The Music of Merrifield Hall

I was tied up in a meeting last night and was not able to attend the premier of some pieces that my buddy Mike Wittgraf prepared from recordings that we made in Merrifield Hall a few years ago before it underwent renovation.

We did this as part of a larger project to commemorate Merrifield Hall prior to it undergoing a massive renovation. To mark this transformation of a key building on campus, we published a book edited  by Shilo Viginia Previti, Grant McMillan, and Samuel Amendolar called Campus Building which you can download here.

Mike added video effects to the audio recordings which capture in his inimitable way the acoustic character of the building and use it as a foundation for a deeper exploration of campus change.

These videos are in some way a sequel to Mike’s earlier work “Hearing Corwin Hall,” which we published with some exegesis at Epoiesen in 2021. They represent and manifest the complex changing taking place on campus and the tensions between looking forward toward the future and recognizing the importance of continuity, history, and tradition in the past. They also communicate the anxieties inherent in these transitions.

Two for Tuesday: An Archaeology of Black Pseudoarchaeology

When scholars think of an archaeology of pseudoarchaeology they’re as likely to think of Foucault as, say, archaeology of the contemporary world or historical archaeology. There’s a long tradition of heresy hunting in academia and the general approach to pseudoarchaeology has followed a model of tracing problematic ideas through the muck and determining their origins. In many narrative, a Foucauldian pseudoarchaeology typically passes through Fascist Europe and ends in places like Blavatsky. 

There is, of course, another kind of archaeology, the kind that focuses on material culture qua material culture rather than ideas. Recently archaeology has started to take a more serious interest in the “Great Migration” of Blacks from the American South and the Caribbean to northern cities. Jane Peterson and Michael M. Gregory’s article in the last issue of the Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage, “Preserving Chicago’s Great Migration Legacy through Archaeology and Public Engagement” is a solid example of this kind of scholarship as is Paul Mullins’ work on interwar Indianapolis (and elsewhere; some of which is captured here) and Krysta Ryzewski’s groundbreaking work on Detroit. 

There is also the work of generations of sociologists and anthropologists (especially those early on associated with the famed Chicago School of urban studies). This appreciation of how the urban fabric shaped the range of lived experience in northern US cities produced studies laced with evidence for the material conditions of newly arrived urban Blacks from the American south.

Erdmann Doane Beynon showed in his classic study of the earliest days of the Nation of Islam (then known, tellingly, as a “voodoo cult”) in the 1938 American Journal of Sociology, the urban context provides a key lens for understanding the rise in groups like the Nation of Islam (or, say, Moorish Science). He shows how many Black migrants to Detroit experienced alienation from their tight knit communities in the often rural south. In its place, emerged new forms of urban community anchored in their shared employment (often in the auto industry in Detroit), new religious experiences, and various manifestations of consumer culture (especially centered on status marking expressed through musical tastes, automobiles, and clothing). It is telling, for example, that the founder of the Nation of Islam, (variously named, but most frequently known as) Wallace Fard Muhammad initially spread his message and got to know the Detroit community by working as traveling salesman. Through his time spent going door-to-door and building commercial relationships in the community, he ingratiated himself particularly to women who felt the effects of social isolation in Great Migration Detroit in particularly acute ways. Just as a traveling salesmen introduced certain consumer goods to status conscious new urbanites by sharing their neighbors’ tastes and purchasing history, they also provided a connection between the often alienated individuals on a spiritual and religious level. These individuals would have then reinforced these connections and consumer choices as well as religious forms during their periodic returns to the south where they could demonstrate their newly found status and beliefs to the relatives and friend who resided in other cities and similar struggled to assert state and build a sense of community.

The connection between consumerism and community was not the only way that Beynon demonstrated the role the material culture played in activating the spread of groups like the Moorish Science Temple and Nation of Islam. Both groups’ focus on the body and diet connected food to the growing health problems associated with the cramped and unsanitary conditions of urban life. Fard Muhammad connected avoiding certain foods, particularly pork, alcohol, and tobacco, not only with traditional religious prohibitions in Islam and Judaism, but also in bodily health. The Nation of Islam likewise promoted cleanliness as a way to demonstrate attentiveness to the home (especially by women), but also healthy living. In many cases, the savings gained through eliminated the expenses of alcohol and smoking allowed Nation of Islam members to acquire other forms of status-defining goods including better clothing, housing, and cars. In a city as deeply embedded in automobile culture as Detroit (along with other cities in the industrialized, urban north), driving the latest car offered a distinctive form of display. More nuanced reading of many of these same phenomena appear in Stephen C. Finley’s, In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam (2022) and, to be honest, I missed them in my initial reading of his study and I need to return to his book again.

This short post is to suggest, first, that we can learn a good bit about the materiality of Great Migration period from sociological and anthropological studies of the time without the need to do fieldwork. This is hardly a revelation and the next book on my list is another classic: Arthur Huff Fauset’s Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North (1944). It is notable the John Szwed authored the introduction to the 2001edition. 

