RAC/TRAC Session 17: Decolonial Roman archaeology from disruption to transformation

Conference Sessions and Abstracts - Saturday 13 April 2024

17. You cannot decolonise a syllabus: Decolonial Roman archaeology from disruption to transformation

Eva Mol – University of York 
Zena Kamash – Royal Holloway
Miko Flohr – Universiteit Leiden 
Andrew Gardner – UCL
David Mattingly – University of Leicester

This session wants to discuss decoloniality and the decolonization movement in Roman archaeology. The urge to more structurally eliminate the reproduction of epistemic and intellectual colonialism in the field has been growing recently. Decoloniality has brought a critical lens able to create awareness of issues of colonial language, power inequalities, and better ways to discuss diversity in the past. Likewise, it has been able to address some fundamental issues relating to current ethics of research and a renewed attention to the lack of diversity in the field (Kamash 2021). However, this attention has been partial and slow in its movement, and we want to discuss how we can make decoloniality from a disruption into a transformation of the field. It is our conviction that Roman archaeology will not only become more inclusive, but way more exciting if we work to include traditionally marginalized voices, works, and ideas in a structural way, if we give more space to non-canonical subjects, and grow more diverse in practice and people. This cannot be done of course, without also discussing responsibility and labour involved.

This labour includes a critical take on the concept itself, and the worrying developments we see happening in academia concerning decolonisation. The term ‘decolonisation’ has increasingly become hijacked by people and institutions for neoliberal gain. More worryingly, decolonisation has increasingly come to denote a primarily academic and cultural movement (Táíwò 2022), used as a metaphor rather than drawing to the direct action of repatriation of Indigenous land and life (Tuck and Yang 2012). In other words: the term implies action and can never be used lightly.

We welcome scholars, museum practitioners, field archaeologists; anyone who wants to reflect on these issues or has in any way been working on inclusive practices and positionality, social justice, or ways to disrupt Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies. We welcome contributions on recentering marginalised and subaltern voices (either in Roman history or the discipline itself) or in any way involved in using creative means to disrupt and deroot colonial thought from Roman archaeology.

Bibliography:
Ahmed, S. 2012. On Being Included, Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press
Kamash, Z. 2021. Rebalancing Roman Archaeology: From Disciplinary Inertia to Decolonial and Inclusive Action. Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal 4(1): 4: 1–41. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/traj.4330 
Táíwò, O. 2022. Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously. Bloomsbury: Hurst Publishers
Tuck, E. and Wayne Yang, K. 2012. Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1(1): 1-40

Session schedule 

Abstracts 

 ‘Are you really Dutch?’ (Un)belonging in Roman Archaeology
Miko Flohr – Universiteit Leiden

As is well known, Roman archaeology emerged as a profoundly ‘Western’ practice with deep roots in European colonial and imperial projects, and with a demography still overwhelmingly dominated by people of white, European descent. In many post-imperial European societies, the field is considerably less ethnically diverse than the broader population, and leading popular and scientific discourse still replicates ideas derived from European imperialist thinking that once shaped thinking on the Roman world; at the same time the complex colonial and imperial roots of the field remain at the margins of scholarly and professional narratives. This makes the field hard to navigate for people with roots outside ‘the west’. In this paper I will suggest that we should look at this problem in terms of ‘unbelonging’, and that a profound and broadly shared understanding of the anatomy of this ‘unbelonging’ is an essential step towards making Roman archaeology more diverse and inclusive, and to dismantle the implicit (masculine) whiteness and coloniality that still pervade the field. I will argue, however, that this cannot be done without having difficult but sincere conversations about practices of bias and exclusion, and the ways in which these can accumulate into academic reputations and marginalizations.

 ‘Are you really Iraqi?’ Belonging, social bonds and decolonial action 
Zena Kamash – Royal Holloway

In this paper I will explore how it feels to be a Roman archaeologist from a British Iraqi perspective. Building on the ideas drawn together by Soraya and El-Solh (1988), I will examine the ambivalence of being both an insider and an outsider as a British Arab woman, with particular reference to my experiences of leading the ‘Crafting Heritage for Wellbeing in Iraq’ project. Thinking through this project also allows an opportunity to engage deeply with the challenges and opportunities of decolonial action through archaeology and heritage in rebuilding fractured societies. 

Bibliography:
Altorki, S. and Fawzi El-Solh, C. (eds) 1988. Arab Women in the Field: studying your own society. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press

 Confronting Colonialist Narratives of the Ancient Indian Ocean: A Re-evaluation of the Roman Sources
Nicholas Bartos – Stanford University

New research on the maritime economies of the western Indian Ocean is increasingly highlighting the substantial contributions of a more diverse range of regional actors during the Roman period. Nevertheless, the field is still largely characterized by the colonialist, Eurocentric, and Orientalist holdovers of past scholarship. Many treatments rely on biased and incomplete ancient texts and exclude the world of late antiquity. Others perpetuate the narrative that the Romans disproportionately influenced regional economic development, a scholarly legacy deriving from earlier work by members of the British Raj in India who fashioned themselves as Roman descendants. Efforts towards more inclusive research are underway, but these are hampered by the unbalanced preservation and study of Roman textual and archaeological material compared to that from East Africa, Arabia, or Asia. This paper outlines how we can use these same sources to highlight the roles of more marginalized participants in this multicultural space. It draws on two case studies: the first involving computational models of non-Roman seafaring in the Periplus Maris Erythraei and the second incorporating recently excavated material of foreign diaspora communities along the Red Sea. Together, these demonstrate the importance of expanding the traditional boundaries of classical antiquity and its cultural diversity.

