ludlow and the nation heard. Little children

roasted alive make a front-page story. Dying by inches of
starvation and exposure does not.
Mary Harris (Mother) Jones (2004:126)

In June 1999, I stepped up to a podium in Pueblo, Colorado, to address

a gathering of striking steelworkers and their families. Oregon Steel had
locked them out of the Rocky Mountain Steel mill after the workers had
gone on strike to challenge forced overtime. I had come to the gathering
to talk about our archaeological research at the site of the Ludlow
Massacre. My first words were, “I greet you as a brother in the AFL-
CIO.”1 The applause that followed my declaration told me they had
been the right words.
The Ludlow Massacre was the most violent and significant event of
the Colorado Coalfield War of 1913–1914. On the morning of April 20,
1914, Colorado National Guard troops and armed strikers engaged in a
pitched battle at a tent colony of twelve hundred striking families, at
Ludlow, Colorado. The battle continued through the day. As dusk gath-
ered, the Guard finally drove off the armed strikers, and the troops swept
through the camp looting it and setting it aflame. The next dawn saw the

188
Ludlow 189

camp a smoking ruin and nineteen of its inhabitants dead, including two
women and twelve children. What followed is one of the few true exam-
ples of class warfare in the history of the United States. Armed strikers
took control of southern Colorado, burning company towns and killing
company employees. Ten days later federal troops restored order to the
region. The significance of the Ludlow Massacre goes far beyond the
struggle of the 1913–1914 Colorado Coalfield War. The American pub-
lic was shocked and outraged by the killing of women and children at
Ludlow, and popular opinion soon turned against violent confrontations
with strikers. Progressive reformers used the massacre as a focal point in
their attempts to change labor relations in the United States. At this pivot
point of U.S. history, labor relations began to move from class warfare to
corporate and government policies of negotiation, co-option, and regu-
lated strikes. Since 1918, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA)
has maintained the massacre site as a shrine, and descendants of the
strikers and union members make an annual pilgrimage to the site.
Dean Saitta of Denver University, Philip Duke of Fort Lewis College,
and I began the Archaeology of the 1913–1914 Colorado Coalfield War
Project in 1996.2 Our joint effort soon grew into something we have
called the Ludlow Collective. The collective consists primarily of faculty
and students from the University of Denver in Colorado, Fort Lewis
College in Colorado, and Binghamton University in New York, but has
also included students from other U.S., Spanish, and British institutions.3
Even though this chapter mainly reflects my personnel reflections, it is
very much a product of the collective and not me alone. In 1996, Bing-
hamton University gave me a faculty development grant to begin the
project. The Colorado Historical Society generously funded our research
from 1997 to 2004 using public monies generated from taxes on casino
gambling (the Colorado State Historical Fund).
The project has sought to fulfill multiple goals and address diverse
audiences. Our scholarly goal was to exhume the class struggle of the
strike. We have joined the national discourse about labor rights, unions,
and the role of working-class people in U.S. history in order to raise aca-
demic and popular consciousness about the contemporary struggles of
working families. The project also has confronted two major ambiguities
in the practice of United States archaeology. We designed the project to
escape the colonial practice of archaeology in North America and to
transcend the tradition of archaeology primarily serving middle-class
interests. We began our project with the assumption that our work
should and does serve multiple communities (Shanks and McGuire
190 Ludlow

1996). These communities include the scholarly community of archaeol-

ogists and historians as well as the traditional, middle-class, public audi-
ence for archaeology. But the primary community that we wish to
address is unionized labor in the United States. We have joined with
them in the battle against fast capitalism’s erosion of organized labor. We
are building an archaeology of the American working class that speaks to
a working-class audience about working-class history and experience.
We are doing this through an ongoing dialogue with both the descen-
dants of the participants in the Colorado Coalfield War and unionized
workers in southern Colorado.

Communities and Praxis

The three of us who began the Coalfield War Project all built our careers
by studying the heritage of Native Americans, and we are well aware of
the colonialism of that practice. In the 1980s, we joined other progressive
scholars supporting the efforts by Native Americans for repatriation and
for the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act of 1990. The struggle over repatriation required a real
commitment to political action, and it entailed a degree of risk that was
largely absent from then contemporary abstract discussions of ideology
and hegemonic discourses. Many in the discipline regarded the handful
of archaeologists in the United States who supported the Native
American position and called for the reform of archaeology as traitors
(Zimmerman 1989). Individuals were denied jobs, cut off from publica-
tion opportunities, not allowed to present papers at national meetings,
and denied promotion because they were “too political,” or, to put it
more simply, because they opposed the political stance of the majority of
the profession. This distrust did not evaporate in 1990, when federal leg-
islation forced archaeologists to concede the Native American position.
After 1990, some mainstream U.S. archaeologists sought to rewrite the
history of the repatriation struggle to deny that archaeologists, as repre-
sented by the Society of American Archaeology, ever opposed the Native
American position. The radicals who did support repatriation are an
inconvenient fact that disputes this revisionist history (Zimmerman
1992).
The accommodation that existed between Native Americans and
archaeologists in the mid-1990s was an uneasy one (D. Thomas 2000;
Watkins 2000). On the positive side, NAGPRA forced archaeologists to
consult and work with Native Americans. It also addressed deeply felt
Ludlow 191

Native American desires to protect the sanctity of their ancestors’ graves

and to recover sacred objects. The accommodation did not, however, go
deep enough in the 1990s to resolve the fundamental contradiction of
U.S. archaeology, that is, its rootedness in colonialism. NAGPRA gave
Native Americans ultimate control over the bodies and some of the
objects that archaeologists recover. However, it left archaeologists to
write aboriginal histories and overlooked the essential difference between
the way Native Americans think of their own history and the way we
think of it. Accommodation and consultation allow archaeologists to
avoid the troubling questions that Native American people continue to
haunt us with: Why do we as archaeologists seek to study pasts that are
not our own? Can we, in fact, study this stolen heritage in a way that is
liberating for Native Americans and not oppressive? These are questions
that we still struggle with, but the development of an indigenous archae-
ology since the turn of the twenty-first century has provided us some
guide to answering them.
Our discomfort with the colonialism of our profession in the mid-
1990s led Dean Saitta, Philip Duke, and me to consider our own heritage
and a history that has meaning for working people. The Colorado
Coalfield War of 1913–1914 is not exotic or ancient history. It is familiar,
close to home, relevant, and about ourselves. It is also part of my own
heritage. In the 1890s, my great-grandfather worked in the southern
Colorado coalfield, although above ground as a blacksmith, and married
my great-grandmother there. Her sister’s family participated in the 1913–
1914 strike. In 1901, however, my great-grandparents moved to the
mines at Hannah, Wyoming. When I was a child, my grandmother told
me the story of the 1903 mine explosion at Hannah that killed over two
hundred men, including four of her male relatives. My great-grandfather
survived the 1903 explosion and a second one in the Hannah mine in
1907. After that, he had had enough of coal mining. He moved his fam-
ily to Fort Collins, Colorado, where he resumed working as a blacksmith
and also became a machinist and a union leader. Driving from our home
in Texas to visit my grandparents in Fort Collins, my mother would stop
at the Ludlow Monument and explain to my sister and me what had hap-
pened there.
The radical reorientation of the class position of archaeology that is
necessary to develop a working-class archaeology began in our case with
the assumption that archaeology is a craft that can be used to serve the
interests of multiple communities (Shanks and McGuire 1996). We have
entered into a dialogue with the academic community of archaeology
192 Ludlow

through published works like this one and through papers presented at
meetings. We have sought to educate archaeology’s traditional middle-
class public audience about labor’s struggles for a decent living, benefits,
and dignity. However, the primary community that the Colorado
Coalfield War Project seeks to serve is unionized labor in Colorado and
beyond. To accomplish this goal, we have sustained collaboration with
the United Mine Workers of America in union halls and at community
meetings, picnics, and rallies. We have confronted the public with the
realities of labor’s past, realities that the processes of fast capitalism are
re-creating to make labor’s future.
Because archaeology lives in the middle class, attracting primarily
a middle-class following, we have imbued our scholarly labor with
working-class interests to broaden its appeal (Sennett and Cobb 1972;
Frykman 1990; Potter 1994:148–149; McGuire and Walker 1999). Our
project participates in the dialogue between organized labor and scholars
that began with the election of John Sweeny as president of the AFL-CIO
in 1995. Seeking to unite labor and the academy to confront the fast cap-
italism that threatens us both, the labor movement has attempted since
the mid-1990s to reforge connections with the academy, which were sun-
dered by disputes over the Vietnam War in the 1960s. This alliance has
more recently manifested itself in broad-based globalization actions led
by anti-corporate interests, such as the protests against the World Trade
Organization in Seattle in 1999 and in statements opposing U.S. military
action against Iraq, recently adopted by many labor unions. We are con-
tributing to these efforts by studying a history that has meaning for
working people and by addressing their interests in this history.
A praxis based in collective agency has guided our work. In our
research at Ludlow we have attempted to examine collective agency and
consciousness in the formation, execution, and ultimate failure of the
1913–1914 strike, as well as the role of Ludlow in the formation and
maintenance of a modern working-class consciousness (Saitta 2005,
2007). This examination begins with us asking a series of questions.
What was the social reality of interests, identities, and communities
that existed in 1913? In southern Colorado we are dealing with an eth-
nically diverse working class of miners. The owners of the mines were
uniformly white and Anglo and lived in Denver or other urban areas out-
side the state. A white, Anglo, middle class of managers, administrators,
and professionals represented them in southern Colorado. This industrial
society of the mines was embedded in a rural society ethnically differen-
tiated between Anglos and Chicanos, with a rural working class of cow-
Ludlow 193

boys and field hands, smallholder herders and farmers, and a rural bour-
geoisie of large ranchers and merchants.
How did the interests of these identities and communities relate to one
another, with special attention to the conflicts and contradictions that
have existed among them? The most obvious distinction in interests was
among the working-class miners who worked the mines, the bourgeoisie
who owned the mines, and the middle class who ran the mines. This is
the classic capitalist contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the pro-
letariat. The members of the working class, however, did not uniformly
experience day-to-day life in the southern Colorado mining community.
Gender, ethnicity, race, and workplace differentiated their experiences.
In this social reality, how is a shared consciousness created to form a
community of struggle? Here we examine the identities (ethnic, gender,
and racial) that crosscut the miners and that worked against the forma-
tion of class consciousness. We look at how conditions before, during,
and after the strike were differentially experienced by individuals as a
result of these identities and the social relations that created them. Our
goal here is to see how differences were maintained, redefined, and even
created within the working class of miners through the struggle of the
strike.
Finally, we have asked, How does our study fit with and participate in
contemporary social struggles in southern Colorado and in the United
States in general? Or in other words, what communities does our
research serve, and how does it do so? The most obvious of these com-
munities is the scholarly community of archaeologists, whom we address
in scholarly meetings, articles, and books. We have addressed the middle-
class community of Colorado through newspaper articles, teachers work-
shops, and public presentations, especially in conjunction with the
Colorado Historical Society and the Colorado Endowment for the
Humanities. Our active engagement with these two traditional commu-
nities of archaeological research demonstrates that we accept them as
valid, but we would argue that a truly radical praxis of archaeology
requires that we involve ourselves with other communities, those that are
locked in struggle against inequality and exploitation. Yet if we were to
concentrate only on the middle class, we would surely be guilty of repro-
ducing the same sort of bourgeois ideologies that theories of individual
agency tend to reproduce. Thus, we designed our study in collaboration
with the United Mine Workers of America.
The people who died at Ludlow—men, women, and children—engaged
in collective agency (Saitta 2005, 2007). They struggled in solidarity to
194 Ludlow

transform the world, and their deaths had a significant effect on the
course of labor history in the United States. Their sacrifice helped work-
ing people in the United States to win the rights that they enjoy today.
Had they been individual agents, had their sacrifice been solely personal,
it would not have been transformative. Only their families would remem-
ber it, and we would not be doing archaeology at Ludlow.

The 1913 – 1914 Colorado Coalfield War

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States had a rapidly
growing industrial economy. Two things powered this expansion: cheap
immigrant labor and coal. The third wave of immigration, from eastern
and southern Europe, crested in the second decade of the century.
Immigrants filled the burgeoning slums of the cities and the mines and
mills of the West. Progressive reformers sought to Americanize these
immigrants and improve their lot in the United States. The reformers
challenged the laissez-faire capitalism of the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, struggling to break up monopolies and make the political system
more democratic. Unions also fought to improve the lot of workers
through violent strike after violent strike. Many in the United States
feared class warfare. All of this occurred under a pall of smoke from the
coal fires that drove the mills, factories, mines, and trains.
In 1913, Colorado was the eighth largest coal-producing state in the
United States, with most of its production coming from the southern part
of the state (McGovern and Guttridge 1972). The bituminous coalfields
in Huerfano and Las Animas counties, north of Trinidad, Colorado, pri-
marily produced coke for the steel mills farther north at Pueblo (map 3).
The largest company mining coal in this region was the Rockefeller-
controlled Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I). This company
employed approximately fourteen thousand miners in 1913, 70 percent
of whom were immigrants, most of them having come from southern
Europe (principally Italy and Greece) and eastern Europe (primarily
Austria-Hungary, Poland, and Russia), along with Welsh, Irish, and
Japanese. The remaining 30 percent included mostly Euro-Americans,
along with some African Americans and Chicanos. Union organizers
bemoaned the problem of organizing workers who spoke at least twenty-
four different languages. m[ap3]
Although most families shared a working-class life in the isolated min-
ing communities of early twentieth-century southern Colorado, their
day-to-day experience varied. Ethnic differences were evident in each
Map 3. Trinidad coalfields area.
196 Ludlow

group’s formation of its own subcommunity, both in patterns of resi-

dence and through social institutions such as churches, ethnic associa-
tions, and fraternal organizations. Also, gender differences occurred
within these households, creating power relations and exploitation (Long
1985). Women had few if any opportunities for wage employment. They
worked in the household to maintain the miners, who went down in the
pit. They also contributed to household income by taking in boarders
and laundry and by canning and sewing. Racial discrimination existed as
well, with Euro-American workers discriminating against African
American and Chicano workers, and with the union largely excluding
the handful of Japanese in the camps from its activities. The Anglo-
Americans who lived in local, rural, agricultural communities regarded
the miners as inferior foreigners, and the mining companies hired many
of their private guards from the ranks of the rural working class. The
rural bourgeoisie by and large sided with management against the strik-
ers. A small, primarily ethnic-based, petty bourgeoisie of shop owners
and trade people identified with the miners, who were their customers. gifure4her
Working conditions in the mines were unfair at best and dreadful at
worst (Beshoar 1957; McGovern and Guttridge 1972; Papanikolas
1982). The miners loaded their cars with coal, which occurred in seams
in the mountains, and sent them to the tipple, where check weighmen
weighed the cars and credited the miners for their tonnage. The miners,
paid by the ton by the companies, all agreed that the company’s check
weighmen routinely shorted their weight. Reports of the Colorado mine
inspectors confirmed short weights on several occasions. The companies
did not pay miners for deadwork, that is, the work that was necessary to
maintain the mines but did not involve loading any coal. Such work
included removing rock, timbering mine shafts, and removing roof falls.
Deadwork kept the mines safe, but lack of pay for it discouraged miners
from doing it. In 1912, Colorado mines had an accident rate three times
the national average (Whiteside 1990). The companies operated the
mines in southern Colorado in flagrant violation of numerous state laws
that regulated safety and the fair compensation of miners. Sometimes
death came in a dramatic explosion and collapse of the shaft, killing
dozens or hundreds of men. More commonly it came from a rock falling
from the roof, a run away coal car, or the kick of a mine mule. Early
twentieth-century miners in southern Colorado did not worry about
black lung disease, because most of them died or left the mines crippled
before they could die from the black choking filth that filled their lungs.
In addition to owning the mines, the companies owned all the land
around them. They built unadorned, isolated towns near the mines to
Ludlow 197

house their workers. When workers did put up their own rude shacks,
they did so on company land. The company usually owned the only
store in each community and often they paid the miners in script usable
only at that store. The miner and his family went to a company doctor,
drank in a company-approved saloon, studied under company-hired
teachers, and played baseball on a company-owned field. The companies
surrounded the towns with fences, and the enclosures were policed by
company guards, who also guarded the gates to the towns, regulating
who could enter and leave. For instance, during the 1913–1914 strike,
company guards turned the governor of Colorado away from the com-
pany town of Hastings. The companies instructed their employees on
how to vote. They arranged the election of the sheriff of Huerfano
County and the county corner. In 1914, the journalist Edwin Seligman
(1914) described the situation in the southern coalfields as feudal.
The UMWA had first tried to organize southern Colorado coal miners
in a 1907 strike, but in the end the companies won that labor action.
When the UMWA launched a new, massive organizing campaign in
southern Colorado in 1913, the companies fought back by expelling
miners suspected of union sympathies, and company guards harassed
and brutally assaulted union organizers. The newly unionized miners
called for a strike in the fall of 1913 (Beshoar 1957; McGovern and
Guttridge 1972; Papanikolas 1982). The strikers had seven demands:
1. recognition of the UMWA as their bargaining agent
2. a 10 percent increase in the tonnage rate
3. an eight-hour day, as already required by Colorado law
4. pay for deadwork
5. the right to elect their own check weighmen, as already required by
Colorado law
6. the right to trade, seek medical care, and board in any facility of their
choosing, as already required by Colorado law
7. the enforcement of existing Colorado mining laws and the removal of
mine guards

Simultaneously the companies brought in the Baldwin-Felts Detective

Agency to violently suppress the organizing efforts and later the strike.
The agency, which specialized in breaking coal strikes, sent dozens of
agents and two machine guns fresh from strikes in West Virginia. The
companies also recruited members of the southern Colorado rural work-
ing class to work as mine guards. The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company
built a homemade armored car called “the death special,” which the
Baldwin-Felts agents equipped with a machine gun and a spotlight.
198 Ludlow

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 4. Ludlow tent colony before the massacre. Photo by Lou Dold, courtesy
of the Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, Z-193.

