Photovoice and Participatory Strategies for Community Heritage in the Peruvian Andes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Huancavelica mining landscapes in the Peruvian Andes present two historical narratives that continue to shape contemporary heritage discourse. On one hand, Huancavelica was the "crown jewel" of the Spanish empire due to lucrative mercury mining. For indigenous Andean peoples forced to labor underground, Huancavelica became known as "the mine of death" due to the lethal toxicity of mercury extraction. More recently, the Peruvian Ministry of Culture placed Huancavelica on the UNESCO Tentative List, and ongoing heritage discussions continue to follow this interrelated binary of wealth and violence. However, for the Santa Bárbara community, the high-altitude grasslands near the colonial mines and ruins of smelters are not just spaces of past exploitation or technological development, but home. In this talk, I examine how the people of Santa Bárbara negotiate the development of cultural heritage in their community in concert with and sometimes counter to the narratives of government officials, outside consultants, and North American archaeologists. Drawing from archaeological fieldwork and oral histories collected since 2013, as well as a PhotoVoice project initiated in 2018, I show how Santa Bárbara people root their heritage claims in a communal notion of landscape, rather than specific historical sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26184