Resistance and Care in the Time of COVID-19: Archaeology in 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic offered humanity a portal through which we could break with the past and imagine our world anew. This article reviews how over the course of 2020, a series of intersecting crises at the nexus of racism, settler colonialism, climate change, and sexual harassment have prompted acts of resistance and care in the field of archaeology. Throughout the article, we provide concrete suggestions as to how we can continue the work of movements begun over the course of the past year to improve dynamics within our field and use the lessons from our field to improve life for all people in the world and for our planet. [resistance, care, COVID-19, 2020, climate change, #MeToo, restorative justice].

Archaeology has long been concerned with how change in society takes place. The year 2020 brought into sharp relief just how the traditional means of getting things or avenues of recourse have failed us. Our officials, our colleagues, our universities, and our societies didn't do anything to meaningfully stem climate change or stop sexual harassment or racism in the academy. At best, they stumbled along trying to take small actions that would not alter or change our comfortable status quo; we are not outside the histories of violence that anthropology has critiqued. The COVID‐19 crisis cast a bright light on how the lack of meaningful action has real and devastating consequences. From the silencing of whistleblowers like Li Wenliang, whose warnings about COVID‐19 could have prevented a global spread, to the officials who failed to enact social distancing fast enough, one thing was clear: the established way of doing things was not working. Following those weeks in early 2020, the pandemic ended the world as we knew it, offering, as Arundhati Roy (2020) put it, “a portal,” one that allows us to break with the past and imagine our world anew. We became bolder because the end of the world as we knew it made some of us lose everything, gave others the possibility of losing it all, and made us want to “set on fire” (see Jobson 2020) the trappings that kept us previously bound so tightly to the institutions that didn't serve or protect us. This has included the institutional trappings of anthropology and archaeology.

In this review, we reflect on how, in the midst of the ongoing violence of 2020, acts of resistance and care allow us to build this world anew. We highlight three interventions in the realm of restorative justice, sexual harassment, and climate change and discuss pathways forward for addressing the related, persisting inequalities in the discipline. We argue that interlocking forms of oppression—racism, white supremacy, heteropatriachy, and capitalist systems of extraction—are all symptoms of the settler‐colonial state and that dismantling the structures that uphold it is critical.

ARCHAEOLOGIES OF RESTORATIVE JUSTICE: DISMANTLING SETTLER COLONIALISM AND RACISM IN NORTH AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY

During the summer of 2020, the COVID‐19 pandemic converged with mass protests against ongoing police and state‐sanctioned violence directed at Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Together, these events laid bare stark racial inequities in the United States, from racially marginalized communities’ increased likelihood of severe illness, hospitalization, and death from COVID—itself a factor of health disparities, including lack of access to health care, racism within health‐care delivery, and high prevalence of underlying conditions experiences by racial and ethnic minorities (CDC 2019)—to the disproportionate murder of Black, Indigenous, and people of color at the hands of police and self‐purported vigilantes. While these social and health impacts of racism remain largely unchanged, the precariousness of the current moment as represented through pandemic lockdowns, associated unemployment, and mounting deaths from COVID‐19, in addition to highly visible police murders and violence perpetrated against Black Lives Matter protestors, galvanized widespread awareness of and dialogue centered on racial inequities fostered by white supremacy and US settler colonialism. These dialogues occurred in tandem with—and contrast to—the Trump administration's response to both COVID‐19 and the mass social movements of the summer, which consisted of downplaying the severity of COVID‐19, casting protestors as violent enemies of the state, and going so far as to label cities such as New York City, Seattle, and Portland as “anarchist jurisdictions.”

In the wake of protests and the pandemic, archaeological and anthropological professional societies—in addition to many businesses and public organizations—issued statements in support of Black Lives Matter and committed themselves to antiracist actions and racial equity. At the same time, I, Sara Gonzalez, have also witnessed what a colleague, Jean Dennison, refers to as networks of care (see also Lyons and Supernant 2020; Supernant et al. 2020) that have developed as a means for navigating and dismantling racial inequities. From my spring 2020 Indigenous Archaeology seminar, students’ early insistence to create a space that promoted one another's wellness (a decision that was well‐placed as we learned COVID impacted our small learning community) to the formation of new organizations (such as the Indigenous Archaeology Collective) to direct actions (such as the mutual aid projects undertaken by the Black Trowel Collective Microgrants and Association for Washington Archaeology Emergency Aid Fund) to emerging partnerships (such as the Archaeology Center Coalition), we have witnessed a proliferation of alternative ways of doing and being in archaeology. These collective efforts are actively reimagining our disciplinary community and its practices in ways that are challenging us to “do better.” But what does “doing better” mean? What concrete steps can and have individuals and organizations implemented to transform our relations? And how can we carry on the momentum of the summer of 2020 into the coming months, years, and beyond?

Doing better consists of creating an archaeological practice and community that is heart‐centered, reflective, and reflexive and that examines how everyday practice and research impact multiple, cross‐cutting communities within and outside of archaeology (Supernant et al. 2020). It means direct action designed to alleviate suffering and inequity, from creating spaces free from harassment or abuse to providing mutual aid and support to ensure greater access to training and promotion in the field. It means transforming the stories archaeology tells and who tells them, creating platforms and avenues to elevate BIPOC voices in the field alongside active listening and witnessing of community needs. These doings are sorely needed in a field like archaeology, where it is critical that we realize how our field reproduces settler colonial relations and, wittingly or not, undermines Tribal sovereignty under the pretext of claiming ownership over and access to Indigenous lands, heritage, and ancestors. As Marek‐Martinez (2021) argues, understanding both the historicity of these relations and how they continue to be reproduced through current practice are essential for dismantling racism and colonialism in the field.