On September 23, 1913, the strike began with over 90 percent of the
miners leaving the shafts. The companies evicted people from company-
owned housing. Several thousand people moved into tent camps that the
UMWA had set up on the plains below the mines. Ludlow was the largest
of these camps, with approximately 150 tents and about 1,200 residents
(figure 4). The UMWA made Ludlow the strike headquarters for Las
Animas County. The miners at Ludlow elected Louis Tikas, a Greek, as
the camp leader. Each of these camps contained a mix of nationalities,
including Italians, Greeks, various eastern Europeans, Chicanos, and
Welsh, along with African Americans.
The strike began violently, with both sides committing assaults, shoot-
ings, and murders (Beshoar 1957; McGovern and Guttridge 1972;
Papanikolas 1982). Shortly before the strike, mine guards gunned down
a union organizer on the streets of Trinidad. The day after the strike
began, strikers ambushed and killed a particularly hated mine guard. On
numerous occasions the Baldwin-Felts agents used the machine gun on
the death special to fire over the camps. The violence escalated until late
October, when pitched gun battles between strikers and mine guards in
Walsenberg and Berwind left two deputies and three strikers dead and a
company building in flames. At the urging of the coal companies, the
governor of Colorado called out the National Guard on October 24,
1913. Over the winter of 1913–1914, relations between the strikers and
Ludlow 199

the Guard deteriorated. On January 22, 1914, mounted guardsmen rode

down a peaceful demonstration of miners’ wives and children on the
streets of Trinidad. By April, the state of Colorado could no longer afford
the cost of having the militia in the field. The governor removed the reg-
ular guardsmen from the region, and the mining companies filled the two
remaining National Guard units with their own employees and Baldwin-
Felts agents, under the command of Colorado National Guard officers.
On April 20, 1914, a battle broke out at the Ludlow tent camp. At
about 9:00 A.M., the Guard commander ordered Louis Tikas to meet him
at Ludlow Station. On a hill overlooking the tent camp, a dozen guards-
men with rifles and a machine gun loaded their weapons. Fearing that
this might be a pretext for an attack, a contingent of strikers armed
themselves and moved into a railroad cut overlooking the station and
flanking the position of the guardsmen. This movement unnerved the
guardsmen. In the midst of this tension, a rifle discharged, and the
guardsmen began firing the machine gun into the tent camp. By noon, up
to two hundred guardsmen had joined the fight, and company guards
added a Baldwin-Felts machine gun to the first. Mary Thomas (1971)
later remembered that, after a few hours of firing, the tents were so full
of holes that they looked like lace. Although the strikers had dug cellars
under many of their tents to shield their families from bullets, they tried
to draw the machine gun fire away from the camp by shifting their posi-
tion across the plains, and the pitched battle shifted with them.
Chaos reigned in the camp. Women and children huddled in a large
walk-in well that the railroad company used to fill steam engines. Many
families took shelter in the cellars under their tents. The camp’s leaders,
Louis Tikas, Pearl Jolly, and Mary Thomas, ran from tent to tent all day,
telling people to flee up a dry creek bed north of the camp. In the early
afternoon, a twelve-year-old named William Snyder came up out of a cel-
lar to get some food and was shot dead. His distraught father then went
from tent to tent, countering the instruction to flee, telling people their
children would be killed.
As dusk gathered, a railroad crew stopped their train in front of the
machine guns, blocking their line of fire. Guardsmen threatened to shoot
the train crew if they did not move the train, but the crew stayed, pro-
viding the miners a respite from the machine gun fire. By the time the
shooting stopped, the armed strikers were out of ammunition. Tikas
ordered them to withdraw because they could do no more good, so the
majority of working families who had been pinned down in the colony
fled up the dry creek bed. In the fading light, the guardsmen charged into
200 Ludlow

the camp, looting tents, and the train’s brakeman saw them setting tents
aflame.
In a cellar below tent 58, Mrs. Alcarita Pedragon and the pregnant
Mrs. Cadilano Costa and Mrs. Patria Valdez huddled with their eight
children. Mrs. Costa did not know that her husband, Charles Costa, had
been shot dead in the battle. Flames drove Mary Petrucci and her three
children from the cellar below tent 1. She then sought refuge in the hole
beneath tent 58, huddling with her three children on the steps into that
cellar. The women and children cried, cringing in fear as the flames con-
sumed the tent above them. One by one they passed out. Outside, the
guardsmen seized Louis Tikas and two other of the camp’s male leaders
and summarily executed them. The next day, the early morning light
showed the camp to be a smoldering ruin (figure 5). Mary Petrucci woke
up in the dark hole below tent 58 to find her children, Cadilano Costa,
Patria Valdez, and the other eight children dead. Alcarita Pedragon
climbed out of the pit and staggered to Ludlow Station. There, the sta-
tion master put her on a train, and she later left the region. In addition to
the thirteen deceased in the “death pit” and eleven-year-old William
Snyder, five strikers, at least one militiaman, and a hitchhiker on the
highway, a mile away, died. gif[ure5]
Following the attack, enraged strikers took up arms and seized control
of the southern Colorado mining district. They attacked and destroyed
several company towns. Finally, after ten days of open war, President
Wilson sent federal troops to Trinidad to restore order. During the ten-day
war, at least twenty-one company employees and militia perished in the
fighting, and a handful of strikers died. That summer, the strikers returned
to Ludlow and built a new camp. The UMWA sent three female survivors
of the massacre on a national tour to raise money for the strike. The
funds they raised prolonged the strike but were not enough to win it. In
December 1914, a bankrupt UMWA ended the action. At least seventy-
five people died violently during the eighteen months of the strike, and at
least two hundred others were wounded.4 In the first eighteen months
after the strike, over one hundred miners died in accidents in the pits. The
National Guard hastily convened a court martial that cleared the guards-
men who had attacked the Ludlow colony of any crimes. No person was
ever convicted for any of the murders committed during the strike. In
1918, the UMWA erected a monument at the massacre site to the men,
women, and children who died there. John D. Rockefeller Jr. showed up
uninvited at the dedication ceremony and asked to speak, but the union
officers turned him away (Gitelman 1988).
Ludlow 201

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 5. Ludlow after the massacre. Photo by Lou Dold, courtesy of the
Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, Z-199.

Violence in coal strikes and adult male deaths were commonplace in

the early twentieth century, but the killing of women and children at
Ludlow stunned the nation (Gitelman 1988). Progressive reformers such
as Upton Sinclair and John Reed used the massacre to demonize John D.
Rockefeller Jr. The United States Commission on Industrial Relations
investigated the events of the strike and issued a twelve-hundred-page
report condemning the companies and National Guard (U.S. Congress,
Senate 1916). In response to this bad press, Rockefeller hired the first
corporate public relations firm and embarked on a campaign of charity
that included the founding of Colonial Williamsburg. He also employed
the Canadian socialist Mackenzie King to set up a series of reforms in the
mines of southern Colorado. The Rockefeller Plan established YMCAs in
the camps, improved camp services, and set up a company union. It is
not clear what practical impacts these reforms had on the lives of miners
and their families, but they did not bring labor peace. From the end
of World War I, until the Depression of 1929, the miners went out on
strike three times. The United Mine Workers of America finally orga-
nized the southern coalfields in 1934 following the passage of New Deal
legislation that guaranteed the legal right of workers to join a union
(McGovern and Guttridge 1972).
202 Ludlow

How Can Archaeology Enhance Understandings of

the Colorado Coalfield War?
Thousands of pages of primary text, hundreds of photographs, and
scores of oral histories constitute the incredibly robust documentary
record of the Colorado Coalfield War. Very little of this documentary
record, however, addresses in any systematic way the mundane realities
of day-to-day life in the mines, the company towns, and the strike
camps. The craft of archaeology allows us to systematically examine the
material conditions of daily life in the coal camps and in the strike
colonies of southern Colorado. These mundane conditions shaped the
experience and consciousness of miners and their families. This shared
experience and shared class consciousness are what prompted the min-
ers to go out on strike, but their day-to-day life is obscured in the docu-
mentary record.
Historians have dug in the rich archival record of documents and
photos related to the Colorado Coalfield War to produce several key his-
tories of the strike (Beshoar 1957; McGovern and Guttridge 1972;
Papanikolas 1982). These studies focus on the events, the politics, the
companies, the strike leaders, and the organizational work of the
UMWA. They highlight the male miner and the common experience of
working in the mines as the source of the class consciousness that united
ethnically and racially diverse men to strike. The histories often assume,
and sometimes state, that men shared a common lived experience at
work but that they returned home each night to ethnically different
domestic lives. These historians have accepted a traditional theory of
labor action that accentuates the actions of men in the workplace and
overlooks the agency of women in the home. Their theory tends to link
class and class struggle with active men in the workplace, and ethnicity
and tradition with passive women in the home.
The striking steelworkers I have spoken to in Pueblo, Colorado, and
the UMWA members we have worked with have a very different per-
spective on class consciousness, solidarity, and strikes from that of the
historians. They tell us that it is families, not male workers, who go out
on strike. They emphasize that families make the decision to strike at the
kitchen table before miners affirm it in the union hall. We, and many
other academics, doubt the traditional theory of solidarity (Long 1985,
1991; Beaudry and Mrozowski 1988; McGaw 1989; Cameron 1993;
Shackel 1994, 1996; Sider 1996; Mrozowski et al. 1996). We see the eth-
nic identities that crosscut class in southern Colorado, and we agree that
Ludlow 203

they hindered the formation of class consciousness. But we have misgiv-

ings about the formulas of class = workplace = solidarity = male, and
ethnicity = home = alienation = female. We find that class and ethnicity
crosscut both mine and home, male and female. We hypothesize that
working-class men in the mines and working-class women in the homes
both shared a common, mundane, lived class experience and that ethnic
differences alienated them in both contexts.
The existing histories clearly show that ethnic divisions existed in the
mines. The companies hired miners as independent contractors, and the
workers organized their own work crews. The miners chose to work
with family members and friends, usually all of the same ethnicity
(Beshoar 1957; McGovern and Guttridge 1972; Papanikolas 1982;
Long 1991). Historical and industrial archaeologists have also demon-
strated in many other cases that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
workplaces were ethnically structured (Hardesty 1988; Bassett 1994;
Wegars 1991). The traditional theory holds that the male camaraderie
of the work experience sweeps away these ethnic divisions in the mine
and that it prevails over a passive domestic ethnicity to create class
consciousness.
We cannot demonstrate from the existing histories and analyses that a
class-based commonality of lived experience in the home also aided in
the formation of class consciousness and solidarity. The primary histories
all concur that the mundane lives of miners’ families were difficult, but
they offer only anecdotal evidence of the reality of those lives. Anecdotes
and assertions of hardship pepper the oral histories, but they lack sys-
tematic information and detail on that lived experience. The research of
the historian Priscilla Long (1985) helped inspire our position. She has
demonstrated that women in the early twentieth-century Colorado coal-
fields shared an experience of sexual and gender exploitation, but her
work also lacks detailed data on the realities of day-to-day lived experi-
ence in the home.
Scholars can use historical archaeology to analyze the relationship
among social consciousness, lived experience, material conditions,
human agency, and transformative change (Orser 1996; Shackel 1996).
Historical archaeologists can interweave documents and the archaeolog-
ical record to understand both the consciousness and material condi-
tions that form lived experience (Beaudry 1988; Leone and Potter 1988;
Little 1992; Leone 1995; De Cunzo and Herman 1996; Wylie 1999;
Delle et al. 2000). People speak in texts and oral histories about their
consciousness, their interests, and their struggles, but not all people have
204 Ludlow

the same presence, power, or voice in the documents. Also, they rarely
tell us in detail about their mundane lives. They tend instead to speak
about the unusual, the significant, the momentous, and the exotic.
People, however, unintentionally produce the archaeological record with
the residues of the small actions that make up their day-to-day experi-
ence. The archaeological record consists primarily of these mundane
residues, which all people leave behind.
Archaeological research gives us one means to gain a richer, more in-
depth, and more methodical knowledge of the everyday domestic experi-
ence of Colorado mining families. These families unwittingly left evi-
dence of their day-to-day lives in the earth. We have recaptured lived
experience from the charred remains of their tents, from the plans of
camps, from the contents of their privies, and by from the trash that they
abandoned. Interweaving these data with information from documentary
and photographic sources allows us to infer domestic life. In order to
understand the dynamic relationship of lived experience, solidarity,
struggle, and change, we apply these methods to company towns occu-
pied before the strike, to the strikers’ tent camps, and to the company
towns rebuilt under the Rockefeller Plan.
Our position stresses the importance of domestic life in the formation
of class consciousness and solidarity. We can archaeologically demon-
strate that a class-based, everyday, lived experience of the home tran-
scended ethnic divisions before, during, and after the strike. Our analysis
demonstrates that women and children were active agents, with male
miners, in creating class consciousness in solidarity for the strike.

Archaeological Fieldwork
With the help of our field school students, we did five years of excava-
tions both at Ludlow and in the ruins of the CF&I-owned company
town of Berwind. The massacre site is a near perfect archaeological con-
text, a very short-term occupation destroyed by fire. The construction of
a memorial with a fenced-in area, the lining of the death pit with con-
crete, and a building disturbed one small portion of the former colony.
Outside this area, cattle grazing and other activities have had little impact
on the remains of the colony. We initiated our research in Berwind right
after the area had been subdivided for sale, but the streets, foundations,
latrines, and trash pits of the old company town remained visible on the
surface. As the lots were sold, many of the new owners bulldozed and
built over these remains.
Ludlow 205

Ludlow

The Ludlow Massacre site covers forty acres of gently sloping plains
swathed in short grass. We conducted controlled surface collections over
the site. The distribution of surface material corresponded quite closely
with the plan of the strike camp as it is revealed in photographs taken in
1914 and assisted us in locating numerous features associated with the
camp. We also systematically dug soil cores to find cellars and pits. There
has been very little deposition on the site, and the majority of its features
occurred at shallow depths of ten to twenty centimeters. We located and
excavated one complete and several partial tent platforms, as well as sev-
eral shallow pit features. We have also located a number of deep features,
among them a possible privy and seven holes that were subterranean
shelter or storage cellars constructed by the colony’s residents (figure 6). [figu
Photographs have been a valuable source of information, greatly aid-
ing our excavations. Several hundred photographs exist of the strike,
including dozens of the Ludlow tent colony. A few days before the mas-
sacre, the independent photographer Lou Dold took a panoramic photo
that shows the camp (figure 4). Gene Prince (1988) and James Deetz
(1993) pioneered a photo overlay technique to locate features that
appear in old photographs but no longer exist in a modern landscape. In
the summer of 1999, we used this technique to define the positions of the
tents and other features in the colony. We had 35-mm negatives made of
Dold’s premassacre photo,5 and we mounted each negative in turn on the
ground glass in the viewfinder of a Nikon single-reflex camera with a 50-
mm lens. Dold took his photograph from atop a water tower on the rail-
road line near the colony. We were able to locate the position of this
water tower by using other photos and physical remains on the ground;
then we elevated the camera with a hydraulic lift placed over that loca-
tion. By superimposing the negative image on stable landscape features,
such as hills, mountains, and the section line road, we were able to posi-
tion the camera where Dold had stood to take his picture. With the cam-
era in position, we sighted through the viewfinder to see the image of the
camp superimposed over the existing landscape, then directed crew
members to move within the image and place pin flags marking the loca-
tions of tents and other features. In this way, we were able to locate over
a quarter of the tents in the colony.6 In the summer of 2002, we located
additional features by using the same technique with other photos taken
at ground level within the camp (Jacobson 2006).
The various photographs from Ludlow and the Forbes tent camp show
206 Ludlow

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 6. Excavating a tent cellar at Ludlow, 2001. Photo by Randall

McGuire.

how the miners set up the tents. They first dug a shallow basin, then laid
wooden joists directly on the ground to support a wooden tent platform
and frame, usually with a wooden door. After covering the frame with
canvas, the miners piled a ridge of dirt around the base of the tent. In
numerous cases, they dug a cellar or pit under the wooden platform.
In 1998, we excavated one tent platform. We were able to define it
on the basis of soil stains and shallow trenches (probably drainage
ditches to carry water away from the structure) and rows of nails that
followed the joists. A large number of small artifacts, likely to have
been lost by residents through the slats in the floor or with the burning
of the tent, lay on the bottom of the shallow basin. These included a sus-
pender part bearing an Italian inscription, “Society of Tyrolean Alpin-
ists,” and a collection of Catholic religious medals, suggesting that the
occupants of the tent were Italian Catholics. Our excavation of other
tent locations revealed extensive soil oxidation resulting from the
intense heat of the burning tent, and we recovered metal tent and furni-
ture hardware that survived the fire.
Work on a possible privy on the southern edge of the colony revealed
evidence for early acts of memorialization at the site. We recovered a
metal tripod and wire wreath frame from atop a series of artifact-rich
deposits. Material from the lower strata of the feature consists of hun-
Ludlow 207

dreds of steel cans, including a multitude of Pet brand condensed milk

cans, medicinal and sauce bottles, tobacco tins, fragments of furniture,
and a miner’s lamp.
We located and tested seven other deep features that we believe to be
earthen cellars the strikers dug below tents for storage and refuge. We
fully excavated two of these. The stratigraphy and contents of each
clearly tell the story of the attack on the colony. Fire-damaged family
possessions sit on the floors of the cellars. To reach them, crews dug
through the burned remains of the tent, a level of blackened wood,
charred canvas, and rusted grommets. A layer of charcoal, coal clinker,
rusted metal, and charred possessions, trash that the miners used to fill in
the holes after the massacre, overlays the tent remains.

