It is important to stress that the mobilization of archaeology as a technology of government does not produce a static set of relationships. Nor does the mobilization of archaeology as a technology of government always mean that archaeological wishes are upheld. Indeed, archaeological expertise and authority will itself often be marginalized against more powerful economic interests in CRM. Furthermore, from time to time and in certain political contexts, indigenous knowledge may also be granted greater legitimacy than archaeological pronouncements. Nonetheless, the deployment of archaeological knowledge in helping policy makers understand and regulate certain problems or conflicts ensures an overall primacy of place in knowledge claims over the past. Nor is the use of archaeological knowledge to regulate indigenous conflicts over the past necessarily or inherently negative. For instance, during the 1970s the then Australian Labor Government explicitly called on the new archaeological discoveries at Lake Mungo (which suggested that human occupation of Australia was at least 40,000 years old) to help legitimize its attempts to bring in radical land rights legislation (Smith 2004: 154). That this legislation eventuated only in very limited form in 1975 rests more on the fact that this government was overthrown by the nefarious activities of the Australian Governor General and the Conservative opposition party that ousted the Labor Government from power, than the fact that public sympathy had not been sufficiently mobilized to support the legislation. However, the point here is that the authority of archaeological knowledge is used to help legitimize (or refute) indigenous cultural claims. Whether this has positive or negative outcomes is somewhat beside the point, since for the politics of recognition it is vital that recognition flows from an organic expression of identity – that is, that those proclaiming their identity are in control of its expression and thus have a greater chance of influencing how that identity is recognized, while decreasing the possibilities of its misrecognition. Moreover, the archaeological governance of heritage, and the claims to identity associated with that heritage, disallows any acceptance of the legitimacy of difference– rather all things must be understood through the lens of archaeological science. Yet, the acceptance of the legitimacy of difference is vital if indigenous knowledge, identity and experiences are to be recognized. This is not to say that indigenous knowledge must always be uncritically accepted or that it must always take precedence over archaeological knowledge, but rather that we accept as a base line that it is legitimate for different knowledge systems to coexist, and moreover to acknowledge and understand the extended political and cultural consequences that will occur when one knowledge system is given greater authority and legitimacy over another.
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