Abstract
This chapter argues that progressive activist archaeologists should consider taking a more politically and socially radical approach to their research than has been typically practiced. While public, engaged, and community work has done much for the field, it is now time for us to do much more with our inherently socially transformative craft. Focusing on the concept of praxis, with a slightly different definition than is typically followed, we come to understand that critique and lifelong action that results in the elimination of material conditions of alienation can be at the forefront of our activism. Using an example from the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and Virginia, it is also clear that we must actively seek sites and people of the past who lived lives through their praxis. Their praxis will nurture our own and our future effectiveness in transforming the wider alienating social world we have created.
I was born a slave. My recollections of early life are associated with poverty, suffering and shame. I was made to feel, in my boyhood’s first experience, that I was inferior and degraded, and that I must pass through life in dependent and suffering condition. The experience of forty-three years, which were passed by me in slavery, was one of dark fears and darker realities.
(Thomas H. Jones, 1885)
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Notes
- 1.
For those who do not know the character, Homais was a main source of comic relief in the novel as he was an exemplary philosophaster; close inspection of his thick monologues shows he had quite a gift for assembling a learned-sounding perspective on any matter from the most disparate, incongruous, and dubious of sources.
- 2.
In this chapter, I do not elaborate on Marx’s concept of alienation owing to space limitations. But, I refer the reader to other works in which I do explore the concept more fully (e.g., Sayers 2003, 2008a, 2014a, b) and to key sources I have used during the past 15 years to develop my understanding of the concept and its real-world significance (Marx 1906, 1988, 1998; and, Axelos 1976; Ollman 1971; Marcuse 2007; Mészáros 1971; Patterson 2009; Singer 1980; Taussig 1980; Wendling 2009).
- 3.
To date, we have excavated about 0.003 % of the nameless site’s historical soils—some 250 m2 of a 20-acre, or 80,937 m2 acre island. We have observed at least 11 separate cabin structures, a probable community defense structure or compound, hundreds of cultural features, and several thousand associated artifacts. This suggests that if we excavated 100 % of the site we would find evidence of well over 3000 separate cabin structures that date to the 1607–1860 era as well as perhaps thousands of other cultural features. Even taking a conservative view, allowing for variables of whatever sort (e.g., population fluctuations) we still would anticipate finding evidence of perhaps 2000 cabin structures, hundreds of cultural features, and well over 100,000 artifacts at the nameless site. As the nameless site is one of potentially hundreds of islands in the original swamp, we can surmise that a great many people lived in the swamp across the pre-Civil War centuries.
- 4.
I prefer this term, resuscitation, to “reused,” “repurposed,” and “recycled.” The preferred term evokes the reemergence of material culture into a living social world by human effort, in this case among swamp interior communities and individuals (Sayers 2014a).
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Acknowledgments
I thank Mark Leone and Jocelyn Knauf for the kind invitation to contribute to this volume. Additionally, Mark’s review comments on this chapter were very important in seeing it become the strongest essay it could be. The data from our fieldwork is the result of the efforts of many people including the students and volunteers in the 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 American University/GDSLS Archaeology Field Schools, Karl Austin, Kevin Bradley, Brendan Burke, Vipra Ghimire, Cynthia V. Goode, Lance Greene, Aaron Henry, Julia Klima, Dan Lynch, Becca Peixotto, Jordan Riccio, Justin Uehlein, and many others; I thank all people wholeheartedly who have helped me in the swamp. My work in the Great Dismal Swamp has been supported by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Endowment for the Humanities (grant RZ-51219-10), the Canon National Parks Science Scholars Program, American University, and College of William and Mary though the views expressed in this chapter do not necessarily reflect the views of any supporting institution or agency.
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Sayers, D. (2015). Alienation, Praxis and Significant Social Transformation Through Historical Archaeology. In: Leone, M., Knauf, J. (eds) Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12760-6_3
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