Fires and Seeds. Considerations for a decolonized Mesolithic archaeology

Abstract

The world is on fire, and European archaeologists are starting to feel the heat. With the war in the Ukraine, the rise of polarizing politics and global authoritarianism, and the climate emergency pushing us closer to the tipping point of planetary destruction, we cannot help but to feel deeply affected. In the face of these challenges, we want to act, but what we do as archaeologists can sometimes seem trivial and insignificant. Even worse, a critical examination of our disciplinary history can lead us to conclude that we are complicit in the injustices and even partially responsible for the current situation. The chasm between the social, cultural, and environmental crisis of our time, and the academy was masterfully depicted by Ryan Cecil Jobson in his essay ‘The case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019’ (Jobson 2020) written in the aftermath of the 2019 AAA meetings in San Jose, California, which saw hundreds of anthropologists fly in to socialize and discuss issues like inequality and climate change in a city covered by the smoke from raging wildfires. The irony was not lost on anybody. In the essay Jobson framed the situation as an epistemic crisis of the discipline and called for it to abandon its liberal suppositions (Jobson 2020, p. 261). The response is characteristic for a trend in academia today to respond with socially conscious scholarship and attempts at tearing down what Jobson calls ‘the fictive separation’ of ‘bourgeois academic work from the material histories of other fields that took shape alongside the formalization of the human sciences’ (Jobson 2020, p. 261). In this discourse we often encounter an amalgam of intellectual thought that combines anti-racism, feminism, anti-capitalism, and post-colonial criticism, with calls to decolonize institutions of power. It is in this context that I view the piece by Warren and Elliot calling for us to decolonize the Mesolithic, and I welcome it. At the same time, I am also wary of the critique framed by Olúfémi O. Táíwò as ‘elite capture,’ referring to the phenomenon of how movements to decolonize, including discourses, resources and processes intended to empower the marginalized, often become appropriated by the privileged (Táíwò 2022). I share the authors’ commitment to a socially conscious archaeology. I agree that archaeology is political and should be engaged in the contemporary world, and I am pleased to see this issue explicitly brought into focus for the Mesolithic, which often has remained on the margins of these debates. I am disappointed that several of our colleagues felt strongly enough to reach out to express their discontent and discourage continued work in this area. I wish we had come farther – but at least this seems to have struck a nerve that I think we should continue to put pressure on. That being said, and in the spirit of exploratory