June 22nd, 2021 marked a year for the Black Trowel Collective (BTC) microgrants program, and in that time, BTC has distributed $43,500 USD to archaeological students in need from 22 countries, including India and Brazil. The latter two countries were recently centered due to the impact of COVID-19 in those regions. The total to students from India and Brazil since this push at the beginning of May to mid June 2021 has been $6,350 USD. Given this remarkable example of mutual aid within archaeology, I thought it important to talk to the collective about what it meant to set up something like this; what sorts of practices has the collective developed? How do they make it work? Most questions related to the BTC Microgrants, for example: what is a microgrant , how they work, who is eligible, and how to donate, are all answered and available on their website. This interview was conducted on a google document, over a couple of months, with multiple respondents from the collective. 

Uzma Rizvi (UR): First of all, thank you so much for all the labor that this collective is doing for the discipline and field. Thank you also for taking the time out to respond to some questions. There is no doubt in my mind that this microgrants program is one of the most important interventions by and for archaeologists that is available globally. Last year there was an increased awareness and development of mutual aid groups across the United States in response to COVID-19, mostly on the neighborhood level. Prior to BTC microgrants, I was most familiar with such solidarity work within activist circles, collectives who were engaged in mutual aid for the safety and well being of disenfranchised communities. Here, I’m thinking of Mariame Kaba’s and Dean Spade & Mia Mingus’s work on mutual aid, and the histories of where such movements come from within the context of the US. What does mutual aid mean to BTC? And what sorts of experiences or knowledge sharing was involved in creating a mutual aid program? 

Black Trowel Collective (BTC): The meaning of mutual aid probably differs depending on which Collective member you ask. The central idea for most is probably best highlighted through the now fairly ubiquitous tagline used by many mutual aid groups: “solidarity, not charity”. This essentially incorporates a lot of anarchist principles and practices. It means instead of waiting for a state or institution to address an issue, or trying to get them to take care of it, we’ll do it ourselves (direct action). It means coming together as a group and making decisions through consensus (discussion leading to full agreement). It means recognizing that charity often involves forms of violence that seem fine to folks who haven’t had to navigate the world by constantly having to prove they are valid to be recipients of help. Basically it means stripping away and radically undermining structures of violence to see the recipients of aid as equal to the people distributing that aid. No one makes charity committee members prove their qualifications to each recipient who asks for help. Why should we make each recipient have to prove they qualify? Particularly when the qualifications we enact replicate so many of the inequalities that are baked into our disciplines and institutions. That’s all wrapped up in the phrase, “solidarity, not charity”. In the end, mutual aid is about crafting and maintaining relationships and our relationships with our students are our main priority. We generally help them with whatever they need outside of the microgrants themselves as well. At least within our ability.

The Sportula microgrant project’s support and visible success organizing something similar in Classics was absolutely essential to helping us find our footing. As for experiences, many of the original Collective members who set up the microgrants program talked about how traumatic economic issues were/are for them as they tried to navigate the archaeological field as a student. One of the members relied heavily on dumpster diving for food to support their family while working as a PhD student in one of the top archaeology programs in the US. Some relied on state aid and were battered by the constant harassment, denigration, and structural violence that was applied to them to receive any sort of help. These types of conditions structurally reinforce who can become an archaeologist and so these experiences fed into the desire to start the program up and try and create a broader sense of solidarity within our field for folks that have not traditionally been supported by the field.

UR:  It is so important to amplify the significance of what it means to break down the hierarchies between donors and grantees in the name of solidarity. I would like to invite us to talk about process. Can we talk about how the idea first started, and what sorts of conversations were had in order to make this a reality? Can you also talk through the ins and outs of how such self organizing happens?

BTC:  The Black Trowel Collective began through conference sessions and conversations about the relationship between anarchist theory and archaeology, and anarchist archaeology, probably starting back in 2009 but really initiated by TK back in the 1990s. These all culminated with a funded Amerind workshop in 2016. During this workshop, archaeologists (and former archaeologists) from multiple continents (some explicitly anarchists, others more interested in the theoretical applications of anarchism), laid out a vision of what an anarchist archaeology might look like. This was also done in concert with a strong social media presence so that folks who were not able to attend because of space and financial limitations, could participate and direct the conversations of the in-person attendees.

