Archaeology’s epistemological breadth: Collaborative-Indigenous and ontological turns in historical perspective

This paper considers two Indigenous-oriented approaches in contemporary archaeology that seek to increase archaeology’s epistemological breadth: collaborative Indigenous archaeology and the ontological turn. One more practical, the other more theoretical, these approaches are rarely considered together. Each seeks to build new connections between archaeology and Indigenous peoples, politics, and/or perspectives. These connections increase focus on Indigenous knowledges while identifying—and correcting for—the arbitrary modernist values that undergird the discipline. Although they prioritize similar goals, these approaches take very different paths. By placing them into historical context and highlighting connections to previous anthropological and archaeological engagements with difference or “alterity,” this paper emphasizes important similarities and differences between these approaches. Drawing historical parallels with relativist and feminist turns, this comparison shows important distinctions between how new practitioners and new theories help to expand archaeology’s epistemological breadth.