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Journal of Social Archaeology

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DOI: 10.1177/1469605320969097
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Alexander A Bauer
Department of Anthropology, Queens College and the
Graduate Center, CUNY, NY, USA

Abstract
Recent calls across the world for removing monuments to White supremacy have
brought widespread attention to the power of images and the role of heritage in
society. A more careful examination of heritage’s itineraries and pragmatics—its prac-
tical effects—is thus warranted. This paper interrogates the pragmatics of heritage in
two ways. First, what are the discourses and rhetorics of heritage—how is heritage
invoked and talked about, like a sign of history, in making statements about the world?
Second, what does heritage do, as a sign in history, when it is invoked, encountered, and
circulated? What does heritage activate, and what are the practical effects of its itin-
eraries? Drawing on the examples of the return of the Euphronios krater to Italy and
the removal of Confederate and racist monuments in the US and elsewhere, I argue
that while operating in these two modes—as signs of and in history—heritage’s greatest
potential for transformational change is when it ceases acting as a rhetorical device and
instead becomes itself the center of experiential social action.

Keywords
Heritage, iconoclasm, object itineraries, pragmatics, Confederate monuments, racism

Corresponding author:
Alexander A Bauer, Department of Anthropology, Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, New
York, NY, USA.
Email: alexander.bauer@qc.cuny.edu
2 Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed by police when he was arrested on the
suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 bill and the arresting officer choked him for
eight minutes and 46 seconds. Video of the arrest circulated widely as the latest
example of police violence against Black people and set off a series of protests
against institutionalized racism across the US and worldwide. These protests
echoed those that took place in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, and elsewhere
which included a movement to dismantle statutes of Confederate soldiers and
other monuments to White supremacy (McGreevey, 2020).1 By early June 2020,
dozens of such statues and monuments had been either toppled by protestors or
ordered removed by state and local governments, including a statue of Robert E.
Lee in Richmond, VA, and one of Confederate Admiral Raphael Semmes in
Mobile, AL.2
In the midst of this, Egyptologist Sarah Parcak (2020) tweeted instructions on
how to pull down an obelisk that “might be masquerading as a racist monument I
dunno,” a not-so-veiled reference to just such an obelisk to Confederate soldiers in
Birmingham, AL, that initially drew muted reaction from an archaeological com-
munity whose concern for preservation tends to be wary of iconoclasm (see for
example the resistance to the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement in the UK by prom-
inent scholars like Mary Beard, as noted by Chigudu, 2018: 55; see generally
Kwoba et al., 2018). Indeed, the lack of public statements on the removal of
Confederate monuments by professional and academic organizations may be
due to there being no clear consensus on the issue among their membership, but
likely also the result of their being overwhelmingly White (with various recent
surveys putting that number between 97-99%; see White and Draycott, 2020).
While the monuments’ removal may be justified, some argued, their relocation
to museums or other repositories would be preferable to destruction that might
“erase” history (see also Levinson, 1998).
A second concern regarded how far this iconoclasm would go. Protests quickly
spread worldwide to target monuments to White supremacy of all kinds. A statue
of Edward Colston, who made his fortune in the transatlantic slave trade, was
thrown into the harbor of his home town of Bristol, England. Monuments to
Christopher Columbus were toppled in Miami and Chicago, decapitated in
Boston, and removed by city decree in Camden, NJ, and those of Belgium’s
King Leopold II, known for his brutal subjugation of the Congolese, were defaced
in cities across Belgium (Rankin and Crary, 2020). Even statues of Gandhi were
vandalized and faced growing calls for their removal in cities in the UK and else-
where (following one such removal from the University of Ghana in 2018) because
in spite of his work promoting non-violence and human rights, critics charged that
he supported caste differences and his writings included assertions that the Indian
race was superior to that of Black Africans (BBC News, 2020). These examples
raise renewed questions about the power of images (Freedberg, 1989), and illus-
trate how the ascription of difficult or “negative heritage” depends on whose point
of view is being taken. To the Taliban, Meskell (2002) observes, the Bamiyan
Buddhas were negative heritage in the sense both that they were blasphemous
Bauer 3