The group published a manifesto on Savage Minds, an issue of the SAA Archaeological Record, and a volume of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. After this intense activity over three years, there was a pause in organizing as people moved to other projects. The original plan to maintain a website as a nexus for anarchist archaeologists never really worked. There were some attempts to create private groups through a couple of social media outlets, and a bit of organizing was sustained through this, particularly for Collective members from Spain and Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries in South America. Eventually, the Facebook space for the Collective was abandoned as so many members had fled that platform. A few members started talking about maintaining an anarchist archaeology bibliography because there had been so many publications in the last decade. After an early discussion about whether to establish a public Zotero bibliography or something a bit more accessible, a Google site was created in 2019. This was followed by a shift from the Facebook Group to a Whatsapp group, as many of the collective members were isolated in distributed locations.

In May 2020 on the Whatsapp group, Lewis Borck proposed that we start a Microgrants initiative, modelled on Sportula. We very rapidly got organized, meeting weekly, and launched on June 22, 2020. There were some teething pains, as we tried to understand international tax law, rogue t-shirt shops capitalizing on our designs, and the verification of the archaeology student status of applicants. All of this was during the COVID-19 pandemic and during the uprisings associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, when people were overwhelmed by the ongoing circumstances, and recognized the immediate need for mutual aid efforts. 

Eventually Whatsapp became too overwhelming for people to engage with 100s of linear messages, so we moved to Discord, where organizing different threads is easier. As the BTC has grown, this has led to an expansion of our activities and the attending organization of consensus and safeguarding, or creating a security culture for our many members who fear an affiliation with anarchism will negatively impact their career.

UR: Let’s talk a bit about the grants themselves. These are small grants – between 5-300 USD. How did BTC come up with that range and what was the thought behind the micro-ness of the grants?

BTC: We copied the amount from The Sportula, who had demonstrated the efficacy of small grants. People tend to ask for the maximum amount, which usually does not cover their entire need, such as rent. When they ask for lesser amounts, it is usually specific to need, such as the registration for a field school. Even when people ask for $300, we cannot usually provide that much, as there are many requests each month. At the year mark, we’ve distributed about $43,500, but in total folks have needed about $90,000.

UR: I know for collectives such as BTC, group decision making, consensus, and distributive and lateral leadership models are very significant. Can we talk a bit about how the grant works? How do you make the decisions? To be completely transparent, I am opening the door here to talk explicitly about how we can engage in anarchic praxis and the many benefits of such work.  

BTC: When an applicant submits their microgrant application, the Microgrants committee, a subset of seven members of the larger Black Trowel Collective who are accountable to the whole, take a few discrete steps. The applicant’s request is verified as coming from our intended community – archaeology students – by establishing communication with the applicant through their institutional email and verifying their payment details. Once their request is verified, as much of their request as can be covered is distributed to the applicant. Because this is a fully volunteer operation, funding disbursements generally only happens 1-3 times a month (although committee members are working every day monitoring email and verifying student status, etc.). Emergency disbursements, if necessary, will happen during this daily work.

Anarchist principles and praxis are manifested in how we frame our relationship to our applicants and their needs, as well as how we decide to disburse. Marginalized and historically excluded students are well accustomed to having to “perform their pain” and demonstrate how they are oppressed but still conforming to the values of the institution and groups oppressing them, and how their grant awards will be put to “proper” use – often a very restricted range of possibilities directly tied to their research. In contrast to this, Black Trowel Collective Microgrants follow an anarcho-feminist perspective where no such performance or justification is necessary. Finding and applying for the Microgrants is justification enough. Optional, additional comments can be made, and many of our applicants open up here about what they intend to use the money for (and while this may help us identify priority cases, the lack of additional comment has never stopped a grant award as long as we can verify they are students). These additional comments show the breadth of precarity that archaeology students are made to navigate: automobile repair in order to make it to fieldwork (or additional jobs); veterinary bills for cherished animal companions; required school textbooks; expensive testing requirements and graduate school applications; health costs for themselves and family members; testing fees; food bills, and many more.

