GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY
PUBLIC SYMPOSIUM ON ARCHAEOLOGY
February 29 , 2008
Archaeology and Human Rights
Fairfax Campus, Johnson Center Room E (3rd floor), 10:00 AM - 5:30 PM
Archaeology provides empirical evidence for the full range of the human experience. Yet this evidence is rarely integrated into larger discussions of social issues being conducted both elsewhere in academia and among the general public. If the relevance of our research is to be established, scholars and the public need to be brought together to establish new dialogues.
The subject of human rights presents a particular challenge to archaeologists. The body of relevant evidence is extensive, but has rarely been framed by the modern debate. The role of archaeologists in the ongoing human rights struggle throughout the world is well-documented, but archaeological evidence itself - pertaining to slavery, oppression, maltreatment, justice, revolt, and conflict - is seldom invoked.
In developing the theme of human rights for the 2008 symposium, we will emphasize two topics that have received considerable attention in recent archaeological discussions: exploitation and resistance. Our speakers will present empirical evidence representing historic and prehistoric periods from diverse regions to address these subjects, in the process demonstrating how the modern debates over human rights can be illuminated by the experience of our ancestors.
Symposium Schedule
10:00 James Snead (GMU)
Welcome
“Benign Irrelevance”: Archaeology’s Place in the Social Sciences
10:30 Elizabeth Grzymala Jordan (VDOT)
“From Time Immemorial”: Archaeology and Social Responsibility
11:00 Discussion
11:15 Break
11:30 Sarah Chicone (Museum of the Earth)
Archaeology and the “great moral issue of our time”: Working-Class Poverty and the 1913-1914 Southern Colorado Coal Strike
12:15 Discussion
12:30 Lunch (Johnson Center food court)
1:45 Reconvene:
Matthew Liebmann (William and Mary)
“Now the God of the Spaniards is Dead”: Religious Rites, Human Rights, and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in Colonial New Mexico
2:15 Discussion
2:30 Lori Lee (Syracuse U./GMU)
Land of the Free, Home of the Slave: Race and Contested Human Rights in Antebellum Virginia
3:00 Discussion
3:15 Break
3:30 Dawnie Wolf Steadman (Binghamton U.)
Archaeological Contributions to Human Rights Investigations: Documenting Evidence of Atrocities
4:00 Discussion
4:30 Roundtable and commentary
5:15 Adjourn
The George Mason Symposium on Archaeology is a forum to present new information about archaeological research on critical social topics to a broad audience. Students, professionals, academics, and interested members of the public are welcome. It is our hope that this evolves into an annual event. Thanks to student volunteers and the considerable logistical assistance provided by Wilma Hallock, Karen Secrist, and Alex Antram. The support of the archaeological community is gratefully acknowledged. Please send thoughts and comments to organizer James Snead at jsnead@gmu.edu.
Click here for directions to George Mason University
Participants and Abstracts
Archaeology and the “great moral issue of our time”:
Working-class poverty and the 1913-14 Southern Colorado Coal Strike
Sarah Chicone (Museum of the Earth at the Paleontological Research Institution)
Democratic presidential candidate Jonathan Edwards calls poverty, the “great moral issue of our time” (Edwards 2007:340). As national and international rhetoric seek to define and reduce its consequences, anthropology has the potential to refocus attention on the social processes at work in poverty’s production, to call into question its quantification and the homogenization of its effects and outcomes (Green 2006). Archaeology is uniquely positioned to actively engage this evolving national and global discourse and to question poverty’s reification.
This paper uses the events of the 1913-14 Southern Colorado Coal strike to explore emergent historical narratives of working-class poverty and the role they play in shaping contemporary ideologies and public policy. It seizes upon public interest, to look beyond the ineffectiveness of the either-or dichotomies of deserving and undeserving poor, blame and responsibility. The Ludlow Massacre thrust the brutalities of labor conflict into the American consciousness. The well-publicized reforms that followed the strike focused national attention on improvements made to miners’ lives and the new relationship forged between management and labor in the early 20th century. While the strike influenced poverty’s production, it did not lessen its pervasive hold on the region.
We need to take advantage of events like Ludlow that force us to confront the working poor face-to-face. The events at Ludlow do more than just mark a significant moment in labor relations; they mark a significant moment in the on-going battle waged by America’s working poor.
“From Time Immemorial:” Archaeology and Social Responsibility
Elizabeth Grzymala Jordan (Virginia Department of Transportation)
Although the Dutch first imported slaves to the Cape of Good Hope in 1658, until recently the subject has received relatively little scholarly attention. While this is in part a function of sources, it is also a result of National Party policies that transformed Afrikaner heritage into South African history. Apartheid not only constrained the social, cultural, and material lives of non-white South Africans, but repressed and distorted their histories as well. My doctoral project, centered on the washing places and municipal washhouses of Cape Town, represents an historical archaeological attempt at redress. Using archaeological, archival, and oral historical data, it was possible to reconstruct the daily lives and labors of slave washerwomen and their descendants; to explore the strategies they employed for survival; to trace the extent of their family and community networks; to witness the varied expressions of their occupational solidarity; and ultimately, to experience their success in overcoming nearly three centuries of continuous oppression. In this paper, I use examples from my doctoral research to illustrate how academic theory and social responsibility can be integrated into archaeological practice.
