Chip Colwell
Biographic Data
| ID | 75984 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Chip Colwell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Chip |
| FAMILY NAME | Colwell |
| SIGNATURE | COLWELL C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Denver Museum of Nature and Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0836-3394 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 292 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
When museums are battlegrounds in the culture wars
Following the end of World War II the U.S. Army Map Service distributed maps captured from the German military to research libraries across the United States, where they have remained largely hidden collections. One focus of the University of California Berkeley’s German World War II captured maps digitization project has been the creation of detailed metadata for the German military map series. Data-rich catalog records with information about so…
A deeper sense of empathy in a time of protest
This guest editorial examines how anthropologists should respond to contemporary crises, from Trump's attacks on academic institutions to global authoritarianism. While protest has long characterized anthropological practice, activism alone is insufficient. Drawing on critiques of empathy's inherent biases, its favouring of ingroups and susceptibility to manipulation, this editorial proposes a deeper form of empathy aligned with Liu and Shange's …
Grappling with the Legacies of Anthro-Cast: The Work of Bones in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Anthropologists as Digital Influencers
Since their advent in the early 2000s, social media platforms have become an important tool for forming connections, community, and facilitating global discourse regarding current events and trends. More recently, anthropologists have identified new ways to incorporate the resources that these digital platforms can provide, as a means of democratizing scholarship, relationship building, and engaging in community‐based practices. The idea that the…
Dialogues: Decolonizing anthropology in/with Japan
A dialogue with Sachiko Kibota, President of the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology
A Palimpsest Theory of Objects
For many years, scholars have sought to track and explain how objects come to have layered, contested, and evolving meanings over time. This article examines the potential contributions and limitations of a palimpsest theory of objects to help explain such meaning-making practices. A palimpsest is a tablet or parchment from which writing has been partially or completely erased to make space for another text. This proposed theory investigates in w…
Craft an African American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
Anthropology, Empathy, and the Need for Social Science Communication
This is a call to science communicators and science journalists to feature social science research and researchers in their reporting, with an emphasis on anthropology and its potential to increase public empathy, improve the quality of public discourse, and contribute to contextual and narrative news trends
An ethical crisis in ancient DNA research: Insights from the Chaco Canyon controversy as a case study
In recent years, the field of paleogenomics has grown into an exciting and rapidly advancing area of scientific inquiry. However, scientific work in this field has far outpaced the discipline's dialogue about research ethics. In particular, Indigenous peoples have argued that the paleogenomics revolution has produced a 'vampire science' that perpetuates biocolonialist traditions of extracting Indigenous bodies and heritage without the consent of,…
Ferguson, T. J.
Parker, Arthur Caswell
NAGPRA at 30: The Effects of Repatriation
On November 16, 1990, US President George H.W. Bush signed into law the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This federal legislation marked the culmination of decades of debate among scientists, curators, and Native American leaders and activists over the control of ancestral human remains and sacred, funerary, and communally owned objects. Anthropologists have now investigated myriad aspects of NAGPRA, from its under…
Arqueologia colaborativa não é o fim
Há mais de um século atrás a arqueologia científica estava presa nas teias do colonialismo. Ao redor do globo, nações extraiam recursos culturais de locais distantes - mais frequentemente em comunidades indígenas - para tecer histórias, construir museus, e arrecadar prestígio e poder para acadêmicos e suas instituições. Nos anos setenta, ativistas indígenas e seus aliados começaram a criticar esse modelo e a propor alternativas que empoderavam co…
Can Repatriation Heal the Wounds of History
In 1990, the US Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which in part established a legal procedure for Native Americans to reclaim cultural items and ancestral remains from museums and federal agencies. Many advocates have framed NAGPRA as a kind of restorative justice in which “healing” is fundamentally integrated into the repatriation process. This article engages with a growing literature that ensu…
Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience
What Are Anthropologists Reading, Watching, and Listening To This Summer
Guanyin's Limbo: Icons as Demi-Persons and Dividuating Objects
