Archaeology in the shadow of apartheid : race, science and prehistory

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.