Toward a Critical Archaeology [and Comments and Reply]

Introduction: New Directions in African Diaspora Archaeology

“…This wave of critical thought and theorizing challenged those excavating historic Black sites to participate in self‐reflexivity, engage with descendant community members as equal partners in the production of knowledge, and to recognize race as an integral part of modern society (Leone et al. ; Mullins ; Orser , ; Potter ). Moreover, the application of critical theories of race, class, and gender more closely aligned the goals of African American archaeology with the political and intellectual aims of the study of the African Diaspora by closely linking the field with the aims of the racial vindicationist tradition (Mullins ).…”

A Pioneering Experiment: Dialoghi di Archeologia between Marxism and Political Activism

“…Overall, from a political point of view, Dialoghi di Archeologia predated many aspects of the Anglo-American critical archaeology of the 1980s (Leone et al 1987;Leone 2005Leone , 2010Potter 1992). Indeed, some of the sources of inspiration of the two cultural movements (i.e.…”

“…Indeed, some of the sources of inspiration of the two cultural movements (i.e. Gramsci's ideology, see Leone et al 1987) were the same. Nevertheless, there were some substantial differences.…”

1 Home Turf: Archaeology, Territoriality, and Politics

“…) have focused on revealing how dominant political practices assemble spaces, echoing earlier literature in critical archaeology that sought to expose how manipulations of landscapes serve to “naturalize” certain elements of social order (Leone ; Leone et al. ). In turn, social landscape archaeologists have generally avoided defining either political territories or archaeological “regions,” due to the perception that their historical contingency, and their implication in projects of nation‐building and political marginalization, makes mapping them analytically (if not also politically) problematic (A. Smith :181).…”