Consensus practices are used to figure out how to most equitably disburse grant money which we receive from our donors (really our fellow travelers without whom this would be impossible). The Microgrants committee meets monthly to assess the ebb and flow of need; in the course of this discussion, priorities are made for emergency disbursements, for applicants from countries, or backgrounds, that the Microgrants are currently centering (such as India or Brazil, in response to the surge in COVID-19 cases that took place this past spring, Black students during the US originating uprisings during the summer of 2020 to help with anything from bail for protesting to rent). In the course of this discussion, the committee hears all proposals for how we make these prioritizing decisions, and will not come to a decision until all members of the committee agree on that course of action (full consensus). All meetings are open to the rest of the Collective and so the Microgrants committee is fully transparent and accountable to them. And we do monthly updates for the donors. Except for a few months, the incredible need that our applicants have had forced on them means that we do not typically have the ability to fully fund applicants. We often choose to help as many applicants as possible with partial funding instead of committing to a first come first serve basis, which may prioritize the needs of those with more available free time or access to the internet. Unfortunately, this may mean we still end up with more applicants than money, having exhausted our ability to fund applicants near the end of a given month. We encourage applicants who have not received money to reapply to the Microgrants; higher priority is given to students who have applied and not received money.

These practices are always up for discussion and re-discussion; the Microgrants, along with all of our practices and perspectives in the Collective are open-ended and can be brought back into consensus conversations by any Collective member that has concerns. The above decisions about how we prioritize need are re-evaluated every month, and have come about by arriving at consensus; they can and very likely will change in the future.

UR: What sort of future are we looking at for the BTC microgrants program? Is this a program that will run indefinitely? Does the collective have ideas for how long this will be in place? 

BTC: Simply, yeah. We hope to run for as long as we can still muster the money and the effort to distribute it. We don’t really see the need for these grants diminishing. The comments discussing specific needs that we sometimes publish on twitter, with permission, from the recipients of the microgrants really highlight how bad it is for many students who don’t come from economically privileged backgrounds. And these are often the more moderate comments as we don’t usually get permission to publish comments from applicants in absolutely terrible situations, or who have multiple, long-term barriers  to becoming professional archaeologists. It does take considerable time, effort and emotional labor to administer the grants. Distributing the microgrants, like most mutual aid projects, is incredibly rewarding, but taxing. Pushing against neoliberal models that create need and inequality for many to facilitate the success of a few is honestly exhausting, but we think it’s necessary. This balance between what needs to happen and who has the capacity to work on it can be difficult to navigate, but we do the best that we can. We have been trying to rotate our members through different committee roles, both to avoid burn-out and to combat issues of soft power collecting through long-term committee membership. 

UR: Thank you again for so much of your time, labor, and for all the work that BTC does to make archaeology a more equitable and just practice. As we near the end of our conversation, I wondered if there were any closing remarks the collective might want to make.

BTC: The Black Trowel Collective has made it obvious (to at least one of its members) how powerful and important it is to have communities that cross boundaries between institutions, countries, and academic and professional categories that are built on principles of mutual aid, radical egalitarianism, cooperation, consensus, and direct action. Even if you aren’t an anarchist, consider joining or forming a collective (maybe a union!), particularly if you want change. We are more powerful together, we protect us, and we can come together to make a new world in the shell of the old.  