What is more interesting (to me) is that consumer culture, new forms of material expression, and attention to the body during the Great Migration provided media through which religious ideas travelled. Again, this is not a novel observation by any means. In fact, right now, I’m also reading  Deidre Helen Crumbley’s, Saved and Sanctified: The Rise of a Storefront Church in Great Migration Philadelphia. (2012) which offers vaguely similar arguments in her urban ethnography of a Great Migration period storefront church. 

My modest contribution to this conversation could be to link the material worlds of Great Migration Black religion to the emergence of the distinctive strains of Black pseudoarchaeology. It would be simplistic to reduce all forms of pseudoarchaeological thought to the displacement and alienation associated with migration (as tempting as it may be). In fact, the causes of these migrations — systematic, institutional racism, for example, in the Jim Crow south and economic opportunities in the industrialized and rapidly modernizing north — may have exerted as much an influence on the character of Black pseudoarchaeological thought as the migration itself. Moreover, there are obvious links to the various distinctive form of spirituality long cultivated by Black communities as well as broader trends in early-20th century modernism. While these influences certainly shaped the distinctive expression of Black pseudoarchaeology, by acknowledging the broader trends in globalization, migration, and modernism, which all exist in material contexts, we can situated Black pseudoarchaeological thinking alongside such famous expressions as the Kensington Runestone. It seems to me that this attention to objects and materiality creates the basis for “an archaeology of pseudoarchaeology” that goes beyond the traditional genealogical approach favored by many contemporary critics and offers a space to bring it into conversation with the historical archaeology and archaeology of the contemporary world. 

New Book Day: The Archaeology of Contemporary America

I try to refrain from blatant self promotion on blog, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t announce the publication of my new book: The Archaeology of Contemporary America.

(Look! No subtitle!)

More than that, if you’re interested in a discount, you can use this code “AU224” which is valid until the end of February. It’s a $45 discount!

More important than that, this feels like a good opportunity to remind myself (and my readers) that academic books are rarely solo endeavors. This book, in particular, took a village. From its prehistory when folks like David Pettegrew, Nick Kardulias, Lita Diacopolous-Gregory, and Tim Gregory supported my curiosity and my unorthodox field work in Greece to the folks who worked with me in the Bakken (especially Kostis Kourelis, Richard Rothaus, Bret Weber) and at the Atari Excavations in Alamogordo (especially Andrew Reinhard, Rothaus, and Weber) and the series editors (Krysta Ryzewski and Michael S. Nassaney) who likely saved me from the worst of my blunders and did their best to keep my unruly manuscript in check.

I’m particularly appreciative of all the folks who took time to read and offer feedback on various sections and chapters here on the blog. Over the last four years, I’ve circulated virtually the entire book here (including some sections that while they were researched and considered, got cut from the final version of the book). 

Along side my blog readers, my friends and family also listened patiently to my half-baked ideas, supported my effort to write, and offered critical feedback.

Of course, for a book to happen, a press had to accept it, had to get the manuscript edited, had to typeset it, had to get it printed, and had to work to maintain distribution, marketing, and publicity channels. This all reflects a tremendous commitment to the idea that academic publishing remains valuable.

Finally, there’s an old saying among academics, by the time the book comes out, we’re on to the next project. This is partly true for me (although PKAP2 which is NOT the next project in any conventional sense will continue to linger on my desk for another month or so), but I’m beyond eager to get started on my next project. 

Pseudoarchaeology in Action: Othello’s Children

I know that I keep saying it, but I also keep meaning it: my semester has been hectic. That said, I do try to keep the very tip of my fingers in my ongoing research. Mostly, this amounts to doing some reading and some noodling around on the ole blog here.

I just finished reading Jose V. Pimienta-Bey’s book Othello’s Children in the New World: Moorish History and Identity in the African-American Experience (2002). It’s a pretty fantastic book that offers historical perspectives through the lens of the Moorish Science Temple of American theology and teaching.

The book argues that the term Moor reflects a specific group of people who inhabited a large swath of both northern and even central Africa as well as parts of Spain and the Central and South America. This large “Moorish Empire” left traces in both the extent of the Islamic faith as well as other cultural and political artifacts that ante-date Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean. This maximal reading of Moorish dominions is problematic, of course, especially for archaeologists and historians who reject the arguments that Africans traveled to North and South America before the 15th century. I suspect that Africanists might also challenge the some of Pimienta-Bey’s arguments for the extent of Moorish control or cultural influence in Northern Africa and its historical connection to Kemetic and Asian populations (especially Hebrew speakers). To be clear, these claims are historically and archaeologically problematic.

What is more intriguing, however, is how Pimienta-Bey uses these arguments. He contends that the Moorish legacy provides an alternative identity to many Black Americans. In fact, this identity — in keeping with MSTA teachings (at least in my understanding) — transcends that of race alone. The reason for this is bound up in the legal perspective of citizenship. Since a Moorish state existed prior to the foundation of the United States and since the United States respected claims to citizenship of individuals recognized by other states from some of the earliest statements of colonial political autonomy (e.g. the Articles of Association [1774]), then the US recognized Moorish citizens or individuals who had claim to Moorish citizenship. This recognition of citizenship distinguished Moorish citizens from enslavement or other laws meant to deny enslaved or even free Blacks from rights. At the same time, individuals of Moorish descent or Moorish citizens could become American citizens with the establishment of the various 18th century constitutional documents which recognized denizens of the colonies who were neither enslave or free Blacks nor Native Americans as citizens of the US. As Pimienta-Bey cleverly notes, there were white individuals whose ancestors had also been enslaved and this did not disqualify them from their status of citizen in the US or Europe.

The ambiguous space between race (i.e. whether white, Black, or Native American) and citizenship (i.e. having claim to Moorish or European citizenship) then gave individuals who claimed Moorish descent or identity a political identity in the free colonies. Treaties between the US and the Morocco in 1786 through which Morocco recognized US independence further established the legitimacy of Moorish identity and rights even outside of Morocco. Citizenship then as now was portable. 

Claims to Moorish identity, of course, are complicated legally and historically, and Pimienta-Bey, in keeping with MSTA teachings, tends to offer a maximalist view both of traditional Moorish dominions and consequently individuals who can make claims to Moorish citizenship (irrespective of race). That said, there is something compelling about his approach especially as a critique of the kind of structural racism often recognized in the American legal system. As I have noted before on this blog in my remarks on Stephen Dew’s book on Aliite religions, followers of Noble Drew Ali recognized citizenship as a way to construct arguments that undercut racial views of legal identity. If an individual had claims to citizenship (either in the US or elsewhere), then they had legal rights provided that the US recognized this citizenship.

~

This text offers a great example of how pseudoarchaeological ideas can inform contemporary problems. The Aliite intellectual tradition generally seeks to replace identities based on race with those based on the notion of citizenship which they see as conferring certain rights. Leveraging a range of arguments grounded unconventional, pseuodo-, and alternative archaeologies (including the problematic work of characters such as Barry Fell, folk etymologies, and historical arguments, such as those proposed by Hugo Prosper Leaming, that argued for the presence of a significant number of Black Muslim among Slaves and Maroon communities in the US), they seek to produce a maximalist interpretation of Moorish dominions which encompass much of North Africa, Spain, and parts of North and South America. By aligning their identity with this expansive view of traditional Moorish territories, they claim rights established both through treaties and through “traditional” (albeit not unproblematic) land claims.

To be absolutely clear, the claims of contemporary Sovereign Citizens draw on a similar tangle of arguments where they assert rights based on traditional land claims, treaty law, and unconventional interpretations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. These claims often lead members of this movement, some of whom claim to follow the teachings of Noble Drew Ali, to appropriate private property, refuse to license vehicles, and other illegal acts. The rights claimed by these groups also can undermine and complicated rights asserted by indigenous communities over their traditional territories based on more widely accepted, legally recognized (and often, but not always archaeological) arguments. This is deeply problematic. 

That said, the aims of groups like the M.S.T.A. to assert a post-racial identity which would have worked to undermine the power of structural racism by articulating an innovative theory of rights is significant. It addresses a persistent anxiety existing at the intersection of race, citizenship, and rights. By articulating claims to right based on historic precedent, they exploit the murkiness associated with the emergence of nation-states to demonstrate how alternative narratives can support deeply subversive and even decolonizing and anti-racist positions as relevant in the early 20th century as they are today.

In fact, one could argue that the contemporary migrant crisis, which archaeologists have rushed to address through a range of innovative method and approaches, likewise brings to the fore the fraught intersection of identity, citizenship, race, and rights. While Aliite histories and archaeologies offer a view of how a community of engaged and innovative thinkers sought to invent traditions to support their claim not just to citizenship, but to equality.

Three Things Thursday: Teaching, Reading, and Writing

This semester will be pretty hectic and I’m trying to maintain realistic expectations on what I can accomplish outside of keeping on top of my classes. My hope is that a certain amount of mindfulness will keep my expectations in check and allow me to continue to focus on what’s in front of me and temper my aspirational anxieties.

Thing the First

I’m teaching three new preps this semester: a new version of History 240: The Historians Craft, a new version of History 301: Medieval Civilization, and a dozen students in a practicum in editing and publishing. So far, the students have been amazing and even when the class hasn’t quite gone as planned, they understand that I’m doing the best that I can and that everything is a work in progress.

So far, my students in History 240 are doing a great job with some challenging readings. Today they face readings by Edward Said and David Armitage, and I’m guardedly optimistic. The students in my Medieval class face Eusebius’s Life of Constantine.

Thing the Second

I continue to struggle to find time to do research reading even though I have the immense good fortune to find time to read almost daily. This month, I’ve been reading contributions to the next issue of NDQ, a book manuscript for The Digital Press, readings for class, and to odd article.

What I want to finish is José V. Pimienta-Bey, Othello’s Children in the “New World”: Moorish History & Identity In The African American Experience (2002). This book is a reading of “Moorish” identity through the lens of a member of the Moorish Science Temple and a Ph.D. in African American Studies at Temple. This book will contribute to my work on Black pseudoarchaeology which continues to take on a more clear shape in my head even as I struggle to find time to read.

Thing the Third

The elephant in the room is the second volume of the PKAP series. As readers of this blog know, it’s nearly done. In fact, we’re now only waiting on one last chapter, some citation formatting, and the figures. To my mind, this is the lowest form of “writing,” but it nevertheless vital to producing a final manuscript.

