New York New York

This is a map of where the 1755 African Burial Ground boundaries exist.   

Archaeology.org (1993) Bones & Bureaucrats. [online] Available at: http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/afrburial/index.html [Accessed: 18 Mar 2012].

     For our case study, our group is looking at the handling of and ethical concerns surrounding the discovery of the Tse-Whit-Zen burial ground, outside of Port Angeles, Washington. Briefly, the case at Tse-Whit-Zen was the Department of Transportation was pushing through a project to build graving dock on an ancestral burial ground of the Klallam Nation. It has raised some important questions and ideas surrounding the decolonization of archaeology that I think can be applied to all cases in archaeology.
     With these thoughts in mind, when I started looking around for what I would write about this week, I came across an article about the excavation of 420 (Harrington, 1993) skeletons from a section of the African Burial Ground in New York City, where enslaved African American peoples were buried during the colonial era of New York City. The section was sold to General Services Administration (GSA) in 1990, who planned to build office towers on top of it (Harrington, 1993).
     I found some interesting parallels to the research we have been doing on Tse-Whit-Zen, though both communities involved are so different. In both cases, descendent communities were not involved in the excavation and recovery processes, the affected communities petitioned the government, successfully, to end construction on the sites, and in both cases the pressure of big business and the profit motivation led to cultural resource management firms performing a less than adequate survey of the sites.
     In New York, it eventually came out that GSA had known about the existence of the burial ground all along and knew there was a possibility of finding human remains, but continued anyways with the project (Harrington, 1993), showing a lack of considerstion for the African American community and a complete lack of sensitivity for the violently oppressive history of slavery and colonialism faced by those buried there.
     Both of these cases, along with so many others, highlight the need for inclusion of affected communities in archaeological research right off the bat. By simply involving communities in planning processes, valuable knowledge can be gained which would not only aid in decolonizing the processes of archaeology, but through preventative measures, would help to mediate costs to businesses and government (in the case of Tse-Whit-Zen).
     Of course, processes of decolonizing archaeology involve many other actions and policies.What are some aspects you can identify as necessary to the decolonization of archaeology? What are some issues still present today other than those identified here?
     This case could provide me with a whole other project on decolonizing archaeology, but for now I will stick to researching Tse-Whit-Zen, and hopefully some day I will be able to come back to this and look more in depth.


References:

1. Harrington, S. (1993) Bones & Bureaucrats. [online] Available at: http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/afrburial/index.html [Accessed: 18 Mar 2012].