Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

African American Studies

First Advisor

Messeri, Lisa

Abstract

This dissertation examines the relationship between Black women and archaeological knowledge production. Through a focus on knowledge production, it considers how the history of American archaeology, current practices, and as a way of knowing mediate the ability for Black women to fully participate epistemically within the field. Informed by a mixed-methods approach of participant observation, archival research, and 24 interviews with Black women archaeologists trained or based in the United States, this research tracks how as a result of misogynoir—linked and co-constitutive gendered racism and racialized sexism—Black women are excluded from epistemic participation within the field at the interpersonal, institutional, and disciplinary level. This research demonstrates that this denial of expertise is contingent on embedded misogynoir, which undergirds the exclusion of Black women from the knowledge project of archaeology. As a result, the exclusion of Black women as knowers inhibits archaeology to act as a robust science of inanimate objects as it loses Black women’s particular epistemological standpoint. Additionally, this research explores how Black women’s standpoint is engendered by an understanding of lived experience that extends beyond the self but to ancestors as well. This research argues that this epistemological standpoint offers crucial insights into ongoing anti-Black racism as enacted through the interpretation and treatment of artifacts; and in turn creates new forms of engaging with material outside of anti-Black violence.

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