and became a reminder of the Western world’s disregard for the plight of Afghan
citizens who were suffering the effects of a long-term drought. And after all, if the
buildings Albert Speer designed for the Nazi party were dismantled following the
Second World War, why not also the US White House or the Pyramids of Giza,
both commonly regarded (if somewhat misleadingly, in the case of the latter) to
have been built by slave labor,3 or the Colosseum in Rome, which was the site of
brutal public executions of slaves and prisoners as entertainment?4
These are not facetious questions but are raised to highlight two important
points. First, signs are contextual in terms of other signs, but also in terms of
the linkages they maintain to each viewer/recipient, and their meanings can be
activated in different ways. An object seemingly old and often “unnoticed” can
be reactivated as a locus of current heritage contestation and social meaning
through renewed human engagement. This is illustrated by the way that these
monuments have seemingly suddenly become a locus of demonstrations amid
calls for their removal. At the same time, while a sign might be “inactive” to
those who have the luxury to ignore it, it may very well be a site of ongoing
symbolic violence to others. In the case of monuments of negative heritage such
as White supremacist and other oppressive symbols, the ability to “not notice”
them is a function of White privilege that those who are targets of the symbolic
oppression do not share. As Dickinson (2020) remarks, “these monuments are
physical reminders that we do not belong and should not anticipate equity.” So
while objects can move in and out of social consciousness more generally, they may
be entangled in a variety of ways for different individuals and groups.
That things themselves have social lives (Appadurai, 1986; Kopytoff, 1986) has
provided important insight into the ways the values and meanings of heritage
objects transform over time (see e.g. Hamilakis, 1999). Recent rethinking of this
approach through the concept of object itineraries offered by Joyce and Gillespie
(2015a) brings us to a second point, namely that past and present (and indeed,
future) engagements with an object are all part of its ongoing and multiple itiner-
aries, and it is only when we collapse these distinctions that we can fully appreciate
the intellectual and ethical implications for how an object’s present entanglements
are central to, rather than separate from, its archaeological narrative (Bauer, 2019;
Joy, 2009; Kersel, 2019; Meskell, 2004).
Indeed, archaeologists have long examined moments of reactivated meaning in
the past as important phases of an object’s history, but often regard contemporary
engagements with the same objects only through the lens of potential threats to the
archaeological record. This is most certainly the case when it comes to activities
that destroy the archaeological record such as looting, iconoclasm, and the
destruction of sites through development (or even as the result of archaeology
itself). In the context of the contemporary world, archaeologists typically position
themselves as “stewards” of the archaeological record (Lynott and Wylie, 1995), to
protect it from being transformed or destroyed without proper documentation and
recovery (though see Lucas, 2001). But this runs the risk of adhering to the kind of
“Pompeii premise” that even Binford (1981) criticized, which assumes that an
4 Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)

object or site has an authentic and original meaning that should take priority over
later transformations, and especially over present engagements. In this way, the
Elamite sack of Ur at the end of the 3rd millennium BCE, during which its statues
were carted off to Susa as loot, is an important subject for scholarly scrutiny, but
the objects moved through the modern-day trade in antiquities cannot even be
discussed or examined in any way beyond wholesale disapproval (Bauer et al.,
2007; though see e.g. Gillespie, 2015 and Kersel, 2019, as well as Kersel’s
“Follow the Pots” project more generally at http://followthepotsproject.org/).
In this paper, I draw on both the concept of object itineraries as well as on
Richard Parmentier’s (1987) distinction between “signs of history” and “signs in
history” to argue that a shift to a pragmatic approach to heritage, one that assumes
an object’s itinerary is not divided into past and present engagements but continues
into the future, allows us to address both how heritage is talked about among
different communities of actors, as well as what heritage does to produce effects in
the world. The recent iconoclastic movement to tear down White supremacist
monuments in the US and worldwide serves as a potent illustration that while
acting as both a sign of and in history, heritage’s greatest potential for transfor-
mational change is when it ceases acting as a rhetorical device and instead becomes
itself the center of experiential social action, such as through its encounter, circu-
lation, or being rendered visible (or invisible).

Discourse and the pragmatics of heritage

It has been more than 20 years since David Lowenthal (1998: xii) remarked that
“[a]ll at once, heritage is everywhere” in the opening line of his landmark book,
The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. But it is clear that references to
heritage are even more pervasive today. Heritage has become both an industry and
a catchword, itself commodified just like the things it is used to describe (Smith,
2006), with UNESCO’s imprimatur sought after for touristic, geopolitical, and
even therapeutic ends (Aykan, 2013; Luke and Kersel, 2013; Meskell, 2012,
2018). It is a way of marketing experiences and authenticity (Churchill, 2006)
that are at the same time sanitized, both in the sense of being unthreatening for
the consumer (Meskell, 2000) as well as conforming to particular global standards
of cleanliness and order expected in a successful tourist destination (Collins, 2008).
When invoked so freely, to identify everything from folk songs to flags, ethnicity to
eggs, how can “heritage” continue to have salience? And how can we hope to study
it, manage it, or preserve it, when it is in so many places and can be so many
things? This obvious problem seems not to have deterred the rapid development of
policies aimed at regulating and protecting heritage, and it is only now that schol-
ars are beginning to study critically the intentions and effects of such policies both
locally and globally.
One set of challenges facing the development of any kind of coherent approach
to heritage regards its definition and its disciplinarity. “Heritage,” or perhaps more
specifically “cultural heritage,” has historically been divided into two types:
Bauer 5