I’m also getting excited to write something up that uses our ongoing efforts to digitize census data from Grand Forks, North Dakota. Just yesterday, I learned that the team at the University of Richmond had digitized the redlining maps for Grand Forks, ND. This not only provides us with a 1930 cadastral map, but also a lens through which to understanding the census data in the city. This will be particularly significant for understanding the city’s 1960s effort to enact urban renewal, which is an ongoing project.

In short, stay tuned.

Busy Archaeology: A Test Trench

Years ago, I wrote a bit exploring the idea of “slow archaeology” (you can get a sense of my ideas here). The idea, from what I recall, was to propose an alternative to what I felt to be the accelerating rate of field work and academic publishing as well as the pressures of contract and salvage archaeology. While my papers were generally focused on the fetishization of efficiency for the sake of efficiency especially in the introduction and use of technology in the discipline, they also proposed slow work as both a kind of resistance, an appeal to the roots of the discipline in craft, and as an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between disciplinary work and knowledge.

My papers never specifically defined “fast archaeology” as the opposite of “slow archaeology,” but some recent experiences and conversations have suggested that perhaps the concept of “busy archaeology” is a more appropriate counter point.

Like many people in the 21st century, I find myself feeling busy more often than not. Like many academics, at least some of the busyness is self inflicted. My daily routine has become cluttered with the need to grade over-engineered (and often under-theorized) assignments, unnecessary meetings, waves of emails, distracting tangents, and “priority churn” where each day introduces a new competitor for the position of “top priority.” (This phrase is a hat tip to my advisor, Tim Gregory, who reassure us us whenever we him to read or write something that it was his “top priority.”)

Of course archaeologists are busy and love to study busyness. In fact, in my little corner of the professional universe there are two famous articles the document the “busy countryside of late antiquity.” Marcus Rautman’s use of the term “busy” was deliberate especially in the context of Cyprus. Not only did it situate the island in Late Antiquity outside the “Orient” which, as Said has so famously shown, 18th and 19th century historians historically characterized as inhabited by “lazy bodies”, but also reinforced the division between Late Antiquity and the subsequent, more “Oriental” (at least in the hands of many historians past and present) Byzantine or Muslim worlds. In other words, the busy Late Roman countryside marked Cyprus and Antiquity as characterized by modern, Western, values of industriousness. This has particular significance on contemporary Cyprus where prosperity and rapid economic development characterize the Republic of Cyprus, which is part of the EU; in contrast the politically isolated “Turkish Republic” which governs the occupied part of the island languishes.   Whether we should read Rautman’s (and Pettegrew’s subsequent) use of this term as an ironic reference to certain long-standing, if outmoded historical trends, a nod to the contemporary situation, or as a simple descriptor of the bustling Late Roman landscape remains unclear. 

It seems that archaeologists have a particular penchant for seeing coastal towns, ports, and harbors as “busy.” They’re in good company, of course, E.P Thompson in his monumental Making of the English Working Class likewise notes “In London, the arsenal, the shipyards,, and the docks were busy…” (252), but also reminds us that “In the eyes of the rich between 1790 and 1830 factory children were ‘busy’, ‘industrious’, ‘useful’; they were kept out of their parks and orchards, and they were cheap” (342) and clearly linked the busyness as a virtue to the rising influence of Methodism among the management class in 18th century England. It is in this context where capitalism developed its virtuous view of busyness and came to celebrate a busy workplace, a busy commercial district, and busy employees. 

By the 21st century, authors like David Graeber in his irreverent but incisive 2018 book Bullshit Jobs, makes clear that busyness (or “Busy-Bee” syndrome) is part of the core problem associated with contemporary work. As one might expect, Graeber largely blamed capitalism-addled middle-manager class for the growing need to appear busy. Managers often urged their workers to at least appear busy as a way to protect their jobs. At the same time, managers also often burdened these same employees with unnecessary busywork as a way to reinforce their own authority (and employment). 

In academia, claims to busyness often seek to thread the needle between resistance and industriousness. On the one hand, most of my colleagues do their best to appear occupied (if not preoccupied) by their jobs. In fact, we often criticize individuals who aren’t busy (e.g. “I’m not sure what he actually does here”) and often see it as a kind of complicity with mechanisms of power that privilege particular faculty with free time at the expense of their colleagues.

On the other hand, faculty have learned (I’m assuming from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education) that when saying “no” to additional work, it is often useful to claim particular busyness. Once during a committee meeting when no one would agree to be chair amid clamorous claims to being “too busy,” I offered to take on the role, but only if everyone in the room explained to me how they were too busy to do it. After my colleagues proved only too willing to list off their obligations, I sheepishly told them that I was kidding and realized that indeed they were all too busy (perhaps to even do their jobs!). In this way, busyness has become a form of resistance even when it’s directed not at the small but powerful managerial class in academia, but at their colleagues. Academics are only too willing, it would seem, to use busyness as an excuse to drag their colleagues back into the bucket. 

