Labor History and Worker Visibility in Mexican Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Oral History, Coloniality, and Community Collaboration in Latin America" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The manual labor involved in the production of archaeological knowledges tends to go unacknowledged, and archaeologists have historically had epistemological authority over the interpretation of the past. In Latin America, acknowledging Indigenous labor in archaeology often focuses on restoring historiographic visibility to Indigenous interpretations of the past, or emphasizing workers’ roles in knowledge production—both concerns of archaeologists. In this paper, I argue that acknowledging workers should begin with the form and content of local historicity, rather than archaeologists’ categories alone. To illustrate this argument, I discuss the Indigenous Totonac custodians of the archaeological site of El Tajín, Mexico. These workers consider the site’s history in terms of a generational succession of custodial cohorts, distinguished local socioeconomic conditions, admissions procedures, and the nature of labor. I conclude by arguing for the analysis of archaeological labor in workers’ terms.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Oral History, Coloniality, and Community Collaboration in Latin America   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology