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COLONIAL HISTORY, WESTERN LENS
Archaeology includes the study of artifacts and other aspects of material culture but is more importantly about people-understanding people's daily lives, their sense of place in the world, the food they ate, their art, their spirituality, and their political and social organization. In piecing together multiple lines of evidence, including written documents, oral histories, analytical data from artifacts and ecofacts, and a range of regional and local environmental evidence, archaeologists attempt to write the stories of the past. Stated simply, archaeology is one of many tools utilized for understanding the past. However, when placed in its proper historical context, it is clear that the discipline of archaeology was built around and relies upon Western knowledge systems and methodologies, and its practice has a strongly colonial history.1 Many archaeologists have come to recognize that archaeology is based on, and generally reflects, the values of Western cultures.2 In privileging the material, scientific, observable world over the spiritual, experiential, and unquantifiable aspects of archaeological sites, ancient peoples, and artifacts, archaeological practice demonstrates that it is solidly grounded in Western ways of categorizing, knowing, and interpreting the world.
However, as Indigenous and local groups around the world have demonstrated, it is not only archaeologists who feel stewardship responsibilities toward archaeological materials and locations-many groups have rights and responsibilities to the human and material remains and to the knowledge, memories, and spiritual power that are intimately tied with the places and materials studied by archaeologists. Prior to European colonization, communities were able to act as stewards over their own cultural resources and history-examining, remembering, teaching, learning, and protecting their own heritage. In North America, as in many places around the globe, all of that changed abruptly when colonization began and the wealthy elites from Europe and newly settled Americans began to exercise their curiosity over the materials beneath their feet in the "New World."3 While disease, quests for land, warfare, and forced religion were decimating Native people and disrupting their daily lives and practices, antiquarians and anthropologists were gathering the remains of the dead and dying-including their bodies, skulls, sacred materials, and items of everyday use-for study and placement in museums around the world.4
While one of the most far-reaching acts of cultural, spiritual and physical...