Micah White, one of the organizers of the 2011-2012 Occupy Movement, and its associated protests, emerged from Occupy so disillusioned that he published a book titled The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution. In it, White argues that activists tend to overestimate the effects of protest in the short term and underestimate them in the long term. For that reason, future social movements will need to “re-conceive activism in time scales of centuries, not seconds.” Archaeology can speak to this issue of time scale by reminding all of the sustained efforts necessary to create social change. By documenting the sites of protest and curating the materiality used by protestors to convey their messages, archaeology can counter narratives of success or failure for individual protest actions and reveal the larger and lengthier trajectories of their underlying social movements.

In 2022 the Granada Relocation Center National Historic Landmark, a WWII Japanese American incarceration center, became part of the National Park Service. This transfer was the result of generations of activism from community organizations, survivors and descendants, and 15 years of collaborative archaeological research.

To facilitate the nomination a diverse community needed to organize and work collaboratively towards a common goal. As archaeologists we moved from advocates to activists, strategizing with the community on how to use archaeology to meet community goals around demonstrating the site's significance, future preservation, and interpretation. Instead of inviting the community to collaborate with archaeological research we were invited to collaborate on community activism - shifting our shared understandings of the role of archaeological research.

In 1870, former captive Ervin James (1815-1872) purchased one hundred and five acres from two white landowners to establish his family farm. By 1891, his sons had bought an additional 140 acres where they grew crops, raised livestock, and hunted wildlife in the swamp. At the community’s peak in the 1920s, over 250 people called Jamestown home, and the community included a cemetery, a Methodist church, and a school. In the 1940s, the community started to decline, as residents increasingly had to seek employment farther away.

Archaeological and historical evidence, including oral histories, underscore the complexity of everyday life at Jamestown. While residents were economically marginalized, they still owned and worked their own land, something that was--and still is—denied to many African Americans. This paper focuses on the confluence of historical struggle, perseverance, and present-day protest in rural South Carolina.

Germanna, as a set of sites in Orange County, Virginia, has seen archaeology since the late 1960s. The goals have changed over time. Interest in the site of Alexander Spotswood’s 1720 home (which came to be known as “the Enchanted Caste”) prompted initial archaeological research. Over the course of 50 years, approaches to the site have changed as have the research questions posed by archaeologists. The Germanna Archaeology project restarted excavations at Germanna sites in 2016. Today, we view our project as public archaeology being done in a State and local environment of a contested past, in the form of the educational “culture wars.” In daily practice, the project finds itself in activism. Routine finds mark interconnected communities, including those who’ve been marginalized and pressured by “erasure” – enslaved Africans, African-Americans, and Indigenous peoples. Activism has changed archaeology over the last 30-40 years. What’s archaeology do now?

The activist roots of North Brentwood, Maryland, were planted by its founders. The Randall Family purchased the first lot in 1891 to dodge the racial housing covenants that were spreading through neighboring developments. Decades later, North Brentwood became the first incorporated Black town in Washington D.C.’s metropolitan area, and the second such town in the State of Maryland. Jeremiah Hawkins, the first mayor, fought for levees to keep flood waters at bay. Rev. Perry Smith III organized Freedom Rides and many others from town rode those buses south. Rev. Smith also worked to break up local White Citizens Councils. This small sample of examples from North Brentwood represents a legacy of activist practice that is the community’s heritage, passed from one generation to the next. The NBDAHP is working to answer lingering historical questions and to pass this heritage to the younger digital generations using multiple approaches.

Hundreds of state and local laws and resolutions have been adopted recently to restrict how teachers teach the history of race in America. As a result, today’s teachers face undue scrutiny, critique, and punishment for how they approach Black history. It is in this volatile climate that John Brown Lives!, a human rights organization centered on the John Brown Farm State Historic Site (North Elba, N.Y.), sought to expand outreach to teachers and students through its innovative Hands-on History project. In this paper, we will introduce this initiative, which brings together educators, historians, artists, and archaeologists to develop and implement curriculum illuminating the region’s freedom history. After describing its goals and the steps taken to support and listen to teachers and other stakeholders during this precarious political moment, we will situate the collaboration in the history of archaeology and activism, and we will reflect on lessons learned during its implementation.