Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress ( 2019)

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11759-019-09385-4

Crossing a Threshold:
RESEARCH

Collaborative Archaeology
in Global Dialogue
Alison Wylie, Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia, 1866 Main
Mall, BUCH-E370, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada
E-mail: alison.wylie@ubc.ca

ABSTRACT
________________________________________________________________

If collaborative archaeology is crossing a threshold, as several contributors

to this special issue attest, nowhere is this more clearly evident than in the
kinds of critical scrutiny it is attracting from those who are sceptical about
its aims, its ethical/political integrity and its practical efficacy. There is a
striking difference between the overtly hostile critiques that early advocates
of collaborative practice faced and the kinds of challenges they now
address. Rather than anxiety that community-based collaborations pose an
existential threat to archaeology as a discipline, current critics object that
they have failed to make any significant break with a conservative status
quo and the extractive modes of inquiry it perpetuates. I trace the
ARCHAEOLOGIES Volume 15 Number 3 December 2019

trajectory of critical responses to collaborative archaeology since the early

1990s and use this as a frame for thinking with contributors about the
nature of the threshold marked by this special issue.
________________________________________________________________

Résumé: Si l’archéologie collaborative aborde une nouvelle phase ainsi

qu’en attestent plusieurs contributeurs à cette édition spéciale, ceci n’est
nulle part ailleurs plus clairement évident que dans les types d’examen
critique qu’elle suscite de la part de ceux affichant leur scepticisme quant à
ses objectifs, son intégrité éthique/politique ainsi que son efficacité
pratique. Il y a une différence frappante entre les critiques ouvertement
hostiles auxquelles les premiers soutiens favorables à une pratique
collaborative ont été confrontés et les types de défis qu’ils doivent
aujourd’hui relever. Plutôt que l’expression d’une anxiété quant au fait que
les collaborations communautaires puissent représenter une menace
existentielle pour l’archéologie en tant que discipline, l’argument des
critiques actuelles est qu’elles ont échoué à se démarquer de manière
significative d’un statu quo conservateur et des méthodes extractives de
recherche qu’il perpétue. Je m’attache à reconstituer la trajectoire des
réactions critiques à l’archéologie collaborative depuis le début des années

570  2019 World Archaeological Congress

 Crossing a Threshold 571

1990 et je l’utilise avec des contributeurs comme un cadre de réflexion

portant sur la nature de cette évolution soulignée par cette édition spéciale.
________________________________________________________________

Resumen: Si la arqueologı́a colaborativa está cruzando un umbral, como

atestiguan varios contribuidores a este número especial, en ninguna parte
queda más evidente que en la clase de escrutinio que atrae de los que son
escépticos en cuanto a sus propósitos, su integridad ética/polı́tica y su
eficacia práctica. Existe una diferencia notable entre las crı́ticas abiertamente
hostiles que enfrentaban los primeros promotores de la práctica
colaborativa y los desafı́os que abordan ahora. En vez del temor de que las
colaboraciones basadas en la comunidad representen una amenaza
existencial a la arqueologı́a como disciplina, los crı́ticos actuales plantean la
objeción de que no han podido realizar una ruptura significativa con el
orden conservador establecido y los modos de investigación extractivas
perpetuados por ese orden. Sigo la trayectoria de las respuestas crı́ticas a la
arqueologı́a colaborativa a partir de inicios de los años 1990 y utilizo esto
como marco para pensar, junto con los contribuidores, acerca de la
naturaleza del umbral marcado por este número especial.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

KEY WORDS

Collaborative research, Critical archaeology, Indigenous archaeology, Politics

of archaeology
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A number of contributors to this special issue describe collaborative prac-

tice in archaeology as crossing a threshold (eg. Dring et al. 2019), and the
diversity of practice represented here certainly attests to the maturation of
community-based and community-led ways of doing archaeology. But this
is a complicated threshold, one that reflects ongoing debate about the goals
and viability of such practice: not just how to do it (well), but whether it
marks a break with extractive modes of inquiry and the injustices they per-
petrate; and, conversely, what its implications are for the integrity and
credibility of archaeology as a discipline. I trace the trajectory of critical
responses to collaborative archaeology since the early 1990s as marked by
three contrasting sets of objections, and use this as a frame for thinking
with contributors about the nature of the threshold marked by this global
dialogue on collaborative practice.
572 A. WYLIE

