Why are there so many White archaeologists?

In a recent study, Laura Heath-Stout (Reference Heath-Stout2019; Reference Heath-Stout2020) sampled 2,718 archaeologists from across the globe, representing multiple subfields within the discipline, to assess disciplinary diversity (see also Fulkerson and Tushingham Reference Fulkerson and Tushingham2019). Of this sample, 2,315 (85 per cent) identified as White. In my own field of study, historical archaeology of the Americas and the Atlantic world, the numbers are even more discouraging, with 248 of 283 respondents (88 per cent) identifying as White. Additionally, only three (1 per cent) identified as Black/African American. In the United Kingdom, William White and Catherine Draycott (2020) note that, based on a 2013 poll, 99.2 per cent of paid archaeological staff and 97 per cent of volunteers identified as White. Similarly, through data collected from the Society for American Archaeology Needs Assessment Surveys, Alicia Odewale, Justin Dunnavant, Ayana Flewellen and Alexandra Jones (Reference Odewale, Dunnavant, Flewellen and Jones2018) note that, as of 2015, only 0.3 per cent of total respondents identified as African American. In response to the slow rate growth of African American archaeologists in the field (about 0.1 per cent every five years), the authors compellingly argue that the minimal demographic changes in the field may prove to be a hindrance for a more equitable archaeology for the next generation, a serious concern which, building on foundational efforts and projects like New York’s African Burial Ground, groups like the Society of Black Archaeologists are working tirelessly to remedy (see Flewellen et al. Reference Flewellen, Dunnavant, Odewale, Jones, Wolde-Michael, Crossland and Franklin2021). I single out disparities in representation between White and African American historical archaeologists in the United States not to reify an American-centric lens for understanding global archaeology but to demonstrate the severity of the issue within a subdiscipline where research on race and the African diaspora remains a priority.

Demographic data have been read across multiple grains of analysis, including gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, country of origin and so on (e.g. Heath-Stout Reference Heath-Stout2019; Reference Heath-Stout2020), but here I prioritize the generalizable category of whiteness to pose questions about the field that we have, for better or for worse, inherited. Maria Franklin’s provocative question about the lack of Black archaeologists is one of the most pressing questions that has yet to be adequately addressed in the more than 20 years since it was initially posed. At the same time, the framing of the question may inspire a particular reading in which the onus is placed on people of colour to justify their positionality and place in the field and, in turn, do the hard work of increasing representation in the name of diversity. In flipping the question, I want to challenge the overwhelming majority of (White) archaeologists to move away from the ‘problem’ of diversity (or lack thereof) and instead deconstruct their own privilege and taken-for-granted space of dominance in the field worldwide.

In short, diversity is a White problem. As Lily Zheng (Reference Zheng2019) notes in the Harvard business review, ‘One of the functions of privilege is rarely having to think about privileged identities as “identities.”’ Indeed, if we looked to graphs of racial demographics in archaeology, those self-identifying as White would comprise a single overwhelming blob that signals a problem for those ‘other’ slivers that need to catch up. In and beyond archaeology, countless workshops, panels, statements, publications, syllabi, training seminars and lectures have paid lip service to a seemingly blind assertion of the merits of diversity. Of the many substantive critiques of this now overused and arguably empty trope, Jamaican writer Marlon James (Reference James2016) unapologetically makes the case that people of colour, who are inevitably asked to do the heavy lifting in the kinds of work associated with diversity, are exhausted from engaging in such projects:

I raise these points not to dismiss disciplinary efforts that promote diversity and seek to democratize the field but to suggest that self-reflexivity on the part of White archaeologists must be part of the process. How, then, can archaeologists do the work that problematizes their own positionality in the field? Full and satisfactory answers to this question will take time and effort, and I don’t pretend to offer any kind of essential model, but I here offer suggestions for how we might start the process.