In North America, the relations of archaeological practice are artifacts of settler colonialism. The historically and persistent asymmetrical relations between the state and Indigenous Nations are replicated within the legal and disciplinary frameworks that guide how we study, preserve, and represent heritage and, importantly, who has the right to do so. For example, US heritage laws charge archaeologists with legal stewardship over the archaeological record. This is enshrined in the Society for American Archaeology's (2018) “Principles of Archaeological Ethics.” Yet, the authority of archaeologists as stewards of the archaeological record is predicated on the systematic occupation and dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their homelands. It is no accident that Indigenous‐led protest movements such as #IdleNoMore in Canada and #NoDAPL or the current Stop Line 3 movement in the United States specifically highlighted the intersections between settler colonialism, environmental racism, historic preservation regulations, and archaeology. The continued control over Indigenous lands and heritage, as enshrined in federal and state heritage laws and regulations, remains fundamental to the settler‐colonial project as they cement settler claims to Indigenous land (Estes 2019). These laws and regulations do so by vigorously denying and thus erasing Indigenous sovereignty over their ceded and unceded homelands and heritage within the present moment. Put simply, that Indigenous peoples are no longer in place provides the premise for the state's and its agents’—in this case, archaeologists’—continued claim to and over Indigenous lands and heritage.

These sets of settler‐colonial relations were further evidenced in the actions taken by the Trump administration in response to Indigenous lands and heritage. In the case of the Dakota Access Pipeline, through executive order and via a memorandum to the US Army Corps of Engineers, then‐president Donald Trump mandated an expedited review and approval process of the project through the National Environmental Policy Act. Similarly, the Trump administration's review and subsequent reduction of the newly created Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monuments circumvented years‐long formal government‐to‐government consultation with Tribal nations (Navajo, Hope, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian, and Zuni Tribal nations), who worked with agents of the Department of the Interior to provide greater protection for sacred and ancestral cultural and environmental resources at Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante. Together, these rollbacks of environmental and cultural regulations were neither accidents nor the folly of an inept administration. Rather, they reflect a systematic, planned assault on Tribal sovereignty by the Trump administration that was designed to weaken government‐to‐government consultation with Tribal nations and dismantle environmental and heritage regulations.

In addition to heritage regulations, the relations of settler colonialism are also manifested through the history of archaeological and anthropological collecting of Indigenous, Black, and other colonized peoples’ heritage and their ancestors, whose remains and histories have been fashioned into objects of study by scientists and now lie distributed in museums around the world. Today, more than 115,000 Native American ancestral remains are eligible for repatriation under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) (O'Brien 2020) in federally funded US collections alone. An unknown number of remains of people of African descent are stored in museum collections. With the passage of the National Museum of the American Indian Act in 1989 and NAGPRA in 1990, the US Congress created a pathway for the repatriation of Indigenous ancestors held by federally funded institutions. Thirty years later, many of these institutions remain out of compliance with NAGPRA (Amati 2020), and according to current estimates, repatriation of known ancestors alone (not including items of cultural patrimony, funerary objects, or sacred objects) is estimated to take another sixty to seventy‐five years to accomplish (Chari and Lavallee 2013, 13). Despite attempts to pass the African American Burial Ground Network Act, there remain little to no protection of African American graves or cemeteries and no legal avenue for Black communities to pursue repatriation of their ancestors held by museums and other scientific institutions. That Black and Indigenous bodies and heritage constitute a significant area of study for North American archaeology while few Black or Indigenous peoples are represented within the field of archaeology signals a persisting inequity in our field (Flewellen et al. 2021).

This background provides context for the multitude of responses to the mass protests of confederate and other monuments that enshrine the values of a settler state and also serve as a backdrop to ongoing debate about the role of monuments in American society. Monuments to settler colonialism are a target for direct actions (i.e., formal removal and nonlegal removal) as they are critical sites for contesting the values and meanings attached to the state. Monuments to white supremacy have been critical sites for negotiation—both for individuals and movements to preserve and also to dismantle white supremacy. Momentum began in summer 2020 for removal of confederate monuments and symbols of white supremacy both in the United States and abroad (for example, in the United Kingdom, statues of slave owner Edward Colston were removed). In response, white nationalists at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville held a “Unite the Right” rally protesting the removal of a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee. White nationalists portrayed the removal of statues as “erasure of history,” but archaeologists took the opportunity to point out that statues being toppled has always been a part of history and that these statues should now be our archaeology (e.g., Baxter 2020; Flewellen et al. 2021; Gopnik and Birkett‐Rees 2020), even providing guides on how to safely remove them (Parcak 2020; Thompson 2020).

These movements have also forced anthropology departments to revisit their own violent histories. In particular, the movement to rename Kroeber Hall at UC Berkeley that started in summer 2020 was successful and represents some progress in starting to recognize how scholars in our own field have participated in the dehumanization of Indigenous communities (Brennan 2021; Kell 2021; Nelson 2021). As we wrote this article in 2021, the discovery of unmarked graves of Indigenous children at residential schools (Austin and Bilfesky 2021) once again brought to the forefront the dire need to confront the history of genocide that colonial actors have perpetuated against Indigenous communities and the need to dismantle the structures of white supremacy and the violence they have created. It is critical that as we carry out science, we do so in a way that recognizes the sovereignty of Indigenous nations and moves archaeology away from being a colonial and extractive science.

The year 2020 saw some steps backward in this direction when it became apparent that many archaeologists working in the United States have continued to oppose efforts to recognize Indigenous sovereignty. It is within this broader national context that on June 19, 2020, the Society for American Archaeology's (SAA) president, Joe Watkins, submitted a letter of opposition to the University of California Office of the President's (UCOP) Native American Cultural Affiliation and Repatriation Policy (Watkins 2020). In tandem, calls were made, over email, for SAA members to block repatriation efforts and withdraw the UCOP policy. In addition to strengthening Native American representation, the UCOP policy required all University of California campuses to proactively review collections that may contain ancestral remains and cultural items in consultation with Native American Tribes or Native Hawaiian organizations, and to establish Tribal consultation and approval requirements for access to ancestral remains for research, instruction, and exhibition. The letter of opposition sent to UCOP and to SAA's California members attempted to frame the debate as one whereby enacting proper steps toward repatriation on UC campuses would result in affiliated faculty, students, and staff inability to carry out research on existing or new collections. Respondents to this statement of opposition (Indigenous Archaeology Collective 2020) pointed out that many of these claims were simply false and made clear that what the UCOP policy outlined was the consent of Indigenous communities to conduct research.

When considered from an international perspective, the opposition to the repatriation of Indigenous remains can be read as attacks on Indigenous sovereignty over their heritage and lands. When archaeologists work internationally, we are required by cultural heritage laws in the countries we work in to first and foremost recognize that country's sovereignty over their own cultural heritage and that we work there as guests, first by seeking permits with relevant authorities and communities. When two of the authors of this piece (Sara and Jade) discussed this issue, it became clear to us that if Jade challenged the People's Republic of China's cultural heritage laws or refused to abide by them, she would never be allowed to work there again. It is unthinkable that we should operate by lesser standards when working on Indigenous nation's ceded and unceded territories. In unincorporated colonial territories under US oversight, like Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa or the Mariana Islands, Indigenous communities have been systematically dispossessed of their Indigenous identities, and their sovereignty remains unrecognized by the state. As such, they have no legal recourse to protect their heritage from US federal intervention and have no standing under NAGPRA to pursue repatriation or protect Indigenous graves and cemeteries. These politics of colonization make it so that one of us (Isabel) has very limited options to repatriate the ancestors and cultural items of her native land, Puerto Rico, hundreds of which are held scattered in US institutions.

While the disciplinary challenges to repatriation and cascading examples of settler‐colonial and anti‐Black racist violence we witnessed in 2020 highlighted persistent social and disciplinary inequities, it also catalyzed acts of care and resistance within our disciplinary community. Echoing Franklin et al.’s (2020, 756) explicit call for us to “risk our privilege and status and share mutual accountability in causing radical systematic change” and to become “accomplices” in creating systemic change, rather than just “allies” who risk no skin in the game, grassroots organizing between BIPOC archaeologists and accomplices, in particular, have led to the formation of new partnerships and initiatives designed to create equity and dismantle racism and settler‐colonial relations within archaeology.

For example, From the Margins to the Mainstream: Black & Indigenous Futures in Archaeology, a webinar series coordinated under the leadership of the Society of Black Archaeologists, the Indigenous Archaeology Collective, SAPIENS, the Wenner‐Gren Foundation, and the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, formed during the summer of 2020. Featuring nine webinars, including “Reclaiming the Ancestors” (Society of Black Archaeologists et al. 2020a) and the “Archaeology of Redress and Restorative Justice” (Society of Black Archaeologists et al. 2020b), the series tackled how we can begin to redress the systemic inequities that archaeology reveals and envision a future for the field where Black and Indigenous voices are no longer marginalized. Other webinars organized this past year continued this momentum in the Southeast Asian context, specifically considering and highlighting local Indigenous communities (Wenner‐Gren Foundation et al. 2020). Collectively, these disciplinary conversations drew public attention to the critical role that heritage plays in perpetuating white supremacy, as well as resisting and dismantling its edifice within our public and disciplinary spaces (Flewellen et al. 2021). Indeed, some of the most powerful calls for the transformation of our discipline came from this arena.

These webinars, in particular, were critical in highlighting the voices of Black and Indigenous archaeologists and communities within the discipline, but their reach was even wider (Flewellen et al. 2021; Franklin et al. 2020). Compared to previous workshops and presentations, the “Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter” webinar drew an audience of over 2,000 people (with over 3,500 who subsequently viewed the recording) and resulted in a much wider response from professional organizations (Franklin et al. 2020). The recommendations created by these seminars were not just talk; rather, materials supporting the inclusion of the From the Margins to the Mainstream webinars in teaching are currently being assembled by the Archaeology Centers Coalition, with the SBA and Columbia Center for Archaeology providing similar pedagogical materials in support of the “Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter” webinar. Panelists and organizers of these events are also producing a series of public and academic publications that carry on these important dialogues (Flewellen et al. 2021; Franklin et al. 2020). For example, the SBA issued a series of actionable recommendations and insights, shared on the organization's website, and Flewellen et al. (2021) shared a four‐phase approach to building a new foundation for the antiracist archaeological practice.

Social media played a critical role in amplifying the broadening of the reach of each of these transformational acts of resistance and care and helped draw support to coalitions arguing for change and transformation to the relations of archaeology (Flewellen et al. 2021; Franklin et al. 2020). For instance, via its social media platforms, the Black Trowel Collective launched direct action designed to create equity in the field through mutual aid microgrants to archaeology students. Since June 22, 2020, they have distributed over US$45,100 to archaeology students in need (Black Trowel Collective Microgrants 2021). In reference to the Indigenous Archaeology Collective's Call to Action (2020), created in the wake of the SAA's opposition to the UCOP repatriation policy and signed by 800 individuals, the Society for American Archaeology committed to several of the petitioner's action items. These include the passing of a resolution that recognizes the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and revision of the society's 1986 “Statement on the Treatment of Human Remains.” The SAA has also established a Task Force on Decolonization and a Task Force on Social Justice to draft plans for implementing the recommended action items submitted by the Indigenous Archaeology Collective and 2020 Black Lives Matter Letter campaigns organized by Sarah Janesko and Erin Cagney. These webinars and calls to action, and the attention they garnered on social media, also made it clear that the most important forms of theoretical discourse and knowledge production in the field began shifting from the ivory tower and high‐impact journals to other online sources (Flewellen et al. 2021). We add the following recommendations to those made by others (Figure 1).

FIGURE 1

Our recommendations for restorative justice. [This figure appears in color in the online issue]

#METOO

Gendered forms of violence, including the imposition of patriarchal and heteronormative structures, have long been noted to be keyways in which the settler‐colonialist state maintains control (Goeman 2013). This control manifests not only as hierarchies of power and oppression that circumscribe the role of women and minoritized communities but also, importantly, in violence directed at the individuals in these groups. Violence takes several forms, from violence perpetrated against individual bodies, to policing of gendered behavior, to exclusion of women and gender minorities in “masculine” fields such as archaeology (Voss 2021a, 2021b). For women of color, the impacts of gender discrimination are often especially acute and intersect with racialized oppression.