Critiques of collaborative practice

There was a palpable sense of horror in early reactions to those who argued
that, rather than resisting external demands for accountability, archaeolo-
gists should actively seek out and cultivate equitable, working partnerships
with non-scientific stakeholders, especially descendant communities; noth-
ing less than the core identity of archaeology as a discipline was under
threat. Geoff Clark’s uncompromising resistance to demands for repatria-
tion in Demon-haunted World (1998) captured the spirit of these critiques;
to accede to the interests of non-archaeologists was to open the door to the
very anti-Enlightenment forces of obscurantism and superstition that
threatened to rob archaeology of its database. Rather than ‘‘capitulating’’ to
the dictates of a misguided liberal pluralism, as philosopher Paul Boghos-
sian later put it (2006: 2), archaeologists should vigorously defend archaeol-
ogy as a science of and for human kind against the intrusion of special
interests; anything less would be to abandon a commitment to professional
integrity and undermine its defining intellectual reason for existing as a
field. A decade later Bob McGhee (2008) doubled down on objections that
had circulated more discretely. He argued that Indigenous communities
have no epistemically distinctive standpoint that could offer alternative ways
of understanding the past; to claim otherwise is to re-entrench a pernicious
essentialism. In this case, the very idea of an Indigenous archaeology, or an
archaeology informed or led by Indigenous partners, is a non-starter; the
universalizing goals of an archaeology that serves humanity, society at large,
take precedence over community-specific interests.
In face of this epistemic and ontological boundary policing, one coun-
ter-strategy taken up by those working to secure a foothold for a different
kind of archaeology was to publish positive object lessons that illustrate
how productive it can be to do archaeology in partnership with stakehold-
ers who had typically never been consulted about, let alone actively
engaged in the research process. The ‘‘Working Together’’ columns that
appeared the SAA Bulletin beginning in 1993 did exactly this. In the first
few years, most carried the message that the sky had not fallen; the integ-
rity of archaeological research was not fatally undermined; indeed, much
was to be gained on all sides by working in partnership. In particular, they
show in concrete terms that the shifting array of non-archaeological others
whose influence had seemed so threatening have a great deal to offer by
way of distinctive insights about the cultural pasts archaeologists study,
and also about archaeology itself. They often illustrate the point that col-
laborative partners could bring to bear the wisdom of critical distance,
broadening the horizons of inquiry by questioning background assump-
tions—about the goals of inquiry, conventions of practice, norms of justifi-
 Crossing a Threshold 573

cation—that archaeologists themselves largely took for granted. Other more

directly critical responses call into question the value-free, context-tran-
scendent ideals of scientific integrity that critics of collaborative practice
invoke; this is the line I took in appraisal of Clark and Boghossian, among
others (Wylie 2015). The rebuttals to McGhee’s claims that appeared in
American Antiquity after a two-year delay also challenge his assumptions
about the integrity of community partners; as Michael Wilcox puts it, he
‘‘misrepresents both science and Indigeneity’’ (2010: 221; see also Croes
2010; Silliman 2010; Colwell-Chanthaphohn et al. 2010). Although the
focus here was on Indigenous communities, several decades of sophisti-
cated debate about ‘‘strategic essentialism’’ make it clear that critiques of
the stance taken by McGhee have broader reach; appeals to collective (sub-
altern) identities need not presume rigid boundaries and internal homo-
geneity, or depend on reactionary bio-essentialism, to ground standpoints
that are epistemically distinctive and consequential.
Critics of collaborative archaeology have since pivoted sharply away
from the objection that it forsakes, or threatens to undermine, the defining
ideals of archaeology as a science; instead, they target failures to realize its
own goals as an explicitly situated and ethically, politically engaged under-
taking. In an uncompromising series of critiques published in the last dec-
ade, Marina La Salle and Rich Hutchings condemn collaborative,
community-based archaeology on grounds that, whatever the intentions of
its advocates, no significant inroads have been made toward changing ‘‘the
colonial culture of archaeology’’ (La Salle and Hutchings 2018: 224). Col-
laborative archaeology is ultimately ‘‘the same old practice dressed up in
new language’’ (La Salle 2010: 402); it is mainly in the business of ‘‘pro-
duc[ing] self-interested and self-referential knowledge’’ (2010: 403) that
functions as a ‘‘colonial technology of government designed to control liv-
ing Indigenous people by controlling their heritage’’ (La Salle and Hutch-
ings 2018: 231). Moreover, this is not just a contingent failure to realize
‘‘lofty goals’’ (La Salle and Hutchings 2016: 170). On La Salle and Hutch-
ings’ account, the institutional and economic conditions under which
archaeology is practiced enforce complicity with the eliminationist agendas
of settler colonial regimes and the economic imperatives of late-stage capi-
talism—a complicity that is perpetuated by self-delusion and complacency
(La Salle and Hutchings 2016: 175), deliberate misrepresentation and eva-
sion (Hutchings and La Salle 2016; La Salle 2010: 413–414). Those engaged
in collaborative practice, they charge, do not ‘‘seriously engage with …
foundational and systemic problems, notably modernity, capitalism, neolib-
eralism, elitism, racism, resourcism, and, above all, ecocide, ethnocide, and
genocide’’ (La Salle and Hutchings 2016: 175). They may position them-
selves as part of the solution (La Salle and Hutchings 2018: 233), but their
practice is at best an ineffectual fraud, if not actively harmful to those it is
574 A. WYLIE