Anarchist visions of collectivity and mutual aid are often ridiculed as impossibly utopian or only workable on the small scale. The futures we imagine–and which we attempt to prefigure through our actions–seem constantly to recede into the distance. As archaeologists, however, we know it can also be salutary to look to the past. Before capitalism, before states, before Homo sapiens and even mammals, there were stromatolites. Stromatolites are the first multi-celled organisms to thrive and colonize the hot salty seas of a young earth over a billion years ago. A stromatolite forms when various single-celled microbes, many of them cyanobacteria, become stuck in sediment; they grow together towards the sun, eating and excreting, forming a food-rich, sticky mat that other microbes settle on. Collectively they feed each other, build layers of mat upon mat, and create undulating underwater forests of pillars. Among their excreta was most of the oxygen in our planet’s atmosphere. At a fundamental level, our entire existence is possible because a bunch of different single-celled organisms formed an accretive collective and thrived. Collectivity, mutual aid, and peaceful coexistence are the farthest things from impossibly idealistic: they are, as the stromatolites remind us, at the very root of what it is to be a multi-celled organism; and they are by far the most proven strategies for making a future worth living in. More than a billion years after they first came together, there are still living, thriving stromatolite colonies, now sheltering fish but still pumping oxygen out for the rest of us to breathe as they grow, layer upon layer, towards the sun. 

UR: That is beautiful (sigh). Thanks to all of you for your time and for this interview.

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

Source

By The Black Trowel Collective

To be an archaeologist is to revel in the diversity of human expression through time. Trans perspectives and voices add necessary further dimensions to our understandings of the past. We are inspired by the high-profile bravery and strength of trans people, such as Olympic weightlifter Laurel Hubbard and soccer player Quinn, and by the everyday resilience and determination shown by our trans and gender diverse comrades, students, friends, family, and colleagues.

The Black Trowel Collective has called for archaeologists to stand in solidarity with trans people, noting that “an archaeological understanding of the past is incompatible with transphobia and so-called ‘gender critical’ or trans-exclusionary radical feminism.” Here we further discuss this stance and the scientific backing of our position.  

Archaeologists for Trans Liberation: Sex and gender in the past and the present

Archaeology looks to the material past to understand the complexities of human behavior and action. The deep histories it produces tell us about how people lived, created societies and made meaning in their world from the time of our earliest hominin ancestors to the present. With that million-plus year perspective on humanity, we can say with confidence that there are very few universals in what it means to be human. We travel (but sometimes we stay put); we make art (but what we archaeologists call art looks very different depending on time and place); we build things (but some of the traces of these things are so ephemeral that archaeologists have to guess what they were); we create families and societies (organized along a multiplicity of social logics with no universal pattern); we use tools (of many different materials for an infinite variety of purposes); we make love (including with all other hominins); and sometimes we don’t.

That variety and the joyous mess of overlapping narratives also gives a special insight into human society: at any one time, there are myriad ways of being, doing and perceiving. The archaeological record speaks in many (often contradictory) voices because past people were not homogenous, their experiences of the world not universal and their ways of navigating personal relationships, societal power dynamics and exogenous pressures were unique to their own experiences. In essence, archaeological data allow us to perceive a past that is, like the present, culturally diverse and full of people whose own experiences of their world were shaped by their distinct social, political, and environmental contexts. It is simply incorrect to impose present day prejudices upon the past.

We offer the information that follows as neither a comprehensive discussion of archaeology’s knowledge of gender and sex, nor as a definitive statement on the subject. Rather, we hope that this overview will serve as one of a suite of trans people’s “tools for liberation” (sensu Harry Josephine Giles 2021).

Human biology extends beyond and between “Male” and “Female”

The erasure of the complexity of sex and gender beyond simple binaries is a function of contemporary transphobic ideologies within archaeological analyses and not a reflection of past peoples’ lives. Moreover, this erasure risks providing fodder for accounts of the past that are used to further marginalize trans and gender fluid people.

Identifying and understanding past people’s conceptions and experiences of gender is not straightforward. The further back one goes, the fewer and more fragmented the traces of people’s lives become and the more complicated it is to interpret and understand them. We work from scraps to construct narratives that are messy, ragged and rarely twine together.

Archaeologists first identified the gender of skeletons by funerary assemblages, then explored their sex by measuring bones which have been considered diagnostic, and now, increasingly, by DNA analysis. The first two are infamously imprecise, and result in sensationalist “re-discoveries” of Viking warrior women (Price et al. 2019) and gay lovers buried together (Geller 2016). Additionally, individual skeletons have had their sex estimated as male or female, with interpretations changing through time (Geller 2016; Chawkins 2006). The ambiguity of such estimation methods is a function of their reliance on measurement of traits that have a wide range of variation, with only clusters of significance around “male” and “female.” A recent re-evaluation of biological sexing of archaeological remains suggests that different methods of sexing have different accuracy rates: in a known sample, proteomics (protein analyses) were 100% accurate regarding chromosomal sex, DNA was 91% accurate and morphometric analysis (studies of skeletons) was 51% accurate (Buonasera et al. 2020). Having said that, chromosomes are only one element of what we call biological sex alongside genital appearance, sex hormones, and others (Davis and Preves 2017: 80). In fact numerous intersex chromosomal conformations are known. The medical classification of biological sex is a historically malleable practice (Griffiths 2018).

Like gender, sex is better understood as bimodal rather than binary. Scientists estimate that 1-2% of the population is biologically intersex (Blackless et al. 2000). Intersex bodies take many forms: some are chromosomally intersex but phenotypically male or female, others have genital or organ differences. Some intersex people never learn they are intersex, others discover it in adulthood or adolescence. Medical doctors have historically surgically and endocrinologically  altered intersex infants’ bodies to more rigidly conform to male or female sex characteristics (Kessler 1990; Knouse 2005). Intersex activists challenge this practice as medically unnecessary and a violation of consent (Dreger 1998; Ammaturo 2016). In this way, the sex binary can be seen as a social construction that materializes cis-normative gender ideologies, not the other way around. Some intersex people identify with a binary gender–often the one they were raised with–while others find they are more naturally trans, nonbinary or fluid. As with binary sexed people, there are no rules and one’s social gender and biological sex need not and do not always overlap. What we gloss as the finite and bounded category of “biological sex” is in fact a contingent and variable form. It is based on a complex combination of chromosomal structure, pre and post-natal hormonal configuration, and the cultural and social milieu into which those genetic and hormonal forms emerge in an individual (DuBois and Shattuck-Heidorn 2021).

Intersex people and intersex bodies have only recently become part of archaeological discourse (e.g. Power 2020; Redfern et al. 2017). Ancient genetic research has identified a handful of chromosomally intersex individuals (Rivollat et al. 2020; Moilanen et al. in press), although more research is needed regarding their lived experience.

Gender and sex binaries have been fixed and policed by force and coercion

Our current social organization, based around strict lines delineating gender, primary sex characteristics, and sexuality, is a relatively recent phenomenon. It emerged as part of European hegemonic colonialism and serves to enforce and maintain capitalist norms in the home and wider society (Monaghan 2015). An imposed and rigid gender binary regulates reproduction (a concern of nationalist states), breaks down Indigenous and non-European kin connections and families (perpetuating genocide), and positions the household as a site of capitalist surplus accumulation (through regulated social roles and relations of (re)production) (Morgensen 2010: 2012).

Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies critics such as Deborah Miranda (2010) and Scott Lauria Morgensen (2011) have documented the ways in which colonial governments engaged in violent projects of gender normalization targeting Indigenous individuals and communities. Daniel Justice (2010) draws on archaeological materials as resources for inspiring queer Cherokee worldviews, politics, and modes of belonging. Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim TallBear, in her academic writing (2018) and public scholarship (Wilber, Small-Rodriguez and Keene 2019), explores the way binary structures colonised bodies and beds, breaking and distorting traditional kin relations.

