Gateways to Future Historical Archaeology in Mexico and Central America

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Gateways to Future Historical Archaeology in Mexico and Central America," at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Historical archaeology is still an ambiguous category in Latin America. In part, this reflects a history of European and North American researchers who prized the prehispanic cultures of the region and left the understanding of subsequent colonial and republican era histories to documentary historians. In addition, "historical" has often been a term interpreted in the colonial and republican contexts as solely about documents, especially those in European archives. These two developments have contributed to problematic outcomes: the creation of an artificial discontinuity between pre-colonial indigenous histories; a lack of attention to the complexity of indigenous strategies and tactics of survivance under colonial and republican governance; and silence about the ways that African descendant people shaped colonial and republican society and culture. This session brings together participants working on these complex histories in Mexico and Central America, using a range of archaeological data to explore how contemporary research in historical archaeology is transforming understanding.