intended to serve. Until archaeologists ‘‘openly and honestly’’ confront this

indictment of their practice, it will never change (La Salle and Hutchings
2016: 175).
Invoking Audre Lorde’s essay, ‘‘The master’s tools will never dismantle
the master’s house’’ (1984), La Salle registers scepticism that ‘‘individuals
trained in a Western tradition and operating under Western capitalist ide-
ology’’ can ever successfully ‘‘‘think outside the box’ to affect real social
change,’’ especially when this ideology takes the form a mainstream liberal-
ism that ‘‘conveniently excuses [them] from taking a stand’’ (2010: 413–
414). If archaeologists are serious about rectifying the power asymmetries
that perpetuate social injustice, they should be prepared to ‘‘act as techni-
cians’’ and cede to their community partners the right to decide not only
what research to do but also, crucially, ‘‘to decide not to do research’’
(2010: 416). The end point of continua of collaborative practice (eg. Col-
well-Chanthaphohn and Ferguson 2008; Colwell 2016) should not be col-
laborative partnerships, however equitable, but Indigenous control and
‘‘planned obsolescence’’ for archaeologists as experts (La Salle and Hutch-
ings 2016: 173, 2018: 229; La Salle 2010).
In fact, ‘‘open and honest,’’ often sharply critical appraisal of who bene-
fits from collaborative archaeology, the risk that extant conditions will sys-
tematically undermine its avowed goals, and the need to surrender power
and authority in ways that will radically transform archaeology, is by no
means the sole province of critics like La Salle and Hutchings. The con-
cerns they insist have been off the table have figured prominently in the lit-
erature on collaborative practice from the outset, albeit typically with more
attention to the challenges posed by particular contexts and types of collab-
orative practice than La Salle and Hutchings consider, and in the spirit of
finding constructive ways forward. For example, Kurt Dongoske made the
issues they raise a priority for the SAA Bulletin’s ‘‘Working Together’’ col-
umn when he took over its editorship in 1995. While he ‘‘applaud[ed] the
effort to bring to the attention of the SAA readership the many cooperative
working relationships between Native Americans and archaeologists that
exist throughout the Americas’’ (1995: 7), he suspected that the good news
stories highlighted in ‘‘warm and fuzzy’’ case studies were likely the excep-
tion, not the rule. To ensure that the column would be a useful guide to
practice, not just a ‘‘self-serving, ‘pat ourselves on the back’ exercise’’
(1995: 7), he sought critical commentary, especially from Indigenous part-
ners, and cases that illustrate break points and failures in building these
working relationships, not just their putative successes. I leave it to others
to assess his success in this overall, but several early examples—for exam-
ple, Randy McGuire’s and Michael Smith’s descriptions of collaborative
projects in Mexico, published in 1995 and 1997—detail exactly the risks of
reproducing and exacerbating oppressive political dynamics that concern
 Crossing a Threshold 575

La Salle and Hutchings. In this spirit, the response by Andrew Martindale

et al. (2016) to ‘‘What makes us squirm’’—La Salle and Hutchings’ (2016)
critique of a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Archaeology on ‘‘Com-
munity-oriented Archaeology’’ that Martindale co-edited with Natasha
Lyons (2014)—is a strikingly candid appraisal of the risks of co-optation,
the constraints imposed by entrenched asymmetries of power and resource,
and the limitations of what archaeologists can contribute, as archaeologists,
to broader decolonizing goals. They agree that ‘‘good intentions’’ (La Salle
2010: 417) are not enough and that constant vigilance is required to ensure
that ‘‘archaeology as service’’ actually does serve partner communities and
goals of social justice. But ultimately they disagree that archaeology is sim-
ply or inevitably statecraft (2016: 185), and pose the challenge: ‘‘do we
work to end archaeology or do we work to transform it?’’ (Martindale
et al. 2016: 192).
In taking up this challenge, Martindale et al. build on a rich store of
insight and advice articulated by prominent advocates of collaborative
practice who had wrestled with exactly the issues raised by La Salle and
Hutchings from the time they first advocated such work (eg. McGuire
1992; Ferguson 1996; Swidler et al. 1997; Collwell-Chanthaphohn and Fer-
guson 2008; Atalay 2012). A consistent theme in this literature is an insis-
tence that, wherever a particular project sits on a continuum of
collaborative practice, a commitment to partnership requires archaeologists
to cultivate a stance of epistemic and, for that matter, social and cultural
humility; they must be prepared to rethink their goals and reconfigure prac-
tice from the ground up with the aim of shifting control of the research
process to partner communities. In a probingly self-critical appraisal that
appeared 2 years before La Salle and Hutchings published their no-holds-
barred critique of ‘‘Community-oriented archaeology,’’ Kisha Supernant
and Gary Warrick (2014) describe two cases in which conditions of con-
flict, perpetuated by the imposition of colonial systems of governance on
Indigenous communities, led them to conclude that ‘‘there are situations
where we cannot do ethical archaeology as outsiders’’ (2014: 582). Far
from evading issues of complicity, they give a vivid account of how it
became clear that, under the circumstances, the process and the results of
archaeological investigation would re-entrench colonial constructs, exacer-
bating internal and inter-community conflict. There are no easy answers,
they say, and none that generalize, but if the aim is to ‘‘decolonize archae-
ology in solidarity with Indigenous peoples’’ (2014: 563), the imperative is
to ask honestly for whom are we doing archaeology (584). Like La Salle
and Hutchings they recognize that this may well mean that archaeologists
serve partner communities in a technical capacity and that this expertise
may not be welcome or useful. But unlike La Salle and Hutchings they are
576 A. WYLIE

