Partnerships for Patrimony: A Community-based Approach to Sustainable Archaeological Protection

Summary

This paper will discuss preliminary research related to the complex, contemporary archaeological identities built around the site of Huari, capital of the first Andean Empire, where archaeological remains are of national value and yet contemporary native identities retain a negative connotation in the national imaginary.

The project applies an ethnographic method referred to as ‘community-based participatory research’ (Sonya Atalay 2012), which has an initial goal of revealing local campesino relationships to and personal identities with the site in order to introduce a framework for the long-term protection of Huari via the crafting of State and local co-management strategies. Central to this applied-anthropological objective is investigating Pre-Hispanic cultural-continuity and to reveal total life histories of the adjacent community of Pacaycasa.

Collaborative and Community Archaeology have made great strides to address issues of indigenous representation at archaeological sites in the recent past, and the discipline of archaeology has generally begun to adopt research methods that integrate native populations at every stage of research. However, multi-scalar ethnographic investigations have not yet been fully adopted by most community-based approaches prior to initiating collaboration, for which it is the purpose of this project to demonstrate their importance to the successful decolonization of our discipline.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage