"Mo té la": Community-Engaged Plantation Archaeology in French Guiana

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.

Archaeology in French Guiana takes place within a neo-colonial framework in terms of permitting, reporting, and disseminating results. While still a generally public pursuit, archaeological projects rarely deploy explicit strategies for involving stakeholders in research. Furthermore, because archaeology is overseen by France, the power dynamics involved in defining local communities are stark. Archéo La Caroline is an ongoing project and the first and only programmed archeological investigation of a village for enslaved laborers in French Guiana. The project actively engages multiple, overlapping stakeholders - Afro-descendant, indigenous, and French - in addition to local and international teams of researchers. This paper discusses efforts to 1) define community stakeholders and encourage participation on multiple levels; 2) break down barriers of scientific authority, thereby allowing the project to intersect with local identity negotiation and heritage projects; and 3) mediate the sometimes conflicting needs of researchers and communities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 929