Moving the Baseline: Why Isn’t Community Archaeology the Convention?

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Community Archaeology in 2020: Conventional or Revolutionary?" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Collaborative and community-based approaches to archaeological practice should be the base from which all projects are developed. Archaeologists are often complicit in creating or perpetuating heritage protection policies or programs that are superficial; they do not get at the roots of the problems of preservation, nor at the broader sociopolitical or economic issues that affect local communities with archaeological resources.

This paper uses as a case study the Tihosuco Heritage Preservation and Community Development Project, located in the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico. I focus specifically on the role that archaeologists can play in developing ideas about rights to and ownership of historic resources. A true collaborative project can breakdown hierarchies of access to local heritage resources and develop into a completely different type of project that not only studies the past, but explores the uses and consequences of that past in the present and future.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Community Archaeology in 2020: Conventional or Revolutionary?

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 425