Abstract:
What was the relationship between archaeology and apartheid in
South Africa? How did South African archaeologists navigate the
relationship between science and state under apartheid? This paper
makes two arguments: the first is that the nature of this relationship
was less about the goals, beliefs and attitudes of individual archaeologists, than it was about the structural relationship between the discipline of archaeology and the apartheid state, evidenced in matters of
political economy, the availability of funding, the influence of theory
from the disciplinary metropoles in the global north, and the local
social and political contexts in which archaeologists practised. The
second is that describing this relationship is less a matter of choosing
between binary terms of resistance and collusion, than it is about
assaying a more complex and ambiguous middle ground, made up of
compromises, accommodations, strategic silences, and minor failures
of will and vision. In the case of South African archaeology, the edges of
this relationship were sharpened by three factors: first, the discipline
was largely state funded through the apartheid museum and university system; second, the subject matter of archaeology is so centrally
concerned with black history and experience; and third, the need by
archaeologists to access material cultures, human remains, and sites
on the landscape. South African archaeology was a material beneficiary of apartheid, in the sense that the years of greatest political
repression were arguably its years of greatest achievement. However,
more marked than this was the manner in which the totalitarian
politics of apartheid freed archaeologists from public accountability.
Apartheid delivered up archaeological sites, sacred places, and human
and cultural remains, for collection, representation, and display, with
little possibility of popular dissent. The legacies of this history of unaccountable practice may prove to be among the most lasting legacies of
the decades of archaeology in the shadow of apartheid.