Despite decades of interventions by feminist archaeologists (The Chilly Collective 1995; Gero and Conkey 1991; Wylie 2007), few inroads have been made in removing perpetrators of racial, gender, and sexual violence in the discipline. Still, the year 2020 saw dramatic shifts in power start to take place on the front of sexual harassment. This was a year in which it became apparent that getting into “good trouble” might be necessary to address gendered and racialized forms of discrimination and assault in the field. Sometime in mid‐2019, several Jane Doe's began these acts of resistance by talking with a student reporter about their experiences of sexual harassment with three prominent Harvard University professors. On May 29, 2020, I (Jade d'Alpoim Guedes) woke up to a series of text messages and voicemails from former advisors and graduate student classmates about an article that had just appeared in The Harvard Crimson (Bikales 2020d). One of the stories, about professor of Andean archaeology Gary Urton, made my face flush with anger. A Jane Doe described how she received an invite from Urton to join her in a hotel room for sex. My hands shook when I read Urton's response to the allegations, which he characterized as “untrue, inaccurate, or misleading” (Bikales 2020d). I knew he was lying because I, too, had received an email from Urton propositioning me to join him in a hotel room for sex. A house of cards began to fall the day that article was published, as it became apparent that these were not isolated events but that many had experienced long‐standing patterns of abuse and predation.

I promptly filed a Title IX complaint. Over the next few weeks, I would learn of a total of six other Urton survivors. What I learned from them, however, was that my Title IX complaint might go nowhere. Harvard had long known about Gary Urton, and previous attempts at taking action against him had been squashed. In one case, when a student complained to the administration about his demands for sex, she was told that she could either get her PhD or put in a complaint. A few of the current professors at the anthropology department beseeched me to put in the Title IX complaint, which could help them put Urton on leave. Yet, they cautioned me to stick with established procedures, warning me to be careful about sharing the email I had in case it damaged my credibility, and they urged me to consider the impact it might have on Harvard's reputation if I spoke to journalists.

I decided that getting into some “good trouble” and sharing the truth with the world might be the only way that cases against Urton might be taken seriously. I, after all, had nothing to lose: I was tenured faculty and had job security. I made the decision to tweet (d'Alpoim Guedes 2020) a screenshot of the email Urton sent me. This tweet garnered substantial media attention and resulted in other survivors coming forward (e.g., Bikales 2020b; Gibbons 2020). Urton was placed on administrative leave following their publication and found guilty of violation of interpersonal relations and unprofessional conduct (Bikales 2020c).

This was, however, only the beginning. When my Title IX proceedings began, I remember balking at the request from Harvard's Office of Dispute Resolution (ODR) to schedule a two‐hour “intake” interview with me. We were mid‐pandemic, and I had a new baby and could barely manage to find the time to teach my classes or advise my students. I replied that I wanted to continue the discussion via email; however, the office insisted I meet via Zoom and suggested they could drop my case. I had to ask for copies of university regulations that interviews must be conducted live before they agreed that there were none. Other survivors who dealt with years of abuse and demands for sex from Urton went through between thirty and eighty hours of interviews with Harvard ODR lawyers, who showed no regard for the huge impact that these proceedings had on the survivors. The survivors had twenty‐four‐hour response deadlines placed on them to compile documentary evidence that supported their claims, and ODR threatened to abandon their Title IX proceedings if they did not respond on time. Survivors were forced to relive each moment of their abuse, and when some told the lawyers cross‐examining them that the proceedings were making them want to engage in self‐harm, the lawyers responded only by saying, “When can you get us this document?”

Urton finally had his emeritus status removed and was sanctioned by the dean (Isselbacher 2021), yet this act of justice relied on evidence from only two Title IXs (one of which was mine). ODR never investigated the anonymously submitted cases, and others (including those who suffered the most harm at Urton's hands) had to withdraw their cases and crucial testimony and evidence due to the trauma‐inducing investigatory practices used by ODR.

What does this example tell us about the state of #MeToo in archaeology? The first thing that it tells us is that the system is fundamentally broken at every level. University Title IX proceedings are not set up in a way that they can be helpful to survivors; on the contrary, they are profoundly traumatizing. The overemphasis on formal legal compliance can set up substantial roadblocks or deterrents to going through with the procedure (see comments in Clancy, Cortina, and Kirkland 2020). For example, it is clear that Harvard's ODR proceedings were designed to work in cases only where hard evidence, such as the email I presented, were available. Most abusers do not leave a paper trail when they sexually assault or make inappropriate demands for sex. Requiring physical evidence creates room for abuse to continue for decades. Furthermore, it is only in the rarest of circumstances that abuse has direct witnesses. In requiring these standards of evidence, universities are setting themselves up as being incapable of responding to the most egregious incidences of sexual assault and harassment.

What going through an actual Title IX entails in terms of demands on time for survivors is also rarely taken into account. In order to comply with ODR interviews, survivors themselves need to be in a privileged situation where they can benefit from flexible work arrangements and meet for two to eight hours weekly over several months during the workday (Harvard's ODR would not schedule outside of 9 a.m.–5 p.m. EST). If participants have childcare demands, nonflexible work schedules, or a significant difference in time zone, participating in the process is impossible. In addition, survivors’ reports often entail huge writing commitments; one survivor at Harvard told me that her report totaled over 140 pages. How can we ask our graduate students or tenure‐track faculty or people in precarious employment to reasonably engage with these huge demands on their time, in addition to the stress and emotional toll that putting in a Title IX complaint takes on survivors? In Figure 2, we present our recommendations on how universities could begin to start to reform these processes.

