Norwegian Archaeological Review最新文献

{"title":"An Exposition on Colonialism and the European Mesolithic by Benjamin Elliott and Graeme Warren","authors":"N. Tiwari","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2203133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2203133","url":null,"abstract":"The influence of colonial legacy on the scholarly work of the European Mesolithic has been represented in this paper by Elliot and Warren. Their take on this subject within the myriad of Decolonisation thought is wellresearched. They entangle the histories of colonial subjugation in the European Mesolithic by carefully examining the fundamentalswhy, how, and who (suggested by Graeme Warren in a discussion). This train of thought helps us understand why decolonisation is necessary, how it has and does affect the current scholarship on Mesolithic, and whom it affects. Elliot and Warren dive into the previously unknown deep waters of Mesolithic archaeology in the European scenario and weigh the consequences of the colonial thought process in Mesolithic archaeology globally. The present paper by the authors is an outcome of the long ongoing debates within the broader community of hunter-gatherer studies. This includes the scholars working with the indigenous communities and the archaeologists working in Mesolithic archaeology. As explained in the paper, specific dialogue on ‘Decolonising the Mesolithic’ began with the workshop on this topic that the authors organised in May of 2021. Before understanding the use of the term ‘Mesolithic culture’ worldwide, the necessity to explain and unhinge the European scenario is somehow the spine of this whole project. The deep-rooted use of this term has to be questioned, and Elliot and Warren, in this paper, rightly target such a sensitive issue with factual information. The term Mesolithic is frequently used loosely and globally and is attached to the tool typemicroliths, which were produced largely from Late Pleistocene to the Late Holocene period. The occurrence and production of this tool type are spatiotemporally varied globally. However, the nomenclature denoted to this phasei.e. Mesolithicis used and applied in the countries under colonial rule. Elliot and Warren pointed out the origin of this term, its definition, and its apt use in Northern Europe, and they also state that this term is by far not inclusive for the whole of the European continent. Beginning with the basis of this research, the authors start by explaining decolonisation and whether it impacts our daily lives in academic research and for them as educators. Looking at decolonisation through a macro lens, they try to understand it in university-level teaching by following Pimblott’s (2020) and Bruchac’s (2014). They point out the universities’ Eurocentric approach towards assessing indigenous populations’ cultures and traditions. Such repertoire must be dismantled to listen to","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42404697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Confronting Commerce: Whetstones, Economy and Ecologies of Interdependence in Medieval England","authors":"Ben Jervis","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2203717","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2203717","url":null,"abstract":"Whetstones imported from Norway into England are used to explore emergent processes of commercialisation in medieval England. The study is based on a sample of 2201 whetstones (both imported and locally provenanced) from excavated contexts, and the distribution and chronology of these objects is presented. Drawing on the nomadic thought of Rosi Braidotti and the associated concept of ecologies of interdependence, these innocuous objects are understood as constituents of affective processes of intensification. The paper explores the contrast between the acquisition of foraged and commodified stones for emergent urban and rural experiences of economic transformation between the 12th and 15th centuries.","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46445289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Archaeology and the Genetic Revolution in European Prehistory","authors":"Stefan Burmeister","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2203168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2203168","url":null,"abstract":"Kristian Kristiansen is certainly one of the leading scholars in European archaeology. Anyone who studies the third and second millennium BCE will already have read some of his publications. His publication list is breath-taking, and if you look at the immense number of total views on Academia, actually every archaeologist in the world must have already looked at least one article by him. Kristiansen is important, influential and opinionforming. His work can only be admired. But that is precisely why it is important to look closely here. Kristiansen’s textual mass production has churned out a book that bundles many of his central themes of the last few years and puts them into an overall outline. As he explains in his acknowledgements, the text was written ‘to meet the theoretical and methodological challenge raised by the third science revolution and its implications for how to study and interpret European prehistory’ (p. 89). So, the objective is maximally large. Since Kristiansen’s book consists of a series of outtakes from earlier works or works in print, nothing is really new – in the end, no one can constantly reinvent himor herself, certainly not with such a publishing output. But the book provides a good overview of Kristiansen’s worldview and his approach to the past. It is hard to deny that archaeogenetics is a powerful game changer in the study of prehistoric societies. Migration and kinship studies have been taken to a new level. For Kristiansen, genetics – and with it other molecular biological approaches – is triggering a scientific revolution in archaeology. Since he calls this the third, after the classification inspired by geology, botany and zoology and the access to absolute time made possible by the 14C method, archaeology has thus far been poor in revolutions. And revolutions seem to be triggered only from outside the discipline. The many shifts in perspective and paradigms that archaeology has undergone in the same period do not seem to have had an equal influence. One could also reflect on why the discipline cannot seem to renew itself on its own. Archaeogenetics has already experienced its breakthrough, but according to Kristiansen it is still far from the phase of steady implementation. The differences between genetics and archaeology pose great challenges for interdisciplinary cooperation. Kristiansen complains about the criticism of earlier publications as unjustified. The criticised striking statements about extensive population changes, the spread of the Indo-Europeans and their language, which are not covered by the actual results of the study, he appeases with the fact that in the Supplementary Information these statements were formulated in a much more deliberate, cautious way. He also rejects accusations of implicit racist tendencies in genetic research. But here Kristiansen makes it too simple: discourse in science is primarily conducted via scientific publications. It is the duty of researchers to argue cleanly ","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45414889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Decolonization, Indigeneity, and the Cultural Politics of Race","authors":"Ben Pitcher","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2203149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2203149","url":null,"abstract":"I am not an archaeologist, but I do know a bit about cultural politics and the ways in which ideas circulate between researchers and the cultures they inhabit. To me, one of the key challenges of decolonization to any field of research is in understanding how this relationship plays out: to develop a better grasp of the two-way traffic of meaning between disciplinary specialists and the wider public as we contend with the ways in which both constituencies express, modify, and contest the ongoing legacies of colonialism. If decolonization is to involve the pursuit of social justice in the present, then it becomes necessary to move beyond the confines of a particular field to trace the ways it is implicated in a wider set of relations over which it will have little or no scholarly jurisdiction. It is little wonder that this is said to be a difficult and unsettling process. It is. It is to Elliott and Warren’s credit that they have sufficient confidence to open up their field and render it vulnerable to its broader cultural contexts. In their reflexive examination of the historical formation of Mesolithic research, the authors address their field’s embeddedness in the structures of colonial knowledge production without telling a reductive and onedirectional story about causality. Colonial-era Mesolithic scholarship is understood to have both reflected and given shape to teleological, progressivist, and universal stories about Western modernity where racialized others came to stand in for the temporal others of the distant human past. As they trace Mesolithic archaeology’s enduring entanglement with colonial ideas and conceptual frameworks, Elliott and Warren retain an understanding of their field as both constituted and constituting. Decolonization is not, therefore, a one-off moment of epistemological cleansing whereby scientific facts are neatly extricated from non-scientific values, but instead a continuous process of reflection and critique. Decolonizing is not about apportioning blame but about establishing ethical research practices that engage the colonial legacy in the cause of social justice. Of central significance to this ethics is a reconfigured relationship to Indigenous peoples. Given the central and problematic role that ethnographic analogy has long played in their field, Elliott and Warren reconceive of Mesolithic knowledge production as a collaborative process more closely engaged with the interests of contemporary Indigenous communities. While once Indigenous peoples served as the objects of research that consolidated racist typologies of human development, their involvement as subjects provides a way of speaking back to monodirectional knowledge extraction and to the colonial history of Mesolithic research. Conceptually, indigeneity continues to open up a space for knowledge claims generated outside of the categorizing logics of Western science, for fostering ontologies or cosmologies that were subjugated and","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48133813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Assembling Archaeology. Teaching, Practice, and Research","authors":"Per Ditlef Fredriksen","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2173085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2173085","url":null,"abstract":"This book is a timely and important contribution to knowledge production in archaeology. Firmly grounded in the two authors’ own teaching experience and previous conversations about pedagogy, the book makes a convincing case for the value of assemblage approaches. The solution offered requires a rethinking of teaching, training, and practice in archaeology, turning the very discipline into the subject of investigation. Facing neoliberal political economy and its narrow-minded demands for humanistic disciplines to be ‘useful’, there is a need to resituate and re-weave the web of relations between archaeological teaching and research. At its core, the book addresses the undervaluing of teaching. As the authors point out, such undervaluing has seriously affected the fundamentals of