Such practices seem to have been a regular or even necessary force in sustaining European colonial violence across the globe. Religious strictures against ‘sodomy’ (which often glossed a range of non-heteronormative sex practices) were frequently used by European colonial and religious authorities to punish gender nonconforming individuals in Africa and South America. Epprecht notes that the British South African Company was particularly enthusiastic in prosecuting “homosexual crimes” during its first year of occupation of Zimbabwe, suggesting the commonplace nature of non-heteronormative relationships prior to Colonization, and “[indicating] a reflexive defense of patriarchal, heterosexual masculinity by the homophobic  representatives of the colonial state” (Epprecht 1998: 217). British colonial sodomy laws, despite no longer being in place in the U.K., remain on the books in many colonized countries, and continue to drive state violence and acts of bigotry against queer and gender diverse people (Sanders 2009; Semugoma 2012).

Humans in the past and the present have had many genders and sexualities

Archaeologists have a long history of imposing modern patriarchal gender and sexual norms onto the past, portraying men as active (e.g. hunters, warriors) and women as passive (e.g. gatherers, home-keepers) and disseminating this through museum exhibits and public scholarship (O’Sullivan 2015: 214). Feminist archaeologists began to critique this imposition in the 1980s and 90s (e.g. Conkey and Gero 1993; Conkey and Spector 1984), and in the 21st century, this critique has expanded further, reconstructing and documenting a range of gender forms in the past (e.g. Geller 2017). For instance, archaeologist Sandra Holliman has written about gender identities beyond the male-female binary in the peoples who came to what we now call North America by at least 12,000 years BP, asserting that “the first people to migrate to North America from North Asia were members of societies that recognized more than two genders” (Holliman 2001: 130). Archaeologist Elizabeth Prine (2000) has found archaeological evidence that suggests there were multiple genders, including miati, in Indigenous Hidatsa houses beginning in the 15th-19th centuries, immediately prior to or during the period of European colonization of Hidatsa Lands, and characteristic of long histories of gender fluidity.

These gender-fluid examples occurred in contexts where masculine and feminine genders would have been recognized alongside them. Moreover, we should be wary of projecting our modern sex and gender identity categories onto past individuals whole-cloth, as this leaves aside the frequently contextual and contingent nature of gender variation (Geller 2019). Nevertheless, it is clear from archaeological, historical, and ethnographic accounts that human gender is highly variable and that human beings have historically been comfortable with a range of genders beyond modern “masculine” and “feminine” binaries (Weismantel 2013).

Trans people are under threat from state power, regressive social and cultural forces, and interpersonal violence.

The year 2021 has seen a record number of anti-LGBTQ laws being passed or proposed, and with many of these specifically focused on policing the bodies of trans people in the realms of restrooms, sports, and medicine (Feliciano 2021). In the distinctively virulent and hostile transphobic environment in the UK, the Equalities minister has openly discussed adopting laws to prevent trans people from using bathrooms and accessing medical care (Parsons 2020).  At least 77 countries around the world have federal laws that criminalize sexuality or gender expression (Human Rights Watch 2021). Beyond specific laws targeting them, trans people face proportionally higher rates of police scrutiny, harassment, and assault (Grant, et al 2011: 158-172). And all of this is taking place in the context of a continued epidemic of interpersonal violence against trans people globally (Trans Murder Monitoring 2021). Anti-trans violence and legislation, share a common origin in and act to reinforce white supremacist ideals through narrow biological essentialism that homogenizes the categories of Woman and Man to normative white bodies, rendering a spectrum of bodies and ways of being deviant and disruptive (hooks 1982; Lewis 2019; Upadhyay 2021).

In this context, archaeologists have an ethical and scholarly responsibility to disrupt transphobic rhetoric, practices and interpretive frameworks in our discipline. We must avoid intentionally or unintentionally providing fodder for cis-normative ideologies, and craft accounts that center the social and historical variation of gender and embodiment beyond biologically essentialist and imperial binaries. Moreover, we must work to make our institutions safe and equitable for our transgender and gender diverse students and colleagues.

The Black Trowel Collective is a multiethnic collective of archaeologists from around the world. Not all members are comfortable with disclosing their membership, as they are under authoritarian regimes or have other considerations in play.

Editors Note: We usually do not encourage long bibliographies in blog posts. In this case, we recognize the significance of citation and see these references as ways for all of us to learn more.

Works cited and related references

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