nonetheless optimistic that archaeologists can ‘‘mobilize their privilege to

help work against power imbalances’’ (La Salle 2014: 582).
A recent article by Charles Menzies and Caroline Butler (2019) extends
this point about respecting the autonomy of community partners and fur-
ther complicates assumptions about who archaeologists are and in what
relation they stand to community partners. Menzies, an anthropologist at
the University of British Columbia, is a member of the Gitxaała Nation
whose culture and heritage he studies, while Butler is a non-Indigenous
employee of the Nation with whom, often as not, Menzies has to negotiate
research access. Together, they challenge the paternalism of assuming that
it is communities who have a ‘‘capacity deficit’’ that collaborative research
partnerships can redress (2019: 268), or that they play a ‘‘passive,’’ depen-
dent role when it comes to determining what research will be done and
how it will proceed. From a Gitxaała perspective, they report, ‘‘capacity
building has gone in the opposite direction—it is the Nation that has been
building capacity at UBC for over a decade’’ (2019: 277). In doing this, the
Gitxaała have been highly strategic in taking control of the research process
so that it serves the sovereigntist agenda of the community, deliberately
‘‘working to undermine the unidirectional aspect of knowledge extraction’’
(2019: 278). Like La Salle and Hutchings, they acknowledge that ‘‘good col-
laborative research … results in the researchers becoming disempowered’’
(2019: 280), but they also emphasize the importance of an ongoing negoti-
ation that builds external as well as internal capacity; if researchers are to
contribute to Gitxaała goals, their careers must flourish at the same time as
they take up projects that benefit the partner community. La Salle and
Hutching’s critique is too simplistic to capture the complexity and dyna-
mism of such reciprocal relationships; to paraphrase Wilcox, they misrep-
resent both partners to collaborative projects.
A recent third turn in critical appraisal of community-based collabora-
tive archaeology echoes many of La Salle and Hutching’s objections but
takes exactly the opposite tack where the question of alternatives is con-
cerned. Citing the ‘‘recent wave of reactionary populism’’ as a watershed
that poses a particular challenge for community-oriented, public archaeol-
ogy, Alfredo González-Ruibal and his co-authors object that archaeologists
lack a critical politics and therefore reproduce the structural conditions
that subvert good intentions (González-Ruibal et al. 2018: 507; González-
Ruibal 2019: 49). But by contrast to La Salle and Hutchings, the problem
they diagnose is not enforced complicity in the political-economic regimes
that collaborative archaeology is meant to disrupt. In their view, neither
the heritage industries that serve oppressive systems of governance nor
‘‘predatory capitalism’’ need archaeologists or their ‘‘legitimating narra-
tives’’ to construct a politically expedient, commodified heritage (2018:
 Crossing a Threshold 577

