• they/them

dmitri / 29 / big butch hermit


yesterday my partner and I tried watching Unknown: Cave of Bones, which is about the possibility of Homo naledi burying their dead significantly earlier than Homo sapiens. I was super interested in it, but got too annoyed when the documentary cut to Israel, saying that this is where the oldest modern human burial we know of is.

while on the surface, yes, Qafzeh Cave is located is what is currently called by some "Israel," it feels disingenuous to simply gloss over how colonialism impacts fields like anthropology / paleontology. I'm not, like, that well-read on the subject, but I do know the Rockefeller Archeological Museum (yes funded by that Rockefeller family!), which houses some of the remains found in Qafzeh, was built during British rule of Palestine in al-Quds and later taken over by Israelis. one of the first people to lead excavations of Qafzeh in 1932, Moshe Stekelis, was a staunch zionist. it's worth questioning who gets access to these paleolithic sites, what lens they're viewing them with, and how it connects back to control over the land. what does it mean to say, "one of the oldest modern burial sites is in Israel"?

maybe this isn't really a critique of the documentary, but a critique on the field itself, and if anything, it made me really energized to seek out information that isn't connected to Britain and Israel. I just found Insaniyyat / Society of Palestinian Anthropologists, but if anyone has any books films etc that talk about the ethics within anthropology / paleontology, or anything else related to the subject, I'd love to hear!


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