Chicanx Archaeology

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Chicanx Archaeology," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Traditional frameworks for studying culture contact and colonialism dominate archaeological understandings of Hispanic-descent communities in the United States. Spanish colonial archaeology often glosses over the centuries after any recognizable peninsularity has faded from the material record, and an emphasis on Spanish coloniality has obscured the impact of American settler colonialism on both Hispanic-descent and Indigenous communities. In what is currently the American West, most "Spanish" settlers came from Mexico. These settlers established communities and developed relationships with surrounding Indigenous nations for almost 500 years. An emphasis on peninsular policy, identity, and material culture has occluded the specific sociocultural trajectories of Mexican settlers located within Pueblo, Apache, Tohono O’odham, Chumash, and other Indigenous worlds. The complex layering of kinships, violences, and colonialities in the history of Mexican-Indigenous-Anglo-American relations demands nuanced theoretical approaches to interpreting this past. This session draws Chicanx Studies into archaeological theory. Papers outline major currents in Chicanx Studies as they relate to the interpretation of sites and materials. Participants might address political ecology, kinship, borderlands, colonialisms, indigeneity, heritage, or community engagement, amongst other topics. The session centers scholarship from the northern Rio Grande in reflection of the conference’s location in Albuquerque, NM, but other relevant work is welcome.