Archaeology as Grounding: Decentring, Detaching and Decolonizing in the Service of Communities

Abstract

Collaborative archaeologies have transformed relations between archaeologists and descendant communities, yet their most consequential effects remain undertheorized. We argue that such collaborations constitute a form of grounding for both standpoints – whether descendant or archaeologist. Drawing on cases from the Northwest Coast of North America, we show how collaborative archaeological practice reconnects Indigenous peoples with ancestral belongings and places in ways that support what Glen Coulthard and Leanne Simpson call ‘grounded normativity’ – the embodied, land-connected ethical lifeways that colonialism has sought to sever. We extend the concept of ‘archaeology as therapy’ by demonstrating that therapeutic effects arise from this grounding: the restoration of reciprocal relations between living communities and their heritage. We maintain that meaningful collaboration requires an inverse movement for archaeologists – not attachment, but detachment from colonial-derived frameworks of site ownership, scientific authority and possessive control over heritage that originates with the ancestors of descendant peoples. Decentring archaeology means recognizing the archaeological ‘site’ itself as a colonial construct – one that severs belonging from the places and people descendant from that heritage. Practiced with genuine commitments to community sovereignty, archaeology can ground itself in right relations and better serve the peoples to whom the heritage belongs.