Historical archaeology from a Latin American perspective

Summary

Historical archaeology has started in the USA as an endeavor for understanding the Anglo-American experience, but soon the discipline expanded to include the excluded pasts of such groups as African-Americans, Asian-Americans, women and a plethora of groups, interests and subjects. It spread to Latin America early on, first as an imported discipline to be adapted to the subcontinent. Epistemological discussions in the Anglo-Saxon world led to new contentions about the discipline as the study of capitalism, modernity and globalization, or as the study of all societies with written records, from the earliest to the latest civilizations. Latin America played a role in this discussion, considering that the Spanish and Portuguese colonization was only partially understandable as capitalist, while cultural contact and interaction in the region was particularly complex, so much so that new interpretive concepts, such as transculturation, were put into use by anthropologists, historians and archaeologists. Furthermore, historical archaeology developed during the Cold War (1947-1989) and most of Latin American faced dictatorial rule during part or most of the period. Since the late 1980s th

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2014   •
• Questions that Will Count in the Future: Global Perspectives on Historical Archaeology

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): SYM-7,18