Berwind

The CF&I built Berwind in Berwind Canyon, near Ludlow, in 1892 and
abandoned it in 1931. Miners occupied the town before and after the
strike. Many of the strikers at Ludlow originated from Berwind. In
1998, we made a detailed map of the community based on remains vis-
ible on the surface of the ground. Using this map, old photos, and early
twentieth-century plat maps, we were able to define numerous discrete
residential neighborhoods and date them relative to the strike. Test
excavations revealed stratified deposits as much as fifty centimeters deep
in the yards associated with houses. At Berwind, we excavated in trash
dumps, latrines, and yards. We divided these deposits into ones dating
before, during, and after the strike. Our analysis of artifacts from the
tests confirmed the dating of some neighborhoods to before the strike
and others to construction after the strike as part of the Rockefeller
Plan. We also contacted and started collecting oral histories from former
Berwind residents, who recounted life in Berwind in the 1920s and
1930s.
Locus K dated to before the strike. Our excavations at a dump in this
locus unearthed a stunning array of objects, from household furnishings
to domestic rubbish to fragments of footwear, clothing, and other per-
sonal effects. Through fine-grained stratigraphic analysis, we also learned
more about how families transported trash to the dumpsite and how the
dump itself was operated. Our crews located and sampled a large privy
associated with the residential area in the locus. The various filling
episodes and the artifacts within it reflect the regular use and mainte-
nance of the privy. The artifacts also date the capping of the pit and the
208 Ludlow

destruction of the neighborhood to make room for a new junior high

school in 1916. Combined with oral histories and census data, the mate-
rial from this prestrike section of Berwind provides a window into the
material conditions of life that in part motivated the collective struggle of
1912–1913.
Locus B dated to after the strike. Here, as part of the Rockefeller
Plan, the company built a cluster of concrete-walled houses for the work-
ers. Improving beyond Locus K, they built cement-lined privies, which
the company cleaned on a routine basis. We mapped the houses, privies,
and the outdoor beehive bread ovens behind the houses. Our excavations
concentrated in the yards of the houses and in trash deposits thrown into
the creek bed below the houses.

Archaeological Conclusions
In their dissertation research, several archaeologists with the project have
elaborated on the themes of everyday domestic life and the construction
of class consciousness. Margaret Wood has examined how women’s con-
tributions to household survival and reproduction changed before and
after the strike. Michael Jacobson has analyzed how owners, working
families, and the union manipulated the landscape in the struggle over
class consciousness. Sarah Chicone has asked how working-class poverty
in southern Colorado changed because of the strike and the Rockefeller
Plan.
Margaret Wood’s study of the Berwind remains (2002a) shows how
working-class women in the company towns struggled to raise families
on miners’ wages that would not cover enough food for even two people.
In trash dating before the strike, she found many tin cans, large cooking
pots, and big serving vessels. Families took in single male miners as
boarders to make extra income, and women used canned foods to make
stews and soups to feed them. Wood calculates that through this activity
women accounted for a third to half of the household’s income. After the
strike, the Rockefeller Plan forbade the taking in of boarders, but miners’
wages remained too low to support a family. The tin cans and big pots
disappeared from the trash, replaced by canning jars and lids and the
bones of rabbits and chickens. Also, women now used the outdoor bee-
hive ovens to bake bread in quantity. Wives and children, who could no
longer earn money from boarders, instead produced and processed food
at home to feed the family.
Michael Jacobson (2006) has looked at the landscapes of Berwind and
Ludlow 209

the Ludlow tent colony as loci of class struggle. In Berwind before the
strike, the struggle revolved around worker-built versus company-built
housing. Company industrial buildings, such as coal tipples and coke
ovens, dominated the landscape of the company towns, and the com-
pany-built houses for the workers were interspaced within this industrial
landscape. Workers could escape company domination by building their
own homes up the side canyons away from the company buildings, thus
removing themselves from the constant gaze of the company and gaining
some control over their landscape. During the strike, the company and
the National Guard represented the strikers as dirty, anarchistic foreign-
ers who could not function without the control and supervision of the
companies; however, the UMWA and the miners laid Ludlow out in
ordered rows of tents, with a central meeting tent and areas for team
sports, realizing in the landscape the ordered democratic society they
created in the camp. After the strike, the Rockefeller Plan provided com-
pany-built housing for all workers, which improved the material condi-
tions of home life but left working families with less control over their
lives and the landscape.
Sarah Chicone (2006) has asked about poverty and the lives of south-
ern Colorado coal mining families. She looks at poverty not as a thing
but as a process. She examines how middle-class ideologies of poverty
affected the lives of working-class families and those families’ lived day-
to-day experience of poverty. Middle-class ideologies constructed the
poverty of the mining families in one of two ways. A conservative point
of view held that working families were poor because they were unclean,
lazy, and drank too much. Progressive reformers argued that the impov-
erishment of working families sprang from company exploitation. Need-
less to say, the companies took the first position to justify the lot of the
workers, and the union took the second to raise public sympathy for the
strike. The workers saw their impoverishment in neither of these ways
but rather as a struggle that affirmed family and community. The
Rockefeller Plan only slightly improved the materiality of working-class
poverty in southern Colorado, and it did little to alter the lived experi-
ence of poverty.
For almost ninety years, the United Mine Workers have maintained
the site of Ludlow as a shrine to the workers who died there (Walker
2000). When we began our project in 1997, a monument was located at
the site but little or no interpretative information existed there. In this
context our archaeological work became a powerful form of memory
and political action.
210 Ludlow

Archaeology as Memory
The death of women and children in class warfare clashes with most
accepted narratives of class relations in the United States, particularly in
the West (McGuire and Reckner 2002). We argue that the painful reality
of Ludlow represents a watershed in American history that needs to be
retrieved for a broad range of constituencies. By doing so we raise popu-
lar awareness of labor’s struggle and help to generate political support
for the rights of workers. Many middle-class visitors to the memorial site
arrive unaware of what happened there and become uncomfortable
when they learn the story. Others see the story of Ludlow as a reminder
of an unfortunate past that is best forgotten. They believe that we are all
middle-class in the United States today and that class conflict has been
banished to history. They do not see how fast capitalism has eroded
workers’ rights and dignity. I need not reexamine the ideological power
of this line of thought. On the other hand, after we presented our pro-
posal for archaeological fieldwork at the Ludlow Memorial to the
UMWA’s local in Trinidad, one coal miner suggested, “All you need to
know about Ludlow can be summed up in three words: they got fucked”
(Duke and Saitta 1998). The deep alienation and even hostility apparent
in this statement was a wake-up call concerning the realities of working-
class life and thought and the class differences that separate us from the
miners. It also threw into question the wider social value of a pursuit like
archaeology.
Outside union circles, few remember the story of the 1913–1914
Colorado Coalfield War and the Ludlow Massacre. The UMWA regards
Ludlow as a place of pilgrimage, and it uses the site as a powerful symbol
to raise class consciousness and build solidarity (Walker 2000). In 1997,
Dean Saitta and I presented our proposal for the project to a union pro-
fessional at the regional office of the UMWA in Denver, Colorado. At the
end of our presentation, he indicated that what we wanted to do sounded
okay but that we had to realize that Ludlow is sacred ground for the
union. He had one question for us: “Are you Republicans?” I looked at
Dean for a moment and then I replied, “No, we are not Republicans, we
are socialists.” He said that was okay as long as we were not Repub-
licans. Memory leads to action when working people see their contem-
porary struggles against fast capitalism as a continuation of the struggle
at Ludlow.
In 1997, the Colorado Department of Transportation erected a point-
of-interest sign to mark the exit for the Ludlow Monument off Interstate
Ludlow 211

25. The sign draws a small but steady stream of summer tourists to the
site, most of whom arrive expecting to find a monument to an Indian
massacre (Walker 2003). In this context, our excavations have become a
form of memory, recalling for these visitors the details of what happened
at Ludlow, the sacrifices of the strikers, and the terrible struggle that won
working people their rights. The story of Ludlow, made compelling by
the violence and the death of women and children, has great popular
appeal. Also, it is not a tale of a distant or exotic past. Descendants of the
strikers still regularly visit the site, and the United Mine Workers hold an
annual memorial service at the monument.
Our focus on mundane life humanizes the strikers, because it empha-
sizes relations and activities that our modern audiences also experience:
relations between husbands and wives, between parents and children,
and approaches to family food preparation and laundry. The parallel and
contrast between the modern realities of these experiences and those of
the miners’ lives enable our modern audience to understand the harsh-
ness of the strikers’ experience.
Archaeological excavations often make the news. Each season of our
excavations in Colorado resulted in articles in major newspapers in the
state. Farther afield, Eric Zorn, a columnist with the Chicago Tribune,
picked up on our excavations for his Labor Day column in 1997. He
titled that day’s column “Workers Rights Were Won with Blood” and
pointed out how fast capitalism has corroded many of the rights that
were so hard won. Through our excavations, the events of 1913–1914
became newsworthy again and took on a modern reality.
An important part of the project was developing an interpretive pro-
gram at the massacre site. We do not have to interpret the site for the
members of the United Mine Workers, because the union has made
Ludlow and the massacre a symbol of their ongoing struggle. But the
tourists who regularly pull off the highway, presumably to visit the site of
an Indian massacre, need background information in order to under-
stand Ludlow’s significance in the present. During each summer’s exca-
vation we greeted people, gave them a tour, and told them about what
happened at Ludlow. During the summer of 1998, over five hundred
people visited our excavations. At the Ludlow Memorial Service in June
1999, we unveiled an interpretive kiosk, which includes three panels: one
on the history of the strike and massacre, a second on our archaeological
research, and a third on the relationship of Ludlow to current labor
struggles. Over seven hundred working people viewed the kiosk during
that year’s memorial service. We have also created two traveling exhibits
212 Ludlow

of artifacts that we have displayed at each annual memorial service and

have sent to union halls around the country. And in the spring of 2006,
we installed a more detailed interpretive trail at the site.
The struggle for dignity and basic rights among working people in
southern Colorado continues today. Between 1997 and 2004, several
hundred striking steelworkers from United Steelworkers locals 2102 and
3267 in Pueblo, Colorado, joined the Ludlow Memorial Service. They
went out on strike against CF&I to stop forced overtime, struggling
against fast capitalism’s pressures to erase the boundaries of work and
home at the expense of their families. They also sought to regain one of
the basic rights that the Ludlow strikers died for, the eight-hour day. The
Ludlow Massacre became a powerful symbol in their struggle, powerful
enough that the parent company (Oregon Steel) sought to distance itself
from the killings of 1914 by altering the name of its Pueblo subsidiary
from CF&I to Rocky Mountain Steel. The company wanted to break the
union and thereby deprive the steelworkers of another of the basic rights
that people died for at Ludlow, the right to collective bargaining. In June
1999, the steelworkers invited us to speak to them in Pueblo. In the
spring of 2004, the United Steelworkers won the strike.
The struggle of labor for dignity and basic rights also continues to
engender opposition in southern Colorado. In May 2003, vandals
attacked the memorial to the Ludlow dead with a sledgehammer. They
decapitated both the male and the female statues at the base of the mon-
ument (Saitta 2004). To repair the monument, the local union of the
UMWA embarked on a national fund-raising campaign. Money poured
in from individuals and union locals, and within a few months the local
had raised the eighty thousand dollars necessary. The union rededicated
the restored monument at the annual memorial service on June 5, 2005.
Dean Saitta of our project joined union leaders at the podium to help cel-
ebrate the restoration and commemorate the events of 1914 (figure 7). [figure 7]

Descendants and Descendant Communities

Many historical archaeologists have argued that scholars have an obliga-
tion to work with the descendant communities of the sites that we study
(Spector 1993; Blakey and LaRoche 1997; Wilkie and Bartoy 2000;
Singleton and Orser 2003). Because many of these researchers do not dis-
tinguish between individual agency and collective agency, they confuse
the individual descendants of historical communities with a descendant
community. In the case of Ludlow, we have tried to serve both individual
Ludlow 213

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 7. Dean Saitta addressing the 2005 Ludlow Memorial Service with
UMWA leaders behind him and a portrait of John Lewis to his left. Photo by
Randall McGuire.

descendants and the descendant community, but we recognize that in this

case only the descendant community is a community of struggle.
Many descendants of the miners in the 1913–1914 strike (children,
grandchildren, nieces, and nephews) come to the memorial each year. Few
of them are miners or even working-class; they are principally middle-
class Anglos. Their parents or they or both participated in the great social
mobility of the 1950s and 1960s. Today they live scattered across the
United States as teachers, lawyers, businesspeople, managers, and admin-
istrators. They share an identity as descendants of the massacre, but they
do not form a community, either in living near one another or in forming
any type of interacting group, organization, or club. The descendants
desire a familial and personal memorialization of the strike and mas-
sacre. They come to the memorial to establish a connection to this famil-
ial heritage and to see to it that their family’s role in these events is prop-
erly honored.
We have aided descendants in various ways. We helped the niece of
Cadilano Costa locate the graves of her aunt, her uncle, and her cousins
so that she could raise a stone on the unmarked plots. Irene Dotson was
one of the last survivors of the strike.7 A frequently published picture of
214 Ludlow

strikers and their families in front of a tent in the Forbes camp includes
her at age two (figure 8). The archives of the Colorado Historical Society
and of the Denver Public Library listed the wrong family name for the
individuals in the picture, and the photo has been published numerous
times with this misinformation. Mrs. Dotson supplied us with the correct
names, and we contacted the archives. They corrected the identification
of the photo to “the Oberosler family and friends” and labeled it with
the names of the individuals. gif[ure8]
The unionized working people of southern Colorado make up the
descendant community of the 1913–1914 coal strike. A few of them are
descendants of people who participated in the strike, but the vast major-
ity of them have no ancestral connection to it. Some of them are ethnic
whites (Italians and eastern Europeans); the majority are Chicano. They
maintain the monument, organize the memorial, and make the events of
1913–1914 part of their active union struggle.
When we conceived the project in the mid-1990s, an active, unionized
coal mine, the Allen Mine, was still operating west of Trinidad. When we
entered the field in the summer of 1997, we were very disappointed to
learn that the mine had closed just before Christmas in 1996. We feared
this closing would transform the project from an active engagement with
a union community to a postindustrial memory project, but it did not
work out that way. Ludlow remains a sacred place for all of the UMWA,
and the District 22 office in Price, Utah, took over responsibility for the
monument. The memorial service remains a national event for the union,
with representatives from the national executive council attending each
service. Since our project began, both the government workers in Las
Animas County and the hospital workers at the Mount San Rafael
Hospital, in Trinidad, have unionized. Both groups of workers have cho-
sen the union of their fathers and uncles, the United Mine Workers of
America. Both also identify with the 1913–1914 strike.
We did sometimes find our knowledge at odds with beliefs of the
union community in southern Colorado. We encountered numerous per-
vasive myths about the massacre that our research proved false. These
myths tended to brutalize the National Guard.
Contemporary reports sympathetic to the UMWA maintained that
the National Guard had used explosive bullets (Seligman 1914). We have
found spent bullets in our excavation, and we can identify their caliber
and type. Ammunition boxes with readable labels also appear in numer-
ous photos of the Guard. None of the spent bullets that we have found or
the labels on the ammunition boxes shown in the photographs were
Ludlow 215

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 8. Oberosler family and friends. Irene Dotson is in the center, in a white
dress. Photo by Lou Dold, Denver Public Library, Western History Collection,
X-60448.

from explosive ammunition. Most of the Guard used standard military

issue, steel-jacketed, ball ammunition. The one National Guard unit
equipped by the companies fired civilian, lead, hunting rounds.
Many local people in southern Colorado told us that following the
massacre guardsmen had ripped open Cadilano Costas belly and torn
out her unborn child on the tip of a bayonet. We do not believe this hap-
pened, and the documentary evidence provides no support for it . None
of the contemporary accounts of the massacre mentioned this story, and
none of the hundreds of photos of the Guard show soldiers with bayo-
nets. The coroner’s report indicates no wounds on Cadilano Costas’s
body. The Red Cross party that recovered the body made no mention of
mutilation. A UMWA representative accompanied the Red Cross party
and observed the autopsy, but the UMWA never reported the bayonet
story either. In 1914, British propaganda published in U.S. newspapers
accused the “beastly Huns” who invaded Belgium of exactly this atrocity.
We believe that this tale was picked up in the popular imagination of
southern Colorado, and people transferred it to the Ludlow Massacre.
A few descendants of strikers told us that the number killed in the
216 Ludlow

massacre had been far higher than the twenty-four recorded deaths. They
believed that the National Guard had killed hundreds of people. They
asserted that the Guard had dug a great trench in the middle of the camp
and buried the uncounted bodies there to hide them. Our testing and
excavations were extensive enough to have found such a pit in the camp,
but our work revealed no evidence for such a trench. A photo of the sec-
ond UMWA camp built on the site after the massacre clearly shows the
remains of the burned tents from the massacre but no evidence of a
freshly dug mass grave. We did, however, hear stories from descendants
of relatives who had died days or weeks after the massacre. In some
cases, these relations died of wounds. In other cases, they died from ail-
ments or physical conditions that were worsened by the trauma and
stress of the massacre or by exposure to the elements when they fled the
carnage. We conclude that there were unrecorded deaths from the mas-
sacre, but they do not number in the hundreds, and the Guard did not
bury bodies in the area of the camp.
We always listened to these stories respectfully, even when we had
heard them many times. They were useful ethnographic information that
demonstrated to us the depth of alienation that developed after the strike
and massacre. In each case, we explained why we thought the story was
not true. I do not know if we changed any minds, but people always
respectfully listened to our explanations.
Attitudes about the environment presented another potential source
of tension between archaeologists and UMWA members. As coal min-
ers, the UMWA would like to see more coal dug in the United States.
The union and most of its membership blame environmentalists and
environmental concerns for decreasing and limiting the amount of coal
currently mined. The UMWA consistently supports programs and legis-
lation that would increase coal usage, principally in energy production.
Archaeologists tend to be avid environmentalists. The interests of the
archaeological community have long been linked with environmental
interests. The goals and research of the project did not broach environ-
mental issues, and as a whole we avoided such issues. Individual archae-
ologists and individual union members often discussed environmental
issues, but these conversations were always respectful and measured on
both sides.
We remember Ludlow by using our knowledge of the world to cri-
tique the world and to teach other communities how labor’s rights were
won with blood. They were not freely given but bought with the lives of
working people like those who died at Ludlow. We also use Ludlow to
Ludlow 217

reveal how fast capitalism has eroded many of those rights to the point of
their endangerment today.

