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Once upon a time in land far, far away…
No, not like that. I’m only joking.
But I am going to tell you a story.
It’s not your story…
It’s my story…
…a story like you’ve never seen before.
But you want a proper story, eh?
Then I must tell you some things
Of my people, and my land.
David Gulpilil, Ten Canoes (dir. Rolf de Heer)
This extract from the Cannes-award-winning Australian film Ten Canoes epitomises the essence of the 10th World Archaeological Congress (WAC), which was held from 22 to 28 June on the unceded lands of the Larrakia Nation, Darwin, Australia. The film was released in 2006 and is set in Arnhem Land in Northern Australia. It was produced and developed alongside the Traditional Owners of the area. It depicts a community of hunters on an expedition into the marshes following the trail of Magpie Geese. Using different cinematographic devices, it cleverly merges three stories – one being told in the present day, one being told a few thousand years ago, and one being told in the Dreaming. As part of the Congress’s cultural programme, the WAC committee organised an outdoor beachside screening and Q&A with the director – Rolf de Heer. During the Q&A, de Heer explained that it was not possible to present the narrative properly in the way that the Traditional Owners wanted, as their story and the techniques for telling it would not be comprehensible to a Western audience.
The tension between Indigenous storytelling and the narratives told by non-Indigenous archaeologists was writ large in a number of sessions at WAC. The World Archaeological Congress, first convened in 1986 in Southampton, UK, has always had a driving vision to recognise explicitly the historical and social role and the political context of archaeological enquiry. First Nations archaeologists and archaeologies are an integral part of this political and social context. WAC’s Codes of Ethics have led the world in supporting Indigenous rights over Indigenous cultural heritage. Moreover, WAC recognises that Indigenous perspectives enrich archaeological practice and interpretation, but importantly empower communities to own and manage their traditional lands and cultural heritage. This year, archaeologists participated in WAC from more than 70 countries and sponsorship was raised to cover the travel costs for over 400 First Nations people to attend. With five keynote addresses and 175 different sessions over five days, it was truly a global conference.
A particularly interesting session on submerged palaeolandscapes by Dr Hanna Steyne, demonstrated the rich archaeological deposits that exist beneath the sea around the coast of Australia – some of which are now coming to light due to the growth of renewable energy and the subsea marine geophysical surveys that precede it. These surveys are informed by, and in some cases led by, the Traditional Owners of Sea Country – whose deep-time knowledge of the land before the inundation by the sea 10,000 years ago has been passed down through generations of storytelling. The knowledge not only indicated where deposits may be found, but crucially gives the context for those landscapes. Submerged palaeolandscapes exist all over the world, although not many places retain the deep-time stories that can give that full understanding of what we, as archaeologists, are looking at. As an example, Doggerland, the area between the United Kingdom and continental Europe, was once a land bridge, and the submerged landscapes have been extensively studied both with geophysics and underwater survey – however, the stories behind those deposits, and the naming of those landscapes and their features, are lost, as the ‘First Nations’ of Doggerland no longer exist.
Whose stories are we telling?
The themes of storytelling continued to be woven through many of the sessions. In particular, a series of sessions on the theme of gender and women’s ancestral knowledge in the Global South challenged who can tell these stories and who is allowed to hold that knowledge. It reminds us that a huge inequality of knowledge and skills exists across the world. Even more so, a dichotomy existed in the conference programme, between papers on the advances in scientific analysis versus the contribution of Indigenous knowledge to the practice of archaeology. On the one hand, huge leaps have been made in certain areas – for instance, new dating techniques enable us to put all world events on to a fixed (Western) chronology. But the concept of deep-time and, indeed, the timelessness of First Nations storytelling shows us there is more than one time-frame in the world, which raises questions as to whose time it really is that we are talking about. The Western tradition of being able to ‘classify’ archaeological deposits is deeply situated in the tradition of humans understanding and changing the natural world to suit us. However, many of the sessions at WAC challenged this premise and reminded us that, while we are now so used to shaping the world around us – including the narratives about the past – actually, for a huge amount of human history, we were just a small part of and fundamentally entangled with nature.
The keynote talk by Professor Kisha Supernant of the University of Alberta, entitled ‘Indigenous Archaeology as Restorative Justice’, was a powerful illustration of just how far our thinking has to move for us to understand what that deep entanglement feels like. She leads ‘Exploring Métis Identity Through Archaeology’ (EMITA), a collaborative research project that takes a relational approach to exploring the material past of Indigenous Métis communities, including her own family, in western Canada. Professor Supernant gave a poignant example of her own work excavating a piece of Métis beadwork. She uncovered the intricate beadwork as part of an excavation, and began to use the normal Western methods for block-lifting delicate archaeology (bandaging and boxing the remains, and carefully lifting them). However, as she was working, she felt as if something was wrong – her own words were that ‘the beadwork was not happy’. That deep connection with her heritage and identity meant that she recognised the beadwork’s own identity – and instead of being an artefact to remove and study – the beadwork had its own agency and also its own rights to remain where it lay.
Countless papers at WAC, mainly from First Nations speakers, reinforced this reciprocal relationship between humans and nature. By simply taking from the land, we lose sight of the agency and animism of the land itself. The land gives to the human, and the human should recognise that gift and give something back. Our recent extractive industrialised past has blurred that fundamental relationship, with nature seen as something to be exploited, and as archaeologists that attitude has influenced the way we think about people’s relationships with nature in the past. We see and study those relationships in the same way as we experience them in the Western world, as a resource to be used. Whereas, and as informed by Indigenous knowledge, our ancestors were likely to have been reciprocal, careful, and respectful of nature.
Conferences like WAC that bring people together from all over the world and from many different lifeways are vital to help us all think about the past in a different way, and also to help us frame the stories we tell as archaeologists. As Peter Schmidt, one of WAC’s elders, said in the plenary session: ‘other worlds have other ways of thinking’. Indeed, perhaps we can examine our current relationship with nature and the planet by allowing ourselves to explore those different stories and those different ways of thinking.
Dr Stu Eve is the Chief Executive of Wessex Archaeology.
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