December 18, 2023

A few little updates

I wanted to share a few actual research updates in this newsletter because I actually have some! This early in a project, those are few and far between!

I have had a chapter published in a great new volume Kinship, Sex, and Biological Relatedness: The contribution of archaeogenetics to the understanding of social and biological relations edited by Harald Meller, Johannes Krause, Wolfgang Haak, and Roberto Risch. The book is open access and free to download, it's beautifully illustrated and a lovely output from a truly excellent conference I attended last year. I definitely recommend following the link and browsing through the chapters if the topic is of interest to you!

My chapter "Kin and connection: Bodies and relations in archaeology and ancient genetics" (pdf link!) is an outline of some of the ideas that underlie this very project (the title might have given that away) and begins to draw out the initial steps to thinking through the complexities of both biomolecular analysis of ancient remains and discussion social models of kinship within an archaeological context.

I also very happily joined an excellent session at the AAA's in Toronto organised by Sabina Cveček.

(Photo by Sabina Cveček with thanks!)

The aim of the session was to interrogate kinship within archaeology, specifically in dialogue with aDNA research. To that end, Sabina (and anthropologist who works with archaeologists and archaeological material) brought together a couple of archaeologists from different interpretative schools, two brilliant archaeo-geneticists, and two socio-cultural anthropologists (including the discussant). Personally, I found the whole session exciting and stimulating - I hope and fully expect the conversation among the participants to continue and develop.

In non-kinship news, I also recently co-authored a major review piece with my colleagues and comrades in the Black Trowel Collective for American Anthropologist.¹ Our article, "Archaeology in 2022: Counter-myths for hopeful futures" grapples with archaeology's role in a rapidly changing world. We argue that archaeologists can and should be future-focussed in our work - by building up radical archives of alternate social conformations to challenge contemporary inequalities and inspire more equitable future world; by resisting the call to hierarchical myth-making; and by building more equitable structures in our workplaces and professional relationships to push back against capitalist imperatives that damage our work and our relations and to model the sort of collegial, mutually supportive, multi-vocal and deeply respectful world we are seeking to build.

Happy holidays, by the way! This will be the last newsletter until January - I hope you all have some time to relax and spend time with family, friends, pets, and nature as the year ticks over into 2024.