FIGURE 2

Our recommendations for Title IX and dismantling inequality. [This figure appears in color in the online issue]

It is clear that universities also don't protect survivors from retaliation. In my case, the office accepted a Title IX complaint against me from Urton for publicly sharing the results of my investigation (Bikales 2020a). It is unclear how, given this, they could prevent an abuser from attempting to destroy a student's career prospects. Further, the lawyers that work in the ODR are not independent of the universities that employ them and often serve to further the universities’ mission, not protect survivors. The Harvard graduate student association has long been fighting for a truly independent review of Title IX proceedings and has yet to see any action on this front. Outside of Harvard, many of the cases that have been brought to light on social media this year (Balter 2020) have yet to see resolution for survivors. It is worth noting that Balter himself has been the subject of criticism about his treatment of informants and victims of sexual harassment.

This has forced many survivors into a situation where they are either faced with a failed system of university investigation or have to seek out press coverage in the hopes that public outrage prompts action. Unfortunately, even the organizations that reported to help survivors don't always have the best intentions, leaving very few places to turn to for help (e.g., Aldhous 2020).

What each of these cases reveals is that archaeology has a fundamental climate issue: one that has allowed sexual harassers to operate and enforces cultures of silence. We have known that sexual harassment has been rampant in archaeology for a while now (Clancy et al. 2014; Hodgetts et al. 2020; Meyers et al. 2018). The year 2020 and the beginning of 2021 saw us beginning to break this culture of silence with several prominent archaeologists speaking out about their own experiences (e.g., Voss 2021) and increased reporting on several other cases in Andean archaeology (Balter 2020). In each of these cases, it has often been a single brave act of resistance that has set into motion processes of tumbling the houses of cards that harassers have set up. Not everyone has the privilege, however, of being able to speak openly: students who rely on harassing advisors for recommendation letters risk their entire careers in doing so. We argue that it is critical that those of us who do have the privilege of being able to speak without loss of livelihood use this privilege to end the culture of silence in our field.

Sexual harassment is often just the tip of the iceberg in a range of other aggressions that impacts women and minoritized students’ ability to continue their careers in academia. As Clancy, Cortina, and Kirkland (2020) point out, the fact that formal university grievance procedures have tended to focus only on the most egregious forms of sexual assault has meant that other forms of gendered or race‐based harassment have been left unaddressed. It turns out that sexual harassment by Urton was just the tip of the iceberg, too. Kimberley Theidon, a former faculty member in Harvard's anthropology department, argued in a 2015 lawsuit that Urton intentionally poison penned her letter for promotion to tenure due to her speaking out about the sexual harassment of students by another Harvard anthropologist, Ted Bestor (Bikales 2020a).

Intentionally destroying careers and sexual or gender harassment are far from being the only aggressions that have led many to leave academia. Subtle exclusions like failing to invite women and BIPOC colleagues to conferences or as speakers to series, plagiarizing work, or failing to cite their scholarship are all issues that are rampant in archaeology (Hodgetts et al. 2020). As we detailed in the case above, sexual or gender harassment is often tied to other forms of bullying, including the long histories of exclusion, exploitation, and racialized harassment of BIPOC scholars (Clancy, Cortina, and Kirkland 2020; Hodgetts et al. 2020).

This cultural climate in archaeology has even cost individuals their lives. As Voss (2021) points out, “Stereotypes of risk‐taking, adventurous, white, masculine archaeologists support a widely shared but often unspoken belief that pursuing archaeological research is more important than personal or community safety—in fact, that the risks incurred add value to the research itself.” In her recent oeuvre, We Keep the Dead Close, Cooper (2021) documents the story of Anne Abrahamson, who is sent by her PI to travel with Michael Gramly to search for a lithics source at a site that was several hours’ travel from their main camp. In her diaries, Anne described a series of events where Gramly waited several days before making radio contact with the site PIs, where she was left behind on dangerous tactical hikes, holding onto crumbling rocks. One morning, Anne disappeared, potentially even murdered by Gramly. Her story demonstrates how a lack of concern for personal safety and the valorization of risk‐taking has led to horrific loss of life.

These imbalances are visible also in our publications. Heath‐Stout (2020) showed that although there has been an influx of women archaeologists, these have been dominated by individuals who are white, heterosexual, and cis‐gendered. The continuing failure to cite Black and Indigenous scholars is something that has also been prominently highlighted by the #CiteBlackWomen initiative (Flewellen et al. 2021), as well as individual scholars, such as Zoe Todd (2021). This epistemic injustice (see Fulkerson and Tushingham 2019; Fricker 2009) biases the production of knowledge in our fields, but also acts as a deterrent to women and BIPOC scholars to pursue a career in archaeology or be promoted in rank. There is, of course, still also a tendency to hire men in academic anthropology, and archaeology is no exception (Hodgetts et al. 2020; Speakman et al. 2018).

The resulting leaky pipeline is still far from being patched, and the bad news is that the COVID‐19 pandemic is only serving to exacerbate the position of women, caregivers, and marginalized scholars in archaeology. Across the sciences, a slew of different reports has pointed out that the COVID‐19 pandemic is unduly impacting the work of academic mothers. Deryugina, Shurchkov, and Stearns (2021) found that while both mothers and fathers saw increases in household chores and childcare during the pandemic and a reduction in research hours, mothers’ work increased significantly more than that of their coparents. This is superimposed on a crisis where systemic underrepresentation and promotion of marginalized people is rampant in academia (Durodoye et al. 2020). We ask our colleagues reading this to consider: How will you redevelop measures for evaluating your junior colleagues that consider the long‐lasting impact that this pandemic will have on academic productivity? We argue that delaying tenure clocks is not sufficient. We ask departments to lower their standards of production so junior faculty careers are not held back over the next decade. Similar things should be considered when evaluating student CVs for applications to graduate school or for jobs in cultural resource management, which require training in field methods.

THE CLIMATE CRISIS

As we wrote this article in 2021, it became impossible for the Global North to ignore the climate crisis, itself a product of the extractivist nature of settler colonialism and capitalism, in particular fossil fuel capitalism (Boger, Perdikaris, and Rivera‐Collazo 2019; Estes 2019). The year 2020 had already seen devastating fires in Australia and Northern California, and in 2021, the Pacific Northwest had its highest ever recorded temperatures from a heat dome that killed billions of salmon and shellfish, the Gulf of Mexico was set alight, a record drought hit the American Southwest, buildings crumbled in Miami partially due to rising sea levels, and record flooding took place in Germany and China. These catastrophic events are not new for island and coastal communities throughout the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and the Global South more generally, where people have long had to cope with climate change impacts.

