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“American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing.” Gordon Willey and Phillip Phillips open their book, Method and Theory in American Archaeology, with this line of thought inspired by Phillips’ 1955 article outlining the significance of general anthropology to archaeological praxis. Today, American archaeology asks questions that move us beyond the dictums presented in 1958 while continuing to honor that epistemic placement within anthropology.
Reflecting a choice, the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences never explicitly references archaeology. Carolyn Rouse identified the lack of engagement with subfield breadth as one of the primary methodological failures of the Report. Their specific attack on anthropology not only misrepresents the current and accurate state of scholarship but threatens the very commitments we have as knowledge producers, educators, and human actors in the world. This archaeological response to the Report therefore (1) affirms a commitment to ethical practice and knowledge; (2) repudiates claims of diminishing standards; and (3) stands in solidarity with broader anthropological commitments to the communities with whom we work and of which we are a part.
Ethics
We do not believe it to be an oversight that the Report neglects a consideration of ethics and instead provides murky statements regarding moral and political standards that allegedly influence the evaluation of our scholarship. We recognize such rhetorical decisions disguised as assessment in the Report as deliberate and tactical, aimed at producing confusion and harm to contemporary scholarship. Archaeology’s disciplinary commitments today stem from a critical assessment of past harms, the expectation of community engagement, and a self-reflexivity woven into the fabric of our disciplinary practice for decades. In no uncertain terms, past archaeological practice assisted in Indigenous removal, ignored or erased Black pasts and presence, pillaged sites around the globe to fill institutional storerooms and coffers, and unapologetically determined how to study past cultures and who got to do the studying. Archaeological societies and journals have reassessed standards over the last several years. The priority has been an overhaul of not scholarly but ethical standards. Responding to issues of Indigenous dispossession, racism, sexual harassment and violence, ableism, and more, the discipline has taken seriously ethical practice and accountability, which produces stronger and more rigorous scholarship.
Standards
Rigorous scholarship is not created in a vacuum; it is the result of engaged, deliberate, and critical peer review. True for publications as well as grants, and rightfully extended into our practice in the world, our juries are made of our peers and communities. In all spheres of archaeological practice, we are committed to ensuring that an assessment of our work is conducted. Rigorous, quantitative work provides clear data regarding the identities of our knowledge producers and representational disparities, highlighting real disciplinary problems. Yet we retain a commitment to upholding ethical standards of practice to communities within which we work, produce, and share knowledge. This includes descendant and local communities, publics with vested interests, stakeholders, and global partners, ensuring that all voices are considered. We do not consider a field that separates academic knowledge production from the wellbeing of stakeholder communities to be rigorous scholarship.
In Solidarity
We stand steadfastly with an anthropological discipline committed to ethical practice, care, and scholarly rigor. We will continue to work to produce knowledge alongside communities, publics, and stakeholders, with transparency and a commitment to equity, efforts at reparatory justice, and reclamation within the broader turn to engaged scholarship, and to work towards undoing past harms. Our placement within anthropology provides us with the opportunity to research the ancient and contemporary world; we therefore confront how past methodologies have created lasting harm and damage to the same societies we work within. We share these commitments with the many subfields under the aegis of our larger discipline of Anthropology and stand with all of them in the face of such rampantly misinformed reports.
The Report will no doubt cause harm to all of us, especially in places where our colleagues are being forced to justify the existence of their departments. True academic value lies in our ability to self-determine the quality and direction of our own discipline—we are, in fact, the experts within our discipline. Self-reflexivity, epistemic critique, and clarity of mission are part of what we do. The production of misinformation and ignorance about our disciplines will not be tolerated. When administrators look to this Report to make decisions, they should consider whether they agree with the authors of the Report who conclude by stating, “Part of the raison d’être of a university is that it should engage in disinterested inquiry.” Archaeology, like anthropology, necessarily engages in interested inquiry. We do so because there is nothing neutral about how we, as a society, understand the past.