"How far is that in Bernie Miles?" Landscape and Identity in Abiquiu, New Mexico

Summary

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

Current community-based, diachronic archaeological research in Abiquiú, New Mexico seeks to undertake specific projects that answer stakeholder questions about the past and bring these narratives about the past into conversations about the present. Balancing the diverse requirements and entailments of this kind of partnership and project necessitates thinking with the way that landscape, identity, and the community-based nature of the project are entangled. It also requires recognition of the fact that findings about the past have lives in the present. In Abiquiú, landscape is a point of both continuity and flux, the site of community livelihoods, identities, aspirations, and anxieties. Furthermore, the positionality of academic archaeologists—in identity, space, and time—has a direct and integral role to play in the way that research is conceptualized, performed, and articulated. Landscape-based archaeological and ethnographic approaches must not only take an emic perspective but also acknowledge the positionality of the archaeologist. Integrating the messiness inherent in these dynamics provides more nuanced and fuller view of not only the archaeological and historical record but the practice of fieldwork itself.

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): 24547