Teaching Labor and the Labor of Teaching

The powerful ideology of a classless U.S. society typically silences the
record of class struggle in popular narratives of American history. Ending
this silence makes education an extraordinarily vital part of our project
(Walker and Saitta 2002; Wood 2002b). We have extended our collabo-
ration with the UMWA in building the interpretive program at the
memorial site and in our traveling exhibits to teach our own field school
students about American labor, past and present, and to help public
school teachers incorporate labor issues into their curricula.
Fitting the predominant pattern in archaeology, the majority of students
who attended our field school from 1997 to 2004 came from middle-class
backgrounds. Most of these students grew up in North America. They had
learned about labor unions from mainstream educational institutions and
corporate media outlets. While a limited number had been exposed to U.S.
labor history and been taught about class structures in U.S. society, the
majority had had few experiences that made them aware of class in general
or, more specifically, of their own class positions. The field school also
included students from England, Spain, and Bulgaria. These foreign stu-
dents had a much higher awareness of class and class relations than the
U.S. students. The foreign students generally found the American students
to be apolitical and apathetic in comparison to their peers at home.
The nature of the Ludlow Massacre site brings the reality of class and
class conflict in American history into stark relief for students. Many
of our students were shocked that such events could have happened in
the United States. However, the awareness of labor history in no way
guarantees the realization of class relations in the present. To challenge
this situation, we always scheduled fieldwork to overlap with the annual
June UMWA memorial service at the Ludlow Monument, a gathering
that confronted students with the realities of labor unionism and
working-class solidarity in a powerful way. Every summer, staff and stu-
dents of the Archaeology of the 1913 – 1914 Colorado Coalfield War
Project participated in the memorial service along with three hundred to
one thousand union people from all over the United States and from
many different occupations. Contact with striking steelworkers from
Pueblo, Colorado, was particularly insightful for the students. Several
times we traveled with our students to the union hall in Pueblo to have
218 Ludlow

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Figure 9. At the National Endowment for the Humanities’ 1999 teachers’ insti-
tute, educators listen to a retired miner and his wife (standing second and third
from left) at the Ludlow Memorial. Photo by Randall McGuire.

dinner with strikers and their families. At these and other events, stu-
dents presented their work on the archaeology of Ludlow and discussed
the significance of the massacre with working people.
The Colorado Coalfield War Project developed a relationship with the
Denver-area AFL-CIO Union Summer Program. This program brings
interns (often, though not exclusively, college-aged activists) together to
support the organizing efforts of workers in the Denver metropolitan
area. Union Summer groups made several visits to the Ludlow Memorial,
which allowed our field school students to share their emerging perspec-
tives on labor history with people their own age who had committed
their summer to labor activism. We believe that these social interactions
were some of the most important experiences the field school provided.
We also structured our field school to challenge the guild ideology that
permeates the training of archaeology students. An aspect of traditional
archaeological apprenticeship, the expectation that field school students
will work long hours on weekends and into the night, trains students to
self-exploit when they go to work for profit-making contract archaeology
firms. In our field schools, we always kept eight-hour days. Students were
occasionally asked to attend lectures in the evenings and to go on field
trips on weekends, but work stopped at the end of the eighth hour. Any
Ludlow 219

activities after that time were for the education or recreation of the stu-
dents. Also in our profession, many archaeologists have a macho (macha)
contempt for safety on excavation projects, commonly deriding safety
concerns and OSHA regulations. A 1997 survey of field technicians
showed that 33 percent had been injured on the job (Wilson 2001b). For
this reason, we made instruction on safe practices in excavation and
OSHA requirements part of our program, in addition to teaching the
craft of archaeology. Throughout the field school we pursued a theme of
teaching students their rights as workers. The union workers we collabo-
rated with readily reinforced this theme.
We have worked with Colorado public school teachers to prepare
school programs and educational packets, including a curriculum for
middle school students on the history of labor in Colorado, with the
1913–1914 strike as its central focus. During the summers of 1999 and
2000 at Trinidad State Junior College, the Colorado Endowment for the
Humanities used our project as the focus of training institutes for teach-
ers (figure 9). These institutes strove to educate the teachers on labor his-
tory and to develop classroom materials to use in the teaching of Colo-
rado labor history. We organized these institutes and did much of the
instruction in them. We have also prepared a “history trunk” that circu-
lates in the Denver, Colorado, School District. The trunk is a box filled
with artifacts, photos, and text material that teachers can bring to their
schools and use with their classes. gif[ure9]

Class and Praxis

The Archaeology of the Colorado Coalfield War Project continues to be
a very productive scholarly endeavor. Our six summers of field school
trained nearly one hundred students in the craft of archaeology and in
their rights as workers. Members of the Ludlow Collective have pre-
sented more than fifty papers in professional meetings and published
nineteen scholarly articles or book chapters. We have posted a Web atlas
of the strike. Students in the project have produced eight master’s theses
and three Ph.D. dissertations, with three additional Ph.D. dissertations in
process. A monograph describing our excavations is on file at the
Colorado Historical Society. We have an edited volume of interpretive
articles by members of the collective under review, and Dean Saitta
(2007) recently published a book summarizing the project.
The real measure of the project, however, does not lie in this scholarly
production or in how well the project has incorporated arcane aspects of
220 Ludlow

academic theory. The real measure of the project lies in our praxis with
our brothers and sisters in the labor movement. In order to initiate the
project, we had to overcome suspicions (Are you Republicans?) and mis-
conceptions (I thought archaeologists study dinosaurs) on the part of the
leaders and members of the UMWA. Once we passed these hurdles, how-
ever, collaboration with the union and its members has been relatively
easy. Occasionally class differences have been manifest (They got fucked),
but we have all shared a common goal of telling labor’s story and honor-
ing the sacrifices of Ludlow. We have brought archaeology to union halls,
and our efforts have been met with applause. Our students and we have
learned about the labor experience from union people, and they have
learned about archaeology and history from us.
We have made the Archaeology of the 1913–1914 Colorado Coalfield
War Project something that working people can relate to, both emotion-
ally and intellectually. It is one of the few archaeological projects in the
United States that has spoken to the experience and struggles of working-
class people, past and present, in a language they can understand, about
events that interest them and to which they feel directly connected. While
we feel that our work has won considerable interest and approval from
the people closest to the history of Ludlow, we have no illusions that we
have overcome all boundaries; we believe that a degree of continued
unease and distrust on their part has been healthy. We have also worked
to reach a broader audience that has never heard of the Ludlow
Massacre and has missed, or misunderstood, the history of U.S. labor
conflict and the legacy it represents. In so doing, we have engaged in
praxis—seeking to know the world, critique the world, and most impor-
tant to take action in the world.

Notes
1. I am a member of the United University Professionals. This union repre-
sents faculty in the State University of New York system. My union is affiliated
with the American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO.
2. There has been a persistent rumor that we concocted the project while
drinking martinis and soaking in Phil Duke’s hot tub in Durango, Colorado. This
is false. We were not drinking martinis. We were drinking gin and tonics.
3. The Ludlow Collective has included, among others, Philip Duke, Dean
Saitta, Mark Walker, Margaret Wood, Karin Larkin, Amie Gray, Bonnie J. Clark,
Paul Reckner, Michael Jacobson, Sarah Chicone, Summer Moore, Clare Horn,
Donna Bryant, Jason Lapham, Stacy Tchorzynski, and me.
4. Calculating the number of people who were killed or wounded in the
1913–1914 Colorado Coalfield War is very difficult. Primary and secondary
Ludlow 221

sources report different counts. This is especially true for the number of armed
strikers killed in the ten-day war. The count for the Ludlow Massacre itself is
consistently presented as nineteen Ludlow residents (McGovern and Guttridge
1972).
5. Dold’s panoramic print, which is frequently reproduced in histories of the
massacre, is made from three overlapping original prints.
6. Several things prevented us from locating more than a quarter of the tents.
Trees and the building in the monument area blocked our view of about a third
of the colony area. Parallax made it difficult to locate tents with any accuracy in
the eastern third of the camp area.
7. Irene Dotson died on November 13, 2003, in Colorado Springs, Colorado,
at the age of ninety-one.
Conclusion
The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer
consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary
mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation
in practical life, as constructor, organizer, “permanent
persuader” and not just a simple orator.
Antonio Gramsci (1971:10)

Over seventy-five years ago, from his cell in a Fascist jail, Antonio
Gramsci charged intellectuals to abandon esoteric pursuits and academic
cheerleading and to enter into the practical life of political struggle. Near
the dawn of the twenty-first century, few intellectual pursuits seem more
esoteric than archaeology. As Vine Deloria has commented: “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”
(1997:211). Yet, it is exactly this exoticism and seeming irrelevance to
practical life that give archaeology political power. Indeed, Deloria
(1997:215) challenges archaeologists and anthropologists not because he
had a grossly inflated notion of what we are paid but because he recog-
nized that we have a key role in the modern U.S. political debate over
who defines what an Indian is. In the arenas of struggle over economics,
ideologies, politics, and identities, archaeology has traditionally been
used to support the powers that be. It has been mobilized to create
mythic charters for bourgeois nationalism, sometimes with horrifying
consequences as in Nazi Germany and the Babri Mosque in Ajodhya,
India. At other places, such as the former Gestapo headquarters in Berlin
and at the Club Atlético in Buenos Aires, archaeologists have used their
craft to challenge the status quo. My purpose has been to consider how
archaeology might be a form of praxis to help create a more humane
world. How can archaeologists be more than simple orators?

222
Conclusion 223

In this book I have reflected on how to adapt the modern practice of

archaeology to those who do it, are interested in it, and are affected by it.
I have considered praxis in concrete contexts of class relations in archae-
ology, binational archaeology along the U.S. – Mexican border, and an
.

archaeology for the working class at the Ludlow Massacre site. In this
final chapter I will return to these cases in order to reflect on how our
concrete efforts inform a theory and method of praxis.
. . .
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a
weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in
the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the
worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the
architect raises his structure in imagination before he
erects it in reality.
Karl Marx (1906:198)

Human action is conscious action that must first exist in people’s minds
before it can be realized. People often engage in the practice of reproduc-
ing and maintaining their social world with a minimum of awareness,
imagination, or critical consciousness of what they are doing. Human
consciousness may also entail free, creative, and critical contemplation,
and through such thought people may engage in action that seeks to
change their social world. People can embrace concepts of possibility and
change. They may come to realize that they can subvert and transform
the world that they make in their everyday lives. Such theoretically
informed, goal-oriented, and potentially transformative action is praxis.
The whole of the practice of archaeology—that is, all of what archae-
ologists do—is necessary for praxis, but very few archaeologists engage in
praxis. The vast majority of archaeologists practice their craft to gain
knowledge of the world. Various archaeologists have sought to critique
the world and the place of archaeology in it. Fewer have fully entered into
the dialectic of praxis and built an archaeology of political action to trans-
form the world. The test of praxis is collective action. The critiques, argu-
ments, cases, knowledge, and theory of this book seek to build praxis, but
that praxis is realized only through collective action. In Sonora, México,
this realization comes with the establishment of a collaborative, bina-
tional archaeology that presents an alternative to the traditionally discon-
nected practices of Mexican and North American archaeologies. In south-
ern Colorado, our praxis has been realized through our contributions to
224 Conclusion

solidarity building in the United Mine Workers and in educating a general

public that workers won their rights with blood. The praxis of this book
will be made real if other archaeologists also mobilize their practice to
confront alienation, strive for emancipation, and transform archaeology.
My arguments for a praxis of archaeology do not seek to dissuade the
vast majority of my colleagues from their fascination with learning about
the past. Archaeologists cannot, however, step outside the dialectic of
praxis. The question, Is archaeology political? has only one answer: it is.
Thus, we need to ask, How is archaeology political? and How does our
practice of archaeology fit into a praxis of archaeology? I do argue that
all archaeologists need to reflect on the coherence, context, correspon-
dence, and consequences of the knowledge that we make. I hope this
book aids in that reflection. I have, however, written this book primarily
for those archaeologists who wish to fully enter into the dialectic that
will build archaeologies of political action to confront alienation and aid
emancipation.

Fast Capitalism
The pace of fast capitalism is dizzying. Like children on a merry-go-
round gone mad, we spin around until we succumb to vertigo and then
stagger about. We are disoriented, and we do not know how to do any-
thing except hang on and try to keep up with the pace. Fast capitalism
has seeped into every corner of our society, eroding socially derived
moral frameworks, values, and political programs. It replaces the
humane with the ethos of the market. It reduces all social relations to the
cold calculus of cost and benefit and weighs all things in terms of profit.
Praxis begins when we realize that we can do more than just whirl
around in fast capitalism (Agger 2004:131–168). We can make social
change, beginning with changes in people. We can step back from the
pace and critically examine how our lives fit into the larger processes of
fast capitalism. From such critique we, can engage in a praxis that chal-
lenges fast capitalism’s penetration of all areas of social and personal life,
both in the field of archaeology and in the world we practice it in.

Fast Capitalism and Archaeology

Fast capitalism attacks the values that drew us to archaeology and have
sustained us in our craft. It denigrates the life of the mind, because such
a life does not maximize gain. It transfigures heritage and education to
Conclusion 225

make profits from multinational cultural tourism. It leaves slight space

for a craft of archaeology that unifies heart, hand, and intellect, and it
exploits the camaraderie and shared purpose of fieldwork to boost speed
and efficiency. Fast capitalism grinds down the community of scholarship
that drew most of us to the craft of archaeology.
The hypercompetition of fast capitalism drives universities and cul-
tural resource management firms to replace the traditional craft rela-
tionships of archaeology with market principles of flexibility, competi-
tion, and profit. These principles seek to proletarianize the academy and
turn universities into diploma factories. Advocates of fast capitalism
emphasize rote learning, skill acquisition, and value-added accountability
while they attack liberal arts education, tenure, theory, philosophy, per-
sonal fulfillment, and humanism (Agger 2004:98; Siegel 2006). These
advocates have actively interfered with governmental funding agencies
and have challenged the privilege of the professoriat (Bloom 1987; Sykes
1988). Cultural resource legislation springs from values of heritage and
community, but these run afoul of the market ethos of fast capitalism,
because they interfere with the generation of profit. Thus, CRM faces an
explosive contradiction. It must adapt to demands for flexibility, hyper-
competition, and accelerated production to survive as a business in fast
capitalism. Yet, fast capitalism wears away the values that validate CRM
while fast capitalism’s advocates seek to eliminate the laws that created
CRM as an economic enterprise.

Fast Capitalism on the Border

A major transition facing the global politics of archaeology over the last
twenty years has been the shift from archaeology primarily serving
nationalist agendas to archaeology as a servant of heritage or cultural
tourism. In the 1980s, my Mexican collaborator Elisa Villalpando and I
began the Trincheras Tradition Project in northern Sonora, to create a
radical praxis of archaeology that challenges double colonialism on the
border. A confrontation with the nationalist agendas of archaeology in
both countries lay at the heart of our project.
Even as we strove to confront nationalist programs, the processes of
fast capitalism eroded and transformed the terrain that we stood on. At
the turn of the twenty-first century, economic crisis, NAFTA, and the tri-
umph of the conservative Partido Acción Nacional accelerated fast capi-
talism in México. The Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Historia
now finds itself under siege. National heritage and scholarly research do
226 Conclusion

not create profit, but cultural tourism does. PAN has sought to privatize
archaeological sites and transfer control of México’s heritage from the
INAH to state governments. In Chiapas, fast capitalism finds its opposite
in the Zapatista movement, which advances an indigenista program and
seeks to wrest control of archaeological sites from the Mexican state.
NAFTA has increased U.S. investment in and access to Mexican
resources, and México is for sale. This is especially the case in Sonora,
where the government strives to make the state a tourist playground for
the inhabitants of Phoenix and Tucson. In a few cases, local govern-
ments and private individuals are seeking to exploit sites such as Cerro de
Trincheras as tourist destinations. Construction of the tourist bubble
buffering visitors from the social and economic realities of Sonora is
destroying archaeological sites.
In this changing terrain, we have to rethink what a binational eman-
cipatory praxis of archaeology might look like in México. Mexican law,
like that of the United States, protects archaeological sites and requires
mitigation of economic impacts on those sites. Erratic efforts to comply
with these laws have led to more contract archaeology being done in
Sonora. Presently, the INAH manages these efforts, and individual
archaeologists move back and forth from grant-funded projects to con-
tract jobs. The problem for the future will be how to maintain this inte-
gration and also how to develop a more consistent, regularized compli-
ance with preservation laws. Heritage tourism in Sonora has traditionally
been minimal, focusing on Spanish missions, but it is increasing and
incorporating more archaeological sites, especially highly visible ones,
such as Cerro de Trincheras. At the same time, multinational corpora-
tions are developing beachfront destinations that destroy less visible her-
itage sites. The Centro de INAH is charged with mitigating the impacts
of this beachfront development on heritage sites. In general, the Centro
de INAH works with communities to create tourism at heritage sites
that will be educational and benefit the local people. The challenge for
foreign researchers like myself is how to make our work complementary
and supportive of these efforts.

Fast Capitalism and Organized Labor

Workers in the United States are increasingly losing control over their
work and family lives because of the effects of fast capitalism. The hyper-
competitiveness of fast capitalism compels employers to drive down
wages and demand total commitment from their workers. This has
Conclusion 227

meant a declining quality of life for many working families as a result of

reduced real wages, increased levels of stress, less time spent with friends
and families, and an overall dissatisfaction with their lives. Fast capital-
ism encourages union busting, because the struggle of unions to uphold
respect, a living wage, the eight-hour day, and safe working conditions
for working families slows capitalism. On October 3, 1997, United
Steelworkers Locals 2102 and 3267 walked out on strike from Oregon
Steel’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company steel mill in Pueblo, Colorado.
They left the mill to contest forced overtime, which was stealing their
control over their family lives and blurring the line between work and
home. Oregon Steel welcomed a prolonged strike as a way to break the
union. That same year, the Archaeology of the 1913–1914 Colorado
Coalfield War Project, in collaboration with the United Mine Workers of
America, launched full-scale excavations at the sites of the 1913–1914
strike by coal miners against Colorado Fuel and Iron. The steelworkers
embraced the labor conflict of eighty years earlier as a symbol of their
contemporary strike and made our project part of their struggle.
Unionized labor remembers the history of Ludlow and mobilized this
remembrance in the steelworkers’ strike. Through our research, archae-
ology became part of this memory. The project’s message is simple: work-
ing families shed blood to win labor’s contemporary rights to a safe
workplace, benefits, reasonable wages, a forty-hour week, and dignity.
Capitalists did not freely give these rights; rather, working people, such as
those who died at Ludlow, bought them with their lives. We collaborated
with the UMWA and the striking steelworkers to develop our education
campaign. Our goal was to help them build solidarity among working
families and to educate a broader public in support of labor’s struggle.
The realization of this praxis is ongoing, and the effectiveness of our
efforts is hard to measure. Following Ollman (2003:20), however, we
have decided which side we are on in the class struggle of fast capitalism
and have joined the fray.