513). The problem as they see it is that, under the guise of an ‘‘epistemic
populism,’’ archaeologists who aim to work with and for stakeholder com-
munities ‘‘invent the People that they need’’; they construct an idealized
conception of ‘‘the community’’—the ‘‘units into which the People are
organized’’ (2018: 508)—that obscures the ‘‘diverse, fragmented, complex’’
realities, and the often reactionary politics, of those with whom they
develop partnerships (2018: 508). The ‘‘soft politics’’ of well-intentioned
liberalism leaves archaeologists without ‘‘the political or intellectual weap-
ons necessary to face the coalition of predatory capitalism and reactionary
populism’’ (2018: 510). In particular, the ideological commitment to multi-
culturalism and multivocality that González-Ruibal et al. attribute to com-
munity-oriented practitioners provides no basis for critically appraising
they work with. Archaeologists in general—especially those engaged in
community-oriented, collaborative archaeology—are described as uncriti-
cally celebrating ‘‘everything that is popular, bottom-up and local’’ (2018:
210), ignoring the illiberal values and attitudes of those who are, as they
put it, ‘‘greedy, patriarchal, xenophobic, uninterested in the past’’ (2018:
509), and downplaying intransigent conflict (2019: 51). The evasion here is
of such questions as, ‘‘Who are the public? Who is indigenous?’’ (2018:
507), and of conflict itself which González-Ruibal regards as ‘‘inherent to
social life,’’ something that ‘‘a truly political approach should not attempt
to displace by sacrificing agonism for the sake of consensus’’ (2019: 50).
The response that González-Ruibal and colleagues recommend is pre-
cisely not to cultivate a humble appreciation of the limits of what archaeol-
ogy has to offer, defer to community interests, and accept the ultimate
obsolescence of archaeological expertise. It is, instead to take up a forth-
rightly critical and activist stance as experts: ‘‘provoke the People’’; tell
uncomfortable truths; articulate explicit social critique; and actively inter-
vene with the aim of ‘‘creat[ing] social links and support[ing] collective
action that has the potential to bring about real change’’ (2018: 511). They
call on those who are committed to the goals of social justice to ‘‘make
archaeology political again’’ (2018: 513); they should embrace what Gonzá-
lez-Ruibal refers to as a ‘‘hard politics’’ that explicitly refuses the ‘‘post-po-
litical tendencies’’ of mainstream archaeology (2019: 50). It is precisely
because archaeology is superfluous to global capitalism and hegemonic sys-
tems of governance that it ‘‘has the opportunity to redefine its relationship
with society’’ (2018: 210). In exploiting this opportunity what archaeolo-
gists have to offer, on González-Ruibal’s account, is a set of ‘‘operations’’
by which they can and, he acknowledges, often do effectively disrupt
entrenched ideologies that naturalize present conditions, for example: ‘‘dis-
sensus‘‘ and ‘‘disclosure’’ that make visible negative histories that have
been suppressed; ‘‘defamilarisation’’ and ‘‘desublimation‘‘ that expose the
banal or abject dimensions of a valorized past; and ‘‘descent’’ that recon-
578 A. WYLIE

structs suppressed genealogies, linking the violence of historical process to

its visible, sanitized, taken-for-granted outcomes (2019: 58–69). All of these
strategies figure prominently in the examples of collaborative practice pre-
sented in this special issue, and González-Ruibal’s appraisal of their effec-
tiveness echoes what many contributors describe as the distinctive
contributions archaeology can make in the context of collaborative prac-
tice. ‘‘The trope of unearthing the past might be a well-worn one,’’ Gonzá-
lez-Ruibal observes, but it ‘‘holds tremendous potential’’ to surface
‘‘truths’’ that have been disappeared, recentre the lives and practices of
those written out of received history, and tangibly challenge the distortions
and erasures of ‘‘supermodernity’’ (2019: 62).
This call to action is by no means a new departure; indeed, González-
Ruibal describes it as a return to a more forthright and radical political
stance in archaeology exemplified, for example, by McGuire’s Archaeology
as Political Action (2008). Reflecting on the Mexican borderlands case he
described in his 1995 ‘‘Working Together’’ column as well as his later Col-
orado Coalfield War project, McGuire argues that ‘‘archaeologists should
not simply let every community’s interests go unchallenged’’ but should
base their actions and judgments on ‘‘an ethic of human emancipation’’
(2008: 144). Indeed, a good many collaborative practitioners have done
exactly this. González-Ruibal’s injunction against romanticizing ‘‘the Peo-
ple’’ resonates with Michael Smith’s 1997 ‘‘Working Together’’ column,
‘‘Archaeology in the Middle of Political Conflict in Yautepec, Mexico,’’
which he opens with the observation that discussions of collaborative prac-
tice can sound ‘‘naı̈ve and out of touch’’ to anyone who works in contexts
where there is no single ‘‘public’’ and when positive interactions with any
one community or faction will be received as hostile by others. It is exactly
this kind of complexity that Supernant and Warrick consider, that Menzies
and Butler negotiate, and that contributors to this global dialogue explore.
But while they steer clear of La Salle and Hutchings’ paralyzing pessimism
about the prospects for archaeology ever making a constructive difference
in such contexts, they clearly do not embrace the unapologetic elitism of
González-Ruibal’s call for a ‘‘hard politics’’ of interventionist community-
facing archaeology. They all work in spaces of political precarity and intel-
lectual uncertainty of a kind that González-Ruibal and his co-authors only
occasionally acknowledge, as when they qualify their endorsement of an
‘‘archaeology that teaches’’—‘‘admittedly, teaching by archaeologists is
totally out of place in many non-Western (indigenous) contexts, where
archaeologists have indeed more to learn than to teach’’ (2018: 511)—and
when González-Ruibal concedes that the contrast between a hard and soft
politics of engagement is not strictly dichotomous: a hard politics can
sometimes be seen in archaeological work that is presented as ‘‘just soft
interventions’’ (González-Ruibal 2019: 50). The range of examples of col-
 Crossing a Threshold 579

laborative practice presented in this special issue suggests that what Gonzá-
lez-Ruibal and his colleagues acknowledge as exceptions are most likely the
rule, with the result that the lessons drawn are a good deal more nuanced
than those put forward they them or by critics like Clark and McGhee,
and La Salle and Hutchings.