The legacy (both current and past) of colonial extractivist actors in our current climate crisis hit home particularly hard for me, Isabel Rivera‐Collazo, in 2017. The month of September marked the end of the world as I knew it as Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated the islands of the northeastern Caribbean. Just a few months prior, I had published an article that concluded “upon facing the projected climate and environmental changes in the present and near future, the studied communities will be highly vulnerable and prone to social crises” (Rivera‐Collazo, Rodríguez‐Franco, Garay‐Vázquez 2018, 106). Just a few weeks after this article was available online, over five thousand people would die in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, thousands of archaeological sites would wash away with the storm surge and mudslides, and devastating gentrification and disaster capitalism would transform our ways of life (Boger, Perdikaris, and Rivera‐Collazo 2019; Ezcurra and Rivera‐Collazo 2018; Rivera‐Collazo 2019; Rivera‐Collazo, Rodríguez‐Franco, and Garay‐Vázquez 2018). By the time the pandemic year started, Puerto Rico had already been deep into a tumultuous mess of financial constraints made worse by the Federal Fiscal Board alongside devastating out‐migration, seriously damaged infrastructure, job losses, and serious mental health impacts due to all the complexities of disasters.

In this context, I shifted my work to respond more efficiently to the needs of my people, sending support after Hurricane Maria and working on recovery and coproduction of knowledge with communities and NGOs. Thus, when the many crises of 2020 hit us, they were not a surprise; they felt familiar. I had already dealt with the crisis of having to respond to less shelter security; to losing home, food, and clean water; to lack of access to medical care; and to having to resist injustices on the streets and face the wrath of police (Dean Olmsted, Rivera‐Collazo, and Lopez‐Rivera 2018).

In the midst of the global pandemic, archaeology has been confronting the climate crisis in five key ways: (1) archaeology and cultural heritage are beginning to be included at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and large‐scale conversations of climate change; (2) archaeology has begun to improve the ways in which we can contribute to issues of modern concern; (3) the climate change committee of International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) published a report that organizes climate drivers and impacts to heritage, including archaeological sites and museums; (4) there is increased investment in the systematization of heritage vulnerability assessments, with more nuanced understanding of the role of communities and local knowledge for emergency intervention after disasters and for long‐term heritage preservation and management; (5) there are growing numbers of reported archaeological sites directly impacted both by direct effects of climate‐change‐related phenomena and the institutionally established interventions to mitigate the forecasted climate impacts.

Yet, archaeology and cultural heritage have been consistently absent from conversations regarding climate change at policy and governmental scales (Kohler and Rockman 2020), even though we have a lot to offer in terms of providing context for our climate crisis. In 2020, a group of archaeologists successfully petitioned the IPCC to accept a call to include heritage. As a result, a UNESCO‐ICOMOS‐IPCC International Co‐Sponsored Meeting on Culture, Heritage, and Climate Change (ICSM CHC) will soon take place. This opportunity can be transformative, given the potential that archaeology has to inform about ranges of options and of human responses to multiple types of climate impacts (Holtorf 2018; Jackson, Dugmore, and Riede, 2017; Rockman 2012; Rockman and Hritz 2020).

This effort to insert archaeology and heritage into the IPCC and government‐level conversations has been successful because of what Rockman and Hritz (2020) call a change in archaeology's social environment. While it is easy to talk about archaeology with archaeologists, it is less easy to convince others that archaeology is relevant to our present climate crisis. Growing on the shoulders of the 2017 Social Sciences Perspectives on Climate Change workshop (i.e., Hardy et al. 2018), publications in 2020 demonstrated the urgency to leave the comfort of a familiar audience and the need to learn the languages and terms that other stakeholders use (Kohler and Rockman 2020). This sense of urgency to communicate to wider audiences is also reflected in the 2020 special issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled “Archaeology, Climate and Global Change” (Rick and Sandweiss 2020). This collection of seven articles highlighted interdisciplinary interest among a global academic audience to learn from archaeology's deep‐time records. We know the range of climate variations over the time in which humans domesticated crops and animals and also know that future projections will see us well outside of these boundaries (Xu et al. 2020). It is critical that we ask our governments how our economies can cope with ranges of climatic conditions that humans have not known during the time in which they began to farm. It is critical that we communicate this information not only in academic forums but also to our politicians and to the public.

In addition to these contributions, combining traditional archaeological methods with decolonizing practices and awareness of justice has allowed a more nuanced understanding of the meanings of nature for people and the time depth of these relationships (Desjardins, Friesen, and Jordan 2020). For example, deep‐time data can help to improve the understanding of what constitutes sustainable human exploitation of the land. In the Jiuzhaigou National Park in China, authorities acted under the belief that the Amdo Tibetans who occupy the area had a negative impact on biodiversity in the park and decided to resettle the nine villages who used to farm, carry out pastoralism, hunt, and cut firewood in the area. Archaeological research has shown that humans have carried out these activities in the park for the past six thousand years; they actively contributed to maintaining biodiversity in the park rather than reducing it (d'Alpoim Guedes et al. 2020). Similar observations have long been put forth by Indigenous scholars (e.g., Cook, Jackson, and Williams 2012; Davis 1995; Mason et al. 2012; Rivera‐Collazo 2015; Ross, Pragnell, and Coghill 2010) regarding Indigenous traditions of controlled burning to regulate wildfires on the Pacific Coast of the United States and Australia (McKemey et al. 2021; Sherry et al. 2019; Zahara 2020).

Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, archaeology is also shedding light on the impacts of environmental racism, while at the same time helping empower traditionally marginalized communities bearing the brunt of climate impacts. To these ends, the panel “The Fire This Time: Black and Indigenous Ecologies” discussed how our understanding of past and present ecologies allows us to imagine new ethics of care and responsibility for all of our relations and what shared obligations such ethics create for archaeological practice (Society of Black Archaeologists et al. 2021c). In the context of climate change, the voices of Indigenous, Black, and other marginalized communities are reconsidering the meaning of resilience and vulnerability in the context of deep‐time, inherited, ecological racism that is being recovered from archaeological practices through coproduction of knowledge (Armstrong and Brown 2019; Armstrong et al. 2021; Boger, Perdikaris, and Rivera‐Collazo 2019; Caron‐Beaudoin and Armstrong 2019; Davis, Seeber, and Sanger 2020; Douglass 2020; Pearson, Jackson, and McNamara 2021; Rivera‐Collazo et al. 2020). Given the seeds of change in archaeology and the increased political activism among archaeologists, those voices now have a channel to reach the IPCC reports.

One of the challenges of articulating climate change and archaeology is differentiating between the past record of climate change and the present threats of climate impacts. Focusing on present threats, sea‐level rise and coastal erosion have received so far the widest attention in archaeology given that the damage is evident and intervention is urgent. However, as the understanding of climate impacts grows, expanding on the nuances of the threats they pose to archaeology and tangible cultural heritage has become more pressing. Addressing this need, the climate change committee of ICOMOS published a report that organizes climate drivers and impacts to heritage, including archaeological sites, museums, and communities (ICOMOS 2019). Released in July 2019, the Future of Our Pasts report presents a map to articulate cultural heritage and climate action. In particular, the report's Table 6 organizes individual climate impacts and the expected effects they could have on movable heritage (including museums and collections), archaeological resources (including underwater), buildings and structures, cultural landscapes, associated and traditional communities, and intangible cultural heritage. If archaeology and cultural heritage have the potential to further our understanding of the impacts of climate change and constitute an important resource that communities use to recover from the impacts of climate‐related events, it is urgent to assess the vulnerability of these resources to be lost under the weight of climate impacts themselves, and several efforts have been made on this front (e.g., Carmichael et al. 2018; Cook, Johnston, and Selby 2019; Day, Heron, and Markham 2020; García 2019; Mattei et al. 2019; Sesana et al. 2020). In general, three elements are required for climate‐vulnerability assessments: solid databases, effective stakeholder engagement, and a path to decision‐making and prioritization of intervention. Through the efforts of the Climate Heritage Network (CHN), there is a growing effort to increase the effectiveness of engagement with stakeholders and work toward capacity‐building that supports culturally sensitive assessment of heritage vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, with specific examples in Africa, Scotland, California, and Puerto Rico. These efforts are geared toward furthering the understanding of the way in which assessments of vulnerability are conducted, focused on the meaning of loss (DeSilvey and Harrison 2020) and the incorporation of Indigenous and locally defined value criteria for the assessment of impact to heritage. Recognizing the impacts of systemic and environmental racism over access and valuing of different types of knowledge, these efforts are also tackling the issue of access to assessment tools and capacity‐building among traditionally marginalized communities. Having access to protocols for generating and producing assessments of their own heritage will allow communities to recognize risks and threats and create mitigation plans and prioritize action in ways that are culturally relevant (Dawson 2016).

The impacts of the climate crisis have been a regular fixture of popular media in 2021. Climate change is impacting sites at a rate faster than our publication cycles, and current citations are not representative of the number of sites impacted or lost (Rivera‐Collazo 2019, 2021). The issue of climate change impact on cultural heritage has gained significant traction in Europe, North America, and the Global North. References identify urgency regarding the effects of increased temperature, thawing permafrost, and other climate drivers affecting the archaeological and paleoenvironmental records in the Arctic and other glacial regions (Boethius et al. 2020; Desjardins, Friesen, and Jordan 2020; Hillerdal, Knecht, and Jones 2019; Hollesen et al. 2018; Pedersen et al. 2020; Walls et al. 2020). In the Global South, however, the conversation is just beginning and has been led by Colombia in coproduction of knowledge, the horizontal relationship between heritage management and Indigenous communities, and the communication of climate change and archaeology in Cartagena de Indias. The topic is also in its early stages in the African continent (Brooks et al. 2020).

The potential impact of coastal erosion and sea‐level rise on tangible cultural heritage has received particular attention in archaeology. The risks are often measured by evaluating the projected rate of sea‐level rise, together with remote measurements of rates of coastal retreat, and the digital databases of the presence and distribution of known archaeological sites (Anderson et al. 2017; Ezcurra and Rivera‐Collazo 2018; Hil 2020). However, research in Borikén, Puerto Rico, has demonstrated that desk‐based assessments to identify risks of coastal erosion and sea‐level rise can be too conservative. While remote detection is useful, it is only as good as the understanding of the presence, extent, and distribution of culturally relevant sites, which registers are often biased against Indigenous and Native perspectives. A study conducted right after Hurricane Maria and again in 2021 evidenced that the impact to coastal heritage was 400 percent higher than expected from the governmental list of registered archaeological sites in an 11 km stretch of coastline of the island (Rivera‐Collazo 2019, 2021).

This destruction of cultural heritage poses a threat to the identity of communities (DeSilvey and Harrison 2020; Douglass and Cooper 2020; Rivera‐Collazo 2021). Stemming from the pioneering work of Dawson's SCAPE project, much effort has been invested in partnering with local communities to document and monitor the impacts of erosion and sea‐level rise, such as Florida Public Archaeology's project Heritage Monitoring Scouts. Given the speed of climate change, effective community engagement and coproduction of knowledge is central to the preservation of linked tangible and intangible heritages (Rivera‐Collazo 2021; Seekamp, Rivera‐Collazo, and Catanzariti 2021). Effective relationships with communities have supported not only the recording of heritage, returning it to the living memory of colonized communities, but also the importance of climate engagement and activism, as shown in cases in Alaska (Hillerdal, Knecht, and Jones 2019; Knecht and Jones 2019 and Puerto Rico (Rivera‐Collazo 2021; Rivera‐Collazo et al. 2020).