Engaging Praxis
The idea of praxis begins with theory and the realization of praxis in
concrete experience and struggle should prompt the reconsideration and
revision of that theory. Praxis can be built in archaeology in multiple
ways. Processualists, postmodernists, and feminists have mixed up praxis
in various hues and shades. The primary color of this book has been red,
a relational, dialectical Marxism. This shade of red is compatible and
228 Conclusion

complementary with many other hues. Where appropriate, I have drawn

on compatible and complementary theory in the intersectionalities of
dialectical Marxist, feminist, and indigenous theories to mix the most
pleasing shade of red.
Not all theoretical approaches in contemporary archaeology help us
build praxis. Agency has become a common buzzword. Archaeological
discussions of agency have tended to focus on the actions of individuals
as a remedy to a materialistic determinism (Hodder 1982; Meskell 1999;
Dobres and Robb 2000). This emphasis on agency is well founded,
because, in the absence of agency, praxis is impossible. At the same time,
the reduction of agency to the actions of individuals is problematic.
Individuals do not just live in society; they must make society to live. A
dialectical view assumes that neither society nor the individual exists as
an essential or autonomous “thing,” but rather that the terms society and
individual summarize complex webs of social relations that bring the two
into being. Therefore, a focus on collective agency recognizes the impor-
tance of human action and the embeddedness of that action in social
relationships.
Transformative social action occurs when people struggle commu-
nally to advance their common interests. A shared consciousness of
group identity and interest makes collective agency possible. This con-
sciousness may be based in class, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, or
some combination thereof. A dialectical approach to collective agency
defines the study of the reproduction and production of everyday life as
the focal point of our research. The ability of human communities to
engage in collective agency depends, in part, on their members’ subjective
evaluations of their identities and interests (that is, on consciousness) and
on the historical processes and relations they enter into with other groups
and communities. Individuals realize this social consciousness through
the experience of everyday life. The ability of a social community to
form social consciousness is not predetermined or given. Lived experi-
ence, cooperation, dialogue, and struggle produce consciousness.
Struggle springs from the inevitability that the praxis of one group will be
opposed by the praxis of other groups. For this reason, both conscious-
ness raising and praxis often fail, generally resulting in unforeseen
consequences.
For example, in the Colorado Coalfield War of 1913–1914, miners
and their families created the class consciousness necessary for the soli-
darity of a strike. The shared experiences of men, women, and children
in the workplace and in the home raised this consciousness. In the end,
Conclusion 229

their collective agency failed when they lost the strike. However, the mas-
sacre of women and children stirred more Americans to support pro-
gressive causes that ultimately led to more rights, better benefits, and dig-
nity for working people.
Many of the archaeologists who advocate individual agency also argue
for a multivocal archaeology that requires archaeologists to surrender
their authority as scholars and any claims of privileged knowledge. My
colleagues and I have not done that. In México and at Ludlow we have
surrendered the authority to unilaterally define research questions, but
we have strived to use our craft as a tool to advance community interests.
In México, the craft of archaeology has been the focus point of collabo-
ration between Mexican and U.S. archaeologists. At Ludlow, we have
used our craft to make the massacre news again, to connect modern ob-
servers to the events through artifacts and features, to understand the
class-, gender-, and ethnic-based lived experience from which the strikers
built consciousness, and to develop education programs.
A dialectical epistemology that stresses critique and knowledge has
been our alternative to a relativistic multivocality. As Ollman comments,
“What we understand about the world is determined by what the world
is, who we are, and how we conduct our study” (2003:12). Ollman’s
observation accepts that a real past exists, but he also acknowledges that
we cannot know that past apart from its making of the present. Thus,
knowledge is a complex product of the observations that we can make of
the archaeological record and the social context that we make them in. A
dialectical epistemology seeks to weigh equally the subjectivities of
knowing and the realities of the world but does not reduce knowledge to
either. This is an intentionally uneasy epistemology. It rejects the security
of true knowledge as well as the complacency of subjectivity. It is this dis-
comfort and tension that provide the means to avoid the dangers of
either extreme. In a dialectical approach, the evaluation of knowledge
involves a four-part dialectic among the four Cs: coherence, correspon-
dence, context, and consequences.
Feminist, indigenous, post-processual, and Marxist archaeologists
have demonstrated that all knowledge is ultimately political. Empirical
observations become significant, turn into knowledge, only by means of
social discourses about the world. These discourses occur in the present
and entail social and political interests. Accepting that knowledge is
social and political, however, does not mean that empirical observations
can not correspond or fail to correspond with reality (Eagleton
2002:103–109). Saying that the U.S. Declaration of Independence was
230 Conclusion

signed on July 4, 1776, entails, among other things, a Western notion of

time, the use of the Gregorian calendar, and prejudgments about the
importance of this event and its date. The observation necessitates a cul-
turally constructed awareness of how to make sense of the world, but it
does correspond with reality, whereas the observation that the
Declaration of Independence was signed December 23, 1951, does not.
Archaeologists need to retain some authority over the production of
knowledge in order to assess correspondence. We undergo special train-
ing to master the perspectives and skills of our craft. People must be edu-
cated to think archaeologically, to acquire the background knowledge
needed for archaeological research, and to learn the technical skills to do
archaeology. Archaeologists make interpretations at all levels, from the
first transect of a survey to the choice of illustrations for the final report
(Hodder 1999). Realizing that the craft of archaeology entails interpre-
tation does not, however, mean that it is simply subjective or that just
anyone can do it.
Archaeologists need to retain the authority of our craft when the inter-
ests of communities spring from conceptions of the world that lack cor-
respondence to our empirical observations or conflict with our existing
knowledge. Cultural anthropologists have challenged our discipline to
“speak truth to power.” But what should scholars do when fictions sup-
port the subordinate and challenge the dominant? If we wield politically
convenient falsehoods to support the cause, we lose any authority in the
struggle. We cannot “speak truth” with deceit (Conklin 2003). Archae-
ological knowledge claims need to have some independence from the
interests of social groups. This independence springs from our craft and
is realized within the community of archaeologists.
The knowledge claims of archaeologists may come into conflict with
the claims of the communities we work with. We encountered such con-
flicting claims during our work on the Colorado Coalfield War in the
unfounded story that union members told of the National Guardsman
ripping the fetus from its mother’s womb with a bayonet. The story
clearly demonized the guardsmen, and it spoke to the extent of animos-
ity between the Guard and the strikers. Such contradictions can create
beneficial tensions that force archaeologists and social groups to critically
examine our dialogue. This critique may modify the perceptions and
interests of the archeologists or the community or both, or it may reveal
previously unrealized social relations and ideologies to any of them. In
Colorado, our disbelief about the bayoneted fetus served to humanize the
mine guards and state militia, which led archaeologists and union men
Conclusion 231

and women to discuss why some working people would betray class sol-
idarity and others would not. These discussions gained contemporary
significance when they moved from individuals now dead to the scabs
that crossed the steelworkers’ picket lines at the Pueblo steel mill.
Archaeologists should practice their craft in the service of multiple
communities. The craft of archaeology, however, lives in the community
of archaeologists, and in order to develop, critique, modify, and enhance
that craft, archaeologists must always interact within the community of
archaeology. The community of archaeologists is who reviews, validates,
and critiques the craft of archaeology and, through this critical process,
lends authority to our craft. The internal dialogue of archaeology is
indispensable, but it is not all that the discipline should engage in.
Knowledge entails ideology, and for this reason archaeology has a polit-
ical role in society, and it has the potential be used as a tool of oppres-
sion. The knowledge that we create also serves the social and political
interests of other communities, and some of us should engage in praxis
with those communities.
For archaeologists to work effectively with other communities, espe-
cially those outside the traditional middle class, we need to surrender
some of our privilege. This privilege should not be the privilege and the
authority that come from our craft. Rather, it should be the program-
matic privilege to determine the questions, substance, and aspects of the
archaeological record that we will study. In a praxis of archaeology, these
factors should flow from a dialogue with the communities with whom
we work. We can do research that is relevant to the interests of those
communities if we collaborate with them in defining the research objec-
tives, questions, and methods of our studies. By continuing the process of
negotiation throughout the research process, we have the chance to
engage in a praxis that will transform archaeology, communities, and
knowledge.

Working with Communities

An emancipatory praxis can exist only within real contexts of social rela-
tions, struggles, interests, institutions, and agents. Praxis has no impor-
tance or value in the abstract; it becomes significant only in its applica-
tion. Thus, one of the most important questions of theory and method
should be, How do we work with communities?
When archaeologists enter an area to do research, they step into a his-
torically created social context. Taking that step inserts archaeologists
232 Conclusion

into that context and into the social relationships that compose it.
Specific historical experiences, cultures, interests, relations to other com-
munities, and ideologies define each community. Archaeologists enter
this social context as fully constituted social beings, with their own iden-
tities based on class, race, ethnicity, gender, profession, sexuality, and
nationality. Communities will initially evaluate and interact with archae-
ologists on the basis of their perceptions of those identities, their histori-
cal experience with the social groups that the archaeologists represent,
and their evaluation of the power relationships between themselves and
the archaeologists. Archaeologists cannot assume that we will be judged
by our intentions or by our personalities. Communities will stereotype
archaeology and individual archaeologists. A historical understanding of
social contexts provides archaeologists with the opportunity to counter
stereotypes and to interact more effectively with the social groups
affected by our research.
A historical understanding helps archaeologists structure their inter-
action with communities. With such understandings we can decide which
communities we should oppose, educate, consult, collaborate with, or do
any combination of these things. Voices can use the past to advance
interests that archaeologists should oppose and resist. We have already
considered examples of such malicious voices—the Nazi archaeology in
Europe (Arnold 1990) and the Hindu nationalist archaeology at the
Babri Mosque in Ajodhya, India (Romey 2004). Archaeologists who
embrace an ethic of human emancipation must contest voices like these.
The question of how to act is more difficult to answer when relations
within subordinate communities alienate certain of their people from the
others. Opposing the inequalities within the communities we work with
could alienate their members or put the scholar in a paternalistic stance
in relation to them or both. Here the archaeologist must weigh what the
cost of larger emancipatory goals will be in terms of alienation within the
community. If emancipation for the community means greater alienation
for some subset of its members, then we need to question the larger
effort.
As an indigenous archaeology has shown us, the key to praxis lies in
collaboration. Collaboration occurs when individuals or social groups
work together with integrated goals, interests, and practices. The dia-
logue of collaboration should go beyond an instrumentalist concern with
resolving a conflict or respecting rights and responsibilities; it should be
transformative of the parties involved. Each social group contributes dif-
ferent resources, skills, knowledge, authority, and interests to a collabo-
Conclusion 233

rative effort. Collaboration entails combining these distinctive qualities

to establish shared goals and practices. Effective collaboration usually
starts with the definition of an objective or problem, so that all involved
can have a say in this definition. In an emancipatory praxis, collabora-
tion gives subordinate groups a greater voice in the practice of dominant
groups. With true collaboration and the trust that comes with it, scholars
can also engage a community with discussions of how to transform inter-
nal inequalities. As praxis, collaboration unifies knowledge, critique, and
action to transform archaeologists’ practice and the communities we
work with.
The successes and failures in the Trincheras Tradition Project and the
Archaeology of the 1913–1914 Colorado Coalfield War Project illus-
trate the intricacies of working with real communities. In each, archaeol-
ogists have stepped into historically created social contexts of which we
have become a part. Each community has had its own historical experi-
ence, culture, interests, relations to other communities, and ideologies.
These relationships have stereotyped and linked the participating com-
munities and archaeologists in different ways. Each of these projects has
involved archaeologists in education, consultation, and collaboration. In
both cases, the most successful praxis has come from collaboration as
opposed to education or consultation.
The Sonora project has presented a much more complex field of social
relations and histories than the Colorado project. In Sonora, the archae-
ologists have engaged four communities divided by race, nationality,
class, and language. In Colorado, class relations have separated working
families and middle-class archaeologists. The histories of relationships
between the communities have also varied. In Sonora, we entered into
preexisting imperialistic relationships between Mexican and North
American archaeologists. We brought with us a colonial history of con-
flict between archaeology and indigenous peoples, specifically the
Tohono O’odham. These two parameters have created the bind of dou-
ble colonialism on the border. At Ludlow, a class division has existed, but
the relationship between archaeology and working families has been a
new and unique one. As evident from the comment “they got fucked,”
different class perceptions of knowledge and action have distanced
archaeologists and union members. We have had to overcome the popu-
lar stereotype of archaeologists as Indiana Jones and misunderstandings
such as the idea that archaeologists study dinosaurs. We have not, how-
ever, had to transcend a history of conflict and bad feelings between the
archaeological community and unionized workers in southern Colorado.
234 Conclusion

In both cases, praxis has followed from establishing linkages between

the communities. Mexican and U.S. archaeologists share the craft of
archaeology. We also share basic concepts about history and how to
know the world that are different from those held by the Tohono
O’odham. The project has revealed differences in the understanding that
each group has of the craft of archaeology, but far more is shared than
dissimilar. At Ludlow, the archaeologists from Binghamton University
(both myself and the graduate students) have all been members of AFL-
CIO affiliated unions. And the archaeologists from the University of
Denver and Fort Lewis College have shared political positions and goals
with the unionized workers of southern Colorado. We could honestly
answer the pointed question, “Are you Republicans?” in the negative. In
the halls of academia, in the steel mills, in the coal mines, in the corridors
of hospitals, and working on county roads, we can all feel fast capitalism
weathering away the control that we have over our work and family
lives. In México and Colorado, these linkages and shared interests have
become the basis for collaborative efforts between Mexican and U.S.
archaeologists and between archaeologists and union families. In Sonora,
we have not achieved collaboration with the Tohono O’odham, only
consultation. Changes in the political position of Mexican archaeology
and the challenges of fast capitalism to Mexican interests have prevented
us from fulfilling the agreements we made with the Tohono O’odham.

Final Thoughts
It is obvious; it is painfully obvious that you are not
going to stop racism and fascism by writing songs about
it. I am surprised people ask me, still ask me that ques-
tion: “Do you think that you are going to stop these
things by writing songs about it?” Of course you are
not going to stop it, but that doesn’t stop you from
trying now, does it?
Billy Bragg (1995)

The observation of English protest singer Billy Bragg about the efficacy
of song writing for an emancipatory praxis could just as easily be applied
to archaeology. It should also be obvious, painfully obvious, that doing
archaeology will not stop racism and fascism, nor will it alone slow the
wheels of fast capitalism. But this should not stop archaeologists from
trying. I have argued that the power of archaeology to engage in a polit-
Conclusion 235

ical praxis lies in its apparent irrelevance to political life and action. The
political consequences of archaeology do not usually have direct costs for
people’s lives or for political issues. Inflation does not increase if we
overestimate the volume of obsidian trade in the Neolithic of the Levant,
and we cannot bring down a British government by exposing social
inequalities in the Wessex culture. But it is archaeology’s seeming irrele-
vance and uselessness as a political tool that have made it an effective
instrument of ideology.
Political struggles over the past are first and foremost ideological,
because their political nature is usually hidden or obscured. Archaeology
produces symbols, knowledge, and heritage, which give rise to awareness
and consciousness of group identity and are invoked to inspire and jus-
tify collective agency. Groups wage powerful struggles over what is
remembered and what is forgotten about the past (Van Dyke and Alcock
2003). Archaeologists and the knowledge that we produce are part of
those struggles, whether we like it or not. What we choose to remember,
what we choose to study, what questions we ask, and how we frame the
answers all have political importance for identity, heritage, social agency,
and fast capitalism. What I have argued here is that we should make
these decisions in a conscious praxis of archaeology.
In November 1938, Francisco Franco’s Fascist army broke the back of
the Spanish Republic at the battle of the Ebro River, and Barcelona fell
in February 1939. Madrid would fall in March of the same year.
Throughout the newly conquered areas, Fascist political officers hunted
down officials of the Republican government, officers in the Republican
army, intellectuals, teachers, and others for execution.
When the Fascists came to the Catalán town of Oleso de Monserrat,
they rounded up ten men and two women and took them to a cemetery
for execution. The army unit sent to perform the deed apparently had lit-
tle stomach left for killing now that the war was over. The officer in
charge of the execution squad stood the men and women up against the
wall and instructed them to fall to the ground when the squad fired over
their heads. The Fascist political officer on the scene, however, had no
such qualms; she walked over to the prostrate men and women, drew her
pistol, and shot each of them in the head. Her coup de grâce was badly
aimed at one man, and the bullet passed through his cheeks. Wounded
and bleeding, he stumbled back to his home in Oleso, where his family
took him in and hid him. Three hours later the Fascists followed the trail
of blood to his house. When they found him, they arrested two people
who had hidden him. They took the wounded man and the two others to
236 Conclusion

the cemetery at Oleso, shot them to death against the back wall, and
buried them there.
In the fall of 2004, archaeologists from the Universitat Autònoma de
Barcelona and bio-archaeologists from Binghamton University laid out
excavations in the cemetery at Oleso (Gassiot 2005). The Associació per
la Recuperació de la Memòria Històrica de Catalunya (the Catalán
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come and locate the remains of the people shot to death in February
1939. After several weeks of work, they had not located any of the indi-
viduals (Gassiot et al. 2005). As I finish this book, they are planning a
second field season to recover the memory of the victims of Spanish fas-
cism in Oleso and to continue a praxis of archaeology.
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Index