To my mind, this is a pretty intriguing historical and professional context, then, to consider what an archaeology of busyness. The challenge would be that busyness for all the energy it consumes, anxiety it creates, and movement that it embodies remains rather ephemeral. In fact, “busy work” both occupies a good bit of our time as academics, within capitalism, and in modernity, but the absence of any discernible or significant results distinguishes it from “real work.” It is both the opposite of “slow” in that it’s frenetic, hurried, and often impatient, but like the “slow” the measure of busy is in the moment. For many of us “the busy” isn’t so much the result of particular or specific external pressures, but the cumulative embodiment of a particular set of moral (or at very least ethical) imperatives to DO something. 

The question becomes, then, what would the archaeology of busyness look like? What traces do our persistent commitment to doing leave behind when accomplishments are so often secondary to performance?

How does archaeology itself with its roots in modernity and capitalism occlude our ability to discern the traces of business and reproduce the moral imperative to remain constantly in motion?

One wonder whether the elusiveness of busyness is part of its persistence. It leaves no traces and as a result, we can deny or ignore its presence. 

Richmond’s Monument Avenue in Context

On a weekend when many Americans reflect on Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement, I took some time to listen to the music of Max Roach and read Marvin T. Chiles’s book The Struggles for Change: Race and the Politics of Reconciliation in Modern Richmond (2023). My colleague Eric Burin recommended it to me, but what inspired me to read it was an early draft of a chapter for my forthcoming book, The Archaeology of Contemporary American Culture, where I try to dig a bit deeper (pun intended) into the removal of the Confederate Statues from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia.

This particular site has personal significance to me. I did my undergraduate work at the University of Richmond (RC ’94) and while there, I worked at the JCC on Monument Avenue. My parents were married at St. John’s UCC on (formerly?) Stuart Circle, my father grew up in Richmond (attending Thomas Jefferson High School), and I still have family there. When I started to write my chapter on the removal of statues, I felt confident that my experiences in Richmond would help me be able to present the context for these events in a more nuanced way. After making a bit of a flailing effort to put what I knew on paper, it turned out that I was wrong and daunted by the extensive, complex, and nuanced corpus of scholarship on race and urban space in Richmond, I gave up. 

If I had been able to read Marvin Chiles’s book, I might have stuck with my original plan to try to say something more substantial. It turns out, my instincts weren’t entirely wrong: Richmond did represent a nearly majority Black city that had long struggled with the burden of its racist past as capital of the Confederacy. Chiles’s book, however, unpacks that more recent context for that burden starting in the 1960s and culminating in the removal of the statues in 2020. More than that, he showed how understand the particular historical context of this national (or even global) response to police violence is vital to appreciating what the removal of Confederate War memorials meant to local communities. 

Chiles’s book, for example, stressed that the removal of the Confederate statues from Monument Avenue was not the manifestation of a community pushed to the breaking point and resorting to violence to make its desperation known. Instead, it was culmination of a half-century of work between poor Black residents of Richmond, the Black elite, and what he calls the “White Establishment.” Each of these groups sincerely sought to shed the burden of Richmond’s racist past and navigate the changing realities facing a city with a majority (or near majority) population. This isn’t to suggest that every member of the White Establishment was committed to anti-racist policies or that every Black Richmonder had the same values and ideas. Moreover, this isn’t some kind of bootstrap narrative that suggests Richmond managed to find its way without outside help or a triumphalist narrative distorted by boosterism. Instead, Chiles’s book demonstrates that by the 21st century, the failures, challenges, and history of often tense collaboration between various economic, racial, and social factions in Richmond produced a city that eagerly sought to move beyond its history as the capital of the Confederacy. 

Chiles, for example, demonstrates how efforts to annex outright (or at least parts of) Henrico and Chesterfield Counties to recapture more affluent populations who moved out of the city of Richmond in the post war period cut across racial lines. The White Establishment sought to annex Richmond’s growing suburbs to secure tax revenues to support a cash strapped and increasingly poor and Black city. Black elites, on the other hand, often resisted these efforts to maintain their electoral majority in the city and to prevent the Black majority from being diluted by an influx of white suburban voters. Poor Blacks, however, recognized that annexation had the potential to increase funding for social services, schools, and other public amenities that would improve their lives. 

The controversy over annexation, which would ultimately involve only the annexation of part of Chesterfield county, played out at the same time Richmond struggled to desegregate its public school system through the use of bussing. These efforts, which met only uneven success, underscored the racial tensions in the city and resistance to bussing relied on stroking tired racist fears of Black student violence and Black students lowering the academic performance and standards in the classroom.

These stories, in turn, were set against both top-down efforts by both the White Establishment and the Black elite to revitalize the city through massive downtown investment projects such as Project One and the Sixth Street Marketplace. While these projects largely failed (as so many efforts to revitalize cities through ambitious retail schemes did nationally), they didn’t fail because elite Blacks and Establishment Whites didn’t care or weren’t working together to address poverty and racism in the city. They failed because they were flawed schemes, because of political bickering among their sponsors, and because white consumers refused to support them. Race shaped these situations to be sure, but race did not necessarily dictate the outcomes. 