“tangible” and “intangible” (Blake, 2000). Tangible heritage includes things like
works of art, ancient objects, monuments, historic buildings, and even landscapes,
while intangible heritage refers to cultural practices and folk traditions that are not
“fixed” but are essentially performed, such as oral histories, music, religious fes-
tivals, foodways, and ethno-medical knowledge. While most experts on cultural
heritage issues will now admit that this division is neither accurate or particularly
helpful, as what makes something “heritage” is its meaningfulness to one or more
living communities (see e.g. Munjeri, 2004)—an object is important, for example,
because of the cultural practices associated with it (Handler, 2003)—the distinction
has been codified in international and national law so that working around it can
be bureaucratically complex (Lixinski, 2013). The question of its definition thus
continues to get in the way of constructive policymaking, and with so much poten-
tially claimable as “heritage”—and I take the view that heritage is a discursive
claim and not inherent—it is no wonder that Lowenthal declared it to be
“everywhere.”
This brings us to consider the first way that the pragmatics of heritage may be
understood to operate. That is, what are the discourses and rhetorics of heritage
(Samuels and Rico, 2015)—how is heritage invoked and talked about, like a “sign
of history” (Parmentier, 1987), in making statements about the world? How has
that shifted over time, as the term is increasingly invoked to explain and defend a
wide range of actions and attitudes, and how do the different discursive commu-
nities who speak about heritage engage (or not) with one another? If, to quote
Rorty (1989: 7), “the chief instrument for cultural change” is “a talent for speaking
differently,” then a key path for productively bridging discursive divides and devel-
oping new conceptions of what “heritage” is and how to deal with it would be to
provide contexts for those communities to speak to each other, which would
require them to hear and confront each other’s languages in the process of trans-
lation and communication. In other words, could attempts to communicate across
disciplinary, bureaucratic, and political boundaries (among others) help each dis-
course community to question its assumptions about, and approaches to, heritage?
It can be argued that this is precisely what has happened in the more general
move toward use of the term “cultural heritage” over “cultural property,” which
had dominated the way heritage was managed and controlled within the law and
policy arena for most of the 20th century (Bauer, 2015a). This shift resulted in part
from a growing recognition among legal scholars of the inadequacy of the idea of
“property,” based as it is in Western legal concepts of labor and ownership, for
dealing with a cultural rather than possessive relationship to both tangible things
and “intangibles” such as traditional knowledges, languages, and cultural expres-
sions (Blake, 2000; Prott and O’Keefe, 1992), and given forward momentum by
indigenous activism worldwide that resulted in new laws such as the Native
American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and the Indian Arts and
Crafts Act in the United States in 1990, the Native Title Act in Australia in
1993, and at the UN the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of
the World’s Intangible Heritage (Brown, 2003) and the United Nations
6 Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)

Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. As an alternative, the

human relationship with these cultural (tangible and intangible) expressions has
been variously described in terms of stewardship (Wylie, 2005), custodianship
(Geismar, 2008), and sustainability (Gonzalez et al., 2006), related to sacred
knowledge (Tsosie, 1997) and moral rights (Janke, 2001).
In spite of these rhetorical shifts, however, there has been surprisingly little
movement in the thirty years since NAGPRA and other “awakenings” regarding
indigenous and post-colonial claims to heritage. While we can point to individual
cases of repatriation and the development of more equitable relationships and
institutions (such as the National Museum of the American Indian in the United
States, and the reconfiguration of the Australian Museum; see Vrdoljak, 2006;
Nash and Colwell, 2020), their significance is often overstated (including by this
author). The self-declared “universal” museums continue to exist and collect
objects, in spite of ongoing critique (see most recently Hicks, 2020a), groups for-
merly (and sometimes currently) subject to colonialism continue to have a hard
time regaining authority over their heritage, and ethnic minorities and indigenous
peoples still face existential threats to their being and traditions as a result of global
power and wealth inequalities.
A crucial question therefore is why the discursive transformations discussed
above have not been accompanied by similar transformations in practice. To
answer that question, we must consider heritage in another way, and ask what
does heritage do, as a sign in history, when it is invoked, encountered, and circu-
lated? What does heritage activate, and what are its “practical effects”? I want to
argue that it is when we consider these questions that heritage’s greatest potential
for transformational change is possible.
I am here drawing on Richard Parmentier’s (1987) distinction between signs in
and of history, coupled with Rosemary Joyce’s (2015) recent articulation of “object
itineraries,” which suggest we consider “the value of circulating objects for the
production and reshaping of cultural boundaries and social relations.” “Signs of
history,” Parmentier (1987: 11–12) explains, refers to those expressions which
“through their iconic, indexical, and residually symbolic properties, record and
classify events as history.” These are the signs of historical discourse that commu-
nicate and comment upon history itself, effectively relating information about
cultural continuity and change as time unfolds. They may be monuments such
as the sacred village stones of Belau, representing offspring of the goddess Milad,
erected in each of four principal villages to explain to inhabitants and visitors alike
how they stand in relation to each other, seemingly part of a naturalized discourse
that operated in a long-term historical scale not unlike Braudel’s longue dur
ee
(Parmentier, 1985, 1987).
“Signs in history,” in turn, refers to those signs which, “as objects, linguistic
expressions, or patterns of action, themselves become involved in social life as loci
of historical intentionality” (Parmentier, 1987: 12). These are signs that are meant
to do something for someone. They call to mind and bring about certain relation-
ships that might be more immediate and historically contingent, not unlike
Bauer 7