The global dialogue

Although the genres of critique I have identified are often tendentious and
over-stated, they throw into sharp relief a persistent set of challenges with
which practitioners of collaborative archaeology have to reckon. I whole-
heartedly agree with Dring et al. (2019) that even though collaborative
practice is now flourishing in many contexts this is not a moment for self-
congratulation. There is certainly value in ongoing, evolving critique that
challenges practitioners to interrogate each of the key terms that define the
remit of a ‘‘global dialogue on collaborative archaeology,’’ and I am heart-
ened that the contributors to this special issue address exactly the issues
raised by critics like La Salle and Hutchings, and González-Ruibal et al.
Taken together, the specificity of the political, social, material and epis-
temic circumstances they navigate unsettles any presumption that there is
one way to respond to these widely and explicitly recognized challenges.
The one ‘‘unifying principle’’ Clark and Horning (2019) identify in their
introduction is that ‘‘active collaboration with a wide variety of stakehold-
ers forces practitioners to rethink how and why we do archaeology,
indeed…to question what archaeology is, can, and should be.’’ What’s
needed is not another round of sweeping programmatic claims about the
failings or the virtues of collaborative archaeology, but close-to-the-ground
attention to the tenuousness, the dynamism and the complexity of the
ongoing negotiations that characterize this work in the diverse contexts
where it is now practiced.
I cannot hope to do justice to the essays that make up this special issue
and, in any case, they speak for themselves. But to highlight one way they
move discussion forward, consider how, as a collective, the contributors
engage the various genres of critique of collaborative practice I have identi-
fied. In the process I identify two additional unifying principles that I see
emerging in this discussion.
The first type of critique—that collaborative practice threatens the integ-
rity of archaeology as a field—is not in itself a primary concern. As Clark
(2019) puts it, her aim is to ‘‘push us to think about a potentially more
radical proposal,’’ one that moves beyond a general recognition, of the
kind I have advocated, that mobilizing diverse epistemic resources makes
for better outcomes in the form of ‘‘more accurate reconstructions of a
580 A. WYLIE

richer, embodied past’’—‘‘better science.’’ Articulating what is, perhaps, a

second unifying principle, she puts the emphasis squarely on ‘‘good pro-
cess.’’ And, indeed, every contributor identifies not only ways in which the
process of working in partnership can be transformative and should be val-
ued in its own right, but also how it is constrained by conventional disci-
plinary measures of success and productivity. Greenberg (2019) gives an
especially vivid account of how, in highly competitive environments, insti-
tutional reward systems reinforce the narrow specialism of entrenched dis-
ciplinary norms in ways that systematically disadvantage even those who
are, in principle ‘‘free to follow their conscience’’ as academic or indepen-
dent researchers. Dring et al. (2019) also describe the persistent tension
involved in balancing a commitment to pursue lines of inquiry that are rel-
evant to the preservation and management goals of the Eastern Pequot
with the demands of the academic institutions that employ and train their
archaeological partners. They respond directly to La Salle’s (2014) reading
of what this involves, noting that, in this ‘‘fundamentally cultural and
political exchange,’’ the Eastern Pequot ‘‘never envisioned themselves to be
the only beneficiaries of this heritage process.’’ The active role they play in
this ongoing negotiation, and their interest in pursuing a strategy of ‘‘dual
advancement,’’ resonates with Menzies and Butler’s (2019) discussion of
the reciprocal capacity building required for archaeologists to be effective
community partners. The implication is that archaeologists committed to
explicitly political goals of social justice have to be activists not just in their
engagement with community partners and stakeholders but with respect to
their own institutions, a point to which I return at the end.
The second type of critique—that collaborative archaeology is complicit
in systems of oppression—is an explicit and dominant concern in this glo-
bal dialogue. The target of these critiques is often the genre of good news
stories labelled, by Dongoske and by La Salle and Hutchings alike, as
‘‘warm and fuzzy’’ accounts of success that ignore or, indeed, deliberately
obscure the ways in which well-intentioned collaborations can perpetuate
the very social injustices they mean to subvert. The contributors to this
special issue do present what might be characterized as positive object les-
sons in the form of rich examples of collaborations that are productive in
just the senses valorized by González-Ruibal: ‘‘stich[ing] together the frayed
fabric of memory’’ (Greenberg 2019); using tangible material traces to
evoke pasts that have been ‘‘wilfully forgotten’’ (Clark and Horning 2019),
or deliberately suppressed through settler colonial practices of ‘‘repressive
erasure’’ and annulment (Mrozowski and Rae Gould 2019; Smith et al.
2019); tracing genealogies of presence that testify not only to profoundly
violent ‘‘negative histories’’ but also to strategies and legacies of survivance,
countering legally consequential narratives of disappearance (Dring et al.
2019; Mrozowski and Rae Gould 2019). But in each case contributors doc-
 Crossing a Threshold 581