The most intriguing part of the book is Chiles exploration of the murky and partial archives related to grassroots activism in Richmond. He shows how religious leaders, academics, and community leaders worked together to try to address racial housing practices, urban poverty, and, most relevant to my interest, the city’s historic landscape deeply inflected by its racist past. These groups did hard, serious, and important work under the White Establishment and Black elite radar. While there weren’t always successful in their efforts — employment schemes ran out of money, various collective organizations fractured along racist lines, and radical rhetoric sometimes proved easier to ignore than to consider — they also moved the needle. The use of walking tours, for example, in the public schools to trace the history of Black Richmond, as a counterweight to visible and oppressive burden of the city’s Confederate past, played an important role in making it possible for Black and White city residents to think about an urban landscape traced by reconciliation rather than antipathy. While the line from a school’s walking tour to the erection of Arthur Ashe’s statue on Monument Avenue and the removal of the Confederate memorial on Monument Avenue is a long and winding one, Chiles shows how this line (along side the struggles of school desegregation, bussing, failed urban revitalization projects, the threat of gentrification, and other challenges) is the story of racial reconciliation in Richmond.

[To be clear, I’ve simplified and streamlined complicated stories and likely misrepresented some essential aspects of Chiles’s argument. Go read this book if you’re interested in American urbanism, race, history, and reconciliation!] 

In other words, the removal of the Confederate monuments was not a desperate and violent gesture of a disenfranchised and alienated Black community, but a widely accepted and understood moment in the long struggle toward racial reconciliation in the city. As we say in the archaeology business, context is everything and Chiles’s book offers a nuanced and approachable context for the removal of the Confederate statues. Like many urban stories, the shadow of future challenges remains, but there is also hope for Richmond, and as our national media and political leaders seek to stoke racism, polarization, and (ideological and physical) violence, perhaps we all need to read some hopeful stories. 

Pseudoarchaeology and Fiction

Over the last year or so, I’ve started to think as much about how pseudoarchaeological ideas transmitted as pseudoarchaeological ideas themselves. Over the holiday weekend, I read Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). The book tells the story of the Exodus, but does it in an idiosyncratic ways that supposes Moses was an Egyptian rather than a Israelite.

The book is epic in scale, but also somehow disarming intimate as it traces Moses’s life first as a Egyptian Prince, then as a desert ascetic, and finally as savior of the Israelites who led them through the desert to the border of the promised land. Hurston introduces Moses inner life and his conflicted attitudes toward God’s commands. The book is also subtly laced with allusions to esoteric knowledge and leans deeply into “Moses the Magician” trope.

In this way, the book capitalizes on a number of key pseudoarchaeological themes. For example, it privileges Egyptian culture as crucial to the development of other ancient Mediterranean societies. It does this by interrogating an ancient story and revising its claim. In Hurston’s novel, Miriam claims that Moses was found by the daughter of the Pharaoh, but she actually lies having fallen asleep while watching the baby Moses after his mother hid him among the reeds. It is hardly surprising that efforts to revise the narrative of the Exodus have interested pseudohistorical and pseudoarchaeological thinkers for years. Rand Flem-Ath’s worked on Moses as well as a theory of Atlantis grounded in Charles Hapgood’s theories of polar inversion. Of course, Hurston’s novel also appeared the same year as Freud’s Moses and Monotheism.

Deirdre Dempsey’s and Julia Zeppenfeld’s recent work offer both summaries of scholarship on this novel and its contemporary implications. Dempsey, for example, notes that most critics believe that Hurston did not know Freud’s work on Moses, as her book was completed by the mid-1930s, but Hurston’s biographers have noted that she appears to have been familiar with Flinders Petrie’s Egyptian Tales (1899). Hurston’s work with Franz Boas at Barnard is also well known as is his support for her ethnographic research in the American south. It seems likely that she also was familiar with the basic outlines of the Kenite Hypothesis and the work of Josephus. Zeppenfeld notes the importance of the Exodus narrative for African Americans as it evoked both their emancipation from slavery and their subsequent efforts to secure political, social, and economic freedom.   

Jon Woodson’s more unconventional work has argued that Hurston’s novel also alludes to George Gurdjieff’s philosophy (perhaps filtered through the influence of A.R. Orage and P. D. Ouspensky). Gurdjieff’s and his follower’s work represents an expansion of Madame Blavatsky’s work which, as John Hoopes has observed, is a well-spring of many strains of pseudoarchaeology. Woodson contends that Hurston’s work includes references to Oragean esotericism that fellow followers would have recognized but the average reader would have simply overlooked. While the specific cypher that Woodson offers is beyond my ability to critique, it is clear that Hurston’s novel includes several unresolved digressions including several passages about a book of Thoth hidden on an island near Koptos which was known to Moses Hebrew servant. Moses eventually visits the site and defeats the immortal serpent that guards the book. Curiously, we’re never told what the book said or even, clearly, why Moses’s pilgrimage to the site was important for the story. A passing description amulets that Hurston modeled on “slave bundles” in the novel connect Black spirituality to Egyptian magic. Moses’s spiritual quests and his efforts to lead the Israelites out of Egypt were both called “the work” in Hurston’s novel. The Work stands as both a reference to Grudjieffean quests for self-knowledge and Black traditions of magic and spiritual power grounded in Caribbean practices such as Voodoo.  

