Ethnographic Archaeologies: Reflections on Stakeholders and Archaeological Practices (review)

It has now become nearly commonplace for archaeologists to integrate ethnography in conventional archaeological research, which in many ways builds on more than a century of archaeology that wielded ethnographic knowledge to interpret materiality. Yet many archaeologists now have pushed beyond simply borrowing basic ethnographic methods and instead use ethnography as the foundation for quite ambitious community partnerships that confront exceptionally complicated intersections of power, materiality, and heritage. At the heart of such work is a consciousness of the consequential if not privileged claims that stakeholders and descendant communities place on an archaeological heritage identified as "theirs" in some form. Quetzil E. Castaneda and Christopher N. Matthews's edited volume Ethnographic Archaeologies: Reflections on Stakeholders and Archaeological Practices presses this politicization to the heart of the discipline when it defines archaeology as a contemporary social practice embedded in ethically tangled relations of power, authority, and ownership. They argue that such an archaeology is compelled to integrate ethnography into the way the discipline researches and manages archaeological heritage, crafting a picture of archaeology that places ethnography at the heart of archaeological methods and disciplinary politics.

On the one hand, this collection of seven papers confirms that some archaeologists have placed stakeholder communities at the center of archaeological practice for at least two decades, so it underscores an increasingly substantive archaeological commitment to publicly engaged scholarship. On the other hand, though, it reflects that ethnography, community, stakeholder, and collaboration can mean a vast range of things in various archaeologists' hands, and the ambitious ethnographic work this collection champions fashions a complicated picture of archaeological practice. Castaneda and Matthews accept that such umbrella terms can mean various contextually specific things, requiring particular approaches and methods in any given place, but they and the contributors push for explicitly and self-reflectively confronting how stakeholders are defined and acknowledging the ways in which heritage provides a common ground to speak along and across contemporary lines of difference.

The volume began as a Wenner-Gren workshop in 2005 that examined the ways ethnographic methods might transform archaeological practice, shift how we conceptualize archaeological constituencies, and force archaeologists to rethink the concrete political and social meanings of archaeological interpretation. With the exception of Richard Handler, the contributors all approach these problems as archaeologists, albeit ranging across a breadth of places and periods. Julie Hollowell and George Nicholas sound one of the collection's central themes when they advocate for an utterly contemporary archaeology that must use ethnographic insight to document how heritage is seen from and situated in specific present-day social positions. In this vein, much of the book is ultimately an ethnography of archaeology itself, aspiring, in Larry Zimmerman's words, to help "the discipline see real people." Zimmerman presses this further by arguing that such ethnography will involve stakeholders' own reflection on how they engage with archaeology, ideally helping them clarify their own visions of the past and archaeological practice. Chris Matthews offers one of the book's clearest case studies in his assessment of the African Burial Ground project in New York, where a descendant community successfully lobbied for an African American research team to excavate and interpret the colonial cemetery. Matthews argues that the irony of this successful community activism is that the site's museum ultimately interprets the Burial Ground as a document of past experiences and does not concretely link the legacies of racism and inequality to contemporary African America or the very people who lobbied for a reflective, anti-racist field project.

What exactly constitutes an "ethnographic archaeology" is complicated and differs reasonably from one archaeologist and case study to the next, but the clearest articulation of the concept is provided in Quetzil Castaneda's chapter. Castaneda argues that the ethnographic turn in archaeology is driven by archaeologists' ethical commitment to consider the meanings descendant communities give to their material heritage. He contrasts this newfound ethnographic perspective with more than a century of archaeological research that...