ument the vagaries of process; these are by no means uncritical, self-con-

gratulating narratives of success. The value of such accounts lies in the can-
dour with which they describe uncertainties and mis-steps, failures or
limitations that could not be overcome, as well as pitfalls narrowly avoided
and lucky accidents that opened up unanticipated opportunities for pro-
ductive engagement. These include, for example, the ‘‘hybrid’’ public out-
reach/archaeology project that Clark developed through a process of
experimenting with strategies for engaging communities of Japanese intern-
ment camp survivors and their descendants; Chesson et al.’s (2019) and
Shakour et al.’s (2019) ethnographic process of listening and observing that
resulted in a wholesale reframing of their research agendas in Calabria and
in western Ireland; the uncertain, labour-intensive process of mining state
archives designed to erase Nipmuc presence and political leadership (Mro-
zowski and Rae Gould 2019); and the decades-long dialogue that Dring
et al. (2019) emphasize as essential for ensuring that they and their Eastern
Pequot partners understand not just what archaeology might contribute
but also what risks it carries.
What makes a narrative ‘‘tellable,’’ some argue, is that in tracing what
happened it also ‘‘sideshadows’’ what could have but did not happen; it is
in identifying counter-factually articulated turning points that foreclose
some possibilities and become, in retrospect, the necessary precondition
for what followed, that narratives get explanatory traction (Beatty 2017: 35,
39–41). In the case of narratives about collaborative practice, it is these
contrastive ‘‘disnarrative’’ elements that offer instructive lessons for prac-
tice, not as categorical directives but as counterfactuals that suggest ways of
going on that may extend beyond the case at hand. A disnarrative that is
useful in this action-guiding, normative sense will be one that provides an
understanding of the motivations, and the material and structural condi-
tions, that configured the space of possibilities navigated in a particular
case including, most especially, those that conspire to undermine best
intentions, compromising action and enforcing complicity. The lessons that
emerge in the suite of process narratives presented here focus attention on
the specificity of the circumstances that make constructive engagement
possible, and emphasize the contingencies involved, first in learning what
kinds of ‘‘intellectual service’’ (Chesson et al. 2019) are called for, and then
determining how an archaeological tool kit might be put to work in this
connection. The question of whether master’s tools, in the form of archae-
ological inquiry, can serve purposes other than those of domination is
raised by Chesson and her co-authors. Invoking Lorde they ask how
archaeologists can ‘‘still be archaeologists and work to help, not harm.’’ It
is worth noting that what Lorde refers to as ‘‘master’s tools’’ are the strate-
gies that dominant elites use to secure their ruling position by setting those
582 A. WYLIE

they subjugate against one another, fostering fear and suspicion that under-
mines their capacity to work in solidarity against their oppressors. By con-
trast to the implications La Salle draws, it does not follow that the
intellectual, technical, material and institutional resources that a dominant
class has used to divide and control those they subjugate can only ever
serve their interests. What contributors describe as a Freirean process of
active investigation and responsive listening is often, most fundamentally, a
process of determining how ‘‘master’s tools’’ in this narrower sense—in
this case, the resources of disciplinary archaeology—might be appropriated
and used to subvert the conditions of systemic oppression they have played
a role in creating and sustaining. The process of articulating research agen-
das that serve these ends needs to be reclaimed as, itself, innovative and
critical work that is inextricably political as well as intellectual.
Finally, all the contributors to this special issue counter the third line of
critique, directly or by example: that collaborative practice is predicated on
a simplistic conception of ‘‘the People,’’ an uncritical celebration of their
interests and goals, and a studied refusal to take a political stand. Shakour
et al. (2019) echo González-Ruibal’s suspicion of tendencies to homogenize
or essentialize those they work with, calling on their colleagues to ‘‘compli-
cate the term ‘community’.’’ Others heed this call, foregrounding the com-
plexities of the communities with whom they work. In some cases,
process-focused narratives highlight unexpected insights about generational
dynamics and rural-urban divisions where overtly political divisions are
not immediately apparent (eg. Chesson et al. 2019; Shakour et al. 2019).
By contrast, the imposition of settler colonial legal systems on Indigenous
and Aboriginal peoples is an example of master’s tools in exactly the sense
that concerns Lorde; calculated to divide and control, they systematically
erase traces of the violence by which eliminationist strategies are trans-
acted. It may be obvious that commitment to a sovereigntist agenda is
what’s called for, but successful repurposing of archaeological tools in these
contexts requires an ongoing process of learning what the stakes are when
strategies of dispossession are ongoing and when they are effective precisely
because they are a moving target.
Working in a context of overtly violent oppression, Greenberg (2019)
describes the perils of taking an explicitly political stand against the repres-
sive politics of the Israeli state. But just at the point when it seems his con-
clusion must be that archaeology has nothing useful to offer under the
circumstances, he makes the case that the anarchy of capitalism and the
divided loyalties of academic institutions ‘‘create some wiggle room’’ that
archaeologists can exploit to decolonize their own practice and to foster a
politics of resistance in solidarity with ‘‘a growing backlash against the
neoliberal paradigm and against ethnocentric conservatism’’; archaeological
tools are not necessarily ‘‘wedded to privilege.’’ Horning (2019), who navi-
 Crossing a Threshold 583