Braudel’s e
v

enement. Parmentier identifies such examples as the beads, bracelets,
and other objects used as “money” in Belau that reflect on and act within individ-
ual social relationships and transactions. As Parmentier points out, however, no
sign acts in just one of these ways. Rather, a sign may be both of and in history,
and may shift between the two as it moves in relation to people and other objects.
This movement of an object across contexts, relationships, and over time—
once characterized as a thing’s “social life” (Appadurai, 1986)—is better under-
stood through the concept of object “itineraries,” which has mainly been devel-
oped in a series of papers by Rosemary Joyce (2012a, 2012b, 2015). Itineraries
are “the routes by which things circulate in and out of places where they come to
rest or are active” and “extend backward to incorporate the sources from which
materials came and forward to incorporate the conversion of wholes into frag-
ments or assemblages” (Joyce, 2015: 29). Unlike the biography metaphor, itin-
eraries do not have clear beginnings or endings, births or deaths, but are open-
ended and multidirectional, and include an object’s composition, transforma-
tions, fragmentations, and intersections with other objects and their itineraries.
Because of these intersections, an object’s itinerary contains stoppages (see
Küchler, 2003; or “knots,” as in Gosden, 2006), since it need not be physically
moving in space to still be “in motion” (Hahn and Weiss, 2013: 7; Joyce and
Gillespie, 2015b: 3). Rather, an object at rest is still moving relative to the other
things (animals, humans, objects, the air, etc.) whose own itineraries it intersects.
Each engagement with an object seemingly fixed in space can therefore be seen as
a new semiotic encounter, in a pragmatic, performative sense (see Crossland and
Bauer, 2017; Parmentier, 1997). Just as one can never step in the same river
twice, because it is always moving and reconstituting itself, so the concept of
itineraries pushes back against specific temporalities and life histories, allowing
us to transcend the arbitrary separation of past from present (and future) and
explore the ways that entanglements extend out in all directions and even impli-
cate contemporary practices (Bauer, 2019).
This last point is crucial for understanding the ways in which objects and
monuments may simultaneously act as signs in history and signs of history,
shifting between these ideal positions even when they have not moved physically.
Like a river, signs may be “fluid” (Daniel, 1984) but also exist in relation to
other signs. What Peirce called “chains” (following the logic of his semiotic) are
perhaps better understood as “assemblages” (see Bennett, 2005, 2010), for the
understanding of signs depends on their relationship to other signs embedded
and mobilized within specific contexts. The itineraries of signs across modalities
are not inevitable but fixed, like the village stones of Belau, by authoritative
discourse until challenged and destabilized through counter-hegemonic efforts.
It is the special quality of objects—their perduring materiality—that demands
continual reengagement (Preucel and Bauer, 2001), and so can play a crucial role
in both mobilizing and being activated by alternative discourses as they travel
along their itineraries.
8 Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)

From signs of history to signs in history: The itineraries of

heritage objects
Let us now turn to consider two recent examples where objects of heritage have
shifted their status between being signs of and in history, and in doing so highlight
the importance of recognizing the ongoing itineraries of objects as central to their
story. Such shifts are helpful to identify because they both lie at the heart of
conflicting discourses regarding heritage objects, and yet may also provide insight
into what remedies are possible and necessary for heritage practice.
The first example is that of a Classical ceramic vase known as the “Euphronios
krater,” and serves to illustrate how an ancient object—in this case an object of
contested heritage ownership which was eventually repatriated—continues to act as
a sign in history through its ongoing itineraries and stoppages. This calyx krater
(Figure 1), made in the Attic Greek red-figure style around 515 BCE in the famous
pottery workshops of Athens and likely exported to Etruria (in modern-day Italy)
for internment in an elite burial, was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art
(the Met) in 1972 for the record-breaking sum (at the time) of $1 M (Brodie, 2002;
Hoving, 1993). This price not only elevated the ascribed status of what was already a

Figure 1. Euphronios Krater, on display in the National Museum of Cerveteri. Signed by

Euxitheos, as potter; signed by Euphronios, as painter. Greek, Attic Krater (ca. 515 BCE).
National Museum of Cerveteri. Photo by Sailko, licensed under CC by 3.0.
Bauer 9

fine example of Greek vase painting, but had a ripple effect across the ancient art
market, serving to raise values and, in turn, promote further looting (Watson and
Todeschini, 2006: 359; see also Nørskov, 2002). Though the dealer who sold the
piece, Robert Hecht, had claimed it had been in a private collection since 1920,
rumors soon circulated that it had in fact been looted from the Etruscan cemetery
of Cerveteri in late 1971 and given a false provenance to facilitate the sale.
While its mysterious history and high price kept questions circulating about its
legality, it was not until the early 2000s that several developments converged to change
the Met’s position on the krater. As a result of a 1995 raid on the Geneva storage space
of Giacomo Medici, a dealer long suspected of trafficking in illegal antiquities, firm
evidence finally appeared of the krater having been looted. Medici’s subsequent crim-
inal conviction in 2005, and the trial of his conspirator, Robert Hecht, which began
that same year, shed light on how widespread the involvement of museums such the
Met was in the illegal antiquities trade (Watson and Todeschini, 2006). At the same
time, the 2003 conviction of antiquities dealer Frederick Schultz in the US for traf-
ficking in stolen antiquities had a further chilling effect on the trade because it effec-
tively settled the legal question of whether other nations’ claims to own all
undiscovered antiquities within their borders would be enforced in the United
States (Gerstenblith, 2006; Yasaitis, 2005). Finally, the Italian trial in 2010 of the
(now former) Getty Museum curator Marion True for her involvement in the illicit
trade showed that even curators were not immune from criminal charges. As a result,
the then Director of the Metropolitan, Philippe de Montebello, agreed in 2006 to
transfer the ownership of the krater to Italy in a cooperative agreement between them
(Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Republic of Italy, 2006).
Meanwhile, the growing public sentiment against looting and for the repatria-
tion of objects to their communities of origin led to a backlash within the com-
munity of major collecting museums such as the Met and British Museum, who
worried that an existential crisis was at hand. As a result, in late 2002, the directors
of dozens of these museums convened in Munich for a discussion that resulted in
“The Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums” (Art
Institute of Chicago, Bavarian State Museum, State Museums of Berlin, et al.,
2004), a statement that sought to defend their continued collecting and ownership
of art and antiquities from around the world. Most striking were the opening lines,
which show how the itineraries of objects intertwine signs in and of history:

The international museum community shares the conviction that illegal traffic in archae-
ological, artistic, and ethnic objects must be firmly discouraged. We should, however,
recognize that objects acquired in earlier times must be viewed in the light of different
sensitivities and values, reflective of that earlier era. The objects and monumental works
that were installed decades and even centuries ago in museums throughout Europe and
America were acquired under conditions that are not comparable with current ones.