Mitigation of climate impacts and disaster capitalism also have pressing and often disastrous effects over Indigenous, descendent, and local communities (Boger, Perdikaris, and Rivera‐Collazo 2019). As engineering solutions propose community relocations, river canalizations, building of hard infrastructure to mitigate sea‐level rise, and solar panels and wind‐farm fields on deserts and offshore, heritage is undervalued and destroyed. The impact is not limited to the direct removal of archaeological sites, such as that reported in Borikén, Puerto Rico (Rivera‐Collazo 2021), but also extends to the intangible heritage of landforms, sounds, wind, and plant and animal relatives, among many others. In the realm of cultural resource management (CRM), more work is needed to identify and value the perspectives of Indigenous, descendants, and community groups and move toward the preservation of heritage and not just the use of archaeological monitoring to push forward capitalist and gentrifying development projects or to bolster our own publication records.

The pandemic may also have provided a portal for us to make good on what was largely just talk about reducing climate emissions and demonstrate care for our planet and its fellow inhabitants. For one of us, Jade d'Alpoim Guedes, the pandemic provided an opportunity for me to question the extent to which I was part of the problem. After pulling out a carbon calculator, I learned that despite being committed to reducing my carbon emissions through not driving, the emissions I was responsible for outweighed not only those of most people around the world but also those of most Americans. This was almost entirely due to the flights I took in order to attend academic conferences. Prior to 2020, people talked about how to move our conferences online, often with little buy‐in from our professional organizations or academics themselves (e.g., Hamant, Saunders, and Viasnoff 2019; Hickel 2018; Pandian 2020; Roelofs 2020). This matters, given that a six‐thousand‐person conference in Seattle produced 16,000 metric tons of carbon emissions, or roughly as much as Haiti produces in an entire year (Nevins 2014). Shifting the culture around flying may be one of the highest‐impact individual actions we can commit to as academics. Rather than being failures, the online webinars that the pandemic forced us to create (some of which we detail above) have actually enabled much wider attendance from students, international participants, or individuals who would otherwise not be able to afford registration, housing, and an airline ticket (Franklin et al. 2020). This has made our conferences not only more sustainable but also more accessible. We might feel we are missing out on opportunities to socialize at conferences, but we will never address the behavioral changes needed to achieve the minimum goals of the Paris Agreement, or any other climate change goal, by continuing business as usual. This sacrifice is minuscule compared to the impacts suffered by those losing their homes and livelihoods in nations impacted the most by the climate crisis.

At the cusp of 2021, a few things about the COVID‐19 virus have become clear: this will be with us for a long time, and we will need to continually develop new vaccines in order to stem its spread and mortality. How can we enact an ethos of care as we think about our future fieldwork and conferences? Not every country and region will have equal access to these vaccines, and in those that do, we may see high rates of noncompliance, making it difficult to achieve herd immunity. Our conference and fieldwork travel may expose vulnerable communities (including holders of traditional knowledge) to higher mortality. We urge our professional organizations to think about the ethical implications of holding in‐person conferences, and we urge our colleagues to opt for virtual options for the indefinite future.

Conferences aside, the pandemic may have also introduced more efficiency in the day‐to‐day academic life for faculty. Prior to the pandemic, we would often commute into campus (often, for US scholars, using a car) to have a single meeting. The pandemic has demonstrated that many of these meetings could, in fact, have been held online. We call on universities, departments, and administrators to think carefully about how they can encourage work from home and reduce unnecessary carbon‐emitting commutes by personnel, students, and professors to campus. Online teaching may also have benefits for overexploited lecturers who would have previously had to commute from campus to campus (Nyugen 2021).

While remote work is an advantage to faculty, it can be a severe disadvantage and burden to our students. We emphasize that even working remotely, live feedback provides a better experience to students than a completely recorded experience. For most of our students—and, in particular, BIPOC students and students of disadvantaged backgrounds—COVID has drastically impacted their mental health, particularly due to isolation and lack of human contact. Holding some of our classes asynchronously may, however, help universities attract and retain a greater number of our students by allowing them schedule flexibility to juggle demands on their time, like holding down several different jobs, parent their own children, or provide other caregiving duties within their families or communities (although, of course, here the ultimate solution lies in reducing tuition so they don't have to carry out these juggling acts). Moving to an online teaching format also poses a threat to the job stability of adjunct and instructor faculty positions, as universities might attempt to replace them with recorded and uploaded lectures. Moving forward in a world post‐COVID, we have to strike a balance between the comfort of working from home and the needs of our undergraduate and graduate students and equity in the field. In Figure 3, we present our recommendations for climate action at multiple levels.

FIGURE 3

Our recommendations for climate action. [This figure appears in color in the online issue]

CONCLUSION

The recommendations we have made are done in the spirit of offering inspiration for how we might remake our relations and thus imagine a new world that works for us all. The COVID‐19 pandemic, coupled with the climate crisis and persisting gender and racial harassment and discrimination, brought this to the forefront in a way that is impossible to ignore. Communities who have occupied spaces of oppression have always known the injustices that the past eighteen months have laid bare. For others, these months have only recently awakened their appreciation for the interconnections between systems of global capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, and heteronormative patriarchy.

All of this can be overwhelming and preclude radical action to address such deep divisions and inequity in our societies at large, let alone within the discipline. Imagining a new future from these ashes requires an approach that is grounded by a deep understanding of the nature of these inequities. It also entails a commitment to a radical dreaming of what might be possible when we lead with our hearts and imagination (Supernant et al. 2020). Echoing Marek‐Martinez (2021, 508), when our work emerges from our heart, or tamina, archaeology “moves away from being a solely scientific process and becomes an engaged, responsible, and reciprocal approach to investigating and learning about the past.” In turn, we are asked to consider how our own individual actions can be powerful sites of resistance, ones that create ripples of love and care for our relations past, present, and future. The suggestions offered herein are but one potential path forward for reimagining our disciplinary and community responsibilities, and they live alongside those offered by our colleagues.