These Words Are My Own: Archaeological Theory in Dialect

Abstract

English is the lingua franca not only for academia but also for almost all international infrastructures and global communications. It comes as no surprise, then, that the dominant and assumed normative voice in archaeology is standard British English (SBE) for narratives of various times and places. This language is ‘majoritarian’—by this we do not mean that it is spoken by most of humanity, but that it is the imposed ‘ideal’ others are measured against, and that is an issue. Categories, terms and ways of interpretation are all done from a privileged majoritarian position. These do not translate and are certainly not applicable in all the different places where archaeology takes place. This paper is the culmination of conversations that occurred during a Theoretical Archaeology Group conference session in 2023, with contributing authors having adapted their talks into a discussion format to keep the conversation on challenging language representation active within the discipline.