Ethnicity and Race in Anthropology

Traditional archaeologists, whose field developed in the same racialized and colonial context as the rest of anthropology, were typically concerned with tracking the material remains of contemporary groups into the past. This cultural historical approach and the search for ethnicity in the archaeological record often led archaeologists to uncritically project modern and national identities into the past. Prominent examples include French claims to Roman and Gallic identities, Nazi projections of past "Aryan" peoples onto much of Northern and Western Europe, and general European continental claims to the material heritage of ancient Greece and classical Egypt (see Jones).

New approaches to identity in archaeology, though, are leading to more accurate and complex reconstructions of past peoples. Moreover, archaeologies of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity are encouraging researchers to include different and historically marginalized voices, such as African resistance to slavery in Kenya and African-American cultural expressions in the colonial archaeology of the United States. Researchers in these areas generally resist drawing simplistic conclusions between desires to trace "ethnic origins" in the past for mobilization and political use in the present.