In 2002, James Whitley declared there were ‘too many ancestors’ in archaeology following the ubiquity of them in Neolithic narratives of the 1990s. He was critical that they were invoked as an explanation for seemingly everything and could be found everywhere. Furthermore, it could be argued that several authors discussed ‘the ancestors’ without clearly defining who they were or what their relationship to the living was.
More than 20 years on, the ancestor’s hold on archaeology hasn’t loosened, yet we believe this concept can still be used uncritically. Therefore, rather than throw the ancestral baby out with the bathwater, we think it would be useful to rethink this major concept in archaeology. We both work in contexts with ancestors albeit understood differently. In Neolithic Britain, ancestors have been found in tombs, old pathways, and standing stones however ideas about ancestry draw heavily from ethnography. Similarly in the Caribbean, ancestor worship is often cited as the rationale for a whole host of practices, images, and objects.
In this session, we want to think about ancestors in archaeology without the theoretical baggage they have previously brought with them and are looking for papers reconsidering this concept in a radically different way taking inspiration from posthumanism, new materialism, and Indigenous theory.
2:00pm | Ancestor? We hardly know her! An introduction | Andy Rogers & Jonny Graham
2:20pm | Ancestral rupture, structural violence and the politics of kinship in 1st millennium northern Europe. | Kevin Kay and Marianne Hem Eriksen
2:40pm | A building lineage? Palimpsests, brochs, and complex identity in the Scottish Iron Age | Sam Scott-Moncrieff
3:12pm | Not quite dead: how ancestors shaped prehistoric cooperation | Mark Haughton and Mette Løvschal
3:35pm | What could ancestors do? – Reflections on different roles of ancestors in the Neolithic in north-west Germany | Sarah Bockmeyer
3:55pm | Memories of an ancestor: becoming-minoritarian at Quanterness | Jonny Graham
4:15pm | Discussion and roundtable |
Full paper abstracts available here: https://tag2024.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/tag-2024-session-abstracts-1.pdf
