Archaeological Practice at the Cultural Interface

Archaeological practice conventionally aims to employ scientific methodologies to investigate the pasts of (usually) other people. ¹ Many Indigenous communities have enthusiastically yet apprehensively embraced such attempts to characterize and understand their own pasts through professional archaeological research. This guarded Indigenous interest in archaeological historicism reflects tensions between, on the one hand, community desires for one’s own history to be investigated, told locally and/or in the broader world and, on the other hand, Indigenous historical experience of intruders’ practices in producing knowledge about them.