With these words in mind, the krater’s status as contemporary sign in history and
not just a sign of history is clear: its initial purchase generated headlines and served
10 Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)

as a potent reminder about both the continuing problem of looting soon after the
adoption of the 1970 UNESCO Convention aimed at combating it, and how much
money could be made in the trade. Its display meanwhile spoke to the Met’s spotty
regard for heritage ownership laws and concern about looting, until the moment
when the transfer was agreed to and the accession number on its display label
changed from “1972.11.10” to “L2006.10,” a subtle but significant discursive shift
that indexed that it was now on loan from the Republic of Italy. Now physically
returned to Italy, it is currently housed in the museum at Cerveteri, the site of the
cemetery where it was originally interred, as part of a specific Italian policy of
returning objects to their places of origin.
While the Met may not altogether have been a willing participant in these events,
the case of the krater and its return has nonetheless played a role in shifting global
discourses about heritage ownership and control. Increased scrutiny and prosecutions
have forced cooperative engagement from previously unwilling participants, but the
Met’s success in effecting the krater’s return has since been matched by similar efforts
by the Getty Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, among other institu-
tions, to repatriate objects and cooperate with nations of origin, offering some hope of
what an ethic of sharing might look like (Bauer, 2015b).5 In Europe too, there has
been growing recognition of the need to redress the wrongs of colonialism through
both repatriation and cooperation, as evident in the mission of the Sarr-Savoy report
(Savoy and Sarr, 2018) and other developments, suggesting some hope for honest
confrontation of this legacy (Laely et al., 2019).
A second example returns us to the events discussed at the outset of this paper, the
worldwide protests in support of Black Lives Matter calling for the removal of
Confederate and other White supremacist monuments from public spaces and build-
ings in the United States and elsewhere. These developments illustrate the ways in
which even seemingly “fixed” heritage objects move along itineraries where their
status can shift between being signs of and in history. But like the Euphronios
krater example, it also points to the importance of their removal as a transformative
practice. Indeed, a closer examination of these monuments and their itineraries shows
how they were established to function not so much as signs of history but rather signs
in history—or perhaps more accurately, are signs in history masquerading as signs of
history, in order to present a particular White supremacist historical discourse as
naturalized and beyond the vagaries of individual human experiences.6
As outlined in a 2019 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC, 2019),
the vast majority of the almost 2000 dateable monuments and other symbols hon-
oring the Confederacy were erected not as simple post-war memorials to the dead
but as a way of sanitizing and romanticizing the Southern states’ “Lost Cause”
narrative (see also Blight, 2001; Cox, 2003) while at the same time committing an
act of symbolic aggression against Black people over the subsequent century and a
half. In fact, increases in monument building coincide with periods of White
aggression and heightened animus toward African Americans. As illustrated in
Figure 2, the vast majority of the public symbols documented in the SPLC
report were erected during the Jim Crow era of the 1890s–1920s, when states
 Bauer

Figure 2. Timeline of Confederate symbols, with explanatory text, from the SPLC 2019 report. Reproduced courtesy of the Southern Poverty
Law Center.
11
12 Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)

chafing from reconstruction enacted segregation laws to disenfranchise and restrict

