The chairs at the Preserving the Past Together workshop were literally locked together. To create small groups for discussion participants had to work together to pull apart the chairs. Dr. Gonzalez made an interesting comment about how the chairs represent archaeology’s structural impediments to collaboration and it had me thinking about that metaphor more deeply. If individuals want to work together but the system does not allow that to be easily implemented, how do we break apart the “chairs” toward a more collaborative archaeology?

The questions raised by the audience also mirrored this concern. How do we find the time, personnel, and funding to build meaningful collaborations? In the lowest bidding environment, the cheapest bid wins. How can archaeologists demonstrate that working with tribes is an asset to the project and not a hindrance?

Dr. Gonzalez mentioned that working with tribes from the outset of CRM projects saves money. Long term planning and relationship building seems to be a useful strategy for saving money and for demonstrating the worthiness of collaboration. I think that in these beginning stages of collaboration it will take many individuals putting in overtime, going above and beyond their bids, and being creative about how to reach out to tribes. We may have to swim against the current until the tide changes. Breaking apart the chairs, breaking apart structural impediments, and breaking apart attitudes will be a long battle, but a battle worth fighting.

Often archaeology is taught and viewed from the side of a university, indigenous people and groups are often viewed as passive agents and are sources of information. That information is extracted and used for the benefit of the universities rather than the tribe. The direct descendants or cultural descendants of a community are often not the ones uncovering and publicizing information and discoveries about archaeological sites. This separates indigenous groups not only from their history but from modern society, when someone else is writing their history it’s easy for others to forget their existence and remember them as something belonging to the past. The Meaningful Collaboration workshop was a brilliant educational reminder of these facts.

As a student of archaeology I believe these workshops explore important aspects to the discipline which have either been ignored or unidentified as sources of conflict between indigenous groups and archaeologist. Instead of extracting information archaeologist should work alongside, or even for, indigenous groups to build relevant knowledge for these groups. As scientific the discipline wants to appear, when working with descendant populations the information uncovered does not belong to the archaeologist, it belongs to tribe. When gathering information it is important to consider how one is interacting with indigenous groups, the Modes of Interaction chart shown during the workshop, highlights what these different modes look like, from one of colonial control to one of indigenous control. Personally I believe that either a mode of indigenous control or one of collaboration should be used depending on the situation. Although overall an archaeologist should strive to work for an indigenous group, rather than working for their own benefit. One of the most important questions that this workshop raised for me was how archaeology should be conducted to be beneficial to those it effects the most.

Knowledge is a systems of place and people, and that has no disciplinary boundaries

–Dr. Chip Colwell, 02/16/2017

First breakout session – Twitter account @preserveseminar

The second workshop of the “Preserving the Past Together” seminar series had a guest key note speaker, Dr. Chip Colwell, senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. I walked in half way through the lecture and was glad to see the room was full of people because the types of the conversations that are occurring throughout this series need to be discussed more often. It shouldn’t just be for individuals in the archaeology field, but also among those in museums, history, cultural resource management and any discipline that is involved with some type of historical preservation, including tribal preservation.

One conversation that arose was the creation of knowledge and what to do with it. Sure, there is some public outreach to educate people about new discoveries.  But more often than not, the information does not reach the community it should be reaching. Several of the panelists addressed the importance of sharing the knowledge with the community related to the space where the knowledge is produced. Academics shouldn’t share their knowledge just among themselves, but back with the community itself. This is probably one of the last, but equally important steps to take when working in a collaborative archaeology project, a main theme in the overall series.

Two other important aspect of collaborative archaeology that I took from this seminar  were knowing how to listen and knowing when to step away from the collective. There are more workshops in the making that will be produced this academic year, but if there is one word that can sum up all of these themes and topics its respect.