Archaeologists are no strangers to in-depth studies of heterogeneous populations nominally identified as White (in the past or present). Interestingly, however, studies of various and diverse White populations seldom frame race as an essential analytic, instead choosing to critically dissect, for example, class, labour, gender, religion, nationalism, identity formation and so on. While some archaeologists have recently highlighted the need to take whiteness seriously (Matthews Reference Matthews, Matthews and McGovern2015; Gorsline 2015), aside from Alison Bell’s (2005) study of White ethnogenesis in the Chesapeake and a recent issue of Historical archaeology, guest-edited by William White and Christopher Fennell (2017; White Reference White2017), whiteness hardly appears in archaeological parlance at all. This normalizes whiteness to the extent that it is viewed as irrelevant in discussions of race and racialization. This disciplinary omission is all the more surprising and troubling given the enormous quantity and quality of work dedicated to the racialization of, and racism experienced by, non-White populations and individuals.

But it’s here in this very literature that we see the earliest murmurs of an archaeology of whiteness that has yet to come to fruition, albeit in a different form than what I’m espousing here. Beginning in the 1990s, Terrence Epperson (Reference Epperson1990; Reference Epperson1997; Reference Epperson2004) highlighted how whiteness, just like blackness, needed to be socially constructed and materially ingrained in colonial Virginia. Charles Orser (Reference Orser1998, 666) similarly decreed that ‘to become true partners in the expanding anthropological discourse on race in America, historical archaeologists must seek to illustrate the effects of racism on African Americans and other peoples, developing at the same time a historical archaeology of whiteness’. Here, Orser had in mind archaeologies dedicated to the study of poor White or racially ambiguous populations, like the Irish, who ‘became white’. In many respects, this historical archaeology of whiteness has made some headway. Archaeologies of rural Whites in Appalachian coal country, the diasporic Irish and poor Whites in the Caribbean have certainly expanded the archaeological dataset (see Horning Reference Horning2002; Orser Reference Orser2007; Brighton Reference Brighton2009; Komara Reference Komara2019; Reilly Reference Reilly2019).

At the same time, however, case studies about the historical heterogeneity of whiteness may not be sufficient to account for how whiteness has played, and continues to play, a role in the development of the modern world. As William White (Reference White2017, 140) has recently argued, ‘Whiteness is not just a reference to people of European descent, but is also linked to hegemony over other racial groups.’ He continues, ‘The diverse cultural and ethnic variability of the European diaspora was ironed out in the United States in order to create Whiteness, with its social, economic, and political advantages’ (ibid., 140). The focus of White’s study, whiteness-making in 19th- and 20th-century Boise, Idaho, coincides with the birth of a more robust archaeological discipline. If, in following White’s call, there is a need to explore whiteness formation processes during this period, there is a similar need for taking critical stock of how whiteness, as a structuring ideology, frames archaeological epistemology in the first place. The recent work of Ayana Flewellen (Reference Flewellen2017) and L. Chardé Reid (Reference Reid2021) has compellingly demonstrated that the consequences of White supremacist knowledge production are manifest in the practice of archaeology, the way knowledge is presented to and absorbed by the public, the stories that are told at historically significant sites, and the grander narratives of what and who from the past ‘counts’ in the here and now.

My assertion is that a self-reflexive analysis of the discipline that foregrounds whiteness can be a critical tool for deconstructing and decolonizing the field. As Richard Dyer (Reference Dyer1997, 1) noted in his classic work on whiteness over 20 years ago, ‘As long as race is something only applied to non-White peoples, as long as White people are not racially seen and named, they function as the human norm’.Footnote ⁴ Recognizing the material power in the creation of self, space and race in the past is part of this archaeological challenge, but it is also a call for what Meg Gorsline (2015) refers to as an ‘archaeology of accountability’ that fully confronts White privilege in the field itself; it challenges us to rethink the archaeological principles and practitioners that we hold dear, encouraging all archaeologists, but especially those in training, to perhaps depart from our traditional methods in favour of more emancipatory frameworks that shirk the most crippling aspects of personal whiteness emanating from the pores of the field’s earliest professionals and the knowledge they produced.

