Archaeology, Indigenous erasure, and the creation of white public space at the California missions

This paper explores how the materiality of the past has been mobilized to simultaneously erase Indigenous presence and create white public space at Spanish mission sites in California. As the site of present-day Santa Clara University, Mission Santa Clara de Asís presents an important case study. The documentary record associated with more than a century of archaeology at the mission reveals its intersections with heritage-making, particularly the maintenance of public memory that privileges and valorizes whiteness. These same records further detail how the university and local residents effectively erased the heritage of the thousands of Ohlone people and members of neighboring Indigenous groups who lived, worked, and died at Mission Santa Clara. Recognizing how archaeology has contributed to the current heritage landscape at Santa Clara and other California mission sites is a necessary first step in the creation of new archaeological and heritage practices that center the experiences and persistence of Native Californian communities.

Rwandan solutions to Rwandan problems: Heritage decolonization and community engagement in Nyanza District, Rwanda

Highlighting the rural district of Nyanza in Rwanda, this article examines community relations to heritage resources. It investigates the possibilities for more ethical, engaged models of heritage management which can better deliver on agendas of decolonization and development. Our research finds that Nyanza’s heritage stakeholders highly value heritage’s social and economic roles, but communities are also significantly alienated from heritage resources. In seeking to bridge this gap, heritage professionals utilize a discourse of technocratic improvement, but community leaders emphasize ideas of ownership, drawing on higher state-level discourses of self-reliance and “homegrown solutions.” They mobilize the state’s own attempts to filter developing, decolonizing initiatives through Rwandan frameworks to advocate for communities’ right to participate in heritage. This local agency offers a roadmap for utilizing favorable aspects of existing governance to push heritage management toward community engagement and decolonization.

Excavating Europe’s last fascist monument: The Valley of the Fallen (Spain)

Since 1945, most fascist monuments have disappeared or been deactivated in Western Europe. There is one in Spain, however, that remains fully operative: the Valley of the Fallen. The complex, devised by the dictator Francisco Franco, celebrates the Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), keeps the bodies of thousands of victims of the conflict, as well as the leading fascist ideologue and the dictator himself, and provides a material narrative that exalts the dictatorship. With the advent of democracy in 1978, the Valley remained unchanged, untouchable, and an important focus for fascist and extreme right celebrations, both national and international. However, with the new progressive government that came to power in 2018, it has become the object of an ambitious program of resignification in which archaeology has an important role to play. In this article, I describe how archaeological work undertaken at the Valley of the Fallen is contributing toward destabilizing the dictatorial narrative by opposing the monumental assemblage of fascism to the subaltern assemblage of those who built it.

Domestication is not an ancient moment of selection for prosociality: Insights from dogs and modern humans

Domestication is often portrayed as a long-past event, at times even in archaeological literature. The term domestication is also now applied to other processes, including human evolution. In such contexts, domestication means selection for friendliness or prosociality and the bodily results of such selective choices. Both such perspectives are misleading. Using dogs and modern humans as entry points, this paper explores why conceiving of domestication as a threshold event consisting of selection for prosociality is both incomplete and inaccurate. Domestication is an ongoing process, not a moment or an achievement. Selection in breeding, including for prosociality, is a part of many domestication histories, but it alone does not sustain this process over multiple generations. Further, much selection in domestication has little to do with human intention. Care, taming, commensalism, material things, and places are critical in carrying domestic relationships forward.

Fear of a cannibal island: Colonial fear, everyday life, and event landscapes in the Erromango missions of Vanuatu

Archaeological landscapes of colonial encounter were shaped to varying degrees by mutual mistrust, misunderstanding, anxiety, and the inherent terror of frontier violence. In the mission encounters of Island Melanesia, the colonial trope of “cannibalism” added a particular tinge to these fears of the colonized other. Mythologies of cannibalism both repulsed and motivated Christian missionaries who were led to places such as Erromango in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). Cannibalism as a practice was rare or even non-existent in these encounters, but it remained part of the European imaginary of the region. Several highly-publicized missionary martyrdoms on Erromango between 1839–1872 remain important to local social memories enacted in place. At the same time, there is a backdrop of relatively peaceful everyday life for missionary families as revealed by the archaeological record of mission houses. The structural and actual violence perpetrated by Europeans in missions and other colonial encounters are historically and currently underemphasized.

