Becoming Archaeologist
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 18/01/2021

Post-Processual archaeologies have provoked considerable disciplinary soul searching about to how we can diversify our predominantly white, straight, male, able bodied, middle and upper class profession in the present, and how we can tell out non-normative identities in the past. There has been nearly four decades of such debate, and yet advances toward a diverse discipline are painfully slow. But what if the way we problematise this is the problem in the first place? When we discuss diversifying archaeology it is always in opposition to a norm (illustrated precisely by the first sentence of this abstract), and in turn we reify that norm. Thus, the steps we might take to diversify our profession are always caught in a tension which reproduces, and gives primacy to, the norms we seek to disrupt. Instead I turn to new materialist feminist approaches to consider how difference is emergent, and examine how, if we shift our attention to consider the assemblages of becoming archaeologist, we can move beyond foregrounding problematic constants by examining how past and present archaeological identities are materialised.


Hannah Cobb, University of Manchester