Hurston’s novel, on the one hand, served as an alternate history of the Exodus that would have resonated with Black readers who had begun to leverage both Egyptian and, in some cases, Hebrew or Israelite, identities to negotiate the challenges Jim Crow laws, the displacements of the Great Migration, and the economic trauma of the Great Depression.

On the other hand, Moses, Man of the Mountain, would have worked as a cypher for esoteric knowledge and offers a window into the way in which certain strains of mysticism, the Black religious experience, and pseudoarchaeology go hand-in-hand. Moreover, these currents are not always obvious to uninitiated (or uninformed) readers leaving them with a patch work of pseudohistorical and pseudoarchaeological narratives that invite further understanding, but serve as a shadowy guide. 

In the end, works like Hurston’s Moses serve as a framework for pseudoarchaeological knowledge to enter mainstream awareness. Hurston’s reputation as an important contributor to be Black literature in the US and to archaeology and anthropology through her commitment to ethnographic recording and publishing of Black folk knowledge makes her an especially compelling figure in fictionalized pseudoarchaeology.

I’m increasingly come to realize that authors like Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Ishmael Reed (who was likely influenced by Hurston’s work), Sun Ra, and even contemporary authors such as Minister Faust or even, obliquely, Fred Moten help keep pseudoarchaeological ideas alive and circulating in the Black community. Many of these ideas are entangled with other forms of counter-hegemonic knowledge that can, at the worst, support racist, antisemitic, colonialist, and white supremacist arguments, but, at their best, can be decolonizing, identity forming, and revolutionary.

As readers of this blog know, one of my projects is to decolonize pseudoarchaeology and to consider it potential both to complement more established archaeological ways of knowing and to offer ways of understanding the role that archaeology can and does play in the face of contemporary challenges of race, migration, and climate change.

Music Monday: John Coltrane in High Point, North Carolina

We often associate John Coltrane’s musical career with his time in New York or Philadelphia, but Coltrane grew up in central North Carolina and attended high school in Hight Point, North Carolina.

This weekend, I took in some of the sights (and sites) associated with Coltrane there. The most notable is probably the large mural painted by Jeks.

High Point has also a monument in downtown celebrate one of the town’s most famous sons. My photo leaves much to be desired…

Finally, we visited Coltrane’s home in High Point on Underhill Street. Apparently the home owned by the City of High Point and some funds were appropriated for its renovation as a museum in 2022. 

The home looked cared for, but as far as I could tell, it wasn’t open for visitors or anything like that. Of course, this isn’t the only Coltrane home that activists have sought to preserve. His home in Philadelphia and his home in Dix Hills, New York (or here) have received attention and earned recognition as historic landmarks. 

It’s interesting to consider why John Coltrane’s memory seems to focus on houses. On the one hand, this is a pretty standard way to understand and preserve heritage especially for individuals whose cultural contributions were, in some sense, immaterial. It may be a bit romantic to envision the intensely spiritual aspect of Coltrane’s art as demanding a kind of grounding in the more mundane world of the domestic. It would be a bridge to far, I expect, to argue that an interest in the human elements of Coltrane’s life grounded his spiritual flights in domestic space as a way to remind us that such flights often start from humble origins.

Pseudoarchaeology, Esotericism, and Citizenship

Over the last month or so, I’ve been working to expand my understanding of what I’m coming to call the “pseudoarchaeological discourse.” I’m tentatively using this term to describe the larger conversation in American society that supports the pseudoarchaeological imagination as well as literal pseudoarchaeological practice. As I’ve noted elsewhere on this blog, the goal of this is loosely to show the potential of a more expansive view of pseudoarchaeology to address pressing contemporary problems and to discourage (or at very least mitigate) the scorched earth “war of pseudoarchaeology” currently undertaken by more fanatical members of the archaeological discipline. 

Over the last week, I’ve been reading two works. The first is Stephen C. Finley, Margarita Simon Guillory, and Hugh R. Page Jr. wonderful edited volume: Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: There is a Mystery… (2015). The other is Spencer Dew’s The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali which appears in the University of Chicago Press excellent Class 200 series in religion in 2019. Most of the contributions to the former volume foreground religion in discussions of the Black esoteric and mystical experiences. The Dew monograph, in contrast, stressed the legal aspects of the “Aliite” religions that developed from the teaching of Noble Drew Ali and his Moorish Science Temple of America in the early 20th century. Many Aliite groups remain active today under such confusing names as United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors (or the Yamassee Native American Moors of the Creek Nation) or Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah (or simply Washitaw Nation).

It is probably worth stressing here that I’m in no way advocating for these groups or somehow condoning their behavior or attitudes. My goal here is to simply note the Black currents in the broader pseudoarchaeological discourse and demonstrate that these currents demonstrate the potential of pseudoarchaeological thought to contribute solutions to pressing metaphysical and social problems facing these communities as well as support the capacity for the continued work to produce contemporary pseudoarchaeological media and research. 