Images of transformation in the Lower Amazon and the performativity of Santarém and Konduri pottery

This article analyses Amazonian objects of the Santarém and Konduri styles (1100–1600 AD), many of them with images of beings in transformation, adopting a framework that goes beyond an emphasis on the visual to recuperate pragmatic aspects of the rituals in which the objects were involved, apprehended through the formal properties and affordances of the artifacts themselves. Different rules are identified in the construction of these artifacts, some displaying anthropomorphic beings that transmute into zoomorphic beings, others that are revealed through the manipulation of artifacts or through a change in perspective enabled by a change in viewing angle. Composite bodies also constitute an important focus of attention. While the Santarém objects are distinguished by the standardization and reproduction of their design, suggesting a social intensification of a set of practices, the chimerical Konduri figurations point to a relationship closer to the paradoxical dynamic of ritual art, which works to reveal and conceal simultaneously.

Working with huacos: Archaeological ceramics and relationships among worlds in the Peruvian North Coast

This article proposes a multitemporal approach to the study of archaeological ceramics in the Peruvian North Coast through archaeological ethnography. It allows us to create a new perspective of a past that seems to be continuously brought back in the ritual practices of curanderos (shamans), and in the daily life of other subjects that interact with what archaeologists call archaeological artifacts. In the rituals of curanderos and in the practice of huaqueo, where archaeological ceramics are known as huacos, it is possible to see how these vessels come to life, performing within a complex meshwork of relationships which extend over different worlds, as well as human and other-than-human participation. This discussion provokes the reevaluation of the relationships among archaeological heritage, archaeological material, and archaeological practice itself. It also shows how past and present are related in this specific Andean context.

Esparto crafting under empire: Local technology and imperial industry in Roman Iberia

Drawing on scholarship in postcolonial archaeology that emphasizes the place of indigenous technology in colonial and imperial contexts, this article explores the role of local communities in esparto grass weaving and basketry in the southeast Iberian Peninsula in antiquity. Esparto crafting became essential to Phoenician and Carthaginian colonial economies of the 1st millennium BCE and, later, to the production equipment for mining and other industries under Roman imperial rule. This paper uses ethnographic studies alongside archaeological evidence of esparto objects, particularly esparto mining equipment, to reconstruct the chaîne opératoire of ancient esparto crafting. It argues that local communities developed landscape learning and tactile technical knowledge surrounding esparto crafting over many generations. In supplying equipment essential to Roman mining, these communities used their technical knowledge to maintain agency and construct their identities under imperial rule. Ultimately, understanding esparto crafting helps elucidate the relationship between resources, technology, and imperial or colonial encounters.

Oral tradition as emplacement: Ancestral Blackfoot memories of the Rocky Mountain Front

We highlight the significance of process, event, and context of human practice in Indigenous Creation traditions to integrate Blackfoot “Napi” origin stories with environmental, geological, and archaeological information pertaining to the peopling of the Northwestern Plains, where the northern Rocky Mountain Front may have played a prominent role. First, we discuss the potential and limitations of origin stories generally, and Napi stories specifically, for complementing the fragmentary records of early human presence in the Blackfoot homeland. Second, we demonstrate the intimate connection among processes, events, place-making practices, and stories. Last, we aim to expand multivocality in the interpretation of the deep past through an archaeological practice that considers Indigenous philosophies and stories to be as valid as non-Indigenous ones.

Haplotypes and textual types: Interdisciplinary approaches to Viking Age migration and mobility

When geneticists became interested in Viking Age migration and mobility, about 20 years ago, their evidence was drawn from the DNA of modern populations. More recently, ancient DNA (aDNA) techniques have been refined to the extent that evidence from archaeological skeletons is now being brought into the discussions. While modern DNA can provide large datasets, it remains a question how well these represent populations of over a thousand years ago. On the other hand, aDNA is indeed ancient, but the datasets are small and therefore also not necessarily representative. The historical and literary texts about Viking Age migration and mobility also suffer from doubts about how representative they are. This common characteristic of texts and genetics indicates that an interdisciplinary approach would be fruitful. This paper will explore intersections between ancient texts and aDNA to suggest some ways forward.