What happens when prospective students are made aware of an engaging field but are then convinced that this same field is not theirs? How might a student be led to believe that archaeology is not a field in which they belong? That for the overwhelming majority of its existence, the world of archaeology was created by and for White men to be consumed by White men may not come as a surprise to many professional archaeologists. Indeed, Michael Nassaney and Cheryl LaRoche (Reference Nassaney and LaRoche2011) pointed out the Society for Historical Archaeology’s troubled past of racism and concerted efforts to build an anti-racist organization over a decade ago. But perhaps we need to think more critically about how troubling histories are entangled with the startling representational statistics in the 21st century presented above. One of the underlying problems, I argue, is the way in which archaeology is taught to students in the classroom and how its disciplinary history continues to be uncritically venerated. The development of basic methodological principles is haunted by looming silences concerning the treatment of non-White bodies and beliefs, which must be connected to the exclusion of BIPOC students in university training into the 21st century. An archaeology of whiteness, therefore, is one attuned to the deep tradition of the tenets of White supremacy that allowed violence against non-White bodies to produce archaeological knowledge. In this foray into an archaeology of whiteness, I provide two examples from archaeology’s hall of fame, so to speak, to demonstrate how whiteness has unconsciously shaped the way we work and think.

Excavating archaeology: rendering BIPOC bodies invisible

Our history of the field privileges those White males who generated archaeological knowledge and techniques built on the backs of enslaved Black and Brown bodies and through the erasure of Indigenous peoples. This fact is becoming more widely acknowledged (Mickel Reference Mickel2021), but it seldom features in archaeological pedagogy. Introductory courses to archaeology consistently include foundational histories, methods and ideas of the field. A student is likely taught the rationale for systematic excavation, how and why archaeologists excavate in specific places, and how archaeologists formulate interpretations of the material record. For better or for worse, textbooks remain a common resource for such courses. Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn’s Archaeology. Theories, methods, and practice (2019) and the more concise Archaeology essentials remain two of the most widely used texts. The 2015 Essentials edition features a portion of a painting of ongoing 19th-century mound excavations in the Mississippi valley (Renfrew and Bahn Reference Renfrew and Bahn2015, 22). Included in a chapter that briefly outlines the history of archaeological thought and practice – a common format found in many archaeological textbooks, even if this exact painting and site are not referenced – prior to ensuing chapters that introduce proper field methodologies, the inclusion of the painting serves to demonstrate the antiquity of archaeological science and methodological rigour.

The painting, which remains relatively well known among archaeologists, is Irish artist John Egan’s The Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley (Figure 1). The massive panorama, completed in 1850, is 348 feet in length, consisting of 25 individual scenes, depicting the splendour of the Mississippi valley with a rather unique focus on archaeological work. The panorama, now in the possession of the Saint Louis Art Museum, was commissioned by amateur archaeologist Montroville Wilson Dickeson in the 1840s. Dickeson looked to Egan to capture not only the natural beauty of the landscape but specifically his archaeological work. In the mid-19th century, there were multiple panorama paintings that featured the Mississippi valley. Offering viewers a sensorial experience of a landscape that many would likely never visit in person, these monstrous works were put on display in grand, domed halls throughout the country (Lyons Reference Lyons1976). For Dickeson, Egan’s painting, based on his own illustrations of excavations, afforded him the opportunity to charge 25 cents to Americans eager to witness the bucolic Mississippian countryside and catch a glimpse of exotic, stoic and noble Native Americans (Lyons Reference Lyons1976, 32). The money accrued from this touring panorama funded many of Dickeson’s future archaeological excavations, which would later put appropriated ‘Indian Antiques’ on display to showcase the exotic, primitive other to White audiences around the country (Veit Reference Veit1997, 113).

Figure 1.

John J. Egan, American (born in Ireland), active mid-19th century, Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley, ca1850; distemper on cotton muslin; 90 inches × 348 feet; Saint Louis Art Museum, Eliza McMillan Trust 34:1953. Courtesy of the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Montroville Dickeson was largely forgotten in the annals of archaeological history, which Richard Veit (Reference Veit1997, 115–16) suggests was due to his penchant for exaggeration and his failure to complete a career-defining publication.Footnote ⁵ Nonetheless, thanks to the visual provided in the painting, he is still credited as a pioneer of rigorous stratigraphic excavation and meticulous note taking. Despite these ‘blemishes’, Veit praises Dickeson as ‘an innovator in terms of archaeological method and interpretation, and … a scholar by the standards of his time’ (Veit Reference Veit1997, 118; see also Veit Reference Veit1999). It is for these reasons that a portion of Egan’s painting continues to appear in archaeological texts, demonstrating the long-standing empiricism that characterizes archaeological science. Over the last several years, many archaeologists have challenged the racist assumptions of Dickeson and his contemporaries, who discounted the possibility that Indigenous peoples were responsible for the construction of ancient mounds (Watkins Reference Watkins2000; McNiven and Russell Reference McNiven and Russell2005; Atalay Reference Atalay2006; Echo-Hawk and Zimmerman Reference Echo-Hawk and Zimmerman2006), but their methodological contributions to the field remain a focal point of how we introduce students to archaeological science.

