Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recently, archaeologists have turned to more collaborative and participatory approaches and are considering more centrally the impact and relevance of archaeology to the contemporary world. The past is deeply rooted in communities, and integrating local understandings and interests in cultural heritage with archaeological interpretation and presentation is essential to cultivating meaningful partnerships with Indigenous and local communities. Such methodological innovation requires an expansion of explanatory spaces to accommodate epistemologies and worldviews that can be radically different. Relying on Anishinabe traditional knowledge, Sonya Atalay has developed and productively applied the concept of "braided knowledge" to community archaeology and brought to the foreground the challenges of cross-threading distinct ways of knowing and doing in engaging with the past, and the critical need for structural changes in the discipline to reflect these practices. In this paper, we provide an orientation to diverse methods of knowledge production and sharing in archaeological research and conservation, considering both successful synergies and epistemological incommensurabilities. We start with a discussion of "braided knowledge" and contextualize the challenges at hand, reviewing recent approaches and interpretive frameworks. We then share examples of attempts to braid knowledge through collaborative cultural heritage projects organized by InHerit in the Maya region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25851