We all have blind spots. Harmless blind spots might be amusing. Blind spots cloaked in the mantle of authority, however, can have a rather pernicious life with manifold ill effects. This paper explores interpretive blind spots within the euro-centric science of archaeology. We begin by setting the stage for how the North American variant of this science had its roots in a white supremacist ethnic mobility and replacement ideology.  While we acknowledge that a discipline can slip the shackles of its parents’ desires, that the practitioners of the discipline can act in ways contradictory to its initial conception, we find a blind spot persist in the disciple’s continued adherence to a euro-centric ideology of science.  Next we draw upon our own experience appropriating archaeological-science for Indigenous led inquiry. Here we examine the intersection of euro-centric skepticism and pragmatic discovery focussed blindness. We explore this through two stories: “the archaeologist and the waakyil (current) patch,” and; “there’s nothing of significance here (archaeologists and abalone). Finally we conclude by suggesting a way out of this legacy blind spot through upending the euro-centrism of archaeological science and adopting an Indigenous intellectual framework.

The relationship of language with interpretation is an important part of archaeological discourse. This paper shares examples of how an anachronistic and government-endorsed language of archaeology shapes the interpretation of commercial practice (e.g., designations for the paleo period). As more people review commercial archaeological products, archaeologists and non-archaeologists alike are challenging the use of particular language and by extension the interpretations of commercial archaeologists (e.g., use of “Iroquoian” culture historical references in Anishinaabe traditional territories). The vernacular of commercial archaeology is slowly shifting as these interventions are negotiated but are the interpretations changing as well? The challenges of shifting language and interpretation in a practice caught between government standardization and predetermination of terms and methodologies are examined alongside ongoing strategies to realize change.

Archaeobotany is a branch of archaeology that can provide direct evidence of the enduring ties that First Nations communities in British Columbia and throughout Canada have to their ancestral territories.  In B.C., the legal recognition of these ancestral and ongoing ties has regularly been contested and denied by settler institutions and remain largely unresolved at many levels of government. In this paper, we describe how a large and comprehensive archaeobotanical data set is being collected and analyzed to interpret five millennia worth of sustained land and resource use by Sts’ailes, a Coast Salish community whose territory includes many ancestral settlements on the middle Harrison River of southwestern British Columbia. We organize the data in a fashion to address legal concepts of rights, title, and Western ownership principles, at the same time as situating them within Sts’ailes understandings of relationships to human and non-human beings and customary law principles governing land use and tenure. This framework helps to bolster the historical and evidentiary foundations for negotiating self-governance and the maintenance of reclaimed lands and critical ecosystems by the Sts’ailes and other First Nations communities throughout British Columbia.

Arrows are readily indefinable objects that are widely understood by the public as weapons of either hunting or war. But to archaeologists they are artifacts that symbolize different types of information: culture historical “ethnicity”, site function, technological transition, regional type, or temporal marker. These types of classifications can be useful analytical tools, but they often involve projecting meanings on to artifacts that might not align with the typology of the artifact’s maker. In this process artifacts become caricatures symbolizing information that bares little resemblance to traditional design principals. In this talk, we discuss arrows recovered from ancient hunting landscapes in the Yukon, and how the Ice Patch Research Group is analysing the design of hunting arrows using ethnographic descriptions interpreted in the context of biological, geographical, and ecological land use settings. By connecting observed artifact traits with described traditional design principles it is possible to derive nuanced interpretive meaning from these artifacts. In this we hope to understand arrows, not as a caricature, but as object filled with meaning that serves to enhance the public’s sense of place and tradition when experiencing archaeology.