Culture wars: When archaeology ended up on the woke hitlist

It seems there isn’t much that isn’t woke these days. In the ongoing culture war all of the following have all been labelled as such: capitalism, Covid, the legal system, James Bond, the police and artificial intelligence.

That list is anything but exhaustive, and to it we can now officially add archaeology.

During equalities questions in the House of Commons, Conservative MP Philip Hollobone cited a study authored by a professor at the Musuem of London, describing it as “sensationalist research findings and woke archaeology”.

The equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, agreed and stated that she’d written to the museum to express her concerns.

Aside from it being objectively funny that a man called Hollobone is complaining about archaeology, what is the ‘woke’ study in question? Unsurprisingly, it’s about race and inequality.

Published in the journal Bioarchaeology International and titled Race, Population Affinity, and Mortality Risk during the Second Plague Pandemic in Fourteenth-Century London, England, the paper looks at the possibility that people of certain ethnicities may have been more at risk of dying from the bubonic plague than others.

Researchers examined the remains of 145 people – 49 buried in plague cemeteries and 96 buried in non-plague cemeteries – which is acknowledged as a small sample size – and analysed five features of their skulls to estimate their likely heritage.

The study found that those of likely African heritage were disproportionately more likely to have died of the plague than those of Asian or European heritage, which could possibly have been down to existing inequalities in addition to free or forced migration outcomes.

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This might all seem fairly innocuous, but not if you’re a frontline soldier in the culture wars. Ms Badenoch said in the Commons that the study was “based on phrenology” – which it wasn’t – and that the idea of structural racism being a factor in health outcomes could lower trust in the health system among ethnic minorities.

The obvious rejoinder to this would be that trust in the health system is lower among ethnic minorities because of structural racism. A 2016 study on US medical students found they wrongly assumed black people needed less pain medication than their white counterparts, based on misconceptions such as black people having thicker skin or fewer nerve endings. Almost two thirds (65%) of black people who responded to a 2022 British Medical Journey survey said that they had experienced prejudice from doctors and other staff in healthcare settings.

That though, is to treat ‘woke archaeology’ with more seriousness than it deserves. For a certain section of the population ‘woke’ just means ‘things I don’t like’. You know, “my woke ex-wife won’t let me see the kids after the woke divorce because I stopped paying woke child support”.

The phrase originally meant being alert (or awake) to racial prejudice and discrimination but has been co-opted by the Jordan Peterson and Neil Oliver set who view it as part of a secret Marxist plot to bring down western civilisation.

That’s not a joke. The idea goes back to the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who in his writings sought to understand why revolution had not spread outside of the USSR.

He concluded that as well as a direct physical hegemony (the kind involving guns and the army) of the ruling class, there existed also a cultural hegemony represented by institutions such as the church, universities, newspapers and more.

Italian philosopher and theorist Antonio Gramsci popularised the idea of a cultural hegemony, highlighting the role of institutions in culturally shaping society (Image: Newsquest)
Rather than shy away from, for example, academia, he reasoned, those of a Marxist persuasion should try to enter into those spaces and present their own counter-hegemonic ideas. These ideas would be studied by academics from the so-called Frankfurt School, a group of largely Jewish intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany after being accused of propagating ‘cultural Bolshevism’.

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After settling in the US they continued to look at how things such as race, class, gender, culture and more intertwine to create society as we see it today – or, if you prefer, set about undermining the fabric of western society to bring about a communist future.

As a result we have a Tory government on its way out, clinging to poorly-defined culture wars as its only bulwark against electoral oblivion, suggesting without a hint of irony that there’s such a thing as ‘woke archaeology’.

What will be the next battleground in the war on woke? Woke orienteering? Woke carpentry? Woke cutlery that blocks the drawer from opening? It’s enough to put you to sleep.