Uzma Z. Rizvi

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Pratt Institute

Much needed within scholarship related to archaeology, the construction of nations, and the politics of epistemic practice, the two books under review— Bureaucratic archaeology and Archaeology, nation, and race —are certainly welcome additions. The first, by Ashish Avikunthak, is a deep and engaged ethnographic study of the ways by which the Archae...

EDITORS' COMMENT We are delighted to be able to host this outstanding collection of papers on community engaged heritage projects in Pakistan, written by eight specialist from that country. As so eloquently expressed by our guest editor for this issue, Uzma Z. Rizvi, the Global North has for too long acted as gate keeper for what material from othe...

In this piece, I highlight the critical interventions presented in this collection for archaeology as heritage practice, as well as amplify many of the points that were made in relation to politics, particularly around the intersection of racism and gender/sexuality. Core tensions running through this collection are the many relationships between w...

This chapter is about everyday encounters while conducting research in India. It interrogates those moments of feeling like I belonged, like I had a stake, and how that might change through time. It is about intimacy, it is about friendships, and it is about betrayal. Ultimately, it is also about how we do archaeology. There was an everydayness to...

This article reorients archaeology’s approach to things by acknowledging the moment of the encounter with the past as one of speculation. Years of scientific claim, research design and methodology place the agentive nature of research in the hands of the archaeologist: we go to the site to find the past. However, if we acquiesce to the possibility...

Whereas Sarr and Savoy (2018) focus on artefacts taken from various African countries after 1885, Incidental archaeologists , considers “the first four decades of the French conquest and pacification of Algeria under the authority of the French military Government General” (p. 24). Throughout the volume, Effros presents a convincing argument in whi...

This Vital Topics Forum looks at archaeology as a form of bearing witness. While bearing witness has been an important frame for scholarly interrogation of structural violence for some time (Agamben 1998; Butler 2016), it is perhaps Paul Farmer (2004) who popularized this way of scrutinizing structural violence. For Farmer, there are two ways to be...

Bringing together 25 case studies from archaeological projects worldwide, Engaging Archaeology candidly explores personal experiences, successes, challenges, and even frustrations from established and senior archaeologists who share invaluable practical advice for students and early-career professionals engaged in planning and carrying out their ow...

Decolonization is not imagined in the same way around the world. Indeed, the recognition that colonization did not happen in a similar fashion in a global context is key to envisioning futures that free the binds of colonial rule and neocolonialism. A desire to decolonize requires close attention to these specific histories, and the manners by whic...

Having followed the scholarship related to new materialisms, the call for a symmetrical archaeology, its critiques and subsequent responses, I believe that this dialogue is one of the more interesting ones as it illustrates the problematic and reiterative nature of debate within a symmetrical/asymmetrical framework. There is some clarity achieved t...

In this article I introduce the concept of resonance to interrogate how things and meanings are relevant beyond the cultural context within which they begin. The notion of resonance is theorized as an intangible affect that the material thing has beyond its formal physical boundaries within larger planes of perception creating dynamic relationships...

First presented as part of the 2010 TAG Plenary session on Location of Theory, this short project questions archaeologies quest to locate theory. It posits that we reconsider the questions we ask to allow us to encounter the objects we study in a more intimate and visceral manner, providing them with properties that go beyond the social lives that...

Seated between the Primordial Goddess and Ishtar, in the company of Kali, the Snake Goddess, Amazon, and Hatshepsut (to name just a few), the Fertile Goddess has the second place setting in pioneering feminist artist Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (1974-1979), an installation as monument dedicated to great women through the ages. An early embodime...

This project is the first step in problematizing and reconceptualizing the Ganeshwar Jodhpura Cultural Complex (GJCC), located in Northeastern Rajasthan, as a collection of Chalcolithic settlements bound together by a shared cultural language that encompass similarities in material culture, production of copper tools, and geographic proximity to co...