Decolonial archaeologies: from ethnoarchaeology to archaeological ethnography
A dialogue is always a good thing; and the dialogue on the origins, the problems, the current state and the potential future of ethnoarchaeology as a relic or as a still viable intellectual endeavour is of particular interest and import. In reading this interesting and engaging set of papers, it becomes immediately clear that such a conversation is not merely to do with an archaeological subdiscipline which, as admitted by Lyons and Casey, many archaeologists today regard a thing of the past. It is mostly about the very definition of archaeology itself. As such, I will attempt here to link this discussion to the wider contemporary debates on the ontology of archaeology and on its political underpinnings and role in the contemporary moment. Many canonical texts in the discipline, especially in the Anglo Saxon tradition, would present ethnoarchaeology as a fairly coherent and clearly defined sub field, associated at its origins with 'New Archaeology' and developed primarily in North America and Britain, perhaps in a couple of other European countries. But a closer look would reveal that many of the practices now associated with ethnoarchaeology have been developing in many parts of the world, partly independently and partly in a critical dialogue with the Anglo American tradition (see Fewster 2013; Politis 2015; Sillar and Ramon Joffre this volume) The dialogue of professional/Western archaeologists with indigenous people and traditions has often been, as Bill Sillar and Gabriel Ramon Joffre note, the driving force of such alternative strands of thought, and it is debatable whether they can be called 'ethnoarchaeological' in the conventional sense. There is thus a danger that the term may come to denote a very disparate range of phenomena with divergent, and perhaps contradictory, ontologies, epistemological directions and even political affinities. To claim them all as ethnoarchaeological may be expedient for the advocates of this field, but it is, at the end of the day, disingenuous and even confusing. Most of the criticism of ethnoarchaeology, including my own (Hamilakis 2011; Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos 2009) in fact had in mind the foundational principles as presented and practised by the people who came to be considered pioneers in this field, primarily within the Anglo American tradition. While most of the authors here seem to want to distance themselves from that dominant tradition, the defensive position adopted by Lyons and Casey echoes these earlier principles, despite the rhetorical proclamations of the opposite. For a start, they are at pains to emphasize, time and again, that ethnoarchaeology is not a theory but a method. This is a cop out. It absolves them of any responsibility for the theoretical underpinnings of the sub field, for its relationship to time and otherness, let alone its political undertones and effects.