Animal Archaeology

The following blog post will contain spoilers for Mattie Lubchansky’s recent book Simplicity, which is out now and I highly recommend folks – especially those of you who work in the museum and anthropology fields – read it first!

Simplicity (Lubchanksy, 2025) is not about museums. I mean, it kinda is – but it’s more than that. It’s an engaging story about an academic sent out to a commune in the hopes of undergoing ethnographic study to inform the development of a museum exhibit. But of course, fieldwork becomes complicated as our protagonist settles himself amongst the community – oh, and this is all set in a dystopic future where cities are set within secured and militarised walls.

But because I’m an academic who works primarily in museums and within anthropology myself, I am (unsurprisingly) going to focus on that. Because Simplicity is a really great piece of speculative fiction that touches on queerness, dystopia, capitalism, resistance, community – and how these things get recorded and remembered, which resonates strongly with some of my own work at the moment.

Our protagonist, Lucius Pasternak, is an anthropologist sent to the commune of Simplicity in upstate New York by an allegedly philanthropic corporation that is in the process of building a museum of “the former state of New York”. Lucius, presented as a somewhat naive academic throughout, sincerely believes in this mission of accurately capturing and preserving the commune’s way of life – but this belief is eventually shattered with the realisation that not only is the museum being built as part of a larger residential and commercial complex on the site of the commune itself, but that ultimately his funders are only supporting his fieldwork to perform the bare minimum and “get the damn charities off [their] case”. The academic fieldwork is just a means of legitimising what is ultimately a landgrab, destroying not only the commune but decontextualising its culture and history in an instant, allowing those with money and power to rewrite their story for their own means.

This sort of “performative benevolence” by the wealthy and their organisations within cultural heritage spaces can be seen within many major museums today, and it’s something I’ve previously written about here on the blog. By sponsoring exhibits as a means of sharing art and culture to the general population, these organisations attempt to whitewash their complicity in violence around the world, from facilitating genocide to destroying the environment (Nayyar 2025, Ware 2025). And while I wish museums were more courageous in rejecting such offers, I also understand the corner they are often backed into as perpetually underfunded institutions under intense pressure due to worsening culture wars and further threats of defunding. In Simplicity, I can see so much of myself as a young museum worker and archaeology student in Lucius – still feeling as though the work I did, regardless of the wider context of how it was being funded or supported, would be a net positive for others. That further understanding of our heritage or culture could only be a good thing, that even if the field was problematic, we could do good things within it. And while this isn’t to say that there is no way to do anything good within the confines of our sector, I do think there is still a widespread romanticisation of our work that can often obscure some of the mechanisms by which heritage work can become complicit in cycles of harm.

Lubchansky’s vision of the weaponised museum in the future is extreme, but I think its a welcomed addition to the sort of speculative writing and thinking in the heritage sector, which has been utilised by archaeologists and museum professionals to creatively and boldly reimagine how our work is practiced and engaged with in the present and future (e.g., Harrison and Sterling 2023, Morgan 2025). Through these practices of speculation, we can identify the steps necessary to create an ideal future for our sector, as well as experiment with better methodologies for understanding and disseminating the past. Speculative writing and thinking provides us with a space outside of the traditional norms of our sector, allowing us to push back against assumptions and normative, harmful thinking that often holds us back and restricts us to the limitations imposed by our historic disciplinary gatekeepers (in other words, the limitations of cisheteronormativity, whiteness, etc.).

I think it’s important that when we speculate about our future as a sector, we think about the good and the bad – that we draw hope from optimistic writing that gives us something to strive for, while also using more dystopian visions as precautionary lessons of what we should avoid. Lubchansky’s Museum of the Former State of New York represents so much of what should be seen an antithetical to our work as practitioners – a whitewashed version of the past which is weaponised to provide a hyper-capitalist, hyper-surveilled space with a veneer of cultural value. Control of the past enables control of the present and future, disrupting remembrances of resistance and replacing them with a continuous narrative of obedience and a need for such overwhelming control for a functional society. We do not have to acquiesce to such demands, though – a better world is possible, and we can imagine it so.

You can buy Simplicity from Penguin Random House or wherever books are sold.

References

Harrison, R., and Sterling, C. (2023) The Speculative and the Profane: Reimaging Heritage and Museums for Climate Action. In N Shepherd (ed) Rethinking Heritage in Precarious Times: Coloniality, Climate Change, and Covid-19. Routledge, pp. 93-110.

Lubchansky, M. (2025) Simplicity: A Novel. Pantheon Books.

Morgan, C. (2025) Archaeology as Worldbuilding. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, pp. 1-10.

Nayyar, R. (2025) Protest Targets Whitney Museum Board Ties After Canceled Performance. Hyperallergic. Retrieved from https://hyperallergic.com/1015804/protest-targets-whitney-museum-board-ties-after-canceled-performance/

Ware, J. (2025) Education union calls on schools to boycott London’s Science Museum over ‘image-laundering’ sponsorship deals. The Art Newspaper. Retrieved from https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/06/10/education-union-calls-on-schools-to-boycott-londons-science-museum-over-image-laundering-sponsorship-deals

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