9/11, 121–22 202; to change fast capitalism, 134,

2000 U.S. presidential election, 186n7 138, 224; collective, 39, 42–46, 62, 87,
90, 138, 192, 193–94, 203–4, 212,
Aboriginal Australians, 78–79, 80 223, 228–29, 235
academy, the, 9, 48; apprenticeship in, Agger, Ben, 21, 28, 84–85, 134
116, 119–22, 126, 133, 134, 135; Ajo (Arizona), 165
archaeology in, 99–100, 101, 109–11, Ajodhya, India, 26, 144, 222, 232
115, 120, 121, 122, 126, 137; bill of Ak Chin Indian Community, 181, 183
rights, 135–36; and bourgeois class, Akimel O’odham. See Tohono O’odham
105, 116; community colleges, 118; (Papago): Akimel O’odham (Pima)
and cultural resource management, alienation, 4–5, 14, 22, 32, 54, 73, 87–
115–16, 122–23, 124–25, 126, 127, 88, 92–93, 128, 203, 210, 216, 232;
137; deskilling, 135; fast capitalism’s and archaeology, 6, 7, 42, 109, 224.
impacts on, 9, 99–100, 111, 112, 115– See also emancipation, human
22, 135, 136, 225; hierarchy of, 118, Allende, Salvadore, 172
122; Indian people and, 79, 116; Latin Allen Mine, 214
American autonomous universities, 66; Altar (Sonora), 170. See also Río Altar
and middle class, 101, 103, 104; Span- alternative archaeologies, 3, 6, 52; praxis
ish, 66, 67; star system in, 114, 118, in, 63–64
122; and women, 76, 77, 121 Althusser, Louis, 71, 72
Active Museum of Fascism and Alverez, Ana María, 172, 173
Resistance, 34 amateur archaeologists, 100, 108
adjunct faculty. See workers, adjunct American Anthropological Association, 76
faculty American Association of University Pro-
AFL-CIO, 99, 100, 115, 129, 133, 188, fessors, 136
192, 220n1, 234; Union Summer American Bar Association, 138
Program, 218 American Cultural Resource Association
Africa, 17, 29, 77 (ACRA), 100, 126, 127, 129–31
African Americans, 24, 72, 73, 111, 114, American Egg Board, 130
116, 146, 194, 196, 198 American Federation of Teachers, 220n1
Africans, 66, 152, 186n3 American Indian Movement, 78, 154–55
age, 47, 75, 87 American Medical Association, 138
age grades, 8 American Museum of Natural History
agency, 2–4, 38–39, 43, 44, 62, 63, 84, (New York), 154

281
282 Index

American Revoluton, 26, 71 Babri Mosque (India), 26–27, 144, 222,

Ancient Druid Order, 15 232
Andalusia (Spain), 1–2 Babur (Mogul emperor), 27
Anglo. See Euro-Americans Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, 197, 198,
Anglo-American archaeology, 52, 63, 64. 199
See also United States archaeology Bangalore (India), 113
Annapolis (Maryland) archaeology proj- Bangladesh, 27
ect, 71–73, 96 Baram, Uzi, 28
antebellum South, 40 Barcelona (Catalunya), 23–24, 26, 66,
Anthropological Study Center of Sonoma 67, 235
State University (California), 99 Battle of the Bean Field, 15
anthropology, four-field, 154 Bejarano, Eugenio, 179fig
Anthropology Newsletter, 76 Belgium, 215
Antiquities Act of 1906, 154 Belize, 31, 32–33
Antone, Cecil, 155 Bell, Gertrude, 14
Apache Indians, 165 Bender, Barbara, 62–63
apolitical archaeology, xii, 10–11, 16– Be Pukte Community Center, 33
22, 36, 56, 64 Berlin (Germany), 33, 34, 222
Arabs, 25 Berlin Wall, 34, 44
Archaeological Papers of the American Bernal, Ignacio, 158
Anthropological Association, 76 Bernbeck, Reinhard, 20, 27–28
archaeological record, 108, 110 Berwind (Colorado), 10, 198; archaeol-
Archaeological Survey of India, 27 ogy at, 204, 207–9map, 195
Archaeology (magazine), 106 bias. See political bias
Argentina, 10, 33, 34–35, 47, 66, 159; Binghamton University, 98, 99, 119, 148,
Dirty War, 35, 36 168, 170, 173, 174, 175, 176, 189,
Arguelles, José, 13 234, 236
Arikara Indians, 88 blackballing, 130
Arizona, 9, 50n2, 57, 106, 186n11; black lung disease, 196
Department of Transportation, 155; Black Pig’s Dyke, 25, 26
and Trincheras Tradition Project, 141, Boas, Franz, 157
148, 155–56, 157, 165, 167, 168, 172, Bolivia, 58
177, 180, 181, 182 Bolshevism, 53
Arizona State Museum, 155, 181 Bonampak (México), 185
Arizona State University, 174 border, international, xi, 9–10, 46, 142,
Armagh (Ireland), 25 147–48, 164; crossing, 147, 164, 166–
Armenians, 26 67; effect on archaeology, 167, 177,
arqueología social, 52, 172, 173; history 185, 223; Norteños and, 177–80;
of, 159–60; praxis in, 64–68 power on, 147–48; on Tohono
Ashmore, Wendy, 108 O’odham Nation, 165–67, 180–86.
Asia, 17, 151 See also colonialism: double
Asian Americans, 111, 116 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 26, 33, 36
Associació per la Recuperació de la Boston (Massachusetts), 113, 136
Memòria Històrica de Catalunya, bourgeoisie. See class: bourgeoisie
236 Bowers, Stephanie, 171fig
Asturias (Spain), 1 Bragg, Billy, 234
Athenian Acropolis, 26 Braniff, Beatriz, 172, 173
Atil (Sonora), 164, 170, 178 Brazil, 10
audience for archaeology, 106–7, 144. British Bronze Age, 15
See also communities British Heritage, 15
Australia, 9, 30, 77, 78–79, 80, 94; High British High Commission in Iraq, 14
Court of, 78 Brown, Ben, 173
Australian Archaeological Association, 78 Brumfiel, Elizabeth, 75
Austria-Hungary, 194 Bryant, Donna, 220n3
Aztecs, 75, 151; Templo Mayor, 159 Buenos Aires (Argentina), 34–35, 63, 222
Bulgaria, 217
Babel (Iñárritu), 30 Bureau of American Ethnology, 153
Index 283

burrean, 178 90, 191–92, 193–94, 196, 222;

Button, Alex, 171fig bureaucratic, 54; consciousness, 38, 45,
47, 189, 192–94, 202–3, 204, 208,
Caborca (Sonora), 167, 183 210, 217, 218, 228–29; defined, 97n,
California, 164, 178, 179 102; denial of, 99, 107, 125, 210, 217;
California State Employees Association, 99 middle, 9, 10, 72, 87, 88, 93, 96, 97,
camaraderie, 6 97n1, 98, 100–101, 101–7, 108, 109,
Cambridge University, 16, 55 110–11, 112, 114, 115, 116–19, 129,
Camelot Project, 151 132, 133, 137–38, 145, 147, 148,
Canada, 10, 30, 138, 149, 160, 186n1, 189–90, 192–93, 209, 210, 213, 217,
201. See also North America 220, 231, 233; mobility, 103, 109, 213,
Canadian archaeologists, 149, 186n2 214; reproduction of class position,
Cancún (México), 12 100–101, 102–4, 105, 110, 111, 116–
cannibalism, 92 19; struggle, xii, 10, 98, 99–100, 103–
capitalism. See fast capitalism 4, 133–39, 189, 190, 197–201, 202,
Caracas (Venezuela), 65 210, 211, 212, 217; war, 10, 189, 194,
Cárdenas, Lázaro, 158, 161 200, 210, 227; working, 100, 102, 103,
Caribbean, 5 106, 107–9, 110, 112, 114–15, 116,
Caso, Alfonso, 158 117, 118, 124, 133, 137, 147, 189–90,
Castañada, Quetzil, 12, 13 192–203, 208, 210, 213, 217, 233–
Catalán archaeology, 66–68 34. See also workers
Çatalhöyük archaeological site (Turkey), Clinton, William, 114
61–62, 92–93 Club Atlético, 34–35, 36, 47, 63, 222
Catalunya (Spain), 1, 23–24, 235–36 coal, 30, 194; managers, 45, 192, 208;
cattle, 43–44 miners, 45, 188, 191, 192–93, 194–
Celts, 28 201, 203–4, 208–10, 211–12, 214–
cemeteries, 16, 26 16, 215fig, 218fig, 220, 228–29, 230–
Central America, 167 31, 233–34
Centro Sonora de INAH, 148, 167, 168, coherence. See four Cs: coherence
173–74, 176, 182, 184, 226 collaboration, xii, 7–8, 10, 36, 53; on
Cerro de Trincheras, 168–71, 169map, Colorado Coalfield War Project, 192,
170fig, 177, 178–79, 179fig, 180, 226; 193, 210–20, 227, 233–34; with
repatriation at, 181, 184–85 communities, 80–81, 87, 142, 146,
cerros de trincheras, 168, 171, 187n12 156, 157, 232–33; defined, 146; on
change. See dialectic Trincheras Tradition Project, 172–77,
Charter of University Workers’ Rights, 185–86, 223, 225–26, 229, 233–34
136 collective agency or action. See agency:
Chiapas (México), 185, 226 collective
Chicago Tribune, 211 colonial archaeology, 69, 80, 94, 140,
Chicanos, 192–93, 194, 196, 198, 214 152, 189, 233. See also colonialism
Chichén Itzá, 12–13, 15, 30, 31 colonialism, xii, 5, 7, 9, 59, 64, 77–78,
Chicone, Sarah, 208, 209, 220n3 80, 140, 148–49, 162; double, xi, 140,
Chihuahua (México), 168, 173, 186n11 141, 148–49, 171, 180, 185, 190–91,
Childe, V. Gordon, 52, 53–55, 64–65, 233
68, 70. See also knowledge: true Colonial Williamsburg, 201
Chile, 66, 159, 172 Colorado, xi–xii, 10, 18, 84, 87, 186,
CIA, 151 186n11, 195map, 223–24, 226–27,
Civil War (U.S.), 186n4 228–29, 230–31; coalfields, 45, 188–
Clandestine Center of Detention and Tor- 221, 227, 233–34; Department of
ture. See Club Atlético Transportation, 210; Endowment for
Clark, Bonnie, 220n3 the Humanities, 193, 219; Historical
class, 5, 7, 36, 37, 44, 49, 54–55, 65, 75, Society, 189, 193, 214; National
76, 87, 88, 91, 143, 228, 229; analyses, Guard, 10, 188–89, 198–201, 209,
47; and archaeology, xi, 9, 10, 46, 98– 214–16, 230–31
139, 145, 217–18, 223; bourgeoisie, Colorado Coalfield War of 1913–1914,
36, 69, 92–93, 96, 97n1, 98, 102–3, xi–xii, 10, 46, 109, 133–34, 191,
104–6, 110, 112, 113–14, 116, 189– 194–202, 228–29; archaeology of, xi,
284 Index

Colorado Coalfield War (continued) correspondence. See four Cs:

10, 99, 188–90, 191–94, 202–21, correspondence
223–24, 226–27, 228–29, 230–31 Costa, Cadilano, 200, 213, 215
Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 194, Costa, Charles, 200
197, 204, 207, 212, 227 cotton, 5
Colorado Springs (Colorado), 221n7 cougar, 41, 42
Colorado State University, 78, 155 country and western music, 141
Columbia University, 133, 157 craft of archaeology, xii, 61, 81, 86, 88,
Committee on Gender Issues of the SHA, 91, 95, 100, 129, 162, 189–90, 191–
76 92, 202, 223, 234; authority of, xii,
Committee on the Status of Women of the 85–86, 89, 90, 94–96, 145, 154, 229,
SAA, 76 230–31; defined, 7–8; in fast capital-
commodified culture, 22, 26–33, 35, ism, 6, 9, 99–100, 101, 112, 115–32,
112. See also tourism: cultural and 133–34, 137, 138, 224–25; guild
heritage ideology, 46, 99, 100–101, 109–11,
commons, English, 43–44 122–23, 124–25, 126, 127, 133, 134,
communism, 3, 18–19, 54 135–36, 218–19
communities, xii, 16, 47, 48, 189 – 90; creolization, 66
archaeological, 9 – 10, 89, 95, 96 – 97, critical archaeology. See Marxist archae-
109 – 11, 144, 147 – 48, 190, 193, ology: critical archaeology
230 – 31; defined, 87 – 90; descendant, critical theories, 3, 4–5, 6, 22. See also
10, 88, 146, 212, 214 – 17; fast capi- Marxism: critical theory
talism’s impact on, 113; historical critique, 3, 18, 19, 21, 37, 38–39, 42, 45,
processes of, 8 – 9; indigenous, 7, 9 – 48–49, 51–53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 61,
10, 12 – 13, 33, 48, 53, 69, 80 – 81, 88, 63, 65, 68, 69, 70, 75, 76, 77, 83, 97,
89, 95 – 96, 146, 180 – 86, 190 – 91; 134, 147–48, 223, 230; self-, 9, 13–
inequalities within, 8 – 9, 45, 87 – 88, 14, 16, 20–21, 39, 47, 67. See also
89, 94, 232; interests, 38, 45 – 46, 48, praxis
69, 87, 88, 91 – 97; and praxis, 7 – 8, Croats, 26
86 – 97, 228 – 29; strategies for inter- Crow Creek Massacre Project, 88
acting with, 7 – 8, 45, 67, 69, 73, 88 – Cruz, Robert, 155
97, 142 – 48, 190 – 94, 230 – 34; work- cult archaeology, 109
ing class, 36, 69, 89, 109, 117, 189 – cultural evolution, 18–19, 55, 64, 66, 70,
90, 192, 193 – 94, 210 – 20, 223. See 74–75, 92, 107
also specific communities cultural resource management (CRM), 9,
community archaeology, 36, 80 77, 98, 99, 100, 110, 218–19; bill of
company store, 196, 197 rights for field technicians, 135–36;
complicity, 19, 20 deskilling in, 128–29, 130–32; and
Conkey, Margaret, 74 fast capitalism, 111, 112–13, 115,
consciousness, 43, 65, 82; false, 51, 54, 122–32, 133, 225; living wage, 136–
69–70, 72; raising, 45, 46, 70, 71, 228; 37; managers, 100, 115, 125, 128, 132;
shared, 38, 42–43, 44–46, 47, 90, project directors, 99, 101, 115, 124,
189, 192–94, 202–3, 204, 208, 210, 134–35
217, 218, 228, 235 culture history, 52, 64, 66, 173
consequences. See four Cs: consequences culture industry, 21–22, 28–33, 36
consultation, 8, 80, 191; with communi-
ties, 143, 145–46, 156; defined, 145; Daimler-Benz, 34
on Trincheras Tradition Project, 172, Davis, Edwin H., 105
180–86, 233–34 day-to-day life. See lived experience
Contact Lens Manufacturers Association, de Boer, Trent, 126
130 deer, 41, 42
container ships, 6, 113 Deetz, James, 205
context. See four Cs: context Deloria, Vine, 222
contract archaeology. See cultural Denmark, 104
resource management (CRM) Denver (Colorado), 30, 192, 210, 218;
contract firms, 9 public schools, 219
Copán (Honduras), 31 Denver Public Library, 214
Index 285

Denver University, 189, 234 156, 185–86, 192–93, 220, 224, 226,
desaparecidos, 35 232, 233. See also praxis: emancipatory
descendant communities. See communi- emotional and psychological needs. See
ties: descendant individual, the: emotional and psycho-
descendants, 10, 13, 31, 32, 36; of logical needs
Ludlow massacre, 211, 212–14, 216 empirical observations. See knowledge:
Desemboque (Sonora), 168 observations in
dialectic, 2–3, 37, 39–43, 224; enclosure, 44
contingency, 46; contradictions, 40, 42; Engels, Friedrich, 1, 41
and knowledge, 48, 81–96; laws of England, 5, 10, 15–16, 29, 43–44, 55,
motion, 41, 53; as method, 39, 41; 106, 189, 215, 217, 235
of nature, 40, 41, 42; relational or English, 141, 149, 234; archaeology in
Hegelian, 2, 37, 39, 40, 41–43, 48, México, 176
142–43, 227–28; transformative Enlightenment, 37, 104
change, 41, 42–43, 45–46, 47; unity entry point. See feminist archaeology:
of opposites, 40, 42 entry point
digroes (term), 128 epistemology. See knowledge
disabled people, 18, 92 Escuela Nacional de Antropología y His-
Disney, Walt, 29 toria, México (ENAH), 158, 159, 161,
Disneyland, 29, 30 162, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 184
divorce, 40 Español, 141; archaeology in México,
Dold, Lou, 205, 221n5 176
Donegal Bay (Ireland), 25 Estéve , Jordi, 16
Dotson, Irene, 213–14, 215fig, 221n7 ethics, 8, 17, 20, 38, 144, 145
double colonialism. See colonialism: ethnicity, 4, 7, 8, 9, 23, 24, 37, 39, 45,
double 47, 49, 79, 87, 88, 91, 192, 193, 194–
druids. See Ancient Druid Order 96, 198, 202–3, 206, 228, 229
Duke, Phil, 189, 191, 220nn1,2 Euro-Americans, 72, 105, 111, 149, 152,
Durango (Colorado), 220n2 154, 192–93, 194, 196
Dutch East India Company, 29 Europe, 5, 17, 18–19, 28, 30, 61, 66, 84,
92–93, 104, 105, 144
Earth Watch, 106–7 European Union, 28
Ebro River, Battle of, 235 everyday life. See lived experience
eco-feminists. See goddess worshipers
education, 8, 9, 79, 81, 211, 219, 227; faculty, 100, 109, 111, 115, 117, 134,
archaeological field school, 217–19; of 136; tenured, 101, 118–22, 134–35,
communities, 144–45, 192, 216, 233– 137
34; consumerist model of, 144–45; Falangists (Spain), 1–2, 11nn1,2, 235–36
defined, 144; ethnographic approach false consciousness. See ideology: as false
to, 145; in fast capitalism, 6, 112, 225; consciousness
history trunk, 219; and the middle fascism and fascists, 1–2, 3, 11nn1,2, 18,
classes, 102–4; of Norteños, 177–78, 33–35, 63, 66, 67, 92, 234, 235, 236
180; of U.S. and Méxican archaeolo- fast capitalism, xii, 9, 28, 30, 37, 111–
gists, 175, 186n8. See also academy, the 16, 224–27, 235; defined, 5–6; hyper-
educators, 10, 193, 217, 218fig, 219. See competition, 6, 101, 113, 114, 123,
also faculty 125, 225, 226; ideology of, 61, 62, 71,
Egypt, 29, 32, 47, 84, 88 117; and México, 157, 160–62, 225–
ejido, 166, 186n10 26, 234; rise of, 112; secret writing in,
El Pilar Archaeological Reserve for Maya 21–22, 28–29, 134; and working peo-
Flora and Fauna (Belize), 32–33 ple, 10, 111–32, 189, 190, 192, 210,
El Plomo (Sonora), 166 211, 216–17, 226–27, 234. See also
El Salvador, 31, 151 craft of archaeology: in fast capitalism
emancipation, human, xii, 3–5, 8, 14, 69, Faulkner, Neil, 36
88, 92–93, 144, 145, 147, 224. See Fayetteville (North Carolina), 131
also alienation Felipe V of Spain, 24
emancipatory archaeology, 2, 5, 33–37, feminist archaeology, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 20–21,
48, 58, 61, 69, 94, 96–97, 99, 140, 36, 37, 49, 50, 51, 63, 64, 66, 69, 86,
286 Index