Disrupting the narrative to better serve the London Museum’s audiences
Rebecca Redfern – Museum of London

Over the past decade, multidisciplinary work by colleagues has challenged many of deeply held beliefs about Roman Britain and one of the most visible in the media is the presence of racialized minorities, and the scientific evidence which refutes that these people were first- generation migrants or only ‘seen’ at military sites. We are all very familiar with how this played-out (and still does!), coinciding as it did with Brexit. The Museum of London is currently working to decentre whiteness within its own practice, and the author’s bioarchaeological research questions deeply held narratives about the people of Roman Britain and London – both are challenges for our existing audience groups. Nevertheless, curatorial are striving to ensure that content at the museum’s new site disrupts, challenges, and wherever possible questions the knowledge and ‘facts’ held by or taught to our audiences in order to serve them better. An overview of this curatorial experience is shared, particularly the challenges faced when need to create a new narrative often results in some very ‘plain speaking’ audience feedback! What is the cost of being disruptive when it is apparent that some audience groups want familiarity and reassurance from their visit?

 Woe to the Etruscans: Colonial thought and Classicism in Roman Archaeology and its Impact on Pre-Roman societies
Michale McCabe III – Universiteit Leiden

The concept of a decolonised humanities and a decolonial Roman archaeology has been one for some time now. Edward Said’s famous text on Orientalism has been out for 40 years, but we still use conceptual frameworks such as Orientalising and Orientalised in our works. What’s more, is that the power balances and colonial language used are still applied in our conceptualisation of Romanization and Hellenization. Roman Archaeology, thus, still fundamentally operates on the colonial “Us vs. Other” paradigm, with nearly zero radical change in our methodological and theoretical toolbox in interpreting the past. This binary system of understanding the world has led to a severe misunderstanding of Etruscan material culture, specifically as it relates to extant “other” objects, more often than not, Roman. Etruscology is still operating with the paradigm of acculturation concerning Greek, Roman and Near-Eastern influences. This paper explores the post-Enlightenment thinking of nation-states, colonial influence, power dynamics and where the decolonial movement seems to have met a wall in Roman archaeology while concentrating on the impact this has had on Etruscology as a whole, specifically the Romanization debate. The goal is to discuss the relationship between the theoretical and methodological supremacy of colonial perspectives in Roman Archaeology and Etruscology. This paper thus suggests a critical revaluation against a new paradigm of participatory actants within a developing Mediterranean Koine, reshaping the understanding of the role of material culture and stylistic development.

 Ways to disrupt Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies: a focus on Latin and class 
Richard Hingley – Durham University
 
This paper focuses on Latin language as a highly effective method for enacting inclusion and exclusion. Education in Latin formed/forms part of a powerful culture of exclusion: Learning the correct form of the language excluded those with less advanced training and knowledge ('barbarians', provincials, soldiers, traders, etc.). The currency of Latin derives from the use of the language to define status and class in the Roman world, as reinvented since the Renaissance as part of Eurocentric thought. This makes it difficult not to see the UK government's recent proposal to extend Latin teaching to state schools as an attempt to educate a wider spectrum of young people to know their place. The structure of the academy appears to hold back direct critique of the exclusionary nature of Latin education, and archaeology surely has a role. The focus on identity in Roman archaeology has served, if anything, to sideline issues of inequality since it has flattened concepts of hierarchy. One idea is to turn some attention to the complex means through which inequalities were enacted and projected in the Roman past, consciously using this as part of the project to critique inequalities in our own societies.  

 Disrupting the Archaeological Archive: Experiments in Decolonial Intervention
Anne Chen – Bard College        Adnan Almohamad – Birkbeck        Jen Baird – Birkbeck

What would it take, in concrete terms, to effectively and meaningfully disrupt an entrenched Eurocentric knowledge hierarchy tied to a blockbuster ‘Big Dig’ era excavation? What obligations do we as scholars, curators, and students in the West, who have benefitted from the ‘Big Digs’ of the early 20th century, have to help bring about more equitable access to the (physical and intellectual) products of those excavations or to help rebalance processes of knowledge-making? Taking these questions as a starting point, this talk first reflects on what post-colonially informed perspectives and community engagement have taught us about the long-lasting repercussions of foreign excavations at the site of Dura-Europos, Syria. We then describe our recent collaborative efforts to harness the potential of emerging technologies to work toward active remediation of persisting inequities and biases of the sort which are often rooted in early archaeology.

Back to RAC/TRAC Conference 2024 Timetable