Module 22: Archaeology as Critique II

Reading: Williams, "A River Runs Through Us"

Was the Williams article appropriate for this class? It doesn't contain archaeology, but Leone et al. want archaeology to be able to critique our own society. They suggest that a focus on race and racial inequality can bring white people to focus on things they don't want to know.

Whites are living in denial—of what? Their wealth, as a group, is built on exploitation of other people, environmental destruction—it has been ruthlessness. Is this "The Greatest Country in the World?"

Do African Americans want Leone et al. to use their history to address these questions? Not particularly—why not? Were Leone et al. successful in getting whites to focus on the things they don't want to know? Not particularly.

A focus on the environment is a more neutral subject, where victimization doesn't sound like making excuses. It also makes it possible to discuss how groups of people without power or wealth continue to be more subject to the harmful effects of the pursuit of profits—environmental injustice.

Is there a struggle between use value and exchange values?

•Demand for commodities (beaver dam protection against erosion ended; competition and warfare among Native Americans; tobacco growing, exhausted soil; silt entered into the river, making it too shallow for navigation; Africans enslaved; overfished the river—all by the end of the eighteenth century).

•As the national capital, Washington was an important Navy Yard and marine port: sex trade; deforested hills during Civil War; silting results in mud-bound flats; with increase in size came increase in sewerage, malaria; increase in black migration after the Civil War and increase in restrictive housing results in crowding in Black Belt.

•After World War II, nationalism resulted in "beautification," "urban renewal," the movement of African Americans out of downtown, crowded shoddy buildings, and increased highways; increases pollution flowing into river, increased eutrophication and falling fish populations.

•Current urban renewal will clean up river and turn riverbanks over to developers to build luxury apartments and condos, forcing African Americans to move again, lose access to river.

It seems like archaeology could result in a successful exhibit on both environmental and African American history.