Archaeology and racism

Archaeologist Chris Gosden wrote "Racism occurs when judgements about people always proceed from their physical features of their body; when biology is given social force.

[2][3] Today, it is thought to have been the capital of a little-known great kingdom during the country's Late Iron Age and the edifices are believed to have been erected by the ancestral Shona.

[6]The first excavation to be carried out at the site was by J. Theodore Bent, who undertook a season at Zimbabwe with Cecil Rhodes's patronage and funding from the Royal Geographical Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

By the third edition of his book, published in 1902, he was more specific, with his primary theory being "a Semitic race and of Arabian origin" of "strongly commercial" traders living within a client African city.

In Medieval Rhodesia, he rejected the claims made by Adam Render, Carl Peters and Karl Mauch, and instead wrote of the existence in the site of objects which were of Bantu origin.

[16] French and English travel writers and colonists during the 17th and 18th century, including William Bartram, wrote about and illustrated the mounds, accepting that they were likely built by Native Americans.

In his book History of the American Indians, Irish historian James Adair acknowledged that they built the mounds, while arguing that they were descended from a "lost tribe of Israelites.

Influenced by the work of Constantine Samuel Rafinesque and a merchant named John D. Clifford, Atwater argued the mounds were created by “a people far more civilized than our Indians, but far less so than Europeans” which he considered to be a lost race of Hindus.

[18] In 1848, the fledgling Smithsonian Museum released its first publication, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley by Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis, a major survey of sites according to apparent function, such as burial grounds, effigies, fortifications, and building foundations.

[20][17] Today, the prevailing consensus among archaeologists is that the various cultures which built mounds are descendants of the original settlers of the Americas and ancestors of contemporary Native Americans.

After visiting earthworks in Ohio and New York, Priest concluded that these mounds could be traced back to a lost race that had inhabited America even before the Native Americans.

[28] Flinders Petrie worked closely with the scientific racists Francis Galton and Karl Pearson and over the years of his excavation career sent bones, skulls, and horses to their Anthropometric Laboratory at the University College London, forming personal relationships with both.

Kossinna's approach, and its association with the Nazis, had a long-lasting effect on European archaeologists, making them reluctant to investigate questions of race or ethnicity in archaeological contexts.