This brings us back to Egan’s painting. Archaeologists like Dickeson, presumably represented in the painting as one of the White men taking notes in the foreground, are credited as the innovators of our science and progenitors of how we think as archaeologists. Where does that leave the majority of people represented in the painting? What can be said about the Black bodies toiling with shovels, perfecting the ways in which trench profiles are crafted? What about the Indigenous peoples who stand adjacent to the mound who were summarily written out of archaeological histories associated with the mysterious race of mound builders said to be responsible for the construction of such sites?

Dickeson worked throughout the Mississippi valley in the 1840s, but it’s likely that the scene painted by Egan unfolded in Condoria Parish, Louisiana in 1843. The featured mound is likely one of the earthen features that comprise what are now known as DePrato Mounds, currently on the National Register of Historic Places. A site report on surveys undertaken in the area in the 1990s notes that Dickeson excavated four of the mounds, including one that contained glass beads, indicative of a post-Contact component to the site, but subsequent development and destruction has left only five on the contemporary landscape (Cusick et al. Reference Cusick, McMakin, Dawdy and Yakubik1995). At the time of Dickeson’s excavations, the mounds were on the property of William Ferriday.Footnote ⁶ Ferriday, from England, received roughly 3,600 acres of land from his father-in-law as a wedding gift. According to an 1860 census, the property owned by Ferriday then included 30 cabins and 149 enslaved persons. Are these some of the nameless, enslaved individuals featured in Egan’s painting? In the same article in which Richard Veit (Reference Veit1997, 105) lauds Dickeson’s ‘meticulous’ note taking, it is summarily stated that ‘it seems that the planters were quite willing to divert their slaves for an afternoon of archaeology’.

The wilful omission of slavery from the story of archaeology’s emergence in the United States and elsewhere is a telling example of how White supremacy was essential in the discipline’s forging and paramount to its deafening present-day silence on this past. How many early excavations unapologetically utilized the labour of enslaved Black Americans? Renfrew and Bahn’s introductory text credits Thomas Jefferson as conducting ‘the first scientific excavation in the history of archaeology’ (Renfrew and Bahn Reference Renfrew and Bahn2015, 17), lauding his rigorous methods and objective interpretation of the evidence at hand (ibid., 12). Where in this origin story do we place the enslaved labourers who may have played a role in pioneering mound excavations? Jefferson’s description of excavations in his Notes on the state of Virginia served as justification for White settler colonial Indigenous removal (see Hatzenbuehler Reference Hatzenbuehler2011), while conveniently understating the continued pilgrimages made by Indigenous populations to mound sites (Jefferson Reference Jefferson1787, 106). In referring to excavations, Jefferson passively notes all that he himself found (ibid., 101–8), but could the nature of White supremacist archival practices suggest that enslaved peoples took part in these early archaeological efforts? Turning back to Dickeson, could the funds accumulated from the display of Black bodies in paintings like Egan’s have been used to pay other plantation owners for the use of enslaved people on Dickeson’s future projects? As historians continue to shed light on the centrality of slavery and racism in the making of American (and global) capitalism (Baptist Reference Baptist2014; Berry Reference Berry2017; Rosenthal 2019; see also Robinson Reference Robinson1983), could a similar history be written connecting archaeology with slavery and, later, Jim Crow labour exploitation?

Such questions should give us pause when considering the fact that much of the archaeological knowledge produced today by White professionals relies upon the labour of non-White bodies around the globe (Dyon Reference Dyon2015; Mickel Reference Mickel2019). The callous defence that workers are now paid hardly does justice to the power inequities that still constitute field practices and knowledge production.Footnote ⁷ The ‘ethnographic analogies’ referenced above heralded by Veit were developed through the study of dispossessed Indigenous Americans gazed upon by White visitors eager to pay their 25 cents to fund Dickeson’s archaeological science. Twenty years ago, Anna Agbe-Davies (1998) would comment about this very painting in the AAA’s Anthropology newsletter: ‘It’s time we examined how the concept of “race” structures the experiences of archaeologists, such as these 19th-century excavators, as well as its salience at the sites we uncover.’ I couldn’t agree more, and whiteness is a critical component of this examination.

