Finding Community in the Past and Present through the 2022 PARCC Field School at Buen Suceso, Ecuador

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Finding Community in the Past and Present through the 2022 PARCC Field School at Buen Suceso, Ecuador" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ethical archaeological practice is driven by theory; thus archaeological field schools should also espouse a clear theoretical framework at the outset, particularly as concerning collaboration with and expectations of students, community members, and project leaders (Borck 2018; Cipolla et al. 2019; Clarke and Phillips 2012; Gonzalez and Edwards 2020). The Proyecto Arqueologico Rios Culebra-Colin 2022 field school applied an anarchical approach to both the past and present by avoiding assumptions of the necessity of hierarchy or organized power. To execute this vision, students helped create and agreed upon codes of conduct, participated in many aspects of fieldwork (excavation, total station mapping, lab work, community consultation, etc.), and were central to the ongoing archaeological knowledge production even after the digging was done. This session highlights the results of this approach by presenting (1) the archaeological findings from Buen Suceso, a multicomponent site in coastal Ecuador and the focus of our 2022 field excavations; (2) results from community heritage work with local Dos Mangas residents; and (3) student reflections on the field school experience. By presenting these papers in one symposium, we emphasize the interconnectivity of these activities, rather than seeing them as siloed or of ranked importance in the archaeological endeavor.