feminist archaeology (continued) Gramsci, Antonio, 45, 49, 140, 222

89, 155, 229; entry point, 5, 7, 37, 49, Grapevine (newsletter), 126–27
50n4, 75–76, 84, 99; praxis in, 53, Gray, Amy, 220n3
73–77 Great Britain, 25, 30, 50n1, 107, 109, 112
Field Museum (Chicago), 154 Great Pyramid (Egypt), 84
field technicians. See workers: field Greece and Greeks, 26, 194, 198
technicians Greek War of Independence, 26
Fine-Dare, Kathleen, 17–18 Green Revolution, 59
First Americans. See Indians: first Gregory, David, 57
Americans ground-penetrating radar, 27
First Nations. See Indians Guadalajara (Jalisco), 161
Forbes tent camp, 205, 214, 215fig Guardia Civil (Spain), 1
Ford, Anabel, 33 Guatemala, 31
forensics, 2, 33, 67 guild model of archaeology. See craft of
Foro por la Recuperación de la Memoria archaeology: guild ideology
Histórica, 2, 33 Gujarat (India), 27
Fort Collins (Colorado), 78, 191 Gulf of California, 168
Fort Lewis College, 18, 189, 234 Gurna (Egypt), 32
Foster, J. W., 105 Gypsies, 18, 50n1, 92
four Cs, 7, 8, 51, 53, 82–96, 224, 229; gypsy scholars, 99, 100, 121, 122
coherence, 82–83, 83–84; conse-
quences, 82–83, 90–96; context, 21, Habermas, Jürgen, 73
47–48, 67, 82–83, 86–90; correspon- Haiti, 186n3
dence, 61, 82–83, 84–86; defined, Hamilakis, Yannis, 20, 22
82–83 Hannah (Wyoming), 191
Franco, Francisco, 1–2, 11n2, 24, 66, Harris, Mary. See Mother Jones
235 Harrison, William Henry, 105
Frankfurt School, 71 Harvard University, 120
Franklin, Maria, 73 Hastings (Colorado), 195map, 197
Fraternidad Blanca de Quetzalcótal, 13 hegemony, 65, 71, 73
French Center for the Study of México Hempel, Carl, 55
and Central America, 180–81, 182 heritage, 12, 13, 15, 20, 22, 23, 24–26,
Fried, Morton, 75 28–33, 36, 66, 67, 78, 79, 80, 91, 104,
108, 132, 142, 151, 152, 153–54,
Gadsen Purchase, 165 157–59, 160, 161–62, 190, 191, 225,
Gamio, Manuel, 157, 158 226, 235. See also ideology: nationalist;
Garbage Project, 58 nationalism
gardens, 16 heritage industry. See tourism: cultural
gays, 4, 18, 44, 92 and heritage
gender, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 20–21, 31, 37, 45, hermeneutic circle, 60
47, 49, 64, 73–77, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92– Hermosillo (Sonora), 167, 168, 173, 174,
93, 99, 114, 121, 132, 133, 143, 193, 175, 176, 178, 181
196, 202–3, 208, 228, 229. See also Hesse, Herman, 19–20
feminist archaeology Hindu, 3; nationalists, 26–27, 144, 232
geology and geologists, 42 hippies, 15
German archaeology, 18, 19 Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism
Germany, 18, 19, 34, 92, 222 (Leone and Potter), 71
Gero, Joan, 74 historical archaeology, 71–73, 76–77,
Gestapo headquarters, 33–34, 36, 63, 222 188–221
Gila Bend Reservation, 165 Historical Archaeology Women’s Caucus
Gila River, 165 (SHA), 77
Gila River Indian Community, 155, 156, history. See praxis: role of history in
181 History of Archaeological Thought (Trig-
Giza (Egypt), 84 ger), 69
Glass Bead Game, The (Hesse), 19–20 Hitler, Adolph, 44
globalization. See fast capitalism Hodder, Ian, 55, 60, 61, 63, 82, 85, 91,
goddess worshipers, 61, 63, 91, 92–93 92, 108, 109
Index 287

Hohokam Tradition, 150map, 168, 177 34; religion, 94; and repatriation, 17–
homosexuals. See gays 18, 53, 77, 78, 79, 155–57, 181–82,
Honduras, 31 185, 190–91; self-determination, 79,
Hopi Nation, 18, 50n2, 183 155, 162; in universities, 79, 116; in
Horkheimer, Max, 4 Venezuela, 65–66; views of the past,
Hormiga, La (site), 171 95–96, 145, 153, 157. See also indige-
Horn, Claire, 220n3 nous archaeology; names of specific
Houston (Texas), 131 Indian nations, communities, pueblos,
Huerfano County (Colorado), 194, 197 tribes
human rights, 33, 35, 36 Indian Self-Determination Act of 1973,
Huns, 215 155
husband, 40, 45 indigenismo, 152, 157–59, 160, 162,
hypercompetition. See fast capitalism: 163, 164, 186n9; compared to
hypercompetition indigenista, 186n5
indigenista movement, 162, 185, 186n5,
identity, 9, 12–13, 23, 24–25, 27–28, 226
31–32, 38, 42, 45, 63, 65, 87, 93, 104, indigenous archaeology, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 37,
145, 157–59, 163–64, 193, 194–96, 49, 51, 63, 64, 69, 86, 89, 146, 157,
202–3, 213, 222, 228, 232, 235 191, 229, 232; defined, 79–80;
ideology, 9, 13–14, 17, 20–21, 26, 39, partnership archaeology, 80–81;
89, 210, 222, 230, 235; of apprentice- praxis in, 53, 77–81
ship in the academy, 101, 111, 119–22, individual, the, 38, 42–43, 45, 47,
124–25, 126, 217–18; archaeological 54, 61, 62, 63, 87, 194, 228, 229;
record as, 108, 110, 125, 130–31; of emotional and psychological needs,
class, 99, 103, 106, 110, 111, 210, 92–93; in fast capitalism, 134. See also
217; factory, 16, 67, 89; as false con- ideology: of the individual
sciousness, 51, 54, 69–70, 72, 96, industrial revolution, 44
134–35; of gender, 73–74, 92; of the information technologies, 6, 112, 113,
individual, 43, 44, 61, 62, 193; as legit- 135
imation, 18–19, 46, 52, 69, 104, 149, Instituto Nacional de Antropología y
152; nationalist, 12, 23, 24–25, 65– Historia (INAH), 12–13, 158, 159–
66, 71, 104–5, 142, 149, 151–54, 60, 161, 162, 167, 168, 172, 173, 174,
157–59, 161, 162, 164; secret writing, 175, 176, 225–26; Consejo de Arque-
21–22, 25–26, 28–29, 30, 31, 33, 36, ología, 180, 184, 185; and repatriation,
47, 134; state, 54, 65–66, 67; struc- 180–86
turalist concept, 71. See also fast Instituto Nacional de Indigenista, 166
capitalism intersectionalities of theories. See praxis:
I’itoi, 167 intersectionalities of theories
immigrants and immigration, 194, 196; Iraq, 14, 20, 192
illegal, 114, 147, 164, 167 Ireland, Republic of, 25, 26
imperialism, 9, 37, 65, 140, 151 Irish: in America, 194; tinkers, 50n1
imperialist archaeology, 69, 94; U.S., in Irish-Anglo War, 25
México, 140, 141, 148–51, 157, 158, Iron Age, 25
159–60, 162, 167, 171, 172, 173–77, Iroquois Confederacy, 26
184, 233 Israel, 14, 25, 26
Iñárritu, Alejandro González, 30 Israeli Defense Force, 14, 25
India, 5, 26–27, 59 Italy and Italians, 194, 198, 206, 214
Indiana Jones, 233
Indians, 7, 24, 26, 48, 69, 84, 87, 88, 92, Jackson, Andrew, 105
146, 152, 222; as archaeologists, 3, Jacobson, Michael, 208–9, 220n3
79–81, 111; in Belize, 33; in Boliva, Jameson, Frederic, 37
58; in Chiapas, 162; Chorti, 31; first Japan and the Japanese, 30, 194, 196
Americans, 104–6, 152, 153–54; in Jefferson, Thomas, 105, 153
Honduras, 31–32; land claims, 32, 81, Jews, 18, 44, 92
154; massacre, 211; Mayan, 12–13, Johannesburg, South Africa, 29
14, 31–32, 33; in México, 12–13, Jolly, Pearl, 199
157–59, 162, 163–64, 180–86, 233– Jones, Sian, 22
288 Index

Jorvik Viking Center, 30 López, Adrián, 171fig

Joyce, Rosemary, 47 Lorenzo, José Luis, 29
Los Amigos de El Pilar, 33
Kehoe, Alice, 16–17 Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High
King, Mackenzie, 201 Court (India), 27
King, Martin Luther, 44 Ludlow (Colorado), 10, 188, 195map,
knowledge, xii, 3, 6–7, 14, 19, 20, 21, 227; archaeology at, 204, 205–7,
38–39, 45, 48, 51–53, 78, 94–97, 206fig, 208–9, 221nn5,6; death pit,
108, 112, 223, 231, 233; dialectical, 200, 204; massacre at, 10, 109, 188–
53, 61, 81–96, 142–43, 147–48, 229– 89, 199–200, 201, 214–16, 221n4,
30; and middle class, 100, 103; nega- 223, 229; memorial services, 189, 210,
tion of error, 54; observations in, 48, 211–13, 213fig, 217, 218fig; memory
53, 83, 84–85, 86, 94–95, 229–30; of, 210–17, 220, 227; monument, 200,
positivist, 55–58, 60, 64, 69, 75, 82, 209, 210–11, 212; station, 199, 200;
83, 96; radical relativism, 7, 59–63, ten-day war, 188, 200, 221n4; tent
81, 82, 92, 96, 229; true, 48, 51, 52, camp at, 188–89, 198, 198fig, 201fig,
53–55, 59, 60, 64–65, 66–67, 68, 199, 205, 209
69–70, 82, 91, 96, 144, 229. See also Ludlow Collective, 46, 189, 219, 220n3
four Cs Lukás, Georg, 72
Kohl, Philip, 52, 68 Luxor (Egypt), 32
Kossinna, Gustav, 18
Kramer, Carol, 76 Mabo decision, 78
Madrid (Spain), 1, 235
labor. See workers Managua (Nicaragua), 67
Lakota, 88 Manchester (England), 5, 29–30
Lal, B. B., 27 Mandal, D., 27
Langford, Ros, 78 Maori, 79
language and archaeology in México, 176 Mao Tse-tung, 122
Lapham, Jason, 220n3 maquiladoras, 178
La Playa (site), 178 Marcuse, Herbert, 28
Larkin, Karin, 220n3 market principles. See fast capitalism
Las Animas County (Colorado), 194, marriage, 40
198, 214 Marshall, Yvonne, 36
Las Vegas (Nevada), 29, 32 Martin, Paul, 57
Lathrop, Samuel, 151 Marr, Nikolay, 18–19
Latin America, 17, 55, 58, 64–66, 67, 77, Marx, Karl, 1, 4, 5, 37–38, 43, 46–47,
151, 159, 162, 173, 186nn1,2,4 50n3, 64, 172, 188, 223
Latinos, 111, 116 Marxism: and alienation, 4; classical, 37,
Lawrence, T. E., 14 41; and concept of society, 40–41, 42–
laws of motion. See dialectic: laws of 43; critical theory, 37; critiques of, 49,
motion 50n4; defined, 37; dialectic, xii, 2, 37,
Lead Industry Association, 130 39–43, 227–28; and emancipation,
legitimation. See ideology: as legitimation 4–5; French structural, 71; Hegelian,
Leone, Mark, 70–71, 72, 73, 96 humanistic or relational, 2, 37, 41–43,
Levant, 235 49, 53; theory of, 37–50, 93; Western,
Lewis, John, 213fig 37, 50n4, 52, 70. See also dialectic
licenciatura, 161, 176; defined, 186n8 Marxist archaeology, xi, 2, 3, 7, 11, 14,
Little, Barbara, 71 37, 49, 50n4, 52, 63, 73, 75, 76, 86,
lived experience, 39, 45, 46–47, 49, 87, 89, 229; classical Marxists, 6, 37, 52,
88, 101, 107, 124, 132, 139, 193, 53–55, 60, 64–70; critical archaeo-
202–4, 209, 228, 229 logy, 52, 64, 70–73, 89, 96; Hegelian,
living history museums. See museums: liv- humanistic or relational, 2, 37, 39, 40,
ing history 41–43, 48, 51, 53, 81–96
living wage, 136–37, 138 Marxist Archaeology, A (McGuire), xi, 2,
Lloyd, William Foster, 43, 44 21, 50n4
Long, Priscilla, 203 Masada, Israel, 25, 26
looters, 107–9, 144 Masewal Forest Trail, 33
Index 289

mass graves, 1–2, 33, 35, 36, 67 Muslims, 26, 27, 32, 93
masters, 40, 41–42 mythic charters and histories, 3, 22, 23,
material conditions of life, 43, 46, 47 24–26, 33, 69, 96, 104, 152, 222
Mayan archaeology, 12–13, 14, 15, 31–
32, 33, 149, 151 Napoleon, Bonaparte, 24
McGuire, Randall, 98–99, 171fig, 230 National Geographic Society, 31, 168,
McManaman, Frank, 24 171fig, 187nn12,14; magazine, 106
memory, 1–2, 33, 36, 67, 194, 209–14, national guard. See Colorado: National
227, 235 Guard
Merriman, Nick, 106, 107, 109 nationalism, 22–23, 24–25, 27–28, 33,
Mesa Verde (Colorado), 84 36, 71, 94, 222; in the Americas, 151–
Meskell, Lynn, 16, 22, 47 53; in México, 157–59, 161, 162, 164,
Mesoamerica, 157, 167, 173, 175, 177 184–85, 186nn5,9, 225–26; in United
Mesopotamia, 20 States, 104–6, 153–54; in Venezuela,
mestizos, 162, 175, 177, 185; defined, 65–66. See also ideology; nationalist
152, 157 nationalist archaeology, 9, 12, 22–28, 35,
metanarrative, 59, 63, 91 66, 69, 94, 104, 144, 149, 151–53,
Mexican archaeology, 9–10, 13, 29, 141, 157–59, 173, 177, 225, 232
142, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 157–62, nationalist ideology. See ideology:
171, 172–77, 182, 183–85, 186n2, nationalist
187n17, 223, 225–26, 229, 233–34 National Museum of Natural History
México, xi, 9–10, 12–13, 31, 140–42, (Washington, D.C.), 154, 156–57
147–52, 157–86, 187n16, 223, 225– National Museum of the American Indian
26, 229, 233–34; Revolution, 157 (New York), 156
México City, 13, 159, 184 National Science Foundation, 168,
middle class. See class: middle 187nn12,13
Mimbris culture, 57 nation-state, 25, 28, 69, 104, 148–49,
miners. See coal: miners 151, 186n3, 186n5; defined, 23. See
Minneapolis (Minnesota), 154 also nationalism
Minnis, Paul, 57 Native American Graves Protection and
modernism, 52, 64 Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA),
Mongolia, 33 17–18, 78–79, 155–56, 181–82, 185,
Montané, Julio, 172 190–91
Montezuma. See I’itoi Native Americans. See Indians
Moore, Summer, 220n3 Navajo Nation, 18, 50n2; Cultural
Morley, Sylvanus, 14, 151 Resource Management Program, 79
Morocco, 30 Nazis, 18, 19, 34, 63, 92, 144, 222, 232.
Morton, Samuel G., 105 See also fascism and fascists
Mostar (Bosnia and Herzegovina), 26 Nelson, Margaret, 76
Mother Jones, 188 Nelson, Sarah, 76
Mound Builders, 105, 153 neoliberalism, 160–62. See also fast
Mount San Rafael Hospital, 214 capitalism
multivocality, 7, 60–62, 80–81, 91, 92, Neolithic, 61
229; relational, 63, 91, 229 New Age, 13, 50n1, 91, 94
Mundo Maya, 31 New Archaeology. See processual
Murcia (Spain), 1 archaeology
Murrieta, Joaquín, 164, 179–80 Newcastle (England), 30
Murrieta, Raúl, 179fig New Deal, 201
Museo del Hombre Venezolano New Economy, 112, 116
(Venezuela), 65–66 New Mexico, 57, 186n11
Museum of Northern Antiquities New York: city, 122; state, 26, 130
(Denmark), 104 New Zealand, 9, 30, 77, 79
museums, 34, 48, 65–66, 67, 100, 104, Nicaragua, 67–68
105, 107, 122, 123, 153, 155, 156, noble savages, 92, 104, 153
158, 161, 162, 180, 184; Iraq Museum, Noel-Hume, Ivor, 74, 77
20; living history, 16; natural history, Norteños, 9–10, 141, 142, 162, 179fig,
154; tribal, 156–57 181, 186n9; border and, 147–48, 164;
290 Index