the rights of recently freed African Americans. This phase coincided with a signif-
icant expansion of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been founded just after the Civil
War, as its White supremacist agenda was on the rise (SPLC, 2019). Fewer monu-
ments were erected in the period of the World Wars, as this was a time of greater
national cohesion and thousands of African American soldiers fought on behalf of
the United States. But monument-building activity resumed and reached another,
smaller peak during the civil rights era of the 1950s–60s, when segregationists
fought back against that movement’s push for equality and justice. In other
words, we must take account of their itineraries. The important questions,
Bunch (2018) asks, are “Who built these monuments and when? What were the
builders’ agendas? What were they meant to represent? What do they represent
now?” A statue commemorating a fallen Confederate soldier, placed in a cemetery
during or just after the Civil War, is transformed when erected in a public square
or in front of a government building during a time of increased violence and
resentments towards Black Americans such as the 1900s or 1950s: “The first
[case] might be a genuine reflection of loss and sorrow, whereas the latter is a
message of intimidation and power” (Baxter, 2020).
The debates surrounding the history of the Confederate battle flag’s use in
official state symbols was in many ways a rehearsal for the statues debate and
the tropes invoked in it of Southern pride and of “misunderstanding” the flag as a
racist symbol. Initially designed as a second flag of the Confederacy because it was
easier to distinguish from the Union’s “Stars and Stripes” on the battlefield than
the official Confederate “Stars and Bars” flag, the battle flag gained prominence
during the post war period among those mourning the “Lost Cause” of the South
(Coates, 2015; Coski, 2005). In 1894, as the famous Plessy v. Ferguson case was
moving through the courts, Mississippi became the first state to use the battle flag
in an official capacity, when it incorporated it in its state flag (that flag was offi-
cially abolished in June 2020 following the George Floyd protests). It was not used
by other states until the middle of the 20th century, following its adoption (along
with other Confederate symbols) by the segregationist “Dixiecrat” Party (officially
the “States Rights’ Democratic Party”) in 1948 (Ogorzalek et al., 2017), as a
symbol to re-assert White supremacy during the civil rights era. Georgia used it
in two state flags between 1956 and 2003 (the current flag is based on the first flag
of the Confederacy), and the flag was flown over the capitol buildings of South
Carolina from 1961 until 2015 and Alabama from 1963 (when the infamous
Governor George Wallace unfurled it, declaring “segregation forever”) until
1993 (SPLC, 2019). The timing of these displays shows that they were not
simply statements of Southern pride both unintended to be and misperceived as
racist (as a kind of “gaffe”; see Hill, 2008), but were set up as signs—a flag being
the epitome of an object intended as a sign—to celebrate, as former Mayor of New
Orleans Mitch Landrieu remarked, “a fictional, sanitized Confederacy, ignoring
the death, ignoring the enslavement and the terror that it actually stood for”
Bauer 13

(SPLC, 2019) and to send a message of White control over Black Americans within
those states’ governments.
The Colston statue ripped down in Bristol has a similar history, and shows how
discourses of White supremacy—and challenges to them—move in networked
relation to each other. It was erected in 1895, shortly after the conservative
Unionist government led by Lord Salisbury took power on a platform of imperial
expansion in Africa. As Hicks (2020b) points out, “[t]his was a government that
oversaw a virulent intensification of British military violence in Africa,” including
British aggressions against the Ashanti in 1895–6, a punitive expedition to Benin
in 1897, annexation of Sudan in 1898, and the Boer War in South Africa from
1899–1902. This imperial expansion was inexorably bound up in notions of race
and civilization (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991), and included the looting of
thousands of artworks from conquered lands and their installation in Western
museums in ways that often showed both the value of the imperial effort and
justification for subjugating exotic or uncivilized “others” (Schildkrout and Keim,
1998). Hicks (2020b) goes on to make the interesting observation that Bristol both
erected the statue of the slave-trader Colston “just a month before Rhodes’
Jameson Raid in South Africa . . . to celebrate a renewed politics of anti-black
violence,” and installed a bronze head looted in the 1897 campaign to Benin in the
Bristol City Museum, which was “displayed in order to celebrate, and thus to
naturalize, the ongoing dispossession of the global south through anti-black vio-
lence.” So the restitution of looted cultural property and removal of monuments
are intertwined.
The past decade has witnessed increased scrutiny of these monuments and
symbols, and calls for their removal have gained momentum with the Black
Lives Matter movement, which emerged in 2013 as a response to the ongoing
shootings of unarmed Black people at the hands of White aggressors (Lebron,
2017). In the aftermath of the White supremacist violence in Charlottesville in
August 2017, over 100 such monuments were dismantled or relocated (SPLC,
2019). But these efforts have not happened without resistance. From his bully
pulpit, Donald Trump has loudly bemoaned, “they’re trying to take away our
culture. They’re trying to take away our history” (Greenwood, 2017), a telling
quote that simultaneously describes the monuments as signs in (they are “our
culture”) and of history (they are “our history”). More generally, this defense of
leaving the statues in place appealed to their being part of a regional “heritage,” as
if heritage was something immutable and not constructed (pace Lowenthal) and to
some extent benign because of the temporal and cultural distance from their orig-
inal installation. Echoing the Universal Museums declaration’s appeal to the
“different values” of the time, such defenses emphasized the monuments’ historical
nature and dismissed their potential role in continuing to support racism. As
Atalay (2006: 281-282) has pointed out, it is imperative that we “not ignore the
effect of past practices by placing the acts in a historical context that works to
excuse them . . . [For] the colonial past is not distinct from today’s realities and
14 Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)

practices, as the precedents that were set continue” to inform current practice and
to perpetuate harm.
What pragmatics underscores is that these monuments were never really signs
of history in the way that Trump and others have asserted. For if, as Trump
declared, their removal for some risks “tak[ing] away our culture,” then their
role as contemporary social actors is not only undeniable but is being explicitly
reaffirmed. Authoritative discourse had for so long tried to “fix” these monu-
ments, like Belau’s village stones, as signs of history—monuments simply record-
ing some past historical events. But the iconoclastic movement sparked by the
Black Lives Matter movement has undermined this stability and laid bare how
objects always act as signs in history—as “loci of intentionality”—within ever-
moving assemblages of signs. The protests have brought statues of historical
figures into a relationship with present-day murderers, effecting an alternative
narrative that enacts them as a locus of both past and ongoing injustice, both
signs of and in (a counter-hegemonic, race-centered) history. Moreover, the iconic
replication of this iconoclastic move, outside the African-American context
through similar protests in the UK, Belgium, and elsewhere, illustrates the ways
in which objects continue to move along semiotic itineraries—what Urban (2010)
calls “cultural motion”—creating new sign assemblages across shifting social
contexts.

Conclusion: Heritage as transformative practice

By invoking these examples, I am trying to point out that the ongoing itineraries of
objects are central and not peripheral to their histories, and that we need to devel-
op a pragmatic approach to cultural heritage that understands and prioritizes their
practical effects as signs in history when thinking about archaeological practice
and taking positions on heritage management. This is not to argue for some unan-
chored relativism and that present meanings should override historical accuracy.
Rather, an ethical account demands that the full itineraries of things be explored
and discussed, through and including present contexts. Archaeologists usually
regard objects as “signs of history” because they tell us things about the past—
the way they operated as “signs in history” for people in the past. But what object
itineraries teach us is that to isolate the past from present (and future) stoppages in
an object’s itinerary is to pursue an archaeology whose sole aim is to discover a
particular past, an “authorized” past (Smith, 2006) that often elides the narratives
of minority and other disenfranchised groups within the discipline (consider the
lessons from the lack of feminist perspectives in archaeology, as pointed out in
Conkey and Spector, 1984; Gero and Conkey, 1991; Wylie, 1992). If instead we
acknowledge and embrace how objects act as signs “in history” both past and
present, we might better understand their practical and ethical effects as material
agents.
A pragmatics approach allows us to consider the ways signs are embedded in a
network or meshwork of meaning relations: signs may simultaneously be
Bauer 15

mobilized in a variety of ways. This is particularly apparent with (though not

exclusive to) physical objects whose perduring materiality persists across discursive
contexts, creating constellations of affordances, that vary depending on their rela-
tion to other perceiving agents. The ways in which we come to terms with and
respond to this range of possibilities are in fact not inevitable but a question of
ethics, as these engagements are situated in specific contexts and have real effects
on others in the world (Bauer, 2019: 341; Keane, 2018: 46). So a Confederate
monument may simultaneously celebrate White supremacy to some while to
others it reveals a history of systemic injustice to be confronted. How we respond
to such signs depends on our context of understanding—the assemblages of signs
they are part of—and our particular vision for the future.
As Trouillot (1995) has taught us, silences can be more powerful than the noises
of history, and those regarding the past can be just as insidious as those of the
contemporary world. The continued display of objects with troubling histories or
from damaging colonial policies without discussion of those histories is doubly
wrong. So, for example, the American Museum of Natural History in New York
City embarked on a special exhibition entitled “Addressing the Statue” that sought
to confront the troubling symbolism and legacy of the Theodore Roosevelt statue
standing at its entrance (AMNH, 2018), which depicted the former president on
horseback flanked by (and towering above) two standing figures, one Native
American and one African. While the decision was ultimately reached in June
2020 to remove it altogether, not as a result of the exhibition but in the context
of the protests against other offensive monuments, confronting and discussing this
statue was an important effort that other museums could learn from, and is a far
cry from the almost undetectable change in the label for the Euphronios krater.
The fact that an object lacks provenience should be considered part of its story
rather than ignored, a point powerfully illustrated by Muscarella (2000) who
argues that archaeological understanding of ancient Western Asia continues to
be based on a very unreliable data set—and thus may be highly inaccurate—
because many scholars have refused to openly address the legacy of collecting
and the lack of context (and the related problem of forgeries) that undermines
reliable archaeological inference.
Indeed, one of the solutions often offered regarding the Confederate statues and
other artifacts of oppression is to move them to a museum or other space where the
stories of their origins and contexts are told, so they can be contextualized as signs
in history rather than venerated as signs of history (e.g. Levinson, 1998). This is the
strategy taken with statues of Lenin in Russia, Hungary, and Lithuania (Baxter,
2019). But even if they are not preserved—after all, there are no Hitler statue parks,
as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2020) noted—removing or even destroying a few statues
will not “erase” history. There are plenty of records and accounts to consult,
museums to visit, books to read that cover these events from countless angles
(Araujo, 2020; and see e.g. Araujo, 2014). And anyway, as Cain (2016) has inci-
sively asked, even if such objects are kept as didactic tools, “who does the burden of
educating fall upon? Who precisely will bear the burden of making those
16 Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)

Figure 3. Banksy’s suggestion for how to replace the Colston statue. Accompanying the image,
he wrote: “What should we do with the empty plinth in the middle of Bristol? Here’s an idea that
caters for both those who miss the Colston statue and those who don’t. We drag him out the
water, put him back on the plinth, tie cable round his neck and commission some life size bronze
statues of protestors in the act of pulling him down. Everyone happy. A famous day commem-
orated.” Instagram post, June 9, 2020. Available at www.instagram.com/p/CBNmTVZsDKS/.

materialized symbols do that work?” A more fair and productive approach might
be to replace them with works that memorialized the Black experience of slavery
and American history (Ater, 2010), addressing historical memories that actually
have been silenced in precisely the ways Trouillot (1995) argued, if not “erased”
entirely (certainly much more so than in taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee).
Moreover, the act of removal can be a powerful new statement of current social
action that can itself be remembered and memorialized: as Classical art historian
Mary Beard (2020) (though herself an opponent of “Rhodes must fall”) points out,
“iconoclasm can be performance art,” an observation that is cleverly illustrated by
Banksy’s proposal that the Colston statue in Bristol be reinstalled with additional
sculptural figures posed in the act of pulling it down (Figure 3),7 itself reminiscent
of Parcak’s instructions for toppling an obelisk.
Bauer 17