How do objects and humans relationally constitute one another? In this article, we examine statues of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, in Hong Kong to illuminate the forms of personhood and agency that arise through human-icon relations in a modern metropolis. We follow the life course of Guanyin statues, investigating their production, circulation, animation, and disposal-teasing out worshippers' contradictory discourses on whether the de…
Footprints of Hopi History
Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma dedicates this book to Dalton Taylor and the other advisors whom he first worked with at the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, including ValJean Joshevama Sr., Frank Mofsi, LaVern Siweupmptewa, Owen Numkena, and Bert Puhuyestewa.e cultural knowledge and wisdom shared by these advisors
Footprints of Hopi History: Hopihiniwtiput Kukveni'at
Kukveni—footprints—are a powerful historical metaphor that the Hopi people use to comprehend their tangible heritage. Hopis say that the deity Máasaw instructed their ancestors to leave footprints during their migrations from their origin place to their home today as evidence that they had fulfilled a spiritual pact to serve as stewards of his land. Today’s Hopis understand these footprints to be the archaeological remains of former settlements—p…
Thinking Through “Community” In Archaeological Practice
Community engagement is a central component of archaeology. Whether it is initiated through local, state, or national regulatory frameworks or as part of academic research, working with stakeholders is often structurally incorporated into project plans. However, what defines a community, and how this conception impacts archaeological practice is frequently not problematized. This conversation discusses the practice of archaeology as it engages wi…
Oral Traditions
Never before have oral narratives been more important in Southwest archaeology than they are today. Spoken histories—variously known as oral traditions, oral histories, Native literature, and verbal arts—play key roles in fostering a dialogue between descendant communities and archaeologists, affording broader anthropological understandings of Native cultures and their heritage, and providing novel and more informed understandings of the past. Ul…
Hopisinmuy Wu’ya’mat Hisat Yang Tupqa’va Yeesiwngwu (Hopi Ancestors Lived in These Canyons)
Legacies of space and intangible heritage : archaeology, ethnohistory, and the politics of cultural
Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture
"A fascinating account of both the historical and current struggle of Native Americans to recover sacred objects that have been plundered and sold to museums. Museum curator and anthropologist Chip Colwell asks the all-important question: Who owns the past? Museums that care for the objects of history or the communities whose ancestors made them?"--Provided by the publisher
Developing a Native Digital Voice: Technology and Inclusivity in Museums
The exclusion of Native Americans from their own cultural heritage is a persistent problem in twenty-first museums. Although in recent decades museums have greatly expanded their programs and institutional frameworks to be more inclusive, experimental projects remain vital to creating new bridges between American museums and Native Americans. In 2010 and 2011, an innovative pilot program titled the "Native American Museum and Technology Workshop"…
Tree-Ring Dates and Navajo Settlement Patterns in Arizona
The historical timing and movement of Navajo communities in the U.S. Southwest continue to be key, but unresolved, issues. This paper analyzes tree-ring data to consider initial Navajo settlement patterns in the Little Colorado River watershed, Black Mesa, and nearby regions in northern Arizona. We are critical of previous studies that deem all tree-ring dates to be equally valid, so we present a new approach to systematically identify potential …
Collaborative Archaeologies and Descendant Communities
In the 1970s, public archaeology, a major theme in anthropology, sought to articulate the field's new orientation toward engaging the nonprofessional, general public, particularly in the realm of cultural resource management (CRM). Over the decades that followed, this approach evolved to focus increasingly on ways to connect archaeological heritage to different kinds of publics. Through this work, among the most important publics that emerged wer…
NAGPRA at 30: The Effects of Repatriation
On November 16, 1990, US President George H.W. Bush signed into law the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This federal legislation marked the culmination of decades of debate among scientists, curators, and Native American leaders and activists over the control of ancestral human remains and sacred, funerary, and communally owned objects. Anthropologists have now investigated myriad aspects of NAGPRA, from its under…
On Secrecy, Disclosure, the Public, and the Private in Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 12
Anthropology and cognate disciplines have long addressed the complex and troubled relations of public and private life, supplying insight into such matters as identity, politics, and civic life. In the multiple, interconnected settings of an intricately globalized and mediatized twenty-first century, how secrets are made, maintained, and broken remains vitally important to social science and its publics. The special issue we introduce here brings…
Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture
"A fascinating account of both the historical and current struggle of Native Americans to recover sacred objects that have been plundered and sold to museums. Museum curator and anthropologist Chip Colwell asks the all-important question: Who owns the past? Museums that care for the objects of history or the communities whose ancestors made them?"--Provided by the publisher
Curating Secrets: Repatriation, Knowledge Flows, and Museum Power Structures
Museums often keep secret information concerning the acquisition and stewardship of their collections even though retaining such privileged information may contradict the ideal of the museum-serving the public good in the public trust. Over the last three decades, this paradox has been particularly revealed during repatriation debates, which have threatened many museums with the loss of objects while exposing histories of illicit and unethical co…
Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience
A Palimpsest Theory of Objects
For many years, scholars have sought to track and explain how objects come to have layered, contested, and evolving meanings over time. This article examines the potential contributions and limitations of a palimpsest theory of objects to help explain such meaning-making practices. A palimpsest is a tablet or parchment from which writing has been partially or completely erased to make space for another text. This proposed theory investigates in w…
Can Repatriation Heal the Wounds of History
In 1990, the US Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which in part established a legal procedure for Native Americans to reclaim cultural items and ancestral remains from museums and federal agencies. Many advocates have framed NAGPRA as a kind of restorative justice in which “healing” is fundamentally integrated into the repatriation process. This article engages with a growing literature that ensu…
An ethical crisis in ancient DNA research: Insights from the Chaco Canyon controversy as a case study
In recent years, the field of paleogenomics has grown into an exciting and rapidly advancing area of scientific inquiry. However, scientific work in this field has far outpaced the discipline's dialogue about research ethics. In particular, Indigenous peoples have argued that the paleogenomics revolution has produced a 'vampire science' that perpetuates biocolonialist traditions of extracting Indigenous bodies and heritage without the consent of,…
The Snow-Capped Mountain and the Uranium Mine: Zuni Heritage and the Landscape Scale in Cultural Resource Management
Known in English as Mount Taylor, Dewankwin Kyaba:chu Yalanne (“in the east snow-capped mountain”) in northwestern New Mexico is a sacred landscape to the Zuni people. From an archaeological perspective, the mountain is dotted with hundreds of discrete archaeological sites that record 12,000 years of history. From a Zuni perspective, Mount Taylor is a rich cultural landscape—a tangible record of ancestral migrations, a living being, a pilgrimage …
Deleuze and Foucault: Series, Event, Genealogy
Deleuze and Foucault: Series, Event, Genealogy C. Colwell (bio) Although the term 'genealogy' is most closely associated with Nietzsche and Foucault it is Judith Butler who gives us the clearest, or at least most succinct, definition: "...genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of or…
Developing a Native Digital Voice: Technology and Inclusivity in Museums
The exclusion of Native Americans from their own cultural heritage is a persistent problem in twenty-first museums. Although in recent decades museums have greatly expanded their programs and institutional frameworks to be more inclusive, experimental projects remain vital to creating new bridges between American museums and Native Americans. In 2010 and 2011, an innovative pilot program titled the "Native American Museum and Technology Workshop"…
Guanyin's Limbo: Icons as Demi-Persons and Dividuating Objects
How do objects and humans relationally constitute one another? In this article, we examine statues of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, in Hong Kong to illuminate the forms of personhood and agency that arise through human-icon relations in a modern metropolis. We follow the life course of Guanyin statues, investigating their production, circulation, animation, and disposal-teasing out worshippers' contradictory discourses on whether the de…
Laguna Sheepherding
In the U.S. Southwest, the introduction of domesticated animals in 1540 dramatically changed Native American subsistence strategies and cultural practices. Pueblo communities across the Southwest quickly adopted sheep into their diet and became dedicated sheepherders within a century, coming to hold herds numbering into the thousands. The Pueblo of Laguna, in west-central New Mexico, became especially focused on sheepherding in the mid-1800s, and…
Thinking Through “Community” In Archaeological Practice
Community engagement is a central component of archaeology. Whether it is initiated through local, state, or national regulatory frameworks or as part of academic research, working with stakeholders is often structurally incorporated into project plans. However, what defines a community, and how this conception impacts archaeological practice is frequently not problematized. This conversation discusses the practice of archaeology as it engages wi…
Dialogues: Decolonizing anthropology in/with Japan
A dialogue with Sachiko Kibota, President of the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology
Anthropology, Empathy, and the Need for Social Science Communication
This is a call to science communicators and science journalists to feature social science research and researchers in their reporting, with an emphasis on anthropology and its potential to increase public empathy, improve the quality of public discourse, and contribute to contextual and narrative news trends
Tree-Ring Dates and Navajo Settlement Patterns in Arizona
The historical timing and movement of Navajo communities in the U.S. Southwest continue to be key, but unresolved, issues. This paper analyzes tree-ring data to consider initial Navajo settlement patterns in the Little Colorado River watershed, Black Mesa, and nearby regions in northern Arizona. We are critical of previous studies that deem all tree-ring dates to be equally valid, so we present a new approach to systematically identify potential …
Deleuze, Sense and the Event of Aids
Deleuze, Sense and the Event of AIDS C. Colwell . . . and the moral of that is — “Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.” —the Duchess.1 AIDS, like cancer, syphilis, cholera, leprosy and bubonic plague before it, has woven the threads of our biological, social and moral existence together into a complex disease entity that is much more than the physical interaction between its cause(s) and the human organism. It prese…
Deleuze and Foucault: Series, Event, Genealogy
Deleuze and Foucault: Series, Event, Genealogy C. Colwell (bio) Although the term 'genealogy' is most closely associated with Nietzsche and Foucault it is Judith Butler who gives us the clearest, or at least most succinct, definition: "...genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of or…
Michel Foucault: Personal Autonomy and Education . James D. Marshall
The Sacred and the Museum: Repatriation and the Trajectories of Inalienable Possessions
Since the formation of museum anthropology, scholars have been interested in collecting Native American objects of religious and spiritual significance. For many years, these objects predominately served scientific inquiry and public curiosity, but over the last three decades scholars have become increasingly aware of how indigenous communities continue to value these objects despite their radical recontextualization. This article seeks to bring …
The Snow-Capped Mountain and the Uranium Mine: Zuni Heritage and the Landscape Scale in Cultural Resource Management
Known in English as Mount Taylor, Dewankwin Kyaba:chu Yalanne (“in the east snow-capped mountain”) in northwestern New Mexico is a sacred landscape to the Zuni people. From an archaeological perspective, the mountain is dotted with hundreds of discrete archaeological sites that record 12,000 years of history. From a Zuni perspective, Mount Taylor is a rich cultural landscape—a tangible record of ancestral migrations, a living being, a pilgrimage …
Curating Secrets: Repatriation, Knowledge Flows, and Museum Power Structures
Museums often keep secret information concerning the acquisition and stewardship of their collections even though retaining such privileged information may contradict the ideal of the museum-serving the public good in the public trust. Over the last three decades, this paradox has been particularly revealed during repatriation debates, which have threatened many museums with the loss of objects while exposing histories of illicit and unethical co…
On Secrecy, Disclosure, the Public, and the Private in Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 12
Anthropology and cognate disciplines have long addressed the complex and troubled relations of public and private life, supplying insight into such matters as identity, politics, and civic life. In the multiple, interconnected settings of an intricately globalized and mediatized twenty-first century, how secrets are made, maintained, and broken remains vitally important to social science and its publics. The special issue we introduce here brings…
How the archaeological review behind the Dakota Access Pipeline went wrong
Laguna Sheepherding
In the U.S. Southwest, the introduction of domesticated animals in 1540 dramatically changed Native American subsistence strategies and cultural practices. Pueblo communities across the Southwest quickly adopted sheep into their diet and became dedicated sheepherders within a century, coming to hold herds numbering into the thousands. The Pueblo of Laguna, in west-central New Mexico, became especially focused on sheepherding in the mid-1800s, and…
Collaborative Archaeologies and Descendant Communities
In the 1970s, public archaeology, a major theme in anthropology, sought to articulate the field's new orientation toward engaging the nonprofessional, general public, particularly in the realm of cultural resource management (CRM). Over the decades that followed, this approach evolved to focus increasingly on ways to connect archaeological heritage to different kinds of publics. Through this work, among the most important publics that emerged wer…
Oral Traditions
Never before have oral narratives been more important in Southwest archaeology than they are today. Spoken histories—variously known as oral traditions, oral histories, Native literature, and verbal arts—play key roles in fostering a dialogue between descendant communities and archaeologists, affording broader anthropological understandings of Native cultures and their heritage, and providing novel and more informed understandings of the past. Ul…
Hopisinmuy Wu’ya’mat Hisat Yang Tupqa’va Yeesiwngwu (Hopi Ancestors Lived in These Canyons)
Legacies of space and intangible heritage : archaeology, ethnohistory, and the politics of cultural
Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture
"A fascinating account of both the historical and current struggle of Native Americans to recover sacred objects that have been plundered and sold to museums. Museum curator and anthropologist Chip Colwell asks the all-important question: Who owns the past? Museums that care for the objects of history or the communities whose ancestors made them?"--Provided by the publisher
Developing a Native Digital Voice: Technology and Inclusivity in Museums
The exclusion of Native Americans from their own cultural heritage is a persistent problem in twenty-first museums. Although in recent decades museums have greatly expanded their programs and institutional frameworks to be more inclusive, experimental projects remain vital to creating new bridges between American museums and Native Americans. In 2010 and 2011, an innovative pilot program titled the "Native American Museum and Technology Workshop"…
Tree-Ring Dates and Navajo Settlement Patterns in Arizona
The historical timing and movement of Navajo communities in the U.S. Southwest continue to be key, but unresolved, issues. This paper analyzes tree-ring data to consider initial Navajo settlement patterns in the Little Colorado River watershed, Black Mesa, and nearby regions in northern Arizona. We are critical of previous studies that deem all tree-ring dates to be equally valid, so we present a new approach to systematically identify potential …
Footprints of Hopi History
Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma dedicates this book to Dalton Taylor and the other advisors whom he first worked with at the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, including ValJean Joshevama Sr., Frank Mofsi, LaVern Siweupmptewa, Owen Numkena, and Bert Puhuyestewa.e cultural knowledge and wisdom shared by these advisors
Footprints of Hopi History: Hopihiniwtiput Kukveni'at
Kukveni—footprints—are a powerful historical metaphor that the Hopi people use to comprehend their tangible heritage. Hopis say that the deity Máasaw instructed their ancestors to leave footprints during their migrations from their origin place to their home today as evidence that they had fulfilled a spiritual pact to serve as stewards of his land. Today’s Hopis understand these footprints to be the archaeological remains of former settlements—p…
Thinking Through “Community” In Archaeological Practice
Community engagement is a central component of archaeology. Whether it is initiated through local, state, or national regulatory frameworks or as part of academic research, working with stakeholders is often structurally incorporated into project plans. However, what defines a community, and how this conception impacts archaeological practice is frequently not problematized. This conversation discusses the practice of archaeology as it engages wi…
Can Repatriation Heal the Wounds of History
In 1990, the US Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which in part established a legal procedure for Native Americans to reclaim cultural items and ancestral remains from museums and federal agencies. Many advocates have framed NAGPRA as a kind of restorative justice in which “healing” is fundamentally integrated into the repatriation process. This article engages with a growing literature that ensu…
Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience
What Are Anthropologists Reading, Watching, and Listening To This Summer
Guanyin's Limbo: Icons as Demi-Persons and Dividuating Objects
How do objects and humans relationally constitute one another? In this article, we examine statues of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, in Hong Kong to illuminate the forms of personhood and agency that arise through human-icon relations in a modern metropolis. We follow the life course of Guanyin statues, investigating their production, circulation, animation, and disposal-teasing out worshippers' contradictory discourses on whether the de…
Ferguson, T. J.
Parker, Arthur Caswell
NAGPRA at 30: The Effects of Repatriation
On November 16, 1990, US President George H.W. Bush signed into law the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This federal legislation marked the culmination of decades of debate among scientists, curators, and Native American leaders and activists over the control of ancestral human remains and sacred, funerary, and communally owned objects. Anthropologists have now investigated myriad aspects of NAGPRA, from its under…
History (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Archaeology (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · History (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation (9 works) · Geography (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works)