Land of the Free, Home of the Slave: Race and Contested Human Rights in Antebellum Virginia
Lori Lee (Syracuse University/George Mason University)
Rights to life, liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the law were not universal in nineteenth-century Virginia—they were denied to enslaved African Americans. Archaeology provides a means of understanding the past of exploited groups, such as enslaved laborers, whose versions of history remain largely unwritten. This paper focuses on the archaeological record of antebellum slavery in central Virginia at Poplar Forest plantation.
Antebellum plantations were contested landscapes where race and class relations were mediated through exploitative work relationships. Contemporary historical documents from Poplar Forest indicate passive and active resistance to this exploitation through malingering, physical insubordination, running away, murder, and arson. Archaeological analysis reveals resistance through material evidence of social and consumer practices that index a self-definition that struggled against the imposed identity of ‘slave’ and the denial of basic human rights.
Prior to emancipation, enslaved people were engaged in a significant informal economy of property ownership and trade throughout the South. The acquisition of property did not lessen the oppression of slavery, not did it equate to freedom. However, through the selective process of consumer choices the enslaved were able to acquire things they both needed and desired. Significantly, these choices were made within the restraints imposed by a racialized social structure wherein the enslaved themselves were classified as property. Consequently, consumerism among the enslaved also provides evidence of the constraints of race and concomitant poverty in the antebellum period.
“Now the God of the Spaniards is Dead”:
Religious Rites, Human Rights, and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in Colonial New Mexico
Matt Liebmann (College of William and Mary)
In August of 1680 the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico united in an armed uprising, expelling Spanish colonists from their lands in one of the most successful indigenous rebellions in the annals of North American colonialism. Until recently, this tumultuous phase in the history of the American Southwest has been poorly understood, as the Pueblo peoples did not record their versions of these events in writing. However, in the past decade archaeological research has made significant contributions to our understanding of this era, playing a vital role in reconstructing the period of Native independence that followed the Pueblo Revolt.
Through an examination of artifacts and architecture from late seventeenth-century New Mexico, this paper will investigate both the causes and the effects of the Revolt, comparing Spanish records with the cultural forms adopted and adapted by the Pueblos in the wake of the uprising. In so doing it seeks to demonstrate that archaeology can make a unique contribution to the recovery of subaltern voices in the past, while at the same time raising questions regarding the relationships among colonialism, human rights, and anti-colonial resistance.
“Benign Irrelevance”:
Archaeology’s Place in the Social Sciences
James E. Snead (George Mason University)
The traditional perception of archaeology in the social sciences is one of “benign irrelevance”: providing curious artifacts for museums and public consumption or to occasionally embellish interpretations provided by more “serious” scholars. This stereotype has numerous sources, including a broadly-based intellectual disinterest in material culture, the distinctive historical origins of archaeological theory and practice, artificial disciplinary boundaries, misconceptions over the relevance of the past for “modern” concerns, and the reluctance of archaeologists to engage a broader audience. This marginalization is particularly unfortunate given the unique position of archaeology to provide evidence from a “global” past for a wide range of subjects. The topic of this years’s GMU symposium on archaeology, “archaeology and human rights,” highlights new research bearing on the issues of exploitation and resistance in a variety of cultural/historical contexts, making the contribution of archaeology to these topics quite clear. This presentation will introduce the subject and outline the potential for archaeological research to engage the social sciences and the public at large in new and important ways.
Archaeological Contributions to Human Rights Investigations:
Documenting Evidence of Atrocities
Dawnie Wolfe Steadman (Department of Anthropology, Binghamton University, SUNY)
Anthropologists have been formally involved in the investigations of human rights abuses for over two decades. In the 1990s well over 100 forensic anthropologists and archaeologists participated in more than 1300 investigations in 33 countries. Eye witness testimonies may be ambiguous or unavailable so objective, empirical data from the deceased victims provide the most unequivocal evidence of atrocities.
Systematic archaeological excavation of mass graves can aid in reconstructing the events of death and burial. For example, the position of the bodies indicates whether individuals were shot above the grave and fell in or were thrown or placed in the grave after death, ballistic evidence around the site can demonstrate where the assassinations took place, soil survey can indicate the tools used to dig the grave, and taphonomic evidence indicates if the grave had been tampered with. Similarly, anthropological examination of the victims yields a wealth of incriminating evidence. Assessment of age, sex, ancestry, stature and antemortem pathological conditions assists with personal identification and careful interpretation and documentation of perimortem and postmortem injuries adds to the reconstruction of the death event. For instance, the trajectory of bullets entering the back of the skull of each of ten victims buried together effectively refutes any “official story” that the deaths occurred during a battle. The empirical anthropological data are critical to the prosecution of the accused and anthropologists are often called to testify in criminal and war crimes trials. In addition, these efforts give families long-awaited knowledge of the fate of their loved ones and provide an objective historical record of the victims (embodying the dead). Paradoxically, the effectiveness of the anthropological investigations in obtaining objective evidence of atrocities has created problems in that political and armed obstruction of the investigations is not uncommon.
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