For now, I’d like to confine my observations to three points:

1. Esotericism and the Harlem Renaissance. I’m only now scratching the surface of the connection between esoteric beliefs, Black literary culture, and the efforts to excavate the origins of Black culture from the shadowy period of slavery. I was blown away by Jon Woodson’s contribution to the Finley et al. edited volume which explored “The Harlem Renaissance as Esotericism Black Oragean Modernism.” I can’t trace all the lines of his argument, but one thing that I took away from his article (and I’ve ordered his book To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance (1999)) is that the work of Jean Toomer was clearly influenced by the esoteric thought of G. I. Gurdjieff and his discipline A.R. Orage. In fact, Toomer’s long poem “Blue Meridian” (1936) represents an extended poetic retelling of Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine. Toomer was, of course, an influential and controversial figure in early 20th century Black letters and the Harlem Renaissance. Woodson argues that scholars have sometimes overlooked Toomer’s stature and influence in Black literary circles. In particular, he suggests the Zora Neale Hurston used Toomer as a model for Moses in her novel: Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) which represents a kind of pseudoarchaeological novel and anticipates some of the pseudoarchaeological themes in the work of Ishmael Reed, for example. Hurston’s work as an ethnographer is perhaps better known to archaeologists who owe a debt of gratitude to her tireless effort to document Black culture which helped (mostly white) archaeologists make sense of peculiar deposits in the homes of enslaved people. 

That Hurston’s and Toomer’s works were suffused with esotericism, which, in turn provides a foundation for at least one branch of pseudoarchaeological thought offers yet another perspective on just how deeply pseudoarchaeology-adjacent ideas saturated 20th century Black culture. It is hardly surprising that the great saxophone player Marion Brown (who performed with Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders in Coltrane’s final and most mystical and exploratory phase) would produce a trilogy of albums influenced by Jean Toomer’s novel Cane.

2. Dew on Aliite Religion. Stephen Drew’s volume on Aliite religion offers only the barest treatment of the complex historical analysis that Aliite thinkers have developed to support the connection between contemporary Blacks and Moors. At its most pseudoarchaeological, it involves the lost content of Mu (a version of Lemuria), which through some etymological razzle-dazzle becomes the origins of the word Moor (Mu’ur). In the hands of various Aliite groups, Mu is more than just a pseudoarchaeological fascination, but represents a claim to a unique Moorish identity. This Moorish identity confers on Aliite groups a particular kind of sovereignty and citizenship required by their interpretation of E Pluribus Unum, which they claim establishes the need for a national (or at very least collective ethnic) identity (that is: the “plures” in the phrase) to share American citizenship (the unum). Of course, the conventional reading of this phrase is that the “plures” are the thirteen original colonies.

Dew stresses the belief among Aliite communities that they need to conduct their own research to establish their rights to citizenship as Moors and ultimately claims to land that ceded to them as part of the Louisiana purchase. Obviously, there is a good bit of historical and ethnic “funny business” going on to establish these claims. That said, much of the “funny business” refracts with pseudoarchaeological claims to the origins and identities of mound builders, the ethnic origins of the Poverty Point complex in Louisiana, and various other Native American sites.

Putting aside problematic of these claims, Dew makes the important point that Aliite understandings of the importance of origins and legal status of citizenship reflect the ongoing importance of these concepts in the contemporary world. The claims by Aliite groups underscore the significance of claims to legal rights to acquire the full status of humanity in a world where migrants across national boundaries often lose their rights to due process and in all too many cases basic humanity. Contemporary Aliite efforts to assert their legal rights through complicated assertions of their origins and their long-standing relationship with the United States as Moors (as opposed to any racial category) reflect the anxieties associated with citizenship, status, and basic humanity.

Pseudoarchaeology’s contribution to these claims, however problematic it may be, represents a counterhegemonic strategy designed to subvert the contemporary arguments that serve to erode the very humanity of groups by recognizing race (i.e. being Black) rather than a (pseudo) historically constituted category (and the privileges they recognize associated with such historical origins).   

3. Conspiracy and Popular Culture. One of the most intriguing aspects of these conversations is the role that popular culture plays in providing the foundations for various pseudoarchaeological and esoteric arguments. The more I read about Black pseudoarchaeology, the more I’m struck by the utter obscurity of the routes in which these ideas travel. Some of this has to do with their deliberately esoteric nature, some of this has to do with the role that orality plays in the communication and development of these ideas, and some of it has to do with the prevalence of ephemera — including books, periodicals, broadsheets, and so on — in propagating pseudoarchaeological ideas.

In other words, there is this churning undercurrent of pseudoarchaeological thought that periodically ruptures into the public eye when a prominent religious movement (e.g. Nation of Islam, various Aliite groups, and so on) or individual (e.g. Sun Ra, Louis Farrakhan) promotes it. These currents contribute to how certain groups understand works of literature, music, and film. These long-standing currents of pseudoarchaeological thought would also inform the understanding of explicit works of pseudoarchaeology broadcast on television, promulgated via YouTube channels, and published in other media which have caused archaeologists so much anxiety over the past three or four decades. 

What is particularly interesting to me is how these pseudoarchaeological undercurrents present in both historical and contemporary Black thought represent meaningful efforts to address the challenges of race, ethic identity, political authority, and existential anxiety present in the contemporary world. In other words, pseudoarchaeology, much like the discipline of archaeology, reflects genuine efforts to make the world meaningful. For this reason alone, it deserves more sincere attention that many of my colleagues are willing to afford it.