gates the stark political divides of post-Troubles Northern Ireland, is cited

by González-Ruibal in his indictment of the politics of neoliberal multicul-
turalism as an example of all that he finds problematic in community-ori-
ented archaeology. As she demonstrates, this is a gross misrepresentation.
She problematizes the language of collaboration, noting that, in Northern
Ireland, it signals betrayal and deception as much as working together;
here the hard politics González-Ruibal advocates could not be more coun-
terproductive. The stand Horning takes is a commitment to peacebuilding
in a context where tangible archaeological evidence can do exactly the work
of surfacing ‘‘truths’’ about the past that González-Ruibal calls for (2019:
62), bringing into sharp focus the complexities of a ‘‘wilfully forgotten’’
past that destabilize hardened oppositions in the present. This is by no
means an evasion of the politics of conflict; it is an explicitly political com-
mitment to ‘‘open space for reconsidering the future,’’ informed by critical
appraisal of the ways in which collective memory has been manipulated to
normalize structural conditions that compromise contemporary peacemak-
ing efforts (Horning 2019).
In closing, I note a sense in which collaboration of the kind Horning
warns against may be worth retaining. As in much earlier reflection on col-
laborative archaeology, the central challenge marked by all the contributors
to this global dialogue is that, to transform archaeology, it is crucial to take
an activist stance aimed at transforming the institutions and structural
conditions that configure its practice. This is the third principle I see run-
ning through this global dialogue, alongside the first two: that there is no
one way to do collaborative practice and, given this contextualism, and
that it is crucial to displace a preoccupation with products and attend to
the qualities of process that make productive partnerships possible. As per
the first principle, in some cases effective activism may require disengage-
ment, a refusal to pursue an archaeological research agenda, or the hard
politics of an oppositional stance. In others, it may be possible to work
from within. As Britt (2019) argues, possibilities for change may open up
even within the most unpromising of institutional settings; she describes
making use of legislated ethics to enforce the obligations of federal agencies
and decolonize the consultative processes they mandate.
In this spirit, Atalay offers an inspiring catalogue of lessons learned,
skills cultivated, and practice-tested strategies developed by community-fac-
ing archaeologists that are essential tools for transforming institutions, rele-
vant well beyond the archaeological contexts and purposes for which they
were intended. These are a matter of building connections and creating
spaces that foster collaboration, exactly the strategies that Lorde advocates
when she argues that, to effectively counter the divisive legacies of oppres-
sion, we need to ‘‘take our differences and make them strengths’’ (1984:
112). To be a collaborator in this sense is to deliberately betray the norms
584 A. WYLIE

and practices—the characteristic ‘‘pathologies of end-stage capital-

ism’’—that configure the disciplinary specialisms and institutional silos in
which archaeology has traditionally been taught and practiced (Atalay
2019). A commitment to reach across difference and bridge these divides is
what animates these strategies. Using the master’s tools—taking the stance
of the disengaged critic, invoking the authority of elite expertise in service
of social justice—may secure limited and short-term gains, primarily for
those who deploy them. But as strategies that exploit extant hierarchies of
power they reproduce the divisive oppositions Lorde calls on us to disman-
tle. As she puts it, the master’s tools ‘‘may allow us to temporarily beat
him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine
change’’ (1984: 112). The hope, courage, compassion, and solidarity of
commitment to an ‘‘ethic of human emancipation’’ require radically differ-
ent tools, ones grounded in a stance of epistemic and political humility
that take a recognition of uncertainty and the need for situationally tuned
and responsive engagement as their point of departure. While advocacy for
such as stance is by no means new, I take it to be emblematic of the
threshold collaborative archaeology is crossing, and it is by no means
‘‘post-political.’’

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