Atalay, Sonia. “An Archaeology led by Strawberries” in Archaeologies of the Heart. Kisha Supernant, Jane Eva Baxter, Natasha Lyons, and Sonya Atalay, editors. 2020. Springer, New York. xiv + 280.

Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450–1516), The Garden of Earthly Delights, central panel inside (left side), detail: People sit around a large strawberry, c.1490 and 1500

A Palliative Archaeology?

In “An Archaeology led by Strawberries” Sonia Atalay (Anishinaabe-Ojibwe) presents the state of scholarship on a series of land-based archaeology and repatriation projects utilizing a community-based participatory methodology. Centering Anishinaabe epistemologies and concepts of health, she explores how reclaiming traditional knowledge, ancestral remains, indigenous language, and sacred sites can contribute to healing and well-being. She discusses the use of arts-based research and knowledge, mobilization methods — including collaborative comics, storybaskets and counter-mapping — as part of indigenous storywork, demonstrating how lessons drawn from reclaiming tangible and intangible heritage provide a model for imagining decolonial research futures.
Atalay’s chapter is part of a collection titled Archaeologies of the Heart which she co-edited with Kisha Supernant, Jane Eva Baxter, and Natasha Lyons. Her contribution formally introduces an archaeological perspective with a “heart-centered” approach, a concept more commonly associated with health and other care-based disciplines. Atalay argues that this approach constitutes a form of “research medicine,” which reminds the scholar of the inherent connections between archaeology and people—those whose heritage is the focus of study; as well as students, collaborators and the wider public. Atalay and her co-editors argue that adopting a heart-centered approach in archaeology involves rejecting the prevailing notions of impartiality, dispassionate reasoning, and judgment that have historically dominated bioethics and, more broadly, Western science, including the conventional practices of archaeology. 

Atalay underscores the Indigenous nature of the “heart-centered” approach, and illustrates it through the “Indigenous Research Paradigm” graphic by Lori Lambert. This paradigm emphasizes the heart as part of a web of connections that prioritize relationality, responsibility, reciprocity, and rematriation/repatriation. Atalay’s advocacy is refreshing in light of the need to steer decolonial efforts towards something practicable. She staunchly positions indigenous archaeology as distinct from the cold science of preceding approaches. For example, she unabashedly states how emotions and intellect can go hand in hand in archaeological investigation. Reflecting on emotional reactions beyond those elicited between human beings, both in historical and contemporary contexts, she emphasizes the emotional significance that numerous archaeologists attach to present-day heritage sites and locations. 

Atalay not only discusses the fundamental nature of this indigenized heart-centered approach but also exemplifies its application. She underscores the significance of interconnectedness, emphasizing that the ontology gains greater viability through continuous development and awareness of their compatibilities, evolving into a more compelling reflection of the past. The heart-centered approach is thus poised to actualize the transformative influence and confluence of preceding post-processual turns.
Atalay’s definition of the technical (measuring research and teaching impact or quantifying emotion) and ethical challenges of the framework was crucial in envisioning the comprehensive and transformative indigenous framework. It is in this regard that critics of the approach remark that it is not immune from the problem of a persistent need to assure readers that they are inherently “rigorous,” which ironically echoes an argument firmly held by Western orthodoxy. This incongruity leads me to think that the approach is more palliative than the promised curative approach. In other words, the “research medicine” is something that relieves, but does not overcome the disease of colonial knowledge apparatuses. My critique lies on the same point that any call for a posthumanist perspective that transcends anthropocentrism is ultimately questioned on the grounds of its being reactionary—that there is always a burden of proving relevance in a world in which many perceive indigenous knowledge to belong in the distant past. The archaeologist therefore deals with a specter of the human element even in the posthumanist philosophy. But rather than being the center of investigation, human beings are treated as intertwined with the material world. Therefore, there is little change in the qualitative interpretation but simply a more layered evidentiary procedure.

Atalay’s approach can also be treated as palliative in the sense that while it is indigenous in name, the approach itself is not exceptional as it has striking similarities with non-indigenous approaches such as Kare Barad’s “intra-active productions,” which suggests that it is through interactions that entities emerge, emphasizing the process of intraaction. In the same manner, the heart-centered approach treats materiality not as a property contained within the object but determined through the relational processes that constitute and configure them. In certain new materialist approaches, “things are understood as assemblages,” collections of relational structures. This concept of assemblage, however, is contested by Tim Ingold, who proposes an ontogenetic rather than ontological turn in his essay “One World Anthropology,” which deserves its own discussion.

The heart-centered approach is among ontologies that are relationally constituted, composed of interwoven things that form “flat ontologies,” meaning none of the entities are prioritized, and they all share the same ontological status.

There is no doubt that the indigenous illuminates diverse methods in archaeological research; it challenges the impartial and dehumanized practices emphasized by Western science and colonized intellectual environments. Atalay’s chapter is remarkable in encouraging an examination of the relevance of critical practices, advocating for a bold collective effort to inclusively decolonize and assert the necessity of redefining the future trajectory of archaeology. While indigenous perspectives—the “archaeologies of the heart”— provide proleptic visions that benefit from the structure and guidance offered by these perspectives, they are not to be overburdened with the expectation of being a panacea to the protracted and disease-ridden process of decolonization.