Archaeology and the Normality of Care

In my introductory archaeology course this semester, we started with a discussion of the 25 Grand Challenges for Archaeology, identified by Keith Kintigh and colleagues in 2014. My students expressed surprise that war and conflict was, in their view, so underemphasized in comparison to other questions about leadership, hierarchy, and human-environmental interaction. To them, it seemed obvious that violence should be one of the most robust areas of inquiry for archaeology. It’s hard to blame them. At the same moment they were asking the question, their phones were flashing in their backpacks with news alerts about protestors being tear gassed and murdered in the United States and in Iran, immigrants and activists being detained and disappeared, updates on the kidnapping of Maduro, rumblings of a Greenland invasion and potential subsequent world war, and reminders of ongoing violence against Palestinians by the Israeli state. In this context, I have to imagine it is difficult to understand how our discipline could be concerned with anything in the human past besides the history of war and violence.