Talk:Indigenous archaeology

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Anthropology

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 10 January 2022 and 11 March 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Peer reviewers: Lulj2.

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment[edit]

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Brandonvo, TeslaWannaBe.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 22:56, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Problematic phrasing[edit]

Indigenous archaeology is a form of archaeology where indigenous peoples are involved in the care of, excavation and analysis of the cultural and bodily remains of their ancestors.

The assumption that remains found on the territory of an "indigenous" population belong to "[t]heir ancestors" is highly problematic because it assumes continuity. In parts of the world where more is known about history, such claims are usually regarded with great scepticism by scholars or even actively disputed, such as when Lebanese claim Phoenicians as their forebears or Aramaic Christians claim descent from ancient Assyrians, Ukrainians fancy themselves descended from Scythians, or worse even, anyone in Western Europe dare themselves style as a modern descendant of Germanic or Celtic tribes of antiquity! That even though such claims are not inherently implausible (provided no claims of pure descent with no foreign admixture at all are made, which are of course unprovable, difficult to believe and plain unlikely). Funny enough, in the case of Egyptian Arabs, Greeks or Israeli Jews, the same claims regarding supposed ancestors from millennia back are not doubted, either, perhaps because of the continuity of the ethnonym – which is, however, a dubious argument for biological continuity – or for, ahem, political reasons. Sometimes nationalistic claims are simply dismissed as unsupported by science, in other cases suspicion of acute xenophobia is cast on the fancier of the past (whether justified or not), but often ideological, exaggerated nationalism is simply excused or even supported, especially when the population in question has a recent history of domination by other ethnic groups. (Even when the scholarly community, and the world at large, have a justified interest in investigating the remains of a supposed "ancestor", which due to this government-supported Blut und Boden ideology have to reburied, for example. That before any tests can even carried out to determine whether the remains belong to a relative/ancestor of the current ethnic community at all, thus allowing the claim of "ownership" of the remains at all, in principle, however dubious the concept. Ideology is therefore established by government fiat to be more important than science, because the natives are apparently too retarded to educate about the true significance of the remains and that this vile Blut und Boden ideology in the end only hurts their own cause. Argh.) Double standards, anyone? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:19, 19 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

In addition, evidence has been found in some areas of peoples migrating into or out of an area, before the pressures of European encounter. So, if they arrived at their "historic" homeland and pushed other peoples out in a cascade of actions, who are the "descendants" of remains found in the territory? Parkwells (talk) 18:53, 17 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Argument rather than article[edit]

Much of this seems an essay on the factors that led to the development of internalist or indigenous archeology, rather than an article on what it is. It is full of generalizations and scholarly arguments, rather than examples of sites or projects where new or different decisions have been made that reflect the purported changes. The only legislation reflecting this change in NAGPRA in the US. Needs more facts and examples.Parkwells (talk) 19:09, 17 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]