A session for WAC-6 under the theme Archaeological Theory? Legacies, Burdens, Futures, which was announced on Archaeolog in June.
The meta-theoretical approach of processual archaeology gave rise to a history of archaeology, concentrating on the discipline as a cultural and political practice. It narrated a historical trajectory of a scientific discourse closely linked to the ascendancy of the nation state in Europe. These histories were extensive chronological accounts delineating the trajectory of archaeology in relation to larger meta-narratives of nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism with Europe as the centre of its historical genealogy. This session is arguing for an epistemic shift. It specifically concentrates on the ideology of archaeological micro-practice as methodological intervention in the colony and underscores the distinction between metropolitan archaeological practice and its colonial instantiation. Archaeological practice in the colony was an efficacious location for the consolidation of the disciplinary discourse and legitimized its scientific validity. The colony was arguably a more effective location than the metropole, for the emergence of the discursive framework of the discipline. The archaeologically potent landscape of the colony – Egypt, Mesopotamia, South Asia, South America, North Africa were productive location for metropole archaeologists like Flinders Petrie, Leonard Woolley, Mortimer Wheeler and many others to formulate the discursive universe of the discipline. This session investigates the modalities of these archaeological micro-practices in the colony not as an instance of a European meta-practice but a key site to examine archaeology?s deep colonial genealogy. It will focus on a deep and particularistic history of archaeological intervention in the colony and seeks to disturb the Eurocentric fixation of history of archaeology. The session will attempt to reinstate the primacy of the colonial location in the meta-narrative of archaeology’s historical genealogy and argue that it was perhaps outside the European metropole that archaeology as a discipline gained its methodological and discursive authority.
Please send proposals to the session organizer by November 30th.
Dr. Ashish Chadha
Lecturer, Dept. of South Asian Studies
Yale University
Email: ashish chadha