‘My only purpose here is to illustrate methods’: archaeological science, diffusionism, and White supremacy

The Black bodies who were forced to contribute the labour for early American archaeology have largely been erased from the discipline’s memory, but labour exploitation and the erasure of BIPOC bodies from the annals of archaeological history is a global phenomenon (Mickel Reference Mickel2021). In a corporeal sense, it’s also the skulls and heads of ancient and contemporary BIPOC individuals that were used to build archaeological knowledge on both sides of the Atlantic (for the Americas see Thomas Reference Thomas2000; Colwell Reference Colwell2017). Flinders Petrie, active a generation or two after Dickeson, is still heralded as a forefather of archaeological method and thought, including in Renfrew and Bahn’s widely used text (2015, 23, 112). The Flinders Museum at UCL in London houses millions of artefacts recovered by projects under his direction throughout Egypt and the Near East. While the work of Debbie Challis (Reference Challis2013; Perry and Challis Reference Perry and Challis2013; Challis Reference Challis2016) has thoroughly outlined the deplorable racist attitudes of Petrie, and the effect of these attitudes on his archaeological thinking, his methodological rigour and dedication to strict empiricism have left him enshrined on an archaeological pedestal. Perhaps most jarring is his close relationship with UCL colleague and father of eugenics Francis Galton. Galton wasn’t particularly interested in the ancient past, but as Debbie Challis has recently highlighted, ‘Petrie was a prestigious advocate of Galton’s anthropometric data gathering and racial science in understanding ancient Egypt and archaeological evidence, as well as a backer of Galton’s eugenic vision in contemporary society’ (Challis Reference Challis2013, 3).

If Dickeson is often heralded for his adherence to stratigraphic principles and techniques, Petrie’s own empiricism earned him a reputation as the founder of the relative-dating method of seriation. Associating like types with like types in order to build relative chronologies is a useful archaeological tool that is regularly imparted to students in introductory classrooms (Renfrew and Bahn Reference Renfrew and Bahn2015, 112), but how often is seriation paired with Petrie’s devotion to anthropometric science and racial hierarchies? In a 1902 issue of Man, the publication of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Petrie published a paper demonstrating the methodological significance of diagrams, simply titled ‘The use of diagrams’. Seemingly unbiased, with a neutrality that promotes sound data, diagrams can provide helpful visuals for otherwise tricky concepts or overwhelming data sets, but there’s something far more sinister at work that again highlights the White supremacy so deeply ingrained in archaeological thought and practice. Petrie goes into painstaking detail to describe the fairly complicated diagram that appears in Figure 2. The lengths and angles found on each triangle represent measurements and dimensions of skull features of what were believed to be distinct races. These races are then plotted on a diagram indicating the temperature of their natural climate and the corresponding level of intelligence.

Figure 2.

Diagram from W.M. Flinders Petrie’s ‘The use of diagrams’ (Petrie Reference Petrie1902, 83).

Petrie dissects the data presented, paying careful attention to their comprehensiveness and complexity; he even mentions how they can be improved by adding additional measurements. Taking stock of what the data are suggesting, Petrie (Reference Petrie1902, 84) concludes, ‘the left-hand triangles slope out to the left, i.e., the long heads are of the lowest ability’. It naturally follows, according to Petrie, that ‘the right-hand triangles are mostly equilateral, i.e., a mean type of skull is the most capable’, a group he later refers to as ‘the best types’. Debbie Challis’s (2016) detailed work on Petrie indicates that this 1902 article is not an aberration but an example of a lifelong commitment to the ‘science’ of craniometrics and ceramic typologies that could be put in the service of White supremacist paradigms of archaeological thought. Petrie concludes this article by addressing how these methods might best serve archaeology in the future: ‘My only purpose here is to illustrate methods, which may, I hope, be applied more fully than my opportunities permit’ (Petrie Reference Petrie1902, 84).

