Oral History, Coloniality, and Community Collaboration in Latin America

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Oral History, Coloniality, and Community Collaboration in Latin America," at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Archaeologists and anthropologists continue to confront the colonialist tendencies of our disciplines and how they center whiteness. Coloniality exists as an undercurrent and series of obstacles to research that encourages bi-directional knowledge exchange with local collaborators. In this session, we address some of the most frequent questions and contradictions that arise when archaeologists, particularly in Latin America, work cooperatively with economically and socially marginalized communities. For example, how do labor and economic relationships that emerge through archaeological practice shape conceptions of culture, heritage, and memory? How does archaeology interact with and exist apart from local understandings of the past? What would an archaeology that forefronts local histories and stories entail? Can today’s archaeology aim to share its power and support a multivocal past? Here, we discuss ideas about what steps to follow to understand the social and political consequences of the past in the present and move archaeological practice forward.