Go to any gathering of archaeologists in this province, and you will look upon a sea of white faces. Visit archaeological sites, and you will overwhelmingly see white people in charge. Deal with the Archaeology Branch in Victoria and you will learn that the staff that manages an 15,000 year old archaeological record that is 99% Indigenous lacks representation from those communities.
Archaeology, like many fields, has a diversity problem.
But why is it a problem? Don’t archaeologists, and other scientists, apply their knowledge and methods in unbiased ways? Doesn’t the evidence speak for itself? Aren’t training and education sufficient?
To begin answering these questions, let’s consider the history of history-making.
Much of early archaeology was indisputably racist: antiquarians dedicated to identifying the vast spectrum of non-European peoples, then organizing them into hierarchies from more to less sophisticated, with European (and later North American) white cultures at the top.
A common approach to this involved measuring skulls. The idea was to identify features associated with more intelligent, moral, “advanced” peoples, and with less intelligent, immoral, “barbaric” peoples. Called phrenology, this now-debunked race science was practiced widely on Black and Indigenous people, living and dead.
In British Columbia, early archaeology was consumed with the idea of confirming the primitive nature of Indigenous peoples using this method, which led to horrific exhumation of burial grounds by the men considered the founders of BC archaeology.
In 1899, Harlan I. Smith wrote to Franz Boas on how this was done: “By taking skeletons out on our backs we got them out without Indians realizing the bulk & so free from objections. But when the Indian return from fishing it will not be pleasant to be here”. These stolen ancestors remain in museums, the property of “science”, and this history of grave-robbing remains a stain on our field.
The practice of skull-measuring was carried out on the living too. Some of the most enduring images we have of renowned Tk’emlups Chief Louis Clexlixqen, for example, came from just such efforts: race-science masquerading as portraiture.
Throughout the Americas, much of 19th and early 20th century archaeology concerned itself with explaining how some of the most astounding architectural achievements of precolonial societies could not have been created by ancestors of living Indigenous people, who were “too primitive” to have built mounds, engineered canals, or created monumental art.
Non-Indigenous archaeologists interpreting ancient Indigenous culture have necessarily done so through the lens of Euro-centric biases. The result has often been to reduce millennia of sustainable technologies to insignificant “stone age” cultures.
So why does it matter now? Because much of the fundamental knowledge that North Americans and Europeans have on Indigenous and other cultures still rests on the racist stereotypes that archaeology has generated. Our research has helped rationalize dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their land, marginalizing Chinese people as worthy of only labour, segregating Black people as less-than-human.
For example, the very basis of Canadian “Indian policy” rests on stereotypes that archaeology and anthropology helped create. The Indian Residential School system was an answer to the belief that Indigenous cultures and peoples were inferior and in need of fixing. The Indian reserve system was used to remove people from lands on the grounds that they were unused wilderness, a lie backed up by archaeologists’ refusal to consider any evidence that didn’t line up with European expectations.
So back to the question of diversity: would having more archaeologists of colour change how archaeology is done? Of course. Archaeology is the people who do it, after all.
The questions that researchers ask determine the products of science. As the history of archaeology shows, scientists motivated by demonstrating the supremacy of white people produce racist results. Scientists of colour, with real connections to communities they study, will necessarily ask—and answer—these questions differently, creating a field that’s more accountable to all communities.
It’s beyond time to open the gates and hear from a diversity of voices on the past.
IMAGE: Digging at Marpole midden (cesnam) 1888, City of Vancouver Archives.
Labourers and archaeologists excavating deposits and collecting skulls for comparison at c̓əsnaʔəm. Known to Musqueam people as a major ancestral village site, archaeologists referred to the area as the Great Fraser or Marpole Midden, an archaeological term for garbage dump.