In recent years, postcolonial theories have emerged as one of the significant paradigms of contemporary academia, affecting disciplines throughout the humanities and social sciences. These theories address the complex processes if colonialism on culture and society—with repect to both the colonizers and the colonized—to help us understand the colonial experience in its entirety. The contributors to Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique present critical syntheses of archaeological and postcolonial studies by examining both Old and New World case studies, and they ask what the ultimate effect of postcolonial theorizing will be on the practice of archaeology in the twenty-first century.

Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique represents a synthesis of postcolonial archaeological studies from the Old and New Worlds. This volume addresses the processes of postcolonialism in light of new paradigms in contemporary academia that affect the practice of archaeology.

The contributors to this volume—themselves from six continents and many representing indigenous and minority communities and disadvantaged countries—suggest strategies to strip archaeological theory and practice of its colonial heritage and create a discipline sensitive to its inherent inequalities.

This book proposes new ways of looking at the built environment in archaeology, specifically through postcolonial perspectives. It brings together scholars and professionals from the fields of archaeology, urban studies, architectural history, and heritage in order to offer fresh perspectives on extracting and interpreting social and cultural information from architecture and monuments. The goal is to show how on-going critical engagement with the postcolonial critique can help archaeologists pursue more inclusive, sensitive, and nuanced interpretations of the built environment of the past and contribute to heritage discussions in the present. The chapters present case studies from Africa, Greece, Belgium, Australia, Syria, Kuala Lumpur, South Africa, and Chile, covering a wide range of chronological periods and settings. Through these diverse case studies, this volume encourages the reader to rethink the analytical frameworks and methods traditionally employed in the investigation of built spaces of the past. To the extent that these built spaces continue to shape identities and social relationships today, the book also encourages the reader to reflect critically on archaeologists’ ability to impact stakeholder communities and shape public perceptions of the past.

Bureaucratic Archaeology is a multi-faceted ethnography of quotidian practices of archaeology, bureaucracy and science in postcolonial India, concentrating on the workings of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). This book uncovers an endemic link between micro-practice of archaeology in the trenches of the ASI to the manufacture of archaeological knowledge, wielded in the making of political and religious identity and summoned as indelible evidence in the juridical adjudication in the highest courts of India. This book is a rare ethnography of the daily practice of a postcolonial bureaucracy from within rather than from the outside. It meticulously uncovers the social, cultural, political and epistemological ecology of ASI archaeologists to show how postcolonial state assembles and produces knowledge. This is the first book length monograph on the workings of archaeology in a non-western world, which meticulously shows how theory of archaeological practice deviates, transforms and generates knowledge outside the Euro-American epistemological tradition.

An Archaeology of Resistance: Materiality and Time in an African Borderland studies the tactics of resistance deployed by a variety of indigenous communities in the borderland between Sudan and Ethiopia. The Horn of Africa is an early area of state formation and at the same time the home of many egalitarian, small scale societies, which have lived in the buffer zone between states for the last three thousand years. For this reason, resistance is not something added to their sociopolitical structures: it is an inherent part of those structures—a mode of being. The main objective of the work is to understand the diverse forms of resistance that characterizes the borderland groups, with an emphasis on two essentially archaeological themes, materiality and time, by combining archaeological, political and social theory, ethnographic methods and historical data to examine different processes of resistance in the long term.

The practiceof archaeology has many different facets: from academia, to government, tocultural resource management, to public media. Considering the place of archaeology in society means understanding the rolesthat archaeology has in the present day and a sense of the contributions thatit can make in each of these areas, both now and in the future. Archaeologistscome to the field to pursue a variety of interests: teaching, examininghistory, preserving the environment, or studying a specialized time period orinterest. The outside world has a number of other expectations of archaeology:preservation, tourism, and education, to name but a few. From a broad and varied background, the editors have compiled a rare group ofcontributors uniquely qualified to address questions about the current state ofarchaeology and its relevance in society. There is no single answer to thequestion of how the field of archaeology should develop, and what it can do forsociety. Instead,the authors in this volume lay out the many ways in which archaeology isrelevant to the present day - considering, for example, climate change, energyexploration, warfare, national identity, the importance of stories and how theyare told, and how and why opportunities to engage with the past throughmuseums, digs, television, classes, and the print media have the formsthey currently do - creating a state-of-the-art tool for archaeologists, policymakers and the public alike to understand the work of many in the fieldand address the challenges we all face.

For more than three decades, preeminent scholars in comparative literature and postcolonial studies have called for a return to philology as the indispensable basis of critical method in the humanities. Against such calls, this book argues that the privilege philology has always enjoyed within the modern humanities silently reinforces a colonial hierarchy. In fact, each of philology's foundational innovations originally served British rule in India. Tracing an unacknowledged history that extends from British Orientalist Sir William Jones to Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said and beyond, Archaeology of Babel excavates the epistemic transformation that was engendered on a global scale by the colonial reconstruction of native languages, literatures, and law. In the process, it reveals the extent to which even postcolonial studies and European philosophy—not to mention discourses as disparate as Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu nationalism, and global environmentalism—are the progeny of colonial rule. Going further, it unearths the alternate concepts of language and literature that were lost along the way and issues its own call for humanists to reckon with the politics of the philological practices to which they now return.

Historical archaeology studies once relied upon a binary view of colonialism: colonizers and colonized, the colonial period and the postcolonial period. The contributors to this volume scrutinize imperialism and expansionism through an alternative lens that rejects simple dualities and explores the variously gendered, racialized, and occupied peoples of a multitude of faiths, desires, associations, and constraints. Colonialism is not a phase in the chronology of a people but a continuous phenomenon that spans the Old and New Worlds. Most important, the contributors argue that its impacts—and, in some instances, even the same processes set in place by the likes of Columbus—are ongoing. Inciting a critical examination of the lasting consequences of ancient and modern colonialism on descendant communities, this wide-ranging volume includes essays on Roman Britain, slavery in Brazil, and contemporary Native Americans. In its efforts to define the scope of colonialism and the comparability of its features, this collection challenges the field to go beyond familiar geographical and historical boundaries and draws attention to unfolding colonial futures.

"The author intertwines archaeology, history, and ethnohistory to examine the aftermath of the uprising in colonial New Mexico, focusing on the radical changes it instigated in Pueblo culture and society"--Provided by publisher.