Such an opportunity would present itself to Petrie, following his death, in one of his most blatant demonstrations of White supremacy. As if a career of scientific racism and social support for White racial supremacy weren’t enough, Petrie donated his own head to the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Shortly before dying of complications from a bout of malaria in 1942, W.E. Thompson wrote to Sir Arthur Keith of the Royal College of Surgeons and Piltdown fame, to relay Petrie’s wishes, noting that ‘one of the very earliest requests he made, in case he should not survive the attack, was that his skull should be sent to the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons under your care, as a specimen of a typical British skull’ (Perry and Challis Reference Perry and Challis2013, 277). Having witnessed his methodological insights become enshrined in the archaeological toolkit, all that remained for Petrie to do was to allow his personal whiteness to legitimize these very methods and theories. The hubris of this act is rivalled by the reverence in which we still hold his dedication to empiricism and the knowledge he produced about the ancient, non-White other.

Such a comparative approach is still lauded in archaeological practice, but the organization and interpretation of data belie a deeper problem with an archaeological science that has yet to adequately address its White supremacist underpinnings. Framed as a question, how are we to justify our science and empirical rigour if they are predicated upon methods that were developed in order to create an ancient past that legitimized global White supremacy? Petrie’s overtly racist theories may have fallen out of favour in archaeological thought, but, as Neil Silberman (1999, 77) argues, his ‘pioneering utilization of stratigraphy and pottery typology can not be easily separated from the larger ideology they serve’. Petrie’s methodological contributions were matched by his theoretical influences surrounding migration and diffusion, argued by Petrie to be central to innovation and civilization. His 1911 book The revolutions of civilisation made an empirical case for the existence of distinct racial types, whose movements and interactions spurred the rise and fall of civilizations based on race mixing. Not all archaeologists espouse(d) similarly racially charged rhetoric, but avoiding Petrie’s unabashed White supremacy suggests that contemporary archaeologists ‘may be in danger of perpetuating the very same pseudoscientific ideas about racial conflict and racial inequality that once filled Petrie’s head’ (Silberman 1999, 77). In other words, seriation as an archaeological tool need not be abandoned, but the leap from method to interpretive theory needs more robust practical and pedagogical scaffolding to adequately address racially charged knowledge production.

Working at roughly the same time as Petrie, German ethnologist and archaeologist Leo Frobenius espoused early ideas of cultural diffusion that would later support Petrie’s beliefs surrounding racial and cultural superiority. Part of an influential German ethnological and archaeological paradigm at the time (see Heine-Geldern Reference Heine-Geldern1964, 411–12), Frobenius developed models of cultural diffusion based on extensive fieldwork throughout the African continent. His political stance against indirect colonial rule was marked by a deep appreciation for the African communities in which he worked, but his diffusionist ideas reveal the depths of White supremacist logic in forging ideas about ancient and contemporary civilizations. As Suzanne Marchand (Reference Marchand1997, 159) argues, Frobenius ‘thought them [Africans] to be living documents of an otherwise unrecoverable universal human past’. Indeed, Frobenius so steadfastly believed living Africans to be living fossils that he conjured, rooted in his archaeological data, a diffusionist theory in which ancient African civilizations were said to be the product of an ‘African Atlantis’ from which a White Mediterranean race spread their ideas, technology and general social complexity (Miller Reference Miller1999, 4).

The brief discussion of Frobenius serves as a foil to Petrie’s more explicitly racist brand of archaeology, indicating that seemingly (by the standards of the day) well-intentioned researchers can fall into similar White supremacist traps through the mundanity of seriation or diffusionism. The argument outlined here suggests that early methodological and theoretical advances in archaeological thought and practice were coupled with White supremacist underpinnings that have left an indelible mark on how we produce knowledge about the past. The banality of organizing ceramic sherds into typologies and relative chronologies should not be divorced from Petrie’s effusive defense of racial hierarchies. The idea that the grandeur of ancient Egypt and other prehistoric civilizations had ‘adopted’ their hallmarks of human ingenuity from foreign and superior races finds a 21st-century correlate in wildly popular pseudoscientific theories of ancient aliens. Both theories are summarily dismissed today by archaeologists, but it’s the methodology and thought process associated with the former theory that we still take seriously in archaeology classrooms and publications.