The topic of my discussion was “Archaeology as Social Justice.”  This week, we dealt with defining some more theoretical terms relevant to the idea of community and public archaeology.  Some other goals of this week’s discussion were to answer questions like How can we address issues of class using archaeology?  What is the difference between critical archaeology and post-processual archaeology?  For critical theory, we looked to Randall McGuire, a professor of Anthropology and archaeologist who received his PhD at the University of Arizona in 1982.  Critical theory stems from consumerism: fed products that ultimately perpetuate class structure.  In critical theory, class relations are reorganized by ideology.  An example of this dominant ideology is meritocracy, which is the idea that people start on the same playing field and succeed by solely by working hard.  Ultimately, the goal is to bring these ideologies to light so that people can recognize and understand them.

Processual archaeology is essentially deductive positivist theory, which adopts a strict way of performing scientific study.  The idea here is to create studies that are replicable with refutable or non-refutable hypotheses.  Processual archaeology seeks to explain why societies are more complex than others.  Post-processualism emerges against processual archaeology, coming out of post-structural thought.  Post-processualism is kind of like an umbrella of techniques against processualism, including meaning, critique, and transformation.  The critique aspect of post-processualism deals with the researcher knowing his or her biases and understanding context.  Transformation of post-processualism deals with creating a new practice.

We talked a little bit about feminist literature and research relating to archaeology, which largely deals with the intersecting of categories of experience with each other and the relationships among domination, power, and balance.  Marxist archaeology puts class above other categories of experience.  Indigenous archaeology intersects with some of the feminist perspective but asks the question, how do these result in colonization?  Ultimately it is important to understand how we create and use knowledge.  In order to transform archaeology, we must understand how we create knowledge.