Global Archaeologies and Latin American Voices: Dialogues Transcending Colonizing Archaeologies

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Global Archaeologies and Latin American Voices: Dialogues Transcending Colonizing Archaeologies," at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The rise of Latin American archaeologies had an undeniable colonial dimension intrinsically tied to the global, imperialist and racist nature of contemporaneous scientific practice. The white “founding fathers” that arrived in the region exoticized and commodified its past, and local elites appropriated indigenous sites and symbols to reinforce their own social standing and political agendas. Contemporary approaches drawing from postcolonial and decolonizing perspectives have begun to disentangle the complicated narratives derived from past practices, and to challenge the problematic research designs and their implications for heritage management. The papers in this session tackle these and other problems, and offer new perspectives on their ongoing investigations in our home countries and across Latin America. Our goal is to further the research agendas of Latin American scholars, and facilitate a space that fosters dialogue and collaboration among us beyond the remaining colonial dimensions of archaeology in our home countries.