contemporary archaeological practice and is anchored in a lack of diversity in disciplinary demographics. Overall, the book is well written, well-structured, and well researched. Its greatest merit, however, is that it offers a sympathetic view that takes students – including their various viewpoints and points of entry into archaeology – seriously. From early on this reader is struck by two key qualities. The first is how useful the book is for teachers of archaeology. Not only in giving practical advice, but also in providing a much-needed comprehensive status for pedagogical research of particular relevance for the discipline. The second quality is how refreshingly clear the authors are in their criticism of neoliberalism. The core message is well summarized in the concluding chapter: ‘a fundamental way to challenge neoliberal agendas [...] is to recognize [...] that a place in which learning emerges is through research, and that research often emerges through teaching’ (p. 153, orig. emphases). Cobb and Croucher’s departure point for this book might humble even the most experienced teachers of theory in archaeology. Such readers will quickly recognize the philosophical heritage of the assemblage framework, drawing primarily on Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) but referring to a wide array of ‘assemblage thinkers’ like DeLanda, Latour, Barad, and Bennett (cf. Hamilakis and Jones 2017, pp. 80–81). A key concept is rhizomatic learning, ‘something which develops along messy, non-linear, complicated, and unpredictable routes’. This fuels the authors’ rethinking of ‘both interpretations of the past and practice in the present in realist, new materialist, non-anthropocentric ways’ (pp. 46–47). While this wonderfully ‘messy’ approach levels with students’ experiences of uncertainty and unpredictability, it is not the easiest to convey in an accessible manner. In my opinion, Cobb and Croucher manages this quite well, first and foremost because they never lose sight of what they really want to achieve: a concrete archaeological pedagogy that takes students’ everyday challenges and life-worlds seriously. The book consists of 10 chapters and ","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42870659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Stonehenge to Mycenae. The Challenges of Archaeological Interpretation","authors":"Svein Vatsvåg Nielsen","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2022.2157745","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2022.2157745","url":null,"abstract":"It is not often I come across books that are concerned with two supposedly unrelated prehistoric phenomena, but which still succeeds in capturing my full scholarly attention. From Stonehenge to Mycenae. The Challenges of Archaeological Interpretation by John C. Barrett and Michael J. Boyd is another one of these rare books. It is even a rather tiny piece, with a total of 169 pages of text and 45 illustrations, focused thematically on the knowledge production of European prehistory and the challenges of archaeological interpretation. More specifically, the book addresses ‘the archaeology of two regions that were once linked by the diffusionist narratives that Colin Renfrew recognized as no longer being viable’ and the two regions are, as indicated by the title, the area surrounding Stonehenge and Aegean during the second and third millenniums BCE. The main challenge of archaeological interpretation that From Stonehenge to Mycenae focuses on is the one emerging from the relation between two types of archaeological evidence. On the one hand, there is that evidence which pertains to mobility in the past, or what was previously referred to as ‘diffusion’ in archaeology, and on the other hand there is that which pertains to regional continuity in cultural traditions. This general theme is also probably what makes the book itself so alluring, no matter what background the reader has, and the authors do a good job in situating their work within the now well-known research history of processual and postprocessual archaeology. From their view, which it should be mentioned is firmly UK-based (Sheffield and Cambridge), the first important contribution to our knowledge of European prehistory during this period was made by V. G Childe in the late 1950s, when he connected the archaeology of different regions of Europe and Western Asia through diffusionist and rather schematic models. This was the state of the art in European prehistory before the advent of radiocarbon dating, which we know had a tremendous impact on chronologies. The second contribution, in these author’s view, was made by Colin Renfrew in the 1970s, when he used results from radiocarbon dating to form a new chronology of early metal production on the European continent, which according to the authors laid the very foundation for the formation of a processual archaeology in European archaeology. Their argument is, in short, that where Childe had explained the emergence of metallurgy in Europe by migrations from Mesopotamia, the Aegean etc., Renfrew on the other hand saw technological developments realized through ‘indigenous social and economic forces’ (p. 7). Thus, systems theory in processual archaeology, combined with radiometric dating methods, had a profound effect on European prehistory. However, even studies in processual archaeology, and particularly through the application of World Systems modelling, also came to recognize certain ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ geographical regions in Europe ","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45402970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fires and Seeds. Considerations for a decolonized Mesolithic archaeology","authors":"Liv Nilsson