Changing Paradigms in Oaxaca Archaeology: Examining the Past to Understand Our Future

Summary

This is an abstract from the "A Construir Puentes / Building Bridges: Diálogos en Oaxaca Archaeology a través de las Fronteras" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the past century, archaeology in Oaxaca had gained a reputation among American researchers as a space rife with contentious debates. On the other side of the border, Mexican researchers remained disconnected from these scholarly debates, in part because little effort was made to build a dialogue between the American and Mexican academies. To address this divide, junior scholars have organized the Diálogos en Oaxaca Archaeology project, bringing together American and Mexican-based researchers working in different regions of Oaxaca and on various research themes and time periods. This presentation traces the history of archaeology in Oaxaca, starting first with Ignacio Bernal and Alfonso Caso’s work at Monte Albán and Kent Flannery’s Human Ecology Project, before connecting it to the next wave of researchers in the 1990s and onward. This historiography of Oaxacan archaeology casts a critical eye on paradigmatic shifts and highlights what is at stake in contemporary debates, especially with regard to heritage and stewardship of the past. By reassessing the past and cultivating “bridges” between scholars, we challenge the asymmetrical knowledge production that has plagued Oaxacan archaeology over the last century in order to build more equitable futures.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• A Construir Puentes / Building Bridges: Diálogos en Oaxaca Archaeology a través de las Fronteras

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32813