Re-Centering Southeastern Archaeology – An Equitability Project
This project is an outgrowth of remote conversations begun in mid-March between a casually collected group of women archaeologists, all members of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC). What started out as introductions in a group chat among people loosely connected within 6 degrees of each other, became commiseration, cooperation, and collaboration over bi-monthly Zoom hangouts. Group members are at different career and life stages, work in all archaeological periods and areas across the Southeastern US (and in other places), and cover nearly every analytical specialty.
The topic of starting a group bibliography was raised in June 2020, in part as a response to attending the “Archaeology in the time of Black Lives Matter” panel discussion, our recognition of our privilege as White scholars, and our frustrations with the lack of equity among the authors most frequently cited in archaeology syllabi and bibliographies. We ultimately decided that a dynamic online bibliography that allowed for community-sourcing and keyword tagging of entries would be the most useful to the widest audience.
We chose Zotero to house the bibliography, a Google Form for community submissions of entries, Google docs to create a project framework and controlled vocabulary for the keyword tags, and a project website hosted by Humanities Commons. In recognition that our discipline’s practitioners are overwhelmingly White, the goal of this bibliography is simple: to make easily accessible the work of women, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, LGBTQ+ archaeologists and scholars of all abilities and to provide a living database where those works can be shared across the archaeological community.
Project Team Members
Sarah Baires, PhD, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, Eastern Connecticut State University
Jodi A. Barnes, PhD, Arkansas Archeological Survey, University of Arkansas
Emily L. Beahm, PhD, Arkansas Archeological Survey, University of Arkansas
Elizabeth T. Horton, PhD, Rattlesnake Master LLC, Charlottesville, Virginia
Maureen S. Meyers, PhD, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Mississippi
Erin S. Nelson, PhD, RPA, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, University of South Alabama
Tanya M. Peres, PhD, RPA, Department of Anthropology, Florida State University
Grace E. Riehm, MA, RPA, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Karen Y. Smith, PhD, RPA, Heritage Trust Program, South Carolina Department of Natural Resources
Karen A. Stevens, PhD candidate, University of Kentucky, Kentucky Heritage Council