Stutz","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2203140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2203140","url":null,"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","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47167624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Colonialism and the European Mesolithic","authors":"Ben Elliott, G. Warren","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2182232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2182232","url":null,"abstract":"This paper heeds the broader societal calls for decolonisation in Britain and Ireland, and seeks to apply various strands of decolonial practice within the context of Mesolithic archaeology; a subfield which has seen little postcolonial reflection to date. We question the historic interactions between Mesolithic archaeology and colonial hegemony, and argue that Mesolithic research continues to reinforce these hegemonies today. This occurs simultaneously within Europe, and on the inter-continental scale. With this in mind, we explore areas of Mesolithic research practice that hold potential to shift this dynamic, and contribute to the deconstruction of colonially rooted power imbalances. In doing so, our focus falls upon the ethics of ethnographic analogy, and the ontological turn within Mesolithic Studies.","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43719296","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Realm of Virtual Knowledge: Exploring the Capacities of Norwegian Metal-detected Assemblages","authors":"Caroline Fredriksen","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2181212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2181212","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the knowledge potential of the Norwegian metal-detected assemblage through the conceptual framework of assemblage thinking. Drawing on the concepts of the actual/virtual, affect and coding, combined with the actor-network theory (ANT) notion of inscriptions, I discuss the metal-detected assemblage’s realm of potential for new archaeological knowledge. I identify and articulate the constituents of the Norwegian metal-detected assemblage, identifying inscriptions and coding mechanisms affecting the phenomenon of metal detecting in the present, such as policies, management practices and cataloguing. Further, I discuss how these practices frame specific types of objectives, constituting and affecting the virtual diagram of the particular assemblage. In conclusion, Norwegian archaeological practices enable specific types of objectives, actualising specific types of knowledge.","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49263336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Choosing the Right Weapons and Arenas - Comments to Elliott and Warren","authors":"Håkon Glørstad","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2203189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2203189","url":null,"abstract":"Benjamin Elliott and Graeme Warren have bravely taken on the project to write a debate article for Norwegian Archaeological Review about colonialism and the European Mesolithic. The dialog-oriented shape they have given the text makes it valuable and thought provoking and the authors certainly deserves credit for this, as most decolonising debates resembles the trench warfare of the First World War, not very attuned to dialog. Their arguments are many and complex and the format of the debate makes it difficult to address all the issues that they raise. I therefore limit my comments to just a few themes. These are the European or Western peccatum originale; the benefits of universality; the relation between structure and history; and finally, the significance of the archaeological record itself. I find it fascinating that the text de facto presents the core of the decolonisation debate as a theological problem of the peccatum originale or original sin in western culture. Few people in European societies and even fewer researchers in archaeology have taken a direct or active part in oppressing indigenous populations across the world. Still, their thinking, their language and their way of life are oppressing. This is, as far as I can see the classical dilemma of the original sin. I must admit that I am very sceptical to this doctrine, and I find it paradoxical that this very western and Christian problem, defines the debate about decolonisation – a debate aimed at criticising the very same phenomenon. This does not make the debate or problems per se (the very uneven distribution of capital, influence and power in the world today) irrelevant or silly, it raises however the question of how we are best served to investigate, discuss and debate injustice in the world today. In this respect, I doubt that colonialism and post-colonialism are the best tools for making intellectual or political progress. The reason for this is first that I think the problems are much more complicated than the fact that some nations and people in the modern era colonised other people’s land. Second, the terms themselves – colonialism, post-colonialism – come to act as a metaphor of everything wrong and thus preclude any attempt to make a precise analysis of the problems at stake. Just like the terms processual and post-processual mobilised generations of archaeologists in the 70s, 80s and 90s, (post)-colonialism also effectively mobilises current archaeological thinking – but does the term describe something of substance? To me it seems much more like a repetition of a classical Christian and western paradox, introduced to control through penance – not to liberate or enlighten. In this perspective, it is interesting that Elliot and Warren emphasise that the archaeologists that have been inspired by the ‘ontological turn’ in their interpretations of Mesolithic societies abstained from letting","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46479606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}