Seminar Notes 9: Indigenous Perspectives and Decolonizing

Archaeology
By: Kyra Neufeld
For: ANTH 3123
Seminar Leader: Lara Curasev
Professor: Leigh Symonds

Date: March 21st, 2023.

 Chapter 13 of Johnson’s (2020) text goes over the political and social issues presented in

the discipline of archaeology and outlines some ways in which we can combat these issues.

Johnson takes the approach that everything we do in our everyday lives are influenced by some

political narrative of sorts. The author goes on to explain how archaeologists that claim to be

free of political bias as exhibiting privilege. The archaeological record is explained as something

that is grounded in colonial customs in which the world, we see around us is only known from

the eyes of one culture and not including others such as the indigenous peoples. The

indigenous worldview is also discussed in the paper to have attributed different worldviews

towards archaeological contexts such as artifacts. The indigenous peoples add another form to

the artifacts that includes spirituality and sacred meanings.

The article written by Cheng (2017) details the “Peaking Man” which represents the

Homo erectus that lived within Zhoukoudian near Beijing. The Peaking man was believed to

represent the direct ancestors of the Chinese inhabitants. The Chinese nationalist agenda led to

people believing that people from China did in fact evolve separately from everyone else and

were not related to the rest of the world’s population. The anthropologists in the article are

described as taking on the China-origin Chinese (COC) hypothesis in which people from China

did originate from a separate lineage while geneticists take on the Africa-origin Chinese

hypothesis in which people from China originated from Africa like everyone else. This debate

has become one in which politics is very much involved today.

Wilkinson’s (2019) article talks about the inequalities that are influenced by state

projects. Individuals such as minorities may be more susceptible to the negative effects of

certain state projects such as the shutting down of community facilities that are relied upon in
impoverished neighborhoods. The understanding of how these projects may affect minorities is

an important consideration within the fields of anthropology as it showcases the politics of a

civilization. The article goes on to further explain how certain technologies can be linked with

differing political connotations that vary geographically. The Inca Road is talked about in the

paper as being misrepresented in the archaeological record as it is interpretated from one side,

the traveler.
 References

Cheng, Yinghong
2017
“is Peking Man still our ancestor?”—genetics, anthropology, and the politics of racial
nationalism in China. The journal of Asian studies 76(3):575–602.

Johnson, Matthew H.
2020
Archaeological Theory: An Introduction. Blackwell, London, England.

Wilkinson, Darryl
2019
Infrastructure and inequality: An archaeology of the Inka road through the Amaybamba cloud
forests. Journal of social archaeology 19(1):27–46.