How do archaeologists write about racism? Computational text analysis of 41 years of Society for American Archaeology annual meeting abstracts

How often, and in what contexts, have archaeologists discussed racism over the last four decades? Do societal events lead to sustained discussions of racism among the academic community? Here, the authors seek to answer these questions by applying computational text analysis methods to 68176 abstrac...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAntiquity Vol. 96; no. 387; pp. 696 - 709
Main Authors Park, Gayoung, Wang, Li-Ying, Marwick, Ben
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.06.2022
Subjects
Abstracts
Analysis
Anthropological research
Archaeologists
Archaeology
Conferences
Discourse analysis
Practice
Racism
Social issues
Text analysis
United States
racism
Society for American Archaeology
computational text analysis
academic discourse
history of archaeology
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Summary:How often, and in what contexts, have archaeologists discussed racism over the last four decades? Do societal events lead to sustained discussions of racism among the academic community? Here, the authors seek to answer these questions by applying computational text analysis methods to 68176 abstracts from 41 meetings of the Society for American Archaeology. Discussions of racism are found to be rare—usually a passing mention in the context of broader social issues. Historical archaeologists have addressed racism more frequently than other archaeologists. The results form a baseline against which the discipline's engagement with racism as a research theme and with anti-racist strategies might be tracked.
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ISSN:0003-598X
1745-1744
DOI:10.15184/aqy.2021.181