Ordinary Histories of People and Place: Inequality, Belonging, and Community Collaboration in Northern Belize

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.

For the people of contemporary Belize, issues of heritage/ancestry are often narrated through binaries of long-term indigenous continuity or sharp, colonial discontinuity. Yet, for ordinary people these are complicated issues tied to histories of forced movement, social inequality, and violence. Today, northern Belize is populated by peoples of Spanish and Maya ancestry who sought refuge from the Caste War of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula in the mid-1800s. Since 2015, I have worked with locals from San Joaquin Village who have shared stories that complicate ideas of what it means to live amidst archaeological remains of the ancient Maya. This paper draws on these stories to explore how locals craft a sense of social and material belonging to the landscape. I argue that attending to ordinary histories of people and place enables archaeologists to collaborate with locals on issues of heritage and history without essentializing local identities or relationships to archaeological remains.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology