Our research endeavor seeks to catalyze a conversation about science, with specific application to understanding history and the environment via both empirical evidence and critical social theory.

Our focus is the past, its material and historical manifestations, the environmental context within which it occurred, and how we study its subjects. Our work is interdisciplinary and overlaps with geochemistry, biochemistry, philosophy, archaeology, history, legal studies, anthropology, and museology - and it connects to Indigenous studies. Archaeology in Canada is largely the exploration of Indigenous history and landscapes from non-Indigenous perspectives and by non-Indigenous people - a pattern that we replicate. Most of our team are not Indigenous. We work primarily with Indigenous communities and aspire to equitable partnerships toward community-oriented research goals, but as we signal in our title, all research is community-oriented, and our focus inevitably includes our own (Martindale and Lyons 2014; Martindale et al 2016). Numerous authors signal the value of community engagement in archaeology, an argument initially proposed by Indigenous scholars (Atalay 2012) and increasingly invoked by non-Indigenous authors (see Wylie 2014 for a review). In these usages, the "community" is typically Indigenous. We coined the term "community-oriented archaeology" to parse out a specific relationship: that all forms of archaeology are oriented to a community and that the community represented by non-Indigenous archaeologists is typically overlooked. Our point is not that this community should be considered, but that it almost universally is - largely without acknowledgement or analysis, creating erasure and inequality, especially of Indigenous scholarship and voices (Martindale and Nicholas 2014; Martindale and Armstrong 2019). We seek to bring attention to this asymmetry and its implications, and we aspire to reducing both this unfairness and the embedded structures by which it is replicated.

Ours is a work in progress in a societal context of injustice that we both seek to change and directly benefit from. 

Our aspirations can be both difficult to achieve and self-serving (LaSalle and Hutchins 2016; Martindale and Armstrong 2019; Menzies and Martindale 2019; Supernant and Warrick 2014). Ideally, any effort to understand Indigenous pasts is led and conducted by Indigenous people. While we work with Indigenous communities at their request and in directions that they set - non-Indigenous academics only have value in this context because of the inequities, disenfranchisements, and violence of colonialism, its legacies and its ongoing processes. For example, an earlier iteration of this project was called "Indigenous/science". While this was an attempt to problematize the lack of respect for Indigenous scholarship in science, it replicated a conceit that we could advance this endeavor without a critical assessment of our own positionality - thereby occupying space of Indigenous views (Schneider and Hayes 2020). 

Current work includes:

• Development of technical training programs for Indigenous communities in British Columbia with the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm Archaeology Office.
• Compilation of a collaborative volume on the Materializing History project.
• Grant applications to better equip the UBC-xʷməθkʷəy̓əm Archaeology Office partnership in geophysics, biochemistry, wet site management, and remote sensing technologies.

Martindale, Andrew & Lyons, Natasha & Nicholas, George & Angelbeck, Bill & Connaughton, Sean & Grier, Colin & Herbert, James & Leon, Mike & Marshall, Yvonne & Piccini, Angela & Schaepe, David & Supernant, Kisha & Warrick, Gary. (2016). Archaeology as Partnerships in Practice: A Reply to La Salle and Hutchings. Canadian Journal of Archaeology/Journal Canadien D'archéologie.40(1):181-204.

Martindale, A., & Nicholas, G. P. (2014). Archaeology as federated knowledge. Canadian Journal of Archaeology/Journal Canadien d'Archéologie, 434-465.

Menzies, C. R., & Martindale, A. (2019). ‘I Was Surprised’: The UBC School and Hearsay—A Reply to David Henige. Journal of Northwest Anthropology, 53(1), 78-107.

Schneider, T. D., & Hayes, K. (2020). Epistemic Colonialism: Is it possible to decolonize archaeology?. American Indian Quarterly, 44(2), 127-148.

Simpson, F. (2008). Community Archaeology Under Scrutiny. Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites, 10(1), 3–16.

Supernant, K., & Warrick, G. (2014). Challenges to critical community-based archaeological practice in Canada. Canadian Journal of Archaeology/Journal Canadien d'Archéologie, 38(2): 563-591.

Wylie, A. (2014). Community-based collaborative archaeology. Philosophy of social science: A new introduction, 68-82.