Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities by Sonya Atalay (review)

Atalay’s book is a road map for the future. With precision and nuance, she explains and models Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) goals and methods. In the process, she coaches contemporary archaeologists about how to overcome their discipline’s ugly, colonial history and produce a decolonized archaeology that can work for and with indigenous peoples. Atalay’s work shows definitively that while Native peoples are overwhelmingly anti-colonial, we need not be summarily anti-archaeology.

The book makes clear that for practitioners of CBPR, indigenous and local communities—not scientists—are in charge of their own cultural heritage. While she convincingly illustrates how benefits accrue to both communities and archaeologists when genuinely respectful collaboration is cultivated, there is no confusion about the real power that communities wield in CBPR partnerships: “Can we be truly collaborative? The power-sharing collaboration I’m referring to leaves critical space for communities to say ‘no,’ to stop excavation or the research process altogether, if they choose to do so. It is not a neocolonial collaboration . . . in which archaeologists still maintain the ability to act (research, excavate, train students) in the same ways, but now doing so with more partners” (81–82). The respectful archaeology that Atalay advocates will increase collaboration with Indian communities because CBPR does not hide from the inequalities that haunt and hinder mainstream archaeology. As she says, “The process of being participatory doesn’t create new problems; it simply uncovers existing tensions” (219). CBPR works because it calls for “differences in approach or difficult conversations to come to the foreground, rather than being left unstated or unexamined” (219).

Such frank discussions inevitably come around to research questions. Who is interested in what, and why? CBPR is community based and participatory precisely because research agendas originate in the community. Although archaeologists gain in multiple ways, Atalay argues that CBPR work must be for communities. Archaeology is done in the service of concerns and questions raised by Natives themselves. This means that research outcomes are not simply those that scientists have argued Indians should care about, but rather benefits that Indian communities identify and find tangibly useful.

Because “transparency is key” (125), Atalay advocates creating lists of research-created benefits accrued by communities and also by researchers. And because collaboration requires regular conversations about how a project is progressing, these lists can be updated and revised as investigations unfold. For Natives, it is particularly important that Atalay explicitly warns archaeologists not to adopt the pose of value-neutral facilitators. That is, these lists of benefits include researchers’ recognition that scientific access to the cultural heritage of other peoples is a gift and “not a right” (74). Archaeology CBPR-style proceeds with humility because its practitioners explicitly understand and appreciate that scientific investigations are not a panhuman imperative.

Perhaps most important of all for American Indians, Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiians, Atalay calls on the growing population of individual CBPR-practicing archaeologists to transform their national professional organizations: “Shifting archaeology from an expert-driven to a community based endeavor at the national and professional organizational level has not occurred. Professional archaeological organizations do not have mechanisms in place to involve descendant communities in policy decisions that affect their heritage. . . . For example, sharing power and involving Native people fully in policy decisions, especially about what happens to Native American ancestral remains and other critical issues, have not yet become the norm of national practice” (81). Given the perpetual resistance of the leadership of the Society for American Archaeology to fully implementing the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), these efforts may prove the true test of CBPR efficacy. Encouragingly, Atalay’s volume is part of a small but growing corpus of archaeologists’ writings advocating a CBPR turn in their field.¹

Although the discussions of policy and protocol are necessary and important, my favorite parts of the text come when Atalay allows us access to specific difficulties she...