Exploring the emotions behind Archaeology

Archaeology is a discipline that excavates the past, piecing together scant and often disparate details to answer questions about how people lived, grew, interacted and died. For Madalyn Grant [2024], this means that Archaeology is a discipline steeped in human emotions. Yet, for a subject so infused with emotion, its practitioners tend not to confront their own feelings, preferring to foreground their professional objectivity. This tendency complicates sensitive discussions, particularly when it comes to a topic like repatriation, says Madalyn.

“We need to better understand how we research and mobilise to all aspects of the past – however emotional, however uncomfortable – in order to have productive conversations about reconciliation, repatriation and creating institutional trust,” she states. “Understanding emotions has a critical role to play in these interdisciplinary and intercommunity conversations.”

Her PhD in Archaeology [2024] will turn the microscope towards those who are involved in repatriation, about whom there is very little data. She states: “Because of a lack of data on the emotions of those who are involved in the return of Ancestral Remains, the assumption has held that Indigenous peoples are overly emotional when it comes to repatriation. Typically, Anglo practitioners – myself included – feel an obligation to pedagogies and modes of objective practice that we were taught, but these have been racialised and moralised. We need to look reflexively at these framings. I think emotions will play an important role. They rehumanise us and re-educate us. They make the field more approachable and the hard conversations more nuanced and productive.”

Madalyn will build on her work at the University of Queensland where she was the Repatriation Manager, and on her time at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies where she worked in collections access, Stolen Generation family history research and legal rights. All of this also builds on her previous academic studies and an interest in History and Archaeology, which began at an early age.

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