The Work of Studying Labor: Archaeological Taskscapes and Community Engagement in the Andean Highlands

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.

This paper will examine labor relationships between a mostly North American archaeological project, Proyecto de Histórico-Arqueológico-Santa Bárbara (PIHA-SB) and the local descendent community of Santa Bárbara. Since 2013, PIHA-SB has worked collaboratively with Santa Bárbara through an archaeological and historical research program that examines how indigenous Andean communities negotiated Spanish labor regimes at the Huancavelica mercury mine. Discussions of cultural heritage have rapidly expanded in recent years, a result of the Peruvian Ministry of Culture placing Huancavelica on the UNESCO tentative list, increasing direction from the Santa Bárbara community. In this paper, we examine how different types of fieldwork and labor organization (survey, excavation, oral history collection, Photovoice) fostered different types of discussions regarding heritage. Employing the perspective of taskscape (Ingold 1993), we argue that archaeologists should pay closer attention to the role of archaeologist-field assistant labor relations in understanding the interrelated production of archaeological knowledge and local heritage.

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