The itineraries of objects include how they become transformed and incorpo-
rated into new objects, how past and present are inseparable and entangled. The
past has never stayed in the past—“it’s not even past,” as the oft-quoted line from
Faulkner (1994 [1951]: 73) goes—and it “propels” us à la Benjamin (1968 [1955])
towards the future. In other words, heritage is not just about how we regard the
past in the present, but about how it enacts the present for the future. And aside
from bland rhetoric about safeguarding heritage for “future generations,” it is that
futurity that is too often absent from treatments of heritage (though see Dawdy,
2010; Harrison et al., 2020). In fact, I would argue that references to the future are
intentionally left unspecified precisely because of the complicated questions they
raise around the effects of heritage for different communities.
It is time we confront these questions. Because to see objects and heritage this
way should not be considered some kind of forced activism in tension with good
academic practice. In fact, it is to recognize fully their position as material agents,
which must include questions of ethics (Meskell, 2004; Meskell and Pels, 2005).
For whether we choose to acknowledge it, these and all objects have been signs in
history all along. The krater’s continuous ownership by the Met was an active
symbol of that museum’s (dis)regard for heritage laws and ownership claims, not
to mention a lack of concern for the looting of archaeological sites. And as long as
Confederate monuments stand, they act to reproduce the ideologies and
structures of racism they were undeniably erected to celebrate. As Hicks (2020b)
notes, “[s]tatues were used to make racial violence persist. Today, their physical
removal is part of dismantling systems of oppression.”
In the end, what these and other episodes show is that all objects of heritage (as
all “bits of culture”) continually shift in status between being signs in and of history
through their itineraries: their flows and stoppages, their engagements with people,
when their labels are changed or they are moved, when they continue to stand up,
and when they are taken down. And it is when we think about heritage in this way,
about how objects act as signs in history in our contemporary moment—as new
stoppages along their itineraries—and so generate practical effects, that we can
begin to unleash archaeology’s power for social change in the present.

Acknowledgements
This paper was first drafted in the fall of 2017 at the invitation of Bob Preucel and Steve
Mrozowski for a session they organized on pragmatism in archaeology at the Society for
American Archaeology meetings in 2018. I was asked to write on the pragmatics of heritage,
and given that I wanted to discuss the ways in which heritage was activated in the present to
effect social change, the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and counterprotests taking
place at that time which invoked the Confederate monuments issue offered an immediate
and almost visceral case. When the protests expanded in the aftermath of the murders of
George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the spring of 2020 and the movement to remove
monuments spread worldwide, I felt compelled to revisit the paper, though not without
some degree of uncertainty, as I don’t feel qualified to speak on or for the African-American
experience of racism. I have continued forward, though, because I believe that social justice
18 Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)

can and should be part of broader academic analyses, such as the application of pragmatism
in archaeology, and should not be cordoned off as the domain of a marginalizable “critical
archaeology” or other disciplinary metadiscourses. As De Leon (2012: 143) remarks, “all
archaeological interpretation is in some way political, it is just that some choose to openly
address political topics and some are more self-aware about how their research (in positive
and negative ways) contributes to both public discourse as well as the construction of
competing narratives.” So it is with both hesitation and the certainty of my limitations
that I offer this paper, and hope that it has some productive “practical effects.” It is in
many ways still a work in progress, as I continue to think through the issues engaged with
here. I wish to thank Bob and Steve for their feedback on it, as well as some thoughtful and
challenging comments from Anna Agbe-Davies, along with those of the anonymous
reviewers. I appreciate their generosity.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

Notes
1. As these are both situated racial categories, I am here following the lead of Appiah
(2020), Painter (2020), and the National Association of Black Journalists style guide
(available at https://www.nabj.org/page/styleguide) in capitalizing both “Black” and
“White.”
2. The statue of Lee in Richmond still stands, pending a trial in October 2020 (see
Schneider, 2020).
3. At the time of writing this paper, just such a question came up regarding the Pyramids.
See Amin (2020).
4. Not just buildings, but many public institutions and companies of the modern capitalist
world benefited from slave labor (as well as the Nazi party, such as the corporate
behemoths VW, BASF, and Bayer; see Hayes, 2001) so that current inequalities between
White and Black Americans, for example, are the result of those racist policies. The best
remedy for this is not literally tearing down the buildings on Wall Street but rather
reparations (see Coates, 2014).
5. Although beyond the scope of this paper, it should be noted that returning objects to
nations of origin is not always without potential controversy, as nations do not always
line up precisely with the communities descendant from the objects’ original makers and
users (see Bauer et al., 2007).
6. This is terrain more meaningfully and thoroughly discussed by others who are specialists
on the history and historical archaeology of the US, one of which I am not. Please refer
to the work of those I cite here as more knowledgeable voices on these issues.
Bauer 19

7. Interestingly and similarly, in mid-July, artist Marc Quinn erected a statue of one of the
protesters, Jen Reid, in a pose of triumph on the pedestal where Colston stood. See Bland
(2020).

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Author biography
Alexander A Bauer is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College
and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is interested in
the Eurasian Bronze Age, archaeological semiotics, and the ethics of archaeology,
and serves as the Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Cultural Property.