Norteños (continued) Pima. See Tohono O’odham (Papago):

dress, 164; food, 164, 175, 187n16; Akimel O’odham (Pima)
history of, 163–64; music, 141, 164; Pisté (México), 12
relations with gringos, 164; and Pliestocene, 84
Trincheras Tradition Project, 171–72, Plog, Fred, 57
177–80, 185 Poland, 194
North America, 30, 55, 66, 71, 77, 94, political action, xi, 2, 3–4, 10–11,
145, 157, 162, 167 14–15, 16, 19, 21, 22, 26, 27–28,
North American archaeology in México, 31, 33, 38–39, 51–53, 54–55, 56–
13, 66, 68, 69, 70, 148, 149–51, 58, 63, 65, 67–68, 69, 71, 76–77,
157, 158, 159–60, 167, 172, 173, 97, 143, 209–12, 222–23. See also
174, 176, 186nn1,2, 223, 225–26. praxis
See also United States archaeology political bias, 18–19, 21, 56–57, 59–60
North American Free Trade Agreement, political struggle. See political action
160, 162, 225, 226 Pollock, Susan, 20, 27–28
North Carolina, 131 Portugal, 10
Northeastern University, 136 positivism. See knowledge: positivist
Nuremberg Rally, 92 postcaptialism. See fast capitalism
postmodernism. See post-processual
Oberosler family, 214, 215fig archaeology
objectivity. See knowledge post-processual archaeology, 3, 5, 6, 37,
Oleso de Monserrat (Catalunya), 235–236 49, 52, 55, 68, 75, 86, 89, 96, 229;
Oliveros, Arturo, 172 praxis in, 59–63
Ollman, Bertell, 40, 98, 227, 229 pothunters. See looters
opposition, 8; of community’s interests, potsherds, 3, 4, 17, 52
144, 232 Potter, Parker, 71, 109, 145
Oquitoa (Sonora), 164, 171, 178 Powell, John Wesley, 105
oral tradition, 81 Pozo Verde (Sonora), 166
Oregon Steel, 188, 212, 227 practice theory, 43
Orozco, José, Clemente, 158 praxis, xi–xii, 2–4, 5, 9, 10, 16, 19, 21,
OSHA, 219 37, 51–97, 222–24, 235; archaeology
Ottomans, 26 of the Colorado Coalfield War as, 188–
221, 223–24, 225–26; arqueología
Pakistan, 59 social and, 64–68; to change class
Palenque (México), 185 structure of archaeology, 132–39;
Papago Indian Reservation. See Tohono Childe and, 53–55; classical Marxism
O’odham (Papago) and, 68–70; and consciousness raising,
Papagos. See Tohono O’odham (Papago) 45, 46, 70–73, 228; critical archaeol-
Papaguería, 165 ogy and, 70–73; defined, 3, 38–39, 44,
Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), 161–62, 51, 223–24; dialectical, 81–96; eman-
184–85, 225–26 cipatory, 3, 8, 14, 20, 33–37, 140, 142,
Partido de la Revolución Democrática 143–44, 146, 156, 185–86, 192–93,
(PRD), 161 220, 226, 227–36; feminism and, 53,
Partido Revolutionario Institutional 73–77, 155, 227, 228; history of, in
(PRI), 158, 160, 161, 162, 186n6 archaeology, 53–81; indigenous
partnership archaeology. See indigenous archaeology and, 77–81, 228; inter-
archaeology: partnership archaeology sectionalities of theories, 5, 6–8, 37,
paseitoes, 1 49, 51, 53, 228; post-processual
Pasqua Yaqui, 183 archaeology and, 59–63, 227; proces-
Patterson, Thomas, 38, 40, 52, 68 sual archaeology and, 55–59, 227; role
Pendragon, Alcarita, 200 of history in, 46–47, 48, 68, 69, 72,
Peru, 68, 151, 159 91–92, 93, 96, 142–43, 147–48, 231–
petroglyphs, 26 32; social engineering, 6–7, 49, 53–54,
Petrucci, Mary, 200 56, 58–59, 60, 63, 81, 90, 143–44;
Phoenix (Arizona), 165, 226 tragedy of the commons as, 44;
Phoenix Basin, 164 Trincheras Tradition project as, 167–
Picture Rocks (Pennsylvania), 26 86, 223, 225–27
Index 291

predator-prey, 41, 42 Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 194, 200, 201;

prejudice, 20–21 plan, 201, 204, 207, 208, 209
Preucel, Robert, 22 Rocky Mountain Steel Mill, 188, 212
Price, Utah, 214 Rome (Italy), xi, 29; Romans, 25, 26
Prince, Gene, 205 Rosario (Argentina), 35
private property. See fast capitalism Rowen, Yorke, 28
processual archaeology, 6, 37, 49, 52, 55, rurales, 166
59, 60, 64, 66, 68, 69, 173; and gender, Russia, 194
74–75; praxis in, 55–59. See also Ruta Maya, 31–32, 47
knowledge: positivist
professors. See faculty Saitta, Dean, 189, 191, 210, 212, 213fig,
progressive reformers, 189, 194, 201, 220n3
209 Salazar, Medardo, 179fig
project directors. See cultural resource Salmon, Merrilee, 56–57
management (CRM): project directors Salt River Indian Community, 181
proletarianization. See workers: proletari- Sanjoa, Mario, 65
anization San Pedro River, 165
public, general, 86–87, 105, 144–45 Santa Cruz River, 155, 165
Pueblo (Colorado), 188, 194, 202, 212, Santaella (Spain), 1, 2
217, 227, 231 Santa María del Mar Basilica, 23–24, 26
Puebloan archaeology, 57, 84, 91 San Xavier Mission Bridge, 155–56
Schoolcraft, Henry, 105
queer theory, 5, 49, 76; defined, 75. See Scotland, 25
also sexuality Seattle (Washington), 192
Quitovac (Sonora), 180–81, 182, 184 secret writing. See ideology: secret writing
Section 106, 125
race, 4, 5, 7, 9, 37, 45, 47, 49, 66, 75, 79, self-critique. See critique: self-
87, 88, 91, 99, 102, 111, 115, 133, Seligman, Edwin, 197
143, 193, 228, 233; Aryan, 18 Sells, Arizona, 157
racism, 18, 36, 57, 99, 111, 128, 196, settler states, 77–78, 79
234 sexuality, 4, 5, 7, 8, 31, 37, 47, 49, 75,
radiocarbon dating, 85–86 76, 87, 88, 91, 99, 143, 203, 228
Rainbow Family, 13 Sharer, Robert J., 108
Rama (Hindu god), 26 Shovel Bum (de Boer), 126
Rathje, Bill, 58 Sierra Pinacate (México), 182
Raza, La. See mestizos Sinai Peninsula, 14
Reagan, Ronald, 112 Sinclair, Upton, 201
realist philosophy of science, 68, 82 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 158
Reckner, Paul, 220n3 Shanks, Michael, 7
Red Cross, 215 slavery. See workers: enslaved
Reed, John, 201 Smithsonian Institution, 154, 156
reflexivity. See knowledge social democracy, 37
Registry of Professional Archaeologists, social engineering. See praxis: social
138 engineering
relational dialectic. See dialectic: social evolution. See cultural evolution
relational or Hegelian social groups. See communities
relativism. See knowledge: radical socialists, 210
relativism Society for American Archaeology (SAA),
repatriation. See Indians: and repatriation 76, 111, 155, 190
Republicans, 210, 220, 234 Society for Creative Anachronism, 93
reserve army of labor. See workers: Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA),
reserve army of the unemployed 76
Resource Management Act of 1991, 79 Society of Tyrolean Alpinists, 206
Río Altar, 170, 171, 181, 187n12 “Sociology of Knowledge” (Childe), 54
Río Magdalena, 165, 173, 180, 187n12 solidarity, 10, 45, 62, 193–94, 202–3,
Río San Miguel, 168 210. See also consciousness: shared
Rivera, Diego, 158 Sonoma State University (California), 99
292 Index

Sonora, México, xi, 9, 141, 148, 150map, 142, 153, 157; Akimel O’odham
162, 164, 165–73, 169map, 174, 175, (Pima), 164–65; and border, 147, 148,
176–85, 186n11, 187n15, 223, 225– 162, 164–67; Cultural Affairs Com-
26, 233–34; desert, 165, 168 mittee, 182, 183; history of, 164–67;
South Africa, 29, 30, 32, 77; apartheid in, museum, 157; Nation, 165, 167, 181,
78 183, 184; and Quitovac, 167, 180–81,
Southwest-Northwest Culture Area, 167, 182, 184; and repaitriation, 155–56,
173, 175, 177, 187n17; defined, 186– 181–86; San Xavier District, 155–56,
87n11 181; status in México, 165–67; and
Soviet Union, 18–19, 53–54, 96 Trincheras Tradition Project, 170, 171–
Snyder, William, 199, 200 72, 177, 180–86, 233–234; Wi:gita
Spain, 1–2, 10, 11nn1,2, 23–24, 54, 66– ceremony, 167, 180–81
67, 189, 217; archaeology, 64, 66–68; Topography of Terror (museum), 34
Civil War, 1–2, 11nn1,2, 24, 33, 36, tortillas, 75, 141, 164, 187n16
67; language, 160; in México, 163, torture centers, 33–35, 36, 63
165, 169, 173, 176–77, 226; Second totalitarianism, 144; dictatorship, 1–2,
Republic, 1–2, 11n1, 235; War of Inde- 11nn1,2, 18–19, 35, 54, 159; in
pendence, 24; War of Spanish Succes- theory, 39, 48–49
sion, 23–24 tourism, 81; Annapolis project and, 71–
Squire, Ephraim G., 105 73; bubble, 30–31, 32–33, 226;
Stalin, Joseph, and Stalinism, 18–19, 54 cultural and heritage, 9, 12–13, 15, 22,
Starbucks, 30 28–33, 35, 47, 71, 72, 112, 161–62,
Stark, Miriam, 76 224–26; eco-tourism, 33
state historic preservation offices, 123 tragedy of the commons, parable of, 43–
Statement on Graduate Students, AAUP, 44
136 travelers, British, 15, 50n1, 63
State University of New York, 121–22, treasure hunters. See looters
220n1 Treaty of Guadalupe del Hidalgo, 142
Steward, Julian, 154 Tribal Historic Preservation Officers
Stonehenge, 15–16, 50n1, 63; Free Festi- (THPOs) 79, 156
val, 15 Trigger, Bruce, 18, 22, 35–36, 51, 52,
Stonewall riot, 44 68–70, 96, 104
subjectivity. See knowledge Trincheras (Sonora), 164, 170–71, 178,
subject-object opposition, 42 178–80, 182
Sweeny, John, 115, 133, 192 Trincheras Tradition, xi, 9, 168, 177;
Symbolic and Structural Archaeology archaeology project, 141, 142, 148,
(Hodder), 55 150map, 153, 162, 167–86, 169map,
symbolic capital, 100, 103, 105, 110, 116 223, 225–26, 233–34; defined, 168–
70
Tasmanian Aboriginal community, 78 Trinidad (Colorado), 194, 195map, 198,
Tchorzynski, Stacy, 220n3 199, 200, 210, 214
teachers. See educators Trinidad State Junior College, 219
Temple of Hatshepsut (Egypt), 32 Triumph of the Will (film), 92
Teotihuacán (México), 151, 158, 159 triviality of archaeology, 14–15, 16, 19–
Te Ture Whenua Maori Act of 1993, 79 20, 21, 26, 33, 84, 222, 235
Texas, 131, 186n11, 191 Trotter, Robert T., 106
Thatcher, Margaret, 15, 112 Tucson (Arizona), 165, 178, 226
theme parks, 28–30 Tucson Basin, 165
Third Reich. See Nazis Tucumán (Argentina), 35
Third World, 59, 89 Turkey, 14, 61–62, 92–93
Thomas, Cyrus, 105, 153
Thomas, Mary, 199 unbiased archaeology. See apolitical
Tijuana (México), 179 archaeology
Tikas, Louis, 198, 199, 200 Underground (newsletter), 126–27
Tilley, Christopher, xi, 16, 59 Understanding Civilizations (Trigger), 70
Tío Benino (site), 171 unintended consequences, 38, 43–44, 46,
Tohono O’odham (Papago), 9–10, 141, 91
Index 293

Unión Coorperativas Agropecuarias de University of Arizona, 174, 168

Miraflor, 67 University of Massachusetts at Boston,
Union of Operating Engineers, 129 136
unions, 10, 99, 100, 114–15, 188–90, University of New Mexico, 174
192–93, 194–202, 209–12, 214, 216, university professors. See faculty
217–18, 220, 220n1, 226–27, 233– urban ghettos, 57
34; academic, 118, 120, 129–32, 138 Utah, 186n11
United Archaeological Field Technicians
(UAFT), 100, 126–27, 129–31, 138 Valdez, Patria, 200
United Kingdom, 25 Valencia (Spain), 1
United Mine Workers of America, 10, 87, Valle de Altar (Sonora), 171fig. See also
189, 192, 193, 196, 198, 200, 201, Río Altar
202, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213fig, 214, Valley of México Project, 151, 177
215–16, 217, 224, 227 Valley of the Nobles (Egypt), 32
United States, 9–10, 16–18, 26, 29–30, Valve Manufacturers Association, 130
40, 50n2, 55, 57, 71, 74, 78–79, 87, vanguard party, 53–54, 58, 60, 63, 90,
94, 97n1, 99, 101, 104–5, 107, 112, 143–44
113, 115, 116–19, 138, 142, 145, 147, Vargas-Arenas, Iraida, 65
148, 149, 151, 153–54, 160, 164, Venezuela, 65–66, 159
165–66, 175, 181, 186nn2–4,7–8,11, Venice, 29
187n16, 188–221. See also North Vera Cruz (México), 161
America Vietnam War, 192
United States archaeologists, 171fig, 216, Vikings, 30
217; on the border, 141, 142, 147, Villalobos, César, photo, 171fig
148–49, 162, 170–71, 223, 225–26, Villalpando, Elisa, 9, 140, 148, 168, 170,
233–34 171fig, 172–73, 180, 181, 225
United States archaeology, 9–10, 14, 16, Vizcaya (Spain), 1
55, 68, 152, 153–57; in México, 141,
149–51, 158, 159–60, 167, 173–77, wage labor. See workers: waged
229. See also North American archae- Walker, Mark, xi, 99, 220n3
ology in México Wallace, Mike, 29
United States Declaration of Walsenburg (Colorado), 195map, 198
Independence, 230 Washington, D.C., 44
United States government: Bureau of Washington, George, 105
Indian Affairs, 79, 166; Bureau of Land Welsh, 194, 198
Management, 131; Commission on Wessex Culture, 235
Industrial Relations, 201; Congress, Western civilization, 20, 69, 74, 93
154; Corp of Engineers, 131; Depart- West Virginia, 197
ment of Labor, 129, 130–31; Forest white bread, 141
Service, 131; Indian Claims wife, 40, 45
Commission, 154; National Park Ser- Wildesen, Leslie, 76
vice, 131, 153 Williamsburg (Virginia), 158
United States–México border. See border, Wilson, Michele, 126–28
international Wilson, Woodrow, 200
United Steelworkers of America, 212, witchcraft, 70
217–18, 227 Women in Archaeology Interest Group
United University Professionals, 99, (SAA), 77
220n1 Wood, Margaret, 208, 220n3
Universidad Central de Venezuela, 65 Woolley, Leonard, 14
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Méx- workers: adjunct faculty, 9, 100, 101,
ico, 161 118–22, 125, 133, 134–39; African,
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de 5; capitalist, 4, 128; defined, 97n1;
Nicaragua, 67 English, 5; enslaved, 5, 40, 41–42,
Universidad de Sonora, 180 186n3; exploitation, 9, 111, 119–20,
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 16, 124, 132, 133, 137; in fast capitalism,
66, 67, 236 5–6, 9, 100–101, 113, 118–32, 135,
universities. See academy, the 189, 190, 192, 210, 226–27; field
294 Index

workers (continued) Wounded Knee, battle of, 105

technicians, 9, 99, 101, 124–32, 133, Wupaki National Monument, 106
134–39; living wage, 136–37; proletari- Wylie, Alison, 71, 75–76
anization, 6, 9, 112, 113, 116, 119, 124,
128–29, 130–32, 134, 225; reserve Yadin Yigal, 14, 25
army of the unemployed, 110, 114, 116, Yaxchilán (México), 185
121, 127, 137; rights, 6, 10, 101, 111, Yescas, Ramón Alejandro, 179fig
114, 135–36, 193–94, 210, 216–17; YMCA, 201
teaching assistants, 9, 100, 118–22, York (England), 30
136; unionized, 10, 87, 101, 114–15, Yucatán (state), 161
138; waged, 5. See also class: working Yucatán Pennisula, 12–13, 14
working class archaeology, xi–xii, 10, Yugoslavia, 26, 28
109, 117, 189–90, 192, 193–94, 210– yuppies, 29–30
20, 223
working families, 10, 202–3, 227, 233 Zapatistas, 162, 185, 226
World Archaeology Conference, 155 Zeder, Melinda, 111
World Trade Organization, 192 Zimmerman, Larry, 88
World War I, 14, 201, 215 Zionists, 25
World War II, 19, 34, 53, 112, 151, 159 Zorn, Eric, 211
Worsaae, Jens J. A., 104 Zuni Pueblo Archaeological Program, 79
 CALIFORNIA SERIES IN PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY
The California Series in Public Anthropology emphasizes the anthropologist’s role
as an engaged intellectual. It continues anthropology’s commitment to being an
ethnographic witness, to describing, in human terms, how life is lived beyond the
borders of many readers’ experiences. But it also adds a commitment, through
ethnography, to reframing the terms of public debate—transforming received,
accepted understandings of social issues with new insights, new framings.
Series Editor: Robert Borofsky (Hawaii Pacific University)
Contributing Editors: Philippe Bourgois (University of Pennsylvania),
Paul Farmer (Partners in Health), Alex Hinton (Rutgers University),
Carolyn Nordstrom (University of Notre Dame), and Nancy Scheper-Hughes
(UC Berkeley)
University of California Press Editor: Naomi Schneider

1. Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death,

by Margaret Lock
2. Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel,
by Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh (with a foreword by Hanan Ashrawi)
3. Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, edited
by Alexander Laban Hinton (with a foreword by Kenneth Roth)
4. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor,
by Paul Farmer (with a foreword by Amartya Sen)
5. Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America,
by Aihwa Ong
6. Chechnya: Life in a War-Torn Society, by Valery Tishkov (with a foreword
by Mikhail S. Gorbachev)
7. Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison,
by Lorna A. Rhodes
8. Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope,
by Beatriz Manz (with a foreword by Aryeh Neier)
9. Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown,
by Donna M. Goldstein
10. Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-
First Century, by Carolyn Nordstrom
11. Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide,
by Alexander Laban Hinton (with a foreword by Robert Jay Lifton)
12. Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It,
by Robert Borofsky
13. Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back, edited
by Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson
14. Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor,
by Harri Englund
15. When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa,
by Didier Fassin
16. Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World,
by Carolyn Nordstrom
17. Archaeology as Political Action, by Randall H. McGuire
18. Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in
Colombia, by Winifred Tate
19. Transforming Cape Town, by Catherine Besteman
20. Unimagined Community, by Robert J. Thornton

Text: 10/13 Sabon

Display: Sabon
Compositor: BookMatters, Berkeley
Printer and binder: Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group