The Blind Spots of the Colonial Legacies of Archaeological Theory and Practice

Abstract

The authors introduce their interesting and thoughtful piece with a personal anecdote that serves as an origin story to the argument within the paper itself and to the issues they have been wrestling with for some time. In 2018, they attended the 12 International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHAGS), which was held in Penang, Malaysia. Located in a former British colony and in a part of the world that is often included in the Global South, the conference featured extensive engagements with the colonial legacies within hunting and gathering studies and political activism to initiate positive changes in future research. I am sure that many representatives of Indigenous groups and their research partners were able to attend this conference. Southeast Asia is home to a hugely diverse Indigenous cultural and social landscape, and this is not different for adjacent regions. At the same time, within the same region, many Indigenous groups suffer from oppression and their cultural and ethnic survival continues to be an ongoing struggle within different nation states. While I do not want to speculate further about the experiences of the authors on this occasion, it seems that the anecdote is reflective of a very common colonial/postcolonial situation. First, the authors mention that in Penang, they were in the minority as European researchers. This is an unusual experience for academics, who specialise in European subjects and can rarely engage with Indigenous communities from the Global South directly. Second, they experienced that their own field – hunter-gatherer studies – was seen and practiced in a very different way in a region that experienced European colonial occupation in the past and that was subjected to oppression by a foreign power. These processes were multidimensional and varied with historical circumstances; they were political, economic, social, and intellectual. In many countries in Southeast Asia, decolonisation after WWII was a violent process and in Malaysia it also involved a long and painful liberation conflict. These aspects are potentially known to Europe-based researchers, but it is a different story being exposed to the respective legacies directly and personally. I was not able to attend the CHAGS conference in 2018, but I can relate very well to the experiences of the two authors and how we are entangled in colonial legacies wherever we are and work. After finishing my PhD in the UK, I worked for several years in museums in Germany before moving to Australia in 2008. After focussing on European Palaeolithic archaeology and Palaeolithic art studies, I have now been working with Aboriginal people in Northwest Australia for many